by Earl
A mile! It could stow the great ore-freighters in its hold as though they were toys! What incredible mystery lay before their eyes?
Mayella came out of her dull apathy enough to ask, “What is it, Ted?”
“I don’t know!” he replied truthfully. He was still looking it over. It was astounding in other ways besides its size. It had no rocket tubes for propulsion, as far as he could see. Nor port plates. Its hull was one continuous, smooth sheet, like a metal egg. No sign of life was apparent from the outside.
“But it must be a ship of some sort,” reasoned Pitman. “I’ll signal it.” He shot a bright magnesium signal flare over the ship’s nose. Into his radio he barked: “Ship ahoy! Ether Patrol calling. Answer immediately!”
But no acknowledgment came from the mystery craft, even after Pitman had shot a dozen signal rockets. Growling, he lined the sights of his gun.
“I’ll wake them up!” Pie sent a shell glancing off the hull. Pie knew its vibrations would clang through the interior of the ship like a thousand bells.
Still no answer—not the tiniest whisper—from the strange vessel!
“What are you going to do?” queried the girl, seeing the sudden grim set of his jaw.
“Any ship,” fumed Pitman, “no matter where in the Solar System, that doesn’t answer either by radio, light-signals, or rockets, is subject to attack! We’ll see if a nice little hole in their hull doesn’t do the trick!”
Savagely, he lined up his gun squarely for the broad side of the ship, and fired. A fountain of flame cascaded from the explosion. Pitman’s lungs gave an astonished gasp.
The hull was undamaged where his high-powered shell had struck. Not the slightest dent was apparent!
Cursing, dumfounded, Pitman sent shell after shell pounding at the adamant metal, but each had as little effect as the first. That hull simply could not be penetrated, not even scratched. Nor did the occupants of the ship show any sign of awareness of the bombardment, though the noise must be deafening within!
“This is the craziest mystery I ever ran across!” Pitman muttered, baffled.
“Where can the ship be from?” asked Mayella.
Pitman shook his head and tuned his transmitter to the Patrol’s waveband. “Emergency report!” he said tensely. “Unknown ship of gigantic proportions refuses to make contact!” He went on to give the details and its spatial position, in accordance with his charts. “Suggest navy ships be sent,” he concluded, “in the event of hostilities. Report by Lieutenant Ted Pitman, EP-45X-3.” Then he waited for an answer, staring at the meteor-sized ship.
Suddenly, for the first time, it gave an indication of being other than a mass of metal. It moved! Slowly, smoothly, it began to glide through space, toward Earth! With an exclamation, Pitman rocketed his ship to follow.
“Guess I can’t take you to Mars,” he said briefly to the girl. “I’m on duty now. I’ll have to keep this ship in sight and report its new position.”
But soon the huge ship gathered speed at a rate that threatened to leave them, behind. Without hesitation, Pitman did the one thing left—turned toward the ship and drew closer. It was like landing on a broad, smooth metal plateau. He let out magnetic grapples that held the tiny Patrol ship fast.
The metal goliath, accelerating at an incredible rate, slid smoothly toward Earth. The Patrol ship clung to its side like a flea on some beast of the void.
“I wish I knew what this is all about!” growled Pitman. He glanced at the girl. “I’m sorry you’re in this, Mayella.”
She smiled wanly. “I’m glad,” she said simply, “it’s with you rather than anyone else.”
HOURS later the great ship decelerated to a stop. Earth was considerably nearer now. It displayed a disk and near it was the bright dot of the Moon. Pitman contacted his headquarters and reported the new position. A fleet had already embarked and would soon arrive. The Ether Patrol was prompt in keeping the space lanes under rigid supervision.
Pitman’s heart leaped when the fleet blinked into view’, like a group of fireflies. He counted a dozen ships. Four of them were thirty-man warships, bristling with guns.
“Now let these chaps try to ignore signals!” said Pitman grimly. “Those warships have guns that will blast down a range of mountains!”
The commander of the fleet, after a brief contact with Pitman, sent signal rockets across the mystery craft’s nose. He evidently went through the same stages of rage and bafflement Pitman had, for soon shells began to hammer against the hull. Pitman could feel the concussion through the hull of his own ship, touching the other’s hull. Then, all else failing, the bigger warships let fly with their heavy shells. Pitman waited breathlessly to see the result.
Each would have been sufficient to tear any normal ship in half, penetrating the toughest armor-plate known. But the effect on the giant ship’s hull was absolutely nil! Infrabeams were then brought into play, pouring a hell of heat down on the great hull. The metal failed even to glow!
Pitman gasped incredulously. Was the substance impenetrable to all the known forces? So it seemed.
The fleet began circling now, raining down its ineffective destruction, seeking a vital spot. But there seemed no vital spot in the uniform, unbroken surface of the Gargantuan ship. Explosive shells and infra-rays alike were unable to knock an atom loose.
Pitman’s mind whirled. Who were the people within the ship, so secure against attack? What was their purpose? Did they have any offensive armament?
As though in answer to his mental query, retaliation struck. Not a hundred yards away, a circular patch of the hull suddenly began to glow with a violet color. Electrical forces gathered and abruptly shot forth in a blinding streak. The superlightning impinged on one of the warships. For one second sparks shot from its hull. The next second it was gone, and a puff of gray dust expanded into the void. The Patrol warship had been annihilated to the last atom!
Pitman groaned in dismay as he saw the deadly force spring to each of the fleet in turn, utterly destroying them. The last ship turned tail, but futilely. The lightning force stabbed out to it—and the Patrol fleet was gone!
Blindly, obeying instinct rather than reason, Pitman sent his ship away from the hull, with little hope that he would escape the universal destruction. Mayella was moaning hysterically at the awful sight they had just witnessed. What terrible menace did the great ship spell?
And then, down below, a hole yawned in the great hull. An artificial hole, opened by the occupants. Some force stabbed upward, gripped the little Patrol ship, and drew it down. Gasping, Pitman turned on the full power of his rockets to get away, but the weird force was the stronger. His ship was pulled into the opening and deposited with a bump within a large, round chamber. Overhead, sliding panels came together, to seal off escape.
Pitman drew a breath. “It looks as though we’re going to meet the ship’s crew.” Mayella crept into his arms, trembling.
In a moment, a door opened in the wall nearest them. Pitman was not too shocked to see an alien being step in. The ship had been alien from the start.
The creature was tall and thin, and most nearly resembled a centipede with eight pairs of arms running down its sides. It stood upright on a pair of short, sturdy limbs, Perhaps, in its earlier evolution it had run on all its limbs, but now it stood erect and the upper limbs had evolved into arms. The head was queerly human, but hairless and without ears.
MAYELLA shuddered against Pitman. It was not a pretty looking thing, but obviously intelligent. With sixteen supple hands supplied by Nature to serve its brain, it could hardly fail to have achieved intelligence. Sixteen hands, where humans had only two—did the ratio carry through in their respective degrees of civilization? And science?
The being beckoned to them with four of its sixteen arms, to come out. “Guess we’ll have to,” Pitman shrugged. “Evidently they don’t mean us any immediate harm. Here—space suits. They probably breathe different air.”
They donned the sealed suits, hooki
ng oxygen bottles to their belts, and stepped from their ship.
“Do you speak our language?” asked Pitman, his suit’s audio-unit rendering his voice beyond.
The creature gave no sign of having heard. Lacking ear organs, it obviously didn’t know the meaning of sound. Pitman saw now why they had been so slow in detecting the presence of Earth ships before. The sounds of the battering shells on their hull had meant nothing to them.
But the being gave an answer to Pitman’s question anyway. “I do not know what you mean by ‘speak.’ We use the universal language of telepathy.” And the two Earth people, staring at each other in surprise, realized they had “heard” the message in their minds, by telepathic impulses! The aliens’ evolution, denying them the sense of sound, had instead sharpened their psychic sense.
“You will disarm yourself,” continued the being. “You have two weapons in your belt!”
Pitman saw now that the alien held three shiny weapons in three of its hands, covering them at all angles. For an instant, he thought of trying to shoot the alien down, but what good would that do? There was still no way to get out of the ship. They were more or less at the mercy of these beings. Pitman quietly removed his pistols and tossed them on the floor.
“Come!” The creature led them through the door and down a broad corridor. Pitman wondered how many other corridors there were in this tremendous ship. At one place on the wall he saw a schematic diagram, evidently of the ship. It was a maze so intricate that even its denizens needed such a reference!
The corridor opened out into a large room in which were gathered several dozens of the centipede people. Their cold, unblinking eyes looked the prisoners over frostily. Mayella shivered and pressed her space-suited body as close to Pittman’s as possible. He gripped her gloved hand reassuringly.
They were conducted before a centipede-being half reclining with sinuous grace on a web-like frame. This one, apparently highest in authority, stared at them for a long minute, till the two were nervous.
“You people have evidently been trying to get in touch with us,” he finally telepathed, clearly. “You have even—in your conception—attacked us, though it did no harm.”
“From where are you?” asked Pitman aloud, knowing his thoughts would carry as well. “What is your purpose here?”
“We are from another star system,” informed the alien. “It is about nine light-years away.” Pitman thought of Sirius and the creature promptly added: “Sirius, you call it. We have existed there as a civilized race for a million of your years. We have recently decided to send out ships to search for possible colony sites among the nearer stars. Those back in our world will be glad to hear of this solar system. After landing and setting up a sealed, impregnable headquarters on Earth, we will send the ship back to bring more of our people. It will be the van of a fleet. Unfortunately, of course, as we expand, you Earth people will be eliminated!”
Pitman and the girl looked at each other in horror at the cold-blooded tone of the alien. There would be no such thing as mercy extended.
“It is the rule of all life,” resumed the centipede-being. “The inferior must give way to the superior. You have seen how impregnable we are. The hull surrounding us is composed of solidly packed neutrons. It is a substance so dense that your explosives are like puffs of a breeze against it. Our lightning weapon produces a stream of electrons traveling at the speed of light. We nullify gravity, in running this ship. Power we extract from shattered atoms. Our science is far superior to yours!” Pitman didn’t try to deny that. He stood numbly, in the realization of this ruthless invasion from another star.
“Go now!” commanded the alien, waving six of his many arms peremptorily. “Tell your people to leave Earth, or we will drive them away. Later, we will want all the planets, but at present just Earth. It is the most suited to our purpose, as we have observed after cruising through all the Solar System. Go!” A spark of anger flamed within Ted Pitman, at the alien’s smug assurance. “You won’t find it so easy to take over Earth!” He roared. “You’re biting off a bigger piece than you can chew!”
“We will defeat all your ships!” prophesied the leader of the Sirians.
THEIR former guide led them back to their ship. He even allowed Pitman to pick up his two weapons, still on the floor. In the cabin, they doffed their sealed suits. When the trapdoor overhead opened, Pitman sent his little ship scudding out.
They were free! It all seemed like a fantastic dream. They had been captured by alien beings from the star Sirius, told of a doomful fate for Earth’s civilization, and then tamely released.
Pitman growled. “They want us to tell our people to give up before the battle is even begun!” he muttered. “They want Earth turned over to them without a struggle, to be overrun with their hordes!”
“Ted, is it all possible?” whispered Mayella Harkness, eyes dazed. “Beings from another star? Invasion of the Solar System? It’s all so unreal!”
“I’m afraid it’s bare fact,” returned Pitman soberly. “It’s not so incredible. More than half the stars are known to be binaries, like Sirius. They are likely to have planets, because of gravitational stresses between two close stars. Evolution must have produced rational life-forms in many of the systems. Scientists admitted that. Some even predicted visitations, eventually, of beings from other stars. In fact, it happened once. A strange conical ship landed on Titan, Saturn’s moon, ten years ago, bearing queer creatures never known in our system. But they were dead, evidently from the hardships of a long journey between the stars. These Sirians seem to have solved the problem of interstellar travel.”
“In a ship that can’t be destroyed!” murmured the girl defeatedly.
“They must be destroyed!” hissed Pitman. “Otherwise they’ll send the message back for more of their ships to follow!”
tie was already barking into his radio. “Lieutenant Ted Pitman reporting. Grave emergency! Giant ship from Sirius. Threatens invasion of Earth! First Patrol fleet annihilated! Crisis facing Solar System!”
He knew that he couldn’t make the report too strong. When headquarters contacted him, he went on to give the full details, crushing their initial skepticism by his sheer earnestness. Besides, they had to believe. The last Patrol ship, before being destroyed, had managed to send out a tragic message about the wholesale destruction.
“What do you think we’re up against, Lieutenant?” asked Admiral John Harmon, commander-in-chief of all the Ether Patrol. “How many ships do we need?”
“Every ship we have in the Solar System!” snapped Pitman. “Fully armed and ready for the toughest battle in all history! Good lord, sir, this is no time to hesitate or quibble! Send all you can. The enemy has only one ship, but there isn’t a dent on its hull from the first fleet’s bombardments! You must believe me, sir!”
“I’m beginning to,” retorted the admiral. “I’m sending out full space mobilization orders. Stand by there and report any new positions the enemy ship may take.”
“Right, sir!”
Mayella looked into Pitman’s eyes as he turned from the radio. “What if all our ships, all our armament,” she said in a low, tense voice, “were unable to harm the Sirian ship?” Pitman didn’t answer, but there was a worried stare in his eyes. He looked at the girl, smiling a little. “A short while ago we were so concerned about—ourselves. Now it seems so petty, in the face of this. Doesn’t your attitude seem foolish, now, Mayella?”
Her eyes clouded. “No, Ted. Regardless of this other thing, or however it turns out, I couldn’t marry you!”
Pitman reflected in bafflement that the greatest mystery of the universe had always been, and always would be, a woman’s mind.
FOR two days they hovered, in their little ship. The metal Cyclops they were watching made no move. It seemed to be waiting patiently, ominously. Pitman eyed his gauges apprehensively. His small stores of oxygen, food and water were rapidly vanishing. But the fleet should arrive soon, or some part of it.
&nbs
p; Finally it appeared, a vast swarm of rocket lights that danced among the stars. Not since the days of the great interplanetary wars had such an armada been amassed. The main body halted a mile away from the brooding bulk of the Sirian ship. When several small ships came forward, Pitman rocketed to meet them.
“We’ll try signaling,” informed the commanding officer, by radio, after a short conversation.
“You won’t get an answer,” stated Pitman.
Convinced of that after a succession of radio signals, rocket flares and small shells against the hull, the officer barked: “Retreat to a safe distance, Lieutenant. This means battle!”
Pitman swung his ship away, halting at a half-mile. “We’ll watch!” he said tensely to the girl. Instinctively, she crept within the protection of his arms. A world’s fate, perhaps, rested on the outcome.
Tine Earth fleet moved up in formation, small ships in the lead, dreadnaughts behind. All the cosmos seemed to hold its breath. Then hell broke loose—
Raking shell-fire swept over the enigmatic ship from another star. Its great, broad hull sparkled with rapid flashes. The airlessness of space muffled all sound. It was like a silent movie reel. The first contingent swept by in a curving arc. As Pitman expected, the alien ship’s hull was mockingly undamaged.
The second contingent let loose a barrage of liquid fire. The thermite fire, developed for spatial use, had been used at times to burn away large meteors in the ship lanes. It licked futilely at the neutronic hull of the enemy, which showed not the slightest pitting!
By now, Pitman knew, the fleet commander must be awe-struck at this vessel whose outer skin was so adamant.
