by Pel Torro
“Wait a minute—you’ve missed an important step out. You’ve said he arrives on earth—he wants to set himself up as one of our scientists—where does this bit about Challenger and the book come in?”
“If everybody else has two arms, two legs, and a head you can’t just go wandering around as a blob of jelly. Somebody is going to spot you sooner or later. Now—let’s just assume, and this is my wildest sweep of conjecture—that he grabs a book. Maybe he’s semi-invisible, maybe he rolls in through the library wall during the night; maybe he hears a librarian coming first thing in the morning—so he snatches the first book he can find, that has a reference to science in it. He doesn’t know whether they’re old books or new books—he doesn’t know anything about our culture. He’s a new boy—he’s got nothing but the brain he stands up in! So he snatches a book—not knowing it’s fiction. He knows so little about our culture, that had he picked up a copy of “Alice in Wonderland,” he might easily have changed into the March Hare!”
“Or the Mad Hatter,” grinned the trooper.
“Or a Frankenstein monster—under the impression that everybody keeps pet monsters in disused mills! He doesn’t know. There may be no fiction on his world. He may be one of those who tell nothing but the truth, and devote themselves entirely to scientific fact.”
“Let’s hope they aren’t planning to conquer us!” groaned Pete.
“—so he finds this book, this Conan Doyle book, in the book is the picture of Challenger, and the description. As far as he knows Challenger was a real man, a very realistic writer. His descriptions are so good they almost jump out of the page and hit you. You could almost feel you were shaking hands with the characters. If the time factor wasn’t 200 years old, a Doyle character could come walking in this door any minute, Malone, Challenger, Lord John Roxton, any of them—even Sherlock Holmes!”
Pete Neil was looking at the sergeant with keen, intelligent eyes.
“Things are beginning to make sense. I think your theory’s more than supposition, sarge, I think it has a real chance of being somewhere near the truth, no matter how incredible it may sound by the standards of ordinary, everyday life, as we understand them.”
“There ain’t such a thing as ordinary, everyday life, son,” said the sergeant. “Not in the space age, there ain’t. Not in the 22nd century. Ordinary, everyday life is a myth. It’s a myth preserved by ostriches and by old ladies of both sexes.” Pete grinned. “Now,” said the sergeant, “let’s just finish off this theory, if you like to dignify it by that name. It’s still supposition.” He had half as eye the clock as he was speaking, the clock that was ticking away the vital minutes that would say whether Don Cameron would return under his own volition … when the next fifteen minutes had ticked away they were going to need a rescue party.
He forced his attention away from the deadly, ticking pointers. “It takes a book, and it’s interrupted. It knows nothing of fiction. It may not believe that a lot of trouble can be taken to produce a book about something that is not true. Even the Martians and Venusians don’t understand our love of literature. It may belong to their solar system, or it may belong to the other side of the universe, from another galaxy. If it’s as strange as we believe it to be, if it’s a blob of jelly that can turn itself into anything, maybe it didn’t even need a space ship. Maybe it just travelled here by will power.…”
“What about hyper space,” put in Pete. “Let’s go the whole hog. Maybe the thing travelled faster than light and got into the deep space between the worlds. Maybe it short-circuited Time. Maybe he’s even from the Future. Maybe from a parallel probability track.…”
“Let’s not worry about where he’s from, let’s just think of him as being an alien. He’s a thing we don’t know and a thing we don’t understand. He’s not governed by the molecular laws of mass and volume that we understand and that we’re governed by. He’s as fluid as a gas.… He has to hurry because even now they are on his trail. Somebody has reported a blob floating about. It may be a secret weapon from behind the Iron Curtain, or it’s something that shouldn’t exist. Maybe a scientific experiment gone wrong. Maybe a lump of radio activity that has suddenly grown some intelligence, and is just going to move around a ‘do’ for everybody. The blob in a hurry to change from being a blob to being something else. We have him, with a 250 year old book with a picture of what he thinks is a scientist, so he changes into a likeness of the picture.…”
“Perfect—he reads the description, because we believe he has enough intelligence to comprehend the print of matter, just as you and I could crack Indian hieroglyphics if there was a picture of a man with a bow and arrow, and a picture of a dead buffalo. We don’t speak the Indian language but we know what those pictures mean. We don’t understand them because they were drawn by a race with a simpler idea of conveying its thoughts, of putting its concepts in a pictorial form. We could understand hieroglyphics because hieroglyphics is simpler than the writing we use today. Now the fellows who come after us—we’ll just assume that this guy is either from the future or from a parallel time track that’s got more technology or from a super-advanced race from another side of the universe. Or maybe he’s come from somewhere quite close at hand, like Sirius. Maybe he came in a perfectly orthodox ship and ditched it at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.”
Imagination was running away.
“One thing we can be certain about in our thoughts, is that there is an alien running loose. An alien who had changed himself by understanding, what would be to him, very primitive writing. These letter forms of ours could very soon be cracked down into words. If we went to somewhere like the Central Deserts of Australia and contacted the aborigines, it wouldn’t take us very long to learn their language, because they only have about a three hundred word basic vocabulary. Some tribes have even less than that…”
“If we, with a twenty thousand word vocabulary would find it extremely easy to crack open a language which only has three hundred basic words, so the fellow who comes from an advanced culture, with a twenty-million-word vocabulary, would have a brain that was capable of analysing our mere twenty thousand word vocabulary in a matter of minutes, maybe even less.”
“That’s it,” said the sergeant, “that’s how I see it. But while allowing for his super intelligence we still have to allow for his super hurry. You see, maybe as long as he was in that soft jelly form in which he travelled through space, or in which he escaped from the ship, or in which, shall we say, he was transmitted through hyper space by some kind of electronic transmitter—maybe he was teleported here—maybe somebody slung him here by the power of telekinesis.… Maybe anything. But he’s here and let’s assume he’s vulnerable while in that soft, flabby body … he’s got to get out of it. Fast! He’s got to change into something that will pass among the other inhabitants.”
“Let’s assume something else,” said Pete, “for this will answer the question that’s been in my mind to ask you since we started moving our minds in this direction—having changed into something that he afterwards found was awkward, and an anachronism—why didn’t he change to something else?”
“I can’t answer that one,” said the sergeant. “That punctures the whole theory.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Pete, “because while one part of my brain was asking it, the other part was answering it. That’s why maybe I seemed a little bit far away, I was following you—in fact, I was ahead of you, in trying to deal with this one particular difficulty.…” Pete’s eyes strayed up to the clock. Five minutes to go!
It helped to talk to the sergeant, but it didn’t kill the anxiety altogether.
“This is the spiel as I see it—having changed, he loses the ability to change … at least until somebody whisks him back through one of these machines. Let’s say he’s like lead, ordinary casting, printer’s lead, in one of those automatic lino-typing machines, that have their own electric heating apparatus underneath, that melts the lead, and it pours into the caster——”
“I know, and I see your simile,” agreed the sergeant. “We’ll say that on his other planet he’s in a certain shape, we’ll call it A, and then for purpose of transmission across hyperspace, or however he happened to come, something happened to him—in other words, the lead which was originally hard, has now been heated and is a blob of soft, pliable, liquid lead. Molten lead. That blob is poured into another mould, and that is the equivalent of this creature taking on the form of an earthman! But once he had taken on that form—just like lead that’s hardened in the mould, he can’t change again.”
“Not till the lead is re-heated and then he’s got to look for another mould.”
“Perfect,” said the sergeant, “absolutely perfect! That would explain the reason why he hasn’t changed again. He arrives looking like a blob of molten metal, and he looks for a shape to pour his molecules into, he finds the Challenger description, thinks that’ll do nicely, moulds himself to that, goes out confidently to meet the other natives, in the fond hope that he’ll be recognised as an eminent scientific type, and finds, to his horror that he’s made himself rather grotesque and that he is an anachronism. He can get rid of the clothes, but he can’t get rid of the other characteristics.”
“He could have got rid of the beard,” protested Pete Neil.
“No—he couldn’t,” said the sergeant, “not if our theory is good, you see, he’s not really five foot two, two-hundred-and-sixty pound man with a spade shaped beard. The thing that looks like a black beard may be just part of his anatomy that’s been hardened into that shape. Let’s just pretend that a man is made of wax, and you melt that man down and you pour him into a mould. After you’ve poured him into the mould you harden him, and, if it’s like a little Father Christmas mould with a beard, that beard is still wax—not real hair. So although the hairs on our alien friend look like hairs, they’re really part of his alien body. They may be some vital organ for all we know. He’s allowed his molecules to flow into this peculiar shape. We’ll assume this metabolic process goes on in the same way, despite his actual physical dimensions. But what he can’t afford to do, is to lose any of himself.”
“You mean his beard doesn’t grow longer, and would never need trimming?”
“The mere act of trimming might be fatal!”
“Thirty seconds to go, serge,” burst out Neil.
“Go to the door and see if he’s coming, will you,” said Harding. He grinned, “I’ll be quite honest, Neil, I haven’t got the nerve to go and look, myself … because if he ain’t coming I’m going to feel so sick, I’m going to make a mess all down this nice new uniform I’m wearing.”
There was a long silence as Neil looked up and down the street—there was no sign of Lieutenant Don Cameron’s single seater police patrol vehicle. He came in. His face told its own story. He had no need to speak.
“We’re out of luck, sarge.”
“I thought we would be. It’s not like Don to cut things as fine as that. He’d have been back by now if everything was O.K.”
“What do we do now?” asked Pete Neil, hopelessly.
“Carry out orders,” said the sergeant. His voice had gone dull, listless. He felt like a man who has been kicked in the stomach. All the air had gone out of him. The room seemed suddenly dull, and grey and drab. He had been trying to fight the thought off all the time. Now it crashed in upon him like a descending avalanche. Don Cameron didn’t look as if he was coming back. The air in the station could have been cut with a knife. It was a thick, grey gloom. It emanated from the two men staring at each other with dull, lack lustre eyes.
“Blast,” said the sergeant, suddenly, savagely. “Damn and blast Anzar, whoever or whatever he is. My God, when I get my hands on him, whatever he’s done to Cameron he’ll pay for.”
“Same here,” agreed Pete Neil quietly. “I think every man on the force will say the same … if we can get our hands on him.”
“What do you mean by that,” snapped the sergeant. “Of course we’ll get our hands on him!” He was about to say more, but what was the use of cursing? Mere epithets wouldn’t harm the strange creature with the ungainly body and the gross black beard, that called itself Professor Anzar. Dark thoughts of revenge went through his mind for a few seconds and then he realised there was a job to do. A duty to be done. If the revenge was ever to be carried out it would have to be through the official means and the legal channels, and the machinations of the I.P.F. What one man in the person of Don Cameron had failed to do, one lone individual in the person of Sergeant Joe Harding would also fail to do. Not a hope in hell! Cameron was tougher than he was. Joe would have been the first to admit it. Cameron was a better shot, Cameron was faster on the draw, Cameron was a better all-round police man than Joe Harding. What Cameron had failed to do on his own, there was very little hope that Harding could accomplish.
There was only the will, urging him, driving him towards that sinister dark house on the cliff. But Sergeant Joe Harding was too well-trained an officer to allow his feelings to get the better of him. What he wanted, what he had to do, were two different things. And he did what he had to do. Duty was foremost, as it always had been.
He picked up the audio-visiphone, and called H.Q. He radioed a brief report through to the Captain at the other end, and watched as the grim-faced senior officer said.
“All right. I’ll see that a heavy patrol is sent immediately, I have the location.”
Then duty done, the instinctive feeling to go on his own grew too strong to be ignored.
“You’re in charge of this station,” he said to Neil. “I’ve radioed the message through, there’ll be a big force arriving from Brayton any minute. There’s nothing to stop me going on my own.”
“I refuse to take charge of the station,” said Neil quietly, “if you’re going, I’m going with you!”
“I can’t leave the blasted station empty,” exploded the sergeant.
“Why not,” said Pete recklessly, “hey, give me that walkie-talkie.” He picked up the short beam contact unit.
“What are you doing?” demanded the sergeant.
“I’m calling in Tom from traffic patrol. The junction won’t be too busy now, we can spare a man from there. Let Tom come and look after the station! I’m coming with you!” reiterated Pete determinedly.
“If you insist,” said Joe. “I’m breaking regulations anyway, so I don’t see how I can throw the book at you.…”
“Glad you see it that way,” say Pete.
Tom was back at the station in less than a minute and a half.
“Where are you fellows off to?” he asked.
“No time to explain,” answered the sergeant. He and Pete ran round and snatched up the handle of the nearest police patrol vehicle. Seconds later they were tearing off at top speed in the direction of the House of Anzar, standing gaunt and sinister atop its beetling cliff. As they flashed towards it, the thought that was uppermost in Harding’s mind framed itself as coherent speech.
“There’s another thing I was trying to explain when we were talking about this guy. Our friend the blob … remember we said if he was from some other system, some other probability track, or deep space, then he’d come for one of two reasons, either as an exile, or else he was the vanguard of an attack. In either case he would be doing one of two things that could account for those peculiar radio-electric emanations that have been blazing out of the Anzar house, the things that have been cutting up the road way, and interfering with plants, T.V. and radio, and maybe causing the ghost-like emanations in the crypt of St. Mark’s. But I think there’s more to those than a mere chance emanation. I don’t think any radio wavelength, or electromagnetic force field could possibly make green ghosts wander around an ancient crypt. I think there’s an explanation for them, but I don’t think that’s it.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Pete.
They were not far from the turning now, the turning leading along the track to the sinister old house itself.
�
��Well, in the first place, if he’s an exile, or an escaped criminal from some super society, then he’ll obviously be building a weapon, way beyond our comprehension, to fight his own people when they catch up with him. On the other hand, if he’s just the forerunner of a big invasion unit——”
“He’ll be building a communication unit.” Pete interrupted. “So that would account for the emanations.”
“The big question we have to answer is this. Is whatever he’s got up at that isolated house a communication unit or a weapon?”
“If it’s neither?” said Pete. “What then?”
“Then we have to start from scratch again,” said the sergeant dolefully. “But I think we shall find out in a few minutes.”
The police vehicle was lurching its way up the track towards the sinister old house, there wasn’t far to go…
“Frontal attack?”
“No, we’ll use a bit more craft. I’m going in, and if I’m not back in five minutes then you get-the-hell back to the station, and tell ’em what’s happened.”
“I don’t like it,” said Pete. I’m coming in with you.”
“Look, you stay here, and keep that door covered with every gun you’re got on board this car! O.K.? I’m not going inside. I’m going to knock at that door and you stand where you can keep me covered, and when whoever is inside that house comes to the door. I’m going to tell them that you’ve got them covered, and that unless they produce our lieutenant alive and kicking within thirty seconds you’ll blast ’em. Simple, but I hope, effective.”
“So, do I,” said Pete. “But I can’t think of a better one.” He parked the car with its powerful energy blaster pointed directly at the sinister old door of the enormous chateau towering above the cliff. With trepidation mixed with anger the sergeant got out and made his way to the door. He thundered on it. For a second or two he heard nothing, then slow dragging footsteps sounded on the other side of the door.