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

by Geoff St. Reynard

  “And if Ynohp isn’t a Martian at all?”

  “Washington, did you ever see a Martian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could anything in the universe make itself look like a four-foot-tall, four-armed, slate-gray man with pink eyes?”

  “I don’t know,” said Daley. “Maybe there’s something in System Ninety that can. Hypnotism, matter transference, fluidity or a lot of other facts could explain it.”

  Kinkare and Bill Calico came in on the run.

  Their news didn’t surprise Pink greatly.

  The space drive was out of commission.

  They were adrift in the void.

  CHAPTER IV

  The intercom, the space drive, the life-scanner. So far apart that one man couldn’t have put them out of whack. No one connected in any way with the others. Ynohp snoring gently in his stateroom. Pinkham, Daley, Silver, Kinkare, Jerry Jones, Calico, and the girl, all gathered in the Captain’s quarters, tense, baffled, and all talking at once.

  And out of the hubbub, one clear sweet voice saying something that didn’t make sense and yet electrified Pink as if he’d put his hand on a lighted cigar....

  “Maybe it’s the space giants?”

  “Shut up!” bawled Pinkham. The officers turned toward him, brows lifting, mouths still open. “Now,” he said quietly, “Circe—Miss Smith—what did you say?”

  “Space giants,” she repeated “I don’t think they exist, but I certainly saw something.”

  “Give it to us slow,” said Daley.

  “Well, a couple of times while I was anchored to the asteroid, watching tri-di movies, I had the impression that something enormous was floating just beyond my face plate, watching me. Of course I was slowed down so far that it must have taken me an hour to register the fact, and another hour or two to flick my eyes up away from the movies. What was a second to me was at least that long. But just once I got a clear view of something incredible. It vanished almost at once.”

  “What was it?”

  “A very big man, naked, bald, with eyes like fires. That’s the only way I can describe him. He looked humanoid, except he was so big.”

  “How big?”

  “I can’t tell and hate to make a guess—but at least a thousand feet. Of course I hadn’t anything to compare him with.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Randy Kinkare, the assistant pilot, voice reeking with unbelief. “How could you see through an opaque face plate?”

  “It’s not opaque,” said Joe Silver officiously. “It’s translucent from without and transparent from within. I took a look at it this afternoon.”

  “Space giants,” groaned someone. “Oh, Lord!”

  “We can’t discount it,” said Pink, realizing that he was doing just that, but refusing to disbelieve Circe. Illusion? Not a lie, surely? “She wasn’t drugged, after all. She was in full control of senses that were merely slowed down.”

  There was a discomfortable silence.

  Intercom, space drive, life-scanner. Maybe other machinery by this time. Sabotage in such a clever way that no one of the highly skilled officers and technicians could discover how it was done, what was wrong. Space giants? Ah, come on, Pink!

  Ynohp. Something wrong with him, some flaw in his looks? No, he was Martian in every oversize pore. Some anachronism?

  Hey! Anachronism. Pink’s mind fished up the dictionary definition. An error in chronology by which events are misplaced in regard to each other....

  He had it.

  He got to his feet, motioned Jerry and Wash Daley to go with him. They congregated outside the door, as further talk broke out inside his quarters. He said urgently, “Remember what Ynohp said about his cataleptic state? ‘Moth and rust do not corrupt.’ He said it as if it were a quotation.”

  “It is,” said Daley. “More or less word for word it’s from the King James version of the Bible.”

  “Dated, if I remember correctly, about 1611 A.D.?”

  “Yes.”

  “At which date the Martians had been without space flight for about 3,600 years. At which date, further, Ynohp claims to have been sitting on an asteroid for about 4,000-plus years.”

  “Coincidence?” asked Jerry.

  Pink asked, “Do you think so?”

  “Hell,” said Jerry, “no.”

  “Let’s go look at his space suit,” said Daley urgently. They ran down the corridor, shoving for the lead.

  Ten minutes later they sat back on their heels and stared at the interior of the suit.

  Rust had corrupted here, or at any rate decay; the Martian steel, ancient and harder than any known metal, was worn to a papery shell, and in many places tiny holes had eroded clear through the suit.

  “No man or Martian or anything I know except the space-eating bacteria of Pallas could have lived in that suit, cataleptic state or not.” Pink looked around at his friends. “What in the name of heaven have we brought into the ship?”

  Then the three were racing for the “Martian’s” stateroom. They burst in, and found that now it was empty of life.

  They stood, indecisive, just outside. Pinkham’s gaze went to the door, on which, as was the custom, a hastily-printed card had been placed with the officer’s name upon it. He read it. Then he blinked.

  “Look,” he said, gesturing.

  “What about it?”

  The card blared its secret, its pun, at them.

  Y N O H P.

  “Read it backwards,” said Pinkham....

  CHAPTER V

  “None of you thought to look at the Martian spacesuit when we’d removed it?” asked Pink. The others shook their heads. They were all in his quarters again.

  “Neither did you, Captain,” said Joe Silver. “You were as busy looking at the Martian as we were.”

  “True enough,” admitted Pinkham. “Well, the thing to do first is radio the Diogenes and the Cottabus to stand by for trouble.” He lit a cigarette. “If the radio hasn’t been tampered with,” he said. “Silver, go tell Sparks to start sending to them. Diogenes is down by Planet Five, and Cottabus heading for Four. Tell them to look for us somewhere in the planetoid orbit. They’ll have to come in on the radio beam. I don’t suppose we can expect them for a day.” Joe Silver gave Circe’s arm an encouraging squeeze—they’d got on together pretty damn fast—and started out. “And instruct them not to pick up anybody, off asteroids or planets or out of the ether. I don’t care if they see their grandmothers floating outside a spaceport.”

  The thought of his armada joining him made Pink feel more at ease. No sense to that, of course, but three ships are better than one, if only for moral support. “Daley,” he said then, “lower the Mutiny Gates.”

  “You think it’s wise?”

  “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t do it,” he snapped. It would be the first time that a mutiny gate had been used in more than forty years. All the large ships were equipped with them, great plastikoid barriers which operated from the captain’s room, sealing off the officer’s sector from the rest of the ship. They had been made standard equipment in the old days, before screenings became really effective and the danger of psychopathic trouble in the crew grew negligible. Now they were of theoretical use in case of boarding by alien life, or of damage to a large segment of the hull ... but they had never actually been brought into play in Pinkham’s lifetime. “Drop ‘em,” he repeated.

  Daley pulled open a drawer, tugged at an unused switch, which creaked protestingly; then the brief alarm clang that heralded the fall of the forty gates sounded in the distance. “If he’s beyond the gates,” the senior lieutenant said heavily, “the crew may be done for.”

  “No more than if the gates were up,” Pink told him impatiently.

  “You’re projecting,” said Daley. “How do we know the nature of the beast? He may mop ‘em up in a fit of pique at being shut out there.”

  “The chances are he’s on our side of the walls,” said Bill Calico. “Nothing out there of much importance to him. The h
ydroponics farm, history room, library, and so on.”

  “We don’t know what’s important to him,” said Daley. “We don’t know what in blazes he wants aboard. We don’t know a doggone thing!”

  Silver returned. “I heard the mutiny gates go,” he said questioningly.

  “Are you all armed?” asked Pink. They nodded. “Then let’s sweep the place,” he said, glancing from one grim face to another. “Pick up the other officers as we go, and make a chain of inspection that he can’t bust through. We’ll corner him sooner or later. Then we’ll see if atomic pistols will settle his hash.” He looked at Circe. “You’d better stay here,” he said.

  “I agree,” said Randy Kinkare suddenly. “And you’d best lock her in—from the outside.”

  “Why?” blazed the girl.

  “We picked you up on an asteroid too,” said the assistant pilot.

  Pink, restraining himself from bashing Kinkare in the nose, said reluctantly, “You’re right. We can’t trust any stranger till we find out what’s going on. Sorry, Circe.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” She sat down, a little flushed, eyes snapping. “Have I the right to ask for protection? I’m just as unsafe as you are, whether you believe me or not. Please leave Lieutenant Silver to guard me.”

  He couldn’t refuse. He nodded curtly to Joe Silver, who looked too damn smug for words. So they’d paired off already? So much for his quick dream of marrying a spacegirl....

  It had never happened to him before, though, and it was a hard dream to give up, all the more so for its abrupt flowering in a heart that heretofore had held nothing but love for the silence of the spaceways. John Pinkham, rugged, handsome, all a woman could want, had been dedicated to his profession since he was five; and many a wench had found that out to her disappointment. Now ... oh, well. Maybe there wasn’t room for space and a girl in his heart, after all. And maybe she wasn’t what she seemed.

  He led them into the corridor and locked the quarters behind him.

  Around the first bend and up the first ramp they found Second Watch Officer Wright. They knew him by his chubby build and his uniform. They couldn’t recognize his head, even when they found it three minutes later.

  CHAPTER VI

  They gathered in Sparks’ radio room. That was due to the simple fact that, aside from themselves, only Sparks was alive on this side of the mutiny gates. The other officers were scattered—in the most grisly sense of the word—all over the place.

  “Seven of us, if Silver’s still alive,” said Daley. “Eight with the girl. Why us? He could easily have attacked us in a body.” Five of the dead officers had been found in a heap, just-used pistols in their rigid hands. Atomic force was obviously useless against the thing from the asteroid.

  Pink said, fighting nausea, “All the senior officers are alive. We can run the Elephant’s Child without the eleven who died. Maybe that’s why. Maybe we have to be preserved to carry this monster wherever he wants to go.”

  “Logical,” said Jerry. “He’ll have to be pretty persuasive, though. I hope he knows that.”

  Sparks said, “The radio’s working. I had an answer from the Cottabus that she’s heading this way. Diogenes hasn’t replied; she must be further off.”

  “Evidently he doesn’t care if the radio works,” said Calico.

  “Or else he wants the whole armada assembled,” added Daley.

  “I could use a drink,” blurted Kinkare. “You got anything in this place, Sparks?”

  “Gin on the shelf,” said the radioman, pointing.

  Kinkare picked up the bottle. “You always leave the cap off?”

  “No! Somebody’s been at it.”

  “Where is he?” asked Pink in a whisper.

  “What, Captain?” Kinkare stopped the bottle halfway to his lips.

  “Where the devil is the brute? We combed the place. He can’t have got through the mutiny gates. He can’t have slipped past our chain. Where the hell is he?”

  “Maybe disguised as one of us,” said Daley slowly. “He isn’t a Martian, but he imitated one to the last pore. Why couldn’t he imitate us?”

  “Well, I’m me,” said Kinkare, and put the bottle to his mouth. Then he dropped it, screeching. Pinkham stared at him and saw his upper lip turned violent, hideous scarlet. Blood began to drip to the rug. The skin and flesh of his lip had dissolved as though sprayed with acid.

  Kinkare fell to his knees, covering his face with both arms. The others sprang to help him, Sparks reaching for the medicine chest; but Pink snatched up the gin bottle. What the hell? Acid? Or—

  From the square spout poured a gush of smoke, writhing sinuous in the bright indirect light of the small room; it coalesced, clotted into a body. Impossible, brain-boggling, an unreal fantasy amid the most concrete achievements of man, the thing swelled into solidity before the Captain’s staring eyes.

  He was eight feet tall, three broad; his eyes were brilliant vermilion, his swollen head was egg-bald, and the expression on his coarse features was at once lecherous, evil, savage and cunning. He was stark naked, completely humanoid. And he had come out of the bottle.

  A voice boomed from him like a vocalizing cannon. “I object to anyone trying to drink me!” he roared at them.

  In the reeling chaos of all his beliefs gone wild, Pinkham had one sane thought, and yelled it as fast and short as he could. “Don’t shoot! For God’s sake, don’t shoot!” Then, as Calico and Jerry held their pistols partly raised, he said urgently, “We’ll only blast each other. Remember this thing’s invulnerable.”

  The pistols were holstered with reluctance. The five pale men—Kinkare still thrashed in agony on the floor—gaped at the apparition, which said, “I am Ynohp the Martian.” Gargantuan laughter rocked him. “I am your god, Earthmen. Bow down to me!”

  “Damfido,” said Jerry, which was evidently all he could manage to get out of “Damned if I do.”

  “Drop your weapons on the floor,” said the being.

  Pink drew his gun; casually he sighted on the great head above him, and risked one shot, which had all the effect of a sunbeam; then he let the pistol fall. The others discarded theirs. The naked creature reached out a foot and herded the weapons into a corner. “You can’t hurt me with them,” he said, “but you might try suicide, and I need you. Take heart, mortals,” he said, laughing, “you may get out alive!”

  Then he dwindled and his lines blurred into ephemera and he slid out through the door, which was open perhaps an inch.

  CHAPTER VII

  “But by all that’s holy,” said Daley (it was an hour later, and the eight were gathered in the control room, Kinkare now bandaged and relieved of pain, but unable to speak), “if he’s a brain-picker, and got his lingo out of our minds, who did he get ‘take heart mortals’ from?” The lieutenant glanced at Pinkham. “It may seem little, but it’s minutiae that will give us clues to his nature, and therefore how to fight him. Take heart, mortals, after all. Who talks like that?”

  “You’re right,” said Pink wearily. “It’s little things we’ve got to look for. Like, evidently, gin bottles.”

  “Item,” said Jerry, who was eating a sandwich. “He’s composed of something alien to any life we know. Gas? I doubt it. Atomic shock would disseminate gas. Are his molecules loose and do they edge aside for obstacles, compress together when he wants to shrink, and so on? Possible. But anyhow, he’s different—and so far as we know, invulnerable.”

  “How did he gimmick the guns?” asked Calico, a note of desperation in his voice. “We picked them up as soon as he’d gone, and they wouldn’t fire.”

  “Same way he gimmicked the intercom, the life-scanner, the space drive. Known hereafter as Unknown Method One.”

  “Another item,” went on Jerry. “He talks English without using a lingoalter. Thus, probably, he’s telepathic. ‘Take heart mortals’ he might have grubbed out of somebody’s subconscious.”

  “It adds up to this,” said Pink. “We’re helpless against him. G
ranting this, I say let’s go get him.”

  It made no sense, it was the gesture of fools in love with death or of madmen battling their own futility; but every officer there shouted, “Right!” Except for Joe Silver.

  “I say, sit tight and wait,” he said. “Something will happen. There’s no use committing suicide.”

  “If he wants us alive, and we can’t fight him, I think we’re better off dead,” said Jerry through his teeth.

  “Hell. Where there’s life there’s hope.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” said Pink slowly. His muscles ached, his hands grasped ceaselessly at the air; he was a man of action, his desire for combat throttled by incapability. “Twenty-some hours before the other ships get here. If our deductions are on the beam, he won’t do anything till then. He wants the whole armada.”

  Then, with a snarl of static, the intercom came to life.

  At first they heard a jumble of voices. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing works....” “Are all the officers dead?” It was the crew, beyond the barriers of the mutiny gates, evidently trying to get into communication. Over and over one voice said, “Hello, Captain Pinkham. Come in, Captain Pinkham.”

  Pink took two strides and flipped the switch of the visiograph. Tuning it first to one crew station and then another, he told them succinctly what bad happened. “Don’t panic, for God’s sake. The mutiny gates are for your protection. If they work, you may be able to do something later, regardless of what happens to us.”

  * * * *

  Their somber faces looked out of the screen at him. “Let us in, Captain,” pleaded one big repairman. “We’ll mob the critter.”

  “No use, Jackson. Stand by.” He turned the dial of the visiograph into the officers’ section, scanned one room after another. No alien being appeared. “I wonder if he’s in here with us?” said Pink half-aloud.

  Jerry came to him. “I have an idea,” he said quietly. Then he whispered at length into Pinkham’s ear.

  “It won’t work. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “How do we know that? If he needs us, he’s ignorant of spaceships. Look at the intercom—he turned it off, by some means, then turned it on when he found out what it was. The space drive must have been easy to guess at; likewise the life-scanner. But the intercom’s a lot of complex machinery that only adds up to a television-telephone communication system. However he snarls the stuff, it’s instantaneous and simple for him to do. I think he just took a crack at everything that looked important. Now he’s experimenting, learning the ship, finding out what he threw out of joint. Obviously he doesn’t give a damn if we talk to the crew!”