Yet she had to know. Gently she said, ‘You suspect disease, Ted?’
‘You saw.’
‘I saw, yes, but I want you to say it. You have done the tests and made the conclusions. I ask you again, Ted. Disease?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Age.’
*
The observation room was fitted with chairs and soft coverings with a tinkling fountain giving a susurration of subdued melody designed to give the impression of warmth and security, the balmy magic of a summer’s evening, a scented, sub-tropical night.
Here lovers came to walk beneath the stars, to sit and whisper sweet promises. Here too came the tired and those who felt the need to stretch the vision into the infinite. And, here, too, came those who felt the need to be alone, others who wished to cherish memories of the Earth they had left behind.
From a shadowed place Maddox looked at dimly seen heads, saw the glimpses of arms and legs, the pale blur of lifted faces, other faces, darker, gleaming like ebony, like sun-kissed fruit. If any saw him they gave no sign and he, in turn, stood as if he were a man in total isolation.
That, too, was an attribute of the room. In it, should that be the desire, privacy was absolute.
A privacy now invaded by the watchful eye of the alien sun.
Words, he thought, ones which had little meaning and which, even so, were wrong. The thing was not a sun and it was far from alien. Here, in this place, it belonged and his ship did not. The Ad Astra was the intruder. They were the alien interlopers.
And they would remain alien — for how long?
Again Maddox stared at the enigmatic, brain-like core of the central mass. Its greenish radiation pulsed as if in response to the pound of a living heart. Its shape, all the more disquieting because of medical associations, gave it the appearance of a monstrosity. Its satellite, unseen now, had vanished behind the main body which hung low above the horizon. An accident had made it so — had they entered the mysterious area at a slightly different angle then it would have appeared directly overhead.
Lifting the communicator from his belt, Maddox triggered the instrument and read the digital time-check thrown on the tiny screen.
It vanished as he pressed a stud.
‘Eric?’
‘Carl!’ Manton was in his private laboratory, seated, a litter of graphs and paper before him. ‘Where are you?’ He nodded as Maddox answered. ‘Waiting?’
‘Yes. How much longer?’
‘Without precise measurements we have to allow for a wide margin of error. And, as you know, we had trouble in determining the area of this space. Even now we have only a rough approximation.’
‘How long?’
‘You’ll know as soon as we find out, Carl. Don’t ask for the impossible.’
A stubborn man, thought Maddox as the screen went blank. But a less stubborn one would never have achieved his fame. For that, if nothing else, he should be respected.
But it was hard to wait.
Hard to hang on the edge of a precipice of doubt, not knowing if a simple matter of time would solve their problem by showing there was no problem at all, or whether the hopes and entire lifestyle of the ship would have to be changed.
For, if they were trapped, change would be inevitable.
The communicator hummed and he looked at Rose’s smooth and lovely face.
‘Commander! We have determined —’
‘Wait! I’m coming to join you. Have Professor Manton notified.’
He was already in Mission Control when Maddox arrived, standing to one side of the console, his face heavy with deeply graven lines. An expression which told Maddox the worst.
‘We’re trapped?’
‘I — yes, Carl. I’m afraid so.’
‘But surely we can escape through hyperspace when we’ve recharged our accumulators with sufficient power?’
‘That is possible, I suppose, but…’ Manton pursed his lips. ‘But it would be a tremendous risk.’
‘Why? The Hyper-Drive is a proven and safe technology — it brought us to this region of interstellar space in the first place. And we’re relying in it to return to Earth when we’ve completed our mission. So —’
Manton shook his head. ‘You know how the Hyper-Drive works — we create an energy field around our ship, a field of sub-space stress, so intense that it cannot exist in our universe — so something happens. The ship vanishes from our normal universe and enters a space where it can — hyperspace. When the field is released the ship emerges again into the normal continuum, but somehow it has moved from the place where it entered hyperspace —’
‘— where one hour in hyperspace is equal to a light year in travel,’ Maddox interrupted impatiently. ‘Direction of flight remains constant and the initial speed is irrelevant…so why can’t we use it to escape now?’
‘Have you forgotten what I said earlier?’ Manton shook his head again. ‘That this region appears to be a miniature universe with its own laws and own energy-levels that have no relation to those with which we are familiar? If we generated power like that here, where normal physics might not apply, it could well result in a colossal nuclear explosion!’
‘Saha?’
‘The Computer verifies, Commander. Our measured distance from the central body is remaining static. Sufficient time has lapsed for our velocity to have carried us away from it if we were continuing to move in a straight line relative to this area.’
‘But how?’ Maddox frowned as he snapped the question. ‘Our velocity was too high for us to be swung into orbit so soon.’
‘In our own universe you would be right,’ said Manton. ‘But, as I warned, the rules here are not the same as those outside. Direction, velocity, mass — all have different meanings. And there’s something more. Rose?’
‘All surface instrument readings are betraying an extremely odd condition. Commander. There is an increasing amount of energy potential radiating from the ship and apparently streaming into space.’
‘What?’ Maddox glared his incredulity. ‘Energy leaving the ship?’
‘Yes.’
‘That doesn’t make sense. We should be receiving it from the sun — the main body. It’s radiating light and there must be other energy-emissions. Yet you say — Frank?’
‘Monitors confirm, Commander. The ship is suffering a continual energy-loss.’
‘Scale?’
‘Treble normal and mounting.’
‘Cause?’
‘As yet unknown, but we have a clue.’ Weight killed the lights, leaving only the screens and monitors active. His face, reflecting the glow of tell-tales, too on the aspect of a clown’s mask; patches of coloured luminescence moving in a drifting pattern of variegated hue. ‘Look at the Omphalos, Commander.’
‘The Omphalos?’
‘The central body — we had to give it a name and this seemed appropriate.’
‘The Omphalos — the centre.’ Maddox looked at it, bright with greenish light, marked, pulsating.
‘I’m boosting the registers,’ said Weight. ‘Lifting the reception monitors into the ultra-violet and beyond and incorporating a compensatory translator. Now watch!’
The image nickered as he threw switches, the greenish hue changing to a pale violet.
‘A beam!’ In the shadowed darkness Manton echoed his amazement. ‘We’re connected by a beam!’
It rose all around, an inverted cone of shimmering radiance which led from the Ad Astra to a point on the Omphalos. A funnel of sharply defined clarity which joined the two bodies together as a line would join a hooked fish to a rod.
Maddox felt his muscles tighten at the analogy.
‘What is this? A freak of some kind? Rose?’
She too was touched with coloured patches of shifting brightness; reds and blues, greens and yellows from the banked instruments before her touching uniform, hair, face and hands.
‘The registers show a directional flow of energy along the beam from us to the Omphalos, Commander. It checks with the observed drain.’
‘Eric?’ Maddox turned, staring into the darkness, feeling a mounting irritation, one caused by his hampered vision. ‘Frank, turn on the lights.’ He blinked as Weight obeyed. ‘Well, Eric?’
Manton said, slowly, ‘We can make assumptions, Carl, but we need more facts. We know that the beam did not originate with us so it is safe to assume that it came from the Omphalos. It could be a natural effect of this space, an automatic discharge-reception such as the exchange of energy between a particle of low potential and one of high. Something similar to a lightning flash, for example.’
‘A flash is almost instantaneous.’
‘True, but we could be dealing with a temporal vagary — time could appear or actually be different here. In that case an almost instantaneous flash would seem to us to be of long duration.’
‘You’re guessing, Eric.’ Maddox looked at the Computer. ‘Saha — can you do better?’
‘Not me, Commander, but the Computer — maybe.’
‘Try. Find out degrees of probability and waste no time about it. Frank, check every inch of that space out there you can with everything you’ve got. I want —’ Maddox broke off as one of the screens flashed then went blank. ‘Trouble?’
‘An external scanner burned out.’ Weight made checks and drew in his breath with a sharp inhalation. ‘I should have guessed this would happen. The energy drain is affecting our external installations. That particular scanner was close to the defence screen; when it radiated as it did it must have weakened the components and the prevailing drain finished the job.’
‘And the others?’
‘Already show loss of conversion efficiency, Commander.’
‘Have them replaced — all of them. Get on to Maintenance right away. Eric — come with me.’
In his office Maddox sealed the doors cutting him from Mission Control and slumped at his desk. Manton took a seat facing him and for a moment they looked at each other.
‘It’s bad, Eric. Right?’
‘It could be, Carl.’
‘It is.’ Maddox was certain of it, in his heart, head and stomach. The physical signs of an intuition honed by repeated dangers. ‘That beam — natural or not it’s got us hooked. Maybe that’s why we took up an orbit around the Omphalos. That other satellite too, perhaps?’ He punched a button and looked at Weight’s face as it appeared on the communications post.
‘Frank — a question. Does the planetoid we observed also have a beam connecting it to the Omphalos?’
‘It’s just come into view, Commander. If you’ll hold —’ A pause then, ‘Yes, it does.’
‘Thank you.’ Maddox broke the connection and, rising, began to pace the floor. ‘An explanation,’ he said. ‘Eric, give me an explanation.’
‘As yet we can only guess, Carl.’
‘Then let us make a start. Here we have a closed system; an area of space which is sealed against the reception of any form of external energy. Any radiated form, that is, we are proof that matter can penetrate. Right?’
Manton nodded.
‘Such an area would, in time, reach entropic death; all energy would have reached a common level and there would be no differing potentials. No life of any kind could exist in such a space, no matter, nothing but a sea of diffused and low-level residue of energy.’
‘There is an alternative,’ said Manton. ‘A remote possibility that all available energy would become concentrated into a common node. There would still be a run-down, naturally, but instead of a sea of low-order residue there would be a — for want of a better word — a lump of inert mass. Ash, in essence.’
‘A magnet,’ said Maddox. ‘A sponge which would grab every particle of energy that was going. Sucking it into itself like dry ground sucks water. It caught that planetoid and who knows what else besides? Now it’s caught us’, he added, bitterly. ‘Swinging us like an apple on the end of a string. We’re trapped in this damned bubble in the sky. Whoever or whatever placed those warnings knew what they were talking about.’
‘Death and devastation,’ said Manton, bleakly. ‘Death and devastation.’
The loss of all energy, the reduction of matter itself, the end of the Ad Astra and all it contained. Inevitable — unless somehow they could break free.
*
The Pinnaces rose like ungainly wasps; insect-like with the forward vision screen, their armour a natural chitin, their command modules the thorax, the passenger compartments the abdomens.
Their lasers vicious stings.
West, in command of Pinnace One, led the other two up and away from the launching hold of the Ad Astra. Higher and he caught a flash of movement, tiny, suited figures almost invisible against the hull, dimly lit by the greenish luminescence of the Omphalos.
‘Service engineers,’ said his co-pilot. Phillip Martyn was young, eager, a little too loquacious, but, at least, he was not a dreamer as Gogol had been. ‘A hell of a job — who wants to work suited up on the hull of a spaceship?’
‘Someone has to do it.’
‘Sure, just as someone has to do the cooking,’ agreed Martyn. ‘I’m just glad that it isn’t me.’
West said, tersely, ‘Check your instrumentation.’
‘Sure, Skipper. All systems in the green.’
‘Keep them that way.’ The pilot pressed a control. ‘Report in Pinnaces Two and Three. Carey?’
‘Everything smooth, Skipper.’
‘Holt?’ West nodded as a second voice reported that all was well. It should be, all Pinnaces were kept at the optimum pitch of efficiency, but only a fool would take anything for granted in space. ‘Right. Stay in position.’ Another switch and Weight looked from the screen.
‘Douglas?’
‘All set to go. Any alteration in conditions?’
‘No. You’d best approach from the side away from the beam. It might be best to leave one Pinnace in space in case of —’
‘Leave it to me, Frank. I’m the one doing the job.’
And risking his neck. Weight caught the implication and shrugged. ‘So you are, Douglas. Did I say you weren’t?’
‘In as many words — no.’
‘So why get annoyed?’
‘I’m not.’ West shook his head. ‘I’m edgy, I guess. Sorry, Frank.’
‘For what?’ Weight returned West’s smile. ‘It’s all yours, Douglas. Happy landings.’
‘Thanks.’
West broke the connection and, as the screen went blank, lifted his eyes to stare through the forward vision ports. Their objective lay ahead, the smooth, slightly glistening ball of the planetoid he was to investigate.