Front matter (continued 2)

Trace believed this too. He was a pretty fair student of electronics and he doubted that any race could disguise a high vacuum thermionic tube or an amplifying circuit or a thyratron so that he, Sergeant Trace Roscoe, couldn't identify it. The photoelectric cells that opened and closed the doors seemed to be of the same type as those used on this planet for the same function; Trace had taken two minutes off to pry off the cover of the cell in the left wall and inspect the construction. So he ought to know the "kidnap-device" when he came across it.

He glanced at his watch. More than half an hour had passed since they entered the ship.

The race of man hung on his fingers, which fumbled among a myriad esoteric gadgets in search of one which might be no more than a pair of resonant cavities, an anode, a cathode, and a grid. He felt his coolness departing, the sweat of terror stood on his face, he lost the tough-sergeant veneer and became a panting, panicked man.

Then he caught the eye of Jane Kelly, and he bit his lip and told himself off in Gaelic cuss words, and went to his job again with a firmer grip.

And in five minutes he found the device he was hunting.

"Slough!" he shouted, in the bull's roar that once had nearly drowned out the Red guns in Korea. "Slough, come here!" And the small man, who had been six steps away, bounded to his side with his blue eyes wide in astonishment. "Is this it?" asked Trace fiercely. "Am I right, is this it?"

Slough glared at the small recess, and said, "Aha!" It was an intricate and highly specialized form, if he was any judge, of the resonant cavity magnetrons with which he had worked often in the past. He said so, and Trace nodded. "Okay. Now we gimmick it."

"Can I help?" asked the midget, eager as a boy.

"You're damn right. My fingers are too big to get into all the crannies. You do what I tell you; get in behind the tube, like so, with your index finger...."

As Trace ordered and Slough obeyed, the others came round them, still alert for raiders, but eager to listen to the mysterious words which came, sharp and intense, from the sergeant's lips. Now and then Slough would disagree, and they'd argue; Bill began to fidget with apprehension. The words were Greek to him.

"But if we lead in the wire from this other thing, which has got to be the fuel feed—"

"Why must it be? We don't know it is. I say build up the frequency of oscillation until—"

"Well, then, stick your damn fingers over here and hold this steady while I—"

And so on. Bill was certain that it would never end, that they must be caught at sunrise by an investigating party of the green aliens; but suddenly the midget and the soldier were moving off from the control banks, looking at each other with expressions half smug and half fearful. "Let's get out," said Trace abruptly.

"What did you do?" asked Jane Kelly, as they hurried through the rooms toward the entrance port.

"Gimmicked it," said Trace. His hand fell on her arm and squeezed reassuringly. "The electronic device is now altered so it'll build up an intolerable frequency; it's also connected with the thing we think is the fuel feeder, and with a row of buttons we're almost certain connect with the blasting rays."

They reached the port. "In other words," prompted Jane, "what?"

"In other words, when the ships are set to zoom old Earth into the sub-space subways, this disk is going to blow sky-high; and since they're all connected in series electronically, the whole goddam fleet will explode simultaneously."

They wriggled through the short passage, dropped to the ground. It was very dark on the plain. Patches of snow on the ground showed dark shapes of tree and bush and boulder; after the green light of the saucer, this outer world was dim and full of illusions. Jane thought she saw a Graken approaching, and stifled a scream when she realized it was the shadow of a swooping owl. She said loudly, "I don't like it."

"What?" asked Trace. They were standing in the shadow of the saucer, indecisive.

"I don't like this. It's too easy. It's a let-down." She grasped him by the arms, and he, startled, looked down into her face that was a lovely softened blur in the night. "I'm half Irish too, Trace Roscoe, half pure black Irish; that's the Kelly in me. And I tell you plain, I feel wrong about this. It can't happen so pat, you can't just change a wire or two, hook up this and attach that, and foil the kidnapping of a whole world. There's something wrong, there's a thing missing that's vital."

"Baby," he said, so low that no one heard but the girl, "I can tell you what it is. It's a security on this. Because there's about one chance in a thousand that what we did will work like we want it to. That machinery's out of this world. Half of what we did I can't explain to myself, even. We just made a purblind stab at bollixing the deal."

"It's something else. You're forgetting something. Oh, Trace, Trace," she cried suddenly, gripping him savagely in her anguish, "I know! It's that there's no crew in this saucer, and they aren't coming to fight us! That means they've either taken the earth into their galaxy already, or else that they'll do it without bothering about this saucer—and then where will your fine plan be?"

Trace almost sat down, his body went so limp. "Oh My God," he said slowly in capitals. "I never thought of that."

"You've got to get a crew here," she said, as the others crowded about them stammering their worry and terror. "You've got to get them out of their ships, no matter how busy they are, and let them see that they can take this one over again. They can't know anything that's happened since we killed the last one in there."

"She's right," exclaimed Bill. "We have to create a diversion to suck 'em out of their hidey-holes, Trace."

"The only way is to attack the saucers," he said wearily, "and how we do that with two rayguns and a revolver, heaven only knows."

"Why, we do it with two rayguns and a revolver, then," said Barbara suddenly. "Why not? That next saucer's maybe a hundred feet away. Take a shot at it, for Pete's sake. Try it and see."

Trace inflated his chest and stuck out his jaw and once more he was the complete sergeant. He tore the pistol from Bill's hand, raised it and sent a streak of green death arrowing at the dark bulk of the spacecraft. Playing it along the rim, he tried to strike the oval ports with it; and he did not release the trigger for a full minute. "Now let's see," he said. He looked at Jane and the redhead. "You two take off," he barked. "Head for the hill, pronto." His tone was so unanswerable that they ran, Jane twisting her head back at every third step. Shortly they were out of sight.

Nothing moved, and if there was any damage to the other saucer, it could not be seen from where the men stood. Trace, impatient, was lifting the weapon again, when a green light shone out from the center of the edge.

"Ah," breathed Trace. "We've raised 'em. Now let 'em come, don't stop 'em, and we'll man this death-trap yet!"

CHAPTER XIII

They lay in a kind of shallow ditch just under the outer edge of the great saucer, watching the orange lights from the helmets bob and duck nearer. Bill said quietly, "We're cut off from the hill now."

"That's okay. The women will wait; and we can fall back on the ruins of the town if they chase us. They may just investigate the ship here, and not bother with us. We are only vermin, after all."

Hafnagel said, "What if they see the changes you made in that panel?"

"They shouldn't, unless they look almighty close."

"And will it work?" asked the big man.

"Who the hell knows?" retorted Trace irritably. "Maybe it's too late now. Maybe we're spinning around Tsloahn already. Who can tell? We can't see the stars, the clouds are too thick."

The aliens were very close now and the four men fell silent. The lamps drew up to the deserted ship, hesitated, and at last one lifted and disappeared, as its wearer vanished into the open port. Trace shut his eyes and said a quick private prayer of thanksgiving; then he whispered, "We're okay now. Let's head for the ruins." They crawled out of the ditch and like a quartet of raiding Comanches, their work done, made for the empty wreckage at top speed.

Behind them a shout went up, a raucous croak of triumph. Then a voice said weirdly in English, pitched high and carrying, "Not run, die!"

Trace got the idea, disagreed with it, and put all his strength into a terrific sprint. He found himself bathed in orange radiance, as the distant Graken focused their helmet beams; just before the first green ray was fired, he saw a very low wall of bricks miraculously uncrumbled, jinked and made for it, dived over and landed on his chest with a scarce-felt smack of pain. The others followed him, and hugged dirt as the rayguns sliced the cold air harmlessly.

After a while the orange glow went away. Trace cautiously looked over the wall. He couldn't see anything but he had a feeling. They hadn't all gone into the ships, he knew that.

He was not quite unprepared, therefore, when the Graken came over the bricks on top of him.

It was probably the largest and heaviest of all those whom the band had seen. It fell on Trace like the side of a collapsing barn, and Trace felt all his breath leave his lungs in one excruciating wheeze. He fought to bring the muzzle of the raygun against it, but could not move his arm, which was pinned under the creature's knee. Only the soldier's left arm was free. He flailed a blow that landed solidly, but the alien only squalled, and chopped at his face with its clubbed pistol. Trace felt skin and flesh give way along his cheekbone, blood gush from the slice of the metal. He heaved up as heartily as he could, at the same time aiming another left jab for the brute's face. His knuckles took it square in the eye. It shrieked, reeled back on its knees, and Trace fought tigerishly and was free. He delivered his finest right cross to the throat, and the Graken writhed on the frozen earth. Then Slough and Bill were there—the fight had taken only seconds—and the magician in a frenzy of rage booted the green head with the toe of his heavy shoe. That was that.

Slough's voice said softly, "Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lurmen ademptium." He rolled the big head up to the dusky light, and the broad single eye gaped blankly. "Virgil said that about another Cyclops, luckily of a mythical breed. 'A horrible monster, misshapen, vast, whose only eye had been put out.'" He signed. "Trace, the only real work we had is done, for failure or success it's finished, and we can't do any more good here. Let us go back to the women. If so be it our plan succeeds, they'll need you to watch over them in the—ah, the post-war world, which may be a little wild for a time. And if we've lost our gamble, then you should be with your girl when the end comes. You can't do any good by fighting guerrilla-fashion down here."

"My girl?" asked Trace, who had no idea of how he had been moon-calfing at Jane Kelly.

Hafnagel laughed. It was a joyous sound, the expression of a troubled man who had found release. "Go on, Sarge," he said. "Go to the hill, all three of you. I'll cover your withdrawal from here." He hefted the raygun he carried. "Don't argue with me," he said before Trace could speak. "You know a retreat needs a rear guard—and I mean to have another Graken scalp or two before I quit. Go on."

Trace argued in passionate whispers, but shortly found himself creeping on all fours across the razed town, without fully remembering how he had left the wall. There was no sound or sign of movement on all the wide plain; and as they came to the beginnings of the slope, he said, "I shouldn't have left him. He ought to have come with us."

Then they saw in the distance the streaks of green fire, and a pair of orange spotlights which almost immediately went out. The ray pistols kept darting their beams along the ground, and Trace said again, "I shouldn't have left Hafnagel."

"He never meant to follow us," said Slough.

"It was right to leave him," said Bill Blacknight quietly. "You gave him a few minutes of glory. That's no bad deal, you know."

When they crested the hill, the green shafts had vanished, and the plain was dark under the heavy clouds that hid the sky.

CHAPTER XIV

The five of them sat on the lip of the hill, hunched up against the cold, clasping their knees and occasionally rubbing hands or ankles for warmth. Trace had one arm around Jane Kelly, whose dark head lay against his chest. He was almost happy. He thought he had lost, lost his vengeance and his universe, and still he was all but contented, because he had this girl close to him.

The saucers rested without motion on the plain. The clouds had thinned, the moon's location could be told by its misted radiance, but no stars shone and the humans could not tell whether they were spinning around Sol or Tsloahn. After all, as Trace had said, the moon might have been kidnapped with them—or it might be a different moon, one of the other stolen planets in the Graken's home system.

Barbara hated stillness. She asked Trace, "How come those greenies thought your damned old movie was real? Couldn't they tell it was only a picture—them and their high IQ's?"

"No," said Trace. He roused himself and looked over at her. Bill Blacknight was snuggled against her (oh, for warmth, sure, thought Trace cynically) and the magician was obviously on the verge of the same strange happiness that touched Trace himself. "No," he said again, "they couldn't tell it was a picture."

"Why not?"

"Because they only have one eye apiece."

"I don't see what difference that makes."

He assumed the role of patient instructor, dredging in his memory for the right words. "You need two eyes functioning as one organ to have what they call binocular vision. The retina isn't adapted for three-dimensional perception, see?"

"No," said Barbara.

"Well, to perceive solid things for what they are, you have to have two retinal images, thrown on both eyes by the one object. You get help from linear and aerial perspective—if you know the size of a thing you can judge how far away it is—but supposing you don't know its size, you're liable to misjudge its distance if you've only got one eye. One eye, two dimensions; two eyes, three dimensions."

"I get that," said Bill sleepily. "How'd you happen to think of it, Trace?"

"It was Slough here. Twice a greenie made a mistake as to how far away he was: once on the street, when it didn't grab for him when it could have, and again in the theater, when Glodd motioned for him to come closer, and hit him accidentally. Both of them thought Slough was average human size. Both were looking at him from a low viewpoint, the first on its knees and Glodd sitting on the floor. That's when it occurred to me that their eye-sight must be two-dimensional. Of course it wouldn't bother them on their home planets, where everything was known by size and aerial perspective filled in their deficiencies. Probably their navigational instruments made up for their lack of depth perception in flight, too. But when I turned the Nazi Army onto them, they were baffled. They must have thought giants were coming up out of a hole under the theater. Which is why they ran like hell, and then blasted the town."

"Very clever," said Slough. Jane echoed this, and Trace said to her quietly, "I'm not quite the uneducated slob you might think I was, baby."

"I don't think anything of the sort! You're—you're a man, a fine tough intelligent man." She was so sincere she sounded angry. Trace glowed with pride.

There was a very long silence then. Nobody moved from their chosen vantage point. The hidden moon went down. At last Trace cleared his throat self-consciously.

"I'd like to ask a question myself. Of you, Slough."

After a slight pause, Slough said, "What is it, Trace?"

"Well, you're a little too smart a geezer for reality, if you know what I mean. You figured those helmets for thought-radios, when it was a fantastic possibility that no normal man would have hit on so quick with so little to go on. Then you did things with the electronic device in that saucer that I couldn't have come up with in a coon's age."

"I'm an engineer," said the tiny man. He chuckled. "And I read a lot of science-fiction."

"Okay. Then there's this. Thirty-odd hours ago you had a badly broken left arm, which I set for you and put in a sling." Trace spoke slowly, almost with fear now that he voiced his suspicions. "Some time during our first raid on the town, you discarded the sling; when we were in the saucer, you fought and afterwards you worked on the instruments with both hands. It's impossible, but it must be true—your arm knit completely within a day." He turned and bending over Jane Kelly he stared wide-eyed at the dark figure of the little man.

"Slough," said Trace huskily, "what are you?"

Slough sighed. "Whatever I am, Trace Roscoe, I am not your enemy. No, nor ever shall be, yours or your people's. Look!" He cried out so suddenly that the four of them, shocked, stared out in the direction in which he gestured. "The saucers," he said, "they're rising!"

"The gimmicked one?" asked Bill, whose eyes were bleary with lack of sleep.

"Yes, all of 'em," said Trace. He jumped up, hauling Jane to her feet with him. "It's coming, they're hoping to do it," he said, and he clenched his teeth and took a firm grip on the girl, as though he wanted to hold her on the earth when it shot into the uncanny regions of sub-space. "Hold tight," he said, with no particular sense but a vast deal of emotion. "Hold tight, Jane baby." And Jane held him tightly.

The saucers rose higher, dwindling in size; they reached the low cloud layer and passed into it, becoming hazy and then invisible.

Twenty thousand spacecraft girdled the globe, linked electronically, readied for flight with their stolen planet to unknowable distances of deep space.

The men and women waited, their breath emerging in brief white frosty spurts in the cold air. And nothing happened.

After twenty minutes, Trace put a trembling hand to his forehead. "We lose," he said. He saw Slough begin to walk away from them, going back along the gradual slope among the bare trees, but he did not even call after him. It didn't matter a damn now, what or who the midget was.

"We lose," he said again, and hugged Jane fiercely.

And then the sky exploded.

CHAPTER XV

Trace flung himself on the ground, sheltering Jane; he felt rather than saw that Bill had done the same with Barbara. He gazed up, and saw the great rack of clouds torn and dispersed by the force of the blast. There was a chain of brilliant green-white balls of light, like so many bursting sky-rockets, that stretched from horizon to black horizon across his world. He thought of the shards of metal, the evil whistling splinters and hunks of meteoring death that would rain out of the sky after such a multiple explosion, and he buried his face in Jane's soft hair, trying desperately to cover her whole body with his own. The noise above them was so mighty a roar that Trace was deafened, and his head hummed and rang intolerably.

In that moment, oddly, he thought again of Slough, and realized what he must be. The Irish intuition, second sight, or what-have-you it works in a cockeyed way, he said to himself, waiting for the shower of molten hail.

Slough was of the extraterrestrials too!

Oh, not the Graken, the wicked green one-eyed bird-footed destroyers. But he was a saucerman, right enough. Lord knew how many of them had been living among us before the greenies attacked. No telling how many had died, how many still lived.

Trace remembered the saucer sightings that had perplexed the Air Force for so many years before. The blue-lit disks that soared and dipped and shot away from pursuit, the disks which had been seen by reputable folk for—well, possibly for centuries. Funny he hadn't thought of it before, but all those well-vouched-for sightings could not have been Graken. The Graken shot into our system no longer ago than late December! And all the long while before we'd been under the surveillance of blue-lit saucers—not green, but blue at night and silvery in the sunlight!

He wriggled, his body awaiting the impact of the metallic missiles, his mind occupied with Slough.

And if there'd been saucers here for so long, and even saucer-people among us, what had happened to them when the Graken came? Any space battles between warring saucers would have been seen. Had they retreated to their own planet at sight of the Graken fleet, through space or interdimensional sub-space? Maybe. Or maybe they'd hidden in or on the earth.

Why hadn't they fought? The Graken had no allies in the universe. The blue-disk cowards had run! Except old Slough, if he were one, he hadn't run. Why had the great ships left Terra? Not their fight? Or....

Or suppose they couldn't fight! Suppose they had no weapons in their craft, no rays nor bombs—Trace exclaimed wordlessly as this probable truth occurred to him. The blue disks were only observers, they weren't warcraft. Perhaps their people had no weapons at all. Perhaps they were a nation of peace, as the Graken were a nation of eternal war. And their long watch over the world had been either curiosity, or hopeful friendliness.

In which case, they'd likely be back. Trace hoped they would; he had liked Slough. Terra could use friends now.

He jerked his head up and stared at the sky. Even if the Graken ships had been three miles up, their remains should have showered down to earth by this time. He got to his feet with a grunt. The gimmicking of the controls in that saucer had been better than he'd known; the ring of saucers had not only exploded, they'd been atomized.

Trace helped Jane to her feet, as Bill Blacknight did the same for Barbara. "Well," said Trace, "let's not sit on our cans out here all night. Let's get this show on the road. We have a hell of a lot to do."

"Such as what?" asked Bill.

"Mac," said Trace firmly, "this is still the Army of the United States, and we got a world to police up. There'll be more left than us four; there'll be millions of people, here and on the other continents too, who'll need all the help we can give 'em."

"We can help the world?" asked Barbara. "Us four?"

"We've done a lot already," said Jane drily.

"There's more, we haven't begun yet. We have to find a radio, get in touch again," said Trace, his voice strong and happy. "There ought to be some planes left, in private airports and out in the country. We got to scrape together what's left of civilization and patch it up and make it better than it ever was. You know anybody that could do the job better?"

"No," Jane said, "darling." Trace blinked. He was not a demonstrative man, but he leaned over and kissed her on the nose with haste and embarrassment. "Come on," he said, gulping a little, "we got work to do."

They started off along the crest of the hill, and then Bill grasped Trace's arm and said in a whisper, "Oh, oh Lord, we forgot."

"Forgot what?"

"We may be in the Graken's star system, what the hell was it, in Lluagor! They took such a long time—maybe they got us there before they blew up!"

The four people searched each other's faces silently, and even Trace was too appalled at the thought to verify it for a moment. Then Jane Kelly turned her face up to the sky, where the clouds had been rent and scattered by the blast.

After a long moment she put her hand in Trace's.

"I'm not much of an astronomer, Trace," she said, her voice calm and sweet and proud. "But even so, I can recognize the Big Dipper when I see it." She pressed his fingers affectionately. "And I do see it," she said....