“I—go—also—they—no—kill—yet.”
The Centaurian rolled on before. With an extraordinary dexterity, be opened the door. He had merely seen it opened. Jack took the lead. His side-arm force gun remained in its holster beside him, but it was useless. He could probably kill the plant man behind him, but that would do no good.
Dim hootings ahead. The plant man made sounds—loud and piercing sounds. Answers came to him. Jack came in view of the new group of invaders. There were twenty or thirty of them, every one armed with half-cylindrical objects, larger than the first creatures had carried.
At sight of Jack there was excitement. Eager trembling of the armlike tentacles at either side of the headless trunks. There were instinctive, furtive movements in the direction of the weapons. A loud hooting as of command. The Things were still. But Jack’s flesh, crawled from the feeling of sheer, carnivorous lust that seemed to emanate from them.
His guide, the former captive, exchanged incomprehensible noises with the newcomers. Again a ripple of excitement in the ranks of the plant men.
“Come,” said Jack curtly.
He led the way to the main control room. Once they heard someone screaming monotonously. A woman cracked under the coming of doom. A hooting babble broke the silence among the ungainly Things which followed Jack. Again an authoritative note silenced it.
The control room. Alstair looked like a man of stone, of marble, save that his eyes burned with a fierce and almost maniacal flame. A visiplate beside him showed a steady stream of Centaurians entering through a second air lock. There were hundreds of them, apparently. The dictawriter came in, under Helen’s care. She cried out in instinctive horror at the sight of so many of the monstrous creatures at once in the control room.
“Set up the dictawriter,” said Alstair in a voice so harsh, so brittle that it seemed pure ice. Trembling, Helen essayed to obey. “I am ready to talk,” said Alstair harshly into the dictawriter microphone.
The machine, rustling softly, translated. The leader of the new party hooted in reply. An order for all officers to report here at once, after setting all controls for automatic operation of the ship. There was some difficulty with the translation of the Centaurian equivalent of “automatic.” It was not in the vocabulary file. It took time.
Alstair gave the order. Cold sweat stood out upon his face, but his self-control was iron.
A second order, also understood with a certain amount of difficulty. Copies of all technical records, and all—again it took time to understand—all books bearing on the construction of this ship were to be taken to the air lock by which these plant men had entered. Samples of machinery, generators, and weapons to the same destination.
Again Alstair gave the order. His voice was brittle, was even thin, but it did not falter or break.
The Centaurian leader hooted an order over which the dictawriter rustled in vain. His followers swept swiftly to the doors of the control room. They passed, out, leaving but four of their number behind. And Jack went swiftly to Alstair. His force gun snapped out and pressed deep into the commander’s middle. The Centaurians made no movement of protest.
“Damn you!” said Jack, his voice thick with rage. “You’ve let them take the ship! You plan to bargain for your life! Damn you, I’m going to kill you and fight my way to a rocket tube and send this ship up in a flare of clean flame that’ll kill these devils with us!”
But Helen cried swiftly: “Jack! Don’t! I know!” Like, an echo her words—because she was near the dictawriter microphone—were repeated in the hooting sounds of the Centaurian language. And Alstair, livid and near to madness, nevertheless said harshly in the lowest of tones: “You fool! These devils can reach Earth, now they know it’s worth reaching! So even if they kill every man on the ship but the officers—and they may—we’ve got to navigate to their planet and land there.” His voice dropped to a rasping whisper and he raged almost soundlessly: “And if you think I want to live through what’s coming, shoot!”
Jack stood rigid for an instant. Then he stepped back. He saluted with an elaborate, mechanical precision.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said unsteadily. “You can count on me hereafter.”
One of the officers of the Adastra stumbled into the control room. Another. Still another. They trickled in. Six officers out of thirty.
A Centaurian entered with the curious rolling gait of his race. He went impatiently to the dictawriter and made noises.
“These—all—officers?” asked the machine tonelessly.
“The air officer shot his family and himself,” gasped a subaltern of the air department. “A bunch of Muts charged a rocket tube and the rocket chief fought them off. Then he bled to death from a knife in his throat. The stores officer was—”
“Stop!” said Alstair in a thin, high voice. He tore at his collar. He went to the microphone and said thinly: “These are all the officers still alive. But we can navigate the ship.”
The Centaurian—he wore a wide band of leather about each of his arms and another about his middle—waddled to the G.C. phone. The tendrils at the end of one arm maniplated the switch expertly. He emitted strange, formless sounds—and hell broke loose!
The visiplates all over the room emitted high-pitched, squealing sounds. They were horrible. They were ghastly. They were more terrible than the sounds of a wolf pack hard on the heels of a fear-mad deer. They were the sounds Jack had heard when one of the first invaders of the Adastra saw a human being and killed him instantly. And other sounds came out of the visiplates, too. There were human screams. There were even one or two explosions.
But then there was silence. The five Centaurians in the control room quivered and trembled. A desperate bloodlust filled them, the unreasoning, blind, instinctive craving which came of evolution from some race of carnivorous plants become capable of movement through the desperate need for food.
The Centaurian with the leather ornaments went to the dictawriter again. He hooted in it:
“Want—two—men—go—from—ship—learn—from—them—now.” There was an infinitely tiny sound in the main control room. It was a drop of cold sweat, falling from Alstair’s face to the floor. He seemed to have shriveled. His face was an ashy gray. His eyes were closed. But Jack looked steadily from one to the other of the surviving officers.
“That will mean vivisection, I suppose,” he said harshly. “It’s certain they plan to visit Earth, else—intelligent as they are—they wouldn’t have wiped out everybody but us. Even for treasure. They’ll want to try out weapons on a human body, and so on. Communications is about the most useless of all the departments now, sir. I volunteer.”
Helen gasped: “No, Jack! No!”
Aistair opened his eyes. “Gary has volunteered. One more man to volunteer for vivisection.” He said it in the choked voice of one holding to sanity by the most terrible of efforts. “They’ll want to find out how to kill men. Their thirty-centimeter waves didn’t work. They know the beams that melted our hull wouldn’t kill men. I can’t volunteer! I’ve got to stay with the ship!” There was despair in his voice. “One more man to volunteer for these devils to kill slowly!”
Silence. The happenings of the past little while, and the knowledge of what still went on within the Adastra’s innumerable compartments, had literally stunned most of the six. They could not think. They were mentally dazed, emotionally paralyzed by the sheer horrors they had encountered.