The gunman had gone. Erhlich had leapt out of the sports car and chased him into the forest. Carter had waited, but his girl in the back seat had spied a small lake and a boat house amongst the trees and had impatiently pleaded with him to go to it. Now he rowed strongly out across the lake under the hot sun. Ehrlich was forgotten as the girl sunned herself in the prow of the boat and pouted invitingly at him. He rowed faster, trying to reach the foliage-covered hump of an island in the calm, deep waters...
They ferried the fuel cores down the steel corridor to the circular door.
EXTREME DANGER. NUCLEAR WASTE.
Carter and Bartlett stared vacantly at the massive locking mechanisms that kept the danger door shut. Wordlessly, Carter swung the thermal lance off his shoulders again and began setting it up. He directed the fierce flame at the thick steel and began cutting into it...
‘Maya?’ Koenig called urgently from the surface outside the Monitoring Station.
‘Yes, John?’ she asked from the Eagle ship.
He told her where he was. ‘The airlock doors have been welded from the inside. I’m going to ram them with the Buggy to break the weld.’
‘We’re standing by,’ she told him as he made his way to the Moon Buggy and climbed inside. ‘Be careful. We’ve got Ehrlich. I don’t think he’ll make it, John. Tony’s taking his suit off right... wait a moment.’ Verdeschi’s voice channel and the two of them conversed between themselves for a few moments. Then Maya’s voice spoke to him again: ‘We’ve found the electronic key to the central waste storage chamber inside Dome Three. Ehrlich was carrying it. Looks like we’ve won a little time.’
Koenig gritted his teeth. ‘Just as well,’ he replied. ‘They’re inside.’ He aimed the Buggy at the outer doors and squeezed the pressure-sensitive acceleration control inside the steering wheel. The Buggy shot forward and he braced himself for the collision.
The hastily-welded metal cracked and the doors rolled open in response to his comlock. The inner doors presented another problem. They too had been welded and to break their weld with the Buggy he would have to leave the outer doors open to provide a run up, which would risk losing the atmospheric pressure of the Station, and perhaps kill Bartlett and Carter. But if Bartlett and Carter weren’t stopped, then everyone on Alpha would be killed.
Grimly, he backed the Moon Buggy from the doors and charged at them. The weld snapped – without the doors opening of their own accord. The two unwilling power-jackers had been lucky, he thought, as he backed the Buggy out and jumped down. He walked through the outer doors and closed them behind him. He pressurized the air-lock, then opened the inner doors and moved quickly inside.
He took off his helmet and looked around the deserted Station. One glance was sufficient to tell him that Bartlett and Carter were already deep inside one of the Domes, cutting their way into a storage room. He walked round to the front of the console and stabbed at a button. Maya’s face appeared in the monitor screen.
‘How can the Field still control Alan and Bartlett?’ he asked in puzzlement. ‘Everything’s closed down... where are they getting their energy?’
Maya shrugged. ‘The human brain generates electrical ac tivity. It could be that. There’s probably enough among the population of Alpha to keep a few of us under hypnosis.’
Koenig tapped the console top while he thought what do do. ‘When people are unconscious, their brain activity is reduced, isn’t it?’
‘Very greatly...’ She looked calculatingly at him, guessing his intentions. Before she could speak further he cut her off.
Helena came on the screen.
‘Helena, I want everyone on the Base knocked out – with the exception of yourself and the Chief Engineer.’
Helena looked incredulously at him. ‘What!? You mean unconscious?’
‘Yes, I do mean unconscious!’ he snapped. He glanced worriedly over his shoulder toward the three doors which led to the Waste Domes. Above one of them a red emergency light was blinking.
‘But...’ Helena began.
‘Please don’t argue with me. Can you do it?’
‘Yes... I can use a contact gas; it acts instantly, lasts about an hour. But, John, I’ve got to know...’
‘Just do it, Helena. Out.’ He broke contact with her and moved quickly towards the door...
The girl was tired of being played with, so Bartlett took her back inside the apartment.
He smiled at his wife and linked her arm. ‘Fancy a drive?’ he asked, reliving the distant, Sunday afternoon.
She nodded. ‘It needs a good clean.’
He scowled good-naturedly. It was one of the jobs he never liked doing – hosing down cars, weeding, or fixing items that had fallen into disrepair. But apart from this one fault, of his wife’s – her insistence on neatness and cleanliness and perfection at all times – she made up for it in a great many other desirable ways. Reflecting pleasurably on the fact that he was the only happily-married person he knew, he got the elevator down to the parking lot at the bottom of the apartment block and began hosing down the car...
The remains of the locking mechanism holding the thick steel door, fell away beneath the intense heat of the thermal lance.
He drew back and pulled away his equipment. Tirelessly, he and Carter began pulling open the door.
‘Alan...! Bartlett..!’ Koenig’s voice sounded suddenly behind them. They turned and watched the advancing figure. The unexpected sound of its voice had distracted them from their work; its visual significance as their commander meant nothing to them. But suddenly a fierce new motivation powered their paralyzed thinking centres.
The figure bounding towards them might have been Koenig – but in their dream-world of unreality, it was a madman. A berserk psychotic with a machine gun spraying bullets at everyone he saw...
Koenig halted, aware of their changed feelings towards him. He was still a few yards away from them; he was watched by the silent Jelly sentinels which were rooted ineffectually to the spot, their strength gone.
Too late, Bartlett and Carter moved swiftly inside the Storage Room and pushed the heavy door shut behind them, Koenig sprang forward, drifting down the steel bore of the corridor, banging from side to side against its walls. He reached the door and found his feet. He pushed wildly at it.
The Storage Room was actually an access point. In it was a circular access shute down which the nuclear waste had been tipped, into the container buried deep beneath the lunar surface. It was highly radioactive.
Koenig’s lungs tightened as the cool, charged air was sucked inside him. His skin tingled as though he had been dipped in a bath of menthol. He knew, before he had set out, that he might have to sacrifice himself for the sake of the Moon Base as a whole. As Commander, sacrifice was his ultimate rôle. But he had never known that death would be like this... that the finality of it would be upon him so quickly, so finally...
He fought down his feelings and moved towards the two figures who were standing by the chute. They were lifting one of the heavy cores into position ready to slide it down into the waste below. Bartlett was holding it whilst Carter attacked its cap with a wrench, unscrewing it to expose the rod of fuel inside. Koenig hurled himself at Carter, intending to knock him aside, but Bartlett, seeing him coming, stepped in his path and took the brunt of the collision. With an expert throw, he deflected the Commander against the wall. Koenig had taken hold of his space suit and now both men rolled over. With a strength born of desperation Koenig twisted round and kicked the physicist away, sending him spinning through the air towards the roof ofthe dome.
Bartlett hit the roof and bounced off it. His body drifted helplessly back toward the floor and collapsed against it. The knock seemed to bring him to his senses for he sat up and rubbed his eyes, as though only recently awoken.
The parking lot, the car he had been hosing, the sinister madman with the gun who had tried to attack him and Carter... vanished. It had been a dream. Then...?
Dazedly, he looked aroun
d him. Slowly, he took in the true nature of his surroundings. He reacted suddenly in panic and struggled to rise to his feet. ‘Atomic fuel...!’ he yelled.
Koenig had set on Carter. He was delivering the Eagle Pilot a series of karate chops. ‘Yeah...’ he spoke to Bartlett as he fought. ‘You were about to plug it into the core.’
‘We’d have blown up the entire Moon...’
Carter went down finally. His body slammed against the floor and bounced upward. Koenig caught him and dragged his unconscious body to rest. ‘You and Alan have been living an illusion...’ Koenig told the physicist. ‘But their control...’ he indicated the Aliens standing outside the corridor, ‘has been broken...’ He glanced behind him in alarm.
The Jelly Beings were back on their protoplasmic equivalent of feet, sucking and squelching their way towards him. They were arriving en masse, their phosphorescent bodies adding extra illumination to the drab lighting of the Storage Room.
They were being motivated by the radiation, he suddenly realized. They were absorbing it... which meant that he, Bartlett and Carter might not have received lethal doses after all.
But despite all the radiation food that they were absorbing, the Jellies were still in a weak condition. They had never had much strength to begin with he thought, watching them squeeze their repulsive bodies into the room. The best that the Jellies could hope to do was smother them.
They would have to get out before it got too congested.
‘Get Carter and we’ll push our way through th...’ he began to instruct Bartlett, then noticed, appalled, that Carter was back on his feet. With renewed strength, Carter was grappling with the fuel core once again.
The Space Field appeared to have decided to concentrate all its powers on the Eagle Pilot.
Koenig threw himself back on Carter and dragged him clear. Too late, the cap sealing the fuel core rolled off and the cylinder that housed the core tilted precariously on the lip of the chute. One simple tilt and it would slide down into the waste, and trigger off the nuclear explosion that the Space Field was after.
He held Carter in a lock around the throat and yelled at Bartlett who was staring on in confusion. ‘Help me hold him...’ He turned his head toward the Eagle Pilot and shouted desperately at him. ‘Alan, it’s Koenig. It’s all...’ But once more he was interrupted.
A violent shaking seemed to take hold of the room. A cold, red presence entered it. The air burst into cold tendrils of flame.
‘Is it too late, Koenig?’ a harsh voice sounded. The flames burnt amongst the Jellies. Koenig remembered the cold fire he had seen in his dream, the strange, visionary manifestation of the Space Field. He remembered the wicked, Satanic voice, mocking him.
Bartlett snatched for his laser, but Koenig stopped him. ‘That won’t help,’ he said.
The cold voice laughed hollowly. ‘You learn quickly, John Koenig. That is hopeful.’
‘Hopeful for whom?’ Koenig asked it, staring around him amongst the consuming flames as he held Carter in the strangle hold.
‘It’s true, Jack,’ the voice of the Space Amoeba addressed itself to the Physicist. ‘You have been living inside an illusion... but haven’t you been happy?’ It’s voice took on a crooning quality, and the cold flames of hatred roared more fiercely round about them. ‘Happier than you’ve ever been on Alpha before? Living your life, re-united with your loved ones; living, as it were, back on Earth?’
Bartlett’s face changed to one of grief as the tears welled inside him at memory of his wife and daughter. There was no denying that he had been happy.
The Space Field was trying to win by mental blackmail Koenig realized ironically. It had stepped in now, on the last moment, to tip the scales in its favour.
Carter struggled violently in his grasp, but he held him firm. He turned to Bartlett, to counter the Space Field’s seductive argument. ‘It’s true what the voice says... but it’s not real. You’ve been living in a dream, not a reality.’
The Space Amoeba replied, sonorously, persuasively, before Bartlett had the chance to. ‘Isn’t it better to live in a dream of happiness than to face a reality which you hate? Can you really face living out your lives, growing old and dying on this piece of debris?’
The voice seemed to grow weaker. The flames that a moment ago had roared so furiously, lessened, and the Jelly Beings had ceased their slithering and were standing motionlssly again.
Koenig sensed that they were on the edge of victory... if only they could hold out. Despite the radiation, the Space Field’s power was still on the wane. He pleaded firmly with the physicist.
‘Bartlett, help me...’ But, already confused, Bartlett was now completely incapable of making a decision and simply stood with his head hung low, sobbing for all his worth. He grew impatient with him, and shouted: ‘How long would a dream have lasted? As soon as that nuclear waste was triggered, all human life on the Moon would have been wiped out.’
‘“How long” is a meaningless term,’ the Space Amoeba cut in. ‘Time is relative. A butterfly lives a gloriously full life in a day; a single-celled organism in a micro-second. So long as one is fulfilled. Time is irrelevant.’
The grip Koenig held on Carter became unbearable to maintain. His arm ached, and he grew giddy with fatigue. He clung grimly on. He tried to order his mind, to counter the line of argument. But the Space Field continued with it itself.
Its voice grew weaker, also. A note of desperation had crept into it, and now it seemed to address them all.
‘We can offer the people of Alpha a complete life – as it would be with your loved ones in your own homes on Earth, with this great improvement; that it would be a perfected life, a life as you would have wanted it in your fondest wishes, free of all flaws and blemishes.’
‘But it wouldn’t be real!’ Koenig cried savagely.
‘What is reality?’ the Space Amoeba asked, provoking Bartlett to thought. ‘A knowledge of bliss!’ it answered itself. ‘A life without pain or sorrow, without fear or loss – this is what I offer!’
Koenig shook himself, clearing his head of the dying, seduc. tive voice. The intense psychic waves of pleasure that were present in the room were starting to affect him. ‘The life you offer us would be a fleeting illusion...’ he accused the Space Field.
Carter broke free.
With a snarl the Pilot launched himself at the cylinder projecting from the waste shute. Koenig tripped him up – and inadvertently sent his body flying into it.
A wave of horror swept through Koenig as the body of the spaceman impacted with the cylinder. The sudden shock of impending doom served also to bring Bartlett to his senses once more. Through his glazed senses of confusion, he had seen everything.
The two men reacted fast, moving through the icy, swirling flames towards where Carter was slumped. They dragged the body clear, expecting to see the cylinder gone and the chute empty. Instead, they saw that by a freak chance the force of the Eagle Pilot’s body had jammed the cylinder against the back of the curved maw leading to the waste.
They heaved a sigh of relief and tried to pull the fuel core out. But for the moment it was well and truly – and safely –wedged.
As they toiled the psychic flames burst suddenly, brilliantly all around them. The Dome trembled violently, and a loud cry of rage and despair echoed chillingly about it.
It was the moan of one who, suddenly, and unwillingly, confronted Death.
But from out of the chaos of the disintegrating forces that had held the aged Space Amoeba together came not the an guished voice they had expected, but a controlled, proud voice, tinged only slightly with the bitterness that it must have felt: ‘You are a truly primitive organism, Commander. You can have no conception of what you have destroyed... of how long I have lived, of the power I have had. I could have given you an eternity of happiness in an instant of time. Now your life will be what the life of your species has always been – nasty, brutish and futile.’
Aghast, the Alphans stopped what t
hey were doing and turned to face the centre of the fire vision.
Its flames were writhing randomly and passionately. It was consuming itself with the last reserves of its energy.
Then voice, flames and Jelly Beings died away into the emptiness forever.
THE END
Space 1999 - The Psychomorph Page 16