Fletcher Pratt

“ You're not wanted in this world.”
“You know, or should know, the law of evolution,” replied the Lassan. “The weaker and less intelligent must ever give way before the stronger. By the divine right of—” his flow of thought stopped suddenly, changed to a wild tumult of panic. Sherman looked up. Round the rim of the blue dome, where it stood above the hangings, a string of lights was winking oddly, in a strange, uneven rhythm. “God of the Lassans, deliver us!” the thought that reached his own was saying. “The tanks are broken—the light is loose!” ”

“ For the offensive was on—the advance of the Lassans had been turned to a retreat. Along the water's edge, with its back to the sea and the steamers ready to pick up the survivors of the defeat of the last army of man, the last army of man had rallied; rallied and stood as the new lead-tipped shells began to come in and the artillery spouted them at the Lassan fighting-machines, no longer invincible, invulnerable monsters, but hittable and smashable pieces of mechanism. ”

“ The hills below rocked and roared to the repeated shock. Trees fell in crashing ruin as lightning-bolt or infra-sound shivered them to bits; great cars of burned earth and molten rock marked the spots where the gravity-beam struck the ground. All round was a maze of yellow rays, lightning flashes, and green globes that reeled, rose, fell, sometimes blowing up, sometimes giving ground, but always fighting back sternly and vigorously and always rising through the clear spring evening. ”

“ Murray glanced around him. In every direction the long lines of the convoy stretched out, big liners loaded to the funnels with men, guns, tanks and ammunition. On the fringes of the troopships the sleek grey sides of the cruisers and destroyers that protected them were visible, and overhead there soared an armada of fast airplanes—no mere observation machines, or peaceful explorers like the South Africans, but fierce, deadly fighting planes, rocket-powered, which could step along at four miles a minute and climb, dive and maneuver better than a dodo. ”

“ Now that he could see them clearly, Murray noted that they were all of fifty or sixty feet long. Their polished sides seemed one huge mirror, bright as glass, and a phosphorescent glow hung about their tails. Along either side was a slender projection like the bilge-keel of a ship, terminating about three quarters of the way along, and with a small dot of the phosphorescence at its tip. They seemed machines rather than animate objects. Murray wondered whether they were, or (remembering his own evolution into a metal man) whether they were actually metal creatures of some unheard-of breed. ”

“ It struck him that it would do little good to escape unless he did learn something about these elephant-people, their mysterious light-guns, their vast city that they seemed to have hollowed out of the heart of the solid Catskill rock, their chemistry and metallurgy and methods of attack and defense. Otherwise escape would be a jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. There would be nothing for it but a desperate, harried existence, the existence of one of the lower animals faced by the insupportable competition of man. ”

“ Perhaps an accident produced by your strange and active race. The connections have broken; the tanks of the substance of life in the bowels of this mountain have broken and the whole is set free. It is hard to see the labor of centuries thus destroyed; to see you, creatures of a lower race, inherit a world so divinely adapted to the rule of intelligence.
“For in this accident the whole of our race must perish if you have told the truth about the destruction of our green globes. We called in all the Lassans from your world for the work of the destruction of your armies. ”

“ As he flew along toward the Newark airport, a shadow fell athwart the wing and he looked up.
A big bird was soaring past, flying above and fully as fast as the plane. In his quick glance Sherman caught something unfamiliar about its flight, and leaned over to snap on the mechanical pilot while he had another look. The bird, if bird it was, was certainly a queer specimen; it seemed to have two sets of wings and was using them as though it were an airplane, with the fore pair outstretched and rigid, the hind wings vibrating rapidly. ”

“ Painfully, he turned over in bed and felt the left elbow where the ache seemed to center. He received the most tremendous shock of his life. The motion was attended by a creaking clang and the elbow felt exceedingly like a complex wheel.
He sat up to make sure he was awake, tossing the offending arm free of the covers. The motion produced another clang and the arm revealed itself to his astonished gaze as a system of metal bands, bound at the elbow by the mechanism he had felt before, and crowned, where the fingers should be, by steely talons terminating in rubber-like finger-tips. ”

“ The group hurried past without a sideward glance, the metal feet of the ape-men ringing oddly loud on the granite of the echoing passage. After a minute Sherman and the dancer crept cautiously forward; the procession had gone straight on down. Very likely a wrecking crew.
Sherman and Marta sprinted up the passage in the direction from which the ape-men and their guide had come. The passage no longer rose with the same steepness, and as the ascent grew more gentle, the tunnel widened, with frequent side-passages to the right and branches leading down to the track at the left. ”

“ Relieved of the helmet Sherman could hear a confused roaring like that on the day when Marta Lami and he had short-circuited the mining machine. “Come on,” he called to the rest, dropping the helmet. “Hell's let loose. We've got to hurry.”
Outside the roaring was perceptibly louder and seemed to be approaching. As they leaped down to the track a faint glow was borne to them redly along the rail. The ape-men in the cage-room they had escaped from were howling and beating the bars of their cages, with no blue lights to forbid them. ”

“ Oil lines and radiators seemed all tight and when he swung the propeller, the motor purred for him like a cat.
With a kind of secret satisfaction gurgling within him Herbert Sherman taxied across the field, put the machine into a climb, and went forth to have a look at New York.
He thought he could see smoke over central Manhattan and swung the Roamer in that direction. The disturbance seemed to be located at the old Metropolitan Opera House which, as he approached it, seemed to have been burning, but had now sunk to a pile of glowing embers. The fire argued human presence of some kind. ”

“ With a roar, the light-beam let go a third time. Ben saw the edge of it graze their right wing-tip; the airplane swung wildly round and down, with the pilot fighting for control; the earth seemed to rush up to meet them, tumbling, topsy-turvy. Ben noted a warped black spot where the beam had touched the wing-tip, then surprisingly, they were flying along, level with the surface of the Hudson beneath them, and hardly a hundred feet up.
“That was close,” came the aviator's voice, shaky with relief. “I thought they had us that time. Say, that's some ray they have.” ”

“ Gloria paused, leveled her light-gun at the ape-man, and his face vanished in a spray of fire. The human advanced slowly as though struggling against some force that was too strong for him. Sherman reached him first, wrenched the helmet from his head and dropping it on the floor stamped on it till the fine mechanism was irretrievably ruined. The mechanical human fell to his knees. ”

“ Murray noticed and called Gloria's attention to the curious expression the misty light gave the bronze face and she looked up to see, to be recalled to her driving by a yell from Kevitz announcing the metallic carcass of a policeman squarely in their path.
Gloria twisted the wheel sharply to avoid it; the car skidded on the damp pavement, and reeling crazily, caromed into the iron fence around the statue with a crash. At the same moment an enormous mass of rock struck the place where they should have been and burst like a shell, sending a shower of fragments whistling about their ears. ”

“ Sherman vaulted down the six-foot drop, landing with a bang. “Come on,” he cried, “short-circuit every wire you can find; tear them loose if you can't cut them any other way—and make for the middle door at the back.”
They ran across the hall toward the work benches. It seemed enormous; like a race in a dream, in which one seems to make no progress whatever. But the workers did not appear to notice them. Driven by the thoughts of the controlling Lassans, they were incapable of attending to anything else unless it was forced on their attention. ”

“ Sherman determined to find a gun without delay.
Newark was like Jackson Heights; same stony immobility of inhabitants, same sense of life stopped at full tide in the streets. He prowled around till he found a hardware store and possessed himself of a fine .50-.50 express rifle with an adequate supply of cartridges as well as a revolver, added to it a collection of small tools, and stopped in at a library to get a supply of reading matter more to his taste than the drug store could provide. ”

“ Murray glanced through the side peep-hole again—one, two, three, four, five—all the American tanks seemed undamaged. The monster had confined its attention to the whippets, apparently imagining they were doing the shooting. He pulled his throttle back, shot the speed up, rumbling down the hill, toward the village. As he looked back, darkness had closed in; the brow of the hill, its rows of trees torn and broken by the light-beam stood between him and the enemy. Before him amid the flaring light of the enemy shells was a stir of movement, the troops seemed to be pulling out also. ”

“ Off to the right came the answering crash as it caved in the armor of another of the luckless whippets. He aimed his gun carefully at the base of the snout and pulled the trigger; on the side of the monster there appeared a flash of flame as the shell exploded, then a bright smear of metal—a direct hit, and not the slightest damage!
Ben Ruby's voice came through the radiophone, cool and masterful. “Pull out, folks, our guns are no good against that baby. I'm cutting off; radio positions back to the heavy artillery. Put the railroad guns on.” ”

“ Your curious race, for all its defects, has certain qualities of intelligence, and above all that strange quality of activity and what you call courage. If we could have summoned up the same activity; if we had possessed the same courage to attack against odds, this would not have happened. It is our failure that we have depended too much on naked intellect; learned to do too many things through the hands of our servants. Had Lassans been at the controls of our fighting ships, instead of the automatons we used, you would never have conquered them so easily. ”

“ We were letting them alone.”
“Same right wolf obtains when hungry,” said Yoshio. “Wolf is larger than rabbit—end of rabbit.”
“Correct,” agreed Beeville. “They were the strongest. It's a case of hit or be hit in this universe. Our only out is to give them better than they give us.”
“Oh, I don't know,” said Ben Ruby, “it may be a good thing for the old world at that. You never heard of all the governments of the world cooperating before as they are now did you? There are still people alive you know. Civilization hasn't been killed off by a long shot. ”

“ He approached Sherman on noiseless feet, moved his trunk up and down as though examining him and then, producing from a pocket in his cloak one of the thought-helmets, set it on Sherman's head, tightened a connection or two with his trunk and placing a like device on his own head, settled himself on the twisted bench.
The ordeal of the helmet! “They make you think whatever they want you to; it's like being hypnotized,” Marta Lami had said. He braced himself resolutely. This alien intelligence should not plumb his thoughts without a struggle... ”

“ As it glided slowly to earth at the airport a little group of officers was waiting to meet them.
“What in thunder have you been doing?” one of them greeted the Americans. “Your static, or whatever it was you let loose, burned out all the tubes in half the army radio sets in New Jersey.”
“By the nine gods of Clusium!” said Sherman. “I never thought of that. We're reducing matter pretty much to its lowest terms, and it's all a good deal alike on that scale—vibrations that may be electricity, magnetism, light or matter. ”

“ Sherman went on. “Children should be seen, not heard. But what I've got here is a piece of permalloy. Under certain magnetic conditions it defies gravity. Now if we can screen gravity that way, why can't we concentrate it, too?”
“Why not? Except that nobody ever did it and nobody knows how,” said Ben Ruby.
“Well, here's the catch. We can do anything we want to with gravity if we go about it right. What is it in chemical atoms that has weight? It's the positive charge, isn't it? The nucleus. And it's balanced by the negative charges, the electrons, that revolve around it. ”