Destroyer of Worlds (8 page)

‘The transition point,’ murmured Manton. ‘This is where all light and radiation is seized by the enveloping force and rotated in a half-circle. If we were a photon of light or even a minute particle of spatial debris, we too could be so rotated.’

But the Ad Astra had tremendous mass and any force which could move it so quickly from its destined path would volatise the entire body to incandescent vapour.

‘Carl!’ whispered Claire. ‘Carl, I —’

‘Now!’

The screens blurred as Manton called out, stars seeming to flow from the centre to the edges, to wink, to vanish…

To be replaced by a wall of utter darkness.

A blank, ebon surface which served as a backdrop to something incredible.

‘Carl!’ Claire’s fingers dug into his hand, the nails gouging at his flesh. ‘Carl — it’s a brain! A living, human brain!’

It shone with a pulsating greenish glow, a leprous luminescence blotched with the lines of convolutions, divided into sponge-like hemispheres, rounded and soft-looking and incredible.

‘A brain!’ Manton’s voice reflected his amazement. ‘But big! So big!’

The size of the Earth as seen from the Moon, tremendous, dominating. Maddox stared at it, noting details unseen before, the haze-like appearance of the thing, the blurred detail, the pulse of the greenish glow. The image blurred even more as he watched.

‘Frank?’

‘Interference, Commander. The external scanners are being affected by the discharge from our defensive shield.’ His voice rose a little, ‘Discharge far higher than normal. A radiated loss of seven per cent and mounting.’

Maddox moved his eyes and stared at the external view of the screen. The outer hull was glowing, bright with emitted energy, scintillating with eye-hurting brilliance.’

‘Rose — any sign of anything approaching?’

‘No, Commander.’

‘No attacking vessels, then, and it would do no harm to drop the shield.’ The image in the main screens cleared as Weight collapsed the shield, sharpening in detail, shining with an inner light, an emerald mystery.

It couldn’t be a brain. Not a human, pulsating, living organ — the size alone was against it being that. Maddox listened as Rose Armstrong reported the findings of her instruments.

‘Mass 2.365 Lunar. Volume 5.463. Distance .025 au. Local radiation 7.973 plus normal. Temperature —?’ She broke off then said, unsteadily, ‘Apparently zero.’

‘Check!’

‘I’ve done that, Commander. Our instruments must be defective in some way. No light-source can have zero temperature and yet that is what we appear to be looking at.’

A mystery, another to add to the rest, but the solutions could wait. Maddox’s first responsibility was to the ship and he listened as the reports came in.

‘All systems operating. No damage. Vessel at optimum.’ Weight turned in his chair. ‘Stand down from red alert. Commander?’

‘Yes. Switch to yellow. What do you make of it, Eric?’

Manton was already at work at his computer terminal and other apparatus.

‘A moment, Carl. Saha, will you please check this analogue with the Computer? Thank you.’ He pursed his lips as the technician handed him the readout. ‘As I suspected. Interesting. Most interesting.’

Maddox said, tightly, ‘No games, Eric. I want answers’.

‘We have passed through the outer wall of force isolating this area from the normal universe. Naturally the parameters are dark because no light is being received — all is being rotated around the circumference of this space. We are, fortunately, travelling on a line which will bisect the sphere on a chord towards its lower region. I say “fortunately” because if we had been travelling in a more direct line towards the centre then a collision with the central mass would have been inevitable.’ Manton made a calculation, then: ‘At our velocity and knowing the relative masses of the two bodies, both would have been totally shattered.’

The death and devastation the warning had meant?

‘And?’

‘Be a little patient, Carl. We have, in effect, entered a completely new universe and it will take a little time to learn something about it. After all we have taken two million years to learn about our own and still are ignorant.’

‘Please, Eric, no lectures. Can you anticipate any immediate danger?’

‘Immediate? No.’

‘Conclusions?’

Manton sighed and shook his head. ‘You ask a hard question, Carl, and I can only give the roughest of answers. Basically we should, if conditions are as we know, merely proceed until eventually we will leave this area as we entered it. Imagine a circle. Imagine an object, the tip of a pen, for example. It moves on a straight line, hits one side of the circle, passes on, crosses the area and leaves the ring on the far side. We are the tip of the pen and this space is the circle.’

One containing the tremendous representation of a human brain. Maddox glanced at it where it hung in the screens, grotesque, monstrous, and knew himself to be the victim of suggestion and illusion. The thing could not be a human brain. It couldn’t be a brain at all.

The colour was wrong, a brain would have been grey and streaked with red, not a pulsating green. Claire had planted the suggestion, forming an association with a familiar object, turning a vague similarity into a firm depiction. The dark lines of assumed convolutions must be fissures and valleys, the green that of vegetation, the apparent pulsation a fault in the scanners, the glow —?

‘Rose — still no temperature?’

‘None that we are registering, Commander.’

Cold light? It was possible — some insects had the facility of producing a glow by chemical means, but Maddox knew that nothing radiating that brightly could possibly do it without emitting energy of some kind. And that energy would register as heat.

‘Check on the complete electromagnetic spectrum. Saha, feed all received data into the Computer for the purpose of constructing a local analogue of our present and extrapolated situation. Anything new as yet, Frank?’

‘Findings are being correlated, Commander.’ Weight grew busy with his instruments. ‘Additional data on screens now.’ The image of the glowing central mass shifted and something else took its place. ‘This was behind the main body and has just come into view.’

It was a ball of something which could have been rock but the surface was rounded, smooth, a dull grey illuminated by the green glow and resembling a polished pebble. A natural satellite of the central mass, perhaps, but Maddox didn’t think so. Manton had no alternative answer.

‘It could have been trapped sometime in the past. Given enough time other objects beside ourselves must have entered this pocket universe. That could have been a lump of stellar debris at one time, a small planetoid or a large meteor.’

‘Trapped,’ said Maddox. ‘How? Why? If it entered, then why didn’t it leave?’

‘There could be many reasons,’ said Manton, precisely. ‘It could have had a low relative velocity. It could have bisected this space very near the central mass and have been caught by its gravitational attraction. Or —’

Maddox snapped, ‘Saha! Have the Computer check on those possibilities.’

‘Carl?’ Manton frowned. ‘Is something on your mind?’

‘Never take the obvious for granted, Eric. You were one of the first to teach me that. Just because an answer appears to be the logical solution doesn’t mean that it is correct. Saha?’

‘The possibilities mentioned by Professor Manton are mutually conflicting.’ Nelson Saha cleared his throat as he studied the display. ‘Assuming the relative masses to be the same as at present observed the difference in relative velocity would have had to be small for the intruder to be trapped into a stable orbit. But if it had been so low then it would have been drawn by gravitational attraction into the main body.’

‘In other words,’ said Maddox, grimly, ‘If the intruder was moving slow enough to be trapped then it wouldn’t have been moving fast enough to avoid destruction. So much for logical answers, Eric. Want to try again?’

Manton said, slowly, ‘There’s another answer, but we don’t know enough yet about local conditions to be sure if it is correct. I hope that it isn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘This could be a closed-system, Carl. A miniature universe with his own laws and own energy-levels which have little relation to those with which we are familiar. In that case —’ He paused then said, bleakly, ‘It could be that everything entering this space is trapped. We could go on and on but all we’d be doing is to follow the interior of this space around and around. If that is the case, then we are caught — trapped for eternity!’

*

Ted Bain adjusted the microscope, stared through the eyepiece, made a further adjustment and, after another examination, leaned back from the instrument. He was frowning, twin lines graven deep between his eyes, the corners of his mouth downturned a little as if he had looked at something unpleasant.

‘Doctor?’ Nurse Khan halted at his side. She was trim and neat in her uniform, olive skin enhanced by the stark whiteness of her sleeve. ‘You look perturbed, is something wrong?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Not to be sure is to be aware of life,’ she smiled. ‘Only the dead can be certain of the absence of change.’

‘Which is an apparent contradiction as you know. If dead, there can be no certainty.’

‘True,’ admitted the girl. ‘And with only one hand how can there be clapping?’

Bain shook his head. At times he found the girl impossible. Young, attractive, Marla Khan seemed to take a delight in firing abstruse quotations at him, many of which he was fairly certain she invented on the spot, but she was, he had to admit, a superb master of her trade and for that he could tolerate much.

And he liked her. Liked her, perhaps, a little too much. ‘Marla —’

‘Ted?’ He had broken the coldly formal manner of professional address and she reminded him of it with the use of his given name and a smile. ‘Were you going to invite me to join you after duty? I’ve a recording of Gus Easton’s Lunar Approach, remember it? The one with the simulated rocket blast and the sub-audible voices? If you want, you could come to my quarters and listen to it.’

‘Thank you, Marla, but no.’

‘Don’t you like good music?’

‘Good music, yes.’ He softened his rejection. ‘You know the wise old saying? One man’s meat is another’s poison? Gus Easton may be a good musician to you but to me he’s a —’

‘Careful, Ted!’ she warned with mock ferocity. ‘You’re talking of the man I could have loved. But I know what you mean. To be honest I borrowed the recording because I thought you might like it. Now I’ve found we have yet another thing in common. Well, what else can we do? I know! Take me to the observation room. I’ve heard the view now is fantastic. Is it true that Doctor Allard first described the central body as a brain?’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t in Mission Control at the time.’

‘Well, it is. Nurse Ryder told me. She’s seen it. A brain, Ted. Think of it. A planet-sized brain.’

‘Or something which just happens to resemble one,’ he corrected. ‘A walnut looks the same only much smaller. That’s why the Romans used to think it good for headaches and such. The similarity of appearance made them think the two were connected in some way.’ He sighed, wistfully, ‘Medicine in those days was simple.’

‘Hit and miss, Ted. If it worked you did it again. Now we know exactly what we’re doing and why.’

‘Do we?’ His shrug was expressive. ‘I wish I could be as sure.’

She caught his tone, recognising its seriousness, and immediately became the true professional she was. The time for informality had passed.

‘There is something wrong! What is it, Doctor?’

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps nothing more than a contaminated culture. I’ve been checking blood corpuscles and noted something strange. Then I checked out a culture of bacteria, X238 — a harmless but essential component of the lower bowel.’

‘And?’

‘Probably nothing. It could even be fatigue. In any case I’ll have to check again. If you could prepare two cultures for me, nurse?’

‘X238?’

‘Yes.’

‘Both on agar?’

She moved away as he nodded and, alone, he turned again to the microscope. Lost in the magnified world of sub-cultures he didn’t hear Claire approach him. Only when she rested her hand on his shoulder did he lift his head.

‘What? Oh, Doctor Allard!’

‘Did I startle you?’

‘No — I wasn’t expecting you. How is Brian?’

‘He’ll be alright.’ Brian Shaw was one of those who had recently injured himself. ‘Some superficial bruising, minor contusions but the fractured ribs we suspected turned out to be little more than hair-line breaks.’ Claire glanced at the notes Bain had made. ‘Blood-checks, Ted?’

‘A routine count. I’m a little concerned about Guthrie. He isn’t recovering as he should and I suspect a lowered red-cell count.’

‘Guthrie?’ Claire frowned. ‘He was discharged as fit before we hit the barrier. Before —’ She swallowed then forced herself to continue, ‘Before Ivan Gogol collapsed.’

‘Yes.’ Bain removed the slide from the instrument and selected another. ‘You remember how concerned we were at Gordon Kent’s prolonged hospitalisation. His wound seemed reluctant to heal. Well, I’ve been doing some research on the problem, no answer as yet and maybe there never will be, but I did bump into something odd when I tested out Guthrie’s blood. He was injured about the same time and suffered the same superficial conditions. Well — look at this.’

He stepped aside as Claire stooped over the microscope. For a long moment she examined the slide.

‘And?’

‘Now examine this.’

‘A comparison?’

She turned at his nod and again became engrossed in her study of the illuminated picture beneath the lenses. Without speaking she selected other slides then looked at his notes.

‘You made other tests, Ted?’

‘On X238 — they check out.’ He drew in his breath and held it for a moment before releasing it in an audible sigh. ‘I’m having fresh cultures made, of course, but I’m afraid the picture is clear.’

Claire looked at him; a skilled man, an experienced physician and a master of pathology. Not a man to be easily terrified and not one to show unfounded anxiety. And far too good a scientist to leap to unfounded assumptions.