Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (114 page)

“On what wave-length does it operate?” pursued Graham.

“One and a quarter meters.”

“Eureka!” He bounced to his feet, alight with the fire of battle. “A weapon at last!”

“What d’you mean, a weapon?” Wohl was not overly impressed.

“The Vitons don’t like it. We’ve seen that for ourselves, haven’t we? Heaven alone knows how its emanations appear to their alien senses. Perhaps they feel it as unbearable heat, or sense it as the Viton equivalent of an abominable smell. Whatever the effect may be, we’ve the satisfaction of knowing they like to get away from it as fast as they can travel. Anything that makes them want to go someplace else is,
ipso facto,
a weapon.”

“I reckon maybe you’ve got something,” Wohl conceded.

“If it is a weapon, or a potential one,” remarked Doctor Curtis, seriously, “surely the Vitons would have destroyed it? They never hesitate to destroy where they deem it necessary. Why should they leave untouched this threat to their existence—if it is a threat?”

“I can imagine nothing better calculated to draw despairing humanity’s attention to the properties of therapy cabinets than to go around destroying them.”

“I see.” Her large, dark eyes were thoughtful. “Their cunning is indeed great. They think way ahead of us all the time.”

“All the time so far,” he corrected. “What of yesterday when we’ve still got tomorrow?” He reached for her telephone. “I must pass this information to Leamington without delay. Maybe it’s dynamite. Maybe it is what I hope it is— and God help us if it’s not! Besides, it may be enough to permit some of his gadgeteers to throw together an apparatus which will give protection to tonight’s meeting.”

Leamington’s tired, worn features grew into the tiny visor. They relaxed somewhat as he listened to Graham’s hasty flow of data. Finishing, Bill Graham turned to Doctor Curtis.

“This meeting is a scientific one to be held at nine o’clock this evening in the basement of National Guarantors Building, on Water Street. I’d like to take you along.”

“I’ll be ready at eight-thirty,” she promised.

Professor Chadwick already was in the middle of his speech when Bill Graham, Harmony Curtis and Art Wohl moved quietly down the center aisle, took their seats. The basement was full, the audience silent, attentive.

At one end of the front row, Colonel Leamington twisted around, attracted Graham’s attention, jerked an indicative thumb toward a large cabinet standing guard by the only door. Graham nodded his understanding.

With a rolled newspaper in one hand, the other left free for his frequent gestures, Professor Chadwick was saying. “For a couple of months
The Herald-Tribune
has been exhuming masses of data and still hasn’t dug out the half of it. The amount of material is so enormous that one cannot help but marvel at the barefaced manner in which the Vitons were able to operate with complete confidence in humanity’s lack of suspicion. To them, we must have seemed witless beyond words.”

“Which we were,” commented a cynical voice from the rear.

Chadwick sighed hasty agreement and went on, “Their methods of ‘explaining’ their own errors, omissions, mistakes and oversights by insinuating superstitious notions to ‘account’ for them, backing up those notions by the performing of so-called miracles when required, and the production of poltergeist and spiritualistic phenomena when asked for, does full credit to the hellish ingenuity of these creatures whom we call Vitons. They have made the confessional box and the seance-room their centers of psychic camouflage; the priest and the medium have been equally their allies in the devilish work of seeing that the blind masses stay blind.” He brushed a sardonic hand from left to right. “Thus the wide-sighted always have been able to take their pick: visions of the holy virgins, or saints, or sinners, or the shades of the late lamented. Step up, boys, they’re all yours!”

Someone laughed mirthlessly, a cold, grating laugh that jarred on the hearers’ nerves.

“The Herald-Tribune’s
data is, in grim fact, a record of human gullibility, a record of how men in the mass can look facts in the face—and deny them! It is a record of how people can see fish and call them flesh or fowl, according to the conventionalisms of dogmatic tutors as purblind as themselves, according to their personal fears of losing invisible shares in nonexistent heavenly mansions, according to their credulous belief that God may deny them wings if they, in turn, assert that a sight authoritatively declared to be straight from heaven may indeed have come straight from hell.” He paused, added in a hearable undertone, “Satan was a liar from the first—they said it!”

“I agree,” boomed Leamington, not giving a damn whose personal idiosyncrasies were being kicked around.

“I’ve discovered a good deal of cogent data, myself,” continued Chadwick. “For example, things we now know to be Vitons were frequently in the Fraser River district of British Columbia early in 1938. They got into the papers time and time and time again. A British United Press report dated July 21, 1938, says that the huge forest fires then ravaging the Pacific coast of North America were caused by something described as ‘dry lightning,’ admitted to be unique phenomena.

“In 1935, in the Madras Presidency of India, was reported an esoteric sect of floating-ball worshippers who, apparently, could see the objects of their devotions which were quite invisible to non-believers. Attempts to photograph what they were worshipping invariably failed, though I know and you know what might have been recorded had the photographers been able to employ Beach’s emulsion.

“The Los Angeles Examiner
of mid-June, 1938, reported a case paralleling that of the late Professor Mayo. Headed: FAMOUS ASTRONOMER LEAPS TO DEATH, it stated that Doctor William Wallace Campbell, president emeritus of the University of California, had met his end by flinging himself from the window of his third-floor flat. His son ascribed his father’s act to his fear of going blind. Personally, I feel that while his fear may have had direct connection with his sight, it was not in the manner then believed!”

Disregarding supporting murmurs from his audience, Professor Chadwick said, “Believe it or not, but one man’s extrasensory perception, or his wide-sightedness, was so well developed that he was able to paint an excellent picture showing several Vitons floating over a nightmarish landscape and, as if somehow he sensed their predatory charactor, he included a hawk in the scene. That picture is Mr. Paul Nash’s
Landscape of a Dream,
first exhibited in 1938, and now in the Tate Gallery, in England. Nash himself died very suddenly a few years later.”

Turning his eyes toward Graham, the speaker declared, “All the evidence we have been able to gather shows beyond doubt that the Vitons are creatures of primal energy held in a form both compact and balanced. They are neither solid, nor liquid nor gas. They are not animal, vegetable or mineral. They represent another, unclassified form of being which they share with fireballs and like phenomena, but they are not matter in the general accepted sense—they’re something else which is strange to us but in no way supernatural. Maybe they’re a mess of wavicles complex beyond all possibility of analysis by any instrument we have today; we know they’re so peculiar that our spectroscopic tests of them have proved worthless. It seems to me that the one possible weapon we can bring against them is something influencing their own strange matter-state, namely, a form of energy such as a radiation having a heterodyning effect, something that might interfere with the Vitons’ natural vibrations. The discovery made only today by Mr. Graham, of the Intelligence Service, amply confirms this theory.” Raising his hand and beckoning to Graham, he concluded, “So I now ask Mr. Graham to give you the valuable information he has obtained, and I feel sure that he will be able to assist us still further with some useful suggestions.”

In a strong, steady voice, Graham recounted his experience of a few hours before. “It is imperative,” he told them, “that at once we should undertake intensive research in short waves projected on the radio-beam system, and determine which particular frequencies—if any—are fatal to Vitons. In my opinion, it is desirable that we set up a suitable laboratory in some far away, unfrequented spot distant from war areas, for our evidence is that Vitons congregate where humanity swarms most thickly, and very rarely visit uninhabited regions.”

“That is an excellent idea.” Leamington stood up, his tall form towering above his seated neighbors. “We have ascertained that the Vitons’ numerical strength is somewhere between one twentieth and one thirtieth that of the human race, and it is a safe bet that the majority of them hang around fruitful sources of human and animal energy. A laboratory hidden in the desert, a locality sparse in emotional fodder, might remain unobserved and undisturbed for years.”

There came a loud buzz of approval from listeners as Leamington sat down. For the first time since the Bjornsen-precipitated crisis, they felt that humanity was getting somewhere, doing something to rid itself once and for all of the burden of the centuries. As if to remind them that optimism should be modified by caution, the ground quivered, a muted rumble sounded outside, then followed the roar from the sky as lagging sound caught up with its cause.

Already Leamington had in mind a suitable site for the establishment of what he hoped would be the first anti-Viton arsenal. Ignoring outside noises, the Secret Service chief bestowed a fatherly smile on his protege still standing on the platform. Instinctively, he knew that this plan would go through, and that Graham would play the part best calculated to enhance the reputation of the Service. Leamington had never demanded more of his boys than just their bodies and souls. He had never received less than that.

“It is of little avail,” Graham reminded, as outside sounds died away, “to battle the Asians without also attempting to subdue their crafty overlords. To wipe out the luminosities is to remove the source of our enemies’ delusions, and bring them back to their senses. They’re humans, like us, those Asians—take away their mad dreams and you’ll take away their fury. Let’s strike a blow by giving our solitary clue to the world.”

“Why not organize our native scientists and get them on the job?” inquired a voice.

“We shall do that, you may rest assured. But as we know to our cost, a thousand widely separated experimenters are safer than a thousand in a bunch. Let the entire western world set to work, and nothing—visible or invisible—can prevent our ultimate triumph!”

They roared their agreement as he stared absently at the cabinet still standing guard over the only door. The memory of Beach was a dull pain within his mind which held other and equally tragic memories—the rag-doll appearance of Professor Mayo’s broken body; the sheer abandon with which Dakin had plunged to his sickening end; the horrid concentration in the eyes of the sufferer with an imaginary dog in his belly; Corbett’s dying
crump
as he smacked into stone; the great black banner of tormented atoms which had been unfurled above Silver City.

Not much use damping their spirits in this rare moment of enthusiasm. All the same, it was as clear as daylight that short-wave research could move in only one of two directions—the right one, or the wrong one. Wrongness meant slavery forever; and the first indication of rightness would be the heartless slaughter of every experimenter within reasonable reach of success.

There was murder in prospect, murder of every valuable intellect in the frontline of the eerie campaign. It was a dreadful certainty that Graham had not the heart to mention. As the audience fell silent, he left the platform. The silence was broken by the now familiar feature of sudden death.

The floor jumped six inches northward, settled slowly back. While the occupants of the basement posed in strained attitudes, the tearing rumble of tottering masonry came to them through the thick walls. Then the vile bellow from the sky as if the Creator were enjoying the agonized writhings of his own creations. A pause, followed by the lower, lighter rumble of vehicles dashing along the street, heading for the new area of wreckage, blood and tears.

Sangster was worried and made no attempt to conceal the fact. He sat behind his desk in the Office of the Department of Special Finance, in Bank of Manhattan, watched Graham, Wohl and Leamington, but spoke to none of them in particular.

“It’s twelve days since that international broadcast giving a line to everybody from hams to radio manufacturers,” he argued. “Was there any interference with that general call? There was not! Did one radio station get picked up and tossed around? No, not one! I say that if short-waved research was a menace to the Vitons they’d have played merry hell to prevent it. They’d have listed the radio experts and had a pogrom. There’d have been slaughter all the way from here to there. But the Vitons took no notice. So far as they were concerned, we might have been scheming to wipe them out by muttering a magic word. Ergo, we’re on the wrong track. Maybe they avoided therapy sets just to put us on the wrong track. Maybe they’re doing the laughs they can’t make up the sleeves they haven’t got.” He tapped his desk nervously. “I don’t like it, I don’t like it.”

“Or maybe they want us to think the same way,” Graham put it, easily.

“Eh?” Sangster’s jaw dropped with suddenness that brought grins to the others’ faces.

“Your views are proof that the Vitons’ disinterest ought to be our discouragement.” Strolling to the window, Graham regarded the battered vista of New York. “I said ought,’ mark you! I’m suspicious of their seeming nonchalance. The damned things know more of human psychology than experts of Jurgens’ type are likely ever to learn.”

“All right, all right!” Mopping his brow, Sangster pawed at some papers on his desk, extracted a sheet, held it up. “Here’s a report from the Electra Radio Corporation. Their twenty experts might as well be shooting craps. They say short waves stink. They’ve thrown at passing luminosities every frequency their plant can concoct, and the spheres merely ducked out as if they’d encountered a bad smell. Bob Treleaven, their leading wiseacre, says he almost believes the cursed things really do sense certain frequencies as their equivalent to odors.” He tapped the paper with an accusatory finger. “So where do we go from here?”