“A pretty ransom they would have fetched...”
Acrid smoke vapors began filling the room as Carter and Koenig frantically worked their raw Wrists, finally succceding in contacting one another. Carter’s index finger was able to rest on the tiny transmitting button on Koenig’s flashing indicator.”
“Now,” Koenig instructed him. “Tap it when I say... and let’s just hope somebody up there remembers their old training.”
It was by accident that the circuitry inside the small indicators, designed mainly as medical aids, had been discovered also to act as crude but effective transmitters and receivers. They were not able to transmit sophisticated pictures and words but they were able to handle single-pulse signaLs.
On the console in the Command Center they were pulsing now—not transmissions from the Moon Base —but incoming transmissions. Transmissions that could only be from one source.
Mathias’s heart quickened with sudden excitement. He called incredulously to Verdeschi. “We’re getting something on the indicators!”
A crowd instantly gathered around the console.
A series of intermittent flashes was occurring. Some were long, others were short.
Verdeschi’s face slackened in a mixture of puzzlcment and despair. He turned to Sandra Benes, standing beside him. “Does it mean anything to you?”
She shook her head, baffled. “Just some sort of code.”
“Anybody?” Verdeschi looked around the group. “Does anybody get it?”
Tom Jackson, a fechnician, suddenly snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute! It’s the old Morse code!”
“Morse code?” Maya looked more puzzled than ever.
“An old form of signal,” Jackson continued. “We used to learn it as astronaut cadets—”
“Of course!” Verdeschi cried. He turned urgently to Maya. “The computer!”
Maya ran to her own console, followed by the anxious Alphans. She patched into Helena’s console and immediately began getting the signals. They streamed across her screen. Beneath them the computer, programmed to translate numerous codes, including Morse, printed out the letters.
They soon had all the information they needed. Verdeschi ran back to his own console and called Logan.
“Scotland?” the staggered doctor exclaimed. He turned urgently to Carla. “Recalibrate. Scotland.” He turned back to the screen. “Where and when?”
“New Year, Bannockburn—plus twenty-five years,” Verdeschi told him, a trifle uncertainly. “That’s the bit I’m not certain about.”
“You’ve no need to worry,” Logan told him brightly. “That part I do know, being of Scottish descent. If your friends manage to stay alive for a few seconds longer, we’ll have them back.”
He turned again to Carla, scratching his head, while he mentally calculated the date. “Plus twenty-five. Scotland 1339, Carla 1339!”
Carla hit her control with a speed that was impressivo. “Transfer procedure green!” she exclaimed triumphantly.
She glanced up at the digital clock, which now told them that they had only five minutes left before the eclipse occurred.
“Halation positive,” she informed her superior calmly.
Dense clouds of smoke filled the inside of the hut.
Through the gray, swirling mass they made out the evil tongues of flame darting up the front of the building. Already the heat was getting to them, but they knew that they would die of asphyxiation before they died of burns. It was a cruel kind of mercy.
Coughing, gasping for breath, with tears streaming down his checks, Carter still continued to tap out the Morse signals on Koenig’s wrist. He knew the code by heart now. Besides which, Koenig had been forced to stop talking. But soon even that became impossible. They stopped coughing, already half-dead, and waited listlessly to die, their eyes bulging from their sockets.
When Carter awoke, the bare interior of the geodesic dome gradually sharpened into resolution.
Slowly, he took in what had happened and before moving, before trying to do anything, he heaved a huge sigh of relief. He sat perfectly still while every cell in his body drank in the wonders of the new lease on life that had been granted to him.
Then he opened his eyes again and began unstrapping himself. He helped Koenig unfasten his straps, then stood up and walked shakily out of the plastic transference chamber with its complex arrays of circuitry and equipment—now silent and dead.
There was a strong tang of ozone in the air—an odor that was infinitely preferable to burning pine wood.
The transference dome and its console were deserted.
Drunkenly, he looked behied him.
Koenig was trying to lift Helena’s unconscious form from her chair, so he returned. When he emerged again, helping to support the ailing doctor, the dome had filled with happy Alphans. They had rushed in from the Command Center to see if the reverse transference had really been conducted as safely as their instruments told them.
“It worked!” Verdeschi cried out. He and Maya were in the lead and ran forward to greet them, with Mathias and Vincent close behind. The two doctors quickly took charge of Helena.
“Soon have her on her feet,” Vincent beamed when he was told what had happened. “Down on Earth they’re so uncivilized, but up here on Moon Base Alpha we’re quite advanced, actually.”
“You know,” Koenig smiled wryly when they were through with the hugging, “when I think of all the events we could have been part of, it was bad luck to draw Scotland in 1339.”
“Sure, we might have caught the Massacre of St. Bartholomcw, the Spanish Inquisition, the retreat from Moscow, the sinking of the Titanic or the London blitz!” Carter grinned, surprising them with his knowledge.
Maya looked at him wide-eyed, shaking her head. “With a history like that, who wants to go back to Earth, anyway?”
They walked back to the Command Center. In Maya’s question hung a sweet, bitter irony. No, it didn’t really matter to them if they didn’t go back to an Earth poisoned with insecticide and dried into a desert. But yes it did. They did want to return to Earth again... to the Earth they remembered. To the Earth they loved and cherished. They wanted to go back with all their aching hearts. Logan, the bungling, well-intentioned scientist, had reminded them of their dream, had given three of them a precious sampling. But the brief moment of contact was now irredeemably lost.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The moment of contact was now probably lost—not only for one hundred years, but forever.
For ahead of them in space, on the mad course that the rogue Moon was taking, the galaxy itself was now coming to an end.
The Moon was gradually approaching the galaxy’s rim, where the millions of blazing stars petered out into the infinite deeps of the universe, the fathomless, everlasting seas of nothing that existed between the galaxies.
It was hurtling on its final trajectory.
Previously, successive time warps had thrown the Moon from one galaxy to another; it had never had to enter the great intergalactic gulfs. The population of human castaways it carried had never had to survive on a world without neighbors to help or hinder. They had always had rapport of some kind with other civiiizations, bleak and unpromising though this had often been. The Alphans had always had the chance either to find their way back home to Earth or to find a new home.
Now, with another golden opportunity lost, their chances of long-term survival looked very slim.
Grimly, Koenig gazed at the last few stars depicted on the Big Screen in the Command Center—the screen that had, in the past, been crammed with so many worlds. The last time warp had thrown the Moon near the rim of Galaxy M31, and that was where they now were. Ironically, M31 wasn’t dissimilar to their own native galaxy, the Milky Way. It was roughly the same shape and size. It was also its neighbor. But the distances that separated it from neighbors, even the Milky Way, were so stupendous that the Alphans would have died out a hundred times over by the time they had arrived at a
new galaxy. For the rest of their lives, after the few lone outpost worlds they were approaching had been passed, they would not see another star. There would be no more chances to survive.
In the same vicinity of space as the outpost stars, the Moon Base sensors had also picked up a mysterious object travelling toward them. The object was small, but it was fast. It was still many millions of miles from them and appeared to have come up at them from a direction along the rim. It was radiating a force field and had an active põwer source, but no life form signals. They presumed, therefore, that it was a robot device of some kind. Friend or foe—or plain, neutral—it also constituted the last potential contact with another race that they would be receiving.
The one unnerving aspect about the UFO was that it was headed toward them; it had a fix on their trajectory. It made them wonder what it or its builders needed of them. They wondered what business brought it to be in such a remote region in the first place.
“Component sensor readings coming in,” Maya informed them, leaning forward in her seat in order to study a newly arrived print-out. She frowned. “Carbon, hydrogen, argon, rebillium, oxygen, sulphur...” She reeled off more names of the chemical elements, many of which were gaseous.
“Raw matter?” Koenig asked-her.
“More than that—they’re mixed up in a kind of gas cloud!” she exclaimed in mystification. “Then, how come it’s—”
“Being driven by an energy source, and how come it has a force field? Right on.” Koenig nodded. “That’s what I would like to know.”
His demeanor had changed abruptly from one of wary curiosity and melancholy to one of alarm. Many other Alphans who had also been pondering their fate suddenly snapped to attention.
“Expanding and solidifying,” Verdeschi called from his console.
“Alan, density and volume?” Koenig asked Carter sharply. The Australian was operating the console directly in front of him. He hit switches and stabbed at buttons.
“It’s big, John,” he said. “About a cubic kilometer big.”
“My guess is, a spaceship,” Verdeschi told them, staring at the Big Screen, which now showed the UFO. “Only it’s travelling as pure matter. Nothing else could explain it.”
Further baffled by his speculation, they gazed on in silence as the cloud grew in size. It became the size of a football.
“Magnify!” Koenig ordered.
It swelled abruptly to fill the screen. Now they could see clearly the billowing, colored mass of gases that composed it. The gases seemed to fly in rippling, interrelating sheets. They glowed lurid, a polychrome hue, as though ionized.
As they watched, the shapes and colors gradually blurred, shrinking in size and dissolving into the outlines of a large ship. It was still speeding toward them.
“Right first time,” Koenig muttered to the Security Chief. “Sahn, make contact.” He rose from his seat and joined Verdeschi. The Security Chief was working furiously, analyzing the new information that his sensors were picking up.
“No hostile movements,” he informed the Commander. He tore off a print-out. “A meson converter! I thought so.”
Koenig nodded gravely. “A means of converting matter to energy and back again...”
“And shifting it through space almost instantaneously,” the other added.
“We have a life form signal now,” Maya called out suddenly.
“Sahn, have we got contact?” Koenig whirled around to face Sandra Benes’s replacement operative, an alert, attractive dark-haired girl in her mid-twenties.
“Not yet, John,” she answered. She was efficiently punching communicator buttons on her console. “Whoever they are, they don’t seem to be responding.”
Enormously big, the alien ship grew larger as they watched. Nose on, it looked like a black tailless barrage balloon... like a large, sinister space whale.
Koenig ran back to his console and stabbed at it. He got the weapons section. “Activate radiation screens.”
Verdeschi looked white. “It’s not stopping... only one minute to collision at the rate it’s travelling.”
“It must have seen us!” Carter gasped.
“Red alert!” Koenig slammed his hand down on the Red Alert button. Instantly the Moon Base became pandemonium of scurrying figures rushing to their emergency posts. “Defense crews into position if you have time!” he added fiercely, under his breath.
“Surface Eagles to underground hangars!” Carter gave the instruction to retract the Eagle Ships from their ramps and tuck them safely away beneath the lunar surface. The impact that the Moon would make with the approaching maniac might seriously damage them.
“All non-active personnel into protective areas and stand by,” Koenig finished his series of announcements.
“Ten seconds...” Verdeschi counted. “Five... It’s through our screens!”
“Wait—” Koenig began, but he and the rest of the Command Center personnel were abruptly bathed in a brilliant, blinding white light.
The magnesium brightness appeared to emanate from nowhere, although it seemed to be at its brightest around Maya’s console. Shielding their eyes with their arms, they were able, with difficulty, to discern her writhing shape. While they were unhurt, she was moaning and contorting in agony. As they gazed helplessly on, the light flared even more brilliantly around her, cocooning her with its fierce rays, and she crashed forward on her console. Crying, screaming, and still twisting, she rolled sideways and fell heavily to the floor.
The light followed her. It blazed around her again, then faded away completely.
Still fighting to see through the after-images that burned in their eyes, Verdeschi and Carter ran forward to assist her. Koenig put out a hurried emergency call for Helena, forgetful for the moment that the imminent collision point had passed—and not occurred. He seemed more interested now in what Maya was shouting.
In her agony, the Psychon was shouting out a word. It was the same word, repeated over and over again—and by the look of terror mixed in with the pain on her face, it was intended as a warning.
“Dorcons! Dorcons!”
CHAPTER
NINE
Frail and wizened with the experience and learning of great age, the great oyerlord of Dorcon sat in regal splendor in the stateroom of the alien craft. His name was Archon, his small, nut-like body scarcely visible in the folds of the garments and richly embroidered blankets. But his aura of power was unmistakable. It radiated off him at the merest lifting of a finger or the raising of an eyebrow.
By his side on the royal dais stood a young, handsome man still caught in the fleeting fullness of youth—Malic, Archon’s ambitious nephew. There was a distinct cruelness about this person’s mouth and eyes. The eyes themselves never rested long on anything, darting about restlessly from object to object, accusing the world of betraying their owner. He looked overburdcned with premature independence and with responsibilities that had crept up on him too soon in life—an adultness which he would rather not have but with which he was unwillingly courted.
Facing both of them was a tall, graceful woman with a beauty renowned throughout Dorcon. She was, probably, the most beautiful woman in old Archon’s service. As Archon liked to surround himself with beautiful women, perhaps to remind himself of his youth, for he was now totally impotent, and she was beautiful indeed.
Malic’s face twisted with sudden bitterness and hatred at her intrusion. He whirled around to face his uncle. “Ignore her, Uncle. Give the order to invade.”
“And if they resist?” Varda, the woman, put in a quick question before Archon could be swayed by his nephew’s madness.
Malic turned to her and scoffed proudly. “Naturally, they will be destroyed.”
Softly, maddeningly, she said, “We need their cooperation, Malic.”
“You choose to grovel to these primitives?” the young man shouted, growing red in the face.
Varda’s jaw tightened. “I will conduct this operation as I see fit!”
<
br /> “I command this ship!” the other almost shrieked.
The wrinkles on Archon’s aged face suddenly moved in an intimation of weariness. He raised his jewelled hands for silence. His audience obeyed, and he turned to Malic. “Consul Varda commands you as I command her. Your advice is rejected, nephew.”.
There was a moment’s tense silence while the ship’s young commander considered the implications of these words—not the implications for him, but the implications he planned for his uncle and the loyalist woman. His eyes flashed darkly; his face grew rigid with suppressed emotion. Without another word and without the customary form of obeisance to his ruler, he turned on his heel and strode out of the room.
Unperturbed, Archon’s eyes rotated back to Varda inside their drying, fleshy beds. “Arrange it how you must. But get that Psychon.”
Aware that Archon was in need of rest, and satisfied that she had managed to keep the unstable Malic in his place, she bowed her head in respect and parted. But as she walked hurriedly along the ship’s corridors she feared for herself. She knew that Malic and the men he commanded would eventually get their own way. With a ruler as weak and impotent as Archon, it was only a question of time.
The pain had subsided, leaving Maya feeling wasted and empty inside. Verdeschi lifted her to her feet and walked her back to her console.
“I’m okay now, thank you,” she told him, brushing strands of hair from her face. She smiled bravely.
Verdeschi was about to ask her what she knew of the strange ship and its inhabitants when Sahn announced that contact had been made.
The unblemished, graceful beauty of Varda appeared on the Big Screen, and they looked up in awe. She was so like them in appearance, yet she had an air of supremacy about her. She seemed relaxed and friendly, almost to the point of being condescending.
“Greetings, Commander,” she said warmly. “I am Consul Varda. We’ve journeyed through half the galaxy to meet you people.”
“We’re flattered, Consul,” Koenig told her guardedly. He eyed her shrewdly. “May we know why?”
“We need your cooperation, Commander,” her smiling, youthful face replied.
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