To their bewilderment the door responded. It swung evenly down and lowered the landing steps toward them.
They staggered up the steps and burst through the open inner airlock doors into the bright interior. Helena ran forward in relief to greet them. She looked white and shaken from her ordeal.
But the laboratory itself looked almost the same as when they had left it. The figure of Verdcschi still lay on the medical couch. None of the contents in the room had been rearranged. Only the rock had altered. It had grown. It was now twice its original size and it was shining with a far greater brilliance.
Koenig moved numbly forward across the room toward the motionless Verdeschi. He examined the cold, pallid features and the expressionless eyes staring at the ceiling. He turned to Helena. “You said he had come alive...?”
The doctor looked at a loss. Distraughtly she joined him at the bedside and began reattaching the electrodes to her patient’s body. “He was still is... but back in the same state,” she told him.
The wildly flashing monitors on the medicai console above Verdeschi’s head quietened down. The brain readings returned to normal. The cardiac readings became nonexistent.
“What do you make of it?” Maya asked her, her distress mounting again.
Helena shook her head. “It’s beyond me. By all that I know, Tony should be dead. But...” She stared strangely at them. “There is a way, a crazy non-medical way it could be explained. It seems as though there are somehow two Tonys—one a spirit of Tony, or inner essence; the other, a physical Tony... both living inside the same body...”
They were interrupted again by the onboard computer. This time it was not to inform them of the countdown.
“Computer reporting... losing control of ship’s systems,” it said in its clipped, neutral, almost casual tone of voice.
They started in alarm. Koenig and Carter tore heavily into the pilot section and flung themselves into their seats. They began activating the controls.
“No response,” Carter reported grimly.
“Switch to manual.”
They tried again, but there was still no response.
“All systems dead.” Koenig hit the vital communicator buttons that kept them in link with Moon Base Alpha. The screen on which they would normally have seen the friendly faces of Yasko and Sahn, Bill Frazer and Sandra Benes, was dead.
“Eagle Four to Moon Base Alpha—come in, Moon Base Alpha. Eagle Four to Moon Base...”
But there was no response.
Out of the frozen silence came the electronic bleep of the onboard computer again.
“Minus one hour, forty-five minutes to lift-off.”
They had one hour and forty-five minutes in which to regain their power—before Moon Base Alpha and the runaway Moon on which it was installed hurtled ever onward, out of range of their fuel tanks.
The deceptive rock glowed and flashed with power and life. Its strange molecules hummed with new Vitality—a life urge born of hope—as it weighed up its new circumstances.
For hundreds of years it had existed on a dry, barren globe of matter, conserving water supplies, ekeing out its life to the last. The main bulk of its stony body had been allowed to crumble away to dust. The waning life force had been concentrated in a few scattered telepathically linked outcrops of rock around the planet. It had clung to life in grim desperation, refusing to die, hoping for the infinitesimal chance to survive—that one day the rolling brown clouds above would release their water, or that visitors from another world would provide it with new hope.
Miraculously, that chance had occurred. On a runaway Moon, on a trajectory brought about by random, unpredictable forces, an alien life form had been brought into its proximity.
The chance of the Alphans’ arrival was one in a million. Now it had only to work out the best way of securing itself a new lease on life. But its complex, unknown physiology was close to death and it could not afford to be either sentimental or ineffectual. Whatever steps it took had to be taken ruthlessly. They had to be final and irreversible.
Maya stared compassionately at it, realizing its dilemma. She had encountered it face to face, as it were. She had talked to it in its own tongue. In that fleeting moment of communication it had stated its case, and she had experienced its longing and grief. But with equal strength of feeling she knew that its cold radiations could kill them all, so she could not side with it.
“It fouled up the computer and brainwashed it into believing milgonite was here,” she informed the stricken Alphans who were gathered around the Security Chief’s bed. “Its energy took over Tony’s spirit body, using him, to slice off that other piece of rock from its parent body and increase its size and power.”
“I think I’m beginning to get the scene—” Reilly interrupted, removing his hat and scratching his head. “This rock could have been dropped here out of space fifty thousand years ago... maybe more, the fallout from a cosmic storm, who knows? It needed water to survive and over the centuries drained this planet dry... drop by drop. And you know what? I may be a dumb geologist, but this much I know: if we travel with that rock in the Eagle, we’re committing suicide.” He smiled morbidly at each of them in tum. “The human body is mostly water...”
They shuddered at the horrid suggestion. Koenig lifted himself restlessly to his feet and began moving his overworked and strained body again, pacing heavily about the floor. “Didn’t it say what it wanted us to do... or what it was going to do to us?” he asked Maya.
The Psychon shook her head. “Obviously it wouldn’t...”
He clenched his jaws. “Then, save for life support and lighting we’re gonners. The ship’s systems are dead.” He paused. “There’s nothing we can do—except one thing.” He turned suddenly to face them.
“It’s too dangerous to keep that rock—that creature—in the Eagle any longer.” He looked at Helena. “I’m sorry, but we’ll just have to work on the problem of communicating with it and saving Tony outside the ship.” He turned and moved toward the gleaming mass on the workbench.
“No! Leave it alone, John!” Helena cried out, rising to her feet. “It could kill you!”
Before she could reach the determined Commander, a ray of intense, blue light sprang from the rock and struck him in the chest. As with the orange light that had consumed Verdeschi, this one engulfed Koenig. They watched in horror as he staggered to his knees on the floor and let out a sharp cry of pain. Unlike the other ray, this one did not render its victim unconscious.
The blue light cut out.
“I’m all right... I think,” Koenig gasped as Helena and Carter supported him. He managed a wry smile. “Obviously my heart’s still beating.”
They helped him to his feet, still gasping and choking. Helena took his pulse and nodded. Anxiously she felt his cheek with the back of her hand.
“The rock hit with a blue light, not an orange one,” she observed. “It paralyzed him. Then...” She hesitated as a chilling thought struck her. “What color kills?”
They had no time to try to reply to her question. As though angered and prodded into action by their attempts to remove it, the rock began glowing fiercely bright again. It throbbed with unguessable power, causing them all to look toward it in fear.
Gradually they realized why.
It was sucking out their air. With its telekinetic control of the ship’s systems it was activating the life-giving atmosphere pumps, reversing the flow of the pump’s mechanisms.
It had decided to kill them.
Now they all began gasping and wheezing, trying to draw in small amounts of the air before it was totally evacuated. Koenig staggered to the airlock and tried to activate it. This time the inner door worked and pulled slowly apart, but he was already too far gone to appreciate the good fortune of this fact. As the others stumbled drunkenly inside the chamber he frantically tackled the outer door, trying to let in some of the precious air from outside. But it wouldn’t function. The second door, the most vital, remained
inoperable.
With numbed, reeling senses he beat at the controls before sliding down into blackness. Behind him the other Alphans collapsed also.
Inside the Eagle ship, Helena was riveted to the floor, unable to move, her face a frozen mask of horror. She was enveloped in a cold, lurid ray of green light which lanced out authoritatively from the glowing rock, preventing her from following the others.
Somehow, she alone was able to breathe. Her senses were unharmed, and she watched from her green prison in anguish as the inner airlock door closed on her friends, effectively sealing them off.
CHAPTER
THREE
Out of the darkness came glimmers of light and beingness once more, spurring his body back into awareness.
Koenig awoke in the airlock, in the warm, dry draught of the planet’s air. The eternal dimness seeped in from the open outer airlock door, reminding him of the unpleasant events which had occurred.
So the door had eventually opened, saving them. He looked behind him, beyond the gradually reviving heap of the other Alphans. The inner door had closed. But... why?
He struggled to his feet and stumbled down the landing steps to the desert. The figures of Reilly, Carter, and Maya jumped down beside him.
“Helena? She’s Inside...!” he heard himself declaring numbly. Laboriously he climbed back up the steps and began trying to activate the inner door, without success. He withdrew his laser and fired its white hot light at the thick alloy of the door. But he knew that this was next to useless, for the door had been designed to withstand the strongest heat.
Grief-stricken, thinking that she had been unable to leave the ship in time and had died, he pulled out his comlock and punched her code.
“Helena, do you read me?”
Abruptly, unexpectedly, Helena’s living features flooded on the tiny screen and he felt himself almost collapse with relief.
“Yes, I... read... you... John...”
She seemed to be under some kind of strain. Then he noticed that she was surrounded by a green light. Over the screen it looked tenuous and fragile. She was struggling to move forward.
“Comlock won’t open the door!” she gasped out in one breath.
“Try the computer again,” Koenig ordered.
“I can’t get to it...” She stopped struggling, exhausted.
“Any pain?” he asked in consternation.
—“numb... can’t move... no feeling. The light... it’s intensifying....”
Her face lost resolution as the green light increased in hue. Now he could see only a hazy blur of her outline amidst the radiance.
“Helena!”
At once the green ray vanished and her image returned clearly again. She looked suddenly more relaxed. Her eyes weren’t looking at him. lnstead they were looking around off-screen and seemed filled with a mixture of relief and wonderment.
“The light has moved away from me... it’s exploring the storage supply wall...”
He realized now that the rock like life form had deliberately forced them from the Eagle. It had not wanted to kill them, but, for some reason, it still wanted Helena.
“Go to the pilot section,” he told her sternly.
“I... I can’t I’m still numb... immobilized...” she protested. Then: “It’s fixed itself on the water supply.”
Koenig turned with exasperation to the others. They had remounted the steps again to see if they could help, and they exchanged knowing, helpless looks of despair.
“John...” her voice continued feebly. “The rock has absorbed the water... every drop. It just sucked it all out in a great jet and... drank it all. The water just shot across the room and into the rock. It’s... growing bigger.”
They listened grim desperation to her commentary.
“Helena, we’ll find a way to get in,” Koenig vowed to her harshly as they descended the steps again. “We’ll make sure that we burn the rest of that rock out of existence.”
He set out doggedly in the gloom, fighting against the gravity, struggling to see what lay ahead. Keeping the comlock in one hand, he withdrew his laser again and gripped it tightly in the other. He waved to the others to follow.
They hadn’t got far when Helena began screaming again. He glanced hurriedly down at the screen. She was surrounded by the same blue ray that had consumed him, and now he knew the grisly reason why she had been retained on board Eagle Four.
It was to keep them from retaliating.
He moved on regardless, remembering that though the blue ray had hurt, it had not killed or damaged him in any way. Her screams grew louder and more agonized until he was forced to pull back, unable bear her pain. Bitterly, he brought the party to a halt. He turned once more to face the dim outline of the Eagle and. stared at it—hating not the ship, but the alien thing it contained.
Instantly, the screaming stopped and Helena’s voice sobbed over the comlock. “I’m sorry, John. I couldn’t help it...”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It was me. I couldn’t bear it, either. Helena, for the moment it looks like that thing has us beatcn. So all we can do is wait. We’ll wait here. You watch and let us know what’s going on.”
Her tear-streaked face nodded and looked away offscreen. A moment later her voice returned again. She sounded startled. “There’s a yellow light now....”
They drew around Koenig with sudden curiosity, watching the screen intently.
“It’s exploring the pilot section... using the reflective surfaces to bounce off and get around the corners.”
“Put something in the way of the pilot section doorway!” Koenig shouted at her as sudden illumination hit him. “Keep it from getting its ray in!”
“I still... can’t move. I’m trying....” she panted.
He sighed heavily.
“John, it’s activating the flight controls!” she cried in terror. “I can hear it!”
“For Christ’s sake, try to move!” he yelled at her.
They moved instinctively backward, away from the Eagle’s engines that might at any moment erupt into life and burn them to ash. They realized that the rock intended to steal the ship so that it could search for more water. As its awful plans became clear, they were gripped by an overwhelming feeling of terror.
The terror of death. The terror of being severed forever from the Moon Base.
There seemed to be no way now of getting back inside Eagle Four. They watched the ship’s mighty rockets belch forth their red plumes of power. They watched it shudder and shake, then slowly rise into the boiling brown cloud. They watched it almost disbelievingly, such was their horror, as though the whole incident was no more than a particularly nasty scene from a nightmare film.
No amount of praying or pleading or raging would bring it back, and they watched neutrally and numbly. As it ascended in the murky ceiling of cloud, they heard Helena’s mindless screaming over the comlock.
Then, when their senses were at their most wretched and disoriented, the ship began to descend. At first they thought it was illusion. The ship grew larger. But soon it was impossible to deduce other than that it was descending.
“It’s coming down!” Carter croaked hoarsely in the dry heat.
“Yes...” Koenig spoke slowly in exaltation. “Now I realize something else. Perhaps that rock can’t leave the rest of itself behind!”
They gathered around him again, their faces shining with fresh hope through the gloom. Each looked as though he or she had been brought back from the dead. Unexpectedly, it seemed as though they had won another round in the struggle of survival between them and the rocky inhabitant of the dead world they had landed on.
When the ship had settled again, sending up clouds of dust and stones into the air, Koenig raised his comlock to his lips and spoke into it. “What happened in there, Helena?”
“I don’t know...” she replied, still badly shaken. Her features looked deathly-white. “I was almost crippled. Luckily it stopped.”
“It could have becn
testing the engines.” Carter offered them a new reason. They tensed again. “What about Tony?” Maya asked her.
“I can’t see much of him. He looks the same. No change.” There was a longish pause while they thought about what to say. Then her voice sounded urgently. “John, it’s starting to glow brightly again.”
“Color?” Koenig asked sharply.
“The yellow light’s starting to come off it again.”
“Yellow doesn’t inflict pain,” Maya observed. “It seems to denote brain activity.”
“It’s taking over the computer....”
“What’s it reading?” Koenig asked.
There was silence while, they assumed, she craned her neck around from her frozen position in ordcr to study what was going on. “Different star charts are flashing on the screen,” she announced at last.
Reilly grunted. “A hundred to one it’s looking for a place where there’s water!”
“Yeah, it’s facing a deadline—the same as we are,” Koenig said grimly. He turned to Carter. “Unfortunately for us, you were right. It was just testing the engines a moment ago.”
“Only problem is, which deadline runs out first?” Carter asked.
“Does it matter?” Maya put in dejectedly. “It won’t let us in. And it’s got to get off this planet soon or it’s going to die.”
“We know that feeling well,” Carter commented downheartedly.
After a moment’s grave commiseration Koenig spoke again to Helena. “Are the star charts still flashing?”
“They’ve cut out. The screen is blank.”
“Helena, then listen. It’s still just a chance that the rock won’t be able to take off without the rest of its bits out here. Tony might have to go out and do his gathering again. If that happens, the second he leaves the Eagle, alert us. Okay?”
“Okay,” she replied. “What—?”
“Not now,” Koenig interrupted her. He glanced at the others, his face set in a new expression of determination. “Let’s go and see what’s happening to the rocks out here... and wait for Tony, if he comes.”
Space 1999 - The Edge of the Infinite Page 3