The Onslaught from Rigel Part 19

"You got me, boy friend. Sssh! Watch the dopey."

Sherman glanced over his shoulder to see the ape-man moving aside from the door and bent back to his work. Evidently something important was imminent, judging from the actions of the sentry and the energetic attention the ex-dancer was giving to her machine. He was not deceived.

Down the pa.s.sage came something moving; something flesh-like and smooth, of a pale, grey-blue, dead-fish color, like a dangling serpent, then a round bulging head and finally the full form of an elephant!

But such an elephant as mortal eye had never before seen. For it stood barely eight feet high and its legs were both longer and infinitely more slender and graceful than the legs of any earthly elephant. The ears were smaller, not loose flaps of skin, but possessed of definite form and pressed close to the head. The skull was enormous, bulging at the forehead, and wrinkled in the middle down over the large intelligent eyes in an expression permanently cross and dissatisfied. As for the trunk it reached nearly to the floor, longer and thinner in proportion than the trunk of an ordinary elephant, and at its tip divided into four finger-like projections set around the circle of the nostril.

Oddest of all, the elephant wore clothes! Or at least an outer garment, a kind of long cloak which appeared to be attached underneath its body and which covered every portion except the ankles. The feet also were covered. A kind of hood hung back from the head on that portion of the cloak which rested on the creature's back. But what chiefly aroused Sherman's sense of strangeness and loathing was that the naked skin, wherever exposed, was of that same poisonous, dead-fish blue.

For a moment the thing stood in the doorway, regarding them, swinging its long trunk around restlessly, as though it could tell something about them by its sense of smell. Then it advanced a step or two into the room, and placing its trunk close to Sherman's body, began to run over it, sniffing, a few inches away. He felt that he wanted to shriek, to turn and strike the thing, or to run, but a warning glance from the dancer kept him motionless.

Apparently satisfied with the result of its examination the elephant turned to go, stopping as it did so to unhook some projection on the ape-man's helmet and apply it to its ear. After listening for a moment, it put the end of the trunk to this projection, snorted into it, and went away with soundless steps.

For several minutes the two worked on in silence after this. Then:

"Well, now you seen him," said the dancer, in the same word-by-word fashion as before. "That was our boss."

"That--thing?" asked Sherman, incredulously.

"I'll tell the c.o.c.keyed world. Say, those babies know more than Einstein ever heard of. Try to get fresh with one of them and see."

"What do they do?"

"Shoot you with one of the light-guns. They carry little ones around with them. They melt you down wherever they hit you and you have to go to the operating room to have things put back and it hurts like h.e.l.l."

"Oh, I must have been there after they brought me down in my plane. They did something to my back."

"Then you know, boy friend. After that they put the helmet on you and you have to tell 'em what you're thinking about. You can beat that game, though, if you're careful. All I'd give 'em was how good a couple of Scotch highb.a.l.l.s would taste and it made monkeys of 'em."

It was all very strange and not a little bewildering. Intelligent elephants that controlled forces beyond the powers of men; who could place a helmet on your head and read your thoughts; who could repair the new mechanized human form after it had apparently suffered irreparable damage, and who treated men and women as lower animals. Their arrival must have been that of the comet.

Herbert Sherman had read deeply enough, though not widely. He remembered some Englishman--Colvin--Kevin--Kelvin, that was it!--who had a theory that life had drifted to the earth from somewhere out in the void of s.p.a.ce and time. Had these, too, drifted in, in the same way the ancestors of man had come, to set a period to the day of man's dominance over creation? A strange enough creation it was now, though, with its mechanical men and its animals turned to metal statues. He wondered what Noah would say, and giggled at the thought.

"What's the joke, boy friend?"

"Oh, nothing. I had an idea."

Their plight at the hands of these master-animals was bad, but it might be worse. At least he had a certain amount of freedom, he was stronger than he had ever before been in his life, and felt quite as intelligent.

It would be strange if he could not accomplish something.... He fell to planning out ways of escaping and failed to notice the pain in his fingers in the intensity of his thoughts.

Everything seemed to show that the operation of most of these machines was predominantly electrical. It would be strange if the car that carried them to and fro was not, yes and by Jove, the helmets the ape-men wore. If he could short-circuit the works, or even a part of them....

Apparently his new body was a good conductor and impervious to the injurious effects of the electric current. Short-circuit something, that was the idea, create a confusion--and trust to escaping in the midst of it? Perhaps--but at all events a good deal could be learned about these elephant-men and their methods by watching them in such an emergency.

Their machinery was so efficient that a child could operate it; it was in a pinch that their real intelligence would show.

It struck him that it would do little good to escape unless he did learn something about these elephant-people, their mysterious light-guns, their vast city that they seemed to have hollowed out of the heart of the solid Catskill rock, their chemistry and metallurgy and methods of attack and defense. Otherwise escape would be a jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. There would be nothing for it but a desperate, harried existence, the existence of one of the lower animals faced by the insupportable compet.i.tion of man.

Information! That was the first need. He must bend all his energies to the task of obtaining it.

"By the way, what do these eggs call themselves?" he asked.

"La.s.sans," said the dancer.

A light flickered along the corridor. The ape-man at the door came forward, touched him on the arm and led him to the pa.s.sage where he caught the car back to his cage.

CHAPTER XIV

In the Pa.s.sages

The first thing to be done, Sherman decided, was to short-circuit the mind-reading helmet of the guard at the door, if it were possible. He was not certain that the thing was electrical, and ignorant of how the current was conveyed if it were. He realized that he was dealing with the products of an utterly alien form of mentality, one that might not produce its results in the same way as an earth-man would at all. But something had to be dared, and this seemed to offer the best opportunity.

If the thing were electrical, the current must come through the tube to the top of the head. On his second work-period he observed this tube with care. It ran through an aperture in the stone roof and was apparently provided with some spring device, for a considerable length of it reeled out when the ape-man wished to walk across the room, and was absorbed as he returned.

The tube seemed to be made of the rubber-like material that composed the floor of his cage. The simplest plan, of course, would be to bring his chopping-knife with him and when the ape-man paused before the wall, swing it up in a sweep, severing the tube. But this, he felt, was not to be recommended. It would not necessarily short-circuit the current and the damage would be too readily laid at his door. The desideratum was some damage that apparently accidental, would yet produce a good deal of uproar.

He talked it over with Marta Lami.

"I think you're bugs," she said frankly, "but anything for excitement.

What do you want me to do about it?"

"Well, here's what I figured out," Sherman explained. "We both arrive about the same time. I'll bring my knife. When we come in you hang back a bit, and while you're doing it, I'll take a poke at that cable with the knife, not enough to cut it, but enough to damage it. Then about half-way through the work period, I'll turn around and say something to you. If I do it quick enough, I think the monk will start for me, and if the cable doesn't go then, I'll miss my guess."

The next period proved unsuitable; the dancer's car arrived considerably before Sherman's and the plan was dropped for the time, but on the following occasion, as Sherman came down the pa.s.sage, he noticed Marta Lami just ahead of him. He hurried to catch up and she evidently understood, for she avoided the guard's outstretched hand and hung back a minute against the wall as Sherman came up behind. He made one quick motion; the cable sheared half-way through exposing two wires of bright metal.

As luck would have it, it proved unnecessary to put the second part of the plan into operation. For just as Sherman was nerving himself to swing round and attract the ape-man's attention, he heard the soft pad-pad of one of the approaching La.s.sans. The ape-man stepped back to clear the entrance as he had before, and as he did so, there was a trickle of sparks, a blinding flash, and the cable short-circuited.

The result was totally unexpected. From the great machine before Sherman there came an answering flash; the ground gla.s.s split across with a bang, there was a hissing sound and something blew up with a roar that rocked the underground chambers....

Sherman came to himself flat on his back and with pieces of rock and the debris of the machine lying across his legs. He looked around; Marta Lami lay some little distance across the room, half covered with fallen rock, one arm flung across her eyes as though to protect them. Above, the solid granite looked as though a blasting charge had been fired in its midst. Sherman pulled himself to a sitting posture, and finding nothing damaged, stood upright. The machine, badly shattered, lay in fragments of bent rods, broken pulleys and wrecked cylinders all about him. In the place where it had stood was a long narrow opening, down at the end of which something irregular shut off a bright point of light. A blast of heat exuded from the place and a steady, deep-voiced roaring was audible. The ape-man guard was nowhere to be seen.

He bent to pick up the unconscious girl, wondering how one revived a mechanical woman, especially without water, but she solved the problem for him by opening her eyes and asking:

"Who touched off the pineapple, boy friend?"

"I did. Come out of it and tell me what we do next. Anything busted?"

"Only my head." She patted the ma.s.s of stiff wire. "Boy, am I glad I wore my hair long before they made a robot of me!" And with an effort she stood up, looked down the pit where the machine had been and said, "Say, let's get out of here. That don't look so good."

"All right," said Sherman, "which way? Wait till I get my knife."

"No, leave it," she said. "Those babies are n.o.body's saps. If they find it on you they'll know you shot the well. Come on, I think that thing is going to pop again."

The roaring had increased in both volume and intensity, and the machine-room had become unbearably hot. They turned toward the door, but just at the entrance into the pa.s.sage a pile of debris had descended, making egress impossible. Behind them the roaring increased still more.