The Doom That Came to Dunwich

by Richard A. Lupoff

  Dr. Chen protested. Beijing 11-11 carried only a limited number of EEPs — External Excursion Pods. They were meant to be used only in cases of extreme necessity. For servicing and repairs of the station, for transportation between space vehicles — although there were no other space vehicles within the better part of a two billion kilometers of Beijing 11-11 — or as lifeboats. They were emphatically not intended for exploration.

  But Kimana Hasani would not be deterred. He suited up in protective gear and entered the EEP. He promised Chen Jing-quo that he would maintain a continuous video and audio link with Beijing 11-11 . Once he had climbed into the EEP he waited for the interlock to click green, hit the launch button and dropped away from Beijing 11-11 .

  Dr. Chen watched twin video screens. On one she followed the progress of her partner’s EEP as it dropped away from Beijing 11-11 and drifted down toward the atmosphere of Yuggoth. On the other she watched Kimana Hasani’s face. He in turn concentrated on the instruments and controls of the pod.

  As the tiny craft entered the atmosphere of the planet Chen Jing-quo heard her partner mutter something but this phase lasted only a few seconds. She thought she heard Kimana Hasani say something like sizzling, heard him speak part of her name. Then she observed a flash. The screen that had carried Kimana Hasani’s image went blank. The screen that had carried an exterior image of the EEP flared a brilliant golden-orange. A shock wave spread visibly through the atmosphere where the EEP had been, then rippled outward and downward toward the surface of Yuggoth.

  And upward, toward Beijing 11-11, where Dr. Chen cried out in startlement and grief at what she had seen, and at what she suspected was its meaning.

  The only phenomenon that she could think of that would produce so violent a discharge was a nuclear explosion. She knew the design of the EEP as she knew every surface, every weld, every circuit on Beijing 11 -11. She knew that Kimana Hasani’s pod carried no fissile material. She inferred what had happened. The atmosphere of Yuggoth was composed of SeeTee matter.

  SeeTee. CT. Contra-Terrene.

  Antimatter.

  She experienced a flash of recollection, of her school days, of a student joke: What do you get if a normal matter boy makes it with an antimatter girl?

  Answer: No matter.

  No matter. No matter, in truth. Just one hell of a release of pure energy.

  Yuggoth was composed of SeeTee matter.

  The mountains and plains of Yuggoth, its black, viscid seas, its ebony ice caps, its cyclopean cities with their towering, eye-wrenching structures, its monstrous inhabitants, all were composed of contraterrene matter.

  Of antimatter.

  Chen Jing-kuo returned to the electron telescope. She trained it upon the Yuggothian city directly below the point where Kimana Hasani’s pod and Kimana Hasani himself had been converted to pure energy. The city lay in ruins. Titanic structures had been toppled, crushed to rubble. The inhabitants of the city had died by the millions, their terrible bodies torn and scattered hither and yon.

  Shaking her head, Chen Jing-kuo wiped her tears. She turned from the telescope and opened a hyper-light speed link to Luna. The communications operator who received her call was a onetime classmate, Matyah Melajitm. For a moment Melajitm’s smile filled Dr. Chen’s screen. Then the comm-op saw the expression on Chen Jing-quo’s face.

  “What’s the matter? Something’s happened. What is it?”

  “Get Dr. Jerom. Kimana is dead. We seem — I think we’ve started a war. The first interplanetary war!”

  It seemed to take hours — more likely less than two minutes — for Harleyann Jerom to replace Matyah Melajitm at the Luna comm-link.

  “Dr. Chen, tell me.”

  Chen Jing-quo gave her a quick summary of the event.

  Harleyann Jerom groaned. “All right, Chen. Do nothing now. Better yet, batten down Beijing 11-11. Not that I imagine you can do much to defend the station if the Yuggothi choose to counterattack. They’re likely to interpret the explosion as an attack. They surely will if they’re anything like us.”

  “There was no way. I mean, how could Kimana ever imagine …” Dr. Chen’s voice trailed away.

  “Never mind blame,” Jerom responded. “There will be plenty of time for that later on. Or maybe not. But not now, that’s for sure. Keep the link open.”

  Chen Jing-quo saw Harleyann Jerom turn away, heard her give instructions to Matyah Melajitm. Chen knew that Jerom was going to talk with Earth, get a quick decision from the politicians who ran planetary affairs.

  A quick decision.

  Fat chance.

  Jerom reappeared on Beijing 11-11’s comm screen. “Chen, was there ever — ever — any indication that the Yuggothi were even aware of Beijing 11-11?”

  Chen Jing-quo shook her head. “No. That’s what was so — we tried — we tried to establish communication with them. They ignored us. Or — it wasn’t even that. It was as if they were completely unaware of us. As if were bacteria, viruses, and they were humans. Or mammoths. How many bacteria does such a beast crush with every step? To the Yuggothi we were bacteria. Or less. They never even noticed us. Until Kimana hit their atmosphere. Then …” She spread her hands, helpless to continue.

  Harleyann Jerom nodded. “An apt simile. They probably won’t be angry with us. A mersa bacterium doesn’t hate its host and a human doesn’t hate a bacterium. They’re just two kinds of organism, and one will kill the other in order to preserve itself and perpetuate its kind. The infection will kill the host or the host will kill the infection.”

  “Right.” Chen Jing-kuo reacted with a manic grin.

  Jerom’s voice was harsh. “Get a grip!”

  “Nothing personal,” Dr. Chen went on.

  “I said, Get a grip! This is a crisis that could make all the wars in human history look like playground squabbles.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chen said. She was calmer now. Her nerves were jumping. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest. It must be beating close to two hundred beats a minute. Her breath was coming in desperate gasps.

  She recognized the phenomena. Some ancestor was reaching down to her, reaching through the genetic matter that carried ancient reflexes. Her body sensed her desperation, prepared itself for combat or for flight. Appropriate reactions for a Cro-Magnon, for Pithecanthropus Erectus, for an ancestor even more ancient. But hardly apt for Homo Interplanetarius.

  She was in control of herself. “What are my instructions, Dr. Jerom?”

  “For now, observe and report. What do you see on Yuggoth?”

  Chen returned to the telescopes. She activated a third screen, one for an electron image, one for an optical image, one for a superimposed combination.

  “It’s daytime down there. You know, it’s always daytime on Yuggoth. The planet rotates but its light comes from its core so it doesn’t really matter. The city that was destroyed by the shock wave — I see Yuggothi arriving from all directions. I suppose they’re rescue crews. The devastation is terrible. The casualties — I can’t even guess at the number. Some of them are still alive, though. I see Yuggothi crawling through the ruins. Some with dreadful injuries. Some are just — just — it looks as if their body parts, when they were ripped off by the shock wave, some of them didn’t die and now they’re flopping around, moving like torn starfish. And — and — I can’t go on, Harleyann. I can’t.”

  “That’s all right, Jing-kuo. You’ve done what you can. And we’re getting feeds from Beijing 11-11’s instruments.”

  There was a pause, then Harleyann Jerom resumed. “You’re convinced that Kimana Hasani’s EEP set off the explosion on Yuggoth?”

  Dr. Chen’s eyes were still focused on the screens showing conditions on the surface of Yuggoth. “I’m certain, Harleyann. The only explanation — I’m convinced it’s the only explanation, the only way that little EEP could cause the devastation — the only explanation is that Yuggoth is composed of antimatter. Once Kimana’s EEP hit the atmosphere that was all it took. The EEP and
Kimana himself were cancelled out. Converted to pure energy, along with an equivalent mass of Yuggothi atmosphere. He — ”

  Her words were cut off by a gasp from Harleyann Jerom. Then the voice of the woman on Luna said, “They’re here!”

  “Who? What are you saying, Harleyann?”

  “The Yuggothi.”

  “Impossible. I just saw them leave their planet.”

  “They’re here. They’re circling overhead. Their ships are unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. They look like — like cyborgs. They’re monsters, something like bats, something like octopuses, something like humans. And machines. They’re machines, too.”

  “But — they can’t have traveled that far in a few minutes.”

  “They can, Jing-kuo. They must have — I don’t know — we manage to skip message through wormholes or subspace or however our system works. We don’t really understand, do we, we just know that it works. And they’ve found a way to travel, oh, not through space. Between space. Whatever. And they’re heading toward Earth, Jing-kuo. I can see. I can see waves of blackness sweeping across the planet. The atmosphere is burning, the oceans, forests, ice caps. Oh, my God, my God, my God. It’s worse than — ”

  The transmission ended.

  Chen Jing-kuo studied the surface of Yuggoth, pulsing red, filling the sky above Beijing 11-11.

  The virus doesn’t hate its host, she thought, and the host doesn’t really hate the virus. There is nothing personal about it. Nothing personal. If the host doesn’t destroy the virus in time, the virus will kill the host. But even if that happens, once the host is dead, the virus also will die.

  Chen Jing-kuo turned the telescope toward Earth. The image was magnified until it filled a screen. As she watched, bits of black appeared on the blue-and-white disk. They spread from points to irregular blots. More of them appeared, and more, until they began to run together.

  For a moment the planet disappeared against the solid black background of space. Then points appeared again, became blots, multiplied and grew until Earth was a red disk. Like Yuggoth, it began to pulse, to pulse like a malevolent heart. Now Chen Jing-kuo understood what she was seeing. The Yuggothi, she realized, had devised a means to convert the normal matter of Earth, contact with which would have been instantly, disastrously fatal to them, into contraterrene matter. Antimatter.

  Now they could live in Earth, and now there remained no other life to compete with them.

  But Yuggoth itself was also contraterrene. The Yuggothi had erected no shield against a potential plunging space station of terrene matter. For all Chen Jing-kuo could tell, the Yuggothi were as unaware of the station as a human would be of a single fatal bacterium.

  Earth was dead. Chen Jing-kuo knew that now. The Yuggothi had simply fired uncounted bombs of solid contraterrene matter into Earth’s atmosphere until there remained nothing of the world that had lived for billions of years. They had wiped it clean. The atmosphere was gone. The oceans, the forests. The ice caps were gone. The planet had been wiped clean. It now had new owners. Octopus-bat-man-machine things that even now were walking or slithering or flying across the black, dead surface of the once blue-green, beautiful world. The black surface that was now pulsing with a red, evil rhythm.

  Even so, there was no way that Yuggothi could, themselves, land upon that murdered world. Unless they had devised a means to convert their own bodies to terrene matter — or the very Earth to contraterrene.

  The oblate globe of Yuggoth spun beneath Beijing 11-11. Chen Jing-kuo set the controls, activated the verniers, sent Beijing 11-11 plunging away from Yuggoth, away from Earth and Earth’s sun, out into the arm of Earth’s galactic womb.

  Chen Jing-kuo fully expected to die in Beijing 11-11.

  The odds of reaching an inhabitable world, no less meeting friendly aliens, were astronomical. Chen Jing-kuo laughed. Truly the odds were astronomical. But some day, some day a thousand years hence or a billion, some unimaginably strange creatures would find Beijing 11-11 and know that a species with hands and feet and minds had lived. That they were not alone in the cold universe.

  If you enjoyed The Doom That Came To Dunwich, we would be really grateful if you could leave a review on the Amazon page and Goodreads.

  For weekly updates on our free and discounted eBooks sign up to our newsletter.

  Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.