Pattern

In Short

Robert H. Rohrer's short story "Pattern" follows a human space pilot named Brenner whose ship drifts helplessly into a starless void of deep space. There, he encounters Rahll, an ancient, cannibalistic alien existing only as a fragile electrical pattern. Desperate for sustenance, the alien slowly strips away Brenner's physical senses one by one using deceptive illusions, while Brenner fights back by turning his own ship's generator against the creature. The story has endured as a taut, psychological sci-fi encounter that turns the traditional first-contact narrative into a tense battle of wits and perception.

The Story

The narrative opens in the cold expanse of deep space, where an ancient alien consciousness named Rahll floats in near-total disintegration. Surviving a cataclysmic civil war among his kind centuries ago that shattered their unified grid, Rahll has warped into a solitary cannibal. Reduced to a jagged, starving pattern of electrical impulses, he survives by absorbing other life-forms and twisting them to his own frequency.

Across the void, a human space pilot named Brenner sits trapped in his small, three-compartmented ship after his directional equipment fails him. Cut off from his home base and thinking longingly of Earth, his fiancée Barbara, and his superior Hale, Brenner suddenly notices strange anomalies. First, an unexplainable scent of coffee appears and then vanishes, along with his sense of smell. Soon after, the hum of his ship's generators disappears as his hearing goes next.

Rahll discovers that Brenner's consciousness is divided into five distinct sensory spokes connected to a central hub. Too weak to consume the entire human at once, Rahll begins systematically isolating and absorbing Brenner's senses. He deploys mental illusions—mimicking the voice of Captain Hale and the form of Barbara—to trick Brenner into accepting the false environment as normal. Each time Brenner falls for an illusion or loses a sense, a "block" moves into place, cutting off another facet of his humanity.

As the two minds press against each other, they unconsciously trade traits. Rahll begins picking up human concepts like names, tempers, and voices, while Brenner pieces together the alien's nature, realizing that Rahll feeds on flexible, chemically stimulated impulses and harbors a half-conscious fear of rigid, unyielding electrical currents. Recognizing the deadly endgame—where Rahll plans to consume all life across the universe—Brenner devises a desperate counter-strategy.

Brenner swallows a measured dose of morphine to slow his own heartbeat and consciousness to a bare minimum, then throttles down his ship's mechanical generator. When Rahll lunges to consume what he thinks is the weakened human impulse, he mistakenly swallows the continuous, inflexible stream of current pouring directly from the generator. The rigid electricity freezes Rahll's crystalloid form solid, locking him into a motionless state. Brenner survives, but the psychological contamination is absolute: having absorbed the alien's patterns, Brenner's own mind has warped into a cannibalistic shape. He turns his ship around, hungering for the men waiting at Base.

How It Unfolds

• The void of survival — Rahll floats in absolute darkness, a decaying electrical impulse driven mad by centuries of hunger following an ancient cosmic cataclysm.
• The drifting pilot — Stranded far from his base in a starless sector, Brenner curses his faulty navigation equipment while thinking of his distant home and family.
• The sensory siege — Rahll covertly attaches to Brenner's multi-spoked consciousness, using tailored sensory illusions to block out smell, sound, taste, and touch one by one.
• The phantom visions — The alien projects cruel, shifting hallucinations of Captain Hale and Barbara to break the pilot's psychological defenses and secure total absorption.
• The mechanical trap — Realizing the alien's aversion to unyielding machinery, Brenner drugs himself with morphine and feeds his ship's steady generator current straight into the predator's jaws.
• The chilling aftermath — The alien consciousness is permanently frozen by the rigid electricity, but Brenner's mind has already mutated into a mirror image of the cannibal.

The People

• Rahll is an ancient, disembodied electrical entity who wants only to escape his agonizing dissolution by hunting and absorbing other life-forms. His physical weakness and burning hunger stand in his way, forcing him to rely on stealthy psychological illusions, and he ends up permanently paralyzed and frozen by the rigid mechanical current he mistakes for food.
• Brenner is a frustrated human space pilot who wants nothing more than to fix his ship, reconnect with his base, and return to his fiancée Barbara. The incomprehensible alien intelligence outside his hull blocks his escape and systematically robs him of his physical senses, and he ends up surviving the encounter only to have his own thought-patterns permanently corrupted into those of a cosmic cannibal.

In Its Own Voice

He had been badly wounded, unable to move in any direction; so for thousands of years after the explosion he had floated in darkness, waiting for a sign of another impulse with which to make contact and create mutual sustenance.

This line establishes Rahll's ancient isolation and the desperate, foundational hunger that drives his encounter with the human pilot.

The pattern of a cannibal.

This stark, three-word fragment defines the horrific evolutionary turn Rahll's consciousness took during millennia of starvation in the void.

Brenner could no longer feel or taste.

This chillingly concise sentence marks the precise moment the alien's systematic dismantling of the pilot's physical reality reaches its penultimate stage.

What It's Really About

The story explores the terrifying friction between organic humanity and completely alien forms of existence, suggesting that true contact changes both parties irreversibly. It examines the fragility of human perception, showing how easily our grip on reality can be manipulated when our sensory inputs are compromised. Beneath the plot lies a darker inquiry into assimilation: can a human fight a cosmic predator without adopting its monstrous nature? Rohrer argues that survival often demands a chilling cost, as the victor ultimately inherits the very contagion he fought to destroy.

Why Read It Today

Readers who love cerebral, claustrophobic science fiction in the vein of classic twilight-zone encounters will find this story deeply compelling. Reading it feels like being trapped in a sensory deprivation tank with an unseen adversary, where every shifting shadow and phantom sound carries lethal weight. The story does not rely on space opera spectacle; instead, it builds relentless tension through a microscopic battle of pure consciousness. While the period framing reflects early 1960s pulp conventions—such as the straightforward nomenclature and rugged space-worker archetypes—the psychological horror of losing one's own senses and humanity remains strikingly potent. What ultimately stays with you is not the defeat of the alien, but the quiet, chilling finality of Brenner's transformation, proving that some victories leave the victor just as lost as the monster they overcame.

What other classic short-form science fiction from the golden age of magazines would you like to explore?