Zehru of Xollar

by Hal K. Wells

unknown forcethat was keeping the purple mists at bay, for fan-like antennae at thetop of each post spread a similar shimmering sheet that formed a ceilingfor the clear-aired area.

  * * * * *

  The three Earthlings were facing one of the side walls of the bigenclosures. The purple mists outside made it hard to see clearly forany distance, but Blake had an impression that the surrounding terrainwas featured by the same barren, nearly desert bleakness thatcharacterized the interior of the enclosure, where scattered clumps ofdead, spiky black branches of shrub-like vegetation were the only signof plant life.

  Just within the distant end wall at their right there was a low platformsurmounted by a wide arch some ten feet in height, both constructed ofsilver-colored metal. There was nothing between them and the end wall totheir left, but they could see that the ground sloped sharply upwardfrom the barrier-sheet, and on the crest of the ridge a giganticcone-shaped structure of solid black could be seen dimly through theintervening mists.

  The cone-building seemed to be the source of the power that kept theenclosure intact. Slender cables of black metal ran down the slope fromit into the clear-aired space, spreading out over the dusty gray-blueground to the base of each of the tall posts, with a heaviercopper-colored cable running on the silver arch. From within thewindowless interior of the cone there was audible a low hum as oftremendous power being generated there.

  "Gee, what a rummy joint this place is!" There was frank awe in thegangster's voice as he at last broke the silence. "That guy with thegreen net sure took us for one sweet ride. Mebbe we're on the Moon now,or on Mars, huh?"

  Blake shook his head. "No, we're completely out of our entire solarsystem. Those twin purple suns up there prove that. We may even be inanother universe, or another dimension from our own. A piece ofapparatus that could whisk us up through fifty feet of earth and masonryas that green net did obviously works in dimensions of which we'venever dreamed. The only thing we're sure of is that we were brought tothis purple world deliberately and intentionally by an intelligent beingof some kind, scooped up like tadpoles from a mud-puddle and dumped herein this elaborate enclosure It had already prepared for us."

  * * * * *

  Blake nodded to where the black cone-building loomed through the purplemists outside the end wall. "Whoever or whatever the thing was thatbrought us here, I have a hunch It's there in that power-house watchingus. I'd suggest that we walk down toward that end of the enclosure for acloser look. We may at least find out whether we're guests orprisoners."

  "Listens good to me, fellah," agreed Mapes, sliding a hand up to hisshoulder holster and bringing out a squat black automatic pistol ofheavy caliber. "We'll do a prowl, over that way, and if His Nibs triesany more funny business mebbe a few slugs outta this rod will change hismind for him."

  "Better go easy with the gun, Mapes," advised Blake as the three of themstarted slowly toward the cone-building. "From what we've already seen,there must be weapons in this world that would make your pistol looklike a kid's pop-gun. We'd better go easy till--wait, what's that?"

  The thin high-pitched whine, followed promptly by the familiar growlingthunder of infra-bass, had again become audible. At the same moment along pencil-like beam of green light glowed into visibility, extendingfrom the tip of the cone to a point high within the enclosure just backof them. As they halted abruptly and watched, they saw the interlacingmeshes of the green flame-net materialize suddenly at the end of thebeam.

  The beam curved into an arc that dropped the net swiftly to the groundsome thirty yards from them. Its meshes were packed nearly full of dark,writhing figures.

  "Looks like some more tadpoles arriving for our pond!" Mapes exclaimed."I wonder what part of N' Yawk His Nibs yanked these babies from?"

  * * * * *

  Blake's answer died on his lips as the net and beam glowed blindinglybrighter for a brief second, then disappeared, leaving the dark figuresin full view. Helen choked back a gasp of horror. Mapes swore inconsternation and hurriedly swung his pistol into line with thosewrithing shapes.

  The net's latest captives were not from New York, nor were they from anyother part of the planet Earth. Hideous spawn of some unknown world outin the black void of Space, they writhed for a moment in a nightmarechaos of countless brown-furred bodies, then swiftly disentangledthemselves before the staring eyes of the three Earthlings.

  The things were apparently too low in the mental scale to have anyreaction to their situation other than a blind instinct to attack anyother living being within reach, for they promptly headed for the threecaptives from Earth.

  As the creatures came shambling rapidly forward on powerful bowed legs,and with the tips of their long hairy arms brushing the ground, theylooked like grotesquely distorted apes. The crowning horror of thoseshambling figures, however, lay in the fact that they were completelyheadless!

  Even when the things approached to a distance of less than ten feetbefore halting in momentary indecision, Blake could detect no sign ofany normal skull in the blunt space at the top of the powerful hairytorso. There was a furry-lipped mouth opening of some kind in the hollowbetween the bulging shoulders, but of eyes, ears, nose, or brain cavitythere was no discernible trace.

  For a long moment the headless ape-things and the three human beingsstood silently facing each other. Mapes' pistol was leveled pointblankat the nearest of the creatures, but their overwhelming numbers made thegangster hold his fire.

  There were two distinct groups of the things. At least twenty members ofeach group were in the crowd facing the Earthlings. To the rear of theseattackers two oddly repulsive objects were carried and carefullyshielded by picked guards of four unusually large and powerfulape-things.

  * * * * *

  The nature of those two guarded objects puzzled Blake. They looked likelarge eggs of dirty-gray jelly, about a yard in length. They wereobviously alive, for their gelatinous masses quivered and trembled inconstant activity. Blake noted that there seemed to be a curiousconnection between the ebb and flow of pulsations in the egg-masses andthe movements of the ape-things.

  His attention was abruptly recalled to the headless things in front ofhim as they suddenly began shambling forward again. There was nopossible mistaking the intention of those advancing horrors. They weremoving to the attack.

  They reached barely to Blake's shoulders, but he realized that theirenormous numbers and hook-taloned hands would make the result of thebattle almost a foregone conclusion. The fact that the headless thingswere without eyes was no handicap to them. The swift certainty of theirmovements proved that they had a sense of sight of some kind that was inevery way as efficient as eyesight.

  Blake looked hurriedly around him, seeking a place where they might beat the best possible advantage in the impending battle. There was asmall dense thicket of the spiky dead branches half a dozen yards totheir right. At Blake's low command, the three made a dash for thethicket. Arriving there, they ranged themselves against it, with theirbacks at least partially protected from attack.

  * * * * *

  The maneuver seemed to puzzle the ape-things for a moment. They stoodpassively watching the retreat of the three until they had reached thethicket. Then the creatures again began slowly closing in upon them.Blake snatched up a dead branch from the ground near the thicket, andwas delighted to find that its weight and tough fiber made it anexcellent club.

  He stripped off his topcoat and passed it back to Helen. Its toughfabric, heavily rubberized for proof against rain, might guard her headand face at least momentarily from those ripping talons if the headlessattackers came to close quarters. With Helen safely behind them, Blakeand Mapes turned grimly to face the enemy.

  The attack was prompt in coming. Moving with the perfect synchronizationof a single unit, one of the main groups came shambling in, followed aninstant later by the other group. Mapes' pistol
sent a bullet crashingsquarely into the nearest attacker. The creature staggered momentarily,then came lurching on again, apparently not even crippled. Blake swunghis heavy club in a whistling arc that sent two of his adversariesbroken and writhing to the ground.

  He heard Mapes' pistol bark four times more as the things closed in.Then the gun was knocked from the gangster's grip by a gropingtalon-armed hand. Mapes tried to batter back his assailants with hisnaked fists, but the flailing arms of the horde knocked him from hisfeet. His limp body was promptly tramped into unconsciousness by themilling feet of the close-packed group.

  Blake lashed the heavy club about him with a burst of savage fury thatfor the moment sent the furred horrors reeling backward. Their retreatended after a scant two yards. Reforming their ranks, they again begancautiously shambling forward in a new attack that Blake realized wouldprobably mean the end.

  * * * * *

  It was easy enough to batter the things to ground, but it seemedimpossible to seriously hurt them. Their incredible vitality and theiroverwhelming numbers made them almost invincible. Grimly Blake sethimself to battle as long as he could in that last desperate effort tokeep the hordes at bay.

  He noticed idly that the two groups still kept their oddly separatedformation. Behind them the two egg-masses of jelly were now seething innew activity after a brief lessening of their gruesome shivering. Blakenow saw that there was a direct and unmistakable connection between theactivity of the jelly and the corresponding activity of the ape-things.

  Realization of the fact sent a sudden flash of inspiration flamingthrough Blake's weary brain, correlating the real significance of adozen different things he had been subconsciously noting ever since thefirst appearance of the weird beasts.

  Those attacking things were not hordes of individual animals. They weremerely two complete organisms, with the members of each organismcontrolled by its nucleus through invisible lines of nervous force asthe various individual cells of the human body are linked by nervefibers. No wonder the creatures themselves were blind. The egg-mass thatwas the nucleus of each of the two groups was eyes, brain, and seat oflife for every ape-thing in the group.

  With a swift surge of hope Blake realized the way to conquer the things.If he could only shatter those flaccid masses of jelly, he would destroythe swarming dozens of beasts at the same time.

  Reaching the jelly ovoids seemed at first consideration to be animpossible task. They were carefully guarded far in the rear of theattacking groups. Blake knew that he had scarcely a chance in a hundredof battering his way through the intervening ape-things.

  * * * * *

  Then he remembered the gangster's pistol. His searching eyes found itimmediately, there on the ground nearly under the feet of the ape-thingsas they again shambled forward to the attack.

  Blake staked everything upon a last desperate sortie against theadvancing things. With his club whistling around his head in crashingblows that wrought murderous havoc in the close-packed hordes, he drovethem back for one breathless moment that gave him time to leap forwardand snatch up the pistol.

  The ape-things were already springing back upon him as he swung thepistol into line with one of the jelly-masses. He barely pressed thetrigger before the charging brutes knocked him from his feet.

  As he went down he flung his arms over his head to protect his face fromthe expected attack of those hooked talons, but none came. A bodythudded down upon him, then slid limply off again without making anymove to attack. Blake scrambled to his feet.

  Writhing upon the ground all around him were ape-things in their deathagonies. On the ground beyond them, quivering and broken in the midst ofits dying guards, was a viscid mass of loathsome gray jelly. Blake'sshot had apparently struck home squarely in the center of thatvulnerable blob. Even as he watched, the gelatinous mass shuddered in alast convulsion, then became quite still. At the same instant the lastsign of life vanished from the writhing ape-things on the ground.

  A good half of the attacking creatures were included in the dead bodies.The other half, Blake now saw, had retreated to cluster in wild panicabout the remaining blob of jelly. Realizing exultantly that his singleshot had slain one of the two weirdly disassociated organisms, Blakewith pistol in hand advanced toward the other, trying to get a clearshot at the jelly through the furry bodies clustering around it.

  * * * * *

  The group promptly turned and fled in blind panic. Blake sent thepistol's last shot crashing into the mass without any appreciableeffect. Then the things' stampede carried them hurtling on through oneof the gold-flecked side walls out into the swirling purple mists.

  The gold-flecked sheet flowed together again so swiftly behind thethings that a fraction of a second later there was not even theslightest indication in its shimmering unbroken surface to show that ithad ever been pierced.

  For thirty yards the fleeing ape-things sped on into the purple vapors.Then disaster struck them with bewildering swiftness. They stopped infull flight, shuddered for a moment, then slumped to the ground withtheir limbs writhing in agony. In their center the jelly ovoid quiveredmadly in the same strange torture.

  Tiny patches of vivid purple appeared at a hundred different points uponthe dying creatures. The patches spread and merged with lightningrapidity until a solid sheet of livid purple covered the writhing mass.Swiftly that mass lost both movement and shape as it melted down into apool of turgid purple slime. Then the slime vaporized into purple miststhat blended into the surrounding vapors, and all trace of theape-things and their jelly nucleus had vanished.

  Stunned by the incredible speed of this general dissolution, Blakerealized for the first time the real reason for the presence of thegold-flecked walls of force. Without those shimmering walls the captiveswould not have lived for a minute in the deadly purple atmosphere ofthis weird world beneath the twin suns. The gold-flecked walls were boththeir protection and their prison. The swirling purple mists outsidethose walls held the Earthlings as effectively and hopelessly prisonersin their enclosure as gold-fish in a bowl of water.

  * * * * *

  Blake turned back to the thicket to see how Helen and Mapes had fared inthat terrific battle with the headless things. He was relieved to seethat the girl had apparently escaped without even a scratch. She waskneeling beside Mapes' prone figure, doing what she could to revive him.The gangster was badly battered, but he seemed to have no seriousinjuries. He was already beginning to stir weakly and show signs ofreturning life.

  Blake started to step over to the two. Then he stopped abruptly as heheard a sharp metallic clang from the cone-building out in the purplemists beyond the end wall. He looked quickly up and saw that an ovalwindow had opened in the structure near its tip. Framed in the openingwas what seemed to be a large concave mirror. At one side of the mirrorwas a living being of some kind, but the intervening mists preventedBlake from making out any details beyond a hazy glimpse of a cluster ofwhat seemed to be long slender snake-like black tentacles.

  The next moment there spurted from the mirror a broad and swiftlyspreading beam of red light so brilliant that it glowed clearly even inthe bright purple rays of the twin suns. Before Blake could shout awarning to Helen the racing flood of ruddy radiance was upon them. Thescene reeled in a blurred kaleidoscope of flaming colors before Blake'seyes for a brief second, then complete oblivion swept over him.

  * * * * *

  After an interval that seemed hours, consciousness returned to him assuddenly as it had left him. His first bewildered look around himdisclosed the fact that startling changes had occurred in hissurroundings during the period while he was under the anesthesia of thered ray.

  His first effort at movement brought realization that he was in the gripof a strange paralysis. His head and neck seemed quite normal in everyway, but from the throat downward his body was completely dead as far asany power of v
oluntary movement was concerned.

  He twisted his head stiffly to one side, and saw that Helen was standingthere beside him. Just beyond her was the motionless figure of GilMapes. Both the gangster and the girl were in the grip of the samestrange paralysis. Like Blake, they were standing there rigidlymotionless, facing the gold-flecked barrier wall just in front of them.

  A moment's painful scrutiny of their position showed Blake that theposts forming the wall of the enclosure at the end toward the cone hadbeen brought in nearly a hundred yards toward them while they slept. Theshimmering barrier sheet was now scarcely a yard from their faces, yetthey still stood near the thicket where they had battled the headlesshorrors. Blake saw his coat half-buried in the blue-gray dust near hisfeet where Helen had discarded the garment to minister to Mapes.

  Their unseen captor had obviously made definite preparations forwhatever his next purpose with them was to be, for a long wheeledplatform had been brought to a position opposite them just outside theshimmering gold-flecked sheet. Blake noted the shattered remains ofMapes' pistol on the ground at one side of the platform. It hadapparently been fished from the enclosure and rendered harmless aftertheir captor had seen the weapon's efficient use against the headlessape-things.

  Clustered upon the wheeled platform was an assemblage of intricatelywinding coils, glowing tubes, and other apparatus that conveyed no moremeaning to Blake's bewildered gaze than a sight of the interior of ametropolitan power-house would to a Congo savage.

  * * * * *

  There was only one piece of the apparatus regarding whose probablefunction Blake could even guess. This was a pair of long slender armsthat projected through the shimmering walls into the enclosure,supporting at their end a large thin metal plate located just over theheads of the three Earthlings. Blake was willing to wager that it wasthis overhead plate that was responsible