And yet no harm was done. He might have been tossing feathers at an elephant, for all the damage the heavy slugs caused.
Then a shocking thing happened.
Like a whip lash, the Vulcanid shot out a tentacle, and the long pseudopod struck Arabin on his gun arm. He screamed, and dropped his gun, clutching his right arm where the monster had lashed him.
The tentacle lifted again, and then hesitated. Instead of striking, it fell gently towards Leo's neck. He was too badly hurt to look up and see what was happening, though we shouted desperately to him.
Slowly, to our horror, the tentacle drew itself across his neck, and Leo fell as though dead. The semi-transparent arm wound round his shoulders and started to draw him towards the monster, when — Isidore struck with his axe.
As the gleaming blade sliced through the Vulcanid's boneless arm, Isidore, too, screamed, dropping his axe and wringing his hands.
The two others with Isidore were swift to act. Taking a man apiece they dragged the two injured men a few yards out of the Vulcanid's range. By then the rest of us were hurrying across the lank grass, and in a matter of seconds we had Leo and Isidore outside the railings and into a car.
Meanwhile, Krill Hvensor had called up the farm and warned Axel to stand by. The car containing the two wounded men left at once, and in Leo's absence, I took control of the battle with the monsters.
It seemed to me that the Vulcanids could not be harmed by gunfire or the like, but we had seen that amputation of their tentacles was effective. The Vulcanid who had lost an arm, though, seemed but little harmed.
Just where were we with them? It was a desperate question that I asked myself, and I could see no answer to it.
What about fire? Could we fire the grass around them and burn them? That prospect was not too hopeful, for the grass was soaked with the April rains. I did not like to risk spraying them with burning petrol, even if we had the equipment to do that. We had seen that the Vulcanids moved only slightly and slowly, but we could not guess what effect the shock of burns would have upon them. They might be galvanised into swift action — we knew that those tentacles could strike like a cobra, and that they were extensible.
In the circumstances, I decided upon watching them for a time, to see if we could learn anything of use to us.
After two hours of close observation, during which the Vulcanids had only moved their positions very slightly, an urgent voice came over my loudspeaker. It was Arabin.
"Denis! Denis!" he called. "You getting me clearly? Good! Listen! There's a Virian here beside me who says the Vulcanids have got his mind — no, they've not got control of him, but he knows something they want to tell us. I'm going to put him on now — here he is."
There was a brief pause as the Virian came on the circuit.
"Denis Grafton, I am Nura Ludhor," the voice said, and I recognised it as that of a Virian who had elected to stay on the farm.
"I have to tell you that the Vulcanids wish you to know something. I am to say that they know you are thinking of fire, and that if you attempt to burn them they will destroy you and every man with you."
I was appalled. I called Leo to the microphone at once.
"Leo! You hear that?" I asked. "Are you sure this Virian isn't a stooge for them? Sure he's not under their control?"
It was the Virian who answered.
"No, Denis Grafton, I am not under their control. They can never take control of a mind they have lost.
That is why the Nagani are their own masters now. They threw off the control, and now the Vulcanids can never resume it. But I can hear in my mind something the Vulcanids wish me to hear. It is true!
How else would I have known of your thoughts of fire?"
That seemed fair enough evidence, and 1 told Nura Ludhor to continue.
"The Vulcanids wish you to know," he went on, "that they have the means of exploding the Disc. They want you to look — I cannot understand... wait... Yes! They want you to look on the grass between them now. They say you will see proof of what I tell you."
I told the Virian to wait, and I focused my binoculars on the group of Vulcanids. There between them on the grass was a fiat rectangular shape.
I called for more lights on the spot, and then looked again. There was some piece of mechanism there in their midst, and one Vulcanid standing beside it waved a tentacle up and down as if to draw attention to it.
They undoubtedly appeared to have the upper hand, unless they were bluffing. But dare we risk calling their bluff? The danger was there, I was sure. Although our Virians had dismantled, as far as they were able, the Discs in our possession, there had been much of the mechanism that was incomprehensible to us.
I knew, too, that they were able, apparently by control from a distance, to explode the Discs in mid-air.
Might this apparatus be a kind of switch? If the Disc went up, we should perish, for the blast area, as we had seen when we first landed and the following Discs were wrecked, was extremely wide.
I called into the microphone again.
"What do they want us to do?" I asked.
There was a longer pause, as though Nura Ludhor was waiting for some answer from the Vulcanids.
Then he came in again.
"You are to leave them, they say. You are to leave them in darkness. They promise they will not move from this spot. You will find them here when daylight comes."
It had never occurred to me to ask myself the question: could one take a Vulcanid's word? The question was patently absurd.
But we had no alternative that I could see.
One fact stood out a mile — unless we were wrong in our assessment of the monster's mobility, we should certainly find them there in the morning. I talked with Arabin over the microphone for some minutes. He was of the same opinion.
"If we all get away to some distance," he said cautiously, "we might be able to make a plan without them tuning in to our minds. It's all we can do, Denis. Leave 'em, and come over here and we'll talk it over."
I called off our men reluctantly, but the situation was so unexpected, so completely new, and so abominably loaded with potential horror, that I realised we must plan carefully. And we could not do that while the Vulcanids could read our minds.
There was the faint, remote hope that distance might give us the mental advantage over them. We had no knowledge of the conditions under which their telepathy worked, and little hope of acquiring that knowledge.
But we retired, as the only possible alternative to fairly certain annihilation. Back at the farm we found Arabin and Lopez pretty well recovered. Axel had treated them for electric shock, and the great red weals across Arabin's shoulders and along Isidore's arm had the appearance of typical electrical burns.
They had been in considerable pain for some time, but Axel had coated their burns with acriflavine-plus and had given them much relief.
"But we can't count on them always using a mild current," remarked Leo ruefully. "As it was, another second or so of that shock and I'd have been finished. I was burning up — literally burning up, I tell you." He wriggled his shoulders painfully. "But for good old Isidore and his chopper, they'd have had me."
Isidore Lopez had been a stevedore at Barcelona. He was a giant of a man just settling into that fatness that so often overtakes the strong man, but had lost none of his strength, for all that.
"That arm 1 chop," he said. "Was sdrong, dhick, sdrong like bone. Is no jellyfish, dhe Vulcanids, is sdrong, vairy sdrong..."
We embarked a party in cars, and drove northwards, taking Nura Ludhor with us. We kept a constant check upon him to find whether the Vulcanid control wore off as the distance increased between us and them. At last, as we reached the clock tower at Lewisham, he shook his head.
"No message now," he said. "But perhaps the Vulcanids can still tell what we think. Cannot tell yet..."
To make sure, we drove another five miles and pulled up at a pub.
I have not mentioned the fact that we had foun
d the world's stocks of wine and beer — bottled beer —
greatly improved by nearly a year's settling and maturing. This was one of the very few comforts remaining to us after the destruction of our fellows.
We sat round a table, a bottle of wine between us, and talked over our plans. Krill Hvensor, who probably knew more about Vulcanid psychology than anybody, gave us all the information he could, but it was little enough, alas!
He assured us that, as far as his experience went, the anemone-like creatures were almost static. They were able to move slowly, and it might be that these, which were unlike the ones he had seen on Vulcan, had additional powers. He had never seen, for instance, a Vulcanid use an extensible tentacle.
On Vulcan, those monsters who wished to move about had special small vehicles for the purpose, but their movements were conducted in what almost amounted to secrecy. Humans and Virians had only very rarely seen the Vulcanids in motion.
Could they have concealed their vehicles in the disc, we asked? He did not think so.
We assumed that these Vulcanids had secreted themselves in the Disc when it first left the Lunar base, for Krill Hvensor told us that the young Vulcanids were small enough to be hidden in a small compartment. Their growth was rapid, though, and when they started to increase in size, they did so almost overnight.
We agreed that their movement must be confined to. an area we could keep under observation. We must also find a means to destroy them, for it was obvious that we could not allow them to survive and control the minds of the future generations of humans and Virians.
We talked over possible weapons. Fire? If necessary, we could use flame throwers on them, but would they be destroyed? Their physical composition seemed quite different from any organisms we knew.
Isidore vouched for the tough quality of their tentacles, whereas our nearest parallel — sea anemones — were fragile in the extreme.
It could be that, if they were not constructed of carboniferous matter, fire would not destroy them.
Acid? There again, we had no means of knowing their vulnerability.
Until we could (a) get the Vulcanids away from the Disc and so avert the threat of explosion, or (b) capture one of them for experiment, little would be possible in the way of exterminating them. For we could not guess the extent of the blast area if the Disc were to be exploded.. And if we were to capture one, it would doubtless raise the alarm with those who guarded the Disc.
However, we decided that our only plan was to try to segregate one or two of the monsters, and run the risk of their causing the others to explode the Disc. We accordingly worked out the possibility of erecting an electrified compound into which we might lure one or two of the Vulcanids.
By dawn we had so far proceeded with this plan as to have Alatto Skirr and his brother erecting insulated costs a mile away from the Disc landing ground. We left them there, with a petrol-driven generator to provide the current and several thousand yards of copper cable for the fencing.
Then we returned to Primswood Place.
Our first sight of the Vulcanids by daylight brought a horrifying shock.
Where we had left thirty or forty of the creatures we now saw three times that number.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dr. Axel was benevolently enthusiastic as he stood with us on the low hill that overlooked the park. "Of course!" he beamed. "They reproduce by fission! But creatures of a largeness so — that they should reproduce offspring of the same largeness! Is wonderful! Yes?"
He could not have been more pleased if they had been his own patients. We had to remind him that these creatures were not simple, harmless mammals such as he was accustomed to, but a completely alien form of life that menaced our own existence and that of every living creature — and those were few enough — on the face of our world.
The Vulcanids did, undoubtedly, reproduce by fission, which added an unexpected threat to our plans.
A fully-grown Vulcanid could, it appeared, simply tear itself in two, and there you had two Vulcanids.
The raw edges, such as we could see, took on a roundness visibly, and within an hour there was nothing to show that two Vulcanids had so recently been one.
Axel attempted to reassure us by explaining that only the lowest forms of life were able to reproduce in this manner, but again, we had to remind him that what he was watching was not Terrestrial life, but life from another world. We had no standards by which to judge its degrees in the cosmic scale of life.
For all we know, Terrestrial unicellular creatures and the lower worms, which divide and reproduce by fission, might have reached superiority on Earth, as the Vulcanids had on Hafna, if only some slight factor in the balance of creation had been upset.
But theorising would get us nowhere. We now had about one hundred Vulcanids to cope with. Thirty we might have beaten, but one hundred! And they might multiply still further within the next few hours.
One thing we did discover: during daylight there seemed practically no communion between the Vulcanids and our Virians. We later formed the theory that light waves interfered with their system of transmitting their thoughts. It seemed logical enough; a similar phenomenon with regard to radio waves had been noticed for half a century, and there seemed to be a parallel here.
We saw, too, that many of the creatures had moved about during the night. Long, slimy trails on the grass, which was also crushed to the ground, showed their tracks. And Krill Hvensor was not comforted by the realisation that these Vulcanids could move much faster and further than those he had known on Vulcan. They were, he was sure, a species that was unknown to him.
Where they had been bunched round the Disc during the night, they were now spread over more than an acre of ground, but they were still contained by the railings of the park on two sides and the fencing of neighbouring tennis courts on the other two.
We had sited our electrified compound in the direction they would most easily take if they decided to leave the park. Only in that direction was there a clear way, unobstructed by walls, hedges, or railings.
We had also closed every gate and built barriers by the lower walls so that we might the better channel specimens into our compound.
We relied on their strangeness in our world, and on the fact that every material object would be new to them, to force them to take the path we wished them to take. And as we watched them through the morning hours, we saw that our plan was working.
Slowly, so slowly as to be only just perceptible, there was a general move in the direction of the open track we had left for the hideous creatures. They ignored — or seemed to ignore — their watchers completely, but continued their waving and bowing between themselves. There was no doubt in our minds that their flexions and flutterings signified some sort of communion between themselves.
By noon, the two Virians had finished electrifying the wire compound down the hill, and we posted guards alongside the track to it, with others to observe the Vulcanids remaining in the park and those slowly approaching the funelled entrance to the electrical corral.
They possessed no sight, these semi-translucent monsters from Vulcan, but seemed gifted with an extraordinary sense of proximity to objects in their path. Clearly, some seventh sense — perhaps even more than one extra sense — enabled them to exist in a material, solid world. We checked on this by dropping a curtain made of canvas from the farm before those who were foremost in the downhill march. They seemed unaware of the obstacle until they were six or seven feet from it, and then they halted, their wide-spreading filaments waving towards it.
We were encouraged to note that the foremost Vulcanids seemed to make no effort — by bending or turning back — to advise others of the obstruction. This might mean that it was a case of each for himself.
It might also mean — and it was a chilling thought — that they possessed a mass mind, and that the thoughts of one were the thoughts of all.
When we raised the canvas curtain, the leading Vulcanids crept on at their f
ormer speed.
As we had expected, over the distance of nearly a mile, some outdistanced the others, and by dusk the leaders were down to three, with the followers two hundred yards behind them. Nightfall brought qualms to us. Would this unknown type of Vulcanid, unlike the normal species, move in the dark?
We could only leave them to their movement, and could not control it.
However, we brought our car lights to bear on those who remained by the disc. There were eighteen of these. All the rest had started their straggling, oozing march along the track we had prepared for them.
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