Forbidden Planet (17 page)

Adams said, “Good!” and nodded to himself.

More orders from inside, and within seconds the fence was dead—just a series of metal posts again. The searchlight was switched off too, and Adams drove slowly through and parked close to the side of the ship.

Farman came up as we climbed out. He shouted, “Fence on!” into the darkness, and I heard the click-clock of a big switch. He looked at Adams and said, “Hi, Skipper,” and then was formal with, “Fence established. Nothing to report.”

Adams said, “Fine. How’s Lonnie getting along with that modulator?”

Farman said, “Been shut up in his shop all day. You get anything out of Morbius?”

Adams didn’t answer; he started for the gangway, and Jerry and I tagged along . . .

It was the Cook’s off-watch and we had a cold meal served by one of the orderlies. Adams and I were both ravenous, but in between mouthfuls we told Farman and Lonnie Quinn about everything we’d seen. Quinn hadn’t wanted to leave his work, and it had taken a personal visit to the workshop to get him up to mess. But now he was glad he’d come. In fact, he was fascinated, and fired questions at us as fast as a Colt-Vickers disintegrator. His face had smears of grease all over it, and his hair was standing on end, and his eyes were sparking behind their huge glasses.

A lot of the questions were beyond us, but we did our best. And we questioned him too. About the power source and that hellish set of flame seventy miles under the ground.

When we’d described it—with me doing most of the talking and Adams putting in the key word once in a while—I came to the use of the word ‘cosmic’ by Morbius, and how we didn’t know whether it was just a figure of speech or whether he’d meant it literally.

I thought Lonnie was going to jump right out of his chair. He was speechless for a moment, but then started another rapid-fire burst of questioning; so rapid-fire that we couldn’t catch more than one word in three.

Adams cut in on him. He said, “Hold it, Lonnie—hold it! First chance we get, you can see for yourself.”

And that was the end of the meal. Quinn shot back to his workshop, down in the bowels of the ship. Farman went to his bunk to catch a few hours sleep before his night watch. Adams, taking over, started making rounds with the Bosun—and I went to the surgery.

I locked myself in, and put on an overall. I set up my operating-table, and got the lights fixed right, and then went to my spare vacuum-locker, and opened it and took out the body of the titi . . .

IV

It must have been about half an hour later, while I was staring white-faced and groggy at the opened-up subject on my table, that the EM fence began to act up. As Adams told it to me afterwards, he was standing between the gangway and the rig, talking to the Bosun, when it happened. The section of fence right behind the rig began to spark violently, sending out its joining sets of electric fire. This meant—or should have meant—that something or someone was approaching from outside the perimeter.

But the shadowless sand, almost black in the moonlight, was visible for miles. And there was nothing on it. Nothing moving or still.

“What the hell—?” said Adams, and the Bosun shouted for a hand called Nevski, who was Quinn’s most trusted helper and in charge of the fence.

Nevski came running—and all the time the fence went on sparking. Only it was sparking differently now, with the bolts of flame no longer joining each other but growing shorter and shorter.

And the rest of the fence, which should have gone into sympathetic operation, was completely dead.

Adams didn’t like it. Nor did the Bosun, who began to shout for extra men but countermanded the orders when Nevski, a phlegmatic soul, merely rubbed at his chin and said, “That ****ing continuer must be shorting again,” and marched off toward the fence-control gear on the other side of the rig.

Adams and the Bosun followed him—perhaps, as we figured later, saving their lives in the process.

They watched while he grumbled his way down into the machine-pit and started tinkering. After a few minutes, Adams asked him whether he thought Mr. Quinn should be sent for, but Nevski, with all that sturdy independence so typical of Devisor hands, merely spat in the sand and asked, “What the * * * * can he do that I can’t do?”

It was then that the young Cadet-hand Grey came running up to Adams. He was panting, and almost dropped his D-R rifle as he saluted. He said, “Reporting off post, Sir—” and then shed all military formula. “I heard it again, Sir!” he said. “The breathing! It went right by me! But there’s nothing there! There’s nothing there!” His voice was going too quickly up the scale.

Adams barked, “Where? Where’s your post? Quick, man.”

But the boy didn’t have to reply. Because, right on top of his words, the scream came . . .

It came from the direction of the ship, and everyone outside the ship—sentries, mechanics, Adams and the Bosun—all heard it.

It was the dreadful scream of a man in terror and agony. It hung on the still air for one intolerable moment—and then died. After it, the silence seemed thicker than it had before.

It was Lonnie Quinn who had screamed, and it was Adams who found what was left of him . . .

I saw it only a few minutes later, after Grey had come pounding at the surgery door.

The boy was in such a state that he could barely articulate, and it was with only the knowledge that Quinn was dead that I rushed out of the ship and around toward the little open port of his workshop. Over my head, the communicator’s emergency siren howled, followed by a voice shouting orders. And the searchlight came on at full power and began to sway its beam around the desert.

There was no one with the remnants of Alonzo Quinn when I reached them, and hardened surgeon though I was, I had trouble resisting an almost irresistible urge to vomit.

He had been, literally, torn to pieces. Worse, he had first been dragged bodily out through the port—whose aperture was too small by many inches to force his body through except by the exertion of some almost unthinkable power. There were dreadful evidences on the rim of the port—and the rest, far worse, was strewn about the sand. Not a limb had been left on the trunk, and even that had been ripped asunder . . . And the head—well, it lay face downwards, thank God!

In my mind I kept hearing Morbius’ voice—“. . . Like rag dolls—ripped to pieces by a malignant child . . .”

V

It was after midnight when Adams called me and Farman into the mess room for a conference. A full strength guard was still surrounding the ship, and the fence, so far as any of the Divisors could tell, was working again.

The searchlight was tireless, but it had revealed nothing and no one. Except—

Another trail of the great amorphous footprints. They first appeared immediately outside the fence, just where Adams and the Bosun had been standing when the so-called shorting had taken place. And they led straight to the ship and around it to the port of Quinn’s workshop.

And there they stopped. Whatever made them must have passed within six feet of Adams, made direct way between two constantly patroling sentries, and crossed the full vision-field of the gunner stationed at the rear blaster.

But it hadn’t been seen; and the footprints had come out of nowhere, dissolved into nowhere . . .

And now the three surviving officers of United Planets Cruiser C-57-D were looking at each other over the bare mess-table.

Adams said, “I’ve made up my mind. We’re getting out. It’s clear my duty’s to take Morbius back. Come daylight we start the job of putting that core back in the ship. With Lonnie gone, it’s going to take—” he pondered—“maybe twelve hours. But we might be attacked again while we’re on the job.” He looked from me to Farman. “Any ideas?”

There was an urgent knocking on the door, and the Bosun marched in. He was obviously the bearer of more bad news, but he was very military, very correct.

He snapped a salute at Adams and said, “Report man missing, sir. Zero two four eight six three—Specialist First Class Dirocco, James.”

Adams jumped up—and sat down again. He said, “That’s the Cook,” and the Bosun said, “Yessir. He’s gone, sir.”

Adams shot questions at him, but didn’t find out much. The whole story was that when, only a few moments ago, the Bosun had been around the perimeter, checking each man at his post, he’d discovered that Cookie was missing. He’d made a full search, including the ship, and there was no doubt about it. There had been conflicting stories from the other men as to when he was last seen—but the fact remained he had disappeared.

“The crew was wonderin’, sir,” the Bosun said, “whether we’d be puttin’ out a search party—”

He got no farther. Adams said, “No!” slamming his first down on the table.

“Yessir. Right, sir.” The Bosun snapped another salute—and was gone.

And again the remaining officers of Cruiser C-57-D looked at each other across the table.

Adams said heavily, “That’s two . . .”

Farman said, “Looks like Morbius wasn’t fooling about that Force.”

I said, “One thing we know now—it’s nothing to do with him. That shot I gave him knocked him out.”

Adams said, “What is it then? Some—some left-over Krell?”

There was a silence—which I broke. I said, “There are too many things we don’t understand. If we got the answer to even one of ‘em, the rest might fall into place . . .”

They stared at me, puzzled. As well they might be; I wasn’t any too sure myself why I was talking this way. But I went on with it. I said, “Take that monkey—the titi,” and told how I’d taken its body out of the tractor and kept it to dissect.

I said, “I was just generally curious about the animals. I’d no idea what I was going to find. Or
not
going to find—”

The way they looked at me made me realize I must be showing something of what I’d felt down there in the surgery.

Adams said, “For Christsake, what are you talking about?”

I said, “I’m not sure I know. But—well, that monkey wasn’t possible. It shouldn’t have been living. In my book, it wasn’t ever living. And yet we saw it alive. In fact, we killed it and heard it die!”

Farman said, “Jesus—what’re you trying to do? Can’t you talk English?” He was almost shouting; I suppose our nerves were stretched too tight.

I said, “All right. In plain words for the layman, the titi didn’t have the works for living. Inside, it was a biologist’s nightmare. A heart and only two main arteries. No stomach. No intestines, just a single duct. No veinous network. A chest cavity, but no lungs in it.” I found I was thumping the table. “And no glandular system. Get that, will you? No glands! . . . And everything padded, filled up, with a mass of cross-weaved fibrous tissue no more use than a stuffing of cotton!”

I don’t know how much of my own horror I’d gotten over to them, but at least they were listening. And even thinking. Because Farman said, “What about the brain?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t started on the head.” I thought about it. “I’m not sure I want to,” I said.

There was a long silence, until Adams said, “Okay, Doc—so it’s a mystery. And you may be right about the answer helping with everything else. But we don’t have an answer. So right now I’m on another problem. Morbius. He’s either got something to do with our troubles, drug or no drug, or he hasn’t. And if he hasn’t, he might be in trouble himself. Maybe that immunity he talked about isn’t holding.” He was carefully saying nothing about Altaira, but I knew he must be thinking about her. He said, “Either way, he ought to be under guard. To protect him, or us. Because as soon as this ship’s ready, she’s taking off. With him on board.”

Farman said, “The ship wants a guard too, Skipper. And all hands to work on getting the core back in.”

Adams nodded. “That’s the trouble, Jerry. How to spare the men. One man even.”

I said, “Why not me? You’d be without a doctor—but my Dresser’s as good as most of us with degrees.”

Adams looked at me quickly. He almost smiled. “That’s an idea, Doc! Quite an idea!”

VI

In less than half an hour, I was in the tractor and on my way, with one of the older Cadet-hands driving me. I had Adams’ belt on, with the audi-video attachment. So I could keep in touch, Adams had said.

It was certainly a consolatory thought. But still, now I was actually en route, with all bridges burned behind me, I wasn’t so pleased with myself as I had been when I’d volunteered.

The desert looked blacker than ever now the moons were high. And my driver gave me a bad ten minutes along the edge of the chasm. He was a taciturn lad named Randall, and he seemed unmoved by this trip through country he’d never seen before; country which might very well house the terrifying, apparently invisible enemy which had already torn one man to bloody shreds and spirited away another.

I tried to talk to him, but without much success. He was called Gabby by his shipmates—and I understood why. I can’t say that his apparent nonchalance made me feel any better; I had more than a suspicion it might be assumed, to cover much the same sort of qualms I was having myself.

We went through the rocks and down into the valley, and Gabby was moved to words for once. He looked at the scene, placid in the green moonlight, and said, “Sorta nice,” and after that effort relapsed into a silence which lasted until we drew up by the patio.

There was no light behind any of the windows; no sign of life. And no sound from anywhere.

I told him to wait a minute and climbed down and crossed the patio to the door. As I reached it, I thought I saw something move in the bushes which lined the track. I repressed a violent start, and looked carefully, and came to the conclusion that my eyes—and nerves—had been fooling me.

I tried the door, and found that it opened. I didn’t want to make any noise and perhaps frighten Altaira, so I went back to the tractor again and spoke softly to Gabby. I said, “Everything’s all right. You can go back. Thanks.”

He nodded. He took his D-R pistol from his holster and laid it on the seat beside him, and then reached out and tested the spring catch of the manually operated Colt-Vickers slung against the seat. He looked at the house-front with an appraising eye.