The deadly screaming noise of the motor subsided, dropping lower in tone until it died away altogether. And as mysteriously as it had come, the icy cold presence they had felt drifted away and the air became suddenly, unbearably hot.
Koenig and Verdeschi staggered up the corridor, followed by the gorilla. They reached a cooler spot and Verdeschi rested once more. He looked gratefully up at his giant protector. ‘Thanks, Lady,’ he said. ‘You sure play rough.’
The outlines of the animal shimmered into light, and Maya re-materialized back before them. She rushed at once to Verdeschi and held him briefly. ‘I’m glad you’re all right,’ she said.
Koenig indicated the Workshop which still billowed out clouds of black smoke. His face looked ashen. ‘Another malfunction?’ he asked.
Verdeschi shook his head. ‘Not this time. It wasn’t turned on, but it started up on its own. I turned it off and it wouldn’t stop.’
Koenig and Maya looked at one another in grave alarm. Koenig drew out his comlock and alerted the Fire Department to the scene. Then, all three of them sped back to the Command Centre.
‘Let it stop... let me stop!’ Carolyn Powell sobbed into her hand.
She sat in her quarters in front of her dressing table mirror. Her hair looked wildly disarrayed. Her features looked anguished.
She stared pleadingly at her reflection. ‘Please... I don’t want to do these things... I don’t want to!’
The semblances of herself that were charitable and well-disposed to her fellow men and women fought bravely to rid herself of the other, darker side of her mind – the hate, jealousy and vindictiveness – that seemed nowadays to dominate her behaviour. But the fight was useless. She knew that she was in the grip of the Devil, and he had a very strong hold over her.
Despairingly, she shook her head from side to side. ‘No... No...’ she moaned, remembering the hideous dreams and visions she had had; comparing them with the normal, human state of her existence of before. She had always been jealous of Sally – she had told the truth to the Commander. But she had never really meant her to die. It had been a silly, childish desire... until the Devil had taken her over.
She wished with all her heart that she could reverse what had happened. She wished the tyrannical, mocking creature of shadow that had taken her over would leave her and take his sadistic sport elsewhere...
Koenig paced in agitation in front of the Big Screen. He glared at the picture of stars. He glared at Helena, Maya, Verdeschi and anyone else who happened to come under his vision. ‘Some unknown force kills Sally... instruments go haywire... Eagles malfunction... a Tiranium motor turns on by itself and won’t stop... and all this has happened since the appearance of this... this... what the hell is it?’ He turned sharply to Maya. ‘Can’t you get any readings on that thing?’
Maya was hunched over her console, pouring over printouts and analyzing them in her head. She seemed excited. She ignored the Commander’s uncharacteristic irritability. He had been raging on for too long now, and she merely assumed he must have got out of the wrong side of his bed. ‘I am getting something, John...’ she told him firmly. A more rapid series of bleeps came from the oscilloscope mounted next to her. ‘Lambda Waves...’ she continued, uncertainly. ‘Lambda Waves, I think...’
Helena sprang to attention. ‘Lambda Waves!’ She rushed over to Maya’s console to see for herself, conscious of the blank, uncomprehending expressions that followed her. Maya was right. They were now picking up the rare brain wave patterns. She explained. ‘Normally the human brain swings between Alpha and Beta Waves. Very rarely, some brains throw off these Lambda Waves. They were discovered during research into ESP, paranormal powers of the mind...’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘Now if this field of radiation we’re in is sending off Lambda Waves...’
‘Then it could be having an effect on some of our staff?’ Koenig asked urgently.
Helena nodded. ‘It could.’
‘How do we find out?’
‘I could conduct some experiments and see,’ the doctor replied.
Koenig nodded grimly. ‘All right, go ahead. Conduct your experiments.’ He watched as Helena started to exit. He turned to Verdeschi. There was a look of fresh resolve in his eyes. ‘I want this Lambda Field, if that’s what it is, dispersed. Hit it with everything we’ve got.’
‘Yes, sir!’ Verdeschi threw him a salute, relieved that some positive action had been decided on at last. He moved over to the Laser Console and began operating the controls.
The Moon Base was constructed partly below and partly above ground. When the Base was first built, more than five years before, it was designed with the lunar ambience in mind –cold, airless conditions in the total vacuum of Space. Meteoric activity of any significance was comparatively rare, so the principal Sections and Centres had been built on the surface. Economically, there had been no justification for doing otherwise. But when the ancient Moon was hurled from her orbit and flung into deep space, the hazards that the Moon Men had to face increased a thousand-fold. It had been quickly decided by the stranded man-force to rebuild the living and operations’ quarters beneath the lunar surface – leaving only the Store Houses, Ammunitions Depot and the like above ground. At great cost to life and limb, the rebuilding had commenced, and was now complete. The Alphans were buried away from the perils that threatened them and their sense of vision was replaced with Technology. In fact, they were more dependent than ever on their instruments.
On the freezing lunar surface above their heads, the giant dishes of the powerful defence lasers swivelled round to face the congested heavens. These were their Instruments of War and another very good reason to be tucked safely away below ground. Verdeschi operated them with all the power of Moon Base’s enormous energy output, training them on a single point in Space a few miles above the Moon. When they were activated and their deathly photon rays were beamed out, they would cut through anything – visible or invisible – that lay in their path and that was composed of matter. When their white-hot points of light collided, they would create an intense artificial sun – in effect, a constantly exploding bomb of the most powerful kind, that would serve to take a large chunk out of whatever was up there.
Effortlessly, Verdeschi pressed the Master Activation Button, and watched on his instrument panels as the tell-tale readings told that the exploding sun had been created.
He turned with a confident smile to Koenig and the other Alphans who were watching the Big Screen. With more remote-controlled instruments – the camera eyes that were positioned everywhere in and out of the Base – they were filming the explosion. A huge, searing ball of fire was burning brightly, obliterating the stars and casting the entire lunar surface in an eerie bath of bluish light.
Verdeschi turned to Maya, who was frantically assimilating her console readings, trying to keep up. He expected to see her expression turn to one of relief as she learnt that the strange Space Field they were imprisoned inside had been successfully dispensed with. But the expected rejoicing never came. Puzzled, he depressed more buttons on his console, increasing the power still further. The sun pulsed alarmingly and Koenig motioned abruptly to him to turn the guns off. They were using up too much of their valuable energy.
Verdeschi did as he was bid and the brilliant, artificial sun faded away. He walked over to Maya, and peered over her shoulder.
She looked up, perplexed – and frightened. ‘It just doesn’t make sense...’ she began. She looked pleadingly in Koenig’s direction. ‘No change, John. No change at all... but...’
‘But what?’ Verdeschi asked impatiently, trying vainly to make sense of the reams of print-outs.
Maya shook her head incredulously. ‘The light energy... it didn’t destroy it. It fed it.’
‘What?’ Koenig stared at her as though she were mad. ‘You mean, it absorbed it all?’
‘According to my readings, the Lambda Wave frequency has increased... as a direct result of the laser energy being introduced,’ Maya told
him.
Verdeschi whistled.
Koenig looked exhausted and beaten. His defences were down, and he said shakenly: ‘Then maybe Helena will have better luck.’ So saying, he rose from his Command Chair and walked tiredly from the Centre.
Helena wouldn’t have finished with her work so instead of hindering her Koenig decided to stop off in his quarters first, to sort his mind out.
If the Lambda Waves were responsible for the dangerous psi phenomena which appeared to be occurring in the Moon Base, and if they had been unwittingly increased, then the Alphan’s problems were proportionately increased.
He paced agitatedly up and down the length of floor in front of his desk, living solely on the nervous energy that was propping him up. Eventually, he could not keep the tiredness back and he threw himself on his bed, intending just to doze and so help clear his mind. Instead, he fell instantly into a deep sleep. As he slept, the temperature in the room dropped and he moved and moaned restlessly about, trying to keep warm.
‘You killed us, John Koenig. You left us to die...’ The voice of the sweet, dark-haired girl sounded again inside his head. Into his sleep crept her ghostly face. It looked young and fresh and hauntingly beautiful... and he had killed her. She was right.
His uncovered body writhed and twisted now with guilt, and fear. He moaned in despair. ‘Yes... I killed you... it was a mistake... Leave me... I had to kill you...’ The semi-transparent form of a young man appeared by the girl’s. side. He knew that the girl’s name was Tessa... the boy, he thought wildly, was called Sam.
The boy was young and pale. A deep radiance of eternal youth shone from behind his eyes. He looked accusingly down at Koenig. ‘You left us to rot away with Venusian Plague...’
‘No... No... I...’ he gasped. He began choking in his sleep. He watched the two benign faces of seeming innocence begin to dissolve away. In their place of beauty, hideous blotches of a rotten-green coloration appeared. The blotches ate the beauty away. Their smooth, spectral skin bubbled and puckered into folds of horror.
He shrank away from the repelling sight, but he was prevented from escaping by an unmovable wall behind him.
Their decaying, diseased faces loomed towards him, and he heard himself start screaming.
He woke up abruptly, drenched in sweat.
He sprang off the bed and looked at his white, drawn features in the mirror. He was going mad. The lack of sleep and the pressure of his rank were driving him insane.
Helena and Maya worked speedily and purposefully inside the Recreation Centre Lounge where, not a few hours ago, big Garth had expressed his differences of opinion in no uncertain manner.
Now, another event of a similar kind was about to take place; not a violent event brought about by maliciousness, but a controlled laboratory experiment to try to prove that psi-phenomenon – the psychic powers of the mind – were at work and thriving in the Moon Base.
Helena had chosen the Lounge because she felt that the subjects she was planning to use as guinea pigs would respond better in familiar surroundings. With Maya’s help she had erected a row of tables, each containing different experiments, from simple card-guessing to fork-bending. Behind the tables sat the guinea pigs, looking a trifle apprehensive despite the precautions she had taken – Carl Renton, Mark Sanders, Peter Garforth, and Harry Garth. They were all Alphans who had been the subject of suspected psychic attacks.
Helena began first with Mark Sanders. She sat herself down in front of his table and pointed to the cards. ‘These contain simple patterns. Cross, square, circle, triangle, crescent...’ She began shuffling them. ‘I shuffle the cards, turn them over, you tell me which cards I’ve turned.’
Sanders swallowed nervously. He looked embarrassed. ‘How? I can’t see the cards.’
‘That’s the point of the experiment.’
Now he looked positively baffled. ‘Beats me – but whatever you say...’ Hesitantly, he tapped the cards in turn and called out what he thought they were. ‘Cross... another cross. Circle... triangle... cross...’
Helena recorded the cards and the guesses, turning them over as Sanders went through them. When he had finished, she nodded satisfaction. She re-shuffled the cards and they began again.
On the table next to her, Maya engaged Carl Renton. She showed his expressionless face a plastic box with a steel ball-bearing in the middle. She rested it on the table between them.
Carl smiled in sudden understanding. ‘Don’t tell me. I’m supposed to move the ball-bearing without touching the box?’
Maya nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘How?’ he asked, almost inevitably.
‘It’s very simple. All you do is... concentrate,’ Maya purred. ‘Now concentrate!’
Renton sighed dutifully and began staring at the box. His brow rucked deeply to show how hard he was concentrating.
At first, nothing happened. Then, imperceptibly at first, the steel ball began to roll. His astonishment caused the ball to stop.
‘Very good, Mr Renton!’ Maya encouraged him. Extra-Sensory Perception, was nothing new to her. ‘Now this time, concentrate harder and don’t look so amazed. It’s all highly scientific.’
Finished with Sanders, Helena moved to Pete Garforth’s table and smiled reassuringly at him. The engineer looked angrily at her, convinced that the experiments were, in his own words, ‘a load of bosh’.
‘I can tell you here and now,’ he told her argumentatively as she seated herself in front of him, ‘this is not going to work. I’m an engineer, I know metals.’
He picked up one of several thick strips of steel that had been laid on the table and began stroking it with his finger. ‘To bend a strip like this, you’d need a vice and a wrench. There is just no way I’m going to...’
His voice trailed off in amazement and Helena laughed outright in pleasure as the steel strip began to fashion itself into a horseshoe shape under his touch.
Needing no further confirmation from this quarter, she rose, leaving him speechlessly scratching his head, and moved on to the fourth table. Her smile tightened as she sat herself down before Harry Garth. If Garforth had been mildly angry, the big miner looked positively ferocious. He obviously still hadn’t had time to recover from his humiliating experience at the hands of Verdeschi, and still bore all and sundry the grudge.
She was wondering how to talk to him, when Carolyn Powell abruptly entered the lounge. She seemed in a great state of agitation, and marched over to Mark Sanders, who was studying his cards with deep interest.
‘Mark!’ she hissed, in a loud whisper which everyone could hear. ‘I was waiting for you.’
Sanders looked up and smiled. ‘Sorry. I got tied up. Anyway, I knew I’d see you here!’
‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ Carolyn told him urgently.
‘Sure, later. We’re taking these tests right now.’ He looked back down at his cards.
Carolyn tautened. ‘Mark, I must see you... talk to you.... alone!’
Sanders looked mildly agitated by the intrusion. ‘Later... later.’
Helena extricated herself gratefully from the newly-acquired seat in front of Garth and caught Carolyn’s eye before the girl could continue with her persistent line of conversation. It was a stroke of good luck that the young research engineer had decided to enter when she did. Helena had tried to contact her once before, but had been unable to get through.
‘Will you be next, Carolyn?’ she asked her.
Carolyn’s manner changed as she realized that she had been caught out. She beamed politely, as one colleague would to another. ‘It’ll be a pleasure, Doctor Russell.’ Realizing that she could now also achieve her original aim by doing so, she sat down next to Sanders who moved himself up uncomfortably. Helena sat down and put her through the same test as she had Sanders, her boyfriend.
The numbing exhaustion that had come upon him had forced him back to his bed. The shock of seeing the gaunt, pallid face staring at him from his bedside mirror had sent the b
lood draining away from his head.
Vainly he tried to keep his eyes from closing, and keep at bay the ghosts. But the haunting figures returned despite his attempts. They manifested themselves in his room... swirling, rippling figures, decayed faces dripping with slime. He was wide awake, yet their vaporous spirits were still there.
Though he was tired, he was far from incapacitated, and reasoned that the psi phenomenon must be affecting him too. They were causing his lassitude, taking him back in his mind to the time of the disastrous Venusian expedition. In a way, he was killing himself with his own guilt... for he could not believe that the manifestations were anything other than the sunken memories of long ago.
Repeatedly, he tried to raise himself, to reach Helena, but each time fell back, too groggy to get on his feet in the cold air.
What seemed like hours went by, until eventually the macabre spell he had been put under was broken by Helena announcing herself on his monitor. He told her to come in and she did. She was carrying a sheaf of notes, and looked happy. Her pleasure was marred though by the gradually warming temperature of the air and the obviously distressful condition of the Commander.
She leaned worriedly over his bed.
‘I’m OK,’ he said, sitting up and running his hand over his forehead. ‘Just felt a bit off-colour.’ A more healthy flush was returning to his cheeks. ‘What have you managed to find out?’
Uncertainly, she began to tell him, then got back into the swing of her enthusiasm as the impact of her experiments hit her anew. She held up the papers. ‘The preliminary test results. John, they’re fantastic!’
Koenig rubbed his eyes, trying hard to re-order his mind and take everything in. Helena continued, unabated.
‘Over ninety per cent of subjects tested showed significant increases in paranormal powers,’ she went on.
‘They do?’ Koenig asked, his faculties returning.
Space 1999 - The Psychomorph Page 4