Space 1999 #9 - Rogue Planet

by E. C. Tubb

  ‘Trapped,’ said Koenig. ‘How? Why? If it entered then why didn’t it leave?’

  ‘There could be many reasons,’ said Bergman precisely. ‘It could have had a low relative velocity. It could have bisected this space very near the central mass and have been caught by its gravitational attraction. Or—’

  Koenig snapped, ‘Kano! Have Computer check on those possibilities.’

  ‘John?’ Bergman frowned. ‘Is something on your mind?’

  ‘Never take the obvious for granted, Victor. You were one of the first to teach me that. Just because an answer appears to be the logical solution doesn’t mean that it is correct. Kano?’

  ‘The possibilities mentioned by Professor Bergman are mutually conflicting.’ David Kano cleared his throat as he studied the readout. ‘Assuming the relative masses to be the same as at present observed, the difference in relative velocity would have had to be small for the intruder to be trapped into a stable orbit. But if it had been so low, then it would have been drawn by gravitational attraction into the main body.’

  ‘In other words,’ said Koenig grimly, ‘if the intruder was moving slow enough to be trapped, then it wouldn’t have been moving fast enough to avoid destruction. So much for logical answers, Victor. Want to try again?’

  Bergman said slowly, ‘There’s another answer, but we don’t know enough yet about local conditions to be sure if it is correct. I hope that it isn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This could be a closed system, John. A miniature universe with its own laws and own energy levels which have little relation to those with which we are familiar. In that case—’ He paused, then said bleakly, ‘It could be that everything entering this space is trapped. We could go on and on, but all we’d be doing is following the interior of this space around and around. If that is the case, then we are caught—trapped for eternity!’

  Bob Mathias adjusted the microscope, stared through the eyepiece, made a further adjustment and, after another examination, leaned back from the instrument. He was frowning, twin lines graven deep between his eyes, the corners of his mouth downturned a little as if he had looked at something unpleasant.

  ‘Doctor?’ Nurse Sinto halted at his side. She was trim and neat in her uniform, olive skin enhanced by the stark whiteness of her sleeve. ‘You look upset. Is something wrong?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Not to be sure is to be aware of life,’ she smiled. ‘Only the dead can be certain of the absence of change.’

  ‘Which is an apparent contradiction as you know. In death, there can be no certainty.’

  ‘True,’ admitted the girl. ‘And with only one hand, how can there be clapping?’

  Mathias shook his head. At times he found the girl impossible. Young, attractive, Avril Sinto seemed to take a delight in firing abstruse quotations at him, many of which he was fairly certain she invented on the spot, but she was, he had to admit, a superb master of her trade, and for that he could tolerate much.

  And he liked her. Liked her, perhaps, a little too much.

  ‘Avril—’

  ‘Bob?’ He had broken the coldly formal manner of professional address, and she reminded him of it with the use of his given name and a smile. ‘Were you going to invite me to join you after duty? I’ve a recording of Gus Halliday’s “Lunar Approach,” remember it? The one with the simulated rocket blast and the sub-audible voices? If you want you could come to my quarters and listen to it.’

  ‘Thank you, Avril, but no.’

  ‘Don’t you like good music?’

  ‘Good music, yes.’ He softened his rejection. ‘You know the wise old saying? One man’s meat is another’s poison? Gus Halliday may be a good musician to you but to me he’s a—’

  ‘Careful, Bob!’ she warned with mock ferocity. ‘You’re talking of the man I could have loved. But I know what you mean. To be honest I borrowed the recording because I thought you might like it. Now I’ve found we have yet another thing in common. Well, what else can we do? I know! Take me to the observation room. I’ve heard the view now is fantastic. Is it true that Doctor Russell first described the central body as a brain?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t in Main Mission at the time.’

  ‘Well, it is. Nurse Tyde told me. She’s seen it. A brain, Bob. Think of it. A planet-sized brain.’

  ‘Or something which just happens to resemble one,’ he corrected. ‘A walnut looks the same only much smaller. That’s why the Romans used to think it good for headaches and such. The similarity of appearance made them think the two were connected in the same way.’ He sighed, wistfully, ‘Medicine in those days was simple.’

  ‘Hit and miss, Bob. If it worked you did it again. Now we know exactly what we’re doing and why.’

  ‘Do we?’ His shrug was expressive. ‘I wish I could be as sure.’

  She caught his tone, recognising its seriousness, and immediately became the true professional she was. The time for informality had passed.

  ‘There is something wrong! What is it, Doctor?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps nothing more than a contaminated culture. I’ve been checking blood corpuscles and noted something strange. Then I checked out a culture of bacteria, X238—a harmless but essential component of the lower bowel.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Probably nothing. It could even be fatigue. In any case I’ll have to check again. If you could prepare two cultures for me, nurse?’

  ‘X238?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Both on agar?’

  She moved away as he nodded and, alone, he turned again to the microscope. Lost in the magnified world of subcultures he didn’t hear Helena approach him. Only when she rested her hand on his shoulder did he lift his head.

  ‘What? Oh, Doctor Russell!’

  ‘Did I startle you?’

  ‘No—I wasn’t expecting you. How is Shaw?’

  ‘He’ll be all right.’ Shaw was one of those who had recently injured himself. ‘Some superficial bruising, minor contusions, but the fractured ribs we suspected turned out to be little more than hairline breaks.’ Helena glanced at the notes Mathias had made. ‘Blood-checks, Bob?’

  ‘A routine count. I’m a little concerned about Ellman. He isn’t recovering as he should, and I suspect a lowered red-cell count.’

  ‘Ellman?’ Helena frowned. ‘He was discharged as fit before we hit the barrier. Before—’ she swallowed, then forced herself to continue—‘before Ivor Khokol collapsed.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mathias removed the slide from the instrument and selected another. ‘You remember how concerned we were at Sam Blake’s prolonged hospitalisation. His wound seemed reluctant to heal. Well, I’ve been doing some research on the problem, no answer as yet and maybe there never will be, but I did bump into something odd when I tested out Ellman’s blood. He was injured about the same time and suffered the same superficial conditions. Well—look at this.’

  He stepped aside as Helena stooped over the microscope. For a long moment she examined the slide.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Now examine this.’

  ‘A comparison?’

  She turned at his nod and again became engrossed in her study of the illuminated picture beneath the lenses. Without speaking she selected other slides, then looked at his notes.

  ‘You made other tests, Bob?’

  ‘On X238—they check out.’ He drew in his breath and held it for a moment before releasing it in an audible sigh. ‘I’m having fresh cultures made, of course, but I’m afraid the picture is clear.’

  Helena looked at him, a skilled man, an experienced physician and a master of pathology. Not a man to be easily terrified and not one to show unfounded anxiety. And far too good a scientist to leap to unfounded assumptions.

  Yet she had to know. Gently she said, ‘You suspect disease, Bob?’

  ‘You saw.’

  ‘I saw, yes, but I want you to say it. You have done the tests and made the conclusions. I ask y
ou again, Bob. Disease?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Age.’

  The observation room was fitted with chairs and soft coverings with a fountain giving off musical tinklings, a susurration of subdued melody designed to give the impression of warmth and security, the balmy magic of a summer’s evening, a scented, subtropical night.

  Here lovers came to walk beneath the stars, to sit and whisper sweet promises. Here too came the tired and those who felt the need to stretch the vision into the infinite. And here too came artists and poets seeking inspiration, those who felt the need to be alone, others who wished to cherish memories of a vanished age.

  From a shadowed place against one curved wall Koenig looked at dimly seen heads, saw the glimpses of arms and legs, the pale blur of lifted faces, other faces, darker, gleaming like ebony, like sun-kissed fruit. If any saw him they gave no sign and he, in turn, stood as if he were a man in total isolation.

  That, too, was an attribute of the room. In it, should that be the desire, privacy was absolute.

  A privacy now invaded by the watchful eye of the alien sun.

  Words, he thought, ones which had little meaning and which, even so, were wrong. The thing was not a sun and it was far from alien. Here, in this plane, it belonged and Alpha did not. The Moon was the intruder. They were the alien interlopers.

  And they would remain alien—but for how long?

  Again Koenig stared at the enigmatic, brain-like core of the central mass. Its greenish radiation pulsed as if in response to the pounding of a living heart. Its shape, all the more disquieting because of medical associations, gave it the appeareance of a monstrosity. Its satellite, unseen now, had vanished behind the main body which hung low above the horizon. An accident had made it so; had they entered the mysterious area at a slightly different angle, then it would have appeared directly overhead.

  Lifting the commlock from his belt Koenig triggered the instrument and read the digital time-check thrown on the tiny screen.

  It vanished as he pressed a stud.

  ‘Victor?’

  ‘John!’ Bergman was in his private laboratory, seated, a litter of graphs and papers before him. ‘Where are you?’ He nodded as Koenig answered. ‘Waiting?’

  ‘Yes. How much longer?’

  ‘Without precise measurements we have to allow for a wide margin of error. And, as you know, we had trouble in determining the area of this space. Even now we have only a rough approximation.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘You’ll know as soon as we find out, John. Don’t ask for the impossible,’

  A stubborn man, thought Koenig as the screen went blank. But a less stubborn one would have been dead long ago, and certainly without that trait Bergman would never have achieved his fame. For that, if nothing else, he should be respected.

  But it was hard to wait.

  Hard to hang on the edge of a precipice of doubt, not knowing if a simple matter of time would solve their problem by showing there was no problem at all, or whether the hopes and entire lifestyle of the base would have to be changed.

  For if they were trapped, change would be inevitable.

  The commlock hummed and he looked at Sandra’s smooth and lovely face.

  ‘Commander! We have determined—’

  ‘Wait! I’m coming to join you. Have Professor Bergman notified.’

  He was already in Main Mission when Koemg arrived, standing to one side of the consol, his face heavy with deeply graven lines. An expression which told Koenig the worst.

  ‘We’re trapped?’

  ‘I—yes, John. I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Kano?’

  ‘Computer verifies, Commander. Our measured distance from the central body is remaining static. Sufficient time has elapsed for our velocity to have carried us away from it, if we were continuing to move in a straight line relative to this area.’

  ‘But how?’ Koenig frowned as he snapped the question. ‘Our relative mass is too great for us to have been caught by gravitational attraction. And our velocity was too high for us to be swung into orbit so soon.’

  ‘In our own universe you would be right,’ said Bergman. ‘But, as I warned, the rules here are not the same as those outside. Direction, velocity, mass—all have different meanings. And there’s something more. Sandra?’

  ‘All surface instrument readings are betraying an extremely odd condition, Commander. There is an increasing amount of energy potential radiating from the Moon and apparently streaming into space.’

  ‘What?’ Koenig glared his incredulity. ‘Energy leaving the surface?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. We should be receiving it from the sun—the main body. It’s radiating light and there must be other energy emissions. Yet you say—Paul?’

  ‘Monitors confirm, Commander. The base is suffering a continual energy loss.’

  ‘Scale?’

  ‘Treble normal and mounting.’

  ‘Cause?’

  ‘As yet unknown, but we have a clue.’ Morrow killed the lights, leaving only the screens and monitors active. His face, reflecting the glow of tell-tales, took on the aspect of a clown’s mask, patches of coloured luminescence moving in a drifting pattern of variegated hue. ‘Look at the Omphalos, Commander.’

  ‘The Omphalos?’

  ‘The central body—we had to give it a name and this seemed appropriate.’

  The Omphalos—the centre. Koenig looked at it, bright with greenish light, marked, pulsating.

  ‘I’m boosting the registers,’ said Morrow. ‘Lifting the reception monitors into the ultraviolet and beyond and incorporating a compensatory translator. Now watch!’

  The image flickered as he threw switches, the greenish hue changing to a pale violet.

  ‘A beam!’ In the shadowed darkness Bergman echoed his amazement. ‘We’re connected by a beam!’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It rose all around, an inverted cone of shimmering radiance which led from the Moon to a point on the Omphalos. A funnel of sharply defined clarity which joined the two bodies together as a line would join a hooked fish to a rod.

  Koenig felt his muscles tighten at the analogy.

  ‘What is this? A freak of some kind? Sandra?’

  She too was touched with coloured patches of shifting brightness, reds and blues, greens and yellows from the banked instruments before her touching uniform, hair, face and hands.

  ‘The registers show a directional flow of energy along the beam from us to the Omphalos, Commander. It checks with the observed drain.’

  ‘Victor?’ Koenig turned, staring into the darkness, feeling a mounting irritation, one caused by his hampered vision. ‘Paul, turn on the lights.’ He blinked as Morrow obeyed. ‘Well, Victor?’

  Bergman said slowly, ‘We can make assumptions, John, but we need more facts. We know that the beam did not originate with us, so it is safe to assume that it came from the Omphalos. It could be a natural effect of this space, an automatic discharge-reception such as the exchange of energy between a particle of low potential and one of high. Something similar to a lightning flash, for example.’

  ‘A flash is almost instantaneous.’

  ‘True, but we could be dealing with a temporal vagary—time could appear or actually be different here. In that case an almost instantaneous flash would seem to us to be of long duration.’

  ‘You’re guessing, Victor.’ Koenig looked at the computer. ‘Kano—can you do better?’

  ‘Not me, Commander, but Computer—maybe.’

  ‘Try. Find out degrees of probability and waste no time about it. Paul, check every inch of that space out there you can with everything you’ve got. I want—’ Koenig broke off as one of the screens flashed then went blank. ‘Trouble?’

  ‘An external scanner burned out.’ Morrow made checks and drew in his breath with a sharp inhalation. ‘I should have guessed this would happen. The energy drain is affecting our external installations. That particular scanner was
close to the defence screen. When it radiated as it did it must have weakened the components, and the prevailing drain finished the job.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Already show loss of conversion efficiency, Commander.’

  ‘Have them replaced—all of them. Get on to Maintenance right away. Victor—come with me.’

  In his office Koenig sealed the doors cutting him from Main Mission and slumped at his desk. Bergman took a seat facing him and for a moment they looked at each other.

  ‘It’s bad, Victor. Right?’

  ‘It could be, John.’

  ‘It is.’ Koenig was certain of it, in his heart, head and stomach. The physical signs of an intuition honed by repeated dangers. ‘That beam—natural or not it’s got us hooked. Maybe that’s why we took up an orbit around the Omphalos. That other satellite too, perhaps?’ He punched a button and looked at Morrow’s face as it appeared on the communications post. ‘Paul—a question. Does the planetoid we observed also have a beam connecting it to the Omphalos?’

  ‘It’s just come into view. Commander. If you’ll hold—’ A pause. Then, ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Koenig broke the connection and, rising, began to pace the floor. ‘An explanation,’ he said. ‘Victor, give me an explanation.’

  ‘As yet we can only guess, John.’

  ‘Then let me make a start. Here we have a closed system, an area of space which is sealed against the reception of any form of external energy. Any radiated forms, that is. We ourselves are proof that matter can penetrate. Right?’

  Bergman nodded.

  ‘Such an area would, in time, reach entropic death. All energy would have reached a common level and there would be no differing potentials. No life of any kind could exist in such a space, no matter, nothing but a sea of diffused and low-level residue of energy.’

  ‘There is an alternative,’ said Bergman. ‘A remote possibility that, all available energy would become concentrated into a common node. There would still be a rundown, naturally, but instead of a sea of low-order residue there would be a—for want of a better word—a lump of inert mass. Ash, in essence.’