Space 1999 - Earthfall

by E. C. Tubb

  “No. You want to help, you say?”

  “That’s right. And if you want to know why I’ll give it to you straight. Biebuyck saved my life. If he hadn’t done what he did I’d be lying there now or maybe waiting to be processed. That means something to me. It’s put me in his debt and I want to get even. From what I know about such things a guy in his condition needs a lot of blood, right?”

  “Yes. Part of the treatment is to literally wash his blood free of any containments it may contain. We can also use various means to reduce the residual radiation it may contain, use the cleansed blood to circulate through the body and so pick up more destructive particles and then wash it again. Obviously there is a high degree of wastage and loss. What group are you?”

  “O. That makes me a universal donor, right?” He smiled as she nodded. “Then what are we waiting for?”

  Later, as she fed the fresh blood into Biebuyck’s veins, Mathias came to join her. He stood watching, seeing her frown as she checked the counters, moving so as to perform a small but essential task, freeing her from the labor to check her patient for the hundredth time.

  “You shouldn’t be working alone, Helena. Why haven’t you a nurse?”

  “They’re busy.”

  “Moving non-ambulatory patients down into the lower levels,” he said. “Packing and taking down all medical supplies not in actual use. Shifting everything of value in case the worst happens and we get hell knocked out of us. And what about him?” He nodded at the figure on the couch, “And the apparatus you’re using?”

  “He and it stay here.”

  “Against orders?”

  “No, Bob. In Medical I give the orders and I say he and the equipment stays.”

  “And if John Koenig demands otherwise?” He shrugged as she didn’t answer. “He would be right, Helena, and we both know it. On balance the lives and needs of hundreds are of more importance than one. Especially if that one is as good as dead.”

  “Is he?”

  “I saw his exposure meter—one thousand and thirty Rontgens. I know how long it was before he came for help. The others were lucky, their suits held and, in any case, Biebuyck acted as a barrier. Some slight contamination but nothing too serious. A couple of days’ rest and the usual, routine treatment and they’ll be as good as new.”

  “All of them? Does that apply to all of them?”

  “Of course.” The sharpness of her tone drew his attention. “Why do you ask?”

  “Max Kufstein came to me and offered to donate blood. He told me you had checked and cleared him. Obviously he lied.”

  “Not consciously,” he corrected. “I could afford to tell the regular members of the squad the facts but there were a pair of volunteers, Kufstein was one, who might not have been able to understand. So I told them the truth, they were in no danger, and left it at that. And Kufstein wanted to donate blood. I wonder why?”

  “To clear a debt, he said.”

  “Or to redeem himself?” Mathias shrugged. “Well, no harm done. He’ll be weaker than he thought for a while but as far as Biebuyck is concerned it makes no difference.”

  “Given up on him. Bob?”

  “He isn’t my patient, Helena.”

  “And that makes a difference?” She saw him stiffen at her tone, her sneer. “For God’s sake, man, are we still bound by that old, professional-conduct nonsense of the past? Your patient, my patient—a sick man is the patient of the world. And this world is too small to tolerate murderers and fools masquerading as surgeons and physicians; the patients too few to permit the luxury of stepping aside.”

  “I agree with you, Helena, but—”

  “You wash your hands, is that it? You and Pilate both.”

  “You mentioned luxury,” he snapped. “Trying to keep a man alive who is as good as dead is a luxury. Extending his existence might be a visible tribute to your skill—but at what price to the community? This apparatus is irreplaceable. If we lose it then we could lose a dozen who would have lived had it remained intact, a hundred, maybe, even more. A good bargain, Doctor?”

  “There are no bargains where life is concerned!”

  “There should be none,” he corrected, “but there are. As there is always a price to be paid by someone for every decision made. And, in this case, those who pay it will be those in later need. The ones who will die because you chose to spend too much on too small a hope of reward.” He glanced at the dials and automatically made an adjustment, recycling the washed blood, fighting for the fading life despite what he had claimed. A good man and a good doctor. “Helena?”

  “We have two hours yet,” she compromised. “We’ll give him one.”

  But, in forty-seven minutes, Biebuyck was dead.

  C H A P T E R

  Seventeen

  The tension was something he could taste. It dried his mouth as if it was filled with cotton and made every nerve as taut as one of the strings on his guitar, but, as he sat at his console, Paul Morrow allowed no trace of it to show on his face. Instead his eyes moved from point to point as tell-tales winked and told him the situation of the base.

  A flare and Medical was closed and sealed, another and the dispensary followed suit, two more and the kitchens were cold and deserted, a scatter and the living quarters were as empty as a grave.

  A bad analogy—and were graves empty? A thought he didn’t pursue as more signals gave him the information that the lower levels were sealed and separated and, no matter what was to come, those below were as safe and as secure as could be managed.

  To live, perhaps, after the upper installation had been reduced to shattered rubble. To meet and merge and live like gnomes in candle-lit darkness until the fat ran out and the air grew low and thirst came to turn them into desiccated mummies such as rested beneath the Egyptian sands.

  “Paul?” Sandra Benes had sensed his disquiet and was smiling at him with eyes warm with promise. “Thinking, Paul?”

  “Worrying.” To lie was useless, to attempt a false confidence was to insult her intelligence. “Wishing that you were snug below with the others.”

  “My place is with you, Paul.”

  “Your station is in Main Mission,” he corrected. “As is mine.”

  “Darling—”

  He made no response, not looking at her as, falling silent, she concentrated on her instruments. A nice girl, passionate, sincere, one who loved him and whom he loved in turn, but why couldn’t she remember Ecclesiastes?

  To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose . . .

  A time to be born and a time to die . . . a time to weep and a time to laugh . . . a time to mourn and a time to dance . . .

  A time to love but that time was not now, not when they stood poised on the edge of murder, violence and sudden death. The penalty they would pay unless the plan worked.

  “Paul?” Kano was waiting like an ebon statue; an idol which his ancestors had carved from heavy-grained wood and oiled and polished until the features became blurred from the impact of hands. A face which had looked at men dancing in leaping firelight and watched the blood and torment of captive prisoners being done to ceremonial death, “How long, Paul?”

  “A few minutes.”

  There would be no count-down. No neat and scientific precision. The human element was too much involved for that. But the button had been pressed and the wheels set into motion. Now all they could do was wait.

  Simon Lansing hated it. He crouched beneath a flimsy cover heaped with dust, a camouflaged hide which held his suited figure, a rocket-launcher, twelve missiles and nothing else. He was a member of a select group, all volunteers, all now lurking in hiding on the Lunar surface, and all probably a little mad.

  Mad with the peculiar kind of insanity which makes a man risk his life for others.

  But he hadn’t anticipated the waiting.

  It was unavoidable, he knew, and he had been warned about it and had accepted it but only on a mental level. He hadn’t known how tough it would be
to crouch and listen to the thin hiss of cooling air, to feel the sweat crawl like spiders over his body, to be unable to scratch and, because of that, to suffer from the nervous reaction more than he would have done as his skin seemed to become a mass of itching sores.

  Grimly he tried to forget the discomfort, weighing his chances, moving the spare missiles a little further from his hand, moving them back, setting some to either side, placing them together again. He didn’t touch the launcher, there was no need. It was loaded, primed, ready to go. As soon as a target appeared he would track it, wait until it made to dive, blast it before it could do any damage. He and the rest set about the base—the suicide volunteers.

  Monica had called them that when he had told her he had joined them.

  A fine woman, Monica and he couldn’t get her out of his system. The way she had felt beneath his hands, the response he had felt before she had ruined the whole damned episode with her crazy ideas. But it wasn’t her fault. No one could be wholly normal living on and in a ball of barren rock. A woman like that needed space and air and sunshine.

  He had a mental image of her, standing face to the wind, the breeze catching her hair and blowing it back as it stung roses in her cheeks. There would be a baby on her hip and another in her belly and her breasts would be heavy with milk. His kids and his woman. Maybe on a new world if ever they found one, settling a piece of land as his folks had done way back in the past, building, growing, making a home.

  He grunted, wondering why it was so easy to think of Monica in that way, why he wanted it to be the way he thought, why he had a sudden, crazy urge to dig his hands in the dirt.

  It was the waiting! God damn the waiting!

  Helena heard the sigh, the incoherent noise and quickly closed the door. The passage was dim with ghostly light and she doubted if the lovers had noticed or, would care if they had. It was not a time for concern over unimportant things and, lost in their own, private world, she and the rest did not exist.

  Yet they had been careless and she wondered why. The door could have been blocked so as to give a little warning and provide a slight delay. A crude way to obtain privacy but better than nothing in the cellar-like compartment. And, despite herself, she wondered who they were? Which nurse with which man? Not Kiddiko and the slim, cat-like technician from Indo-China. Certainly not Bob who, if not busy in a distant compartment, would be soothing Rita Cantry. Or loving her, perhaps, it seemed to be a time for lovemaking.

  At least Mathias was fortunate in that the one he loved was close.

  “Helena?” Bergman came down the passage towards her. “Is that you?”

  “Yes, Victor.”

  He seemed surprised. “I thought I saw you in compartment twenty-eight.”

  “You did. I was just checking.”

  “Then we’re doing the same job.” He looked at the hand she rested on his arm as he took a step towards the chamber behind her. “No?”

  “It’s occupied.”

  “I understand.” He wasn’t surprised. “Odd, isn’t it, how the urge to reproduce becomes so strong at times of stress? Always, during a war, the birth rate rises and, always, there is a higher incidence of male births to female as if nature is compensating for the loss of potential fathers.”

  “We don’t need fathers, Victor, only mothers.”

  “Here, yes, but that wasn’t so in primitive times. True, one man can impregnate many women and so, logically, a tribe only needed the one, fertile male. But it took men to hunt down game, to drag it back to the cave, to stand guard and protect the females and their children against wild beasts. A thing those women who demand total equality tend to forget; men and women are not equal in the sense they can each fill the function of the other.”

  “A man can’t have a child and a woman can’t hunt and give birth at the same time. I know the arguments, Victor, but we are talking of a different age.”

  “One in which the biological habit-patterns were established, Helena, and you are too good a psychiatrist to believe they can be ignored. And don’t forget the gene pool.”

  She said, slowly, “You’re assuming that we are stuck here for good. If not you would never have mentioned the gene pool.”

  “Do you think we’re not?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it. Oh, I know what John told us and all the rest of it, but has it really sunk in? We’ve been so busy and it seems so incredible that we’re never, ever going to see Earth again. People are still thinking in old-established references. Anoux proved that; he was more concerned as to who gave the orders than the necessity for them. I’m surprised we haven’t had talk of union-demarcations, strikes and all the rest of it.”

  “We have,” said Bergman, dryly. “Majolin took care of it.”

  “With his fists,” she said. “Well, that’s one way.”

  “And sometimes the only one. We don’t really have a homogeneous population here, Helena, despite our common misfortune. You have, of course, anticipated the danger of nationalities and races contracting into isolated groups and so farther reducing the dissemination of the limited gene pool. Such a practice will lead to inbreeding and the accentuation of existing weaknesses. To avoid it we must try and establish a sperm bank together with a system of genetic typing which will enure the elimination of hereditary malfunctions.”

  “The first step to establish a Utopia,” she agreed. “If that is what you want to build. But how to convince others of that?”

  She glanced at the door behind which two people were lost in their own world. Safe enough now, but what when the contraceptives ran out? Would natural demands allow them to accept restraint?

  Another problem to add to the others and, suddenly, she was tired of problems. It would be nice simply to rest. To lie with warm and comforting arms around her and feel the protection of someone who cared.

  Koenig sat in the command chair of an Eagle, suited, the helmet still open, leaning forward a little against the restraints as he looked at the screen.

  From it Morrow said, “Base totally dead, Commander, aside from this present communication. I’d like permission to maintain instrument-observation.”

  “Permission denied.”

  “Comunication channels?”

  “Keep radio band open for reception after initial strike proves successful. If it should fail—well, Paul, you know what to do.”

  Hide beneath a cover of electronic darkness and hope to survive.

  Koenig thumbed a button. “Warning to all Eagles. Prepare for flight but do not activate until I give the word. Alan?”

  “Ready, Commander.”

  “Stand by!”

  Moments which dragged as Carter made an automatic check of his Eagle. Tell-tales flickered on the panel as he activated the craft—the first to go he was the first to turn the inert mass of metal into a vibrant, near-living thing.

  “Check all systems,” he said, then remembered that he was alone. No co-pilots were being carried; trained men were too valuable to lose and, with luck, they would not be needed. “Cancel that order,” he said, whimsically then added, “And stop talking to yourself, Alan, old lad, or you’ll be waltzing with a dingo for sure.”

  Lowering the faceplate of his helmet he settled back and thought about the alien thing outside.

  It was alive and growing and burying itself deep. Something like a queen ant or a termite, eggs already hatching into a swarm of workers, diggers, fighters, attendants, cells being constructed, grubs sealed inside, new queens readied with their attendant drones. Fecund life taking over the only place he could call home.

  Against it they had the Eagles.

  Carter stiffened as a red lamp winked on the panel. Others followed it, signals from the instruments detecting the pulse and stir of life in the other vessels. Quickly he checked them, three in the first line, five as back-ups, the others were still not ready, lying waiting for the power to complete their fabrication and repair.

  “Alan?” Koenig waited for the flash. “Go!”<
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  He pressed a button.

  The wall and roof of the hangar vanished beneath the impact of chemical explosives.

  Carter blasted into action.

  His Eagle was up and moving before the cloud of dust had even begun to settle. Like a thunderbolt it streaked up and over the crater, dropping on the far side to turn in a wide arc, small objects falling from it to land with little spurts of dust on the Lunar plain. Decoys. Boxes equipped with batteries and an electronic device which boosted the power and emitted it as bait for the dancing torpedoes. They dived towards it like a swarm of avid wasps.

  But not all.

  Even as the rock and stone shattered beneath the touch of destructive energies other spindles were hurtling towards Carter’s Eagle, at Koenig’s, at Chadalah who followed. Slim shapes with noses winking ruby and hulls which ripped and disintegrated into pocked craters edged with jagged, crystalline serrations. Lasers which blazed and burned and blazed again, but too clumsy, too slow!

  Men stabbing at flies with red-hot needles.

  Koenig glanced at the screens, saw the cluster of torpedoes busy destroying the decoys, heard a warning yell.

  “Commander! Your rear!”

  Chadalah who was already sending his Eagle to face the threat, his laser pulsing with searing shafts of energy, beams which hit and fused and sent once-bright shapes falling like dead and brittle leaves.

  But even as they fell others darted in, stinging, pock-marking the hull of the Eagle, causing Chadalah to veer and slew, to hurl the ship upwards and away, the movements erratic.

  “Eagle Three report!” Carter’s voice and Koenig heard the answer as, again, he studied the area where the decoys had fallen.

  “Main guidance system hit. Now on emergency. Some damage in rear module. Air lost and am working in sealed suit. Left-hand lower missile launching tubes inoperative.” He added, anticipating the question. “I’m still operational. Chief.”

  “Keep your distance and keep firing.” Carter shot down a torpedo. “Commander? You want me to move in yet?”