"I can't believe Win is one of them," said Brave stubbornly.
"And I can't find any other explanation. If I make sure she is, and if we find they're evil, as we think, then I know what's the first thing I'll do." He looked his friend in the eyes. "I'll kill her, Brave. I'll cut her damned lying throat!"
Then he stood up. "Enough of that. There are bigger things at stake than Win right now. I think we may take it as a truism that you and I can't hinder the superman's plans worth a whoop. Nor could we get to more than one or two people in authority before we were found out and stopped. Lord, the very ones we'd naturally go to are probably mutants themselves! So there's just one thing to be done. Enlist the fellows we know are all right. There's Don Mariner, for a start. He's plump and balding and looks ineffective but he's as smart a lad as we have on the Project. Then there's Rob Pope; he was in the hospital last month when he cut himself badly on a hot sheet of plastiquartz. He's in the plastic chemistry section, but he knows a lot about hypnotism and such-like, so he'd be an asset."
"Can we trust him just because he cut himself? He might have faked the pain."
"Brave, we've got to trust somebody! All we can do is grasp at little indications of true humanity. Let's see. Who else is there?"
"Bill Thihling, the rocketjet man. He was at Oxford with me. Rhodes scholar, prince of a guy, and abnormally sensitive—I've seen him throw up when a dog was run over. He's no callous mutant."
"Good deal. That's five of us. Any more?"
They thought hard. Mentioning names, discarding them as unsure risks, they ran through all their acquaintances. No more potential allies could they find till Alan said, "Jim McEldownie!"
"What do we know about Jim?"
"That he's uglier than the Duchess inAlice. Look at the mutants we've recognized: the welder, a well-set-up Tarzan type; the pilot, a clean-cut handsome dog; and Win, a raving belle. Does Jim fit in with them? My sainted grandmother, no! And if we convince him of our belief, he might put us on TV to broadcast it to the country.Worlds of Portenthas a huge following, and people believe what they see and hear on it. Then afterward, iftheyget us, we won't have wasted what may be the first and last opportunity men have had to publicize the presence of the enemy among us."
Brave went to the visiphone. There was an atmosphere of tense disquiet in the room now, as though things were about to burst out in violence and passion at any second. The Indian talked with Don Mariner and Pope and Thihling, who all agreed to come over within the hour; then he called McEldownie. Shortly the lanky announcer was looking quizzically at him from the screen. "How, Lo." He shuddered. "How low can you reach for a gag? What's up?"
"Mac, can you get here right away?"
"Unholy cats—apologies to Unquote—why the rush?"
"Just say we need a good man in a hurry."
The other cocked an eyebrow. "I detect the aroma of butter, salve, and the old oil. Okay, I'll take an air taxi. Heat up any spare steak you have lying around. I haven't eaten breakfast."
"Naturally," said Brave, and turned off the visiphone. "There," he said to Alan, "now all we have to do is convince them."
It took two hours to convert the four men to their views. Don Mariner, because of his own findings, was with them from the first exposition; Pope was intrigued but skeptical; Thihling was frankly incredulous; and McEldownie was scornful and astonished by turns. At last the fierce earnestness of Brave and Alan had its effect, and all of them were on their feet, pacing up and down, shouting at one another, smacking their fists into their palms and proposing unworkable plans at random.
Alan argued with Jim about the telecast. Finally the lean man said, "All right. I'm wacked. We're all wacked. They'll take away my job, my license, and my reputation. They'll toss us all in the hatch. Maybe we'll be lucky and get a room together. We can sit in a ring and make faces at each other for the next fifty years." He shrugged. "Nevertheless, we'll do it. We'll do it tonight. If things are coming to a head, we've got to step high and swift. I'd scheduled the Secretary of State tonight, but he'll have to wait. I'll go down and make arrangements. Won't say anything to the sponsors, naturally, or the staff. They trust me ... they've done it for the last time, I imagine. Well, I've had five good years on TV. Let's finish it in a real crackerjack blaze of the well-known glory, gents. Here we go round the loony bin."
"You, boy," said Alan fervently, "are okay."
"I'm a living doll," said McEldownie moodily, and left.
Bill Thihling, the rocketjet man, a compact sturdy pocketsized fellow about Brave's age—thirty-six or -seven—said, "Now let's have some action. Let'sdosomething."
"First thing we do is swallow some antigues," said Brave, going into the kitchen for the bottle. Antigues were anti-fatigue tablets, on which a man could keep fresh and intelligent for seventy-two hours without sleep. "I have an idea that sleep will be a myth and a vagrant memory for us before too long."
"And then," said Don Mariner, "we catch one of the supermen and beat some truth out of him."
Alan laughed hollowly, reminding himself of a character out ofMacBeth. "Beat it out of him? Torture a being that doesn't feel pain?"
"Kill him, then," urged Rob Pope. "It's simple bloodthirst, but we've got to make a beginning. Perhaps it'll make his cousins fret a little. Bring 'em into the open."
"We don't even know they can be killed. A thousand-pound 'sword' couldn't faze the pilot of that disk. What couldwedo?"
"We can try! It's no good our arguing back and forth; we haven't any real data. The only thing to do is kidnap one ofthem, see what makes him tick, and then do our planning."
"I'm for that," said Don. "Which one shall we take?"
"The welder's vanished, and we can't very well torture, or try to torture, Win Gilmore. Too rough on Alan. Let's have in the pilot of the wrecked disk."
"He wouldn't come here if we called him: too suspicious a request," said Alan. "Kidnapping's the thing."
"Pope and I can handle that," said Thihling. "Anyone know his name?"
"Erin Grady," said Don Mariner. "Judas, isn't that a handle!"
Rob Pope, a big rangy man built in the style of a woodsrunner out of early America, said, "Ho for Erin Grady, then. And if he tries any of his damn superman's hypnosis, I'll fling it in his own teeth. I know a trick or two in that line myself."
The two of them left the house. Brave began to mix three stiff highballs, and Don Mariner took out a harmonica and played Bach, with only a few sour notes per bar. Alan picked up the cat Unquote and fondled her. But his thoughts were grim. All he could see was a beautiful girl who he longed to hold in his arms. A beautiful girl with a cigarette burn on her arm. A girl who felt no pain. Win....
CHAPTER VI
They brought in Erin Grady, dressed in brown civilian clothes and wearing an expression of curiosity on his lean well-proportioned face and in eyes that were accustomed to peering into measureless deeps of the sky. "How'd you get him?" asked Brave.
"Lied like a trooper," said Pope, and the pilot turned half-angry, half-amused blue eyes on him.
Brave gestured to a straight-backed chair. "Please sit there, Mr. Grady." The pilot did so without question. "Forgive this wire," Brave went on, looping the heavy coils around the man's chest and arms, "but we don't think rope would hold you."
Then the pilot spoke. "Kept telling myself for years that scientists are all cracked," he said philosophically. "Guess this proves it."
"Bill," said the Indian to Thihling, "go out and patrol the house. Let us know if anybody approaches—anybody at all."
The rocketjet man left them. Brave put Grady's hands flat on the arms of the chair and lashed them down at wrist and knuckles. Then he stood back, Alan and Don and Rob a little behind him, and he said gravely, "Erin Grady, you smashed up a disk yesterday. But you weren't hurt."
"I was lucky."
"You sat in the regular pilot's chair as it hit?"
"Sure, I—" then his eyes narrowed and he shut his mouth.
"Too late," said Brave grimly. "You gave yourself away. You aren't so clever as you're supposed to be."
"Whaddaya mean?"
"For a superman, you're too slow on the trigger. We got into that disk before they clamped a security ring around it. We saw what happened to the chair. No human could have missed being sliced down the brisket by that juggernaut that came through the control board."
"You clever, clever little bastards," said Grady venomously. "You'll be dealt with." For the first time he seemed angered at the wire that held him. He threw his weight against it, but it held firm. He glared at each of them, and Rob Pope said, "He's trying hypnotism; watch yourselves."
Mariner chuckled. "He can't affect me, I'm too fat. The thought waves get lost."
Brave did not even feel the tentative vibrations of the pilot's mind, but he glanced at Alan and saw that his friend was sweating. "You okay, guru?" he asked anxiously.
"He's talking to me." Alan's face cleared. "But I'm not going under. I believe your treatment did the trick, Brave."
The pilot relaxed and deliberately spat on the rug. Brave reached out an arm like a tree trunk and slapped the tanned cheek, so the head rocked sideways. "We aren't going to be gentle with you, pal," said Don. "Face that. We aren't playing for marbles."
Grady did not speak. Brave took eight strips of light wood, narrow and about two inches long, from his pocket. Kneeling, he fitted them neatly under the pilot's well-manicured and rather long nails. The man flipped them out with a convulsive motion of the fingers; Brave impassively brought his enormous fist down like a hammer on the back of the fellow's right hand. Grady shrieked.
"Do that again and I'll break the other one," said Brave.
"You red-skinned bastard!" howled Grady, "you did bust it up."
"I meant to. I wanted to see if you'd be quick enough this time to simulate pain."
Had Alan not known better, he would have sworn the pilot was actually suffering. "What are you talking about? Why in blue hell shouldn't I feel pain?"
"Because you're a mutant, and we know you can't. Why can't you, I wonder," muttered Brave in a conversational tone, fitting the splinters under the nails again. "Pain is a necessity of life as we know it. It warns you of danger. A man could be sliced off up to the waist without noticing it, except for pain. Why would the next higher animal to man in the scale of evolution have lost the sensation of pain? It doesn't make sense."
"That's the first thing you've said that I agree with or understand. It doesn't make sense. You're all nuts."
"Come off it," said Alan. "You have given yourself away too often. Don't go back to the old innocent routine."
Rob Pope said, "Suppose they can regenerate lost appendages? It isn't as mad as it sounds. Suppose that welder slipped away and grew himself a new hand? In the case of such a beast, what good would pain be to him? It'd be no more than a nuisance. The lack of pain then becomes an intelligent development—but only then."
"What devils they must be," said Don, staring at Grady. "Right out of the swamps of Hell."
Brave said to the pilot, "Now I'm going to ask you a question. If you give me a fair answer I'll take out one of these sticks. If you don't, I'll drive it into you—under the nail it hurts about as bad as anything can—and light it. It's an old trick and it works wonders as a tongue-loosener. Here's the question: are you a mutant of our race, a superman?"
Grady looked at him for a moment and then he laughed. He was still laughing when Brave hit the stiff wood with a hammer and sank it beneath the nail. Then he screamed.
"You do that real well. It sounds as if that hurt you. Keep it up if you like; it won't bother me. I'm an Indian, Mr. Grady. I'm as sensitive and humane as the next guy until I'm up against somebody who fights unfairly, who's mean and cruel and treacherous; then I turn cold and I say to myself, how shall I fight this brute? and if torture is the best answer, I use it without any qualms. That's sense, it seems to me. Well, I hate your uncanny guts, Mr. Grady, and all your crew: and there isn't any way to fight you that I can see, so I'll torture you. And even if I'm nine-tenths certain that you aren't feeling it, still it eases me a little to hear you whoop and yell. And there's that tenth of my brain that says maybe you are feeling it. I hope you are. I really hope you are."
He lit the wood: it was synthetic, a very light, hard compound of fibers that burnt with a quick flame, as hot as the heart of a coal. It reached the nail and curled it back in two shavings of black char: and Grady almost shattered his throat with his roaring.
"Brave," said Alan, "stop it! He does feel it!"
"You raving maniacs, certainly I feel it!" Grady cried. "Where'd you get the idea I couldn't? You're all mad!"
Don Mariner said calmly, "I'll tell you why he doesn't feel it. Just look at his face." They all did so, uncomprehending. "He isn't sweating," said Don triumphantly, "and he hasn't even turned pale!"
Grady turned his head toward the engineer. "Oh, you fat little blob of stupidity," he said icily. "You stand there with your idiot companions and your bright little idea that's about as wrong as wrong can get. Of course I'm not sweating.I haven't any sweat glands. I haven't any pores.And naturally I can't turn pale. This is my natural color. I'm no damned human chameleon. But I can feel pain, in spite of your driveling theories. What do you want to know?" He spat again. "I won't sit here and take this agony for anyone. What the blazes can you do to us if you do know? You can't touch us. Go on, ask away."
"Are you mutants?" asked Brave.
"No."
"Are you human?"
"Not as you understand it."
"Where did you come from?"
The pilot sneered. "From the ninth planet of a sun unknown to you," he said.
Brave glanced back at Alan. "Think he's lying?"
"I swear I don't know."
"I'm not lying," said Grady. "Want to know how I got out of that disk alive? I heard the damn machinery shifting in front of me—oh yes, my ears are sharper and my sight's better, and I can move a lot faster than you can—so I spread myself out thin against the back of the seat. Lucky for me the monster stopped an inch short of my guts. Want to see how I did it? Will that convince you?"
Then he did an incredible, a terrible thing to see: he seemed to turn almost fluid, and though none of his features changed, they withdrew to the sides; his whole body thinned out and flattened along the chair back, and he became a caricature of a man run over by a steam roller. Then he laughed at them.
Above Rob's gasp and Alan's cry came the shriek of Don Mariner. Then he had swept Brave aside and fired a grenade pistol almost in the face of the pilot; and Grady died without a sound.
"No recriminations," said Alan. "You can't see a thing like that and hold your hand. If I'd been armed I'd have done it myself."
Brave was running his hands over the exposed flesh of the dead pilot. "This is weird stuff," he said. "It isn't human—well, that's obvious. It feels vaguely like gutta-percha. It's swelling up slowly. No, by glory, it's going back into shape again. It's becoming humanoid again." He looked up. "Notice how that word springs to the mind? Humanoid. He wasn't human, he told the truth about that. He wasn't even superhuman. He was alien."
Don Mariner, still shaking, said, "I'm sorry I shot him. I just went out of my head at that stunt he pulled. Never been so scared in my life. I sure fouled up our chances of learning how and whom to fight."
"'What can you do to us if you do know? You can't touch us.'" That was Rob Pope musing aloud. "What did he mean by that? That they're so powerful it doesn't matter now if we know about them?"
"You could put any interpretation on it," said Alan.
"Before we theorize any more," said Bill Thihling from the door, "you'd better know there's an air taxi headed this way. It's a Manhattan job and I thought it might be McEldownie again, but you never know. So what do we do with the corpse you birds so casually created?"
Brave said promptly, "The garbage disposal unit. It'll take care of him in thirty seconds—and very appropriate too." He hoisted the body of the pilot out of the chair, after cutting the wires. As he carried it off to the kitchen and the hidden well that was the disposal unit, Alan opened a camouflaged wall cupboard and took out the all-vac. Switching it on, he ran its round nozzle over the gouts and stains of blood on the rug, the walls, and the chair. It sucked them into itself like an anteater inhaling a hill of ants, leaving no trace of discoloration. Whipping it back into its nook, and tossing the long pieces of wire in after it, he slammed the door and turned round.
"That's that. We're clean. If it's Mac, we tell him the truth; otherwise Grady was never here. Right?"
Bill opened the door. McEldownie was just coming up the walk.
"Cheers, gang. The eminent statesman is put off. We're set for tonight. What crimes have you been committing?"
"Oh, kidnapping and murder," said Alan. The announcer dropped to the couch.
"You're jesting, I trust?"
"In a gnat's eye," said Mariner. "You're just thirty seconds too late to see the corpse." He told Jim briefly what they had done. The bony man did not say anything for a few moments, and then, "Jee-blinking-rusalem! You caught one and pumped him and slew him out o' hand, all in the time it took me to fly to the studio and back. What a bunch of thugs. The Black Hand could have taken lessons from you." He leaned forward as Brave came in. "Well, you seem to have got precious little out of him before young Donald here got peeved, but let's coordinate it and see what we have."
"One, he could do miraculous things with his physical structure," said the Indian. "It's the first wholly sure thing we've learned since we saw the welder burn off his hand without flinching."
"Two," put in Alan, "he said his kind aren't mutants, but aliens from another system. It may be true. Lord knows. We have only his word."
"Three, he claimed to feel pain, and if he was faking, he was a class A actor," said Rob Pope. "I'll tell you why: I was pretty sensitive to his brain waves, even when he wasn't broadcasting at us. Once I thought I caught a plea for help to someone unnamed. And every time Brave hurt him, I felt that he was actually suffering."
"I felt it too," agreed Alan.
Brave, getting out bottles of Scotch and rye, said, "In the minute I had to examine his skin and flesh, I found he wasn't lying about his being without pores. The skin was perfectly smooth. It felt rather like a kind of rubber, though not so much so as to seem inhuman to a casual touch. And his body assumed the human shape after death, so it would appear to be the natural form of the beasts." He passed one bottle to Rob and the other to Mac. The six allies drank deeply. Through two bottles they discussed the enemy; coming at last to a sort of half-conclusion, that there were extraterrestrials who could change their shapes within limits, and there were others, either from the same strange world or existing as a mutation of Earthmen, who were impervious to pain. The aliens, Alan and his crew decided, were susceptible to it. The near-tangible thought waves from the tormented pilot had been too agonized to deny.
It was then a little past four in the afternoon.
"A bit more than three hours before we need to leave for the station," said Thihling, "if we take one of the colony's air taxis. What say we relax and loaf and forget for part of those three hours?"
Alan got up and went sprawling at full length on the deep-napped rug. "I'm for that. Let's loosen up. Loll around. My God, I'm as strung up as Captain Kidd."
"I thought you fell down on purpose," said Rob. "But if you're capable of turning phrases like that, I guess you're just too drunk to stand."
Unquote found Alan and sat down with an air of modest ownership in the small of his back. Brave got out more bottles. "We ought to be drinking to things," he said. "There should be witty toasts and pledges to fair maidens. Bumpers should be drained to the memory of gay college days and friends long gone."
He passed the rye to McEldownie, who said, "We ought to be sucking this booze out of old ivy-covered pewter mugs, then, instead of giving each other our loathsome diseases. More collegiate, y'know."
The Indian took a healthy gulp of bourbon. He sighed appreciatively and flipped the bottle through the air and Bill caught it and had it uncorked and upended in the same motion, dexterous as a conjurer. "Ah," he said, choking and spluttering, "smooth!" He passed it to Alan, who nearly upset Unquote in reaching for it; the cat dug her claws into the rough fabric of his coat, glared at the back of his neck, and spoke sharply and at some length concerning the irreverence of certain men.
"Puss, simmer down," said Jim. "Your master drinketh."
"Now there's a bad word in its context," said Alan gravely. "You know nothing about cats, Mac, m'boy. Nobody was ever a cat's master. If Napoleon kept a cat, it bullied him."
"Napoleon, my illiterate friend, had an intense fear of cats. So obviously he didn't own one."
"If Tamerlane had a cat, it bullied him. If Genghis Khan—"
"You've made your point. Send the alky on its way," said Don.
"Brave, pass around the old ivy-covered pewter mugs," Alan said grandly, rolling over and precipitating a furious Unquote to the rug. "While you're at it, get some old ivy-covered crackers and cheese."
"I could stomach an old ivy-covered potato chip," murmured Rob Pope.
"Let's have a little masculine nostalgia," said Bill. "Let's remember Oxford, Brave."
Four strictly-American-college men hooted him down.
Brave brought glasses and a tray of snacks, and, thoughtfully, a dish of milk for Unquote. "Here comes old ivy-covered Brave now," said Rob. The big Indian emptied a fifth of rye into the glasses. Jim picked up the empty bottle, regarded it like Hamlet with the skull of Yorick, and said, "Blessed blue ruin, how I love thee. Omar had nothing on McEldownie."
"McEldownie the Tentmaker," said Alan. "It has a fine classic ring to it."
"I pawned my fine classic ring last week. I was hungry."
"God," said Bill. "Classic of '58, I presume?"
They finished the rye and after serious consultation opened a bottle of Scotch. McEldownie began to talk with a broad Highland accent and it seemed very funny to everyone. Unquote stalked away to her playbox in disgust. Brave sat bolt upright, looking like a statue of copper-colored granite. They all got drunk.
The announcer stood up and juggled three glasses, then four, and the others applauded, for he was good at it. "For all your awkward look, Mac," said Alan, "you're a slilful—skilful old bird."
"When I juggled before the crowned heads of Europe, they went mad over me. I often wished I could juggle in front of whole people," he added wistfully. "Never did. Just heads."
"Oh, brother," said a woman's voice. They all turned round and looked toward the door. Win Gilmore stood there, shaking her beautiful blued coiffure. "This place looks like a shebeen. And you're all fried to the eyeballs. Ought to be ashamed of yourselves." She dropped her lavender cloak: she was wearing an amethyst-colored halter and a pleated nylon skirt of syenite blue, which clung to her legs as she walked toward them. Alan could see the play of muscles in her thighs where the soft skirt touched them. Some of the liquor sank away from his brain and he remembered that this woman was not human. He gritted his teeth and turned his head away to look at Brave. The Indian was also sobered. He said, "Well, hello," uncertainly.
"It makes me mad," said Win, pouring herself a shot of rum. "All this attractive male virility going to waste. No women to appreciate it. There ought to be wenches flung picturesquely here and there."
"You paint a sordid picture, madame," said Rob. "We've been chastely reliving old school days, knotting old school ties, and reciting the Boy Scout oath to each other. It's uplifting. It's—"
"Sophomoric?"
"Who is this dazzling fluff?" McEldownie asked.
"Win Gilmore."
The tall man opened his green eyes wide. "Oho? The super-jade!"
Win regarded him without affection. "Who the hell are you, and what the hell do you mean by that crack?"
"Your secret is known, harridan," said Jim. He stared into her wide eyes. "Alan says you can't feel pain. That makes you one of the enemy in our book. If it weren't for your perfection of form, I myself would take pleasure in booting you in the left nostril." He let his gaze wander over her well-stocked amethyst halter. "Alan," he said critically, "far be it from ol' Mac to question your judgment, but I doubt this lassie's inhumanity. I really feel we've made another error. If she isn't human, then I'm a rhinoceros."
"You look more like a starving stork," Win cried furiously. "Alan, who is this wretch?"
"Peace, gal, I'm standing up for you, no matter what it sounds like. Doc, you can't convince me that a gal with a balcony that'd grace the Palace Theatre isn't human. I think you're wrong."
"Of course she's good looking. She's a step above us in the evolutionary scale, isn't she?" snarled Alan. "Or else she's from some goddam planet out in the other galaxies." Win looked at him blankly.
"I think you've jumped to a conclusion when you should have crawled to it." McEldownie took a step forward and caught Win's eyes with his own. "I believe you can feel pain," he said.
"Good Lord, of course I can feel—ouch!" She gave a little scream. The announcer had pinched her sharply on the naked flesh just below her halter. Because she had been looking into his eyes, she could not have seen the casual motion of his hand.
"There!" said Jim, standing back and bowing with a juggler's flourish. "What about that, gentlemen?"
Brave spoke. "Win, he's drunk, so don't hold it against him. But he's done you—and us—a great service." Raising his voice above her passionate cursing, he went on. "You know our mutant theory. It's been changed today but the pain angle still holds good to a degree. Well, Alan burnt you accidentally with his Rocketeer cigarette last night, and you didn't feel it; so we have been thinking that you must be one of them. Evidently you're not. You have our apologies all round."
She stood silent, taking it in; then she said, "Great heavens above!" and turned on Alan, who was looking sheepish and incredibly relieved. "You grunt-brain! Don't you, with all your knowledge, realize that there are times in a woman's life—yes, and in a man's—when she or he can be burned, whipped, and kicked in the funny bone, without realizing it?"
Alan made a gesture of incomprehension.
"You moron, what were we doing when you burned me?"
Brave reached into the encyclopedia of his mind and said, "She's right, governor. It was first explained in 1952. When one is sexually stimulated, the increase in blood pressure, the intensified heart-beats, and the rigidity of all the muscles sometimes combine to make one totally unaware of pain. The author of the theory was a Dr. Linsey, or Kinsey, or something like that." He pursed his lips. "I don't suggest that you were necking, chieftain, but if you were, that explains it, and we were damned unjust to Win."
"If you weren't necking, Doc," said Jim, "you're dead, or ought to be."
Win tossed down her rum. "I'll have more to say on the subject later," she declared to Alan. "For now, I'm too mad to risk staying here and breaking up the furniture. I found that burn on my arm after you left. By then it hurt like hell." She strode over and picked up her cloak. "Good night, or afternoon, or whatever the everlastingly blasted time it is," she said between her teeth, and closed the door gently behind her which made a more effective exit than if she had slammed it and made the walls quiver.
"Bless my soul," said Jim mildly, reaching for his glass. "We have transformed a superwoman into a livid Fury. What a day!"
CHAPTER VII
Brave passed around anticohol tablets, those excellent remedies for drunkenness developed in Japan in 1957; and they all ate them and drank water and looked at one another and grinned. "That was quite a bat while it lasted," said Don.
McEldownie rested his head on the couch and closed his eyes. Occasionally the tablets would put one to sleep for a short time. Rob Pope said, "We've had our reaction against all the shocks, and it was a luxury I think we deserved; but now we've got to plot and plan."
"The telecast is our first big hope. Let's put our heads together."
"And produce a sickening thud," said Jim, opening his eyes. "Okay we'll see what we can do. Or more likely," he said thoughtfully, "what we can't do."
The door opened and Win came in, a look of contrition on her face. They all gaped at her. "Well," she said to Alan, "it's like this. I'm sorry. I blew my cork. I was insulted. I'm not any more. I know the strain you've been under and I realize it was an awful coincidence to happen just when it did. I forgive you and your tame flamingo with the wandering hands. Can I help?"
"Take a pew," said Alan relieved beyond words. "We're talking out the telecast. You can help, sweetheart."
When it was time to leave—they had decided to take Rob Pope's station wagon rather than an air taxi—Brave locked up the house. Both he and Alan felt they might not be able to come back to it, at least not soon. Just before he shut the front door, a brown blur shot past him and landed on Alan's chest. Unquote clung there, claws entangled in his jacket, great blue eyes begging with false humility to be taken along. "I nearly forgot you, kitten," he said. He boosted her up to his shoulder and the eight of them got into the station wagon, which Brave then wheeled about and sent roaring toward Manhattan.
Just before eight they entered the studio. McEldownie said, "How about you lads waiting in the reception room? If anybody comes raging into the place for our hides, you can cause 'em a certain amount of trouble before they get to Doc and me."
Brave looked reluctant, then agreed. The others trooped out. Jim said, "You can watch it on the monitor," and locked the door behind them. "There's an extra precaution. Now for it, Doc. Cross your fingers."
The lights came on.
Alan talked well. Just at first, while McEldownie was giving him a purposely vague introduction, he felt rather light-headed; this passed quickly. He had the feeling that something had tried to insert itself into his thoughts. Whatever it was, it failed, he said thankfully. Mac finished his introduction. Alan began to speak.
He gave it to his audience straight and fast, without preamble, lest an engineer or official with access to the controls should be a mutant or alien.
"Listen to me. There are enemies among us, enemies from another world, or perhaps sports of our own species. We are all in deadly danger."
He spoke coolly and sanely. There could be no mistaking his competence to talk on the subject, he thought, I sound like an old statesman. And if that's vanity, let it be.
After sketching in the incidents which had led to his suspicions, he told of the disks' unsuspected power, and of the pilot who could expand his body inhumanly in any direction. He did not mention Grady's death. He stressed the need for immediate action. "What that action must be, I don't presume to suggest. There are many men more qualified to tell you that than I am. But here are ideas...."
Seek them out, he said. Try to recall incidents, accidents, that made no sense to you. Try to remember instances of lack of pain. I'm sorry I can't give you more identifying traits, but that's all we know so far. Except the lack of pores, the heightened senses.
There will be trouble. I feel sure there will be bloodshed. Don't quail, don't despair. We'll beat them. We're essentially a decent race and from all indications they are devious, malevolent, and evil.
And we outnumber them, that's pretty certain.
Don't flinch. Don't hesitate. Seek them out. Capture them, kill them, butfind them!
He was really a little proud of himself as the telecast ended. He even felt light-headed again, and ascribed it to pride.
McEldownie clapped him on the shoulder. "Well, boy, if this mess pans out okay, you and I can take our pick of soft government posts, or retire on the bounty of a grateful world. Let's see what the gang thought of it."
He unlocked the door and opened it. Brave stood on the threshold, his dark face bewildered; the others crowded behind him, worried, tense. "Alan," said his friend, "what went wrong?"
Alan's belly shrank back and sweat broke out on his palms. "What do you mean, Brave? Didn't it go on the air?"
"It must have," Jim said. "I was watching a monitor."
"It went on, all right." Brave sighed. He looked as beaten as an Indian can ever look. "I should have guessed they wouldn't let you do it. They'd get to you some way, both of you."
"For the love of God, Brave, what are you talking about?" cried Alan. The other rested his hands on the scientist's shoulders.
"Son," he said quietly, "you talked about fuel. The two of you talked for fifteen minutes about the newest developments in rocket fuel. You never said a damned word about the enemy race!"
CHAPTER VIII
"So now we're all but helpless," said Bill Thihling, wiping his mouth. They had just finished three enormous platters of curried chicken at an exotic Bengali restaurant on 49th Street. "Where there's life, et cetera, but so long as the aliens control our very tongues, what can we do? Echo answers, Nothing."
"I blame myself for it," growled Brave. "I should have gone on the telecast; or Rob, maybe. We can withstand hypnotism, know how to fight it, while Alan had already had one bad dose of it. It must have been easy to recapture his mind."
"What about me?" objected Jim. "I've never been mesmerized before. I didn't feel a thing, either, or hear voices, nor nothin'."
"Are you sure you haven't been hypnotized? Alan didn't know it till I found out under mechanical-visual trance."
"Gad, maybe I have been, then," murmured Jim uncertainly.
"Theygot to Alan and Mac," said Rob. "Had you or I tried it, Brave, they'd have done something more violent; blasted the station off the air, killed us. They undoubtedly have their eyes on us, and we can't get in touch with humanity again. We're on an island surrounded by a sea of cynical, sneering demons; they won't let us do anything but make despairing futile signals to the mainland."
"Brother," said Win, "are we getting poetical in our sorrow! Listen, I have a feeling we oughtn't to go back to Project Star. They must be grouping to wipe us out by now. They know us, they're not dumb; they'll be after us." She bent over the table and all the others did likewise. "Suppose we go up to Central Park? Sit out there all night, loll on the sward and talk. We won't be hunted there. And perhaps by morning some solution will have occurred to us."
"That's the best thought any of us have had," said Rob Pope. "Fresh night air! I know this washed and filtered stuff is the best atmosphere for you, but I crave some real old-fashioned germ-polluted air."
So they took the station wagon up to the park, and walked onto the grass that was already spangled with moisture under the moon; on a knoll surrounded by trees they flung down blankets from the trunk of the car, and stretched out and tasted the night that was brought to them on a softly brisk little breeze; and Alan said, "Mother Nature! You can't beat the old girl. She makes you see sparks of light where you know there's nothing but the dark."
They lay there and talked and napped and drank and relaxed through the night, till dawn rose gray and turned to blue and the sun came up. For no reason but their physical comfortableness, they all felt good. Even Unquote was gay and frisked like a kitten. Their fantastic trouble seemed smaller and further away than it had ever been....
When the first great disk came down on the city, skimming the treetops of Central Park, heading straight for the Times Square district at that height and rising only when it seemed certain that it would smash itself against one or another of the buildings of Manhattan, none of them could speak for surprise. They stared up, amazed, as the whirling silver surface caught their eyes with its glancing beams of sun reflection; and it was incredible to them that the disk should be there in the bright morning sky.
It vanished over Brooklyn, tilting on edge and shooting straight up into emptiness.
"Well, if this isn't the feeble-minded pinnacle of idiocy," exclaimed Don Mariner. "A test flight over the city itself! What drooling sub-human intellect ordered that one?"
In the distance a muted babbling arose, as the city caught its breath and began to talk excitedly about the flying saucer, the first (barring some fugitive glimpses in the '40s and '50s which had never been properly verified) that New York had seen.
Then the disk came back. It led a wobbling formation, two sister ships just behind it and then a gap and three more, all going at a hawk-fast clip and slanting down out of the eastern sky to zoom over the park once more in an uncanny, wavering, noiseless line. Jim McEldownie leaped to his feet, his narrow face, with the green eyes staring out, a twisted mask of panic terror. Alan was shaken, as much by the lean man's fear as by the sight of the disks. "Mac, Mac," he shouted, "what is it?" For he could see nothing to dread that was worse than the thing they had been living with for the past hours.
Jim stared after the disappearing ships. "They aren't ours," he said, his voice gurgling and choking with the fear. "They aren't ours!"
"Of course they are," snapped Brave. He too had risen, and stood like an age-old oak beside the quavering poplar that was McEldownie. "Whose would they be?" he reasoned. "Do you suppose any country could manufacture those things without our men on Albertus spying them out?"
"I tell you they aren't our ships!" cried Jim, taking the Indian by the lapels. "I know our designs up and down, and those aren't ours! Tell him, Mariner."
"He's right," said Don, white as paper. "The superstructure's all wrong. And they're bigger, I think, than ours."
"Don't forget that Homo superior, or his cousins from the space lanes, may have changed the plans without letting you in on it," said Bill Thihling bitterly. "Great God! Nobody but a callous, egotistical mutant or alien, unacquainted with pain and insensitive to our safety, would fly a squadron of virtually untested disks over a crowded city. This is misanthropy with a vengeance!"
Mac groaned. "You bumbling dinkey engines," he said, "can't you get off that one track? I tell you these things don't come from Project Star—they don't even come from Earth!"
Win spoke for the first time. She was still seated, the cat cradled against her breast. "I think you're right," she said. "I feel it; you're right. Those aren't human beings in those ships. They're from black space somewhere. They know we are reaching out for the stars and they've come to stop us." Her tone was level and wholly undramatic. "We'd be a menace, rampaging through the systems. They won't let us begin. Their spies here, Grady and his ilk, have called them down to stop us."
Brave and Alan frowned at each other. Each asked the other wordlessly, Where are these two getting such wild conceptions? What do they see—what do theyknow, that we don't?
The saucers returned, in a different formation this time, like a V of geese. Geese made of glittering blue-silver metal, round geese traveling at eight hundred miles an hour. They roared overhead: soundlessly, yes, but with so swift and terrible a movement that one could call it nothing but a silent roar. In that instant Alan, staring upward, felt his convictions dissolve. Mac was right. He did not know enough about the design of Project Star's disks to say that these were different; but he knew suddenly that there was an alienfeelto these things, an aura of irrelation, a stupendous pulsation that pervaded the senses and forced the knowledge on him that here was nothing terrestrial, nothing human or even superhuman.
Watching them shoot over, he tried weakly to find an analogy, to anchor his wits to some concrete remembrance and save them from scattering in panic. All he could think of was the night when he, aged six or seven, had wakened to know positively and without question that there was a ghost in the room with him. Even yet he was sure there had been a ghost. And this sense of alienness that came from the flying disks was the same as that he had felt in the night, when the invisible ghost crouched in a corner and mowed at him. An outsider, said his blood and viscera to him, a stranger from the cold hells of unknown space. An alien, said the wisdom drawn out of nowhere by primeval instincts lying in the murk at the bottom of his soul.
He moved to Brave and put a hand on one of the mighty arms and saw that Brave knew it now too. "Grady's kin," said the Indian. No one else spoke except Unquote, who gave a bizarre Siamese screech of rage.
Back they came, this time from the direction of Richmond, in a strung-out dipping line; and out of the crystal bubble in the belly of the leader there fell a shining golden egg, a tiny thing at this distance, seen only because the sun caught at it and played along its surface. It fell slowly, far too slowly for an Earth-hatched egg; Thihling and Mariner automatically judged its descent at six or eight feet per second. Either it was full of a light gas, or it had some form of anti-gravity mechanism attached to it. Leisurely it dropped toward Manhattan.
Then the people began to run.
All the millions who had been taught to act calmly and sanely in an emergency lost their heads; they were suddenly so many witless chickens who had caught sight of the axe. With the dropping of the golden egg, the terror of alien danger had clutched at them all. So they fled. There was no place to flee to, but they fled. Into subways and out again, insane with the horror of dying underground. Into buildings, to know the walls were collapsing on them, to run out once more. And the egg fell lazily toward them. Now it had passed the spire of the tallest skyscraper.
Up in the park, people were running too. Alan and his group stood together and watched them helplessly. "Like field mice from an owl," muttered Rob Pope. They saw a woman dash straight into a tree, carom off with a cry and go on. An elderly man came up to them, faltered, put a hand to his chest and pitched over at their feet. Bill turned him over. He was dead. "Heart attack. Poor devil."
Alan did not know why none of his friends ran. He repeated a random line that came into his head: "Stand and fight and see your slain, and take the bullet in your brain...."
Or the atomic blast, or the unimaginable projectile from the inconceivable weapon.
Then Jim McEldownie yelled, "On your faces, for God's sake!" and Alan turned from the city and flung himself down and covered his head with his arms.
And the world opened up and a mushroom from Hell sprouted over Manhattan, and the buildings rocked and tottered and crashed to earth. The sky went black and the great white-yellow cloud, perimetered with blood-scarlet, arose against it; the universe shook and shattered and then came together and righted itself and sailed on. The Empire State was the last of the tall structures to hit ground. Clear at the northern tip of Central Park they felt that final smashing, a postscript to a letter from Lucifer.