by Eando Binder
Mog prodded us through the door and down a long corridor. We passed various other aliens. The dome must be crammed with them. Had they all come in one spaceship or several? Were more spaceships arriving regularly, augmenting their forces for the grand day of victory?
Those were things I had to find out. I felt a little crushed already. One lone pair of robots against a dome full of these invaders from the void. What hopeless odds faced us?
I tried to pump Mog.
“How many of you are there here on Earth?” I asked.
“Quiet,” he growled. “Speak only when you’re spoken to, prisoner.”
A side corridor branched to the large prison room. The wide face of it was simply a series of open bars. Behind the bars were the human prisoners. A hundred or so of the soldiers who had been gassed in the battle I had seen.
The jailer unlocked the door. Mog shoved us in.
“Join your fellows,” he laughed. “And talk over the end of your race’s rule on this planet.”
Eve and I stumbled forward in the rather dimly lit prison. The men hardly glanced up, haggard and despondent. They sat or sprawled on the cold stone, shivering and suffering. We had stumbled over a corpse laid by the door. The jailer dragged it out without a word, locking the door again.
“Pneumonia, I guess,” chattered one man to us. “Died an hour ago. The tenth one already, that way. Welcome to hell, strangers.”
I inadvertently stepped on his toe, in the close-packed chamber.
“Ouch! Damn you—” He was suddenly a wild, enraged animal, his nerves broken by the cruel imprisonment. He cracked his fist against my face—or tried to. Eve caught him by the shoulders and held him as easily as a child.
His rage gusted out in stunned incredulity at Eve’s strength. And he was suddenly peering at us closely. All the men were. “Why, you’re not—not humans,” he gasped.
Others had jumped up.
“It’s the damned aliens in disguise! Tear them apart—”
“Stop, you fools,” hissed another voice. “Can’t you see the metal in spots? It’s Adam Link the ro—”
“Shut up,” I snapped quickly, shaking my head violently for their benefit. “I’m Adam Link, the spy.”
They caught on, especially when the jailer appeared at the bars. “What’s the commotion in there?”
Silence greeted him and he left with a shrug. He hadn’t heard the near giveaway. It was my sole ace-in-the-hole, to be taken as a human by the enemy.
I made my way to the far corner of the prison, out of earshot of the jailer if we talked low. The men quietly moved around me.
“Adam Link the robot,” breathed the man whose toe I had crushed. “I’m Captain Taylor, chief officer of these men. Are you with us, Adam Link? Maybe with your help we can break out and do something.”
I was a little gratified that they had heard of me and my exploits. Most humans had ignored me, or passed me off as a freak or clever toy. These men accepted me as an equal, and sought my help. I cut off these personal ruminations.
“When the time comes,” I whispered. “Right now, I have some questions. You were gassed, before capture?”
“Couldn’t have been gas,” the captain returned, puzzled. “I had my men wear gas-masks. We saw, heard, and felt nothing. All our muscles just suddenly went limp, as if paralyzed. We didn’t lose consciousness. The effects wore off in a few hours, after we were locked up here.”
Induced paralysis? Perhaps by a projected, invisible ray. My heart sank. Another manifestation of their advanced science. Whole armies and cities rendered helpless, captured without a gunshot, if they wished—
Captain Taylor was suddenly moaning a little. He was, after all. a young man. Recent events had been soulshaking.
“God, the shock of it—seeing these inhuman beings. Horrible creatures from another world. It’s a wonder we aren’t all insane. Poor Jones did go. I put him out of his misery myself. Adam Link, we’ve seen enough to know the whole world is threatened. We’ve got to do something if we can.”
“Easy,” I said at the hysterical edge in his voice. “We can’t go ahead blindly. What else do you know?”
“Mighty little,” Taylor muttered. “We’ve been locked up in this ice-box all the time. They feed us from the kit-rations they picked up among our dead, after the battle. Every day a few have been taken out. They don’t return.”
I knew what happened to them, but didn’t tell Taylor. Vivisection and mental study. Humans put under the knife and microscope, like interesting little bugs, so that the aliens would know every factor of the race whose world they wanted to wrest away.
Taylor knew nothing of the layout of the dome, or the number of aliens, or their guns—things I had to know. I pondered.
“You have a plan?” Captain Taylor asked hopefully. “Somehow I feel glad you’re here, Adam Link. You’ve got to save the human race.”
All their eyes turned to me. I was already accepted as their leader, their champion. Champion of the world, of the human race. Within me, a wild elation surged. It was good to have humans accept me at last, place their trust in me.
But still, what could I do?
“For the present,” I began, “we will wait—”
Interruption came as the door grated open and three aliens stepped in. One of them was Mog again.
“We want three of you—any three,” they announced.
They grasped the nearest three men by the arms, roughly, and began dragging them away. One shrieked, struggling to escape. He jabbed his fist in Mog’s face.
The giant jabbed back. His gorilla-like and delivered a blow that knocked the human cold. Then the alien bent the limp form across his broad chest and slowly began cracking its spine.
“I am strong,” Mog boasted. “Watch, as I break this wretch in half. It will teach you others a lesson.”
The other men watched in helpless horror. Some turned to me in appeal, but they knew I did not want to reveal my identity. It was more important to save earth than save this man. I told myself that, for about one second. Then I acted.
“Adam, don’t—” Eve hissed, grabbing my arm.
“Let go, Eve. There are some things—”
I was there in two strides. I caught the alien by the arm, wrenching him around so that he dropped his burden. Mog glared down at me, from his height of nine feet. I was David before Goliath, a little pygmy scarcely reaching to his chest.
“You must want a taste of my strength,” he roared, pounding his fist into my chest. The blow knocked me back a full inch. I was amazed, for never before had any creature short of another robot displayed such power.
He struck again, but this time I was braced. He gave a grunt of pain as his arm went numb.
I struck back, full in his ugly face, but only succeeded in staggering him a little. I was again astonished. The blow might have snapped the neck of a human. For my second blow, I used fully half my machine-power. My arm shot out like a steam-piston. The alien flew back against the iron bars with a thud.
He came roaring back to finish the fight, but now I saw the folly of my course.
“Cover me, men,” I yelled.
They understood. They milled about me so that I was lost in their numbers.
“Which one was it?” demanded Mog angrily. “Which one of you weaklings thinks he is stronger than I. Where is he?”
But luckily he couldn’t pick me out by sight. The light was dim and it had all been a swift blur of action. All humans looked as alike as peas to them. His two companions pulled him back and calmed him down.
“Let him go,” they admonished, half laughingly. “Next time don’t pull your punches, Mog. Now we’ll take our three.”
They pulled their holster weapons this time, aiming at three men. Only a slight buzz sounded from the instruments. The three unlucky victims fell limply, all their muscles paralyzed. The three aliens carried them out, and the jail door clanged shut.
“Thanks, Adam Link,” Captain Taylor said simply,
as some of the men attended to the victim I had saved. All the men looked at me, half in awe at my strength, half in gratitude.
“Forget it,” I said. “I nearly gave myself away. I’ll have to be more careful.” I resumed where I had left off, before the interruption. “For the present we will lie low and—”
“Lie low?” Captain Taylor suddenly blazed. “While earth is doomed if we don’t do something? While they take us out one by one, cutting into our numbers? No. If you haven’t a plan, Adam Link, I have. Next time they open the door we’ll rush out in a body, fight our way through—”
“How far?” I asked sharply. “You humans are brave—but fools. How far would you get against an unknown number of them? And what is the way out? And what powers their guns? And what is their dome made of? And how many more spaceships are coming? And how can this dome be sabotaged effectively? We have to know those things, instead of blindly rushing out to become corpses who died in foolish glory.”
“You’re right,” Taylor muttered, subsiding. “But how are we going to find out? You can’t get out of this cell to do any spying around.”
“You forget who I am,” I said without boastfulness. “There is only one kind of jail that could hold Adam Link. A completely solid steel chamber—if the walls were thick enough. Now be quiet all of you.”
It was late night now in the outside world. And in this dome, the hum of activity floating down the corridors died gradually. The aliens slept at night too, fortunately.
I watched the single guard on duty outside our barred room. He was sitting in a chair-like support, leaning against the wall, bored at the thought of his all-night vigil. Gradually his eyes blinked and closed. Sounds rumbled from his barrel chest. He slept.
“Now is my chance,” I whispered to the men.
“How will you get out?” Taylor queried.
For answer, I strode to the bars where the ends were buried in the cell wall. Bracing my feet, I tugged at a bar. My locomotor unit within hummed as rising horsepower fed into it. I kept an eye on the guard, but he slept heavily.
The bar was thick and strong, more resistant than any jail bar of earth, which I would have jerked away with one hand. Eve had to help me. Together, like metal Samsons, we bent the bar. It came away suddenly, out of its socket. We loosened a half dozen more, forming an aperture wide enough to slip through.
The soldiers had watched with silent wonder. I faced them.
“Stay here. Too many of us would invite detection. Eve and I will scout, since we are the swiftest and strongest. We will try to be back before the guard awakes. Come, Eve.”
A moment later we stood beyond the bars, in the hall. We bent the bars back into place. Even if the jailer woke for a while and looked around, he would not know of the two who had skipped.
Before we stepped away, I held Eve back against the wall.
“Photoelectric units across the front here,” I warned. “To announce any jail-break. Hug the wall carefully, and we won’t break the beam.”
Cautiously, we slid sideways for twenty feet. Beyond that, the beams did not stretch. We were free. We strode silently down the corridor. It was dimly lit, as were all the passages during the night-period.
At the next cross-corridor, I paused. I pondered as to the general lay-out of the honeycombed dome.
“That searchlight,” I told Eve, “must shine up from some room at the apex. We’ll try to find it.”
After several turns, we came upon a passage whose floor sloped upward steadily. It was the one we wanted. We crept along like two metal ghosts, warily watching for aliens. One appeared, abruptly, a guard lounging on routine duty. From his niche shone a patch of bright light we would have to cross.
He was not asleep, though staring vacantly. We would have to distract his attention. Estimating the curve of his niche, I made a tiny clicking sound. With mathematical precision known only to a robot-brain, I knew the sound would reflect in an acoustic curve back of him.
He started, came to his hooved feet and turned, wondering who or what was clicking in the wall back of him. While he thus surveyed the blank wall, Eve and I tip-toed across the lighted patch and melted into the shadowy stretch beyond.
Not long after, the slope led us to what I calculated must be the center of the dome. I was sure of it when it opened out into a gigantic round chamber. There were lights burning within and aliens were at work. We hugged the doorway’s shadow.
I ran my eye swiftly around. The room had a sliding roof, now closed, like the sliding roofs of astronomical observatories. In the center was a huge bowl-shaped object, surrounded by what seemed to be generators and other power-producing apparatus.
The signal-light.
From here, rolling back the roof, they shone their supersearchlight, guiding their scout craft back from all corners of a world as yet new and not fully mapped to them.
My quick, searching eye noticed two other things.
One, that large recesses leading off from this giant room held the ring of defense guns.
Second, and more arresting, there was a huge unfinished machine at one side. Workmen were on scaffolds around it. Somehow, with huge crystalline tubes and a maze of wires, it suggested a radio. A transmitter, perhaps, with which to signal their home-world, hurling radio waves far into space? It must be important to them, since this was a night shift at work.
We watched one workman. He was completing a framework, enclosing a great tube. A tubular, hissing affair in his hand sprayed out smoky matter that instantly congealed to form the hard construction beams. It was miraculous, like forming something out of nothing. And forming something harder than steel, for it was the same material of the dome.
“How is it done?” Eve marvelled, in a whisper camouflaged by the noise they made. “They seem to draw it out of nowhere.”
“From the air,” I said, “They are masters of plastics. They draw oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the air and compress them instantaneously into dense plastics, ten times harder than polyethylene or any metal, earth is just exploring plastic science.”
“How fast they work,” Eve said. “It’s almost like a spider spinning out his web as fast as he can move.”
“It accounts for the rapid construction of the dome,” I nodded. “Joe Trent swore the dome was not here a month ago. They built this whole dome in that short time. Any comparable structure would take earth engineers at least a year. Let’s look at the guns, Eve.”
CHAPTER 19
Robot Saboteurs
Following a passage that led to the gun-emplacements, we approached the first. Dark and unattended, we could make little out except that it was surprisingly small—a mere ten-foot instrument of intricate design. But the guns must be super-powerful. They had shot earth warships out of the water, with one charge each.
By what principle? What did they shoot? How did they aim so accurately?
The answer came more quickly and completely than I wanted.
Without warning, an ear-shattering report sounded against the outside of the dome. Then I caught the drone of aircraft. The U.S.A.F. was making a desperate night attack, since the truce attempt—the false one Eve and I had been part of—had come to nothing.
The aliens streamed to their guns. What I saw then I hardly believed. Each gunner simply wore a helmet with wires trailing to the breech of the gun. Then he raised his eyes to a plane above, seen through a slit, and the gun magically aimed the same way. Finally, at his silent command, the gun spoke only a fractional second later. The target plane exploded into debris, struck by a hissing charge of something infernal.
After watching this same performance a few times, it all clicked in my mind. “Eve,” I whispered. “Earth has no chance against that weapon. It shoots electric bolts at the speed of light itself. And most diabolical of all is their aiming method—simply looking at a plane with their eyes. The most accurate ‘gunsight’ possible. And a simple swift thought-command then fires the gun. In essence, the aliens kill with their thoughts
. Aim, fire! Aim, fire! As fast as they think it, humans die.”
After dozens of American planes went down, the attack broke.
Stunned, Eve and I returned to prison, bending the bars straight after letting ourselves in. In the morning, the awakened dome would not know of the two robot spies who had learned much—but not yet enough.
“What was the excitement about?” Captain Taylor asked. “We heard muffled thumps down here.”
He and his men listened to our story with incredulous eyes.
“Thought-controlled guns,” Taylor mused. “If we could spike those, the dome would be defenseless—”
“For about a week,” I cut in. “Earth forces would continue to bomb—and fail to chip off an atom. And in a week, the aliens would make new guns with their plastic magic. No, men. We have to get at the root of the dome. Somewhere they must have a generator that feeds power to the guns. Probably a thermonuclear unit. If I can find that . . .”
The next night, Eve and I again sauntered out of prison. Again our jailer was sleeping away a watch that to him seemed totally unnecessary.
We roamed completely around the dome, looking for a central power-plant. We peered in bunk-rooms, in which aliens slept heavily. Supply rooms, stacked with boxes and plastic-cans of their food. The air-conditioning room, where a huge, silent machine piped cold air, normal to them, through the dome.
“If we could only find a room with weapons,” I told Eve. “Distributed among the men, we would have an armed fighting force.”
But there seemed no small-weapon supply, outside of those carried by the aliens themselves. Balked at every turn! We could not keep up this night spying forever. Sooner or later we would be discovered. Before that, we had to have some definite plan of action.
I reported no luck to the men, back at prison. They groaned in dismay. Each day several of them had been taken away, never to return. Our numbers were going down steadily. And the chill of prison was weakening those left.
