by William Tenn
He had just about made up his mind to look into a series of zigzag indentations in the opposite wall when he observed Lirld pointing the blaster at him with determined if unprofessional tremulousness. His mind, which had been filing the recent conversation between professor and assistant in an uninterested back-portion, suddenly informed him that he was about to become the first, and probably unrecorded victim, in a War of Worlds.
“Hey!” he yelped, entirely forgetting his meager powers of communication. “I just want to look up Rabd. I’m not going on any ramp—”
Lirld did something to the curlicued instrument that seemed like winding a clock, but was probably more equivalent to the pressing of a trigger. He simultaneously shut all of his eyes—no mean feat in itself.
That, Clyde Manship reflected later—when there was time and space to reflect—was the only thing which saved his life. That and the prodigious sideways broad-jump he made as millions of crackling red dots ripped out of the instrument toward him.
The red dots sped past his pajama-tops and into one of the lower vaults that made up the ceiling. Without a sound, a hole some ten feet in circumference appeared in the masonry. The hole was deep enough—some three or four feet—to let the night sky of the planet show through. A heavy haze of white powder drifted down like the dust from a well-beaten rug.
Staring at it, Manship felt the roll of tiny glaciers toward his heart. His stomach flattened out against its abdominal wall and tried to skulk quietly around his ribs. He had never felt so completely frightened in his life. “Hey-y-y—” he began.
“A little too much power, Professor,” Srin observed judiciously from where he rested easily with tentacles outspread against the wall. “A little too much power and not enough glrnk. Try a little more glrnk and see what happens.”
“Thank you,” Lirld told him gratefully. “Like this, you mean?”
He raised and pointed the instrument again.
“Hey-y-y!” Manship continued in the same vein as before, not so much because he felt the results of such a statement would be particularly rewarding as because he lacked, at the moment, the creative faculties for another, more elaborate comment. “Hey-y-y-y!” he repeated between chattering teeth, staring at Lirld out of eyes no longer entirely flat.
He held up a shaking, admonishing hand. Fear was gibbering through him like the news of panic through a nation of monkeys. He watched the flefnobe make the peculiar winding trigger adjustment again. His thoughts came to a stop and every muscle in his body seemed to tense unendurably.
Suddenly Lirld shook. He slid backward along the tabletop. The weapon dropped out of stiffened tentacles and smashed into bunches of circular wires that rolled in all directions. “Srin!” his mind whimpered. “Srin! The monster—Do—do you see what’s coming out of his eyes? He’s—he’s—”
His body cracked open and a pale, blue goo poured out. Tentacles dropped off him like so many long leaves in a brisk autumn wind. The eyes that studded his surface turned from turquoise to a dull brown. “Srin!” he begged in a tiny, faraway thought. “Help me—the flat-eyed monster is—help—help!”
And then he dissolved. Where he had been, there was nothing but a dark liquid, streaked with blue, that flowed and bubbled and dripped off the curving edge of the table.
Manship stared at it uncomprehendingly, realizing only one thing fully—he was still alive.
A flicker of absolutely mad, stampeding fear reached him from Srin’s mind. The laboratory assistant jumped from the wall against which he’d been standing, skidded across the tabletop with thrashing tentacles, paused for a moment at the knobs that lined its edge to get the necessary traction—and then leaped in an enormous arc to the far wall of the building. The zigzag indentations widened in a sort of lightning flash to let his body through.
So that had been a door after all. Manship found himself feeling rather smug at the deduction. With so little to go on—pretty smart, pretty smart.
And then the various parts of his brain caught up with current events and he began trembling from the reaction. He should be dead, a thing of shredded flesh and powdered bone. What had happened?
Lirld had fired the weapon at him and missed the first time. Just as he was about to fire again, something had struck the flefnobe about as hard as it had the Assyrian back in the days when the latter was in the habit of coming down like the wolf on the fold. What? Manship had been using no weapon of his own. He had, so far as he knew, no ally on this world. He looked about the huge, vaulted room. Silence. There was nothing else, nobody else in the place.
What was it the professor had screamed telepathically before he turned into soup? Something about Manship’s eyes? Something coming out of the Earthman’s eyes?
Still intensely puzzled—and despite his relief at having survived the last few minutes—Manship could not help regretting Lirld’s extinction. Possibly because of his somewhat similar occupational status, the flefnobe had been the only creature of his type toward whom Manship felt any sympathy. He felt a little lonelier now—and, obscurely, a little guilty.
The different thoughts which had been mashing themselves to and fro in his mind abruptly disappeared, to be replaced by a highly important observation.
The zigzag doorway through which Srin had fled was closing, was coming together! And, as far as Manship knew, it was the only way out of the place!
Manship bounced off the huge tabletop in a jump that for the second time in ten minutes did great credit to a few semester-hours of gym some six years ago. He reached the narrowing gap, prepared to claw his way through the solid stone if necessary.
He was determined not to be trapped in this place when the flefnobe police closed in with whatever they used in place of tear gas and machine guns. He had also not forgotten the need to catch up to Rabd and get two or three more driving lessons.
To his intense relief, the aperture dilated again as he was about to hit it. Some sort of photoelectric gadget, he wondered, or was it just sensitive to the approach of a body?
He charged through, and for the first time found himself on the surface of the planet with the night sky all around him.
The view of the sky almost took his breath away and made him forget, temporarily, the utterly strange city of the flefnobes that stretched away in every direction.
There were so many stars! It was as if these stellar bodies were so much confectioner’s sugar and someone had tossed a bagful at the heavens. They glowed with enough luminosity to maintain a three-quarters twilight. There was no moon, but its lack was not felt; rather it seemed that half a dozen moons had been broken up into quadrillions of tiny white dots.
It would be impossible, in this plenty, to trace out a single constellation. It would be necessary, instead, Manship guessed, to speak of a third brightest patch, a fifth largest sector. Truly, here in the center of the galaxy, one did not merely see the stars—one lived amongst them!
He noticed his feet were wet. Glancing down, he saw he was standing in a very shallow stream of some reddish liquid that flowed between the rounded flefnobe buildings. Sewage disposal? Water supply? Probably neither, probably something else completely out of the range of human needs. For there were other colored streams flowing parallel to it, Manship saw now—green ones, mauve ones, bright pink ones. At a street intersection a few yards from him, the reddish stream flowed away by itself down a sort of alley, while a few new colored ribbons joined the main body.
Well, he wasn’t here to work out problems in extraterrestrial sociology. He already had the sniffling intimation of a bad head cold. Not only his feet were wet in this spongelike atmosphere; his pajamas clung to his skin in dampest companionship and, every once in a while, his eyes got blurry with the moisture and he had to brush them dry with the back of a hand.
Furthermore, while he was not hungry, he had not only seen nothing resembling human-type victuals since his arrival, but also no evidence to suggest that the flefnobes had stomachs, let alone mouths.
Ma
ybe they took in nourishment through the skin, soaked it up, say, from those differently colored streams that ran through their city. Red might be meat, green could be vegetables, white for dessert—
He clenched his fists and shook himself. I’ve no time for any of this philosophic badminton, he told himself fiercely. In just a few hours, I’m going to be extremely hungry and thirsty. I’m also going to be extremely hunted. I’d better get moving—work out some solutions!
Only where? Fortunately, the street outside Lirld’s laboratory seemed deserted. Maybe the flefnobes were afraid of the dark? Maybe they were all good, respectable homebodies and everyone, without exception, toddled into his bed at night to sleep the darkness through? Maybe—
Rabd. He had to find Rabd. That was the beginning and the end of the only solution to his problems he had come even close to, since his materialization on Professor Lirld’s lab table.
Rabd.
He tried “listening” with his mind. All kinds of drifting, miscellaneous thoughts were sloshing around in his brain, from the nearer inhabitants of the city.
“All right, darling, all right. If you don’t want to gadl, you don’t have to gadl. We’ll do something else…”
“That smart-aleck Bohrg! Will I fix him properly tomorrow.
“Do you have three zamshkins for a plet? I want to make a long-distance send…”
“Bohrg will roll in tomorrow morning, thinking everything is the same as it’s always been. Is he going to be surprised…”
“I like you, Nernt, I like you a lot. And that’s why I feel it’s my duty to tell you, strictly as a friend, you understand.
“No, darling, I didn’t mean that I didn’t want to gadl. I thought you didn’t want to; I was trying to be considerate like you always tell me to be. Of course I want to gadl. Now please don’t look at me like that…”
“Listen here. I can lick any flefnobe in the place…”
“To tell you the truth, Nernt, I think you’re the only one who doesn’t know. Everybody else…”
“So you’re all scared, huh? All right, I’ll take you on two at a time. Come on, come on….”
But no hint of Rabd. Manship began to walk cautiously down the stone-paved streets, sloshing through the little rivulets.
He stepped too close to the wall of the dark buildings. Immediately, a zigzag doorway opened its jagged invitation. He hesitated for a moment, then stepped through.
Nobody here either. Did the flefnobes sleep in some central building, dormitory fashion? Did they sleep at all? He must remember to tune in on some likely mind and investigate. The information might be useful.
This building seemed to be a warehouse; it was filled with shelves. The walls were bare, however—there seemed to be some flefnobe inhibition against putting objects against the walls. The shelves rose in tall tiers—again free-form shapes—from the center of the floor.
Manship strolled over to the shelving that was the height of his chest. Dozens of fat green balls rested in white porcelain cups. Food? Could be. They looked distinctly edible, like melons.
He reached out and picked one up. It immediately spread wings and flew away to the ceiling. Every one of the other green balls, on all the shelves, spread a similar set of multiple, tiny wings and flew upward, like so many spherical birds whose nests have been disturbed. When they reached the domed ceiling, they seemed to disappear.
Manship backed out of the place hurriedly through the jagged aperture. He seemed to be setting off alarms wherever he went!
Once out in the street, he sensed a new feeling. There was a sensation of bubbling excitement everywhere, a tense waiting. Very few individual thoughts were coming through.
Suddenly the restlessness coalesced into an enormous mental shout that almost deafened him.
“Good evening!” it said. “Please stand by for an emergency news bulletin. This is Pukr, the son of Kimp, coming to you on a planetwide, mind-to-mind hookup. Here is the latest on the flat-eyed monster:
“At forty-three skims past bebblewort, tonight, this creature was materialized by Professor Lirld from astronomical unit 649-301-3 as part of an experiment in one-way teleportation. Councilor Glomg was present as a witness to the experiment in the course of his official duties and, observing the aggressive way in which the monster comported itself, immediately warned Lirld of the dangers in letting it remain alive.
“Lirld disregarded the warning and, later, after Councilor Glomg had departed with his son, Rabd, the well-known interplanetary explorer and flefnobe-about-town, the monster ran amuck. Having fought its way out of a cage of solid paper, it attacked the professor with an unknown type of high-frequency mental beam that seems to emanate from its unbelievably flat eyes. This beam seems to be similar, in effect, to that thrown out by second-order grepsas when all fuses have blown. Our best psycho-physicists are, at this very moment, working feverishly on that aspect of the problem.
“But Professor Lirld paid with his life for his scientific curiosity and for disregarding the warnings of Councilor Glomg’s experience. Despite the best efforts of Srin, Lirld’s laboratory assistant, who fought a desperate and courageous diversionary action in an attempt to save the old scientist, Lirld perished horribly before the monster’s ferocious onslaught. With his superior dead, Srin retreated tentacle by tentacle, fighting all the way, barely managing to make his escape in time.
“This alien monster with its incredible powers is now loose in our city! All citizens are urged to remain calm, not to panic. Rest assured that as soon as the authorities know what to do, they will do it. Remember—above all—stay calm!
“Meanwhile, Rabd, the son of Glomg, has postponed his mating flight which was to have begun tonight. He is mating, as you all know, with Tekt, the daughter of Hilp—Tekt being the well-known star of fnesh and blelg from the southern continent. Rabd is leading a troop of volunteer flefnobes to the scientific quarters of the city, where the monster was last seen, in an attempt to exterminate it with already-existing, conventional weapons before the creature starts to reproduce. I will return with more bulletins when they are available. That is all for now.”
That was more than enough, Manship felt. Now there wasn’t any hope that he could work out some method of communication with these creatures and sit down for a little quiet conversation on ways and means of getting himself home—which seemed to be a conclusion earnestly desired by all. From now on the watchword was going to be Get That Manship!
He didn’t like that at all.
On the other hand, he didn’t have to wander after Rabd. If Manship can’t get to the flefnobe, the flefnobe will come to Manship. Heavily armed, however, and with homicidal intent…
He decided he had better hide. He stepped up to a building and wandered along a wall until the doorway opened. He walked through and watched it close behind him, then looked around.
To his relief, it seemed like an excellent place to hide. There were quantities of large, heavy objects in the center of the place, none of them, so far as he could tell, alive, and all of them satisfactorily opaque. He wedged himself between two of these, which looked like stored tabletops, and hoped wistfully that the flefnobe sensory apparatus did not boast any more detective mechanisms than he had already experienced.
What he wouldn’t give to be an assistant professor in Kelly University again instead of a flat-eyed monster ravening, all unwittingly, through an alien metropolis!
He found himself wondering about the strange powers he was supposed to possess. What was all this nonsense about a high-frequency mental beam emanating from his eyes? He hadn’t noticed anything coming out—and he should have noticed if anyone did, he felt. Yet Lirld had made some comment to that effect just before he dissolved.
Was it possible that there was some by-product of the human brain that was only visible to flefnobes and was highly deleterious to them?
After all, he could tune in on the flefnobes’ minds and they couldn’t tune in on his. Maybe the only way he could make his
mental presence felt to them was in some prodigious blast of thought which literally ripped them apart.
But he apparently couldn’t turn it on and off at will—he hadn’t caused the slightest alteration in Lirld, the first time the professor had fired.
There were ripples of new, excited thoughts reaching him suddenly. They were coming from somewhere in the street outside.
Rabd had arrived with his posse.
“Three of you move down that way,” the young flefnobe ordered. “I want two each to cover the side streets. Don’t spend too much time searching through the buildings. I’m positive we’ll find this monster skulking somewhere in the dark streets, looking for new victims. Tanj, Zogt and Lewv—come with me. And keep on your tentacle-tips, everybody—this thing is crazy dangerous. But remember, we’ve got to blast it before it starts reproducing. Imagine what this planet would be like with a couple of hundred of these flat-eyed monsters running around!”
Manship let out a long, slow sigh of relief. If they hoped to find him on the streets, he might have a little time.
He let his mind follow that of Rabd. It wasn’t too hard—just a matter of concentration—and you pretty much blocked out the thoughts of the other individuals. Follow Rabd’s mind, Rabd’s thoughts. Now block out most of Rabd’s conscious thoughts. There. The subliminal layer, the memory patterns. No, not the stuff about that female flefnobe last month, all eyes and soft tentacles, dammit!
The memory patterns, the older ones. “When landing on a C-12 type planet…” No, not that one. A little further. There!… “Having fired the forward jet to clear it, gently depress the…”
Manship combed through the operational instructions in Rabd’s mind, pausing every once in a while to clear up a concept peculiar to flefnobe terminology, stopping now and then as a grinning thought about Tekt wandered in and threw everything out of focus.
