The Giants From Outer Space Part 13

When one did, it came at them with a rush, snarling soundlessly as it sought the source of the illumination. Towering over the insignificant bottles, it halted, shuddered, stared down--Pink held his breath--and the incredible disintegration and flow of the body happened. The giant entered the bottle, leaving not a trace of its thousand-foot carca.s.s outside. Restraining a desire to leap out and cork up that bottle, Pink waited. The movement of this alien had caught the red eyes of others; they advanced, some hurrying and some cautious, till two more had scented or sensed the alcohol and poured into bottles. Pink kept his eyes on the little containers. Beside him, Circe gazed with horrified fascination at the coming gargantuas....

A trio of them were misting now; this was the test. One empty bottle remained. What would happen, Pink wondered; was one giant per bottle the maximum content? The three streaked down, like smoke sucked into a vacuum cleaner. They jetted into the bottles, and again nothing was left outside. Pink said "Good," in a mutter, and forced himself to wait longer. The more the merrier. How long would it take them to soak up the alcohol? His captive had said the process was slow. How slow? How long did he dare wait?

He caught eight more, then the next hesitated, looking around for the source of light. Either he was capable of more resistance to the seductive element, or the bottles were now full of churning, lapping aliens. There were more of them approaching, but he didn't dare wait any longer. He jumped forward, potting at the foremost.

It went down thrashing, and he shot over it into the yellow of them.

Emptying the Colt, he reloaded hastily and plugged or nicked another half dozen. By then he was standing over the bottles. Nothing had emerged yet. He stooped to slam on the caps.

With horrible speed two giants pounced for him; he saw them out of the corner of his eye. Then they slammed full length to the rock, and he knew that Circe's automatic was in action. He corked the last bottle and slung it on his belt, put down the two remaining containers. Then he turned and made a mighty jump away from them, dragging Circe with him.

The aliens came on.

Some of them could withstand the pull of the liquor, and some could not.

There was a phalanx of them coming, for a good third of the growth's population had seen the disturbance by now. Any who appeared to be pa.s.sing by the bottles, he and Circe shot; those who hesitated by them and were drawn in exchanged their liberty for their lives, because in two minutes Pinkham had feverishly capped them into the leaden prisons.

He hooked them onto his belt and said into the mouthpiece before his lips, "Go for the entrance, baby. I'll cover you."

"No!" she snapped back. "You are not going to sacrifice--"

"Sacrifice, nuts!" he yelled. "This is part of the plan you'd have heard if you hadn't sneaked into the landing party at the last minute. Get going!" He was reloading as he spoke.

She ran, almost flying down the cave-tunnel with great leaps that covered many yards each. He fired three times at the giants who now loomed above him; then he was running too, stretching his legs and throwing every ounce of power and panic in his frame into the incredible jumps. And apparently he had the advantage over the brutes, for he began to outdistance them; their ma.s.s being greater, he was helped by the lack of gravity.

Then a rock crumbled under his toe, he was thrown off balance, his momentum shot him full tilt against the wall of the pa.s.sage, and his head cracked sharply against the inside of his helmet. He knew that he was losing consciousness, and that he had fallen and was rolling straight into the path of the raging aliens.

CHAPTER XIX

Thought came to him before feeling. Pink lay in a hazy world of shifting ideas, of coagulating and disintegrating forms of cerebration. He was not wholly unaware of what had happened, but his groping mind was more concerned with piecing together certain facts and fancies, reaching conclusions he felt were of the first importance. If his body were in danger, it must help itself, for Pink had other fish to fry.

As he sank into thick-witted stupor, then fought up to the light of reason, feeling his mind ebb and flow with ideas and mad conjectures, it came to him that he knew the truth of the giants, and had not stated it to himself before in so many words. He had deliberately shied away from it, in fact, for it stank of fantasy, of crack-brained superst.i.tion and imbecilic fairy tales....

Admit it, he told himself, giggling in the far reaches of his brain.

Admit it. You know about these critters, Pink.

Yes. I know about them. They are the djinn.

The djinn that Solomon ruled, conquered, and put down. The enormous ent.i.ties of Arabian Nights tales, whose habits and character and shrewd-canny-gullible ways of thinking were all set down in the books and marveled at by people even yet, hundreds and hundreds of years after they had been written. Marveled, sure, but marveled only at the imaginations that had produced them. And it wasn't imagination at all.

It was the real actual G.o.ddam solid thing.

The djinn had been at once a triumph and a sad mistake of nature. They were the ultimate in physical perfection, needing nothing, living perfectly independently, huge and strong and yet able to a.s.sume the tiniest proportions when needed. Wounds were nothing, for their makeup was such that their molecules compressed away from weapons, to ooze back into place when danger was past. They controlled the forces of the atom, at least to the extent of ability to freeze protons, and probably they could do many more stunts in that line.

All their powers, being far in advance of man's, had been misunderstood and misinterpreted in the old days. So when a djinni let his atoms flow into the most convenient shape for getting into bottles for alcohol or for pa.s.sing an obstruction he didn't care to demolish, it seemed to men that he turned into a cloud of smoke. Hadn't Pink used that simile to himself?

The fact that they could levitate, probably by control of the force of gravity, and fly through the thin upper air, by some process Pink only dimly understood, was certainly enough to stamp them as minor G.o.ds in Arabia and all the other countries they had infested.

Sure, they were a triumph of nature; but also a colossal failure. For they were, despite their scientific powers, too stupid for pity, too insensitive for compa.s.sion, and too egocentric for tolerance. Their nature was that of the most depraved human being. Consequently they'd been beaten. In spite of their terrific strength, they'd been beaten by puny, unscientific, b.u.mbling man.

How?

Well, Solomon had known about the lead. He'd sealed them in copper bottles with stoppers of lead, and Pink would bet a buck those bottles had been lead-lined, too. Solomon hadn't gone far enough, of course; he'd thrown the bottles into the sea, and sometimes they'd washed up and been opened. For bait, he must have used alcohol, too, since it was the Achilles heel of the djinn.

Had he nailed the entire breed of djinn in his lifetime? It seemed likely, for the legends stopped soon afterwards, didn't they? Pink wasn't sure. Anyway, there sure as h.e.l.l weren't any djinn on Earth today.

How had they gotten out here, all the way to Star System Ninety? That was beyond conjecture. How come the first brute he had contacted, old Ynohp the phony Martian, spoke a kind of messed-up Shakespearian lingo?

G.o.d only knew.

Now he'd discovered them, anyway, and they wanted to go back to Earth.

If they got hold of the _Elephant's Child_, they might do it. He couldn't let them succeed ... but then the crew was going to blow up the ship in two hours.

Two hours!

Pinkham's mind beat wildly at the prison of lethargy and dimmed consciousness. How long had he lain here? Where _was_ he lying? Did the giants, the djinn, have him? And Circe?

Circe. Making the most intense and painful effort of his life, Pink dragged his eyes open and tried to sit up. He had to find Circe.

He saw nothing, and there was a weight on him that held him flat on his back. Either his lamp was broken, or he was blind.

Sensibly, though it cost him untold h.e.l.l to be sensible, Pink lay quietly until he felt all his faculties under control. Then he made an abrupt and violent attempt to sit up. Whatever it was that was holding him down rolled off. He managed to get to his knees, one hand on the rock beneath him, and then arms were thrown around him and a body pressed against his.

The horror of absolute blackness and the unknown predicament he was in proved just a little too much for him. Captain Pinkham gave a loud, long scream of fear.

CHAPTER XX

"What is it?" asked Circe, her voice wild with fright. "Pink, darling, what is it? Are you hurt?"

It was Circe who was holding him. Sobbing with relief, he said into the radio, "No, no, baby, I'm fine, I'm wonderful."

Her answering cry was a tiny sound of joy and affection. "I wish I could kiss you," she said, "but there are two s.p.a.cesuits in the way."

He found her hand and squeezed it hard. "I wish I could see you, Smitty," he said, "but either I'm blind or--"

"Oh, I should have told you at once. I turned off our chest-lamps."

"But where are we?"

"Not far from where you fell." Her hand was a comfort in his, as much so as a squad of s.p.a.ce Marines marching down to greet them would have been.

"You flew past me like a kicked football, Pink, and I veered off to see if you were okay. When you fell and didn't move, the first thing I did was snap off the lamps. About a second afterwards, the giants went past.

They have a weird kind of glow in the dark. I think they could have seen us--certainly they don't exist blind in this ink-pool--but there's a ridge of rock and we were pretty well hidden behind it. I dragged you about forty feet and found this hole and we've been lying here ever since."

"The others," he said, remembering.