Man and Monster Page 6

  "And your deduction?" asked Rhodan.

  "A trick, what else?! Somebody is afraid. There is only one conclusion. Land and nip this in the bud faster than the opposition can move!"

  Moments later the program-input keys of the small computer calculator began to click. The robot psychologist also seemed to know something about natural psychology. Possibly the actions of inhuman creatures were fairly similar to those of a machine.

  "Dr. Certch is right. What else could it be but a miserable trick?" asked Rhodan, agreeing with the diminutive doctor. Then he issued orders: "Everson, all weapon systems on standby—ready to fire! Chaney commandos, ready for launch! Brian, open data link to Ganymede. The cartographic work on the Southern Hemisphere should be continued from space. Start it at once. Freyt will send out remote-controlled atmospheric-analysis probes—only initiate matter-tracing stage A. I want to know if anything of an unnatural nature has been produced. There is still one little catch, Dr. Certch?"

  This time, Rhodan grinned sarcastically. Dr. Certch shoved his giant spectacles back onto his nose. His outstretched index finger paused in midair.

  "You have overlooked the fact that we are looking for the Aras. The message could have come from them. Or can you prove that these fellows are not telepathically endowed?"

  Certch began to whistle in a high, false pitch. His bright little eyes twinkled. In that moment, the landing manoeuvre of the Titan began.

  The Arkon steel monster pressed down through the thickening atmosphere. Far below the super giant waited other monsters. They were not as big but they were strong physically as well as in numbers!

  In the scorching breath of the propulsion engines' exhaust streams, an entire mountain of ammonia salt began to vaporize. A raging storm tore at the extended weapon turrets of the heavy fighter ship. Landing pads of alarming dimensions sank into the yielding ground. The super-battleship was cloaked in gloom. The sun of Mooff revealed itself only as a pale disc behind the thick cloud layers.

  Salts and pools of ammonia reacted under the resulting temperatures and prevailing outside pressures in a startling way. The available traces of nitrogen and hydrogen seemed to regard the Titan as a catalyst. In the enormous heat of the propulsion engines and under the prevailing air pressure they also began to react. Here were chemical processes which normally could not have been demonstrated in a laboratory.

  The bell-shaped exhaust fires blasting from the Titan kindled a raging tornado. It was as though they had landed in the center of the Nether Regions. Free and open space seemed infinitely removed. Freyt's radio communications fought their way through heavy static. They had arrived but did not quite know why they had thus tread upon the first doorstep to Hell.

  700 men looked at each other in relative calm. The engineers in the power-control sector thanked their lucky stars that they had not been sent out into this high-pressure poison kitchen. The men of the ground force commandos checked and rechecked the flawlessly functioning microgenerators of the Arkonide suits. The scientists speculated what might happen to a man if these body protective screens should fail to work. Actually the speculation wasn't needed: they knew full well what this pressure, heavy gravity and poisonous gas could do.

  In the interests of an unrestricted freedom of movement it was impossible to wear clumsy space armor for special operations under the Arkonide attack suits. The unwieldy additional gear could only have provided protection against poison gas and the pressure. With a gravitational pull of 2.8 gravs, it could be of little service.

  Outside raged a hurricane. The wind velocity registered 280 miles per hour.

  5/ A PARAPSYCHIC PHANTOM STRIKES

  "How are they holding up?" asked Khrest.

  By 'they' he meant the monsters, who had made their appearance after the landing. By the thousands, and perhaps by the tens of thousands, they made a stand, at a respectful distance, around the landed battleship.

  They were much larger than remembered. About 7½ feet in height and 4½ feet wide, they sat ponderously, in their bell-shaped jellyfish forms on the ground. On top where one could assume the bodies ended, rounded heads with protruding knobby eyes emerged from the colorless sponge bodies, whose incredible elasticity was capable of absorbing abnormal hurricane winds by means of extreme deformation and flattening of form and face. They were so constituted by nature that they could present a narrow profile to the powerful winds, regardless which way they were cowering close to the ground.

  It did not seem to be more than just cowering and yet certain unbelievably fast and scurried movements had been seen. Countless stubby appendages of locomotion projected from under the edges of the arched jellyfish bodies. The Mooffs did not appear to have a natural mechanism for grasping things. At least no one had been able to observe any yet.

  Shortly after the landing, Pucky had awakened from his brief drugged sleep. Now the mouse-beaver hunched down in front of the viewscreens and lay in wait for the mental impulses of the non-human creatures.

  They were natural telepaths, as Pucky had been able to determine once again. Normal human-like speech would have been impossible in the sound inferno of the eternal hurricanes. Nature had found a splendid solution.

  For 10 minutes now, every man of the crew wore an Arkonide attack suit; but Rhodan had not yet given the order for launching out of the airlocks. He was waiting for something that he felt must happen as a matter of course.

  When anybody came into the Command Central, he never came alone. After the telepathic attack, Rhodan had strengthened the individual commando units to at least 10 men. Each was to watch the other to see if he was acting normal.

  Thus stood the Titan on its towering landing struts in the midst of a canyon-gutted plain. In the distance a low mountain emerged into the overcast sky. Whipped by the hurricane, a continuous rain of ammonia crystals beat against the high-tension defense screens of the ship. It looked as though some invisible presence were creating a mighty firework display. On the windward side, they glimmered and lightninged. The crystals then faded like dying embers while generating highly poisonous steam.

  "Why don't they attack?" asked Rhodan, speaking aloud to himself. His questioning gaze passed over the leading officers of the giant ship.

  Everson sat at the magnifying controls of the infrared tracker. The bodies of the Mooffs developed a prominent heat echo, although in this super cooled cryogenic atmosphere they were practically living refrigerators. Nevertheless, they did possess bodily warmth. The infra-detectors were better than the purely optical ones, which were always getting clouded up by steaming vapors outside.

  "Tactics, sir," offered Everson restlessly. "They'll need some time to assemble enough of their kind together. After all, they don't have any airplanes."

  "Which wouldn't have a chance in this hurricane," said Tanner. He sat beside Julian Tifflor at the master weapons firing console of the super-battleship. "When will we receive permission to open fire?" he added.

  Rhodan turned around to glare at him. "There will be no firing her except in a clear case of self-defense," he shouted. "Dammit, how many times do I have to tell you that?! Gentlemen, your space academy training does not provide for killing alien intelligences without any provocation! Just imagine that you have come here as uninvited guests. The right still lies on their side."

  "But only morally," interjected Khrest. "My friend, how will you ever conquer an empire? How do you believe my forefathers ever founded a stellar empire?"

  "That's your history to justify," Rhodan retorted. "I am a man of Terra. Now I'm going to say this just once more: Anybody shooting without cause will be standing in front of a ship's court martial, facing me, within 10 minutes!"

  The biologist, Jansuvan Orgter, interposed, "It's life but it still isn't human life!"

  "It's intelligent life," insisted Rhodan sharply. "Only if, in spite of their high intelligence, they let themselves get carried away with a serious attack—then I'll be justified before men and my own conscience if I strike back in self
-defense. True intelligence should realize that unusual haste can also have unusual consequences. So just wait it out. Major Chaney!"

  The commander of the ground force appeared on the telecom screen. Heavily armed men of the commando attack force crowded near him in the Titan's large groundlock.

  "Chaney," if nothing has happened within exactly 15 minutes, move out in a fast foray. Take hover tanks and make use of the tractor beams. Capture at least 10 of these fantastically huge Mooffs. Aside from that, there's hardly anything we can do. Only from them can we find out where the Aras stronghold is located. So, in 15 minutes—the countdown's begun…"

  Chaney confirmed quickly. In the backpacks of the Arkonide attack suits the micro-reactors hummed. Brief checks indicated the operational readiness of the field generators. In order to hold the effective gravity at a constant Earth-gravity equivalent of one grav, 1.8 gravs of the prevailing planetary 2.8 gravs had to be neutralized. This meant a considerable drain of the energy reserves, which were needed for the protective screening against the high atmospheric pressure. Nevertheless, the reactor output was sufficient to maintain both the antigrav-neutralizers—and the defense screen projectors at high-level operation. But if one should be under heavy fire, the safety circuits would automatically switch all power into the defense screen generation. So it could easily happen that a man might suddenly feel the full weight of the local natural gravity. The mere thought of having to lie helplessly on the ground under an almost tripled body weight occasioned almost a physical pain.

  Chaney looked at his watch: 5 minutes had passed already. The Mooffs still did not attack, although the infallible tracking computer was indicating thousands of them out there. They held themselves at a distance of a little over a mile beyond the energy screen limits.

  Just then Pucky emitted a loud cry of warning. But the monsters had no intention of taking a single step closer to the ship in order to effect their attack.

  "The thought impulses are growing quieter—they seem to flow into one another," cried Pucky. "Watch out, they're making a total bodily contact! If they think now, it will be 10,000 of them all in one direction! They are becoming one entity. Look out!"

  "Tifflor—Tanner, stand by" shouted Rhodan to the officers at the fire console. "Dr. Garand, beef up the defense screens! I—"

  Rhodan interrupted himself. An alien force, registered only in the consciousness, made itself felt. It began with a gentle tugging sensation at the back of the neck, then with a suddenly shooting pain along the scalp it struck the brain. Rhodan fought it with all the will power his parapsychic schooling had given him. Other men did the same, for there was no one on board the ship who had not had similar training.

  But this was a Titanic storm flood that broke in upon every living and thinking being here. The thought-inundation happened in seconds. With each passing moment it increased many times over until the suggestive character of this force could not be denied. It was a grinding and shattering in the foundation of reason.

  Marcus Everson was already groping his way toward the master controls. Tifflor and Tanner rose up abruptly from their swivel seats in front of the fire control board. Rhodan was only aware of the horrible pulling at his brain. The Mooffs were about to cripple the entire crew at one blow.

  "Pucky!" he rasped despairingly. He staggered forward with all his forces of will concentrated on the fire control board. He tried to screen his mind, to neutralize the mental influence, to see this psychic power as something ineffective and superfluous.

  Only the mouse-beaver, who this time was prepared, did not seem to be suffering. Rhodan saw something rush past him. He saw the furry creature suddenly pop up at the fire control board. The fire computer had long since been programmed for the most variegated target areas. Until now, no weapons had been fired, but now it must be done or all would be lost. Everson reached for the master switch for the individual controls, which could deactivate all auxiliary stations.

  "Fire, Pucky, fire!" shouted Rhodan. Every step became torture. Something alien sought to hinder them. "Fire!"

  Pucky's soft little paws became the extension of Perry's will. Tiny fingers played with forces which lay beyond the powers of comprehension. The green, blue and red buttons were depressed into their slots and then hell exploded.

  The light caliber impulse cannons of the Titan opened fire. Heavy to heaviest units followed. Thin energy beams a foot in diameter up to the mammoth atomic streams from the polarizers roared through the defense screens of the weapon tubes.

  Two seconds after opening fire from all batteries, the parapsychic phantom was gone. Then came the unexpected shock of mental relief. Everson jerked back from the controls. Tifflor and Tanner threw themselves across the fire control board. Rhodan was plagued again with a painful headache.

  "Abnormal attack on unprotected nerve channels, which were too quickly activated," said the psychologists.

  The Titan's gun turrets had spewed calamity and destruction forth for only two seconds. Now they were silent again. There was merely an afterglow in the field muzzles of the thermally operated impulse cannons. Outside, beyond the bell-shaped defense screen, a circular volcano had been formed. The circle was about one mile across, sheltering in its center the undamaged Titan. No more Mooffs were detected. Their presence could not be traced. Their faint heat radiations had been damped out.

  "Out of here!" shouted Rhodan. Red pinwheels of fire whirled before his eyes. "Lift off and set down about a dozen miles away—in front of the mountain. Do it!" His head sank down against the instrument panel.

  Pucky sent out reassuring and pain-relieving impulses. The crewmen operated swiftly and confidently now. All that was left of their pain was a slight skull pressure.

  The mile-thick mountain of Arkon steel roared upward from the ground. At only 300 feet of altitude the ship moved at minimum speed and left the zone of destruction behind.

  "This is Prof. Kaerner," came a call over the ship's wireless P.A. "The patients are restless. They seem to sense the enemy's presence in their unconscious minds. Are you going to continue the attack on Mooff 6?"

  "Yes, why do you ask?" said Rhodan.

  "Then I'll be forced to strap them in; and as for the mutants, I'm going to have to put them in deep anesthesia, and I'm talking about total incapacitation, along the lines of curare. Otherwise I can guarantee nothing. Do you agree? The highly sensitive nerve centers of the mutants showed reaction during the attack, in spite of deep sleep. It has to be."

  "You're the doctor. Put it into effect."

  The Titan set out again immediately, this time close to the front of the mile-high mountain, whose highest crest was still towered over by the giant ship.

  Capt. Brian appeared on the video-com. He was looking in helpless astonishment into his optical tracker. "They're out there again!" he cried. "Sir, the monsters were waiting for us!"

  6/ THE MUSICAL MONSTERS

  "If those are Mooffs," said Marcus Everson, "I'll eat my helmet!"

  A man in Engineering Station 3 began to scream. The muffled roar of a portable impulse beamer tortured the microphone and speaker of the communicator installation. The man became visible on the automatically focusing videoscreen. He wore an Arkonide protection suit but was not able to turn on his body defense screen. Something writhingly alive, grey, colorless and apparently remorseless, had embraced the engineer. It appeared that the unknown Thing's chief aim in life was to suck the body of its victim into itself. It carried no weapons but made use of something that could pass for one. Its strengths, both physical and mental, were inhuman. The prehensile arms quivering forth out of the body were wrapped around the helpless man with breathtaking power. At the same time something happened that caused Pucky to react with a lightning swiftness and attack.

  The furry fellow, who was gifted with the ability of teleportation, disappeared from the Command Central in a fluorescent shimmering of light. Almost in the same moment, Pucky materialized in the engineering control station. Wavering flicker
s of heat generated from indiscriminate ray-gunning by a panicked technician, attacked his soft fur. Pucky's shrill cry was lost in the rising thunder of other ray weapons. Suddenly, Hell broke loose in the ship.

  Panic calls emerged from more than 20 stations. Monsters of the same description were appearing but these were no Mooffs. Never before had human eyes beheld such creatures. They had appeared so suddenly that the 3-foot thick walls of the battleship might as well have been veils of mist through which one could pass in a single step.

  Pucky still saw the pulsating Thing in front of him. Drawing hastily back into a protected corner, the mouse-beaver gathered all of his telekinetic forces together and put them to use.

  The unconscious engineer was torn from the cloying tentacles by an invisible force. The sightless Thing turned around. Growing pseudo pods reached out toward the mouse-beaver, who in this decisive moment discovered how the monsters could appear so suddenly. It had become quiet in the control station. Pucky realized, to his surprise, that it required no great effort to subdue the creature. With a cry, it glided up from the deck until it slammed against the vaulted steel ceiling bulkhead.

  Behind Pucky, a hatch slid open. Two men of the attack commandos stormed in with activated defense screens. Again and again, Pucky's powers succeeded in throwing the strange-sounding creature against the ceiling. When he finally let go, it fell to the deck.

  "Careful!" cried Pucky in his high-pitched voice.

  The strange creature, flattened out like a cookie tin, suddenly swelled itself into a globular shape, out of which two thin, extremely elastic tentacles extended. It had not even been injured yet.