by Brian Lumley
“Because our comsats are down, that’s why.”
“Down?”
“Either taken out or blocked in some way. Never mind visuals, you wouldn’t be getting voice if not for our surface cable to Earthside! But these things are like sitting ducks, Frankie! And with our cannons…you just say the word and this time we won’t simply be firing at chunks of space rock!”
“Abel, listen: you’ll do no such thing! Don’t even shine a light on those pyramids! You’re not the only one with SOPs, you know. Mine are pretty much like yours and while we’ve been talking I’ve glanced through them. Know what happened the last time someone flashed a light at one of those things?”
“Yes, I know. Anomaly 13. But I wasn’t thinking in terms of flashlights, Frankie. I was thinking in terms of guns that fire so fast and hard they can vaporize incoming meteorites!”
“Abel, hold it a minute. The General is here, and he’s been listening in.”
“Abel, Gordon Sellway here. When our security people get in we’ll look at our options. There’s too much history—too much of a situation here—for any one man’s decision. Do you copy?”
“Shit! I copy, but it looks like one of my gunners doesn’t!”
“What?”
“Some trigger-happy jerk has just opened up! Ah! That 1ight…leaping from one pyramid to the next…reaching up like a wall of brilliant white fire, and…. “ (Transmission ends.)
XI
“Ahem! Voice record of Dr. G. L. Spatzer, at—ummm, let’s see—0845 hours on the 13th of November, 2407:
“Just had a call from James Goodwin. He’s coming to see me. Puzzling—in fact amazing! Until recently I was the one man he least wanted anything to do with! But bad timing, because right now the HQ is a madhouse—and I don’t just mean the psychiatric ward! All of the top brass, the military and their minions, and droves of civil servants rushing to and fro; I daren’t step out in the corridor for fear of getting trampled underfoot!
“Understandable in the current circumstances, I suppose. Apparently some idiot paparazzi hack was tuned in on an insecure Earth/Darkside Luna conversation last night and patched it through as an ‘exclusive’ to his patron news channel…since when it’s spread like wildfire!
“This morning it’s on the airwaves, the TV screens, and in the papers all over the planet! Two shuttles on course for the moon from UES II, grav-drive Spirit of Space inbound from the asteroid belt, and the untried gunship Sir Galahad ordered up into Earth orbit. I didn’t catch it all: something about ‘anomalies’—like Jim Goodwin’s, I wonder?—and a total Darkside-Luna shutdown. Space Central working desperately hard, even too hard, to put it about that it’s some kind of ‘freak power failure’ and nothing to be concerned about. Frankly I can’t see it. If it’s nothing to be concerned about, why is this place in an uproar?
“I can hear Goodwin come purring down the corridor…I’ll leave the recorder running. Maybe he’ll have something interesting for me. High time, too! I admit I’m beginning to despair of ever getting through to him….”
(The hiss of pneumatic doors opening and the deep-throated purr of a powerful electric motor. Dr. Spatzer’s voice warning, “Mind your head, Jim!” And a high-pitched whine quickly fading into silence as the motor shuts down.)
Goodwin’s voice: “Surprise, surprise, Doc!”
Dr. S: “Good morning, Jim. You seem in fine spirits!”
Goodwin: “Cheerful, you mean? In a way, I suppose. Not much good feeling down; not any longer, anyway. Fact is I’m ready to talk—about everything. I’ve remembered everything, Doc—and it’s stopped hurting!”
Dr. S, indeed sounding surprised, and perhaps not a little alarmed: “Stopped hurting? But how can that be, Jim? The drugs? I mean even the best painkillers can’t—”
Goodwin: “No, it’s not my backside, what little is left of it; I’m talking about my head! I can think it through now without it shuts me down every time.”
Dr. S: “And you believe you can talk about it? About, well, everything, did you say?”
Goodwin, most eagerly: “That’s right. It was the library—the archives, all the restricted stuff that I’ve been reading—and then to top it off this morning’s news. That’s what finally did the trick. You see Doc, until now I couldn’t figure it out. But now…now I’m pretty sure I know what it was all about.”
Dr. S: “The archives? Ah, yes! You’ve been spending quite a lot of time in the library, haven’t you? Your newfound freedom and unrestricted access? We’ve tried to make everything as easy and as normal as possible for you. Not everyone has that kind of access to the archives. As for this morning’s news: do you mean the problem on Darkside?”
Goodwin: “That’s what I mean all right—but it isn’t just Darkside Base that’s got a problem, Doc. No, not at all. So, do you want to hear about it—about everything?”
Dr. S, cautiously: “An unscheduled session, you mean? Right here in my office?”
Goodwin: “Relax, Doc. I’m not going to bite you. That’s all over and done with now. Fact is, everything is done with now. I just thought you’d like to know about it before…well before they get here, is all. Then you can make up your mind like I’ve made up mine.”
Dr. S, warily: “But you know, Jim, that’s a rather peculiar smile you’re wearing. Also…well, you’re not making too much sense either. I mean, we’ve had our little problems, and—”
Goodwin: “I know, and I’m sorry. But I’m okay now, I assure you. And to tell the truth, I don’t think there’s too much time left. But if you’re really not interested, well—”
Dr. S, with a wry chuckle: “Hmmm! So then, maybe you’re the real psychiatrist here, eh? But okay, I’m hooked, and of course I’ll listen to you. So go ahead, explain away. Tell me about…everything.”
Goodwin: “It’s a long story but I’ll cut it short as I can. The reason I wasn’t able to do it before was because I couldn’t understand how anyone—how any intelligent thing, or things—could be so terrifyingly, cold-bloodedly, calculatingly merciless. Nothing in my experience, in the skies, on the earth or in the oceans has ever come anywhere near it for what I took to be sheer unfeeling cruelty. But it happened to me, and it happened to poor Sue Rafferty. And it was so horrifically unnatural that my mind was shutting down every time I started to think back on it.
“Okay, let me get started:
“That flash of light from the anomaly had KO’d me, knocked me out cold. Sue too, as it later turned out. So it seems more than likely I dreamed that stuff about looking down on the universe…it’s something I’m not sure about. I mean, how could I possibly have done something as weird as that? But one thing is for sure: I felt that I’d been moved—conveyed, transported—oh, a very, very long way. It was just a feeling I had, that distance was somehow meaningless now….
“Anyway, Sue was awake first.
“I came to when I heard her calling out to me. We were in a couple of purplish-blue bubbles with semi-opaque walls; she was next door, standing with her hands spread on the adjoining wall and looking through at me. The walls distorted things; they had these ripples of blue light moving over them. Whatever was outside our rooms—more of these bubbles, with vague shapes moving around inside them—it all seemed to melt away into a hazy distance. I was on my back, on a flat, circular table with five thin legs. When I stood up I could see a similar table in Sue’s bubble. We were both stark naked; our pressure suits and clothing lay in twin heaps against the walls of our respective bubbles, in fact our cells.
“Once I was on my feet, I felt heavy; Earth-heavy, which I wasn’t used to. I went toward Sue, touched the wall. It gave a little under my hand but finally resisted me. A force-field of some sort; it had to be. We were naked as babes, as I’ve said, but in this situation…well hell, that didn’t matter at all.
Sue’s voice was faint, as if she was in another room—which of course she was—but I know you get my meaning.
“‘Jim, where are we?’ she said. I could
tell she was scared witless. For all that it was warm she stood there shivering but without making a move to cover her parts. Hey, who am I to talk about being scared? I was naked too and I hadn’t given a single thought to putting some clothes on. I tried to speak to Sue but when she saw my lips moving she shook her head, said, ‘No!’ And finally it dawned on me that she wasn’t just speaking but shouting at me!
“So I shouted back and she heard me. ‘Clothes,’ I told her, and I made for my stuff where it was heaped against the wall. I figured that being clothed would at least provide us with something of dignity. But:
“‘No!’ Sue shouted again as I reached for my drawers.
“And bang—I was zapped! There was some kind of isolation field around my clothing. It hummed and sparked, made traceries of fire and knocked me off my feet. Damn, that stung! It numbed me from my fingertips to my armpits! But at least I knew why Sue was naked now, and why I was going to stay that way, too….
“Time passed, quite a bit of time. We got sore throats from shouting at each other, asking pointless questions. And finally we slept…
“When I woke up again, that was when the horror started.
“It was Sue’s screams that woke me. And believe me, she was screaming! Coming loud and clear even through the bubble walls, it drilled into my nerves, shook me awake and tumbled me off my table bed so that I hit the floor in a heap. And I hobbled over to the wall and looked in on her cell.
“In there with Sue were three of the vague shapes we’d seen before in the bubble rooms outside our own. But they weren’t so vague now. As a kid I had been fascinated by all kinds of rocks from fossils to meteorites. It was a sure bet I would be either a paleontologist or a spaceman; and we know how that worked out. But looking at these creatures in Sue’s cell, I suddenly remembered my favorite fossil, the one I prized over all the others in my small collection: a trilobite some five inches long, nose to tail. Except these things had too many lobes—four in fact—and they were ten feet long; six-feet of it on the deck, held up by God knows how many crab legs, and the front lobe upright, standing four foot tall, with six many-jointed, armlike appendages, three to a side, and swiveling crab eyes on stalks under a chitin cowl. They were as shiny black as my fossil and scurried when they moved, their many legs seeming to flicker, shifting them to, fro, sideways, backwards, mobile as hell and a lot more nightmarish! Picture clever cockroach-crabs, with upright, mantis-like front ends—you’ll know what I was looking at. But as for what they were doing to Sue…
“Two of them held her pinned down on the table; it’s possible they’d come upon her while she was asleep, or I would have heard her screaming before I did. Anyway, they’d put some kind of clamps on her ankles and wrists, an adhesive material, as I later discovered, which stuck to the table and held her fairly motionless. And then…and th-th-then….”
Dr. S, concernedly: “Jim, if you want to stop now…”
Goodwin, after clearing his throat: “No, it’s okay. I’ll be okay now. Where was I? Oh, yeah:
“So the third member of this trio, he wheeled in a machine. But first he stepped out through the wall, as easy as you like, then returned pushing this machine that floated some six inches off the floor. And by the way, that floor was made of some sort of tough rubber, crisscrossed with thin strips of white metal.
“Anyway, this machine is all glass and silver metal. A very intricate thing…and God, a very devilish one, too! A screen appeared on the joining wall—the wall between Sue’s cell and mine—which was just as clear on my side as it must have been on hers. And when these things had positioned this bloody awful machine beside Sue’s table, they swung certain of its extensible adjuncts out over her body. One of these was quite obviously some kind of X-ray camera, because a full-size picture of Sue’s innards appeared on the screen. Her outline and all of her organs were clearly visible: her heart hammering like mad, stomach heaving, lungs fluttering…she was panting. And yet she kept on screaming, cursing and yelling at these bastards, too, until one of them brought what I figured to be a remote control device over to the wall, looked at the screen, and b-b-began to operate the thing…which operated the machine at Sue’s table.
“And on the screen I saw the machine extend a fork-tongued probe of shining silver metal down into poor Sue’s mouth! Stabbing through into the back of her neck, it straddled her spinal column and pinned her head to the table. A trickle of blood appeared on the table where twin prongs had poked through the skin at the back of her neck.
“But the terrible thing is, she was still conscious! All of Sue’s organs were still working: her heart pounding, her bowels churning. If she could have gone on screaming, she’d still have been doing that, too! But as it was it was me—I was doing the screaming now—hammering on that soft, impenetrable wall, trying to dig my hands into it, then stepping back and hurling myself at it without doing any good at all; until finally my legs turned to jelly. I flopped to the floor then and just sat there watching the rest of it—unable to drag my eyes away—watching not only the blurred, indefinite activity of the horseshoe-crab aliens at Sue’s table but also the hideous reality of what they were doing on the crystal-clear wall-screen: her suffering as the roach-like bastard with the remote continued to ogle the screen while proceeding with her t-t-torture!
“And Doc, you can quit your squirming about, and don’t even think about stopping me! Not one single fucking word, you hear? I’ll be just fine once I’ve got all of this shit out of me. And since it’s what you’ve been working at for a couple months now, you should just sit there and fucking enjoy it—okay?
“Well, okay then….
“Sue was still jerking about on her table—or her operating table, as I now thought of it—and that wasn’t good enough for the aliens, who weren’t nearly finished with her. Down came another spindly instrument from the machine: this time a hypodermic of yellow liquid, which stabbed deeply, brutally into her belly. And on the screen I watched the stuff spread through her system.
“Then…she went totally crazy! Her body throbbed, vibrated, went into spasms. God only knows what they’d put into her, but if it was meant to quieten her down…well Christ, surely there were easier ways to knock someone out! Unless they didn’t give a damn. And in fact it was as simple as that: they really didn’t give a damn! But in the end, as a result of the hellish agony it was causing her, she did go under. And me, when Sue’s body went slack, I thanked God—even though I thought she must be dead—still I thanked Him that she wasn’t any longer suffering like that. But no, they didn’t want her dead, just quiet so they could get on with it. And when I saw how she was still alive, still breathing, and her heart fluttering but no longer threatening to burst, I thanked God again—just for a moment gave thanks—and in the next moment cursed Him! I cursed Him that He was allowing this to happen; cursed God and everything in God’s entire fucking universe!
“For now another tool descended on Sue from the machine. A hollow glass drill, it chewed through her skull and passed maybe a quarter-inch into the front of her brain, where it paused to vacuum up some clear liquid and a little grey tissue; which was when I threw up.
“But for all that I was sick I just couldn’t turn away; it was like I was hypnotized; I simply had to know! And I saw them take samples of Sue’s liver, her kidneys and lungs, even marrow from her bones; but never enough to kill her, not yet. And each time the machine bit into her, its tools would burn bright with some weird energy, cauterizing the wound. And my teeth were beginning to hurt, aching from the way I was grinding them. And I reckon it’s that, Doc—what they did to Sue and would later do to me—that brought on my problem with needles and sharp instruments. Can you b-blame me? Well can you, eh?
“But you know, as bad as I felt about Sue I was more scared for myself. I mean, she had been the first, but when would they start on me? What does that make me, some kind of lousy coward? Well let me tell you, Doc, while there isn’t a man in the world I would ever run away from, there isn’t an
yone on any world who wouldn’t want to escape from the horror of the notion that he’d be next under that machine on one of those t-tables!
“Anyway, let me get on….
“Finally, dissolving Sue’s clamps, the bugs turned off the wall-screen, took their God-awful machine and samples and left. With the screen gone there was no way to know if Sue was living or dead. And then, mentally and physically exhausted—because Sue and me, we hadn’t had a bite to eat nor even a sip of water since we were taken—I fell asleep again…but on the floor and against the wall, not on my table! And though I nightmared, still I somehow managed to sleep—
“—Until I sensed movement and started awake!
“One of the bugs was just leaving, passing out through the wall as if it was mist. There was a bowl of pale blue liquid on the table, along with a carrot-like root with purple skin and a tuft of blue-green leaves. I took the smallest sip of the liquid and it was…well, water! The tuber had a bitter taste but it stayed down. After finishing off the tuber and drinking some of the water I went to look through the wall into Sue’s bubble. She just lay on her table, completely motionless. And still not knowing if she was alive or dead—full to the brim with horror and despair—once again I dropped off to sleep—
“—And again sensed movement!
“It was Sue, staggering here and there as she made her way over to the wall. I could scarcely believe she was on her feet! But as she reached the wall she just slid down it, went to her knees with her pale face and one shoulder leaning against it.
“‘Jim, they…they….’ Her voice was so weak and gasping, I had to put my ear to the wall in order to hear it. ‘They hurt me, Jim.’
“‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I saw it all. Oh God, I’m so sorry, kid! But look over there, on the floor there. The water is safe and that carrot thing is edible. You have to eat; you’ve got to survive, got to keep going, Sue.’ That’s what I told her, but I really don’t know why. It was bullshit, that’s all.
