Lifeforce Read online

  “No, but they might be at the back, towards the jets — if that’s how it’s driven.”

  Now he was hovering over one of the stairways. From a distance, it looked like a fire escape, but at closer quarters, he saw that the metal was at least a yard thick. It was the same dull silver as the floor. Each step was about four feet high and deep. There were no handrails. He followed them upwards, to a gallery supported by pillars. A catwalk, also without rails, ran across a gulf at least half a mile wide.

  Craigie said: “Can you see a light?” He pointed.

  Carlsen said: “Switch off your lights.” They were in blackness that enclosed them like a grave. Then, as his eyes adjusted, Carlsen knew Craigie was right. Somewhere towards the centre of the ship, there was a greenish glow. He checked his Geiger counter. It showed a slightly higher reading than usual, but well below the danger level. He told Dabrowsky: “There seems to be some kind of fault luminosity. I’m going to investigate.”

  It was a temptation to thrust powerfully against the stairs and propel himself forward at speed across the gulf. But ten years in space had made caution second nature. Using the catwalk as a guide, he floated slowly towards the glow. He kept one eye on the Geiger counter. Its activity increased noticeably as they drew closer, but it was still below the danger level, and he knew his insulated suit would protect him.

  It was farther than it seemed. The four men floated past galleries that looked as if they had been designed by a mad Renaissance architect, and flights of stairs that looked as if they might stretch back to earth or outward to the stars. There were more immense columns, but this time they broke off in space, as if some roof they had once supported had now collapsed. When Carlsen brushed against one of these, he noticed that it seemed to be covered with a fine white powder, not unlike sulphur dust or lycopodium. He scraped some of this into a sample bag.

  Half an hour later, the glow was brighter. Looking at his watch, he was surprised to see it was nearly one o’clock; it made him realise that he was hungry. They had switched off their searchlights, and the green glow was bright enough to see by. The light came from below them.

  Dabrowsky’s voice said: “That was moonbase, Olof. He said your wife had just been on television with the children.”

  At any other time, the news would have delighted him. Now it seemed strangely remote, as if it referred to a previous existence. Dabrowsky said: “Zelensky says there are four billion people all sitting in front of the televisions, waiting for news. Can I send an interim report?”

  “Wait ten minutes. We’re getting close to this light. I’d like to find out what it is.”

  Now at least he could see that it was pouring up from a chasm in the floor. The greeny-blue quality reminded him of moonlight on fields. He experienced a surge of exultancy that made him kick himself powerfully downwards. Ives said: “Hey, Skip, not too fast.” He felt like a swallow skimming and gliding towards the earth. The edge of the gulf lay a quarter of a mile below him, and he could see the full extent of the immense rectangular hole that was like a cloud-filled valley among mountains. The Geiger counter had now passed the danger point, but the insulation of the suit would protect him for some time yet.

  The hole into which they were plunging was about a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. The walls were covered with the same designs as the outer chamber. The light seemed to be coming from the floor and from an immense column in the centre of the space. He heard Murchison say: “What in hell’s that? A monument?” Then Craigie said: “It’s made of glass.” Carlsen stretched out his hands to cushion his impact against the floor, rolled over like a parachutist, then bounced for a hundred yards. When he succeeded in standing upright, he found himself at the base of a pedestal that supported the transparent column.

  Like most things on this ship, it was bigger than it looked from a distance. Carlsen judged its diameter to be at least fifty yards. Inside, immense dim shapes were suspended. In the phosphorescent light, they looked like black octopuses. Carlsen propelled himself upwards until he was opposite one of them, and then shone his searchlight on it. In the dazzling beam, he could see that it was not black, but orange. At close quarters, it looked less like an octopus, more like a bundle of fungoid creepers joined together at one end.

  Close beside him, Ives said: “What do you make of that?”

  Carlsen knew what he was thinking. “I don’t think these things built this ship.”

  Murchison pressed the glass of his space helmet against the column. “What do you suppose they are? Vegetable? Or some kind of squid?”

  “Perhaps neither. They may be some completely alien life form.”

  Murchison said: “My God!”

  The fear in his voice made Carlsen’s heart pound. When he spoke, his own voice was choked. “What in God’s name is it?”

  Something was moving behind the squidlike shapes. Craigie’s voice said: “It’s me.”

  “What the hell are you playing at?” The shock had made Carlsen angry.

  “I’m inside this tube. It’s hollow. And I can see something down below.”

  Cautiously, Carlsen propelled himself upwards, braking himself by pressing his gloved hands against the glass of the column. He was sweating heavily, although the temperature of the spacesuit was controlled. He floated past the top of the column, made a twist in the air and managed to land. He could then see that, as Craigie had said, it was hollow. The walls containing the squidlike creatures were no more than ten feet thick. And when he looked into the space down the centre, he noticed that the blue glow was far stronger there. It was streaming up from below the floor. “Donald? Where are you?”

  Craigie’s voice said: “I’m down below. I think this must be the living quarters.”

  Carlsen reached out to grab Murchison, who had propelled himself too fast and was about to float past him. Without speaking, both launched themselves headfirst into the hollow core. Since space-walking had become second nature, they had lost their normal inhibitions about this position. They descended gently towards the blue-green light. A moment later they were floating through the hole into a sea of blue that reminded Carlsen of a grotto he had once seen on Capri. Looking up, he realised that the ceiling — the floor of the room they had just left — was semi-transparent, a kind of crystal. The glow they had seen from above was the light that filtered through this. Down the wall to the right, another great staircase descended. But the scale here was less vast than above. This was altogether closer to the scale on the Hermes. The light came from the walls and the floor. There were buildings in the centre of the room, square and also semi-transparent. And at the far end of the room, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, Carlsen could see stars burning in the blackness. Part of the wall had been ripped away. He could see the immense plates twisted inwards and torn, as if someone had attacked a cardboard box with a hammer. He pointed. “That’s probably what stopped the ship.”

  The fascination of violent disaster drove them towards the gap. Dabrowsky was asking for further details. Carlsen stopped at the edge of the gulf, looking down at the floor, which was buckled and torn under his feet. “Something big tore a hole in the ship — a hole more than a hundred feet wide. It must have been hot: the metal looks fused as well as ripped. All the air must have escaped within minutes, unless they could seal off this part of the ship. Any living things must have died instantaneously.”

  Dabrowsky asked: “What about these buildings?”

  “We’ll investigate them now.”

  Ives’s voice said: “Hey, Captain!” It was almost a shriek. Carlsen saw that he was standing near the buildings, his searchlight beam stabbing through transparent walls and emerging on the other side. “Captain, there’s people in there.”

  He had to check the desire to hurl himself across the quarter of a mile that divided him from the buildings. His impetus would have carried him beyond them, and perhaps knocked him unconscious against the far wall. As he moved slowly, he asked: “What kind of people? Are they
alive?”

  “No, they’re dead. But they’re human, all right. At least, humanoid.”

  He checked himself against the end building. The walls were glass, as clear as the observation port of the Hermes . These were undoubtedly living quarters. Inside were objects that he could identify as tables and chairs, alien in design but recognisably furniture. And two feet away, on the other side of the glass, lay a man. The head was bald, the cheeks sunken and yellow. The blue eyes stared glassily at the ceiling. He was held down to the bed by a canvas sheet, whose coarse texture was clearly visible. Under this sheet, which was stretched tight, they could see the outlines of bands or hoops, clearly designed to hold the body in place.

  Murchison said: “Captain, this one’s a woman.”

  He was looking through the wall of the next building. Craigie, Ives and Carlsen joined him. The figure strapped to the bed was indisputably female. That would have been apparent even without the evidence of the breasts that swelled under the covering. The lips were still red, and there was something indefinably feminine about the modelling of the face. None of them had seen a woman for almost a year; all experienced waves of nostalgia, and a touch of a cruder physical reaction.

  “Blonde too,” Murchison said. The short-cropped hair that covered the head was pale, almost white.

  Craigie said: “And here’s another.” It was a dark-haired girl, younger than the first. She might have been pretty, but the face was corpselike and sunken.

  Each building stood separate; it struck Carlsen that they were like a group of Egyptian tombs. They counted thirty in all. In each lay a sleeper: eight older men, six older women, six younger males and ten women whose ages may have ranged between eighteen and twenty-five.

  “But how did they get into the damn things?”

  Murchison was right; there were no doors. They walked around the buildings, examining every inch of the glass surface. It was unbroken. The roofs, made of semi-transparent crystal, also seemed to be joined or welded to the glass.

  “They’re not tombs,” Carlsen said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t need furniture.”

  “The ancient Egyptians buried furniture with their dead.” Ives had a passion for archaeology.

  For some reason, Carlsen felt a flash of irritation. “But they expected to take their goods to the underworld. These people don’t look that stupid.”

  Craigie said: “All the same, they could hope to rise from the dead.”

  Carlsen said angrily: “Don’t talk bloody nonsense.” Then, as he caught Craigie’s startled glance through the glass of the helmet: “I”m sorry. I think I must be hungry.”

  Back in the Hermes , Steinberg had cooked the meal intended for Christmas Day. It was now mid-October; they were scheduled to leave for earth in the second week of November, arriving in mid-January. (At top speed, the Hermes covered four million miles a day.) No one had any doubt that they would be leaving sooner than that. This find was more important than a dozen unknown asteroids.

  The atmosphere was now relaxed and festive. They drank champagne with the goose, and brandy with the Christmas pudding. Ives, Murchison and Craigie talked almost without pause; the others were happy to listen. Carlsen was oddly tired. He felt as if he had been awake for two days. Everything was slightly unreal. He wondered if it could be the effect of radioactivity, then dismissed the idea. In that case, the others would feel it too. Their spacesuits were now in the decontaminator unit, and the meter showed that absorption had been minimal.

  Farmer said: “Olof, you’re not saying much.”

  “Tired, that’s all.”

  Dabrowsky asked him: “What’s your theory about all this? Why did they build that thing?”

  They all waited for Carlsen to speak, but he shook his head.

  “Then let me tell you mine.” Farmer said. He was smoking a pipe and used the stem to gesture. “From what you say, all those stairways couldn’t serve any practical purpose. Right? So, as Olof said this morning, it’s probably an impractical purpose — an aesthetic or religious purpose.”

  “All right,” Steinberg said, “so it’s a kind of floating cathedral. It still doesn’t make sense.”

  “Let me go on. We know these creatures aren’t from within the solar system. So they’re from another system, perhaps another galaxy.”

  “Impossible, unless they’ve been travelling for a hundred million years or so.”

  “All right.” Farmer was unperturbed. “But they could have come from another star system. If they could reach half the speed of light, Alpha Centauri’s only nine years away.” He waved aside interruption. “We know they must have come from another star system. So the only question is which one. And if they’ve travelled that far, then the size of the ship becomes logical. It’s the equivalent of an ocean liner. Our ship’s no more than a rowboat by comparison. Now…” He turned to Ives. “If people migrate, what’s the first thing they take with them?”

  “Their gods.”

  “Quite. The Israelites travelled with the Ark of the Covenant. These people brought a temple.”

  Steinberg said: “And it still doesn’t make sense. If we all migrated to Mars, we wouldn’t try to take Canterbury Cathedral. We’d build another on Mars.”

  “You forget that the cathedral’s also a home. Suppose they land on Mars? It’s an inhospitable place. It might take them years to establish a city under a glass dome. But they’ve brought their dome with them.”

  The others were impressed. Dabrowsky asked: “But why the stairways and catwalks?”

  “Because they’re the basic necessities of a new city. Their size is limited. As the population increases, they have to expand upwards. It’s the only direction. So they’ve built the skeleton of a multilevel city.”

  Ives said with excitement: “I’ll tell you another thing. They wouldn’t be alone. They’d send two or three ships. And they wouldn’t land on Mars, because it doesn’t support life. They’d land on earth.”

  They all stared at him. Even Carlsen suddenly felt more awake. Craigie said slowly: “Of course…”

  They sat in silence. Murchison whistled.

  Steinberg voiced their thought. “So those creatures could be our ancestors?”

  “Not our ancestors,” Craigie said. ” Theywere the ones who reached earth. But the brothers and sisters of our ancestors.”

  They all began to speak at once. Farmer’s slow Northumberland voice emerged after a few seconds. “So we’ve explained the basic problem of human evolution — why man is so unlike the apes. We didn’t evolve from apes. We evolved from them .”

  Carlsen asked: “And what about Neanderthal man and all the rest?”

  “A different line entirely.”

  He was interrupted by the radio buzzer. Craigie switched it on. They all listened intently. Zelensky’s voice said, “Gentlemen, I have a surprise for you. The Prime Minister of the United European States, George Magill.”

  They looked at one another in pleased surprise. If the world could be said to have one statesman who emerged head and shoulders above the others, it was Magill, the architect of World Unity.

  The familiar deep voice came into the room. “Gentlemen, I daresay you have realised this already, but you are now the most famous human beings in the solar system. I’m relaying this message immediately after seeing your film of the inside of the ship. Even with some truly infuriating interferences, it is the most remarkable film I have ever seen. You are to be congratulated on your extraordinary adventure. You will have…” At this point, his voice was drowned with static. When it again sounded clearly, he was saying: “…agrees with me that the first and most important task is to bring back to earth at least one of these beings, and if possible, more than one. Of course, we shall have to rely upon your judgement as to whether this is feasible. We realise that when you break into the tombs, they may crumble to dust like so many mummies. On the other hand, it should be possible for you to ascertain whether these tombs contain an atmosphere, or whether they are vac
uums. If they are vacuums, then you should have no problem…”

  Carlsen groaned. ” Whydoes the idiot want to rush things?” He subsided as he saw the others straining their ears to catch the rest of Magill’s message. He sat there gloomily for the next five minutes while Magill boomed on, spelling out the scientific and political implications of their discovery.

  Then Zelensky came on again. “Well, boys, you heard what the man said. I agree with him. If it’s possible, we want one or two of these creatures brought back to earth. Cut your way into one of the tombs. Bear in mind they may not be dead, but only in a state of suspended animation. If you get them into the ship, seal them in the freezing compartment, and leave it sealed until you get back to moonbase. Leave them untouched.”

  Carlsen stood up and left the room. He went to his own quarters and used the lavatory, then lay down on the bed. Almost instantly, he was asleep.

  He woke up to find Steinberg standing over him. He sat up. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Seven hours. You looked so tired we decided not to wake you.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Four of us have just got back. We’ve opened one of the tombs.”

  “Oh, Christ, why? Why couldn’t you wait until I woke up?”

  “Zelensky’s orders.”

  “ Igive the orders while I’m captain.”

  Steinberg was apologetic. “We thought you’d be pleased. We’ve cut a doorway in the tomb, and it’s a vacuum. The body didn’t crumble to dust. There shouldn’t be any problem getting him into the freezer.”

  Five minutes later, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he went down to the control room. Through the port, he could see the familiar blue-green glow. The ship had been manoeuvred opposite the chamber of the humanoids: he could see the tombs clearly.

  Dabrowsky said: “Did Dave tell you it wasn’t made of glass?”

  “No? What was it?”

  “Metal. A transparent metal. We’ve put the segment in the decontamination chamber, but it doesn’t seem to be radioactive. And there’s no radioactivity in the tomb. It’s a shield against radioactivity.”