First in German, then Italian, then Dutch—speaking for three minutes in each by my watch—and finally in English. It was a strangely muted English, spoken by none of us could imagine what form of being, but it was English none the less.
“English tongue. We speak now in English tongue,” said the strange, slow voice. “Tongue number four in the speech form of Sol Three. From Outside we speak in English. Someone on Sol Three may hear us speaking in English . . .
“Someone in the System of Sol sends us the Sign. We now speak to Sol Three in English. We have spoken to Sol One,
Sol Two, and have heard their replies. The Sign comes from neither of these. We shall speak in eighty-four more tongues of the speech form of Sol Three, and shall then repeat these speeches. If there is no reply, we shall then go on to speak to Sol Four and the rest of the System of Sol. Hear and answer, you who have the Sign. If the Sign comes from Sol Three, answer...”
Harry Crow Eyes murmured urgently into his microphone as he adjusted his tuning dial.
“Message received . . . message received . . .” lie repeated over and over again Then—“Oh, hell! How can we answer? How do we know they’re even working on known frequencies. How do we know it’s not... not telepathic?”
He cut his control down into the micro-wave band, and continued speaking into the microphone, and meanwhile, the voice spoke on, calling for a reply—a reply that we knew not how to give.
By now the voice had gone through English into French, and then into three languages that were unfamiliar to me. Now it was speaking in Latin.
Suddenly Arabin clapped a hand to his forehead.
“The bat-men!” he hissed. “They have the clue to this . . . And he ran into the adjoining room, where four of the Esoes had been left in the safety of the lead shielding there.
Almost at once he was running out again, with one of the round shells under each arm. And before he had reached his place again, there was a sharp detonation that told us one of the bat-men had teleported himself into the darkness of the next room.
We looked towards the door, expecting Arabin to go back and talk with the bat-man, but he stood there, as though waiting, and we could see that he was murmuring to the globes he carried. As though in answer to his call, the door opened again, and out into the light came the bat-man.
He walked slowly into the full light of the workshop, his great wings covering his head to protect his eyes from the daylight. We slowly stepped back as the creature walked hesitantly towards the bench, his clawed feet scraping on the floor as he picked his blind way across the room. Then, as he approached the bench, he extended one hooked wing as though to help him sense his direction, and walked more quickly and certainly straight towards our equipment.
As the out-thrust wing, with its hand-like appendage on the peak joint, touched the apparatus, a pale blue haze sprang into glowing life round the cylinder of thorium. Then, with one hand grasping the stone we had brought from Varang-Varang, and the other extended to the tube of thorium, the creature spoke.
It was an unearthly, terrifying sound that came from the fringed, beak-like mouth, a sound never before heard by man, but still, we assumed, it was a language.
The voice from the loudspeaker, which had been speaking in, I think, Russian, was at once arrested.
There was a silence, and the bat-man spoke again in his terrible tongue. Then came the reply in the same harsh, alien tones as he had used.
“That’s the secret,” rapped Arabin. “Contact with the two minerals.”
As he spoke, there came a long, shocking, guttural stream of sound, rapid and unintelligible, from the throat of the bat-man. Then the hideous creature from Varang-Varang crumpled slowly and slipped to the floor. He lay there motionless, except for the dry, leathery wings, which gradually shrank inwards and drew closely round the body.
The voice from the loudspeaker continued, until its owner realised that there was no reply. Then it fell silent.
Arabin leapt to his feet and, before we could stop him, was darting across the workshop towards the apparatus, striding' carefully over the massive bulk of the bat-man. At the same time, three of us stepped forward towards the great leathery figure on the ground. Repulsive to us though the alien monster was, we each felt a strange sympathy for its agony. Its skin was cold and rough to the touch as we dragged it—the body was too heavy for us to lift—into the darkened room next door.
The few moments that this occupied were enough for Leo to grasp the two electrodes of the weird transmitter that we had assembled. When we returned, he was standing rigid, eyes tightly closed, head thrown back and arms outstretched towards the equipment. The blue aura we had seen before enveloped his hands as they gripped the two electrodes.
From the loudspeaker came the crackling, harsh voice again, now considerably lowered in pitch so that we could scarcely hear it. But from what was audible to us, it seemed that the voice still spoke in the tongue of the bat-creatures. Arabin seemed to be hypnotised as he stood there motionless, and the voice droned on.
“Leo!” I called, running towards him, “Are you all right?”
“Yes. What goes on?” demanded Harry, snatching off his headphones and making to cross the room.
Leo opened his eyes widely and shook his head, as though waking from sleep. Dropping one hand from the living mineral he had gripped, he wiped it across his brow.
And the voice suddenly broke off. The blue light faded slowly out, and again silence fell.
“It . . . spoke to me,” said Arabin wearily. “You heard it. The Wise One . . He looked round him suddenly. “The voice,” he said, with more life in his tones, “The voice has gone.”
He seemed dazed by his experience, and we led him to a seat, while Harry Crow Eyes strode to the bench and seized the mineral electrodes.
“Calling in English,” he murmured steadily, “Calling in English. Can you hear me? This is a call in English, tongue number four in the speech form of Sol Three, calling ... those Outside, as they called to us. Can you hear me . . . Outside? Can you hear me?”
As though the unknown speaker was searching his mental records for the correct language, there was a pause. Then came a reply, decided, firm, and spoken in a voice that sounded a new one to us.
“We hear you,” it slowly said, in deep, soothing tones. “And we speak to you in English again. Do you now understand the method of communicating with us?”
“We do not,” answered Harry, with equal decision. “We know that we must—do what we are doing now, but beyond that we do not understand.”
“There is no need to understand further,” came the reply. “You can communicate with us like that, so you have the secret.”
“There is another secret we do not have,” put in Harry. He dropped his voice. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“It is right that you should want to know, and you will be told,” assured the voice. “But not at this stage. We must leave you almost at once. We shall return ... Be ready. We shall return ... Be ready. We . . .” and the voice was cut off sharply as the blue light snapped out.
XVIII
That is how the Voice from Outside first came to us. We had no idea as to when it would return, but that it would return we were sure.
And so we were left to ponder its source and its significance. With time to give the matter thought, we were hushed into appalled silence at the enormity of the prospect it raised. Some of us felt that the voice—or rather voices, for there had been more than one—came from outside the Solar System, because of what it had said about questioning each world in turn. Others, with nothing but intuition to guide them, believed that we had heard a voice from another time rather than from remote space. But whatever our theories, we were agreed that there had been someone—or something—that had spoken to us there in the tower. There was no question about that. We discussed the possibility of hallucination or auditory illusion and rejected it at once. Each of us had heard and seen identically the same things.
But—what had we heard and seen? We could not comprehend, and so we philosophically agreed to await the return of the voices.
Meanwhile, after we had talked in whispers for a time, we remembered the bat-creature in the adjoining room. We had no idea how we could help him, if he was still alive, nor how we could even ensure whether he was alive. By our standards, his temperature, pulse rate and heart-beat might mean nothing. When, with some hesitation, we brought the body out into the light, we found it apparently lifeless. There was now no reaction to the light, and no sign of any life stirring within the great body.
But there was one of us—Karinga Varga—who could surely tell us whether the bat-man still lived or not. We sent a fast car out and had him brought back to the tower, together with Dr. Axel Bjornstrom.
The Virian walked round the body twice, and stood over, with eyes closed. He stooped nearer to it, and then rose.
“Dead, I am sure,” he said flatly. “From the mind there is no picture now; all is blank.”
Axel, too, examined the bat-man, with little grunts of astonishment and whistles of surprise. So far, it had been with the greatest difficulty that we had prevented him from sequestering one of the bat-creatures for examination, but now he had his chance. As he straightened himself after bending over the creature he dusted his hands together with an air of finality.
“Is quite, quite dead, the bat-man,” he pronounced. There was a kind of satisfaction in his voice which might have sounded unpleasant if we had not known him so well, and known of his keen desire to study at first hand this strange form of life.
“But,” he added rather regretfully, “you must not think that I am wanting to post-mortem him. Let us first give him back to the other bat-men. Then I shall speak with them. I shall tell them,” he went on thoughtfully, “that I think I may be able to protect them from what they most fear—light.”
He stooped and lifted one of the great wings, letting it fall again with a leathery rustle as he showed us the surface it had covered.
“You see,” he explained, looking solemnly at us over his spectacles, “you see that he is lighter where the wing has covered. Darker everywhere else. Is a lack of pigment in the living tissue that is corrected after death. I shall replace that pigment in the living ones. May be easy—may be not so easy. But I shall try—if they will allow me.”
We found it hard to give him our attention. We had witnessed phenomena that reduced the problem of the bat-men’s allergy to a place of little importance. Axel had not, and so he was filled with enthusiasm for his projected experiment. He talked of injections, of actinic sensibility, of anti-bodies, and of a host of such technicalities, and we tried to give him our attention. He was sure, he said, that he could restore to them the tolerance of strong light which had once—he was convinced—had been theirs. He picked up one of the Esoes that had lain forgotten in a corner.
“And here, too, we have something to think about,” he said.
“If the bat-creatures will consent, I will.. . Aaah! Is too late! See! Even now the tissue here is collapsing.”
He held the perforated sphere up to the light and we saw that it now held a small, round mass as big as a golf ball.
“Mmm! Well now—is perhaps here something left that will give us some information,” he sighed philosophically. “And now, please to have him brought to my laboratory.”
It was well that the doctor, knowing nothing of the revelation we had received in that room, brought his matter-of-fact demand to bear on us. If we had had nothing to take our minds off the enormity of our experience, I do not know what we should have done. As it was, we found it hard to concentrate on material things and immediate needs. But we shook off our feeling of awe, and prepared for the return to our settlement.
We left Harry at the radio controls until we could send him a relief. We left a companion with him as well, for none of us dared remain alone in that room—that room that had become the speaking trumpet of the Voice from . . . Outside.
Axel, when we reached his laboratory, perceived that something serious had happened.
“So! Is unsettled the mind, ha? A sedative, then. Not too much sleep lately? You shall stay here and sleep; No! Please! No excusings! You are my patients. Families shall be told. Then tomorrow, after good sleep, going home again. Right? Of course is right!”
I slept heavily and awoke a full twelve hours later, imagining I heard Leo’s voice again, crying: “It spoke to me . . . the Wise One. . . ”
I found Leo himself shaking my shoulder.
“Denis,” he said thoughtfully, when I was fully awake, “Did you find that you dreamed about. . . those voices?”
I told him I had not dreamed at all.
“You’re lucky,” he said, with a grimace. “I certainly dreamed about them. I heard them all night long, and—here's the odd thing about it—I understood them all the time, no matter what language they used.”
A chord of memory sounded in my mind, and I asked him: “Leo, do you remember anything of what you heard when you were holding those electrodes?”
He thought before replying. “Fact is,” he said slowly, “I do remember.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Why do you ask?” I told him. “Because the voice was speaking in what I think was the bat-men’s language—but you seemed to understand what it was saying.”
He nodded. “That’s so. I can hardly believe it, but that’s the case all right. I did understand it. Don’t ask me how. I didn’t seem to hear any sound, for instance, yet I knew what it was telling me.”
“And that was ... ?”
“It seemed to me,” he answered heavily, “that it was telling me I was near the end of a journey. Odd thing was that I felt comforted to know it. Comforted, yet mournful. What do you make of that?”
To me, as a spectator of what had happened, the meaning seemed clear.
“The message wasn’t meant for you,” I suggested. “It was for the bat-man. Perhaps for all the bat-men. Their race is finished. The voice was telling them so. But I still don’t see how you understood. Telepathy, perhaps? Seems likely to me.”
“I think you’re right. Here’s a thing, too. I knew who was speaking. But now—I don’t know.”
“You said at the time: ‘The Wise One ... It spoke to me’,” I reminded him.
“I said that? I’ve been wondering. It all seems so vague now. The Wise One, eh? Who do you suppose the Wise Ones are?”
I could not answer. Leo had heard the voice, and had understood it. I had heard it, and had not understood. The course of events looked like becoming too much for our understanding, at this rate. Our little colony, schooled into a wider credulity by the mind-shaking fact of having been taken from Earth to another world, and then brought back again, had undergone much that would have been deemed impossible in days gone by. All of us these days found our minds ready to accept what once was the impossible, but in this matter of the Wise Ones I was still unconvinced. I thought that perhaps the term might have been the nearest approach the bat-men could make to something more normal, something more acceptable to human thought. The type of entity that could control worlds, as the Wise Ones were reputed to have done, was difficult, if not impossible, to accept at that stage.
And so I told Leo.
He tapped me on the shoulder. “Remember, Denis, they’re coming back. They said so. We’ll know more next time the voices come back. In the meantime, how are we going to break this news to the others—the others who didn’t hear these things? Think they’ll believe us? It worries me.
It worried me, too, when I gave it thought. How were we to prepare our people for this thing? How to make them ready for the impact of the voices from ... where?
But before I come to that, I must tell of Axel’s work with the bat-creatures.
He called the bat-men to him—all of them—in a darkened room. They knew, of course, that their companion had died. The Esoes had communicated the fact at the moment of the creature’s death. They expressed no sorrow, but on
ly a great surprise, for, it appeared, they had come to regard themselves as almost immortal. By discussion with them, and by careful calculation, we assessed their life-span at the astonishing figure of seven hundred years. Death came to them, they told us, only as the result of violence or accident. The question of bacterial attack in the alien—to them—world in which they now found themselves was discarded by Axel after examining the dead monster.
For the bat-men had readily agreed to Axel’s investigation of their dead fellow, especially when he suggested that from his examination he might bring them hope of living in the light.
After a few days he held out even stronger hopes of success in this direction. His research into the anatomy and metabolism of the bat race showed that their allergy to actinic light was the result of long ages of living in darkness. He found, nevertheless, traces of pigmentation that could be stimulated and developed as a protection.
It was a remarkable sight to see him working on them in the dim glow of infra-red projection, and injecting each great creature with the preparation in his hypodermic syringe. As he fussed round them, I was put in mind of a vet working on some domestic animal. He confronted them with little chirrups, patted them rewardingly as they stoically withstood the jab of his needle, and in one of his Nordic languages, chaffed them with a “There! That wasn’t so bad, was it?” sort of quip.
At the end of a week he dropped the infra-red projection in favour of a dim red light. The reaction of the bat-men was that they could now see, whereas the infra-red had temporarily blinded them.
He increased the light almost hourly, until, after five of his subcutaneous injections and a dozen or so increases in the dosage of light, he and they were able to see each other plainly and without distress to the alien monsters.
Seen in full light, they were terrifying indeed. We tried hard to hide our revulsion, but the long tradition of ages would not be completely thrust aside. They were everything, save for the lack of a tail, that we had believed devils to be. Their colouring, now that Axel’s pigmentation process had succeeded, was a dark, hideous red. Their skin was a shining, leathery integument, hard and bright as a beetle’s wing. Their expressions were all that we had once known as diabolical. They were vertitable creatures from Hell.
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