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

Half a dozen ape-men stood behind the benches of their masters apparently serving at this singular meal.

As the two humans entered there was one of those silences which are pregnant with events. Then:

"Good evening, folks. How's the boy?" said Marta, and curtsied gracefully.

The sound of her words seemed to release the spell. With a bellow of rage the nearest Lassan leaped from his bench, fumbling at one of the pouches in his cloak. "The light-gun!" thought Sherman and braced himself to spring, but another of the masters extended his trunk and detained the first one. There was a momentary babble of rumbling conversation, then one of the Lassans reached behind him, picked up a helmet and placed it on his head, and attaching a tube to one of the ape-men, rose.

The ape-man moved toward Marta and Sherman like a being in a dream. They turned to run, but the Lassan produced a light-gun with such evident intention of using it at the first motion that they paused.

"Looks like we're in for it," said the dancer. "Oh, well, lead on Napoleon. What do we care for expenses?"

Under the direction of the Lassan the ape-man took them each by an arm and led them back through the hall of the metal fish, down among the machines, where two or three others stared at them curiously or lifted inquisitive trunks in their direction. Then into another passage which had one of the inevitable car-tracks. Their Lassan conductor reached around the corner into the passage, applied his trunk briefly to something and a moment later one of the cars slid silently into position. The door opened.

"So long, old scout," said Marta Lami. "Even if I never see you again, we had a great time together."

"So long," replied Sherman, taking his place in the car. He felt a distinct pang at leaving this dancer—vulgar, no doubt, and flippant, but gay and debonair, and the best of companions.

The car did not take them far. It discharged Sherman in a little passage before a narrow door, which opened automatically to admit him to a small blue-domed room containing nothing but a seat, one of the benches on which he had seen the Lassans reclining and a mass of wires and tubes. There seemed nothing in particular to do. He was at liberty, save that the door closed firmly behind him, cutting off escape, and seeing that he was left alone, he seated himself and began to examine the machinery, most of which was attached to his chair.

CHAPTER XV The Lassan Explains

Before he had time to riddle out any of its secrets the door opened again and one of the Lassans came in—a distinctly different type than any he had hitherto seen. This one was smaller than most; his skin, where exposed, was covered by a tracery of fine wrinkles and his coloring was whiter than the rest. Little crowfeet stood around the corners of his eyes, giving him an expression that was singularly humorous. He approached Sherman on noiseless feet, moved his trunk up and down as though examining him and then, producing from a pocket in his cloak one of the thought-helmets, set it on Sherman's head, tightened a connection or two with his trunk and placing a like device on his own head, settled himself on the twisted bench.

The ordeal of the helmet! "They make you think whatever they want you to; it's like being hypnotized," Marta Lami had said. He braced himself resolutely. This alien intelligence should not plumb his thoughts without a struggle....

To his surprise, there seemed no attempt to force his mind. The thought leaped up, unbidden, "Why, this—this Lassan is friendly!" No definite image or plan or connection of ideas formed itself in his brain; he merely felt enormously soothed and strengthened. After all, he found himself arguing, nobody desired to hurt him; merely to discover what curious process of thought had led him to act as he had.

"You are too intelligent, too high a type to have been put to work at the machines," came the unspoken thought of the Lassan. "We might better have put you at the controls of one of the fighting machines." (This thought caused a mental image of the giant silver fish he had seen in the hall of the dome to rise in his mind; he pictured himself as seated amid a mass of levers before a panel set with complex gauges.)

"It was a mistake," the thought he was receiving went on, "that you were sent there. The Alphen of the mental department, who had your case in charge should have known better. You earth-men make much better machines than the ones we brought with us. You do not even need the helmets in order to control. Some of you are even capable of understanding and operating the lights." (This, he explained afterward appeared not as a consecutive sentence in Sherman's mind, but as a succession of ideas, almost as though he were thinking them himself. With the word "lights" a complex picture presented itself, involving the light-guns and a large amount of other complex apparatus, whose exact uses he did not then or later understand, but which he felt he understood at the moment.)

"Now," the Lassan's thought went on, "I don't blame you for being frightened and trying to run away, but you know we are different and I don't quite understand what frightened you. You were working at a machine, were you not?" And as Sherman unconsciously thought of himself sticking his fingers in the apertures of the machines, "I thought so. What happened?"

Unbidden, the memory of the explosion came to him. Again he heard the Lassan's step in the corridor, saw the guard move aside, the sputter from the cable, and then the explosion; then his memory jumped to the moment of tugging at the stones with the roar and heat all round and the white-hot stream in pursuit.

A vague, but sympathetic thought reached him, followed by a question—"But what made that happen? You're intelligent, you understand these things, you are a mechanic—what made it happen?"

With a start of surprise Sherman realized that the Lassan had been leading him gently along from place to place—to trap him! He struggled desperately to keep the thought of the short-circuiting of the guard's helmet from his mind; struggled to think about anything else at all—thought of a plate of steaming corned beef and cabbage, of the multiplication table—5 x 5 = 25, all in neat rows of figures, thought of how to control a plane that had gone into a tail-spin....

The pressure suddenly relaxed, the mind opposite his became friendly again; once more he received the vague intimation of sympathy and understanding, even of admiration of his mental strength.

"Why," the thought was telling him, "you have quite as much mentality as a Lassan! That is a very high compliment. I have never before met one of the lower animals who could withhold his thoughts from me. It is most extraordinary. Is it possible for you to withhold your thoughts from your own kind as well?"

Not at all difficult, thought Sherman, relaxing a bit; indeed the difficulty in human communication lies not in withholding thoughts but in expressing them.

His interlocutor went on, "Ah, but the feeling, the thought is generally understood, though it may not be clear. Tell me, have you never withheld a thought from someone who wished to know it?"

Yes, thought Sherman, I have—and remembered the poker game at the Cleveland airport when he had drawn two cards and unexpectedly filled a straight flush to win the biggest pot of the evening from Barney's full house; and of the time when he had thought of numerous unpleasant ways of slaying the mechanic who had left a leak in his oil-line and of the time when a girl had tried to gold-dig him and he had divined her intention first, and of the time when he had lifted the knife—!!!

Again that jar! He realized with a start that the Lassan having failed to pick his brain with friendliness, was trying to do it with flattery, and the realization so filled him with anger that he had no difficulty in resisting the pressure that was applied to make him tell, tell, tell what had happened in the machine-room at the end of the passage.

Once more the pressure relaxed. The Lassan was congratulating him again. "No, this is sincere this time and not flattery. You win. I shall not try to make you tell me again. We can probably obtain it from the other one anyway. Oh, man of a debased and alien race, I salute you. If your race were all like you we might breed them for intelligence and live in cooperation with you. It is almost a pity you had to be mechanized. If there is any information you wish, I will gladly exchange with you. We have seen your homes, we are curious—imagine living above the ground!—and from others of your race we know that you have many fine machines, almost a civilization, in fact. We would willingly know more of it and in return will tell you of our accomplishments."

Could this offer conceal some new trap? Sherman wondered, but the Lassan divined this thought as soon as formed, and reassured him. "Since we now live here and since there are so few of your folk left it is important that we know about each other. We must live side by side—why not in friendship?"

The offer seemed fair enough. At all events if there were any injudicious questions he could turn them aside, and there was a good deal he wished to learn—about his mechanized body, about the purpose of those curious machines, the blue-domed halls, the silver fish, the interweavings of this underground city, where the Lassans had come from—he assented.

"Good," the message reached him. "Suppose you ask a question and then I will. What do you wish to know?"

"How I was made into a machine."

"I do not know that I can explain it to you. I perceive your knowledge of the nature of light is elementary.... But the material with which we surrounded the space-ship in which we came, in order to protect it from the radiation of suns unknown to you, has a powerful action on all animal substances. It is a material not unlike your radium, but a thousand times more powerful. When we reached your planet, your atmosphere carried it to every part of the earth, and all living things received it. Those who were most affected by it were turned to metal which retained that quality called 'life' within its interior reaches; the others became merely solid metal.

"Our birds are under instructions to bring us all such individuals as possess life. In our laboratories we make their forms over, so they will be useful to us as servants. Those who have become solid, of course, nothing can be done for. We have found in the past that when we take a new planet and make the individuals over into machines, unless we return them to familiar surroundings, they lose their brains when they reawake. Therefore you woke in the same place in which you passed from consciousness."

"Wonderful," said Sherman, "and where do you come from and how did you get here?"

He felt the Lassan's amusement. "That is two questions you have asked, and not one. Nevertheless I will answer. We come from a planet of another star, very far away—I do not know how to express it to you. Your methods of measurement for these things are different from ours." In Sherman's mind appeared a picture of the night heavens with the tremendous ribbon of the Milky Way swinging across its center; his attention was directed to one star, a very bright one.

"Rigel!" his mind called, and the thought went on. He was suddenly transported to the neighborhood of the star, felt that it was ages ago, long before the earth had cooled, and saw that the star, then a sun like our own, was threatened by some enormous catastrophe, a titanic explosion. Abruptly the picture was wiped out and he beheld the comet, the great comet the earthly astronomers had watched for so long before it struck on that fateful night, and realized that it was no comet, but an interplanetary vehicle bound from the planet of Rigel to the earth.