The Project Gutenberg eBook ofDon't Panic!This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Don't Panic!Author: Robert W. KreppsIllustrator: W. E. TerryRelease date: October 3, 2021 [eBook #66463]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DON'T PANIC! ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Don't Panic!Author: Robert W. KreppsIllustrator: W. E. TerryRelease date: October 3, 2021 [eBook #66463]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Title: Don't Panic!
Author: Robert W. KreppsIllustrator: W. E. Terry
Author: Robert W. Krepps
Illustrator: W. E. Terry
Release date: October 3, 2021 [eBook #66463]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DON'T PANIC! ***
DON'T PANIC!By Geoff St. ReynardJanuary 9th, 1955 began like any normalday on Earth. Then suddenly our planet tossedin a death agony. The Green Men had landed....[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromImagination Stories of Science and FantasyNovember 1954Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
January 9th, 1955 began like any normalday on Earth. Then suddenly our planet tossedin a death agony. The Green Men had landed....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromImagination Stories of Science and FantasyNovember 1954Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Despite conflicting reports, the Air Force believed in the flying saucers. The scares began in 1947 and as a responsible agency the Air Force had to start investigations. At various times they'd cautiously release some information; then there would be some hysteria and they'd hurriedly debunk the whole business as "mass hallucinations" and "crackpot theories" until the public had regained its balance, when they'd start letting out bits of truth once more. The nature and implications of the saucer sightings made this on-again-off-again policy necessary in dealing with such an unstable thing as a war-nervous, tensed-up population. If the truth about the saucers had been known, the entire truth, then the Air Force could have published it and the country would have accepted it in stride; but the mystery that clouded the strange ships was susceptible of too many interpretations.
In December of 1952 a blue-lighted saucer was sighted, without a shadow of a doubt, over Laredo, Texas. In January of '53 a whole V-formation of blue objects appeared over Santa Ana, California. These were military sightings and beyond question. There were many before and even more afterward. Some of them mentioned blue lights and some other colors, and the daylight viewings talked of silver metallic luster.
The first low-flying saucer to be reported authoritatively was that which flew over the Capitol in Washington at 11:18 a.m. on Saturday, Christmas Day, 1954. It was caught by the cameras that were making a telecast at that time of the festivities in Washington, and beamed without explanation all over the country. A few minutes later the screens of America's viewers went blank and then the President appeared to urge calmness and sanity. There was no question of mass hallucination and crackpot theories any longer. The saucer was perhaps three hundred feet broad; it was of the usual shape reported in previous sightings, round with a central cabin, and it was green in color. It had flown comparatively slowly, at an estimated 125 m.p.h. It had disappeared over the Potomac.
At 2:24 p.m. the President was on tv again. There was some commotion at the door of the room from which he was broadcasting. He turned his head and nearly one hundred million people who were jammed before television sets across the nation saw his jaw drop and his eyes bulge slightly with irrepressible awe. In about nine seconds a very curious group walked into camera range. There were half a dozen secret service men with drawn guns, and in their midst, the target of those watchful weapons, was the first of the green horde.
He was—the measurements were determined later—six feet seven and one-half inches tall. He was dressed in a green shirt and trousers, caught around the waist by a heavy belt on which were stitched a number of cabalistic designs; on the left breast were more of the same, a circle and three slim triangles. In a holster slung at the right side of his belt was a large revolver or pistol. It was what had been known in the old West as a half-breed holster, enabling the wearer to swing up the muzzle and fire the gun without jerking it free of the leather. The alien had his hands folded carefully across his chest. Had he made a single motion toward the gun, he would have been blown in two.
In proportions and frame he was very like a human being. His chest was deep and his legs and arms well muscled. His skin was a delicate, olive-green in hue, as those viewers with color tv could see. His face was normal, perhaps a bit stern in expression, but with the ordinary features of a man, except that he had only one eye. It was located immediately above the bridge of his nose; it was about four times the area of a human eye and almost round in shape, and its small pupil roamed swiftly to and fro as the alien walked slowly toward the President. The pupil of the eye was like a tiny animal in a cage, dashing from side to side, up and down, uncanny, incredible, and horrifying.
The cameras did not show his feet. These were somewhat like those of an ostrich, each having two enormous toes, naked, horny, and padded with thick layers of green fatty matter on the soles.
The tint of his skin could have been accepted as a mutation of the strictly human animal. The single eye, even, might have suggested a humanoid sport or far-future development. But the feet were utterly inhuman and even the most callous or most unimaginative among the citizens who saw him personally that first day agreed that the feet were terrifying.
The cameras were turned off after about twenty seconds. An announcer came on and spluttered some drivel about keeping cool and not losing our heads, spoiling the effect of these admonitions at once by a piercing, hysterical giggle.
Before a quarter of an hour had elapsed, there were minor riots and demonstrations throughout the continent. The worst of these were sparked by fanatic groups claiming that the end of the world had come. Others, scarcely less violent, went screaming that the Martians were invading us, that the White House had been captured "right on the television" and much more of such idiocies. In many places the militia were called out to suppress waves of looting and street fighting.
The Air Force, which had not been taken entirely unaware, since they had privately come to the conclusion some time before that the flying saucers were extraterrestrial, now flung a canopy of fighter planes, both jet and motor-driven, over Washington, and, somewhat later, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Birmingham and New York. Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities of strategic importance were likewise protected within a period of two hours.
The rioting was subdued by evening. Army trucks equipped with public address systems patrolled everywhere, repeating the warnings to keep calm and do nothing until official word was broadcast of our intentions toward the aliens and vice versa. Meanwhile the first of the green horde was given a comfortable room in the Pentagon, where he was kept under an unobtrusive but thorough twenty-four-hour-a-day guard, and where means of communication with him were speedily sought for.
In a matter of a day and a half, or, to be precise, at two minutes to midnight on Sunday the 26th of December, he articulated his first English word. It was "Yes." Shortly he proved that he had absorbed much more than this word, for he began making attempts at complete sentences around 2:00 a.m. on the 27th. He had been under the constant supervision and teaching of a corps of scientists, language experts, and assorted brain-workers; he had shown no desire for sleep during the thirty-six hours he had been on the ground, and had listened to and worked with the teachers all that time. He showed now a good rudimentary grasp of English. It was given as the official opinion that he had shown in this the intelligence of a human genius, although not of the very highest order, rating perhaps an I.Q. of 195.
In the eight-hour period following this he spoke with the President and assured him, partly in words and partly in signs, that the folk of the green saucers were friendly explorers from a distant galaxy. His voice was throaty and rather unpleasant, with a tendency to crack in the upper registers.
He expressed a desire to return to his saucer for some purpose which he could not make plain with his basic English. This was at 10:17 a.m. on the 27th. It was considered politic to allow him to enter the saucer alone. He did so, by a method which was unfortunately not communicated to the public later. Shortly the craft rose from the earth and shot rapidly out of sight in the direction of Mount Vernon. There was no jet exhaust detected in its take-off; it simply rose like an iron filing to a magnet, soundless and abrupt. For three days thereafter there were no reported sightings of saucers.
It was officially decided in this period that the green man with the single eye and bird's feet was not intent on mischief; he had been given an idea of how far we had progressed technically, in many fields, but the information was only what he and his kind could have discovered for themselves in the years'-long surveillance of the world which they must have been making. No secrets had been imparted to him and he had expressed nothing but cordiality and good will, though he had managed to tell the interrogators only a little about himself and his race and home planet, which when boiled down and analyzed came to this: his home was far away (of course it would be) and he was friendly.
After the three-day lapse, saucers were detected on radar screens all over the civilized world: rather too high for the usual reconnaissance, they came and passed in greater numbers than ever before. No planes reported them, their altitude being too great. This long-distance traffic worried the governments of every nation. It was capable of so many explanations that deduction was futile. The protective canopies of fighter planes remained over key cities in the United States and Canada, and to some extent over the capitals and industrial centers of the world.
Eight days after the tremendous influx of saucers, Russia issued her considered opinion. The green one-eyed man was a capitalistic hoax. No such creature existed. The radar blips were "a" natural phenomenon, "b" a secret weapon of the Soviet, "c" a secret weapon of America and or Britain, "d" a capitalistic hoax. Somehow the masters of propaganda made it appear that all four of these silly charges were true, notwithstanding their mutual cancellation.
Two days thereafter the green horde launched its attack, at 11:34 a.m. on Sunday, the 9th of January, 1955.
CHAPTER II
Although the great flights of fighter planes were continually aloft, the reassuring program had gone on, the broadcasting trucks still rumbling about the streets foghorning their messages of cheer and optimism to a somewhat restive public. Some elements of the free press had been warning direly of "unknown dangers" and "possible treachery"—this causing some gimlet-eyed gentlemen in high places to come out with bills and demands for suppression of a free press for the duration of the so-called negotiations with the alien people. There had been no negotiations whatever. In this case, as in many others, the free press was perfectly right; but their warnings in the face of official hopefulness served only to confuse and fret the public. Hence, the tv lulled, the radio allayed, and the bellowing loudspeakers on the cruising trucks attempted to quiet fear under a blanket of sound.
At the said moment of attack, 11:34 a.m., the green saucers swept down with a perfection of simultaneity that made you think, as someone said later, that the devil had murmured "Synchronize your watches, boys." They hurtled from the skies over New York and Bangkok and Berlin and London and Madrid and Shanghai, down upon Moscow and San Francisco and Tokyo and Paris and Bombay. In the instant that the devastation hit New Orleans it also smashed at Edinburgh and Nome and Minsk and Berne. The first skyscraper toppled in Chicago as the first factory blew to flinders in Rio de Janeiro.
It was curious that their weapons did not seem to include the atomic variety. No A-bombs or H-bombs; rays, of incalculable destructive power and unknown origin, lanced from the diving saucers and struck the earth with the force of exploding bombs, but instead of crashing and then echoing away, these explosions continued, like great rolls of terrible thunder, for as long as the rays were aimed downward. One ray, directed from the belly-port of a canting ship, would set the ground a-shudder, crumple all structures in its path or near it, and create an ear-shattering blast that kept on and on until the saucer, tilting away, shut off the ray. So that each ray, in effect, was like an unending and ever-replenished series of huge bombs—and from each ship came a ray, and over each city there were hundreds of ships....
The mighty centers of civilization were obliterated. The great concentrations of population over the globe died. Manufacturing cities and cities which produced nothing of strategic value whatever were smeared indiscriminately into blood and dust and muck. It was an attack, not at man's weapons or production, but at man himself. It was the beginning of man's end, a giant step toward his classification with the dodo, the auk, the sabertooth tiger and the passenger pigeon.
One large eastern city in the United States presented a typical picture during that hour of cataclysm. In the first fifteen minutes its canopy of fighter planes was blown out of the sky; the weapons they carried, some of them atomic, were as effective against the green saucers as sling-shots on platinum. By noon the air had begun to fill with billowing, drifting masses of smoke-yellow vapor, reeking of sulphur and molten metal and burnt flesh and death. Those who had been unlucky enough to live through the attack thus far were now so nauseated by the odors of mankind's collapse that they stumbled among the shattering streets, retching and vomiting, as eager to escape the yellow hell-cloud's stink as they were to avoid the crumbling steel and cement.
At the end of an hour, while the greater part of the two hundred and twenty-eight saucers continued to raze the city, one alien ship made a landing on a leveled field of the suburbs. Its entry port jawed open, somewhat like a huge clamshell parting, and a single green man emerged. He was six feet nine and his eye measured a good four inches across. He carried a flag of red, white and green, on which the device of a circle and three triangles which he wore on his left breast was repeated. He strode away from the ship, gazing about with satisfaction. Some distance off lay the wreckage of a broadcasting truck; its warped, ruined loudspeakers yawned over the body of an Army sergeant, who still held in a firm grip the microphone into which he had been talking when the world was scuttled around him.
On the side of the demolished truck there remained a sign which read DON'T PANIC—THEY'RE FRIENDLY!
There was blood on the sergeant's mouth and forehead and he had bled from the nose. The blood was almost wholly dry now. His eyes were open.
The green conqueror looked at him and grinned. It remains one of the most curious facts of the matter that both mankind and the bird-footed beasts of the green horde expressed amusement and pleasure by turning up the corners of the mouth....
The alien peered all about him, shading his eye with his right hand. Nothing moved anywhere except the skimming saucers and the collapsing city. He stepped forward and lifted his pennon high, to plant its ten-foot staff in the dead body of the earthman. Holding it up, he spoke a few words in his own language, a guttural cracking speech which ranged up and down like that of an excited bird.
As he was about to stab the corpse with his flag, the corpse rolled onto its back and contracted its body, shot up its feet and kicked the alien square in the belly.
Catching the shaft of the flag, the erstwhile dead sergeant jerked it out of the alien's grasp, immediately bounded to his feet, took a firm two-handed grip of the thing—the sharp lance-head made it a splendid weapon—and ran it with savage violence straight into the throat of the green man, who died instantly and without sound.
Pausing only to shake his head once, because it ached fiercely, the sergeant bent over the tall body, folded one big hand around the pistol and its half-breed holster, and yanked. The retaining strap broke. The sergeant turned and began to run in the opposite direction from the grounded saucer, which continued to show no sign of life. Shortly he had disappeared into the smoking, burning ruins of the city's edge.
And so at 12:46 p.m. on January 9th, 1955, a moribund world drew the first blood from its extraterrestrial assassins.
CHAPTER III
Trace Roscoe had been a sergeant, off and on, for nine years. He belonged to the regular Army and had never thought of choosing any other career. Twice he had been busted to corporal and twice regained his stripes. Once he had been up for a commission and had, after due thought, refused it, because he'd known he wouldn't have it long. He had an Irish temper, and that was from his mother; he had a bulldog English muddle-through determination, and that was from his father. He was a hell of a good man in a fight. He was the best driver in his company, a better mechanic than a driver, and a better boxer than either. He read adventure novels and Von Clausewitz and Spillane and Voltaire and anything else that happened his way. He didn't consider himself much of a brain, but would have smeared the man who implied he was less intelligent than Einstein, for a man's opinion of himself should not be held by other people.
He had been driving his broadcasting truck along Highwood Avenue when the saucers attacked. He had been reciting the pap about not panicking, and hoping that he could personally see one of the single-eyed aliens sometime. He put no faith in the friendly-explorer crud. He wanted to look into that lone eye and decide for himself what the critters intended, because Trace Roscoe fancied himself a pretty good judge of character, even the character of ostrich-hoofed schmoes from outer space.
Well, the earth rose up around him and his truck before he rightly knew what was going on; and after a period of blackness he woke up to pain and a stench like one of Poe's charnel houses in his nostrils. He found that he was lying with his left arm draped over a jagged hunk of truck, clutching the mike with stiff fingers. Not being one to act without thinking in an emergency, he lay perfectly quiet and listened for a while to the rumble and crump of bombs—which he later found out had been the rays from the saucers instead—and the buzzing of his own skull. He could taste blood and feel it drying on his skin. He didn't believe he was at all badly hurt.
A little way from his face there was a busted headlight. He gazed at it a while, collecting his thoughts and opinions, and noticing that an arrangement of the shattered glass and chrome made a quite respectable mirror in which he could see a good deal of what went on behind him. Before he had decided what to do, he saw the saucer come to ground on the blasted field. He played possum and after a bit he saw the greenie come up the rise and stand there glaring around, holding the queer pennon and tipping back the pronged helmet from his eye.
Trace concentrated on holding still until the critter stepped over to him, and then Trace exploded all over the poor bastard, and took away his gun, which he wouldn't be needing any longer, and ran.
He half expected to be popped off by a bullet or a ray or a lord-knew-what from the saucer, but he reached the first edge of ruins safely and went to ground like a rabbit. Sitting in an angle of broken wall, he scanned the city. The saucers were engaged in a final mop-up. Trace felt sick. He looked at his town from end to end and he knew there couldn't be a dozen people alive in it. He had no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of the world, but he made some shrewd guesses. He was aware of the incredible number of blips that had been showing up on the radar screens lately. He knew that this city wasn't important enough in the scheme of things to warrant more than a small section of the attacking forces. This must be what Revelations called "the great day of God" when good and evil fought it out at Armageddon. Except that evil seemed to be winning, hands down.
Trace Roscoe peeked over his wall at the grounded saucer, and saw that a lot of greenies were coming out of it, advancing cautiously toward their dead comrade who lay with ten feet of flag-pole sticking up from his throat. Trace counted them as an automatic action (there were seventeen), in case he would need to know how many made up a saucer's crew in the future. Then he bent low and ran from hillock to hillock through what had that morning been the south-western suburbs of his city. As he ran he discarded the holster of the alien's gun, and thrust the weapon itself into his belt. If he had had a few minutes to examine it, and had he discovered how many loads it carried, he would have remained and started a fight with the one-eyers. Running was strategically correct in view of his ignorance of his only weapon.
When he had covered a mile he got up on a one-story-high mound of rubble and looked back. The green men had planted their flag and returned to their craft; even as Trace watched, it rose like a round green bullet and disappeared above the yellow haze. None of the other saucers landed, so far as he could see. The landing, then, had been for the vainglorious purpose of leaving their banner in token of victory. Trace spat and jumped down and went on into the city.
The reek made him gag now and then, but he had smelled some god-awful things in his time and was able to control his uneasy stomach. He considered the possibility of poison gas and judged it too slight to worry over; the destroying rays had certainly no need of accompanying gases, for they were as all-destructive as a thousand hurricanes rolled up in one package.
By three o'clock—his watch, miraculously, was still going—Trace had entered the city itself. He trotted down a broken, heaped-up thoroughfare, his glance roving constantly from side to side in search of movement. A sergeant whose army was gone had to find himself another in a hurry; and if so be it he was the general in that one, well, Trace Roscoe was ready to take on the job.
He had no fanatical hope of beating the greenies, because he was a soldier and level-headed, and odds of some millions to one were no odds at all. He figured the enemy's strength at something between ten and a hundred thousand saucers, with at least twenty individuals crewing each. There were at a conservative estimate 200,000 troops on the other side; and more like 2,000,000. So Trace was not indulging in any optimism when he started hunting for an army. He was merely following his natural inclinations, which were to fight the opposition as long as he had breath in his body and hands on the ends of his arms.
He was not full of sorrow and wild regret either, for that wasn't Trace's way. Besides which, the destruction of the civilization of this earth was too big to be grasped and understood all at once. If Trace had found the bodies of a score of people, he might have burst into tears, for his heart was big and Irish and sentimental. But pacing down the stinking tomb of hundreds of thousands of men and women was so incredible as to be simply a fact and not a comprehensible horror.
Alone he stood in the middle of a more-or-less flat plain in the city, staring and listening; and when he heard the shout, he went toward it at once, exulting that so quickly he'd discovered a private, or it might be a captain, for his army. There was a hole that was floored with cracked steps and went down into the ground, and Trace dived into it without hesitation.
Sitting at the bottom, with chunks of concrete heaped around him like divot around a duffer's tee, was a thin gentleman in a mustache, half a top hat, one leg of a pair of black trousers, and little else but a scowl. "They killed her," he said as Trace came into his view. "They blew her right out of my arms."
"Can you stand?" Trace asked him, reaching out one big hand.
"I don't know. Ouch! Yes, I can," said the man. "I tell you, they murdered Fannie."
"I'm sorry, fellow. Your wife?"
"My rabbit."
"Rabbit?" Trace turned him around and looked him over for wounds; there were none more serious than extensive bruises.
"I'm a magician," said the naked man. "Blacknight the Great. I had Fannie for three years and she never made a mistake. Smartest damn rabbit you ever saw. I was carrying her to a shelter and one of those rays shot along over the Farinello Building and the whole street blew up and she was gone, just like that. Damn green monsters." He stared at the sergeant. "I suppose it seems silly to you, feeling bad about a rabbit?"
"No," Trace said shortly. "I had a marmoset once. Let's get out of here and see how many others are alive."
"I haven't heard a thing for an hour," Blacknight said. "Not until your footsteps in the gravel. I think they're all gone." The two men stood in the open, craning their necks. "Nobody," the thin man said bitterly. "Two men left out of a world. We can't even start our race again. That takes a female too. My God," he said suddenly, and put his hands over his face.
"Come on," Trace Roscoe said sharply. "I'm hungry."
The naked magician looked up at him. "In the middle of this?" he said, and then, considering, "I guess I am too. I wouldn't have thought it was possible."
Farther along they found the remains of a two-story department store; a lot of it was gone, but in the mess they managed to find a shirt and a pair of pants for Bill Blacknight—he swore it was his own name—and a couple of cans of corned beef hash. They invented a skillet and stove out of twisted metal, and shortly had wolfed down the hash and were prowling further into the city.
Trace saw the policeman first. He was walking in a tight little circle around a shattered telephone pole, waving his revolver and talking loudly to nobody. Trace sneaked up within a dozen yards before the cop spotted him. The first bullet cut his ear and the second missed, and then Trace had the gun. He tried to subdue the policeman but the poor devil was hopelessly mad. Trace shot him mercifully in the head. He took the cartridges out of the leather belt and dropped them into his shirt pocket and stuck the gun beside the alien's weapon in his belt. He and Bill Blacknight traveled on, going methodically from street to street in search of recruits.
When dusk came they had six more people. Bill told Trace that it was the damn silliest-looking excuse for an army which he could imagine. Trace shrugged. "They're human, anyhow."
"Are you sure?" Bill asked him. "Even Slough?"
"He has two eyes," said Trace, "and that's the only qualification a man needs for my army."
Slough might be called a midget. He stood exactly four feet high. He was beautifully proportioned, smoothly muscled and lithe-looking. He had a large head with a wild mane of yellow hair, and his eyes were pure Delft blue. He spoke in professorial tones and appeared entirely unaffected by the fact that his left arm was broken below the elbow. Trace set it for him, expertly and swiftly, while Slough talked quietly and with six-syllable words of the ghastly doom he hoped to see visited on the alien destroyers. He said he had been an airplane designer. He was without doubt the most intellectual member of Trace Roscoe's forces, and the only one save Bill Blacknight the magician whom Trace felt he could trust.
There were two girls, red-headed Barbara Skye who had been a secretary and couldn't seem to stop saying how awful, how awful it all was; and a dark-haired woman of twenty-five or so, who had not said a word thus far. Trace believed she was sane, but stunned into a sort of walking coma. He did not therefore consider killing her in mercy, but took her along as a potential ally.
The other three men, all office workers, looked useless; but Trace was setting out to avenge his world, and he had to accept every scrap of manpower that came his way. The three were in various degrees of shock, the worst being Johnson, who wept and shivered if you looked at him, the next Kinkaid, a plump balding man with a bad case of shudders who kept trying to run away from the little band, and the best Hafnagel, almost as big as Trace, with a tic in his cheek and fingers so rigid with nerves as to be almost useless. Johnson had had a rifle when they found him, a heavy sporting thing with four loads that he'd picked up in the rubble of a firearms shop. Trace had taken it from him and given it to Bill. Johnson had been too frightened and sick to protest.
Trace sat them down in a circle on the highest point of what had been the city, where tumbled buildings and upheaved earth made a barren hill which would never produce anything, flowers or homes, for a thousand years.... He stood among them and began to talk. His manner was that of a sergeant with a detail of raw recruits.
"Okay. There are seven of you and by and large I've seen better material, but you'll have to do. Now I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to find the green lice that did this to our country, and blast 'em. We're going to make 'em wish they'd never left Venus, or Mars or wherever the hell they sprang from."
Hafnagel, the big man with stiff hands, said something unprintable. "How, you jerk? How can you fight a flying saucer?"
Trace gave him a look that in its time had crackled the enamel on the teeth of many a GI. He said slowly, "My name is Sergeant Roscoe and I am your commanding officer and you had better remember it, Mac, or you will have cause to wish you had become extinct some years before you ever laid eyes on me. Now I shall continue. The fleet of enemy ships left here at a terrific pace between one and two o'clock this afternoon, heading in the direction of Washington, D.C. I haven't spotted one since. Therefore what we will do is pick up our flat feet and head for the capital. God knows what we'll find there, but it's a cinch we've got to get out of here plenty fast."
"Why?" asked Kinkaid, the fat one.
"For one thing, Mac, they'll not be back this way, because what have they got to come back for?" asked Trace patiently.
"All the more reason to sit right here," said Hafnagel. "We can dig enough out of the ruins to live like kings."
"Ignoring the fact that you are gonna go where I say you're gonna go," said Trace through his teeth, "let me ask you, Mac, to take a sniff of the breeze."
"The smell's bearable."
"It will get worse. By this time two days from now it'll be enough to suck the guts out of you. I needn't say why."
"Oh," said Hafnagel, his cheek twitching. "Oh, I hadn't thought—"
"Exactly. Don't try to. Just listen to me. I am your superior officer, Mac," said Trace, "and with you and these other slewfooted remnants I am going to put a crimp in them Martians—thoseMartians—that they'll feel clean to the GHQ. Now we'll take ten and be on our way. I want to clear this area before the atmosphere gets serious."
He looked at them, seven shivering people huddled from the cold into the coats, scarves and parkas they had managed to snatch before their universe had erupted into nothingness. Despair was unknown to Trace Roscoe, but a grin of wonder touched his mouth; wonder at his own temerity. He was leading these poor reluctant untrained slobs against a million or two giant bird-footed interplanetary warriors, and with about nine-tenths of his mind he expected to do some damage to them. The other tenth said to him, with the voice of his grandmother, "Och, Trace boy, it's mad you are, mad clean through to your Irish bones."
"Wirra, Grandmither," Trace said to her in his head, "it's the bloody English in me too, d'ye see, that won't let me stop sluggin' and won't admit I can be whupped; and then there's all the American of me, and ye know fine that an American never is whupped at all, at all!"
He chuckled—first time that day—and sat down to examine the alien's pistol by the flare of his lighter.
CHAPTER IV
There was a good-enough moon. They made the outskirts of the city by eleven o'clock. A restaurant, all but demolished, gave them canned food; Trace had to bat Johnson in the chops to keep him from wolfing down a dirty chicken sandwich he found lying on the floor, and Johnson went into a fit of wailing hysterics, but when he came out of it he was just about cured, and didn't weep or shiver any longer. They walked a little farther and at midnight Trace plunked them down on a wooded hill, beyond the rayed area. He and Bill Blacknight gathered dry brush and built a blazing fire against the chill of January.
"Dangerous?" queried Slough, the tiny man.
"Calculated risk," said Trace. "I think we can presume the saucers won't be over this sector for a while, and if they do come, they may believe it's a natural fire. The main reason is to attract survivors to us." He didn't mention that he himself was so inured to climatic changes he would never have thought of building a fire for warmth, save for the others. He wore his heavy shirt and trousers and over them a light topcoat Bill had found for him. He could not have said off-hand whether he was cold or comfortable.
When they had all gone to sleep, some like corpses and others as light-slumbering as wildcats, Trace walked a beat around them, keeping an eye and an ear open for approaching steps. There were none.
Toward morning he heard the dark girl sobbing. He sat beside her and stroked her hair soothingly. When Bill took the watch, Trace fell asleep with one arm over the girl's shoulders. At dawn she was all right, and could talk again.
Her name was Jane Kelly and she'd been a teacher, and Trace considered her a very fine-looking dish indeed, even in the fat parka. She was not so flamboyantly female as Barbara Skye, the redhead, but she was distinctly not the sort you would take for a boy at forty paces. She had curves and a warm face and eyes like brown gold, if there was such a thing.
Trace said "Yo," like John Wayne was always doing in those Old West pictures about the cavalry. "Let's travel." They tramped off toward Washington.
They never reached it. They never even got as far as Philadelphia.
The first trouble came as they were crossing a field of frozen mud and corn-stalk stubble; Barbara turned her ankle and sat down with a squawk. She was wearing high heels, not spikes but a good two-and-a-half inches, and Trace was disgusted with himself for neglecting his job. He was so full of vengeance and hatred that he forgot to check on the little things that could sabotage him. He should have scrounged some shoes for her somewhere yesterday.
He glanced at Jane's feet. She wore sensible shoes. They didn't improve her ankles any, but they couldn't spoil them either. Trace had never been an admirer of sensible shoes, yet now he felt a rush of affectionate gratitude to Jane for wearing them.
"You can't go barefoot," he said to Barbara, who was chattering petulantly and rubbing her ankle, exposing an astonishing length of silken thigh in the process. "And you can't travel in those things. You'll have to be carried."
"Why don't you leave her?" said Kinkaid, the plump man. "She's no use to you. Neither am I. I'll stay with her."
Barbara said venomously, "I'd as soon be stranded with one of those bird-footed weirdies as with you, Tubby. Take your cotton-pickin' eyeballs off my leg before I scratch them out for you."
Hafnagel, the big man, said, "Take a vote, Roscoe. You can't force us to limp all over creation with you. Because you're crazy enough to want to find the saucers is no—"
"I'm no soldier," said Johnson. He was a blond man with a crooked nose and jughandle ears. "I'm going to take to the hills. The aliens are invincible; but a man might avoid them for years in the hills. There's farms and such to live off."
"Don't think I'll go with you," said Barbara, standing up. "I wouldn't trust one of you creeps if Roscoe was out o' sight. I'm going with him if I have to walk on my palms."
"We're not splitting up," said Trace. "Someone's got to carry you, honey." His breath misted out on the frosty air. "Hafnagel, you're big enough."
Hafnagel knelt down. Barbara straddled his shoulders, the man took her ankles carefully in his stiff fingers, as impersonally as if they had been firewood, rose and started forward. "Hey," Barbara said, "this is okay. You can see from up here."
"Any saucers?" asked Trace.
"No. Nothing moving at all." They all went on.
Trace's troubles multiplied through the day. Of all his crew, only three were interested in cracking back at the destroyers—the midget Slough, the magician Blacknight, and the teacher Jane Kelly. Barbara was against his plan, but would not leave Trace, whose uniform gave her a sense of security. The three others fought him constantly, with words and sometimes with action.
Hafnagel tried to knock him out during a halt. Trace presented him with a bloody nose, and saddled him with Barbara and drove them all onward.
Johnson broke for cover when they passed a willow-bordered river. Trace caught up with him and washed his face in the icy current, and Johnson restricted himself to verbal attacks thereafter.
Kinkaid refused to budge from their noon camp. Trace grabbed his left ankle and dragged him over the hard rocky earth for twenty yards, and Kinkaid shrieked that he'd walk. Later he pretended to go lame, fooled Trace into half-carrying him for a mile, and then had his fat face slapped so hard that he was filled with respect for Trace's authority, and made no more trouble.
Those were the intentional oppositions. Trace had likewise to contend with recurrent hysterics, with terrible fits of moaning agony of mind, and with a depression that now and again settled over the entire company. He bellowed at them, shoved them around, occasionally patted them like dogs; he realized what they were going through, and he was not a callous man, but he knew he had to keep them on the move for their own sakes as well as that of his plan. Civilization had all but died yesterday. He couldn't expect to pick up a gang of hard, angry, level-headed companions. He had to make do with what he had, and improve on this weak raw material by his tough, high-handed methods.
Again and again he examined the strange firearm he'd taken from that green beast with the flag. It baffled him. There was no place to load the thing, no jointure in all its smooth dark surface. The muzzle was pierced by a hole about a millimeter wide. That was where the missile would come out; but could the weapon be reloaded there? What kind of ammo would go into a millimeter opening?
The pistol—he decided to call it that—was much lighter than a Colt of comparable size. There was a narrow trigger and trigger guard in the same position as on an earth-made revolver. That was logical, as the hands of the aliens were, barring the color, perfectly human. Trace decided he'd have to take a chance and fire the thing. The unchancy weapon would come in handy if he could work it. He bit his lip. Maybe it had just one shot. Oh, blazes. He had to find out.
On their next halt, he aimed it at a tree (there was no sight and he aimed by feel, like a gunman) and pulled the trigger. It had a hard pull, so hard that only a strong man could have budged it at all. It made no sound. There was a thin streak of green light, and the trunk of the tree commenced to smoke and steam. Then it burst into yellow-green flame and exploded, fragments of bark and splintered wood showering out to a great distance. Trace ducked, let up on the trigger, and the beam died. He was reasonably sure now that it wasn't a one-shot.
"And that's what you want us to go against," said Johnson. "A million Martians armed with those. What right have you to make us?" he shrieked. "What authority?"
"This authority," said Trace, hefting the pistol. "Likewise the supreme authority of the United States Army, as I have declared martial law. And then there's the authority of me, Sergeant Trace Roscoe, who will mop up this whole damn valley with your fat puss if so be it you are disinclined to obey my orders, buster."
"Thinks he's so tough," grumbled Kinkaid.
But they all followed Trace when he marched on. Jane Kelly kept up easily with the men, and Trace was especially proud of her; but he had to admit that most all of them were whipping into shape better than he'd any right to hope for. "Few more days and I'll have me a real fine belly-achin' fighting-mad platoon here," he said to himself.
Unfortunately he didn't have a few more days. He made contact with the green-skinned destroyers no more than half an hour thereafter.
CHAPTER V
They lay on the crest of a hill. Before them was a rolling plain spotted with patches of old snow. A thousand yards from the base of the hill was a small town, with figures moving among the houses. It had not been blasted by the saucers, but Trace's people did not run down the slope toward it, because along that plain from horizon to horizon rested a line of the great green spacecraft; and the moving figures, there was little doubt, had olive skin and horny bird-feet and a single eye apiece.
"Reconnoiter," breathed Trace. "Got to know what's what. That place must be local GHQ, and they look dug in pretty solid. I'm going down after dark and give 'em a squint. I'll take Bill with me, in case I want to bring back souvenirs."
"I'm rather more insignificant in the dark than he," said Slough quietly. "And you ought to have three on the party."
"Your arm would slow you down."
"It would not," said Slough firmly. Trace looked at him and after a moment shrugged. "You're right, I could use another." He took the sporting rifle from Bill and gave it to Jane Kelly. He offered the revolver to Slough, who refused it; he handed it to Bill, keeping the alien's pistol for himself. Then he drew the teacher off a short distance. "Look, miss," he said earnestly, "I want you to keep these inter-office-memo types waiting here for me if you can. I don't expect you to actually shoot 'em, but maybe the rifle will cow 'em some. They aren't what you'd call blood and guts sort."
"Why don't you let them go?" she asked suddenly. "What good will three cowards do for you?"
"You never know. I figure they are human, and in the long run they'll show it. Hafnagel is the best—if he has time to recover. He lost his wife in the city."
Jane said, "I was lucky. I hadn't anyone to lose. Except mankind."
Trace looked at her steadily. "At another time, Miss Kelly," he said, "I'd like to tell you what a hell of a fine female you are. I know it wouldn't mean anything to you now, but I must say you are one swell dish." Then he blushed all over his big hawk-nosed face, and turned abruptly to the saucer-cut plain.
In the first darkness the three of them crawled over the top and headed down the slope.
The greenies kept no guard of any kind on their headquarters town; nor, so far as Trace could see, did they set a sentinel over their saucers. They were horribly sure of themselves, sure of having crushed the highest race on this planet. The night was nearly black, thick jetty clouds obscuring the moon, and stabs and splashes of orange light showed where the aliens walked. The three earthmen made their way to the edge of town, took a road straight toward the center, and trotted down the sidewalk past silent houses. They were cautious, but even so they nearly ran into a greenie who came round a corner not twenty yards ahead. They went to earth under a hedge and watched him walk by. The orange illumination was explained: from the front of the helmet he wore, a beam of strong undiffused, red-yellow light shot out and down, showing him the path as he walked with bent head. Luckily he did not flick it from side to side, or he must have seen them crammed under the hedge.
When his soft padding footsteps had died, the midget Slough said urgently, "Trace, do you intend capturing one?"
"I might at that. Why?"
"If you do, remove his helmet at once. Immediately!" His breath mingled frostily with Bill's and Trace's. "The triple prongs atop the helmet may be antennae, for radiating and receiving waves, either of thought or a form of radio. It may be thus that they communicate, so knock off the helmet at once if you attempt a capture, or if we're discovered."
"You are a shrewd cookie," said Trace thoughtfully. "Okay, will do. Now let's get the lead out."
The town had been a small place, with one drug store, one theater, half a dozen stores. The men prowled all round the heart of it, and Trace said, "Here's something funny. They haven't shown any curiosity—the theater's still locked up tight, like it must have been on Sunday when the attack was made on the cities. How come? Don't they want to check on what a building like this is used for? They don't seem to have pried into much of anything."
"Maybe they're not interested in us," said Bill. "Maybe they don't give a whoop for what we've done and how we've progressed. What if they considered themselves so superior to us that they thought we had nothing to teach them? Then they wouldn't pry into our heritage and culture. They'd just obliterate us."
"And why bother to obliterate us?" asked Slough.
"Lot of answers to that," said Trace briefly. "Meanness, desire for sense of power, what have you. Let's nail one and drag tail." He led them past the movie house, and gestured at an orange light approaching. "That one."
"Don't forget the helmet," urged Slough.
"Take it easy, Mac," said Trace huskily. They went to ground behind evergreen shrubs on the lawn of a funeral parlor.
The tall creature neared them, his horny feet with their heavy pads making little noise on the cement. He passed, and Trace launched himself at the broad back, feeling joy wash through him in a heady wave at the first action since his attack on the flag-planter. He struck the alien with all the weight and power of his two hundred pounds, expecting it to pitch forward on its face. It did nothing of the sort. It staggered one step, stiffened, whirled on him. He clutched wildly for a grip, but the stonewall character of this great beast had thrown off his timing. The thing hit him in the face with a forearm. Trace reeled back and fell into a pine tree.
Bill Blacknight leaped on the one-eye even as Trace was hurled away, and darting up one long arm, the magician hit the helmet with the tips of his fingers. In a flash the dexterous hand found the edge of the metal and flipped upward; the alien, squawking, reached for the headgear, just too late. It clanged on the sidewalk. Bill wrapped himself around the steel-tough torso. He knew nothing of brawling, but he was as slippery as an oiled eel. The green man groped for him and he was somewhere else. Terrible hands groped to tear his head from his body, and Bill was a human cummerbund, folded around the waist of the thing and punching desperately for a vulnerable spot. Then he had flattened up along its back and had a half-nelson on the thick throat.
The greenie drew his weapon. Bill did a contortionist trick and booted it out of his hand.
Trace climbed out of the pine tree, swearing bluely.
Slough appeared just before the alien, who tensed his arms to grip the tiny man. Slough was no more than three feet off, well within reach and full in the glare of the fallen helmet's lamp; yet the one-eyed marauder did not catch him. Bill had forced him to his knees. The huge round eye glared across at Slough, while the thing appeared to wait for something unguessable to happen. Slough swung his good arm and caught the brute a healthy crack on the jaw. With a bird's cry, high and ferocious, like the wail of an eagle who has sighted on a rabbit and seen it turn into a wolf, the greenie jerked his head back and staggered to his two-toed feet.
Trace came in like Joe Louis at Tony Galento. He put a fist into the rigid belly and it smashed in like so much well chewed bubble gum. Then he pasted the alien in the throat, pulling his punch just enough so as not to shove the spine through the nape of the neck. Last, as the alien was toppling over, he unleashed the left uppercut which had won him seventy bouts in two years. The greenie flipped up his face and stared sightlessly at the black sky for an instant, whereafter he crumpled into a heap that would never get up and walk away under its own power if it lay there till the crack of doom.
The three friends panted a little at each other.
"Swell captive you have there," said Bill at last. "A lot he'll tell you, Sarge. I heard eighteen distinct bones bust when you biffed him that last one."
"Have to catch another," said Trace irritably. "Damn!"
"And here it comes, at the double," said Slough.
A light bobbed a block away. Bill gestured at the fallen helmet. "Look at that, a regular searchlight." The beam was reaching up to flicker on low-hanging clouds. Its source of power must be startlingly potent. Trace picked up the helmet and settled it on his own head, where it dropped and rested heavily on his ears. He stepped behind a maple tree between sidewalk and street. "Out of sight," he growled at the others.
The second alien slowed, walked briskly, faltered, stopped. He called out a couple of questioning syllables in the avianlike tongue. Trace came out from behind the tree and shot the orange beam directly into the single great eye. In the second's grace he thus achieved, he stepped up to the creature and clipped it sharply, competently, on the button.
"That does it," he said with satisfaction. "We got it made."
He knelt, removed the helmet, passed it to Slough. Then he took off the one which he himself wore and gave it to Bill. "Toss them someplace where the light won't show. Can't mess around trying to turn 'em off—and they might be a couple of booby-traps. Broadcasting stations with brims, that'd lead the enemy right to us." He heaved up at the greenie's middle. He whooshed with surprise. "Little help, Bill," he grunted. "This thing weighs about three hundred!"
With the magician's aid he stood up, holding the alien over one shoulder. He looked toward the invisible hill; he was thinking of Jane Kelly. It doesn't matter a damn about the others, he thought, not even the girl Barbara; but that little teacher with the sensible shoes....
They went up to the theater and turned the corner and there ahead of them were many ducking, bobbing orange lights. A ragged line of aliens were approaching the town, had already cut them off from the hill. They ran, Trace heavily with the inert weight on his shoulder, and there were more coming at them from the other side, so that their only escape lay through an alley that ran beside the theater. Down this they pounded, Trace cursing the helmets which must have shot out warning signals when they were removed; the aliens were coming too fast and purposefully for it to be accidental.
The alley debouched into another, but this was spotted at the ends by more head-lamps. Bill felt a cold touching him that was deeper and more icy than the January wind. He said, "The movie's the last bet," and jumping to the back exit of the place, he performed a swift sleight-of-hand that every magician knows of, and the lock swung open, the hasp flipping back from the staple. He pulled at the door, Slough crept into the blackness, and Trace, still carrying the unconscious greenie, followed. Bill closed the door behind him. It was possible that the extraterrestrial marauders did not know the principle of the padlock, of course; in which case they might not notice the unlocked door. But Bill rather doubted it. So did Trace.
CHAPTER VI
Trace carried the feebly stirring alien along the aisle of the deserted theater, the others following behind him. He went up the stairs to the balcony and found the entrance to the projection booth; negotiated those narrow steps and dumped his captive unceremoniously on the floor between the two big projectors.
"No lock," said Bill, examining the door.
"The place is a trap," said Trace irritably. "Damn it ... but there wasn't anyplace else to go." He knelt and rolled the green man onto his back and slapped his face hard. The alien opened his great eye dazedly, stared round at the three earthlings, and croaked, "What occur?"
"English!" gasped Bill.
"Sure," said Trace. "I expected it. Their emissary learned it and must have broadcast it to 'em while he was being taught. The helmets, the helmets. It's logical."
"Chwefft is told English," said the green man, "we talk English all." He put a hand to his head, and his tight mouth was drawn open into an oval of surprise. "Hat?" he said uncertainly.
"The first one beamed it to the fleet," agreed Slough. "That makes our job easier."
"How?" asked Bill.
"Knowledge, boy, the acquiring of knowledge."
The green man made as if to get up. Trace shoved him back. The creature came away from the floor at him like an enraged panther, striking up with little skill but immense strength at his head and chest. Trace dodged through the perfunctory guard and belted him on the nose, then, as his struggles merely increased, let him have a left cross high on the cheek, just grazing the rim of the eye. The alien cringed and held up his hands in supplication.
"Lousy fighter," said Bill.
"If you think so, I'll time the two of you for a couple rounds," said Trace savagely. "He's scared of his eye being touched; it must be sensitive as hell. Besides, we've got two of those pistols of theirs now, and he's no fool."
"Allow go," said the man on the floor. "Not keep."
"First you talk," said Trace, trying to keep basic English. "How many of you are there?"
"How many? Ah," the thing said, giving a curious one-eyed frown. He had no hair on his head and only a bald ridge for an eyebrow. "How manyindicating number?"
"That's right."
"Not knowing word for how many. More than you," he said, "more on voyage than you, and more more at home."
"Home? Where's home?"
"The system Lluagor, home planet Chwosst," said the other, sitting up cautiously and clasping his knees. He smiled. His expression said clearly, If these insignificant mites want to question me, what harm can it do? Trace, fighting a surge of Irish rage, went on. Bill prowled over to the openings that showed the deserted theater, squinting through the gloom. They had turned on the lights in the projection booth, and that worried him, for the searchers might come in below at any minute. He found the house lights and threw them on, so that the booth would not glow a warning. Thank heaven the power plant's still working, he thought. As Trace hammered at the green man with questions, Bill began tinkering with the machines.
Bird-foot was saying, in his unpleasant tones, "How many saucers about twenty to forty thousand, this worked out by our mathematicians Chwefft and Hlamnig after learning your system of numbers. Interesting primitive system without knowing sub-space and lacking even name forfpiolhesit."
"Sub-space!" exclaimed Slough, darting forward until he stood directly before the alien. "How did he learn the name for that concept, I wonder? But it makes sense. Certainly it would seem logical that such an advanced race would have conquered the mathematically-conceived sub-space, in order to travel interdimensionally from galaxy to galaxy. How else could they go distances that even at light's speed would take a portion of eternity?"
The green man eyed Slough, his head cocked. "Intelligent," he croaked. "Come closer." He reached out a finger that was crooked as if to beckon, bumped it against Slough, and recoiled, an expression of dismay fleeting over his hard features. Then the olive-green skin smoothed out. "Ah. Small, small man. Not know."
"You got a looney," said Bill.
"He's not crazy," said Trace. "I had that sort of figured out before." He left the subject as Bill frowned at him, quite uncomprehending, and said to the alien, "What do you want here?"
"Your planet."
The words were rasped out without emotion, but they were as cold as the wind of January that played outside the theater. Trace said, "Why?"
"Need worlds. Chwosst long ago full, more worlds needing." He labored ahead, perfectly in command of the English he knew, seeking now and again for words beyond his ken, substituting others that were yet clear to the enthralled listeners. For five minutes he talked, and eight and ten, to the three humans in the projection booth; outside his bird-footed, one-eyed compatriots padded the empty town, whose inhabitants they had eliminated with the handguns that morning, down to the last dog and canary. Now they had found the dead alien and the two helmets, now they sought those who squatted in the theater; beyond the town lay the ravaged country, and across its face stretched the lines of thousands upon thousands of quiescent green saucers, some spied on by other survivors of humanity, others proud in a total destruction wrought by their all-shattering rays. Of all of this Trace Roscoe was aware, and still the story of the captive green man pinned him without movement to the closing trap of the theater. Once he thought of Jane Kelly. This thought he battled down, because Trace Roscoe was engaged in a war, and he couldn't have any personal dreams at all....
Gradually the queer speech of the world-assassin painted the portrait of his race, his mission, and his egocentric soul.
CHAPTER VII
So long ago that there were no words for the incredible period of time that lay between then and now, the planet Chwosst, fourteenth from the sun Tsloahn in the star system Lluagor, had become overcrowded to the point of danger. The dominant race of Chwosst were the two-toed one-eyed green men who called themselves Graken, which signified The Mighty, or All-Consuming. The other races of life on the planet were insignificant, small rodent-like beasts used for food by the Graken, who were wholly carnivorous.
They conquered the principles of space travel and sent out fleets of ships—these early craft were bullet-shaped, much as the designers of the first potential rockets of Earth had shaped their creations—and within a hundred-year space they had perfected these so that travel was negligibly dangerous. In their own system they had discovered one other planet capable of supporting their kind. This had given them a long breathing space, during which they hammered at the locked gates of the sub-space corridors. The Graken bred fast, though, too fast, and their two planets filled up before they had solved interdimensional travel.
There followed a long spell of civil war, revolutions that cut their numbers down fantastically and at last came near to exterminating the Graken entirely. While they were repopulating their double homelands, they made a peace among themselves that was never again broken. To assure it, they invented the headgear which broadcast their thoughts, and in a generation or two they had become a kind of ant horde, billions of individuals conditioned to a kind of community thought, a way of life in which every idea of every individual was passed on to those near him, shared and refined amongst so many thousands that a giant race-mind at last made its appearance, and no single Graken ever felt thathehad conceived anything, but thattheyhad done it.
This conjoint cerebration did not reach through space from planet to planet, and so the single-mindedness of the Graken was kept on its track by constant emissaries from one half of the race to the other.
Now a new terror arose for them: the rodents on which they had fed, a breed of beast even more amazingly fertile than the Graken themselves, were decimated by a plague; and nourishment became so scarce that extinction was threatened. Of course there were no rich and poor among the Graken, no money and no privilege, any more than there would be among a queenless ant tribe. So as one grew hungry, they all did. They might have fed half their people and let the other half starve, but that was not the Graken way.
Now, at this most crucial time of their history, the secret of sub-space was finally discovered, and the relatively simple manner of intratime interstellar journeying ascertained.
Patrols were sent out in the old-style bullet-craft, but due to a lack of manual maneuverability in entering and leaving the galaxies now opened to them, the casualties were nine ships out of each ten sent out from Chwosst. Even so, another habitable planet was found within a matter of a few Earth-months, and food (composed of the "inferior races" found thereon) brought back to the hungry system of Lluagor.
The saucer-shaped spacecraft were developed and fleets, so numerous that each of the three worlds became hardly more than a vast landing-ground, were built. Two of every three able-bodied male Graken were trained as pilots, navigators, technicians and attack-masters. Patrols of from ten to fifty thousand ships left the base planets regularly, cutting through dimensions of sub-space in a search for new worlds that was of necessity haphazard, and yet which regularly discovered habitable globes in the limitless reaches of the universe.
No instruments had ever been developed by the Graken with which to ascertain the facts about a planet from a distance greater than a few thousand miles. Thus, to check on size, gravity, atmosphere, animal life and so forth, the patrols were forced to scan a world from just beyond its limit of attraction. One possible haven out of each hundred thousand planets checked was an excellent average, one in half a million more than usual. Some worlds accepted were smaller, with less gravity, others had certain differences atmospherically; but the Graken were an adaptable breed, and readily conformed to such changes.
The one male Graken in three who was not taken for saucer duty became a shepherd, a breeder of food animals, or a scientist.
The females bred and raised their offspring and bred again; their fertile life extended over the years from fourteen to eighty-five, their gestation period was four months. The race was prolific.... The need for worlds was continually urgent.
And Terra was an almost perfect duplication of the Graken's prototype home planet.
The last development in the Graken's marauding through the reaches of space was the actual kidnapping of the new worlds, the theft of entire planets and their transportation through sub-space into the star system Lluagor.
This had been conceived and perfected only a few generations before. The chain of Graken-inhabited globes had reached the sum of fifty-three, and travel between them had become tedious, arduous, and sometimes dangerous, for the ships used for ordinary traveling were fewer and of older patterns than the patrol vessels. The Graken found their communal minds drifting into widened channels, as direct contact became less and less. The pressing need was for a single system of worlds ranged about one star, in which travel would be easy and frequent. They therefore devised the kidnapping principle.
First every planet unfit for Graken life in the system Lluagor was exploded, leaving only two balls spinning about the sun Tsloahn. Then, one by one, the new Graken planets were brought through sub-space and dropped into the home system. This was done by a method which could not be made completely clear by the captive green man; the basic idea of which, however, was easy to comprehend:
A patrol of no less than 20,000 saucers was brought within a mile of the world's surface. They hovered in lines, opened file, linked up until the planet was girdled by one continuous belt of ships. On a planet of the Earth's circumference, this would be about one saucer per mile. The ships were connected electronically in series, and at a button's push, a lever's throw, or a dial's setting in the control vessel, the saucers together with the captive world were shot through sub-space and into the system Lluagor, where they were fixed in an orbit around the parent star Tsloahn. The saucers then drew off, and the Graken owned another world, a new home for their waxing, fruitful hordes.
After two failures, in which planets already crawling with millions of Graken blew up while entering sub-space, the method of annexation was perfected and the remaining forty-nine planets were added to the first two, Chwosst and Csenfar, in the home system. Later acquisitions were brought to the base after any intelligent native races had been crippled or annihilated, and there, in the comfort and convenience of their own spaceways, the Graken mopped them up and settled on them, keeping alive any species that made acceptable food. The journey through sub-space and the orbit-fixing did not affect the atmosphere or inhabitants of the planets in any way.
Thus far, no humanoid (or Grakenoid) races had been found in all the explored universe. The possibility of humans as Graken-food was left undiscussed. Cannibalism, even of this off-beat kind, might be repugnant to the green folk, even though race-murder, of a second-cousin breed like Man, was not.
The patrol fleets were not in touch with their home base, as communication through sub-space was impossible. This was established by repeated questioning of the alien prisoner, whose name was an approximation of the syllable Glodd.
Only chance had brought the patrol to the Solar system. It was so far from Lluagor, even by the dimension-cutting sub-space, that it might never have been found except for an accident in their navigation.
Terra had been conquered and ravaged and would now be kidnapped because of a slip of an alien finger on an unknown instrument panel!
CHAPTER VIII
"Well," said Trace, sucking in his breath, "thereissome hope."
"Where?" asked Bill Blacknight with deepest woe.
"Tell you later. Did I hear something out there?"
Bill jumped to the apertures and peered into the lighted theater. "There are half a dozen of 'em coming up the aisle," he said. "We are sunk."
"Not yet. What's that film on the reels there? Is it the main feature or a short?"
Bill gave him a glance that said he was out of his head, but obediently pulled the negative out a little and squinted sideways at it. "Feature. All ready to run. You want to entertain these lousy green hellions, Trace?" He shook his head. "My Lord, of all films to show 'em.The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.I saw that eight years ago, and it stunk then—about three-fourths of it's old newsreel clips."
"I know, I saw it," said Trace impatiently. "I noticed the marquee outside and I've been thinking ... can you work one of those gadgets? Those cameras?"
"The projector? Hell, yes. I can do anything in show business. You want sound too?" Bill, mystified, was trying to take orders without thinking about them.
"Yeah. Better start now, I want that ready to run as soon as we get a lot of greenies inside." As Bill began working over the projector, Trace scowled and did his best to remember the Grade C thriller he'd been conned into seeing so long ago. If only he was right about the opening scene! Slough, at the view-holes, said, "They're crowding in. The lights must suggest our presence."
"Get the show on the road," snapped Trace. He stood up; and the alien Glodd, seized the opportunity, rose as though he were spring-propelled and leaped for the stairs that led to freedom. Trace snatched at him, snarling; the Graken hit him with the flat of one big hand and Trace was hurled clear across the tiny room and into a stack of film cans. The one-eye slammed open the door and vanished down the steps, croaking like a buzzard in pain.
"Roll it!" yelled Trace at Bill. "Roll it! And throw up the sound as loud as you can, or we're stew for their supper tonight!"
The ten seconds were an eternity; then it was suddenly a chaos of noise in the theater, a crash of artificial thunder breaking out of nowhere to engulf the startled green men who choked the aisles and searched among the seats of main floor and balcony. Even in the projection booth, where the sound was muffled, the effect was that of some dreadful cataclysm. The thunder merged into a titanic roll of many military drums, and Trace barked, "House lights down!" but Bill Blacknight, the old showman, had already flicked them low.
On the screen appeared a countryside, through which a broad highway cut straight from the camera's position. Far down the road something moved, growing slowly and menacingly as the drums tattooed. The aliens were held petrified, staring with their great single eyes at the panoramic screen and the black and white picture thereon. Even Glodd had halted at the foot of the booth's steps, gazing immobile across the heads of his closest companions, all laved and assaulted by the strange burst of sound.
Trace stood in the open door, looking at their erstwhile prisoner. Glodd was their worst danger for the moment. There was no telling how much of their conversation about the movie he could have understood; yet even if he'd grasped none of it, he was still the only Graken who knew where they were—and he was not stupid. Trace had one of the ray pistols in his hand. Risking everything, he centered it on Glodd and hauled back the stiff trigger.