Part 2

"Good God, no. Wait 'til you understand the--the monster better. It's got all us humans trapped. Helpless. Sometimes it treats us kindly--it's got its own ideas about building up a world of humans, for it to rule. But when you make it mad, the wrath of the monster is horrible!"

His words were making me shudder. "You have a wife," I murmured. "Where is she?"

"She's dead," he said. His voice went drab. "Eight months ago, by Earth-time, I guess it was. She--she displeased the Supreme One, and so it killed her. Four of the Physicals just--just grabbed her arms and legs and they pulled until she--she came apart!"

His voice trailed away. I could only stand with my hand on his shoulder, staring mutely at him as I shuddered. Then he was leading me along the corridor which ran like the spoke of a wheel toward the center of the disc-shaped vehicle.

"What I was saying," he went on in his swift murmur. "Torkine and those fifty men of his convict band--I wouldn't trust a damn one of them. The monster likes Torkine, so he's the boss of us humans. But Torkine is planning something murderous. I've been sure of that for quite a while. And this fellow Bragg is married to a girl we got from Mars. Her name's Setta. She's all right."

His voice sank even lower as he stopped in the corridor and gripped me. "Listen, I've seen your girl Dora--Setta's been taking care of her. I hope the Supreme One decides to marry you to her. But I wouldn't count on it. I've seen Torkine and Bragg both lookin' at her pretty queer. She's a damn sweet-lookin' girl."

My heart was pounding. "Johnny, look here; you say you want to escape, get back to Earth?"

"That's what I was tellin' you. Or to Mars--that would be all right. Setta and I are planning it. Can't tell you now. She loves Bragg, and wants to get him out of here. Bragg has been punished by the monster."

"Johnny, listen. When we get to the planetoid, I want to be in with you--Dora and I."

"Yes. That's what I guessed. Suits me fine. But I'm tellin' you--don't you trust a damn soul!"

* * * * *

The weird passions of humans. Here on this little space-vehicle we all were captives of the Supreme One. And yet, wherever there are humans, smoldering strife will exist. The criminal Torkine and his fifty men--what murderous action were they planning? We passed one of them in the corridor; a big, beetle-browed fellow in trousers and shirt. He stood with his hands on his hips, staring after us with a grinning leer. But he moved quickly enough when a little Physical came marching up with its hurried, jerky little steps and ordered him away.

At the entrance to the small control tower which projected up like the hub of a wheel from the center of the disc-vehicle, Bragg was standing.

"So they got you and your girl?" he murmured.

"Yes," I agreed.

I stared at the woman who was beside him. Setta, his wife, the girl from Mars. She was a small, brown-skinned girl of perhaps twenty. An odd face with slanted eyes, narrow nose and queerly pointed chin. Long sleek black hair framed her face, fell over her brown, sleek bare shoulders and crossed her full breasts to make a sort of bodice. From her waist a fringed brown skirt hung to her bare ankles.

Strange-looking young woman of another world from mine. But as she smiled at me, revealing even white teeth, I felt her charm, and almost at once my sense of her strangeness was gone. At least we were both humans, a man and a woman, with so vast a gulf between us and the gruesome little Physicals.

"I have tried to be good to your woman Dora," Setta said as I passed her.

"Yes, thank you," I responded.

The Control Turret was pallid with overhead starlight. Its big circular glassite windows showed me the spread of the planetoid's barren surface underneath us. We had dropped down through cloud layers now. The wild naked wastes of the little world's surface were no more than ten thousand feet down. Still there seemed nothing but barren metal rocks; no sign of life human or otherwise.

"So you did not die, Tom Ralston. Welcome to our little colony!"

Torkine's ironic voice greeted me. He was seated at the control table where the intricate dials, levers and vacuums of the disc's mechanisms were ranged. He stood up as I entered. And beside him I saw Dora. She was still clad in her Earth garments, and her long pale-blonde hair was braided and coiled on her head. I have not spoken of Dora's beauty. Loving her, my own opinion of it possibly was exaggerated; and yet I have never known a man, or a woman either, who differed greatly from me in praising it--a delicate, ethereal beauty.

She gave a little cry as she saw me, half started to her feet, and then sank back on the bench beside Torkine. Her face was pallid, but she was trying to smile at me.

"Welcome," Torkine said again. "Come sit here with us, Ralston, and I'll show you our new world. You see he did not die, little Dora?"

I saw Torkine now as a huge burly giant; six feet four at least. A swaggering, handsome fellow, this escaped convict. In age he could have been thirty odd. He was grinning at me ironically as he shoved a metal chair toward me.

"The Supreme One will be glad to have you," he added. "You and Dora Franklin. Especially Dora. We need Earth beauty in our motley little colony of humans. The Supreme One spoke to me of that--there will be several marriages soon after we arrive tonight. The Great Master is deciding now which men and which women of our humans shall be mated."

Omnipotence. Torkine's irony was gone now; he spoke casually, as though stating a casual fact. Humans here, who before the power of the Supreme One were no longer individuals to have a will and emotions of their own. Everything to be decided for us.

But I saw the pallid hawk-nosed Bragg staring at Dora with a look that made my heart pound. And Torkine himself dropped back on the bench and murmured:

"Do not be surprised little Dora, if the Master decides not to give you to this fellow Ralston--"

He leered at me, and his arms went around Dora, drawing her to him. She gave a little cry of terror and repugnance. It was too much for me. I jumped up.

"Stop that!" I rasped. "You Torkine--take your hands off her!"

He turned his head, grinning at me, but he did not move. I would have been upon him in another second. Behind me I heard Johnny Blair give a cry to try and stop me. In the shadows of one of the circular walls, half a dozen of the little box-like Physicals, all identical, were ranged motionless in a line. They were muttering now--weird mutterings that popped from them like tiny explosions. And abruptly acting in unison, they came pouncing at me!

* * * * *

"Ralston, stand still!" Blair shouted. "Your only chance--stand still!"

I checked my advance and tried to get my wits; to master the frenzy that was upon me. It was a moment of horrible chaos; I knew that my life or death in that second hung in the balance. With hands at my sides I stood irresolute as the weird little creatures spread out and surrounded me. Little creatures? Still my brain would barely encompass the amazing fact that these were not individual little beings but merely the detached parts of one great Individual--one almost Omniscient Mentality. As though they were just arms and legs with a remote giant central Being to guide them in what they were doing now.

As I stood panting, waiting, with my heart pounding, for an instant it seemed that I would be seized, with the tentacle arms of the box-like little things pulling at me, like poor Blair's young wife, with arms and legs pulled until she came apart....

It was a breathless, horrible moment of suspense. All the humans here in the pallid turret stood breathlessly silent, tense, as helplessly we waited to see what the Supreme One would decide to do. By what weird method of nature were swift communications passing between these little things and their main Being so distant? Our human mind doubtless will never yield an answer to that. Yet perhaps it was no different in its essence from the swift orders which our own brain gives to our distant hands and feet. Ours is a transmission through nerves; this other a transmission through the ether. Each of these little parts had its subsidiary eye, to see these local happenings; a little subsidiary brain to record them, to amplify them with reasoning and to fling the result out to the Supreme One for decision.

Thoughts themselves are instant things. I stood with a flood of such thoughts as the Physicals surged at me. Their little eyes, in the middle of each box-like body, were balefully glaring. A few of the tentacles gripped me. The touch was cold, slimy, yet from it I could feel a current tingling, like a mild electric shock.

Then the gripping fingers in unison relaxed. One of the little hollow voices muttered:

"Tom Ralston, I will punish you later."

As though suddenly the incident were closed, in unison all the Physicals turned, and with their hurried little precision steps marched back to the wall where they lined themselves up, motionless, silent, with only their eyes alert.

And from the bench where still his arm encircled the shuddering Dora, the giant Torkine was grinning at me with a leer of triumph.

The huge disc which was the spaceship dropped lower into the dark night of the weird little planetoid. For a brief time I sat at one of the control turret windows, staring down over the rim of the disc at the barren, tumbled surface. We were slowly sailing now hardly a thousand feet above it. Still there was nothing apparent down there save naked crags. But I knew we were nearing our destination. In the dim little corridors which spread out like spokes here from this hub of the disc, distant sounds of activity were audible. A dozen or more of Torkine's men were on board, watched and herded by a score of the little Physicals. This raid on Earth had produced quantities of food which the humans needed to sustain them on the planetoid. There was alcoholite also. I could see that many of Torkine's villainous-looking men were imbibing it. Their faces were flushed; some of them were murmuring to each other, with leering, appraising looks at Dora.

And this raid had produced a few more Earth captives. Young men and girls who were confined in the little cubbies along one of the corridors. Their frightened voices were audible now as the Physicals herded them with preparations to disembark.

"The planetoid world," Dora abruptly whispered. "Look--there is the city."

Torkine momentarily had moved away, and Dora had shifted to sit beside me. Together we gazed down. The ragged mountainous horizon of the sharply convex surface of the little world seemed only a few miles away. And as the disc, dropping still lower, sailed forward, a human settlement came suddenly into view. I had only a brief glimpse of it. At first it was a group of light-dots. Then the colored glow from them disclosed little groups of dwellings. The lights came from their windows, and other glowing tubelights were set on poles in the spaces, like irregular streets between the houses.

It was a weird, motley little settlement. Small, crude, single story dwellings, evidently erected from materials and parts of other houses filched from Earth on previous raids. A hundred little habitations, set in a group.

* * * * *

Torkine was beside Dora and me now. "Very nice, isn't it?" he said with his ironic smile. "That is for our Earth-people. With nothing here on this planetoid, we have had to do the best we could by bringing everything from Earth. And there to the left is the Martian village. And to the right, our Venus people live."

The two other little house-groups stood a few hundred yards further away, with the weird night-shadows enveloping them. A score perhaps of strangely-fashioned habitations in each of them. A few dozen Martians, living here, captives of this monstrous Thing that ruled here. The spindly, fragile-looking Martian village was almost wholly dark. The Venus group was blue with flickering torchlight which disclosed little mound-shaped houses of wood and stone.

"The nucleus of a new civilization," Torkine was saying. "The Supreme One is proud of it. Earth, Mars and Venus will be blended here in the new race we will produce. And the Great Master will rule and guide us. He chooses our mates. He directs our lives--he even thinks and acts for us, because, you see, we humans are very inferior."

The irony of Torkine's voice made me turn and stare at him. He was grinning at me. But in his dark, deep-set eyes there was something else that smoldered with the glinting reflection of his own thoughts.

"I see," I murmured.

"Well, you don't," he retorted. "But you soon will. There, to one side--that round thing is where the Supreme One houses himself. See it?"

Figures were visible down in the village now as men and women gathered in the doorways and in the spaces between the houses. They were all staring up at our arriving disc. And everywhere I could see the box-like little Physicals. Some stood like sentries at the street corners. Others were marching with their little precision steps back and forth. My gaze followed Torkine's gesture. To one side, partly between the Earth and the Martian sections of the weird village, a flat cauldron depression of the rocks seemed to have a big circular cover over it. It was a bulging dome-like roof perhaps a hundred feet in diameter.

The house of the Monster. The one thing which was native here. The dome-like roof, of some material which to me was nameless, indescribable, glowed with a weird violent sheen. Its circular outer rim was some ten feet above the ground--ten feet of entrance space. But the violet sheen down there was like a barrage-wall, with slits in it like doorways. Groups of Physicals were standing there on guard.

Our space-disc was settling to a level, rocky, open area just beyond the glow of the village lights. The Physicals here in the turret herded Dora and me away. Torkine, with one of the weird little shapes on each side of him, grimly, silently watching him, was at the bank of controls, landing us.

Dora and I had no chance to see young Johnny Blair again. Nor the Martian woman, Setta. At one of the rim pressure-exits, three of the Physicals stood waiting with us. Then we felt the big disc settle with a bump to the ground. The exit door slid open and our captors pushed us out.

The new world. Its strangely heavy air choked me a little at first, and made my head reel. I could feel that the gravity was less than Earth, but not much so because of the immense density of the planet. A babble of muffled sound was audible as human voices greeted us. In the weird darkness of dim tubelights, a fringe of staring captive humans showed on the rocks nearby. But Physicals like little policemen paced in front of them, keeping them away.

Along a descending rocky path Dora and I were shoved until in a moment the violet sheen of the barrage at the house of the Monster loomed ahead. Then we went through one of the slit openings under the dome-like roof. And presently we stopped at a luminous waist-high railing; and in a lurid violet-yellow glow, we stared down at the giant thing which was spread here before us!

* * * * *

The circular area inside here seemed about fifty feet in diameter and was depressed ten feet below us. A violet-yellow luminescence suffused it so that for a moment it was a blur. Then gradually it clarified and we saw the Supreme One! Its flat, intricate body was a quivering, palpitating, luminous mass of tissue spread in a great fifty foot circle. A Thing fifty feet in diameter, and perhaps three feet thick. For a moment I thought that it was lying flat on the rocks. Then I saw that it was suspended a foot or two in the air with a violet curtain or radiance connecting it to the solidity of the ground.

A rooted monster! Incapable of locomotion it spread here, with radiance like roots, through which doubtless it was drawing from the ground its sustenance, its life. Electric sustenance, of course. Weird life-force, animating its nerve-ganglia, replenishing its living tissue. Intricate electronic streams of nourishment which in a human body are blood-streams. A life-force of indescribable chemistry, drawn through its electronic roots from the planet itself.

An amazing Being. Glowing, multiple brain-lobes were like a score of transparent heads with luminous threads of what could have been nerve tissue connecting them; an intricate network of ganglia in a tangle everywhere through the palpitating body-tissue. Other organs, indescribable, unnamable, were crimson and violet glowing blobs. I could see the streams of nourishment swiftly circulating from one to the other--huge transparent arteries of fluorescence, threading out into veins and tiny capillaries. And in the center of the body-mass, a giant eye on a flexible stem, huge organ of sight with spectral colors darting like fire within it, was glaring at us.

All that I saw with my first swift awed gaze. Then other details were apparent. A dozen globes of what could have been transparent muscle were rhythmically palpitating, like huge hearts pumping the strange current through this Thing to keep it alive. And then I saw that under the central giant eye there was the orifice for a voice and another for hearing.

An awesome rooted monster. The only living thing on its barren little world until the humans came, a pseudo-solidity of roof and walls; a radiance which streamed from the monster itself. And now in the lurid dimness I could see faint streams like the threads of an aura emanating from the different sections of the monster. Little cables of vibrations, infinitely long, perhaps as unsubstantial as a human thought. In the darkness here beside Dora and me, a dozen of the little Physicals were ranged. Parts of the monster. I saw it now--saw those evanescent threadlike streams from the circle of quivering tissue--each thread ending in one of the Physicals. The pathways of transmission for orders from the central Being to its seemingly detached physical parts.

Thoughts are so swift! I suppose Dora and I stood there gazing for no more than a minute. The monster for that minute was silent; the round central eye, as big as my head, gazed with appraisement. I heard Dora suck in her breath with terror as she mutely stared. Both of us, clutching at each other. And a weird feeling swept me. It was as though I was gazing at a living thing of vast immensity. The power of thought here, immense, vast and unfathomable to me who was just a human. It gave me a feeling of my own futility, so that in the presence of this Being I stood cringing. Unutterably helpless; small, and terrified.

And then the Supreme One spoke:

"You have been causing me trouble, Tom Ralston. I should have destroyed you, there on the spaceship."

It was a soft, measured, toneless voice, issuing perhaps from near the giant eye. Yet it had a faraway sound as though blended and muffled by distance. And now I could see that one of the brain-lobes near us had been stimulated into action greater than the others. The luminous aura from it had intensified. Beneath its membrane tissue, like a million luminous little snakes writhing one upon the other, the brain-folds were in motion. This, then, was the brain-lobe concerned with us now; the lobe from which the thing had learned English; had learned indeed, that there were other living things in the Universe besides Itself.

"Speak, human!" the monster said suddenly.

"Yes," I stammered. "Should have--killed me--yes."

"But I have not many humans here. Perhaps I shall kill you. Perhaps I shall marry you to this human you call Dora. I have not yet decided."

* * * * *

I had thought that Dora and I were standing by a railing. But like the rest of this dwelling it was a barrage barrier. I could see its outlines quivering in front of me; feel its repellent force so that if I had taken a step forward it would shove me back.

Beside Dora and me now, Torkine had appeared. He stood gazing down at Dora. His face, with the lurid glow on it, was grinning. And suddenly the Supreme One said:

"You, Torkine, you tell me you knew this girl many of your years ago?"

"Yes, Master. Oh, yes." Torkine said ingratiatingly.

Knew Dora years ago? That was news to me.

"I shall think of it," the monster said. "There are several marriages for me to perform presently in your Earth, and Mars and Venus fashions. I need more humans here. You, Tom Ralston--have they told you my purpose?"

"No," I said.

"We shall have a human world here for me to rule. A little world of blended Mars and Venus and Earth. And then we will spread. The parts of Me will go abroad to this great planet and that one, conquering! Conquering everything, until at last I shall master the entire Universe!"

Torkine was chuckling. I stood gripping Dora and my thoughts swung to young Johnny Blair. He had some plan with the woman Setta to escape from here. To me now it seemed a thing utterly hopeless.

And suddenly I shuddered, with a new stab of terror. Could this monstrous Being read our human thoughts? Apparently not, for its voice said sharply:

"For why do you chuckle, Torkine?"

"I was thinking of that fellow Bragg," Torkine responded, "who did his work so badly on this last voyage to Earth. We brought only fifteen more humans, Master."

"I am bringing Bragg here to see me and talk to him more closely," the monster said. "You, Tom Ralston, and you, Dora Franklin--that is all I wish of you now. You will learn my decision soon."

Threadlike streams from one of the brain-lobes of the monster were swaying past me; and as I turned, I saw a dozen little Physicals attached to the faintly luminous threads--Physicals who came marching in with Bragg among them--Bragg, more pallid than ever with his hawk-face contorted by terror. Torkine stood aside, still chuckling. Then Physicals were surrounding Dora and me, herding us away. We stumbled back through the luminous darkness; along a little path. It was no more than a hundred feet until the outlines of a small house--loomed before us. A voice from one of the Physicals said:

"You go inside and wait for my decision." A miniature of the monster's central voice. I realized now that all the Physicals spoke with the same voice, in miniature.

"All right," I said. "You'll have no trouble with us, Master."

The dim room was crudely furnished with Earth furniture. I sat the trembling Dora on a couch; dropped beside her with my arm around her.

"Weird, Dora." I whispered it. "But don't be too frightened. We'll find a way out of this."

In the shadows two figures suddenly were moving! Then I saw that they were the Martian woman, Setta, and young Johnny Blair. They came forward.

"The Physicals all went outside?" Johnny murmured.

"Yes," I agreed. "Good Lord, that weird monster--can it hear us, if we whisper like this?"

"No. Safe enough, in here now."

* * * * *

The room had the door through which we had entered, and two windows. Both were open. In the glowing dimness outside we could see other Physicals ranged in a line, watching us.

"The house is surrounded," Johnny whispered. "No way of getting out--any break would be instant death. But a little later, when they're getting ready for the marriages there's just a desperate chance. There's generally a hundred Physicals guarding the spaceship, but not so many tonight, if they are needed other places. Did he take Bragg in there?"

"Yes," I agreed. "Bragg looked pretty frightened. Good Lord, if that damned monster ever gets really angry--"