Man and Monster Read online

  Sgt. O'Keefe held his ground. He took a wide-legged stand in the middle of the control station. The thumb wheel adjustment on his gun muzzle stood at intensity level 6. He did not pull the trigger until the incomprehensible monster was within 6 feet of him.

  A wide-fanning ray of energy streamed from the barrel. The inflated ball was encompassed by it.

  O'Keefe still stood on the same spot as the globe, now 18 feet in diameter, which began to distort to the accompaniment of high, melodic tones. In the midst of the raygun discharge, the Thing attempted to depart in the same way it had arrived. O'Keefe shot a second time. Only a small part of the Thing disappeared. The rest of it remained. Nothing else happened to it.

  The automatic air-conditioning system began to sound its alarm. The heat in Engineering Control Station 3 had exceeded the allowable tolerance level. O'Keefe quickly withdrew toward the hatch under protection of his energy shield. Smouldering vapors arose from the destroyed Something that lay on the deck. The attacked engineer saw himself suddenly surrounded by a shimmering forcefield, which held off the deadly heat. At the last moment, Pucky had managed to turn on the suit's projector.

  "Beat it!" yelled O'Keefe to the furry mutant.

  In the same moment, Pucky sensed Rhodan's mental call. He was in an emergency. A swift teleport jump brought Pucky out of the fiery breath of the super-heated air.

  When he materialized in the Titan's giant Command Center, the defense screen of his small custom suit began operating. Two monsters similar to the first one had thrown themselves on Everson and Janus van Orgter. The biologist's forcefield was on. Everson was not yet protected. The physical powers of the man failed miserably in the grip of the monstrosity.

  Pucky heard Rhodan's bellowing. Cursed by helplessness, the men stood with ready weapons before the swirling masses of colorless bodies, among which only here and there the limbs of their victims projected.

  Bright lightning flashed from Van Orgter's shield. The monster came into repeated contact with it and yet was not killed by it. Everson was essentially worse off. His breathing had become almost inaudible. As Pucky appeared, Rhodan was dropping his ray gun to attack the sponge-like mountain of flesh with his commando knife.

  "Get back!" screamed Pucky.

  Rhodan was barely able to dodge away before the weird creature was yanked upward by telekinetic forces. The half-conscious Everson fell from 6 feet of height and lay crumpled on the deck. Glowing ray beams destroyed the Thing that clung to the ceiling.

  That was the moment in which Van Orgter became invisible! They heard his despairing cry in the radio communications speakers. There, where he had been in the grip of the monster, a bright nebulous form was seen, which suddenly attenuated. The biologist had vanished from the Command Central.

  In the same moment, the Titan's guns began to go into action. Tifflor and Tanner had come to realize what was going on. Pucky's short cries of warning had been understood.

  These rubbery monsters must be teleporters; creatures that could transport their physical bodies a certain distance by means of psychic forces. Only in this light could their sudden appearances and disappearances be explained.

  Above in the tracking center, Brian began to yell. Rhodan understood. With a side blow of his hand he disconnected the automatic fire control. The muffled roaring in the Titan's weapon turrets was silenced.

  "Sir!" cried Tifflor, horrified, as he saw his panel lights fade. "Sir!"

  "Cease fire! Van Ortger has landed outside. The beast took him with it," shouted Rhodan over the ship's

  P.A. "Chaney, launch a robot commando unit. Van Ortger is just 1500 feet away from the ship. Let the robots rescue him. I want all fighting machines turned out. Let them put everything under fire that doesn't look like a man. These monsters are very weak teleporters. They have to be close to the ship before they can risk a jump. Don't let the dumb things get through our energy screens."

  "They don't react to it!" came a voice from the ship's energy control. "They teleport through the screen, then materialize inside the bell zone. From there they make a second jump."

  "So get them inside the zone. Individual firing mode—every one take a target. Tifflor, switch over to manual. Get off the heavy ordnance or we'll all be killed!"

  Ready fighting robots began to march. Janus van Ortger, who felt as though he were in the center of Hell, noticed the opening groundlocks. Silvery glistening Giants with mighty weapon arms and insensitive mechanical bodies Boated effortlessly to the ground. They were still far away, much too far, from Van Orgter's point of view.

  The hurricane howled all around him. As the pain of rematerialising began to subside and he started to stir, a waking movement occurred also in the rubbery mass of the monster, which had spread out over him like a pancake. Janus struck it with his knees but the Thing hardly moved. He pressed his fists upward and broke out in sweat as the automatic control of his suit switched all available energy reserves into the defense screen. With a muffled groan, the biologist gave up. The full weight of 2.8 gravs leapt at him like a beast of prey.

  The lightning from his screen continued heavier. His microreactor worked at capacity to eliminate the contact-seeking obstacle. The monster, however, showed little reaction to the normally deadly energies of the defense screen. Weakly pulsing, apparently utterly exhausted, it covered the man's body with a thin, unbelievably tough membrane. Then Janus van Orgter perceived that the fighting robots would arrive too late.

  The thick atmosphere of the planet Mooff 6 seemed to be a good sound conductor. He heard the howling of the storm and noticed also a melodic singing note inside the convulsive body of the monster. It was as though it were struggling to gather new reserves of power. Janus felt that he was smothering. By this time the heavy gravity was pulling him so heavily to the ground that his oxygen-starved lungs were about to cease functioning.

  "I'm gone!" he rattled over the radio com. Rhodan's calls only reached his ear but not his consciousness. The Thing on top of him had ceased to move.

  Janus was considering that it would have been better to shoot when something happened in the strange substance of the creature. Suddenly the flat pancake of a Thing pulled itself together. It was as though some invisible force were attacking it. With a cry, the Thing rose up and contorted itself into a ball, which immediately exploded in a blinding flash of light. The heavy pressure disappeared from Orgter's lungs. All of a sudden he could breathe again, freely and unencumbered. His angrily humming energy reactor returned to its normal sound of operation.

  Other monsters, which had just newly appeared, also exploded, It seemed as though an unknown ally had come into the fray. Van Ortger staggered up, only to be thrown about and whirled across the ground by the next hurricane blast. The mighty defense screen of the Titan came threateningly near. Ortger shouted. Released from the anchorage provided by the monster, he became like a limp leaf in the midst of the storm.

  He heard the Titan re-open its firing. Thundering energy beams fanned out above him and away. In the distance, glowing craters came into being. For a moment, Ortger found an anchorage behind a drifting dune of coagulated ammonia crystals. But as the crystals came in contact with his flashing protection screen, they began to react immediately. Poisonous steam was generated directly before his eyes. After a few seconds he was whirled through the dune and hurled closer to the great bell of energy surrounding the Titan

  Far behind the screen, shadowy figures raced over the rough ground. The robots kept getting delayed because new monsters continued to appear inside the energy bell. They followed their programming, which commanded them first of all to fire upon any non-human targets.

  Janus van Ortger saw the end coming near. Before him the glowing wall of fire reached to the sky…

  • • •

  Maj. Chaney was letting it rip! After 'The Turtle', a mighty hover tank from the war arsenals of the planet Arkon, had glided out of the groundlock to the ground, he had gotten under way without any thought to his surro
undings.

  The broad caterpillar treads of the vehicle were idle. The 'Turtle' hung suspended in the energetic repulsion shock field, which held it continuously one and a half to two-feet off the ground. In this manner, enormous velocities were attainable.

  Chaney also did not concern himself with the monsters that were popping up everywhere, because the massed fighter robots from the groundlocks were now bringing their fire to bear on them. Only very few of the creatures now were succeeding in taking a second teleport jump, after crossing over the main energy barrier. They had a range of about half a mile, which the men of the Mutant Corps would have considered to be an extremely limited capacity.

  For the able-bodied crewmen on board the battleship, however, it was plenty. But from here on, since they were prepared for the abrupt appearance of the rubbery creatures, there were no more abductions. There was always somebody there to notice the shimmering of a materialization in time. Then the rayguns would roar before the uninvited interlopers had a chance to operate. A hard, defensive battle raged in all rooms of the fighting ship.

  Within the past few minutes the Things had been called the 'Opera Singers'. Somebody had expressed the name just once and already it had become a part of the men's hard-bitten vocabulary. The musical sound effects associated with the creatures had given rise to this designation.

  The people on board ship had organized themselves into 10-man troops. As long as Orgter hadn't been rescued yet, there could be no thought of a takeoff. Therefore it was necessary to wait out the success or lack of success of the ground force commandos.

  Chaney and his 10 men knew that they actually should not have risked leaving the protection of the ship's screens. If a monster were to jump directly into their vehicle, they were as good as lost. It would not be possible to use the thermal ray weapons in such a restricted space. It would mean certain destruction of the tank.

  The creatures showed no reaction whatsoever to the usually unfailing disintegrators. The tissue structure of their bodies had to have an extremely unusual molecular arrangement. Until now they had responded only to the heaviest and most dangerous of weapons, the heat concentration of the thermo-weapons. These seemed to be too much even for these alien organisms—if they were organisms in that sense of the word!

  So the men of the tank crew lay in wait for every shadow. If anything stirred in the terrain, the revolving weapon turret jerked around. They shot at everything that moved out there in the semi-darkness. Two fighter robots fell victim to nervous firing.

  Chaney swore in every key because Orgter's body absolutely could not be discerned with the optical tracer. Only the infrared tracer invoked a magic heat-echo on the screen. Accordingly, Chaney drove the tank through the terrain. His eyes were filled with sweat. Everyone on board the vehicle had been forced to avoid using their protection screens because the close contact between them would have resulted in self-destruction.

  "He's drifting off!" yelled the Major into his microphone. "Could you spread the screen forward 5 or 6 hundred feet?"

  Rhodan's face bung suspended in a small vid-screen. He only nodded. Seconds later, engineers in the power control center operated their switches. The giant defense screen began to wander.

  Outside, far ahead, shapeless creatures took flight. Naturally the Mooffs were out there too, although they had avoided a direct attack this time. So they had sent other creatures ahead of them, beings which certainly were under their hypnotic control.

  "Hold up two seconds!" Rhodan's voice roared in the speaker.

  Chaney pulled back the step-up switch of the small radiation propulsion unit. As a result of the heavy atmospheric resistance, the vehicle stopped on the spot.

  One of the crewmen groaned as fire burst from the giant curved hull of the battleship.

  A monstrous cyclone of fire blasted over and beyond 'The Turtle'. A glaring explosion of light struck the men's eyes from the view screens. Never before had they experienced how a single shot from the giant ship appeared from the outside.

  Chaney got under way immediately thereafter. Orgter's body clung at the time to the foot of a phosphorescent crystal pillar, which had not been there moments before. Liquefied matter had congealed into strange phantoms at these super-low temperatures. They approached with the hover tank, just as Orgter was whirled away again, but this time a tractor beam leapt from the projector muzzle. The biologist was plucked up and held in the midst of the storm. Only 150 feet away, the energy screen arched into the sky.

  "Pull him in easy!" shouted Chaney through the turmoil. "What the devil! Who's that shooting?! I—"

  The roar of their own pulse-ray cannons took the words out of his mouth as 20 or more monsters appeared out of the swirling dusk. Blazing fingers of light shot out of nowhere. The marching robots fired

  so closely past the motionless tank that its defense screen spewed out crackling energy discharges.

  Chaney saw 4 of the monsters get through the tank's field. When they began to shimmer, he knew it was the beginning of a short teleport jump, which would bring them inside the tank. "Fire, O'Keefe!" he yelled, horrified.

  In the next moment the 4 phantom creatures burst into glowing balls of fire. Chaney still stared with widened eyes as his men pulled the biologist into the airlock. The Major still remained silent as the hover tank raced at high speed toward the waiting Titan. They were raised up in the strong antigrav field of the groundlock. A last salvo of giant fire broke from the weapon turrets of the huge ship.

  Chaney listened with half-deafened ears to the roaring and thundering. Rhodan appeared in the big materiel hangar. The fighter robots came floating up one after another. Outside a storm wind developed such as no one had ever experienced. Somewhere in the ship a thermo-beam gun roared. It must be still another monster that had penetrated inside.

  As things quieted slightly and the propulsion engines began to rumble to takeoff power, Maj. Chaney asked tonelessly: "Always when it was at the worst out there and the situation seemed hopeless, some of those beasts would blow to smithereens. Why? Why precisely at the exact moment? Who took a hand in it? Pucky?" Chaney's vacant gaze found the face of the Commander.

  "No!" retorted Rhodan. "Not Pucky. He had his hands full here pulling people out of those clinging messes!"

  Chaney was startled. "No? But then—who actually did it? Those Things didn't explode by themselves! They were just about to knock us out completely."

  "Now don't start mentioning the warning we got when we were landing here," retorted Rhodan, exhausted. "Just lay off, or the crew will put us through a wringer. Keep your mouth shut!"

  Rhodan turned about abruptly. The Titan was already aloft in the turbulent air. The 'Opera Singers' were left behind.

  With a vacant stare they looked up to the giant battleship which had now become unreachable.

  On the other side of the weird mountain another plain extended itself. An ammoniac lake of considerable dimensions shimmered on the viewscreens.

  Then a signal came from the Ganymede, still waiting in outer space. In the Southern Hemisphere of the planet, more than 50,000 miles removed from the present location of the Titan, something had been discovered that was not compatible with this poison kitchen.

  At least it appeared improbable that the planet Mooff 6 could have produced first-class light steel with a molecular film surface.

  The Titan leapt forward at a furious new pace. Behind the controls sat a man with burning, deeply sunken eyes. In the sickbays of the ship the sick ones lay in moribund somnolence.

  7/ THE LAST WARNING

  One thing was certain: a complicated structure on Mooff 6 could neither have been built by the Mooffs themselves nor by the so-called 'Opera Singers'.

  It was equally certain that these two dissimilar life forms lived in a form of symbiosis. The Mooffs ruled the phantom creatures. On the other hand, the Aras controlled the jellyfish beings. It was a ghastly triple team, a psychic deformity on an inhuman yet intellectually towering level.


  Medics, chemists and biologists on board the Titan had been at work for some time. Remnants of the destroyed monsters that had been found were examined. They had no brains! They possessed absolutely nothing that could have given them the faculty of independent thought.

  Nevertheless, they lived; nevertheless they could attack with astonishing consistency of purpose. It was only explainable in terms of a certain remote control, which was indisputably linked to the telepathic-hypnotic faculties of the highly intelligent Mooffs. The 'Opera Singers' themselves posed mystery upon mystery. Their tissue seemed not to be organic. Orgter could only shake his head. The chemists muttered something about 'animated synthetic matter or plastic substance related to alien and unknown valence bondage in a methane-ammonia high-pressure environment.'

  On the Titan's viewscreens gleamed a giant blue-shimmering dome. It was broad and only slightly arched. With a diameter of almost two miles, it lay on a storm-whipped ocean of liquid ammonia. For 10 minutes now the Titan had been tracking it with its own equipment, after the Ganymede, lurking in orbit, had served as a relay station and transferred the data.

  The spherical spacer pushed nearer at low speed. The energies of all power plants were channeled into the triple-stacked defense screens. Only 0.3% of available power was demanded by the operating gravity absorbers.

  New messages came through. Colonel Freyt informed that all planetary space around the sun of Mooff was as if dead. Nowhere was there the slightest echo from any alien living form.

  "Calculate a new orbit," Rhodan ordered. "You will remain stationary over the target area and be on the alert for radio messages."

  Freyt confirmed. The Titan's outer space-tracking system soon indicated that the fighter ship moved out of its previous orbit with a minimum of propulsion power.

  "With that, those others down below have lost," said Everson. Involuntarily he rubbed his black and blue marks and bruises that he had acquired from the monster's 'embrace.'