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

bringing a chubby little man who announced himself as F. W. Stevens.

"The boy plunger?" queried Murray absent-mindedly, and realized from Gloria's gasp that he had said the wrong thing.

"Well, I operate in Wall Street," Stevens replied rather stiffly.

Ben came with three recruits. At the sight of the first, Murray gasped. Even in the metal caricature, he had no difficulty in recognizing the high, bald forehead, the thin jaws and the tooth-brush moustache of Walter Beeville, the greatest living naturalist. Before dark the others were back—Yoshio with one new acquisition and Mrs. Roberts, whose energy paralleled her strength, with no less than four, among them an elaborately gowned woman who proved to be Marta Lami, the Hungarian dancer who had been the sensation of New York at the time of the catastrophe.

They gathered in the Times Square drug store in a strange babble of phonographic voices and clang of metal parts against the stone floor and soda fountains. It was Roberts who secured a position behind one of these erstwhile dispensers of liquid soothing-syrup and rapped for order.

"I think the first thing to be done," he said, when the voices had grown quiet in answer to his appeal, "is to organize the group of people here and search for more. If it had not been for the kindness of Mr. Ruby here, my family and I would not have known about the necessity of using oil on this new mechanical make-up nor of the value of electrical current as food. There may be others in the city in the same state. What is the—ah—sense of the gathering on this topic?"

Stevens was the first to speak. "It's more important to organize and elect a president," he said briefly.

"A very good idea," commented Roberts.

"Well, then," said Stevens, ponderously, "I move we proceed to elect officers and form as a corporation."

"Second the motion," said Murray almost automatically.

"Pardon me." It was the voice of Beeville the naturalist. "I don't think we ought to adopt any formal organization yet. It hardly seems necessary. We are practically in the golden age, with all the resources of an immense city at the disposal of—fourteen people. And we know very little about ourselves. All the medical and biological science of the world must be discarded and built up again. At this very moment we may be suffering from the lack of something that is absolutely necessary to our existence—though I admit I cannot imagine what it could be. I think the first thing to do is to investigate our possibilities and establish the science of mechanical medicine. As to the rest of our details of existence, they don't matter much at present."

A murmur of approval went round the room and Stevens looked somewhat put out.

"We could hardly adopt anarchy as a form of government," he offered.

"Oh, yes we could," said Marta Lami, "Hurray for anarchy. The Red Flag forever. Free love, free beer, no work!"

"Yes," said Gloria, "what's the use of all this metallizing, anyway? We got rid of a lot of old applesauce about restrictions and here you want to tie us up again. More and better anarchy!"

"Say," came a deep and raucous voice from one of the newcomers. "Why don't we have just a straw boss for a while till we see how things work out? If anyone gets fresh the straw boss can jump him, or kick him out, but those that stick with the gang have to listen to him. How's that?"

"Fine," said Ben, heartily. "You mean have a kind of Mussolini for a while?"

"That's the idea. You ought to be it."

There was a clanging round of metallic applause as three or four people clapped their hands.

"There is a motion—" began Roberts.

"Oh, tie a can to it," said Gloria, irreverently, "I nominate Ben Ruby as dictator of the colony of New York for—three months. Everybody that's for it, stick up your hands."

Eleven hands went up. Gloria looked around at those who remained recalcitrant and concentrated her gaze on Stevens. "Won't you join us, Mr. Stevens?" she asked sweetly.

"I don't think this is the way to do things," said the Wall Street man with a touch of asperity. "It's altogether irregular and no permanent good can result from it. However, I will act with the rest."

"And you, Yoshio?"

"I am uncertain that permission is granted to this miserable worm to vote."

"Certainly. We're all starting from scratch. Who else is there? What about you, Mr. Lee?"

"Oh, I know him too well."

The rest of the opposition dissolved in laughter and Ben made his way to the place by the counter vacated by Roberts.

"The first thing we can do is have some light," he ordered. "Does anyone know where candles can be had around here? I suppose there ought to be some in the drug store across the street, but I don't know where and there's no light to look by."

"How about flashlights? There's an electrical and radio store up the block."

"Fine, Murray you go look. Now Miss Roberts, will you be our secretary? I think the first thing to do is to get down the name and occupation of everyone here. That will give us a start toward finding out what we can do. Ready? Now you, Miss Rutherford, first."

"My name is Gloria Rutherford and I can't do anything but play tennis, drink gin and drive a car."

The rest of the replies followed: "F. W. Stevens, Wall Street," "Theodore Roberts, lawyer," "Archibald Tholfsen, chess-player," "H. M. Dangerfield, editor," "Francis X. O'Hara, trucking business," (this was the loud-voiced man who had cut the Gordian knot of the argument about organization). "Are you a mechanic, too?" asked Ben.

"Well, not a first class one, but I know a little about machinery."

"Good, you're appointed our doctor."

"Paul Farrelly, publisher," "Albert F. Massey, artist"—the voices droned on in the uncertain illumination of the flashlights.

"Very well, then," said Ben at the conclusion of the list. "The first thing I'll do is appoint Walter Beeville director of research. Fact number one for him is that we aren't going to need much of any sleep. I don't feel the need of it at all, and I don't seem to see any signs among you. O'Hara will help him on the mechanical side.... I suggest that as Mr. Beeville will need to observe all of us we make the Rockefeller Institute our headquarters. He will have the apparatus there to carry on his work. Let's go."

CHAPTER III Rebellion

They whirled away to the east side of the city and up Second Avenue like a triumphal cortege, blissfully disregarding the dead traffic lights, though now and then they had to dodge the ruins of some truck or taxi that had come out second best from an argument with an elevated pillar where the driver's hand had been frozen at the wheel. At Forty-ninth Street Ben's car, in the lead, swung in to the curb and pulled up.

"What is it?" ... "Is this the place?" ... "Anything wrong?"

An illuminating voice floated up. "Electric store, get all the flashlights and batteries you can. We're going to need them."

A few moments later they were at the great institution, strangely dark and silent now after all its years of ministering to the sick, with a line of rust showing redly on the tall iron fence that surrounded the grounds. They trooped into the reception room, flickering their lights here and there like fireflies. Ben mounted a chair.

"Just a minute, folks," he began. "I want to say something.... What we have to do here is build civilization up all over again. Undoubtedly there are more people alive—if not in New York, then in other places. We have two jobs—to get in touch with them and to find out what we can do. Mr. Beeville is going to find out about the second one for us, but we can do a lot without waiting for him.

"In the first place, there's that funny-looking bird that we all saw and that chased Roberts. There may be others like it and a lot of new queer forms of animal life around that would be dangerous to us. Therefore, I think it's in line to get some weapons. Miss Lami, you and Mr. Tholfsen are delegated to dig up a hardware store and find guns and cartridges.... Now for the rest, I'm open to suggestions."

Everybody spoke at once. "Wait a minute," said Ben. "Let's take things in order. What was your idea, Mr. Stevens?"

"Organize regular search parties."

"And a good idea, too. We don't even need to wait for daylight. Everybody who can drive, get a car and trot along."

"X-ray machines are going to be awfully useful in my work," offered Beeville. "I wonder if there isn't some way of getting enough current to run one."

"As far as I remember, this building supplies its own current. Murray, you and Massey trot down and get a fire up under one of the boilers. Anything else?"

"Yes," came from Dangerfield, the editor. "It seems to me that the first thing anyone else in the world would try to do if he found himself made into a tin doll like this is get hold of a radio. How about opening up a broadcasting station?"

"I don't know whether you can get enough power, but you can try. Go to it. Do you know anything about radio?"

"A little."

"All right. Pick whoever you want for an assistant and try it out. Any more ideas?"

"What day is it?" asked Ola Mae Roberts.

Nobody had thought of it, and it suddenly dawned on the assemblage that the last thing they remembered was when the snow on the roof-tops bespoke a chilly February, while now all the trees were in leaf and the air was redolent of spring.

"Why—I don't know," said Ben. "Anybody here got any ideas on how to find out?"

"It would take an experienced astronomer and some calculation to determine with accuracy," said Beeville. "We'd better set an arbitrary date."

"O. K. Then it's May 1, 1947. That's two years ahead of time, but it will take that long to find out what it really is."

The assumption that sleep would be unnecessary proved correct. All night long, cars roared up to the door and away again on their quests. The number of people found was small—the cream had apparently been gathered that morning. O'Hara brought in a metallic scrubwoman from one of the downtown buildings, the tines that represented her teeth showing stains of rust where she had incautiously drunk water; Stevens turned up with a slow-voiced young man who proved to be Georgios Pappagourdas, the attach� of the Greek consulate whose name had been in the papers in connection with a sensational divorce case; and Mrs. Roberts came in with two men, one of them J. Sterling Vanderschoof, president of the steamship lines which bore his name.

At dawn Dangerfield came in. He had set up a powerful receiving set by means of storage batteries but could find no messages on the air, and could find no source of power sufficient for him to broadcast.

The morning, therefore, saw another and somewhat less optimistic conference. As it was breaking up Ben said, "You Tholfsen, take Stevens, Vanderschoof and Lee and get a truck, will you? You'll find one about half a block down the street. Go up to one of the coal pits and get some fuel for our boilers here. We haven't too large a supply."

There was a clanking of feet as they left and Ben turned into the laboratory where Beeville was working, with the scrubwoman as a subject.

"Something interesting here," said the naturalist, looking up as he entered. "The outer surface of this metal appears to be rust-proof, but when you get water on the inside, things seem to go. It acts like a specially annealed compound of some kind. And look—" He seized one of the arms of his subject, who gazed at him with mildly unresisting eyes, and yanked at the outer layer of metal bands that composed it. The band stretched like one of rubber, and she gave a slight squeal as it snapped back into position. "I don't know of any metal that has that flexibility. Do you? Why—"

The door swung open and they turned to see Murray and Tholfsen.

"Beg pardon for interrupting the sacred panjandrum," said the former, "but Stevens and Vanderschoof are indulging in a sulk. They don't want to play with us."

"Oh, hell," remarked Ben cheerfully and started for the door, the other two following him.

He found the recalcitrants soon enough. The Wall Street man was seated across a doctor's desk from Vanderschoof and looked up calmly from an interrupted conversation as Ben entered.

"Thought I asked you two to go with the boys for some coal," said Ben, waving at them. "My mistake. I meant to."

"You did. I'm not going."

Ben's eyes narrowed. "Why not?"

"This