Wandl the Invader

R >> Raymond King Cummings >> Wandl the Invader

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

It was a brief struggle, and instantly they knew that they had lost.
The huge Martian whirled and flung them off. Her upflung fist, with a
blow like a man's, caught Anita's thigh and knocked her toward the
ceiling. She sank in a heap on the floor, saw that Venza had shoved
back, but was standing upright.

Anita bent double, with her feet braced against a chair, tensed to
shove forward again. At the still unopened window, Meka crouched.
Anita heard Venza's warning outcry. "Anita, look out for her! She's
got a knife!"

Upon this scene, in a moment, Snap and I came with a rush. The closed
door was not barred. We slid it down and catapulted through the
opening. Meka sailed over us. I swam up at her; seized her. The knife
ripped my blouse and slit the flesh of my upper arm with a glancing
blow. Then Snap came and struck against us; we sank to the floor.

Meka had fought silently, but now she was shouting. I twisted her
wrist, seized the knife handle and flung the knife away. I was aware
of Anita lunging to retrieve it. And over us Venza appeared, waving a
metal chair as though it were a huge feather.

Snap gasped, "Gregg get your hand over her mouth. Shut her up!"

We had her subdued in a moment, but it seemed almost too late. Outside
the opened door a distant shout sounded.

I shoved Meka toward the door. "If you don't do what I say, I'll kill
you," I whispered into her ear.

"What shall I do?"

There came another shout, closer, now. Someone was coming.

"Call out in Martian. Say there's no trouble, nothing wrong. You were
arguing with these girls."

She did as I commanded. The voice down the corridor answered, and then
subsided.

Snap slid the door closed. "Hurry! We'll go by the window. I dropped
those damn shoes."

Anita and Venza tore their dark coats into strips. We bound and gagged
Meka, laid her in a corner of the room. We had dropped the shoes as we
came plunging through the door oval. We found that we could all fasten
their things to our feet. I put Meka's knife in my belt.

"Hurry, all of you!" Snap was saying. "Got to get out of here; jump by
the window."

"Say, look at these wing-shields!" From a recess in a corner of the
room Venza appeared with an armful of the small shields. We thrust our
hands and forearms into their loops. The shields extended from a few
inches beyond our fingers to the elbow.

Snap had slid the window blind. I bent over the prone form of Meka.
"Don't try to move. Molo will release you when he comes back."

We gathered on the starlit balcony. The city stretched around us.
There was as yet no alarm. No swimming figures near here; but a
distance away we saw the towering conclave globe, with its audience
just beginning to emerge, like bees coming from a hive.

"Let me go first." I held Anita and Venza at the rail. "It's like
swimming. I suppose we'll get the way of it pretty quickly."

I balanced on the rail, and then leaped off. With the others after me,
we swam awkwardly upward into the reddish starlight.

The city structures dropped away, showing in a dark blur with winking
lights. Over us were the stars and the cloudless night sky. Behind,
the flashing light beams of radiance at the landing stage, the
figures fluttering, the great globe, all dropped swiftly beneath a
sharply curving horizon.

We had passed the city. A thousand feet below us, a dark forest
stretched. It was beyond this that the control station was located.

The swimming flight became less awkward, but it was an effort in this
abnormal Wandl air. Snap and Venza were behind me. Anita was leading,
a strange, bird-like little figure. White blouse; long parted dark
skirt from which her gray-sheathed legs kicked out as she swam,
sometimes half upon one side, or with a breast stroke. The braids of
her dark hair fell forward over her shoulders.

She was tiring: I could not miss it. How far had we gone? Ten miles,
perhaps. There was only a small vista of this little world visible at
once, it was so sharply convex. A line of distant mountains was to our
left. We had crossed a river at the forest edge.

I suppose we had been half an hour swimming those ten-miles. Was
daylight coming? It seemed that the sideline of mountain-tops had a
little light on them. The opalescent beam from Earth had swept this
portion of the sky and was gone below the horizon.

Apparently there was no pursuit from the city. Behind me, Venza
panted, "Say, I'm about finished. Can't we rest?"

With this altitude we could cease our efforts and drift down. It would
take several minutes.

We gathered together, falling with a slow drift toward the dark forest
under us. The trees seemed huge and spindly, a porous growth something
on the Martian style, with huge leaves and a tangle of matter vines.
They came mounting up at us as we fell with slowly gathering speed.

"Shall we go on?" I suggested.

"Yes." But she was tired, and Anita as well.

"Girls," I asked, "where is the _Star-Streak_?"

They did not know.

Anita said, "Perhaps we can land in the trees, and examine what
devices we have here."

The girls had carefully watched Molo upon several occasions. They
thought we might find we had a hand-globe or a couple of the repulsive
rays. With these we could attain rapid flight without effort.

We sank, fluttering, into a dark and tangled mass of the forest
tree-top growth. I had understood that Wandl was crowded with its
human population, yet this dark and silent forest evidently was
uninhabited. We clung, like awkward birds, to a swaying limb of a
tree-top. The trees were close together.

"Let's see what you've got," Venza demanded.

We handed the girls the various devices we had taken from Wyk. Most of
them were the size of my fist: globular metallic projectors like hand
bombs; ray cylinders; a device with multiple barrels the size of one's
finger, set in a small circumference of a circular grid of wires.

Anita said, "I saw Molo with one of these. He killed an unwilling
worker on the ship."

"I'll take a look around," Snap said anxiously. "Suppose we're being
followed? Give me that weapon."

There was vegetation partly over us, so that the sky was half
obscured. Snap took the weapon, and like a monkey swaying
precariously, he ran and leaped among the upper branches, crashing his
way until he could see back toward the horizon beyond which lay the
city of Wor.

We heard his voice. "All clear. Nothing in sight. You coming up?
Better get started."

I put the weapons in my pocket. Snap had one now in the branches over
us. I was examining an electronic bolt, when suddenly there came
Snap's call. "Gregg! Look out!"

We heard the hiss and saw the flash of his bolt.

Anita swung at me. "Gregg, see there!"

I followed her gesture, and then I knew why this forest was shunned by
humans!

13

The forest swarmed with living things. Here in the dark they had been
crawling upon us. Every branch of this leafy tree-top angle had
something staring at us; the darkness was suddenly glowing with a
myriad little green torches which were their eyes. They all winked on
in an instant, as though at a signal, or at the sound of Snap's shout
and the hiss of his bolt.

Insects? I suppose I should call them that. With a glance I saw that
they were of many sizes and shapes; tiny little things with eyes like
lanterns; things of many legs, finger-length, hand-length, and some as
long as my forearm. Brown-shelled things, with eyes glowing on stems.
There was one quite near us, a smooth, brown-shelled body; a round
head on top, as big as my fist. And these things had heads like little
distended brains.

What horrible jest of nature this was, with miniatures of the Wandl
workers, crawling here, unable to stand erect, groping with little
pincers. And miniature brains with naked, shriveled bodies.

It seemed that the eyes of that little brain were fixed on me with a
baleful green glare in the darkness. Anita and Venza were floundering
to their feet in horror. They all but slipped from the limb. The
weapons and devices they had arranged there slid off and went down
into the darkness unheeded. From above us came Snap's horrified shouts
and the hiss of his bolts.

"Here!" I gasped. "My hand--Anita, Venza, jump!"

I shoved Anita upward. The little eyes suddenly were all in movement,
advancing upon us. Anita floundered, fluttered, got into the air and
mounted toward Snap. Again Venza slipped off the limb. I lunged and
drew her up. Green eyes nearest us came swooping. I did not dare fire
a bolt; it was too close to Venza. I flung the entire weapon at the
green eyes, but I missed.

The little thing bit Venza's arm. She screamed and her flailing hand
hit the tiny distended head. Its hideous little scream mingled with
hers. It floated downward, massed and purple-red with gushing blood.

I struggled upward with the inert form of Venza under one arm. Anita
was mounting, free. Snap came lunging down.

"Fired every bolt in the damn weapon!" He saw the unconscious Venza.
"Good God, Gregg!"

Never have I heard such anguish in his tone. "Gregg, she isn't...."

"One of them bit her. Help me."

He floundered up with her, a hundred feet above the tree-tops of that
horrible forest. The little lanterns of eyes down there had all winked
out. The open starlight was over us.

Anita came swimming, then Venza stirred. She murmured, "... all
right."

She had fainted. It seemed nothing more; but I found her upper arm
swelling. She tried to bend her body and sit up; but it threw us all
out of balance.

"Lie straight," Snap murmured. "Venza, are you all right?"

"Yes. Why not?" And then she laughed. It sent a shuddering chill over
me. "What's the fuss about? Let's get away from here. Somebody will be
coming."

She was swimming now and we let her loose, but stayed close by her.
The reddish firmament was like an inverted bowl. The curving Wandl
surface gave us a narrow little vista, the forest rolling up from the
horizon in front. Then we saw where the forest seemed to end. Water
was beyond it: a ribbon like a broad river, and beyond that, frowning
mountains, terraced and spired with jagged peaks.

Snap and I suddenly recalled the gravity ray projectors. We tried
them; found that they would fling little beams of two varieties.
Pencil points of radiance, they seemed to have an effective range of
no more than a few hundred feet.

I let myself drift downward, experimenting. The tiny beam struck the
forest-top. I felt the projector pulling violently downward in my
hand. I clung to it. I was being drawn swiftly down by the attractive
gravity force of the ray. The forest rose rapidly under me: I was all
but flung upon it before I could find the other controls.

Then the ray altered its nature; the projector in my hand pulled me
steadily up. But after a few hundred feet, I felt I was mounting only
of my own momentum, with gravity and air-friction retarding me.

Snap had tried similar experiments. We rejoined the swimming girls. I
stared into Venza's face; it was pale but she did not seem distressed.
She winked at me.

"How's your arm, Venza?"

"It hurts, but I guess it's all right."

I turned to Snap. "I guess we can work these things. Get Venza to
cling to you."

Our progress now was far less difficult. Venza clung to Snap's ankles
and Anita to mine. With the repulsing rays directed downward, we had a
strong upward and forward thrust. We went forward with great
thousand-foot bounds. The forest rolled back under us. We came over
the gleaming river. It seemed several miles broad. It appeared to have
a swift current.

I saw sunlight upon the mountain ahead. The darkness had been paling.
Now day suddenly burst upon us. The sun, smaller than on Earth,
mounted swiftly up. It was a flattened, distorted, dull-red disc,
blurred by Wandl's strange atmosphere. We were in a dim red daylight.

Anita twitched at my ankles. "Look back of us!"

We were going up. Venza and Snap, behind us, were in a descending arc.
Above them, far back in the direction from which they had come, two
blobs were visible up against the reddish day sky.

Pursuit? It seemed so. The blobs went down, but came up again,
traveling with rays, like ourselves.

I called to Snap, "Someone after us! Two figures back there!"

He was shouting, "Gregg! Gregg, help!"

My gaze had been on the distant figures. I saw now that at the bottom
of his arc, and starting upward again, Snap had lost Venza. The
impulse of his ray had twitched his ankle from her grasp. Or had she
let loose? He was about a hundred feet above the river, and Venza,
with acceleration downward unchecked, was falling into it.

"Gregg, help! Venza, swim up!" His frenzied call reached me as I used
the attractive ray and Anita and I whirled over and lunged downward.

"Gregg, help! Venza use your arms! Swim!"

She was lying inert, making no effort to keep from falling. Her body
turned slowly, end-over-end. She struck the swiftly-flowing river
surface but did not sink; instead, she half emerged, came up and lay
in a crumpled heap; and with its rapid current, the river carried her
away.

It was several minutes before we could reach Venza. Snap was already
there, floundering on the water, awkwardly maintaining his balance,
bending over Venza. "Gregg, she's unconscious. Fainted again."

The bite of that insect! The thought of it turned me cold.

The river surface was like a very soft rubber mattress. The water
clung to us, wet us. We could not kneel or stand erect; but in sitting
down only a few inches of our bodies were submerged. We floated like
corks, we were so light, and so little water did we displace.

We struggled with Venza across the gluey river surface. She had fallen
near the further shore. Rocks, crags and strewn boulders were passing
as the current swept us along at a speed of about ten miles an hour.
She lay in our arms, eyes closed, her face pallid but calm. She seemed
to breathe rapidly; but that on Wandl was normal.

We landed on the rocky shore. It was still daylight. The blurred sun
was winging across the zenith so swiftly that its movement was
visible. Wandl had been suddenly endowed with axial rotation. Even in
these few minutes, the day was past its noon. On the distant mountain
peaks looming above the nearby horizon; it seemed that the sheen of
coming night was mingled with the red sunlight.

Anita and Snap laid Venza on the rocks. I suddenly remembered the two
blobs in the sky behind us, which had seemed to be following. I stood
gazing across the river. The red sky there seemed empty.

"Thank God, she's reviving!" Snap called at me and I joined them.
Venza was stirring. Color was coming into her cheeks. Her lips were
murmuring as though she were talking in her sleep.

Then she opened her eyes. Her gaze fixed on us as we bent over her.
"Why, what's the matter? Where are we? I thought we were in the
tree-tops. Snap, don't look at me like that, dear. I'm all right--only
confused."

She could remember nothing since that gruesome thing bit into her arm,
but the attack of its poison in her veins seemed definitely over. We
sat with her, soothing her, explaining what had happened. And she was
wholly rational. Her strength came back; her mind cleared.

The brief red day came to its close. The sun plunged below the
horizon; the stars winked into being. The red-purple Wandl night
again was here. And now we saw that the whole firmament was swinging,
the rotation made visible.

The darkness leaped around us. Shadows filled the rock hollows. The
caves and recesses of this rocky shore turned black with darkness. And
in the sky now we saw another of those familiar opalescent beams. This
was the one from Mars: we could identify the red disc of the planet.

And then, from the mountains ahead of us but still below our horizon,
the Wandl control station shot its attacking beam upward. Again there
was that conflict in the sky. The axis of Mars was being altered, its
rotation slowed.

We could see now that we were much nearer than before to the control
station. It seemed only about twenty miles ahead of us. The scream
from it was deafening.

The Wandl beam died presently. The electrical scream from the control
station was stilled.

The Earth's axis had been altered. Now Mars; and next would be Venus.
A few more of these gravitational attacks and then the helpless
planets, with rotation checked, would be towed away by Wandl, out into
the deadly cold of interstellar space.

Anita abruptly gave a startled outcry. The four of us, sitting in a
group, had no time to rise. From behind a dark crag nearby, two
figures appeared. The starlight showed them clearly.

Molo and Wyk! They lunged forward at us.

14

We were unarmed. I had flung my weapon at the thing in the forest; and
Snap had exhausted all his bolts firing at the multitude of green
eyes. Molo and Wyk came with a dive through the air. Two tiny flashes
leaped from them to the rocks behind them, and flung them forward.

Snap and I seized Venza and Anita. It was a second of confusion; then
I saw we would not be able to rise in time. The driving, oncoming
figures were no more than twenty feet away.

"Protect Venza, Snap! Get her behind you!"

Snap shoved Venza behind him; I got myself in front of Anita. We had
almost gained our feet. I tried to thrust Anita and myself violently
upward. We rose, but only a few feet. And then we were struck by the
oncoming body of Wyk, like a huge, light-shelled, three-pound insect
lunging in mid-air against us. The two longest tentacle arms wrapped
around us. Anita twisted and kicked. The gruesome, goggling face of
Wyk thrust itself almost into mine. The hollow voice panted, "I have
you fast."

One of my arms was free and I struck with my fist at the gaping,
upended mouth. There was a crack. My fist sank through the shell; a
cold, sticky ooze spurted out.

Wyk screamed. His encircling arms fell away. The grisly smashed face
was white with ooze and pulp where my fist had gone in.

We had sunk back to the rocks. I kicked the dead body of Wyk away.

"Anita! Swim up!"

"No!"

Sinking beside us were the flailing bodies of Molo, Snap and Venza
were drifting down. They seemed intermingled. Snap was shouting: "No
you don't! Drop that!"

I leaped for them. Something long and thin and glowing was dangling
from Molo's hand. He broke loose from the struggling Snap and Venza;
his feet struck the rocks and he shoved himself backward. My leap had
carried me too high. I saw that in his hand was a six-foot length of
glowing wire. He whirled it. The weight on its end described an arc,
and then he flung the handle. The weighted wire struck Venza and Snap
just as their repulsive ray shot down against the rocks and shoved
them upward. The whirling wire wrapped itself around them, bound them
together. Its glow vanished. Snap had been shouting, "Gregg, come up."
But it died in his throat.

All this while, in those few seconds, I was vaulting over Molo, trying
to get back to the ground to leap again. I saw that Anita was crawling
on the rocks. My gravity cylinder was at my belt. I had jammed it
there to leave my hands free just as Wyk struck me.

I saw that Snap and Venza, wrapped together by the wire, had dropped
their gravity projector. Their entwined figures went up some fifty
feet and stopped; then began drifting down.

Molo was shouting, "You, Gregg Haljan! Now for you!"

I struck the rocks and fell twenty feet beyond him. I jerked out my
gravity projector, but I did not know what I wanted to do with it. And
in that second I saw that the standing Molo was aiming at me. Directly
over my head the inert bound bodies of Venza and Snap were falling.

A flash leaped over the dark rocks from Molo. There was a split-second
when I thought it was the end of me. But I was still alive. The bodies
of Venza and Snap struck my head and shoulders; knocked me down. I
felt Molo's ray upon me. Not death, but only his gravity ray, like a
giant hand pulling me. Apparently he wanted us alive. I was scrambling
on the rocks, entangled with Venza and Snap. Molo's radiance clung.
All three of us went tumbling forward toward him. I flashed my own
ray, but I was rolling end over end, and it went wild.

I dropped it, saw Molo's beam vanish, saw his upright standing figure
towering above me. Snap, Venza and I were in a heap at his feet. He
leaned down and seized me. "Now, Gregg Haljan, I will teach you not to
try escaping like this!"

With the huge, muscular Martian gripping me, his fist striking for my
face but missing and hitting my shoulder, this was a semblance of
normality. I could understand fighting like this. I wrapped my legs
around him; my fingers reached for his brawny throat as he kicked us
into the air free of the entangling bodies of Snap and Venza.

We rose a few feet and sank back, gripping each other, lunging and
striking. He was very powerful, this Martian. I caught the round
pillar of his throat with my hands. For an instant I shut off his
wind, but I could not hold the grip. He struck me a glancing blow in
the face, then the heel of his hand was under my chin. It forced back
my head, broke my hold on his throat. With returning breath, he gasped
an inhalation. And I heard his exulting words: "You are not strong
enough!"

We rolled and bumped over the rocks. I caught a blow from his fists
full in my face. It was almost the end; I felt my strength going. He
laughed as he struck away my answering swing. I was on my back against
the rocks, with his body on top of me. Then beyond and behind his
hulking shoulder, silhouetted against the sky, I saw Anita rise up.
She was lifting a jagged gray mass of stone, full four feet in
diameter. She poised it, then crashed it down on Molo's head. He sank
away from me; his arms relaxed. The boulder rolled beside him.

It was over now. Wyk was dead; his gruesome body with its smashed face
lay near us. Molo was unconscious, breathing heavily, lying
motionless, with a wound on the back of his head, the blood welling
out, matting his hair.

Anita and I were uninjured, victorious--but what a hollow victory. On
the rocks here, bound together by that strange wire, Snap and Venza
lay inert. We bent over them. The wire was cold to the touch now. It
resisted our efforts to untwine it. We pulled frantically as we
pleaded: "Snap, speak to us! Venza, can't you speak?"

Their eyes were open. I was aware that there was no starlight above
us, but instead, a lurid sky of flying clouds, shot with a greenish
cast. The darkness here was green. The glow of it struck upon the
wide-open staring eyes of Venza and Snap. It seemed that there was
intelligence in those eyes.

"Snap, can't you hear us?"

His eyelids came down and up again, slowly, as though by a horrible
effort. "Can you move, Snap?"

His right eyelid moved. Was his answer, no?

Anita and I had never felt so horrible a sense of aloneness as that
which swept us in those succeeding minutes. A breeze was springing up
in the lurid green night. It came from the mountains. It wafted across
the nearby river, rippling the surface which was now green and sullen.
We did not know where to go, what to do.

We found at last that we could untwist the stiffly clinging wire. We
laid Venza and Snap on the rocks side-by-side, about thirty feet back
from the river. The glowing wire had burned their clothes only a
little, as the current was absorbed by the contact with their bodies.

"Snap, are you in pain?"

His eyes seemed to be trying to talk to me. Anita rose from Venza:
"Oh, Gregg, what shall we do? Can't we carry them?"

But where? To what purpose? Wild thoughts thronged me: Wandl's control
station, bringing chaos and death upon Earth. Mars and Venus. What was
that now to me? I thought of Molo's ship.

"Anita, if we can get to the _Star-Streak_, seize it and escape from
this world...."

"Carry Snap and Venza there now? But we don't know where it is. Can we
make Molo lead us?"

But Molo lay unconscious. I could not rouse him.

Anita and I were so alone! We clung together.

"Gregg, look at that sky!"

The mounting wind was tugging at us. It whined through the dark
mountain defiles, surged out over the river where the water now was
beginning to toss with waves crossing the swift current. The sky was
shot with green shafts of radiance. Over us, the lowering, leaden
clouds were scudding, riding the wind.

It burst now upon us; I found suddenly that Anita and I were bracing
against it. A puff dislodged us, so that we were blown a dozen feet,
bringing up against a crag, as though we were balloons.

"Anita--this wind--we can't maintain ourselves here. We...."

Horror checked me at the thought of Venza and Snap, lying there on the
rocks. We saw the body of Wyk, like a great dried insect, lifted by
the wind, whirled like a brown leaf over and over, and carried away.

A little pebble came hurtling and struck me. Then a rain of pebbles,
like hailstones was pelting at us.

The storm was probably caused by the axial rotation of Wandl. The
light-beam upon Earth had been attacked by the Wandl control station
without axial rotation. But to attack the beam from Mars, a
manipulation of Wandl was necessary. The planet's rotation was
started; and suddenly checked. It remained night now, here in this
hemisphere. Perhaps there were natural storm tendencies here; perhaps
the operators of the control station were unduly eager, manipulating
the rotation too suddenly.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11