Part 1

MONSTER OF THE ASTEROID

By RAY CUMMINGS

They might gamble, but win or lose the take was death for these two new slaves of the Master of that pitted Devil's Isle of outer space.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The amazing thing began that summer evening of 1965 while I was sitting with Dora Franklin on the third ramp at the crossroads, listening to the outdoor public-music. We were on the fringe of the crowd in a secluded little place where there was a small bench under the overhanging branches of a tree. It was a romantic scene with the audience seated in crescent rows under the strings of colored tubelights. My arm went around Dora, with her head against my shoulder as we listened to the soft exotic music.

Around us, countless other couples were also listening in silence.

A pair of young lovers. I realize now that was doubtless what first attracted the furtive man to us. How long he and his weird little companion had been watching us I have no idea. I was aware of the two dark shapes in the shadow under a nearby tree--a tall blob and a short one. Then the tall one came forward; the short one lurked in the deep shadows a few feet away.

"The music is very pretty?" a guttural voice said. It was a man in a long, dull-black cloak. His black peaked hat had a fringe almost in woman fashion which dangled past his ears and shrouded his face so that I could hardly see it. With his mumbled greeting he sidled up and dropped to the bench beside me, peering past me at Dora as though he were infinitely more interested in her rather than me which was not in itself a surprising fact.

"Yes," I agreed. Dora and I sat up and shifted reluctantly to give him room. The little figure ten feet away, stood impassive. I recall that I stared with a sudden startled astonishment; and then with a vague shudder stabbing into me. The silent shape was no more than five feet tall, so that with a quick glance here in the dimness one might have thought it a half grown boy. A man's long black overcoat fell from the top of its head almost to the ground, as though a boy had the overcoat hung on his head, with all of him shrouded inside it. But the top of the overcoat was limp, sagging. I had the sudden crazy thought that the thing was headless--an overcoat hanging on wide square shoulders without any head above them!

I shuddered involuntarily.

"You and the young lady like music?" the man beside me was saying. "It is romantic. You are engaged maybe? Or honeymooning?" His voice was almost too solicitous.

Between the shrouding fringe of his hat the colored tubelight sheen gleamed on his partly shrouded face. It was pallid, hawk-nosed, with burning dark eyes that still were staring with an almost rude intentness at Dora.

"No," I said. I moved with an impulse to stand up and take Dora to another bench, but the man's hand reached out and touched my arm.

"Just a minute," he said in his limping guttural voice. "My name is Bragg. What is yours?"

"Ralston," I said stiffly. "Thomas Ralston."

I could see that Dora now was staring at that little lurking figure. She, too, sensed that there was something gruesome about it.

The man beside me was speaking more swiftly now in a low furtive flow of mumbled words. "I can interest young lovers like you. I have a place, just for honey-mooners. A little colony of lovers. A place to live, without cost, and no work. You would like it. A very beautiful place."

"We're not married," I said. Was this weird fellow a solicitor for some rich man's altruistic colony? I had heard of such places. In my father's day there was a big one on an island off the Florida coast, and another in the South Seas--colonies where newlyweds went to create an earthly paradise, which, of course, wouldn't work out.

"But you will be married?" the man insisted. "It is a very beautiful place. There is no place like it. I am sure Miss Franklin will--"

I tensed, jumped to my feet, and Dora stood up beside me. Miss Franklin! But I hadn't named her. This fellow knew us then. At our movement, it seemed that the little figure nearby was edging closer. I am a pretty husky, six foot fellow. As I stood up, the man on the bench rose also, with his hand still on my arm. He was about my height. I flung off his light hold.

"Not interested," I said. "Come on, Dora."

We started to go.

Was that damnable, headless little thing about to pounce on me? There were five hundred people here within sound of a shout, but despite it a thrill of fear darted through me. I'm not exactly afraid of anything human; but somehow this seemed different--as though that square, box-like, wide-shouldered little thing were something gruesome--something you couldn't fight with your fists. It was standing sidewise to us now, in a deeper shadow than before and, even more than before, I got the impression that the ominous-looking little figure was headless.

"But won't you at least come and see what I have to show you?" the man at my side was insisting. "It is not very far--"

"Thanks, no." I turned away with an arm around Dora. And suddenly the man was slinking off with the wide-shouldered little thing following after him on stiff little legs. In a moment they were gone.

* * * * *

That was the beginning. The details of me are not important here; I need only say that I was twenty-four that summer. Dora and I were engaged to be married. Both of us were orphans. She was wealthy; I was not, so that I did not want to marry until I had made a success of an invention on which I was working--a ray-weapon with which I hoped, not to make war more deadly, but to make war impossible. It was a non-killing, paralyzing vibration. In theory, if I could project it any great distance--a vibration on speeding form--then with it whole armies would be stricken down, rendered helpless.

But I had not progressed that far as yet. I was living in Dora's home, working in a small laboratory with which it was equipped. Just this week I had completed a miniature projector. With tests upon animals it seemed to be effective at some fifty feet....

Dora's home was some three miles out in the country from the Crossroads Municipal Village where we had gone to hear the music. We took her little air-roller which was parked nearby. We did not fly it for such a short distance, merely rolled it out on the State Road. Dora was frightened, but I tried to shrug away the mysterious incident.

"That--that little thing that stood watching us," she said. "Oh Tom--"

"Looked like a boy with an overcoat over his head," I told her. "Forget it, Dora."

Had she noticed that the man who had accosted us knew her name? She did not mention it, nor did I. We were approaching her home within five minutes. Here, fifty miles north of New York City, there was one of the infrequent patches of lonely country. Her small cement and metal cottage nestled against a wooded hillside. Queer--as we rolled up, the house was in complete darkness. Yet Mrs. Holten, our housekeeper, certainly would not have retired now at ten o'clock.

We stopped at the main entrance and climbed out. "Oh Tom--" Dora murmured. "Something very strange about this--"

She stood clinging to me, with the dark silent house beside us. Overhead the moon was riding a sky of low, swift-flying clouds. The trees around the house stirred with a night breeze, but beyond that it seemed that everything was abnormally silent--a silence hanging menacingly around us.

"Mrs. Holten must have gone to bed," I said. "Come on, let's go in."

But Mrs. Holten wasn't in the house. We called; then lighted all the lights. The place was in perfect order, but the housekeeper was gone.

"Strange," I said. "I suppose something called her away. She should have left us a note."

But what I didn't say was that on the wall of the hall, near the door of the laboratory there were dark marks on the plaster--marks that suggested a burn, as though heat had struck the wall.

"Tom, come here," Dora called from the living room. "What a queer smell!"

I met her frightened gaze; her nostrils were dilating. I could smell it--an acrid, pungent smell.

"_Government Food Depot Raided!_" The crisp low voice here with us in the living room was so unexpected that Dora gave a low scream and clutched me. It was our news-radio which Mrs. Holten had evidently left on; and now a news announcement was being made. "_Allenville, New York. Mysterious raiders broke into the Government Surplus Food Depot, here tonight--probably about 9.50 p.m. Large supplies of sealed cooked food stolen. Four watchmen found dead--others missing._"

Dora and I stood stricken, listening to the newscaster's droning voice. Allenville was the Municipal Housing Village we had just left. The Government Food Storehouses were on its other side half a mile from where we had heard the music.

"... _and the bodies of the watchmen show that they were attacked by some mysterious weapon. There are no wounds. The clothing is charred a little, as though some weird form of heat were applied. Two of the men have burned spots on the forehead--as though some electric charge of a lethal power_--"

The signal lights on top of our instrument showed that another public-news station was signalling it had a visual broadcast of immediate interest. I reached and tuned to it. The televisor glowed. Numbed with startled horror, Dora and I stood staring at the moving image on the televisor grid. It was from a public observor lens mounted on a pole beside one of the roads leading out of Allenville. An alarm signal had been turned in by a traffic director there on a crossing ramp. He had evidently flung on the alarm-light so that all the scene was bathed in its white actinic glare. And the road-side observing lens was bringing it now to us, broadcasting it to every receiving set in the country.

What we saw was the crossing ramp with milling, frightened pedestrians and the traffic in a tangle. Momentarily the people were blinded by the glare and deafened by the shrieking of the alarm-siren. In the background loomed a building which I knew was another of the Government Food Depots. The alarm evidently had originated there.

"Tom--look--that doorway!" Dora murmured.

From one of the dark doorways of the Food Depot a little figure came scurrying out. And then another--and at the foot of the ramp where the crowd was milling, several others suddenly were visible. Figures identical with the one which had watched us by the bench!

"Oh Tom--dear God!"

For a brief instant one of them was bathed in the alarm-light and our image of the turmoil showed it clearly. The shrouding garment was open in front as it faced us. The scurrying little thing was headless! It seemed to have square wide shoulders, straight across from tip to tip--no neck--no head! The glimpse was ended in another second as the thing darted away and was gone in the turmoil.

In our living room, Dora and I stood stricken. And suddenly our room tubelight was extinguished and we were plunged into darkness! There was just the moonlight glow from one of the living room's open windows--a pallid rectangle where now I saw a weird box-like thing lurching as it climbed over the sill!

A little automatic bullet-projector for home emergency use was hanging on a rack beside me. I snatched it. The disintegrating air-charge hurled the bullet with an almost soundless whizz. My aim doubtless was true enough; but from the oncoming little creature a faint violet radiance was streaming out, like an enveloping aura around it, visible now in the darkness. The bullet melted with a soundless little puff of light.

I was aware that Dora was clutching at me, screaming. Then something hit us with a numbing electric shock. I was conscious of nothing save that I was falling; galvanized so that I went down rigid, with a crash. Then there was only Dora's scream of terror, swiftly fading as my senses were flung away.

* * * * *

I came to myself with the sense that a considerable time had passed. I knew that I was thinking. For a while it seemed that there was nothing of me alive, except my mind. I was conscious now that my body was numb; lifeless.

Like catalepsy. It was a consciousness most horrible--dead, yet alive. I struggled to move, but there was nothing that would react. Then very slowly I could feel the sensation of tingling. It seemed to define my body; make me conscious of my legs and arms that were prickling as though with a thousand needles stabbing them. I could feel now that I was lying on something soft. My eyelids fluttered up so that I had the swimming vision of narrow metal walls and a low grid ceiling. The room was faintly luminous with a weird dull radiance.

Then my clearing sight focused on a lens-shaped window. Stars were out there--glittering points of blue-white light in a firmament solid black. The stars were in a slow circular procession of movement so that I knew the room was revolving.

Interplanetary Space. I was in a space-vehicle. I could hear the faint, throbbing humming mechanisms now, and see the endless procession of celestial glory outside my window. Numbly, for how long I do not know, I lay blankly watching it. The space-vehicle obviously had a slow horizontal axial rotation. The glittering distant worlds swung past. And then I saw the Earth! The blazing, flame-enveloped ball of Sun was off to one side, so that it was a great crescent Earth. Much time indeed had passed. Hours; days--a blank to me. The Earth was dull red-yellow. The sunlight gleamed on the mountains at the limb of its crescent; and I could see the mottling of clouds and the configurations of oceans and continents beneath them.

"Maybe you can move now. Your name is Tom Ralston, isn't it? Any chance you can speak--you're coming out all right, damned if you're not. I'd about given you up."

It was a low voice beside me; and suddenly I was aware of a hunched man's form sitting here on the floor. My gaze swung to see him--a slim young fellow in ragged Earth garments of tight black and white striped trousers and white blouse open at the throat. His face was good-looking; slack-jawed, weak face with pale blue eyes. His stubble of beard made his weak chin and thin cheeks bluish. He was smiling.

"All right now, Ralston?"

"Yes, I guess so." I could barely mouth it. My tongue was thick; all my body was a torture now from that prickling. But I could move, and every moment I could feel my strength coming back to me. "Where am I?" I mumbled. "What happened? Who are you?" And then I remembered Dora. "She--Dora Franklin--she was with me. Is she all right?"

"Oh sure. If you could call being on this damned ship anything to be pleased about. The woman Setta is taking care of her. The damned little Physical hit her and you both with its shock, but you got much the worst. Dora's all right, now."

I lay, with my strength coming back, listening in mute wonderment to the weird things he was telling me. His name was Johnny Blair. A year ago, in New York City, he had just been married. He and his young wife had been approached by that same weird man who had accosted Dora and me. They had yielded to his lure of a honeymoon paradise; had gone with him. The man's name was Bragg--an escaped Earth criminal, member of a band of fifty who in a wholesale jailbreak five years ago had gotten loose, stolen a space-vehicle and left Earth. Roaming in Space, they had landed on a little planetoid, a member of our Solar System, which encircles the Sun in an orbit outside the orbit of Earth; between the Earth and Mars.

"We're almost there now," young Blair was saying. He had lowered his voice so that now he was furtive, fearing that what he was telling me might be overheard by someone outside our cubby. "Pretty weird new world we're headed for, Ralston," he commented grimly. He jerked his thumb toward the lens-shaped pressure window. "If you're strong enough to take a look, you'll see it right under us. We're dropping down into its stratosphere now."

With his arm supporting me, weakly I staggered to the window. Blair was explaining that our tiny cubby was on the outer rim of the flat, disc-shaped vehicle. Its rocket-streams gave it a slow horizontal rotation, and its gravity plates, set now into repulsion, were slowly dropping it downward.

Through the window I stared down. The little planetoid, some six hundred miles in diameter but with an immense density since it was almost solid metal, lay spread close beneath us. A weird world indeed; a great spread of convex surface of barren, tumbled rocks and mountains in great serrated tiers. The sunlight gleamed with a dazzling sheen on the burnished heights. Then we passed into the shadow of night.

* * * * *

I gazed, wordless. It was a fearsome, barren waste of blue-white metal rocks, fused and pitted as though the little world had been born in a fiery convulsion; a tumbled, strewn land of crags and boulders with ragged gashes of canyons in which now the shadows were black, impenetrable. And over it all there was a lurid green-red glow. It seemed inherent to the air; and it streamed up like a radioactive aura from the rocks of the ground.

"The whole planetoid is like that?" I murmured. "Surely that's not habitable?"

Johnny Blair rubbed his bluish stubble of beard. "Well, there's water--it rains sometimes. Maybe there's soil where things would grow, but I've never seen any. There's quite a colony of us humans here now. We've been stealing our food--"

So that explained the raids on the Government Food Depots! A band of fifty escaped criminals, fugitives from Earth, originally had come here. Their leader was one Torkine; the pallid fellow Bragg was his lieutenant. And now, raiding Earth of food and supplies, married couples were being brought--and young men and young girls, to be married on the planetoid. A new world.

"We've brought some young people from Mars also," Johnny Blair was explaining. "Been there three times, and once to Venus. Quite a lot of humans here now--four hundred maybe."

To colonize an uninhabitable world. I said something like that and Johnny stared at me mutely. "It was inhabited," he said grimly. He seemed to shudder. "A world with just one inhabitant. It--it's a ghastly thing. It's got us all as its prisoners now. The Supreme One--that's what it calls itself. God, when you see it--"

What weird horrible thing was this? I could only return his stare. A barren little planetoid, with just one inhabitant. Something not human.

"But," I stammered, "when Bragg accosted us, there was a little headless thing in an overcoat standing near him. And we saw several of them coming out of the Food Depots."

Johnny's smile was grim. "We call those the Physicals. They're parts of the Supreme One--like his arms and legs, only they're detached."

"Part of him? His arms and legs? I don't get you."

"No? Well, my God, you'll see." Johnny's gesture seemed trying to express his hopelessness at explaining. "You'll see him--the main central part of him, I mean, that never leaves his house. He's a Being, not all in one piece, like us humans. His housed main body can't move. You understand? He's rooted to the ground. The rest of him is detached and he works it by remote control. There must be thousands of those little Physicals--some in one shape, some in others. But mostly they're like the ones you saw."

A new form of life. A Thing, an Individual--the sole occupant of its world. My mind tried to encompass it. On Earth, every living creature at least seems to be, as Johnny expressed it, all in one piece. But why should that be exclusively necessary throughout the Universe? Here, on this little remote planetoid, was one of God's creations that was made wholly different.

Johnny's voice went lower. "He--It--the Supreme One--it's got us all trapped. It's delighted--having something besides parts of itself to rule. You see? that's why it's been sending its parts--like its arms and legs--to make Bragg and the others lure young men and girls. To establish a human world, and the Supreme One will rule it."

I understood it better now. That headless little thing in the overcoat had been watching Bragg--a moving part of the Supreme One, making Bragg do its bidding. And now Johnny was explaining that as though it were a giant electric eel, the headless Physical could emit from its own body a weird electronic discharge. That was what had shocked me into catalepsy. And it had thrown a barrage about itself, so that my bullet had been futile to hit it.

"These Physicals," I was murmuring. "Can they hear you when you speak? Can they talk?"

He nodded. "Yes. Subsidiary organs that operate for themselves when the main body is too remote." Again he shrugged hopelessly. "I guess we humans aren't capable of fully understanding--"

* * * * *

He checked himself suddenly. He and I were still standing by the little bull's-eye window. Behind us I heard a click. A doorslide to our cubby opened. I sucked in my breath with a gasp. One of the Physicals stood there. A little square, box-like thing mounted on two jointed legs, with flexible hinged feet, long and pointed. The light from an outside corridor was behind it, so that I could at first only see its outline in silhouette. As it stood, it seemed to click and a third leg came sliding down to support it like a tripod. Its arms, three on each side of its box-body, were waving like little tentacles. Ghastly little living thing. Its box-body was some two feet wide by three feet long, with perhaps a foot of thickness. The light gleamed on its top edge; the foot-thick surface there was level, smooth and shining, with rounded ends gruesomely to suggest a travesty of human shoulders.

And then it spoke--a low, hollow, tonelessly mechanical voice. "You have recovered? You are the human called Tom Ralston?"

English! Queerly intoned, but correct. Johnny nudged me. "Yes," I said. "That's who I am."

Its third leg slid up again into its body; and with padding little steps it came forward. I could see it better now. Was it clothed? Was it living tissue, or wholly metal? For a moment there seemed no answers. Then I realized that there was no detachable clothing. A body of animal tissue, or mineral? Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. A substance different. But I could see that parts of it were rigid, and parts of it quivering. Down the front of its square little body rows of knobs protruded; and as I stared, one of them shifted aside and a little knife-like finger came out on a tentacle arm and waved at me. Then I saw what might have been called its face--a mobile, flexible-looking circular area in the front center of its body. A hole there seemed to glow as though an eye were in it. A round orifice from which the voice issued was on one side of it; and on the other, a hole that could have been an ear. And over them there was a crescent-shaped little area which was greenly luminous--the little brain in there, visibly palpitating.

"I told Torkine," the Physical said, "that he might see you when you recovered. Blair will bring you now." Its feet turned. With little precision steps it marched out and vanished in the dim corridor.

I stared at Johnny, and now suddenly he gripped me. "We'll have to go," he murmured swiftly. "Listen, we'll be landing in an hour or two--this may be the last chance I have to talk to you alone. I been tryin' to get away from this accursed thing for six months now. Escape--I want to get back to Earth."

"And you couldn't?"