Lifeforce Read Free Page B

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