Jerry blinked. He opened his eyes and blinked again.
Had Pink made it to the atmospheria?
He must have, for the air was sweet and normal once more. So either Pink
or Joe Silver had saved them. The others had all dropped along the way;
he had passed Daley's motionless form some yards back there--now he
looked, and saw the senior lieutenant sitting up against the wall.
Jerry rubbed his forehead gingerly. What a headache!
By the time he managed to stand, shakily, Joe Silver had appeared in
front of him. Before Jerry could ask questions, the big man said
hoarsely, "Must have been the captain. _I_ passed out before I made the
door." He shook his own head, which evidently ached too. "The blasted
door is now locked. I can't get in."
The three of them went toward the atmospheria, Calico and Sparks
following slowly. Before they reached it, the door opened and the alien
thing emerged, stooping to clear the lintel. In its tree-thick arms lay
Pinkham, apparently lifeless, his head dangling.
"Aside, mortals," the beast mouthed at them, and added, grotesquely,
"goddammit!" They dropped back, it passed them and turned a corner and
vanished. "Wait," said Daley urgently, "don't follow it yet." He
switched on the passage intercom screen. "We'll spy on it with this. If
Pink's alive, we mustn't anger the brute."
Tense, they watched the image of the stranger as it prowled through the
ship, carrying their chief. It passed Randy Kinkare, and they saw him
shrink away, a noise of terror gurgling in his gullet. The lipless
Kinkare had reason to be afraid.
The giant took Pinkham into his own quarters and laid him on a
foam-couch. Then it sat down in an angle of the wall, and its gruesomely
human-like body swelled until it occupied much of the free space in the
cabin.
"To scare him if he wakes," breathed Bill Calico.
"Isn't it frightful enough?" asked Jerry. "I have an idea: if the
Rabelaisian types outside are at their normal size, which seems logical,
then this one may be uncomfortable, having to go around all compressed
to eight feet."
"Could be ... let's advance," said Daley. "We'll wait just outside
Pink's door. Then if it tries anything--"
"Yeah?"
"We'll make a protest," finished Daley. "Somehow, we'll make a strong
protest."
They left the screen, a few seconds before Captain Pinkham groaned and
opened his eyes.
The alien regarded him with its habitual expression of overpowering
slyness. "Why did you nearly die?" it asked. "Was it something I did?"
When Pink could trust himself to speak without gibbering--it was
horrifying to see half his room filled by this bronze-yellow balloon of
evidently solid flesh--he said, "Naturally it was something you did, you
big ape. You turned off our air."
"Air?" It compressed its lips. "Ah, I remember air. A substance needed
on Earth for life. We never understood it."
"Don't you breathe?" asked Pink. "Don't you take any element into your
system and mix it with your blood and then--oh, you haven't any blood."
He paused. "But don't you need _any_ outside element to sustain life?"
"No. Nor do we eat."
"But you are organic life?"
"Of course. A life which you cannot understand, I see. A life impervious
to anything beyond it, indestructible and eternal."
_I think you're lying_, said Pink to himself. Nothing in the universe is
indestructible ... or at any rate, unalterable. Everything has its
Achilles heel, even the atom.
* * * * *
The monster spoke, half to itself. "That, the locked switch was the air,
then. I thought it was the air-lock." It laughed. Pink thought it had a
pretty primitive sense of humor. "Not the air-lock, but the air."
"You wanted to let your friends into the ship," accused Pink. The beast
nodded. "Didn't you know that opening the air-locks without sealing off
their compression rooms would kill all the humans aboard?"
"No," it said. "I want you alive. Some of you. To teach us the working
of this rocket."
"Spaceship," corrected Pink without thinking. Then, "Why do you want the
ship?"
Its eyes glowed fire at him. "To return to Earth," it hissed. "To return
to our own planet!"
"_Your_ planet!"
"As much as yours, mortal." It leaned forward, obscuring practically all
the room for him. "Show me how to open the air-locks," it said.
"In a swine's eye."
"With safety to yourself, naturally," it said impatiently, "Come, show
me."
"Find the machinery yourself. Experiment. Knock us all off. You'll be
stuck out here with a ship you can't operate."
It plucked him off the foam-couch and hurled him against the wall,
jarring him in every bone. "Show me how," it roared. "Thou zed, thou
cream-faced loon--" Shakespeare? wondered Pink--"show me the controls!"
Pink dived behind a stationary chair. He drew his useless pistol and
threw it at the being's face; it rebounded to the floor. He snatched up
a vase of ever-blooming Jovian lilies, sent them after the gun. The
monster reached for him, snarling. He leaped over its hand, hurdling it
as if he were a boy crossing a fence. On the far wall were many weapons.
When he made Captain, and was given the _Elephant's Child_ as his
flagship, he had transferred all his belongings to it, so that nowhere
in the galaxies would he ever feel at home save here. Among his
keepsakes was the collection of antique weaponry handed down to him by
his father, whose grandfather had bought them in the long ago from many
museums. Gradually he had added to the collection, souvenirs of the
planets he had explored. They were bracketed on the wall. Zulu war clubs
and Kentucky muskets. Martian spear-guns and antiquated jet-pistols; a
Derringer, a Colt .44, a blowpipe from an unknown Pacific island.
The alien giant was too swollen to turn swiftly. Pink reached the wall
display. He tore down an assegai, whirled and thrust it at the
monstrous, contorted face, searching for the eyes.
He was a mouse, bedeviling a cat with a broom straw. The thing batted
his spear aside, brushed him with its fingers in a powerful swat,
smashed him against his desk. A corner caught him, and he felt a rib
snap. The pain enraged him.
* * * * *
In that desk he kept his other collection, ammunition for those weapons:
it was his boast that he had at least six rounds for every
projectile-thrower there. Some of it had been painstakingly fashioned in
modern times from the old formulae, some miraculously preserved through
the centuries. On strange planets he and Jerry used to have target
practice with the ancient toys.
Now the agony and the fear forced him into a gesture. He would die in
this room, for certainly he'd never tell the giant where to find the
air-lock switches; he had to go down fighting, and if to fight this
impervious lout was the most futile of gestures, at least he would make
it a glorious one!
Fumbling, he tore open a drawer and clutched a box out of it. This was
the ammunition for the Colt revolver. Gripping it in his left hand, he
jumped aside as the beast put out a hand for him. He fled across the
room, his ears cringing from the titanic yells of fury behind him. Now
he had to get the Colt .44 from the wall.
It took him three horrible minutes of dodging and bounding to reach the
weapons again. He snatched at the revolver, missed, made another
desperate grab as he dropped to the rug; the second time he had it. He
crawled under a chest which stood twenty inches off the floor. Luckily
the alien was trying to catch him, not slay him, for it could long since
have smeared him into jelly with a piece of furniture for a bludgeon.
Feverishly he loaded the chambers of the Colt. For a moment his
scattered wits could not recollect just how to operate this special
weapon. Then he remembered.
The fingers of the monster, sausage-sized and disgusting in their parody
of humanity, came groping beneath the chest. Pinkham wormed back and
came up behind it, staring into the red eyes.
With a concentration of power that he had not known he could summon, he
shot out from behind the chest and vaulted onto the top of his enormous
desk.
The alien, lips curling, straightened till its head brushed the ceiling.
It reached out for him.
In the last split second, Pink had a vision of himself, and instead of a
glorious gesture, it seemed to him suddenly that he was making an awful
ass of himself. Like a man before a firing squad thumbing his nose....
Nevertheless, he aimed the Colt full into the gargantuan face before
him, and pulled the trigger.