‘What was it, John?’ Helena asked, white-faced while she helped one of the medics.
Koenig winced at the application of a disinfected swab. ‘The casing must have blown-up... under tremendous in-built internal stresses. Probably my own stupid fault for injecting the nitrogen.’
A sudden, horrified shout came from one of the Decontamination Squad. ‘Commander! Over here, if you can!’
Alarmed, Koenig pulled himself away from the medic and walked shakenly through the shattered partition to the missile. He braced himself to expect an unpleasant sight, and glanced down into the ruptured side. There lay the head and shoulders of a young boy – rimmed and solid with frost. His eyes bulged open in an opaque stare, and his lips were stretched in the ghastly rictus of the dead.
He turned away, sick with horror and grief.
‘What is it, John?’ Helena asked, reacting to his appalled expression. She walked slowly through.
‘Whatever, whoever it... he... is inside there... it’s humanoid. We’ve just killed him...’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The boy was young, no more than eighteen, Helena hazarded. He had a face of almost cherubic innocence, with fair curly hair. At one time he had possessed a youthful flair and energy just like any other youngster. He wore a bright yellow tunic with a red band across it. He was about her own height.
She and Ben Vincent stared at him through the plastic survival tent that had been erected around his bed. Each, at one time or another, on Earth, had had children of their own, and they were grief-sticken. A mass of leads and tubes connected the boy to the banks of regulators and monitors behind him. In the foreground, a red rubber breathing bag feebly inflated and deflated.
‘Start the fibulator,’ Helena told the other doctor. Vincent nodded and activated it. As he did so, Koenig strode anxiously into the room. ‘He’s alive, John,’ she told him before he could ask. ‘Just.’
‘Impossible!’ Koenig breathed. ‘The liquid nitrogen we injected into that container should have frozen him to death...’
‘It seems that he was already in deep freeze when you opened the cylinder,’ Helena informed him. ‘Cryobiology, John. The application of freezing techniques to living tissue.’
A change on one of the oscilloscopes recording the boy’s heart-rate made her start forward. ‘Increase the fibulator voltage. He’s fading.’
Koenig frowned. ‘You mean there’s no chance he’s going to make it?’
‘We still can’t assess the effects of the explosion,’ Vincent told him.
Koenig was thoughtful. Suddenly, he spun round and jabbed at a communicator button. Verdeschi’s face appeared on the tiny wall screen. ‘Tony... I want another container brought down. Fast.’
‘Prepare transporter Eagle for launching,’ Verdeschi’s voice came over, as he passed on the instruction. He looked back towards the camera. ‘Any particular container?’
Koenig paused. ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘The twin of the one we’ve got.’
Helena looked up as Verdeschi clicked off. ‘Why bring another one down? We don’t know how to unseal them.’
Koenig indicated the dying boy. ‘He can tell us how to open that container... keep him alive.’
Helena looked indignant at this. ‘I’m a Doctor, John. I save life for the sake of saving life.’
Koenig’s mind had been operating on a totally different level. ‘These people have the secret of travel in space,’ he told her. ‘Some day our survival may depend on knowing that secret.’
Helena relented. ‘We have part of the answer already. A plastic membrane covering the whole body.’
Koenig reacted keenly, and peered through the tenting.
‘You can’t see it,’ Helena said. ‘It’s as fine as tissue... but strong...’ Her attention was drawn back to the falling heart-rate. ‘Double the voltage,’ she told Vincent.
The other, older Doctor looked up sharply. ‘You’ll kill him!’ he declared.
‘Double it! And quick!’ she snapped.
Vincent turned the dial rapidly. A needle on the fibulator swung over alarmingly into the red.
Helena stared anxiously at the oscilloscope tube in front of her. The wave representing the heart beat gave a sudden double blip and she smiled. She walked to the bed and removed the tent, the tubes and the oxygen mask. ‘He’s going to be OK,’ she declared warmly.
They gathered a respectful distance round the boy and watched him. His eyes flickered open and he looked from side to side. A struggle seemed to take place inside him and his beautiful young features creased. ‘Cantar...’ he gasped weakly, almost inaudibly. ‘My name is Cantar.’
Koenig leaned forward urgently. ‘Cantar...’
‘My people... save my people...!’ the boy whispered with more force.
‘We will if you help us...’ Koenig told him gently.
The creased features eased and the boy seemed to relax as he heard this. He tried to sit up, to see who Koenig was, but couldn’t. ‘The others... have you sighted the others?’ he asked.
Koenig patted his blanketed body. ‘They’re in orbit around our base.’
The boy strained suddenly again in alarm. ‘You... must... recover them,’ he gasped. ‘Immediately... the cylinders...’
‘John!’ Helena called out urgently. ‘Let him rest.’
Koenig withdrew himself from the bedside and glanced at the oscilloscope. The peaks were reducing again, but he turned to Helena nevertheless. ‘We have to know, Helena.’
Cantar’s eyelids flickered open again. He spoke very weakly indeed now, and they had to bend close to listen. ‘They are not constructed to withstand gravitational forces. They will shatter if left in orbit...’
‘How do we open them without blowing them apart?’ Koenig asked, pressing himself even closer to the boy’s mouth to hear the reply.
Helena crossed her arms in anger behind him.
‘You... must relieve the internal pressure by heating the capsule from outside...’ At that, the boy sank again into a deep, semi-comatose sleep, and now Helena intervened more, firmly.
‘No more,’ she told Koenig adamantly. ‘You’ve had as much out of him as I’m going to allow you for now.’
‘Right, Doc,’ Koenig arose from where he had been crouching. He had the information he wanted. As he rose to leave, he pecked her on the cheek, but angrily she waved him away.
Another of the grey, fluted containers lay before him. This one had been easier to bring down – now that it was known that it wasn’t armed. But just for safety’s sake it was being opened by remote-control again, in a new laboratory.
‘Heat seven points of maximum,’ Maya called out from her position at the controls. A strong, red light bathed the craft, giving it the equivalent of a good roasting.
‘Kill it,’ Koenig decided. The heat treatment was stopped and the group of white-coated people in the observation area tensed in the sudden quiet. They strained forward to see if there had been any response to their experiment.
A small panel in the fluted top of the cylinder drew back and a red glow emanated from inside.
The operatives waited vigilantly for signs of life. When none were forthcoming, Koenig unlocked the partition door and cautiously edged himself inside the room. Soon he was standing directly over the open portal, gazing down into the redness. The Laws of Physics, Life, Probability and the Universe couldn’t have been put to better test, he thought philosophically as he gazed in surprise on the spectacle of a beautiful young girl, companion to the boy. Unblemished, her features frozen in a beatific smile, she had been delivered pure and sound.
Hurriedly, he supervised the extrication of the girl from the capsule, and her transportation by stretcher trolley to the Medical Centre. A much happier Helena greeted him. About twelve hours had elapsed since the early conversation with Cantar. Since then the boy had pulled through with remarkable speed.
‘Blood temperature almost normal,’ Ben Vincent was announcing as he e
ntered with the new patient. The Doctor looked round from his instruments, perturbed, letting go of the stethoscope. He and Helena rushed towards the trolley and began off-loading the girl onto the bed they had prepared for her – next to Cantar’s. The same tent had been erected over her bed, and they quickly fixed to her the various sensor leads, oxygen mask and electrocardiogram discs. They stood back and began to put the life-saving equipment into operation.
‘Zova...’ Cantar, the boy began to speak again from behind them. Helena turned to comfort him. He was struggling weakly and she tried to keep him in his bed. But he sat, propping himself up on an elbow, and gazed plaintively at the isolation tent. ‘She is my wife...’ he told them, more strongly.
Startled, and inquisitive once more, Koenig came over to his bedside. He squatted down beside the boy. ‘You were floating in pairs?’ he asked, hazarding a guess.
‘Pairs... threes... fours... family groups,’ Cantar replied. He added with surprising viciousness, ‘It appealed to their sadistic sense of humour.’ He seemed to speak almost without thinking as he anxiously watched Helena and Vincent working on Zova.
Koenig leaned forward intently. ‘Whose sense of humour? Where are you from?’ he urged.
Cantar sank back, unable to support himself on his elbow. ‘Golos was known to us who lived there as the Peace Planet...’
‘You were invaded...?’ Koenig asked shrewdly as he helped prop their guest back up with pillows.
Cantar appeared relieved, but still bitter. ‘We were cast out...’ he told Koenig. ‘Exiled. An internal struggle. We were unarmed, helpless. The others were small in number but ruthless...’ He was distracted again by thoughts of his wife. ‘Is she breathing?’ he asked Helena urgently.
Helena had returned to assist Vincent, but now she came briefly back to the boy’s bedside. ‘She’ll be all right,’ she replied gently, feeling his fevered brow.
Cantar’s arm fell out of the blankets and stretched toward the neighbouring bed. For the first time, he smiled. It was not a smile of happiness as such, but a smile of relief... from intolerable burdens. ‘You are humane people...’ he said. ‘You’ll save us all, I know that...’
Koenig looked suddenly uncomfortable, but he let the boy drop back off to sleep. For the moment, at any rate, he was safe in his assumptions.
He arose from the bedside and left the room. A deeper, darker picture was beginning to build up in his mind. It might be that the Moon Base was under some kind of attack after all. But an attack of a far more subtle kind. Perhaps an attack that even the attackers themselves were not aware of... a slow, creeping, insidious psychic attack.
He returned to the Command Centre and sat himself down thoughtfully. ‘That cloud, Sandra. Have we got any specifications yet?’
‘A good, clear picture. A long shot, but nothing else positive,’ Sandra Benes replied from her console. With a few deft movements she brought the picture of the cloud on the Big Screen. There was, as she had said, not much to go on, but what there was was unmistakable. The screen was filled with stars – in this small area of space alone there were as many visible to the naked eye as could be counted in all the heavens of Earth – and circled helpfully by Sandra was the cloud mass he was looking for. It looked a tiny, black circle of insignificance, blotting out the other stars. In actual fact, in astronautical terms it was extremely close to them. Furthermore, it lay uncomfortably near to their trajectory.
Koenig mused. It seemed too distant for there to be any connection. Regretfully, he would have to wait until they got closer to it. He depressed a button, and the live coverage of the orbiting space capsules flashed back on again.
The cloud revealed no more of its mystery, but two days later the youthful space traveller had completely recovered from his harrowing ordeal. He looked strong, vital and confident, as though he had never suffered an illness in his life. His confidence was so cock-sure, it unnerved Koenig. The wisdom of age had taught the Commander that if you made one charitable act to a member of your fellow brethren in space, further acts of charity were quickly expected – not as a gift, but as a right: He could end up having his whole Moon Base taken over.
‘Your request is out of the question,’ he told the boy gravely when Cantar had come to him to ask him again to retrieve his orbiting friends. They were standing in the Command Centre, overheard by Hayes and Helena. ‘Our Life Support facilities cannot handle any more... It’s impossible.’
Cantar looked worried, but he still had a lot of attack left. ‘In thirty-six hours gravity will shatter those containers. Can you stand by and let it happen?’
Koenig heaved a sigh of exasperation. They had been arguing for almost an hour. He indicated Helena with a wave of his hand, and said, ‘My Medical Officer is in charge of our Life Support system. Tell him, Helena.’
‘We don’t even permit any new births on Moon Base Alpha because we’re afraid to overload,’ Helena told the youth.
‘We’ve no choice, Cantar,’ Koenig told him.
Their guest tightened his lips, and they could see him struggling with himself. Another angle, born of desperation occurred to him. ‘We can give you a choice... Zova and myself,’ he told them brightly. ‘We can use our skills to increase your recycling capacity tenfold...’
Koenig frowned disbelievingly. ‘In thirty-six hours?’
‘If that’s all we have – yes.’ Cantar replied.
The offer seemed specious. Koenig gave a final shake of his head. ‘Sorry, Cantar. I can’t take the chance.’
Annoyance and anxiety crept into Cantar’s expression. He tried one last approach. ‘You say you want to learn our secret of suspended animation in space travel... Bring them down and I will give you the secret !’
‘No.’
‘Then send us back!’ Cantar cried. ‘Send Zova and myself up to die with our people!’ He spun round and walked angrily from the Centre.
Koenig stared impassively at the Big Screen, his face set in an irremovable expression. Deep inside him, he was unhappy – not at his decision, which he felt was sound, but at the fact of having to enforce it. After a moment’s inner reflection, he also arose and returned to his quarters. As he went he felt the uncomprehending and indignant gazes of his own personnel.
‘Why am I the only one who can see the dangers?’ he shouted in frustration at himself when he was safely in his room. He slammed his fist down on his desk. Allowing him no umbrage, the door buzzer rang and Helena’s face appeared on the tiny monitor.
‘May we come in?’ she asked in a determined voice.
Without replying, he hit the release button. Helena, followed by Hayes, entered. ‘Any more fit in?’ he asked them sarcastically, knowing full well why they had come.
‘They’re people, John,’ Hayes began accusingly, ‘like you and me.’
‘They look like you and me. But that’s all we know about them. About their minds, their motives, we know nothing.’
‘Must you assume the worst?’ Helena asked, half pleading and half coldly.
‘Yes... where the safety of this base is concerned,’ Koenig replied.
‘So we abandon them?’ Helena flared. ‘Watch them die?’
He arose from his desk and paced agitatedly up and down his book-lined room in front of them. He had given in on rare occasions, invariably with disastrous consequences to all. ‘When I was an astronaut cadet,’ he spoke softly, but with pain, ‘I was on a Resupply Mission to a Venus space station. As we prepared to dock, a computer diagnosis showed fourteen of the scientists up there were sick. Three already dead. A disease unknown to Earth against which we had no antidote. My Commander had to make a decision. He couldn’t bring that disease back to Earth.’ He paused. ‘We left those men to die.’
There was a respectful silence.
‘But this situation is different,’ Helena argued. ‘These people have no trace of sickness...’
‘They may have something our sensors can’t pick up. My concern is the survival of this base...’
‘Is survival all-important?’ Hdyes asked heatedly. ‘What sort of society is it that abandons fifty innocent, fellow humans.’
‘Of course we’re concerned with our own survival,’ Helena hedged him from the other side. ‘But we have to decide what price we’re willing to pay for it.’
He adopted a grim, wordless stance once more, while he considered ways in which he could continue to implement his decision, yet show a greater degree of human charity. They stared at him, expectantly, with worried faces. Firmly, he pressed a button on his desk monitor. Sandra Benes’ face appeared on the screen.
‘John?’
‘Ask Cantar to come to my quarters, please.’ He snapped off her image and re-sat himself heavily in his seat. He opened a drawer.
‘John... thank you,’ Helena stepped forward.
‘Don’t thank me yet,’ Koenig warned her, unsmiling, and she stepped tensely back. They waited in silence until the door buzzer sounded again.
‘Please come in, Cantar,’ Koenig said. He hit a button.
Cantar entered, evidently still angry, and stood sullenly in front of the Commander. Helena and Hayes smiled faintly to reassure him that something had been worked out.
Koenig abruptly pulled a stun gun out of his drawer. He pointed it at the surprised Cantar and fired it, before anyone could stop him. Helena and Hayes stepped back in horror, but they were too shocked to speak as they watched the boy stagger and collapse, enveloped in a bright aura of light energy.
His face a rigid, self-imposed mask of inhumanity, Koenig called Sandra back to the screen and ordered a stretcher team. He turned to the appalled Helena and an equally appalled though mystified Hayes. ‘I had to be sure our weapons were effective against him,’ he explained, and watched as sudden, unwilling understanding contorted their expressions. ‘Let them try to expand our Life Support systems... but I want security men on guard at all times.’
Hayes nodded weakly. ‘I’ll see to it, John. They will never be alone in the Life Support Centre.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Space 1999 - The Space-Jackers Page 12
