Robert W. Krepps

“ Above Rob's gasp and Alan's cry came the shriek of Don Mariner. Then he had swept Brave aside and fired a grenade pistol almost in the face of the pilot; and Grady died without a sound.
"No recriminations," said Alan. "You can't see a thing like that and hold your hand. If I'd been armed I'd have done it myself."
Brave was running his hands over the exposed flesh of the dead pilot. "This is weird stuff," he said. "It isn't human—well, that's obvious. It feels vaguely like gutta-percha. It's swelling up slowly. No, by glory, it's going back into shape again. It's becoming humanoid again." ”

“ So they took the station wagon up to the park, and walked onto the grass that was already spangled with moisture under the moon; on a knoll surrounded by trees they flung down blankets from the trunk of the car, and stretched out and tasted the night that was brought to them on a softly brisk little breeze; and Alan said, "Mother Nature! You can't beat the old girl. She makes you see sparks of light where you know there's nothing but the dark." ”

“ The ship was much larger than those of Project Star, and more complex within; the ramp reached to a corridor with three doors. Mac was dashing for the farthest one; Alan threw his weight against the middle door. As it burst open his first glimpse was of four outlanders rising, open-mouthed, from chairs set before a bank of control panels.
Afterwards he could recall only the thing which flashed through his mind in that first instant of viewing them: that in the old West it had been proved time and again that one good man with a repeating rifle was better than four good men with revolvers. ”

“ Men lived, too: lived blind and wounded and lamed and torn asunder, lived without minds and minds strangely contorted and warped. No one who had been in Manhattan that day survived without scars of body and brain left by the death of the city.
The golden egg had hatched its chick of death at eight-fifty-three of a Friday morning in June of 1970.
After a while, when the hurricane had dropped away and the earth had stilled its shaking, Alan sat up and looked toward the heart of the city. ”

“ Your only help will be the knowledge that we will live with the memory of that mistake the rest of our lives; and they are long, long lives.
"We are men of good will. We beg you to believe this. We have outlawed war and our planet lives at peace, prosperous peace. Now we have committed an intolerable crime against a brother race. We are hurt, in our way, as much as you have been hurt."
Brave had taken Alan's hand in his own and was squeezing it hard; the scientist thought suddenly that if he were not impervious to pain, his hand would be aching like fury. ”

“ He'll be my man."
"I don't think so," said Brave calmly. "I don't care what sort of all-powerful rays you put him under, or how you've caught the reins of his mind. If you kill me, Alan is sooner or later going to kill you. Live with that, McEldownie, or whatever your right name is. I don't for a minute believe that you can take as good a man as Alan and murder his best friend before his eyes and have him lick your boots. Kill me and you're done, Mac."
"Damn you, Lo! You're wrong, and you know it." He snarled at the viewplate. "You absolutely won't get out of the disk if I land it?" ”

“ He glanced at Brave and Alan. "First I must thank you for your indispensable help in overcoming the rebels at Project Star."
"We didn't do much for you."
"You fought beside us when you hated us for the bombing of your cities; that implies understanding, if not forgiveness. We appreciate that. You saved innocent lives; that is the best way to help us. To kill is a terrible thing to us. We do not do it lightly. To kill innocents, even in cases of dire necessity, is trebly terrible." ”

“ Brave knew he carried a slug in his leg just next the groin; Alan had no idea whether he had been hit. Enemies were continually firing at them both.
Alan was knocked to the turf by a man who leaped on his back and beat at his head with a pistol butt. Brave swung the rifle, a terrible war club in his hands, and broke the man's head like a rotten gourd. Alan got up with the feeling that he should have a headache. But he felt nothing.
Then the rebel outlanders gave up. ”

“ Win Gilmore stood there, shaking her beautiful blued coiffure. "This place looks like a shebeen. And you're all fried to the eyeballs. Ought to be ashamed of yourselves." She dropped her lavender cloak: she was wearing an amethyst-colored halter and a pleated nylon skirt of syenite blue, which clung to her legs as she walked toward them. Alan could see the play of muscles in her thighs where the soft skirt touched them. Some of the liquor sank away from his brain and he remembered that this woman was not human. He gritted his teeth and turned his head away to look at Brave. ”

“ Alan, strapped to his chair, was leaning over toward Mac as far as he could. Now he said, "By heaven, you haven't any pores in your skin!"
"I was afraid you'd notice that before. I had a fantastic yarn cooked up to explain it. That's right, pal; Grady and me, and all the rest of us, haven't any sweat glands or pores or tear ducts. There are other little differences too, but they don't cut any ice. The differences notwithstanding, we are human. Not strictly Earthtype human, I suppose, but human nonetheless." He brooded over his controls, as the disk roared silently through the sky. ”

“ At last the fierce earnestness of Brave and Alan had its effect, and all of them were on their feet, pacing up and down, shouting at one another, smacking their fists into their palms and proposing unworkable plans at random.
Alan argued with Jim about the telecast. Finally the lean man said, "All right. I'm wacked. We're all wacked. They'll take away my job, my license, and my reputation. They'll toss us all in the hatch. Maybe we'll be lucky and get a room together. We can sit in a ring and make faces at each other for the next fifty years." ”

“ There were men from sixteen saucers, over four hundred of them, and they ran like deer, like cheetahs after deer, like winds after cheetahs. Mutely, with a kind of ferocious impersonality, they descended on the colony.
Men came running out with machine guns and feverishly began to load them. They were picked off by rifle bullets, by paralyzing ray tubes, and relays came and were picked off and more came. One gun stuttered into action momentarily, and the crew went twisting up in the air, their gun blown apart, their bodies rent by a weapon that even Alan had not known of. ”

“ Another machine gun blew up.
Among the buildings there was hand-to-hand combat, automatics against fire tubes, outlander against rebel outlander in wrestling, heaving confusion. All the men from the stranger planet fought without speaking; the robots shouted, like normal men in a battle. Brave was bawling war whoops and Alan was cursing steadily, as he always did under fire. Bill Thihling had got himself lost somewhere.
The leader of Alan's saucer went by, blond hair streaming, blood dripping down the brown chest. Alan caught a thought: thanks. ”

“ I haven't any pores. And naturally I can't turn pale. This is my natural color. I'm no damned human chameleon. But I can feel pain, in spite of your driveling theories. What do you want to know?" He spat again. "I won't sit here and take this agony for anyone. What the blazes can you do to us if you do know? You can't touch us. Go on, ask away."
"Are you mutants?" asked Brave.
"No."
"Are you human?"
"Not as you understand it."
"Where did you come from?"
The pilot sneered. "From the ninth planet of a sun unknown to you," he said.
Brave glanced back at Alan. "Think he's lying?" ”

“ When the first great disk came down on the city, skimming the treetops of Central Park, heading straight for the Times Square district at that height and rising only when it seemed certain that it would smash itself against one or another of the buildings of Manhattan, none of them could speak for surprise. ”

“ He stared into her wide eyes. "Alan says you can't feel pain. That makes you one of the enemy in our book. If it weren't for your perfection of form, I myself would take pleasure in booting you in the left nostril." He let his gaze wander over her well-stocked amethyst halter. "Alan," he said critically, "far be it from ol' Mac to question your judgment, but I doubt this lassie's inhumanity. I really feel we've made another error. If she isn't human, then I'm a rhinoceros."
"You look more like a starving stork," Win cried furiously. "Alan, who is this wretch?" ”

“ We gave ourselves less than a day. For we knew that our ships would have been sighted and the rebels would be speeding their plans. So we found many robot humans, many scientists working with our exiled people, and we thought that in all these places there must be millions of potential foemen."
The message was charged with emotion; it was impossible to believe that the man was lying. Indeed, thought Alan, there was no reason why he should lie. If he could wipe out New York with one small golden egg, he had no need to make allies of a few puny humans. ”

“ Brave said, "I see what you mean, Alan, and in abstract theory I agree with it. If the mutants are a good breed, a real improvement on our own kind, then we owe them the allegiance of intelligent underlings. But concrete evidence says they're not good. They shoot at you; they employ the most malefic and vicious kind of hypnotism on you, where a simple conditioning to the fact of their goodness would have brought you around to their side just as easily—and with twice the value. They aren't good. They are villainous." ”

“ Greetings, chieftain."
"How," said Brave with a straight face. "You want-um audience with great sachem?"
"That I do, Lo."
"Oh, gad," groaned the Indian, "if I hear that weary old jest once more I'll burst into tears and die. Come in, comedian. Dr. Rackham's dressing."
"Thanks. Forgive me for the godawful gag, friend. I haven't eaten breakfast yet and an empty stomach plays the devil with my sense of humor." He rattled over to a chair and sat down. At least, thought Brave, closing the door, you expected him to rattle. He was the longest and thinnest bag of bones ever seen on Long Island. ”

“ CHAPTER VIII
"So now we're all but helpless," said Bill Thihling, wiping his mouth. They had just finished three enormous platters of curried chicken at an exotic Bengali restaurant on 49th Street. "Where there's life, et cetera, but so long as the aliens control our very tongues, what can we do? Echo answers, Nothing."
"I blame myself for it," growled Brave. "I should have gone on the telecast; or Rob, maybe. We can withstand hypnotism, know how to fight it, while Alan had already had one bad dose of it. It must have been easy to recapture his mind." ”

“ Alan drank obediently, and stood and followed Brave into the lab. In a cleared space stood a pair of machines, looking somewhat like giant cameras, the lens of one covered by a multicolored disk, that of the other unshaded; there were plastic charts bolted to the sides, and dials and several types of indicator, and among all these the distinctive green and gold seal of the Institute of Psychotherapeutic and Hypnotherapeutic Research. ”

“ Alan, naked to the waist and with a white bandage over his right ear, put on by a surgeon in the saucer, was a figure differing radically from the barbaric saucermen and the sedately-clothed rebels and robots. They had taken off their shirts in the dance for a better reason than holding the attention of the soldiers. Among a hundred men like them they would have been indistinguishable had they stayed fully clothed. It's simple, he thought, to tell the good guys from the bad guys; the good guys haven't got any shirts. ”

“ We are too happy on our own world. But it would be wonderfully satisfying to know the truth of our beginnings!"
Alan felt himself becoming intellectually agog over this matter, and resolutely drew away from it. "Please," he said, "your history."
"Certainly. On the new planet, which we call Tlonis, our race set up a civilization that has endured for many millennia. Our ancestors found no intelligent race on that world, by the way, but only low forms of animal life. The flora is analogous to your own in many ways, as is natural when two planets are so alike. ”