A space liner is a brilliantly designed machine. It is not the kind of thing that disappears without good reason. The Q 97 bound for Alpha Centauri vanished with disquieting suddenness. Stelgen and his crew of expert investigators went in pursuit...and also vanished! On the other side of Infinity they found a nightmare galaxy where things of incalculable power plotted cosmic evil. Stelgen argued that somewhere, somehow, there had to be an answer to the apparent invincibility of these unbelievably deadly aliens. His problem was to find the answer and get it back to his own people. Trouble was, that someone from the Q 97 was working against him... When an answer finally presented itself it was so beautifully simple that it needed a genius to see it, and whatever his other qualities Stelgen was not a genius.
Release date:
February 27, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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STELGEN was off duty when the call came through. He was relaxing on an antigrav bunk, allowing himself the rare luxury of playing back a colour organ chromatic recital which he had recorded on wire. The wire was throwing patterns of translucent splendour and beauty on to the screen above his bunk. Stelgen was lying on his back looking up. The screen was a kind of miniature universe, he thought, the colours were all the galaxies of the cosmos, dancing together in their eternal patterns. Gestalts were formed and broken only to be formed and broken again. Patterns were dying, new patterns were being born. It was a kind of surrealist impression of the universe which the recorded symphony of colour was enacting.
Stelgen found himself drifting into a kind of reverie. His personal communicator shrilled with a sudden loudness. It was the kind of jarring tone which brooked no denial. Stelgen jumped. It was a purely reflex action. He turned off the delicious easiness of the antigrav, swung his legs over the edge of the bed in a rather irritated fashion and picked up the receiver of his personal communicator. A face appeared on the screen.
“What’s the matter, Arpad?” demanded Stelgen. “I’m supposed to be off duty.”
“I’m sorry.” Arpad’s apology was a mere courtesy. He muttered the words as an introduction only. He was not in the least sorry. He was bursting with information. Stelgen could sense it. Arpad was not normally an excitable individual at all. If something had roused Arpad and his department to this kind of fever pitch of super charged emotionally-stimulated activity, then something pretty serious must be happening.
“A call has just come through the Warp,” said Arpad. “Top priority, grade A emergency.”
“I’ll admit that is unusual,” murmured Stelgen, “but I still don’t think it gives you the right to wake me up in the middle of a colour reverie.”
“It’s a personal call for you.”
“Personal?” Stelgen was surprised.
“Will you take it in there on the communicator? Or do you want to come and unfasten the capsule?”
“Well, as far as I know, I have no dark and guilty secrets that can’t go through the communicator,” returned Stelgen. “Let it run.”
“O.K.,” agreed Arpad.
Stelgen smiled almost invisibly. The thought of Arpad’s unsatisfied curiosity would have amused him considerably, but the communications engineer was a good man—apart from being interrupted in the middle of his colour organ reverie, Stelgen was sincerely friendly towards Arpad.
The click and flash from the communicator told Stelgen that the communications engineer had fastened the hyper-drive capsule into the relay position. He also had no doubt at all that Arpad, being fully saturated with human curiosity, as he was himself, would be surreptitiously watching the other end of the transmission screen. A picture appeared. It was as unmistakable as the Great Seal of England had been in the days of medieval history thousands of years before on faraway Earth. This was the face of the Commander-in-Chief of the Inter Galactic Force, a Force in which Stelgen held a District Commission.
“This is a special assignment,” said the face of the image of the senior officer.
Although he knew that he was not transmitting directly back to his superior, Stelgen leapt smartly to attention and saluted. He felt that he owed it to himself as much as to the man on the screen. There was a slight pause while the communicator tape stuck for a second. Arpad’s voice came over the wire.
“Sorry. I’ll have it fixed my end in a minute.” This, decided Stelgen, was like living on the edge of a volcano, and not knowing when it was about to erupt; not knowing in which direction the lava would flow when the eruption finally comes.
Even though some eruptions are bloodless, Stelgen was very anxious indeed about the outcome of this one. He was not a man who normally fell a prey to anxiety, but the sight of that uniform, and the face—the oh, so familiar face—of the Commander in Chief, had robbed Stelgen of most of his poise and certainty.
In the general run of things, Stelgen felt that he could take life in his stride, could deal with almost any eventualities, but a visit from the Top was not just any eventuality. It was something that happened only three or four times in a space man’s entire career. Stelgen knew that this wasn’t exactly a visit, but a personal communication was just as rare.
“The Q97, bound from Earth to the colony planets of the Alpha Centauri system, has vanished,” said the Commander’s voice.
“Vanished, sir?” Stelgen found himself inadvertently answering the recorded message that had been flown through hyper-space in the capsule.
“I am sure that there are a great many questions that you wish to ask,” said the Commander’s image. Stelgen was nodding, and feeling every kind of fool for talking back to a tape. He was like a 20th century child of long, long ago, listening to an old fashioned radio and answering back, or talking and retorting to a voice on a gramophone or phonograph cylinder.
“The Q97 has been apparently sucked out of hyper space by some technological process beyond our present comprehension,” said the Commander. “I am speaking to you personally, Stelgen, because your record is undeniably a good one. I am also speaking to you personally because I don’t want there to be any doubt in your mind about the dangers involved in this job. The commission is entirely a voluntary one. If you wish to accept it, pick a crew, and set off for the Alpha Centauri immediately. Our staff there will give you every co-operation and assistance.”
And so it was that Stelgen found himself on board his medium range cruiser, biting into the warp, and emerging again very close to Alpha Centauri and her planetary system.
The landing on the main humanoid planet was effected in a purely routine way.
The Commander of the Centaurian force gave Stelgen the V.I.P. treatment.
“It is very good of you to come, Major Stelgen,” he said. “I have been instructed from the Top to re-advise you that this is very much a voluntary mission.”
“Thank you,” replied Stelgen.
“And now, Major, what can I do to be of most assistance?”
“Well, the actual commission that I had for the job was a very brief one,” returned Stelgen. “I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to all the details you could let me have.”
“We have only one clue—odd as it may sound,” said the Commander.
“Oh? Any clue is acceptable, surely?” suggested Major Stelgen.
“For what it’s worth, then,” returned Commander Ludac, “here it is.” He took from his pocket a sheet torn from a memo-pad. On it four letters were scribbled. O-T-Y-R. “Otyr,” he said out loud.
Stelgen looked at it with interest and repeated the syllables aloud as Commander Ludac had done. “Otyr,” he murmured. “Where has this come from?”
“It was the only message we received from the Q97,” replied the Commander.
THE Commander and Major Stelgen climbed aboard a waiting anti-grav spinner and fluttered lightly back to the admin building. Stelgen looked rather ruefully at the guard of honour that had been drawn up in his benefit.
“I’d have liked to have made that last a little longer,” he said quietly. “I’m afraid I’m not used to the Red Carpet welcome. It’s rather a thrill!”
“Well, we’re so overloaded with V.I.P.s and their entourages here,” returned the Commander, “that it almost gets to be a rather meaningless chore.” His eyes twinkled, “when you actually get a little sincere and unsophisticated gratitude from one of the said V.I.P.s then the thing stops being meaningless, and takes on form and character.”
“A little gratitude!” replied Stelgen. Then he paused before going on quietly, “as they used to say in the old books on ethics, ‘it costs so little and means so much’.”
They reached Commander Ludac’s inner sanctum. Guards on duty at various points near the building saluted with almost mechanical precision as the Commander and the Major strode down the corridor.
“Now,” said Ludac, as he spread out a large chart on the table, “this is a two-dimensional representation, of course, and as such is only of very limited efficiency.”
The Major grinned at the Commander.
“I’ve got a mind of limite. . .
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