Destroyer of Worlds by E. C. Tubb Read Free Book Online

questions and answers, and realised that the present interrogation wasn’t the first. He had been questioned under hypnosis; taken from the Pinnace, sedated, drugged, cross-examined. His anger died as quickly as it came. To each their responsibility and the burden of that carried by Claire Allard was far from light.
    She said, ‘Douglas, you were very young when your mother died. Correct?’
    ’Yes.’
    ‘But you remember her.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You remember her,’ she said again. It was not a question. ‘A person is a receptive organism and all that happens close at hand is noted and filed within the cortex. Now, those lights, the shape and voice you saw and heard. I suggest that they could have been the reflected illumination of an external source. The shadow that of a woman limned against them. The voice that of your mother telling you to be silent, perhaps. A common occurrence. You agree it might be possible?’
    An ancient memory dredged from his subconscious?
    ‘Good,’ she said as he nodded. ‘As I suspected. It leads to the conclusion that the force responsible is one which triggers various rejective syndromes within the brain. If so it accounts for the diversity of experience common during the warning periods. You were fortunate, Douglas.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘You returned to early childhood. If Frank hadn’t withdrawn the Pinnace from that sector of space —’
    ‘Back even further?’ He had anticipated her reasoning. ‘Back to the embryo?’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘Is that what happened to Ivan?’
    ‘No.’ Claire glanced to where he lay, eyes open but unseeing. ‘He isn’t catatonic. Not in the true sense that he has retreated to early childhood to escape the pressures of being an adult and then having to retreat even further because childhood is not a happy time. He has, in a sense, escaped, but in some different form. The fact he tried to open the port worries me. He must have known the danger which means he was subconsciously trying to kill himself.’
    ‘Kill himself? Ivan?’
    ‘He belongs to a race in which the death-wish is very strong.’
    Douglas glanced at the other, finding it impossible to believe that a man so strong and so fit should be eager to find death. And, if not one, then why not them both? Why had Gogol succumbed and he survived?
    ‘If all men were alike, Douglas,’ said Claire when he put the question, ‘they wouldn’t be men they’d be robots. How do I know? Yet it’s something we’ve got to try and find out and find it soon.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Within sixty-seven hours to be exact.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because that’s when we hit the bubble which almost sent you insane and wrecked Gogol’s mind.’ She looked at where he lay. ‘And what happened to him could happen to us all!’

CHAPTER 4
    Nothing.
    Maddox stared at the screens and felt the tug and pull of frustration. With an effort he kept his face a blank mask, his hands unclenched. To be a commander was more than to give orders. Always he had to present a confident aspect, always to radiate a confidence he might not feel and yet, this time was harder than most.
    How to fight an enemy unseen? A danger unknown?
    Before him the stars glittered with their usual brightness, the bright expanse of the galaxy glowing as if a rich scatter of gems lay on the sombre velvet of a jeweller’s cloth. It was hard to realise that between he and they rested something destructive. A thing which threatened them all. An invisible killer edging closer even as he watched. A menace which had already caused the death of one man and had reduced another to a mindless shell.
    For a moment Maddox had the impression of a crouching beast, alien, horrible, waiting with gaping jaws and venomous sting to grip, to hold, to suck intelligence and life from the hapless prey falling into its grasp.
    A moment only, then the illusion was gone and, taking a deep breath, Maddox glanced at the chronometer.
    ‘Minus fifteen seconds, Commander.’