It was nearly half an hour later when Crayley halted again, staring intently ahead through his thick goggles. On the torchlit circle of soil before him, something had moved. Helen saw it, too, and threw out her right arm, waving back the men behind her.
Only Ralph Wilkus, perhaps missing the signal, moved forward into the region of dubious stirring. He did not recoil or shrivel but stepped right on through and continued to test his way with his staff on the featureless plain beyond.
Obviously, this was not a new type of shock patch; but what it was wanted investigation. Less foolhardy than Wilkus, the other explorers hesitated before advancing, their staffs waving experimentally above the region of stirring. Only the surface sand moved, as though blown by a faint, circularly whirling, breeze.
Crayley knew there was no breeze. The wind needle on Helen’s helmet did not even vibrate. He raised his gloved hand and made signs in the torchlight.
“Something unknown here,” he motioned. “Stay back.”
They spread out, trying to measure the size of the whirling patch of particles. Several yards ahead, Wilkus, his back to them, was moving steadily forward, his dynamometer swinging in the light of his torch.
No one would ever know whether he had missed Crayley’s signal or had ignored it: for suddenly, with shocking abruptness, a blinding purple light flared out in the darkness above him and to his right, and seemed to reach out and touch him. With a terrible wrenching, he doubled up, hands pawing at his stomach. His torch and staff fell to the ground.
For an instant the light hovered above him, pulsing with a greedy brilliance. Then it dimmed and whipped away into the darkness. Wilkus collapsed limply, like a deflating balloon.
When Crayley picked up the stricken youth he seemed to be holding a nearly empty suit. The light of his torch on Wilkus’s helmet revealed two eyes that shone with the light of idiocy in a formless, boneless face.
Crayley clicked his torch off and stood for an instant in nearly total darkness, holding the awful burden. The others were coming toward him, swinging their lights in wide arcs.
Helen was the first to reach him. “What happened?” she gestured.
Crayley’s helmet turned slowly in negation. He snapped on his torch again and focused it on Wilkus’s helmet. Helen cried out involuntarily. The face of the stricken man was chillingly expressionless, the features like wax. But the twitching of his mouth showed he was still alive. By now the others had come up and clustered about the tall scientist and his limp burden. He motioned, “We’ve got to go back. Wilkus is seriously injured.”
Parkerson stepped to Crayley’s side and took part of his friend’s weight upon his shoulders, although it was so negligible that Crayley could easily have borne it alone. Seaton picked up Wilkus’s torch and staff, and with leaden hearts the group began retracing its steps.
Imbued with abnormal caution, they walked slowly, swinging their staffs in wide arcs before them, but they did not encounter any more shock patches until the vast, gleaming bulk of the spaceship loomed in reassuring relief against the sky. Then Helen’s dynamometer recorded one about five hundred feet from the stern of the ship, and the party made a cautious circle about it.
A moment later they were ascending a metal ladder over the curving surface of cobalt glass. The little group crawled in beneath enormous hatches, down another short ladder inside, and along a narrow corridor that blazed with cold-light lamps. Then Helen threw a switch at the end of the passage and the hatches fell into place with a sharp clang. Air hissed in; another hatch opened before them.
They emerged into the ship’s combined control room and bunkhouse. Crayley gently eased Wilkus down on one of the bunks and then sat down, fumbling with the screws of his helmet. Helen and the others also slumped down on their bunks, still wordless in the cold light of the room.
Crayley got his helmet off first and then shucked off his spacesuit, depositing it in inside-out disarray on one of the benches. As the others struggled out of their suits, he turned and began unscrewing Wilkus’s helmet. His thoughts were under grim self-control; he half expected what he would find and was stoically prepared for it.
Not so the others. As Crayley stripped the spacesuit from the injured man, the other men took one shocked look and turned away. Helen saw the shriveled body with the drooling, idiot face moving, jerking about on the bench; for fully five seconds she stared without a sound, lips slack. Then she crumpled.
When she opened her eyes again she was lying on her bunk, concealed behind the automatic privacy screen that provided the only seclusion she had on the vessel. Parkerson was standing beside her. For a moment she could not recall where she was nor what had happened; then, with a little cry, memory returned and she swung her feet out and tried to stand up.
Parkerson sat on the edge of the berth and took her small hand in his, restraining her lightly.
“Frightened?” he asked.
She shook her head. “What happened to Wilkus?”
Parkerson avoided her gaze.
“Tell me,” she insisted.
“He died.”
Some of the strain went out of Helen’s face; she moistened her dry lips with her tongue.
“I’m going to Gibbs,” she said, struggling to her feet. “Where is he now?”
“In the laboratory,” said Parkerson.
He stood regarding her for a moment with a troubled expression, still holding her hand. Helen looked in his eyes. “What’s—what is it, Parky?”
“I—nothing…”
“Wilkus was your friend…”
Parkerson made an impatient gesture. “He was more than that. We grew up together. But that’s not it. Forgive me, Helen; I’m upset. It’s Gibbs…”
“Gibbs?”
“Yes. You’re married to him. You know him better than any of us. I wonder if it ever occurs to you how he looks to other people.” Parkerson looked away from her. “He’s not human,” he said in a strained voice. “He’s a damned machine. Did you see his face when he took off Wilkus’s suit? You’d think he was taking a clock apart!”
Helen touched his arm. “You know you’re wrong, Parky. It’s the situation we’re in that’s getting you. Gibbs Crayley wouldn’t be what he is if he didn’t have that kind of iron control. He’s in charge, Parky. Wilkus and Grayson were out there on his orders. In spite of the fact that they were careless, both of them, Gibbs feels responsible. He always will; you know that. You’ve lost a dear friend; but at least you didn’t acquire that kind of a burden at the same time.” She squeezed his shoulder gently. “Think it over.”
Parkerson managed a small smile. “You’re right, of course. I guess—I guess I blew my top. Thanks, Helen.”
Helen found her husband sitting motionless beside the covered body of Ralph Wilkus. He looked up and scowled when she entered the tiny laboratory and shut the sliding door behind her.
“Parkerson told me,” she said, looking down at the narrow ledge where the dead man lay.
Crayley said nothing for a moment. He was grateful for the assurance of her hand seeking his and tightening in sympathy.
At last he said, “He died before I could etherize him.”
“What did you find, darling?”
Crayley’s lips tightened. “Something…incredible.” He turned to the ledge and removed the sheet. “Let me show you.”
Helen turned pale. Wilkus’s body was flaccid and blue. It looked as though it had been poured on the ledge. The girl bit at her lower lip and dug her nails into her palms in her effort to maintain self-control.
“He should have died out there,” said the calm man beside her. “His vitality must have been tremendous.”
Helen said, “It’s incredible, Gibbs.”
Crayley looked down at the body before him. “Look, I’ll show you something.”
He put on his rubber gloves and raised the lim
p, bluish hand of the dead man. With the other he turned up a Bunsen burner standing on the table until the flame was blue-hot.
“Watch.”
He sprayed the intense flame of the burner on the corpse’s hand as far as the wrist. The flame flared, shot out fiery jets; its color turned greenish, then purple, then blue again, as Crayley moved the torch here and there over the lifeless member.
“I have dipped that arm in hydrochloric acid, dilute solution,” he said. His tone was clinical, impersonal.
Helen’s eyes widened as she grasped a little of what this meant. Crayley turned to the table again and picked up a thin glass slide. He held it before the flame-sheathed flesh.
“What color do you see through that glass, Helen?”
“Yellow,” she whispered, awe-struck.
“Only the faintest tinge of orange in the flame,” he said. “And when you view it through green glass it looks yellow, not green as it should.”
Helen drew in a long breath. “Then there’s no calcium at all. No calcium—even in the cells of his flesh! What—?”
Crayley shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that when calcium compounds are moistened with hydrochloric acid, they turn the blue flame deep orange. Strontium also turns it orange-red, often concealing the characteristic calcium glow—but strontium shows yellow under green glass. The faintly orange tinge was undoubtedly imparted by strontium. Calcium would show finch-green under green glass.”
He turned down the flame of the torch. “I used spectroscopic tests to make sure,” he said. “The characteristic lines of calcium—orange and green and faint indigo—were wholly absent. Helen, something has extracted all the calcium from Wilkus’s body!”
“But could a man live if—”
“A little while, apparently,” said Crayley, anticipating his wife’s thought. “I would have said no, but we can’t dispute the evidence. The instantaneous withdrawal of calcium from his body must have left behind the neural patterns, temporarily at least. Motor and sensory nerves functioned, although the brain failed completely.”
“But what could have caused it?” asked Helen.
“Only one thing. Radiation. Invisible-spectrum radiation, more intense than anything we have ever known on Earth. A terrific bombardment by ultraviolet. So-called black-sheep rays, perhaps, which would be deadly to all life on Earth.”
He turned off the Bunsen burner. “Why, even the comparatively harmless members of the ultraviolet family will drain calcium from protoplasm. You know—single cells, amoebae, slipper animalcules, things like that, exposed to ultraviolet and whirled in a centrifuge become viscous blobs in a few seconds—blobs with a hardened core. The radiation drains the calcium from the outer surface of the cell and deposits it about the nucleus. Such radiation as I have suggested would do that to all the cells of the human body, drain off the external lime and—”
Crayley shivered for the first time. “It’s pretty horrible, dear. Horrible. And yet there’s something wonderful here, too. This looks like a directed, a purposeful, effect. Outside there in the darkness there may be living—perhaps intelligent—beings. Mercury is not a lifeless planet, as we thought!”
Helen shook her head in bewilderment. “But ultraviolet does not penetrate metal, Gibbs.”
“You are forgetting that difolchrome is a silver alloy, Helen. Ultraviolet could penetrate our difolchrome suits if the radiation is sufficiently intense. And it must have been unimaginably intense to do what it did to Wilkus.”
“You think it is a life form?” breathed Helen. “Why? Did you see anything?”
“Just that flash of purple light. And we both saw the moving sands. Something was resting on the sand, perhaps, and arose as we approached.”
“You don’t think the form was composed of invisible light itself?”
Crayley shook his head. “I hardly think so. I think it used the rays as a weapon. Something tangible moved out there.”
He covered Wilkus’s body again, and then slipped off his gloves. His fingers were shaking a little.
Helen said, “Are you going out again, Gibbs?”
Crayley nodded slowly. “I shall take the infrared stroboscopic camera with me, too,” he said.
“Stroboscopic?—”
“Suppose the shapes are moving incredibly fast. Maybe that is why we couldn’t see them with our own eyes. The stroboscopic camera can take dozens of swift images at intervals of ten-millionths of a second. The infrared plates will take care of the darkness, and the strobe will catch movements too swift for the eye to catch.”
“But why do you think the objects are moving so fast, Gibbs?”
“They are invisible, or nearly so. That means either that they are composed of some alien form of energy which emits light waves too long or short for visual perception—or else that they are moving so fast that they can be seen only as faint blurs in bright light, and in darkness not at all.”
The two started to walk from the laboratory. Helen took her husband’s hand.
“It will be a terrible risk, Gibbs,” she said quietly.
He looked down at her with a faint smile on his lips but said nothing.
The next two hours were to confirm Helen’s fears more grimly than she had anticipated, but a perverse fate denied Crayley the privilege of sharing that risk in person. On the way up to the main observation chamber, the leader of the First Mercury Exploring Expedition wrenched a tendon in his right ankle atrociously on a ladder rung.
Parkerson, Seaton, and Wilson stood white-faced, listening to him curse and rave. For the first time during the trip, Crayley surrendered to his emotions with an explosive vehemence which did not even respect the presence of his wife. The ankle wrench had thwarted him at a vital point.
Helen suddenly found herself half smiling, catching Parkerson’s shocked gaze. Slowly a half grin spread across his face, too, and she knew his thought: Well, what do you know! The skipper’s human, after all!
The other men immediately volunteered to serve as proxies, and Crayley, after he had calmed down, selected Seaton and Wilson. Helen found herself wondering if the men would have volunteered so readily had she not been present in the passageway. Meeting Parkerson’s half-disappointed gaze after the other two had been chosen, she suddenly realized that there was no doubt about it at all. A woman’s presence did act as a catalyst, making lonely men more willing to endure hardship and heightening the intensity of their subconscious drives.
While the two men climbed into their spacesuits again, Parkerson went to get the stroboscopic camera from its storage compartment. It was a compact device, a small metallic cone about the size of an oxygen tank on top of a stroboscopic focusing panel and a curved, flexible carrier. Parkerson handed it to young Seaton, and then stood beside Crayley and Helen while the two men climbed awkwardly up the ladder to the airtight hatch above.
Crayley took a step, and a spasm of pain convulsed his features. Helen tried to restrain him, but with a muffled grunt he pulled free of her grasp and limped across the chamber to seat himself in a swivel chair before the control panel of the ship. For a moment he swayed in the chair, while the pain receded.
Then he threw a switch on the panel, and immediately a small opening appeared in the center of the wall above it. Swiftly the hole widened as the cobalt glass withdrew in overlapping crescents from an observation window of miraculously transparent glass.
Through the exposed window the three in the spaceship stared out into the black Mercurian night. Suddenly one torch flared out, then another, and into the cone of light thrown by the first the cumbersomely clad figure of Allan Wilson moved. Slowly, slowly he walked, with testing staff extended and his own torch focused on the soil before him.
Suddenly, for an instant, a purple light shone blinding clear above the plodding figure. Then it vanished, and as it did, Wilson seemed to stagger. For a full ten seconds the torc
hes of both explorers continued to sweep across the terrain, but all at once it seemed as if Wilson was moving much too rapidly. Before any of the three could say a word, they saw the man pivot about, his legs kicking free of the surface, and abruptly disappear upward. With him went his torch, its beams dancing fantastically on objects far away.
Seaton’s torch beam wavered, as if he had been shocked into indecision. It turned out later, however, that he had intrepidly set up the stroboscopic camera and was trying to take some pictures of the invisible horror that had captured his crewmate.
Inside the ship, Crayley manipulated a rheostat near the center of the panel, and instantly the plain was flooded with a blue-white light from an immense arc lamp set in the spaceship’s entry hatch. In the light, the three in the ship saw a sight that none of them ever would forget. High above the rust-red plain the body of Wilson was dancing and bobbing about, arms thrown wide. He seemed spread-eagled against a field of star-flecked blackness—impaled upon empty air. Below the suspended man a vague, grayish blur seemed to intercept the light and dim the plain beyond.
Crayley turned to the other two, his fists clenched. “He’s dead, I think,” he said. “He couldn’t live—”
But then Helen gave a low scream and pointed out the window. The suspended figure had been released and was falling leaf-like to the ground. It struck and bounced, then rolled over and over, careening along the plain until it collided with a boulder, when it disappeared in a burst of flame.
Seaton had turned and was racing headlong back to the ship. In one hand he held his torch, while his dynamometer staff, momentarily forgotten, jogged at his shoulder like a sheathed wagon. In the other hand he held the camera in a convulsive grip. Soon he disappeared into the ship’s shadow.
Crayley swung about, shut off the arc-light control switch, and said in a coldly calm voice, “Seaton made it. Better help him in and get the camera, Fred.”
Parkerson nodded and went up the ladder to the hatch, which soon opened, revealing a sagging Seaton still hanging on to the camera. Parkerson gently wrested it from his grasp, clicked open the wafer-thin steel cover, and thrust his hand deep into the protecting tube. The cold of space seemed to gnaw at his fingers as he grasped the little camera and drew it forth. He tossed it to Crayley and then helped Seaton down the ladder and unscrewed his helmet.
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 42
