Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (109 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Complete them?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How much wider?” inquired a doubting voice.

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

“What, seeing heat?” pursued the other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about fireballs?”

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

Graham said, seriously, “Yet science agrees that fireballs are compact and temporarily balanced forms of energy which cannot be duplicated in any laboratory. They may be dying Vitons. They may be these very creatures, as mortal as us, whatever their life-span, falling in death, dispelling their energy in suddenly visible frequencies.” Taking out his wallet, he extracted a couple of clippings.
“World- Telegram,
April 17: case of a fireball that bounced through an open window into a house, scorched a rug where it burst. Same day, another hopped erratically two hundred yards down a street and popped into nothingness with a blast of heat.
Chicago Daily News,
April 22: case of a fireball that floated slowly across a meadow, entered a house, tried to rise up a chimney, then exploded, wrecking the chimney.” Replacing the clippings, he smoothed his hair tiredly. “I borrowed those from Beach. He has a huge collection of clippings dating back one hundred fifty years. Nearly two thousand of them deal with fireballs and similar phenomena. When you look through them, knowing what at long last is known, they look different. They’re no longer a mere collection of off-trail data. They’re a singular collection of cogent, highly significant facts which makes you wonder why we’ve never suspected what has now been discovered. The terrible picture has been there all along— but we weren’t able to get it into proper focus.”

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

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

“Like hell they do!” swore a voice at the back.

Nobody looked round. Carmody frowned his displeasure at the interruption, the rest concentrated their attention on Graham.

“Little has been discovered,” Graham told them, “but that little means plenty. Beach has satisfied himself that not only are the Vitons composed of energy, but also that they live on energy, feed on it
—our
energy! So far as they’re concerned, we exist as energy-producers which kindly nature has provided to satisfy whatever they use for bellies. Thus, they breed us, or incite us to breed. They herd us, drive us, milk us, fattening on the currents generated by our emotions in precisely the same way that we fatten on juice involuntarily surrendered by cattle to whom we have given fodder containing stimulants for lactation. Show me the highly emotional man whose life has been healthy and long, and you show me the Vitons’ prize cow, the medal-winner!”

“The devils!” snapped a voice.

“If you ponder this to the full, gentlemen,” Graham persisted, “you will realize its awful implications. The nervous energy produced by the act of thinking, also as the reaction to glandular emotions, has long been known to be electrical or quasi-electrical in nature, and it is this output which nourishes our shadowy superiors. They can and do boost the harvest anytime they want, by stimulating rivalries, jealousies, hatreds, and thus rousing emotions. Christians against Moslems, whites against blacks, Communists versus Catholics, all are grist to the Viton mill, all are unwitting feeders of other, unimaginable guts. As we cultivate our food, so do the Vitons cultivate theirs. As we plow our fields, sow and reap, so do they plow and sow and reap. We are fleshly soil, furrowed with Viton-dictated circumstances, sown with controversial ideas, manured with foul rumors, lies and willful misrepresentations, sprinkled with suspicion and jealousy, all that we may raise fine, fat crops of emotional energy to be reaped with knives of trouble. Every time someone screams for war, a Viton is using his vocal chords to order a Viton banquet!”

A man sitting near Veitch stood up and said, “Maybe you know what some of us are doing. We're trying to make atom-splitting behind the times. We’re trying to find a way to bring about the complete dissipation of subatomic particles into primal energy. We're trying to make a wavicle bomb. If we ever get it, boy, it’ll be some bomb! Even a little one will rock the world.” He licked his lips, looked around. “Are you suggesting that we’re Viton-inspired?”

“You haven’t made such a bomb?”

“Not yet.”

“There’s your answer,” said Graham, dryly. “Maybe you’ll never make one. Or if you do, you may never use it. But if you do make one—and drop one—!”

There came a heavy knock on the door, its sudden sound making several start in their seats. A uniformed man entered, whispered briefly to Keithley, then took his departure. Keithley arose, his face pale, his tones vibrant. He looked at Graham, then at the audience, and spoke slowly, earnestly.

“Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that I have just been told that the
Olympian
has been involved in a collision twenty miles west of Pittsburgh.” He swallowed hard. His strain was obvious. “Many people have been injured, and one killed. The casualty is Doctor Beach!”

Amid a babble of comment from his horrified listeners, he sat down. For a full minute the audience shifted about, muttered, stared at each other, at the screen, at the feverish eyes of Graham.