They ate silently, and as wordlessly cleaned the pans with bunches of grass. Woodin got his pipe going, the other two lit crumpled cigarettes, and then they sprawled for a time by the fire, listening to the chuckling, whispering river-sounds, the sighing sough of the higher hemlock branches, the lonesome cheeping of insects.
Woodin finally knocked his pipe out on his boot-heel and sat up.
“All right,” he said, “now we’ll settle this argument we were having.”
Ross looked a little shamefaced. “I guess I got too hot about it,” he said subduedly. Then he added, “All the same, you fellows do more than half disbelieve me.”
Woodin shook his head. “When you told us that you’d seen creatures unlike anything ever heard of while flying over this wilderness, Gray and I both believed you. If we hadn’t, do you think two busy biologists would have dropped their work to come up here into these unending woods and look for the things you saw?”
“I know, I know,” said the aviator. “You think I saw something queer, and you’re taking a chance that it will be worth the trouble of coming up here after it. But you don’t believe what I’ve told you about the look of the things. You think that sounds too queer to be true, don’t you?”
For the first time Woodin hesitated. “After all, Ross,” he said indirectly, “one’s eyes can play tricks when you’re only glimpsing things for a moment from a plane a mile up.”
“Glimpsing them?” echoed Ross. “I tell you, man, I saw them as clearly as I see you. A mile up, yes, but I had my big binoculars with me and was using them when I saw them.
“It was near here, too, just east of the fork of the McNorton and the Little Whale. I was streaking by in a hurry—I’d been three weeks up at that government mapping survey on Hudson’s Bay. I wanted to place myself by the river fork, so I brought my plane down a little and used my binoculars. Then, in a clearing by the river, I saw something glistening, dropped lower, and saw—the things. I tell you, they were incredible, but just the same I saw them clear! I forgot all about the river fork in the moment or two I stared down at them.
“They were big, glistening things like heaps of shining jelly, so translucent that I could see the ground through them. There were at least a dozen of them, and when I saw them, they were gliding all in that little clearing, a floating, flowing movement.
“Then they disappeared under the trees. If there’d been a clearing big enough to land in within a hundred miles, I’d have landed and looked for them, but there wasn’t and I had to go on. But I wanted like the devil to find out what they were, and when I took the story to you two, you agreed to come here by canoe to search for them. But I don’t think now you’ve ever fully believed me.”
Woodin looked thoughtfully into the fire. “I think you saw something queer, all right, some form of life. That’s why I was willing to come up on this search. But things such as you describe, jellylike, translucent, gliding over the ground like that—there’s nothing like that since the first protoplasmic creatures, the beginning of life on Earth, glided over our young world ages ago.”
“If there were such things then, why couldn’t they have left descendants like them?” Ross argued.
Woodin shook his head. “They changed into different and higher forms of life, starting the great upward climb of life that has reached its height in man. Those long-dead, single-celled protoplasmic creatures were the start, the crude, humble beginn of our life. They passed away and their descendants were unlike them. We men are their descendants, too.”
Ross looked at him, frowning. “But where did they come from in the first place, those first living things?”
Again Woodin shook his head. “That is one thing we biologists do not know and can hardly speculate upon, the origin of those first protoplasmic forms of life. It’s been suggested that they rose spontaneously from the chemicals of the Earth, yet this is disproved by the fact that no such things rise spontaneously now from inert matter. Their origin is still a complete mystery. But, however they came into existence, they were the first of life, our distant ancestors.”
Woodin’s eyes were dreaming, the other two forgotten, as he stared into the fire, seeing visions.
“What a glorious saga it is, that wonderful climb up from crude protoplasm creatures to a man! A marvelous series of changes that has brought us from that first low form to our present splendor. And it might not have occurred on any other world but Earth! For science is now almost sure that the cause of evolutionary mutations is the radiations of the radioactive deposits inside our planet, acting upon the genes of all living matter.”
He caught a glimpse of Ross’s uncomprehending face, and despite his raptness smiled a little.
“I can see that means nothing to you. I’ll try to explain. The germ-cell of every living thing on Earth contains in it a certain number of small, rod-like things which are called chromosomes. These chromosomes are made up of strings of tiny particles which we call genes. And each of these genes has a potent and different controlling effect upon the development of the creature that grows from that germ-cell.
“Some of these genes control the creature’s color, some control his size, some the shape of his limbs, and so on. Every characteristic of the creature that grows from that germ-cell will be greatly different the fellow-creatures of its species. He will be, in fact, of an entirely new species. That is the way in which new species come into existence on Earth, the method of evolutionary change.
“Biologists have known this for some time, and they have been searching for the cause of these sudden great changes, these mutations, as they are called. They have tried to find out what it is that affects the genes so radically. They have found experimentally that X-rays and chemical rays of various kinds, when turned upon the genes of a germ-cell, will change them greatly. And the creature that grows from that germ-cell will thus be a greatly changed creature, a mutant.
“Because of this, many biologists now believe that the radiation from the radioactive deposits inside Earth, acting upon all the genes of every living thing on Earth, is what causes the constant change of species, the procession of mutations, that has brought life up the evolutionary road to its present height.
“That is why I say that on any other world but Earth, evolutionary progress might never have happened. For it may be that no other world has similar radioactive deposits within to cause by gene-effect the mutations. On any other world, the first protoplasmic things that began life might have remained forever the same, down through endless generations.
“How thankful we ought to be that it was not so on Earth! That mutation after mutation has followed, life ever changing and progressing into new and higher species, until the crude protoplasm things have advanced through countless changing forms into the supreme achievement of man!”
Woodin’s enthusiasm had carried him away as he talked, but now he stopped, laughing a little as he relit his pipe.
“Sorry that I lectured you like a college freshman, Ross. But that’s my chief subject of thought, my idée fixe, that wonderful upward climb of life through the ages.”
Ross was staring thoughtfully into the fire. “It does seem wonderful the way you tell it. One species changing into another, going higher all the time—”
Gray stood up by the fire and stretched. “Well, you two can wonder over it, but this crass materialist is going to emulate his remote invertebrate ancestors and return to a prostrate position. In other words, I’m going to bed.”
He looked at Ross, a doubtful grin on his young blond face, and said, “No hard feelings now?”
“Forget it.” The aviator grinned back. “The paddling was hard today, and you fellows looked mighty skeptical. But you’ll see! Tomorrow we’ll be at the fork of the Little Whale, and then I’ll bet we won’t scout an hour before we run across those jelly-creatures.”
“I hope so,” said Woodin, yawning. “Then we’ll see just how good your eyesight is a mile up, and whether you’ve yanked two respectable scie
ntists up here for nothing.”
Later as he lay in his blankets in the little tent, listening to Gray and Ross snore and looking sleepily out at the glowing fire embers, Woodin wondered again about that which had Ross actually seen in that fleeting glimpse from his speeding plane. Something queer, Woodin was sure of that, so sure that he’d come on this hard trip to find it. But what exactly?
Not protoplasmic things such as he described. That couldn’t be, of course. Or could it? If things like that had existed once, why couldn’t they—couldn’t they—?
Woodin didn’t know he’d been sleeping until he was awakened by Gray’s cry. It wasn’t a nice cry; it was the hoarse yell of someone suddenly assaulted by bone-freezing terror.
He opened his eyes at that cry to see the incredible looming against the stars in the open door of tent. A dark, amorphous mass humped there in the opening, glistening all over in the starlight, and gliding into the tent. Behind it were others like it.
Things happened very quickly then. They seemed to Woodin to happen not consecutively, but in succession of swift, clicking scenes like the successive pictures of a motion-picture film.
Gray’s pistol roared red flame at the first monster entering the tent, and the momentary flash showed the looming, glistening bulk of the thing, and Gray’s panic-frozen face, and Ross clawing in his blankets for his pistol.
Then that scene was over and instantly there was another one, Gray and Ross both stiffening suddenly as though petrified, both falling heavily over. Woodin knew they were both dead now, bu t he didn’t know how he knew it The glistening monsters were coming on into the tent.
He ripped up the rear wall of the tent and plunged out into the cold starlight of the clearing. He ran ten steps, he didn’t know in what direction, and then he stopped. He didn’t know why he stopped dead, he did.
He stood there, his brain desperately urging his limbs to fly, but his limbs would not obey. He couldn’t even turn, could not move a muscle of his body. He stood, his face toward the starlit gleam the river, stricken by a strange and utter paralysis.
Woodin heard rustling, gliding movements in the tent behind him. Now, from behind, there came into his line of vision several of the glistening things. They were gathering around him, a dozen of them it seemed, and he now could see them quite clearly.
They weren’t nightmares, no. They were real, poised here around him, humped, amorphous masses of viscous, translucent jelly. Each was about four feet tall and three in diameter, though their shapes kept constantly changing, making exact dimensions hard to guess.
At the center of each translucent mass was a dark, disk-like blob or nucleus. There was nothing else to the creatures, no limbs or sense-organs. He saw that they could protrude pseudopods, though, for two of them held the bodies of Gray and Ross in such tentacles and were now bringing them out and laying them down beside Woodin.
Woodin, still quite unable to move a muscle, could see the frozen, twisted faces of the two men and could see the pistols still gripped in their dead hands. And then, as he looked on Ross’s face, he remembered.
The things the aviator had seen from his plane, the jelly-creatures the three had come north to search for, they were the monsters around him! But how had they killed Ross and Gray, how were they holding him petrified like this, and what were they?
“We will permit you to move, but you must not try to escape.”
Woodin’s dazed brain numbed further with wonder. Who had said those words to him? He had heard nothing, yet he had thought he heard.
“We will let you move, but you must not attempt to escape or harm us.”
He did hear those words in his mind, even though his ears heard no sound. And now brain heard more.
“We are speaking to you by transference of thought impulses. Have you sufficient mentality to understand us?”
Minds? Minds in these things? Woodin was shaken by the thought as he stared at the glistening monsters.
His thought apparently had reached them. “Of course we have minds,” came the thought-answer into his brain. “We are going to let you move now, but do not try to flee.”
“I—I won’t try,” Woodin told himself mentally.
At once the paralysis that held him abruptly lifted. He stood there in the circle of the glistening monsters, his hands and body trembling violently.
There were ten of them, he saw now. Ten monstrous, humped masses of shining, translucent jelly gathered around him like cowled and faceless genii come from some dimension of the unknown. One stood closer to him than the others, apparently spokesman and leader.
Woodin looked slowly around their circle, then down at his two dead companions. In the midst of the unfamiliar terrors that froze his soul, he felt a sudden aching pity as he looked down at them.
Came another strong thought into Woodin’s mind from the creature closest him. “We did not wish to kill them; we came here simply to capture and communicate with the three of you. But when we sensed that they were trying to kill us, we slew quickly. You, who did not try to kill us but fled, we harmed not.”
“What—what do you want with us, with me?” Woodin asked. He whispered it through lips, as well as thinking it.
There was no mental answer this time. The things stood unmoving, a silent ring of brooding, unearthly figures. Woodin felt his mind snapping under the strain of silence as he asked the question again, almost screamed it.
This time the mental answer came. “I did not answer, because I was probing your mentality to ascertain whether you are of sufficient intelligence to comprehend our ideas. While your mind seems of an exceptionally low order, it seems possible that it can appreciate enough of what we wish to convey to understand us.
“Before beginning, however, I warn you again that it is quite impossible for you to escape or to harm any of us, and that attempts to do so will result disastrously for you. It is apparent you know nothing of mental energy, so I will inform you that your two fellow-creatures were killed by the sheer power of wills, and that your muscles were held unresponsive to your brain’s commands by the same power. With our mental energy we could completely annihilate your body, if we chose.”
There was a pause, and in that little space of silence, Woodin’s dazed brain clutched desperately for sanity, for steadiness.
Then came again that mental voice that seemed so like a real voice speaking in his brain.
“We are children of a galaxy whose name, as nearly as it can be approximated in your tongue, is Arctar. The galaxy of Arctar lies so many million light-years from this galaxy that it is far around the curve of the sphere of the three-dimensional cosmos.
“We came to dominance in that galaxy long ages ago. For we were creatures who could utilize our mental energy for transport, for physical power, for producing almost any effect we required. Because of this, we rapidly conquered and colonized that galaxy, traveling from sun to sun without need of any vehicle.
“Having brought all the matter of the galaxy Arctar under our control, we looked out upon the realms beyond. There are approximately a thousand million galaxies in the three-dimensional cosmos, and it seemed fitting to us that we should colonize them all so that all the matter in the cosmos should in time be brought under our control.
“Our first step was to proliferate—to multiply our number to that required for that great task of colonization of the cosmos. This was not difficult since, of course, reproduction with us matter of mere fission. When the requisite number of us were ready, they were divided into four forces.
“Then the whole sphere of the three-dimensional cosmos was quartered out among those four forces. Each was to colonize its division of the cosmos, and so in their tremendous hosts they set out from Arctar in four different directions.
“A part of one of these forces came to this galaxy of yours eons ago and spread out deliberately to colonize all its habitable worlds. All this took great lengths of time, of course, but our lives are of lengths vastly exceeding yours, and we comprehend t
hat racial achievement is everything and individual achievement is nothing. In the colonization of this galaxy, a force of several million Arctarians came to this particular sun and, finding but this one planet of its worlds habitable, settled here.
“Now it has been the rule that the colonists of all these worlds throughout the cosmos have kept communication with the original home of our race, the galaxy Arctar. In that way, our people, who now hold the whole cosmos, are able to concentrate at one point all their knowledge and power, and from that point go forth commands that shape great projects for the cosmos.
“But from this world no communications have been received since shortly after the force of colonizing Arctarians came here. When this was first noted, the matter was deferred, it being thought within a few more million years reports would surely be made from this world, too. But still no word came, until after more than a thousand million years of this silence the directing council at Arctar ordered an expedition sent to this world to ascertain the reason for such silence on the part of its colonists.
“We ten form that expedition, and we started from one of the worlds of the sun you call Sirius, a short distance from your own sun, where we too are colonists. We were ordered to come with full speed to your world and ascertain why its colonists had made no report. So, wafting ourselves by mental energy through the void, we crossed the span from sun to sun and a few days ago arrived on your world.
“Imagine our perplexity when we floated down here! Instead of a world peopled every square mile by Arctarians like ourselves, descended from the original colonists, a world completely under their mental control, we find a planet that is largely a wilderness of weird forms of life.
“We remained at this spot where we had landed and for some time sent our vision forth and scanned this whole globe mentally. And our perplexity increased, for never have we seen such grotesque and degraded forms of life as presented themselves to us. And not one Arctarian is to be found on this whole planet.
The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 62
