The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard

by Geoff St. Reynard

  “And that’s what happened—”

  “To Geoff Exeter. Yes. We did the same thing with him that you saw two nights ago with me in the chair. Unfortunately—there’s a feeble word!—we bungled somehow. And Geoff is blind.”

  * * * *

  “You get used to it,” said Geoff Exeter cheerfully. “It’s in a good cause. Better cause than we fought the Nazis for if Jerry Wolfe was right.”

  “We’re banking that he was. We’re betting our eyes or our lives, Johnson, that he was right.”

  “If you’ll forgive me, sir, it seems a terribly long chance to take. He might have been addled in the head, or drunk; or if he was right, you may all lose your eyes and never acquire his strange vision.”

  “We’re relying on old Jerry,” said Alec Talbot. “You see, at least three of us were at loose ends, with nothing to make of our lives, and our hearts full of bitterness and frustration. It’s given us an aim in life. It’s given us life itself, by heaven! We drew lots, Geoff and Will and I; Geoff got first try, Will the second, and I lost. I’m to be the third one. Before he was murdered, Jerry told me who was all right and who wasn’t. He’d seen a few chaps he knew—Will and Geoff and the doctor here, Marion and Colonel Bedford. He bequeathed me their names. I rounded them up and beat them with Jerry’s yarn until they began to feel a horrid truth in it. Then just a few days ago I remembered that you’d been our waiter at the Club that night, and he’d sat easy and safe in your presence; so we knew you were human too.”

  “I’m sure I’m very gratified, sir. But what can I do?”

  “We don’t know. We don’t know what any of us can do. But we were only six. Johnson—six against half a world. We grasped at you like a drowning man at a—”

  “Straw,” said Marion. “Really, Alec, your similes stun me!”

  “I was going to say ‘bottle of whisky’,” growled Alec.

  “Do you get the whole picture now, Johnson?” I asked.

  “I think so, sir. Just one thing....”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, sir, what do these aliens look like? I mean, if you can see them?”

  “Like obscene nightmares,” I said. “Like demons down under the sea. Like anything and everything you can conjure up that’s evil and strange and full of hellishness.”

  “Oh. Quite so, sir,” said Johnson woodenly.

  “Jerry talked of toads, of sharks and dragons, weird tree-shapes and amoebae, but he made it clear that those were only far-fetched similes.” Alec’s voice was low; he was remembering his friend, haggard and gray in the face, a ghastly ghost of the man he had once been. I broke in.

  “Yes, Johnson, they’re a fearful horde. If Jerry was right, they’re overrunning us in a manner far more subtle and deadly than any invader ever did before. Which is why we must take these desperate measures. Are you with us?”

  “Of course, sir,” said the old waiter.

  “Why?” asked the skeptical Doctor Baringer. “Why so quick to leap at this fantastic story, Johnson? I’ve got into the affair over my head, but I’m still not sure I believe in it.”

  “Well, sir, you might say I’m in just about the same position as Mister Exeter and Mister Talbot and Mister Chester. I’m an old soldier, much too old to be of any use in a regular war any longer; and I still fret for the days of bivouac and battle. If you’ll pardon the liberty, sir, I must agree with you that it’s a rum go, a very rum go. But if it’s true, then I may be of some slight use in the world after all.”

  “You were a soldier, Johnson?” I asked.

  “Sergeant, Boer War, sir. I fought at the siege of Ladysmith and a dozen other engagements.”

  “I thought the Boer War was a million years ago,” said Marion Black.

  “Very nearly, miss,” said Johnson with a dry chuckle.

  “Welcome to the ranks, Sergeant Johnson,” said Alec Talbot.

  I started to say something, but suddenly was very weary, so instead I went to sleep.

  CHAPTER III

  Ten days later they took off the bandages. The doctor had changed them and examined my eyes a number of times, but always in what was to me total darkness; I believe he used some sort of queer light, infra-red or black or what-have-you. I’m not up on these medical and scientific gadgets.

  The last layer of gauze came off. Nothing happened. The world to me was all a pinkish-red blurring.

  “I can’t see,” I said. “John! I can’t see!”

  “Neither can I when my eyes are closed,” said Marion, with a nervous choked laugh.

  So I opened my eyes.

  I saw a tall straight old man, a one-armed chap, a young fellow in dark glasses, a rather stuffy-looking retired colonel, a middle-aged physician with a worried face, and a girl as radiant as a spring morning.

  “Greetings,” I said unsteadily. “Greetings, little army. Don’t look so scared.”

  Alec Talbot grinned and Marion gulped with relief, Colonel Bedford clapped me hard on the shoulder, muttering something that was probably “Stout fella!” Geoff Exeter said, “You can see, Will? Your eyes are all right?”

  “I think so. Yes, there isn’t anything but a little fuzziness around the edges.”

  “That may be the result of the long spell of darkness,” said John Baringer, fussing about professionally.

  “Well, let’s get out and test the old orbs,” said I, throwing off the covers. John pushed me back into the pillow.

  “Not for a day or two. You’ve got to regain your strength. Been in bed a long time.”

  I raged, but it did no good. It was three mornings later when at last I was allowed to leave the old castle—it belonged to Geoff Exeter’s family, by the way, Geoff’s father being old Lord Joseph Exeter—and go into town, with Colonel Bedford at the wheel of my Jaguar.

  We averaged a wild and impetuous thirty-two miles per hour all the way there. The Colonel was a driver of the old, the very old, school, and obviously wished that the sleek little sports car were a two-wheeled tonga. As for me, I fidgeted and mumbled and longed to get behind the wheel myself; I had once clocked the two-seater at a hundred and fourteen m.p.h., and when she was forced to creep along like this, both she and I were unhappy. However, my job was to observe, and so I contained my impatience perforce.

  * * * *

  We circled the village and came in from the opposite end. No one knew we were staying at the long-deserted Exeter Castle, and we meant to keep it that way. It was a priceless hideaway, an excellent G.H.Q. for our planned insurgence.

  The village of Exeter Parva contained some three hundred souls, if one included eighteen large placid-faced farm horses and ninety-seven dogs more or less. It was market day. The countryside had boiled into town for a hectic time. You might have scraped more citizens out of the pubs of one short London lane, and heard more noise in Westminster Abbey; but for Exeter Parva it was a gala morning.

  We drove down the main street—I believe it was the only street, but this may be prejudice on my part—and stopped to let a couple of deeply suspicious cows pass by on either side. “Well?” asked the Colonel.

  I had nearly forgotten the purpose of the jaunt. I narrowed my eyes and stared keenly about me. I saw farmers in dull blue and faded gray, women in carefully mended finery, children in everything from Sunday bests to Saturday rags. I saw what one might see in any small village on market day. I saw no monsters whatever. I sighed and gave a weak grin. “Just people,” I told him. “Just Englishmen.”

  He attempted to gnaw his short mustache. “Which means either that they don’t foregather in small towns, or that they existed only in Captain Wolfe’s brain,” said he meditatively. “Which, mind you, young fella, I don’t believe for a minute. If there was ever a sane ‘un, Wolfe was he. Besides, he’d served in my old stations in India.” He pronounced it “Injuh.” He edged the Jaguar forward through what Exeter Parva doubtless considered its heavy traffic. “Or else the experiment didn’t work. When you think about it, that’s the logical explana
tion. Whatever happened to the Captain’s eyes must have been almighty complicated. Don’t understand a tenth of it myself, these dimensions and whatnot, but there it is. Frightfully complex changes must ha’ been wrought.”

  * * * *

  I was too dispirited to answer that. “Let’s have a drink,” I said. “There’s a tavern. At least we can have a mug of ale before we go back.”

  “Right.” He parked the Jaguar expertly if rather slowly. We went into the tavern, which was called The Leathern Funnel.

  “Well, gents, what’ll it be?” inquired the barmaid affably.

  “Two ales, miss, if you please,” said the Colonel. It was lucky for me that he ordered. I could not have produced anything but a squeak or a howl. The mugs bumped down before us and I picked mine up with both hands and drank it off like a thirst-mad sot after a month of bread-and-water. Then I aimed myself carefully at the door and put on the greatest piece of acting of my career; I walked casually and without a single stumble all the way to the street. The Colonel came after me.

  “What the deuce, Chester! You don’t allow a chap much time to enjoy his bit of ale,” he grumbled.

  I got in at the off side of the Jaguar without speaking and put my hands on the wheel. “Ready?” I managed to ask.

  “Here, I’m to drive.”

  “You are like hell. Get in.” He did. “Hang on.” I nudged the old girl out of the village and when we were hidden by the first hill I trod on her pedals with all my weight and terror behind my feet. We crashed off into a beautiful eighty m.p.h., which I held or surpassed all the way home. Three or four times he tried to bellow something at me. I ignored him.

  When we had flown up the long winding drive I put her into the stables, part of which we had fitted up as a garage. Then I sat there in the gloom and shook with what felt like fever.

  “Here, what is it, laddie?” he barked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Describe the barmaid,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Describe the barmaid.”

  “Fortyish, plain, thickset, red hands, red face, couple of warts. Pleasant expression. Right?”

  “Not exactly. You left out a few things.”

  “What on earth?”

  “The green horns, six of ‘em, growing out of her face in the middle where the nose should have been. The shifting outlines that looked now like a tree stump and now like an octopus. The pulsing heart of scarlet fire in the belly. The dusky-pink tentacles that pushed the mugs across the bar. The pure hatred that throbbed visibly and seemed to feel cold when it got near you. The eyes like bursting orchids full of slimy white worms.”

  He put his hand on my arm and tightened his grip until his knuckles grew pale. “Merciful God!” he said quietly. “Merciful God!”

  CHAPTER IV

  We went into the deserted hall of Exeter Castle. “Look, Colonel,” I said, “will you tell them about this? They’ll be upstairs. Tell ‘em that it works, that I can see as Jerry Wolfe saw, and everything he told Alec was true. I’ll be all right after a while, but now I want to be alone. I don’t want to be hedged in by close walls, or have to talk. I’ll just roam around down here for a bit. You tell ‘em it’s okay, that I’ll speak to them later.”

  “Absolutely.” The Colonel was the best stuff there is. “Come up when you feel like it, son.” He was gone.

  I strolled over to one of the great mullioned windows and touched its dusty glass lightly. That glass was older, probably, than all our little band put together. I thought: when it was placed here, were the usurping devils abroad in England? How long have they been filtering through into our world—a hundred years, a thousand? If you start with one and he lets in others, then figuring by the birth rate and the multiplying branches of his horrid clan, how long would it take to let in a million of them? How many figures of our glorious history were just that—figures, puppets, marionettes pulled by fourth-dimensional strings, flesh-and-bone shadows fronting for demons....

  We are no other than a moving row of magic shadow-shapes that come and go....

  Jerry had asserted that when the human body died, the alien was relegated to his own world again. Then it had to come back, I presumed, via another birth. It must be centuries, then, at the very least a couple of centuries, since the first one came through. It takes time to corrupt the blood of six-thirteenths of all England.

  But was it six-thirteenths? Jerry had taken his census in Charing Cross Station. At Exeter Parva I had seen exactly one usurper. Were they then centered in London? Were there perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty thousand of them altogether? That brought down the odds!

  * * * *

  I laughed loudly, and the age-old echoes waked in the oak rafters and laughed after me. Oh, the odds were in my favor, all right.

  Opposing me, say (conservatively) twenty thousand foemen: great livid beasts like nothing a sane mind could conceive, that had a system of communication outside my dimension which could gather a score or a thousand of them to down me if I showed fight.

  On my side, a regular Colonel Blimp of a retired officer, a Boer War veteran, a skeptical middle-aged physician, a blind man, another chap with no left arm, and a girl.

  And I: Will Chester, thirty-three years old, five feet ten, moderately strong, normally intelligent; having all my teeth save two, a thick crop of black hair, brown eyes, a complexion more ruddy than otherwise, and a face that, if it would not halt a charging bull in his tracks, still would not win a beauty competition either.... Seven years of Army behind me, an income of eight hundred pounds a year from a legacy, and nothing much in view as a future, until this morning—when I had suddenly been elected the savior of mankind.

  I walked across to the tremendous blackened fireplace, empty now of everything but a lonely-looking single bronze firedog. Above the keystone of the arch were the arms and motto of the Exeters, done in ancient stonework. I could not read the motto, having forgotten what Latin I once knew. The arms were a jumble of crossed lances, fleurs-de-lis, and hounds couchant. I wished I had a hound to fondle and pat, to be a companion in these moments when I felt I could not bear a human being near me.

  * * * *

  For half an hour or so I stood there gazing blindly into the depths of the hearth and pitying myself shamelessly. Then a touch on my arm made me leap like a deer. It was Marion; Marion, carrying with her her own special radiance even in the shadowed hall.

  “What cheer, old stager?” she said.

  “Not much cheer, lady.”

  “Obviously. What is it, got the wind up? Scared sky-blue-pink?”

  “Yes. I’ve just realized that this whole affair is fact, is true; that it’s not a crazy adventure in fancy, but a dreadfully real matter of saving the sane world from destruction—and I’m scared!”

  “We all are.” She said it quietly, and with her simple words I knew for the first time that I was not alone in my terror of the unknown. We were all afraid. I put my arm around her shoulders. Her long light hair tingled on the back of my hand. I loved her very much, and so I tormented myself.

  “I’ve been thinking of Jerry Wolfe, and of how alone he must have felt. He didn’t have six pals behind him when the first alien fouled his view.”

  “Poor old Jerry,” she said.

  “You were engaged to him, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, back in prehistoric times, before Jennifer Tregennis caught him. Jennifer was one of them, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. D’you still love Jerry?”

  “How do you mean? Of course I do.”

  I didn’t say anything. She went on after a moment. “But I’m not in love with him, if that’s what you’re driving at. Good heavens, Will, do you see me as a moony widow-in-name-only? I’ve got more sense than that.”

  My heart lifted. I patted her on the back. “Come along young Marion. Let’s go plan strategy with the troops.”

  We went up the stairs to our sitting room, and I stood before the six of them and took the reins into my hands. I
had a job to do.

  CHAPTER V

  “It comes to this, then,” said Alec. “You mean to go and mingle with the enemy, and try to discover weak spots in ‘em, eh?”

  “I don’t see any other way to begin. We’ve been scratching for a plan ever since we first heard of the usurpers; and nobody’s come up with one, for the good reason that we have nothing to go on. Oh, granted we know we can kill their worldly bodies and send them home. But I hardly think we’re going to do nothing but roam the countryside killing off puppets for the next thirty years.”

  “Remember what Jerry told me—that once one of them was sent back to his own dimension, he could evidently still communicate with those who were left here? That the aliens who’re attached to human bodies exist in both dimensions equally?”

  “Yes, Alec, I was thinking of that a few minutes ago. It means that under no circumstances can I let any one of them discover I can see them; for even if I killed him here, he could go around his silver-lined dimension telling all his pals about me. It means working in the dark, from behind, anonymously. It means I’ve got to be circumspect as Satan. We all have to be circumspect.”

  “Beg pardon, sir,” put in Johnson, “but when do the rest of us have a try at warping our eyeballs?”

  “You don’t, Sergeant,” I said flatly.

  “What d’you mean, we don’t?” cried Alec. “Of course we do.”

  “No, son, not for a while, anyhow. It’s a hundred to one, or a million, more likely, to one, that we couldn’t duplicate the exact injuries again. We can’t blind anyone else now. One of us seeing them may be enough—or if he isn’t, then half a dozen might not be any better.”

  “I think Will’s right,” said Marion suddenly. She lit a cigarette while we waited. “I think we mustn’t press our luck too far. At least we should wait until we have a plan. I think—I really think one will be enough.”

  “Why?”

  “Those million to one odds. Why did the experiment succeed the second time? I think God’s with us. I think God’s on our side, and means us to win.”