Seven desperate survivors drifting helplessly in a life-capsule, sight an uncharted world. The anti-grav landing shields are only working spasmodically, but the survivors still land safely. In this strange, alien environment there is room for vivid, dramatic conflict of personalities. The survivors are at a loss to explain the strange conduct of the humanoid ethnic groups which they find of this strange world. Slowly the horrifying truth begins to dawn on the dwindling band from the capsule. There are other life forms in evidence on the planet, things which were extinct on earth aeons ago. Yet there is a vital, terrifying difference between the giant reptiles of earthly prehistory and the monsters on this alien world.
Release date:
December 30, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
THE ship made a strange whining sound, reminiscent of an animal in pain. The Captain, galvanised into action, leapt out of his bunk so violently that the grav-simulator was unable to deal with the force of his thrust. He floated towards the control panel in an odd, helpless sort of arc. The navigator reached up a hand and steadied him.
“Thanks.” The monosyllable was terse but the navigator knew his skipper well enough not to take exception to the terseness with which the gratitude had been expressed.
The Captain checked the main drive and the subsidiary drives. As his fingers flicked the buttons of the test circuit activators there was a negative response from the warning system. The navigator had joined him at the control panel.
“What do you make of it, Aster?” asked the Captain.
The navigator shook his head uncertainly.
“I don’t know, Captain Velos.”
“You can hear it, can’t you?”
“Hear it clearly, sir.”
“Would you say it is getting louder?”
“I think perhaps it is.”
There was a tense, vibrant silence. Aster and Velos looked at each other and then back at the control panel.
“It is getting louder,” affirmed Velos.
Aster put his head on one side and listened like a bird.
“Louder,” he repeated, and nodded.
The Captain pressed the General Alarm button. The penetrating tones of the audible signal filled the ship. The three off-duty members of the crew came off their bunks like sleepy caterpillars dropping off cabbage leaves.
There was Plumbus, the ship’s biologist, doctor and psychiatrist. He was a big, slow-moving, rather phlegmatic man; he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and came to the centre of the control cabin.
“What’s the matter, Velos?”
The Captain put a finger to his ear.
“Listen,” he said significantly.
Plumbus began to listen. He did it deliberately and with great precision.
“There’s a queer sort of whining noise,” he agreed.
“Yes, exactly!” returned the Captain.
He and Aster, the navigator, looked at Plumbus thoughtfully. Schafft, the mechanic, seemed to be also a general, all-round inventor. He was a thin, angular sort of individual. Where Plumbus was slow, almost lethargic, in his movements, Schafft was lightning fast, quixotic, mercurial, in both speech and gesture.
“That’s a damn queer noise,” he said.
“Well, if you don’t know what it is, I’m sure none of the rest of us do!” said Aster.
“What do you think, Schafft?” asked the Captain.
Beneath their heavy lids the eyes of Dr. Plumbus travelled from the control panel to Schafft’s face and back again.
Kramer, the geologist, planetographer, photographer and recording expert, was surveying the control panel, as though he would have liked to have hit it with a sampling hammer. Kramer was as hard as the rocks that were his main interest. He had a jaw like granite, eyes like flints, hair like asbestos fibres, and a voice that sounded like water running through subterranean tunnels and passages. Kramer was not a man who spoke much but, as though in a strange compensatory manner, he seemed to listen and think all the more.…
Schafft unscrewed a couple of bulkhead panels and began examining, examining the circuits underneath.
“Press the test circuit buttons again,” he asked.
The captain pressed them, the test lights showed negative response.
“The circuits appear to be O.K. but, of course, they may have shorted out somewhere around the fault,” said Schafft.
“Is that very likely?” asked Aster.
“Damned unlikely!” agreed Schafft. “Normal procedure is for a short to throw in the central alarm system. Mind you, freak shorts do sometimes occur, but only once in a hundred thousand times. They are put in the textbooks as an example of what can happen to the uninitiated. There was the case of the Lepros IV which was lost with all hands in deep space, finally turned out, when salvage crews picked her up years later, with the skeletons still aboard, that was what had happened.”
There was silence for a few minutes. Silence, that is, except for the whining noise, which continued to grow.
“Whatever it is,” announced Schafft, rather enigmatically, “it’s getting worse.…”
“You’ve got no idea at all?” asked the Captain.
“I’ve got plenty of ideas,” returned Schafft, “the thing is, how many of them are right? And how much time have we got in which to test them out? It could, I suppose, be one of the signal bearings on the main riffel drive. It could be one of the golandian bars come adrift near the akon chamber.… It might be the magnetrox in the helyon compartment.”
“You don’t really think that any of those possibilities are likely, do you?” asked the Captain.
This crew had sailed together on many occasions before. They knew each other well. Velos knew his men perhaps better than any of them knew him, for Velos was something of a mystery man. He had the mystique of the captain.
The whining grew worse. The ship began to shudder. Emergency lights began flashing on.
“Skin seems to be coming adrift,” said the navigator, pointing to the emergency light in the third panel. Tension switches were thrown. The emergency light flicked off for a second. The whining grew louder. The ship’s vibrations grew worse. The emergency lights flashed on again.
“What else can we do?” asked the Captain. “The tension switches have all been thrown.”
“Retract the forcefield,” suggested the engineer. He was shouting to make himself heard above the whine.
The Captain nodded to show that he had heard. He threw over the lever which would bring back the force-field until, instead of acting as a buffer, for any stray meteoric particles, it was absorbed into the hull itself. To retract a force-field was the Grade A emergency. The whining grew louder.
The engineer suddenly snapped his fingers.
“I’ve got it!” he roared.
“Do you mean you can stop it?”
Schafft shook his head.
“Life capsule,” he shouted. “Life capsule, as fast as you can make it!”
They scrambled into the ship’s life capsule, but a swift glance at the panels made the navigator scream a warning.
“It can’t be done!” he shouted. “It can’t be done!”
The four space men looked at Aster questioningly. The whining was so loud that it was painful. The altitude gauge was down to practically zero.
“We should never launch in time,” yelled the navigator.
“We shall have to attempt a landing!” Somehow, the Captain fought his way back to the control panel, contrived to close his mind to the brain-destroying whine. The gauges, the levers, the wheels, the dials and the switches seemed to dance in front of his face. Nothing seemed to really make any sense. He forced himself to go on concentrating. Lives depended on his ability to concentrate. He must not let them down. It wasn’t just his own life depending upon him. It would have been easier to give in, then. It was the other lives that mattered.
Velos kept on wrestling with the controls. Finally he got the shattered, disintegrating ship absolutely athwart her auto-landing beam. He threw the switches to automatic grounding position, and collapsed, clapping his hands to his ears.
Aster was already down; Plumbus and Schafft were buckling at the knees, only Kramer stood erect, fighting the noise. Kramer, the rock man, thought the Captain.
Then the intensity of the sound made him black out. His last conscious thought was a prayer that the auto-lander would get them down on this planetary surface, wherever they were.
“IF I didn’t know better,” said Val Stearman, pointing towards a skimming disc of light, “I would be inclined to say that that was a flying saucer.”
The Cleopatrine beauty beside him fixed her exquisite eyes on the descending disc ship.
“It is a saucer,” she said quietly.
Val looked at her.
“You’re joking!” But her voice had not been bubbling with humour when she had spoken. Deep down within his secret heart of hearts, at the lowest level of his existence, Stearman knew that she was not joking.
“But—” he began, and then stopped in mid-sentence. The thing was moving fast, and there was no doubt at all that it was coming towards them.
The fields on either side of the narrow road along which Val was driving his powerful sports saloon were white with snow. The lingering February frosts of the frozen beginning to 1963 still had large areas of the East Anglian countryside in their savagely icy grip.
Val and La Noire stopped the car and sat watching for a few microseconds which seemed to last hours.
“Do you think we’re in danger of being hit?” she asked suddenly. “Let’s get out.”
“Out?” protested Stearman. “Darling, it’s cold! There’s about fifteen degrees of frost.”
“Let’s get out!” she repeated.
Val stopped arguing. He knew La Noire well enough to know that her mysterious, Cleopatrine beauty was not her only attribute. She possessed a keen and hyper-sensitive brain. If she sensed danger, then a hundred to one that danger was very real and very close. He waited for her to get clear and then opened the door and scrambled out himself.
The spinning circle of light in the sky ahead of them was very much closer now. Val looked at it with considerable interest. There was practically no cover, but on the other side of a gateway on the other side of the road was a firmly frozen ditch. Its icy surface was two or three feet below the level of the field which it drained.
La Noire climbed gracefully over the gate and Val vaulted it with ease and athletic precision. The disc of light was now quite unmistakably some kind of artifact, and if it wasn’t a space ship of some kind, Val Stearman would have been prepared to eat the old check cap which he habitually wore when he was driving.
Putting his arm protectively across La Noire’s shoulder, Val pinned her to the icy surface of the ditch. His body half covered hers. A few feet above their heads, cutting into the frozen surface of the field, throwing soil and small stones into the air, the fuselage of the strange disc made contact with earth.
Clods of frozen soil and showers of earth and little stones spattered all around them. Val and La Noire crouched in the protective miniature valley of the ditch.
“Thank heaven it’s frozen,” said Val.
As he spoke there was an ominous cracking sound. There was a grinding roar from behind them, which drowned the cracking sound that the ic. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
