by E. C. Tubb
A signal, lamp flashed, Carter’s face appearing on a screen.
‘Paul, did you contact Parks and Bannion?’
‘They’re working over at Area Two. They’ll report to you direct when they return to base.’
‘Can’t you recall them?’
‘Without official orders, no.’ Morrow was firm. ‘Sorry, Alan, but I’ll tell them to waste no time.’
He smiled as Carter, frowning, broke the connection. The two men were his unofficial back-up crew—he was still hoping the Meta probe would be launched. His smile widened as he caught a flash of yellow from an approaching sleeve.
Sandra Benes, young, slightly built, dark haired and with a petal-like skin—a girl for whom he had a great regard.
‘Sandra?’
‘Trouble.’ She handed him a print out. ‘Heat levels rising at Area One. Now at 1873 Celsius.’
Above the melting point of iron!
‘Radiation?’
‘Rising. Paul—’
‘Back to your post, Sandra.’
Morrow hit buttons and checked a row of meters. The heat was rising at an incredible rate. Already the alloy containers would be softening, yielding to the internal pressures within, the waste vaporizing, molecular activity accelerated by the heat. And pressure would be building beneath the sealed mounds, growing, a potential bomb which could blow at any moment.
The alarm blared as he sounded the general alert. From speakers a taped voice echoed above the harsh noise, sounding louder as it ceased.
‘All personnel to alert-stations! All personnel to alert-stations! Interconnecting doors to be sealed, exits contained, external workers to enter the base immediately!’
Bergman, breathing hard, ran to stand beside Morrow.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Area One, Professor. I think it’s about to blow.’ Morrow gestured at the screen, his instruments. ‘The heat level is now well into the red. At 4,500 celsius and rising. High enough to fuse rock and vaporize steel.’ He grunted as a screen flashed and died. ‘One of the scanners has burned out. All hell must be breaking loose out there. The Commander—’
‘Isn’t here,’ said Bergman thickly. ‘We developed some new monitoring instruments and he’s taken an Eagle to check the area. Morrow, get him back before it’s too late!’
It had been a crazy thing to do and Koenig admitted it, but the temptation had been too great. It was good to sit at the controls again, to feel the pulse and throb of the engines, to become a living extension of the Eagle in which he rode. And he could justify the indulgence—he had no moral right to send a man into danger unless there was no alternative.
Yet Area One had to be checked, his theory put to the test.
He flew high, the globe of Earth falling behind, dropping beneath the horizon as he pushed on towards the dark side. Ahead he could see the tiny glow of the beacon and he slowed, circling, one hand hitting a series of switches as he activated the external instruments hastily fitted to his instruction. Field sensors, Geiger counters, monitors which would record the electro-magnetic flux—others which Bergman had produced and which he barely understood.
He was well protected too. Thick metallic padding rode beneath his suit. His helmet was overlaid with layers of foil, wound with a coil of wire which carried a variable current—a heterodying barrier to any known stress field. A small box, another of Bergman’s products, rested on the co-pilot’s seat. From it streamed an invisible force which caused small vibrations to come from the metal of the hull. An ultrasonic projector—another line of defence should it be needed.
But his best defence was luck and height. Luck to avoid the pulse should it come, height to minimize its effect if it did.
It was the one thing which saved his life.
Had there been an atmosphere he would have died, crushed in his ship by the shock wave, as it was he saw the glare, a savage burst of light which filled the cabin and threw all detail around the area into sharp clarity. The glare and then the initial results of the explosion which ripped open the mounds, tore great masses of stone from the ground and sent them together with a rain of molten droplets high above the Luna surface.
‘Commander!’ Morrow’s voice was strained. ‘Commander we’ve a general alert. Return to base immediately. Something’s happened at Area One—’
‘I know.’
‘—all scanners and sensors are—’ Morrow’s voice changed. ‘You know? Commander, where are you?’
‘Where it’s happening. Victor, get those readings!’
‘John!’
Koenig was too busy to answer. Beneath his hands the Eagle jerked, a gout of fire missing it by inches, the hull ringing to the impact of molten stone. The controls felt sluggish, the ship slow to respond, and he thinned his lips as a second glare followed the first.
The secondary blast, he thought. Paper to light wood to light coal. A bad analogy, and perhaps not even a true one, but it seemed to fit. Particles firing vapour which, in turn, would trigger the fission of the bulk of the waste. The waste and, perhaps, something more. The fusion of the rock itself. If that should happen . . .
‘Commander?’ Morrow was anxious. ‘What is your situation?’
Damned bad, but Koenig didn’t say so. The habits of official communication died hard.
‘Am leaving area and heading towards base. Eagle slow to respond. Condition yellow.’
Yellow moving to red as the Eagle slewed, turning and veering, now hopelessly out of control, just a dead mass of metal which began to fall to the jagged peaks of the ground below.
A slow fall, with gravity only one sixth Earth normal, there was time to check the fastenings and make himself firm. Time to regain a little control, not much, just enough to win a blast from the motor, to turn the dive into a glide, to aim the nose at the edge of a crater. Time to hope. And to pray.
If he hit the nearside of the crater rim he was dead but if the Eagle managed to clear it there was a chance—it would hit the slope and skid down to rock, its final impact cushioned by the dust.
The difference between possible survival and certain death was a matter of feet.
And all he could do was to wait.
Wait until he hit and slid and fell into an engulfing darkness.
Once, when Koenig had been small, he had fallen from a tree, cracking his head on the way down and knocking himself out—becoming aware only when in the hospital with a nurse fussing over him and his mother’s worried face large in his field of vision.
Now, for a moment, it seemed that he had time-jumped and was reliving the experience, catching the same smells, hearing the same noises. An odd moment which quickly passed. The person fussing over him was not a nurse but Doctor Mathias. And it wasn’t his mother who stared at him with concern but Helena.
She said, ‘He’s conscious, Doctor.’
‘Naturally.’ Mathias plucked away more of the sensor pads which were held by an adhesive gel. ‘I’ve broken the micro-current circuit to the sleep-centre. How do you feel, Commander?’
‘Fine.’ Koenig drew in his breath, conscious of a sharp pain, an ache. ‘I guess I’m lucky to be alive.’
‘Yes,’ said Mathias dryly. ‘I would say that you are. The rescue crew never thought you’d make it. It just shows how wrong some experts can be.’ He removed the last of the pads. ‘All right, Helena, he’s all yours.’
He left the room as Koenig rose from the couch. He wore a new uniform and could feel the constriction of dressings around his chest. He winced as he stood upright.
‘One cracked rib,’ said Helena, flatly. ‘Extensive bruising and some metabolic shock, but that’s about all. We can’t find anything else—so far.’
He had been terribly lucky, more than he deserved, perhaps, but something in her tone irritated him. It held a note of condemnation.
‘You disapprove?’
She held him with her eyes, her voice hard, accusing. ‘Commander, you knew that area was dangerous. You’d put it out of bound
s for all personnel—and yet you went right out there yourself. Do you honestly think that we need heroes?’
‘We need answers,’ he snapped. ‘Information. I was trying to get it.’
‘And you almost got yourself killed!’
‘Yes.’ he admitted then added, dryly, ‘You know, Doctor, I didn’t think you cared.’
‘I—’
‘You had better come with me,’ Koenig interrupted. ‘Let’s see what Victor has found.’
Bergman joined them in the office loaded with papers, graphs and print-outs. Dumping them on the desk he said, ‘I’ve had these processed by the—Sorry, John. How do you feel?’
‘Fine.’
‘Good. Well, I checked out your Eagle, the rescue team brought it in, and I think we’ve found what we were looking for. As you suspected the accumulated waste was generating a magnetic pulse-field which—’
‘Slow down, Victor. I didn’t say anything about a magnetic field.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ admitted Bergman. ‘But that, primarily is what it was. Just as well for you, the protection we devised gave you full protection.’
‘I hope you can be certain of that,’ said Helena bleakly. ‘But I still want the Commander to report each twelve hours for cerebral checks.’
‘Later.’ Koenig turned to Bergman. ‘ You were saying?’
‘The pulse-field. John, it’s incredible! The magnitude was tremendous—far more dense than anything we have ever known before. Localized, of course, it seemed to spread in a funnel-formation from the centre of Area One and in that appears to follow the attributes of light. A paradox—magnetism, as far as we know cannot be beamed or projected. I’ve had the computers run some equations based on the figures we obtained and the results are more than promising. In fact the implications are—’
‘Please, Victor!’ Bergman, consumed by scientific interest, was entranced by the potential discoveries the findings promised. ‘Did you find anything peculiar to the site? Any geological oddity?’
‘A mass of ferrous-bearing lunite—but you know that, John. It was the reason the site was chosen in the first place. Lunite is hard yet easily worked, has a high tensile strength and forms a good barrier to atomic particle-emission. We only moved to Area Two because—’ He broke off then said, slowly, ‘Area Two!’
‘Also based on a mass of ferrous-bearing lunite,’ said Koenig. ‘And what has happened once could happen again.’
‘Another explosion?’ Helena looked from one to the other. ‘Is it possible?’
‘You’ve studied chemistry,’ said Koenig. ‘You know what happens when you mix various compounds. Permangate and glycerine, for example. You generate heat and combustion. No matter how often you do it you always get the same result.’
‘That is true,’ she admitted, ‘but—’
‘The mix has to be right, I agree.’ Koenig looked at Bergman. ‘That’s the next job, Victor. I want to know exactly what is in those cans as regards quantities and constituents. We’ll have to make a cross-reference to Area One. If there’s a correlation—’
He didn’t have to finish—Area Two held almost a hundred and fifty times the amounts dumped at Area One.
It was a quiet room, a compartment which held the imprint of a strong personality, plans and drawings fastened to the walls, a mobile suspended from the ceiling, a framed award, a shelf of well-thumbed books; classics standing beside the latest works of modern technology: Bergman’s laboratory in which he spent a great deal of his time. A retreat, perhaps, a world of his own.
He sat at his desk busy with a computer terminal, fingers dancing over the keys as he fed equations into the machine, pausing as he studied the answers, moving again with a skilled grace.
He was, thought Helena watching from where she stood in the open door, almost a part of the mechanism. A man dedicated to science, the terminal an extension of himself—or himself an extension of the terminal.
Without turning or glancing towards her Bergman said, quietly, ‘No, Helena, I’m not a machine.’
‘Did I say you were?’
‘You thought it. A lot of people do and, sometimes, I think it myself.’ He turned, rising. ‘Where does it begin? With a set of artificial teeth? An electronic ear? A plastic larynx? A mechanical heart?’ His hand rose to touch his chest. ‘Sometimes I think we should all be fitted with these things at birth. Then no more adrenalin-induced anger, no hatred, no passion, no—’
‘Fear?’
‘I was going to say love.’
She moved deeper into the room, looking at the framed testimonial of his Nobel Prize won for his work in physics. A sheaf of plans lay on a bench and she touched a drawing studying its complexity. The plan of a proposed photon drive. Another held the design of a antigravity shield and force screen. A third was a fantastic contruction of a self-contained space city. A fourth was the plan of a house drawn with painstaking care. An old plan, the paper cracked, the corners frayed. An old plan and a simple house.
‘It was never built,’ said Bergman quietly. ‘She died.’
‘Your wife?’
‘The woman I was to have married. The only woman I could ever have married. Sometimes, sitting here, I wonder what would have happened had she lived. The house would have been built and I’d have taken a job with some big corporation and—who knows?’
‘You would have been happy.’
‘Happy?’ Again his hand lifted to his chest, the buried mechanism which kept him alive. ‘Perhaps, but at least we would have been together. They did me no favour when—but never mind. That was long ago now.’
She said, bleakly, ‘We all bear our scars.’
‘Yes.’ He touched the plan she still held. ‘You like it?’
‘Very much. If things had been different I could have had one like it. Lee—’
She broke off, not wanting to remember. The plans they had made, the long hours of talk when he had lain at her side, passion spent, replaced by the warm glow of shared intimacy. Bold plans, forward-looking, a dream of a home and a garden, children—plans which had crumbled into the wasted years.
He said, quietly, as if guessing her thoughts, ‘You still have time, Helena. Don’t throw it away.’
‘Advice?’
‘Good sense. Time passes too quickly—I know. Before you are aware of it the chances have gone and there is nothing left but work. Do you want to spend the rest of your life at Alpha?’
‘There are worse places.’
‘True—but there are many better. John realized that and—’
‘He came back.’
‘Because he was needed and, perhaps, like you, he wanted somewhere to hide.’
Dropping the old plan she turned to face him, her eyes questioning. ‘Have you known him long?’
‘For most of his life, Helena. He was orphaned in his early teens and had to make his way alone. For him it wasn’t easy. Money was short and he had to fight every step of the way. He won, but he paid for it, that black sleeve didn’t come cheap. And I’m not talking about money. As you said, Helena—we all bear our scars.’
Scars which, in Koenig’s case, were buried deep, hidden away from casual eyes. Yet she remembered his face when he had lain on the couch, the expression on wakening, the empty yearning quickly masked. Almost she had touched him then, enfolding him in her arms, giving what comfort she could. Tempted to respond to something which had woken inside of her—an impulse resisted only because of the sense of betrayal.
Quickly, to break the mood of the moment, she said, ‘Have you completed your investigations?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
Bergman shook his head. ‘Trouble, Helena. The mix is the same. It’s only a matter of time before—’
He broke off as his commlock buzzed. As he lifted it from his belt the operator spoke from the screen.
‘Professor Bergman, the Commander has asked me to inform you that Commissioner Simmonds is on his way from Earth. Estimated time of arrival thirte
en minutes.’
CHAPTER FOUR
He was cold, his eyes hostile, the touch of his hand a mere formality. As Koenig led him towards his office he said, ‘I am most disturbed, John. The Meta probe is overdue and your demand for classified information was highly irregular.’
‘I needed to know the contents of the waste cans.’
‘Even so you should have cleared it with me first. Should the news leak out there could be serious repercussions. Coupled with the delay in launching the Meta probe it places me in an awkward situation. In fact I’ve had to rescind the halt on waste disposal. Normal operations will recommence in three days.’
‘No!’
Simmond’s lips tightened but he said nothing, waiting until Koenig had closed the doors of his office, cutting out the curious eyes and flapping ears. Quickly Koenig said, ‘We can’t take anymore waste, Commissioner. Not in the Disposal Area at least. If you want to dump it elsewhere that’s up to you.’
‘I can’t agree to that. The Committee—’
‘Can go to hell. They aren’t in charge up here, I am.’
For now, thought Simmonds, but not for much longer. Yet with the diplomacy won over years of political haggling he kept the thought to himself. Time enough to use the axe when he had achieved as much as he could. The blame for any mistakes made now would be shifted to Koenig then.
And, perhaps, something could still be saved.
‘The probe, John. You promised me that you would get it launched. We made a deal—’
‘Which you’ve broken.’
‘I had no choice.’
‘And neither had I.’ Koenig felt relief that he now had no cause to send men to their deaths. Despite Carter’s willingness to take a chance the odds were against him. ‘We’ve had other things to worry about—or haven’t you heard what happened to Area One?’
‘The explosion?’ Simmonds shrugged. ‘An accident, John. A freak occurrence. Unfortunate, but I’m sure that it’s an isolated incident. My technicians assure me that it is impossible for an area to detonate. The waste cannot reach critical mass.’
The man was a fool and a dangerous one. Koenig snapped into his commlock.