Colin Wilson - Lifeforce.pdf - Colin Wilson - margozap

Lifeforce

originally published as The Space Vampires

by Colin Wilson

a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

Back Cover:

WILL THE EARTH EVER BE THE SAME?

The derelict spaceship was vast, and like the landscape of a deeply disturbing

dream. Equally strange were the immobile bodies of the humanoid passengers discovered

by Captain Carlsen and his men. Later, when three of the aliens had been transported to

earth, the oddity became a nightmare. The beings were energy vampires whose seductive

embraces were fatal, whose eroticism few humans could resist. As their lust for lifeforce

remained insatiable and sexual murders spread, Carlsen fought to discover who they were

and how to destroy them -- before their evil hungers contaminated all of mankind and

Carlsen himself became the willing victim of the most beautiful and irresistible alien of

them all.

"EXCELLENT. . . A FAST-MOVING, PLAUSIBLE PIECE OF SUPERIOR SCIENCE

FICTION." -- Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

This Warner Books Edition is published by

arrangement with Random House. Inc.,

201 E. 50th Street. New York, N.Y. 10022

Warner Books. Inc. 666 Fifth Avenue New York. N.Y. 10103

A Warner Communications Company

Printed in the United States of America

First Warner Books Printing: June; 1985

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For June O'Shea,

my criminological adviser

Acknowledgements

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."

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

"It must have been a meteor storm."

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 ten A . 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."

Colin Wilson - Lifeforce.pdf

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