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

did not dare move. He could find little shelter in the small corner where the circled doorway did not fully meet the rectangular corridor, but there was no other to be had.

Shots from within the control room were coming close now. He could feel the heat they generated in the metal floor. While he tried to edge closer into the corner, somebody else came into his view. It was an impressive, militaristic figure, undoubtedly Commander Rennies, for his harsh, arrogant voice was ordering one of the men to call for assistance from the other end of the ship.

Then, suddenly, the Commander stiffened. Even Underwood could glimpse the stare that glazed his eyes like polished glass. Jandro?

The others in the room saw it also, and heard the crash as the heavy body fell to the floor.

The disaster to the Disciples disrupted their attack for an instant. It was long enough for Underwood to get his gun up and fire straight at his opponent. The man started and whirled with a look of surprise on his face for an instant before he died.

And then another shot came from the opposite side of the room and caught one of the remaining defenders unaware. Terry was there at last!

Underwood breathed heavily in relief. He had been afraid Terry had been caught. Apparently the archeologist had met opposition of his own and had eventually succeeded in overcoming it.

Terry and Underwood rushed the control room simultaneously. Only a single member of the Disciples was able to offer resistance. Beams from the two guns crossed the room and caught him in a lethal blaze.

Cautiously, Underwood advanced not quite inside the doorway.

"Terry, you there?" he called.

"Check. I ran into one of them in the corridor."

"Keep out of the way. I'm going to come in blasting in your direction in case any more of these fanatics are hiding."

"Right. If I don't get your okay in five or so, I'll come in the same way."

Underwood set the beam to a low but deadly intensity and fanned it up and down, bringing the plane of motion ever nearer the wall that could be hiding an attacker. Without exposing himself, he extended his hand and brought the gun about until he knew the room was cleared or that any one hiding there had been hit.

He entered then and called to Terry. The redhead entered grinning, but a smear of blood covered his left arm from the shoulder down.

"Terry! You're hurt!"

"I didn't get him good enough with my first shot. I'll be all right. What do we do now?"

"We can clear the ship by throwing some chloryl triptanate into the air system. But even after that, we can't even go back to the moon to return Jandro to his own people—that would bring the whole fleet down on them."

"We'll figure something out," said Terry optimistically. "We didn't expect to get this far. I wonder what happened to that guy Jandro. Have you found out where he actually is yet?"

"No. He apparently killed Rennies, but I've heard nothing from him."

"I'll get the triptanate, and some mesarpin for antidote. If I'm not back in half an hour, it'll be your baby."

"You guard here," said Underwood, "You'd better take it easy with that arm of yours."

"You're more important around here than I am. I'll be back in five minutes." Terry disappeared in the direction of surgery.

Underwood sat down wearily—and suddenly became aware of the fixed dead stare of the eyes of Commander Rennies, who lay on the floor.

His name had been vaguely familiar to Underwood and now he knew why. Rennies had attained considerable renown in the interstellar military field. He had been an able leader, highly trained, widely read, intelligent, and a clever tactician—yet his mind had been as vulnerable to Demarzule as the most illiterate of the Disciples.

Then Underwood became aware of a slow stirring upon the floor. The last Disciple he had shot was not dead. The lips twisted in a snarl of hate.

"Fools!" The Disciple spat out. Blood poured from between his lips. "Do you suppose you can block the Great One? The human race waited ten thousand years for this savior. Man shall become the greatest in all the Universe with him as leader. Pay homage to the Great One as all the Galaxies shall pay homage to us!"

Underwood said, "Why?"

"Because we are the greatest!"

He looked at the man curiously. It was as if the knowledge of semantics did not exist, yet for twelve hundred years semanticists had slowly been prying loose the ancient false extensions that cluttered men's thinking and dwarfed their concepts.

Demarzule had wiped out all of that merely by his presence. Underwood found himself wondering why he should be at all concerned with the matter.

He knew, however, that as a member of the human race he had to keep on hoping that the course of evolution would lead it to something greater than constant strife and insecurity. He had been blind when he had tried to escape. There was no escape; he saw that very clearly now.

A sudden sound in the corridor alerted his senses. His gun moved slightly to cover the entrances.

Then Terry burst into view with the containers of chemicals from the surgical lab.

"Made it," he said. "Any trouble here?"

"No, just one revived for a little while to gab. He's dead now." The man was quiet in a pool of his own blood. "How do things look out there?"

"A lot of racket in the direction of the lock area. Must be fighting going on down there. I didn't see anyone at all near this end."

While he spoke, Terry bent over and moistened a strip of his clothing with one of the liquids. He held it to his nostrils for a moment and passed it to Underwood. Then he opened the return air vent and poured the contents of the other bottle into it. The highly volatile liquid quickly vaporized and passed to the fans of the central ventilating blowers, from which it passed into every chamber of the ship. Within ten minutes it had anesthetized every person aboard the ship except the two who had inhaled the antidote.

While they waited, Underwood stared thoughtfully at the dead Rennies. "I wonder how Jandro kills," he said. "Can there be any defense against such silent power? Have you thought of what that implies with relation to Jandro's people and the society they live in?"

Terry nodded. "I haven't thought much of anything else since I first saw him kill that guard in our stateroom. A civilization in which every member holds a silent, secret weapon over the head of his neighbor. It's incredible that it could exist."

"But it has existed and continues to exist, and I'll bet that Jandro is the first of his kind to use this power for generations."

"It certainly implies a stability and individual recognition of responsibility that has never existed among us. I doubt that it ever will."

"Someday it might."

"We won't be around."

"There's something else, too," Underwood said. "This may be the way out for us. It could be."

"What do you mean?"

"Suppose just one of us had the power Jandro has. That would be the weapon against Demarzule that we need!"

Terry hesitated. "We're not likely to get that power—and if we did, we could never get near enough to Demarzule to use it."

"No? Suppose we let the fleet capture us and take us back. It's my guess that Demarzule wants us alive. His pleasure in our downfall should come from personally witnessing our defeat. It would fit his character. So we'll be brought back as prisoners. Then all that would be necessary would be to dispose of him just as Jandro did with Rennies."

"You're forgetting that Demarzule has the same organs and the same powers. You don't know what kind of defense could be offered against them—perhaps they are immune to such attacks themselves. That would explain this mystery of Dragboran civilization. Maybe Demarzule could detect it if any of us possessed the organs. Lastly, there is absolutely no possibility of our getting them, anyway."

Underwood's face darkened. "That's the one thing I haven't figured out yet, but there's got to be a way. It looks as if this is the only hope left us to destroy the alien. We'd have to defeat the whole fleet to continue searching for the Dragboran weapon, and there's no chance of that."

"I hope you're right. Well, the anesthetic has had time to act. Let's revive our men and set to work on it."

They made sure of their weapons, and left the control room. Within the whole ship there was no sound except their footsteps in the corridor. One by one, they opened the stateroom doors as they went down toward the locks. They held the cloths moistened with the restoring vapors to the nostrils of each of their own men.

The first were Dreyer and Phyfe. Mason and his crew were found in the next room toward the stern. Quick explanations were made and those revived went to the task of restoring still others.

In Illia's stateroom, they found her lying composed upon her bunk. For a moment, as he looked down upon her serene features, Underwood forgot the intense urgency of his tasks. He tried to recall just why he had been willing to sacrifice the life that Illia and he had hoped to share—sacrifice, because she had believed in man, while Underwood had wanted only escape from the pressure of an erratic and chaotic society. Surely that life together would not have been postponed if he could have seen the choices earlier as he saw them now. Was it too late to hope now for reprieve from the destruction that hovered over them? He dared not answer.

Gently, he restored her to consciousness.

"I had the nicest dream," she said. "I knew you were in control as soon as the first whiff of triptanate came through."

"We're not in control yet. The main fleet will arrive within a few hours and have us cornered. Most of us are revived with the exception of a large group down by the locks. Will you go up and help Armstrong, the engineer? He's in B05 and badly hurt. We haven't been able to do a thing for him yet."

Illia nodded. "I'll take care of him. Any others?"

"Terry here." He motioned at Terry's bloodcaked arm. "You'd have to tie him down to work on him, though. Maybe he can go until we get organized."

They separated in the corridor and Underwood hurried on toward the stern locks. As he came up he could see a large group of the men gathered around. Apprehension drove him to a run along the narrow passageway. The group turned as they heard his footsteps and made a path for him.

A scene of death lay before him. Bodies of scientists and Disciples lay side by side on the floor. There were Roberts, the surgeon, and Parker and Muth, two of the chemists. Three others were not recognizable. Six of his own men had died and five of the Disciples before the gas had brought an instant and bloodless end to the battle.

He turned away. He wished there might have been some other way than sacrificing those men, but if the scientists had not held the lock, the Disciples might have remained in permanent control of the ship.

He beckoned to Terry, who was checking the roster with Mason. "Have you accounted for everyone yet?"

"Peters, Atchison, and Markham appear to be the three we couldn't identify," said Terry. "And, of course, Jandro. No one has heard or seen anything of him since he killed Rennies."

"Jandro!" Underwood was suddenly and fearfully aware of Jandro's absence. "We've got to find him. There's no use of any of us leaving unless we do."

"I couldn't be sure, but I think I saw him from the lock viewplates a minute ago," Captain Dawson said. "There's no way of telling except by that oversize spacesuit, but he may be lying on the ground out there."

"If he's been killed—" Underwood raced toward the nearest viewing station.

He switched it on and scanned the area about the ship. Disciples were milling about, hesitant about using their Atom Stream weapons to force entrance without orders from their Commander.

Dawson pointed. "Toward the stern—there!"

It was unmistakably Jandro, though a blast had blackened the upper right portion of the spacesuit and a gap showed in it.

"If the self-sealers worked, he may not have been out there too long," Underwood said urgently. "Dawson, drive the mob back with the big Atom Stream, then throw a force shell over to Jandro so we can go out and get him."

Dawson hurried away, calling for his mates and engineers on his way to the control room. Underwood remained watching the exterior from the plate. Abruptly the Disciples turned