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| TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES. | x by RUSSELL THOMPSON

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SUPER-SCIENCE

ee nc FICTION

Vol 3— No. 4 . June, 1959 CONTENTS

NOVELETTE BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR by Richard F. Watson. 62

Monsters too weird to be real brought hideous death

SHORT STORIES TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES by Russell Thompson 2

It was a ghastly horror, far, far worse than death!

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME by James Rosenquest .... 22

A horrible mockery of life was waiting — for us

THE DAY THE MONSTERS BROKE LOOSE ...eeeeeeseene by Robert Silverberg vesreveessee | 44

People were eaten in the streets like tidbits

MATING INSTINCT by Lloyd Biggie Ir. wesssecccccccesses 96

It seemed monstrous. Two sexes needed to reproduce!

THE ENORMOUS DIAMOND by Bill Wesley ....seeeeeeees 110

The gem was beautiful — the price was calamity FEATURES |! LOOK TO THE STARS by Scott Nevets sessoesseccsecsees 48 NUCLEAR NEWS ‘by Steven Rory sssccscscvecdsissseceesee 95 GALACTIC CREATION by Edgar P. Straus ..secccceseevecee 128

COVER by Kelly Freas ILLUSTRATIONS by Emsh. W. W. Scott — Editor

SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION ts published bi-monthly by Headline Publications Inc., os 1 Appleton Street, Holyoke, Mass. Editorial office at 1790 Broadway, New York

N: Y. Second class postage paid at the post office at Holyoke, Mass. Single copy 38. Subscription rates, $4.00 for 12 issues. Not responsible for unsolicitegd manu- seripts, and all such materials must be accompanied by self-addressed, stamped en- velopes, All stories printed in the magazine are fiction, and any similarity between the characters an@ actual persons is coincidental. Copyright 1959 by Headline Pub- Neations Inc. All rights, including ‘translation, reserved under International Copy- right Convention and Pan American Copyright Convention, Printed in the U.S.A.

TERROR OF © THE UNDEAD CORPSES

by Kbsciit ASN

illustrated by EMSH

It was a ghastly thing that happened, inconceivably horrible. Death on a far planet is bad enough, but this thing was much worse than death, and beyond it

é ish rustling in the thick

foliage stopped, and Cadet 1-C Davies let his right hand relax and drop from the hol- ster, where his .45 automatic lay, heavy and reassuring, against his right thigh. He re- sumed his patrol around the sleeping bulk of the space ship.

The night air of Venus was warm and humid, and he wiped the sweat repeatedly from his brow with the back of one sticky hand. His light cotton uniform clung to his dripping torso. He would have dearly loved to shuck it off, but for

the blood-thirsty flying — in- sects that were waiting to swoop down and plunge their stingers into his skin and drink the thick, salty blood of this strange two-legged alien. As it was, he had to bat from time to time at the tiny, gnat-like bugs that dived at his face. Aside from the pale, com- forting light that streamed out into the oppressive night air

from the central porthole of thé

ship, it was quite dark. The ever-present, unbroken cloud layer that surrounded the sec- ond planet from the sun shut

€

4 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

out even the friendly twinkle of stars that helped to lighten earthly nights even when there was No moon,

But tomorrow there would be light aplenty, as the rota- tion of the planet carried them into the glare of a sun that was some thirty-five million miles nearer than it was to earth. Without that high, protective barrier to filter out the infra- red and ultra-violet rays to the extent of some fifty percent, MSV #3—Manned Space Ve- hicle Number Three—could could never have disgorged its crew onto the steaming surface of Venus.

Cadet Davies completed his fifteenth or sixteenth round of the ship—he had lost track in the little game he played with himself:to ease the monotony— and stopped in the shadows just beyond the shaft of light emanating from the silent ship, hoping that the light would lure some of the persistent fly- ing insects away from him.

They were phototropic, just.

as on earth, and Davies leaned for a few minutes against the reassuring wall of the .MSV, watching the six- and eight-

legged insects with their garish, multi-colored wings weaving in a rainbow dance in the cold, ~ fluorescent light. The heavy, cloying silence was broken only by the faint humming of the

ship’s ; central power- package.

ae he heard the rustling again, and jerked from his slumped, relaxed stance against the steel alloy hull into rigid, upright attention. The sound came from the dense growth that ringed the little clearing at

a distance of some _ thirty yards. Staying just beyond the —

range of the light-shaft, so as to present no target, he moved forward one cautious step at a time, his spine tingling and the hairs bristling at the nape of his neck. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, he thought to himself, and hoped for a quick showdown with the nuisance that lurked just out of sight. Of course, he’ reassured himself, it was just the fear of the unknown that raised his hackles and counted his vertebrae with an icy fin- ger despite the humid warmth.

The preliminary, daytime exploration some ten hours

TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES 5

ago, when the ship had first set down, had failed to reveal any animal life larger than a dog, and even that specimen, some- what resembling a boar with six legs and two horns, had dashed off fearfully at the ap- proach of the exploring party.

He removed the pistol from its holster and held it cocked and ready, bolstered up by the thought that one well-placed slug from it could stop any- thing they had so far encount- ered,

Beside which, one shout from him would bring. almost instant aid from the ship, where his relief dozed lightly just inside the doorway on a cot draped with mosquito net- ting.

He stopped a few feet from the edge of ‘the foliage and squinted tensely into the al- most tangible blackness. But the sound had stopped at his _ approach, and all that he could hear was the sound of his own heavy breathing, punctuated by the. monotonous drip-drip of moisture condensing on the fleshy leaves of exotic plants and falling to the damp black earth, |

He yawned and turned his back deliberately, in a con- scious gesture designed more to reassure himself that he was not really afraid, and began to walk back toward the space ship—but he still kept his gun ready in his right hand.

He was just a few feet away from his assigned circular pa- trol route when a rare gust of wind blew toward him out. of the lush vegetation, carrying a rank odor, a completely alien scent that caused his skin to prickle. He whirled around, his gun levelled, and his startled eyes caught a swift flash com- ing at him, barely illuminated by the light from the vessel.

‘Then it was upon him, cov- ering his nose and mouth with a slimy, tenacious, smothering grip that caused him to drop the pistol and rip at the thing that was cutting off his’ wind. He tried to cry out for help, but the clammy, leathery thing that was stifling him also pre- vented the call for help from passing ‘his lips.

He rolled on the ground, his chest heaving futilely and his eyes bulging, and the veins standing out on his forehead.

6° SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

An. eternity seemed to pass while he struggled vainly for breath, and then a red mist formed behind his staring eyes. His clawing hands fell limply away from the creature that had now wrapped itself com- pletely around his head, and the red mist deepened into a black- ness that would never lift.

AY HEN relief sentry Durk- heim had awakened with a -start of alarm and a deep sense of guilt, the incandescent dawn of Venus was already pouring over the landscape in a tidal wave of heat and light. He had brushed aside the netting hasti- ly and donned his boots and pith helmet, muttering under his breath at what he thought was Davies’ generosity in not waking him up for relief,

Then he had stepped outside _the ship, saw the limp form ly- ing on the ground some fifteen yards from the ship’s lock, and ran toward it. He turned Da- vies over on his back to look for. signs of life, and jerked up- right as if he had been struck in the face.

His stomach turned over with nausea and panic, and he

pressed both .hands -to his mouth to muffle the involun-: tary scream. Then he staggered into the ship on legs _ had turned.to water.

Captain Langdon and ship’s physician Sutton:stood over the body with grim faces in which pity. mingled with horror.

“Good Lord!” the Captain gasped. ‘“‘What could have done that to him?”

The physician did not an- . swer, but stood wiping his hands repeatedly against his trousers, as if they had handled something unclean or contami- nated.

Davies was hardly recog- nizable. The flesh of his face had shrunken and_ tightened until the cheek bones almost showed through the transpar- ent skin, and the lips were drawn back from the teeth in a malignant expression that was half grin and half snarl.

The filmed eyeballs glared up from the sockets that seemed to have become lidless. The whole body had the curi- ous appearance of a limp dum- my or a rag doll, or a scare- crow that. had lost most of its straw stuffing.

TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES 7

“T don’t: know,” the medic muttered finally. “It looks as though something had drained the blood from him—all six or seven quarts of it.” He shook his-héad dubiously. “And yet there is still good color in the cheeks, as you can see for

yourself,”

Captain Langdon continued to look at the pitiful remains with a sick expression. Then he pulled himself together with a. distinct effort and snapped a command to two other crew members standing at a respect- -ful distance. They trotted for- ward and lifted the limp form, one taking the arms and the other the legs.

“Take him to the lab,” he added hoarsely, then to the medic: “I assume you'll want to make some kind of examina- _tion before we put him in the hold in cold storage?”

“Yes, of course,” the doctor confirmed, and the two fell in behind the crew members and their gruesome burden. The body was carried into the lab and placed. on the white porce- lain table.

As the two enlisted men left the lab, one of them turned

and paused in the doorway hesitantly. “Sir,” he said, through pale lips. The Captain “Yes, Sergeant?” “Well, sir,’ the man said nervously, “there’s something awfully peculiar about the— the body.” “What do you mean?” “Well, sir, it’s awfully heavy—for the tondition it’s in, if you know what I mean. Well, what I mean is, even though it’s all sort of shrunken like, it seems to be just as heavy as a: normal, live man not light, like-you’d expect.” » “T see,” the Captain «said heavily. “All right, you may go about your assignments now.”?' “Yes, Sir,” the Sergeant re- sponded with relief, and van- ished into the corridor, his face as white as a sheet.

looked up.

Captain Langdon turned’ to Doctor Sutton. “What do you suppose he means?”

“We'll soon find out,” ‘the medic grunted, and made some adjustments just below the ta- ble top. The porcelain’ slab sank slightly, and a dial at one end indicated one hundred and

8 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

seventy pounds. The physician let out a small sigh of surprise.

“Do you know off hand what this man weighed on takeoff from Earth?”

“Ves. Every man’s weight had to be known for fuel com- putations. He weighed exactly -one sixty-five.” j

“Then,” murmured the med- ic with a curious expression on his thin face, “this man has actually gained five pounds.”

Langdon stared unbelieving- ly at the shrunken thing in front of them, then looked quizzically at the physician.

“There’s only one way to find out,” the other said grim- ly, answered the unspoken question. “Help me get it ready for an autopsy.”

Together they stripped the now baggy clothing from the withered limbs and torso until the shrivelled thing that had been a man lay naked on the laboratory table. The Captain washed his hands thoroughly in disinfectant, then stood off to one side, studiouly inspect- ing a star map and smoking a

cigarette with trembling fin- .

gers. Sutton donned a rubber apron and rubber gloves and

procured a tray of scalpels and saws from a cabinet.

Soon the ship’s skipper -be- gan humming loudly to himself to shut out the slight tearing and ripping sounds that came from the table behind him. Af- ter some ten minutes or so, he heard a _ startled gasp and whirled around. The medic’s complexion was a mottled patchwork of pink and gray.

“Come here and look at this!”

The Captain approached the table and stared down at the doctor’s handiwork. The ciga- rette dropped from his fingers.

The entire abdominal cavity had been laid open from the breastbone to the pelvis, and the internal organs dissected. But Langdon had been in the Fourth World War, and it was not the sight of human viscera

that disturbed him.

It was the matter that filled the cavities of the body—a translucent substance resem- bling gelatin...

The medic pointed with a- long finger.

“That’s what took care of the body weight that should have been missing,” he com-

TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES. 9

mented grimly. ‘emething caused the blood plasma and lymph to exude into the inter- nal body cavities, and turned it into this jelly.”

Then he reached for a knife and a saw and attacked the chest area feverishly, Langdon turned away and hummed until

the sawing and ripping noises —

ceased. Sutton’s voice broke in.

“See here. The lungs are also filled with the same junk!”

The skipper kept his face averted. “I'll take your word for it,” he said weakly,

“Well now,” the physician proclaimed, “I’ll just have to take a sample of this jelly and prepare a slide for microscopic examination.” And he began to whistle softly, professional cu- riosity and enthusiasm over- coming his initial distaste.

Fifteen minutes later. he ap-

-proached the chair where the

Captain sat holding his head between his hands, as though suffering from an itoler able headache.

“John,” he said in a strained tone of voice, ‘‘we lad better put the cadaver in cold storage right away and quarantine it. There’s something I don’t like

at all about this. Instead of be- ing a uniform, smooth jelly, the stuff seems to have a crude cellular structure of its own.

“Furthermore,” he added, his voice sinking almost to a whisper, “the cadaver itself bothers and puzzles me. In spite of lying out in the heat and dampness of this godfor- saken planet for at least eight hours, it still shows no signs of rigor mortis or decomposi- tion!”

“Very well,” the skipper as- sented wearily. “You'll have time to patch him up later be- fore we return him to Earth for a hero’s funeral. The first man to die on Venus!”

The daytime furnace waned on into the afternoon, and then cooled off into the banked oven of night. The remaining five crew members—Captain, phy- sician, engineer-navigator, ser- geant and corporal—ate the evening meal in a silent mess- room. After a showing of an old 3-D movie in which nobody showed any real interest, they retired for the night.

CORPORAL Riley made the 54 rounds of the ship on.

10 - . SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

stockinged feet—on the in- terior. The Captain decreed that there would be no outside sentries. The portal was locked securely and the ventilation system turned.on inside, despite the drain on the power plant. They would have to do without fresh air, at least during the night. Nobody had any objec- tions.

The corporal made a com- plete circle of the ship—all the living quarters were laid out in a band around the ship’s cen- trally located power plant and engine room—and stopped for a minute to light one of the precious, rationed cigarettes.

The tiny light of the match was reflected ‘from an alumi- num nameplate at his eye level, bearing the single word: “HOLD.” He looked at the closed door with a suppressed shudder, realizing that he had lost his bearings in the endless, dizzying circuit of the ship. He expelled a hasty gust of to- bacco smoke, and started. to make another round, when he heard the sound.

Half sigh. Half groan.

He dropped the partly con- ‘sumed cigarette to the metallic

floor and ground it absently underfoot, oblivious to «= his burned heel. Then he dashed on silent feet to the Captain’s

room and stood over the sleep-

ing figure, timidity wrestling with fear. He reached out one hand and shook his skipper by the shoulder. When the Cap- tain had rubbed the sleep from his dark-rimmed eyes and sat on the edge of the cot, Riley related what he had heard.

Langdon rubbed: his blue- stubbled chin with a heavy hand. “Maybe we ought to—. No,” he contradicted himself then, “let the medic sleep. Pll tell him in the morning.” He looked up at the enlisted man keenly. ‘You’re not supersti- tious, Riley, are you?”

“No, sir, of course not,” the corporal denied, squaring his shoulders. ~

“Good man. I saw cases like this before, in a field morgue. Occasionally gases form in a cadaver and escape through the mouth, ‘sounding like. gasps and groans. Sometimes a corpse will even sit up partially, due to gas pressure and contraction

-of the muscles in the abdominal

wall. So that takes care of the

TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES i

sounds you heard. Everything o. k. now?” The corporal nadied silent-

“ly, and withdrew. The skipper

sighed wearily and turned over On one side and tried to sleep.

Silence and darkness. The dim, recessed lights in the walls of the passageways only accentuated the pools of shad- ow in the unlighted curves and corners, and the almost in- audible hum of the power plant seemed only to make the si-

~ lence throb.

Corporal Riley gingerly on his round, stopping now and then to peer vainly through the thick glass window of the ship’s portal, or outside someone’s room to drink in the reassuring sound of human breathing. He glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist

- watch: 2300 hours, ship’s time.

Another hour and it would be time to wake up Sergeant Durkheim for relief.

He completed a circuit once again, and knew without look- ing that he was only a few feet from the door to the dreaded cargo hold. He whistled softly to himself under his breath, then smiled when he remem-

guard of his

continued

bered the incident years ago, when he was a boy of thirteen, and had been challenged by playmates to climb the fence of an old cemetery and walk across it to the other side. Then

‘he had whistled, too, as small

boys will, to keep up his cour- age. Half groan, half sigh? Creak and rustle?

Then he realized .that the sounds, like a furtive animal on padded feet, had crept past the tuneless, soft whistling, and lurked crouch- ing in the background of his thoughts.

He stopped whistling and © held his breath. Yes, there it was again. His head felt sud- denly like a rubber baloon that had been inflated near to the bursting point, while his arms and legs had turned to wax.

Then he thought of what the skipper had told him, and he recalled also the boyhood inci- dent long ago. Crossing the old graveyard, he had come upon a mausoleum On his own ini- tiative (it was not in the dare) he had walked up to the little stone building, stood on tip- toes, and peered through the

12 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

little window for a full minute.

But he saw nothing, and nothing happened, and he went on his way with a new-found courage. He knew that he would have to open the door to the hold and look inside, ever so briefly, to convince himself and to bolster his own morale. Once the unknown was faced, and became the known, it lost all its terror.

He moved forward silently, drew a deep breath . and pushed the door open slowly.

. He was met by a frigid breath of air from the refriger- ating system that had been turned on full force to inhibit the process of decay. In the far wall, one small, dim light burned, like a vigil candle. His eyes wandered toward the roughly assembled coffin lying in the remote corner. Only the top edges were visible, and be- low them, a pool of inky dark- ness.

He was sighing with relief at the uneventful accomplishment of his self-imposed discipline

’ and was turning to leave, when

something stirred in the pool of

darkness lurking in the wooden box,

Time stood still, and his heart with it, while the head emerged first into the dim light, followed by the scalpel- — mangled torso, The blank eyes gleamed and glared at him in the reflected light, and from the gaping slash of a mouth came the sound of groaning and sighing.

Riley -held his ground, re- membering that this was a na- tural phenomenon, and _ there was nothing to be afraid of. He would observe, calm and de- tached, and then when the cadaver settled back again, he would go on his way. Then when time came to wake up. Sergeant Durkheim for his re- lief, he would report the event to him and warn him not to be alarmed by strange noises.

He stood rigid, watching the corpse as it sat up to a full sit-

ting position, accompanied by ~~

a whistling exhalation of air and gases. Yes, soon it should — be over, the pressure released, and ‘the poor remains would set- tle back once more to their rest.

His jaw dropped limply and his eyes bulged as if they would extrude from their sock- ets.

ALLL LECTIN Tt

TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES 13

The corpsé continued its up- ward and outward motion. And then it was outside the. wooden box, staggering on shrunken legs, the entire belly split open and bulging out like rotten fruit.

Riley turned abruptly to flee from the hold, and realized with an electric shock of para- lyzing terror that he had let go of the door unconsciously and it-had closed behind him—and locked. And it could be un- locked only from the outside.

He heard.a sudden thump and whirled around. The thing had fallen to the floor, the legs having become useless. As the corporal watched in frozen, speechless terror, it scrabbled across the floor like a giant crab.

He turned-and pounded on the door.

“Help! Some one let me out for God’s sake! Help!”

He heard a rustle just behind him, and knew the thing was close.

He closed his prayed.

“Oh, no, Davies,” he plead- ed. “You’re dead, you're dead!”

eyes and

He heard a coughing grunt, then felt a tickling sensation on his right ankle that turned into a feeble grip of clutching fingers. Then a grip on his oth- er ankle, and he knew the thing was pulling itself up.

He whirled around and flung up his hands against the face that peered up into his... glar- ing, sightless eyes and snarling gash of a mouth. He had time to scream twice before the rot- ten clamminess pressed itself over his nose and mouth and shut off all breathing.

ERGEANT Durkheim,

whose room was closest to the cargo hold, rolled over on his cot and sat bolt upright on the edge. The nightmare that the screams had created in his subconscious mind merged with reality, and he came _ fully awake in time to hear the echo reverberating in the steel cor- ridor.

He glanced at the luminous. dial of his wrist watch: it was fifteen minutes past midnight— fifteen minutes past the time he should have been aroused by Riley for relief duty.

“Qh Lord!” he gasped. to

14 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

himself, and stumbled out into the passage way in his bare feet. He ran into the forms of the. Captain, the medic, and the engineer.

“Did you hear that, sir?”

“Yes,” replied the skipper grimly. He looked at his own watch. “Aren’t you supposed to be on duty now?”

“Yes sir,’ Durkheim mum- bled, “but Riley didn’t wake me up.”

They exchanged frightened glances all around.

“Then I’m afraid that was the corporal,” the skipper whis- pered, ashen-faced. He cocked the forty-five he held in one hand, and gestured to the oth- ers. ‘“‘Follow me—to the hold.”

They reached the locked door to the improvised mortu- ary.

The Captain called out: “Corporal, Riley, are you in there? Answer me!”

Silence, except for the heavy breathing of the three men.

The Captain waved the oth- er two men back. ‘Stand aside, but be ready to come to my aid if I need you.”

He turned the lever on the door and pushed. The door

opened a foot, then met resis- tance. He poked his head through the crack. “Oh my God!” they heard him mutter . over and over, “oh my God!”

Then he pulled his head out again; his lips compressed to a hair-line and his eyes sick. “Give me a hand with this door,” he demanded.

The three men leaned their weight against the door and pushed it wide. The skipper thrust through into the frigid room.

Riley lay on the floor, his eyes wide ‘in death, his face” purpled. The desiccated corpse of Davies lay across him in a necrophiliac embrace. Durk- heim and Engineer Burke re- mained outside while the phy- sician joined the Captain in the hold. They stood looking down silently, their breath congealing in the cold air into wraith-like forms.

At last the ship’s physician spoke. ‘I’d like to have the corpse of Davies brought into the lab again. I have an idea. I think there is no more dan- ger from it, but for the time being we had better leave Riley in here.”

~ TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES AB

Captain Langdon issued the necessary orders, and Burke and Durkheim keeping their eyes fixed rigidly ahead, car- ried the now lightweight cada- ver of the cadet into the lab, They turned to leave, but the skipper stopped them with a gesture. :

“You two: men had better stay here,” he suggested. “You might as well know the nature of the menace that we face.”

A few minutes later, the medic had finished wielding his trepanning saw, and the skull _ of Davies lay opened before them.

_ There was no brain.

Furthermore, the jelly that had filled the internal cavities had either shrunken or disap-

peared, leaving only a thin ' slime clinging to the desiccated organs.

The physician gestured wearily. “My fault,” he con- fessed. “The autopsy was not complete. I should have looked into the skull the first time.”

Captain Langdon looked at him with wide eyes. “Yes, but what does it mean? You said you had some kind of an idea, back there in the hold?”

The doctor pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Ye-e-ess,” he drawled doubtfully. “Of course, it’s only tentative, since we are faced with an entirely un- known form of life. But to put it concisely, some form of in- ternal parasite is responsible for the two deaths. Of that I’m fairly certain.” He gestured to the empty cranium and _ the abandoned thoracic and abdom- inal cavities.

“Tt must be something on the order of a giant leech, such as we knov’ them on earth. But in- stead of fastening itself to the outside of the victim and drain- ing its blood, it evidently kills the prey by suffocation—by fastening itself over the breathing apparatus. Then it crawls or oozes into the body cavities of the victim and drains the body fluids internal- ly.

“You will ‘remember,” he continued, looking at the .Cap- tain, “that I mentioned how the tissues of the cadet seemed not to have decayed. I think now that the cadet was not en- tirely dead when we performed the first autopsy.”

Captain Langdon and the other two men looked ill.

16 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

“Qh, he wasn’t’ at all con- scious,” the medic hastened to reassure tnem. ‘This—crea- ture—insinuated itself into the organs and took over the life processes until it felt satisfied. It evidently also infiltrated the brain, spinal cord, and nervous system, thus controlling the body, and enabling it to manip- ulate the muscles and move the body until it was in a position to attack Riley and transfer it- self to him.”

The Captain mopped his forehead of the huge beads of sweat that broke out sudden- Ramee “T hen—then,” he whis- pered, ‘the body of Riley should go through the sam stages!”

The doctor nodded. “Yes, if I’m right.”

“But he was lying on the floor, absolutely motionless,” Langdon protested.

“Incubation period,” the physician muttered briefly. “The creature needs time to take over the nervous system and the musculature of the newest victim. With a modifi- cation, perhaps.”

“A modification?”

“Ves. Having already ab-

sorbed and used the brain and |

nervous system of one human, the autonomous stage may be much closer than it was in the case of Cadet Davies.”

ERE was stunned silence

in the lab. And then, as if

to verify the last statement of

the physician, the sound of

pounding and muffled cries

came to their shocked, unbe- lieving ears.

“Mother of God!” the en- gineer gasped, “it’s—it’s the corporal! He’s come back to life!”

Doctor Sutton thrust out a

restraining hand. “Take it. easy,” he warned. “I was afraid of this. Don’t be de-

ceived. The thing has taken

over his body already. That ©

wasn’t Riley, but something operating through him! It’s

‘learning fast—very fast. And

it’s not working under the handicap of having its -latest host-body crippled by dissec- tion.”

“But what are we going to

do?” somebody cried out.

_ “Destroy it,” the Captain in- terposed grimly. “But we’ve

tenth ate

a en

EE eamieannamenan

TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES 17

got to be careful. We can’t con- front it directly yet, since we don’t know how strong it may be in its new body.”

He whirled to the engineer. “Burke! How about the refri- gerating system in the hold. Is it on full force?” .

“No, sir. The temperature is at zero degrees centigrade— the freezing point. It can be sent much lower, but it will im- pose a considerable strain on

the electric supply of the ship.” -

The skipper turned to the medic. “I understand that the lower the temperature, — the slower is the metabolism of all living things, even cold-blood- ed organisms. Think it will work on this thing?”

Sutton nodded slowly. “It might, in spite of the fact that the zero temperature in the hold has so far not prevented it from acting. Yes, a sudden and pronounced drop might slow it ‘down.”

“Good enough,” the Captain replied with grim satisfaction, and turned again to the engin- eer. “Burke, I want the refrig- eration system in® the hold turned on full force at once.”

The engineer nodded in a

frightened way and left the lab for the engine room. Two min- utes later the lights dimmed and almost went out, and the whine of the generator becam2 more clearly audible.

Burke returned. “That ought to do it,’ he reported. “The refrigeration is on full force now. In about thirty minutes it ought to be down to minus twenty centigrade.”

The Captain nodded silently in approbation. “Now we just wait,” he announced, grim- faced. “I suggest, gentlemen, that we all stay here in the lab in full sight of each other, in- stead of going to our respective rooms. In half an hour, we go again in a body to the hold, and dispose of whatever is in there.”

They waited in the ghostly dimness, dripping with sweat as the temperature rose in the lab while the ship’s generating system fought with the over- powering heat on the outside in an effort to lower the temper- ature in the cargo hold. Even in the so-called absolute zero of outer space it had been no problem for the air. condition- ing system to maintain a com-

18 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

‘ fortable atmosphere inside, for their was nothing to carry the heat away from the ship, other then radiation.

But maintaining temperatures, even in a part of the ship, was rendered enor- mously difficult by the heavy, humid, tropical air of the plan- et.

The engineer vanished for a minute or so into the engine room, then came back with a worried expression.

_“TIt’s just barely holding at minus five degrees,” he report- ed. wringing his hands. “TI don’t think it’s going any lower from here on.”

The skipper looked at his watch. ‘‘Half and hour gone al- ready,” he informed the others, gnawing at his lower lip. He stood up suddenly. “I think it’s time for action, all the same.” He inspected the clip of his gun, then hefted the weapon thoughtfully. “Need something better than this,” he murmured, half to himself, half to the oth- ers. -

“Sergeant Durkheim,” he commanded abruptly, “go to the weapons cabinet and get me-the sub-machine gun. Six

sub-zero

ordinary forty-five caliber bul- lets may not be enough to stop that. thing.”

The Sergeant complied, re- turning in less than a minute with the requisitioned weapon. The Captain inspected it and found it to his satisfaction.

“Gentlemen,’ "he announced, “T’m going in after this thing alone.” He waved aside their protests, “(No use risking all of us. If this won’t work, I don’t know what will. The rest of you will have to carry on if I don’t make it.” Looking toward the medic: “It will be up to you, Doctor, to think of something else—poisons, gas, fire—what- ever you think will work.”

Sutton nodded. “Be careful, sir,” he pleaded. “We don’t know how much that creature will act like a normal human being, now that it has the re- sources of two brains at its dis- posal, and an _ unmutilated body. Assuming that it has sur- vived the sub-freezing temper- ature. It may have become less—less thing-like and more man-like. You follow me?”

CaptaineLangdon nodded in understanding. “Zero hour,” he said with an attempt at humor.

ey EA

~ == ‘ : m TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES | 19

Then, more seriously: ‘Listen for the sound of the sub-ma-

- chine gun. I will try to cut it

in two. That should cramp its activities. If I don’t return within five minutes after you hear the barrage, you’ll know that I failed. Sutton, you’ll then be in command.

“But my final order to you would be to remain on Venus until you’ve disposed of that monster in the hold, whether it is occupying my body or any one else’s. Under no circum- stances must you return to Earth with that creature on board.”

He shuddered. “I hate to think of it loose on Earth, look- ing like a human being, and proceeding unchecked from victim to victim.”’ He looked at the engineer next. “Burke, as a double check, I also order you to implement my _ instructions by refusing to take off from Venus until the monster has been disposed of.”

He threw his shoulders back and drew a deep breath. “O.K..

men, wish me luck.” He turned”

and left the lab, and the three remaining men watched him vanish through the doorw2v

and down the corridor toward the hold, listened to his foot- steps echoing in the metallic corridor, and held their breaths.

The sounds of pounding from the interior of the hold, and the muffled cries, had long since ceased, and every one in the lab felt more relieved—felt that the Captain’s chances were good. Then they heard a creaking and rasping as the in- trepid skipper, far down the curved corridor and out of sight. threw open the door to the hold.

HE Captain stood in the

doorway, and the chill that struck to the marrow of his bones did not come entirely from the frigid air within the room. He stared with bulging eyes at the figure leaning against the far wall, a vague, shadowy menace in the dim light. .-Then it moved forward, smiling, and he almost forgot his purpose as it moved for- ward ,into the shaft. of light from the corridor, looking for al the world like the old Cor- poral Riley he had come. to know and to love like his own S07.

20 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

But then he saw, just in time, that there was no cloud of moisture issuing from the 4 lips. It was not breath- ’ ing...He raised the sub-ma- chine gun and held down the trigger, waving the muzzle from left to right.

The hellishly re-animated body of the corporal fell heavi- ly to the floor, cut in two. From the abdominal cavity a thicktsh slime or jelly oozed out onto the floor, pulsing, ‘thin bands of luminous materi- al running through the viscous mass like a primitive nervous system, while it heaved and swelled and ballooned into a congeries of irridescent bub- bles, shining with all the colors of the rainbow and with other colors that it hurt his eyes to look at so near were they to the ultra-violet end of the visi- ble spectrum. Then it grew still, and the Captain heaved a ‘sigh of enormous relief. The battle was over.

The three men in the lal: stiffened in every muscle as they heard the ripping and chattering noise of the sub-ma- chine gun, magnified to an ear-splitting assault as the

sound echoed and re-echoed in the vault of the cargo hold and

‘rebounded along the steel walls

of the corridor.

A few minutes passed, in which the ensuing silence was almost as deafening as the sound that preceded it. Then they heard the sound of firm footsteps coming nearer in the corridor, and all three stood up as one man, peering fearfully at the doorway.

Captain Langdon appeared, carrying the sub-machine gun limply .in one hand. “Every- thing’s all right now,” he re- ported wearily. He looked at Sergeant Durkheim and com- manded crisply: ‘Durkheim, flood that hold with gasoline and light it. I want everything remaining in that accursed room burned to ashes.”

He turned to the engineer

“next. “Burke, we take off from

this planet at exactly 0600 hours. I think we could all use a little sleep”—he grinned—“‘if any one is in the mood to sleep!”

As the incandescent dawn of Venus flooded over the land- scape: in a tidal wave of heat aad light, MSV #3 rose from

oo

4

TERROR OF THE UNDEAD CORPSES 21

the steaming ground, up through the cloud-wrapped atmosphere, and plunged back to the greenstar of Earth in an

- arc of acceleration.

HE first Venus expedition was only a partial success, for it returned to Earth with a cargo of five cindered corpses, and only one survivor: Engin- eer Burke. They listened to his story of a disease that had struck down the other members of the crew with pity and sympathy. Of course, he was put in quarantine. for several weeks, and subjected to peri- odic and thorough physical ex- aminations. He was feted as a hero then, for several weeks af- ter his release from observa- tion, and then after that he was given leave from the space ser- vice for a fulough of indefinite duration. But Engineer Burke had not

been feeling really well since his return. The food did not agree with him. He found the pale, watery sunshine of Earth not entirely to his satisfaction, and the thin, cool atmosphere was definitely uncomfortable. He had strange periods in which his mind seemed to be slipping out of his control. He thought often of his former crew buddies, Captain Lang- don, the medic, the sergeant, the corporal, and Cadet Davies with—what was it?—a sort of delicious hunger, an appetite that pervaded every cell of his being.

No. This crude, boiled and burned food did not satisfy him at all. Some time very soon, af- ter night had fallen, he would have to lurk in some dark al- ley, and wait for more suitable nourishment.

THE END

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME

by JAMES ROSENQUEST

There were no living things on Mars; that seemed to be for sure. But dormant in the green slime of its canals was a hideous mockery of life that could wait and wait

EAR and Terror. Phobos

and Deimos. Those are the names of Mars’ two little moons in Greek, Fear and _ Terror. Whoever named them showed the same kind of un- canny intuition that inspired Dean Swift, in 1726, in Gul- liver’s Travels, to describe the two satellites of the Red Plan- et with fantastic accuracy al- most 150 years before they were actually discovered.

My doctor. has given me a renewable prescription for sleeping capsules. Not that I have trouble sleeping. They make me sleep deeply enough so that I can’t have night- mares,

i

You know, alien planets are no place for kid stuff, and least of all Mars. But I am getting ahead of myself—. Anyhow, it almost wrecked the first Mars expedition...

“What on earth—or rather, what on Mars—possessed you to do such a fool thing?” snapped Doctor Fordham ir- ritably, The ship’s physician had Jack Hall’s right foot in his lap, and had the first two toes spread apart to examine the skin between them closely.

“Bad case of athlete’s foot,

huh Doc?” answered the navi-

22

gator, with a feeble attempt at humor, Jack was twenty-five, and a damned good navigator

Ky we f i eS fe

s Ea 7, f We 4

cate, Se

24 | SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

—made the first Mars run with the accuracy of a big electronic computer—but ‘sometimes he acted like a kid in his ’teens. We all miss him, but we prefer not to think of him, and talking about him or what happened to him is abso- lutely taboo. I was his best friend, but even I would not care to say that I wish it had happened to me. instead of him. God, no! Even the deep- est friendship doesn’t go that far.

The Doc had that funny mirror with the hole in the center of it over one eye and was examining the skin be- tween Jack’s toes with a mag- nifying glass.

He grunted. “Might be a little more serious than that,” he retorted. He shook his head and reached for a swab and a bottle of silver-protein anti- septic, and rubbed the brown- ish medicine on the deep fis- sure between the toes.

“After all the warnings about alien bacteria and other life forms—to which humans might have no natural resist- ance—you have to go wading

barefoot. in one of those so-

called canals,” he snorted.

At the time, we were all sympathetic toward Jack. Lat- er, we began to fear him like the Black Plague.

You know ofcourse that Mars has some extremes of temperature. During the night it sinks to fifty below zero. But during the daytime it may go up to fifty degrees above, which is not at all uncomfort- able.

We had landed purposely at the planet’s equator to take advantage of the ‘mild’ climate in that region. That meant that we could venture outside the protection of the space ship with no more protection than a leather jacket. And, of

“course, a breathing mask.

The astronomers had been absolutely right in their long- range analysis of Mars’ at- mosphere with their spectro- scopes and other instruments. The oxygen content was only about one sixth of earth’s, so that we had to carry our own oxygen supply with us.

And, naturally, we wore heavy lead attachments on our boots. Since Mars’ gravity is only about one third of earth’s,

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME 25

without them we would have bounced a couple of feet into the air with every step we took,

After a week of cautious ex- ploration and sampling of the

air and soil, the initial exhila-.

ration at being the first men to land on the Red Planet be- gan to wear off. On top of that, Mars is probably the least interesting planet in the Solar System. Nothing but red sand as far as the eye can see, with a few low hills only ac- centuating the dreary monot- ony of the plains.

Here and there were great, shallow patches of grey-green primitive plants, and an occa- sional ‘canal,’ which was real- ly only a thin trickle of mois- ture running off the shallow polar ice-caps.

At night, of course, these

canals froze over;. but during the forty to fifty degree tem- peratures of the equatorial day they thawed out briefly. It was during these thaw periods that you could see the thin layer of green slime at the bot- tom of these puny Martian creeks. 3 Anyhow, at the beginning of

the second week, Jack got im- patient and threw all caution to the winds. He had no as- signment that day, so he found nothing better to do than to remove his weighted boots and heavy woolen socks and go wading barefoot in the shallow stream that ran by a hundred yards from the ship.

“Hey, Bob,’ he called out gleefully over the walky-talky, “come on in. The water’s fine! Sure feels good for burning, tired feet.” And he went wad- ing up and down the shallow stream, sliding his feet along the slimy bottom rather than taking steps that would have sent him bounding into the air. That was his mistake. Who knows—if he had not dragged his bare feet over the bottom...

I hissed urgently into the microphone on the inside of my glass helmet. “Get out of there, you nut, and put on your boots before the Skipper catches you!” :

“O.K., thou brother’s keep- er,’ he crackled laughingly: over the short-wave intercom. ‘ He came. out ofthe stream,‘ dried his feet by walking

26 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

through the fine red sand for a few minutes, and replaced his stockings and boots, just in time to avoid the keen eyes of the Skipper as he rounded one of the hills with an ex- ploration party and headed for the ship’s gaping lock.

I wish to God that the Old Man had seen him, or that I had been G.I. enough to re- port him, at least to the medic. But you cover up things for a buddy, you see? So it wasn’t really my fault, I keep trying to tell myself. So-I paved the

road to Jack’s hell with my

good intentions.

S° it. wasn’t until three days

after the wading episode that Jack reported on_ sick call and showed the raw fis- sure between the first two toes of his right foot. Then it was

that he had’to confess to the:

irresponsible, foolish, kid thing he had done.

Doctor Fordham finished the swabbing and put some gauze over the crack and-ap- plied a small adhesive band- age, then warned him to stay ‘off his feet for several days and to come back to the dis-

pensary for additional oe ment every day.

“That won’t be hard: for you, Hall,” rasped Captain Kramer, “As punishment, you’re confined to quarters for five days. That’s all.” Jack

. hobbled off dejectedly to his

private cubicle.

That evening after chow, when our time was our own, I went to see Jack in his room. He was seated on the bunk with his right foot resting on his left knee, and I was dis- mayed to see that he had re- moved the bandage and was examining the fissure with such concentration that he did not hear me enter. I tapped him on the shoulder.

“Trying to doctor yourself now?” J asked cynically. “Why couldn’t you leave the

dressing on?”

He looked startled and sheepish at first,*then a wor- ried frown creased his fore- head.

“Take a look, Bob.”

I bent over and peered gin- gerly. The surrounding skin was brown, of course, where the medic had applied the an- tiseptic, and.I suppose the

= CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME

crack should have been brown, too. But it wasn’t. It was a de- cided. green.

“Better tell Doctor Ford: hanrabout it,” I said Be ly.

“Heck, no,” he grunted, re- placing the bandage and then pulling on his” stocking. “He probably saw it when he put the guck on it. And anyhow, he’ll see it tomcrrow soon enough.”

I shrugged despairingly at his customary stubbornness and indifference to conse-

' quences. “Suit yourself. It’s your “funeral.”

The following day he re- «ported to the dispensary again as instructed, and I. tagged along out of worry and curios- ity. The Captain. was there, too. He never overlooked or forgot anything. He was,’ nat- urally enough, worried by the possibility of contagion, An outbreak of athlete’s foot on board would seriously cramp further exploration — sorties, -and our rations limited us to just one more week*on Mars. Then it would have to be homeward bound to Earth again.

® 27

The ship’s «physician _ re- moved the dressing gently and exposed the infected region. His sharp intake of air was audible. The Skipper swore a

- soft oath, unusualy for him. I

felt’ a little sick to my stom- ach, myself.

The green patch had spread, and was now visible to me, even at a distance of several feet, as a fine, fuzzy growth, like short, very fine gréen hairs. The medic let out his breath very slowly and looked up at the Captain.

“This man will have to go into quarantine,” he said flat- ly.

Jack grinned pathetically. “Guess I put my foot into it, huh? Hey, that’s a pun, son! Get it? Put my foot in it!”

No one was amused, and the Captain muttered something under: his breath about the fool back at Earth GHQ who had assigned a juvenile delin- quent to the first serious probe into outer space.

The doctor fetched a glass slide and a _ small surgical knife and scraped some of the green. fuzz from between Jack’s toes.

28 @

“Pll want to examine this under the microscope,” he said heavily. ‘Perhaps make a cul- ture, too.” He looked over at Jack with half-angry, half- worried eyes. “With the Cap- tain’s permission, I’m resttict- ing you to your room for an indefinite period. You will keep “your door closed. Your meals will. be brought to you. You are not to leave under any circumstances.

“Instead of coming here to the dispensary, stay in your room—and keep ‘the door locked. No visitors except my- self. I'll come to you when I think it is time for another ex- amination or treatment. Un- derstood?”

The Captain confirmed the doctor’s order curtly, and Jack acknowledge the command with a hang-dog_ expression. He limped off down the gang- way to his room, his shoulders drooping dejectedly. I wanted to follow him to buck up his morale a little, but a warning glance from the Skipper stopped me short.

“He is to be left in strict isolation,’ Captain Kramer warned ‘ominously. “And that

- of Mars’

SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

includes you as well. We don’t want any more casualties, no matter how minor.”

That night, after chow, I managed to pass by his cubi- cle. The door; was closed and locked, but through the round, glass window near the top I could see that Jack was sitting on the edge of his bunk, hold- ing the bandaged foot in one hand and rocking back and forth gently, like a man in pain.

I rapped lightly, surrepti- -

tiously, and he looked up quickly, the grimace of pain giving way to the-boyish*smile I had come to know so well. I made the universally recog-

nized V signal with my first*

two fingers, and moved my lips silently: “Chin up.” He waved back nonchalantly and stabbed toward the ceiling with one thumb.

I found it hard getting to sleep that night. Through the thick porthole of special rein- forced glass-over my bunk, I could see the velvet-black sky thin atmosphere, through which an_ incredible number of brilliant, unwinking stars looked down, cold and

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME : 29

pitiless, at the handful of soft little bipeds that were threat- ening to invade their eternal realm.

The thought came to me that they were not hostile, but regarded our first tentative probing into their infinite gulfs with a vast, cosmic indiffer- ence to our fate, and I shud- dered.

I finally fell asleep, but my slumber was upset by dreams of a familiar figure covered with fine, greenish fuzz from head to foot, with only the eyes recognizable in a feature- less mass of waving green ci- lia, despairing and pleading at the same time.

I woke up about an hour . before the pale Martian dawn broke over the silent red sands, and through the port- hole could see the moon Pho- bos— Fear —racing across the sky in its seven-hour revo- lution about the parent planet, as though being pursued. My pillow was soaked with perspi- ration, j

FTER breakfast in the

mess hall, the Captain, who had sat. hunched and

brooding over his coffee and hot roll, seized me grimly by the arm and led me along the ©

, echoing gangway in the direc-

tion of the dispensary and lab- oratory.

“How well do you know Jack Hall’s family?” he asked softly, and a chill rose slowly up my spine like cold fingers counting each vertebra. I could not miss the implication of the question.

“V-very well,” I stammered. “My folks died in an auto crash when I was eighteen, and his mother and father have been like foster-parents to me.” I looked up into his stern face anxiously, “But why do ‘you ask, sir? Isn’t he— isn’t he going to be all right?”

The Skipper muttered heav- ily, “I don’t know, Bob. It doesn’t look too good. Last night he was in such pain when the doctor dropped in for a final night examination that he had to have a codeine injection. And that damned fungus has spread out to cov- er his entire right foot.

My head reeled and I thought I would lose my breakfast when I thought’ of

30 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

the prophetic dream I had the night before. Jack—my best friend, almost like a brother —turned into a quivering mass of green fungus.. I trembled violently. The Captain noticed it and looked at me with a sudden softening of his gran- ite features.

“Well,” he said with a deep sigh, “that’s what I wanted to know. If we can’t beat this thing—if, mind you—I’d like you to be the one to break the news to his family when we get back to Earth. Can you do that for me?”

I nodded dumbly, stunned

by the sudden turn of affairs.

I still could not completely grasp the possibility that Jack might not be coming home _ with us, back to the green hills and the great swelling oceans and the soft clouds and. skies of Mother Earth? It just _doesn’t happen to your best friend, you see?

I was so lost in my dazed _thoughts that I only came out of my trance when I realized that the Skipper had led me into the. laboratory.

“You. might as well know

.

all the details,” he said heav- ily.

The physician was = atasdiae at one side of the porcelain lab table. Pierce, the ship’s biologist, was -seated at the ta- ble, bent. over a high-power microscope with a fierce: in- tensity of concentration that made him oblivious to our en-

’ try:

We stood silently until he finally tore his eyes away from the instrument and looked up at us, squinting to bring his strained eyes into fo- cus. I noticed a bead of per- spiration running down his brow, and a _ small muscle jumped persistently in his right cheek. His jaws were clenched _ tightly. stood up suddenly and pushed

the chair back and rubbed his -

eyes wearily. The doctor broke the silence

first. “What did you find, Pierce.”

The biologist - shook — his head. “This is no ordinary

fungus growth,” he said slow- ly. “It’s. actually a sort of

lichen—that is, a combination -

of a fungus living in symbiosis with an alga, a combination. of

Then he :

eons

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME ee:

a. simple plant with a primitive animalcule, each helping the other in some way to survive. In this respect it is very much like lichens on Earth. But in

addition the green slime seems |

to carry some kind of giant

protein molecule or spore in a

state of suspended animation.” He looked at the physician. “Youre familiar with the the- oretical structure of genes, vi- ruses, and protein molecules?”

The ship’s medic nodded hesitantly. “To some degree.”

“Good enough,” continued the biologist slowly, as_ if searching for words. “This ' green slime is a triple symbi- osis, if you will. The giant spores seem to have no func- tion, but are merely carried by the lichen as a sort of privi- leged guest, doing nothing it- self, but being nourished and protected.

“Tt is the largest and most complicated protein structure I have ever seen. It looks like a gene—a pattern or template for a much more complicated organism that we have found so far on Mars. I can’t shake off the impression that it is

the seed of something lying dormant.”

The Skipper frowned. “I don’t quite follow you.”

The biologist pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘“Consider,” he said at last, ‘that we have found no higher life forms on the planet. Just the areas of lichens struggling desperately for life in the moist areas near the ‘canals’ and the green scum itself lining the bottom | of the same canals.

“As you know, the life his- tory of Mars has been a short and brief one, compared with Earth’s. Perhaps not in abso- lute time, but by revolution- ary standards, Mars is a very old planet, A dying planet. It went through the cooling proc- ~ ess while our Earth was still a hell of erupting volcanoes and inconceivably violent. earth- quakes, when the air rained fire and the century long storms poured down millions of tons of water that turned into live steam and boiled up- ward again the instant it touched the incandescent sur- face.

“Later on, life appeared in its first primitive forms, and

32 : SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

took billions of years to cul- ‘minate in man, On Mars, this process must have been great- ly condensed and foreshort- ened, and life had to adapt it- self to changing conditions at a much faster rate than it did on earth.

“And as the favorable con- ditions for higher forms of life quickly passed away, life may have been compelled to turn in on itself, to become _ simpler and more compact, in a desperate attempt at surviv- al.

“It may have followed a dwindling spiral, finally wind- ing up as the dormant spores now clinging to existence in the cold, slimy womb of the green lichens at the bottoms

of the canals.”

The biologist paused for thought, polishing his pince- nez. “Last night,” he contin- ued, “I took a sample of the growth scraped off Hall’s foot yesterday by Doctor Fordham here’—he gestured absently toward the medic with one hand— “and incubated it in a warm, nutrient broth. The spores—broke—and_ developed _ into clusters of shapeless pro-

toplasm, like giant amoebas, but died quickly when they ex- hausted the amino acids in the solution,”

His lips tiehtened and I thought he turned somewhat pale, “Then,” he went on, his voice sinking to a whisper, “I tried an experiment. I put some more of- the scrapings into another beaker of nutri- ent, waited until the spores be-

‘gan to grow and burst, and

poured some into a bowl con- taining one of the fish we brought along for test and ex-

perimental purposes. Now, if

you will please step over here to this stand.”

We followed him silently to where a small stand stood in one corner of the lab, covered with a black. cloth. He lifted the cloth with a hand that trembled noticeably, and we all leaned forward to gaze into the fish bowl.

Startled by the sudden light, the goldfish. dashed about erratically in the cloud- ed water, bumping blindly into the glass wall that shut it in.

My ‘stomach churned vio- lently when I saw that green

>

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME 33

fur sprouted from edch finny occupant—thick masses of waving, poisonously green ci-

lia where there should have

been reddish-golden_ scales. And worse -yet, the fish was almost out of its normal stream-lined shape by nodules and bumps that seemed to swell up at random under the furry growth.

I thought of Jack, and of - my. dream, and stared with bulging eyes at the fish-thing in the bowl, and suddenly I was at the other side of the room, leaning over a_ basin and retching violently between sobs of anguish.

I felt a light hand on my shoulder, got myself under control] and turned,. around. The Captain was looking at me with luminous, pitying eyes, “You see,” he said - gently, ‘if we can’t save Hall, some one is going to have to break the news to his family, sparing them the details. All they need know is that he died of an unknown infection indige- nous to Mars.”

“But isn’t there anything

completely distorted °

we can do for him?” I wailed _ despairingly.

The physician broke in. “We are trying everything, from penicillin through the whole gamut of antibiotics, and even the crude, primitive arsenicals used in the early twentieth century against ven- ereal diseases. But as Pierce indicated, the thing is of a semi-virus, semi-gene nature. It insinuates itself into the very cell-structure of the host and converts it to its own pur- poses.

“Anything strong enough to completely destroy the green invader would also be fatal to the host organism.” He spread his hands helplessly. “There is nothing more we can do for . him, except to keep him under sedation and. ease his pain. The horror of it is that, as in rabies, his mind is crystal clear, and will probably re- main that way until—termina-

tion.”

They let me go then, and I staggered rather than walked back to my room. On the way, I passed Jack’s cubicle fur- tively, noticing the red quar- antine sign hung on the door,

34 and was shocked to see that an opaque shield of some kind had been pasted over the glass window from the inside, so that it was no longer possible to peer into the little room or look in on its occupant.

What in God’s name was happening in there? Then I thought I heard a muffled groan from within, and I clapped my hands over my ears and ran to my own room and threw myself face down on the cot, and cried unasham- edly,

post day, although Mar-

tian days are of about the same length as_ Earth’s, seemed of endless duration. I donned my helmet and oxygen mask once and stepped outside the ship, and stumbled about aimlessly through the silent -red sands, and once IJ stood on the bank of the stream where Jack had gone wading in sheer boyish exuberance, and I shook my fist and cursed fu- tilely at the green slime lining the bottom.

I came back into the ship in time for lunch, but had no ap- petite to eat.

During the |

SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

course of the meal, the biolo- gist hurried into the mess hall and whispered something into his Captain’s ear. The Skip- per. turned gray, threw down his napkin and followed the “piologist. I raised myself slow- ly from-the table and followed a few yards behind them. They did not go directy to the lab | as I had thought they would, but stopped first outside Jack’s room.

The Captain extracted a key from his pocket, and the two men slipped. inside, Dur- ing the brief moment the door was opened, I could hear the agonized gasp inside, and then the door was slammed _ shut and the sound was cut off,

I dashed wildly for the dis- pensary, and: almost knocked the ship’s :physician off his feet as he came out, carrying a hypodermic in one hand. I seized him violently by the arms,

“For God’s sake,” I cried out. “What’s going on in that room? What’s happening to Jack? Isn’t there something— anything—that you can do for him?”

The medic was ashen. He

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME 35

shook his head silently, de- tached himself gently but firmly from my grasp and went down the gangway to the sealed room. He knocked on the door twice, and some’ one on the inside let him in quick- ly and slammed the door be- hind him.

I stood there helplessly, with clenched fists, not daring to come closer to that locked room with its terrible secret, and yet frozen to the spot, un- able to move. The door opened again a little later and the three men came out. It was quiet now inside.

The Captain, the doctor and the biologist passed me on the way to the lab, and the Skip- per stopped long enough to suggest that I go tos:my room and stay there. Then the med-

ic said that he thought I ought

to be given a tranquilizer of

some sort, and I followed him _

to the dispensary, where. he shot a hypodermic -into my gluteal muscle, and soon there- after I felt the scothing waves of synthetic peace wash over my feverish brain,

_ The doctor dismissed me, suggesting that now perhaps I

would be able to finish my lunch, and then to go to my room and try to get some rest.

He joined the Captain and the biologist then in the ad- | joining laboratory, and before - I shambled away, I could see through the open doorway that the biologist had raised the cloth covering the goldfish ~ bowl so that the others could look at its occupant.

“My God!” the Captain burst out involentarily, and the physician staggered back was up against one wall and from the bowl until his back his eyes closed as if to shut out what he had just seen, The cloth dropped into place again and I staggered back to my cubicle before they could turn around. and observe me spying on them from the door- way.

Back in my room, the tran- quilizer began to take effect, and the afternoon passed by in a sort of stupefied eupho- ria. I was too drugged to feel anything but a sort of not-un- pleasant numbness in my limbs, and a curious detach- ment, as if my brain had been cut- off from whatever nerve

36 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

tracts bring it the messages of emotion and feeling.

I seem to remember long hours of staring stupidly out the porthole at the endless ex- panses of red sands, and watching with naive, childish pleasure as the small, distant, watery disc of the sun sank below the sharply curved rim of Mars’ foreshortened _hori- zon, turning the sands first into blood red and finally into featureless black.

Sometime in the evening, a kindly crew member brought me my dinner to my room, and I spooned something down mechanically, not knowing or caring what it was I ate. Still later on, when it came time to retire for the night, the doctor appeared again briefly and gave me another shot of tran- quilizer.

He shook his head and firm- ly refused to answer any of my thick-tongued questions about Jack’s condition, and I was almost too numb to resent his refusal. But I could clearly see how haggard and drawn his face was as he bent over me to administer the shot.

Then he pressed me. down

gently on the cot, switched off the light and left me, I plum- meted down into infinite, black gulfs, down into a shaft, and before I reached bottom, I was asleep.

P= hypo wore off, alas, too soon, They must have

expected me to sleep on into the next day, but my nervous system was so keyed up under the covering blanket of drug that I woke up again before the bleak Martian dawn was due to break. Pale light fil- tered down from the jet sky and poked ghostly fingers through the porthole into the silence and pitch-blackness of my room, The darkness and quiet were oppressive, press- ing dowh on me with an al- most angible weight.

I rolled to the edge of my cot and sat up and looked out through the porthole. Deimos — Terror—floated through the night sky like the ghost of a dead planet. Then Phobos appeared on the scene, moving three times as fast as its satel lite sister, moving in the op- posite direction, soon passing it by and dwindling rapidly

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME 37

toward the invisible horizon like a frightened wraith.

I turned on ‘the light and went over to the wash basin and splashed my face and head with cold water. The shock hastened the fading out of the narcotic daze, and I felt my faculties and senses return with sudden keenness. I re- turned to the edge of my cot

and sat with my head in my-

hands, trying to recall the . events of the day before, which seemed to have a

dream-like quality of its own. Then I remembered the lifting of the cloth over the fish bowl, and the exaggerated reactions of the- medic and the ship’s Captain to what they had seen inside it, and I sat up sudden- ly.

I knew I would have to see it for myself, whatever — it might be, no matter how ter- rible. The secrecy was unbear- able. At least I would get a line on what was happening to Jack and how he was progress- ing—if he was. Like the naive fool I was, I thought that the truth, however terrible, was preferable to uncertainty and ignorance and all the formless

fantasies that my lack of knowledge led me to substi- tute for the truth.

I took off my shoes—I had slept fully dressed—and slipped out silently into the semi-dark corridor. I crept on tip-toe, feeling my way along the cool, alloy walls of the passage, listening to the reas- suring sounds of heavy breath- ing and snoring that betokened that the rest of the crew = soundly.

I wondered how many of them knew what had _ hap- pened to Jack. In the mess hall the day before, I had been the focus of many eyes, being Jack’s buddy, and practically everybody had spoken in irri- tating whispers and under- tones. But no one had- ven- tured to question me openly, and it would have done little good in any case, for I knew scarcely more than they did.

I reached the doorway into the dispensary and the lab that’ lay just beyond. The lights were on, and I saw with dismay that ‘Pierce, the biolo- gist, sat in a chair with his

_back toward the door. I. stood

irresolutely, wondering wheth-

38 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

er to return to my room, when I noted the steady, rhythmic rise and fall of his shoulders and heard his heavy breath- ing. I tiptoed forward with in- finite care, holding my breath, until] I came around in front of him and saw that his eyes were closed and his chin rested on his chest. He was sound asleep.

I glided silently past the sleeping sentinel and into the ‘lighted lab beyond the next doorway. I walked up to the fish bow!. I stood-a long mo- ment, the fear of an unbear- able revelation fighting with the desperate desire to know.

I finally reached out with a trembling hand and raised the cloth that covered the little glass tank.

The poor, mishapen mon- strosity that swam feebly in the dirty water was only a nightmare caricature of its former self. It was a longish spheroid of green fur; some of the waving strands now sever- al inches in length. But through the loathesome tangle of matted hair the nodules and

protuberances of the day be-

fore had lengthened and ex-

tended outward from _ the shapeless mass, as if the gold- fish were trying to grow limbs. I bent forward in_ horrified fascination, :

One of the excresences was almost as long as my little fin- ger, and as I peered closer, I could see that it was pinched off, near the body of the fish, to a narrow connecting band that barely joined it to the parent mass. Then, as I watched, stunned and_ sick- ened, the process of matura- tion completed itself suddenly, and the hair-thin connecting link snapped off and the de- tached segment floated free in the water.

It floated free—and then it began to move. It began to move, A mere, shapeless blob at first, it wriggled and con- torted and finally settled down into a crude but recognizable reproduction .of the goldfish to which it had been attached only a minute before. Its eyes were still shut, like a new- born kitten’s, and the fins and tail were only rudimentary, but it moved on its own, and I could even see the primitive gills open and close,

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME 39

I couldn’t help it. I dropped the cloth back into place and let out a strangled cry. I clapped my hands over my mouth, but it was too late. I heard the rush of footsteps, and then the biologist was be- hind me. He seized me by the arm and whirled me around.

“You fool,” he hissed angri- ly, and yet there was a sickly kind of pity in his red-rimmed eyes. “You fool, you ineffable fool! We tried to spare you this. Isn’t it enough that three of us have to carry the bur- den? But no! Fools always rush in where the angels them- selves fear to tread.” He rubbed a weary hand over his lined face. “Well, now you know.”

I seized him by the shoul- ders and shook him. “Know what?” I almost shrieked. He tried to press a_ restraining hand over my mouth, but I ig- nored him.

“Tell me!” I shouted. “What am I supposed to know now?”

He looked at me incredu- lously, then stepped to the fish bowl and raised the cloth

briefly. He nodded to himself, .

as if he had expected what he saw, then dropped the cloth back in place. He faced me again.

“You’ve just seen that,” he murmured unbelievingly, ‘and you still can’t deduce what’s happening to your friend? But no,” he continued pityingly, “your mind won’t let you face the truth.”

“For the love of God,” I cried despairingly, “tell me, tell me! I can’t stand your damned mysteries any long- er!” I seized his arm with a grip that made him wince.

“Listen,” he said with weary patience. “You remem- > ber what I said to the Captain — and Doctor Fordham the other day, in your presence.” =

I ran my fingers through my hair wildly. “Yes. yes, I re- member! But I didn’t—didn’t understand all of it.”

E regarded me out of

dark, somber eyes—eyes in which barely suppressed horror lurked. “You _ recall that I advanced the hypothesis that the spores that seemed to serve no function in the econ- omy of the green slime were

40 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

like the huge, highly complex molecules that comprise the genes of living things, at least as we know them on Earth.

“T suggested that they might be the highly condensed survival form of any and all higher life that might have once lived on this dying, for- saken planet. I also thought that they might be like virus- es, invading the .cells of the host organism and converting them to its own form in order to reproduce.

“Well, I had half of the truth, and the other half was exactly the opposite of what I thought. The invading spores do not reproduce themselves in their own image from the living -protoplasm of the in- fected organism. They adapt themselves. The ultimate form of adaptation, And in this way they perpetuate themselves as an imitation of the parent mass, budding off and then breaking free to live a life of their own.

“JT don’t know yet how much they are really like the organ- ism they duplicate, or what new features of their own they introduce. But at least, in this

way, they can survive and re- produce themselves in any en- vironment that the host organ- ism can live in,

“Perhaps, in the course of time, they mutate and return to the form of life that was dominant on Mars countless ages ago.” He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows? It’s too soon to tell yet.”

I went berserk then. I waved my arms and screamed. “Too soon to tell yet? You cold-blooded, inhuman mon- ster! You know what Jack -is going through, and yet you let him live on! He’s just an ex- periment to you—an interest- ing subject! Why haven’t you put him out of his misery?”

The biologist stared at me, shocked. “Good God, no!” he gasped in horror. “You're all wrong. We have to try to save him, right up to the very end: We don’t have the right to end his life, least of all Doctor Fordham, who took an oath to struggle against disease and death until the matter is taken out of his hands. Don’t you see that?”

“Let me go,” I said hoarse- ly. “I’ve got to go to Jack.

+

CREATURES OF GREEN SLIME 41

I’ve got to help him. Some- body’s got to help him!”

I tried to brush past the bi- ologist, and he seized me by the arm to restrain me. In blind panic and horror I lashed out at his jaw and con- nected violently. He sank to the laboratory floor silently.

I realized suddenly that the door to Jack’s room would be locked, and searched rapidly through his pockets until I found a key with the number of Jack’s cubicle stamped on it. I dashed out of the lab and through the dispensary, and ran head on into the Captain, who must have been awakened by my shouting.

“What the devil—?” he be- gan. I pulled myself together quickly and put on a show of calmness with an immense ef- fort of will. By good fortune, the inert body of the biologist was not visible from the angle of the doorway to the dispen- sary.

“Just been having an argu- ment with Pierce,” I said sheepishly. “I’m afraid I got a little hot-headed.”

He looked at me out of nar- rowed eyes. “Very well,” he

from its

said slowly, “but don’t let it happen again. You can go back to your room now.”

I reached the sealed door to my friend’s room, inserted the key fumblingly, and stumbled into the room. The weak, cold, watery light of the rising sun poured through the porthole and illuminated the thing that writhed and moaned in deliri- um on the cot, and I could see what my friend had turned into.

I screamed until my throat was raw. My screams must have awakened the poor thing final delirium, be- cause the eyes opened in the furry blur of the face and looked at me with recognition. And then when I ceased my screaming and trembling long enough to reach for the heat- ray pistol hanging on the wall and turn the flared muzzle to- ward the remnants of human- ity on the cot, I thought I saw a gleam of gratitude in the feverish, sunken eyes. :

When they finally rushed into the room and seized me, it was too late. I had done the ultimate favor a man can do

42 - SUPER-SC'ENCE FICTION -

_ for his friend, other than lay- ing down his life for him.

They snatched the gun from my limp hand, but the sicken- ing monstrosity had been re- duced, along with its bed of pain, to a mound of blackened _ cinders,

ey say I. was hysterical

for days, raving and crying alternately. All they could do was shoot me full of tranquil- izers, while the rest of the crew almost perished from hunger and thirst waiting un-

til an incubation period had

passed, and no one else showed any signs of being infected. The samples of fungus and the goldfish were disposed of, and the entire interior of the ship was thoroughly scorched with -heat rays and then washed down with the strong- est antiseptics we could find. Eventually we returned to Earth. However, the Captain had to inform Jack’s family after all, veiling the truth in _ vague generalities. How could I have faced his parents? I was twice over his murderer,

once by omission and once by,

commission. J had failed to re- port his childish action that first day out of mistaken loy- alty, and then later I reduced him to ashes. But I’d do it again,

Sometimes the sleeping cap- sules don’t work too well, and I wake screaming from night- mares in which I see him again in his last moments.

Ugh! That naked, shapeless, furry thing huddled on its cot

. The excrescences all over the vague, greenish outline of a man, like huge blisters or carbuncles, The anaesthetic drugs must have gradually lost their potency from continuous use, for he had opened his

fuzz-covered .mouth and

screamed, faintly, for the last time.

And as he screamed, two of the huge carbuncles burst open, just before I rayed him into cinders, and two tiny heads poked up out of the fes- tering wounds—caricatures of the face I had come to know and love—and two tiny voices shrilled in unison.

THE END

jn

~ LOOK TO THE STARS

by SCOTT NEVETS

Blueprints for a power gen- erating station to be built on the moon have been devised by

- a group of Westinghouse en- gineers. The proposed station will resemble a vacuum tube of giant proportions, making use of photoelectric phenomena to

~ manufacture usable electrical power.

To construct the lunar power station, the plan requires that thin plastic sheets be stretched between supports on the moon’s surface. The sheets would be covered with a layer of photo-

sensitive material. about one

micron thick.

Since the moon is without atmosphere, the two surfaces would function as an emitter and collector in a vacuum. Each cell, emitting and collecting electrons when struck by the

- rays of the sun, would generate a few volts, but if several cells were connected in series the device, according to Westing- house, could obtain practically any voltage. Be |

s

43

A “floating island” has been discovered on Jupiter—a for- mation of massive brick-red mountains floating in its at- mosphere. This is reported by a Florida meteorologist who has studied the. giant planet fer years. The area, known as the Great Red Spot, has been un- der observation since the nine- teenth century, but no satisfac- tory explanation of its makeup has ever been offered.

The meteorologist, Dr. Sey- mour- L. Hess, suggests that the Great Red Spot is detached from the solid planet below, and drifts in the thick Jovian at- mosphere. It is a formation some 25,000 miles long and 8.000 miles wide—far bigger than the entire Earth. Dr. Hess has compared the changing ap- pearance of the Spot with cloud flow patterns around the Hima- laya Plateau, and the compari- son reveals so many similarities that he believes the Great Red Spot is indeed an island in Ju- piter’s atmosphere, studded with immense mountains.

THE DAY THE MONSTERS. BROKE LOOSE

by ROBERT SILVERBERG

People were trampled underfoot, people were crunched

by ten-foot teeth in huge, fanged jaws — people died

by the hundreds that day — were eaten like tidbits!

EXT week they’ll be hold- ing the Big Show, the Spectacular of Spectaculars, in Chicago. 150,000 people will beg packed into Soldier Field to watch a couple of alien mon- sters rip each other to shreds. Well, I’m not going to be there, for onces I’m going to be a couple of thousand miles away, in Los Angeles, ‘sitting in a little bar off Wilshire where they don’t have video, and I'll be guzzling syntho- scotch and trying to forget all about my part in next week’s show. I’m the guy who caught the creatures that are going to per- form next Fiveday night. I’m

Jim Barstow of Barstow Ex- pediters, Incorporated. We Bring ’em Back Alive is our motto, shamefully stolen from a great hunter of a couple of centuries ago, and right up un-

‘til our last trip we were con-

sidered the top outfit in our line. But now I want to sell my share and get out of the filthy business while I still have a little piece of my soul left.

We made our first trip to World Twelve of Star System DA-7116- exactly two years ~ ago. Herschel, my booking agent, gave me a buzz on the telestat one morning and said he had landed a fat contract for us. Barstow Expediters

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46 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

_happened to be between jobs at the moment, and I was en- joying the pleasant layoff, but I dbediently came shuttling across the country to New York for the contract inter- view.

We were being hired by J. Franklin Magnus of Magnus Promotions—the number one spectacle-producer of the twen- ty-second century. Magnus was

famous for-the way he threw.

money around. I flew to New York determined to soak him for all he would part with.

We met in his office on the 180th floor of the Universe Building in uptown Manhattan, Magnus was a small, roly-poly man with a deep and probably phoney sun-tan and a thick, stubby mustache died blue ac- cording to the latest fashion. ‘He was wearing a blue-white Sirian diamond the size of a peach. He reeked of wealth.

He offered me some hun- dred-year-old brandy and said, “Sit down, Barstow.” _ ;

I sat. He pulled out photo- graphs in tridim solido and shoved them across the desk at me.

“Know what there are, Bar- stow?”

The tridims showed an ani- mal. A big animal. Somebody had parked a two-man jetflitter in the picture to provide com- parison, and I figured the beast was at least eighty feet high. It stood on two legs the size of treetrunks, only thicker, ending in flat pads. There were four more limbs, but these. were made for grabbing and tearing.

The creature’s head looked like it was all teeth, except for a trio of eyes the size of plat- ters, mounted to swivel in all directions.

I nodded and said, “Sure I know what it is. It’s a beastie called by a Latin name two yards long. It lives on—let me think—World Twelve of Star System DA-7116.”

“Right!” Magnus exclaimed, as if I’d just answered the million-ruble question on a quiz program. Of course, it’s my job to know where the real- ly fierce creatures of the galaxy can be found.

Magnus went ‘on, “I want you to catch me one. of those things, Barstow. I’m going to match it in the arena with a pair of knifeleg killersaurs

THE DAY THE MONSTERS BROKE LOOSE 47

from Procyon Eight.” His eyes were glittering with delight. “Nobody’s ‘ever brought a

~ World Twelve monster back to

Earth alive before. Think ‘you can do it?”

“Ves,” I said. “For a price.”

‘Name it!” =

“How soon do you need the animal?”

“Tomorrow. Next Next month. Anytime!”

week.

I thought for a moment. “The round trip to Star Sys- tem DA-7116 takes nine weeks. Allow two weeks more for catching the beast. I can de- liver within twelve weeks, Magnus. Is that good enough?”

“Splendid!”

“And the price,” I added casually. “I’ve got to figure on the cost of shipping out a three-month expedition. Insur- ance, food, fuel, payroll. Plus margin of profit. I'd say I could supply you with your animal for—oh, in the neigh- borhood of $750,000. If that sounds okay, I can give you a detailed estimate later in the day—”

“Make it $800,000,” he said buoyantly, “and don’t worry about counting the nickels.

Just get me that creature, Barstow!” ~

So we signed the contracts right then and there. I got $250,000. as an advance, the rest to be paid on delivery. De- livery to be made in three months or less, of one adult and healthy creature.

I picked my crew out of the pool of thirty or forty men I use on such expeditions. Seven men, hand-picked, went along ~ with me when we blasted off for Star System DA-7116 four days later.

don’t think historians of the

future are going to be very kind to the twenty-second cen- tury. It was a century of peace, sure—harmony prevailed on Earth and for the first time in aeons no war even loomed on the distant horizon. Earth knew peace.

But, sad to say, there: are various instincts of aggression and hostility bound up in the human psyche, unhappy rem- nants. of ‘our caveman past. And with no war to release these dark emotions, they man- ifested themselves. in other ways. It was a bloody century

48 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

for the entertainment industry. First there was the bullfight craze sweeping the world, but

that soon bored everyone. And_

then the human gladiators, the Roman Revival period, only that was on the shocking side, and the United States finally banned it.

There were steeplechases and jet races and all sorts of other hazardous _ exhibitions. The populace loved the sight of blood. They loved to feel vicarious pain,

Then along came Magnus and the others of his ilk, the monster merchandisers. It seemed that the universe was full of ferocious and ghastly creatures, many of them for- midable in size, Why not, rea- soned these promoters, hire ex- plorers to bring back alien creatures and pit them against each other in the arenas?

So the spectacular contests began. My outfit and a dozen others began to roam the stars, bringing back the wildlife of a thousand worlds. The arenas reeked with alien blood. Green blood, yellow blood. The crowds loved it. They paid ten bucks a seat to watch a giant

\

octopus from Bellatrix VII go at a land-whale from Rigel [IT.

The monsters really packed them in. Guys like J. Franklin Magnus became billionaires promoting the monster con- tests, and guys like me built - up comfortable bank accounts by supplying the raw material for these bloodfests. -

This was-my fortieth col-

~lecting trip. I didn’t want to

think about the tons and tons of monsterflesh I had ferried back to Earth to be ripped apart in the arenas, while a hundred thousand screaming maniacs yelled encouragement from the sidelines and a hun- dred million more sat on the edges of their seats and drooled into their video sets.

We made the thirty-two day outbound trip without any complications,

shuttling into

“ spacewarp on schedule and

shuttling out at the proper time.

“There she is,” said Mickey Delacorte, our navigator, as Star System DA-7116 burst into view on our screens. It was a yellow Sol-type sun, young and hot, orbited by sev-

~

THE DAY THE MONSTERS BROKE LOOSE 49

enteen worlds. The first nine

or ten planets of the system

had never been explored; they were too hot, with temperatures up around three hundred plus, and obviously life had not yet appeared on them.

World Twelve was our baby —Farthtype, though a little bigger, and still_in its infancy as planets go. An exploring team had visited the place five years back; I had a copy of the report. They described the planet as “primitive,” still in the era of giant plants and big animals.

We landed and set up camp next to the ship. The ship was a big one—it had to be, if we were going to transport an eighty-foot-long monster back to Earth in it—but most of the ship: was given up to cargo space and fuel storage, and liv- ing quarters were on_ the cramped side. So we were glad to get out and stretch.

The air was fresh and rea- sonably breathable—a little high on carbon dioxide, but still within our tolerance levels. The sun was up on the side of the planet where we had land- ed, and it was ot; temperature was around 112, the humidity

was tremendous, and sweat poured down our sides \in waves.

We didn’t say much. We had worked together a long time, and we knew our jobs. We were here to catch an animal and get it home, not to see the sights or to collect souvenirs for the museum. So we set about our jobs.

Delacorte and I did the scouting work. We broke out the collapsible two-man _jet- flitter and took off, making a quick reconnaisance tour of the area to find.out if any of our quarry happened to be in the vicinity.

Abrams, the signalman, re- mained in the ship to monitor our dispatches and keep track of us. McDonnell and Webster checked through our hunting equipment, making sure that the force-field projectors were in working order and the blast- er charges renewed. Crosley and Manners busied them- selves with the receiving cham- ber for the big beastie, when we caught him—we would vir- tually split the ship in half the long way, hoist the trussed-up animal into his berth, and close

BO

up the ship again. Anderson, the final man, scouted the area to see how edible the local food was,

Delacorte and I covered about three hundred square miles that afternoon in the flit- ter before we saw what we were looking for. We had spied. plenty of other nasties—a_ snake that must have been a hundred fifty feet long, sun- ning itself by the bank of a river; crocodiles with snouts like boxcars shuttling under the surface of the water; fly- ing creatures with leathery wings that opened~ out wider than the wingspread of our plane; lots of stuff like that. But so far as we were con- cerned these were just ‘small fry.

We were after bigger game. We found it a little while after we saw the snake. °

Delacorte, with his quick eyes, spotted it first. He sucked in his breath and pointed.

eT here!” :

I Looked down. The creature had emerged into a little clear- _ ing in the thick jungle, and he had heard the sound of our en- gines as ‘we circled five hun-

SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

dred to a thousand feet above him, ge SSS

He was glaring up at us and snarling. I estimated that he was close to a hundred feet tall. He was waving his upper set of arms at us as if wishing we would come within reach so he could rip us apart and stuff us down that yawning mouth. His teeth were like shining swords in the bright sun.

Delacorte scribbled our coor- dinates down on a piece of pa- per and shoved them over to me. I clicked on the radio and said, “Abrams, are you getting me?”

“Clear as a bell, Jim.”

“Okay. We’ve found one of Magnus’ little pets.” I gave him the coordinates. “He’s big and he looks mean—just;.the kind we want. Alert the men. I’m going to start driving him toward the ship.”

WE had caught plenty of “" big boys before, though never quite. such a behemoth as this. The procedure was the same as always, though. First find your prey, then drive it

‘toward the ship, then immo-

bilize and capture. There was

-

THE DAY THE MONSTERS BROKE LOOSE 51

no sense slapping the monster down with a force-field way out here, and then having to transport a couple of dozen tons of flesh overland for fifty or a hundred miles. We couldn’t bring the ship to the monster; the next best thing was to bring the monster to the ship.

Delacorte got on the controls of the jetflitter, and I handled the artillery. This part of the operation was always tricky, and I liked to take care of it personally.

One thing I didn’t want to do was dump a bomb right onto the beast and kill or maim it. I just wanted to attract its attention, was all,

I racked the implosion bombs out over the dropping bay and squeezed the first one ~ down. I wanted to put it just back of the big boy, and I succeeded. It landed two hun- dred yards behind the mon- ster, in some thick shrubbery, and detonated with a quick inward swooshing sound fol- lowed by a loud clap.

The monster jumped for- ward cagily and snarled at our flitter above him. I had Dela-

corte take another swoop around behind the beast and‘ I dropped two more bombs in quick succession,

Then we lit out shipward, and the thoroughly angry mon- ster followed us.

“Cut the altitude to three

-hundred feet,” I ordered. “Just

skim the treetops.”

The flitter dropped. I looked through the rear windows and saw the beast bashing along through the underbrush on our trail. We hovered in place with the rotors until the animal had caught up with us. We hung, no more than a couple of hundred feet - above that yawning mouthful of yellowish swords, while the beast bel- lowed and clawed at the sky and implored us to come with- in reach. ;

I gave it a little peppering with our light machine-gun— solid pellets, strong enough to. tickle and annoy him without messing up his hide, The crea- ture howled and ripped up a

‘couple of tree trunks to wave at

us.

“Okay,” I told Delacorte. “Start heading toward the ship again.”

And so it went, over the

52 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

twenty miles that separated us from the landing area. Out lit- tle jetflitter danced in and out of the monster’s path while I dropped implosion bombs, fired guns, and otherwise worked hard to distract and enrage the beast. He followed along, get- ting angrier and angrier, prob- ably thinking he was pursuing some new and troublesome kind of insect. He didn’t know it, but we were leading him right into the jaws of a trap.

When we were a couple of miles from the ship I radioed ahead, warning the men to get ready. By this time I hoped McDonnell and Webster had checked out all the force-field projectors and had them set up ready for use. If this baby burst onto the clearing before they were prepared to nail him, our expedition would come crashing down into ignominious fiascohood.

I got Abrams:

confirmation from everything was set

and in readiness. They were on™

their toes and waiting for our pet to appear.

As we approached the ship area, with the creature in anx- ious pursuit, I racked in the

_ remaining ‘and brought our

bombs secondary weapon. into use: gas bombs. We had devised these bombs specially for use against crea- tures of this size.

The gas was a light one that never got closer to the ground than forty or fifty feet. It hung in a thick cloud around the monster’s head, generally slow- ing him down considerably, but left the operators on ground- side with free and unhindered vision so they could carry out the trapping job.

implosion

As Delacorte piloted us into the clearing where we had set up our camp, I nudged the ejector and a gas bomb went through the bay. I scored a direct hit; the bomb landed athwart the monster’s skull, and a moment later a blinding cloud of dense, oily gas swirled around him. Above the noise of the jetflitter’s engines I could hear the anguished roar of the maddened beast. I saw mighty arms threshing as he tried fruitlessly to sweep away the gas that clung to him,

The beast stumbled around in confused circles. I signalled Delacorte and he lifted the flit-

THE DAY THE MONSTERS BROKE LOOSE 53

ter up to the thousand-foot level, where we ran no risk of getting ourselves entangled in groundside activities. I saw our men running around near the ship, manning the force-field projectors.

Then they came into play. Four projectors at once went into operation, and_ green beams of light converged on the monster, wrapping him in an impenetrable cocoon of neutronic force. We were bag- ging the ninety-foot giant as simply as if we were out net- ting butterflies on a balmy summer day.

Within minutes the confused and baffled beast was utterly and hopelessly bottled up. He came topping down to the ground, falling like a mighty oak, and I knew the worst was over.

“Bring us down,’ I told Delacorte.

By the time I leaped from the hatch of the jetflitter’s cockpit, ten minutes later, my team had already done a quite efficient job. The monster lay prostrate, totally hemmed in by the force-field. We could glimpse his blazing, furious

eyes through the mistiness of the neutronic field that bound him.

Anderson and Webster were busily rigging the hoist, while the others were occupied in opening the ship and preparing the hold to receive its burden. The entire operation took no more than two hours.

The crane creaked and com- plained, but got the beast off the ground and into the wait- ing chamber. Manners super- vised the closing of the ship after the atmospheric pumps had done their job. The mon- ster was locked up in the heart of our ship. We had taken less than a day of our scheduled two weeks for the catch,

The next morning we blasted off for Earth, having taken aboard in the — meanwhile enough raw meat to content the pinioned and imprisoned mon- ster for the four and a half week journey home. We didn’t congratulate each other on a job well done. We had been to- gether too- long for stuff like that. ‘

One thing we knew, and knew silently: we had captured a jungle monarch and we were

i

54 _~ SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

taking him trussed back to Earth to meet a grisly fate in a public arena. We had cap- tured a lord of a primitive world, and we were fetching him to satisfy the blood-lust of a bunch of over-fed, over-civil- ized Earthmen.

It wasn’t a pretty thing we had done. But what the hell, we each told ourselves in si- lent rationalization. If we hadn’t done it, someone else would have. It wasn’t much of an excuse, but we tried to satisfy our consciences with it.

JHE monster caused a stir when we landed it on Earth, naturally. It was the biggest alien being ever trans- ported alive from its home world to the Solar System:

It measured 92 feet ftom the flaming red crest at the top of its skull to its flat pads. We _ didn’t have any way of deter- mining its weight, but we es- timated something in the neigh- borhood of twenty tons. It gobbled up a ton of fresh meat a day by way of food.

Magnus gave us the big, wel- come—and the big-check, too. Much fuss was made. As ar-

ranged, we delivered the mon- ster to Magnus’ animal ranch in Nevada; the show itself was to be held at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena,

The advertising splash was colossal. Two bloodthirsty

knifeleg killersaurs were being -

groomed to fight our boy. The killersaurs, which came from Procyon Eight, grew to about thirty feet in height, and the lower halves of. their bodies were studded with razor-keen spines. They were considered the most ferocious creatures. in the galaxy, and my outfit had imported fifteen or twenty of them for various. promoters. They were automatic smash hits whenever they fought. ©

Magnus was putting two of

them up against the beast from World Twelve—which might result in a collaborative effort that would bring the huge ani- mal down, or which might turn into a tremendous free-for-all with no holds barred and all three beasts out for blood. Magnus had the best public- relations men in the trade, and he succeeded in getting the public worked. up about the contest to such an extent. that

THE DAY THE MONSTERS BROKE LOOSE

hardly anyone talked about anything else for the month between the time of our arrival and the day of the fight.

The Rose Bowl’s 110,000 -

seats were booked solid; Mag- nus had peddled the seats at twenty bucks a throw, and word was getting around that some of the tickets had been changing hands privately for as much as three and four hun-

dred dollars. He sold the world ©

video rights for a sum way up in the millions. Oh, Magnus was getting a good return on his $800,000 investment, that was for sure!

The day of the fight was typical Southern California weather: dry, sunny, beautiful. Pasadena and Los Angeles were mobbed. The special con- voy of armored trucks had fetched the animals in from Magnus’ Nevada ranch the night before. They weren’t be- ing fed at all the day of the fight, to sharpen their appe- tites. -

r Magnus provided me with a good seat, midway up the Bowl where I could get a good view of what was going on. I had been tempted to sell my

-*

_the

55

ticket, in view of the current

going price for them, but de- cided against it. It would have looked bad.

Custom dictated that the promoter set aside a certain number of seats for. the in- trepid trappers who supplied him with his animals, and I knew I was supposed to be there to give the event a little extra twist, as if anything ex- tra was needed.

McDonnell drove me out to the Bowl from his place in Santa Monica. We were all seated in the same section that

afternoon, Crosley’ and Man-

ners and Anderson and Dela- corte and Websier and McDon- nell and Abrams and me, the men who had brought the big beast ;back. Marty Beaumont was theshunter who had caught killersaurs for Magnus. Marty and I shook hands for the benefit of the video cam- era before the show began, and exchanged a couple of insin- cere words about the produc- tion. :

ae

T two o’clock the show got under way with the pre- lim. It was an encounter be- tween a Martian sandbat and

56 ; SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

a maneater cat from Venus, just something to whip up some excitement and put the smell of blood in the air. It lasted ten minutes. The maneater cat, which looked like a tiger with horns, did its best to claw the sandbat to shreds, but the bat managed to flutter out of harm’s way—the heavier grav- itation of Earth kept it from getting actually off the ground —and finally it opened its wings, folded them like a shroud around the cat, and made the kill.

When the arena was cleared, there was a fanfare and a gasp from the crowd, and the east gate was pulled open. A long moment of anxiety. Then one of the killersaurs came bound- ing out into the arena.::

The audience shrieked with delight and horror. An invisi- ble barrier of neutronic force surrounded the combat area to prevent any rambunctious beast from hopping into the audience—but because the bar- rier is invisible, the people down in the front rows often get qualms when they see something hopping around not very far from them and with

no apparent restraining wall, The killersaur was a real horror. It was a thirty-footer, with a full set of claws, spines, horns, and other implements for cutting, rending, and tear- ing. It galloped around the empty arena, snorting, pawing dirt, and just about doing eve- rything but breathing fire.

The audience watched it for a while. Magnus had timed it just right. As soon as the audi- ence had decided that there couldn’t be anything in the uni-’ verse more terrifying than a killersaur, the west gate swung open and out came the monster of World Twelve.

God, it looked big in that arena! -It stood up to its full ninety-foot height and roared in anger and hatred, and you could hear the hush of horror that passed through the 110,000 onlookers and the hun- dreds of millions around the world who were viewing this scene on their video screens.

It caught sight of the killer- saur. The killersaur glared back. The killersaur was big” and mean-looking, but it looked like a puppy-dog next to our boy.

~ THE DAY THE MONSTERS BROKE LOOSE 57

Then the east gate opened. The second killersaur came prancing out. Someone in the crowd screamed. The trumpets went off like the last call of Gabriel, and the battle was on.

HE killersaurs. didn’t seem certain whether to make for each other or for the big fellow. The monster of World Twelve

lit out for them both, though. -

All three came together in the center gf the arena. The killersaurs realized where their danger lay, and set about try- ing to slash the legs of the giant. For a moment I figured it would be all over in a few minutes: I saw the giant form of our monster towering up in the middle of the field, with the two killersaurs burrowing away at his legs with their tusks.

Then the monster reached down, picked up one of the killersaurs—picked up a beast weighing five tons!—and start- ed to rip it into chunks.

It had to give up that idea when the other killersaur clamped its teeth on a huge leg and started gnawing. But I realized with some relief that

those killersaurs weren’t going to last long.

It was all over in fifteen minutes. The monster’ from World Twelve was just too big and too smart for the killer- saurs. It got its hands into their mouths and’ split their jaws open; then. it lifted them and crashed them down a few times on the ground.

There was blood_ every- where, and most of it was thick black killersaur blood. The crowd screamed in delight as the monster relentlessly mas- sacred two of the fiercest beasts in the universe. They were really getting their mon- ey’s worth,

And then they got something that they weren’t expecting for the price of admission.

The monster got tired of kicking the pieces of killer- saur around the arena. He had eaten all he wanted, and the show had degenerated into a bloodbath. I figured that any minute Magnus’ attendants would come out with the force- field projectors and recapture the monster for use some other time.

But the monster picked up

58 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

and headed for the audience. It charged the: far section, down near the end of the field. I watched, confident that the force-field barriers would bounce it back. Then I gasped as the monster went ploughing

through the place where the - force-field barrier was — sup- posed to be, and plunged on over the embankment into the bleachers, climbing merrily to- ward the rim of the Rose Bowl and crushing half a dozen peo- ple underfoot with each stride!

I’ve never heard such a wail

of horror as went up when that beast broke loose in the Bowl. I got up and started running for the exit, and a hundred thousand other people got the same idea. The band tried to play to calm people down, but it was no good. There was a mass exodus. I was swept out with all the others. Once I looked back and saw the monster poised at the edge of the Bowl, peering down into the parking lot.

Then the force-field projec- tors were wheeled out, and green flares of neutronic force burst over the field, and the beast was immobilized before it

could get out of the Rose Bowl. A plane standing by flew over and blasted the monster’s head off. By that time I was outside the Rose Bowl, part of the swirling, hysterical mob that had fled when the creature broke loose.

The people sitting at home at their video sets saw a sight that afternoon that they won’t ever forget. Two hundred peo- ple died before the monster was brought under control, Ten thousand suffered injuries in the mad rush of panic that fol- lowed.

It was quite a finale. What I couldn’t understand was how the creature had gotten through the barriers in the

first place. A month later, when every- thing had calmed down and sanity had returned, I got another call from my agent, telling me to come to New York and talk contract with Magnus.

Magnus had survived the de- bacle of his Rose Bowl show. There had been loud talk of a Congressional investigation of the tragedy, but the promoters

THE DAY THE MONSTERS BROKE LOOSE 59

got together and smeared enough money around to quiet things down. Word went forth that there had been a once-in- a-lifetime failure of the force- field just at the moment when our monster decided to go ram- paging through the crowd. It could never happen again, the public was told.

And the public listened. Two weeks after the Rose Bowl af- fair, another spectacular was staged at the Indianapolis Speedway by one of Magnus’ competitors, and two hundred thousand people turned out to watch a couple of Arcturan centipedes fifty feet long slug it out.

I flew to Magnus’ place and Magnus had a check waiting for me, all made out. He hand- ed it to me. I looked at it. It was for $1,500,000.

“What’s this?” I asked.

He smiled smugly. “I want you to go back to World Twelve of Star System DA- 7116, Barstow. I want you to bring me two of those beasts. I’m planning to match them against each other in the show . of the century!”

“Two of them?”

“That’s right.” His eyes were gleaming with excitement. “It'll _ be fantastic. We've - booked Soldier Field in Chica- go already. Can you-do it?” _

“The price is right,” I said. “T won’t disappoint you.”

So we outfitted another ex- pedition, two ships this time, and trundled off to Star Sys- tem DA-7116 once again. I couldn’t argue with a million and a half bucks. We caught the two beasts after some minor complications. -They were smaller than the first one —only about seventy-five feet high, though that was enough —and two of my men got killed in the hunt. But we stuck to our motto, and we brought ’em back alive.

Two of them.

I delivered them to Magnus amid much fanfare and hoopla, and he paid as agreed. The prometion got under way im- mediately. The show of shows, he proclaimed. A fight to the: death by the biggest creatures of the galaxy!

There was one thing I want-_ ed to know, though. I asked Magnus about it the week be-

_ fore the show.

60 - SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

I said, ‘These tickets you gave me—they’re pretty close to the arena, Magnus.”

“So? Are you afraid? Bar- stow, the intrepid hunter, afraid?”

“I was in the Rose Bowl when that other beast broke out,” I told him. “I don’t mind hunting down monsters’ on alien worlds. But I don’t like fighting for my life in a pan- icky mob, If those force-fields happen to give way again—”

-“Oh, they won’t,” Magnus assured me. “Not this time. We don’t want that happening too often or itll give the sport a bad name.”

“What do you mean—not too often?”

He had made a slip, and he knew it. “Well—that is—”

“You mean to say, Magnus, that you can let something like that happen again?”

That was when he gave me the spiel. He told me all about it, the new concept in public entertainment that he had worked out.

It seemed, according to Magnus, that the public was losing its interest in great spec-

tacles. That the novelty had |

worn off, and within another couple of years or maybe less the entire kick would be gone.

So J. Franklin Magnus had thought up a new kick, all by himself.

Make the show risky. Scare the spectators. They won’t be spectators any more; they'll sit in their seats wondering when the monsters are going to get tired of battering each other and decide to light out

after the onlookers. It took the

vicarious element out of the game. Now, every man took his life in his hands when he plunked down his money and bought a seat.

Yes, that’s right. Magnus deliberately permitted the Monster of World Twelve to get out into the audience. The invisible force-barriers had been shut off the moment the killersaurs were dead.

“What do you think of it?” he finished up. ‘The spectators will never know whether they’re protected or not. They experience constant anxiety. How’s that for a kick? It’s something the ancient Romans never thought of!”

I looked coldly at him. I realized it didn’t make any

THE DAY THE MONSTERS BROKE LOOSE 61

sense saying anything, scream- ing to the authorities, raising any fuss at all. Magnus knew what he was doing. The public wanted this kind of entertain- ment nowadays, They would pay and pay through the nose for the chance to sit in a stadi- um and possibly be trampled down or slashed by a runaway killersaur. Maybe eventually they would shut off the force- barriers all the time, and make no pretense about anything.

I shook my head and took the block of tickets Magnus had given me out of my pocket. I handed them back to him.

“Here,” I said. “Take them.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you want them?”

“I’m not going to be there,” T said.

“Now, hold on! I told you there wouldn’t be any danger this time, and—”

I didn’t listen, I got up and walked out, and I flew back across the country to Los An-

geles, and now I’m trying to sell my share in Barstow Ex- pediters and get the hell out of the monster-catching business while my soul is intact. I see the direction we’re travelling in, and I don’t like it. The next step is. just to turn monsters loose in big cities, for kicks. For laughs.

So here I am. Next week they’ll be holding the Big Show, the Spectacular of Spec- taculars, out in Chicago. I won’t be there. I'll be sitting in a little bar off Wilshire where video isn’t allowed, and I'll be sipping synthoscotch and trying to forget. While halfway across the continent two seven- ty-five foot monsters will kill each other.

“T give the public what it wants,” Magnus says. Maybe he’s right. But I hope to hell

‘ that he’s the first to get ripped

apart, the next time a monster busts loose,

THE END

Sa or

BEASTS OF _ NIGHTMARE HORROR

by RICHARD F. WATSON

NOVELETTE

illustrated by EMSH

The monsters were far too fantastic, far too weird to be real. They were like evil dreams come to life.- Yet they caused real terror, real destruction, real death!

Ss strange monsters made

their first appearance on what was-otherwise a pleasant early spring afternoon on the Terran colony-world of Camer- on. Cameron had been settled three years before; its popula- tion consisted of some. five thousand hard-working settlers. They had built themselves a neat, in the heart of the fertile plain

well-constructed village ~

of Cameron’s largest continent,

and for three years the colo- nists had known no trouble. Then, out of nowhere, the monsters came.

62

They were first seen at the western edge of town by a ten- year-old colonist named Jim- my Wellington. Jimmy had finished his classes for the day and was on his way home to put away his books and go out to help his father in the fields. On a young colony-world like Cameron, there was little lei- sure time for anyone old enough to man a power-spade or guide an electroplow.

He was twenty feet from the front door of his family’s plastic-extrusion dwelling bub: ble when an unexpected shad-

63

64 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

ow passed overhead—the effect of a great cloud cutting off the light of Cameron’s sun, perhaps, except that on Camer- on clouds were rare events. Startled, Jimmy looked up. The “cloud” had passed by. And it was no cloud. It was, he saw with astonishment, some gigantic flying creature, wing- ing eastward over the village.

Jimmy gasped. The crea- ture’s wingspread was at least fifty feet. Its wings were broad leathery expanses, dull red in color, pumping effortlessly up and down in lazy sweeps. Set between the huge wings was the body: short and thick, bright yellow in color, with two rend- ing claws and an enormous beak. Jimmy caught a glimpse of crimson eyes and a forked blue tongue. Then the creature was gone, its shadow floating beneath over the houses of the colony like a faithful compan- jon.

It was a stunning sight. Sup- posedly Cameron had no large forms of life at all. At least, in three years none had ever been discovered. There were a few small mammals, no bigger than rats or squirrels, and the

seas held fairly large fish. But

_nothing the size of the flying

creature had ever been seen on Cameron before.

And then Jimmy turned. to see the other monsters—

Four of them, marching with steady tread down the broad street. In the lead was a bulky creature taller than the tallest bubble-house on the block. It ambled along on four enor- mously thick legs that ended in flat pads. Horns a dozen feet long sprouted above its immense eyes. Gleaming yel- low tusks projected from its vast opening of a mouth, The beast was covered with short, stiff green fur.

Close behind came a two- legged one, almost as tall, with drooling lips and savage claws. On the ground crawled some- thing like a serpent with a hun- dred legs, twenty feet long, whose yawning mouth dis- played a frightening array of razor-sharp teeth,

The final creature was even more terrifying: a smaller creature, no more than ten feet high, with ropy tentacles growing in clusters of six from each shoulder, and a face that

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR | 65

writhed with wriggling blue projections that looked like

_ “worms.

IMMY stared, goggling with

bewilderment, at the crea- tures trooping down the quiet street toward him. They were less than a block away. The Street was empty; everyone was either at work in the fields or else downtown doing con- struction work or administra- tive jobs. Jimmy let his books drop unheeded to the ground and sprinted frantically for the entranceway to his home.

He burst through the swing- ing hatch and bolted it behind him. Heart pounding, eyes wide with disbelief, Jimmy snatched up the phone and cranked the handle for the operator.

She answered, after a mo- ment. “Downtown. What is it, please, 403?”

Jimmy said, “Miss: Bryson, this is Jimmy Wellington. I’ve got to talk to Colony Director Majeski.» The most horrible sorts of monsters are coming down Cleveland Street—”

In the small town that the Cameron colony really was, everyone knew everyone else

‘fairly well. The telephone oper-

ator said in reproachful tones, “Jimmy, you ought to know ~ better than to waste Mr. Ma- jeski’s, time with silly fibs! And I always thought you were such a good boy, too. If your parents heard you were spread- ing silly rumors like—”

“Look, Miss Bryson, there really are big animals coming down-Cleveland Street. They’re right outside my house right now.”

“Jimmy—”

Sweat cascaded down the boy’s neck -and_ shoulders. Through the front window he could see the creatures clearly, outside the house. They had gathered round the bubble- dwelling across the street, the home of*the Jenkinses, and they were prodding at it in- quisitively. Jimmy prayed that the Jenkinses were out in the fields, and not at home. The big one with the horns and tusks was trying to push the house over.

Fighting to keep his teeth from chattering with terror, the boy said, “They’re right outside now. Pushing over the Jenkins house. There’s a big

66 : SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

one with tusks, and a slithery one with a lot of legs, and something with wings flew past a few minutes ago—”

The operator began to say something, suddenly screamed, and the phone went dead. Jim- my stared at the useless re- ceiver for a moment, cranked the phone fruitlessly, and fi- nally hung up. Looking out the window, he saw that the mon- sters had finished with the Jenkins bubble-house—it was an upended ruin now—and had moved on, proceeding in steady fashion down Cleveland Street to the more populous section of the colony.

The phone had gone dead because the operator’s atten- tion had been distracted by a sudden shape drifting past the window of her cubicle in the Cameron Communications Cen- ter. The flying beast, advance guard of the marauding mon- sters, had winged past her window, peered inquisitively in, and flapped on past.

Miss Bryson knew that the first rule in tending a switch- board is to remain on duty, no matter what happens. But this was an exceptional circum-

stance. She ran to the window. The immense beast was Cit. - cling over Liberty Square. It was swooping—

People who had been peacé- fully going about their business in the street below now scat~ tered, running for their lives. As Miss Bryson _ watched, chilled, the flying monster made a diving attack, seized someone in-its gnarled talons, and shot upward again, until it was only a winged blur against the brightness of the sun. 2

She ran back to her switch« board. The board was bright with calls, now, but she ignored them. ‘Hastily she plugged in the jack that contacted her with the office of Colony Di- rector Majeski, five blocks away on Jefferson Street.

Majeski snatched up the phone impatiently. He was @ big man, with enormous phys- ical strength and a virtually limitless capacity for hard work, who had veen in charge of the colony since its incep- tion. He picked up the phone with his left hand, continuing to scribble notes about future expansion plans with -his right.

¢

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR 67

“Majeski speaking.”

“Helene Bryson at Commu- nication Center. We’ve been invaded, Director Majeski! Terrible monsters—man killed in Liberty Square—things prowling on Cleveland Street— big one with wings—”

“Whoa! Hold it! Hold it, Helene! Have you gone out of your wits?”

“Tt was awful,” the girl gab- bled. “Jimmy Wellington called, said he saw monsters near his house. I didn’t believe him, of course. But then this— this thing looked in my win- dow, some sort of flying mon- ster the size of a house, and then it swooped down on the Square and grabbed somebody up and flew away with him—”

Majeski wasted no time tell- ing the girl her story was im- possible. He knew. that Helene Bryson was too sensible to be peddling hallucinations, and, in any event, if her story were true quick action would be needed.

He said sharply, “Okay. Get off the wire and find me Police Chief Eames on the double.”

The phone clicked. A mo- ment later the voice of the

colony’s police chief said, “I tried_to get you before, . boss, but the line was busy. Some kind of crazy monster just grabbed up Mike Carter and flew away with him. And the people at the west end of town are going crazy—more mon-

sters up there, ripping up houses—”’ “All right,” Majeski said.

“Try to keep things calm. Sound a general alarm and get your men assembled. Dust off the guns and we'll start fight- ing back.”

ig the short history of the -

Cameron colony, there had never been a major emergency. Never a famine, never an epi- demic, and certainly never an onslaught of hostile alien beasts. The colonists were caught unprepared.

There was no armed force, only a twenty-man police corps that served chiefly as a roving accident-prevention outfit, since there was no such thing | as crime in the colony. Crime is a rarity in any young colony.

The police corps had a few large weapons—medium-range tactical guns—but, except for

.

68 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

the semi-annual drills required by law, they had never had oc- casion to use the artillery. Now they gathered, cradling the unfamiliar weapons under their arms. The general alarm had sounded, wailing out over the farmland, and the colonists had come in from the fields to see what was the matter.

There was no sign of the flying creature. But the other four had continued their steady advance down Cleveland Street, marching west to east across the town. As.they went, they destroyed and ruined and killed when they could. Ob- servers with - communicator units broadcast a running re- port of the creatures’ where- abouts.

The police corps advanced, reinforced by as many of the colonists as could use guns. A small army of nearly a hun- dred stalked up Cleveland Street, led by Majeski and Po- lice Chief Eames.

“Lord,” Eames breathed. “There they are!”

They were plainly visible now—four enormous creatures that looked as though they had stepped out of a nightmare or

out of some fantastic tridim- film. Even at a distance of half a mile, their loud rumbling bellows were plainly audible.

Majeski turned to the de- fenders. “Okay. We'll stop here and wait for them.”

The little army dug in, set- ting. up artillery. Behind them, the townspeople watched grim- ly.

When the nearest of the monsters was a quarter of a mile away, Majeski gave the order to fire. A gleaming mor- tar shell arched into the air, aimed straight and true. The monster made no attempt to avoid the shell. It waited for it, even though .obviously the trajectory would carry right through its hideous body.

Suddenly—as the shell reached its target—the mon- ster flickered. Its very exis- tence seemed to cease for a mo- ment; it returned, wavy and immaterial, and instants later the shell crashed to the ground a hundred yards behind it, throwing up a tremendous bar- rage of shattered pavement.

Eames gasped. “Damned if’ the shell didn’t pass right through the beast!”

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR 69

“Fire another round,” Ma- jeski ordered.

Another round was fired— and another, and another, . While the men with rifles pep- pered away at the eyes of the approaching beasts. But the weapons did not avail. They passed impotently through the bodies of the creatures, land- ing and doing real damage to the street behind them.

And still the animals ad- vanced. Now they were less than a hundred feet away. Seizing a rifle from one of his men, Majeski fired again and again, with a kind of hopless desperation.

At his side, Eames whis- pered, ‘“We’d better fall back. Those things can’t be stopped!”

And indeed they aad not. But before Majeski could. give the order to drop back, the creatures had reached them— and went right on through. It was as if they were images painted on the air, rather than solid beings. They drifted past the colonists and continued on their way.

Majeski signalled for a halt in firing. “We’re only wreck-

/

ing our streets, and the crea- tures don’t seem to suffer.”

But suddenly a shadow ap- peared overhead—the fifth monster, the winged one. It was plunging downward toward the assembled band of colo- nists. There was no time for anyone to move. Majeski took one startled step; then he felt the pressure of the air dis- turbed bythe beating of the great wings, stared for a mo- ment into mdlevolent crimson eyes—and then Police Chief Eames was gone, snatched away from Majeski’s _ side. Looking up, the Colony Direc- tor saw Eames writhing in the grasp of the talons, already © five hundred feet above the ground.

“Quick! Fire at it!” Ma- jeski ordered.

“But the Chief—” someone protested.

“He’s as good as dead al- ready,” Majeski_ ordered. “Fire!”

Reluctantly, the men opened fire. And an incredible thing happened. As the shells ap- proached the upsweeping mon- ster, it too wavered and seemed to become transparent. Police

70 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

Chief Eames, released, plunged downward, The shells dropped back to the ground, exploding and scattering the watchers. And, when the barrage had ended, the flying creature had _ solidified again and flew in de- fiant circles many hundreds of feet above the ground.

| ee that day, when the

strange invaders had gone, the people of Cameron took stock of their losses. Night was “.coming;-the big moon glinted in the sky, and the smaller one was just beginning to rise. Or- dinarily the nights when both moons were in the skies of Cameron were festive nights, when people stood outside staring at the glory of the heavens, and lovers nestled in each others’ arms in the fields. But tonight no one noticed the ‘beauty of the sky.

The monsters had gone as suddenly and as -strangely as they had come—simply wink- ing out of existence, vanishing as if into a pocket of invisibili- ty. But they had left behind a trail of death and chaos.

_ Fifteen colonists were dead. Two had been carried up by

the winged monster and re- leased high above the ground— Eames and Parker. ‘The re- maining thirteen had been killed by the wandering marauders as they pursued their eastward way through the village.

Nearly thirty homes had been partially or completely destroyed by the invaders. A dozen other: homes had been damaged by the colonists’ own shells as they passed through the monsters. And the damage to the streets caused by the useless shelling would take many months to repair, and would--remove many useful workers from the task of ex- panding the colony.

The colonists met that night in their town hall to discuss the frightening situation. Dur- ing that afternoon Majeski had ordered all building and con- struction bodied men were placed on immediate militia call.

During the town meeting, a hundred men roamed the vil- lage, armed with tactical weap- ons and carrying communica- tors, in case the monsters should make an unheralded re-

halted; all able-—

~ . BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR 7\

turn visit. Even if weapons were useless against them, the colonists had to remain on guard lest they be taken again by surprise.

At the rostrum, the colony’s leaders discussed the bewilder- ing invasion.

“T think it’s an invasion from some other continent of Camer- on,” suggested Martin Baird, the colony’s chief medical man. “The survey scouts ex- amined this part of our planet pretty thoroughly before they recommended it for human colonization, and they didn’t report seeing any. such animals of the size we saw today. Per- haps these creatures were lurk- ing on the other side of the sea, and came across to try to drive us out.”

Paul McAfrey, head of the colony’s construction. teams, shook his head. “I disagree, Martin. The survey scouts took a good look at all the conti- nents of Cameron before we came here. And they reported that the place was not inhabit- ed by any form of large animal life. I don’t see how they could have overlooked beasts so big.

My guess is that it’s an inva-

sion from some Other planet.” Colony Director Majeski

-broke in to say, “It doesn’t

matter much where the crea- tures came from, at the mo- ment. What we have to decide is what to do if they come back for another visit. —

“Ts there anything we can do?” Martin Baird asked in a pessimistic tone.

“I don’t. know,” said heavily. “Our guns didn’t do any harm to them. All we achieved was the blowing up - of our own streets.”

“The creatures seem to exist on two states of matter,” said the colony’s scientific leader, Henry Brickman. ‘When they’re in the normal state, they can do damage—and pre- sumably they can be destroyed. But the moment we try to de- - stroy them, they shift to that state of non-matter, and our shells go right through them.”

“At least they can’t do any damage_ themselves while they’re in the non-matter state,” McAfrey pointed out.

“But we can’t very well keep up a constant bombardment,” said Brickman. “For.one thing, we don’t have enough ammuni-

Majeski —

72 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

tion for the kind of perpetual barrage we’d need. For anoth- er, our shells do damage when they, land. If we don’t shoot at the monsters, they remain in normal state and kill our peo- ple and wreck our homes. And if we do shoot at them, our own shells’ destroy what we've built.”

“Call in the Patrol!” shout- ed.a deep voice from the first or second row of assembled colonists.

Director Majeski rose to his feet. Anger and. pain showed on his massive face. “If we call in the Patrol to help us, we'll be admitting our weakness as a colony. I refuse to believe that this is a situation Camer- on can’t ultimately handle it- self.”

“How are you going to han- dle it, then?” Brickman chal- lenged. “What happens if the monsters come, back?”

“We'll work something out!” Majeski thundered. ‘There has to be a defense.”

“Not against creatures that are unlike anything else in the galaxy,” Brickman retorted. “T think it’s definitely a case for the Patrol. We can’t possi-

bly fight off these creatures ourselves.” |

“No Patrol,” Majeski said adamantly. “Not until we’re

. sure we need outside help.”

“Put it to a vote!’ someone yelled from the back of the hall.

Doubt appeared on Majes- ki’s face. Calling in the Inter- stellar Patrol was a risky step; it indicated a possible lack of self-reliance that might go hard against the colony when the time came to ask Earth for complete independence. And Cameron’s record was spotless up to this point.

“Put it to a vote!” someone else cried.

Majeski_ shrugged. “All right,” he said. “We’ll put it to a vote. Those of you who think Cameron Colony can fight its own battles without calling in outsiders, stand up and_ let yourself be counted.”

There was silence in the big hall. Hesitantly a few men in the ‘front rows came to their feet, looking around at the others self-consciously. Then, gradually, the ringing fervor of Majeski’s words began to take hold. A dozen colonists rose; -

f

\

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR 73

then fifteen and twenty more. The movement became. conta- gious. Within moments, nearly three quarters of the people in the hall were standing.

“Very well,” Majeski said. “Now let’s see those who think we ought to yell for help.”

Barely fifty people stood up,

~ most of them rising half-heart-

edly and slipping quickly back into their seats when they saw that they were very much in the minority.

“J don’t think it’s necessary to call for a count,” said Ma- jeski. “I’ll assume it as the wish of this assembly that we'll refrain from calling in the Patrol. Now—in case of further attack—the first step will be to work out a schedule of alarms. Regular work sched- ules will be temporarily sus- pended and reassignments will be made. We'll have a round- the-clock lookout squad posted effective right away.

“Brickman, I want you to call a meeting of your science

_ people and. see if you can fig-

ure out any convincing ex-

planation for these on-again-

off-again monsters that at- tacked us today.

“Tomorrow morning we’il send out scouting planes to ‘ search for the home base of these monsters. Perhaps if we drop a bomb on them by sur- prise, they won’t get a chance to shift to their non-matter state. Does anyone have any questions?”

“Just one,” Brickman said. “How are we going to defend ourselves against monsters that can’t be harmed by artillery fire?”

“We'll work something out,” Director Majeski said darkly. “We'll have to.”

T was an uneasy night in the

colony. The lookouts paced the streets all night, while in the bubble-houses the colonists slept in uneasy half-wakeful- ness, fearing that at any mo- ment some lookout would cry that the attackers, had re- turned. But the night passed without incident; the morning sun rose as always above the little colony, and no further at- tack had taken place.

Majeski and his innermost council had worked all night, preparing revised schedules for the colony in the current emer-

74 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

gency, and when morning came the schedules were posted at the usual notice-boards.

Fifty men were assigned to the task of repairing the shat- tered streets. A hundred work- ers were given the task of

_ building new dwelling-places

for the families that had been “made homeless during the at- tack. A crew of ten scouts was chosen to man the colony’s . five two-seater jet planes, and an- investigation area was _ chalked out for each of the scout teams.

‘ The upheaval caused by the attack of the monsters would set the colony’s growth sched- ule back badly. But, Majeski realized grimly, nothing could be done about that. He had no choice but to suspend construc- tion of the new school, the recreation center, and the oth- er half-finished colony build- ings.

Agriculture and food produc- tion had to go on, of course, but colony. expansion would have to be curtailed until the threat. of the monsters ~was ended.

Work continued through the morning. The morale of the

colonists remained high despite the surprise attack, and they set to work vigorously clearing away the damage and rebuild- ing the ruined houses. Director Majeski held meetings all morning, in the hope _ that someone would be able to sug- gest a workable means of fight- ing off the monsters.

No one had any suggestions to offer. The situation was simply beyond their compre- hension. For three years they had labored peacefully to build their colony, and now, out of the blue, came unkillable crea- tures to shatter their tranquil existence.

The chief hope was a sur- prise attack on the monsters’ home base. But, as reports came in from one after another of the airborne scouts during the morning, that hope grew dimmer and dimmer, They had

covered hundreds of square —

miles already, without a single sign of the creatures.

There was not even a hint of the track that monsters so huge must have created while travel- ling through the heavily-wood- ed regions surrounding the set- tled areas, The scouts were in-

=

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR 75)

structed to range still farther afield, within the limits of their fuel supply, before returning to the colony.

In the colony, no one could refrain from looking back over his shoulder frequently to see whether the new attack had come. No one doubted that there would be a second attack, and probably a third and a fourth and a fifth. The dark

shadow of fear hovered over,

the colony.

And, shortly after noon that day, the alarm sirens began to scream.

This time the marauders had approached the city from the north. They had first been sighted by the lookout squad posted at the extreme northern

end of the settlement, along

the wide central avenué known as. Madison Boulevard that ran lengthwise through the colony. At five minutes after twelve the monsters appeared—wink- ing abruptly into view at the entrance to Madison Boule- vard.

There were seven of them this time. Two were flying

creatures of the kind that had .

seized Police Chief Eames, but

they differed from the original in that they bore a single bony spike ten feet long mounted between their crimson eyes.

Behind these two came the remaining five: a ponderous thing that looked like a mag- nified hippopotamus, but with none of the hippo’s sleepy characteristics; this was a fiercely vigorous creature whose gaping mouth snapped shut and open hungrily. Its marching-companion was a thin, towering monster forty feet high, with dangling bone- less tentacles, and a cilia- girdled orifice in its midsec- tion.

Three others brought up the rear—an_ eight-legged scaly creature with a long, powerful tail surmounted with six sharp bony projections; a scuttling, crawling thing like an animat- ed carpet covered with eyes; and a creature that hopped along on a single powerful leg, reaching for its prey with arms that tripled their length to make the catch and then con- tracted to normal size again.

The first casualty was re-. corded only moments after the appearance of the new mon-

76 - SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

sters. One of the winged beings flew downward, impaling a lookout squadman on the point of its unicorn-like spear, and flew off with the man still feebly writhing. The other lookouts fled, sounding the alarm as they ran. The attack had been resumed.

As the shrill wailing of the general alarm burst out over the colony, Majeski’s defense plan went into effect, Women and children hastened to shel- ter. The mea ran to the weap- ons-dispensaries, grabbed their artillery, and hastened into the streets.

“The invasion is at the north end of the city,” came Majes- ki’s booming amplified voice. “Five creatures are advancing down Madison Boulevard, and two flying beasts are at large over the city.”

Machine-gun emplacements were established in the middle of Madison Boulevard, while snipers stationed themselves atop buildings along the path of the invasion That proved a poor idea; the two winged creatures dropped from the sky without warning, spearing the defenders unawares and

carrying them away to death,

The weird procession ad- vanced down the streets. Only a couple of unwary colonists were captured—the one-legged - hopper lashed out with a tele- scoping arm to snare a fleeing woman, and the animated car- pet seized a man and tore him to shreds. The machine-gunners waited in the middle of Madi- son Boulevard—but, before the creatures came within range, they split off, shuffling into the side streets.

Cursing, Majeski ordered pursuit to counteract the change of tactics. The monsters were at large, roaming through the streets where colonists lay hidden. The dull boom of gun- fire echoed through the city, but again to no avail; the mon- sters simply shifted into their non-matter state whenever ua- der fire, returning to their more destructive normal phase once they were gut of range.

The onslaught continued for nearly an hour. The monsters, moving at will, wrecked house after house, smashing or over- turning the bubbles in search of victims, while the winged creatures disorganized the de-

Ce

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR Ff

fenders downward plunges.

Then, as quickly as they came, all of the monsters van- ished, except one of the winged ones. It circled leisurely over the town, too high for the guns of the defenders—and a loud voice boomed out, ‘This is only the beginning, Earthmen! Leave this planet at once or you will be completely de- stroyed!”

by their

HERE was no need for an

open town meeting this time. Majeski and his group of advisers came together, two hours after the end of the raid, to decide on the colony’s next step.

Majeski read. the statistics of the second attack. “Fifty houses destroyed, nearly seven- ty people killed and a hundred injured.” aa.

“And it was a brand new bunch of monsters this time,” Brickman said. “What night- marish horrors these were! I didn’t ‘believe the universe could spawn such repulsive- looking things.”

McAfrey said, “It seems ob-

vious to me that we're the vic-

tims ef some kind of illusion- ary process.”

“What do you mean?” Ma- jeski asked.

“Simply that Brickman’s right—the universe can’t spawn giant horrors like. these. There’s no rhyme or reason to these monsters. They look like something out of nightmares, all right—not like any crea- tures that could have evolved normally on any known _plan- Cute

“So you think we dreamed them, eh?” Majeski demanded.

McAfrey shook his head. “T didn’t say that. But it might be some kind of mass hypno- tism—”

“Hypnotism that can kill seventy people?” Majeski asked sharply.

McAfrey shrugged. “I don’t have any explanations‘ at all. Neither do the rest of us.”

“What about that message?” Martin Baird said. “We all heard it. In English, warning us to leave this planet at once.”

“It’s some kind of planet- sized blackmail,’’ Majeski said. “An attempt to frighten us off Cameron.” Z

“A damned good attempt,

78 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

too,” Brickman said acidly. “A few more raids like these two and we might just as well pull up and go. We can’t de- fend ourselves. And so far it’s only been a handful of mon- sters. What would happen to us if a-shundred came at a time? Or a thousand? We’d be wiped out before we could fire a shot.”

Majeski was silent, brooding over the abrupt and violent end to three years progress on Cameron. His council members’ discussed the

situation back and forth in in-_

“creasing tones of hoplessness. Finally Brickman turned to Majeski and said, “I think there’s oniy one possible thing to do.”

“And that ~ is?” asked.

“The Patrol. Dammit, we can’t be stubbornly proud about it any more. We’re licked. Maybe even the Patrol won’t be able to help us. But -at least they'll evacuate us while we’re still alive. We can settle somewhere else—”

“After three years of hard work here,’ Majeski said.

“What else can we do?”

Majeski

of peaceful-

Majeski did not reply. His

eyes showed pain—the pain of

a. strong man faced with a sit- uation totally beyond his own strength, It was a defeat for Majeski to have to call in the Patrol. But he knew he had no choice.

Further stubborn insistence that Cameron could handle these invaders itself was sui- cidally wrongheaded. If he

.kept maintaining that the Pa-

trol should not be summoned, his advisers might possibly re- move him from office and sum- mon the Patrol themselves.

He gestured hoplessly. In a heavy voice he said, “Is it the opinion of this council that we should ask for help?”

The vote was unanimous. Majeski rose from his place at the head of the table. “Very well. Prepare a request for help and send it out on wide- band galactic communication at once,”

The message was duly sent.

And, several hours later, it was picked up by the relay monitor station of the Interstellar Pa- trol’s base on Kandoris IV, five hundred light-years from Cameron. :

repre oops con ying pen pt So a

BEASTS OF NIGIHTMARE HORROR 79

The Patrol’s main job was a troubleshooting one. Its staff roved from galaxy to galaxy as required to help out any of Earth’s multitude of newly planted stellar colonies. But it was considered a black mark against a world to call in the Patrol for anything but the most dire emergency. A sun going nova, a sudden alien at- tack—these were valid reasons for asking for help. Anything less might be construed by Earth as a sign of weakness.

Signalman Dworshak read the Cameron message off the decoder intake, ran a check to verify it, and switched on the communicator channel of Pa- trol Leader Avery.

“What is it, Dworshak?” the Patrol Leader asked.

“Message just came in, sir. A request from Cameron Colony on Danimor IlI— they’ve been invaded: by some kind of weird monsters and they’re unable to fight back.”

Avery glanced at his adju- tant, Captain Morse. “Morse, get me the specifications on Cameron Colony, Danimor III. Go ahead, Dworshak. Do they

give any further details about this invasion?”

“All they say is the monsters are of enormous size and don’t seem to mind artillery shelling. So far they’ve had two attacks, eighy-five dead and a lot of property damage. They ask immediate help.”

“T see. Hold on, Dworshak.” Avery took the chart from Captain Morse, ran his finger down the list of planets, and stopped at Danimor III. He nodded..Earthtype planet, third out of six worlds, located at a distance of some five hundred light-years from Kandoris IV. That meant it fell within his jurisdiction. “All right,” Avery said. “Send a message to Cameron right away.’ Tell them we'll have a_ Patrol squad out there in—ah—make it eight hours. When you’ve sent that message, ring up Crew Seven and get them ready for immediate depar- ture.”

Avery let the communicator unit drop back into its mag- neto-field. ‘Giant monsters,” he snorted. “Impervious to ar- tillery Shells. What won't these colonials think of next?”

80 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

AN hour later, the three slim ships that comprised Crew Seven of the Kandoris wing of the Interstellar Patrol were en route, gliding through the no- space congruencies across the light-years to Cameron. Avery himself piloted the leading ship; Morse guided the sec- ond, and a Captain named Norton handled the third.

Six hours after departure, the three ships snapped out of nospace and into the normal continuum. Ahead of them lay the golden star that was Dani- mor. The Patrol fleet homed in on Danimor’s third world, the one that had been named Cameron for its first discov- erer.

At his signal controls, Dwor- shak made contact with the

“groundside operative at the Cameron spacefield and ceived landing coordinates. The three ships spiralled round the green-and-brown world in front of them, hooking into the diminishing orbits of landing, and made perfect touchdowns on the bare soil of the space- field. It was exactly ten hours since the S.0.S. from.Cameron had gone out to the Patrol.

re-

As the Patrolmen left their ships, a delegation of Camer- onites came forward to greet them. A big, grim-leoking man with an air of authority said,

'““Who’s in charge?”

“T am,” Avery said. ‘Patrol Leader Avery.”

“Glad to see you. ’m Ma- jeski. Colony Director. It wasn’t my idea to send for you fellows, but the circumstances left me no choice.”

Avery nodded. “Well, we'll have a look around. Monsters, you say.”

“And a threat.”

“Threat?” Avery repeated.

“After the second attack, yesterday afterncon, a message in English was broadcast to us: something like Get off this planet, Earthmen, or we'll con- tinue to destroy you.”

Avery’s eyes narrowed. “This planet was supposed to be uninhabited when you colonists took it over, wasn’t ite:

“That’s what the survey scout people teld us,” said Ma- jeski.

“Have you done any scout- ing yourselves since these two attacks?” "

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR 81

“We’ve sent some two-man planes out to explore the im- mediate vicinity. We simply don’t have the kind of long- range jets we’d need to have a look at the other continents. But we haven’t found a thing within a thousand-mile radius of the colony.” —

“Yet these monsters . have twice. popped out of nowhere anc laid the colony to waste?”

“That’s right. Twice on suc- cessive days. They haven’t come back yet today.”

“And you’ve tried to defend yourselves?” :

“With such weapons as we have, which aren’t very much. A colony-world isn’t supposed to bother much about defense, you know. Our job is to build.”

Avery nodded. “What hap- pens when you shoot at these— ah—monsters?”

“The shells don’t have any effect. It’s as if the beasts are nothing more than illusions.”

“Maybe that’s all they are.”

“Tilusions don’t kill ninety people and wreck a hundred homes, Leader Avery,” said Majeski coldly. “Come along to the damage area and I'll

show you what I mean.”

There was no alien attack that day at all. The Patrol squad examined the wreckage and agreed that something strange had indeed been going on. But they had nothing else to go by except verbal descrip- tions of the invading monsters, and, Avery had to admit, the monsters sounded like nothing ever seen on any world of the universe.

On the day after the arrival of the Patrol, the third attack on the colony took place. This time nine monsters converged on the town from three sides— one group entering at the west once again, another appearing at the southern end, the third coming through from the farm regions: to the east.

Avery and his Patrol outfit were stunned witnesses to the brief, ¢furious encounter. The creatures raged through the city, doing damage wherever they could, and whenever any hostile bullet was fired at them they simply shifted into a non- material state and let the mis- sile fly harmlessly past them.

The attack lasted some forty minutes. And once again, at the conclusion of the onslaught, ©

-

82 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

the enormously amplified voice rang out over Cameron:

“This is the third attack, Earthmen, but it will not be the last, Leave this world at once—or prepare ‘yourselves for total destruction!” _ Fifty people had died in this

new invasion, seventy others were homeless, and nearly two hundred had suffered minor injuries. Majeski and his ad- visers met in the Colony Di- rector’s office, and this time Avery and four officers of the Interstellar Patrol were with them.

“Well?” Majeski demanded. “Can you help us, Avery, or should we just pack up and get out? I’m a stubborn man and IJ’d hate to see this colony forced to disband—but I can’t ask my people to stay here and face certain death.”

The Patrol Leader shook his head. “Give us a little time to figure this thing out.”

“Time? What good will that do?”

“We'll relay a description of the invasion to Patrol Cen- tral, on Earth. They coordinate all Patrol aotivities. Perhaps

there’s been a similar attack

on some other world—maybe there’s additional informa- tion—”

“We can’t fight an enemy we’re unable to hurt,” Brick- man said bitterly.

Avery turned on the white- haired scientific director. “You called for the Patrol,” he snapped. “Let us worry about handling this. Take me to your communications center.” 3

As the Patrol group left the room with Brickman, Majeski glared sourly around at Baird,

McAfrey, and the others. “You

see? They regard us as dirt, Stupid colonials.”

- “Maybe they can save us,” McAfrey said tiredly. “Let them have their arrogance, The Patrol is our only hope now, and we all know it.”

WO hours later, Avery:and

his sub-officers returned to the headquarters of the Colony Director.

“Well?”? Majeski asked. “Anything new?”

“We've got the answer,” said Avery. “We checked with Patrol Central and they re- ported six other cases of this kind of attack. Two colonies

_ Six months ago,

fore

ore ey

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR 83

were completely wiped out— Heifetz in the Deneb system, and Millman out Procyon way. What we’ve got on our hands, gentlemen, is nothing less than a full-fledged galactic war.”

“What?” Majeski asked in- credulously.

“A galactic war that began ” Avery said. “And a war that Earth may lose ever though the enemy doesn’t fire a single shell.”

“What are you talking about?” Majeski demanded. “What enemy?”

“A small humanoid race out of the Andromeda Galaxy, mil- lions of light-ycars from Earth.

We don’t know what they call

themselves. The Patrol has captured some, but they let themselves be put to death be- they'll speak. They’re ugly little green oxygen- breathers. Their own galaxy is overcrowded. They want le- bensraum—so they’re - march- ing into our part of the uni- verse.”

Majeski was puzzled. “Small green humanoids? But what about the monsters?”

“Thought-projections,” Av-

ery said. ‘We don’t know how they do it,-but it’s a devilish stunt. Somehow they have projectors that can amplify and solidify mental images. It takes a tremendous amount of power, but they seem to be ‘tapping a nospace vortex to give it the boost it needs. The monsters really are nightmare creatures. Right out of the nightmares of the little beast- men out of Andromeda.”

“No wonder our shells don’t have any effect!”

“Of course. The images are solid only when the enemy wants them to be. As soon as there’s any sign of a hostile counter-attack, they simply al- ter the projection flux and de- materialize the images.”

“When they’re solid, we can damage them—but we can’t catch them unawares. And once they dematerialize, our weapons can’t touch them. But —what do they expect to gain by this business of monsters?”

“They hope to drive you colonists out,” Avery said. “It’s much simpler than fighting with you. It only takes a crew of eight or nine aliens to man the projection station, some-

84 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION /

where on Cameron. And you’re totally at their mercy. They can keep on raiding you with their phantom killers until you’re forced to pull out and abandon the planet to them. Which want.

“They can’t tolerate Terran colonization because of their own tremendous expansion. They need every planet they can get, the devils!”

‘Well, they won’t get this one,” Majeski said. “We'll fight back—somehow.”

Avery nodded. “If we can only find their projection sta- tion, there won’t. be any trou- ble. But they’re not easy to find. We have an entire planet to search to find one tiny en- campment. Once we do, it’ll be the end of the monster inva- sions. But until then—”

“Don’t: worry,” Majeski said. “Now that we know what they are, we'll manage to hold our own until you’ve rooted them out.” 3

But the problem, Avery thought when he: had left the Cameronite men, was not going to be solved as simply and as easily as all that. When speak-

is what they really

ing to Majeski, the Patrol Leader had minimized the im- plications of the report he had received from Patrol Central.

So far, six other cases of An- dromedan invasion had been reported. On two _ colony- worlds, the colonists had been driven off completely before the arrival of the Patrol. On the other four planets, all at- tempts to root out the alien invaders had failed, and the colonists still lay in danger of constant attack by the crea- tures conjured up by the thought-projectors.

No successful counter-attack had been carried out’ yet, either by colonists or by the Inter- stellar Patrol. °

And the Adromedan attack was spreading like an ugly cancer. Cameron was the seventh world to report inva- sion. Before long, Avery thought gloomily, there might be dozens—hundreds. The en- tire galactic network of Terran colonization might be imperiled by the insidious onslaught fro Andromeda.

Patrol Leader Avery spent the day working out an inves- tigation-pattern. His fleet of

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR * 85

three ships was all he had to go by, since the tiny Cameron air- ships were useless beyond a limited distance. And the An- dromedan base might be _lo- cated anywhere in the millions _ of square miles of Cameron’s six continents.

The Patrol ships were equipped for atmospheric navi- gation and fcr very delicate de- tection operations. But, Avery knew, it might easily months or even years before every inch of: Cameron was ‘covered.

He sent out his men. He commandeered the five coloni- al two-man planes and sent out men in them to fine-comb the immediate area once again. Majeski recognized that as a veiled impiication that the Cameron men might have over- looked something important in their examination of the area, but the Colony Director held his feelings in check.

He had called in the Patrol, and, he forced himself bitterly to remember, he had to give the Patrol absolute authority now.

The three Patrol spaceships went out on more distant _rov-

take .

ing operations, to the border of the continent and then across the great’ seas to the other, supposedly uninhabited, con- tinents beyond them. Patrol Leader Avery himself remained behind in Cameron Colony to coordinate the exploration op- eration and to receive further messages from Patrol Central on Earth, if there were any.

A week went by. The mon- ster attacks continued, at in- tervals of about a day and a half, and though the defenses of the colony improved to suca an extent that they could mo- bilize the artillery within sec- onds after the arrival of the nightmare creatures, each at- tack took its toll in lives and property.

Neariy two hundred colo- nists had fallen since the after- noon when Jimmy Wellington first saw the monsters ap- proach the town. The once neat streets now were blackened and shell-cratered; the colony looked like a battleground. The colonists themselves were fear- haunted people, all but Colony Director Majeski, whose fea- tures showed sadness at the destruction of his colony. but

86

whose spirit remained in- domitable.

“Any time you _say_ the

word,” Avery told him, “we can signal for evacuation. It may take months for us to root the Andromedans out. The colony may be totally de- stroyed by that time.”

“No,” Majeski replied stol- idly. “We’re not going to run away. We’ll last this thing out, and when it’s over we'll re- build.”

Avery shrugged. “It’s your colony, Majeski. I can’t force= you to evacuate. But your colonists can.”

“Are you suggesting the pos- sibility of a revolution against me?”

“Ym not. suggesting any- thing. You’re a stubborn man, and I admire you for your guts. But we’re up against a ‘pretty stubborn enemy.”

“T know that. But we’re not leaving.”

N the eighth day after the arrival of the Patrol, a coded signal flashed across the Eastern Sea to Leader Avery’s headquarters in Cameron. It was from the most distant of

SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

his three roving exploratory ships. It said simply, We have located the alien base, and gave the coordinates.

Immediately Avery ordered the other two ships to return from. their’ wanderings. His own flagship stopped at Cameron to pick up Majeski and Avery himself, and then all three ships converged on the point where the Androme- dan base had been located.

From forty thousand feet up, they could see it plainly on the infra-red visioscope: a _ tiny encampment, three or four tents clustered round a small spaceship, nestling in a valley between two thrusting mountain-ranges in the heart of the largely-unexplored east- ern central continent of the planet.

Avery beamed a message to the aliens on full-band trans- | mission. ‘Your location is known. You have half an hour to leave this planet, and then we will be compelled to destroy you.” é

“Destroy them now,” Ma- jeski hissed. “Why give them advance warning like that? Drop a bomb on the little kill-

iY

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR

ers and make an end of it!”

“No,”. Avery said. ‘“There’s no formal state of war. obeying interstellar law by or- dering them off. If they make no reply, I’m within my rights in bombing them. But not un- til then.” :

A reply was not long in com- ing. It thundered out of fhe loudspeakers of the hovering spaceship.

“Earthmen! Your threats do not frighten us. We repeat our warning. Leave this planet im- mediately or we will continue our raids until the last of you is dead.” :

“Well?” Majeski demanded. “Do you need any further ex- cuses for wiping them out?”

“No,” Avery agreed. He opened the inship communica- tor channel. “Attention ail hands. Bombing formation: prepare to-drop ten-kiloton fis- sion bomb on target below.”

The bomb was placed in fir- ing position; the ship wheeled into bombing formation. On the ground, no sign of defensive activity was forthcoming. Av- ery gave the order for the bomb’s_ release. The

Tm.

small. _Utomic weapon plummeted true

87

to the. target. There was a bright flare of light, and the mushroom cloud rose heaven-

“ward—

And when the cloud cleared, the Andromedan base could still be seen, unharmed, in the center -of the area of atomic destruction.

“Another prdjection!” Avery growled. “Yhey’ve fooled us with their damned gadget!”

“Not even an atomic ‘bomb did any good,” Majeski said.

“It would have—if we'd dropped it on the right place. But that wasn’t the Androme- dan camp below us. It was just a phony—a decoy that they created with their projector to dupe us. The real camp may be thousands of miles from here.”

Signalman Dworshak cut into the communicator circuit. “New message from the aliens, sir, just coming through. Want me to switch it over to you?”

“Of course, Dworshak.”

“so you have failed, Earthmen. You will not destroy us with your clumsy weapons. Evacuate this planet now, while you still live.”

Avery looked away, scowl- ing. “The little devils! We'll

88 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

send them back to Andromeda yet!” He opened the main cir- cuit again. “Dworshak! Can you get any directional fix on that Andromedan broadcast?”

“ve been trying, sir. But they’ve got a vector-scrambler working, it seems. I keep com- ing up with five or six differ- ent equally likely points of origin.”

“All right,” Avery said wear- ily. “Let’s head back to the colony. We’ve done all we’re going to do out here today.”

The three ships turned, heading away from the smok- ing slagpit they had so useless- ly created. An hour later, they landed at the Cameron space- field, six thousand miles away, after rocketing up out of the planet’s atmosphere and re- turning* again at the proper point.

There had been another at- tack on the colony in their ab- sence. A formation of winged creatures had swept overhead, swooping down to kill four people, before an artillery bar- rage drove them off. Ammuni- tion was running low. Colony morale was running even low- ‘er. And time was running out,

as even Majeski was grudging- ly beginning to admit. The colonists could not take much more. Another week of strike- and-vanish raids and they would be screaming in the streets, calling. for Maejski’s overthrow and immediate evacuation to. some _ safer planet, :

Three times in the next five days, Avery’s exploring ships came upon what they thought were alien bases, and’ each time they dropped a bomb without warning—only to see, by the disappearing and imme- diate reappearing of the “base,” that their target had only been ‘another projected illusion.

During those five days, there were two further attacks on the colony—one a minor one, the other a severe and pro- longed attack which cost a dozen lives and nearly deplet- ed the colony’s supply of heavy ammunition.

Time was running out.

T was the end of the second week since the coming of Avery and his Patrol outfit.

BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR 89

Avery’s men had dropped five atomic bombs—half of the en- tire supply they had brought with them—and five times they

had wasted their bomb on a~

phantom decoy. Three hundred of Cameron’s five \ thousand people were dead. And still the

loathsome dream-projected monsters raged through the city.

On the fourteenth day, one of Avery’s scouts discovered yet another alien base—this one at the very edge of the continent where the colony was located, some two thousand miles to the east of Cameron on the shore of the ocean. The scout had flown over the alien camp, noted its location, and returned to the colony.

“They can’t all be illusions,” Avery said wearily. “One of

these times luck is bound to_

be with us, and we'll drop a bomb on the right place.”

“We can’t be sure,” said Majeski. “They may be hiding in an underground cave some- where, and projecting these lit- tle camps just to keep us tied wp and wasting bombs.”

Avery shrugged. - “One _ of

days we'll blast them. We’re bound to.”

The Colony Director chuck- led.* : : “What’s the joke?” Avery asked.

“Youre starting to ‘sound like me, Avery. Making brave noises so you don’t need to ad- mit that you’re licked.”

“Do you think we’re beaten, Majeski?”

“If I did, ’d ask for an. evacuation. But I don’t think the situation is very cheerful, Avery. Not at all.”

“Maybe. this is the one,” Avery said hopefully.

“If it isn’t, you’ll just have wasted another bomb. I have a better idea.”

The Patrol Leader glanced up. “Anything is a better idea. What’s yours?”

“Instead of whaling away with an atomic bomb, send an observer in on foot. Parachute him down in the forest a cou- ple of miles from the observed camp and let him take a look around. If the place is a fake, he can signal you and you

“won’t waste a bomb. If it’s the

real thing, he’ll give the word

90 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION ©

and you can wipe the filthy aliens out.” : ,

Avery brightened. “It’s worth a try, I suppose. Except that it’s risky business. I hate sending one of my men into ~ an alien camp -alone.”

“You won’t have to,” Ma- jeski said. “I volunteer for the jo med

“Vou?”

“That’s tions?”

“Plenty. This a job for the Patrol, not for a civilian, Ma- jeski.”

“Tm the head of Cameron Colony. Either let me take the job; or Til withdraw my re- quest for Patrol assistance and order you off the planet.”

“But”

“Well, Avery?”

right. Any objec-

The Patrol Leader slumped in his seat. “It’s a suicide mis- ~ sion, Majeski, if it really 7s the alien base and they catch you. But if you’re set on com- mitting hara-kiri, I guess I can oblige. We don’t have time to argue. If you’re bullheadedly going to insist on volunteering, I accept your offer—reluc- tantly.”

The spaceship hovered forty

thousand feet above the sur- face of the planet. The ejection hatch was-open, and a figure clad in a bulky dropsuit stood with his mittened hands grasp- ing the release lever. He wait- ed, while the quiet voice in his headphones counted off num- bers for him. ‘

“Tens... nine... >< eight

~SSCVON 5. ue SIX... re” LIME .... four .... three .... two .ees one .... jump, Ma- jeski!” A

The figure in the dropsuit yanked down on the release lever and the metal arm cata- pulted him through the ejection hatch..A jet flared behind him —a tiny rocket strapped to his back, designed to force him down through the spaceshin’s slipstream. Down and down he tumbled, spiralling through the thin air. Even with the protec- tion of the dropsuit he could sense the bitter cold: all about him.

The voice in his headphones never left him. It was the voice of Avery. “Can you hear me, Majeski?”

“T hear you fine.”

“You’ve dropped. teh thou-

‘sand feet. How does your head

feel?”

BEASTS OF NIGI iITMARE HORROR 9I

“It’s still attached to my neck.” =e

“Okay. You’ve dropped fif- teen thousand feet. “You’re twenty-five thousand feet above the ground. Put ‘your hand on your chute ring.”

“Got it.” Se

“Good. Count to five and pull.”

Majeski counted out loud. At five, he yanked on the ring and the chute ballooned out. He glanced up over his shoul- der after the sudden jolt to'd him that his free fall had been arrested and he now drifted gently. He could barely see the _ grayish-blue fabric of the chute above. It was a special low- visibility fabric, chosen to pre- vent observation from the ground.

It seemed to take forever for him to land, He dropped, fi- nally, into a heavily forested area, coming down between two big trees without fouling his chute. He cut himself loose, climbed out of the cumbersome dropsuit, and took a positional reading. Then he activated the tiny microphone in his chin- _ band and called Avery in the hovering spaceship.

“Landing successful. I’m

four miles due west of the An- dromedan base. I won’t call you again until I’m there and have looked around. Get your bomb ready just in case this one isn’t a fake.”

“Right.”

“And don’t be ‘itchy on the trigger. Wait till you hear from me.”

“Check, Majeski.”

REAKING the contact, the

Colony Director began to walk. Spring was several weeks. old, here in the east, and the trees were ripening into their summer brilliance. This was fertile land out here, he thought. It was a wonderful planet.

Someday they would build their second city here, on the eastern coast—after the aliens were driven off.

He walked at a steady pace, following his compass. He felt no sense of fear, only the nag- . ging dread that perhaps this base, too, might be only an il- lusion. But he knew strangely that it would not be a mirage. Fate owed that much to him, |

After half an hour of con- stant trek through the forest,

92 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

he paused and took a new po- sitional reading. He was less than two miles from the sup- posed location of the alien base. He moved on. Fifteen minutes later, he checked again: three quarters of a mile more. Twelve or. thirteen hun- dred yards, that was all.

His spirits rose as he drew nearer and saw unmistakable signs of activity: trees had been felled, a path had been cleared in the forest. This was it, he thought. The hidden base from which the attacks on his colony had. been projected!

When he was about half a mile away, he could see the alien spaceship—a sleek blue point rising above the trees. Now he proceeded more warily. He was armed with a blaster and with a knife; the latter had been his own idea. Getting closer, Majeski could see the tents as well, three of them.

And—he sucked his breath in sharply—there was one of the aliens!

The Andromedan was com- ing out of a grove of fruit-trees to the left of the path, laden with’ a basket of gathered yel- low applefruits. No doubt he was providing for the aliens’

meal tonight. Majeski smiled coldly. ;

The Andromedan was an ugly little creature. He was humanoid, a squat, stocky bowlegged being with glisten- ing green skin, who wore only a brightly woven cloth round his middle. The alien was hair-

less and slimy-looking. Majeski .

scurried up behind him, rais- ing his knife.

The Andromedan turned just as Majeski began to lunge. The Colony Director got a good look at the alien’s face—little piggish eyes, a flattened snout, a wide mouth from which prominent yellow incisor teeth projected—and then he drove the keen blade deep into the Andromedan’s belly and twist- ed upward, The alien dropped his basket of fruit and tumbled soundlessly to the ground. Ma- jeski looked up quickly; no one had observed.

He exulted. One of the aliens was dead! That was for Dave Eames, he thought. A repulsive bluish fluid was gushing in irregular spurts from the alien’s body. Majeski knelt and efficiently slit the creature’s throat, just in case the first slash had not com-

ee Pane 2 ee eS SS eee

< BEASTS OF NIGHTMARE HORROR > 93

pletely killed it. moved on.,

There was no doubt, now, that this was the real base. Majeski smiled. The proper thing to do was to make a quick exit, get to a safe dis- tance, and notify Avery that this was the right target. But Majeski had no such notions. He continued toward the three tents. ©

Then he

He turned toward the right and entered the first one, blaster drawn. Three aliens were in it, bent busily over complex machinery. Majeski glanced at the gleaming vision- screens on the wall and saw the images in miniature of hideous monsters. An attack on the colony was under way!

He fired quickly. His first bolt went searing through the body of the nearest Androme- dan. That’s for Mike Parker, ~he thought. He fired again, killing another. For Eleanor Johnson. The third stared at him, piggish little eyes ablaze with fear, and Majeski shot him in: the face. For Tom Davis, he said to himself.

He was pleased to see that the images on the screen

blanked out the moment he had begun firing. A. nauseous stench of burned flesh was ris- ing in the tent. Majeski turned. There were still two tents more.

He entered the second and found four Andromedans at work, servicing some sort of complex power generator. He killed two of them at once; the third leaped wildly at him with a wrench in his hand, while the fourth dashed out of the rear of the tent.

Majeski’s bolt caught the on- coming alien in the throat and hurled him back against a live grid of the generator, where he sizzled briefly and charred to a crisp. But for the first time a hitch had developed. One of his intended victims had gotten | away.

The Earthman burst from the tent just in time to see three additional Andromedans come racing toward him from the remaining tent. He ducked as some kind of energy .bolt whizzed past his ear; firing, he cut down the closest An- dromedan. As he aimed for the second, the remaining alien scored a hit: the energy bolt sang in the air and cut through

94

Majeski’s body like a dart of flame.

Wincing, Majeski put one hand to his stomach methodically cut down the two surviving aliens before they could fire again. He looked around. All was quiet in the Andromedan camp.

Motion was an effort, but Majeski forced himself to look in the third tent. It was empty. There had only been eight or nine of them, then, es they were all dead.

He activated his microphone and said in a weak voice, “Come in, Avery... .come in.”

“Majeski! What’s been go- ing on down there? We haven’t heard from you for so long we thought you were dead.”

“No....not dead yet.”

“What’s been happening?”

“This is....real camp, An- dromedans here.”

“For the love of God, get out of there, then—and we’ll bomb them to bits.”

“No—don’t. All dead.”

“Dead?” s

“IT... .killed them,’ Majeski said hoarsely. “All of them. But their machines... .intact. You come down, take them, study them. Thought projec-

2

and >

city soon....

SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

tors. Use their own weapons against them, drive them out of the galaxy....”

“Majeski! Are you all right?” “Not... .exactly.”

“What do you mean?” Avery asked. “T....wounded. Blaster bolt

in the belly. Not....going to last long.”

“Majeski!”

“But....aliens all dead,”

the big man said through pain- clenched lips. ‘Captured their

base. And the colony... .the colony....is safe....we can rebuild, expand....a second -

”

The effort was too much. Majeski clutched his side and toppled forward. Half an hour later, when the spaceship had landed and Avery and his Pa- trol unit had reached the alien base, they found Majeski sit- ting upright, dead, with the shattered bodies of Androme- . dans everywhere about,

But Majeski was smiling. He had saved the colony—and he had done it, not the Patrol. In death, his face gleamed with triumph,

THE END

NUCLEAR NEWS _

by STEVEN RORY

A weird garden of mutated plants at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island of- fers a foretaste of what an Earth devastated by atomic energy may look like. The ten- acre tract, closely guarded, is ‘in its tenth year of use. It fea- tures a long cylinder of radio- active Cobalt-60. that is low- ered into the ground for sev- eral hours each day, showering the nearby plants with 2000- curie gamma rays that induce the genetic changes known as mutations.

Several useful plant muta- tions have resulted, though most of the garden’s plants are biological monstrosities. Among the useful mutants are a bushy type of navy bean that is re- sistant to disease and easier to harvest; a strain of oat re- sistant to the costly rust dis- ease; and a hardy, short-

stemmed rice plant. A strain of peach trees that ripens two weeks earlier than normal, and one that ripens two weeks later than normal, have also been produced.

But most of the crop is strange and bizarre. In a wedge-shaped bed of -gladi- oluses, those nearest the gamma

-source (which would kill a hu-

95

man being four feet away with- in an hour) are dwarfed to one eighth normal size. Tobacco plants grow © with | cord-like, stringy leaves in the Brook- haven garden. Some other plants bear little resemblance to their non-mutated originals.

The purpose of the Atomic Energy Commission-sponsored garden is to develop beneficial mutants for the improvement of agriculture. More than 150 plant breeders and geneticists are taking part in the radiation experiments.

MATING INSTINCT

by LLOYD BIGGLE JR.

It seemed odd to the Outsiders. that the inhabitants of Earth were divided into two sexes. It seemed monstrous to them — but it opened up the easy way to an invasion

AZIE Perkins ate her

lunch stoically and kept her nose in her’ plate. The tittering voices from the next booth were burning lashes that ripped at her bent shoulders.

“T’m worried about Mazie.”

“What’s she done now?”

“It’s about Charlie Rawson. He threw her over, you know.”

“She said she threw him over.”

“What would you expect her to say? She isn’t getting any younger, but she still has some pride left.”

“That was a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it? Don’t tell me she’s still -moping. She’s been thrown over I don’t know how many~times before. She ought to be used to it.”

“She was pretty far gone on Charlie.”

96

7

“Say—you don’t she’s...” ; The titters erupted wildly.

“Time will tell. But now she’s really gone off the deep end. Know what she told me this morning? She’s found her ideal man. It’s the purest of pure love. They communicate mentally, and she’s never seen him.”

“Honestly! Just who is this ideal lover-boy?”

“She didn’t mention his name. All she said was that he’s out of this world.”

Mazie picked up her check, and adroitly slipped away un- seen. Outside, the wind was cold and cutting, and there was a trace of snow in the air. An- other nine inches by tomorrow morning, the weather forecast said. Mazie buried her face in

suppose

MATING

the narrow fur of her collar, and smiled happily to herself. She’d show them, she would— the cackling hens! Just wait until He came. He’d promised He would come, and she _ be- lieved Him. Who wouldn’t be- lieve a promise like that?

Her wind-reddened cheeks blushed a deeper red as she thought of some of the details of last night’s conversation. She was certain of one thing. When her dream-man finally arrived, He would really be a lover-boy.

SUPERIOR -General Phelaz

hunched himself forward on his cushion, and idly coiled lower left around upper right. - “Tt looks promising,” he ad- mitted. “Just now it’s the most promising thing we have. But it’s too far—much too far. Keep a file on it,.and perhaps after the next jump it will be within range.”

Inferior-General Pnarar ges- tured appealingly with middle left and right, “It would be a shame to waste it. Pkalir seems to have an excellent connection, and he’s making good progress. Why not let him follow it up?”

INSTINCT 97

“Too far,” Superior-General Phelaz said. “Too risky. I hope you haven’t forgotten the Plaoz disaster. We only exceeded the safe range by seventeen per cent that time. This one would be at least thirty per cent. It isn’t worth the risk, no matter how promising the world might be.”

“But—hoping you will ex- cuse the foolish obstinacy—this case has some unusual aspects. Would you consent to discuss it with Pkalir?”

Superior-General Pbelaz un- coiled and coiled again. “Tf it is a truly unusual case, there could be no harm in discussing it. Certainly there is little we can do but talk, until our next objective is defined. You may send for Pkalir.”

Inferior-General Pnarar bowed deeply, and fluttered upper left and right. “I have Pkalir waiting outside.”

Communications technician Pkalir, elite grade, entered the room confidently. Generals did not awe him. He rubbed uppers with generals every day, and he’d never met one who could channel a thought beam with his dexterity. The Superior-

98 SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION

General was hardly in the same class with lesser officers, but even So...

Pkalir bowed, and snappily saluted with upper and middle left. -Inferior-General Pnarar made the presentation. Superi- Or-General Pbelaz relaxed on his cushion, and ordered Pkalir to tell him just what it was about this distant planet that - was different.

“The name of the planet,” Pkalir said, “is Earth. Using the native terminology, -of course.”

“Awkward,” Superior-Gen- eral Pbelaz mused. “We must change it. Supposing we short- en it to Pbert?”

“As you wish, sir,” Pkalir said. “I am accumulating data upon this planet Pbert as rap- idly as possible. It seems to be a-most