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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of Armageddon, 1970, by Geoff St. Reynard
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: Armageddon, 1970
-
-Author: Geoff St. Reynard
-
-Release Date: August 9, 2021 [eBook #66021]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
-             Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARMAGEDDON, 1970 ***
-
-
-
-
-                           ARMAGEDDON, 1970
-
-                         By Geoff St. Reynard
-
-              As atomic weapons from space laid waste to
-             Earth's cities, Alan Rackham searched for the
-             traitors. Was it possible he sought himself?
-
-           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
-              Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
-                             October 1952
-         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
-         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
-
-
-They tried to kill Alan Rackham about an hour after he had seen the
-accident. They bungled the job. They shot at him from ambush--with
-an ordinary automatic pistol--as he was walking up to his house; and
-Brave, who had a sixth sense for danger which never failed him, knocked
-Alan over at the very instant of the shot and sprawled across him, a
-great solid shield holding him down and protecting him despite his
-angry wrigglings. Brave's grenade pistol was in his hand before the
-two of them hit ground, and he sent four quick shots at the bushes,
-spaced so that the tiny hot fragments tore hell out of thirty yards of
-shrubbery. Nobody yelled or groaned. Brave waited a full minute, and
-then he rose cautiously, so that Alan could sit up and brush himself
-off and swear as he spat out dirt. They went into the house and Alan
-reported the assassination attempt to his immediate superior, Dr.
-Getty. After that they didn't try again to kill Alan for a long time.
-
-The accident had been uncanny. It happened in the room where the shells
-of the silver-colored disks were fitted together and welded, before
-they were sent to the gargantuan baths that half-melted them again to
-rechill them into solid masses of metal which nothing short of a direct
-hit by a blockbuster would crack.
-
-A welder, using one of the newly-developed torches that made the old
-ones seem like match-flares by comparison, dropped it accidentally. Its
-flame licked up and sprayed across the man's right hand. It melted the
-protective glove like ice cream on a stove; crisped away the skin and
-liquefied the flesh, charred the bones black and left the welder no
-more than half a palm and two fingers before he could jerk his hand out
-of the terrible blast of fire.
-
-Alan and Brave were standing about twelve feet off, and there could be
-no mistake as to what they saw then.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The welder turned off his torch with his left hand; he held the remains
-of his right before his face, turned it and stared at it (the blood
-coursing in little sluggish streams down the forearm, the charcoal
-that had been bone sifting off into the air, the flesh a greasy
-yellow-red mass like candle drippings), and he shook his head slowly,
-an expression of annoyed mortification on his face. It was as though he
-had cut himself while shaving, no more. He was simply piqued, when he
-should have been shrieking with horror and unendurable pain.
-
-Alan and Brave ran to him. "My God, man," said Alan, shaken, "let me
-get you to infirmary."
-
-The welder stood up. "That's all right, Dr. Rackham. I can go myself.
-This don't hurt." And then a curious look spread over his face, as if
-he had just recollected a lesson taught him long ago. "It don't hurt
-_much_," he amended. "I guess it's cauterized so bad I can't feel it
-yet. Don't you worry, sir, I can make it."
-
-He walked away, perfectly steady, carrying the almost destroyed hand
-in front of his chest; and Alan was so dumbfounded he let him go.
-
-The welder never reached the infirmary. No man saw him again, alive or
-dead.
-
-So an hour thereafter someone took a shot at Alan Rackham. Since
-Brave had witnessed the accident too, and because neither of them
-could account for the shooting except in connection with that strange
-accident, it seemed stupid and pointless for an attempt to be made
-on Alan's life alone; especially when a grenade pistol, one of those
-lean evil handguns developed in 1959, would with one shot have cut an
-eight-yard-wide swath in everything before it and eliminated both of
-them. But there it was. They shot at Alan with an automatic--the bullet
-nicked across his chest and spoiled a blue coat that was practically
-new--and then they disappeared.
-
-Alan's house, which he shared with Brave, was a four-room brick atop
-a knoll on the outskirts of the colony. It was a perfect bachelor
-establishment; the precipitron kept it free of dust and Brave's innate
-neatness overcame Alan's careless disregard of surroundings to the
-extent that dirty socks and unpressed trousers were not often to be met
-with lying in corners or hanging over the backs of chairs. Brave was a
-good everyday cook and Alan occasionally took a couple of hours off to
-chef up a New Orleans style banquet for two. The living room was lined
-with books and the plastiglassed-in lounging quarters in the rear
-held racks of pipes and a well-stocked bar. They were very comfortable
-there. It was only a ten-minute walk from Alan's laboratory, and four
-minutes' ride from the center of the colony.
-
-The colony was called Project Star. It was located on Long Island,
-protected much as Oak Ridge had been in the '40s and '50s, and Project
-Bellona in the early '60s; with electrified fences, and soldiers
-carrying the latest weapons, and a ring of grotesque machinery all
-around it, comprised of radar detectors and great ack-ack guns
-and a number of generators that threw up a kind of primitive,
-partly-effective force field. The force field would stop any aircraft
-or at least cause it enough trouble to slow it down for the ack-ack.
-
-Of course the artificial satellite, Albertus (named in honor of Dr.
-Einstein), kept a watchful telescope on Project Star. But in that
-year of 1970 it seemed to most men that all the caution and secrecy
-was overly dramatic. After the collapse of Soviet Russia a decade
-before, from internal causes precipitated by the successful fixing
-of the American-controlled satellite Albertus in the heavens, and
-after the almost Carthaginian peace imposed on Argentina when its
-dictator A-bombed London, the world had quieted down considerably.
-America was top dog in the nations and her supervision of the science
-of other countries left little possibility of successful attack or
-even of effective sabotage within the many colonies which worked on
-advancements in weapons and other civilized phenomena, and on space
-flight.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Nearly everyone believed that the purpose of Project Star was to
-construct "flying saucers" (the inadequate name had stuck through the
-years) for use in reaching out to the other planets. Only the men who
-were working there, and a few others in government and in the military
-forces, knew that the disks were not intended for extra-terrestrial
-flight--there were rocket projects galore for that--but for journeys in
-the atmosphere or slightly above it, at speeds incredible even in 1970.
-The name Project Star had not been chosen to mislead anyone, but it
-had done so and nobody bothered to correct the impression. Secrecy had
-become an ingrained national habit in the past thirty-odd years.
-
-Dr. Alan Rackham was one of the scientists who worked on the problem of
-fuel for the disks. He was not a member of the vastly important handful
-who headed the colony and came equipped with everything sacred and
-untouchable except halos, but he was considered of enough consequence
-to rate a house of his own and an assistant who was also an efficient
-bodyguard. This was Brave, whose proper name was John Kiwanawatiwa.
-
-Brave sat down in his own chair, a sturdy specially-built job, while
-Alan called Dr. Getty on the visiphone to report the shooting. Brave
-never sprawled out or slouched as his superior did. He sat straight,
-a red-copper-colored man built to the scale of a Greek statue, about
-half again life size. His arms and legs were tough as cable steel,
-his chest a brawny barrel. He was a Navajo Indian, but his features
-were more nearly those of a Sioux: a great finely-formed crag of a
-nose, thin straight lips over white teeth, dark eyes that a hawk might
-envy their piercing power, a wolf-trap jaw. His speech was that of an
-M.S. of Carlisle and Oxford, except when he spoke with people he did
-not know or like; then it became a parody of the nineteenth-century
-storybook red man's gutteral discourse. At times, when he went with
-Alan to meetings of the hierarchy (a few of whom, including Dr. Getty,
-he cordially detested for their bland self-importance), he even wore a
-bedraggled chicken feather sticking upright in his black hair, stood
-behind Alan with folded arms and a fierce expression and confined his
-remarks to "Ugh" and "Waugh." This gave both Alan and himself a great
-deal of innocent pleasure.
-
-For Alan Rackham was also a rebel against stuffiness and conceit.
-He was a perfectly normal-looking man, of slightly more than middle
-height, thirty-one years old, handsome enough if you liked lean bony
-features and unruly brown hair; his muscular development was so
-unobtrusive that no one ever guessed he had been a Marine and won
-himself a DSC in Argentina. He enjoyed his work at Project Star, for
-he had a scientist's inquiring mind; but he liked even more the huge
-Indian with whom he lived, the girl in the metallurgy section who wore
-his engagement ring, and the book of rather impudent philosophy on
-which he worked during his free evenings.
-
-He also loved a long drink, a thoughtful pipe, an involved practical
-joke, and the moody Siamese cat, Unquote.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Now he turned from the visiphone, as the image of Dr. Getty faded out
-on its screen, and he frowned at Brave. "Son," he said, "why would
-anybody take a potshot at me?"
-
-"What does Doc Pomposity say about it?" rumbled the Indian.
-
-"Mainly blah, blah, blah."
-
-"Naturally," nodded Brave. "You know, sagamore, I think it's that
-accident. There was something cockeyed about it.... I don't care
-how shocked the fellow was, or how quickly the flame seared up and
-anesthetized the wound; there should have been plenty of pain in that
-hand. And he didn't even yip when it happened. He only looked peeved."
-
-"Getty says he never got to infirmary. No one has seen him at all."
-
-"Cockeyed," said Brave again. "The whole thing's a muddle." He stared
-at Alan. "Boss, I have an instinct that warns me we're in for trouble."
-
-"That's an instinct? When I get shot at, this gives you an instinct?"
-
-"The noble red man has an instinct," said Brave imperturbably, "which
-sits in his belly and beats on a tomtom when trouble's coming. I don't
-mean ghastly wounds that don't make men cry out, or even lunatics
-laying for you thereafter--and there's a connection between the two,
-that's sure. But I mean big trouble. There's something in the air. I
-can't quite catch it, but it's been there for a long time. Weeks and
-months, sirdar."
-
-"You've been reading the thesaurus again. You know more synonyms for
-'master' than Roget. You mean this seriously, Brave? About trouble?" He
-had a respect for the Indian's intuition which was based half on his
-anthropological knowledge of the weird powers of certain older races,
-and half on pure human superstition; at times when Brave made his
-predictions, Alan felt as though a gypsy crone had passed by him and
-whispered some incantation in his ear.
-
-"I mean it, Alan. And the damned instinct has never been wrong yet.
-It's beating in my guts right now like it did at Campana just before
-hell broke loose."
-
-"Well, batten down the hatches, then," said Alan resignedly, while the
-hair on the back of his neck prickled and tried to stand up. "It's got
-itself off to a fine start, your trouble. My tailor will never be able
-to mend this jacket."
-
-"Why don't you cook us some oysters Rockefeller and lobster thermidor
-and all that Frenchified goop you brew up?" suggested Brave. "If we're
-in for afflictions, we may as well meet 'em with pleasantly full
-stomachs."
-
-"Right. While I'm at it, you write a report of the incident--of both of
-them--and sign my name. Getty'll never know the difference. He thinks
-you haven't mastered Basic English yet."
-
-"Ugh," said Brave. "Noble red man will inscribe li'l pictures on
-birchbark for medicine man, while medicine man raises cain in frozen
-food locker. Don't get that sauce too thin this time, patriarch. I
-can't bear watery sauce on my lobsters."
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER II
-
-
-Next morning, while Alan was still dressing and yawning, and Brave
-was clattering skillets in the kitchen, humming the _allegro con
-passionato_ movement from "Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of Savannah,"
-the door chimes bonged softly. Brave went to the spywindow, surveyed
-the caller, and shifted his grenade pistol to a handier position before
-opening the door. A stranger stood on the threshold.
-
-"Ichabod Crane," said Brave to himself, and aloud, "Yes?"
-
-"Ah," said the stranger, "you would be the tough egg with the
-unpronounceable name. Greetings, chieftain."
-
-"How," said Brave with a straight face. "You want-um audience with
-great sachem?"
-
-"That I do, Lo."
-
-"Oh, gad," groaned the Indian, "if I hear that weary old jest once
-more I'll burst into tears and die. Come in, comedian. Dr. Rackham's
-dressing."
-
-"Thanks. Forgive me for the godawful gag, friend. I haven't eaten
-breakfast yet and an empty stomach plays the devil with my sense of
-humor." He rattled over to a chair and sat down. At least, thought
-Brave, closing the door, you expected him to rattle. He was the longest
-and thinnest bag of bones ever seen on Long Island. Fully six feet
-eight, he was lean from the top of his narrow skull, which was covered
-by an inch-long mat of straight stiff blond hair, to the soles of his
-number twelve feet. If he had any fat in him at all it must have been
-a very lonesome blob of fat indeed, well camouflaged and utterly alone
-in a wilderness of stringy muscle, meager sinew, and shaving-slender
-bones. His green eyes, perpetually half-lidded on either side of a nose
-like the prow of a Chinese junk, were humorous and sharp and as bright
-as polished emeralds.
-
-Brave said to himself, Here is a shrewd customer, who isn't one-tenth
-the fool he appears to be.
-
-"You don't have an appointment with Dr. Rackham."
-
-"No, I don't. A plump little meathead called Getty over at the central
-offices said he'd be here, and I popped over on the chance. I want to
-inveigle him onto a TV program of mine."
-
-"Dr. Rackham is a busy man."
-
-"So is President Blose of the U.S. of A., but _he_ came on the program,
-Lo. Pardon me," said the man, "there I go again. It's second nature. I
-don't mean to offend, but I was a disk jockey once. Look, friend, my
-name is Jim McEldownie. I'm _Worlds of Portent_ McEldownie."
-
-"I'm _Lashings of Victuals_ Kiwanawatiwa, and my eggs are scorching,"
-said Brave, going out to the kitchen. "The books are counted, so are
-the pipes, and the first editions are booby-trapped. Don't get ideas."
-
-"Injun, I could grow to love you," said McEldownie. "Listen, seriously,
-don't you ever watch TV?"
-
-"I do not."
-
-"That explains it. Existing in the dark like this, you wouldn't have
-heard of me. I run this klatch, see, called _Worlds of Portent_, onto
-which I entice various important and pseudo-important characters, and
-there I cajole and browbeat and query till they tell me all sorts of
-fascinating lies, and the public laps it up like a bunch of silly
-cats."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Unquote, the Siamese, rose out of her hygienic playbox and gave him a
-frozen glare. He recoiled. "My God," he said, "I seem to be offending
-everyone this morning. Forgive me, puss."
-
-Unquote snarled and collapsed in a boneless pile of beautiful fur. Alan
-stuck his head into the room and said, "Where do you classify me?"
-
-"Huh? Oh, hallo, Doc. You're important. Anybody from Project Star
-is important. Whether the same can be said for those officials of
-our mighty government who have gasped and babbled and turned blue on
-_Portent_, I'm not one to declare. How about it, Doc? Will you appear?"
-
-"Talking about what? Fuel? That's all I really know."
-
-"If you can talk for thirteen minutes about it, without violating any
-regulations or giving away secrets, I want you. Fuel is hot stuff with
-the space-minded John Q."
-
-"What do you think, Brave? Should we do it?"
-
-Brave said, "Too much time and no fun, that's how it sounds to me."
-
-"Oh, I don't know. I've never been on the air."
-
-"Please," said McEldownie, shuddering like a leafless willow in a high
-wind. "The phrase is 'on the space.' Air belongs to that outmoded,
-decadent, but apparently deathless medium called radio. There, I've
-said it. Have you got any mouth-washing soap?"
-
-"A positive Hilton Boil," said Brave in the kitchen. "A real yokked-up
-comic. Wait till I've fed him and we'll hurl him out."
-
-"All right," said Alan, "I'll do it. I'm a ham at heart. When do you
-want me?"
-
-"Tomorrow night at eight vacant?"
-
-"As vacant as--" he was going to say "Dr. Getty's head," but caught
-himself in time. The TV man's flippancy was contagious. "Quite vacant.
-Give Brave the directions and we'll be there."
-
-Brave said, "Breakfast is on. There are three plates and food for two.
-I hope you eat lightly, Mr. Portent."
-
-"McEldownie, but call me Jim. I eat like a bird."
-
-The bird, thought Alan half an hour later, must be a starving turkey
-buzzard; he sighed and stood up. "We're due at work, Jim. See you at
-eight tomorrow, then?"
-
-"Seven-fifteen. I have to brief you. Cheers, gentlemen. Apologize to
-the cat for me. I insulted it a while back and it's been burning holes
-in my neck ever since." He took himself off, still with the illusion of
-rattling bonily. Alan and Brave washed up and strolled down to their
-laboratory.
-
-Nothing happened that day or the next, save for a thorough search for
-the missing welder, which turned up no trace of him. At seven-fifteen
-the two friends walked into the TV studio in Manhattan.
-
-"Hi," said McEldownie, waving a long hand. "Sit down and let's gurgle
-about fuel." They did so. At one point the lean man said, "An idea.
-What if Brave were to stand behind you all through the program? It'd
-look impressive as hell. Sinister Indian guards scientist even on
-national hookup. 'No precaution too elaborate for our men,' says head
-of Project Star. How about it?"
-
-Alan looked at Brave. He would not expose his friend to stupid
-ridicule. Brave winked. "Okay," said Alan. "But no gags."
-
-"Abso-bloody-lutely. Play it for gravity. Show people that there is
-danger connected with the business. And I think there is," he added
-solemnly.
-
-Alan stared. "Why do you say that?"
-
-"I don't mean the TV, I mean your work out on Long Island. You can't
-tell me that nobody in the world wishes our country any ill, chum. We
-have enemies just as we always have had. Why else the ack-ack and force
-screens?"
-
-Alan did not answer. He thought of Brave's prediction of trouble, and
-he was more impressed with this lanky comedian than he had been before
-that moment.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Thirty seconds before the program time he sat down at the round table
-opposite McEldownie, and Brave took up a forbidding posture behind his
-chair.
-
-His host began to speak, and suddenly Alan realized why the tall blond
-irrepressible fellow had been trusted with a program of such gravity
-as _Worlds of Portent_. As the cameras rolled and the brilliant lights
-came on, the jester's motley dropped away from him and was replaced by
-a cloak of earnest sobriety. His fantastic appearance heightened the
-seriousness; it was as shocking and thought-producing as if a scarecrow
-had begun to talk Schopenhauer.
-
-He knew precisely how much to say; when to sit back and let Alan do a
-monologue, and when to interrupt with a pertinent question. He was a
-genius at his work.
-
-And then, perhaps four or five minutes after the telecast had begun,
-Alan became aware of two things, each quite extraordinary. First, Brave
-had disappeared. Alan glanced back over his shoulder and found the
-Indian had vanished. The lights were so bright that his vision did not
-extend to the walls of the studio, so he presumed that his friend was
-still there somewhere; but he had left the range of the cameras. And
-secondly, something was happening to Alan's mind.
-
-He tried to analyze the trouble, but he could not do it. He could only
-touch a few salient points of it; the fact that although he was talking
-very learnedly, and with (so far as he could tell) lucidity and vigor,
-_he_ was not controlling his tongue in the least. It was almost like
-being drunk; there seemed to be a small entity perched on the root
-of his tongue who was pulling the strings of speech. But whereas the
-drunken entity was malicious and got him into all sorts of rows and
-riots, this particular sprite was doing what seemed a fine job for him.
-He knew quite well that he himself was not forming or directing the
-words he spoke. It was unpleasant, to say the least.
-
-And there was something else. His mind, freed of necessity to
-concentrate on the program, was somewhere off in space, listening
-intently ... listening to a voice from without and within, a voice
-that inhabited the cold wastes of time and infinity as well as the
-bone-bounded sphere of his brain.
-
-_Listen to me, Alan Rackham_, said the voice. Wordlessly, yet with
-words, from the farthest stretches of the galaxies and still existing
-in the core of his own intellect, cold as hoarfrost, hot as berserker's
-rage, gentle and persuasive as a doting mother, the voice said to him,
-_Listen to me_.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-He would not listen. It was good and evil both together, and if he
-listened he would die. Yet it was said he would live. He would live
-forever; if time can be measured in terms of endlessness, he would not
-die. But he knew he would die. He struggled. The cameras picked up no
-hint of the travail. His face was intense and good-humored and his
-words were intelligent; and all the while he fought with the voice and
-would not listen. He fought it for an hour, and for a month, and till
-the end of the world came and beyond, and it spoke to him, fire and ice
-in the same words, but without words, and then he began to listen to it.
-
-At this point six minutes of the telecast had gone by.
-
-_You are listening now_, said the voice. _You are listening, are you
-not?_
-
-_I'm listening, God curse you._
-
-_I am taking you, Alan Rackham, as a bear takes a lamb, as a man takes
-a woman, as a hand takes a glove and the glove takes the hand._
-
-_I understand, curse you. Take me._
-
-_I am older than your whole race, and wiser than its cumulative wisdom,
-and I come from the stars._
-
-_Of course, you come from the stars. You are myself, and I understand
-you, friend._
-
-_Yes, I am yourself, wiser and stronger and older and beyond you in
-every way, and I am you. You are my servant, my slave, and myself._
-
-_Certainly, master. Why do you tell me things I have always known?_
-
-_You are not obeying when you follow me, for you follow yourself, you
-who are now me._
-
-_You are God, are you not?_ said Alan in his mind. _The Buddhists are
-right._
-
-_No. Not God. I am the atom and I am the intergalactic void, you and
-me and everything right and wrong. Have you learned your lesson?_
-
-_It is a lesson I knew in the womb._
-
-_Now you are mine_, said the voice, approving without an iota's loss of
-the flame and frost of hatred and love blended flawlessly.
-
-_This is a pleasure beyond pleasure, sensation far above sensation.
-This is maelstrom descent and flying into the sun. This is the keenness
-of sexual transport to the nth power. I live for you._
-
-_Now you have it. Never forget it._
-
-_Never!_ swore Alan.
-
-_Now forget it._
-
-_I have forgotten it._
-
-_Now what do you have to do for me?_
-
-_Whatever it is you wish._
-
-_Truly you are mine. Now you have forgotten me._
-
-_I have forgotten._
-
-_Who am I?_
-
-_Who are you?_ asked Alan, perplexed.
-
-_Truly you have forgotten. What have you to say?_
-
-"So the problem of most importance confronting us then was, how can we
-carry enough of this fuel to get us to the moon and back? It took us
-seven years to solve that one, but as everyone knows, we did. Then Van
-Horne discovered the hitherto unknown properties of--" he was talking
-blithely, almost by rote, for this was history-book stuff; and there
-had never been any sprite guiding his tongue at all, nor any voiceless
-voice in the bitterness of the eternal chasm between the stars and
-there was no memory anywhere in his consciousness of such things, nor
-any lingering discomfortable feeling that he had known a thing now
-forgotten....
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER III
-
-
-They were driving out Queens Boulevard toward the colony, and Alan
-said, "Why did you leave, Brave? Where'd you go?"
-
-The great Indian spun the wheel for a curve. "Just back to the wall."
-
-"Why?"
-
-"Lights were too bright for my eyes."
-
-Alan stared at him. "You could out-gaze the sun, you pokerfaced liar,
-and you know it. Why did you leave?"
-
-Brave glanced over at him. "Caliph, I hate to go on sounding like a
-spae-wife, or the Witch of Endor. But never in all my life have I had
-such a succession of ominous bodings. You'll think I'm turning raven in
-my old age--"
-
-"No, damn it, Brave, I know you can smell danger a mile or a month
-away. Go ahead."
-
-"Quoth the raven, then. I didn't feel happy about standing there.
-Before we started, it seemed like a good quiet joke. But when we were
-there and the lights came on, and the cameras started, I suddenly had
-to step back out of sight. I _had_ to, Alan. A couple of my ghostly
-ancestors took me by the scruff and hauled me right away from there."
-
-"That would have made a nice tableau on TV."
-
-Brave chuckled deep in his chest. "Running Lizard and Pony Sees-the-Sky
-saving John Kiwanawatiwa from the white man's magic ... I laugh,
-viceroy, but I swear it felt like that. The old desert-spawned
-blood--the blood that doesn't tame down--boiled up under those lights
-and cameras. It pulled the civilized flesh and bones away from them.
-It whispered that things were wrong, wrong for an Indian and wrong for
-his friend." He stepped on the gas viciously and the MG spurted forward
-onto the Union Turnpike like a turpentined hound. "Alan, I almost
-yanked you up and walked off with you under my arm. I didn't like you
-sitting there in the bath of electrical magic."
-
-"Why didn't you do it?" asked Alan curiously.
-
-"Oh, hell, boss man. It's one thing to have these primeval urges, and
-another to forget all your technical training and scientific knowledge
-so completely that you'll follow the impulse. Do you bust a window
-every time you'd like to?"
-
-"Hmm." Alan was ill at ease. It seemed to him for a moment that there
-was something to Brave's instinct, and that he should have been
-snatched from those lights. Then he said, "I think it's merely that
-someone had a shot at me the other day, and you've fretted over that
-till you're seeing assassins behind every chair."
-
-"Maybe. Maybe." Brave rocketed the little car along the dark highway,
-across the miles to home, and all the while the tomtoms beat in his
-blood and he knew that he should be afraid, that he should be coldly
-and sanely afraid of some black hazard soon to come.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Don Mariner walked into their laboratory the following afternoon. He
-was one of the top engineers on Project Star, a youngish-middle-aged
-man running to flab and ever-thinning hair. Ordinarily good-humored,
-today he had a long face and a crease between his eyes. Without a word
-he spread a sheaf of blueprints and photostats out on a lab table. Alan
-and Brave bent over them. Don's stubby finger traced the outline of a
-flying disk, then stabbed at the fuel storage tanks and several other
-sections of the interior.
-
-"Look at this, you two. I've had it under my nose for three months and
-it never struck me till today. Just look at it. See anything wrong?"
-
-After a moment Alan said, "The fuel tanks are too big."
-
-"My God! You ought to be the engineer instead of me. I ought to hire
-out for a potato peeler. Three months it took me to see it."
-
-"What's the point of it?" asked Brave. "If the disks are going to
-use hornethylene, they won't need a tenth--not a hundredth that much
-storage space, even if they want to circle the earth a dozen times
-without landing."
-
-"Here's another thing," said Don Mariner. "This closet for space suits.
-Why? The stratosphere is the highest they're supposed to go, and
-there's no need for space suits there. You want a space suit to crawl
-around the outside of Albertus, but not to wear in a disk. If there's
-trouble outside the shell you will simply land. Now look at these
-instruments." He showed them another chart. "Are these instruments for
-earth travel?"
-
-"I don't know. Are they?"
-
-"They are not. And also they're not the instruments Carey designed for
-the disks last year. They're a new set entirely, and some of 'em I
-don't understand myself, but I'll tell you this: they're not for earth
-travel. They're what you'd want in a space rocket." He looked up, his
-gray eyes bleak. "I faced Carey with 'em, and he swears they're his old
-design; and Carey doesn't lie in the ordinary course of events. But
-they're not, and I know it."
-
-"What's the point?" asked Alan. The question was almost rhetorical; he
-knew the answer.
-
-"The point is, these disks we're building are supposed to be purely
-and simply a faster means of traveling around Terra than any we have
-now. But the man in the street, that faceless brainless little cipher,
-believes they're for conquering the stars. And by Judas, he's right!
-We're building interplanetary disks--_and we're not supposed to know
-it_!"
-
-The three men stared at one another.
-
-"Who's keeping it from us?"
-
-"And why?"
-
-"There are plenty of rocket projects--so what if someone wants to
-try a space disk instead? Why would he tell all his scientists and
-technicians a pack of lies? There's no need for secrecy, for God's
-sake!"
-
-"But--my gosh," protested Alan, "no one man could keep a thing like
-this from all the rest of us. There must be ten or twenty who know.
-And details like these, the fuel tanks and instruments, they can't be
-hidden from anybody!"
-
-"So where does it lead us?"
-
-"Up a narrow, dank, and ill-smelling blind alley," said Brave.
-
-"Not so bl--"
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-There was a detonation outside the lab; a harsh, clangorous thunderclap
-of a sound, like the bursting of a bomb full of wash tubs and
-anchor chains. The three men were dashing for the door before the
-reverberations had died away.
-
-A disk had crashed on the airfield. Brave and Alan and Don piled into a
-jeep and raced down toward it.
-
-"I didn't know they had any ready for use," Alan shouted.
-
-"Oh, yes. They haven't advertised it much, though. And this must be
-the first test flight. I didn't know it was coming off today."
-
-"You'd think we'd all have been invited to the takeoff. Big impressive
-show, faithful workers get afternoon off, and all that."
-
-"Hell," said Don, "if they're keeping the purpose of the things from
-us, for no good reason that I can see, they might want to keep the test
-flight secret too."
-
-"How can they keep it secret? It obviously had to take off in plain
-sight, and they couldn't shoo everyone indoors. No, I guess they just
-didn't give a damn about us. Underlings, unimportant servants, that's
-us," said Alan bitterly, with a flash prevision of the terrible idea
-that would soon be obsessing him.
-
-They pulled up beside the wreckage of the disk. There was no danger of
-explosion, due to the peculiar properties of hornethylene. The giant
-platter, with its raised top like a hot-dish cover and its bubble of
-clear crystal beneath, lay crumpled and bent, one-third of its whole
-edge accordioned in upon itself. Even as they came up the crystal
-bubble inched open; not smoothly, as it should have done, but like a
-damp-swollen door creaks away from its frame under heavy pressure. The
-pilot thrust his legs out and dropped to the ground. Alan and a dozen
-others ran to him.
-
-"Hi," said he. "Guess I pulped this job up right."
-
-"Good Lord, man, are you okay?"
-
-"Not a nick. I just had time to see the ground coming up at me and
-bingo, I was sitting there with my eyes popping. Anybody got a drink?"
-He was cut to the pattern of all airmen since the days of monoplanes:
-tall, narrow of hip and wide of shoulder, lean always-tanned face, a
-wry grin on the mouth and horizon-hunger in the eyes.
-
-Somebody gave him a flask. "Were you alone?" asked Alan.
-
-"Sure. They can't risk two guys in these things yet. We don't know what
-they'll do. This one'll take some going over with a microscope and
-tweezers; it's full of bugs. Someone jockey me to the main offices?"
-
-The crowd dispersed slowly; but Brave, putting an urgent hand on Alan's
-arm--it enfolded his biceps and the fingertips met the thumb, for
-Brave's hands were as outsize as the rest of him--held him there. "Wait
-a minute, risaldar. I want to check something."
-
-"Another instinct, Brave?"
-
-"Plain horse sense. And I want to check it before the big boys clamp a
-top secret sign on this wreck."
-
-He reached up and gripped the edge of the crystal bubble. It resisted
-him. He set his muscles and tugged with all his incredible strength.
-The crushed metal hinges complained and shrieked and parted, and the
-great bulbous sheet of plastiquartz fell to the ground, narrowly
-missing him as he dodged back.
-
-"I'll boost you up, and you can give me a hand."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Inside the disk, they crouched and went through the tunnel into the
-control room. This comprised the entire central portion of the disk;
-suspended within the shell, like a small kernel in a large nut, it
-was held comparatively steady as the outer husk rocked and rolled
-and flipped in its characteristic skipped-rock flight. Alan did not
-understand the principle of this near-motionless suspension of the
-control room within an erratically weaving hull, although Don Mariner
-had tried to explain it to him in patient two-syllable words. It
-involved a knowledge of the newest developments in gyroscopics, which
-the young fuel expert did not comprehend. Brave had a fairly good
-idea of the basic laws involved, but wisely had never tried to beat
-it into his friend's head. Alan on fuel, on chemistry, on philosophy,
-was superb; Alan on dynamics or any other branch of mechanics was
-deplorable.
-
-They looked around the room. Nearly all the equipment was still in
-its place, for the clamps that held it during the astonishing speeds
-the disk could maintain in flight had held it still in the shattering
-instant of the crash. But the entire control board, the panels of
-instruments and the wide mirrors that gave the pilot a view of the
-earth and air from every angle, had all been shoved back and broken
-when the saucer had struck its nose edge into the ground.
-
-Brave walked over to the pilot's seat and stood silently surveying the
-mess. At last he said, "Alan."
-
-"Yes?"
-
-"Look here."
-
-Alan looked, and started as though he had been stabbed with a
-hypodermic needle. "God ..." he said.
-
-The control board had buckled back against the pilot's chair; something
-beyond it, some ponderously heavy piece of machinery in the space
-between central room and shell, had knifed through wall and board as
-sharp and deadly as the blade of a guillotine. The metal had sliced the
-center of the pilot's seat to within six inches of the back.
-
-No man could have sat there at the moment of the crash, as the pilot
-averred he had done.
-
-He would never have lived. He would have been cut in two....
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER IV
-
-
-That night Alan and Brave rode across Project Star to the women's
-building, where Alan's fiancee, Win Gilmore had a small apartment.
-Win--short for Winifred, and God help the man who called her
-_that_--opened the door before the sound of the diacoustic bell had
-died away.
-
-The first thing that struck you about Win was color: she looked as
-though she had been put together by a Bergdorf Goodman display artist
-with a genius for analogous chromas. Her hair was washed in a pale
-aquamarine and dusted over with luminous flecks of mauve; it was
-drawn back to the crown and clasped there by an abstract spiral of
-silver, from which it fell in darkening waves down her naked back. Her
-nylon jersey lounging outfit, cut with almost severe simplicity, was
-graduated from pink to a deep violet hue. Her finger and toe nails were
-lacquered with phosphorescent sapphire, and the lashes of her blue eyes
-were dyed with mascara of the same glowing shade.
-
-Her skin was a soft golden color, thanks to half an hour a day under
-the sun lamps of the colony's gymnasium.
-
-"How, oh squaw of rainbow brilliance," said Brave, holding up a hand in
-grave salute. "I leave this warrior in your keeping, whilst I shuffle
-down to the recroom and squander a few bucks on the pinball machines."
-
-"How, oh mountain that walks. Will you have a slug of Scotch first?"
-
-"The noble red man, pampering his internal workin's, drinks only rum
-this week. No thanks, Win. The gambling fever's got me. See you."
-
-Alan closed the door behind him and took Win into his arms. He kissed
-her, gently at first, then hard, their lips parted, warm on each
-other as their bodies warmed, his hands strong and taut on her back;
-he smoothed his fingers down the hollow of her spine, ran them up
-into her soft hair. She said against his mouth, "You demolish that
-toilsomely-wrought thatch, boy, and I'll demolish you." He laughed and
-pushed her away and lit a cigarette, stray flecks of mauve from her
-hair glittering on his fingers.
-
-She went to the low cocktail table and picked up an already filled
-glass. He took it from her. "Here's atomic dust in yer eye,
-Winniefred," he toasted, and drank long and thirstily.
-
-"Whoa, Nellie. Haven't you drunk anything today?"
-
-"Only the dregs of woe," he said lightly, and then his lean face
-changed and his eyes looked into a remote place which they did not
-like. At once she touched his arm.
-
-"Sit down, Alan." He did so automatically, and she perched
-tailor-fashion on the edge of the couch beside him. "What's the matter?"
-
-"I wish I knew."
-
-"Just the blues? You been skipping meals? That always makes you
-ethereal and moody. I'd as soon have Unquote with a toothache around
-the place as you after you've missed your lunch."
-
-"No, not the blues. Big trouble, sweetheart, that's been exploding
-right and left with no rhyme to it. I've thought so much about it in
-the last few hours that I doubt if I can even talk about it now."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Then, of course, he told her everything: beginning with the welder's
-accident and eerie lack of pain, then the shot from the bushes, Brave's
-indefinite fears climaxing at the telecast, Don Mariner's discovery
-of the undreamt-of potentials of the disks, the crack-up ending the
-almost-furtive test flight, and the pilot who lived when he should have
-been butchered, Alan brought it all out; and as he listened to his own
-words a dreadful idea was born and grew and expanded throughout his
-intellect until suddenly he knew that here was his answer, that no
-other could be rationally accepted. He sat silently for minutes, while
-Win watched him, and gradually the color swept out of his face and he
-began to shiver.
-
-She put the glass into his hand. He drained off the last of the drink,
-and she clicked open a deep drawer of the cocktail table and gave him
-another, freshly mixed at a touch of her finger on the emerald stud of
-the drawer.
-
-"What is it, Alan? You've seen something in it, some connection between
-these events. What is it?"
-
-He took a shuddering breath through open lips and said, "Yes, I know. I
-know what we have to fight."
-
-"Fight? You mean there are enemies? You can deduce that from--"
-
-"My God, yes, there are enemies." He turned, to fix her with a glare
-like a lunatic's. "Listen, Win. We all have the desire to go out to the
-other planets, and to the stars beyond our system. We've built a score
-of rocket projects all over the continent because of that desire. It's
-no secret, everyone has it. Right?"
-
-"Sure, darling. Even I want to see--well, Mars, anyway."
-
-"But here are these disks, too good, too damned good by far, possibly
-capable of doing just that; and the government and most of us have
-thought they were only for earth travel. Why? Who would want to build
-ships for interplanetary, or even for all I know interstellar-space
-flight, and keep it hidden from the rest of mankind?"
-
-"Russia?" she suggested humbly.
-
-"Oh, nuts. You might as well say Switzerland. No, it's here at home, on
-Project Star, and it's a handful or more than a handful of our own top
-men.
-
-"Now the other angle: there are men here who apparently can't be hurt
-by ordinary means, who don't feel pain, who can resist the force of
-such a weapon as a thousand-pound cutlass-edged juggernaut, and who
-only stare quietly when their hands are melted off like butter in a
-flame."
-
-"Yes?"
-
-"Put the two together, Win. Remember that after I'd seen one evidence
-of this lack of pain, I was ambushed. Someone thought I ought to die
-before I spread the word around. Who?"
-
-"Well, who?"
-
-He drank again and lit a cigarette. The lighter shook in his hand.
-"There's only one answer I can see," he said. "Correct me if I'm crazy,
-baby. There are mutants among us. We've been anticipating them in
-fiction for decades. Now they're here, and they want to reach the stars
-before we do, they want to pass unnoticed until they're ready to--to
-take over, or whatever their purpose is."
-
-"Mutants, Alan?"
-
-"The natural progression from Homo Sapiens. Homo superior. The
-supermen."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-She slid a pointer across its bar two notches and pressed the emerald
-button and the table delivered a dry Martini, which she sipped as she
-regarded him steadily. At last she said, "Is that the sole possibility,
-sweetheart? Isn't it a pretty wild explanation to accept on the
-evidence of a couple of queer accidents?"
-
-"I don't think so," he said gruffly. "No, blast it, I don't think it's
-too wild. It's perfectly possible, and it fits the facts."
-
-"Your Homo superior must be about as fallible as poor old sapiens then,
-because he's let his secrets out with a vengeance. I'd think that
-anyone smarter than we are would at least simulate pain after his hand
-was burnt off."
-
-"That was a slip-up, yes. But he didn't know anyone was watching."
-
-"Homo superior must have a low opinion of our intelligence, or he
-wouldn't have let those blueprints get into our hands."
-
-"The progression of the disks' manufacture has come to the point where
-he couldn't help it, I suppose. And maybe by now it doesn't matter.
-Don's had those fuel tank charts for three months, because it was
-necessary that he work on aspects of construction so close to the tanks
-that it was impossible to falsify them. But he only saw the instrument
-panel plans this morning. As I said, maybe it doesn't matter now. If
-the disks are near enough ready to be taking test flights, maybe the
-mutants are going to step out in the open."
-
-"Then why would they shoot at you?"
-
-"Hell, I don't know. Perhaps they'll publish the purpose of the disks
-without mentioning their own roles, as secret designers and builders
-and as creatures that can't be hurt. They could say 'security reasons'
-and get away with a lot."
-
-"It's an explanation, all right," said Win. "I don't swallow it, boy,
-but it does fit the facts. So do all sorts of other weird theories."
-
-"Such as?"
-
-"Ah, you don't want my ideas. They're as mad as your own." She leaned
-over the arm of the couch and touched several glowing spots on its
-outer surface; at once the illumination of the room cooled and faded.
-The forest green walls, complimentary to her own coloring and to the
-clothing she wore, appeared to recede and become the dark depths of
-a woodland on a moonless night; the furniture seemed to change into
-moss-grown stumps and great misshapen rocks. Overhead, the ceiling
-turned dusky blue under the play of hidden tint-beams, and miniature
-galaxies twinkled and gleamed across its surface, their varying
-incandescence giving the illusion of tridimensional infinity.
-
-Alan set down his glass and looked over at her. She was a shape of
-nocturnal secrecy, sinuous darkness against which her nails and
-eye-lashes burned with phosphorescent sapphire. Her use of the luminous
-lacquer was an artful bit of technique. It made her into a fantastic
-mystery which cried out to be solved. Although Alan had seen the
-trick before, he could never resist it. It was unbelievable that the
-sober girl in a shapeless smock who sweated in the metallurgy lab was
-also this Cleopatra, this shadowy temptress; Troy's exquisite Helen,
-yearning for love, her strong enchantments designed to make her both
-conqueror and conquest.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Forgetting the half-smoked cigarette between his fingers, forgetting
-the supermen and everything else but his physical craving, he threw
-himself down on the wide couch beside her. His hands touched the live
-softness of the halter and slid to her back. The sweet strong muscles
-glided under his fingers as she lifted her arms to take his face
-between her hands. Then his hands went down from flesh to fabric and he
-felt her long body pressing tight against him, close as his own skin.
-
-He opened his eyes and saw the glowing purple of her lashes and in the
-thick gloom the dimmed luster of her teeth between the parted lips. He
-kissed her and closed his eyes again. He touched her throat, where the
-blood throbbed close to the surface in a fast steady rhythm; he found
-other pulses and held his fingertips on them until his own caught their
-beat and merged with it and the separate throbbings were one.
-
-It was dark, then very dark, the dark of a sunless sea lapping all
-about them, and slowly it grew lighter and he was sitting up to run his
-fingers through his unmanageable hair and remember that some time ago
-he had been holding a cigarette.
-
-"Hey," he said, "what happened to my Rocketeer?"
-
-Win stretched out a lazy arm and brought the lights up once more. "Sure
-you didn't put it out?"
-
-"I swear I didn't. My God, here it is," he said, picking it off the
-couch where it had been smashed and its tobacco scattered. "What did I
-stub that out on?"
-
-"Probably the couch. It doesn't matter, it's resistant."
-
-He looked carefully but could find no place where a cigarette's fire
-might have been crushed. He shrugged. "So long as I didn't burn you,
-baby."
-
-"You didn't." She had the automatic table mix them two cocktails.
-"There's Brave back from the recroom," she said.
-
-"Ears like a fennec," he said admiringly. "I didn't hear anything."
-
-"Watch it, brother. I know what a fennec's ears look like." She went to
-open the door for the big Indian. "How'd you do, Brave?"
-
-"Gambled away a dollar and seventy-five cents in a reckless passion.
-Are you ready to go home, sheikh?"
-
-"Yes, I am. I have a theory I want to talk about."
-
-"You argue him out of it, Brave," said Win. "He's been working too
-hard. He thinks supermen are after him."
-
-Brave looked at Alan and his fine face grew hard and set.
-"Supermen ..." he said. "Mutants. Alan, is that it?"
-
-"I think that's it."
-
-"It fits the picture, all right."
-
-"It explains every instance we've observed."
-
-"I believe you're on the right track," nodded Brave. "When did you find
-it?"
-
-"While I was telling Win about it. Let's go home and thrash it out,
-son. She's a disturbing influence."
-
-Brave eyed Win up and down with a leer that on anyone else would have
-been particularly lewd and lascivious. From the faithful Brave it
-was merely what he meant it to be--a piece of mild buffoonery. "You
-understate the case, my liege. Yon woman has a plump and supple look;
-she wriggles too much, such minxes are dangerous. Let's drag tail."
-
-"Okay, boys. Go knock your steel-plated skulls together. But remember
-that I think you're barking up an impossible tree at an invisible
-possum what ain't thar." She swung the door open for them and stood
-aside, one arm upraised with the hand on the jamb.
-
-Alan kissed her a light farewell, and Brave patted her on the head and
-said, "Ketch-um sleep, squaw, you look bushed." Then, as Alan turned
-away, his glance was caught by a mark on Win's arm. It was a round
-blemish, an angry-looking red welt to the edges of which still clung
-infinitesimal flakes of gray ash smudged into the skin. He turned away
-and walked down the corridor with Brave at his side, and he thought
-ferociously of every possibility he could imagine, but his mind always
-came back to the same answer.
-
-It was a burn, just such a small wound as would result, say, from a
-cigarette being pressed out against the arm by an oblivious lover.
-
-And it should have been shockingly painful.
-
-But Win had not felt it at all....
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER V
-
-
-Alan awoke after an hour of nightmare-ridden sleep. He opened his eyes
-and got quietly out of bed and put on his tweed suit and a pair of
-loafers, and walked out of the house without disturbing the slumber of
-Brave.
-
-He went down to the main road and walked along it in the moonlight
-toward a distant group of buildings. Presently a soldier stepped into
-his path.
-
-"Halt and identify yourself."
-
-"I am Dr. Alan Rackham of Fuel Research. My security number is
-A10C14B44."
-
-The soldier looked at him a moment and then his eyes glittered. "Pass,
-friend," he said, and standing aside he watched Alan go on toward the
-buildings. There was a cynical smile on the soldier's mouth.
-
-Alan came to a squat flatroofed structure like a concrete shed. He
-knocked on the door. It opened and he went in. One weak bulb burned in
-a lamp. There was a tall man standing there in the shadows. He shook
-hands with Alan.
-
-"Welcome, companion. Just sit down here."
-
-Alan seated himself on a stool. The other passed along two walls and in
-succession a number of vivid lights flared out, bathing Alan in their
-burning radiance. He did not blink, but looked steadily and fixedly
-ahead.
-
-_Greetings_, said the voice.
-
-_Greetings, master._
-
-_Are you happy to return to me?_
-
-_I have never been away from you._
-
-_That is true. Now I have things to tell you. You will not remember
-them consciously tomorrow, but you will obey the commands and refuse to
-do those things which I tell you are wrong. Understood?_
-
-_Understood._
-
-_Now first, slave_, said the voice coldly, anger piled on icy anger in
-the dripping wordless thoughts: _you have decided that there are aliens
-among you. A race of supermen, mutated from your own weak breed._
-
-_Yes._
-
-_That is untrue. Forget it._
-
-_It is forgotten._
-
-_Such an idea is foolishness._
-
-_It is stupid_, said Alan, believing.
-
-_There are no aliens. There are neither supermen nor mutants. There
-is no thinking race on earth but the genus Homo. The accidents are
-unrelated; the welder a victim of shock, the pilot merely lucky._
-
-_I see._
-
-_The disks are under the supervision of the government, who wished to
-keep their purpose secret until now._
-
-_Security reasons_, said Alan in blind agreement.
-
-_There is only you and there is only me, I who am you, you who are me.
-And this is our private knowledge and not to be spoken of._
-
-_I would die rather than tell of it._
-
-_Now you are mine again._
-
-_Never anything else, master._
-
-_Forget me._
-
-_Forgotten._
-
-_Go home._
-
-_Of course._
-
-Alan rose and passed out of the range of the lights, and the tall man
-nodded with approval and began to switch off his terrible lamps.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Alan woke in the grayness of dawn, cramped and half-chilled from
-sleeping in a chair. He stretched and groaned, and got up to brew some
-coffee. Brave woke at the clinking of china and came padding out to the
-kitchen.
-
-"Up so early, commodore? You look as if you hadn't slept."
-
-"I slept, all right, but it didn't do much good. My head's splitting."
-
-Brave took over the coffee pot. "Any more ideas on the mutant theory?"
-
-"Oh, hell. I guess I was wrong."
-
-Brave turned and looked at him. "Why do you say that?"
-
-"Well, look. The welder might have been suffering from shock. The pilot
-was--just lucky. And the business of the disks can be explained by
-obtuse government security regulations. And where does that leave our
-precious superman notion? Out in the cold and wet."
-
-Brave shook his great head. "Huh-uh, son. More to it than that. Too
-many coincidences spoil the broth; too many queer things happening
-isn't right. I think you were on the trail of truth last night."
-
-"I was talking through my ear," said Alan irritably.
-
-Brave stared at him. A furrow appeared above the great hawk nose. He
-bent and pushed Alan's head back and looked into his friend's eyes.
-Alan tried to jerk his head away and Brave held it steady in the grip
-of one tough fist. He lifted Alan's lids one after the other and
-growled deep in his chest.
-
-"What the devil, Brave!"
-
-The Indian stood erect. "By the Great Spirit," he said. "Hypnotized!"
-
-"What in hell's name are you talking about?"
-
-"You've been hypnotized. Your pupils are swollen as big as grapes."
-
-"You're crazy."
-
-Brave regarded him equably. "Sure, tetrarch. Sure I'm crazy. Did you go
-out last night?"
-
-"You were with me. What's wrong with you? We went to Win's."
-
-"I mean later, when I was asleep."
-
-"Certainly not. I did get up and go into the living room, though, and I
-fell asleep in a chair."
-
-"Ah," said Brave. He considered a moment. "Watch the java, will you?"
-
-Alan nodded. The Indian went out of the kitchen. Alan heard him moving
-things about in their little laboratory beside the plastiglassed
-lounging quarters. In five minutes he returned.
-
-"Alan, you trust me, don't you?"
-
-"My God, do you have to be reassured on that? Ever since we marched
-through Argentina together. Since Campana and Buenos Aires and that
-hell of Pergamino. I'd trust you if you told me to jump into Lower Bay."
-
-"Okay. Now do me a favor." He gulped down a cup of scalding coffee.
-"Drink up and come with me."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Alan drank obediently, and stood and followed Brave into the lab.
-In a cleared space stood a pair of machines, looking somewhat like
-giant cameras, the lens of one covered by a multicolored disk, that
-of the other unshaded; there were plastic charts bolted to the sides,
-and dials and several types of indicator, and among all these the
-distinctive green and gold seal of the Institute of Psychotherapeutic
-and Hypnotherapeutic Research.
-
-Alan balked. "Hold on, Brave! You aren't going--"
-
-"You said you trust me. Do it now if never again. Sit down."
-
-"No!" he shouted. He was not quite sure of his reasons, but he knew he
-must not be hypnotized.
-
-Brave moved to shut him off from the door. "You'll sit there if I have
-to knock you out, boss."
-
-Alan saw he was not joking. He said, "Where did you get the machines,
-Brave?"
-
-"Had 'em around for years. I've always been intrigued by hypnosis, you
-know that. In fact you knew I had the machines. Will you sit down?"
-
-"What are you going to do?"
-
-"Damn it, you're sparring for time. If you think--"
-
-Alan swung on him without warning, a lashing buffet that could have
-broken a lesser man's neck; Brave took it square on the side of his
-jaw and staggered back, shaking his head. Then he caught Alan's coat
-as the smaller man leaped for the door. He swept him around by the
-coat like a yo-yo on a string, and judging his blow as carefully and
-dispassionately as an old champion measures an upstart contender, he
-rammed his big fist into Alan's belly just below the ribs. It jolted
-Alan back and doubled him over and made him blind with agony. He could
-not breathe. There was no air left in his lungs and he could not suck
-any into them. He was going to die. He wanted to die. He was dying.
-
-Brave dropped him, unresisting, into the chair and tied him down with a
-few turns of a light rope. "Son," he said, "I know that wasn't you that
-socked me, it was whatever creeping louse got to you last night. I'll
-apologize later for smacking you ... if you want me to." He went to his
-machines and began to turn dials and adjust gauges, and move pointers
-on the graduated scales. He tipped Alan's head up and clamped it firmly
-in the vise-like apparatus which rose from the chair's back. Alan was
-groggy, his breath now hissing in and out between clenched teeth.
-Brave went on talking.
-
-"I could have knocked you out, and it wouldn't have hurt nearly as
-much; but I wanted you awake. That pain may help, too. Rob Pope
-was saying something the other day about intense pain being an aid
-in nullifying the effects of hypnosis, when allied, that is, with
-counter-hypnosis. We'll see. Take it easy, pup."
-
-Your technical training could be a deterrent factor, thought Brave; you
-may be able to oppose the mechanical-visual patterns successfully. I
-hope not. It doesn't seem to me that there's a lot of time left to us,
-and I want you back on my side.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-He focused the lens of one machine on Alan's half-open eyes and
-pressed a button. Light began to flicker across the agonized face,
-its color changing from second to second. Brave cut in the other beam
-and white light that shifted its form even as the first shifted color
-lanced through the blue and red and yellow. Alan shut his eyes, but
-immediately opened them again.
-
-"You can't resist it," said Brave quietly. "You don't want to resist
-it. You like the pretty lights." The voice was an important stimulus
-too. "Your mind is conditioned to taking orders, isn't it, son?
-Somebody's been giving you evil commands. You don't like that. You'd
-rather listen to me." The weird patterns of the light beams held
-Alan's dull gaze. He was already adrift in a flashing vacuum. Brave's
-voice came to him slurred and without sense. Gradually he began to hear
-the words.
-
-"Somebody hypnotized you last night, didn't they, son?"
-
-"Yes. I think they did."
-
-"Who did it?"
-
-"I don't know. A tall man."
-
-"Do you know his name?"
-
-"I couldn't see his face very well."
-
-"What did he tell you?"
-
-There was a long silence. Then Alan, his face contorted, said, "He
-didn't tell me anything. He only put on the lights. They were vivid as
-sin. Then there was a voice."
-
-"What did the voice say? You can tell Brave, son. Good old Brave. You
-trust Brave."
-
-He thought. "I can't tell you," he said. "Not even you. It was a voice.
-It was the voice. My voice. I love it."
-
-"Isn't there anything you can repeat?"
-
-"Yes. It said I had to forget the superman theory. It explained the
-accidents; and the disks. It's all natural. It isn't mutants."
-
-Brave started to sweat. He pried at Alan's mind, learning almost
-everything about the night before. But he did not find out that Alan
-had first heard the voice at the telecast, nor did he learn that
-the voice and Alan were one, master and slave, but one. The earlier
-hypnosis had been too clever. It had struck at the roots of Alan's
-soul, becoming religion and truth to him, and he would not deny it or
-betray it.
-
-At last realizing that he had heard all he was going to hear, the
-Indian gave Alan certain counter-commands. He repeated them until
-Alan squirmed and whimpered under the repetition. Finally Brave was
-satisfied. By using the powerful mechanical-visual stimuli, it was
-usually easy enough to plant ideas in a subject, and only infinitely
-stronger agents could destroy such ideas. Brave hoped that the enemy
-did not have stronger agents; but he knew that in the last analysis it
-was a timid and unsure hope indeed.
-
-"About all I can do now," he growled low, "is stick with you as if I
-was a cocklebur in your hair. Till they kill me, or we beat 'em."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-He turned off his machines and brought Alan to full consciousness. He
-untied him and led him into the lounging quarters, pushing him down
-onto a yielding sofa. "Take it easy for a while. That was quite an
-ordeal. I guess you have a belly-ache." He poured two long Scotches.
-"Now tell me what you remember."
-
-Alan thought. "Everything," he said with surprise. "At least I suppose
-it's everything." He repeated the substance of what they had both said
-in the lab. "Right?"
-
-"That's it. I told you to remember it all. I wanted to level with
-you, chief. We've got a fight on our hands and I can't have you
-going around in a daze. You've got to realize what happened to you
-last night, so you can buck another attempt like it. By the way, you
-couldn't tell me why you went down to that building."
-
-"I don't know. I haven't any memory of going, or of what happened
-there; I simply recall telling you about it. I have a memory of a
-memory, I suppose you could say."
-
-"Strong medicine those dog soldiers are using, by God," said Brave.
-"The more I learn about them, the surer I am that they're superior
-mutants."
-
-"I think so too," said Alan. Brave grinned. His therapy had overcome
-the former hypnotist's commands. Alan went on. "The big question
-was, why have they suddenly appeared among us, why now? I think we
-have that answered. It isn't sudden; it may have been happening for
-generations. Slip-ups may have occurred as far back as history goes.
-One mistake might go unremarked; two might make a man wonder: then he'd
-investigate, and be either eliminated (they shot at me, you remember!)
-or hypnotized and taken under the control of the mutants."
-
-"Bright lad! Your own experience bears that out."
-
-"So the newest big question would be: how do we fight them? Perhaps
-we're the first to recognize them and retain our own wills. We can't
-let that circumstance go to waste, Brave. We've got to strike at them
-for our race's sake." He scowled. "But that leads to this: _do_ we
-strike at them?"
-
-"What do you mean, Alan?"
-
-"I mean ... well, Brave, would we be in the right to take law into our
-own hands and start a murder campaign, say, against them? Suppose we
-were fighting good, instead of evil?"
-
-Brave looked blank.
-
-"How do we know they're wrong?" Alan continued. "How do we know they're
-against us? Perhaps they are the true race of the future, and every man
-of intelligence should be on their side. No, this isn't an hypnotically
-planted theory: it's something I brooded on last night before I went to
-sleep. Where do our loyalties stand? If Homo superior is intelligent
-and self-centered, callous toward us, then obviously we fight him fang
-and claw. But if he is intelligent and benevolent, as you'd expect from
-a higher type of being, then we should ally ourselves with him."
-
-"He shot at you. Is that benevolence?"
-
-"I know. We might be wrong. It may have been a simple maniac who did
-it. Again, I think the coincidence would be too great; well, perhaps
-Homo superior had a good reason for it. We can't judge too deeply on
-insufficient evidence."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Brave said, "I see what you mean, Alan, and in abstract theory I agree
-with it. If the mutants are a good breed, a real improvement on our
-own kind, then we owe them the allegiance of intelligent underlings.
-But concrete evidence says they're not good. They shoot at you; they
-employ the most malefic and vicious kind of hypnotism on you, where a
-simple conditioning to the fact of their goodness would have brought
-you around to their side just as easily--and with twice the value. They
-aren't good. They are villainous." He grimaced. "I can see you hate the
-idea. Why? What's on your mind that I don't know about?"
-
-Alan turned a haunted face to him. "Brave," he said, "Brave, Win's one
-of them."
-
-The Indian said, "No. You're wrong. Not Win."
-
-"That's what I repeated a couple of hundred times last night. Not Win,
-not Win. But I mashed out a cigarette on her arm--accidentally, of
-course--and she didn't feel it. It left a hell of a burn. But she never
-felt it. She can't feel pain. _She's mutant._"
-
-Brave laid his hands on his thighs and shook his head and could say
-nothing. Alan went on. "Has she been playing with me, then? Or can they
-get physical pleasure from us? Or was it her job to watch me for signs
-of awareness?"
-
-"Not that. You've been engaged too long for that."
-
-"Well, what is the reason? Is it possible that she could actually be
-in love with me? Me, a member of a lower species! I've asked myself,
-could I fall in love with an orangutan? A fairly bright, good-looking
-orangutan? The answer always comes out _no_."
-
-"Hardly a fair comparison."
-
-Alan glanced over at the mirror that formed the west wall of the
-otherwise plastiglassed-in room. He saw himself haggard, gray in
-the face, with bloodshot pouched eyes, and clad in tweeds that had
-obviously been slept in. "Hardly fair to the ape," he said, grinning a
-little.
-
-"I can't believe Win is one of them," said Brave stubbornly.
-
-"And I can't find any other explanation. If I make sure she is, and if
-we find they're evil, as we think, then I know what's the first thing
-I'll do." He looked his friend in the eyes. "I'll kill her, Brave. I'll
-cut her damned lying throat!"
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Then he stood up. "Enough of that. There are bigger things at stake
-than Win right now. I think we may take it as a truism that you and I
-can't hinder the superman's plans worth a whoop. Nor could we get to
-more than one or two people in authority before we were found out and
-stopped. Lord, the very ones we'd naturally go to are probably mutants
-themselves! So there's just one thing to be done. Enlist the fellows
-we know are all right. There's Don Mariner, for a start. He's plump
-and balding and looks ineffective but he's as smart a lad as we have
-on the Project. Then there's Rob Pope; he was in the hospital last
-month when he cut himself badly on a hot sheet of plastiquartz. He's in
-the plastic chemistry section, but he knows a lot about hypnotism and
-such-like, so he'd be an asset."
-
-"Can we trust him just because he cut himself? He might have faked the
-pain."
-
-"Brave, we've got to trust somebody! All we can do is grasp at little
-indications of true humanity. Let's see. Who else is there?"
-
-"Bill Thihling, the rocketjet man. He was at Oxford with me. Rhodes
-scholar, prince of a guy, and abnormally sensitive--I've seen him throw
-up when a dog was run over. He's no callous mutant."
-
-"Good deal. That's five of us. Any more?"
-
-They thought hard. Mentioning names, discarding them as unsure risks,
-they ran through all their acquaintances. No more potential allies
-could they find till Alan said, "Jim McEldownie!"
-
-"What do we know about Jim?"
-
-"That he's uglier than the Duchess in _Alice_. Look at the mutants
-we've recognized: the welder, a well-set-up Tarzan type; the pilot,
-a clean-cut handsome dog; and Win, a raving belle. Does Jim fit in
-with them? My sainted grandmother, no! And if we convince him of our
-belief, he might put us on TV to broadcast it to the country. _Worlds
-of Portent_ has a huge following, and people believe what they see and
-hear on it. Then afterward, if _they_ get us, we won't have wasted what
-may be the first and last opportunity men have had to publicize the
-presence of the enemy among us."
-
-Brave went to the visiphone. There was an atmosphere of tense disquiet
-in the room now, as though things were about to burst out in violence
-and passion at any second. The Indian talked with Don Mariner and Pope
-and Thihling, who all agreed to come over within the hour; then he
-called McEldownie. Shortly the lanky announcer was looking quizzically
-at him from the screen. "How, Lo." He shuddered. "How low can you reach
-for a gag? What's up?"
-
-"Mac, can you get here right away?"
-
-"Unholy cats--apologies to Unquote--why the rush?"
-
-"Just say we need a good man in a hurry."
-
-The other cocked an eyebrow. "I detect the aroma of butter, salve, and
-the old oil. Okay, I'll take an air taxi. Heat up any spare steak you
-have lying around. I haven't eaten breakfast."
-
-"Naturally," said Brave, and turned off the visiphone. "There," he said
-to Alan, "now all we have to do is convince them."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-It took two hours to convert the four men to their views. Don Mariner,
-because of his own findings, was with them from the first exposition;
-Pope was intrigued but skeptical; Thihling was frankly incredulous; and
-McEldownie was scornful and astonished by turns. At last the fierce
-earnestness of Brave and Alan had its effect, and all of them were on
-their feet, pacing up and down, shouting at one another, smacking their
-fists into their palms and proposing unworkable plans at random.
-
-Alan argued with Jim about the telecast. Finally the lean man said,
-"All right. I'm wacked. We're all wacked. They'll take away my job,
-my license, and my reputation. They'll toss us all in the hatch.
-Maybe we'll be lucky and get a room together. We can sit in a ring
-and make faces at each other for the next fifty years." He shrugged.
-"Nevertheless, we'll do it. We'll do it tonight. If things are coming
-to a head, we've got to step high and swift. I'd scheduled the
-Secretary of State tonight, but he'll have to wait. I'll go down and
-make arrangements. Won't say anything to the sponsors, naturally, or
-the staff. They trust me ... they've done it for the last time, I
-imagine. Well, I've had five good years on TV. Let's finish it in a
-real crackerjack blaze of the well-known glory, gents. Here we go round
-the loony bin."
-
-"You, boy," said Alan fervently, "are okay."
-
-"I'm a living doll," said McEldownie moodily, and left.
-
-Bill Thihling, the rocketjet man, a compact sturdy pocketsized fellow
-about Brave's age--thirty-six or -seven--said, "Now let's have some
-action. Let's _do_ something."
-
-"First thing we do is swallow some antigues," said Brave, going into
-the kitchen for the bottle. Antigues were anti-fatigue tablets, on
-which a man could keep fresh and intelligent for seventy-two hours
-without sleep. "I have an idea that sleep will be a myth and a vagrant
-memory for us before too long."
-
-"And then," said Don Mariner, "we catch one of the supermen and beat
-some truth out of him."
-
-Alan laughed hollowly, reminding himself of a character out of
-_MacBeth_. "Beat it out of him? Torture a being that doesn't feel pain?"
-
-"Kill him, then," urged Rob Pope. "It's simple bloodthirst, but we've
-got to make a beginning. Perhaps it'll make his cousins fret a little.
-Bring 'em into the open."
-
-"We don't even know they can be killed. A thousand-pound 'sword'
-couldn't faze the pilot of that disk. What could _we_ do?"
-
-"We can try! It's no good our arguing back and forth; we haven't any
-real data. The only thing to do is kidnap one of _them_, see what makes
-him tick, and then do our planning."
-
-"I'm for that," said Don. "Which one shall we take?"
-
-"The welder's vanished, and we can't very well torture, or try to
-torture, Win Gilmore. Too rough on Alan. Let's have in the pilot of
-the wrecked disk."
-
-"He wouldn't come here if we called him: too suspicious a request,"
-said Alan. "Kidnapping's the thing."
-
-"Pope and I can handle that," said Thihling. "Anyone know his name?"
-
-"Erin Grady," said Don Mariner. "Judas, isn't that a handle!"
-
-Rob Pope, a big rangy man built in the style of a woodsrunner out of
-early America, said, "Ho for Erin Grady, then. And if he tries any of
-his damn superman's hypnosis, I'll fling it in his own teeth. I know a
-trick or two in that line myself."
-
-The two of them left the house. Brave began to mix three stiff
-highballs, and Don Mariner took out a harmonica and played Bach,
-with only a few sour notes per bar. Alan picked up the cat Unquote
-and fondled her. But his thoughts were grim. All he could see was a
-beautiful girl who he longed to hold in his arms. A beautiful girl with
-a cigarette burn on her arm. A girl who felt no pain. Win....
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER VI
-
-
-They brought in Erin Grady, dressed in brown civilian clothes and
-wearing an expression of curiosity on his lean well-proportioned face
-and in eyes that were accustomed to peering into measureless deeps of
-the sky. "How'd you get him?" asked Brave.
-
-"Lied like a trooper," said Pope, and the pilot turned half-angry,
-half-amused blue eyes on him.
-
-Brave gestured to a straight-backed chair. "Please sit there, Mr.
-Grady." The pilot did so without question. "Forgive this wire," Brave
-went on, looping the heavy coils around the man's chest and arms, "but
-we don't think rope would hold you."
-
-Then the pilot spoke. "Kept telling myself for years that scientists
-are all cracked," he said philosophically. "Guess this proves it."
-
-"Bill," said the Indian to Thihling, "go out and patrol the house. Let
-us know if anybody approaches--anybody at all."
-
-The rocketjet man left them. Brave put Grady's hands flat on the arms
-of the chair and lashed them down at wrist and knuckles. Then he stood
-back, Alan and Don and Rob a little behind him, and he said gravely,
-"Erin Grady, you smashed up a disk yesterday. But you weren't hurt."
-
-"I was lucky."
-
-"You sat in the regular pilot's chair as it hit?"
-
-"Sure, I--" then his eyes narrowed and he shut his mouth.
-
-"Too late," said Brave grimly. "You gave yourself away. You aren't so
-clever as you're supposed to be."
-
-"Whaddaya mean?"
-
-"For a superman, you're too slow on the trigger. We got into that disk
-before they clamped a security ring around it. We saw what happened to
-the chair. No human could have missed being sliced down the brisket by
-that juggernaut that came through the control board."
-
-"You clever, clever little bastards," said Grady venomously. "You'll
-be dealt with." For the first time he seemed angered at the wire that
-held him. He threw his weight against it, but it held firm. He glared
-at each of them, and Rob Pope said, "He's trying hypnotism; watch
-yourselves."
-
-Mariner chuckled. "He can't affect me, I'm too fat. The thought waves
-get lost."
-
-Brave did not even feel the tentative vibrations of the pilot's mind,
-but he glanced at Alan and saw that his friend was sweating. "You okay,
-guru?" he asked anxiously.
-
-"He's talking to me." Alan's face cleared. "But I'm not going under. I
-believe your treatment did the trick, Brave."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The pilot relaxed and deliberately spat on the rug. Brave reached out
-an arm like a tree trunk and slapped the tanned cheek, so the head
-rocked sideways. "We aren't going to be gentle with you, pal," said
-Don. "Face that. We aren't playing for marbles."
-
-Grady did not speak. Brave took eight strips of light wood, narrow
-and about two inches long, from his pocket. Kneeling, he fitted them
-neatly under the pilot's well-manicured and rather long nails. The
-man flipped them out with a convulsive motion of the fingers; Brave
-impassively brought his enormous fist down like a hammer on the back of
-the fellow's right hand. Grady shrieked.
-
-"Do that again and I'll break the other one," said Brave.
-
-"You red-skinned bastard!" howled Grady, "you did bust it up."
-
-"I meant to. I wanted to see if you'd be quick enough this time to
-simulate pain."
-
-Had Alan not known better, he would have sworn the pilot was actually
-suffering. "What are you talking about? Why in blue hell shouldn't I
-feel pain?"
-
-"Because you're a mutant, and we know you can't. Why can't you, I
-wonder," muttered Brave in a conversational tone, fitting the splinters
-under the nails again. "Pain is a necessity of life as we know it. It
-warns you of danger. A man could be sliced off up to the waist without
-noticing it, except for pain. Why would the next higher animal to man
-in the scale of evolution have lost the sensation of pain? It doesn't
-make sense."
-
-"That's the first thing you've said that I agree with or understand. It
-doesn't make sense. You're all nuts."
-
-"Come off it," said Alan. "You have given yourself away too often.
-Don't go back to the old innocent routine."
-
-Rob Pope said, "Suppose they can regenerate lost appendages? It isn't
-as mad as it sounds. Suppose that welder slipped away and grew himself
-a new hand? In the case of such a beast, what good would pain be to
-him? It'd be no more than a nuisance. The lack of pain then becomes an
-intelligent development--but only then."
-
-"What devils they must be," said Don, staring at Grady. "Right out of
-the swamps of Hell."
-
-Brave said to the pilot, "Now I'm going to ask you a question. If
-you give me a fair answer I'll take out one of these sticks. If you
-don't, I'll drive it into you--under the nail it hurts about as bad as
-anything can--and light it. It's an old trick and it works wonders as a
-tongue-loosener. Here's the question: are you a mutant of our race, a
-superman?"
-
-Grady looked at him for a moment and then he laughed. He was still
-laughing when Brave hit the stiff wood with a hammer and sank it
-beneath the nail. Then he screamed.
-
-"You do that real well. It sounds as if that hurt you. Keep it up
-if you like; it won't bother me. I'm an Indian, Mr. Grady. I'm as
-sensitive and humane as the next guy until I'm up against somebody who
-fights unfairly, who's mean and cruel and treacherous; then I turn cold
-and I say to myself, how shall I fight this brute? and if torture is
-the best answer, I use it without any qualms. That's sense, it seems
-to me. Well, I hate your uncanny guts, Mr. Grady, and all your crew:
-and there isn't any way to fight you that I can see, so I'll torture
-you. And even if I'm nine-tenths certain that you aren't feeling it,
-still it eases me a little to hear you whoop and yell. And there's that
-tenth of my brain that says maybe you are feeling it. I hope you are. I
-really hope you are."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-He lit the wood: it was synthetic, a very light, hard compound of
-fibers that burnt with a quick flame, as hot as the heart of a coal. It
-reached the nail and curled it back in two shavings of black char: and
-Grady almost shattered his throat with his roaring.
-
-"Brave," said Alan, "stop it! He does feel it!"
-
-"You raving maniacs, certainly I feel it!" Grady cried. "Where'd you
-get the idea I couldn't? You're all mad!"
-
-Don Mariner said calmly, "I'll tell you why he doesn't feel it.
-Just look at his face." They all did so, uncomprehending. "He isn't
-sweating," said Don triumphantly, "and he hasn't even turned pale!"
-
-Grady turned his head toward the engineer. "Oh, you fat little blob of
-stupidity," he said icily. "You stand there with your idiot companions
-and your bright little idea that's about as wrong as wrong can get. Of
-course I'm not sweating. _I haven't any sweat glands. I haven't any
-pores._ And naturally I can't turn pale. This is my natural color.
-I'm no damned human chameleon. But I can feel pain, in spite of your
-driveling theories. What do you want to know?" He spat again. "I won't
-sit here and take this agony for anyone. What the blazes can you do to
-us if you do know? You can't touch us. Go on, ask away."
-
-"Are you mutants?" asked Brave.
-
-"No."
-
-"Are you human?"
-
-"Not as you understand it."
-
-"Where did you come from?"
-
-The pilot sneered. "From the ninth planet of a sun unknown to you," he
-said.
-
-Brave glanced back at Alan. "Think he's lying?"
-
-"I swear I don't know."
-
-"I'm not lying," said Grady. "Want to know how I got out of that disk
-alive? I heard the damn machinery shifting in front of me--oh yes, my
-ears are sharper and my sight's better, and I can move a lot faster
-than you can--so I spread myself out thin against the back of the seat.
-Lucky for me the monster stopped an inch short of my guts. Want to see
-how I did it? Will that convince you?"
-
-Then he did an incredible, a terrible thing to see: he seemed to turn
-almost fluid, and though none of his features changed, they withdrew
-to the sides; his whole body thinned out and flattened along the chair
-back, and he became a caricature of a man run over by a steam roller.
-Then he laughed at them.
-
-Above Rob's gasp and Alan's cry came the shriek of Don Mariner. Then he
-had swept Brave aside and fired a grenade pistol almost in the face of
-the pilot; and Grady died without a sound.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-"No recriminations," said Alan. "You can't see a thing like that and
-hold your hand. If I'd been armed I'd have done it myself."
-
-Brave was running his hands over the exposed flesh of the dead pilot.
-"This is weird stuff," he said. "It isn't human--well, that's obvious.
-It feels vaguely like gutta-percha. It's swelling up slowly. No, by
-glory, it's going back into shape again. It's becoming humanoid again."
-He looked up. "Notice how that word springs to the mind? Humanoid. He
-wasn't human, he told the truth about that. He wasn't even superhuman.
-He was alien."
-
-Don Mariner, still shaking, said, "I'm sorry I shot him. I just went
-out of my head at that stunt he pulled. Never been so scared in my
-life. I sure fouled up our chances of learning how and whom to fight."
-
-"'What can you do to us if you do know? You can't touch us.'" That
-was Rob Pope musing aloud. "What did he mean by that? That they're so
-powerful it doesn't matter now if we know about them?"
-
-"You could put any interpretation on it," said Alan.
-
-"Before we theorize any more," said Bill Thihling from the door,
-"you'd better know there's an air taxi headed this way. It's a
-Manhattan job and I thought it might be McEldownie again, but you never
-know. So what do we do with the corpse you birds so casually created?"
-
-Brave said promptly, "The garbage disposal unit. It'll take care of him
-in thirty seconds--and very appropriate too." He hoisted the body of
-the pilot out of the chair, after cutting the wires. As he carried it
-off to the kitchen and the hidden well that was the disposal unit, Alan
-opened a camouflaged wall cupboard and took out the all-vac. Switching
-it on, he ran its round nozzle over the gouts and stains of blood on
-the rug, the walls, and the chair. It sucked them into itself like an
-anteater inhaling a hill of ants, leaving no trace of discoloration.
-Whipping it back into its nook, and tossing the long pieces of wire in
-after it, he slammed the door and turned round.
-
-"That's that. We're clean. If it's Mac, we tell him the truth;
-otherwise Grady was never here. Right?"
-
-Bill opened the door. McEldownie was just coming up the walk.
-
-"Cheers, gang. The eminent statesman is put off. We're set for tonight.
-What crimes have you been committing?"
-
-"Oh, kidnapping and murder," said Alan. The announcer dropped to the
-couch.
-
-"You're jesting, I trust?"
-
-"In a gnat's eye," said Mariner. "You're just thirty seconds too
-late to see the corpse." He told Jim briefly what they had done.
-The bony man did not say anything for a few moments, and then,
-"Jee-blinking-rusalem! You caught one and pumped him and slew him out
-o' hand, all in the time it took me to fly to the studio and back. What
-a bunch of thugs. The Black Hand could have taken lessons from you." He
-leaned forward as Brave came in. "Well, you seem to have got precious
-little out of him before young Donald here got peeved, but let's
-coordinate it and see what we have."
-
-"One, he could do miraculous things with his physical structure," said
-the Indian. "It's the first wholly sure thing we've learned since we
-saw the welder burn off his hand without flinching."
-
-"Two," put in Alan, "he said his kind aren't mutants, but aliens from
-another system. It may be true. Lord knows. We have only his word."
-
-"Three, he claimed to feel pain, and if he was faking, he was a class
-A actor," said Rob Pope. "I'll tell you why: I was pretty sensitive to
-his brain waves, even when he wasn't broadcasting at us. Once I thought
-I caught a plea for help to someone unnamed. And every time Brave hurt
-him, I felt that he was actually suffering."
-
-"I felt it too," agreed Alan.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Brave, getting out bottles of Scotch and rye, said, "In the minute I
-had to examine his skin and flesh, I found he wasn't lying about his
-being without pores. The skin was perfectly smooth. It felt rather
-like a kind of rubber, though not so much so as to seem inhuman to
-a casual touch. And his body assumed the human shape after death,
-so it would appear to be the natural form of the beasts." He passed
-one bottle to Rob and the other to Mac. The six allies drank deeply.
-Through two bottles they discussed the enemy; coming at last to a
-sort of half-conclusion, that there were extraterrestrials who could
-change their shapes within limits, and there were others, either from
-the same strange world or existing as a mutation of Earthmen, who
-were impervious to pain. The aliens, Alan and his crew decided, were
-susceptible to it. The near-tangible thought waves from the tormented
-pilot had been too agonized to deny.
-
-It was then a little past four in the afternoon.
-
-"A bit more than three hours before we need to leave for the station,"
-said Thihling, "if we take one of the colony's air taxis. What say we
-relax and loaf and forget for part of those three hours?"
-
-Alan got up and went sprawling at full length on the deep-napped rug.
-"I'm for that. Let's loosen up. Loll around. My God, I'm as strung up
-as Captain Kidd."
-
-"I thought you fell down on purpose," said Rob. "But if you're capable
-of turning phrases like that, I guess you're just too drunk to stand."
-
-Unquote found Alan and sat down with an air of modest ownership in the
-small of his back. Brave got out more bottles. "We ought to be drinking
-to things," he said. "There should be witty toasts and pledges to fair
-maidens. Bumpers should be drained to the memory of gay college days
-and friends long gone."
-
-He passed the rye to McEldownie, who said, "We ought to be sucking this
-booze out of old ivy-covered pewter mugs, then, instead of giving each
-other our loathsome diseases. More collegiate, y'know."
-
-The Indian took a healthy gulp of bourbon. He sighed appreciatively
-and flipped the bottle through the air and Bill caught it and had it
-uncorked and upended in the same motion, dexterous as a conjurer. "Ah,"
-he said, choking and spluttering, "smooth!" He passed it to Alan, who
-nearly upset Unquote in reaching for it; the cat dug her claws into the
-rough fabric of his coat, glared at the back of his neck, and spoke
-sharply and at some length concerning the irreverence of certain men.
-
-"Puss, simmer down," said Jim. "Your master drinketh."
-
-"Now there's a bad word in its context," said Alan gravely. "You know
-nothing about cats, Mac, m'boy. Nobody was ever a cat's master. If
-Napoleon kept a cat, it bullied him."
-
-"Napoleon, my illiterate friend, had an intense fear of cats. So
-obviously he didn't own one."
-
-"If Tamerlane had a cat, it bullied him. If Genghis Khan--"
-
-"You've made your point. Send the alky on its way," said Don.
-
-"Brave, pass around the old ivy-covered pewter mugs," Alan said
-grandly, rolling over and precipitating a furious Unquote to the rug.
-"While you're at it, get some old ivy-covered crackers and cheese."
-
-"I could stomach an old ivy-covered potato chip," murmured Rob Pope.
-
-"Let's have a little masculine nostalgia," said Bill. "Let's remember
-Oxford, Brave."
-
-Four strictly-American-college men hooted him down.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Brave brought glasses and a tray of snacks, and, thoughtfully, a dish
-of milk for Unquote. "Here comes old ivy-covered Brave now," said Rob.
-The big Indian emptied a fifth of rye into the glasses. Jim picked up
-the empty bottle, regarded it like Hamlet with the skull of Yorick,
-and said, "Blessed blue ruin, how I love thee. Omar had nothing on
-McEldownie."
-
-"McEldownie the Tentmaker," said Alan. "It has a fine classic ring to
-it."
-
-"I pawned my fine classic ring last week. I was hungry."
-
-"God," said Bill. "Classic of '58, I presume?"
-
-They finished the rye and after serious consultation opened a bottle
-of Scotch. McEldownie began to talk with a broad Highland accent
-and it seemed very funny to everyone. Unquote stalked away to her
-playbox in disgust. Brave sat bolt upright, looking like a statue of
-copper-colored granite. They all got drunk.
-
-The announcer stood up and juggled three glasses, then four, and the
-others applauded, for he was good at it. "For all your awkward look,
-Mac," said Alan, "you're a slilful--skilful old bird."
-
-"When I juggled before the crowned heads of Europe, they went mad over
-me. I often wished I could juggle in front of whole people," he added
-wistfully. "Never did. Just heads."
-
-"Oh, brother," said a woman's voice. They all turned round and looked
-toward the door. Win Gilmore stood there, shaking her beautiful blued
-coiffure. "This place looks like a shebeen. And you're all fried to the
-eyeballs. Ought to be ashamed of yourselves." She dropped her lavender
-cloak: she was wearing an amethyst-colored halter and a pleated nylon
-skirt of syenite blue, which clung to her legs as she walked toward
-them. Alan could see the play of muscles in her thighs where the soft
-skirt touched them. Some of the liquor sank away from his brain and he
-remembered that this woman was not human. He gritted his teeth and
-turned his head away to look at Brave. The Indian was also sobered. He
-said, "Well, hello," uncertainly.
-
-"It makes me mad," said Win, pouring herself a shot of rum. "All this
-attractive male virility going to waste. No women to appreciate it.
-There ought to be wenches flung picturesquely here and there."
-
-"You paint a sordid picture, madame," said Rob. "We've been chastely
-reliving old school days, knotting old school ties, and reciting the
-Boy Scout oath to each other. It's uplifting. It's--"
-
-"Sophomoric?"
-
-"Who is this dazzling fluff?" McEldownie asked.
-
-"Win Gilmore."
-
-The tall man opened his green eyes wide. "Oho? The super-jade!"
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Win regarded him without affection. "Who the hell are you, and what the
-hell do you mean by that crack?"
-
-"Your secret is known, harridan," said Jim. He stared into her wide
-eyes. "Alan says you can't feel pain. That makes you one of the enemy
-in our book. If it weren't for your perfection of form, I myself
-would take pleasure in booting you in the left nostril." He let his
-gaze wander over her well-stocked amethyst halter. "Alan," he said
-critically, "far be it from ol' Mac to question your judgment, but I
-doubt this lassie's inhumanity. I really feel we've made another error.
-If she isn't human, then I'm a rhinoceros."
-
-"You look more like a starving stork," Win cried furiously. "Alan, who
-is this wretch?"
-
-"Peace, gal, I'm standing up for you, no matter what it sounds like.
-Doc, you can't convince me that a gal with a balcony that'd grace the
-Palace Theatre isn't human. I think you're wrong."
-
-"Of course she's good looking. She's a step above us in the
-evolutionary scale, isn't she?" snarled Alan. "Or else she's from some
-goddam planet out in the other galaxies." Win looked at him blankly.
-
-"I think you've jumped to a conclusion when you should have crawled to
-it." McEldownie took a step forward and caught Win's eyes with his own.
-"I believe you can feel pain," he said.
-
-"Good Lord, of course I can feel--ouch!" She gave a little scream. The
-announcer had pinched her sharply on the naked flesh just below her
-halter. Because she had been looking into his eyes, she could not have
-seen the casual motion of his hand.
-
-"There!" said Jim, standing back and bowing with a juggler's flourish.
-"What about that, gentlemen?"
-
-Brave spoke. "Win, he's drunk, so don't hold it against him. But
-he's done you--and us--a great service." Raising his voice above her
-passionate cursing, he went on. "You know our mutant theory. It's been
-changed today but the pain angle still holds good to a degree. Well,
-Alan burnt you accidentally with his Rocketeer cigarette last night,
-and you didn't feel it; so we have been thinking that you must be one
-of them. Evidently you're not. You have our apologies all round."
-
-She stood silent, taking it in; then she said, "Great heavens above!"
-and turned on Alan, who was looking sheepish and incredibly relieved.
-"You grunt-brain! Don't you, with all your knowledge, realize that
-there are times in a woman's life--yes, and in a man's--when she or he
-can be burned, whipped, and kicked in the funny bone, without realizing
-it?"
-
-Alan made a gesture of incomprehension.
-
-"You moron, what were we doing when you burned me?"
-
-Brave reached into the encyclopedia of his mind and said, "She's
-right, governor. It was first explained in 1952. When one is
-sexually stimulated, the increase in blood pressure, the intensified
-heart-beats, and the rigidity of all the muscles sometimes combine to
-make one totally unaware of pain. The author of the theory was a Dr.
-Linsey, or Kinsey, or something like that." He pursed his lips. "I
-don't suggest that you were necking, chieftain, but if you were, that
-explains it, and we were damned unjust to Win."
-
-"If you weren't necking, Doc," said Jim, "you're dead, or ought to be."
-
-Win tossed down her rum. "I'll have more to say on the subject later,"
-she declared to Alan. "For now, I'm too mad to risk staying here and
-breaking up the furniture. I found that burn on my arm after you left.
-By then it hurt like hell." She strode over and picked up her cloak.
-"Good night, or afternoon, or whatever the everlastingly blasted time
-it is," she said between her teeth, and closed the door gently behind
-her which made a more effective exit than if she had slammed it and
-made the walls quiver.
-
-"Bless my soul," said Jim mildly, reaching for his glass. "We have
-transformed a superwoman into a livid Fury. What a day!"
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER VII
-
-
-Brave passed around anticohol tablets, those excellent remedies for
-drunkenness developed in Japan in 1957; and they all ate them and drank
-water and looked at one another and grinned. "That was quite a bat
-while it lasted," said Don.
-
-McEldownie rested his head on the couch and closed his eyes.
-Occasionally the tablets would put one to sleep for a short time. Rob
-Pope said, "We've had our reaction against all the shocks, and it was a
-luxury I think we deserved; but now we've got to plot and plan."
-
-"The telecast is our first big hope. Let's put our heads together."
-
-"And produce a sickening thud," said Jim, opening his eyes. "Okay we'll
-see what we can do. Or more likely," he said thoughtfully, "what we
-can't do."
-
-The door opened and Win came in, a look of contrition on her face.
-They all gaped at her. "Well," she said to Alan, "it's like this. I'm
-sorry. I blew my cork. I was insulted. I'm not any more. I know the
-strain you've been under and I realize it was an awful coincidence to
-happen just when it did. I forgive you and your tame flamingo with the
-wandering hands. Can I help?"
-
-"Take a pew," said Alan relieved beyond words. "We're talking out the
-telecast. You can help, sweetheart."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-When it was time to leave--they had decided to take Rob Pope's station
-wagon rather than an air taxi--Brave locked up the house. Both he and
-Alan felt they might not be able to come back to it, at least not
-soon. Just before he shut the front door, a brown blur shot past him
-and landed on Alan's chest. Unquote clung there, claws entangled in
-his jacket, great blue eyes begging with false humility to be taken
-along. "I nearly forgot you, kitten," he said. He boosted her up to his
-shoulder and the eight of them got into the station wagon, which Brave
-then wheeled about and sent roaring toward Manhattan.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Just before eight they entered the studio. McEldownie said, "How about
-you lads waiting in the reception room? If anybody comes raging into
-the place for our hides, you can cause 'em a certain amount of trouble
-before they get to Doc and me."
-
-Brave looked reluctant, then agreed. The others trooped out. Jim said,
-"You can watch it on the monitor," and locked the door behind them.
-"There's an extra precaution. Now for it, Doc. Cross your fingers."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The lights came on.
-
-Alan talked well. Just at first, while McEldownie was giving him a
-purposely vague introduction, he felt rather light-headed; this passed
-quickly. He had the feeling that something had tried to insert itself
-into his thoughts. Whatever it was, it failed, he said thankfully. Mac
-finished his introduction. Alan began to speak.
-
-He gave it to his audience straight and fast, without preamble, lest an
-engineer or official with access to the controls should be a mutant or
-alien.
-
-"_Listen to me. There are enemies among us, enemies from another world,
-or perhaps sports of our own species. We are all in deadly danger._"
-
-He spoke coolly and sanely. There could be no mistaking his competence
-to talk on the subject, he thought, I sound like an old statesman. And
-if that's vanity, let it be.
-
-After sketching in the incidents which had led to his suspicions, he
-told of the disks' unsuspected power, and of the pilot who could expand
-his body inhumanly in any direction. He did not mention Grady's death.
-He stressed the need for immediate action. "What that action must be, I
-don't presume to suggest. There are many men more qualified to tell you
-that than I am. But here are ideas...."
-
-Seek them out, he said. Try to recall incidents, accidents, that made
-no sense to you. Try to remember instances of lack of pain. I'm sorry I
-can't give you more identifying traits, but that's all we know so far.
-Except the lack of pores, the heightened senses.
-
-There will be trouble. I feel sure there will be bloodshed. Don't
-quail, don't despair. We'll beat them. We're essentially a decent race
-and from all indications they are devious, malevolent, and evil.
-
-And we outnumber them, that's pretty certain.
-
-Don't flinch. Don't hesitate. Seek them out. Capture them, kill them,
-but _find them_!
-
-He was really a little proud of himself as the telecast ended. He even
-felt light-headed again, and ascribed it to pride.
-
-McEldownie clapped him on the shoulder. "Well, boy, if this mess pans
-out okay, you and I can take our pick of soft government posts, or
-retire on the bounty of a grateful world. Let's see what the gang
-thought of it."
-
-He unlocked the door and opened it. Brave stood on the threshold, his
-dark face bewildered; the others crowded behind him, worried, tense.
-"Alan," said his friend, "what went wrong?"
-
-Alan's belly shrank back and sweat broke out on his palms. "What do you
-mean, Brave? Didn't it go on the air?"
-
-"It must have," Jim said. "I was watching a monitor."
-
-"It went on, all right." Brave sighed. He looked as beaten as an Indian
-can ever look. "I should have guessed they wouldn't let you do it.
-They'd get to you some way, both of you."
-
-"For the love of God, Brave, what are you talking about?" cried Alan.
-The other rested his hands on the scientist's shoulders.
-
-"Son," he said quietly, "you talked about fuel. The two of you talked
-for fifteen minutes about the newest developments in rocket fuel. You
-never said a damned word about the enemy race!"
-
-
-
-
-                             CHAPTER VIII
-
-
-"So now we're all but helpless," said Bill Thihling, wiping his mouth.
-They had just finished three enormous platters of curried chicken at
-an exotic Bengali restaurant on 49th Street. "Where there's life, et
-cetera, but so long as the aliens control our very tongues, what can we
-do? Echo answers, Nothing."
-
-"I blame myself for it," growled Brave. "I should have gone on the
-telecast; or Rob, maybe. We can withstand hypnotism, know how to fight
-it, while Alan had already had one bad dose of it. It must have been
-easy to recapture his mind."
-
-"What about me?" objected Jim. "I've never been mesmerized before. I
-didn't feel a thing, either, or hear voices, nor nothin'."
-
-"Are you sure you haven't been hypnotized? Alan didn't know it till I
-found out under mechanical-visual trance."
-
-"Gad, maybe I have been, then," murmured Jim uncertainly.
-
-"_They_ got to Alan and Mac," said Rob. "Had you or I tried it, Brave,
-they'd have done something more violent; blasted the station off the
-air, killed us. They undoubtedly have their eyes on us, and we can't
-get in touch with humanity again. We're on an island surrounded by a
-sea of cynical, sneering demons; they won't let us do anything but make
-despairing futile signals to the mainland."
-
-"Brother," said Win, "are we getting poetical in our sorrow! Listen,
-I have a feeling we oughtn't to go back to Project Star. They must be
-grouping to wipe us out by now. They know us, they're not dumb; they'll
-be after us." She bent over the table and all the others did likewise.
-"Suppose we go up to Central Park? Sit out there all night, loll on
-the sward and talk. We won't be hunted there. And perhaps by morning
-some solution will have occurred to us."
-
-"That's the best thought any of us have had," said Rob Pope. "Fresh
-night air! I know this washed and filtered stuff is the best atmosphere
-for you, but I crave some real old-fashioned germ-polluted air."
-
-So they took the station wagon up to the park, and walked onto the
-grass that was already spangled with moisture under the moon; on a
-knoll surrounded by trees they flung down blankets from the trunk of
-the car, and stretched out and tasted the night that was brought to
-them on a softly brisk little breeze; and Alan said, "Mother Nature!
-You can't beat the old girl. She makes you see sparks of light where
-you know there's nothing but the dark."
-
-They lay there and talked and napped and drank and relaxed through the
-night, till dawn rose gray and turned to blue and the sun came up. For
-no reason but their physical comfortableness, they all felt good. Even
-Unquote was gay and frisked like a kitten. Their fantastic trouble
-seemed smaller and further away than it had ever been....
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-When the first great disk came down on the city, skimming the treetops
-of Central Park, heading straight for the Times Square district at
-that height and rising only when it seemed certain that it would smash
-itself against one or another of the buildings of Manhattan, none of
-them could speak for surprise. They stared up, amazed, as the whirling
-silver surface caught their eyes with its glancing beams of sun
-reflection; and it was incredible to them that the disk should be there
-in the bright morning sky.
-
-It vanished over Brooklyn, tilting on edge and shooting straight up
-into emptiness.
-
-"Well, if this isn't the feeble-minded pinnacle of idiocy," exclaimed
-Don Mariner. "A test flight over the city itself! What drooling
-sub-human intellect ordered that one?"
-
-In the distance a muted babbling arose, as the city caught its breath
-and began to talk excitedly about the flying saucer, the first (barring
-some fugitive glimpses in the '40s and '50s which had never been
-properly verified) that New York had seen.
-
-Then the disk came back. It led a wobbling formation, two sister ships
-just behind it and then a gap and three more, all going at a hawk-fast
-clip and slanting down out of the eastern sky to zoom over the park
-once more in an uncanny, wavering, noiseless line. Jim McEldownie
-leaped to his feet, his narrow face, with the green eyes staring out,
-a twisted mask of panic terror. Alan was shaken, as much by the lean
-man's fear as by the sight of the disks. "Mac, Mac," he shouted, "what
-is it?" For he could see nothing to dread that was worse than the thing
-they had been living with for the past hours.
-
-Jim stared after the disappearing ships. "They aren't ours," he said,
-his voice gurgling and choking with the fear. "_They aren't ours!_"
-
-"Of course they are," snapped Brave. He too had risen, and stood
-like an age-old oak beside the quavering poplar that was McEldownie.
-"Whose would they be?" he reasoned. "Do you suppose any country could
-manufacture those things without our men on Albertus spying them out?"
-
-"I tell you they aren't our ships!" cried Jim, taking the Indian by the
-lapels. "I know our designs up and down, and those aren't ours! Tell
-him, Mariner."
-
-"He's right," said Don, white as paper. "The superstructure's all
-wrong. And they're bigger, I think, than ours."
-
-"Don't forget that Homo superior, or his cousins from the space lanes,
-may have changed the plans without letting you in on it," said Bill
-Thihling bitterly. "Great God! Nobody but a callous, egotistical mutant
-or alien, unacquainted with pain and insensitive to our safety, would
-fly a squadron of virtually untested disks over a crowded city. This is
-misanthropy with a vengeance!"
-
-Mac groaned. "You bumbling dinkey engines," he said, "can't you get
-off that one track? I tell you these things don't come from Project
-Star--they don't even come from Earth!"
-
-Win spoke for the first time. She was still seated, the cat cradled
-against her breast. "I think you're right," she said. "I feel it;
-you're right. Those aren't human beings in those ships. They're from
-black space somewhere. They know we are reaching out for the stars and
-they've come to stop us." Her tone was level and wholly undramatic.
-"We'd be a menace, rampaging through the systems. They won't let us
-begin. Their spies here, Grady and his ilk, have called them down to
-stop us."
-
-Brave and Alan frowned at each other. Each asked the other wordlessly,
-Where are these two getting such wild conceptions? What do they
-see--what do they _know_, that we don't?
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The saucers returned, in a different formation this time, like a V
-of geese. Geese made of glittering blue-silver metal, round geese
-traveling at eight hundred miles an hour. They roared overhead:
-soundlessly, yes, but with so swift and terrible a movement that one
-could call it nothing but a silent roar. In that instant Alan, staring
-upward, felt his convictions dissolve. Mac was right. He did not know
-enough about the design of Project Star's disks to say that these
-were different; but he knew suddenly that there was an alien _feel_
-to these things, an aura of irrelation, a stupendous pulsation that
-pervaded the senses and forced the knowledge on him that here was
-nothing terrestrial, nothing human or even superhuman.
-
-Watching them shoot over, he tried weakly to find an analogy, to anchor
-his wits to some concrete remembrance and save them from scattering
-in panic. All he could think of was the night when he, aged six or
-seven, had wakened to know positively and without question that there
-was a ghost in the room with him. Even yet he was sure there had been
-a ghost. And this sense of alienness that came from the flying disks
-was the same as that he had felt in the night, when the invisible ghost
-crouched in a corner and mowed at him. An outsider, said his blood and
-viscera to him, a stranger from the cold hells of unknown space. An
-alien, said the wisdom drawn out of nowhere by primeval instincts lying
-in the murk at the bottom of his soul.
-
-He moved to Brave and put a hand on one of the mighty arms and saw that
-Brave knew it now too. "Grady's kin," said the Indian. No one else
-spoke except Unquote, who gave a bizarre Siamese screech of rage.
-
-Back they came, this time from the direction of Richmond, in a
-strung-out dipping line; and out of the crystal bubble in the belly
-of the leader there fell a shining golden egg, a tiny thing at this
-distance, seen only because the sun caught at it and played along
-its surface. It fell slowly, far too slowly for an Earth-hatched egg;
-Thihling and Mariner automatically judged its descent at six or eight
-feet per second. Either it was full of a light gas, or it had some form
-of anti-gravity mechanism attached to it. Leisurely it dropped toward
-Manhattan.
-
-Then the people began to run.
-
-All the millions who had been taught to act calmly and sanely in an
-emergency lost their heads; they were suddenly so many witless chickens
-who had caught sight of the axe. With the dropping of the golden egg,
-the terror of alien danger had clutched at them all. So they fled.
-There was no place to flee to, but they fled. Into subways and out
-again, insane with the horror of dying underground. Into buildings, to
-know the walls were collapsing on them, to run out once more. And the
-egg fell lazily toward them. Now it had passed the spire of the tallest
-skyscraper.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Up in the park, people were running too. Alan and his group stood
-together and watched them helplessly. "Like field mice from an owl,"
-muttered Rob Pope. They saw a woman dash straight into a tree, carom
-off with a cry and go on. An elderly man came up to them, faltered, put
-a hand to his chest and pitched over at their feet. Bill turned him
-over. He was dead. "Heart attack. Poor devil."
-
-Alan did not know why none of his friends ran. He repeated a random
-line that came into his head: "Stand and fight and see your slain, and
-take the bullet in your brain...."
-
-Or the atomic blast, or the unimaginable projectile from the
-inconceivable weapon.
-
-Then Jim McEldownie yelled, "On your faces, for God's sake!" and Alan
-turned from the city and flung himself down and covered his head with
-his arms.
-
-And the world opened up and a mushroom from Hell sprouted over
-Manhattan, and the buildings rocked and tottered and crashed to earth.
-The sky went black and the great white-yellow cloud, perimetered with
-blood-scarlet, arose against it; the universe shook and shattered
-and then came together and righted itself and sailed on. The Empire
-State was the last of the tall structures to hit ground. Clear at
-the northern tip of Central Park they felt that final smashing, a
-postscript to a letter from Lucifer.
-
-From Fulton Street to 53rd, from the North River to Stuyvesant Town,
-nothing lived. In that terrible instant of fission, caught where ever
-they were, whatever they were doing, working at desks, peering from
-windows, running down deserted alleys or pushing madly against the
-press of maniac crowds on Broadway and Fifth and Madison, score upon
-score of thousands of men and women died; died screaming or weeping
-or fighting for breath, praying to their gods or cursing or dumb with
-dismay.
-
-They died in subways, never having known that the silver ships of the
-enemy were sailing above their great town. They died asleep in their
-hotel rooms, lifting forkfuls of breakfast eggs to their mouths, typing
-words on paper, making love, staring at the sky.
-
-Very few of them wanted to die. Some of them expected to live for many
-years. Some of them did not really expect to die at all. Many of them
-could accept the fact that death would come for every man in the world
-some day ... except themselves; that was incredible and not to be
-thought of at all.
-
-But they all died.
-
-It came so quick, so quick; and even those who believed the golden egg
-to be a bomb never knew when it struck and smashed out at them and
-obliterated them, for the quickness was that of death, the swiftest
-thing that walks the universe.
-
-Beyond the huge area of instant perfect destruction, many others
-died. Tall buildings collapsed on them, or they fell into the splits
-and great fissures that opened in the earth; they were hurled to the
-pavements and their brains spilled out, or the noise and the fearful
-rush of air got into their heads and tore their cerebra to tatters.
-Some of them could not bear the appalling horror of the bomb, and
-slit their own throats or put guns into their mouths and pulled the
-triggers. Some went so totally mad that their life forces disintegrated
-and they died where they stood, of madness and panic and the terrible
-knowledge of their impotence.
-
-Men lived, too: lived blind and wounded and lamed and torn asunder,
-lived without minds and minds strangely contorted and warped. No one
-who had been in Manhattan that day survived without scars of body and
-brain left by the death of the city.
-
-The golden egg had hatched its chick of death at eight-fifty-three of a
-Friday morning in June of 1970.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-After a while, when the hurricane had dropped away and the earth had
-stilled its shaking, Alan sat up and looked toward the heart of the
-city. The disks were gone--and so were the people and the buildings,
-the life and the fine aspiring skyline of Manhattan. Nothing was left
-but a leveled, broken, sawtoothed waste, over which hovered the direful
-mushroom cloud.
-
-Grotesquely, irrelevantly, all his mind could focus on in that moment
-of near-insanity was his cat. "Where's Unquote?" he asked harshly.
-"Where's little Unquote?"
-
-The cat spoke furiously above his head. She had flown into a tree
-at the blast. He coaxed her down as the others stood and brushed
-themselves off and stared at the atomic cloud. At last she bounced
-from a crotch of the tree into his arms. She was shivering with terror.
-
-Bill said urgently, his voice no more than a croak, "Let's make tracks.
-Lord knows what scuds of radioactivity will be blowing our way soon, if
-that wind didn't bring 'em already."
-
-"All those people," whispered Win. Now the screams and howls of
-survivors could be heard where they stood. "All those poor people."
-
-"The wagon's liable to be stolen if we don't get to it," said Don.
-"Come on. Please."
-
-There were still men and women running through the park, some shouting
-with fear, some white and sick and mute. A couple passed them, their
-eyes round and horrified, the man's coat torn and the girl's green
-dress ripped off one shoulder. They must have fallen, or been caught in
-a fight. There were two men brawling over by the reservoir.
-
-There seemed to be no balance or reason left in mankind, save for
-the seven on the knoll, who clung to their sanity only by conscious
-physical effort.
-
-Now they ran for the station wagon, to find its windows broken, the
-upholstery slashed by a knife, the windshield shattered. "Berserk,"
-said Rob Pope. "They've all gone berserk."
-
-"It does that to me, too," said Don. "I want to sink my teeth into
-something and worry it. I can't touch the enemy and so I want to take
-it out on something I _can_ touch." He shrugged. "If you were lost in
-Hell, and found a car, and couldn't start it because you didn't have
-the key, wouldn't you get sore enough to wreck it? How are the tires?"
-
-Brave said, "Okay. He was too mad to think of them." He knocked the
-remaining shards of windshield from the frame and got in behind the
-wheel. They all piled in. He started it and it rolled off northward.
-
-McEldownie said, "No, Brave. Go down towards town. I want to get to a
-radio or TV station. We've got to try to establish contact with the
-rest of the world. This may have happened in other cities too." He
-leaned forward and put his hand on Brave's shoulder. "I don't think
-we need worry about radioactivity," he said. "These are beings from
-another planet, obviously much farther advanced than we are. Their
-weapons, though producing an apparently atomic cloud, would probably be
-without post-explosion danger. They'd have eliminated the radioactive
-dust because they'd want to land and take over at once, or at least
-quite soon. Let's take a chance. Let's go down toward Times Square."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Brave glanced back at him. The argument was specious, as a basis for
-action it wouldn't hold water. But Alan said, "I think so too, Brave.
-It sounds logical." Win and Don agreed. Brave looked at them. He was
-about to argue and then the fatalism of his ancient race seemed to grip
-him. They ought to get to a radio station, true; and if the city were
-radioactive, what did it matter in the long run? They were only seven
-people and a cat; ranged against them on one hand stood the ranks of
-shadowy supermen and aliens, on the other the unknown disk-people. The
-world was in chaos. He could not dredge up enough ego to believe that
-he and Alan and the others would be very important in the ordering
-of that chaos. He shucked off his science and his civilized thought
-processes and he said, "All right. We'll go down." Stoically, the very
-incarnation of his thrice-great grandfather Pony Sees-the-Sky, he
-wheeled the car around and sent it hurtling toward Times Square.
-
-Broadway was a shambles. As far up as Columbus Circle all the windows
-were gone, the light standards had been curved by the blast, autos were
-overturned and leaking gas and oil. There were cracks in the paving.
-Occasional men and women staggered along northward, and bodies lay
-in the gutters, across the thresholds. The wreckage of an air taxi
-half-blocked the way, corpses spilt halfway out of its doors.
-
-"How many weapons have we?" asked Mac suddenly. "There's a sporting
-goods store. We ought to load up on guns. There's no telling what
-maniacs we'll be meeting; and if there's an occupation, we might have
-to be guerrillas." He pulled back his coat. "I have a grenade pistol,
-for a start."
-
-Brave had one, and an automatic for longer range work. Don Mariner
-carried another grenade pistol. Win had her derringer-sized automatic
-in her purse. That was all they had. Brave pulled to the curb. He and
-Alan got out.
-
-The store had lost its windows. Brave stepped through onto the display
-ledge and dropped inside. A voice in the gloom said, "Stand right
-there, mister." The proprietor, white and tense, leaned over his
-counter and held a .45 revolver steadily, its muzzle looking at the
-Indian's chest. "One more step and you join them." Brave saw there were
-bodies on the floor.
-
-"I'm no looter, man," he said sharply. "I'll buy guns."
-
-The fellow considered that. "By God, you sound sane. And you look
-like a good man. Everybody's crazy out there. You come back and pick
-yourself out something. We're going to need sane men with guns in this
-mess."
-
-"Men are fighting each other," nodded Brave. "The blast drove them
-crazy."
-
-"Can't tell me anything about that. One of those bodies was my brother.
-I couldn't let even my brother loose in this hell with a gun, not when
-he'd gone out of his head. Tried to kill me for a gun." The face was
-drawn and cold. "How about a .30-'06?" he asked. "Stop a grizzly if
-you're good enough. Heavy though."
-
-"I wasn't looking for an air rifle," said Brave. Alan came in through
-the window. "He's with me. We have five others outside."
-
-"You can have guns for 'em all. Sorry I don't have grenade pistols or
-flamers. This is a sporting goods store." He handed a .30-'06 across
-the counter. "Take this. I'll give you all the ammo I have for it. You
-put it to good use when the Russkis come."
-
-"It wasn't Russians," said Alan, "It was flying saucers."
-
-"Russkis in flying saucers. They'll be coming on the ground pretty
-soon. Didn't I see 'em come in in Germany in the big war? Take these
-boxes. Enough ammo to stand a good siege here. Save it all you can.
-We're going to be at war a long, long, time."
-
-Shortly they came out into the morning air, carrying armloads of heavy
-rifles, four revolvers, and what seemed half a ton of ammunition.
-
-The owner had at first refused payment, then taken only the wholesale
-cost. At the last minute he had given each of them a long hunting
-knife. "You were in Argentina, eh? You can use these. Give 'em
-what-for, boys." They had offered to take him with them. "I stick,"
-he'd said. "This is my store."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-They looked up and down the street. There were more people now, and the
-worst faction was evident--the looters, the sly lurkers who stole from
-the dead and exhausted and mad, the bestial men on the prowl for women,
-the ones who had gone lunatic and were bent on senseless destruction. A
-policeman, his uniform bloody, came toward them as they handed the guns
-into the station wagon; suddenly he whipped out his pistol and fired. A
-teen-aged boy came flopping and shrieking out of a store window, where
-he had been filling his pockets with candy and jacknives and junk.
-The cop came abreast of them, his eyes lit with insane anger. Brave
-reached out and hit him on the jaw and he fell. "There was no call to
-shoot that kid," said Brave. He picked up the pistol and threw it into
-a drain. From up and down Broadway came scattered yells and sounds of
-gunfire.
-
-They got into the wagon and Brave drove down to 57th Street. There was
-a mob of maddened men who fought each other and ran howling toward
-the car when they saw it. "Turn right," said Jim urgently. "There's a
-little independent radio station about two blocks away. With luck we
-can get in--and out to the rest of the country. Unless that damned bomb
-smashed the place." They drew quickly away from the mob, which went
-back to fighting among themselves.
-
-They found the station apparently safe; many of the smaller buildings
-here had been protected by the larger from the force of the blast. With
-Don left to guard the wagon and guns, they ran into the place. The
-elevators had stopped. The men, with Win, trotted up four flights, to
-find a door marked with radio call letters. "This is it."
-
-At the opening of the door three men turned swiftly from their work,
-grenade pistols and flamers--flame-throwing handguns--in their fists.
-"Hold it," said the lanky Jim urgently.
-
-"Bless us all," said one of the men, lowering his weapon, "it's
-McEldownie! What the hell are you doing in a _radio_ station, Mac?"
-
-"I'll eat crow for it, but right now I want to get out on the air," he
-said. "Can I?"
-
-"God knows. We've sweat blood over the thing. Our own generators are
-okay, but the city's power is off, and the antennae got mashed up some.
-Couple of boys up on the roof now, worrying at it. Do you suppose we're
-loony for staying here?" he asked. Obviously he valued McEldownie's
-opinion. Alan realized for the first time what a reputation the
-scarecrow-like announcer had.
-
-"No. There seems to be no danger of radioactivity; either the bomb
-burst in air, or it's a new kind. We've got to get communication
-established as soon as possible. You're almost the only sane people
-we've seen."
-
-"Most of our gang went out to try and get home. We're all bachelors
-and we figured it was up to us to stay." He ran a hand through his
-hair. "Who is it, Mac? Who hit us?"
-
-"Martians," said Win.
-
-"Venusians," said Rob Pope.
-
-"Who are all these guys, Mac?"
-
-"Scientists from Project Star." The three radio men opened their eyes
-respectfully. "Pounce onto it, will you!" roared Mac. "We've got to get
-out. We've got to learn what's happened to the world!"
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER IX
-
-
-"Hi, Mac," said a weary voice. "This is Johnny Gibbons, in Frisco. No,
-they haven't been here, but they've hit half the big cities on the
-continent. Just heard that Mexico City's flat as a--my brother and his
-wife were in Mexico City. Vacation. Get away from it all."
-
-"Cheers, Mac," said a deep sad voice. "Roscoe Toddy here. They bombed
-Chicago. Funny thing: some professors at Northwestern University here
-in Evanston turned their detectors on Chicago and couldn't get a whiff
-of radioactivity. Must be a new kind of A-bomb, or X-bomb, or GD-bomb
-or something."
-
-"Mac," babbled a voice that verged on screaming lunacy, "Mac, you ought
-to see it. There's nothing left at all, not a thing, not a house or a
-tree, not a person in the whole place, nothing but waste, waste, Jesus,
-death all over, I tell you the universe has gone mad!" They never
-learned where this voice came from, or what city was gone.
-
-"Well, McEldownie, old horse," said a voice, trained to unctuousness
-but laced now with intolerable sorrow and strain, "our station was
-partly wrecked but we finally got this thing in operating condition.
-Pittsburgh is gone, but we're out in East Liberty and didn't take
-too much of the blast. It was one bomb, Mac, one lousy big H-bomb or
-whichever letter they put on the biggest boom they can make. Mac, I'm
-beat to my socks." The voice coughed tightly. "I saw the Cathedral of
-Learning go. My God, Mac, what a mighty toppling that was! It folded
-in and over and you thought it'd make a hole five miles deep, but it's
-lying there now, just a heap of busted stone, and I went to school
-there. Dear old Pittsburgh, Alma Mater."
-
-A dark voice that spoke from far away said, "It was the maddest thing
-I ever saw. This golden oval thing fell about as fast as a feather,
-and everybody went out of their heads. We all started to run like
-mice. Cars were jamming Cahuenga and Sunset and Vine, and people were
-scuttling.... I don't know why I wasn't killed. I just don't know."
-
-"Yes," said a haunted and somber voice, "we ran. We all poured out into
-the streets and ran, and fell down and got stepped on and rose and ran
-and sweated and had heart attacks and died and lost our breath and
-panted and gulped and ran and ran and ran. Fort Worth is a shambles, a
-mucked-up mess."
-
-"No," said a faintly insulted voice, "it wasn't a large bomb, not large
-at all. It didn't flatten more than four blocks. I was half a mile off
-when it hit but all I got was a skinned knee from falling. Hang it, why
-a large bomb on Los Angeles and only a little one on Toronto?"
-
-"Seattle got it," said a smooth southern voice, "and your town, Mac,
-and L.A., and there isn't a peep out of Moscow but who can tell if
-they're playing possum? London is smashed; we're getting scraps from
-the hinterlands of England but London's had it. Paris is on the air.
-Johnny Jill, poor devil, is crying over there now, wanting to know if
-Hoboken is okay. We haven't seen the saucers yet in N'Orleans. So ol'
-Manhattan got the guts torn out of her? Rough, boy, darned rough. We're
-sorry."
-
-"Austin's gone, gone, I tell you it's all all ALL GONE!" shrieked a
-slow-dying voice, and that was all it could say.
-
-"Listen to this, Mac," urged a girl's voice, sounding strange and
-ethereal after the men had spoken so long. "We don't get how they
-did it, but those disks have thrown a force screen around every army
-encampment and station in the country, perhaps in the world. At Fort
-Bragg they mustered and marched out into an invisible wall. They
-can't penetrate it. It didn't hurt them, it just stopped them cold.
-Someplace in Pennsylvania the National Guard got into trucks and lit
-out for New York and ran into one of the walls that piled them up in
-heaps. It looks like we're all alone. Nobody's coming to help. We're
-all alone."
-
-"This is London calling," said a cultured, horrified voice. "Hello,
-America. Can you hear me? We're not sure were getting across the
-Atlantic. We haven't heard anything from you yet. Are you there? Can't
-you send us some word? This is the B.B.C. calling. London is gone.
-Bombed out completely. This is actually--actually Greenwich. Are you
-there? Is all America gone? Oh, this is ghastly, this is the end. Is it
-the end of the whole world? Are you there?"
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER X
-
-
-Don Mariner, leaning out of the window of the station wagon as the band
-emerged, said urgently, "One of them landed. It landed just over there
-a way, I don't think more than half a mile. There aren't any others in
-sight. This one floated down not half a minute ago."
-
-"What did I say?" exclaimed McEldownie. "They eliminated radioactive
-dust, so they could come right in after a bombing. It's logical."
-
-"We'll go on foot," said Brave, "though I hate to abandon the car. But
-we'll have to go on foot over this rubble, and I take it we _are_ going
-to the thing?"
-
-"We sure are," said Rob Pope.
-
-"Wait a minute. One of us ought to go with Win in the wagon and try
-to make it back to Project Star. She shouldn't be in this ruckus,"
-protested Alan.
-
-"You think she'd be better off out there with Lord knows how many
-mutants or supermen or aliens?" asked Bill Thihling. "You're not
-thinking straight, boy. We've got to stick together. Separate now and
-we may never see each other again."
-
-"Besides, you can't get rid of me," said Win finally.
-
-Don passed out the heavy sporting rifles, one to each of the men. They
-each had a sidearm, Brave two, and he and Alan had the wicked knives of
-the shopkeeper. Win had her little automatic for use in emergencies.
-Dividing the ammunition, and anchoring Unquote firmly to Alan's left
-shoulder with lengths of twine fashioned into harness and leash, they
-set off across the street; passed between buildings and across another
-street and yet another; and came to the area of near-total destruction.
-Here the going was precarious and tricky. Brave stared around them.
-
-"Looks like Pergamino when we'd finished with it," he said to his
-friend.
-
-A queer dead hush followed them about, muffling their footsteps and
-depressing them as though they crept through a graveyard. "That's
-what it is," said Alan half-aloud. "The biggest graveyard in the
-world." His hands ached to feel the throat of an enemy, to tear out
-the jugular, to slay and slay. His world had been struck a fantastic,
-unaccountable blow, and it was dead around him and he and his friends
-seemed the only living humans from pole to pole.
-
-They passed on, drifting quietly between broken crags that two
-hours before had been office buildings, hearing the echo of their
-light foot-falls tossed back by windowless walls and heaps of brick
-and stone. One passage was clogged breast-high with corpses. They
-went around it, climbing over powdery granite piles that had been a
-theater's facade.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Then there was the broad plain of ruin, a gargantuan bowl, smoothed
-down from its rim to the center, which was some twenty feet below
-the original level of the ground. Everything had been smashed here,
-buildings and trees and everything that stood upright; in the middle
-of the frightful desolated bowl rested one of the great silver disks,
-tilted like a gyroscope and balanced on its extreme edge, as though it
-leaned at its forty-five-degree angle against an invisible wall.
-
-"That settles it," said Don. "Our ships can't do that stunt. Look,
-it balances like that and the bubble opened up makes an incline to
-the ground; fit steps inside the bubble and you have a perfect way of
-getting in and out. Our system is much clumsier. How the devil do they
-make it balance, though?"
-
-"They've set up effective force screens around our armies," said Jim.
-"If they can do that, certainly they can utilize small editions of the
-screen mechanisms to hold up their saucers."
-
-"Or maybe it's a principle of gyroscopics," added Bill.
-
-"Well," said Brave, "we're going down there. At least I am. Anybody
-wants to stay here, Lord knows I won't blame him."
-
-"We're all going."
-
-"Okay. First Alan and Bill and I will walk out. If we aren't shot by
-the time we've gone twenty yards, you four come on. We can't plan
-anything till we get a look at the brutes in the disk; but as soon as
-we do, I'll shout out our next move. Is that all right with everyone?
-Or does one of you want to take charge?"
-
-"You're the chief, Brave," said Rob. "Maybe we outrank you on Project
-Star, but in action I'd back you against all of us. I've heard about
-you in Argentina."
-
-"I didn't mean to assume command on the strength of my war record,"
-said Brave seriously. "I simply figured I had the biggest voice and no
-matter what happens you'll probably be able to hear me. Okay, here we
-go. Guns at the ready."
-
-They walked out onto the flattened waste that had been New York.
-
-Nothing happened.
-
-When they had been walking for eternity and six days longer, as Alan
-judged it, figures appeared below the huge disk, coming down the
-inclined steps or plane in the crystal bubble, grouping on the ground.
-The Earthmen were then just over an eighth of a mile from the ship.
-
-The aliens looked human; it was difficult to see differences in their
-structure and that of a man; and they wore clothing that glistened
-as they moved in the sun. They were setting up three small pieces of
-machinery beneath the disk. Alan could not guess what they might be.
-
-Then the men in the lead, Brave and Bill and Alan, ran into an unseen
-wall that knocked them staggering from the force of their own motion.
-The aliens had set up a screen around their ship.
-
-"Here's where I yell out the plan, I guess," said Brave ruefully. "The
-plan is to make faces, men. That seems to be the only thing we can do
-of a warlike nature. God, a force wall! We might have known."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Alan, who had sat down abruptly when he struck it, jarring the
-tied-down cat on his shoulder and causing her to sink her claws through
-the coat into his skin with anger, stood up and felt the air before his
-face.
-
-"Amazing. Touch this thing, you fellows. It feels like a sheet of hard
-rubber. It's perfectly tangible. I can almost feel a grain in the
-thing."
-
-"What scientists they must be!" exclaimed Rob Pope. "This--hey!" he
-shouted, startled. "Here's an opening!"
-
-Then he had walked on across the bowl. Bill Thihling, nearest him,
-tried to follow. He found there was no hole there. He skinned his nose
-on the force screen.
-
-"Rob's crazy," he said. "He thinks there ain't no force wall there. So
-he walks through it. Only a loon could do it."
-
-Pope came back. "I heard that. What the hell...? It was here a minute
-ago."
-
-"Can't you get back?"
-
-"No! The wall's solid again. By Jupiter, they let me come through; they
-wanted to see one of us at a time. All right, I'll play their game." He
-wheeled and marched straight toward the disk.
-
-"Oh, Rob, come back!" screamed Win. "They'll do something awful to you!"
-
-"Too late now," said Alan, taking her arm. "They've caught him in their
-cage like a rabbit."
-
-"A fanged rabbit, anyway," said Don. "He's got his guns."
-
-Rob walked under the silver ship, into its shadow. The aliens clustered
-about him. Beyond the wall of force, the men and the girl held their
-breath tensely.
-
-After a minute or two, "Why," said Jim McEldownie, "they haven't even
-taken away his rifle!"
-
-Shortly Rob turned his face toward them and waved. It was an
-encouraging motion. Whatever was happening did not seem hostile.
-
-"And yet," said Alan to himself, "these are the devils who smashed
-Manhattan. They _are_ enemies." Even here, on the sloped plain that
-had been a roaring city, it was hard to realize it. He shook himself.
-Simply because they had not chopped Rob Pope down immediately, he had
-begun to slack off his hatred of them. He was growing tired and stupid.
-He reached into his pocket and took out an antigue tablet and swallowed
-it.
-
-Don Mariner, leaning heavily against the invisible wall, was abruptly
-shot forward to fall on his belly; the wall had vanished where he
-stood. Jim reached the spot an instant later, but the screen was whole.
-Don sat up, and his plump face was pale, but his grin was without panic.
-
-"The Mariners have landed," he said, "and will shortly have the
-situation well in hand. Hold tight." He went down to the disk and the
-aliens.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The waiting grew terrible in its intensity; Bill Thihling took his
-pulse and found it like a machine gun, even Brave sweated with anxiety,
-his dark fine face taut and frowning.
-
-He was, as it happened, the next to be admitted to the silver ship's
-area. Walking through the hole that opened to him, he thrust an arm
-back through it, trying to hold the force away till Alan had had time
-to follow him. Roughly, with a sensation of faint burning, the screen
-shut down and flung his arm to his side. It was like a sentient animal
-leaping from the sky to stand between him and his friend. After a
-moment's hesitation he went to the disk.
-
-Mac came to Alan's side. "Listen, Doc," he said urgently. "Get your
-girl over here. The three of us are going through this thing together
-when our time comes."
-
-"How?" And why, thought Alan. Is he scared to walk down over the plain
-alone? Why Win and me? How about Bill?
-
-"I'll show you. Get up against the wall. I'll idle beside you and Win
-can stand on the other side. When it opens in front of one of us, the
-other two will jump like crickets and we'll go in in lock step. Okay?"
-
-"They may blast us if we disregard their obvious wishes." He gestured
-at the titanic bowl. "They can undoubtedly do it if we peeve them," he
-said lightly.
-
-"We'll take that chance. I have an idea."
-
-Alan shrugged. What they did seemed unimportant, the activities of a
-handful of fleas under a microscope.
-
-The screen, as it happened, dissolved before Alan. More properly, he
-thought, it went up, like a sliding panel under his light-touching
-fingers. "Here it is," he said.
-
-Instantly Mac had stepped behind him, one hand clutching out for Win's
-arm, the other around Alan's waist. Alan felt himself propelled through
-the doorway as if by a giant's shove; and the three of them stood
-inside, the girl looking rather bewildered.
-
-"My Lord," she said to Mac, "you can move like an express train when
-you want to."
-
-"Now listen," said the announcer. "When we get down there, be on your
-toes. Follow my lead. I know what I'm going to do. I'm--we're going to
-take over that ship."
-
-"Jim, you're out of your head."
-
-"No, I'm not. I know exactly what I'm going to do. We came here to
-smack these demons down, didn't we? Well, we will. Just be on your
-bloody toes, that's all."
-
-Then they walked down the gentle slope until they had reached the
-shadow of the alien disk. They stopped a few feet from the watching
-outlanders. The captive Unquote writhed forward as far as she could on
-Alan's shoulder and spat at them.
-
-They were a strange, a fantastic group, and yet they seemed to be human
-beings. Their bodies, much of which was unclothed, were built on the
-human scale; they averaged about six feet in height and their chest
-and limbs were developed to the same degree as a normally husky man's.
-Their foreheads were uniformly high. Their eyes varied in color, only
-one having irises of an unearthly hue, a kind of vivid violet. Only in
-the arrangement of their features did they differ perceptibly from the
-men of Terra: the cheeks were broader, the noses flatter, the eyes more
-widely spaced, and the bone structure much less apparent. Somewhere
-Alan had seen a man, lately, whose vague memory reminded him of these
-fellows. Where...?
-
-Erin Grady!
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-When the pilot had spread himself out, so to speak, against the back of
-the chair, his face had widened, the features had drawn sideways and
-perceptibly flattened, so that he had resembled these saucermen. Was
-this what he had meant when he said, "You can't touch us. What could
-you do anyway?" This holocaust, this ghastly obliterating of New York
-and Los Angeles and fifty more great cities?
-
-Grady had been a spy for them, then; a watcher, landed perhaps from one
-of the disks on a dark night....
-
-He shook himself. That's romantic hogwash, he said. Everyone on Project
-Star had a thorough checking-over, and his history from birth to the
-present was recorded in the files. That meant that Grady had been born
-here, in the United States.
-
-Unless the keepers of the files were alien too, in which case a
-falsified record would be a simple matter to arrange.
-
-But if he had been left here in comparatively recent times, say even
-four or five years ago, Alan went on, how did he learn our language,
-our backgrounds, our habits and customs and all the rest of it, so
-well? Are these creatures then so much farther advanced than we, that
-they can take on the perfect counterfeit of humanity in so short a
-time? He could not quite believe it. Grady had been too human.
-
-Damn it all, _these_ men looked too human!
-
-He shrugged mentally, and began to examine their clothing. What there
-was of it was metallic, or of cloth that seemed metallic: each one
-wore a wide belt of silver filigree, reaching up to the ribs and down
-just past the groin; beneath this a material that resembled cloth of
-gold, very soft and fine, was wound about the loins. They all wore
-sandals, of varying colors, the straps of which appeared to be made
-of tinted copper or a like metal. The rest of their outfits were
-evidently according to the individual's own taste; some wore arm bands
-of glittering orange or yellow gold, some had circlets of shining gray
-argent bound about their hair, which in all cases was blond and cut
-about shoulder length. The over-all effect was splendidly barbaric, and
-about as far as Alan could imagine from the usual picture of visitors
-from space.
-
-"They ought to have broadswords swinging at their thighs," he murmured
-to Win. "Or at least be toting horn cups full of mead."
-
-"Aren't they something!" she said, and then, "are these the devils who
-bombed all our world a few hours back? These big good-looking boys? I
-can't believe it!"
-
-One of them bent over a square steel-like box and turned a dial; they
-heard Bill Thihling shout in the distance, "Hey, the wall's gone!" and
-saw him come running toward them.
-
-"They're the ones," said Alan, and his mind, occupied till now with the
-romantic appearance of the invaders, became filled with hate.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Instantly he felt something probing into his thoughts. It was, although
-he did not remember it, very like his first experience of hypnosis
-during the telecast. All he knew now, however, was that someone was
-leafing through his emotions and ideas as if they had been a large
-plainly-printed book. It made him furious. He might have done anything,
-shouted angrily or struck out at the nearest alien in an access of
-physical passion; but it was then that Jim McEldownie made his move.
-
-"Okay," the lanky man roared, "strike now! Blast 'em! Get into the
-ship!" He lifted his rifle and fired it from the hip, and one of the
-outlanders spun round and fell, a great bloody cavern torn in his chest.
-
-Alan did not question Jim's methods, though two minutes before he
-would have; he blew the head off the nearest blond saucerman and shot
-over the falling body at another. Brave fired too, and Don Mariner; the
-others were caught by surprise and only stared wide-eyed.
-
-An alien drew a silver tube from the back of his filigreed silver
-girdle and from its tiny muzzle a gout of scarlet flame flew at Alan.
-He felt nothing, thanked his luck that it had missed, and shot the
-man through the head. Then he was racing after McEldownie toward the
-crystal bubble's inclined plane.
-
-Up they went into the disk, he and Mac in the lead, Unquote shrieking
-murder on his shoulder. Behind them he could hear the others pounding
-along, crying out questions or vague threats or battle-cries.
-
-The ship was much larger than those of Project Star, and more complex
-within; the ramp reached to a corridor with three doors. Mac was
-dashing for the farthest one; Alan threw his weight against the middle
-door. As it burst open his first glimpse was of four outlanders rising,
-open-mouthed, from chairs set before a bank of control panels.
-
-Afterwards he could recall only the thing which flashed through his
-mind in that first instant of viewing them: that in the old West it had
-been proved time and again that one good man with a repeating rifle
-was better than four good men with revolvers. Alan proved it now, not
-against guns, but against the small silver tubes that spat flame
-balls. The room was a shambles in eight seconds, and Alan turned for
-more conquest, to stumble over the body of a man in the corridor.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-It was Don Mariner, and he had no face. There was a raw bloody burn
-from ear to ear, from brow to throat. He had probably died very
-quickly. Alan straightened and gripped his gun's stock till the
-fingertips splayed out white and flat against it. Old Don, he said,
-old plump Don. Not so old, he said, probably no more than forty-two
-or -three, but you always thought of him affectionately as Old Don. Now
-who will there be to exclaim "By Judas!" when things get tough?
-
-"Brave!" he bawled out. "Brave, are you safe?" He was hideously afraid
-for his great friend. When the copper face peered out of the third
-door, he was ill with relief.
-
-"Had a little dust-up in here," said the Indian. "These boys wanted to
-brawl. My God," he said, coming out, "Don's had it."
-
-"Yes, he's had it."
-
-"He was a good man. Did we lose anyone else? I think the saucermen are
-all through."
-
-Jim McEldownie joined them. "The big control room's up front there. We
-killed seven of 'em there. Rob took a leg burn and he'll walk with a
-limp for a while. No more casualties."
-
-"Those tubes of theirs are frightful. If we hadn't taken them so by
-surprise--"
-
-"They were too careless," said Brave. "Doesn't make sense."
-
-Rob Pope hobbled out, one arm over Bill's shoulders. "I think I know
-why," he said. "When they got me down here, they searched through my
-mind. I could feel it plain as a physical touch. They found hate there,
-I'll be bound, but it was for the bombing of the city, not a congenital
-hatred of outsiders. They found the same in Bill's mind. It relaxed
-them and put them off guard."
-
-"How do you figure that?" asked Win.
-
-"They were looking for an ingrained enmity toward themselves. It
-astonished them when they didn't find it. They're tremendously
-telepathic, and I'll wager hypnotic too. I think they do much of their
-own communicating by thought waves; at least I didn't hear them speak
-once.
-
-"When they discovered why I was angry, they were stunned. I mean they
-were shocked blue. You see, they made a mistake. They realized that as
-soon as they'd pried into my mind. They thought we were down here just
-waiting to kill them as soon as they landed, and naturally they had to
-cripple us before they dared do it. Then they found out their mistake.
-They had to kill someone, I'm not sure who, but the bombing of our
-cities could have been avoided had they known what we were like."
-
-"Wait a minute," objected Brave. "Rob, how do you know all this?"
-
-Pope looked surprised. "Why, they told me. They had just begun to
-explain it, hardly got more than a few ideas across, when you and
-Mac and Alan busted loose. If I'd known what you were planning I'd
-have stopped you. But now we have made a mistake as bad in its way as
-theirs."
-
-"They told you all this?" asked Win blankly.
-
-"Yes. They talked in my mind. Not in English, but it came out that
-way. It was--pictures, I suppose is the nearest thing to it. Emotions
-and both abstract and concrete ideas can be transmitted by a good
-telepathist; and these boys were the best." He shook his head. "It's
-too bad. God knows where it will all end now."
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER XI
-
-
-They carried the body of Don Mariner down the ramp and laid it on the
-rock-hard earth of the desolate bowl.
-
-Mac, standing next to Alan, said in his ear, "Come aboard again. I want
-to show you something."
-
-Alan turned obediently, although why he should follow Mac's
-commands--for it had been a command--he wasn't sure; and Win screamed,
-a high hysterical keening that set Unquote to ululating too. The men
-all cried out. "What's wrong? What is it?"
-
-"Look at your head!" she said to Alan, pointing. Even in that somber
-moment he could not help laughing.
-
-"How?" he said. "I'm not built that way."
-
-"Oh, God," said Bill Thihling. "Alan, you took an awful blast in the
-ear. Why didn't you say something about it?"
-
-"What are you talking about?" he said irritably. "I wasn't hit." He put
-a hand up to his right ear. Brave said, "Look out, boss, you'll hurt
-it. It's a bad one."
-
-He fingered the ear. The tip and lobe, and part of the convolutions
-of the outer ear, felt like bits of steak which had been burnt in a
-searing flame; he looked at his fingers, amazed, and saw black flakes
-of skin and powdery, charcoal-like stuff. That must be the flesh,
-cooked and carbonized, almost incinerated in the astounding heat of the
-little fireball. "They did hit me," he said stupidly, staring at his
-fingers. "I never felt it."
-
-Brave, examining the ear without touching it, said, "You'll lose most
-of that ear, son. It's--_you never felt it_?"
-
-"I can't feel it now. I mean, I have sensation in it, I can feel my
-fingers when they touch it, but it doesn't hurt."
-
-Then, just as comprehension of what he was saying began to dawn on him,
-he heard Mac say again, very urgently, "Get aboard the ship. Jump!" And
-he jumped.
-
-He hared it up the ramp, Unquote writhing on his shoulder, and leaped
-in through the first door he came to; Mac yelled, "No, this one!" It
-was the front control room, the largest of the three; he was out and
-into it in a flash, to find Mac already sitting in a chair before the
-central panels. "Sit down there," snapped the lanky man, indicating the
-next seat. Alan did, half-wondering why, half-knowing that he must. The
-great viewplates above the controls, on which was mirrored the earth
-and sky on every side of the disk, blinked on; Mac cursed angrily.
-
-"Why couldn't you have followed me at once? Now the fools have got in."
-He was out of the chair and bolting the door of the room before Alan
-could open his mouth. Then he was back, touching levers and buttons,
-adjusting dials. One of the viewplates showed the crystal bubble
-closing; then another came on and they could see the center room. Brave
-and Win and the others were there, talking earnestly, although their
-voices could not be heard. Suddenly the door to that room swung shut.
-Brave hurled his tremendous bulk at it, but it was shut fast. Mac
-chuckled.
-
-"Okay, you damned impetuous idiots. Sit down if you don't want to be
-smeared all over the floor." Evidently they could hear him. After a
-moment's argument they took seats. Mac pushed over a long lever, like
-the joystick of a monoplane, and with a very slight rocking motion the
-saucer rose into the air.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Mac glanced at Alan. "Buckle that strap around your chest, pal. You'll
-need it for the turns."
-
-"How in the name of everything sane did you learn to operate a disk,
-Jim?" he asked. Just then he was less surprised at the man's cavalier
-treatment of his friends than at the enormity of this, that McEldownie
-could fly an alien disk.
-
-"Nothing to it," said the other. "I was a pilot originally." He looked
-over again. "_That was five hundred years ago_," he said, almost
-casually. "Buckle the strap, hang it."
-
-Alan did so in a daze. He knew that he was not in complete control of
-himself, and yet he did not know why. There were a hundred questions
-rocketing in his mind and they confused him so that obedience to
-McEldownie's commands came automatically. He wondered if he were under
-hypnotic influence again; but he did not feel that he was.
-
-"Oh, you are, chum," said Mac without looking at him. "Not altogether,
-you understand; Brave's counter-hypnosis played hell with my plans for
-you. Cuss the big so-and-so. I should have killed him when he moved out
-of the lamps and out of any possible control. But I wanted him too. I
-liked him."
-
-"Who are you?" breathed Alan....
-
-The cold voice spoke in his mind, shattering his questions before they
-were asked, shaking what was left of his confidence, forcing him to
-quail mentally and physically.
-
-_Oh, stubborn slave, didn't you know? Didn't you know?_
-
-_God, God, perhaps I did._
-
-_I am you and you are me..._
-
-McEldownie laughed. It was not a cold laugh, not sinister or dramatic.
-It was a perfectly healthy expression of mirth. "Alan, I'm sorry.
-I'm really sorry, and you won't ever believe that, but it's true. It
-surprises me. Living among you for all these years has mellowed ol'
-Mac, I guess. I find myself thinking of you as friends, when I used to
-regard you as dogs: faithful without knowing it, helpful, indispensable
-in many cases, but hardly more than good dogs." He paused a moment,
-then went on. "I'm your voice, of course. There's no trick to it when
-you know how. A matter of hypnosis plus the lights plus psychology,
-plus whatever the power in us is that makes our minds different from
-yours. I'm the voice. I wasn't going to admit it, but my plans have
-changed for you."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-He banked the disk around over desolate Manhattan and said, "Takes
-a while to get the reflexes working again. I haven't sat behind the
-controls since we left home. Your five-times-great grandfather wasn't a
-twinkle in his old man's eye when we left home."
-
-Alan could not speak. He was remembering things he had not been able to
-remember, the voice and what it had told him, the night that it called
-him from bed to come to the terrible lamps, and--
-
-"Yes, it was me, it was all me, Alan. I was the voice in your head at
-the telecast, I called you in the night; I worked the lights in the
-shed on Project Star. There are plenty of us out there, but I wanted
-you for my own personal sidekick. You're smart and a good scientist,
-and you'll make a good lieutenant when we go home." The words made no
-sense and yet Alan seemed to catch a glimmering of the understanding
-that was to come.
-
-He said, "I guess I ought to exclaim, 'You're mad!' but I know you're
-not. You can pilot this thing and you can move faster than a cheetah,
-and everything's gone mad this past week and I want to know why. Don't
-lie to me, Mac. For the love of God, don't lie to me. One more wrong
-theory implanted in my skull and I'll blow my stack for good."
-
-"I won't lie. I'm all through lying, to you at any rate. The others
-can't hear me at the moment, but I suppose I may as well tune them in
-too." His homely face, with its great prow of a nose and the half-shut
-green eyes, looked a little sad. "I'm afraid they're all going to die,
-Alan. Except Win, that is. You see, the speeds at which I'm going to
-fly this disk will kill a human being. On the turns, if I get into
-dogfights, the 'G' forces will be terrific. You and Win can stand 'em,
-because you've been conditioned. Brave and Rob and Bill will be smashed
-to jelly under the 'G' impact. I'm sorry. I like Brave and I admire
-Rob's intelligence. I'd like to save them. But they got aboard because
-you were slow, and now they're done for. I can't land and put 'em out.
-Time is precious. I have to maneuver this ship until I know I can do
-stunts with her like the ones I did at home. A long time ago, Alan." He
-grinned ruefully. "A long time even to me."
-
-"What do you mean, I was slow getting aboard?" Alan fastened on this
-small facet of the affair, frightened of finding out too much of the
-truth at once.
-
-"Man, you can move as fast as I if you try. You've had three long
-treatments under the lamps. Your energies are stepped up, if you learn
-to use them correctly, your reflexes are as fast as those of the cat on
-your shoulder, and you're almost deathless compared to your friends.
-Might as well start there," he mused. "They can hear us in the other
-room." On the viewplate, Win and Brave nodded. Jim clicked shut a
-switch. "Now they can see us. Okay, you four, I'm going to do some
-explaining. I can hear you now, but if you start to interrupt I'll
-switch you off."
-
-Brave said, "Alan, are you all right?"
-
-"He's ginger-peachy," said Mac. "In fact he'll be all right two
-hundred years from now.
-
-"There's no use in explaining the rays to you; it would take hours
-and you would scarcely grasp the principle even then. I'll tell you
-what they do. They lengthen your life span--my own is about a thousand
-years, but Alan's will be nearer four hundred, for I caught him late.
-Generations of my ancestors were exposed to them, too; it affects the
-genes eventually and we're born long-lived. They quicken your reflexes
-through a process of strengthening the nerves and certain cells of
-the brain. They also affect the portions of the brain which send and
-receive telepathic stimuli. After one treatment it's easy to control a
-man over a long distance.
-
-"The effect of the rays on the muscles is unique. They become almost
-rubbery, not loose, you understand, but capable of stretching and
-flexing in directions that look uncanny to a non-initiate. That's how
-poor Grady escaped being sliced down the middle when he rammed up his
-ship. He drew all his muscles to the sides and flattened out like a
-plaster on the chair. You couldn't do that; your skeletons are thicker
-and more immovable than ours. I'd show you how I can ooze out sideways
-and make my ribs about as level as a picket fence--but I'm afraid you
-wouldn't like the sight. It must be pretty gruesome to an Earthman."
-
-"Were the rays in the TV lights?" asked Bill Thihling.
-
-"That's right. I've caught plenty of fish that way, including President
-Blose of the U.S. of A. and nine-tenths of his cabinet. A lot of your
-scientists have become unwitting puppets through being seen on _Worlds
-of Portent_. Alan got two treatments there and one on Project Star.
-Win got her first in the gym of the colony and two more in that shed."
-He smiled guilelessly. "You were right about her, of course, in a
-way I mean; for she can't feel pain. I caught her mind just before I
-pinched her--and very pleasant it was, too, my dear, even if I meant it
-impersonally--and told her to simulate pain. She was under my control
-every second of that time. When she left, I pretended to go to sleep,
-and called her back. I had a feeling I'd need her around. Glad I did.
-She and Alan are all the fighting forces I have at the moment."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Alan brushed over much of what he wanted to know, to ask, "Can you feel
-pain, Mac?"
-
-"Yes, I can. A man can't give up pain. It's too valuable. We put an
-added ingredient into the rays we used on you people of Terra, to
-eliminate pain."
-
-"Why?"
-
-"I'll get to that. The welder, of course, was a man who had been
-treated. One of our boys got rid of him in a vat of molten metal.
-Couldn't have an unfinished experiment walking around loose. He
-slipped up when he failed to simulate pain. Sometimes we get 'em like
-that, too dumb to do the right things even under complete hypnosis.
-Win was a different case. She didn't know she'd been burnt by that
-cigarette. If she'd seen it, she'd have yipped. She was conditioned to
-do it, even to think she felt pain. If you'd known you'd been grazed by
-that fireball, Alan, you'd not only have roared, you'd have _thought_
-you felt it."
-
-"Why don't I think so now?"
-
-"It's too late for verisimilitude. Your subconscious knows that. It
-shrugs its teensy-weensy shoulders and forgets it."
-
-"Who shot at Alan after the welder incident?" asked Brave. His face was
-cold and malignant.
-
-"One of Getty's men."
-
-"Doc Pomposity?"
-
-"That's right. Getty's not fully under control. His unconscious
-and natural wish not to kill Alan made him send a man out with an
-automatic, rather than a grenade pistol. But he was conditioned enough
-to feel that Alan was dangerous to us and he at least made a stab at
-assassination. Then before he could do it again, we got to him and told
-him we were going to 'convert' you."
-
-All this while he had been twisting and turning the disk, making
-practice runs and dives; the control rooms, floated within the hull and
-leveling off no matter what direction the great saucer took, vibrated
-slightly and continuously. It was almost like being in the hold of a
-sailing ship.
-
-Rob said, "I suppose the curious construction of your skeletons and
-muscular development helps you stand the motion and the acceleration of
-the disks?"
-
-"That's right. Alan and Win can stand it too, especially since they
-feel no pain of any sort. But we haven't started going fast yet--I
-haven't put it above five hundred. When we hit four thousand--that's
-m.p.h.--I'm afraid you'll die, you three." Mac scowled unhappily. "I
-hope you realize I don't want to kill you? In the first place, I'd like
-to have you on my side, because we both have a score to settle with the
-hounds who bombed your cities. I would have slain Mariner out of hand,
-slain him as he slew poor Grady when he had him helpless in that chair,
-but luckily he got his in the fight. I haven't any wish to kill off
-my potential army, but the speed of an air battle will do it. And I'm
-going to be in some fights before long."
-
-Alan, strapped to his chair, was leaning over toward Mac as far as he
-could. Now he said, "By heaven, you haven't any pores in your skin!"
-
-"I was afraid you'd notice that before. I had a fantastic yarn cooked
-up to explain it. That's right, pal; Grady and me, and all the rest of
-us, haven't any sweat glands or pores or tear ducts. There are other
-little differences too, but they don't cut any ice. The differences
-notwithstanding, we are human. Not strictly Earthtype human, I suppose,
-but human nonetheless." He brooded over his controls, as the disk
-roared silently through the sky. "I like you all, too, dammit. I don't
-want to kill you. I think I'll chance another ten minutes and set you
-down.
-
-"I must be getting soft in my middle age," he added with a wry smile.
-"Chancing the loss of a world for three idiot kids. Oh, well. What the
-hell. A gallant gesture will maybe pay off in the long run."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-There were several minor points that nagged at Alan; he wanted them out
-of the way before someone asked the one big question of McEldownie.
-"Why didn't Grady control my mind when we tied him up? Why couldn't he
-save himself?"
-
-"Erin Grady was a weak link. We have 'em in our chain, you know.
-We're not supermen. He was weak at hypnosis and he couldn't bear
-pain. I think he was a throwback to the days when we were altogether
-Earth-style humanity. He called to me, though, and I shot back; but I
-came just too late. That fool Mariner!" With a savage twist he angled
-the disk toward earth. Then he laughed. "I've wanted to compliment
-you on your mutant theory, Alan. It was ingenious as the devil and
-it accounted for everything you'd seen up to that time. If we could
-regenerate parts, the loss of pain wouldn't matter, and we could take
-the treatment we're giving you and lose pain and be thankful. But
-'tain't so. We're not supermen. It's only our robots--pardon me, our
-earthly henchmen--who are immune to pain. Coming in contact with both
-kinds of 'aliens' must have confused the very living dickens out of
-you."
-
-"Hold on," said Alan. "I just thought of something. If I'm immune to
-pain, why did I feel it so excruciatingly when Brave hit me, when he
-wanted to put me under hypnosis? Tell me that was all in my mind...!"
-
-"It wasn't. You didn't get the pain-destroying rays till your third
-treatment, on last night's telecast."
-
-"Oh. That's it." He patted Unquote on the head; she was getting
-restless. Then it became obvious why. "Damn," said Alan, "now I'll have
-to have this suit cleaned. Puss, couldn't you have waited a little
-longer?"
-
-Bill asked, "What about the saucers? I mean, they suddenly turned out
-to be better than anyone suspected. Why?"
-
-McEldownie looked grim. "Some saucers had been sighted that we knew
-weren't ours. We had a few left from the days when we first came to
-Earth, in the late 1700s; we used to fly 'em occasionally to keep our
-hands in. But these weren't ours. So we knew we had to speed things
-up. Till then we'd been content to go along, giving your scientists
-an unobtrusive push now and then, so they'd believe they had done it
-all; our time schedule called for intergalactic-space disks about
-1984. Well, we knew when the others were seen that we didn't have all
-the time in the world, as we'd thought. So we had to jump in feet
-first, take a lot of men under our controlling wing, start making
-robots--there I go again, that's a bad word for them--making unkillable
-soldiers of others, and substitute our own advanced designs for those
-in use at that time. We were too late; the damned enemy came down
-too fast. But now that I've got one of theirs--and a beauty it is,
-too--thanks to your help, I have a fighting chance."
-
-"Who are the enemy?" It was Win, breathless, leaning forward, her
-breast rising and falling rapidly with the emotion and wonder of this
-thing. "Who are you going to fight?"
-
-Mac looked at her in the viewplate. "The men from my planet," he said
-quietly. "The men who cast us out, as if we'd been the fallen angels of
-Lucifer in your myth, chucked us out of our own world and sent us to
-wander in the void."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-He made the ship do a quick turn, and Alan saw Brave and Rob and Bill
-suck in their bellies and grimace. Mac said, "They half-crippled
-me then, damn them, and this is the first time I've flown since I
-left home. Some of the others have managed to stay a little more in
-practice. But by God, I'm still the best hotshot pilot my people ever
-produced, and I'm going to prove it today." He glanced up at the
-viewplate. "I'm going to let you out, you three. I want Alan and Win;
-they're my people now, and in a fight they can be a terrific help, for
-they're almost impossible to kill. I'll land now, and you can go. I
-oughtn't to do it. But curse you, Injun, I like you." He shot the disk
-toward the earth from a height of seven miles.
-
-Brave said, "We won't get out."
-
-"Don't be silly. You'll die under the 'G' load when I really get going."
-
-"Then we'll die. I won't leave Alan with you, nor Win either. You will
-let us all out, or kill us."
-
-"You bloody village idiot. What good will it do you to die?"
-
-"I can't leave Alan. I saw him through Argentina and I'll see him
-through this hell you've put him into. Besides, someone's got to clean
-and bandage that ear, or he'll lose the whole thing. It's a bad wound."
-
-"Not to him it's not. He doesn't feel it. The rays eliminate all danger
-of infection, disease--he can't even catch a common cold. His ear will
-be okay."
-
-"Ear, schmear," said Rob Pope. "I stick by my friends too. Maybe all
-I can do is die like a squashed mouse, but I _can_ do that. We don't
-scuttle for cover, alien."
-
-"Likewise," said Bill Thihling laconically.
-
-"Beastly blasted blue-bottomed baboons of knotheaded numbskulls!"
-roared McEldownie. "Do you want me to kill you, then?"
-
-"I want you to let us all go; but if you won't, then Alan's better dead
-than living under your influence, like a marionette."
-
-"He won't die. I tell you! No matter what happens to you, he'll go on
-living. He'll be my man."
-
-"I don't think so," said Brave calmly. "I don't care what sort of
-all-powerful rays you put him under, or how you've caught the reins of
-his mind. If you kill me, Alan is sooner or later going to kill you.
-Live with that, McEldownie, or whatever your right name is. I don't for
-a minute believe that you can take as good a man as Alan and murder his
-best friend before his eyes and have him lick your boots. Kill me and
-you're done, Mac."
-
-"Damn you, Lo! You're wrong, and you know it." He snarled at the
-viewplate. "You absolutely won't get out of the disk if I land it?"
-
-"No."
-
-"Then die, you fool," said Mac, the words half-strangled in his throat;
-and he sent the ship rocketing through space like a meteor.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Alan had felt Mac's mind leave his when Brave started to argue. He
-had concentrated furiously then on what he could do to over-power the
-alien. Very little of worth had occurred to him; but as a last resort
-he had determined on quick physical violence. If he could move as fast
-as Mac said he could, there was a chance.
-
-Now, as the disk shot forward, he sensed Mac reaching out to touch
-his brain again, and with all his will he thought of other things,
-anything, anything except what he meant to do. He stared at the
-viewplate that showed the central room. He could feel almost no
-sensation of motion, and Win seemed quite all right. But the three men
-were curled in their chairs, gasping, even the mighty Indian writhing
-under horrible, painful pressure.
-
-"For the love of God, Mac!" cried Alan.
-
-And McEldownie slowed the ship. He turned a sickened, saddened
-countenance to Alan. "I can't do it," he said a little pitifully. "I
-can't kill that big red devil. I like him too well. I think he knew
-that when he made his proposition. I don't care how much it delays me,
-I've got to land him. Hear that, Lo?" he said to the viewer. "I'm going
-to do it. I'll put your whole precious gang out on land, and find some
-of my own boys. Project Star will be the place, if I can get there
-without interference. I can load up my crew and a few of the painless
-gentry and it'll make a better army than this would have been. But
-dammit, I did want my protege Alan with me."
-
-"Say your dog, rather," suggested Alan bitterly.
-
-"All right. Didn't you ever love a dog?"
-
-"Yes."
-
-"It's the same with me. I can't help feeling your race is inferior,
-but I can still be good and sorry to see you die, I can still feel
-affection for you."
-
-"And that makes up for what you have been doing to him and the others?"
-asked Bill weakly.
-
-"Oh, hell!" Mac bit his lip. "You are an impossible breed, you
-Earthlings."
-
-Alan felt his mind withdraw again as he angled the disk around toward
-the west. In that instant, shoving aside the already unbuckled strap
-from his chest, and drawing the long hunting knife from its sheath
-at his side, he pounced out of his chair full upon the alien. Mac's
-green eyes flew open as Alan, his movements blurred by his incredible
-quickness caught the outlander's chin and dragged it back and with
-the other hand pressed the edge of the keen knife against the brown
-throat. Then, as he collected his startled thoughts, Alan said briskly,
-"Don't do it, Mac. Don't even think about touching my brain, because
-it's clear as a bell right now, and the first feeling I have of your
-meddling with it, I'm going to drag this knife through your windpipe.
-You can't control me without at least half a second's preparation, and
-with the reflexes you've given me, that's enough." He glanced up at
-the viewer. "Brave, Rob, don't either of you try to tell me anything
-telepathically. I know the different sensations I get when I'm being
-paged or controlled, and the first whimper of one of 'em sends this
-blade into Mac's neck."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-No one spoke for a moment. Then Mac said, "If you knew how ridiculous
-you look, standing there with that whopping carver and with that sick
-cat on your shoulder, I really believe you'd give this business up and
-bust out laughing."
-
-"Don't count on it," said Alan levelly. "I'll tell you what, Mac. You
-said you were going to let us all go. Maybe you were. But I don't trust
-you worth an inflated nickel. You'd have found a way to get Win and me
-back. Besides that, we only have your side of the story, and about a
-tenth of it, at that. I want to meet some of these birds that bombed
-our cities. They told Rob, before you had me murder them, that they had
-made a mistake. They had to kill someone but they didn't mean to kill
-us. That someone was obviously you. I want to know why. If I let you
-and this saucer get out of my hands, and then find that the bombers are
-in the right in whatever quarrel they have with you, I'll be sorry the
-rest of my life. So you're going to take us to 'em, Mac. We're going
-to get the whole story."
-
-McEldownie laughed. It was a completely mirthless noise.
-"Kiwanawatiwa," he said to Brave, "I have you to thank for this mutiny,
-you and those hypnosis gimmicks of yours."
-
-"No, not altogether," said Alan. The knife pressed in a little and the
-tall man winced. "It was your admission that you were my voice." My
-beloved voice in the depths of space, he thought, almost ruefully. It
-was fearful but I loved it. "If you hadn't wanted to brag, you might
-have kept control of me."
-
-"I wasn't bragging. I wanted you as an ally and friend, rather than a
-puppet."
-
-"Robot is the word. You used it a couple of times."
-
-"Not for you, damn it. I liked you as a fellow human being."
-
-Something flicked at Alan's mind with feathery tentacles; the knife
-drew blood and the feathery searching stopped. "That hurts," objected
-Mac.
-
-"It'll hurt worse. Take us to the nearest disk you know of."
-
-"How would I know of any?"
-
-"You can find them. Do it."
-
-"Don't push me too far," said the other icily. "Remember I'm infinitely
-stronger than you."
-
-"But very susceptible to a sliced-up jugular."
-
-"I won't wreck five hundred years of plans, even for you!"
-
-"Not for me," said Alan easily. "For the sake of your throat, Mac old
-boy."
-
-Mac sighed, and turned the ship gently, for fear of the deadly blade in
-Alan's remorseless hand, and sent it rocking over the hills inland.
-
-"I'm a weak link," he said bitterly. "A weak link like poor old Grady.
-I didn't know I'd be so afraid to die."
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER XII
-
-
-They landed gently beside the two great silver disks, and Mac sat back
-and said, "Well," proudly, for it was his first landing in half a
-millennium. "Now what, Jack the Ripper?"
-
-"Now we go out and talk to them. First we let the gang out of the
-middle room, though."
-
-Mac flipped a switch. "They can open the door now."
-
-Brave and the others came to meet them in the corridor. They all had
-their rifles at the ready. "Put up the knife, Alan," said Rob Pope.
-"He's under control pretty well, I'd say. One phony move or thought and
-he's done."
-
-Mac looked at them all. "I liked you," he said sadly. "I suppose I'll
-have to kill you eventually, but I did like you." Then they marched him
-down the ramp to the ground.
-
-Alan and Win and Rob were aware at once of the amazement that ran
-through the alien forces like a chinook wind among pines. Alan could
-catch the thoughts plainly: _It is he, it is the leader!_
-
-"Holy cats," he said, and Unquote stirred feebly but angrily on his
-shoulder. "Mac, are you the chief of your bunch?"
-
-"Yes. Oh, laddie, I'm a prize catch. They'll give you the Iron Cross
-for me. Or the Lead Casket."
-
-The outlanders, duplicates in form and clothing of the men slain by
-Alan and the others, clustered around them. Alan wondered if there
-were hatred in his brain to be found by these fellows. He did not
-actually know himself whether or not he hated them for their bombing.
-The destruction of New York had been such a gargantuan thing, such an
-incredibly huge blow, that the solution of smaller problems seemed to
-have driven it out of his thoughts entirely; perhaps it was a trick of
-his subconscious, to prevent his going mad with horror.
-
-He could hear them--if "hear" was the verb--talking mentally together.
-There was no language involved, evidently, for the thoughts were surely
-as plain to him as to the aliens themselves. "It's like listening in on
-an old-fashioned party line," he told Win.
-
-"Isn't it! I mean," she added hastily, "I'm not old enough to remember,
-but it must be."
-
-Alan grinned. "As I catch it, they're congratulating each other on
-capturing Mac. And by glory, they're thanking us!"
-
-"They just unfolded my mind like a road map," said Rob, "so they know
-about all that we know. What stupendous capacities for absorption their
-brains must have! I get the feeling that they just glance through a
-kind of card index that's in the back room of my skull, and then they
-know how I feel about them, and about chess and women, and what I had
-for supper last night."
-
-"It's not that miraculous," said McEldownie, on whose wrists two of the
-aliens in filigreed harness had placed brass manacles connected by a
-long chain. "They--and I--touch the centers of emotion, and judge from
-them what sort of person you are. Just now they read the records of how
-you got the disk, and how you captured me; and they tried to find out
-how you reacted to the bombing of New York, but your emotion there was
-too obscure."
-
-"I obscured it myself. I was ashamed of it. Because," said Rob,
-wrinkling up his forehead, "although I'm shaken when I think of it,
-and feel so sorry that _sorry_ is a mild word, still I can't find any
-hatred for your brothers here. I honestly think it was a mistake on
-their part; and it must have been based on evidence, so that evidence
-was falsified; and only you and your crew could have done that. Ergo, I
-don't hate them. I hate you, Mac."
-
-"You're all wrong."
-
-"I'll find out before I do anything about it."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Half a dozen of the bare-chested blond fellows came to stand before
-them. Again, there was no evidence of weapons--but whereas the first
-group had been careless after finding no basic hatred in Rob and Bill,
-this contingent had carefully studied the intent and the mental content
-of each of them. Probably, thought Alan, it was because they had
-brought McEldownie, who had been instantly recognized.
-
-"That's right," said Mac in answer to his thought. "That first bunch
-were strangers to me. See the tall bloke with the argent head-band?
-That's my uncle, my mother's brother. Half of this lot knew me at home."
-
-"Mac," said Win, "where _is_ your home?"
-
-"Erin Grady told you the truth. We come from the ninth planet of a sun
-unknown to you."
-
-"And why did you come?"
-
-"That's a long yarn--and my uncle says he has something to tell you."
-Mac shut his mouth. Tall, bony, homely, dressed in ordinary American
-clothes, his beak of a nose and the half-lidded green eyes so familiar
-to them all, Alan and the others felt a pang at seeing him silent and
-crestfallen among the fantastically clad outlanders. He was one of
-them, but he was also McEldownie, the TV announcer, the fellow who made
-bad puns and got drunk and ate enormously and suffered with them when
-New York died. Even Rob Pope, surer than the rest that Mac was at the
-bottom of all the hell unleashed that day, scowled and gave him a sorry
-grin.
-
-"Maybe I'm planting the thought in your minds," Mac said cynically.
-None of them had spoken.
-
-"I'd know if you were, I think," said Rob. "No, it's natural. You were
-a good egg."
-
-"And as good eggs go, I went bad." He shrugged. "I think now that I
-didn't need to let you capture me for them. I might have killed Alan on
-the spot by touching a single button. Damn you all," he said without
-emotion. "I either loved you too well, or I was sick of running and
-being a rebel."
-
-"A rebel against what?" asked Bill Thihling.
-
-"Stuffiness and authority. I've got to shut up." He hung his head. He
-looked very tired and rather older than he had before this hour.
-
-Then the leader of the aliens spoke to them. The message came in the
-curious wordless manner, and each of them put words to it in his own
-mind. To Alan it came like this:
-
-"We are profoundly shocked at our hasty action of this morning. We have
-done you incomparable injury where a little more investigation would
-have shown us you were not inimical, not working against us, not bad at
-all as men go. Our only excuse is that we were direly pressed for time.
-
-"We investigated certain sections of your planet where activities
-showed us some of the rebels from our world were at work; they were
-building ships and weapons to return to us, to attack us. We found at
-these places, some cities and some isolated deserts, some small towns
-and some government projects, that our rebels had taken control of
-your people, making them invulnerable with the ray which is known to
-us, making them long-lived and incapable of pain and with quickened
-reflexes and swifter bodies than before. To investigate this we should
-have had weeks. We gave ourselves less than a day. For we knew that our
-ships would have been sighted and the rebels would be speeding their
-plans. So we found many robot humans, many scientists working with our
-exiled people, and we thought that in all these places there must be
-millions of potential foemen."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The message was charged with emotion; it was impossible to believe that
-the man was lying. Indeed, thought Alan, there was no reason why he
-should lie. If he could wipe out New York with one small golden egg, he
-had no need to make allies of a few puny humans.
-
-"Again, our sole excuse is the lack of time. We did find many places
-where only a portion of those checked were under rebel control. Those
-places we did not bomb, trusting that if we struck the large cities and
-the projects where disk manufacture was under way, we could mop up the
-others with ground fighting."
-
-I wonder if Project Star is gone, thought Alan.
-
-"I wonder," echoed Win aloud. Then they turned to each other,
-astounded. "Darling," she said after a second, "that's the one thing I
-like about this hardening, pain-removing process--now we can talk to
-each other without words!"
-
-"Think what we can do with our mouths while we're talking," he grinned.
-
-The leader went on. "I may interject here that we took over control
-of your artificial satellite some days ago. We did not kill the men
-therein, who were not enemies, but control them by simple hypnosis.
-They will of course be freed of this as soon as our job is done and a
-peace settled on between our worlds."
-
-Brave looked up at the sky. Albertus, of course, could not be seen
-with the naked eye, but he said, "I know a couple of the lads that run
-that space station. Good boys. I'd been afraid they were dead. I knew
-they wouldn't have let us be smeared like this if they'd been able to
-prevent it."
-
-"Only one city we bombed that we had not personally checked on; that is
-the large one over there," and he gestured toward Manhattan. "We could
-not send our men on the ground into that place; the entranceways are
-too complex, the place is too big, it would have taken too long; and
-we could scarcely fly over and drop spies. After earnest consultation
-we decided to bomb it. Being the largest concentration of civilized
-people in your world, being so close to the major rebel project, we
-felt--we _knew_--that it was full of enemies. Our stupidly certain
-assumption was wrong. We can never make reparation for that mistake,
-we cannot begin to make amends to you. Your only help will be the
-knowledge that we will live with the memory of that mistake the rest of
-our lives; and they are long, long lives.
-
-"We are men of good will. We beg you to believe this. We have outlawed
-war and our planet lives at peace, prosperous peace. Now we have
-committed an intolerable crime against a brother race. We are hurt, in
-our way, as much as you have been hurt."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Brave had taken Alan's hand in his own and was squeezing it hard; the
-scientist thought suddenly that if he were not impervious to pain, his
-hand would be aching like fury. Brave said, "Son, I need help," quite
-simply and humbly.
-
-"What is it, Brave?"
-
-"Alan, these people are good. They look like barbarians, they ride in
-twenty-second century vehicles, and they plaster our greatest cities
-into the earth. But they're good. He isn't lying."
-
-"What's the problem, Brave?"
-
-"I hate them," the Indian said fiercely. "I'd like to have them all
-here," he let go Alan's hand and jabbed a great forefinger at his
-palm. "I'd smash 'em like lice. I don't want to feel that way. It's
-primitive. But strip me of the veneer I've lost these last hours, and
-I'm primitive to the core. I'm simple and single-minded. I hate people
-who do me harm. I won't go berserk and start in on these gentry, but by
-heaven, by the Great Spirit, I'd like to wipe them all out--slaughter
-them all! I want to sacrifice them to the ghosts of our dead cities."
-
-Alan said slowly, "And you don't want to feel that way. Because they're
-good, you want to forgive them their mistake. My God, Brave," he cried,
-"how can we ever forgive them? We can understand them, but none of us
-will ever truly forgive and forget. Do you think because you feel that
-way that you are reverting to savagery? Then we're every one of us on
-the face of the earth pure howling savages!"
-
-Brave searched his face. He nodded. "I see. I thought it was just me. I
-guess I thought you would be shooting them up if you felt that way too.
-Sorry, khedive. Heap sorry make-um dust-up over nothin'."
-
-Alan smiled grimly.
-
-Rob said, "If we only knew a little more of the basic story, hang it!
-They haven't mentioned where they came from, why they exiled Mac's
-boys or why they chased after them, anything about themselves except
-that they made a mistake. Holy old boot, we know that."
-
-The leader put in urgently: "I sense many questions which I would
-happily answer if I had the time. But I have just received word that
-our forces are massing to attack the disk project to the east of that
-large city. I must therefore leave you until the job is done."
-
-"They're attacking Project Star!" said Win sharply. "Good Lord, Alan,
-we've got a hundred friends there!"
-
-"Yes, and just as innocent people as those who died in Manhattan. They
-can't do it." He stepped forward--it was significant that not one alien
-tried to stop him--and laid a hand on the leader's bare, brawny arm.
-The flesh was almost normal ... but not quite. Alan recalled Brave's
-suggestion of the feel of a rubber product. The arm was hairless and
-without pores, cool to the touch. He looked up into the leader's face.
-It was a good face, though the widened features gave it a somewhat
-aboriginal cast. It was a patriarchal face, more that of the ruler of a
-tribe than of the leader of a fleet of space disks who must also be an
-advanced scientist. The long yellow hair was turning slightly gray over
-the temples.
-
-The man smiled. Yes, he said to Alan without words, I am over nine
-hundred years old.
-
-"He comes from Shangri-la," said Bill Thihling. "He's the High Lama.
-Can't kid me."
-
-Among his captors, the manacled McEldownie threw back his head and
-laughed. "That's what we needed," he said, "a good feeble jest. This
-meeting was getting dull as hell."
-
-Alan ignored them. He tried to pierce into the leader's brain with his
-eyes, he thought fiercely and as hard as he ever had.
-
-After three minutes the leader nodded. Alan turned to Brave. "Boy,
-we're going with them. We're going to lead the attack on Project Star."
-
-"If you've got something up your sleeve--" began Rob.
-
-"Nothing he doesn't know of. You think I'm able to keep my thoughts to
-myself? But we can save, or try to save, a lot of our people. Win stays
-here, of course. So does Rob, who has a bad leg." The leader started,
-gestured to another outlander, who opened one of the numerous cases
-on the ground and took out bandages and salves in tins, with which he
-began to repair the burn on Pope's leg. "Bill," said Alan, "you want to
-come?"
-
-"Try and dissuade me!"
-
-"Cheers, then, gal," said Alan lightly, and kissed Win. He turned
-and went into the great disk via the bubble's ramp. Brave and Bill
-followed him. The leader and five of the others went up, leaving half a
-dozen with McEldownie and Win and Rob. Then Alan reappeared, looking
-sheepish, came down and handed a weary cat to the girl. "I've been
-wearing her on my shoulder for so long she thought she was growing
-there." He patted Unquote (who raked up the energy to spit at him) and
-disappeared once more. The disk rose silently into the air.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Alan learned now that the aliens had a spoken tongue; for they began to
-chatter to each other, the sentences brief, the words evidently long
-and complex. It sounded a little like Latin, a little like Greek; but
-no words were even faintly familiar.
-
-"What's your plan, Alan?" asked Brave.
-
-"Not a very complex one, I'm afraid. We're to be allowed to go in
-first, the disk having flown low to avoid being sighted, and been
-landed behind the hill that overlooks our house. We're to gain entrance
-naturally, if possible, or sneak in if the place is too heavily
-fortified and suspicious. I think we can walk right in. I'm patently
-a 'robot' and you two can be under my charge. Then we have an hour to
-contact everyone we can. We tell the fellows who are okay to collect
-in the chem lab. We try to persuade the robots to congregate in the
-welding room, where they can be captured easily and without bloodshed.
-But if we can't tell the difference between robots and aliens, then we
-pass along quick. We have to step high and fast, lads. And we can't
-separate to do the job, since you two can't check over the thoughts of
-the people we meet."
-
-He stood up. "I'm going to wander around and get to know the boys.
-We'll be fighting on their side soon."
-
-"I hope it's the right side."
-
-"I think it is."
-
-He walked over to the nearest group of aliens, who greeted him
-courteously. He found that when they spoke aloud he could not read
-their thoughts; but when they sensed that he believed them to be
-talking about him or about secrets they had from him, they at once went
-mute and directed their thought conversation to his brain cells. He sat
-down and began to ask questions. He found that he was able to do so now
-without strain.
-
-"Yes," one of them told him, "your powers develop rapidly after the
-third exposure to the rays. They come so gradually that you are hardly
-aware of them. It's a rapid gradualness, though."
-
-Alan recalled that it was in the captured disk that he first felt
-the tremendous awakened power of his mind to read and feel the
-reciprocation of other minds. He nodded. They went on talking.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-At three-thirty p.m. of the day New York died, the three men walked up
-to the gate of Project Star. They carried their heavy rifles openly,
-and looked belligerent. It would have been hard to appear otherwise.
-
-They were challenged by a soldier, who fronted a squad of men with
-flamers and grenade pistols. Before Alan could answer, the soldier
-said, "Oh, it's Dr. Rackham. Pass in, sir. Where'd you come from?"
-
-"Manhattan."
-
-"Cripes! you're lucky to be here." It was the same soldier who had
-passed him on the night of his treatment in the shed. He went in to the
-colony, Brave and Bill Thihling at his heels.
-
-At four-twenty-eight p.m. the three of them walked up close to the
-same gate. There were nine soldiers on duty. Beyond the fence were the
-ack-ack guns, radar detectors, and force field generators, manned by a
-number of other soldiers.
-
-The three put their rifles down on the ground. Then they solemnly began
-to dance around in a little circle, unbuttoning their coats as they
-did so. The squad stared, moved uneasily a little closer, looked at
-their leader for guidance. He shrugged. He was a robotized fellow who
-had been made a particular pet by one of the aliens; he knew a great
-deal about the scheme of things in the colony--consciously, rather than
-unconsciously as most of them did--and was trusted above most of his
-fellows. He was not especially bright.
-
-"They ain't breaking any rules," he said. "You never know what the hell
-a scientist is gonna do."
-
-Brave and Alan and Bill had now divested themselves of their shirts
-and were taking off their undershirts. They were still dancing their
-lilting small cakewalk.
-
-"Nuts," said the soldier. "They're nuts. Musta caught some radiation
-from that buster." All the men on the ring of huge equipment beyond
-the fence were watching them too. It was amusing to see a really mad
-scientist, and three were delightful. They whooped and cheered and
-laughed.
-
-Then the saucermen came over the hill.
-
-It was as though they erupted from the ground, even to Alan and his
-henchmen who had been watching for them. And what a sight it was!
-Barbarians in every physical trait, from face to naked chest to ornate
-girdle and gold loincloth, armed with tiny tubes that hurled fireballs
-and with thin blowpipes that shot numbing darts over incredible
-distances, they might have been warriors from a forgotten land in a
-long-forgotten time. And they came silently, so that they seemed to
-approach through the noiseless depths of a dream. But the shriek of a
-soldier falling from a gun platform, his face in flames, was not out of
-a dream, but a hideous nightmare.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The three men pounced on their rifles, threw them up and were firing
-methodically even before they had regained the erect position. Alan
-and Brave, crack shots who had been used to practice every Sunday
-morning on the military range, shot for the heads; Bill, a less certain
-marksman, tried for the chests. The brain and heart were the only sure
-targets when you fought a man who could feel no pain and could keep
-going with half of his body shot away.
-
-For a brief time it seemed to the soldiers that the scientists were
-shooting aliens; then the leader turned and saw where the muzzles
-pointed.
-
-"Get 'em!" he bellowed, and sprayed a charge from a grenade pistol
-that went wide of its mark but fanned Bill's cheek with tiny scraps of
-hot breeze. Next instant he was down kicking from Bill's slug, and the
-guards of the gate were finished.
-
-The vanguard of the outlanders swept in and across the grounds. They
-had concentrated on this single gate, as the others had too open
-approaches for safety. There were men from sixteen saucers, over four
-hundred of them, and they ran like deer, like cheetahs after deer, like
-winds after cheetahs. Mutely, with a kind of ferocious impersonality,
-they descended on the colony.
-
-Men came running out with machine guns and feverishly began to load
-them. They were picked off by rifle bullets, by paralyzing ray tubes,
-and relays came and were picked off and more came. One gun stuttered
-into action momentarily, and the crew went twisting up in the air,
-their gun blown apart, their bodies rent by a weapon that even Alan
-had not known of. He spotted it finally, a blunderbuss-shaped thing of
-silver with a flaring mouth, fired like a bazooka. Another machine gun
-blew up.
-
-Among the buildings there was hand-to-hand combat, automatics against
-fire tubes, outlander against rebel outlander in wrestling, heaving
-confusion. All the men from the stranger planet fought without
-speaking; the robots shouted, like normal men in a battle. Brave was
-bawling war whoops and Alan was cursing steadily, as he always did
-under fire. Bill Thihling had got himself lost somewhere.
-
-The leader of Alan's saucer went by, blond hair streaming, blood
-dripping down the brown chest. Alan caught a thought: _thanks_. He
-knew, from touching Alan's mind in passing, that many of the nonrobot
-men and women were gathered in safety, and even a number of the
-alien-controlled puppets had been herded into the welding room and
-locked in, obedient to Alan's hypnotic order.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The Indian and Alan came at last to the end of the ammunition that
-had bulged out their trousers' pockets. They clubbed their rifles and
-waded into a melee that staggered back and forth between two office
-buildings, across the scarlet-stained grass. Then Alan lost his rifle,
-and drew his automatic. The range was always short and his hand was
-steady as a granite statue's. He was recognizing his foemen at every
-turn, and putting away the recognition and thinking, _They are rebels
-from the stars, mutineers against a good people, it was their plottings
-brought on the smashing of our cities. This is not Dr. Coulterre,
-it's a creature eight hundred years old who wanted to make me into a
-brainless slave. That isn't Dr. Simms curled up with my bullet in his
-belly, it's the slayer of a million New Yorkers as sure as if it had
-put its own damned finger on the trip release._
-
-He could tell the robots because they yelled, and those he left alone,
-because the saucermen were shooting them with numbing rays that did
-not kill. It was a humane method as far as it went. Sometimes he had
-to blow a robot's brains out, or be slain by him. Then he said, I've
-killed a friend. He went looking for more aliens to fight.
-
-In all the press of bodies Alan and Brave were easiest to see. Brave
-was huge and his head was that of a savage buck, the lips writhed
-back from teeth athirst for blood; Alan, naked to the waist and
-with a white bandage over his right ear, put on by a surgeon in the
-saucer, was a figure differing radically from the barbaric saucermen
-and the sedately-clothed rebels and robots. They had taken off their
-shirts in the dance for a better reason than holding the attention
-of the soldiers. Among a hundred men like them they would have been
-indistinguishable had they stayed fully clothed. It's simple, he
-thought, to tell the good guys from the bad guys; the good guys haven't
-got any shirts.
-
-The two of them made excellent targets. Brave knew he carried a slug in
-his leg just next the groin; Alan had no idea whether he had been hit.
-Enemies were continually firing at them both.
-
-Alan was knocked to the turf by a man who leaped on his back and beat
-at his head with a pistol butt. Brave swung the rifle, a terrible war
-club in his hands, and broke the man's head like a rotten gourd. Alan
-got up with the feeling that he should have a headache. But he felt
-nothing.
-
-Then the rebel outlanders gave up. Suddenly, all over the scattered
-fields of battle, they had thrown down their weapons and thrust up
-their hands above their heads in the universal signal of surrender.
-Their robot people followed suit. The saucermen had won. Project Star
-was theirs.
-
-
-
-
-                             CHAPTER XIII
-
-
-They were back at the temporary base of the disks, sitting on the grass
-in the shade of the great ships, the sun just going down behind them.
-Brave's slug had been extracted and the wound bandaged with ointments
-that eased the pain. Bill Thihling, who had been knocked cold early in
-the fight, was sucking on a lozenge that was lessening his headache by
-the minute. Alan had not been shot and the beating his head had taken
-did not worry him, for pain was forever a stranger. He sat with Unquote
-asleep in his lap and Win's hand held tight in his.
-
-"I don't want to live four hundred years," he said. "I want to die
-in the same years that Brave and my friends go. I don't want to be
-invulnerable; I want to stick myself with a needle and yell Ouch. I
-don't want to move like a hopped-up panther, and know what people are
-thinking, and send brainstorms out to sea from my little skull. I want
-to be me again." His words were light and half-whimsical, but his
-thoughts were black.
-
-"Same here, baby," said the girl. She put up a hand to adjust her
-amethyst halter and his eyes followed it; she laughed. "At least your
-baser instincts are still intact, thank God."
-
-Rob Pope said, "There's a lot they have to explain to us yet. We seem
-to have heard the final chapter of a thousand-page book. They haven't
-even said who they are, or which system they come from, or what Mac's
-gang did that they were exiled for."
-
-"And by the way," said Win indignantly, "no one's told me yet why they
-attacked Project Star on the ground instead of bombing it. Give."
-
-"Yes, love. They attacked it that way because they didn't want to
-damage any of the experimental stuff and the disks. They lost four
-disks in space, coming here, and they're overcrowded, besides having
-Mac's crew to take home for trial. They need disks. And they're
-interested in seeing what advances we may have made on fuel and
-instruments, advances that might give them ideas. All quite logical."
-
-"Sure, sure. Everybody knew but Winnie."
-
-"Between their numbing rays and our preliminary work, we managed to
-save nearly all the normal humans on the colony grounds, and about
-seventy per cent of the robots. There are aliens there now, guarding
-them and the disks and the whole project."
-
-The leader came over to them and squatted on the grass, radiating
-intelligence and power. "There's quite a man," said Rob in spite of
-himself.
-
-"He is that. I wonder how such advanced people happened to evolve such
-barbaric ornaments and clothing?" Win said.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The leader smiled. Evidently the blood Alan had seen on his chest had
-been someone else's, for he was unhurt. Now he said to their minds,
-"The girdles and arm bands are traditional. They go back farther
-than the oldest histories, and date perhaps from our original home,
-which was on a different planet from our present one. We consider
-them attractive, if gaudy and a little unfitted for our sort of
-civilization; but it would be unthinkable to change our mode of dress
-after so many centuries."
-
-"And _that_ is the attitude I rebelled against," said Mac aloud, from
-his place between two guards. "That's how they look at everything.
-Jee-blighted-rusalem, can you blame me?" He stared at his manacled
-wrists. "I used to go around the cities in a kind of toga that appealed
-to my esthetic sense. My God, I was shunned. I was a pariah. No
-armband."
-
-The leader smiled again. "My nephew exaggerates. Five hundred years
-haven't calmed that roiling renegade blood.
-
-"I know what you are desirous of knowing. I will try to tell you the
-story simply and quickly, for I must join my companion ship within
-two hours in the island which I see you call England." He glanced at
-Brave and Alan. "First I must thank you for your indispensable help in
-overcoming the rebels at Project Star."
-
-"We didn't do much for you."
-
-"You fought beside us when you hated us for the bombing of your cities;
-that implies understanding, if not forgiveness. We appreciate that. You
-saved innocent lives; that is the best way to help us. To kill is a
-terrible thing to us. We do not do it lightly. To kill innocents, even
-in cases of dire necessity, is trebly terrible."
-
-"Your men went at it as if they were born to it," said Brave.
-
-"They do not like it, no, but there is a heritage in our blood of
-fighting that dates back, as do our clothes, to the times before
-history."
-
-"Pious old fraud," said McEldownie, "you love it, but you won't admit
-it to yourselves. It was we rebels who were the honest ones."
-
-The leader ignored him. "I was about to tell you--"
-
-Mac said aloud, so that the leader's thought waves were garbled,
-"I could hate you two for running amok alongside these sniveling
-so-and-sos. You helped kill scores of my companions. You couldn't have
-been that sure we were wrong, could you? Damn it, I loved those boys. I
-lived with them for a dozen of your match-spark lifetimes."
-
-"If you speak out of turn again, I shall have you taken into the leaded
-room of my disk, where your thoughts and words will be confined to
-yourself. I was about to tell you of our history," the leader thought,
-looking at Alan's group. "Long, long ago, so long that even we, who
-live a thousand years, cannot comprehend what a vast reach of time it
-was, we lived on a planet very like your own. The atmosphere must have
-been exactly, or nearly exactly, like that of Earth; for you and I have
-the same lungs, the same organs, and only differ fundamentally in the
-texture of our skins and the flexibility of our skeletons and muscles.
-
-"Then, for a reason we do not know except by vague and undependable
-myth, our ancestors left that planet and went out into space. They were
-already superbly advanced scientists, though they did not have the rays
-later developed, which gave us our extended life span. They built disks
-and journeyed out into the star systems, and eventually found a planet
-that could support their life in the way the mother planet had done.
-There they settled. The old charts and logs and histories are long
-since lost, and this is known only by legend and tradition."
-
-"What does legend say sent them away from the first planet?" asked Rob
-Pope.
-
-"Several things. Terrible wars, the rise of inimical civilizations
-which would have had to be obliterated to insure peace, which
-our ancestors did not wish to do--" _bovine feces_, muttered Mac
-rudely--"and the sinking of their homeland into the sea."
-
-"Good grief," said Win, opening her eyes wide, "could that have been
-Atlantis? Here on Earth?"
-
-"The time wouldn't seem to be right," said Bill, "but heaven only
-knows, it sounds like it."
-
-The leader groped in their minds. "You have a legend of just such
-a nation here, on this planet," he thought excitedly. "We must
-investigate it. This may be our home." He chuckled aloud. "Don't worry,
-we wouldn't come back and settle in with you. We are too happy on our
-own world. But it would be wonderfully satisfying to know the truth of
-our beginnings!"
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Alan felt himself becoming intellectually agog over this matter, and
-resolutely drew away from it. "Please," he said, "your history."
-
-"Certainly. On the new planet, which we call Tlonis, our race set up a
-civilization that has endured for many millennia. Our ancestors found
-no intelligent race on that world, by the way, but only low forms of
-animal life. The flora is analogous to your own in many ways, as is
-natural when two planets are so alike.
-
-"For all our recorded history we have been a peaceful people, although
-in the course of our scientific advancement we have discovered terrible
-weapons, which we manufactured and put aside in the always possible
-case of invasion from another system. Our own sun system, in which
-Tlonis is the ninth planet from the sun, contains no other life at all;
-but we recognized the possibilities, and built the weapons to be ready.
-We also improved the disks, and discovered the ray of longevity and
-that of painlessness. Our astronomy was always our first science, and
-there I venture to say we outshine you as your sun does your moon."
-
-"He's right," said Mac suddenly, looking up. "Tlonis telescopes make
-your Giant Eye look like a gnat's. If you had one here, you could see a
-candle lighted on the sun."
-
-"Your turn is coming; be silent.
-
-"We have always existed in excellent harmony with one another. Wars
-are unknown. There is no such thing as territorial expansion, for we
-are all one nation, one blood. The government is a form of benevolent
-parliamentary rule."
-
-McEldownie did not venture to interrupt, but his homely face spoke
-bookshelves of disdain.
-
-"Our joys were intellectual, a reveling in rationality, philosophy and
-perception of truths, metaphysical reasoning. I am speaking in the past
-tense; I should not be. These are the things which have always occupied
-us, and always will."
-
-"Sounds deadly dull," said Rob Pope, and Mac grinned and shook his head
-in vigorous agreement.
-
-The leader went on. "This sounds too placid to you. We are a different
-race, remember. It fits our temperaments to a T.
-
-"But there are members of any society whose tastes run counter to the
-norm of that society; in our case, in our time, it was this nephew of
-mine and his faction who rebelled. First in dress, as he has said;
-then by initiating the custom of hunting and killing the lower forms
-of life for sport, a thing unheard of before they originated it. This
-was their first serious breach of our laws and customs. From it they
-went on--talking against the government, decrying traditions, until at
-last their mania to be different intensified and turned to violence. In
-short, they mutinied against the established order of things which had
-made our race a happy one for untold ages. They wished to substitute
-ways of life which would have torn us apart with dissension and strife."
-
-"We rebelled against complacency, fatheadedness, hidebound slavishness
-to tradition, and unutterable dullwitted dullness. You can appreciate
-that, for cripe's sake," said Mac. "Picture the way of life he's given
-you a briefing on, and tell me you, especially Alan and Brave, wouldn't
-have rebelled, even if it meant war, to be allowed the right to live
-your own lives."
-
-Alan and the great Indian looked at each other. The same thought was in
-both their minds: it sounded as though Mac and his outlaw crew had been
-in the right.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The leader directed a thought at them. "You must realize that this
-man, my nephew, was not content to share his views with those who
-agreed with him. He forced an insurrection on a people who had been
-thoroughly happy. There was bloodshed in a race that had known none for
-generations. We overcame him and we might have executed him, but it was
-repugnant to us. So we gave him space disks and fuel and synthetic food
-machines and all else he would need, he and the men who had fought for
-him, and we exiled him to space.
-
-"We knew that somewhere there was a planet which could sustain life.
-He had a chance of finding it, a small chance, but a chance. As it
-happens, he did find it."
-
-"After three hundred years of the blackness of the void," said
-McEldownie. "It was the mercy of God we did. Otherwise we'd have lived
-out our lives in space. Do you see the cruelty that lurks in these
-people, which they won't recognize? Killing us would have been kind;
-but they sent us to wander among the galaxies."
-
-"You may tell them briefly what you did then," the leader ordered him.
-"Be quick, my time is nearly up."
-
-Mac stood up and walked back and forth, clinking his chained manacles.
-"We found Earth because our detectors told us the atmosphere was the
-same as that of our world. It was the only one of its kind we'd come
-across in all those centuries, centuries of sweeping through sun system
-after sun system.
-
-"Maybe it's the original home planet our ancestors left, and maybe it
-isn't. I've mucked around with that Atlantis theory too. The names are
-similar--Atlantis, Tlonis. It isn't important.
-
-"We landed in the late years of your eighteenth century. Our disks were
-seen and you can still find records of the sightings in the books and
-periodicals of that time, and of later times when our lads took the
-ships out of hiding for practice flights. I never practiced because
-it's only in the last forty years my crippling wounds have been really
-healed.
-
-"We more or less took you over. It was reprehensible from your point
-of view. Don't hate me for it. We had to make you advance a thousand
-years' worth in two hundred. We wanted to go back to Tlonis and--not
-conquer it, but make a place for our kind of thinking so we could live
-there. It's home, after all. We needed disks and an army.
-
-"Sure, we kept you in a stew, worked up, always at war, and so on. It
-was the only way. You'd always warred before, anyway. Only in times of
-war could we advance your knowledge of science and make its rapidity
-seem logical. So we controlled governments and laboratories and brains.
-If we hadn't, you'd still be in the gunpowder stage, instead of the jet
-and electronic stage. We aren't all bad. We aren't pure black. We hurt
-you but as little as we could. We used you as you used to use oxen and
-horses; but like you loved horses--which often got killed in war, mind
-you--we loved you."
-
-"Stop apologizing, Mac. We understand your point of view," said Alan.
-"But we understand this man's, too."
-
-"Sure, sure. Everybody has a right to his own opinion, even if it's a
-stuffy one.
-
-"Anyhow, in the early '40s we gave you the atom bomb, nuclear fission,
-that is. And the radiations of those first bombs went out across the
-great spaces, and twelve years later were detected and analyzed on
-Tlonis by the astronomers. Uncle's bunch got in an uproar, as we'd
-known they would, and piled into ships and started out for Earth. We
-couldn't help that; we'd had to give you fission. We figured we had
-enough time. We started disk construction and we began to build an
-invincible army out of your men, by raying them with the painkilling
-and telepathic rays. We miscalculated the time it would take Uncle
-to get here. We wanted to meet him in space or bypass him and get to
-Tlonis with our gang. Maybe, we thought, he wouldn't have connected
-the atomic explosion with us, anyhow. But he did, and knew we were
-preparing to invade Tlonis, and he came.
-
-"His scouting ships reached Earth a few months ago, reported back
-to the main fleet, and down he came, to blunder and take things for
-granted and make too-hasty decisions, as always; and he murdered more
-people through hastiness than we ever would have in our scheme of
-things."
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The leader thought bitterly, "I admit the justice of that. I have said
-we are more sorry than we can tell." He gestured at Alan. "Consider
-this as you weigh what my nephew has said. There is a false sense of
-kinship between you because of the mutual language. He talks while I
-must telepath my thoughts to you. Discount that when you judge us,
-please."
-
-Mac said, "That's right. When you sit down to think us over, just
-consider the stories, not who told 'em. I believe you'll agree with my
-way of thinking, whether you hate me for what I've done or not." He
-moved over in front of Brave. "Oh, you great iron-faced ruffian, you
-lost me my world, I think. Simply because I liked you too well to kill
-you, you and your sidekick here. Believe that or not. I have a real
-affection for you."
-
-It seemed important to the lanky alien. Brave said, "I believe you,
-Jim."
-
-"Thanks, Brave." He grinned. "Will you shake hands with a fallen angel,
-or if you prefer with an ambitious devil, John Kiwanawatiwa?"
-
-Brave stood and took his hand. Alan and Bill, Rob and Win did likewise.
-There was something paradoxically touching about the little ceremony.
-Then the leader thought at them, "We will take him back for trial, him
-and those of his mutineers who are still alive. There are some still
-free in your world. With your permission we will stay on Earth until we
-have hunted them down. We would also like to study your histories, out
-of intellectual curiosity, and exchange scientific knowledge with you.
-These things can be arranged with your governments after their members
-have been freed from the hypnosis applied by our rebels."
-
-He paused. "But we owe you this. You are representative of the people
-of this world. I give you the right to speak for all of them now. Shall
-we leave you? You hate us, will always hate us for what we did out of
-blindness and hasty folly. If you say so, you five, then we will get
-into our ships and go home."
-
-Alan was a little staggered. "We can't speak for our country."
-
-"I am not interested in governments, which are in reality artificial
-things. I am interested in the people of this planet, and I think you
-five can speak for them."
-
-Alan did not hesitate. "Then I say, stay till you've found the rebels,
-and till you've made your researches. You're right, I believe we'll
-hate you. But it would be insane to pack you off and lose all that you
-can give us, or have you lose what we may be able to teach you."
-
-The leader smiled. "Then we will stay." He turned to his men and
-gave an order; shortly many of the blond aliens came trooping out of
-the disk, carrying machinery. They proceeded to set it up before the
-Earthmen.
-
-The leader told them, "These will be used on all of you who were
-tricked or cajoled or forced into the beams of the mutation rays by my
-nephew and his cohorts. Please stand quietly."
-
-Shafts of violet and indigo color shot out of the lenses of the
-machines. It took a full ship's complement of men to work all of them.
-The lights played across Alan and Win, to a lesser degree on Brave and
-the scientists. There was no sensation from them.
-
-Then Alan said, "Wow! That hurts my ear something fierce."
-
-Win turned to him. "Your ear hurts, darling?"
-
-"Like a red-hot iron."
-
-Brave clamped his hands on his friend's biceps. "Emir! You can feel
-pain!"
-
-"Pain ... my Lord, blessed pain! Oh, how it burns! I've a splitting
-headache, too." Alan hit Brave in the chest, laughing, and then
-embraced Win. "Baby, I can feel pain! I'm okay!" He kissed her
-savagely. She gave a shriek.
-
-"You bit me, you--Alan, I can feel it too!"
-
-"Of course," the leader told them. "You are whole again. The effect of
-my nephew's rays is dissipated."
-
-Alan sobered. "One thing. Will I still live four hundred years?"
-
-"No. That effect is gone too, unfortunately."
-
-Alan stared around him at his friends. "Thank God," he said quietly.
-
-Then Rob Pope said, "Look, the bubble of that disk is closing!"
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-It was true. The leader of the outlanders turned and saw it and gave a
-loud cry. "He is escaping! You let him out of your sight, you fools!"
-he thought angrily. All the gold-and-silver-clad men ran toward the
-disk. It rose into the air, flipping its edges impudently. Then it
-gathered speed and shot out of sight.
-
-Brave said, "Jim, old Jim! He's made his break. I kind of thought he
-would. He was too restless a spirit to sit calmly under chains and
-captivity!"
-
-The aliens had clustered together and were sending their brain waves
-out across the land, signalling other disks in remote spots to find and
-pursue the escaping McEldownie. Alan said, "I almost hope he makes it!"
-
-Then straight across the sky from horizon to horizon a great silver
-ship flashed, bright in the rays of the vanished sun against a
-darkening lapis lazuli vault, on its way out to sea in the direction of
-Africa. The abandoned outlanders were piling into their second disk to
-give chase.
-
-Brave put his arm over Alan's shoulders. "Chief, I hope he makes it
-too. Maybe he was Lucifer, fallen and using us as dogs of war to regain
-his lost kingdom; or maybe he was really Prometheus, fighting the
-stodgy gods to bring fire--the fire of real freedom--to his friends.
-By his lights, he was justified in using us to do it. He caused us an
-awful throng of troubles in the past two hundred years, but what he
-gave us may be worth it in the final estimate. And when he had his goal
-in sight he threw it away because he couldn't bring himself to kill us."
-
-"Prometheus is the word, son. I'd hate to see old Zeus there bring him
-back in chains, to be bound to the rock for the vultures."
-
-Brave looked into the sky where Jim McEldownie had disappeared. He
-chuckled deep in his chest.
-
-"He claimed to be the best hotshot disk pilot in the universe. If he
-is, I have a notion he'll get away." He rubbed a hand across his chin
-reflectively. "By the Great Spirit!" he shouted, laughing. "I believe
-he will!"
-
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