Lifeforce

 THE SPACE VAMPIRES

Colin Wilson
(1976)

(version 4.0)

For June O’Shea,

my criminological adviser

This book originated, many years ago, in a discussion with my old friend A. E. van Vogt, whose story “Asylum” is a classic of vampire fiction. (Aficionados of the genre will recognize my indebtedness to it.) August Derleth, who published my first work of science fiction, offered warm encouragement; unfortunately, he has not lived to see the completion of our project. For the idea of the parallelism between vampirism and crime, I must acknowledge my indebtedness to June O’Shea of Los Angeles, who has kept me plentifully supplied with books and press cuttings on recent American crime. This book also owes much to the stimulus of discussions with Dan Parson — on vampirism in general, and on his great-uncle, Bram Stoker, in particular. I must also express my warmest thanks to Count Olof de la Gardie, both for his hospitality at Raback, and for allowing me to inspect family papers relating to his ancestor Count Magnus. Finally. I must thank Mrs. Sheila Clarkson for her careful work in retyping and correcting the dog-eared manuscript.

— C.W.

Their instruments picked up the massive outline long before they saw it. That was to be expected. What baffled Carlsen was that even when they were a thousand miles away, and the braking rockets had cut their speed to seven hundred miles an hour, it was still invisible.

Then Craigie, peering through the crystal-glass of the port, saw it outlined against the stars. The others left their places to stare at it. Dabrowsky, the chief engineer, said: “Another asteroid. What shall we name this one?”

Carlsen looked out through the port, his eyes narrowed against the blinding glare of the stars. When he touched the analyser control, symmetrical green lines flowed across the screen, distorted upwards by the speed of their approach. He said: “That’s no asteroid. It’s all metal.”

Dabrowsky came back to the panel and stared at it. “What else could it be?”

At this speed, the humming of the atomic motors was scarcely louder than an electric clock. They moved back to their places and watched as the expanding shape blocked the stars. They had examined and charted nine new asteroids in the past month; now each knew, with the instinct of trained spacemen, that this was different.

At two hundred miles, the outline was clear enough to leave no doubt. Craigie said: “It is a bloody spacecraft.”

“But, Christ, how big is it?”

In empty space, with no landmarks, distances could be deceptive. Carlsen depressed the keys of the computer.

Looking over his shoulder, Dabrowsky said with incredulity: “Fifty miles?”

“That’s impossible,” Craigie said.

Dabrowsky punched the keys and stared at the result. “Forty-nine point six four miles. Nearly eighty kilometres.” The black shape now filled the port. Yet even at this distance, no details could be seen.

Lieutenant Ives said: “It’s only a suggestion, sir… But wouldn’t it be an idea to wait until we get a reply to our signal from base?”

“That’ll be another forty minutes.” Base was the moon, two hundred million miles away. Travelling at the speed of light, it would take their signal half an hour to get there, and another half-hour to bring a reply. “I’d like to get closer.”

Now the motors were silent. They were drifting towards the spacecraft at fifty miles an hour. Carlsen switched off all the cabin lights. Gradually, as their eyes adjusted, they could see the grey-black metal walls that seemed to absorb the sunlight. When they were a few hundred yards away, Carlsen stopped the Hermes . The seven men crowded against the port. Through its thick crystal, as transparent as clear water, they could look up at the side of the craft, towering above like an iron cliff as far as their eyes could see. Below, the same wall seemed to plunge into the gulf of space. They were all accustomed to weightlessness, but it produced a sensation of dizziness to look down; some instinctively drew back from the glass.

At this distance, it was clear that the ship, was a derelict. The walls west grained and pitted. A hundred yards away to the right, a ten-foot hole had been ripped through the plates. The searchlight showed that the metal was six inches thick. As the beam moved slowly over the walls, they could see other deep indentations and smaller meteor holes.

Steinberg, the navigator, said: “She looks as though she’s been in a war.”

“Could be. But I think that’s mostly meteor damage.”

“It must have been a meteor storm.”

They stared in silence. Carlsen said: “Either that, or she’s been here a very long time.”

No one had to ask what he meant. The chances of a spacecraft being struck by a meteor are roughly the same as the chance of a ship in the Atlantic bumping into a floating wreck. For this hulk to be so battered, it would have had to spend thousands of years in space.

Craigie, the Scots radio operator, said: “I don’t like this bluddy thing. There’s something nasty about it.”

The others obviously felt the same. Carlsen said, almost casually: “And it could be the greatest scientific discovery of the twenty-first century.”

In the excitement and tension of the past hour, no one had thought of this. Now, with the telepathic intuition that seems to develop between men in space, they all grasped what was in Carlsen’s mind. This could make each individual of them more famous than the first men on the moon. They had found a spacecraft that was clearly not from earth. They had therefore established beyond question that there is intelligent life in other galaxies…

The sound of the radio made them all jump. It was their reply from moonbase. The voice was that of Dan Zelensky, the chief controller. Obviously, their message had already caused excitement. Zelensky said: “Okay. Proceed with caution and test for radioactivity and space virus. Report back as soon as possible.” In the silence, they could all hear it. They also heard Craigie’s reply, dictated by Carlsen, Craigie’s voice sounded cracked from excitement. “This is definitely an alien spacecraft, approximately fifty miles long and twenty-five miles high. It looks like some damn great castle floating in the sky. It seems unlikely there is life aboard. It’s probably been here for at least a few hundred years. We request permission to investigate.” This message was repeated half a dozen times at minute intervals, so that even if space static made most of them inaudible, one might get through.

In the hour during which they waited for the reply, the Hermes bumped gently against the unknown craft. They were all eating tinned beef and washing it down with Scotch whisky; the excitement had made them ravenous. Again Zelensky came on personally, and his voice was also thick with tension.

“Please take fullest possible precautions, and if any danger, prepare for return to moonbase immediately. You are advised not to attempt to board until you’ve had a night’s sleep. I’ve talked to John Skeat at Mount Palomar, and he admits that he’s baffled. If this thing’s fifty miles across, it should have been discovered two hundred years ago. Long-exposure photographs show nothing in that part of the sky. Please complete all other possible tests before attempting to board.”

Although the message told them nothing they could not have guessed in advance, they listened intently and played it back several times. Life in space is boring and lonely; now, suddenly, they felt they were the centre of the universe. On earth, their news would now be on every television channel. Since two hours ago, they had entered history.

Back in London, it was now seven o’clock in the evening. The men of the Hermes regulated their lives by Greenwich mean time; it was a way of maintaining contact. The evening that lay ahead already sagged with a quality of anticlimax. Carlsen issued more whisky but not enough to produce intoxication; he didn’t want to board the derelict with a crew suffering from hangover.

Together with Giles Farmer, the medical officer, Carlsen manoeuvred the emergency port of the Hermes opposite the ten-foot meteor hole; guided robots took samples of cosmic dust from inside the derelict. Tests for space virus were negative. (Since the Ganymede disaster of 2013, spacemen had been highly conscious of the dangers they might be bringing back to earth.) There was slight radioactivity, but not more than would be expected from dust exposed to periodic bursts of lethal radiation from solar flares. Flashlight photographs taken by the robot showed a vast chamber whose dimensions were difficult to assess. In his last bulletin before he retired to sleep, Carlsen said he thought the ship must have been built by giants. It was a phrase he would regret.

Everyone had difficulty in getting to sleep. Carlsen lay awake, wondering what the rest of his life would be like. He was forty-five, of Norwegian extraction, and married to a pretty blonde from Alesund. Understandably, she disliked these six-month-long expeditions of exploration. Now it looked as if he might return to earth permanently. He had the traditional right, as captain of the expedition, to produce the first book and magazine articles about it. This alone could make him a rich man. He would like to buy a farm in the Outer Hebrides, and spend at least two years exploring the volcanoes of Iceland… These pleasant anticipations, instead of making him drowsy, produced an unhealthy excitement. Finally, at three in the morning, he took a sleeping draught; even so, he spent the night dreaming of giants and haunted castles.

By tena.m. they had eaten breakfast, and Carlsen had chosen the three men who would accompany him into the derelict. He was taking Craigie, Ives and Murchison, the second engineer. Murchison was a man of immense physique; somehow it gave Carlsen a sense of comfort to know he would be along.

Dabrowsky loaded the mini-camera with film for two hours’ shooting. He filmed the men climbing into their spacesuits, then asked each of them to describe his feelings; he was already thinking in terms of television newsreels.

Steinberg, a tall young Jew from Brooklyn, looked ill and melancholy. Carlsen wondered if he was upset at not being included in the boarding party. He said: “How you feeling, Dave?”

“Okay,” Steinberg said. When Carlsen raised his eyebrows, he said: “I’ve got a creepy feeling. I don’t like this. There’s something creepy about that wreck.”

Carlsen’s heart sank; he recalled that Steinberg had experienced a similar premonition just before the Hermes almost came to disaster on the asteroid Hidalgo; on that occasion, an apparently solid surface had collapsed, damaging the ship’s landing gear and injuring Dixon, the geologist. Dixon had died two days later. Carlsen suppressed the misgiving.

“We all feel that way. Look at the damn thing. Frankenstein’s castle…”

Dabrowsky said: “Olof, you want to say a few words?”

Carlsen shrugged. He disliked the public relations aspect of exploration, but he knew it was part of the job. He sat on the stool in front of the camera. His mind immediately filled with commonplaces; he knew they were clichés, but could think of nothing else. To encourage him, Dabrowsky said: “How’s it feel to… er —”

“Well… ah… we don’t know what we’re going to find in there. We don’t know a damn thing about it. Apparently… Professor Skeat at Mount Palomar points out that — that it’s strange no one ever saw this thing before. After all, it’s pretty big, fifty miles long. Astronomers have detected asteroid fragments two miles long by photo-comparators. The explanation may be its — colour. It’s an exceptionally dull sort of grey that doesn’t seem to reflect much light. So… er…” He lost the thread.

Dabrowsky prompted: “Do you feel excited?”

“Well, yes, of course I feel excited.” It was untrue; he was always calm and matter-of-fact when faced with action. “This could be our first real contact with life in other galaxies. On the other hand, this craft could be old, very old, and it’s —”

“How old?”

“How the hell do I know? But to judge by the condition of the hull, it could be anything from ten thousand to… I dunno, ten million.”

“Ten million ?”

Carlsen said irritably: “For Christ’s sake, turn that thing off. This isn’t a fucking film studio.”

“Sorry, Skip.”

Carlsen patted his shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Joe. It’s just that I hate all this… posing.” He turned to the others. “Come on. Let’s move.”

He was the first into the airlock; for the sake of safety they would go one by one. The powerful magnets in the soles of his shoes produced an illusion of gravity. When he looked down at the chasm below he felt dizzy. He pushed himself very gently out of the hatch, then slammed it behind him. In the vacuum, it made no sound. With a push of his hand, he propelled himself across the five-foot gap and in through the jagged hole. The camera was slung across his shoulder. The searchlight he carried was no bigger than a large torch, but its atom-powered batteries could send a beam for several miles.

The floor was about fifteen feet below him. It was made of metal; but when he landed on it, he bounced six feet into the air. Clearly, it was nonmagnetic. He floated down gently, headfirst, and landed as lightly as a balloon. He sat on the floor and shone the torch towards the opening, as a signal that all was well. Then he looked around.