“Once again we have to thank Howard Phillips Lovecraft for the clues. It was eclipses that proved the key.
“He saw at least one total eclipse himself—in North America, in August 1932. He left an account of it in his letters . . .” She thumbed through the pages of her notepad. Evidently she had brought, on a space mission, pithy quotes from long-dead nutjobs. “Here we are. ‘When the crescent waned to extreme thinness, the scene grew strange and spectral—an almost deathlike quality inhering in the sickly yellowish light.’ Typical Lovecraft!”
“And the Color?”
“Now, look, on May 17, 1882, there was an eclipse over Egypt. And at the moment of totality, with the sun’s glare gone, observers saw an object close to the sun itself. They thought it was a comet—called a Kreutz comet, a sungrazer. All right? And then, just a few weeks later, in June 1882, the Color incursion, on the Gardner farm. Where something landed.” She stared at me. “Come on, Jones. You’re the space pilot. Work it out! Suppose that wasn’t a comet that was seen in May, close to the sun? If it was some kind of craft—”
“It was decelerating,” I said, figuring it out as I spoke. “If you come in from interstellar space, and you want to dump velocity with the greatest efficiency, your closest approach to the sun is the place to do it.” I looked at her. “So this thing flies in from the stars—”
“More likely at high speed through some time-convergent funnel.”
“It slows up at the sun, and two weeks later lands on Earth.”
“That’s it. Look, we’re not sure what the link is with eclipses. Maybe they use them as cover for their operations—hiding in the shadow of the Moon . . .
“The Color is some kind of parasite, we think. Characterized chiefly by a draining of the local life-force. Apparently it somehow uses that life energy to escape. The witnesses at the Gardner place saw bolts of light shoot up from a well, back to space. We know of further incursions that were probably made by the same class of entity. In 1896, the ‘Saliva Tree Incursion’ at a place called Cottersall in Norfolk, England.
“And then, 1908. On June 20, an annular eclipse. Two days later, Tunguska. Acres of forest flattened. The Tsarist authorities didn’t know what to make of it. But after the Revolution, the Soviet scientists were fascinated. Look, Jones, the Soviets see themselves as having waged a war of existential struggle since the moment their regime took power. Anything they can use to get an edge—”
“Are you saying they tried to capture this alien horror, this Color?”
She shrugged. “In fact they followed a British example. You saw the plaque at Tarooma, the Q-I mission? 1953. Experimental deep space flight. In that case an alien infestation penetrated the ship itself, and was brought back down to Earth. Anyhow, the Russians figured, maybe they could similarly lure the Color into some kind of technological trap.
“There was a total eclipse due in February, 1961. The Soviets anticipated a fresh Color Incursion. So they launched this station, manned by a military crew—this was before Gagarin publicly flew, remember. And they loaded it up with flora from Tunguska, as much as they could cram in. The idea being, hopefully, to attract the newcomer to the relics of a previous visitant.”
“And trap it up here. Why? To harness it, as yet another Cold War weapon?”
She shrugged. “Maybe not. The two sides have been known to cooperate over the incursions. Remember Zellaby and Midwich? The West cooperated in the nuclear destruction of a Russian changeling nest at Gizhinsk, near Okhotsk. This was last year, just before the Cuba missile crisis. That operational-level contact did a lot to help defuse—”
“So they trapped this Color in here, in Zarya.”
“That was the plan. It worked. And when it came here—you know, the 1882 landfall attracted lightning. Electricity. The Color trapped in Zarya seems to have set off a global electromagnetic disturbance called the ‘Ring of Fire.’ You must remember that . . . ?”
“If some kind of meteorite hit this station . . . Quite a trick to survive that in the first place.” I glanced around—if there was any evidence of damage repair it was hidden by the foliage. “Where the hell is it?”
She sighed, impatient. “You should have read the briefing more carefully, Jones. There’s always a kind of rocky shell which contains the Color itself, which is . . . intangible. And the rock disappears. Sublimates maybe. In some cases physical traces remain.”
I shrugged. That was the least strange thing I’d heard in the last half hour.
“Well, the Color was trapped in here, but it broke out of control, inside the station. The crew was killed. But there doesn’t seem to have been enough living matter on the station for the Color to consume and escape altogether.”
“So the Soviets have this unholy menace bottled up in here, stuck in orbit. Then what?”
“Then, as best we understand it, Yuri Gagarin, already a national hero, volunteered to lead a fresh crew up here, scientifically qualified, to attempt to save the first crew, if any survived, and deal with the Color. An expedition that failed in its turn. And so I was ordered to find out what became of Gagarin and his crew, and to deal with the Color once and for all. The nuclear sanction was very much a last resort. But I was clearly instructed to take that resort, if all else failed.”
I watched her carefully, trying to read her. “Aha. Whereas that’s the last thing you intend to do.”
“I couldn’t let that happen, Jones. I infiltrated the mission, made sure it was me who brought up the nuke, so I—we—could be sure it would not be used . . .”
“Who’s ‘we’? Not the British authorities, not the Human Protection League or the US government. You’re somehow on the side of this Color.”
“It’s not that simple. I asked you to keep an open mind, Jones. Given all I’ve told you, can you not see how everything is changed? How everything you ever believed is wrong? The life forces from beyond the Earth haven’t just come into our homes, our petty planet, like movie monsters. They are into everywhere. Every when. Inside us. And we have to embrace that—”
“Who’s Azathoth? I heard you, with Gardner, before the launch, like you were praying. Who’s Azathoth?”
But she seemed beyond speech now. Her eyes were bright—and seemed to me then to shine with that strange, elusive non-color I’d already glimpsed in this station, in the moisture in the air—but she did not speak further.
Still she held the gun on me.
What happened next has become controversial.
Look at it from my point of view.
I was bewildered by all the talk of multiple alien invasions, and the distortion of humanity’s evolution, its entanglement with life on Earth itself, and yakety yak. If any of it was true, what did it mean for me? What was good, what was evil, in such a context?
Well, I had a moment of clarity. Right here, right now, in this standoff, there was only one unimpeachably good action for me to take. So I took it.
I shot the dog.
V
I found out later that the instant I pulled that rocket-gun trigger was the moment the sun passed into totality. I didn’t, couldn’t, know that at the time.
Sometimes I think there’s something in all the spooky stuff.
Anyhow, all hell broke loose.
The main lighting failed, to be replaced by a sick emergency-red wash, and wan eclipse sunlight leaking through murky, slime-coated windows. Alarms howled, including some kind of recorded voice of which I couldn’t understand a word. I guessed Peabody was right that poor Laika had somehow been used as a sort of canine computer to run the station—or whatever gestalt thing this station had become. Now I’d shut her down.
And the trees, the damn foliage that crowded out the place—I’ll swear they stirred and moved, the branches stretching like short skinny limbs, the needles raking, like they were trying to reach me.
Peabody, hanging in the air, had her hands pressed to her face. Even now she had that backpack nuke, floating with her.
And somet
hing was hammering on the other side of the hatch to the third compartment. Something massive and heavy, like a dumb animal ramming its head against the bars of its cage. But I heard a human voice call: “. . . eez-vee . . . eez-vee-neetee . . .”
Something was coming through.
I was plunged into nightmare.
I muttered to myself, “What now, Jones? Well, you came here to rescue Yuri Gagarin. Not for this Lovecraft crap.”
I pushed my way to that damn hatch, to the third chamber. It bulged with each blow, as whatever was beyond was slammed against it.
Another red wheel. I turned it and hastily shoved myself out of the way.
The hatch slammed open.
The thing tumbled through.
It was like the others, the corpses. A human body, still jammed inside a ragged, filthy blue coverall, but swollen, distorted—the spine bent, the joints looking dislocated, parts of the torso alternately shriveled or swollen. Like it was stuffed with outsize copies of its internal organs, the liver, the bowels. The head was a grotesque balloon, as if the skull had been inflated. And all of this rendered, not in the texture of human flesh, but in a crumbling gray, like the ash-ghost of a log you sometimes see on a hot fire, holding its shape, just before it collapses to cinders.
But this one, unlike the other cosmonauts, was alive.
Still he moved, scattering flakes of ash-gray in the air as he did so. One shoulder was smashed, flattened, and I surmised this was what he had used to beat against that hatch. I wondered if the other two crew had forced him in there, or if he had tried to save himself from them.
Alive. When he moved, pulling himself across the deck, he made a sucking, sticky sound. That pumpkin head twisted now, and a face looked up at me—stretched, distorted, flaking ash. I recognized him. Of course I did. That broad peasant face was one of the most famous in the world. I felt like saluting.
And he looked at me, with eyes that had somehow survived, like glass beads in a hearth. “Eezveeneete . . . Eezveeneete . . .”
Peabody seemed to have calmed, even as the shriek of the alarms continued. She looked down at this figure. “Polkovnik Gagarin.”
Those eyes turned to her. “Eezveeneete . . .”
“What’s he saying?”
“Sorry,” she said. Her expression was complex—pity, I thought, warring with exultation. “He’s saying sorry.”
“What’s he sorry for?”
And now she had her gun again, pointing at my head. I cursed myself for not getting it off her while I had the chance.
She said, “He’s sorry because he lured us up here. Look, Jones, the Color is a parasite on life-forces. In Massachusetts it consumed animals, vegetation, people—the Gardners. And why? So it could build up the energy to get back into space, and move on, to find some other place to settle, and feed again. Grow, maybe. Spore.
“Now, think about it. The Soviets lured the Color here. It broke out, but it was trapped. A few pot-plants and three skinny cosmonauts weren’t enough to fuel its escape, right? Colonel Gagarin here led up a second crew. Again the Color overwhelmed them, consumed the new crew. Still not enough to escape.”
“But it spared Gagarin—”
“Yes. Spared him deliberately. It kept him alive. Maybe it understood how it had been lured here, and trapped. And now, you see, it used Gagarin to lure us.”
I looked down at the Gagarin monster, those clear human eyes in the distorted mask of gray. I knew his story, as much as anybody in the West did back then. The boy raised on the collective farm, who survived the German occupation. The technical school student who studied tractor-building. The volunteer air cadet. The first in space, as far as the whole world knew. After all he’d achieved, he wasn’t yet thirty years old. And now, this.
“Eezveeneete . . . Eezveeneete . . .”
“He knows who he is,” I said. “The Color left him that much.”
“It seems so,” Peabody said. “The lure wouldn’t have worked otherwise, would it?” She raised the pistol. “And it has worked, you see. It lured you here. His name alone. And now—”
“Now you’re going to feed me to the Color.”
“Us, Jones. Us. Me too. Do you see, Jones? Do you see? They gave me this bomb to bring here. Oh, I was never going to use it. All I ever intended was to bring you. You and myself. Two of us, you see, perhaps with this Gagarin morsel. It will be enough. The Color will destroy this toy, and return to that center of ultimate Chaos, and speak to Him in the Gulf of our petty world, and its readiness for consumption . . . Do you see, Jones? You with your petty ambitions, your infantile clinging to illusory order. Embrace the Chaos! The Crawling Chaos . . . !”
I just stared.
Now, if I’d been her, I’d have pulled the trigger there and then, disabled me, and fed me to the Color, whatever. Instead she started to chant, in a kind of frenzy—to Lord Azathoth, Him in the Gulf, Lord of All Things, Father of the Nameless Mist and Darkness, the ancestor of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath and Cthulhu in the Deep . . . And she started shrieking, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Meanwhile, you see, I still had my Buck Rogers rocket pistol. Which she had forgotten about, in her turn. I pressed the nuzzle up against the back of Gagarin’s swollen head, and figured trajectories.
I’ll swear to this day that Gagarin knew what I was planning. He looked at me. “Spaseeba . . . Bal’shoyespaseeba . . .” I didn’t understand what he whispered to me. But I memorized it syllable by syllable and found out later. Thank you. Thank you very much.
In turn I used the only Russian word I knew. “Poyekhali, Yuri.”
I fired.
Yuri Gagarin’s head was blown to smithereens of ash.
And the pulse passed through that fragile shambles of a head, and, just as I planned, hit Peabody on her right shoulder. The shoulder holding the pistol. The gun went flying.
After that, I had to move fast.
I dumped Gagarin, a corpse at last, and pushed through the air. I landed on top of Peabody and slugged her to make sure she was out.
And I got hold of that backpack nuke, fumbled with it until I found the panel that opened to reveal the command keys. Then I searched Peabody’s suit pockets and pouches until I found the piece of paper Maxwell Gardner had slipped her before the launch. It was, of course, the bomb’s enabling code. I punched this in.
And then we had five minutes to get away. Think a classic countdown, red-digit counters clicking over. James Bond, you should have been there.
I closed up my suit and Peabody’s, and hauled ass out of there, through the second chamber, through the first. I had to get her out, you see, and I couldn’t afford to kill her, because I wanted to destroy that damn Color, not risk feeding it, not even with the energy of Peabody’s miserable life. I was flying on instinct, on reaction, and that was my deepest, most profound reaction. This thing had to be killed. So I plotted how I’d do it.
If that sounds like clinical, rational, professional decision-making, believe me, it wasn’t. It was a kind of sublimated panic. Because when I shot Yuri Gagarin, the whole crazy place got even crazier.
You have to imagine those tree branches scratching at me as I passed, furious, spouting electric sparks from their tips. I think if those damn Siberian pine trees could have uprooted themselves like that Russian biofuel plant and come after me, they would have done.
At the hatch, I looked back. The emergency lights were a sullen red glow, and it was an infernal scene in there, with the trees lashing now, lashing and straining to get at us, their branches shedding sparks and flashes.
And then there was the water. The air was already misty, and now there were detonations like grenades, and I saw that stainless steel Soviet-engineered water tanks were cracking and spewing their contents in the air. Back in 1882 the Color had, in the end, infested the Gardner farm’s water supply, a well. So it was here. The air in that place was quickly full of it—not a formless mist, but something alive in itself, an animated miasma that rippled and pulsed
and smashed in great spouts against the station windows, seeking release. Like a fire-hose let go, perhaps, gushes of it spraying and splashing.
Water that glowed, with the Color itself—that was the first time I’d really seen it, not a color from the spectrum you learn about at school, something different, stranger. Literally indescribable. A Color out of space.
I got us out of that insanity. I even remembered to fix our helmets before swimming out into vacuum.
I scrambled over the umbilicals back to the Gemini, stuffed Peabody into her couch, closed the hatches, piloted that sweet, responsive bird out of there. Wary of radiation, I positioned us with the heatshield between us and the nuke, and maybe a mile of space.
I jammed my eyes shut.
Peabody was out cold, through the whole of it. In fact, I made sure she stayed out until we’d been picked up in the ocean, after re-entry, by the boys of the helicopter carrier Guadalcanal just off Puerto Rico, a few hours later.
And the sea air had blown away the last shreds of the Color from my lungs.
Epilogue
So here I am in Arkham, England. A plague village centuries dead. Trying to find out a little more about Squadron Officer Mabel Peabody, who played here as a child. Trying to understand.
Not that the Human Protection League understands, or the RAF. The Lovecraft Squad are mortified somebody managed to infiltrate to such senior levels. It’s sent them and their government masters into a kind of existential crisis, I think.
Peabody was taken away after we splashed down, and is probably being interrogated in Washington right now, under maximum security. As for me, I think I see the character logic a little more clearly. You could say she was a traitor to her race, for trying to lure down Azathoth— which seems to be some kind of horror behind the horrors that have been pressing down on us from space since the time of the Great Old Ones. She was certainly dazzled by all that.
But it wasn’t so simple. Peabody was operating in the human world too. She, and others like her, believe they see a better way for the world to be ordered. I’ve done my research on these characters. As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, I’m methodical. They call themselves names like the “Olde Fellowes.” Or, the “Armies of the Night.” Very hard to pin them down, or to establish any connection between them. Yet they exist, they are already scarily powerful, and they ain’t going away. Why, Peabody herself managed to infiltrate both the RAF and the HPL.
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