CHAPTER X

Don Mariner, leaning out of the window of the station wagon as the band emerged, said urgently, "One of them landed. It landed just over there a way, I don't think more than half a mile. There aren't any others in sight. This one floated down not half a minute ago."

"What did I say?" exclaimed McEldownie. "They eliminated radioactive dust, so they could come right in after a bombing. It's logical."

"We'll go on foot," said Brave, "though I hate to abandon the car. But we'll have to go on foot over this rubble, and I take it we _are_ going to the thing?"

"We sure are," said Rob Pope.

"Wait a minute. One of us ought to go with Win in the wagon and try to make it back to Project Star. She shouldn't be in this ruckus," protested Alan.

"You think she'd be better off out there with Lord knows how many mutants or supermen or aliens?" asked Bill Thihling. "You're not thinking straight, boy. We've got to stick together. Separate now and we may never see each other again."

"Besides, you can't get rid of me," said Win finally.

Don passed out the heavy sporting rifles, one to each of the men. They each had a sidearm, Brave two, and he and Alan had the wicked knives of the shopkeeper. Win had her little automatic for use in emergencies. Dividing the ammunition, and anchoring Unquote firmly to Alan's left shoulder with lengths of twine fashioned into harness and leash, they set off across the street; passed between buildings and across another street and yet another; and came to the area of near-total destruction. Here the going was precarious and tricky. Brave stared around them.

"Looks like Pergamino when we'd finished with it," he said to his friend.

A queer dead hush followed them about, muffling their footsteps and depressing them as though they crept through a graveyard. "That's what it is," said Alan half-aloud. "The biggest graveyard in the world." His hands ached to feel the throat of an enemy, to tear out the jugular, to slay and slay. His world had been struck a fantastic, unaccountable blow, and it was dead around him and he and his friends seemed the only living humans from pole to pole.

They passed on, drifting quietly between broken crags that two hours before had been office buildings, hearing the echo of their light foot-falls tossed back by windowless walls and heaps of brick and stone. One passage was clogged breast-high with corpses. They went around it, climbing over powdery granite piles that had been a theater's facade.

* * * * *

Then there was the broad plain of ruin, a gargantuan bowl, smoothed down from its rim to the center, which was some twenty feet below the original level of the ground. Everything had been smashed here, buildings and trees and everything that stood upright; in the middle of the frightful desolated bowl rested one of the great silver disks, tilted like a gyroscope and balanced on its extreme edge, as though it leaned at its forty-five-degree angle against an invisible wall.

"That settles it," said Don. "Our ships can't do that stunt. Look, it balances like that and the bubble opened up makes an incline to the ground; fit steps inside the bubble and you have a perfect way of getting in and out. Our system is much clumsier. How the devil do they make it balance, though?"

"They've set up effective force screens around our armies," said Jim. "If they can do that, certainly they can utilize small editions of the screen mechanisms to hold up their saucers."

"Or maybe it's a principle of gyroscopics," added Bill.

"Well," said Brave, "we're going down there. At least I am. Anybody wants to stay here, Lord knows I won't blame him."

"We're all going."

"Okay. First Alan and Bill and I will walk out. If we aren't shot by the time we've gone twenty yards, you four come on. We can't plan anything till we get a look at the brutes in the disk; but as soon as we do, I'll shout out our next move. Is that all right with everyone? Or does one of you want to take charge?"

"You're the chief, Brave," said Rob. "Maybe we outrank you on Project Star, but in action I'd back you against all of us. I've heard about you in Argentina."

"I didn't mean to assume command on the strength of my war record," said Brave seriously. "I simply figured I had the biggest voice and no matter what happens you'll probably be able to hear me. Okay, here we go. Guns at the ready."

They walked out onto the flattened waste that had been New York.

Nothing happened.

When they had been walking for eternity and six days longer, as Alan judged it, figures appeared below the huge disk, coming down the inclined steps or plane in the crystal bubble, grouping on the ground. The Earthmen were then just over an eighth of a mile from the ship.

The aliens looked human; it was difficult to see differences in their structure and that of a man; and they wore clothing that glistened as they moved in the sun. They were setting up three small pieces of machinery beneath the disk. Alan could not guess what they might be.

Then the men in the lead, Brave and Bill and Alan, ran into an unseen wall that knocked them staggering from the force of their own motion. The aliens had set up a screen around their ship.

"Here's where I yell out the plan, I guess," said Brave ruefully. "The plan is to make faces, men. That seems to be the only thing we can do of a warlike nature. God, a force wall! We might have known."

* * * * *

Alan, who had sat down abruptly when he struck it, jarring the tied-down cat on his shoulder and causing her to sink her claws through the coat into his skin with anger, stood up and felt the air before his face.

"Amazing. Touch this thing, you fellows. It feels like a sheet of hard rubber. It's perfectly tangible. I can almost feel a grain in the thing."

"What scientists they must be!" exclaimed Rob Pope. "This--hey!" he shouted, startled. "Here's an opening!"

Then he had walked on across the bowl. Bill Thihling, nearest him, tried to follow. He found there was no hole there. He skinned his nose on the force screen.

"Rob's crazy," he said. "He thinks there ain't no force wall there. So he walks through it. Only a loon could do it."

Pope came back. "I heard that. What the hell...? It was here a minute ago."

"Can't you get back?"

"No! The wall's solid again. By Jupiter, they let me come through; they wanted to see one of us at a time. All right, I'll play their game." He wheeled and marched straight toward the disk.

"Oh, Rob, come back!" screamed Win. "They'll do something awful to you!"

"Too late now," said Alan, taking her arm. "They've caught him in their cage like a rabbit."

"A fanged rabbit, anyway," said Don. "He's got his guns."

Rob walked under the silver ship, into its shadow. The aliens clustered about him. Beyond the wall of force, the men and the girl held their breath tensely.

After a minute or two, "Why," said Jim McEldownie, "they haven't even taken away his rifle!"

Shortly Rob turned his face toward them and waved. It was an encouraging motion. Whatever was happening did not seem hostile.

"And yet," said Alan to himself, "these are the devils who smashed Manhattan. They _are_ enemies." Even here, on the sloped plain that had been a roaring city, it was hard to realize it. He shook himself. Simply because they had not chopped Rob Pope down immediately, he had begun to slack off his hatred of them. He was growing tired and stupid. He reached into his pocket and took out an antigue tablet and swallowed it.

Don Mariner, leaning heavily against the invisible wall, was abruptly shot forward to fall on his belly; the wall had vanished where he stood. Jim reached the spot an instant later, but the screen was whole. Don sat up, and his plump face was pale, but his grin was without panic.

"The Mariners have landed," he said, "and will shortly have the situation well in hand. Hold tight." He went down to the disk and the aliens.

* * * * *

The waiting grew terrible in its intensity; Bill Thihling took his pulse and found it like a machine gun, even Brave sweated with anxiety, his dark fine face taut and frowning.

He was, as it happened, the next to be admitted to the silver ship's area. Walking through the hole that opened to him, he thrust an arm back through it, trying to hold the force away till Alan had had time to follow him. Roughly, with a sensation of faint burning, the screen shut down and flung his arm to his side. It was like a sentient animal leaping from the sky to stand between him and his friend. After a moment's hesitation he went to the disk.

Mac came to Alan's side. "Listen, Doc," he said urgently. "Get your girl over here. The three of us are going through this thing together when our time comes."

"How?" And why, thought Alan. Is he scared to walk down over the plain alone? Why Win and me? How about Bill?

"I'll show you. Get up against the wall. I'll idle beside you and Win can stand on the other side. When it opens in front of one of us, the other two will jump like crickets and we'll go in in lock step. Okay?"

"They may blast us if we disregard their obvious wishes." He gestured at the titanic bowl. "They can undoubtedly do it if we peeve them," he said lightly.

"We'll take that chance. I have an idea."

Alan shrugged. What they did seemed unimportant, the activities of a handful of fleas under a microscope.

The screen, as it happened, dissolved before Alan. More properly, he thought, it went up, like a sliding panel under his light-touching fingers. "Here it is," he said.

Instantly Mac had stepped behind him, one hand clutching out for Win's arm, the other around Alan's waist. Alan felt himself propelled through the doorway as if by a giant's shove; and the three of them stood inside, the girl looking rather bewildered.

"My Lord," she said to Mac, "you can move like an express train when you want to."

"Now listen," said the announcer. "When we get down there, be on your toes. Follow my lead. I know what I'm going to do. I'm--we're going to take over that ship."

"Jim, you're out of your head."

"No, I'm not. I know exactly what I'm going to do. We came here to smack these demons down, didn't we? Well, we will. Just be on your bloody toes, that's all."

Then they walked down the gentle slope until they had reached the shadow of the alien disk. They stopped a few feet from the watching outlanders. The captive Unquote writhed forward as far as she could on Alan's shoulder and spat at them.

They were a strange, a fantastic group, and yet they seemed to be human beings. Their bodies, much of which was unclothed, were built on the human scale; they averaged about six feet in height and their chest and limbs were developed to the same degree as a normally husky man's. Their foreheads were uniformly high. Their eyes varied in color, only one having irises of an unearthly hue, a kind of vivid violet. Only in the arrangement of their features did they differ perceptibly from the men of Terra: the cheeks were broader, the noses flatter, the eyes more widely spaced, and the bone structure much less apparent. Somewhere Alan had seen a man, lately, whose vague memory reminded him of these fellows. Where...?

Erin Grady!

* * * * *

When the pilot had spread himself out, so to speak, against the back of the chair, his face had widened, the features had drawn sideways and perceptibly flattened, so that he had resembled these saucermen. Was this what he had meant when he said, "You can't touch us. What could you do anyway?" This holocaust, this ghastly obliterating of New York and Los Angeles and fifty more great cities?

Grady had been a spy for them, then; a watcher, landed perhaps from one of the disks on a dark night....

He shook himself. That's romantic hogwash, he said. Everyone on Project Star had a thorough checking-over, and his history from birth to the present was recorded in the files. That meant that Grady had been born here, in the United States.

Unless the keepers of the files were alien too, in which case a falsified record would be a simple matter to arrange.

But if he had been left here in comparatively recent times, say even four or five years ago, Alan went on, how did he learn our language, our backgrounds, our habits and customs and all the rest of it, so well? Are these creatures then so much farther advanced than we, that they can take on the perfect counterfeit of humanity in so short a time? He could not quite believe it. Grady had been too human.

Damn it all, _these_ men looked too human!

He shrugged mentally, and began to examine their clothing. What there was of it was metallic, or of cloth that seemed metallic: each one wore a wide belt of silver filigree, reaching up to the ribs and down just past the groin; beneath this a material that resembled cloth of gold, very soft and fine, was wound about the loins. They all wore sandals, of varying colors, the straps of which appeared to be made of tinted copper or a like metal. The rest of their outfits were evidently according to the individual's own taste; some wore arm bands of glittering orange or yellow gold, some had circlets of shining gray argent bound about their hair, which in all cases was blond and cut about shoulder length. The over-all effect was splendidly barbaric, and about as far as Alan could imagine from the usual picture of visitors from space.

"They ought to have broadswords swinging at their thighs," he murmured to Win. "Or at least be toting horn cups full of mead."

"Aren't they something!" she said, and then, "are these the devils who bombed all our world a few hours back? These big good-looking boys? I can't believe it!"

One of them bent over a square steel-like box and turned a dial; they heard Bill Thihling shout in the distance, "Hey, the wall's gone!" and saw him come running toward them.

"They're the ones," said Alan, and his mind, occupied till now with the romantic appearance of the invaders, became filled with hate.

* * * * *

Instantly he felt something probing into his thoughts. It was, although he did not remember it, very like his first experience of hypnosis during the telecast. All he knew now, however, was that someone was leafing through his emotions and ideas as if they had been a large plainly-printed book. It made him furious. He might have done anything, shouted angrily or struck out at the nearest alien in an access of physical passion; but it was then that Jim McEldownie made his move.

"Okay," the lanky man roared, "strike now! Blast 'em! Get into the ship!" He lifted his rifle and fired it from the hip, and one of the outlanders spun round and fell, a great bloody cavern torn in his chest.

Alan did not question Jim's methods, though two minutes before he would have; he blew the head off the nearest blond saucerman and shot over the falling body at another. Brave fired too, and Don Mariner; the others were caught by surprise and only stared wide-eyed.

An alien drew a silver tube from the back of his filigreed silver girdle and from its tiny muzzle a gout of scarlet flame flew at Alan. He felt nothing, thanked his luck that it had missed, and shot the man through the head. Then he was racing after McEldownie toward the crystal bubble's inclined plane.

Up they went into the disk, he and Mac in the lead, Unquote shrieking murder on his shoulder. Behind them he could hear the others pounding along, crying out questions or vague threats or battle-cries.

The ship was much larger than those of Project Star, and more complex within; the ramp reached to a corridor with three doors. Mac was dashing for the farthest one; Alan threw his weight against the middle door. As it burst open his first glimpse was of four outlanders rising, open-mouthed, from chairs set before a bank of control panels.

Afterwards he could recall only the thing which flashed through his mind in that first instant of viewing them: that in the old West it had been proved time and again that one good man with a repeating rifle was better than four good men with revolvers. Alan proved it now, not against guns, but against the small silver tubes that spat flame balls. The room was a shambles in eight seconds, and Alan turned for more conquest, to stumble over the body of a man in the corridor.

* * * * *

It was Don Mariner, and he had no face. There was a raw bloody burn from ear to ear, from brow to throat. He had probably died very quickly. Alan straightened and gripped his gun's stock till the fingertips splayed out white and flat against it. Old Don, he said, old plump Don. Not so old, he said, probably no more than forty-two or -three, but you always thought of him affectionately as Old Don. Now who will there be to exclaim "By Judas!" when things get tough?

"Brave!" he bawled out. "Brave, are you safe?" He was hideously afraid for his great friend. When the copper face peered out of the third door, he was ill with relief.

"Had a little dust-up in here," said the Indian. "These boys wanted to brawl. My God," he said, coming out, "Don's had it."

"Yes, he's had it."

"He was a good man. Did we lose anyone else? I think the saucermen are all through."

Jim McEldownie joined them. "The big control room's up front there. We killed seven of 'em there. Rob took a leg burn and he'll walk with a limp for a while. No more casualties."

"Those tubes of theirs are frightful. If we hadn't taken them so by surprise--"

"They were too careless," said Brave. "Doesn't make sense."

Rob Pope hobbled out, one arm over Bill's shoulders. "I think I know why," he said. "When they got me down here, they searched through my mind. I could feel it plain as a physical touch. They found hate there, I'll be bound, but it was for the bombing of the city, not a congenital hatred of outsiders. They found the same in Bill's mind. It relaxed them and put them off guard."

"How do you figure that?" asked Win.

"They were looking for an ingrained enmity toward themselves. It astonished them when they didn't find it. They're tremendously telepathic, and I'll wager hypnotic too. I think they do much of their own communicating by thought waves; at least I didn't hear them speak once.

"When they discovered why I was angry, they were stunned. I mean they were shocked blue. You see, they made a mistake. They realized that as soon as they'd pried into my mind. They thought we were down here just waiting to kill them as soon as they landed, and naturally they had to cripple us before they dared do it. Then they found out their mistake. They had to kill someone, I'm not sure who, but the bombing of our cities could have been avoided had they known what we were like."

"Wait a minute," objected Brave. "Rob, how do you know all this?"

Pope looked surprised. "Why, they told me. They had just begun to explain it, hardly got more than a few ideas across, when you and Mac and Alan busted loose. If I'd known what you were planning I'd have stopped you. But now we have made a mistake as bad in its way as theirs."

"They told you all this?" asked Win blankly.

"Yes. They talked in my mind. Not in English, but it came out that way. It was--pictures, I suppose is the nearest thing to it. Emotions and both abstract and concrete ideas can be transmitted by a good telepathist; and these boys were the best." He shook his head. "It's too bad. God knows where it will all end now."