Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (189 page)

It was late night when Morton looked up from a book and saw Kent emerge through the door that led from the laboratories below.

Kent carried a large, flat bowl in his hands; his tired eyes flashed across at Morton, and he said in a weary, yet harsh, voice: “Now watch!”

He started toward Coeurl, who lay sprawled on the great rug, pretending to be asleep.

Morton stopped him. “Wait a minute, Kent. Any other time, I wouldn’t question your actions, but you look ill; you’re overwrought. What have you got there?”

Kent turned, and Morton saw that his first impression had been but a flashing glimpse of the truth. There were dark pouches under the little chemist’s gray eyes—eyes that gazed feverishly from sunken cheeks in an ascetic face.

“I’ve found the missing element,” Kent said. “It’s phosphorus. There wasn’t so much as a square millimeter of phosphorus left in Jarvey’s bones. Every bit of it had been drained out—by what super-chemistry I don’t know. There are ways of getting phosphorus out of the human body. For instance, a quick way was what happened to the workman who helped build this ship. Remember, he fell into fifteen tons of molten metalite—at least, so his relatives claimed—but the company wouldn’t pay compensation until the metalite, on analysis, was found to contain a high percentage of phosphorus—”

“What about the bowl of food?” somebody interrupted. Men were putting away magazines and books, looking up with interest.

“It’s got organic phosphorus in it. He’ll get the scent, or whatever it is that he uses instead of scent—”

“I think he gets the vibrations of things,” Gourlay interjected lazily. “Sometimes, when he wiggles those tendrils, I get a distinct static on the radio. And then, again, there’s no reaction, as if he’s moved higher or lower on the wave scale. He seems to control the vibrations at will.”

Kent waited with obvious impatience until Gourlay’s last word, then abruptly went on: “All right, then, when he gets the vibration of the phosphorus and reacts to it like an animal, then—well, we can decide what we’ve proved by his reaction. May I go ahead, Morton?”

“There are three things wrong with your plan,” Morton said. “In the first place, you seem to assume that he is only animal; you seem to have forgotten he may not be hungry after Jarvey; you seem to think that he will not be suspicious. But set the bowl down. His reaction may tell us something.”

Coeurl stared with unblinking black eyes as the man set the bowl before him. His ear tendrils instantly caught the id-vibrations from the contents of the bowl—and he gave it not even a second glance.

He recognized this two-legged being as the one who had held the weapon that morning. Danger! With a snarl, he floated to his feet. He caught the bowl with the fingerlike appendages at the end of one looping tentacle, and emptied its contents into the face of Kent, who shrank back with a yell.

Explosively, Coeurl flung the bowl aside and snapped a hawser-thick tentacle around the cursing man’s waist. He didn’t bother with the gun that hung from Kent’s belt. It was only a vibration gun, he sensed—atomic powered, but not an atomic disintegrator. He tossed the kicking Kent onto the nearest couch—and realized with a hiss of dismay that he should have disarmed the man.

Not that the gun was dangerous—but, as the man furiously wiped the gruel from his face with one hand, he reached with the other for his weapon. Coeurl crouched back as the gun was raised slowly and a white beam of flame was discharged at his massive head.

His ear tendrils hummed as they canceled the efforts of the vibration gun. His round, black eyes narrowed as he caught the movement of men reaching for their metalite guns. Morton’s voice lashed across the silence.

“Stop!”

* * * *

Kent clicked off his weapon; and Coeurl crouched down, quivering with fury at this man who had forced him to reveal something of his power.

“Kent,” said Morton coldly, “you’re not the type to lose your head. You deliberately tried to kill pussy, knowing that the majority of us are in favor of keeping him alive. You know what our rule is: If anyone objects to my decisions, he must say so at the time. If the majority object, my decisions are overruled. In this case, no one but you objected, and, therefore, your action in taking the law into your own hands is most reprehensible, and automatically debars you from voting for a year.”

Kent stared grimly at the circle of faces. “Korita was right when he said ours was a highly civilized age. It’s decadent.” Passion flamed harshly in his voice. “My God, isn’t there a man here who can see the horror of the situation? Jarvey dead only a few hours, and this creature, whom we all know to be guilty, lying there unchained, planning his next murder; and the victim is right here in this room. What kind of men are we—fools, cynics, ghouls—or is it that our civilization is so steeped in reason that we can contemplate a murderer sympathetically?”

He fixed brooding eyes on Coeurl. “You were right, Morton, that’s no animal. That’s a devil from the deepest hell of this forgotten planet, whirling its solitary way around a dying sun.”

“Don’t go melodramatic on us,” Morton said. “Your analysis is all wrong, so far as I’m concerned. We’re not ghouls or cynics; we’re simply scientists, and pussy here is going to be studied. Now that we suspect him, we doubt his ability to trap any of us. One against a hundred hasn’t a chance.” He glanced around. “Do I speak for all of us?”

“Not for me, commander!” It was Smith who spoke, and, as Morton stared in amazement, he continued: “In the excitement and momentary confusion, no one seems to have noticed that when Kent fired his vibration gun, the beam hit this creature squarely on his cat head—and didn’t hurt him.”

Morton’s amazed glance went from Smith to Coeurl, and back to Smith again. “Are you certain it hit him? As you say, it all happened so swiftly—when pussy wasn’t hurt I simply assumed that Kent had missed him.”

“He hit him in the face,” Smith said positively. “A vibration gun, of course, can’t even kill a man right away—but it can injure him. There’s no sign of injury on pussy, though, not even a singed hair.”

“Perhaps his skin is a good insulation against heat of any kind.”

“Perhaps. But in view of our uncertainty, I think we should lock him up in the cage.”

While Morton frowned darkly in thought, Kent spoke up. “Now you’re talking sense, Smith.”

Morton asked: “Then you would be satisfied, Kent, if we put him in the cage?”

Kent considered, finally: “Yes. If four inches of micro-steel can’t hold him, we’d better give him the ship.”

Coeurl followed the men as they went out into the corridor. He trotted docilely along as Morton unmistakably motioned him through a door he had not hitherto seen. He found himself in a square, solid metal room. The door clanged metallically behind him; he felt the flow of power as the electric lock clicked home.

His lips parted in a grimace of hate, as he realized the trap, but he gave no other outward reaction. It occurred to him that he had progressed a long way from the sunk-into-primitiveness creature who, a few hours before, had gone incoherent with fear in an elevator cage. Now, a thousand memories of his powers were reawakened in his brain; ten thousand cunnings were, after ages of disuse, once again part of his very being.

He sat quite still for a moment on the short, heavy haunches into which his body tapered, his ear tendrils examining his surroundings. Finally, he lay down, his eyes glowing with contemptuous fire. The fools! The poor fools!

It was about an hour later when he heard the man—Smith—fumbling overhead. Vibrations poured upon him, and for just an instant he was startled. He leaped to his feet in pure terror—and then realized that the vibrations
were
vibrations, not atomic explosions. Somebody was taking pictures of the inside of his body.

He crouched down again, but his ear tendrils vibrated, and he thought contemptuously: the silly fool would be surprised when he tried to develop those pictures.

After a while the man went away, and for a long time there were noises of men doing things far away. That, too, died away slowly.

Coeurl lay waiting, as he felt the silence creep over the ship. In the long ago, before the dawn of immortality, the coeurls, too, had slept at night; and the memory of it had been revived the day before when he saw some of the men dozing. At last, the vibration of two pairs of feet, pacing, pacing endlessly, was the only human-made frequency that throbbed on his ear tendrils.

Tensely, he listened to the two watchmen. The first one walked slowly past the cage door. Then about thirty feet behind him came the second. Coeurl sensed the alertness of these men; knew that he could never surprise either while they walked separately. It meant—he must be doubly careful!

Fifteen minutes, and they came again. The moment they were past, he switched his sense from their vibrations to a vastly higher range. The pulsating violence of the atomic engines stammered its soft story to his brain. The electric dynamos hummed their muffled song of pure power. He felt the whisper of that flow through the wires in the walls of his cage, and through the electric lock of his door. He forced his quivering body into straining immobility, his senses seeking, searching, to tune in on that sibilant tempest of energy. Suddenly, his ear tendrils vibrated in harmony—he caught the surging charge into shrillness of that rippling force wave.

There was a sharp click of metal on metal. With a gentle touch of one tentacle, Coeurl pushed open the door, and glided out into the dully gleaming corridor. For just a moment he felt contempt, a glow of superiority, as he thought of the stupid creatures who dared to match their wit against a coeurl. And in that moment, he suddenly thought of other coeurls. A queer, exultant sense of race pounded through his being; the driving hate of centuries of ruthless competition yielded reluctantly before pride of kinship with the future rulers of all space.

* * * *

Suddenly, he felt weighed down by his limitations, his need for other coeurls, his aloneness—one against a hundred, with the stake all eternity; the starry universe itself beckoned his rapacious, vaulting ambition. If he failed, there would never be a second chance—no time to revive long-rotted machinery, and attempt to solve the secret of space travel.

He padded along on tensed paws—through the salon—into the next corridor—and came to the first bedroom door. It stood half open. One swift flow of synchronized muscles, one swiftly lashing tentacle that caught the unresisting throat of the sleeping man, crushing it; and the lifeless head rolled crazily, the body twitched once.

Seven bedrooms; seven dead men. It was the seventh taste of murder that brought a sudden return of lust, a pure, unbounded desire to kill, return of a millennium-old habit of destroying everything containing the precious id.

As the twelfth man slipped convulsively into death, Coeurl emerged abruptly from the sensuous joy of the kill to the sound of footsteps.

They were not near—that was what brought wave after wave of fright swirling into the chaos that suddenly became his brain.

* * * *

The watchmen were coming slowly along the corridor toward the door of the cage where he had been imprisoned. In a moment, the first man would see the open door—and sound the alarm.

Coeurl caught at the vanishing remnants of his reason. With frantic speed, careless now of accidental sounds, he raced—along the corridor with its bedroom doors—through the salon. He emerged into the next corridor, cringing in awful anticipation of the atomic flame he expected would stab into his face.

The two men were together, standing side by side. For one single instant, Coeurl could scarcely believe his tremendous good luck. Like a fool the second had come running when he saw the other stop before the open door. They looked up, paralyzed, before the nightmare of claws and tentacles, the ferocious cat head and hate-filled eyes.

The first man went for his gun, but the second, physically frozen before the doom he saw, uttered a shriek, a shrill cry of horror that floated along the corridors—and ended in a curious gargle, as Coeurl flung the two corpses with one irresistible motion the full length of the corridor. He didn’t want the dead bodies found near the cage. That was his one hope.

Shaking in every nerve and muscle, conscious of the terrible error he had made, unable to think coherently, he plunged into the cage. The door clicked softly shut behind him. Power flowed once more through the electric lock.

He crouched tensely, simulating sleep, as he heard the rush of many feet, caught the vibration of excited voices. He knew when somebody actuated the cage audioscope and looked in. A few moments now, and the other bodies would be discovered.

* * * *

“Siedel gone!” Morton said numbly. “What are we going to do without Siedel? And Breckenridge! And Coulter and— Horrible!”

He covered his face with his hands, but only for an instant. He looked up grimly, his heavy chin outthrust as he stared into the stern faces that surrounded him. “If anybody’s got so much as a germ of an idea, bring it out.”

“Space madness!”

“I’ve thought of that. But there hasn’t been a case of a man going mad for fifty years. Dr. Eggert will test everybody, of course, and right now he’s looking at the bodies with that possibility in mind.”

As he finished, he saw the doctor coming through the door. Men crowded aside to make way for him.

“I heard you, commander,” Dr. Eggert said, “and I think I can say right now that the space-madness theory is out. The throats of these men have been squeezed to a jelly. No human being could have exerted such enormous strength without using a machine.”

Morton saw that the doctor’s eyes kept looking down the corridor, and he shook his head and groaned:

“It’s no use suspecting pussy, doctor. He’s in his cage, pacing up and down. Obviously heard the racket and— Man alive! You can’t suspect him. That cage was built to hold literally anything—four inches of micro-steel—and there’s not a scratch on the door. Kent, even you won’t say, ‘Kill him on suspicion,’ because there can’t be any suspicion, unless there’s a new science here, beyond anything we can imagine—”