The Alien by Raymond F. Jones (best summer reads of all time TXT) 📖

ship, and as they did so, the police began firing into the opening ports. The scooters poured into the ship, more than one bearing a mortally wounded crewman.

Altogether, only fourteen returned.

"That's all," Byers said grimly. "The rest of the boys won't be coming back."

For a drastic moment of uncertainty, Underwood wondered if his demand for the records would be worth that sacrifice. It had to be, he told himself. Without hope of a weapon to defeat the Sirenian, there was no purpose in flight into space.

He returned to the control room and gave the order to lift ship.

CHAPTER TEN

Through the ports Underwood watched the nearby buildings drop away. The Sun's disk shot up over the horizon and bathed them in golden glow. Then the pilot adjusted the controls and sudden, crushing acceleration was applied to the ship, but to the occupants it was imperceptible.

Like the tired old man that he was, Phyfe slumped down in a cushioned seat beside the navigator's table.

"You look as if you'd had a pretty rough time of it since I saw you last," said Underwood.

Phyfe smiled disparagingly. "For fifty years I've been a scholar and archeologist. It's much too late to find myself in the midst of a planetary crisis, and expect to be able to cope with it."

"You've done a fine job so far."

"I could never even lead an expedition very satisfactorily, and certainly not a group of this kind. Terry might, but he lacks the physical knowledge you have. Mason might, but he knows nothing of the Sirenians. You're the best qualified of us all for the job."

"I want to be sure the rest think so. It might not be a bad idea to hold an election."

"We should call a meeting of everyone, anyway. Many of the scientists are not adequately acquainted with the problem. They should be organized according to their specialties, and we ought to prepare some system of defense."

With the ship no farther than the orbit of the moon, a meeting was called of the hundred and twenty-five scientists and crewmen of the Lavoisier. Phyfe, as nominal chairman, presented Underwood formally as leader of the group. Acceptance was unanimous and enthusiastic, for Underwood was known to nearly all of them by reputation if not personally.

Briefly, he outlined the events concerning the discovery and restoration of Demarzule, the futile attempts of the scientists to stand against humanity's demand for a new god. Then he called on Dreyer to describe the characteristics of the enemy who opposed them.

"In the ages of Earth's past history," Dreyer said, "there have been conquerors, emperors, dictators and tyrants, but there has never been Demarzule, the Sirenian. To the Sirenians, conquest and leadership were as essential as food. There was only one solution for them as they expanded in the Galaxy, and that was complete mastery of the Galaxies—or extinction. It was undoubtedly fortunate for our own world that the Dragbora succeeded in destroying them.

"As to our present problem, Demarzule will sell the peoples of Earth the idea of their complete superiority over all other races in the Universe. They're ripe for acceptance of such doctrine. He'll use the supernatural aspect of his appearance among us and encourage a worshipful attitude. Then he is, I think, certain to begin the construction of battle fleets and the assembly of weapons and armies—not the ships and weapons we know, but the best that Sirenian science could produce half a million years ago.

"Within a few hours from now he'll be sure to learn of our escape and our identity as enemies. It is impossible to believe he will not dispatch pursuit ships to destroy us. Our only chance is to be too far away for them to catch up with us. At least in Terrestrial ships. By the time Sirenian designs are built, we must have an answer.

"That, then, is the nature of the problem we face. Our one hope—and it is a slim one—appears to be the discovery of the weapon by which the Dragbora overpowered the Sirenian hordes long ago. If we remain limited by the range of our own science, I am convinced the problem is hopeless, though I'm aware that happily there are those of you whose minds differ radically from mine and would not admit defeat even with such limitations."

"Some of you had objections to our flight, arguing that we should remain and conduct an underground opposition movement. You were those who lacked a correct evaluation of our enemy. I want you to understand that such a movement would have been absolutely futile. A successful underground movement must be that of an oppressed majority against a minority of ruling numbers. Humanity wants Demarzule. Never forget it. That is why we are fleeing.

"But our battle is not with our fellow men; their faults are rooted in the dark processes of evolution and racial development. The appearance of Demarzule is an extraneous factor, however, one that evolution did not allow for. Without him, men would eventually attain maturity and balance out of the conflicts of their racial adolescence. With Demarzule as god and leader, generations of development may be wiped out.

"You must remember that we have committed ourselves to the only possible course—escape. We're nothing but children beside the racially old Demarzule. He's a superman from a super-race that outstripped ours long before our first cave ancestor discovered fire. Let us hope that we find the weapon of the Dragbora, so our kind may climb the long evolutionary ladder upon which they have stumbled so sorely."

After Dreyer's speech it was a solemn group of men that faced Underwood. The semanticist had conveyed for the first time to most of them the immensity of the threat that confronted them.

They proceeded then with the organizing of the large group into smaller units according to their specialties. Underwood found there was a preponderance of physicists and biologists. The thirty physicists were grouped under the leadership of Mason. To them went the task of investigating the possible weapons and defenses which could be employed against the attacks that would certainly come.

The men with strictly engineering qualifications were assigned to work with Mason's group.

The biological group included a dozen surgeons and four psychiatrists under Illia's leadership. Dreyer and his fellow semanticists were assigned with the archeologists to examine the records they had salvaged from the fire in the hopes of finding a clue to the Dragboran world and the weapon that might be there.

Most of the physical scientists had varying degrees of skill with machine tools and equipment and could assist in the fabrication of armaments for the ship.

The first task was to rig the ship with absorbing screens to prevent radar echoes and nullify this means of locating them from Earth. It was a relatively easy project and one that was completed by the end of their first twenty-four hours in space. That left only astronomical means by which they could be detected from Earth, and with each passing hour, this possibility became more remote. Underwood, however, could not put off the uneasiness that beset him in the face of the pursuit he knew must surely come.

Six days out and a hundred thousand light years from Earth, Phyfe uncovered the first evidence that fortune was with them.

He and Dreyer, along with Terry and Underwood and the other semanticists and archeologists, were working in the single large chamber allotted to study of the records. Phyfe's sudden exclamation burst upon the silence of the room. He held up a small metal roll, fused on the outside, but unrolled in a spiral coil where he had broken the fused portions away.

"This looks as if it might have been the log of one of the refugee ships," he said. "Look at it."

Underwood bent over the small machine they had devised for supplying the correction radiation which would render the characters visible. Normally, they stood out against their dull, metallic background like white fire, but these were dim almost to the point of obliteration. He read slowly, aloud.

"Meathes. 2192903. One detela since leaving Sirenia. Lookout reports Dragboran vessels within range. A thousand of them, which means we are outnumbered ten to one. Flight bearings 3827—"

Underwood looked up. He could read no further. "Those last figures—"

"Could they be the relationship between his own fleet and the home planet?" said Phyfe.

"More likely it would be the bearings of the Dragboran fleet in relation to the Sirenians. In any case, such figures would be a clue to the location of the worlds, because they would be related to their Galactic references. That's the catch, though, finding those references. To us, they would be entirely arbitrary. But if this is a log, it may give the location of the planets and their Galaxy that we can identify. If we can work out the changes in astronomical positions that take place in five hundred thousand years."

He took the roll from the machine and examined it more closely. "It's almost hopeless to get any more out of this. Is there any other specimen that was found in the same locality?"

Phyfe checked the records and shook his head. "This was found stuck to a completely fused mass of iron, apparently part of the ship in which it lay when the Dragbora struck. We may as well send it to the lab for restoration. If it becomes possible to read it, it may help."

In four hours the duplicate record came back, restored as completely as possible, but there were long blanks which were un-intelligible. Underwood turned up the maximum radiation which helped bring out the characters, but also burned them rapidly away if left on too long. Suddenly he caught his breath.

"Listen to this: 'Our bearings are now 6749367 Sirenia, having traveled 84 tre-doma, Sirenia. In two te-ela we land. Perhaps for the last time—'"

"That's it!" Phyfe exclaimed.

"All but the key to their co-ordinate system," said Underwood. "Do you see any possibility of interpreting it, Dreyer?"

The semanticist shook his head. "It must be based upon entirely arbitrary reference points as ours is. I see no hope of interpretation with the figures we now have. Perhaps our astronomers could suggest something."

Masterson and Ebert, the two astronomers included in the group, were called in from their task of preparing star charts of the Universe of half a million years ago. They considered the facts Underwood presented.

Masterson said, "I'm afraid the bearings given by the Sirenians won't be much help. The distance is of value. That shows us that we have a shell at a radial distance of approximately ninety million light years from the Solar System. At best, then, we have this shell, which may be considered as several thousand light years thick, in which to search. If we could find even approximately the proper sector of this shell, we might soon isolate the possible planetary systems to which the Dragbora and Sirenians belonged, but without being able to narrow down the possible sectors of that shell, it becomes an impossible task. Just a single reference to some Island Universe that we might identify would do it, perhaps."

Underwood and Dreyer had to agree. They had gained something; if they could just obtain one more scrap of astronomical information, it might give them the key.

The search for that key went on among the records and artifacts. The repository itself was searched inch by inch—and still almost none of the artifacts found there could be identified or explained. Apart from the repository, most of the material they had was native to the planet on which the Sirenians landed.

By the eighth day Mason's crew had managed to construct equipment for throwing a force shell about the Lavoisier, and Underwood breathed considerably easier. They could travel indefinitely behind the protection of that impenetrable shield. Data for navigation was obtained through almost infinitesimal pilot units set outside the shell and connected through hair-fine leads running through equally small holes in it.

Underwood was proud of this accomplishment. With their limited facilities for manufacture, it was little short of a miracle that they had been able to turn out the mass of complex equipment in so short a time. Somehow, it seemed symbolic to him, as if there were definite laws favoring their success—the success of Earth.

And then on that same eighth day, when they were almost beyond the limit at which such small, dark objects could be identified, the lookout observer on duty sounded a warning to the control center.

"Fleet departing from Earth. Twenty warships. Corius type. Apparent course 169 46 12 and 48 19 06. Velocity—"

Underwood looked at Phyfe, who was beside him at the time. "This is it," he said.

The warning went throughout the ship and the men looked up from their tasks a moment, then resumed with grimmer eyes and firmer mouths. Mason's group was working on the problem that had baffled armament men for generations, the problem of firing the Atom Stream through the force shell. Underwood