by Basil Copper
What did seem strange here was the lack of any life; a light, a figure, a footfall, an electric signal - anything would have broken that blank aridity. Now I was among the round, dome-like dwellings these people had improvised for themselves, and the bulbous openings were, I hazarded, some form of double air-lock in which they would remove their polluted clothing before going inside.
I could not help thinking that they had made the best of their bleak conditions though; unless one were completely underground, there was very little difference where one lived on the surface of the world today. Having completed a circuit of the buildings without seeing any sign of life and the darkness now being almost total, I decided to return along the shore the way I had come. As I swung round, shifting my cases to my left hand to ease my cramped fingers, I was conscious out of the corner of my eye, of a blurred shadow that seemed to flit across the dim phosphorescence of the water and flicker behind a boulder.
I am not a particularly courageous man but my curiosity was aroused. I had come a long way to set eyes on the people of this place and though I did not want to disturb them in their houses - a a formal visit would have taken up too much of my time that night - I would have liked to establish relations, preparatory to returning another day.
Among the boulders the atmosphere was foetid and the overhanging rocks and moss-like creepers made it dark. I soon began to regret my decision, but I had to go on as I could not now see properly to return and it was all uphill. The place appeared to be some sort of tunnel and I hoped it would lead towards the sea again.
Ahead of me there was a slight scratching noise that might have been metal-shod feet on rock, but I could not be certain. I paused to listen but the sound was not repeated. The place was beginning to get on my nerves. The walls were getting narrower and then the rocky, overhanging cliffs began to split into different passages and alleyways which made consistent direction impossible.
This was confusing, but as I stopped again for breath I felt a faint stirring of the hairs on my spine as there was another furtive movement - this time behind me. Then there followed a noise that I didn't particularly like. It was a sort of slithering, scratching sound, and I had the unpleasant simile of a blind person spring suddenly into my mind. I was in a cleft of rock by the side of the track, a nasty place in which to be trapped, and there was little time to lose.
Whoever - or whatever it was, could barely be a dozen feet away. I ducked down and with a quick flash of wild fear slithered, as quietly as I could, out of the blind alley and round the next corner which was about six feet away. I paused a few feet back from the entrance of another gully; here at least, I had a clear line of retreat. Nothing happened for a few moments and I thought that perhaps my imagination had been too much.
But the tapping began again after a bit and now it was much nearer. A pause and more sounds, another pause then a few more steps. There was a long period of hesitation as the thing gained the entrance to the passage where I crouched with the flash I had hastily eased out of my hip-pocket.
It would serve both to see the creature I faced and also as a weapon if need be. As the seconds went past I resolved on a bold move. Without wasting anymore time I gave a loud and somewhat quavery shout which sounded deafening in the confined, echoing space, sprang out into the main gully, and stabbed on my flashlight.
A great shadow crept across the rock, my scream was echoed by a high, shrill cry, even louder than mine, and I fell down in a blind panic mixed up with some soft, yielding shape that blundered against me. The saviour of both was the flashlight which fortunately fell upwards, spreading its beams evenly and illuminating both faces. Which of us was the more frightened I cannot tell. It was a breeder from the village who had seen me prowling about and had come to investigate, at first thinking it was one of her own community.
We laughed in sickly relief and then she put me on the right road for home, glad of some company in those dark ravines. I was the first man of the outside world she had ever seen, and she was pathetically eager for knowledge; it was evident that she regarded the Central Committee and its scientific officers and other employees as the only hope for mankind, and she made me promise to visit the village again in the daylight and do what I could for its people.
This I readily agreed and noted down her number for future reference. Visits to the village and additional research here would give some variety to life on the island, and I was interested to see how these people made out in their hard and lonely struggle. This girl - she was little more than nineteen - was not unattractive but her hair was already going grey and she appeared to be suffering from debilitation. She stumbled many times along the track but always declined my assistance. When we gained the open shore again she was plainly exhausted and I stayed with her a bit after she had put me on my road; I offered to accompany her back to her people but she would not hear of this.
Her dark eyes seemed to have a world of experience in them and she was always looking first seaward and then over her shoulder, but I put this down to the strange environment and the hard life she led. As I waved her goodbye and set off along the stony track, she called me back. The thin cry in the wind again caused me some uneasiness, I could not say why, and when I reached her the dark eyes were closed and the hollows under them seemed full of pain.
Then she beckoned and urged me towards the shore where the baleful light from the sea was beating on the dark sand and against the worn white boulders of the cove. I had told her of my qualifications coming down the ravine, but I could not at first grasp what she wanted of me. But in broken sentences she at last made me understand her needs.
Before I could stop her she had unbuttoned the smock-like overall she was wearing and stood stripped to the waist. I had seen many strange things in my thirty-five years and was inured to most sights that have become a commonplace of these times, but I could not resist an exclamation.
The girl had what would have been a magnificent figure under normal circumstances. But across her abdomen and over her breasts were only what I could describe as a mass of devilish green fungi; beneath it the skin glowed faintly luminous, cicatriced and crisscrossed with vein like cuts and striations. The whole mass seemed to have a life of its own, independent of the girl's body, and I felt it must be a trick of the twilight when I saw the growth - I can call it nothing else - begin to stir and twitch, sluggishly at first, and then almost imperceptibly to expand, flowing outwards gently but inexorably, a fraction of an inch before it settled down to a slow pulsation - or was it the girl's own breathing?
Fear settled on me as I looked at this. I could do nothing for the wretched child then, but as she dressed I told her I would do what I could. I would bring medicines, instruments, the next time I came… perhaps injections would help. She seemed infinitely relieved at this and clung to my arm for a moment as though I were her benefactor and she already cured.
She would not, or could not, tell me how she had contracted this malignant condition, but I gathered that hers was not the only case in the village. I was not disposed to linger; my encounter with the girl, the atmosphere of the island, and now this last shock had put a blight on my spirits, and I was eager to be off. As I went up the path I was almost inclined to break into a run. There was something else - something that defied analysis and yet gave me the greatest foreboding of all. For as I had crouched over the girl, attempting to diagnose something entirely outside my experience, there had been a strange perfume from her body.
I am, of course, familiar with the odours given off by the human body under various conditions of illness and decay, but I use the term perfume in its true sense. Whether it emanated from the girl herself or from the thing from which she suffered, I did not know. For a few moments, as I stood on that lonely shore, my mind was drenched with images; the drowned face of a girl I had once known, a melody playing somewhere long ago - something that I recalled as a treasured, recorded fragment of the past, on old archaic instruments by people playing together; what was it?
Violins - that was it; violins and the perfume seemed somehow to symbolize all these things and above all the wild despair of regret.
But worst of all was the almost overmastering longing to reach the source of the perfume; there was wild delight in it and I caught myself, for one mad second, contemplating the frightful action of burying my mouth and face in the loathsome thing that was devouring the girl's body. Sanity came back like a blast of cold air as sand whipped by the night wind stung my eyes - and with it a black fear; I knew now what Rort meant. There was something devilish about the island, something which as scientists we had to unravel. I knew also that I had to go back to the village and find out what it was.
But for the moment while the wind buffeted me as I breasted a spur of rock and came back off the foreshore to the preferable loneliness of the downlands that led to K4, I forgot the nostalgia and remembered only the sickly horror of that degenerate moment. Then black fear took possession of me and I was running, slipping, and sliding across the slimy turf to the comparative peace and sanctuary symbolized by the tiny spark that was the light of K4's observation tower, piercing the smoky darkness like a torch.
III
I am ashamed to say it was almost three weeks before I felt able to go back to the village, and even then it was in the early morning so that I should have time to return before nightfall. Much of the interval had been spent in research on obscure radiation conditions and my companions at K4 had not been as helpful as they might. The night I arrived back, panting, muddy, my cases lost down some pothole, there had been roars of laughter from the steadier nerved, though I noticed Rort looked considerably pale as I told my story.
Fitzwilliams, a short, stocky figure was particularly humorous at my expense; his dark brown moustache seemed to bristle as he exploded with laughter and he pounded his fist on the table as he elaborated his ideas.
"By Future, this is rich," he spluttered - we had given up using the term "God" since the nature of creation had been discovered -and then went on to embellish his fancy with some bawdy and outrageous trimmings. I well remember the laughing faces at the supper table that night; it was almost the last time that our little group had anything to be happy about, and that a feeble excuse at best. Looking back, I suppose it was ludicrous. I, a grown man, bounding across the slimy hillocks, completely out of control, my gear flying this way and that until I fetched up against the blockhouse entrance of K4.
That my first encounter with the girl was absurd, I was prepared to admit; my foolish fancies about the village and ravines; even my headlong flight. But the girl's condition was real enough; that was serious indeed and concerned us all if it were due to atmospheric conditions - and about that I was not prepared to laugh. I am afraid I got rather angry as the evening continued. But one man at least had not been amused.
"What do you think, Rort?" I asked.
His answer was a long time coming and when it did it was, for him, a strange one. He tapped nervously with his thin, tapering fingers, now stained and torn like most of our hands, and did not look at me directly.
"I prefer not to think - in this instance," he said quietly and then got up and went quickly out of the bantering atmosphere of the mess-room.
I was wrong though, about one thing. There was one other man who took my story seriously. That was Commander Masters, the person most likely to be able to do something about it. He buzzed for me to go up to his private room two evenings later. I could relax with him; he was a man I liked and trusted. Immensely capable, Masters looked more distinguished, more serious than usual, as he faced me across the gleaming metallized surface of his desk, his dusty silver hair outlined against the warm glow of the wall lamps, so that he seemed to resemble one of those ancient "saints" I had seen in a printed book preserved in a museum.
"You think this could be some new mutation that we haven't come up against?" he asked. I shrugged. There might be much more to it than that.
"I don't know. I should have to make some pretty exhaustive tests on the girl to be able to come to any real conclusion. I'd like to have her up here so that we could make some proper lab checks, but that wouldn't be fair to the others."
Masters's eyes narrowed and he shifted uneasily in his chair. "Meaning…?"
"Meaning that we don't know exactly what we're dealing with, sir. This condition - an unknown factor at the moment - may be peculiar to this one girl; it may or may not be malignant. Again, there's always the possibility it might be environmental or spread by contact."
"Hmm." Masters's nose wrinkled and he lay back in his chair, hands straight on the desk before him, and contemplated his nails for what seemed like minutes.
"What would you want in the way of gear and assistance to sort this out?"
"Little out of the ordinary. Laboratory facilities, of course; a few days uninterrupted study, someone to help me. This may be a false alarm, but it won't take long to establish the nature of the problem, one way or the other."
Masters straightened himself behind the desk. "Tell Fitzwilliams to give you everything you want from the lab. Make out the usual indent and credit the material to 'extracurricular investigation.' I don't know who you'll want to pair with you on the job."
He frowned again and consulted a panel inset into the desk which gave detailed breakdowns of each man on the station, with his duty rota, rest periods, and other information. He scanned rapidly down the columns, humming quietly to himself, while I waited, my mind half absorbed by the problem that the girl had set, half ashamed by my panic flight of such a short while ago. I wondered if Masters was secretly amused by my adventure and whether he considered this little extra assignment a means of testing my efficiency under stress.
Probably nothing of the kind. He understood well the loneliness and occasional strangeness of our work in remote places; it was a more likely possibility that he had discounted the fiasco from the start and knew that absorption in my self-allotted task would outweigh any possible dangers that might present themselves.
"Yes…" His fingers made calculations as he chopped at various names. "I can't spare Pollock" - and here he mentioned half a dozen names - "… that leaves you with Channing, Sinclair, and Rort. You'd better ask one of them if he wants a few days off."
Masters smiled briefly, for he knew as well as I that the trip might turn out unpleasantly. He stood up abruptly, with the swift, alert movements that often surprised his staff, and waved me to my feet with a suave but decisive gesture of the hand.
"Report to me before you go. And let me know if there's anything you need. If there is something down there we haven't seen before, we may not be able to help if we don't know what we're up against."
Reassuring words, that echoed in my mind long after I had gone back to my cabin.
IV
Fitzwilliams, of course, was frankly sceptical of the value of the whole business when I discussed the question of equipment with him; even the angle of the bristles in his moustache looked derisive, but when he heard that it was a direct priority from Masters he changed his manner and became instantly helpful.
"What do you expect to find?" he asked, laughing, though there was the beginning of doubt in his eyes. That was a question they were all asking during the next twenty-four hours and indeed it was a question I did not really like to ask myself. Karla seemed to be the one person who had taken my story to an extreme; perhaps it was because she was a woman, but nevertheless my description of the unfortunate girl at the cove had filled her with an unnameable terror; and my earlier uneasiness returned a day or two afterwards when we were talking the situation over.
We were sitting in the observation tower, where I had just completed a tour of duty. Karla had been taking part in an experiment that afternoon, acting alternately as assistant and subject. As we were both free for an hour or two we stayed on in the tower, idly chatting, while our reliefs busied themselves as they took over.
We sat on steel backed chairs in a bay of one of the observation ports looking out over
a dreary waste of uplands, even more forlorn in the dusk, pricked out here and there with the steel reflection of a mere that gave back the purple-tinted cloud that served for sky. Farther out, the green phosphorescence of the sea glowed menacing and wearily as it always did at dusk.
Karla had been silent, her mind overborne by this now familiar scene, which affected each of us to a certain extent, even though we had been trained to check emotion. Now she put her hand on my arm and her eyes were dark and troubled.
"This girl… will she die?"
"I don't know." I spoke honestly, for who could say? She looked even more distraught and turned again to the green and purple vista outside the observation port. Swirls of mist were even now heralding such a night as followed one after the other in this place.
"This is a dreadful spot," she said, and shuddered. Her remark surprised me, for she was an unusually steady and sober-minded girl whose position with the unit had been attained by those very qualities.
"Take care," she said, as we went down the stairway to our own quarters. "I have the strangest feeling that there is some harm in this for me."
She clutched my arm as she turned to go, and despite myself the expression in her face almost unnerved me for the fraction of a second.
Then I laughed: "Don't be silly," and gently pushed her towards the gallery leading to her own cabin. They were almost the last words on a serious topic Karla ever addressed to me but I had good cause to remember them, as later events will show.
To my relief Rort, whom I proposed to take along as my companion, was not only glad but even enthusiastic when I indicated my choice to him. His sombre face lit up at the thought of doing something more physically positive than the statistical work he was engaged on at that moment. For him, his manner was almost breathlessly hilarious as we checked over the instruments and other gear Masters's generous list had secured for us.