Three planets of Proxima Centauri were endowed with climates and atmospheres favorable to vegetation and animal life, but only on one planet now, and that the smallest and most distant, did any trace of animal life survive. And even there the Centaurians hunted feverishly for the last and dwindling colonies of tiny quadrupeds which burrowed hundreds of feet below a frozen continent.
It became clear that the Adastra was an argosy of such treasure—in the form of human beings—as no Centaurian could ever have imagined to exist. And it became more than ever clear that a voyage to Earth would command all the resources of the race. Billions of human beings! Trillions of lesser animals! Uncountable creatures in the seas! All the Centaurian race would go mad with eagerness to invade this kingdom of riches and ecstasy, the ecstasy felt by any Centaurian when consuming the prehistoric foodstuff of his race.
V.
Egg-shaped, featureless ships of space closed in from every side at once. The thermometer banks showed a deliberate, painstaking progression of alarm signals. One dial glowed madly red and faded, and then another, and yet another, as the Centaurian ships took up their positions. Each such alarm, of course, was from the momentary impact of a radiation beam on the Adastra’s hull.
Twenty minutes after the last of the beams had proved the Adastra’s helplessness, an egglike ship approached the Earth vessel and with complete precision made contact with its forward side above an air lock. Its hull bellied out in a great blister which adhered to the steel.
Alstair watched the visiplate which showed it, his face very white and his hands clenched tightly. Jack Gary’s voice, strained and hoarse, came from the biology-laboratory communicator.
“Sir, a message from the Centaurians. A ship has landed on our hull and its crew will enter through the air lock. A hostile move on our part, of course, will mean instant destruction.”
“There will be no resistance to the Centaurians,” said Alstair harshly. “It is my order! It would be suicide!”
“Even so, sir,” said Jack’s voice savagely, “I still think it would be a good idea!”
“Stick to your duty!” rasped Alstair. “What progress has been made in communication?”
“We have vocabulary cards for nearly five thousand words. We can converse on nearly any subject, and all of them are unpleasant. The cards are going through a duplicator now and will be finished in a few minutes. A second dictawriter with the second file will be sent you as soon as the cards are complete.”
In a visiplate, Alstair saw the headless figures of Centaurians emerging from the entrance to an air lock in the Adastra’s hull.
“Those Centaurians have entered the ship,” he snapped as an order to Jack. “You’re communications officer! Go meet them and lead their commanding officer here!”
“Check!” said Jack grimly.
It sounded like a sentence of death, that order. In the laboratory he was very pale indeed. Helen pressed close to him.
The formerly captive Centaurian hooted into the dictawriter, inquiringly. The speaker translated.
“What—command?”
Helen explained. So swiftly does humanity accustom itself to the incredible that it seemed almost natural to address a microphone and hear the hoots and stridulations of a nonhuman voice fill the room with her meaning.
“I—go—also—they—no—kill—yet.”
The Centaurian rolled on before. With an extraordinary dexterity, he opened the door. He had merely seen it opened. Jack took the lead. His side-arm force gun remained in its holster beside him, but it was useless. He could probably kill the plant man behind him, but that would do no good.
Dim hootings ahead. The plant man made sounds—loud and piercing sounds. Answers came to him. Jack came in view of the new group of invaders. There were twenty or thirty of them, every one armed with half-cylindrical objects, larger than the first creatures had carried.
At sight of Jack there was excitement. Eager trembling of the armlike tentacles at either side of the headless trunks. There were instinctive, furtive movements of the weapons. A loud hooting as of command. The Things were still. But Jack’s flesh crawled from the feeling of sheer, carnivorous lust that seemed to emanate from them.
His guide, the former captive, exchanged incomprehensible noises with the newcomers. Again a ripple of excitement in the ranks of the plant men.
“Come,” said Jack curtly.
He led the way to the main control room. Once they heard some one screaming monotonously. A woman cracked under the coming of doom. A hooting babble broke the silence among the ungainly Things which followed Jack. Again an authoritative note silenced it.
The control room. Alstair looked like a man of stone, of marble, save that his eyes burned with a fierce and almost maniacal flame. A visiplate beside him showed a steady stream of Centaurians entering through a second air lock. There were hundreds of them, apparently. The dictawriter came in, under Helen’s care. She cried out in instinctive horror at sight of so many of the monstrous creatures at once in the control room.
“Set up the dictawriter,” said Alstair in a voice so harsh, so brittle that it seemed pure ice.
Trembling, Helen essayed to obey.
“I am ready to talk,” said Alstair harshly into the dictawriter microphone.
The machine, rustling softly, translated. The leader of the new party hooted in reply. An order for all officers to report here at once, after setting all controls for automatic operation of the ship. There was some difficulty with the translation of the Centaurian equivalent of “automatic.” It was not in the vocabulary file. It took time.
Alstair gave the order. Cold sweat stood out upon his face, but his self-control was iron.
A second order, also understood with a certain amount of difficulty. Copies of all technical records, and all—again it took time to understand—all books bearing on the construction of this ship were to be taken to the air lock by which these plant men had entered. Samples of machinery, generators, and weapons to the same destination.
Again Alstair gave the order. His voice was brittle, was even thin, but it did not falter or break.
The Centaurian leader hooted an order over which the dictawriter rustled in vain. His followers swept swiftly to the doors of the control room. They passed out, leaving but four of their number behind. And Jack went swiftly to Alstair. His force gun snapped out and pressed deep into the commander’s middle. The Centaurians made no movement of protest.
“Damn you!” said Jack, his voice thick with rage. “You’ve let them take the ship! You plan to bargain for your life! Damn you, I’m going to kill you and fight my way to a rocket tube and send this ship up in a flare of clean flame that’ll kill these devils with us!”
But Helen cried swiftly: “Jack! Don’t! I know!”
Like an echo her words—because she was near the dictawriter microphone—were repeated in the hooting sounds of the Centaurian language. And Alstair, livid and near to madness, nevertheless said harshly in the lowest of tones:
“You fool! These devils can reach Earth, now they know it’s worth reaching! So even if they kill every man on the ship but the officers—and they may—we’ve got to navigate to their planet and land there.” His voice dropped to a rasping whisper and he raged almost soundlessly: “And if you think I want to live through what’s coming, shoot!”
Jack stood rigid for an instant. Then he stepped back. A new respect and understanding dawned in his eyes.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said unsteadily. “You can count on me hereafter.”
One of the officers of the Adastra stumbled into the control room. Another. Still another. They trickled in. Six officers out of thirty.
A Centaurian entered with the curious rolling gait of his race. He went impatiently to the dictawriter and made noises.
“These—all—officers?” asked the machine tonelessly.
“The air officer shot his family and himself,” gasped a subaltern of the air department. “A bunch of Muts ch
arged a rocket tube and the rocket chief fought them off. Then he bled to death from a knife in his throat. The stores officer was—”
“Stop!” said Alstair in a thin, high voice. He tore at his collar. He went to the microphone and said thinly: “These are all the officers still alive. But we can navigate the ship.”
The Centaurian—he wore a wide band of leather about each of his arms and another about his middle—waddled to the G.C. phone. The tendrils at the end of one arm manipulated the switch expertly. He emitted strange, formless sounds—and hell broke loose!
The visiplates all over the room emitted high-pitched, squealing sounds. They were horrible. They were ghastly. They were more terrible than the sounds of a wolf pack hard on the heels of a fear-mad deer. They were the sounds Jack had heard when one of the first invaders of the Adastra saw a human being and killed him instantly. And other sounds came out of the visiplates, too. There were human screams. There were even one or two explosions.
But then there was silence. The five Centaurians in the control room quivered and trembled. A desperate blood-lust filled them, the unreasoning, blind, instinctive craving which came of evolution from some race of carnivorous plants become capable of movement through the desperate need for food.
The Centaurian with the leather ornaments went to the dictawriter again. He hooted in it:
“Want—two—men—go—from—ship—learn—from—them—now.”
There was an infinitely tiny sound in the main control room. It was a drop of cold sweat, falling from Alstair’s face to the floor. He seemed to have shriveled. His face was an ashy gray. His eyes were closed. But Jack looked steadily from one to the other of the surviving officers.
“That will mean vivisection, I suppose,” he said harshly. “It’s certain they plan to visit Earth, else—intelligent as they are—they wouldn’t have wiped out everybody but us. Even for treasure. They’ll want to try out weapons on a human body, and so on. Communications is about the most useless of all the departments now, sir. I volunteer.”
Helen gasped: “No, Jack! No!”
Alstair opened his eyes. “Gary has volunteered. One more man to volunteer for vivisection.” He said it in the choked voice of one holding to sanity by the most terrible of efforts. “They’ll want to find out how to kill men. Their thirty-centimeter waves didn’t work. They know the beams that melted our hull wouldn’t kill men. I can’t volunteer! I’ve got to stay with the ship!” There was despair in his voice. “One more man to volunteer for these devils to kill slowly!”
Silence. The happenings of the past little while, and the knowledge of what still went on within the Adastra’s innumerable compartments, had literally stunned most of the six. They could not think. They were mentally dazed, emotionally paralyzed by the sheer horrors they had encountered.
Then Helen stumbled into Jack’s arms. “I’m—going, too!” she gasped. “We’re—all going to die! I’m not needed! And I can—die with Jack.”
Alstair groaned. “Please!”
“I’m—going!” she panted. “You can’t stop me! With Jack! Whither thou goest—”
Then she choked. She pressed close. The Centaurian of the leather belts hooted impatiently into the dictawriter.
“These—two—come.”
Jack and Helen stood, hands clasped, momentarily dazed. The Centaurian of the leather bands hooted impatiently. He led them, with his queer, rolling gait, toward the air lock by which the plant men had entered. Three times they were seen by roving Things, which emitted that triply horrible shrill squeal. And each time the Centaurian of the leather bands hooted authoritatively and the plant men withdrew.
Once, too, Jack saw four creatures swaying backward and forward about something on the floor. He reached out his hands and covered Helen’s eyes until they were past.
They came to the air lock. Their guide pointed through it. The man and the girl obeyed. Long, rubbery tentacles seized them and Helen gasped and was still. Jack fought fiercely, shouting her name. Then something struck him savagely. He collapsed.
He came back to consciousness with a feeling of tremendous weight upon him. He stirred, and with his movement some of the oppression left him. A light burned, not a light such as men know on Earth, but a writhing flare which beat restlessly at the confines of a transparent globe which contained it. There was a queer smell in the air, too, an animal smell. Jack sat up. Helen lay beside him, unconfined and apparently unhurt. None of the Centaurians seemed to be near.
He chafed her wrists helplessly. He heard a stuttering sound and with each of the throbs of noise felt a momentary acceleration. Rockets, fuel rockets.
“Were on one of their damned ships!” said Jack to her. He felt for his force gun. It was gone.
Helen opened her eyes. She stared vaguely about. Her eyes fell upon Jack. She shuddered suddenly and pressed close to him.
“What—what happened?”
“We’ll have to find out,” replied Jack grimly.
The floor beneath his feet careened suddenly. Instinctively, he glanced at a porthole which until then he had only subconsciously noted. He gazed out into the utterly familiar blackness of space, illumined by very many tiny points of light which were stars. He saw a ringed sun and points of light which were planets.
One of those points of light was very near. Its disk was perceptible, and polar snow caps, and the misty alternation of greenish areas which would be continents with the indescribable tint which is ocean bottom when viewed from beyond a planet’s atmosphere.
Silence. No hootings of that strange language without vowels or consonants which the Centaurians used. No sound of any kind for a moment.
“We’re heading for that planet, I suppose,” said Jack quietly. “We’ll have to see if we can’t manage to get ourselves killed before we land.”
Then a murmur in the distance. It was a strange, muted murmur, in nothing resembling the queer notes of the plant men. With Helen clinging to him, Jack explored cautiously, out of the cubby-hole in which they had awakened. Silence save for that distant murmur. No movement anywhere. Another faint stutter of the rockets, with a distinct accelerative movement of the whole ship. The animal smell grew stronger. They passed through a strangely shaped opening and Helen cried out:
“The animals!”
Heaped higgledy-piggledy were cages from the Adastra, little compartments containing specimens of each of the animals which had been bred for food, and which it had been planned to release if a planet suitable for colonization revolved about Proxima Centauri. Farther on was an indescribable mass of books, machines, cases of all sorts—the materials ordered to be carried to the air lock by the leader of the plant men. Still no sign of any Centaurian.
But the muted murmur, quite incredibly sounding like a human voice, came from still farther ahead. Bewildered, now, Helen followed as Jack went still cautiously toward the source of the sound.
They found it. It came from a bit of mechanism cased in with the same lusterless, dull-brown stuff which composed the floor and walls and every part of the ship about them. And it was a human voice. More, it was Alstair’s, racked and harsh and half hysterical.
“—you must have recovered consciousness by now, dammit, and these devils want some sign of it! They cut down your acceleration when I told them the rate they were using would keep you unconscious! Gary! Helen! Set off that signal!”
A pause. The voice again:
“I’ll tell it again. You’re in a space ship these fiends are guiding by a tight beam which handles the controls. You’re going to be set down on one of the planets which once contained animal life. It’s empty now, unoccupied except by plants. And you and the space ship’s cargo of animals and books and so on are the reserved, special property of the high archfiend of all these devils. He had you sent in an outside-controlled ship because none of his kind could be trusted with such treasure as you and the other animals!
“You’re a reserve of knowledge, to translate our books, explain our science,
and so on. It’s forbidden for any other space ship than his own to land on your planet. Now will you send that signal? It’s a knob right above the speaker my voice is coming out of. Pull it three times, and they’ll know you’re all right and won’t send another ship with preservatives for your flesh lest a priceless treasure go to waste!”
The tinny voice—Centaurian receptors were not designed to reproduce the elaborate phonetics of the human voice—laughed hysterically.
Jack reached up and pulled the knob, three times. Alstair’s voice went on:
“This ship is hell, now. It isn’t a ship any more, but a sort of brimstone pit. There are seven of us alive, and we’re instructing Centaurians in the operation of the controls. But we’ve told them that we can’t turn off the rockets to show their inner workings, because to be started they have to have a planet’s mass near by, for deformation of space so the reaction can be started. They’re keeping us alive until we’ve shown them that. They’ve got some method of writing, too, and they write down everything we say, when it’s translated by a dictawriter. Very scientific—”
The voice broke off.
“Your signal just came,” it said an instant later. “You’ll find food somewhere about. The air ought to last you till you land. You’ve got four more days of travel. I’ll call back later. Don’t worry about navigation. It’s attended to.”
The voice died again, definitely.
The two of them, man and girl, explored the Centaurian space ship. Compared to the Adastra, it was miniature. A hundred feet long, or more, by perhaps sixty feet at its greatest diameter. They found cubbyholes in which there was now nothing at all, but which undoubtedly at times contained the plant men packed tightly.
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 35