They landed gently beside the two great silver disks, and Mac sat back
and said, "Well," proudly, for it was his first landing in half a
millennium. "Now what, Jack the Ripper?"
"Now we go out and talk to them. First we let the gang out of the
middle room, though."
Mac flipped a switch. "They can open the door now."
Brave and the others came to meet them in the corridor. They all had
their rifles at the ready. "Put up the knife, Alan," said Rob Pope.
"He's under control pretty well, I'd say. One phony move or thought and
he's done."
Mac looked at them all. "I liked you," he said sadly. "I suppose I'll
have to kill you eventually, but I did like you." Then they marched him
down the ramp to the ground.
Alan and Win and Rob were aware at once of the amazement that ran
through the alien forces like a chinook wind among pines. Alan could
catch the thoughts plainly: _It is he, it is the leader!_
"Holy cats," he said, and Unquote stirred feebly but angrily on his
shoulder. "Mac, are you the chief of your bunch?"
"Yes. Oh, laddie, I'm a prize catch. They'll give you the Iron Cross
for me. Or the Lead Casket."
The outlanders, duplicates in form and clothing of the men slain by
Alan and the others, clustered around them. Alan wondered if there
were hatred in his brain to be found by these fellows. He did not
actually know himself whether or not he hated them for their bombing.
The destruction of New York had been such a gargantuan thing, such an
incredibly huge blow, that the solution of smaller problems seemed to
have driven it out of his thoughts entirely; perhaps it was a trick of
his subconscious, to prevent his going mad with horror.
He could hear them--if "hear" was the verb--talking mentally together.
There was no language involved, evidently, for the thoughts were surely
as plain to him as to the aliens themselves. "It's like listening in on
an old-fashioned party line," he told Win.
"Isn't it! I mean," she added hastily, "I'm not old enough to remember,
but it must be."
Alan grinned. "As I catch it, they're congratulating each other on
capturing Mac. And by glory, they're thanking us!"
"They just unfolded my mind like a road map," said Rob, "so they know
about all that we know. What stupendous capacities for absorption their
brains must have! I get the feeling that they just glance through a
kind of card index that's in the back room of my skull, and then they
know how I feel about them, and about chess and women, and what I had
for supper last night."
"It's not that miraculous," said McEldownie, on whose wrists two of the
aliens in filigreed harness had placed brass manacles connected by a
long chain. "They--and I--touch the centers of emotion, and judge from
them what sort of person you are. Just now they read the records of how
you got the disk, and how you captured me; and they tried to find out
how you reacted to the bombing of New York, but your emotion there was
too obscure."
"I obscured it myself. I was ashamed of it. Because," said Rob,
wrinkling up his forehead, "although I'm shaken when I think of it,
and feel so sorry that _sorry_ is a mild word, still I can't find any
hatred for your brothers here. I honestly think it was a mistake on
their part; and it must have been based on evidence, so that evidence
was falsified; and only you and your crew could have done that. Ergo, I
don't hate them. I hate you, Mac."
"You're all wrong."
"I'll find out before I do anything about it."
* * * * *
Half a dozen of the bare-chested blond fellows came to stand before
them. Again, there was no evidence of weapons--but whereas the first
group had been careless after finding no basic hatred in Rob and Bill,
this contingent had carefully studied the intent and the mental content
of each of them. Probably, thought Alan, it was because they had
brought McEldownie, who had been instantly recognized.
"That's right," said Mac in answer to his thought. "That first bunch
were strangers to me. See the tall bloke with the argent head-band?
That's my uncle, my mother's brother. Half of this lot knew me at home."
"Mac," said Win, "where _is_ your home?"
"Erin Grady told you the truth. We come from the ninth planet of a sun
unknown to you."
"And why did you come?"
"That's a long yarn--and my uncle says he has something to tell you."
Mac shut his mouth. Tall, bony, homely, dressed in ordinary American
clothes, his beak of a nose and the half-lidded green eyes so familiar
to them all, Alan and the others felt a pang at seeing him silent and
crestfallen among the fantastically clad outlanders. He was one of
them, but he was also McEldownie, the TV announcer, the fellow who made
bad puns and got drunk and ate enormously and suffered with them when
New York died. Even Rob Pope, surer than the rest that Mac was at the
bottom of all the hell unleashed that day, scowled and gave him a sorry
grin.
"Maybe I'm planting the thought in your minds," Mac said cynically.
None of them had spoken.
"I'd know if you were, I think," said Rob. "No, it's natural. You were
a good egg."
"And as good eggs go, I went bad." He shrugged. "I think now that I
didn't need to let you capture me for them. I might have killed Alan on
the spot by touching a single button. Damn you all," he said without
emotion. "I either loved you too well, or I was sick of running and
being a rebel."
"A rebel against what?" asked Bill Thihling.
"Stuffiness and authority. I've got to shut up." He hung his head. He
looked very tired and rather older than he had before this hour.
Then the leader of the aliens spoke to them. The message came in the
curious wordless manner, and each of them put words to it in his own
mind. To Alan it came like this:
"We are profoundly shocked at our hasty action of this morning. We have
done you incomparable injury where a little more investigation would
have shown us you were not inimical, not working against us, not bad at
all as men go. Our only excuse is that we were direly pressed for time.
"We investigated certain sections of your planet where activities
showed us some of the rebels from our world were at work; they were
building ships and weapons to return to us, to attack us. We found at
these places, some cities and some isolated deserts, some small towns
and some government projects, that our rebels had taken control of
your people, making them invulnerable with the ray which is known to
us, making them long-lived and incapable of pain and with quickened
reflexes and swifter bodies than before. To investigate this we should
have had weeks. We gave ourselves less than a day. For we knew that our
ships would have been sighted and the rebels would be speeding their
plans. So we found many robot humans, many scientists working with our
exiled people, and we thought that in all these places there must be
millions of potential foemen."
* * * * *
The message was charged with emotion; it was impossible to believe that
the man was lying. Indeed, thought Alan, there was no reason why he
should lie. If he could wipe out New York with one small golden egg, he
had no need to make allies of a few puny humans.
"Again, our sole excuse is the lack of time. We did find many places
where only a portion of those checked were under rebel control. Those
places we did not bomb, trusting that if we struck the large cities and
the projects where disk manufacture was under way, we could mop up the
others with ground fighting."
I wonder if Project Star is gone, thought Alan.
"I wonder," echoed Win aloud. Then they turned to each other,
astounded. "Darling," she said after a second, "that's the one thing I
like about this hardening, pain-removing process--now we can talk to
each other without words!"
"Think what we can do with our mouths while we're talking," he grinned.
The leader went on. "I may interject here that we took over control
of your artificial satellite some days ago. We did not kill the men
therein, who were not enemies, but control them by simple hypnosis.
They will of course be freed of this as soon as our job is done and a
peace settled on between our worlds."
Brave looked up at the sky. Albertus, of course, could not be seen
with the naked eye, but he said, "I know a couple of the lads that run
that space station. Good boys. I'd been afraid they were dead. I knew
they wouldn't have let us be smeared like this if they'd been able to
prevent it."
"Only one city we bombed that we had not personally checked on; that is
the large one over there," and he gestured toward Manhattan. "We could
not send our men on the ground into that place; the entranceways are
too complex, the place is too big, it would have taken too long; and
we could scarcely fly over and drop spies. After earnest consultation
we decided to bomb it. Being the largest concentration of civilized
people in your world, being so close to the major rebel project, we
felt--we _knew_--that it was full of enemies. Our stupidly certain
assumption was wrong. We can never make reparation for that mistake,
we cannot begin to make amends to you. Your only help will be the
knowledge that we will live with the memory of that mistake the rest of
our lives; and they are long, long lives.
"We are men of good will. We beg you to believe this. We have outlawed
war and our planet lives at peace, prosperous peace. Now we have
committed an intolerable crime against a brother race. We are hurt, in
our way, as much as you have been hurt."
* * * * *
Brave had taken Alan's hand in his own and was squeezing it hard; the
scientist thought suddenly that if he were not impervious to pain, his
hand would be aching like fury. Brave said, "Son, I need help," quite
simply and humbly.
"What is it, Brave?"
"Alan, these people are good. They look like barbarians, they ride in
twenty-second century vehicles, and they plaster our greatest cities
into the earth. But they're good. He isn't lying."
"What's the problem, Brave?"
"I hate them," the Indian said fiercely. "I'd like to have them all
here," he let go Alan's hand and jabbed a great forefinger at his
palm. "I'd smash 'em like lice. I don't want to feel that way. It's
primitive. But strip me of the veneer I've lost these last hours, and
I'm primitive to the core. I'm simple and single-minded. I hate people
who do me harm. I won't go berserk and start in on these gentry, but by
heaven, by the Great Spirit, I'd like to wipe them all out--slaughter
them all! I want to sacrifice them to the ghosts of our dead cities."
Alan said slowly, "And you don't want to feel that way. Because they're
good, you want to forgive them their mistake. My God, Brave," he cried,
"how can we ever forgive them? We can understand them, but none of us
will ever truly forgive and forget. Do you think because you feel that
way that you are reverting to savagery? Then we're every one of us on
the face of the earth pure howling savages!"
Brave searched his face. He nodded. "I see. I thought it was just me. I
guess I thought you would be shooting them up if you felt that way too.
Sorry, khedive. Heap sorry make-um dust-up over nothin'."
Alan smiled grimly.
Rob said, "If we only knew a little more of the basic story, hang it!
They haven't mentioned where they came from, why they exiled Mac's
boys or why they chased after them, anything about themselves except
that they made a mistake. Holy old boot, we know that."
The leader put in urgently: "I sense many questions which I would
happily answer if I had the time. But I have just received word that
our forces are massing to attack the disk project to the east of that
large city. I must therefore leave you until the job is done."
"They're attacking Project Star!" said Win sharply. "Good Lord, Alan,
we've got a hundred friends there!"
"Yes, and just as innocent people as those who died in Manhattan. They
can't do it." He stepped forward--it was significant that not one alien
tried to stop him--and laid a hand on the leader's bare, brawny arm.
The flesh was almost normal ... but not quite. Alan recalled Brave's
suggestion of the feel of a rubber product. The arm was hairless and
without pores, cool to the touch. He looked up into the leader's face.
It was a good face, though the widened features gave it a somewhat
aboriginal cast. It was a patriarchal face, more that of the ruler of a
tribe than of the leader of a fleet of space disks who must also be an
advanced scientist. The long yellow hair was turning slightly gray over
the temples.
The man smiled. Yes, he said to Alan without words, I am over nine
hundred years old.
"He comes from Shangri-la," said Bill Thihling. "He's the High Lama.
Can't kid me."
Among his captors, the manacled McEldownie threw back his head and
laughed. "That's what we needed," he said, "a good feeble jest. This
meeting was getting dull as hell."
Alan ignored them. He tried to pierce into the leader's brain with his
eyes, he thought fiercely and as hard as he ever had.
After three minutes the leader nodded. Alan turned to Brave. "Boy,
we're going with them. We're going to lead the attack on Project Star."
"If you've got something up your sleeve--" began Rob.
"Nothing he doesn't know of. You think I'm able to keep my thoughts to
myself? But we can save, or try to save, a lot of our people. Win stays
here, of course. So does Rob, who has a bad leg." The leader started,
gestured to another outlander, who opened one of the numerous cases
on the ground and took out bandages and salves in tins, with which he
began to repair the burn on Pope's leg. "Bill," said Alan, "you want to
come?"
"Try and dissuade me!"
"Cheers, then, gal," said Alan lightly, and kissed Win. He turned
and went into the great disk via the bubble's ramp. Brave and Bill
followed him. The leader and five of the others went up, leaving half a
dozen with McEldownie and Win and Rob. Then Alan reappeared, looking
sheepish, came down and handed a weary cat to the girl. "I've been
wearing her on my shoulder for so long she thought she was growing
there." He patted Unquote (who raked up the energy to spit at him) and
disappeared once more. The disk rose silently into the air.
* * * * *
Alan learned now that the aliens had a spoken tongue; for they began to
chatter to each other, the sentences brief, the words evidently long
and complex. It sounded a little like Latin, a little like Greek; but
no words were even faintly familiar.
"What's your plan, Alan?" asked Brave.
"Not a very complex one, I'm afraid. We're to be allowed to go in
first, the disk having flown low to avoid being sighted, and been
landed behind the hill that overlooks our house. We're to gain entrance
naturally, if possible, or sneak in if the place is too heavily
fortified and suspicious. I think we can walk right in. I'm patently
a 'robot' and you two can be under my charge. Then we have an hour to
contact everyone we can. We tell the fellows who are okay to collect
in the chem lab. We try to persuade the robots to congregate in the
welding room, where they can be captured easily and without bloodshed.
But if we can't tell the difference between robots and aliens, then we
pass along quick. We have to step high and fast, lads. And we can't
separate to do the job, since you two can't check over the thoughts of
the people we meet."
He stood up. "I'm going to wander around and get to know the boys.
We'll be fighting on their side soon."
"I hope it's the right side."
"I think it is."
He walked over to the nearest group of aliens, who greeted him
courteously. He found that when they spoke aloud he could not read
their thoughts; but when they sensed that he believed them to be
talking about him or about secrets they had from him, they at once went
mute and directed their thought conversation to his brain cells. He sat
down and began to ask questions. He found that he was able to do so now
without strain.
"Yes," one of them told him, "your powers develop rapidly after the
third exposure to the rays. They come so gradually that you are hardly
aware of them. It's a rapid gradualness, though."
Alan recalled that it was in the captured disk that he first felt
the tremendous awakened power of his mind to read and feel the
reciprocation of other minds. He nodded. They went on talking.
* * * * *
At three-thirty p.m. of the day New York died, the three men walked up
to the gate of Project Star. They carried their heavy rifles openly,
and looked belligerent. It would have been hard to appear otherwise.
They were challenged by a soldier, who fronted a squad of men with
flamers and grenade pistols. Before Alan could answer, the soldier
said, "Oh, it's Dr. Rackham. Pass in, sir. Where'd you come from?"
"Manhattan."
"Cripes! you're lucky to be here." It was the same soldier who had
passed him on the night of his treatment in the shed. He went in to the
colony, Brave and Bill Thihling at his heels.
At four-twenty-eight p.m. the three of them walked up close to the
same gate. There were nine soldiers on duty. Beyond the fence were the
ack-ack guns, radar detectors, and force field generators, manned by a
number of other soldiers.
The three put their rifles down on the ground. Then they solemnly began
to dance around in a little circle, unbuttoning their coats as they
did so. The squad stared, moved uneasily a little closer, looked at
their leader for guidance. He shrugged. He was a robotized fellow who
had been made a particular pet by one of the aliens; he knew a great
deal about the scheme of things in the colony--consciously, rather than
unconsciously as most of them did--and was trusted above most of his
fellows. He was not especially bright.
"They ain't breaking any rules," he said. "You never know what the hell
a scientist is gonna do."
Brave and Alan and Bill had now divested themselves of their shirts
and were taking off their undershirts. They were still dancing their
lilting small cakewalk.
"Nuts," said the soldier. "They're nuts. Musta caught some radiation
from that buster." All the men on the ring of huge equipment beyond
the fence were watching them too. It was amusing to see a really mad
scientist, and three were delightful. They whooped and cheered and
laughed.
Then the saucermen came over the hill.
It was as though they erupted from the ground, even to Alan and his
henchmen who had been watching for them. And what a sight it was!
Barbarians in every physical trait, from face to naked chest to ornate
girdle and gold loincloth, armed with tiny tubes that hurled fireballs
and with thin blowpipes that shot numbing darts over incredible
distances, they might have been warriors from a forgotten land in a
long-forgotten time. And they came silently, so that they seemed to
approach through the noiseless depths of a dream. But the shriek of a
soldier falling from a gun platform, his face in flames, was not out of
a dream, but a hideous nightmare.
* * * * *
The three men pounced on their rifles, threw them up and were firing
methodically even before they had regained the erect position. Alan
and Brave, crack shots who had been used to practice every Sunday
morning on the military range, shot for the heads; Bill, a less certain
marksman, tried for the chests. The brain and heart were the only sure
targets when you fought a man who could feel no pain and could keep
going with half of his body shot away.
For a brief time it seemed to the soldiers that the scientists were
shooting aliens; then the leader turned and saw where the muzzles
pointed.
"Get 'em!" he bellowed, and sprayed a charge from a grenade pistol
that went wide of its mark but fanned Bill's cheek with tiny scraps of
hot breeze. Next instant he was down kicking from Bill's slug, and the
guards of the gate were finished.
The vanguard of the outlanders swept in and across the grounds. They
had concentrated on this single gate, as the others had too open
approaches for safety. There were men from sixteen saucers, over four
hundred of them, and they ran like deer, like cheetahs after deer, like
winds after cheetahs. Mutely, with a kind of ferocious impersonality,
they descended on the colony.
Men came running out with machine guns and feverishly began to load
them. They were picked off by rifle bullets, by paralyzing ray tubes,
and relays came and were picked off and more came. One gun stuttered
into action momentarily, and the crew went twisting up in the air,
their gun blown apart, their bodies rent by a weapon that even Alan
had not known of. He spotted it finally, a blunderbuss-shaped thing of
silver with a flaring mouth, fired like a bazooka. Another machine gun
blew up.
Among the buildings there was hand-to-hand combat, automatics against
fire tubes, outlander against rebel outlander in wrestling, heaving
confusion. All the men from the stranger planet fought without
speaking; the robots shouted, like normal men in a battle. Brave was
bawling war whoops and Alan was cursing steadily, as he always did
under fire. Bill Thihling had got himself lost somewhere.
The leader of Alan's saucer went by, blond hair streaming, blood
dripping down the brown chest. Alan caught a thought: _thanks_. He
knew, from touching Alan's mind in passing, that many of the nonrobot
men and women were gathered in safety, and even a number of the
alien-controlled puppets had been herded into the welding room and
locked in, obedient to Alan's hypnotic order.
* * * * *
The Indian and Alan came at last to the end of the ammunition that
had bulged out their trousers' pockets. They clubbed their rifles and
waded into a melee that staggered back and forth between two office
buildings, across the scarlet-stained grass. Then Alan lost his rifle,
and drew his automatic. The range was always short and his hand was
steady as a granite statue's. He was recognizing his foemen at every
turn, and putting away the recognition and thinking, _They are rebels
from the stars, mutineers against a good people, it was their plottings
brought on the smashing of our cities. This is not Dr. Coulterre,
it's a creature eight hundred years old who wanted to make me into a
brainless slave. That isn't Dr. Simms curled up with my bullet in his
belly, it's the slayer of a million New Yorkers as sure as if it had
put its own damned finger on the trip release._
He could tell the robots because they yelled, and those he left alone,
because the saucermen were shooting them with numbing rays that did
not kill. It was a humane method as far as it went. Sometimes he had
to blow a robot's brains out, or be slain by him. Then he said, I've
killed a friend. He went looking for more aliens to fight.
In all the press of bodies Alan and Brave were easiest to see. Brave
was huge and his head was that of a savage buck, the lips writhed
back from teeth athirst for blood; Alan, naked to the waist and
with a white bandage over his right ear, put on by a surgeon in the
saucer, was a figure differing radically from the barbaric saucermen
and the sedately-clothed rebels and robots. They had taken off their
shirts in the dance for a better reason than holding the attention
of the soldiers. Among a hundred men like them they would have been
indistinguishable had they stayed fully clothed. It's simple, he
thought, to tell the good guys from the bad guys; the good guys haven't
got any shirts.
The two of them made excellent targets. Brave knew he carried a slug in
his leg just next the groin; Alan had no idea whether he had been hit.
Enemies were continually firing at them both.
Alan was knocked to the turf by a man who leaped on his back and beat
at his head with a pistol butt. Brave swung the rifle, a terrible war
club in his hands, and broke the man's head like a rotten gourd. Alan
got up with the feeling that he should have a headache. But he felt
nothing.
Then the rebel outlanders gave up. Suddenly, all over the scattered
fields of battle, they had thrown down their weapons and thrust up
their hands above their heads in the universal signal of surrender.
Their robot people followed suit. The saucermen had won. Project Star
was theirs.