#58 - Attack from the Unseen

by Clark Darlton

  The mutant grinned at Pucky’s misusage.

  "I only wanted to help my 3 missing crewmen," said Marcel defiantly. "Even Rhodan can’t deny me that. Now the K-7 has disappeared! You should be helping me to search for it instead of criticizing."

  "In the last couple of hours we’ve covered the whole surface of Mirsal 3 but, we didn’t find any trace of a guppy."

  "Do you think the Unseen stole it?"

  "There could be some connection maybe," Pucky nodded. He waddled confidently toward the ‘exit that led into a wide hallway. "Let’s all take a look at the castle together. I keep hoping we’ll find some Mirsalese who was overlooked—and I have a feeling there’s one around here somewhere."

  "Here—in the castle?" Rous sounded dubious. "But we’ve been everywhere."

  "Is that so?" said Pucky. He began to organize certain incoming thought impulses which were now becoming stronger. It was as though someone were awakening from a deep sleep and starting gradually to think again. "Did you also check the cellar vaults and dungeons?"

  Rous slowly shook his head and followed Pucky, who was already out in the hallway. Wide stone steps led downward into the depths. Tama and Dubruque made up the rearguard.

  The deeper they went the darker it became. Fortunately, Marcel Rous was equipped with a powerful flashlight, which he turned on. They must have descended by now under the surface of Mirsal 3 but the staircase led still deeper. It seemed as if the steps were leading straight into the centre of the planet or at least they went deep into the interior of the mountain on which the castle had been built.

  Finally the staircase ended. The passageway continued straight ahead. The air was clammy and damp, as though it was not easily renewed in these depths. Somewhere farther on there was a noise.

  Unconcernedly, Pucky kept on going. "Relax. It’s a prisoner. The Unseen must have overlooked him."

  Then they were standing before a stone door.

  "I’ll teleport into the room beyond," offered Pucky but Tama touched his arm with restraint.

  "Why, Pucky? Shouldn’t we all go together? Let me open the door."

  The mouse-beaver understood the real motive behind the offer. Why shouldn’t Tama have a chance to also show what he could do for once?

  At first the Japanese tried in vain to use his telekinetic power to break the ponderous metal lock that barred the way but finally be resorted to a more pragmatic method. He drew his thermo-beamer and stepped closer to the door. With the energy finely concentrated, he melted the lock. The heat generated by the operation seemed pleasant down here in the chill damp of the subterranean corridor.

  The heavy bar and lock mechanism before him began to glow and melt. Then it all crashed to the ground in a clanging of bars and chains. With a sigh of relief the mutant stepped back out of the way.

  Pucky’s own powers were sufficient to push the door inward. It turned ponderously in its hinges but finally yielded.

  The 3 men looked excitedly over Pucky’s shoulder into the dungeon.

  It was empty. Alongside the vacant beds of straw, chain shackles fastened to rings in the wall were lying loosely on the stone floor. This and the mute testimony of various wooden bowls lying about here and there suggested that prisoners had once eked out a bare existence here under inhumane conditions.

  "Over there," whispered Pucky and he led the way farther.

  And now the others became aware of what he saw.

  The dungeon was not entirely empty. One prisoner had been left behind. He lay on the partially rotted straw and stared at them with widened eyes filled with terror. His torn and shredded clothing hinted of the dramatic circumstances under which he had been captured. Which was emphasized quite clearly by the bloodied bandage around his right arm.

  Pucky probed into the thoughts of the prisoner. "He knows nothing about what happened," he said. "He’s been here for weeks already and has been waiting to be sentenced. Down here the Unseen must not have been very thorough. This one would have died of hunger if we hadn’t found him."

  With Tama’s help the iron shackles were quickly sprung open. The Mirsalese prisoner, who was about 6 feet tall, was listless and permitted them to do with him what they wished. He probably even thought that his final hour had come and that any resistance was useless. Once he stammered a few words, which Pucky could understand but didn’t answer, although he was also a weak and somewhat undeveloped hypnotist. But it would not have been difficult for him to establish communication with the man.

  Marcel Rous didn’t speak until they were all standing outside in the castle’s courtyard, relieved to be in the warm sun where the last vestiges of the chill and shivers were finally driven out of their limbs.

  "What do we do now? The flier is too small to accommodate all of us. Should we separate?"

  "What for? asked Pucky, surprised. "There’s a transmitter on board that thing, isn’t there? Well then! We make contact with Rhodan and ask to be picked up. Until then we can wait here in the castle."

  The lieutenant was obviously in a dejected mood. "What’s the chief going to say if I return without the K-7?"

  Pucky’s face remained expressionless. "We’ll find out soon enough, lieutenant. If I were in your shoes I wouldn’t be too happy about the reunion. In the meantime, think up a good excuse. I’ll worry about making a radio contact with the Drusus!"

  Tama took charge of the released prisoner while Pucky clambered into the small flier with Dubruque in order to call the Drums.

  * * * *

  Rhodan’s hand was just reaching toward the intercom switch when it suddenly paused in midair. He saw something that needed no further explanation. Simultaneously, so did Talamon aboard the Arc-Koor

  The bow of the small rocketship, which had been hovering without apparent motion between the 2 mighty space battleships, began to evaporate. At first it seemed as though a shimmery haze was enveloping the blunt, silvery snout, but then it began to slowly disappear, as though it were hesitantly and reluctantly slipping into some other medium. Inch by inch the uncanny transformation continued—steadily and inexorably.

  A new attack by the Unseen.

  Rhodan jumped up and ran into the Com Central. "Talamon!" he shouted and waited until the broad face of the Mounder appeared on the viewscreen. "Did you see it?"

  "As clearly as you did, Rhodan. What should we do?"

  Rhodan brushed the dark blond hair from his forehead with an unsteady hand. "If I only knew!" There was a pause while another few inches of the rocket became invisible. David Stern, who was at the regular radio console, suddenly began to wave his arms excitedly. Perry pulled the earphones from his head. "Hold it, Talamon—yes, Stern? What is it?"

  "They’re transmitting!" shouted the chief communications officer. "The people in the rocket are sending a message! I don’t understand the signals but there’s no doubt they’re coming from the rocket!"

  "You heard him, Talamon," said Rhodan, turning again to the viewscreen. "So what now? How can we defend them against an attack of the Unseen when we don’t know ourselves how to attack them?"

  "Protective fire!" replied Talamon swiftly. He was grim. "We’ll lay a ring of energy beams around the rocket. If that doesn’t drive off the Unseen, then the devil’s got his hand in it!"

  "I’m with you," said Rhodan with equal swiftness. "Keep in touch!"

  Without waiting for an answer, Rhodan hurried again into the Command Central and issued the necessary orders. Since the start of the attack of the Unseen, hardly 30 seconds had passed. Almost 3 feet of the rocket’s bow had disappeared in the meantime. Rhodan wondered briefly why the process was so slow but noticed simultaneously and to his alarm that the rate of disappearance was increasing now. Before his orders could reach the battle stations, the small rocket had become another 6 feet shorter.

  Then the battle began…

  The Arc-Koor and the Drums were less than a mile apart. Between them floated the small rocket, still under attack by the Unseen. This meant that the weird
opponent must now be located between the 2 great battleships. In order not to damage each other, Talamon and Rhodan raised their respective ships slightly so as to have the target below them.

  The batteries opened with their defensive fire.

  A ring of fire surrounded the rocket. It seemed to stand there motionless, enhaloed by the effects of the most advanced technology, combining the very powers of Good and Evil. The impulse beams passed unhindered through the space between firing point and target. There was nothing in between. The attackers were not only invisible but also immaterial. There was absolutely nothing there—yet they were present!

  Through narrowed eyes, Rhodan stared at the incomprehensible phenomenon. About 10 feet of the rocket’s bow could no longer be seen.

  He then activated the antigrav beams and generated a corresponding held, which had to work its effect on any kind of matter.

  John Marshall had been standing close by and had observed the spectacle in silence until now. "I’m picking up thought impulses again," he said. "They come and go like ocean waves. Sometimes they are strong but they’re completely incomprehensible. You’d almost think they’re coming through a distortion interference scrambler—but of course that’s impossible."

  "Nothing is impossible!" muttered Rhodan as he saw another 3 feet of the rocket dissolve into nothingness. "We are powerless! There’s nothing we can do to help them!"

  He got up and went in to David Stem. Talamon was not on the viewscreen. In his place sat an Arkonide who was stationed before the Arc-Koor’s communications console.

  "Call Talamon!" said Rhodan.

  The Arkonide nodded and disappeared. 5 seconds later the face of the Mounder appeared on the screen.

  "Rhodan?"

  "It’s useless! We have no weapons against the Unseen. We can’t help that rocketship!"

  "This beats me! What kind of a menace are we up against? What kind of beings don’t even counter-fire? There’s nothing we have that will bring them into line!"

  Rhodan shrugged. "The Regent of Arkon said he’s been trying to do that for 10 years now. How can we accomplish it in one day?"

  Talamon ran a hand through his beard. In his eyes was a gleam of actual fear—but he strove to conceal this weakness. "Rhodan, you have your mutants!"

  The statement came almost as a reproach but at the same time it expressed the helplessness of the Mounder and the Arkonides. Indirectly it also betrayed the helplessness of the gigantic robot Brain on Arkon.

  "What good are mutants if they can neither see nor feel nor detect the enemy? How can a teleporter aim himself at a destination when no destination exists? They jump into emptiness, that’s all. The Unseen don’t even send out normal thought impulses so that they can be traced. How can a telekineticist grasp something that isn’t there? No, Talamon, we’re beaten!"

  "Rhodan!" Talamon’s voice was full of bitterness and despair. "Are we going to give up? The existence of the Milky Way depends upon us!"

  Casting a side-glance at the viewscreens in the Command Central, Rhodan was able to see that the flaming inferno of energy had closed completely around the defended area. There was nothing that could reach the small rocket without destruction. Anything approaching it would have to be dissolved into nothing, consumed by the unimaginably concentrated power of the destructive impulse beams. And there was the rocket now only 60 feet long.

  "No, we won’t give up, Talamon!" But we’ve lost the battle for this little ship. The courageous space travellers of Mirsal’s 2nd planet have had to pay with their lives for their attempt to reach their neighbouring world. And we have to just sit around without offering any help. Maybe they’ll even think that we are their cruel attackers."

  "If they noticed the attack at all," Talamon added.

  "Would they have called for help otherwise?"

  "Is that what they actually did?" asked the Mounder doubtfully. "Nobody’s found out yet how to decipher their message. Anyway, the signals have stopped."

  Rhodan nodded slowly. "Let’s cut off the protective fire. We’re wasting energy needlessly."

  Rhodan noticed that the Unseen had now started their attack on the stem of the vessel as well. Only a few seconds more and they would swallow their prey without a trace. On the tracking screens of the Drusus, the blip that represented the rocket grew smaller.

  Then it disappeared entirely.

  The little rocketship, 120 feet long, bearing a great cargo of hope for the future, had ceased to exist.

  "There are many ways of looking at what happened, Talamon. We don’t know what’s actually become of the rocket’s passengers. Are they really dead? Are they only invisible to our eyes and our detection equipment? There’s another important question I’d like to ask: is this the only rocket that took off from Mirsal 2?"

  "So do you think I should stick around?"

  Yes, Talamon We’re going to pay a visit to Mirsal 2 and…"

  He was interrupted. Sikermann’s excited voice came from the Command Central.

  "We’re getting blips from the direction of Mirsal 2. It must be a whole fleet!"

  Rhodan shot a swift glance at Talamon. "Wait!" he said and with 3 jumps he was with Sikermann. "What is it? Where?"

  Then he saw for himself.

  The tracking screens revealed at least 50 slowly moving points. They were large enough by now to also be visible on the viewscreens. A few control buttons made the transfer possible. Seconds later, in the place of indefinable tracking blips, recognizable rockets drifted across the convex surface of the screens. At first glance Rhodan realized that these were the same types of rockets as the one that had just dematerialised before their eyes.

  "It looks as though they were escaping from something," he muttered. Maybe the Unseen are attacking Mirsal 2. Sikermann! Get ready for a short transition to Mirsal 3. We have to pick up Pucky and Tama. Maybe we’ll locate the K-7 at the same time. And then we’ll return to this location. Hurry it up! Transition in 5 minutes!"

  Without waiting for the confirmation of his First Officer, he went back to the Corn Central. "You wait, Talamon!" he said, repeating his previous request. It sounded like a command. "I’m picking up my people on Mirsal 3 and I’ll come back here. We will make a joint report to the Regent."

  "Good, Rhodan. I’ll wait."

  Rhodan breathed a sigh of relief. For the first time his features relaxed slightly when he said: "Don’t worry, Talamon, we’ll do it yet! We won’t need any 10 years until we expose this invisible enemy. They must have a weak spot somewhere and we’ll have to smoke it out. But first we have to know who they are and where they come from. I consider that to be the most urgent problem: where do they come from? From what part of the Milky Way? When we find that out…"

  "And if they come from another galaxy?"

  "You aren’t serious, are you…?"

  "Is there anything that might be impossible now?" asked the Mounder, posing a counter-question.

  Rhodan refrained from answering. He knew only too well that nothing was impossible any more. Not after today!

  He dismissed himself with a short nod and returned to Sikermann. "Are you ready?"

  "30 seconds to go," confirmed the First Officer. He gave instructions to the crew over the intercom. "Going into transition—2 light-hours—25 seconds to go!"

  Rhodan sat down and signalled to Marshall. "Contact Pucky right away. We have no time to lose."

  "10 seconds," droned Sikermann unperturbed…

  7/ MENACE TO MIRSAL 2

  With an increasing sense of uneasiness, Talamon stared at the empty space where the mighty Drusus had been located. 2 minutes had passed since the transition. How much time would Rhodan need in order to pick up his people on Mirsal 3?

  Talamon was anything but the apprehensive, fretful type. For thousands of years his clan had functioned more or less as the armed escort and general security cover for the commercial fleets of the Springers and had overcome many a difficult situation. In the past few decades it had become more pe
aceful in the Empire, even though the perennial war against the pirates had not come to an end.

  No, until now Talamon had never known fear. But now—actually since yesterday—he knew the meaning of fear. The encounter with this invisible menace had shaken him to his core and left him weak.

  The shrill sound of the alarm tore him out of his fearful torment.

  "Sector 18-b-9! Emergency!" A voice bellowed at him from the intercom. "The Chief Engineer is disappearing!"

  An icy hand clutched at Talamon’s heart. His face became colourless. With a lightning move, his hand struck a switch on the intercom. "Who is this?"

  "Lt. Rab-Ort, Tech Detail! He’s only half there!"

  "Who?"

  "Chief Engineer Morlag! His legs have become invisible!"

  Talamon hit several switches in front of him and roared into the microphone. "Short transition! In 5 seconds…"

  The Arc-Koor dematerialised. Talamon left all further navigation to his officers. He had jumped up and dashed out into the corridor where he hurled himself into an antigrav lift. 30 seconds after the transition he arrived in Section 18-b-9, where he became rooted to the spot in the open doorway.

  He couldn’t believe his eyes.

  Lt. Rab-Ort leaned against a control console, pale as death and trembling in every limb. Eyes filled with terror, the comparatively young Arkonide stared down at the outstretched body that lay on the deck, stiff and weirdly deformed.

  He was dead.

  Talamon knew that a distance of 2 light-hours lay between him and the location of the attack. The Unseen would not be able to track down the new position of the Arc-Koor very quickly—or at least he hoped so. Therefore, he had time.

  The man there on the deck was Chief Engineer Morlag. His mouth wag wide open as well as his eyes. They still showed evidence of the monstrous fright and terror of his last second of life—and the awful pain that must have gripped him.