Between The Galaxies

by Perry Rhodan

  Eric experienced something akin to guilt for a few moments. He recalled that the stranger's propulsion system had failed when gun position 1 had fired its warning salvo. The powerful thermo cannons generated wide-ranging interference fields which may have been too much for the alien's weakened control navionics. The vessel lost its retropulsion capability then. And if anybody had been alive on board before the collision, they certainly weren't alive now. Not even an alien life form would be able to survive the terrible inertial punishment from all that jumping around out of control—what with its antigrav system having apparently gone wild.

  But he soon recovered from this direction of self-recrimination. If the same thing happened all over again he probably would react in the same manner. Anybody coming straight at him like that without answering any calls deserved a warning shot. Eric would have been irresponsible if he had not fired under the circumstances. It was vital to let the stranger know that the station was ready to defend itself.

  Eric watched the erratic blip of the ship reflectively. Just for a fraction of a second before the crash he had seen the actual vessel on the optical screen. Like most interstellar ships used in the galaxy, it was spherical in shape—but there were certain features about it that were alien to any of the known configurations. Where he was concerned, that said a lot. Eric Furchtbar was an expert in extra-terrestrial ship types. If he couldn't recognize a vessel and classify it, it was fairly certain that it was not a known type. So this had to be an alien—out of an unknown part of the galaxy, or from even another island universe.

  What must the beings have looked like on board that ship? Where had they come from? And why had they come? Moreover,whom had they been slugging it out with out there?

  Eric sat there lost in thought. The knobs and levers on the control panel before him were a momentary other reality as he seemed to stare through them. But he tensed suddenly when he became aware that something had just moved there. Alarmed, he focused his attention on the controls. He made a visual check of them, one after another, and found them to be at their proper settings. He calmed down quickly again. He had to remember that he had probably suffered a concussion. Heaven only knew what tricks of impression might be the result of such a jolt to the brain.

  He was about to lean back and have his first cigarette since the emergency but then he was aware of the movement again. This time he happened to be looking in the right spot. It was the main dial for power to the hyper-telecom!

  Eric jumped up. He reached out wildly with his hand and grasped the knob, preparing to turn it back to zero. But he felt resistance. Angrily, he used both hands on the dial but even though his knuckles whitened under the strain the

  thing didn't move.

  He climbed halfway onto the control panel to get into a better position. He made a third attempt and succeeded in bringing the dial a few degrees back toward its zero setting. But before he could be

  completely successful something very strange happened.

  Suddenly a bloody welt appeared on the backs of his hands as if someone had sliced him with a sharp knife. It all happened so fast that he failed to note whether the scratch had come from right or left. But he felt the throbbing, burning pain and released the knob with an angry cry.

  • • •

  Eric Furchtbar was not one to burden himself with premature judgments. Yet he suddenly recalled that when he went out of the Com Room an hour before he had felt something touch his shoulder. And also how Art Cavanaugh had thought that he had said something to him.

  Something was there.

  It was a something that made others believe they were hearing voices—something that touched strangers, shoulders and sliced people's hands with sharp knives and turned power dials on telecom transmitter consoles.

  Eric turned around. Doc Johannesson was still busy with Ed Hynes. The duty corporal was off to one side, pale and weak, lying in a more comfortable form chair. No help to be expected from any of these. However—

  A wild idea came to him. If somebody was trying to get power to the space telecom it could only mean that they wanted to operate the transmitter. The major part of the telecom circuitry was located below in the Com Room.

  With a few deft movements over the panel, Eric made an intercom connection. He didn't have much hope that anyone would answer because the receivers had switched automatically to the main control room and the three communications men were attending to their injuries. Nevertheless the small visiscreen lit up to reveal the drawn face of Art Cavanaugh.

  Eric sighed with relief. "Check over your telecom, Sergeant! on the double!"

  Art's eyes narrowed slightly with sudden purpose as he jumped up at once. For half a minute, all Eric saw on the screen was the chair where Cavanaugh had been sitting. Then he was back.

  "Everything ship-shape, sir," he reported. "Power off—all instruments intact."

  "Poweroff ...?"

  Incredulously, Eric glanced at the power dial on his own panel. He had seen it turned on—and he had two painful gashes on the backs of his hands to prove that he had sought to turn it off against an unseen resistance. But now Cavanaugh was saying—

  Then it came to him that his own power dial was back at zero. He drew a deep breath and held it. Had he really lost his mind? But when he looked at the backs of his hands he let out the air from his lungs again. The welts were still there and blood still oozed from them—not to mention the fact that they were still paining him.

  No, he was not crazy. Somebody had sliced him. The same one who had first turned on the power and then while he was talking to Cavanaugh, had turned the dial back to zero again: He barked another order: "check out the activity of the transmitter during the last 10 minutes, sergeant!"

  Art Cavanaugh had served too long in the spacefleet to contradict any order from a superior officer. He confirmed the instruction and disappeared from in from the pickup's range of vision. Eric knew he'd need at least 10 minutes to study the transmitter's automatic recordings and find out what had happened. In the

  meantime, Eric had another idea. He switched the open line to Cavanaugh into the automatic call circuit and then contacted the instrument section.

  In his excitement he momentarily forgot that the emergency schedule did not provide for any coverage of this section. This he finally remembered when there was no answer. He was about to shut off the connection impatiently when the screen lit up at the last moment and the pain-wracked face of one of the duty techs stared at him.

  Eric was the "old Man" again. Faced with the possible presence of danger in the BOB 21 again, he had no time for considering the other man's pained condition. His voice was as hard as everyone one was accustomed to hearing it before the collision episode. "Check out the oxygen consumption on board during the past two hours!"

  "Yes, sir," answered the technician. He turned his head to read some indicators. "At the moment the atmospheric composition on board—" He broke off in the middle of the sentence.

  "Well, what is it?" asked Eric impatiently. "You were going to say normal, weren't you?"

  "I was going to, yes, sir... " The man stared at him helplessly.

  "But...?"

  "we've lost some oxygen, sir—maybe a leak!"

  "Don't jump to conclusions!" interrupted Eric. "Check the nitrogen content."

  "Normal, sir," the tech man answered unhesitatingly.

  Eric's next question was slightly sarcastic. "So what kind of a leak would that be?—that leaks only oxygen out and not the nitrogen?"

  The man was nonplussed. Eric knew it and gave him a new order.

  "Make a carbon-dioxide analysis—and hurry!"

  The screen was empty again. The analysis wouldn't take long. All the tech man had to do was press a key and read a certain indicator. The CO2 content of the station's atmosphere was not constantly indicated. Unlike oxygen and nitrogen, the constant was minimal and not an ordinarily important.

  But now... ?

  When the technician came back his
face was flushed with excitement. Sweat had appeared on his forehead. "Above normal, sir," he cried out. "The build-up rate..."

  While the man went on with his technical jargon, Eric's mind raced. His first reaction was one of sudden calm. His suspicions had confirmed. For one or two seconds it was a feeling of satisfaction but then he realized that it was much more reasonable for him to be concerned with this new danger than to triumph over a mere confirmation of his theory.

  "I told you—didn't jump to any hasty conclusions," he warned the technician calmly. "Does the CO2 increase compare with our extra loss of oxygen?"

  The tech operator only needed a moment to think this over. "Yes, sir—almost to 1/10th of a percent."

  "Thank you. That is all for the moment."

  He cut off but in the next breath it occurred to him that perhaps a precise analysis of all data might be strategic, after all. Exactly how much oxygen had been consumed? If he assumed an approximate time period of 2 hours and considered the air consumption per man, then he could figure out how many...

  He rejected the idea. Two hours was guesswork, and the oxygen-consumption rate per average man would be still more arbitrary. There wasn't a reliable point of reference.

  He wondered if the life-support system had been damaged. He was thoroughly familiar with the recycling setup. It was based on the fact that oxygen was consumed in human lungs and carbon dioxide was exhaled. Over a period of time, the oxygen was consumed in non-regenerating atmosphere; without replacement there could be nothing but carbon dioxide. The BOB 21's recycling system—through a number of processing phases—separated the carbon dioxide and broke it into pure oxygen and graphite. The resulting oxygen was returned to the station's atmosphere and the graphite was stored so that every 3 months it could be transferred to the supply ships. It was only unnecessary ballast for a space vessel but on Earth there was a high demand for pure-grade graphite.

  Anyway, the recycling system was one of the least sensitive installations on board. If the sensitive circuits of the hyper-telecom had withstood the shock of the sideswipe then it was a guaranteed certainly that nothing had happened to the recycler setup. In which case, of course, there was only one explanation for the remarkable present state of the local atmosphere.

  The auto-call again opened a channel on the intercom with the Com Room. Art Cavanaugh was ordinarily a person who had good self-control but just now his expression revealed that something very unusual had happened.

  "Sir...!" he said excitedly. "I found that a message has been beamed out!"

  He seemed surprised when Eric only nodded calmly. "The code?" asked the commander curtly.

  "Not recognizable, sir." He opened his mouth as if to add something but then remained silent.

  Eric noted it. "Go ahead and say what's on your mind," he urged.

  "It's only a suspicion," Art blurted out, "and it would have to be really checked out first. But the modulation seems to be the same as we registered for that other illegible signal that we were getting for hours before."

  Eric also nodded calmly to that. "How long is the whole message?"

  "12 to 13 seconds, sir."

  "Did you see any repeat patterns in it?"

  "No, sir." "Did you notice anything else unusual?" Art hesitated a moment. "No, sir..." This time he was hesitant again. "I—I've been getting the feeling, more and more often now, that somebody is close to me. Each time it happens I look around but everything looks normal. You remember about an hour ago I thought you had spoken to me when you didn't. Must be some kind of lingering hallucination."

  Eric shook his head. "You need have no fear on that score, Art. It's no hallucination." Then he cut off the intercom mike. He had a strange urge to swing around in his chair and scan the long control room behind him. This he did suddenly, taking in the walls and the central area critically. He saw Doc Johannesson putting the final bandage on Ed Hynes. There was nothing else going on. Nonetheless, Eric knew very well that they were there! He turned back to the console again and made an input to the positronics, programming the computer to encode an emergency dispatch to the Joann. Since the message only contained a few words, it only took a hundredth of a second for the equipment to handle the assignment. However, the input and output phases took longer. Eric had to wait three seconds for the punched strip to come out. Then he shoved it into the transmitter.

  Moments later a very unusual message left the hyperantenna of the observation station. Not without a grim touch of amusement, Eric tried to imagine Nike Quinto's expression when he read the dispatch: "Invisible aliens on board the BOB 21!"

  4/ THE PHANTOMS STRIKE

  As it turned out, Nike Quinto had been counting on a few more surprises than most of the other men. When he received Eric Furchtbar's short message he remained completely calm. Ron Landry stood next to him and tried to see over his shoulder. Nike turned and gave it to him reproachfully.

  "No need to kibitz, Major, when you can read it for yourself."

  Ron took the plastic strip and read it. He swallowed once, read it again, and then found his voice. "They've really been shaken up over there," he said. "Looks to me like they're having hallucinations." Quinto glared at him angrily. "Any, more amateur remarks like that and my blood pressure will hit the top!" he upbraided him. But his voice didn't have its usual force. Ron was amazed to see that Quinto was taking the message seriously. "Haven't you ever seen an invisible person before?" continued Nike—then corrected himself. "I mean, one who can make himself invisible? All he'd need for that would be an Arkonide transport suit."

  "I wasn't referring to that, sir," argued Ron. "The fact that the intruders are invisible doesn't bother me at

  all. It's how they got on board that bugs me—when the BOB 21 has a strong defense screen."

  Quinto dismissed the objection with a wave of his hand. "At the time when the two vessels grazed each other there must have been a second or so when the screen was weakened—its energies taken up by having to absorb the impact. We only have to imagine that the aliens foresaw that moment. They made themselves ready for the transfer, and at the right instant they simply jumped."

  Ron had an impression that Quinto was overrating the strangers' intelligence but he kept his thoughts to himself. As silently as the others he sat there and waited for further news from the BOB 21.

  About an hour went by without untoward event. At brief intervals Furchtbar reported his various efforts to make contact with the unseen intruders. Either they weren't able to understand his attempts to approach them or they were avoiding any contact. Eric was apparently getting desperate. To all appearances the aliens were keeping quiet but they were getting an unbearable psychological pressure on board the station. Nike Quinto soon found himself in the role of "chaplain" where he had to reassure and console the other commanders. Surprisingly, he was fairly good at it.

  At any rate, he didn't have to exert himself for very long.

  Between 17:00 and 18:00 hours the aliens began to stir. Then suddenly things began to happen so fast that the men on board the Joann had trouble making rhyme or reason out of the rapid succession of incoming reports.

  • • •

  Art Cavanaugh had a lively imagination yet kept an open mind. He took a great interest in the new situation on board the BOB 21 but without the feeling of panic that seemed to be gripping the majority of the crew members as the hours passed.

  Before he was promoted to sergeant, Art had taken many courses and attended many special seminars, all of which was required of any sergeant in the Terran spacefleet. Nobody could rise to one of the highest non-com levels without having a broad education in the various branches of modern science and technology. So Art Cavanaugh was not in danger of being led into wild conjectures concerning the strange invisible visitors. He knew how to differentiate between fantasy and plausibility. He did not believe for one moment that here at last was a manifestation of all the old ghosts of myth and legend which had been reported on Earth for thousands of years—an
attitude which had since taken hold of the crew.

  With Art it was different. He decided there were just two possibilities. The aliens might have a method of adjusting the index of refraction of their bodily substance to the surrounding air in the ship. This was the more classic method. Or they were producing around them one of those R-9 fields which were capable of bending light rays. R-9 designated the distance from the skin (if they had any skin) in which the field would remain effective. It surrounded the object to be made invisible in a thickness of only about 100,000th cm. this was necessary because the light rays going around an obstacle had to travel farther than a straight-line ray. If the field were too "fat" around the invisible person, then even the most unbiased observer would notice certain curious distortions of the background behind the interloper.

  Of course even a good R-9 field produced some distortions but one had to realize that the invisible ones would be careful to take this into consideration. Art kept a sharp lookout but no matter how much he stained his eyes he couldn't detect the slightest distortion effect anywhere.

  He admitted that the aliens could also have an entirely new system of some kind. In which case he was sitting here racking his brains for nothing. Maybe it would be better to think out a way of making contact with them. He wondered what would happen, for example, if he were to reproduce on a piece of paper the scope patterns of one of their transmissions—showing the modulations that none of the Terran techs had been able to decipher. For them the pattern would be familiar and they would be alerted to the fact that somebody was trying to get through to them.

  Art was fascinated by this idea. He got busy with the auto-recorder machine and wound back one of the used tapes to where a portion of the hours long transmission was available which they had started to pick up after the first of the bombs had exploded. He coupled this part to the oscilloscope and let it play. Then he procured some writing foil and a ball stencil. When the image formed on the green-glowing screen of the scope, he at first studied it for several minutes. When he had finally memorized the modulation pattern, he began to draw. With slow, careful strokes he sketched in the sinusoidal outlines of the carrier wave and added the dips and peaks of the envelope that carried the information. But he began to have his doubts in the middle of his work. He tried to place himself in the aliens' situation. If someone presented him with a Terran radio message, especially if in code, would he know what it was supposed to communicate? Not for certain, he had to admit.