Sinister Barrier (10 page)

“No, I guess they won’t.” Jurgen mused a moment, then said, “I don’t wish to seem melodramatic, but would you be good enough to tell me whether any of these Vitons are near us at this moment?”

“There are none,” Graham assured him. His wide, glistening eye gazed through the window. “I can see several floating over distant roofs, and there are two poised high above the other end of the road, but there are none near here.”

“Thank goodness for that.” Jurgens’ features relaxed. He used his hand as a comb, passing thin fingers through long, white hair, smiled quietly as he noted that Wohl’s face also expressed relief. “What I’m curious about is the problem of what is to be done next. The world now knows the worst, but what is it going to do about the matter—what
can
it do?”

“The world must not only know the worst, but also see it in all its grim and indisputable actuality,” said Graham, earnestly. “The government has practically co-opted the big chemical companies in its plan of campaign. The first step will be to put on the market large and cheap supplies of the materials cited in Bjornsen’s formula, so that the general public may see the Vitons for themselves.”

“Where does that get us?”

“It gets us a big step toward the inevitable show-down. We must have a united public opinion to back us in the coming fight, and I’m not talking parochially, either. I mean united the world over. All our numerous squabbling cliques, political, religious, or whatever they may be, will have to drop their differences in the face of this greater peril and unitedly support us in future efforts to get fid of it once and for all.”

“I guess so,” admitted Jurgens, doubtfully, “but—”

Graham went on, “Moreover, we must gather as much information concerning the Vitons as it may be possible to obtain. That is because what we know about them to date is appallingly little. We need more data, we need it in quantities that can be supplied only by thousands, maybe millions of observers. At the earliest possible moment we must counterbalance the Vitons’ enormous advantage in having an ages-old understanding of human beings, and gain an equally good comprehension of them. Know thine enemy! It is futile to scheme, or oppose, until we can make an accurate estimate of what we’re up against.”

“Perfectly sensible,” Jurgens conceded. “I see no hope whatever for humanity until it has rid itself of this burden. But you know what opposition means?”

“What?” Graham encouraged.

“Civil war!” His distinguished features grave, the psychologist wagged a finger to emphasize his words. “You will not get a chance to strike one miserable blow at these Vitons unless first you’ve managed to conquer and subdue half the world. Humanity will be divided against itself—they’ll see to that. The half that remains under Viton influence will have to be overcome by the other half, in fact you may have to exterminate them not only to the last man, but also the last woman and child.”

“I can’t see them being that dopey,” Wohl put in.

“So long as people insist on thinking with their glands, their bellies, their wallets or anything but their brains, they’ll be dopey enough for anything,” declared Jurgens, fiercely. “They’ll fall for a well-organized, persistent and emotional line of propaganda and make suckers of themselves every time. Remember those Japs? Early last century we called them civilized, poetic; we sold them scrap iron and machine tools. A decade later we were calling them dirty yellow bellies. In 1980 we were loving them and kissing them and calling them the only democrats in Asia. By the end of this century, they may be hell’s devils again. Same with the Russians, cursed, cheered, cursed, cheered—all according to when the public was ordered to curse or cheer. Any expert liar can stir up the masses and persuade them to love this mob or hate that mob, as suits the convenience of whoever’s doing the stirring-up. If ordinary but unscrupulous men can divide and rule, so can Vitons!” He turned from Wohl to Graham. “Mark my words, young man, your first and most formidable obstacle will be provided by millions of emotional dimwits among your fellow beings.”

“I fear me you may be right,” admitted Graham, uneasily.

Jurgens was right, dead right. Bjornsen’s formula was marketed a mere seven days, in immense quantities, and the first blow fell early in the morning of the eighth day. It fell with thunderous vim which humanity felt like a psychic blast.

An azure sky splashed with pink by the rising sun spewed two thousand thin streamers of flame from the invisibility of its upper reaches. The streamers curved downward, whitening with condensation. Thickening as they lost altitude, they resolved themselves into mighty back-blasts of strange, yellow stratosphere planes.

Below lay Seattle, a few early citizens on its broad streets, a few wispy columns of smoke rising from stoked furnaces. Many amazed eyes turned to the sky, many still-sleeping heads tossed on their pillows as the aerial armada howled across Puget Sound, swooped over Seattle’s roofs.

The bulleting rush brought the howl up in pitch to a shrill scream as the yellow horde rocketed over the rooftops, the badge of a flaming sun showing on the underside of each stubby wing. Black, ominous objects excreted in pairs and waggled downward from sleek, streamlined fuselages, fell for a hushed age, buried themselves in the buildings beneath. The buildings promptly disrupted in a mad, swirling mêlée of flame, fumes, bricks and splintered timbers.

For six hellish minutes Seattle shuddered and shook to an uninterrupted series of tremendous explosions. Then, like wraiths from the void, the yellow two thousand vanished into the stratosphere whence they had come.

Four hours later, while Seattle’s streets still sparkled with shards of glass and her living still moaned amid the ruins, the invaders reappeared. Vancouver suffered this time. A dive, six minutes of inferno, then away. Slowly, lackadaisically, their condensing blast-streaks dissipated in the upper regions, while beneath lay pitted avenues, strewn business-blocks, crushed homes around which wandered silent, thin-lipped men, sobbing women, screaming children, some whole, some not. Here and there a voice shrieked and shrieked and shrieked like one of the damned doing his damnedest in a world of the damned. Here and there a sharp report brought quietness and peace to someone urgently in need of both. A little lead pill was welcome medicine to the partly disemboweled.

It was coincidentally with that evening’s similar and equally effective attack on San Francisco that the United States government officially identified the aggressors. The markings on the attackers’ machines should have been sufficient indication, but this evidence had seemed too unreasonable to credit. Besides, officialdom had not forgotten the days when it had been considered expedient to strike blows under any flag but one’s own.

Nevertheless, it was true. The enemy was the Asian Combine, with whom the United States was supposed to be on friendliest terms.

A despairing radio message from the Philippines confirmed the truth. Manila had fallen, the Combine’s war vessels, air machines and troops were swarming through the entire archipelago. The Filipino army no longer existed, and the United States Far East carrier fleet—caught on distant maneuvers—was being attacked even as it raced to the rescue.

America leaped to arms while its leaders met to consider this new problem so violently thrust upon them. Playboy financiers made ready to dodge the draft. End-of-the-world cultists took to the hills and waited for Gabriel to come fit them with halos. Among the rest, the mighty masses making ready for sacrifice, a fearful questioning went whispering around.

“Why didn’t they use atom-bombs? Haven’t they got any—or are they wary because we’ve got more?”

With or without atom-bombs, so savage and unprovoked an assault was Viton-inspired, and no doubt about it. But how had the luminosities managed to corrupt and inflame the normally slumbersome Asian Combine?

A fanatical pilot, shot down while attempting a crazy solo raid on Denver, revealed the secret. The time was ripe, he asserted, for his people to enter into their rightful heritage. Powers unseen were on their side, helping them, guiding them toward their divinely appointed destiny. The day of judgment had arrived and the meek were about to inherit the earth.

Have not our sages looked upon these little suns and recognised them as the spirits of our glorious ancestors, he asked with the certitude of one who poses the unanswerable question. Is not the Sun our ancient emblem? Are we not sons of the Sun, fated in death to become little suns ourselves? What is death but a mere transition from the army of abominable flesh to the celestial army of the shining spirit, where much esteem is to be gained in company with one’s honorable father, and one’s exalted fathers’ fathers?

The path of the Asians is chosen, he yelled insanely, a path sweetened by the heavenly blossoms of the past as well as the unworthy weeds of the present. Kill me, kill me—that I may take my rightful place with ancestors who alone can lend grace to my filthy body!

Thus the mystic rambling of the Asian pilot. His entire continent was afire with this mad dream, cunningly conceived and expertly insinuated within their minds by powers that had mastered the Earth long before the era of Emperor Ming; powers that had the precise measure of the human cow, knew when and where to jerk its dangling udders. The notion of plausibly “explaining” themselves as ancestral spirits did full credit to the infernal ingenuity of the Vitons.

While the Western Hemisphere mobilized as speedily as it could in the face of constant and inexplicable handicaps, and while the Eastern pursued its holy war, the best brains of the Occidental world sought frantically for means by which to refute the insane idea placed in Asian minds, means to bring home to them the perilous truth.

In vain! Had not the Occidentals themselves first discovered the little suns and, therefore, could not dispute their existence? Onward, to victory!

The hordes of the spiritually inflamed poured out of their formerly peaceful boundaries, their eyes aglow with ignorance instead of knowledge, their souls dedicated to a divine mission. Los Angeles shrivelled in a sudden holocaust that fell upon it from the clouds. The first lone enemy flier to reach Chicago wrecked a skyscraper, minced a thousand bodies with its concrete and steel before a robot-interceptor blew him apart in mid-air.

By August the twentieth, no atom bombs, no radioactive gases, no bacteria had been used by either side. Each feared the retaliation which was the only effective defence. It was a bloody war and yet a phoney war.

But Asian troops were in complete possession of the whole of California and the southern half of Oregon. On the first of September, the air-borne and submarine transports cut their increasing losses by reducing their flow across the Pacific. Contenting itself with consolidating and holding the immense foothold it had gained on the American continent, the Asian Combine turned its attention in the opposite direction.

Triumphant troops poured westward, adding maddened Viet Nam, Malaysian and Siamese armies to their strength. Two hundred ton tanks with four-feet treads rumbled through mountain passes, were manhandled when bogged by humanity in the mass. Mechanical moles gnawed broad paths through previously impassible jungles, bulldozers shifted and piled their litter, flamethrowers burned the piles. Overhead, strat-planes dotted the sky. In sheer weight of numbers lay the Asians’ strength. Theirs was the greatest weapon, the weapon possessed by every man… that of his own fertility.

Into India they swept, a monstrous conglomeration of men and machines. The ever-mystical and Viton-infested population received them with open arms and three hundred million Hindus became recruits at one swoop. They added themselves to the swarms of the Orient, thus making one quarter of the human race the poor dupes of an Elder People.

But not all bent the knee and bowed the head. With superb cunning the Vitons boosted the emotional crop by inciting the Moslems of Pakistan to oppose. Eighty millions of them stood with their back to Persia and barred the way. The rest of the Moslem world made ready behind them. Frenziedly, they died for Allah, and impartially Allah fattened the Vitons.

The brief breathing space permitted by pressure being transferred elsewhere enabled America to get its wind and recover from the initial shock. The press, once given exclusively to every aspect of the conflict, now saw fit to devote a little space to other matters, especially to Bjornsen’s experiments in the past, and news about Vitons’ activities both past and present.

Inspired by the resurrection of Beach’s collection of press clippings, several papers searched through their own morgues in effort to discover cogent items which once had been ignored. There was a general hunt for bygone data, some conducting it in the hope of finding support for pet theories, others with the more serious intention of gaining worthwhile knowledge about the Vitons.

Holding the opinion that not all people could see identically the same range of electro-magnetic frequencies, the 
Herald-Tribune
 asserted that some were endowed with wider sight than others. Wide-sighted persons, said the 
Herald-Tribune,
 had often caught vague, unrecognizable glimpses of Vitons many times in the past, and undoubtedly it was such fleeting sights that had given birth to and maintained various legends of banshees, ghosts, djinns and similar superstitions. This implied that spiritualists were Viton-dupes on an organized basis, but for once the 
Herald-Tribune
 overlooked religious susceptibilities.

Only a year ago, the 
Herald-Tribune
 itself had reported strangely colored lights seen floating through the sky over Boston, Massachusetts. Reports of similar lights had been made at various times, and with astonishing frequency, as far back as they could trace. A singular feature of all reports was that they’d been received with a total lack of science’s much-vaunted curiosity: every expert had dismissed them as odd phenomena devoid of significance and unworthy of investigation.