The Miniature Menace
A THRILLING NOVELET
By Frank Belknap Long
Condemned without trial for his refusal to open fire on an alien space-craft, Ralph Langford had to be free to investigate the strange menace from beyond the stars! For if the alien were an enemy, then it would be the most terrible enemy men had ever encountered.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Future combined with Science Fiction Stories May-June 1950.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The sky was harsh with the flare of rocket jets when Captain Ralph Langford emerged from his deep space cruiser on the Mars City landing field. There was a girl standing alone at the far end of the field, and for a moment Langford thought it might be Joan, irrational as the thought was. Of course, Joan couldn't be here; he was to see her at the hospital. He started across the field, blinking in the glare, his eyes shining with a warm gratefulness to be home again; as he approached the solitary figure, he could see it was not Joan, though there was a resemblance. He was so engrossed that he didn't notice the tall, eagle-eyed young Patrol officer who came striding toward him, until he heard the man's voice.
"You're under arrest, sir!" the youth said, his hand whipping to his visor. "Commander Gurney's orders."
Langford looked up suddenly, then stiffened in belligerent protest. "Hold on, Lieutenant! You can't arrest me and march me off to jail like a common criminal. Commission regulations! How long have you worn those stripes, youngster?"
The youth's eyes were respectful, sympathetic; he did not appear to be offended. "I'm sorry, sir," he said firmly. "Commander Gurney went before the Commission and had you certified as irresponsible."
Langford flushed angrily. "So that's it," he grunted.
The Patrol officer hesitated. He had prepared what he intended to say, but the fame of the big man facing him had reached sunward to Mercury, and outward to Pluto's frozen tundras.
Langford's fist lashed out suddenly, catching the youth flush on the jaw, and crumpling him to his knees. The girl, who had been a silent witness up to now, gasped, then turned and ran like a frightened rabbit. Langford did not stop to apologize. Rumor had it that deep space officers bore charmed lives, but Langford knew as he broke into a run that his life hung by a thread that might at any moment turn crimson.
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No part of the field was unguarded. If the guards had orders to withhold their fire he saw a desperate chance of outwitting them; but if they had orders to blast, his fate was already sealed. As he ran he had a vision of himself sinking down in a welter of blood and blackness, his ears deafened by the hollow chant of concussion weapons. He saw himself lying spread out on the landing field, the taste of death in his mouth, the air above him filled with a harsh, eerie crackling.
He ran faster, ran like a man bemazed, his eyes filled with dancing motes that kept cascading down both sides of his oxygen mask. He was a hundred feet from the ship when he became aware that a dozen armed guards had emerged from shadows at the edge of the field and were converging upon him.
Angry curses whipped through the night and the field seemed to tilt as the guards came racing toward him. Far off in the darkness a siren wailed.
Langford suddenly realized that he was becoming light-headed from too much oxygen intake; his head was filled with a dull roaring, and seemed to be expanding. It was filled with flashing lights as well as sound, and was leaving his shoulders as he ran.
He had a sudden impulse to laugh and shout, to whoop at how ridiculous it was. His head had left his shoulders and was spinning about in the air. But before he could grasp the tube which was flooding his brain with hilarity, armed guards were all about him, raising their weapons to cover him and shouting at him to raise his arms.
Unfortunately he couldn't seem to move his arms. When he made the effort he went plunging and skidding over the ramp with running figures on both sides of him. He was skating, cutting capers on ice. Fantastic and incredible capers. Then the ice was inside his skull, swelling up thick; his heels were together when the lights in his head went out.
When the lights came on again Langford found himself stumbling forward into a blank-walled room with a steady pressure at his back. At first he thought the room was a cell, but when his vision adjusted itself to the glare he saw that he was facing a seated man whose head seemed to be dancing in the air.
"Here he is, Commander!" a harsh voice said. "He blacked out, but that didn't stop him from putting up a terrific fight!"
Langford had no recollection of putting up a fight, but the guard's jaw was bruised and swollen, which seemed to indicate that a struggle had taken place. A massive desk swam into view and the head of the seated man settled down on his shoulders.
Langford blinked. Facing him in the cold light was the supreme commander of the Solar Patrol, a thin, hollow-cheeked man of fifty whose eyes behind narrowed lids glittered as cold as glass.
Commander Gurney's immobility was not unlike the roll of thunder in a vacuum. There was sound and fury to it, and yet not a muscle of his face moved as he dismissed the guard with a curt nod, and waited for the massive door behind Langford to clang shut.
The instant silence settled down over the room Commander Gurney came to life. "You're under arrest, Langford," he said, quietly. "If you've anything to say in your own defense you'd better start talking. I can spare you—" the patrol commander glanced at his wrist watch—"Exactly twenty minutes."
"Good enough!" Langford grunted. All the muscles of his gaunt face seemed to pull together as he seated himself. For an instant he remained motionless, his eyes troubled and angry, as if he could not quite accept the fact that he had been deprived of his command by the irate man opposite him.
The two men who sat facing each other in the cold light were sharply divergent types. Langford was a man of enormous strength and a temper that was just a little dangerous when it got out of control. He had never once failed in his duty and the inner discipline which he had imposed on himself showed in his features, which were as tight as a drum. But beneath his rough exterior Langford concealed the sensitive imagination of a poet, and an immense kindliness which sometimes overflowed in strange ways, embarrassing him more than he cared to admit.
Commander Gurney had never experienced such embarrassment; he had imposed his will on the Solar Patrol by becoming an absolute slave to efficiency at considerable detriment to his health. There was something rapacious and hornetlike about him, something ceaselessly alert. Now he sat regarding Langford with a stinging contempt in his stare, poised for the attack, his harsh features mirroring his thoughts like an encephalograph. "Well?" he prodded.
Langford wet his dry lips. Reaching inside his resplendent uniform, he removed a small, shining object which he set down at the edge of his superior's desk. "They shot this out at us when I ordered them to stand by for boarding," he said. "It was contained in a small, translucent capsule which I picked up with a magnetic trawl. It's just a model in miniature, but take a good look at it, sir; would you care to make the acquaintance of a creature like that in the flesh?"
Commander Gurney's eyes widened and his mouth twitched slightly. "In the name of all that's unholy, Langford, what is it?" he muttered.
Langford shook his head. "I wish I knew, sir. It looks quite a bit like a praying mantis. A little, metallic praying mantis six inches tall. But it doesn't behave like one!"
The statuette on Gurney's desk seemed chillingly lifelike in the cold light. It had been fashioned with flawless craftsmanship; its upraised forelimbs were leaf green, its abdomen salmon pink, and its gauzy wings shone with a dull, metallic luster as Langford turned it carefully about.
Gurney couldn't help noticing, with a little shudder, that its mouth-parts consisted of a cutting mandible, and a long, coiled membrane like the ligula of a honeybee. Huge, compound eyes occupied the upper half of the metal insect's face.
Gurney's hand had gone out, and was about to close on the little statue; but something in Langford's stare made him change his mind. As his hand whipped back he fastened his gaze on Langford's face with the ire of a peevish child denied access to a jampot.
"What in blazes has that to do with your failure to obey orders?" he demanded, with explosive vehemence. "That ship must have used an interstellar space-warp drive to appear out of nowhere in the middle of the Asteroid Belt. And you deliberately let it slip away from you!"
Langford shut his eyes before replying. He saw again the myriad stars of space, the dull red disk of Mars and the far-off gleam of the great outer planets. He saw the luminous hull of the alien ship looming up out of the void. An instant before, the viewpane had been filled with a sprinkling of very distant stars with a faint nebulosity behind them. The ship had appeared with the suddenness of an image forming on a screen, out of the dark matrix of empty space.
Langford leaned forward, a desperate urgency in his stare. "Mere alienage doesn't justify the crime of murder, sir!" he said. "Attacking an alien race without weighing the outcome would have been an act of criminal folly, charged with great danger to ourselves."
Commander Gurney shook his head in angry disagreement. "Just how would you define murder, Langford?" he demanded. "If a highly intelligent buzzsaw came at you would you bare your throat?"
Langford ignored the question. "Violence breeds violence, sir," he said, with patient insistence. "Suppose the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose the inhabitants of another planet attacked you without giving you a chance to prove your friendliness?"
Langford's eyes held a dogged conviction. "Remember, sir—to issue a warning is an act of forbearance. No reasonable man could mistake a warning for an aggressive act. If their weapons are superior to ours, or they are superior to us in other, truly terrifying ways, they proved their friendliness by warning us. Would you have had me attack their ship without studying that warning?"
Gurney's eyes had returned to the statue. He seemed fascinated by the glitter of its folded wings. He had a sudden vision of the metal insect spreading its wings and taking off with a low, horrible droning.
Suddenly there was a dull throbbing in the Patrol commander's temples. A frightful dread took possession of him, so that he could hardly breathe; in his mind's gaze he saw a vast, stationary plain that seemed to hang suspended in midair above a fiery sea. Sweeping straight toward him, dark against the glow, were hundreds of flying mantis shapes with their arms upraised in the glow.
Gurney shuddered and gripped the arms of his chair. He transfixed Langford with an accusing stare. "Man, if you'd engaged them in open combat we'd at least know where we stand! We could have put the entire patrol on the alert. Now they've given us the slip and may show up anywhere, armed with weapons that could wipe out civilization overnight."
"I chose what I believed to be the lesser of two evils, sir," Langford said, stepping closer to the desk. His eyes rested briefly on the metal insect; then they returned to Gurney's face.
"There were two metal insects in that capsule, sir. I'm going to show you exactly what happened to the one I experimented with."
Langford's forefinger whipped out as he spoke, striking the little statue sharply on its folded wing membranes. For an instant nothing happened; then, with appalling suddenness, the metal insect came to life. It spread its wings and ascended straight up into the air.
Gurney leapt to his feet with a startled cry. As he did so the flying insect's wings blurred and another pair of wings came into view behind them. The wings were shadowy at first, but they quickly solidified, taking on a glittering sheen. Preying arms sprouted from them. Then, even more quickly, a big-eyed head and a writhing, salmon-pink abdomen.
The instant the second shape became a complete insect it whipped away from its parent image with a furious buzzing. As Gurney stared up in horror the original insect gave off eight more buzzing replicas of itself. They darted swiftly up toward the ceiling and circled furiously about, their wings gleaming in the cold light.
Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light. The flying replicas vanished and the original insect thudded to the floor. For an instant the little horror squirmed; then lay motionless.
"It's playing possum!" Langford said.
Langford advanced as he spoke and raised his foot. The instant he started to bring his heel down the metal insect shivered convulsively, lifted its huge eyes and stared up at him.
Then an incredible thing happened. There was no need for him to crush the insect; methodically and with cold deliberation it began to dismember itself, tearing off its wings with its own sharp claws, and ripping its abdomen to shreds. After a moment, it lay still.
Langford turned and stared soberly at Gurney. "If we wanted to warn them we could send them a little mechanical man, complete in every detail armed with miniature weapons. They've simply sent us a replica of themselves, a model in miniature. It's so unbelievably complex that we could learn nothing by subjecting it to mechanical tests. But we don't have to know what makes it tick.
"They've warned us that they can multiply by fission, so rapidly that they could overrun the Earth in a few hours; they've also warned us that if they find themselves facing impossible odds, they won't hesitate to destroy themselves."
Commander Gurney had returned to his desk and stood facing Langford, his face as grim as death. "I quite agree," he said. "That was—an ugly warning. Langford, letting that ship get away was worse than treasonable. Your twenty minutes are up!"
He was reaching for the communication disk on the far side of his desk when Langford reached inside his uniform for the second time. When the big man withdrew his hand he was clasping an automatic pistol.
Gurney took a swift step backward, his eyes widening in alarm. "So the guards forgot to search you!"
"I'm afraid they did, sir!" Langford said, quietly. "Sit down. I'm going to ask a small favor. A port clearance permit, signed and sealed by you; if you give me your word you won't move until I've cleared the port I won't tie you up."
Gurney sat down and stared at the young space officer in scornful mockery. "Suppose I refuse to promise anything. Would you blast me down in cold blood?"
Langford hesitated. His jaw tightened and a candid defiance came into his stare. "No!" he said.
"Then if you're not prepared to murder me you haven't got what it takes to exact a promise!" Gurney said.
Langford shook his head. "That's sheer sophistry," he pointed out. "I've just laid my cards on the table. If you take advantage of my good faith you'll be hitting below the belt. You see, sir, there's something I've got to do; if I fail I'll come back and give myself up."
For a moment not a muscle of Gurney's face moved. Then he shrugged and glanced at his wrist watch. "I'll sit perfectly still for exactly fifteen minutes, Langford," he said. "That should give you sufficient time to clear the port."
His eyes narrowed to steely slits. "But heaven help you when I move!"
"Fair enough!" Langford said.
Ten minutes later the Patrol captain was climbing into a small jet plane at the edge of the spaceport. Far to the east the skyline of Mars City rose above the horizon like a glittering copper penny swimming in a nebulous haze. A penny flipped in desperation that had miraculously come heads.
Part of the wonder he felt was due to his knowledge that he would soon be flying straight through the penny toward a tall white building he would have braved the sun to scale.
2
A grave-faced physician met Langford at the end of the corridor and beckoned him into a small white-walled room. The physician was not talkative; he didn't need to be. The girl who sat under the bright lamps with her eyes swathed in bandages told Langford all he cared to know.
Her lips were smiling and she held out her arms as her husband came into the room. Langford went up to her, and kissed her tenderly on the cheek, his big, awkward hands caressing her hair that lay in a tumbled dark mass on her shoulders.
She had tried to keep back the tears, but they came now, so that her body quivered with the intensity of her emotion. "I'm going to see, darling!" she whispered; "I know I'm going to see again. I wouldn't let them remove the bandages until you came."
"Sure you are!" Langford said, gruffly. "And you'll have better sight than ever before! Both kinds of sight, just as you had before!"
"I was afraid you might be hurt, darling!" Joan Langford whispered, running her forefinger down his wet cheek as she held his head close. "I used the other sight that makes me so different, and terrifies people much more than it should!"
"You should not have done that!" Langford said, scowling; "I was in no real danger!"
"You were being hunted like a criminal!"
She turned her head toward Dr. Crendon as she spoke. The physician looked away, feeling her gaze on him through the bandages.
"The law of compensation, child," he said, gently. "Mutants are clairvoyant; their vision is piercingly sharp where vision matters most. When nature confers a priceless gift she sometimes withdraws a lesser one; no one knows why, not even the biologists." He smiled, "There I go, personifying the impersonal again. Perhaps ordinary sight will someday be vestigial in all of us."
Langford glanced up. The physician was pressing his finger to his lips and gesturing toward the door. Langford got quickly to his feet. A chill wind seemed to blow into the room, driving all the warmth from his mind.
Just outside the door Dr. Crendon turned and spoke in a cautious whisper. "I haven't given up hope!" he said. "But the chances are not too good, we don't know why, but mutants have defective vision from birth even when their eyes are normal."
Langford nodded, "I know that, doctor!"
The physician's voice became gentler. "We know so little about mutants. Fifty thousand of them in the world, perhaps—born too early or too late! An inward vision that can pierce the barriers of sense and see to the heart of things. And an outward vision that's defective, faltering, almost a blind man's vision. Clairvoyance and failing sight—it just doesn't make sense."
"Joan makes sense," Langford said. "If she were stone blind I'd still worship her."
Dr. Crendon held his hands straight out before him and looked down at them. "I did my best," he said, simply. "There were slight peculiarities of structure in the choroid but I'm sure that the new cornea will adjust. It's the retina itself, the innermost nervous tunic of the eye, that I'm worried about."
He paused, then went on quickly: "A mutant's retina is hypersensitive. It responds to light in a peculiar way and has a tendency to distort images. But that distortion vanishes when the mind becomes really active."
Langford looked at him. "Just what are you trying to tell me?"
"I'm not sure I know!" There were little puckers between Crendon's eyes. "Put it this way. If she doesn't brood too much, if she leads an active life and has complete confidence in her inner vision, her sight may improve. I think the failure of a mutant's sight may be partly due to—well, a kind of fear. Mutants feel cut off from 'normal' humanity—whatever that may be—and are tempted to use their inner vision as a means of escape. And when they do that the outer vision dims to the vanishing point."
"Then you think—"
"Make her feel that she can be of assistance to you in every moment of your waking life. Give her some important task to perform. Keep her with you, lad, as much as you can. She's missed you these many months. Make her realize you can't get along without her."
Langford's eyes held a dawning wonder; he seemed like a man from whom an immense weight had been lifted. "I was just about to tell you that I need her inward vision," he said. "Not only the eyes you've done your best to restore, but her powers of clairvoyance."
"You mean that?"
"Why should I lie to you, doctor?"
For the second time Crendon smiled. "No reason, I suppose. But I thought you might be deceiving yourself by pretending you needed her when you didn't. You've been under something of a strain."
It was Langford's turn to smile. "You don't know the half of it."
"Oh, yes I do! She saw you crossing the skyport with scanner beams trained on you; she saw you playing hide and seek with annihilation. I had to give her a sedative injection to quiet her."
Langford did not move. Something in Crendon's face told him he was not expected to say anything.
"So that makes me an accessory!" Crendon said, the smile still on his lips. "Her vision went blank when I decided she'd seen enough for her own peace of mind."
He nodded. "I didn't know whether you managed to escape or not; it kept me on the tetherhooks until you showed up in my office twenty minutes ago. I've always liked you, Langford; I flatter myself I know an honest man when I see one."
His hand went out and tightened on Langford's palm. "Come on, now! We've got to remove those bandages before she reads my thoughts, and knows how scared I get when I operate. Mutants know what humbugs we all are, Langford; they can see all the flaws in us, and if they can still trust us and believe in us despite that, they must be the forerunners of a new humanity in more ways than we dream!"
If Joan Langford had eavesdropped, using her strange sight, she gave no sign when her husband returned to her side. The conversation in the corridor had taken him from her for the barest instant, but that instant had seemed like an eternity to Langford and the inner vision of his wife.
For how could 'time' be measured in minutes or hours by a woman wearing a blindfold, shut away in the dark, and waiting a verdict that could cause the future to slough away into chill gulfs? And how could 'time' have any meaning when the stars faded out of the sky and a sunset gun boomed farewell to the joys of the physical world? And to one who loved and hoped—could 'time' be measured by the moving hands of a clock?
Quickly Langford's fingers interlocked with those of his wife. "This is it, darling!" he said.
Crendon's fingers fumbled a little as he turned Joan's head gently from the light and began to unwind the bandages.
"Don't open your eyes until I've removed the gauze pads," he warned. "And don't look directly at the light. At first you may not see at all; you must be prepared for that."
Crendon hated himself for his sternness, but experience had taught him that it was best to arouse a faint antagonism in his patients; it prevented them from regarding him as a miracle worker. He wanted them to face reality with courage, for healing depended on many things and was often a matter of blind, fanatical trust.
"Now then!" he said.
As he spoke he raised the last fold of the bandage, and carefully removed the small, moist pads beneath, one from each eye. He straightened, his back to the light.
Langford looked away quickly. As though from a great distance he heard Crendon say: "Now you may open your eyes. Remember, you may not see at all for five full minutes!"
Mentally he added: Or ever! I shouldn't be discouraged. A man does what he can. Ten years of it, ten years of trying to save human sight. And every day I learn something. And every day I envy men who endure merely the loneliness of space. Why pretend? I have never felt compassion for humanity in the abstract. It is only when I look into eyes that I have failed to heal and realize that I can do nothing at all.
"Dr. Crendon, I can see! Everything—clearly."
And so it was that Dr. Crendon—moody, skeptical Dr. Crendon—received the greatest shock of his life. He had anticipated an agonized outcry—or a joyous one. But Joan had spoken hardly above a whisper, in a tone of quiet assurance, as if she had known all along that she would see.
And suddenly Crendon realized that she had known! For mutants could see into the most probable future! Not too clearly, but clearly enough! How could he have been so blind?
As Crendon turned he saw that Langford had fallen to his knees beside his wife and was sobbing convulsively, his head cradled in her arms. He tiptoed softly out of the room. He felt curiously hollow inside, as though all capacity for emotion had been burned out of him by the corroding acid of his own skepticism.
3
Five minutes later Langford was replacing the bandages on Joan's eyes. He felt like a man who was playing a game with a deadly, unseen antagonist in a room full of crouching shadows. No—not a room. As he bent above his wife, his hand on her tumbled hair, the space about him seemed to fall away into darkness. And now he was gazing straight down the interplanetary deeps at a green world swimming in a nebulous haze. The haze dissolved, drifted away, and he saw the green hills of his native land.
He saw the earth, and crouching shadows covered the face of the land.
The crouching shadows of enormous insects. He could not escape from them because they were everywhere; when he broke into a run the mantis shapes followed him. They towered above him, sinister, horrible. He felt like a man caught in an invisible trap, the sky hemming him in, the ground beneath his feet a dissolving quagmire.
He shook the illusion off, for he did not want Joan to see the shadows as he saw them. What was it Crendon had said? She must be made to feel that you need her. Well, he did; he knew now that more than his own honor was at stake. If the alien ship could not be located his fears would not remain subjective. The fate of humanity hung in the balance.
His imagination had been stimulated abnormally by the events of the past few days; now it was leaping ahead of developments. For all he knew to the contrary the alien ship had foundered in the void or crashed on one of the inner planets in a red swirl of destruction.
Interstellar exploration was not without its risks and those risks would mount steadily to an alien intelligence as unfamiliar landmarks loomed up out of the void.
"You do not need the bandages," Langford said, a deep solicitude in his voice. "If you simply shut your eyes you would see the ship clearly. My thoughts would guide you to it."
"My vision is sharper when my eyes are bandaged," Joan replied. "You must trust me, darling; I know. When my eyes are sealed there is no emotional block and my inner vision has free play. I am prevented from using my eyes by an actual physical impediment. So I strain all of my faculties to see as far as I can in the dark. Call it a psychological quirk if you wish; I only know that it helps."
"If it helps that's all that matters," Langford assured her. "Forget I put my oar in."
"Don't think about the ship for a minute," Joan said. "Make your mind a blank. Then visualize yourself standing before the viewport staring out, just as you stood when you first saw the alien ship. Visualize the ship coming toward you through the void. If you can visualize it clearly I'll be able to locate it, no matter where it is now."
Joan paused, as though she didn't quite know how to make the complexity of the problem clear to her husband. "I can't explain the power," she said; "I know so little about 'time', far less than the physicists think they know. Mutants, they tell us, can visualize 'time' as a stationary dimension, freezing all event objects in 'the past' and in the 'probable future'. They can travel along 'time' in either direction at will."
"But you do not think of it as an actual journey?" Langford asked; "you merely shut your eyes and see?"
Joan shook her head. "It isn't quite as simple as that. Clairvoyance is never simple; it's accompanied by an intense inward illumination. It's a little like staring at something through a long vista of converging prisms. Objects get in the way and there's doubt, uncertainty. Sometimes it's sheer torment.
"Sometimes I can't see at all. And even when I can see there's a curious, almost terrifying sense of wrongness about it."
"You mean you feel guilty?"
Joan smiled slightly. "Did Alice feel guilty when she went through the looking glass? Perhaps she did! But I didn't mean that kind of wrongness, not a moral wrongness. It's as though the strange tensions will get you if you don't watch out. Rush in upon you and project you forcibly into another place. As though you were a jet of steam imprisoned in a bottle that's much too tight and forced in the wrong direction by a power you can't begin to understand.
"You keep fearing you'll get caught in the neck of the bottle and wake up screaming."
"Good Lord!" Langford muttered.
"I've never got caught," Joan said. "Now make your mind a blank, darling. We're going to find that ship!"
A moment later Langford stood holding his wife's hand, a sharp apprehension in his stare. Joan seemed slightly agitated. She sat gripping the arms of her chair, her bandaged eyes turned from the light.
Suddenly her lips moved. "Ralph, I can see the ship! It's coming straight toward the viewport. You didn't tell me it was so beautiful, so—so huge!"
"I was waiting for you to tell me!" Langford said, quickly.
"Well, I'm telling you, darling! I'm glad you didn't completely visualize it. Now I'm sure I'm not just reading your mind. It must be three hundred feet long; it's hard to tell where the illumination comes from."
Joan straightened suddenly. "It's no longer just a ship," she said. "I'm still outside, but I've moved closer to it. And I can sense a rustling deep inside the hull, a vague stir of activity that's not entirely physical."
While Langford held his breath Joan pressed her palms to her temples. "The rustling is becoming clear. There are swift, abrupt movements, accompanied by thoughts. But I'm not sure whether the thoughts come from one mind or many minds. The thoughts are swift, piercing. Darting thoughts. That's the only way I can describe them."
Her voice rose slightly. "I can sense a living presence deep inside the ship. More than one, I think. There's a kind of swarming."
"A swarming?"
"I'm not sure about that," Joan said, quickly. "I don't think they're moving about much. The thoughts seem to come from one direction. I can just make out a shape now; it's tall, and very slender."
"Winged?" Langford whispered.
"No, no, don't prompt me!" Joan was excited. "The important thing is that I can see it. I may never see it clearly. Gauzy—yes, it is winged. It has gauzy, shining wings, folded on its chest. Two clawlike appendages, raised in a praying attitude. Perhaps I saw that in your mind; you mustn't interrupt again."
"I won't!" Langford promised.
"The creature is horribly agitated!" Joan said. "It looks upon your ship as a menace. Its brain is humming with fear; it is preparing to contact you, warn you. It's getting ready to warn you in a strange way. It has prepared something for just such an emergency. Something small, glistening. I can't make it out, but it's putting the object into a luminous shell!"
"That's right!" Langford said, forgetting his promise. "They shot the shell into the void; we picked it up with a magnetic trawl."
There was a brief silence as Joan thought that out. Then her lips twisted in a strained smile. "If you say another word—"
"Sorry!"
"It's bad; it hinders." She raised her arms in a gesture of grim urgency. "Now the ship is moving swiftly away from your ship. I can dimly sense vast distances rushing past. And there's a feeling of loneliness, of utter desolation. No despair, exactly; it's as though I were sensing the utter desolation of deep space through a mind filled with a bitter nostalgia!
"If the feeling wasn't so intense, so strange and bewildering, I'd say it was a 'Carry me back to old Virginia' feeling! Does that make sense to you? It's like—someone thrumming a guitar a billion miles from home, whistling to keep up his courage, remembering something very precious and beautiful lost forever. I can't explain it in any other way."
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: "Now a planet is taking shape in the darkness. It's pale green and crossed by a long, wavering streamer of light. I can make out continents and seas."
Joan stiffened. "Ralph! There's only one planet in the Solar System that catches the sunlight through great swarms of meteors in the plane of its ecliptic. The lights of the Zodiac! It must be the Earth!"
Langford dared not speak for fear of breaking the spell. Joan was trembling now, as though thoughts from the past were impinging with a tormenting intensity on her inner vision.
"The ship's out of control!" came suddenly. "It's plunging down through the lower atmosphere toward a vast expanse of jungle. A tropical rain forest. A mist is rising over the trees and a burst of flame is coming from the ship. It's zigzagging as it descends."
Emotion seemed to quiver through her. For a moment she remained silent, her lips slightly parted.
Then more words came in a rush. "The ship lies on an island in a forking river. Above it the foliage is charred, blackened. There are three rivers and just below the island the water is white with foam. There's a tremendous cataract about five miles below the island. It's the largest cataract I've ever seen."
There was an eagerness on Langford's face, but he remained silent.
"There's a man swimming in the river above the cataract," Joan went on. "A brown-skinned man with straggly hair, his shoulders gleaming in the sunlight. I'm going to try to read his mind."
Langford did not move. For a moment there was no sound in the room save Joan's harsh breathing. Then, suddenly, she straightened and ripped the bandage from her eyes.
"Brazil!" she exclaimed, exultantly. "Darling, I've located the ship for you. That island is in the interior of Brazil, in the deep jungle, close to the headwaters of the Amazon!"
Langford stood very still, scarcely daring to breathe. In his mind's gaze he saw a slender space cruiser lying unguarded in a suburban hanger close to the dark waters of the great Northwestern Canal. Commander Gurney's own private cruiser, the White Hawk!
How much of his mental audacity was inspired by sheer desperation Langford could not guess. But he suddenly saw himself climbing out of a thrumming jet plane in deep shadows and running straight toward the cruiser with Joan at his side.
He saw the cruiser ascending, saw himself at the controls, with the red disk of Mars dwindling beyond the viewport. He saw the myriad stars of space and the rapidly expanding disk of the Earth pierced by wavering banners of light.
And then it dawned on him that in some strange way Joan had seen the vision first and was sharing it with him. He knew then that he could not fail.
4
Beneath the descending cruiser the roof of the forest gleamed in russet and emerald splendor above a labyrinth of wooded archipelagoes.
It still seemed a little like a dream to Langford, but he knew that it wasn't. The vision that he had experienced three days before, standing beside his wife in a white-walled room, had taken on the bright, firm texture of reality.
He stood before the controls, with a thrumming deck under him, and studied the shifting landscape through the White Hawk's viewport. He had never before flown directly over the Amazon Basin, and a river of shining wonder seemed to flow into his mind as he stared.
It was Joan who broke the spell. She tugged gently at his arm, her face anxious. "I don't see any sign of the three rivers!" she exclaimed. "Do you?"
Langford swung about. "We haven't passed the great cataract of Itamaraca yet," he said. "It rushes straight along for five or six miles. Then it becomes the most impressive waterfall in South America. A few miles below the falls the river spreads out into a lake."
Langford turned back to the viewport. "When we see the lake we can look for another branching and the island. The island is right in the middle of the three rivers you saw in your vision. But it's just a dot on the electrograph. Are you sure it has a distinctive shape?"
"It has a high, rocky shoreline," Joan assured him. "The central tributary cuts it in half and the other rivers flow around it. It's heavily forested, but the rent in the foliage where the ship came down is so wide you should be able to see it from ten thousand feet. The treetops are charred over a half mile radius."
Langford smiled and squeezed her arm. "I bet you'd be happy mapping the Amazon in a bark canoe like a twentieth century explorer," he said.
He grinned wryly. "A big rock island, mysterious as a cave of vampire bats, bisects the largest tributary west of the Tocantins, and it's just a dot on an electrograph to us. We've explored every crevice of every world in the System, but sometimes I envy our ancestors; they had elaborate pictorial maps to guide them."
After a moment the ship leveled off, and the Great Cataract swept into view. It was a shining whiteness between two towering walls of foliage festooned with hanging vines, and flame-tongued flowers upon which the red sunlight seemed to dance.
It foamed and cascaded over jagged rocks, swept around little clumps of submerged vegetation, and tore at sloping mud banks glimmering in the sunlight.
Then the cataract became a receding blur and the wide river split up.
Langford heard Joan cry out.
The island which loomed below was about eight miles in circumference and so heavily forested that it resembled a single shrub of wilderness proportions growing from a cyclopean stone flowerpot.
Its high banks were almost vertical, its summit a charred mass of foliage cleft by an enormous rent which funneled the sunlight downward to a circular patch of bare, scorched earth.
Something glittered on the forest floor, far below the blackened foliage. But whether it was the alien ship, or merely the glint of sunlight on the river which flowed completely through the island Langford could not determine from his aerial vantage point.
A divided island was really two islands, but Langford was in no mood for geological hair-splitting. Erosion had failed to efface the original, hoary uniqueness of that towering mass of jungle, and for all practical purposes it was one island still, its high banks and far-flung aerial traceries hemming it in, and sealing its teeming life in eternal solitude.
Langford turned and looked at Joan with eyes that were meshed in little wrinkles of confidence. "I'm going to gun her down through that gap!" he said. "We could crash through anywhere, but the best way to locate a wreck is to hew close to the cinder line!"
He bent grimly over the controls, in his mind a vision of a great host of alien creatures rushing toward him through the forest, swarming over the ship, refusing to let him emerge.
He feared their weapons, which he had never seen. He remembered the little statue with its suicidal impulses, and its ability to shed force-shell replicas of itself.
The ship thrummed as it swept downward, the lights in the control room blinking on and off. Lower it swept and lower. The blood was pounding in Langford's temples when a black-rimmed funnel of swirling brightness yawned suddenly before the viewport. The same instant the cushioning pressure of the anti-gravity jets made itself felt, holding the ship suspended above the roof of the forest until its atomotors ceased to throb.
The ship descended under its own weight amidst a slowly dissolving pressure field. Sweeping down between the fire-blackened trees, it circled slowly about and settled to rest on the soggy forest floor.
When Langford and Joan emerged a warm breeze, laden with jungle scents, swept toward them. They stood for an instant close to the air-lock, staring about them.
No sound broke the stillness except the insistent hum of insects and the rustling of the vegetation on both sides of the ship. A few yards from where they were standing the ground sloped to the brown waters of a swift-running river, its surface flecked with white foam, and studded with little whirlpools that swirled with a darkly writhing turmoil as dry leaves fluttered down, twisting and turning in the breeze.
Twisting and turning above a limp form that lay sprawled on the riverbank, its bare shoulders horribly hunched, its head immersed in the muddy brown water.
Joan screamed when she saw it.
She broke from Langford's restraining clasp and went stumbling forward until she was knee-deep in the swirling current. She was stooping and tugging in desperation at the half-submerged figure when Langford's hand closed on her shoulder.
"Let me handle this," he said, firmly; "it's no job for a woman."
On the bank Joan swung about to face him. "It's a job for a mutant!" she protested, her lips shaking. "You don't know how close he is to death. He's still breathing, but if we don't get him out—"
She broke off abruptly when she saw that Langford needed no urging. He was already on his knees, tugging at the sprawled form. For a moment he tried to succeed from the bank, his knees sunk deep into the mud, his neckcords swelling. Then, with a gesture of fierce impatience, he waded deep into the water and lifted the unconscious man on his shoulders.
Langford carried the man up the sloping bank, eased him to the ground and rolled him over. A small, wiry man, darkly bearded, his mouth hanging open! Staring down at the familiar face, Langford experienced a sense of irony so sharp and over-whelming it interfered with his breathing.
He leaned forward, and started working the man's arms slowly up and down. He knelt in the soft mud, a murk of depth and shadow looming behind him, a grim anticipation in his stare.
Suddenly the man on the riverbank stirred, groaned and opened his eyes. "Hey, cut that out!" he grunted. "What in blazes are you trying to do, you devil? Wrench my arms from their sockets?"
"Good morning to you, Commander!" Langford said, chuckling.
"Langford!" Commander Gurney's eyes began to shine, as though lit by fires from unfathomable depths of space. A convulsive shudder shook him. Digging his fists into the mud, he sat up straight.
"You stole my ship!" he rasped, staring at Langford accusingly. "What made you think I couldn't trace my own cruiser? You can't rip out infra-radiant alarm installations unless you know where to look. Didn't you know I'd follow you in a fast auxiliary cruiser and get here ahead of you?"
"I was afraid you might, sir!" Langford smiled ruefully. "But it was a chance I had to take."
Gurney's eyes narrowed. "Your ship was sending out more automatic alarm rays than a chunk of radium. My men had orders to close in the instant you brought her down."
"Just where are your men now, sir?" Langford asked.
Something happened to Gurney's face. His features twitched and the strained intensity of his stare increased so sharply he seemed to be staring right through Langford into space.
"Those devilish things attacked us!" he muttered. "Exactly as that little statue did! There were dozens of them, ten feet tall, and they kept coming. We blasted, but the charges went right through them; they lifted my lads up in their devilish preying arms and dumped them in the river!"
Sweat gleamed on Gurney's brow. "It was ghastly, Langford. In the river—like pieces of dead timber. The current carried them downstream. I was helpless. I—I kept blasting, but I couldn't save them!"
"How did you save yourself?" Langford asked.
Gurney passed a dripping hand over his brow. "I was struggling with one of them when everything went blank. That's all I remember."
Langford stood up. "I don't understand it. Why did that creature go away and leave you with your face submerged? Why didn't it make sure you'd drift downstream too?"
"I'm sure I don't know, Langford!" Gurney jerked a tremulous hand toward the wall of foliage on the opposite bank. "Why don't you swim over to their ship and ask them? You'll find the ship in a clearing about three hundred yards from the bank. They've cleared a path to it."
"That's just what I intend to do!" Langford said.
Joan paled and moved swiftly to his side, her eyes wide with alarm. "Ralph! You're not going alone—"
Langford nodded. "I'm a pretty good swimmer," he said.
Joan stared at him. "But why?"
"It's a little hard to explain," Langford said. "You've got a picture in your mind of something pretty horrible happening to me. Somehow I feel that everything about that picture is wrong. I've got to cross that stream, darling; I'd be a pretty poor specimen of a man if I turned back now, when we're so close to the answer."
Joan said nothing. She would have argued and pleaded, but she knew that it would have been of no use.
Five minutes later Langford was stripping on the riverbank. He slipped into the water quietly, and struck out with powerful, even strokes. On the opposite bank he turned an instant to flick a wet strand from his forehead, and wave to his wife. Then he struck off into the forest.
He was a hundred feet from the bank, walking with his shoulders squared, when something bright and incredible swirled up from the forest floor directly in his path.
"For your forbearance, your kindliness, thank you, Langford!" a voice said.
It was not a spoken voice. It was still and small and remote, and it seemed to come from deep inside Langford's head. Langford stopped advancing; he stood utterly rigid, his temples pounding, his eyes riveted on a darting shape of flame.
"Don't be alarmed, Langford," the voice said. "I'm not a shape of flame. But I can wrap myself in blinding flame so that the human eye cannot see me as I am."
"Who are you?" Langford heard himself asking.
"A traveler blown from his course by ill cosmic winds!" the voice said. "A lone and bewildered stranger from a universe so remote its light has not yet reached you. A genuinely frightened stranger and—a telepath, Langford."
The voice paused, then went on. "I made you come to me just now. A promise of medals could not have done it, but I got inside your mind, and drew you to me. Medals, rewards, promotions; you prize them, don't you? What a pity that I cannot stay until your tunic gleams with ribbons."
Another pause. Then the voice said: "It is difficult to get the intimate feel of your language. You must forgive me if my speech seems a little strained."
"Your speech. You—"
"You're not afraid of me, Langford? No, you mustn't be; you are the kindest of men. How can I convince you that I am—you have a phrase for it—letting down my hair? I shall leave you soon, my friend. I have repaired my ship, and I must try to return to my own people. But before I go I will tell you the truth."
Another pause while the brightness pulsed. "You could have destroyed my ship when we met in the Asteroid Belt with a single blast; but you refused to do so. And I, not knowing you as I do now, tried to frighten you. There are so many worlds where intelligent life is cold and merciless that I was prepared for any emergency. I am rather proud of that little multiplying creature I shot out into the void. It was a child's bauble in my world, Langford—a toy!
"I am alone, my friend. Alone in a ship that utterly dwarfs me. But you like large ships, too; we're curiously alike in some respects. We'd never be satisfied with mechanical mastery on a puny scale!"
"Mechanical mastery?" Langford's lips had gone cold. "Just what kind of mastery? Why did you attack Commander Gurney and his men?"
The shape of flame seemed to pulse with a curious, inward merriment. Langford could feel the merriment beating into his brain, waves upon waves of it.
"I didn't attack them. I can no more divide by fission than you can. But when I saw them crouching by the river, their faces merciless, waiting to seize you, I got inside their minds and drove them into the river.
"Like chattering monkeys they fled from the terrifying images I planted in their minds. They were prepared to believe I was not one, but many, a swarming multitude. They floundered and swam until their strength gave out. When they could no longer swim they dragged themselves from the river, and went floundering through the jungle, fleeing from shapes that had no real existence.
"Good Lord!" Langford muttered.
"Their weapons are now at the bottom of the river. That stern and silly little man, who is nothing more than a jumble of bones, fell face down in the river; before I could reach his side you were lifting him up. You have won his undying gratitude. He will grumble and fume, but when he sees my ship disappearing into deep space you will wear ribbons, my friend. You will become—yes, a senior commander!"
"A senior—"
"Perhaps you'd like to see me as I really am, Langford, my friend! You'll promise not to laugh? I may look a little ridiculous to you."
Langford's eyes were suddenly moist. "You couldn't possibly look ridiculous to me," he said.
"Well ... I wouldn't like to show myself to just anybody. Certainly not to Skin-and-Bones! But it's terribly important that you know how completely I trust you. How else can I prove my gratitude?"
Slowly the shape of flame began to contract. Its edges became brighter, sweeping inward to become a small, dazzling circle of radiance that hovered in the air like a blazing signet ring.
In the middle of the ring a tiny form appeared. Amidst Langford's rioting thoughts one thing stood out with mind-numbing clarity. The form was minute, so tiny that the mantis shape it had shot into the void would have utterly dwarfed it. The form was minute, and yet—it did resemble a mantis. Its arms were upraised, and its pinpoint eyes fastened on Langford with a blazing intensity that seemed to bore deep into his brain.
But there was no enmity in that stare. Only complete gratitude, trust and friendship. Yes, and a certain greatness!
"Now you see me as I really am!" the voice said. "I am so small that you could crush me between your thumb and forefinger. But I would not hesitate to alight on your thumb, my friend!"
A strange wonder throbbed in Langford's brain. And suddenly he found himself thinking: "Jimmy Cricket!"
Yes, that was it! The tiny shape was as friendly, as puckish, as noble in essence as that little nursery rhyme will-o'-the-wisp, Jimmy Cricket. And it did look like a cricket; a chirping, gleeful, truly great cricket.
Suddenly down the long sweep of the years Langford saw two small human figures advancing over a path of golden bricks toward a glittering distant palace.
One of the forms was himself, the other his sister. They moved in awe and terror, because the palace was inhabited by a mighty wizard with truly terrifying powers. But when they reached the palace they met a human, likeable little man who wasn't terrible at all. And they knew then that the mighty wizard was a humbug. But somehow in his simple humanness the wizard seemed even greater than he had been. Greater, but no longer terrifying.
Jimmy Cricket was—the Wizard of Oz. And he was something more. A lonely, wayfaring stranger, blown from his course by ill cosmic winds, taking reasonable precautions, but seeking only a responsive friendliness in the gulfs between the stars.
For a moment Langford felt a swirl of energy brush his fingertips, like the clasp of an intangible hand. Then the mental voice said: "Good heavens, Langford! You're dripping wet! See how the dry leaves of the forest cling to your feet!"
Startled, Langford lowered his eyes.
When he looked up the circle of radiance was gone.
"Forgive me, Langford!" a faint, diminishing voice said. "But partings should not be prolonged! Goodbye, my friend!"
When Langford emerged on the riverbank, sunlight struck down over his tall, straight body, giving him the aspect of a Greek god emerging from a forest glade in the morning of the world.
He paused for an instant on the sloping bank to wave to his wife. Then he plunged into the river and swam straight toward her.
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