Destroyer of Worlds by E. C. Tubb Page A

Not a man to be easily terrified and not one to show unfounded anxiety. And far too good a scientist to leap to unfounded assumptions.
    Yet she had to know. Gently she said, ‘You suspect disease, Ted?’
    ‘You saw.’
    ‘I saw, yes, but I want you to say it. You have done the tests and made the conclusions. I ask you again, Ted. Disease?’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘Age.’
    *
    The observation room was fitted with chairs and soft coverings with a tinkling fountain giving a susurration of subdued melody designed to give the impression of warmth and security, the balmy magic of a summer’s evening, a scented, sub-tropical night.
    Here lovers came to walk beneath the stars, to sit and whisper sweet promises. Here too came the tired and those who felt the need to stretch the vision into the infinite. And, here, too, came those who felt the need to be alone, others who wished to cherish memories of the Earth they had left behind.
    From a shadowed place Maddox looked at dimly seen heads, saw the glimpses of arms and legs, the pale blur of lifted faces, other faces, darker, gleaming like ebony, like sun-kissed fruit. If any saw him they gave no sign and he, in turn, stood as if he were a man in total isolation.
    That, too, was an attribute of the room. In it, should that be the desire, privacy was absolute.
    A privacy now invaded by the watchful eye of the alien sun.
    Words, he thought, ones which had little meaning and which, even so, were wrong. The thing was not a sun and it was far from alien. Here, in this place, it belonged and his ship did not. The Ad Astra was the intruder. They were the alien interlopers.
    And they would remain alien — for how long?
    Again Maddox stared at the enigmatic, brain-like core of the central mass. Its greenish radiation pulsed as if in response to the pound of a living heart. Its shape, all the more disquieting because of medical associations, gave it the appearance of a monstrosity. Its satellite, unseen now, had vanished behind the main body which hung low above the horizon. An accident had made it so — had they entered the mysterious area at a slightly different angle then it would have appeared directly overhead.
    Lifting the communicator from his belt, Maddox triggered the instrument and read the digital time-check thrown on the tiny screen.
    It vanished as he pressed a stud.
    ‘Eric?’
    ‘Carl!’ Manton was in his private laboratory, seated, a litter of graphs and paper before him. ‘Where are you?’ He nodded as Maddox answered. ‘Waiting?’
    ‘Yes. How much longer?’
    ‘Without precise measurements we have to allow for a wide margin of error. And, as you know, we had trouble in determining the area of this space. Even now we have only a rough approximation.’
    ‘How long?’
    ‘You’ll know as soon as we find out, Carl. Don’t ask for the impossible.’
    A stubborn man, thought Maddox as the screen went blank. But a less stubborn one would never have achieved his fame. For that, if nothing else, he should be respected.
    But it was hard to wait.
    Hard to hang on the edge of a precipice of doubt, not knowing if a simple matter of time would solve their problem by showing there was no problem at all, or whether the hopes and entire lifestyle of the ship would have to be changed.
    For, if they were trapped, change would be inevitable.
    The communicator hummed and he looked at Rose’s smooth and lovely face.
    ‘Commander! We have determined —’
    ‘Wait! I’m coming to join you. Have Professor Manton notified.’
    He was already in Mission Control when Maddox arrived, standing to one side of the console, his face heavy with deeply graven lines. An expression which told Maddox the worst.
    ‘We’re trapped?’
    ‘I — yes, Carl. I’m afraid so.’
    ‘But surely we can escape through hyperspace when we’ve recharged our accumulators with sufficient power?’
    ‘That is possible, I suppose, but…’ Manton pursed his lips. ‘But it would be a tremendous