“The higher members of our race, whom you see about you now, took over bodies—but even then there was a surplus of crystal material which still needed bodies. One body, in the watchtower, separate from the rest, we dare not investigate for fear there might be air present in dense quantity. Such would have been fatal to us. We could only conjecture about the solitary watcher—have conjectured for many ages indeed, until you came out of the void. Machines registered your arrival, and to our delight you broke the dome. That enabled me to take over that body. But still there is surplus crystal…”
The man paused, something grimly significant in his last words. Then, as Len and Rex attempted no reply, he went on:
“I saw that the record which had lain so long under the man’s hand had gone. Only you could have taken it. We have had time to learn the language of the men, of course—and yours too by way of radio transmission. But the cause of these manlike beings from Earth being present here has never been solved—until now.”
The man waved the foils in his hand.
“What is it? A log?” Len asked, curiosity ahead of the present danger.
“One might call it a last statement of events,” the man replied. “It seems that he was the last of his race. He died, voluntarily like his fellows by cutting off the air pumps and opening the valves to the void. Told briefly, it seems that he and his fellows left Earth because the sun was shielded by a cosmic cloud which had entirely enveloped Earth and shut off the luminary. This cloud, it seems, created a Glacial Epoch, of which you may have some knowledge.
“These scientists saw their race dying under the sun-blot. No other planet was safe to visit, so they created a synthetic planet in the void close to Earth by fusing together streams of meteoric matter and adding it to matter projected by their own mammoth space guns. Ultimately, they fashioned a small, heavy world. They migrated to it, fully believing they would be free from the blight enveloping Earth. But something went wrong with their gravitational anchors and their little world was hurled into furthest space, to become—to become this world you call Pluto.
“Here, with the scant few who had survived, and all of them males, which made any chance of perpetuation impossible, they sought the underground, for the atmosphere had almost been whipped away and the solar heat gone. But our life, cold-life spores which had always remained dormant on Earth’s warm surface, came into being in the airless cold. So our life occupied the surface and evolved into intelligent crystal protoplasm, while below was the type of life about which we had wondered.
“These Earthmen—and the Earthman in the tower particularly, for he was an astronomer—had studied his world to see the outcome of the Blight. He saw that his magnificent race had been reduced to cavemen, the survivors that is, and were walking the icy plains of the now clear world. Atavism, caused by the blocking of vital solar rays, had set in…
“To return to a world of cavemen was useless: better to wait until they evolved. But evolution only brought wars and strife, so these scientists, virtually trapped in a world of their own making, decided on voluntary relinquishment of life. Thus runs the log…The astronomer in the tower was the last to die and made the final record…”
“So that’s the explanation,” Len mused. “It explains the Glacial Epoch, Pluto’s queer size in relation to the four giant outer worlds, and perhaps even solves the mystery of our mighty extinct civilisations, the remains of which are still found.”
“What it explains,” said the Plutonian, “is of little importance. Naturally, we are gratified to have the problem solved, but more pressing things concern us. I have explained how we have taken over these dead, frozen bodies for our own purposes—how we are the rightful denizens of this frigid world. I have also mentioned that there is surplus crystal waiting for a home—crystal which you have seen for yourselves. It requires—just two more bodies! Then our race is complete. There will be no limit to what we can do.”
Len’s eyes narrowed. “So that’s the idea, eh? You want us? That damned crystal stuff wants to split into two and sink into both of us as it did into the guy in the tower. Try it!” he finished grimly, and then thrilled as his hand clamped on his empty gun holster. He had forgotten his loss for the moment.
“It will not be difficult,” the Plutonian said coldly. “One puncture in your suits and your bodies will instantly freeze to the desired hardness for us to take possession. Then we can use your legs, your arms, your tongues for speech…”
He stopped and made a motion. In response the flowing mass of the crystal which had been near the doorway came forward, swelling and flowing as usual within itself.
Len and Rex stared at it in horrified fascination, unable to absorb the fact that here was a form of Earth life which had never been suspected—zero life—filled with merciless and superhuman intelligence. Perhaps it hadn’t been such a mistake on Nature’s part after all to pin it down with a useless physical vestment, for given the priceless appendages of hands and feet there were clearly no shackles on its ambition.
“Only one thing to do,” Rex murmured through his intercom. “Make a dash for it! The ship’s not far away, anyhow, and the valves to the exterior are open. I’m for chancing it.”
Len nodded his helmeted head—then suddenly the pair of them swung round, dived for the nearest gap in the encircling men and fled for their lives to the door of the huge chamber. They found they had miscalculated the speed of their foes, however, for, with lightning movements, the zero-men wheeled round, charged after them, barred the doorway with their bodies.
Furious, desperate, Len clenched his fist and drove it with stunning force into the blank, granite-like face in front of him. A cold, sickly chill went through him as he found the power of his punch had knocked the man’s head right off! No blood flowed: the body was as hard and brittle as though it had been immersed in liquid air—but there was something revolting about seeing the head go flying, to smash into a thousand splinters on the floor. It had been like hitting a plaster statue.
Len hesitated, appalled—and his horror rose still higher when the man did not drop, but continued to bar the way! Of course! The truth flashed through Len’s mind. The creature did not rely on the dead man’s nerves, arteries and muscles. He merely used them, could do without them if need be. Instinct was his sole guide. The missing head made no difference as long as the body could move…
With a terrific effort Len mastered himself, punched again. This time he missed and the others came piling up on him. Thick and fast he and Rex hit out, right and left, knocking off the men’s fingers here and there, smashing forearms like carrots, generally hurling themselves through the creatures which sought by every possible means to stop them.
The leader came hurrying up and fired his gun. By a fluke he missed—and by that time the two men were through the doorway, pursued by the weirdest assortment of damaged men that ever came out of a nightmare—and behind them again moved that expanding, spreading crystal life.
This stuff indeed was the more deadly by reason of the length to which it could stretch itself and so bar the path. Despite the speed at which the two men travelled, it somehow headed them off as they raced for the still yawning valve-way.
Baffled, Len slid to a stop and looked sharply about him.
“In here!” he panted, nodding to a building.
They dived for the open doorway of the building, then paused a moment as they noted that two of the zero men had gone ahead and were busy closing the valves to shut off all avenue of escape. Then they came back to their fellows and the crystal. Both began to converge slowly on the building where the two Earthmen stood indecisively.
They backed inside, amongst machines. So far as they could tell, the place was some kind of factory. With their eyes fixed on the damaged men and the crystalline, they did not notice where they were backing, but they suddenly realised with horror that they were stopped against a wall. They could retreat no further.
Len flashed a glance behind him, then swallowed hard
. It was not a wall, but the oval side of an immense machine as long as a locomotive, and if it came to that it wasn’t unlike one either. It seemed from the brief glance he gave it to be bristling with valves and wheels, its whole ponderous mass connected to a switchboard close by.
Sideways and backwards, there was no escape now. Forward meant another charge at the creatures, but this time they were ready to balk all efforts. And the leader had his gun ready, too, obviously reluctant to use it in case he damaged the potential “carriers” of the crystal life too severely.
“Climb on to this machine!” Rex cried. “It’s the only thing to do. Might fight them from the top of it.”
He set the example by blundering up the side of the machine, hanging on to the wheels and valves to support himself. Len followed immediately, fell back again as one of the wheels span unresisting in his fingers. Then he was clawing his way up the bellying mass, kicking at the fierce, brittle hands which tried to drag him back.
By dint of hard effort the pair of them reached the top, stood waiting grimly to sell their lives as dearly as possible. All chance of escaping from the machine into the further reaches of the building were negated by some of the creatures grouping in readiness round the back. To slide down into their clutches would be suicide.
“Okay, let them have it!” Len decided finally, as the first zero-man clawed his way to the machine’s top.
He lashed out with the toe of his heavy boot, struck the man under the jaw. It cracked his chin, but he came on doggedly, backed by the rest of his fellows swarming beside him.
Len drew back his fist to the limit, but he never landed the smashing blow he had intended, for the thin, fiery stream of the leader’s raygun slashed at him, tore a gaping hole through the sleeve of his spacesuit.
Hardly had Len realised the fact that he was doomed before icy coldness stabbed throughout the interior of his suit. He fell to his knees on the cylinder top, choking hoarsely. In a blur he saw Rex brought down too, brittle fingers tearing the spacesuit from him. Death in this place, steeped in airlessness and space cold, was inevitable.
With swimming brain Len fell his length, hardly conscious of the frantic hands pulling at him…then, to his surprise, he felt a sudden heady current of fresh air, so powerful it nearly keeled him into unconsciousness with its intoxicating strength.
He sank limp, drinking it in, feeling himself getting stronger and stronger. The cold was still there, biting in its intensity, but already the void-sting had gone from it…And the air increased suddenly to a positive wind.
Aware that the hands had fallen from him, Len twisted his head round and saw Rex also gulping in the currents swirling about him.
“It’s—it’s this cylinder!” he shouted huskily.
“Air is coming out of it— Out of these—”
He motioned to immense gratings in the cylinder top from which there was undoubtedly something hissing and rushing. A vague memory stirred Len— The wheel he had accidentally moved when climbing up…
He staggered to his feet, shreds of his space-suit still hanging about him. To a slight extent it served to mitigate the tomblike chill. He stared about him.
The zero-men were bundling away from the cylinder as fast as they could go, all ideas of fight banished. Suddenly he understood why they had been so nervy. They had known, of course, that this was an air cylinder, and as the leader himself had said, air was fatal to them.
“Look!” Rex gasped suddenly. “By all that’s queer!”
Queer was right. From their high vantage point they saw the zero men fleeing for their lives through the open doorway of the factory towards the valves they had so firmly closed. This indeed had proven their undoing. In trying to cut off escape they had also stopped all chance of the air leaking out—and it was fast overtaking them, swirling in all directions.
They hurried on desperately, the weirdest assortment ever, but before they could even reach the doorway of the factory they began to stagger and fall. Then it was that the normal death and disintegration which should have so long ago claimed these frozen Earth bodies, caught up. Each body collapsed into a dissolving mass of putrefaction from which, tortured and smashed by air, escaped long columns of rapidly evaporating crystal life.
In time even the crystal life turned to jelly and ceased to move. Inside ten minutes the only remains of the zero life were splotches of dead matter and dusty piles of lifeless crystal.
“Looks like they finished the job for themselves,” Rex said in a sober voice.
“Yeah.” Len’s face was grim for a moment as he surveyed the remains. Then a smile spread slowly over his face.
“But why the hell are we worrying? Think what we’ve found! The biggest story ever—the biggest scientific advancement in history! All we have got to do is to weld up these suits and then get moving…We have cameras to photograph everything, instruments, all we need to provide proof. Come on, fellow, this is where we have our turn!
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Lunar Vengeance: A Collection of Science Fiction Stories Page 16
