by E. C. Tubb
A reasonable explanation—how often did you meet the dead?
‘You were talking,’ said Koenig. ‘Did he tell you anything of value?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Try and remember. What was the last thing he said?’
‘Something about danger. He was worried about me. I had the impression that he thought we were in trouble of some kind.’
‘No details?’
‘None. It could have been a result of his disorientation. Maybe he imagined himself to be back in the astro-ship. We know the engines must have failed and if it fell into Jupiter’s gravity well—’
Death, and no way to stop it. A long, long drop through turbulent atmosphere, pressure mounting, the hull yielding, flattening—a hell of a way to die.
‘Did you mention Terra Nova to him at all?’
Another woman would, perhaps, have flushed a little, she did not. Meeting his eyes she said, steadily, ‘Yes, I did. I wanted to reassure him and spoke of plans we had made in the past. Hopes we had had. If you want the details?’
‘No.’ He could guess what they must have been. The fluffy ball, the music box—had she once knitted garments for babies which never came? ‘How was he then, calm?’
‘No, he—’ she paused, frowning. ‘I think he touched me,’ she said, slowly. ‘Lifted his hands to my shoulders and looked at me. I remember his eyes. That’s the last thing I remember, his eyes.’
‘And the Eagle?’
‘Nothing.’
A continuing lack of information. Koenig drew in his breath and said, ‘Doctor, are you certain, quite certain, that he is your husband?’
‘Of course—aren’t you?’
Bergman was waiting in the medical section. As Koenig joined him he lifted a sheaf of prints.
‘These might decide something, John. They are thermographic X-rays I took of Lee Russell. Normally they would have been passed to Helena for analysis, but Mathias decided they might disturb her. You’ll see why in a moment.’
He clipped one of the plates on an illuminated panel and Koenig studied it. It showed the various internal organs in a wide range of colour which covered the heat-spectrum.
‘It looks normal to me.’
‘Yes, but now look at this.’ Bergman placed another plate beside the first. It was flat, almost monochrome, sharp distinctions lost in a general yellowish overlay.
‘That isn’t a thermograph of a living man.’
‘Yet they both came from the same source.’
‘Russell?’
‘Yes, and now you know why we didn’t want Helena to see them. The sight of Russell upset her more than we know. A part of her knows that his presence is impossible, but another part wants him to be alive. The scientist versus the woman, John. I suggest we let the woman win.’
Koenig said, ‘These scans—were they both taken at the same time?’
‘No. This one,’ Bergman touchcd the first, ‘was taken shortly after they arrived. Helena was with him. The other was taken after she had fainted and was carried to her quarters.’
‘Yet Russell appears to be normal?’
‘Sleeping, but normal, yes, John. The question now seems to be whether he is alive or dead.’
‘And the answer?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bergman admitted. ‘My eyes tell me he’s alive and well and completely human. Logic tells me he can’t be. And yet there’s always a doubt. If, for example, he managed to reach Terra Nova and managed to live there for five years, he could be as we see him. As far as we know the planet could easily sustain life. The difference in his metabolism could be explained by the necessity to adapt to the new environment.’
Koenig said, impatiently, ‘You’re a scientist, Victor. You know that no human could change so much in a life-time let alone five years.’
‘On Earth, no, John, but we’re a long way from our little sector of space. We can’t begin to believe that we know it all. Odd things can happen and, perhaps, this is one of them.’
‘The astro-ship was monitored. It disintegrated in the atmosphere of Jupiter. As the computer says it would have been impossible for Russell to have survived let alone reach Terra Nova. And how did he enter the Eagle?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There’s too damn much we don’t know!’ Koenig stared at the plates. ‘This, for example. Why the change when Helena was absent? Is he sucking her life-force in some way? And what about the pilots? Any change in their condition as yet?’
‘No.’
‘Let’s do some imagining,’ said Koenig. ‘Let’s assume that something from Terra Nova managed to enter the ship. After it lifted it—grew. To do that it needed energy and drained the electronic systems. It also almost killed Parks and Bannion. And then what?’ He paused, remembering. ‘Helena was the first one to touch him. She turned his head and held it, right?’
Bergman nodded. ‘So?’
‘So before she turned that head and looked at that face—what did it look like?’
A question Bergman pondered then he said, slowly, ‘You’re thinking of an amorphous creature which can, somehow, adapt its shape to mental stimulus. An alien form of life which feeds on energy. It would account for the collapse of the pilots, life is basically electrical, and it is possible that such a thing could have a rudimentary form of telepathy. A clever theory, John, but it isn’t the answer.’
‘Why not?’
‘It doesn’t fit all the facts. You’re forgetting something. When we found Russell he was fully dressed and wearing the uniform of the Astro Seven Mission. Real clothes, we removed them.’
‘Damn!’ Koenig thought he’d had the solution. An alien form of life, no matter how strange, was something which could be understood and handled. Now he was back at the beginning and, if anything, the mystery was greater than before. He snatched impatiently at his commlock as it signalled.
‘What is it?’
‘Security, Commander. Lee Russell has gone berserk!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
He stood in the care unit among a litter of broken equipment, smashed glass, metal twisted and bent, a man lying supine against one wall, another attendant moaning as he nursed a broken arm.
Before him stood Mathias, a hypogun in his hand, ready to give a numbing injection should he get the chance. His voice was calm, soothing.
‘You should be resting Lee. Why don’t you just let me help you. We all want to help you.’
‘I want Helena!’
‘In a moment. First you must—’
‘I want my wife!’ A rack of instruments crashed to the floor as Russell slammed his hand against it, metal clasps ripping as if they had been made of paper. A display of insane strength. ‘I want Helena!’
Mathias stepped back and glanced at the security men who stood to either side. They were armed with stun-guns lifted ready to fire. One of them glanced at the doctor.
‘You’re not going to calm him down, sir. Shall we knock him out?’
‘No!’ Koenig had heard the question as he entered the compartment, Bergman at his heels. ‘Do that and he’ll be out for hours.’ He glanced at Mathias. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know, Commander. I left Russell apparently asleep and went to clear up some details on his file. I heard a crash and a yell. When I came in the place was as you see it. The attendants must have tried to restrain him. I called security and tried to talk him back to bed. I failed. All he seems to want is his wife.’
‘Get her.’
‘But—’
‘Get her!’
She arrived wearing pyjamas, her hair dishevelled, her face pale. Without hesitation she walked to where Russell stood, a nurse tending a patient, a mother soothing a child.
‘It’s all right, Lee. Everything is all right. No one is going to hurt you.’
‘Helena!’ He became abruptly calm. ‘I needed you and you came. You came.’
‘Yes, darling.’ Taking his hand she led him towards the bed, halting as K
oenig stepped before her.
Looking at the man he said, flatly, ‘It’s time we had a talk.’
‘Commander!’
‘And we’re going to have it now.’ Koenig ignored the woman’s protest. ‘We’ll use your office, Mathias. Helena, you’d better leave us. Guards, watch him close.’
‘I’m not leaving.’ She was stubborn. ‘He needs me.’
The eternal appeal to any woman’s heart. For a moment Koenig hesitated, then decided not to argue. And her presence could be valuable in calming the man. Already he was docile, his previous rage dissipated. As Mathias went to tend the injured Koenig shrugged.
‘If you insist, Doctor. But on no account will you interfere.’
The office was small, compact, files at the walls, a table in the centre, chairs on which they sat. Russell faced Koenig, the two guards at his rear, Bergman to one side, Helena the other.
Without preamble Koenig said, ‘Russell, what are you doing here?’
‘I had to come.’
‘From where?’
‘The planet which you call Terra Nova. How I came isn’t important.’
‘Let me decide that. How did you get to Terra Nova in the first place?’
‘I don’t know.’ Russell looked from one to the other. ‘I just don’t know. I simply can’t remember.’
‘What happened out there near Jupiter?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How did you get to Terra Nova?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then what the hell do you know?’ Koenig made an effort to master his anger. Rage, now, would get him nowhere. ‘Listen,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve over three hundred men and women to take care of. We can live on that planet and we’ve got to start moving soon if we hope to evacuate the base. I need you to—’
‘No!’
‘No, what?’
‘You can’t live on that planet. You mustn’t go near it. Don’t you understand what I am saying? You mustn’t go near it.’
Something concrete at last. Bergman said, ‘Why not? Is it inhabited?’
‘No . . . yes . . . not in the way you think. I warn you to stay away.’
‘Why?’
‘There is danger. It will destroy you.’
‘What and how?’ snapped Koenig.
‘It is there. You must believe me.’
Fog again, words which meant nothing, vagueness which covered—what?
Koenig said, curtly, ‘You aren’t making sense. As far as we know the planet is suitable to support our kind of life. You are living proof of that if—’ He broke off, not adding the qualification, conscious of Helena and her watching eyes. If Russell, as he suspected was not human, then it would be cruel to break her illusion. Instead he ended, lamely, ‘we can believe the evidence of our eyes. Can we?’
‘You ask too much, Commander.’
‘Then I’ll make it simple. We intend to land on Terra Nova and start a new life. Can we survive?’
‘No.’
‘Explain why not.’
‘Explanations.’ Russell looked down at his hands where they rested on his lap. His eyes lifted, moved to Helena, back to Koenig. ‘What can I tell you? I have warned you—that is enough.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t believe me. You’ll go to Terra Nova no matter what I say.’ Russell looked at his hands again as if seeing them for the first time. ‘In that case there is nothing more I can do. But you have been warned—remember that.’
He slumped a little, his head falling back, his eyes turning to empty windows in a deserted house. The hands which had been lying in his lap fell to dangle limply at his sides.
‘Victor!’
Koenig knew the answer even before the man made his report.
Russell was dead.
He had gone like the flame of a blown-out candle, the spirit, the go, vanishing to leave nothing but an empty husk over which Mathias and Bergman would later work. Cutting, slicing, probing, examining, conducting an autopsy which could provide some answers.
Helena, to Koenig’s relief, took it well.
She had bathed and changed and tidied her hair and now sat in her quarters looking at a photograph of a man playing with a dog. Lee Russell with a pet now probably long dead but still alive in the trapped moment. As the man was alive. As, perhaps, he would never die.
‘Helena, I’m sorry.’ It was, he realized, the first time he had used her given name, but it seemed natural, the moment did not belong to the stiff formality of routine.
‘It’s all right,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve been over it a dozen times. I don’t blame you for what happened. I can’t.’
‘The interrogation was essential, you know that, but if I’d waited a little, not been so impatient.’ Koenig glanced at the photograph. ‘It could have had something to do with it.’
‘Could, John, we simply don’t know. Maybe we shall never know. You did what you had to do. Lee . . . Lee just died. That’s all there is to it.’
‘The autopsy might tell us something.’
‘Perhaps. As a doctor I’m naturally interested, but as Lee’s wife, I want to forget the whole thing.’ She paused, looking at the man playing with the dog and then said, softly, ‘The first time I lost him I thought I’d never survive. We’d been so close, made so many plans, nothing mattered after they told me. I just wanted to go away and find a corner and creep inside it. To shut myself away from everything and everyone. The sound of laughter, couples, the smile a man gave to his companion—all was pain. That’s why I took up the position here. I had to get away.
That, at least, they had in common, but Koenig said nothing, waiting.
‘Now it’s happened again,’ she whispered. ‘And yet it isn’t the same. Now I feel numb. Disappointed, but numb. I suppose that I never really believed I had got him back. Not deep down inside.’
The womanly intuition which had warned her that the man had not been what he seemed. The instinctive rejection, overriden by her own need to find out what he had represented, love, affection, the intimacy of close association.
Koenig’s hand lifted, hovered an inch over the shining mass of her hair, lowered as he resisted the temptation to touch its enticing softness.
‘I’m glad, Helena,’ he said. ‘Glad that you aren’t suffering as much as you might.’
‘I’ve been through that, John. I’ve already learned to live without him.’ The photograph made a brittle sound as she placed it face-down on the table. ‘And we have work to do.’
Work, the universal anodyne, and there was much to do. Parks and Bannion had recovered, oddly at the same time Russell had died, but they could contribute little.
‘They felt a sudden drop in temperature,’ Bergman said. ‘Both experienced a retinal flash and that’s all they remember.’
‘The Eagle?’
‘Was sealed when they left it after landing. Nothing of any size could have entered the command module without them knowing it. And we found Russell in the passenger compartment, don’t forget. That was closed—you opened it yourself.’
Koenig nodded. ‘The autopsy?’
‘We haven’t started yet, but I’ve taken some external samples. The epidermis is most unusual. When Russell was alive it seemed to be normal, but now it’s undergoing a change. The texture is hardening as if some form of crystalization is taking place. And this is a reversal of polarity.’
‘Such as?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’ Bergman frowned as he moved about his laboratory. ‘Living tissue simply can’t act that way, but I remember some experiments conducted by Professor Feldon at the Deimos Laboratory. He found a vein of peculiar ore which was unstable in a peculiar manner. The application of intense magnetic fields coupled with a surge-pattern of electronic stress resulted in the formation of something close to anti-matter.’
Koenig frowned. He knew the theory of reversed atomic electronic charges—a state in which the proton held a negative, not positive charge as was usual in normal ma
tter.
‘Anti-matter,’ he said. ‘If it comes into contact with ordinary matter the result would be an explosion of tremendous magnitude.’
‘Theoretically, yes,’ admitted Bergman. ‘But Feldon found there was an intermediate state in which there was a literal cancelling out. The energy released was high, but not in the anticipated order of magnitude which had been predicted. The things which worries me is that the samples I took from Russell seem to be following that pattern. It is almost as if the force which had held them in normal form are now dissipating and allowing them to revert. If the reversed polarity should progress to a point where it is in direct opposition to ordinary matter—John, could that be what he was trying to warn us about?’
‘Terra Nova made of anti-matter? Impossible.’
‘So is a dead man appearing within a closed ship,’ reminded Bergman.
‘Lee Russell wasn’t a man and we both know it.’ Koenig was impatient. ‘And the planet can’t be made of anti-matter or the Eagle which landed would have been immediately destroyed. It wasn’t. Parks and Bannion both went outside. They took samples. Be logical, Victor, could that have happened if what you suspect is true?’
‘No, John, I admit it couldn’t.’ Bergman moved around his laboratory, touching a piece of equipment, a plan. Without looking at Koenig he said, ‘Maybe you had better wait before sending down the preliminary team.’
‘Wait?’
‘Until we are certain nothing is wrong down there. Lee worried me and I’ll admit it. He—’
‘Lee Russell wasn’t a man.’
‘It then, does it matter?’ Bergman turned, his face serious. ‘Why did it appear, John? Let’s think about it. What did he do—let’s call it he, it’s easier. What purpose could there have been behind the whole incident?’
‘Life needs no purpose other than the need to survive.’
‘True, but in that he failed. He gave us a warning and then simply died. Died or went away or did what he had to do. The warning, John. Remember the warning.’
