Discord in Scarlet Read online

  Discord in Scarlet

  A. E. VanVogt

  IXTL sprawled unmoving in the boundless night. Time paced slowly toward the eternity, and space was fathomlessly black. Across the immensity, vague patches of light gleamed coldly at him. Each, he knew, was a galaxy of blazing stars, shrunk by incredible distance to shining swirls of mist. Life was out there, spawning on the myriad planets that wheeled endlessly around their parent suns. In the same way, life had once crawled out of the primeval mud of ancient Glor, before a cosmic explosion destroyed his own mighty race and flung his body out into the intergalactic deeps.

  He lived; that was his personal catastrophe. Having survived the cataclysm, his almost unkillable body maintained itself in a gradually weakening state on the light energy that permeated all space and time. His brain pulsed on and on in the same old, old cycle of thought - thinking: one chance in decfflions that he would ever again find himself in a galactic system. And then an even more infinitesimal chance that he fall on a planet and find a precious guul. A billion billion times that thought had pounded to its unvarying conclusion. It was a part of him now. It was like an endless picture unrolling before his mind’s eye.

  Together with those remote wisps of shiningness out there in that gulf of blackness, it made up the world in which he had his existence. He had almost forgotten the far-flung field of sensitivity his body maintained. In past ages that field had been truly vast, but now that his powers were waning, no signals came to him beyond the range of a few light-years.

  He expected nothing, and so the first stimulus from the ship scarcely more than touched him. Energy, hardness - matter! The vague sense perception fumbled into his dulled brain. It brought a living pain, like a disused muscle briefly, agonizingly, into action. The pain went away. The thought faded. His brain slid back into its sleep of ages. He lived again in the old world of hopelessness and shining light splotches in a black space. The very idea of energy and matter became a dream that receded. A remote corner of his mind, somehow more alert, watched it go, watched the shadows of forgetfulness reach out with their enveloping folds of mist, striving to engulf the dim consciousness that had flashed into such an anguish of ephemeral existence.

  And then once more, stronger, sharper, the message flashed from a remote frontier of his field. His elongated body convulsed in senseless movement. His four arms lashed out, his four legs jackknifed with blind, unreasoning strength.

  That was his muscular reaction. His dazed, staring eyes refocused. His stultified vision was galvanized into life. The part of his nervous system that controlled the field took its first unbalancing action.

  In a flash of tremendous effort, he withdrew it from the billions of cubic miles from which no signals had come, and concentrated its forces in an attempt to pinpoint the area of greatest stimulation.

  Even as he fought to locate it, it moved a vast distance. For the first time, then, he thought of it as a ship flying from one galaxy to another. He bad a moment of awful fear that it would move beyond where he could sense it, and that he would lose contact forever before he could do anything.

  He let the field spread out slightly, and felt the shock of impact as once more he received the unmistakable excitation of alien matter and energy. This time he clung to it. What had been his field became a beam of all the energy his weakened body could concentrate. Along that tightly held beam, he drew tremendous bolts of power from the ship. There was more energy - by many millions of times than he could handle. He had to deflect it from himself, had to discharge it into the darkness and the distance. But, like some monstrous leech, he reached out four, five, ten light-years, and drained that great ship of its drive power.

  After countless eons of eking out his existence on fragile darts of light energy, he did not even dare to try to handle the colossal power. The vastness of space absorbed the flow as if it had never been. What he did let himself receive shocked the life back into his body. With a savage intensity, he realized the extent of the opportunity. Frantically, he adjusted his atomic structure and drove himself along the beam.

  In the far distance, the ship - its drive off but its momentum carrying it forward coasted past him and began to draw farther away. It receded an entire light-year, then two, and then three. In a black despair, IXTL realized it was going to escape in spite of all his efforts. And then … the ship stopped. In mid-flight. One instant, it was coasting along at a velocity of many light-years a day. The next, it was poised in space, all its forward momentum inhibited and transformed. It was still a tremendous distance away, but it was no longer receding.

  IXTL could guess what had happened. Those aboard the vessel had become aware of his interference and were deliberately stopping to find out what had happened, and what had caused it. Their method of instantaneous deceleration suggested a very advanced science, though he could not decide just what technique of anti-acceleration they had used. There were several possibilities.

  He himself intended to stop by converting his gross velocity into electronic action within his body. Very little energy would be lost in the process. The electrons in each atom would speed up slightly - so slightly - and thus the microscopic speed would be transformed to movement on the microscopic level.

  It was on that level that he suddenly sensed the ship was near.

  A number of things happened then, following each other too swiftly for thought.

  The ship put up an impenetrable energy screen. The concentration of so much energy set off the automatic relays he had established in his body. That stopped him a fraction of a microsecond before he had intended to. In terms of distance, that came to just over thirty miles.

  He could see the ship as a point of light in the blackness ahead. Its screen was still up, which meant, in all probability, that those inside could not detect him and that he could no longer hope to get to the ship itself. He assumed that delicate instruments aboard had sensed his approach, identified him as a projectile, and raised the screen as a defense.

  IXTL flashed to within yards of the almost invisible barrier. And there, separated from the realization of his hopes, he gazed hungrily at the ship. It was less than fifty yards away, a round, dark-bodied metal monster, studded with row on row of glaring lights, like diamonds. The space ship floated in the velvet-black darkness, glowing like an immense jewel, quiescent but alive, enormously, vitally alive. It brought nostalgic and vivid suggestion of a thousand far-flung planets and of an indomitable, boisterous life that had reached for the stars, and grasped them. And - in spite of present frustration - it brought hope.

  Till this instant there had been so many physical things to do that he had only dimly comprehended what it might mean to him if he could get aboard. His mind, grooved through the uncounted ages to ultimate despair, soared up insanely. His legs and arms glistened like tongues of living fire as they writhed and twisted in the light that blazed from the portholes. His mouth, a gash in his caricature of a human head, slavered a white frost that floated away in little frozen globules. His hope grew so big that the thought of it kept dissolving in his mind, and his vision blurred.

  Through that blur, he saw a thick vein of light form a circular bulge in the metaffic surface of the ship. The bulge became a huge door that rotated open and tilted to one side. A flood of brilliance spilled out of the opening. There was a pause, and then a dozen two-legged beings came into view. They wore almost transparent armor, and they dragged, or guided, great floating machines.

  Swiftly, the machines were concentrated around a small area on the ship’s surface. From a distance, the flames that poured forth seemed small, but their dazzling brightness indicated either enormous heat or else a titanic concentration of other radiation. What was obviously repair work proceeded at an alarming ra
te.

  Frantically, IXTL probed the screen that barred him from the ship, looking for weak spots. He found none. The force was too complex, its coverage too wide, for anything that he could muster against it. He had sensed that at a distance.

  Now he faced the reality of it.

  The work - IXTL saw they had removed a thick section of the outer wall and replaced it with new material - was finished almost as quickly as it had begun.

  The incandescent glare of the welders died spluttering into darkness. Machines were unclamped, floated toward tile opening, down into it, and out of sight. The two-legged beings scrambled after them. The large, curved plain of metal was suddenly as deserted and lifeless as space itself.

  The shock of that nearly unseated IXTL’s reason. He couldn’t let them escape him now, when the whole universe was in his grasp - a few short yards away. His arms reached out, as if he would hold the ship by his need alone. His body ached with a slow, rhythmical hurt. His mind spun toward a black, bottomless pit of despair, but poised just before the final plunge. The great door was slowing in its swift rotation. A solitary being squeezed through the ring of light and ran to the area that had been repaired. He picked up something and started back towards the open air lock. He was still some distance from it when he saw IXTL.

  He stopped as if he had been struck. Stopped, that is, in a physically unbalanced fashion. In the glow from the portholes, his face was plainly visible through his transparent space suit. His eyes were wide, his mouth open. He seemed to catch himself. His lips began to move rapidly. A minute later, the door was rotating again, outward. It swung open, and a group of the beings came out and looked at IXTL. A discussion must have followed, for their lips moved at uneven intervals, first one individual’s, then another’s. Presently, a large metal-barred cage was floated up out of the air lock. There were two men sitting on it, and they seemed to be steering it under its own power. IXTL guessed that he was to be captured.

  Curiously, he had no sense of lift. It was as if a drug was affecting him, dragging him down into an abyss of fatigue. Appalled, he tried to fight the enveloping stupor. He would need all his alertness if his race, which had attained the very threshold of ultimate knowledge, was to live again.

  “How in the name of all the hells can anything live in intergalactic space?”

  The voice, strained and unrecognizable, came through the communicator of Grosvenor’s space suit as he stood with the others near the air lock. It seemed to him that the question made the little group of men crowd closer together. For him, the proximity of the others was not quite enough. He was too aware of the impalpable yet inconceivable night that coiled about them, pressing down to the very blazing portholes.

  Almost for the first time since the voyage had begun, the immensity of that darkness struck home to Grosvenor. He had looked at it so often from inside the ship that he had become indifferent. But now he was suddenly aware that man’s farthest stellar

  frontiers were but a pin point in this blackness that reached billions of light-years in every direction.

  The voice of Director Morton broke through the scared silence. “Calling Gunlie Lester inside the ship… Gunlie Lester…”

  There was a pause; then, “Yes, Director?” Grosvenor recognized the voice of the head of the astronomy department.

  “Gunlie,” Morton went on, “here’s something for your astro-mathematical brain.

  Will you please give us the ratio of chance that blew out the drivers of the Beagle at the exact point in space where that thing was floating? Take a few hours to work it out.”

  The words brought the whole scene into even sharper focus. It was typical of mathematician Morton that he let another man have the limelight in a field in which he himself was a master.

  The astronomer laughed, then said in an earnest tone, “I don’t have to do any figuring. One would need a new system of notation to express the chance arithmetically. What you’ve got out there can’t happen, mathematically speaking.

  Here we are, a shipload of human beings, stopping for repairs halfway between two galaxies - the first time we’ve ever sent an expedition outside our own island universe.

  Here we are, I say, a tiny point intersecting without pre-arrangement exactly the path of another, tinier point. It’s impossible, unless space is saturated with such creatures.”

  It seemed to Grosvenor that there was a more likely explanation. The two events could conceivably be in the simple relationship of cause and effect. A huge hole had been burned in the engine-room wall. Torrents of energy had poured out into space.

  Now they had stopped to repair the damage. He parted his lips to say as much, and then closed them. There was another factor, the factor of the forces and probabilities involved in that assumption. Just how much power would be needed to drain the output of a pile of a few minutes? Briefly he considered the formula applicable, and shook his head slightly. The figures that came through were so enormous that the hypothesis he had intended to offer seemed automatically ruled out. A thousand coeurls among them couldn’t have handled energy in such quantities, which suggested that machines, not individuals, were involved.

  Somebody was saying, “We ought to turn a mobile unit on anything that looks like that.”

  The shudder in his voice stirred a like emotion in Grosvenor. The reaction must have run along the communicators, because, when Director Morton spoke, his tone indicated he was trying to throw off the chill of the other man’s words.

  Morton said, “A regular blood-red devil spewed out of a nightmare, ugly as sin - and possibly as harmless as our beautiful pussy a few months ago was deadly.

  Smith, what do you think?” The gangling biologist was coldly logical. “This thing, as far as I can make it out from here, has arms and legs, a development of purely planetary evolution. If it is intelligent, it will begin to react to the changing environment the moment it is inside the cage. It may be a venerable old sage, meditating in the silence of space where there are no distractions. Or it may be a young murderer, condemned to exile, consumed with desire to get back home and resume life in his own civilization.”

  “I wish Korita had come out with us,” said Pennons, the chief engineer, in his quiet, practical fashion. “His analysis of pussy on the cat planet gave us an advance idea of what we had to face and - ”

  “Korita speaking, Mr. Pennons.” As usual, the Japanese archeologist’s voice came over the communicators with meticulous clarity. “Like many of the others, I have been listening to what is happening, and I must admit I am impressed by the image I can see of this creature on the vision plate before me. But I’m afraid analysis on the basis of cyclic history would be dangerous at this factless stage. In the case of pussy, we had the barren, almost foodless planet on which he lived, and the architectural realities of the crumbled city: But here we have a being living in space a quarter of a million light-years from the nearest planet, existing apparently without food, and without means of spatial locomotion. I suggest the following: Keep the screen up, except for an opening for the cage to be taken out. When you have your creature actually in the cage, study him - every action, every reaction. Take pictures of his internal organs working in the vacuum of space. Find out everything about him, so that we shall know what we are bringing aboard. Let us avoid killing, or being killed. The greatest precautions are in order.”

  “And that,” said Morton, “is sense.”

  He began to issue orders. More machines were brought up from inside the ship.

  They were set up on a smooth, curving expanse of the outer surface, except for a massive fluorite camera. That was attached to the mobile cage.

  Grosvenor listened uneasily while the Director gave final instructions to the men guiding the cage. “Open the door as wide as possible,” Morton was saying, “and drop it over him. Don’t let his hands grab the bars.”

  Grosvenor thought, It’s now or never. If I have any objections, I’ve got to offer them. There seemed nothing to say. He could o
utline his vague doubts. He could carry Gunlie Lester’s comment to its logical conclusion and say that what had happened could not be an accident. He might even suggest that a shipload of the red, devil-like beings was possibly waiting in the distance for their fellow to be picked up.

  But the fact was that all the precautions against such eventualities had been taken. If there were a ship, then by opening the protective screen only enough to admit the cage, they were offering a minimum target. The outer skin might be seared, the men on it killed. But the vessel itself would surely be safe.

  The enemy would find that his action had served no useful purpose. He would find arrayed against him a formidable armed and armored vessel, manned by members of a race that could pursue a battle to a remorseless conclusion.

  Grosvenor reached that point in his speculation, and decided to make no comment. He would hold his doubts in reserve.

  Morton was speaking again. “Any final remarks from anyone?”

  “Yes.” The new voice belonged to von Grossen. “I’m in favor of making a thorough examination of this thing. To me, thorough means a week, a month.”

  “You mean,” said Morton, “we sit here in space while our technical experts study the monster?”

  “Of course,” said the physicist.

  Morton was silent for several seconds, then he said slowly, “I’ll have to put that up to the others, von Grossen. This is an exploratory expedition. We are equipped to take back specimens by the thousand. As scientists, all is grist for our mill. Everything must be investigated. Yet I feel sure that the objection will be made that if we sit out in space an entire month for each specimen we plan to take aboard, this journey will take five hundred years instead of five or ten. I do not offer that as a personal objection. Obviously, every specimen must be examined and dealt with on its own merits.”

  “My point,” said von Grossen, “is let’s think it over.”