THE TORPID tenor of his thoughts exploded into chaos. His mind, grooved through the uncounted ages to ultimate despair, soared up, up, insanely. Life surged from the bottom point of static to the swirling, irresistible height of dynamism, that jarred every atom of his scarlet, cylindrical body and his round, vicious head. His legs and arms glistened like tongues of living fire, as they twisted and writhed in the blaze of light from those dazzling portholes. His mouth; a gash in the center of his hideous head, slavered a white frost that floated away in little frozen globules.
His brain couldn’t hold the flame of that terrific hope. His mind kept dissolving, blurring/Through that blur, he saw a thick vein of light form a circular bulge in the metallic surface of the ship. The bulge became a huge door that rotated open and tilted to one side. A flood of brilliance spilled out the great opening, followed by a dozen two-legged beings in transparent metal armor, dragging great floating machines.
Swiftly, the machines were concentrated around a dark projection on the ship’s surface. Intolerable light flared up as what was obviously repair work proceeded at an alarming pace.
He was no longer falling away from the ship. The faint pressure of gravitational pull was drawing him down again—so slowly. Frantically, he adjusted his atomic structure to the fullest measure of attraction. But even his poorly responding brain could see that he would never make it.
The work was finished. The incandescent glare of atomic welders died to spluttering darkness. Machines were undamped, floated toward the opening of the ship, down into it and out of sight. The two-legged beings scrambled after them. The vast, curved plain of metal was suddenly as deserted and lifeless as space itself.
Terror struck into Xtl. He’d have to fight, have to get there somehow. He couldn’t let them get away now, when the whole universe was in his grasp—twenty-five short yards away. His letching arms reached out stupidly, as if he would hold the ship by sheer fury of need. His brain ached with a slow, rhythmical hurt. His mind spun toward a black, bottomless pit—then poised just before the final plunge.
The great door was slowing in its swift rotation. A solitary being squeezed through the ring of light and ran to the dark projection, just repaired. He picked up an instrument that gleamed weirdly, a tool of some kind forgotten, and started back toward the partly open lock.
He stopped. In the glow from the portholes, Xtl could see the other’s face through the transparent armor. The face stared up at him, eyes wide, mouth open. Then the mouth moved rapidly, opening and shutting, apparently a form of communication with the others.
A moment later the door was rotating again, opening wide. A group of the beings came out, two of them mounted on the top of a large, metal-barred cage, steering it under power. He was to be captured.
Oddly, his brain felt no sense of lift, no soaring hope, none of that mind-inflaming ecstasy. It was as if a drug was dragging him down, down, into a black night of fatigue. Appalled, he fought off the enveloping stupor. He must hold to his senses. His race, that had attained the very threshold of ultimate knowledge, must live again.
THE VOICE, a strained, unrecognizable voice, came to Commander Morton through the communicators in his transparent spacesuit: “How in the name of all the hells can anything live in intergalactic space?”
It seemed to the commander that the question made the little group of men crowd closer together. The proximity of the others made them feel easier. Then they suddenly grew aware of the impalpable yet alive weight of the inconceivable night that coiled about them, pressing down to the very blazing portholes.
For the first time in years, the immensity of that night squeezed icily into Morton’s consciousness. Long familiarity had bred indifference into his very bones—but now, the incredible vastness of that blackness reaching a billion trillion years beyond the farthest frontiers of man stabbed into his mind, and brought an almost dismaying awareness. His deep voice, clattering into the communicators, split that scared silence like some harsh noise, startled him:
“Gunlie Lester, here’s something for your astronomical-mathematical brain. Will you please give us the ratio of the Beagle at the exact point in space where that thing was floating? Take a few hours to work it out.”
The astronomer replied immediately: “I don’t have to think about it. The chance is unstatable in human arithmetic. It can’t happen, mathematically speaking. Here we are, a shipload of human beings, stopping for repairs halfway between two galaxies—the first time we’ve ever made a trip outside of our own galaxy. Here we are, I say, a tiny point intersecting without prearrangement exactly the path of another, tinier point. Impossible, unless space is saturated with such—creatures!”
“I hope not,” another man shuddered. “We ought to turn a mobile unit on anything that looks like that, on general principles.”
The shudder seemed to run along the communicators.. Commander Morton shook his great, lean body as if consciously trying to throw off the chill of it. His eyes on the maneuvering cage above, he said:
“A regular blood-red devil spewed out of some fantastic nightmare; ugly as sin—and probably as harmless as our beautiful pussy last year was deadly. Smith, what do you think?”
The cadaverous-faced biologist said in his cold, logical voice: “This thing has arms and legs, a purely planetary evolution. If it is intelligent it will begin to react to environment the moment it is inside the cage. It may be a venerable old sage, meditating in the silence of distrac-tionless space. Or it may be a young murderer, condemned to eternal exile, consumed with desire to sneak back home and resume the life he lived.”
“I wish Korita had come out with us,” said Pennons, the chief engineer, in his quiet, practical voice. “Korita’s historical analysis of pussy last year gave us an advance idea of what we had to face and—”
“KORITA speaking, Mr. Pennons,” came the meticulously clear voice of the Japanese archaeologist on the communicators. “Like many of the others, I have been listening to what is happening as a welcome break in this, the longest journey the spaceship Beagle has ever undertaken. But I am afraid analysis of the creature would be dangerous at this factless stage. In the case of pussy, we had the barren, foodless planet on which we lived, and the architectural realities of his crumbled city.
“Here we have a creature living in space a million years from the nearest planet, apparently without food, and without means of spatial locomotion. I suggest you make certain that you get him into the cage, and then study him—every action, every reaction. Take pictures of his internal organs working in the vacuum of space. Find out every possible thing about him, so that we shall know what we have aboard as soon as possible. Now, when we are fully staffed again and heading for a new galaxy for the first time in the history of man, we cannot afford to have anything go wrong, or anybody killed before we reach there. Thank you.”
“And that,” said Morton, “is sense. You’ve got your fluorite camera, Smith?”
“Attached to my suit,” Smith acknowledged.
Morton who knew the capabilities of the mournful-looking biologist turned his attention back to the cage fifty feet away. He said in his deep, resonant voice: “Open the door as wide as possible, and drop over him. Don’t let his hands grab the bars.”
“Just a minute!” a guttural voice broke in. Morton turned questioningly to the big, plump German physicist. Von Grossen continued: “Let us not rush this capture, Commander Morton. It is true that I was not aboard last year when you had your encounter with the creature you persist in calling pussy. But when you returned to the base planet before embarking on the present voyage, the story you told to the world was not reassuring, not to me, anyway.”
His hard, gray-dark face stared grimly at the others: “It is true that I can see no real objection to capturing this creature in a cage. But it happens that I am replacing a man who was killed by this—pussy. Therefore I speak for him when I say: Such a thing must never happen again.-‘
Morton frowned, his face lined wit
h doubt. “You put me in a spot, von Grossen. As human beings, we must take every possible precaution. As scientists, however, all is grist for our mill; everything must be investigated. There can be no thought of shunning danger before we even know it to be danger. If this voyage is to be ruled by fear, we might as well head for home now.”
“Fear is not what I had in mind,” said the physicist quietly. “But I believe in counting ten before acting.”
Morton asked. “Any other objections?”
He felt oddly annoyed that there were none.
XTL waited. His thoughts kept breaking up into little pieces of light and lightless—-a chain of dazzle and dark—that somehow connected up with all the things he had ever known or thought. Visions of a long-dead planet trickled into his consciousness bringing a vague conceit—and a contempt of these creatures who thought to capture him.
Why, he could remember a time when his race had had spaceships a hundred times the size of this machine that swam below him. That was before they had dispensed completely with space travel, and just lived a quiet homey life building beauty from natural forces.
He watched, as the cage was driven toward him unerringly. There was nothing he could do, even had he wanted to. The gaping mouth of the large, metal-barred construction closed over him and snapped shut the moment he was inside.
Xtl clawed at the nearest bar, caught hold with grim strength. He clung there an instant, sick and dizzy with awful reaction. Safe! His mind expanded with all the violence of an exploding force. Free electrons discharged in dizzying swarms from the chaos of the spinning atom systems inside his brain and body, frantically seeking union with the other systems. He was safe—safe after quadrillions of years of sick despair, and on a material body with unlimited power to take him where he would* to go. Safe when there was still time to carry out his sacred purpose. Or was he safe?
The cage was dropping toward the surface of the ship. His eyes became gleaming pools of caution, as they . studied the men below. It was only too evident that he was to be examined. With a tremendous effort, stung by fear, he tried to push the clinging dullness from his brain, fought for alertness. An examination of him now would reveal his purpose, expose the precious objects concealed within his breast; and that must not be.
His steely-bright eyes flicked in anxious dismay over the dozen figures in transparent armor. Then his mind calmed. They were inferior creatures, obviously! Puny foes before his own remarkable power. Their very need of spacesuits proved their inability to adapt themselves to environment, proved they existed on a low plane of evolution. Yet he must not underestimate them. Here were keen brains, capable of creating and using mighty machines.
Each of the beings had weapons in holster at the side of his space armor—weapons with sparkling, translucent handles. He had noticed the same weapons in the holsters of the men at the top of the cage. That, then, would be his method if any of these creatures flashed a camera on him.
As the cage dropped into the belt of undiffused blackness between two portholes, Smith stepped forward with his camera—and Xtl jerked himself with effortless ease up the bars to the ceiling of the cage. The gash of his mouth in the center of his round, smooth head was split in a silent snarl of fury at the unutterable bad luck that was forcing this move upon him. His vision snapped full on; and now he could see blurrily through the hard metal of the ceiling.
One arm, with its eight wirelike fingers, lashed out with indescribable swiftness at the ceiling, through it, and then he had a gun from the holster of one of the men.
He did not attempt to readjust its atomic structure as he had adjusted his arm. It was important that they should not guess that it was he who fired the gun. Straining in his awkward position, he aimed the weapon straight at Smith and the little group of men behind him—released the flaming power.’
There was a flare of incandescent violence that blotted the men from view. A swirl of dazzling light coruscated virulently across the surface of the ship. And there was another light, too. A blue sparkle that told of automatic defense screens driving out from the armored suits of the men.
In one continuous movement, Xtl released the gun, withdrew his hand; and, by the act, pushed himself to the floor. His immediate fear was gone. No sensitive camera film could have lived through the blaze of penetrating energy. And what was overwhelmingly more important—the gun was no good against himself. Nothing but a simple affair which employed the method of transmutation of one element to another, the process releasing one or two electrons from each atom system. It would require a dozen such guns to do damage to his body.
THE GROUP group of men stood quite still; and Morton knew they were fighting, as he was, the blindness that lingered from the spray of violent light. Slowly, his eyes became adjusted; and then he could see again the curved metal on which he stood, and beyond that the brief, barren crest of the ship and the limitless miles of fight-less, heatless space—dark, fathomless, unthinkable gulfs. There too, a blur among the blurs of shadows, stood the cage.
“I’m sorry, commander,” one of the men on the cage apologized. “The ato-gun must have fallen out of my belt, and discharged.”
“Impossible!” Smith’s voice came to Morton, low and tense. “In this gravitation? it would take several minutes to fall from the holster, and it wouldn’t discharge in any event from such a slight jar of landing.”
“Maybe I knocked against it, sir, without noticing.”
“Maybe!” Smith seemed to yield grudgingly to the explanation. “But I could almost swear that, just before the flare of light dazzled me, the creature moved. I admit it was too black to see more than the vaguest blur, but—”
“Smith,” Morton said sharply, “what are you trying to prove?”
He saw the long-faced biologist hunch his narrow shoulders, as if pulling himself together. The biologist mumbled: “When you put it like that, I don’t know. The truth is, I suppose, that I’ve never gotten over the way I insisted on keeping pussy alive, with such desperately tragic results. I suspect everything now, and—”
Morton stared in surprise. It was hard to realize that it was really Smith speaking—the scientist who, it had seemed sometimes in the past, was ready to sacrifice his own life and everybody else’s if it meant adding a new, important fact to the science of biology. Morton found his voice at last:
“You were perfectly right in what you did! Until we realized the truth, you expressed the majority mind of this ship’s company. The development of the situation in the case of pussy changed our opinion as well as your own, but it did not change our method of working by evidence alone. I say that we should continue to make such logic the basis of our work.”
“Right. And beg your pardon, chief!” Smith was brisk-voiced again. “Crane, turn the cage light on, and let’s see what we’ve got here.”
TO MORTON, the silence that followed seemed like a sudden, oppressive weight, as the blaze of light showered down on Xtl crouching at the bottom of the cage. The almost metallic sheen of the cylindrical body, the eyes like coals of fire, the wirelike fingers and toes, the scarlet hideousness of it startled even these men who were accustomed to alien forms of life. He broke the spell of horror, half-breathlessly:
“He’s probably very handsome—to himself!”
“If life is evolution,” said Smith in a stiff voice, “and nothing evolves except for use, how can a creature living in space have highly developed legs and arms? Its insides should be interesting. But now—my camera’s useless! That flare of energy would have the effect of tinting the electrified lens, and of course the film’s ruined. Shall I get another?”
“N-n-no-o!” Morton’s clean-cut, handsome face grew dark with a frown. “We’ve wasted a lot of time here; and after all, we can re-create vacuum of space conditions inside the ship’s laboratory, and be traveling at top acceleration while we’re doing it.”
“Just a minute!” Von Grossen, the plump but hard-boiled physicist, spoke: “Let’s get this straight. The Beagl
e is going to another galaxy on an exploration voyage—-the first trip of the kind. Our business is to study life in this new system, but we’re not taking any specimens, only pictures and notes—studies of the creatures in their various environments. If we’re all so nervous about this thing, why are we taking it aboard?”
“Because”—Smith beat Morton to the reply—“we’re not tied down to pictures and notes. There will, however, be millions of forms of life on every planet, and we shall be forced to the barest kind of record in most cases. This monster is different. In our fears we have almost forgotten that the existence of a creature capable of Living in space is the most extraordinary thing we’ve ever run across. Even pussy, who could five without air, needed warmth of a kind, and would have found the absolute cold of space intolerable. If, as we suspect, this creature’s natural habitat is not space, then we must find out why and how he came to be where he is. Speaking as a biologist—”
“I see,” interrupted Morton dryly, “that Smith is himself again.” He directed a command at the men on the cage. “Take that monster inside, and put a wall of force around the cage. That should satisfy even the most cautious.”
Xtl felt the faint throb of the motors’ of the cage. He saw the bars move, then grew conscious of a sharp, pleasant tingling sensation, brief physical activity within his body that stopped the workings of his mind for a bare second. Before he could think, there was the cage floor rising above him—and he was lying on the hard surface of the spaceship’s outer shell.
With a snarl of black dismay that almost cut his face in two, he realized the truth. He had forgotten to readjust the atoms in his body after firing the gun. And now he had fallen through!
“Good Heaven!” Morton bellowed.
A scarlet streak of elongated body, a nightmare shadow in that braid of shadow and light, Xtl darted across the impenetrable heavy metal to the air lock. He jerked himself down into its dazzling depths. His adjusted body dissolved through the two other locks. And then
Space Beagle- the Complete Adventures Page 5
