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

by Geoff St. Reynard

  “You could be right.”

  “So if I do what I want to, it’ll confuse hell out of him. It may give us an advantage. And we’ll certainly learn something.”

  “It’s worth a try.” Pink looked at Jerry, his closest friend. “I’ll send Silver to do it,” he said.

  Jerry shook his lean head. “This is my baby, Pink.” Then he opened the door and went out, closing it behind him.

  Pinkham said levelly, “Daley, come here.” He whispered the plan into his lieutenant’s ear. Daley said admiringly, “Good deal. And I think that’s sense—he can’t know much about the ship. I’ll bet he was hiding in that bottle, casing Sparks’s equipment and learning how to operate it. The quick look he got at the rest of us on our jobs before he started playing hob must have given him the barest, scantiest idea of things. So Jerry’s notion could work.”

  “Or it could blow up,” said Pink dismally. “Go tell the others. Whisper it, in case our guest is in here.” He struggled briefly with his deepest feelings. “Don’t tell Circe. We can’t be sure of her yet.”

  “Roger.” Daley left him alone at the intercom. Pinkham set the dial to show the large room toward which Jerry was making his way....

  Somewhere beyond their ken, the incredible beast from the void made another decision, or tried another experiment; and the life-scanner flickered into working order again. Joe Silver saw it first. Its screen blinked, then its alarm buttons glowed vividly. Without the ship, at a vast distance but approaching rapidly, were an untold number of organic entities, life-sources that reacted upon the scanner like approaching aircraft on a radar set. They could be spaceships, slugjet suits, or anything that contained the intangible thing called life. And the sister ships of the Elephant’s Child were still too far away to register.

  “Great Jupiter!” bellowed Joe Silver, pointing. “What now?”

  CHAPTER VIII

  O. O. Jerry Jones crept along the last ramp. Why the devil was he skulking like this? Habit, he grinned ruefully to himself; the habit of primitive man who crouched and slunk in the presence of danger, no matter what kind.

  And the old preservation instinct was also giving him all sorts of reasons to knock this silly business off, and go back to the protection, however illusory, of the control room. For instance, said the sly instinct, if this alien is telepathic, as you so neatly proved to yourself, then doesn’t he know all that you and your pals know about a spaceship?

  Shut up, Jerry told himself. I was wrong. He can’t be telepathic, or he wouldn’t bother to keep us alive after he’s combed our brains.

  “Couldn’t he have some physical use for you all?” said the instinct.

  Get thee behind me, Satan, he growled in his mind.

  He opened the door of the room he was seeking.

  Where to start? One wall was banked with books; never mind them. Another wall was covered with strange-looking projections, tubes and spouts and wheels and levers, behind a long table of plastikoid. There? Good enough.

  He had a momentary pang as he picked up a spanner from the rack of tools by the door....

  Then he was across the room and smashing wildly at levers, spouts, wall tanks, faucets; beating metal into scrap, crushing shining aluminum to scarred uselessness; he did not rest his arm until the whole wall was a ruin of beaten metal and broken glass. Then he turned his attention to the third wall.

  Here was a giant turntable, rack on rack of shellacked alloy discs, mysterious-appearing charts and cabalistic signs. These he wrecked as methodically and ruthlessly as he had the first, but now there were tears glistening in his eyes. He ended the destruction with a moan of sorrow.

  He paused to snap on the intercom. Pink’s worry-lined face appeared. “How’m I doing?” Jerry asked his captain.

  “Great so far. Calico is crying like a child.”

  “I have news for you,” Jerry said. “So am I.” Then he turned to the last wall. Before it spread a long array of mechanical devices: large boxes on spindly legs, with glassed tops and brilliant colors splashed across their surfaces; taller, narrower cases with crooked levers and viewplates on which were small designs and words. There was a kind of double cage with tiny cubes therein. There were great wheels with many numbers. Almost all were attached to the wall by electric cords, though some were entirely mechanical and others ran on self-generated power. Jerry began at one end and passed down the line, shattering glass and snapping wooden legs with his spanner.

  He had almost finished when the door burst open and the tall humanoid form of the stranger appeared. A blast of rage almost lifted Jerry off his feet. The being came at him, its motion a flowing tigerish pounce. The spanner was twitched from his hand flung across the room. He backed against the wall, bloating with fear in spite of himself. The creature swelled above him.

  “Whoreson knave!” it bawled angrily. “What are you doing?”

  “Making d-d-damn sure you don’t take the ship anywhere,” said Jerry, croaking a little. “Now t-try and run it!”

  He was suddenly lifted off his feet and dangled helplessly a yard off the floor. “Fix them,” snarled the alien thing into his face. He had time to realize that its grip was extremely powerful, whatever its molecules and atoms might be made of. “Reconstruct them, or you die.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Jerry told it, making up his mind that he was as good as dead and might as well go out like a man. “There isn’t a single spare part aboard for any of these devices.” He managed a sick grin. “If you’re so smart, you know I’m telling the truth.”

  Pinkham called from the screen of the intercom. “That’s true, whatever-you-are. Those things are useless to you now.”

  The alien took Jerry by the chest, wrapping one hand around his back to do it; slowly it exerted pressure, and Jerry realized that it must have elongated the hand enormously to encompass him so. He also knew that his rib cage would shortly collapse. He shrieked.

  Then Circe, the girl from the asteroid, was gazing from the screen, horrified. “No!” she screamed at the being. “You can’t kill him for only wrecking the—”

  “Shut up!” squealed Jerry.

  “The recreation room!” she finished.

  Abruptly he was dropped to the floor, where he lay gasping, massaging his bruised sides. The thing above him said, “Recreation room?”

  “Sure. The soda fountain, the phonograph, and the pinball machines and games.”

  Then Pinkham had encircled her throat with one arm, clamped his other hand on her mouth, and dragged her back. But the damage was done.

  The alien gave another of those mirthless peals of bull’s laughter. “Clever,” he said. “Oh, clever little man.” Then he plucked Jerry off the floor once more.

  I’m going to die now....

  The brute set him on his feet, twisted him toward the door, and gave him a brisk, forceful pat on the backside that sent him staggering. He gained his balance and ran into the corridor. It was more humiliating than had he been slain.

  CHAPTER IX

  “It didn’t work, but it taught us a few things.”

  “You’re right. It taught us that this bitch can’t be trusted. Either she’s in league with it, a sister or brother of it, or else she’s so stupid that she’s a menace to our survival.”

  “Oh, you blithering jackass!” said Circe indignantly to her fellow organicus officer. “How could I guess what your plan was? Nobody told me. All I knew was that you were going to be murdered for doing a perfectly harmless—”

  “She’s right,” said Joe Silver. “We ought to have told her.”

  “Shut up,” said Pinkham savagely. “Any more of that and I’ll figure she’s corrupted you or addled your brains, and I’ll toss you into the brig, Silver.”

  “You try it you pigsqueak,” shouted Silver, who measured half an inch over Pink’s six-foot-three. “Captain or not, this is a grade A emergency and we’re all needed. I’ll pull the Mars Convention on you if you try to shut me up.”

  “He’s r
ight,” said Daley to the captain. “Mars Convention says that in a grade A emergency any officer above Second Watch is equal to the captain or commander, Pink.” Then he turned to Silver, grinned, and lashing out with a hand the size of a spaniel, caught his under-lieutenant on the ear. It knocked Silver sprawling. “That’s for slanging at your superiors,” he said quietly. “And the Mars Convention says I can do that.”

  Silver got up and blinked. He seemed dazed and for the first time in his space life, uncertain of himself. He looked at the others and recognized himself as a minority here. “Okay,” he said, “okay, I’m outvoted. But I say the girl is only suspect, by no means convicted of anything but ignorance of the plan.”

  Kinkare, unable to speak through his bandaged mouth, nodded strongly. Circe glared defiance at Pinkham. “Next time, for God’s sake tell me what you have in mind,” she said. “Not that I’d let you sacrifice poor Jerry, anyway.”

  “Women,” said Jerry. “Women on a ship. Jonahs. Sentimental imbeciles.”

  “I’ll knock your teeth down your scrawny throat,” began Joe Silver, and “Quiet!” roared Pinkham. “We’re quarreling like kids. What’s to be done now!”

  “I was saying it taught us a few things,” said Daley. “Let’s figure them out. The thing’s evidently not telepathic. It can’t run a spaceship, or it wouldn’t have been so worked up over the ruin of the soda fountain, which must have looked pretty vital to its inexperienced eyes. It’s definitely tangible, for it picked Jerry up.”

  “It also murdered eleven men,” said Pink. “That’s tangible enough too.”

  “It’s damned intelligent, for it must have spotted Jerry on the intercom, which means it was working it. It also speaks a very funny breed of English. ‘Whoreson knave,’ for example. Nobody here ever called anyone that.”

  “Whoreson knave is Shakespearean,” said Jerry.

  “And, to finish what I’ve deduced, the monster is as strong as a couple of men, at least.” He grinned at Jerry. “Not that you needed me to deduce that.”

  Randy Kinkare was staring at the life-scanner screen. Now he beat a tattoo on the arm of his chair, pointed so that they all looked. The flecks of light that indicated organic life had thronged in toward the ship; not so numerous as the stars, they were still too many to count. One object on the screen was large now, large enough to be identified. It approached the ship at a slow but steady rate, and they gasped as they saw it was another of the human-like figures.

  “His brothers,” said Pinkham. “That must be their natural form, then.”

  It grew and grew. It seemed it must now be touching the scanner’s outside cell; but no, it grew even greater. At last it could not be seen in its entirety, then only its face showed. It was a hideous face, twisted with sardonic malice. The face grew. When it stopped, only one enormous eye filled the screen.

  Jerry cleared his throat. “Do you know what that means?” he asked. “It means that, at a conservative estimate, the critter is—”

  “Go on,” said Daley impatiently, when Jerry’s silence had lengthened intolerably.

  “It must be at least one thousand feet tall,” said the O. O.

  There was a long, unbroken stillness, a hush of horror and disbelief in the control room.

  Finally Circe said slowly, “I think I’m going to faint.”

  And she did.

  CHAPTER X

  The long-unused armaments room was half the width of the ship away. They went toward it silently, seven men and a girl, praying that their visitor would not meet them or spot their furtive advance on the intercom. They slunk into the gunroom and Pink, coming last, ran the heavy emergency bolt across the door behind him.

  The armaments officer was dead, of course. Pink said quietly, “Who knows the principles of these weapons?” Daley and Joe Silver raised their hands. “Activate the viewers, then.”

  Two walls darkened and became the silver-flecked night of space; it was as if they had become suddenly transparent. Half a dozen of the void-giants showed near the Elephant’s Child, hovering or slowly drifting around the bow of the ship.

  “Now,” said the captain, “if only our friend in the bottle has left us our guns—train ‘em on those monstrosities and fire every forward battery simultaneously.”

  The lieutenants, seated in foam-chairs behind the double banks of the gun controls, manipulated instruments that were very like the sights on common atom-pistols. Thin blue lines moved across the reflected picture of the space beyond the ship’s nose, steadied and centered on the nearest giants. Silver glanced at Daley, who said, “Count o’ three, Joe.”

  Every man leaned forward, scowling at the screens. The nearest space-soarer squinted full in their faces, as though he could actually see them as they were scanning him. Coincidence, but—Pink shuddered.

  “One,” said Daley. “Two.”

  The Elephant’s Child rocked wildly up and back as thirty platinum guns, the heaviest type in the known universe, fired their hell-projectiles—great shells whose inconceivable destructive power was released by the splitting of the curium atom. In flight, the ship would have absorbed the tremendous recoil automatically; stationary as she was, it bucked her over like a blown leaf.

  The shells, set to explode at the very closest range that safety permitted, flashed upon the twin screens like bursting suns. Human eyes looking directly at such a bombardment would have crisped in their sockets; even on the screens their glare was too bright for comfort.

  The men blinked, peered sharply for signs of the effect on the giants.

  Pink felt disappointment, so biting and gut-curdling that he nearly vomited. For at first the shells seemed to have had little effect except to hurl the giants back a mile or so from the ship. Then, as they slowly surged forward toward it again, he saw that they had not escaped whole.

  One lacked an arm; another had, half his head blown away; a third drifted in without the lower half of his torso. The expressions of their bronze-yellow faces were not of pain, however, but only of rage.

  “Hey!” bellowed Calico. “We nicked ‘em up, anyway!”

  “Look again,” said Daley morosely, standing from his foam-chair. “Look at the head of the far left skunk.”

  He who had lost half his cranium was slowly regenerating it, the brow and cheek pressing outward to form new firm outlines, a missing eye gradually emerging from the bloodless tatters of the old socket. Pink said, “Well.” He took a deep breath. “Well, that’s that. Let’s all get out and plink at them with bean-shooters. It’ll do as much harm.” All the giants were reconstituting their lost parts.

  Now one monster, floating right up to the ship, wrapped his five-hundred-feet-long arms around it and gave it a shake. It was as if a man had rattled a box full of beetles. The officers of the Elephant’s Child, who had ridden through the bucking of the tremendous explosion, were unprepared for this movement, for they had risen from their deep seats. They sprawled across the room, smashing up against the wall with bone-jarring thumps. Pinkham found himself entangled with Circe Smith in a pretzel of arms and legs that would under other circumstances have been ridiculous but pleasurable. Fearing for her safety, he grasped her around the waist; she yielded to him a moment, then struggled back and stood up. Was her face flushed with indignation, fright, or—? He got to his own feet. The giant had released the ship.

  “We are chastened,” murmured Jerry, feeling a bruised shin.

  “And now what?” asked Joe Silver. “Ordinary weapons are as much use to us as spitballs.” He sat down. “Let’s figure out what else to try. Somewhere there’s an answer.”

  They all sat down, Pink said, “Remember Wolf 864?”

  “Sure,” said Daley, who had been on that expedition with Pinkham when they were young cubs out of jetschool. “Friendly natives, kind of vegetable-animal life, and we murdered half of them unintentionally. We had to get out and never go back.”

  “How?” asked Circe. “How did you kill them?”

  “Germs. The comm
on ordinary non-toxic germs we carry in our systems all the time. It was a massacre—and of a queer, sweet kind of beast. They had no tolerance for our microbes.”

  “I volunteer to find the alien and breathe in his face,” said Jerry. “Somebody hand me an onion,” he added.

  The conversation went on. It grew aimless to Pink, a bunch of boys whistling by a graveyard, eight prisoners speculating on their escape when they had no real knowledge of their jailer. He fiddled with the intercom, saw that the crew had gathered by the mutiny gates and were waiting tensely, puny weapons in their hands. He spoke a few words of encouragement to them. 57 men—whom he hated to see die. Somehow he had to save them.

  It was about half an hour afterwards that he first discovered he was breathing too shallowly.

  CHAPTER XI

  “What is it?” asked Circe. Her lovely face was a trifle pallid. “I feel odd—and you all look pale.”

  Then it struck Pink. None of the others, even Daley, had recognized what was happening. He did not dare waste a second in telling them. He tore the door open and leaped into the corridor.

  Deliberately he tried to draw as much oxygen into his lungs as he could. It was growing rarer every instant; but never mind trying to conserve it—the life of everyone aboard depended on his reaching the atmospheria. For the air in the spaceship was rapidly degenerating, becoming unbreathable as what remained of the good stuff was inhaled and thrown off as useless gases....