by Brian Ball
‘The final flight. They never gave it?’
‘No. And the ship can take us back to Earth!’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘That’s the ship,’ said Bergman.
Koenig was disappointed. The craft was no larger than one of the Eagles. Stubby, scarred by radiation, it lay half-buried under a fall of ash. A port was open.
‘The metals are very dense,’ said Bergman. ‘I’m not familiar with the composition of the materials for the drive—they’ve confused the computer, of course. I had some analyses run, but they’re not enough yet. I had to feed the stuff in manually, John. I don’t want any of the technicians to spread the word.’
Koenig marvelled. The ship blended into the background. It was impossible to see it when he stood back a few metres. It was no wonder that the survey-ships had missed it.
‘I had new gravity and atmosphere units sent out,’ said Bergman.
‘You’ve been busy.’
There was something wrong, though Koenig could not pinpoint why he should feel uneasy. Bergman was right to keep a thing like this to himself. But should he talk so possessively of the ship? And how was it that he had discovered it?
Bergman was ahead of him.
‘I stumbled out after the crash—dazed, you know, John. Carter was busy calling Alpha, and you and Sandra Benes were both unconscious. I panicked, I suppose, and ran out. I fell from that ledge and landed against the ship.’ He indicated the post. ‘I was too dazed to care much about scientific investigation. I must have activated an external switch. It opened at once.’
‘So you set up a guard?’
‘Yes. With orders not to approach nearer than a hundred metres. I said it was the wreck of an experimental unit I had been testing.’
‘So only you know about it—’
‘And you, John. Just you and me.’
Koenig felt a prickling around his scalp. Things were taking shape, but still there were inconsistencies.
‘What’s the trouble, John?’ asked Bergman.
‘My head.’
‘Is it hurting still?’
‘It should. But it isn’t.’
‘I expect Dr Russell made a good job of it.’
‘I was badly hurt—’
‘You heal quickly.’ Bergman indicated the open port. ‘See what you make of the ship.’
Koenig forgot his worries. A thousand-year-old mystery lay before him. He clambered through the tilted port and found himself in a brightly-lit command room. Metals glinted, unstained by time. Dials gleamed, and there was the slight pulse that tells a spaceman a ship is alive.
‘The crew?’ he said.
‘Look.’
Koenig turned. A wall of black glass-like material faced him. Behind it, three recesses. Each was slightly more than two metres in height. Each was large enough to hold a man of rather more than average size. Koenig shivered. The long-dead crew of the alien ship had once used those containers. It was as Bergman said. A small heap of dust lay at the bottom of each shadowy recess.
‘John, this ship is programmed for a flight to Earth. I’ve checked its power reserves. It will take three of us back to Earth from any part of the Galaxy.’
‘It didn’t take them,’ said Koenig. The containers were coffins.
‘I’ve checked that too. Their screens must have failed momentarily. There’s a tiny hole in the deepfreeze compartment—’
‘Deep-freeze?’
‘A voyage such as theirs took time. A lot of time. They should have been in suspended animation until their ship was somewhere near the Moon. Long before they reached it, a particle no bigger than a pin-head ruptured their life-support systems.’
‘And?’
‘They did not regain consciousness.’
‘Thank God for that.’
Koenig thought of the three unknown aliens, gently sliding from life to death without waking. The other thing would have been worse—incarcerated, conscious, behind the black material which was far tougher than glass. Waiting for death. But no, they had gradually become dust as the Moon circled the Earth.
‘Forget them!’ Bergman said violently. ‘It’s an opportunity that will never come again, Koenig—I can have this ship operational in hours!’
Koenig’s head still felt muzzy, his thoughts unclear.
‘Operational?’
‘Koenig, you’re not thinking, man! It’s our chance! We take the ship! Any three Alphans can be on a course for Earth within the next few hours. I’ve looked at the life-support systems. Whoever the aliens were, they had the same kind of metabolism as ours. They needed more oxygen and a trace of a couple of gases we don’t use, but I can have the tanks converted with no trouble. Look, Koenig, call David Kano and have him bring some equipment. Swear him to secrecy, first. Call him, John!’
‘Kano you mean, offer him a place?’
‘Yes! You, me, and Kano!’
Koenig had the sense of wrongness that had troubled him during the short Eagle trip to the crater. Bergman’s excitement, his own inability to reason: there was more. He looked beyond the crater’s rim, thinking of the dust settling on the ancient vessel. Then he saw the purple-tinged star. His head hurt and he looked down.
‘Bergman,’ he said, ‘what gives you the right to choose who stays and who goes?’
‘Finding the ship! It’s the law of possession, John!’
‘So we leave. You, our best brain. David Kano, our top technician. And me.’
‘What are we leaving? A barren rock on a flight to nowhere!’
‘And what of the others? What about Helena Russell?’
‘Then let her come! But get Kano to ensure the life-support systems are checked! And be careful how you make the request, John. If word gets out, we’ll have a full-scale mutiny on our hands. Let’s get this ship away as soon as we can!’
Koenig closed his eyes. The green fields were very close now. Blue skies, the sound of leaves, the feel of rain on his face. He thought of a girl he had known, pale-skinned, who had swum like a mermaid in a warm Cretan sea one golden summer. He could go back.
And then he had a distant memory of a walk back to Moonbase Alpha. A walk of a hundred miles. Black rock, dust, jagged horizons. It had taken such a short time. He looked up again, sensing constraint as he did so: he saw the star-system edged in purple.
‘That star-system,’ he said to Bergman.
‘Which?’
‘There.’
Bergman ignored the question:
‘Look, John, if it will satisfy you, I’ll ask the computer to give a reading as to who’s eligible for the third place in the ship. What do you say?’
Koenig thought it reasonable. But the star-system persisted in drifting before him. Bergman was impatient.
‘Call Kano!’ he ordered.
‘Leave them behind?’ Koenig said slowly, for the first time fully appreciating what Bergman proposed. ‘Leave them to face that?’
And he raised his hand to the emptiness beyond the strange star-system.
‘Leave them? Yes! And be damned to them! What have they ever done for you? Or for themselves? You’ve had to make every decision for them! Don’t think that they’ll be any safer if you stay, John! The Alphans are finished—save yourself!’
Koenig looked at his heavy gauntleted fist. Anger flooded through him. Rage shook his tall, muscular frame. Bergman flinched as the mailed fist began to swing towards his visor.
And Koenig stopped it.
The blow never fell. Instead, Koenig’s mind blazed with a new fury. And then he lunged free of the Moon’s weak gravity, disregarding Bergman’s now frenzied pleas. A wild purple void rushed towards him.
‘Raan!’ yelled Koenig. ‘Raan!’
The crater, the alien ship, the Moon itself fell away in purple shadows and Bergman too merged with the void. Koenig tried to peer into the blazing purple haze.
‘Raan!’ he yelled. ‘I’m not an animal! I’m a man!’
Walls slowly materialized about him. The
void gave way to the quarters which should be his but were a projection of the Zennite’s mind. Koenig tensed, expecting Raan to appear. Instead Vana came to him.
‘John?’, she called. ‘My father doesn’t mean to harm you!’ Koenig knew that he had been used. He felt defiled.
‘He’s using me as a laboratory animal! It wasn’t Bergman I saw—just another of your Zennite tricks! There never was an alien ship! It was all a fake! And so is this!’
Koenig included the living quarters in his wide sweep.
Vana’s face registered shock.
‘But he is a scientist, John—no more and no less. He would never inflict pain or degradation on you. He seeks only the truth about you.’
Koenig stared at her for a few moments. She could read his mind; but what if she were incapable of understanding the thoughts that filled it?
Slowly his fury subsided.
‘Vana,’ he said. ‘Understand this. Your father is setting up situations to test my reactions. It wasn’t Bergman I talked to and Sandra Benes didn’t die. It was a deliberately invented stress situation.’
‘You were clever to guess it.’
‘No. I know Bergman would never consider abandoning the Alphans. No more than I could. Your experiment failed, Raan.’
Vana stepped closer, and Koenig caught the delicate scent. He was looking into the gold-flecked eyes once more. A new emotion replaced his anger.
‘Again you surprise me, John Koenig,’ he heard.
Vana and he looked at Raan.
‘I think, John Koenig, that you might well have attempted violence if Vana had not spoken to you first. I find the prospect fascinating!’ His handsome face was alive with enthusiasm. ‘Vana is right, Commander—I have no wish to humiliate you, but how can I observe your reactions if there is no stress situation? Commander, what I and my colleagues see is something that has been absent from our culture for a million years! In you we can see in action the blind furies that before were only text-book abstractions to us. Murder, war, torture—they are present in your thought, even if suppressed. Those, your admirable group-loyalty, and your amazing intuitive insight into your companions—that is what we study, Commander! But why did the experiment fail?’
Koenig said:
‘You got the technology right, I’ll give you that. I believed that such a ship as you projected could make Earth. It was logical that an alien would inspect Earth from the Moon, and it was within the limits of probability that their ship would be holed. But you don’t know men! All right, you’ve gained two million years on Earthmen, but have you really changed, Raan? I doubt it. Tell me, have you faced any threat to your existence in all that time—as a group, as a race?’
‘No, John Koenig,’ said Raan. ‘No.’
‘When you are threatened, do you think you will be unemotional?’
Raan did not answer for some time.
‘I don’t know, John Koenig. Perhaps that was the purpose of the experiment: to find out about the Zennite psyche.’
‘And when you’ve finished your investigation, what then? Will you send me back to Alpha?’
Raan looked at Vana. She reached out a hand to Koenig.
‘John, you can’t return. It is no longer possible.’
Koenig looked from the tall handsome man to the slim, elegant girl with the beautiful eyes.
‘Is this another experiment?’ he said harshly.
‘No, John,’ said Vana. ‘See.’
Koenig gripped the hand until the purple void closed in again. Time and space altered subtly, and the sensation of huge distances, mind-reeling leaps across the gulfs had him by the throat. He heard the Zennite woman say: ‘You are dying, John.’
He was watching Paul Morrow struggle with indecision. The big screen in Main Mission Control filled with light and then settled. Koenig could see Helena Russell, and beyond her his own long frame.
‘What are the chances, Dr Russell?’ said Morrow.
Helena Russell pushed her long blonde hair back from her face wearily. ‘The fracture can be treated. The rest is superficial. But how can I give a medical opinion about that?’
She pointed to the registers that showed no life-activity.
‘I’ll try revival procedures.’
She indicated to the assistants what she required.
‘What’s Professor Bergman’s opinion now?’ asked Morrow.
‘What it has been from the first,’ Bergman said. He approached the scarce-breathing body. ‘We’re faced with a paradox. John Koenig is neither dead nor alive. Apparently there has been a cessation of electrical activity throughout the nerve centres. Yet he breathes. It’s so unnatural as to be unbelievable. I am convinced that he is affected by some external agency which we can’t investigate because our computer can’t begin to define it.’ He looked down at the glittering electrodes on the shaven head. ‘If I were a superstitious man, I’d say that his soul had been stolen.’
‘That’s nonsensical—’ Morrow snapped angrily, but Helena Russell was already speaking. Morrow stopped to listen.
‘I’m reinforcing the charge by two more electrodes over the heart, Victor. No, I’ll do it,’ she told her assistant. When they were in place, she looked up at the screen. ‘Victor isn’t being fanciful,’ she said. ‘If it’s a spell, we’ll break it.’
‘Or John,’ said Morrow. His voice was loud in Main Mission Control. ‘I can’t authorize this, Dr Russell! It’s the crudest kind of treatment! Damn it, Helena, shock therapy is an archaic and discredited form of treatment! You’ve even said yourself there’s an odds-on chance you’ll kill him! And I won’t permit it! I’m in command now and I say—’
Kano snarled: ‘You say nothing, Morrow! If there’s any decision to be made, Dr Russell will make it! You’re not the Commander of Moonbase Alpha any more than I am!’
Morrow swung round furiously. He was faced with something he could not understand. Outright opposition could be dealt with, whereas the eerie thing that had happened to John Koenig left him dismayed and helpless. His fists balled.
Appalled, John Koenig turned to Vana. ‘They’re falling apart,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s going to wreck Moonbase.’
Instinctively he ordered Morrow to calm down, but Morrow couldn’t hear. Koenig realized that his presence at Moonbase was only a projection sent across the continuums to watch his own death. Gritting back the angry words, Koenig heard Helena Russell say:
‘I made this decision, Controller Morrow.’
Paul Morrow’s anger ebbed. Helena Russell nodded to her assistant. ‘Half-power,’ she said.
There was dead silence in the Diagnostic Unit. Then Koenig saw his own shaven head jerk once, twice, as the power surged through his inert body. A sympathetic shudder raced along his spine. Vana clutched his hand.
‘Well?’ said Paul Morrow.
Helena Russell’s blue eyes were fixed on the life-line readings. Momentarily the red electronic lines began to creep upwards.
‘Raise it three points,’ she said.
‘He can’t stand that charge!’ Kano called.
‘I can’t leave him like this. He’s dead, a zombie!’ Helena said bitterly.
The assistant hesitated, then looked at Morrow.
‘Raise the level,’ said the Controller.
Koenig saw the shaven head jerk again. Then it slumped back, eyes open and unseeing.
Vana wept, and then Koenig sensed the power she began to exert. Space bent. Light-years flashed past. The Diagnostic Unit faded and merged into a rushing, purple void. There was an echo of Helena Russell’s low sigh, and then Koenig saw the strange towers of Zenno form about him.
Raan was there, subdued and watching them with a worried expression:
‘Well, John Koenig? What do you see as your future now? Can you make the adjustment? Are you strong enough to come out of the jungle and cross into the city? Can you become a Zennite?’
Koenig held Vana for a moment, then he gently pushed her aside. It was she who spoke for him:
‘Haven’t you seen enough, Father? Do you have to watch him suffer like this? Can’t you see that John can never have the kind of intellectual detachment you have? He is not a man of our times, Father! He may be a primitive, but he is still a man—perhaps even a better man than you! We have no right to tear him away from his people and use him as a testing ground!’
Raan’s hard gaze bored into Koenig. Koenig looked back, steadily aware of the probing, fierce intelligence that drilled into his mind. Raan’s puzzlement was obvious.
‘I find this difficult to believe, Commander,’ he said. ‘I can no longer read your mind. I have an impression of unrest and a decision impending, but I cannot come to any conclusion about your intentions. He turned to Vana. ‘And your thoughts, too, are hidden from me.’ He laughed. ‘It is almost as though you, John Koenig, and you too, Vana, are subject to strong and almost—primitive—emotion!’
He watched for a while. And then the purple haze hid him. Koenig felt Vana’s slim softness, very close.
‘I’ve read of it in the ancient texts,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose any of our people have ever experienced it.’ Vana smiled. ‘John, isn’t it called “love”?’
CHAPTER SIX
Koenig knew what it was like to be young again. The hours passed in a slow and dazzling procession, each minute bringing its own excitement. Vana was by his side as he explored Zenno.
‘John, see—we project our image of the city, and when we find a new way of expressing ourselves, we can alter it. You will learn, John! You have the intelligence, and you can develop the skills.’
It seemed to Koenig that he was drifting in a web of purple haze. Force-fields bore him up above the city and its glorious towers. Below, he could see Zennites casually wandering amongst flowered terraces, all young and strong. Sometimes one or another would drift away from a group, to soar through the purple night on his own inspired errand.
‘It’s a world of dreams,’ said Koenig. ‘It has the texture of reality, but it’s so tenuous! It changes so quickly—shape, colour, quality! I see it, and then I can’t take in the shapes—I can’t imagine how I could begin to form anything so beautiful.’