Asteroid Man (18 page)

Slowly he reversed the gun in his hand and held it out meekly toward the nearer of the two creatures.

The two ships began maneuvering for position. Rotherson looked keen and alert and alive.

"It's not terribly unlike us in some ways," he said to Jonga.

Jonga nodded. "I should imagine they're about the same culture level. Funny we always imagine the Out-worlders as being either ahead of, or behind us. I don't know why. Still, there's no guarantee that he is an Out-worlder in a strict sense; he might be from somewhere a lot nearer. He's not from Proxima; we've explored that. How about Altair?"

"It is only sixteen light years away," said Krull. "If there's a planetary system there that developed at about the same rate as ours has, they could be humanoid types. Do you think we're right to go into the attack?"

Krull's was the only dissenting voice; the others were in favor of shooting first and asking questions afterward.

"Okay," said Rotherson, "stand by!"

The two ships circled each other warily, neither being willing to fire the first broadside, both wanting to let the opponent come to them to test out his weapons and fire power.

"Let's put a shot across the bows, shall we?" said Krull. "If we're going to do anything, make it a warning shot; don't aim for them."

"Right you are," said Rotherson. "I suppose it's the chivalrous thing to do. They might want to heave to and surrender. They may be unarmed."

He fired the forr'ard cannon of the dart ship. The atomic shell burst with spectacular brilliance a couple of miles ahead of the alien. The alien responded by hurling a green light beam about an equal distance away from the dart ship.

"Hmm. In that case, tit for tat," said the general. "That's certainly not a surrender signal; that's green for danger."

"Do you think we could go into radio contact before we go into a head-on fight with them?"

"I don't know," said Rotherson. "There's no guarantee that they'd understand us."

"Yet again, they might—"

"Try sending out a simple signal."

"What do you suggest, sir?" said the young wireless operator.

"Flash out in English and then in Galactic code, 'We are friends! We would prefer to speak with you.' There's no set signal for this purpose," he said ruefully. "It's never happened before. These chaps possibly won't understand the Galactic code anyway; it's rather an ambitious title, for what really only applies to our own world and Proxima, isn't it?"

"Never mind; let's try."

The message was duly sent, on general beam. An unintelligible answer came back!

Krull's feeling of foreboding had been growing gradually stronger.

"You know, I don't think we ought to attack, sir. Don't fire any more and see what their reaction is."

"I don't know," said Rotherson. "I think we ought to go ahead and shoot it out with them, then go across and pick up any survivors later."

"Yes, but what if they're friendly. If they have no connection with that asteroid, they may not have."

Suddenly an inspiration flashed into Krull's mind. "I don't see why they might not be from another system like ours, which has also been raided by that asteroid. They may be looking for it in the same way that we are."

"There's a slim possibility, I agree," said Jonga. "In that case we could join forces. Our two technologies together might be much more effective than one of us alone. Launch the dinghy."

"All right," said Krull. "I don't think we all ought to go—"

"Volunteer for the dinghy," said Rotherson, looking round.

"It was my idea that they're friendly; I ought to take the risk. I'll go," said Krull.

"Are you sure?" said Rotherson.

Krull got into his suit and made his way through the airlock. Rotherson pressed the dinghy release; slowly and carefully Krull crossed the intervening spaces, keeping in radio touch all the time. He reached the alien ship without incident. He saw all along the portals of the stranger a line of tubes with peculiar lenses. It was obviously from these that the green light emanated. He fetched up in front of what was obviously the alien's lock—and waited.

They must have seen him; they must know he was there. He got carefully out of the dinghy with his hands upraised and stood by the airlock. He stood there for what seemed ages, and nothing happened.

"All right so far," he signaled back to his ship. "They've done nothing hostile. The airlock's opening."

It was indeed. The portal, which seemed to be of a beryllium type compound similar to their own, slid back, and Krull, rather apprehensively, moved into the aperture. He wondered what was waiting on the other side. He imagined a bug-eyed monster with green and yellow pseudopods, intelligent octopi, one-eyed gorillas, almost anything from a science fiction author's nightmare to an ordinary man like himself. Yet the ship was so like their own that he couldn't help hoping they would be recognizably humanoid. The lock slid to behind him, and the inner door opened. He was greeted by a tall, ebony-skinned individual, who looked at him curiously and gestured to him to enter.

Krull tapped the breathing space on his helmet and then made a circular movement with his hands, indicating the atmosphere inside their ship. The dark one understood and nodded. Very cautiously Krull slipped back the visor and sniffed carefully. The air seemed pretty good. It was certainly as dense as the atmosphere he was used to. He gave a sign of greeting. It was difficult to communicate when he was on the inside of a suit and they were not. He slid the visor back and lifted the helmet carefully.

Pointing to himself he said: "Krull."

The black superman facing him repeated the gesture and tapped his own muscular chest and said "Pythol." The other members of the alien ships' crew were gathering round in the central cabin. A green man, a light, bottle-green man whose skin seemed almost to glow, was the next to introduce himself. "Rashak," he said. There was a red man among them, too, looking like a cross between a yoga from Tibet and a North American priest. "Andos." His voice was deep. His eyes looked mystic and spiritual.

The fourth member of the alien's crew was a white man. He might almost have been an earth man, so similar was he in every respect to Krull. "Valstar," he said, repeating the now characteristic gesture. Krull held out his hand; apparently the symbol was understood. Valstar took it in his own for a moment and smiled. That was also understood. Krull retrieved his helmet and radioed back to his ship. "There are four of them, and they are friendly. We haven't got over the language barrier yet."

Rashak the green man was looking at him intently; then, taking him gently by the arm, he led him gently into a forward cabin where a very complex electronic device was screwed to a table. Something that was very obviously a microphone surmounted the contraption. He himself put on the headphone and adjusted a dial on the side of the machine. Krull, speaking very slowly and clearly, began:

"We are from the planet earth of the solar system. There are nine planets on our system, and we evolve round a white-yellow sun of the G-type. We are four light years distant from the next nearest star which we call Proxima. Beyond that lies a star which we have not yet visited, which we believe may contain intelligent life. Possibly it is your home world; we call it Altair." As he said Altair, smiles broke out on the faces of the others, and there were nods of affirmation. So I was right, thought Krull, they are Altairians.

The green man gestured to him to go on speaking while he himself fiddled among the dials. Realizing that the machine was some kind of language analyzer, working on an electric computer principle, slightly in advance of their own, Krull went through the letters of the alphabet, and then counted slowly up to a hundred, after that he began to say anything that came into his head. He recited as much as he could remember of the galactic convention act. He talked about space ships and space pilots; he spoke about earth and its cities. He pointed to the various parts of his body, hand, arm, leg, foot, head, giving the appropriate word at the same time. The green man was nodding happily now; within half an hour the computer had broken down the common vocabulary of English to Altarian. Armed with this, the green man began feeding more tapes back into his machine, and at the end of another hour they were able to understand one another well enough.

The tale that the four aliens had to tell was fascinating and exciting…

Krull learned that they, too, were victims, as he had intuitively suspected, of the raid of the weird asteroid. They had lost practically an entire colony to this fantastic individual. They had also lost their king and their princess, a beautiful girl named Astra. There were four races living harmoniously on the seven planets of their system, and each was noted for some particular forte, or specialty. The green were the intellectuals, the blacks were the athletics, the reds were the psyhic-esthetic priests, and the whites were a combination of all three qualities. The green had just developed, and Rashak in particular had brought on this project a new weapon which they hoped might be capable of destroying, or at least rendering powerless, the terrible asteroid man. They were even now searching for the asteroid, and on first sight of the earth ship had been suspicious lest it was connected with the alien. The green ray which the earthmen had seen provisionally demonstrated was a small and rather modified version of the weapon which the Altairians were going to use against their deadly and powerful enemy.

Now that the language barrier had been broken down, the two parties were only too glad to join forces. The ships moved into convoy, one behind the other, and set off again, searching for the alien. Rashak spoke to General Rotherson, explaining some of the principles of their weapon and the way in which they hoped to use it when they met the asteroid.

"We have an old saying in my world that two heads are better than one," said Rotherson, "even if they are only sheep's heads. A sheep is a rather stupid animal, and none of us are stupid. We've got nine heads between us. There are fields of technology which our people have explored and yours haven't. The same holds good in your science. In some fields we are head of you; in others you are ahead of us. If we put our knowledge together, we shall have the combined understanding of the nine planets of our system and the seven of yours. That gives us the combined comprehension of sixteen different worlds, and their separate developments. Some of my party have unexpected gifts." He was thinking of Dolores and her fantastic strength.

Krull took Rotherson's place at the radio and began talking to Rashak about the computer course which he had lined up. Krull and Rashak soon discovered a great affinity for each other. Between them they could almost make a computer talk. They began plotting probability courses for the asteroid. It wasn't long before they arrived at a directional path which they felt would be more than probable—but distinctly possible. They moved along it and kept detector screens probing in front. Somewhere on that asteroid the Altarians hoped they would locate their missing Princess; somewhere on that asteroid the earth men hoped to find their missing Greg Masterson. What else they would find, they could only guess.

It seemed as though encountering one another had brought luck to the expeditions, for mere hours after joining forces the radar screen leapt into excited life. The asteroid had been sighted.

Like two angry hornets, the ships roared down, the green ray sweeping and swirling like a swathe of pure radiant energy across the artificial pebbled surface of the weird world. All that Rashak had claimed of it was justified. It cut deep into the surface and beyond, exposing a section of the labyrinthine honeycomb. As yet, it seemed, the asteroid man was unaware of his danger. Either that, or his nullifier beam was ineffective against the green ray. The Altairians signaled to the earth ship.

"Try a small bomb to test his nullifier field," requested Rashak.

Jonga was on the point of dropping a missile at random when his attention was suddenly focussed upon a hideous carnivorous monstrosity crawling across the face of the asteroid. It was the hideous, primeval, experimental beast which had almost destroyed Greg Masterson on his arrival.

Jonga decided it would make an excellent target. He let fly with a quarter megaton bomb, the smallest in the armory. The deadly missile landed within a few feet of the beast and exploded with a devastating roar.

"Some visiting cards," said Rotherson with a grim smile.

The fragments of the asteroid man's gruesome little pet were scarcely distinguishable from the pebbles.

"My device is even more successful than I dared to hope," signaled Rashak. "It has obviously counteracted the effect of the nullifier force field."

They came in to land; the nine space-suited figures leaped out with the agility of commandos and made their way into the gaping hole which the green ray had torn in the planetoid's surface. The asteroid man's hideous army of Frankensteinian monstrosities were racing through the labyrinth to drive off the attackers. But the asteroid man had made his last, fatal mistake. So confident had he been that his nullifier ray was the ultimate weapon that he had little else in working order to repel a surprise attack. His shambling caricature men were pathetically useless against invaders whose guns were working.

Rotherson was leading the charge. His powerful hand blasters cut swathes of carnage into the ghastly ranks of the shambling monsters. One got past his fire, seized the general's gun in a grip of steel and wrenched it from his hand. But Dolores and the enormous Pythol were close at hand. Before the creature could do any serious harm, the vast Altairian Negro smashed his gun butt down on the creature's skull, lifted the vast body as though it were a toy and hurled it into the ranks of its companions. Dolores seized another and smashed it to a pulp, as a child tosses a rag-doll against the floor of a nursery.

There was no stopping this avenging expedition. With axe, gun and knife, with muscle, brain and courage, they cut through the asteroid man's defenses as a red-hot knife goes through butter.