Terror from Outer Space

by Robert Vernon

  “Really, the only way we can stop them now is to get help from the outside.”

  “My friends are out there somewhere. If only I still had my walkie-talkie . . .” Mike’s eyes suddenly lit up. “Spence’s wristwatch!”

  Spence struggled to find his way down a dark corridor. Reaching into his daypack, he pulled out a baseball cap and placed it on his head. He pulled off the front patch and had an instant beam of light flooding his path.

  Mike’s voice suddenly came over the walkie-talkie. “Eagle Two, Three, Four . . . Do you copy?”

  Spence grabbed the walkie-talkie off his hip. “Mike! Is that you?”

  “Yeah, your wristwatch invention actually works!”

  Spence remembered that the guard outside was also listening in. “Mike, we’ve got a snoop. Go to channel thirty-four.”

  “Wait a minute, Spence. How do I change channels on a wristwatch?”

  “Just set the second hand to the channel you want,” Spence explained.

  “Roger that!”

  The Last Chance Detectives had enough experience with walkie-talkies to know that people could easily eavesdrop. So, Spence had devised a clever mathematical code to fool anyone who might be listening in on their conversations. The secret to Spence’s code was simple addition. He’d asked Mike to use channel thirty-four even though two-way radios only have fifteen usable channels. All Mike had to do was add three and four together to know the new channel was seven.

  Mike pulled out the stem of the watch and set the second hand at 7:00. Then he lifted the wristwatch to his mouth. “Spence? You there?”

  “We’re all here, Mike!” It was Winnie’s voice.

  “Where are you guys?” Mike asked.

  “We’re right here on this creepy base! Where are you?” Ben asked.

  “I’ve been taken captive along with—” Mike began.

  “Wait a second, Mike,” Commander Schaeffer interrupted. “If they’re here on the base, you’d better warn them about the ‘fear compound.’”

  “Tell us where you are, and we’ll come get you,” Spence offered.

  “Hold on! There’s something very important I need to tell you first.” Mike didn’t want his friends to have to go through what he had. “Be careful because—”

  The door handle to the room in which they were being held captive suddenly rattled. Mike could hear keys sliding into the lock.

  Mike quickly turned the receiver on the watch off and set it down on a nearby table.

  Commander Schaeffer threw a rag over the watch. “Hang on, Mike. This may get ugly.”

  Chapter 13

  MIKE AND COMMANDER SCHAEFFER stepped away from the table as a burly figure dressed in army fatigues entered the room. The man removed his gas mask, revealing a face that had classically handsome features buried under a thin layer of healed scar tissue. Mike guessed that sometime in this man’s past, he’d been burned in a horrible fire. It was apparent where plastic surgeons had applied skin grafts in an attempt to make him look normal again. The man gave them a crooked smile that was anything but friendly.

  Commander Schaeffer spoke first. “Chuck Munson, I still can’t believe—”

  “That one of NASA’s senior training advisors would be part of all this?” Munson chuckled as he removed gloves from his scarred hands. “I’d find your naiveté amusing if you hadn’t become such a thorn in my side.”

  “Where’s my crew?” Commander Schaeffer demanded.

  “Trust me, they are faring much better than most of my men did last night.”

  “Bad dreams, huh?” Commander Schaeffer asked with a slight smile.

  Munson was not amused. “Curious thing, though, Commander. Somehow, I get this foreboding sense of dread. As if your crew members’ very lives were hanging in the balance.”

  “Munson, if you so much as—!”

  “Let me assure you, Commander, I’ll do everything within my power to keep my men from exacting their revenge for what you did to them last night.” Munson reached down and removed the rag that had been covering the watch. “But if you want to get back on their good side, it would behoove you to show us a sign of good faith. Don’t you think?”

  “Like what?” Commander Schaeffer asked.

  Mike watched nervously as Munson picked up the wristwatch.

  “The ‘fear compound.’” Munson closely examined the face of the watch. “Each and every grain of the compound is extremely valuable to us. We collected and accounted for almost all the vials. Only two are missing. And we both know how you wasted one of them by putting it into the air ducts.”

  Munson suddenly slammed the watch down on the table and stepped in to stand nose to nose with Commander Schaeffer.

  “But I will not be denied the other!”

  Winnie made her way down a narrow hallway littered with file cabinets, old office furniture, and packing boxes. It was a tight squeeze, but she continued forward. Her flashlight beam shined dully in the hazy atmosphere.

  Mike had not responded to their radio calls for several minutes. But Winnie and her friends each took turns trying to get him to respond.

  “Come in, Eagle One,” Ben’s voice called over Winnie’s radio.

  “Forget it, Ben,” Winnie spoke into her walkie-talkie. “Something must’ve happened to his radio. All we can do is keep looking and hope we hear from him again.”

  “But be careful, you guys,” Spence transmitted from another part of the building. “It sounded like he was trying to warn us about something.”

  “Ewww!” Winnie pushed her way through a thick curtain of cobwebs. “Sure hope it had nothing to do with creepy crawlers.”

  The corridor Spence was exploring took a turn and then opened into a medium-sized room. The fog-like haze was much lighter in this room and allowed him to see well enough to tell that it had once been some sort of laboratory.

  Tables were scattered with beakers, scales, and dusty old electronics. Pipes—with gauges attached to them—ran from floor to ceiling.

  But the thing that really caught Spence’s interest was a large, transparent testing chamber in the middle of the room. It was shaped like a tube and ran from floor to ceiling. A glass door was on one side, just big enough to allow a person to enter.

  Spence realized that it looked just like a set piece used in a sci-fi television series he liked to watch. On the weekly show, Doctor Atom used a tubular glass chamber to put himself into a state of suspended animation as he traveled through time.

  The glass chamber Spence now stood before was almost an exact copy. His curiosity got the best of him, and he stepped into the chamber to see what it felt like.

  Spence was so busy looking at the gauges inside that he didn’t notice the door slowly swing closed. When the latch clicked into place, Spence realized he’d made a huge mistake.

  He calmly gave the door a push, but it wouldn’t open. He pushed harder. Still nothing. Spence braced himself against the opposite wall and pushed as hard as he could. The door didn’t budge an inch.

  “How did I not see that coming?” he mumbled. “All right, Spence, the main thing now is not to panic. All you’ve got to do is call for help.”

  Spence pulled the walkie-talkie from its holster and raised it to his lips. “Winnie? Ben? I’m gonna need somebody to help me out here.”

  “What’s the matter?” Ben responded.

  “I think I may have got myself locked into a . . .” Spence searched for the words. “Well, I guess you’d call it a test chamber.”

  Spence gave up pushing on the door, looked around, and discovered a lever near the door but at floor level. “Wait a minute.” Spence reached for the lever. “I may have found a way out!”

  Spence turned the lever, but the door didn’t open. Instead, he heard the low thud of a valve opening and the groan of old pipes being pressurized. His eyes opened wide in horror as he looked down toward his feet. The metal grate he was standing on was bubbling with slowly rising water!

  Winnie had run int
o a dead end. Her flashlight revealed that the room she was now in was so thick with cobwebs that no one could’ve possibly been there for decades.

  “Guys!” Spence’s voice sounded serious. “I’m in real trouble here! Hurry!”

  “Don’t worry, Spence! We’re on our way!” Winnie radioed back.

  Winnie quickly retraced her footsteps but slowed when she came to the curtain of thick cobwebs she had broken through earlier. From the side she now stood on, things looked entirely different. It wasn’t just an old dusty cobweb she had pushed her way through—it was actually an impossibly huge spiderweb that funneled down into the corner of the room. The large strands of webbing looked fresh. They glistened and cast shadows as her flashlight moved across their threads.

  If I can just squeeze by the way I came, she thought.

  She was about to move forward when something caught her eye. She focused her flashlight a few inches to the left of the hole she had made earlier and discovered a spider-egg sac the size of a softball.

  “No!” she whispered. “Anything but spiders!”

  Winnie had no choice. Since there was no other way out of this room, she would have to go back the way she came. She turned sideways, leaned away from the egg sac, and slowly started inching forward. Her shoulder accidentally caught on part of the webbing and it slightly shook the sac. Winnie froze perfectly still and held her breath. The egg sac bounced and then settled back into place. Winnie noticed a small split across the middle of the egg sac that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Spindly legs reached out of the crack and a small black spider crawled out.

  Mustering all her courage, Winnie slowly reached forward and gingerly flicked the spider away. The slight movement made the webbing bounce once again. Now awakened, the egg sac suddenly burst open. Hundreds of hairy black spiders fell out and darted in all directions.

  Winnie screamed involuntarily and jumped away from the web, back into the room. Her only way out was now blocked by a quickly spreading army of arachnids!

  Commander Schaeffer placed his hands on Mike’s shoulders and tried to appeal to Munson. “At least let the kid go, Munson. He’s an innocent party in this.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “C’mon!” Commander Schaeffer looked at him sternly. “It’s obvious you’ve got no loyalty to your country, but you’ve still gotta have a little compassion in there somewhere.”

  “Compassion? You’re going to lecture me about compassion?” Munson’s voice trembled with anger. “Look at my face! Just look at it!”

  Mike and Commander Schaeffer remained silent as the words echoed in the room.

  Munson regained his composure and started pacing the room. “I served my country. I gave the space program the very best I had. Over three thousand hours in a cockpit. Earned two master’s degrees in biological and computer sciences. Was ranked at the very top of my class. And what did I get in return?” Munson pointed to his scarred face. “They gave me this!”

  “You can’t blame anyone for that fire,” Commander Schaeffer reasoned. “A bolt of lightning hit your capsule while it was still on the launchpad.”

  “But I can blame them for not giving me another chance!” Munson’s anger was beginning to boil over again. “No one has any idea of the agony I went through in rehabilitation. No one could possibly know how hard I trained to make a comeback!”

  “But they took you back!”

  “As an instructor, Schaeffer. An instructor! Do you have any idea what they pay instructors?”

  “No,” Commander Schaeffer quietly admitted. “No, I don’t.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Munson lowered his voice. “I realize now that I’ll never be a celebrated astronaut like you, Schaeffer. I’ll only be a tragic footnote in NASA’s long, storied history. So, if I can’t enjoy the fame of being an astronaut, then I say I deserve some fortune!”

  Chapter 14

  THE WATER IN THE GLASS CHAMBER in which Spence was trapped had already risen to his knees.

  “You guys better hurry!” he yelled into his walkie-talkie. “I’m not kidding!”

  “I’m on my way,” Ben responded.

  Since the glass chamber was about eight feet tall, Spence estimated that it would take approximately five minutes to totally fill. The problem was that Spence was only four feet tall, and he had absolutely no idea how to swim.

  The reason he couldn’t swim went back to an event in Spence’s past.

  When Spence was still a toddler, his mother had been putting him into a fresh set of clothes after a bath. She left momentarily to answer the door and although it took only fifteen seconds, when she returned, she was horrified to find that he’d tottered back into the bathroom and had fallen into the tub. Only her quick response had saved him from drowning. Though Spence wasn’t physically harmed in the incident, from that point on he suffered from aquaphobia—a deep fear of water.

  The water in the glass test chamber was quickly reaching Spence’s waist. He desperately kicked at the glass wall but found that it was too thick to break. The water showed no sign of slowing.

  Ben stumbled forward in the dark, retracing his footsteps on his way to help Spence. He had just made it to the large main room where the three of them had split up earlier when he got another call on his walkie-talkie.

  “Ben! It’s Winnie! Help! Please!” Winnie radioed.

  “Uh . . .” Ben hesitated, not sure what to do. “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now!”

  Ben took a few steps toward Winnie’s passage then stopped and looked back at the hallway where he had last seen Spence. “But I gotta help Spence!”

  Winnie backed into the middle of the room, frantically sweeping her flashlight beam back and forth. She discovered there were spiders all around her—scampering over boxes, climbing the walls, even on the ceiling. They were not just baby spiders anymore. Winnie noticed that some were quite large.

  “Ben!” she yelled into her walkie-talkie.

  “Spence needs me!” Ben’s voice said over the radio.

  A tarantula-sized spider leaped toward Winnie. She quickly dodged out of the way but could feel spiders crunching under her feet. “I need you more!” she squealed. “Trust me!”

  “Okay, okay!” Ben radioed back. “I’m on my way!”

  “Don’t leave me, Ben!” It was Spence’s voice. “I can’t swim!”

  Back at the conference room in which Mike and Commander Schaeffer were being held captive, Munson paused at the door before leaving.

  “We’ve nearly come to the end of my patience, Commander. If you don’t come up with that last vial within the next hour, I’ll unleash my men. They’ll come up here and tear this place—and you, I’m afraid—apart.”

  “Threats now? C’mon, Chuck! You’re better than this.”

  Munson ignored the comment and continued, “Or you can simply cooperate, and I’ll be . . .” He seemed to search for the right word. “Merciful!”

  Commander Schaeffer shook his head in disbelief. “Vial or no vial, you’re never going to let us out of here alive.”

  Munson stepped into the outer hallway and smiled back at them. “Commander, there are many ways to die. I never said I was going to let you live. I said I would be merciful.”

  Munson closed the door and locked it securely behind him. Mike waited until he heard Munson’s footsteps trail away into the distance before he picked up his watch from the table. He pulled the metal stem up and the face of the watch lit up.

  “Eagle Two!” Mike called. “Are you still out there?”

  “We’re here, Eagle One! But we’ve got some serious problems!” Spence’s voice sounded panicked. “I’m trapped in some sort of chamber that’s filling with water!”

  Winnie danced around desperately, not sure where to step next. Spiders were appearing everywhere—the floor, the walls, even the ceiling.

  “Spiders, Mike! Spiders! They’re everywhere!” Winnie tried not to hyperventilate. “Hurry, Ben! Hurry!”<
br />
  “Okay! Easy!” Mike said over the radio. “Everybody, just calm down for a minute.”

  A large spider with an abdomen the size of a baseball descended directly over Winnie—its legs wiggling wildly as it reached for her. Winnie held her flashlight defensively, like a small baseball bat.

  “Calm down? You want me to calm down?!” Winnie swung the flashlight as hard as she could and hit a line drive into the darkness.

  “Just get me outta here!” she screamed.

  Mike felt horrible listening to his friends as they suffered from the effects of the fear compound. From his own recent experience, he knew just how real the experience could seem.

  “Everybody, listen to me!” he called into the two-way radio. “What you’re experiencing is just in your imagination!”

  “You’re trying to tell me”—Spence coughed—“that this water I’m swallowing isn’t real?”

  “That’s right! The water, the spiders, none of it is real!”

  As Commander Schaeffer listened in on Mike’s conversation, a concerned look came over his face. He had been leaning against a large, exposed pipe that ran from floor to ceiling. He now realized that the pipe was vibrating.

  “Repeat: It is not real!” Mike continued. “What you’re experiencing is—”

  “Hold on, Mike!” Commander Schaeffer held his ear against the pipe and listened. “Oh no!”

  “What is it?” Mike asked.

  “I hear water moving through the pipe. I’m afraid some of it might be real after all!”

  The water in the experimental tube was up past Spence’s shoulders. With one hand he held his walkie-talkie above the waterline. He knew that he couldn’t let the radio get wet—it was his only lifeline to the others. With his free hand, he did his best imitation of a dog paddle. He tilted his head back and tried to keep his mouth above the water.