The Merchandise Guide
Annual 1975

of peace, almost. Was he dead? Gingerly, he felt himself. Moved. No, he was still flesh and blood-- real blood, for his glove brought some of it from a cut across his forehead. He sat up and looked at the damage tohis Eagle, marvelling that the console, apart from the master fusing elements, was all in one piece. "Got--got to fix it. New fuses. Get back to Moonbase." His voice sounded thick and slurred in his ears.    Then, as he clambered ponder- ously to his feet, he saw that the blackness throught the frontal screens was not the blackness fo space. It was featureless. No distant stars gleamed. None of the phosphorescent effect of far-off galaxies broke the curtain. Even as his mind struggled to make a logical assessment, he heard the hiss of the airlock door behind him, and he whirled, reaching for his helmet, he knew that his Eagle was no longer suspended in space. Both doors were open, and

had the craft been in anything other than some kind of docking bay, the vacuum of space would have exploded him in a billionth of a second!    Alan Carter's mouth fell open, and just for an instant, his hand hovered over the handle of his stun-gun. But the movement stopped short, for there was no mistaking the clear menace of the weapon that pointed unwaveringly at his stomach, even though there was no possible identification of the strange and horrifying being who held it clasped in long, sinuous feelers! The thin, skeletal body balanced on three sucker-tipped legs, and a beaked head like a football, the one eye centrally placed beneath the hairless, round done regarded him un- winkingly.    A thin, hollow twittering came from the beak. It was repeated by two other aliens who appeared behind the first. And then, like a man in the grip of some nightmare, Alan Carter found himself seized in the supple grasp of feelers, and hauled bodily out of his Eagle!    His mind reeling, the Moonbase astronaut was aware of a vast, vaulted cavern of a place. Yes, it was dark, but now his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and he picked out the shapes of smaller craft near to his own. Ferry vehicles in the belly of their mother ship. "Who--who are you? Where are you taking me . . .?" But there only came the un- intelligible twittering, and the soft but strong urging of the feelers that thrust him on . . .    Suddenly, Carter realised that he was not afraid. If they'd wanted to kill him, these aliens would surely have wrecked his Eagle, and left it to drift,

an eternal coffin for him. He'd been captured, yes . . . but why?    It was a question that soon produced an answer. A reddish glow lit the high room into which he was taken. A room whose walls were covered with con- coles of electronic machinery. A room in which, centrally, stood a glass-like dome, lifted clear of what looked like some kind of operating table.    Carter struggled as they lifted him onto the table. He struggled in vain. Electrodes were clamped to his head, and then the dome was lowered over him. Grotesque as they were, the aliens, seen through the glass of his prison, were double so! Carter felt his will-power ebbing as flashes of power ran through the wires attached to him--flashes that seemed to drain all effort from him! And then he realised that he could hear. Could hear and understand these aliens who peered at him so closely, so cautiously.    "His intelligence level is high!"    "The race he represents could indeed be a threat to us!"    Carter gritted his teeth. He tried to say, "We are peaceful . . ." but no words would come.    "It was well that Morgax sent us to investigate the approach of their strange sphere. It must be de- stroyed before it enters the orbit of our planet."    "We can suffer no beings like these to invade us! The very shape of them is disgusting . . ."    Carter writhed. "Who are you? Listen! I can tell you where we come from--what's happened to us! We seek no conquest . . ."    The solitary eye of one of the aliens bored down at him, and he saw the beak-mouth openl. "We care

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