by Pel Torro
“Yes, I know what you thought,” said the major. “I thought the same thing. How long was I lying there before you managed to get me out?”
“Not more than thirty seconds, sir, it took me twenty seconds to fasten the suit, and ten seconds to get the tank to your side. Once you were in the tank you were in pure atmosphere again, then it took us four or five minutes to drive clear of the fog, and find this patch of fresh air.”
“It was quick work, anyway,” said the Major. “It’s difficult to tell with that paralysis effect, but I almost thought I was dead … I felt as though my heart had stopped and my lungs had stopped.”
“Well I’m no medical man, of course, sir,” said the driver, “but there’ll be one here in a minute. But I’ve got the horrible feeling that you weren’t breathing, anyway.”
“We’ll talk to the doc. when he arrives,” said the major.
The medical officer rolled up. It took him about ten minutes to make a quick survey of the major.
“Well what do you think?” demanded Grosvenor.
“What it was, I can’t think. I’m completely baffled by it,” admitted the doctor. “It appears to belong to some technology that’s either ahead of ours, or alien to it. But it’s left no permanent ill effects. You’ll be as good as new in a day or two.”
“That’s a relief anyway,” said the major.
“Don’t be over confident, when I say no permanent ill-effects I mean no permanent ill effects that are easily ascertainable. I can’t give an accurate pronouncement when I’m dealing with an unknown quantity like a new vapour or a new drug. It’s certainly not one of the old favourite poisons. It’s not an acid, it’s not a corrosive, it’s not a narcotic. You breathe something into you that just seems to freeze up the whole works. You look like a man that’s stopped dead, been frozen solid, and then thawed out just as rapidly, and started off again.”
“Sounds fascinating, really fascinating,” said the major. “But we’ve got no time to waste discussing my symptoms, we’ve got to get this attack going. Get it going fast, now that we know they’re using gas we’ll take necessary precautions and we can’t worry too much about our own men getting hurt.”
“You mean you’re going to use the H.E. on the house?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I shall have to. This Anzar has got to be taught a lesson, even if we blow our own men up to do it.”
“Don’t you think it’s rather cutting off our noses to spite our faces,” argued the doctor.
“As a medical man you may be O.K.” said Grosvenor with a touch of anger in his voice, “but please leave the tactics to me.” He called a junior officer.
“Get on to that loud speaker and tell Anzar the H.E. is coming right down on the house. He’s got ten seconds to hand our men over and get out of the house. Tell him if he uses that gas again, we’ll use flame throwers.”
“Right sir.” The message was relayed.
The major waited twenty seconds.…
There was no response or reply of any kind from Anzar.
“Right then,” said Grosvenor. “In with the H.E.” The hermetically sealed planes screamed over, the H.E. screamed down. The tanks came into shelling range, bursting loose with flame throwers. In the holocaust of yellow mist, tanks, guns, bombs and fire, figures could be seen dimly moving.
“I think he’s coming out,” shouted Major Grosvenor triumphantly over his short wave. “I think he’s surrendering.” The jerky, metallic looking figures appeared from that distance, and distorted by the mist, to be men in suits, were standing motionless.
“Cease fire,” ordered Grosvenor. “I think we’ve got him.”
The planes obediently zoomed away. A wind sprang up, as though from nowhere. It was a heaven-sent wind. A wind of destiny. The yellow mist, stinking cordite fumes, the dust and the debris of the H.E., the wind-borne dirt began to clear. The leading IPF vehicle was only a matter of a few inches from the nearest of the stationary, suit-clad Anzar defenders when it stopped. The tank commandant threw up his hatch, and slid gracefully over the side—at least as gracefully as a man can descend from a tank, when encumbered by an IPF suit—he looked at the atmosphere gauge on his wrist, it was registering normal. The yellow mist had near enough cleared in that heaven-sent wind. He thrust back his helmet to take a good look at the motionless figure ahead of him. It was going vaguely through his mind to wonder what kind of people these defenders were. What kind of idiot would back up a fool like Anzar? A lonely, crazy, eccentric scientist, against whom the entire force of the three-planet-empire and the entire mechanized might of the IPF—the Interplanetary Force—could be assembled. What kind of fool would throw in his hand with the lone wolf, against so much organised military might? Against so much united scientific acumen. And yet, there were obviously people of that kind, thought the tank commandant.… He stood facing this one now. It was funny he couldn’t see through the visiglass … he switched his suit radio on to universal wavelength, held the mouth piece of his helmet close to his lips, the helmet itself balanced loosely in his hand.
“Come out of that suit,” he said. “Your mist has cleared, I want to take a good look at you.” The figure in front shook its head slowly. It was a strange, mechanical movement.…
“I said come out of the suit,” repeated the commandant. He wondered if this was some trap to get him and his fellow commandants out of the tanks. Maybe the fellows were figuring on keeping their suits, getting the IPF exposed again to that yellow mist, and then suddenly pumping more out. Well this time, he figured, it wouldn’t work. There was too much wind, and besides, they could zip the suits up as rapidly as Anzar could pump his yellow filth, his ochre poison, his jaundiced vapour. The metallic figure continued to shake its head. The rest of its body remained motionless. The tank commandant suddenly drew his energy gun.
“You’ve got five seconds,” he said coldly over the radio. He still held his helmet in the other hand. “Four … three two.…”
“I am robot, I am not wearing suit,” said the figure jerkily, mechanically, in tones so inhuman that it was quite obvious it was telling the truth.
No human voice, no matter how disguised it might be by iron and plastic, could ever have rasped out, quite as flatly and dully as that. There is something about a human voice which has a timbre of warmth and humanity. The human voice has personality; to an extent it reflects its owner’s personality. The telephone, the visiphone, the loud speaker, all these things are capable of distorting the human voice, are capable of rendering it utterly inhuman … but this voice had never issued from a larynx, had never come past a tongue. It owed far more to electronic ingenuity than it owed to breath, and to the control of a flesh and blood brain. The tank commandant went closer, and realised, with a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach, that the mechanical figure was speaking the truth. It was nothing more nor less than a robot. He could see right past the eye-piece now that he was standing really close, what had first looked like the visual face-piece of a space suit, was no more than a thick plasti-glass covering for an ingenious mechanism beyond. That’s all there was. No face, no brain, no skull, no human eyes looking back at him. Nothing but wheels and wires and valves. Nothing but relays and cogs. Just an amazingly complex circuit. It was the robot’s thinking mechanism, as far as that went. Its head was in the right place, but its thinking mechanism was a purely electrical and electronic set-up. There was no flesh and blood in the robot, no bone, no sinew—plastic and steel and ingenuity!
The tank commandant let out a gasp of surprise.
“And these others?” he asked the metal thing that looked so deceivingly like a man, this thing that was so deceptively human. This thing that had looked so man-like in the fog, and yet now was so obviously not a man.
“We are all the master’s servants,” said the robot rather enigmatically. “We are all built in the same way. These others are like me. We are all alike. We are the servants of the lord Anzar.”
“Good havens,” spluttered the com
mandant. His message was picked up over the universal wave band on which his helmet radio was still transmitting.
Major Grosvenor suddenly bellowed back across at him on the same universal wave length.
“Tank 106 what the devil are you saying?” the commander pulled himself together.
“I’m saying, sir, that these so called defenders are not human. Anzar has left his house in the hands of his robot defenders.” “It was obvious that we would have to surrender. It was a matter of pure logic,” went on the robot whom the tank commandant had first addressed.
“We are not proof against your high explosive, and the yellow mist had less effect on you than it should have done.”
“No fault of yours, is it?” retorted the tank commander. “It was only because we have suits.” His voice dripped with heavy sarcasm, “And where is Anzar? Are you permitted to say? Or are you built to utter some kind of excuse? Maybe you go off the air when we ask the vital question?”
“There is no reason why you should not know where Anzar is not,” said the robot, with a touch of something that might have been humour.
“Well,” answered the commandant with a touch of exasperation, “Where isn’t Anzar?”
“Anzar is not here,” said the robot.
“That figures,” said the tank commander. “We know he’s not in the caves under the house. We know that the house has been shaken by the H.E. He can be in one of three places:—hell, where he belongs; the house, hiding among the debris; or the caves underneath. We know he’s not underneath, he’d be a fool to be in the house, so where is he? “Tank commander no. 2 popped out of his hatch.
“I say, Skip,” he shouted across. “Maybe ninety-nine of these things are robots, and the hundredth is Anzar in disguise.” The idea was flashed back to Major Grosvenor.
“Very intelligent supposition, that man,” came back the major’s congratulations. “We will examine all robots very closely.” The IPF clustered round the motionless and unprotesting metal figures. Most minute examination revealed that the good idea of the second tank commander had been a good idea only … with no foundation in fact.
Wherever Anzar might be he was not in one of the suits. He was not disguised as a robot, he was not, apparently, in the house. Leaving the line of motionless defenders where they stood, a cohort of IPF men crashed their way into the ruins of the derelict house and searched it swiftly but efficiently. The leader came back and reported to Major Grosvenor.
“We found one underground laboratory with a gigantic metal cylinder, and some kind of machinery, very complicated looking.…” he said quickly. “I should think it is the machinery that produces the yellow mist, but apart from that, there is no sign at all of anything or anybody. Even allowing for the bomb damage, the house must have been in pretty bad shape before we got here.”
Major Grosvenor was roaring, raging, stamping and fuming!
“This is just what we need!” he exploded. “We take every available IPF man, we launch a full scale attack on the house. We get repulsed, and what happens? We go back. We counter-attack, we use our detector mechanism so that he can’t escape through any of the cellars, a bolt hole he might have arranged, and when we get there what do we find? We find the house is empty! We find a metal cylinder, and we find a machine used to make, we think, yellow mist! You remind me of a story about a brilliant scientist, the most outstanding genius of the 19th century.”
“I haven’t heard that one sir,” replied the officer who had searched the building.
“Then let me tell it to you,” said the major with biting sarcasm. “This great scientist made the following discovery. He took a flask of red stuff, he mixed it with yellow stuff and produced orange.” The officer saw the point.
“I’m very sorry sir—I know it’s as obvious as the story, but I really did my best sir.”
“All right! I know you did! I’m sorry I blew up! But where the devil can he have gone?” A gleaming metal cylinder was the only mocking answer from the house of Anzar.…
Chapter Seven
Secret of the Cylinder
CAMERON was looking intently at Anzar trying to read the strange scientist’s inscrutable face.
“I wonder what you really want, what you’re really driving at?” he was thinking to himself. “Above all I wonder what’s going to happen to me, and I wonder what’s ultimately going to happen to the earth?”
“The time has come to introduce you to the machine.” Anzar repeated. Suddenly he was looking past Cameron. Too late, the IPF Officer looked around him. What appeared to be two men in space suits were approaching, then he noticed that there was something indefinably wrong … the differences seemed infinitesimal, yet they existed. The lever mechanisms on the ends of the suits, for example, those great claw-like extremities, they were never hands? No human hands worked that dreadful device.… With a sick feeling of horror, he realised that the metal clad things were robots. They seized him in a grip of unbelievable power. It was like being held in a walking vice. He knew he had no more chance of escape than an icecream had of surviving in hell. He was half-dragged, half carried in the wake of the sinister professor Anzar…
They descended into the lower gloom of the dreadful old house. The lower regions of the derelict house were like the bilge of an abandoned hulk. Suddenly Anzar opened a door, and there was an enormous metal cylinder.
On the floor below the cylinder was a cloud of yellow mist not more than two or three feet deep, it pulsated strangely as though it was constantly wasting away and being renewed. It was like a gaseous fountain, rather than a mere inert cloud of vapour.
“Prepare him,” barked Anzar, and the hapless Cameron was flung savagely face downwards into the yellow gas. It bit into his lungs like a million knife edges. It was cold—cold as ice. Then hot—hot as fire. And suddenly Cameron felt completely paralysed. He still had his faculties though they were leaving him rapidly. He wondered what this gas was. What was its purpose? He realised that Anzar intended to reduce him to a series of electrical impulses, and transmit him to Sirius as an experiment, that was all too obvious! And this metal cylinder was in some way connected with the transmission. Obviously a vital and integral part. Cameron was no scientific expert, but he was scientific enough to recognize that cylinder as a vortex transmitter. It fitted in with everything the insane scientist had said. It had to be the mechanism. And there had been such a gloating, triumphant tone in Anzar’s voice as he had said:
“And now I will introduce you to the machine.” He had said ‘machine’ with veneration, as though it was the pride and joy of his evil life. The young IPF officer looked at the thing without fear. And that took a man of supreme courage. His senses were slipping rapidly from him now. A terrible desire to sleep overwhelmed him. Paralysis held his body as rigid as a log. He wondered whether that was the purpose of the gas, to produce insensibility and this kind of motor-paralysis. A paralysis that would leave him in a suitable state to be transmitted. The paralysis that would reduce him to so much inert human matter.
Just a piece of space jetsam, a floating flotsam, a piece of human luggage, a human guinea pig.
From behind the safe distance of the door, and the yellow mist, Anzar was gesturing instructions to the robots. It was the last thing the lieutenant saw before unconsciousness swooped down upon him. He seemed to be diving into a bottomless pit. Dark waters closed over his head. The pit went down and down forever. Lieutenant Don Cameron went down with it. It got blacker and blacker. More and more Stygian. The blackness was like velvet. He was breathing it into him. His lungs were full of black velvet. His eyes had ceased to register anything, but he was still capable of registering tactile sensations, he was still feeling things.…
He felt the claw like hands of the robots, seizing him once more in a vice-like grip, and dimly, as if from a hundred thousand light years away, he heard a clang. A clang that was obviously some kind of hatch being opened in the cylinder and then all his senses left him. And like the final stage in S
hakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, he felt himself. “Sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything.…”
Sergeant Joe Harding thundered on the door with his gun at the ready. He knew that Pete Neil was a good man, and he knew that Pete Neil had him covered. Ninety nine possibilities out of every hundred. Ninety-nine potentialities out of every hundred were taken care of. Unfortunately, as in the classic parable, although ninety and nine might lie safely in the sheep fold, it was the hundredth that chose to wander. The ninety-nine potentialities for which forethought had been taken, never materialised…
It was the hundredth eventuality that burst into flagrant flaming life, like a blistering bomb shell.
It was that one, odd, unexpected, hundredth potentiality that took the tough, grizzled, veteran IPF sergeant completely off balance and by surprise. He heard slow dragging footsteps. His subconscious put two and two together and came up with a rational answer to the problem. Slow dragging footsteps meant some kind of slow dragging individual. Slow dragging individuals might carry guns, and so the sergeant’s grip on his trigger tightened up, and he looked with keen, experienced eyes—the eyes of a battle hardened veteran—at the door. The first hint of a blue-black barrel poking round it, and Sergeant Joe Harding would have fired.… But suddenly, at the last minute, when it was far too late for Harding or Pete Neil to act, the unexpected happened. There was a crazy crashing miracle, one of those unfortunate miracles, which are the cause of the ‘best laid plans of mice and men so often ganging agley’ as the early poet had said. The slow dragging footsteps changed to clanging action.… Joe Harding suddenly found himself confronted by an enormous steel hand. A steel hand that was like something out of a nightmare. He was confronted by a thing that could have been a tin lobster, or a robot—it was, he decided, in the fraction of a second that was left to him, in which to decide anything that it was definitely not a tin lobster! Even in this direst moment of extremity the IPF sergeant, grizzled old campaigner that he was, had that fatalistic sense of soldier humour that had carried him through. He could laugh in the face of death. He could laugh in the face of the most hideous and horrible form of death that could confront anybody. A robot like a cross between Frankenstein’s monster, and a tin of baked beans that had been run over by a truck. All this he saw in the fleeting fraction of a second that it took for the creature to size him in that vice-like grip. So that, he reflected, was part of Anzar’s spiel, that was part of the build-up, the gimmick, that, he realized, as the thing seized him in those enormous steel claws and dragged him inside, was the way in which Don Cameron had been deluded into capture … if it wasn’t, it was near enough. He conceded that it had certainly fooled him. The slow, dragging footsteps, giving the impression that somebody old and rickety and feeble was coming towards that door, and then, just at the last moment, when, although any visiting IPF man, might have calculated that there would be something with a gun … he had calculated that the something with the gun would be comparatively ancient. The slow drag was a brilliant, theatrical, melodramatic touch—yet it was not so melodramatic that it failed in its effect.…