The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales

by John W. Campbell

  Ross was thrown violently forward against the switchboard. For an instant he clung to the edge of the massive panel, swaying groggily. Then he straightened, stood erect. Shook his head to clear it of dizziness.

  A terrible fear was taking shape in his mind. The deadly beam had pierced the vessel and passed onward through space. Clanging plates and dimming lights were the inevitable sequels of a direct hit. Fortunately, the concentrated beam pierced space as a thin, lethal filament. It seared all flesh in its path, but its range was limited to within a radius of a few feet.

  With shaking fingers, Ross lifted the audiphone on the switchboard before him, pressed it to his ear. For an instant he stood grimly listening. Then all the blood seeped out of his face, leaving it ashen. He swayed. In the pilot chamber above, Robert Brooke was audibly moaning.

  When Ross reached the lad’s side after a frantic, tortured ascent from the bowels of the little vessel he found him slumped at the base of the pilot’s chair. The beam had pierced his chest; seared him horribly. Burned fragments of rubberized leather mercifully concealed the lesser wounds in the blackened flesh of his arms and thighs. His lips were flecked with crimson froth as he tried to smile into the compassion-filmed, tormented eyes of the man kneeling beside him.

  “She won’t get—the insurance—now,” he muttered with a wrenching effort. “But I guess—it’s—all part—of the game. I hope you get ’em, chief. The concentrated beam—prohibited—Interplanetary law—”

  Ross nodded. He was close to tears and could only murmur indistinctly.

  “We’ll look after her, lad. The Patrol will look after her.”

  Brooke raised his face, succeeded despite his pain in really smiling. Then the light faded from his eyes. His breathing became irregular, tortured. His chest rose and fell spasmodically for an instant. Then he uttered a little cry; went all limp. The smile returned to his lips a moment before his breathing stopped.

  CHAPTER III

  Circle of Slaughtered Men

  It was a grimmer Ross who returned to the observation window fifty Earth-minutes later to watch the beam-suspended little vessel floating in the ether before Hyperion increase rapidly in size. With deep sorrow and reverence he had sent the flag-wrapped body of Robert Brooke out through a gravity port to a star burial in the night of space. He sat sad and watchful, feeling very lonely now, and, despite his youth, very old.

  Of one thing he was grimly certain. He would overtake and capture Nichols’ vessel. Solo spacecraft were too light to carry more than thirty Sillovolts of beam energy in their S-tubes. Nichols had shot his bolt, lethally, malignantly. Now Nichols would pay with his life. As for the girl—Ross’s lips tightened. He would show her no mercy.

  The tiny craft throbbed evenly through space, drawing nearer and ever nearer to the dimly glowing misty face of little Hyperion. The beam-suspended vessel was now clearly visible to the naked eye in the quartz observation window and Ross needed no telescope to discern its mist-enveloped outlines.

  He was rebanking the blast engines with fuel sheets of re-energized electrons when a curving crescent of light shot from the mist on the little moon. Instantly Ross leaned forward above the controls, staring in breathless wonderment through the quartz window.

  In the wake of the light something was rising from Hyperion’s surface, a dark, wedge-shaped mass that moved obliquely through the ether with curious little jerks and regressions. Something about its contours and mode of progression was vaguely spiderlike as it scuttled up through the white opacity. Ross was so startled he forgot to breathe.

  From the summit of the weird, irregularly moving wedge a thin ray of light crossed the Sillo-beam, in seeming immunity to its refractive repulsion. Then, suddenly, a startling phenomenon occurred. The Sillo-beam cocoon dissolved under the impingement of that other beam. It dissolved completely. The streaming radiance flowed off from the tiny craft’s bow and stern and was dissipated in the ether.

  Instantly the dark wedge grew very bright on its lateral side. Out from it there projected a secondary wedge of glimmering light which descended slowly toward the newly liberated vessel.

  Suddenly Ross perceived that the wedge was transparent and unstable. The wavering, mist-enveloped face of the little moon was obscurely visible through it. As it approached Nichols’ spaceship, its contours altered. It wavered nebulously, then buckled into billowing folds.

  Ross’s flesh went cold as his mind groped for an explanation of that strange encounter in space. Was the wedge deliberately trawling in the ether for the little vessel and its crew? Was the luminous, weaving projection a sort of net which the dark wedge was employing in its search for prey? Even as Ross stared, Nichols’ little craft was caught up, enveloped by the luminous folds.

  Chills raced along Ross’s spine. He stared in horror as the net enveloped the vessel completely. The next instant the dark wedge moved jerkily backward toward the luminous mists of Hyperion. Like a great, scuttling spider retreating into the white opacity of its lair, with its prey in a bright, dewy web of its own contriving.

  Ross had braked his little vessel while the grim drama was unfolding. Now, as the dark, sinister wedge vanished in the mists above Hyperion.

  He released additional fuel sheets into the basal blast engines.

  Sitting tight-lipped at the control panel, he guided the little vessel down and down. Through whirling layers of atmospheric gases, through thin convexial stratovacuums which frosted the observation window despite the heat of the outer plates. At fifteen miles altitude he started braking his course. He shut off all but one of the atomic blast engines and swung the gravity-stabilizer toward zero. At five miles his acceleration had been cut to a blast propulsion minimum of three miles a minute.

  T two miles he shut off the blast engines; twirled the rotor dials. The little vessel circled slowly downward toward a world unplumbed. A world of blood-hungry leech-weeds, poisonous fungus growths, and a dark sky marauder that scuttled, spiderlike, out of white mists to trawl for men!

  He landed safely in a rocky valley between two little hills that loomed bleakly forbidding in the green-lit gloom. The vessel settled comfortably on a black granite ledge abutting on a nearly level terrain.

  When Ross came out through the open gravity port with a Dulo oxygen filter strapped to the lower part of his face he moved with grim purpose and yet, paradoxically, like a man entranced. He was in thrall to emotions that would have seemed incomprehensible to the adventurers and explorers who had trod Hyperion’s soil before him. Though a sense of alienage and a premonition of horror oppressed his mind, his dominant thought was one of vengeance.

  He had been cheated of his vengeance by the scuttling horror from the white mists. No foot as firm as his had ever trod this little world before him. No Earthman had ever moved as resolutely into the unknown or displayed more indifference as to what might befall him.

  The little backwater moon had no glory skies. A thin green light poured downward from clouds that hid even the immense rings of its primary. Beneath Ross’s feet the soil was as smooth and polished as a surface of glass. There were no tumbled stones here; no crevices or pitfalls to ensnare his feet as he progressed. All about him a tomblike silence reigned. Nowhere was there a suggestion of movement or echo of sound. The soil was curiously metallic in texture. A surface layer of glowing blue-green composed of tiny particles like sand overspread a more solid stratum which resisted the impress of his solar boots. Wisps of green fog came down into the valley, obscuring horizons and concealing the landscape directly before him.

  He walked swiftly forward through the mist, driven by a compulsion which was more intuitive than logical. Yet he was sure that Nichols’ vessel had been drawn by the raider from the mist into this or an adjacent valley. He had followed the captured vessel closely; had entered the mist directly behind it, paralleling its plane of descent. It seemed unlikely that it could be far away.

  He had covered perhaps seventy-five feet when the green mist which had obscured his vie
w slowly parted, to reveal a scene which stopped him in his tracks and drove the blood in torrents to his heart.

  Twenty feet from where he was standing, on the smooth, metallic soil, was a little group of Earthmen. Fifteen or twenty Earthmen kneeling in a wide circle, with Simel automatic heat-guns in their hands and with the green cloud shining upon them. They were utterly motionless.

  Their eyes stared vacantly into space; their features bore expressions of frozen horror. Great splotches of crimson stained their torn and dusty garments. In gaps in the wide circle the heads and shoulders of prone men protruded. Heads without skull caps; shoulders hunched and misshapen, and striated with clotted blood.

  As Ross stared horror such as he had never known surged up in him. Horror and sick revulsion. But despite the tremors which shook him he forced himself to move again. Unsteadily he advanced to the edge of the circle of corpses, and examined the scene of carnage at close range.

  The bodies of the kneeling men were gruesomely rigid. Above their horror-distorted faces their heads were gruesomely flat. The skull caps had been removed completely and with precision, as though a saw or surgeon’s scalpel had aided in the grim disfigurement. Within the brain cavities were neither cerebra nor cerebella. Merely dark striations, grisly splotches along the base of the periosteum and in the region of the Orbital cavities. The brains had been lifted out!

  Not all of the bodies bore wounds. Something more deadly than lethal beams or blast bolts had stricken them as they fought grimly to defend themselves against some ghastly enemy.

  Suddenly Ross perceived a little metal object lying on the ground near the rim of the circle. He stooped and picked it up. It was a metal sheet diary, containing about twenty leaves and scrawled in ten-point characters, with a few blockings out here and there. As Ross thumbed the leaves he was filled with a sense of impending disaster, as though he had strayed into a region of ghastly unreality where all the shadows were images of Death.

  On one sheet the unknown diarist had written:

  I am quite sure that I am the only Earthman who will ever read this record. But if I do not occupy my mind in some way I shall go mad. In a few hours I shall be dead. I shall die resisting, with the curious stubbornness of my kind. When 1 am dead they will remove my brain, preserve it in one of their queer little jars, and perhaps dissect it in some undreamed of laboratory beyond the Solar System. But they will never know, never really understand how it feels to be a man.

  Ross thumbed frantically backward through the record, scanned another sheet. Sentences here and there stood out on the gleaming ten-point script with an ominous clarity.

  My contract with the Jupiter Company having expired in 2089 I engaged passage on the trans-Saturnian transport Iris. My wife and I had planned a vacation of six Earth-months in the South Martian Littoral. I intended to debark at Eridanus City; after a stop-over of six Earth-months at Mare New Cetus.

  The alien ship attacked us while we were 0.16 off Saturn’s orbit. Diacoustic field blocked out. The luminous web of energy which enveloped our vessel and carried us to Hyperion shows the same frequency in the electrokinetic thermolysis units as the paralyzing beam which they employ as an aid to hypnosis. Their death-beams do not register on our units.…

  They are creatures of intellect with bodies unutterably loathsome. They are from far beyond the Solar System. They can vaguely understand some of our thoughts, but our emotions are utterly alien to them. They have no desire to remain alive at all.

  As long as life remains in their hideous frames they seem to experience a kind of negative pleasure in merely living and thinking. But when we attacked them with our hands, maiming and crippling them, they calmly continued the process of destruction, literally stripping their limbs of all substance. They are incapable of malice. They hate us no more than humane men on Earth hate the ants and bees which they thoughtlessly trample under foot.…

  It is the hypnosis we fear most. We have resolved to die rather than continue to submit to it. By some extraordinary development of the power of telepathy they can read our minds and actually transfer their own thought-images, their own alien ways of willing and thinking to us. When they stare steadily at us for several minutes our brains are narcoticized and enfeebled. We fall into an hypnotic trance and think the tendril giant’s thoughts, dream their awful, impersonal dreams. Dreams in which self-preservation plays no part.

  Most of my companions have altered appallingly. They have renounced their human heritage, and are no longer capable of revolt. Hopelessly wretched, and lost, I and a few others have struggled to remain human and have succeeded in resisting hypnosis. We intend to flee tonight. They no longer guard us closely. They foolishly believe that we have lost all desire to escape. We shall flee to Blue Ore Valley, where there are no poison spores or deadly leech-weeds. We will camp there, strengthen our defenses. They are taking our lost companions away tonight in their stellar space vessels. But we the dead will lose only our brains…

  Ross read no further. Sweat beaded his forehead as his gaze returned to the circle of massacred men, lingered on each in turn. But there was nothing to identify the diary writer. He had found sanguinary oblivion along with his companions. The gruesome fate which he had foreseen had not spared a single member of that heroic band.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Tendril Giants

  A scream tore suddenly out of the mist, echoed appallingly from the black crags on both sides of the valley and reverberated afar. It was a human scream, vibrant with terror, shrill with pain.

  Ross turned and faced down the valley, straining his ears to catch whatever sound might come. Presently footsteps echoed through the thin green mist a few yards ahead of him, footsteps that faltered to the pitiable accompaniment of groans and low, gurgling sobs, and then advanced again.

  At length the mist divided to reveal a tall, staggering form, nearly naked, who could not stand upright because of the wounds he bore; who could only groan and twist his head in torment as he approached Ross on legs that threatened to collapse beneath him.

  Justin Nichols was an object of horror. Corrosive spores had eaten away all but the shoulder straps of his space suit, and from his exposed flesh there hung the long, ribbonlike tails of writhing leech-weeds. The heads of the weeds were buried deep in his flesh.

  Ross drew a breath of shuddering horror. A great wave of pity and compassion flooded his being. He had vowed eternal vengeance against this killer of his friend. But it was impossible to feel anything but pity for a wretch so tormented, so cruelly trapped.

  Nichols was clutching now at Ross’s sleeve. His voice was hoarse with terror.

  “Thank God you followed us,” he almost sobbed. “Did you see their ship? It came up out of the mist, threw a sort of light—Ross, it’s horrible. They’re from beyond our universe. Vegetablelike things—”

  Nichols swayed suddenly. Ross caught him about the shoulders, steadied him.

  “Easy,” he cautioned. “Easy, Nichols. We’ve got to get these leech-weeds off.”

  “Never mind me, Ross,” Nichols groaned. “You can save Marta. You can take her off in your ship. They’re totally deaf. That’s how I got away. I couldn’t wake Marta. They put her to sleep. Put me to sleep too, but I woke up.”

  His grasp tightened on Ross’s sleeve. “I stumbled into a nest of leech-weeds. God! It was horrible. They attacked me, tore me.”

  His breath was coming laboriously now.

  “I’m dying, Ross. Must finish. Must tell you. Marta is my sister. She thought me—innocent. I lied to her. When I stole—from Mercury Company—I was desperate. Horribly in debt. I thought I could return—platinum—before I was—was noticed. When I found I couldn’t—I had to flee, Ross. She followed because she was loyal. In the terminal—just impulsive. It was your life or mine and I—was her brother. She didn’t know I—rayed you-in space. She’s blameless, Ross—”

  Suddenly Nichols’ tormented eyes bulged glassily. He cried out in terror, jerked his body erect and, twisti
ng free from Ross’s supporting arm, plunged with terrified whimperings into the obscuring mist.

  Ross was so startled he stood rooted to the soil. A tall, wavering shape had emerged from the mist a few yards away and was moving swiftly along the valley toward him. The creature was eight feet in height and covered with a kind of yellowish fuzz. It looked like an immense, shriveled root. Only its head, which was vaguely anthropomorphic in contour, and its little tubular legs hinted at animal kinship. Its heart-shaped face was a flat, wrinkled expanse, expressionless save for the bright glitter of two little slitted eyes, and a writhing, puckered orifice immediately beneath them which appeared to serve as its mouth.

  From its twisted, cankerous body there sprouted numerous frail, plantlike tendrils, some green, some red, and a few the pallid, sickly hue of Saturnian corpse fungi. A few sturdier tendrils, more like tentacles, were wrapped tightly about the upper part of its torso. Both the tendrils and the curiously twisted and unsymmetrical body suggested a vegetable rather than animal origin.

  Held tightly in the curling extremity of one very brilliant tendril was a little metallic cone about eight inches in length. As the repulsive creature advanced on its stumpy legs it slowly raised the extremity of the tendril and leveled it in Ross’s direction.

  Instantly a beam of light flashed from the cone and enveloped the terrified Earthman. The light flashed out so abruptly that Ross’s faculties responded with a violent shuddering. All through his body the strange, intense convulsion passed; his muscles, nerves, the very pulse of his blood was affected by it.

  Then something seemed to grip him about the shoulders and draw him agonizingly backward. The paralyzing beam jerked his arms sideward and pinioned them at the elbows; then took possession of his legs and stiffened them till he stood rooted to the ground.

  He was now incapable of movement. Only his brain remained feverishly active, oppressed by qualms which twisted his features into a quivering mask of horror. Moving constantly closer the abhorrent shape seemed to increase its speed with every foot traversed. When it was appallingly close the little slitted eyes opened suddenly, horribly, in the pear-shaped, wrinkled face and widened to a hideous bigness.