‘You get anything more from her?’ Maya asked.
‘Only the name of the planet – Sunim. Don’t ask me how she came to know that though. When I try to push her she starts to get upset again. She’s in the Hydroponics Section. Just for safety, I put a guard on her.’
Maya mused thoughtfully behind her console. ‘Sunim,’ she repeated the word. ‘That’s Minus... spelled backwards. Interesting...’
Koenig looked sharply at her. ‘That fit with anything you’ve come up with?’
‘It might.’ She hit a button in front of her, and they looked to the Big Screen. The video scan that Maya had taken of the temple interior flashed up. The tape panned from pillar to pillar in the gloom, showing the barely discernible evolutionary drawings. They studied the drawings intently.
‘This was on a stone pillar,’ Maya informed them.
‘What’s it supposed to represent?’ Verdeschi asked, leaving his console and moving closer to the screen.
‘They depict the whole evolutionary process of Man – beginning with his emergence from a sea of turbulent, primeval slime, then advancing through all the stages of development... Simian, Australopithecus, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon to Modern...’
The screen went completely dark as the tape panned elsewhere. Then, the dim, scorched outlines of the human figures began to appear – on the floor, the walls and even the ceiling.
‘They look human enough,’ Koenig observed uncomfortably.
‘They look human enough John. I don’t know if they are,’ Maya told him.
‘What are you saying, Maya?’ Koenig quizzed.
‘It’s just a theory. Somewhere up the ladder of development – at some period in time – something happened.’ She paused as the silent images of doom moved dramatically across the screen. ‘Life stopped. There was a violent death...’
‘A war?’ Verdeschi suggested.
‘You might call it a war – of a sort. Whoever they were, they must have died in a searing burst of some kind of energy. That would account for the scorch marks.’
‘Yet our sensors said there were no life forms on Sunim. They still say so,’ Verdeschi pondered.
‘Explanation?’ Koenig leaned towards Maya.
The Psychon pulled a face of incredulity. ‘I know it’s mind boggling, but my theory – based on what I’ve seen and computer hypotheses – is, we’re dealing with a conflict of antimatter against matter.’
The Command Centre went silent as the screen continued its grim documentary. An air of death and the despair of the dead phantoms it revealed swept into the room. They shivered.
The two large cabinets came into view.
‘This is an accelerator,’ Maya told them before anyone could ask her. ‘It was set up in the temple. I’ve seen a similar design only once before – on Psychon.’
Koenig and Verdeschi glanced at one another, neither having realized that so much was in fact known about the temple and its workings. They looked pleased.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ Koenig told her. ‘What’s its function?’
‘Used to attempt conversion of anti-matter into a matter form,’ Maya replied.
Koenig grinned wryly. ‘My simple mind is boggled,’ he said. ‘Please elucidate.’
Before she could reply, Verdeschi reached out and lifted a chair. He banged it down in front of the smiling Koenig. ‘This is made up of particles of matter...’ He looked around him for something else to bang. He banged his hand against the side of Maya’s console. ‘And this.’
‘Even this!’ Maya laughed, clouting Verdeschi’s bobbing head. ‘You don’t have to be a genius to understand that..!’
Verdeschi glowered at her. ‘For every particle of matter –there’s a balancing particle of anti-matter. It’s known as the Law of Symmetry...’ He rubbed his head and grinned at Koenig.
‘In plain words,’ Maya finished off his sentence for him, ‘nature always maintains a balance. In theory, we live in the world of matter so... there must be an anti-matter world.’
‘Existing where?’ an astonished operative who had been listening called from the back of the Centre.
‘Here. Now,’ Verdeschi replied.
The operative looked doubly puzzled. ‘Occupying our space?’
‘Occupying its own anti-space,’ Koenig told him, laughing outright. ‘I know all this elementary stuff,’ he chastized Verdeschi and Maya good-naturedly. For the sake of the operative he continued with his explanation. ‘If an anti-matter being were standing here... my hand would go straight through him.’ He demonstrated, and the astounded operative gulped.
‘Like a ghost?’ he asked.
Maya nodded. ‘You might call an anti-matter being that...’
‘Would it be so terrible if the anti-matter beings came through to our world?’ the operative asked with a sudden shrewdness that unnerved them all.
Maya hit a button. The tape rewound and the pictures on the screen became a blurr. She stabbed another button and the tape stopped, showing the outline of one of the scorched figures. ‘Trouble is... matter and anti-matter beings are incompatible,’ she continued her lecture. As he grasped her meaning, the operative looked horrified. ‘If they come into contact, they destroy each other. This shows what must have happened at this stage. But their machine for conversion –this generator – failed...’
She stabbed another button and the tape spun on. She stopped it at a picture of the equipment bank. They could see that it too had been damaged by some great force exploding inside the temple.
Koenig frowned. ‘There’s still a more frightening principle – maintaining the balance. For every anti-matter being that comes into our world, one of us has to be sent to theirs...’ He eyed Maya. ‘Nobody could have known at the time... but when you and Shermeen entered that temple, you probably walked into a hostile anti-matter world.’ His eyes flicked back to the screen and the cabinets. There was a mixture of respect and awe in his voice now. ‘They came close – too close. With a nuclear generator they might have made it...’
He was still musing wonderingly at the screen when the full content of his own words hit him. Without thinking deeply about them, he had merely stated the obvious – it would take a nuclear generator! Thoughts connected inside his head and almost exploded ‘Maya! Get Frazer! Ground all Eagle Ships until further notice!’ he yelled. As the Psychon went into action he punched out the frequency of the guard he had posted outside the Hydroponics Section. There was no reply.
He and Verdeschi eyed one another in alarm and launched themselves out of their seats. They ran from the Centre, watched tensely by Maya; she was trying to tell them that she could get no response from Frazer.
They raced along the polished, featureless corridors, down Dunlop Starglide travellators and through endless Sections and fire doors.
But they were too late.
The Hydroponics Section door was open... in itself a severe breach of safety regulations, something no Alphan in his right mind would do. Just as no Alphan would decline to answer his commlock, unless prevented by circumstances beyond his control.
They ran inside and through the impeding compartments, all of which had been left open and their atmospheres allowed to intermingle. In one, they found the body of a stores’ assistant from the Equipment Section, Potter, slumped in a bed of marrows. Further on, in the next compartment lay the body of the guard, covered in the remains of a slimy, decaying plant which seemed to have collapsed on top of him.
The air reeked of a vile scent that had them clutching at their stomachs. Retching nauseously, they scraped off the sticky residue of the plant and dragged the unfortunate guard clear. Both guard and assistant looked as though they would be unconscious for some time, and without waiting for them to come round, Koenig commlocked Helena.
Instead, he got Maya. She had intercepted and she looked deathly serious. ‘John, Shermeen has taken off with Frazer in Eagle One... and I’ve just had a report from the Equipment Section. A miniaturized nuclear gen
erator is missing...’
Koenig clenched his jaws tightly, and nodded. He looked in a bad humour. ‘I know. We’ve been caught with our pants down. I’ll meet you on board Eagle Two in three minutes. In the meantime, prepare her for immediate lift-off!’
Beyond the substance of the positive universe, beyond the material state of tables and chairs, beyond consoles and Eagle Ships, beyond stars and the frozen swirls of distant nebulae, beyond life and love; the ghostly, shadowy denizens of the anti-matter universe shrieked, howled and clamoured to escape their dying world.
Vindrus’ long and drawn, yet strikingly handsome face smiled through the darkness of the Temple at Shermeen. His calm, twinkling eyes expressed only kindness and she felt a wave of happiness and physical satisfaction break over her. Maya, Tony Verdeschi, the Moon Base and all the trials and tribulations it held for her did not seem important now. It seemed to her that she had developed into a new, more mature woman. She looked gladly back on the younger and less enlightened one that Vindrus had helped her to banish.
‘You have done well,’ the ghost praised her with his evil heart – and she glowed. The heavy nuclear generator lay on the floor by the side of the two acceleration cabinets where she had rolled it. It had taken all of her small strength to get it from the Eagle to the Temple. It was marked with the warning symbol for radioactivity as well as the legend: ‘Property of Moon Base Alpha’. The lethal, stupendous force that was stored inside it would soon be used to activate the transmitting and receiving powers of the cabinets. For what reason, she had not yet been told.
The terminals of the fat, heavy-duty cables leading from the generator were bolted into place on the equipment console. Soon she had the generator functioning, and under Vindrus’s guidance, began setting the operating controls.
‘Turn the green dial a fraction more to the right,’ he instructed her. ‘Excellent!’
‘Is the machine set now?’ she asked.
He nodded silently. ‘All that remains is for me to come into your world, Shermeen... and then we can be together. Quickly, you must hurry into your cabinet. The power is building up.’
She hesitated, the first suggestion of caution coming to her. But her faith in her new guru overrode her feelings. She was determined not to show herself up now by chickening out just at the moment when he most needed her. She had done that on too many other occasions in her life.
Bravely, she swung open the transparent door of the casement, and climbed inside. Almost immediately, she regretted her decision. The air was icy – feeling more like freezing liquid than air. It clung to her skin and she struggled to escape, but her limbs had paralyzed. She lacked even the strength to hold off the door which slowly closed.
‘Let me out!’ she screamed, but her voice could not carry from her prison. In front of her, she could see the other cabinet. Vindrus’s smiling, transparent form had materialized inside it. But no amount of false comforts from him could allay her mortal fear now. His hold over her had gone. For all their faults, in the clear cold gloom of the acceleration cabinet, she wished for nothing more than to see the friendly, reassuring faces of her fellow Alphans.
As the power from the generator built up, she began to lose her bodily senses. Her thoughts grew distant and then indecipherable. An incredible pain tore at her being, and she lost the complete sense of who or where she was. For a timeless period she floated in limbo, as the fierce currents of the transmitting energy forced her discorporate atoms across the boundaries that had once separated her material body from the anti-matter universe. Then she came gradually together again and she awoke as though from a terrifying dream.
A small part of her psyche had still clung resolutely inside the cabinet. The rest of her being hung somewhere behind her in the dark, cold void. It seemed as though she had been reborn into a world which had run itself down, and now waited for its final energies to exhaust themselves. The desperate, protesting voices of its unseen inhabitants jabbered and chattered in the background.
Vindrus had left his cabinet and stood in front of her. He looked whole and fleshy. A radiant smile – a smile not so much of innocent happiness as smug triumph – was on his face. ‘You will not be harmed, Shermeen. I will keep my word.’
But she did not believe him. She struggled desperately to reassert herself in the world he had usurped from her, but to no avail. In her world, the world she once loved, she was now as ill-equipped to live as a fish out of water.
Vindrus suddenly looked apprehensive. He had heard something and turned to face the steps leading out of the Temple. ‘The Alphans!’ she heard him mutter. ‘They will soon be here!’ He turned back to her but this time he did not look at her. He glanced sharply past her – at his anti-matter friends. ‘Take her down!’ he commanded.
‘No! No!’ Shermeen’s being cringed with terror as she felt her last, grasping link with the real world being severed. ‘Please, I want to stay...’ But it was too late.
Chilling, leprous hands reached up for her and they pulled her away.
Koenig, Helena and Verdeschi crashed through the undergrowth towards the Temple. They had left Eagle Two in the clearing next to Eagle One. A cursory examination of Bill Frazer had led them to conclude that he was under some kind of trance, and they had left him there until they got back.
‘We must stop Shermeen being sent across!’ Koenig shouted as they ran. ‘Not only for her sake, but for everyone else’s too! The positive material universe can’t take a mass exodus from the anti-matter universe!’
The silent, lush vegetation thinned out and the Temple came into view. At their noisy approach, the Thaed sent out a warning roar. Verdeschi raised his laser and moved forward, but Koenig restrained him. ‘No, Tony! Leave this to me!’
He waved Verdeschi and Maya back, and pushed his way onto the smooth, oddly picturesque lawn. The Thaed snarled and shook and lowered its head in annoyance. Long, rumbling and complaining sounds issued from its immense body. The Temple and lawn shook optically as it charged, but the shaking sensations were not transmitted through the ground. They seemed to be a purely mental phenomenon. Koenig advanced coolly towards the lumbering monster, boldly presenting himself as a target. He hoped to all that was good in the world that he was not mistaken in his assumptions.
Verdeschi moved towards him in alarm, but Maya dragged him back. ‘No... I think I know why he’s doing it. Trust him.’
Verdeschi’s mind boggled with a mixture of disbelief and horror at what he saw taking place. ‘W-we can’t...’ he stammered. Then, the amazing took place. The giant Thaed and the small, helpless figure of the Commander connected – and nothing happened.
The Thaed, for all its puffing and blowing, was a ghost.
‘How did you know?’ the Italian gasped. He ran forward nevertheless to feel Koenig and to make sure that he was as unaffected as he looked.
Koenig smiled. ‘The scan showed no life form on Sunim. It had to be an apparition...’
‘John!’ Maya stepped forward suddenly. She was staring at the temple steps with a look of apprehension on her face.
They turned.
A tall, gaunt figure dressed in a white tunic was standing quietly before them. ‘Welcome to Sunim!’ the figure smiled imperiously. ‘Your sensors were mistaken. There is life here.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘Another apparition?’ Verdeschi asked cynically.
‘Only one way to find out...’ Koenig replied. He moved toward the figure, followed by the others. He reached the head of the steps where the figure stood, and stopped. He extended his hand in greeting. ‘I’m Commander Koenig from Moon Base Alpha.’
Vindrus’s calm features looked hesitant. His expression turned to one of puzzlement.
‘It’s a custom where I come from to shake hands in greeting,’ Koenig explained pointedly.
The figure nodded and smiled as though in sudden understanding. ‘Ah, yes.’ He reached out and shook the proffered hand. ‘Welcome to Sunim. My name is Vindrus.’
> Koenig winced at the painful pressure of Vindrus’s grip and was thankful when the alien desisted. He glanced at Verdeschi and Maya.
‘Welcome?’ Koenig recovered himself and looked scathingly at the Thaed that was bellowing in rage and still making repeated charges through them.
‘Ah, Thaed!’ Vindrus declared casually. ‘He only restricts access to the Temple.’
‘Thaed...’ Koenig repeated tautly. ‘Death... backwards. An apparition, Vindrus. You know it – we know it.’
‘Your powers of scientific perception are amazing,’ Vindrus responded with mild, platonic sarcasm.
Koenig ignored him. ‘We’re looking for one of our people – a girl. She landed on this planet a short while ago... and she’s no apparition,’ he added firmly.
Vindrus looked queryingly at them. ‘And you think she may have... wandered inside the temple?’
‘Has she?’ Verdeschi asked, piqued.
Vindrus appeared taken aback. ‘You’re obviously all very sceptical.’ He shrugged and stepped inside. ‘Why not investigate for yourself?’
Koenig didn’t need to be asked twice, and he led the way down the steps into the temple. ‘Look around for her...’ he instructed Maya and Verdeschi in a scarcely audible whisper. While they darted into the gloom amongst the cabinets and the frescoes he stayed close to Vindrus, making a visual search of the dim premises.
‘As you can see, this girl you speak of is not here,’ Vindrus commented after a few moments. He was about to continue with his confident patter, designed to delude them, when Maya called sharply out of the shadows.
‘John! The generator is here.’
Vindrus’s face tightened. Koenig shot him a look of disgust and ran to join Maya and Verdeschi who had gathered round the cabinets. He made a brief examination of the generator, and turned angrily back to Vindrus. ‘Where is she?’
Space 1999 - The Space-Jackers Page 9
