by Earl
A farmer Tad rushed in, eyes round with suppressed excitement, followed by a burly policeman who said: “Says he wants to see the Chief about that meteor thing that come down couple hours ago. Thought you’d like to hear what he’s got to say, Lieutenant.”
The latter nodded. “Chief’s in bed nights, my boy,” he said kindly. “I’m in charge; tell me about it.”
“Well,” gasped the boy, nervously fingering his shirt buttons, “that mete’r ain’t no mete’r atall! It’s round and smooth like a’ egg, sir!”
Lieutenant Arpy looked suspiciously at the other officer. “What’s this? Some funny joke—”
“Don’t look at me, Lieutenant, I don’t—”
“But . . . but it’s true!” cried the boy almost tearfully. “We all seen it, my dad and two uncles and lots o’ others, and we figured it was suthin’ for the police. It ain’t no mete’r; it’s round like a’ egg and it ain’t smashed, and we don’t know—”
“How far is it?” interrupted Arpy.
“Ten mile straight west.”
Lieutenant Arpy decided to look into it; he ordered his under officer to get three men into the station’s squad car and be ready to leave in a few minutes. He told the farmer lad to get into his car and lead the way to the “round thing like a’ egg.”
When everyone had left the room, Lieutenant Arpy allowed a gleam of sardonic glee to come to his eyes. He walked quietly over to the peacefully sleeping Murphy, slumped in the switchboard chair, and viciously threw a full glass of cold water in his chubby face.
“I’m going out, Murphy. If anybody wants to know where, it’s to that meteor—ten miles west. You stay awake!”
With which useless advice, Lieutenant Arpy stalked from the room, more pleased with what he had just done than with anything that transpired later that day. For two years he had wanted to throw a glass of water at Murphy; this night of nights it had come to pass.
The police car with its five passengers followed the farmer boy out of Joliet along a decent gravel road that degenerated to a bumpy wagon trail before they reached their destination. Lieutenant Arpy whistled at the sizable crowd gathered around a fire that was being fed by newly chopped orchard trees. He whistled louder at the snatches of talk he heard, but he found himself unable to whistle when he looked at the “meteor” on the other side of the hill.
It was now a dull red and promised to be quite cool in another two hours. The policemen were able to approach within fifty yards and play their flashlights over its surface, finding it smooth like metal and with not a crack or seam anywhere. They silently circumnavigated it to find that the other side was the same, as the other side of our moon will prove to be when men conquer space and look upon it for the first time.
“Seventy blue devils!” Lieutenant Arpy muttered eloquently.
He thereupon began issuing orders to his men, not wanting them to think this had bewildered or stumped him. He sent one man to the nearest telephone to call headquarters and leave a message to the effect that he, Lieutenant Arpy, and his four men would stay with the mysterious object till relieved, when the Chief saw fit. He detailed two of the policemen to “keep watch,” one on either side of it. The farmer folk who watched the policemen with silent curiosity, he disregarded entirely, considering them as neither adding to nor detracting from the pursuance of his duty.
He and the remaining officer sat down on the knoll, whereupon Arpy recounted with prideful rhetoric how he had heroically thrown water at “that damn’ snoozer,” who had innocently irked him for two years with his buzzing chorus of snores. But it was natural that the thing before their eyes should engage their talk when other topics had run out, and when the first grays of approaching dawn pushed back the veil of darkness, Arpy was speaking.
“Now I’d be willing to bet, Jones, that this here metal egg is some sort of new ship that some fool inventor took up and didn’t know how to handle. Or p’raps it wasn’t c’nstructed right in the first place, see? So he takes it up, gets maybe a dozen miles, and snap!—goes somethin’ and he plops to the earth which he shouldn’t’ve left without better tests, see?”
“Now what I think,” argued the other called Jones with the confidence of ignorance, “is that it’s a war machine! Yes, sir!—a war machine. Take Russia—d’you think fer a minit she’s unpr’pared fer war? Not on yer life! She’s got scientists who’re makin’ all kinds of things—poison gases an’ bigger guns an’ . . . an’ this thing here, which I think is a war machine—”
“Might be,” agreed Arpy, willing to concede the point without inwardly crediting it much, because the more you opposed a man like Jones, the more confident he became! “Say!” he exclaimed, looking around, “the crowd is getting bigger right along. I’m betting the papers and radio will have this out by breakfast time.”
l Lieutenant Arpy then noticed a young man who was dressed too neatly to be a farmer standing near them and looking at him in hesitancy. At the officer’s glance, the boy came closer.
“Pardon me,” said Bert, for it was he, “I . . . I heard you talking about what you think that . . . that thing is, and I—”
“Well, what d’you think it is?” asked Arpy somewhat coldly.
“A transatlantic rocket-ship!” answered Bert with a rush, all eagerness to impress them. “One of those ships that go from Berlin to New York in two hours—through the stratosphere. You’ve seen pictures of them, haven’t you?”
“Oh—er—oh, yes,” lied Arpy, unwilling that the boy should surprise him. “Sure, sure. So you think—” He bent his eyes on the ellipsoid as though weighing the matter in his mind.
“The pictures look just like that ship,” went on Bert importantly. “Rocket tubes in back, and they must be in front too—for slowing down, you know. But one thing this ship hasn’t got is wings. That puzzled me at first but I figure that since those rocket ships are in the experimental stage—only been heard of the last six months—they change designs whenever they want to.”
Lieutenant Arpy was the recipient of an inspiration at that moment. He had a chance to solve the whole mystery before the ship cooled enough to look into it and before the Chief came. He got to his feet.
“How could we get in touch with the rocket-ship people?”
“Call up New York,” answered Bert quickly. “They have an office there.”
Professor Honstein of the Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay, Wisconsin, swore bitterly while his assistant helped him unload the photographic plates with which they had meditated catching the image of Saturn.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” cried the professor, his voice echoing with a hundred more “damns!” in the domed telescope pit. “Out with ’em, man! Ruined as they are, we don’t have to be careful with them!”
The professor threw a switch with a savage gesture.
“Peabody, I tell you it’s . . . it’s damn’ provoking! Of all the times for a cursed meteorite—and of course it had to be a bright one—to flare across the ecliptic. Why—why—couldn’t it have chosen the rest of the sky! There’s plenty of it—”
He had the habit of emphasizing words with a shake of his head, and after this petulant soliloquy, he jerked his head in an explosive “damn!” so violently that Peabody feared for the continued wellbeing of his neck.
Professor Honstein pulled out his watch and conquered his peevishness at the same time. “All right, Peabody. We’ll load again; it’s only 11:30.”
By one o’clock, the professor had gotten several plates of Saturn and retired. The meteor had quite slipped his mind with his interest in the work and the unretentive qualities of his memory . . . he being what they call an “absent-minded professor.” But not so Peabody; he had been partially blinded by the bright meteor as it flashed from almost straight above, grew like a super-fast comet, and then swung like a lightning bolt to the south. It piqued his curiosity, and at four o’clock, he tuned in the Early Worm Radio Reporter. What he heard sent him dashing to the professor’s room.
“Meteor?
” repeated Professor Honstein vaguely, sitting up in bed and listening to Peabody’s incoherent words. “Ah—the meteor! What’s that nonsense you said?—not a meteorite but a metallic ellipsoid half buried in the ground, heated white-hot and slowly cooling?”
Peabody nodded.
“Well, let me tell you,” said the professor with a flash of the previous evening’s anger, “I’m going to sue whomever that thing belongs to for ruining those plates. Now let me go back to sleep.”
* * *
Chief of Police Saunders of Joliet stroked a smooth-shaven chin with portentous gravity as he looked at the mystery ship from the top of the knoll and at the same time listened to the laconic voice of Lieutenant Arpy. Chiefs of police always carry that air of wisdom and poise that becomes a man, so important in the social affairs of civilization. Chief Saunders had a particularly sagacious and knowing mien; one could not look at his face but think immediately that he must be possessed of illimitable knowledge. At the moment, his countenance, with its undisturbed sang-froid, camouflaged a brain that started a dozen thoughts and tumbled them together in the center of his cranium without a single survivor. A close observer might have seen the vacuity in his eyes that betokened a bewildered pound or so of gray matter.
“The rocket people,” finished Lieutenant Arpy, “deny having anything to do with it.”
“Oh, naturally they’d deny it,” said Chief Saunders when Arpy stopped and made it necessary for him to say something. “Why, if it was their ship, they could be arrested and fined for endangering human life! You see, Lieutenant?”
“But, Chief,” added Arpy cautiously, “it’s quite a jump from New York, where those rocket-ships are supposed to land, to here. Kinda unreasonable to suppose they’d accidentally go another thousand miles!”
Saunders nodded; within him he wondered where Arpy had ever got the idea of the rocket people and how he knew so much about them. It was not like Lieutenant Arpy to know much about such advanced matters. The Chief began wishing to himself that the responsibility of attacking the mystery had fallen to someone else. Somehow, the partially buried ellipsoid struck him as a hard nut to crack. How to get into it in the first place? He had himself walked all around it in the brightness of the morning sun and had seen no way of opening or entering the thing. It was exasperating, to say the least.
It was eight a. m. Already a horde of scribbling reporters had arrived and almost besieged Chief Saunders, wanting to know—for their papers—what the thing was all about, as though he should know. Already the news would be headlining around the country, for mysterious ships do not streak from the sky like meteors every day, and the accounts would say: “. . . a mystery as yet, but Chief Saunders of the Joliet Police Force is in charge of investigation and promises a comprehensive report . . .”
The unfortunate Saunders almost hated the policeman who came up after eight to report that the outside of the ship had cooled sufficiently for human hands to touch it. Now what to do? he asked himself in misery. Yet that imperturbable look of benign wisdom on his face never left; it had grown there permanently, though the mind behind it had never in his whole lifetime justified the expression.
But Saunders, at the crisis of his life (he who had battled desperate gunmen from behind brick walls at two hundred yards with belching guns but aimless bullets) was spared taking the initiative.
l A voice, shouting from the foot of the knoll, electrified the crowd which mainly centered at the hilltop, “I heard a noise! I heard a noise inside this thing!
Unbelievable as it sounded, it proved true, for not a minute later there was a ringing and clanking from the ellipsoid that everybody heard. Yet the thing itself did not move; it came from inside, that noise!
There are times when a crowd hovers between two things induced by momentarily inexplainable things: breathless but sturdy suspense, or panicky flight. At the clangor from the mysterious ellipsoid, only one thing perhaps prevented the latter procedure. A little boy no more than seven pointed at it and asked in a shrill voice of his father, “What makes it jingle, Dad?”
This eased the tension and quelled the innate emotion of fear in the massed group.
Chief Saunders might have made an ass of himself, for the world to read about, by approaching the now quiet ship and shouting loudly, “Who’s in there?” But events moved too swiftly after that.
Of a sudden, a new noise was heard, again freezing the crowd, a noise like the highest pitch of an organ, or like the harmonic bellow of a steamship whistle, or like a dentist’s drill, or like an electrical generator, whichever the reader chooses, as they were all reported along with dozens of other analogies.
But the after result of the noise they all agreed upon; a circular section of the ellipsoid’s wall, perhaps ten feet in diameter, abruptly parted from the rest of the surface and toppled with ringing tones to the hard ground. Yet it was not a “door” or “hatch” because the edges were uneven and ridged unsymmetrically, indicating that the piece had been cut or otherwise severed from its surrounding material.
This, then, positively proved that someone—perhaps none of them at the moment thought of it as something—was inside and was coming out! How can one describe with what avid interest and, to be frank, fearful apprehension, the people waited for the denouement of this mysterious drama that had started with a flaming meteor descending from the heavens? It was the grand moment for which many had gone sleepless and practically unfed.
Then it came—first a series of flickering movements in the shadowed aperture as though mirrors were being uncovered, then a shiny white bulk which emerged slowly and ponderously. It straightened up and stepped from shadow into sunlight so that all could see it clearly. Thus human eyes had the first glimpse of one of the Robot Aliens.
With a low moan, the crowd quivered like jelly, reformed into streams like melting butter on a table, and radiated away from the spot. Fear—blind, unreasoning, human fear, the emotion that supersedes all other human emotions—drove them away with but one thought: to escape that utterly monstrous apparition beside the aperture of the metallic ellipsoid.
Only four persons (besides the police who at such times are held back by a sense of pride) held their ground and dared to look twice. Then they looked at each other, as if questioning individual reasons for staying, and moved together when the people between them melted away.
Bert Bodell, with the individualism his nights of amateur astronomical pursuits had given him, was not swayed by the crowd emotion. Professor Honstein (for his curiosity had gotten the better of him) was too pedantic to yield to panic. Peabody had a strong mind—when the professor was around. And the little boy of seven who had once shamed his elders, and who had been deserted by a weak-minded father in the rush, had the courage of innocence.
With them stood Chief Saunders, his facial expression half broken down to an idiotic mixture of disdain and terror, and Lieutenant Arpy, who trembled so violently that his puttees came together in regular clicks.
The monster stood motionless and silent, seeming to watch the precipitate departure of frightened humanity. It was a metallic creation, twelve feet tall and faintly suggestive of the human form, but having instead of head and torso, two equally large bulks, one of which must have been the “head,” for it had unmistakable “eyes” and “ears,” but no mouth or nose. From the upper of the two bulks, or the head, came four long “arms” so many-jointed that they might be called tentacles, coiled in repose against the body. From the lower “torso” came four shorter appendages, jointed twice and reversely; these were folded against the body and terminated in a grotesque parody of the human hand. For support and locomotion, the monstrous creature had two appendages jointed but once and apparently similar in purpose to human legs, ending in broad, flat plates of metal.
Its composition seemed entirely metallic, silvery in color, with here and there at the joints a blue or blackish metal. From the rounded top of the upper bulk extended three long, thin rods terminating in balls. It was l
ater observed that whenever the creature walked, sparks of electricity leaped from ball to ball of these rods, accompanied by a loud crackling noise.
This was the nightmarish object that the group of men faced and watched as silently and motionlessly as the metal monster itself observed them.
But when it suddenly leaned forward and ponderously moved a leg toward them, the humans paled and gasped and trembled. And when the metal monster proceeded to move toward them, an incredible walking machine, they, one and all, without exception, ran in fright. Their bravery had been but a shade greater than that of the rest of the crowd, and, in fact, proved less than that of several newspaper reporters who had clambered orchard trees and from such vantage, observed the metal monster and scribbled down its description and movement with shaking hands.
CHAPTER III
The Army Attacks
l “This is something new,” said Captain Pompersnap of the Illinois National Guard. “Ten years ago, my men were picketed in southern counties to pacify rioting miners, or in central parts to quell strikers, or in northern parts to keep the milk farmers from raising Cain. Now Pm to take my men and surround a strange sort of airship which seems to have been run by people disguised in armored suits.
While the handsome captain shook a puzzled head, his over-officer, Major Whinny, explained, “In these modern times of armed peace, Captain, we must not be lax. If this wingless ship and those ‘metal monsters’ as the papers have it, are a threat to the independence of our great nation, then we must take care that they are destroyed.”
“Is it as serious as all that?” asked Pompersnap. “I had an idea it might be some publicity stunt, advertising a new wonder alloy, or just some clever inventor trying to introduce his new mechanical robot to the world by means of headlining.”
“Might be,” agreed Major Whinny with a small chuckle. “For all we know about it as yet, it may be something of that sort. But orders have come from Washington—from the Secretary of War, mind you—for us to picket the thing in case it turns out more serious. Personally, I think that asinine Chief Saunders of the Joliet Police is a yellow-streaked moron—saying that the first mechanical man which stepped from the ship tried to attack him. At least, I’d rather believe the Evening American account which stated that the robot, or mechanical man, or whatever it really is, merely took one step forward and then turned around and went back into the ship. But Saunders lost his nerve and turned the whole thing over to the Federal authorities and that’s why you are going there.”