The eyes opened, and blinked at the boy...
“Dance, Traggon, dance,” shouted Smith with delight as they emerged from the Central Tower into the late afternoon sunlight.
The ha-Grebst, absolute captive of the silvery headset, pranced and danced in awkward alien hops, as the two proceeded toward the Djengl.
“Tut-tut,” Smith said, observing the clumsy antics of his new slave, “surely you can dance better than that?”
“Dancing not ha-Grebst concept,” said Traggon slowly, forced by the headset to conceptualize thoughts so alien to him that his head would have hurt if it had still been under his control. “Closest thing is antics of very youthful ha-Grebst, before learning ha-Grebst way.”
“Hmmm,” Smith said. As the alien spoke of the Tia-Grebst way,’ Smith had picked up a stage from his mind involuntarily defining it. It was not a pretty thing, the ha-Grebst teaching method. There was a lot in that flash from Traggon’s mind about whips, and electric shocks, and other, more formless horrors. With the flash came something of an insight into the ha-Grebst mind, however: an utterly feral, insensately ferocious natural attitude that could only be kept under control by the most savage kind of conditioning.
Smith shook his head as if to dislodge the images of pain and bestiality. “This mind-controlling business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” he thought. “But I shall make do, in my customary indomitable manner.”
They rounded a comer and the ha-Grebst raiding-craft loomed before them, its spherical bulk almost completely filling the width of the small plaza it sat in.
“Phew,” said Smith. “What a reek around that thing! Tell me, my unwashed lad, do you have H2O on your wretched planet?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, why in thunderation don’t you ever use it on yourselves?”
“We do. Once a porlan, whether we need it or not. Or more frequently, if the ship’s Ritualizer proclaims a water-immersion day. It is the ha-Grebst way.”
Once again Smith received an image directly from Traggon’s mind; a porlan, it seemed, was something on the order of 144 days, though it was difficult to be sure how long a ha-Grebst day was.
“Well,” Smith said, “that certainly explains that. When my new order becomes fully established, I believe that will be one of the first things I shall see to changing. Do you hear that, you misbegotten fugitive from a garbage heap? I shall introduce regular bathing to your people, and a new joy in life shall be yours!”
The alien snarled.
“I heard that, Traggon. We’ll have no more of that. Now. How do we get inside this contraption?”
Traggon reached up to the side of the raider-craftand half-twisted a small disk set in the Djengl’s hull.
With a harsh sawing sound, a steep ramp extended outwards and downwards from the ship, and a panel slid aside. In the opening stood another ha-Grebst.
The new ha-Grebst snarled at Traggon.
A slow smile grew on Smith’s face. The headset was translating every word for him—which was fortunate, because the ha-Grebst did not have his voder translator on.
“I heard that, Rethog,” Smith said. “I hear everything. And I shall answer instead of your compatriot here, who is no longer answering any questions but those I pose him. No, Rethog, I am not his prisoner. He is mine.”
“And so are you.”
Raid-Chief Rethog snarled and took one step forward—and froze in mid-step.
The smile on Smith’s face grew broader.
“Ahhhh. How easy it is for a superior mind to impress his inferiors.” He thought a moment.
“Order all your men to come out here and—no, wait. I’ll do it myself.”
Smith’s face creased in concentration, as he formed a mental order for the rest of the ha-Grebst to appear—and then he remembered Judy, and ordered them to bring her out too.
Moments later they began appearing, walking hesitantly at first, then more firmly as Smith’s mind grew more adept at its task.
With the last two of the twelve rat-faced aliens was Judy, looking pale.
“Dr. Smith!” she gasped. “They caught you too! Are—are the others all right?”
“They are perfectly well, so far as I know, my dear,” he answered unctuously. “And as you will see, so am I!”
He concentrated on a series of mental commands then.
The twelve ha-Grebst silently grouped themselves in a circle on the small plaza, in the deep afternoon shadow of their raider-craft.
Then they all joined hands and, with extreme awkwardness, began to dance around in a circle. . .
Judy’s mouth gaped in stunned wonderment.
Smith chuckled indulgently. “A mere nothing. Watch now!”
The ha-Grebst ceased their cumbersome dancing, squatted down on the plaza, and, slowly, deliberately, stood on their heads, propping themselves up with varying degrees of success with their claw-like hands...
Smith clapped his hands, and they all resumed their upright positions.
“What else would you like me to have them do, my dear—as, let us say, a penance for having the temerity to take prisoner a friend of Dr. Zachary Smith?” He was in his element now, and he both knew it and relished it thoroughly.
She had to make several attempts at speaking before intelligent sounds came out. “What . . . why . . . why are they doing that?”
“Ah, now,” Smith said triumphantly, smugly, “that will be my little secret.
“But I will tell you that I can make them do whatever I want them to do, from now on. And the first thing I shall do is to use my power to get us off this planet. I have found what I wanted—what I have always wanted. Power!
“Yes, my dear, from now on the story of Smith the man shall be transformed into the story of Smith the king—Smith the Emperor!”
A thought struck him, and he brightened even more.
“And you may, if you wish, become my first Empress—once I’ve got things running properly under my control, that is. Even with my power, I shall have to proceed with a certain amount of care. As someone or other has said, these things must be done delicately . . . “
Regaining some of her composure, Judy said forthrightly, “Dr. Smith, I don’t understand. Could you explain all this more clearly? What do you mean, Emperor—and Empress? What makes you think I want to be an Empress, too—especially your Empress?”
Smith’s face darkened.
“My dear, with the control device . . . hm, we won’t go into that. At any rate, I can make anyone—or any thing, such as these loathsome unwashed beasts I have had cavorting for your amusement—do precisely what I order them to do. My intentions are simple. I shall take over their planet, and their planet’s possessions, and then I shall expand my influence. I should imagine that within, oh, a few months, I shall have a nice little interstellar empire going, and I assure you I shall proceed to expand its boundaries to the limits of this marvelous machine’s capabilities. Why, the possibilities are endless!”
Judy’s eyes widened. “Dr. Smith! You wouldn’t—”
“Ho, ho, ho!” Smith said. “Just watch me!”
“I’ll have nothing to do with your mad plans,” she said decisively. “You can have all these smelly beasts if you want to, but I’m going back to the Jupiter.”
And she strode purposefully down the ramp and past Smith.
“That’s what you think,” Smith muttered, scowling. He shot a mental command at her—and she kept walking!
"What the—” said aloud, astonished. Already he could see his dreams of conquest fading. “No, I won’t accept it, I won’t! My beautiful empire!” he wailed.
Judy kept walking.
“Stop!” he shouted at her—and breathed a sigh of relief.
Judy had frozen in mid-step.
“Now, come back here,” Smith said aloud. She turned and walked woodenly toward him.
“I can see this gadget is going to take some time getting used to,” he grumbled. “Why didn’t you come the first t
ime?”
“The first time? I only heard you call once,” she said, as expressionlessly as one of the ha-Grebst voder translators.
He scowled, then brightened immediately. “I have it! The first time I controlled a ha-Grebst, it was a vocal command that preceded it—and it was the same with you. Yes! Very likely it takes that much for the headset to establish neurological resonance with a given race; then after that, a mental command alone . . . After all, to whomever really owns this city, we are both alien races.” He didn’t bother to explain to her that the moment he’d first touched Traggon’s mind, he’d learned the ha-Grebst were aliens to this planet, just like Earthmen.
“Well, that’s no longer important; I’m tuned to both races now.”
He thought about that for a moment, then turned decisively to the ha-Grebst, who were standing exactly as he had left them.
The sight pleased him; obviously he was getting the hang of controlling people with the headset. Fortunately, less immediate concentration on each individual seemed to be required, the longer they remained raider his control.
“That’s fortunate for my plans, if so,” he mused aloud. “I hadn’t considered how difficult it might be to be constantly giving commands one by one—to a whole planetful of people!”
“Hmmm, people. Perhaps we’d all better just go along now and look up the rest of the Robinson family.”
Smith stood up straighter, hummed a little tune, and smoothed his tunic.
“Now, my beautiful cohorts, follow me! Work to do, work to dol March now—hut, two three, four, hut two—”
And twelve ha-Grebst and one Earth girl fell into step behind him . . .
“I think we’ve found what were looking for,” Will had shouted down to the Robot. “Why don’t you call Dad and the others and get them all down here?”
The Robot had complied, and a few minutes later the crew of the Jupiter II—less Judy and Dr. Smith— were crowding in through the doorway to the room of the vats.
They were just in time to see a twelve-foot-high, naked, sexless, hairless being climb very slowly down out of one of the vats.
Will called to them excitedly.
“Come on, come on, Dad, I don’t think he’s dangerous,” he was shouting.
“He?’ Maureen said half-aloud, as the being reached the bottom and turned to face them all. “How can you possibly tell?”
The giant being began going into what were obviously a form of isometric calesthenics—a slow pattern of stretchings and tensings of its magnificent muscles which continued for several minutes while the Earth people stood in silent awe, watching.
Then the giant stopped, and peered closely at Will, his hairless brows knitting slightly.
“Eng-lish,” he said at last, slowly. “Am I . . . to presume . . . that . . . you all . . . speak this rudimentary ... spoken tongue?”
The voice was a pleasant baritone, with overtones and resonances that gave an odd, but not unpleasant, twang to his speech.
“That’s right,” Robinson said, stepping forward.
“And I presume that you are of the race that built this city?”
“The . . . city.” The giant blinked several times.
“You must . . . pardon me. I have been here for . . . some time. It is . . . difficult to speak . . . even to think . . . waking up after . . . so many years.”
The giant closed his eyes and turned his head from side to side several times, slowly, then opened his eyes and looked at them again.
“So it is . . . my turn at last . . . to supervise.”
“Supervise?”
“It is a . . . long story,” the giant said.
Suddenly the expressionless face was creased with a faint smile. “A longer story . . . than you could dream.”
“Dream!”
With the repetition of the word, the smile vanished from his face, and he shook his head again from side to side a few more times.
“Such dreams . . . such dreams I’ve had,” he said then. “Better than waking . . . far, far better. I think that I shall go back to sleep again after the . . . proving, even if . . . you are the Worthy Ones.”
The Earth people could almost hear the capital letters in the last two words.
Then the giant seemed to remember something, and strode slowly over to the nearest wall. He pressed a white square in it, and the wall lit up with an intricately cryptic diagram which the giant studied carefully for several minutes in silence.
“All is well, then, with Giandahar,” he said. The city stands, and my people remain . . . asleep.”
“But many have visited Giandahar since first I fell into my dream-rich sleep, and all have left again.”
He sighed. “And still do we await ... the Worthy Ones.”
“How . . . how many of you are there, asleep downhere in these gigantic vats?” Robinson asked, and realized as he spoke that he was little more than whispering, with the awe of what they were seeing.
“Alas,” the giant said with sadness in his voice, “little more than a . . . million of us decided to await the Worthy Ones. The rest have been dead since before we placed ourselves in the nutrient vats . . .”
“And how long have you yourself been sleeping?” Robinson continued, determined to try to begin to make coherent sense out of what was happening.
The giant turned to the glowing wall, and cryptic squiggles flashed across it.
“So very long?” he said, and shook his head a third time.
“I have been sleeping here . . . for seven billion years."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There was a ringing sound in Robinson’s ears, and then he heard his wife’s voice calling his name alarmedly.
“John, John, are you all right?”
He realized that he had half-slumped to the floor and that she had held him from falling completely over.
“I—I guess so. Guess I’ve been under . . . too much on my mind, lately. Strain.”
“I’ll say,” she announced maternally. “You haven’t even had anything to eat since breakfast and it’s almost night time. Have a bite of emergency rations, John. They may not taste good, but they’ll do you good.”
He munched on the biscuit in his pack and began to feel better.
During this, the giant had turned away politely and was studying his arcane wall-charts.
Robinson decided his head was clear again, and spoke. “Uh, I’m sorry. Bit too many shocks too quickly, I believe.”
“You find my story hard to believe already, do you not?” the giant said.
“No,” Robinson answered firmly, which made the giant look at him with greater interest. “No, it’s just because I do believe you, I think, that made me dizzy for a moment. I don’t think the idea’s preposterous because I’ve seen your city.”
“I’ve seen many things in the past two years. The galaxy is big, and it is old. And much is strange past my understanding; not, however, past my belief.”
“That is, assuming you can explain.”
“Two other members of your race are on the surface,” said the giant obliquely. “And a dozen members of a failed race.”
It was Robinson’s turn to shake his head, in puzzlement. “The ha-Grebst? You move too fast for me. Er . . . By the way, what name should we call you by?”
The giant smiled. “You change your thoughts even as you speak, yet you complain when I do much the same. The life-force still breeds true. You may call me Gil-mish. It is a symbolic rendition in your tongue of my Giandhu name, which exists only as a pure thought construct and is not capable of being directly verbalized.”
Don blew air through his pursed lips, but could not whistle.
Maureen spoke up, rather surprised at the sharpness of her tone. “One of those humans up on the surface is my daughter, Gil’mish. She is a prisoner of . . . I suppose those you called a ‘failed race.’ Is she safe? Can you help her?”
Gil’mish passed a hand over his smooth broad forehead.
“I . . . I am certain she will be safe . . . for the time being. You must, however . . . pardon me. I remain temporarily . . . weak with reaction to my awakening. It may take me a few small units of your time . . . till I am fully myself. Then we shall see about the failed ones.”
“Very well,” said Robinson. “We accept that; after all, we are uninvited guests here in the first place. Maureen, I’m sure that with what we’ve seen, we needn’t fear that Gil’mish is capable of helping us. And I’m sure that he will when he can.”
“Thank you,” Gil’mish said, and nodded. “But I must assure you, you are hardly uninvited guests.”
“You were supposed to come here.”
“Supposed to!” said Don. “I quit. This is beyond me.
“Pardon, that is not quite accurate. I meant that all are welcomed here, who are capable of getting here.”
“Including the ha-Grebst? They were in process of systematically looting this place when we arrived. How do you keep such people from making off with everything—” Robinson laughed in spite of himself “—especially since, as you said, you’ve been asleep for . . . seven billion years.”
“We have our methods. This history screen tells me nothing has happened that cannot be repaired.”
“Over thirty thousand times in the period since the Giandhu chose to sleep has one of us been awakened— each time, the city has seen to it that a different one was wakened, incidentally, for that was what we all agreed upon. Hopefully, none of us will have to waken more than once before we waken for the last time, all of us, to greet the Worthy Ones.”
The Robot whirred and clicked. “For your information, Professor Robinson, that indicates that the Giandhu apparently were prepared to sleep here for well over two hundred billion years. This figure is far beyond that date established as the probable time of the final energy death of the entire universe. Suggestion: take Gil’mish’s statements with a small quantity of sodium chloride. Hrrrmmm. That is, a grain of salt.”
“Your science is in error,” Gil-mish said gravely. “I perceive as innate in the present structure of your language, that you do not accept the ‘steady state’ theory of the universe. But such a position is, as I said, in error.”
Lost In Space Page 13
