by John Brunner
“Correction,” said Captain Vassiliev politely. “I think we have reason to doubt that it is a sea creature, have we not, Dr. Gordon?”
Gordon nodded. “The results aren’t all in yet, but the TV camera we have working at the two-thousand-fathom level has located an opening in the mud which seems to indicate a point at which something emerged from below. Around the opening we located various objects, probably metallic, which resemble oxygen storage canisters. The bathynef Pavel Ostrovsky has just a short while ago started down to investigate the site. It’s far below the levels at which we’ve dived so far, but two members of Professor Wong’s staff who have taken equivalent pressures in land-based tests are crewing for this dive, and both Ostrovsky and Wong think they should be able to stand it.”
Lampion nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Gordon. Well, the situation seems to be this. What we have discovered is a survivor of an extraterrestrial species which very probably invaded our planet upwards of a hundred thousand years ago. It enslaved human beings—this is assumed by analogy with current actions—and was then overwhelmed by the latest orogenic or mountain-building era. Their powers are unknown to us. The fact that this individual could emerge from some probably prearranged refuge after such a lapse of time and adjust to the changed situation with such speed suggests that we are facing a very dangerous opponent. Yes, Dr. Trant?”
Peter leaned forward. “I’ve experienced this power,” he said. “I think we can assume it’s nonphysical, at least as we define physical. It is probably not limited to the mental infliction of pain, as witness the posthypnotic command we can deduce compelled Luke Wallace to steal the bathynef and return to set the alien free from its buried hiding place. In addition, we can presume that either it is equipped with technical devices of a high order, or that it is physically almost indestructible and could survive the pressure at two thousand fathoms as easily as at sea level.”
“Can we presume also that we have only one to deal with?” Vassiliev inquired softly. Lampion shrugged.
“A question that must be answered. For myself, I think we must assume so. Any other survivors are probably still under thousands of feet of ooze. Let us not multiply our problems.”
“At the moment we have one,” Vassiliev said. “What is to be done about this liner and its dangerous passenger?”
“Your opinion, please.” Lampion waved his hand vaguely.
Captain Vassiliev looked around the table, as though trying to make up his mind. At length he said, “A torpedo. Now. If necessary, with a nuclear warhead.”
Heads shook automatically. Someone murmured, “No. No.”
Vassiliev bent his head and spread his hands. “Very good. All I can say is that I am glad it is not the coast of Soviet Russia to which the ship is coming near.”
“We are all frightened of what might happen,” said Peter, thinking of the possible consequences. “But there are still several hundred people on the liner, whom we may be able to save. We’ve obviously got to kill the creature, or render it powerless somehow. If it means to come ashore, then it will very likely expose itself to some means of attack. It’s big, heavy, possibly clumsy. I doubt if it could stand, say, a shell from a forty-millimeter cannon if it were a direct hit.”
Officially, the Queen Alexandra was simply “missing.” The vast search operations had used the liner as a cover story. But it was not going to be long before the truth broke, that was for sure. If it could only be held back for another day or two, though, that would suffice.
These thoughts were running through Peter’s mind as he and a thousand others waited on the edge of the ocean. The liner was aiming for the Florida coast a little south of Jacksonville. It was as though a patch of blankness had progressed across the ocean, without anyone actually seeing her. There were press releases ready to state that the liner had been commandeered by mutineers. A thin story. It would hold for long enough to help their chances of success. Although the population was boiling with startled anger at the military occupation of an area backed off inland from this stretch of shore.
It was at least comforting that the creature had not made directly for a city. That implied that he felt his power to control human beings was limited, and that he preferred to come ashore in a relatively isolated spot.
The liner stood to nearly a mile offshore. It was nearly dark, but its lights showed brilliantly. Unless the creature had the power to sense the thoughts and intentions of human beings as well as their mere presence, he could not know of the ambush that awaited him. There would merely be individuals scattered, a few in groups, mostly separated, over several square miles.
It was hard to make out, even with binoculars, what was happening. Boats were being lowered, it seemed, and that was logical. But was the creature in one of them?
He was not. The first boats grounded on the beach. Their occupants, wild-eyed, drawn-faced, looked around superficially and then signaled back to the liner with the lamp. An advance party. Peter wished achingly that they could be kidnapped into freedom at once. But the creature had to be allowed to show himself. …
And he did.
Bowing, gesticulating, beating gongs and wailing, the miserables aboard the liner were carrying him on what looked like the top of a dining table upholstered with chair cushions, up to the largest lifeboat on the shoreward side. The range was too great for accuracy, probably, or the dark blob of the creature was too indistinct a target, so the gunners held fire. Peter wished he had Mary beside him, and then was glad that he had not, for he had not wanted her to take the risk this trip would involve, and she was better employed out at the Atlantica site.
The boat was lowered. As it descended, a hundred men and women, stripping off their clothes desperately, prepared to follow it down. They jumped, in a crazy human fountain, and vanished from sight. Sickly, the watchers prayed for them to reappear.
Some did not. But most did, and swam to the bow of the lifeboat to seize lines dangling in the water and begin towing it to shore. Peter’s nails bit deep into his palms with the fury he had to suppress.
The boat was still a quarter of a mile from shore, when there was a sudden muted explosion, and the first shell ripped the bows of the lifeboat above the water line. In an instant, six more fired together.
And that was all.
After the explosions, there were screams, and Peter had begun to hope they were the creature’s. He felt the anger and the pain just as he realized that they came from the shore around him, and he took two facts with him into the twilight consciousness which was all his mind could contain beside the pain.
The first was that the monster was unharmed. The second, that if his power to control human beings was truly limited, they had not found the limit.
XIII
IT WAS NOT quite as bad as it had been before, aboard the ’copter. But it lasted longer. And it did not permit escape into oblivion. That time, Peter reasoned when he was allowed to think his own thoughts for a few seconds, it had been an absent-minded stroke designed to incapacitate someone for whom the monster had no use. This had purpose behind it.
It was like a migraine in that it was in his head. It was more like the flaying of skin from a body already raw with burning in its savage intensity. He tried to fight it, knowing that others were doing the same, but there was only one way to obtain relief. Act as the monster desired.
Lights sprang up on the dusky shore. Men and women, both those from the liner and those who had been in ambush, staggered about as though blind. And they were screaming, in high, inhuman voices. The weakest stopped screaming first, and set to work on the tasks that did not displease their master.
It was not easy to find what he wanted them to do, for no instructions were given; simply a continued torment until by chance the victim fell on the desired action. Then it was lifted a little, and as a child racked by stomach pains will lie frozen for hours in the position that causes least suffering, so they went frenziedly to work to avoid a return of the lashing.
Many
died. The gunners who had dared to open fire on the creature sprayed their weapons at each other until they were ragged and bloody heaps beside their ruined guns. Some of the watchers, driven into the open, were struck down in this way. Most of them, though, survived.
Hating himself, unable to bear the agony, wishing that a shell had ripped through his guts during the firing, Peter found he was walking towards the water. Another crack of the mental whip and he was running, with hundreds of others, into the sea, and swimming towards the damaged lifeboat.
Coldly, from his improvised palanquin, the creature drove his subjects. That they should have attempted his life—and come so close to succeeding—both angered and alarmed him. It was alarming because it implied that his precautions had not been sufficient. They had found out where he was due to land, and been waiting for him. It made him angry because it was intolerable for inferior creatures to treat him thus.
But they would learn! He would show them their true status; show them that to him, they were no more than tools, to be used until they broke and then thrown away.
Since they had damaged his boat, let them repair it! He whipped and goaded and lashed, and into the ragged hole in the boat’s bow a fat woman from the liner jammed her body, crying with the pain of it that was still less frightful than the pain of the master’s displeasure. The hole was caulked. He urged the swimmers to drag the boat towards shore.
When it grounded on the beach, he gave them no respite. They must carry him on their shoulders, all the tons of him, and if they stumbled they must be taught better. If one was weak, let another take his place. They were expendable, the planet was crawling with them, there were millions and millions of them! He would take them, teach them, grind them down.
Now he would appropriate his first land-based city. He forced his new subjects forward, and as the caravan progressed he summoned others to join it.
By midnight, the train was thousands strong.
“But this is insanity!” said the President of the United States.
“Of course it is!” snapped Dr. Gordon, irritably shoving his glasses back on his nose. “We’re dealing with a creature whose mind works differently from ours. It doesn’t think as we do. It treats us like dirt!”
“That’s so, Mr. President,” confirmed an army psychologist. The atmosphere of the White House seemed to impress him less than most of the other hastily summoned outside delegates. He retained an armored calmness while others fidgeted and moved in their chairs. “We’ve picked up some of the poor so-and-so’s who got left behind. They’re exhausted, half-starved because they haven’t been given time to feed themselves. Their minds are beaten down to the moron level and in some cases to total blankness. They’re filthy, they are mostly covered with untreated sores or vermin. Or both. They’ve just been used to their maximum endurance and left to die.”
“And you can’t find out what’s happened in Jacksonville?”
“Not a thing,” said a four star general called Barghin, who had already presented the report demonstrating that Jacksonville, Florida, had been cut off from the world. He sounded weary, but patient, as though he were a good Republican and didn’t expect a Democrat president to have more than the brains of a louse. “Every highway is blocked with wrecked cars, houses dynamited with the families still in them, even, on one road, with a pile of a hundred corpses. We tried to put a reconnaissance tank in across country. It stopped reporting after ten minutes and aerial surveys showed it ran full speed into a gasoline storage tank and blew up. The crew had probably been blanked out like the search party that found the Queen Alexandra.”
“What happened to the ship?” the president demanded.
“The dampers were pulled on the pile before they left her,” a Navy spokesman answered. “When we got a party aboard, they found the engine room was a puddle of fused uranium and other stuff. It took us a whole night to decontaminate the search party. We took her in tow and she’s being kept at sea till we get a ruling from the owners what to do with her. Can’t bring her to port, she’s radiating like crazy.”
“What about aerial reconnaissance over Jacksonville?” The President was not to be put off.
“As usual,” General Barghin sighed. “We have high-altitude TV planes circling the city, but clouds have been bad, and the two times we’ve tried to get remote-controlled ships down to below a thousand feet, they’ve been shot down. He got a coastal defense missile station along with the city, of course, and there are about sixty homing missiles of the Thunder-horse class in store there.”
“Vassiliev was right,” muttered Gordon despondently.
“What was that, Dr. Gordon?” the President rapped.
“The captain of the Soviet bathynef,” Gordon explained. “He said it would be safest to sink the Queen Alexandra with the monster aboard, using a nuclear torpedo if necessary.”
“Agreed!” said General Barghin forcefully. “Something of the sort will become inevitable. Mr. President, there may be no limit to this creature’s powers. He may ultimately enslave the whole United States, the world in fact!”
“I’m not going to authorize the construction of a nuclear missile without UN approval,” the president said bluntly. “It took us years of squabbling to get rid of the damnable things, and I for one hope there’ll never be another made on this planet! How about conventional missiles? Is there any way of pinpointing the exact location of the monster?”
“He could be anywhere in four or five hundred square miles,” Barghin answered. “The limits of the blanked-out area have remained constant since early yesterday, when he took over Jacksonville, but it’s unlikely he’s remained at the geometrical center of it. He probably just chose the most convenient limits, geographically and demographically.”
“And we daren’t let it spread,” the naval spokesman added in a tone of sepulchral gloom. “With a hydrogen warhead, it would be possible to make sure we don’t miss; once he’s extended his domains, we’d have to go on hitting till we got him, and that might use up several bombs.”
“I think Washington should be evacuated,” said Barghin suddenly. “Here, we’re too damn close to the scene.”
A knock came at the door, and the President grunted permission to enter. An aide placed a stack of photographs before him.
“These were taken from a scanner rocket flying too fast for countermissiles, Mr. President,” he said. “A courier just delivered them and said they’d try again by daylight tomorrow. And there’s a young woman and a Chinese from Atlantica who were sent to see Dr. Gordon.”
The President glanced at Gordon, who nodded. “I’m expecting details of the creature’s hideout,” he said. “We found a kind of burrow in the mud that he emerged from. I think we should hear this right away.”
The President gave a curt command, and the aide brought in Mary and a young Chinese of wiry build, who was introduced as Dr. Sun. Mary’s face was drawn and expressionless. She clutched a thick portfolio of papers.
Acknowledging the President, she sat down next to Gordon. “Is there any news?” she said in a low voice.
“Of Peter? No, my dear, I’m afraid not. There hasn’t been news of anyone who was within a mile of the beach when the creature came ashore, or of anyone between there and Jacksonville. The whole area has been cut off.”
He tried not to make it sound hopeless, but he knew it was no good disguising the truth. Mary nodded, put her papers on the table, and sat with head downcast and hands folded.
“Could we hear from Dr. Sun?” Gordon proposed.
The Chinese spoke very good English, with hardly a trace of accent. He said, “As you know, your American deep-television camera showed us certain articles on the ocean floor, which we went to investigate in our comrades’ bathynef. I was one of the special crew, for it was very very deep.
“We had time only to take a few things and many pictures, because the mud had again closed the mouth of the hole and we must spend three hours clearing it before beginning. But we did find much
of interest. Mrs. Mary, please!”
Mary started and handed him pictures from her portfolio.
“There was many things like’ this,” Sun said, holding up a picture of a large cylinder with a huge blunt hollow needle on the end. “We find traces of oxygen and of dried organic liquid inside. We hypothesize that the creature would drive the point through his hide into a vein-equivalent and thereby oxygenate his blood, which is perhaps the dried liquid we find in the hollow sharp end. There are of these perhaps thousands.
“There are also”—another picture, this time of ranked shelves full of shadowy black oblate forms—”what it is perhaps possible to call ‘food.’ Water is dissolving these big lumps, but we salvaged some, and their analysis shows they include many elements common to the skin and skeleton of the dead body which Dr. Trant discovered in Atlantica.”
He was about to go on to another picture, when Gordon snapped his fingers and made an exclamation. Sun blinked at him, and courteously indicated that he should speak.
“Excuse me,” he apologized. “But I have an idea. On the basis of what can be deduced about the creature’s metabolism, could we synthesize a poison for him? A heavy poison gas, for example, which might be harmless or at worst merely dangerous to human beings?”
“God knows, Dr. Gordon,” said the President. “But if it can be done, that would certainly be the solution. Barghin, see that the Department of Chemical Warfare gets all the necessary data, would you?”
Realizing he was being addressed, the general looked up with a start. “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” he said. “I was just getting something out of these TV pictures of Jacksonville. I think I can guess where the monster is.”
XIV
HE HAD BEEN one of the lucky ones. …
