Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  The twelve soldiers have been listed as “Missing—Believed killed” since, in spite of the disappearances, it is impossible to be sure that they are dead. The twelve are:

  Sergeant Alan Queeny Corporal Walter Clark Private Joseph Mossberger Private Dan Sewell Private Murray Irwin. . . .

  EXTRA!

  SPACE SHIP DESTROYED!

  Invading Arcturians Exterminated in Furious Battle June 26, 1953.—In a terrific final struggle in which eighty-one men lost their lives, the Arcturian invading exoedition which landed near Marceline five days ago was completely wiped out last night.

  The gleaming, hundred-foot cylinder from space, which, with its invisible protective screen (said by Dr. Richard Forbstein, radiologist attached to the U.S. Army Research Corps, to be composed of vibrations which accelerate or induce chemical decomposition to a marked degree, thus causing the disintegration of living plant and animal tissues and detonation of explosive shells) had withstood repeated doses of machine-gun fire, shell-strafing, aerial bombardment, and barrages of solid shot, was completely destroyed after its screen collapsed.

  About eleven o’clock last night, with only a desultory fire marking the position of the curving, invisible shield above the cylinder, the Arcturians suddenly—in desperation, as it later appeared—abandoned their policy of passive resistance and took the offensive.

  The first warning was when men in the trenches, a few hundred yards from the besieged ship on Drummond’s crest, began to drop dead. The symptoms were the same as those produced by the energy screen of the Arcturians—accelerated decay of living flesh. The soldiers attempted to shield themselves behind their earthworks, but to no avail; death continued to strike erratically among the front-line companies, never more than one man falling at a time. This went on until eighty-one men, all told, had been struck down in the trenches; then it ceased abruptly, and was succeeded by a threatening inactivity on the part of the Arcturians, like the calm before the storm.

  There were no wounds and no wounded; the men died instantly, without a mark save the shriveling and darkening of the skin over wide areas.

  IN SPITE of the panic occasioned by these losses, the officers succeeded in rallying their troops, who showed real courage and fortitude in the face of this unknown terror. A heavy bombardment of the Arcturian vessel was begun, using guns of the heaviest caliber and the most powerful aerial bombs available; General Headquarters frantically prepared for the attack which it believed imminent. The rain of fire on the shield of vibration was so heavy and continual that the ship was completely hidden under smoke and dust; suddenly, however, an aerial observer noticed that the shells were passing through the zone where until now they had been exploded by the screen, and continuing their trajectories to the ground. The bombardment was at once slackened in order to allow the smoke to clear; and as it lifted the men on the ground saw that the ship from Arcturus was smashed to crumpled wreckage, a lifeless, shattered shell in the midst of widely strewn remains of machinery.

  Scientists from all over America were last night preparing to examine the wreck, but anticipated no discoveries of importance, due to the intensity of the shellfire which destroyed the vessel and its occupants. It was hoped that the secret of the alloy of which the hull was composed, which during the three days’ battles had repelled bullets, shell splinters, shrapnel, and solid shot, might be discovered; but on close examination of the wreck, the metal of which the ship was constructed was discovered to be almost as soft as lead.

  “This is another mystery which will probably never be solved,” said W. L. Darcy, metallurgist attached to the Army Research Corps. “It is to be regretted that the Arcturian ship was so completely destroyed. . . . However, the welfare of the human race is the primary consideration.”

  The dead in today’s battle were . . .

  EXTRA!

  EXTRA!

  ARCTURIAN ‘INVASION’ WAS

  NOT INVASION!

  Survivor of Kidnapped Twelve Tells

  Amazing Story

  Space Ship Could Easily Have

  Wiped Out Entire Army

  Exclusive to the Marceline Or-

  acle: Story of Corporal Walter

  Clark, Made Prisoner by the

  Arcturians and Admitted Into

  Their Councils

  June 26, 1953.—Early this morning a tourist, George T. Ekman, passing along the detour which during the past days has routed traffic on the road between U.S. 36 and the town of Wien around the scene of battle with the Arcturians, discovered a soldier lying in the ditch, alive and conscious, apparently uninjured, but with both legs paralyzed. This man gave his name as Walter Clark, corporal in the United States Army; but he did not explain how he came to be in that location and condition. Ekman carried him into town, but found that all of Marceline’s three doctors had already fled before the anticipated Arcturian attack. Since the Oracle office was the only large establishment remaining open and unoccupied by the Army, due to the great demand for news straight from the battlefield, he left Clark there.

  WHILE he waited for an Army doctor to arrive, Clark was induced to tell his story, which, transcribed by shorthand and here printed for the first time, is certainly one of the most remarkable narratives ever made known.

  “I suppose the Arcturian space ship has been blown up by now?” asked Clark, lying propped up on an improvised couch in the outer office.

  “It was destroyed about midnight last night,” he was told.

  “Well, I’m sorry, in a way,” he said

  slowly. “Though they’ve taken the use of my legs from me, they were pretty good scouts after a fashion.”

  “Corporal Clark,” broke in a reporter, “we understand that you were among the men who disappeared without trace during the encirclement of the Arcturian vessel two days ago. Can you tell us what happened to you, and what became of the others?”

  “They’re dead,” said Clark bluntly. “All except me, and I’m three-tenths dead. Exactly. I have the Arcturians’ word for it.” He smiled almost without bitterness. “Except for a bit of fast talking, I’d be four-tenths dead. But I oughtn’t to beat around the bush and build up your curiosity, boys. I’ll give you the story straight, snappy, and unembellished, and you can take it for what it’s worth.”

  Day before yesterday afternoon, I think you said it was (proceeded Clark), they fired the big mine underneath the Arcties’ ship; and for a moment we all thought it was done for. Then it started buzzing, swooped over us, and headed off into the north. It acted clumsy and heavy in the air, almost like it was damaged, and kept settling until it landed among the trees atop a big hill about a mile away. We could hear the timber splintering like toothpicks.

  Well, we sweated through the valleys between us and it at the double, and through the bed of a little gravelly creek and a hickory grove, and started sneaking up the side of the hill. I was in command of the squad leading the advance of Nelson’s platoon. Halfway up the ridge came out of the woods, with nothing in front of us almost all the way to the top but a hillside pasture overgrown with young tree sprouts.

  I was just about to give the order to halt—we were advancing in broken formation, keeping to cover, but there wasn’t any cover for three hundred yards on up that hillside except young growth that wouldn’t hide a full-grown rabbit, and anyway we were well ahead of the rest—when all at once I felt funnier than I ever felt before and funnier than I ever hope to feel again. I felt like my foot had gone to sleep, only all over—if you get me. And then I went out like a light.

  WHEN I woke up, I couldn’t see anything for a minute or two but a lot of funny, bright lights that hurt my eyes. Then I realized that I was in a lighted chamber, with a curving ceiling of silvery-gray metal visible from where I lay on my back. I rolled over and sat up, and simultaneously bumped my head and got the big shock of an eventful life.

  I was sitting on a sort of metal pedestal about five feet in diameter, underneath a hemisphere of almost invisible glass that was clamped o
nto this as a base. It was in the midst of a rather biggish room, as rooms in space ships go—Don’t ask me how I knew I was in the Arcties’ space ship. Maybe it was the sheen of those curving walls, maybe it was the round ship-like portholes and queer tubular girders and beams, or maybe it was the presence of the Arcties themselves, ranged in a triple ring all around me.

  The Arcturians were like tall, sheeted ghosts. I don’t know what they were really like, because I never saw one unclothed; but from head to foot their tall, thin figures were draped in a single long, white garment that reached the floor. They stood side by side, as immobile as so many statues about to be unveiled; I couldn’t even see their eyes, but I know that they each had two, about where a man’s are, by the big dark-lensed goggles that stared at me. They must have been much like men, but they were too tall, too narrow, and their figures, what I could tell about them, just weren’t proportioned right at all. I knew right away that they were Inhuman. I may even have dimly realized that they were superhuman.

  Presently, as I just sat and stared back at them, I realized that they were talking—probably about me. Their voices were almost too deep and low for human ears to hear; I guess I just caught the higher notes. They sounded like great bass violins plucked at intervals. Their throbbing filled the chamber; I began to get the impression of an assembly, a conference. The air was charged with a feeling of something imminent. But perhaps it’s just that subsonic waves do unreasonable things to a man’s mind; and the air here was full of ’em.

  All the time, I felt more and more uncomfortable and stared-at. I said to myself, if this Ku Klux Klan convention is going to make an example of me, it won’t do it without a fight. I drew back as far as I could in those cramped quarters and rammed my army boot against the inside of that thin glass bubble.

  Only it wasn’t glass. I came near to spraining my ankle, but the wall of my transparent prison didn’t even give. Then I remembered that our Browning fifty-caliber slugs had ricocheted off the unshuttered windows of the Arcturian ship.

  I was inside that ship, and somewhere outside was Uncle Sam’s Army and Air Force, hammering away at the thing with everything they’d got. Or were they? I didn’t hear a sound.

  I looked around at the ghostly audience lined up at attention, staring impassively at me, and I saw red. I hammered on the inside of my glass cage and shouted at them, “Let me out of here, you . . .s![2] What the hell’s the big idea?”

  Then I shut up with my mouth hanging open, as the tallest of the Arcturians slipped out of the ranks and drifted across to my cage. At least that’s the impression I got, of motion without movement. He—or it—just glided easily over the padded floor and came to a stop in front of me.

  “Be calm,” he said, in a deep, resonant voice way down on the lower edges of deep bass, and with that plucked-string quality about it that made it vibrate queerly in a man’s ears. But in English, get it? A thing from the stars ten million miles away!

  THE spook went on, in slow, measured tones, “We have awakened you, Corporal Clark, to ask your advice on a matter of great moment.” Surprise Number Two! He knew my name—me, Walt Clark, that never could get even a dirty look from the Colonel back at old Fort Wood. What with the atmosphere, it was enough to give a fellow the big jimmies.

  “Y-yes?” I begged him to go on. “We desire the attendance of one of your race in our council,” answered the Arcturian. “You were chosen among the twelve which we seized by teleportation on account of the quality of your intellect.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me get this straight. You want me to join your powwow? And how did you say I got here?”

  “By teleportation,” answered the ghost’s deep, booming voice. With a slight shock, I realized that that voice came from where his chest should have been, rather than from his face—if he had a face behind that pillow-slip.

  “The word sounds familiar,” I said. “But I can’t recall it at the moment—”

  “That is strange,” said the Arcturian, and his voice—which, on its own subterranean scale, was flexible—sounded really puzzled. “We lifted the words which we have used from your own mind. Teleportation signifies the transportation of material bodies from one point to another, in an immaterial state, by means of short ether waves. That is how we captured you and your comrades, who are still under the anesthetic which we used in order to test your mentalities.”

  My head was spinning like a gyroscope top. “Then you learned English by telepathy, or what-not?”

  The tall draped figure inclined toward me in what I interpreted as a gesture of affirmation. “That is true.”

  “And what do you want with me? About the intellectual qualities—I never was noted for ’em.”

  “We chose you not as an exceptional member of your race, but as one approximating the average. Of all the twelve minds tested, yours most closely approached the mathematical mean for the entire group. Therefore you were selected as a representative of your race to sit in our council.” By a slight motion he indicated the ranks of supernaturallooking beings ranged motionless around us.

  Well, that was a comedown, of course, just about the time I was thinking I was a cinch for Information Please. But it was a relief to know I wasn’t subnormal. “What do you want with me?” I asked again.

  The creature glided backward until he remained only a couple of feet in front of the line, but enough to show that he was of higher rank than the rest. I gathered that he was the Grand Dragon, or Presiding Elder, or something.

  “We are discussing,” he said, and his voice was like a great organ going way down the scale on some melancholy hymn, “whether we shall, with the facilities at hand, make resistance against the attacks of the Earthmen, or whether we shall resign ourselves and await death at their hands.”

  I had a sensation of strangeness. It seemed such a queer question to be putting. You know that with a human crew there wouldn’t have been any discussion. But as I said before—the Arcturians weren’t human, but superhuman.

  “It seems to me,” I couldn’t help putting in, “that you’ve been resisting pretty effectively so far.”

  “In the nose of this vessel,” went on the Dragon, “there is an atomic blast rifle, for the purpose of destroying meteors and small planetoids too small to be worth charting yet large enough to constitute a menace to intersteller shipping. It is capable of burning a hundred milligrams of prepared atomic fuel per second, and, under your atmospheric pressure, of throwing a blast flame a thousand Earthly miles. By its use we could easily destroy your army, or wipe out all life on your planet.”

  I SAT up like a jack-in-the-box and crowned myself on the inside of my inverted goldfish bowl; but I didn’t even feel it.

  “Judas Priest!” I said, horrified. “You can’t do that!”

  It was a little while before the Arcturian answered; when he did, at last, his voice was yet lower than before, almost inaudible; and there was a ceremonial intonation to it that I could not fathom. “We wish to see justice done. Justice is the greatest of all ideals, and that on which civilization is most firmly founded.”

  It sounded almost like dodging the issue to me. But the triple circle of robed figures swayed slowly forward, and made deep musical sounds of applause, swelling up in a harmonious chorus. It was weird and impressive.

  “We are determined that justice shall be served, even at the cost of our own lives,” intoned the Dragon. Another ripple of applause from the amen corner.

  “Since that is so,” proceeded the speaker, “we must make the high principle of justice accord with the inexorable facts of our case. I will explain to you our reason for landing on your planet, and the reason why we cannot leave.”

  He went on to explain that, in passing near the Earth, something had gone haywire in their ship’s transmission mechanism, or something like that; there was barely enough power in the emergency storage batteries to limp across the few million miles to Earth and make a landing on the helicopters they used for taking off at
home.

  They couldn’t use them to rise off the ground here, though, because their power was too low and the gravity was too much above their norm. They were using the last juice in the batteries to power this screen which protected the ship, and one other defense as well; but it would soon be gone.

  “We have calculated,” said the chairman, and I swear I couldn’t be sure of either regret or sorrow or anger or hope in his bullfrog voice, “that within ten of your long days our stored power will be exhausted. This will be just two days before we can complete repairs on the generator transmission. When it fails, our screen will go down, and at the same moment the tension-maintenance device which keeps up the artificial surface tension of our hull will cease to operate, and it will no longer be impervious to your crude projectiles. Then we will all die.”

  “I guess you’ve about called the turn,” I admitted. “So what?”

  “There is still the atomic blast gun,” said the Arcturian, slowly. I turned cold all over. “But we do not wish wholesale destruction. We wish only to see that justice is performed.”

  I wiped my brow with a shaking hand. “Well, so what?” I demanded fiercely, to cover up the fact that my spine had turned to Jell-o and my heart was knocking against my Adam’s apple.

  “On our home world, which revolves about the star you call Arcturus, forty light years distant, the law has always been: A death for a death. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”