Slan

by A. E. van Vogt

  Jommy lay very still, his eyes straining to follow the path of the strange craft. A spaceship. By all the heavens, a spaceship! Had these tendrilless slans realized the dream of the ages – to operate flights to the planets?' If so, how had they kept it secret from human beings? And what were the true slans doing?

  The scraping noise reached him again. He crept to the edge of the roof and peered across. He could only vaguely see the yawning blackness lessen as the two great metal [...]

  There was a legend that space had been conquered long ago before or during the slan-human war. But the human government had always ridiculed the idea as being slan propaganda. sheets slid together and the roof was whole again.

  For a moment longer Jommy waited, then he bunched his muscles and sprang. Only one purpose was in his mind now: to get back to Granny quickly and by as devious a way as possible. Back alleys, side streets, must be his route. For this ease of escape from slans suddenly seemed suspicious. Unless, of course, they didn't dare set up safeguards for fear of betraying their secret to human beings.

  Whatever the reason, it was only too obvious that he still needed desperately the security of Granny's little shack. He had no desire to tackle a problem so complicated and murderous as the slan-human-tendrilless slan triangle had become. No, not until he was full-grown and capable of matching the sharp brains that were fighting this unceasing and deadly battle.

  Yes, back to Granny, and by way of the store to get some peace offerings for the old wretch, now that he was certain to be late. And he'd have to hurry, too. The store would close at eleven.

  At the store, Jommy did not venture near the jewelry counter, for the girl who objected to little boys was still at Work. There were other richly laden counters, and he swiftly skimmed the cream of their smaller merchandise. Nevertheless, he made a mental note that, if he came into this store in future, he would have to be on the scene before five o'clock, when the evening staff arrived for their shift Otherwise that girl could prove a nuisance.

  Sated at last with stolen goods, he headed cautiously for the nearest exit, then stopped as a man, a middle-aged, paunchy person, walked by thoughtfully. The man was the chief accountant of the store, and he was thinking of the four hundred thousand dollars that would be in the safe overnight. In his mind, also, was the combination of the safe.

  Jommy hurried on, but he was disgusted with his lack of foresight. How foolish to steal goods that would have to be sold, with the risks at both ends enormous compared to the simple business of taking all the money he wanted.

  Granny was still where he had left her, but her mind was in such turmoil that he had to wait for her to speak before he could understand what she wanted.

  "Quick," she said hoarsely, "get in under the blankets.

  A policeman was just here warning Granny to move on."

  It must have been at least a mile farther on that she stopped the cart and tore the blanket off Jommy with a snarl. "You ungrateful wretch, where have you been?"

  Jommy wasted no words. His contempt was too great for him to speak to her more than he had to. He shivered as he watched the eagerness with which she snatched at the treasure he dumped into her lap. Swiftly she evaluated each item, and stuffed it carefully into the false bottom that had been built into the cart.

  "At least two hundred dollars for old Granny!" she said joyously. "Old Finn will give Granny that much. Oh, but Granny's smart, catching a young slan. He'll make not ten thousand but twenty thousand a year for her. And to think they offered only ten thousand dollars' reward! It should be a million."

  "I can do even better than that," Jommy volunteered. It seemed as good a time as any to tell her about the store safe, and that there was no need for more shop-lifting. "There's about four thousand in the safe," he finished. "I can get it tonight. I'll climb up the back of the building, where it's dark, to one of the windows, cut a hole in it... you've got a glass cutter somewhere?"

  "Granny can get one!" the old woman breathed ecstatically. She rocked back and forth with joy. "Oh, oh, Granny's glad. But Granny can see now why human beings shoot slans. They're too dangerous. Why, they could steal the world. They tried to, you know, in the beginning."

  "I don't... know... very much about that," Jommy said slowly. He wished desperately that Granny knew all about it, but he saw that she didn't There was only the vaguest knowledge in her mind of that misty period when the slans (so human beings accused) had tried to conquer the world. She knew no more than he did, no more than all this vast ignorant mass of people.

  What was the truth? Had there ever been a war between slans and human beings? Or was it just the same propaganda as that dreadful stuff about what slans did to babies? Johnny saw that Granny's mind had jumped back to the money in the store.

  "Only four thousand dollars!" she said sharply. "Why, they must make hundreds of thousands every day – millions!"

  "They don't keep it all in the store," lied Jommy, and to his relief the old woman accepted the explanation.

  He thought about the lie as the cart rattled on. He had uttered it in the first place almost automatically. Now he saw that it was self-protection. If he made the old woman too rich, she would soon begin to think of betraying him.

  It was absolutely imperative that during the next six years he live in the security of Granny's shack. The question therefore became: How little would she be satisfied with? Somewhere he must strike a mean between her insatiable greed and his necessity.

  Just thinking about that enlarged its dangers. In this woman was an incredible selfishness, and a streak of cowardice that might surge up in a panic of fear and destroy him before he could properly realize his danger.

  No doubt about it. Among the known imponderables overhanging the precious six years separating him from his father's mighty science, this gaunt rascal loomed as the most dangerous and the most uncertain factor.

  Chapter Seven

  The acquisition of money corrupted Granny. She disappeared for days at a time, and he gathered from her disjointed conversation afterwards that she was at last frequenting the pleasure resorts she had always longed to go to. When she was at home, her bottle was her almost inseparable companion. Because he needed to have her around, Jommy prepared meals for her, and so kept her alive despite her excesses. It was necessary – when she ran out of money – to make occasional forays with her, but otherwise he kept effectively out of her way.

  He used his considerable spare time to gain an education – something which was not easy to do. The area was poverty-stricken in the extreme, and most of its inhabitants were uneducated, even illiterate, but there was a scattering of people with alert minds in it Jommy discovered who they were and what they did and how much they knew by asking them and by asking about them. To them, he was Granny's grandson. Once that was accepted as fact, many difficulties were resolved.

  There were people, of course, who were wary of a junk dealer's relative, considering him untrustworthy. A few individuals, who had felt the sting of Granny's sharp tongue, were quite antagonistic; but their reaction was to ignore him. Others were too busy to bother with either Granny or himself.

  From some he aggressively, though as unobtrusively as possible, compelled attention. A young engineering student called him "a damned nuisance," but explained the science of engineering to him. Jommy read in his mind that the student felt that he was clarifying his own thoughts and understanding of his subject, and that he occasionally boasted that he knew engineering so well that he could make the principles clear to a boy of ten.

  He never guessed how precocious this boy was.

  A woman who had traveled widely before her marriage – but was now in poor circumstances – lived half a block down the street, and fed him cookies one at a time while she talked eagerly of the world and its people as she had seen them.

  It was necessary to accept the bribes because she would have misunderstood if he refused the cookies. But no teller of tales actually ever had a more attentive pair of ears to talk
to than Mrs. Hardy. A thin-faced, bitter woman whose husband had gambled away her possessions, she had wandered over Europe, and Asia, and her sharp eyes had recorded an immense amount of detail. More vaguely, she knew about the past of those countries.

  At one time – so she had heard – China had been heavily populated. The story was that a series of bloody wars had long ago decimated the more densely inhabited areas. These wars, it seemed, were definitely not of slan origin. It was only in the last hundred years that the slans had turned their attention to babies of Chinese and other Eastern origin – and so turned against them people who had hitherto tolerated the slans' existence.

  As explained by Mrs. Hardy, it seemed like one more senseless action of the slans. Jommy listened and recorded the information, convinced that the explanation could not be as stated, wondering what the truth was, and determined that someday he would bring all these deadly lies out into the open.

  The engineering student, Mrs. Hardy, a grocer who had been a rocket pilot, a radio and TV repairman, and Old Man Darrett – these were the people who educated him, unknowingly, during the first two years he spent with Granny. Of the group, Darrett was Jommy's prize. A big, stocky, lonely, cynical man of seventy-odd years, he had once been a professor of history – but that was merely one of the many subjects about which he had an almost inexhaustible fund of information.

  It was obvious that sooner or later the old man would bring up the subject of the slan wars. It was so obvious that Jommy allowed the first few casual mentions of it pass, just as if he weren't interested. But early one winter afternoon, there it was again, as he had expected. And this time he said:

  "You keep talking about wars. There couldn't have been wars. Those people are just outlaws. You don't fight wars with outlaws; you just exterminate them."

  Darrett stiffened. "Outlaws," he said. "Young fellow, those were great days. I tell you a hundred thousand slans practically took over the world. It was a beautiful job of planning, carried out with the utmost boldness. What you have to realize is that men as a mass always play somebody else's game – not their own. They're caught in traps from which they cannot escape. They belong to groups; they're members of organizations; they're loyal to ideas, individuals, geographical areas. If you can get hold of the institutions they support – there's the method."

  "And the slans did that?" Jommy asked the question with an intensity that startled him; it was a little too revealing of his own feelings. He added quickly in a subdued tone: "It sounds like a story. It's just propaganda to scare us – like you've said so often about other things."

  "Propaganda!" said Darrett explosively. And then he was silent His large, expressive black eyes were half hidden by his long, dark eyelashes, He said at last slowly, "I want you to visualize this. Jommy. The world was confused and bewildered. Everywhere human babies were being subjected to the tremendous campaign of the slans to make more slans. Civilization began to break down. There was an immense increase in insanity. Suicide, murder, crime – the graph of chaos rose to new heights. And, one morning, without knowing quite how it was done, the human race woke up to discover that overnight the enemy had taken control. Working from within, the slans had managed to take over innumerable key organizations. When you learn to understand the rigidity of institutional structures in our society, you'll realize how helpless human beings were at first. My own private opinion is that the slans could have gotten away with it except for one thing."

  Jommy waited, silent. He had an unhappy premonition of what was coming. Old Man Darrett went on:

  "They continued ruthlessly trying to make slans out of human babies. It seems a little stupid in retrospect"

  Darrett and the others were only the beginning. He followed learned men around the streets, picking at the surface of their minds. He lay in concealment on campus grounds, telepathically following lectures. Books he had in plenty, but books were not enough. They had to be interpreted, explained. There were mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy – all the sciences. His desire had no limit.

  In the six years between his ninth and fifteenth birthdays, he acquired the beginning of what his mother had prescribed as basic knowledge for an adult slan.

  During those years, he watched the tendrilless slans cautiously from a distance. Nightly, at ten, their spaceships leaped into the sky; and the service was maintained on precision time. Every night at two-thirty, another shark-shaped monster plunged down from space, silent and dark, and dropped like a ghost into the top of the same building.

  Only twice during those years was the traffic suspended, each time for a month, and each time when Mars, following her eccentric orbit, teetered on the farthest side of the Sun.

  He stayed away from the Air Center, because almost every day his respect for the might of the tendrilless slans grew. And it seemed increasingly clear that only an accident had saved him that day when he revealed himself to the two adults. An accident and surprise.

  Of the basic mysteries of the slans he learned nothing. To pass the time he indulged in orgies of physical activity. First of all, he must have a secret way of escape, just in case – secret from Granny as well as the world; and second, he couldn't possibly live in this shack as it was. It required months to build hundreds of yards of tunnel, months also to rebuild the interior of their home with fine, paneled walls, shining ceilings and plastic floors.

  Granny sneaked the furniture in at night, past the junk-laden yard and the unchanged, unpainted exterior. But that required nearly a year in itself – because of Granny and her bottle.

  His fifteenth birthday... At two in the afternoon, Jommy laid down the book he had been reading, took off his slippers and put on his shoes. The hour for decisive action had come. Today, he must go into the catacombs, and take possession of his father's secret. Because he did not know the secret slan passageways, he would have to risk going in through a public entrance.

  He gave scarcely more than a surface thought to the possibility of danger. This was the day – long ago, it had been planted in his mind, hypnotically set by his father. It did seem important, however, that he slip out of the house without the old woman's hearing him.

  Briefly, he let his mind contact hers, and without the slightest sense of disgust sampled the stream of her thought. She was wide awake and tossing on her bed. And through her brain poured freely and furiously a welter of astoundingly wicked thoughts. Jommy Cross frowned abruptly. Into the veritable hell of the old woman's recollection (for she lived almost completely in her amazing past when she was drunk) had come a swift, cunning thought: "Got to get rid of that slan... dangerous for Granny now that she's got money. Mustn't let him suspect... keep it out of my mind so..'."

  Jommy Cross smiled mirthlessly. It was not the first time he had caught the thought of treachery in her brain. With sudden purposefulness he finished tying the shoelace, stood up and went into her room.

  Granny lay, a sprawling shape under the sheets that were stained brown with liquor. Her deeply sunken black eyes stared dully out of the wrinkled parchment of her face. Gazing down at her, Jommy Cross felt a quiver of pity. Terrible and vicious as had been the old Granny, he preferred her as she had been then to this weak old soak who lay like some medieval witch miraculously deposited in a blue and silver bed of the future.

  Her eyes seemed to see him for the first time, clearly. A string of bloodthirsty curses reeled from her lips. Then, "Waddya want? Granny wants to be alone."

  The pity drained out of him. He gazed at her coldly: "I just wanted to give you a little warning. I'm leaving soon, so you won't have to spend any more time thinking of ways to betray me. There aren't any safe ways. That treasured old hide of yours wouldn't be worth a nickel if they caught me."

  The black eyes gleamed up at him slyly. "Think you're smart, eh," she mumbled. The word seemed to start a new trend of thought that it was impossible for him to follow mentally. "Smart," she repeated gloatingly, "smartest thing Granny ever did, catching a young slan. Dangerous now though
... got to get rid of him..."

  "You old fool," Jommy Cross said dispassionately. "Don't forget that a person who harbors a slan is automatically subject to death. You've kept that mud-turtle-complexioned neck of yours well oiled, so it probably won't squeal when they hang you, but you'll do plenty of kicking with those scrawny legs."

  The brutal words spoken, he turned abruptly and went out of the room, out of the house. On the bus, he thought: "I've got to watch her, and as soon as possible leave her. Nobody who thinks in probabilities could trust anything valuable to her"

  Even downtown, the streets were deserted. Jommy Cross climbed off the bus, conscious of the silence where usually there was bedlam. The city was too quiet; there was a very absence of life and movement He stood uncertainly at the curb, all thought of Granny draining from him. He opened his mind wide. At first there was nothing there but a wisp from the half-blank mind of the driver of the bus which was disappearing now down the otherwise earless road. The sun glared down on the pavement. A few people scuttled hurriedly past, in their minds simply a blank terror so continuous and unvarying that he could not penetrate beyond it.

  The silence deepened, and alarm crept into Jommy Cross. He explored the buildings around him, but no clamor of minds came from them, nothing whatever. The clatter of an engine burst abruptly from a side street Two blocks away a tractor emerged, pulling a tremendous gun that pointed menacingly into the sky. The tractor clattered into the center of the street, was unhooked from the gun, and bellowed off into the side street from which it had come. Men swarmed around the gun, preparing it, and then stood by, looking up at the sky, waiting tensely.

  Jommy Cross wanted to walk closer, to read their minds, but he didn't dare. The sense of being in an exposed and dangerous position grew into a sick conviction within him. Any minute a military or police car might roll past and its occupants ask him what he was doing in the street He might be arrested, or told to take off his cap and show his hair and the golden threads that were his tendrils.