The fear that didn’t diminish was the acute physical fear of the sweating and the pain. He had walked a little way along the floor of the raw tunnel, the loop of cable behind him. Then he had seen movement. He had tried to tell of seeing the movement, and suddenly he could not move. The sweat boiled out of his body and he had stood, his underlip sagging away from his teeth, unable to change even the focus or direction of his glance.
The pain was in his ears and his head. Because it seemed to be focused in his ears, he thought of hypersonics.
He could see slow, fumbling movements in the distance, faintly lighted by a glow that seemed to come from a huge metallic thing that filled the tunnel from wall to wall.
He could not move, and the fumbling thing had come toward him, and it was like a nightmare of childhood, himself unable to turn, unable to escape. It was a large thing, greyish white, moving along the dirt floor of the tunnel.
Because his eyes were still focused on the distant place, he could not look at it.
Greyish white, moving along the dirt floor.
It was as though mental fingers fumbled at his mind. It was as though a stranger were fitting an unfamiliar key to an unknown door in a strange house in a foreign city …
Thoughts, unexpressed in words. Thoughts to which he had to fit the words.
The thought of heaviness, and intense cold. He could not move. Slowly the odd pressure on him diminished, and with a great effort he turned his glance downward.
His eyes had become used to the faint glow. The thing on the floor was a vast, pulpy, obscene caricature of a man. Naked and grey. Eyes with faceted prisms protruding from the face, a tiny furred orifice below the eyes, and a wide lemon-yellow gash that was a mouth. Ten feet tall if standing, he guessed. The arms were oddly jointed and there was something horribly wrong about the hands and fingers, the fingers curling to the outside of where the wrists should be, rather than in toward the body.
Something else horribly wrong. The suety grey fat of the body was dragged down toward the floor of the cave, and the creature moved with great difficult as though it were being subjected to a centrifuge. He comprehended that this was an alien, a creature from space, and that it was accustomed to far lesser gravity.
The mental fingers moved in his brain with more certainty. The thoughts said, “You are a primitive creature. Where are your masters?”
He found his lips could move. “There are no masters,” he said, startled by the sound of his voice in the silence. He tried to lift the microphone to his lips but he could not move it.
“You are the apex of life on this planet,” the thoughts said.
And he was ashamed, somehow. Humbled. As though contempt had somehow been put in his mind. It was primitive and absurd to have made sounds with his lips.
The creature seemed to be contemplating him. Suddenly the mike slipped, fell to the short length of flexible cord, banged against his thigh. Woodenly his hands unbuckled the straps and the equipment fell to the crushed rock floor.
With even regular steps he walked toward the big shining ship from space. As he walked he marveled that one part of his mind could accept orders and issue the neural instructions to the necessary parts of his body without his being aware of the action until it was under way. For the first time he began to wonder if actually the walls of the deep hole had fallen in on him without warning, and this was one of the early dreams in death.
Behind him he heard the click of small stones as the creature followed him laboriously. A vast port was open in the stern of the ship. He stepped through and his second step inside the ship, in the warm blue-grey glow, sent him floating toward a far wall. The sensation twisted his stomach and he was suddenly and violently ill.
When he turned, the creature was behind him, and it stood erect. He saw that the hairless head was far too small for the massive body. In the lesser gravity inside the ship the big creature moved with the controlled ease of a man on earth. Martin’s slightest movement sent him blundering out of control.
He turned sharply and floated into a slow fall as another of the creatures appeared in a huge doorway to his right.
He knew that they communicated with each other, as alien thoughts seemed to rush through his mind, just beyond his ability to comprehend. He detected the contempt of the second creature, and it seemed a sharper scorn than that which the first one had expressed.
One quick thought seemed to smell of death, and the first one protested and there was a mental shrug from the second one. A mental shrug which said, “Do what you please with it.”
The second creature turned and left. The one who had crawled on the tunnel floor and now stood erect sent flashing into Martin’s mind a vague thrust of amusement, of casual interest. Martin suddenly realized that it was the same sort of emotion that he might express concerning a strange dog who had wandered across his path.
At that, the creature’s amusement seemed to grow more intense, and Martin guessed that he had intercepted and interpreted the thought.
The air inside the ship was very hot, and very moist. The creature seemed to sweat not at all. Martin Rhode felt his clothes clinging to him. He was still nauseated from the effect of the lesser gravity.
Once again his legs began to move without his volition, thrusting him awkwardly against a wall, then carrying him through the doorway. He gasped as he looked up a seemingly endless corridor, illuminated by the blue-grey radiance that seemed to shine out from the metallic corridor walls. Everything was too big.
His steps carried him down the hall in long bounds, halting him before another doorway. He went into the room and he was alone. It was a room twenty feet square, half as high. He could move freely. He wanted to look out in the corridor again. But when he tried to go through the doorway, he ran against an invisible, transparent substance. He could not get through the doorway. He removed most of his clothes, and made a rude bed of them. He was tired and he went to sleep, as though ordered to sleep.
* * * *
He awakened hearing a throb of power, a distant clanking. He was in a different part of the ship: a larger room with a huge port in one side. He stood up, forgetting the gravity, smacked lightly against the high ceiling and floated down gently.
He looked through the port and saw a vast square room. The two creatures he had seen before were outside the ship, and yet they moved easily. The room had evidently been hollowed out of the solid rock. It appeared to be at least two hundred feet square and fifty feet high. The side of the ship had been brightened in some manner so that the radiance of it filled the furthest corners of the room.
When he looked more closely at the two creatures, he saw that they wore close-fitting suits of metal. He guessed that the garments duplicated the gravitational conditions existing within the ship.
He was puzzled by their activities, apparently they were assembling some sort of equipment, but it was foreign to anything in his experience. The way they walked about was odd, due to the extra joint in their legs, a joint which was like a second knee bending in the opposite direction.
A huge cube of milky glass, thirty feet on a side, rested near the far wall. Within the cube he could vaguely make out the intricate form of what appeared to be a large natural crystal formation, hexagonal in shape. The crystal seemed to shimmer behind the clouded walls of the cube.
Supports slanted out from the top four corners of the cube as though the cube were supporting the weight of a far greater area of the ceiling.
He saw no other representatives of the odd race, and began to wonder if only the two of them had arrived in this spaceship which had punched its way down through the Earth’s crust, as though diving into water.
A great desire for sleep welled over him and he let himself sink to the floor. Something about the warm, moist air inside the ship, he guessed …
He awakened the second time on a high bench. One of the creatures stood
looking down at him, and he saw the fine hair encircling the oval orifice in the middle of its face move as it breathed. The lemon-yellow slash of its mouth showed no semblance of teeth.
The mental fumbling was gone. The thoughts were clear, precise, incisive.
“You are of a warlike race. We have had difficulty with your people. A—has been placed around this area to keep them away.” One word was a blank. He had no word to fit the thought. It gave him the impression of immovable force, a linkage of particles of pure force.
“Where are you from?” Martin Rhode projected the thought as clearly as he could.
“A far place.”
“Who are you?”
“This will be difficult for a primitive to comprehend. We are two of a warrior race. This planet is much as our planet must have been countless eons ago. I have never seen our home planet. My brother and I were born in space, as were thirty generations before us. We are accustomed to lesser gravity, and the constant heat inside our ship. Your planet is cold, and gravity makes us very heavy. My brother has requested that I destroy you, as we have learned from you all that is necessary for us to know. But I have a foolish sentiment about you. You are as our race must have once been. To see you is to look into the dim past. We have seen many primitives on many strange planets that circle unknown suns. You are more like what we must have once been than any we have yet seen. Thus, there is a sentiment that fills my mind when I look on you and think on your desperate, petty little wars, like children with rocks and slings.”
In the thoughts there was such a powerful impression of great age and aloofness that Martin Rhode felt small and awed.
His lips trembled as he expressed the thought, “You called your people a warrior race?”
“Like yours. In the beginning tribe fights tribe, then city fights city, then nation fights nation, then continent fights continent. That is your present stage. Should you survive this stage, you will find planet fighting planet, then solar system fighting foreign solar system, and at last galaxy warring with galaxy. Who can tell? Possibly beyond that is universe making war with universe, or dimension against dimension. In each step there is always the possibility of mutual extermination, and with that, the peace that living things can find. Only in death is there peace, and death is the final step.”
There was horror in those thoughts. Horror and great age and great resignation.
“We have been at war with another race for eight hundred of your lifetimes. This other race is aquatic, and their spaceships are filled with the fluids of their home planet, long since destroyed. Our great fleets are no more. All told, we probably have no more than five thousand ships, four hundred thousand individuals out of the millions upon millions who once existed. This small patrol ship of ours was pursued. The ships from which we fled are somewhere in this vicinity.”
Martin’s head was whirling. He thought, “What are you planning to do here?”
“We will make certain preparations. Then we will let our presence here be known. When the pursuing ships are within proper range, we will explode this planet. We will die, of course, but the gases of the explosion with great speed, will engulf some of their ships and the heat will kill a great many of them, boil them alive in the fluids of their ships.”
Martin Rhode’s mind rocked under the implications of the statement. He wanted to believe that it was some sort of a trick, and yet the calm certainty in the thoughts that had lanced his mind made belief inescapable.
“Kill all of us! All of us!” he said aloud.
“Believe me, creature, it is something that you will eventually do to yourselves if we do not do it. For uncounted generations we talked of the end of war. Now we know—there is no end.”
Martin searched unsuccessfully for some way to refute the alien’s argument. Impossible. The alien had all the weight of fact on its side. Fighting down his despair, Martin asked, “How will you explode our planet?”
“With an ancient technique. It is a technique that you creatures possess. The power of the atom. It was used without avail against our—.” Again that thought for which there was no word. “Our power is derived from the controlled oscillation of crystals subjected to electromagnetic impulses. That is what drives this ship at speed equal to forty times the circumference of your planet within a space of time equal to three pulsations of the organ which circulates your blood.
“With the power of the crystals, we will compress hundreds of thousands of tons of the matter of which your planet is composed into a very small space. It is the principle which limits the maximum size of planets through molecular compression at the core. The atoms will be crushed. With this small substance of enormous weight, we will have a fuse. By heating it instantaneously to critical temperature, once again through the crystal, we will induce a chain reaction which will detonate this planet. That is the work my brother is doing now. He is setting up the necessary equipment to begin the task of compression. The ultimate bit of matter will have ten million times the density of water.”
Martin was silent. The thoughts were once again clear to him. “I can feel your grief and your sense of loss, creature. You are thinking that those of your race will continue with their pointless war up to the moment of extinction. You are thinking that if you could escape, you could warn them. They would think you mad. They cannot come to this place because of the—. Your wish is futile.”
Martin Spoke aloud: “Could you—could you give my people some unmistakable evidence of all this? Just so they would stop fighting for the short time they have left?”
He could read no expression in the faceted eyes. There was a slight movement of the lemon-yellow mouth.
“It might be amusing. What mechanical device do you use to communicate with each other? I will speak to my brother.”
“I dropped a short-range radio on the floor of the tunnel.”
The creature stood up and left. Martin Rhode sat on the bench, his face in his hands. So this was the climax of the empty years. There was no denying the truth of the thoughts he had read.
He guessed that it was a half-hour before the creature came back. “This is a simple device. Apparently your whole planet is served with less power than is needed to operate our small ship. Within a few hours I can construct a device which will enable you to reach every one of these devices on your planet, covering simultaneously all bands and wavelengths. Do many of your people have them?”
“Every soldier wears a small one on his wrist. Orders are given over them. There are few dwellings on the planet without one.”
The alien grimaced. “My brother does not object to my amusing myself by giving all of your people some small period of peace before death.”
* * * *
In the long ward there was soft music, selected for its therapeutic value. It also concealed the drugged moans of the seriously wounded.
Alice Powell was marking a chart when the music faded and the strong voice, the familiar voice rang out. She dropped the pen and put her hand to her throat.
“This is Martin Rhode speaking. My voice is coming simultaneously from every radio set in the world. The earth has been invaded from outer space. The barrier which you cannot penetrate protects these strange beings while they work. I am held captive. I know their plans … “
On Colonel Wing’s desk was a picture of his wife and children. They had died during the first week of the war. After Martin finished speaking, Colonel Wing picked up the picture and sat very still, looking at the familiar faces.
Field Marshall Jatz listened until the voice died, and then he struck his aide heavily in the mouth. “Listen!” he roared. “Another weapon they have developed! What is wrong with our people?”
The aide crawled to the doorway, blood smearing his chin.
Stanford Rider sat at his long desk, his face in his hands. After Martin had stopped speaking he began to laugh. The tone of his laughter
crept constantly higher and the tears began to run down his face. It took a long time to quiet him.
* * * *
In all the places below the hard crust of the world, people listened to the words of Martin Rhode. Many of them did not understand his language. But many millions did understand, and it was easier to believe that it was a trick than to believe what Martin Rhode had said.
Martin Rhode stood and looked into the shining screen as the huge grey-white creature manipulated the dials. In a barren ravine men fought and died, and blood stained the rocks in the pale sunshine.
“You see, creature, they did not believe you. It is as I told you.”
Martin felt grief well up within him. “Can’t you do anything to make them believe?” he asked desperately.
No thought came to Martin for many minutes. Then he received the thought of laughter. Wry laughter.
“You creatures do not communicate through thought. I believe I am beginning to understand your psychology. I will hook up the drive crystal of the ship, using it to amplify my thoughts. I will use you as a target so that my thoughts will be keyed to the minds of your creatures. Then I will give each of them a clear mental picture of me, an impression of great fear, and a view of the destruction of this planet. Then they will no longer doubt.”
An hour later the hookup was ready. A small room near the rear of the ship. A large metallic object, shaped like a funnel.
The full impetus of the thoughts crashed in on Martin Rhode’s brain. In the beginning the thoughts had been like awkward fingers. Then they had achieved deftness and finish. But he knew at that moment that all that had gone before had been gentle, almost tender. These were not thoughts to be articulated into words. These were raw emotions, driven into his mind as though by a pneumatic hammer placed against the grey jelly of his brain.
He recoiled and he felt his mouth twisting, heard his own weak scream echo in his ears. In his mind he saw a huge image of one of the aliens, faceted eyes blazing. The fear was like no fear he had ever experienced. It was complete and utter horror! Then it was as though he were snapped off into space, looking down at the Earth, a planet the size of half a grain of rice. Huge ships ripped noiselessly by, headed for Earth. Then once again he was below the Earth’s surface. The two grey-white creatures stood, intent, watching a view-screen. Red light emanating from the heart of a crystal played fitfully across a dark one-inch cube which rested in the centre of a huge plate of grey metal.
Death Quotient and Other Stories Page 3
