Dark Continuum

by John E. Muller, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Beyond the eccentric orbits of Pluto and Neptune lies a vast, empty wilderness. There is nothing but the silence of space between the fringes of the Solar System and our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri. The outer worlds of the Home System were only inhabited by Service and Scientific Personnel. Life for them was a constant routine war against an almost impossibly hostile environment.
Then something in deep space began to affect the fringe of the Solar System. The isolated Observers in their living domes were helpless. They could do nothing except report on the increasingly bewildering phenomena. As the strange effects worsened, several domes were abandoned. The menace from Beyond continued to encroach on the civilised planets as it head steadily earthwards...
What was the rational, scientific explanation for the thing that looked like an eye? Was it merely motiveless and purposeless, or was it guided by something sinister and more dangerous? Were men fighting a Cosmic Accident or an enormous Intelligence from out there...?

Release date: February 27, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

MARIAN LASSITER, Interplanetary Federation Scientific Officer in charge of Dome 187, finished checking her suit, slid open the lock and moved out rather reluctantly into the formidable sub-zero temperature of Pluto. There was something irregular in the thermometer. Her calculations on the Barograph had indicated that the expected temperature variance was not conforming to a pattern which earlier records had indicated was practically immutable.

At first Marian had been rather excited by the result of the calculations. Her posting to 187 was her first real work. The training of an Interplanetary Federation Scientific Officer is a long process. Having left the Central Marsport University only two months previously, armed with her new qualifications and a great sense of her own importance, Marian had become gradually disillusioned with the life and work of an I.P.F. Scientific Officer.

The living domes had been very carefully designed. They had as much aesthetic appeal as it was possible to build into places that were primarily utilitarian and secondarily habitable. This was not to say, by any means, that the living domes were a cross between a laboratory and an observatory with a bunk casually tossed in one corner. There were microfilm readers and a library of sufficient magnitude to ensure that even the most voracious bibliophile would not tire of its contents. There was a teletape player and a wide selection of programmes. In fact, there was more amusement provided for leisure time than there was leisure time in which to enjoy it. The routine of the Scientific Officer in a living dome was quite a difficult one. Not that the tasks themselves appeared particularly formidable, but the violently hostile environment of the Outer Planets made it hard to carry out even the simplest routine tasks.

Marian Lassiter was thinking about this as she began to check the thermometer. What would have been a matter of a few minutes’ work on Earth or Mars was a morning’s frustrating, boring routine. The pressure suit she wore had to be perfectly insulated and one hundred per cent pressure proof. Pluto was way down below zero and airless. The slightest fault in Marian Lassiter’s apparatus would have meant an almost instantaneous, though not necessarily painless, death, either from suffocation or from freezing. Neither of the two possibilities appealed to her much!

Marian had begun her training early, and this meant that unlike a number of other officers in her year, who had graduated with her, she was still in her early twenties. Despite the strength and vigour of her youth, she had considerable difficulty in manipulating the thermometer clamps on the outside of the dome. The fiendishly cold planet seemed intent on making the thermometer clamps rigid by virtue of their very coldness, but Marian persevered. Once she had to go back into the dome for a long-handled spanner which, she realised afterwards, she ought to have brought with her on her first egress.

The thermometer clamps came away at last and she took it back into the dome, closed the hatch very carefully behind her, checked that pressure and temperature of the dome were normal again, and slipped off the helmet of the suit. Marian Lassiter always felt a certain amount of claustrophobic tension when she was encased in the protective clothing. It was an elaborate performance getting into and out of the Scientific Officer’s suit; somehow, the job seemed far more fatiguing and laborious than it really was. Marian remembered some of the psychological advice which she had received as an intrinsic part of her early training. The words of a lecture that she had heard over five years ago went through her head as clearly as though she were hearing them for the very first time. “Remember that boredom leads to fatigue; when we really do not wish to do a job, our subconscious tries to persuade us that we are tired.”

Marian tried to tell herself that her present fatigue was the result of a boredom which her subconscious was expressing in the form of inertia. It helped a little but some of the irksomeness remained. The thermometer lay on the dome’s work bench before her like a challenge. Duty in the abstract seemed to be waving that thermometer like a flag.

With a deep sigh—a sad sound in one so young—Marian Lassiter began to examine the thermometer. She checked it against two of the spares. Their readings were all identical. Frowning a little, she checked the scale again. At last, completely satisfied that the heat measurer was working after all, she refastened her helmet and opened the lock, took the thermometer outside and began the laborious task of resecuring it to its clamps. Once it was in place, she double-checked the conductors that brought the thermometer’s reading down into the dome and thus to the control panel, which she read daily, sometimes more frequently.

As a final check she took the panel reading then, still wearing the suit, went out and checked it with the external reading on the thermometer itself. The readings were accurate within .01 of a degree and that, even by the standards of an Interplanetary Federation Scientific Officer, was quite close enough.

Marian Lassiter began to recheck the lengthy and complex calculations which had shown her that the temperature pattern was not corresponding to its previously established gestalt. Only when she was fully satisfied on both counts did she begin drafting her report.

The report, which was short and to the point but nevertheless comprehensive despite its concise nature, explained in detail the sequence of events from the first calculation to the final check. As an appendix to the report Marian Lassiter added a short note to the effect that she was completely at a loss to understand any reason for the alteration in the behaviour of the temperature pattern. Then she took her report over to the transmitter and relayed it to the next nearest dome.

The system of carefully positioned domes and orbiting satellites made a radio link with Earth a possibility. It was not by any means rapid but it was an indispensable adjunct to life on one of the outer planets. Without the radio link Marian Lassiter trembled to think what life would have been like at all. She added a few brief, almost chatty, remarks to the Scientific Officer at the next radio relay dome, and then rather reluctantly terminated her transmission. To have seemed unduly effusive on the radio would have started tongues wagging to the effect that the loneliness of Dome 187 was proving too much for the new girl and, as lonely as she felt, Marian Lassiter was determined to prove herself as a Scientific Officer of the Interplanetary Federation.

After she had finished her minimum term of office, she would seriously consider applying for a transfer to a double or treble dome. There were a number of such posts available; in fact, one or two had been available when she applied for the 187 post. The 187 salary had been higher and Marian had misjudged her own personality by thinking that her temperament would have been more suited to endure loneliness than confinement with another human being with whom she might find subsequently she did not agree.

She was still thinking along these lines as she took off the protective suit, stored each item carefully in the locker where it belonged, and turned her attention to preparing a meal. ‘Preparing a meal’ was something of a euphemism for the actual duties that Marian Lassiter was carrying out at that moment. Everything was a matter of discipline and routine, thought the girl. She put balanced extracts and concentrates on the edge of her plate with the attitude of an artist squeezing tubes of pigment on to the edge of a palette.

Marian looked at the concentrates, the vitamins and the desiccated dehydrated foods, and wrinkled her nose a little. With a small spoon she began placing soupçons into her mouth. The concentrates were flavoured with harmless vegetable flavourings, but even these culinary subterfuges failed to rouse any spark of appetite or interest as far as Marian Lassiter was concerned. She ate as a duty and not as a pleasure, and when eating becomes a duty something, somewhere, is seriously wrong, she told herself.

Having finished the meal, she looked at the wall chron and its accusing pointers told her that there was still an hour of worktime before she could settle down to the relaxation period to which she was looking forward. At least she thought she still had an appetite for that. Discipline and training ensured that she worked as meticulously as though she were under constant supervision. She carried out a number of routine tasks with various instruments and dials that had to be read, and figures that had to be recorded. It was just before completing this last round of the working day that she found a small but none the less significant anomaly. The second she saw the gravity field indicator she wondered whether the temperature indications were connected with this other variation. Something was not reacting as it should have done, something was, in fact, reacting very oddly. She had not felt any physical difference in the dome’s gravity but, according to the indicator, there was a new force pulling from somewhere outside.

She went to the radio and called Dome 186. The Scientific Officer there, an old hand named Jergins—for it was the policy of the Interplanetary Federation to intersperse new officers with veterans as far as possible—spoke calmly and reassuringly.

“Have you checked the apparatus, Captain Lassiter?”

“Not yet, Captain Jergins.” Marian forced her voice into a calm, cool, normal tone.

“Well, I should do that if I were you.” Jergins didn’t exactly sound aloof but he was one of those rather strange individuals who normally keep themselves very much to themselves. Paul Jergins was a very self-sufficient man. Marian Lassiter had only seen him physically on two previous occasions and from what she remembered of him he was tall, grey and of rather saturnine appearance. There was something about Jergins which, to Marian’s way of thinking, could best be summed up in the word ‘severe,’ or perhaps ‘austere.’

“Call me again when you have checked,” said Jergins, cutting across the girl’s train of thought.

Station 186 was far enough away for there to be a noticeable time lag between radio signals, and preoccupied as she was, Marian found it easy for her thoughts to stray during the period of the time lag.

The radio went quiet and the loneliness of Dome 187 pressed in upon Marian Lassiter like a living thing. She drew a deep breath and took a pace around the Dome.

“I will not give in,” she said quietly. “I am not afraid. I am quite capable of carrying out my duties. I will stick it out to the end of my term of office. I will, I will.” She went on saying it until “I will” had changed to “I must,” and then, with her arm across her face, she collapsed sobbing to the foot of her bed and ‘I must’ became ‘I can’t’. It took her several minutes to get her voice and her nerves back under control; she said once more, “I will and I can, I shall, I must.” Her firm young chin was set in a line of determination. “I can and I will,” she said aggressively.

The dome seemed to absorb her words as though storing them, as though putting them deep in some invisible memory bank of its own. It was as though the beryllium and aluminium alloys of the dome were absorbing the girl’s words and feelings into themselves. She thought of the old theory about ghosts, the old idea that so-called psychic phenomena were, in reality, nothing more nor less than violent emotion released by human minds and absorbed into the physical fibre, the bricks and mortar, the wood and plaster of the buildings in which those emotions were discharged. But this, thought Marian Lassiter, was the worst possible time or place to consider psychic phenomena. A man or woman alone in a dome, an Interplanetary Federation Scientific Officer at that, alone in an observation station out here on the fringe of the solar system, was inviting insanity by allowing himself, or herself, to think of the unknown, the weird, the macabre, the eerie or the supernatural. Marian Lassiter certainly had more sense than to allow her mind to dwell upon such inexplicable phenomena as these.

She carefully unscrewed the cover plate of the gravitational gauge and began checking the delicate instrument inside. All her checks produced a positive result. There was nothing in the least negative about the gravitational indicator; it was working perfectly.

She picked up the radio and ca. . .