“Someone coming—keep those triggers ready!” he called to Pete.
He backed away a little, so that whatever was coming couldn’t take him by surprise. He drew his own gun and stood with it levelled at waist height at who-or-what-ever might fling back the door.
The atmosphere was electric, he could feel the short hairs rising on the back of his neck. An icy trickle of fear, a thrill of excitement and apprehension ran down his back. Every nerve tensed and thrilled. Blood pulsed through his veins, and his heart was beating like a trip hammer.
There came the sound of bolts being withdrawn, and with a creaking, grating noise, the great door swung back.
What he had expected to see he didn’t know. But certainly not this! He gave a choking gasp of surprise. Pete, squinting along the gunsights didn’t know whether to fire or whether to run to his sergeant’s aid. But he was a good trooper … for a long moment everything was frozen into silence, and then things happened so fast that Pete never had a chance to act.
Something metallic flashed in the cold grey light, and the sergeant was jerked inside the house as though he had been launched there by an enormous catapult. He was the second IPF Officer to complete the vanishing trick.
Pete dare not open fire for fear of hitting his colleague. He was no coward but there was obviously only one sensible thing to do. That was to obey the sergeant’s earlier order. Go back, round up every man on the force, and get back to the house on the cliff.…
Chapter Five
House of Anzar
IT was with mixed feelings that lieutenant Don Cameron stood before the door of the house atop the cliff. His single seater police patrol vehicle was a few yards behind him, with engine ticking over for immediate getaway if the opportunity presented itself. Or indeed if there should be any need for a getaway. He kept trying to tell himself that everything he had thought and suspected may be a complete fabrication. Why should there be anything secretive about Anzar? Why? Why should the man have anything to hide? He might be nothing more than a purely eccentric scientist who desired for personal reasons to conceal the date of his birth. Some middle aged men were still touchy about their age, even in this advanced century. He couldn’t see why they should be, but on the other hand, why shouldn’t they? It was no more than a whim or a fancy to which genius was entitled. It was certainly not a crime. Again, wrecking a road surface, interfering with everybody’s television, crashing an autocar, frightening the daylights out of the passengers in a hover craft, and projecting ghosts into the crypt of a Norman church, hardly ranked as practical jokes. But was Anzar responsible? Was it, after all, just a chain of coincidence?
As he stood listening to the slow, dragging footsteps approaching him, Lieutenant Don Cameron felt some of his self-confidence abating. Maybe he was all wrong.
What if the old scientist just pulled the innocent? He heard bolts being withdrawn.
There was a creaking, grinding sound, as the door opened. There stood the man who answered the description of Professor Anzar perfectly, in every detail. He was square as a biscuit tin, with an enormous barrel chest, short, powerful arms, sturdy legs, and an enormous disproportionate head; he looked like the caricature of a man produced by a distorting mirror.
“Excuse me,” said Don. “Are you Professor Anzar?”
“I am,” replied the other.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” said the police lieutenant. “My name is Donald Cameron, I’m a police officer. I’m afraid I have one or two routine inquiries to make, in connection with some television disturbance which has been reported down in Radville. Some flats at the north end of the town.…”
“Come in … come in!” the professor interrupted him. “I have a small electrical device here, which I have been operating lately, it may be the cause of the trouble. If so, I am terribly sorry. I had no idea…”
“Wonder if I was wrong,” thought Cameron. He stepped inside.
Then he knew that he had been right.
The slow dragging footsteps had been part of a build-up. It was quite obvious that the professor had seen him coming and there was nothing slow or dragging about the way that Anzar jumped into action now…
Like an uncoiled spring he hurled the police officer forward into the corridor, passed swiftly behind him, slammed the door and crashed home the heavy bolts.
“Now, my interfering Cameron—if that’s what your name is—I’ll show you that it is not wise to pay visits to the house of Anzar unless you are an invited and honoured guest, and you are neither!” snarled the short, grotesque scientist. “I have no particular reason or cause to love your race. I find its police force singularly inquisitive and objectionable. Now”—he got no further. If there was one thing that Don Cameron didn’t like it was being slung around.
Particularly by so ferocious a looking monster, as the stunted giant who know stood between him and the door. Detection was the second part of his nature. At rock bottom Don Cameron was a fighter. There was Gaelic blood in his pedigree, and it rose to the fore now. With a blood curdling shout, he hurled himself at Anzar, and before the diminutive professor could throw up a guard, the police lieutenant crashed home a shattering, sizzling right hook, full into the beard.
The professor staggered back.
Even in the wild exhilaration and exuberance of the fight, Cameron’s mind was working with cool calculating, efficiency.
There was something odd about that beard! Something damnably odd. It didn’t feel like a beard ought to feel at all. It looked like one. It wasn’t that it was false, it felt springy as though it were made up of minute molecules of flesh instead of hair. It was like punching a lung, or a slab of meat lying in a butcher’s shop. It wasn’t like hair at all. It made the lieutenant feel slightly sick …
He slammed home another punch and then another. The professor was losing ground. The whole of the man’s body felt odd. It was more like thumping into a punch-bag than flesh and blood, what the devil was wrong with him? wondered the police lieutenant. But there was no time for wondering, for no matter what he might feel like, no matter how oddly yielding or surprisingly resilient and resistant the shorter man might be, there was no doubt about his strength. Two arms like steel vices seized the lieutenant’s arm, and began bending it savagely over a leathery shoulder. Don Cameron felt streaks of lightning—red hot fire, darting through his elbow. He crashed his other fist round, and connected again with the side of his opponent’s head. The brute released his arm, and he tore it free. This was no time for the Queensbury rules … he swung a staggering kick that landed somewhere around the midriff. The wind seemed to whistle out of professor Anzar as though he was a punctured balloon. He rolled over on the floor, his strange, stunted body thudding against the corridor wall with a loud crash. The whole of the ancient building seemed to shake. That was understandable. The house was derelict, dilapidated, rickety, and there were two hundred and sixty pounds of professor Anzar, which was quite a lot of professor to be used as a battering ram. But he was up again surprisingly fast, and before Cameron could follow up his advantage the short stocky form of the professor was rushing at him with its head down, charging like a bull. The head when it caught him didn’t seem bony. Leathery, tough, yes, but not as hard as a head should have felt. That feeling of wonderment, of fear, of bewilderment, went through Cameron’s mind again, as he brought his fist up into the florid face that was butting the wind out of his own stomach. Again Anzar reeled back as Cameron’s steel hammer right caught him full and flush in the face.
Don Cameron had been in plenty of fights. He had fought big men, coloured men, all kinds of men—you don’t get to be a police lieutenant without having rough housed it quite a lot in your days as a trooper. He had fought men with knuckle dusters. He had fought men who were bony and as hard as concrete; he had fought flabby men, who had wallowed and rolled in fat to such a depth that it was difficult to injure them, but he had never before fought a man who felt as this man felt. For when he struck his opponent in th
e face there didn’t seem to be any bone structure behind the features. It was just like punching an octopus, or a piece of leather. It was like fighting a jelly fish. And the wild theories that had been crystallising in his mind suddenly all came to the fore. And it looked as if he had been right about the thing that called itself professor Anzar.… All the more reason for them to fight … and he knew, experienced warrior that he was, that he would have to change his methods of conflict. Fists are all very well against a man on whose chin you can plant a knock-out blow. Fists are not so good against a leathery thing that just yields and goes with them. That wants gripping and holding. He wrestled with the monster and got a lock round its neck, trying to choke the wind out of it.… The more he squeezed the more the neck gave. It was like trying to fight a bag of putty, like trying to wrestle with a feather mattress. And suddenly Anzar did some unexpected things … for there was one vital point which Cameron had overlooked. If Anzar was, as he now knew him to be, apparently devoid of a hard skeleton bone structure, he was not necessarily handicapped in the same way as men are who can only bend their knees in the one direction which the knee joint permits. Legs and fists came round at fantastic and unexpected angles. For Anzar was more than double-jointed, he was jointless!
A leathery, but tremendously powerful fist, landed with stunning force at the back of the detective’s neck … How Anzar had got his arm round there Cameron couldn’t think. One minute he was squeezing the life out of the stocky professor, the next moment his world had exploded in a kaleidoscopic pattern of stars and he lay unconscious on the floor.
With a grunt of satisfaction Anzar seized the lieutenant by the smart collar of his uniform, and dragged him away into the depths of the echoing, derelict house.
Very little of the place was furnished. And as Don Cameron opened dazed eyes he noticed this. His eyes were opened but his brain was still heavy. And he could no more have prevented himself from being dragged along that corridor than he could have grown wings and flown off to Antares. Or taken a quick orbit of the moon, and coasted back again on rockets protruding from his feet. He was dazed and slightly concussed. He felt as though a steam roller had been racing around the back of his skull, and finished up doing a cha-cha-cha and a rock-an’-roll on each temple. His head felt three times as big as the professor’s looked. And that was some head!
He heard the clanging of an iron grating. The leathery, humanoid thing gave a sudden deep laugh and tossed him inside. The iron grating slammed shut again. He was in what appeared to be a small room, with a cage-like steel door.
“Now perhaps we can converse without you taking liberties upon my person,” said Anzar in his strangely cultured, old-fashioned voice.
“There’s one thing about him,” thought Cameron, the voice fitted in with the general facial characteristics. It had that rather stilted yet impeccable Victorian phraseology which suited the Professor Challenger appearance which the weird Anzar presented to the outside world.
“Now then, perhaps you’d like to tell the real purpose of your visit, would you? Come lying to me about radio interference! That’s the least of your worries. I’ll tell you what you’re worried about. You’re worried about plants that walk; you’re concerned because a six mile strip of your road has been twisted and blasted and buckled. Because it’s subsided, and because the tarmacadam on the surface has been melted by some tremendous heat and power, but you can’t see what. There are no tracks of any engine being across it. It’s just as if the road was suddenly exposed. I’ll tell you what else you’re concerned about—an old man named Tom Farrow, in whose garden strange things have happened. You are equally anxious to know what it was that the Rev. George Tremayne saw in the crypt beneath his church, that nearly drove him out of his mind. You’d like very much to know the answer to the problem of how a hover car, which is designed to coast a few feet above the road on a cushion of controlled air from its jets, suddenly boosts itself to a height of two hundred feet, gets caught in an air current, and lands on soft ground. You’d like to know that, wouldn’t you? Hmmm, I thought you would.” He was reading Cameron’s eyes as he spoke. And despite himself, the dazed detective was unable to conceal the surprise he felt. “There is another question you would like answered. I expect, and that is, who I am? And what I am doing here on your paltry planet?”
He had given himself away! He had credited Cameron with knowing more than the IPF man actually did.
“So you admit you’re not one of us?” said Don suddenly.
“I imagine you discovered that for yourself just now, when you tried to mix it with me, as I believe you term this crude physical violence, in which your people appear to excel,” said Anzar.
“Yes, I thought you felt a bit odd,” said Cameron brightly, “rather like wrestling with a sponge. Or a rubber band.…”
“Do you see this machine over here,” said the professor with a wry grin—“it’s an X-ray device. If you were to step in front of it, it would reveal your bone structure, and the principle organs of your body—the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, all working very satisfactorily. Now watch what happens when I step in front of it!” He slipped off his jacket, and stepped quickly in front of the X-ray plate. He depressed the switch and powerful radiation shot through him, illuminating him.
“What do you think of that, Mr. Cameron?”
Don Cameron caught his breath. Apart from the metal trimming of buttons and fasteners on the suit, nothing showed on the plate whatsoever. There was no bone structure, no major organs, just something that might have been a kind of air cavity. Cameron remembered when he had kicked the uncanny professor in the stomach, there had been a sound as of a punctured tyre. He had thought that there had been lungs being forcefully emptied of air, but they obviously weren’t. If there was an air compartment inside the professor, he didn’t appear to use if for breathing. There was some other purpose in his metabolism which required it. Some other purpose.…
“I trust you are duly impressed,” said the thing that called itself Anzar, and switched off the X-ray.
“I’m impressed right enough,” answered Cameron, “Maybe you’d like to fill in one or two of the blanks for me? Exactly who are you? Where are you from? What do you want?”
“Oddly enough my name really is ‘Anzar’ ” said the professor. “As to where I’m from—if I told you the name it would mean nothing to you, so I’ll give it to you in the earthly name. I come from the third planet revolving round the star that you call Sirius. The Dog Star. To us it is the central furnace. It is the sun of our solar system.”
“But how did you come? It is a distance of several light years,” said the IPF Officer. “I didn’t know it was possible to communicate from one system to another?”
“Not by the crude mechanical means that you use, of course it isn’t,” snorted Anzar. “You can’t sit in a hundred thousand mile an hour rocket ship and waste your life away cruising from one star system to another … your grandchildren might reach it, but you wouldn’t. No! We’re farther than that! The molecules of my body can be dissolved into pure electronic charges, having been dissolved into pure electronic charges they can be transmitted at many times the speed of light.”
“I didn’t think it was possible to exceed the speed of light!” protested Cameron in genuine astonishment.
“It is not, of course, by your paltry technology—but we have a device known as a vidic supercharger, which does just that. It has several side effects as well. But that is its main purpose, to accelerate the velocity of the electrons till they are travelling at many times the speed of light. So a journey which would take five, ten, fifteen years … can be accomplished in a matter of what you would term ‘minutes’. As you comprehend time.”
“Good lord!” exclaimed the police officer, genuinely taken a back. “Is this true, Anzar.”
“Is it true?” jeered Anzar. “You, as a human being are a fine one to speak to me of ‘truth and lies’. It was your peculiar delight in fantasy and falsehood, partic
ularly as it is exemplified in the buildings which you dare to designate as ‘libraries’ which placed me in the present predicament. As I travelled in my electronic form from my planet to this I arrived as a rather amorphous mass—I think the term that you would use is ‘blob’. I was a rough, semi-transparent sphere when I reached this planet and materialised once more from my pure electron form. I was the seventh or eighth member of my race to attempt the crossing. Unfortunately I am the only one who survived.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because it pleases me to speak of the achievements of our great and noble race. Because since the stupid decisions of your council a few years back, I have been forced to live the life of a recluse up here. Shunned. Disliked. I don’t wish to speak to the ordinary common masses, with their minds like mud turtles, and the scientists will no longer have anything to do with me. Though they were childish enough! How I put up with their puerile babblings for so long I don’t know. As I was saying, seven or eight of our pioneer adventurers lost their lives on the trip. It was not the trip itself, it was the landing. The electrons normally are caught in a focal beam at the other end. They dematerialise safely within the confines of that apparatus. Now here is no apparatus on a raw planet. So the first pioneers had to come armed with nothing but their courage. Some died in deserts before they could reach habitable areas, some were drowned in your oceans. Some were frozen to death in your North Polar regions.”
“Again, I ask you, why are you telling me all this?” I don’t believe all the guff about being lonely.”
“You will understand all things in due course if you just wait for my explanation,” said the alien. “Or perhaps I had better tell you now”—a cruel smile twisted his mouth. “I am telling you because you will never be able to relay the information to anyone else. I fully intend that you shall die as soon as I have finished with you.”
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