Space Beagle- the Complete Adventures Page 7

  Korita’s sibilant voice hissed out of the audioscope: “Morton, take this chance, but do not count on success. Notice that he has appeared once again before we have had time for a discussion. He is rushing us, whether intentionally or accidentally matters not, because the result is that we’re on the run, scurrying this way and that, futilely. So far we have not clarified our thoughts. I am convinced the vast resources of this ship can defeat any creature—any single creature—that has ever existed, or that ever will exist, but only if we have time to use them—”

  His voice blurred briefly in Morton’s ears. Von Grossen had taken a notebook from his pocket, and was sketching rapidly. He tore the sheet loose, and stepped forward, handed it to the creature, who examined it curiously.

  Von Grossen stepped back, and began to sketch again on the second page, with a swift deftness. This sheet he handed also the creature, who took one glance at it, and stepped back with a snarl that split his face. His eyes widened to blazing pools; one arm half reached forward toward von Grossen, then paused uncertainly.

  “What the devil have you done?” Morton demanded, his voice sounding unnaturally shrill even to himself.

  VON GROSSEN took several steps backward, until he stood level with Morton. To the commander’s amazement, he was grinning:.

  “I’ve just shown him,” the German physicist said softly, “how we can defeat him—neutronium alloy, of course and he—”

  Too late, Morton stepped forward, instinctively trying to interpose his huge form in front of von Grossen. A blur of red swept by him. Something—a hand moving so fast that it was invisible—struck him a stunning blow, and knocked him spinning against the nearest wall. For an instant, his body threatened to collapse from sheer, dazed weakness. The world went black, then white, then black.

  With appalling effort, he fought the weakness aside. The immense reservoir of strength in his magnificent body surged irresistibly forward; his knees stopped wavering, but his vision was still a crazy thing. As through a distorted glass, he saw that the thing was holding von Grossen in two fire-colored arms. The two-hundred-and-ten-pound physicist gave one convulsive heave of dismay; and then seemed to accept the overpowering strength of those thin, hard muscles.

  With a bellow, Morton clawed for his gun. And it was then that the maddest thing of all happened. The creature took a running dive, and vanished into the wall, still holding von Grossen. For an instant, it seemed to Morton like a crazy trick of vision. But there was only the smooth gleamingness of the wall, and eleven staring, perspiring men, seven of them with drawn weapons, which they fingered helplessly.

  “We’re lost!” a man whispered. “If he can adjust our atomic structure, and take us through walls, we can’t fight him.”

  Morton chilled his heart to the dismay he read in that rough semicircle of faces. He said coldly:

  “Your report, Pennons?”

  There was a brief delay, then the engineer’s lean leathery face, drawn with strain and effort, stared into the plate: “Nothing!” he replied succinctly. “Clay, one of my assistants, thinks he saw a flash of scarlet disappearing through a floor, going down. That’s a clue of course. It means our search will be narrowed to the lower half of the ship. As for the rest, we were just lining up our units when it happened. You gave us only two minutes. We needed three!”

  Morton nodded, his thoughtful mood interrupted by the abrupt realization that his fingers were shaking. With a muttered imprecation, he clenched them, and said icily:

  “Korita has given us our cue—organization. The implications of that word must be fully thought out, and coordinated to the knowledge we have of the creature. Von Grossen, of course, has given us our defense—neutronium alloy.”

  “I don’t follow the argument,” interjected Zeller, the metallurgist.

  It was Smith who explained: “The commander means that only two parts of the ship are composed” of that incredibly dense metal, the outer shell and the engine room. If you had been with us when we first captured this creature, you would have noticed that, when the damned thing fell through the floor of the cage, it was stopped short by the hard metal of the ship’s crust. The conclusion is obviously that it cannot slip through such metal; and the fact that it ran for the air lock is proof. The wonder is that we didn’t think of it before.”

  Morton barked: “Therefore, to the heart of the ship—-the engine room. And we won’t go out of there till we’ve got a plan. Any other way, he’ll run us ragged.”

  “What about von Grossen?” a man ventured.

  Morton snapped harshly: “Don’t make us think of von Grossen. Do you want us all to go crazy?”

  IN THAT vast room of vast machines, the men were dwarfs in gigantica. It was a world apart; and Morton, for the first time in years, felt the alien, abnormal tremendousness of it. His nerves jumped at each special burst of unholy blue light that sparkled and coruscated upon the great, glistening sweep of the ceiling. Blue light that was alive, pure energy that no eliminators had ever been able to eliminate, no condensers absorb.

  And there was something else that sawed on his nerves now. A sound—imprisoned in the very air! A thin hum of terrifying power, a vague rumble, the faintest, quivering reverberation of an inconceivable flow of energy.

  Morton glanced at his watch, and stood up with an explosive sigh of relief. He swept up a small sheaf of notes from a metal desk. The silence of unsmiling men became the deeper, tenser silence of men who fixed him with their eyes. The commander began:

  “This is the first breathing spell we’ve had since that creature came aboard less than—incredible as it may seem—less than two hours ago. I’ve been glancing through these notes you’ve given me, and I’ve divided them into two sections: those that can be discussed while we’re putting into effect the purely mechanical plans for cornering the thing—these latter must be discussed now. There are two. First, Zeller!”

  The metallurgist stepped forward, a brisk, middle-aged, young-looking man. He started: “The creature made no attempt to keep the drawings which von Grossen showed it—proof, incidentally, that von Grossen was not seized because of the drawings. They fell on the floor; and I picked them up. I’ve been showing them around, so most of you know that the first drawing is a likeness of the creature stepping through a metal wall; and beside the wall is an enlarged atom system of the type of which the wall is composed—two hundred electrons arranged about the nucleus, forming a series of triangles.

  “The second picture was a rough, unfinished but unmistakable single atom of neutronium alloy, with only eight hundred of the forty thousand electrons showing, but the design of each eighty electrons with their sixteen sides clearly indicated. That kind of language is inter-galactic; and the creature understood the point instantly. He didn’t like it, as we all saw by his actions; but apparently he had no intention of being thwarted; and perhaps saw the difficulty we might have in using such knowledge against him. Because, just as we cannot energize the walls of the whole ship—Pennons has said it would take days—so we have no materials to plate the ship throughout with neutronium alloy. The stuff is too rare.

  “However, we have enough for me to build a suit of space armor, with which one of us could search for von Grossen, whom the thing is obviously hiding behind some wall. For the search, naturally, we’d use a fluorite camera. My assistant is already working out the suit, but we’d like suggestions—”

  There were none; and, after a moment, Zeller disappeared into the machine shops adjoining the engine room. Morton’s grim face relaxed slightly.

  “For myself, I feel better knowing that, once the suit is built—in about an hour—the creature will have to keep moving von Grossen in order to prevent us from discovering the body. It’s good to know that there’s a chance of getting back one of the boldest minds aboard the ship.”

  “How do you know he’s alive?” a man asked.

  “Because the creature could have taken Darjeeling’s dead body, but didn’t. He wants us alive—Smith’
s notes have given us a possible clue to his purpose, but let that go now. Pennons, outline the plan you have—this is our main plan, gentlemen; and we stand or fall by it.”

  THE chief engineer came forward; and it worried Morton to note that he was frowning blackly. His usually dynamic body lacked briskness and suggested uncertainty. The implications of the lack of confidence were mind-shaking. The mechanical wizard, the man who knew more about energy and its practical application that any other living human being—this man unsure of himself—

  His voice added to Morton’s dismay. It held a harsh, nasal tone that the commander had never heard from him in all the years he had known the man.

  “My news isn’t pleasant. To energize this ship under a controlled system would require about a hundred hours. There are approximately two square miles of floors and walls, mostly walls. And of course, as I said before, uncontrolled energization would be suicide.

  “My plan is to energize the seventh level and the ninth, only the floors and not the walls. Our hope is this: so far the creature has made no organized attempt to kill us.

  Korita says that this is because he is a peasant, and does not fully realize the issues at stake. As a peasant he is more concerned with reproduction, though what form that is taking, and why he has, captured von Grossen is a matter for our biologist. We know, as apparently he does not, that it’s a case of destroy him, or he’ll destroy us. Sooner or later, even a peasant will realize that killing us comes first, before anything else, and from that moment we’re lost. Our chance is that he’ll delay too long—1 a vague chance, but we must accept it because it is based on the only analysis of the creature that we have—Korita’s! If he doesn’t interfere with our work, then we’ll trap him on the eighth level, between the two energized floors.”

  Somebody interjected with a swift question: “Why not energize the seventh and eighth levels, so that he’ll be in hell the moment he starts down?”

  “Because”—Pennons’ eyes glittered with a hard, unpleasant* light—“when he starts down, he’ll have one of us with him. We want that man to have a chance for life. The whole plan is packed with danger. It will take about an hour and a half to prepare the floors for energizing.”

  His voice became a harsh, grating sound: “And during that ninety minutes we’ll be absolutely helpless against him, except for our heavy service guns. It is not beyond, the bounds of possibility that he will carry us off at the rate of one every three minutes.”

  “Thirty out of a hundred and eighty!” Morton cut in with a chill incisiveness. “One out of every six in this room. Do we take the chance? Those in favor raise their hands.”

  He noted with intense satisfaction that not one man’s hand but was raised.

  THE REAPPEARANCE of the men brought Xtl up to the seventh level with a rush. A vague anxiety pushed into his consciousness, but there was no real sense of doubt, not even a shadow of the mental sluggishness that had afflicted him at first. For long minutes, he was an abnormal shape that flitted like some evil monster from a forgotten, hell through that wilderness of walls and corridors.

  Twice he was seen; and ugly guns flashed at him—guns as different from the simple action ato-guns as life from death. He analyzed them from their effects, the way they smashed down the walls, and made hard metal run like water. Heavy duty electronic guns these, discharging completely disintegrated atoms, a stream of pure electrons that sought union with stable matter in a coruscating fury of senseless desire.

  He could face guns like that, but only for the barest second would die spinning atom system within his body carry that intolerable load. Even the biologists, who had perfected the Xtl race, had found their limitations in the hot, ravening energy of smashed atoms.

  The important thing was: “What were the men doing with such determination? Obviously, when they shut themselves up in the impregnable engine room, they had conceived a plan—” With glittering, unwinking eyes, Xtl watched that plan take form.

  In every corridor, men slaved over atomic furnaces, squat things of dead-black metal. From a hole in the top of each furnace, a while glare spewed up, blazing forth in uncontrollable ferocity at the ceilings; intolerable flares of living fire, dazzling almost beyond endurance to Xtl protected by a solid metal wall as well as by his superlatively conditioned body.

  He could see that the men were half dazed by the devastating whiteness that beat against their vision. They wore their space armor with the ordinary transparent glassite electrically darkened. But no light metal armor could ward off the full effect of the deadly rays that sprayed, violent and untamed, in every direction.

  Out of the furnaces rolled long dully glowing strips of some material, which were instantly snatched into the maw of machine tools, skillfully hacked into exactly measured sections, and slapped onto the floors. Not an inch of floor, Xtl noticed, escaped being inclosed in some way or another by these strips. And the moment the strips were laid, massive refrigerators hugged close to them, and froze the heat out of them.

  His mind refused at first to accept the result of his observations. His brain persisted in searching for deeper purposes, for a cunning of vast and not easily discernible scope. Somewhere there must be a scheme that would explain the appalling effort the men were making. Slowly, he realized the truth.

  There was nothing more. These beings were actually intending to attempt the building of walls of force throughout the entire ship under a strict system of controls—anything less, of course, was out of the question. They could not be so foolish as to think that a partial energization could have the faintest hope of success. If such hope smoldered, it was doomed to be snuffed out.

  And total energization was equally impossible. Could they not realize that he would not permit such a thing; and that it would be a simple matter to follow them about, and tear loose their energization connections?

  IN COLD COMTEMPT, Xtl dismissed the machinations of the men from his mind. They were only playing into his hands, making it easier for him to get the guuls he still needed.

  He selected his next victim as carefully as he had selected von Grossen. He had discovered in the dead man—Darjeeling—that the stomach was the place he wanted; and the men with the largest stomachs were automatically on his list.

  The action was simplicity itself. A cold, merciless survey of the situation from the safety of a wall, a deadly swift rush and—before a single beam could blaze out in sullen rage—he was gone with the writhing, struggling body.

  It was simple to adjust his atomic structure the instant he was through a ceiling, and so break his fall on the floor beneath; then dissolve through the floor onto the level below in the same fashion. Into the vast hold of the ship, he half fell, half lowered himself.

  The hold was familiar territory now to the sure-footed tread of his long-toed feet. He had explored the place briefly but thoroughly after he first boarded the ship. And the handling of von Grossen had given him the exact experience he needed for this man.

  Unerringly, he headed across the dimly lit interior toward the far wall. Great packing cases piled up to the ceiling. Without pause, he leaped into them; and, by dexterous adjustment of his structure, found himself after a moment in a great pipe, big enough for him to stand upright—part of the miles of air-conditioning pipes in the vast ship.

  It was dark by ordinary light, but to his full vision a vague twilight glow suffused the place. He saw the body of von Grossen, and deposited his new victim beside the physicist. Carefully now, he inserted one of his slender hands into his own breast; and removed one precious egg—deposited it into the stomach of the human being.

  The man had ceased struggling, but Xtl waited for what he knew must happen. Slowly, the body began to stiffen, the muscles growing rigid. The man stirred; then, in evident panic, began to fight as he realized the paralysis that was stealing over him. But remorselessly Xtl held him down.

  Abruptly, the chemical action was completed. The man lay motionless, every muscle stiff as a rock, a horrib
le thing of taut flesh.

  There were no doubts now in Xtl’s mind. Within a few hours, the eggs would be hatching inside each man’s stomach; and in a few hours more the tiny replicas of himself would have eaten themselves to full size.

  Grimly complacent, he darted up out of the hold. He needed more hatching places for his eggs, more guuls.

  ON THE ninth level now, the men slaved. Waves of heat rolled along the corridor, a veritable inferno wind; even the refrigeration unit in each spacesuit was hard put to handle that furious, that deadly blast of superheated air. Men sweated in their suits, sick from the heat, dazed by the glare, laboring almost by instinct.

  At last, Morton shut off his own furnace. “Thank Heaven, that’s finished!” he exclaimed; then urgently: “Pennons, are you ready to put your plan into effect?”

  “Ready, aye, ready!” came the engineer’s dry rasp of a voice on the communicators. He finished even more harshly: “Four men gone and one to go. We’ve been lucky—but there is one to go!”

  “Do you hear that, you spacehounds!” Morton barked. “One to go. One of us will be bait—and don’t hold your guns in your hands. He must have the chance at that bait. Kellie, elaborate on those notes you gave me before.

  It will clear up something very important, and keep our minds off that damned thing.”

  “Er!” The cracked voice of the sociologist jarred the communicators. “Er, here is my reasoning. When we discovered the thing it was floating a million light-years from the nearest system, apparently without means of spatial locomotion. Picture that appalling distance, and then ask yourself how long it would require for an object to float by it by pure chance. Gunlie Lester gave me my figures, so I wish he would tell you what he told me.”

  “Gunlie Lester speaking!” The voice of the astronomer sounded surprisingly brisk. “Most of you know the prevailing theory of the beginnings of the present universe: that it was formed by the disintegration of a previous universe several million million years ago, and that a few million million years hence our universe will complete its cycle in a torrent of explosions, and be replaced by another, which will develop from the maelstrom. As for Kellie’s question, it is not at all impossible; in fact, it would require several million million years for a creature floating by pure chance to reach a point a million light-years from a planet. That is what you wanted, Kellie?”