Siedel walked to a wall communicator, talked in a low voice to someone, and then returned. “The Director says if we can get him into the cage without violence, it’s fine with him. Otherwise, just lock him up in any room that he’s in. What do you think?”
“The cage!” A score of voices spoke in unison. Grosvenor waited for a moment of silence, then said, “Put him outside for the night. He’ll stay around.”
Most of the men ignored him. Kent glanced at him and said sourly, “You don’t seem to be able to make up your mind, do you? One moment you save his life, the next you recognize him as dangerous.”
“He saved his own life,” said Grosvenor shortly.
Kent turned away, shrugging. “We’ll put him in the cage. That’s where a murderer ought to be.”
Siedel said, “Now that we’ve made up our minds, how are we going to do this?”
Grosvenor said, “You definitely want him in the cage?” He didn’t expect an answer to that, and he didn’t get one. He walked forward and touched the end of the nearest of Coeurl’s tentacles.
It shrank away from him slightly, but Grosvenor was determined. He grasped the tentacle again firmly, and indicated the door. The animal hesitated a moment longer, and then started silently across the room.
Grosvenor called, “There’s got to be exact timing here. Get set!”
A moment later Coeurl trotted docilely after Grosvenor through another door. He found himself in a square metal room, with a second door on the opposite wall. The man went through that. As Coeurl started to follow, the door slid shut in his face. Simultaneously, there was a metallic clang behind him. He whirled, and saw that the first door was shut also. He felt the flow of power as an electric lock clicked into place. His lips parted in a grimace of hate as he realized the intent of the trap, but he gave no other outward indication. He was aware of the difference between his earlier reaction to a small enclosure and his present one. For hundreds of years he had been intent on food, and food only. Now a thousand memories of the past were reawakening in his brain. There were powers in his body that he had long since ceased using. In remembering them, his mind automatically fitted their possibilities to his present situation.
He sat back presently on the thick, lithe haunches into which his body tapered. With his ear tendrils he examined the energy content of his surroundings. Finally he lay down, his eyes glowing with contempt. The fools!
It was about an hour later when he heard the man—Smith—fumbling with some mechanism on top of the cage. Coeurl leaped to his feet, startled. His first feeling was that he had misjudged these men, and that he was to be killed out of hand. He had counted on being given time, and on being able to do what he planned.
The danger confused him. And when he suddenly sensed radiation far below the level of visibility, he stimulated his entire nervous system against possible peril. Several seconds went by before he realized what was happening. Somebody was taking pictures of the inside of his body.
After a while the man went away. For a time, then, there were noises of men doing things far away. These died away gradually. Coeurl was patient as he waited for the silence to envelop the ship. In the long ago, before they had achieved relative immortality, coeurls also had slept at night. Watching some of the men dozing in the library, he had remembered the habit. There was one sound that did not fade away. Long after the great ship was generally silent, he could hear the two pairs of feet. They paced rhythmically past his cell, receded to some remote distance, and then came back. The trouble was, the guards were not together. First one pair of footsteps walked past. Then, about thirty feet behind, came the second pair.
Coeurl let them come by several times. Each time he estimated how long it took them. Finally, he was satisfied. Once again he waited for them to make their round. This time, the moment they were past, he switched his senses from concentration on human-made vibrations to a vastly higher range. The pulsating violence of the atomic pile in the engine room stammered its soft story to his nervous system. The electric dynamos hummed their muffled song of pure power. He felt the whisper of that flow through the wires in the walls of his cage, and through the electric lock of his door. He forced his quivering body into straining immobility, while he tried to tune in on that sibilant tempest of energy. Abruptly, his ear tendrils vibrated in harmony.
There was a sharp click of metal on metal. With a gentle touch of one tentacle, Coeurl pushed open the door. Then he was out in the corridor. For a moment he felt a return of contempt, a glow of superiority, as he thought of the stupid creatures who dared to match their wits against a coeurl. And in that moment he suddenly remembered that there were a few other coeurls on this planet. It was a strange and unexpected thought. For he had hated them and had fought them ruthlessly. Now he saw that vanishing small group as his kind. If they were given a chance to multiply, no one—least of all these men—would be able to stand against them.
Thinking of that possibility, he felt weighted down by his limitations, his need for other coeurls, his aloneness—one against a thousand, with the galaxy at stake. The starry universe itself beckoned his rapacious, vaulting ambition. If he failed, there would never be a second chance. In a foodless world he could not hope to solve the secret of space travel. Even the builders had not freed themselves from their planet.
He padded along through a large salon and into the adjoining corridor. There he came to the first bedroom door. It was electrically locked, but he opened it noiselessly. He pounced inside and smashed the throat of the sleeping man in the bed. The lifeless head rolled crazily. The body twitched once. The id emanations from it almost overwhelmed him, but he forced himself to go on.
Seven bedrooms; seven dead men. Then, silently, he returned to the cage and locked the door behind him. His timing was beautifully precise. Presently, the guards came along, peered through the audioscope, and went on their way. Coeurl emerged for his second foray, and within minutes had invaded four more bedrooms. Then he came to a dormitory with twenty-four men sleeping in it. He had been killing swiftly, aware of the exact moment when he must again return to the cage. The opportunity to destroy a whole roomful of men confused him. For more than a thousand years he had slain all the living forms he could capture. Even in the beginning, that had yielded him no more than one id creature a week. And so he had never felt the necessity for restraint. He went through that room like the great cat he was, silent but deadly, and emerged from the sensuous joy of the kill only when every man in the dormitory was dead.
Instantly, he realized he had overstayed his time. The tremendousness of the blunder made him cringe. For he had planned a night of murder, each wave of deaths timed exactly so that he would be able to return to his prison and be there when the guards glanced in at him, as they had done on every round. That hope of seizing this monster ship during one sleep period was now jeopardized.
Coeurl caught at the vanishing remnants of his reason. Frantically, careless now of the accidental sounds, he raced through the salon. He came out into the cage corridor, tense, half expecting to be met by energy blasts too powerful for him to handle.
The two guards were together, standing side by side. It was obvious that they had just discovered the open door. They looked up simultaneously, briefly paralyzed by the nightmare of claws and tentacles, the ferocious cat head and hate-filled eyes. Far too late, one of the men reached for his blaster. But the other was physically frozen by the doom he could not avoid. He uttered a shriek, a shrill cry of horror. The eerie sound floated along the corridors, awakening a shipload of men. The sound ended in a frightful gurgle as Coeurl flung the two corpses with one irresistible motion the full length of that long corridor. He didn’t want the dead bodies found near the cage. That was his one hope.
Shaken to the depths, conscious of his terrible mistake, unable to think coherently, he plunged into the prison. The door clicked softly shut behind him. Power flowed once more through the electric lock. He crouched down on the floor, simulating sleep, as he
heard the rush of many feet and caught the sound of excited voices. He knew when someone actuated the cage audioscope and looked in at him. The crisis would come when the other bodies were discovered.
Slowly, he stiffened himself for the greatest struggle of his life.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Siever gone!” Grosvenor heard Morton say. The Director’s voice sounded numb. “What are we going to do without Siever? And Breckenridge! And Coulter and—horrible!”
The corridor was packed with men. Grosvenor, who had come some distance, stood at the tail end of one overflow. Twice he tried to jostle through, but he was effectively jostled back by men who did not even glance around to identify him. They blocked his passage impersonally. Grosvenor gave up the futile effort, and realized that Morton was about to speak again. The Director looked out grimly over the throng.
His heavy chin seemed more prominent than usual. He said, “If anybody’s got so much as a germ of an idea, bring it out!”
“Space madness!”
The suggestion irritated Grosvenor. It was a meaningless phrase, still current after all these years of space travel. The fact that men had gone insane in space from loneliness, fear, and tension did not make a special sickness of it. There were certain emotional dangers on a long voyage like this—they were among the reasons why he had been put aboard—but insanity from loneliness was not likely to be one of them.
Morton was hesitating. It seemed clear that he also regarded the remark as valueless. But it was not a moment to argue subtle points. These men were tense and afraid. They wanted action and reassurance and the feeling that adequate countermeasures were being taken. At such moments, directors of expeditions, commanders in chief, and others in authority had been known to lose permanently the confidence of their followers. It seemed to Grosvenor that those possibilities were in Morton’s mind when he spoke again, so careful were his words.
The Director said, “We’ve thought of that. Dr. Eggert and his assistants will examine everybody, of course. Right now, he’s looking at the bodies.”
A thunderous baritone bellowed almost in Grosvenor’s ear. “Here I am, Morton. Tell these people to make way for me!”
Grosvenor turned and recognized Dr. Eggert. Men were already crowding aside for him. Eggert plunged forward. Without hesitation, Grosvenor pushed after him. As he had expected, each individual took it for granted that he was with the doctor. As they came up near Morton, Dr. Eggert said, “I heard you, Director, and I can tell you right now the space-madness theory won’t fit. The throats of these men were smashed by something with the strength of ten human beings. The victims never had a chance to cry out.”
Eggert paused, then asked slowly, “What about our big cat, Morton?”
The Director shook his head. “Pussy is in his cage, Doctor, pacing back and forth. I’d like to ask the opinion of the experts on him. Can we suspect him? That cage was built to hold beasts four or five times as large as he is. It seems hard to believe that he can be guilty, unless there’s a new science here, beyond anything we can imagine.”
Smith said grimly, “Morton, we have all the evidence we need. I hate to say this; you know that I’d rather keep the cat alive. But I used the telefluor camera on him, and tried to take some pictures. They were all blanks. Remember what Gourlay said. This creature can apparently receive and send vibrations of any wave length. The way he dominated the power of Kent’s gun is adequate proof for us—after what has happened—that he has a special ability to interfere with energy.”
A man groaned. “What in the name of all the hells have we got here? Why, if he can control that energy and send it out on any wave length, there’s nothing to stop him killing all of us.”
“Which proves,” said Morton, “that he isn’t invincible, or he would have done it long ago.”
In a deliberate fashion, he walked over to the mechanism that controlled the cage.
“You’re not going to open the door!” Kent gasped, and reached for his blaster.
“No, but if I pull this switch, electricity will flow through the floor and electrocute whatever is inside. We had that built into all our specimen cages as a precaution.”
He unlocked the special electrocution switch and jerked the switch itself hard over. For a moment the power was full on. Then blue fire flashed from the metal, and a bank of fuses above Morton’s head went black. Morton reached up, took one of them out of its socket, and frowned down at it.
“That’s funny,” he said. “Those fuses shouldn’t have blown!” He shook his head. “Well, we can’t even look inside the cage now. That wrecked the audio, also.”
Smith said, “If he could interfere with the electric lock enough to open the door, then he very likely probed every possible danger and was ready to interfere when you threw the switch.”
“At least it proves he’s vulnerable to our energies,” Morton said grimly. “Because he had to render them harmless. The important thing is, we’ve got him behind four inches of the toughest of metals. At worst, we can open the door and turn a semi-portable blaster on him. But, first, I think we’ll try to feed electricity in there through the telefluor power cable.”
A sound from inside the cage interrupted his words. A heavy body crashed against a wall. That was followed by a sustained thudding, as if many objects were collapsing to the floor. Grosvenor mentally compared it to a small landslide.
“He knows what we’re trying to do,” Smith said to Morton. “And I’ll bet it’s a very sick pussy in there. What a fool he was to go back in the cage, and does he realize it!”
The tension was relaxing. Men were smiling nervously. There was even a ripple of humorless laughter at the picture Smith had drawn of the monster’s discomfiture. Grosvenor was puzzled. He didn’t like the sounds he had heard. Hearing was the most deceptive of senses. It was impossible to identify what had happened or was happening in the cage.
“What I’d like to know,” said Pennons, the chief engineer, “is why did the telefluor-meter dial jump and waver at full power when pussy made that noise? It’s right here under my nose, and I’ve been trying to guess what happened.”
There was silence both within and without the cage. Abruptly, there was a stir in the doorway behind Smith, Captain Leeth and two officers in their military uniforms stepped into the corridor.
The commander, a wiry man of fifty, said, “I think I’d better take charge here. There seems to be some conflict between the scientists as to whether or not this monster should be killed—is that right?”
Morton shook his head. “The conflict is over. We all feel now he should be executed.”
Captain Leeth nodded. “That was the order I was about to give. I believe the security of the ship is threatened, and that’s my province.” He raised his voice. “Make room here! Get back!”
It took several minutes to ease the pressure in the corridor. Grosvenor was glad when it was done. If the creature had come out while those in the foreground were unable to move back quickly, he’d have been able to destroy or injure many men. That danger wasn’t completely over, but it was alleviated.
Somebody said, “That’s funny! The ship seemed to move just then!”
Grosvenor had felt it, also, as if for an instant the drive had been tested. The big ship trembled as it settled back from that moment of straining.
Captain Leeth said sharply, “Pennons, who’s down in the engine room?”
The chief engineer was pale. “My assistant and his helpers. I don’t see how they—”
There was a jerk. The big ship careened, and threatened to fall on its side. Grosvenor was flung with cruel violence to the floor. He lay stunned, and then in alarm fought back to consciousness. Other men were sprawled all around him. Some of them were groaning in pain. Director Morton yelled something, an order Grosvenor didn’t hear. Then Captain Leeth was struggling to his feet. He was cursing. Grosvenor heard him say savagely, “Who the devil started those engines!”
The frightful acceleration con
tinued. It was at least five, possibly six gravities. Having assessed its tremendous force as being within his capabilities, Grosvenor climbed agonizingly to his feet. He rumbled with the nearest wall communicator, and punched the engine-room number, not really expecting that it would work. Behind him, a man let out a bass bellow. Grosvenor turned in surprise. Director Morton was peering over his shoulder. The big man called out, “It’s pussy! He’s in the engine room. And we’re heading out into space.”
Even as Morton spoke, the screen went black. And still the pressure of acceleration continued. Grosvenor staggered through the door into the salon, and across the great room into a second corridor.
There was, he remembered, a space-suit store-room there. As he approached it, he saw that Captain Leeth was ahead of him and was in the act of fumbling his body into a suit. As Grosvenor came up, the commander closed up the suit and manipulated its anti-acceleration unit.
Quickly he turned to help Grosvenor. A minute later, Grosvenor sighed with relief as he reduced the gravity of his suit to one G. There were two of them now; and other men were stumbling up. It took only a few minutes to exhaust the supply of space suits in that store-room. They went down to the next floor and brought up suits from there. But now dozens of the crew members were available for the job. Captain Leeth had already disappeared; and Grosvenor, guessing the next step to be taken, hurried back to the cage where the big cat had been imprisoned. He found a score of scientists assembled at the door, which had apparently just been opened.
Grosvenor pressed forward and peered over the shoulders of those who were ahead of him. There was a gaping hole in the rear wall of the cage. The hole was big enough for five men to have squeezed through at one time. The metal looked bent, and had numerous jagged edges. The hole opened on to another corridor.
“I’ll swear,” whispered Pennons through the unclosed headpiece of his space suit, “that it’s impossible. The ten-ton hammer of the machine shop couldn’t more than dent four inches of micro-steel with one blow. And we heard only one. It would take at least a minute for the atomic disintegrator to do the job, but the whole area would be poisonously radioactive for several weeks at least. Morton, this is a super-being!”
Space Beagle- the Complete Adventures Page 14
