“There they are!” shouted someone else.
“Down with the Vanyans!"
A mob of men moved into the banquet room, brandishing guns. Drganu and Sanal rose slowly to face their attackers. They were unarmed. I heard them say something in their own tongue to Kria and she, too, got up.
It appeared immediately that there was going to be no opportunity of arguing with the intruders. They were after the Vanyans. The television camera next to the master of ceremonies turned just in time to give the outside world a glimpse of violence as one of the invaders struck the master of ceremonies over the head with the butt end of his pistol. This precipitated swift action on the part of the other members of Alpha Phi Gamma, but just as the free-for-all started someone conveniently turned out the lights.
In that exact instant I ran around the end of the table and grasped Kria's arm. It was the first time I had touched a female of the species, so I was unprepared for the delightful shock of vibrant warmth and personal electricity that shot to my brain. I knew a few words of the Vanyan tongue, so I was able to say, “Kria-friend-follow..."
She must have recognized my voice, because she followed me instantly.
I had officiated at several functions held previously at the Town House and happened to know where the doors were which led both to the kitchen and to the service sections of the building. We were knocking over chairs and banging into tables in the kitchen before anyone knew she had left the banquet room.
Fortunately, I made a mistake and opened a door which I thought would lead out the back way. Instead, I found myself groping about in a service closet. But the first thing I laid my hands on was someone's raincoat, which turned out to be equipped with a plastic hood. I immediately threw this around Kria and tucked her hair well in under the hood. Then I actually found the exit I sought and we went out. Behind us we could hear shouts, fighting, and the sound of furniture being thrown about
Inasmuch as bold, swift action had accomplished this much so far, I reasoned that it was our only recourse until we reached ultimate safety. So I led her out onto the side street where I had parked my car.
We were just emerging from the narrow passage between buildings when three news reporters sprang out of a car and dashed toward us. They were about to pass us in an attempt to reach the scene of the turmoil through the rear entrance, but in the same moment one of them caught a good view of Kria's bare leg, then her Vanyan style sandals.
He gave a shout to his companions, and in the next instant the three of them blocked us as efficiently as an All American team.
“Here's a Vanyan dame!” yelled the first one.
“Luck!” responded one of his companions.
But they made the mistake of laying hands on her and myself to detain us. I took hold of two of them and shoved them off violently. I think I must have struck the third one in the chest, because he staggered back and came at me belligerently.
“All right, wise guy!” he shouted. “You're in the way. We want stories and pics and we're going to get ‘em. Don't let's get rough!"
Already one of them had his camera ready and a flashbulb went off. People who had been running toward the entrance to the Town House now began to converge on us.
“See what you've done?” I argued. “This girl's life is in danger! Now we've got to make a run for it!"
As the reporter still blocked my way, I called upon an old reserve of strength and muscular coordination left over from my athletic days and threw my two hundred pounds at them. I made a path for Kria and took her hand. Silently, she followed me on the run.
But it was exactly like a fox hunt. The hounds had scouted out their prey and the howling and the chase began.
“Hey! There's a Vanyan trying to get away!” I heard someone shout.
“Who's the guy with her?"
“Probably a copper. Get her, quick!"
Flashbulbs popped behind us. The sound of many running feet grew loud in our ears. Some men tried to intercept us and I straight-armed them rather neatly. Hands reached out and tore at Kria's raincoat, which soon came off.
Suddenly, we were piling into my Ford convertible and I was starting the engine. Bodies crowded around us, hands reached in. There was a bedlam of shouting.
“Get out of the way!” I yelled as the engine started.
The Ford pulled away sluggishly as the crowd actually tried to hold it back. In the next instant, I was racing toward Sixth Street, intent upon reaching Virgil Avenue so that I could head for the Hollywoodland hills, Cahuenga Pass and the San Fernando Valley. I crossed Sixth and went on up to Third. Just as I turned into Virgil I discerned three sets of headlights in my rear vision mirror. When you are traveling as fast as the road will allow, you know when you're being followed.
* * * *
At Beverly the lights were against me. I couldn't wait, so I went through. As luck would have it, there were no police cars or Motor cycles on hand to intercept me-as yet. But I knew I couldn't race across town at this pace and keep ahead of my pursuers without attracting the police, and then the whole thing would be at an end. I reasoned that even the police might not be able to do anything against the mob, and before order could be restored Kria might actually get hurt.
For the moment, the situation all seemed to boil down to one thing. Outracing my pursuers was a bad choice. Outsmarting them would be better. It all depended on who knew the city best. I needed a temporary hiding place.
I darted into a side street and began a laborious threading of residential mazes in the general direction of Vermont Avenue. The Los Angeles City College was not far away, and I had keys to some of the buildings. Several times I still discerned headlights in the rear vision mirror, but now there were only two sets.
All this time I was only vaguely aware of Kria sitting next to me. She had been fumbling in the glove compartment for something, and finally I knew she was looking at a city map.
Suddenly, just as we hit the bright lights of Vermont Avenue, I did a double take at her and almost wrecked the car.
She was completely naked. Even the veil had been torn from her in the mad rush.
“Kria!” I shouted, inanely, as I barely missed colliding with a streetcar.
She looked up at me sweetly, just as though nothing were wrong. She murmured something at me in the Vanyan tongue, and I caught the word, “Where?” She was indicating the map.
I signalled to her to get down out of sight. As she failed to comprehend, I put my hand on her back and gently pressed her down beside me. Suddenly, she understood, and in the next moment she was curled up on the seat beside me like a contented kitten. It was all I could do to concentrate on my driving, and there was no time to remove my coat to cover her with it.
But why should she want to know where I was going? Furthermore, she did not seem to be overly concerned about her father and her brother, back there at the Town House. Then the thought struck me that the Vanyans, after all, might have taken certain precautions prior to coming to the city. Did they have an emergency plan of action in case of danger? Why should Kria be so interested in a city map?
Vague apprehensions assailed me. Were the witch-baiters right, then? Were these beings from the stars truly supermen who merely presented a gentle face to conceal their real proportions and abilities? Would this attack upon them cause them to reveal their true natures, their hidden weapons and powers, making us seem suddenly like so much captured livestock?
“That's for the comic books!” I muttered, angrily, and pressed the accelerator to the floorboards.
And now, at last, I discerned a red light in my rear vision mirror and heard the blood-chilling sound of a police siren. Sooner or later, it had to happen.
* * * *
But Melrose was close, which meant that the City College was within reach. I took a chance, intending to explain later to the authorities. There were racing headlights following that police car, and I knew what that meant—reporters, mobs, violence.
I swung around behind
the college and skidded to a stop. In an instant, I was out of the car, leading Kria toward the darkened buildings. There was a trap door under the bushes nearby. It led into the tunnels that carried the steam and water pipes. I doubted that they'd think of looking there.
I found what I was looking for, and we climbed down into the dark passage. I lit a match and we duck-walked along next to the insulated steam pipes, putting a good distance between us and the trap door. When I came to three branch tunnels I relaxed, momentarily, and we caught our breaths. And I stopped lighting matches. Retinal fatigue came in handy to keep reminding me of Kria and how she looked, crouching there beside me like some idealized version of the primordial she.
Through it all she had remained as calm and unworried as a clam. I even began to wonder if her species were possessed of an instinct of self-preservation. It was at such times that I sensed the alienness of her, for all her obvious and natural attractions.
She put her hand on my arm, trustingly, waiting. I had a distinct feeling it was she who was waiting for certain foreseeable developments of her own imagining-not I. And I wondered who was leading whom. All I could do was wait for the dust to settle and then take her to a more suitable hiding place.
Suddenly, the small lights went on in the tunnel, and I knew what that meant. The police had found the watchman, and he had led them to the boiler room, which gave access to the tunnels. We could hear the pipes clanking. They were coming for us.
For one fleeting moment I considered what might happen to my reputation as a college professor, caught in a tunnel with a stark naked Vanyan woman-and just at the beginning of the school year. But then I thought of graver things. The primordial reasoning that was behind all of this confusion and turmoil. Apes chasing lost angels. A rotten egg splattered across an original Michelangelo. A bowling alley terminating at an altar.
It all made as much sense, this terrestrial reaction to the Vanyan visitation. There was an aspect of finality to my situation-like bridges burned behind one. Irretrievability.
Kria grasped my arm and spoke one of the few English words she had mastered. “Up!” she exclaimed, urgently.
I looked into her eyes, or tried to. In the illumination offered by the lights of the tunnel I observed her more plainly than I had before. There was something of finality in that, too. Possessiveness. The threads of our years had come together somehow. From here on out I had the feeling that those two threads would be woven together.
“Up!” exclaimed Kria, tugging at me. “Out!” Something in her eyes told me that she had reasons for getting out of the tunnel which might surprise me.
I moved, leading her back toward the trap door we had entered. When we came out under the bushes we could see about fifty men running about the campus. Kria tugged at my arm, trying to lead me out into the open, right into the center of the campus, where everyone would see us.
“Follow!” she commanded, in her own tongue.
“Are you crazy!” I blurted out, in English, and I held back.
But suddenly she pointed to the sky.
Even before I saw it, I knew what to look for. I might have known it. The Vanyans were prepared for an emergency, and their powers were beyond us. Kria had been en rapport, somehow, with her people. They knew exactly where she was.
The disc settled slowly, almost majestically, toward the campus. It showed no lights. It was merely a lesser darkness in the night sky, dully reflecting the city lights. If Kria had not pointed it out to me, I'd not have seen it until it landed. The men running about the college buildings looking for us did not see it.
We began to run, then, out into the open. Even before we reached the general area in which the disc was going to land, our pursuers spotted us. Somehow, a white, naked body shows up well in the night when it is running across green grass, with or without a bewildered college professor in tow.
“There she is!” came an exultant shout.
“There they both are!"
“Get ‘em, men!"
The mob began to close in. But suddenly they all came to a standstill as the disc lowered abruptly into view and then quietly landed. Its great port lights glared into sudden brilliance and a door opened. A Vanyan guard appeared with the familiar little bird-cage and glowing bulb which had been described as a paralysis weapon. I guess it was, because the crowd did not move or cry out.
Kria and I went up the ramp and into the Vanyan ship without molestation. The ramp folded inward, the door closed, and the floor almost buckled my knees as we rose into the sky.
* * *
CHAPTER V
MY FIRST impressions of the flying disc were necessarily blurred because of the rapid maneuverings which were forced upon the pilot in this tense situation. I had an impression that they were trying to rescue Drganu and Sanal, which they did, because I saw them later. Long afterward, I gathered the story that the two had simply surrendered to the crowd. The police had interfered and managed to place them in protective custody. Then the Vanyans had come with their paralysis weapons and rescued them.
But this was only the beginning of trouble. The anti-Vanyan revolt was world wide. I soon perceived that we were being followed as we raced outward into space. And the only thing that could follow a flying disc was another flying disc. Ergo, my own kind had either succeeded in building facsimiles of them by now, or they had captured a few Vanyan vessels.
Their one weak point, I gathered, was a human limitation in regard to acceleration. As I struggled to keep my consciousness, I caught a blurred view of Drganu and Sanal bending over me. Beyond them I saw a weird, three-dimensional miniature of space behind us. There was the vast globe of Earth, pale lavender in the moonlight, and silhouetted against it were half a dozen pursuing discs. I knew what the problem was. To outdistance the pursuers would be to kill me with the pressure of acceleration which only they seemed to be able to stand. The Vanyans were different, after all. They were superhuman.
I stared back at Drganu and Sanal, like an animal caught in a trap. The terrible pressure of acceleration was causing their facial contours to sag into grotesque caricatures of men, thus accentuating the impression in my wavering mind that they were monsters in human form. I think I screamed at them and told them to go away.
Then later I thought: They could destroy the others, but they don't wish to. They are benevolent. It was not they who started the trouble. They intelligently recognized this momentary uprising as something that would soon be quelled by established governmental agencies.
But delirium twisted my thoughts again, and I told myself that they were very, very clever-not wishing to spoil their camouflage of benevolence. It was not yet time for the blow they were preparing. With phlegmatic calm they were sidestepping the insult and fiendishly biding their time.
After that, I passed out. But I dreamed of Kria. I saw her smiling face. I saw her naked body, afar, running toward me across an infinite plain of black ebony, arms stretched out in yearning. She wanted me. I think the thought sustained my life's forces under the brutal pressure of acceleration that finally caused the pursuers to give up the chase. Or it might have been the injections they gave me. Or both.
But I was in love with Kria. It was a fact which I accepted without questioning why.
The Vanyans brought me to Mars at her request, because she thought I would be in danger back on Earth. As it developed, the danger to myself was not great. I might have been arrested for questioning and then released.
But that is how I came to Mars and took up residence there-until governmental forces from Earth caught up with me...
* * * *
The rest of you came there later. I was the first to behold the new planet. And then I knew, with a certainty, that the Vanyans were truly benevolent. They were a god race which could have destroyed us as a mere whim, if it chose to do so. They were great enough in their science and intelligence to handle us without subterfuge. There was no necessity of laying groundwork for conquest. That could have been accomplished at any
time.
They came to that starved out world and filled it with titanic stresses, awakening within its core the ancient fires and the sustaining forces of nature. Long before they landed, earthquakes were caused to rage through the ancient crust, raising whole new mountain chains which were designed to catch the moisture which they intended to provide for the Martian skies, to catch it and pour it through rejuvenated soil into fresh new rivers, which led into lakes, which poured into embryonic seas, thus establishing the cycle of evaporation and return.
They bored swiftly into the planet's depths and installed their gravitation equipment, capturing the globe in a restrengthened spherical vortex of sub-electronic fields of force which comprised mass attraction-and thus a stabilized atmosphere was assured. Their great engines of power operated electrochemical plants designed to release oxygen from the soil. They established miniature suns in orbits between Deimos and Phobos, providing additional light and warmth.
All their stupendous technology was not dedicated to necessity alone, but to the aesthetic sense, as well. A harsh, soulless race might have been content to eke out an existence in barren deserts under skies that were unrelieved by the changing phenomena of nature, but not the Vanyans. Their eyes were not blind to the beauty of the rainbow and the splendour of cloud-framed sunsets. Their ears were not deaf to the patter of rain and the crash of thunder. They required the aesthetic setting of broken horizons, of verdure clad hills and the misted plumes of distant waterfalls, the cool presence of placid lakes, the crashing spray of an ocean's surf-and the song of birds. That was one of the first things they wanted of us. A shipment of live songbirds.
Those scare-mongers who were behind the anti-Vanyan uprising should have thought of that. Their bogeyman from space asks not for unconditional surrender. He requests a shipment of songbirds. And later, sheep, cattle-and honeybees. A very sinister race, indeed!
There are only about fifty thousand Vanyans, or rather, there were about that many; yet their city covered almost one hundred square miles. It was a city that offered the ultimate in technological efficiency and yet succeeded in not being a city at all. The only stationary buildings were the Palace of the Council, the Central Research Laboratory, a few specialized factories and the oxygen plants. There were no shopping centers, no restaurants or amusement centers-not even colleges in the architectural sense. Each Vanyan household was a self-contained unit which could fly, when desired. According to individual tastes, each household “sky island” could land where its owners pleased-beside a lake, at the oceans shore, on a mountain top, or in some secluded valley. If it became necessary for one member of the household to travel to another location, he could do so by means of teleportation, which to the Vanyans was as simple a matter as dialing the desired call frequency of one's destination. A Vanyan citizen could visit a spot a hundred miles distant and return home all within one minute, if he chose to do so. To attend concerts or attend to business it was not necessary to come to “town.” As we see events via television they indulged in the cultural life by means of tridimensional visisonic apparatus. By means of remote controlled robot extensions they could even sign papers at a distance.
Martian Honeymoon and Beyond the Darkness Page 3