Maddox said, ‘How fast, Eric?’
‘Does the beam convert matter into energy? I don’t know, Carl, we’ll have to make tests to find out. But I don’t think that it can be very fast. If the energy is liberated too quickly it could overload whatever mechanism or function the Omphalos uses to absorb it. And the people here had time to construct their tunnels.’
Digging like desperate rats to escape the inevitable. Delving deeper and deeper into their world as the surface was stripped away. Fighting to obtain a defence against premature aging, waiting, hoping, breeding, dying until, at the end, there was no more hope, nothing but extinction.
How long would it be until the Ad Astra’s crew reached that point?
‘Carl?’
‘I was thinking, Eric.’
‘Of your crew.’ Manton was shrewd. ‘I know. The pattern is similar.’
The pattern, perhaps, but not necessarily the ingredients. His crew were human with all that implied. A race born and reared against a background of ceaseless effort, their lives a continual act of violence, they had survived only because of all life forms their planet had known they were the most ruthless.
Obeying a simple, savage creed.
To kill what they feared.
To destroy all that threatened.
Maddox said, ‘Eric, when you’ve finished here return to the ship in Carey’s Pinnace.’
‘And you, Carl?’
‘I’m going to visit the Omphalos.’
*
He travelled alone; if death waited there was no point in sharing the burden. The Pinnace rose, leaving the planetoid behind as the engines sent it across space towards the pulsating green mass of the Omphalos. Maddox avoided the energy-beam, swinging around until he was at a point between the Ad Astra and the remnant of what had once been an inhabited world, then aimed the nose of the Pinnace at its target.
‘Commander?’ Weight stared from the screen. He blinked as Maddox gave his orders. ‘A relay from Mission Control on upper register? Sure. I’ll put it on the secondary channel. Two minutes.’
It appeared in one, the Omphalos a pale violet, the energy beams clear. Maddox looked at the image, comparing it with the direct view. On the relay his Pinnace would be visible if Weight increased the magnification, but he could do that only by narrowing the area of the visible field. It was better to scan a wider area — Maddox knew where he was.
‘Commander?’ Weight was concerned. ‘You’re going in alone — how about some support?’
‘No.’
‘I could send more Pinnaces for rescue and as a backup and —’
‘No, Frank!’ Maddox snapped his impatience. ‘I’m doing this alone. Watch the monitor but no support and no interference. Maintain continual check on all energy-fluctuations. Activate defence shield at low power and try to hit a bearable compromise between protection and power-loss. Understood?’
‘Yes, Commander.’
‘I’m making a reconnaissance,’ said Maddox, more softly. ‘Just a general probe to gather readings at close proximity. Eric should be with you soon but, until he arrives, you are in full command.’
He broke the connection, there was nothing more to say, nothing more to do now but wait as the engines killed the distance between the Pinnace and its destination. Time to relax in the padded chair, to think, to speculate a little.
A brain.
Claire’s analogy had been good and the likeness persisted even though he was seeing it from a different angle and from a closer point. The convoluted surface, the dark lines, the division between the hemispheres — all backed the similarity. But no brain could live without a body, a source of energy to maintain it, a skull to protect it. The thing could only be a mass of ordinary matter, barren, lifeless.
But, in that case, why did it pulsate?
An illusion? A trick of the light deceiving the eyes? Maddox narrowed his own watching, timing the apparent swell. Real or imagined? A thickening of the haze followed by a clarity would produce such a result. A gentle inflation and deflation the same. Even a steady rippling of the surface — but how could a solid mass ripple in such a manner?
He glanced at the upper register. The pale violet of the image was steadier than the normal view in green. The twin cones of pale luminescence seemed to drift over the surface as they followed the orbiting masses of the Ad Astra and the planetoid.
Like hands, he thought, extended and grasping. Like the antennae of insects, the feelers of things which lived in darkness, the suckers of an octopod.
Maddox shook his head, irritated at his fantasies. He studied his instruments, seeing that the temperature of the Omphalos was still apparently zero despite the energy-intake and its luminescence.
Well, soon now he might have the answer.
‘Commander — you’re getting close.’
Weight on the screen with a warning Maddox could do without. He acknowledged it with a grunt then concentrated on sending the Pinnace into a spiralling orbit around the pulsating central mass of this pocket universe.
Closer and he could see the convolutions now stark and clear. Not deep valleys as he had expected but gashes dulled with ebon tracery lying sombre and menacing in the twinkling haze. Closer still and beneath him the alien landscape spun towards the rear in a blur of mounds, dells, scoops, peaks, twisting blurs, spinning, whirling, swirling…windings…writhing…
Confusion which rose to engulf him.
‘Maddox! Carl Maddox! You will hear me and you will obey!’
A voice echoing in his mind, reverberating, booming as if from the far end of a long tunnel, amplified and empty, a remnant of the past.
‘Carl Maddox you will succumb to my will. You are helpless to resist. You will obey…obey…obey…’
A school quadrangle, a gang, an elder boy confident of his physical strength, the loyalty of his sycophants. A spiritual weakling, a sadist, a vicious bully.
‘Carl Maddox you will obey me without question. You will obey me in all things. You will obey!’
Now, as he had then, Maddox shouted his defiance.
‘Go to hell!’
‘What? You —’
‘Go to hell!’
The voice was an illusion, a revived scrap of memory triggered by the hypnotic condition of the greenish illumination. It had to be that. Rock and stone and raw energy were not alive. Nothing could be alive in this seething hell.
Nothing — then why did he see a smiling face?
Pain stung the inside of his lip as his teeth met in the tender flesh. A stab of agony which cleared his eyes and banished the confusion so that he could clearly see the shape and position of the instruments before him, the controls of the Pinnace in which he rode.
A switch which he closed.
‘Frank!’ he gasped. ‘Frank, help me…help…’
A moment of clarity, gone almost as quickly as it had come, replaced by the swirling confusion which rose to take him and hurl him into chaos.
He was a mote of life drifting in an endless, emerald sea. The waters were warm and comforting, lulling him with gentle surges, carrying him over a vast expanse of fretted stone and shells and strands of delicate weed. Other life drifted around him, small, innocent, scraps of awareness conscious only of the need to eat and to propagate, the sole pleasures of their limited existence.
When death came in a darting shadow of fin and jaw it was nothing.
Again he drifted, this time in an atmosphere of gentle breezes and solemn silences, the sun a shimmering orb of emerald splendour. Again he was minute but this time a little larger than before. A thinly constructed creature of vanes and sacs filled with hydrogen, of foils to catch and use the wind, of muscles to bunch and make dense his bodily substance so that, at will, he could gain height or lose it, could drift with the wind or tack against it.
He and the uncountable numbers of others who hung with him in the emerald sky.
Food for larger beings of more complex structure. Drifting giants who roved the atmosphere and browsed on the clouds of things of which he was a single part.
And again, when death came, it was nothing.
Death was always nothing.
The gateway to a new existence, a door which all things had to use, a path every living creature had to take. Death was not an ending but a new beginning. The old cells and structure broken, torn into their component parts, incorporated into other, more sophisticated arrangements. The pattern of the mind released from its fleshly bonds to free the spirit which would pass on to join the single great accumulation of all feeling, all experience, all knowledge, all awareness, all consciousness which was the gestalt of the universe.
And it was right that the larger should feed on the smaller, the lesser give its awareness and substance to a thing of greater complexity. As atoms had been created in the empty space to form molecules and compounds and thus the basic matter of planets and suns so the single-celled gave to the many-celled and they, in turn, gave to those higher in the evolutionary scale.
The way of life and the arrow of time.
The ladder which reached from primeval mud to the stars.
The sacrifice which gave the ultimate peace.
Peace.
‘No!’ Maddox stirred, something within him rebelling, waking, protesting. ‘No!’
‘Such foolishness,’ whispered a thin voice. ‘Such stupidity. What are a few days when set against the total span of time? What is a lifetime when set against eternity?’
‘No, damn you! No!’
‘Why fight, Carl Maddox? Why continue to carry the burden? You’ve carried it long enough and there will be no end to the weight, the responsibility, the guilt. You killed Phillip Martyn. You killed Alan Guthrie. You killed Ivan Gogol. You killed …you killed…you killed…’
The list of names seemed endless.
The guilt a burden on his soul.
Each who had died and who would die was his concern. He was the commander; his the decision and therefore his the responsibility. Always his was the responsibility. Always his would be the guilt.
Always.
‘No,’ he said, stubbornly. ‘It isn’t like that.’
‘But it is, Carl Maddox,’ whispered the voice. ‘It always has been. It always will be. How many can you order to their deaths? How long can you rest hearing their cries and reproaches? One mistake and all will die. One mistake…one…only one…’
Once dead he would be freed from the possibility that he would make that mistake.
‘No,’ he said, again. ‘No.’
The voice was a lie. It was the sound of cowardice, the lure of timidity. Yield, give up, cease the struggle and be rewarded with eternal regret. A bribe which had no substance.
Who was tempting him?
Who — or what?
A red eye began to blink at him, flash…flash…flash…A Cyclops which demanded attention. Maddox stared at it, seeing it through a green haze, a swirl of distorted reality. It was hard to concentrate. It would be easier simply to lean back and relax and to close his eyes and to sink into that wonderful state of utter detachment in which nothing had importance and nothing really mattered because, in the end, all things would be the same.
So easy to lean back…to drift…to drift…
*
Frank Weight scowled at his instruments, the expression accentuating the lines on his face, a fatigue. A deep, bone-nagging weariness aggravated by his frustration.
‘Nothing.’ He checked a row of instruments, fingers stabbing at buttons, cross-meshing circuits. From the console little lamps flared, tell-tales merging with illuminated dials and digital readouts, monitors which told him the condition of every sector of the ship. ‘Nothing,’ he said again. ‘The Pinnace’s dead.’
‘Keep trying.’ Eric Manton studied the screens, the images they carried. ‘Keep trying, Frank.’
‘I’m sending out a continuous signal but there’s no answer. I’ve tried to use the override but there’s no response. Something is cancelling out the signals and I can’t gain remote control. Try, you say; I’ve tried everything I know.’ His voice rose a little grew bitter. ‘Damn it, Professor! Do you think I’ve just been sitting here twiddling my thumbs?’
‘No, Frank, of course not.’ Fatigue bred short tempers, but as Manton knew, Weight’s outburst was less due to weariness than to a stronger feeling. He, like all of them, was sick with worry and concern for the lone man in the distant Pinnace.
‘He hasn’t landed,’ said Weight quietly. ‘He’s orbiting the Omphalos, but so close he must be skimming the edge of any force field it might have. Field or atmosphere,’ he added, bleakly. ‘God alone knows what he’s found out there.’
‘Rose?’
‘No change. Professor. I’ve been monitoring the path of the Commander’s flight pattern and there is no discernible energy-variation.’
‘Which means that he can hardly be cutting through a force field if one should exist,’ mused Manton. ‘If he was we’d surely spot a halation.’
‘Only if the situation out there followed a familiar electronic sequence.’ Rose checked her instruments again. ‘Surface temperature still zero. No measurable radiation. No magnetic flux. There seems to be no reason why the Commander just can’t level orbit and head back to our ship.’
‘Frank?’
‘His guidance systems could be frozen in some way. I’ve sent out checking signals and received no response but that could be due to a different cause.’ Weight shook his head, baffled. ‘He’s out there. We know it and know just where to find him. As far as I can determine all systems are operational.’
‘So?’
‘Either the Commander has deliberately cut the remotes or they have failed to function because of some local effect. The Omphalos could be surrounded with a blanket of electronic distortion which traps all emissions. That could explain why I’m getting no personal contact.’
‘But surely the Commander would know that and return?’ Rose Armstrong, well-versed in survival disciplines, knew the regular safety-procedure. ‘He wouldn’t risk his life and a Pinnace for nothing.’
Manton said, ‘Perhaps he has no choice.’
‘Professor?’
‘He could be unconscious or hurt in some way. It is the only explanation for his continued radio silence unless the Omphalos has a distortion field as Frank suggests. At this very moment the Commander could be calling on us for help.’ Manton frowned at the screens. ‘Frank, is an energy-cone impinging on the Pinnace?’