"And I'll ask the first few of them. Mr. Cromleigh, why won't you let me bomb the sofa ?"
The old man twisted his hands nervously together. "Because a bomb in the smoking-room would kill Old Jay when he hears about it; the man always goes to Lhasa in Tibet when July Fourth rolls around. He's been that way since the Wall Street Massacre in `24 or `5. Because I'm not cold-blooded. And because, dammit, those little people I saw were cute."
"Yeah!" agreed Battle reminiscently. "That she was. To begin at the beginning, your dream was substantially correct. They're little people from an asteroid. They have war-machinery and no hearts whatsoever.
They're listening twenty-four hours a day. Not a word spoken in the room escapes them and it all goes onto records."
"Good—good God!" whispered Cromleigh, cracking his freckled knuckles. "What that information must be worth!" He rose. "Let's get back to Manhattan for a drink, Lieutenant," he said shakily. "And there's another aspect I want to discuss with you. Your first trip was a sort of foray. It was mostly to convince me that I wasn't mad. And to size up the ground as well. Now can we discuss planting a permanent spy in the sofa? To keep tabs on them and move only when necessary?"
"Delightful," said Battle thoughtfully. "I have friends. My own club you probably do not know of, but it is the best of its kind."
CROMLEIGH, NERVOUSLY tapping his desk with a pencil, was alone in the great New Jersey lab as far as could be seen. Grotesque machinery lined the walls; during the day there would be eight score technicians working, checking and double-checking their results, bringing new honor and glory to the Cromleigh Vacumaxie Sweeper and the rest of the string of electric products. His sugar plants and labs were far away in Pasadena; the Cromleigh Iron Works were going full blast in the ore basin of the continent. He looked like a very worried man.
From the shadows, with completely noiseless tread, stole a figure.
"Good evening, sir," said Battle. "I've brought all of the Sabre Club that's available on two hours' notice.
"Miss Millicent, this is Mr. Cromleigh," he announced, leading forth from the shadows a tall, crisp woman. When she spoke it was with a faint, Southern drawclass="underline"
"Pleased t' know you. Any frien' of Lieutenant Battle's …" She trailed back into the darkness and vanished completely.
"Doctor Mogilov, former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kazan." A slight, smiling man bowed out from the darkness; he was smooth-shaven and looked very un-Russian. In a pronounced Cambridge dialect he said: "Delighted," and put one hand on the butt of a revolver slung from his slender waist.
"And Alex Vaughn, Yorkshire born and bred." The Englishman said thickly, in the peculiar speech that makes the clear-headed, big-boned men of York sound always a little intoxicated: "Ah coom wi' russi-veh-shins, soor. Lut thawt bay oondair-stud."
"He says," interpreted the Lieutenant, "that he comes with reservations; let that be understood. And that completes the present roster of the Sabre Club present in New York."
"Only three?" complained Cromleigh. "And one a woman? You gave me to understand that they could completely smash the invaders."
"Yes," said the Lieutenant, his voice heavy with added meaning. "Any invaders."
"No doubt—" said Cromleigh. Then some message in Battle's eyes alarmed him unaccountably; his hand trembled on the desk-top and gripped the edge to steady itself.
"That did it!" snapped Battle. He swung on Ole Cromleigh "How long have we?" he grated, pulling a gun and aiming for the financier's throat.
In a voice hoarse with hatred Cromleigh yelled: "Just two minutes more, you meddling scum! Then—"
"Lights!" yelled Battle. "Turn the damned lights on, Miss Millicent !" As the overhead indirects flared up, bathing the huge lab in a lambent, flaming radiance, the four figures of the Sabre Club members, the Billionaire Clubman and one other leaped into sharp reality.
It was the figure of the sofa. "We took the liberty," said Battle, his gun not swerving an inch, "of removing this object from the smoking room.
It's going lock, stock and barrel into the enlarging machine you have here."
"You fool!" roared Cromleigh. "Don't you know—" The descending gun butt cut off any further conversation.
"Hurry up!" grated the Lieutenant. He hefted the sofa to his broad shoulders.
"That trembling hand was a signal if ever I saw one. His friends'll be here any minute. Open that damned machine and plug in the power!"
The Russian philosopher, muttering wildly to himself, swung wide the gates of the box-like magnifier through which Battle had come only a few hours before.
"Thank God there's plenty of room!" groaned Battle. "And if this doesn't work, prepare for Heaven, friends!" He turned on the machine full power and speed, took Miss Millicent by the arm and dragged her to the far end of the vast lab.
DURING THE INCREDIBLY long three minutes that ensued, they made ready their weapons for what might prove to be a siege, while Battle explained in rapid-fire undertones what he had had no time for during the plane-ride from Manhattan.
As he checked the load of his quickfirers he snapped: "Invaders—fooey!
Anybody could tell that those women were fresh from an office. They had the clerical air about them. The only invader—as a carefully logical process of deduction demonstrated—was the gruesome creature who's been posing as Cromleigh. Just murdered the old guy—I suppose—and took over his body. Him and his friends whom he just signaled. He's the only baby who hypnotized the Phi Beta Kappas they use for busboys.
"Why did he risk sending me in there? The inevitable mark of a louse.
Doesn't trust anybody, not even his own office-staff dyed a pale green and reduced to half gnat-size. So he sent me in for a spy on them. The whole cock-and-bull story of the creatures from an asteroid was so that there'd be no suspicion directed at him in case some bright waiter should find the louse-people. Wouldn't be surprised if he's from an asteroid himself. Crazy business! Craziest damned business!"
"How about the financial angle?" asked Vaughn, who could be intelligible when money was involved.
"I picked that bird's pocket slick as a whistle just before I conked him.
Feels like a hundred grand."
"Here they come !" snapped Miss Millicent.
"They" were creatures of all shapes and sizes who were streaming through the only door to the lab, at the other end of the room.
"Awk!" gulped the lady involuntarily. "They" were pretty awful. There were a hundred or so of them, many much like men, a few in an indescribable liquid-solid state that sometimes was gaseous. The luminous insides of these churned wildly about; there were teeth inside them two feet long.Others were gigantic birds, still others snakes, still others winged dragons.
"That settles it," grunted the Russian philosopher as he flicked his gun into and out of its holster faster than the eye could follow. "That settles it. They are amoebic, capable of assuming any shape at all. One is changing now—awk!" He persevered. "Indubitably possessed of vast hypnotic powers over unsuspecting minds only. Otherwise they would be working on us."
"They" were rolling in a flood of shifting, slimy flesh down the floor of the lab.
"The machine! The sofa!" cried Miss Millicent. Battle breathed a long sigh of relief as the cabinet-like expander exploded outward and the sofa it held kept on growing—and growing—and growing—and growing! It stopped just as it filled the segment of the lab that it occupied.
With a squeaking of tortured timbers the laws of cross-sectional sufferance power asserted themselves and the hundred-yard-high sofa collapsed in a monstrous pile of rubble.
"Sit very still," said the Lieutenant. "Be quite quiet and blow the head off any hundred-yard centipede that wanders our way."
There were agonized yells from the other side of the couch's ruins.
"That couch," Battle informed them, "was just plain lousy. Full of centipedes, lice, what have you. And when a louse smells blood—God help any invaders around, be they flesh, fish, fowl or amoebic!"