Anzar had a communication problem. The only way in which he could communicate, reckoned the IPF man, would be by sending an old fashioned, written message through the cylinder prior to anything experimental which he might release through it.
“Now, just suppose,” thought the lieutenant, “that he had been taken a little by surprise. And had decided on transmitting Cameron, before he had sent communication—assuming that the guards or technicians at the receiving end, would be all ready to pick Cameron up as he arrived. If prior to sending Cameron, his main transmission material had been only animal or vegetable, the guards wouldn’t be expecting trouble—there was a world of difference between, guinea pigs, dogs, and horses: and a tough, armed, IPF security lieutenant.”
Cameron’s hand travelled casually, disarmingly over the glass towards his belt. He had heard footsteps.…
This time the footsteps weren’t mechanical. Who or whatever was making them, had some allegiance at least to flesh and blood. To muscle and bone, rather than to plastic and steel.
He waited with baited breath, wondering if, when the hatch cover was released, the life giving air in the cylinder would be forced out, and he would collapse, a helpless splodge of exploded flesh and blood, on the floor, like a diver who had suddenly been robbed of the protection of his suit. Or an astronaut in a pressurised cabin which has suddenly collapsed … and exposed him to the deadly vacuum of space itself.
There was a faint hissing noise as the hatch opened, and an almost imperceptible change in the pressure of the cylinder—but otherwise the atmosphere remained constant, steady and breathable.…
There was, if anything, a vague smell which reminded the young IPF man oddly of hot plastic. It was a smell which one associated with a laboratory, almost any laboratory. Don supposed that technicians worked with similar materials no matter what their planet. For basically the elements of the universe were not so very different one from another, as to allow of so many different combinations.
It was the ingenuity of man, not the paucity of his resources which restricted his technological and scientific progress. The thing on the other side of the cylinder that now faced Don Cameron was as weird and bizarre as anything that ever came from the imagination of a science fiction writer. It was a horror-writer’s nightmare come to life.… It was so hideous and indescribably ghastly by earthly standards, that Don Cameron, tough as he was, and who had tried to prepare his mind for almost any eventuality was totally unprepared for this. His recovery was almost instantaneous—a tribute to the elasticity and brilliance of his mentality. The thing looked vaguely like a cross between a deformed octopus and a sea anemone. It was covered with tentacles and taste buds; with waving pseudo-pods, and twisting writhing limbs. The noise that he had originally taken for footsteps, had been the noise which it had made with a pair of tentacles flopping against the side of the cylinder. In only one thing had he been right—that was, that this was not mechanical. It did live—if anything so hideous could be called a form of life. As a child he had been revolted by pictures of white slimy things that lived in lightless waters, below the caverns of the earth, and now here was something a thousand times more revolting. Something which seemed to emit an aura of intangible evil.
It looked at him from three, triangularly mounted, baleful red and green eyes. If the eyes are the mirror of the soul, and if Don Cameron was reading them aright, the physical proportions of the creature were no libel upon its character.…
It was a hideous, misshapen body, governed by an even more hideous and misshapen mind.
“So this,” thought Cameron “was a native Sirian without his disguise. This was a native Syrian, living intelligence, without the dismembered atom transmutation which had produced the strange Challenger—like effigy of a man which called itself Professor Anzar.
There was no time to waste. No time at all. Cameron dived for his gun in the style of an old-time Western hero. His hands streaked down like a blur of light, and before the weird thing—the hideous octopoid Sirian, with the blemished eyes—had time to make any offensive or defensive action, the great blaster exploded just once, and the efficacy of an energy charge proved itself yet again, even on an alien life-form on an alien planet. In death the grotesque monster was even more hideous than it had been in life.
Don Cameron climbed out through the hatch, wondering what awaited him on the other side.
It was obviously a laboratory of some kind, similar in many respects to that which he had seen in Anzar’s own house, on a rather larger scale.
Then his eyes fell upon the actual control panel lying beside the cylinder. It was not as complex as it might have been.
There was one, simple operating lever, with a position marked at either end of its slot in two colours. It was obvious to the young IPF man that it, at the moment, rested in the receiving position. All that was necessary then, was to throw the lever back, climb back into the cylinder, and be transmitted to earth.
Would that be possible without being immersed in the yellow paralyser gas first?
At a guess he thought it would. He thought the paralyser gas was an added refinement that was necessary when the transmittee was no willing passenger.
He hoped he was right! He had to be right if he was ever to see earth again. He was in the very act of readjusting the lever, when there was a noise from inside the cylinder.… Before his startled eyes, Sergeant Joe Harding appeared.… Don Cameron looked at him in amazement!
Was this wishful thinking? For a second he thought it was Anzar, in another disguise.
But the sound of the sergeant’s voice reassured him.
“Joe, is it really you?” he repeated in spite of himself. The question was impulsive, unnecessary, but it had to be asked. Some kind of subconscious mechanism deep down within him, had to ask it.
It was imperative to his mental well-being.…
It was a kind of intuitive question.
“Yes, sure it’s me!” said Harding, rapidly. The sergeant and the lieutenant exchanged experiences.…
“So that’s how things are,” said Don.
“I was a mug, I’m sorry,” said Harding. “Fancy falling for an old trick like that!”
Cameron shook his head.
“I should have fallen for it. In fact I did fall for a similar one. I appreciate the fact that you came after me.” Both meant a great deal more than the actual words that they spoke. There was feeling between them that ran deeper than the comradeship that was sharing their common duty. Fighting shoulder to shoulder in a great common cause.
“There’s something we’ve gotta know,” said Cameron swiftly. Harding was ahead of him.
“You get back in the cylinder, skip, and I’ll put the hatch back and fire you off, and maybe I can force one of these to do the same for me at gunpoint.…”
Cameron shook his head.
“We’re not doing that, and if we were I’d fire you off! Captain’s privilege—stay with the ship!”
“You ain’t a Captain, you’re only a lieutenant,” grinned Harding.
“All right! Lieutenant’s privilege,” said Cameron with a grin. “We go together Joe, or we don’t go. Right?”
“Fair enough.”
“The problem is, how do we do it?”
“I was wondering if that hatch is essential.”
“Would they build it if it wasn’t?”
“I dunno. If only we had something to try it out on.”
“What about that pile of jellied eels on the floor?” said Joe Harding with laconic humour.
“Let me introduce you to a native Sirian.”
“I guessed that’s what it was, from what you’ve just told me,” rejoined the sergeant. “Pleasant looking cuss—I should imagine he was even more so in life!”
“About the same. No aesthetic value, as a cadaver or as a living entity,” said Don Cameron. “He wouldn’t make a bad guinea pig though—sling him in and leave the hatch open and see what happens when we press the firing lever.”
>
“Fair enough!”
“Watch it!” shouted Harding suddenly.
A far door in the laboratory had opened and another of the hideous tentacled creatures had just writhed its way in.
Both IPF men were incredibly fast on the draw, and the two shots synchronised in one reverberating explosion.
The thing that had just come in never had a chance. “If they didn’t hear the first shot, I’ll bet they heard that little duet,” said the lieutenant.
“Yes, I reckon they did,” agreed Joe. “It only means we’ve got two guinea pigs instead of one.”
They dragged the recumbent corpses across to the cylinder, and tossed them through the hatch unceremoniously.
Harding pulled down the lever at Cameron’s direction. There was a strange feeling of vibration in the room. A feeling as if all was not well, and yet when they released the lever and looked across at the cylinder again, it was as empty as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.
“That answers one small part of the problem,” said Cameron. “They go somewhere!”
“Yea—question is—where?” said Harding.
“The only place they can go, I reckon, is the place they’re beamed to—which at the moment, barring any kind of accident, must be Anzar’s laboratory.”
“Oh, won’t he be surprised to see his friends! I wonder how we can get round that yellow fog,” said the IPF man.
“I don’t think we’re going to have much of a problem,” said Joe. “You remember, I was telling you that they didn’t get Pete Neil.
“Don’t speak too soon,” laughed Cameron. “Any second now Pete is likely to pop up in that cylinder wiping bits of dismembered Sirian off his face! Like a guy who just took a dive into a stack of hamburgers and onions.”
The simile was picturesque if not exactly literal. It struck Harding as being extremely funny.
Cameron went on.
“You think Anzar is probably in IPF hands by now?”
“Well I reckon so,” said Joe. “He could take care of an odd officer on his own, but he couldn’t hold off the force of the IPF, not if he had all the robots on Sirius helping him.”
“No, I agree,” said Don. “Do you think it would be good policy to wait until we’ve given them a good chance to break in?”
“We don’t know how time cogs … we may get back on earth and find we’ve been away five years! Or we may arrive back within minutes of departure.”
“Yes, that’s a problem,” said Harding.
The problem was suddenly solved for them by the clamour outside.
They raced to the heavy laboratory door and blasted off down the corridor into a twisting mob of Sirian technicians or guards, or such they judged the weird monstrosities to be who were making their way to the laboratory.
They slammed the door and hurled home the bolts into ferroplastic sockets.
“That’ll hold for a few seconds, but not a lot more,” said Cameron, panting. “Let’s get into that cylinder and get going.”
“Just imagine,” said Harding, “that one of us gets in, sort of leans out, and presses that lever over.”
“Yes, go on—you go back without a head and shoulders! No thanks!” he picked a heavy plastic bench top from its moorings, balanced it above the lever, slung a coil of wire that lay beneath the bench around the plastic slab, passed the other end into and around the cylinder, and climbed inside.
“Come on Joe, quick! I’m hoping that when I pull this wire, the weight of the slab is going to drop the lever, and hold it there.”
“Well, if you’re wrong, we’re going to finish up floating around in space somewhere. Halfway between earth and Sirius, like a shuttle service.…”
“We just gotta be right,” said Cameron, and he pulled the wire.
The plastic slab slipped down onto the lever, and held.… There was that awful disintegrating feeling again, and they were in radionic hyper-space once more. Flashing away towards earth as super-electronic particles. The two of them together. As the last vestiges of consciousness seemed to fade from Harding’s mind he was aware of the presence of a fear. A strange, rather irrational fear that somehow their bodies would get mixed up on the way, and they would arrive as a four-armed, four-legged, two-headed giant. Like some kind of adult Siamese twin. It was not a pleasant thought! After what seemed an eternity, but may have been nothing but split seconds, they were aware of a strange disturbance in the vortex.
Something seemed to hit them at fantastic speed. It was over faster than it had begun … they were both aware of it, yet neither was in a position to communicate with the other.
Communication requires some medium. It is impossible for two disintegrated men, whose mere spiritual consciousnesses remain alive, to communicate with one another.
And then, they were reassembling.
This time the sensation was vaguely familiar, and they recognized Anzar’s cylinder … as they spluttered back into consciousness.
They lay gasping and panting in the metal container, and realized that they had made it!
Suddenly Harding knew why they were panting, practically exhausted. Pressure was low. It wasn’t quite a vacuum or they would have blasted apart but it was rarefied, it was like trying to breathe on the top of the Himalayas.… His hand flashed to his gun again, and the hatch of the cylinder disintegrated in a splutter of energy.
They scrambled out sucking in lungfuls of clean, good, earth air… It was then that Don Cameron noticed that they were in the midst of a ruin … the House of Anzar was a mass of rubble, smoke and debris, and there were IPF men everywhere rounding up what remained of Anzar’s robots.
On the Sirian planet the guards had finally succeeded in smashing down the tough ferroplastic door of the laboratory. But they were too late.
Unbeknown to the IPE men there was a very weird secondary reaction that was set in motion when the cylinder was used without a hatch. It produced no harm to the occupants of the cylinder. But the laboratory and its environs suffered effects that were worse than fatal. As a by-product of the subatomic radionic dissolving process, an extremely high frequency sonic vibration beam was set in motion, radiating from a focal point approximating to the hatch cover of the open cylinder almost like the shock waves that tremble behind a fast moving jet plane, a by-product of its sheer speed, which can disintegrate that plane, and anything over which it may fly, unless the aerodynamicists take the necessary precautions. In this case the necessary precaution was the installation of a hatch cover. The safety valve had been left off. The strange flashing feeling that the men had had, as though something had passed them at great speed, had been Anzar. Anzar had been launched by his own robots. Anzar was now halfway back to his own world and his own people. Anzar it was who had passed them, and had emerged from the cylinder at the very moment that the guards burst in.…
Anzar, who at that very second was re-assuming his own shape, and not the Challenger-body which he had originally adopted. Anzar who was changing from a short giant of a man into a twisted reptilian, octopoid shape with tentacles and pseudopods. He too, suddenly saw the danger.…
He, too, realised what it was that had passed through him. He knew that it must have been the earth men coming back! A sinking feeling of despair, followed by rage and frustration, shot through his hideous beings making his tentacles twitch, and his antennae vibrate, and the three triangulated eyes look even more blemished than usual.
With the strength and speed of desperation, the despairing Sirians forced the hatch cover back into position.…
Too late.…
Too late.
The radionic disintegration beam on the hypersonic frequency had already set up a disintegrating frequency. The whole planet was trembling shaking, as deep craters and cracks, and movements which made earthquakes seem like children’s cap-guns going off split and tore and rent asunder. Gravity and centrifugal force did the rest. The whole geophysical planetary balance of Anzar’s world was lost.
And then, almost as rapidl
y as it had begun, it was all over.
The Sirian planetary system had an asteroid belt which it had never had before!
And Anzar and his kind died. Died because of their greed and their avarice.
Their greed for the fair green fields of earth.
The flowers of earth had not been destined for then to pick.…
If you’ve enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you’ll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.
For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …
For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …
Visit the SF Gateway.
www.sfgateway.com
Also by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe
Writing as Bron Fane
Blue Juggernaut
Last Man on Earth
Nemesis
Rodent Mutation
Softly by Moonlight
Somewhere Out There
Suspension
The Intruders
The Macabre Ones
U.F.O. 517
Unknown Destiny
Writing as John E. Muller
A 1000 Years On
Beyond the Void
Beyond Time
Crimson Planet
Dark Continuum
Forbidden Planet
Infinity Machine
Mark of the Beast
Micro Infinity
Orbit One
Out of the Night
Perilous Galaxy
Phenomena X
Reactor XK9
Special Mission
Spectre of Darkness
Survival Project
The Day the World Died
The Exorcists
The Eye of Karnak
The Man From Beyond
The Man Who Conquered Time
The Mind Makers
The Negative Ones
World of the Gods Page 12