‘It worked,’ he said. ‘We’ve found a way to beat the Omphalos.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She did not share his conviction. ‘A medical trick, Eric, but we can’t continue to inhale drugs. Unless we discontinue their use soon the balance will have swung the other way and the anti-hallucinogens will produce distorting side effects.’

  ‘Such as?’ He didn’t really want to know. ‘Never mind. As soon as we collect Carl we can get away from here. When will that be?’

  Douglas alone had the answer. As Manton and Claire entered the command module he said, without turning in his chair, ‘We’re now in orbit following a path a little higher than the other Pinnace. We’ve re-established the tracking monitor and have course and direction plotted. All that remains now is to go in.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘It has to be soon. I’d like to take a few minutes to confirm relative courses and to establish any local patterns of variable turbulence. There could be magnetic fields, eddy-currents, areas of contrasting potential.’

  ‘We didn’t find any,’ reminded Manton. ‘All sensors registered negative.’

  ‘They still do.’ West made a slight adjustment. ‘But I’d like to be sure. As it is we won’t have the chance.’

  The time factor, of course, Manton had almost forgotten it.

  ‘We have ten minutes,’ he said.

  ‘We had.’ West was grim. ‘We haven’t now. We used it up regaining control. You can give Nelson the thanks for that,’ he added. ‘If it hadn’t been for him we’d all be dead now. If he ever gets tired of nursing his machine he can transfer to Reconnaissance any time he wants.’

  From West that was high praise, and Saha beamed his gratification. But nothing, they all knew, would ever woo him away from the one great love of his life. To him the Ad Astra’s computer was more than a machine. It was an actual, living creature.

  And one with a mellifluous woman’s voice.

  ‘Is that Carl’s Pinnace?’ Claire leaned forward as a fleck appeared on the screen. ‘There!’

  It grew as they watched it, taking on shape and substance, a little vague against the greenish glow, the bulk of the Omphalos into which it was heading.

  ‘Still no contact?’

  ‘No, Professor.’ Saha checked his instruments. ‘We should be able to reach him but he doesn’t answer.’ He added, ‘And no contact with Ad Astra.’

  As Manton had expected. His own heterodyning field which maintained the Pinnace’s systems from interference would also bolster the radio-barrier.

  ‘We’re going in,’ said West. ‘Get ready for the exchange. We’ll have no time to waste so make it fast. Saha?’

  ‘Four minutes total starting from — now!’

  Four minutes in which to make actual physical contact with the other Pinnace, to establish the seal, to enter and to carry Maddox back to safety. Manton felt the deck of the Pinnace move beneath his feet as he sealed his helmet. Claire had done the same and he stepped to where she was standing before the hatch and, counting seconds, waited.

  Forty-three and the Pinnace dipped, veered, juddered as West fought to bring it into alignment with the other vessel.

  Sixty-two and the clash of touching metal rang through the hull.

  Eighty-seven and again the hulls touched, parted, touched again, the hulls clamped with the aid of powerful electromagnets.

  ‘Contact!’ West signalled to Saha. ‘Establish and hold. Professor! Get moving!’

  Two minutes in which to pass through the hatches, enter the other Pinnace, get Maddox, return, seal, break apart and head away from the nearing danger of the Omphalos.

  Manton went first, slamming open the port, reaching for the other with barely a glance at the enclosing seal of transparent flexible plastic which joined the hulls together like a fat section of hose. The external lock resisted his tug and he threw his weight against it, conscious of the passing seconds.

  ‘Hurry, Eric!’ Claire’s voice was strained. Tense as it came from his phones. ‘Hurry!’

  The lock yielded, the port opened and Manton thrust himself into the command module of Maddox’s Pinnace. The commander was slumped in his chair before the controls, head forward, face hidden by the fold of his arms.

  ‘One minute!’ said West. ‘Hurry!’

  ‘Get back in the Pinnace, Claire,’ snapped Manton, as she stepped towards the figure in the pilot’s chair. ‘There’s no time for you to treat him now. Get back and clear the way.’

  ‘He could be hurt! Lifting him wrongly could kill him!’

  A gamble they would all have to take. As she stepped back Manton moved to the chair, stooped, thrust his arms beneath the limp form and lifted. Maddox sagged, one arm falling to trail across the back of the seat, his head almost hitting the edge of the port as Manton passed through it. Claire slammed it shut.

  ‘Twelve seconds!’ West’s voice was brittle with tension. ‘Have you got him safe?’

  ‘Safe,’ said Manton.

  ‘Good! Saha, break seal. Stand by for emergency lift. Now!’

  The note of the engines rose, became a throbbing roar, exhaust gases blasting from the venturis as the Pinnace tore free from the other vessel and began to lift from the danger below. For a moment it seemed as if they had waited too long, taken one chance too many, then, with a gusting sigh of relief, Saha saw the movement of needles, the shift of perspective.

  ‘We’ve done it! Man, we’ve done it!’

  West relaxed a little as the greenish bulk of the Omphalos dropped away. Against it the shape of the other vessel grew small, almost vanished, then suddenly expended in an eye searing patch of raw and crimson flame.

  ‘Three seconds,’ said Saha. ‘Three seconds more and we’d have shared that pyre.’ He shuddered then said, without turning, ‘How is the commander?’

  He was lying where Manton had placed him, face down, arms hiding his cheeks, his knees bent a little. He looked a man asleep; only the steady rise and fall of his chest showing that he was still alive. Claire knelt and gently turned him over.

  Manton heard the sharp sound of her indrawn breath.

  ‘Claire?’

  ‘His face,’ she whispered. ‘Dear God, look at his face!’

  It was old with an oldness which went beyond mere attrition of tissues. The lines were too deep, the skin too taut, the creped patches widespread so that he looked as a withered mummy might look or a corpse which had been left to desiccate in some tropic sun.

  ‘Carl!’ Claire threw back her helmet and stooped over him, her eyes wet with tears. ‘Carl!’

  A call to the man she had known, the person with whom she had shared a fantastic adventure and perhaps a little more than that. Manton saw her shoulders move in the unmistakable signs of grief and stood, feeling a little helpless, a little unwanted.

  And, he too felt grief.

  They had wanted a miracle and for a brief moment he had thought that one had been granted. The Pinnace contacted, the hallucinations banished, the crippling stress-fields cancelled out and the commander saved. But saved for what?

  ‘He’s dying!’ said Claire. ‘Dying!’

  Cursed by the age-accelerator which threatened the ship. The sucking beam which drew life and energy from all it touched. Guthrie had died because of it and, even now, others might have succumbed.

  But no beam had impinged on the Pinnace.

  Manton said, ‘Claire. It might not be what you think. The vapour — quickly!’

  ‘This isn’t an hallucination, Eric.’

  ‘To us, no, but to Carl?’ He left the question hanging. ‘Try the vapour. Try it!’

  Maddox coughed as she stripped the apparatus from around her neck and held the mask to his mouth and nose. He stirred, one hand lifted as, weakly, he tried to push the device away.

  ‘It isn’t going to work,’ she said, dully. ‘We’ve rescued him only to watch him die,’

  Of senility, spending his last few days or hours like a crippled animal, his mind gone, his strength, his agility.

  It would have been better to have left him to burn in the pyre of the fallen Pinnace.

  A quick and merciful death.

  ‘Claire!’ Manton leaned forward from where he stood. ‘It’s working. Look!’

  Maddox’s face changed. The creped and desiccated skin began to smooth, the lines to fill, the corpse-like appearance to vanish. Dark circles remained around his eyes and his face still bore traces of age, but they were the result of fatigue, of muscles strained and settled into a mask of exhaustion.

  ‘Carl!’ Claire caught him as he coughed again and tried to stir. His cheeks, Manton noted, were moist with her tears. ‘Carl! Oh, Carl!’

  His eyes opened and he stared at her with a blank expression. A man in a daze, unbelieving that what he saw could be real. One who tried to smile and gasped and sucked vapour into his lungs and who, as they watched, became the man they had known and respected.

  ‘Claire.’ Manton dropped his hand to her shoulder. ‘He’ll be alright now. Just give him time to recover.’

  And to give herself time to gain composure, to adopt once more the iron mask of professional detachment.

  But she could not forget what she had seen; the apparent miracle which had turned an old and dying man into one little older than herself and obviously fit.

  ‘The vapour,’ she said. ‘It had to be that. But Eric, how did you know it would work?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he confessed. ‘But now it seems obvious what must have happened. Carl was alone, unprotected, the victim of God knows what hallucinations. We both know the power of illusion; under hypnosis a man can be convinced he cannot walk and he will be a literal cripple. Hysterical blindness, paralysis, loss of taste, smell, and touch — you must have seen many cases.’

  ‘I have,’ she admitted then added slowly, ‘So you are saying that Carl was suffering from a psychosomatic condition?’

  ‘What else?’ Manton paused, remembering his own experience. ‘He must have been subjected to intensely strong hallucinations formed of age and death, decay and collapse. Hallucinations so strong that they became an integral part of him and affected his actual physical being. Once convince the mind of a thing and the body will follow. Drench it with the concept of age and the facial muscles will respond; the skin alters texture, the capillaries enlarge, the tissue show all the signs of desiccation. But, Claire, as a doctor you know all this.’

  She had known it, but had been too disturbed to look beyond the obvious. Manton had done that, his mind relatively free of the emotions which had numbed her. The attribute of his solitary life, perhaps, or—

  She shook her head, annoyed with the vein of calculation. What did it matter how he had arrived at the conclusion he had? His suggestion had worked and Maddox was himself again.

  He smiled as, again, she leaned over him.

  ‘Claire! Are you real?’

  ‘Yes, Carl. I’m real.’

  ‘You came after me,’ he said, slowly. ‘Rescued me.’ His eyes moved from the woman to where Manton stood silently watching. ‘You and Eric and who else?’ He frowned as she told him. ‘And what if you had been trapped as I was?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She met his eyes. ‘Eric left orders that under no circumstances was a second rescue attempt to be made.’

  She, all of them, had taken a calculated gamble with death but there was nothing he could say. The decision had been a personal one and he would have done exactly the same. One attempt could be justified — more could not. The expedition could not afford to waste crews and Pinnaces.

  As he climbed to his feet to stand, unsteadily, one hand supporting his weight, Manton said, ‘You were locked in orbit around the Omphalos, Carl. You had time to study it. Did you —?’

  ‘Decide what it was?’ Maddox shrugged. ‘I only know one thing, Eric. It is inimical — and it is alive.’

  *

  Alive in a way in which nothing in his experience had been alive. A node of awareness, self-contained, a mesh of balanced energies forming a living, conscious world. And it was conscious, of that he had no doubt. Sitting in the passenger compartment of the Pinnace, eyes half-closed, he recalled and relived that dreadful time during which the entire universe had been filled with the desire and the concept of death.

  ‘It’s sentient,’ he explained. ‘A form of life which we can only understand by analogy. Think of an oyster or a barnacle. A plant such as a Venus Flytrap. A sea-urchin, a leech, a basking whale. The Omphalos is all of these and more. You called it a brain, Claire. It is that too.’

  ‘A conscious brain?’ Manton was fast with the question. ‘Are the beams directed against the Ad Astra and the planetoid the result of a conscious decision?’

  ‘Intelligent direction, Carl?’ Claire frowned. ‘Is it possible?’

  He said, dully, conscious of the inability of mere words to convey what he had felt and emotionally comprehended, ‘Perhaps not intelligent as we use the term. Those beams could have been emitted as we would put out a hand to touch something. Or as a parasite would automatically introduce a proboscis into the skin of a victim. It reacted to our presence. Perhaps it couldn’t help but to react. It, like ourselves, like all living things, is driven by the need to survive. To it we are little more than a source of energy.’

  Food!

  Claire looked at where the Omphalos was pictured on a screen to the fore of the compartment. It was smaller now they were on their way back to the ship. West, she noticed had, with innate caution, taken a flight path which kept them well clear of the energy-sucking cone.

  Even as she watched the green expanse seemed to flex with its mysterious pulsations.

  A creature born in an alien dimension stirring at the impact of intelligent life?

  Responding to mental stimuli received, perhaps, at a para-physical level?

  And if the thing were sleeping and should wake — what then?

  The concept chilled her then she shook herself, aware of her flight into fantasy, the sudden flurry of an undisciplined imagination. It was a relief to listen to what Manton was saying.

  ‘Carl, you said that to the Omphalos we were little more than a source of energy. That is a source of food. Do you imply that we could be even more?’

  A moment in which Maddox remained silent, looking ahead with haunted eyes, aware of the trap into which his private knowledge had led him. The impression he had gained of something into which other sentient creatures could and had been assimilated. Of a plethora of minds aware and helplessly entrammelled. Of the ghostly echoes of screams.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said at last. And then, to change the subject, ‘Did you manage to measure the rate of attrition on the planetoid?’

  ‘Not to the precision I would like, Carl, but we took some rough measurements. It is slow, as I anticipated. We seem to be dealing with a total conversion of matter into energy and there must be a limiting factor to the amount which can be stored and utilised.’ He added, grimly. ‘But there’s no danger of the thing going hungry for a long time yet. The mass of our ship and its atomic engines will keep it supplied for quite a while.’

  The people too, but Maddox didn’t want to think of that.

  Claire pressed him back in the seat as he attempted to rise.

  ‘Take it easy, Carl. There’s nothing for you to do now.’

  ‘I want to see if we can contact the ship.’

  ‘Why?’ She frowned as he made no answer. ‘The defence shield? Frank kept it on as you ordered. Anything else?’

  ‘The metal we found,’ he said. ‘The olive stuff lining the tunnels and chamber of the aliens. Did you find out what it was, Eric?’

  ‘Basically some form of non-ferrous alloy aligned to long-chain polymers of a silicone structure. They must have found a way to blend the various materials into a flux which they spread and let harden as we do with an epoxy glue. Once set it’s difficult to cut and impossible to rework.’

  ‘Can we duplicate it?’

  ‘Not at the moment and I doubt if we will ever be able to match it exactly.’ Manton rubbed thoughtfully at his chin. ‘I didn’t have much time to work on it myself, but Demetriov is doing his best. He knows metals and plastics better than any, Carl. If there’s an answer to be found, then he’ll find it.’

  Maddox nodded, remembering the man, a solemn, middle-aged product of the Ukraine, a person who rarely smiled but had never, to his knowledge, displayed anger.

  Claire said, ‘Why the interest, Carl? What importance can the alien metal have for us?’

  ‘Those creatures used it for protection,’ he explained. ‘They lined their tunnels and chamber with it.’

  ‘Naturally, so as to seal them against air-loss.’ She saw his eyes, his expression. ‘But you think there was something else, Carl. A protection against what?’ Her mind leapt to the answer. ‘The aging element of the energy-beam? Is that it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was only a possibility.’

  ‘We could make a test.’ Claire frowned, thinking. ‘Culture plates,’ she decided. ‘Ted is already working with them and Demetriov could shield them with some of the alien metal and see if there is any change in the catabolic rate.’

  ‘See if the radio is working. If it is, give the orders.’

  Maddox tried to relax as she left, knowing there was nothing more he could do for the present. If contact could be established, then everything possible for the moment would have been done.

  In the meantime, it was good just to sit, to know that he was safe among his fellows, that the ghastly isolation he had known when orbiting the Omphalos was a thing of the past.

  Something to be forgotten — if such a thing could ever be that.

  ‘Carl!’ He started and opened his eyes aware that he must have dozed. Claire was beside him.

  ‘Did you get through?’

  ‘Finally, yes.’

  ‘And?’

  She said, flatly, ‘Demetriov is dead.’

  CHAPTER 13

  He had died as Alan Guthrie had died, falling to lie in his suit, suffering from terminal senility, dead of old age before he could be rescued from the exterior hull of the ship on which he had chosen to carry out tests.

  ‘I warned him,’ said Bain. ‘I told him of the danger and begged him to use remote control apparatus but he wouldn’t listen.’ He added, as if in explanation, ‘He left a wife and two young children back on Earth.’