Space 1999 - Mind-Breaks of Space

by Michael Butterworth

  Abruptly Tony rocked back on his heels, feeling like he had been run into by an invisible and very heavy sand bag. He shook his head to clear it as Helena reached out to steady him.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘It’s a strong force field... but at least it’s not as vicious as some I’ve experienced.’

  He took out his gun and turned the laser ray up to full power. The beam of pure light hummed out and struck the force field in a blaze of sparks. It didn’t appear to have any other effect.

  ‘You’re wasting your time.’

  Helena and Tony both jumped with surprise when the voice of Zarl sounded close behind them. They turned around to face both him and a smirking Zamara.

  Zarl added, ‘Not all the power of your Moon Base could scratch that shield.’

  ‘You were not supposed to leave your quarters,’ Zamara stated, stepping forward. ‘Why have you come here to the Computer? What did you hope to achieve?’

  Tony felt a wave of resentment rush through him... that she should dare to question the urge for gaining freedom that any person held prisoner would feel. Then he looked at Helena and the message in her eyes was a timely reminder to keep calm.

  ‘We were worried about our friends. We were trying to find a way to get to them,’ he said with forced politeness.

  Helena was keeping a close watch on Zarl, catching his occasional sidelong looks. She was still certain that there was the seed of a real emotion down there... if only she could find the way to encourage it.

  She stepped closer to him and asked softly, ‘Please... release us... and the Moon Base.’

  The mask of arrogance drained away from Zarl’s face and a look of doubt took its place. ‘Perhaps...’ he looked at Zamara, ‘... perhaps there’s another way?’

  ‘No!’ she said harshly, and Zarl obediently resumed his own severe attitude.

  ‘If you’re so worried about your friends, why don’t you go back and see them?’ his voice was cutting once again.

  ‘Go back? But how?’

  Zamara laughed, short and sharp. ‘They never learn, do they? To go back all you have to do is clear your mind and the positronic transfer will take you where you are inclined to go.’

  Helena and Tony exchanged glances of doubt, wondering whether the Vegan androids were setting them up for some further mockery. They both knew that there was enough of a chance that they weren’t able to miss the opportunity. They shut their eyes and strained to blank out their thoughts.

  As Helena’s wide-opened gaze adjusted itself, she saw around her the unmistakeably bright and functioning lights of Alpha Command Centre. Just behind her Tony was letting his own senses adjust, and except for him, there was no one else in the room.

  Tony was feeling momentarily disconcerted by the effect of the positronic travel technique, but as soon as he recognized where he was he gushed with delight. Then he recognized that all the circuits looked back to normal and felt even better. With full facilities restored and with a chance of working out a plan with the rest of the Moon Base Senior Officers, he felt sure they could thwart the Vegan scheme.

  Helena’s worried question abruptly halted the flow of his confidence. ‘Where is everybody, Tony?’

  Leaping to the control panel, Tony punched communications buttons. ‘Weapons Section... Weapons Section.’ He pressed some more. ‘Petrov? Are you at your station, Petrov?’ He looked around in confusion at Helena while continuing to try. ‘Medical Section? Doctor Vincent, are you there?’

  Unable to stand idly by any longer, Helena ran out of the room and down the corridor. She quickly reached the door with the sign on it. ‘Commander’s Quarters’. With a musical chime of her commlock the door slid open for her.

  ‘John!’ she shouted. ‘John!’

  Only a terrible silence answered her. In ever rising fear she ran out again and looked into several other nearby rooms before returning to the Command Centre. She didn’t need to tell Tony what she had found.

  ‘They must have been sent down somehow... they must be on Vega,’ he said with a shake of his head. He had been wondering at the twisted cruelty of the Vegans to let them know they could come back to Alpha just as they were somehow enticing all the other Alphans to Vega.

  ‘We’ve got to get back,’ Helena said quickly.

  ‘How?’

  ‘The same way as before. Blank our minds and let the positronic process take us back.’

  Neither of them hesitated this time, closing their eyelids and waiting expectantly for the odd tingle of displacement that would tell them they had arrived. But this time, there was nothing. They opened their eyes to the same old acrylic walls of Moon Base.

  ‘They must have somehow turned off the power for the positronic system. We can’t go back!’ Tony turned to the computer console and got it to feed a diagram of the local star system up to the big screen. They located the position of the moon by a flashing light and then checked on the location of Vega. There seemed to be a gap between the two of over a light year and it was constantly increasing.

  Helena was shattered. ‘A light year? Then we’ll never see the others again!’

  ‘We’ll never see anybody again,’ Tony said unhappily, ‘except each other.’

  Helena moved listlessly around the space in her own room. Arrayed on a worktop surface was a collection of various medications which she had been inventoring at the moment when she had been interrupted by Maya’s visit... only hours before, though it seemed like days.

  She picked up one of the bottles that contained a mild tranquilizer and took one of the small green pills out. Popping it into her mouth, she washed it down with a swallow of water from a small cup. Anticipating that the edge would soon be taken off her nerves, she went over to her voice recorder. She felt obliged to make some kind of log entry of what had happened to them.

  ‘Moon Base Alpha...’ she said sombrely. ‘Status report... Doctor Russell recording. We do not know what has happened to John Koenig, Alan Carter... in fact, all of the Moon Base personnel. Tony Verdeschi and I are alone in Alpha. All systems are now functioning, but we have not been able to establish contact with Vega, where we suspect the other Alphans have been taken. The anticipation of future loneliness is having a terrible effect on both Tony and myself... as well as the thought of losing... of never...’ Helena felt herself hesitate as the very personal sense of loss that she and Tony felt proved too difficult to commit to record in such a coolly routine way.

  She turned off the recorder and walked back to her desk. There, amidst the pill bottles was a plastic cup of steaming coffee. Tony had graciously brought it in for her about five minutes before and had let her know how unsuccessfully his attempts to make radio contact with Vega were going. Nor could he solve the mystery of their sudden and enormous acceleration away from the planet.

  Helena picked up the cup and turned to walk back and have another try at recording her report. A flash of brightness caught her eye... a small twist of red paper in the bottom of the white disposal bin on the floor. That morning she knew the bin had been empty and she knew her own pharmacopia well enough to recognize the paper as the wrapper off a dexetrol tablet, a very potent sedative. She recalled that Tony had stood by the desk for a few minutes, talking, after he had brought the coffee.

  Sniffing at the cup of coffee, penetrating the smell of the drink itself, Helena could clearly detect something chemically bitter. With growing alarm she walked across the room to the small adjoining washroom and emptied the cup down the drain.

  She did not notice the small strip of perspex that was part of the moulded contour of the wall... as it slid open and revealed a very cleverly concealed viewing gap. In the darkness behind it a well satisfied pair of eyes seemed to gleam with anticipated triumph.

  Tony could think of nothing else to try but to keep up a barrage of broadcasts back towards the disappearing dot of Vega. The computer could give him no reason at all for the sudden jump in either space or time that they had undergone by returning to A
lpha. He could only presume that some effect of the positronic method of travel had placed them on Alpha months in the future and their fate was now sealed.

  His voice had grown tired, calling out fruitlessly into space. He pressed a button that would automatically broadcast a distress code on all frequencies. If they were going to be heard at all, that would be the only way. He considered one morbid possibility... that the Vegans had achieved their aim of getting the Alphans to show them violence. After all there were enough hotheads in the crew to find one that couldn’t resist being provoked... certainly not without prior warning of the scheme. By now the Androids could have had their lesson in violence and used it to kill all the humans, native and Alphan, that were on Vega. And no doubt, Maya too, his beloved Psychon.

  His unhappy daydream was interrupted suddenly, in a crudely ironic fashion by the thing that had started the grim tragedy in the first place. The life support malfunction alarm went off. Tony punched a quick series of codes into the computer and this time could clearly see that it wasn’t a faulty circuit... the oxygen in the Moon Base really was disappearing... from all areas and very quickly.

  He called through to Helena’s room. ‘Helena? Helena, are you there?’ When there was no reply he tried the Medical Section. ‘Helena! Answer me Helena! We are losing our atmosphere...’

  Even as he spoke he could feel himself starting to gasp, the first uncomfortable onset of oxygen deprivation. The computer was reporting on the source of the fault and located it in the Life Support Operations Room.

  He knew there was no more time to try to find Helena. He had to go and see if he could repair the fault. At the rate air was being lost they only had minutes before they would both die from suffocation, no matter what part of the Moon Base they were in.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was difficult moving down the corridor at all, let alone in a hurry. Tony felt like his legs had turned to soft rubber and the walls seemed to be suspended on ropes so that they swung crazily from side to side. He drove himself on, knowing he hadn’t a second to spare.

  The door of the Life Support Centre was ahead of him only a dozen paces away. He moved towards it with such concentration that he didn’t notice when the door of the Hydrophonics Section that he had just passed, eased open. Nor did he see Helena stagger out and walk in the other direction, holding herself up against the wall as she went to the Command Centre. Clutched nervously in her hand was a stun gun.

  As soon as he was inside the door, his eyes immediately saw the door of the master control panel standing open. He knew that not many Alpha staff members had the necessary authority in their commlock key frequency to unlock it. But of course, both he and Helena were among the few.

  Inside the panel he found that the handle to empty the entire base of its artificial atmosphere had been pulled. With fading strength he pushed it back into place and heard immediately the low hissing of air replacement as the alarm sound ceased.

  Recovering his strength, he re-locked the panel and turned to start back to the Command Centre. On second thought, and very reluctantly, he took out his stun gun and held it at the ready before he left the room.

  Helena had checked as quickly as she could to see exactly what Tony had been up to while she was supposed to have been drugged in deep sleep. As far as she could tell he had been doing his best to make radio contact with Vega, but there was no indication of a reply. Evidently he had something else in mind too, something that had caused a fault in the base’s oxygen supply. Maybe he had intended just to syphon the air from her bedroom and finish her off and it had gone wrong. There was no way to tell, but she had to suspect the worst.

  As the door behind Helena slid open she spun around, raising her gun. She froze in icy fear as she saw Tony was crouched just over the threshold, aiming at her with his own weapon.

  After a heart stopping moment, she said in a tensely terrified voice, ‘Tony... I don’t want to shoot you. Put down your gun.’

  He didn’t answer but moved slowly towards her, keeping his gun steady.

  ‘Tony,’ she pleaded, ‘... drop it, please.’

  By her fright and the tears of regret in her eyes, Tony could tell that whatever was wrong with Helena, she wasn’t irredeemable. ‘Easy, Helena,’ he said soothingly, ‘I only want to help you.’

  Trying to humour him, trying to calm him any way she could, Helena replied, ‘Yes, I know that Tony. That’s why you put the Dexotrol in my coffee. You wanted to calm me down... but if you want to do that, then just put your gun away.’

  Verdeschi wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but expected it must be part of whatever delusion she was under that had made her let out the base’s oxygen. ‘Is that why you sabotaged the Life Support System?’ he asked.

  ‘Me?’ she replied with incredulity. ‘Tony, listen to me. You’re hallucinating. I didn’t sabotage the Life Support System. I’ve not been near it. Why would I do that? I’d be killing myself.’

  Tony paused thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know why you did it. The situation we’re in now must be causing you a lot of stress. People do strange things when they’re despondent... lonely...’

  ‘No, Tony,’ Helena said adamantly. ‘No.’

  ‘There’s only the two of us on Alpha... and I’ve been in the Command Centre all the time. It had to be you.’

  ‘But it had to be you that put a drug in my coffee!’

  Tony’s eyes suddenly lit up with a flash of inspiration. An outrageous suspicion came into bloom and began to grow from possibility to probability in the space of a few seconds. Helena saw the idea cross his face and caught it instantly.

  ‘That is, it had to be you unless there are more than two of us on Alpha.’ She no more had to speak the thought than to be convinced by it. With a big smile at Tony she put her gun away and laughed. ‘Can you imagine that those silly Vegans thought they could make us hate each other?’

  Tony’s guffaw echoed around the room, his elation feeling very genuine. Even though they were still in the Vegans’ clutches, at least he knew Helena was not going mad... and also that there was still a chance that they could get back to the real Moon Base Alpha.

  ‘How about that?’ he said. ‘They don’t know how much fun we have playing their little games.’

  Helena shouted out cheerily. ‘Zarl! Zamara! You can show yourselves. The game’s over.’

  A section of the wall just below the big screen slid open and from behind the false panelling stepped the two androids, looking piqued with the failure of their elaborate ruse.

  ‘So you think it’s a game, do you?’ asked Zamara.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ laughed Tony. ‘You built all this... a full replica of Alpha... down to every detail. You gambled that, and lost.’

  Zamara turned on her heel and stalked away. ‘This time!’ she shouted, and in a blur of light, she disappeared before she got to the exit.

  Koenig was checking the latest condition reports in the Command Centre when the Security Guard came rushing in to get him. The air in the room, as throughout the base, was chilly and rapidly getting very stale. Over half the time they had left to live had passed... and they were no nearer a solution.

  Carter had failed to get through to the Eagles. There was no way to operate the travel tubes and even the electrics that controlled the space suit functions were on the blink. All ionic transfer on luna was being blocked by the force field so that electric current just couldn’t flow. Most likely the Eagles would be powerless as well.

  Alan got the urgent message from the Security man and shouted it across to Koenig. ‘Commander! There’s an alien in the recreation area!’

  Koenig was on his feet and running with Carter and Maya close behind. From the open doors of the Rec Room he could hear the loud strains of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He dashed inside just as they stopped, in mid-chord.

  Zamara was standing by the cassette library and had just taken the music tape off the machine. She turned and looked at him expressionlessly as he walke
d closer.

  ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

  ‘They are safe,’ she said. Moving further along she came to the shelves of the micro-film library... thousands and thousands of the world’s greatest books stored on tiny spools of celluloid. She chose one and slid it into the viewing machine.

  ‘Why have you come back?’ asked Koenig.

  Zamara set the viewer into action, turned on to fast forward play... usually used to hurry to the later pages in a reference book. Koenig thought for a moment that the Vegan simply didn’t understand the controls of the machine, but then gathered with surprise that she was apparently reading them as they flipped past in a blur.

  ‘We needed... additional material,’ she explained without looking away.

  Out of the corner of his eye Koenig saw Carter start to sneak out his stun gun and motioned for him to put it away. Without knowing what was happening to Helena and Tony they couldn’t risk taking forceful action.

  Zamara changed the micro tape in the viewer for another one, unaware of how close she came to getting all the information that she needed. As the new film whizzed through, she nodded appreciatively. ‘Ah... Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare... and here is a story of murder.’ She took the micro-film out. ‘Et tu, Brute?’

  ‘You have an eidetic memory,’ commented Koenig.

  ‘I have reviewed the pages. They killed Caesar. Why?’

  Puzzled by her interest, Koenig shrugged. ‘It was a political act.’

  ‘Are you on Alpha of a political nature?’

  Koenig was feeling increasingly impatient. ‘No.’

  Looking for another film, Zamara said quietly, ‘Then we do not want Julius Caesar.’

  ‘What do you want?’