Bug-Eyed Monsters

by Bill Pronzini

  He did not pursue it or fire a second time. Instead, he gingerly pulled the Rull antigravity plate out of the brush and examined it. The question was, how had the Rull degravitized it without the elaborate machinery necessary?

  And if it was capable of creating such a “parachute” for itself why hadn’t it floated down to the forest land far below where food would be available and where it would be safe from its human enemy?

  One question was answered the moment he lifted the plate. It was “normal” weight, its energy apparently exhausted after traveling less than a hundred feet. It had obviously never been capable of making the mile-and-a-half trip to the forest and plain below.

  Jamieson took no chances. He dropped the plate over the nearest precipice and watched it fall into distance. He was back in the lifeboat when he remembered the varnish. Why, there had been no cue, not yet.

  He tested the scraping he had brought with him. Chemically, it turned out to be a simple resin, used to make varnishes. Atomically, it was stabilized. Electronically, it transformed light into energy on the vibration level of human thought.

  It was alive, all right. But what was the recording? Jamieson made a graph of every material and energy level, for comparison purposes. As soon as he had established that it had been altered on the electronic level—which had been obvious, but which, still, had to be proved—he recorded the images on a visiwire. The result was a hodgepodge of dreamlike fantasies.

  Symbols. He took down his book, “Symbol Interpretations of the Unconscious,” and found the cross reference: “Inhibitions, Mental.”

  On the referred page and line, he read: “Do not kill!”

  “Well, I’ll be—” Jamieson said aloud into the silence of the lifeboat interior. “That’s what happened.”

  He was relieved, and then not so relieved. It had been his personal intention not to kill at this stage. But the Rull hadn’t known that. By working such a subtle inhibition, it had dominated the attack even in defeat.

  That was the trouble. So far he had got out of situations, but had created no successful ones in retaliation. He had a hope, but that wasn’t enough.

  He must take no more risks. Even his final experiment must wait until the day the Orion was due to arrive.

  Human beings were just a little too weak in certain directions. Their very life cells had impulses which could be stirred by the cunning and the remorseless.

  He did not doubt that, in the final issue, the Rull would try to stir.

  On the ninth night, the day before the Orion was due, Jamieson refrained from putting out a can of food. The following morning he spent half an hour at the radio, trying to contact the battleship. He made a point of broadcasting a detailed account of what had happened so far, and he described what his plans were, including his intention of testing the Rull to see if it had suffered any injury from its period of hunger.

  Subspace was as silent as death. Not a single pulse of vibration answered his call.

  He finally abandoned the attempt to establish contact and went outside. Swiftly, he set up the instruments he would need for his experiment. The tableland had the air of a deserted wilderness. He tested his equipment, then looked at his watch. It showed eleven minutes of noon. Suddenly jittery, he decided not to wait the extra minutes.

  He walked over, hesitated, and then pressed a button. From a source near the screen, a rhythm on a very high energy level was being broadcast. It was a variation of the rhythm pattern to which the Rull had been subjected for four nights.

  Slowly, Jamieson retreated toward the lifeboat. He wanted to try again to contact the Orion. Looking back, he saw the Rull glide into the clearing and head straight for the source of the vibration.

  As Jamieson paused involuntarily, fascinated, the main alarm system of the lifeboat went off with a roar. The sound echoed with an alien eeriness on the wings of the icy wind that was blowing, and it acted like a cue. His wrist radio snapped on, synchronizing automatically with the powerful radio in the lifeboat. A voice said urgently:

  “Professor Jamieson, this is the battleship Orion. We heard your earlier calls but refrained from answering. An entire Rull fleet is cruising in the vicinity of the Laertes sun.

  “In approximately five minutes, an attempt will be made to pick you up. Meanwhile—drop everything

  Jamieson dropped. It was a physical movement, not a mental one. Out of the corner of one eye, even as he heard his own radio, he saw a movement in the sky. Two dark blobs that resolved into vast shapes. There was a roar as the Rull super-battleships flashed by overhead. A cyclone followed their passage that nearly tore him from the ground, where he clung desperately to the roots of intertwining brush.

  At top speed, obviously traveling under gravitonic power, the enemy warships turned a sharp somersault and came back toward the tableland. Expecting death, and beginning to realize some of the truth of the situation on the tableland, Jamieson quailed. But the fire flashed past him, not at him. The thunder of the shot rolled toward Jamieson, a colossal sound that yet did not blot out his sense awareness of what had happened. His lifeboat. They had fired at his lifeboat.

  He groaned as he pictured it destroyed in one burst of intolerable flame. And then, for a moment, there was no time for thought or anguish.

  A third warship came into view, but, as Jamieson strained to make out its contours, it turned and fled. His wrist radio clicked on:

  “Cannot help you now. Save yourself. Our four accompanying battleships and attendant squadrons will engage the Rull fleet and try to draw them toward our great battle group cruising near the star, Bianca, and then re—”

  A flash of vivid fire in the distant sky ended the message. It was a full minute before the cold air of Laertes III echoed to the remote thunder of the broadside. The sound died slowly, reluctantly, as if endless little overtones of it were clinging to each molecule of air.

  The silence that settled finally was, strangely, not peaceful, but like the calm before a storm, a fateful, quiescent stillness, alive with unmeasurable threat.

  Shakily, Jamieson climbed to his feet. It was time to assess the immediate danger that had befallen him. The greater danger he dared not even think about.

  Jamieson headed first for his lifeboat. He didn’t have to go all the way. The entire section of the cliff had been sheared away. Of the ship there was no sign.

  It pulled him up short. He had expected it, but the shock of the reality was terrific.

  He crouched like an animal and stared up into the sky, into the menacing limits of the sky. It was empty of machines. Not a movement was there, not a sound came out of it, except the sound of the east wind. He was alone in a universe between heaven and earth, a mind poised at the edge of an abyss.

  Into his mind, tensely waiting, pierced a sharp understanding. The Rull ships had flown once over the mountain to size up the situation on the tableland, and then had tried to destroy him.

  Who was the Rull here with him, that super-battleships should roar down to insure that no danger remained for it on the tableland?

  Well, they hadn’t quite succeeded. Jamieson showed his teeth to the wind. Not quite. But he’d have to hurry. At any moment they might risk one of their destroyers in a rescue landing.

  As he ran, he felt himself one with the wind. He knew that feeling, that sense of returning primitiveness during moments of excitement. It was like that in battles, and the important thing was to yield one’s whole body and soul to it. There was no such thing as fighting efficiently with half your mind or half your body. All, all, was demanded.

  He expected falls, and he had them. Each time he got up, almost unconscious of the pain, and ran on again. He arrived bleeding—but he arrived.

  The sky was silent.

  From the shelter of a line of brush, he peered at the Rull.

  The captive Rull, his Rull to do with as he pleased. To watch, to force, to educate—the fastest education in the history of the world. There wasn’t any time for a leisurely exchange of in
formation.

  From where he lay, he manipulated the controls of the screen.

  The Rull had been moving back and forth in front of the screen. Now, it speeded up, then slowed, then speeded up again, according to his will.

  Some thousands of years before, in the twentieth century, the classic and timeless investigation had been made of which this was one end result. A man called Pavlov fed a laboratory dog at regular intervals, to the accompaniment of the ringing of a bell. Soon, the dog’s digestive system responded as readily to the ringing of the bell without the food as to the food and the bell together.

  Pavlov himself never did realize the most important reality behind his conditioning process. But what began on that remote day ended with a science that could control animals and aliens—and men—almost at will. Only the Rulls baffled the master experimenters in the later centuries when it was an exact science. Defeated by the will to death of all Rull captives, the scientists foresaw the doom of Earth’s galactic empire unless some beginning could be made in penetrating the minds of Rulls.

  It was his desperate bad luck that he had no time for real penetrations.

  There was death here for those who lingered.

  But even what he had to do, the bare minimum of what he had to do, would take precious time. Back and forth, back and forth; the rhythm of obedience had to be established.

  The image of the Rull on the screen was as lifelike as the original. It was three-dimensional, and its movements were like an automaton. The challenger was actually irresistible. Basic nerve centers were affected. The Rull could no more help falling into step than it could resist the call of the food impulse.

  After it had followed that mindless pattern for fifteen minutes, changing pace at his direction, Jamieson started the Rull and its image climbing trees. Up, then down again, half a dozen times. At that point, Jamieson introduced an image of himself.

  Tensely, with one eye on the sky and one on the scene before him, he watched the reactions of the Rull—watched them with narrowed eyes and a sharp understanding of Rull responses to the presence of human beings. Rulls were digestively stimulated by the odor of man. It showed in the way their suckers opened and closed. When, a few minutes later, he substituted himself for his image, he was satisfied that this Rull had temporarily lost its normal automatic hunger when it saw a human being.

  And now that he had reached the stage of final control, he hesitated. It was time to make his tests. Could he afford the time?

  He realized that he had to. This opportunity might not occur again in a hundred years.

  When he finished the tests twenty-five minutes later, he was pale with excitement. He thought: This is it. We’ve got it.

  He spent ten precious minutes broadcasting his discovery by means of his wrist radio—hoping that the transmitter on his lifeboat had survived its fall down the mountain, and was picking up the thready message of the smaller instrument and sending it out through subspace.

  During the entire ten minutes, there was not a single answer to his call.

  Aware that he had done what he could, Jamieson headed for the cliff’s edge he had selected as a starting point. He looked down and shuddered, then remembered what the Orion had said: “An entire Rull fleet cruising . . .”

  Hurry!

  He lowered the Rull to the first ledge. A moment later he fastened the harness around his own body, and stepped into space. Sedately, with easy strength, the Rull gripped the other end of the rope, and lowered him down to the ledge beside it.

  They continued on down and down. It was hard work, although they used a very simple system.

  A long plastic rope spanned the spaces for them. A metal climbing rod, used to scale the smooth vastness of a spaceship’s side, held position after position while the rope did its work.

  On each ledge, Jamieson burned the rod at a downward slant into solid rock. The rope slid through an arrangement of pulleys in the metal as the Rull and he, in turn, lowered each other to ledges farther down.

  The moment they were both safely in the clear of one ledge, Jamieson would explode the rod out of the rock, and it would drop down ready for use again.

  The day sank towards darkness like a restless man into sleep—slowly, wearily. Jamieson grew hot and tired, and filled with the melancholy of the fatigue that dragged at his muscles.

  He could see that the Rull was growing more aware of him. It still cooperated, but it watched him with intent eyes each time it swung him down.

  The conditioned state was ending. The Rull was emerging from its trance. The process should be completed before night.

  There was a time, then, when Jamieson despaired of ever getting down before the shadows fell. He had chosen the western, sunny side for that fantastic descent down a black-brown cliff the like of which did not exist elsewhere in the known worlds of space. He found himself watching the Rull with quick, nervous glances. When it swung him down onto a ledge beside it, he watched its blue eyes, its staring blue eyes, come closer and closer to him, and then as his legs swung below the level of those strange eyes, they twisted to follow him.

  The intent eyes of the other reminded Jamieson of his discovery. He felt a fury at himself that he had never reasoned it out before. For centuries man had known that his own effort to see clearly required a good twenty-five per cent of the energy of his whole body. Human scientists should have guessed that the vast wave compass of Rull eyes was the product of a balancing of glandular activity on a fantastically high energy level. A balancing which, if disturbed, would surely affect the mind itself either temporarily or permanently.

  He had discovered that the impairment was permanent.

  What would a prolonged period of starvation diet do to such a nervous system?

  The possibilities altered the nature of the war. It explained why Rull ships had never attacked human food sources or supply lines; they didn’t want to risk retaliation. It explained why Rull ships fought so remorselessly against Earth ships that intruded into their sectors of the galaxy. It explained their ruthless destruction of the other races. They lived in terror that their terrible weakness would be found out.

  Jamieson smiled with a savage anticipation. If his message had got through, or if he escaped, Rulls would soon feel the pinch of hunger. Earth ships would concentrate on that basic form of attack in the future. The food supplies of entire planetary groups would be poisoned, convoys would be raided without regard for casualties. Everywhere at once the attack would be pressed without letup and without mercy.

  It shouldn’t be long before the Rulls began their retreat to their own galaxy. That was the only solution that would be acceptable. The invader must be driven back and back, forced to give up his conquests of a thousand years.

  Four p.m. Jamieson had to pause again for a rest. He walked to the side of the ledge away from the Rull and sank down on the rock. The sky was a brassy blue, silent and windless now, a curtain drawn across the black space above, concealing what must already be the greatest Rull-human battle in ten years.

  It was a tribute to the five Earth battleships and their escort that no Rull ship had yet attempted to rescue the Rull on the tableland.

  Possibly, of course, they didn’t want to give away the presence of one of their own kind.

  Jamieson gave up the futile speculation. Wearily, he compared the height of the cliff above with the depth that remained below. He estimated they had come two-thirds of the distance. He saw that the Rull was staring out over the valley. Jamieson turned and gazed with it.

  The scene which they took in with their different eyes and different brains was fairly drab and very familiar, yet withal strange and wonderful. The forest began a quarter of a mile from the bottom of the cliff, and it almost literally had no end. It rolled up over the hills and down into the shallow valleys. It faltered at the edge of a broad river, then billowed out again and climbed the slopes of mountains that sprawled mistily in the distance.

  His watch showed four-fifteen. Time to get g
oing again.

  At twenty-five minutes after six, they reached a ledge a hundred and fifty feet above the uneven plain. The distance strained the capacity of the rope, but the initial operation of lowering the Rull to freedom and safety was achieved without incident. Jamieson gazed down curiously at the worm. What would it do now that it was in the clear?

  It looked up at him and waited.

  That made him grim. Because this was a chance he was not taking. Jamieson waved imperatively at the Rull, and took out his blaster. The Rull backed away, but only into the safety of a gigantic rock. Blood-red, the sun was sinking behind the mountains. Darkness moved over the land. Jamieson ate his dinner. It was as he was finishing it that he saw a movement below.

  He watched as the Rull glided along close to the edge of the precipice.

  It disappeared beyond an outjut of the cliff.

  Jamieson waited briefly, then swung out on the rope. The descent drained his strength, but there was solid ground at the bottom. Three quarters of the way down, he cut his finger on a section of the rope that was unexpectedly rough.

  When he reached the ground, he noticed that his finger was turning an odd gray. In the dimness, it looked strange and unhealthy.

  As Jamieson stared at it, the color drained from his face. He thought in a bitter anger, The Rull must have smeared it on the rope on his way down.

  A pang went through his body. It was knife sharp, and it was followed instantly by a stiffness. With a gasp, he grabbed at his blaster, to kill himself. His hand froze in midair. He fell to the ground. The stiffness held him there, froze him there motionless.

  The will to death is in all life. Every organic cell ecphorizes the inherited engrams of its inorganic origin. The pulse of life is a squamous film superimposed on an underlying matter so intricate in its delicate balancing of different energies that life itself is but a brief, vain straining against that balance.

  For an instant of eternity, a pattern is attempted. It takes many forms, but these are apparent. The real shape is always a time and not a space shape. And that shape is a curve. Up and then down. Up from the darkness into the light, then down again into the blackness.