The Merchandise Guide
Annual 1976

and imprisoned it in a sphere. . ."    Koenig turned. "A sphere. The sphere we found. They shot it out into space to get rid of it, and enclosed a warning to any other beings who might have found it. But--but Kano--foam isn't horrible. . ."    Kano's eyes rolled. "What I saw wasn't foam, Commander. . ." "Commander! The video screens have gone blank!" Paul Morrow spun on his heel, and behind him, Koenig could see that the wall-mounted monitor showed nothing but blackness inside Main Mission. And there was vibration. A vibration they could all feel!    "Not blank, Paul--there's still contact. The foam's changed. Changed to something else. Something that fills the room! At a guess, I'd say that whatever was imprisoned in that sphere has undergone changes--changes occasioned by termperature and environment. It may have lived in its space prison as a vital entity that found release here on Moonbase, emerged as foam, then--with conditions perhaps similar to those on the planet it attacked--regained its original form. Kano--just what was the form of this horrible thing you saw?"    Kano spread his hands. "A monster, Commander. Just a--monster!"    Koenig ordered the people with him to withdraw even further--back along the corridors to their own quarters. He dressed himself in a survival suit and armed himself with a laser pistol. Then--alone--though there was a back-up group ready behind him--he triggered the comlock that opened the door into Main Mission! Not half an hour previously, he had stared death in the face in the welter of foam. Now he faced it again--but he didn't know what form it would take! Did it matter? He told himself that death was death. No more, no less! The door slowly opened. . . What Koenig saw made him leap back with alarm! His blood seemed to turn to water in his veins! The whole doorway was filled with a mass of writhing tentacles-- tentacles of some unworldly substance that gave off stinking, intolerable fumes! And behind the tentacles, a glowing, fiendish eye that bored its vision right into his brain, paralysing his every movement! If this were the menace that some distant planet had managed to expel, then they were well rid of it!    The tentacles swept towards him! A frightful shrieking cut into his very brain! It took every ounce of his will-power to press the trigger of his laser--but the beam seemed only to enrage the vile monster that slithered and lurched towards him!    "Commander! Fall back! Fall back!" He heard the captain of the back-up squad behind him yelling. But he couldn't move! A tentacle lashed his face! Then the blast of laser rifles cut past him, and strong arms tore him away from the dreadful menace that had already left the confines of Main Mission--to gain entrance to the rest of Moonbase!    "We--we can't fight it! Nothing affects it!" He heard himself screaming the words as his friends dragged him backwards through another door, locking it tightly closed behind him. . .    Out beyond Moonbase Alpha, Alan Carter sat at the controls of his Eagle. On his video screen he'd seen everything. Knew exactly what was going on. And he also knoew that the stress of a chaotic and fantastic situation had probably put his superiors beyond the reach of rational quick-thinking. "Koenig's in corridor three," he thought. "That monster's emerged from Main Mission, and it's in the filter area between Main Mission and Executive Living Area One." Deliberately, Carter turned his Eagle so that it was facing down towards the star-spread of Alpha. "Keep out of Filter Area One," he yelled into his comlock. "Stay still everywhere--or you've had it!"    The Eagle flashed down, and Carter thumbed the button

A terrifying, tentacled monster--a fearsome light of malign evil glowing within! of his laser cannons! A blast of light flashed from his craft to slam into the stressed metal of the connecting corridor, tearing the roof open like paper! He saw the hole bloom open. Saw it fill with something black and writhing. And then a whirling tangle of tentacles came blossoming out, sucked by the very vacuum of space! A tangle that spread and split and came past his Eagle in a shrieking welter of torn and riven particles--particles with a central glow of fierce, malevolent light that dimmed and scattered as he watched. He grimaced sourly as bits splattered the screens of his Eagle's beak, only to be whipped clean from the smooth surface. . .    "Commander." He blew lustily with relief, and saw the strained face of Koenig come up on the screen of his comlock. "Don't--repeat, don't try and get back into Main Mission. Not until you've got survival suits on, and life-lines so's you're not drawn into space. 'Fraid I 've had to bust some holes in Moonbase, but I guess they can be fixed. I saw your monster, by the way--and I reckon he isn't going to give any more trouble. . ."    "It's funny, Alan," said Koenig. "It just came to me in a flash. You were the answer. I was going to order you to blockbust that corridor and pull our enemy into nothing!"    "Yeah. That's what all the bosses say," grinned Carter. "Hope it's on recored that this one was my idea. . ." While repair teams re-built the shattered communicating area that had proved the monster's undoing, Koenig kept in his quarters, along with Helena Russell and Victor Bergman. Alan Carter had returned, been interviewed, congratulated, and then dismissed as being too smug by half. Bergman said: "We still have the black box, John. And now we have access to Kano's computer again, we might find out the planet that sent it up. If it happens to lie somewhere on our course, we might put our adventure to good use. . ."    Koenig smiled. "Send down and tell them we encountered their monster and destroyed it for them, Victor? Hope they'll be so grateful that they'll invite us to share their home? Well--it's a thought, but it's just as much a long-shot as finding that sphere in the first place. You never know what's going to happen when you encounter something in space. . ."

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