_Condemned without trial for his refusal
to open fire on an alien space-craft, Ralph
Langford had to be free to investigate the
strange menace from beyond the stars! For
if the alien were an enemy, then it would be
the most terrible enemy men had ever encountered._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Future combined with Science Fiction Stories May-June 1950.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The sky was harsh with the flare of rocket jets when Captain Ralph
Langford emerged from his deep space cruiser on the Mars City landing
field. There was a girl standing alone at the far end of the field,
and for a moment Langford thought it might be Joan, irrational as the
thought was. Of course, Joan couldn't be here; he was to see her at the
hospital. He started across the field, blinking in the glare, his eyes
shining with a warm gratefulness to be home again; as he approached
the solitary figure, he could see it was not Joan, though there was
a resemblance. He was so engrossed that he didn't notice the tall,
eagle-eyed young Patrol officer who came striding toward him, until he
heard the man's voice.
"You're under arrest, sir!" the youth said, his hand whipping to his
visor. "Commander Gurney's orders."
Langford looked up suddenly, then stiffened in belligerent protest.
"Hold on, Lieutenant! You can't arrest me and march me off to jail like
a common criminal. Commission regulations! How long have you worn those
stripes, youngster?"
The youth's eyes were respectful, sympathetic; he did not appear to
be offended. "I'm sorry, sir," he said firmly. "Commander Gurney went
before the Commission and had you certified as irresponsible."
Langford flushed angrily. "So that's it," he grunted.
The Patrol officer hesitated. He had prepared what he intended to say,
but the fame of the big man facing him had reached sunward to Mercury,
and outward to Pluto's frozen tundras.
Langford's fist lashed out suddenly, catching the youth flush on the
jaw, and crumpling him to his knees. The girl, who had been a silent
witness up to now, gasped, then turned and ran like a frightened
rabbit. Langford did not stop to apologize. Rumor had it that deep
space officers bore charmed lives, but Langford knew as he broke into
a run that his life hung by a thread that might at any moment turn
crimson.
[Illustration: Langford's fist lashed out suddenly, catching the
youngster flush on the jaw....]
No part of the field was unguarded. If the guards had orders to
withhold their fire he saw a desperate chance of outwitting them;
but if they had orders to blast, his fate was already sealed. As he
ran he had a vision of himself sinking down in a welter of blood and
blackness, his ears deafened by the hollow chant of concussion weapons.
He saw himself lying spread out on the landing field, the taste of
death in his mouth, the air above him filled with a harsh, eerie
crackling.
He ran faster, ran like a man bemazed, his eyes filled with dancing
motes that kept cascading down both sides of his oxygen mask. He was
a hundred feet from the ship when he became aware that a dozen armed
guards had emerged from shadows at the edge of the field and were
converging upon him.
Angry curses whipped through the night and the field seemed to tilt
as the guards came racing toward him. Far off in the darkness a siren
wailed.
Langford suddenly realized that he was becoming light-headed from too
much oxygen intake; his head was filled with a dull roaring, and seemed
to be expanding. It was filled with flashing lights as well as sound,
and was leaving his shoulders as he ran.
He had a sudden impulse to laugh and shout, to whoop at how ridiculous
it was. His head had left his shoulders and was spinning about in the
air. But before he could grasp the tube which was flooding his brain
with hilarity, armed guards were all about him, raising their weapons
to cover him and shouting at him to raise his arms.
Unfortunately he couldn't seem to move his arms. When he made the
effort he went plunging and skidding over the ramp with running figures
on both sides of him. He was skating, cutting capers on ice. Fantastic
and incredible capers. Then the ice was inside his skull, swelling up
thick; his heels were together when the lights in his head went out.
* * * * *
When the lights came on again Langford found himself stumbling forward
into a blank-walled room with a steady pressure at his back. At first
he thought the room was a cell, but when his vision adjusted itself to
the glare he saw that he was facing a seated man whose head seemed to
be dancing in the air.
"Here he is, Commander!" a harsh voice said. "He blacked out, but that
didn't stop him from putting up a terrific fight!"
Langford had no recollection of putting up a fight, but the guard's jaw
was bruised and swollen, which seemed to indicate that a struggle had
taken place. A massive desk swam into view and the head of the seated
man settled down on his shoulders.
Langford blinked. Facing him in the cold light was the supreme
commander of the Solar Patrol, a thin, hollow-cheeked man of fifty
whose eyes behind narrowed lids glittered as cold as glass.
Commander Gurney's immobility was not unlike the roll of thunder in a
vacuum. There was sound and fury to it, and yet not a muscle of his
face moved as he dismissed the guard with a curt nod, and waited for
the massive door behind Langford to clang shut.
The instant silence settled down over the room Commander Gurney came
to life. "You're under arrest, Langford," he said, quietly. "If you've
anything to say in your own defense you'd better start talking. I can
spare you--" the patrol commander glanced at his wrist watch--"Exactly
twenty minutes."
"Good enough!" Langford grunted. All the muscles of his gaunt face
seemed to pull together as he seated himself. For an instant he
remained motionless, his eyes troubled and angry, as if he could not
quite accept the fact that he had been deprived of his command by the
irate man opposite him.
The two men who sat facing each other in the cold light were sharply
divergent types. Langford was a man of enormous strength and a temper
that was just a little dangerous when it got out of control. He had
never once failed in his duty and the inner discipline which he had
imposed on himself showed in his features, which were as tight as a
drum. But beneath his rough exterior Langford concealed the sensitive
imagination of a poet, and an immense kindliness which sometimes
overflowed in strange ways, embarrassing him more than he cared to
admit.
Commander Gurney had never experienced such embarrassment; he had
imposed his will on the Solar Patrol by becoming an absolute slave to
efficiency at considerable detriment to his health. There was something
rapacious and hornetlike about him, something ceaselessly alert. Now he
sat regarding Langford with a stinging contempt in his stare, poised
for the attack, his harsh features mirroring his thoughts like an
encephalograph. "Well?" he prodded.
Langford wet his dry lips. Reaching inside his resplendent uniform, he
removed a small, shining object which he set down at the edge of his
superior's desk. "They shot this out at us when I ordered them to stand
by for boarding," he said. "It was contained in a small, translucent
capsule which I picked up with a magnetic trawl. It's just a model in
miniature, but take a good look at it, sir; would you care to make the
acquaintance of a creature like that in the flesh?"
Commander Gurney's eyes widened and his mouth twitched slightly. "In
the name of all that's unholy, Langford, what _is_ it?" he muttered.
Langford shook his head. "I wish I knew, sir. It looks quite a bit like
a praying mantis. A little, metallic praying mantis six inches tall.
But it doesn't behave like one!"
* * * * *
The statuette on Gurney's desk seemed chillingly lifelike in the cold
light. It had been fashioned with flawless craftsmanship; its upraised
forelimbs were leaf green, its abdomen salmon pink, and its gauzy wings
shone with a dull, metallic luster as Langford turned it carefully
about.
Gurney couldn't help noticing, with a little shudder, that its
mouth-parts consisted of a cutting mandible, and a long, coiled
membrane like the ligula of a honeybee. Huge, compound eyes occupied
the upper half of the metal insect's face.
Gurney's hand had gone out, and was about to close on the little
statue; but something in Langford's stare made him change his mind. As
his hand whipped back he fastened his gaze on Langford's face with the
ire of a peevish child denied access to a jampot.
"What in blazes has that to do with your failure to obey orders?"
he demanded, with explosive vehemence. "That ship must have used an
interstellar space-warp drive to appear out of nowhere in the middle of
the Asteroid Belt. And you deliberately let it slip away from you!"
Langford shut his eyes before replying. He saw again the myriad stars
of space, the dull red disk of Mars and the far-off gleam of the great
outer planets. He saw the luminous hull of the alien ship looming up
out of the void. An instant before, the viewpane had been filled with a
sprinkling of very distant stars with a faint nebulosity behind them.
The ship had appeared with the suddenness of an image forming on a
screen, out of the dark matrix of empty space.
Langford leaned forward, a desperate urgency in his stare. "Mere
alienage doesn't justify the crime of murder, sir!" he said. "Attacking
an alien race without weighing the outcome would have been an act of
criminal folly, charged with great danger to ourselves."
Commander Gurney shook his head in angry disagreement. "Just how would
you define murder, Langford?" he demanded. "If a highly intelligent
buzzsaw came at you would you bare your throat?"
Langford ignored the question. "Violence breeds violence, sir," he
said, with patient insistence. "Suppose the shoe were on the other
foot. Suppose the inhabitants of another planet attacked you without
giving you a chance to prove your friendliness?"
Langford's eyes held a dogged conviction. "Remember, sir--to issue a
warning is an act of forbearance. No reasonable man could mistake a
warning for an aggressive act. If their weapons are superior to ours,
or they are superior to us in other, truly terrifying ways, they proved
their friendliness by warning us. Would you have had me attack their
ship without studying that warning?"
Gurney's eyes had returned to the statue. He seemed fascinated by the
glitter of its folded wings. He had a sudden vision of the metal insect
spreading its wings and taking off with a low, horrible droning.
Suddenly there was a dull throbbing in the Patrol commander's temples.
A frightful dread took possession of him, so that he could hardly
breathe; in his mind's gaze he saw a vast, stationary plain that seemed
to hang suspended in midair above a fiery sea. Sweeping straight toward
him, dark against the glow, were hundreds of flying mantis shapes with
their arms upraised in the glow.
Gurney shuddered and gripped the arms of his chair. He transfixed
Langford with an accusing stare. "Man, if you'd engaged them in open
combat we'd at least know where we stand! We could have put the
entire patrol on the alert. Now they've given us the slip and may
show up anywhere, armed with weapons that could wipe out civilization
overnight."
"I chose what I believed to be the lesser of two evils, sir," Langford
said, stepping closer to the desk. His eyes rested briefly on the metal
insect; then they returned to Gurney's face.
"There were two metal insects in that capsule, sir. I'm going to show
you exactly what happened to the one I experimented with."
* * * * *
Langford's forefinger whipped out as he spoke, striking the little
statue sharply on its folded wing membranes. For an instant nothing
happened; then, with appalling suddenness, the metal insect came to
life. It spread its wings and ascended straight up into the air.
Gurney leapt to his feet with a startled cry. As he did so the flying
insect's wings blurred and another pair of wings came into view behind
them. The wings were shadowy at first, but they quickly solidified,
taking on a glittering sheen. Preying arms sprouted from them. Then,
even more quickly, a big-eyed head and a writhing, salmon-pink abdomen.
The instant the second shape became a complete insect it whipped away
from its parent image with a furious buzzing. As Gurney stared up in
horror the original insect gave off eight more buzzing replicas of
itself. They darted swiftly up toward the ceiling and circled furiously
about, their wings gleaming in the cold light.
Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light. The flying replicas
vanished and the original insect thudded to the floor. For an instant
the little horror squirmed; then lay motionless.
"It's playing possum!" Langford said.
Langford advanced as he spoke and raised his foot. The instant he
started to bring his heel down the metal insect shivered convulsively,
lifted its huge eyes and stared up at him.
Then an incredible thing happened. There was no need for him to crush
the insect; methodically and with cold deliberation it began to
_dismember itself_, tearing off its wings with its own sharp claws, and
ripping its abdomen to shreds. After a moment, it lay still.
Langford turned and stared soberly at Gurney. "If _we_ wanted to warn
_them_ we could send them a little mechanical man, complete in every
detail armed with miniature weapons. They've simply sent us a replica
of themselves, a model in miniature. It's so unbelievably complex that
we could learn nothing by subjecting it to mechanical tests. But we
don't have to know what makes it tick.
"They've warned us that they can multiply by fission, so rapidly that
they could overrun the Earth in a few hours; they've also warned
us that if they find themselves facing impossible odds, they won't
hesitate to destroy themselves."
Commander Gurney had returned to his desk and stood facing Langford,
his face as grim as death. "I quite agree," he said. "That was--an
ugly warning. Langford, letting that ship get away was worse than
treasonable. Your twenty minutes are up!"
He was reaching for the communication disk on the far side of his desk
when Langford reached inside his uniform for the second time. When the
big man withdrew his hand he was clasping an automatic pistol.
Gurney took a swift step backward, his eyes widening in alarm. "So the
guards forgot to search you!"
"I'm afraid they did, sir!" Langford said, quietly. "Sit down. I'm
going to ask a small favor. A port clearance permit, signed and sealed
by you; if you give me your word you won't move until I've cleared the
port I won't tie you up."
Gurney sat down and stared at the young space officer in scornful
mockery. "Suppose I refuse to promise anything. Would you blast me down
in cold blood?"
Langford hesitated. His jaw tightened and a candid defiance came into
his stare. "No!" he said.
"Then if you're not prepared to murder me you haven't got what it takes
to exact a promise!" Gurney said.
Langford shook his head. "That's sheer sophistry," he pointed out.
"I've just laid my cards on the table. If you take advantage of my good
faith you'll be hitting below the belt. You see, sir, there's something
I've _got_ to do; if I fail I'll come back and give myself up."
For a moment not a muscle of Gurney's face moved. Then he shrugged
and glanced at his wrist watch. "I'll sit perfectly still for exactly
fifteen minutes, Langford," he said. "That should give you sufficient
time to clear the port."