CHAPTER VII

So long ago that there were no words for the incredible period of time that lay between then and now, the planet Chwosst, fourteenth from the sun Tsloahn in the star system Lluagor, had become overcrowded to the point of danger. The dominant race of Chwosst were the two-toed one-eyed green men who called themselves Graken, which signified The Mighty, or All-Consuming. The other races of life on the planet were insignificant, small rodent-like beasts used for food by the Graken, who were wholly carnivorous.

They conquered the principles of space travel and sent out fleets of ships--these early craft were bullet-shaped, much as the designers of the first potential rockets of Earth had shaped their creations--and within a hundred-year space they had perfected these so that travel was negligibly dangerous. In their own system they had discovered one other planet capable of supporting their kind. This had given them a long breathing space, during which they hammered at the locked gates of the sub-space corridors. The Graken bred fast, though, too fast, and their two planets filled up before they had solved interdimensional travel.

There followed a long spell of civil war, revolutions that cut their numbers down fantastically and at last came near to exterminating the Graken entirely. While they were repopulating their double homelands, they made a peace among themselves that was never again broken. To assure it, they invented the headgear which broadcast their thoughts, and in a generation or two they had become a kind of ant horde, billions of individuals conditioned to a kind of community thought, a way of life in which every idea of every individual was passed on to those near him, shared and refined amongst so many thousands that a giant race-mind at last made its appearance, and no single Graken ever felt that _he_ had conceived anything, but that _they_ had done it.

This conjoint cerebration did not reach through space from planet to planet, and so the single-mindedness of the Graken was kept on its track by constant emissaries from one half of the race to the other.

Now a new terror arose for them: the rodents on which they had fed, a breed of beast even more amazingly fertile than the Graken themselves, were decimated by a plague; and nourishment became so scarce that extinction was threatened. Of course there were no rich and poor among the Graken, no money and no privilege, any more than there would be among a queenless ant tribe. So as one grew hungry, they all did. They might have fed half their people and let the other half starve, but that was not the Graken way.

Now, at this most crucial time of their history, the secret of sub-space was finally discovered, and the relatively simple manner of intratime interstellar journeying ascertained.

Patrols were sent out in the old-style bullet-craft, but due to a lack of manual maneuverability in entering and leaving the galaxies now opened to them, the casualties were nine ships out of each ten sent out from Chwosst. Even so, another habitable planet was found within a matter of a few Earth-months, and food (composed of the "inferior races" found thereon) brought back to the hungry system of Lluagor.

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The saucer-shaped spacecraft were developed and fleets, so numerous that each of the three worlds became hardly more than a vast landing-ground, were built. Two of every three able-bodied male Graken were trained as pilots, navigators, technicians and attack-masters. Patrols of from ten to fifty thousand ships left the base planets regularly, cutting through dimensions of sub-space in a search for new worlds that was of necessity haphazard, and yet which regularly discovered habitable globes in the limitless reaches of the universe.

No instruments had ever been developed by the Graken with which to ascertain the facts about a planet from a distance greater than a few thousand miles. Thus, to check on size, gravity, atmosphere, animal life and so forth, the patrols were forced to scan a world from just beyond its limit of attraction. One possible haven out of each hundred thousand planets checked was an excellent average, one in half a million more than usual. Some worlds accepted were smaller, with less gravity, others had certain differences atmospherically; but the Graken were an adaptable breed, and readily conformed to such changes.

The one male Graken in three who was not taken for saucer duty became a shepherd, a breeder of food animals, or a scientist.

The females bred and raised their offspring and bred again; their fertile life extended over the years from fourteen to eighty-five, their gestation period was four months. The race was prolific.... The need for worlds was continually urgent.

And Terra was an almost perfect duplication of the Graken's prototype home planet.

The last development in the Graken's marauding through the reaches of space was the actual kidnapping of the new worlds, the theft of entire planets and their transportation through sub-space into the star system Lluagor.

This had been conceived and perfected only a few generations before. The chain of Graken-inhabited globes had reached the sum of fifty-three, and travel between them had become tedious, arduous, and sometimes dangerous, for the ships used for ordinary traveling were fewer and of older patterns than the patrol vessels. The Graken found their communal minds drifting into widened channels, as direct contact became less and less. The pressing need was for a single system of worlds ranged about one star, in which travel would be easy and frequent. They therefore devised the kidnapping principle.

First every planet unfit for Graken life in the system Lluagor was exploded, leaving only two balls spinning about the sun Tsloahn. Then, one by one, the new Graken planets were brought through sub-space and dropped into the home system. This was done by a method which could not be made completely clear by the captive green man; the basic idea of which, however, was easy to comprehend:

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A patrol of no less than 20,000 saucers was brought within a mile of the world's surface. They hovered in lines, opened file, linked up until the planet was girdled by one continuous belt of ships. On a planet of the Earth's circumference, this would be about one saucer per mile. The ships were connected electronically in series, and at a button's push, a lever's throw, or a dial's setting in the control vessel, the saucers together with the captive world were shot through sub-space and into the system Lluagor, where they were fixed in an orbit around the parent star Tsloahn. The saucers then drew off, and the Graken owned another world, a new home for their waxing, fruitful hordes.

After two failures, in which planets already crawling with millions of Graken blew up while entering sub-space, the method of annexation was perfected and the remaining forty-nine planets were added to the first two, Chwosst and Csenfar, in the home system. Later acquisitions were brought to the base after any intelligent native races had been crippled or annihilated, and there, in the comfort and convenience of their own spaceways, the Graken mopped them up and settled on them, keeping alive any species that made acceptable food. The journey through sub-space and the orbit-fixing did not affect the atmosphere or inhabitants of the planets in any way.

Thus far, no humanoid (or Grakenoid) races had been found in all the explored universe. The possibility of humans as Graken-food was left undiscussed. Cannibalism, even of this off-beat kind, might be repugnant to the green folk, even though race-murder, of a second-cousin breed like Man, was not.

The patrol fleets were not in touch with their home base, as communication through sub-space was impossible. This was established by repeated questioning of the alien prisoner, whose name was an approximation of the syllable Glodd.

Only chance had brought the patrol to the Solar system. It was so far from Lluagor, even by the dimension-cutting sub-space, that it might never have been found except for an accident in their navigation.

Terra had been conquered and ravaged and would now be kidnapped because of a slip of an alien finger on an unknown instrument panel!