Destroyer of Worlds (18 page)

‘As far as we know — but how can we be sure? The power may fail, the energy-beam take more than we can deliver, circumstances may change at any moment. We’ve got to act while we have the chance.’

Rising, Maddox paced the confines of the passenger compartment. How to explain the fear which engulfed him? The conviction that already they were on borrowed time?

‘Commander!’ Holt called from the command module. ‘The Omphalos — come and look!’

It hung in space as he remembered, greenly glowing, marked with the dark tracery of lines which gave the appearance of convolutions, divided into the resemblance of a human brain. And then it pulsed.

‘Carl!’ Manton leaned towards the screen. ‘It — It —’

How to describe the sudden inflation and deflation of apparently solid matter? The previously noted pulsations had been minor, the product of an interplay of light or the interpretation of a dazzled mind. But this had been no gentle undulation.

‘God!’ Holt was a big man with no concept of personal fear but now his voice held a strained terror. ‘It moved! Commander — the damn thing’s alive!’

*

The drugs were bitter to the taste, tablets which he swallowed and washed down with a sickly liquid. Dope to keep him awake and aware, to force tired muscles to respond, eyes to see, his brain to think.

‘Carl, you shouldn’t take all these things.’ Claire had been reluctant to give them, yielding only to his direct order, his thinly veiled anger at her reluctance to obey. ‘You’ll pay for this later.’

‘Sure — now, don’t bother me.’

‘Carl —’

‘Claire, we’re fighting time. Give what drugs are needed and spare me your lectures. Don’t you understand, woman? We’re fighting for our lives!’

Against a thing which could not exist but, incredibly, did.

Maddox stared at it where it rested in the screens. Around him in Mission Control everyone seemed to be holding their breath, waiting, standing poised on the brink of extinction.

‘The Omphalos has increased to one fifth its previous size,’ Weight reported. ‘Is now pulsing at twice the rate observed when it commenced.’

‘Rose?’

‘Energy loss mounting, Commander. The rate is nearing totality.’

Complete absorption, the energy drained as fast as it was produced and when the defence shield went down all would be helplessly exposed to the aging action of the alien forces.

Time!

It was running against them, wasted by necessity, precious seconds turning into minutes, into hours.

How much longer did they have?

‘What news from the Pinnace, Frank?’

‘On its way, Commander. All remaining personnel aboard together with Professor Manton.’

‘Have him report here as soon as he docks. Get me defence.’ Maddox waited as an auxiliary screen blurred to steady, to picture the taut face of a Security guard.

‘Commander?’

‘Report on readiness for action.’

‘All as ordered. Tubes aimed and ready. Missiles primed and all warheads with treble charges.’ Hesitating he added, ‘If we fire as ordered we’ll be stripped of all capability.’

‘If you don’t we’ll be dead.’

Maddox shook his head as the screen darkened. Too many drugs taken too quickly had fogged his vision and etched at his self-control, but he’d had no choice and neither had the others. Weight, red-eyed, face slack with weariness. Rose, looking like a ghost, Saha a grim and silent figure, Claire, reproachful and yet helpless to do more than what she had.

And now she could do nothing but wait.

Wait as West’s Pinnace came into view, darting in to land as the screen lowered, settling as again the shield lifted, the lights dimming, almost dying, restored as Weight adjusted his instruments.

Close — and the shield had lost its previous brilliance. Even now she could be growing old with accelerated speed, bones becoming brittle, blood thinning, glands withering, life and the lust for life drained and sucked by the alien thing to which this constricted universe belonged.

How long had it traversed space?

A tiny thing at the beginning, perhaps, feeding on energy, growing, developing, aware of food-sources, catching them with its beams, reducing them into energy which it stole. Eating them.

A roving parasite of the void.

A danger sealed into a space of its own by some race owning a tremendously high technology but lacking the inclination to destroy. Instead they had warped the very fabric of the continuum to form an escape-proof cage and had set it about with warnings as to what it contained.

‘Eric!’ Maddox turned as Manton entered Mission Control and came towards him. ‘Is everything ready?’

‘Yes.’ Manton glanced at the chronometer. Firing commences in one hour thirty-three minutes.’

‘So long?’

‘The planetoid must be in the right position for the plan to work. The Computer gave position and timing. Right, Nelson?’

‘Yes, Professor.’ Saha rubbed at his reddened eyes. ‘Any deviation from the plan will result in lost efficiency.’

A lowering of the already slim margin of potential success, but the odds against them were growing all the time. Maddox glanced at the dials, saw the needles edging towards the red, the warning flash of signal lights.

‘Cut all unessential power to all areas, Frank.’

‘I’ve saved all I can, Commander.’

‘Save more. Switch to emergency battery power if you have to. Just remember that we’ll need full power fed into the shield when we blow.’

Weight acknowledged with a nod and Maddox moved to where Claire stood watching the screens. The greenish light, now a blazing flame, touched her face and accentuated the strong contours of jaw and cheeks, the wide-set of the eyes.

She whispered, ‘That pulsing, Carl. It’s like the pound of a heart.’

Or the kick of a child impatient to be born. Yet how could familiar concepts apply? The Omphalos was not a creature giving birth nor yet a creature being born. It was expanding, growing as an organic thing would grow, and yet it was not organic.

Maddox remembered the sensations he had experienced when lost in the illusions he had known while in close proximity to the green bulk. Had he experienced the stored knowledge of actual beings? The deaths — had they been actual memories of minds absorbed by the Omphalos?

A germ, he thought, caught in a human bloodstream, drawn to the brain, entrammelled in the cortex, sharing, in part, the stir and process of thought.

Did a man consider the fate of what he ate?

Would he care if it was aware?

*

‘Thirteen minutes, Commander.’ Rose Armstrong was tense, uneasily aware of the superstition connected to the number. Now, if at all, any bad luck would surely become manifest. Despite her resolution not to look, she lifted her eyes to where the main screen depicted the Omphalos. It was twice its original size now, pulsating, greenly malevolent. A predator poised and ready to strike. A bomb on the edge of explosion.

‘Rose!’

Weight had been watching her and at the sound of his voice she started, dropping her eyes from the hypnotic image, concentrating again on her instruments.

‘Sorry, Frank.’

‘Time?’

‘Eleven minutes,’ At least the unlucky number had been safely passed. ‘Energy loss mounting. Some traces of temperature differential noted from the central body.’

‘High?’ Manton fired the question.

‘No. It’s varying from zero to twelve degrees Celsius.’

‘Any radiation?’

‘Slight traces, Professor, but our own energy-loss is affecting the readings.’

‘But they are positive?’

Manton grunted as she nodded. To Maddox he said, ‘You realise what this means, Carl? The external layers of the Omphalos must be splitting. The result, perhaps, of the massive increase in its energy-intake since we entered its space. It is obviously adapting to meet the new circumstances.’

‘Growing?’

‘In a sense, Carl, yes. As a crystal will grow when immersed in a super-saturated solution. It is a sponge absorbing energy, using it to build up its mass, adding to its reserves. Later, if all sources of energy should be denied to it, then the reverse process will apply. It will shrink as it consumes its own bulk. Men do the same, Carl. And stars. It seems to be a universal law.’

Eat or starve.

Grow or wither.

Kill or die!

Maddox glanced at the screens, the instruments facing Weight where he sat, the tell-tales and monitors of the console. The ship was on red alert, ground defences standing by, engineers ready to wring the last erg of power from generators and to maintain a maximum flow no matter what the cost.

‘Three minutes.’ Rose’s voice betrayed her strain. ‘Two and a half. Two.’

Now only a hundred seconds to wait…ninety…eighty…seventy…

Maddox felt Claire at his side and turned his head to smile reassurance.

‘Soon now.’

‘Carl! If it doesn’t work!’

‘It will! It must!’

Their only chance and, if it failed, death would be waiting. A gamble with their lives as the stake.

‘Ten!’ Rose began to count the seconds. At the console Weight sent signals to the waiting men. Manton, eyes narrowed, stared at the glowing mass of the Omphalos. Saha gently stroked a panel as if giving comfort to his beloved computer.

Maddox felt his face harden and grow wet with oozing sweat.

He had to be right.

Had to!

‘Three…Two…One…Now!’ A moment then Rose said, bleakly, ‘It isn’t working. It isn’t going to work!’

‘Wait!’ Manton turned from the screen. ‘We can’t see anything as yet and your instruments can’t pick up what lies behind the Omphalos. Frank?’

‘Booster signals sent, Professor, but the automatics should have fired by now.’

The time fuses planted with the massed nuclear materials in the body of the planetoid. Heaped with mathematical precision in the chamber of alien dead. A tremendous bomb flashed to life in an eye-searing halo about the Omphalos.

A wide circle of savage, blue-white glare that dulled the green. Which spread to form a backdrop of sun-like fury.

‘It worked!’ Manton shouted his relief. ‘Carl! It worked!’

The fuses, yes. The nuclear bomb itself, yes. But the rest?

A flood of raw radiation, by itself, wouldn’t have been enough. The Omphalos ate energy, it used it, lived on it, sucked it in. At the distance, savage though it was, the atomic explosion would have been of limited use. But there had been more.

The planetoid with its shafts and mass. The chamber which had held the bomb, the blasting explosion which had torn the remnants of what had once been an inhabited world apart, fragments which even now, if the calculations had been correct, were hurtling towards the green menace.

A blast of matter which would rip into the Omphalos with the impact of a shotgun blast against a bag of water.

Matter which would be converted into energy on contact, each grain of dust, every fragment, in turn an atomic explosion.

‘Frank! Fire all missiles!’

Weight nodded at Maddox’s command and relayed the order. From the launching tubes ringing the ship slender shapes lanced into space; torpedoes loaded with a treble charge of atomic destruction in their heads, their drive mechanisms rigged to gain maximum velocity at the expense of accuracy.

The target was too big to be missed.

Weight said, anxiously, ‘Commander! The shield?’

‘Wait!’

There was time yet and every second was precious. Maddox stood, mentally counting, visualising what was happening in space. The flight of the massed torpedoes, the paths taken by the masses torn from the disrupted planetoid. They would strike together, a double-blow in opposed synchronisation and, when they did, the Omphalos would die.

The alien mass would be destroyed, disintegrated, bathed with a flood of energy so intense that it could not be stored or utilised.

‘Commander?’

‘Not yet.’

‘But, Carl!’ Manton too was anxious. ‘If —’

‘Wait!’

A knife-edged calculation. Raise the defence shield to full strength too soon and the energy would be drained to leave them defenceless against the moment of need. Wait too long and they too would be blasted by the floor of raw destruction soon to fill the enclosed area of this miniature universe.

On the screen the Omphalos flickered, seemed to jerk, to swell, to expand with frightening speed.

‘Now, Frank! Now!’

The blaze of the defence shield matched the fury of the heavens, the dazzle of scintillating particles blasting the eyes with a mass of kaleidoscopic coruscations.

For a long moment there was silence then Claire said, ‘Carl, is it holding?’

‘Rose?’

‘Energy loss mounting towards total drain. Still climbing.’ Her voice quivered a little and the knuckles of her hands where they gripped the edge of the panel shone white. ‘Climbing. Climbing — no, steadying now. Steady and falling. Falling! Commander — we’re safe!’

Safe behind the protection of the shield as the naked fury of disrupted atoms streamed around them, filling all space with a maelstrom of tormented energies, stresses mounting, conflicting, tearing at the very fabric of the continuum until something had to yield.

When it did it was like the snapping of an over-strained rubber band.

Maddox felt a jerk, a sudden movement of the floor beneath his feet, a shudder which ran through the ship, then heard Manton’s startled cry.

‘Look! The stars! The stars!’

The screen was full of them; bright, coldly remote but comforting in their familiarity. Space was normal again, the bubble which had held them prisoner broken and dissolved.

They were free and, of the Omphalos, nothing remained but a dying smear of fading emerald — the pyre of a destroyed world.

If you enjoyed Destroyer of Worlds keep reading for a free excerpt of Tubb’s original novel, CHILD OF SPACE.