by E. C. Tubb
Then madness.
A blur, a wash of greenish radiance which clung to the structure of the base, the people within it, the rock outside so that, for a fleeting moment, the Moon itself glowed with spectral light.
A moment during which Helena felt herself rise from the floor, to float, to crash down again with stunning force as the screens died and a giant snarled its mindless rage.
The floor starred with a mesh of fine cracks, the plastic growing red with an oozing film, blood which gushed from nose and eyes and ears. Which seeped from beneath her nails and streamed from her mouth as capillaries yielded beneath crushing pressures.
A pressure which flattened her then lifted so that she hovered, to return and hold her down harder than before.
“Help me!” gasped a voice. “For God’s sake do something!”
“The glow—a residual effect of the field. But how? Why?”
“Twenty G acceleration and more—I can’t take it!”
“Kill me! Let me die!”
The last a scream as the pressure returned, coming from all sides at once, invisible hands which gripped and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until, darkness came as a blessed relief and she fell into a tunnel of infinite length and endless depth.
C H A P T E R
Six
Koenig stirred, opening his eyes, swallowing and tasting blood, feeling the burn of torn membranes and lacerated tissue. His teeth, biting into the delicate inner skin of lips and cheeks, adding to the damage caused by ruptured capillaries. His nails which had dug crescents into his palms. A fallen stanchion against which he had been thrown and which had dug savagely into his chest. The broken glass which had cut through his uniform into thighs and knees.
But the physical pain was nothing against his concern for the base.
“Paul!” Koenig reached up and caught the edge of a desk and hauled himself painfully upright. “Paul, damn you! Answer me!”
In his chair Morrow groaned, one hand closing to lift, to fall again like the crippled limb of a gigantic insect.
“Paul! Check the environment! Check it!”
Main Mission swirled as Koenig completed the journey to his feet. He stood, swaying, fighting the nausea which rose within him, ignoring the signals of pain from his hurt flesh. Only his ears were active, listening, straining to catch the dreaded hiss of escaping air—the signal of approaching death.
“Paul!” His ears caught the rush and pound of his own blood, rang with a thin, high stridulation, but the whine he had feared was absent. Main Mission then, at least, was airtight. But the rest of the installation? “Paul! Paul, snap out of it man! Check the environment!” Morrow’s lolling head rocked as Koenig sent the flat of his hand hard against a cheek. “Paul!”
“Wha . . . ?” Morrow blinked, winced, then sucked in his breath. “Commander! What happened?”
“Save questions for later. Get to work, check the condition of all Sectors, maintain our environment at all costs. Get to it man. Fast!”
Koenig moved away as Morrow reached for his panels. David Kano was rising from the floor, blood thick on his mouth and chin, more making thin trails from his ears. He waved aside Koenig and pointed to Sandra Benes. She too showed signs of injury, ugly bruises marring her white skin but, she too, had recovered consciousness. Others were not so fortunate; a man who lay with a pulped skull, another who stared with protruding eyes and the broken end of a beam pinning his stomach, a girl who would never smile and laugh and walk again.
Gerald Simmonds who had died with a snarl.
It parted the bearded lips, the beard itself fringed with blood, the head at an odd angle as it rested on the shard of jagged plastic on which he had fallen. One hand was extended, the palm upwards, the fingers curled as if, even at the last, he had tried to grasp more than he could hold. The eyes were glazed, suffused with blood, glinting rubies in the cold glare of the emergency lights.
“John!” Koenig turned at the whispered sound. “John, help me!”
Victor Bergman, incredibly alive, framed in a ring of metal, cushions thick beneath his extended body. He was pale, his lips tinged with blue, one hand fumbling at a pocket, the box he produced spilling capsules.
“John!”
There was water in a dispenser and Koenig drew a cup and knelt beside the man and gave it to him after slipping a capsule between the blue-tinged lips. For a moment Bergman lay still, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving then he sighed and struggled upright to lean with his back against the wreckage which had ringed him with scraps and rods of metal.
“Thank you, John. I’ll be all right in a moment. How bad is it?”
“Paul’s checking.”
“No air-loss at least. Well, that’s something.” Bergman’s eyes widened as he looked past Koenig towards a section of the compartment. “John! Is that Helena?”
He turned and saw the glint of blonde and tumbled hair, the long, smooth lines of the body enhanced by the white-sleeved uniform and felt a momentary confusion, a merging and substitution of identities.
“Marcia! Marcia, for God’s sake! Are you hurt?”
And then as he reached her, to turn her over and to examine the pale face with anxious eyes, the moment had passed and the ghost born of confusion and similarity vanished to leave an individual with wide-staring eyes and lips which trembled as he wiped away the ugly stains.
“I . . . you said . . . you thought . . .”
“Nothing, Helena. A mistake.” His hand touched her cheek to rise and lift the mane of her hair, his eyes following it, absorbing her image, meeting her own in a sudden bond of understanding. An emotion born in pain and fear and suffering, triggered by a biological directive as old as the race and as old as time, one which left him purged of old regrets and stimulated by the need to survive. An emotion she shared as, lying on the floor, she looked up at him, feeling herself react to the touch of his hand. A moment stolen from time and then he was the Commander again. “Are you hurt? Can you stand?”
“Yes, John, I think so.” She rose, cautiously, breathing carefully, relaxing as she felt no grate and jar of broken bone, no lancing pain of torn and penetrated lungs. “Some bruises,” she said. “Some slight, superficial injuries, but nothing serious.” Her eyes widened as she looked around Main Mission. “Some of these people are badly hurt. I’d better get help.”
“Not yet.” Koenig nodded to where Morrow was hard at work. “Not until we know the situation. Just do what you can with what you have.”
Her skill and knowledge, strips torn from uniforms, some water, some crude splints, the easing of tormented limbs and damaged tissue.
As she worked Koenig joined Morrow at the main console.
“Well, Paul?”
“It’s not too good, Commander. Air-loss in sectors seven and fifteen. Corridors nine, thirteen and twenty cracked. Extensive damage in workshops and external installations. Generator Two malfunctioning. Air—”
“Any danger of radiation hazard?”
“Not as yet.” Morrow checked his panels. “Safeties threw out in time.”
Koenig nodded, relieved as the man continued his report. It was bad but it could have been far worse. The damage could be repaired, the broken passages and compartments sealed and the environment maintained. About one fifth of the upper installation would have to be abandoned and two subsurface compartments with them. Another had been flooded by stored water but, fortunately, had remained intact. The loss of the recycling plant was more serious as was the destruction of the chorella vats in which basic food was cultured. Worst of all was the tally of the dead and seriously injured.
Koenig’s face hardened as he listened; the guards Simmonds had brought with him had died to a man—their prison ripped open by opposed stresses. The women, five of them, had been more fortunate but two of them had severe internal injuries and one had a broken neck. Fifteen Security Guards had died at their stations, ten Maintenance staff had followed them, a dozen men and women had been lost when their compar
tment split open.
Too many deaths and too many injured but before they could be taken care of the environment had to be secured.
Morrow attended to it, relaying orders, checking the data fed him by his instruments, guessing when such data was absent, using his knowledge and instinctive skill to send men to prevent further damage, others to fasten struts and braces on existing protections, still more to undo the chaos which appeared to rule.
“John . . . I mean, Commander.”
Helena was before him. Koenig smiled as he looked into her eyes. “John will do. What is it?”
“I must get to the hospital. People are hurt here and need medical attention. There could be others.”
“There are.”
“Then I can waste no more time. Doctor Mathias and Doctor Riden—”
“Riden is dead,” said Koenig. “Paul has the report. And a couple of nurses, too; Sylvia Noriet and Paula Yancy.”
“Paula?”
“Yes. She was close to you?”
“She’d been here only a few weeks,” said Helena, dully, remembering the girl, her youth and vivacity. “But she was close to Alan Carter.” The mention of his name brought him to mind. “Alan! John, what happened to him?”
“He was outside,” said Koenig. “On observation. He must have been caught in the blast.”
Caught and destroyed, she thought, bleakly. Crushed, broken, smashed down to lie in the wreckage of his Eagle or hopelessly lost in space. No man or machine could have survived the holocaust which had flowered in irresistible fury on the surface of the Moon.
Then from where he sat, Paul Morrow said, incredulously, “Commander! I’m getting a signal from outside. A recognition pattern from an Eagle.”
“The screens?”
“Still inoperative.” Morrow glanced to where they framed nothing but darkness. “But I might be able to manage a direct transmission.” His hands flew over the ranked controls. “Eagle, come in. Eagle, come in. Use channel nine, frequency eight oh seven three. Maximum boost.” He grunted as a screen flared with darts of vibrant color. “No joy, use voice and identify. Who are you?”
“Paul, damn you for a walleyed Wallabong,” said a tired but familiar voice. “Just tell me where to set down this bird. And do it fast, eh? The old girl’s running out of juice.”
Alan Carter had returned from the dead.
“Luck,” he said when, later, after having landed and joined others in Koenig’s office, he slumped into a chair. “I guess if ever a man had luck it was me. Makes me feel a little selfish in a way. Seems I had more than my fair share.” He looked at his hand where it rested clenched on the desk. “Paula’s, maybe.”
“You know?”
“I know.” Carter sighed and deliberately relaxed his fingers. “She was a good kid,” he said, dully. “A girl with plans. Well, I guess it happens.”
To her and to others. From where he sat at the end of the desk Bergman said, “What happened out there, Alan?”
“Didn’t you get it?”
“We saw the initial plasma form then the scanners went out and, well, everything went a little wild.”
“When the stuff hit all hell broke loose,” said the pilot. “And that’s an understatement. As I said I was lucky. I’d moved back and had the curve of the Moon between me and the point of impact. I dropped lower and monitored the relay I’d set. It lasted long enough for me to see the plasma form and the cans begin to blow. I guess the flare must have reached up and out for maybe a couple of thousand miles. It seemed to be contained and looked just like the flare from a rocket engine. It acted that way too.”
Bergman said, precisely, “You mean it seemed that way, Alan.”
“I mean it acted that way.” Carter looked from one to the other. “Didn’t you feel it? The kick? The acceleration? Man, I’m telling you, the whole damned Moon shifted beneath the blast.”
“What?” Bergman stared his disbelief, “Moved?”
“I told you. I was down below the curve and when the blast peak hit I was suddenly in trouble. The moon was coming at me like a scalded cat. A damn great ball of dust and rock shooting towards me like a bullet fired from a cannon. It was odd-looking, greenish, tinged with a glow which flickered.” Carter paused, frowning. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, things were happening too fast and I guess reflexes took over. I gunned the Eagle and tried to gain distance. It was like one of those nightmares where you keep running but can’t get anywhere. I cut in full power, used the boosters and drained the generator but still I was in a losing race. Then, luck again, I seemed to go faster. Fast enough for me to manage a soft landing. Well, a relatively soft landing. At least I wasn’t pasted to the interior structure.”
But the hulls had been split and the vehicle almost wrecked. Only his suit had saved the pilot and his chair had been bent and warped with the force of his landing. Koenig remembered the report and the comments from engineering, remembered too the bruises which marred the pilot’s body, the cracked ribs now bound with wide bandages. Remembered too Helena’s concern with his internal organs. A “soft” landing? Koenig wondered what the man would admit to being a hard one.
Bergman said, frowning, “I don’t understand this, Alan. You claim that the Moon actually came towards you?”
“Yes.”
“It couldn’t have been that the Eagle was diving towards the Moon?”
“No.” Carter anticipated the next question. “I’m certain of that, Professor. Visually the two things might appear the same but there are other effects. I’m a pilot and I know when my vessel is moving. Crazy as it may sound the Moon came at me as if it had been fired and I had a hell of a job to keep away from it. In the end I lost the race.”
“Couldn’t you have veered off to one side?”
“No. I tried but it seemed as if I was stuck. Anyway I had no time or energy to spare. I was too intent on staying ahead—to have tried anything else would have been curtains.” Then, quietly, he added, “Don’t you believe me, Professor?”
“It isn’t a matter of belief, Alan. I’m trying to understand what took place.” Bergman rose from his chair and began to pace the office. “The antimatter hit,” he murmured. “There was the anticipated explosion and when the temperature rose high enough gas and released vapor burned to form a plasma. That, in turn, reached and released the energy stored in the cans of radioactive waste. The result would be a tremendous explosion equalled only by the forces generated within a sun. There would have been pressure—we felt the shock-wave. But what else?”
“Movement,” said Koenig. “Newton’s Third Law—to each action there must be an equal and opposite reaction.”
“The basic fundamental of rocketry,” agreed Bergman. “But against the mass of the Moon?”
“Why not? Size is relative. A colossal explosion against a tremendous mass so, theoretically, the Moon could have been blasted from its orbit.” Koenig hit the button of his intercom. “Paul? Have you fixed the external scanners yet?”
“Still working on them, Commander.”
And, until they were repaired, the base was blind.
Bergman said, “You’re forgetting something, John. The mass of the Moon would contain a tremendous inertial-resistance. The time-lag would cause the sphere to shatter before it could yield. The shock-wave of the explosion would set up a violent sequence of tremors which would have built up a destructive harmonic within the inner magma. My preliminary calculations showed that there would have been surface shattering together with actual segmentation.”
“Which would have destroyed Moonbase Alpha,” said Koenig. “We are living proof that it didn’t.”
“The Moon moved,” insisted Carter. “I saw it. It didn’t split it moved. Damn it, Professor, I was out there. I was scared but I wasn’t drunk or dreaming. It happened.”
“But—”
Bergman broke off as the communicator hummed. Morrow was on the screen. He looked pale, incredulous.
“Commander!”
<
br /> “What is it, Paul? Are the external scanners operating?”
“They’ve just been fixed.” Morrow swallowed. “But, Commander, I can’t find the sun and I can’t find Earth. They’ve vanished!”
The voice belonged to another age, another time, one in which tomorrow could be relied on and things were as apparently immutable as the stars. A fiction, things changed and the voice of the broadcaster, caught by a monitoring recorder, held a threnody of the horror to come.
“A circus,” said Helena, as she listened. “They expected a circus. Fireworks in the sky and all the rest of it.”
“Simmonds alerted them.” Bergman rasped one hand over his jaw. His eyes were red with fatigue, his cheeks sunken, his hair a straggle of rebellious strands. Watching him Helena noted the cyanotic tinge of the lips, the little jerkings of overtired muscle, but said nothing. That he was alive at all was a miracle and, to insist on drugging him now, was to rob the conference of his genius. “They knew where to aim their cameras but God alone knows what they thought when the Moon began to break free from its orbit. Some of them, perhaps, might have guessed what would happen.”
Earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanos erupting, the ground opening to close with animal-like writhings. Fires and the rolling thunder of disturbed geologic balances. Heated rains and ash and the darkness of devastation.
Koenig sighed as the voice fell into an abrupt silence. He had listened to it a dozen times since the recording had been discovered and knew little more now than at the beginning. The Moon had moved, that now was certain, but how and to where?
Bergman said, abruptly, “It was my fault I see it now. I am to blame.”
“For what, Victor?”
“For what happened, John. I did it.”
“You summoned the antimatter from the depths of space? Made sure it was on a collision course with Earth? Shrewdly split and diverted it so that a fragment would hit the waste disposal areas?” Koenig was sharp. “Are you human, Victor, or something more? Are you claiming superhuman powers?”
