Space 1999 #9 - Rogue Planet

by E. C. Tubb

  Setting aside the drill, Ellman crouched, fighting a sudden giddiness. He was an electronics man and a good one. Testing his work was a waste of time. Each connection was firm, every terminal correct, and when he did a layout everything was as it should be. To him it was a matter of pride that it was.

  A small thing, perhaps, but important to both himself and to Alpha.

  Now he swore as his gloved hands were slow to obey his mental commands. The wires fell, were recovered, failed to click home. He paused, squeezing shut his eyes before trying again. He was tired, a treble shift was enough to take it out of a giant, but working was better than waiting and if he could do nothing else he could work.

  ‘Get in!’ he muttered. ‘Damn you, get in!’ Again the wires slipped. There was too little slack, the junctions were awkwardly placed, the connections too tight, the design a lousy combination of some nut-dreamer and a moronic engineer. Why the hell couldn’t they build stuff a man could use? ‘Get in! In!’

  He sighed with relief as the terminals clicked home. A tug to test, a check for fit and the scanner was back in its hold, aligned on its guides, ready to operate as it should.

  Chalk up one more success.

  His head reeled as he climbed to his feet, the Lunar plain turning, twisting, heaving as if with a life of its own.

  ‘Tony!’ Cheng had been watching. He began to run as the distant figure swayed. ‘Move in, Gerry. Fast!’

  ‘Got it, Nyat.’ Gerry Ross lunged forward as fast as safety would allow. He was close when Ellman began to fall, closer when he spun, to topple, to land with a horrible gasping.

  The more horrible sound of escaping air.

  ‘His face-plate!’ He reached the fallen man, one hand tearing at the emergency patches attached to his thigh, ripping free the adhesive-backed plastic and holding ready as he turned the limp figure. His guess had been wrong, the helmet was intact, the rupture at a point close to the junction with the suit. A jagged shard of rock had ripped through the tough material.

  ‘Quick!’ Cheng had joined him. ‘The patch, man! The patch!’

  The air-hiss died as it was slapped home but the horror remained.

  ‘His face!’ Ross swallowed as he looked at it. ‘His face, Cheng! Look at his face!’

  Age can bring beauty, but only when it is the natural achievement of the passage of time. A wall, mellowed, graced with lichens, hard lines and edges worn and smoothed beneath the hand of years. A garden, grown in harmony, each plant settled in an area hard-won and now its own, colours blending, leaves interwound, a whole where there had once been only parts. Those parts now blended and matured with the passing of numerous seasons. Such things held beauty but age, gained without reason, was something else.

  Helena Russell stared at horror.

  A horror implied, not actual, for there was nothing really horrible about a face which had grown the deep lines and creped skin of advancing years. Nothing dreadful at seeing the natural state of all living things, providing they manage to survive long enough. No doctor could ever find the relentless workings of katabolism strange and fearful. Men were born, they lived, they grew old, they died. It was the way of the human race.

  The horror lay in the unusual.

  Tony Ellman was thirty-two years of age.

  Now he looked eighty.

  He was eighty.

  Mathias was in no doubt.

  ‘Every test proves it, Doctor. Blood, marrow, hormones, lymphatic fluids—the man is senile.’

  ‘How?’ Then, as he made no answer, she asked again, more savagely this time, ‘How did it happen? How?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You asked how it happened and I gave you a truthful reply. I don’t know how it happened, but I do know it is an extension of previous discoveries. Accelerated aging, Doctor, a speeded breakdown in the metabolism which leads to inevitable senility.’ He added quietly, ‘You saw the results of my tests. You made checks yourself. What we suspected then is now a fact.’

  One she was relucant to accept, and still questions remained—ones which could be answered.

  ‘Ellman was a patient together with Sam Blake. He was under observation for strained ligaments and a cartilage operation on the knee. Healing was slow, but not extremely slow.’

  ‘As it was with Blake,’ Mathias admitted. ‘A connection?’

  ‘Both were outside workers. Both could have been exposed to an area of intensive radiation of some kind. I’m guessing,’ she confessed. ‘No radiation should cause such results—superficial injury, cellular breakdown, cancer, eventual death, yes—but senility?’

  ‘Senility is the breakdown of all normal physical functions coupled with mental aberration,’ Mathias reminded. ‘A deranged mind could contribute to the result by failure to maintain control over the bodily processes. Exposure to radiation could easily cause cortical degeneration.’

  ‘And eventual physical breakdown,’ said Helena. ‘But the time element, Bob? This man aged in a matter of hours. He was apparently fit when he commenced his tour of duty and yet, when found, he was in the last stages of exhaustion. He was suited, isolated and yet, somehow, he aged fifty years.’

  And was still aging. Helena glanced at the monitors, then through the transparent partition to where Tony Ellman lay in the intensive care unit. The lighting was dim, rich in ultraviolet, the blueish glow giving his skin the waxen appearance of a corpse. His cheeks were sunken, closed eyes resting in bruised sockets, folds of skin hanging from his jowls. His hands, thin and fragile, rested on his lap. The bulk of the life-support apparatus covering his torso hid any motion of his chest, and only the winking tell-tales showed that he was still alive.

  ‘He’s going to die, Bob,’ she said bleakly. ‘There’s nothing we can do to save him.’

  A patient lost, and one who would not be allowed to rest in peace. Dead he could still talk, with his tissues, glands, bones and brain. With scraps of internal organs, ligaments, sinews, membranes, skin. Items which would be taken and tested and wrung for information. The last service to Alpha Tony Ellman would ever make.

  Mathias said thoughtfully, ‘He was prone—it has to be the explanation. Triggered and primed by his earlier exposure. Then, when he went outside he was ready to go. The treble shift did it and, once started, the aging process was geometrical.’

  Two becoming four becoming eight becoming sixteen becoming thirty-two—how long would it take for enough cells to die for senility to become obvious? All too soon, she thought. Once started the process would rage through normal tissues like fire through a cornfield ready for harvest.

  Helena lifted the commlock from her belt.

  ‘Get me the Commander.’ A moment, then, as Koenig’s face appeared on the screen, she said, ‘This is urgent, John. I have to see you.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘No.’ His face and tone betrayed the tension he was under. ‘No,’ she said again. ‘It can’t wait.’

  ‘Join me in my office in ten minutes.’ Then, before breaking the connection, he added, ‘What is it about?’

  ‘Us, John. All of us in Alpha—we are all facing premature death!’

  ‘Age!’ Victor Bergman lifted his hands and looked at them. Broad, capable, the backs marked with brown splotches, the knuckles prominent, the nails neatly filed and polished. ‘There’s no doubt, Helena?’

  ‘None.’ Her eyes moved from Bergman’s hands to Koenig’s eyes. ‘Ellman died just after I called you and Bob’s doing the autopsy at this moment, but we know what he will find. Death caused by senility—I won’t bother you with the medical jargon. Just say that he died of old age.’

  ‘He was a young man.’

  ‘Was, John.’ She emphasised the past tense. ‘But not now. Something outside drained the life from his body as if he were water and it a sponge.’ She caught his change of expression. ‘John?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He saw her determination and shrugged. ‘It was just the analogy you used—water
and a sponge. I’ve used it myself.’

  ‘Age,’ said Bergman again. He lowered his hands. ‘A sudden acceleration in the metabolic breakdown, Helena. Am I correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Caused by some external force?’

  She nodded, sensing there was more to the question, something which, as yet, she didn’t understand.

  Bergman said quietly, ‘It fits the pattern, John. Life is a form of energy and one more subject to destruction than most. Ellman was somehow more sensitive than the rest. His insistence on working the treble shift was symptomatic of his condition—a sudden and final blaze of energy similar to the glow of a fire fanned by a wind, brightening before the last of its fuel is exhausted. How long do we have, Helena?’

  He was the oldest and would have the greater personal concern and Helena remembered the way he had lifted his hands as if to study them. A natural reaction—what man could tamely ignore the approach of extinction? It was hard not to be able to give comfort.

  ‘I don’t know as yet, Victor, but it can’t be long. We were still running tests when Ellman collapsed and had determined that there was a general attrition of the metabolism giving a preponderance to the katabolic factors. Ellman aged fifty years in a matter of hours so, obviously, there must be a collapse point. It is probably a variable governed by the individual resistance of each individual—but all will be affected.’

  Koenig said, ‘Is there anything we can do? Some protection we can adopt?’

  ‘All I can suggest is that none of those working with Ellman be permitted to leave the shelter of the base. They should be found work in the lower levels. In fact it would be best if everyone were to be kept deep beneath the rock. It might help.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Koenig told her of the mysterious beam and energy loss. ‘The same analogy, Helena—water and a sponge. We’re the water and the Omphalos is the sponge. Now it seems it wants to suck up more than we can afford to give. Could there be a connection?’

  ‘Perhaps, but I’ll have to make tests to be sure. Cultures could be set and exposed and checks made to see how the bacteria progress. But, John, can’t we use the defence shield? Won’t it protect us?’

  Using it would cost energy, but at least it might buy them time. Koenig rose and led the way into Main Mission.

  ‘Upper register, Paul. Let’s see that beam.’

  He heard Helena inhale as it appeared on the screens, lambent, cold, hungry.

  ‘Up shield!’

  As it rose, shimmering, scintillating with a brilliant coruscation of sparkling energy, Sandra Benes reported from her station.

  ‘Energy loss thirty-nine percent, Commander.’

  ‘Boost to the three-quarters full! Sandra?’

  ‘Fifty-seven percent total loss.’

  More than half their generated power streaming wastefully into space. Koenig snapped, ‘Full power, Paul. Hold until I give word to lower.’

  He blinked as the shield blazed with sudden and savage fury, light and brilliance turning the connecting beam into a glowing cone, solidifying it as dust would a beam of light.

  ‘Commander!’

  The internal lights dimmed as Morrow gave the warning. An alarm sounded, another, warnings that the base was dying, the power which was its life drained from the machines essential to survival.

  ‘Commander! You must—’

  ‘Cut!’ Koenig anticipated the demand. ‘Sandra?’

  ‘Power restored. Loss now registering at twenty-two percent.’

  Higher than before and it would mount. Time was against them in more ways than one. Trapped, dying, their energy draining away—how long could they last?

  CHAPTER NINE

  In the darkness something moved, a bulky shape which reflected glitters, the helmet staring with its single eye, dust rising from beneath the boots. Alan Carter watched it, noting how the beam of Dale’s light caught the hanging webs and turned them into fairy-shimmers of gossamer rainbows. Sparkling curtains blotched with the suspended dead which hung like dried fruit on the fronds of some alien plant.

  Like flies caught and drained and left as desiccated husks by some monstrous spider.

  An unpleasant analogy and one too close to the truth. There was no spider and this chamber was no lair. The dead had not been drained by slavering fangs. The darkness held no alien peril.

  But death, when it came, would be just as real.

  Irritably Carter shook his head and, rising from where he squatted, waited for Dale to join him. For a moment he fumbled. Then the connection snapped into place and they could talk again.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘No.’ Dale was curt. ‘I moved all around the edge of the floor—it was solid all the way. Lots of dust and some boxes. A litter of fragments which could have been anything. I didn’t waste time examining them.’

  ‘No traps?’

  ‘I told you—nothing.’ Over the phone Carter could hear the man take a deep breath, and when he next spoke his voice held a forced lightness. ‘Well, Skipper, I guess this is it, right?’

  ‘Wrong.’

  ‘You’re an optimist. The door’s sealed, the chamber is solid, the radios don’t work so we can’t call for help—are you hoping for a miracle?’

  ‘We’re not dead yet,’ said Carter. ‘And while there’s life—’

  ‘—there’s hope.’ Dale finished the quotation. ‘They used to teach me that at Sunday School but I never managed to figure out just what it meant. Hope for what? Me, I’d settle for a radio that worked, or a mining drill which could drill a way out of here, or a rescue party suddenly appearing right in front of us. Hope!’ His voice carried resignation. ‘Maybe we should just sit down and pray?’

  Carter said flatly, ‘I’ve done that. Now let’s take another look at that door.’

  It was as they had left it, a metal slab firmly set in the octagonal jamb. The inner wheel bore the same ring of symbols, but no matter how he turned it, Carter hadn’t been able to swing it free. Now he tried again, trying to remember the exact sequence he had used before. A double wriggle like a twisted helix, an interwound line, a pattern of superimposed stars.

  The door stayed sealed.

  ‘Something must have closed it,’ said Dale. ‘But what?’

  ‘We know what closed it.’ Carter turned the knurled wheel, trying again. With three symbols there would have been six possible combinations. The marked ring held fifteen—it could take a thousand years to hit the correct sequence by trial and error. ‘We felt the shift of the floor. The planetoid must have tilted a little on its axis.’

  Only a little, but it would have been enough to swing shut the counterbalanced door. To turn the chamber of the dead aliens into a human tomb.

  ‘Let me try,’ said Dale as Carter dropped his hands from the wheel. ‘Maybe I can hit it.’

  ‘Keep trying,’ said Carter. ‘I’m going to take a look around.’

  He jerked free the connecting wire and let it wind back on its spring-loaded spool. Now the silence within his helmet was broken only by the sound of his own breathing, the gentle susurration of circulating air. Normally the sound was almost inaudible, noticed only when absent. Now it had grown to dominate all others.

  When it ceased he would die.

  A matter neither of them had mentioned because each knew it too well. Death waited, not in the alien chamber, but in their own air tanks. It grew as the oxygen diminished, would strike when the last dregs had been used, would claim its own when, asphyxiated, they succumbed to the final, eternal darkness.

  He stumbled and almost fell, regaining his balance to look down to where a tangle of metal rods lay at his feet. Stooping, he picked them up, turning them, studying their arrangement. Loops and eyes and interlocking bars forming a peculiar combination of unknown purpose. A toy? An instrument of some kind? A religious object? Discarded junk? How to read an alien mind?

  Carter moved on, turning once to look at Dale where he stood before the door, reflected light haloing helme
t and suit and turning him into a bizarre presentation of the human shape.

  The juncture of the walls and floor was, he knew, solid. Previous investigations had shown the floor to be the same. Higher, beyond reach, darkness ran from the moving circle of his light, the webs casting lacey shadows, colours sparkling to fade and die, to return with swaths of sombre hue.

  Webs which had to be suspended from something. The rods he had found perhaps?

  Carter knelt, rolled on to his back, stared upwards towards the roof as he inched himself across the dust. A race which used webs as couches could have had an avian ancestry—certainly they would have had little fear of heights. Living in a practically three-dimensional area, they would have placed doors and entrances without regard to the factors which guided human use. Perhaps beyond the range of his vision another opening could be found.

  Dale turned as Carter slapped his hand on the other’s helmet. Once connected, he said, ‘No luck, Skipper. The wheel just turns and turns. I’ve tried until I’m dizzy.’

  ‘Sit down. Rest a while. Step up the oxygen.’

  They had cut down the flow to conserve supplies but had paid for it with rapid fatigue and a slowness of mental aptitude. Now as they squatted, Carter opened his valve and watched as Dale did the same.

  ‘How long, Skipper?’

  He was talking about their life expectancy but Carter deliberately misunderstood.

  ‘Not long. Kendal knows we went down the shaft. He knows we’ve broken communication. He’ll come looking for us.’

  ‘And find what?’ Dale snorted. ‘There’s a maze outside that door, so how can he trail us? And even if he could, how can he know we’re behind that door? And even if he does know, how can he open it?’