Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (108 page)

“Stronger than mine,” commented Graham as the scientist put the clippings back, turned off the light, resumed his seat.

“The power varies. Ilga Kirps was a Viton hybrid. Extrasensory perception is a Viton trait.”

“What!” His fingers clawing at the arms of his chair, Graham sat upright.

“It is a Viton faculty,” repeated Beach, calmly. “Ilga Kirps was the fairly successful result of a Viton experiment. Your own case was less fruitful, perhaps because your operation was prenatal.”

“Prenatal? By God, d’you mean—?”

“I’ve outgrown the age of saying what I don’t mean,” Beach assured. “When I say prenatal, I mean just that! Further, I say that had we never been cursed with these luminosities, we should not also be cursed today with most of our complications in childbirth. When someone suffers, it’s not the unfortunate accident it’s believed to be! Why, Graham, I now accept the possibility of a phenomenon which all my life I’ve rejected as patently absurd, namely, that of virgin births. I accept that there may have been times when helpless, unsuspecting subjects have been artificially inseminated. The Vitons are continually meddling, experimenting, practicing their super-surgery on their cosmic cattle!”

“But why, why?”

“To see whether it is possible to endow human beings with Viton abilities.” There was silence for a moment, then Beach added, dryly, “Why do men teach seals to juggle with balls, teach parrots to curse, monkeys to smoke cigarettes and ride bicycles? Why do they try to breed talking dogs, train elephants to perform absurd tricks?”

“I see the parallel,” Graham acknowledged, morbidly.

“I have here a thousand or more clippings telling about people mysteriously endowed with inhuman powers, suffering from abnormal or supernormal defects, giving birth to atrocious monstrosities which promptly have been strangled or hidden forever from human sight. Others who have endured inexplicable experiences, unnatural fates. Remember the case of Daniel Dunglass Home, the man who floated from a first-floor window before the astounded eyes of several prominent and trustworthy witnesses? His was a thoroughly authentic case of a person possessing the power of levitation—the Viton method of locomotion! You should read a book called
Hey-Day of a Wizard.
It tells all about Home. He had other weird powers as well. But he was no wizard. He was a Vitonesque-humanoid!”

“Good heavens!”

“Then there was the case of Kaspar Hauser, the man from nowhere,” Beach went imperturbably on. “Nothing comes out of a vacuum, and Hauser had an origin unlike anything else. Probably his was in a Viton laboratory. That, too, may have been the eerie destination of Benjamin Bathurst, British ambassador extraordinary to Vienna, who, on November 25, 1809, walked around the heads of a couple of horses—and vanished forever.”

“I don’t quite see the connection,” Graham protested. “Why the devil should these super-creatures make people disappear?”

Beach’s grin was cold and hard in the darkness. “Why do medical students make stray cats disappear? From what wondering, puzzled pond vanishes the frogs that later are to be dissected? Who snitches a pauper’s body from the morgue when the viscera runs out a mile farther down the street?”

“Ugh!” said Graham, with frank distaste.

“Disappearances are commonplace. For example, what happened to the crew of the
Marie Celeste?
Or the crew of the
Rosalie? Were
they suitable frogs snatched from a convenient pond? What happened to the
Waratah?
Did that man who, at the last moment, refused to sail on the
Waratah
have extrasensory perception, or was he instinctively warned off because he was an unsuitable frog? What makes one man suitable, another not? Does the former live in continual peril; the latter enjoy lifelong safety? Is it possible that some peculiar, unidentifiable difference in our mutual make-ups means that I am marked for death while you remain untouchable?”

“That’s something only time will show.”

“Time!” spat Beach, contemptuously. “We’ve carried the devil on our backs perhaps a million years and only now are aware that he’s there. Homo sapiens— the man with a load of mischief!” He murmured some underbreath comment to himself, then went on. “Only this morning I was studying a case to which no solution had been found in ten years. The details are given in the London
Evening Standard
of May 16, 1938 and the
British Daily Telegraph
of several dates thereafter. The 5,456-ton vessel
Anglo-Australian
vanished at short notice, without trace. She was a modern, seaworthy boat plowing through smooth, tranquil waters when she and her crew of thirty-eight abruptly became as if they had never been. She disappeared mid-Atlantic, within fifty miles of other ships, shortly after sending a radio message stating that all was well. Where has she gone? Where are most of the thousands of people who have been listed and sought for years by the Bureau of Missing Persons?”

“You tell me.” Graham’s eyes raked the darkness for the screen, failed to find it. Somewhere in the black it was standing, a silent sentry, waiting, guarding them, yet unable to do more than give them split-second warning of invaders that they alone must resist.

“I don’t know,” confessed Beach. “Nobody knows. All we can say is that they’ve been seized by agencies only now within our ken, powers unfamiliar but in no way supernatural. They have been taken for purposes at which we can but guess. They have gone as they have been going since the beginning of history and as they’ll keep on going in the future. A few have come back, warped in ways we’ve not been able to understand. Those we have crucified, or burned at the stake, or shot with silver bullets and buried in garlic, or incarcerated in asylums. Still more have been taken and will continue to be taken.

“Maybe,” said Graham, skeptically. “Maybe.”

“Only a month ago the New York-Rio stratplane passed behind a cloud over Port of Spain, Trinidad, and didn’t reappear. A thousand eyes saw it one moment, not the next. Nothing has been heard of it since. Nine months ago the Soviets Moscow-Vladivostok new streamliner vanished in a similar way. That’s not been heard of, either. There has been a long series of such cases going back for decades, right to the earliest days of aeronautics.”

“I can recall some of them.”

“What happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan; to Lieutenant Oskar Omdal, Brice Goldsborough and Mrs. F.W. Grayson; to Captain Terence Tully and Lieutenant James Medcalf; to Nungesser and Coli? Some, perhaps, crashed, but I have little doubt that others did not. They were snatched away, exactly as human beings have been snatched for century after century, singly, in groups, in shiploads.”

“The world must be told,” swore Graham. “It must be warned.”

“Who can tell, can warn—and live?” asked Beach, caustically. “How many would-be tellers lie tongue-tied in their graves? How many thousands more can be silenced as effectively? To talk is to think, and to think is to be betrayed, and to be betrayed is to die. Even we, in this lonely hideout, may eventually be found by some roaming invisible, overheard, and made to pay the penalty of knowing too much; the price of inability to camouflage our knowledge. The Vitons are ruthless, utterly ruthless, and it is ghastly evidence of the fact that they blew Silver City to hell the moment they found that we’d discovered a means of photographing them.”

“Nevertheless, the world must be warned,” Graham insisted, stubbornly. “Ignorance may be bliss—but knowledge is a weapon. Humanity must know its oppressors to strike off their chains.”

“Fine-sounding words,” scoffed Professor Beach. “I admire your persistent spirit, Graham, but spirit is not enough. You don’t yet know enough to appreciate the impossibility of what you suggest.”

‘That’s why I’ve come to you,” Graham riposted. “To learn enough! If I leave here ill-informed, the blame for my shortcoming will be yours. Give me all you’ve got—I cannot ask for more.”

“And after that?”

“I'll take the responsibility and the risk. What else can I do?”

Silence in the ebon gloom while the two sat by the wall facing the screen, one nervously impatient, the other brooding grimly. Silence pregnant with swift, conjecturing thoughts and timed by slow, deliberate ticks. It was as if the fate of the world was being weighed in the balance of one man’s mind.

Suddenly, Beach said, “Come!” Turning up the lights, he opened a door near the still inactive screen, switched on more lights that revealed the neat, orderly length of a compact and well-equipped laboratory.

Darkening the room they were leaving, Beach closed the connecting door, indicated a bell on the laboratory wall, and told the other, “If that screen in the next room glows, a photosensitive cell will operate and cause this bell to ring. If it does ring, you’d better muddle your thoughts swiftly and completely—or prepare for the worst.”

“I understand.”

“Sit there,” ordered Beach. He washed his fingers with a spot of ether, picked up a bottle. “This reaction of Bjornsen’s is synergistic. D’you know what that means?”

“It’s a purely associative effect.”

“Correct! You’ve your own way of expressing it, but it’s as good a definition as I’ve heard. It’s a reaction produced by drugs functioning cooperatively which none can produce separately. You can see what that means—to test the effects of multiples in all possible combinations means a number of experiments running into astronomical figures. Synergy will keep research busy for years. They mightn’t have stumbled on this one for fifty years to come. If Peder Bjornsen hadn’t had the brains to recognize a stroke of luck when he saw it, we’d all—” He let his voice trail off while he tilted the bottle over a measuring vial, counting the drops with utmost care.

“What makes now?” Graham asked, watching him.

“I’m going to treat you according to Bjornsen’s formula. It will blind you for a few minutes, but don’t let that scare you—it will only be your rods and cones readjusting themselves. While your sight becomes modified, I’ll tell you every detail I’ve been able to gather.”

“Is this treatment permanent in effect, or temporary?”

“It seems permanent, but I wouldn’t be dogmatic about that. Nobody’s had it long enough to be sure.” Putting down the bottle, he came to Graham with the vial in one hand and a small pad of cotton wool in the other. “Here goes,” he said, “and listen carefully to what I tell you—my opportunity to repeat it may never come!”

Unconsciously, he was prophetic there!

There were pale streamers struggling across the lowering moon, a deep, almost solid blackness in the valley. The building squatting in sullen loneliness at one end was completely hidden in the murk of night, and also hidden was the figure that edged through its armorplate door and flitted through the gloom toward the sighing pines.

For a moment, the figure became a man-shaped silhouette in the moonlight by the crumbling fingerpost, then it faded into the less-revealing background of trees. A pebble rattled on the trail, a twig snapped farther on, then there was only the whispering of multimillion leaves, the moan of night breezes among the boughs.

At the other end of the trail a mountain ash spread concealing arms over a narrow, racy cylinder of highly polished metal. Something dodged around the trunk of the ash, merged with the cylinder. Then came the soft click of a well-oiled lock, a low but powerful hum. A startled nightbird squawked its alarm as the cylinder projected itself from the black pool beneath the tree, flashed along the highway, bounded over the farther crest.

The same cylinder stood in the Boise Strat-Station at dawn. On one side, weak stars still twinkled against a back-drop of gradually lightening gray; on the other, the sky mirrored the pink of oncoming day. Morning mists were a gauzy veil on the Rockies.

Yawning, Graham said to Police Lieutenant Kellerher, ‘There are very special reasons why Beach and myself are leaving at different times and by different routes. It is absolutely imperative that one of us reaches Washington. I hold you personally responsible for picking up Beach in one hour’s time, and seeing him safely on the
Olympian. ”

“He’ll be on it, don’t you worry!” Kellerher assured.

“Good! I’ll leave it to you.” With another wide yawn, Graham ignored the lieutenant’s fascinated stare at his eyes, climbed into the rear seat of a racy looking army jetplane that was ready to rush him eastward.

The pilot bent forward in his seat, gave his machine the gun. Short plumes of fire and long streams of vapor shot backward from the vessel’s tail and from other tubes flushed into the trailing edges of its mirror-polished wings. With a rising howl that soon lost its lead and fell behind them, they dived into the morning sky, their vapor trail stretching and thinning, the lagging noise of their jets bouncing off the mountain peaks.

Whizzing high over jagged points of the Rockies which speared the red dawn, the pilot leveled off. Graham gaped repeatedly as he suppressed more yawns, stared through the plastiglass with eyes whose utter bleariness failed to conceal their underlying luster.

The jets shivered steadily half a mile ahead of their sound. Graham’s chin sank slowly onto his chest, his eyelids drooped, fluttered futilely, then closed. Overcome by the rhythmic vibration of the jets, and the swing and sway of the plane, he began to snore.

A bump and a swift rush of wheels along the runway awoke him. Washington! Nudging him gently, the pilot grinned, gestured to his clock. They had made excellent time.

Four figures hurried toward the machine as he got out. He recognized two of them: Colonel Leamington and Lieutenant Wohl. The others were burly individuals who carried themselves with an authoritative air.

“Got your wire, Graham,” announced Leamington, his sharp eyes afire with anticipation. He pulled the message from his pocket, read it aloud. ‘“Case busted wide open. Solution important to peace of world and worthy of Presidential attention. Meet me army special due Washington port two forty.’” He worried his mustache. “Your information must be of terrific consequence?”