Invaders of Earth

by Groff Conklin

The clammy tightness inside him eased as he saw Art Zote getting up shakily from the deck, not dead, not dead after all. Abruptly, Wardell was trembling in every muscle. Good old Art. It took more than a scoundrelly lizard to kill a man like that.

  “Art!” Wardell yelled in a blaze of his tremendous excitement, “Art, turn the three-incher on that sub. Sink the damn thing. We’ll teach those skunks to—”

  The first shell was too short. It made a pretty spray a hundred yards from that distant metal hull. The second one was too far; it exploded futilely, stirring a hump of grayish rock on the shore into a brief furious life.

  The third smashed squarely on the target. And so did the next ten. It was beautiful shooting, but at the end of it Wardell called down uneasily, “Better stop. The shells don’t seem to be penetrating—I can’t see any holes. We’d better save our ammunition for point-blank range, if it comes to that. Besides—”

  He fell silent, reluctant to express the thought that had come to his mind, the fact that so far the creatures on that mysterious vessel had done them no harm and that it was the Albatross and its crew that were doing all the shooting. There was, of course, that business of their oil being rendered useless and the curious affair just now: the thing coming aboard for the single purpose of studying the harpoon gun. But nevertheless—

  He and Preedy talked about it in low, baffled tones during the foggy afternoon and the cold evening, decided finally to padlock all the hatches from inside and put a man with a gun in the crow’s-nest.

  Wardell wakened to the sound of excited yelling. The sun was just streaking over the horizon when he tumbled out onto the deck, half dressed. He noticed, as he went through the door, that the padlock had been neatly sliced out.

  Grim, he joined the little group of men gathered around the guns. It was Art Zote, the gunner, who querulously pointed out the damage. “Look, cap’n, the dirty beggars have cut our harpoon cable. And they’ve left us some measly copper wire or something in its place. Look at the junk.”

  Wardell took the extended wire blankly. The whole affair seemed senseless. He was conscious of the gunner’s voice continuing to beat at him:

  “And the damn stuff’s all over the place, too. There’s two other harpoon sets, and each set is braced like a bloomin’ masthead. They bored holes in the deck and ran the wires through and lashed them to the backbone of the ship. It wouldn’t be so bad if the stuff was any good, but that thin wire—Hell!”

  “Get me a wire cutter,” Wardell soothed. “We’ll start clearing it away and—”

  Amazingly, it wouldn’t cut. He strained with his great strength, but the wire only looked vaguely shiny, and even that might have been a trick of light. Behind him, somebody said in a queer voice, “I think maybe we got a bargain. But what kind of a whale are they getting us ready for?”

  Wardell stood very still, startled by the odd phrasing of the words: What . . . are they getting us ready for?

  He straightened, cold with decision. “Men,” he said resonantly, “get your breakfasts. We’re going to get to the bottom of this if it’s the last thing we ever do.”

  ~ * ~

  The oarlocks creaked; the water whispered gently against the side of the rowboat—and every minute Wardell liked his position less.

  It struck him, after a moment, that the boat was not heading directly at the vessel, and that their angle of approach was making for a side view of the object he had already noticed at the front of the stranger’s metal deck.

  He raised his glasses; and then he just sat there too amazed even to exclaim. It was a weapon, all right—a harpoon gun.

  There was no mistaking it. They hadn’t even changed the design, the length of the harpoon, or —Wait a minute! What about the line?

  He could make out a toy-sized roller beside the gun, and there was a coppery gleam coming from it that told a complete story.

  “They’ve given us,” he thought, “a cable as good as their own, something that will hold—anything.” Once again, the chill struck through him, and the words that one of his crew had used: What kind of a whale—

  “Closer!” he said hoarsely.

  He was only dimly conscious that this kind of boldness was utterly rash. Careful, he thought, there were too many damn fools in Hell already. Foolhardiness was—

  “Closer!” he urged.

  At fifty feet, the long, dark hull of the ship, even a part of what was under water, showed plainly; and there wasn’t a scratch to indicate where the shells from the three-incher had exploded, not a sign of damage anywhere.

  Wardell was parting his lips to speak again, his mind hard on his determination to climb aboard under cover of the point-blank range of the machine gun—when there was a thunder of sound.

  It was a cataclysmic sound, like whole series of monstrous guns firing one after the other. The roar echoed hugely from the barren hills and spat backward and forward across the natural hollow made by the almost completely landlocked bay.

  The long, torpedo-shaped ship began to move. Faster, faster—it made a great half circle, a wave of fiery flashes pouring into the water from its rear; and then, having avoided the rowboat completely, headed for the narrows that led to the open sea.

  Suddenly, a shell splashed beside it, then another and a third; Wardell could see the muzzle flame of the three-incher on the distant deck of the Albatross. There was no doubt that Art Zote and Preedy thought the hour of crisis was at hand.

  But the stranger heeded not. Straight for the narrows it thundered, along the gantlet made by the shallows and then out into the deep water. It rumbled a full mile past the schooner, and then the fiery explosions ceased. The skies emptied of the rolling roar on roar of sound. The ship coasted on momentum, then stopped.

  And lay there, silent, lifeless as before, a dark shape protruding out of the restless waters. Somewhere along its course, Art Zote had had the sense to stop his useless firing.

  In the silence, Wardell could hear the heavy breathing of the men laboring at the oars. The rowboat shuddered at each thrust and kept twisting as the still turbulent waters of the bay churned against its sides.

  Back on the whaler, Wardell called Preedy into his cabin. He poured out two stiff drinks, swallowed his own portion with a single, huge gulp, and said, “My plan is this: We’ll fit up the small boat with grub and water and send three men down the coast for help. It’s obvious we can’t go on playing this game of hide-and-seek without even knowing what the game is about. It shouldn’t take three good men more than a week to get to, say, the police station on the Tip, maybe sooner. What do you think?”

  What Preedy thought was lost in the clattering of boots. The door burst open. The man who unceremoniously pushed into the room held up two dark objects and yelled, “Look, cap’n, what one of them beasts just threw on board: a flat, metal plate and a bag of something. He got away before we even saw him.”

  It was the metal board that snatched Wardell’s attention, because it seemed to have no purpose. It was half an inch thick by ten inches long by eight wide. It was a silvery, metallic color on one side and black on the other.

  That was all. He saw then that Preedy had picked up the bag and opened it. The mate gasped, “Skipper, look! There’s a photograph in here of the engine room, with a pointer pointing at a fuel tank—and some gray powder. It must be to fix up the oil.”

  Wardell lowered the metal plate, started to grab for the bag. And stopped himself with a jerk as an abnormality about the—black—of the metal board struck him with all the force of a blow.

  It was—three-dimensional. It started at an incredible depth inside the plate, and reached to his eyes. Curious, needle-sharp, intensely bright points of light peered out of the velvety, dead blackness.

  As Wardell stared at it, it changed. Something floated onto the upper edge, came nearer, and showed itself against the blackness as a tiny animal.

  Wardell thought: “A photograph, by heaven; a moving photograph of some kind.”

  The thought sh
redded. A photograph of what?

  The animal looked tiny, but it was the damnedest horror his eyes had ever gazed on, a monstrous, many-legged, long-bodied, long-snouted, hideous miniature, a very caricature of abnormal life, a mad creation of an insane imagination.

  Wardell jumped—for the thing grew huge. It filled half that fantastic plate, and still it looked as if the picture was being taken from a distance.

  “What is it?” he heard Preedy gasp over his shoulder.

  Wardell did not answer—for the story was unfolding before their eyes.

  ~ * ~

  The fight in space had begun in the only way a devil-Blal was ever contacted: unexpectedly. Violent energies flashed; the inertialess police ship spun desperately as the automatics flared with incandescent destruction—too late.

  The monster showed high on the forward visiplate, a thin, orange radiance breaking out from its thick head. Commander Ral Dorno groaned as he saw that orange radiance hold off the white fire of the patrol vessel—just long enough to ruin the ship.

  “Space!” he yelled, “we didn’t get his Sensitives in time. We didn’t—”

  The small ship shuddered from stem to stern. Lights blinked and went out; the communicator huzzaed with alien noise, then went dead. The atomic motors stuttered from their soundless, potent jiving to a hoarse, throbby ratcheting. And stopped.

  The spaceship began to fall.

  Somewhere behind Dorno, a voice—Senna’s—yelled in relief, “Its Sensitives are turning black. We did get it. It’s falling, too.”

  Dorno made no reply. Four scaly arms held out in front of him, he fumbled his way from the useless visiplate and peered grimly through the nearest porthole.

  It was hard to see against the strong light of the sun of this planetary system, but finally he made out the hundred-foot-long, bullet-shaped monstrosity. The vicious ten-foot snout of the thing was opening and closing like the steel traps of a steam shovel. The armored legs pawed and clawed at the empty space; the long, heavy body writhed in a stupendous working of muscles.

  Dorno grew aware of somebody slipping up beside him. Without turning, he said tautly, “We’ve knocked out its Sensitives, all right. But it’s still alive. The pressure of the atmosphere of that planet below will slow it down sufficiently so that the fall will only stun it. We’ve got to try to use our rockets, so that we don’t land within five hundred negs of that thing. We’ll need at least a hundred tan-periods for repair, and—”

  “Commander . . . what is it?”

  The words were almost a gasp, so faint they were. Dorno recognized the whisper as coming from the novitiate, Carliss, his ship wife.

  It was still a little strange to him, having a wife other than Yarosan. And it took a moment in this crisis to realize that that veteran of many voyages was not with him. But Yarosan had exercised the privilege of patrol women.

  “I’m getting to the age where I want some children,” she had said, “and as, legally, only one of them can be yours, I want you, Ral, to find yourself a pretty trainee and marry her for two voyages—”

  Dorno turned slowly, vaguely irritated by the thought that there was somebody aboard who didn’t automatically know everything. He said curtly, “It’s a devil-Blal, a wild beast with an I.Q. of ten that haunts these outer, unexplored systems, where it hasn’t yet been exterminated. It’s abnormally ferocious. It has in its head what is called a sensitive area, where it organically manufactures enormous energies.

  “The natural purpose of those energies is to provide it with a means of transportation. Unfortunately, when that thing is on the move, any machine in the vicinity that operates on forces below the molecular level are saturated with that—organic—force. It’s a long, slow job draining it off, but it has to be done before a single atomic or electronic machine will function again.

  “Our automatics managed to destroy the Blal’s Sensitives at the same time it got us. We now have to destroy its body, but we can’t do that till we get our energy weapons into operation again. Everything clear?”

  Beside him, Carliss, the female Sahfid, nodded hesitantly. She said finally, “Suppose it lives on the planet below? And there are others there? What then?”

  Dorno sighed. “My dear,” he said, “there is a regulation that every crew member should familiarize himself or herself with data about any system which his ship happens to be approaching, passing, or—”

  “But we only saw this sun half a lan ago.”

  “It’s been registering on the multiboard for three lans—but never mind that. The planet below is the only one in this system that is inhabited. Its land area being one twentieth or more of the whole, it was colonized by the warm-blooded human beings of Wodesk. It is called Earth by its people, and has yet to develop space travel.

  “I could give you some astrogeographical technical information, including the fact that the devil-Blal wouldn’t willingly go near such a planet, because it most violently doesn’t like an eight-der gravity or the oxygen in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, it will live in spite of this physical and chemical irreconcilability; and that is the enormous, indeed, the absolutely mortal, danger.

  “It has a one-track hate mind. We have destroyed its main organic energy source, but actually its entire nervous system is a reservoir of sensitive forces. In its hunting, it has to project itself through space in pursuit of meteorites traveling many miles per second; to enable it to keep track of them ages ago it developed an ability to attune itself to any material body.

  “Because of the pain we have caused it, it has been attuned to us from the first energy exchange; therefore, as soon as it lands, it will start for us, no matter how far away we are. We must make sure it doesn’t get to us before we have a disintegrator ready. Otherwise—”

  “Surely it can’t damage a metalite spaceship.”

  “Not only can, but will. Its teeth are not just teeth. They project thin beams of energy that will dissolve any metal, however hard. And when it’s through with us, just imagine the incalculable damage it will do on Earth before the patrol discovers what has happened—all this not counting the fact that it is considered an absolute catastrophe by galactic psychologists when a planet learns before it should that there is an enormously superior galactic civilization.”

  “I know.” Carliss nodded vigorously. “The regulation is that if any inhabitant of such a planet so much as glimpses us, we must kill him or her forthwith.”

  Dorno made a somber sound of agreement, summarized grimly, “Our problem accordingly is to land far enough from the beast to protect ourselves, destroy it before it can do any harm, and finally make certain that no human being sees us.”

  He finished: “And now I suggest that you observe how Senna uses the rocket tubes to bring us down safely in this emergency landing. He-”

  A gas light flickered outside the door of the control room. The Sahfid who came in was bigger, even, than the powerful Dorno. He carried a globe that burned mistily and shed a strong white light.

  “I have bad news,” said Senna. “You will recall we used rocket fuel chasing the Kjev outlaws and have not yet had the opportunity of replacing it. We shall have to land with a minimum of maneuvering.”

  Even after Senna went out, Dorno had nothing to say. There was nothing to say—for here was disaster.

  They labored—Dorno and Carliss, Senna and Degel, his wife—with a quiet, relentless fury. After four lans, all the drainers were in position, and there was nothing to do but wait drearily while the electronic structures normalized in their agonizingly slow way. Dorno said:

  “Some of the smaller motors, and the useless hand weapons, and the power tools in the machine shop will be in operation before the devil-Blal arrives. But nothing of value. It will require four day-and-night periods of this planet before the drive motors and the disintegrators are working again—and that makes it rather hopeless.

  “I suppose we could fashion some kind of reaction gun, using the remnants of our rocket fuel as a propellant. B
ut they would only enrage the beast.”

  He shrugged. “I’m afraid it’s useless. According to our final observations, the monster will have landed about a hundred negs north of us, and so it will be here some time tomorrow. We—”

  There was a clang as the molecular alarms went off. A few moments later, they watched the schooner creep through the narrows, then hastily back out again. Dorno’s unwinking, lidless eyes watched thoughtfully until the whaler was out of sight.

  He did not speak immediately, but spent some time examining the automatic photographs, which were entirely chemical in their operation and therefore unaffected by the catastrophe that had struck the rest of the ship. He said finally, slowly, “I’m not sure, but I think we’re in luck. The enlargers show that that ship has two guns aboard, and one of those guns has a hooked thing protruding from it. That gives me an idea. We must, if necessary, use our remaining rocket fuel to stay near the vessel until I have been aboard and investigated.”