by Jerry
But one thing I intended to be sure of. The way I was going to load that jeep, we’d be able to cure half the headaches in the galaxy.
XI
The Stardust lifted, floating as quietly and as gently as a soap bubble on a breeze. The ugly rocket blasts, the corrosive outpouring of wasted energies, the swift building of savage pressures, these were all a part of our history now. Cap’n Jules, admittedly a genius with the infinitely complex engines that were his wife and children and hobbies and friends, could render our nine-hundred-foot laboratory-home so light in weight that a man could scull it through the air above this planet with a single oar. Yet in space, by means of Ultraspan, we could move light-years in minutes.
From the air above the Straits, the whole concept of invasion seemed like somebody’s pipe dream. Along the end of the Island the gray cubes could be seen in massed thousands, but every picture we had of the area showed them so. Nothing was appreciably different. On the mainland the empty landscape stretched away. The waves rolled in to the beaches, flattened and receded, leaving long glistening stretches of finely-ground, siltlike wet sand. With gulls and sandpipers and coarse beach grass bristling along the dunes, it could have been any isolated stretch along the Atlantic coast of the U.S.A., North America, Sol III; But there were none of these. Beyond the dunes swept the endless undulations of the lettuce-green slopes. This was the space, the all-important space the gray cubes coveted, the space they planned to make their own. And it seemed to be theirs for the taking. Not a rainbow cube showed in all that vast expanse. Not a wheel rolled across it.
We lifted higher and higher, until the horizon in any direction dropped away in a long curve. The planet became a sphere. The yellow light of the sun Cyrene washed the blue stretches of ocean and the infinite green land. On the side of the ship away from the planet, space became deep violet.
We watched twilight creep across the Straits and over the long slopes. Then night washed out details, leaving the landscape outlines watermarked against the blackness of the planet. And that was all.
We loaded the jeep, made our simple plans and got some rest. We were having breakfast when dawn touched the farthest readies of the Island. It moved in a slow, unhurried line of gray light, and the Stardust dropped in to the slope we had decided on. We rolled down the ramp, the big ship lifted, and we were on our own, bouncing across a still dark battlefield with all the armies missing. It was a weird feeling.
I was right about the light. At dawn we were parked at the top of the last long ridge that looked down on the sand dunes and the Straits. The beach was empty. Across the miles of glassy water the toe of the Island showed as a faint smudge. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in all that emptiness.
We sat. Nothing happened. Pegleg tinkered with his controls, dials glowed, and a faint hum told us that the forcefield was operating. He winked at me.
“We may not need it, and it may not be enough if we do. But it’ll give ’em a tussle.”
“Fiddlesticks!” Ursula Potts said.
“Turn that thing off and let me out of here. I want to set up.”
“Do you think you ought to, Ursula?” Lindy asked anxiously. “They don’t give warning, you know.”
“It’s what I came for, isn’t it? Hop up, Roscoe, and unstrap that easel.”
No doubt about it, Ursula was good for us that morning. I set up the easel, Pegleg unstrapped canvases. Lindy handed out paints, then climbed out herself to stretch her very nice legs. Ursula unfolded her camp stool and sat on it.
“More service than I usually get,” she said. “About a hundred per cent more, I’d say.” She grinned at us, and suddenly I liked the old girl. It occurred to me that when we went out again we could take her along. She really had it.
“The umbrella, Ursula,” Pegleg said. “We’ve forgotten the umbrella. That ought to attract ’em if anything will.” He unstrapped it and set it up. Ursula looked amused. The light was stronger now, and the umbrella’s bright color did take some of fee curse off that never-ending green.
Then we sat some more. Ursula began to paint, roughing in the landscape. Cyrene rose higher. Lindy and I climbed out again and prowled about. Pegleg fiddled with the jeep. The yellow rays of the sun warmed. Nothing happened. High in the eastern sky a tiny silver speck glittered, as the Stardust hovered, watching.
“You know,” I said, “this could be a flop after all. After thousands of years, why should they invade today? And where are the Rainbows?”
Lindy looked at me queerly. “One came,” she said quietly.
I had an apple, a good Earth apple in my lunch pouch, and I remember taking it out and polishing it in my hands. I took a juicy bite—and Ursula Potts said “Now!” I never knew what became of that apple. Maybe we trampled it, and the seeds germinated, and apples are growing now among the lettuce.
The gray cubes lay in a ragged line just above the reach of fee waves rolling up the glistening sand. And there was no end to the line. As we watched, it thickened, doubled and tripled. A cube field came spreading up the slope. The things were appearing in countless thousands. We were a quarter of a mile away, and they rippled toward us like a gray excrescence, blotting out the green of the lettuce as they filled the space.
I picked up Lindy as though she were a rag doll and deposited her gently in the jeep’s back seat. Pegleg slid under the wheel. Ursula sat painting with swift crisp strokes, and even in the face of the approaching gray wave I didn’t dare disturb her.
“Get ready, Roscoe!” Pegleg said. “If they overrun us, I’ll have to set up the forcefield.”
“Won’t be necessary yet,” Ursula said, calmly dabbing away. “Our best bet is to sit tight and not think any hostile thoughts. Then maybe they won’t pick us up.”
The whole thing was like an old movie with the sound track gone. With uncanny clearness I could hear the soft swish of Ursula’s brush, the soft whir of Lindy’s tape camera, the muted creak of the jeep as Pegleg shifted position. The waves rolled up the beaches with the same hushed swish and drag, and the spreading, thickening sea of cubes made no sound at all.
The sun’s rays beat down warmly.
I was cold to my toes, just the same. Goosebumps chased themselves in rows up and down my arms and over my naked chest. I fingered my pouch of aspirin tabs. If my coworkers were as calm as they looked, I admired them for it. If not, I admired their acting.
We had wanted to be close enough to see what went on. Well, we were close enough. Yea, and too close. As always, we couldn’t see them appear, but suddenly they were all around us, gray, scarred, misshapen caricatures of the colorful cubes of the mainland. They covered the ridge. As far as we could see along its length, green had given way to shabby uneven gray.
Somehow, they seemed to respect occupied space, for none crowded us’. The feel, too, was not bad. As Lindy had said, they seemed unaware that we existed. Focused as they were on another kind of danger, we were ignored. Or so it seemed.
Beyond our ridge the cubes spread no farther. The invasion force seemed to have stabilized itself. It simply sat, and in all the universe there was no movement save the roll of the waves up the beach and Ursula Potts’s smooth movements as she painted. It stayed that way for minutes. The effect was hypnotic.
Then our eye trouble began. It seemed to me that little flicks of movement could be detected wherever the cubes lay thickest, yet no cube moved. I was aware that Pegleg was shaking his head. lindy drew a hand across her eyes. Urula’s swift brush strokes stopped, and she peered sharply around her.
“What’s happening, Roscoe?”
I hadn’t an idea, but I was remembering.
When the gray cubes expended the energy to bring them across the Straits, it would exhaust them. That we had got from the Council. They would have to renew themselves—and feed!
“Watch a spot,” I directed. “Hold up two fingers and frame an area. Watch carefully. What do you see?”
It was like watching a shutter click, but the cubes wer
e shifting position after all. And they were growing fewer! I picked the smallest cube I could locate and watched it steadily. For a minute or two it stayed there. Then suddenly it was different. It grew. It changed shape. It looked like a different cube. Yet I couldn’t believe that it had actually grown. Too obvious.
It took some fast brainwork, but the conclusion made sense. The little cube hadn’t grown. Another had formed around it, disassociated it, and absorbed it.
In effect, it had been eaten. In half an hour the invasion force had reduced itself by half. And the cubes that remained were big—big and ominous-looking.
The feel around us began to change.
XII
“Ursula,” I said quietly, “we’d better get back in the jeep now. Another phase has started. It’s dangerous, and it’s real. This is it.”
She dropped her brushes and palette without a word. I knew then that she realized the danger before I did. But we settled in the jeep without trouble, and Pegleg flipped his switches. Dials glowed as the forcefield came into being.
I held my breath until my face must have been turning blue, then exhaled in a long whoosh. There were other sighs from the back seat.
“Easy,” Pegleg said drily. “The forcefield can only take so much.”
“Where are they?” Lindy asked softly. “The colored cubes. Our friends. Where are they?”
“With these things ‘friend’ fits in the same category with ‘he’ and ‘she’,” Pegleg said. “They don’t exist.”
“I don’t believe it,” Lindy said.
“Do you think they’ve been destroyed? They meant to fight—”
She broke off. We all grew tense. In one way at least the forcefield had been a bad idea. It had attracted attention. It was energy, controlled and powerful. The big cubes were massing on all sides of us, and we could detect tentative, probing pulses as they explored.
“Look like tombstones, don’t they?” Ursula didn’t mean to be funny. She was speaking a simple truth.
The forcefield seemed to baffle them, but I knew it couldn’t last. They’d work it out. Sooner or later they’d get through.
“Well, we asked for it,” I said. “Get ready, Pegleg. When the pulses come through, out the forcefield. We’ll cure a few headaches, anyway.”
I had packed aspirin tablets by the pound. We all had handfuls. We sat and stared at the faceless, motionless enemy. The forcefield hummed. And then we began to hear sound. I mean real sound, a low continuous rumble that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and with nothing to cause it. In a world that made few noises, this was enough to make you pinch yourself.
“Look around, Roscoe,” Pegleg said. “Radio silence means nothing now, so I’m going to see what the Stardust sees. We’re blown anyhow.” He flipped another switch, while I swept the slopes with binoculars. The rumbling grew until it sounded like a subway train. I imagined I could feel the ground under the jeep vibrating.
“Dr. Williams!” Johnny Rasmussen’s voice burst out of our speaker. “Are you all right?”
“Healthy up to now,” Pegleg said nonchalantly. “They’ve got us pinned down, though, and I think they’ll solve the forcefield. They’re trying. But it’s the noise that’s bugging us, Johnny. Can you see what’s making it?”
“Fantastic!” Rasmussen seemed to be talking to himself.
“Speak up, man!” Pegleg urged. “We’re going to be right busy here in a few minutes. What do you see?”
“The wheels!” Rasmussen said. “The millwheels you told of! They’re rolling toward the coast from as far as we can see. Fairly streaking, too. There must be millions of them. They’re causing the noise.”
Pegleg looked at me with a broad grin, and I joined my right thumb and forefinger in a triumphant A-OK.
“The United States cavalry!” I chortled. “This script is right on the beam!” I thumbed my nose at the crowding boulderfield. “Have fun, you fugitives from a quarry! You won’t be sitting there long with that blank look on your no-faces. Hear that rumble? The Iceman Cometh!” In exploring a dozen planets, in jam-ups with a thousand life-forms, I should have learned that taunting and jeering only spur the enemy to greater effort. The cubes couldn’t hear me, I knew, but they got the message. The steady hum of the forcefield began to flicker and stutter. Throbbing energy probes made my body jerk. Lindy’s breath came in soft little gasps.
“Better get ready to shut off the field, Dr. Williams.” Ursula Potts spoke quietly. Her usual staccato speech was completely gone. “I seem to be unusually sensitive to them, and if this gets any worse I won’t be able to help. We’ll throw out a shower of tablets, then set up the field again. If we get the first row around us, it might make them pause.”
“I’ll count down from ten,” Pegleg said. He punched a button. The jeep top lowered and folded. We would have an unobstructed shot in all directions. We clutched our handfuls of tablets. Pegleg began to count.
I fixed my eye on a huge, broken, almost pyramidlike specimen that lay as dose to the forcefield edge as it could get. I decided that it was the source of the jolting throbs that were breaching the forcefield and affecting me personally. I began to hate it. My anger grew. I hardly realized that my mind was straying away from rationality. I just hated that cube. I panted for a chance at revenge.
“Seven—six—five—” Pegleg’s voice was slow and measured.
I got ready. My eye never left the cube, and so I saw exactly what happened. Oh at least I saw as much as could be visible to the human eye.
“Four!” said Pegleg. The gray, scabrous surface of the cube faded to a clear transparency, and within it fluids writhed and roiled in murky currents and whirlpools. For the space of a hung breath I got a pulse of agony from it. Then it dissipated slowly, like a mist in sunshine.
“Three—two—”
“Wait!” Lindy screamed it.
I had watched the single cube, but all around us and for several rows back the same thing had happened. The reasons flashed and glittered in the sun. The Rainbow cubes, in classic patterns of fours, sat as inert as ever in the cleared space around the jeep. But of the gray cubes there were no messy remains, no signs Whatever. Permanent disintegration! That was what had happened to them.
The forcefield hum was steady once more. Nothing probed it. I breathed gently and easily again, but when I unclenched my right fist, the powdered aspirin dribbled through my fingers. I must have been closer to complete loss of control than even I knew.
Out beyond the forcefield the noiseless, motionless battle raged. It wasn’t all one-sided, either. The grays learned quickly. They ranged themselves in solid blocks of fours, and when the colored cubes came out of nothing, they materialized into savage energy fields. We couldn’t see this. We just knew, somehow, that it was so. And some of our bright friends didn’t quite make it. They showed briefly, like brightly tinted ghosts, then vanished again. But this was a battlefield that would show no dead.
We had been too busy to notice, but the rumble of the racing hordes of wheels had become closer thunder. The ground under the jeep seemed to shudder. I saw the first wheel roll through a notch in the ridge beyond the dunes. Then they poured over, wave after wave, an incredible sea of motion. And the boulderfield was all gray again. How and where the bright cubes took themselves we never knew.
But once again the forcefield served us well, for the wheels gave way to nothing. The long lines washed into the sea of gray boulders, rolling at high speed, releasing their spurts of white fluid ahead of them. They smashed through the gray cubes as though they were gelatin.
Our forcefield was another story. The wheels slammed into it and bounded high in the air, spinning over our heads like day targets on a skeet range, but always landing on their running edges and being pressed on by the waves behind them. They couldn’t hurt us, and apparently they were never damaged by the crash. But I wouldn’t have recommended our spot for a man with an ulcer. It would have done it no good.
Lindy’s tape camera was
purring gently. Pegleg, too, was clicking away with his old wide-angle mapping camera. With a small drawing board on her lap, Ursula made swift, magic sketches. I can lift more, fight more, take more punishment, but I felt ashamed of myself right then. Ice-water customers, these friends of mine.
XIII
It seemed long, but the telling has taken longer than the happening. Johnny Rasmussen’s estimate of millions of wheels was slight exaggeration, but there were a good many thousand of them. And they did the trick. This was something the gray cubes could not combat. The one thing they might have done, retreat, seemed not to occur to them. So they “died.”
Now indeed were there dead on the battlefield. The dunes and beaches were glistening with viscous, colorless slime. It spread and flowed to the very edges of the water, but seemed not to mix with it. And the wheels rolled back and forth through it, soaking it up, feasting, gorging.
“This,” Lindy said huskily, “is the end of the end. I can go back to babies and petunias and know I’m not missing anything.” She was pale, and her blue eyes were bright, but she looked a little ill. I patted her hand.
“Look at ’em,” Pegleg said. “They’re slowing up.”
And they were. During the battle the wheels had moved in flashing sweeps and darts, but now they were rolling leisurely, even sluggishly, making slow turns and circles, but still soaking up the slime as they rolled. Not a gray cube remained of all the invading horde.
“They don’t look any different,” I said thoughtfully, “but I think something’s happening that never could happen before to them. I think they’re all stuffed.”
You can’t imagine what our view was like. That weaving, twisting mass of gray millstones, endlessly moving, where before all the world had been still. The movies from the Stardust, taken from a few miles up, looked like nothing so much as a yeasty mass of swamp muck, working with worms.