by E. C. Tubb
Mandela nodded and checked his hypodermic. As the girl stirred on the bed Regan said, sharply, “Wait!”
“Mark?”
“I want to see what happens. Let her come out of it.” He leaned over the bed. “Liz? Can you hear me? Wake up, Liz. Wake up!”
“Commander!” She smiled like a sleepy child, soft, warm, comfortable. “Mark Regan. I’m in love with you, Mark, did you know that? I’ve always been in love with you.” She turned and lifted her arms to embrace him, holding him fast about the neck as she pulled his head down towards her own. “But I’m so hungry, Mark,” she continued in a thin, whining tone. “So very hungry. Feed me, Mark. Feed me! Feed me!”
Her arms became circlets of steel, her mouth, open, a ruby-tinted cavern in which shone the whiteness of her teeth. Teeth that tore at his throat, breaking the skin, freeing blood that stained her lips, her chin, ran to dapple the smooth roundness of her shoulders.
“Liz!” Elna’s hand moved, flattened, the palm rammed over the gaping mouth, fingers and thumb upcurved safe from the snapping teeth. “Rob! Quickly!”
Mandela needed no urging. He stooped, the hypodermic in his hand darting towards the column of the girl’s throat, his finger triggering the mechanism that shot the drug into her bloodstream. A moment and then the arms locked around Regan’s neck fell away as, sighing, the girl lapsed into sedated rest.
*
To Adam Carver, a Pinnace was an extension of his being; its engines a supplement to his own, physical power, its armament a strengthening of his muscles, the computer maintaining its efficiency an actual part of his brain. Once in the control chair he became one with the machine, an attribute which had made him the finest pilot of his time and which had made him the head of his Section. As the chief pilot of Reconnaissance he was aware of his duties and responsibility.
As he was a part of the Pinnace he flew so also was he an extension of Moonbase. Its long-range eyes and hands and brain. An essential part of the complex that kept them all alive. And, if sometimes his duties were routine, well, they had to be done. And, always, for him it was a pleasure to be handling a Pinnace. Even on such a minor task as this.
Beside him Hal Barclay said, “A milk run, Adam. A collection job.”
“It could be worse.”
“Sure, we could be down there grubbing in the dust for those things Boardman says are seeds. Seeds!” His snort was indicative of his feelings in the matter. “They look more like ball-bearings to me. Say, how about that? Maybe that’s what they really are. Some joke, uh? The Professor trying to grow ball-bearing trees.”
Adam smiled, the joke was poor but he’d heard worse and Hal, while a little unthinking, knew his job. If he hadn’t he would never have been allowed to occupy the chair he did.
Only the best could be trusted with a Pinnace.
“Take over, Hal.” Relinquishing the controls Carver contacted the base. “Pierre? Adam here. Pinnace One now close to impact point. Any change in the orders?”
“No. Just pick up any of the spheres which may have been found, and bring them back to base.”
“The men too?”
“Yes. Later we’ll arrange to collect the wreckage and move it closer but for now it’ll do no harm where it is. How long will you be?”
“A few minutes. We’re not hurrying. I’m taking a routine sweep over the area to spot any new fissures. As yet nothing. I guess the impact was as soft as it seemed.”
On the screen Versin nodded. “Just as well for all of us. Things like that I can do without. Chess later on?”
“Sure, Pierre. Care to bet?”
“What’s the point, you always lose.”
“Not this time. I’ve been—” Carver broke off as Versin’s face tensed. “Pierre! Something wrong?”
“I’m not sure. I— Adam! Listen to this!”
It came from the speakers in a gurgling rush, voices trying to speak, to scream, to relay information, the whole lost in a blur of static. A background roar that blasted from the speakers like the rush of surf.
“It’s coming from the impact site,” yelled Versin. “Adam! Get there—fast!”
A few miles, the Pinnace responding to his touch like a living thing, vapour blasting from the tubes, more streaming from the retro-rockets as the velocity was cut and the Pinnace set to hover as both pilots searched the scarred terrain below.
“Nothing,” said Hal. “I can’t see a thing.”
“Keep looking.” Adam lowered the Pinnace. “Those men have to be somewhere.”
The roar from the speakers had died, replaced by a brooding silence, against which Versin’s voice rasped with mounting urgency.
“Hammond! Dumas! Answer. If you read me answer. Hammond! Dumas!”
Two men, neither responding, neither to be seen. As Carver swept the Pinnace over the impact area Hal drew in his breath then, almost immediately, shook his head.
“Nothing. I thought I saw a hint of movement but I guess it was our shadow passing over some rocks.”
“Where?” Carver sent the Pinnace to hover over the place. Shadows were possible, patches of dimness against the star-lit rocks, but it would take extraordinary eyes to spot the difference. “See anything?”
“No.”
Imagination, then, the most likely explanation. But there was none to account for the missing men.
“The dust,” suggested Barclay. “Maybe they fell into the dust.”
“Both of them?”
“One could have slipped and the other tried to save him. An outcrop of rock could have yielded and cost him his balance. Both could have been swallowed in a fraction of time.” Pausing he added, “Radios don’t work when deep under the dust.”
A logical explanation, but Carver wasn’t happy with it. Both men had been experienced surface workers and would have known better than to venture too close to any patch of dust unless having first taken all precautions. And, if they had, and one had slipped, the other would have been able to save him. Certainly he would have had time to make a report.
“Adam?” Versin looked from the screen. “Any luck?”
“No. Both men have vanished. Barclay thinks they fell into the dust.”
“He could be right.”
“Shall we land and search?”
“No!” Regan replaced Versin on the screen. “On no account land. Return and pick up a search party.”
“But those men, Commander. They could be hurt, maybe dying.”
“If so I don’t want you to join them.” Regan’s voice matched the hardness of his face. “Do as I order. Return immediately and pick up a search party. I’ll have it waiting.”
He was suited and with a dozen others on the loading dock when the Pinnace arrived. Without waste of time they thronged into the passenger module, Regan moving forward as the Pinnace lifted and headed back the way it had come.
“Commander!” Carver handed the controls over to Barclay. “Your orders?”
“None until I know what’s happened. Did you see anything? Anything at all?”
“No. Barclay thought he saw something move but it must have been a shadow. We looked but saw nothing.”
“Where was this?”
“By some rocks close to Schemiel.”
“Any marks on the dust?”
“Nothing new that I could see. The marks of the wreck’s passage are filling in and anything smaller would have smoothed out almost at once. You know how that stuff acts. It’s like water.” Carver added, “Would they have gone so close to the dust? Hammond was pretty cautious and Dumas never liked to take chances if he could help it.”
The reason both had been picked. Regan said, “If you’re wondering why I didn’t want you to land it was for two reasons. One I didn’t want you ruining any tracks there might be—the other you know. I—What’s the matter, Barclay?”
The Pinnace yawed a little, steadied as Carver took over the controls, levelling the craft and lifting it. In the co-pilot’s chair Barclay linked and shook his h
ead.
“Funny,” he said. “I could have sworn we were over Schemiel.”
“We are.” Carver was curt. “What’s the matter, Hal, can’t you read instruments anymore?”
“I can read them,” snapped Barclay. “If they register correctly. Ours must be all haywire. This can’t be Schemiel.”
“Don’t be a fool, man!”
“All right.” Barclay was stubborn. “If this is Schemiel where is the wreck?”
It had vanished. All of it. Below lay nothing but the crater, the broken rim-wall, the dust and starlit stone. The twisted remnants of the pod and tracery—all had gone.
CHAPTER 5
Boardman said, “When faced with the incredible first eliminate the impossible and then what is left, no matter how improbable, must be the answer.”
“Occam’s Razor,” said Regan sourly. “Or something like it.”
“Actually I think it is a quotation attributed to Sherlock Holmes,” said Boardman mildly. “Not that it matters. The advice is still good.”
Regan rose from his chair and strode across the floor of his office. Beyond the partition, now closed, the Control Room hummed with its usual activity, but here was an oasis of seclusion which he could change at any time to become one with the base.
“Trevor, it is impossible that the wreckage could have vanished without cause.”
“Agreed.” Boardman, sitting, toyed with a microcomputer. “There has to be a cause, but what? A natural volatisation? Could the effect of impact have triggered some ingrained chemical combination which resulted in an abrupt vaporisation of the substance?”
“You think it possible?”
“Mark, I hardly know what to think. The thing was alien and therefore, by definition, beyond our experience. I suppose that such a change in apparently adamantine material is possible, but only remotely so. I’d put it in the order of things which could happen but only because in a universe composed of an infinity of possibilities nothing is or can be impossible.”
Then, seeing Regan’s expression, he added, “I’m sorry. You aren’t in the mood for philosophy.”
“Not with two men dead, Trevor.”
“There is no doubt?”
“None.” Regan halted his pacing. “I knew that before I ordered the Pinnace not to land. Elna had reported that their life-monitors had ceased to function. In any case there isn’t the remotest chance of their being alive after all this time.”
Days in which the entire area around Schemiel had been searched inch by inch by teams of men roped together and guarded by others. Regan had been among them and his reddened eyes and haggard features told of his fatigue.
“Nothing!” The fist of one hand slammed into the palm of the other. “No traces, no signs, nothing but rock and dust. Something must have caused that wreckage to vanish and something must have killed those men.” He added, bitterly, “Aside from myself, of course, but if it hadn’t been for me they would still be alive.”
“You mean if I hadn’t persuaded you not to volatise the object,” said Boardman. “If it hadn’t been diverted those men would be alive now—is that what you’re thinking?”
“Isn’t it true?”
“Yes, it’s true enough, Mark, but why blame yourself? I was responsible, not you. They were collecting seeds on my orders, not yours.” Boardman looked at the computer in his hands and let it fall. It landed on the desk with a little thump. “Blame,” he said, bitterly. “Always we must take the blame. But is it our fault if we are unable to see into the future? Must ignorance always carry the burden of guilt?”
“How can you deny it? You—” Regan broke off, remembering how the man had lost his wife. Those with power must always carry the guilt—it was the price they paid for the authority they were given, but this was no time to open old wounds and to revive old pain. And Trevor had not been to blame. Only in his mind could he consider himself guilty for the crash that had taken her and left him to mourn. In a more even tone he said, “What’s happened is past. Recriminations serve no purpose. Two men are dead. I want to know who or what killed them and I’m not interested in philosophical abstractions. I want facts. Facts!”
They were too few. The recorded transcript of their last communication, Carver’s evidence, Barclay’s statement of a movement he’d spotted or thought he’d spotted. The mysterious vanishing of the wreckage.
The incredible.
Remove the impossible and what was left? And how to decide what was impossible?
“Nothing came from space,” said Boardman. “Even if it had been invisible and somehow lifted the wreckage we would have spotted an energy nexus. So it has to be a local phenomenon.”
“No lunar disturbance was registered,” said Regan. “And if a fissure had opened to swallow the men and then closed and opened again to engulf the wreckage there would have been traces. Eliminate that. Let’s listen to that recording again.”
It washed from the speakers, a sound now all too familiar by constant repetition, ghostly, somehow eerie, the words hopelessly distorted but carrying an unmistakable terror.
“We can’t clear it,” said Boardman as the recording came to an end. “I’ve been working on it together with others. It’s impossible to eliminate the background noise and isolate the words. If we could we might be able to break and blend them into some recognisable pattern.”
“Conclusion?”
“It wasn’t just noise. If it was we could achieve separation. The static, for want of a better term, was inherent in the broadcast. Those men must have been surrounded by an intensely powerful electromagnetic field which built resonance currents into their radios.”
“A field that had to originate somewhere.” Regan frowned. “The dust?”
“It does hamper radio transmission in a similar manner,” admitted Boardman. “But it is usually not so intense. And the broadcast was distorted from the beginning, don’t forget. If a man were falling he’d have time to shout a few clear words and certainly his companion would not have been affected. Not unless both fell at exactly the same time.”
“Not impossible but highly improbable,” said Regan, bitterly. “Trevor, this is getting us nowhere. We’re just speculating and making wild guesses. It isn’t good enough. I’ve got to find out what happened to those two men.”
The men and the wreckage—there was no place for such mysteries on the Moon.
*
Joshua Kanu wasn’t married to the computer but even so he took it to bed with him. A terminal had been installed in his room so that, even when relaxing, he was in close touch with the instrument that dominated his life.
Now, with its aid, he was solving a problem. “More data will be needed before a correlation can be made and a conclusion delivered,” said the machine. It had a soft and pleasing feminine voice, which he chose to use instead of the word-pictures thrown on a screen or the more customarily used printouts. Each had their place but for him the voice held a comfort. A fantasy as he would be the first to admit, but a harmless one. Warriors of all ages have named and personalised their weapons and steeds. Sportsmen the same with their vehicles.
Kanu had done no more than they. To think of the computer as a thing alive—well, who could say that it wasn’t?
No one—if they wanted to retain his friendship.
Now he gave the necessary figures, reading them from the lists compiled by the technicians who had measured the wreck. Data which provided a topological nightmare in its series of complex curves and which would have kept a skilled mathematician busy for weeks to achieve the essential exactitude.
Even the computer took a little time—a few seconds longer than it took Kanu to read the data.
He noted the answer.
More figures, this time relatively simple, the answer coming immediately. An equation, a mathematical exercise, figures which he correlated on his pad.
“Are you certain?”
“I fail to understand the question.” The voice, in his imagination, held a certai
n chill. “I am incapable of error.”
“Sorry.” The incongruity of apologising to a machine never occurred to him. “I meant that there is no possibility of an alternative solution?”
“The conclusion I supplied, based on the figures you gave, is correct.”
And unexpected. Kanu checked his notations and thoughtfully pursed his lips. In his world two and two should always make a nice, neat, understandable four and, if the answer was different, then something, somewhere was very wrong.
Lifting his communicator he activated the instrument and said to the operator, “Commander Regan, please.”
“He’s engaged. Will you hold or try again later?”
“I’ll hold.”
Regan had been talking to Reconnaissance, ordering Pinnaces to prepare for another search. As he lowered the communicator it hummed again and he looked at Kanu’s face.
“Yes?” He frowned at the answer. “Are you certain? Good. That’s excellent. Yes. Yes, of course, come immediately. I’m in my office.” To Boardman he said, “We may have found something. Kanu thinks so and I hope to God he’s right. It could be the solution to the mystery.”
It was based on an inconsistency as the technician explained when, minutes later, he joined the others in the large office. He sat at Regan’s invitation, clearing a space on the desk, pushing aside a litter of papers and empty containers of coffee.
“I was running routine data through the computer,” he said, “when something began to nag at me. You know how it is, Professor, something’s wrong, you don’t know what but you’d stake your life that it’s there. Well, with me it was like that. Something just didn’t seem to make sense so I did some digging.”
“And found?”
“Something odd, Commander. First I had the computer find me the exact volume of the interior of the wreck. Then the exact volume of one of the seeds. From those figures it was simple to determine how many seeds could have been carried within the pod. Naturally I requested optimum packing arrangements.”
“And so discovered the probable number of seeds carried.” Boardman nodded. “I’d run similar checks myself. The number of course, is high.”
