From Fulton Street to 53rd, from the North River to Stuyvesant Town, nothing lived. In that terrible instant of fission, caught where ever they were, whatever they were doing, working at desks, peering from windows, running down deserted alleys or pushing madly against the press of maniac crowds on Broadway and Fifth and Madison, score upon score of thousands of men and women died; died screaming or weeping or fighting for breath, praying to their gods or cursing or dumb with dismay.
They died in subways, never having known that the silver ships of the enemy were sailing above their great town. They died asleep in their hotel rooms, lifting forkfuls of breakfast eggs to their mouths, typing words on paper, making love, staring at the sky.
Very few of them wanted to die. Some of them expected to live for many years. Some of them did not really expect to die at all. Many of them could accept the fact that death would come for every man in the world some day ... except themselves; that was incredible and not to be thought of at all.
But they all died.
It came so quick, so quick; and even those who believed the golden egg to be a bomb never knew when it struck and smashed out at them and obliterated them, for the quickness was that of death, the swiftest thing that walks the universe.
Beyond the huge area of instant perfect destruction, many others died. Tall buildings collapsed on them, or they fell into the splits and great fissures that opened in the earth; they were hurled to the pavements and their brains spilled out, or the noise and the fearful rush of air got into their heads and tore their cerebra to tatters. Some of them could not bear the appalling horror of the bomb, and slit their own throats or put guns into their mouths and pulled the triggers. Some went so totally mad that their life forces disintegrated and they died where they stood, of madness and panic and the terrible knowledge of their impotence.
Men lived, too: lived blind and wounded and lamed and torn asunder, lived without minds and minds strangely contorted and warped. No one who had been in Manhattan that day survived without scars of body and brain left by the death of the city.
The golden egg had hatched its chick of death at eight-fifty-three of a Friday morning in June of 1970.
After a while, when the hurricane had dropped away and the earth had stilled its shaking, Alan sat up and looked toward the heart of the city. The disks were gone—and so were the people and the buildings, the life and the fine aspiring skyline of Manhattan. Nothing was left but a leveled, broken, sawtoothed waste, over which hovered the direful mushroom cloud.
Grotesquely, irrelevantly, all his mind could focus on in that moment of near-insanity was his cat. "Where's Unquote?" he asked harshly. "Where's little Unquote?"
The cat spoke furiously above his head. She had flown into a tree at the blast. He coaxed her down as the others stood and brushed themselves off and stared at the atomic cloud. At last she bounced from a crotch of the tree into his arms. She was shivering with terror.
Bill said urgently, his voice no more than a croak, "Let's make tracks. Lord knows what scuds of radioactivity will be blowing our way soon, if that wind didn't bring 'em already."
"All those people," whispered Win. Now the screams and howls of survivors could be heard where they stood. "All those poor people."
"The wagon's liable to be stolen if we don't get to it," said Don. "Come on. Please."
There were still men and women running through the park, some shouting with fear, some white and sick and mute. A couple passed them, their eyes round and horrified, the man's coat torn and the girl's green dress ripped off one shoulder. They must have fallen, or been caught in a fight. There were two men brawling over by the reservoir.
There seemed to be no balance or reason left in mankind, save for the seven on the knoll, who clung to their sanity only by conscious physical effort.
Now they ran for the station wagon, to find its windows broken, the upholstery slashed by a knife, the windshield shattered. "Berserk," said Rob Pope. "They've all gone berserk."
"It does that to me, too," said Don. "I want to sink my teeth into something and worry it. I can't touch the enemy and so I want to take it out on something Icantouch." He shrugged. "If you were lost in Hell, and found a car, and couldn't start it because you didn't have the key, wouldn't you get sore enough to wreck it? How are the tires?"
Brave said, "Okay. He was too mad to think of them." He knocked the remaining shards of windshield from the frame and got in behind the wheel. They all piled in. He started it and it rolled off northward.
McEldownie said, "No, Brave. Go down towards town. I want to get to a radio or TV station. We've got to try to establish contact with the rest of the world. This may have happened in other cities too." He leaned forward and put his hand on Brave's shoulder. "I don't think we need worry about radioactivity," he said. "These are beings from another planet, obviously much farther advanced than we are. Their weapons, though producing an apparently atomic cloud, would probably be without post-explosion danger. They'd have eliminated the radioactive dust because they'd want to land and take over at once, or at least quite soon. Let's take a chance. Let's go down toward Times Square."
Brave glanced back at him. The argument was specious, as a basis for action it wouldn't hold water. But Alan said, "I think so too, Brave. It sounds logical." Win and Don agreed. Brave looked at them. He was about to argue and then the fatalism of his ancient race seemed to grip him. They ought to get to a radio station, true; and if the city were radioactive, what did it matter in the long run? They were only seven people and a cat; ranged against them on one hand stood the ranks of shadowy supermen and aliens, on the other the unknown disk-people. The world was in chaos. He could not dredge up enough ego to believe that he and Alan and the others would be very important in the ordering of that chaos. He shucked off his science and his civilized thought processes and he said, "All right. We'll go down." Stoically, the very incarnation of his thrice-great grandfather Pony Sees-the-Sky, he wheeled the car around and sent it hurtling toward Times Square.
Broadway was a shambles. As far up as Columbus Circle all the windows were gone, the light standards had been curved by the blast, autos were overturned and leaking gas and oil. There were cracks in the paving. Occasional men and women staggered along northward, and bodies lay in the gutters, across the thresholds. The wreckage of an air taxi half-blocked the way, corpses spilt halfway out of its doors.
"How many weapons have we?" asked Mac suddenly. "There's a sporting goods store. We ought to load up on guns. There's no telling what maniacs we'll be meeting; and if there's an occupation, we might have to be guerrillas." He pulled back his coat. "I have a grenade pistol, for a start."
Brave had one, and an automatic for longer range work. Don Mariner carried another grenade pistol. Win had her derringer-sized automatic in her purse. That was all they had. Brave pulled to the curb. He and Alan got out.
The store had lost its windows. Brave stepped through onto the display ledge and dropped inside. A voice in the gloom said, "Stand right there, mister." The proprietor, white and tense, leaned over his counter and held a .45 revolver steadily, its muzzle looking at the Indian's chest. "One more step and you join them." Brave saw there were bodies on the floor.
"I'm no looter, man," he said sharply. "I'll buy guns."
The fellow considered that. "By God, you sound sane. And you look like a good man. Everybody's crazy out there. You come back and pick yourself out something. We're going to need sane men with guns in this mess."
"Men are fighting each other," nodded Brave. "The blast drove them crazy."
"Can't tell me anything about that. One of those bodies was my brother. I couldn't let even my brother loose in this hell with a gun, not when he'd gone out of his head. Tried to kill me for a gun." The face was drawn and cold. "How about a .30-'06?" he asked. "Stop a grizzly if you're good enough. Heavy though."
"I wasn't looking for an air rifle," said Brave. Alan came in through the window. "He's with me. We have five others outside."
"You can have guns for 'em all. Sorry I don't have grenade pistols or flamers. This is a sporting goods store." He handed a .30-'06 across the counter. "Take this. I'll give you all the ammo I have for it. You put it to good use when the Russkis come."
"It wasn't Russians," said Alan, "It was flying saucers."
"Russkis in flying saucers. They'll be coming on the ground pretty soon. Didn't I see 'em come in in Germany in the big war? Take these boxes. Enough ammo to stand a good siege here. Save it all you can. We're going to be at war a long, long, time."
Shortly they came out into the morning air, carrying armloads of heavy rifles, four revolvers, and what seemed half a ton of ammunition.
The owner had at first refused payment, then taken only the wholesale cost. At the last minute he had given each of them a long hunting knife. "You were in Argentina, eh? You can use these. Give 'em what-for, boys." They had offered to take him with them. "I stick," he'd said. "This is my store."
They looked up and down the street. There were more people now, and the worst faction was evident—the looters, the sly lurkers who stole from the dead and exhausted and mad, the bestial men on the prowl for women, the ones who had gone lunatic and were bent on senseless destruction. A policeman, his uniform bloody, came toward them as they handed the guns into the station wagon; suddenly he whipped out his pistol and fired. A teen-aged boy came flopping and shrieking out of a store window, where he had been filling his pockets with candy and jacknives and junk. The cop came abreast of them, his eyes lit with insane anger. Brave reached out and hit him on the jaw and he fell. "There was no call to shoot that kid," said Brave. He picked up the pistol and threw it into a drain. From up and down Broadway came scattered yells and sounds of gunfire.
They got into the wagon and Brave drove down to 57th Street. There was a mob of maddened men who fought each other and ran howling toward the car when they saw it. "Turn right," said Jim urgently. "There's a little independent radio station about two blocks away. With luck we can get in—and out to the rest of the country. Unless that damned bomb smashed the place." They drew quickly away from the mob, which went back to fighting among themselves.
They found the station apparently safe; many of the smaller buildings here had been protected by the larger from the force of the blast. With Don left to guard the wagon and guns, they ran into the place. The elevators had stopped. The men, with Win, trotted up four flights, to find a door marked with radio call letters. "This is it."
At the opening of the door three men turned swiftly from their work, grenade pistols and flamers—flame-throwing handguns—in their fists. "Hold it," said the lanky Jim urgently.
"Bless us all," said one of the men, lowering his weapon, "it's McEldownie! What the hell are you doing in aradiostation, Mac?"
"I'll eat crow for it, but right now I want to get out on the air," he said. "Can I?"
"God knows. We've sweat blood over the thing. Our own generators are okay, but the city's power is off, and the antennae got mashed up some. Couple of boys up on the roof now, worrying at it. Do you suppose we're loony for staying here?" he asked. Obviously he valued McEldownie's opinion. Alan realized for the first time what a reputation the scarecrow-like announcer had.
"No. There seems to be no danger of radioactivity; either the bomb burst in air, or it's a new kind. We've got to get communication established as soon as possible. You're almost the only sane people we've seen."
"Most of our gang went out to try and get home. We're all bachelors and we figured it was up to us to stay." He ran a hand through his hair. "Who is it, Mac? Who hit us?"
"Martians," said Win.
"Venusians," said Rob Pope.
"Who are all these guys, Mac?"
"Scientists from Project Star." The three radio men opened their eyes respectfully. "Pounce onto it, will you!" roared Mac. "We've got to get out. We've got to learn what's happened to the world!"
CHAPTER IX
"Hi, Mac," said a weary voice. "This is Johnny Gibbons, in Frisco. No, they haven't been here, but they've hit half the big cities on the continent. Just heard that Mexico City's flat as a—my brother and his wife were in Mexico City. Vacation. Get away from it all."
"Cheers, Mac," said a deep sad voice. "Roscoe Toddy here. They bombed Chicago. Funny thing: some professors at Northwestern University here in Evanston turned their detectors on Chicago and couldn't get a whiff of radioactivity. Must be a new kind of A-bomb, or X-bomb, or GD-bomb or something."
"Mac," babbled a voice that verged on screaming lunacy, "Mac, you ought to see it. There's nothing left at all, not a thing, not a house or a tree, not a person in the whole place, nothing but waste, waste, Jesus, death all over, I tell you the universe has gone mad!" They never learned where this voice came from, or what city was gone.
"Well, McEldownie, old horse," said a voice, trained to unctuousness but laced now with intolerable sorrow and strain, "our station was partly wrecked but we finally got this thing in operating condition. Pittsburgh is gone, but we're out in East Liberty and didn't take too much of the blast. It was one bomb, Mac, one lousy big H-bomb or whichever letter they put on the biggest boom they can make. Mac, I'm beat to my socks." The voice coughed tightly. "I saw the Cathedral of Learning go. My God, Mac, what a mighty toppling that was! It folded in and over and you thought it'd make a hole five miles deep, but it's lying there now, just a heap of busted stone, and I went to school there. Dear old Pittsburgh, Alma Mater."
A dark voice that spoke from far away said, "It was the maddest thing I ever saw. This golden oval thing fell about as fast as a feather, and everybody went out of their heads. We all started to run like mice. Cars were jamming Cahuenga and Sunset and Vine, and people were scuttling.... I don't know why I wasn't killed. I just don't know."
"Yes," said a haunted and somber voice, "we ran. We all poured out into the streets and ran, and fell down and got stepped on and rose and ran and sweated and had heart attacks and died and lost our breath and panted and gulped and ran and ran and ran. Fort Worth is a shambles, a mucked-up mess."
"No," said a faintly insulted voice, "it wasn't a large bomb, not large at all. It didn't flatten more than four blocks. I was half a mile off when it hit but all I got was a skinned knee from falling. Hang it, why a large bomb on Los Angeles and only a little one on Toronto?"
"Seattle got it," said a smooth southern voice, "and your town, Mac, and L.A., and there isn't a peep out of Moscow but who can tell if they're playing possum? London is smashed; we're getting scraps from the hinterlands of England but London's had it. Paris is on the air. Johnny Jill, poor devil, is crying over there now, wanting to know if Hoboken is okay. We haven't seen the saucers yet in N'Orleans. So ol' Manhattan got the guts torn out of her? Rough, boy, darned rough. We're sorry."
"Austin's gone, gone, I tell you it's all all ALL GONE!" shrieked a slow-dying voice, and that was all it could say.
"Listen to this, Mac," urged a girl's voice, sounding strange and ethereal after the men had spoken so long. "We don't get how they did it, but those disks have thrown a force screen around every army encampment and station in the country, perhaps in the world. At Fort Bragg they mustered and marched out into an invisible wall. They can't penetrate it. It didn't hurt them, it just stopped them cold. Someplace in Pennsylvania the National Guard got into trucks and lit out for New York and ran into one of the walls that piled them up in heaps. It looks like we're all alone. Nobody's coming to help. We're all alone."
"This is London calling," said a cultured, horrified voice. "Hello, America. Can you hear me? We're not sure were getting across the Atlantic. We haven't heard anything from you yet. Are you there? Can't you send us some word? This is the B.B.C. calling. London is gone. Bombed out completely. This is actually—actually Greenwich. Are you there? Is all America gone? Oh, this is ghastly, this is the end. Is it the end of the whole world? Are you there?"
CHAPTER X
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 wearegoing 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. Theyareenemies." 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,thesemen 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."
CHAPTER XI
They carried the body of Don Mariner down the ramp and laid it on the rock-hard earth of the desolate bowl.
Mac, standing next to Alan, said in his ear, "Come aboard again. I want to show you something."
Alan turned obediently, although why he should follow Mac's commands—for it had been a command—he wasn't sure; and Win screamed, a high hysterical keening that set Unquote to ululating too. The men all cried out. "What's wrong? What is it?"
"Look at your head!" she said to Alan, pointing. Even in that somber moment he could not help laughing.
"How?" he said. "I'm not built that way."
"Oh, God," said Bill Thihling. "Alan, you took an awful blast in the ear. Why didn't you say something about it?"
"What are you talking about?" he said irritably. "I wasn't hit." He put a hand up to his right ear. Brave said, "Look out, boss, you'll hurt it. It's a bad one."
He fingered the ear. The tip and lobe, and part of the convolutions of the outer ear, felt like bits of steak which had been burnt in a searing flame; he looked at his fingers, amazed, and saw black flakes of skin and powdery, charcoal-like stuff. That must be the flesh, cooked and carbonized, almost incinerated in the astounding heat of the little fireball. "They did hit me," he said stupidly, staring at his fingers. "I never felt it."
Brave, examining the ear without touching it, said, "You'll lose most of that ear, son. It's—you never felt it?"
"I can't feel it now. I mean, I have sensation in it, I can feel my fingers when they touch it, but it doesn't hurt."
Then, just as comprehension of what he was saying began to dawn on him, he heard Mac say again, very urgently, "Get aboard the ship. Jump!" And he jumped.
He hared it up the ramp, Unquote writhing on his shoulder, and leaped in through the first door he came to; Mac yelled, "No, this one!" It was the front control room, the largest of the three; he was out and into it in a flash, to find Mac already sitting in a chair before the central panels. "Sit down there," snapped the lanky man, indicating the next seat. Alan did, half-wondering why, half-knowing that he must. The great viewplates above the controls, on which was mirrored the earth and sky on every side of the disk, blinked on; Mac cursed angrily.
"Why couldn't you have followed me at once? Now the fools have got in." He was out of the chair and bolting the door of the room before Alan could open his mouth. Then he was back, touching levers and buttons, adjusting dials. One of the viewplates showed the crystal bubble closing; then another came on and they could see the center room. Brave and Win and the others were there, talking earnestly, although their voices could not be heard. Suddenly the door to that room swung shut. Brave hurled his tremendous bulk at it, but it was shut fast. Mac chuckled.
"Okay, you damned impetuous idiots. Sit down if you don't want to be smeared all over the floor." Evidently they could hear him. After a moment's argument they took seats. Mac pushed over a long lever, like the joystick of a monoplane, and with a very slight rocking motion the saucer rose into the air.
Mac glanced at Alan. "Buckle that strap around your chest, pal. You'll need it for the turns."
"How in the name of everything sane did you learn to operate a disk, Jim?" he asked. Just then he was less surprised at the man's cavalier treatment of his friends than at the enormity of this, that McEldownie could fly an alien disk.
"Nothing to it," said the other. "I was a pilot originally." He looked over again. "That was five hundred years ago," he said, almost casually. "Buckle the strap, hang it."
Alan did so in a daze. He knew that he was not in complete control of himself, and yet he did not know why. There were a hundred questions rocketing in his mind and they confused him so that obedience to McEldownie's commands came automatically. He wondered if he were under hypnotic influence again; but he did not feel that he was.
"Oh, you are, chum," said Mac without looking at him. "Not altogether, you understand; Brave's counter-hypnosis played hell with my plans for you. Cuss the big so-and-so. I should have killed him when he moved out of the lamps and out of any possible control. But I wanted him too. I liked him."
"Who are you?" breathed Alan....
The cold voice spoke in his mind, shattering his questions before they were asked, shaking what was left of his confidence, forcing him to quail mentally and physically.
Oh, stubborn slave, didn't you know? Didn't you know?
God, God, perhaps I did.
I am you and you are me...
McEldownie laughed. It was not a cold laugh, not sinister or dramatic. It was a perfectly healthy expression of mirth. "Alan, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, and you won't ever believe that, but it's true. It surprises me. Living among you for all these years has mellowed ol' Mac, I guess. I find myself thinking of you as friends, when I used to regard you as dogs: faithful without knowing it, helpful, indispensable in many cases, but hardly more than good dogs." He paused a moment, then went on. "I'm your voice, of course. There's no trick to it when you know how. A matter of hypnosis plus the lights plus psychology, plus whatever the power in us is that makes our minds different from yours. I'm the voice. I wasn't going to admit it, but my plans have changed for you."
He banked the disk around over desolate Manhattan and said, "Takes a while to get the reflexes working again. I haven't sat behind the controls since we left home. Your five-times-great grandfather wasn't a twinkle in his old man's eye when we left home."
Alan could not speak. He was remembering things he had not been able to remember, the voice and what it had told him, the night that it called him from bed to come to the terrible lamps, and—
"Yes, it was me, it was all me, Alan. I was the voice in your head at the telecast, I called you in the night; I worked the lights in the shed on Project Star. There are plenty of us out there, but I wanted you for my own personal sidekick. You're smart and a good scientist, and you'll make a good lieutenant when we go home." The words made no sense and yet Alan seemed to catch a glimmering of the understanding that was to come.
He said, "I guess I ought to exclaim, 'You're mad!' but I know you're not. You can pilot this thing and you can move faster than a cheetah, and everything's gone mad this past week and I want to know why. Don't lie to me, Mac. For the love of God, don't lie to me. One more wrong theory implanted in my skull and I'll blow my stack for good."
"I won't lie. I'm all through lying, to you at any rate. The others can't hear me at the moment, but I suppose I may as well tune them in too." His homely face, with its great prow of a nose and the half-shut green eyes, looked a little sad. "I'm afraid they're all going to die, Alan. Except Win, that is. You see, the speeds at which I'm going to fly this disk will kill a human being. On the turns, if I get into dogfights, the 'G' forces will be terrific. You and Win can stand 'em, because you've been conditioned. Brave and Rob and Bill will be smashed to jelly under the 'G' impact. I'm sorry. I like Brave and I admire Rob's intelligence. I'd like to save them. But they got aboard because you were slow, and now they're done for. I can't land and put 'em out. Time is precious. I have to maneuver this ship until I know I can do stunts with her like the ones I did at home. A long time ago, Alan." He grinned ruefully. "A long time even to me."
"What do you mean, I was slow getting aboard?" Alan fastened on this small facet of the affair, frightened of finding out too much of the truth at once.
"Man, you can move as fast as I if you try. You've had three long treatments under the lamps. Your energies are stepped up, if you learn to use them correctly, your reflexes are as fast as those of the cat on your shoulder, and you're almost deathless compared to your friends. Might as well start there," he mused. "They can hear us in the other room." On the viewplate, Win and Brave nodded. Jim clicked shut a switch. "Now they can see us. Okay, you four, I'm going to do some explaining. I can hear you now, but if you start to interrupt I'll switch you off."
Brave said, "Alan, are you all right?"
"He's ginger-peachy," said Mac. "In fact he'll be all right two hundred years from now.
"There's no use in explaining the rays to you; it would take hours and you would scarcely grasp the principle even then. I'll tell you what they do. They lengthen your life span—my own is about a thousand years, but Alan's will be nearer four hundred, for I caught him late. Generations of my ancestors were exposed to them, too; it affects the genes eventually and we're born long-lived. They quicken your reflexes through a process of strengthening the nerves and certain cells of the brain. They also affect the portions of the brain which send and receive telepathic stimuli. After one treatment it's easy to control a man over a long distance.
"The effect of the rays on the muscles is unique. They become almost rubbery, not loose, you understand, but capable of stretching and flexing in directions that look uncanny to a non-initiate. That's how poor Grady escaped being sliced down the middle when he rammed up his ship. He drew all his muscles to the sides and flattened out like a plaster on the chair. You couldn't do that; your skeletons are thicker and more immovable than ours. I'd show you how I can ooze out sideways and make my ribs about as level as a picket fence—but I'm afraid you wouldn't like the sight. It must be pretty gruesome to an Earthman."
"Were the rays in the TV lights?" asked Bill Thihling.
"That's right. I've caught plenty of fish that way, including President Blose of the U.S. of A. and nine-tenths of his cabinet. A lot of your scientists have become unwitting puppets through being seen onWorlds of Portent. Alan got two treatments there and one on Project Star. Win got her first in the gym of the colony and two more in that shed." He smiled guilelessly. "You were right about her, of course, in a way I mean; for she can't feel pain. I caught her mind just before I pinched her—and very pleasant it was, too, my dear, even if I meant it impersonally—and told her to simulate pain. She was under my control every second of that time. When she left, I pretended to go to sleep, and called her back. I had a feeling I'd need her around. Glad I did. She and Alan are all the fighting forces I have at the moment."
Alan brushed over much of what he wanted to know, to ask, "Can you feel pain, Mac?"
"Yes, I can. A man can't give up pain. It's too valuable. We put an added ingredient into the rays we used on you people of Terra, to eliminate pain."
"Why?"
"I'll get to that. The welder, of course, was a man who had been treated. One of our boys got rid of him in a vat of molten metal. Couldn't have an unfinished experiment walking around loose. He slipped up when he failed to simulate pain. Sometimes we get 'em like that, too dumb to do the right things even under complete hypnosis. Win was a different case. She didn't know she'd been burnt by that cigarette. If she'd seen it, she'd have yipped. She was conditioned to do it, even to think she felt pain. If you'd known you'd been grazed by that fireball, Alan, you'd not only have roared, you'd havethoughtyou felt it."
"Why don't I think so now?"
"It's too late for verisimilitude. Your subconscious knows that. It shrugs its teensy-weensy shoulders and forgets it."
"Who shot at Alan after the welder incident?" asked Brave. His face was cold and malignant.
"One of Getty's men."
"Doc Pomposity?"
"That's right. Getty's not fully under control. His unconscious and natural wish not to kill Alan made him send a man out with an automatic, rather than a grenade pistol. But he was conditioned enough to feel that Alan was dangerous to us and he at least made a stab at assassination. Then before he could do it again, we got to him and told him we were going to 'convert' you."
All this while he had been twisting and turning the disk, making practice runs and dives; the control rooms, floated within the hull and leveling off no matter what direction the great saucer took, vibrated slightly and continuously. It was almost like being in the hold of a sailing ship.
Rob said, "I suppose the curious construction of your skeletons and muscular development helps you stand the motion and the acceleration of the disks?"
"That's right. Alan and Win can stand it too, especially since they feel no pain of any sort. But we haven't started going fast yet—I haven't put it above five hundred. When we hit four thousand—that's m.p.h.—I'm afraid you'll die, you three." Mac scowled unhappily. "I hope you realize I don't want to kill you? In the first place, I'd like to have you on my side, because we both have a score to settle with the hounds who bombed your cities. I would have slain Mariner out of hand, slain him as he slew poor Grady when he had him helpless in that chair, but luckily he got his in the fight. I haven't any wish to kill off my potential army, but the speed of an air battle will do it. And I'm going to be in some fights before long."
Alan, strapped to his chair, was leaning over toward Mac as far as he could. Now he said, "By heaven, you haven't any pores in your skin!"
"I was afraid you'd notice that before. I had a fantastic yarn cooked up to explain it. That's right, pal; Grady and me, and all the rest of us, haven't any sweat glands or pores or tear ducts. There are other little differences too, but they don't cut any ice. The differences notwithstanding, we are human. Not strictly Earthtype human, I suppose, but human nonetheless." He brooded over his controls, as the disk roared silently through the sky. "I like you all, too, dammit. I don't want to kill you. I think I'll chance another ten minutes and set you down.
"I must be getting soft in my middle age," he added with a wry smile. "Chancing the loss of a world for three idiot kids. Oh, well. What the hell. A gallant gesture will maybe pay off in the long run."
There were several minor points that nagged at Alan; he wanted them out of the way before someone asked the one big question of McEldownie. "Why didn't Grady control my mind when we tied him up? Why couldn't he save himself?"
"Erin Grady was a weak link. We have 'em in our chain, you know. We're not supermen. He was weak at hypnosis and he couldn't bear pain. I think he was a throwback to the days when we were altogether Earth-style humanity. He called to me, though, and I shot back; but I came just too late. That fool Mariner!" With a savage twist he angled the disk toward earth. Then he laughed. "I've wanted to compliment you on your mutant theory, Alan. It was ingenious as the devil and it accounted for everything you'd seen up to that time. If we could regenerate parts, the loss of pain wouldn't matter, and we could take the treatment we're giving you and lose pain and be thankful. But 'tain't so. We're not supermen. It's only our robots—pardon me, our earthly henchmen—who are immune to pain. Coming in contact with both kinds of 'aliens' must have confused the very living dickens out of you."
"Hold on," said Alan. "I just thought of something. If I'm immune to pain, why did I feel it so excruciatingly when Brave hit me, when he wanted to put me under hypnosis? Tell me that was all in my mind...!"
"It wasn't. You didn't get the pain-destroying rays till your third treatment, on last night's telecast."
"Oh. That's it." He patted Unquote on the head; she was getting restless. Then it became obvious why. "Damn," said Alan, "now I'll have to have this suit cleaned. Puss, couldn't you have waited a little longer?"
Bill asked, "What about the saucers? I mean, they suddenly turned out to be better than anyone suspected. Why?"
McEldownie looked grim. "Some saucers had been sighted that we knew weren't ours. We had a few left from the days when we first came to Earth, in the late 1700s; we used to fly 'em occasionally to keep our hands in. But these weren't ours. So we knew we had to speed things up. Till then we'd been content to go along, giving your scientists an unobtrusive push now and then, so they'd believe they had done it all; our time schedule called for intergalactic-space disks about 1984. Well, we knew when the others were seen that we didn't have all the time in the world, as we'd thought. So we had to jump in feet first, take a lot of men under our controlling wing, start making robots—there I go again, that's a bad word for them—making unkillable soldiers of others, and substitute our own advanced designs for those in use at that time. We were too late; the damned enemy came down too fast. But now that I've got one of theirs—and a beauty it is, too—thanks to your help, I have a fighting chance."
"Who are the enemy?" It was Win, breathless, leaning forward, her breast rising and falling rapidly with the emotion and wonder of this thing. "Who are you going to fight?"
Mac looked at her in the viewplate. "The men from my planet," he said quietly. "The men who cast us out, as if we'd been the fallen angels of Lucifer in your myth, chucked us out of our own world and sent us to wander in the void."
He made the ship do a quick turn, and Alan saw Brave and Rob and Bill suck in their bellies and grimace. Mac said, "They half-crippled me then, damn them, and this is the first time I've flown since I left home. Some of the others have managed to stay a little more in practice. But by God, I'm still the best hotshot pilot my people ever produced, and I'm going to prove it today." He glanced up at the viewplate. "I'm going to let you out, you three. I want Alan and Win; they're my people now, and in a fight they can be a terrific help, for they're almost impossible to kill. I'll land now, and you can go. I oughtn't to do it. But curse you, Injun, I like you." He shot the disk toward the earth from a height of seven miles.
Brave said, "We won't get out."
"Don't be silly. You'll die under the 'G' load when I really get going."
"Then we'll die. I won't leave Alan with you, nor Win either. You will let us all out, or kill us."
"You bloody village idiot. What good will it do you to die?"
"I can't leave Alan. I saw him through Argentina and I'll see him through this hell you've put him into. Besides, someone's got to clean and bandage that ear, or he'll lose the whole thing. It's a bad wound."
"Not to him it's not. He doesn't feel it. The rays eliminate all danger of infection, disease—he can't even catch a common cold. His ear will be okay."
"Ear, schmear," said Rob Pope. "I stick by my friends too. Maybe all I can do is die like a squashed mouse, but Icando that. We don't scuttle for cover, alien."
"Likewise," said Bill Thihling laconically.
"Beastly blasted blue-bottomed baboons of knotheaded numbskulls!" roared McEldownie. "Do you want me to kill you, then?"
"I want you to let us all go; but if you won't, then Alan's better dead than living under your influence, like a marionette."
"He won't die. I tell you! No matter what happens to you, he'll go on living. He'll be my man."
"I don't think so," said Brave calmly. "I don't care what sort of all-powerful rays you put him under, or how you've caught the reins of his mind. If you kill me, Alan is sooner or later going to kill you. Live with that, McEldownie, or whatever your right name is. I don't for a minute believe that you can take as good a man as Alan and murder his best friend before his eyes and have him lick your boots. Kill me and you're done, Mac."
"Damn you, Lo! You're wrong, and you know it." He snarled at the viewplate. "You absolutely won't get out of the disk if I land it?"
"No."
"Then die, you fool," said Mac, the words half-strangled in his throat; and he sent the ship rocketing through space like a meteor.
Alan had felt Mac's mind leave his when Brave started to argue. He had concentrated furiously then on what he could do to over-power the alien. Very little of worth had occurred to him; but as a last resort he had determined on quick physical violence. If he could move as fast as Mac said he could, there was a chance.
Now, as the disk shot forward, he sensed Mac reaching out to touch his brain again, and with all his will he thought of other things, anything, anything except what he meant to do. He stared at the viewplate that showed the central room. He could feel almost no sensation of motion, and Win seemed quite all right. But the three men were curled in their chairs, gasping, even the mighty Indian writhing under horrible, painful pressure.
"For the love of God, Mac!" cried Alan.
And McEldownie slowed the ship. He turned a sickened, saddened countenance to Alan. "I can't do it," he said a little pitifully. "I can't kill that big red devil. I like him too well. I think he knew that when he made his proposition. I don't care how much it delays me, I've got to land him. Hear that, Lo?" he said to the viewer. "I'm going to do it. I'll put your whole precious gang out on land, and find some of my own boys. Project Star will be the place, if I can get there without interference. I can load up my crew and a few of the painless gentry and it'll make a better army than this would have been. But dammit, I did want my protege Alan with me."
"Say your dog, rather," suggested Alan bitterly.
"All right. Didn't you ever love a dog?"
"Yes."
"It's the same with me. I can't help feeling your race is inferior, but I can still be good and sorry to see you die, I can still feel affection for you."
"And that makes up for what you have been doing to him and the others?" asked Bill weakly.
"Oh, hell!" Mac bit his lip. "You are an impossible breed, you Earthlings."
Alan felt his mind withdraw again as he angled the disk around toward the west. In that instant, shoving aside the already unbuckled strap from his chest, and drawing the long hunting knife from its sheath at his side, he pounced out of his chair full upon the alien. Mac's green eyes flew open as Alan, his movements blurred by his incredible quickness caught the outlander's chin and dragged it back and with the other hand pressed the edge of the keen knife against the brown throat. Then, as he collected his startled thoughts, Alan said briskly, "Don't do it, Mac. Don't even think about touching my brain, because it's clear as a bell right now, and the first feeling I have of your meddling with it, I'm going to drag this knife through your windpipe. You can't control me without at least half a second's preparation, and with the reflexes you've given me, that's enough." He glanced up at the viewer. "Brave, Rob, don't either of you try to tell me anything telepathically. I know the different sensations I get when I'm being paged or controlled, and the first whimper of one of 'em sends this blade into Mac's neck."
No one spoke for a moment. Then Mac said, "If you knew how ridiculous you look, standing there with that whopping carver and with that sick cat on your shoulder, I really believe you'd give this business up and bust out laughing."
"Don't count on it," said Alan levelly. "I'll tell you what, Mac. You said you were going to let us all go. Maybe you were. But I don't trust you worth an inflated nickel. You'd have found a way to get Win and me back. Besides that, we only have your side of the story, and about a tenth of it, at that. I want to meet some of these birds that bombed our cities. They told Rob, before you had me murder them, that they had made a mistake. They had to kill someone but they didn't mean to kill us. That someone was obviously you. I want to know why. If I let you and this saucer get out of my hands, and then find that the bombers are in the right in whatever quarrel they have with you, I'll be sorry the rest of my life. So you're going to take us to 'em, Mac. We're going to get the whole story."
McEldownie laughed. It was a completely mirthless noise. "Kiwanawatiwa," he said to Brave, "I have you to thank for this mutiny, you and those hypnosis gimmicks of yours."
"No, not altogether," said Alan. The knife pressed in a little and the tall man winced. "It was your admission that you were my voice." My beloved voice in the depths of space, he thought, almost ruefully. It was fearful but I loved it. "If you hadn't wanted to brag, you might have kept control of me."
"I wasn't bragging. I wanted you as an ally and friend, rather than a puppet."
"Robot is the word. You used it a couple of times."
"Not for you, damn it. I liked you as a fellow human being."
Something flicked at Alan's mind with feathery tentacles; the knife drew blood and the feathery searching stopped. "That hurts," objected Mac.
"It'll hurt worse. Take us to the nearest disk you know of."
"How would I know of any?"
"You can find them. Do it."
"Don't push me too far," said the other icily. "Remember I'm infinitely stronger than you."
"But very susceptible to a sliced-up jugular."
"I won't wreck five hundred years of plans, even for you!"
"Not for me," said Alan easily. "For the sake of your throat, Mac old boy."
Mac sighed, and turned the ship gently, for fear of the deadly blade in Alan's remorseless hand, and sent it rocking over the hills inland.
"I'm a weak link," he said bitterly. "A weak link like poor old Grady. I didn't know I'd be so afraid to die."
CHAPTER XII
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 thatsorryis 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, "whereisyour 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."