by W. J. Stuart
They arrived a moment or two before I thought they would. I did a good job of not hearing them until they were right in the room and then jumped up and said I hadn’t heard them come in.
They weren’t close together now, of course, but there was no mistaking their new relationship. It crackled between them like the EM waves of the fence that by this time Quinn and Farman must have set up around the ship.
But then I saw Altaira had been crying; tears were still welling in her eyes. They didn’t fit the sentimental picture I’d been building in my mind and I blurted out, “What’s the matter?” before I realized this could possibly be the worst thing to say.
But she smiled at me and said, “Please forgive me. I know I’m being foolish—” and gulped down a sob and looked across at Adams and said, “Please—you tell him—please . . .”
Adams said, “It was Khan—that tiger of hers. We—we’d been—we were coming out of the woods back there—and it was going to spring at her. It was out to kill. Luckily I saw it in time—”
He seemed to be bogging down and I said, “So I did hear a D-R. I thought I’d been dreaming . . .”
Adams said, “I couldn’t help it. I had to do it—I had to!” He was speaking to me, but he was looking at the girl.
She gave him a smile which made me know the picture I’d been drawing for myself was right after all.
She said, “Of course you did, J—” She started to say his name but caught herself. She looked at me. She said, “How is Father, Major Ostrow?”
I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t been expecting the question, and I wondered how much—or how little—Adams had told her.
He cut in before I could speak. He said quickly, “I told her about you checking him, Doc. And finding he was way over-tired—”
Poor John Justin Adams, I thought. I could see all too well the jam he’d been in. At first forgetting Morbius completely; then remembering, and thinking what she would think of him for having forgotten; then not wanting to scare her but knowing he’d got to say something—
I said, “Your Father’s fine, Altaira. He’s in bed and asleep. And he’d better stay asleep for twelve hours at least. I gave him a shot; it seemed to me he’d been over-working, not getting enough rest—”
She said, “Oh, I’m so glad! I know he hasn’t been sleeping enough . . . I’ve tried and tried to tell him.” She came closer to me and laid a hand on my arm. She said, “Might I just go in and look at him. I won’t wake him—”
I said, “Of course you can, honey.” I felt old and avuncular.
She gave me another smile, and carefully didn’t look at John Justin Adams, and was gone . . .
John Justin grabbed me by the arm with fingers that felt as if they might leave permanent dents. He said, “I had to do it that way about Morb—about her father, Doc!”
I said, “Of course you did.” I smiled at him because I’d only just realized how young he really was.
But perhaps I shouldn’t have smiled. He didn’t seem to like it. He said, “What the hell d’you mean—of course?” and I couldn’t help smiling again.
He scowled at me—then suddenly changed the scowl to a sheepish grin. He said, “My God, is it that obvious?”
I said, “We-ell, I’m sort of a trained observer of homo miscalled sapiens.”
He caught at my arm again. He wasn’t grinning now, sheepishly or otherwise. He said, “Look, Doc—I don’t know what you’re thinking. But in case it’s wrong, I’d better put it right. And quick!” The fingers were sinking deeper and deeper into my flesh. He said, “You don’t know me very well, but maybe you can guess I’m not—well, I’m no Jerry Farman about women. I—well, I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that if I ever found the right one I just might transfer out of this Deep Space stuff. I mean, so that we could marry, and have a family, and be together the way human beings were meant to—”
He stopped as abruptly as he’d begun. He was bitterly embarrassed, not by me so much as by himself.
And then, before I could think of anything to say, he let go of my arm and pulled the back of a hand across his forehead and said, in a hushed voice that was almost a whisper, “Jesus, Doc—that tiger! If I’d been a split microsecond later with that blaster—” He closed his eyes for an instant, trying to shut out a sight behind them.
And then he said, “Now why the hell would he want to kill Altaira?”
Without thinking I said, “John, where’s your memory? Didn’t I tell you the story of the Unicorn?”
A slow flush crept up into his face, and I could have happily cut out my tongue. The trouble was that I’d suddenly realized how much I liked this boy, and the discovery had startled me into being utterly tactless.
The flush died away. “I see what you mean,” he said, and his face had its poker mask on again.
He walked across to the center window and stood looking out of it for a moment. There was something about the set of his shoulder; the boy had disappeared, and this was Commander Adams again. Commander Adams once more wrestling with the problems of duty . . .
III
It was nearly dusk when we drove away, Adams at the wheel.
As we started around the curve into the grove of trees, I turned in my seat and saw Altaira still standing on the patio, staring after us.
I told Adams, and he nodded. His face was set, and I thought he looked ten years older.
We were two-thirds up the long slope to the desert before either of us spoke again. And then he said, suddenly, “Quite a day, huh? How d’you feel, Doc?”
“Unreal,” I said. “And God-awfully tired!” I wished he hadn’t asked me; it made me feel worse.
There was another silence after that. It lasted until we were through the gap in the rocks. I was three-quarters asleep when he said, just as if we’d been talking all the time, “That roller-coaster trip? I suppose we did take it? . . . Those umpty-million relays! That hell-hole in the looking glass! . . . We aren’t having nightmares, are we?”
“I wish we were,” I said.
I wanted to leave it at that, but he wouldn’t let me. He said, “That god-damn power! What the hell is it, Doc?”
I said, “I don’t know! I’m no scientist.” But then a memory rang in my head. “Remember what he said down there? ‘Cosmic power.’ Do you think he meant it, by any chance?”
The tractor swerved as Adams looked at me, startled. “Christ!” he said, “I wonder—”
There was more silence then, but no more dozing for me. My mind had started working again. I found myself going over every minute of this extraordinary day—and coming up with one vast Why . . .
Why the huge instrument to do away with instrumentality? Why the device which measured intellects with one hand and boosted them with the other? Why the extermination, in what Morbius had called ‘one single night,’ of the whole race of Krell super-beings? Why Morbius’ dread of being forced to report on his discoveries? Why the terra-type animals? And why, why, why hadn’t their development included protective coloration?
I stopped the why-ing right there, because the last was one which, conceivably, I could do something about answering. And any answer in this maze of riddles was better than none, might even give the key to others. Half an hour’s work in my surgery—an hour’s—and I might come up with something. I could only try. I made up my mind to start the minute I was back on board, or at least as soon as we’d had food . . .
I looked around. Adams was driving pretty fast, even though it was quite dark now. But we’d passed the chasm, so there was nothing to worry about. I began thinking about Farman and the others. I wondered whether there’d been any more mysterious happenings, and then realized that if there had, Jerry would have got in touch with Adams on the audi-video.
The lights of the ship were showing more and more plainly now. They’d been augmented by a flare which I figured must be just by Quinn’s rig. And that started me thinking about Quinn, and how it really should have been he to whom
Morbius showed the Krell powerhouse . . .
Adams said out of the blue, “Lonnie’s got to see that underground stuff,” and I laughed and said something about one of us being a telepath.
The moons were coming up. Their green-grey glow was changing the ship’s lights to a glaring, brazen yellow which didn’t fit the Altairian landscape. It was odd. It made me feel, suddenly and for the first time, that after all we were the interlopers.
“The fence is up,” Adams said, and I peered ahead and saw the metal posts, at regular forty-foot intervals, standing all around the perimeter like inanimate sentries.
They looked innocuous, even faintly silly. But when we passed the twenty-yard mark, they burst into crackling life. Between them, great twenty-foot jets of blue-white shot out to join each other, looking like flaring wires. First they were only in that section immediately in our path, but almost at once, as the other posts picked up the impulse, they spread until they outlined the whole perimeter. Inside, the guards came running, converging on the point where the fence first was activated. I could hear the Bosun’s voice shouting orders—and the beam of a searchlight from the ship cut a big ribbon out of the darkness, swept in narrowing arcs, and then hit us, pinning the tractor in a flood of brightness.
Adams said, “Good!” and nodded to himself.
More orders from inside, and within seconds the fence was dead—just a series of metal posts again. The searchlight was switched off too, and Adams drove slowly through and parked close to the side of the ship.
Farman came up as we climbed out. He shouted, “Fence on!” into the darkness, and I heard the click-clock of a big switch. He looked at Adams and said, “Hi, Skipper,” and then was formal with, “Fence established. Nothing to report.”
Adams said, “Fine. How’s Lonnie getting along with that modulator?”
Farman said, “Been shut up in his shop all day. You get anything out of Morbius?”
Adams didn’t answer; he started for the gangway, and Jerry and I tagged along . . .
It was the Cook’s off-watch and we had a cold meal served by one of the orderlies. Adams and I were both ravenous, but in between mouthfuls we told Farman and Lonnie Quinn about everything we’d seen. Quinn hadn’t wanted to leave his work, and it had taken a personal visit to the workshop to get him up to mess. But now he was glad he’d come. In fact, he was fascinated, and fired questions at us as fast as a Colt-Vickers disintegrator. His face had smears of grease all over it, and his hair was standing on end, and his eyes were sparking behind their huge glasses.
A lot of the questions were beyond us, but we did our best. And we questioned him too. About the power source and that hellish set of flame seventy miles under the ground.
When we’d described it—with me doing most of the talking and Adams putting in the key word once in a while—I came to the use of the word ‘cosmic’ by Morbius, and how we didn’t know whether it was just a figure of speech or whether he’d meant it literally.
I thought Lonnie was going to jump right out of his chair. He was speechless for a moment, but then started another rapid-fire burst of questioning; so rapid-fire that we couldn’t catch more than one word in three.
Adams cut in on him. He said, “Hold it, Lonnie—hold it! First chance we get, you can see for yourself.”
And that was the end of the meal. Quinn shot back to his workshop, down in the bowels of the ship. Farman went to his bunk to catch a few hours sleep before his night watch. Adams, taking over, started making rounds with the Bosun—and I went to the surgery.
I locked myself in, and put on an overall. I set up my operating-table, and got the lights fixed right, and then went to my spare vacuum-locker, and opened it and took out the body of the titi . . .
IV
It must have been about half an hour later, while I was staring white-faced and groggy at the opened-up subject on my table, that the EM fence began to act up. As Adams told it to me afterwards, he was standing between the gangway and the rig, talking to the Bosun, when it happened. The section of fence right behind the rig began to spark violently, sending out its joining sets of electric fire. This meant—or should have meant—that something or someone was approaching from outside the perimeter.
But the shadowless sand, almost black in the moonlight, was visible for miles. And there was nothing on it. Nothing moving or still.
“What the hell—?” said Adams, and the Bosun shouted for a hand called Nevski, who was Quinn’s most trusted helper and in charge of the fence.
Nevski came running—and all the time the fence went on sparking. Only it was sparking differently now, with the bolts of flame no longer joining each other but growing shorter and shorter.
And the rest of the fence, which should have gone into sympathetic operation, was completely dead.
Adams didn’t like it. Nor did the Bosun, who began to shout for extra men but countermanded the orders when Nevski, a phlegmatic soul, merely rubbed at his chin and said, “That ****ing continuer must be shorting again,” and marched off toward the fence-control gear on the other side of the rig.
Adams and the Bosun followed him—perhaps, as we figured later, saving their lives in the process.
They watched while he grumbled his way down into the machine-pit and started tinkering. After a few minutes, Adams asked him whether he thought Mr. Quinn should be sent for, but Nevski, with all that sturdy independence so typical of Devisor hands, merely spat in the sand and asked, “What the * * * * can he do that I can’t do?”
It was then that the young Cadet-hand Grey came running up to Adams. He was panting, and almost dropped his D-R rifle as he saluted. He said, “Reporting off post, Sir—” and then shed all military formula. “I heard it again, Sir!” he said. “The breathing! It went right by me! But there’s nothing there! There’s nothing there!” His voice was going too quickly up the scale.
Adams barked, “Where? Where’s your post? Quick, man.”
But the boy didn’t have to reply. Because, right on top of his words, the scream came . . .
It came from the direction of the ship, and everyone outside the ship—sentries, mechanics, Adams and the Bosun—all heard it.
It was the dreadful scream of a man in terror and agony. It hung on the still air for one intolerable moment—and then died. After it, the silence seemed thicker than it had before.
It was Lonnie Quinn who had screamed, and it was Adams who found what was left of him . . .
I saw it only a few minutes later, after Grey had come pounding at the surgery door.
The boy was in such a state that he could barely articulate, and it was with only the knowledge that Quinn was dead that I rushed out of the ship and around toward the little open port of his workshop. Over my head, the communicator’s emergency siren howled, followed by a voice shouting orders. And the searchlight came on at full power and began to sway its beam around the desert.
There was no one with the remnants of Alonzo Quinn when I reached them, and hardened surgeon though I was, I had trouble resisting an almost irresistible urge to vomit.
He had been, literally, torn to pieces. Worse, he had first been dragged bodily out through the port—whose aperture was too small by many inches to force his body through except by the exertion of some almost unthinkable power. There were dreadful evidences on the rim of the port—and the rest, far worse, was strewn about the sand. Not a limb had been left on the trunk, and even that had been ripped asunder . . . And the head—well, it lay face downwards, thank God!
In my mind I kept hearing Morbius’ voice—“. . . Like rag dolls—ripped to pieces by a malignant child . . .”
V
It was after midnight when Adams called me and Farman into the mess room for a conference. A full strength guard was still surrounding the ship, and the fence, so far as any of the Divisors could tell, was working again.
The searchlight was tireless, but it had revealed nothing and no one. Except—
Another trail of the great amorp
hous footprints. They first appeared immediately outside the fence, just where Adams and the Bosun had been standing when the so-called shorting had taken place. And they led straight to the ship and around it to the port of Quinn’s workshop.
And there they stopped. Whatever made them must have passed within six feet of Adams, made direct way between two constantly patroling sentries, and crossed the full vision-field of the gunner stationed at the rear blaster.
But it hadn’t been seen; and the footprints had come out of nowhere, dissolved into nowhere . . .
And now the three surviving officers of United Planets Cruiser C-57-D were looking at each other over the bare mess-table.
Adams said, “I’ve made up my mind. We’re getting out. It’s clear my duty’s to take Morbius back. Come daylight we start the job of putting that core back in the ship. With Lonnie gone, it’s going to take—” he pondered—“maybe twelve hours. But we might be attacked again while we’re on the job.” He looked from me to Farman. “Any ideas?”
There was an urgent knocking on the door, and the Bosun marched in. He was obviously the bearer of more bad news, but he was very military, very correct.
He snapped a salute at Adams and said, “Report man missing, sir. Zero two four eight six three—Specialist First Class Dirocco, James.”
Adams jumped up—and sat down again. He said, “That’s the Cook,” and the Bosun said, “Yessir. He’s gone, sir.”
Adams shot questions at him, but didn’t find out much. The whole story was that when, only a few moments ago, the Bosun had been around the perimeter, checking each man at his post, he’d discovered that Cookie was missing. He’d made a full search, including the ship, and there was no doubt about it. There had been conflicting stories from the other men as to when he was last seen—but the fact remained he had disappeared.
“The crew was wonderin’, sir,” the Bosun said, “whether we’d be puttin’ out a search party—”
He got no farther. Adams said, “No!” slamming his first down on the table.