Menace of the Saucers

by Eando Binder

  “Right,” nodded Thane, opening the door. “I’ll start outlining the book immediately, and gathering research data.”

  Hardly had the MIB’s driven away than Thane felt it safe to let down his mental shield and contact Thalkon.

  “The jackpot, Thalkon,” crowed Thane.

  “Yes, just about, Thane,” came Thalkon’s beamed psycho-waves. “We surmised from various factors that they had no more than a dozen bases on earth, some of which we destroyed before you came into the picture. Now we’ll get most or all.”

  “How about the interplanetary bases? Would the three named cover them all?”

  “Not likely,” returned Thalkon. “We suspect Morlian bases on Jupiter or its moons, also at Saturn, and perhaps even among the asteroids. But it almost hopeless to search for them on huge worlds or in vast volumes of space.”

  His telepathic voice became worried. “And I doubt any of the bases revealed would be their main base. I’m sure they’ve been drilled over and over never to think of where that is, under any circumstances, for fear of the thought being picked up by us.

  “But let us be thankful for lesser favors. Thane, you have been of immeasurable help in our long struggle against the Morlians. We didn’t have the slightest chance of stealing thoughts from them, as you did. Only an ‘innocent’ earthman, with seemingly no mind-reading powers, could have made them let their guard down and hand us tips.”

  “But when their next seven bases go up in smoke so suddenly,” pondered Thane, “won’t they suspect that the leak is through me?”

  “They might,” agreed Thalkon. “Then again they might not. After all, they are unaware that you have been de-brainwashed and that you wear a psycho-unit next to your brain, so why should they even suspect you picked up the information that betrayed seven of their bases? They will attribute it to some new penetrating spy-beam we developed and will hastily outfit their remaining bases with countermeasures.”

  Thalkon went on slowly. “Still, I cannot order you to remain on the job, seeking the greatest tip-off of all—the location of their main base. If you wish, Thane, we’ll pick you up now and whisk you safely into space…”

  “It’s not often that a man gets a chance to be a hero and save the world,” murmured Thane, half-humorously. “Why should I toss it aside? I’ll carry on the psycho-battle of wits with the Morlians and see if I can make it a bases-loaded…there’s some kind of a pun there…home run.”

  “Thanks, Thane Smith,” said Thalkon simply, but eloquently. “You will see the six bases wiped out at zerotime. We will coordinate a simultaneous attack on them all as soon as possible, perhaps tomorrow.”

  * * * *

  The next day, seven fleets of Vigilante ships pounded home at the same time—four on earth, three in space.

  In the snow-capped Himalayas, a base that perched high on an icy crag went up in sheets of flame that rose ten miles into the sky. Deep within Mammoth Cave, where humans had never stumbled on the lower caverns, the Vigilante ships vibrated into wraiths and oozed down through solid rock to create underground chaos where a Morlian camp had existed before.

  In the Gobi Desert, with all preliminary searching for the exact location already done, another contingent of Vigilante warcraft blasted a crater a mile deep, and ten thousand more Morlians were whisked to the Nth dimension as prisoners.

  The Amazon Jungle proved a bit tricky, in that a wandering tribe of Indians had unwittingly camped close to the Morlian base, too close for Vigilante radiation-guns to blast loose. Instead, risking detection during the process, the Vigilante squadron used the high-vibrationary technique of gliding through the solid ground and joining up directly under the fort. The blasting forces then let loose annihilated matter and formed a giant pit down which the structures tumbled like broken toys. The Indians were only aware of a deep rumble and mild earthquake tremors.

  Out in space even more spectacular attacks were taking place at the same time. Thane’s psycho-eye was barely able to take it all in.

  At the moon, Diogenes Crater flashed out into brilliant light that no doubt startled a dozen astronomers. They would never guess that 250,000 miles away, space warships had converted a million tons of equipment into atomic ashes.

  The face of Mars where its Morlian base was located was turned away from earth, so no telescopes spied the mushrooming cloud of radiance that signaled the abrupt disintegration of an alien camp.

  The Vigilante blast squadron did its job at the North Pole with a fantastic pyrotechnic display….

  “It is done,” sighed Thalkon’s psycho-voice, half in triumph, half in relief. “Seven more Morlian bases crossed off our charts.”

  “One more big one to go,” said Thane grimly. “When my three MIB pals drop in next, to see how the book is going, I’ll try picking their brains for where their main base is.”

  * * * *

  Three days later, when they did drop in, Thane felt the air of gloom around them. He hardly had to pick up their leak-thought: Seven bases destroyed! How did it happen?

  Thane rubbed his hands briskly, nodding at typewritten pages on his desk. “The book’s going great, gentlemen. I’m giving Keyhoe a real roasting for mentioning interplanetary bases such as the Diogenes camp on the moon….”

  Thane knew he had made a ghastly mistake.

  “Diogenes camp?” shouted one MIB, leaping to his feet “How did you know which crater on the moon to name, out of the thousands that exist there?”

  “How did you, Thane Smith?” demanded the second MIB, “unless you somehow read our minds last time, and transmitted the information to the Vigilantes?”

  “He must die,” said the third MIB, in a gruesomely mild voice, almost as if offering Thane a gift.

  Desperately, Thane send a psycho-probe into their minds. But they had their psycho-shields up firmly. Thane could not hope to read their minds and outwit them in the fatal moments to come.

  One MIB had hauled a tubular device from his pocket, was starting to aim it Thane, with muscles all tensed and ready, burst into action. He darted his hands down, seized this typewriter, and flung it in one smooth flowing motion. It caught the gun-holding MIB squarely in the chest, making him stagger back with a startled grunt and crash into the wall.

  The other two MIB’s were pulling their alien guns as Thane kept on the move, diving headlong for his loaded shot-gun in the corner. He swung up the muzzle and pulled both triggers. He aimed between the two Morlians because he could not hope to hit one and then the other.

  The powerful blast of buckshot whining between the two MIB’s utterly startled them. One of them dropped his gun. The other held onto his gun and swung it toward Thane again—only Thane was already there close to him, swinging the shot-gun by the barrel. A solid thwack on the MIB’s head and he sank without a groan.

  The third MIB rushed at Thane with his bare hands. Thane combined a left hook with a Judo spill and a Karate slash at the neck to reduce the third MIB into a quivering mass of moaning flesh sprawled on the floor.

  “When you’re able to crawl, gents,” hissed Thane, “Get your miserable carcasses out of here. Yes, I fingered your bases, and sooner or later you’re all going to remove yourselves from my planet, after the Vigilantes launch the final victory battle.”

  Slowly, the three MIB’s got to their feet and lurched out the door. Hoping to catch them off-guard, in their groggy state, Thane snapped: “Where is your main base?”

  But the only leak-thought that came back was—Our main base is located nowhere, somewhere, or anywhere.

  When Thane tuned in Thalkon, a moment later, the Vigilante said: “Obviously a nonsense rhyme that has been drilled into every Morlian’s mind, to make sure he can never reveal the truth. But now that you’ve been exposed as our spy-agent, Thane, our last hope is gone of ferreting out that secret. Hereafter, yo
u will be a marked man to all Morlians.”

  Chapter 17

  Thane looked back at earth as the silvery scout saucer catapulted into space toward the giant Vigilante mother-ship.

  “Take a good look at your home world,” said Thalkon softly. “We can never take you back—not until and unless the Morlians are completely defeated and all their MIB agents leave. It would be death for you to step back on earth now.”

  Thane’s eyes were a bit haunted, glued on the receding blue-green globe which had given him birth. Two weeks ago he had been Thane Smith, disbeliever in UFO’s. Now he was Thane Smith, believer—and exile. An incredible upheaval in his life. Where would it all end? If the Vigilantes failed to uproot the Morlian’s main fortress, in the next 30 or 40 years, Thane’s whole life would have to be spent in space.

  “You are, in effect, a Vigilante,” said Thalkon. “An earth-recruit, we might say.”

  “Though hardly a voluntary one,” said Thane dryly. “Fate sort of dragged me in by the heels.” He waved a resigned hand. “But I might as well take on Vigilante duties. I have to do something.”

  “It has already been so arranged,” said Thalkon briskly. “You and another Vigilante are to take a special ‘spy-craft’ and tour through the solar system in the attempt to find their main base.”

  “Good,” agreed Thane, his spirits lifting slightly at the thought of a thrilling ride among the planets. “Who is the other man?”

  “It is not a man.”

  Thane grunted. “All right, I’ll wait and see which weirdo monster-man, from among your multi-world recruits, I team up with. I hope it isn’t some critter I’ve seen in nightmares.”

  After docking within the mother-ship, Thalkon led Thane to a small flying saucer that bristled all over with sensors on booms.

  “Looks like a pincushion,” commented Thane.

  “Those long-range ultra-electronic sensors can detect the slightest nonrandom vibration in the gravo-electro-psycho spectrum pervading the universe.”

  “Nonrandom means artificial?” guessed Thane.

  “Right,” nodded Thalkon. “In short, Morlian equipment. You and your partner will cruise out to Jupiter and beyond, probing for any G-E-P leak that might come from their hidden main base.”

  “You’re sure it’s out there somewhere?”

  “We’re not sure,” denied Thalkon honestly. “We’re just trying every desperate measure we can think of. We now know the Morlians succeeded in establishing certain spire-antennas on earth that….”

  Thalkon broke off and Thane said, “It is not permitted to tell, eh?”

  “No, but I can tell you this much,” said Thalkon apologetically. “You remember when you interviewed the earth-woman, Theda Ranslick, she told you of the small humanoids—our allies—who used a ‘sparkling’ device. It was to detect any Morlian installation within miles, which they have been secretly planting all around earth for 75 years. It is part of their unspeakable plot against earth.”

  “But if you detected such installations, why not simply blast them out of existence?” Thane wanted to know.

  Thalkon waved his hands helplessly. “How to tell you of the ingenious technology available to the Morlians, as well as us? They first erected each spire-antenna, then made a…a tape of it.”

  “Like a voice on a tape?”

  “Yes, only it is not a voice but a structure that is taped by them. And it is taped rigidly in the air where the spire stood, after it had been blasted apart.”

  Thane’s head swam a little. “You mean the spire-antenna still exists but invisibly?”

  “And permanently,” Thalkon almost groaned. “Just as a taped voice is permanent unless it is wiped out, those ‘taped’ spires also are eternal. And no device for ‘wiping them out’ is known to our science technology.”

  He calmed himself. “So there they stand all around earth, invisible and unknown to your people. When they are ready, the Morlians can beam radiations from anywhere in space, down to the antennas. Then earth will be completely blanketed by a radiative vortex that will accomplish the most…most fiendish feat ever known in galactic history.”

  “You think,” said Thane half-bitterly, “that if you tell me what that fiendish feat is, I’ll lose my mind. Yet if you don’t tell me, I’ll probably lose my mind sooner. The unknown is always worse than the known.”

  “Not in this case,” said Thalkon firmly. “But now you see why it is imperative for us to locate the main Morlian base—and soon. From that base will come the key ray that triggers off all the taped spire-antennas on earth, dooming the human race.”

  “Yet you’re only sending one ship and two Vigilantes to probe the solar system?”

  Thalkon stared at him. “Your ship is Number 4,678. Altogether we’re sending out 5,000, one every minute.”

  “Wow!” breathed Thane, stunned.

  Thalkon turned. “Here comes your partner.”

  Thane braced himself. Would it be a Vigilante horror with ten boneless tentacles?…or fourteen stalk eyes?…or one wearing his skeleton on the outside?

  Thane gasped as the figure rounded the ship. “Miribel? You?”

  * * * *

  The ‘pincushion,’ as Thane dubbed it, spun away from the mother-ship, swinging into a trajectory whose end point was Jupiter.

  “Good,” said Miribel. You followed the computerized signals perfectly, Thane. Now you simply increase speed 100 times, to shorten the long journey to Jupiter. The velocity dial is clearly marked off in multiples of speed.”

  “How do you eliminate inertia, gravity-drag, and all the ordinary laws of physics?”

  “Do you have about a year to listen while I explain?” she asked half-tauntingly.

  “She said to the primitive ape-man,” growled back Thane.

  “No, Thane,” she returned seriously. “We do not look down upon you, the individual earthman. It is your society and its state of unenlightenment we deplore. But the human mind itself has the potential to absorb all our science-technology—in a lifetime of study.”

  “No, thanks,” grunted Thane. “I’ll stay dumb. But I can figure out elementary things like the trip to Jupiter. Let’s see, 500 miles a second to cover about 500 million miles—a million seconds or…ummm”—Thane had always been a rapid calculator—“about ten days.”

  “We could get there faster,” said the girl, “in one day if we wished. But it will take ten days to brief you on using all the sensors aboard. Come, we’ll start.”

  She pointed at a green-glowing phosphor screen that showed squiggly, irregular patterns of brilliant red at times. “Meteoroid sensor, tabulating every grain of matter that passes within a thousand miles to either side. If a nonrandom object—like a Morlian ship—comes within range, the pattern changes to a symmetrical criss-cross and also changes to the color yellow.”

  On and on it went, each sensor more ingenious and mind-numbing than the last.

  Some hours later, after a meal of foods that tasted strange but delicious to Thane, he yawned. “Time for bed I guess…” he began, then suddenly sat up. “Say, we aren’t…well, we aren’t chaperoned.”

  Miribel did not avoid his gaze but stared straight back. “No, we aren’t. What is the need of it?”

  Her kiss was warm, passionate, promising. She drew back a little. “I know something of your immature love codes on earth. They have long been abandoned by Zyl, my world.”

  “Yes?” breathed Thane, wondering where this would lead. He was unprepared for her next deliberate words.

  “We form marriages to have children also. But before that, love is freely given as wished. Sex goes with it, if both partners are willing. Are you willing, Thane?”

  Thane was more than willing.

  Chapter 18

  Jupiter filled the entire sky, an im
mense banded globe 87,000 miles in diameter. Miribel took the controls and plunged their craft down through the thick murky atmosphere.

  “Eight thousand miles deep,” murmured Thane in awe. “Equal to earth’s diameter.”

  As the saucer leveled over the enormous surface of this giant planet, Thane stared perplexed. “No ice? And what I see now, I don’t believe.”

  A huge finned creature was swimming through the thick air, like a fish through water.

  “Jupiter is neither frozen nor lifeless,” gasped Thane.

  “Of course not,” smiled Miribel, as if amused. “The internal heat of the planet has been trapped for ages, under its atmospheric cloak. One of your scientists suspected the truth, that Jupiter is warm and that there is more life here than on earth.”

  Everywhere that Thane stared, he saw myriads of airborne creatures of all shapes and sizes, preying on each other. He started. “Look. One of the sensor screens shows nonrandom pattern. A Morlian ship…?”

  Miribel hastily punched a readout tape, glanced at it, then relaxed. “One of our ships, 500 miles west of us. Many of our sensor craft are scouring Jupiter’s surface, which is 1000 times the size of earth’s surface.”

  “Like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack,” said Thane, hopelessly.

  Miribel spun the ship up. “It is a better bet to search the moons of Jupiter.”

  Rising above the atmosphere, they could see several of the moons shining brightly among the stars. Miribel headed for huge Ganymede and began a monotonous, routine circumnavigation in orbital paths with the sensors probing below. Nothing registered on the sensors for long hours.