The Onslaught from Rigel, Fletcher Pratt [smallest ebook reader .TXT] 📗

ape-men who had been released from the car at the same time. The tunnel led them straight ahead for a distance, then dipped and turned to the right. As he rounded the corner he could see that it ended below and before him in some room where machinery whirred. The ape-men went straight on, looking neither to the right nor the left. As they reached the door that gave into the machine-room they encountered another ape-man wearing the same kind of helmet with its attached tube, as Sherman's instructor had worn. The ape-men who came with him stopped. The helmeted one looked at them stupidly for a moment and then, as though obeying some unspoken command, took one by the arm and led him across the room to the front of a machine and there thrust one of the ubiquitous helmets on his head.

The machine, as nearly as Sherman could make out, was a duplicate of that on which he had injured his fingers; as the helmet was buckled on the ape-man who stood before it he immediately began to watch the ground-glass panels and put his fingers in the holes below.

The process was repeated with the second ape-man, and then the sentinel returned to Sherman. Taking him by the arm, the mechanical beast led him past the row of machines (there seemed to be only four in the room) and to a door at one side, giving him a gentle push. It was the opening of another tunnel, down which Sherman walked for some forty or fifty yards before encountering a second door and a second helmeted ape-man sentry.

This one did exactly as the first had done. Stared at him for a moment, then took him by the arm and led him across the room to a machine, where it left him. Sherman perceived that he was supposed to care for it, and with a sigh, bent to his task.

It was some moments before the rapid flashing of lights gave him a respite. Then he had an opportunity to look about him and observed that, as in the other room, there were four machines. Two of them were untenanted, but at the one next to his, there was someone working. When he glanced again, he was sure it was a mechanized human like himself—and a girl!

"What is this place?" he asked, "and who are you?"

The other gave a covert glance over his shoulder at the sentry by the door.

"Sssh!" she said out of the corner of her mouth, "not so loud.... I'm Marta Lami—and I think this place is hell!"

After a time they contrived a sort of conversation, a word at a time, with covert glances at the ape-man sentry. He looked at them suspiciously once or twice, but as he made no attempt to interfere they gained confidence.

"Who—is—keeping—us—here?" asked Sherman.

"Don't—know," she replied in the same manner. "Think—it's—the—elephants."

"What elephants?" he asked a word at a time. "I haven't seen any."

"You will. They come around and inspect what you're doing. Are you new here?"

"New at these machines. They had me teaching them to write English. This is my first day in here."

"This is my eightieth work-period. We lost track of the days."

"So did I. Where are we? Are there any other humans with you?"

"One in the cage across the corridor from me. Walter Stevens the Wall Street man."

"Have they got him on this job, too?"

"Yes."

Sherman could not avoid a snicker. Back in the days before the comet he had had Stevens as a passenger once, and a more difficult customer to satisfy, a more cocksure-of-his-own-importance man he had never seen. The thought of him burning his fingertips up in one of these machines gave him some amusement. But his next question was practical.

"Do you know what these machines are for?"

"Haven't the least idea; Stevens said they were for digging something. They had the helmets on him twice."

"What helmets?"

"Like the dopey at the door wears. The dopeys all have to wear them."

"Why?"

"Haven't got any brains, I guess. I had one on once when they were teaching me to do this. They tell you what to think."

"What do you mean?"

"You put the helmet on and it's like you're hypnotized. You can't think anything but what they want you to think."

Sherman shuddered slightly. So that was how the mechanical ape-men were controlled so perfectly!

"How did they get you?" asked the girl who had described herself as Marta Lami.

"In an airplane. I'm an aviator. They shot me down somewhere and when I came to, put me in one of those cages. How did you get here?"

"The birds. I was at West Point with Stevens and that old fool Vanderschoof. They started shooting at the birds and the birds just picked us up and flew away with us."

"Where were you after you came to? I mean after the comet."

"New York. Century Roof. I was dancing there before."

"You aren't Marta Lami, the dancer?"

"Sure. Who the hell do you think?"

He turned and regarded her deliberately, careless of the aroused attention of the sentry. So this was the famous dancer who had blazed across two continents and three divorce suits—who had been proclaimed the most beautiful woman in the world in starring electric lights before an applauding Broadway; for whose performances speculators held tickets at prize-fight premiums! How little she resembled it now, a parody of the human form, working her fingers off as the slave of an alien and conquering race.

She asked the next question:

"Where have they got you?"

"I don't know. In a cage somewhere. The only people around there are like these mugs." He nodded toward the ape-man.

"I wonder how long they'll keep us at this."

"I wish I could tell you. How's chances of making a break?"

"Rotten. There was a guy at the next machine tried it three or four work-periods ago. He socked the dopey at the door."

"What happened?"

"They sent a machine down for him and gave him the yellow lights all over. It was fierce, you should have heard him scream."

"How far down are we, anyway?"

"You got me, boy friend. Sssh! Watch the dopey."

Sherman glanced over his shoulder to see the ape-man moving aside from the door and bent back to his work. Evidently something important was imminent, judging from the actions of the sentry and the energetic attention the ex-dancer was giving to her machine. He was not deceived. Down the passage came something moving; something flesh-like and smooth, of a pale, grey-blue, dead-fish color, like a dangling serpent, then a round bulging head and finally the full form of an elephant!

But such an elephant as mortal eye had never before seen. For it stood barely eight feet high and its legs were both longer and infinitely more slender and graceful than the legs of any earthly elephant. The ears were smaller, not loose flaps of skin, but possessed of definite form and pressed close to the head. The skull was enormous, bulging at the forehead, and wrinkled in the middle down over the large intelligent eyes in an expression permanently cross and dissatisfied. As for the trunk it reached nearly to the floor, longer and thinner in proportion than the trunk of an ordinary elephant, and at its tip divided into four finger-like projections set around the circle of the nostril.

Oddest of all, the elephant wore clothes! Or at least an outer garment, a kind of long cloak which appeared to be attached underneath its body and which covered every portion except the ankles. The feet also were covered. A kind of hood hung back from the head on that portion of the cloak which rested on the creature's back. But what chiefly aroused Sherman's sense of strangeness and loathing was that the naked skin, wherever exposed, was of that same poisonous, dead-fish blue.

For a moment the thing stood in the doorway, regarding them, swinging its long trunk around restlessly, as though it could tell something about them by its sense of smell. Then it advanced a step or two into the room, and placing its trunk close to Sherman's body, began to run over it, sniffing, a few inches away. He felt that he wanted to shriek, to turn and strike the thing, or to run, but a warning glance from the dancer kept him motionless.

Apparently satisfied with the result of its examination the elephant turned to go, stopping as it did so to unhook some projection on the ape-man's helmet and apply it to its ear. After listening for a moment, it put the end of the trunk to this projection, snorted into it, and went away with soundless steps.

For several minutes the two worked on in silence after this. Then:

"Well, now you seen him," said the dancer, in the same word-by-word fashion as before. "That was our boss."

"That—thing?" asked Sherman, incredulously.

"I'll tell the cockeyed world. Say, those babies know more than Einstein ever heard of. Try to get fresh with one of them and see."

"What do they do?"

"Shoot you with one of the light-guns. They carry little ones around with them. They melt you down wherever they hit you and you have to go to the operating room to have things put back and it hurts like hell."

"Oh, I must have been there after they brought me down in my plane. They did something to my back."

"Then you know, boy friend. After that they put the helmet on you and you have to tell 'em what you're thinking about. You can beat that game, though, if you're careful. All I'd give 'em was how good a couple of Scotch highballs would taste and it made monkeys of 'em."

It was all very strange and not a little bewildering. Intelligent elephants that controlled forces beyond the powers of men; who could place a helmet on your head and read your thoughts; who could repair the new mechanized human form after it had apparently suffered irreparable damage, and who treated men and women as lower animals. Their arrival must have been that of the comet.

Herbert Sherman had read deeply enough, though not widely. He remembered some Englishman—Colvin—Kevin—Kelvin, that was it!—who had a theory that life had drifted to the earth from somewhere out in the void of space and time. Had these, too, drifted in, in the same way the ancestors of man had come, to set a period to the day of man's dominance over creation? A strange enough creation it was now, though, with its mechanical men and its animals turned to metal statues. He wondered what Noah would say, and giggled at the thought.

"What's the joke, boy friend?"

"Oh, nothing. I had an idea."

Their plight at the hands of these master-animals was bad, but it might be worse. At least he had a certain amount of freedom, he was stronger than he had ever before been in his life, and felt quite as intelligent. It would be strange if he could not accomplish something.... He fell to planning out ways of escaping and failed to notice the pain in his fingers in the intensity of his thoughts.

Everything seemed to show that the operation of most of these machines was predominantly electrical. It would be strange if the car that carried them to and fro was not, yes and by Jove, the helmets the ape-men wore. If he could short-circuit the works, or even a part of them....

Apparently his new body was a good conductor and impervious to the injurious effects of the electric current. Short-circuit something, that was the idea, create a confusion—and trust to escaping in the midst of it? Perhaps—but at all events a good deal could be learned about these elephant-men and their methods by watching them in such an emergency. Their machinery was so efficient that a child could operate it; it was in a pinch that their real intelligence would show.

It struck him that it would do little good to escape unless he did learn something about these elephant-people, their mysterious light-guns, their vast city that they seemed to have hollowed out of the heart of the solid Catskill rock, their chemistry and metallurgy and methods of attack and defense. Otherwise escape would be a jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. There would be nothing for it but a desperate, harried existence, the existence of one of the lower animals faced by the insupportable competition of man.

Information! That was the first need. He must bend all his energies to the task of obtaining it.

"By the way, what do these eggs call themselves?" he asked.

"Lassans," said the dancer.

A light flickered along the corridor. The ape-man at the door came forward, touched him on the arm and led him to the passage where he caught the car back to his cage.

CHAPTER XIV In the Passages

The first thing to be done, Sherman decided,