Collected Fiction (1940-1963)

by William P. McGivern

  He landed the ship but it was not until he crawled from its slit-like door that he realized that Jan had called the shot accurately. They were only about a hundred yards from the main entrance to the underground cave where Jan’s tribe lived. Dirk recognized the large, oddly shaped boulder which marked the opening of the tunnel.

  Lee’s slender figure slipped through the narrow door without difficulty and she dropped to the ground beside him. She gazed slowly about at the barren, ravished landscape.

  “It’s not very pretty,” she said, at last.

  “It was once,” Dirk said slowly. “Before they came it was one of the most beautiful spots in the world.”

  He helped Jan through the ship’s door, but Morma-Ri decided to remain inside. The aged monk’s kindly face was pale under its saffron coloring.

  “I will rest here,” he said. “The task of scrambling over boulders and rocks I must leave to you, the young.”

  With Jan in the lead and Dirk and Lee following hand in hand, they left the ship, making for the cave entrance. Jan was about twenty feet ahead of them when he reached the mouth of the cave and shoved the boulder aside with one quick powerful thrust.

  He started down the steps, a glad smile of anticipation wreathing his stolid features.

  Then he stopped—every muscle of his body freezing into immobility.

  “What’s the matter?” Dirk called anxiously. In another instant he was beside Jan, peering down into the interior of the cave. When he straightened a few seconds later his face was gray with horror.

  “What is it?” Lee asked. Her blue eyes traveled anxiously over his face. She was moving toward the cave entrance when Dirk caught her shoulders.

  Gently he took her away from the tunnel entrance.

  “Wait here,” he said. “Jan and I have to go in, but you mustn’t.”

  HE turned back to the cave. Jan was still standing rigidly on the crude stone steps, his eyes riveted on the scene that had sickened Dirk.

  When Dirk approached, he started slowly down the steps. Dirk followed him. At the bottom both men paused, looking about them.

  There were about five bodies or parts of bodies scattered about the rough floor. Bodies, which despite their hideously seared and blackened condition, Dirk recognized as belonging to members of Jan’s tribe.

  There was a torso, with but one arm remaining, several pairs of legs that looked as if they had been seared in a furnace. Decay had set in, giving the scene its final touch of gruesome horror.

  Silently, Dirk and Jan moved on to other sections of the cave, dreading the thought of what they might find. The radio room was destroyed completely, the mechanism melted down into twisted wreckage as if by an acetylene torch.

  But they found no more bodies. Even the far, unused recesses of the caves were completely empty of humans—dead or alive. The four or five bodies at the base of the steps were the only tangible evidence of the fact that the caves had been inhabited only a few weeks before by forty or fifty human beings.

  Puzzled, they were starting back through the dark passageways when to their ears came a scream, terror-filled and desperate. Dirk’s blood chilled.

  “Lee!” he gasped.

  AS HE spoke he galvanized into motion. Jan at his heels he raced through the twisting corridors, his heart hammering with fear, not for himself, but for Lee. There had only been the one, frantic scream—then silence. That could mean that whatever had scared her had gone, or it might mean . . .

  Reaching the base of the steps he abandoned caution and plunged upward. Jan was at his side as they sprang from the cave entrance into the bright sunlight.

  A scream sounded behind him and, wheeling, Dirk saw Lee. The dark haired girl was struggling wildly with two stocky figures whose bodies seemed covered with green scale-like flakes. In one sweeping glance Dirk saw more of the greenish creatures swarming from the ports of a sleek red ship which had landed not more than a few yards from the cave entrance.

  These figures moved forward with swift jerky strides, almost like mechanical dolls. Their bodies were shaped in a near-human pattern, but their faces were impassive and expressionless as they charged forward, jerking weapons from belts at their waists.

  Lee screamed again and Dirk felt a torrent of blinding rage sweep over him. He sprang forward cursing like a madman, but the wave of charging figures surged over him before he had taken two strides.

  He lashed out at them with both fists, all of the weight of his heavy shoulders behind each blow. At his side Jan was battering at them with fists that fell like bludgeons.

  But their efforts were less than futile. The stocky, emotionless, expressionless creatures charged inexorably into them, the blows glancing harmlessly off their faces and bodies.

  Dirk grimaced in pain as his fist smashed into an unyielding, rock-hard face. Staggering back, he saw Lee being carried toward the red ship, still struggling and fighting.

  “Damn you!” he raged, hurling himself again at the horde of scaly creatures.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Jan go down, flailing desperately at the figures who swarmed over him. Dirk leaped toward him, exposing his back momentarily. He didn’t see the blow that crashed into the back of his head. All he knew was a moment of terrible blinding pain, then a sickening realization that he was falling into blackness. Through the mists that were enveloping his consciousness he heard a faint, far-away scream. He knew it was Lee, but his last desperate effort to crawl to his knees brought a wave of nausea and darkness rolling over him.

  He knew no more.

  CHAPTER X

  In the Hands of the Martians

  WHEN Dirk regained consciousness he was being dragged over a smooth, highly polished metal floor by two of the green creatures who had attacked them. His legs trailed behind him as his captors jerked him along. Their arms under his shoulders were as hard and unyielding as metal bars.

  His head ached throbbingly from the blow he had received and he almost fainted with pain when the arms which supported him were suddenly withdrawn and he fell forward to the hard floor.

  For an instant he could only lie helplessly, experiencing a numb sort of relief slowly stealing over his body.

  A voice, a sobbing, familiar voice, roused him from the lethargic stupor of pain.

  “You brutes! You inhuman brutes have killed him!”

  The words, anguished and frantic, filtered through the deep fog of pain and weariness into which he seemed to be settling. Something inside of him, something quite apart from his natural muscles, responded to that voice. With strength that was more mental than physical, he lifted himself from the floor and raised his head.

  Lee, her eyes startlingly blue in her chalk white face, was struggling with two impassive, green-scaled creatures who were holding her, not more than a dozen feet from where he lay.

  His eyes met hers and he forced a semblance of a grin to his lips.

  “Don’t worry, Honey,” he said weakly. “I’m not dead yet.”

  “But you soon will be”

  The words weren’t spoken, for he hadn’t heard them. Instead they had suddenly impressed themselves on his mind as definitely as audible words would have. It was a thought—but not one of his own. From some other source the words had emanated and stamped themselves with positive force on his consciousness.

  Dazed, Dirk was hardly aware of the metal-hard hands again on his arms, lifting him from the floor and holding him erect. With an effort he shook his head from side to side, clearing it somewhat of the spinning shadows that were flickering in front of his eyes.

  Gradually his vision cleared and he looked about, seeing his surroundings for the first time.

  HE WAS standing m the approximate center of a majestically proportioned room. Its walls, ceilings and floor were composed of some hard, slick material that was the deepest emerald green in color.

  In front of him was a huge dais that caught his attention immediately. For at its apex was a mighty control panel of some sort, almost thirty
feet square. Its entire surface was pitted with hundreds of rheostats, indicators and gauges, meaningless to him, but indicative of brilliant mechanical intelligence in its designer.

  Lee’s voice attracted him again.

  “Oh Dirk,” she cried, straining helplessly at the expressionless creatures who held her, “I was so afraid you’d been killed.”

  He started toward her, but the iron hands on his arms instantly tightened. Beside the four silent green creatures who held him and Lee, he saw at least eight more lined up in a military column, facing the dais. Turning, he saw Jan’s limp figure stretched on the floor. Two more of the emotionless guards stood beside his inert body.

  “I might as well have been,” he said bitterly. “We’re as helpless now as we would be dead.”

  “An extremely intelligent attitude.” It wasn’t a voice. Again it was a thought suddenly bombarded against his mind. Lee was looking at him incredulously. It was obvious that the same idea had been mysteriously forced on her consciousness.

  “Dirk,” she said faintly, “I heard—I thought—”

  Lee’s voice trailed off and she turned slowly, her eyes moving to the base of the monstrous control panel, with its thousands of intricate gauges.

  Dirk turned too, in response to a command that struck his brain with an almost physical force. .

  He saw then what he had not noticed in his first glance at the huge, gadget-studded board.

  At its base, seated in an ornately carven chair, was a tall thin creature, a pale green in color. His head was huge, dwarfing the rest of his body into insignificance. Two large eyes, glowing with a smouldering light, regarded them appraisingly. At the left of this creature was a long device, similar to an organ key-board, over which one thin hand trailed slowly.

  “I am Thogar. I rule here.”

  There was no doubt that the thought originated from the huge-headed creature on the dais. Its eyes swung slowly from Dirk to Lee.

  “Emotion is an uncivilized quality,” the creature’s thought struck them again, “but I am guilty of feeling now. My feeling is one of anger. You miserable beings, by your subterfuge, have occasioned the destruction of the Saturnian city. Using one of their ships to attack us was a cunning move. It prompted us to retaliate by reducing to dust the entire colony of Saturn with all of its inhabitants. We do not regret this, but we regret being deceived by Earthlings.”

  “What are you going to do with us?” Dirk asked grimly.

  The question seemed to amuse the creature on the dais.

  “Such a question is typical of Earthling stupidity. You must die, as all Earthlings have died since we came.”

  DIRK felt a stubborn anger welling in him against the cold intellect that was embodied in the creature on the dais.

  “Why must we die?” he demanded. “What right do you have to decide anyone’s death?”

  The ponderous head swayed slightly and the lambent eyes gleamed with a suddenly brilliant light.

  “You anger me,” its thought lashed at Dirk. “That is extremely unwise of you. For you to imply an equality between us is tactless effrontery. Earth had no civilization until Mars brought one here. Our first task was to stamp out the crude life-forms peculiar to this planet. You are one of those lifeforms, undeveloped, brutish, unintelligent. For that reason you must be eliminated. Millions of your species were teeming the surface of the planet when we arrived. In the place of that senseless profusion we have created robots to perform the elementary tasks which once were the task of low lifeforms of Earth. Those creatures which are beside you, alert and ready to curb your savage impulses, are robots, subject only to my will.”

  Dirk glanced at the flat, mask-like faces and scaly bodies of the things which guarded him and Lee. It was with difficulty that he suppressed a shudder of repulsion.

  “An intelligent being,” Thogar’s thought was coldly contemptuous, “would not be revolted by an economical machine. These robots have enabled the Martians to enjoy an existence unencumbered by the drudgery and mentality which were the principal characteristics of an Earthling’s life. They have also made it possible for the survivors of Mars to devote their time exclusively to scientific pursuits.”

  In spite of Dirk’s preoccupation with Lee’s and his own safety, he could not express his curiosity.

  “How are they powered?” he asked.

  “It would be impossible for you to understand. Their energy is generated from one mighty plant and fed to them individually through a modification of ether waves. Their wills are dominated by mine through simple thought transference. The theories involved would be incomprehensible to you. Incidentally, they are indestructible.”

  As he finished speaking, his huge head leaned back to rest against a specially constructed brace on the top of the carven throne.

  At the same instant Dirk felt the hands on his arms tighten inexorably. Two of the robots were lifting Jan’s still unconscious figure between them and carrying him toward the vast room’s only door. Dirk was dragged along behind him and, twisting desperately, he saw that Lee was being brought along with them.

  The grotesque, huge-headed Martian watched them dispassionately, not a flicker of expression touching his face as they were dragged away from his throne. His attitude rivaled the interest an Earth scientist might have displayed in watching the death throes of a malignant germ under the slide of his microscope.

  THE impassive Martian robots dragged the three humans along a broad corridor with green walls and ceiling. They were not more than six feet apart, Jan in the lead, Dirk and Lee following.

  Dirk twisted around and caught Lee’s eye.

  “Keep your chin up,” he said. He tried to grin.

  Lee matched his effort. “Do you think this is the—end?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “It’s impossible to tell what that cold-blooded devil has in mind.”

  Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the corridor for several silent seconds.

  “Dirk,” Lee said suddenly, “What do you think happened to Morma-Ri?”

  “Not much chance that he got away from the cave alive,” Dirk answered. He heard Lee catch a quick breath. “I’m sorry, Honey,” he said miserably, “he meant a great deal to you, didn’t he?”

  After a moment Lee said, “Yes, he did.” Her voice was perfectly steady.

  They tramped along in silence again, the jerky mechanical footsteps of the robots sounding like the amplified noise of a troop of toy mechanical soldiers.

  Lee broke the silence with a pitiful attempt at lightness. “You don’t look very neat,” she said. “Not from the back anyway. Your leather shirt is completely out of your trousers. If we’re going to make an exit we should make a presentable one.”

  “Right you are, honey,” he said, trying to match her mood. Absently his hands moved to stuff his shirt inside his belt. Suddenly he froze, every muscle and nerve in his body tensing rigidly.

  His fingers had touched a slim metal rod. The slim metal rod, he instantly realized, that they had appropriated from the tendril-armed creatures from Saturn.

  His hopes and thoughts quickened. If they could turn the weapon against these robot guards—Thogar’s words suddenly sprang into his mind to mock his hopes. The huge headed Martian had said, that the robots were indestructible.

  Then another thought struck him. These were the weapons of the invaders from Saturn. Wasn’t it likely that they had been developed for possible use against the Martians? If they were, they might have an effect on the Martian robots. His thoughts were churning wildly. It was a chance, a desperate, million-to-one chance at best, but he had to take it.

  His hands came away from his belt clutching the shining metal rod. He heard Lee’s quick intake of breath. She had seen it. Had her robot guards?

  “Easy, honey,” he said softly. “Are your guards suspicious?”

  “They don’t seem to be,” Lee said faintly, a little later. “I can’t tell by looking at them. Oh Dirk be careful.”

  DIRK had the sil
ver weapon before him now. His fingers ran rapidly over its smooth length, found nothing. Sweat was beading his face. The damn thing had to have a trigger of some sort. One of the ends of the slim tube had had an opening in it. The other end was solid.

  They were approaching a door at the end of the corridor. If anything was going to be done it would have to be fast. Suddenly he remembered the tendril-like arms of the Saturnian creatures. They wouldn’t have been able to pull a trigger, they would have to squeeze . . .

  His hands closed carefully on the metal rod and he felt it give slightly under the pressure. They were almost at the door, there was not time to think, plan or even to hope.

  He pointed the slim weapon at the back of one of the robots that was carrying Jan’s limp figure. Then he squeezed tightly.

  There was no sound from the weapon. No pellet or visible ray flashed from its muzzle. For perhaps three agonizing seconds nothing happened. Then, with a suddenness that amazed him, the robot halted, seeming to stiffen into rock-like rigidity. It twisted slightly, almost as if in pain, then, with a sputtering hiss, it crashed forward to the floor.

  The other robots did not break their stride. Unseeing, unheeding they tramped on, marching over the fallen robot as if it were part of the floor. Swinging the slender weapon around Dirk flashed it over the two robots that were striding beside him. Within twenty feet their mechanically monotonous pace broke, they stiffened, then fell forward.

  In another thirty seconds the remaining three robots were crumpled on the floor, lifeless machines.

  Dirk sprang to Lee’s side and held her close for an instant.

  “We don’t really have time for this,” he murmured, “but then we may never have time. This is one break for us, but we’ll have to make our breaks from now on.”

  A faint moan sounded behind them. “Jan!” Lee whispered.

  Together they hurried to the stocky Earthman’s side.

  Jan was sitting up between the two fallen robots, pressing both hands to his head, as if he were afraid it might fly apart.