Don Mariner, leaning out of the window of the station wagon as the band
emerged, said urgently, "One of them landed. It landed just over there
a way, I don't think more than half a mile. There aren't any others in
sight. This one floated down not half a minute ago."
"What did I say?" exclaimed McEldownie. "They eliminated radioactive
dust, so they could come right in after a bombing. It's logical."
"We'll go on foot," said Brave, "though I hate to abandon the car. But
we'll have to go on foot over this rubble, and I take it we _are_ going
to the thing?"
"We sure are," said Rob Pope.
"Wait a minute. One of us ought to go with Win in the wagon and try
to make it back to Project Star. She shouldn't be in this ruckus,"
protested Alan.
"You think she'd be better off out there with Lord knows how many
mutants or supermen or aliens?" asked Bill Thihling. "You're not
thinking straight, boy. We've got to stick together. Separate now and
we may never see each other again."
"Besides, you can't get rid of me," said Win finally.
Don passed out the heavy sporting rifles, one to each of the men. They
each had a sidearm, Brave two, and he and Alan had the wicked knives of
the shopkeeper. Win had her little automatic for use in emergencies.
Dividing the ammunition, and anchoring Unquote firmly to Alan's left
shoulder with lengths of twine fashioned into harness and leash, they
set off across the street; passed between buildings and across another
street and yet another; and came to the area of near-total destruction.
Here the going was precarious and tricky. Brave stared around them.
"Looks like Pergamino when we'd finished with it," he said to his
friend.
A queer dead hush followed them about, muffling their footsteps and
depressing them as though they crept through a graveyard. "That's
what it is," said Alan half-aloud. "The biggest graveyard in the
world." His hands ached to feel the throat of an enemy, to tear out
the jugular, to slay and slay. His world had been struck a fantastic,
unaccountable blow, and it was dead around him and he and his friends
seemed the only living humans from pole to pole.
They passed on, drifting quietly between broken crags that two
hours before had been office buildings, hearing the echo of their
light foot-falls tossed back by windowless walls and heaps of brick
and stone. One passage was clogged breast-high with corpses. They
went around it, climbing over powdery granite piles that had been a
theater's facade.
* * * * *
Then there was the broad plain of ruin, a gargantuan bowl, smoothed
down from its rim to the center, which was some twenty feet below
the original level of the ground. Everything had been smashed here,
buildings and trees and everything that stood upright; in the middle
of the frightful desolated bowl rested one of the great silver disks,
tilted like a gyroscope and balanced on its extreme edge, as though it
leaned at its forty-five-degree angle against an invisible wall.
"That settles it," said Don. "Our ships can't do that stunt. Look,
it balances like that and the bubble opened up makes an incline to
the ground; fit steps inside the bubble and you have a perfect way of
getting in and out. Our system is much clumsier. How the devil do they
make it balance, though?"
"They've set up effective force screens around our armies," said Jim.
"If they can do that, certainly they can utilize small editions of the
screen mechanisms to hold up their saucers."
"Or maybe it's a principle of gyroscopics," added Bill.
"Well," said Brave, "we're going down there. At least I am. Anybody
wants to stay here, Lord knows I won't blame him."
"We're all going."
"Okay. First Alan and Bill and I will walk out. If we aren't shot by
the time we've gone twenty yards, you four come on. We can't plan
anything till we get a look at the brutes in the disk; but as soon as
we do, I'll shout out our next move. Is that all right with everyone?
Or does one of you want to take charge?"
"You're the chief, Brave," said Rob. "Maybe we outrank you on Project
Star, but in action I'd back you against all of us. I've heard about
you in Argentina."
"I didn't mean to assume command on the strength of my war record,"
said Brave seriously. "I simply figured I had the biggest voice and no
matter what happens you'll probably be able to hear me. Okay, here we
go. Guns at the ready."
They walked out onto the flattened waste that had been New York.
Nothing happened.
When they had been walking for eternity and six days longer, as Alan
judged it, figures appeared below the huge disk, coming down the
inclined steps or plane in the crystal bubble, grouping on the ground.
The Earthmen were then just over an eighth of a mile from the ship.
The aliens looked human; it was difficult to see differences in their
structure and that of a man; and they wore clothing that glistened
as they moved in the sun. They were setting up three small pieces of
machinery beneath the disk. Alan could not guess what they might be.
Then the men in the lead, Brave and Bill and Alan, ran into an unseen
wall that knocked them staggering from the force of their own motion.
The aliens had set up a screen around their ship.
"Here's where I yell out the plan, I guess," said Brave ruefully. "The
plan is to make faces, men. That seems to be the only thing we can do
of a warlike nature. God, a force wall! We might have known."
* * * * *
Alan, who had sat down abruptly when he struck it, jarring the
tied-down cat on his shoulder and causing her to sink her claws through
the coat into his skin with anger, stood up and felt the air before his
face.
"Amazing. Touch this thing, you fellows. It feels like a sheet of hard
rubber. It's perfectly tangible. I can almost feel a grain in the
thing."
"What scientists they must be!" exclaimed Rob Pope. "This--hey!" he
shouted, startled. "Here's an opening!"
Then he had walked on across the bowl. Bill Thihling, nearest him,
tried to follow. He found there was no hole there. He skinned his nose
on the force screen.
"Rob's crazy," he said. "He thinks there ain't no force wall there. So
he walks through it. Only a loon could do it."
Pope came back. "I heard that. What the hell...? It was here a minute
ago."
"Can't you get back?"
"No! The wall's solid again. By Jupiter, they let me come through; they
wanted to see one of us at a time. All right, I'll play their game." He
wheeled and marched straight toward the disk.
"Oh, Rob, come back!" screamed Win. "They'll do something awful to you!"
"Too late now," said Alan, taking her arm. "They've caught him in their
cage like a rabbit."
"A fanged rabbit, anyway," said Don. "He's got his guns."
Rob walked under the silver ship, into its shadow. The aliens clustered
about him. Beyond the wall of force, the men and the girl held their
breath tensely.
After a minute or two, "Why," said Jim McEldownie, "they haven't even
taken away his rifle!"
Shortly Rob turned his face toward them and waved. It was an
encouraging motion. Whatever was happening did not seem hostile.
"And yet," said Alan to himself, "these are the devils who smashed
Manhattan. They _are_ enemies." Even here, on the sloped plain that
had been a roaring city, it was hard to realize it. He shook himself.
Simply because they had not chopped Rob Pope down immediately, he had
begun to slack off his hatred of them. He was growing tired and stupid.
He reached into his pocket and took out an antigue tablet and swallowed
it.
Don Mariner, leaning heavily against the invisible wall, was abruptly
shot forward to fall on his belly; the wall had vanished where he
stood. Jim reached the spot an instant later, but the screen was whole.
Don sat up, and his plump face was pale, but his grin was without panic.
"The Mariners have landed," he said, "and will shortly have the
situation well in hand. Hold tight." He went down to the disk and the
aliens.
* * * * *
The waiting grew terrible in its intensity; Bill Thihling took his
pulse and found it like a machine gun, even Brave sweated with anxiety,
his dark fine face taut and frowning.
He was, as it happened, the next to be admitted to the silver ship's
area. Walking through the hole that opened to him, he thrust an arm
back through it, trying to hold the force away till Alan had had time
to follow him. Roughly, with a sensation of faint burning, the screen
shut down and flung his arm to his side. It was like a sentient animal
leaping from the sky to stand between him and his friend. After a
moment's hesitation he went to the disk.
Mac came to Alan's side. "Listen, Doc," he said urgently. "Get your
girl over here. The three of us are going through this thing together
when our time comes."
"How?" And why, thought Alan. Is he scared to walk down over the plain
alone? Why Win and me? How about Bill?
"I'll show you. Get up against the wall. I'll idle beside you and Win
can stand on the other side. When it opens in front of one of us, the
other two will jump like crickets and we'll go in in lock step. Okay?"
"They may blast us if we disregard their obvious wishes." He gestured
at the titanic bowl. "They can undoubtedly do it if we peeve them," he
said lightly.
"We'll take that chance. I have an idea."
Alan shrugged. What they did seemed unimportant, the activities of a
handful of fleas under a microscope.
The screen, as it happened, dissolved before Alan. More properly, he
thought, it went up, like a sliding panel under his light-touching
fingers. "Here it is," he said.
Instantly Mac had stepped behind him, one hand clutching out for Win's
arm, the other around Alan's waist. Alan felt himself propelled through
the doorway as if by a giant's shove; and the three of them stood
inside, the girl looking rather bewildered.
"My Lord," she said to Mac, "you can move like an express train when
you want to."
"Now listen," said the announcer. "When we get down there, be on your
toes. Follow my lead. I know what I'm going to do. I'm--we're going to
take over that ship."
"Jim, you're out of your head."
"No, I'm not. I know exactly what I'm going to do. We came here to
smack these demons down, didn't we? Well, we will. Just be on your
bloody toes, that's all."
Then they walked down the gentle slope until they had reached the
shadow of the alien disk. They stopped a few feet from the watching
outlanders. The captive Unquote writhed forward as far as she could on
Alan's shoulder and spat at them.
They were a strange, a fantastic group, and yet they seemed to be human
beings. Their bodies, much of which was unclothed, were built on the
human scale; they averaged about six feet in height and their chest
and limbs were developed to the same degree as a normally husky man's.
Their foreheads were uniformly high. Their eyes varied in color, only
one having irises of an unearthly hue, a kind of vivid violet. Only in
the arrangement of their features did they differ perceptibly from the
men of Terra: the cheeks were broader, the noses flatter, the eyes more
widely spaced, and the bone structure much less apparent. Somewhere
Alan had seen a man, lately, whose vague memory reminded him of these
fellows. Where...?
Erin Grady!
* * * * *
When the pilot had spread himself out, so to speak, against the back of
the chair, his face had widened, the features had drawn sideways and
perceptibly flattened, so that he had resembled these saucermen. Was
this what he had meant when he said, "You can't touch us. What could
you do anyway?" This holocaust, this ghastly obliterating of New York
and Los Angeles and fifty more great cities?
Grady had been a spy for them, then; a watcher, landed perhaps from one
of the disks on a dark night....
He shook himself. That's romantic hogwash, he said. Everyone on Project
Star had a thorough checking-over, and his history from birth to the
present was recorded in the files. That meant that Grady had been born
here, in the United States.
Unless the keepers of the files were alien too, in which case a
falsified record would be a simple matter to arrange.
But if he had been left here in comparatively recent times, say even
four or five years ago, Alan went on, how did he learn our language,
our backgrounds, our habits and customs and all the rest of it, so
well? Are these creatures then so much farther advanced than we, that
they can take on the perfect counterfeit of humanity in so short a
time? He could not quite believe it. Grady had been too human.
Damn it all, _these_ men looked too human!
He shrugged mentally, and began to examine their clothing. What there
was of it was metallic, or of cloth that seemed metallic: each one
wore a wide belt of silver filigree, reaching up to the ribs and down
just past the groin; beneath this a material that resembled cloth of
gold, very soft and fine, was wound about the loins. They all wore
sandals, of varying colors, the straps of which appeared to be made
of tinted copper or a like metal. The rest of their outfits were
evidently according to the individual's own taste; some wore arm bands
of glittering orange or yellow gold, some had circlets of shining gray
argent bound about their hair, which in all cases was blond and cut
about shoulder length. The over-all effect was splendidly barbaric, and
about as far as Alan could imagine from the usual picture of visitors
from space.
"They ought to have broadswords swinging at their thighs," he murmured
to Win. "Or at least be toting horn cups full of mead."
"Aren't they something!" she said, and then, "are these the devils who
bombed all our world a few hours back? These big good-looking boys? I
can't believe it!"
One of them bent over a square steel-like box and turned a dial; they
heard Bill Thihling shout in the distance, "Hey, the wall's gone!" and
saw him come running toward them.
"They're the ones," said Alan, and his mind, occupied till now with the
romantic appearance of the invaders, became filled with hate.
* * * * *
Instantly he felt something probing into his thoughts. It was, although
he did not remember it, very like his first experience of hypnosis
during the telecast. All he knew now, however, was that someone was
leafing through his emotions and ideas as if they had been a large
plainly-printed book. It made him furious. He might have done anything,
shouted angrily or struck out at the nearest alien in an access of
physical passion; but it was then that Jim McEldownie made his move.
"Okay," the lanky man roared, "strike now! Blast 'em! Get into the
ship!" He lifted his rifle and fired it from the hip, and one of the
outlanders spun round and fell, a great bloody cavern torn in his chest.
Alan did not question Jim's methods, though two minutes before he
would have; he blew the head off the nearest blond saucerman and shot
over the falling body at another. Brave fired too, and Don Mariner; the
others were caught by surprise and only stared wide-eyed.
An alien drew a silver tube from the back of his filigreed silver
girdle and from its tiny muzzle a gout of scarlet flame flew at Alan.
He felt nothing, thanked his luck that it had missed, and shot the
man through the head. Then he was racing after McEldownie toward the
crystal bubble's inclined plane.
Up they went into the disk, he and Mac in the lead, Unquote shrieking
murder on his shoulder. Behind them he could hear the others pounding
along, crying out questions or vague threats or battle-cries.
The ship was much larger than those of Project Star, and more complex
within; the ramp reached to a corridor with three doors. Mac was
dashing for the farthest one; Alan threw his weight against the middle
door. As it burst open his first glimpse was of four outlanders rising,
open-mouthed, from chairs set before a bank of control panels.
Afterwards he could recall only the thing which flashed through his
mind in that first instant of viewing them: that in the old West it had
been proved time and again that one good man with a repeating rifle
was better than four good men with revolvers. Alan proved it now, not
against guns, but against the small silver tubes that spat flame
balls. The room was a shambles in eight seconds, and Alan turned for
more conquest, to stumble over the body of a man in the corridor.
* * * * *
It was Don Mariner, and he had no face. There was a raw bloody burn
from ear to ear, from brow to throat. He had probably died very
quickly. Alan straightened and gripped his gun's stock till the
fingertips splayed out white and flat against it. Old Don, he said,
old plump Don. Not so old, he said, probably no more than forty-two
or -three, but you always thought of him affectionately as Old Don. Now
who will there be to exclaim "By Judas!" when things get tough?
"Brave!" he bawled out. "Brave, are you safe?" He was hideously afraid
for his great friend. When the copper face peered out of the third
door, he was ill with relief.
"Had a little dust-up in here," said the Indian. "These boys wanted to
brawl. My God," he said, coming out, "Don's had it."
"Yes, he's had it."
"He was a good man. Did we lose anyone else? I think the saucermen are
all through."
Jim McEldownie joined them. "The big control room's up front there. We
killed seven of 'em there. Rob took a leg burn and he'll walk with a
limp for a while. No more casualties."
"Those tubes of theirs are frightful. If we hadn't taken them so by
surprise--"
"They were too careless," said Brave. "Doesn't make sense."
Rob Pope hobbled out, one arm over Bill's shoulders. "I think I know
why," he said. "When they got me down here, they searched through my
mind. I could feel it plain as a physical touch. They found hate there,
I'll be bound, but it was for the bombing of the city, not a congenital
hatred of outsiders. They found the same in Bill's mind. It relaxed
them and put them off guard."
"How do you figure that?" asked Win.
"They were looking for an ingrained enmity toward themselves. It
astonished them when they didn't find it. They're tremendously
telepathic, and I'll wager hypnotic too. I think they do much of their
own communicating by thought waves; at least I didn't hear them speak
once.
"When they discovered why I was angry, they were stunned. I mean they
were shocked blue. You see, they made a mistake. They realized that as
soon as they'd pried into my mind. They thought we were down here just
waiting to kill them as soon as they landed, and naturally they had to
cripple us before they dared do it. Then they found out their mistake.
They had to kill someone, I'm not sure who, but the bombing of our
cities could have been avoided had they known what we were like."
"Wait a minute," objected Brave. "Rob, how do you know all this?"
Pope looked surprised. "Why, they told me. They had just begun to
explain it, hardly got more than a few ideas across, when you and
Mac and Alan busted loose. If I'd known what you were planning I'd
have stopped you. But now we have made a mistake as bad in its way as
theirs."
"They told you all this?" asked Win blankly.
"Yes. They talked in my mind. Not in English, but it came out that
way. It was--pictures, I suppose is the nearest thing to it. Emotions
and both abstract and concrete ideas can be transmitted by a good
telepathist; and these boys were the best." He shook his head. "It's
too bad. God knows where it will all end now."