by Anthology
"Originally the Arbermius spores, drifting through the void, may have created life. But adaptation and environment played a tremendous part. Besides, I doubt if any sort of spore could get through this comet's coma. Microscopic bodies, shoved around by radiation, would be repelled by the electronic barrier. I told you we might run into almost anything here. We're outside normal boundaries -- almost outside our known Universe."
"Are you telling me?" Strike replied bitterly. "Look! I might swallow a whip, but -- this is too much."
Quade didn't believe what he saw. The other men were stupefied with amazement. They had topped a dune. In the valley beneath them squatted a vast bulk. It was alive, but it wasn't homogeneous. It was a freak, a sport, and an impossible one.
It had the body of an elephant, gaudily striped with a zebra's markings. It had the neck of an ostrich, unduly elongated. Its thin, awkward legs resembled those of a giraffe. And atop that lean, gawky neck was -- the head of Tommy Strike.
It was quite unmistakable, to the last freckle and lock of disordered hair falling over the tanned forehead. It looked into space with a wildly vacuous air, turned toward the Earthmen. The colossal hulk writhed, struggled. For a second it stood erect. Then the frail legs splintered, and the torso came crashing down. It struggled in agony.
Incontinently, it vanished.
"All right," Quade said to the befuddled Strike. "That settles it. The whip was a known life-form. This wasn't."
"The component parts were."
Quade refrained from the obvious rebuttal. "Yes. But nothing like that, in toto, ever existed in any universe. It was created, somehow, and it disappeared into thin air. The question is how?"
"Dunno. I think the question's why?"
Quade resumed his forward march.
"The answer to both is in the black tower, I'm certain. It shouldn't be far away now."
They saw it long before they reached it, a colossal structure rearing from the gravelly surface of the comet. It seemed entirely deserted. It was a duplicate of the phantom monolith that had appeared some time before. The same gateway yawned uninvitingly. The same shimmering, metallic sphere crowned the summit, crawling with unknown but potent force.
"Those red and blue globes never built that," Strike said emphatically. "It was built by hands, or their equivalent."
"Maybe the ancestors of our little friends did it," Quade said. "That tower may have stood there for a long, long time. Besides, it might have been built by machinery."
"Machines? Why should the globes use 'em? That outer membrane of theirs serves every purpose. They probably absorb food through it, if they don't acquire it in this screwy atmosphere by respiration."
"That could be, of course. Meanwhile, let's go down and investigate."
Furtively, they sneaked to the threshold of the tower and peered in. A huge bare chamber gaped before them. It was lit by dim, pale fluorescence, and seemed to stretch up and eternally. The interior of the tower was hollow. But far above Quade caught the gleam of metal.
"Machine up there --"
He was interrupted by a cry from Strike.
"Gerry!"
The woman lay across the vast room, stretched unconscious on the floor.
Strike raced toward her, the others not far behind. He knelt beside the woman, examining her oxygen apparatus. Quickly he turned a valve.
Gerry's face was flushed. Her lips were moving, and her eyes stared blankly, unseeingly. For a second, Strike imagined that the creatures of the comet had afflicted her with some weird disease. Then he recognized that this was merely delirium.
"Back to the ship," Quade commanded. "Two of you carry her."
"It's too late," Tommy Strike grunted. "Here come our little friends."
Dozens of the blue spheres were rolling across the threshold into the huge room. More and more of them flooded in. Inexorably they bore down on the trapped Earthmen.
Strike gently lowered Gerry to the floor and whipped out his gun. The others had already drawn. But none fired till the hostile intentions of the intruders became unmistakable.
Then Quade's explosive bullet blew one of the blue globes to fragments. A staccato blast of gunfire instantly boomed and echoed through the cyanogen atmosphere within the tower, when his men followed his lead. A dozen of the enemy vanished, collapsing like split bladders. Curiously enough, some of them continued their disappearance, dematerializing like ghosts. Others remained.
But more of them appeared. Quade and his companions were forced back against the inner wall. They had plenty of ammunition, but it was impossible to withstand the irresistible tide of the globes.
"Where in hell are they coming from?" Strike yelled.
On they came, more and more of them, till the floor of the tower was covered with bluish balls, ranging in size from two to ten feet.
Quade switched on his audiophone and called Morgan, at the ship.
"What's up, Chief?" Morgan asked, hearing the commotion.
"Come after us, quick," the cameraman said quietly. In a few succinct sentences, he explained the situation, pausing at times to take pot-shots at the monsters.
"Can't do it," Morgan said. "One of the engines just went out. It'll take hours to fix. We'll come and get you on foot."
"No," Quade snapped. "Stay in the ship. Get that engine fixed. Those are definite orders."
He had no time to say any more. Some of his men were already down, and the globes were rolling over them. Strike stood straddle-legged above Gerry's unmoving form, a gun in either hand. The remnant of the men were clustered together. Backed helplessly against the wall, they were surrounded by the advancing hordes. Abruptly, unexpectedly, there came a breathing space.
The reason for it could not be discovered at first. Quade only realized that the attackers were failing to press their advantage. Previously, when one sphere had been destroyed, another sprang immediately into its place. But now the ranks were thinning, almost imperceptibly at first, but with steadily increasing speed. An alleyway opened toward the door, and Quade caught a glimpse of something entirely unexpected.
Through the door poured an army of red globes.
Red spheres and blue met in furious battle. The chamber was a seething, raging mass of bubbles, curiously lovely, tumbling and darting viciously in all directions. In dead silence, without visible weapons, the opposing groups pitted their strength against each other. And blue and red globes were deflated one by one.
"You were right," Strike gasped, swaying on his feet. "Those two gangs are down on one another. Boy, is that lucky for us."
"Yeah. If they're not both down on us."
There was enough time to take inventory. None of the men had been injured, save for minor contusions. The strong, flexible helmets had withstood all blows.
"No weapons," Strike said. "They don't use any, apparently. But they're committing mayhem anyhow."
Quade lifted his gun and then lowered it without firing.
"No visible weapons, Strike," he amended. "Don't forget, these creatures are utterly alien to us. Their weapons may be purely mental. They might kill by sheer thought-force."
"Then why doesn't it work on us?"
"Were not of the same species. We're of entirely different chemical composition," Quade pointed out. "Say, this fight looks like it'll keep up forever. There're more spheres now than when they started. They keep coming out of empty air."
"I noticed that," Strike grunted. "Hadn't we better make a run for it?"
"I think so."
The movie man issued orders. In a compact body, bearing Gerry's body between them, the group moved forward, guns lifted. The spheres paid little attention until the Earthmen were almost at the door. Then the bizarre comet creatures realized that their prisoners were escaping. Blue monsters and red joined forces to attack Quade and his companions.
This time results were somewhat different. Under the onslaught, most of the men went down, fighting gamely but uselessly. Quade was knocked flat beside Gerry. He twis
ted his head, trying to rise, saw the woman's eyes open and the light of consciousness spring into them. She recognized Quade.
Her lips moved, but her dead audiophone failed to respond. Nevertheless the movie man managed to read some of the words.
"Out of here ... quick... Save the others later. Only chance..."
There was still a gun in Gerry's hand. It blasted. The woman began to roll over and over. After a brief hesitation, Quade followed.
It wasn't easy. The thought of deserting his men was far from pleasant. But he realized that Gerry was seemingly deserting Strike, and he knew that she would never have done that without good reason. Moreover, two might escape where seven couldn't. Most of the globes were occupied with Strike and the other men.
By luck, skill and murderous aim, Gerry and Quade managed to reach the outskirts of the struggle. There they rose. Gerry gripped Quade's mittened hand and both ran frantically up the slope toward the nearest ridge.
Some of the spheres pursued. The next ten minutes were a chaos of gunfire and collapsing red and blue globes.
Chapter XXIII.
The Seven Sleepers
When no more of the things appeared, Gerry sank down in the gravel, dragging Quade beside her.
"My audiophone," her lips formed. "Can you fix it?"
Quade had an emergency repair kit with him. Hastily he repaired the device. It wasn't long before Gerry's voice came to him.
"Keep your eyes open," she said breathlessly. "I don't know how much time we have, but it won't be long. We've only got the Proteans to contend with for awhile, but pretty soon all hell's going to break loose."
"Proteans?"
"That's what I call them. You'll know why when I tell you what's happened. Meanwhile, have your gun ready."
Succinctly Gerry outlined what had happened to her up to the time of her capture. She went on: "Those creatures are intelligent. They communicate by pictures -- thought-images -- projected on their outer membrane. They communicated with me, all right. I found out plenty. Quade, what I'm going to tell you is going to seem unbelievable. Do you know how many Proteans there are?"
"A few thousand?" Tony hazarded.
"Seven," Gerry said. "Seven Proteans, and that's all. Seven sleepers!"
Quade wrinkled his brow. "I don't --"
"They're a decadent race. Ages ago they had an entirely different form, I don't know just what. They've lived on this comet for unimaginable eons. They evolved along lines totally alien to ours, reached the summit of their culture, and began to slide back. This barren body won't support much life. In time, only seven Proteans were left. They were highly evolved intellectuals, chained to this barren world because they hadn't mastered space travel. Know what they did?"
A red sphere materialized twelve feet away. It rolled toward them, expanding as it moved. Quade blew it to fragments. The fragments dissolved into nothingness.
"They built the black tower," Gerry went on. "It's a machine, Quade, and what it does is something almost impossible. It materializes -- dreams!"
The man didn't laugh. "On first thought, it's crazy," he said thoughtfully.
"I know. But it's a fact that all living tissue has a sort of electric halo, a field of energy. Isn't that so?"
"Yeah. Why back in the nineteen-thirties, two chaps named Nims and Lane made a gadget sensitive enough to detect that field and record its patterns. But what has that got to do with a dream?"
"Dreams take electric energy, the same as conscious thought," Gerry explained. "I figured it out, as well as I could, from what the Protean told me. Ever have a nightmare where you run and run but get nowhere? Ever wake up covered with perspiration, exhausted? That proves dreams take energy. Listen, if corporal life has a measurable electric field, it's only a step further to record the energy patterns of a dream."
For a few moments there was silence, while Quade digested the information.
"I'm getting the picture," Quade said. "I think I follow you. If the energy pattern is recorded, why not change these patterns back into the electric waves that produced them, thus recreating the living issue, or the dream, that created them? The human voice was recorded in visible patterns long before Edison. But Edison's phonograph retraced those visible patterns with a needle and made the sound come to life again.
"Sure," he continued. "Even now images can be recorded as sound tracks. They sound like squeals and grunts, but an experienced movie engineer can identify them. I've done it myself. It's not such a long step to playing them back as three-dimensional images."
"More than images," Gerry put in. "The tower does just that, without the intermediate step. Nothing is actually recorded. The towers just take the electric dream-pattern of the seven Proteans and recreate it, broadcast it, in the precise positions and motions that the dreamer wishes."
"You mean all those spheres were dreams?" Quade asked. "Dreams that had acquired the attributes of matter?"
"Yes. They were real. Or, maybe, one-tenth real. Real enough to fight and die and communicate with me."
"But why?" Quade asked. "Scientifically, it's possible, though screwy as hell. But logically, there's no reason for it."
"It's logical enough," the woman declared, shifting her position uneasily on the hard gravel. "I told you there were seven bored intellectuals left on this comet. Blue and red -- four of one, three of another. They couldn't leave their world. They were faced with an unending monotony of existence. What would you have done?"
"Go crazy," Quade admitted frankly.
"There was another way out. They had to create some interest in life. And they did. A deadly sort of chess game, three on one side, four on the other. It's logical enough. Chess is an intellectual pastime, and this is super-scientific chess. Here's what the Proteans did.
"They made this tower to materialize their dreams. They changed their shape, though I'm not quite sure about that. And they materialized their thought-patterns in the form of duplicates of themselves. Half of their brains are asleep and dreaming, while the other half is conscious, directing operations. We ourselves use only half of our brains, you know."
Quade nodded curtly. "Right. But you actually mean there are only seven real Proteans on the comet?"
"That's all. All the others are dream-images, plenty real enough though, because they're given the energy and attributes of matter by the black tower. For centuries this murderous chess game has gone on. It might have gone on eternally, if we hadn't introduced a new factor into the game."
"Wait a minute," Quade interrupted. Swiftly he told the woman of the bizarre creatures they had seen on the way to the tower -- the Venusian whip, and the freak with Strike's head.
"Sure." Gerry smiled wryly. "I was delirious, feverish. And I was inside the tower. My proximity to the machine simply made my hallucinations materialize. And that's the crux of the matter. The Proteans realized that I was valuable to them."
When Gerry stated her value to the Dreamers, Quade fell silent. His tanned face was suddenly grim and worried as he realized the potential danger.
"Think of our memories," Gerry whispered in horror. "The monsters we've seen on all the planets, the weapons we've used. The Proteans intended to put me asleep, control my brain, and induce me to dream of things I'd experienced. A Venusian whip. What a weapon that would be in the hands of the blues against the reds. We're invaluable to them as fodder. Our brains are storehouses of dreams. And the Proteans can materialize dreams!"
"Lord, oh Lord," Quade groaned. "What a mess. This is just about the damnedest thing I've ever run up against. How the devil can I photograph a dream? It just isn't real."
"It's real enough to be filmed," Gerry said. "And a Protean, a real Protean, not a dream -- can be captured. But there's another handicap. These things are above the minimum level of intelligence. By Interplanetary Law, no intelligent being can be taken from its home world against its consent."
"Well, that can wait," Quade said. "The main problem is to save Strike and my men. Wonder if the sh
ip's ready yet?"
He used the audiophone. Morgan responded worriedly. The engine wasn't repaired but work to repair the ship was proceeding rapidly.
"We can't stay here," Tony said. "And we can't go back to the tower. Let's head for the ship."
"We'd better hurry," Gerry observed. "Once Tommy and the others are put to sleep, their dreams will start to come true. And Tommy has a vivid imagination."
Quade arose painfully, assisted Gerry to her feet. The woman was still weak, but she pluckily shook off the man's arm and started plodding forward.
"Keep your gun handy," she advised.
The Proteans seemed to be lying low. But once the two caught sight of a whip lumbering over a rise to the left. It did not menace them, however, and soon went out of sight.
"The main problem," Gerry mused, "is to awaken the seven sleeping Proteans. It'll do no good to kill the others. New ones will materialize faster than we can shoot."
"Where are the real ones?" Quade asked.
Gerry laughed bitterly. "Oh, they're not tucked away in a private dormitory. That's where the fun comes in. They're mixed in with the others. They're only half asleep, you know. Half of their brain is still conscious. And it's utterly impossible to tell a real Protean from a fake one."
"Can't we simply keep shooting till we kill off all the real ones?"
"It'd be like cleaning up the Asteroid Belt with a bucket," Gerry said in a hopeless voice. "We've got to identify the real ones and -- well, I don't want to kill them unless it's necessary. They'd be no good to either of us dead. If we can awaken them --"
"We can't wake 'em up without identifying them," Quade said. "And we can't identify 'em without waking them up. Lord."
"Well, you can be sure this isn't a real Protean," Gerry said, as a shaggy, apelike figure lumbered over the rise toward them. "It's a Hyclops! Where's your rifle?"
The Hyclops, native to Ganymede, stands more than twelve feet high, is terrifyingly covered with hair, and has four arms. Its three one-eyed heads bear murderous fangs that protrude from a slobbering, loose-lipped mouth. "Get the eyes," Gerry yelped, scurrying to one side. "We haven't any super-explosive bullets, but -- aim at the eyes."