She struggled to rise in her bulky suit, but toppled over backwards and lay helplessly at the transformation’s feet as it loomed over her. She glimpsed the awful paleness of its bone head, its mindless eye, its savage, bared teeth and its two terrible horns. She screamed deafeningly inside her head-piece as it prepared to crush her.
At the last moment a shape sprang at the creature’s flank side and knocked it sideways. The force altered its aim and the boulder deflected into the glassy dust at her side.
The clearing was filling with grey dust clouds scuffed up from their feet and the manoeuvrings of the Buggy, and she found it difficult to see what had happened. Gradually, Carter’s outline came into view, attached to the back of the wildly bucking creature. She climbed awkwardly to her feet and went to his assistance. As she approached she watched with horror as Carter’s body was drawn over the creature’s back and tossed through the air towards a large boulder. The Eagle Pilot struck the rock and began sliding slowly down it, crumpling to the floor.
Almost immediately she saw Carter twist and his gloved arm reach out helplessly for a part of his suit which she knew had been snagged.
His precious air supply was being sucked into Space. The intense cold and the vacuum were seeping in to replace it.
She launched herself off the ground to assist him. But her way was suddenly barred by the creature. She collided heavily with it and they both rolled over on to the ground.
Unable to throw off its obnoxious clinging bulk, she tried instead to pull herself away from its clutches. Unencumbered by a suit, it eventually climbed off her and before she could rise, stood over her once more with a boulder.
This time she was trapped. Carter had his hands full saving his own life and could not help her.
The eye of the creature pulsed madly, bursting into a brilliant, psychedelic display of colours as though signalling its peak of energy. Her assailant drew itself up to its full height to deliver the boulder blow to her. Then, as she lay, paralyzed with the fear of her fate; a sudden seizure seemed to take hold of it. Its body began to shake violently. Its jaw opened and closed as though gasping for air. Its eye shone a vivid, wild crimson. The boulder still poised in its grip caused it to overbalance. It began a pitiful, strangely graceful fall backwards, in such a manner as to give the impression that the fall had been deliberately stage-managed.
It landed heavily on its back, sending out cloud waves of dust from under it. It bounced slightly and then lay still. Its crimson eye went out.
Sweating with fear, she climbed to her feet, then moved as quickly as she could back to the Buggy. She reached beneath the seats in a stow locker and brought out a small emergency bottle of air; then tried once more to reach Carter.
His still, crumpled form had ceased to move. His visor was completely demisted and she suspected the worst. Acting quickly she replaced the empty bottle on his back-pack with the new one and turned it on. Then she examined his suit as best she could in the darkness. Mercifully for him he had managed to locate the snag and slap on a plaster from the emergency kit in his pocket. After doing that he must have passed out.
He stood a good chance of recovery.
As she leaned over him he stirred and opened his eyes. A patch of condensation formed over his visor and she heaved a silent sigh of relief. It took him a while to come round properly, and while she was waiting she called up Sahn in the Command Centre.
‘Sahn, the animal’s running out of air...’ She paused in her announcement, peering through the timeless gloom at the darkened hump of Maya. She quickly explained what had happened. ‘If it transforms back into Maya, she will die instantly. I want an Eagle immediately,’ she finished. She snapped off her connection and turned her attention back to Carter. He was sitting up, his head lolling groggily from side to side.
‘Alan...’ she began, speaking over the channel she had with him.
‘I heard,’ he cut her off. Groaning, he struggled to his feet. ‘How long will she last?’
They moved towards the dying creature. It lay completely motionless, its blank eye facing the stars it had tried so desperately to get to.
‘She can’t last more than a few minutes,’ Helena told him in desperation. As she spoke she scanned the body with a portable Life Detector and squinted at the meter reading.
‘Then the Eagle won’t be in time!’ Carter glanced at the Buggy crashed into the rock face.
He began dragging the weightless, unconscious being towards it. She helped him and they soon had it slumped in the small passenger seat. He was about to climb into the Buggy to see if it worked when he felt sudden vertigo returning. Dizzily, he fell down to his knees.
The doctor offered an arm to him, but he shook his head. ‘No, Helena...’ he gasped, breathing with difficulty. ‘I’ll wait for the Rescue Eagle. I’ve got air and heat now – I’ll be okay...’
She hesitated but knew he was right. One of them would have had to stay behind anyway, for their ungainly passenger was taking up most of the Moon Buggy’s room. ‘I’ll try and start it,’ she said, climbing into the driving seat.
The Buggy, its front buckled from the impact, responded to her touch and she backed it away from the rock face. Then, glancing wordlessly down at Carter, she moved off at full throttle, sending up more clouds of dust into Space. The dust would take forever to settle, drifting aimlessly about, splitting up into particles, finally becoming so rarefied that the clearing would seem to have become devoid of its presence before any of its parts had found a resting place.
The transference back to the Eagle had been completed safely. The Warp Locator probes had been assembled – one at either end of the ship. The cartridges and the advanced viewing, equipment they needed had been transported across and installed.
Verdeschi and Koenig were studying the complex patterns stored on Cartridge 26. They were comparing them with similar grids stored in the memory of their own computer and wracking their brains to decipher them.
They had made some headway.
‘We’ve got the co-ordinates – all we have to do is understand them,’ Verdeschi said frustratedly. He stuck his eye back to the eyepiece of the Locator. A faint blue light danced at the end of the tube. As he watched, the light turned from blue to red, from red to gold, from gold to blue. Other colours pulsed in the background – a spectacularly beautiful arrangement of colours and shapes. They had been able to discover fairly easily how the Locator worked. At least, they hoped they had. The nature of Time, according to the alien technology they were interpreting, was part rigid and part flexible – like rubber. It existed uniformly throughout the visually observable Universe, stabilizing Matter – a great mass of lucid, three-dimensional ‘substance’ pervading everywhere. Occasionally, when certain areas of it became ‘fluid’, compensatory movements caused it to compress in on itself. Sometimes it was compressed so hard a more rarefied ‘passage’ was ‘punched’ through it. Such faults in its structure persisted when the ‘rubber’ set once more.
When the Time-sensitive probes detected the precise coordinate of such a Warp, the colours in the tube would turn on pure white.
‘We can’t go on forever,’ Koenig commented dully, turning from the screen. ‘We’ll have to try with what information we’ve managed to glean – and sod the consequences.’ He eyed the curly black hair of the Italian, an expression of perverse amusement on his face. ‘Are you game?’
Without removing his eye from the Locator lens, the other grunted affirmation. ‘Start feeding it in and let’s hope Old Sally will take it.’
Koenig smiled. ‘Old Sally’ was the name that had been given to the Eagle on-board computer.
Tensely, he turned back to the instrument bank and began making the connections. Soon Old Sally had it all inside her and she did not protest. On the contrary, she seemed quite pleased. When he activated the craft’s inertial guidance system she took over, and took it back to where the Moon had disappeared. Under her expert, programmed guidance, the Eagle underwent
a new series of rolls and pitches; this time directed by the sensitive probes.
Time wore on and Koenig settled down to the hard work of monitoring the manoeuvres, making sure that Sally had the correct data given to her from the probes. This was another part of the alien procedure he didn’t completely understand, but he did his best.
‘One, two, five, six, seven, four, one... down to blue,’ Verdeschi called out.
He marked in the entries on the graph record paper. He frowned. ‘Shouldn’t we have some compensation factors?’
Verdeschi nodded, reading off the magnified dials below the dancing colours. ‘Coming up... Port thruster – 22.2 second burn. Inertia factor – green plus two.’ He looked up from the eye-piece, a hopeful expression on his face. ‘That’s it.’
Koenig sighed uncertainly as he made a quick calculation on a portable calculator. ‘Well... if that’s right, here are the coordinates... let’s hope they’re right.’ He stood up and carried them over to Sally’s print-out. The computer’s figures were out by a mile. He gritted his teeth. ‘We’ve nothing to lose – so here goes.’ He moved to the computer feed-in point and punched the new co-ordinates they had worked out.
They settled back once more to their checks as Sally accepted the information and modified her search programme. Now they could only wait...
And hope that their interpretation was the right one.
Helena paced impatiently ahead of the hospital trolley that carried the motionless form of the horned creature. She opened the Medical Centre door with her comlock, glad to be out of her suit and in the safety of the Moon Base again.
The attendants wheeled the trolley inside and helped her off-load the unconscious body to the bed. Her Life Detector told her that there was still life. This creature was far stronger in constitution than the other and they might just be in time to save it.
‘At least she’s still breathing,’ Vincent said, bending over the animal and putting his ear against the brittle, blackened skin of its chest.
‘Maya... Maya...’ Helena called out insistently, softly. She didn’t expect encouragement so quickly, but a light in the creature’s eye, perhaps reviving somewhat upon being exposed to the air and the warmth of the Moon Base, started to shine. ‘Maya!’ she exclaimed excitedly. ‘Come back!’
Although the eye shone dimly, the creature registered no other signs of an increase in vigour. Vincent had finished attaching monitor electrodes to its skin and was checking the readings on the instruments. ‘You’re not making contact,’ he said.
Helena’s excitement abated. She glanced at her watch. ‘She’s been in that form for almost an hour. She can’t hold it much longer. Then...’ She broke off. She didn’t know what ‘then’ would bring.
Vincent said to her unhappily, ‘She hasn’t come back as Maya the last couple of times... what if she transforms into something even worse?’
He looked at her for her reaction. Unexpectedly he noticed that a beatific expression of joy had come over her face. Her eyes were shining radiantly with a compassion that, for most of the long time they spent on this case, she had been unable to show.
Open-mouthed, he followed her downward gaze.
The Psychon’s true body was at long last materializing from a weak and watery cocoon of the light energy she normally spun around her.
Their efforts had not been in vain.
A doctor’s satisfaction of seeing a patient reviving, or at least reverting as in this case, combined with the joy of being able to watch Maya’s face again, welled up inside them both. But, good doctors as they were, they declined from showing too much feeling, preferring to get on with the job. Without speaking to one another about the miraculous event that had occurred, they began their usual routines.
‘Temperature normal,’ Helena called out happily.
Maya opened her eyes, hearing her voice properly for the first time.
‘All life signs stable,’ Vincent reported from the flashing instrument faces. He grinned broadly at the awakening Maya. ‘All our instruments say you’re fine, Maya. How do you feel?’
The Psychon’s face still looked chalky-white. It looked drawn. Her eyes looked glazed. Her lips were blue. But as they watched, the barest flicker of a smile crossed the taut features that had not long ago almost become a death mask.
Overjoyed, Helena ran to the Medical Centre monitor to announce the news to the Command Centre – and everyone else on Moon Base Alpha.
But now, as she ran, the older, more intense anxiety that afflicted her came to the surface. Unsuppressed by more immediate concerns, it leapt up from inside her and gripped her with an indescribable feeling of terror.
‘Refuelling Eagle maintaining position,’ Sahn informed, reading from her console.
On the Big Screen in front of her the Eagle Ship hung motionless in Space. It was a vastly magnified image, detectable from this distance only by virtue of the fact that no impeding air molecules cloaked the Moon, enabling the giant camera-telescope mounted on its surface to have a clear, undistorted view.
‘Have they anything to report?’ Carter asked her. He sat in Koenig’s Command Chair, still too shaky to stand much after his ordeal on the lunar surface. The Rescue Ship which had come for Maya had come for him instead.
‘Just that they are almost at the point of “no return”.’
‘Tell them to keep at it,’ he ordered, more sharply than he intended. The exhausting strain of Command was knocking a lot of the soft curves off him. He was about to press his palm wearily over his aching head when an exclamation from Sahn made him jump.
‘What is it?’ he asked her. He raised himself out of his seat and walked over to her. She was peering intently at her instrumentation.
‘I’m getting peculiar readings from the area of the Refuelling Eagle,’ she told him. She looked tip at the Big Screen, as though expecting the picture on it to have altered. But the enlarged craft looked completely motionless, undisturbed. She frowned in puzzlement.
‘There’s nothing on the screen,’ Carter told her, equally puzzled.
Sahn looked determined. ‘There’s something there, Alan. My sensors are picking up an enormous disturbance.’
The dancing colours in the tube had grown faint, and Verdeschi trembled with hope.
The air in the Eagle Pilot Section where he and Koenig were working grew suddenly chill. The ship’s walls began bending and wavering in their visions.
They had to stop what they were doing and stagger towards each other for support.
‘We must be going through the... the Space Warp,’ Verdeschi gasped. His lungs heaved painfully, trying to suck in the thin air. They clutched at each other, and as he spoke their bodies began to come apart. Their atoms and molecules expanded, forming tall, vaporous giants.
The Eagle seemed to dissolve round about them into the amazing, swirling colours they had seen at the bottom of the Locator. The colours formed vast, circular walls – a vortex down which the Earthly human components began to fall at an ever-increasing speed.
The colours faded away and the tunnel became white. Pure, blinding whiteness in which they felt no sensation of falling at all
After a blink of eternity which might either have been a fraction of a second or a trillion light years, the white whirlpool began converting back into colours again. It became a streaking mass of golds, blues, greens, and reds that raced wildly around them. Gradually, these too faded away and they felt their bodies shrinking back to size again. The familiar banks of equipment bent and wavered into existence. Their bodies materialized before each other’s eyes. Soon, the Pilot Section was its old self again. Sally hummed and clicked. Lights flashed and winked reassuringly. The Time Storm had left them as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come.
Koenig was the first to realize that they were actually through the Warp. He kicked off weightlessly across the cabin towards the control panels. Tensely, he stabbed at the button that would give them the link with Alpha.
The tiny scr
een flickered, then burst into life. It showed the new field of Space, and speeding towards them snout first was the rescue Eagle Ship, its cabin lights blazing warmly through the empty sea.
‘Do you see what I see?’ he cried exultantly to Verdeschi. The Security Chief appeared behind him and looked over his shoulder.
He whooped with childish delight. ‘We made it!’ he cried, jetting around the cabin.
Koenig reached for the buttons again, about to depress one of them when the monitor signal light bleeped. The image of the Eagle Ship vanished. It was replaced with a clear picture of Sahn’s smiling features.
‘Alpha to Eagle One...’ she called. ‘Alpha to Eagle One...’ Evidently, she knew they were there. ‘Come in, Eagle One... Do you read me?’
Verdeschi stopped his celebrations and stood still once more by Koenig’s side. He beamed happily into the communicator. ‘We read you,’ he said, almost reverently. ‘And we see you, and we hear you!’
‘Eagle One to Alpha – go ahead!’ Koenig grinned, sure now that there was no mistaking that they had arrived. They had come back. They had travelled across Space and Time – and now he allowed himself a moment’s indulgence, to think of the woman he loved.
But behind him, behind the dark endless miles of Space, the ripples they had cast in the Time Pool were still expanding. The ripples spread out into the furthermost reaches of the stars, demanding that the physical laws of the Universe be satisfied, that the compensatory adjustments to the interweaving fabric of Matter and Time be made.
Time stretched again.
Somewhere, somehow, another helpless space craft was tossed on its dark waves. It was drawn into their wash and dragged down into the new Warp. Another helpless, Time-tossed capsule from a remote alien civilization...
The speeding Moon had got out of step and the disturbances it was creating were attracting a whole series of unlikely catastrophic events towards itself.
Space 1999 - The Time Fighters Page 6
