by Eando Binder
Jerry eBooks
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Wonder Stories
February 1934
Vol. 6, No. 9
Custom eBook created by
Jerry eBooks
July 2016
• We know that human nature is a very weak force during crucial moments. Fear is a destructive power in itself and one of the chief weaknesses of man.
Science-fiction authors, since the beginning, have pictured the people of earth welcoming visitors from space with opened arms and literally giving them the keys to the city.
Would this actually happen in reality? Our author does not believe so.
Here is one of the most human, logical, and convincing stories we have ever had the pleasure to present. You will recognize the characters in the tale among your friends. You will smile ironically at their actions when faced with creatures from Outside. A thoroughly absorbing story.
• In the year 1955 A.D., the Robot Aliens startled a tranquil world. That it was a tranquil world may be judged by the many blessings that came upon civilization after the dreadful Depression of 1929-35. There came the miraculous rejuvenation of the United States in 1935, and its effect swiftly started the ball rolling and took the yoke of stagnation from the world. The unemployed had been put back to work; factories had opened full blast; currency had stabilized and circulated freely, and the threat of war had died to faint rumblings. But the latter had come about only after the powers of Europe had entangled for a brief month of such terrific devastation that they hastily made peace without enquiring closely who had won.
With the advent of a sensible division of the work of the world, the general scale of living advanced to a new high in the history of earth. Luxuries became the heritage of the average person. Almost without exception, everybody had comfortable homes, plenty to eat, a great deal of leisure time, and a surfeit of recreation. Even the overcrowded and miserable nations of the Orient meta-morphosized to something saner and happier for their numerous citizens.
With this skeleton introduction, one can see that the world was tranquil, or at least should have been. But had all these great changes and benefits affected human nature? Had human reasoning advanced in like proportion? Did the new regime (as it may be called) make the mass-mind able to deal intelligently with a totally new and unprecedented phenomenon in the history of the world?
* * *
Bert Bodell gazed with undisguised admiration at ringed Saturn through his four-inch refractor on a clear night in the spring of 1942. He was one of that large and ever-growing group of “amateur astronomers” who took delight in observing, when weather permitted, the wonders and glories of the firmament, and who occasionally discovered new comets and asteroids before the observatories did. A young lad of twenty, it was one of his greatest delights to peer through the telescope of his own making. His secret ambition was to get his name in the astronomical records attached to some newly discovered heavenly body, as the custom was.
But this night in spring, the magnetic glory of beautiful Saturn—white and striped through the ‘scope, xanthic-yellow to the naked eye—drew him to aimless staring worship. He was in the back yard of his home in Oak Park, suburb of Chicago. The ‘scope had been installed behind the garage so that the lights from the house would not interfere with celestial observations.
Yet, absorbed though he was in drinking in the majesty of distant Saturn, when a blinding meteor flare caught the corner of his eye, he jerked away from the eyepiece of his ‘scope and turned to watch the sight. For a moment he was panic-stricken—the meteor seemed to be coming straight down!
His wondering eyes saw a white-hot object streak down to the horizon and plunge to earth in a southwesterly direction. Being a quick-witted youth, he pulled out his watch (fumbling a bit at that) and noted mentally the exact time down to the last second. As a conscientious stargazer, it was only his duty to note the time, approximate length of visibility, and apparent source—which latter he judged to be the constellation of Aries.
Then Bert’s mind began to whirl excitedly. The meteorite had landed somewhere near, assuredly in the northern part of Illinois. If it had landed near enough for him to be the first, or one of the first, to locate its position, what a thrill that would be! He might even get official recognition!
Imbued with an inspiration at least as great as the fanatical urge that sent the knights of old after the Holy Grail, the young amateur astronomer precipitately abandoned his ‘scope (even neglecting to throw its canvas covering over it, which was almost a religious duty) and ran to the house.
“Heavens! What’s got into you?” asked Mrs. Bodell surprised as her son tore like a madman through the kitchen and hall to his bedroom and out again.
“Meteorite landed—direction of Aurora or Yorkville—somewhere around there—” gasped Bert both in excitement and from exertion. He jingled his car keys. “Mother, I’m going to chase it in my car!”
“Chase it—?”
“Locate it, naturally!” explained the boy at his mother’s blank look.
“But, Bert dear! It’s late. You’ll lose sleep—”
“Hang sleep!” cried Bert dashing to the study and jerking an Atlas from the shelves. As he turned the pages to a map of northern Illinois, he called to his mother: “Stand out on the back porch, mother, will you?—and listen for the noise. If it comes, look at the clock and remember the exact time—the exact time—seconds and all!”
Mrs. Bodell complied, with a resigned sigh; if she did not humor him, he would nurse a grouch for days over it.
A minute later, Bert flew to the back porch where his mother stood silently. “Hear anything?—like a distant cannon or thunder?”
A negative somewhat quenched the boy’s eager enthusiasm. It was already four minutes since the time of landing. No noise from the meteorite indicated that it had either landed very far away or had failed to explode on hitting the ground and had merely bored downward. In the former case, it would be so far away that he would not reach it for several hours; in the latter case, it would take much searching and concerted effort to locate it unless eyewitnesses had been reasonably near its collision with the earth.
“Aw!” muttered Bert to himself to raise his own hopes, “probably the traffic noise from North Avenue drowned it out.” Thereupon, he followed his original intention and dashed to the garage, determined to at least make an attempt to locate the meteorite which certainly ought to be an important one by the size of it trail.
As he drove his new coupe down the alley to reach North Avenue, a loud voice hailed him from the back fence of a neighbor’s yard.
“Hey, Bert! D’ja see the meteor?” You bet I did, and I’m going after it,” said Bert, stopping the car. “What direction would you judge it—I mean, what town it lined with?”
“Waal,” drawled the neighbor in hesitation, “I’d say Joliet or maybe north of that, near Yorkville. Course, I can’t say how far away—”
From the roar of Bert’s accelerating car came a faint “thanks!”
• Bert knew the highways of the Chicago area quite well and swung to the Aurora road, despite the neighbor’s mention of Joliet which was farther south. At Aurora, thirty-five minutes later (risking a chase by police motorcycles with speeds of seventy and eighty), he found a group of excited people in a main street all waving their hands and talking. To his queries, he got several contradictory answers, but Yorkville seemed to be the favorite direction.
Fifteen minutes of hare-brained driving down what was fortunately very good concrete highway brought him to Yorkville, a sleepy litt
le rural town whose inhabitants had mostly been in bed and had therefore missed the meteorite. But one favorite corner was populated by “night-lifers” who were discussing the meteor vehemently, even belligerently.
Bert stopped the car at the curb. The Yorkvillers advanced upon him in a body, thinking him to want information either on road routes or tourist hotels. But Bert surprised them by asking where the meteorite had landed.
One long, lean fellow, with a dominant swagger, placed his self-assured visage in the window of the car.
“The meteorite? Why’t fell straight south o’ here—”
“Did not!” came a voice from the crowd at his back. “I tell you it was more to the east—I ought to know, I was standing right like this—”
“Straight south,” repeated the first man, indicating that the stranger should disregard any opinions but his own. “Where you from? You a newspaper reporter?”
“No,” Bert answered shortly. “By the way, did you hear any noise?”
A roar came from the crowd and after it broken bits of sentences by various seers and savants: “—like ten cannons”;
—like the world split in half—”; “—my ears’re ringing yet—”; “—shook the floor under my feet”; “—mark my word, it was bigger than you think; I’ll bet we’ll read in the papers tomorrow it killed a hundred people—” etc. All of which indicated it had been a loud noise.
The sage individual, who had attached Bert for his own personal dependent, curled a lip at the murmurs behind him and bent a wise eye on Bert. “Bunch of liars—them!” He jerked a thumb backward. “It was a noise, all right, but real sharp and. . . sudden-like; not like a cannon.”
“Have you any idea how long after the meteor landed the noise came?” asked Bert hopefully, racing his engine as a warning that he would depart in a moment.
The man squinted his eyes sagaciously. “No more’n a minute.”
Bert thanked him and roared from the spot, turning down the next county highway that went south. A minute!—that would make it only about fourteen miles from Yorkville! If it were that near, he still had a chance to be among the first there, more than likely the first with any astronomical knowledge.
In his high enthusiasm, the boy failed to reckon that he might wander up and down many country roads before actually locating the spot; but the gods were with him (perhaps they felt such interest and zeal should be appropriately rewarded) and he struck the trail just outside of Yorkville. A drawling farmer pointed southeastward and mentioned a road he might follow. On this road he met a trudging lad in his teens whom he obliged with a ride in return for worth-while information. It seemed that this lad had been romancing with a girl-friend on her back porch, and together they had seen clearly and later heard, the landing of the meteorite with some fear.
Dropping him off at his home, Bert came soon after to a cross-road where two farmers were conversing about the inevitable meteor. They steered him down another road which brought the impatient youngster to a brightly lit country home whose several shrill women-folk and screaming children were running about haphazardly as though they had received news of an invading army.
Hysterical answers finally convinced Bert that the meteorite had landed but a mile or so away with “a God-awful noise, sir!” They pointed out the direction with trembling fingers and asked if he would see that their menfolk had not been destroyed or hart, for they had gone there What he saw was a metallic ellipsoid, despite their frantic wives’ pleas to stay home.
Bert brushed the perspiration from his brow, for the hysterical women had almost frightened him with their incoherent babble. He drove down a wagon road which should lead him to his destination. Two miles of the jolting road, then he saw a tiny flicker of light to his right across a wide cornfield.
In a fever of excitement, Bert stopped his car, clambered over a barbed wire fence, and trampled his way over young and tender corn shoots, guided by a flashlight in his hand. The ground, was soft from recent rain and dragged—almost spitefully, it seemed—at his shoes. As he approached the light he had seen from the road, it resolved itself into a roaring fire, just beyond a small patch of orchard. At first, Bert was apprehensive of a blazing inferno, should the trees catch fire, but then he saw that the fire was a man-made one, around which several black figures stood conversing.
His first question, when he came close to the group which eyed him curiously, was: “Where’s the meteorite?”
For a moment, there was no answer and Bert looked from one to the other in casual survey to see that they were all farmer folk—four grown men and three boys. The looks on their faces were oddly alike, being an expression of stupefied bewilderment.
Finally one of them answered: “Back there behind that knoll. Come along; I’ll show you.”
Bert willingly complied and noticed that two of the other men followed at a distance.
The man who had answered him spoke again as they ascended an untilled hump of the ground: “But it ain’t no meteorite, mister. It’s suthin’ else!”
Bert was prevented from asking further by seeing the answer for himself, as they topped the low hill. There on the other side, a few hundred yards distant, was an object that brought an incredulous gasp to his lips and stopped him in his tracks.
What he saw was a metallic ellipsoid, half buried in the hard untilled ground, glowing a bright red and radiating heat, even as far as the hill where he stood! It was quite large, judging from the half sticking in the air, perhaps a hundred feet long, and its uniform surface was unmarred by anything resembling a door or window. But the astounding thing was that it was not smashed or damaged in any way!—that is, if the front half were like the back half, the former being tin-revealed to the eye.
“What—what in the world is it?” Bert found himself asking in a hoarse voice.
The man beside him and the two who had followed and now stood with them looked at him and shook their heads. “It’s more’n we know,” the gestures plainly said.
Bert made as though to descend the hill, but one of the men grasped his arm. “Better not, mister; gets awful hot when you ‘proach any nearer.”
Bert nodded and swallowed painfully. The shock of what he saw and the heat that began to be felt as he stood there made him limp with wonder. As though by a signal, the party walked back to the fire which had been made not for warmth, but for light. Men hate to confront mysteries and talk about them in darkness.
Introductions went around. When Bert told of his coming all the way from Chicago, they looked at him in surprise. At the mention of a car, one of the men spoke.
“We been looking at this thing and talking about it for an hour. We ought to get the news to some authorities; seetns this is suthin’ for the police. Maybe you having a car, you’d drive to Joliet and tell the Chief of Police about this thing?”
Bert’s answer was almost involuntary. “I’d rather not—er—I mean I’d like to be here when it’s cooled off.” He feared the police might detain him with numerous questions and thus keep him from returning soon enough to see all that transpired. “But if one of you can drive and wants to use my car—”
One of the youngsters eagerly volunteered and Bert handed him the keys. That he should so indifferently entrust his new car to the hands of a perfect stranger shows to what extent a great and awesome event can level humans to a state—momentary though it is—where they look upon persons newly met as old friends.
For the next few hours, Bert kept up running conversation with his new-found farmer friends, in which they all conjectured and aired opinions and nourished their excitement to high fever. From time to time, other farmer folk arrived who were greeted laconically and were shown the slowly cooling “meteorite” behind the hill. One and all they showed amazement and surprise, but neither of these emotions prevented them from sagaciously “explaining” to one another what it was all about.
Bert divided his time between talking to the others and running to the top of the knoll to look at the mysterious
ellipsoid. It was not till the third trip that he noticed something no one had previously mentioned. From a different viewpoint—i.e., to one side of the knoll—he could see that the hinder part of the object graduated into a circular flange whose walls were parallel at all points. Although the angle was acute, by standing on his tiptoes he could see over the lower part of the flange and could distinguish, dark though it was, what looked like heavy mesh or honey-comb. His agile mind told him it was the discharging end of a multitude of rocket tubes. This, combined with several vague hints by the farmers that the front of the “meteorite” had seemed to belch smoke, settled something in Bert’s mind.
CHAPTER II
The Alien Monsters
• Lieutenant Arpy of the Joliet police, on night duty at the headquarters, yawned and looked at the clock whose steady ticking was the only noise competing with the snores of Policeman Murphy, which latter was a species of buzzing like a hundred bees. Lieutenant Arpy, who was pacing up and down like an insomniac, glanced at his peaceful Irish face more than once in exasperation; he didn’t mind the man taking a cat-nap at the switchboard, but he could at least not rattle his confounded hard-rubber lips. At midnight, the officer had kicked him in the shin with a none-too-gentle toe and told him to straighten himself or he’d fall into the near-by spittoon. At one’clock, Arpy had awakened him to tell him of the meteorite (of which he had heard from a returning policeman who had been on beat) to which Murphy had grunted affected interest without fully awakening, and had thereby resumed his non-stop nasal duet—which noise probably accounted for the fact that Arpy had not heard the meteorite’s landing. At two o’clock, Lieutenant Arpy advanced upon Murphy with the full intent of dousing him with a glass of water, when interruption prevented the righteous deed.
A farmer Tad rushed in, eyes round with suppressed excitement, followed by a burly policeman who said: “Says he wants to see the Chief about that meteor thing that come down couple hours ago. Thought you’d like to hear what he’s got to say, Lieutenant.”
