Project Gutenberg's The Giants From Outer Space, by Geoff St. Reynard This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Giants From Outer Space Author: Geoff St. Reynard Release Date: May 23, 2010 [EBook #32485] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIANTS FROM OUTER SPACE *** Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net The Giants From Outer Space By Geoff St. Reynard [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] CONTENTS CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII Grim terror lurked in the void many light years from Earth. But Pinkham and his men were unaware of it— until suddenly they discovered—The Giants From Outer Space CHAPTER XXIII CHAPTER XXIV CHAPTER XXV CHAPTER I "Okay, make another check on the reading." "I've made four checks already—" "Damn it, make another!" "It's no use, Pink. The life-scanner's never wrong." "No possibility of a monkey wrench dropped into its innards? It couldn't be seeing things that aren't there?" "Not in a million years." "Then there's no water, no air, no gravity worth mentioning, and still—" "That's right. There's life on that silly-looking little apple. There's somebody sitting on it!" In the ninetieth star system to be explored by the insatiably curious men of Earth, there were seven planets. Between the fourth and fifth from the star there was a belt of asteroids: some three or four thousand tiny planetary bodies traveling in vast ellipses around the star. At one time they had probably constituted a single planet, but some unimaginable explosion far back in time had scattered the great ball broadcast, and the largest of the resulting planetoids was now no more than 440 miles across. In the gargantuan belt of them, many were no bigger in diameter than the spaceship Elephant's Child herself. When the instruments of the ship detected this belt of asteroids, Captain Pinkham turned aside as a matter of course, to cruise through it and let his cartographer map it, his organicus officer check it for signs of life, and all his other crewmen turn their inquisitive eyes and machines upon it. It was the seventh asteroid belt to be discovered by man, if you included the one between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, back home, incredible light-years behind.... No life had ever been discovered on an asteroid, except for the vegetable-animal space-eating bacteria on Pallas. No life— Until now. Captain Pinkham headed for the tiny bit of planet, let his ship's screens pick it up and relay its presence to the automatic recoil engines, which slammed the Elephant's Child to a stop about twelve feet away from the knobbly slate-gray surface. The energy testers, having come into play simultaneously with the screens, at once flashed the green "Not Radioactive" sign; a fairly useless gesture, since a positive reaction would have turned the ship away at an angle before it entered the danger zone. The senior officer; said, "Jerry, let's take a look at that critter you think is perched on this thing." The organicus officer grinned with one corner of his mouth. He pulled down a platinum lever, and a thirty-inch screen above his control board sprang to life. The black of space showed the bumpy planetoid like a ball of cold lava, and seated in the center of the screen, a man in a spacesuit. Captain Pinkham licked his lips. "Okay," he said, "I owe you a shot of rye. You were right." Then he blinked his gray eyes. "My God!" he roared. "What's a human being doing out here in System Ninety?" The outburst, he felt, was quite justified; in fact, he might have gone stark raving crazy with justification. There seemed no possibility that his space armada could have been preceded to this star system by another from Earth. The ancient Martians might have made it this far, but their spacesuits were nothing like those of Terra. So he and Jerry were now staring at a hopeless absurdity. It couldn't be there. Pinkham leaned sideways and bellowed into the intercom. "Get in here! Everybody! On the double!" The crew came running, from the engine rooms, the astrogatium and astrolab, from the sleeping quarters and the mess hall. The ship was gigantic; it took twenty minutes, for the ship's complement to assemble in the captain's control hall. There were fifty-seven men, eighteen officers. They stood in casual formation and gaped at the life-scanner's screen. The spacesuited figure had not moved. Captain Pinkham said, "One question. Which of you gadget-happy jokers gimmicked up the scanner on us? Who did this?" Nobody said anything. Only one man smiled: Lieutenant Joe Silver, a very bright, very ambitious big cub who was on his second extragalactic expedition and obviously had visions of earning his captain's bronze comets within the year. Joe was a rather unpleasant young piece of beef, thought Pink; but he wouldn't pull practical jokes. He was too bloody serious. If he smiled, it was probably because he was enjoying the Captain's evident bewilderment. "Then it isn't a joke," said Pinkham. "Three of you outside repairmen get into your suits and bring that in." He gestured at the silent figure on the motionless little world of the scanner. "Jerry says it's alive. Handle with care." He waved them his dismissal. Some twenty minutes later he watched the screen as the three crewmen descended to the surface of the planetoid, pried loose the double anchor which the unknown Earthman had sunk into the ball's crust to hold him steady on the almost- gravityless world, lifted the bulky figure and leaped upward, like thick but weightless panthers carrying their prey, into the open air-lock. The spacesuited stranger had not moved in the slightest. Yet the scanner, which was never wrong, said that within the armor of the suit was life. Pinkham sat staring at the blanked-out screen, and a queer chill began to crawl up his neck. An old slang phrase came to his mind, and wouldn't leave. How come? How come? How come? CHAPTER II Pink and Jerry and Joe Silver walked around and around the spacesuit. Bill Calico, the astrogator, and Washington Daley, the senior lieutenant, sat in front of it on stools covered with Venusian joerg-hide, going through a routine of flippant gags that thinly disguised their bafflement. Finally Pinkham said, "When were these suits invented?" "2144," said Joe Silver. Bright kid, thought Pink with irritation. "Thirty-odd years ago. That's my guess, too." "October 1st, 2144, is the patent date," said Joe Silver smugly. "Click, click, click," said Daley. "Your mind is a damn file room, Silver. It gives me the jitters." Joe Silver looked at him expressionlessly. "I just read the date on the instruction plate," he said. Captain Pinkham bent down and read aloud from the nayrust plate set into the back of the spacesuit. "'Bernard Patent Slugjet Suit, size 24-B patented' ... here it is. 'Instructions for reviving occupant. The man in this suit is alive if the translucent face plate is tinted orange.'" "It is," said Bill Calico with eagerness. "'Unscrew the seven small x-screws around face plate. Depress lever Z on right side of chest plate. Loosen gorget, shoulder pieces, pallettes, brassarts, cuisses....'" They were following the instructions as he read. He thought, these suits were terrific, they were the best. But you had to have a billion dollars behind your expedition or you couldn't afford 'em. Each one cost half as much as a regular-size moon rocket! They shouldn't have stopped making them, though. They ought to have tried bringing down the cost. One of these could save a man's life when nothing else in God's universe could; and a man's life is surely worth as much as half a moon rocket? The Bernard Slugjet Suit. Guaranteed to keep a guy alive for a minimum of 250 years in free space. Guaranteed to let him emerge healthy and—miraculously—sane, provided he was picked up within the time limit. You were jetting toward the edge of the galaxy, say. Your ship ran into trouble. A big meteor tore out your belly, or your fuel gave out, or any of a million things happened to crack up the beautiful great spaceship that was your vehicle and your pride and almost you, an extension of yourself, an expression of your yearning to conquer the stars. So you got into your slugjet suit and walked out an air-lock, if you had enough warning, that is. And there you were in space. Your suit was actually a miniature spaceship itself; if there was land anywhere near, you aimed for it, loosed your powerful shoulder jets, and shot toward it. The suit had a range of about five hundred thousand miles, which was often enough. But suppose it wasn't. Then you just stayed there in black space, and you started to touch buttons in the big gloves, to pull levers on the chest, and to activate other circuits by the sound of your voice. And the suit became a world for you, a world that kept you healthy and sane for a quarter of a millennium. Your life processes were slowed down to a pace of only a crawl and a mumble, next door to death. Your breathing couldn't be detected. Your heart beat six times to the hour. Drugs did it, and vapors, the depressants of a hundred planets gathered and refined by Bernard for his suits. You didn't sleep; you didn't need to. You were a slug, a worm in a cocoon, awake in an ultra-slow-motion way. In 250 years, you aged about fifteen. The suits were supposed to have a maximum efficiency of a thousand years; you came out an old man at the end of that time, maybe, but it was an even bet that you did come out. And to keep your mind whole and unwarped, there in the immensity of brain-shattering space, you were entertained— well and constantly. Three-dimensional movies were shown on your translucent face plate, so slow that to a person with unhampered reflexes they would look like stills. Music played to you, a low drone and buzz that to you was jazz, classical, anything you selected. The Minute Waltz took several hours to play in your ear. Body wastes and carbon dioxide were eliminated, and breathable air released, by the same principles in use in spaceships. You were fed intravenously, vitamins, concentrates of everything you needed were stuck into you without your knowing it, for you lived too slowly to be capable of pain. The temperature of your suit was even. Audiotherapy was given you at suitable intervals. You were rescued, and came out of your suit as well-adjusted, as balanced as you'd gone in. Maybe more so. Rescued? It wasn't all left to luck. The radio in your high bulbous crest broadcast a constant S.O.S. Your suit glowed so that it could be spotted easily, a crimson star against the blackness. Your own life within it called to every life- scanner within 500,000 miles. Meanwhile, you were in a damn fine world of your own.... Pinkham finished reading the instructions, and walked around to the front of the bulky suit. Bill Calico lifted off the crest, Daley removed the helmet, Jerry and Joe Silver caught the suit as it fell away in two sections. And Captain Pinkham caught the girl. She was slim and full in the places where a woman ought to be so, and her hair, close-cropped, was black-brown and shining. Her face was good, damn good, bloody damn fine to a spaceman who'd been out on the ways for a couple of years; but Pink had the happy thought—it was the first one he had, before the shock really hit him that that this was a girl—that she would have looked just as good to him on Earth. She wore the uniform of an organicus officer: just a bit dated, the lapels too wide by an inch, the synthetic fabric of the jacket just a little more clinging and revealing than the current fashion, the pants narrow at the cuff where today's were bell-bottomed. She must have been out here a while; not more than thirty years, though. She did not look more than twenty-five now, and the normal life span was a hundred and ten.... Pink snapped his queer thoughts sharply into line. What did her age matter to him? She was limp in his arms, as relaxed as a sleeping kitten. Her eyes, deep brown, were open but heavy-lidded. He half- knelt, cradling her comfortably, as Jerry anticipated his question and said, "She's okay. She'll be out of it in a few minutes. She's still living slower than we are." Joe Silver, unaccountably across the room by the life-scanner, said, "Hey! There's another one!" "Another what?" asked his senior lieutenant, Daley. "Another fellow—or girl—in a Slugjet. Down that direction a few thousand miles." As all of them but Pink raced to the screen, the girl began to sing, softly, musically, and very slowly. "I am sick of this bucketing Lunar run In this dirty old steel cocoon; I'm sick of the Earth and I'm sick of the Sun And I'm sick to death of the Moon...." That was—what was the name?—the Lament of the Veteran Rocketeer, a ballad that Pink had been singing in his grade school days. He hadn't heard it for more than a dozen years. Probably popular when this gal blasted off Terra. She stopped singing. "'Bout time you got here," she said drowsily. "I've been waiting for months. Didn't Fawcett's crest radio reach you?" "Take it easy," said Pink, and told himself that was a stupid thing to say. "Who are you? What was your expedition?" She blinked. "You aren't Commander Dyevis, are you? Who are you?" "I'm Joe Silver," said that young upstart over Pinkham's shoulder. "Nobody asked you," said Daley. They had left the screen, all but Jerry, who was making course for the second speck of life in the asteroid belt. "This is the Elephant's Child, flagship of Armada Seven, 843 days out of Terra to explore star systems 87 through 93," said Pink quietly. "We just plucked you off an asteroid in System Ninety. This is—" take it easy, he said to himself this time, "this is October 18th, 2176." "Holy Holmendis," said the girl, turning a little pale. "Our ship split up her seams in November of 2158." Daley, the oldest of the lot at thirty-six, and the coolest spacehead of them all, said, "May I introduce Captain John Pinkham, our leader?" Formalities eased a shock, he knew, and helped you over the rough spots. "I'm Lt. Washington Daley and you are—" "Organicus Officer Circe Smith, of Colonel Fawcett's exploratory armada," she said automatically. "Fawcett!" said everyone, loudly and with amazement. "So he got to System Ninety," said Pink. "Every spaceman on the ways has wondered about Fawcett for eighteen years. He vanished with two ships—" "She knows that, Captain," said Daley. "Oh. Of course." "Our other ship was still okay when we broke up," said O. O. Smith, brushing her short hair back from a forehead that was wide and intelligent. "My crest radio was on the fritz, but Fawcett's was all right and he was supposed to call Commander Dyevis, who was cruising down by Planet Four. At least half a dozen of us got off in Slugjet Suits before the ship died. I guess his message never got to Dyevis." "Lord knows," said Pinkham. The Elephant's Child shivered slightly as her recoil engines stopped her. Jerry came over from the controls. "There's another one sitting outside," he said casually. "Maybe it's Colonel Fawcett," the girl cried eagerly. Jerry shook his head. "I'm afraid not." He looked at her a moment, then turned to Pinkham. "This one has four arms," he said. CHAPTER III They sat at dinner, the eighteen officers of the Elephant's Child, eating fresh vegetables and curried lamb from the hydroponics farm and the frozen food lockers. On either side of Captain Pinkman sat O. O. Circe Smith, of the lamented Fawcett expedition, and First Officer Ynohp of the extinct Martian Space Navy. "If you Terrestrians came to Mars over one hundred years ago," Ynohp was saying, in a clear and metallic voice that came from the lingoalter on his chest—a tiny box which could be set to change any of nine thousand spoken languages into any one of the others—"and at that time my people had lost the secrets of space travel for approximately four thousand years, this means that I have been reclining on a planetoid here for at least 4,100 years. The probability is that it has been much longer. Unfortunately my time recorder has long since become inoperative." He extended one of his four rib appendages and picked up a piece of carrot. "Naturally I was in a cataleptic state," he went on. "As you may know, in my race that means that all body processes are suspended in toto. There is no growth and no decay. Moth and rust do not corrupt, you might put it." Pink frowned momentarily. There was a false note somewhere, but he couldn't put his finger on it. He tried to remember all he could about the dying race of Martians. What Ynohp was saying was correct, as nearly as he could recall, but ... he shrugged. My God! he thought, this critter's over four thousand years old! Well, Circe's about forty-five. The hell she is. She's twenty-seven, which was her age when her ship was wrecked, plus about one actual year of life which equals the eighteen she was lost in the Slugjet. Twenty-eight, then, really. I'm thirty-one. Not a bad combination. Hey, boy, you're a confirmed bachelor, remember? He chuckled. Who says so? He took a look at Circe. The prettiest spaceman who ever came my way, he said to himself happily. The dinner broke up. Space etiquette demanded that he escort the Martian to his stateroom first, for the four-armed little gray man was senior to a mere organicus officer; when he returned to the mess hall, he found that Joe Silver had whisked Circe away to show her the new improvements in space drives and other technical details. "At least," said Bill Calico, "he said he was going to." Pink went off to talk to Jerry, who was a lousy substitute for a beautiful girl. He found his O. O. tinkering with the life-scanner. "Something wrong," Jerry said through his teeth. He was a slim young man—Pink, who stood six-three and hefted in at two hundred, would have made two of Jerry—and his normally joyous expression was now writhed into a frown. "The red light's not on, but the scanner's not working." "How d'you know?" "Had a hunch. Don't ask me why—unless it's that the Martian makes me suspicious. Anyway, I tested the scanner; turned it inside and aimed it all over the ship. Nothing doing. No life in here, according to it. So something's the matter with it, and I'm damned if I can figure what." Pink said, "That means what?" "Means that if Fawcett or any of his men are out there, we won't know it. We could flash right by them, or through 'em for that matter, and never know it." "Nothing more serious, though?" "That's bad enough, isn't it?" Jerry asked him. "Sure, sure." Pink shook himself. "I feel—I guess wary is the word." Jerry looked a question. "Yeah," said Pinkham uncomfortably, "it's the Martian. A nice guy and all, but he makes me wonder." "Four thousand years plus," nodded Jerry. "No, not that. I think that's possible. It's something else, son." "What?" Pink said slowly, futilely, "I don't know." He patted the O.O.'s shoulder. "Keep at it, Jerry." He went out and walked down the long ramp to the astrolab. Daley was there. "How's it going?" Pink asked him. "We aren't moving," said the lieutenant. "I know. I told Kinkare to put her into the same orbit as the asteroid belt. We want to stay in the same relation to the planetoids till we decide where to look for Fawcett." "I know you issued those orders, Pink. I meant we aren't in the orbit. We're hanging in space, and the dang asteroids are shooting past us." Daley flipped on his great banks of scanners. "See?" Bands of light were tiny balls of inert matter, flashing by an obviously stationary Elephant's Child. Pink jumped for the intercom. "No use," said Daley. "It's dead. I sent Calico for Randy Kinkare." They looked at each other. "I think it's Ynohp," said Daley. Pinkham took out a pad and pencil. Without saying anything, without admitting to himself that he agreed with his officer, he put down a number of figures. Then he said, "I left Ynohp just fourteen minutes ago in his stateroom. I've put down the distances he'd have to travel to reach all the things that have gone wrong since then. He could have done it—if he was invisible, and could move at the rate of two hundred feet per second." "Maybe he can." "You know Martians have the same rate of speed, roughly speaking, as Terrestrians." "And if Ynohp isn't a Martian at all?" "Washington, did you ever see a Martian?" "Yeah." "Could anything in the universe make itself look like a four-foot-tall, four-armed, slate-gray man with pink eyes?" "I don't know," said Daley. "Maybe there's something in System Ninety that can. Hypnotism, matter transference, fluidity or a lot of other facts could explain it." Kinkare and Bill Calico came in on the run. Their news didn't surprise Pink greatly. The space drive was out of commission. They were adrift in the void. CHAPTER IV The intercom, the space drive, the life-scanner. So far apart that one man couldn't have put them out of whack. No one connected in any way with the others. Ynohp snoring gently in his stateroom. Pinkham, Daley, Silver, Kinkare, Jerry Jones, Calico, and the girl, all gathered in the Captain's quarters, tense, baffled, and all talking at once. And out of the hubbub, one clear sweet voice saying something that didn't make sense and yet electrified Pink as if he'd put his hand on a lighted cigar.... "Maybe it's the space giants?" "Shut up!" bawled Pinkham. The officers turned toward him, brows lifting, mouths still open. "Now," he said quietly, "Circe—Miss Smith—what did you say?" "Space giants," she repeated "I don't think they exist, but I certainly saw something." "Give it to us slow," said Daley. "Well, a couple of times while I was anchored to the asteroid, watching tri-di movies, I had the impression that something enormous was floating just beyond my face plate, watching me. Of course I was slowed down so far that it must have taken me an hour to register the fact, and another hour or two to flick my eyes up away from the movies. What was a second to me was at least that long. But just once I got a clear view of something incredible. It vanished almost at once." "What was it?" "A very big man, naked, bald, with eyes like fires. That's the only way I can describe him. He looked humanoid, except he was so big." "How big?" "I can't tell and hate to make a guess—but at least a thousand feet. Of course I hadn't anything to compare him with." "Wait a minute," said Randy Kinkare, the assistant pilot, voice reeking with unbelief. "How could you see through an opaque face plate?" "It's not opaque," said Joe Silver officiously. "It's translucent from without and transparent from within. I took a look at it this afternoon." "Space giants," groaned someone. "Oh, Lord!" "We can't discount it," said Pink, realizing that he was doing just that, but refusing to disbelieve Circe. Illusion? Not a lie, surely? "She wasn't drugged, after all. She was in full control of senses that were merely slowed down." There was a discomfortable silence. Intercom, space drive, life-scanner. Maybe other machinery by this time. Sabotage in such a clever way that no one of the highly skilled officers and technicians could discover how it was done, what was wrong. Space giants? Ah, come on, Pink! Ynohp. Something wrong with him, some flaw in his looks? No, he was Martian in every oversize pore. Some anachronism? Hey! Anachronism. Pink's mind fished up the dictionary definition. An error in chronology by which events are misplaced in regard to each other.... He had it. He got to his feet, motioned Jerry and Wash Daley to go with him. They congregated outside the door, as further talk broke out inside his quarters. He said urgently, "Remember what Ynohp said about his cataleptic state? 'Moth and rust do not corrupt.' He said it as if it were a quotation." "It is," said Daley. "More or less word for word it's from the King James version of the Bible." "Dated, if I remember correctly, about 1611 A.D.?" "Yes." "At which date the Martians had been without space flight for about 3,600 years. At which date, further, Ynohp claims to have been sitting on an asteroid for about 4,000-plus years." "Coincidence?" asked Jerry. Pink asked, "Do you think so?" "Hell," said Jerry, "no." "Let's go look at his space suit," said Daley urgently. They ran down the corridor, shoving for the lead. Ten minutes later they sat back on their heels and stared at the interior of the suit. Rust had corrupted here, or at any rate decay; the Martian steel, ancient and harder than any known metal, was worn to a papery shell, and in many places tiny holes had eroded clear through the suit. "No man or Martian or anything I know except the space-eating bacteria of Pallas could have lived in that suit, cataleptic state or not." Pink looked around at his friends. "What in the name of heaven have we brought into the ship?" Then the three were racing for the "Martian's" stateroom. They burst in, and found that now it was empty of life. They stood, indecisive, just outside. Pinkham's gaze went to the door, on which, as was the custom, a hastily-printed card had been placed with the officer's name upon it. He read it. Then he blinked. "Look," he said, gesturing. "What about it?" The card blared its secret, its pun, at them. Y N O H P. "Read it backwards," said Pinkham.... CHAPTER V "None of you thought to look at the Martian spacesuit when we'd removed it?" asked Pink. The others shook their heads. They were all in his quarters again. "Neither did you, Captain," said Joe Silver. "You were as busy looking at the Martian as we were." "True enough," admitted Pinkham. "Well, the thing to do first is radio the Diogenes and the Cottabus to stand by for trouble." He lit a cigarette. "If the radio hasn't been tampered with," he said. "Silver, go tell Sparks to start sending to them. Diogenes is down by Planet Five, and Cottabus heading for Four. Tell them to look for us somewhere in the planetoid orbit. They'll have to come in on the radio beam. I don't suppose we can expect them for a day." Joe Silver gave Circe's arm an encouraging squeeze—they'd got on together pretty damn fast—and started out. "And instruct them not to pick up anybody, off asteroids or planets or out of the ether. I don't care if they see their grandmothers floating outside a spaceport." The thought of his armada joining him made Pink feel more at ease. No sense to that, of course, but three ships are better than one, if only for moral support. "Daley," he said then, "lower the Mutiny Gates." "You think it's wise?" "If I didn't, I wouldn't do it," he snapped. It would be the first time that a mutiny gate had been used in more than forty years. All the large ships were equipped with them, great plastikoid barriers which operated from the captain's room, sealing off the officer's sector from the rest of the ship. They had been made standard equipment in the old days, before screenings became really effective and the danger of psychopathic trouble in the crew grew negligible. Now they were of theoretical use in case of boarding by alien life, or of damage to a large segment of the hull ... but they had never actually been brought into play in Pinkham's lifetime. "Drop 'em," he repeated. Daley pulled open a drawer, tugged at an unused switch, which creaked protestingly; then the brief alarm clang that heralded the fall of the forty gates sounded in the distance. "If he's beyond the gates," the senior lieutenant said heavily, "the crew may be done for." "No more than if the gates were up," Pink told him impatiently. "You're projecting," said Daley. "How do we know the nature of the beast? He may mop 'em up in a fit of pique at being shut out there." "The chances are he's on our side of the walls," said Bill Calico. "Nothing out there of much importance to him. The hydroponics farm, history room, library, and so on." "We don't know what's important to him," said Daley. "We don't know what in blazes he wants aboard. We don't know a doggone thing!" Silver returned. "I heard the mutiny gates go," he said questioningly. "Are you all armed?" asked Pink. They nodded. "Then let's sweep the place," he said, glancing from one grim face to another. "Pick up the other officers as we go, and make a chain of inspection that he can't bust through. We'll corner him sooner or later. Then we'll see if atomic pistols will settle his hash." He looked at Circe. "You'd better stay here," he said. "I agree," said Randy Kinkare suddenly. "And you'd best lock her in—from the outside." "Why?" blazed the girl. "We picked you up on an asteroid too," said the assistant pilot. Pink, restraining himself from bashing Kinkare in the nose, said reluctantly, "You're right. We can't trust any stranger till we find out what's going on. Sorry, Circe." "I suppose you're right." She sat down, a little flushed, eyes snapping. "Have I the right to ask for protection? I'm just as unsafe as you are, whether you believe me or not. Please leave Lieutenant Silver to guard me." He couldn't refuse. He nodded curtly to Joe Silver, who looked too damn smug for words. So they'd paired off already? So much for his quick dream of marrying a spacegirl.... It had never happened to him before, though, and it was a hard dream to give up, all the more so for its abrupt flowering in a heart that heretofore had held nothing but love for the silence of the spaceways. John Pinkham, rugged, handsome, all a woman could want, had been dedicated to his profession since he was five; and many a wench had found that out to her disappointment. Now ... oh, well. Maybe there wasn't room for space and a girl in his heart, after all. And maybe she wasn't what she seemed. He led them into the corridor and locked the quarters behind him. Around the first bend and up the first ramp they found Second Watch Officer Wright. They knew him by his chubby build and his uniform. They couldn't recognize his head, even when they found it three minutes later. CHAPTER VI They gathered in Sparks' radio room. That was due to the simple fact that, aside from themselves, only Sparks was alive on this side of the mutiny gates. The other officers were scattered—in the most grisly sense of the word—all over the place. "Seven of us, if Silver's still alive," said Daley. "Eight with the girl. Why us? He could easily have attacked us in a body." Five of the dead officers had been found in a heap, just-used pistols in their rigid hands. Atomic force was obviously useless against the thing from the asteroid. Pink said, fighting nausea, "All the senior officers are alive. We can run the Elephant's Child without the eleven who died. Maybe that's why. Maybe we have to be preserved to carry this monster wherever he wants to go." "Logical," said Jerry. "He'll have to be pretty persuasive, though. I hope he knows that." Sparks said, "The radio's working. I had an answer from the Cottabus that she's heading this way. Diogenes hasn't replied; she must be further off." "Evidently he doesn't care if the radio works," said Calico. "Or else he wants the whole armada assembled," added Daley. "I could use a drink," blurted Kinkare. "You got anything in this place, Sparks?" "Gin on the shelf," said the radioman, pointing. Kinkare picked up the bottle. "You always leave the cap off?" "No! Somebody's been at it." "Where is he?" asked Pink in a whisper. "What, Captain?" Kinkare stopped the bottle halfway to his lips. "Where the devil is the brute? We combed the place. He can't have got through the mutiny gates. He can't have slipped past our chain. Where the hell is he?" "Maybe disguised as one of us," said Daley slowly. "He isn't a Martian, but he imitated one to the last pore. Why couldn't he imitate us?" "Well, I'm me," said Kinkare, and put the bottle to his mouth. Then he dropped it, screeching. Pinkham stared at him and saw his upper lip turned violent, hideous scarlet. Blood began to drip to the rug. The skin and flesh of his lip had dissolved as though sprayed with acid. Kinkare fell to his knees, covering his face with both arms. The others sprang to help him, Sparks reaching for the medicine chest; but Pink snatched up the gin bottle. What the hell? Acid? Or— From the square spout poured a gush of smoke, writhing sinuous in the bright indirect light of the small room; it coalesced, clotted into a body. Impossible, brain-boggling, an unreal fantasy amid the most concrete achievements of man, the thing swelled into solidity before the Captain's staring eyes. He was eight feet tall, three broad; his eyes were brilliant vermilion, his swollen head was egg-bald, and the expression on his coarse features was at once lecherous, evil, savage and cunning. He was stark naked, completely humanoid. And he had come out of the bottle. A voice boomed from him like a vocalizing cannon. "I object to anyone trying to drink me!" he roared at them. In the reeling chaos of all his beliefs gone wild, Pinkham had one sane thought, and yelled it as fast and short as he could. "Don't shoot! For God's sake, don't shoot!" Then, as Calico and Jerry held their pistols partly raised, he said urgently, "We'll only blast each other. Remember this thing's invulnerable." The pistols were holstered with reluctance. The five pale men—Kinkare still thrashed in agony on the floor—gaped at the apparition, which said, "I am Ynohp the Martian." Gargantuan laughter rocked him. "I am your god, Earthmen. Bow down to me!" "Damfido," said Jerry, which was evidently all he could manage to get out of "Damned if I do." "Drop your weapons on the floor," said the being. Pink drew his gun; casually he sighted on the great head above him, and risked one shot, which had all the effect of a sunbeam; then he let the pistol fall. The others discarded theirs. The naked creature reached out a foot and herded the weapons into a corner. "You can't hurt me with them," he said, "but you might try suicide, and I need you. Take heart, mortals," he said, laughing, "you may get out alive!" Then he dwindled and his lines blurred into ephemera and he slid out through the door, which was open perhaps an inch. CHAPTER VII "But by all that's holy," said Daley (it was an hour later, and the eight were gathered in the control room, Kinkare now bandaged and relieved of pain, but unable to speak), "if he's a brain-picker, and got his lingo out of our minds, who did he get 'take heart mortals' from?" The lieutenant glanced at Pinkham. "It may seem little, but it's minutiae that will give us clues to his nature, and therefore how to fight him. Take heart, mortals, after all. Who talks like that?" "You're right," said Pink wearily. "It's little things we've got to look for. Like, evidently, gin bottles." "Item," said Jerry, who was eating a sandwich. "He's composed of something alien to any life we know. Gas? I doubt it. Atomic shock would disseminate gas. Are his molecules loose and do they edge aside for obstacles, compress together when he wants to shrink, and so on? Possible. But anyhow, he's different—and so far as we know, invulnerable." "How did he gimmick the guns?" asked Calico, a note of desperation in his voice. "We picked them up as soon as he'd gone, and they wouldn't fire." "Same way he gimmicked the intercom, the life-scanner, the space drive. Known hereafter as Unknown Method One." "Another item," went on Jerry. "He talks English without using a lingoalter. Thus, probably, he's telepathic. 'Take heart mortals' he might have grubbed out of somebody's subconscious." "It adds up to this," said Pink. "We're helpless against him. Granting this, I say let's go get him." It made no sense, it was the gesture of fools in love with death or of madmen battling their own futility; but every officer there shouted, "Right!" Except for Joe Silver. "I say, sit tight and wait," he said. "Something will happen. There's no use committing suicide." "If he wants us alive, and we can't fight him, I think we're better off dead," said Jerry through his teeth. "Hell. Where there's life there's hope." "I suppose you're right," said Pink slowly. His muscles ached, his hands grasped ceaselessly at the air; he was a man of action, his desire for combat throttled by incapability. "Twenty-some hours before the other ships get here. If our deductions are on the beam, he won't do anything till then. He wants the whole armada." Then, with a snarl of static, the intercom came to life. At first they heard a jumble of voices. "What's wrong?" "Nothing works...." "Are all the officers dead?" It was the crew, beyond the barriers of the mutiny gates, evidently trying to get into communication. Over and over one voice said, "Hello, Captain Pinkham. Come in, Captain Pinkham." Pink took two strides and flipped the switch of the visiograph. Tuning it first to one crew station and then another, he told them succinctly what bad happened. "Don't panic, for God's sake. The mutiny gates are for your protection. If they work, you may be able to do something later, regardless of what happens to us." Their somber faces looked out of the screen at him. "Let us in, Captain," pleaded one big repairman. "We'll mob the critter." "No use, Jackson. Stand by." He turned the dial of the visiograph into the officers' section, scanned one room after another. No alien being appeared. "I wonder if he's in here with us?" said Pink half-aloud. Jerry came to him. "I have an idea," he said quietly. Then he whispered at length into Pinkham's ear. "It won't work. He knows what he's doing." "How do we know that? If he needs us, he's ignorant of spaceships. Look at the intercom—he turned it off, by some means, then turned it on when he found out what it was. The space drive must have been easy to guess at; likewise the life-scanner. But the intercom's a lot of complex machinery that only adds up to a television-telephone communication system. However he snarls the stuff, it's instantaneous and simple for him to do. I think he just took a crack at everything that looked important. Now he's experimenting, learning the ship, finding out what he threw out of joint. Obviously he doesn't give a damn if we talk to the crew!" "You could be right." "So if I do what I want to, it'll confuse hell out of him. It may give us an advantage. And we'll certainly learn something." "It's worth a try." Pink looked at Jerry, his closest friend. "I'll send Silver to do it," he said. Jerry shook his lean head. "This is my baby, Pink." Then he opened the door and went out, closing it behind him. Pinkham said levelly, "Daley, come here." He whispered the plan into his lieutenant's ear. Daley said admiringly, "Good deal. And I think that's sense—he can't know much about the ship. I'll bet he was hiding in that bottle, casing Sparks's equipment and learning how to operate it. The quick look he got at the rest of us on our jobs before he started playing hob must have given him the barest, scantiest idea of things. So Jerry's notion could work." "Or it could blow up," said Pink dismally. "Go tell the others. Whisper it, in case our guest is in here." He struggled briefly with his deepest feelings. "Don't tell Circe. We can't be sure of her yet." "Roger." Daley left him alone at the intercom. Pinkham set the dial to show the large room toward which Jerry was making his way.... Somewhere beyond their ken, the incredible beast from the void made another decision, or tried another experiment; and the life-scanner flickered into working order again. Joe Silver saw it first. Its screen blinked, then its alarm buttons glowed vividly. Without the ship, at a vast distance but approaching rapidly, were an untold number of organic entities, life-sources that reacted upon the scanner like approaching aircraft on a radar set. They could be spaceships, slugjet suits, or anything that contained the intangible thing called life. And the sister ships of the Elephant's Child were still too far away to register. "Great Jupiter!" bellowed Joe Silver, pointing. "What now?" CHAPTER VIII O. O. Jerry Jones crept along the last ramp. Why the devil was he skulking like this? Habit, he grinned ruefully to himself; the habit of primitive man who crouched and slunk in the presence of danger, no matter what kind. And the old preservation instinct was also giving him all sorts of reasons to knock this silly business off, and go back to the protection, however illusory, of the control room. For instance, said the sly instinct, if this alien is telepathic, as you so neatly proved to yourself, then doesn't he know all that you and your pals know about a spaceship? Shut up, Jerry told himself. I was wrong. He can't be telepathic, or he wouldn't bother to keep us alive after he's combed our brains. "Couldn't he have some physical use for you all?" said the instinct. Get thee behind me, Satan, he growled in his mind. He opened the door of the room he was seeking. Where to start? One wall was banked with books; never mind them. Another wall was covered with strange-looking projections, tubes and spouts and wheels and levers, behind a long table of plastikoid. There? Good enough. He had a momentary pang as he picked up a spanner from the rack of tools by the door.... Then he was across the room and smashing wildly at levers, spouts, wall tanks, faucets; beating metal into scrap, crushing shining aluminum to scarred uselessness; he did not rest his arm until the whole wall was a ruin of beaten metal and broken glass. Then he turned his attention to the third wall. Here was a giant turntable, rack on rack of shellacked alloy discs, mysterious-appearing charts and cabalistic signs. These he wrecked as methodically and ruthlessly as he had the first, but now there were tears glistening in his eyes. He ended the destruction with a moan of sorrow. He paused to snap on the intercom. Pink's worry-lined face appeared. "How'm I doing?" Jerry asked his captain. "Great so far. Calico is crying like a child." "I have news for you," Jerry said. "So am I." Then he turned to the last wall. Before it spread a long array of mechanical devices: large boxes on spindly legs, with glassed tops and brilliant colors splashed across their surfaces; taller, narrower cases with crooked levers and viewplates on which were small designs and words. There was a kind of double cage with tiny cubes therein. There were great wheels with many numbers. Almost all were attached to the wall by electric cords, though some were entirely mechanical and others ran on self-generated power. Jerry began at one end and passed down the line, shattering glass and snapping wooden legs with his spanner. He had almost finished when the door burst open and the tall humanoid form of the stranger appeared. A blast of rage almost lifted Jerry off his feet. The being came at him, its motion a flowing tigerish pounce. The spanner was twitched from his hand flung across the room. He backed against the wall, bloating with fear in spite of himself. The creature swelled above him. "Whoreson knave!" it bawled angrily. "What are you doing?" "Making d-d-damn sure you don't take the ship anywhere," said Jerry, croaking a little. "Now t-try and run it!" He was suddenly lifted off his feet and dangled helplessly a yard off the floor. "Fix them," snarled the alien thing into his face. He had time to realize that its grip was extremely powerful, whatever its molecules and atoms might be made of. "Reconstruct them, or you die." "Don't be an idiot," Jerry told it, making up his mind that he was as good as dead and might as well go out like a man. "There isn't a single spare part aboard for any of these devices." He managed a sick grin. "If you're so smart, you know I'm telling the truth." Pinkham called from the screen of the intercom. "That's true, whatever-you-are. Those things are useless to you now." The alien took Jerry by the chest, wrapping one hand around his back to do it; slowly it exerted pressure, and Jerry realized that it must have elongated the hand enormously to encompass him so. He also knew that his rib cage would shortly collapse. He shrieked. Then Circe, the girl from the asteroid, was gazing from the screen, horrified. "No!" she screamed at the being. "You can't kill him for only wrecking the—" "Shut up!" squealed Jerry. "The recreation room!" she finished. Abruptly he was dropped to the floor, where he lay gasping, massaging his bruised sides. The thing above him said, "Recreation room?" "Sure. The soda fountain, the phonograph, and the pinball machines and games." Then Pinkham had encircled her throat with one arm, clamped his other hand on her mouth, and dragged her back. But the damage was done. The alien gave another of those mirthless peals of bull's laughter. "Clever," he said. "Oh, clever little man." Then he plucked Jerry off the floor once more. I'm going to die now.... The brute set him on his feet, twisted him toward the door, and gave him a brisk, forceful pat on the backside that sent him staggering. He gained his balance and ran into the corridor. It was more humiliating than had he been slain. CHAPTER IX "It didn't work, but it taught us a few things." "You're right. It taught us that this bitch can't be trusted. Either she's in league with it, a sister or brother of it, or else she's so stupid that she's a menace to our survival." "Oh, you blithering jackass!" said Circe indignantly to her fellow organicus officer. "How could I guess what your plan was? Nobody told me. All I knew was that you were going to be murdered for doing a perfectly harmless—" "She's right," said Joe Silver. "We ought to have told her." "Shut up," said Pinkham savagely. "Any more of that and I'll figure she's corrupted you or addled your brains, and I'll toss you into the brig, Silver." "You try it you pigsqueak," shouted Silver, who measured half an inch over Pink's six-foot-three. "Captain or not, this is a grade A emergency and we're all needed. I'll pull the Mars Convention on you if you try to shut me up." "He's right," said Daley to the captain. "Mars Convention says that in a grade A emergency any officer above Second Watch is equal to the captain or commander, Pink." Then he turned to Silver, grinned, and lashing out with a hand the size of a spaniel, caught his under-lieutenant on the ear. It knocked Silver sprawling. "That's for slanging at your superiors," he said quietly. "And the Mars Convention says I can do that." Silver got up and blinked. He seemed dazed and for the first time in his space life, uncertain of himself. He looked at the others and recognized himself as a minority here. "Okay," he said, "okay, I'm outvoted. But I say the girl is only suspect, by no means convicted of anything but ignorance of the plan." Kinkare, unable to speak through his bandaged mouth, nodded strongly. Circe glared defiance at Pinkham. "Next time, for God's sake tell me what you have in mind," she said. "Not that I'd let you sacrifice poor Jerry, anyway." "Women," said Jerry. "Women on a ship. Jonahs. Sentimental imbeciles." "I'll knock your teeth down your scrawny throat," began Joe Silver, and "Quiet!" roared Pinkham. "We're quarreling like kids. What's to be done now!" "I was saying it taught us a few things," said Daley. "Let's figure them out. The thing's evidently not telepathic. It can't run a spaceship, or it wouldn't have been so worked up over the ruin of the soda fountain, which must have looked pretty vital to its inexperienced eyes. It's definitely tangible, for it picked Jerry up." "It also murdered eleven men," said Pink. "That's tangible enough too." "It's damned intelligent, for it must have spotted Jerry on the intercom, which means it was working it. It also speaks a very funny breed of English. 'Whoreson knave,' for example. Nobody here ever called anyone that." "Whoreson knave is Shakespearean," said Jerry. "And, to finish what I've deduced, the monster is as strong as a couple of men, at least." He grinned at Jerry. "Not that you needed me to deduce that." Randy Kinkare was staring at the life-scanner screen. Now he beat a tattoo on the arm of his chair, pointed so that they all looked. The flecks of light that indicated organic life had thronged in toward the ship; not so numerous as the stars, they were still too many to count. One object on the screen was large now, large enough to be identified. It approached the ship at a slow but steady rate, and they gasped as they saw it was another of the human-like figures. "His brothers," said Pinkham. "That must be their natural form, then." It grew and grew. It seemed it must now be touching the scanner's outside cell; but no, it grew even greater. At last it could not be seen in its entirety, then only its face showed. It was a hideous face, twisted with sardonic malice. The face grew. When it stopped, only one enormous eye filled the screen. Jerry cleared his throat. "Do you know what that means?" he asked. "It means that, at a conservative estimate, the critter is—" "Go on," said Daley impatiently, when Jerry's silence had lengthened intolerably. "It must be at least on...