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Wandl the Invader

<h2>9</h2> "You, Snap!" "Gregg! But how...?" "Hush! They might hear us." "They can do more than that. They can almost hear you think." "Anita and Venza are here." "I know it. I was with them for a time. This accursed gravity! I can't walk." "Careful," I whispered. "You can crack your head on something with the least false step. Are they taking us ashore?" "I guess so. How did you happen...?" "Tell you later." They had come for me in that dark pressure-port, taken me along a dim corridor of the ship, which evidently had landed a few moments before. Then Snap, with strange figures around him, had been flung at me. These weird beings! The brains were here, but not many; I saw half a dozen on the ship. They could move easily now. They bounced upon their small arms and legs, hitching with little leaps of a few feet. Close at hand they were gruesome; from a distance they had the aspect of thirty-inch ovoids, bouncing of their own volition. And I saw too that underneath, toward the back, was a shriveled body. The other figures were wholly different; they seemed at first to be ten-foot, upright insects. The two legs were like stilts, the body narrow but with bulging chest. The neck was thin, holding the small round head, about the size of my own. Words seem futile to picture this thing which was a man of Wandl. There was no skin, but instead what seemed to be a glossy, hard brown shell. It was laid in scales; and upon the legs was a brown fuzz of stiff hair. There were many joints, both of the legs and the torso. Clothing was worn; a single garment, hanging from a wide belt halfway down the legs seemed incongruous, fantastically aping humanity. This was the worker, equipped by nature for mechanical tasks. There were not two arms, but at least ten. From what could have been called the shoulders, they were tentacles,[73] half the length of an elephant's trunk, with many-fingered hands at the ends. From the waist depended huge lobster-like pincers; and from the chest and back the arms were smaller, each with a different type finger-claw. The head and face were most of all a personal mocking of mankind. Wide, upstanding, listening ears were upon the sides of the head, one on the forehead and one on the back. The face was mobile, with tiny brown scales small as a fish. A nose orifice, with two protruding brown eyes above it was set outward on stems, and an upended slit of a mouth. There was an eye in the back of the head. Probably, over eons of upward development from what was perhaps an original single type, these two specialized forms had developed. The "Masters," as they were known upon Wandl, neglected the body for the brain, and the "Workers," the reverse. There was no separate individual for the female. As is the case with primitive organisms, they were all bi-sexual, the parent dying in the reproduction of offspring. Of necessity I have been forced into digression. But at the time, Snap and I clung together, whispering, as a group of workers pushed us down a descending incline. Snap, back there in Greater New York when Molo's contact light had burst into existence, had fallen, half unconscious. They picked him up. Molo was going to kill him, but the girls persuaded him to take Snap with them. "Anita and Venza pretended never to have seen me before," Snap whispered to me now. "You take the same line." "If we get with them." "We will." It was weird, this landing upon Wandl. We had left the vessel's side-port and were descending what seemed a narrow, hundred-foot landing incline. We were outdoors, and it was night. Shafts of colored radiance flashed around us. The ship was poised on a disc-like platform, with skeleton legs. It seemed a hundred feet or more down to the ground level from where the colored lights were darting up. Overhead was a cloudless, purple-red sky of blurred, reddish stars. No doubt the curious atmosphere of Wandl gave the sky and stars this abnormal look. Later, what a multiplicity of obscure wonders we were to glimpse upon Wandl! The slowing rotation of the Earth[74] caused climatic changes there, volcanic and tidal disturbances, but Wandl rotated and stopped at will. Undoubtedly she was equipped to withstand the shock. Her internal fires could not break into eruption; she had very little fluid surface. And the nature of her atmosphere was such that it was not easily disturbed into storms. Only if there was laxity in the handling of the planet's motion would a storm come. But now, questions pounded at me. Earth, Venus and Mars were to be towed into interstellar space; all life on our worlds would perish in the cold of that stellar journey. Yet Wandl had made that journey. Was her atmosphere inherently such that it did not transmit rays of heat? Snap and I had been pushed down the incline with half a dozen figures in advance of us. Without difficulty we could have leapt down that hundred feet, unaided. Figures were leaping into mid-air from several pressure-ports of the ship. They did not fall, but floated, drifted down. I saw one of the insect-like workers drop with motionless outstretched arms. Others came mounting up, using their arms and legs with sweeping strokes, as though swimming. It was like being under water. It was a strange, weird scene, the vessel wavering above us; the flashing lights; waving beams of radiance. A fantastic structure nearby reared itself several hundred feet with lights on top and outlining its many lateral balconies one above the other. The air was full of the leaping, swimming insect-like figures. The brains, the masters, were not in evidence; then I saw one of them being carried, and others, floating down like distended falling balloons, to be caught by the workers in small nets and thus saved from jarring contact. Snap was suddenly whispering: "That fellow back of us is our guard. I can feel his ray. Some form of attraction; it's pulling at me." Snap was a little behind me. I turned and saw the faint radiance of a narrow light-beam upon him. It came from an instrument in an upper shoulder hand of the insect figure following us, no doubt the reverse form of the same ray which had been used to thrust the wrecked Cometara toward the Moon. We reached the bottom. I saw now that the group of workers in advance of us were carrying metal cubes, seem[75]ingly of considerable weight; they also had to use the incline. We stood presently on a smooth ground surface. We had not seen Anita and Venza, nor Molo and his sister. The insect figure who was our guard came forward. "You stand here. Molo comes." "Where is he?" I demanded. "I want to see him." I stopped myself quickly; I had very nearly mentioned the girls. "And talk with him." "He comes soon." "I'm hungry." I gestured to my stomach. "Food. You know what that is?" The brown scaly face contorted for a smile, a ghastly grimace. "Yes. You shall have food and drink." It seemed that the hollow voice came not from the neck but from the shell-like, bulging chest. He stood aside, with the globular weapon of the ray in a pincer hand. We waited, standing gingerly together, wavering with our slight weight. A wind would have blown us away, but there was no wind. Instead, there was a heavy, sultry air, warm as a mid-summer Earth night, warmer even than the Neo-time of Venus. Snap and I were dressed much the same, wearing heavy boots, for which weight we were thankful, tight, puttee-like trousers, flaring at the top, and high-necked white blouses. Both of us were bare-headed. Doubtless we were as fantastic a sight to these Wandlites as they to us. Some of the workers crowded up, reaching out to pluck at us, but Snap waved them away and our guard dispersed them. One of the master brains came bouncing up. Upon his little upright body the great head wavered. "You will wait here." His eyes glowed up at us. "But listen," Snap began. "You will wait here for the Martian. He has his orders to take you to the Great Intelligence." The little arm from the side of the head had a hand with a finger pointing for a gesture. "There is a meeting place there. We decided now what to do to destroy the warships of your worlds. I do not like your thoughts; they are black. I will inform the Great Intelligence when he can spare the thought for you." He added something in the Wandl tongue. A worker came forward; lifted him carefully, held him in the hollow of an[76] encircling tentacle. And with a bound, the worker sailed upward and was gone. Again we stood through an interval. I noticed now that the towering structure near us, with its storied balconies, was not perpendicular. Its front curved up and back. It was convex, somewhat in the fashion of an irregular globe, a three-hundred foot ball, with a flattened base set here on the ground. The balconies were segments of its front curve. At the top, the roof was as though the ball had been sliced off, like a giant apple with a slice gone for a base and another for the roof. At the bottom was a huge portal with a glow of light from within. And at the terraced balcony levels were lighted windows. "Is that the meeting place?" Snap whispered. "Probably. And look to the side of it, Snap." It was a city. There was a vista of distance to one side of the great globe structure. Now that our eyes were more accustomed to the queerness of this night upon Wandl, we could ignore the colored light-beams of the landing stage and the disembarking palisade upon which we were standing. Gazing into the distance, the curvature of the surface of this little world was immediately apparent. The reddish firmament of stars came down to meet the sharply-curving surface at a horizon line which seemed about a mile away. Spread upon this near distance were a variety of structures with little roads of open space winding between them. Most of the buildings seemed globular in shape. Some were small, little round mound-shaped individual dwellings. Others were larger. Some were tiered like half a dozen apples speared in a row upon a stick and set upright. I saw a ribbon of what might be a river in the distance, with the reddish starlight glinting upon it. To our left, half a mile away perhaps, was a row of buttes and rocks which stood like a miniature range of mountains. The city seemed entirely to encompass them; and every little rock-peak had upon its top a globelike dwelling. Lights were winking everywhere and figures bounded a hundred feet and more, and sailed in an arc, coming down to the ground to bound again. A row of workers went by overhead, not swimming or leaping but stiffly motionless. Tiny[77] opalescent rays went from them to the ground, as though to give them power. Five minutes of Earth-time might have passed while Snap and I gazed at this busy night scene in this Wandl city upon the occasion of the landing of their ship so triumphantly returned from its mission to Earth. As I stood, certainly a helpless captive if ever there was one, nevertheless a strange sense of my own power was within me. This was so small a world; the people were so flimsy. With a poke of my fist I could kill any one of these master brains. The ten-foot workers seemed mere shells, light and fragile; even the buildings were light and flimsy. The little globe-houses on their sticks seemed to waver, almost like nodding flowers. If we ran amuck we could smash everything we saw here on Wandl. We became aware of Molo approaching. What a solid giant this seven-foot Martian seemed now in the midst of this buoyant, almost weightless city! He was still bare-headed and wearing his garments of ornamented leather, with his brawny legs bare. Upon his feet were strange-looking, wide-soled shoes. His hands and forearms were thrust into loops of small shields. These shields appeared to be constructed of a heart-shaped flexible framework, covered with an opaque membrane. They were about two feet long and half as wide. With a hand and forearm thrust into fabric loops, the shield appeared to serve as wings so that the arms had more thrust against the air. He came at us with a sort of swimming stroke. He landed somewhat awkwardly, half-stumbled and almost fell, but gathered himself up and confronted us. He gained his balance and waved our guard aside. His gaze went to me. "You are the new prisoner taken from that wrecked Earth-ship?" "Yes." "What is your name? You are an Earthman, evidently." "Yes." I hesitated. I had seen Molo and heard him talk, back there in Greater New York; but he had not seen me nor heard of me probably. "Gregg Haljan." I added, "I am a skilled navigator; perhaps it was fortunate you saved me."[78] He flung me a look and there was a tinge of amusement in it. "You would save your own skin now?" "Why not? You're a Martian, and this is a war also against Mars." His look darkened, but then again sardonic amusement struck him. "We shall see what the Great Master says. There will be a few of our type humans, men and women, wanted when the worlds begin anew. The Great Master said so. He wants to study life on Earth as it was before the destruction." Molo's glance swept behind us. I turned to see three figures approaching. My heart pounded. They were Anita, Venza and Molo's sister, Meka. They came slowly, trying to walk, with balancing outstretched arms. With a dozen curious Wandl workers crowding them, they came and joined Molo before us. My heart was pounding, but I flung them a curious, impersonal stare. "You are here," said Molo. "Good. We go now." He bent over Snap and me. "I advise you make no effort to leap away, though it may look easy." "Not me," said Snap. "Where would I go alone in this damned world? I can't very well leap back to Earth, can I?" "True enough," said Molo. "You have sense, little fellow. But I just warn you: the guard who will watch you always is very sharp of eye. And the weapons here bring very swift death." I could feel Anita's gaze upon me, but I did not dare look her way. "Let's go," I said, "You will have no trouble with me." With Molo leading us, and the giant insect-like guard following close behind, we made our slow, awkward way across the esplanade portals of the huge globular building. And within, we traversed a cylinder-like, padded corridor and came presently upon the strangest interior scene I had ever beheld.[79] <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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