by Eando Binder
“How far?” I asked sharply. “You humans are brave—but fools. How far would you get against an unknown number of them? And what is the way out? And what powers their guns? And what is their dome made of? And how many more space ships are coming? And how can this dome be sabotaged effectively? We have to know those things, instead of blindly rushing out to become corpses who died in foolish glory!”
“You’re right,” Taylor muttered, subsiding. “But how are we going to find out? You can’t get out of this cell to do any spying around.”
“You forget who I am,” I said without boastfulness. “There is only one kind of jail that could hold Adam Link. A completely solid steel chamber—if the walls were thick enough. Now be quiet, all of you!”
IT WAS late night now, in the outside world. And in this dome, the hum of activity floating down the corridors died gradually. The aliens slept at night, too.
I watched the single guard on duty outside our barred room. He was sitting in a chair-like support, leaning against the wall, bored at the thought of his all-night vigil. Gradually his eyes blinked, and closed. Sounds rumbled from his barrel chest. He slept.
“Now is my chance,” I whispered to the men.
“How will you get out?” Taylor queried.
For answer, I strode to the bars, where the ends were buried in the cell wall. Bracing my feet, I tugged at a bar. My locomotor unit within hummed as rising horsepower fed into it. I kept an eye on the guard, but he slept heavily.
The bar was thick and strong, more resistant than any jail-bar of Earth, which I would have jerked away with one hand. Eve had to help me. Together, like metal Sampsons, we bent the bar. It came away suddenly, out of its socket. We loosened a half dozen more, forming an aperture wide enough to slip through.
The soldiers had watched with silent wonder. I faced them.
“Stay here. Too many of us would invite detection. Eve and I will scout, since we are the swiftest and strongest. We will try to be back before the guard awakes. Come, Eve.”
A moment later we stood beyond the bars, in the hall. We bent the bars back into place. Even if the jailer woke for a while and looked around, he would not know of the two who had skipped.
Before we stepped away, I held Eve back against the wall.
“Photoelectric units across the front here,” I warned. “To announce any jail-break. Hug the wall carefully, and we won’t break the beam.”
Cautiously, we slid sideways for twenty feet. Beyond that, the beams did not stretch. We were free! We strode silently down the corridor. It was dimly lit, as were all the passages during the night-period.
At the next cross-corridor, I paused. I pondered as to the general lay-out of the honeycombed dome.
“That searchlight,” I told Eve, “must shine up from some room at the apex. We’ll try to find it.”
CHAPTER IV
The Space Ship
AFTER several twists, we came upon a passage whose floor sloped upward steadily. It was the one we wanted. We crept along like two metal ghosts, warily watching for aliens. One appeared, abruptly, a guard lounging on routine duty. From his niche shone a patch of bright light we would have to cross.
He was not asleep, though staring vacantly. We would have to distract his attention. Estimating the curve of his niche, I made a tiny clicking sound. With the mathematical precision known only to a robot-brain, I knew the sound would reflect in an acoustic curve, back of him.
He started, came to his hooved feet, and turned, wondering who or what was clicking in the wall back of him. While he thus surveyed the blank wall, Eve and I tip-toed across the lighted patch and melted into the shadowy stretch beyond.
Not long after the slope led us to what I calculated must be the center of the dome. I was sure of it when it opened out into a gigantic round chamber. There were lights burning within and aliens were at work. We hugged the doorway’s shadow.
I ran my eye swiftly around. The room had a sliding roof, now closed, like the sliding roofs of astronomical observatories. In the center was a huge bowl-shaped object, surrounded by what seemed generators and other power producing-apparatus.
The signal-light!
From here, rolling back the roof, they shone their super-searchlight, guiding their scout craft back from all corners of a world as yet new and not fully mapped to them.
My quick, searching eye noticed two other things.
One, that large recesses, off from this giant room, held the ring of defense guns.
Second, and more arresting, there was a huge unfinished machine at one side. Workmen were on scaffolds around it. Somehow, with huge crystalline tubes and a maze of wires, it suggested a radio. A transmitter, perhaps, with which to signal their home-world, hurling radio waves far beyond the Heaviside Layer into space? It must be important to them, since this was a night shift at work.
We watched one workman. He was completing a strut-frame-work, enclosing a great tube. A tubular, hissing affair in his hand sprayed out smoky matter that instantly congealed to form the hard beams. It was miraculous, like forming something out of nothing. And forming something harder than steel, for it was the same material of the dome.
“How is it done?” Eve marvelled, in a whisper camouflaged by the noise they made. “They seem to draw it out of nowhere!”
“From the air,” I said. “They are masters of plastics. They draw oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the air and compress them instantaneously into dense plastics, ten times harder than bakelite or any metal. Earth is just exploring plastic science. Remember that auto manufacturer—Ford I think it was—who tried to dent a plastic body with an axe and failed?”
“How fast they work,” Eve said. “It’s almost like a spider spinning out his web as fast as he can move.”
“It accounts for the rapid construction of the dome,” I nodded. “Joe Trent swore the dome was not here a month ago. The aliens landed less than a month ago. They built this whole dome in that short time. Any comparable structure would take Earth engineers at least a year. Let’s look at the guns, Eve.”
FOLLOWING a passage that led to the gun-emplacements, we approached the first. Dark and unattended, we could make little out except that it was surprisingly small—a mere ten-foot instrument of intricate design. But the guns must be super-powerful. They had shot Earth battleships out of the water, with one charge each.
By what principle? What did they shoot? How did they aim so accurately?
The answer came more quickly and completely than I wanted.
Without warning, an ear-shattering report sounded against the outside of the dome. Then I caught the faint drone of aircraft. The American forces were making a desperate night attack, since the truce attempt had come to nothing!
In swift succession, dozens of bombs exploded against the dome. And below, from the giant room, the aliens began streaming toward the guns.
Eve and I were caught! In a moment aliens would be swarming past us.
“Pretend to be loading the gun or something!” I barked to Eve. “Bend over it.”
An alien glanced into our dark recess, at our two huddled forms.
“Oh, someone here already?” he said, in the English they seemed bent on practicing to fluency. “Well, hurry up and fire. Chief Thorg has given us permission to bring a few down, for sport. But keep the lights off. The Earthlings might happen to have accurate enough bomb-sights to aim for the slits around the guns.”
Keep the lights off! Luckily for us, that was the order.
But he hesitated a moment, waiting for us to make our first shot. Frantically, Eve and I were fumbling around the machine, without the least idea how to use it. I grabbed up a loose affair from a hook. It had trailing wires to the breech. It seemed to be a helmet. In lightning thought I clamped it around my head. It might be a sound-detector.
But now what? How to operate this baffling machine entirely different from any Earth gun I had ever seen. How to aim—
And then, magically, the tube moved, in i
ts slot. The projecting barrel swung skyward toward the raiding planes. The supersearchlight was spraying its blinding radiance fanwise, into the heavens. It formed no definite mark for bombing, and it lit the planes starkly against the black sky.
My eyes fastened to one plane, beginning a bombing dive. With uncanny accuracy, my gun followed it. It had the aim, but now how to fire—
Thump!
The gun fired, at the thought. No shell belched out. Only a hissing, unseen charge. At the same instant, the plane I watched changed into a puff of exploded debris.
“Good!” said the watching alien, who was evidently the gunnery commander. “Now pick off a few more.”
My eyes turned to another plane. How had I aimed and fired before—
With the thought, the gun swung and thumped. And the second plane vanished. I gasped. Thought control! The gunner’s eyes were the sights. His thoughts aimed and fired. It was an ease and accuracy limited only by the gunner’s rapidity in shifting his eyes from plane to plane and thinking—“aim! fire!”
What could I do? With the gun commander watching, I could only continue to blast planes down with my eyes. I felt like a Medieval witch with the Evil Eye, blasting all I merely looked at.
American planes! Human pilots! I was helping the enemy!
I DON’T know how many planes I ripped from the sky. Perhaps a dozen. Each was like a stab in my own vitals.
“Excellent!” the commander praised. “You’re a better gunner than any of them. Keep it up. This is great sport, flicking out the puny Earthlings like flies. I’ll see how the others are doing.”
Mercifully—for me—he left.
I ripped off the headgear.
“God, Eve!” I groaned. “Earth has no chance against this weapon. It shoots electric charges at the speed of light. And in essence, the aliens kill with their thoughts! Aim, fire! Aim, fire! As fast as they think it, humans die!”
All around the circumference of the dome’s ring of recesses, guns were thumping. Plane debris rained down. It was aerial slaughter.
“Leave, you fools!” I almost shouted. “You have no chance at all.”
They left, finally, with half their number gone. The guns fell silent. The aliens, crowing over their ghastly death-dealing, began filing back to their other job.
Eve and I remained at our gun, crouching behind it. Luckily no light had been turned on in the recesses. The gun commander glanced in, failed to see our rigid forms, and left.
AN hour later, when the workmen were absorbed completely in their job, we sneaked down the empty corridor and back to the prison. The guard we had fooled with acoustic ventriloquism was now asleep. The guard at the jail was half curled on the floor, dead to the world.
Our spying had been made possible only by the lack of alertness and discipline in the dome as a whole. The aliens had no need for rigid watch and attention. They had nothing to fear from the puny humans of the world outside.
They feared those within less.
Eve and I bent the bars and slipped into prison. In the morning, the awakened dome would not know of the two robot spies who had learned much—but not yet enough.
“What was the excitement about?” Captain Taylor asked. “We heard muffled thumps down here.”
He and his men listened to our story with incredulous eyes.
“Thought-controlled guns!” Taylor mused. “If we could spike those, the dome would be defenseless—”
“For about a week,” I cut in. “Earth forces would continue to bomb—and fail to chip off an atom. And in a week, the aliens would make new guns, with their plastic-magic. No, men. We have to get at the root of the dome. Somewhere they must have a generator that feeds the guns electricity. Probably an atomic-power unit. If I can find that—”
THE next night, Eve and I again sauntered out of prison. Again our jailer was sleeping away a watch that to him seemed totally unnecessary.
We roamed completely around the dome, looking for a central power-plant. We peered in bunk-rooms, in which aliens slept heavily. Supply rooms, stacked with boxes and plastic-cans of their food. The air-conditioning room, where a huge, silent machine piped cold air, normal to them, through the dome.
“If we could only find a room with weapons,” I told Eve. “Distributed among the men, we would have an armed fighting force.”
But there seemed no small-weapon supply, outside of those carried by the aliens themselves. Balked at every turn! We could not keep this night spying up forever. Sooner or later we would be discovered. Before that, we had to have some definite plan of action.
I reported no luck to the men, back at prison. They groaned in dismay. Each day several of them had been taken away, never to return. Our numbers were going down steadily. And the chill of prison was weakening those left.
“We’ve got to do something, Adam Link!” Taylor kept saying. “Can’t you think of anything?”
He was beginning to lose faith in me. All the men were. They expected Adam Link, from stories they had heard of me, to storm through the aliens like a metal tornado. They could not understand my slow, cautious course.
They did not know that Adam Link was afraid, for the first time in his life. That for once he was up against powers that appalled him. That even a robot must hesitate before beings of nearly equal strength, ability and science.
“Patience,” I admonished. “War” saw was not pulled down in one day.”
THE third night, Eve and I explored all corridors leading down. Finally we found it—the power room. But it was completely sealed off. Diamond-hard plastic walls barred us.
We could only put our ears to the solidly locked doors and hear within the low, steady hum of the generator.
“Probably supplies a million megawatts to the guns above,” I said. “Those guns blast like lightning, at a pressure of at least 500,000 volts. This plant could probably light half of America for a year. There is more power concentrated under this dome than in all the cities of Earth combined.”
“But we can’t get at it,” Eve murmured. “We can’t spike it.”
“No, not yet,” I agreed, filing the room’s location away in my mind. If we could find some instrument or method of breaking into the power-room, it would be the answer.
We found another corridor winding down. It opened out into what I knew must be an underground space. It was wide, huge and dark. We did not make out the bulk in the center at first, till our eyes adjusted to the gloom. Light strayed from the corridor.
The object was 500 feet long, 100 feet wide, in a torpedo shape. It had no wings. From front and rear projected tiers of tubes, many fanning downward.
“It’s their space ship!” I breathed. “With which they dropped down on Earth like a striking eagle. Let’s look it over.”
Undisturbed, we spent an hour there. Its hatch was open. The hull was empty, except for its motor. It had brought the aliens, all their supplies and equipment. It was stored away now, not needed except in the remote event of having to flee.
My scientific curiosity was feverishly aroused by the engine. Was it an atomic-power plant, spitting atom energy from the multitude of drive tubes? How far had it propelled the mighty ship through space? At what stupendous velocity?
I examined the machine with awe. No engine on Earth approached it. Autos, trucks, trains, ocean liners, zeppelins, crawled over Earth’s surface at a snail’s pace. This stupendous craft had plunged through the deeps of space.
“Eve!” I exclaimed. “Now we’re getting somewhere. If I could once find out how to run this ship—”
How did it operate? But here I was completely stumped. The science of Earth was dumb before it. The science of Adam Link stammered in bewilderment. The control board was a maze of switches, relays, dials, rheostats, all numbered and designated with the alien’s enigmatic figures.
“Only the aliens could tell us how to run it,” Eve said. “And of course that’s out of the question.”
IRONIC situation! A plan was shaping in my mind. A p
lan to spike the dome. But one vital factor was missing—how to run this ship. And certainly the aliens wouldn’t oblige, to their own undoing.
“Still,” I growled impotently to Eve, “we could wreck the thing.”
“What good would that do?” Eve said. “Except to make them all the more determined to conquer Earth, having to stay?”
Another thing caught my eye, in a dark corner of the huge underground hangar. A dully glinting angular shape of metal. A tank! One of the captured tanks that they had driven in, perhaps for examination of Earthling war-machines. A pile of metal back of it told of the other tanks taken apart in the investigation. This one tank was left, probably as a museum-piece after Earth had been conquered.
“That tank, Eve!” I whispered. “It has guns, ammunition, armor-plate—”
Eve shook her head. “One tank and two robots against a dome-full of aliens?”
The odds were still against us. We turned away and slipped back to prison.
“Any luck?” Taylor asked hopefully, for his shivering, miserable men.
I shook my head.
“I still don’t know how many aliens there are, altogether. That’s vital, tomorrow night I’ll try to get a count on them. And plan a course of action.”
“Tomorrow night!” Taylor groaned. “Always tomorrow night. And each day six of us are taken away, one or two die from sickness, and we all go slowly mad!”
“Patience,” I said wearily. “Tomorrow night I promise you a plan.”
CHAPTER V
Jailbreak
AND then, as though to smash my careful course, aliens came that day.
They ran an eye appraisingly over our ranks, picking the three burliest men. Two were six-foot men, weighing over 200 pounds apiece. I was the third. I had tried to escape picking, hanging back as before, but this time they singled me out. I was in appearance, a sturdy human being.
“Come along,” said the aliens, waving their guns. “If you don’t come willingly, we’ll paralyze you.”