A minute gone at least, maybe two.

  ‘Douglas! Douglas West! Douglas!’

  He lay as if dead. He was dead and only she could restore him. She had unsealed her helmet, lifting the faceplate, and now she stooped over the still figure. Inflating her chest, she adjusted his head then, parting his lips, pressed her own against them and gusted air into the pilot’s lungs.

  Again.

  Again.

  Inhale, blow, release, inhale, blow, release…pumping air into him as if he were a balloon.

  The kiss of life and the only chance he had.

  Again she massaged the heart, again breathed into him, her mouth against his own.

  ‘Douglas! For God’s sake! Douglas!’

  West stirred, moaned a little, sucked air into his lungs. Claire straightened, still straddled across his body, her helmet touching the top of the sac. From her bag she took a phial and sprayed an acrid compound into his mouth and nostrils. He coughed, choked a little and opened his eyes.

  ‘Douglas. Do you know who you are?’

  ‘I —’ His eyes rolled a little, vague, empty. ‘Who? What? You —’

  She said again, her voice holding the sting of a whip, ‘Who are you? Tell me who you are!’

  The essential test of identity. He could have been dead too long, the ego already impaired, his personality changed, blurred, distorted. If so it was better that she had let him go. Kinder to give him an injection now and report that she had been too late.

  Not that she would need to lie. Maddox, for one, would understand.

  ‘Douglas?’

  ‘Doctor!’ His eyes settled, became bright with life and awareness. ‘Doctor Allard!’

  ‘Who are you? Tell me?’ She relaxed as he obeyed, adding other information, proving that his intelligence was unimpaired. ‘Relax,’ she ordered as he moved beneath her thighs. ‘Don’t try to move just yet. Just lie and breathe and let your heart and lungs achieve full automatic operation.’

  ‘I’m alright, Doctor.’

  ‘Yes, thank God!’

  Her tone betrayed her and, staring up into her face West said, slowly, ‘It was close, eh? I’d passed out. I remember that I was retching then seemed to be falling and then there was nothing. It was odd in a way. As if, at the end, nothing really mattered. That all the struggle and fear was over. And then —’ He broke off then added, slowly, ‘I was dead. Dead and you resurrected me.’

  Her hand reached for another hypodermic, this one loaded with a tranquiliser. She had won the battle with death before and knew what could so easily happen. The resurgence of life, the euphoria, the biological reaction which affected men and women alike and was the most common cause of romantic associations formed by patients for their doctors and nurses.

  West saw the instrument in her lifted hand and said, dryly, ‘You know, Doctor, this is getting to be a habit. If it keeps up, I’ll be so compromised that you’ll have to marry me.’

  A joke and his way of telling her that the danger she feared did not exist, that he needed no chemical help to regain his normal emotional equilibrium.

  Then, as she restored the hypodermic to her bag, he said, ‘I was lucky. You got to me in time. But Martyn? What about Martyn?’

  He was dead, inert flesh locked in a personal coffin, the suit which had maintained his life now a temporary grave. Maddox watched him leave, carried in Holt’s Pinnace together with Claire and her patient. West had sworn that he was fit for duty but Maddox had insisted and he’d had no choice but to obey.

  As the Pinnace dwindled and vanished from sight he turned to where Manton was kneeling, his gloved hands probing at the ground.

  ‘Have you noticed anything strange about this place, Carl?’

  ‘It’s small and round and apparently smooth,’ said Maddox and added, dryly, ‘I’ve been a little too busy to pay much attention to the scenery.’

  ‘The chamber.’ Manton rose. ‘And that metal lining the tunnels. The inscriptions too, all most interesting.’

  And food for later study if ever they had the time or opportunity. Already Carey’s co-pilot had taken a series of photographs and was even now attempting to remove a segment of the stuff from the rim of the shaft. He was finding it hard work.

  ‘At first examination it looks as if at one time it was a mine,’ said Manton. ‘But I don’t think it could have been that. Maybe at first but certainly not for some time. The galleries if any existed have all been sealed and that chamber with the bodies — most unusual.’ He moved his boot over the soil, scraping at the dirt with its edge. It rose in a mound of fine particles to form a heap resembling ash.

  ‘The inner lock of the door was broken,’ Manton mused. ‘It must have been done deliberately which means that the creatures who sealed themselves in the chamber had no intention of ever leaving it. Perhaps they couldn’t. Perhaps there was nowhere else they could go.’ Again his boot scraped at the gritty soil. ‘A last stand,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The final retreat. Did they continue to hope, I wonder? Did some take their own lives? Or did they wait until their air escaped and died as they had lived in a common unity?’

  ‘If they had lived that way.’

  ‘They could live in no other, Carl. It took cooperation to work that metal, to form it, to set it into place. It took more to arrive at a common decision and to stick to it. To fashion the chamber and to enter it and wait. Perhaps they still had hope, Carl, but I doubt it. They would have seen too much, experienced too crushing a defeat for hope to have remained. And yet they must have had determination.’ He paused then said, wistfully, ‘I wished that we could have known them. There would have been much we could have learned and, towards the end at least, we’d have had much in common.’

  The mutual necessity which had driven them to burrow deep into the ground, to construct tunnels, chambers, a means to survive. In that, at least, the aliens and the humans were alike. A common need and a common enemy. A common death, perhaps.

  Maddox said, ‘The beam?’

  ‘It’s obvious what it does, Carl. This is the final proof if we should need it. A force which weakens the molecular and atomic bonds and attracts the latent energy of matter itself. This planetoid could have been much larger than it is now. In fact, I’m certain of it. The bodies we found proves that. There could have been an atmosphere, water, soil, growing things, villages, even. A small world but a pleasant one. Then it entered this space and was trapped by the Omphalos.’

  Caught to be eaten by the beam as a boy would gnaw at an apple on a stick. Matter reduced to energy and drawn away and, as the balance was altered the tiny world would have turned to expose a fresh portion of its surface to the devouring energy. Such a minute shift must have caused the closing of the door which had trapped West and Martyn.

  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.

  CHAPTER 11

  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.