Space 1999 - The Edge of the Infinite

by Michael Butterworth

  The boulders glimmered and shone through the claustrophobic darkness as they approached. There were three of them, large and half-sunken in the sandy granules. They were still energized, perhaps by the strain of the recent attempts by their counterparts on board the Eagle to leave them behind. Either that, or they were glowing for some quite different reason.

  They were obviously heavy. It would have taken several men or one man with a buggy to move them all. Koenig’s hopes faded slightly as he realized the colossal task involved. He was debating whether the rock on board the Eagle would not just blast off to space once more when Helena made another announcement.

  “He’s waking....”

  “Who is?” Koenig called sharply.

  “Tony... and as you said, he’s moving toward the airlock.”

  “Good!” Koenig said with enthusiasm. “Then we have a chance!”

  He listened raptly as Helena told him exactly what Verdeschi was doing. “He’s outside. I think he’s taking the buggy. Yes, I can hear the engines whining.”

  Koenig nodded. He turned to Carter. “You got that?” The other nodded. “We spread out and intercept him... after we know for sure what he’s doing. The rock has apparently programmed the onboard computer to respond only to Tony’s comlock... so that’s what we’re after.” He motioned to them to move off.

  They were soon lost from each other’s sight in the eternal night. As they waited, prone on the sand, they prayed silently that the raging clouds above would not let in their random customary shafts of light at the wrong moment. Perhaps Verdeschi was so heavily controlled that he couldn’t see, anyway, but all the same, they couldn’t take any chances.

  They waited for what seemed like an eternity, until eventually, they too heard the whining sound of the buggy’s battery-operated engines. Its headlights were out and so, Koenig realized thankfully to himself, the italian Security Chief wasn’t able to see.

  The three boulders were glowing more weakly now, as whatever power it was that had brought them to life began to fail. The buggy with its mesmerized occupant stopped by one of them. The semblance that was Verdeschi climbed unsteadily out. It began shambling toward the rock, its hand, clutching a laser, outstretched toward it.

  “Now!” Koenig shouted, rising to his feet. Carter, Reilly, and Maya responded. They stumbled through the gloom, encircling the buggy and the sinister figure. They began moving cautiously in, uncertain what to do.

  As though sensing them, it turned, its sightless eyes staring somewhat above their heads. Some other unerring sense that it possessed guided it and told it where they were positioned. Without ceremony it rotated its dead arm and pointed the laser at Koenig.

  Helped by the crippling gravitational pull of the planet, the Commander threw himself to the ground just in time to avoid the lance of burning ligbt that stabbed through the night above his head.

  Before Verdeschi could fire again, Carter and Reilly both fired their weapons. Their beams struck his shape, exploding it with a brilliant ball of light.

  They staggered back from the glare, surprised at the intensity of the reaction. They had fired only a brief burst at it, yet it was converting into a raging energy globe.

  lnstead of searing them with its heat, the globe emanated an icy-cold radiance that froze them to the core.

  “It’s endothermic!” Maya gasped. “It’s sucking in all the heat....”

  “My gun was only set on stun,” Carter jabbered out in fear.

  “Mine, too,” Reilly nodded.

  Koenig struggled to his feet. By the time he had regained them, the globe had vanished. In its place, lying on the desert floor, were Verdeschi’s laser and comlock. Of Verdeschi himself there was no sign.

  They stumbled forward, awed and terrified.

  Koenig picked up the laser. Reilly retrieved the comlock. At that precise moment, having no particular fondness for Verdeschi, the minerologist was the most collected of the three.

  Maya looked less grieved than they expected. “Endothermic...” she still insisted. “That means that Helena was right. This couldn’t have been Tony himself that we killed. No living, corporate man would suck in heat like that when he was atomized. That means he must have been an antimatter composition of some sort... a psychic projection. But then what’s happened to the real Tony...?” Her voice trailed off in a wail as the thought struck her. She looked distractedly about her. “I must find Tony....”

  “John!” Helena’s amazed voice burst over the comlock. “Something strange... Tony’s body suddenly reappeared where it was!” There was a pause, then a sudden shout of joy. “I’ve been released... and Tony’s just had a sudden physical life movement! He’s biologically, medically alive!”

  “Come on!” Koenig urged them. “The rock’s grown weaker. Let’s get back to the ship with Tony’s comlock before—” He spun sluggishly, wildly around, noticing that Reilly had disappcared from the group. He looked at each of their hands in turn to see who had the comlock. “Hey!” he cried out. “That lunatic’s on his way to do something stupid!”

  Reilly lurched through the dark, his powerful muscles taking him more fleetly than the others across the desert toward the Eagle, more able to resist the powerful planetary fingers of gravity that were gradually sapping them all of their energy.

  He reached the ship and fired the Security Chief’s comlock at its outer airlock. The door opened smoothly, outward and downward, its powerful hydraulics unaffected by the heavy pull of gravity.

  “Minus one hour, thirty minutes to lift-off,” the computer’s voice announced mechanically as he staggered into the brightly lit laboratory.

  Helena was beside Verdeschi, who was smiling groggily and sitting upright. When Reilly entered, they both looked up in alarm but then smiled in recognition.

  “It’s all right....” Helena rose to greet him. She looked toward the rock glowing weakly on the bench. “It seems to be dying....” She noticed his red face, the determined expression that he wore. “Where’s John and the others?” she asked nervously, glancing behind him at the gaping airlock. He ignored her.

  He moved instead toward the rock, laboring with difficulty after his herculean sprint. Withdrawing his laser he took aim at it, shakily.

  “No!” Helena and Verdeschi both cried out together. They rose from the bed in unison. “It might kill you!”

  Reilly only laughed twistedly. “This little darlin’s had too much rope given it. It should’ve been dealt with firmly from the beginning. Now if you had a firm Commander, instead of a...”

  The rock began glowing again, golden, cryptic.

  “Dave, it’s only been resting!” Helena screamed out a warning. Too late, before the showy geologist could depress the firing button on his gun, a yellow ray lanced out at him. It struck his gun arm, electrifying it, sending the laser clattering to the floor. Then, remorselessly, it raised itself upward and played over his face.

  While they watched in horror, it took hold of his mind and guided him toward its source—its golden rock body on the bench. In its mesmeric grip, Reilly was as powerless as a big baby. His fingers reached out and grasped the blazing rock. Doing as he was directed, he placed it under the petroscope. Then, struggling for his life, he was forced to bend down and place his eyes over the eyepiece.

  Koenig, Carter, and Maya climbed wearily inside the room, but they were too late to be of any use. Before anyone could do anything, the vivid orange tongue of light which had converted Verdeschi to a mindless, soulless half-being erupted forcibly again from the petroscope, engulfing Reilly’s head and throwing him violently, threshing and writhing, to the floor.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  The command center on Moon Base Alpha looked half-deserted. Some element that was lacking made it look bare and lifeless, devoid of its usual happy heart and soul.

  People with glum faces sat behind the consoles, ever checking their instruments, ever watchful for the slightest sign that would indicate to them that Commander Koe
nig, Dr. Russell, Maya, Alan Carter, and Dave Reilly were still alive. Yasko, originally from Japan, and Sandra Benes from Clapham in a place called London, on a planet called Earth... and others. Bill Frazer, Eagle pilot, and Dr. Ben Vincent, Helena’s chief medical consultant were grouped anxiously around the command console studying print-outs.

  There was only one element of joy in their dejection.

  A tiny, weak signal was being received—not from the missing Eagle Four but from another sector of the universe entirely. Exactly where it was coming from or who or what was sending it was a partial mystery. And it was as confusing as it was mysterious. For the signal seemed to be emanating from Earth.

  “I don’t get it... and I don’t trust it.” Frazer shook his head. “We’ve been tricked so many times by different beings posing as Earthmen... and how can Earth communicate with us when we must be millions of light-years away from home?”

  “I agree, we’ve been let down too often. It’s too much to expect.” Vincent nodded sagely. “Put it over the Big Screen and let the others have a go at guessing what it is.”

  “We can’t.” Frazer gestured toward the computer operatives. “They’re using the Big Screen to detect the Eagle.”

  The other shrugged. “It won’t hurt just for a moment. Besides, the search won’t stop. It’ll just mean that it goes on non-visually.”

  “Okay.” Frazer stabbed at a row of communicator buttons on the console in front of him. The Big Screen that dominated the Control Room went momentarily dead, and a chorus of protests and groans rose from the personnel. The picture of stars where Koenig had disappeared blanked out and was replaced with another picture of stars, this time from behind the Moon, from the direction of its past trajectory.

  “The Commander’s more important than weak signals that could be coming from anywhere,” Sandra retorted hotly.

  Frazer waved her quiet. “Just sit back and listen, will you? Let us know if you think they are from Earth.”

  There was a reluctant silence while, from billions of miles across space, the amplified signals reached them. Their strange code was deciphered by the main computer and translated into a human voice that crackled faintly over the speakers. Despite themselves, they were caught by the drama of the voice, gripped by inexplicable feelings of emotion as they listened.

  “This is a neutrone transmission,” the distant voice called. “This is a neutrone transmission... Calling Moon Base Alpha by neutrone transmission... Calling Moon Base Alpha by neutrone transmission...”

  It was a hollow, flat, echoing voice, distorted by the infinity of space it traversed.

  They shivered.

  “It could be from Earth,” Yasko pronounced slowly, her permanent Oriental smile beaming benignly around at their disturbed faces. “Communication by neutrone transmission was only a distant speculation at the time we left Earth. But Earth must now be advanced many hundreds of years perhaps thousands. Who’s to say they don’t now have the technology to catch up with us?”

  “But we’ve been fooled by that argument before,” Sandra pointed out.

  Yasko nodded. “We still owe it to ourselves—and to John and Helena—to try to reply to the signal.”

  They all accepted the sense of her words.

  “Get an identification, then,” Frazer told them.

  Yasko’s slender fingertips tapped expertly across the controls in front of her, opening a very wide band width and orienting their transmission beaming equipment in the direction of the signal.

  “This is Moon Base Alpha. Identify,” she called into her microphone.

  The voice that claimed it was from Earth came again almost immediately. Now it seemed excited. “Moon Base Alpha!” it cried. “Is that really Moon Base Alpha? Moon. Base Alpha, we weren’t even sure you existed. This is Space Station One, Texas City, planet Earth.”

  The Alphans in the Command Center found themselves overcome by emotion; they were riveted to their consoles, unable to speak as the voice from Earth vainly tried to continue its contact.

  “I repeat,” it stressed. “Space Station One, Texas City.”

  Those Alphans who were sitting down climbed disbelievingly to their feet and stood in front of the screen. Soon, except Yasko, they were all drawn to the hypnotic voice.

  “Planet Earth. Please stand by...” the voice told them.

  Still they could not respond.

  Finally Dr. Vincent found his voice. “Keep that channel open....”

  Yasko called out frantically to the voice, but now there was no response. “We’ve lost contact!” she declared, upset.

  “Get them back,” Frazer told her. “You must get them back.” The intense feelings were wearing off him, and he turned suspiciously to Vincent. “What about neutrone transmissions?”

  The doctor shrugged again. “In theory they can cover billions of miles in a matter of seconds.”

  “Then how come we can transmit back to them with ordinary radio waves? Even if we knew exactly where Earth was, it would take forever for one of our messages to reach her.”

  “I dunno... I dunno...” Vincent shook his head. “I’m as skeptical as you are. Maybe whoever devised these neutrone transmissions was able to build into them a kind of seek, find, and retrieve signal... retrieve our radio wave transmissions, code them, and take them back by neutrone transmission. Something like a telegram with a built-in reply facility.”

  “Sure,” Frazer replied sarcastically. “With a messenger boy just out there in space waiting to run all the way back to Earth in a split second.”

  “Well, you never know...” Vincent told him open-mindedly.

  “All right... so it could be Earth.”

  “It could be.” The other smiled. “If we can get it back.”

  “But right now we’re switching off that screen and getting on with our search,” Sandra interrupted their discussion. “The search for Earth seems to have fizzled out for the time being.” Shc leaned across the command console and pressed some of the buttons.

  The unfamiliar pattern of stars on the Big Screen blacked out. It was replaced by the pattern they had usurped—the stars among which Eagle Four had disappeared. One of the stars, bigger than the others, had been ringed in red, and it marked the exact spot where the last communication with the Commander had been made.

  Determinedly, Sandra returned to her seat. With the others who had drifted back, she began operating her console; trying once more to get the powerful deep-space cameras mounted on the lunar surface to locate the ringed star’s planets. This time she was more successful, and as she worked, the dim, brown mass of a planet slowly evolved.

  lt was an ugly planet, dark and sinister, and its abrupt presence on the screen filled the watchers with a feeling of dread.

  Somewhere beneath its boiling, putrid layer of cloud lay the Eagle. Intact or in wreckage, they did not know.

  The small onboard laboratory of Eagle Four flickered with light.

  Koenig, Helen, Maya, and Verdeschi stood tensely in the center, bathed by the lights, helpless to act in the drama of the life-and-death struggle that was taking place.

  Dave Reilly’s body was still on the floor. Clearly it was in a ghostly state similar to that which Verdeschi had been in not long ago, but every so often it jerked and shook. Moans of pain escaped its lips as it tried to fight off the deadly control of the rock.

  The yellow beams were emanating like the refracted light off a huge liquid topaz, many of them feeling, probing over the controls and consoles of the ship. The rock was pulsating with a brilliant, strong glare. In syncopation, the lights of the onboard computer were flashing and winking, trying to resist the rock’s control.

  Reilly was caught between them, his unfortunate brain struggling to shake off the insistent fingcrs.

  The rock was weakening; and its fight grew all the more severe. It did not have sufficient energy to completely regain its control or to keep both Reilly and the computer down.

  As they watched, the fantastic
display of lights began, one by one, to diminish. The fierce, pulsating glow coming from the rock itself faded.

  Koenig nodded grimly to them. One by one they drew their lasers. He looked questioningly at Maya. “You sure this’ll work?”

  She nodded. “The four laser beams fired together will create enough heat to dry up a reservoir.”

  “Then it’s a cinch to dehydrate the rock... weaken it,” Carter put in, gazing without much conviction at the object of their attack.

  “Perhaps kill it,” Maya agreed, almost sadly.

  “If we have to, then we have to,” Koenig said tightly. “We can’t risk allowing Reilly in his possessed form to bring in more rock from outside. If that happens, then it’s equivalent to the rock’s bringing in reinforcements.”

  The butter-yellow rays of light stabbing wildly out toward the ship’s hardware ceased. The rock concentrated its waning power instead on the prone form of the geologist. Almost immediately the figure on the floor fell still in sudden submission. Now it ceased to jerk. As they watched, it climbed woodenly to its feet. It turned on them with bloodshot, sightless eyes. Its gaze swept past them; it aligned itself with the open hatchway and began lumbering toward it.

  “We must fire,” Helena urged. But Koenig looked hesitant, uncertain now whether the rock was weak enough, since it had just concentrated its energy.

  “Okay,” he decided at length. But he looked unhappy. “Fire!”

  They raised their arms in unison and their guns were about to blaze. Before they managed to press the firing buttons, though, a suddcn, dazzling battery of rays shot from the rock toward them. They were blue rays—the immobilizing rays of pain.

  “Uh... I...” Carter gasped as their guns were knocked from their hands and they fell to their knees in agony.

  “Alan!” Maya screamed out suddenly from where she lay. Her eyes were riveted on the rock and its strobing arms of blue light. Another ray, this time black, was lancing off it and shining on Carter.