by Perry Rhodan
In a flash it dawned on Bell what had happened and when he noticed that Ivan and Ivanovich targeted one of the returning Bios he uttered a terrified cry: "Don't! For heaven's sake!" The mutant looked at him, thunderstruck. Bell ignored him and began to call so that everybody could hear him: "Ishibashi! Sengu! Yokida! Answer me!" Marshall whipped around with a puzzled look but Bell motioned to him and barked: "Keep shooting!"
From somewhere came a feeble voice. Only half the words were audible: "...2000 feet from you... suits in poor shape... we're coming over..."
Soon 3 dark points emerged from behind a low flat rock and began to move slowly toward the space-disk. Evidently the 3 captives had fared no better than Ivan Goratschin. The gleaming polish of their suits was a thing of the, past and they had to look very hard to see the 3 little points in the twilight. Bell would have liked to ask a great many questions but he went back to his most crucial business: to eliminate as many Goms as possible.
The 3 mutants required 30 more minutes to get back. They had hardly any strength left to climb aboard. Their faces were hollow and Ishibashi's voice sounded strained when he tried to make a report. Bell waved him off. "Okay! We don't have time for long speeches. Pitch in against the Goms! Let Sengu help Ivan if he's still in shape to fight! Pour it on, men!"
Bell was shaken by a grim rage when he thought of the 3 men who had gained their freedom only to be smothered by the Goms and were doomed to die Unless a miracle happened...
• • •
Tako came in low. He had managed to pull his ship out of the dive shortly before crashing on the surface of the planet Gom and to veer off in horizontal flight. That he just happened to execute his manoeuvre in the vicinity of the lethal battle now in progress was due to a combination of luck and technical genius.
Tako's vehicle moved at a speed of 1.2 mach and at a height of 2½ miles. Since the vehicle was not equipped with wings, he used some of its power to maintain his altitude firing down from his vertical jets.
From this low altitude the Japanese had an excellent view of the battle arena. He saw that the defenders were in trouble and that the danger came from the Goms. He made his craft describe a wide loop and returned lower and slower.
When the ship had decelerated to 400 miles per hour and flew a mere 3000 feet above the battleground and within perfect firing range, he set the auto-pilot and moved into the gunner's station, hoping that the steering mechanism would maintain its given flight path while he got busy with the disintegrators.
Reginald Bell caught his first glimpse of Tako's ship when it streaked across the sky, lit up by the light of the red sun. He paid little attention to it because he assumed it was manned by the Bios.
But then it came back lower than before and when the flanks of the Super-Gom had already advanced far beyond the front at the center and threatened to encircle them completely. Bell had no time to watch the spaceship. Each shot he missed cost him a few seconds of precious time.
Betty was the first to stop shooting and look up to the ship. Bell glanced at her and saw that she wanted to say something. However before she could speak a word, two arm-thick, pale green rays shot down from the strange vehicle and hit the top of the Super-Gom a few hundred yards ahead of them, cutting long steaming furrows through the sentient carpet.
"Tako!" Bell shouted with a cracking voice. "He's captured a ship!"
They held their fire and watched the little saucer-like ship. Tako Kakuta—if that's who he was—seemed to follow a certain pattern with his blasts. The green rays of the double disintegrators circled over the Super-Gom and cut an almost perfectly round section out of the huge being in less than 10 seconds.
Marshall saw that confusion rapidly spread amongst the Goms. He expected to see the severed section reunite at once with the main mass but nothing of the sort happened. The circular piece remained disconnected from the huge flat body and continued its advance toward the ship where Bell's brave gang had intended to make its last futile stand.
The disintegrators kept strafing the Goms and Tako broke the immense sheet up into many pieces after it had almost completely choked off Bell's last refuge. The confusion of the Goms spread like wildfire.
• • •
Tako noticed at the last moment that his ship was nose-diving. He left his battle station and rushed as fast as he could to the engine controls as the ship's jets drove it down in a steep curve. He succeeded in averting a crash but was unable to pull the ship higher up into the air again. Tako continued on a tight curve, thereby losing more speed. He saw the rocky ground rush up to him and braked with a final thrust from his forward jets, eyes closed, trusting his luck for whatever might come.
He heard the crash of the violent impact, the buckling and ripping of metal. Then he saw clouds of dust coming in through the cracked hull and felt himself gyrating around his axis. Suddenly it was all over. Although he was not knocked out, the oppressive gravity of Gom rendered him nearly helpless for awhile.
Eventually he climbed out. Now he heard for the first time that the air was filled with a din so loud that be could not hope to hear his companions if they called him. He turned down his outer mike but even then felt the excessively noisy vibration transmitted by the shaking ground to his spacesuit.
The huge billows of dust raised by his emergency landing had settled again. Tako could see the vehicle Bell's people had occupied at a distance of a mile and a little farther behind the glaring flash of a tremendous explosion which seared him so that he ducked behind a big boulder. He couldn't know that Ivan Goratschin had just made Bio #387 bite the dust.
• • •
The action of the Goms lost its coordination after Tako Kakuta had decimated them and cut their frontal assault up in a depth of several miles. They wandered around in all directions and were slow in approaching the ship where Bell had made his fighting retreat. The memory of the divided parts apparently no longer forced them to abide by the orders of the Aras.
They had witnessed Tako's crash from their ship. Bell sighed with relief when he saw the Japanese abandon the wreck, evidently unhurt. He watched him crouch behind the cover when the two-headed mutant detonated the last explosion and was on the verge of calling him when Marshall grabbed his arm and pointed to the right side, shouting: there! The Goms!"
Bell spotted them at once. They were a fragment of the former great mass and seemed to have detected the Japanese. The subdivision was made up of at least 50,000 Goms. It was on its way to attack Tako and it was certainly powerful enough to overwhelm him.
"Tako!" Bell shouted. "Watch out for the Goms!"
Tako heard the warning. He raised his head and looked around. All he could see from his low perspective was a dark wiggly line, moving about 300 feet away.
He crawled away although he knew that the Goms were too fast for him. He was scared out of his wits and failed to heed the warnings coming from his helmet receiver. Only after Marshall's angry voice rose to a crescendo— "Stop where you are and climb up on the rock!" —did he come to his senses.
He saw before his eyes a rock sloping into the sky and began to scale it. But Marshall shouted quickly: "Not that one! The one to the right!"
Tako slid down again and looked back to see that the Goms had already surged forward within 60 feet of him.
The shock gave him the strength of a giant. He stood up, ran in a mad dash to the other rock and clambered up with lightning-speed, since there was too little time for him to concentrate on performing a good teleporting jump.
• • •
"Why did it have to be that particular rock?" Bell asked, baffled. "Do you think the Goms won't get up just as easy on that one as all the others?"
"They won't make it up there!" Marshall replied.
Bell was taken aback. "What makes you think so?"
"You remember that I stayed behind after we left the birth station of the Goms? Well, I had occasion to watch the Goms bump into the steps you had cut into the rock. They never gave up. All they could no
tice was that the world had come to an end and they stopped right there. Do you know why?"
"No."
"The Goms are something like two-dimensional beings. They can only see what is in the same plane as their bodies, although that isn't quite exact. I estimate their angle of sight amounts to a few minutes, or at most half a degree, in the vertical direction from their bodies. If they come up against an object which is not completely vertical they can recognize it well enough to mount, but a vertical wall means the end of the world to them. Take a look for yourself! Tako is already out of their sight."
The 50,000 Goms had surrounded Tako's rock. To judge from their aimless milling around, it was fairly clear that they didn't know what to do. They shifted back and forth for awhile and soon shoved off, leaving the rock and the Japanese behind.
"But..." Bell mumbled flabbergasted.
"I know what bothers you," Marshall interrupted him. "In very large agglomerations, when the Super-Gom has surpassed a certain level of intelligence, he's also capable of recognizing 3 dimensions. We've experienced a demonstration of that ourselves when they erected a wall to shield us from the storm. But the first Super-Gom that chased us shortly after we were forced down on Gom, and which we escaped by slipping into the subterranean tunnel, was about as big as the one that went after Tako. As you recall, the Goms didn't succeed then in finding the entrance to the tunnel because it's impossible for them to see what's above or below them. They can only see—as the expression is commonly used—what's before and behind them. If we figure that the Super-Gom out there numbered about 50,000 individuals, we can deduce that the transition from the 2- to the 3-dimensional world occurs between 50,000 and 100,000 Goms."
Bell looked at him, still amazed, and blurted: "Fantasy!"
Without a hint of trouble Marshall's head suddenly drooped and he rested his helmet on the floor with a whimper. Bell was upset and exclaimed anxiously: "What's up now?"
Betty's jubilant voice answered: "It's Pucky! The Titan is not far from here. Pucky is telling the Goms to scram!"
• • •
They had entirely missed seeing the arrival of the red sphere slowly floating over the horizon.
But then Pucky sent his message via a telepathic amplifier. He gave an ultimatum to the Goms on orders of Perry Rhodan that they had one hour to pull back from the beleaguered group so that the gigantic ship could land in the ring and pick up the members of its crew.
Pucky made it clear that the Goms were inviting disaster if they failed to obey the warning.
His message had been heard by Marshall and Betty Toufry. They watched joyously as the spherical spaceship slowly descended over the plateau and came to a halt close above the surface.
The response of the huge Super-Goms was remarkable. Not only was there no attempt to use their telepathic power on the Titan but they abided unhesitatingly by the given command. The immense body retreated in all outward directions and left the scene quicker than it had appeared, so that the rocky plain soon looked as deserted as before.
Half an hour after Pucky's call the Titan touched down without hindrance. Bell and his people were taken aboard. Perry Rhodan took time out to embrace his old comrades-in-arms and to shake their hands.
The Titan took off at once.
Bell's team was not allowed to relax. They were asked to make their reports while their impressions were still fresh in their minds. The scientists were extremely anxious to learn all they could about the Goms. Everybody contributed what he knew. The sum total of their knowledge didn't add up to very much, Marshall, who had been the keenest observer, furnished 70% of the information.
It was noteworthy that Kitai Ishibashi, Tama Yokida and Wuriu Sengu as well as Ivan Goratschin, who were for a time all trapped by the Goms, had almost nothing to report. Their memory was blotted out the moment they got up from the rear of the cave and walked out to the spot where the wreck of the Gazelle had been. Their memory returned when they woke up from a deep stupor and found that they were held in a low, circular, windowless room and that the world around them was dark and full of eerie noises.
Bell and Marshall concluded that the 3 mutants had been taken to one of the underground birth-stations like Ivan Goratschin and that they woke up when the Goms left their subterranean retreat to join the huge Super-Gom.
Ishibashi, Yokida and Sengu were amazed to see that the silvery coating had disappeared from their spacesuits and that the plastic fabric had become very mushy. The Goms had tried to ingest the men and their suits. But obviously it was easier for them to devour dead than living substances—as shown by the example of the cracked-up Gazelle which was gone in a few hours.
Sengu then looked through the walls and quickly found the way out. The 3 mutants made it back to the surface without further incidents and arrived just in time to intervene in the fierce struggle.
As to the subject of Goms, they knew next to nothing.
The guesswork about the unsolved questions remained a most persistent result of the Gom adventure's aftermath. Theories were proposed, debated and discarded again. They could reach no consensus on a creature that had no concept of 'gratitude' but permitted itself to be burned in square miles of flames during the attack they committed at the instigation of the Aras on peril of death. Why did the Goms refrain from using their parapsychic powers as they had so effectively done in their first encounter when they caused the Gazelle to smash up?
They realized that the creatures they had met on Gom had nothing in common with any other known forms of life; moreover their mentality was as alien as if it had come from another universe.
Rhodan was beseeched from all sides to delay their departure and to spend more time on Gom. But Rhodan declared with a benevolent smile that under the prevailing circumstances science had to take second place to affairs of state. He intimated he would have no objections to visiting Gom again at some time in the future.
• • •
One hour later the Titan put in an appearance over the moon Laros after it had rammed mercilessly through a chain of Aras outposts and destroyed a string of automatic defense bases bristling with nuclear rockets, mammoth disintegrators and thermo-launchers for the interception of foreign objects.
Rhodan deposited an Arkon bomb on the moon with the fuse set for atomic number 14. The bomb initiated the fusion process for the silicon atoms in its vicinity and this process gradually spread over the entire face of Laros.
The atomic fire it created was slow yet uncontrollable. It would take the Aras three weeks to notice the existence of the bomb unless they happened to find out about it sooner by some lucky coincidence. From then on they had 3 more months to flee from Laros. At the close of that period no spark of life would be left on the moon.
It meant the end of the Aras' bastion in the Gonom system.
• • •
Perry Rhodan's men kept a sharp lookout for stray Springer ships as the Titan prepared to quit the Gonom system but none were detected. When the great spaceship finally accelerated out of the alien system, Bell and his companions were at last able to relax. Mentally and physically exhausted from the trying events, they slept the sleep of the dead for 15 hours.
Shortly after Reg wakened he was summoned to the Command Center, where he was surprised to observe that all officers were on duty and activity everywhere crackled electrically in the air.
Rhodan regarded Bell gravely from his pilot seat. "Did you have a good snooze, butterball?" he asked, mock-solicitously.
"Listen!" Bell protested, "I didn't sleep a wink for 4 days between those biological monstrosities and that creepy goop that crawled around on Gom. I had to keep my eyes peeled for 96 hours!"
"I know and I'm glad you're in the pink again. But what I'd like to know is, are you sure the Springers didn't discover the misprogramming of Topthor's tron? They didn't make any corrections, did they?"
Bell's brow wrinkled. The secret of the positronicon discovered? He seriously doubted it, therefore he replied: "As positiv
e as anybody could be.—Why?"
"Because," Perry dropped the bombshell, "Talamon reported a few moments ago by hypercom-beam that a decision has been taken to invade Terra and attack is imminent! We're safe--provided they don't begin to have doubts about the programming of Topthor's computer.
"But we can't be certain.
"We'll return to Earth. The quicker the better!
THE SILENCE OF GOM
Copyright © Ace Books 1973
All Rights Reserved
THE SHIP OF THINGS TO COME
The Terra and Centurion and 10 mutants defend the Earth against the might of the Springer and Mounder Clans. The Centurion is captured, Tiff and McClears head out in a Gazelle but they are also captured. Is this the end for the Earth and Perry Rhodan? All will be revealed in the stirring story of–
THE RED EYE OF BETELGEUSE!
