Wandl the Invader by Ray Cummings (ereader ebook txt) 📕

lay waiting. The space-suit had no weapons for equipment save a knife hung in the belt. I drew it out, held it in my gloved fingers.

The disc sailed upon its level, vertical axis. Its rotation slowed; I saw little windows set around its convex middle. It came up and bumped me with its metal side. I kicked away, shoved off. Shapes were moving in a dim interior light behind the port-panes. Little hand-beams of radiance darted out. They seemed to seize me, draw me.

I found myself glued helplessly to the convex outer surface of the disc. The rotation gathered speed again, but I looked presently only at the gleaming surface to which I was pinned. Had I been a metal bar upon the horns of an electro-magnet, I could not have been more helpless.

An interval passed. With the contact plate of my fingers against this hull it seemed that I could hear voices within, strange, indistinguishable words. I twisted, but could not see into the port.

Again the rotation was slowing. The near shape of the enemy vessel swung close and past; and again and again I saw that we were over it, dropping down into the wide black opening of the funnel-top. It yawned presently like a great black tunnel, into which we fell.

The jar of landing knocked me loose, and no doubt the attraction radiance also released me. I fell another space, bounced up and sank back. I thought that something like a sliding port-door closed over me.[67]

And then, in the dimness, figures were gripping me. I lashed and struck, but the knife was wrenched away.

I was a prisoner in a pressure-port of the enemy ship!

8

It seemed that the small room had a very faint radiance showing through my vizor pane. Narrow enclosing walls were visible. It was a triangular-shaped space, fifteen feet or so down one side, with a concave ceiling overhead. I was lying on the floor. The darkness at first had been impenetrable. The figures which had flung me down and seized my knife were gone; I had not seen them nor where they went.

For a moment I lay cushioned by my bloated suit. When I struggled to my feet, I was almost weightless. The movement of getting upright flung me upward as though I were a tossed feather. My helmet struck the metal ceiling, so sharp a blow that I feared for an instant I had smashed the helmet.

From the ceiling, with flailing arms and legs, I sank back to the grid-floor; and in a moment I was able to stand upright with so slight a feeling of weight that I could have been a bit of thistle ready to blow away in the least wind.

There was, as I stood there balancing myself, a queer feeling of triumph within me. A triumphant hope; for coming down in the ship's capacious funnel—larger than it had seemed from a distance—I had seen what appeared to be a small projectile, resting in some strange landing gear. The disc bearing me had settled on a stage alongside it. Was that the projectile from Earth?

[68]

A growing air pressure was around me; the tiny Erentz dials within my helmet had been immovable, but now they were showing outside pressure. I stood waiting. Whatever sounds were here I could not tell. Then presently the dials stopped. They registered seventeen pounds—whatever that might mean here. I loosed the helmet and took it off.

With the first gasping breath my senses reeled. I sank to the floor, and though I tried to replace the helmet, it was too late. My thoughts were fading. A strange chemical odor was in my nostrils. It was like breathing a thin, perfumed water.

The drifting away was pleasant.

Tortured dreams came with my awakening. I found myself in the same dim room upon the floor. I could breathe better now, and in a few more hours the strangeness had almost gone. I found now that I was not injured, but I was ravenously hungry.

Again, gingerly as before, I stood up and slid my space-suit from me; and now I was aware of movement and sound. The floor-grid vibrations were apparent. And there was a dim, distant, tiny throbbing; it was much like the interior of the Cometara while in flight.

And there were other sounds, indescribably faint, yet strangely clear. I thought they might be distant voices.

I took a cautious step. I could see a dim blank wall nearby with what seemed a bowl-like article of furniture on the floor against the wall. For all my caution, I sailed upward; but this time I held my balance. And I found that with my negligible weight, I could almost swim in this strange air! I hit the wall and slid slowly down it to the floor again, like a man sinking to the bottom of a tank.

It suddenly occurred to me to put my ear against the wall. At once the sounds all became incredibly louder. It was a confusion of sound: the mechanisms of the vessel, some of which I thought I could identify, and some not; the strange swish and thump of what might have been people moving; and there were voices.

The voices seemed mingled babble coming from everywhere. The timber of the sound was very strange. It held no suggestion of how far away from me the voices might be. There were so many of them I could only think they were scattered about the ship; and yet they all seemed together. After a moment, the blend was less confusing. Again, very strangely my hearing seemed able to separate one from the other.

I was to learn that the atmosphere handled sound vibrations differently from that of Earth. Voices had a muffled tone, as though they were smothered. There was undoubtedly[69] a vibrational distortion; and a sound-wave speed slower than Earth's normal-pressure rate of 1,050 feet a second, perhaps as slow as 700. Yet sounds remained audible over longer distances than on Earth.

In this instance now, as I listened with my ear to the wall of the ship, I was hearing all its sounds picked up and carried by the metal.

Now I heard a strange tongue: two types of voices, slow, measured, carefully-intoned phrases, and voices of a curiously sepulchral, hollow sound. My mind went back to the Red Spark restaurant room.

And suddenly I realized that amid the babble I was hearing English. A man's voice, talking English. I caught, very clearly the phrase:

"Master, yes. She means well. Can you not see it?"

Molo's voice! Then the girls must be here also.

Another voice: "I am not sure. Perhaps. The Great Intelligence will talk with her when we are arrived." It was the slow measured voice of one of the brains.

"When will that be? Pretty soon now, won't it, Molo?"

Venza! A great wave of thankfulness swept me. And then I heard Anita. "Your two captives, where are they? You're not going to kill them, are you?"

"No," said Molo. "Perhaps not. No one has inspected the new one yet. The other is being cared for. The Great Intelligence will question him when we arrive."

"We are arriving," said Venza. "That's your world, Wandl, down there, isn't it?"

"Yes. We are dropping fast."

The voice of the brain: "Come, Wyk. The instruments are showing events on our captured worlds. Take me to watch. I am tired of movement."

"Yes. Master."

It seemed that the brain was being carried away; Molo and the two girls were being left alone. I had thought at first that they were in the adjacent room to me, but they could have been far distant. They had mentioned two captives. One, obviously, was myself. Was the other Snap?

"Come," Molo was saying, "stand here with me and we will watch this world. Not mine, Venza chia, as you just called it,[70] But my adopted world. And it will be yours, until we rule the new Mars."

I heard them moving to gaze through the window-port. Then came Anita's voice: "If it's anything like this ship, it will be very strange."

"Strange indeed, little dove. I was there only once, a month ago, and for a few hours only. The Great Intelligence, as they call him, talked with me, absorbing my knowledge: they call it that. And he was much impressed by me, and made very wonderful promises in exchange for my fidelity. And for my sister, too."

I learned further how Molo and Meka became identified with the Wandlites; it was as we had suspected.

"You will rule Mars?" Venza was saying. "When this is over, you mean you will really be given Mars to rule?"

"I would rather live on the Earth," said Anita. "There was a young man there."

"He will not be there much longer." Molo laughed. "You are very lucky that I fancy you!"

"Lucky indeed," Venza echoed. "No death for me. I'm too young."

"But all those millions dead. It seems so terrible."

"It is, for them!" Molo was in high good humor, pleased with himself and with these girls. "See down there; that blurring is the heavy air. We're almost down into it now."

I heard the sound of someone joining them, and then the hollow voice again: "Molo! Bad tidings come from Mars. One of the Masters was captured there in Ferrok-Shahn. They tortured him as they did the one on Earth. But he did not die unyielding. He spoke and told our plans!"

"Hah! Did I not advise you to keep those helpless things on Wandl?"

"But it is done now. The worlds know our purpose. They are preparing spaceships. Already some are rising from Ferrok-Shahn, from Grebhar and from Greater New York."

"We knew they were doing that."

"But now they know our purpose. The Master Intelligence fears that they will come raiding Wandl. Our vessels are being made ready to go out and repel them."

The hollow voice ceased.

"Your purpose discovered?" asked Anita. "What does that[71] mean? Won't you tell us now? Twin queens for your future Mars, and you treat us like children!"

"That light-beam he so cleverly planted in Greater New York," Venza hinted.

"Yes, I will tell you. Without me in New York and my men who went with these Wandlites to Ferrok-Shahn and Grebhar, the vital gravity beams could never successfully have been planted. The apparatus was complicated; you saw it. You saw the labor I had making the contact?"

"But what are the light-beams for?"

I listened, breathless, as he told them. The electronic beams could not be destroyed; a disintegration of the rock atoms had been set up. With each rotation of the Earth it was sweeping the sky. From a great control station, Wandl was flinging attraction gravity upon that beam, using it as a monstrous lever upon the rotation of Earth. With every daily passage now the force was being exerted. The rotation was slowing. In a few days it would stop, with the end of the beam drawn to Wandl and held there.

And the beams from Grebhar and Ferrok-Shahn were the same. Three giant chains! Then Wandl, traveling of its own gravitational volition, would withdraw from our solar system. The gravitational chains would pull the Earth, Venus and Mars after it!

Titanic tow-ropes! The destruction, not of our worlds, but of all life upon them, for the cold of interstellar space would leave no living organism. Three dead worlds; Wandl would draw them to her own Sun and then free them, send them, with new orbits, around the distant blazing star. Three new worlds brought home triumphantly by Wandl to join the little family of inhabited planets revolving around this other Sun. Three fair and lovely worlds, warmed back by the other sunlight to be green mansions untenanted, ready to receive the new beings who would come and possess them.[72]

9

"You, Snap!"

"Gregg! But how...?"

"Hush! They might hear us."

"They can do more than that. They can almost hear you think."

"Anita and Venza are here."

"I know it. I was with them for a time. This accursed gravity! I can't walk."

"Careful," I whispered. "You can crack your head on something with the least false step. Are they taking us ashore?"

"I guess so. How did you happen...?"

"Tell you later."

They had come for me in that dark pressure-port, taken me along a dim corridor of the ship, which evidently had landed a few moments before. Then Snap, with strange figures around him, had been flung at me.

These weird beings! The brains were here, but not many; I saw half a dozen on the ship. They could move easily now. They bounced upon their small arms and legs, hitching with little leaps of a few feet. Close at hand they were gruesome; from a distance they had the aspect of thirty-inch ovoids, bouncing of their own volition. And I saw too that underneath, toward the back, was a shriveled