“Excellent!” said Alstair curtly. “But put some one else on the job if you can. It should be reasonably simple, once it’s started. But I need you for other work. You know what’s been found out about these Centaurians, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. Their hand weapon is not unlike our force guns, but it seems to be considerably more effective. I saw it kill the communications officer.”
“But the creatures themselves!”
“I helped tie one of them up.”
“What do you make of it? I’ve a physician’s report, but he doesn’t believe it himself!”
“I don’t blame him, sir,” said Jack grimly. “They’re not our idea of intelligent beings at all. We haven’t any word for what they are. In one sense they’re plants, apparently. That is, their bodies seem to be composed of cellulose fibers where ours are made of muscle fibers. But they are intelligent, fiendishly intelligent.
“The nearest we have to them on Earth are certain carnivorous plants, like pitcher plants and the like. But they’re as far above a pitcher plant as a man is above a sea anemone, which is just as much an animal as a man is. My guess, sir, would be that they’re neither plant nor animal. Their bodies are built up of the same materials as earthly plants, but they move about like animals do on Earth. They surprise us, but we may surprise them, too. It’s quite possible that the typical animal form on their planet is sessile like the typical plant form on ours.”
Alstair said bitterly: “And they look on us, animals, as we look on plants!”
Jack said without expression: “Yes, sir. They eat through holes in their arms. The one who killed the communications officer seized his arm. It seemed to exude some fluid that liquefied his flesh instantly. It sucked the liquid back in at once. If I may make a guess, sir--”
“Go ahead,” snapped Alstair. “Everybody else is running around in circles, either marveling or sick with terror.”
“The leader of the party, sir, had on what looked like an ornament. It was a band of leather around one of its arms.”
“Now, what the devil--”
“We had two men killed. One was the communications officer and the other was an orderly. When we finally subdued the Centaurian who’d killed that orderly, it had eaten a small bit of him, but the rest of the orderly’s body had undergone some queer sort of drying process, from chemicals the Thing seemed to carry with it.”
Alstair’s throat worked as if in nausea. “I saw it.”
“It’s a fanciful idea,” said Jack grimly, “but if a man was in the position of that Centaurian, trapped in a space ship belonging to an alien race, with death very probably before him, well, about the only thing a man would strap to his body, as the Centaurian did the dried, preserved body of that orderly--”
“Would be gold,” snapped Alstair. “Or platinum, or jewels which he would hope to fight clear with!”
“Just so,” said Jack. “Now, I’m only guessing, but those creatures are not human, nor even animals. Yet they eat animal food. They treasure animal food as a human being would treasure diamonds. An animal’s remains—leather—they wear as an ornament. It looks to me as if animal tissue was rather rare on their planet, to be valued so highly. In consequence-”
Alstair stood up, his features working. “Then our bodies would be the same as gold to them! As diamonds! Gary, we haven’t the ghost of a chance to make friends with these fiends!”
Jack said dispassionately: “No; I don’t think we have. If a race of beings with tissues of metallic gold landed on Earth, I rather think they’d be murdered. But there’s another point, too. There’s Earth. From our course, these creatures can tell where we came from, and their space ships are rather good. I think I’ll put somebody else on the dictawriter job and see if I can flash a message back home. No way to know whether they get it, but they ought to be watching for one by the time it’s there. Maybe they’ve improved their receptors. They intended to try, anyhow.”
“Men could meet these creatures’ ships in space,” said Alstair harshly, “if they were warned. And guns might answer, but if they didn’t handle these devils Caldwell torpedoes would. Or a suicide squad, using their bodies for bait. We’re talking like dead men, Gary.”
“I think, sir,” said Jack, “we are dead men.” Then he added: “I shall put Helen Bradley on the dictawriter, with a guard to handle the Centaurian. He’ll be bound tightly.”
The statement tacitly assumed that Alstair’s order to avoid her was withdrawn. It was even a challenge to him to repeat it. And Alstair’s eyes glowed and he controlled himself with difficulty.
“Damn you, Gary,” he said savagely, “get out!”
He turned to the visiplate which showed the enemy ship as Jack left the control room.
* * * *
The egg-shaped ship was two thousand miles away now, and just decelerating to a stop. In its first flight it had rocketed here and there like a mad thing. It would have been impossible to hit it with any projectile, and difficult in the extreme even to keep radiation on it in anything like a tight beam. Now, stopped stock-still with regard to the Adastra, it hung on, observing, very probably devising some new form of devilment. So Alstair considered, anyhow. He watched it somberly.
The resources of the Adastra, which had seemed so vast when she took off from Earth, were pitifully inadequate to handle the one situation which had greeted her, hostility. She could have poured out the treasures of man’s civilization to the race which ruled this solar system. Savages, she could have uplifted. Even to a race superior to men she could have offered man’s friendship and eager pupilage. But these creatures that-
The space ship stayed motionless. Probably signaling back to its home planet, demanding orders. Reports came in to the Adastra’s main control room and Alstair read them. The Centaurians were unquestionably extracting carbon dioxide from the air. That compound was to their metabolism what oxygen is to men, and in pure air they could not live.
But their metabolic rate was vastly greater than that of any plant on Earth. It compared with the rate of earthly animals. They were not plants by any definition save that of constitution, as a sea anemone is not an animal except by the test of chemical analysis.
The Centaurians had a highly organized nervous system, the equivalent of brains, and both great intelligence and a language. They produced sounds by a stridulating organ in a special body cavity. And they felt emotion.
A captive creature when presented with various objects showed special interest in machinery, showing an acute realization of the purpose of a small sound recorder and uttering into it an entire and deliberate series of sounds. Human clothing it fingered eagerly. Cloth it discarded, when of cotton or rayon, but it displayed great excitement at the feel of a woolen shirt and even more when a leather belt was given to it. It placed the belt about its middle, fastening the buckle without a fumble after a single glance at its working.
It unraveled a thread from the shirt and consumed it, rocking to and fro as if in ecstasy. When meat was placed before it, it seemed to become almost delirious with excitement. A part of the meat it consumed instantly, to ecstatic swayings. The rest it preserved by a curious chemical process, using substances from a small metal pack it had worn and for which it made gestures.
Its organs of vision were behind two slits in the upper part of its body, and no precise examination of the eyes themselves had been made. But the report before Alstair said specifically that the Centaurian displayed an avid eagerness whenever it caught sight of a human being. And that the eagerness was not of a sort to be reassuring.
It was the sort of excitement—only much greater—which it had displayed at the sight of wool and leather. As if by instinct, said the report, the captive Centaurian had several times made a gesture as if turning some weapon upon a human when first it sighted him.
Alstair read this report and others. Helen Bradley reported barely two hours after Jack had assigned her to the work.
“I’m sorry, Helen,” said Alstair
ungraciously. “You shouldn’t have been called on for duty. Gary insisted on it. I’d have left you alone.”
“I’m glad he did,” said Helen steadily. “Father is dead, to be sure, but he was quite content. And he died before he found out what these Centaurians are like. Working was good for me. I’ve succeeded much better than I even hoped. The Centaurian I worked with was the leader of the party which invaded this ship. He understood almost at once what the dictawriter was doing, and we’ve a good vocabulary recorded already. If you want to talk to him, you can.”
Alstair glanced at the visiplate. The enemy ship was still motionless. Easily understandable, of course. The Adastra’s distance from Proxima Centauri could be measured in hundreds of millions of miles, now, instead of millions of billions, but in another terminology it was light-hours away still. If the space ship had signaled its home planet for orders, it would still be waiting for a reply.
Alstair went heavily to the biology laboratory, of which Helen was in charge, just as she was in charge of the biological specimens—rabbits, sheep, and a seemingly endless array of small animals—which on the voyage had been bred for a food supply and which it had been planned to release should a planet suitable for colonizing revolve about the ringed star.
* * * *
The Centaurian was bound firmly to a chair with a myriad of cords. He —she—it, was utterly helpless. Beside the chair the dictawriter and its speaker were coupled together. From the Centaurian came hooted notes which the machine translated with a rustling sound between words.
“You—are—commander—this—ship?” the machine translated without intonation.
“I am,” said Alstair, and the machine hooted musically.
“This—woman—man—dead,” said the machine tonelessly again, after more sounds from the extraordinary living thing which was not an animal.
Helen interjected swiftly: “I told him my father was dead.”
The machine went on: “I—buy—all—dead—man—on—ship—give—metal —gold—you—like-”
Alstair’s teeth clicked together. Helen went white. She tried to speak, and choked upon the words.
“This,” said Alstair in mirthless bitterness, “is the beginning of the interstellar friendship we hoped to institute!”
Then the G. C. phone said abruptly:
“Calling Commander Alstair! Radiation from ahead! Several wave lengths, high intensity! Apparently several space ships are sending, though we can make out no signals!”
And then Jack Gary came into the biology laboratory. His face was set in grim lines. It was very white. He saluted with great precision.
“I didn’t have to work hard, sir,” he said sardonically. “The last communications officer had been taking his office more or less as a sinecure. We’d had no signals for seven years, and he didn’t expect any. But they’re coming through and have been for months.
“They left Earth three years after we did. A chap named Callaway, it seems, found that a circularly polarized wave makes a tight beam that will hold together forever. They’ve been sending to us for years past, no doubt, and we’re getting some of the first messages now.
“They’ve built a second Adastra, sir, and it’s being manned—hell, no! It was manned four years ago! It’s on the way out here now! It must be at least three years on the way, and it has no idea of these devils waiting for it. Even if we blow ourselves to bits, sir, there’ll be another ship from Earth coming, unarmed as we are, to run into these devils when it’s too late to stop--”
The G. C. phone snapped again:
“Commander Alstair! Observations reporting! The external hull temperature has gone up five degrees in the past three minutes and is still climbing. Something’s pouring heat into us at a terrific rate!”
Alstair turned to Jack. He said with icy politeness:
“Gary, after all there’s no use in our continuing to hate each other. Here is where we all die together. Why do I still feel inclined to kill you?”
But the question was rhetorical only. The reason was wholly clear. At the triply horrible news, Helen had begun to cry softly. And she had gone blindly into Jack’s arms to do it.
* * * *
IV.
The situation was, as a matter of fact, rather worse than the first indications showed. The external hull temperature, for instance, was that of the generalizing thermometer, which averaged for all the external thermometers. A glance at the thermometer bank, through a visiphone connection, showed the rearmost side of the Adastra at practically normal. It was the forward hemisphere, the side nearest Proxima Centauri, which was heating. And that hemisphere was not heating equally. The indicators which flashed red lights were closely grouped.
Alstair regarded them with a stony calm in the visiplate.
“Squarely in the center of our disk, as they see it,” he said icily. “It will be that fleet of space ships, of course.”
Jack Gary said crisply: “Sir, the ship from which we took prisoners made contact several hours earlier than we expected. It must be that, instead of sending one vessel with a transmitter on board, they sent a fleet, and a scout ship on ahead. That scout ship has reported that we laid a trap for some of her crew, and consequently they’ve opened fire!”
Alstair said sharply into a G. C. transmitter:
“Sector G90 is to be evacuated at once. It is to be sealed off immediately and all occupants will emerge from air locks. Adjoining sectors are to be evacuated except by men on duty, and they will don space suits immediately.”
He clicked off the phone and added calmly: “The external temperature over part of G90 is four hundred degrees now. Dull-red heat. In five minutes it should melt. They’ll have a hole bored right through us in half an hour.”
Jack said urgently: “Sir! I’m pointing out that they’ve attacked because the scout ship reported we laid a trap for some of its crew! We have just the ghost of a chance-”
“What?” demanded Alstair bitterly. “We’ve no weapons!”
“The dictawriter, sir!” snapped Jack. “We can talk to them now!”
Alstair said harshly: “Very well, Gary. I appoint you ambassador. Go ahead!”
He swung on his heel and went swiftly from the control room. A moment later his voice came out of the G. C. phone: “Calling the Rocket Chief! Report immediately on personal visiphone. Emergency!”
His voice cut off, but Jack was not aware of it. He was plugging in to communications and demanding full power on the transmission beam and a widening of its arc. He snapped one order after another and explained to Helen in swift asides.
She grasped the idea at once. The Centaurian in the biology laboratory was bound, of course. No flicker of expression could be discovered about the narrow slits which were his vision organs. But Helen—knowing the words of the vocabulary cards—spoke quietly and urgently into the dictawriter microphone. Hootlike noises came out of the speaker in their place, and the Centaurian stirred. Sounds came from him in turn, and the speaker said woodenly:
“I—speak—ship—planet. Yes.”
And as the check-up came through from communications control, the eerie, stridulated, unconsonanted noises of his language filled the biology laboratory and went out on the widened beam of the main transmitter.
Ten thousand miles away the Centaurian scout ship hovered. The Adastra bored on toward the ringed sun which had been the goal of mankind’s most daring expedition. From ten thousand miles she would have seemed a mere dot, but the telescopes of the Centaurians would show her every detail. From a thousand miles she would seem a toy, perhaps, intricately crisscrossed with strengthening members.
From a distance of a few miles only, though, her gigantic size could be realized fully. Five thousand feet in diameter, she dwarfed the hugest of those distant, unseen shapes in emptiness which made up a hostile fleet now pouring deadly beams upon her.
From a distance of a few miles, too, the effect of that radiation could be seen. The Adastra’s hull was alloy steel; tou
gh and necessarily with a high hysteresis rate. The alternating currents of electricity induced in that steel by the Centaurian radiation would have warmed even a copper hull. But the alloy steel grew hot. It changed color. It glowed faintly red over an area a hundred feet across.
A rocket tube in that area abruptly ceased to emit its purple, lambent flame. It had been cut off. Other rockets increased their power a trifle to make up for it. The dull red glow of the steel increased. It became carmine. Slowly, inexorably, it heated to a yellowish tinge. It became canary in color. It tended toward blue.
Vapor curled upward from its surface, streaming away from the tortured, melting surface as if drawn by the distant sun. That vapor grew thick; dazzlingly bright; a veritable cloud of metallic steam. And suddenly there was a violent eruption from the center of the Adastra’s lighted hemisphere. The outer hull was melted through. Air from the interior burst out into the void, flinging masses of molten, vaporizing metal before it. It spread with an incredible rapidity, flaring instantly into the attenuated, faintly glowing mist of a comet’s tail.
Before The Golden Age - A SF Anthology of the 1930s Page 91