‘Come on...’ Carter sprang once more towards the door. ‘The other Travel Tube.’
They raced off again down the corridor. They reached the Travel Tube and piled inside. The power supply had been switched back on by Sahn and they were soon speeding along beneath the lunar surface, catching up with the creature.
As they went Carter called the Launch Area Security Guards on the Tube monitor. ‘This is top priority alert,’ he announced gravely. ‘Block Travel Tube One Tunnel. Permit nothing...’
His words were cut off by the sound of more metal being rent and the surprised shout of the Guards coming over the monitor. The face of the Guard he had been talking to disappeared abruptly. He called urgently into the blank screen. ‘Launching Area... Launching Area – what’s happening?’
They heard more shouts, mixed in with the shrill, unearthly whinnying of the creature. Finally the Guard’s alarmed face returned. ‘Mr Carter, we’ve been attacked by it...’
‘Okay, I figured that,’ Carter snapped, thinking quickly. ‘Where is it now?’
‘In Eagle Four.’
‘Christ. Hurry this bloody Tube up...’ He looked impatiently at the forward doors. Unavoidably, the Launch Area had to be sited some way from the Main Buildings. At the same time none of the Travel Tubes were presently working all that well.
Eventually the Tube stopped and they burst out into the Launch Reception Area. In front of them were the Boarding Tube doors. The one leading to Eagle Four was closed. On the floor were the bodies of several Guards, some of them coming round. The Guard who had spoken to them was slumped weakly against the wall, his tunic top soaked in blood.
‘It’s too late,’ he gasped when he saw them. ‘The Boarding Tube is already retracting...’
Carter changed direction and headed into the Eagle Launch Control Room. Helena followed him while Vincent attended to the casualties and alerted the Medical Crew.
The Control Room afforded a good view of the subterranean hangar in which Alpha’s entire fleet of Eagles was docked. The ships were kept in constant readiness for lift-off by a dedicated ground crew of engineers and mechanics. Such astonishing efficiency was normally to be commended. Today it only served to be one more factor that worked against them.
‘You can’t let that Eagle lift off!’ Helena shouted at the surprised personnel.
Without listening Carter pushed the white-coated controllers from their places in front of the long console and depressed buttons in quick succession. Eventually he got an interior shot of the Eagle Four Pilot Section. The creature was stood at the controls, ready to operate them. But it seemed mesmerized.
‘The anaesthetic,’ Helena observed with relief. ‘It’s beginning to take effect.’
‘I’m bringing it in,’ Carter announced. He operated more of the controls.
The Eagle Ship had already been manoeuvred into a take-off position. The large elevator which carried it up to the Launch Pad on the surface had already reached half-way. He halted its ascent and brought it down. It reached the bottom of the shaft and, still on its platform, he guided it horizontally back into the hangar. He stopped it at its maintenance dock.
The sudden jolt brought the creature round. Its hoof struck the flight console in front of it, and its glazed eyes stared uncomprehendingly at the console monitor. It stared blankly at it, then sudden awareness dawned in its drugged mind; it realized that it had been trapped.
Helena and Carter watched tensely, wondering what it would do next. As though to make more trouble for them, even in its last minute of awareness, it swayed perilously over the controls and finally crashed headlong on to them.
The Eagle’s engines erupted into life. Appalled, the observers in the Control Room fled en masse, leaving the doctor and the acting Commander staring transfixed at the scene of havoc=to-be.
‘Can’t you stop it?’ Helena cried out in terror.
Carter’s eyes showed panic. ‘I’ve got no control over it now. Oh, my Christ!’
He watched helplessly through the thick glass observation window as the out-of-control Eagle veered up into the hangar roof. All eight of its ascent engine nozzles were blazing redly. Its flat, white top crumpled and the force of impact tilted it and sent it skewering sideways. With frightening acceleration it ploughed into the centre of the fleet of Eagles, rolled over on its side and then fell heavily to the floor. The other Eagles crashed down around it in a buckled, twisted mass of wreckage. The engines had miraculously stopped.
Carter groaned at the destruction, not knowing whether or not to be pleased that the damage was as minimal as it was –most of their Eagles out of action – or horrified at the burden that repairs and replacements were going to place on their limited resources. He decided to be relieved, for if the engines hadn’t cut out when they had the whole Moon might have gone up.
Silver-suited Firemen began pouring into the hangar from all directions, and were already spraying cascades of foam on the smoking wreckage. Two of them made their way through the growing mountain of whiteness and broke open the doors of Eagle Four. Moments later they emerged, dragging the still form of the horse creature. Others helped them to pull it through the fume-laden, foam-flecked air across the hangar floor to the Reception Area.
Helena ran forward to meet them. She gave the floppy leaden form a cursory examination and turned to Carter with tears in her eyes. ‘She’s dying...’
‘Can’t you save her?’
She shook her head, at a loss. ‘I’ve never seen the species before today. I have no knowledge of its anatomy... its vital functions are a mystery to me...’
Carter stared aghast, first at the animal and then at Helena. He thought of Verdeschi, probably lost for good. Now Maya, the Italian’s girlfriend. Both were gone. He turned pleadingly back to Helena.
‘You must be able to do something.’
CHAPTER FOUR
The mysterious, deadly malaise that had struck the Psychon seemed to enter a last virile phase. Strapped to the Medical Centre operating table after she had been carried bodily inside, her mad molecules began changing their forms in rapid succession. But the new animals all lacked strength. It was as though her fading, jumbled mind was undergoing a brief resume of her life and itemizing the living creatures she had met during it. None of them – and many looked more than capable – so much as expanded the elastic material that her restraints were fashioned from.
At length her appearance stabilized itself in the weird shape of a tree-like creature that Helena had never seen before. It was humanoid – more humanoid than the horse creature – with rough, bark-like skin and grey, matted hair. Like a Human Being it had a nose, two eyes, a mouth, arms and legs – but there the resemblance ended. For all Helena knew, her scalpel, poised to operate, might strike sap instead of blood.
She was at a loss.
‘Maya, you’ve got to change back...’ she said imploringly to the prone, aged bark face. ‘I don’t understand your usual biochemistry properly, let alone this one.’ She glanced helplessly at Vincent. They were both dressed in surgeons’ operating gowns and wore masks over their mouths. ‘At least I know something of her old body – I’d rather gamble with that than with something I know nothing at all about...’ She turned to the Bark Creature’s motionless form again. ‘Maya, you’ve got to change back – or you’ll die.’
The strange patient breathed shallowly.
‘You’re not getting through to her,’ Vincent said. He moved to the X-Ray and Thermographic Scanner, checking the readings with his practised eye. He said to Carter, who was also standing round the bed-side, ‘Your anaesthetic dart really worked.’
‘Maya, you have got to change,’ Helena repeated more urgently.
Vincent switched on the X-Ray screen and they saw the alien workings of the creature’s insides. ‘The pressure is in here somewhere,’ he explained to Carter, pointing to a general area of sausage-like shapes. ‘We have nothing to compare. We have never seen anything like that before.’
&
nbsp; He flicked another switch and more strange designs came on the screen. ‘Thermographic photographs. We have insufficient knowledge of this species to know what it’s all about. We can’t treat its injuries.’
‘Then we just stand here and let Maya die?’ Carter asked incredulously.
Vincent didn’t say anything. He moved instead to a rack of test-tubes and picked up a tube containing a pale amber-coloured fluid. ‘Her blood.’ He indicated another tube full of the same substance. ‘If we treat it we could upset the corpuscle balance. We don’t know what the hell we’re dealing with...’
Carter waved him silent. He turned to Helena. ‘When did Maya transform into this state?’
‘About forty-five minutes ago.’
‘Okay, you’re afraid to operate because you’re unfamiliar with its anatomy, right?’
She nodded with exasperation.
‘All right then. All we have to do is wait another fifteen minutes. Maya can’t hold any form for more than an hour.’
‘I’ve already thought of that, Alan,’ Helena told him as patiently as she could. ‘The only problem is, it isn’t going to live another fifteen minutes...’ Her words served to impress this fact on her and she motioned to Vincent. ‘Ben, there’s no other way. Assist me, please.’
Vincent looked frightened. ‘If you operate, you could kill her.’
‘But Alan’s right, we can’t just stand by and let her go,’ she told him. ‘At least she’ll have a chance. Nurse...?’
The nurse whom she had assigned to the case stepped quickly forward.
‘We’ll make an incision here.’ Helena pointed to the Bark Animal’s chest. ‘If we can reach that blockage...’
Vincent interrupted her with a series of aggressive questions. ‘What if it’s not a blockage? What if it’s natural tissue performing a natural function?’
Helena feigned casualness. ‘Let’s find out.’
The nurse lifted the cover off the tray of sterilized surgical instruments and prepared to hand them to the doctor.
‘All right, easy now,’ Helena said. ‘Here we go.’ She placed her scalpel in a cutting position on the tough grey skin. She was about to make the opening incision when her eyes were attracted towards the oscilloscope across which the slow, almost lifeless record of the animal’s heart-rate had been tracking. The pulse had petered out almost to a straight line.
The creature’s eyes flashed dully open, and a death groan escaped its cracked lips.
‘You can’t operate!’ Vincent declared. ‘She’s not going to make it.’
Helena clenched her teeth. She withdrew the scalpel and pleaded once more with her motionless patient. At the moment of its death it seemed to have awoken. Its eyes rested on hers and seemed conscious of her. ‘Maya, you’ve got to change right now... you’ve got to change,’ she said with anguish.
As though in response to her words the pitiful creature enveloped itself in the yellowish spindle of energy, indicating to those gathered round the bed that it was indeed about to change. They heaved a collective sigh of relief. It seemed to them as though, in the last second of her existence, Maya’s sanity had returned and she was converting back to her typical form.
‘She can hear me, Alan...!’ Helena exclaimed. ‘She can hear me!’
But she spoke too soon.
The light energy cleared and in place of the Bark Creature the outlines of a creature more hideous, more vicious than any that they had previously seen, slowly materialized.
It had a large, ungainly head that seemed to be made of solid bone.
It had a single giant eye of a lacklustre, mottled hue.
Its appendages were calipered.
Its body was cloaked in a long, shaggy down of fur.
From its outrageous, skull-like head sprouted two enormous white tusks in a grim semi-circle of death.
It lay motionlessly on the bed beneath the restraints, as though gathering strength. The pulse-rate reading on the oscilloscope quickened, and the Alphans round the bed stepped back with renewed alarm.
Before the incensed being had a chance to break its bonds, Carter reacted, leaping to the Red Alert housing attached to the wall. By the time it had raised itself to a sitting position and madly knocked aside the figures of the nurse and the two doctors the emergency klaxons were sounding throughout the Moon Base.
Startled by their shrill, whooping noise, it heaved itself powerfully off the bed and launched itself at the Australian.
‘It’s mad with pain!’ Helena yelled warningly, staggering back to her feet. ‘The transformation didn’t wipe out all its injuries.’
But her words were no help to Carter, who was picked up and thrown heavily against the wall. Vincent found his legs and went to the Eagle Pilot’s help. He threw himself on the shaggy, humped back and began punching it savagely and ripping out its hair – anything to cause the monster to engage its unsavoury pair of antlers elsewhere.
None too soon a squad of Security Guards, alerted by the klaxon, burst into the Centre. Their lasers held in front of them, they ran over to where the life and death struggle was taking place.
‘Make sure you’re set on stun,’ Carter told them thickly as he staggered back on his feet. His lips were cut where his face had been slammed into the wall, and he felt as though he had been dipped, brains first, in a bath of sonic radiation.
‘Fire!’
As one, the lasers blazed and struck the creature stabbing blows on its hide. Its hair erupted in flame and filled the room with choking, acrid fumes. It was soon totally enveloped in the numbing energy flow – more than other creatures many times its size could have endured – but it still continued to stand. Bellowing with rage and pain it moved through the astounded Guards and clipped them roughly aside. It disappeared through the doors in a cloud of smoke and fire, its white horns pointing upwards from the mêlée like those of some prestigious and horrific agent of Satan.
At the other end of the billion-year fracture in Time, Koenig stared grimly at the abandoned consoles and equipment bays of the derelict star ship.
As the exterior of the ship had suggested to them, it had lain empty for hundreds of years. Strangely, parts of its electronic circuit were still functioning inside the alien equivalent of its Pilot Section.
They had been able to dock using their grappling arms, and climb in through the torn hole in the hull. Unbelievably, they had then discovered that they could re-pressurize the cabin. They were able to activate the power supply and flood the room with as much heat and air as they needed. In addition to the Eagle supplies they now had sufficient protection for an unknown period of time. Fate could not have smiled at a more opportune – or unlikely – moment; although the relief it afforded them was little more than a drop in the desolate ocean of Space.
They were filled more with curiosity than relief and they nursed a burning hope that the craft’s secrets would provide them with the way of getting back to Alpha.
‘Check out the power source,’ Koenig told Verdeschi as they moved about the flashing instrument panels, testing the ship’s controls and trying to discover how it worked. ‘See if its fuel source is adaptable to our Eagle.’
Verdeschi scratched his head in puzzlement, not knowing where to begin. ‘Okay,’ he said. He spied a large box of fuses on the far side of the spacious cabin and went to see if he could trace the cables back to their source.
Koenig’s attention had been taken by a small viewing screen and a storage rack of cassettes. It was built into one of the most densely instrumented banks on the ship. He guessed that it was probably a part of the Main Computer.
He pulled out one of the cartridges and pressed it into a slot at the base of the screen. Instantly the screen lit up and a series of inexplicable charts appeared on it. One by one he went through the cassettes, trying to find something that he could understand. The beings who once had navigated the beautiful craft did not seem to be too greatly superior to the Alphans in their level of technology, because much of it
was recognizable. But there was no doubt that they had known a few more tricks.
Verdeschi returned and viewed the screen with him. ‘Obviously a data bank,’ he commented.
Koenig nodded. He took out the cartridge and replaced it with another.
Verdeschi continued: ‘The power source is sophisticated. It’s quite a bit beyond our capabilities. In fact I don’t pretend to understand it...’
The image of an alien being flashed across the screen, its sudden appearance and startling looks causing them both to fall silent. Awed, they guessed that the tape was a message deliberately recorded for their ears. Perhaps it explained why the craft’s control section had been left so immaculately preserved.
The being was a grass-hopper species of humanoid. It wore a military-styled hat bearing the emblem of the ship. Its long-dead insect’s eyes stared quizzically at them. Its antennae quivered. Its mandibles moved as it broke hesitantly into speech.
‘This is Captain Duro, Commander of the Betanon Scout-Cruiser, Menon...’ it announced in a high, whispering, almost plaintive voice. They were immediately overwhelmed with feelings of acute melancholy and grandeur.
‘We were 12 parsecs distant from the Mothership Admenon when it disappeared into a Space Warp. That happened Star Time 12. It is now Star Time 32 and through all that long period I and my crew have been desperately trying to find that same entry into the Space Warp.
‘We thought we had pin-pointed the exact location of entry of the Mothership into the Space Warp. It was after we had made a number of unsuccessful attempts to enter the Space Warp that we realized our co-ordinates were wrong. Our ship suffered much damage. There was a fault in our Warp Locator. I set my engineers to work.
‘We were very close to attaining the correct co-ordinates when there was a malfunction in a power pod which caused an explosion, killing all my crew. I myself suffered a fatal wound. In the last few moments of my life, I am making this record so that if any other intelligent life arrives in this area they will have an explanation of these tragic events. The data relating to the Warp Locator is recorded on Cartridge 26.
Space 1999 - The Time Fighters Page 4