Invaders from the Infinite

Russ Evans, Pilot 3497, Rocket Squad Patrol 34, unsnapped his seat belt, and with a slight push floated “up” into the air inside the weightless ship. He stretched himself, and yawned broadly.

“Red, how soon do we eat?” he called.

“Shut up, you’ll wake the others,” replied a low voice from the rear of the swift little patrol ship. “See anything?”

“Several million stars,” replied Evans in a lower voice. “And⁠—” His tone became suddenly severe. “Assistant Murphy, remember your manners when addressing your superior officer. I’ve a mind to report you.”

A flaming head of hair topping a grinning face poked around the edge of the door. “Lower your wavelength, lower your wavelength! You may think you’re a sun, but you’re just a planetoid. But what I’d like to know, Chief Pilot Russ Evans, is why they locate a ship in a forlorn, out of the way place like this⁠—three-quarters of a billion miles, out of planetary plane. No ships ever come out here, no pirates, not a chance to help a wrecked ship. All we can do is sit here and watch the other fellows do the work.”

“Which is exactly why we’re here. Watch⁠—and tell the other ships where to go, and when. Is that chow ready?” asked Russ looking at a small clock giving New York time.

“Uh⁠—think she’ll be on time? Come on an’ eat.”

Seated at the controls once more, he snapped the little switch that caused the screen to glow with flashing, swirling colors as the telectroscope apparatus came to life. A thousand tiny points of flame appeared scattered on a black field with a suddenness that made them seem to snap suddenly into being. Points, tiny dimensionless points of light, save one, a tiny disc of blue-white flame, old Sol from a distance of close to one billion miles, and under slight reverse magnification. The skillful hands at the controls were turning adjustments now, and that disc of flame seemed to leap toward him with a hundred light-speeds, growing to a disc as large as a dime in an instant, while the myriad points of the stars seemed to scatter like frightened chickens, fleeing from the growing sun, out of the screen. Other points, heretofore invisible, appeared, grew, and rushed away.

The sun shifted from the center of the screen, and a smaller reddish-green disc came into view⁠—a planet, its atmosphere coloring the light that left it toward the red. It rushed nearer, grew larger. Earth spread as it took the center of the screen. A world, a portion of a world, a continent, a fragment of a continent as the magnification increased, boundlessly it seemed.

Finally, New York spread across the screen; New York seen from the air, with a strange lack of perspective.

In a moment he had flashed up through the seven stories, and out to the roof. A gigantic silvery machine rested there, streamlined to perfection, its hull dazzingly beautiful in the sunlight. A door opened, and three tall, lean men stepped from it. Already people were collecting about the ship, flying up from below. Air patrolmen floated up in a minute, and seeing Arcot, held the crowd back.

The strange men were tall, eight feet or more in height. Great, round, soft brown eyes looked in curiosity at the towering multicolored buildings, at the people floating in the air, at the green trees and the blue sky, the yellowish sun.

Arcot looked at their strangely blotched and mottled heads, faces, arms and hands. Their feet were very long and narrow, their legs long and thin. Their faces were kindly; the mottled skin, brown and white and black, seemed not to make them ugly. It was not a disfigurement; it seemed oddly familiar and natural in some reminiscent way.

“Lord, Arcot⁠—queer specimens, yet they seem familiar!” said Morey in an undertone.

“They are. Their race is that of man’s first and best friend, the dog! See the brown eyes? The typical teeth? The feet still show the traces of the dog’s toe-step. Their nails, not flat like human ones but rounded? The mottled skin, the ears⁠—look, one is advancing.”

One of the strangers walked laboriously forward. A lighter world than Earth was evidently his home. His great brown eyes fixed themselves on Arcot’s. Arcot watched them.

“There is a sphere, a foot in diameter, ten feet from me,” droned Arcot. The sphere was there. “It is moving to the left.” The sphere moved to the left at Arcot’s thought. “It is rising.” The sphere rose. “It is changing to a disc two feet across.” The sphere seemed to flow, and was a disc two feet across as Arcot’s toneless voice of concentration continued.

“It is changing into a hand, like a human hand.” The disc changed into a human hand, the fingers slightly bent, the soft, white fingers of a woman with the pink of the flesh and the wrinkles at the knuckles visible. The wrist seemed to fade gradually into nothingness, the end of the hand was as indeterminate as are things in a dream, but the hand was definite.

“The hand is reaching for the bar of lux metal on the floor.” The soft, little hand moved, and reached down and grasped the half ton bar of lux metal, wrapped dainty fingers about it and lifted it smoothly and effortlessly to the table, and laid it there.

A mistiness suddenly solidified to another hand. The second hand joined the first, and fell to work on the bar, and pulled. The bar stretched finally under an enormous load. One hand let go, and the thud of the highly elastic lux metal bar’s return to its original shape echoed through the soundless room. These men of the twenty-second century knew what relux and lux metals were, and knew their enormous strength. Yet it was putty under these hands. The hands that looked like a woman’s!

The bar was again placed on the table, and the hands disappeared. There was a thud, and the relay had opened.

But Arcot’s experiment now⁠—it was on a level of its own!

From behind the table, apparently crawling up the leg came a thing! It was a hand. A horrible, disjointed hand. It was withered and incarmined with blood, for it was severed from its wrist, and as it hunched itself along, moving by a ghastly twitching of fingers and thumb, it left a trail of red behind it. The papers to be distributed rustled as it passed, scurrying suddenly across the table, down the leg, and racing toward the light switch! By some process of writhing jerks it reached it, and suddenly the room was plunged into half-light as the lights winked out. Light filtering over the transom of the door from the hall alone illuminated the hall, but the hand glowed! It glowed, and scurried away with an awful rustling, scuttling into some unseen hole in the wall. The quiet of the hall was the quiet of tenseness.

From the wall, coming through it, came a mistiness that solidified as it flowed across. It was far to the right, a bent stooped figure, a figure half glimpsed, but fully known, for it carried in its bony, glowing hand a great, nicked scythe. Its rattling tread echoed hollowly on the floor. Stooping walk, shuffling gait, the great metal scythe scraping on the floor, half seen as the gray, luminous cloak blew open in some unfelt breeze of its ephemeral world, revealing bone; dry, gray bone. Only the scythe seemed to know Life, and it was red with that Life. Slow running, sticky lifestuff.