The moment I reached her apartment block, though, I saw that something was wrong. Not a window in the place had survived the onslaught of an hour before. I quickened from my leisurely pace and raced up the staircase to her apartment, rapped on the door.
“Eva! Open up! It’s me—Jerry!”
There was no reply from within; yet I knew Eva Grant must be at home, for her evenings were spent in studying for the Advanced Science Examination she was determined to pass before we were married.
Again I hammered. Then, as I got no answer, I hurtled myself against the door and sent it flying backward on its hinges. There lay Eva on the floor of the living room, shattered glass from the window all around her, blood smearing the back of her neck under her thick dark hair.
Hauling her up in my arms I carried her to a chair. She was alive, thank God, though her pulse was feeble. Bandages and restorative brought consciousness slowly back to her. Color began to creep back into her cheeks.
Weakly she turned her head, then winced at the pain in her neck. She looked at me and smiled faintly.
“Hello…Jerry.”
“You were attacked by one of those damned bird things?” I demanded, and as she nodded I hurried into the next room and snatched down a blood-test syringe—a small everyday devise used by most of us for determining physical condition.
She started as the needle stabbed her arm, then I gave a low sigh of relief as my worst fears were banished. Her blood was normal enough: no sign of venom from the thing’s jaws.
“Just what happened?” I asked her, as she began to recover.
“I—I hardly remember. I heard the commotion outside so I went to the window to take a look. Then one of the birds came shooting down, smashed the window glass in pieces. I dodged the splinters, thank goodness, but it didn’t avail me much. The bird came half into the room, got me by the back of the neck— Well, next thing I remember I saw you.”
I clenched my fist. “If only I knew what these birds are! What they’re after…”
“I don’t think they’re of this world, anyway,” she said, her voice quiet. “I’ve studied enough science to know that. I saw the bird at close quarters, and it was covered in a black, non-light-reflecting substance, utterly invulnerable. Nature doesn’t provide her creatures with a covering like that without a very good reason—and the only reason I can think of is protection against the cold of space. Just as a fish has extra bones to withstand the pressure of water.”
“I guessed myself that they don’t belong to Earth,” I said. Then I snapped my fingers. “What about the Moon?”
“I wondered about that,” she said, musing. “Their size is feasible then, since the Moon’s gravity is only a sixth of the Earth’s. But why they should so suddenly come to Earth like this I can’t imagine. Unless,” she finished slowly, “the Walters Lunar Expedition to the Moon did succeed after all, and furious at the invasion of their domain these creatures are trying to exact reprisal. Remember, Jerry, there are thirty birds, from all accounts—and thirty men went to Luna. It sort of ties up, doesn’t it?”
It was as god an idea as any—but it didn’t make things any easier. I debated for a moment, but before I could say anything further, there came to our ears through the smashed window that already grimly familiar sound of leathery beating and the whistle of cleaved air.
“They’re coming back!” Eva gasped hoarsely, leaping up from her chair, and at the same moment there came a miscellany of screams and shouts from the street below.
But I was not concerned with this: my gaze was directed to the window as bird after bird came hurtling from the heights. As though driven by some inexplicable instinct, one of them dived and twisted abruptly, hurtling straight for the shattered window. It came with such demoniac force it knocked me flying—but at least I had the time to see it.
It certainly resembled the old-time pterodactyl. There was the same evil head, the merciless scar of beak, the beady, heavily filmed eyes, as though for extra strong protection. The wingspread, huge though it was, was handled with easy grace.
So much I had time to note, then I was struggling with the thing for all I was worth. Firing my useless gun at it, I strove to prevent its settling on the fighting, screaming Eva—but again that steel-hard casing it possessed defeated all my efforts. Right before my eyes Eva was lifted in the thing’s jaws and borne swiftly towards the window.
I made one last desperate effort to save her, but a beating wing struck me with such force I went spinning six feet away and crashed half senseless against the wall. By the time I had recovered my balance and wits, Eva had gone, nor could I see any sign of her by the time I had rushed to the window.
In the street below there was pandemonium as several of the men and women not yet removed from the earlier attack were picked up and carried aloft like children seized by giant eagles. In all there were probably thirty of the monsters once again, and they gathered together almost like plane squadrons, carrying a man or woman each, and heading for the night sky.
By the time I had blundered distractedly downstairs to the street, there were few of them left. The defense guns were rattling again just as futilely as before. I didn’t even stop to watch them. At top speed I raced to Stratosphere Headquarters and hurried in to the Controlling Officer.
“I’ve got to go up and help settle these damned things!” I told him. “They stole my fiancée not two minutes ago and—”
“Hop to it,” he ordered briefly. “We want every man we can get right now. We were going to send for you anyway. Squadron K—Action Station Nine.”
I nodded and raced out.
* * * *
Within ten minutes desperation had hurled me into the air with all engines going the limit. I felt that there might be a chance even yet to overtake the flying horrors, since I reckoned that their speed would slow down as they reached the stratosphere, loaded as they were too.
In this I was partly right. As I climbed I saw a group of them against the full moonlight. By this time New York was a mere segment of spotted light infinitely far below me. Instantly I broke from my squadron and went streaking across the sky after them. They saw me, headed for the greater heights. I was after them immediately, climbing, climbing, with the motors thundering a steady, effortless song. But one thing puzzled me now. These birds no longer carried human beings in their jaws!
Two horrible thoughts flashed upon me. Had they dropped their captives, or was this another flock of birds entirely? Well, what did it matter now? Attack them anyway and trust to the rest of the boys to get whatever others there might be.
The moment I got near enough I opened up with my protonic guns. They shied! One actually blew to pieces, and that brought a hard grin of satisfaction to my face. At last I had a weapon they couldn’t stand. Sheer energy biting into their filthy bodies was more than they could tolerate, evidently.
The fate of this one, however, warned the others. To my amazement they suddenly folded their wings into their bodies and rose higher and higher with increasing swiftness! How they did it I could not imagine—and it was tragic too from my own point of view. There were definite limits to which my plane could ascend, and to go much higher would mean going beyond the atmosphere altogether.
Then, apparently annoyed by my pursuit, one of them deliberately stalled and waited, poised uncannily in space. I could not slow myself down in time, with the result that I hurtled straight at it. Instinctively, I dove out of my chair, and it was this which saved me, for the creature came smashing through the observation dome amid a shower of splinters.
Instantly, the frightful cold of these great heights surged into my cabin. I would certainly have died, but for the protection of my strato-mask and kit. I half knelt by the wall, clawing at the driving, battering mass of shell-encrusted leather overwhelming me. It mastered me in a few seconds, whirled me about, then tore the helmet from its studs at the back of my neck.
Savage pain went through the length of
my body; then I must have fainted…
* * * *
I returned to consciousness aware of the most inexplicable sensation. Beyond having a stiff neck I was sublimely comfortable! I seemed to be lying in the midst of a feather bed, and every weight and pressure of normal existence had gone from me. I had air, warmth, and ease beyond all parallel. From those last conscious moments of horror to this paradise demanded a good deal of puzzled thinking.
When I had sorted things out, I got the shock of my life. I was lying in a kind of pouch, softly hair-lined, and composed of rubberlike skin. One section of this skin was slightly transparent, and through it I gazed upon the incredible vision of space itself—something I had never seen before.
Stars by the quadrillion; a Sun girdled with prominences; a Moon at the full and already swollen beyond normal dimensions, growing so fast I could see the shadows on the slight right-hand edge of the approaching wane.
As I took this in, incredulously enough, my eyes moved on to a flock of birds, wings tight-pressed to their sides, speeding in straight-line formation through the gulf. I counted thirty-eight of them altogether. On the nearer ones I beheld a bulging pouch after the fashion of a kangaroo.
Now I understood! Their jaws had been empty because the captives had gone into the pouches. I was inside the thing that had attacked me, then. Being carried without harm. From vague revulsion my emotion changed to wonder at this marvel of Nature defeating the void of space, yet keeping me safe, Air, I discovered, was entering from a natural sac at one end of the pouch and being expelled by the action of a steadily working muscle and natural vent at the other. Surely Nature in all her varied moods had never created so outlandish a creature as this!
But the reason for it all? I fingered my neck. Blood had dried there. Why hadn’t I been killed? Then it became obvious to me as the Moon increased in size that there was our destination—and at a gigantic speed, too.
The more I studied the birds the more I could see a faint stream of energy being projected from their tails. I think I guessed right in assuming that they utilized the radiations of space as an ordinary bird utilizes air, pushing against its different densities and cleaving through it, given just the right energy wavelength by Nature to expel against it and hurtle them forward. Obviously they could live either in air or out of it: the air I was receiving had evidently been stored somewhere and was now being released for my especial benefit.
And at the end of the journey? That was a grim thought. The more I pondered the more sure I felt that this was an act of vengeance for the desecration of their domain by the Walters Lunar Expedition. If so, then I was resolved to sell my life as dear as possible. I still had my raygun, anyway. Rather than fall victim to a lot of educated pterodactyls, I’d turn it on myself.
At intervals I slept in curiously drowsy contentment, an effect undoubtedly engendered by my cosy position and lack of restricting gravity. I believe the birds absorbed nourishment from the void somehow, probably using the very medium against which they thrust, or else they absorbed radiations unimaginable to a flesh and blood Earthman.
And each time I awoke the Moon was larger and had waned further—until finally we were dropping in perfect formation down to its powdery, blinding white surface.
Craters, glaring mountain ranges, dead sea bottoms—all reared up towards us at alarming speed. Trained as I was to maneuvering a plane, it seemed to me that a crash was inevitable—but at the last second, with easy grace, the whole flock swept over the nearest mountains and dove down into the depths of an extinct crater.
The sunlight snuffed out as though it had never been. We were plunging through abysmal, airless shadows into the very depths of the Moon. The darkness was so intense after the glare outside, I was almost blinded.
Then after a while it began to lighten. From somewhere below a deep pinkish light swelled into rosy glow. It lighted towering canyons, the pumice-like escarpments of this honeycombed satellite, until finally we broke free and landed in a vast central area which I judged must be the approximate core of the Moon. And here, unsupported as far as I could tell, blazed a circular red ball illuminating the colossal cavern from end to end. Judging from the soft shadows there was air here, of sorts.
Something pushed me—muscles I think—and I was ‘ejected’ from the bird’s pouch like a pea popped from a pod. I got to my feet, balancing with some difficulty against the lesser gravitation. Obviously we were not exactly at the Moon’s core, else the gravity would have been equal on all sides and I’d have been in mid-air.
That blazing ball, as far as I could judge, was some sort of radioactive material—possibly even one of the last natural energy minerals left in the Moon. But how it hung there without support I just couldn’t imagine.
Then, as I got over the eye-wrenching dimensions of the cavern and drew comparatively fresh air into my lungs, I looked anxiously round on my fellow-travelers. They too had been ejected—thirty of them—and among them, pale but unharmed, was Eva!
I rushed over to her right away and caught her arm.
“Eva! Thank God you’re safe!”
“Looks as if the guess about the Selenites was right,” she commented after a moment, looking round. “But what the idea is I’ll be hanged if I know.”
Evidently we were soon to find out for, waddling forward in penguin-style on their queer feet, the birds forced us, by no means roughly, to advance along the cavern floor. They did it by prodding us with their beaks, and when we showed reluctance they merely pushed the harder, without resorting to the terrible force they could have used had they wished. This at last seemed a hopeful sign. But back of my mind was the remembrance of the carnage and destruction they had caused back on Earth. Probably we were being led to the slaughter.
We advanced perhaps a mile, and in that time the red ball seemingly so near at hand came no closer to us. I was puzzling over it when Eva seemed to solve the problem.
“It must actually be enormously big and a long distance away, situated at the exact central core of the Moon. Therefore, it needs no support because gravity is pulling equally on all sides. It’s probably the final unburned-out core, and forms a sun of this inner world. I suppose that’s the explanation.”
We stopped suddenly on the edge of a long, sloping incline. Down at the base of it, three hundred feet perhaps, was the real floor of the Moon’s core. More than that: there was a city of sorts. It looked utterly crazy from Earth standards because it was composed of walls without roofs! There wasn’t a roof anywhere. But there was a definite impression of order, and everything was built to an obvious plan.
“Why, it’s a—a nest-city!” Eva rxclaimed, gazing down. “The Selenites must enter their homes through the roof—just as an Earth bird gets into its nest!”
I nodded as we gazed in wonder. The rest of the people gathered doubting and anxious about us. Then I directed my attention to something standing apart from the mass of square, roofless buildings. It was a tapering obelisk with a kind of platform at the top. Upon this, fastened down with massive cables, was a sadly battered and travel-stained rocket ship!
“The Walters Expedition machine!” I cried, pointing to it.
“And no sign of the thirty men who went in it,” Eva said, with ominous quietness. “And there are thirty of us here, too! It begins to look pretty bad—”
She couldn’t get any further for the Selenites pushed us forward again. We were forced to hurry down the sloping cavern side with them behind us—and the nearer we came to the roofless houses the more we could see how large they really were.
We were driven past most of them, but here and there we did catch glimpses that showed these weird creatures were anything but limited to a bird’s intelligence. There were many baffling machines in some of the buildings, queerly fashioned for ornithic instead of human appendages.
And so finally we were seized and lifted over the high wall of one of the largest buildings of all—set gently
on our feet. Here I felt horror grip me completely…
The place was pretty well crowded with birdmen of varying sizes. Some were quite small and less like birds than those which had brought us hither, nor had they any sacs, so presumably they were of a different species. More, they had rudimentary forearms supplied with a humanlike hand. Most of them seemed to be busy with a variety of instruments.
But it was not this that horrified me. It was the sight of thirty Earthmen, motionless and deathly white, strapped to thirty immaculately clean tables! Every member of the Walters Lunar Expedition was there, from Commander Walters himself to the lowliest rocket-hand. Strapped down, at the mercy of these abominable things of a near-dead world.…
“What—what are they going to do?” Eva whispered, her startled eyes turning to me.
I glanced about me at the drawn faces of the others, then at the impregnable lofty walls. Certainly there was no retreat, for there were no doors. The only chance of escape, and that none too certain, lay in getting over the towering walls around us, but, on this I had little time to speculate, for Eva’s horrified gasp snapped me back to studying the scene confronting us.
Others of the Selenite scientists had come into the long operating theater now, pushing rubber-wheeled stretchers before them. And there were thirty of them! Straps were dangling from them in readiness for—? Nothing could have been more significant! They were meant for us!
We all shifted uneasily, but we couldn’t move far for the waiting flying Selenites were immediately back of us, prodded us with their beaks if we moved too far. So we were forced to watch the ghastly business.
To each pinioned Expedition man’s table there was run alongside a vacant trestled stretcher. Between stretcher and table was placed a machine which bristled cables and pumps. It looked rather like one of those old-time ticker-tape machines.
Once this was done, in all thirty cases, the chief operating surgeon made a signal. One of our party, a man, was seized and forced across the floor, fighting and screaming at the top of his strength. Ultimately, as the rest of us watched in quaking anticipation, he was forced down on the furthest stretcher and strapped into place. Delicate needles in the claw hands of one of the surgeons began to probe the back of his neck as he yelled and screamed.
The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack Page 52