Invaders of Earth

by Groff Conklin

  “Be careful!” said Carliss anxiously.

  “My transparent armor,” Dorno told her, “will protect me from all except the most sustained gunfire.”

  A warm sun blazed down on the bay, and that made utterly surprising the bitter cold of the water. The icy feel of it in his gills was purest agony—but even the brief examination of the harpoon gun from the fo’c’sle hatchway told him that here was the answer.

  “A most remarkable weapon,” he told his companions when he returned to the patrol ship. “It will require a stronger explosive to drive it into the Blal and, of course, better metal in every phase of its construction. I shall have to go back for measurements and later to install the new equipment. But that will be simple. I succeeded in negating their fuel.”

  He ended, “That will have to be rectified at the proper time. They must be able to maneuver when the Blal arrives.”

  “But will they fight?” asked Carliss.

  Dorno smiled mirthlessly. “My dear,” he said, “that is something that we shall not leave to chance. A scopeograph film will tell them the rather appalling story. As for the rest, we shall simply keep their ship between ourselves and the devil-Blal. The beast will sense life force aboard their vessel and, in its stupid way, connect them with us. Yes, I can guarantee that they’ll fight.”

  Carliss said, “The Blal might even save us the trouble of having to kill them later.”

  Dorno looked at her thoughtfully. “Oh, yes,” he said, “the regulations! I assure you that we shall carry them out to the letter.”

  He smiled. “Some day, Carliss, you must read them all. The great ones who prepared them for us to administer made them comprehensive. Very comprehensive.”

  ~ * ~

  Wardell’s fingers whitened on his binoculars as he studied the great, bulging back that glinted darkly in the swell half a mile to the north, bearing straight down on the ship. The monster left a gleaming trail in the sea as it swam with enormous power.

  In a way, the part of it that was visible looked like nothing other than a large whale. Wardell clutched at the wild hope and then—

  A spume of water sprayed the sea, and his illusion smashed like a bulletproof jacket before a cannon ball.

  Because no whale on God’s wide oceans had ever retched water in such a formidable fashion. Wardell had a brief, vivid mental picture of ten-foot jaws convulsively working under the waves and spreading water like a bellows.

  For a moment, he felt violent anger at himself that he should have imagined, even for a second, it was a whale. Rage died as it struck him that the thought was not really a wasted one. For it was a reminder that he had all his years played a game where fear was not a factor.

  Very slowly, very carefully, he straightened. He called in a calm, resonant voice, “Men, we’re in this whether we like it or not. So let’s take it in our stride, like the damnedest best whalers in the business—”

  ~ * ~

  All the damage to the Albatross was done in the first two minutes after the harpoon belched forth from Art Zote’s gun.

  At that cruel blow, a nightmare, eyeless head, champing tons of water, reared up; and the attack was a flailing thing of armored legs that stamped as madly at the sea as at the frantically backing schooner.

  She was clear at last; and Wardell, clambering shakily out of the ruin of the bridge, grew aware for the first time of the thunderous engines of the lizard’s ship and of a second harpoon sticking in the side of the monster—the harpoon’s gleaming coppery tail extending tenuous and taut back to the scale-armored vessel.

  Four more harpoons lashed forth, two from each ship; and then they had the thing stretched between them.

  For a solid hour Art Zote pumped the remnants of their shells into a body that writhed with an agonized but unkillable ferocity.

  And then, for three long days and nights, they hung on, while a beast that wouldn’t die twisted and fought with a senseless and endless fury. . . .

  It was the fourth morning.

  From the shattered deck of his ship, Wardell watched the scene on the other vessel. Two lizards were setting up a curious, glittering structure that began to glow with a gray, misty light.

  The almost palpable mist poured onto the beast in the sea; and where it struck was—change—that became—nothingness.

  There was not a sound now, not a movement, aboard the Albatross. Men stood where they were and stared in a semiparalyzed fascination as a one-hundred-ton monster yielded its elements before the transcendental force that was tearing at it.

  A long half hour passed before that hard and terrible body was dissolved. . . .

  The glittering disintegrator was withdrawn then, and for a while there was—deadness. A thin fog appeared on the horizon to the north and blew over the two ships. Wardell waited with his men, tense and cold and—wondering.

  “Let’s get out of here,” somebody said. “I don’t trust those scoundrels even after we helped them.”

  Wardell shrugged helplessly. “What can we do? That bag of chemical powder they threw aboard, along with the motion-picture machine, released only one fuel tank, and that the half-empty one. We’ve used all except a few gallons in maneuvering. We. . . .”

  “Damn those scum!” another man moaned. “It’s the mysterious way they did it all that I don’t like. Why, if they wanted our help, didn’t they come and ask us?”

  Wardell hadn’t realized how great his own tension was. The sailor’s words brought a wave of rage.

  “Oh, sure,” he said scathingly, “I can just picture it. I can just see us rolling out the welcome mat—with a blast from our three-incher.

  “And if they ever did get to tell us that they wanted to take the measurements of our harpoon gun, so they could build one of their own, and would we let them fix ours so that it would hold twenty whales at once, and would we please hang around here until that hellish thing arrived— Oh, yes, we would have stayed. Like hell we would!

  “But they weren’t as big saps as all that. It’s the damnedest coldblooded thing I ever saw pulled off, but we stayed because we had to, and no please or thank you about it. The thing that worries me is the fact that we’ve never seen their kind before, or heard of them. That might only prove that dead men have told no tales, but . . .”

  His voice faded, for there was life again on the lizard ship, another structure being set up: smaller, duller in appearance than the first and equipped with odd, gunlike projectors.

  Wardell went rigid, then his bellow echoed across the deck:

  “That can only be for us. Art, you’ve still got three shells. Stand by, ready to fire. . . .”

  A puff of silver-shining smoke cut off his words, his thoughts, his consciousness—instantaneously.

  ~ * ~

  Dorno’s soft, hissing voice made a quiet design of sound against the silence of the spaceship cabin:

  “The regulations are designed to protect the moral continuity of civilization and to prevent a too literal interpretation of basic laws by time-calloused or thoughtless administrators. It is right that low-degree planets should be protected from contact, so vitally right that death is a justifiable measure against those who glimpse the truth, BUT—”

  Dorno smiled, said, “When important assistance has been rendered a galactic citizen or official, no matter what the circumstances, it is morally necessary to the continuity of civilized conduct that other means be taken to prevent the tale from spreading.

  “There are precedents, of course,” Dorno added quietly. “Accordingly, I have been plotting our new course. It will take us past the distant sun of Wodesk, from whose green and wonderful planets Earth was originally colonized.

  “It will not be necessary to keep our guests in a cataleptic state. As soon as they recover from the effects of the silver gas, let them . . . experience the journey.”

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  ~ * ~

  PART TWO

  THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE:

  It May Happen Yet

>   NOW let imagination rage and horrors flit around! For we are, in this section, freed from the necessity of having to assume that our stories may actually have happened. Here our only concern is that the tales tell of things that are not too impossible.

  With no holds barred, it would be easy to turn this section into a horrendous mess of invincible monsters, telepathic Things, or invisible spirits that blithely, openly, take us over and that’s that. There have been hundreds of such stories published during the past couple of decades; next to the space opera, the “borax” invasion story is probably the most oft encountered form of science fiction in the pulps.

  In this section, however, an effort has been made to keep the BEMS down to a minimum and the overwhelming catastrophes within the realm of at least superreason. Not every story ends with the possible, probable, or actual elimination of the human race. Some, indeed, assume that the human race itself is going places and that those places are not up in smoke.

  But we must have one or two tales of attempted or actually completed conquest of the human race. The section opens with a tale which ominously threatens invasion—and obviously a bloody one, too—and then goes on to one of the most famous of all tales of attempted conquest of Earth. And still farther on you will find mankind in various stages of submission, slavery, or camaraderie, with or to, odd creatures or forces from outer space. Very appetizing futures to look forward to, indeed—all of them!

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  ~ * ~

  Karl Grunert

  ENEMIES IN SPACE

  Translated by Willy Ley

  The following tale, surprisingly lively for a story published in 1907, is a fit opening for this section, which deals with tomorrow’s invasions— particularly since it tells of an invasion that is thus far only planned and has not yet actually happened. There is, of course, a pleasantly old-fashioned ring to some of its aspects—the Russo-Japanese War was still hot stuff when it was written—and its preoccupation with a rather oversimple code message is typical of stories of an earlier generation than ours. Nevertheless, the author’s awareness of the possibilities of radio is genuinely scientific; his alien airships are not too dissimilar to our ultramodern flying saucers; and his concept of political conflict among the inhabitants of the planet planning the invasion is an unusually mature one for science fiction of any age.

  Translator’s Note:

  Most Americans have probably never heard of Karl Grunert, and this is not surprising, since this is to my knowledge the first time one of his science-fiction short stories has ever been translated.

  Grunert was born in 1865, in the city of Naumberg an der Saale. However, before telling more about him, it is first necessary to make a few remarks about another German, Kurd Lasswitz. Lasswitz was born in Breslau in 1848, and studied natural history, history of philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics. After his appointment as professor of mathematics at Gotha in 1876, he began writing imaginative fiction and in 1897 published his great Mars novel, Auf Zwei Planeten (On Two Planets), which became an immediate success. Among the people who admired it enormously was the thirty-two-year-old Karl Grunert.

  Grunert began dreaming along the lines of Lasswitz’s novel then, but did not actually turn to writing himself until Lasswitz had published two volumes of science-fiction short stories a few years later. He then wrote Lasswitz that the short story was the form he had been looking for (all earlier science fiction, with a few exceptions such as the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Fitz James O’Brien, had consisted of book-length novels) and that he would, with Lasswitz’s permission, work in the same form and use some of Lasswitz’s own characters.

  From that point on, the brief literary career of Karl Grunert is easily told. Four volumes of his science-fiction short stories were published between 1905 and 1907, and then, suddenly and surprisingly, he died.

  Among the twenty short stories in the four books, four were about Mars, only one of which was based on Lasswitz’s material—not the one reprinted here. Of the four stories, “Enemies in Space” seems to have been the first one written, although it appeared in the last of Grunert’s books. Although the Martians are not even mentioned, the later tales make it obvious that the invaders were from that planet. In the others, the Martians are actually on Earth, disguised as humans and working as agents. One of them is an assistant to Percival Lowell, a real American astronomer who founded the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona, and is best known for his careful studies of the planet Mars. This assistant works as a photographer, and his job as agent is to destroy all astronomical plates that happen to show Martian spaceships. Another Martian spy, a female, works in a German observatory.

  Grunert’s Martians differ physically from humans; they have a third eye in the forehead and six fingers and toes. The Martian in Lowell’s observatory disguises himself by means of hat and gloves, but the one in Germany uses a new Martian invention: a cape fashioned of living organisms that change their color with the utmost rapidity, to match their environment. While the cape does not render its wearer completely invisible, it is quite effective—especially as long as the humans know nothing about it.

  The following story has been translated from the 1907 German text without change except for the elision of about fifteen per cent of the original, consisting of sentimental or philosophical soliloquies and meanderings that contributed absolutely nothing to the story.

  Willy Ley

  ~ * ~

  JUSTUS STARCK slowly sat down in a chair near the window of his small workroom on the sixth floor of one of the tallest apartment houses in the German capital. The window offered no view other than the gray, bare fire wall of a neighboring building. To others the room might have looked cell-like, but ordinarily Starck paid no attention to it, being fully and happily occupied with his books and his work.

  That day, however, he felt weak and lonely. The rejection should not have come just today, on the anniversary of the death of his only sister. They had been orphaned early, and his sister, being several years older, had taken his mother’s place while he worked and studied to make up for the lack of education in his childhood. He had finally succeeded in getting a job as a draftsman in the engineering office of the Power Plant Company, and he and his sister had celebrated the occasion. He had succeeded in incorporating many of his minor ideas into his work and had attracted some favorable attention.

  Then his sister died, and he spent his now lonely evenings on some work of his own. Successful work—or so it had looked until today, when he was informed that his innovation could not be used.

  His eyes wandered to the table where he had his wireless receiving set, incorporating his own invention. It had seemed so promising. And there had been so many hours of thought and work before it took the shape that he now saw.

  For many months he had been thinking about an improved receiver for Hertzian waves, for wireless telegraphy which had become practical through the efforts of Marconi, Slaby and Arco, Braun, and others, and which had just proved its enormous value in the Russo-Japanese War. But the range was not what one would wish, in spite of the high voltages with which the transmitter worked. To increase the range it was necessary to increase the sensitivity of the receiver—a small apparatus consisting essentially of a glass tube, about as long as a finger, with two pistons of silver that were separated by only about a millimeter. This narrow space was filled with metal filings.

  It is still not known just how Justus Starck increased the sensitivity of his device so enormously: whether he used a special way of preparing the filings, or substituted organic material, or whether he had applied a new principle. At any event, the incredible sensitivity of his device visibly impressed the experts of the Long Range Radio Corporation, who had tested it thoroughly.

  But it had been rejected just the same, Starck did not know why. It may have been a vague distrust against an invention made by a “mere draftsman,” or somebody’s personal envy; officially it was stated that the new receiver was “too sensiti
ve” to be used with the firm’s normal equipment.

  Justus looked thoughtfully at the small device, dreaming about the picture of the future which he had hoped to secure through it. And then there was that other dream about the future—a dream coupled with the picture of a girl whom he had met one day in the drafting room of the power station, where she had come to meet her father, who was one of the directors.

  Justus got up abruptly and went to the worktable where the receiver stood. He made it ready and connected the antenna switch. He had not picked the apartment on the sixth floor merely because it was cheaper, but largely because it was so easy to get to the roof, where his antenna systems were located.

  ~ * ~

  It was not quite midnight when he returned. He had gone to eat someplace and had then walked the streets for a long time, busy with his thoughts. He was physically tired but mentally alert when he returned; his dejection had worn off. For a moment he sat down at his desk and closed his eyes to think.