The Ark in Space

by Marter, Ian

  Vira tried to approach a step nearer, but the Doctor held her firmly back. ‘We cannot abandon the Terra Nova. You know that,’ she murmured.

  The creature reared up again, its tentacles bristling. ‘The Wirrrn must survive… When we emerge the humans will be destroyed – just as they destroyed us…’

  ‘What does he mean?’ whispered Sarah.

  Noah reached out over them with quivering tentacles. ‘Humans came to Andromeda… For long ages the Wirrrn fought them… But they destroyed our breeding colonies on Andromeda Gamma Epsilon…’

  Vira turned to the Doctor with shining eyes. ‘Then our stellar pioneers succeeded,’ she whispered.

  ‘… Since that time the Wirrrn have searched the Emptiness for new breeding places… Now we have found an ideal habitat… The Satellite is ours…’

  The Doctor edged forward a little. ‘The Wirrrn inhabit the Emptiness,’ he said quietly. ‘They do not need the Satellite.’ Noah was poised over them like a gigantic praying mantis.

  ‘You know nothing,’ he rasped. ‘Our breeding is terrestrial – we require hosts for our hatchings… We shall use the humans in the Cryogenic Chamber… In one generation the Wirrrn will become an advanced technological species… We shall…’ A sharp splitting sound obliterated the rest of Noah’s words. The Doctor eased the two women slowly back towards the entrance.

  ‘The pupae are beginning to open,’ he muttered. ‘It’s time we were leaving.’

  As he spoke there came a fusillade of splitting sounds in rapid succession. The Wirrrn’s head moved slowly from side to side, staring at them with fathomless, glowing eyes. Its claw swung in the darkness above them. ‘Leave the Satellite, Vira… Leave now…’

  Vira tried to resist the Doctor’s guiding hand. ‘Noah… Noah,’ she faltered.

  A shattering crescendo of cracks like gunfire made the Doctor whirl round and thrust Sarah and Vira out into the tunnel. He closed the Shield manually, and whipping out the sonic screwdriver, directed it at the locking panel for a few seconds. ‘That should scramble the works,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to chew their way out now.’ Then he led his two companions into the pitch darkness of the labyrinthine Satellite…

  Harry stared down at the Matter Transmitter Couch in the Control Centre where, for the past ten minutes, he had expected the others to materialise just as he and Rogin had done. ‘Something’s gone wrong with this gadget,’ he said gloomily.

  Rogin grunted. He was busy working on a set of systems panels he had lifted out from the wall. He had succeeded in restoring the lighting in the Control Chambers although it was not very bright.

  Harry was irritated by the Technop’s apparent lack of concern. ‘Well, I do think we ought at least to investigate,’ he said.

  Rogin pointed out that there was no lighting elsewhere in the Terra Nova. ‘After what happened to Lycett,’ he added, ‘I want to see where I am treading.’

  Harry glanced down at his own shoeless feet. ‘You should worry,’ he muttered.

  ‘Still no oxygen,’ said Rogin, shaking his head. He stood up, and as he did so seemed to jump a little from the floor and to be suspended for a fraction of a second in the air. At the same moment, Harry realised that the laser lance he was holding appeared to have become mysteriously lighter. Before he could remark on it, there came a sudden clatter from the adjacent Control Chamber, where the TARDIS had materialised. Rogin grabbed the lance from Harry and concealed himself to one side of the opening into the neighbouring chamber. Harry leaped to the other side, bouncing lightly across the floor.

  ‘Anyone at home?’ The Doctor’s hat was poked through the open panel and waved about on the end of the telescopic probe.

  ‘Where on earth have you all been?’ cried Harry as the Doctor entered, followed by Sarah and Vira.

  ‘We bumped into Noah,’ Sarah said wryly.

  ‘Excellent work, Rogin,’ the Doctor said approvingly. ‘You’ve managed to shed a little bit of light on our problems.’

  ‘I have diverted power from the Gravity Static Field, Doctor,’ explained Rogin.

  ‘I thought I was feeling rather light-headed,’ Sarah joked half-heartedly. Rogin explained that he had not been able to restore the oxygen systems. Vira hurried over to the Cryogenic Systems Monitor Panel. The Doctor perched on the edge of the Transmitter Couch and silently offered round the bag of melted jelly-babies. No one responded. He sat deep in thought.

  The silence soon became unbearable.

  ‘Perhaps we should take Noah’s advice,’ said Sarah.

  ‘And what was that?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Vamoose, or stick around and be killed,’ she replied.

  Harry at once moved towards the entrance. ‘Well I’m certainly ready to get going,’ he said eagerly. ‘Why don’t we all jump into the TARDIS?’

  ‘Vira has no intention of abandoning her people, and neither have we,’ the Doctor snapped.

  Sarah moved over to join Harry. ‘So that settles us,’ she sighed. ‘We’ll just stay here and suffocate, or freeze or be gobbled up.’

  With a cry of frustration the Doctor leaped up. ‘If we only had a power source we could electrify the bulkheads of the Cryogenic Section… The Wirrrn would never get through,’ he said. ‘… There must be a way – even with Noah in control of the Solar Chamber.’

  At that moment, Sarah remembered something. ‘Just a minute,’ she cried, ‘Noah said…’

  Harry interrupted her. ‘Perhaps we could lure Noah out of the Infrastructure and into a trap,’ he suggested.

  ‘What do you have in mind, Harry?’ the Doctor asked cuttingly. ‘… a concealed trench covered with elephant grass?’

  Sarah tried to gain their attention. ‘Doctor, listen, I’ve just remembered…’

  The Doctor held up his hand for silence. He turned to Rogin. ‘Could we confuse the Wirrrn by altering the Gravity Static Field?’ he asked.

  The Technop shook his head. ‘It would take hours to trace the lines of force,’ he objected. The Doctor nodded in professional agreement.

  ‘Will someone please listen to me?’ Sarah had climbed up on to the couch and was waving her arms frantically in the air. The Doctor rounded on her with barely concealed annoyance.

  ‘What is it, Sarah?’ he demanded sharply.

  ‘Noah mentioned a Transporter Vessel,’ she replied. They all looked blankly at her. ‘Well, presumably it has a power system of its own…’

  The Doctor clutched at his head. ‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’ he cried. ‘I can’t be expected to think of everything, you know,’ he added with a grieved expression.

  Harry helped Sarah down from the couch. ‘Well done, old girl,’ he grinned.

  The Doctor rubbed his hands together with renewed spirit. He asked Rogin how to reach the Transport Vessel. Rogin leaned across and activated a large display-plan of the entire Satellite. He indicated a shortened ‘spoke’ leading from the Cincture Structure towards the central Infrastructure or ‘hub’, and ending halfway in a circular Docking Structure where the Transport Vessel was mounted. The Doctor studied the display closely.

  ‘We would have to run cables halfway round the Cincture Structure from the Transport Vessel to the Cryogenic Chamber,’ he murmured doubtfully. ‘The Wirrrn will simply cut them.’ Rogin nodded. The Doctor leaned closer to the illuminated plan. ‘What are those?’ He indicated a complex of shafts and lattice girders joining the Transporter Dock to the Central Hub where the Cryogenic Section was housed.

  Rogin shrugged. ‘Obsolete structures,’ he said. ‘Relics of the time when the Satellite was functioning as a research base for stellar exploration.’

  The Doctor peered through his magnifying glass. ‘They connect the Transporter Dock with the Cryogenic Section,’ he said excitedly.

  ‘It is possible,’ agreed Rogin. ‘But we would require a mechanical cable-runner; the conduits are only forty centimetres square.’

  There was a silence. Vira crossed the chamber from the Cryogenic Systems
Panel. ‘We must do something soon,’ she murmured.

  ‘Couldn’t I take the cable through?’ suggested Sarah. ‘I don’t take up much room’.

  ‘That’s no job for you, Sarah,’ Harry said firmly.

  Sarah flushed with indignation. ‘Now look here, Doctor Sullivan…’ she began.

  The Doctor held out a length of his scarf in front of him, and moving his hands apart, he counted off the coloured stripes. ‘There: forty centimetres,’ he said, looking earnestly at Sarah. ‘… Do you think you could crawl through a shaft only this wide?’

  Sarah looked at the short length of scarf stretched between the Doctor’s hands, and then glanced round at the others with a cool, determined air. If she was having second thoughts she was certainly not going to admit it. ‘Of course I could,’ she declared firmly. The Doctor was full of admiration for her courage, but he looked worried. He explained that there would be very little air or heat in the shafts, and that Sarah would have no shielding against cosmic radiation from Space. He also warned her that there would probably be many dead-ends and confusing junctions.

  There was a short silence. Harry was looking apprehensively at Sarah and shaking his head. That was enough for Sarah; she thrust her chin defiantly forward. ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ she cried. ‘We’d better get started at once.’

  The Doctor hesitated a moment, then he patted her shoulder and nodded. ‘Splendid, Miss Smith,’ he said. ‘At last – an assignment worthy of your talents…’

  They swiftly made their way from the Control Centre to the great wheel-shaped Cincture Structure, the Doctor’s torch playing eerily over the polished walls of the tunnels. Everywhere was dark, silent and airless. The immobilised shutters were opened by means of small electronic master keys carried by Rogin and Vira. The curved gallery of the Cincture Structure was dimly lit by the glimmering stars shining through the observation portals. In every shadowed alcove and corner they expected to find the Wirrrn waiting for them; but the Satellite appeared deserted. Here and there the torch picked out the silver tracks of the Wirrrn larvae, and Sarah shuddered when they came upon blackened scraps of Noah’s protective suit littering the gallery floor.

  When they reached the junction with the Cryogenic Access Tunnel, the Doctor parted company with the others. Giving the thumbs-up sign to Sarah, he entered the Decontamination Airlock. ‘It shouldn’t take me long to wire up the Cryogenic Chamber,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll be ready by the time you bring the cable through, Sarah. Good luck, everyone.’ The Doctor waved, and disappeared.

  Rogin led Sarah, Harry and Vira further on round the Cincture Structure towards the Transporter Dock Access Tunnel… They all knew that Sarah was about to risk her life in an appallingly dangerous mission. Sarah herself knew that for a journalist it was the scoop of a lifetime; but above all else in her mind was the realisation that the future of the entire human race might now depend upon her success…

  7

  A Tight Squeeze

  IN THE CENTRE of the Solar Chamber hovered Noah, awaiting the final metamorphosis of the Wirrrn creatures. The chamber was seething with nightmarish activity as the pupae began to split asunder to allow the emergence of the fully developed Wirrrn. First, the transparent crystalline pods became clouded and opaque as billions of tiny fissures burst through the brittle, resinous tissue. Then the pods began to disintegrate and flake apart as the creatures within pushed their tentacles through, sawing their way out with the sharp, bristling hairs. Unearthly shrieks and whistlings echoed round the chamber as the adult Wirrrn struggled to shed their crumbling pupal form. In the midst of the upheaval Noah was poised, with raised antennae, to establish himself as swarm leader…

  Rogin and his party reached the Dock Section safely. They entered, through a complex of airlocks, into a dish-shaped area about thirty metres across. Enormous bell-shaped nozzles hung overhead, and the cradle supporting the Transport Vessel enclosed the humans in a thicket of light steel struts. The Transporter itself towered invisibly above them. Rogin at once began to clamber up one of the support struts towards a small maintenance hatch set in the underside of the Transporter. He carried one end of a heavy high-tension cable from a vast coil that he and Harry had manhandled from an equipment bay.

  Vira led Sarah over to a series of small sealed openings in the side of the ‘dish’ area. She opened several of them with the electronic master key, and directed a powerful microlamp into the dark conduits. ‘This one might be possible.’ She motioned Sarah to look. The shaft was just sufficiently wide to accommodate Sarah’s hunched shoulders.

  ‘It’s awfully narrow, old girl,’ muttered Harry, peering into the icy darkness. ‘… If you take a wrong turning, I doubt whether you’ll be able to turn back.’

  Sarah smiled bravely. ‘Then I’ll just have to make sure that I don’t, won’t I?’

  Vira helped Sarah to fit a tiny two-way communicator, designed rather like a hearing aid with microphone attached, into her ear. Harry unravelled the other end of the cable that Rogin was busy connecting into the Transporter’s generators, and secured it tightly round Sarah’s waist with a complicated nautical knot.

  ‘Well, it would be an awful bore if it came undone,’ he said, as Sarah tugged frantically at the loop of cable to gain a little room to breathe.

  ‘Let’s hope it’s long enough,’ she gasped, Vira quickly explained to Sarah how she would be guided through the conduits by radio from the Transporter Control Deck. She clasped Sarah’s hand in a brief gesture of good luck and clambered up to join Rogin in the Transporter Vessel…

  When all was ready, Harry assisted Sarah as she squeezed herself into the conduit, and began to pay out the cable as she inched her way into the darkness. After a few metres, the cable stopped moving. Harry poked his head into the narrow opening. ‘How are you doing, Sarah?’ he called.

  ‘… ’ve harly go starhed yet…’ came the muffled reply.

  ‘Sorry, old girl. I thought you were stuck,’ Harry shouted. At once the cable was jerked sharply out of his hands. Harry smiled to himself.

  ‘Jolly good luck, old thing,’ he murmured.

  In the Cryogenic Chamber the Doctor was well advanced with the task of welding cable terminals to the wall sections of the huge vault. All around him, the sleeping survivors of a terrestrial catastrophe lay suspended between life and death, the delicate Revivification systems starved of vital power, and the threat of the rapidly developing Wirrrn hanging over them. If Sarah succeeded in reaching the Cryogenic Chamber with the power cable, then there was a good chance of not only preventing the Wirrrn from invading the chamber, but also of restoring power to the chamber’s vital systems.

  Suddenly the Doctor switched off the torch and thrust the sonic screwdriver back into his pocket. He stood quite still, barely breathing, listening intently. There was a faint, dry rustling sound; then silence. He peered into the darkness. In the direction of the Access Chamber he saw two huge, ochre globes swinging from side to side: the eyes of a Wirrrn. He backed stealthily away until he felt the outline of a pallet behind him. Without taking his eyes from the baleful stare of the creature he opened the shield. To his relief he found that the pallet was empty. He climbed inside and closed the shield. He lay motionless, straining his eyes to see through the thick, distorting material…

  The Wirrrn moved slowly round the perimeter of the chamber, apparently pausing to examine some of the pallets. Eventually it approached and stopped in front of the Doctor, turning first one and then the other eye towards him. The Doctor started, just managing to suppress a cry, as something rattled and scraped against the pallet shield. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes, and fought against the painful cramp caused by his keeping utterly still in such an awkward posture. The Wirrrn seemed to stare in at him for an eternity, its sharp spines scratching against the shield with a noise that set his teeth on edge. Then abruptly it turned away, and crawled across the chamber towards the remains of the Wirrrn Queen. The Doctor pressed his face against the pa
llet shield. He could just make out the faint image of the Wirrrn’s eyes as the creature whirled in a frenzy away from the huge corpse of its progenitor, and disappeared whence it had come.

  The Doctor waited for a few minutes, then quietly raised the shield and climbed out of the pallet…

  As Harry clambered laboriously into the Control Module of the Transporter, he overheard Rogin speaking quietly to Vira. ‘… everything is perfect, Commander. We could depart for Earth now. There is nothing to stop us…’

  ‘I say, just a minute…’ said Harry suspiciously, easing himself up into the small, cramped chamber. Rogin and Vira were seated in moving, padded chairs which slid along and revolved around a slim steel pillar running the length of the cylindrical chamber, thus allowing the occupants to reach all parts of the control panelling.

  ‘Generator Manual Overrides linked, Commander,’ announced Rogin, completely ignoring Harry. ‘Initiation of Primary Phasing in forty-five seconds from now.’

  At that moment, Sarah’s voice burst loudly over the intercom. ‘Hello, Rogin. I’ve reached what feels like a three way junction… it’s very tight…’

  Rogin traced his finger over an illuminated plan of the conduit structure on the video screen before him. ‘You are making good progress,’ he replied. ‘You must now proceed to the left.’ There was a short silence, broken by the sound of Sarah’s struggling efforts.

  ‘I can… I can hardly move at all…’ she suddenly panted. There was the sound of a brief tussle, and then Sarah’s frightened whisper. ‘I think the cable is caught somehow…’

  Vira swung angrily round on Harry. ‘You should not have left the conduit hatch,’ she said icily. ‘The cable is obstructed.’

  Harry shamefacedly scrambled back down the alloy ladder, and descended swiftly to the Docking Area.

  Inside the conduit, Sarah was drenched in perspiration despite the intense coldness which numbed her fingers. She had to fight for every breath. Her knees and elbows were raw from scraping against the sides of the narrow shafts. Her hair repeatedly caught itself between her shoulders and the metal sides of the conduits, forcing her to continually retreat a few centimetres in order to release it. The smooth sides afforded her nothing to grip on. She could move only with a kind of caterpillar action which was terribly exhausting; she contracted her body, pressed her knees against the shaft and then straightened her body, pressed her elbows outwards and finally drew her legs along after her by contracting her body. She had to repeat this awkward sequence over and over again. She was often close to despair as the cable snagged, or the bulky knot which Harry had tied jammed itself between her hip and the side of the shaft.