by Jimmy Guieu
“Hoping you can escape after your capture, Zimko, is a grave error that surprises. You must know that the Denebians will take extraordinary precautions to cut off any chance for you to escape when they have you at their mercy.”
Zimko replied, making his old friend more surprised than ever, “I’ve thought of all that and I’m sure that being captured by these monsters will mean certain death. That’s why, in pretending to fall into their trap, I’ll have a big surprise for them.”
Honky looked infuriated. Taking on a more formal attitude he said, “If you deem my post of Chief of the Information Service as unworthy of knowing the details of your plan, which sounds to me rather obscure to say the least, then I must…”
Zimko laughed again, interrupting him. “Save your resignation for another time. Anyway, you’ve threatened me with quitting at least ten times already whenever I try your patience. Did you think I was going to undertake such a thing without giving your service the details?”
He stood up, walked to an armored door that was lined with magnetic locks and announced, “I’m going to present to you the crew, the very special crew that will participate in my… suicide.”
Honky looked aghast. “It’s here in the bio-genetic lab? In the hibernation chamber?”
Smiling enigmatically Zimko joked, “My men are pretty tough, you know!”
Zimko’s space squadron had just entered the orbit of Deimos, Mars’ farthest moon. The surface of the planet was now in their field of vision. The green and ocher zones of the deserts and areas covered with the sparse Martian vegetation formed the puzzle whose huge irrigation canals separated into pieces.
The red splash of the Hellas Desert with the Zea Locus at the center came speeding up until the Fimn’has, adjusting the strength of their gravito-magnetic fields, slowed down to descend vertically on Rynka, the Martian base of the Federated Worlds. Its transparent, airtight dome gave off only a dim light due to the weak sunlight. On a planet like Earth a dome of this kind would reflect a blinding light.
Hovering at a fixed point the space squadron stopped 30 miles above the base. Zimko turned on his viewer and called the chief of the base, who popped up immediately on the screen. He showed no exterior signs of the psychic control he was under, like all the inhabitants of the city.
“Welcome to Rynka, Zimko,” he raised his right hand. “I’ll take care of you from here. You can land.”
A long beam of purple light from the tower on top of the protective dome swept over the star-studded sky. It reached the squadron, which started descending, and kept it in its cone of purple light until it was on the ground. The “control” beam had detected nothing unusual in the Fimn’has cargo.
The 50 flying saucers landed gently on the outside astrodrome and all the crew, dressed in spacesuits, came out.
With Zimko at their head the group of 35 Polarians, 40 Wolfians and 40 Centaurians headed for the decompression chamber at the base of the dome. The Man from Outer Space knew that somewhere in a building in the city—or in an invisible ship hovering in space—the Denebians were watching his strange group. In fact, the beings from Deneb must surely be observing every gesture of the three groups of “weird creatures”, as monstrous to them as they were to the inhabitants of the Federated Worlds.
The 35 Polarians in light gray spacesuits and round, transparent helmets formed the head of the group with an average height of six and a half feet. Then came the Wolfians with their big, metal suits that made them look stocky at four feet, four and a half tall maximum. The Centaurians were last, small, human-shaped creatures with orange skin. In their spacesuits, some transparent, others soft metal with cylindrical chests they could have passed for children wearing “Martian” costumes, the tallest of them barely three feet tall.
At their approach the rectangular access hatch of the base opened. They entered the decompression chamber in groups of 20 and waited in the interior astrodrome where 100 Fimn’has of all kinds were lined up.
The newcomers crossed the runway and took a large avenue that led straight to the central square containing the huge building in the shape of a tower housing the control center and the main technical services.
While walking, Zimko and his companions kept a discreet eye on the inhabitants of the base. To an unsuspecting eye they looked normal, a little too serious in their expressions, perhaps, but nothing showing that they were no longer “thinking”. Nobody would have suspected that behind these cold faces was hiding a foreign will controlling their actions at a distance for more than two Martian days already.
On Zimko’s orders, as he kept only five Polarians, one Wolfian and one Centaurian with him, the other members of his space crew went to their assigned duties around the central square. Armed with disintegrating pistols and paralyzing tubes each of them had a mission to defend the access of the Command Tower in case of a ground attack.
In the meantime, outside the base, four teams made up of a Wolfian and a Polarian went to the observation posts along the exterior astrodrome, which had long-range disintegrator cannons.
Zimko and his seven companions jumped into the gravito-magnetic elevators that took ten seconds to bring them to the 217th floor of the tower, the seat of the Command Post. Hudako, Chief of the Rynka base, welcomed them smiling.
It must have been hard for the Denebian brains controlling his actions to act as naturally as possible. And the visitors noted, they did not quite pull it off. In fact, although it was relatively easy to make a group of beings act under mental control in circumstances not requiring a great deal of “style”, like walking, eating, drinking and sleeping, it was something entirely when it came to putting on a sincere smile, for example, when meeting a friend.
Hudako, without question, was smiling. But an unusual crease for a friendly smile furrowed the corner of his lips. Some of his facial muscles looked painfully tense. In spite of all their efforts the Denebians could only “live in another’s shoes” clumsily. Their way of thinking and their ideas of everyday things were fundamentally different from Polarian concepts and prevented them from perfecting their imitations.
Cool and collected, showing no sign of noticing the strange behavior Zimko played his role. “A psychic message from a pilot flying in your zone, Hudako, alerted us that something strange was happening here.”
“Indeed, we found and chased away a corps of Denebian saboteurs that obviously came to capture some of Rynka’s leaders,” the base chief lied under psychic command of the masters of his brain. “But everything is back to normal. We even took some prisoners. Would you like me to take you to where we’re holding them? Since we don’t have special cells for that we had to shut them up in big room with strongly guarded doors.”
“I’d love to see them, Hudako. Lead away…”
Meanwhile, on the exterior astrodrome, the Polarians and Wolfian on the watch by the disintegrator cannons were ready to aim their rays at any enemy ship that might get in their crosshairs.
They looked casually at the Fimn’has—unmistakable—that were taking off or landing on one of the astrodromes around the huge dome protecting the city. However, it was one of these disc-shaped ships, so familiar but piloted by a Denebian, that had flown over them and landed on the runway after spraying its will-destroying rays.
The same maneuver was repeated at every post equipped with a disintegrator cannon. The exterior defense ring fell into the hands of the Denebians.
Lying low in the rich vegetation of the many gardens and decorative flowerbeds placed around the central square, the Denebians were spying on the groups of Polarians, Wolfians and Centaurians that Zimko had posted around the Control Tower. With weapons in hand they formed a circle around the gigantic building. 200 yards farther out the Denebians encircled the tower in secret and with their will-destroying rays at the ready.
After a meticulous adjustment the green monsters squatting in the tall flowers and leafy bushes figured the moment had come to turn on their portable devices. A faint hum broken by v
ibrations and light crackling—like a spark plug—could be heard. But before this barely audible noise had crossed the distance separating the Denebians from their victims they had already fallen under the power of the will-destroying rays.
The Polarians, Wolfians and Centaurians making their rounds went from normal beings to creatures being “controlled” without any visible transition. They barely even slowed down before resuming their now useless patrols. Hiding motionless behind the screen of plants the Denebians were rejoicing in their success.
In Rynka only Zimko and his seven companions were still in possession of their mental faculties. Guided by Hudako they had just arrived before a big, ribbed door at the end of a hall with fluorescent walls. The Chief of the base went first, placing his hand flat against a pink wall plate, which opened it. The metal door slid silently into a vertical slit and revealed a huge rectangular room with bare walls.
In the back of this room eight Denebians without spacesuits, wearing a short orange jacket and black bodysuit, standing with their backs to the wall, looked at them. They were holding out a kind of black metal cube covered with shiny rods that vibrated fast while emitting a weird crackling sound that echoed through the empty room.
Zimko and his team, for a brief moment, felt a gentle warmth envelop them from head to toe. They stopped in the middle of the room, staring blankly, unblinking, calm and submissive.
Then the eight Denebians stopped sending out the rays and highly satisfied with the complete success of their trap, they all started adjusting the controls of the complicated device strapped to their bellies with a big red belt. Amplified by a special helmet on their heads—from forehead to neck passing over their temples—their psychic orders would infiltrate the minds of their eight captives, who quietly turned around and went back the way they came.
One of the Denebians turned on his radio and announced the good news to his accomplices outside. In the beautiful gardens around the control tower the long leaves and tall flowers started shaking as if a storm was blowing through. 100 green scaly monsters came out of the plants and swaggered toward the huge lobby of the central building.
Followed by the rulers of their brains Zimko and his team went down the ramp along the main street that brought them quickly into the interior astrodrome at the exit hatch. The 100 or so Polarians, Wolfians and Centaurians posted at different points on the base also started their mentally-controlled march to follow their chief to the astrodrome.
The captives checked that their spacesuits were airtight and in groups of 20—accompanied by five Denebians—they entered the big decompression chamber opening the tunnel into the base of the thick dome protecting Rynka.
The strong airlocks automatically closed the reinforced panels behind them while the opposite hatch slowly opened onto the ochre Martian sand. The air imprisoned in the hatch blew out and kicked up a cloud of rust-colored dust that swirled for a few seconds before drizzling back down more slowly than would happen on T27 with its strong gravity.
Zimko and his team, controlled by the Denebian brains, headed toward an empty space that extended for several miles between two transparent tunnels that covered secondary canals bordered by vegetation. The only exterior vegetation that grew on the surface of this planet was puny and drab, pale green tending to dirty gray, a kind of lichen growing in patches around one and a half feet tall on the vast plains. They were mostly found in the zones around the canals whose water, coming from the polar caps, slowly sifted through the underlying layers of Martian soil.
The column of prisoners marched for hours across the gloomy land of the red planet, easily climbing up the low slope forming the side of a hill to the rounded summit and coming back down the other side to cross another red plain scattered with a purple shrubs and their sparse, soot-brown, foul smelling flowers like wide bowls that constituted the main species of flora on this world headed for extinction.
At the top of one of these low hills the prisoners and their guards, whose sympodic nature required no spacesuits, found a strange landscape different from the desert airs that they had just crossed.
At the intersection of two canals protected by a tunnel stood the spectacular ruins of an ancient Martian city. Big walls with incomprehensible sculptures, but whose fine workmanship proved a deep sense of artistry, were still standing. Traces of raised roadways remained—crumbling sections hanging in the air with only one pillar to support them—and by their sturdy conception bore witness to the high degree of civilization that had once built this powerful city.
The presence of these ruins, just a few hundred yards from the branching of two covered canals, was shocking at first sight. One wondered why the canals, which were not the work of the Federated Worlds, had stood up while the Martian city was nothing but ruins. The Polarian archeologists, anthropologists and ethnographers, on their arrival on this planet, took little time to find an explanation. The Martians, around 300,000 years ago, following a cosmic cataclysm, must have left their planet to emigrate in the solar system in search of a suitable world for its physical and climatic conditions19.
Unfortunately, everyone could not emigrate and most of the population was destroyed. The survivors, once the cataclysm had passed, found themselves on a blasted world, the air thinned, the cities razed to the ground. Only the canals had stood for the most part because they were built with almost indestructible materials. The survivors repaired the tunnels protecting the canals as best they could in order to have that water that was indispensable to life and later they started rebuilding the cities.
Unluckily for them, before they could repair the entire irrigation network, the harsh physical conditions in the aftermath of the cataclysm had devastated their ranks. On Mars there was only a small number of particularly strong survivors left and it was very hard to adapt. From one generation to another they gradually lost their scientific knowledge and they fell back into almost animal nature. Their race mutated little by little to survive in the dying planet’s climate and slowly evolved anew. However, all the physical changes and modifications that followed led the last Martian race into an ethic and social organization that was very far from their ancestors.
As the physical conditions on the surface of the planet became harsher and harsher over the course of millennia, the “natives” noticed that birth rates declined and more monsters and abnormal babies were being born. It did not take pong for them to realize that their time was coming to an end. With the fear of a quick, unavoidable extinction at hand, the sight of their monstrous offspring awoke in them the old secular superstitions that had been latent in their subconscious. They fell further into anarchy and ended up separating into clans that kept harassing each other.
In the Martian hills they found weird tunnels cluttered with even weirder machines that belonged to their long-lost ancestors. They hid inside and led the gloomy life of troglodytes. What they did not know was that these countless tunnels were in an area full of radioactive minerals. Victims, no doubt, (and unable to imagine the problem), of a constant bombardment of radioactivity, the Martians soon suffered strange mutations in their organism and morphology. Birth rates rose again but, alas, produced creatures so monstrous that their own parents first blamed it on demons living in the bowels of the planet, which, considering their total ignorance, was not so wrong since these weird genetic mutations were due to radioactive elements in the ground.
In the mines of the old city, at the foot of the tunnel-ridden hills, phosphorescent eyes in the form of a triangle fearfully watched the approach of the “Sky Gods”—the Denebians and their prisoners—who were skirting around the relics of their hunting ground: those strange walls and crumbling buildings in which tiny animals crawled, resembling cockroaches, hard-shelled worms, a kind of big centipede and a multitude of insects similar to the parasites on T27.
From time to time a gruesome shadow jumped over a pile of rocks and slipped one of its hairy arms between the cracks in the walls to grab some of these tasty bugs, which would some
day replace the degenerate and primitive race on Mars that was rushing to its own extinction unawares.
When Zimko and his companions, deprived of their wills, surrounded by the Denebians, walked along the ruins of the city, 30 grisly creatures rushed at them and, stopping at a respectable distance, they crouched down on the ground as a sign of superstitious veneration.
The “Sky Gods” with green scaly skin looked scornfully at these dregs of thinking beings before continuing on their way. The other “Gods,” who also came out of the sky (to their primitive minds), did not even glance at them. This indifference threw the Martians into a gulf of sorrow. If these three very different types of “Gods,” who had always been good to them, did not even bother to look at them, it was because they were angry with them! But what could they have done to cause such anger and deserve their scorn?
The Martians, creatures around three feet tall with a flat little head sitting on a huge torso—“all lungs” the Polarian anthropologists had joked—with their four greenish tentacles ending in suction cups and their two skinny legs, lay prostrate in the dust emitting a tuneful whistle barely audible in the thin air of the planet.
The three, green, phosphorescent eyes set triangularly in their flat skull blinked to express their distress at seeing the “Sky Gods” who had passed by them without giving them that sweet sensation that usually marks friendly physical contact. The “Gods without shells” (the Denebians without spacesuits) on every other occasion had never acted kindly to them but the “Gods” of three different sizes who lived in the North, in a weird, domed city, had never spurned them like today.
And the degenerate Martians wept, their faces in the sand, their four arms trembling, watching the scornful Gods as they stopped in the middle of flat, barren plain, far from their domed city.
