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

by Geoff St. Reynard

  Either the atmospheric system had gone on the blink by itself, he thought, which was a hell of a long shot and too much of a coincidence, or else the alien, experimenting, had turned it off by accident.

  Maybe the brute didn’t need oxygen. Of course he didn’t! His brothers outside sure didn’t have any. Then, if he were independent of it, but could stand living in it, the probabilities were that he didn’t breathe at all; that his metabolism was geared to ignore the elements in which he lived.

  Just possibly he was taking this way to kill them off in a particularly fiendish fashion.

  Silently Pink cursed the architect who had designed the Elephant’s Child with the armaments room in the bow and the atmospheria back near the crew’s sector, a thousand feet of passageways off. Every door he flung open took another bit of strength from his aching limbs. As he passed a mirror, he had a glimpse of his face. His face was flushed now, the grim-set lips were bluish, his eyes seemed to bulge from his head.

  He began breathing through his mouth. It may have been imagination, but he thought the air had a foul taste, like a sea full of putrid fish.

  Pink fell to his knees. Abruptly his strength had waned to almost nothing. He was horrified to realize how swiftly the air was going bad. He had to get to the system! He struggled up, staggered forward like a drunk. His heart, pounding wildly a moment before, now seemed to be slowing, weakening.

  He found himself singing....

  “Blast off at two, jet down at three

  On the dead dry dusty sphere

  What sort of a life is this for me,

  A veteran rocketeer?”

  Great God, was he crazy? Singing, shouting the words to that old song that Circe had brought back to his mind. Using up what amounted to his last drops of energy and air. God, God, help me, he thought wildly; make me shut up. But the maddened outer part of his brain kept him singing.

  “I, who have seen the flame-dark seas,

  Canals like great raw scars,

  And the claret lakes and the crimson trees

  In the rich red soil of Mars!”

  Then he fell, and this time he could not get up.

  He would lie here and die, horribly, gasping for breath where there was nothing to breathe but death. The mind that had made him sing, that had thought of Circe longingly and of what he must do to save her and all his friends, that blacked out, fell into a pit of ebony walls and ink at the bottom, blackness and nothing left anywhere....

  * * * *

  Somewhere deep in his skull, some unknown cranny blazed with the light of knowledge. He had only a few yards to go. He had to make it. This knowledge crept out and through his body, raised cold swollen hands and made them grasp at a wall, forced the feet of this dead man to scrabble for purchase on the floor of the passage. Pinkham knew that he was moving, but it was as if he were sitting on a distant planet and knowing it; there was no realization that this was he, Captain Pinkham, clawing upward and shoving himself on. He looked at himself curiously, rather proud and a little contemptuous. What a fool, what a damn fool, he thought.

  Here was a door. The half-blind thing that was Pink groped for the handle, recognizing dimly that if this were not the atmospheria, then it was all over.

  He opened the door and fell at full length on the carpet. Instinct rolled him over and hauled him to his knees, and he said admiringly and far away on that planet of death, By God, this is a man! Through a red haze he saw that he was in the first of the two small rooms that made up the atmospheria. He lunged forward, falling, jerked convulsively upward, plunged down a mile and smashed his face into the carpet, felt pain that for a moment brought him out of his stupor. He was making for the master switch that controlled the nitrogen-oxygen-ozone-etcetra that poured continuously through the great ship when all was well. From a great distance he could see that the switch was shoved up; only by breaking a steel band of superb tensility could the alien creature have pushed that switch up, for Pink carried the key to the band on his master ring, hanging at his belt. It looked like viciousness, either of knowledge that this was the humans’ finish, or of ignorance flaring into anger. What a beast....

  He gathered himself like a mortally wounded lion. He launched his perishing frame at the switch, hands clawed to drag it down to the normal position.

  He could not feel whether he even touched the wall, for his senses were obliterated. He lay on his face and knew that he would not get up again.

  Idly, he wondered whether he had managed to reach the switch.

  Then the final flame of intelligence winked out, and it was night and unrelieved blackness, and he fell asleep.

  CHAPTER XII

  Jerry blinked. He opened his eyes and blinked again.

  Had Pink made it to the atmospheria?

  He must have, for the air was sweet and normal once more. So either Pink or Joe Silver had saved them. The others had all dropped along the way; he had passed Daley’s motionless form some yards back there—now he looked, and saw the senior lieutenant sitting up against the wall.

  Jerry rubbed his forehead gingerly. What a headache!

  By the time he managed to stand, shakily, Joe Silver had appeared in front of him. Before Jerry could ask questions, the big man said hoarsely, “Must have been the captain. I passed out before I made the door.” He shook his own head, which evidently ached too. “The blasted door is now locked. I can’t get in.”

  The three of them went toward the atmospheria, Calico and Sparks following slowly. Before they reached it, the door opened and the alien thing emerged, stooping to clear the lintel. In its tree-thick arms lay Pinkham, apparently lifeless, his head dangling.

  “Aside, mortals,” the beast mouthed at them, and added, grotesquely, “goddammit!” They dropped back, it passed them and turned a corner and vanished. “Wait,” said Daley urgently, “don’t follow it yet.” He switched on the passage intercom screen. “We’ll spy on it with this. If Pink’s alive, we mustn’t anger the brute.”

  Tense, they watched the image of the stranger as it prowled through the ship, carrying their chief. It passed Randy Kinkare, and they saw him shrink away, a noise of terror gurgling in his gullet. The lipless Kinkare had reason to be afraid.

  The giant took Pinkham into his own quarters and laid him on a foam-couch. Then it sat down in an angle of the wall, and its gruesomely human-like body swelled until it occupied much of the free space in the cabin.

  “To scare him if he wakes,” breathed Bill Calico.

  “Isn’t it frightful enough?” asked Jerry. “I have an idea: if the Rabelaisian types outside are at their normal size, which seems logical, then this one may be uncomfortable, having to go around all compressed to eight feet.”

  “Could be ... let’s advance,” said Daley. “We’ll wait just outside Pink’s door. Then if it tries anything—”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ll make a protest,” finished Daley. “Somehow, we’ll make a strong protest.”

  They left the screen, a few seconds before Captain Pinkham groaned and opened his eyes.

  The alien regarded him with its habitual expression of overpowering slyness. “Why did you nearly die?” it asked. “Was it something I did?”

  When Pink could trust himself to speak without gibbering—it was horrifying to see half his room filled by this bronze-yellow balloon of evidently solid flesh—he said, “Naturally it was something you did, you big ape. You turned off our air.”

  “Air?” It compressed its lips. “Ah, I remember air. A substance needed on Earth for life. We never understood it.”

  “Don’t you breathe?” asked Pink. “Don’t you take any element into your system and mix it with your blood and then—oh, you haven’t any blood.” He paused. “But don’t you need any outside element to sustain life?”

  “No. Nor do we eat.”

  “But you are organic life?”

  “Of course. A life which you cannot understand, I see. A life impervious to anything beyond it, indestructible an
d eternal.”

  I think you’re lying, said Pink to himself. Nothing in the universe is indestructible ... or at any rate, unalterable. Everything has its Achilles heel, even the atom.

  * * * *

  The monster spoke, half to itself. “That, the locked switch was the air, then. I thought it was the air-lock.” It laughed. Pink thought it had a pretty primitive sense of humor. “Not the air-lock, but the air.”

  “You wanted to let your friends into the ship,” accused Pink. The beast nodded. “Didn’t you know that opening the air-locks without sealing off their compression rooms would kill all the humans aboard?”

  “No,” it said. “I want you alive. Some of you. To teach us the working of this rocket.”

  “Spaceship,” corrected Pink without thinking. Then, “Why do you want the ship?”

  Its eyes glowed fire at him. “To return to Earth,” it hissed. “To return to our own planet!”

  “Your planet!”

  “As much as yours, mortal.” It leaned forward, obscuring practically all the room for him. “Show me how to open the air-locks,” it said.

  “In a swine’s eye.”

  “With safety to yourself, naturally,” it said impatiently, “Come, show me.”

  “Find the machinery yourself. Experiment. Knock us all off. You’ll be stuck out here with a ship you can’t operate.”

  It plucked him off the foam-couch and hurled him against the wall, jarring him in every bone. “Show me how,” it roared. “Thou zed, thou cream-faced loon—” Shakespeare? wondered Pink—“show me the controls!”

  Pink dived behind a stationary chair. He drew his useless pistol and threw it at the being’s face; it rebounded to the floor. He snatched up a vase of ever-blooming Jovian lilies, sent them after the gun. The monster reached for him, snarling. He leaped over its hand, hurdling it as if he were a boy crossing a fence. On the far wall were many weapons.

  When he made Captain, and was given the Elephant’s Child as his flagship, he had transferred all his belongings to it, so that nowhere in the galaxies would he ever feel at home save here. Among his keepsakes was the collection of antique weaponry handed down to him by his father, whose grandfather had bought them in the long ago from many museums. Gradually he had added to the collection, souvenirs of the planets he had explored. They were bracketed on the wall. Zulu war clubs and Kentucky muskets. Martian spear-guns and antiquated jet-pistols; a Derringer, a Colt .44, a blowpipe from an unknown Pacific island.

  The alien giant was too swollen to turn swiftly. Pink reached the wall display. He tore down an assegai, whirled and thrust it at the monstrous, contorted face, searching for the eyes.

  He was a mouse, bedeviling a cat with a broom straw. The thing batted his spear aside, brushed him with its fingers in a powerful swat, smashed him against his desk. A corner caught him, and he felt a rib snap. The pain enraged him.

  * * * *

  In that desk he kept his other collection, ammunition for those weapons: it was his boast that he had at least six rounds for every projectile-thrower there. Some of it had been painstakingly fashioned in modern times from the old formulae, some miraculously preserved through the centuries. On strange planets he and Jerry used to have target practice with the ancient toys.

  Now the agony and the fear forced him into a gesture. He would die in this room, for certainly he’d never tell the giant where to find the air-lock switches; he had to go down fighting, and if to fight this impervious lout was the most futile of gestures, at least he would make it a glorious one!

  Fumbling, he tore open a drawer and clutched a box out of it. This was the ammunition for the Colt revolver. Gripping it in his left hand, he jumped aside as the beast put out a hand for him. He fled across the room, his ears cringing from the titanic yells of fury behind him. Now he had to get the Colt .44 from the wall.

  It took him three horrible minutes of dodging and bounding to reach the weapons again. He snatched at the revolver, missed, made another desperate grab as he dropped to the rug; the second time he had it. He crawled under a chest which stood twenty inches off the floor. Luckily the alien was trying to catch him, not slay him, for it could long since have smeared him into jelly with a piece of furniture for a bludgeon.

  Feverishly he loaded the chambers of the Colt. For a moment his scattered wits could not recollect just how to operate this special weapon. Then he remembered.

  The fingers of the monster, sausage-sized and disgusting in their parody of humanity, came groping beneath the chest. Pinkham wormed back and came up behind it, staring into the red eyes.

  With a concentration of power that he had not known he could summon, he shot out from behind the chest and vaulted onto the top of his enormous desk.

  The alien, lips curling, straightened till its head brushed the ceiling. It reached out for him.

  In the last split second, Pink had a vision of himself, and instead of a glorious gesture, it seemed to him suddenly that he was making an awful ass of himself. Like a man before a firing squad thumbing his nose....

  Nevertheless, he aimed the Colt full into the gargantuan face before him, and pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The dawn-man, a thing like a wet rat, bared its teeth at the dinosaur.... The Cro-Magnon faced a horde of hulking Neanderthals with a grin.... The Crusader stood with a broken sword and brandished the hilt at the charging Saracens.... The Apache drew his knife to fight a double-troop armed with carbines.... The American flung his empty M-1 in the faces of forty Japanese ... toujours le beau geste. Captain Pinkham, standing in his cabin aboard the spaceship Elephant’s Child adrift in Star System Ninety, leaned forward and pulled the trigger to the two-century-old, out-moded, laughable popgun of a Colt .44 firing once and twice and again and again into the face of the bronze-yellow space-dwelling giant.

  The being loomed over him, and a scream like the death-wail of a meteor lanced into his eardrums and made him gasp with anguish. He pumped the last slug into the enemy and launched himself side-long, without much hope of landing anywhere but in a bushel-sized palm. He was actually surprised when he found himself on the rug. He scrambled for cover, but before he reached it, it dawned on him that he might not need it.

  The alien had sunk to its knees, was making a convulsive effort to rise but obviously lacked the strength! Somehow, and God alone knew how, Pinkham had wounded the beast!

  He drew back to the wall, watching. The agony of the big humanoid was doubling it over and throwing it upright as though a volcano were erupting in its belly. It flung out an arm, struck a foam-chair, which shattered explosively. Pink put more feet between them. The convulsions were like those of a harpooned whale. Yet the creature did not seem able to move from its knees. Finally, perhaps a minute after the first throes, it collapsed all at once, a crumpled titan. Pink cautiously opened the door, just as Daley was reaching for the handle.

  “What in hell did you do?” shouted the lieutenant.

  “Shot him with a revolving-chamber pistol of the mid-19th Century,” said Pink. His rib was hurting and his flesh felt bruised all over. He grinned. “Figure that one, boy. Atomic disintegrator doesn’t work, antique powder-using firearm does. I’m too beat to know why.”

  “It’s crazy,” said Joe Silver flatly. They all stood around the alien, which was sprawled on its back. The red eyes gleamed, but no muscle moved in the great body. They looked for signs of the wounds, for holes or dissolving matter, for anything different; there was nothing. “What if—” began Silver.

  “This can wait.” Pink took a deep breath, which hurt, and cleared his throat. “There’s plenty to be done. Jerry, check your scanner and detectors for possible damage. Sparks, get on the radio to Cottabus and Diogenes; tell ‘em everything, and warn them to come in cautiously. Kinkare, Daley, see what you can do with the space drive.”

  He walked to the chest and picked up the box of Colt cartridges. He loaded the weapon again. “This works—and for now I’m not asking why. I’ll stay
with this scum of the void and try to get something out of him that’ll clear things up. Bill, you determine our position and give it to Sparks; then start checking all the other equipment for bugs.” He looked at Joe Silver. “You collect the bodies of the dead officers and prepare them for space burial.”

  “Why me?” blurted Silver.

  Pink gave him a long look. “Because it’s an officer’s job. Because I tell you to. And Silver—”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have decided that this is no longer a grade A emergency.”

  Joe Silver said stiffly, “Yes, sir.”

  * * * *

  Pink activated the intercom screen, told the crew briefly what had happened. Then he raised the mutiny gates, giving a sigh of relief. “Get going,” he told his officers.

  “What about the girl?” asked Jerry suspiciously. “She could still be one of them.”

  “Leave her with me. I have six bullets in this thing and forty-eight more after that.” He looked at Circe, who was pale and weary. “Sit down, O. O. Smith,” he said gently. “I think you’re all right. But you realize we can’t chance anything till we have proof.”

  “I understand,” she said listlessly, and dropped into a foamseat, staring at the fallen giant. The others trooped out.

  With the door shut, Pink walked to the head of the creature; it was a swollen and hideous head, but by rights it should have been even more hideous, should have had half a dozen wounds. The yellow hide was unmarked. Pink said, “You’re alive. Can you speak?”

  “Certainly.” The lips barely moved. “I am but immobilized for the moment.”

  “What caused it?”

  The being sneered at him without answering. Pink said, “I can keep you in this state for a long time, chum. And when we’ve shown our heels to your brothers, I’m going to dump you out an air-lock and let you drift around between the stars.”

  He knelt beside it. “What did you do to the space drive?”

  There was a long pause. Then it evidently made up its mind. “The drive should be in working order now. Your men will discover so when they try it. As with the other contrivances, I merely placed a temporary stasis on the protons of certain atoms, which rendered them futile. There should be no damage by this time.”