The Secret Galactics Read online

  Table of Contents

  SPECIAL REPORT

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  /// COMPUTER TRANSLATION FOLLOWS ///

  EARTH AGAINST THE

  ALIEN UNKNOWN …

  ‘What do you think the Deeans are up to?’

  ‘Another ship has come,’ said Nicer. ‘Their third in a hundred years.’

  ‘Do we care?’

  ‘Not basically.’

  ‘Suppose this time it’s conquest?’

  Copyright ©, 1974 by A.E. van Vogt

  SPECIAL REPORT

  From: Galactoid-Embrid Institute, Deea Branch

  To: All Invasion Force Personnel

  Subject: Human Women

  URGENT

  It should be noted that there is a developing interest in the above-named subject. More of the galactic groups, which have utilized our services from time to time, have decided to expand their earth commitment, and our own attempted conquest is about to begin.

  Members already operating on that planet long ago secretly brought to earth embryos of their several races—male embryos only—and, utilizing the special Luind technique, transformed the embryos so that, when they grew up, they looked like, and in fact were in all important essentials, human men.

  Like the rest of the men on earth, they then had the problem of dealing with human females.

  Earth—for those who do not know it—is the third planet of Sol, a sun 36,000 light-years from the central galactic axis of the Milky Way galaxy. The sun is a yellow G-type and can be seen on enlarged stellar maps as a tiny point of light almost exactly on the edge of one plane of this particular wheel-shaped spiral galaxy.

  It is agreed by all: women of earth have to be experienced to be believed. In the entire universe there seems to be no female quite so complex and unpredictable. Human women have been a mystery to their men from prehistoric times.

  It is well to note that earth women evolved in the particularly severe environment provided for them by their men. Outwardly, when first viewed, human males seem to be reasonable, kind, good-natured types with many worthwhile qualities. But in fact the women have found a percentage of them to be prejudiced, negating, restricting, determined to maintain total control.

  These male characteristics and other qualities of the three principal types of earth males—Real Men, Sex Beggars and Inverts—are one aspect of the problem that must be confronted in the conquest of this planet. The other aspect is of course the women. Here we have to deal with the four uncriticizable attitudes that we find in women. Also we have women in the shatter condition (many complex responses here), women in racial frames, women getting even, yelling women, women as workers, women Being Beautiful, women operating in a Secondary Philosophy, women who are 200% for their men, women who keep one well-shod foot out the door (so to speak) … women, women, women—

  Since at first we invaders did not understand all this, it is not surprising that women of earth in these early stages of the invasion have been the principal cause of our failure so far in unexpected and even dismaying ways.

  Transmission begins …

  Chapter One

  MAN OF NOTHING

  Shortly after midnight—

  In a manner of speaking, the phone rang inside Carl.

  Actually, what happened was the phone in the laboratory jingled. Instantly, a relay activated, connecting with a radio-TV transmitter—which triggered a ‘receiver’ inside the six-wheeled vehicle that contained Carl. He thereupon ‘heard’ the ringing with his auditory exteroceptors.

  Carl was a mobile structure. At the top of him was a plastic, transparent dome, and inside this was a curved, mirror-like container with clear liquid half-filling it. Partly submerged in the liquid, anchored in by almost invisible plastic, Carl’s pink and grey brain was visible. Different colored tubes were attached to the brain from below.

  The lower section of Carl was the computer and other equipment through which Carl’s disembodied brain operated the exteroceptor motors and his electronic eyes, ears, and voice box.

  The transparent dome with its brain, and the machinery below it, rested solidly on a six-wheeled truck.

  As his brain leaped out of sleep, Carl closed a relay which switched on the phone in the laboratory exactly as if somebody had picked up the receiver.

  From inside his brain, utilizing the elements of his voice from the years-ago recorded tapes, he controlled the mechanism by which an electronic voice box spoke the words. He said, ‘Hello. This is Carl.’

  ‘Carl, it is you!’ said a woman’s intense voice.

  He thought:—Good God! … her!

  The thoughts which at that moment did a skitter movement through his mind included an astonished realization: he hadn’t considered her among his suspects.

  Almost all the others were there: the women at Non-Pareil; the shady mistresses from the nightclubs mostly, whose beauty and talent had attracted him; the promoted call girls (promoted to be on salary as secretaries), and a number of desirable female bodies that fitted no particular psychologic category. Yet he had mentally and with suspicion taken note of each and every one; and in greater or lesser degree they—or rather somebody in their background—were all possibilities in his gallery of people who might have murdered him a year ago.

  Yes, murdered him.

  But not Silver.

  And, really, the group behind her was the most likely suspect.

  As the jumble of astonishment and memory completed, Carl realized she was speaking again, almost breathlessly, ‘I won’t ask you where you’ve been all these months. I’m so glad to hear your voice again, and to realize you’re all right. You can tell me the details later. Now, listen! Go at once to

  She gave him an address. As in the past, it was one of the swank residential districts. ‘There’s a man there, dead. The alienoids got him. But they couldn’t find what they wanted: a letter. Carl, you must go to the body and read that letter. It’s incredibly important in some way that I haven’t been able to find out. I’ll phone you there. Goodbye.’

  ‘Hey, wait—what?—’

  The click of the receiver being replaced came with finality through his own receptors.

  As he disconnected his own equipment for the phone, Carl was briefly caught up in images of his past association with the woman, Silver. But the emotion that kept coming was that her call, now, required an unexpectedly swift decision from him.

  It was a new thought for a man who, until recently, had been totally—but totally—immobile for over a year.

  From him. A decision.

  Man of nothing. Contacted now by a woman to whom he had once (during a period) made love. The most neuter male, now, ever, anywhere. Possessed of a bodiless brain, and without a skin to receive touch, or a hand to feel with. Yet, somehow, still a male in his thinking and his attitude.

  Gender, it would s
eem, is in the brain, not in the genitals. Behind him was a babyhood and a childhood of being an exceptionally honest, puzzled, curious boy. But with the teens came the change. After a faltering, naive beginning, he had been one of the fellows in his high school who really made it with the girls. And of course at college—wow! Money, good brains, hard study, and girls, girls, girls.

  Yet here he was, twenty years later, like this—

  Silver’s call was, nevertheless, it seemed to Carl, a remarkable opportunity.

  But—he’d have to tell somebody where he was going … if he went.

  Who?

  Tell who?

  He tried, first, Dr. MacKerrie’s cottage at the rear of the laboratory grounds. MacKerrie was the surgeon who had performed the delicate operation that, a year before, had transplanted Carl’s brain from his dying body to a machine which, until recently, had been immobile and restricted in other ways.

  After two rings, there was the familiar sound—familiar to Carl—of a recorder turning on. The voice of MacKerrie said, ‘The rest of this week, beginning August 23, I can be reached daytimes at the Brain Foundation, and evenings at—’ He gave a number.

  Carl did a mental calculation on how long it would take MacKerrie to get out of bed and drive over to the Hazzard Laboratories … Too long.

  With that, he reluctantly accepted that, since his one remaining option to call his wife (which, of course, would be madness; Marie would never understand), he would have to leave a tape account for MacKerrie. And that would be his sole protective action.

  Chapter Two

  BEYOND THE BARRIERS

  The night streets were brightly lighted. Traffic was still quite heavy. Carl drove easily. In the seat behind what appeared to be the steering: wheel, the human dummy sitting there went through a series of motions, which any person casually glancing toward him would take to be those of a real human male in a moving vehicle.

  The movements of the puppet were activated by gears fitted into its works, and driven by a toy-sized motor with a separate connection to the compressed air tank.

  The continuing … neutral … perfection of the journey made it possible for him to become aware that he was disturbed.

  Just thinking about Marie’s possible reaction to what he was doing had—he realized—upset him. Marie believed, with a woman’s perversity, that he would never have got himself killed in the first place if he had used good sense. She seemed to be unaware that women also (for God’s sake) were problems.

  He was waiting for a red light to change, as he had that thought. A dozen people at that moment were charging across the busy intersection. Carl actually suppressed an impulse to call to them: ‘You, there, listen. There is a man’s side to the man-woman thing. It isn’t all a case of guilty male and innocent, injured female.

  ‘Listen—when I was in my teens—’

  He had been fourteen, when, after discovering the delights of sex by way of Onanism, a simple, logical thought had struck him. Accordingly, he had approached a particularly attractive young high school miss, pointed out that between them they possessed all the equipment necessary for thorough co-exploration of the whole sex bit, and proposed that they begin forthwith during every possible private moment.

  The young lady’s outraged reaction caught him by surprise. She began by slapping his face. Then she told him what an awful person he was.

  After he had recovered, and it still seemed like a sensible idea, he subsequently made the same proposition to four other young ladies—and then gave up, baffled. A couple of months later, a youthful male acquaintance, in a boastful mood, mentioned that he was having an affair with the first girl.

  ‘I gave her the usual line,’ he said. ‘About how I’d fallen for her, and wanted to marry her, and how life had meaning for me now that I’d discovered she was in the world.’

  ‘You mean June?’ said Carl, interested.

  ‘Yeah, June.’

  ‘She fell for that?’

  ‘Yep. Just like they all do. Or some variation—you know, fit the honey to the particular bee.’

  Carl was bemused, recalling how he had pointed out to June something that he had already decided was true: that in fact life had no meaning, that their relationship probably wouldn’t last very long in a changing world, and that of course at the moment he had no plans for marriage. So—it had seemed logical to him—let’s have fun while we can.

  Good God! he had thought, as the inanity of his approach burst upon him.

  ‘You mean,’ he said to his informant, ‘your system works. Girls are like that.’

  ‘Never failed me yet,’ said the boastful one.

  From that moment of insight, Carl surged forward into the female universe with total power.

  The memory stirred him anew to a sense of the injustice of what Marie would think… She fell for my line just like the others did—There was only one puzzling aspect to the relationship … Why did I marry her?—

  The biggest lemon this side of Florida. And not only had he married her, but he’d stayed with her after she turned sour.

  Fourteen years, for heaven’s sake—

  He was about to attempt one more baffling analysis of that improbable act … when he spotted the house he was looking for.

  Instantly, Marie, sex, and his teen conquests faded from his mind.

  He could do things like that: concentrate.

  He began by making his usual preliminary survey. He drove around the block. And happily discovered there was a back alley.

  Into this he guided the panel truck. The best place to park—it turned out—was beside the fence of the house that was his destination. It indented slightly, giving him more room for the car. It was from the comparative darkness of his location beside the fence that Carl studied his situation.

  And now he was in a dilemma. Until his ‘death’ a year before, he had entered such houses as this with the ease of a powerful man in his early forties. Like a cat burglar, he vaulted fences, climbed into windows, scrambled over roofs.

  But now—how to manipulate the six-wheeled unit that was the cumbersome physical body, all that remained, of a once agile man? Manipulate it through gates, through locked doors, up stairways.

  It seemed impossible. Yet he knew that compressed air power, and the flexibility of the wheel system, made possible actions and movements that would otherwise be out of the question.

  Without further hesitation, Carl unlocked the rear opening of the truck and rolled down onto the rough pavement of the alleyway. There was a back gate. As he anticipated, it was padlocked from inside. But his hands reached with their crane-like extensors; reached over and reached down.

  For an instant, then, Carl peered at the barrier through a tiny TV camera set into a little hole in one steel arm. What he saw was a padlock … With a single, sharp movement of the steel ‘hands’ he snapped the lock in two.

  The sound of the metal breaking was almost inaudible.

  But the miniscule click as it cracked apart had an effect on him. Out of proportion excitement … I’m enjoying this.

  That was something women never understood, he thought. For a Real Man—Carl hesitated over the appellation as applied to himself; he was remembering the particular female who had in an over-sweet voice labelled him with the term one day; it was that sharp-minded Craig woman. Yet even then he was objective enough in his thinking to notice that it had a certain applicability … for a Real Man, danger actually was a stimulant. Women—those scaredy cats!—would never know how exhilarating it was to be in a battle, cool, observant, alert, prepared to do violence and face any consequences. Only males, it seemed to Carl, who are able to be like that, could ever call themselves men—

  The intense feeling continued, needing no body of flesh and blood to experience it. It seemed to derive in part from his awareness that he could do things in his present state that no human being could match.

  It was, literally, a sense of power. Realization came that the motor centers in his brain w
ere probably free of the restraint normal to the average ageing human. In that condition was pleasure in movement. In doing. In—danger.

  Unhesitating now, impelled by those energetic impulses, Carl pushed the gate open. Silently, he rolled through. Quickly, he closed the gate behind him, and, without pause, headed for the rear of the house.

  The back door was made of wood, with an ordinary Yale lock. Carl burned a curving slit out of the wood all the way around the lock, pushed the door open, and rolled up the three steps and into the house. It was easier than he had expected. What made it possible was the forcing power of compressed air and the flexibility inherent in a six-wheeled vehicle, wherein each wheel could be manipulated separately.

  He was relieved. Not quite the smoothness of human muscles, but the steel-and-motor strength was a powerful plus factor.

  He found the dead body in the library.

  Chapter Three

  ‘THE SHIP IS COMING!’

  Carl forced himself to take his usual precautions. He listened. Heard nothing. Well … street sounds, passing cars, distant night movements of the city. But nothing in the house.

  Were there people asleep upstairs?—Or was this one of those lucky times when the murdered man and his observer had a large two-story mansion to themselves under the protecting mantle of a night that was still in its early stage of darkness? It would be unwise to believe that the situation was that secure for him.

  The implication of danger did not seem to disturb him. And, in fact, at that precise moment he ‘felt’ the letter; and his awareness of his surroundings dimmed. For him, feeling meant that electronic sensors scanned what the finger extensions were touching, consulted a computer memory, and identified what was being felt as paper.

  He drew the letter out of its envelope carefully—it required both hand extensors and several finger extensions in an intricate, balanced maneuver—one important precaution had to be that he did not tear the damn thing into little pieces. So easy to do with all that incredibly strong motor-driven metal.