by Jimmy Guieu
“Negmat is short for Negative Matter,” Zimko answered and he gave details about the formidable weapon.
When he had finished K’wyil looked at him for a long time, very impressed by his revelations. “This extraordinary weapon has to come into our hands at all costs. We will do whatever it takes to get a hold of one of these Negmat spheres in order to study its casing in neutral matter. Furthermore, to accomplish this delicate mission we will use you, whom we will psychically prepare to carry it out. So, now do you understand why we wanted to keep you alive? You’re going to be the centerpiece in our new game.”
“That would surprise me!” Zimko sneered, proudly raising his head. All trace of pain or dejection had mysteriously disappeared from his face.
Taken aback, K’wyil shot him a look, at first surprised by this rebellion, then terribly intrigued. “How dare you mock us when I just need to wave my hand to torture you again.”
“I laugh at your tortures, you vile, turtle-faced creature!” Zimko shouted. “I advise you not to torture any more before I say what I have to say to this filthy lump of reeking waste that is V’kend, the Grand Procyonian Chief!”
The named monster jumped up. His flabby skin emitted no longer a blue but a green bioluminescence in his outrage. His six arms flailed about, trembling with rage.
“Listen up, you foul thing!” Zimko tensed his muscles and shook the cables suspending him from the ceiling. “Even though I’ve been a prisoner in this den of demons for three sfangs, I know that you disgusting creatures destroyed our base in Jupiter…”
K’wyil and V’kend, more and more dumbfounded, stared at the captive dubiously.
“How do you know this if you couldn’t communicate with your people even psychically?” the Denebian Emperor questioned.
“Are you so sure that I can’t communicate with them?” Zimko defied. “From the moment I got here I haven’t stopped sending messages and receiving them thanks to a recently developed mechano-psychic device that you can’t control…”
“That’s impossible!” K’wyil barked. “We searched you thoroughly and found no device, however small, in your clothes.”
After a burst of laughter the Man from Outer Space explained, “You didn’t find the device because it wasn’t in my clothes. In fact,” he suddenly wondered, “what did you do with my companions, the Polarians, Wolfians and Centaurians captured along with me?”
“Some are in an armored cell, 300 feet below my palace. Others have been transferred to various laboratories in Lucknah where they’ll be used for experiments by our scientists.”
“Perfect,” the prisoner smiled. “In that case, you couldn’t find the psychic amplifier because it’s in my body! You thought Zimko so naïve that he’d let himself be captured by your henchmen, K’wyil?”
“And yet you did fall into the trap I set for you,” the Emperor grumbled as his arrogance was starting to wear thin.
“Me?” the prisoner said. “Not at all. I didn’t fall into your trap. It was part of the plan of our general staff to let me be captured. I am, therefore, in your hands, but Zimko is free, for the greater good of the Federated Worlds and the solar systems that he will have to defend against you and your revolting allies.
“No, K’wyil, you didn’t capture Zimko but a… biologically constructed robot in his image! All the Polarians, Centaurians and Wolfians who are in your power are biological robots, machines copying the exact same actions as their originals. Thus, the words that I, Robot, are saying right now are in reality those that Zimko, the real one, are speaking into a mechano-psychic amplifier of his own invention.
“You’ve been played, K’wyil, and if you still doubt it, take a sharp blade and cut a rectangular opening in my chest, just above my number… which, as I told you during the first interrogation, really is a registration number.”
Absolutely astonished by what he had just heard K’wyil grabbed a razor-sharp instrument and sliced into the synthetic skin of the biological Robot that looked like Zimko.
As the blade cut into the plastic “epidermis”, identical to flesh, the Robot said, “Don’t cut too deep or you’ll damage my works, which would prevent me from giving you more interesting information.”
The Denebian Emperor cut a surgical area six inches wide in the prisoner’s chest and peeled off the one-inch thick plastic skin. Through a kind of strong plastex he could see the inside of the thorax, an unbelievable tangle of electronic tubes, wires, connections and tiny instruments and intricate mechanisms that animated this masterpiece of Polarian genius.
“Are you satisfied, K’wyil,” the pseudo-Zimko smiled. “Now listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you and you, too, you maniacs from Procyon!” he raised his voice to the monsters. “You wanted to know what the ultra-secret weapon Negmat was? You were ready to do anything to get your hands on one? Well, coming right up…
“In bringing you all together here, you grand Denebian chiefs and you monsters from Procyon, I pulled off a master stroke. Without you the worlds that you govern would take years to reorganize—if, for example, you were no longer able to lead them. Your replacements would need a long time to undertake any effective actions against the solar system that you desire and that we’re defending. In this room, therefore, is assembled the indispensable brains of your so-called Liberating forces.
“You wanted, I say, to get possession of a Negmat sphere? You have not one but more than 100, of smaller size it’s true but still unheard-of power because I forgot to tell you that every biological robot that you captured has one of these little spheres of unimaginable destructive power installed inside them. And you’re about to see them in action!”
All the monsters in the vaulted room jumped up in panic. They understood that they had blindly jumped into a diabolical trap. Howling in terror, screeching like a herd of angry elephants, the monstrous creatures leaped over their seats, pushing and shoving, scratching and trampling each other desperate to escape.
But before they could reach the exit, Zimko, the real Zimko, Chief of the Space Commandos, in control of this bold performance, pushed a red button blinking on his control panel billions of miles away.
At the same time, psycho-remote-controlled, the Negmat spheres inside the biological robots were released from their neutral casing and coming in contact with the positive matter around them they disintegrator in a dreadful explosion.
In the roar of disaster Lucknah, the Denebian capital, and all the beings it held, were wiped out in a huge explosion, glowing purple visible thousands of miles away, pulverizing the spaceships over the city, razing to the ground everything within a 300-mile range, crumbling mountains, transforming ammonia lakes into giant liquid balls that quickly evaporated, and mowing down forest as if with a giant scythe.
The whole planet was shaken by an earthquake compared to which the previous disasters were just feeble trembling. The shockwave shook the continental bedrock for seven hours. The planet’s atmosphere was totally obscured by thousands of tons of dust thrown 100 miles up into the air for 93 hours (T27 time).
Instead of Lucknah, the seat of the Denebian Imperial Government, a 50-mile wide crater, 10 miles deep gaped in the ground. Out of it flowed rivers of purple lava glinting red, slowly bubbling up from the bowels of the planet whose crust had been split all the way down to the viscous matter on which the continents drifted.
On astrobase 2, in its orbit 600 miles above the Earth, for the second time in 24 hours, the masked stranger—but without a spacesuit this time—summoned the Section Chiefs of the artificial satellite in the name of the General Staff.
Polarians, Wolfians and Centaurians, gathered around Fohag, the Chief of the base, were waiting impatiently for the stranger to speak. He did so in short time.
“I’m happy to announce to you that Lucknah, the Denebian capital, where the chiefs of the green monsters were all together with their Procyonian allies, has been reduced to rubble by a commando team of biological robots whose leader was the copy of…
me.”
On saying this the mysterious spokesman from the General Staff of the Federated Worlds took off his mask. The energetic face of Zimko appeared smiling, satisfied with his clever strategy that had just saved many Polarian, Wolfian and Centaurian lives.
“Now that the war-mongering Denebian-Procyonian association has been decapitated, it will take at least two years T27 for them to reorganize. We will be able to use this respite to make all Earthlings believe in our existence and without unleashing general panic among the primitives. When the time comes to make official contact with the governments of Earth in June of July 1956 of their main calendar, if our projects succeed, the nine planets of this solar system will have strong defense bases from which we can repel any threat coming from space.
“Now, my friends, we have to continue our incursions and the ‘demonstrations of our presence’ on this planet. A great task awaits us on all the other worlds in this galactic zone as well.
“Everyone should go back to their post. Our Fim’has have to keep flying over the continents of this backward planet that we’ve been defending for so long against the Denebians. Its inhabitants, however, are far from suspecting that those whose existence they deny are fighting hard to keep them from falling under the control of the awful, green-skinned monsters and into the ‘claws’ of their hideous allies… these almost mythical monsters whom a sacred book on T27 calls the Beast of the Apocalypse.”
The spaceship of Hogounn and Injya, the two little creatures from a planet orbiting the sun Alpha Centauri, crossed the blue sky at lightning speed, then stopped short over a town in the north of France.
Injya examined the green countryside on her viewer screen. Then she looked at her companion and placed her tiny six-fingered hand on Hogounn’s saying, “I’m really starting to like this planet. I’m eager to establish a base on its surface so we can finally live here together… Its inhabitants are really different than us, just like the Polarians and Wolfians, but they are still our brothers since they are thinking beings. We, along with our Polarian and Wolfian friends will just have to educate them to add one more globe to the grand family of Federated Worlds.”
“Yes, Injya, I’m also eager to take part in building an Earth base and I’m sure that there will be a lot of Earthlings who will accept us and love us like we love them… without suspicion.”
The Fimn’has of the two Centaurians, altruistic and sensitive to the poetry of a foreign landscape, shot up, hovered for ten seconds, wobbled a little while zigzagging for a few miles and then stopped its pranks to soar off into the clouds toward astrobase 2.
The next day in the local papers there would be, as always, a superior attitude, in the name of Science (with a capital S), to say that a “meteor” or a “weather balloon” had drifted over such a place and such a time.
An astronomer would boost this claim with all the weight of his knowledge and make fun of the ridiculous “flying dishes,” proving by A+B that it was a meteor that soared over this region. Moreover, if witnesses dared to tell him that the meteor in question flew in leaps and bounds, shot straight up or zigzagged, the founts of astronomical knowledge would quickly direct all these fine witnesses of the event to a psychiatrist who would pompously cry out, with his face twitching:
“Mild form of collective hysteria! Brain trauma! Senility and schizophrenia!”
And naturally the psychiatrist in question would be even more flabbergasted if someone with a healthy mind claimed that such a diagnosis would better be applied to him.
For, no one is deafer than he who does not want to hear and no one blinder than he who does not want to see.
Notes
1 Escadrille de Surveillance des Mondes Attardés, i.e.: Surveillance Squadrons of Backward Worlds.
2 Gymnotus: fish of the order Gymnotiformes, a kind of eel living mostly in the rivers of Central and South America. Its strong electrical discharge—that it controls at will—is capable of stunning a man or killing certain fish.
3 See Volume 1.
4 See Volume 1.
5 Absolutely true. (Author’s Note)
6 This article appeared in France-Soir on September 14, 1954. (Author’s Note)
7 See France-Soir, September 15, 1954. (Author’s Note)
8 In France the Commission Internationale d’Enquête Ouranos, Rue Etienne-Dollet, Bondy (Seine) publishes the journal Ouranos. In the USA, Flying Saucer International, in particular, publishes Saucers. In England the Flying Saucer Club publishes Flying Saucer News. (Author’s Note)
9 Technicians specializing in rockets. (Author’s Note)
10 True; two unknown satellites described as being “meteors” were discovered by American astronomers in 1954 (See Ouranos, n.12, November 1954). These objects are, according to official sources, artificial satellites. (Author’s Note)
11 See Volume 1.
12 We have, in fact, observed over the past centuries weird flashes and points of light on the Moon that are not sufficiently explained away as “optical illusions.” (author’s Note)
13 67 million miles whereas Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun. (Author’s Note)
14 This encounter actually took place on September 10, 1954 on the Plateau de Millevaches (Corrèze). The farmer, Antoine Mazaud, saw a “spaceman” who shook his hands before getting back into his spaceship, but did not hug him as some newspapers claimed. (Investigative Report of the Ouranos Commission) (Author’s Note)
15 As reported in France-Soir, September 15, 1954. (Author’s Note)
16 The International Investigative Commission Ouranos has countless, credible testimonies that were not published in newspapers as the witnesses feared the mockery of narrow minds and of those who stubbornly refuse to honestly accept the evidence and the reality of the facts. (Author’s Note)
17 See Volume 1.
18 As reported in The Progès de Lyon, Sep. 29, 1954. (Author’s Note)
19 Guieu is referencing here events described in his earlier novel Nous, les Martians.
20 300,000 km/sec.—which physics, until otherwise proved, asserts to be the limit of speed, wherein it will one day be wrong! (Author’s Note)
21 See Volume 1.
22 See Volume 1.
23 Deneb, Alpha of Cygnus, is 4,800 times brighter than our sun, a rather medium-sized star in the galaxy. (Author’s Note)
24 True. (Author’s Note)
Bibliography
Blade et Baker:
Fleuve Noir Anticipation:
Piège dans l’Espace [Space Trap] (No. 145, 1959)
Le Secret des Tshengz [The Secret of the Tshengz] (No. 199, 1962)
Les Forbans de l’Espace [The Space Pirates] (No. 224, 1963)
Les Destructeurs [The Destroyers] (No. 237, 1963)
Joklun-N’Ghar la Maudite [Joklun-N’Ghar the Accursed] (No. 352, 1968)
Traquenard sur Kenndor [Ambush on Kenndor] (No. 395, 1969)
Les Orgues de Satan [Satan’s Organ] (No. 447, 1971)
Le Grand Mythe [The Great Myth] (No. 470, 1971)
Les Maîtres de la Galaxie [The Galaxy Masters] (No. 504, 1972)
Les Rescapés du Néant [Survivors of the Void] (No. 521, 1972)
L’Exilé de Xantar [The Exile from Xantar] (No. 618, 1974)
Les Pièges de Koondra [The Traps of Koondra] (No. 662, 197)
Les Fugitifs de Zwolna [The Fugitives of Zwolna] (No. 674, 1975)
Le Bouclier de Boongoha [The Shield of Boongoha] (No. 707, 1975)
La Colonie Perdue [The Lost Colony] (No. 730, 1976)
Les Légions de Bartzouk [The Legions of Bartzouk] (No. 802, 1977)
Traffic Interstellaire Interstellar Trafic] (published under the nom-de-plume of Claude Vauzière at Marabout, Junior imprint No. 167, 1960)
Captifs de la Main Rouge [Prisoners of the Red Hand] (published under the nom-de-plume of Claude Vauzière at Marabout, Junior imprint in 1963)
Share-cropping novels:
FE: Frank Essem; NG: Nicolas Gauthier; CM: Chris Maya; PR: P
hilippe Randa; RCW: Roland C. Wagner; FW: Frank Walhart
Vaugirard/Vauvenargues:
Les Rebelles de N’Harangho [The Rebels of N’Harangho] (PR) (VG 88, 1992)
Le Serpent-Dieu de Joklun N’Ghar [The Serpent God o Joklun N’Ghar] (RCW) (VG 89, 1992)
Le Poison de Thogar’Min [The Poison of Thogar’Min] (LG) (VG 90, 1993)
Les Maudits d’Hertzvane [The Accursed of Hetzvane] (PR/NG) (VG 91, 1993)
Les Albinos de Sulifuss [The Albinos of Sulifuss] (RCW) (VG 92, 1993)
Les Naufragés du Temps [Castaways in Time] (PR/NG) (VG 93, 1993)
Echec au Destin [Fate in Check] (RCW) (VG 95,1994)
Les Magiciens des Mondes Oubliés [The Magicians of the Forgotten Worlds] (RCW) (VG 97, 1994)
L’Ombre du Dragon Rouge [The Red Dragon’s Shadow] (RCW) (VG 99, 1994)
Le Maître de la Main Rouge [The Master of the Red Hand] (RCW) (VG 100, 1995)
Les Brumes de Joklun N’Ghar [The Mists of Joklun N’Ghar] (RCW) (VG 102, 1995)
Les Voleurs de Dieux [The God Stealers] (CM) (VG 103, 1995)
Flammes sur Batoog [Flames over Batoog] (RCW) (VG 105, 1995)
Au Coeur de Kenndor [The Heart of Kenndor] (RCW) (VG 106, 1996)
La Fin de Gondwana [Gondwana’s End] (RCW) (VG 108, 1996)
Embuscade sur Eileena [Ambush on Eileena] (RCW) (VG 110, 1996)
L’Offensive des Frotegs [The Frotegs Attack] (RCW) (VG 111, 1996)
L’Alliance des Invincibles [The Invincible Alliance] (RCW) (VG 113, 1997)
La Planète sans Nom [The Nameless Planet] (RCW) (VG 115, 1997)
Panique sur Wondlak [Panic over Wondlak] (RCW) (VG 117, 1998)
Les Prisonniers de Bangor [The Prisoners of Bangor] (RCW) (VG 119, 1998)
Conjuration sur Joklun N’Ghar [The Joklun N’Ghar conjuration] (RCW) (VG 121, 1998)
L’Étoile aux cent planètes [The Sun of a Hundred Worlds] (RCW) (VG 123, 1998)