He enumerated them briefly: The mind whisperings, the mental warning, the attack on the control room only— He finished:
“I see our chief biologist is still examining our late adversaries. Smith, what kind of beasts are they?”
Smith turned from one of the monsters. “Purest primeval reptile,” lie said briskly. “Earth could have produced their type during the dinosaur age. Judging by the two brains I’ve cut out, intelligence is about point oh four.”
Morton frowned. He said finally, slowly: “Gourlay tells me, the beasts must have been precipitated through hyper-space. I’m sure he can tell us how this will affect our entire offensive and defensive position. Go ahead, Gourlay.”
Morton waited, quietly, his gaze expectantly on the slouched figure of the communications expert. Abruptly, he was startled. Gourlay, the great man of the ship next to Kent—that Gourlay slow in responding. Perhaps better than anyone on the ship, Morton knew the extraordinary man, whose drawl and surface laziness concealed a mind that was chain Hghtning. If the information, the capacity for counteraction existed, Gourlay would know about it; and it would be there on the tip of his tongue, slow, concise, immensely coherent. He—
Gourlay was straightening; and Morton breathed again. “Hyperspace,” came the familiar drawl, “is not strictly an energy field, though there is a relation. You all know what space is: a tension in time; the function involved is roughly time plus an environment of the basic energy deka.”
He stopped there; and it was several seconds before it struck Morton that he was finished.
“Just a moment,” the commander said hastily, “we all know that man uses hyperspace in planet to planet transmission of material objects. Why shouldn’t he, therefore, be able to transmit from a planet to this ship? After all, we’ve got an atmosphere inside here.”
Gourlay said. “The problem of focusing a hyperspace transmitter on a ship whose speed is measured in fight-year units involves about nine hundred thousand dimensions, mathematically speaking. Accordingly, it’s impossible even theoretically. I think that should answer all your questions.”
Having spoken, Gourlay leaned back and closed his eyes. Morton waited, but there was no further sign from the man.
The whole effect was unpleasantly unsatisfactory; and Morton, who had a very sharp sense of human reaction to bad news, said coolly:
“Obviously, there’s no one in the world that much smarter than we are. There must be simple solutions to the problem of hyperspace which our scientists missed out on.
“No doubt, of course, that these beings have got a lot on the ball, but they haven’t penetrated the multiple energy screen around the Space Beagle. On top of that they pulled the damnedest, dumbest trick in attacking us with a bunch of mindless monsters, when they could have taken the ship by using a more intelligent and organized attacking force, and exploiting their initial surprise to the full. And, finally, they must be scared stiff of our finding out something dangerous if they don’t even want to let us into their galaxy.”
“Look, Morton,” said a bass-voiced man, “if that little pep talk is designed to brace up our morale, you’d better think again. The fact is we’re up against something so big we can’t even imagine it. Let’s start from there.”
It was, Morton reflected grimly, a damned low starting point.
He stood for a moment, then, a brooding giant of a man. His heavy face was dark with the determination that was growing into it. He said finally:
“I don’t accept that pessimism so completely. We’re alive. That’s proof that we’re not pushovers to whatever is out there.”
Slowly, he relaxed. He waved one great hand toward a group of men who sat at his left. He said:
“I see our military expert sitting well to the forefront over there. He’s had about point oh four work to do since this voyage started, but I think we can use his knowledge at last. What do you make of the attack, Dysart?”
Dysart was a medium-sized, oldish man with a lined faced and a bushy beard. He had a sour voice. He said:
“If the objective was our destruction, it failed one hundred percent. If the intention was to scare us, the assault was a smashing success.”
There was a little flurry of laughter, and Morton smiled with a grim satisfaction at the relaxing of tension in the enormous, domed room. He waited a moment, then said:
“Supposing the intention was not destruction.”
Dysart looked abruptly more serious. “I see this affair as a progression of warnings. First, there was a mental warning, now has come a concrete warning.”
His expression grew darker, and the sour rasp in his tone took on a more resonant quality:
“I will not speculate on the purpose behind the warnings. But I think we can safely draw the conclusion that the beasts were symbols of a remorseless and murderous determination, and that the purpose behind them was no mere friendly advice to get out.”
“There is no doubt,” said a small man at the back of the room, “that a great effort is being made to get us to turn around and go back home—alive!”
Morton called: “Come on out here, Kent, and explain that.”
He frowned in puzzlement as the little chemist pushed forward from his seat. Morton regarded Kent as the smartest man on the ship, but the significance of the scientist’s words completely escaped him.
In a ringing voice, Kent began: “It’s possible I have the wrong slant on things, but I always look for ulterior motives. You people see an effort to keep us away from the galaxy we are approaching. My mind instantly jumped to the possibility that our friend out there would like to know where we came from.”
Morton said slowly: “Maybe you’ve got something there, Kent.”
Kent continued: “Just look at it from—his—point of view. Here is a
ship approaching from a certain general direction. In that direction, within ten million light years, are a large number of nebulae, star clusters, star clouds. Which is us?”
There was a dead silence in the room. Morton had the queer feeling that men were shuddering, each from his own mental picture of the hell that could be here. It was Smith who said finally in a gloomy voice:
“What would you suggest, Kent?”
The little chemist replied promptly: “Destruction or scrambling of all identification star charts or pools. Gun-lie Lester, his assistant and all the people aboard who have too much astronomical knowledge in their heads to wear spacesuits with energy guards whenever and wherever we land.
“It is possibly already too late. We know that the creature has been poking around in Morton’s brain, and God only knows how many other minds he’s ransacked. We’d better start exploring this galaxy at top speed, and we’ll be wise to see to it that nowhere along the fine does our enemy have even an edgewise chance to study us again.”
He broke off. “Morton, when do we get to the nearest star of this galaxy?
“Approximately three hours,” said the commander.
The meeting broke up in silence.
The first sun grew big out of space, a ball of light and heat, burning furiously into the great night, and supporting seven planets.
One was habitable, a world of mists and jungles and nightmare beasts. They left it, unexplored, after flashing low over an inland sea, across a great continent of marsh and fungi growth.
Left it because, as Morton said: “We have set ourselves an objective: to find the nature of the intelligence that dominates this galaxy. Conceivably the clues may exist in the vastness of the jungles below—I wouldn’t be surprised if the beasts that were precipitated into the control room came from there—but I think we should search for a more civilized source of evidence.”
Lonely and remote were the suns at this distant rim of the galaxy. They spun on their courses, aloof, like glowworms on a clouded night, in their relation one to the other. Three hundred light years, the Space Beagle sped, and came to a small red sun with two planets crowding up close to its cherry-red warmth.
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One of the two planets was habitable, a world of mists and jungles and nightmare beasts. They left it, unexplored, after darting down low over a marshy sea and a land choked with fungoid growth.
There were more stars now; a sprinkle of them daubed the near distance of the next hundred light years. A large, blue-white sun sporting thirty-seven planets attracted the superbly swift Earth ship.
The great machine spat out of space, raged past seven planets that were burning hells, spiraled toward the three close-together planets that were habitable—and flicked off into the night with its startled crew.
Behind, three steamy jungle planets swirled in their separate, eccentric orbits around the hot sun that had spawned them. “Identical triplets, by God!” Gunlie Lester exploded on the general communicator. “Morton, the axial tilt of those planets was a design to regulate their heat to the requirements of a jungle world. Somebody’s deliberately creating primeval planets. If the next sun has a jungle world also, I think we’d better investigate.”
The fourth star was Sol-size, Sol-type. Of its three planets, one made a neat orbit at eighty million miles, a steaming world of jungle and primeval seas.
The Space Beagle settled through that gaseous envelope and began to fly along at a low level, a great, alien ball of I metal in a fantastic land.
In the geology lab, Grosvenor watched the bank of insturments that registered the nature of the terrain below. Particularly, he stared with strained attention at the density recorder needle as it shifted along its thin range of mud, stone,‘clay, mud, water, fungi—
The needle jumped like flame in high wind—steel, clay, concrete, steel.
Steel!
Grosvenor reacted. His hand snatched up at the geared alarm, and tugged with the frantic sense that it was his strength that must stop the mighty ship. He let go only when the voice of Jarvis, his superior, rasped beside Mm, reporting to the control room:
“. . . Yes, Commander Morton, steel not just iron ore. Our instruments are registering developed metal, not nature in the raw. Depth? . . . What’s the depth there, Grove?”
“T-ten, twenty, f-fifty feet!” Grosvenor stammered. Inwardly, he cursed the way his heart was pounding, caught his voice into a stiff bar of sound. “It varies, and it’s spread over a wide area.”
Jarvis was saying into the communicator: “As you know, commander, we set our instruments at fifty feet maximum. This could be a city buried in the jungle mud.”
It was in a way. It was an incredible rubble of what had been a city. The scenes uncovered by the drillers were shambles. Everywhere was shattered steel and concrete and stone. And bodies!
The bodies were at the street line about fifty feet below the surface; a whole pack of them turned up where Grosvenor was directing a drilling crew. Everything stopped as the great men of the ship came over to examine the find.
“Rather badly smashed,” said Smith, “but I think I can piece together a coherent picture.”
His skillful fingers arranged an assembly of scattered bones into a rough design. “Four-legged,” he said. He turned a curious hazy light on the fragile structure. “This one has been dead about twenty-five years.”
He frowned, and picked up a bone, and brought the hazy, whitish fight nearer to it. “Funny,” he said, “there’s a resinous substance on this end of the bone that’s impervious to ultra-light. It reflects it. In all my experience, nothing concrete, nothing except energy itself has ever stopped ultra-light. Kent, what do you make of that?”
He handed the bone over; and Grosvenor stood, watching and waiting. He felt fascinated, not by the mystery of the bone, but because time and again, since he had joined the ship’s company, he had tried to picture the difference between himself and these men.
Perhaps, he thought now, with intense absorption, it was this ability of theirs to concentrate utterly on some detail of their special science.
Whereas he, Grosvenor, had already rejected as irrelevant everything directly connected with the bones of these long-dead creature. These were the pitiful victims, not the arrogant and deadly destroyers.
The shattered relics that lay around in such abundance might hold the secret of the fundamental physical character of a vanished race, but no clue could there be in them of the unimaginably merciless beings who had murdered them.
The incredible beings who went around deliberately jungle-izing habitable planets.
In spite of his conviction of irrelevancy, Grosvenor had a brief, vivid, mental picture of a civilization of four-legged, two-armed, small-headed creatures whose bodies could reflect every wave of light. And then, Morton’s voice was resonating quietly on the general communicator:
“The . . . curious . . . reflecting feature of the bone . . . undoubtedly deserves study, but in more leisurely moments, not now when our whole will and effort must be concentrated on our search to locate the great forces that rule this galaxy.”
It was vindication for his own opinion. But Grosvenor said nothing. A dark thought came that the vanished race had not been able to reflect the millions of tons of earth that buried them and all their works. But he had no sense of tragedy.
There was excitement in him, and an intense pleasure in die scene of men working with machines that were almost human in their sensitivity, abnormal and terrible in their irresistible power.
For the moment, he felt a part of the scene. Up to a point, it was a geology show. As the geologists were Jarvis and himself, and Jarvis was too busy to bother him, for the first time Grosvenor was on his own.
He flew from drill crew to drill crew, setting up his instruments, registering for five hundred feet now, testing the earth the drills removed.
His communicator buzzed with voices, but only occasionally did he tune them in. Once when he heard Jarvis talking, he listened as his superior said:
“Commander Morton, I’m willing to commit myself. The jungle is a superimposed layer. It was. brought here in some sort of a cataclysm. The strata below resembles that of an older, less primitive planet. It could have been Earth, with certain variations. I would suggest that an astronomical study be made of nearby planets to determine if they show any of the effects that must have resulted when this planet was violently moved out of its original orbit, and violently put into its present one.”
It was about half an hour later that Zeller, the metallurgist, added his words to the developing picture of a, cosmic catastrophe. Zeller’s voice blurred on the communicator:
“This broken steel girder was rolled less than seventy-five years ago. Its electronic fatigue gap is only 23x10-“.”
“Thanks!” Morton’s voice was quiet. “I think we can be pretty safe now in assuming that the catastrophe was of comparatively recent origin. Accordingly, our work on this planet may be considered finished. I’m going back to the ship now, and I’ll issue a general recall from there.”
Grosvenor was thinking unsteadily: “If I could solve this mystery! If I could even get the first clue— The next planet, of course, will be jungle, too, and I’ll concentrate on—”
His thought drained like water running down a sinkhole. His brain twirled. He whispered finally, shakily:
“The next planet will be jungle, too—Good God, that’s it! That’s the angle—and I’m the only one on all the ship who can handle it.”
With an effort, he caught that egotistical twist of his mind. He thought with wry grimness: It was the solution of the problem that counted, not who solved it. But the thought that had come wouldn’t go away.
For beyond all doubt, the hour of hope had struck for the lone, despised Nexialist of the battleship Space Beagle.
Now that the moment was here, Grosvenor felt a spasm of doubt. He stood near Morton looking at the seated scientists and there was no sense of satisfaction in the victory that was going to be his. He grew aware of Morton pushing forward, and raising his hand for silence. The commander said:
“You have probably been wondering, all of you, the purpose of our careeni
ng around during the past two days. As you know, we have visited three widely separated star systems, and it is interesting to note in that connection that no interference has been offered to our flight. Where we willed to go we went.
“What you do not know is that the stars we visited were selected for investigation by Nexial mathematics under a theory conceived and executed by Elliott Grosvenor. Grosvenor, tell your colleagues what you discovered.”
Astoundingly, it was a bad moment for Grosvenor. He stood, shaking inwardly, in abrupt funk. He stood in the grip of a hell of unexpected thoughts that included the devastating realization that you couldn’t just face men whose attitude had denied your intelligence and training. All the months that he had been treated like a grown-up child reached at his tongue and twisted at it, striving to stop him from speaking.
The curious thought came finally that there was only one way to begin a speech; and that was to begin it. He said:
“What I did was to obtain from Gunlie Lester his most developed photographic map of this galaxy. The important thing there was that he had already marked the galactic longitude and latitude planes, and the course we had taken.
“I must now call your attention briefly to a branch of science which has not, I know from experience”—Grosvenor smiled bleakly—“commended itself very highly to the science specialists of this great ship with which we are to explore the entire attainable universe. I refer to the science of Nexialism, which has its own mathematics, and is a method of training designed to bridge the gap between facts that are related but separated, for instance, by being contained in the brainpans of two individuals. Nexialism joins. It seeks to unify apparent irrelations; and its scope is so great that the data of an entire galaxy is not too complicated for it to cast into a recognizable design.”
Grosvenor paused. Because he was doing well. His voice was cool and steady. His brain was working with hair-trigger, split-second alertness. He went on; and his voice sounded thrillingly clear in his own ears:
Space Beagle- the Complete Adventures Page 10
