The Giants From Outer Space Part 8

"Aside, mortals," the beast mouthed at them, and added, grotesquely, "G.o.ddammit!" They dropped back, it pa.s.sed them and turned a corner and vanished. "Wait," said Daley urgently, "don't follow it yet." He switched on the pa.s.sage intercom screen. "We'll spy on it with this. If Pink's alive, we mustn't anger the brute."

Tense, they watched the image of the stranger as it prowled through the ship, carrying their chief. It pa.s.sed Randy Kinkare, and they saw him shrink away, a noise of terror gurgling in his gullet. The lipless Kinkare had reason to be afraid.

The giant took Pinkham into his own quarters and laid him on a foam-couch. Then it sat down in an angle of the wall, and its gruesomely human-like body swelled until it occupied much of the free s.p.a.ce in the cabin.

"To scare him if he wakes," breathed Bill Calico.

"Isn't it frightful enough?" asked Jerry. "I have an idea: if the Rabelaisian types outside are at their normal size, which seems logical, then this one may be uncomfortable, having to go around all compressed to eight feet."

"Could be ... let's advance," said Daley. "We'll wait just outside Pink's door. Then if it tries anything--"

"Yeah?"

"We'll make a protest," finished Daley. "Somehow, we'll make a strong protest."

They left the screen, a few seconds before Captain Pinkham groaned and opened his eyes.

The alien regarded him with its habitual expression of overpowering slyness. "Why did you nearly die?" it asked. "Was it something I did?"

When Pink could trust himself to speak without gibbering--it was horrifying to see half his room filled by this bronze-yellow balloon of evidently solid flesh--he said, "Naturally it was something you did, you big ape. You turned off our air."

"Air?" It compressed its lips. "Ah, I remember air. A substance needed on Earth for life. We never understood it."

"Don't you breathe?" asked Pink. "Don't you take any element into your system and mix it with your blood and then--oh, you haven't any blood."

He paused. "But don't you need _any_ outside element to sustain life?"

"No. Nor do we eat."

"But you are organic life?"

"Of course. A life which you cannot understand, I see. A life impervious to anything beyond it, indestructible and eternal."

_I think you're lying_, said Pink to himself. Nothing in the universe is indestructible ... or at any rate, unalterable. Everything has its Achilles heel, even the atom.

The monster spoke, half to itself. "That, the locked switch was the air, then. I thought it was the air-lock." It laughed. Pink thought it had a pretty primitive sense of humor. "Not the air-lock, but the air."

"You wanted to let your friends into the ship," accused Pink. The beast nodded. "Didn't you know that opening the air-locks without sealing off their compression rooms would kill all the humans aboard?"

"No," it said. "I want you alive. Some of you. To teach us the working of this rocket."

"s.p.a.ceship," corrected Pink without thinking. Then, "Why do you want the ship?"

Its eyes glowed fire at him. "To return to Earth," it hissed. "To return to our own planet!"

"_Your_ planet!"

"As much as yours, mortal." It leaned forward, obscuring practically all the room for him. "Show me how to open the air-locks," it said.

"In a swine's eye."

"With safety to yourself, naturally," it said impatiently, "Come, show me."

"Find the machinery yourself. Experiment. Knock us all off. You'll be stuck out here with a ship you can't operate."

It plucked him off the foam-couch and hurled him against the wall, jarring him in every bone. "Show me how," it roared. "Thou zed, thou cream-faced loon--" Shakespeare? wondered Pink--"show me the controls!"

Pink dived behind a stationary chair. He drew his useless pistol and threw it at the being's face; it rebounded to the floor. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up a vase of ever-blooming Jovian lilies, sent them after the gun. The monster reached for him, snarling. He leaped over its hand, hurdling it as if he were a boy crossing a fence. On the far wall were many weapons.

When he made Captain, and was given the _Elephant's Child_ as his flagship, he had transferred all his belongings to it, so that nowhere in the galaxies would he ever feel at home save here. Among his keepsakes was the collection of antique weaponry handed down to him by his father, whose grandfather had bought them in the long ago from many museums. Gradually he had added to the collection, souvenirs of the planets he had explored. They were bracketed on the wall. Zulu war clubs and Kentucky muskets. Martian spear-guns and antiquated jet-pistols; a Derringer, a Colt .44, a blowpipe from an unknown Pacific island.

The alien giant was too swollen to turn swiftly. Pink reached the wall display. He tore down an a.s.segai, whirled and thrust it at the monstrous, contorted face, searching for the eyes.

He was a mouse, bedeviling a cat with a broom straw. The thing batted his spear aside, brushed him with its fingers in a powerful swat, smashed him against his desk. A corner caught him, and he felt a rib snap. The pain enraged him.

In that desk he kept his other collection, ammunition for those weapons: it was his boast that he had at least six rounds for every projectile-thrower there. Some of it had been painstakingly fashioned in modern times from the old formulae, some miraculously preserved through the centuries. On strange planets he and Jerry used to have target practice with the ancient toys.

Now the agony and the fear forced him into a gesture. He would die in this room, for certainly he'd never tell the giant where to find the air-lock switches; he had to go down fighting, and if to fight this impervious lout was the most futile of gestures, at least he would make it a glorious one!

Fumbling, he tore open a drawer and clutched a box out of it. This was the ammunition for the Colt revolver. Gripping it in his left hand, he jumped aside as the beast put out a hand for him. He fled across the room, his ears cringing from the t.i.tanic yells of fury behind him. Now he had to get the Colt .44 from the wall.

It took him three horrible minutes of dodging and bounding to reach the weapons again. He s.n.a.t.c.hed at the revolver, missed, made another desperate grab as he dropped to the rug; the second time he had it. He crawled under a chest which stood twenty inches off the floor. Luckily the alien was trying to catch him, not slay him, for it could long since have smeared him into jelly with a piece of furniture for a bludgeon.

Feverishly he loaded the chambers of the Colt. For a moment his scattered wits could not recollect just how to operate this special weapon. Then he remembered.

The fingers of the monster, sausage-sized and disgusting in their parody of humanity, came groping beneath the chest. Pinkham wormed back and came up behind it, staring into the red eyes.

With a concentration of power that he had not known he could summon, he shot out from behind the chest and vaulted onto the top of his enormous desk.

The alien, lips curling, straightened till its head brushed the ceiling.

It reached out for him.

In the last split second, Pink had a vision of himself, and instead of a glorious gesture, it seemed to him suddenly that he was making an awful a.s.s of himself. Like a man before a firing squad thumbing his nose....

Nevertheless, he aimed the Colt full into the gargantuan face before him, and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER XIII

The dawn-man, a thing like a wet rat, bared its teeth at the dinosaur.... The Cro-Magnon faced a horde of hulking Neanderthals with a grin.... The Crusader stood with a broken sword and brandished the hilt at the charging Saracens.... The Apache drew his knife to fight a double-troop armed with carbines.... The American flung his empty M-1 in the faces of forty j.a.panese ... _toujours le beau geste_. Captain Pinkham, standing in his cabin aboard the s.p.a.ceship _Elephant's Child_ adrift in Star System Ninety, leaned forward and pulled the trigger to the two-century-old, out-moded, laughable popgun of a Colt .44 firing once and twice and again and again into the face of the bronze-yellow s.p.a.ce-dwelling giant.

The being loomed over him, and a scream like the death-wail of a meteor lanced into his eardrums and made him gasp with anguish. He pumped the last slug into the enemy and launched himself side-long, without much hope of landing anywhere but in a bushel-sized palm. He was actually surprised when he found himself on the rug. He scrambled for cover, but before he reached it, it dawned on him that he might not need it.