Invaders of Earth

by Groff Conklin

  “What kind of bench?” Raven asked. “What work?”

  “Just for some simple experiments,” Sereda coaxed. “They will make no trouble. And I will make my own tools and equipment.”

  Raven was again reminded unaccountably of the grave consideration of children, in which all things are either so or not so, with no stops en route.

  “I humored the little guy,” he explained to Ferris next evening. “He was so darn serious about it. And it shouldn’t do any particular harm. I wonder when and where and what he eats.”

  “I dunno, but he sure got his bench up in a hurry.”

  “Is it in already?” Raven asked.

  “Such as it is,” grinned Ferris.

  They went over and examined it together, while Sereda stood respectfully to one side. The bench was constructed from some plastic metal, rough and pitted, but solid-looking. As Ferris said afterward, it looked as though the metal had been chewed into shape. Raven rubbed his hand reflectively over the surface and withdrew it at once.

  “Not a very level working plane, Sereda,” he said.

  “It will smooth itself,” Sereda ventured.

  “What is it?” asked Ferris, touching the bench gingerly. It had a curious feel, a faint resilience. Ferris had a momentary impression that the bench was feeling him, appraising him, as he touched it. Sereda mumbled something incomprehensible in answer to the question, and Raven announced it was time to get to work, as though he was glad to dismiss the bench from his mind.

  Trouble was, it wouldn’t stay dismissed. The subject came up again next evening when Raven came in about nine. Ferris was up on the platform, and Sereda was in his corner on the main floor of the building.

  “He must have polished on that bench all day,” said Ferris in amusement. “We should turn him loose on some of the brasswork. See how shiny he got it?”

  “I saw it,” Raven answered shortly.

  Bob Ferris looked at him in surprise. It was one of the few times he had ever heard Raven speak abruptly. He followed the direction of the older man’s gaze. The astronomer was looking at Sereda’s workbench. It looked small from that elevation, and every plane of it showed a reflection, as if light were striking it from every direction.

  “Did you ever try to polish a piece of steel, Bob?” asked Raven suddenly.

  “No,” Ferris said, “I never did. Why?”

  “It’s a job,” said Raven. “If Sereda had used the fastest cutting wheels known—even phosphor bronze dipped in oil and diamond dust—and worked all night with the skill and precision of a machine, he might have finished that surface. Shaping the legs and braces—well, that’s impossible!”

  “That may not be as hard as steel,” argued Ferris.

  Raven grinned sheepishly. “That’s it, of course,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I was getting my wind up over nothing. Just the same—”

  “Look here, sir,” Ferris suggested, “if this little guy annoys you, I’ll chuck him out. I’ll get rid of him. Just say the word.”

  “I wish I dared,” said Raven.

  ~ * ~

  Dr. Raven would have been hard put to find words for his uneasiness. There wasn’t anything so menacing about Sereda. In fact, the little man seemed to have a definite code of conduct. But it was a code based on some odd tangent. It was, Raven decided, like trying to fit the behavior of a highly civilized person into the society of Australian bushmen. He ran headlong into it in one of his conversations with Sereda. Raven felt the workbench was getting a little out of hand.

  “You asked for room for a workbench,” he reminded Sereda. “I agreed. But this”—he waved toward the twenty-five-foot segment of shining metal—”this is more than I bargained for.”

  “It’s the same bench,” said Sereda.

  Raven smiled tolerantly. It was easily five times as long as the original bench had been, and along its whole length it gleamed dully. Raven would have given plenty for an analysis of the metal it was made from, yet he shrank from touching it.

  “What makes it shine like that?” he asked.

  Sereda smiled. “Light is life. Light is good,” he said. “Darkness is evil. Darkness is death.”

  “Nonsense,” Raven said, not unkindly. “You’re just afraid of the dark. It’s a common phobia, but you should try to overcome it.”

  Sereda’s wide mouth thinned, but it did not lose its upturned smile. “Light is good,” he repeated stubbornly.

  “Another thing,” Raven went on. “Where are you getting your materials? This table—these tools?”

  He supposed they were tools, though he had never seen anything like them. They were many-shaped. Curving, slender fingers of shining metal. Odd coils, luminous and fragile. Stubby rods and queer, transparent chunks. The shapes were strange, yet vaguely reminiscent.

  “They are needed in my work,” Sereda answered.

  “See here,” Raven protested. “You seem to have a knack for metal-work, and I’m delighted to let you amuse yourself. But you mustn’t interfere with the observatory in what you call your work. What is your work, anyway?”

  “There must be more light. Now there is half darkness. Darkness is evil, is death. To destroy the darkness is to create life.”

  Raven’s black eyes glinted in amusement.

  “Fiat lux, and all that,” he commented. “Well, if you’re going to abolish nighttime, you’ve picked yourself a real job.”

  ~ * ~

  Raven didn’t stop to wonder how the job was shaping up or how it was being done. Not for several weeks. Then it was brought to his attention sharply. Ferris stopped by to give Dr. Raven a lift on this particular evening, so they arrived at the observatory together, quite a bit earlier than usual. The Sun was still touching Mount Palomar, though shadows were deepening in the valley below. They sat in the car for a while, watching the sunset.

  “That little Sereda is wacky,” Ferris said abruptly.

  “What brought that on?” asked Raven.

  Ferris pointed. Sereda was coming up the footpath to the observatory. He was carrying something heavy, and twice he stopped to look back. He climbed so as to be always on the edge of the sunlight as it lifted slowly up the hillside.

  “He’s lining the observatory,” Ferris said.

  “Lining it?”

  “Lining it with metal like his bench.” Ferris sounded more worried than amused. “He’s got one big section of the wall finished.”

  “The hell you say,” commented Raven.

  “What I want to know is, who is this Sereda? Where did he come from? What’s he trying to do? He’s doing things that aren’t possible. They aren’t even human!”

  “Now don’t get upset, Bob,” said Raven.

  “And another thing! People down in the valley say things are being stolen, and they’ve traced it to somebody on the mountain. All kinds of metal. One man said fifty of his chickens were killed, and their hearts cut out.”

  Raven swore softly. His biochemistry was rusty, but he remembered something about the Carrell-Lindbergh experiments—living tissue that grew in chemical solution. He resolved to read up on it when he got home.

  Sereda came over the last turn of the path and saw the car. He hesitated, then walked slowly over to it. He was carrying a big coil of wire that he rested on the ground beside him. He put his hand on the car door, and Raven noticed that his fingers seemed dusted with some metallic powder. Briefly, they seemed to be only caricatures of human fingers. “He’s taller, too,” Raven thought.

  “The dark is coming,” Sereda said.

  “It’ll be light tonight,” Raven answered, and pointed to the full moon on the horizon.

  “Not light enough,” answered Sereda.

  He gazed at the silver Moon face, and his eyes narrowed to dreamy slits.

  “There is a proper orb, one that doesn’t spin madly to evade the light,” he remarked. “It must be a peaceful, homelike place.”

  “Like your home, Sereda?” asked Raven.

  He h
eld his breath, but Sereda shouldered his coil of wire and went into the observatory without answering. Ferris got out of the car and followed. Raven rubbed his fingers along the car door. Where Sereda’s hand had rested, four almost imperceptible hollows could be felt, as though the resting fingers had sunk into the metal. His lips tightened, and he went into the building with the hair on his neck rising.

  ~ * ~

  It was too light inside the dome. Ferris made a wry face, for there was a subdued radiance about the whole lower level, a glow that seemed to reflect from the smooth metal walls. Sereda was not in sight.

  “That tears it!” said Ferris angrily. “Look at those walls! I’m going to throw that little—”

  He stopped, for overhead the whine of the machines began, the machines that open the dome and focus the big two-hundred-incher. Somebody had started the mechanism of the world’s largest telescope. Ferris was outraged.

  With a roar of anger he went up the steps to the platform. Raven started to follow, then stopped as if struck and walked unbelievingly to the workbench. Sereda had tossed the coil of wire on it as he came in. But what Raven saw was not the coil. It was a puddle of metal, still marked with looping lines to show it had been a coil of wire, but a puddle of cold, flowing metal that was slowly being absorbed into the surface of the table. He saw something else. Yesterday he had scratched a mark on the concrete floor, to determine the limit to which the workbench extended. It was now past his mark, by several feet.

  Ferris’s voice floated down furiously from the platform, followed by the chiming tones of Sereda. “What manner of man or devil is this?” thought Raven, and he went up the steps like a shadow.

  The two stood facing each other, their heads swimming into view in the moonlight that streamed through the opened dome. The giant telescope had been leveled directly at the satellite. Sereda’s eyes were almost closed, and there was a beatific smile on his round face. Ferris put out a hand as Raven came up and gripped the older man’s arm with a convulsive clutch.

  “He wants to be the telescope,” he said in a tight, flat voice.

  “That’s all right, Bob,” Dr. Raven answered uncomprehendingly. “Let him see it. He can’t damage anything by looking in the viewplate while we’re here.”

  “He doesn’t want to see it, he wants to be it!” Ferris corrected, and Sereda’s disembodied head nodded in vigorous confirmation.

  Raven made a startled, desperate effort to keep his voice even. “That’s a big step to take, Sereda. Why do you want to be a telescope, anyway?”

  Sereda’s wide slit of a mouth opened, and he bayed gently. “Crazy as a barn owl,” thought Raven, “and I’m not far behind him.” The words that tumbled out were mad, stream-of-consciousness fragments. “—glory of the lights that burn in the heavens, and are never dim, and are always bright, and life is in them, in the flow of light from the living stars—” Ferris looked as if he were going to be sick. Raven’s black brows made a sharp diagonal across his forehead as one lifted and the other squinted down in a thoughtful scowl.

  “Look, Sereda,” he said. “In the viewplate.”

  ~ * ~

  They bent over the telescope, and the full Moon rode in solemn majesty, seeming at a distance of about thirteen miles from Mount Palo-mar. The face was at once transformed into mountains and plains: cratered peaks that seemed to reach almost into touch, and plains that spread dizzily like seas across the moonscape.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be the Moon?” His voice was soft.

  Sereda looked at him thoughtfully.

  “You could make it shine,” Raven coaxed. “You could make it live and shine with light, and all the stars in all the sky would send their light to you.”

  Sereda bent over the viewplate again.

  “No air to cut out the light,” said Raven.

  Sereda turned, and his head floated out of sight as he walked out of the moonlight and down the stairs. His feet made the faintest clanging noise on the metal steps. Raven turned soberly to Ferris.

  “This is invasion,” he said.

  Throughout the night they could hear Sereda below. An occasional clash of metal rang like a muffled bell. The radiance within the vault of the observatory dimmed gradually as he made trip after laden trip out the door.

  Twice Raven’s curiosity took him to the lower level. Once it was to try a drop of reagent acid on a fragment of the luminous metal. Nothing happened. The drop clung for a moment, then the metal seemed to twitch and the drop rolled off and fell to the floor. There was no trace or stain on the metal.

  The second trip was close to morning. There was no sign of Sereda in the building. Raven looked outside and saw the little creature had piled his metal and his tools into a rough stack about twelve feet long. He had evidently grown tired, for he was lying across the pile, and in the wan moonlight he seemed half melted into the metal scraps on which he lay. The whole contour of the pile was rounded and streamlined.

  Toward morning, there was a whooshing noise from outside, and when dawn came Sereda was gone. There was a shallow, rounded trench in front of the observatory, a bed about twelve feet long that looked as though it had been chewed from solid rock. That was the only trace, the only evidence that Sereda had ever been there.

  ~ * ~

  Ferris and Raven both thought about the queer being a good many times in the succeeding weeks, but they did not speak about him until the press of circumstances forced them to. When the newspapers began talking about the Moon’s strange brilliance, they could ignore it no longer.

  Ferris looked up from his calculation. “The albedo is completely cockeyed,” he said. “It’s reflecting about five times as much light as it should.”

  Raven’s knobby hands moved from the wrists in a characteristic gesture of puzzlement, like the working of a claw machine. He looked at Ferris and saw only the untroubled interest of a schoolboy who has just found an unusual problem for his teacher. He spoke in the indulgent tone a fond parent might use to describe the actions of a naughty child.

  Raven looked again at the Moon. “It’s like . . . like stainless steel,” he said, “or that stuff—’”

  “Sereda’s metal,” Ferris agreed. He chuckled reminiscently. “He was a funny little man.”

  “He wasn’t funny,” said Raven. “The last time we saw him he wasn’t little. And I’m damn near convinced he wasn’t a man.”

  Ferris looked startled.

  “If he was human,” Raven continued, “he’s done one of two things. He’s either brought the science of symbiosis to perfection or established a metalline economy.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Ferris. “Symbiosis is the combining of two life forms, like the union of spores and fungi to create lichen.”

  “That’s what it is to us,” Raven said. “We don’t know what it might be to some entity outside earthly experience. Sereda fits no earthly matrix.”

  “What are you trying to do, tell me he was the ‘man from Mars’?”

  “Remember what he said the night he left? ‘A proper orb, one that doesn’t spin madly to evade the light.’”

  “Mercury!” gasped Ferris.

  “There was a meteor shower about a month ago,” Raven recalled. “Meteors that came from Mercury’s orbit. Probably half a dozen struck the Earth. Bob, they weren’t meteors.” He repeated what he had said that other night. “This is invasion.”

  Ferris looked back at the scope. “The contours are going,” he said.

  Raven bent over the viewplate. The familiar peaks and valleys of the Moon were almost gone. As he watched, he fancied he could see the easy flow of brilliance that was making the Moon’s surface as smooth and polished as a marble. Even through the tremendous eye of Mount Palomar, it was now impossible to see more than a ripple on the gleaming sphere.

  He looked at Ferris. “It’s supposed to be only a quarter bright,” he said. “The rest of it’s shining by its own light.”

  “Look now!” Ferris said excitedly.

  Rave
n’s eyebrows met in a black diagonal across his forehead. Upon the luminous face of the Moon new lines were showing. Not the line of contour shadow that had once marked the satellite, but flat, black marks such as a child might draw to form a picture. They were very faint, and he thought they would not be visible to a less powerful telescope than this one.

  “See it?” asked Bob Ferris.

  “Yeah,” said Raven, scowling at the viewplate. “It’s complete, even to the wide smile and the black mole on his chin.”

  “Well, Dr. Raven, that ought to ease your mind,” Ferris said. “Your invasion turns out to be a new Man in the Moon.”