He took a long look at the sunshine, then turned and signaled to the guard. The motor droned and the wall slid slowly back into place. With tired, heavy steps he walked into the elevator. As it started down, he leaned against the inside wall and closed his eyes.
Field Marshal Torkel Jatz stretched out on the hard cot in his headquarters and frowned up at the ceiling. He knew that he was in no physical danger, and yet he was oddly uncomfortable. His headquarters were two thousand feet below the surface of Manhattan Island. Above him were the shattered buildings, the lethal radioactivity that had resulted from the underwater explosions which had hoisted countless millions of tons of radioactive sea water high in the air, the in-shore wind carrying them across the shattered buildings and empty streets.
The entrance to his headquarters was through an amazingly long lateral tunnel which connected with a winding shaft, the opening of which was beyond the boundaries of dangerous radioactivity.
He thought of the biting sarcasm of the last orders he had received from his home country. Yes, they were growing tired of the holding war, tired of the ceaseless drain on resources and manpower.
Ah, but they did not understand these people. Yes, the invasion had been successful, and the beachhead, in the first weeks of surprise, had grown enormously. But these people fought for their home soil, prodigious in their courage, reckless in their hate.
They could not understand it at home, but all he could do was to cling tenaciously to his perimeter defences and continually request new and better weapons which would once more give him the edge, make a further advance possible.
He snorted. They were politicians who continually nibbled at him. Jatz had no interest in politicians. He was a soldier, a lean, hard, tough man in his middle forties, a man who, if necessary, could go out into the filth and mud of the lines and carry the burden of a combat soldier. A man who could handle any command in his forces, from platoon leader to Field Marshal.
Why did they keep sniping at him? Was Rinelli doing any better in Brazil? Was Sigitz performing any miracles along the Salween?
If only he could have the pleasure of the company of a few of those bureaucrats for several weeks. He’d take them out and give them a look at the vicious night-patrol warfare, let them hear the dread siren scream of the Galton guns, let them see a soldier struck by one of those tiny slugs, the instant convulsive death.
What they couldn’t understand was that there were no targets for the rockets, no concentrations of production facilities. And the use of spies was technologically obsolete. Each man in the defending forces, before being given knowledge of any installation, was tested with the serums.
He remembered the attack that had split the beachhead into two parts, and had almost succeeded. Another such attack would be due before long. He hammered his fist against the stone wall, cursing the scientists of his country.
After being spurred on to peak activity, it was the defenders who, after all, had developed a new weapon. He didn’t know very much about it yet. Just one report of it.
An aerial photograph had given the rocket command a faint target, a traffic pattern in the hills of the Chemung Valley, and what looked like a cave entrance.
Ten huge rockets had been launched simultaneously, with the idea that possibly one or two would get through. The observers had reported that the entire flight of rockets had been destroyed at the highest point of their arc. No interceptor rockets had gone up. Of that the observers were certain. Their report said that it was as though all ten rockets had hit some solid object towering high above the earth.
His aide walked briskly in, saluted, his hand slapping the side of his thigh as he brought his arm down smartly.
“Sir, the robot gun carrier that was captured in the northern sector is ready for inspection.”
Jatz stood up wearily, and he knew that in his heart he was afraid. Robot gun carriers, ray screens, rockets detonating harmlessly miles above the earth. How soon would they be driven back into the sea?
Chapter Three
The Beast
Martin Rhode had learned many new and intricate convolutions of the emotion commonly known as fear. There was, of course, a feeling of horror, primitive, superstitious awe at seeing anything so completely alien. But had gradually diminished in intensity.
The fear that didn’t diminish was the acute physical fear of the sweating and the pain. He had walked a little way along the floor of the raw tunnel, the loop of cable behind him. Then he had seen movement. He had tried to tell of seeing the movement, and suddenly he could not move. The sweat boiled out of his body and he had stood, his underlip sagging away from his teeth, unable to change even the focus or direction of his glance.
The pain was in his ears and his head. Because it seemed to be focused in his ears, he thought of hypersonics.
He could see slow, fumbling movements in the distance, faintly lighted by a glow that seemed to come from a huge metallic thing that filled the tunnel from wall to wall.
He could not move, and the fumbling thing had come toward him, and it was like a nightmare of childhood, himself unable to turn, unable to escape. It was a large thing, greyish white, moving along the dirt floor of the tunnel.
Because his eyes were still focused on the distant place, he could not look at it.
Greyish white, moving along the dirt floor.
It was as though mental fingers fumbled at his mind. It was as though a stranger were fitting an unfamiliar key to an unknown door in a strange house in a foreign city...
Thoughts, unexpressed in words. Thoughts to which he had to fit the words.
The thought of heaviness, and intense cold. He could not move. Slowly the odd pressure on him diminished, and with a great effort he turned his glance downward.
His eyes had become used to the faint glow. The thing on the floor was a vast, pulpy, obscene caricature of a man. Naked and grey. Eyes with faceted prisms protruding from the face, a tiny furred orifice below the eyes, and a wide lemon-yellow gash that was a mouth. Ten feet tall if standing, he guessed. The arms were oddly jointed and there was something horribly wrong about the hands and fingers, the fingers curling to the outside of where the wrists should be, rather than in toward the body.
Something else horribly wrong. The suety grey fat of the body was dragged down toward the floor of the cave, and the creature moved with great difficult as though it were being subjected to a centrifuge. He comprehended that this was an alien, a creature from space, and that it was accustomed to far lesser gravity.
The mental fingers moved in his brain with more certainty. The thoughts said, “You are a primitive creature. Where are your masters?”
He found his lips could move. “There are no masters,” he said, startled by the sound of his voice in the silence. He tried to lift the microphone to his lips but he could not move it.
“You are the apex of life on this planet,” the thoughts said.
And he was ashamed, somehow. Humbled. As though contempt had somehow been put in his mind. It was primitive and absurd to have made sounds with his lips.
The creature seemed to be contemplating him. Suddenly the mike slipped, fell to the short length of flexible cord, banged against his thigh. Woodenly his hands unbuckled the straps and the equipment fell to the crushed rock floor.
With even regular steps he walked toward the big shining ship from space. As he walked he marveled that one part of his mind could accept orders and issue the neural instructions to the necessary parts of his body without his being aware of the action until it was under way. For the first time he began to wonder if actually the walls of the deep hole had fallen in on him without warning, and this was one of the early dreams in death.