He was rewarded by a tearing pain in his fingertip. Behind the ground glass a red light now appeared.
When the third light flashed on he refused to copy the motion of his instructor. The light blinked at him insistently. He placed both hands behind his back and stepped away from the machine. The ape-man, looking at him with something like panic, beckoned him forward again. Sherman shook his head; the ape-man threw back his head and emitted a long, piercing howl. Almost immediately the door slid back and the car appeared. As Sherman stepped to its threshold, instead of admitting him, it thrust forth a gigantic folding claw which gripped him firmly around the waist and held him while a shaft of the painful yellow light was thrown into his eyes; then tossed him back on the floor and slammed shut vengefully.
Dazed by the light and the fall, Herbert Sherman rolled on the floor, thoughts of retaliation flashing through his head. But he was no fool, and before he had even picked himself up, he realized that his present cast was hopeless. Gritting his teeth, he set himself to follow the ape-man's instructions, looking him over carefully to recognize him again in case—.
The course of instruction was not particularly difficult to memorize. It seemed that for each color of light behind the ground-glass panels one must thrust a finger into a different one of the holes below; hold it there in spite of the pain, till the colored light went out, and then remove it. The process was very hard on the fingers, made of metal though they were. What was it the farmer had shouted down the hall? "Wears your fingers out?" Well, it did that, all right. After an hour or two of it, when he had learned to perform the various operations with mechanical precision and the tip of his index finger had already begun to scale off, the ape-man smiled at him, waved approval and reaching down beneath the black board, pulled out a drawer from which he extracted a finger-tip, made in the same metal as those he already bore, and proceeded to show Sherman how to attach it.
As a mechanic, he watched the process with some interest. The "bone" of the finger, with its joint, screwed cunningly into the bone of the next joint below, the lower end of the screw being curiously cut away and having a tiny point of wire set in it. The muscular bands had loose ends that merely tucked in, but so well were they fashioned, that once in position, it was impossible to pull them out until the finger-tip had been unscrewed.
The instruction process over, he was returned to his cell, wondering what was to happen next. The poisoned paradise was becoming less of a paradise. He speculated on the possibility of wrecking the car that bore him from place to place, but finally decided that it could not be done without some heavy tool and was hardly worth the trouble in any case until he was more certain of getting away afterward.
CHAPTER XIII
The Lassan
When the car next called for him, it took a much longer course; one steadily downward and around a good many curves as he could judge from the way in which it swayed and gained and lost speed. It was fully a twenty-minute ride, and when he stepped out it was not into a room of any kind, but in what appeared to be a tunnel cut in the living rock, at least six feet wide and fully twice as high. The rock on all sides had been beautifully smoothed by some unknown hand, except underfoot where it had been left rough enough to give a grip to the feet.
At his side were two of the ape-men who had been released from the car at the same time. The tunnel led them straight ahead for a distance, then dipped and turned to the right. As he rounded the corner he could see that it ended below and before him in some room where machinery whirred. The ape-men went straight on, looking neither to the right nor the left. As they reached the door that gave into the machine-room they encountered another ape-man wearing the same kind of helmet with its attached tube, as Sherman's instructor had worn. The ape-men who came with him stopped. The helmeted one looked at them stupidly for a moment and then, as though obeying some unspoken command, took one by the arm and led him across the room to the front of a machine and there thrust one of the ubiquitous helmets on his head.
The machine, as nearly as Sherman could make out, was a duplicate of that on which he had injured his fingers; as the helmet was buckled on the ape-man who stood before it he immediately began to watch the ground-glass panels and put his fingers in the holes below.
The process was repeated with the second ape-man, and then the sentinel returned to Sherman. Taking him by the arm, the mechanical beast led him past the row of machines (there seemed to be only four in the room) and to a door at one side, giving him a gentle push. It was the opening of another tunnel, down which Sherman walked for some forty or fifty yards before encountering a second door and a second helmeted ape-man sentry.
This one did exactly as the first had done. Stared at him for a moment, then took him by the arm and led him across the room to a machine, where it left him. Sherman perceived that he was supposed to care for it, and with a sigh, bent to his task.
It was some moments before the rapid flashing of lights gave him a respite. Then he had an opportunity to look about him and observed that, as in the other room, there were four machines. Two of them were untenanted, but at the one next to his, there was someone working. When he glanced again, he was sure it was a mechanized human like himself—and a girl!
"What is this place?" he asked, "and who are you?"
The other gave a covert glance over his shoulder at the sentry by the door.
"Sssh!" she said out of the corner of her mouth, "not so loud.... I'm Marta Lami—and I think this place is hell!"
After a time they contrived a sort of conversation, a word at a time, with covert glances at the ape-man sentry. He looked at them suspiciously once or twice, but as he made no attempt to interfere they gained confidence.
"Who—is—keeping—us—here?" asked Sherman.
"Don't—know," she replied in the same manner. "Think—it's—the—elephants."
"What elephants?" he asked a word at a time. "I haven't seen any."
"You will. They come around and inspect what you're doing. Are you new here?"
"New at these machines. They had me teaching them to write English. This is my first day in here."
"This is my eightieth work-period. We lost track of the days."
"So did I. Where are we? Are there any other humans with you?"
"One in the cage across the corridor from me. Walter Stevens the Wall Street man."
"Have they got him on this job, too?"
"Yes."
Sherman could not avoid a snicker. Back in the days before the comet he had had Stevens as a passenger once, and a more difficult customer to satisfy, a more cocksure-of-his-own-importance man he had never seen. The thought of him burning his fingertips up in one of these machines gave him some amusement. But his next question was practical.
"Do you know what these machines are for?"
"Haven't the least idea; Stevens said they were for digging something. They had the helmets on him twice."
"What helmets?"
"Like the dopey at the door wears. The dopeys all have to wear them."
"Why?"
"Haven't got any brains, I guess. I had one on once when they were teaching me to do this. They tell you what to think."
"What do you mean?"
"You put the helmet on and it's like you're hypnotized. You can't think anything but what they want you to think."
Sherman shuddered slightly. So that was how the mechanical ape-men were controlled so perfectly!
"How did they get you?" asked the girl who had described herself as Marta Lami.
"In an airplane. I'm an aviator. They shot me down somewhere and when I came to, put me in one of those cages. How did you get here?"
"The birds. I was at West Point with Stevens and that old fool Vanderschoof. They started shooting at the birds and the birds just picked us up and flew away with us."
"Where were you after you came to? I mean after the comet."
"New York. Century Roof. I was dancing there before."
"You aren't Marta Lami, the dancer?"
"Sure. Who the hell do you think?"
He turned and regarded her deliberately, careless of the aroused attention of the sentry. So this was the famous dancer who had blazed across two continents and three divorce suits—who had been proclaimed the most beautiful woman in the world in starring electric lights before an applauding Broadway; for whose performances speculators held tickets at prize-fight premiums! How little she resembled it now, a parody of the human form, working her fingers off as the slave of an alien and conquering race.
She asked the next question:
"Where have they got you?"
"I don't know. In a cage somewhere. The only people around there are like these mugs." He nodded toward the ape-man.
"I wonder how long they'll keep us at this."
"I wish I could tell you. How's chances of making a break?"
"Rotten. There was a guy at the next machine tried it three or four work-periods ago. He socked the dopey at the door."
"What happened?"
"They sent a machine down for him and gave him the yellow lights all over. It was fierce, you should have heard him scream."
"How far down are we, anyway?"
"You got me, boy friend. Sssh! Watch the dopey."
Sherman glanced over his shoulder to see the ape-man moving aside from the door and bent back to his work. Evidently something important was imminent, judging from the actions of the sentry and the energetic attention the ex-dancer was giving to her machine. He was not deceived. Down the passage came something moving; something flesh-like and smooth, of a pale, grey-blue, dead-fish color, like a dangling serpent, then a round bulging head and finally the full form of an elephant!
But such an elephant as mortal eye had never before seen. For it stood barely eight feet high and its legs were both longer and infinitely more slender and graceful than the legs of any earthly elephant. The ears were smaller, not loose flaps of skin, but possessed of definite form and pressed close to the head. The skull was enormous, bulging at the forehead, and wrinkled in the middle down over the large intelligent eyes in an expression permanently cross and dissatisfied. As for the trunk it reached nearly to the floor, longer and thinner in proportion than the trunk of an ordinary elephant, and at its tip divided into four finger-like projections set around the circle of the nostril.
Oddest of all, the elephant wore clothes! Or at least an outer garment, a kind of long cloak which appeared to be attached underneath its body and which covered every portion except the ankles. The feet also were covered. A kind of hood hung back from the head on that portion of the cloak which rested on the creature's back. But what chiefly aroused Sherman's sense of strangeness and loathing was that the naked skin, wherever exposed, was of that same poisonous, dead-fish blue.
For a moment the thing stood in the doorway, regarding them, swinging its long trunk around restlessly, as though it could tell something about them by its sense of smell. Then it advanced a step or two into the room, and placing its trunk close to Sherman's body, began to run over it, sniffing, a few inches away. He felt that he wanted to shriek, to turn and strike the thing, or to run, but a warning glance from the dancer kept him motionless.
Apparently satisfied with the result of its examination the elephant turned to go, stopping as it did so to unhook some projection on the ape-man's helmet and apply it to its ear. After listening for a moment, it put the end of the trunk to this projection, snorted into it, and went away with soundless steps.
For several minutes the two worked on in silence after this. Then:
"Well, now you seen him," said the dancer, in the same word-by-word fashion as before. "That was our boss."
"That—thing?" asked Sherman, incredulously.
"I'll tell the cockeyed world. Say, those babies know more than Einstein ever heard of. Try to get fresh with one of them and see."
"What do they do?"
"Shoot you with one of the light-guns. They carry little ones around with them. They melt you down wherever they hit you and you have to go to the operating room to have things put back and it hurts like hell."
"Oh, I must have been there after they brought me down in my plane. They did something to my back."
"Then you know, boy friend. After that they put the helmet on you and you have to tell 'em what you're thinking about. You can beat that game, though, if you're careful. All I'd give 'em was how good a couple of Scotch highballs would taste and it made monkeys of 'em."
It was all very strange and not a little bewildering. Intelligent elephants that controlled forces beyond the powers of men; who could place a helmet on your head and read your thoughts; who could repair the new mechanized human form after it had apparently suffered irreparable damage, and who treated men and women as lower animals. Their arrival must have been that of the comet.
Herbert Sherman had read deeply enough, though not widely. He remembered some Englishman—Colvin—Kevin—Kelvin, that was it!—who had a theory that life had drifted to the earth from somewhere out in the void of space and time. Had these, too, drifted in, in the same way the ancestors of man had come, to set a period to the day of man's dominance over creation? A strange enough creation it was now, though, with its mechanical men and its animals turned to metal statues. He wondered what Noah would say, and giggled at the thought.
"What's the joke, boy friend?"
"Oh, nothing. I had an idea."
Their plight at the hands of these master-animals was bad, but it might be worse. At least he had a certain amount of freedom, he was stronger than he had ever before been in his life, and felt quite as intelligent. It would be strange if he could not accomplish something.... He fell to planning out ways of escaping and failed to notice the pain in his fingers in the intensity of his thoughts.
Everything seemed to show that the operation of most of these machines was predominantly electrical. It would be strange if the car that carried them to and fro was not, yes and by Jove, the helmets the ape-men wore. If he could short-circuit the works, or even a part of them....
Apparently his new body was a good conductor and impervious to the injurious effects of the electric current. Short-circuit something, that was the idea, create a confusion—and trust to escaping in the midst of it? Perhaps—but at all events a good deal could be learned about these elephant-men and their methods by watching them in such an emergency. Their machinery was so efficient that a child could operate it; it was in a pinch that their real intelligence would show.
It struck him that it would do little good to escape unless he did learn something about these elephant-people, their mysterious light-guns, their vast city that they seemed to have hollowed out of the heart of the solid Catskill rock, their chemistry and metallurgy and methods of attack and defense. Otherwise escape would be a jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. There would be nothing for it but a desperate, harried existence, the existence of one of the lower animals faced by the insupportable competition of man.
Information! That was the first need. He must bend all his energies to the task of obtaining it.
"By the way, what do these eggs call themselves?" he asked.
"Lassans," said the dancer.
A light flickered along the corridor. The ape-man at the door came forward, touched him on the arm and led him to the passage where he caught the car back to his cage.
CHAPTER XIV
In the Passages
The first thing to be done, Sherman decided, was to short-circuit the mind-reading helmet of the guard at the door, if it were possible. He was not certain that the thing was electrical, and ignorant of how the current was conveyed if it were. He realized that he was dealing with the products of an utterly alien form of mentality, one that might not produce its results in the same way as an earth-man would at all. But something had to be dared, and this seemed to offer the best opportunity.
If the thing were electrical, the current must come through the tube to the top of the head. On his second work-period he observed this tube with care. It ran through an aperture in the stone roof and was apparently provided with some spring device, for a considerable length of it reeled out when the ape-man wished to walk across the room, and was absorbed as he returned.
The tube seemed to be made of the rubber-like material that composed the floor of his cage. The simplest plan, of course, would be to bring his chopping-knife with him and when the ape-man paused before the wall, swing it up in a sweep, severing the tube. But this, he felt, was not to be recommended. It would not necessarily short-circuit the current and the damage would be too readily laid at his door. The desideratum was some damage that apparently accidental, would yet produce a good deal of uproar.
He talked it over with Marta Lami.
"I think you're bugs," she said frankly, "but anything for excitement. What do you want me to do about it?"
"Well, here's what I figured out," Sherman explained. "We both arrive about the same time. I'll bring my knife. When we come in you hang back a bit, and while you're doing it, I'll take a poke at that cable with the knife, not enough to cut it, but enough to damage it. Then about half-way through the work period, I'll turn around and say something to you. If I do it quick enough, I think the monk will start for me, and if the cable doesn't go then, I'll miss my guess."
The next period proved unsuitable; the dancer's car arrived considerably before Sherman's and the plan was dropped for the time, but on the following occasion, as Sherman came down the passage, he noticed Marta Lami just ahead of him. He hurried to catch up and she evidently understood, for she avoided the guard's outstretched hand and hung back a minute against the wall as Sherman came up behind. He made one quick motion; the cable sheared half-way through exposing two wires of bright metal.
As luck would have it, it proved unnecessary to put the second part of the plan into operation. For just as Sherman was nerving himself to swing round and attract the ape-man's attention, he heard the soft pad-pad of one of the approaching Lassans. The ape-man stepped back to clear the entrance as he had before, and as he did so, there was a trickle of sparks, a blinding flash, and the cable short-circuited.
The result was totally unexpected. From the great machine before Sherman there came an answering flash; the ground glass split across with a bang, there was a hissing sound and something blew up with a roar that rocked the underground chambers....
Sherman came to himself flat on his back and with pieces of rock and the debris of the machine lying across his legs. He looked around; Marta Lami lay some little distance across the room, half covered with fallen rock, one arm flung across her eyes as though to protect them. Above, the solid granite looked as though a blasting charge had been fired in its midst. Sherman pulled himself to a sitting posture, and finding nothing damaged, stood upright. The machine, badly shattered, lay in fragments of bent rods, broken pulleys and wrecked cylinders all about him. In the place where it had stood was a long narrow opening, down at the end of which something irregular shut off a bright point of light. A blast of heat exuded from the place and a steady, deep-voiced roaring was audible. The ape-man guard was nowhere to be seen.
He bent to pick up the unconscious girl, wondering how one revived a mechanical woman, especially without water, but she solved the problem for him by opening her eyes and asking:
"Who touched off the pineapple, boy friend?"
"I did. Come out of it and tell me what we do next. Anything busted?"
"Only my head." She patted the mass of stiff wire. "Boy, am I glad I wore my hair long before they made a robot of me!" And with an effort she stood up, looked down the pit where the machine had been and said, "Say, let's get out of here. That don't look so good."
"All right," said Sherman, "which way? Wait till I get my knife."
"No, leave it," she said. "Those babies are nobody's saps. If they find it on you they'll know you shot the well. Come on, I think that thing is going to pop again."
The roaring had increased in both volume and intensity, and the machine-room had become unbearably hot. They turned toward the door, but just at the entrance into the passage a pile of debris had descended, making egress impossible. Behind them the roaring increased still more. "Come on, boy friend," called the dancer, tearing at the rocks. "Get these out of the road unless you want to be stewed in your own juice."
Together they toiled over the blocks of granite, hurling them backward toward the wreck of the machine. One minute, two, three—the roaring behind them grew and spread, the heat became terrific.
"Ah!" cried Marta Lami at last. A tiny opening at the top of the heap was before them. Sherman tugged at a rock—one more, and they would be through. But it was too big, would not budge.
"No, this one," shouted his companion and together they dragged at it. It gave—a cascade of smaller stones rolled down the heap to the floor. "You first," said Sherman and stood aside.
The dancer wriggled through and reached back a hand to pull him after. He dived, grunted, pushed—made it. As they turned to slide down the other side of the heap, he looked back. A little rivulet of something white, hot and liquid was creeping through the ruins of the machine and into the room.
Up the passage, strewn with wreckage, but with no more blockades, into the upper machine room. The machines here also were deserted and from one of them issued a minor variation on the roaring sound they had heard in their own room. The guard was not on duty. They turned, sped up the next passage to the place where the cars ordinarily met them. The car-track was dark; by the illumination from the passage they could see the rail on which it ran, a foot or two down from the level of the passage, and about a foot broad—a single shining ribbon of metal. Sherman looked in one direction, then the other. Nothing. The roaring behind them continued.
"Drive on, kid," said Marta Lami. "The boojums are going to get us if we wait."
"Stop, look, listen, watch out for the cars," he quoted as they leaped down and both laughed.
The roadbed was as smooth as glass, the rail set flush with it. Judging that the best route was the one taking them upward Sherman turned to the right and they began climbing, hand in metal hand.
The track was on a curve as well as an ascent. After a few steps they were in complete darkness and could only feel their way along, running into the wall every few minutes. They climbed for what seemed hours. The tunnel continued dark, without branches, simply winding on and on. Finally, so quickly that Sherman missed his step, they reached a level place, rounded one more curve, and saw ahead of them a band of light across the track from some side-tunnel.
"Shall we try it?" he asked as they reached the opening.
"Might be another machine room," she said, "but let's go. This track is terrible. If I wasn't made of iron I'd have bruises all over."
He vaulted over the sill, reached down and hauled her after him. From behind them came the roar, sunk to a vague purring by the distance. They were in another granite-lined passage; one that went straight ahead for a few yards, then branched sharply. The right hand fork seemed to lead downward; automatically they took the other turn. A diffused radiance from somewhere high in the walls, as though the granite had been rendered transparent here and there, filled the whole place with shadowless light. For a time the passage ran level, then it climbed again, with another fork to the right, which dipped away from their level and which they again avoided. Of any other living being there was thus far no sign.
The passage began climbing again, in a tight spiral, this time.
"Good thing we're in training," remarked Marta Lami. "This is worse than the stairs in the Statue of Liberty."
"Oh, did you fall for climbing that, too?" asked Sherman.
"Sure. Publicity stunt about a year ago. Dumb bunny of a publicity man. Photographed on the old lady's spikes. Never will again."
The spiral ended, a side passage branched off. The dancer stopped.
"Sh," she said, "someone's coming. Duck in here." She seized Sherman's hand and led him into the side passage, down which they ran for a few feet, then paused to look back. Down the passage they had just vacated came a group of the ape-men, four or five of them, each carrying on his left arm a long, cylindrical shield like those one sees in pictures of Roman soldiers, and in his right hand some instrument that looked like a fire extinguisher with a long, flexible nozzle.
Each of the group wore one of the helmets and behind them, wearing a similar headgear to which all the tubes were connected from the ape-men's helmets came one of the Lassans. The group hurried past without a sideward glance, the metal feet of the ape-men ringing oddly loud on the granite of the echoing passage. After a minute Sherman and the dancer crept cautiously forward; the procession had gone straight on down. Very likely a wrecking crew.
Sherman and Marta sprinted up the passage in the direction from which the ape-men and their guide had come. The passage no longer rose with the same steepness, and as the ascent grew more gentle, the tunnel widened, with frequent side-passages to the right and branches leading down to the track at the left. Finally, after a sharp turn, it opened out into a big room, untenanted like all they had seen so far, filled with a complex maze of machinery, but machinery of a different character from that they had labored at. At the farther end of the room a door stood open. They dashed across it, plunged through—and found themselves in one of the enormous blue-domed halls, whose ceiling seemed to stretch miles above them.
It must have been all of three hundred feet across, and there was no visible support for the ceiling. All about the place stood various objects and pieces of machinery, and figures moved dimly among the titanic apparatus at the far end. But what most attracted their attention was the huge object that stood right before them.
It looked like a metal fish on an enormous scale. Fully fifty feet long and twenty feet high, its immense proportions dwarfed everything about it, and its sides, of brilliantly polished metal, shone like a mirror. The tail came to a stubby point, from which projected a circle of four tubes; down the side was a rib which ended in a similar tube about half way, and at the nose-end of the mechanical fish was a ten-foot snout, not unlike an elephant's trunk in shape and apparently made of the same rubbery material which held the cables of the helmets.
Marta pulled Sherman down behind the thing, and they peered around the edge seeking for a means of egress from the room. The nearest was twenty or thirty feet away. Watching their opportunity, they chose a moment when they seemed least likely to attract attention and made a dive for it.
They found themselves in another passage, terminating in two doors.
"Which?" asked Sherman.
"Eeny-meeny," said Marta—"this one," and stepping boldly to the right hand door, pushed it open....
For a moment they could only gaze. The room they had entered was another and smaller blue-domed hall. Around its sides was a row of curious twisted benches of green material, each of which was now occupied by one of the Lassans, hood thrown back from head, and elephant-trunk thrust into a large pool of some viscous, green stuff with bright yellow flecks in it, in the center of the circle. Half a dozen helmeted ape-men stood behind the benches of their masters, apparently serving them at this singular meal.
Half a dozen ape-men stood behind the benches of their masters apparently serving at this singular meal.
As the two humans entered there was one of those silences which are pregnant with events. Then:
"Good evening, folks. How's the boy?" said Marta, and curtsied gracefully.
The sound of her words seemed to release the spell. With a bellow of rage the nearest Lassan leaped from his bench, fumbling at one of the pouches in his cloak. "The light-gun!" thought Sherman and braced himself to spring, but another of the masters extended his trunk and detained the first one. There was a momentary babble of rumbling conversation, then one of the Lassans reached behind him, picked up a helmet and placed it on his head, and attaching a tube to one of the ape-men, rose.
The ape-man moved toward Marta and Sherman like a being in a dream. They turned to run, but the Lassan produced a light-gun with such evident intention of using it at the first motion that they paused.
"Looks like we're in for it," said the dancer. "Oh, well, lead on Napoleon. What do we care for expenses?"
Under the direction of the Lassan the ape-man took them each by an arm and led them back through the hall of the metal fish, down among the machines, where two or three others stared at them curiously or lifted inquisitive trunks in their direction. Then into another passage which had one of the inevitable car-tracks. Their Lassan conductor reached around the corner into the passage, applied his trunk briefly to something and a moment later one of the cars slid silently into position. The door opened.
"So long, old scout," said Marta Lami. "Even if I never see you again, we had a great time together."
"So long," replied Sherman, taking his place in the car. He felt a distinct pang at leaving this dancer—vulgar, no doubt, and flippant, but gay and debonair, and the best of companions.
The car did not take them far. It discharged Sherman in a little passage before a narrow door, which opened automatically to admit him to a small blue-domed room containing nothing but a seat, one of the benches on which he had seen the Lassans reclining and a mass of wires and tubes. There seemed nothing in particular to do. He was at liberty, save that the door closed firmly behind him, cutting off escape, and seeing that he was left alone, he seated himself and began to examine the machinery, most of which was attached to his chair.
CHAPTER XV
The Lassan Explains
Before he had time to riddle out any of its secrets the door opened again and one of the Lassans came in—a distinctly different type than any he had hitherto seen. This one was smaller than most; his skin, where exposed, was covered by a tracery of fine wrinkles and his coloring was whiter than the rest. Little crowfeet stood around the corners of his eyes, giving him an expression that was singularly humorous. He approached Sherman on noiseless feet, moved his trunk up and down as though examining him and then, producing from a pocket in his cloak one of the thought-helmets, set it on Sherman's head, tightened a connection or two with his trunk and placing a like device on his own head, settled himself on the twisted bench.
The ordeal of the helmet! "They make you think whatever they want you to; it's like being hypnotized," Marta Lami had said. He braced himself resolutely. This alien intelligence should not plumb his thoughts without a struggle....
To his surprise, there seemed no attempt to force his mind. The thought leaped up, unbidden, "Why, this—this Lassan is friendly!" No definite image or plan or connection of ideas formed itself in his brain; he merely felt enormously soothed and strengthened. After all, he found himself arguing, nobody desired to hurt him; merely to discover what curious process of thought had led him to act as he had.
"You are too intelligent, too high a type to have been put to work at the machines," came the unspoken thought of the Lassan. "We might better have put you at the controls of one of the fighting machines." (This thought caused a mental image of the giant silver fish he had seen in the hall of the dome to rise in his mind; he pictured himself as seated amid a mass of levers before a panel set with complex gauges.)
"It was a mistake," the thought he was receiving went on, "that you were sent there. The Alphen of the mental department, who had your case in charge should have known better. You earth-men make much better machines than the ones we brought with us. You do not even need the helmets in order to control. Some of you are even capable of understanding and operating the lights." (This, he explained afterward appeared not as a consecutive sentence in Sherman's mind, but as a succession of ideas, almost as though he were thinking them himself. With the word "lights" a complex picture presented itself, involving the light-guns and a large amount of other complex apparatus, whose exact uses he did not then or later understand, but which he felt he understood at the moment.)
"Now," the Lassan's thought went on, "I don't blame you for being frightened and trying to run away, but you know we are different and I don't quite understand what frightened you. You were working at a machine, were you not?" And as Sherman unconsciously thought of himself sticking his fingers in the apertures of the machines, "I thought so. What happened?"
Unbidden, the memory of the explosion came to him. Again he heard the Lassan's step in the corridor, saw the guard move aside, the sputter from the cable, and then the explosion; then his memory jumped to the moment of tugging at the stones with the roar and heat all round and the white-hot stream in pursuit.
A vague, but sympathetic thought reached him, followed by a question—"But what made that happen? You're intelligent, you understand these things, you are a mechanic—what made it happen?"
With a start of surprise Sherman realized that the Lassan had been leading him gently along from place to place—to trap him! He struggled desperately to keep the thought of the short-circuiting of the guard's helmet from his mind; struggled to think about anything else at all—thought of a plate of steaming corned beef and cabbage, of the multiplication table—5 x 5 = 25, all in neat rows of figures, thought of how to control a plane that had gone into a tail-spin....
The pressure suddenly relaxed, the mind opposite his became friendly again; once more he received the vague intimation of sympathy and understanding, even of admiration of his mental strength.
"Why," the thought was telling him, "you have quite as much mentality as a Lassan! That is a very high compliment. I have never before met one of the lower animals who could withhold his thoughts from me. It is most extraordinary. Is it possible for you to withhold your thoughts from your own kind as well?"
Not at all difficult, thought Sherman, relaxing a bit; indeed the difficulty in human communication lies not in withholding thoughts but in expressing them.
His interlocutor went on, "Ah, but the feeling, the thought is generally understood, though it may not be clear. Tell me, have you never withheld a thought from someone who wished to know it?"
Yes, thought Sherman, I have—and remembered the poker game at the Cleveland airport when he had drawn two cards and unexpectedly filled a straight flush to win the biggest pot of the evening from Barney's full house; and of the time when he had thought of numerous unpleasant ways of slaying the mechanic who had left a leak in his oil-line and of the time when a girl had tried to gold-dig him and he had divined her intention first, and of the time when he had lifted the knife—!!!
Again that jar! He realized with a start that the Lassan having failed to pick his brain with friendliness, was trying to do it with flattery, and the realization so filled him with anger that he had no difficulty in resisting the pressure that was applied to make him tell, tell, tell what had happened in the machine-room at the end of the passage.
Once more the pressure relaxed. The Lassan was congratulating him again. "No, this is sincere this time and not flattery. You win. I shall not try to make you tell me again. We can probably obtain it from the other one anyway. Oh, man of a debased and alien race, I salute you. If your race were all like you we might breed them for intelligence and live in cooperation with you. It is almost a pity you had to be mechanized. If there is any information you wish, I will gladly exchange with you. We have seen your homes, we are curious—imagine living above the ground!—and from others of your race we know that you have many fine machines, almost a civilization, in fact. We would willingly know more of it and in return will tell you of our accomplishments."
Could this offer conceal some new trap? Sherman wondered, but the Lassan divined this thought as soon as formed, and reassured him. "Since we now live here and since there are so few of your folk left it is important that we know about each other. We must live side by side—why not in friendship?"
The offer seemed fair enough. At all events if there were any injudicious questions he could turn them aside, and there was a good deal he wished to learn—about his mechanized body, about the purpose of those curious machines, the blue-domed halls, the silver fish, the interweavings of this underground city, where the Lassans had come from—he assented.
"Good," the message reached him. "Suppose you ask a question and then I will. What do you wish to know?"
"How I was made into a machine."
"I do not know that I can explain it to you. I perceive your knowledge of the nature of light is elementary.... But the material with which we surrounded the space-ship in which we came, in order to protect it from the radiation of suns unknown to you, has a powerful action on all animal substances. It is a material not unlike your radium, but a thousand times more powerful. When we reached your planet, your atmosphere carried it to every part of the earth, and all living things received it. Those who were most affected by it were turned to metal which retained that quality called 'life' within its interior reaches; the others became merely solid metal.
"Our birds are under instructions to bring us all such individuals as possess life. In our laboratories we make their forms over, so they will be useful to us as servants. Those who have become solid, of course, nothing can be done for. We have found in the past that when we take a new planet and make the individuals over into machines, unless we return them to familiar surroundings, they lose their brains when they reawake. Therefore you woke in the same place in which you passed from consciousness."
"Wonderful," said Sherman, "and where do you come from and how did you get here?"
He felt the Lassan's amusement. "That is two questions you have asked, and not one. Nevertheless I will answer. We come from a planet of another star, very far away—I do not know how to express it to you. Your methods of measurement for these things are different from ours." In Sherman's mind appeared a picture of the night heavens with the tremendous ribbon of the Milky Way swinging across its center; his attention was directed to one star, a very bright one.
"Rigel!" his mind called, and the thought went on. He was suddenly transported to the neighborhood of the star, felt that it was ages ago, long before the earth had cooled, and saw that the star, then a sun like our own, was threatened by some enormous catastrophe, a titanic explosion. Abruptly the picture was wiped out and he beheld the comet, the great comet the earthly astronomers had watched for so long before it struck on that fateful night, and realized that it was no comet, but an interplanetary vehicle bound from the planet of Rigel to the earth.
The star, like our own sun, was threatened by some enormous catastrophe, a titanic explosion.
"But how—?" he began to frame another question. The Lassan cut across it firmly. "It is my turn to seek information now. We are interested in the machine that brought you here—the bird machine. How does it operate?"
Sherman imagined himself in the airplane's seat, operating the controls and as well as he could to a strange type of mind, explained how they worked. "But what drives it?" insisted the Lassan. "I do not understand. No, not the queer thing at the front that turns round. We have that principle ourselves. But the thing that makes it turn."
For answer, Sherman tried to picture the interior of the engine and show the gasoline exploding and driving it. The mind opposite his became thoughtful at once, and then flashed a question. "Are there many—explosives—in this earth?"
Sherman pictured gunpowder, dynamite and all the others he could think of. He at once sensed that the Lassan was both astonished and troubled. Something like a mental curtain which he could not pierce, dropped between them. A moment later the elephant-man rose.
"That will be sufficient for the present," he flashed, and came forward to remove the helmet from Sherman's head.
A few moments later the door was swung open; Sherman saw that one of the cars was waiting for him with the word "EXIT" beckoning him on and he was soon back in his cage.
As nearly as he could judge time, he was left alone for quite twenty-four hours before being recalled for further questioning. As soon as he entered the interrogation room he perceived that something serious had engaged the attention of the Lassans. The seat was prepared for him as before, but instead of one of the twisted benches, there were now three. His acquaintance, the old Lassan, occupied the center one; on one side was a chubby elephant-man whose obesity gave a singularly infantile expression to his features and on the other a slender-limbed type, as though by contrast. All three had tubes connected to the helmet which was placed on his head, but he soon recognized that the older Lassan was the only one to ask questions.
"We wish to ask you about these explosives," came the message. "Are they all alike?"
"No," he answered instantly.
"What causes them to explode?"
"I am not a chemist. I don't know." The idea of chemistry was slightly unfamiliar to them; it was apparent from their thoughts that chemistry had never occurred to them as the subject of a special study. Then came another question, "Are there many chemists?"
An idea struck Sherman. He closed his mind resolutely against the question and flashed back the message that he had come to learn as well as teach. He sensed a certain annoyance among the new auditors, but the old Lassan answered, "That is only just. What do you wish to know?"
"What the machines are for."
"In the center of this as of every other earth lies the substance of life, as it lies at the heart of every sun. The machines pierce to it and draw it up for our uses."
"What is this substance of life?"
"You would not understand if we told you. Sufficient that it is nothing known on the surface of your world. Your idea that most nearly approaches it is—" he paused for a moment, feeling about in Sherman's mind for the proper expression "—is pure light; light having material body and strength. Now let me ask—do you use explosives as we use the substance of life, to fight your enemies?"
"Yes."
"What weapons do you use them in?"
Sherman thought of a revolver and then of a cannon.
"And do these weapons act at a distance?"
"Yes. May I ask a question?"
"If it is a brief one. This interview is important to us."
"How many of your people are there on the earth?"
"It is inadvisable to answer that fully, but there are some hundreds. Now tell us, are there any of these weapons near this place?"
Sherman thought. West Point—Watervliet Arsenal—Iona Island, leaped into his mind. All three Lassans leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction and exchanged thoughts among themselves so rapidly that he could not follow the process. Then the two younger Lassans disconnected their helmets and the older one said,
"We are disposed to be generous to you, we will demonstrate one of our fighting machines to you if you will show us how to use these explosives."
There could be no particular harm in it, he argued to himself. The army was a thing of the past, and if there were other people out in the world, and he could take them a knowledge of the Lassan fighting machines it would be of as much value as any information he could give. He agreed.
The old Lassan rose. "You will retain your helmet. It is a rule that none of the lower races are allowed in the fighting machines without them, and you would be unable to control one without our help in any case."
The car carried them to the blue-domed hall where he and Marta Lami had hidden behind the shining fish. A little pang of loneliness leaped up in him at the sight; he wondered where she was and whether she had been sent back to the machines. "No," the Lassan's thought answered his, "the other servant has not been returned to the machines. Many of them are not working as a result of the recent trouble and the servant has been placed on other work instead. But I do not understand your idea that the other servant is somehow different from you."
"Do the Lassans, then, have no sex?" the thought raced through his brain.
"Sex? Oh, I understand. The difference between two of the lower soft races that makes reproduction possible. Our birds have it. No, we have abolished it of course, as all higher races have. Our young are produced artificially."
CHAPTER XVI
A Dash for Freedom
They stood before the big machine. "You must do exactly as I tell you," the Lassan informed him. "The machinery of this instrument is very delicate. First, to enter, you must reach up there, by that fin, and insert one of your fingers in the hole you will find."
As he did so Sherman saw a door, so closely fitted that when it closed there was no visible seam in the metal, swing back. They entered.
The interior of the machine was disappointingly smaller than its outside would have led one to expect. A narrow walk, railed on both sides, led down the center to the forward part. Along and slightly below this walk was a row of instrument boards not unlike those of the mining machine, and at each of these one of the ape-men lay, helmet on head, apparently asleep. "No, not asleep," the Lassan told him, "they do not require it, like all our mechanical servants. They have merely been thrown into a state of nothingness till we need them."
At the prow of the machine the cat-walk widened into a control chamber. One of the Lassan couches was here and above it dangled a helmet which was connected with those of the slumbering ape-men. The Lassan removed the helmet he wore and exchanged it for this. Before this was another seat in which Sherman took his position. A complex of controls surrounded him, most of them with the fingerholes which were the ordinary Lassan method of handling machinery. Directly in front of this seat was a ground-glass panel, now dark but which lit up as soon as the Lassan had connected up his helmet, to give an accurate picture of the hall in which the fighting machine stood.
"And can you see to a distance?" Sherman wondered. The answer he received was either confused or beyond his comprehension. He gathered that the four-winged birds of the Lassans acted in some way or other as their scouts, remaining in a kind of telepathic communication with the Lassan in the fighting-machine they were assigned to help....
Sherman was surprised to find how readily the enormous bulk and weight of the thing handled under the Lassan's skilled control. He understood, without definitely asking, that the power was furnished by that "substance of life" to which the Lassan had referred; in some way connected with the absolute destruction of matter....
The door swung open before them, leading them down a passage that went up for some distance, then through an immense room where some twenty more of these giants lay stored, through it, and with surprising suddenness into the bright sunlight of a Catskill autumn day. As they emerged the viewing plate swung round to show them three of the big four-winged birds go whirring up from some unseen covert, spiral into the air above them and flying level with them, form an escort.
Like most mail aviators, Sherman held a commission in the Army Reserve and had been to West Point. It was not difficult for him to guide the great fighting machine there, to find a field gun and ammunition and load it into the fighting machine. He knew very little about artillery of any kind, but when they returned to the door of the Lassan city, he was enough of a mechanic to get the shell into the breech and find the firing mechanism. The gun went off with an earsplitting crack and the shell whistled down the valley to burst against a green hillside where they saw a graceful pine dip and fall to the shock.
And just at that moment such a sense of disturbance and alarm invaded Sherman's mind as he had never felt before. He looked around; the group of Lassans who had poured out of the city to see the experiment with the gun was gathered in a tight knot, eagerly conversing with one another. The old Lassan who was conducting him turned round abruptly. "Into the fighting-machine at once," he commanded. "Our birds have sent a message that they are being attacked by some strange creature of your world."
As Sherman climbed through the door of the fighting machine he glanced over his shoulder to see, far down the valley a black speck against the sky. An airplane? he wondered and it suddenly occurred to him that however great his thirst for information, he should have kept his knowledge of guns from the Lassans; for if there were other people alive out there in the world the day might come when it would be a battle—and explosives were as new to the Lassans as the light-ray to the children of men.
After that it became a struggle.
Sherman found he had to be constantly on his guard; constantly he had to conceal knowledge from the probing, insistent mind-helmets. The Lassans seemed interested in only one subject now: human methods of making war, human guns, human armor, human ships. Once they brought him an encyclopedia and as he held it on his lap went over every word of the articles on military subjects, questioning and cross-questioning him. Fortunately, it was an old encyclopedia, and he knew so little about it that in most cases he was able to throw open his mind and let his opponents see that it lay empty on these subjects. And still they were not satisfied.
Yet if he gave information, he also received it; for little by little an understanding of the subtle material they called pure light became part of his mental equipment....
One day, as he returned from a long session in the questioning room and his cage clicked into position behind him, he was startled by a cheery, strident voice:
"Well, well, if it isn't my old pal, Herbie. How's the boy?"
Sherman looked around. In the next cage was Marta Lami, grinning and extending her hand through the bars.
"For Heaven's sake!" he said, and took the offered hand. "How did you get here?"
"How does anyone get anywhere around this place? In one of those patent Fords of theirs."
They gazed at each other for a moment, too glad of a familiar face to make the ordinary banal remarks. The dancer spoke first:
"Well, did they put the screws on you, big boy? They tried to pump me about that accident but all I'd think about was how good Broadway would look with all the lights, and they didn't make much out of me."
"I'll say they put the screws on me. They've had me in there every day since, trying to find out something about guns."
"Guns? What t'hell! Ain't they got that light-ray? They could give cards and spades to all the guns in the world with that. Wait a minute, though...." She thought for a moment. "Do you know, I think they're scared yellow about something and I'll bet a hundred dollars against a case of bathtub gin I know what it is."
"Yeh? Spring it. They keep pumping me and I'd like to know what it's all about."
The dancer glanced around. On the far side of her cage was an inattentive ape-man tossing his oil-ball about, across the corridor another. "Come over here," she said. "They haven't put me next to you for the fun of it, and they may have a dictaphone stuck around somewhere."
Obediently Sherman approached the bars of the cage.
"They put me to work making those fighting-machines," she whispered, "you know, those big shiny things like we hid behind that day we tried to make the break. They had the helmets on me most of the time because I didn't know how to use their tools and machines and I got a lot of what the guy that was running me was thinking about. He was damn nervous about something, and I think it was because there are some people outside going to take a whack at these babies."
"People like—us?" asked Sherman.
"I don't know. I didn't get it very good, but I think they're ordinary flesh-and-blood people. They came and got a lot of the dopeys from the room where I lived the other day and put them in one of the new fighting-machines and took it out. It never came back."
"Mmm," said Sherman, "do you s'pose that was because it got cracked up or because they took it somewhere else?"
"Dunno. But something's stirring."
If the Lassans had set a dictaphone or some similar device to spy on them there was no sign of it in the conversation which Sherman's interrogator held with him during the next period. But when he saw the dancer again, she beckoned him silently to her side, and producing from one of her drawers a book, began to trace letters on it with a fingernail dipped in grease.
"Be careful what you say," she wrote. "They know what we're talking about. They pumped me."
He nodded. "Well, kid," he said aloud. "What do you think? Will you ever make dancers of these Lassans?"
She giggled her appreciation of this remark for their unseen audience. "I'll say I won't. They're too slow on their pins. Rather sit still and suck up that green gooey than do anything. Cheez! What would I give for some good music."
"If I had a hand-organ now—" said Sherman. "We've got the monk." He nodded toward the ape-man, while with his own fingernail he wrote. "How's chances of getting out of here? Do you know the way?"
"I'll speak to one of the big shots tomorrow," she said aloud. "Maybe we can get him to let us run a show." On the book's flyleaf appeared the words. "Only from the work-room on. It has an outside door."
"How would I do as a dancing partner?" asked Sherman. "Good," he wrote. "I've doped out how to work these cars. Are you game for a try at it?"
"You haven't got the figure," she said. "I'd rather dance with that old papa Lassan that does the questions." "Sure," she wrote, "any time you say."
They broke off the conversation at this point, and Sherman set himself to study out a plan for escape. He had watched the cars intently both inside and out. The same needle arrangement that released the cage bars, apparently, actuated the mechanism of the car doors, and it was located inside. This meant that he could secure admission to the same car that carried the girl, and with luck, would be able to get out at the same time she did. What to do after that was a matter of chance and inspiration. If only he had a weapon!... The oil and grease balls. They would do to throw—might spoil a Lassan's aim or check the rush of one of the ape-man servants.
As finally arranged between them the plan was that he was to get in the same car she did. She would tap on the back of her compartment to assure him that everything was in order, and tap again when the door opened for her to get out. He would leave her a second to get her bearings, then they would make a rush of it. He weighed the usefulness of the knife as a weapon and discarded it—too clumsy for throwing and in a close struggle with one of the ape-men slaves, made of metal like himself, it would be quite useless. But another tool, rather like a short-handled and badly shaped hammer, he did take.
At last the hour arrived. The car ran down the line of cages, paused; opened before Marta Lami's. She smiled at him, nodded, and purposely delayed getting in. He fumbled desperately with his needle, fearing he could not make it, then it went home, the little arm at the bottom of the car swung out and its door opened. As he stepped in he heard the dancer's tap of encouragement from the compartment ahead.
Evidently it was some little distance to the work room. The car made several stops on the way, but Sherman, braced and ready, listened in vain for the tap that would tell him they had reached their destination. At last it came; two soft knocks. He bent, thrust home the needle. The door slid back, and he stepped out into one of the blue-domed rooms. His eyes caught a fantastic maze of machinery, helmeted ape-men busy at it and beyond them the huge forms of several uncompleted fighting machines.
The dancer gripped his hand. "This way," she said, pointing along the wall past the machines. "Take it easy; don't run till they notice us."
A feverish passion for activity burned in him. "Hurry, hurry," called every sense, but he fought it down and followed Marta Lami down the line of machines, past the impassive ape-men.
They made over half the distance to the door before they were spotted. Then one of the Lassans, who had sauntered over to the car stop, evidently expecting Marta, missed her and looked around. The first warning the two had was a sudden flickering of blue lights here and there among the machines. "Come on," shouted Marta. "There she goes!"
Sherman looked over his shoulder, saw the Lassan tugging at his pouch for a ray-gun, and paused to throw one of the oil-balls, straight and true, as one pitches a baseball. It struck the elephant-man squarely between the eyes, at the base of his trunk. He squealed with pain and fright and dropping the ray-gun, ran behind a machine. For a second all the eyes in the room turned toward him; then with another flickering of lights, the hunt was up.
Sherman saw a helmeted ape-man at a machine just ahead turn slowly round, gazing vacantly, and then fling himself at Marta. As she side-stepped to avoid his rush, Sherman swung his left from the heels. The metal fist took the slave flush on the jaw, and down he went with a crash. The dazzling spout of a ray-gun shot past them, spattering against the wall in a shower of stars, and they had reached the exit.
"Come, oh come!" shouted Marta, tugging at the heavy door. Sherman pulled with her, and at that moment another ray-gun flash struck it, just over their heads. The door gave suddenly; they tumbled through.
Into a gray twilight they struggled, shot with little dashes of rain that had beaten the valley to mud.
"Cheez!" said Marta, struggling through the gelatinous stuff. "If I live through this, I'll live to be a million."
"No, not that way," called Sherman. "They'll look for us down the valley. Come on, up the hill."
He pulled her upward. They slipped, stumbled, slid, gripped the stump of a tree, then another. Below and behind them came a confused rumble and they heard the great door swing open again. A burst of light, like a star in the cloudy dark, broke out, and Sherman pulled the girl down behind the stump of a huge tree.
"What do you s'pose they'll bring after us?" he whispered, his lips close to her ear.
"Dunno. One of the little machines maybe. Look."
Sherman peered cautiously round his side of the stump. In the valley beneath them, shining brilliantly in the pure white light it had released, was one of the metal fish—but a smaller one than the usual fighting machine, and without the projecting trunk.
"We've been working on them for a while," the girl whispered. "I don't know what they're for, but they aren't fighting machines."
Remembering how the vision plate of the fighting machine he had controlled had reflected every object within range, Sherman made himself small behind the stump. The machine below was probably trying to locate them in the light it had released.
"Wonder they don't bring the birds out," he thought, and as if in answer to this idea, one of the four-winged creatures strutted around the machine, blinking in the light, then took off with a whir of wings, and spiralled upward. The light went out, reappeared as a beam, pointing down the valley and the machine moved off, slowly sweeping the sides of the hills with its pencil of illumination. He could see the multiple glow of the tubes at the stern, greenly phosphorescent, as the machine progressed. High above the bird screamed shrilly.