Invaders of Earth

by Groff Conklin

  “What happens to the bar of iron-cerium at this point is a matter of conjecture. All observers are agreed only that it disappears. Perhaps it leaves the coils so rapidly that it neither injures the wires nor can it be seen. Perhaps the bar passes through a temporary fissure in the three-dimensional system we perceive, falling into some yet unconceivable other dimension. Doctor Ziegler, who first observed this effect, inclines to this latter belief.” Mr. Tedder placed his fingers on the telegraph key he’d rigged up to close the circuit through his apparatus. “Watch closely,” he cautioned, tapping down on the key.

  ~ * ~

  On the twenty-third planet at a distant sun—a planet called by its inhabitants a name for which there are no equivalents in human phonetics—a Young Being in the early stages of prematurity tangled the minds of his elders with feelings of anguish. His teacher had disappeared!

  ~ * ~

  Ned Norcross, who was taking Junior Physics II for the third time, had his mind on neither the Ziegler Effect nor the tragic results of last night’s basketball game. He was slumped at his desk, dreamily rehearsing the topography of one Honey LaRue, a strip-teaser who nightly practiced her art at the Club Innuendo. Norcross pried himself up on one elbow to glance toward the clock above the demonstration bench, then slumped forward on his desk in a faint. Up on the marble top of the demonstration bench, pulling off a right silk glove in time to the lazy ripple of a snare drum, danced Honey LaRue.

  Mr. Tedder yelped, and immediately regretted it. He’d had two beers three days before; could that bring on hallucination at this late date? But Honey had gone, taking the Ziegler coils with her. One terminal of the telegraph key was still connected to the plate on the spark coil, the other wire ended in a little knot of fused silver. No, this wasn’t the effect that Doctor Ziegler had reported, not at all!

  To cover his confusion, Mr. Tedder began to talk. “There, you’ve just seen the Ziegler Effect in action. Explain what you’ve just seen, and you’ll be famous among men.” Indeed, the iron-cerium alloy bar had disappeared; but so had 20,000 cm. of No. 40 silver wire, silk-insulated. But the boys—except, of course, Stetzel and Guenther—hadn’t noticed. Mr. Tedder glanced over his shoulder to the clock, saw that it would be fifteen minutes before the class would end, and made a quick decision in the interest of his sanity. “Class dismissed!” he said.

  There was a stupefied second while the news soaked into dormant nervous systems. Then the boys were shouting across the room, grabbing up books, and hurrying out into the hall to take noisy advantage of their moment of freedom. Stetzel and Guenther, as behooved the top pupils of the Class of ‘95, hurried up to Mr. Tedder to check their notes.

  “The symbol for cerium is ‘Ce,’ isn’t it?” Stetzel asked.

  “Yes. But now . . .”

  “How did you do that, Mr. Tedder?” Guenther interrupted.

  “Do what?” Mr. Tedder glanced suspiciously at Guenther. Perhaps it hadn’t been those two beers.

  “You had a woman dancing, right up where those solenoids were,” Guenther said.

  “That’s what I saw,” Stetzel substantiated. “What a movie! She sure looked three-dimensional to me. Wow!”

  “Yes,” Mr. Tedder said, canceling his decision of a moment before to lay off beer. “That was just a little stunt I thought up to see how many of you were paying attention. New optical principle, you know. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get things ready for the next class. And wake up Norcross on your way out, will you?”

  Stetzel jarred Norcross from unconsciousness and walked out into the hall, talking and gesturing significantly with Guenther. Norcross unfolded himself slowly, glanced with a furtive eye toward Mr. Tedder and the empty bench top, and walked rapidly out of the room, down the stairs, and into the school physician’s office.

  Alone, Mr. Tedder frowned at the bereft lithium battery and telegraph key. He had pressed the key, closing the circuit, and there’d been a spurt of flame. A strange girl had appeared, dancing on the marble top of the demonstration bench. He’d never seen the woman before—a tall blonde wearing very little. . . . What the devil! There she was again.

  Mr. Coar, principal of Tech, walked toward the door to the physics classroom, rehearsing the speech he was going to deliver to Tedder. “Young man, Tech does not approve of the practice of letting students out into the halls before the end of the period. Their racket has shaken the walls of classrooms on three floors. What have you to say for yourself, Mr. Tedder?” Yes, that would do nicely. Mr. Coar opened the door.

  Mr. Tedder was leaning against a front-row desk, nodding appreciatively as a sketchily clad young lady danced for him. “TEDDER!” the principal bellowed. “Stop that!”

  Honey LaRue faded, and the space between telegraph key and lithium battery was empty again.

  “Stop what?” Mr. Tedder inquired, wide-eyed with innocence.

  “Stop letting your classes out early so that you can spend your time gloating over your . . . your . . .” Mr. Coar groped for a stinging adjective, drew a blank, and concluded weakly,”... your movies!”

  “Did you see her, too?”

  “I did, indeed. You came here highly recommended by Indiana University, Tedder; and, frankly, I didn’t expect this sort of thing from you.” “Mr. Coar, I believe that I’ve stumbled across a novel physical phenomenon.”

  “Anatomy was being studied in 1600 a.d., young man,” Mr. Coar observed, his voice dripping sarcasm, “and is scarcely any longer a ‘novel physical phenomenon.’”

  “Sit down, sir.” Mr. Tedder offered the principal the top of a desk in the front row. “Now, what did you expect to see when you came in here?”

  “The apparatus of a physics laboratory—all those gears and coils and tubes and . . . things,” Mr. Coar vaguely enumerated. “Certainly not a . . . “ The principal sat heavily on the desk top, bulge-eyed. On the marble top of the demonstration bench was a Goldbergesque network of machinery, a perfect reproduction of the principal’s uncertain notions concerning scientific gadgetry.

  “How the devil did you do that, Tedder?”

  “People have been asking me all morning. I don’t know. I don’t think that I did do it.”

  “Has that girl . . .” Honey LaRue reappeared on the bench, and the air vibrated with the drums’ seductive roll. “... been here before?”

  “Yes, sir. Couple of boys in my class saw her, too.”

  “Where are they now?”

  Mr. Tedder glanced up at the clock. “It’s second period by now. Stetzel is in Latin III, I believe, and Guenther’s in Microbiology II.”

  Mr. Coar went over to the loud-speaker in the corner of the room, pressed a button, and spoke to his secretary, up in the school office. “Ann, send me students Guenther and Stetzel. Rooms 103 and 309.” He switched the blat-box off. He turned toward the empty demonstration bench, wrinkled his forehead in concentration, and looked up. A pot of geraniums was standing on the marble bench top.

  “Whew! It knows what I’m thinking about!”

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  “But nothing can do that. Not electricity, nor electronics, nor even cybernetics.”

  “Nothing that we know about could, sir. What would you suggest that I do with the screwy thing?”

  Mr. Coar, caught off guard, made a suggestion that was more witty than helpful. The classroom door swung open, and Stetzel and Guenther hurried in together, vocally wondering at their release from schedule. “Good morning, Mr. Coar, Mr. Tedder. Did you want us?” Stetzel asked.

  “Did you see a woman in here?” the principal demanded.

  “Yes, sir,” Guenther said. “The movie, you mean.”

  “So you saw her, too. That rules mass hypnosis out,” Mr. Coar decided, illogically, glancing suspiciously toward the young physics instructor.

  The classroom door swung open again, admitting two teachers. Mr. Percy N. Formeller, known to two generations of biology students as Old Preserved-In-Formaldehyde, was full of indignati
on at the preemption of Guenther from his microbiology class. Miss Maclntire, Latin I-V, followed, equally indignant over Stetzel’s defection from Marcus Porcius Cato.

  “Mr. Coar,” Mr. Formeller demanded, “what is the meaning of this? Guenther left in the middle of a movie on Trypanosoma gambiense, disturbing my entire class. In Technicolor, too,” the biology instructor finished, accusingly.

  “And how about calling Stetzel out of my class during the Third Punic War!” Miss Maclntire said.

  Mr. Coar defended himself. “We have something here which is unique, possibly of great value to science.” Miss Maclntire sniffed. Science was something that students elected to take instead of Latin. “I’m happy that you two teachers came in. You may be able to help us throw some light on our problem. You took the precaution of placing your classes in the hands of responsible monitors, I hope?”

  “Of course!” Miss Maclntire snapped.

  “What is the nature of this ‘unique something’ that our Mr. Coar mentioned, Mr. Tedder?” Old Preserved-In-Formaldehyde spoke as one who seeks to calm troubled waters.

  “I frankly believe it to be an unearthly life form,” Mr. Tedder said. “Telepathic and hallucinative, by my guess, and definitely not from this earth.”

  Mr. Formeller, who kept his three-year subscription to Improbable Stories a closely guarded secret, glanced about him for the extraterrestrial life form. He shouted. There on the demonstration bench was a green-skinned monster, an eight-foot-tall caricature of a Tyrantosaurus Rex, holding a nubile and light-clad young lady under its right foreleg. There was a “thump” beside the biology teacher as Miss Maclntire slumped to the floor. Stooping gallantly to pull his colleague back to her feet, Mr. Formeller stopped thinking of the telepathic, hallucinative, and green Tyrantosaurus Rex, which, grinning, disappeared.

  Mr. Coar stared toward the empty demonstration bench, wrinkled his forehead in concentration, and was again rewarded by the pot-of-geraniums-made-manifest. “See?” he asked rhetorically. “It becomes anything you want it to.”

  “Curious.” Mr. Formeller glared toward the table. A small orange insect appeared. The biology teacher bent over it and counted the spots on the orange anterior wings. “Six spots. A real bipunctata of a common local variety, or I don’t know my Coleoptera.” An idea struck him, and he backed rapidly away from the bench. He turned to Mr. Tedder. “I wouldn’t go too close to the thing, if I were you. It creates these things for a purpose. I believe that this hallucinative power, as you call it, is the logical development of protective coloration, mimicry, and similar devices used by earthly creatures to elude their enemies and to lure their prey.”

  “You mean, this beast on the table top mimics what we’re thinking about in hopes of drawing us close enough to seize us and eat us?” asked Miss Maclntire.

  “Roughly, yes.” Mr. Formeller nodded. “We’ve no way of knowing the metabolic processes, the thought patterns, or even the true form of the creature. Its action in creating a pleasant picture may be as automatic as the Starrkrampf reflex, or playing ‘possum, is to foxes and opossums and Leptinotarsum decemlineatae.” Mr. Formeller paused, hoping that his erudition was showing.

  Miss Maclntire, who had seated herself back at a third-row desk, remarked, “I’d wish that the beast were a rational creature.”

  There was a flurry in the air above the demonstration bench as a togaed Greek gentleman came into being. He raised a portentous index finger, exclaimed an involved Greek observation, and disappeared.

  “It can talk!” Mr. Coar marveled.

  “It said, ‘You’ve got an eel by the tail,’” Miss Maclntire translated. “Greek.”

  “Like having a bull by the horns, or an armful of greased pig,” Stetzel commented.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Guenther said, “it seems to me that the thing has some will of its own. For one thing, whatever form it takes, that form is not ambiguous or wavering, as an image in the mind’s eye must be.”

  “What’s more,” Stetzel continued his friend’s argument, “it can say things that are presumably not in the mind which called it into being. For example, using Greek to explain itself—I hope that I’m being clear —shows that the creature has imaginative power, as well as the ability to read our minds.”

  Percy N. Formeller hadn’t been listening. Psychological investigations could wait until there was a good, solid foundation of physical fact on which to build. “I wonder if it’s carnivorous?” he murmured.

  Mr. Tedder nodded. He approved of Mr. Formeller’s method. Strictly scientific. “I have some meat in my lunch,” Mr. Tedder said. He walked carefully around the demonstration bench, staying a good five meters away from the potential carnivore. If the creature were a meat eater, Mr. Tedder had no desire to have its feeding habits demonstrated upon the person of a young physics instructor. Back in the stockroom, Mr. Tedder opened his brown paper lunch bag, unfolded the wax paper from the top sandwich, and shook out a slice of pimento loaf. He wished that he’d brought a less plebeian lunch. Pork chops, perhaps. Oh, well, Mr. Tedder walked out into the classroom holding the slice of meat by one catchup-moist corner.

  Mr. Formeller impaled the slice of pimento loaf on a length of No. 8 galvanized wire the physics teacher provided. Like a keeper shoving a flank of horse meat into a cageful of lions, the biology teacher thrust the baited wire into the empty air above the demonstration bench.

  The pimento-loaf slice disappeared.

  “Carnivorous,” Mr. Formeller noted with satisfaction.

  “Do you suppose that the creature could get off the table and . . . walk around?” Miss Maclntire hoped that her maidenly caution wouldn’t be thought an old-maid’s foible.

  “If it were readily mobile, it wouldn’t have developed so complex a mechanism to lure its prey,” Mr. Formeller said. “Its various ... what’s the classical word, Miss Maclntire?”

  “Protean.”

  “Yes. Its protean manifestations are a clue to its habits. It is rooted to the spot, like a plant.”

  “Like Venus’s-flytrap?” Guenther suggested.

  “Yes,” the biology teacher approved. “Dionaea muscipula is a cogent example of the sort of plant I’m talking about. By the way, don’t you think we ought to name this thing? We’ve been calling it ‘creature’ and ‘monster’ and all sorts of things. Most unscientific.”

  “We might call it Rete proteanum,” Miss Maclntire suggested from her third-row seat. “A ‘many-formed trap,’ you know.”

  “No, we want a name which suggests its origin as well as its habits.”

  “It’s not of this world nor of the known solar system,” Mr. Tedder commented.

  “That’s it. It’s an extrasolar—no, an extragalactic being-of-many-forms.”

  “Polymorph metagalacticus,” Miss Maclntire said. “Not an inspired name, but it will do, it will suffice.”

  Mr. Coar stared at the empty space between the telegraph key and the bank of lithium reaction cells. His pot of geraniums appeared again, then the scarlet flowers wavered, faded, and became gold-and-purple pansies. “Polymorph it is,” the principal said. His air was that of a bishop conferring imprimatur upon a lay brother’s interpretation of a gospel passage.

  The pot of pansies disappeared, giving way to Honey LaRue. The snare drums swished and chattered, and Honey, who’d rid herself of a good deal more than her gloves, winked knowingly at Miss Maclntire. Spotting Stetzel, Honey propelled her pelvis several centimeters in a horizontal direction, a movement known to the trade as the “bump.” The Latin teacher uttered an unclassical yelp of outraged modesty and averted her head. Stetzel grew pink to his ear tips. This extragalactic polymorph had no tact at all! Honey disappeared with a regretful shrug, and the lascivious drum rolls ceased.

  “This sort of thing could become dangerous,” Mr. Tedder commented.

  “What can we do with it?” Mr. Coar asked. “It wouldn’t do to put a cage around it. It can’t move any more than a . . . geranium plant can. And what will we
feed it?”

  “Pimento loaf,” the physics instructor suggested.

  “Think of the value this thing can have!” Stetzel enthused. “Psychiatrists can see the morbid mind-images of their disturbed patients, the paranoiacs and the like, and devise techniques of cure.”

  “By studying the metabolism of this polymorph, we can deduce the physical conditions of the world it came from,” Mr. Formeller observed, a glint of the hunter instinct in his eyes.

  “We might even ask it questions about the world it came from!” Guenther said. “Maybe it would show its real form to us, and talk or think to us. It’s already shown a lot of initiative, you know.”