INVADERS FROM THE OUTER SUNS, by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.
CHAPTER I
Flight from Saturn
James Ross leaned against a crystal pylon and fingered the conical holster of his subatomic blast pistol nervously. Invisible death stood by his side, and the very air he breathed was fraught with menace.
The Saturnian relaxation terminal was small, crowded, and permeated with the odors of cheap dilitis syrup and rank tobaccos. The spaceship pilots who lounged there without insignia on their begrimed and tattered uniforms were men of unsavory reputations. Two-thirds of them were blackguards, thieves, and murderers. The rest had displayed white feathers in the black, frigid gulfs between the planets.
Virtually everyone in the terminal knew Ross by reputation. The young American was a senior lieutenant in the trans-Saturnian division of the Interplanetary Police Patrol. Tall, lean, weather-bronzed, with clear grey eyes and sharply molded features, he had assumed an ingenious disguise which protected him from the wrath of his enemies.
He was clad in a soiled and shabby space-pilot’s uniform of black rubberized cloth. His rust-colored solar boots were caked with the yellow clay of the Titan mine settlements, and the mesh-wire helmet which dangled by a thin strap from his shoulder was tarnished and misshapen. He had smeared his features with black engine grease and deliberately assumed an expression of drooling idiocy.
The picture he presented was a familiar one. He looked in all respects like a hard-bitten miner from the little Saturnian satellite Titan, hopelessly drunk on dilitis syrup.
Ross knew most of the reveling spacemen. There were murderers in the terminal the law couldn’t touch because of imbecile immunity treaties or lack of legal evidence. There were men there who had endured imprisonment in the Martian penal camps, but who were out on parole now and openly scornful of the Interplanetary Police.
The nations of Earth were constantly at loggerheads as to the most effective method of policing the planets, and the Patrol had the difficult task of enforcing a code of interplanetary law which was moth-eaten, and as variegated as a patchwork quilt. Through the big and little holes in it, big and little scoundrels could wriggle with impunity.
But Ross was determined that a certain scoundrel should not wriggle through. So far luck had favored him. No one had recognized him, and sitting at a metal table a few feet from where he was standing was the blackguard in question.
Justin Nichols’ pale and shadow-haunted face was set in grim lines as he drained dilitis through a thin glass tube and watched the carousing spacemen at adjoining tables. He was entirely alone. Most of the other outlaws had their arms about the slim waists of dancing girls as they swayed drunkenly above the tables.
Still fingering his blast pistol, Ross crossed suddenly to Nichols’ table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Justin Nichols started. His eyes, boring into those of the Patrol officer’s, widened abruptly in recognition and alarm. With an oath, he started to rise.
“Sit down, Nichols,” Ross said. “Pretend you’re glad to see me.”
He tapped his blast weapon bolster significantly.
“Pretend, Nichols. If you make one suspicious move, I’ll sear you!”
Nichols subsided in his chair and sat staring sullenly into the hard, level eyes of the Patrol lieutenant. A dull flush suffused his cheeks.
“You can get up now, Nichols.” Ross smiled grimly. “Walk slowly toward the door and keep remembering what I told you.”
Reluctantly, Nichols obeyed. Ross’s nervousness increased as they passed within inches of ruffians who were killers by instinct and choice. They were still in the midst of the tables near the center of the terminal when a slim, frail girl appeared in the doorway.
A mechanic’s lounge suit draped her slender form. Her skin was radiantly fair; her features indescribably beautiful. Her flowing, copper-colored hair flamed in the glow of the cold light lamps as she slipped swiftly through the doorway and stood for an instant in the shadow of the pylons, staring at Ross and the other.
Ross was so intent on his captive that he did not perceive her agitated features or that she was breathing fast. His inattentiveness nearly cost him his life. The girl suddenly raised her arm and pointed at him.
“That’s Ross, of the Interplanetary!” she exclaimed. Then her voice rose hysterically. “He’s been spying on us! Stop him, someone! Stop him—”
Her warning had a galvanic effect on the dilitis-drunk habitués of the terminal. At a dozen tables, sinister figures stiffened in swift fury. Ross caught a frightening glimpse of brutal, leering faces aflame with hate. Men to whom the spilling of blood was casually instinctive leaped to their feet with fierce oaths.
Ross was taken so completely by surprise that for an instant he stood without movement. Then he whirled, whipped out his blast pistol, and sent a searing, hissing cylinder of ruby-red flame spurting toward the ceiling of the terminal.
The cylinder pierced the cold-light lamps with a positron blast that knocked the little building from roof to floor. Trillions upon trillions of massed subatomic projectiles crashed against the insulated lamp mounts high overhead and cascaded in spreading sheets of hissing, sputtering energy down the terminal’s quaking walls.
There ensued a deafening detonation as the fragments of the cold-light lamps fell in glowing showers between the tables. The fragments spun about on the floor in a mad dervish dance for an instant. Hundreds of tiny pinpoints of light were lashed into quivering activity by the energy thrust of disorganized and escaping electrons. Then the firefly pageant dimmed, vanished. Utter darkness engulfed the terminal.
The dancing girls screamed as the darkness descended. Feet scraped on the corrugated metal floor. There was a volley of oaths and the crash of tables overturning. Ross retreated a pace, his blast weapon gripped tightly in his right hand. In the darkness, it was hard to distinguish between sounds; still harder to move swiftly in a straight line.
On all sides infuriated killers were seeking him out. He could hear the swift paddings of their feet all about him. The door was a faint, glimmering square of violet light. Hands clutched at him as he suddenly reversed his direction and started toward it.
For several yards he encountered no impediment. Then he stumbled into a resistant bulk that swore violently and lashed out at him. Luckily the fist of the ruffian missed his jaw by a narrow margin. Ross caught his assailant about the waist, lifted him into the air, and crashed him violently backward against a pylon. Then he lunged forward again.
He was within three yards of the doorway when he tripped on an overturned chair and went sprawling across the floor. He rose swiftly, but before he could get his body moving again, fists thudded against his ribs. Swiftly he whirled, leaped backward, and flailed the air with the massive, flaring muzzle of his blast pistol.
He heard a sickening crunch as slashing metal thudded against a human skull. In ghastly silence, the dimly outlined form of his assailant swayed, then crashed to the floor.
Immediately another ruffian blocked his path. Ross raised his knee and rammed it into a quivering stomach. The opposing bulk melted away with a groan of pain and rage. The next instant Ross was through the portal and out in the clear, oxygenated air under a canopy of skyflame.
High above his head, the immense crystal dome of the Saturnian skyport shone frostily beneath heaven-spanning rings of bright, swarming meteors. Mile-long oxygen cylinders turned slowly on both sides of him as he sped along a pedestrian airlane toward the spaceship terminal at the far extremity of the dome. From jets in the lateral sections of the huge, black cylinders, the life-sustaining air spurted in continuous blasts and circulated freely throughout the length and breadth of the skyport.
The Saturnian skyport was the largest in the Solar System. Under the meteor-girdled skies it shone with a luster as silvery and resplendent as the Earth-moon’s sheen, or the glowing face of heaven-climbing Titan. Its rounded tower was a tiny pinpoint of bright glory between a Charybdis of swirling detritus and a Scylla of towering granite. Colossally behind it loomed the stupendous crags and buttressed ledges of desolate mountains. Before it there stretched to flame-wrapped horizons a bleak, wind-lashed desert of pulverized lava.
Neither the mountains, which surpassed the mightiest of Earth-moon’s peaks in magnitude, nor the bleak, forbidding desert-land were suitable abodes for the life of Earth. Deadly methane and ammonia gases surged on the tainted air, and the far horizons were lurid with the light of perpetually erupting volcanoes.
Within the skyport the enormous, mile-long cylinders preserved a balanced atmospheric pressure under a dome of palely opalescent cyclisite crystal. Inside the great structure, the bleak, grim, and terrible Saturnian wastelands impinged visually on the senses, but their menace was illusionary so long as the skyport resisted the assaults of storm and soilquake.
At one end of the skyport clustered the relaxation terminals, little glittering domes within the huge mother dome. At the other were the bright cobalt glass berths of huge space transports and tiny solo craft no bigger than the stratosphere planes which darkened all the skies on distant Earth.
Ross was certain that Nichols had taken advantage of the darkness and confusion in the terminal to slip out ahead of him and make for the spaceship berths. Nichols’ little ship was moored next to the eighty-ton transport Ganymede, on one of the public take-off slides used by solo craft.
Across the bleak, interplanetary voids from far-off Jupiter Ross had pursued Nichols’ craft. On arriving at the great dome, he had zoomed his own little vessel into a neighboring berth and swiftly departed on a round of the relaxation terminals in quest of his elusive quarry.
As he raced over the sloping skyway, he cursed the slim, frail girl who had betrayed him to the rogues in the terminal. He did not know who she was. He had never seen her before. But he cursed her as he sped until his breath was coming in wheezing gasps.
All about him now, immense hulks towered. He saw the silvery and resplendent bulk of the thousand-meter titan of the spaceways Erubus, and the Martian armored cruiser Klatan, with her oblong triple-ports reflecting the skygleam of a thousand little moons. He moved swiftly beneath frowning, dark expanses of metal, passed through blue shadows which flickered like the lashing reflections cast by comets’ tails on the mist-shrouds of the larger planets, and emerged at last on the wide, central platform at the base of the public runways.
The platform glowed dimly in the opalescent light of immense meteor belts and swift-circling little moons. Ross stopped an instant to regain his breath, then ascended swiftly over foot-mounts cut in the metal to the tiered runways above; the runways supported the little solo craft of adventurer pilots and independent miners from the Titan ore concessions.
At last Ross reached the take-off slide where he had left Nichols’ vessel. Gasping for breath, he stood staring in bitter chagrin at an empty expanse of shining metal. The little craft was gone! Breathing curses, he turned and ascended swiftly to his own small craft, which rested on the tier above.
A young man of eighteen was standing beside Ross’s gleaming vessel. He wore a mechanic’s lounge suit and short solar boots. An ultraviolet ray-shield hid the upper part of his white face. His jaw was bruised and swollen, and blood oozed from a cut on his mouth. He staggered a little as Ross came toward him.
“So you tried to stop him, eh? Good lad!”
The youth nodded.
“I fought him till he knocked me down,” he said. “The girl helped him. She’s a she-devil, sir.”
Ross’s eyes lit up.
“A girl, eh? The same girl, I’ll wager. Get inside, Bob. We’re going after them.”
CHAPTER II
The Death Ray
Five Earth-minutes later, Ross’s little vessel vibrated from bow to stern; then it crawled steadily down the runway in a snail-like glide. Moving scarcely a foot a second, it zoomed upward toward the summit of the dome.
As it neared the airlocks it bisected a photoelectric beam which automatically set the massive ejection mechanism in motion. The little ship was swiftly drawn into a compartment devoid of air, held suspended an instant in vacuum, and then shunted outward into the sub-zero, methane-tainted atmosphere beyond the skyport.
As the airlock closed behind the tiny craft, the whirring rotoform propellers which had lifted it from the runway ceased to function and the freshly-banked infra-atomic blast engines in its basal compartments exploded with a roar. The initial acceleration had not exceeded a few thousand feet a minute. But now its speed was increased enormously. Up from the volcanon-reddened crust of the ringed planet the little vehicle shot. Its velocity steadily mounted till the outer plates grew red, then white-hot.
Within the heat-resisting inner shell of the incredibly speeding vessel, Ross sat staring out through an observation window of inches-thick quartz at a titanic blue arc shot with gold. This bright inner ring of Saturn, composed of millions of tiny asteroids, was half a million miles in circumference. In the firmament beyond it, six of Saturn’s ten moons hung pendulously suspended, two green, three yellow, and one a blood-red ruby against the diffuse glory of the far-flung constellations.
Within five minutes, the vessel had attained an altitude of one hundred miles. Ross was sitting before a control board grimly manipulating dials and levers when young Robert Brooke entered the pilot chamber. He crossed swiftly to Ross’s side.
“I’ve located them in the telescopic receptor,” he exclaimed. “They’re heading for Hyperion!”
Ross swung about in his metal pilot’s chair, his face suddenly tense and incredulous.
“Good God!” he muttered. “Are they mad? I’d rather land blind in some foul, black bog on Rhea or Japetus. Even if they slip away from us in the dense surface fogs, they’ll find hell waiting when they step out through the gravity ports.”
Brooke nodded grimly. He had read about Hyperion in the navigator’s almanac. It was the backwater moon of the system. It had sufficient density to retain oxygen, but the air was so tainted with deadly carbon monoxide gas you couldn’t breathe it without a Dulo filter. Under the fog blanket, there was a scummy surface film of nasty, malignant life. Corrosive spores, flame-tongued leech-weeds. The last exploring party had landed there blind in 2078. Six months later, a Martian rescue crew had picked up three survivors.
Three haggard, gibbering skeletons, with shriveled flesh gangrening from uncauterized leech-weed abrasions. The little moon was a kind of vegetable inferno, a veritable hell-garden where alien forms of life flourished noxiously in an atmosphere impregnated with death.
“If we follow them to the moon’s surface, we may crash in the fog,” said the youth apprehensively. “I thought—I thought we could try to reach them with the Sillo-beam. I synchronized the S-tube range with the visual field in the receptor screen.”
Ross glanced at him sharply. “Took a lot on your shoulders, didn’t you?” he exclaimed. “Are you afraid to land on Hyperion?”
Brooke bit his lips, reddened.
“I think I understand,” Ross laughed. “A girl, eh?”
The youth nodded.
“We are to be married next month. In Auriga City, Venus. I have no insurance papers, and if anything should happen to me—” His lips set grimly,
Ross descended from the pilot’s seat and gripped his arm.
“All right, Bob. I understand. Just take my place now. Watch the pressure gages. If the gravity stabilizer slips a millimeter, regrade it.”
The youth nodded and climbed into the pilot’s seat, while Ross slipped swiftly from the little chamber. He moved down a narrow corridor and, descending a spiral stairway in the depths of the vessel, emerged into the compartment which contained the telescopic receptor screen and the switchboard which controlled the long-range Sillo-beams.
On the green-lit visual screen, bright images flickered. The screen was vertically suspended between terminus joints in the summit of a massive electrothermal pillar which rose obliquely from the floor of the compartment. The flickering images were conveyed by heat-wave transformation from a powerful reflecting telescope in the vessel’s prow.
The images were very bright and clear because there was little loss of light in the nearly gasless stratosphere five hundred miles above the planet’s surface. Ross crossed to the image screen and studied it intently. Brooke had located the fleeting space ship with competence and accuracy. Near the center of the screen, the mist-enveloped disc of Hyperion shone with reflected meteor light. A little distance from the rim of the dully-illumined moon was a tiny black midge-shape gyrating in the tenuous pressure-drifts of an airless ether.
Ross studied the tiny, cigar-shaped vessel for an instant with set lips. Then he stepped to the illuminated switchboard which controlled the Sillo-beams. If luck favored him, he could stop that fleeing vehicle dead in space. The Sillo-tube could throw a paralyzing ray of magnetically energized light twenty thousand miles across empty ether. The light would envelop the little craft in a blinding shell of force and hold it immovably suspended above the mist-enshrouded satellite.
Ross grasped a small, black dial, twirled it about between his fingers. Five Sillovolts of energy flowed into the Sillo-tube; then ten, then fifteen. The vessel vibrated as the great, space-piercing beam streamed outward from its hull toward the tiny fly-speck of matter thousands of miles away.
Swiftly Ross returned to the receptor screen; stared anxiously. Relief flooded his being when he perceived that the beam had found its mark. With deadly accuracy it had streamed across space and enveloped the fleeing vessel. He had scored a hit!
Nichols’ ship was now utterly motionless in space. Ross wiped moisture from his forehead; laughed loudly in relief and exultation.
“Good lad,” he muttered, addressing the wall in lieu of young Brooke, but thinking of Brooke. “You figured the range to a T! We’ve got Nichols! We’ve got the little vixen who’s with him! We’ve got them both. We’ve—”
Suddenly he gasped. Out from the little vessel near Hyperion there shot a swift beam of blinding purple light. A Sillo-beam, in blasting concentration! The hue was unmistakable.
Ross’s eyes dilated in terror. With a cry he recoiled from the screen, as though even the image of such a beam could maim and kill. As he did so, the little craft rolled sickeningly. There was a clang of tortured metal. All the lights on the Sillo-beam chamber flickered, dimmed.
Ross was thrown violently forward against the switchboard. For an instant he clung to the edge of the massive panel, swaying groggily. Then he straightened, stood erect. Shook his head to clear it of dizziness.
A terrible fear was taking shape in his mind. The deadly beam had pierced the vessel and passed onward through space. Clanging plates and dimming lights were the inevitable sequels of a direct hit. Fortunately, the concentrated beam pierced space as a thin, lethal filament. It seared all flesh in its path, but its range was limited to within a radius of a few feet.
With shaking fingers, Ross lifted the audiphone on the switchboard before him, pressed it to his ear. For an instant he stood grimly listening. Then all the blood seeped out of his face, leaving it ashen. He swayed. In the pilot chamber above, Robert Brooke was audibly moaning.
* * * *
When Ross reached the lad’s side after a frantic, tortured ascent from the bowels of the little vessel he found him slumped at the base of the pilot’s chair. The beam had pierced his chest; seared him horribly. Burned fragments of rubberized leather mercifully concealed the lesser wounds in the blackened flesh of his arms and thighs. His lips were flecked with crimson froth as he tried to smile into the compassion-filmed, tormented eyes of the man kneeling beside him.
“She won’t get—the insurance—now,” he muttered with a wrenching effort. “But I guess—it’s—all part—of the game. I hope you get ’em, chief. The concentrated beam—prohibited—Interplanetary law—”
Ross nodded. He was close to tears and could only murmur indistinctly.
“We’ll look after her, lad. The Patrol will look after her.”
Brooke raised his face, succeeded despite his pain in really smiling. Then the light faded from his eyes. His breathing became irregular, tortured. His chest rose and fell spasmodically for an instant. Then he uttered a little cry; went all limp. The smile returned to his lips a moment before his breathing stopped.
CHAPTER III
Circle of Slaughtered Men
It was a grimmer Ross who returned to the observation window fifty Earth-minutes later to watch the beam-suspended little vessel floating in the ether before Hyperion increase rapidly in size. With deep sorrow and reverence he had sent the flag-wrapped body of Robert Brooke out through a gravity port to a star burial in the night of space. He sat sad and watchful, feeling very lonely now, and, despite his youth, very old.
Of one thing he was grimly certain. He would overtake and capture Nichols’ vessel. Solo spacecraft were too light to carry more than thirty Sillovolts of beam energy in their S-tubes. Nichols had shot his bolt, lethally, malignantly. Now Nichols would pay with his life. As for the girl—Ross’s lips tightened. He would show her no mercy.
The tiny craft throbbed evenly through space, drawing nearer and ever nearer to the dimly glowing misty face of little Hyperion. The beam-suspended vessel was now clearly visible to the naked eye in the quartz observation window and Ross needed no telescope to discern its mist-enveloped outlines.
He was rebanking the blast engines with fuel sheets of re-energized electrons when a curving crescent of light shot from the mist on the little moon. Instantly Ross leaned forward above the controls, staring in breathless wonderment through the quartz window.
In the wake of the light something was rising from Hyperion’s surface, a dark, wedge-shaped mass that moved obliquely through the ether with curious little jerks and regressions. Something about its contours and mode of progression was vaguely spiderlike as it scuttled up through the white opacity. Ross was so startled he forgot to breathe.
From the summit of the weird, irregularly moving wedge a thin ray of light crossed the Sillo-beam, in seeming immunity to its refractive repulsion. Then, suddenly, a startling phenomenon occurred. The Sillo-beam cocoon dissolved under the impingement of that other beam. It dissolved completely. The streaming radiance flowed off from the tiny craft’s bow and stern and was dissipated in the ether.
Instantly the dark wedge grew very bright on its lateral side. Out from it there projected a secondary wedge of glimmering light which descended slowly toward the newly liberated vessel.
Suddenly Ross perceived that the wedge was transparent and unstable. The wavering, mist-enveloped face of the little moon was obscurely visible through it. As it approached Nichols’ spaceship, its contours altered. It wavered nebulously, then buckled into billowing folds.
Ross’s flesh went cold as his mind groped for an explanation of that strange encounter in space. Was the wedge deliberately trawling in the ether for the little vessel and its crew? Was the luminous, weaving projection a sort of net which the dark wedge was employing in its search for prey? Even as Ross stared, Nichols’ little craft was caught up, enveloped by the luminous folds.
Chills raced along Ross’s spine. He stared in horror as the net enveloped the vessel completely. The next instant the dark wedge moved jerkily backward toward the luminous mists of Hyperion. Like a great, scuttling spider retreating into the white opacity of its lair, with its prey in a bright, dewy web of its own contriving.
Ross had braked his little vessel while the grim drama was unfolding. Now, as the dark, sinister wedge vanished in the mists above Hyperion.
He released additional fuel sheets into the basal blast engines.
Sitting tight-lipped at the control panel, he guided the little vessel down and down. Through whirling layers of atmospheric gases, through thin convexial stratovacuums which frosted the observation window despite the heat of the outer plates. At fifteen miles altitude he started braking his course. He shut off all but one of the atomic blast engines and swung the gravity-stabilizer toward zero. At five miles his acceleration had been cut to a blast propulsion minimum of three miles a minute.
T two miles he shut off the blast engines; twirled the rotor dials. The little vessel circled slowly downward toward a world unplumbed. A world of blood-hungry leech-weeds, poisonous fungus growths, and a dark sky marauder that scuttled, spiderlike, out of white mists to trawl for men!
He landed safely in a rocky valley between two little hills that loomed bleakly forbidding in the green-lit gloom. The vessel settled comfortably on a black granite ledge abutting on a nearly level terrain.
When Ross came out through the open gravity port with a Dulo oxygen filter strapped to the lower part of his face he moved with grim purpose and yet, paradoxically, like a man entranced. He was in thrall to emotions that would have seemed incomprehensible to the adventurers and explorers who had trod Hyperion’s soil before him. Though a sense of alienage and a premonition of horror oppressed his mind, his dominant thought was one of vengeance.
He had been cheated of his vengeance by the scuttling horror from the white mists. No foot as firm as his had ever trod this little world before him. No Earthman had ever moved as resolutely into the unknown or displayed more indifference as to what might befall him.
The little backwater moon had no glory skies. A thin green light poured downward from clouds that hid even the immense rings of its primary. Beneath Ross’s feet the soil was as smooth and polished as a surface of glass. There were no tumbled stones here; no crevices or pitfalls to ensnare his feet as he progressed. All about him a tomblike silence reigned. Nowhere was there a suggestion of movement or echo of sound. The soil was curiously metallic in texture. A surface layer of glowing blue-green composed of tiny particles like sand overspread a more solid stratum which resisted the impress of his solar boots. Wisps of green fog came down into the valley, obscuring horizons and concealing the landscape directly before him.
He walked swiftly forward through the mist, driven by a compulsion which was more intuitive than logical. Yet he was sure that Nichols’ vessel had been drawn by the raider from the mist into this or an adjacent valley. He had followed the captured vessel closely; had entered the mist directly behind it, paralleling its plane of descent. It seemed unlikely that it could be far away.
He had covered perhaps seventy-five feet when the green mist which had obscured his view slowly parted, to reveal a scene which stopped him in his tracks and drove the blood in torrents to his heart.
Twenty feet from where he was standing, on the smooth, metallic soil, was a little group of Earthmen. Fifteen or twenty Earthmen kneeling in a wide circle, with Simel automatic heat-guns in their hands and with the green cloud shining upon them. They were utterly motionless.
Their eyes stared vacantly into space; their features bore expressions of frozen horror. Great splotches of crimson stained their torn and dusty garments. In gaps in the wide circle the heads and shoulders of prone men protruded. Heads without skull caps; shoulders hunched and misshapen, and striated with clotted blood.
As Ross stared horror such as he had never known surged up in him. Horror and sick revulsion. But despite the tremors which shook him he forced himself to move again. Unsteadily he advanced to the edge of the circle of corpses, and examined the scene of carnage at close range.
The bodies of the kneeling men were gruesomely rigid. Above their horror-distorted faces their heads were gruesomely flat. The skull caps had been removed completely and with precision, as though a saw or surgeon’s scalpel had aided in the grim disfigurement. Within the brain cavities were neither cerebra nor cerebella. Merely dark striations, grisly splotches along the base of the periosteum and in the region of the Orbital cavities. The brains had been lifted out!
Not all of the bodies bore wounds. Something more deadly than lethal beams or blast bolts had stricken them as they fought grimly to defend themselves against some ghastly enemy.
Suddenly Ross perceived a little metal object lying on the ground near the rim of the circle. He stooped and picked it up. It was a metal sheet diary, containing about twenty leaves and scrawled in ten-point characters, with a few blockings out here and there. As Ross thumbed the leaves he was filled with a sense of impending disaster, as though he had strayed into a region of ghastly unreality where all the shadows were images of Death.
On one sheet the unknown diarist had written:
I am quite sure that I am the only Earthman who will ever read this record. But if I do not occupy my mind in some way I shall go mad. In a few hours I shall be dead. I shall die resisting, with the curious stubbornness of my kind. When 1 am dead they will remove my brain, preserve it in one of their queer little jars, and perhaps dissect it in some undreamed of laboratory beyond the Solar System. But they will never know, never really understand how it feels to be a man.
Ross thumbed frantically backward through the record, scanned another sheet. Sentences here and there stood out on the gleaming ten-point script with an ominous clarity.
My contract with the Jupiter Company having expired in 2089 I engaged passage on the trans-Saturnian transport Iris. My wife and I had planned a vacation of six Earth-months in the South Martian Littoral. I intended to debark at Eridanus City; after a stop-over of six Earth-months at Mare New Cetus.
The alien ship attacked us while we were 0.16 off Saturn’s orbit. Diacoustic field blocked out. The luminous web of energy which enveloped our vessel and carried us to Hyperion shows the same frequency in the electrokinetic thermolysis units as the paralyzing beam which they employ as an aid to hypnosis. Their death-beams do not register on our units.…
They are creatures of intellect with bodies unutterably loathsome. They are from far beyond the Solar System. They can vaguely understand some of our thoughts, but our emotions are utterly alien to them. They have no desire to remain alive at all.
As long as life remains in their hideous frames they seem to experience a kind of negative pleasure in merely living and thinking. But when we attacked them with our hands, maiming and crippling them, they calmly continued the process of destruction, literally stripping their limbs of all substance. They are incapable of malice. They hate us no more than humane men on Earth hate the ants and bees which they thoughtlessly trample under foot.…
It is the hypnosis we fear most. We have resolved to die rather than continue to submit to it. By some extraordinary development of the power of telepathy they can read our minds and actually transfer their own thought-images, their own alien ways of willing and thinking to us. When they stare steadily at us for several minutes our brains are narcoticized and enfeebled. We fall into an hypnotic trance and think the tendril giant’s thoughts, dream their awful, impersonal dreams. Dreams in which self-preservation plays no part.
Most of my companions have altered appallingly. They have renounced their human heritage, and are no longer capable of revolt. Hopelessly wretched, and lost, I and a few others have struggled to remain human and have succeeded in resisting hypnosis. We intend to flee tonight. They no longer guard us closely. They foolishly believe that we have lost all desire to escape. We shall flee to Blue Ore Valley, where there are no poison spores or deadly leech-weeds. We will camp there, strengthen our defenses. They are taking our lost companions away tonight in their stellar space vessels. But we the dead will lose only our brains…
Ross read no further. Sweat beaded his forehead as his gaze returned to the circle of massacred men, lingered on each in turn. But there was nothing to identify the diary writer. He had found sanguinary oblivion along with his companions. The gruesome fate which he had foreseen had not spared a single member of that heroic band.
CHAPTER IV
The Tendril Giants
A scream tore suddenly out of the mist, echoed appallingly from the black crags on both sides of the valley and reverberated afar. It was a human scream, vibrant with terror, shrill with pain.
Ross turned and faced down the valley, straining his ears to catch whatever sound might come. Presently footsteps echoed through the thin green mist a few yards ahead of him, footsteps that faltered to the pitiable accompaniment of groans and low, gurgling sobs, and then advanced again.
At length the mist divided to reveal a tall, staggering form, nearly naked, who could not stand upright because of the wounds he bore; who could only groan and twist his head in torment as he approached Ross on legs that threatened to collapse beneath him.
Justin Nichols was an object of horror. Corrosive spores had eaten away all but the shoulder straps of his space suit, and from his exposed flesh there hung the long, ribbonlike tails of writhing leech-weeds. The heads of the weeds were buried deep in his flesh.
Ross drew a breath of shuddering horror. A great wave of pity and compassion flooded his being. He had vowed eternal vengeance against this killer of his friend. But it was impossible to feel anything but pity for a wretch so tormented, so cruelly trapped.
Nichols was clutching now at Ross’s sleeve. His voice was hoarse with terror.
“Thank God you followed us,” he almost sobbed. “Did you see their ship? It came up out of the mist, threw a sort of light—Ross, it’s horrible. They’re from beyond our universe. Vegetablelike things—”
Nichols swayed suddenly. Ross caught him about the shoulders, steadied him.
“Easy,” he cautioned. “Easy, Nichols. We’ve got to get these leech-weeds off.”
“Never mind me, Ross,” Nichols groaned. “You can save Marta. You can take her off in your ship. They’re totally deaf. That’s how I got away. I couldn’t wake Marta. They put her to sleep. Put me to sleep too, but I woke up.”
His grasp tightened on Ross’s sleeve. “I stumbled into a nest of leech-weeds. God! It was horrible. They attacked me, tore me.”
His breath was coming laboriously now.
“I’m dying, Ross. Must finish. Must tell you. Marta is my sister. She thought me—innocent. I lied to her. When I stole—from Mercury Company—I was desperate. Horribly in debt. I thought I could return—platinum—before I was—was noticed. When I found I couldn’t—I had to flee, Ross. She followed because she was loyal. In the terminal—just impulsive. It was your life or mine and I—was her brother. She didn’t know I—rayed you-in space. She’s blameless, Ross—”
Suddenly Nichols’ tormented eyes bulged glassily. He cried out in terror, jerked his body erect and, twisting free from Ross’s supporting arm, plunged with terrified whimperings into the obscuring mist.
Ross was so startled he stood rooted to the soil. A tall, wavering shape had emerged from the mist a few yards away and was moving swiftly along the valley toward him. The creature was eight feet in height and covered with a kind of yellowish fuzz. It looked like an immense, shriveled root. Only its head, which was vaguely anthropomorphic in contour, and its little tubular legs hinted at animal kinship. Its heart-shaped face was a flat, wrinkled expanse, expressionless save for the bright glitter of two little slitted eyes, and a writhing, puckered orifice immediately beneath them which appeared to serve as its mouth.
From its twisted, cankerous body there sprouted numerous frail, plantlike tendrils, some green, some red, and a few the pallid, sickly hue of Saturnian corpse fungi. A few sturdier tendrils, more like tentacles, were wrapped tightly about the upper part of its torso. Both the tendrils and the curiously twisted and unsymmetrical body suggested a vegetable rather than animal origin.
Held tightly in the curling extremity of one very brilliant tendril was a little metallic cone about eight inches in length. As the repulsive creature advanced on its stumpy legs it slowly raised the extremity of the tendril and leveled it in Ross’s direction.
Instantly a beam of light flashed from the cone and enveloped the terrified Earthman. The light flashed out so abruptly that Ross’s faculties responded with a violent shuddering. All through his body the strange, intense convulsion passed; his muscles, nerves, the very pulse of his blood was affected by it.
Then something seemed to grip him about the shoulders and draw him agonizingly backward. The paralyzing beam jerked his arms sideward and pinioned them at the elbows; then took possession of his legs and stiffened them till he stood rooted to the ground.
He was now incapable of movement. Only his brain remained feverishly active, oppressed by qualms which twisted his features into a quivering mask of horror. Moving constantly closer the abhorrent shape seemed to increase its speed with every foot traversed. When it was appallingly close the little slitted eyes opened suddenly, horribly, in the pear-shaped, wrinkled face and widened to a hideous bigness.
For seconds that seemed to expand into hours and then eternities the bright, saucerlike orbs stared relentlessly into the fright-dilated eyes of the Earthman.
Ross felt his faculties wavering. Light receded from all the objects about him. Their mist-enveloped contours shimmered nebulously; then vanished into darkness. The tendril giant’s eyes became tapers of bright flame burning through a curtain of impenetrable gloom. For a time Ross fought frantically against the stupor which was engulfing him. Momentarily he succeeded in beating his way back to the gates of consciousness. Bursts of light stabbed through the gloom; flashes of clarity showed him familiar objects for an instant. But it was a losing struggle.
The hypnotic orbs were glowing more brightly now than the blinding giant suns of outer space. They usurped his world, his universe. Relentlessly as he struggled oblivion clutched at him with iron fingers and dragged him down into the abyss.
CHAPTER V
Captives in Space
When Ross opened his eyes again be was lying on a smooth, cold expanse of gleaming metallic soil. Obscurely amidst the vapors which clogged his sleep-drugged brain a glimmer of light appeared. Slowly it widened and spread. He became aware of dim shapes that moved slowly across his befogged and distorted vision.
Slowly his faculties expanded. He moved his limbs; raised his head and touched the oxygen filter on his face. For an instant he stared upward into the swirling green mist, bewildered. Then memories came rushing back. With a groan he twisted about and rose to his knees.
Instantly a sense of wonder and utter alienage pervaded his being. A few feet away, partly obscured by the luminous mist, eight tendril giants were standing on their little tubular legs, silently watching him. As his gaze penetrated the mist his eyes widened in sudden, joyful recognition. Within his mind human memories and impulses were now intertwined with images vast in scope, and of non-human origin. For the first time he had perceived the compulsion under which the tendril giants labored and did not recoil from them in revulsion.
The tendril giants were endowed with a wisdom far transcending anything of which the human race could boast. An insatiable, all-consuming curiosity was their dominant appetite. This appetite was more pronounced and aggressive than the simple emotional desires of the Earthmen and included a fierce, uncontrollable urge to explore every crevice of the known universe, to fathom every variation of animal and vegetable behavior on every planetary system. It was this urge which had sent them Saturnward across wide gulfs of space, bent on exploration and discovery.
Resting on the gleaming soil by Ross’s side was the reclining form of a slim young Earthwoman. Sweat beaded her white forehead, and her copper-colored hair was damp with clinging moisture. She had risen on her elbow and was watching him with a slight, perplexed frown. Suddenly she plucked at his sleeve.
“You are James Ross,” she said.
Slowly Ross gazed down at her, nodded. His face showed no surprise.
“And you are Marta Nichols,” he said simply. “You are to be my companion in the great journey which lies before us.”
Ross’s face grew suddenly stern and impassive.
“We have lived lives of folly, Marta,” he murmured. “We have squandered our vain human energies blindly, stupidly. How these great beings must despise us! How loathsome we must seem in their sight! Their cold, impersonal intelligences transcend our little lives as we transcend the lives of worms and insects.”
Slowly he rose and extended his hand.
“Come, Marta,” he said.
The Earthwoman’s face was an enigmatic mask. Her pale features were resigned, composed even, but there was a look in her eyes which was vaguely disturbing. No muscle of her face twitched as she slipped her palm between Ross’s fingers and followed him over the shining soil to where the tendril giants rested. But her eyes were not the eyes of one who has gazed on cosmic glories and experienced a mental rebirth. Her eyes were womanly, human, with glints of rebellion still in their lustrous depths.
Before the tendril giants Ross and the girl paused, in tremulous awe. Their loathsome appearance did not alter the expression of almost rapturous acceptance on Ross’s face. From the group of ten plant-creatures two arose and drew near to Ross and his companion. With soft murmurs that seemed to hold accents of approval and admiration they seized them gently in their tendrils and lifted them from the ground.
The journey which ensued led northward along the valley over a level, moist terrain covered by corpse-white fungus growths and a convoluted, sanguine-hued plant which grew close to the soil and bore a nauseating resemblance to the lobes of a human brain.
The valley widened as they advanced, the soil becoming soggier, and the vegetation more brightly-hued and luxuriant. The tendril giants varied their gait to accommodate themselves to impediments under foot, but no obstacles presented by the changing landscape seemed too difficult to surmount, and Ross and his companion remained safely suspended above the swaying shoulders of their carriers.
Despite the changing topography the journey, in its initial stages, was monotonous, but after an interminable series of detours they ascended a nearly vertical escarpment of bleak, forbidding rock and emerged on a flat, mile-wide plateau above a narrow ravine.
An exclamation of joy and wonder burst from Ross’s throat’ at the spectacle which confronted him. The entire plateau was studded with huge, wedge-shaped spacecraft which rested on elevated landing discs, slowly revolving in the mist-light. Between the enormous dark vessels hundreds of tendril giants were moving over the reddish, pitted soil, testing great projecting valves with upraised tendrils. Others were vaporizing the solid masses of potential energy in the gleaming propulsion tubes which enormous lifting cranes were depositing in the basal compartments of the skyward-pointing vehicles.
A little group of six plant-creatures was bearing to a grim ravine-burial at the edge of the plateau a few shapeless things which had been horribly mangled in the abysses between the stars.
“Look, Marta,” Ross murmured. “Here are nearly all the space-voyagers, the cold, audacious ones who explore the interstellar gulfs. No Earthman has ever before beheld one of the great projectile bases. Two-thirds of all the spaceships of the star people come to rest here.”
Into Marta’s blue eye’s crept a dim flicker, which suddenly became a steady glow, burning into the eyes of her companion. Then it vanished. With a little sigh she stared upward into the mist, as though a grim presentiment weighed upon her.
Progression on the level plateau, despite its pitted surface, presented fewer difficulties to the tendril giants than the plant-infested lowlands beyond and they progressed with unbelievable rapidity on their tubular legs to the base of one of the landing discs.
Still more quickly the two were lifted to the disc; assisted into the great vessel by the down-reaching tendrils of a plant-creature pilot. With soft murmurs the two carriers withdrew from the revolving disc, lumbered backward over the plateau. The pilot drew Ross and the girl quickly upward, over a shining surface of space-weathered metal that glistened in the mist-glow and down into the interior of the vessel.
Ross offered no resistance. A boundless joy surged through him at the thought of the stupendous gulfs he was about to traverse. But Marta struggled a little as though in resentment as the tendril giant pilot fitted her slim body into a passenger berth that was at the rear of the pilot chamber.
The immense compartment in which they found themselves was filled with a fantastic assortment of charts and mechanisms. Green globes filled with wavering fluids, metallic testing meters with altitudic readings which operated by infra-atomic control motion-balancing energy-depleters in square boxlike containers. An illuminated control panel studded with little, glittering dials and surmounted by a celestial chart of huge dimensions, in which the constellations were wondrously displayed, usurped the wall-space directly opposite them.
Ross rested beside Marta in the passenger berth. The tendril giant pilot stood before them for an instant, waving its tendrils and swaying its rootlike body in the throes of unfathomable emotions. Then it turned and advanced across the chamber to the elevated pilot’s seat which abutted on an observation window of such curious molecular construction that its atoms were rearranged constantly as it passed outward into space, enabling it to remain utterly transparent in the alien magnetic fields and inconceivably lowered temperatures of far star-clusters.
The pilot tendril giant ascended into the elevated seat and curved one of its tendrils about a longitudinal bar projecting from the glowing switchboard beside it. The bar was wrenched violently from its socket, turned about and reinserted in an adjacent connection. Instantly it began to revolve, while green and purple sparks ascended in a blinding, whirling cascade to the roof of the chamber. The bar was a generator of stupendous energies. Composed of magnetically-conditioned molecules it acted as a kind of transformer, releasing stupendous fields of force in the liquid reservoirs of potential energy which reposed in the basal compartments of the great vessel.
There was a thunderous detonation and a blinding spurt of light as trillions of electron-volts ripped the wave packets from the sealed ends of the propulsion tubes, lifted the great ship from the earth, and sent it hurtling outward in the direction of the glimmering constellations.
Ross’s eyes were shining. He turned to the girl.
“Do you not see, Marta,” he murmured gently, “that we are about to share an immortal adventure? The star people are testing us, testing our unworthy kind. Hitherto we have been swayed by violent and petty emotions. But now, on some far galaxy, we shall be tested and proved worthy.
“Just what the nature of the test will be, I do not know. But I believe that we shall be given some heroic task to perform. If we do not falter, if we do not allow our petty human emotions to sway and hamper us the star-people will know that there is still hope for our little race. Still hope for the little, primitive bipeds, Marta!”
“You have absorbed the star-people’s knowledge and speak with an alien tongue,” Marta said after a while. “They are great, but they are not as great as we. I, too, have submitted to hypnosis, but though I share their wisdom I am not so easily swayed.”
Ross’s face hardened. He tore his gaze from her countenance and stared at the glowing observation window which revealed a blanket of shimmering suns beyond the gently swaying body of the tendril giant pilot. He knew that somewhere in the far, outer cosmos, perhaps in some superuniverse of inconceivable dimensions, he would be tested gloriously and rise forever superior to the tormenting limitations of his human heritage.
“Look at me, James Ross,” said Marta suddenly.
Ross shivered a little, tried to keep his eyes riveted on the window. But the woman’s voice and gaze had forged a double weapon which threatened him with painfully sweet urgency. He turned again, and their eyes met in a swift, visual embrace.
“For only a brief moment, which was darkened by enmity, were we together, James Ross, in our dear human world. But somehow I—James Ross, I speak now to save you. The reticence which becomes my sex I; must thrust aside. When first my eyes looked into yours, James Ross, I loved you.”
Ross’s lips were mute, but a thrill of wonder went through him. It was as if her voice had penetrated to some secret, inner recess of his being, jarring faculties which slumbered, restoring him to a world of loveliness which was alien to the tendril giants’ nature.
“I know that everything that is human seems distant now and pitiful,” she murmured. “But once it was not so. A hideous spell has been laid upon us, so that a mist films the bright face of that other glory. But through the mist I can see it dimly, and I know that the star-testings you speak of shrivel into insignificance beside it. Look at me, James Ross. Look steadily into my eyes. Perhaps we can recapture it before it is too late.”
ROSS complied. For interminable minutes he gazed deeply into her eyes, until their soft radiance filled his world, his universe, until the tendril giants were forgotten and the glory which Marta saw appeared to him in mistless splendor, and he recognized it as the miracle of love.
Suddenly his shoulders tensed and a grim expression came into his face. Swiftly he descended from the passenger berth and moved across the chamber. The tendril giant was bent above the controls, oblivious to his approach. Ross crept up behind it in utter silence. Slowly, cautiously, his arms went out.
Marta screamed as the Patrol officer tore the writhing creature from its high metal seat, and hurled it with violence to the floor. The next instant Ross was down on the floor beside it, clawing and tearing at its writhing bulk.
The tendril giant looped its appendages about the Earthman’s limbs and tightened them into knots which sank cruelly into his flesh. Marta screamed again. Bright human blood appeared in a swelling rim about the tightening vegetal coils; spurted over the rootlike creature’s repulsive, slowly twisting back.
Ross continued to claw frantically at the torso of the prostrate monster. His fingers tore at pulpy flesh; his nails sank deeply into the thing’s soft vitals. He saw the wavering ceiling of the chamber through a pinkish mist which slowly deepened to the hue of blood. Excruciating stabs of pain cut through his chest and snaked agonizingly down his limbs. He was choking for breath, gasping in an extremity of torment when the pressure slowly relaxed.
The tendril giant untwined its coiling appendages and writhed away from the Earthman’s clasp. The next instant an almost unbelievable thing occurred. The odious creature turned over on its back and began frantically to tear its own flesh. Having suffered injury in some vital region it was proceeding with a frenzied eagerness to escape from the burden of personal existence.
It was all so strange and horrible that Marta sickened as she watched it. Its tendrils went out and ripped all the soft, spongy tissue from its own body. The hideous process of self-destruction continued until there was nothing left of the monster but a fleshless endoskeleton covered with a dark muculent ichor which glimmered offensively in the strange, dim light, of unknown origin, which illumined the interior of the chamber.
Ross got unsteadily to his feet and stared in shivering horror at the prone, repulsively gleaming form. All about it lay pulpy fragments of its own torn and quivering flesh. For several minutes it continued to writhe and move blindly about. Then a convulsive tremor passed over it. It lay still.
Ross’s lips were white. The muscles of his face twitched a little. When he withdrew his eyes from the horror on the floor he stood a moment without movement, staring at Marta who was crouching in an attitude of shuddering incredulity at the edge of the passenger berth.
Suddenly he passed a tremulous hand across his brow.
“Marta I—I believe I can pilot this vessel. I remember how the controls work. They explained the mechanism to me when they put me to sleep. It’s so simple a child could master it.” He was still trembling a little. “They thought that might destroy itself,” he said, nodding toward the denuded horror on the floor. “It often happens. Sometimes they’re seized with sudden, suicidal impulses for no reason at all. They thought if it did happen I’d pilot the vessel back to Hyperion. That’s why they explained the mechanism.”
Suddenly his eyes lit up. His voice grew tense, exultant.
“They were blindly stupid! Do you know what I’m going to do, Marta, my darling? I’m going to reverse our course and fly back to Saturn. Through the airlocks, Marta! Into the skyport!”
Abruptly he turned, limped across the chamber and raised himself with an effort into the high pilot’s chair.
Marta sat as though stunned, silently watching him, hardly daring to breathe. Then a womanly impulse asserted itself. Descending from the passenger berth she crossed to his side and sank to her knees at the base of the pilot’s chair. Her copper-colored hair enveloped a wide expanse of gleaming metal as she laid her cheek against his knee.
“Whatever happens to us, my dear,” she murmured, “we will be together until the end. Either on Earth, or—” Her voice trailed off as the great interstellar craft responded to the guiding hand of its Earthborn pilot. She sat without speaking, gazed tenderly up into Ross’s grimly exultant face, so wrapped up in him that, womanlike, she forgot the perils ahead and thought only of the miraculous present.