In Deep by Damon Knight Page A

Station. Before that, he’d wanted to be a pilot, but had washed out the first year—couldn’t take the math. But he had never once thought of going back to Earth.
    Now, suddenly, after all these years, that tiny blue disk seemed infinitely desirable.
    “Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane, it’s beautiful,” he mumbled.
    Down there, he knew, it was spring; and in certain places, where the edge of darkness retreated, it was morning: a watery blue morning like the sea light caught in an agate, a morning with smoke and mist in it; a morning of stillness and promise. Down there, lost years and miles away, some tiny dot of a woman was opening her microscopic door to listen to an atom’s song. Lost, lost, and packed away in cotton wool, like a specimen slide: one spring morning on Earth.
    Black miles above, so far that sixty Earths could have been piled one on another to make a pole for his perch, Wesson swung in his endless circle within a circle. Yet, fast as the gulf beneath him was, all this—Earth, Moon, orbital stations, ships; yes, the Sun and all the rest of his planets, too—was the merest sniff of space, to be pinched up between thumb and finger.
    Beyond—there was the true gulf. In that deep night, galaxies lay sprawled aglitter, piercing a distance that could only be named in a meaningless number, a cry of dismay: O, O, O…
    Crawling and fighting, blasting with energies too big for them, men had come as far as Jupiter. But if a man had been tall enough to lie with his boots toasting in the Sun and his head freezing at Pluto, still he would have been too small for that overwhelming emptiness. Here, not at Pluto, was the outermost limit of man’s empire: here the Outside funneled down to meet it, like the pinched waist of an hour-glass: here, and only here, the two worlds came near enough to touch. Ours—and Theirs.
    Down at the bottom of the board, now, the golden dials were faintly alight, the needles trembling ever so little on their pins.
    Deep in the vats, the vats, the golden liquid was trickling down: “ Though disgusted, I took a sample of the exudate and it was forwarded for analysis …”
    Space-cold fluid, trickling down the bitter walls of the tubes, forming little pools in the cups of darkness; goldenly agleam there, half alive. The golden elixir. One drop of the concentrate would arrest aging for twenty years—keep your arteries soft, tonus good, eyes clear, hair pigmented, brain alert.
    That was what the tests of Pigeon’s sample had showed. That was the reason for the whole crazy history of the “alien trading post”—first a hut on Titan, then later, when people understood more about the problem, Stranger Station.
    Once every twenty years, an alien would come down out of Somewhere, and sit in the tiny cage we had made for him, and make us rich beyond our dreams—rich with life;—and still we did not know why.
    Above him, Wesson imagined he could see that sensed body a-wallow in the glacial blackness, its bulk passively turning with the station’s spin, bleeding a chill gold into the lips of the tubes, drip, drop.
    Wesson held his head. The pressure inside made it hard to think; it felt as if his skull were about to fly apart. “Aunt Jane,” be said.
    “Yes, Paul.” The kindly, comforting voice: like a nurse. The nurse who stands beside your cot while you have painful, necessary things done to you. Efficient, trained friendliness.
    “Aunt Jane,” said Wesson, “do you know why they keep coming back?”
    “No,” said the voice precisely. “It is a mystery.”
    Wesson nodded. “I had,” he said, “an interview with Gower before I left Home. You know Gower? Chief of the Outerworld Bureau. Came up especially to see me.”
    “Yes?” said Aunt Jane encouragingly.
    “Said to me, “Wesson, you got to find out. Find out if we can count on them to keep up the supply. You know? There’s , fifty million more of us,” he says, “than when you were born. We need more of the stuff, and we got