The visiplate images inside the Adastra grew dim. Stars paled ahead. The Earth ship had lost a part of her atmosphere and it fled on before her, writhing. Already it had spread into so vast a space that its density was immeasurable, but it was still so much more dense than the infinite emptiness of space that it filled all the cosmos before the Adastra with a thinning nebulosity.
And at the edges of the huge gap in the big ship’s hull, the thick metal bubbled and steamed, and the interior partitions began to glow with an unholy light of dull-red heat, which swiftly went up to carmine and began to turn faintly yellow.
* * * *
In the main control room, Alstair watched bitterly until the visiplates showing the interior of section G90 fused. He spoke very calmly into the microphone before him.
“We’ve got less time than I thought,” he said deliberately. “You’ll have to hurry. It won’t be sure at best, and you’ve got to remember that these devils will undoubtedly puncture us from every direction and make sure there’s absolutely nothing living on board. You’ve got to work something out, and in a hurry, to do what I’ve outlined!”
A half-hysterical voice came back to him.
“But sir, if I cut the sonic vibrations in the rockets we’ll go up in a flare! A single instant! The disintegration of our fuel will spread to the tubes and the whole ship will simply explode! It will be quick!”
“You fool!” snarled Alstair. “There’s another ship from Earth on the way! Unwarned! And unarmed like we are! And from our course these devils can tell where we came from! We’re going to die, yes! We won’t die pleasantly! But we’re going to make sure these fiends don’t start out a space fleet for Earth! There’s to be no euthanasia for us! We’ve got to make our dying do some good! We’ve got to protect humanity!”
Alstair’s face, as he snarled into the visiplate, was not that of a martyr or a person making a noble self-sacrifice. It was the face of a man overawing and bullying a subordinate into obedience.
With a beam of radiation playing on his ship which the metal hull absorbed and transformed into heat, Alstair raged at this department and that. A second bulkhead went, and there was a second eruption of vaporized metal and incandescent gas from the monster vessel. Millions of miles away, a wide-flung ring of egg-shaped space ships lay utterly motionless, giving no sign of life and looking like monsters asleep. But from them the merciless beams of radiation sped out and focused upon one spot upon the Adastra’s hull, and it spewed forth frothing metal and writhing gases and now and again some still recognizable object which flared and exploded as it emerged.
And within the innumerable compartments of the mighty ship, human beings reacted to their coming doom in manners as various as the persons themselves. Some screamed. A few of the more sullen members of the crew seemed to go mad, to become homicidal maniacs. Still others broke into the stores and proceeded systematically but in some haste to drink themselves comatose. Some women clutched their children and wept over them. And some of them went mad.
But Alstair’s snarling, raging voice maintained a semblance of discipline in a few of the compartments. In a machine shop men worked savagely, cursing, and making mistakes as they worked which made their work useless. The lean air officer strode about his domain, a huge spanner in his hand, and smote with a righteous anger at any sign of panic. The rocket chief, puffing, manifested an unexpected genius for sustained profanity, and the rockets kept their pale purple flames out in space without a sign of flickering.
But in the biology laboratory the scene was one of quiet, intense concentration. Bound to helplessness, the Centaurian, featureless and inscrutable, filled the room with its peculiar form of speech. The dictawriter rustled softly, senselessly analyzing each of the sounds and senselessly questing for vocabulary cards which would translate them into English wordings. Now and again a single card did match up. Then the machine translated a single word of the Centaurian’s speech.
“—ship—” A long series of sounds, varying rapidly in pitch, in intensity, and in emphasis. “—men—” Another long series. “—talk—men—”
The Centaurian ceased to make its hootlike noises. Then, very carefully, it emitted new ones. The speaker translated them all. The Centaurian had carefully selected words recorded with Helen.
“He understands what we’re trying to do,” said Helen, very pale.
The machine said: “You—talk—machine—talk—ship.”
Jack said quietly into the transmitter: “We are friends. We have much you want. We want only friendship. We have killed none of your men except in self-defense. We ask peace. If we do not have peace, we will fight. But we wish peace.”
He said under his breath to Helen, as the machine rustled and the speaker hooted: “Bluff, that war talk. I hope it works!”
* * * *
Silence. Millions of miles away, unseen space ships aimed a deadly radiation in close, tight beams at the middle of the Adastra’s disk. Quaintly enough, that radiation would have been utterly harmless to a man’s body. It would have passed through, undetected.
But the steel of the Earth ship’s hull stopped and absorbed it as eddy currents. The eddy currents became heat. And a small volcano vomited out into space the walls, the furnishing, the very atmosphere of the Adastra through the hole that the heat had made.
It was very quiet indeed in the biology laboratory. The receptor was silent. One minute. Two minutes. Three. The radio waves carrying Jack’s voice traveled at the speed of light, but it took no less than ninety seconds for them to reach the source of the beams which were tearing the Adastra to pieces. And there was a time loss there, and ninety seconds more for other waves to hurtle through space at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles each second with the reply.
The receptor hooted unmusically. The dictawriter rustled softly. Then the speaker said without expression:
“We—friends—now—no—fight—ships—come—to—take—you—planet.”
And simultaneously the miniature volcano on the Adastra’s hull lessened the violence of its eruption, and slowly its molten, bubbling edges ceased first to steam, and then to bubble, and from the blue-white of vaporizing steel they cooled to yellow, and then to carmine, and more slowly to a dull red, and more slowly still to the glistening, infinitely white metallic surface of steel which cools where there is no oxygen.
Jack said crisply into the control-room microphone: “Sir, I have communicated with the Centaurians and they have ceased fire. They say they are sending a fleet to take us to their planet.”
“Very good,” said Alstair’s voice bitterly, “especially since nobody seems able to make the one contrivance that would do some good after our death. What next?”
“I think it would be a good idea to release the Centaurian here,” said Jack. “We can watch him, of course, and paralyze him if he acts up. It would be a diplomatic thing to do, I believe.”
“You’re ambassador,” said Alstair sardonically. “We’ve got time to work, now. But you’d better put somebody else on the ambassadorial work and get busy again on the job of sending a message back to Earth, if you think you can adapt a transmitter to the type of wave they’ll expect.”
His image faded. And Jack turned to Helen. He felt suddenly very tired.
“That is the devil of it,” he said drearily. “They’ll expect a wave like they sent us, and with no more power than we have, they’ll hardly pick up anything else! But we picked up in the middle of a message and just at the end of their description of the sending outfit they’re using on Earth. Undoubtedly they’ll describe it again, or rather they did describe it again, four years back, and we’ll pick it up if we live long enough. But we can’t even guess when that will be. You’re going to keep on working with this— creature, building up a vocabulary?”
Helen regarded him anxiously. She put her hand upon his arm.
“He’s intelligent enough,” she said urgently. “I’ll explain to him and let somebody else work with him. I’ll come wi
th you. After all, we—we may not have long to be together.”
“Perhaps ten hours,” said Jack tiredly.
He waited, somberly, while she explained in carefully chosen words— which the dictawriter translated—to the Centaurian. She got an assistant and two guards. They released the headless Thing. It offered no violence. Instead, it manifested impatience to continue the work of building up in the translator files a vocabulary through which a complete exchange of ideas could take place.
* * * *
Jack and Helen went together to the communications room. They ran the Earth message, as received so far. It was an extraordinary hodgepodge. Four years back, Earth had been enthusiastic over the thought of sending word to its most daring adventurers. A flash of immaterial energy could travel tirelessly through uncountable millions of billions of miles of space and overtake the explorers who had started three years before. By its text, this message had been sent some time after the first message of all. In the sending, it had been broadcast all over the Earth, and many millions of people undoubtedly had thrilled to the thought that they heard words which would span the space between two suns.
But the words were not helpful to those on the Adastra. The message was a “cheer-up” program, which began with lusty singing by a popular quartet, continued with wisecracks by Earth’s most highly paid comedian —and his jokes were all very familiar to those on the Adastra—and then a congratulatory address by an eminent politician, and other drivel. In short, it was a hodgepodge of trash designed to gain publicity by means of the Earth broadcast for those who took part in it.
It was not helpful to those on the Adastra, with the hull of the ship punctured, death before them, and probably destruction for the whole human race to follow as a consequence of their voyage.
Jack and Helen sat quietly and listened. Their hands clasped unconsciously. Rather queerly, the extreme brevity of the time before them made extravagant expressions of affection seem absurd. They listened to the unspeakably vulgar message from Earth without really hearing it. Now and again they looked at each other.
In the biology laboratory the building-up of a vocabulary went on swiftly. Pictures came into play. A second Centaurian was released, and by his skill in delineation—which proved that the eyes of the plant men functioned almost identically with those of Earth men—added both to the store of definitions and equivalents and to knowledge of the Centaurian civilization.
Piecing the information together, the civilization began to take on a strange resemblance to that of humanity. The Centaurians possessed artificial structures which were undoubtedly dwelling houses. They had cities, laws, arts—the drawing of the second Centaurian was proof of that —and sciences. The science of biology in particular was far advanced, taking to some extent the place of metallurgy in the civilization of men. Their structures were grown, not built. Instead of metals to shape to their own ends, they had forms of protoplasm whose rate and manner of growth they could control.
Houses, bridges, vehicles—even space ships were formed of living matter which was thrown into a quiescent nonliving state when it had attained the form and size desired. And it could be caused to become active again at will, permitting such extraordinary features as the blisterlike connection that had been made by the space ship with the hull of the Adastra.
So far, the Centaurian civilization was strange enough, but still comprehensible. Even men might have progressed in some such fashion had civilization developed on Earth from a different point of departure. It was the economics of the Centaurians which was at once understandable and horrifying to the men who learned of it.
The Centaurian race had developed from carnivorous plants, as men from carnivorous forebears. But at some early date in man’s progression, the worship of gold began. No such diversion of interest occurred upon the planets of Proxima Centauri. As men have devastated cities for gold, and have cut down forests and gutted mines and ruthlessly destroyed all things for gold or for other things which could be exchanged for gold, so the Centaurians had quested animals.
As men exterminated the buffalo in America, to trade his hide for gold, so the Centaurians had ruthlessly exterminated the animal life of their planet. But to Centaurians, animal tissue itself was the equivalent of gold. From sheer necessity, ages since, they had learned to tolerate vegetable foodstuffs. But the insensate lust for flesh remained. They had developed methods for preserving animal food for indefinite periods. They had dredged their seas for the last and smallest crustacean. And even space travel became a desirable thing in their eyes, and then a fact, because telescopes showed them vegetation on other planets of their sun, and animal life as a probability.
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.
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.
Before The Golden Age - A SF Anthology of the 1930s Page 92