Sinister Barrier (8 page)

“And after that?”

“I’ll take the responsibility and the risk. What else can I do?”

Silence in the ebon gloom while the two sat by the wall facing the screen, one nervously impatient, the other brooding grimly. Silence pregnant with swift, conjecturing thoughts and timed by slow, deliberate ticks. It was as if the fate of the world was being weighed in the balance of one man’s mind.

Suddenly, Beach said, “Come!” Turning up the lights, he opened a door near the still inactive screen, switched more lights that revealed the neat, orderly length of a compact and well-equipped laboratory.

Darkening the room they were leaving, Beach closed the connecting door, indicated a bell on the laboratory wall, and told the other, “If that screen in the next room glows, a photosensitive cell will operate and cause this bell to ring. If it does ring, you’d better muddle your thoughts swiftly and completely—or prepare for the worst.”

“I understand.”

“Sit there,” ordered Beach. He washed his fingers with a spot of ether, picked up a bottle. “This reaction of Bjornsen’s is synergistic. D’you know what that means?”

“It’s a purely associative effect.”

“Correct! You’ve your own way of expressing it, but it’s as good a definition as I’ve heard. It’s a reaction produced by drugs functioning co-operatively which none can produce separately. You can see what that means—to test the effects of multiples in all possible combinations means a number of experiments running into astronomical figures. Synergy will keep research busy for years. They mightn’t have stumbled on this one for fifty years to come. If Peder Bjornsen hadn’t had the brains to recognize a stroke of luck when he saw it, we’d all—” He let his voice tail off while he tilted the bottle over a measuring vial, counting the drops with utmost care.

“What makes now?” Graham asked, watching him.

“I’m going to treat you according to Bjornsen’s formula. It will blind you for a few minutes, but don’t let that scare you—it will only be your rods and cones readjusting themselves. While your sight becomes modified, I’ll tell you every detail I’ve been able to gather.”

“Is this treatment permanent in effect, or temporary?”

“It seems permanent, but I wouldn’t be dogmatic about that. Nobody’s had it long enough to be sure.” Putting down the bottle, he came to Graham with the vial in one hand and a small pad of cotton wool in the other. “Here goes,” he said, “and listen carefully to what I tell you—my opportunity to repeat it may never come!” Unconsciously, he was prophetic there!

Chapter 7

THERE WERE PALE STREAMERS STRUGGLING across the lowering moon, a deep, almost solid blackness in the valley. The building squatting in sullen loneliness at one end was completely hidden in the murk of night, and also hidden was the figure that edged through its armor-plate door and flitted through the gloom toward the sighing pines.

For a moment, the figure became a man-shaped silhouette in the moonlight by the crumbling finger-post, then it faded into the less-revealing background of trees. A pebble rattled on the trail, a twig snapped farther on, then there was only the whispering of multimillion leaves, the moan of night breezes among the boughs.

At the other end of the trail a mountain ash spread concealing arms over a narrow, racy cylinder of highly polished metal. Something dodged around the trunk of the ash, merged with the cylinder. Came the soft click of a well-oiled lock, a low but powerful hum. A startled night-bird squawked its alarm as the cylinder projected itself from the black pool beneath the tree, flashed along the highway, bounded over the farther crest.

The same cylinder stood in the Boise Strat-Station at dawn. On one side, weak stars still twinkled against a backdrop of gradually lightening gray; on the other, the sky mirrored the pink of oncoming day. Morning mists were a gauzy veil on the Rockies.

Yawning, Graham said to Police Lieutenant Kellerher, “There are very special reasons why Beach and myself are leaving at different times and by different routes. It is absolutely imperative that one of us reaches Washington. I hold you personally responsible for picking up Beach in one hour’s time, and seeing him safely on the
Olympian.”

“He’ll be on it, don’t you worry!” Kellerher assured.

“Good! I’ll leave it to you.” With another wide yawn, Graham ignored the lieutenant’s fascinated stare at his eyes, climbed into the rear seat of a racy looking army jet-plane that was ready to rush him eastward.

The pilot bent forward in his seat, gave his machine the gun. Short plumes of fire and long streams of vapor shot backward from the vessel’s tail and from other tubes flushed into the trailing edges of its mirror-polished wings. With a rising howl that soon lost its lead and fell behind them, they dived into the morning sky, their vapor trail stretching and thinning, the lagging noise of their jets bouncing off the mountain peaks.

Whizzing high over jagged points of the Rockies which speared the red dawn, the pilot levelled off. Graham gaped repeatedly as he suppressed more yawns, stared through the plastiglass with eyes whose utter weariness failed to conceal their underlying luster.

The jets shivered steadily half a mile ahead of their sound. Graham’s chin sank slowly onto his chest, his eyelids drooped, fluttered futilely, then closed. Overcome by the rhythmic vibration of the jets, and the swing and sway of the plane, he began to snore.

A bump and a swift rush of wheels along the runway awoke him. Washington! Nudging him gently, the pilot grinned, gestured to his clock. They had made excellent time.

Four figures hurried toward the machine as he got out. He recognised two of them: Colonel Leamington and Lieutenant Wohl. The others were burly individuals who carried themselves with an authoritative air.

“Got your wire, Graham,” announced Leamington, his sharp eyes afire with anticipation. He pulled the message from his pocket, read it aloud. “‘Case bust wide open. Solution important to peace of world and worthy of presidential attention. Meet me army special due Washington port two forty.’” He worried his mustache. “Your information must be of terrific consequence?”

“It is!” Graham’s gaze turned to the sky, his cold, shining orbs focused on seeming nothingness. “Unless I take the greatest care, I won’t live to tell it! You’ll have to hear me in some underground place, a well-protected site such as the basement of a government building. I’d like you to have a Blattnerphone running, so that you’ll have a record of what I’ve said if it so happens that—despite my care and good fortune—my story is stopped partway through the telling.”

“Stopped?” Leamington eyed him with a puzzled frown.

“I said stopped. Mouths can be and have been stopped, any time, any place, without warning. Mine’s liable to be slapped shut quicker than any, knowing what I know. I want someplace safer if only insofar as it’s less conspicuous.”

“Well, I guess that can be arranged,” agreed Leamington.

Ignoring the curious expressions with which the others were listening to his remarks, Graham went on, “I also want you to have somebody take Doctor Beach off the
Olympian
when it reaches Pittsburgh tonight. He can be flown here, and he’ll confirm my statements—or complete them.”

“Complete them?”

“Yes, if they don’t get completed by me.”

“You talk very strangely, Graham,” opined Leamington, conducting the other toward a waiting gyrocar.

“No more strangely than men have died.” Getting into the machine, the rest following, he added, “You’ll get the whole story, in plain, understandable terms, pretty soon—and maybe you’ll be sorry you ever listened to it!”

Talk he did; to an audience of thirty seated on rows of hard, uncomfortable chairs in a cellar two hundred feet below street-level. A fluorescent screen, obtained at short notice from a government laboratory, covered the only door, its supersensitive coating inert, lifeless, but prepared to emit a warning glow with the passage of invisible intruders. Overhead, a stony barrier between the secret session and the snooping skies, towered the mighty bulk of the War Department Building.

It was a mixed audience, uneasily attentive, expectant and slightly skeptical. There sat Colonel Leamington, with Wohl and the two Federal operatives who had met Graham on his arrival. Left of them fidgeted Senators Carmody and Dean, confidants of the country’s chief executive. Willetts C. Keithley, supreme head of the United States Intelligence Service, was a broad-shouldered, phlegmatic figure on the right, his personal secretary by his side.

Behind these were a number of scientists, government officials, and advisory psychologists to a total of two dozen. That shrewd face topped with a white mane showed the presence of Professor Jurgens, world’s leading expert on mass-psychology or, as his friends preferred to describe it, ‘mob reaction.’ The thinner, darker features staring over his shoulder belonged to Kennedy Veitch, leading ray expert. The six sitting on his left represented the thousand brains still striving to produce the wavicle-bomb, long-sought-for successor of the atom-bomb. The rest were men equally able, each in his own sphere, some unknown, some internationally famous.

The attention of all became fixed exclusively upon the speaker whose glittering eyes, hoarse voice and expressive gestures drove into their receptive minds the full and dreadful import of his subject. In one corner, magnetised wire ran smoothly through the Blattnerphone, recording the revelation with mechanical accuracy.

“Gentlemen,” commenced Graham, “some time back the Swedish scientist Peder Bjornsen stumbled on a new line of research which he followed, bringing it to a successful end about six months ago when he found that he was able to extend the range of human vision. He accomplished this feat with the aid of iodine, methylene blue and mescal, and although the manner in which these components react relatively to each other is not fully understood, there is no doubt of their efficiency. A person treated with them in the manner prescribed by Bjornsen can perceive a range of electro-magnetic frequencies much wider than that permitted to natural sight.”

“How much wider?” inquired a doubting voice.

“The extension is in one direction only,” Graham answered. “It is far into the infra-red. According to Bjornsen, the limit lies in the ultra-radio band.”

“What, seeing heat?” pursued the other.

“Seeing heat—and beyond it!” Graham assured.

He raised his voice above the resulting murmur of astonishment as grimly he carried on. “Exactly how this effect is achieved is something for you scientists to puzzle over. What I am concerned with here, what concerns this country, what concerns the entire world is an astounding fact that this discovery literally has dragged into the light.” He paused, then gave it them straight from the shoulder. “Gentlemen, another and higher form of life is master of this world!”

Surprisingly, there was no burst of voices raised in angry protest, no skeptical jeers, not even a buzz of conversation. Something had hold of them, some communal sense of truth, or perhaps a mutual recognition of the speaker’s complete sincerity. So they sat there as if glued to their seats, showing him row upon row of shocked, speculative and apprehensive eyes, their faces betraying the fact that his statement exceeded their most fantastic expectations.

“I assure you that this is factual and beyond all disproof,” declared Graham. “I have seen these creatures myself. I have seen them, pale but queerly glowing balls of blueness, floating through the sky. A pair of them skimmed swiftly, silently, high above me as I slunk along the lonely trail from Beach’s isolated laboratory in the mountains between Silver City and Boise. One of them bobbed in the air above Boise Strat-Station shortly before my plane took off to bring me here. There were dozens over Washington when I arrived. There are scores over the city at this very moment, some probably swaying above this building. They favor haunts of humanity; for terrible reasons they cluster thickest where our numbers are greatest.”

“What are they?” put in Senator Carmody, his plump features flushed.

“Nobody knows. There has not been sufficient time to study them. Bjornsen himself thought them alien invaders of fairly recent origin, but admitted that this was sheer guesswork as he had no data on which to base an opinion. The late Professor Mayo agreed that they’re of extra-Terrestrial origin, but opined that they had conquered and occupied this planet many thousands of years ago. On the contrary, Doctor Beach thinks they are native to Earth, just as microbes are native. Beach says that the late Hans Luther went further, and on the strength of evidence about our physical shortcomings, suggested that these things are true Terrestrials, while we are the descendants of animals which they’ve imported from other worlds in cosmic cattle-boats.”

“Cattle!—cattle!—cattle!” The word shuttled around the audience. They mouthed it as if it were foul.

“How much
is
known about these creatures?” someone put.

“Very little, I’m afraid. They’ve not the slightest resemblance to human beings, and, from our point of view, they are so utterly and completely alien that I cannot see how it will ever be possible for us to find a common basis that will permit some sort of understanding. They look like luminescent spheres, about three feet in diameter, their surfaces alive, glowing, blue, but totally devoid of observable features. They don’t register on an ordinary infra-red film, though Beach has now recorded them with the aid of a new emulsion. They aren’t detectable by radar, evidently because they absorb radar pulses instead of reflecting them. Beach asserts that they tend to swarm in the vicinity of radar antenna, like thirsty children around a fountain. He thinks they inspired us to develop radar—and thus provide them with another incomprehensible pleasure at the price of our own sweat.”

His listeners’ features bore a strange mixture of awe and horror as he continued, saying, “It is known that these weird spheres employ extra-sensory perception as a substitute for sight, and that they have this faculty developed to an amazing degree. That is why they have always been able to comprehend us while we’ve not been able to see them, for sixth-sense mental awareness is independent of electro-magnetic frequencies. They also utilise telepathy in lieu of vocal chords and hearing organs—or perhaps it’s merely another aspect of this same extra-sensory perception. At any rate, they can read and understand human thoughts at short range, but not at long range. Beach gave them the name of Vitons, since obviously they are not flesh, and are composed of energy. They are neither animal, mineral nor vegetable—they are energy.”

“Absurd!” ejaculated a scientist, finding at last something within the scope of his training. “Energy cannot hold so compact and balanced a form!”

“What about fireballs?”

“Fireballs?” It caught the critic on one foot. He gazed uncertainly around, subsided. “I’ve got to admit you have me there. Science has not yet been able to evolve a satisfactory explanation of those phenomena.”

Graham said, seriously, “Yet science agrees that fireballs are compact and temporarily balanced forms of energy which cannot be duplicated in any laboratory. They may be dying Vitons. They may be these very creatures, as mortal as us, whatever their life-span, falling in death, dispelling their energy in suddenly visible frequencies.” Taking out his wallet, he extracted a couple of clippings.
“World-Telegram,
April 17: case of a fireball that bounced through an open window into a house, scorched a rug where it burst. Same day, another hopped erratically two hundred yards down a street and popped into nothingness with a blast of heat.
Chicago Daily News,
April 22: case of a fireball that floated slowly across a meadow, entered a house, tried to rise up a chimney, then exploded, wrecking the chimney.”

Replacing the clippings, he smoothed his hair tiredly. “I borrowed those from Beach. He has a huge collection of clippings dating back one hundred fifty years. Nearly two thousand of them deal with fireballs and similar phenomena. When you look through them, knowing what at long last is known, they look different. They’re no longer a mere collection of off-trail data. They’re a singular collection of cogent, highly significant facts which makes you wonder why we’ve never suspected what has now been discovered. The terrible picture has been there all along—but we weren’t able to get it into proper focus.”

“What makes you say that these things, these Vitons, are our masters?” queried Keithley, speaking for the first time.

“Bjornsen deduced it from observation, and his followers came inevitably to the same conclusion. A thinking cow could soon discern the mastery of whoever leads its kind to the slaughterhouse! The Vitons behave as if they own the Earth—which they do! They own you and me and the president and every king or criminal who has been born.”