Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  It was the first time that Kem had seen more than the head and arms of any of these terrifying people. Both of them were standing on the ground, and the tops of their heads came up to within a few feet of the roof of the Saucer. They were twenty feet high, broad in proportion and, from what he could make out in the starlight, appeared to be naked. His head was now hurting frightfully again, and as he stared at them through a mist of pain he saw one of them pick up Carmen.

  She must have regained consciousness; for, as the monster pushed her through the doorway of the Saucer, she let out a piercing cry. Had Kem just arrived on the scene in full possession of his senses and as fit as he had been that morning, he could still have had no possible hope of saving her; but her cry, like a warning bell, roused him anew to the acuteness of his own danger.

  As he struggled to his feet he saw the other giant turn towards him. Lurching round, he staggered a few yards, then fell. In five strides the monster was upon him. He felt the huge hands seize him round the middle and lift him into the air. Kicking and squirming, he let out a shout with all the remaining power of his lungs. He had no chance to give another. The great hands shook him as a terrier shakes a rat, reducing him to breathless silence. Half stooping, as though burdened with something much heavier than Kem, and dragging its feet as if terribly weary, the monster carried him to the Saucer and thrust him into the dimly-lit interior.

  Again his consciousness ebbed and for some minutes he had only the vaguest ideas about what was going on around him. It was not till his head cleared a little that he could even take in his immediate surroundings. Then he found that he was lying sideways on a surface like opaque glass, looking at Escobar’s bandaged head. Turning over on his back, he saw that the ceiling of the Saucer was made of the same substance. With a groan he hoisted himself into a sitting position and gazed about him.

  He was in a chamber that, had he been a caterpillar, would have had the proportions of a shallow, inverted soup-plate; except that it had a central pillar some eight feet high and seven feet in diameter. The pillar was also made of the opaque material and appeared to be hollow, as the only light came from there and he could see shadows moving about inside it. The double doors of the Saucer were now closed and the two giants were lying side by side on their backs about thirty feet away from him. They were both absolutely still, and looked as if they were sound asleep. Escobar, still unconscious, lay huddled on his right, and beyond him Carmen was lying with her eyes shut, faintly moaning. Nearby the things brought from the bedroom were heaped in an untidy jumble. Round the central pillar was ranged a circle of three-feet-high square tanks. No machinery was visible, and the great low chamber contained nothing else at all.

  Almost imperceptibly the Saucer lifted and began to rock a little. Also it began to spin, although Kem did not realise it at the time, because the floor on which they were lying was gyroscopically controlled, and the ceiling, having no pattern or anything attached to it, did not appear to be moving. There was no drumming of any engine, no hiss or roar of escaping power. The Saucer was utterly silent; the only sound in it was Carmen’s low moaning.

  The speed of the ascent increased, until Kem was reminded of being carried up in the express lift of a sky-scraper. Panic seized him at the realisation that he had left the earth—perhaps for ever. He tried to stand up, but the pressure increased every second. His limbs seemed to have become as heavy as lead; an invisible weight pressed down on his aching skull. With a groan he surrendered to the force of gravity, and slumped back at full length on the floor. That brought him no relief. He felt as though some unseen contraption held every part of his body in a vice, and the turning of a thousand tiny screws were inexorably drawing it tighter. The air was forced from his lungs; his nose began to bleed; his eyes were bulging. He now lay sprawled out on the floor and crushed against it. Under the awful pressure the very life was being squeezed from him.

  Fear had left him; but all his life Kem had been intrigued by mysteries, and the urge to learn secrets still lingered in his overwrought brain. He was conscious of one last thought. It was a pity to die when fate had given him this unique chance to solve the riddle of where the Flying Saucers came from. Imperceptibly the pressure lessened, as the Saucer was now passing out of the field of the earth’s gravity. But Kem did not know that. He had fainted.

  9

  Kidnapped

  When Kem came round again his body was still racked with pain, but he was also conscious of an entirely new sensation. Instead of being crushed against the deck of the Saucer, he was barely touching it. His body seemed to have no weight at all. As he moved slightly it floated sideways several feet, as though it were a log in a still pool that had been given a little push, before coming to rest again. After a while it impinged on his overwrought brain that the Saucer must have passed out of the field of the earth’s gravity and that only the almost imperceptible pull of its base kept him from drifting up to its ceiling. He was too exhausted and bewildered by his recent ordeal to think coherently, and mercifully fell into a dreamless sleep.

  On waking his mind was clearer; but on realising his situation he was seized with panic, and with a gulp of over-mastering fear jerked himself up into a sitting position. The result was terrifying. The impulse from his hands on floor shot him straight up to the ceiling. It was spinning at great speed; so the second his head touched it he was thrown from it at a tangent, as violently as if he had been grazed by an express train. For some moments he was whirled round and round the chamber, but at gradually decreasing speed, until he managed to clutch its central pillar and get his feet back on the floor. Even then his unaccustomed lightness made his balance uncertain, and his least movement had the most unpredictable results.

  Clinging to what he supposed to be the control tower, he stared about him. The two giants were lying side by side still asleep. He saw that he had been right about their nakedness. Neither of them had a stitch on, except for the masks that covered a large part of their faces. These were divided into two parts: above the nose a single, transparent, protective cover for both eyes; below it another transparent cover for the nose and mouth, to which was attached a breathing apparatus like a box respirator. The lower cover bulged out over the nostrils, chin and cheeks, but in its centre there was an oval dimple which brought its surface close to the mouth. Below the oval, over the centre of the chin, there was a small knob, which suggested that the oval could be slid up like a visor, thus enabling food to be popped into the mouth without removing the breathing apparatus. Through the lower part of the masks he could see that neither of the giants had beards or moustaches; instead they had great tufts of stiff hair fanning out from their nostrils and ears. Apart from that and their size they differed in no obvious way from human beings. Both were males, the hair on their bodies was red, and both of them were completely bald.

  His glance shifted to Carmen. She was lying motionless on the far side of the deck from the giants, either dead or asleep. Near her lay Escobar, his wrists and ankles still tied, but moving his head slowly from side to side, which suggested that he had regained consciousness.

  Striving to keep his feet on the deck, Kem headed for Carmen, but overshot the mark, and succeeded in pulling himself up only by grabbing her dress, which drew her some distance with him. Her face was deadly pale and dried blood was caked about her ears and nostrils, but he could see from the steady rise and fall of her chest that she was still alive and, apparently, in a sound sleep. His involuntary tug on her sleeve had been quite gentle, and had not roused her; so he thought it kindest to leave her in happy oblivion until she woke of her own accord. Meanwhile, Escobar had caught sight of him and, invoking his patron saint, cried out:

  ‘For San Estévan’s sake, come here and untie me!’

  Reorienting himself cautiously, Kem glided over and, with the grace of a ballerina in the finale of the Le Lac des Cygnes, sank down besides his late antagonist. Escobar’s struggles to free himself had tightened the knots of his bonds, so it was som
e time before Kem succeeded in unpicking them, and while he was busy at it they exchanged a crossfire of abrupt questions and answers. The scientist had been conscious for three hours and during them had believed that he must either be mad or dreaming. He remembered nothing since Carmen had hit him on the head, so had escaped the shock, terror and exhaustion suffered by his fellow captives; but he had no clue whatever to the extraordinary situation in which he found himself on coming round. Kem’s explanations were the reverse of reassuring, but at least they convinced Escobar that he was sane, since he could not ignore the evidence of his own eyes, and everything about him confirmed Kem’s story.

  The injury to his head was evidently not serious, as he said that the pain in it was already easing, but his limbs were stiff from having been bound for so long and hurt him acutely as soon as he tried to move them. After a bout of pins and needles his circulation returned to normal, and he sat up, with the immediate result that he slid forward and began to rise, like an aircraft that had just taken off. Kem seized and pulled him back, upon which, to their mutual surprise, they found themselves locked in a tight embrace and grinning into one another’s faces.

  As Kem released his hold, he said, ‘It seems a bit futile now to apologise for all I did to you; but our present situation is no fault of mine, and we’re both in it up to the neck; so I hope you’ll do your best to forget what happened yesterday.’

  It was the bright sunlight now flooding the compartment with a golden glow which made Kem suppose that he had slept through the balance of the night. In fact he had, but they were not to experience night again for a long time to come, as the Saucer was already so far from Earth that it could no longer be dimmed by Earth’s shadow.

  Escobar nodded. ‘It would be senseless on my part to bear malice. Nothing that happened in the past can possibly have any bearing on our future. But what, in the name of Jesu and all His Saints, can the future hold for us?’

  ‘God alone knows!’ Kem sighed. ‘One can only suppose that these people are carrying us off to another world.’

  ‘As specimens, eh? Just as a naturalist might collect some creatures from a pond in a glass jar.’

  ‘That’s about it.’

  Escobar flung out his hands in a gesture of helplessness, and promptly went over backwards. When he recovered himself, he said: ‘That we have been kidnapped is obvious. But these great ugly beings, who you say carried us off, have the appearance of homo sapiens, only of the most primitive type. And they lie sleeping there; so evidently they have nothing to do with navigating the Saucer. There must be others—of a different race perhaps—whose high degree of intelligence will be apparent from their expressions and the development of their crania. Where are they?’

  ‘I’ve seen no one except these two,’ replied Kem. ‘It was they who carried us from the estancia and pushed us in here. I’ve seen no sign of any others, either. It was dark when we took off and the deck was lit by a steady glow from the central column over there. Above it there is a sort of squat lighthouse projecting about six feet from the roof. The column is hollow, as I noticed some faint shadows moving about inside it, and took them to be parts of the machinery that had been set in motion. It seems obvious that the hub of the thing, formed by the column and the lighthouse above it, contains its control room; but as far as I can see there is no way by which one of these huge creatures could get into it.’

  ‘I agree, and their brutish appearance convinces me that they can be only servants or slaves of other infinitely more advanced types, who must be about somewhere. Evidently their quarters are in the roomier part of the Saucer, below this deck. Come! We must find them and plead with them to take us back to Earth.’

  The only possible approach to the underside of the deck lay at its edge. This did not touch the outer shell of the Saucer, as the circular deck was some ninety feet across, leaving a uniform gap of about three feet all round between its rim and the spinning roof which sloped down towards it. Awkwardly, they propelled themselves to the edge and, gripping it with their hands to keep themselves steady, lay there on their stomachs peeping over.

  Beneath them they could see a slightly convex wall formed by what looked like thousands of strands of wire. It was about twelve feet, deep and there was no gap at either its top or bottom, where it met the upper and a lower deck. Pulling themselves along by their hands they made the full circuit of the deck on which they lay, hoping to see some break in the wire or doorway in the wall it made; but there was none. The huge coil appeared to be solid and cut them off completely from any chamber which might lie inside it between the two decks.

  After a moment, Escobar said: ‘Under the lower deck there must be a compartment similar to this. Perhaps the giants with the master-minds who control this thing have their quarters down there.’

  ‘How could they?’ Kem protested. ‘It would be upside down, and they could not possibly sit on a curved floor that is gyrating at God knows what speed.’

  ‘They would not have to. Gravity being virtually nonexistent in space, they could sit quite comfortably on the ceiling, and are probably accustomed to doing so. One can only assume that they are somewhere below us and do not wish to be bothered with us during the voyage; so have left us up here with these loutish lower-race to look after us.’

  Kem found it hard to visualise people of any kind going about their normal tasks while upside down; but on kicking his feet into the air he turned upside down himself and found that he could remain so without the slightest inconvenience, as the lack of gravity prevented the blood from running to his head. Pulling himself down beside Escobar again, he remarked unhappily:

  ‘Anyway, wherever the supermen are, there seems no way in which we can get to them; so unless they come to us we won’t be much wiser about them till the end of the voyage. I wonder where they come from.’

  Escobar shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. The universe is so vast. Much of it is probably still unknown to us, but from what we already know it is estimated to contain 300,000 million stars.’

  ‘Three hundred thousand million!’ Kem gasped. ‘Surely not; otherwise the whole sky would be like the Milky Way!’

  ‘Not necessarily: like our solar system, on an infinitely larger scale, the whole universe is flattish in form; so that if it were solid it would have the appearance of a disc, inside which our own minute system is revolving. But apart from that, on a clear night the human eye can pick out about 3,000 of the nearest or brightest stars. To form some conception of the immensity of the universe you must imagine each of those representing another sky in which you can see as many again. That would give you nine million, the number it is possible to see with a five-inch telescope. Then you must stretch your imagination once again, to visualise each of those representing another sky having yet again as many. And that gives you only 27,000 million—less than a tenth of the total. There are at least 200 stars for every man, woman and child living on Earth.’

  Kem’s chubby face suddenly broke into a grin. ‘Everyone knows that the universe is a pretty big affair, but I had no idea that it was quite as colossal as that. All the stars are other suns, though, aren’t they: so there couldn’t be any life on them?’

  ‘Certainly not life as we understand it. But many of the near stars are known to have their own systems of planets; so it is reasonable to suppose that the number of planets we cannot see is far greater than the number of stars that we can.’

  ‘Then our possible destinations are as numerous as the places in Baedeker?’

  ‘Yes. The spectroscope has shown us that all known heavenly bodies are composed of similar materials, although in different proportions. It is, therefore, a fair assumption that a high percentage of them have passed, are passing, or will pass, through the same process as Earth. The great majority of the sidereal planets are either still molten or have cooled to a point where their surfaces consist only of barren rock like our Moon. But each presumably passes through a phase, perhaps the equivalent of no longer than
a single hour in the life of a man, during which conditions would make it possible for it to support life. Therefore, although the overwhelming majority of these distant worlds can have no life upon them, their total being so enormous, everything points to there being some form of life on a small proportion of them; and in this case even a small proportion might run to several hundred thousand.’

  It was a staggering conception, but Kem had no doubt that Escobar knew what he was talking about; and, after a moment, he said, ‘I know very little about astronomy, but of course, I knew that many of the stars had solar systems of their own; so it seemed a fair bet that some of them had life of some sort on them; but don’t you find it a bit surprising that, apart from size, these Saucer people are so like human beings?’

  Escobar shrugged. ‘As yet I am not fully convinced that I have not suddenly gone insane, or am imagining all this in a delirium. But if I am in my right senses they are much the sort of beings I would expect to see. All life is governed by natural selection and survival of the fittest. The development of the man-animal to his present form has enabled him to overcome all others on our earth. His head, in relation to his body, is much larger than that of any other species, so enables him to accommodate a bigger brain. Apart from the apes, he is unique in having converted his forelegs to their present use. The upright position gives him an immense advantage over any other animal his own size, as it enables him to see further. Above all, the turning of the fore-paws into hands and separation of the thumb from the fingers must have proved decisive. It enabled him to grip things, to use first a club, then a stone axe, as a weapon; to build himself a shelter and later, by rubbing two pieces of wood together, to make fire.’

  ‘You think, then, that on every planet where there is life it must have followed the same course of development as it did on earth?’