Space Beagle- the Complete Adventures

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Space Beagle- the Complete Adventures Page 34

by A. E. van Vogt


  It was not enough. The dread knowledge of an imminent starvation seeped to the farthest reaches of its body. Through all the countless, tenuous cells of its structure came messages from near and far, proclaiming that there was not enough food. For long now, all the cells had had to do with less.

  Slowly, the Anabis had come to realize that it was either too big—or too small. It had made a fatal mistake in growing with such abandon during its early days. In those years, the future had seemed limitless. The galactic space, where its form could wax ever huger had appeared of endless extent. It had expanded with all the vaunting, joyous excitement of a lowborn organism grown conscious of stupendous destiny.

  It was lowborn. In the dim beginning it had been only gas oozing from a mist-covered swamp. It was an odorless, tasteless gas, yet somehow, someway, a dynamic combination was struck. And there was life.

  At first it was nothing but a puff of invisible mist. Ardently, it darted over the muggy, muddy waters that had spawned it, twisting, diving, pursuing incessantly and with a gathering alertness, a gathered need, striving to be present while something—anything—was being killed.

  For the death of others was its life.

  Not for it was the knowledge that the process by which it survived was one of the most intricate that had ever been produced by a natural life chemistry. Its interest was in pleasure and exhilaration, not in information. What a joy it felt when it was able to swoop over two insects, as they buzzed in a furious death struggle, envelop them, and wait, trembling in every gassy atom, for the life force of the defeated to spray with tingling effect against its own insubstantial elements.

  There was a timeless period then, when its life was only that aimless search for food. And its world was a narrow swamp, a grey, nubiferous environment, where it lived its contented, active, idyllic, almost mindless existence. But even in that area of suffused sunlight it grew bigger imperceptibly. It needed more food, more than any haphazard search for dying insects could bring it.

  And so it developed cunning, special little bits of knowledge that fitted the dank swamp. It learned which were the insects that preyed, and which were the prey. It learned the hunting hours of every species, and where the tiny, non-flying monsters lay in wait—the flying ones were harder to keep track of. Though—as the Anabis discovered—they, also, had their eating habits. It learned to use its vaporous shape like a breeze to sweep unsuspecting victims to their fate.

  Its food supply became adequate, then more than adequate. It grew, and once more it hungered. Of necessity, it became aware that there was life beyond the swamp. And, one day, when it ventured farther than ever before, it came upon two gigantic armored beasts at the bloody climax of a death struggle. The sustained thrill that came as the defeated monster’s life force streamed through its vitals, the sheer quantity of energy it received, provided ecstasy greater than it had experienced during all its previous lifetime. In a few hours while the victor devoured the writhing vanquished, the Anabis grew by ten thousand times ten thousand.

  During the single day and night period that followed, the steaming jungle world was enveloped. The Anabis overflowed every ocean, every continent, and spread up to where the eternal clouds gave way to unadulterated sunlight. Later, in the days of its intelligence, it was able to analyst what happened then. Whenever it gained in bulk, it absorbed certain gases from the atmosphere around it. To bring this about, two agents were needed, not just one. There was the food it had to search for. And there was the natural action of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. In the swamp, far below the upper reaches of that water-laden atmosphere, only a minute quantity of the necessary short waves had come through. The results were correspondingly tiny, localized, and potentially only planetary in scope.

  As it emerged from the mist, it was increasingly exposed to ultra-violet light. The dynamic expansion that began then did not slow for aeons. On the second day, it reached the nearest planet. In a measurable time, it spread to the limits of the galaxy, and reached out automatically for the shining stuff of other star systems. But there it met defeat in distances that seemed to yield nothing to its groping, tenuous matter.

  It took in knowledge as it took in food. And in the early days it believed the thoughts were its own. Gradually, it grew aware that the electrical nerve energy it absorbed at each death scene brought with it the mind-stuff of both a victorious and a dying beast. For a time, that was its thought level. It learned the animal cunning of many a carnivorous hunter, and the evasive skill of the hunted. But, here and there on different planets, it made contact with an entirely different degree of intelligence: beings who could think, civilization, science.

  It discovered from them, among many other things, that by concentrating its elements it could make holes in space, go through, and come out at a distant point. It learned to transport matter in this fashion. It began to jungl-ize planets as a matter of course because primeval worlds provided the most life force. It transported great slices of other jungle worlds through hyperspace. It projected cold planets nearer their suns.

  It wasn’t enough.

  The days of its power seemed but a moment. Wherever it fed, it grew vaster. Despite its enormous intelligence, it could never strike a balance anywhere. With horrendous fear, it foresaw that it was doomed within a measurable time.

  The coming of the ship brought hope. By stretching dangerously thin in one direction, it would follow the ship to wherever it had come from. Thus would begin a desperate struggle to remain alive by jumping from galaxy to galaxy, spreading ever farther into the immense night. Throughout those years, its hope must be that it would be able to jungl-ize planets, and that space had no end..

  To the men, darkness made no difference. The Space Beagle crouched on a vast plain of jagged metal. Every porthole shed light. Great searchlights poured added illumination on rows of engines that were tearing enormous holes into the all-iron world. At the beginning, the iron was fed into a single manufacturing machine, which turned out unstable iron torpedoes at the rate of one every minute, and immediately launched them into space.

  By dawn of the next morning, the manufacturing machine itself began to be manufactured, and additional robot feeders poured raw iron into each new unit. Soon, a hundred, then thousands of manufacturing machines were turning out those slim, dark torpedoes. In ever greater numbers they soared into the surrounding night, scattering their radioactive substance to every side. For thirty thousand years those torpedoes would shed their destroying atoms. They were designed to remain within the gravitational field of their galaxy, but never to fall on a planet or into a sun.

  As the slow, red dawn of the second morning brightened the horizon, engineer Pennons reported on the “General Call.”

  “We’re now turning out nine thousand a second; and I think we can safely leave the machines to finish the job. I’ve put a partial screen around the planet to prevent interference. Another hundred iron worlds properly located, and our bulky friend will begin to have a hollow feeling in his vital parts. It’s time we were on our way.”

  The time came, months later, when they decided that their destination would be Nebula NGC-50,437. Astronomer Lester explained the meaning of the selection.

  “That particular galaxy,” he said quietly, “is nine hundred million light-years away. If this gas intelligence follows us, he’ll lose even his stupendous self in a night that almost literally has no end.”

  He sat down, and Grosvenor rose to speak.

  “I’m sure,” he began, “we all understand that we are not going to this remote star system. It would take us centuries, perhaps thousands of years, to reach it. All we want is to get this inimical life form out where he will starve. We’ll be able to tell if he’s following us by the murmurings of his thoughts. And we’ll know he’s dead when the murmurings stop.”

  That was exactly what happened.

  Time passed. Grosvenor entered the auditorium room of his department, and saw that his class had again enlarged. Every s
eat was occupied, and several chairs had been brought in from adjoining rooms. He began his lecture of the evening.

  “The problems which Nexialism confronts are whole problems. Man has divided life and matter into separate compartments of knowledge and being. And, even though he sometimes uses words which indicate his awareness of the wholeness of nature, he continues to behave as if the one, changing universe had many separately functioning parts. The techniques we will discuss tonight . . .”

  He paused. He had been looking out over his audience, and his gaze had suddenly fastened on a familiar figure well to the rear of the room. After a moment’s hesitation, Grosvenor went on.

  “. . . will show how this disparity between reality and man’s behavior can be overcome.”

  He went on to describe the techniques, and in the back of the room Gregory Kent took his first notes on the science of Nexialism.

  And, carrying its little bit of human civilization, the expeditionary ship Space Beagle sped at an ever-increasing velocity through a night that had no end.

  And no beginning.

  [*] The ship operated on what was called Star Time, based on a hundred-minute hour and a twenty-hour day. The week had ten days, with a thirty-day month and a three-hundred-and-sixty-day year. The days were numbered, not named, and the calendar was reckoned from the moment of take-off.

  THE VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE

  by A.E. VAN VOGT

  The fourth of Simon and Schuster’s Science Fiction Adventures tells of a journey of exploration into the far reaches of space. The author is one of the foremost writers in his field, a leading contributor to the major s-f publication, Astounding Science Fiction magazine. His stories about the crew of the Space Beagle, which provide the basis for this full-length account of its strange voyage, are vividly remembered by science fiction readers.

  Van Vogt is thirty-eight years old, born in Canada, and now a resident of Los Angeles. He is married to another well-known writer, E. Mayne Hull.

  His earlier novel, The World of A, was the first of the Science Fiction Adventures series. It deals with a world governed by the inflexible rulers of semantics, and a man whose very existence defied those rules. Other titles in the series are:

  THE HUMANOIDS, by Jack Williamson—Sleek, eyeless invaders from another world, they threatened mankind with complete mental and physical stagnation.

  SETEE SHOCK, by Will Stewart—“Setee” was matter with its atomic structure turned inside out. It held the promise of an unlimited source of power for all—and the fear of total destruction.

  WAR OF NERVES

  The spaceship flashed through the void—and all at once there began a battle of wits to the death between the crew and a non-human race on a planet still light years away . . .

  THE voyage of the Space Beagle—Man’s first expedition to the great galaxy, M33 in Andromeda—had produced some grisly incidents. Not once, but three times, deadly attacks by aliens had been made against the 900-odd scientists under Director Morton, and the 140 military personnel commanded by Captain Leeth—all this entirely aside from the. tensions that had developed among the men themselves. Hate, dislike, anxiety, ambition—of which Chief Chemist Kent’s desire to be Director was but one example—permeated every activity aboard.

  Elliott Grosvenor, the only Nexialist on the ship, sometimes had the feeling that even one more danger would be too much for the physically weary and emotionally exhausted men, who were now on the long return journey to Earth.

  The danger came.

  Elliott Grosvenor had just said to Korita, the archeologist aboard the Space Beagle: “Your brief outline of cyclic history is what I’ve been looking for. I did have some knowledge of it, of course. It wasn’t taught at the Nexial Foundation, since it’s a form of philosophy. But a curious man picks up odds and ends of information.”

  They had paused at the “glass” room on Grosvenor’s floor. It wasn’t glass, and it wasn’t, by strict definition, a room. It was an alcove of an outer wall corridor, and the “glass” was an enormous curving plate made from a crystallized form of one of the Resistance metals. It was so limpidly transparent as to give the illusion that nothing at all was there—beyond was the vacuum and darkness of space.

  Korita half-turned away, then said, “I know what you mean by odds and ends. For instance, I’ve learned just enough about Nexialism to envy you the mind trainings you received.”

  At that moment, it happened—Grosvenor had noticed absently that the ship was almost through the small star cluster it had been traversing. Only a score of suns were still visible of the approximately five thousand stars that made up the system. The cluster was one of a hundred star groups accompanying Earth’s galaxy through space.

  Grosvenor parted his lips to say, “I’d certainly like to talk to you

  again, Mr. Korita.”—He didn’t say it. A slightly blurred double image of a woman wearing a feathered hat was taking form in the glass directly in front of him. The image flickered and shimmered. Grosvenor felt an unnormal tensing of the muscles of his eyes. For a moment, his mind went blank. That was followed rapidly by sounds, flashes of light, a sharp sensation of pain—hypnotic hallucinations! The awareness was like an electric shock. The recognition saved him. He whirled, stumbled over the unconscious body of Korita, and then he was racing along the corridor.

  As he ran, he had to look ahead in order to see his way. And yet, he had to keep blinking to break the pattern of the light flashes that came at his eyes from other images on the walls. At first, it seemed to him that the images were everywhere. Then, he noticed that the woman-like shapes—some oddly double, some single—occupied transparent or translucent wall sections. There were hundreds of such reflecting areas, but at least it was a limitation. At least he knew where he had to run fastest, and where he could slow down.

  He saw more men. They lay at uneven intervals along his line of flight. Twice, he came upon conscious men. One stood in his path with unseeing eyes, and did not move or turn as Grosvenor sped by. The other man let out a yell, grabbed his vibrator, and fired it. The tracer beam flashed on the wall beside Grosvenor. Grosvenor whirled, and lunged forward, knocking the man to the floor. The man—a Kent supporter—glared at him malignantly. “You damned spy!” he said harshly. “We’ll get you yet.” Grosvenor didn’t pause. He reached his own department safely, and immediately took refuge in the film recording room. There he turned a barrage of flashing lights against the floors, the walls and the ceiling. The images were instantly eclipsed by the strong light superimposed upon them.

  Quickly, Grosvenor set to work. One fact was already evident. This was mechanical visual hypnosis of such power that he had saved himself only by keeping his eyes averted, but what had happened was not limited to vision. The image had tried to control him by stimulating his brain through his eyes. He was up to date on most of the work that men had done in that field, and so he knew—though the attacker apparently did not—that control by an alien of a human nervous system was not possible except with an encephalo-adjuster or its equivalent.

  He could only guess, from what had almost happened to him, that the other men had been precipitated into deep sleep trances, or else they were confused by hallucinations and were not responsible for their actions. His hope was that the womanlike beings—the enemy seemed to be feminine—were operating at a distance of several light years and so would be unable to refine their attempts at domination.

  His job was to get to the control room and turn on the ship’s energy screen. No matter where the attack was coming from, whether from another ship or actually from a planet, the energy screen should effectively cut off any carrier beams they might be sending.

  With frantic fingers, Grosvenor worked to set up a mobile unit of lights. He needed something that would interfere with the images on his way to the control room. He was making the final connection when he felt an unmistakable sensation, a slight giddy feeling—that passed almost instantly. Such feelings usually occurred during a conside
rable change of course and were a result of readjustment of the anti-accelerators. Had the course actually been changed? He couldn’t stop to make sure. Hastily, Grosvenor carried his arrangement of lights to a power-driven loading vehicle in a nearby corridor, and placed it in the rear compartment. Then he climbed on and headed for the elevators.

  He guessed that altogether ten minutes had gone by since he had first seen the image.

  He took the turn into the elevator corridor at twenty-five miles an hour, which was fast for these comparatively narrow spaces. In the alcove opposite the elevators, two men were wrestling each other with a life and death concentration. They paid no attention to Grosvenor but swayed and strained and cursed. Their labored breathing was a loud sound in the confined area. Their single-minded hatred of each other was not affected by Grosvenor’s arrangement of lights. Whatever world of hallucination they were in, it had “taken” profoundly.

  Grosvenor whirled his machine into the nearest elevator and started down. He was beginning to let himself hope that he might find the control room deserted. The hope died as he came to the main corridor. It swarmed with men. Barricades had been flung up, and there was an unmistakable odor of ozone. Vibrators fumed and fussed. Grosvenor peered cautiously out of the elevator, trying to size up the situation. It was visibly bad. The two approaches to the control room were blocked by scores of overturned loading-mules. Behind them crouched men in military uniform. Grosvenor caught a glimpse of Captain Leeth among the defenders and, on the far side, he saw Director Morton behind the barricade of one of the attacking groups. That clarified the picture slightly. Suppressed hostility had been stimulated by the images. The scientists were fighting the military whom they had always unconsciously hated. The military, in turn, was suddenly freed to vent its contempt and fury upon the despised scientists.

 

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