by Ray Cummings
3
I have no idea how long it was before Halsey came back. Snap and Iwere seated on a low metal bench against the wall. The effect of theparalysing ray was wearing off. We were tingling all over, our sensesstill confused.
Halsey stalked in upon us. "So you are recovered?"
Snap stammered, "We--I say, we're sorry as hell we acted like that."
"I know you are." His voice softened. "If I could have done anythingelse, believe me, I would have. But I don't think harm will come tothem. They're clever."
"Are they outside?" I asked. "Did they find a way of meeting theMartians? How long have you been gone?"
Halsey merely stared at me as though he had no intention of answering.And then the audiphone on the desk buzzed.
"This is Halsey," he said. "Yes, I have them here. Bring them--did yousay bring them?"
We could not hear the answering voice, for Halsey had the muffler incontact.
"No, I would prefer not to come. I'm watching something. I'm at theRed Spark Cafe. Well, I'm going back to my office presently to waitthere."
He continued in code. Like Snap, I had never had occasion to learn it.The words were a strange sounding staccato gibberish. He ended, "Iwill send them, Grantline. Very well, I'll tell them to locate him. Atonce, yes." He closed off the audiphone.
Halsey swung on us. "You're all right now?"
"Yes." I stood up, drawing Snap up with me. "What is wanted of usColonel?"
"That's better, Gregg." He smiled, but he was still grim. "I wantedyou here to wait for this call from the Conclave of Public Safety. Itmet at midnight. They have ordered both of you there."
"That's a secret meeting, isn't it?" asked Snap. "There was no reportof it over the air tonight."
"Yes. Secret." He was leading us to the door. "They won't need you formore than half an hour. When they finish, come back to my office. Youcan come openly." He stood with his finger on the door lever."Good-by, lads. Foley will lead you to the service room. You are totake a mail cylinder for Postal Switch-station 20. They'll re-routeyou from there to the conclave auditorium."
The door slid up. "When you disembark," he added, "Ask for JohnnyGrantline. You are to sit with him."
He showed us out and the door slid down before him. We trudged thecorridor, and Snap gripped me.
"For myself," he whispered swiftly, "I'll go to the damnable conclavebecause I'm ordered. But I won't stay there long. Once we get out ofit, if I don't route myself back to the Red Spark, I'm a motor-oiler."
I agreed with him. We had a mental picture of Anita and Venza in theRed Spark's public room. Doubtless Orentino had created a way for themto meet Molo. They would sit there in the Red Spark with that drinkingparty, and in less than an hour we would be back.
But as we crossed diagonally across an end of the main room with Foleyleading us, we caught a glimpse of Molo's table. The party was stillthere, but Molo, Anita, and Venza were gone!
We had no time to get any information. Foley abruptly left us andanother man took his place. In the service room a passenger cylinderwas waiting. Our guide entered it with us.
At the switch station we had the breath knocked out of us. Afteranother ten minutes in the vacuum tube, we reached our unknowndestination. The cylinder-slide opened. We found ourselves with a loneguard; and through a gloomy arcade opening, Johnny Grantline wasadvancing, to greet us.
"Well, so here you are, Gregg. Hell to pay heaven, going on here. Comeon in; I'll tell you."
"We were sent for," Snap said.
"Yes, but they don't want you yet. Come in here."
He waved away the guard and led us through a padded arcade into alow-vaulted audience room, windowless and gloomy. Across it, a doorwaypanel stood ajar. Grantline peered through it. There was the glow oflight from the adjoining room and the distant murmur of many voices.
Grantline closed the door. "Sit down and I'll tell you...."
"Where are we?" I asked.
"The ninth Conclave Hall."
I knew its location: Lower Manhattan, high under the city roof.
Grantline produced little cigarette cylinders. "Steady your nerves,lads; you'll need it."
He grinned at us. The hand with which he lighted my cylinder wassteady as a tower-base, but he was excited. I could see it by theglint in his eyes, and hear it in his voice.
"What's going on?" Snap demanded.
"It's about this invading planet. By the gods, when you hear what'sreally been learned about it!"
"Well, what?" I asked.
He sketched what he had heard this night at the conclave. Themysterious invader was inhabited.
"How do they know that?" Snap put in.
"Wait. I'll tell you the rest of it. The accursed thing changes itsorbit. It banks and turns like a spaceship! It stopped out in space;it's poised out there now between Mars and Jupiter. A world about afifth the size of the Moon, and the beings on it can control itsmovements. They've brought it in from interstellar space, into oursolar system. Evidently the point they've reached now is far as theywant to come. They've poised out there, getting ready to attack, notonly us, but Mars and Venus simultaneously."
Grantline gazed at us through the smoke of his cigarette. He was muchlike Snap, small, wiry, brisk of movement and manner, but older. Hishair was graying at the temples; his voice carried the authority ofone accustomed to commanding men.
"Don't ask me for the technicalities of how they reached theseconclusions. I'm no astronomer. I'm only telling you their conclusionsand what their discussions have been here for the past hour."
Heaven knows, we had no inclination to dispute him. What we had seenand heard at the Red Spark tallied with his words.
He went on swiftly, "The attack, of whatever nature it may be, isimpending at once. Not next month, or next week, but now. Lord, Gregg,I don't blame you for staring like that. You don't know what's beengoing on for the past two days on Earth, and Venus and Mars. It's allbeen suppressed. Neither did I, until I heard it here tonight. TheU.S.W., the Martian Union, the Venus Free State, are all preparing forwar. Every government spaceship on Earth is being commissioned. We'renot going to sit around and wait for invaders to land; the war won'tbe fought on Earth if we can help it."
We stared. Snap asked, "What makes them so sure?"
"That war is coming? Plenty. This new planet has sent out spaceships.The planet itself is hovering sixty million miles away from us, aboutforty million miles from Mars and close to ninety million from Venus.Perhaps its leaders think that's the most strategic spot.
"Then it sent out spaceships, three of them. One is hovering close toVenus. Another is near Mars, and the third is some 200,000 miles offEarth. Several of our interplanetary freighters are overdue; it seemsnow that they must have encountered these invading ships and beendestroyed.
"Still more, and worse: these three hovering ships have already landedthe enemy on Mars and Venus. The helio-reports mention mysteriousencounters in Ferrok-Shahn and Grebhar. For three or four days, Marshas been in a panic of apprehension; Venus almost as bad. And somehave landed here. Not many, perhaps; but one has been captured. Athing--God, it's almost beyond description."
We could well agree with that, since Snap and I had just seen one.
"They've got it here," Grantline was saying. "They've tried to make ittalk. They can't but they're going to try again."
He jumped to his feet and went to the door. "They're bringing it in."Upon his face was a look of awed horror.
We stood crowding the small door-oval. It gave onto a darkened balconyof the conclave hall. The girders of the city roof were over us. Therewere a few official spectators sitting up here in the dark on thebalcony, but none noticed us.
The lower floor of the hall was lighted. Around the polished oblongtables perhaps a hundred scientists and high governmental officials ofthe three worlds were seated. Near the center of the hall was a smalldais-platform. On a table there, someone had just placed a circularblack box, similar to the one we had seen prev
iously.
The hall was hushed and tense. On the dais stood a group of Earthofficials. One of them spoke. "Here it is, gentlemen. And this time,by God, we'll make it speak."
Grantline whispered, "That's the War Secretary from Greater London."
I recognized him: Brayley, Commander in Chief of the land, air, waterand space armies of the United States of the World. He was gigantic instature, with a great shock of gray-white hair. A commanding figure,if there ever was one.
Beside him, Nippor, the Japanese representative in Greater New York,seemed a pigmy. The acoustics of the silent hall carried his softvoice up to us. "I would be afraid of drugs. Will we use force? It isvital."
"Yes, by God! Anything."
It seemed that everyone in the hall must be shuddering: I could feelit like an aura pounding up at me. Brayley lifted the box-lid, reachedin and raised the horrible thing. He held it up, a two-foot ball ofpalpitating gray-white membrane. Another living brain.
"Now, damn you, you're going to talk to us! Understand that? We'regoing to make you talk. Get that box out of the way."
They flung the box to the floor, and Brayley placed the brain on thetable.
A glare of light, focussed on it, showed beneath the stretched tautmembrane the convolutions of the brain, like tangled purple worms. Theblood-vessels seemed distended almost to bursting now. The gruesomeface, with popping eyes and that gaping mouth, showed a horribletravesty of terror. From where its ears should have been, a crookedlittle arm of flabby, gray-white flesh came down, one on each side andbraced the table. And I saw now that it had a shriveled body, or atleast little legs, bent, almost crushed under by its weight.
"Now, damn you," Brayley said, rubbing off his hands on a rough towel,"for the last time: will you talk?"
The goggling eyes held a terrified but baleful gaze upon Brayley'sface. Did it understand? The eyes were fronted our way, and suddenlytheir glance swung up so that I seemed for an instant to see down intothem. And it struck me then: this was a thing of greater intelligencethan my own. A humanoid, with brain so developed that through myriadgenerations the body was shriveled, almost gone. A mind was housedhere, an intelligence housed in this monstrous brain.
Were these the beings of the new planet which had come to attack us?But how could this helpless creature, incapable of almost everything,obviously, save thought, do the work of its world?
Then I recalled again that insulated room of the Red Spark Cafe: thethin, ten-foot hooded shape which was carrying the box. Was that,perhaps, an opposite type of being with the brain submerged, dwarfed,and the body paramount? Were there, on this mysterious planet, twoco-existing types, each a specialist, one for the physical work andthe other for the mental?
I stood with Snap and Grantline in that dark balcony doorway, gazingdown to where the giant brain stood braced upon its shriveled arms andlegs, and realized why we of Earth and Venus and Mars are all cast inthe same mould we call human. It is a little family of planets, herein our solar system; for countless eons we have been close neighbors.The same sunlight, the same general conditions of life, the sameseed, were strewn here by a wise Creator. A man from the Orient isdifferent from an Anglo-Saxon; a man of Mars differs a little more.But basically they are the same.
Yet, confronting us now was a new type, from realms of interstellarspace, far beyond our solar system.
"For the last time, will you talk?" snapped Brayley.
There was another interval of silence. The eyes of the brain were verywatchful. Its gaze roved the hall as though it were seeking for help.It shifted its little arms on the table, seemingly exhausted from thephysical effort of supporting itself.
Brayley's voice came again. "Doubtless you can feel pain acutely. Weshall see."
With what effort of will to overcome his revulsion we may only guess,he reached forward and pinched the little arm. The result waselectrifying. From the upended slit of mouth in that goggling face,came a scream. It pierced the heavy tense silence of the hall, ghastlyin its timbre, like nothing any of us had ever heard before. And in itwas conveyed agony as though Brayley had not merely pinched thatflabby arm, but had thrust a red-hot knife into its vitals.
The brain could feel pain indeed. It crouched with stiffened arms andlegs. The membrane of its great head seemed to bulge with greaterdistension; the knotted blood-vessels were gorged with purple blood.The eyes rolled. Then it closed its mouth. Its gaze steadied uponBrayley's face, so baleful a gaze that as I could see the reflectionof its luminous purple glow a shudder of fear and revulsion swept me.
"So you did not like that?" Brayley steadied his voice. "If you don'twant more, you had better speak. How did you get here on Earth? Whatare you trying to do here?"
There seemed an interminable silence; then Nippor took a menacing stepforward. "Speak! We will force it from you!"
And then it spoke. "Do--not--touch--me--again."
Indescribable voice! Human, animal or monster no one could say. Butthe words were clear, precise; and for all their terror, they seemedto hold an infinite command.
A wave of excitement swept the hall, but Brayley's gesture silencedit. He leaped forward and bent low over the palpitating brain.
"So you can talk. You came as an enemy. We have given you everychance today for friendship, and you have refused. What are you tryingto do to us?"
It only glared.
"Speak!"
"I will not tell you anything."
"Oh, yes, you will."
"No!"
All the men on the platform were crowding close to it now.
"Speak!" ordered Brayley again. "Here in Greater New York is a hidingplace. Where is it?"
No answer.
"Where is it? You are perhaps a leader of your world. I lead ours, andI'm going to master you now. Where is this hiding place?"
The thing suddenly laughed, a gruesome, eerie cackle. "You will knowwhen it is too late. I think it is too late already."
"Too late for what?"
"To save your world. Doomed, your three worlds! Don't touch--me!"
It ended with a scream of apprehension as Nippor grasped the crookedlittle arm. "Tell us!"
"No!" It screamed again. "Let--me--go!"
"Tell us!" Nippor strengthened his squeezing grip. The thing waswrithing, the thin ball of membrane palpitating, heaving. And suddenlyit burst. Over all its purpled surface, blood came with a gush.
Nippor and Brayley staggered backward. The scream of the brain endedin a choking gurgle. The little legs and tiny body wilted under it;the round ball of membrane sank to the table. It rolled sidewise uponone arm and ear, and in a moment its palpitation ceased. A purple-redmass of blood, it lay deflated and flabby.
It was dead.