“Not men,” he said aloud.
“What?” they all said, almost together.
“I’ll wager that it wasn’t men. Not men as we know them.”
“Talk sense,” Coro said. “You’re worse than Crazy.”
Sam strained at his seat belt. “These… killers are from another galaxy, not this one. They might not be men at all.” His mind ran backward to the time in the ship when he still had only a first name and Gnossos had proposed the idea that he was being controlled by extra-galactic forces. Gnossos had been wrong then. But now the theory seemed to fit. He could think of no contradiction with what evidence they now had. Was he just as wrong as Gnossos? “It sounds crazy,” he said, trying to say it all aloud and give it more validity than it now had in the tenuous thought-concepts of his mind. “But think about it. First of all, we do not have men in this galaxy who could perpetrate such violence. Secondly, there is absolutely no way, even if an army of these men existed, that they could secure the weapons to level a city to ashes. They have to be from Outside.”
The others regarded him, trying to find some chink in the reasoning. Crazy spoke first: “But wouldn’t the God who gave us aggression give it to all intelligent species in the universe? I was under the impression that men were actually basically good and sensible and that their bad qualities came from God’s schizoid personality. Now wouldn’t this God from the higher universe control this entire universe?”
Sam started to answer, closed his mouth when he couldn’t think of anything to say. His reasoning seemed sound. When Hurkos had killed the pink grub, the holy worm, then all intelligent species in this universe should have benefited from it. Perhaps God had controlled only part of the universe and… But, no. He had been the entire higher dimension. There had been no other gods with him. That was a fact. Breadloaf’s scientists said it was a fact, and they were hard boys to find fault with. Accordingly, these extra-galactics should not be able to kill, void of blood lust.
But below, a city lay in ruin, concealing two million bodies.
“It must have been fast,” Coro said. “There don’t seem to be any survivors.”
“Let’s take a look at Chaplin-Beta,” Lotus suggested.
“It’ll be the same.” Coro began bringing the floater around in a one hundred and eighty degree turn.
Lotus folded her wings around her pert breasts, hiding her arms and shoulders in a shell of velvet membrane. “Let’s look anyway.”
Coro completed the turn, and all four of them gasped at once when they saw it: a mountain in flight. Rather, a plateau. It was a flat slab of a ship, miles across. The floater was a small pebble beside it, an infinitesimal grain of sand.
“What—” Coro started.
The vast ship was over three thousand feet high, and that was but a fraction of its length and equal to its breadth. It seemed to be a solid piece with no seams and no windows to break its perfect sheen. It appeared to be powered by some magnetic system, as the ground beneath it reverberated in answer to the silent call of its star-shattering engines. The only scars on the great bulk were three rows of tiny holes (tiny from where they sat, but very likely feet across when viewed closely), five hundred holes per row. From the center of the middle row of holes there was a puff of white, and a silver missile like the one that had downed their last ship came spinning lazily toward them.
“Dive!” Sam shouted.
Coro hit the controls, pushing the floater down under the missile.
The projectile whirred past, thrumming like a torpedo. Arcing delicately, it turned back on them, correcting its course.
“It’s self-propelled!” Coro gasped between his teeth like gas escaping from a split pipe. “And has its own radar!”
VI
In the shells of corridors and maze rooms directly out from the Ship’s Core, the mother-slugs were writhing in the throes of racial creation. Their great soft bodies bulged with the fat of readiness, their saucer-sized cataracted eyes glazed with the ecstasy of their purpose. Above and around them, the thin-shelled nodules of male sperm cells hung suspended in the web matter of the new nests, ripe and thick, waiting dumbly for contact with the reproductive segments of the huge mother-body worms. As if in unanimous accord, the hundreds of giant females began bumping and twisting more violently, writhing madly as their brains dissolved under the enzyme-hormones of sexual stimulation. The brain tissue bubbled and frothed, sizzling without heat, dissolving to form a nutrient atmosphere within the reproductive segment conducive to the fertilization of the male cell and the growth of the eggs into young. The intelligence and memory centers were the first to crumble so that there was no long and painful realization of what was happening to them. The end would be a form of glorious, prolonged orgasm for the mother-bodies.
Squirming and flopping heavily in fierce delight, they reared up, smashing the dangling sperm nodules planted there by mates they would never see, and bathed themselves in the soul fire of the male contribution. The raw, skinless, center segments each sported a brown nucleus throbbing on the surface in a primitive one-two, one-two rhythm. The center segments accepted the male fluid, shivered uncontrollably as it seeped sweetly onto the brown nucleus. The air was sweet and sickly, the web matter wet and heavy with the contents of the burst nodules. On hundreds of mother-bodies, the nuclei, permeated with sperm, began a slow but apparent sinking toward the center of the reproductive segment, there to lodge in the warmth of the rich protein bath that had once been a brain.
The mother-bodies curled and shook.
All segments, save the reproductive central ones, died and began the process of rotting.
A new generation was formed, now only zygotes. Someday, full-grown slugs.
From insanity, comes life…
In the war control room, furthest out from Ship’s Core, the slug crewmen prepared various battle programs to initiate against the spherical enemy who had suddenly disappeared from the radar screens though no missile hit had been made. This meant the enemy understood and employed anti-radar techniques. This made it more difficult than had been expected. They buzzed and they chattered, formulating death.
And in the Ship’s Core, the Central Being was, for the moment, unconcerned with the battle against the floating ball and the four humans; unconcerned, also and equally, with the mother-bodies and the cycle of reproduction, since both of these things were so natural, so a part of the general plan. But if truth be known and infinitesimal differences measured, it could be found that the Central Being held a greater deal of interest in the conception of new slugs than in any minor battle. Slugs were life. Life was a tool. Actually, It did not run the slugs as puppets, though strings were attached to be pulled and maneuvered whenever the occasion rose. Mainly, however, the Central Being was a planner of the major pattern, an architect of the overall purpose and methods of execution, not of the bothersome detail of day-to-day. In Its mind was the great plan of Raceship and of the one hundred and a half another hundred Spoorships that had been moved out to spread the plan and the hopes and the dreams. All the Raceverse lay before the Central Being and Its plans became — of necessity — plans in general, not specific. So It drew some strings some of the time, but rarely drew all strings at any one time. At this moment, It toyed with the plan to eliminate the beings of this galaxy. Ever since the Fall, when the Dimensional Vacuum had caused the Big Drop, It had seen Its duty — to Itself and to Raceship and its Spoorships. These strange, two-legged, two-armed, two-eyed beings were a challenge to the concept of Raceship and slug-form. And a challenge to what had conceived Raceship and slug-form. All of them, every last creature, had to be destroyed. It was an absolute prerequisite to the remainder of the plan of Raceship. These beings must die before the overall plan could continue with any degree of integrity. Simply: death to man. Small “m” intentioned.