by Jimmy Guieu
With a blank expression on her face she seemed to be listening to something that the others could not hear.
“There are three of them,” she continued. “Three Denebians and one Earthling behind the wheel. They’re all armed with thermal ray rifles. The Denebians won’t spot me without a psychic detector until they’re 50 yards away. Their paranormal senses are less developed than ours.”
After five minutes of anxious waiting a Peugeot 203 arrived, its headlights turned down. When it was in sight of the airfield it stopped and turned off its lights completely.
“They’re surprised that they don’t see the first car,” she whispered, clutching her disintegrator cone. “But they’re too far for me to shoot.”
The driverless Vedette had stopped almost two miles farther on, running into a runway marker on the airstrip.
“They’re not sure and they’re going to split up and surround the airport.”
Sure enough, the four doors of the Peugeot opened at the same time and three pseudo-men got out, dressed simply in a bodysuit with a big belt from which hung a sheath. Black helmets covered their heads. Each of them held a kind of rifle with a short barrel that ended in a parabolic antenna. Their green, scaly skin glimmered in the moonlight and made them look like living statues, bronze statues but tarnished green. The Earthling who was with them—wearing a dark, felt hat—was also carrying a thermal rifle. They walked toward the Vedette, spreading out and looking around them, intrigued by the absence of the Citroën.
The human accomplice of the Denebians, taking his own way to get to the Vedette from the rear, walked toward the bushes where the explorers and their friends were hiding.
“He’s going to find us,” the Polarian girl hissed. “We can’t hit him with my disintegrator or with your noisy guns or we’ll attract the attention of the others.”
Angelvin shook his right arm and the stiletto dropped directly into his hand. He got up on his knees, held up the blade and fired it at the man walking ten feet from their hiding place. The stiletto flew off like an arrow and buried itself in the hoodlum’s throat. Dropping his rifle the man threw his hands up to his neck. Gasping for air, suffocating, his eyes turned up, he wobbled and then fell into the grass without uttering a sound. Everything happened in total silence. The Denebians did not suspect a thing. Kariven crawled over to the dead man, snatched away the thermal rifle and donned his felt hat, which had rolled off into the grass. He stood up and got on the road the way he was walking. From a distance, in the shadows of the night, the Denebians would not recognize the switch.
Dormoy, Angelvin, Yuln and Jenny started crawling toward the three Denebians. Kariven made a sign to his friends to attack from behind as he got closer to the green monster on his left.
The Denebians slowed down as they converged on the Vedette. When they were than only around 30 yards from each other Kariven made sure that his friends were close enough to fire. He walked another ten yards on the left and pointed the antenna of the rifle at the monsters. Then he pressed the only button on the formidable weapon. A pale yellow ray shot out with a low crackling sound. The light ray hit the first Denebian and charred him in one second. At the same time the Colts fired off a deafening round. The two other green monsters were hit and dropped to the ground. One of them struggled up on one elbow and tried to raise his rifle but the bright flash from Yuln’s disintegrator swept over the airfield. The two monstrous corpses looked like they turned into purple puppets before the night once again covered the peaceful terrain. Of the Denebians (the third one had just been disintegrated) nothing remained but a bad memory.
Off in the distance a dog was barking furiously, woken up by the gunshots. The closest house was three miles away so they had no fear of an unexpected visit.
“We got ’em!” Dormoy shouted in joy, as he holstered his pistol.
“Let’s get back in the car,” Yuln advised, “and leave it at the entrance to the airfield. We can send a message to your father tomorrow, Jenny, so he can come and get it.”
The Vedette, whose bumpers were barely dented, was brought back to the entrance on the gravel road, not far from the Peugeot.
Angelvin went back to look at the first corpse. “Come and see this, Kariven!”
Kariven ran over and shined his flashlight on the grimacing face of the dead man. “It’s the guy with the brown hat who was spying on us in the restaurant!”
“Exactly,” Angelvin retrieved his stiletto from the guy’s throat. He wiped the blade on the corpse’s clothes and when he was sure there was no trace of blood he put it back into the sheath on his forearm, hidden under his sleeve.
“Get back,” the Polarian ordered.
She aimed her disintegrator and made the body disappear in a flash. Then pointing at their hunters’ Peugeot, she gave it the same treatment.
“No need to leave any tracks behind us,” she said, calmly putting the little cone back into her handbag.
It was no everyday sight, these three men and two young ladies, one in a black suit and the other in a low-cut dress, waiting at a small, empty airport in the middle of the night…
“Zimko at last!” the blond Polarian shouted, looking up.
Her companions raised their eyes but saw nothing but sky and twinkling stars. In a moment, however, one of the stars seemed to be getting bigger, becoming phosphorescent, emerald green and soon turned into a luminous disc spinning around. The flying saucer descended at high speed and stopped on a dime, five feet off the ground. A breath of warm wind rustled the Polarian’s dress and lifted Jenny’s skirt.
Yuln took Kariven’s hand and the two of them hurried toward it, followed by Jenny and Angelvin with Dormoy bringing up the rear. One after another they climbed up the tilted walkway and lowered their heads to enter the hatch of the spaceship.
Zimko, dressed in a Chinese robe of green silk embroidered with black and yellow dragons, burst out laughing at their astonished faces. “I didn’t have time to change when I left China.”
On his cue they sat in the reclining seats installed around the cockpit. Dormoy and Angelvin could not believe their eyes. They were inside a flying saucer! Inside one of those machines that had been making headlines for years!
Jenny had already visited this spaceship a few years ago.
The disc took off without the slightest vibration and almost straight up into the night sky at 3,000 miles an hour.
“What’s the plan for the party and where do we fit in?” Kariven asked, glad to be seeing his extra-terrestrial friend again.
“You’re going to take part in a mission as observers, Earthlings and spokesmen. As for our destination… I’ll give you three guesses.”
Kariven and his companions shrugged their shoulders and frowned.
The Polarian declared calmly, “We’re off to Moscow.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“To… Moscow?” the anthropologist repeated, dubious and, it must be said, uneasy.
“I know,” Zimko smiled, “that Russia is not a very welcoming country. In the present state of international tension it’s tough to get in… and especially dangerous to get out, but we have to go there. It’s part of our plan to set up the Earth-Polarian Alliance. Your planet, my friends, is split into two hostile blocs. The blows that result could start a war, a stupid war that would profit only our common enemy: the Denebians. Unfortunately, men have not yet reached a high degree of Wisdom. Not the USA and even less so Russia would agree to listen to us calmly without trying to win us over to their side. Now, we refuse categorically to take either side…
“We Polarians whom Earthly Tradition calls the Dragons of Wisdom are in a way the apostles of non-violence. However, we’re often forced to use violence. You’ve witnessed this over the last 48 hours. We hate to kill but we don’t hesitate to do so when the security of a planet is at stake. And the Denebians are the very ones putting the future of Earth at risk.”
“But what are we going to do in Russia?” Angelvin insisted.
“
Kidnap Professor Serge Yegov, the famous atomic physicist, Head of the Atomgrad Factory/Laboratory Center. This very important man is on vacation in Moscow at the moment. It’s very unusual and we have to take advantage of it.”
“What’s the point of kidnapping him?”
“We’ve done the same with a number of scientists in every country to build up a group of scientific authorities who will, come D-Day, bear witness to our good faith to the countries of Earth.”
“The mysterious disappearances of scientists reported over the past few years all over the world are your work?”
“I don’t deny it, Kariven. These scientists are neither hostages nor prisoners. We treat them as guests and take them to our Galactic Confederation, meaning the planets that we protect or that we are helping to develop, socially and technologically speaking. When we bring them back to Earth at the right time, they’ll vouch for our peaceful intentions toward Earthlings. And they will be believed, because of their character and their arrival all together on Polarian spaceships coming to protect your planet from any eventual attack by the creatures from Deneb.
“Right now you will have to excuse me. I’m going to take off this old Chinese rag which was great when getting around China but of little use in the streets of Moscow. Your sport coats and double-breasted jackets,” he remarked to the explorers, “and especially the American cut, will make you stand out among the Soviets. We gong to fix all that. Please come with me.”
Jenny remained alone with Yuln who had just taken off her dress and put back on her midnight blue bikini with shifting colors along with her short, see-through tunic tight at the waist. She swapped her heels for the shiny short boots and went back to her post at the controls, turning off the automatic pilot.
The young French woman contemplated the bronze-skinned Polarian who read everything in her mind like an open book. Then she offered, “Would you like to try on one of these tunics, Jenny? I have a new one that would look radiant on you and match your pale skin perfectly. Go into my cabin,” she pointed to an oval hatchway, “and take the protective envelop marked with a green star out of the metalo-plastic dresser. You’ll find a complete outfit inside. We’re pretty much the same size so I think it should fit you fine.”
15 minutes later Zimko and the Earthlings came back into the cockpit. All four had put on a black uniform, tight at the collar and decorated with stripes on the shoulders. They wore black boots, black caps with short bills and holstered pistols in their belts. They stopped at the entrance to the cockpit and stared at Jenny.
The young lady, a little confused, had buckled her gold belt around a splendid green, see-through tunic that hid nothing of her graceful curves. Short, green boots with red edges went halfway up her muscular calves. Like Yuln she wore a light helmet the same color as her tunic, from which her brown curls flowed down.
Angelvin purred the usual two-note whistle of admiration and pulled her to him. “A symphony in green! You’re ravishing as a Girl from Space, Jenny.”
She cuddled his chest for a moment and then gently wriggled free, almost with regret. “What’s this costume of yours?” she poked her finger at Angelvin’s chest.
“It’s not a costume,” Zimko corrected her. “These are real uniforms from the MVD26… or almost if you consider that they were made in Kodha, the capital planet of the Pole Star. The material is bulletproof and heat resistant up to 2,500C. With our gloves and attachable hood we can safely walk through 500 yards of inferno. Beyond that the fireproof cloth will still protect us from flames but we’ll heat up inside to around 67C or 150F, which is not very comfortable.”
Where are we? he asked Yuln through telepathy.
The blond girl pressed a button and the screen it up, transformed into a radar display over a map of Central Europe. A red dot was moving east following a path that was roughly east-north-east.
“We’re over Warsaw,” she announced, slowly turning a small multiplier wheel. On the screen the bright red dot representing the flying saucer suddenly sped up.
Kariven examined the map twice and said, “You just said we were flying over Warsaw and now the red dot just passed Smolensk, around 500 miles away!”
Yuln turned the wheel in the other direction, looked over at a dancing needle and then back to the red dot that slowed down enormously. “But we were only going 30,000 miles an hour,” she joked and then mischievously, “Sometimes it’s good that they think our ships are just meteors, even though they can go really fast. I brought our speed down to 600 miles an hour and that’s nothing compared to what this ship can do in space. For an interstellar voyage our standard of measure is the Parsec and for longer distances the Megaparsec27.”
“That’s mind-boggling,” Kariven mumbled, thinking of the immeasurable value of these numbers.
“But at a low speed won’t we be detected by the Russian radar?”
“Not to fear, Michel,” Zimko assured him. “Our ship is equipped with a special device that absorbs radar waves. The device is working right now. The stations on the ground won’t even receive the echo from our passing by, especially since we’ve been surrounded by an invisibility shield once we entered the Soviet air space.”
“We’re over the Moscow suburbs now,” Yuln announced, reducing speed and turning a micrometric dial.”
The map on the screen disappeared and was replaced by a direct video system. Moscow, the powerful capital of the USSR, appeared on the convex surface of the viewer. The dark mass of the Kremlin, surrounded by a wall, stood in the middle of the city in contrast to the brighter Red Square. Everyone seemed to be sleeping in the Bolshevik metropolis where only a few lights cut through the night. The big avenues looked like bright ribbons woven around the apartment blocks.
Very slowly the flying saucer set down on a wide lawn bordered by flowers in the middle of Ismailov Park. Hovering five feet off the ground the ship deployed its tilted plank. Yuln and Jenny remained in the cockpit. Zimko and the three explorers opened the hatch underneath after turning off the lighting in the interior corridor, which would have given them away in the dark night.
Walking across the lawn Zimko whispered to his friends, “Don’t say a word. Whatever situation we get into, let me do the talking. Besides, our MVD uniforms will be a kind of free pass for us. If I remember correctly from my study of Russian life, the Special Force was pretty fierce and feared by every level of society.”
The streets were deserted, lit every step of the way by electric streetlamps. The entrances to the subway were closed. The whole city seemed asleep. Once in a while, in the distance, a motorcycle or car drove by, disturbing the nocturnal silence. Zimko concentrated, standing still amidst his friends at an intersection. The strange, psychic abilities of the Polarian were searching the Soviet capital. In less than a minute his mental projection located the man he sought.
“Professor Yegov is in an apartment provided by the Supreme Soviet, Zimko explained. “But the building is well guarded. We still have a mile to go. The hardest part is yet to come… particularly for us to ‘requisition’ a car.”
When they crossed the intersection they were blinded by the headlights of a big car that was just driving off. It was an aerodynamic, luxury Pobeda.28 It pulled a quick U-turn and stopped in front of the four men just as they were stepping onto the sidewalk.
“Stoï!29“ shouted one of the passengers inside.
Two superior officers of the MVD, hands on the butt of the Nagans30 on their belts approached the four pseudo-officers.
Zimko snapped to attention, clicking his heels together, right away imitated by the three explorers. The superior officer—blond, square-jawed and with protruding ears—barked something at Zimko. He answered in perfect Russian, still at attention. The Russian eyed the three explorers and their uniforms, then frowned before yelling at Zimko again.
Angelvin received a mental order: Button your coat!
The ethnographer realized immediately that he had missed his third button. He corrected his error and
went back to his flawless stance of attention.
The officer threw them a nasty look and said, “Douraki!31“
He shouted a few more curt, stinging remarks. The rare pedestrians crossing the street hurried their step, having little desire to get in trouble with these MVD officers, the terror of the citizens. All of a sudden the superior officer slapped Zimko but in the middle of striking the Polarian a second time the Russian’s hand stopped in mid-air and dropped to his side.
The Polarian had just sent into his mind the order to get back in the car and take the wheel himself. The officer slammed the car door before the Pobeda sped off as the four friends saluted it and clicked their heels.
Zimko rubbed his cheek. His eyes, behind his half-closed lids, lit up with a strange, cold glare of rage. “He slapped me because I refused to follow him. We were almost arrested. It seems that the MVD is confined to quarters tonight. Reason: purging the officers.”
In the distance they heard a crash, then another, louder, accompanied by the sound of broken glass and smashed metal.
“How careless,” Zimko mocked in a tone of false sympathy.
“Do you mean…” Angelvin inquired.
“Yes. The maniac and his three little pigs are now in a better world. Their Pobeda just dove off a bridge over the railroad at 70 miles an hour and smashed 50 yards below into the train tracks. The fast moving Moscow-Voronej will be one and a half hours late tonight. An unfortunate accident,” he sighed ironically, massaging his jaw.
Suddenly his expression changed. “The Denebians! I feel them…”
“Here in Russia?” Kariven was surprised. “Have they spotted us?”
“They can’t,” Zimko answered, concentrating. “I’m protected by the scrambler on board our ship. No, they’re searching for someone else. By the Gods! I see them now! The green reptiles are in a Moskvitch32… A Russian is driving… They’re almost at Professor Yegov’s! Not a minute to lose… We have to get a car.”
