We had been cooped up inside the ship for a long time by then, and with very little to do. Communications with Earth were so staggered as to make a free and frank exchange of ideas impossible, and often the different agencies back home were giving us conflicting advice. The final authority on what was to be done was Doctor Naish, that same Janette Naish who had run the briefings on the Frog God back when we were training. She had crowbarred her way onto the top spot on the Mission Team. She was the human authority on all things Frog Goddish, after all, and if she didn’t have any astronaut training at the outset, she had remedied that with a grim determination, trading her science for our skills until we met in the middle.
I do not know who the word came from, to send in the Expedition Team at last. I mean, probably it was someone on Earth; the head of the Madrid team, or perhaps even a unified front from all the various space agencies that we should stop pussyfooting around and just go in. But it’s equally possible that it was Doctor Naish on her own initiative. She was desperate to get boots on the ground in there, now the remotes had shown we could survive – and we’d be going in suited, after all. We wouldn’t be exposing ourselves to teratogens or mutagens or biohazards despite the congenial air and the home-style gravity. We weren’t stupid about things, is what I’m saying. We weren’t like those dumbass astronauts you see in films, who take their helmets off or bend obligingly low to investigate the killer monster alien eggs.
And we weren’t prepared. But then, we could have hung before the Frog God’s slack lips for a hundred years and not been prepared. The remotes did their best, seeding the near tunnels with signal routers so they could send and receive deeper within the rock, but we were going to take it from there.
And I don’t think it was strictly necessary. Not then, not immediately. We could have continued with remotes a while longer, surely. We might have triggered the traps that way, discovered the hazards that would undo us. Similarly, we might have sent a metal box to the Moon in 1969 that popped up an American flag while silently playing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ It wouldn’t have been the same. The people back at home and the people on the Quixote all wanted the same thing, me included. We wanted to set foot inside the Crypts. We wanted to make them a part of the human domain, to bring them within our compass. The true value of the Expedition Team was as a propaganda victory over the universe.
So the word came. I remember the briefing clearly. Doctor Naish standing in front of us, telling us the day had dawned.
We were going in.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TODAY IS GOING to be one of those trying days.
It starts with the tar trap. One moment I’m trudging along in the dark – you know, the usual – and then I hit a slick of something viscous and nasty, and I make the mistake of pressing on, and soon after that I’m labouring to move my feet at all, glued to the damn floor by some sort of disgusting ooze. It’s another thing they don’t train you for in astronaut school.
I blame the scratching. For some time I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it, to hunt down whatever psychic bastard is doing it to me and do such things to whatever anatomy they are possessed of that they will never so much as scratch again. It has become something of an obsession, Toto, that much I allow, but it’s not as if the damn Crypts are crawling with entertainment.
And I was getting closer, and now I’m standing here with my feet stuck in goo thinking that maybe I’m closer than I thought and the telepathic scrape-monster has a keen sideline in gluing people to the floor before it eats them, and I have just been reeled in like a fish.
My feet aren’t going anywhere, which means that, unless I get the knife and a whole load more desperation, neither is the rest of me. Instead of pointlessly struggling and wearing myself out, I listen for the thing that is surely coming. The alternative is even more depressing, in a way: what if I’m caught in the web of a spider long dead? This glue might remain sticky for millennia. I should patent it. I’d be the richest dead man in this whole alien horror maze.
But no, the trap-maker is alive and well, and abruptly I revise just which is the preferable outcome. I can hear something coming towards me with agonising slowness. It is above me, inching its way along ceiling and walls with careful clicks and clacks as it reaches out and places its feet. Some large, softer part of it is scraping along, giving me the sense of something baggy and huge. Possibly it’s just going to drop on me and then absorb both me and the tar into its body over many days. That sounds exactly the sort of thing that my new life is made of.
I have my little jury-rigged firelighter, and abruptly I can’t live without seeing the agent of my demise. It surely can’t be as horrible as my imagination is painting it. I thrust out the little sparker and flick away at it until I start to throw out little arcs of jagged light.
The trap-maker doesn’t pause, and probably can’t see. I can see it, though, and that prompts another change of heart, because it is considerably nastier than my feeble Earth imagination had posited. Much of its substance is a coiling nest of intestines spread vine-like back along the passageway, so that what is creeping towards me is just one terminus of its distributed body. And as termini go, it is not a pretty one. There are beak-like plates there, at least seven of them, opposed to one another and boasting serrated edges. Even that’s not enough for the discerning intergalactic predator, because it has lashing barbed feelers as well, and coiled things that look a bit like scorpion tails, and fuck-off enormous fangs surely loaded with every kind of agony-inducing venom imaginable. It looks as though it got into God’s desk after school and nicked off with every single nasty toy confiscated from the fallen angels. It writhes towards me along the ceiling, various spiked parts of it clicking and clattering against the stone. It’s in no hurry. It’s probably waited a thousand years for some dumbass Earthman to come along and wake it up.
A fairly large part of me is suggesting I use my knife on myself, rather than let myself be gradually disassembled by that appalling toolkit. No doubt Hamlet thought the same way when he did that To Be Or Not To Be speech, you know, whether it’s nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of etcetera or let yourself be eaten by a Swiss Army knife from space.
The rest of me, though, including that part that largely got spliced into me by that godforsaken Mother Machine (spoilers!) and has left me so very enduring and determined, is having none of it, Hamlet bedamned. I get out my knife. It seems like pissing into the hurricane compared to all those sharp edges the approaching monster has, but I have something it doesn’t. I have human ingenuity.
A few minutes pass as it inches closer, its mouthparts twitching in hungry anticipation. Human ingenuity is drawing a blank. Captain Kirk would have thought of something by now, I’m sure, but I have no red-shirted confederates to feed to it. There’s just me and my useless human brain.
Then I begin to feel a stinging sensation around my feet. I have bare feet, I should say. Inexplicably, the space boots provided by NASA didn’t hold up to months trekking about on a hard surface under a variety of gravities. Now my bare feet feel like they’re on fire, the sticky tar about them fairly bubbling with acidic secretions. Because of course this is what happens, and the slime will dissolve my legs while its maker snacks on my head. This is exactly what happens when you go into space and I can’t think why I ever wanted to get out of Earth’s atmosphere in the first place.
It’s still just stinging, so far, so I strike a spark to see what’s actually going on. What I see is the sticky stuff receding from my toes in a wash of toxic-looking bubbles, and abruptly I can move again. Wherever I place a leathery sole, the alien goo just shrivels away. I am doing this, or at least my body is – I seem to have less and less say in what it can do and when it does it – I am sweating vitriolic solvent through my pores. That is apparently just one more thing the Machine gave me.