He held out his hand. “Well, good luck, young man. Hope you come through safely.”
As they shook hands, Grosvenor said, “How long will it take to roll out the atomic cannon?”
“About an hour, perhaps a little longer. Meanwhile, we’ll have the big vibrators to protect us….”
The reappearance of the men brought Ixtl up to the seventh level with a rush. For many minutes, he was an abnormal shape that flitted through the wilderness of walls and floors. Twice he was seen, and projectors flashed at him. They were vibrators as different from the hand weapons he had faced so far as life from death. They shattered the walls through which he jumped to escape them. Once, the beam touched one of his feet. The hot shock from the molecular violence of the vibration made him stumble. The foot came back to normal in less than a second, but he had his picture of the limitations of his body against these powerful mobile units.
And still he was not alarmed. Speed, cunning, careful timing and placing of any appearance he made — such precautions would offset the effectiveness of the new weapons. The important thing was: What were the men doing? Obviously when they had shut themselves up in the engine room, they had conceived a plan, and they were carrying it out with determination. With glittering, unwinking eyes, Ixtl watched the plan take form.
In every corridor, men slaved over furnaces, squat things of dead-black metal. From a hole in the top of each furnace, a white glare spewed up, blazing forth furiously. Ixtl could see that the men were half blinded by the white dazzle of the fire. They wore space armour, but the ordinarily transparent glassite of which it was made was electrically darkened. Yet no light-metal armour could ward off the full effect of that glare. Out of the furnaces rolled long, dully glowing strips of material. As each strip emerged, it was snatched by machine tools, skilfully machined to exact measurements, and slapped on to the metal floors. Not an inch of floor, Ixtl noted, escaped being enclosed by the strips. And the moment the hot metal was down, massive refrigerators hugged close to it and drew its heat.
His mind refused at first to accept the result of his observations. His brain persisted in searching for deeper purposes, for a cunning of vast and not easily discernible scope. Presently, he decided that this was all there was. The men were attempting to energize two floors under a system of controls. Later, when they realized that their limited trap was not effective, they would probably try other methods. Just when their defensive system would be dangerous to him, Ixtl wasn’t certain. The important thing was that as soon as he did regard it as dangerous, it would be a simple matter to follow the men about and tear loose their energization connections.
Contemptuously, Ixtl dismissed the problem from his mind. The men were only playing into his hands, making it easier for him to get the guuls he still needed. He selected his next victim carefully. He had discovered in the man he had unintentionally killed that the stomach and intestinal tract were suitable for his purposes. Automatically, the men with the largest stomachs were on his list.
He made his preliminary survey, and then launched himself. Before a single projector could be turned towards him, he was gone with the writhing, struggling body. It was simple to adjust his atomic structure the moment he was through a ceiling, and so break his fall to the floor beneath. Swiftly, he let himself dissolve through that floor also, and down to the level below. Into the vast hold of the ship, he half fell, half lowered himself. He could have gone faster, but he had to be careful not to damage the human body.
The hold was familiar territory now to the sure-footed tread of his long-toed feet. He had explored the place briefly but thoroughly after he first boarded the ship. And, in handling von Grossen, he had learned the pattern he needed now. Unerringly, he headed across the dim-lit interior toward the far wall. Great packing cases were piled up to the ceiling. He went through them or around them, as it suited him, and presently found himself in a great pipe. The inside was big enough for him to stand up in. It was part of the miles long system of air conditioning.
His hiding place would have been dark by ordinary light. But to his infra-red-sensitive vision, a vague twilight glow suffused the pipe. He saw the body of von Grossen, and laid his new victim beside it. Carefully, then, he inserted one of his wiry hands into his own breast, removed a precious egg, and deposited it into the stomach of the human being.
The man was still struggling, but Ixtl waited for what he knew must happen. Slowly, the body began to stiffen. The muscles grew progressively rigid. In panic, the man squirmed and jerked as he evidently recognized that paralysis was creeping over him. Remorselessly, Ixtl held him down until the chemical action was completed. In the end, the man lay motionless, every muscle rigid. His eyes were open and staring. There was sweat on his face.
Within hours, the eggs would be hatching inside each man’s stomach. Swiftly, the tiny replicas of himself would eat themselves to full size. Satisfied, Ixtl started up out of the hold. He needed more hatching places for his eggs, more guuls.
By the time he had put a third captive through the process, the men were working on the ninth level. Waves of heat rolled along the corridor. It was an inferno wind. Even the refrigeration unit in each space suit was hard put to it to handle the superheated air. Men sweated inside their suits. Sick from the heat, stunned by the glare, they laboured almost by instinct.
Beside Grosvenor, a man said suddenly, harshly, “Here they come now!”
Grosvenor turned in the direction indicated, and stiffened in spite of himself. The machine that was rolling towards them under its own power was not big. It was a globular mass with an outer shell of wolfram carbide, and had a nozzle that protruded from the globe. The strictly functional structure was mounted on a universal bearing, which, in its turn, rested on a base of four rubber wheels.
All around Grosvenor, men had ceased work. Their faces pale, they stared at the metal monstrosity. Abruptly, one of them came over to Grosvenor and said angrily, “Damn you, Grove, you’re responsible for this. If I’m due to get irradiated by one of those things, I’d like to punch you one in the nose first.”
“I’ll be right here,” said Grosvenor in a steady voice. “If you get killed, so will I.”
That seemed to take some of the anger out of the other. But there was still violence in his manner and tone, as he said, “What the hell of nonsense is this? Surely there must be better plans than to make bait out of human beings.”
Grosvenor said, “There is another thing we can do.”
“What’s that?”
“Commit suicide!” said Grosvenor. And he meant it.
The man glared at him, then turned away muttering something about stupid jokes and moronic jokesters. Grosvenor smiled mirthlessly and went back to work. Almost immediately, he saw that the men had lost their zest for the job. An electric tension leaped from one individual to another. The slightest untoward action on the part of one person brought the others tautly erect.
They were bait. All over the various levels, men would be reacting to the death fear. No one could be immune, for the will to survive was built-in in the nervous system. Highly trained military men like Captain Leeth could put on an impassive front, but the tension would be there just under the surface. Similarly, people like Elliott Grosvenor could be grim but determined, convinced of the soundness of a course of action and prepared to take their chance.
“Attention, all personnel!”
Grosvenor jumped with the rest as that voice came out of the nearest communicator. It took a long moment before he recognized it as belonging to the commander of the ship.
Captain Leeth continued. “All projectors are now in position to levels seven, eight, and nine. You will be glad to know that I have been discussing the dangers involved with my officers. We make the following recommendations: If you see the creature, don’t wait, don’t look around! Throw yourself instantly to the floor. All weapon crews — right now — adjust your nozzles to fire at 50: 1½. That gives you all a clearance of one and a half feet. This
will not protect you from secondary radiation, but I think we can honestly say that if you hit the floor in time, Dr. Eggert and his staff in the engine room will save your life.
“In conclusion” — Captain Leeth seemed more at ease, now that his main message had been delivered — “let me assure all ranks that there are no shirkers aboard. With the exception of the doctors and three invalid patients, every individual is in as great danger as you. My officers and I are divided among the various groups. Director Morton is down on the seventh level. Mr. Grosvenor — whose plan this is — is on level nine, and so on. Good luck, gentlemen!”
There was a moment’s silence. Then the leader of the gun crew near Grosvenor called in a friendly voice, “Hey, you fellows! We’ve made the adjustments. You’ll be safe if you can hit the deck in nothing flat.” Grosvenor called, “Thanks, friend.” Just for a moment, then, the tension eased. A mathematical-biology technician said, “Grove, butter him up some more with soft talk.”
“I always did love the military,” said another man. In a hoarse aside, he said loud enough for the gun crew to hear, “That ought to hold ’em off for that extra second I need.”
Grosvenor scarcely heard. Bait, he was thinking again. And no group would know when the moment of danger came for some other group. At the instant of “guncrit” — a modified form of critical mass, in which a small pile developed enormous energy without exploding — a tracer light would leap out of the muzzle. Along it and around it would pour the hard, silent invisible radiation.
When it was all over, the survivors would notify Captain Leeth on his private band. In due course, the commander would inform the other groups. “Mr. Grosvenor!”
Instinctively, as the sharp voice sounded, Grosvenor dived for the floor. He struck painfully, but came up almost immediately as he recognized Captain Leeth’s voice.
Other men were climbing ruefully to their feet. One man muttered, “Dammit, that wasn’t fair.”
Grosvenor reached the communicator. He kept his gaze warily on the corridor ahead of him, as he said, “Yes, Captain?”
“Will you come down to level seven at once? Central corridor. Approach from nine o’clock.” “Yes, sir.”
Grosvenor went with a sense of dread. There had been a tone in the captain’s voice. Something was wrong.
He found a nightmare. As he approached, he saw that one of the atomic cannon was lying on its side. Beside it, dead, burned beyond recognition, lay what had been three of the four military crew men of the projector. On the floor beside them unconscious but still twitching and squirming, all too evidently from a vibrator discharge, was the fourth crew man.
On the far side of the cannon, twenty men lay unconscious or dead, among them Director Morton.
Stretcher-bearers, wearing protective clothing, were dashing in, picking up a victim, and then racing off with him on a loading mule.
The rescue work had clearly been going on for several minutes, so there were probably more unconscious men already being tended in the engine room by Dr. Eggert and his staff.
Grosvenor stopped at a barrier that had been hastily erected at a turn in the corridor. Captain Leeth was there. The commander was pale but calm. In a few minutes, Grosvenor had the story.
Ixtl had appeared. A young technician — Captain Leeth did not name him — forgot in panic that safety lay on the floor. As the muzzle of the cannon came up inexorably, the hysterical youngster fired his vibrator at the crew, stunning them all. Apparently, they had hesitated slightly when they saw the technician in their line of fire. The next instant, each crew man was unknowingly contributing his bit to the disaster. Three of them fell against the cannon, and, instinctively clinging to it, swung it over on its side. It rolled away from them, dragging the fourth man along.
The trouble was he had hold of the activator, and for what must have been nearly a second he pressed it.
His three companions were in the direct line of fire. They died instantly. The cannon finished rolling over on its side, spraying one wall.
Morton and his group, though never in the direct line of fire, were caught by the secondary radiation. It was too soon to tell how badly they were injured, but at a conservative estimate they would all be in bed for a year. A few would die.
“We were a little slow,” Captain Leeth confessed. “This apparently happened a few seconds after I finished talking, but it was nearly a minute before somebody who heard the crash of the cannon toppling grew curious and glanced around this corner.” He sighed wearily. “At the very worst, I never expected anything as bad as an entire group being wiped out.”
Grosvenor was silent. This was why, of course, Captain Leeth had wanted the scientists unarmed. In a crisis, a man protected himself. He couldn’t help it. Like an animal he fought blindly for his life.
He tried not to think of Morton, who had realized that the scientists would resist being disarmed and who had thought up the modus operandi that would make the use of atomic energy acceptable to all. He said steadily, “Why did you call me?”
“My feeling is that this failure affects your plan. What do you think?”
Grosvenor nodded reluctantly. “The surprise element is gone,” he said. “He must have come up without suspecting what was waiting for him. Now, he’ll be careful.”
He could picture the scarlet monster poking his head through a wall, surveying a corridor — then boldly coming out beside one of the cannon and snatching one of the crew men. The only adequate precaution would be to set up a second projector to cover the first one. But that was out of the question — there were only forty-one available for the whole ship.
Grosvenor shook his head. Then he said, “Did he get another man?” “No.”
Once more Grosvenor was silent. Like the others, he could only guess at the creature’s reason for wanting living men. One of those guesses was based on Korita’s theory that the being was in a peasant stage and intent on reproducing himself. That suggested a bloodcurdling possibility, and a pressure of need on the part of the creature that would drive him after more human victims.
Captain Leeth said, “As I see it, he’ll be up again. My idea is that we leave the cannon where they are for the time being and finish energizing three levels. Seven is completed, nine is almost ready, and so we might as well go on to eight. This will give us three floors altogether. As far as the possible effectiveness of such a plan goes, we should consider that the creature has now captured three men in addition to von Grossen. In each case, he was seen to take them in what we call a downward direction. I suggest that, as soon as we have energized all three levels, we go to the ninth floor and wait for him. When he captures one of us, we wait momentarily; and then Mr. Pennons will throw the switch that sets up the force field in the floors. The creature will strike the eighth level, and find it energized. If he tries to go through, he will find that seven is also energized. If he comes up, he finds nine in the same deadly state. Either way, we force him to make contact with two energized floors.” The commander paused, looked thoughtfully at Grosvenor, and then said, “I know you considered that contact with only one level would not kill him. You were not so positive about two.” He stopped, and waited questioningly.
Grosvenor said, after a moment of hesitation, “I’ll buy that. Actually, we can only guess how it will affect him. Maybe we’ll all be pleasantly surprised.”
He didn’t believe that. But there was another factor in this developing situation: the convictions and hopes that men had. Only an actual event would change the minds of some people. When their ideas were altered by reality, then — and then only — they would be emotionally ready for more drastic solutions.
It seemed to Grosvenor that he was learning slowly but surely how to influence men. It was not enough to have information and knowledge, not enough to be right. Men had to be persuaded and convinced. Sometimes that might take more time than could safely be spared. Sometimes it couldn’t be done at all And so civilizations crumbled, battles were lost, and ships destroy
ed because the man or group with the saving ideas would not go through the long-drawn-out ritual of convincing others.
If he could help it, that was not going to happen here.
He said, “We can keep the atomic projectors in place till we finish energizing the floors. Then we’ll have to move them. Energization would bring guncrit even without the nozzle being open. They’d blow up.”
As deliberately as that he withdrew the Grosvenor plan from the battle against the enemy.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ixtl came up twice during the hour and three quarters that was needed to do level eight. He had six eggs left, and he intended to use all except two of them. His only annoyance was that each guul took more time. The defence against him seemed more alert, and the presence of atomic cannon made it necessary for him to go after the men who actually manned the projectors.
Even with that limitation rigidly observed, each escape turned out to be an achievement in timing. Nevertheless, he was not worried. These things had to be done. In due course, he would attend to the men.
When the eighth level was completed, the cannon withdrawn, and everyone on the ninth level, Grosvenor heard Captain Leeth say curtly, “Mr. Pennons, are you ready to use power?”
“Yes, sir.” The engineer’s voice was a dry rasp on the communicators. He finished even more harshly. “Five men gone, and one to go. We’ve been lucky, but there is at least one more to go.”
“Do you hear that, gentlemen? One to go. One of us will be bait whether he likes it or not.” It was a familiar voice, but one that had long been silent. The speaker went on gravely. “This is Gregory Kent. And I’m sorry to have to say that I am speaking to you from the safety of the engine room. Dr. Eggert tells me it’ll be another week before I’m off the invalid list. The reason I am speaking to you now is that Captain Leeth has turned Director Morton’s papers over to me, and so I’d like Kellie to elaborate on the note of his that I have here. It will clear up something very important. It will give us a sharper picture of what we’re facing. We might as well all know the worst.”
The Voyage of the Space Beagle Page 16