And yet their motives now seemed to hold little of the Satanic. Association with mankind over months had implanted in their incredibly alert minds enough of our language to enable them to converse with us. What is more, they now understood, as well as spoke. On Varang-Varang, as I have told, their first efforts at speaking with us had been harsh, painful almost, and their periods of uncomprehending silence long. Now they were able to speak to us intelligibly, and to understand clearly and at once what we had to say to them.
But there was little new that they could tell us. True, they were able to expand on the history of their race, but I have already outlined much of what they told us in that respect. As to the identity of “The Wise Ones” they could tell us nothing more than we already knew. They emphasized their previous statements that they had never seen the Wise Ones, but had known of their presence by other senses. And at this, I began to wonder how many senses these monsters possessed. That their make-up included much that was foreign to us is a gross under-statement. I thought then, and I think now, that the bat-men had senses other than humans possess, but that very fact made it impossible to describe those extra senses. How, after all, would one describe seeing to a blind man?
One problem caused by the bat-men’s new immunity to light was associated with our own people. We dared not, at first, risk letting the bat-men be seen by everybody. Although we had lived alongside the strange Nagani race for years now, the bat-men were a different proposition entirely. The Nagani had been wholly alien in appearance; the bat-men were too uncomfortably familiar in some respects.
At last, we broke the news by degrees, and finally, such is the elasticity of human powers of acceptance, we were able to “release” the bat-creatures.
Some of our people were as violently shocked as we had expected. But others, who may have suspected the truth, bore with little more than a shudder their first glimpse of the batmen.
With freedom to live above ground and out of doors, the aliens from Varang-Varang (we still do not know whether their race ever had a name of its own) began to lose their powers of dematerialisation. They had developed it, I suppose, as a means of passing through the complex underworld of their planet, where flight was impossible, and where many of the chambers below ground must have been mere-bubbles, with no communication to the outer world.
Flight: there is a matter I must touch upon. Now, for the first time, humanity saw sentient, intelligent, talking, thinking creatures able to fly by their own power.
The sight was fascinating, especially to our small boys, among whom the game of “Bat-men” became popular. The youngsters would rush around, leaping from low walls and hillocks, and fluttering “wings” made, as often as not, from umbrella covers.
But the bat-men in the air—there was a sight!
The great monsters, unwieldy and shambling when at rest or on the ground, became handsome, efficient, splendid creatures in the air. The increased gravitational pull was t<5 some extent balanced by the greater density of atmosphere, and although the bat-men were ugly and clumsy and heavy when earth-bound, they were a magnificent sight when they spread their enormous wings and flew in our denser atmosphere.
I think, too, that the fact of their now being free to live in daylight did much good to them. Gradually, they lost some of their negation of emotion—I hesitate to call it taciturnity— and seemed to wish to enter into our life as the Nagani had entered into it. By now, too, our own people had seen so much that was wonderful and incredible that they eventually ceased to look upon the bat-men as freaks, or objects of horror or pity.
But there was always something at the back of the adult mind that whispered to us that we should shun these strange creatures. It may have been their kinship with the reptilian species—for despite their approximate resemblance to man, there was much that was reptilian about them—it may have been their curious odour, or, more probably, it may have been the impossibility of disassociating them in our minds from the once-popular concept of devils.
Now that they could exist in the light, the bat-men established themselves in quarters near to our Crystal Palace workshop. They would swoop from the top gallery of the tower in vertical dives, suddenly pulling out into a horizontal glide, and then they would spiral up, up, into the blue. Their aerial skill was at first terrifying to us as we watched from the ground. We could not believe that the creatures would fail to crash. Their weight—Axel had persuaded one of them to step on to his scale and the needle had shot round to show eighteen stone —would have crushed them to a pulp in a fall from the heights they attained.
Axel was exceedingly proud when one day a bat-man glided gently down to rest at the front door of his laboratory, and knocked hesitatingly with his great clawed foot. He walked in when Axel opened the door, and extended his right wing.
“Pain, here,” he said diffidently.
Axel examined the leathery but thin membrane of the wing, palped the muscles and tested the reflexes. It was a sprain, he announced. A little embrocation, some heat treatment, no more flying for a week, and the wing would be as good as new. I was beside him as he prescribed, and noted the naive self-satisfaction that filled the talkative little Scandinavian. He tried hard to deal with the bat-man as he would have dealt with one of us, but was quite unable to prevent his delight showing, on being consulted voluntarily by the alien monster.
The bat-man suffered Axel to apply the embrocation, and sniffed at it with zest, although it was particularly evil-smelling stuff. And after the first treatment, he curled his great height up in the back of a truck to be driven back to Crystal Palace —with a quart bottle of embrocation as a prize.
For weeks after that the whole area of the tower reeked of Axel’s liniment, but the bat-men apparently admired the stench above everything else.
Another odd thing was the discontinuance of the use of their externalised sensory organs. With cessation of use, these seemed to atrophy, but on being used again from time to time, they resumed their former size.
We learned that the horny shells in which the Esoes existed were, in fact, made by hand, as we had suspected. They were ancient constructions, and must have been several thousand years old. There were inscriptions on them, carved by the makers, but who or what those makers were we never learned. Either the bat-men did not know, or they did not care to tell.
When a bat-man died, they told us, his Esoes atrophied until they were small enough to slip through the small perforations of the globes, and these shrivelled morsels of tissue were interred with the corpse. The polar regions of their planet had been the sites of their great cemeteries, but so few had been the number of deaths in normal times that a single crater at each pole had sufficed their needs.
After the atomic catastrophe that had overtaken their race, they said, they had been most shocked by the sight of the hundreds of Eso cases lying “indecently” about, without the accompanying ritual of interment in the polar craters.
One detail in the story of the bat-men baffled us. They had never, they insisted, mastered the mysteries of space flight. And yet, when we had first been warned by the Nagani that Varang-Varang had become visible, we had seen space craft on our magnifying televisor screens. We had seen them— minute, glittering specks of light—travelling between the planet and its two moons.
We readily accepted the separation of the two moons from Varang-Varang. A planet could hardly be swung violently out of its orbit without gravely disturbing the balance of its satellites. But we could not accept as illusion the shining specks we had seen on our screens. Something had been travelling between Varang-Varang and its moons. What?
At that enormous distance we had not been able to allocate shape or size to the moving specks, but nevertheless we had seen them. It was Krill Hvensor who offered the theory that the “space craft” we had seen might have been visible evidence of the Wise Ones’ presence.
With the thought in his mind that the bat-creatures were the last of a dying race, Axel worked hard to perpetuate what kno
wledge we had of them. He conducted long examinations of the specimen that had died, finally assembling the skeleton as a guide to any treatment he might be required to administer to the surviving creatures. And with those who lived—seven of them—he worked diligently, studying every action and reaction.
After a month he had assembled a massive monograph, with scores of three-dimensional photographs in full colour. “Some day,” he confided to me, “people are going to say: ‘Never was these bat-things. Was all a joke from Axel Bjornstorm.’ And so my book will show them. My book and these pictures—soch pictures, too!”
And he proudly led me to a seat at the back of his laboratory, where he left me while he turned off the light and the Skirr brothers operated the three-dimensional cine-projector.
There on the screen I saw moving pictures in colour— pictures that would have sent any pre-catastrophe cinema audience screaming into the street, pictures that would have converted any disbeliever to a frantic acknowledgement of the powers of Hell.
The bat-men appeared as gigantic monsters. With wings spread, they were shown hurtling from the tower top, skimming into a glide, shooting aloft again, and spiralling dizzily into the sky. Gleaming darkly red, with the sun now and again shining through the thin web of the wings, darting through the air, walking and moving heavily on the ground—the whole existence of these seven survivors was preserved for those who will come after us.
Axel’s copiously illustrated manuscript, with its attendant exhibits, has also been carefully preserved, of course, and will be handed down to future generations long after the bat-men are otherwise forgotten.
I have not the space, that being the state of things, to dwell over-long on Axel’s research into the bat-men’s race. Briefly, he learned that they were oviparous, but had developed along lines parallel to the mammalia in many other respects. Their bone structure was peculiar, in that instead of having rounded, hollow bones, such as the human race has, it was based on a more flexible system, each bone having a Y-shaped cross-section for greater lightness and strength.
The wings were the strongest part of the frame, with powerful Y-bones linking intricately at each joint, and covered with a thin but immensely tough membrane—quite different from the skin.
It was this fine membrane that sent my mind back to the thin web with which the Esoes covered our cavern entrances on Varang-Varang. The resemblance between the two substances was so strong that I called Leo and Karim and Karinga Varga to examine it with me.
We finally agreed that the web barriers erected by the hermit crab Esoes on Varang-Varang had been akin to the other phenomena in that underground world—in other words, a projection of the mind by the bat-men, who had used for this abstract wall material with which they were familiar: their own wing fabric.
When we invited the bat-men to repeat this feat, they produced nothing better than a mere shimmering veil. It might have been a cloud of smoke for all its holding power.
But, declared Karinga Varga, that was only because we now knew that the barrier was insubstantial. When we had been in ignorance of its nature, we had believed what the bat-men had wanted us to believe. It had then held all the properties of a solid impermeable wall or an unyielding web.
Well, there it is. The alien range of thought and action combined was something incomprehensible to human intellect. We produced the best solution we could to the problem of the barriers on Varang-Varang, but ... I cannot guarantee that it is the correct, or the only solution. Perhaps some day, a wiser mind than mine will understand, and will pass on that understanding.
XIX
So the weeks went by, and still there came no further word from the voices that had spoken to us in the tower. Every minute of every day an operator stood by the receiver and transmitter there, with two others as reliefs.
Harry Crow Eyes assembled another receiver beside the one on' which we had heard the strange voices, carefully and accurately matching each stage with that of the first set. On this duplicate he minutely scoured every wave-length open to it, while still retaining the setting of the main receiver at the reading it had shown when the voices first came in.
And with one of his companions to make contact with the strange electrodes we had erected, he tried again and again to bring the voices back to us. He appealed, called, vociferated and berated the unseen entity, but still no reply came.
Whoever—or whatever—had spoken to us would not return at our bidding.
We had, as well as we were able, prepared all our adults for the return of the voices. There were many, though, who doubted whether we should ever hear the voices again, or even whether we ever had heard them. But Leo insisted urgently that the voices would return. And so we kept a twenty-four hour watch by our equipment.
It was well that we did so, for the voices at last returned.
Three months had passed since our first hearing of them. We received the signal—three flares fired from the tower, and a personal radio call to those who were to attend—late one December afternoon.
Through the keen chill of a winter’s day—for in these times the cold of December seems to strike more sharply than it did before the great catastrophe—seven of us drove up the weed-grown hill that had once been Anerley Road, and turned anxiously into the drive that led to the tower.
Four brightly lit windows marked the suite where we had established our laboratory. The yellow light shone out boldly against the dull grey of the December sky, and we stood and looked up at them for a moment before we went in. Their familiar gleam was somehow greatly comforting to us outside in the thickening winter evening, and we needed every bit of comfort and every familiar thing we could seize upon that evening. It was not the cold that made me shiver, but the thought of the vast unknown we were about to face.
And yet when we entered the laboratory we found Harry and his crew going cheerfully about their work. They seemed to have no fear of the unknown.
“The voices?” asked Arabin, raising a questioning eyebrow.
“Yes. The voices,” replied the Indian. “And boy! you should hear ’em laugh!”
He turned up the volume a little, so that instead of the faint whispering that had trickled through the speaker we now heard clearly the sound of two voices in conversation. They spoke in a language that was completely unfamiliar, and from time to time one of them would chuckle deeply. There was something infinitely reassuring in this very human sound, and we were cheered at once.
“Been waiting for you,” said Harry, as he busied himself with his controls. “Soon as you came, we told ’em, we’d flash ’em. O.K. Eddie. Start talking.”
Eddie Springer, the coloured boy, grasped the electrodes on our primitive reactor, and spoke in his slow, mellow voice.
“All here now,” he called. “If yo’ ready out there, we’re ready here.”
The voices in the loudspeaker ceased at once, and there was silence for a few seconds.
Then—“One of you will speak for all?” questioned the voice. Eddie looked round inquiringly.
This time, it was I who was thrust forward.
I had not expected this, and my throat and lips felt constricted and dry. What was I about to face? What unthinkable void was my voice to span? What unimaginable entity was to speak to me?
As the thoughts flashed through my mind, I found myself standing before the crude contraption we had assembled on the test bench. Mechanically, almost, my hands rose to grasp the two complementary minerals, although it did not seem to be I who was raising them.
As they approached the two electrodes, I saw the pale blue light leap to meet them, and then, as I seized the two contacts, the rare mineral from Earth and the curious rock from Varang-Varang, I seemed to be looking into a depth of blueness.
There is no other description for it. I might have been gazing into a deep blue sky from some point in space. My surroundings vanished and all I saw was the utter blue of infinity.
I heard no sound for several seconds. My companions seemed to
have vanished, and every tiny sound that marks the presence of people—every breath, every movement, every scrape of the foot, of a piece of furniture—had faded. There was nothing—nothing except for that vast blueness.
Then, quietly, came the voice.
In words that I did not know, but yet comprehended, it commanded me to abandon my fears. In an unearthly tongue, and yet a tongue that seemed to me then to be the very basic tongue of the Universe, it ordered me to clear my mind of everything. And by some process—hypnotic? narcotic? anaesthetic?—my mind cleared at once of all thought, even of the knowledge of that fact.
And, still quietly, the voice spoke on. It told me that it would speak with each in turn later. That we were to be still
and to hear. That, although we might not be entirely ready to hear what it would tell us, yet we must open our minds to it.
Then it called for another one to replace me at the apparatus, and I reluctantly dropped my hands from the contacts. I must have stood dazed, as had Leo before, for the next thing I knew, I was being led to a seat Someone else—I did not observe who it was—now held the electrodes, and the loudspeaker now emitted a steady, consistent hum, pervading every inch of the building. Of the words there were none—only the continuous musical humming note, steady at one pitch for about ten seconds at a time. Then it ceased, and the man who had taken my place was walking away slowly.
I frowned in puzzlement, for I could not understand why my successor at the contacts had not heard a voice, as I had heard a voice. Then I looked around me at the others. The mystification I saw in their faces told me that something of the same thought occupied their minds, too.
Karim rose and walked to the bench. Again the blue light as he touched the equipment. Again the humming note, this time slightly lower in pitch. Again the slow return to his seat.
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