Destroyer of Worlds (11 page)

Irritably, Guthrie shook his head. What was the matter with him? Gordon was dead — so what? Everyone had to die and some had the luck to go early and others had to wait. What you lost one way you made up in another. Die young and you dodged the aches and pains of growing old, the failing of natural attributes, the growing inadequacy. Die old and you gained the extra joys of youth.

Why was he thinking about dying when work waited to be done?

Turning he looked around. Lang Ki had apparently given up and was saving further argument until they had finished their stint. A couple of others were in view both hard at work. Guthrie looked at the scanner he had carefully removed from the hull. It was oddly eroded, the lens scarred, the metal surround looking as if it had been abraded with something like an emery-blast. The replacement would be set with a new, wide angle lens fitted with a removable cover of transparent plastic.

Setting aside his space welder, Guthrie crouched, fighting a sudden giddiness. He was an electronics man and a good one. Testing his work was a waste of time; each connection was firm, every terminal correct, and when he did a layout everything was as it should be. To him it was a matter of pride that it was.

A small thing, perhaps, but important to both himself and to the mission.

Now he swore as his gloved hands were slow to obey his mental commands. The wires fell, were recovered, failed to click home. He paused, squeezing shut his eyes before trying again. He was tired, a treble shift was enough to take it out of a giant, but working was better than waiting, and if he could do nothing else he could work.

‘Get in!’ he muttered. ‘Damn you, get in!’ Again the wires slipped. There was too little slack, the junctions were awkwardly placed, the connections too tight, the design a lousy combination of some nut-dreamer and a moronic engineer. Why the hell couldn’t they build stuff a man could use? ‘Get in! In!’

He sighed with relief as the terminals clicked home. A tug to test, a check for fit and the scanner was back in its slot, aligned on its guides, ready to operate as it should.

Chalk up one more success.

His head reeled as he climbed to his feet, the exterior hull of the ship turning, twisting, heaving as if with a life of its own.

‘Alan!’ Ki had been watching. Sliding his magnetic boots carefully over the metal hull, he moved towards the distant Guthrie as he swayed. ‘Move in, Ken. Fast!’

‘Got it, Lang.’ Ken Wainwright lunged forward as fast as safety would allow. He was close when Guthrie began to fall, closer when he spun, to topple with a horrible gasping.

The more horrible sound of escaping air.

‘His face-plate!’ He reached the fallen man, one hand tearing at the emergency patches attached to his thigh, ripping free the adhesive-backed plastic and holding ready as he turned the limp figure. His guess had been wrong, the helmet was intact, the rupture at a point close to the junction with the suit. A metal aerial from the damaged scanner had stabbed through the tough material.

‘Quick!’ Ki had joined him. ‘The patch, man! The patch!’

The air-hiss died as it was slapped home but the horror remained.

‘His face!’ Wainwright swallowed as he looked at it. ‘His face, Ki! Look at his face!’

*

Age can bring beauty but only when it is the natural achievement of the passage of time. A wall, mellowed, graced with lichens, hard lines and edges worn and smoothed beneath the hand of years. A garden, grown in harmony, each plant settled in an area hard-won and now its own, colours blending, leaves interwoven, a whole where there had once been only parts; those parts now blended and matured with the passing of numerous seasons. Such things held beauty but age, gained without reason, was something else.

Claire Allard stared at horror.

A horror implied, not actual, for there was nothing really horrible about a face which had grown the deep lines and creped skin of advancing years. Nothing dreadful at seeing the natural state of all living things providing they manage to survive long enough. No doctor could ever find the relentless workings of catabolism strange and fearful. Men were born, they lived, they grew old, they died. It was the way of the human race.

The horror lay in the unusual.

Alan Guthrie was thirty-two years of age.

Now he looked eighty.

He was eighty.

Bain was in no doubt.

‘Every test proves it, Doctor; blood, marrow, hormones, lymphatic fluids — the man is senile.’

‘How?’ Then, as he made no answer, she asked again, more savagely this time, ‘How did it happen? How?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But —’

‘You asked how it happened and I gave you a truthful reply. I don’t know how it happened, but I do know it is an extension of previous discoveries. Accelerated aging, Doctor, a speeded breakdown in the metabolism which leads to inevitable senility.’ He added, quietly, ‘You saw the results of my tests. You made checks yourself. What we suspected then is now a fact.’

One she was reluctant to accept and still questions remained — ones which could be answered.

‘Guthrie was a patient together with Gordon Kent. He was under observation for strained ligaments and a cartilage operation on the knee. Healing was slow, but not extremely slow.’

‘As it was with Kent,’ Bain admitted. ‘A connection?’

‘Both were outside workers. Both could have been exposed to an area of intensive radiation of some kind. I’m guessing,’ she confessed. ‘No radiation should cause such results; superficial injury, cellular breakdown, cancer, eventual death, yes, but senility?’

‘Senility is the breakdown of all normal physical functions coupled with mental aberration,’ Bain reminded. ‘A deranged mind could contribute to the result by failure to maintain control over the bodily processes. Exposure to radiation could easily cause cortical degeneration.’

‘And eventual physical breakdown,’ said Claire. ‘But the time element, Ted? This man aged in a matter of hours. He was apparently fit when he commenced his tour of duty and yet, when found, he was in the last stages of exhaustion. He was suited, isolated and yet, somehow, he aged fifty years.’

And was still aging. Claire glanced at the monitors then through the transparent partition to where Douglas Guthrie lay in the intensive care unit. The lighting was dim, rich in ultra violet, the bluish glow giving his skin the waxen appearance of a corpse. His cheeks were sunken, closed eyes resting in bruised sockets, folds of skin hanging from his jowls. His hands, thin and fragile, rested on his lap. The bulk of the life-support apparatus covering his torso hid any motion of his chest and only the winking tell-tales showed that he was still alive.

‘He’s going to die, Ted,’ she said, bleakly. ‘There’s nothing we can do to save him.’

A patient lost and one who would not be allowed to rest in peace. Dead he could still talk; with his tissues, glands, bones and brain. With scraps of internal organs, ligaments, sinews, membranes, skin. Items which would be taken and tested and wrung for information. The last service to the Ad Astra Alan Guthrie would ever make.

Bain said, thoughtfully, ‘He was prone — it has to be the explanation. Triggered and primed by his earlier exposure. Then, when he went outside he was ready to go. The treble shift did it and, once started, the aging process was geometrical.’

Two becoming four becoming eight becoming sixteen becoming thirty-two — how long would it take for enough cells to die of senility to become obvious? All too soon, she thought. Once started the process would rage through normal tissue like fire through a cornfield ready for harvest.

Claire lifted the communicator from her belt.

‘Get me the Commander.’ A moment then, as Maddox’s face appeared on the screen, she said, ‘This is urgent, Carl. I have to see you.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘No.’ His face and tone betrayed the tension he was under. ‘No,’ she said again. ‘It can’t wait.’

‘Join me in my office in ten minutes.’ Then, before breaking the connection, he added, ‘What is it about?’

‘Us, Carl. All of us aboard the ship — we are all facing premature death!’

*

‘Age!’ Eric Manton lifted his hands and looked at them. Broad, capable, the backs marked with brown splotches, the knuckles prominent, the nails neatly filed and polished. ‘There’s no doubt, Claire?’

‘None.’ Her eyes moved from Manton’s hands to Maddox’s eyes. ‘Guthrie died just after I called you and Ted’s doing the autopsy at this moment, but we know what he will find. Death caused by senility — I won’t bother you with the medical jargon. Just say that he died of old age.’

‘He was a young man.’

‘Was, Carl.’ She emphasised the past tense. ‘But not now. Something outside drained the life from his body as if he were water and it a sponge.’ She caught his change of expression. ‘Carl?’

‘Nothing.’ He saw her determination and shrugged. ‘It was just the analogy you used — water and a sponge. I’ve used it myself.’

‘Age,’ said Manton again. He lowered his hands. ‘A sudden acceleration in the metabolic breakdown, Claire. Am I correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘Caused by some external force?’

She nodded, sensing there was more to the question, something which, as yet, she didn’t understand.

Manton said, quietly, ‘It fits the pattern, Carl. Life is a form of energy and one more subject to destruction than most. Guthrie was somehow more sensitive than the rest. His insistence of working the treble shift was symptomatic of his condition — a sudden and final blaze of energy similar to the glow of a fire fanned by a wind, brightening before the last of its fuel is exhausted. How long do we have, Claire?’

He was the oldest and would have the greater personal concern and Claire remembered the way he had lifted his hands as if to study them. A natural reaction — what man could tamely ignore the approach of extinction? It was hard not to be able to give comfort.

‘I don’t know as yet, Eric, but it can’t be long. We were still running tests when Guthrie collapsed and had determined that there was a general attrition of the metabolism giving a preponderance to the catabolic factors. Guthrie aged fifty years in a matter of hours so, obviously, there must be a collapse-point. It is probably a variable governed by the individual resistance of each individual — but all will be affected.’

Maddox said, ‘Is there anything we can do? Some protection we can adopt?’

‘All I can suggest is that none of those working with Guthrie be permitted to leave the shelter of the ship. They should be found work inside. In fact, it would be best if everyone were to be kept deep within our holds. It might help.’

‘I doubt it.’ Maddox told her of the mysterious beam and energy loss. ‘The same analogy, Claire — water and a sponge. We’re the water and the Omphalos is the sponge. Now it seems it wants to suck up more than we can afford to give. Could there be a connection?’

‘Perhaps, but I’ll have to make tests to be sure. Cultures could be set and exposed and checks made to see how the bacteria progress. But, Carl, can’t we use the defence shield? Won’t it protect us?’

Using it would cost energy, but at least it might buy them time. Maddox rose and led the way into Mission Control.

‘Upper register, Frank. Let’s see that beam.’ He heard Claire inhale as it appeared on the screens, lambent, cold, hungry.

‘Up shield!’

As it rose, shimmering, scintillating with a brilliant coruscation of sparkling energy, Rose Armstrong reported from her station.

‘Energy loss thirty-nine per cent, Commander.’

‘Boost to three-quarters full! Rose?’

‘Fifty-seven per cent total loss.’

More than half their generated power streaming wastefully into space. Maddox snapped, ‘Full power, Frank. Hold until I give word to lower.’

He blinked as the shield blazed with sudden and savage fury, light and brilliance turning the connecting beam into a glowing cone, solidifying it as dust would a beam of light.

‘Commander!’

The internal lights dimmed as Weight gave the warning. An alarm sounded, another, warnings that the ship was dying, the power which was its life drained from the machines essential to survivals.

‘Commander! You must —’

‘Cut!’ Maddox anticipated the demand. ‘Rose?’

‘Power restored. Loss now registering at twenty-two per cent.’

Higher than before and it would mount. Time was against them in more ways than one. Trapped, dying, their energy draining away — how long could they last?

In the darkness something moved; a bulky shape which reflected glitters, the helmet staring with its single eye, dust rising from beneath the boots. Douglas West watched it, noting how the beam of Martyn’s light caught the hanging webs and turned them into fairy-shimmers of gossamer rainbows. Sparkling curtains blotched with the suspended dead which hung like dried fruit on the fronds of some alien plant.

Like flies caught and drained and left as desiccated husks by some monstrous spider.

An unpleasant analogy and one too close to the truth. There was no spider and this chamber was no lair. The dead had not been drained by slavering fangs. The darkness held no alien peril.

But death, when it came, would be just as real. Irritably, West shook his head and, rising from where he squatted, waited for Martyn to join him. For a moment he fumbled then the connection snapped into place and they could talk again. ‘Anything?’

‘No.’ Martyn was curt. ‘I moved all around the edge of the floor: it was solid all the way. Lots of dust and some boxes. A litter of fragments which could have been anything. I didn’t waste time examining them.’

‘No traps?’

‘I told you — nothing.’ Over the phone West could hear the man take a deep breath and, when he next spoke, his voice held a forced lightness. ‘Well, Skipper, I guess this is it, right?’

‘Wrong.’

‘You’re an optimist. The doors sealed, the chamber is solid, the radios don’t work so we can’t call for help — are you hoping for a miracle?’

‘We’re not dead yet,’ said West. ‘And while there’s life —’

‘— there’s hope.’ Martyn finished the quotation. ‘They used to teach me that at Sunday School but I never managed to figure out just what it meant. Hope for what? Me, I’d settle for a radio that worked or a mining drill which could drill a way out of here, or a rescue party suddenly appearing right in front of us. Hope!’ His voice held a shrug. ‘Maybe we should just sit down and pray?’