‘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.

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  Child of Space

  CHAPTER 1

  Regan heard the sound as soon as he stepped into the cavern and halted, eyes searching the dimly lit interior, finally locating the source among the cluster of men and women assembled at the centre of the open expanse. Boardman was among them and he turned, smiling, as Regan reached his side.

  “A nice touch, don’t you think, Mark?” He gestured to the object of their attention. “Somehow it belongs.”

  Regan looked at a fountain.

  Someone with more than a touch of imagination had built a thing of beauty, setting it in a bowl of polished stone edged with concealed lights which threw a kaleidoscope of gentle luminescence on the arching fronds of transparent leaves. Entranced, he watched the interplay of colour, the water spouting high from the nozzles; an artificial rain which rose to curve to fall in musical cadences.

  “Do you like it, Commander?” Lucy Cochran, the botanist in charge of Rural Area One, was justifiably proud of the installation. “Do you approve?”

  Regan nodded and looked at the walls of the man-made cavern in which they stood. They rose to merge in a common point high above the floor of the chamber that had been gouged from the lunar rock. The floor was levelled, paths running between wide beds of loam; soil made of crushed stone with humus added, chemicals and minerals incorporated with other ingredients to fashion a familiar dirt.

  In it, one day, would grow flowers, blooms serving no purpose other than to please the eye and nostrils. There would be grass on which lovers could stroll and games could be played. Bushes and even trees grown from precious seeds. A miniature forest set far beneath the Lunar surface, an oasis to which they could come to remind themselves of what they had left behind.

  Earth itself, their home, left behind when they had volunteered to begin a five-year exile as one of the personnel manning this first International Moonbase.

  “Mark?” Boardman was watching him. “Do you want to give the order?”

  As the Commander of Moonbase One it was his right, but a Commander could have too many rights and it would be wise not to insist on those that held no real importance.

  Others must be made to feel as if they shared authority as they certainly did responsibility.

  “Mark?”

  Boardman was impatient to see the culmination of his project, eager, perhaps, for praise—he was human enough for that.

  Regan said, “A moment, Trevor. Lucy, who designed the fountain?”

  “Carolyn Markson. Carrie?”

  She was young, lovely, her smoothly rounded face holding an elfin beauty. An electro-technician attached to Cochran’s staff. Regan smiled at her as she came close to halt standing before him. Taking the communicator from his belt he activated it, spoke to the face that appeared on the small screen, then held the instrument out to the girl.

  “Here, Carrie. You do it.”

  “Commander?” Her eyes glanced upwards to the shadowed apex of the cavern. “You mean—”

  “I want you to give the order, Carrie,” he said. “You’ve earned the right. The rest of us just dug out this place but you’ve beautified it with your fountain. So go ahead.”

  For a moment she hesitated, a little smile quirking a corner of her mouth and then, quickly, she said, “Let there be light!”

  Above a sun blazed into being.

  Not a real sun, but something so near as to give that impression. A mass of lights radiating a carefully selected section of the electro-magnetic spectrum that closely matched that of Earth’s sun. Regan felt the warmth of it, knew that if he stayed long in its radiance he would acquire a tan.

  To the communicator the girl said, “Complete cycle.”

  The light faded a little, more, died to create a simulation of twilight, of dusk, of final night. Regan heard the inhalation of those watching as lights began to wink from the roof of the cavern, artificial stars set in a familiar pattern.

  And then the dawn, a milky opalescence strengthening to a roseate glow, the brilliance of early sunrise.

  “Wonderful!” A woman drew in her breath. “I never thought—Trevor, I thank you.”

  “There should be bird-song,” said Carrie as she handed Regan back his communicator. “I could arrange it, light-triggered recordings and strategically placed speakers. Simulacra, too, artificial birds set in artificial trees. We could place one there, and another just there, and two over by the far opening.”

  She was talking more to herself than to him and Regan knew it. Taking the communicator he watched as she moved away to halt at the side of a young man, her face animated, both laughing, both moving off with arms intertwined.

  “Carrie has a point,” said Lucy. “And I’d like to do something with those walls. Some of the men suggested we fashion them into a likeness of the interior of a cathedral. One mentioned Chartres. Did you ever see it, Commander?”

  “Once.”

  “I never had the chance,” she said, regretfully. “I’ve seen slides, of course, and even a hologram, but nothing can convey the impression of antiquity and size, the dedication of those people who gave their labour for the love of God. Could we—?”

  “Within limits, Lucy, yes.” Regan softened his warning with a smile. “But you can’t use essential materials, power or labour. Yet if people want to use their recreation time working to decorate this place I won’t object. However, don’t forget why we built it in the first place.”

  Not for fun, nor for show, but as a place in which to grow food. An addition to the hydroponic tanks and yeast vats which, together with the algae tanks, provided the Base with sustenance. The cavern would serve a double purpose and later, with luck, could be turned into a park and garden.

  “I won’t forget,” she promised. “And you won’t regret this, Commander. I—” She broke off as his communicator hummed.

  Pierre Versin was on the screen. He said, without preamble, “Commander, you’d better come at once to the Control Room.”

  *

  Doctor Elna Mitchell picked up a card, looked at it for a moment, then placed it face down on the desk before her.

  “Star.” The girl lying supine on the bed was thirty feet away across the ward in Medical Centre. There was no possible way she could have seen the design. “You want me to continue, Doctor?”

  “Please, Liz, if you’re not feeling too tired.”

  “Tired?” Liz Caffrey gave a chuckle. “How could I get tired just lying here?”

  And yet there was strain as Elna had warned when, after her series of tests on the personnel had determined their extra-sensory perception potential, Liz had been asked to volunteer for further investigation. Now she was beginning to get a little bored.

  “Star,” she said as Elna looked at more cards. “Circle, circle, square, cross, wavy line, star, wavy line, cross, cross, square, circle, star, star…”

  A complete run of a hundred, each of five cards studied twenty times in random order. Anyone, by naming only one design, could achieve a success-rate of twenty per cent. Liz had scored seventy-eight.

  Elna pondered the figures as she made a notation on a sheet clipped to a board. One high score could be due to chance, two due to coincidence, more and there had to be a reason. On a score of tests Liz had gained results far in excess of the statistical average, a finding enhanced by other tests many made without her awareness.

  “Once more, Liz, if you please.”

  “Must we, Doctor?”

  “Getting tired?”

  “Bored, rather.” The girl stretched then, smiling, said, “Well, why not? Anything to help the cause.”

  Elna picked up the cards, shuffled them and, holding them face down slipped the top card from the pack and laid it, still face down, on the desk.

  “Liz?”

  “Star,” said the girl after a moment’s hesitation.

  Elna made a notation then placed another card face down on the first.

  “Circle,” said the girl after a moment. She sounded unsure. “At least I think it is.”

  “Please do your best to concentrate. And this?”

  The girl’s voice gained firmness as the run progressed. At the end she said, “How did I make out?”

  Badly, but Elna didn’t say so. Again she pondered her findings. The girl made high scores only when Elna looked at the cards, low when she did not. A fact which tended to eliminate clairvoyance and precognition; neither should be affected by the human intervention.

  The girl smiled as Elna approached the bed then looked warily at the machine she pulled towards the head of the cot.

  “More tests, Doctor?”

  “A few simple ones if you have no objection. I want to take readings of your brainwave pattern on the encephalogram while you are under mild sedation. It is important to the success of the experiment that you be wholly relaxed. Have I your agreement?”

  “Why not?” Liz shrugged. “Go ahead, Doctor, a good sleep never hurt anyone yet.”

  Within moments it was done, the girl lying at rest, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow. Quickly Elna attached the adhesive electrodes to various points on the skull. As she reached towards the controls of the machine her communicator sounded the attention signal.

  It was Regan. He said, “Elna, we’re on yellow alert. Have Medical stand by.”

  “Mark!” She stared at the screen, at the face with its peak of dark hair, the eyes which had seen too much, the mouth that betrayed the inner sensitivity. “Is something wrong?”

  “As yet we can’t be sure. I’m just warning you before the general alarm. Have you any emergencies?”

  Elna glanced at the girl. Asleep she was no problem and it was better to leave her that way rather than to jar her metabolism with the shock of conflicting drugs. But there were others, some due for surgery, none, fortunately, in a critical situation.

  “No, Mark. No emergencies.” And then she added, because she was both a woman and human and therefore curious, “What is it? What’s happening?”

  “Probably nothing, but we can’t afford to take chances. There’s something in space heading our way. We don’t know what it is and, until we do, we stand ready for anything.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until it hits us, passes us, or we wipe it from the sky.”

  “Mark! Do you—”

  But he was gone, the connection broken, the tiny screen blank. And, as much as she wanted to be with him, her place was in the Centre, which she controlled.

  *

  From where she stood before her instruments Amanda Barnes said, “No response, Commander. As far as I can determine it is just a lifeless mass of rock. No answer has been received to the entire range of signals we have transmitted and there is no discernable radiation emitted from the located object.”

  “Kanu?”

  “Computer agrees, Commander. All findings to date are consistent with the mass being a scrap of stellar debris.”

  Rock blasted from the world to which it had once belonged, to drift through space as the Asteroids drifted around the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. A lonely wanderer in the ocean of space.

  Leaning back in his chair Regan looked at the direct vision ports. Beyond lay the empty immensity of the void, the stars which shone with a remote indifference distant suns with their own, orbiting worlds.

  His eyes lowered to study the Lunar surface, the ground pocked with craters, seamed with fissures, the hollows thick with a dust as fine as powdered talc. Airless, waterless, those essential ingredients of life having to be reclaimed from the Lunar stone; liquids and gases torn from their chemical prisons to be used, recycled, used again and again.

  A closed ecology in which only power was plentiful, the atomic generators breeding their own fuel.

  “Commander?” Versin spoke without turning in the big chair facing the main console. “Your orders?”