Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Given the same chemical constituents, in more or less the same proportions, it would be unreasonable to suppose it to have done otherwise. As the planet cooled, the beginnings of life would emerge in the warm seas; as the seas receded vegetation would creep up on to the beaches; for eons of time on land there would be only the great swamp forests of giant ferns and spongy growths that are now our coal seams. But sooner or later, according to local solar condition, animals would emerge to inhabit the jungles, and sooner or later man, or something very like him, would become the lord of the particular creation.’

  ‘It’s queer, though, that these people should be giants. That gives the whole business a farcical resemblance to Jack and the Beanstalk. All the fairy stories for grown-ups always describe imaginary beings from another world as little people—like super-intelligent pigmies.’

  ‘They might be. That would depend entirely on the gravity of the heavenly body from which they came. If it were far larger than our Earth, yet similar to it in other ways, its gravity would be much greater. Its people would not require such weighty bodies to keep them down and enable them to go about their business with maximum efficiency; so they would be the sort of dwarfs that sensational novelists have often portrayed. But if their world were much smaller than ours the reverse applies. That, at least, is one thing of which we can be reasonably certain. As these people are about three times our size the odds are that they come from a relatively small planet; possibly one considerably smaller than Earth, and anyway one that has only about one-third of Earth’s gravitational pull at its surface.’

  Kem was still pondering this and thinking how remarkable it was that man had already acquired sufficient knowledge to make deductions about huge spheres so distant that they appeared only as specks of light, when he saw that Carmen had opened her eyes.

  Hardly touching the deck, she lay on her side looking at him, but her look showed no trace of recognition. Both the men moved over to her. At first they feared that she had lost her reason, as she continued to stare blankly at them without uttering a word; but suddenly she closed her eyes again and began to pray out loud, crying:

  ‘Mea culpa! Mea culpa! O Holy Mother, I know that I have sinned and deserve to be cast down into Hell; but I beg you to intercede for me at the Throne of Grace. Have mercy on me, I implore! I beseech you to mitigate the just anger of your Divine Son, so that He will send His Angels to save me from the power of the Evil One.’

  In that vein she continued for several minutes; and, although she repeated herself frequently, she prayed with an earnestness that bore no resemblance to the ravings of a mad woman. When at length she ceased, Escobar whispered:

  ‘I don’t think she has gone off her head, but her mind still refuses to accept our situation as reality.’

  ‘In any case she is suffering from severe shock,’ Kem replied. ‘Just feel how cold her hands are. We had better wrap her up.’

  The long mink coat that had been lying across the foot of her bed when the giants appeared at the estancia was floating near the ceiling. They caught it, pulled it down and wrapped it round her. As they did so she opened her eyes again and began to moan:

  ‘Water! Water! Oh, I know that I have deserved Hell! I know that thirst is an ordained torture! Satan mocks the damned by pouring the precious drops on to the red-hot stones. But, dear Lord, have pity upon me! Don’t let me be consumed by these internal fires. My throat is parched—burning. Have mercy and assuage my awful thirst, even if my punishment must last longer.’

  Escobar and Kem both looked helplessly round the large, low-roofed chamber. They, the sleeping giants, the row of tanks ranged round the base of the control tower, and the scattered oddments from the estancia, were the only things in it. There were no basins, pipes or taps which would have implied that water was laid on; no big jars, bottles or drinking vessels.

  For the first time it occurred to them that probably many hours had elapsed since they had been carried off; and they suddenly realised that they were both hungry and thirsty, which made Carmen’s craving for water a much more normal matter than it had at first appeared.

  With a sideways kick of his feet Kem propelled himself over to the one suitcase that had been brought with them, turned it the right way up, and opened it. The case contained only some of Carmen’s clothes and the now ludicrously useless red brief-case. Following his example, Escobar drew her dressing-case from beneath a large embroidered Spanish shawl, which had formerly graced her bed, and began to run through it. Round its sides there were rows of gilt-topped glass jars, each in a separate fitting, and among the morocco-leather cases containing her jewels were packed a number of little pots and bottles. There were powders, lotions, ointments and perfumes in considerable variety, but nothing fit to drink. The only things he could find which might prove useful in the present emergency were bromides and aspirins.

  He held them up for Kem to see, but Kem shook his head, and muttered: ‘It’s no good giving her those for the moment. We’ve got to find her something to drink.’ Then he glided over to the nearest tank.

  It was made of the same opaque material as the Saucer, and its flat top appeared to be a lid, as there was a hair-line break all round about an inch below it. But apart from that it formed a three-feet-high cube with a dead-smooth surface, and he could discover no means of opening it. As he moved over to the next, Escobar came to his assistance, and between them they began to examine all the tanks. After trying another unsuccessfully Kem came upon one the lid of which opened at a touch; but it was empty and its purpose obvious. It contained a large-mouthed fixed funnel leading down to a pipe about a foot wide, at the bottom of which daylight could be seen. It was clearly a lavatory on the same principle as those installed in railway trains, but lacking any form of trap, or, as far as could be seen, any sluicing apparatus. Nevertheless it was spotlessly clean and had no odour, but was too large and high for a human being to sit upon without discomfort. Hoping to find a wash-basin in one of the other tanks, Kem and Escobar swiftly tried the lids of the remainder, but all were firmly shut and defied every effort to open them.

  Carmen was still moaning pitifully for water all this time, and her appeals to God, the Virgin and numerous saints, filled them with acute distress at being unable to ease the torture that she was obviously suffering.

  With sudden exasperation, Escobar exclaimed, ‘There must be water somewhere in this accursed flying-machine.’ Then he turned towards the giants, and added, ‘Wherever those great brutes have come from, I’m certain of one thing—they couldn’t live without it.’

  Kem followed his glance and went a little pale, as he muttered: ‘I suppose you’re right. That leaves us no alternative. We’ve got to wake one of them and find out where they keep it.’

  The blood drained from Escobar’s ruddy face, and after a moment he said thickly, ‘I’d rather confront a charging bull without a matador’s cloak than rouse one of those giant ape-men and chance his waking in a temper.’

  ‘Water!’ moaned Carmen. ‘O holy Virgin, take pity on me! Water! Water!’

  ‘It… it’s got to be done,’ faltered Kem miserably, and he took a hesitant step towards the nearer monster.

  10

  Space and Speed

  Nerving himself against the probable anger of the sleeping giant Kem laid a hand on his shoulder. On touching the course skin he found it much tougher than he had expected. It was almost as rough and hard as the hide of an elephant, and it flashed through his mind that this was probably the reason why the monsters could do without clothes. As the Saucer was subjected to the full and constant power of the sun, its interior should normally have been as hot as a furnace; but evidently its temperature was controlled in some way, for it was far from hot and so near chilly that any naked human being would have found it difficult to sleep from shivering. That the giants were able to do so without discomfort suggested that they were used to low temperatures and that nature had toughened their skins to make them cold-resistant.


  After a few shakes the giant opened his eyes, shook his bald head and sat up. He was still wearing his two-part mask and through the upper section of it his great expressionless pale blue eyes stared at Kem. Fighting down an impulse to turn and run, Kem made the motions of drinking and pointed with his finger to his mouth.

  The monster was much too tall to stand upright in the chamber, but he rolled over on his side, slid across the deck to the control tower and rapped upon it with his knuckles. After a moment a small trap-door, about six inches square, high up in it, flicked open. The giant pushed up the little transparent visor over his mouth and made some strange clucking noises in his throat. The trap promply shut again but almost instantly, as if by magic, two of the tanks sprang open.

  With his twelve-inch-long finger the giant gave Kem a gentle prod in the back, which sent him floating towards them. He saw that one tank was half full of a green vegetable that looked like beans, the other contained only a coiled length of rubbery-looking pipe attached to a short standard with a press-button top.

  Escobar had propelled himself over to Kem’s side and said at once: ‘The water must be sucked from that pipe. No other way of drinking is possible up here. If one tried to pour out any liquid it would float away in globules.’

  Between them they pushed, rather than carried, Carmen through the air to the tank, put the pipe-end in her mouth, pressed the button, and watched her avidly suck the water. When she took her mouth from it some of the water spilled out and, as Escobar had said it would, danced through the air in a number of round, shiny balls.

  Instantly the giant struck Kem’s hand from the button, flicked up his visor and, sticking out a tongue the size of an ox’s, greedily lapped the water balls into his cavern-like mouth. The episode gave them two pieces of information. Water was evidently precious, and the giant had no teeth. When he had succeeded in catching all the balls, he allowed Kem and Escobar to drink, but only sparingly; then he gave them five beans apiece from the other tank. Some unseen lever closed both the tanks down, the giant turned his back on them, yawned, rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Carmen, her craving satisfied, had closed her eyes and lay white and still, but breathing gently. The two men remained standing, dubiously eyeing their beans. Simultaneously both decided to try one. They were moderately soft and had a sweetish, not unpleasant flavour.

  ‘They’re not bad,’ Kem pronounced. ‘But surely this isn’t the only food we’re to be given?’

  ‘It may be,’ replied Escobar glumly. ‘The master-minds who run the place we are going to may have perfected some vegetables containing all the vitamins necessary to support life. That would be possible by selected breeding over a period of centuries. This ration they have given us may prove sufficient to stave off hunger for several hours.’

  Kem groaned. ‘Oh, God, this is too awful! Just think of having to live on a diet of beans indefinitely, added to everything else!’

  ‘Perhaps the beans are a form of concentrate used only on these space journeys, when keeping the cargo light may be an important consideration. Among a highly developed people it is virtually certain that we shall find other forms of food when we get there.’

  ‘Have you any idea when that will be?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ Escobar snapped irritably. ‘Such a journey might be accomplished in a few months; but it is equally likely that it will take twenty years.’

  ‘Twenty years!’ Kem exclaimed, aghast.

  ‘Yes; if we are being taken to a planet outside our own solar system. The nearest planet that the astronomers consider might be habitable revolves round a star named Wolf 359. It is eight light years away from Earth, or, in lay parlance, 47 million million miles; and that is a mere nothing as astronomical distances go. The nearest globular cluster, ω Centuri, is 22,000 light years distant from Earth, and the farthest extra-galactic nebulae some 140 million light years away.’

  ‘We can’t conceivably be making such a journey. It’s not possible!’

  ‘There I agree,’ Escobar conceded more reasonably. ‘Even travelling at the speed of light, it would take us about three times as long to reach the nearest globular cluster as any known form of civilisation has existed on Earth; so we should be dead before we had completed all but a tiny fraction of the journey. It seems hardly likely that enquiring minds would get much satisfaction out of human remains many thousand years old, after having had ample opportunity to observe living people from the skies.’

  Kem nodded. ‘If the top boys of this other world had been content to receive our mummies the logical thing would have been for them to give orders that we were to be knocked on the head and embalmed as soon as we had been got away in the Saucer. Anyhow, the giants would not have been allowed to spare us any of their precious water, if they did not mean to keep us alive.’

  ‘Yes. That cuts the length of our journey down to within definite limits. But it would have been obvious to them that you and Carmen are still young people, and they may have thought that I looked good for another quarter of a century; so it’s on the cards that we have to face imprisonment in this thing for quite a number of years.’

  ‘From what you say, even if we were flying at the speed of light, it would take us eight years to reach the Wolf 359 system. But light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and the fastest the Flying Saucers have ever been actually checked as travelling is only 18,000 per hour. If that is all they can do, we would still be dead centuries before there was any chance of our reaching the nearest habitable planet.’

  Escobar shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘No one knows how fast the Saucers can travel. They may achieve speeds too high for the human eye to register. In any case they would be able to go far faster in the stratosphere, where they are not subject to the resistance of the atmosphere, which is wrapped like an invisible blanket round the Earth. I do not consider it outside the bounds of possibility that they should travel as fast as light.’

  ‘Surely our bodies could not stand up to 186,000 miles a second?’

  ‘Why not? You are confusing the issue with sensitivity to sudden acceleration. It is not the speed at which a pilot is moving that causes him to black out, but the strain on the human system of forcing it to withstand any pressure greater than that equal to four gravities for more than a few minutes. That is one of the worst headaches plaguing the scientists who are already exploring possible ways of sending a manned rocket to the Moon. Obviously the faster the rocket-ship reaches a high velocity, and can get clear of Earth’s atmosphere, the less fuel it will need; so the nearer it will come to being a practical proposition as far as what is termed its mass-ratio is concerned. But the trouble is that the motors will have to be kept running for at least eight minutes; for if the rocket were driven clear of the atmosphere in less than that its acceleration would have to be so great that the crew would black out.’

  ‘I get the point,’ Kem nodded. ‘To run it for eight minutes would use up so great a weight of fuel that the rocket would not have enough left to complete its journey and stand any chance of getting back.’

  ‘In broad terms that is what it amounts to. One way of getting over that would be to first send up an aerial raft. When I was working for the Germans during the last war they were planning to do that; but not of course with an idea of using it as a stepping-stone to the Moon. Their object was to operate from it certain secret weapons. Anyhow, it is a perfectly practical proposition to send a form of static airship up by means of several rockets, which together would carry it to the stratosphere. There, with very little engine power, it could be kept at a suitable altitude, and it would behave like a very small moon, circling round and round the earth. Further manned rockets would be sent up, and on reaching it each would contribute to its tanks a quota of fuel. Then the Moon rocket could be despatched, refuel at the raft, and go on its way with enough fuel on board to get to the Moon and return. Once the Moon rocket was well away on its big lap, its crew would no longer feel the least inconvenience o
n account of its speed. In fact, they would be able to swim about in the air of their cabin if they liked, just as we could here. And that brings me back to a very elementary example of speed and its effect, of which I was about to remind you. Everyone on earth is hurtling through space at 72,000 miles an hour, because that is the pace that Earth must maintain to accomplish its annual journey round the sun; yet nobody even feels it.’

  Kem put his hand over his eyes as he thought about this astounding but transparently obvious truth. He was quick to pick up the inference that if man could travel at 72,000 miles an hour without knowing he was doing so, there seemed no reason why he should not continue to function normally while moving at far greater speeds; but, all the same, his mind baulked at the idea of doing 186,000 miles per second, and he said:

  ‘I admit that I am completely out of my depth, but do you really think it possible that any machine could go as fast as light? Even given atomic power, or something like it, that seems improbable.’

  ‘They may be using a form of power that with us is as yet only believed to exist theoretically,’ Escobar said thoughtfully. ‘I do not pretend to be a top-ranking scientist myself; but I understand enough about Einstein’s Unified Field Theory to give you some conception of it. He postulated that all forms of nature, stars, planets, light, electricity—everything with the possible exception of the minute particles of which the atom is composed—obey the same universal laws. Further, that all matter is frozen energy, and that matter differs from energy only temporararily. He also proved that gravity is really electro-magnetism. Of course, there is a great deal more to it than that, but there is no point in going into his Space-time concept at the moment, as it is his views on magnetism with which we are concerned.

  ‘It is now agreed that everything from a postage stamp to a battleship has its magnetic frequencies, and that any force which can break those frequencies would disintegrate the object operated on. Such disintegration, if controlled, would provide virtually limitless power. It has been proved by the means of the tenescope that there are 1,257 magnetic lines of force in every square centimetre of matter. If a way could be found to cross two or more of those lines the power so generated could be used to propel matter in any desired direction at speeds hitherto regarded as outside the bounds of possibility; and Einstein contends that by these means matter could be made to travel at the speed of light.