Space 1999 - The Psychomorph

by Michael Butterworth

  BRINGERS OF WONDER

  Continuing its journey through space, the Moon Base enters an unknown area of invisible radiation, transforming the Alpha personnel into super psychics capable of fulfilling their every wish merely by thought. Koenig decides to investigate the roots of this potentially dangerous situation – but with disastrous results.

  While he recovers from his mind-shattering experience, the Moon receives some unexpected and welcome visitors. Aboard what seems to be a Superswift from Earth are longlost friends and relations who the Alphans believed they would never live to see again. But only Koenig sees the truth – the visitation is nothing but a mass hallucination disguising the terrifying invasion of jelly-like aliens – and somehow he must find a way to alert the others before it is too late...

  SPACE 1999

  THE PSYCHOMORPH

  A Star Original

  The air had grown icy. It was so cold now that it numbed her fingers and she found difficulty breathing it in. She turned round helplessly, convinced that some creature had crept stealthily behind her and was about to attack. But the Store was empty. It was silent and cold and empty. Only the faceless, clinical jars stared back at her from their neat and orderly rows.

  She spied her laser gun. It lay on the balance table where she had stupidly left it. She staggered forward to retrieve it. All her strength seemed to have deserted her. She reached out her hand towards the gun and felt a sudden stab of pain as a second, heavy jar fell. It landed on her fingers, crushing them.

  In terror, she watched the amber glass shatter. She watched the white mass of crystals inside burst all over her hand. She tried to scream in pain as the crystal entered her ruptured skin and hurt. It hurt like nothing else had hurt her before...

  Michael Butterworth

  Space 1999

  THE PSYCHOMORPH

  A STAR BOOK

  published by

  the Paperback Division of

  W.H. ALLEN & Co. Ltd.

  A Star Book

  Published in 1977

  by the Paperback Division of

  W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd

  A Howard and Wyndham Company

  123 King Street, London W6 9JG

  Copyright © ITC – Incorporated Television Company Ltd 1977

  this novelization copyright © Michael Butterworth 1977

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Cox & Wyman Ltd, London, Reading and Fakenham

  ISBN 0 352 39620 2

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART ONE

  ‘Star Spectre’

  CHAPTER ONE

  The great, million-mile Space Amoeba quivered and shook with celestial rage.

  Its mighty, cosmic protoplasm flowed and pulsed wrathfully within its ageless boundaries. It had never before contemplated the unthinkable thought of death – that one impossible day it might cease to exist forever and its stupendous bulk return to the space highways from which it had plundered.

  The thought of death made it feel almost demented with hatred and bitterness. For millennia it had scoured the universe swallowing stars, absorbing whole civilizations, obtaining its energies directly from the fiery furnaces of the trillion suns. It had streamed contentedly about in space, gobbling up everything in its path with its huge, million-mile pseudopodic embrace.

  But during the past billion light years or so, the Space Amoeba had been forced to observe that its existence was not without limit – that there had to be an irrevocable end to its mindless, delinquent existence. At first it had resolved to be more scheming and thoughtful. It contrived ways of repairing its aged mass and converting itself back to its state of youthful avarice. But no creature, however large or small, however cunning, can permanently turn back the clock. Its power began to wane. Its improbable, gossamer body began to shrink. It grew weaker and was less able to swallow the energy-providing suns.

  Now it was not even able to swallow. It had only the ability to die.

  In its death throes, it was bitter.

  Blindly, desperately, it still sought to live.

  In its senile madness it denied the fact of death, and searched only for more of the raw power it needed to restore itself to its former glory...

  A cold, clammy presence swept through the Moon Base Chemical Stores.

  The sudden chill was sufficiently noticeable to cause Sally Martin, one of the Medical Centre Technicians, to drop a spatula full of an acidic chemical which she was in the process of weighing out.

  The chrome implement clattered noisily to the floor. A shower of white crystals fell messily over the balance pan, and she scowled in annoyance. This was the second time in the last ten minutes she had done something stupid – and the second time she had felt the funny, shivery feeling.

  Annoyed and puzzled, she got up from her seat in front of the electric balance and gazed apprehensively about at the silent shelves. The shelves were packed with jars of chemicals and bulky packets of laboratory equipment. They looked perfectly normal and ordinary. The store needed dusting, she conceded – another of the endless tasks she couldn’t bring herself to tackle just recently – but apart from the dust and the jars there was nothing else present in the small room beside herself. Nothing, that is, except for the intense silence, and the sudden chill.

  ‘Strange, I could have sworn that...’ she began, but stopped, frightened by the sudden loudness of her own voice. She shivered and tried to push the eerie thought she had to the back of her mind, unvoiced. What she had meant to say was that she thought the intruding presence she had felt enter the Store had been Carolyn Powell – the new girlfriend of her recent ex-boyfriend. But the idea was too preposterous to consider. Carolyn would have faced her openly, not skulked furtively about in the dingy banks of shelves of the Chemical Store.

  She shook herself again and returned to her work. As calmly as she could she took up a balance brush and began brushing the tiny white crystals of chemical off the pan. As she worked, she found herself thinking of Mark Sanders and the uncertain future she faced working for Doctor Helena Russell in the Medical Centre.

  Sally was a young, newly-trained Medical Technician. When she joined the Moon Base she had only been fifteen years old – one of the youngest members of the Alphan team. At the time she had been on holiday from school, visiting her Uncle Albert who worked in the Maintenance Section. The Moon had been blown out of its orbit by the force of the exploding nuclear waste dumps thoughtlessly buried on its far side. She had found herself trapped on a runaway planetoid, hurtling through space at thousands of kilometres an hour.

  To begin with, she had been slow adapting to the new life, but when she had grown used to it, discovered that she had quite liked it. She had worked her way up from Stores’ Assistant to Laboratory Assistant, and then to her present job as a Technician. She had done well. Then, not long ago, she had met Mark.

  It had been a short and disasterous affair – the kind that two temp
eramental people usually make when they decide to get together – and her work had been the first to suffer. After Mark had ditched her, she had found that she could scarcely bring herself to do any work at all. Everything she had to do was just too much effort. Her relationship with Doctor Russell and the other Medical staff had deteriorated. She had been warned, finally, to pull her socks up... or else.

  The balance pan was clean again. Sulkily, for she was still not able to accept the responsibility for what had occurred, she placed the weighing scoop back on the pan and recommenced her weighing procedure. She measured out the last of the chemical.

  Her present task seemed the most tedious of all. The purpose of weighing was to discover and record how much of the chemical remained in the jar. Many of the chemical compounds in the stores were dangerous, and a careful check had to be kept on their usage. ‘Muggins’, as she referred to herself in this instance, had the job of checking the weight in every single one of the jars she saw about her.

  ‘Three point two five grammes, and Doctor Russell is a cold-hearted witch’, she spoke into her note book, reading off the illuminated display panel.

  Instantly, she stabbed at the tape button and erased her last remark. She wasn’t even able to express her feelings to the world, she thought angrily to herself. She was about to switch the tape back on again when the cold, ghostly feeling abruptly returned.

  Its sharpness made her draw in her breath, but this time she was too petrified by it to move. She could only sit stock still, listening paranoically for the slightest sound. It was not just a distinctive temperature drop; she could have explained that away quite easily on the wonky ventilation systems. It was more of an unnatural chilliness, combined with the mental certainty that some malign force had entered the Store and intended her no good.

  ‘Go away...’ she pleaded at last. ‘Please...’

  By way of reply, a jar tipped over on its side on a high shelf above the balance. It made a loud bang that caused her heart to thump wildly. She knew intuitively that no accidental force could have tipped it over. Too frozen to move, she heard the sound of the jar rolling along the metal shelf towards the edge. At the last moment, she tore herself out of her paralysis and looked up.

  The jar was a heavy three kilogrammes. It appeared suddenly, directly above her head, and fell soundlessly towards her.

  She screamed and dived from the seat. The jar struck the spot where, a split second before, her body had been. It smacked against the seat and bounced harmlessly off to the floor, shattering with a loud crash.

  ‘Go away... Go away...!’ she whimpered. ‘Leave me alone...’ She picked herself up from the floor and stumbled towards the door. Sobbing with fright, she pulled out her comlock and aimed it at the doors. She pressed the ‘door open’ button, but they would not respond.

  The air had grown icy. It was so cold now that it numbed her fingers and she found difficulty breathing it in. She turned round helplessly, convinced that some creature had crept stealthily behind her and was about to attack. But the Store was empty. It was silent and cold and empty. Only the faceless, clinical jars stared back at her from their neat and orderly rows.

  She spied her laser gun. It lay on the balance table where she had stupidly left it. She staggered forward to retrieve it. All her strength seemed to have deserted her. She reached out her hand toward the gun and felt a sudden stab of pain as a second, heavy jar fell. It landed on her fingers, crushing them.

  In terror, she watched the amber glass shatter. She watched the white mass of crystals inside burst out over her hand. She tried to scream in pain as the crystal entered her ruptured skin and hurt. It hurt like nothing else had hurt her before.

  Inside his private quarters, Commander John Koenig tossed and turned fitfully in his sleep. Three hours ago he had given over his Command to Security Chief, Tony Verdeschi and escaped to obtain much-needed rest. Although his mind was now far away from the serious problems facing the Moon Base, that did not in any way negate them. They were still there, and becoming hourly more difficult to escape from.

  After its encounter with the Space Cloud, and with the helllish creature that the cloud had spawned – the fearsome hybrid that had almost succeeded in its insane mission to steal the life-giving Alphan Power Core – the Moon Base was desperately short of energy. They were in frantic need of Tiranium, the rare element that kept their buildings warm enough to live in, their air fresh enough to breathe, their armoury working well enough to defend themselves. When the reptilian robot had finally been overcome, the Moon Base had been left with only hours to go before it would cease to function... and before all aboard it perish from cold and asphyxiation. By working round the clock the Alphan miners had managed to break open a minute seam of the element in the low-level workings deep beneath the lunar surface. Tons of worthless rock had been crushed and sorted before instruments had detected a few milli-grammes of the precious material. In the workings that the Moon Men had previously made, the element had become scarcer as the years rolled by, and only traces were to be found. So powerful was Tiranium though, that a trace was sufficient to buy the Alphans time. Their scientists had set-to replenishing the Central Power Core. The Moon Base now had a few days at its disposal, instead of a few hours. When Koenig finally tumbled into bed, leaving the exhausted mining team to continue their work, the energy situation was less critical. But to solve it they would have either to strike a lucky seam, or else encounter a solar system with planets which contained Tiranium.

  To increase worries still further, a spate of accidents, minor disturbances, and plain, petty, niggling irritations seemed to have descended on the Alphan population. In the circumstances, the irritations were understandable, but they were disturbingly frequent.

  Koenig writhed and twisted on his bed as though in pain. He turned his head back and forth on his pillow in anguish, his face heavy with sweat, his skin pallid and drawn.

  He felt as though he were dreaming, yet he knew he was awake, in a light sleep. Despairingly he wished he were dreaming, so that he could escape the helpless, paralyzed state he was in. He wished he could fight off the accusing, ghostly faces and voices from the past that cornered and tormented him.

  ‘You killed me, John Koenig. You left me to die...’ Above him, in the darkness, the face of a sweet, dark-haired girl stared down at him. She was no more than a child. She looked as innocent and smiled radiantly – but there was a sinister vengeful malice behind her mask of youth. It accused him. It cursed him.

  ‘No... no...!’ Koenig moaned in horror. ‘No, I... you’ve got it wrong... I...’

  A violent shaking started up inside his body. It quickly grew stronger. In mortal terror, he thought that it was the ghosts who were trying to claim him. He was about to scream when he realized, mercifully, that he was waking up. The bright outlines of his quarters were asserting themselves on the faces and banishing them away.

  Helena Russell was bending over him. She had turned on the lights and she was shaking him.

  ‘John... John... wake up... It’s me, Helena...’

  Years of training had instilled sharp reflexes inside him and he shrugged off the last shreds of the nightmare and swung out of bed, instantly awake. His face still looked pale and he felt faint. He noticed Helena’s alarmed expression, and asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get you on the monitor, but you didn’t respond,’ she explained, almost wailing, and he could tell now that something was seriously wrong. ‘It’s... well, you’d better see for yourself... in the Chemical Stores...’

  Grimly, he undraped his tunic from his bedside armchair, and pulled it over the clothes he wore for sleeping in. Without comment, he ran with her out of the room and along the corridor.

  The shelves and benches in the Chemical Store had been brought down and upturned as though by a giant’s hand. Bottles and packets had smashed and burst over the floor, their contents reacting and bubbling stickily and emitting flashes of light and pungent wreaths of s
moke. In the midst of the shocking scene lay the still, partially-eaten body of the Technician.

  Sally Martin’s skin was a deathly white and her clothes had been reduced to tatters by the volatile acids. Severe blisters scarred her face and arms. She had died a horrifying death.

  ‘My God!’ Koenig exclaimed, shaken up by the grisly scene. ‘What kind of force did that to her?’

  Helena stood behind him, speechless with shock and grief. She had already seen the body once and she had no desire to see it again. She knew that she must, though. Dealing with the dead was one of the least likeable sides of her job as Chief Medic. This particularly nasty case was compounded.by the fact that she had known Sally personally and had had high hopes for her. Sally had been like a daughter. The shock of fear and dread that she knew Koenig and the Security Chief, Tony Verdeschi, felt, hadn’t yet hit her. At the present she could feel only grief.

  ‘Whatever kind it was,’ a horrified Verdeschi said, as he stooped among the debris and examined a jagged tear in the metal wall of the Store, ‘it was the kind that did this.’ He ran his fingers over the sharp edges of the tear. The tear was about the size of a human and the metal had been parted like a curtain and torn back. Whatever had killed Sally had entered through the wall from the corridor outside.

  Koenig shook his head. Grim-faced, he stepped over the inert body of the girl and examined the rupture. ‘Laser beam?’ he asked the Italian.

  Verdeschi shook his head. ‘Negative. A laser cuts smooth, not jagged. This was ripped.’

  ‘Have you checked perimeter defences?’ the Commander asked. He glanced nervously around him at the chaotic mess, as though half expecting to be set upon.

  ‘I checked. Nothing broke into the base... or left.’

  Koenig scowled. ‘Something came in – and it may still be here.’ He rose to his feet and stood motionlessly for a moment, considering the implications.