Helena nodded sadly. “I know... and I know that what people are feeling right now they’ll forget when it comes to the crunch. You’re right, Earth is infinitely preferable. It’s just that it’s all happened so fast, Maya. No one could quite believe it—now we’ve all had a second shock to contend with.” She smiled wanly. “You must realize we Earthlings aren’t built as robustly as you Psychons.”
Maya laughed. “You’ve got to be joking. I was so upset when... when my father Mentor died and Psychon was finally destroyed....”
She grew distant, but then snapped out of it, her cheerful smile restored. “It has happened quickly. A few hours ago we were still wrestling with that stupid rock!”
They both exploded in laughter, relieving the tension. “And you helped it to live!” Helena exclaimed, then added, “But I’m glad you did.”
“All in a day’s work for Moon Base Alpha,” Maya commented, a trace of light satire in her words.
She stepped proudly back, examining their handiwork.
The dome and its complex instrumentation were completed, after thirty-six hours of gruelling work. Abruptly, they sobered up.
“Now we have to test with the instrumentation you prepared,” the Psychon told the doctor.
Helena nodded to one of the technicians, who wheeled over a trolley containing a small package bristling with instruments. it looked like a homemade time bomb of some kind. The technician off-loaded it and she helped him carry it
The dome was geodesic, fashioned of gleaming aluminum walls. From its roof rose a tall funnel of the same metal, breaking elegantly through the roof and acting as a transmitting aerial, pointing the dome’s delicate instrumentation at the permanent night of the stars on the roof were innumerable receivers and reflectors which were to pick up the strange, unfamiliar transforming energy from the scientists on Earth.
In the interior of the dome, in its center, was a small cubicle surrounded by more equipment. It seemed at first sight as though it were supported only by the thousands of wires and attachments that were clipped to it. Inside were three seats. The ceiling of the cubicle was open in a cone, and the heads of the people to be transmitted, once sitting in the seats, would be exposed to the open tube of the transmitting aerial and the depths of space beyond. When the force fields necessary for the activation of the apparatus were switched on, anyone inside would be protected from the vacuum. Their bodily molecules and atoms would be dispersed and codified in an intricate biologic message that would be flashed across eternity back home, back to Earth.
The transference dome was, in effect, a matter transmitter. It was far beyond the Alphan technology, and they had built it all by following instructions. None of them but Maya knew even now how it worked. Her alert Psychon mind had figured it out, helped by a smattering of Psychon technology which her father had taught her before he died.
Carefully, Helena placed the package on one of the seats. The force fields hummed and flashed. Quickly she returned to the console outside the cubicle and began studying the readings. “Sensors in the test parcels antennae are designed to simulate metabolic functions,” she told Maya. “In every way except life, it’s human.” She signalled to one of the technicians and was put in contact with Dr. Logan, standing by at his end of the operations.
Now the transference operation was ready.
The package had been successfully transmitted. All blood, body, and brain counts had been recorded as normal during the course of its passage. Now, only the first human guinea pigs had to be likewise tested.
It was time for Helena, Carter, and the Commander himself to be transmitted.
Koenig hesitated before the dome, plagued by uncertainty. After their initial distress, all Alphans but a few die-hards had volunteered to he transmitted to the Earth cities. A new mood had swept through the Moon Base. Eventually, even the few die-hards realized that they would be left on their own and they, too, had agreed to go along with the mass exodus. The whole weight of the colony was behind the idea. Yet
There was nothing tangibly wrong with the idea. At least, he couldn’t put his finger on anything. Yet it seemed as though there must be something wrong somewhere. It still seemed too simple to him to be doing what he was doing.
Helena and Carter had entered the dome and the cubicle and were sitting down confidently inside, waiting for him. The technicians and engineers were crowded around, looking on enviously. Behind them were more figures, stretching away into the corridor. They were all waiting to go. No one had bothered to pack...
A ridiculous idea, he told himself.
The only thing that could go wrong was with the actual transference itself. Not with Logan. He firmly believed that Logan was okay, didn’t he?
Tensely, he allowed himself to be led forward by Dr. Vincent and Dr. Mathias who, together with Maya, had been assigned to oversee the operation.
He could be as suspicious as he wished, he told himself. Suspicion was a good thing.
They sat him down next to Helena. She smiled reassuringly at him and patted his leg. “Don’t look so reluctant,” she said sweetly. She placed her arm behind his head and drew him a little closer. Her green eyes flashed seductively at him. “Remember, I helped build this contraption.”
“Okay, okay.” He pulled himself away. “Let’s get started.” He looked at the technicians waiting by the console, ready to commence the procedure. On a large, flat, especially erected screen, Logan’s hairless features appeared. He was looking slightly tense, watching the proceedings with some unexpected trepidation.
“Thank you, Commander.” His voice sounded loud inside the dome. “Less than thirty hours to go, and you’re delaying the proceedings.”
Koenig scowled.
“ln his place, would you do anything different?” Carla, who was standing by the doctor’s side, asked her superior. She turned toward the camera and winked at Koenig.
Logan refused to reply. Instead he spoke an, instruction to the technicians gathered around the transference dome console. “Transfer procedure green.”
One of the technicians responded by depressing a button. “Neutrone factor green,” he reported.
“All charges green,” another technician spoke, studying the dials.
“Stand by for halation countdown... now,” Carla’s voice came again. They watched her hit a button on the corresponding receiving console on Earth.
“60... 59... 58... 57...”
“Reception area,” Logan called cryptically to Carla. She pressed another button, and a screen on her console lit up showing the interior of a small, geodesic chamber.
Koenig’s skin prickled. Presumably the “reception area” was the chamber they would be transferred to. He only hoped that they would make it.
“Pulse normal,” Mathias called out. “Heart rate normal... body temperature normal....”
“Halation begins,” Carla announced dramatically as the count-down finished.
“Good,” Logan enthused. He looked pleased. He spoke to the Alphans. “Now expect a slight temperature drop as the process begins. Heart and pulse should remain normal as they did with your package, Dr. Russell.”
Abruptly, the walls of the cubicle within which Koenig, Helena, and Carter sat began to shimmer with an electric-blue light, interfering with their visibility of activities going on outside. An icy-cold chill gripped them. They looked up instinctively and caught a horrific glimpse of the stark starscape of space.
The cold grew even more intense. Gradually, a light-headedness affected them, and they began to feel their bodies dissolving, pulling apart. They felt the stars sucking at them and lost consciousness.
The slightly tense, perturbed look returned once again to Dr. Logan’s features. He seemed to be studying some instrument in front of him which the intently watching Mathias and Vincent couldn’t see.
Maya was working with the technicians and hadn’t noticed. Verdeschi had, and he came striding over to converse with the two doctors.
“What’s w
rong with him?” he whispered, indicating Logan. He glanced nervously at the transference chamber. It was now a swirling pillar of opaque blue light through which they could not see.
“A piece of unbelievably bad luck.” Logan looked up in reply. He had heard the Security Chief’s whisper. His face now looked very worried indeed, although it still carried sincerity.
“What is it?” Verdeschi snapped.
The assembly gathered round about the dome suddenly became silent as its awed members gradually realized that something was going wrong.
“Freak storm activity?” Carla, too, was puzzled and upset by Logan’s change of manner.
“Worse,” he replied unhappily. “Mr. Verdeschi, we have seismic reports of small quakes in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Maya spun around as she heard his words. “That can affect the calculations.”
Logan nodded. “If they get any worse, yes—they could.”
“Then delay the transfer!” Verdeschi called out.
Logan shook his head. “No, we can’t. It’s too late.”
Verdeschi looked at a loss. “Then what can we do?”
“Nothing, except carry on with the halation and hope they don’t get any worse....”
Verdeschi turned helplessly to Maya.
She shook her head and gazed at him with anguished eyes. “He’s right. We can’t stop it now. If the earth tremors get any stronger they’ll interfere with the balance of the Earth beams transmission equipment.”
Before the sickened Alphans could respond to her explanation, Logan’s face turned a deathly white. “They’re getting stronger... the tremors are increasing.” He began shaking his head again, gazing distractedly about off-screen at his equipment banks. “I’m sorry... m-my instruments have been upset. We can only trust now to luck and hope they get through all right.”
“Holy Mother!” Verdeschi shouted, half in rage and half in horror. “We must get them out of...”
Ignoring Logan, whom he now took to be a fool, he turned to face the transference cubicle.
It was too late. It was halating a fierce blue light, an undulating tube that billowed up into the ceiling of the dome.
Behind him, on the screen, Logan’s laboratory was starting to show signs of shaking. His consoles were coming apart from the walls. They were flashing and sparking, and clouds of dust were pouring down on top of them. Tony could just about make out Logan’s and Carla’s forms staggering about, clutching at anything that was clutchable at, trying to keep themselves and their equipment upright.
CHAPTER
SIX
“Get that power line hooked up right away. Carla, check the calibrators—see if they’re still working....”
The quaking had stopped, and Logan’s thin, stooping frame ran urgently around the devastated laboratory trying to restore order and establish a link with the three Alphan subjects.
Verdeschi’s pale, drawn face stared grimly out at him from the neutrone transmission screen, watching his every move.
“Doctor, what’s happening down there?” the Security Chief asked.
“Give us time....” Logan muttered worriedly as he helped push a console back into position.
“Time?” Verdeschi exploded. “What for? What’s happened to them? They aren’t up here, and they haven’t arrived down there. I want to know what happened!” He was distracted by Dr. Mathias’s voice sounding off-screen beside him.
“We have a reading,” the junior doctor told him excitedly. “Dr. Russell: heart, pulse, temperature—normal. Commander Koenig: heart, pulse, temperature—normal...”
“Tony, we’ve got a reading!” Maya’s voice cried out next. “Wherever they are, they’re alive.”
Verdeschi’s face turned back to face the scene of wreckage in the Texas City laboratory. He had been mollified by the news, but there was still a harshness in his voice that caused a shiver of unpleasantness to run through Dr. Logan.
“Logan... we’re reading them. They’re somewhere in space—and you’ve got to find them.”
A faint but sure tang of forest peat and rank undergrowth pervaded her nostrils. A warm, happy sigh of contentment swept through her as she drifted out of hazy unconsciousness.
She felt the ground beneath her, soft and giving and cool. Gradually she became aware of the rustling of branches and the scything of a chill, harsh wind as it rasped across her.
It wasn’t a dream. She was alive—and off the Moon. She opened her eyes and stared up at a sullen and overcast sky. A cold drizzle buffeted against her, and she shuddered. She remembered Dr. Logan and the matter transference dome and she thought at first that they had arrived back home on Earth.
“Trust it to be raining,” she commented with a wry smile. She struggled to sit up.
She looked around.
The stirring bodies of Koenig and Carter were rolled halfway down the hill, scarcely visible in the night. Overhead, storm-tossed night clouds scudded across an Earth-like heaven of stars. At the foot of the hill was a line of dark trees—a wood. Beyond them was a valley filled with the lights of what appeared to be campfires, and past these a rugged, breath-taking terrain of mountains. Not the harsh, lifeless, barren mountains of the Moon, but mountains cloaked in moorland grass, sparse trees, and craggy outcrops of rock.
“Helena!” Koenig’s concerned voice sounded close to her. He and Carter had managed to rouse themselves and had crawled upslope. They were shivering and windswept, their faces gleaming and ruddy with the rain. “Helena... you okay?” He put his arm around her and hugged her.
She nodded against his shoulder. “Yes, but... where are we?” She pulled herself away and once again looked around her at the haunting landscape.
They each looked, in awe, bewilderment, and cantious joy.
“Rain and trees,” Carter murmured, almost reverently, his words barely audible above the gusting of the wind and the beating of the rain. “At least it’s an atmosphere we can breathe.”
“But everything between the cities is supposed to be a desert... according to those photographs Carla showed us,” Helena remembered suddenly. “A wasteland.”
Koenig nodded slowly, rivulets of water running off his face and down his tunic. “So wherever we are, we’re not on Earth.”
“Don’t say that.” Helena shuddered. “It was so nice to think we were-” She began shivering uncontrollably, and Koenig took off his jacket and wrapped it around her. She protested. “You need it.”
“We’ll be warm... soon,” Koenig replied. “on your feet.” He glanced at Carter through the darkness. “We’ll build a fire in those trees.”
They arose and set off downhill, Koenig leading the way, stumbling every so often on the clumps of turf. Eventually, they reached the wood. Far from being hospitable, the trees appeared to them to be almost as windswept and bleak as the open hillside. They were sparsely planted and tall, leaning down-valley in the direction of the wind. Through them they could still catch a glimpse of the distant fire lights in the valley proper beyond.
They looked longingly at the fires.
“We don’t know whether they’re friendly. Otherwise we could risk contacting them,” Koenig told them. He looked unhopefully around for a suitable area to set up camp. He moved on despondently through the wood ahead of them. At length he called them over. They arrived to find him standing between two large boulders which must at one time have rolled down the mountainside and settled in their position long before the trees had grown.
“We’ll drape the coats over the rocks and camp here until the rain clears,” he commanded. “First, Alan, you gather the wood and get the fire going.”
Helena looked around on the peaty floor for lengths of wood which they could use as frames to support the coats. She found a whole branch and set to dragging it over. When she had drawn it near, Koenig helped her haul it over the boulders. While they worked, the nagging worry of their whereabouts returned to them.
“If we’re not on Earth, where are we?” she asked. K
oenig shook his head. “We could be anywhere in the universe.”
“Then there’s no way we can get back, is there?”
“We’ll get back,” the Commander assured her firmly. “I don’t know how—but we will.” He paused. “What would you do if you were Logan?”
Helena frowned. “Recreate the conditions which caused the error.”
“Exactly—and pinpoint our location. All we do is wait here.”
Carter appeared with an armful of wet, dead wood. “He’d better not drag his feet about it,” he told them. “That eclipse with the constellation takes place in less than twenty-four hours.”
He dumped the wood in a heap at their feet just outside where the entrance to the shelter would be when it was finished. He drew his laser. “He’s got time to spare, I guess. But not much.” He pointed his gun at the pile and fired it. A burning, white beam lanced down on the fuel. He played the beam about over the pile, converting it into a glowing, ashy core.
Billows of wood smoke rose in the air. Quickly he holstered his gun and went in search of more wood to pile on the smoldering mound before the wind and the rain demolished his handiwork.
Soon they had a healthy, roaring blaze too hot to be extinguished. The two men took off their jackets and draped them over the roof. Then they sat down between the cold walls of the boulders and huddled close to one another, seeking all the warmth they could get.
The wind whined and howled through the thin winter trees above their heads. Dark, invisible eddies of air gusted across their faces and drenched their exposed backs.
Every so often they heard other, sharper sounds which rose above the wind. They seemed to be the shouts and screams of voices, or the cracking of brittle branches snapping as hoards of feet marched across them.
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