Silence. The humming of a ventilator somewhere nearby. Then, suddenly, a man screamed shrilly a long distance off, and on the heels of his outcry there came a new noise from one of the Things. It was a high-pitched squealing noise, triumphant and joyous and unspeakably horrible.
Other squealings answered it. There were rushing sounds, as if the other Things were running to join the first. And then came a hissing of compressed air and a hum of motors. Doors snapped shut everywhere, sealing off every part of the ship from every other part. And in the dead silence of their own sealed compartment, the officers on guard suddenly heard inquiring hoots.
Two more of the Things came out of the air lock. One of the men moved. The Thing saw him and turned its half-cylindrical object upon him. The man—it was the communications officer—shrieked suddenly and leaped convulsively. He was stone dead even as his muscles tensed for that incredible leap. And the Thing emitted a high-pitched triumphant note which was exactly like the other horrible sound they had heard, and sped eagerly toward his body. One of the long, tapering arms lashed out and touched the dead man’s hand.
Then Jack’s force gun began to hum. He heard another and another open up. In seconds the air was filled with a sound like that of a hive of angry bees. Three more of the Things came out of the air lock, but they dropped in the barrage of force-gun beams. It was only when there was a sudden rush of air toward the lock, showing that the enemy ship had taken alarm and was darting away, that the men dared cease to fill that doorway with their barrage. Then it was necessary to seal the air lock in a hurry. Only then could they secure the Things that had invaded the Adastra.
Two hours later, Jack went into the main control room and saluted with an exact precision. His face was rather white and his expression entirely dogged and resolved. Alstair turned to him, scowling.
“I sent for you,” he said harshly, “because you’re likely to be a source of trouble. The commander is dead. You heard it?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jack grimly. “I heard it.”
“In consequence, I am commander of the Adastra,” said Aistair provocatively. “I have, you will recall, the power of life and death in cases of mutinous conduct, and it is also true that marriage on the Adastra is made legal only by executive order bearing my signature.”
“I am aware of the fact, sir,,” said Jack more grimly still.
“Very well,” said Aistair deliberately. “For the sake of discipline, I order you to refrain from all association with Miss Bradley. I shall take disobedience of the order as mutiny. I intend to marry her myself. What have you to say to that?”
Jack said as deliberately: “I shall pay no attention to the order, sir, because you aren’t fool enough to carry out such a threat! Are you such fool you don’t see we’ve less than one chance in five hundred of coming out of this? If you want to marry Helen, you’d better put all your mind on giving her a chance to live!”
A savage silence held for a moment. The two men glared furiously at each other, the one near middle age, the other still a young man, indeed. Then Aistair showed his teeth in a smile that had no mirth whatever in it.
“As man to man. I dislike you extremely,” he said harshly. “But as commander of the Adastra I wish I had a few more like you. We’ve had seven years of routine on this damned ship, and every officer in quarters is rattled past all usefulness because an emergency has come at last. They’ll obey orders but there’s not one fit to give them. The communications officer was killed by one of those devils, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well. You’re brevet communications officer. I hate your guts, Gary, and I do not doubt that you hate mine, but you have brains. Use them now. What have you been doing?”
“Adjusting a dictawriter, sir, to get a vocabulary of one of these Centaurian’s speech, and hooking it up as a two-way translator, sir.”
Alstair stared in momentary surprise, and then nodded. A dictawriter, of course, simply analyzes a word into its phonetic parts, sets up the analysis, and picks out a card to match its formula. Normally, the card then actuates a printer. However, instead of a type-choosing record, the card can contain a record of an equivalent word in another language, and then operates a speaker.
Such machines have been of only limited use on Earth because of the need for so large a stock of vocabulary words, but have been used to some extent for literal translations both of print and speech. Jack proposed to record a Centaurian’s vocabulary with English equivalents, and the dictawriter, hearing the queer hoots the strange creature uttered, would pick out a card which would then cause a speaker to enunciate its English synonym,
The reverse, of course, would also occur. A conversation could be carried on with such a prepared vocabulary without awaiting practice in understanding or imitating the sounds of another language.
“Excellent!” said Alstair curtly. “But put some one else on the job if you can. It should be reasonably simple, once it’s started. But I need you for other work. You know what’s been found out about these Centaurians, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. Their hand weapon is not unlike our force, guns, but it seems to be considerably more effective. I saw it kill the communications officer.”
“But the creatures themselves!”
“I helped tie one of them up.”
“What do you make of it? I’ve a physician’s report, but he doesn’t believe it himself!”
“I don’t blame him, sir,” said Jack grimly. “They’re not our idea of intelligent beings at all. We haven’t any word for what they are. In one sense they’re plants, apparently. That is, their bodies seem to be composed of cellulose fibers where ours are made of muscle fibers. But they are intelligent, fiendishly intelligent.
“The nearest we have to them on Earth are certain carnivorous plants, like pitcher plants and the like. But they’re as far above a pitcher plant as a man is above a sea anemone, which is just as much an animal as a man is. My guess, sir, would be that they’re neither plant nor animal. Their bodies are built up of the same materials as earthly plants, but they move about like, animals do on Earth. They surprise us, but we may surprise them, too. It’s quite possible that the typical animal form on their planet is sessile like the typical plant form on ours.”
Alstair said bitterly: “And they look on us, animals, as we look on plants!”
Jack said without expression: “Yes, sir. They eat through holes in their arms. The one who killed the communications officer seized his arm. It seemed to exude some fluid that liquefied his flesh instantly. It sucked the liquid back in at once. If I may make a guess, sir ...”
“Go ahead,” snapped Aistair. “Everybody else is running around in circles, either marveling or sick with terror.”
“The leader of the party, sir, had on what looked like an ornament. It was a band of leather around one of its arms.”
“Now, what the devil ...”
“We had two men killed. One was the communications officer and the other was an orderly. When we finally subdued the Centaurian who’d killed that orderly, it had eaten a small bit of him, but the rest of the orderly’s body had undergone some queer sort of drying process, from chemicals the Thing seemed to carry with it.”
Alstair’s throat worked as if in nausea. “I saw it.”
“It’s a fanciful idea,” said Jack grimly, “but if a man was in the position of that Centaurian, trapped in a space ship belonging to an alien race, with death very probably before him, well, about the only thing a man would strap to his body, as the Centaurian did the dried, preserved body of that orderly ...”