by E. C. Tubb
‘Until we have a better explanation, Carl, that will serve as a working hypothesis,’ said Manton. ‘Claire?’
‘I agree.’
‘The next question,’ said Maddox, grimly, ‘is just what the hell caused it. And how?’
‘What I don’t know,’ said Claire. ‘But I can take a guess as to how. I think it was done, or caused, by direct stimulation of the brain. Normally we see something and the image is carried via the optic nerve to the brain where it is resolved into a recognisable shape and subject. Now, if we stimulate the correct centres of the brain the reverse can happen. A subject can be made to see something which isn’t actually there. The same applies to hearing, of course. In fact, I can produce exactly those results in my laboratory.’
‘By hypnotism?’ Manton was interested.
‘That is one method, but I was thinking of electrical cortical stimulation with the use of probes.’
‘Hypnotism,’ said Maddox. Returning to the desk he leaned on it, resting the flats of both hands on the surface. ‘We were entranced, enamoured, concentrating on the play. Everyone was. The ghost was a shifting, flickering image, exactly what would lead to a hypnotic trance-condition. Am I making sense?’
‘Yes and no,’ said Claire. ‘Our concentration would have made us vulnerable to group suggestion and equally so to response to cortical stimulation, but we can rule out simple hypnotism. There would have had to be a director or directive of some kind. A prompter to tell us what to see. And you are forgetting the words.’
The warning. Maddox straightened and glanced towards the closed doors. Beyond them, he knew, sensitive instruments were sending their findings to digital readouts, to dials, to shifting graphs all to be studied and correlated by skilled personnel and the mammoth abilities of the main computer. Yet despite all their skill and technology, they had found nothing.
‘Halt,’ he said, thickly. ‘Retreat. Withdraw. Return. Death and devastation lie ahead. Did you all get it?’
‘In one form or another, yes.’ Claire touched the fullness of her lower lip with the tip of her tongue as if even thinking of the episode had dried the natural saliva. ‘It could be a natural accompaniment to the hallucination. We are afraid of what could lie ahead and we would all like to return, to go back, to be safe.’
An answer, but not a good one; the mystery remained and with it the fear and anxiety. Maddox didn’t believe in natural happenings, for each event there had to be a reason and to find explanations in the realm of philosophical abstractions was to dodge the issue. At times such dodging was of no importance — on Earth, for example, odd accounts of strange sightings and inexplicable events had been dismissed or ignored without apparent detriment. But they were not on Earth. They had little or no reserves. A mistake, any mistake, could be the last they would make.
On the Ad Astra there was simply no room for the unknown.
‘Eric, run that projection again and repeat the sequence up and down forward and back with varying strengths of sonic projection. Ask for volunteers. I want to check there was no possibility that the occurrence wasn’t of our own doing.’
‘I’ve already checked, Carl.’
‘Then do it again!’ Maddox made no attempt to soften his tone. ‘Claire, you do the same. Tests on all together with cross-questioning. Hypnotic recall if you think it necessary. With enough information we might come up with the true answer.’
‘We may already have it,’ she said, bleakly. ‘We received a warning, remember?’
‘Yes,’ he said, harshly. ‘To halt. To return. To withdraw. To go back. Now tell me how the hell we can possibly obey it!’
*
The bottle was half-empty and Gordon Kent scowled at it remembering a joke he had once been told, a philosophical concept which hadn’t amused him then and didn’t now. A bottle half-empty was just that and calling it one half-full didn’t alter the amount of the contents. Well, to hell with it, when it was all gone maybe he could get more or, at least, would be out of the ward, the bed, the whole damned prison the Medical Section had become.
Lifting the bottle, he drank, swallowing the neat alcohol it contained; surgical spirit intended to ease the pain of bedsores, to clean surface areas of skin. A product of the yeast vats which helped to provide their food and which he had stolen to use as an anodyne for boredom.
He glowered at the lowered level and gently moved his injured leg. Days now and still the damned thing hadn’t healed. Alan Guthrie had gone, smiling, eager to get back to work, making a joke as he left to see about getting a crutch. A joke in bad taste — surely it couldn’t come to that, a broken leg, a gash which was slow in healing.
Quickly he took another drink.
The nurse, damn her, had closed the door so that he couldn’t see out of the ward and so was left in a form of solitary confinement foreign to his nature. He had always liked company, the boisterous comradeship of his fellow crewmen, the challenge of gymnastic activity. A big man, proud of his body, enjoying the euphoria of fitness, of using the fine engine of flesh and blood which was his own.
Again he moved his leg, wincing at the stab of pain. Throwing back the cover he examined it, frowning at the ugly red streaks running from the wound, the skin distended and tender. The doctors had seen it, had muttered over it, and had filled him with antibiotics and other assorted junk all with no apparent success. Tomorrow, so he had heard, he was to be given a complete blood-change and after that, if necessary, immersion in an amniotic tank where new tissue would be grown to replace that they would have to cut away.
He wouldn’t die and he wouldn’t lose his leg but he would lose time and the championship would have been decided and he would still be in this or another ward fitted up with life-support mechanisms of one kind or another. Time which dragged past on leaden feet. Feet — the plural.
He took another drink.
And, remembering Guthrie’s parting joke, yet another and then, because it wasn’t worth saving the little which remained, he emptied the bottle and sank back with his head on the pillow staring at the central light the ward contained.
A bright light which seemed to flicker and swell and pulse as if with a life of its own. To change even as he watched. To alter.
Bain heard him scream.
He had been studying a tissue sample from the man’s injured leg, frowning at the distortion of the cellular structure, testing a variety of agents and collating the results. The scream caught him as he was fitting a new slide and he swore as the glass shattered, a sliver cutting a finger so that blood dripped to stain the sterile instrument.
It came again as he straightened, a shriek which sounded less than human, a thing compounded of naked terror and heart-stopping fear.
‘Doctor!’ A nurse came running towards him, her eyes enormous in the pallor of her face. ‘It’s Gordon Kent. I —’
‘Get help!’ Bain thrust past her, leaving a smear of blood from his cut hand on her uniform, the scarlet bright against the white sleeve. ‘Bring sedatives. Hurry!’
He heard the scream again as he reached the ward and flinging open the door he ran inside.
To see the figure crawling on the floor, face and one hand uplifted, jagged shards of broken glass held like a dagger towards the throat. A dagger which plunged even as he watched to release a fountain of ruby, a stream of blood from severed arteries which splashed on the wall and dappled the floor with a crimson rain.
*
‘Seven injured,’ reported Claire. ‘Five in shock; two catatonics. And one dead.’
Maddox frowned, ‘Dead?’
‘Gordon Kent. He killed himself with a broken boule. Ted saw him do it. Of the injured two are hospitalised; one caught his hand in a drill press, the other was burned. The other injuries are superficial and caused by collisions.’ She added, unnecessarily, ‘Their panic caused them to run.’
And one to run further than most — right into the security of the grave. Maddox remembered the man, a fine crewman who would be missed. Not t
he type he would have taken for wanting nerve, but when true panic struck who could guarantee their reactions?
Remembering he said, ‘How is Ted now?’
‘He is a doctor and a good one.’
‘So?’
‘A doctor gets used to the sight of blood, Carl. He has to.’
And Bain was a good doctor — which said nothing about his potential human weakness and, doctor or not, he could have succumbed to the general panic as had the rest. Maddox drew in his breath, remembering a time of nightmare when fear had clogged his veins and he had cringed with the desire to run, to escape, to hide.
If he had been weak and worried and afraid of personal hurt would he have yielded as Kent had done?
Or was it that the man had owned a far more intense imagination?
Questions, always questions, and still there were no answers. Bleakly he looked at the screens in Mission Control again seeing nothing but the cold burn of distant stars.
‘Rose?’
‘Nothing, Commander.’ She knew the implication of his call. ‘Space, as far as all instrumentation is concerned, is totally empty ahead of us.’
‘Saha, as far as the Computer is concerned, what are the extrapolations?’
‘None, Commander. There is insufficient data on which the Computer can work.’
Maddox felt the fingers of his left hand beginning to close. It was useless to blame a machine for not having the intuitive faculty of a man — but how much data did the damn thing need?
‘Try again,’ he ordered. ‘Feed it all the information we have and, if nothing else, obtain an intelligent guess.’ An inconsistency, no machine could be intelligent despite the claims of those who served them, but Saha might find some factor he had previously overlooked. With relief he saw Manton enter Mission Control. ‘Eric! Anything?’
‘Yes, but all negative.’ Manton cleared his throat. ‘At least we can eliminate all thought of internal causes for the recent wave of panic. All equipment in the theatre was out of operation. I’ve checked all sources of electronic usage and none show any surge or loss which means we can eliminate all packets of energy-source such as spatial vortexes which could have created a high-order energy flow.’
‘Which could mean that nothing happened and we have one dead man and several others injured for no reason at all.’
Maddox was being sarcastic and Manton knew it. Quietly he said, ‘There has to be a reason, Carl. All we’ve done so far is to eliminate sources of familiar energy, but there are others and they may be the cause.’
‘Such as?’
‘Eric is thinking of the paraphysical, Carl,’ said Claire. ‘We know that some people possess the talent to move objects without physical contact but as yet we have no means of discovering what type of energy they use. Telepathy, also, requires a form of energy and that is equally unexplained even though we know that telepathy exists. The warning —’
‘Warning?’
‘It has to be that,’ she insisted. ‘Twice now we have known panic and the desire to run. The first time we heard, or thought we heard, an actual voice giving us instructions. Perhaps that was because of the unusual conditions in which we received the message.’
And a man lay dead to show it should not be ignored.
Maddox took a step forward and halted just behind where Weight sat at the main console. Before him lamps flashed in endless signalling, one of the circuits that continually monitored the ship and surround.
‘The big screen, Frank. Full magnification.’
Maddox watched as the distant stars seemed to move aside, an optical illusion that gave the impression of hurtling at a fantastic velocity towards them in space. And still he saw nothing.
‘Try filters.’
The stars flickered and changed colour as Weight obeyed, feeding selective filters over the scanners, blocking out various bands of the electro-magnetic spectrum while bolstering others.
The results were the same.
Nothing.
Space remained as empty as before.
Empty, but holding something which had warned them twice now to stay away. Something which could emit psychic energy to directly influence the brain. A power which warned of devastation and death unless they obeyed.
‘Commander?’
‘That’s enough, Frank. Order a Pinnace and crew to make ready for an investigation-flight. Douglas West will want to take command — let him pick his own co-pilot.’
‘And?’
‘Put the ship on yellow alert — and keep it on until further orders!’
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