The Sci-Fi Stories - Cyril M. Kornbluth Edition. Cyril M. Kornbluth
we?" he grated, pulling a gun and aiming it for the financier's throat.
In a voice hoarse with hatred Cromleigh yelled, "Just two minutes more, you meddling scum! Then—"
"Lights!" yelled Battle. "Turn the damned lights on, Miss Millicent!" As the overhead indirects flared up, bathing the huge lab in a lambent, flaming radiance, the four figures of the Saber Club members, the Billionaire Clubman and one other leaped into sharp reality.
It was the figure of the sofa. "We took the liberty," said Battle, his gun swerving not an inch, "of removing this object from the smoking room. It's going lock, stock and barrel into the enlarging machine you have here."
"You fool!" roared Cromleigh. "Don't you know—" The descending gun butt cut off any further conversation.
"Hurry up!" grated the lieutenant. He hefted the sofa to his broad shoulders. "That trembling hand was a signal if ever I saw one. His friends'll be here any minute. Open that damned machine and plug in the power!"
The Russian philosopher, muttering wildly to himself, swung wide the gates of the boxlike magnifier through which Battle had come only a few hours before.
"Thank God there's plenty of room!" groaned Battle. "And if this doesn't work, prepare for Heaven, friends!" He turned on the machine full power and speed, took Miss Millicent by the arm, and dragged her to the far end of the vast lab.
During the incredibly long three minutes that ensued, they made ready their weapons for what might prove to be a siege, while Battle explained in rapid-fire undertones what he had had no time for during the plane ride from Manhattan.
As he checked the load of his quick firers he snapped, "Invaders—phooey! Anybody could tell that those women were fresh from an office. They had the clerical air about them. The only invader—as a carefully logical process of deduction demonstrated—was the gruesome creature who's been posing as Cromleigh. Just murdered the old guy—I suppose—and took over his body. He and his friends whom he just signaled. He's the only baby who hypnotized the Phi Beta Kappas they use for busboys.
"Why did he risk sending me in there? The inevitable mark of a louse. Doesn't trust anybody, not even his own office staff dyed a pale green and reduced to half-gnat size. So he sent me in to spy on them. The whole cock-and-bull story of the creatures from an asteroid was so that there'd be no suspicion directed at him in case some bright waiter should find the louse people. Wouldn't be surprised if he's from an asteroid himself. Crazy business! Craziest damned business!"
"How about the financial angle?" asked Vaughn, who could be intelligible when money was involved.
"I picked that bird's pocket slick as a whistle just after I conked him. Feels like a hundred grand."
"Here they come!" snapped Miss Millicent.
"They" were creatures of all sizes and shapes who were streaming through the only door to the lab, at the other end of the room.
"Awk!" gulped the lady involuntarily. "They" were pretty awful. There were a hundred or so of them, many much like men, a few in an indescribable liquid-solid state that sometimes was gaseous. The luminous insides of these churned wildly about; there were teeth inside them two feet long. Others were gigantic birds, still others snakes, still others winged dragons.
"That settles it," grunted the Russian philosopher as he flicked his gun into and out of its holster faster than the eye could follow. "That settles it. They are amoebic, capable of assuming any shape at all. One is changing now—awk!" He persevered. "Indubitably possessed of vast hypnotic powers over unsuspecting minds only. Otherwise they would be working on us."
"They" were rolling in a flood of shifting, slimy flesh down the floor of the lab.
"The machine! The sofa!" cried Miss Millicent. Battle breathed a long sigh of relief as the cabinetlike expander exploded outward and the sofa it held kept on growing—and growing—and growing! It stopped just as it filled the segment of the lab that it occupied.
With a squeaking of tortured timbers the laws of cross-sectional sufferance power asserted themselves and the hundred-yard-high sofa collapsed in a monstrous pile of rubble.
"Sit very still," said the lieutenant. "Be quite quiet and blow the head off any hundred-foot centipede that wanders our way."
There were agonized yells from the other side of the couch's ruins. "That couch," Battle informed them, "was just plain lousy. Full of centipedes, lice, what have you. Naturally; never been fumigated. And when a louse smells blood—God help any invaders around, be they flesh, fish, fowl or amoebic!"
After ten minutes there was complete quiet.
"What abaht th' boogs?" asked Vaughn.
"They're dead," said Battle, rising and stretching. "Their respiratory systems can't keep up with the growth. They were good for about ten minutes, then they keeled over. Their tracheae can't take in enough oxygen to keep them going, which is a very good thing for the New Jersey countryside."
He strolled over to the vast pile of rubble and began turning over timbers, Miss Millicent assisting him.
"Ah!" he grunted. "Here it is!" He had found the body of an apple-green young lady whose paint was beginning to peel, revealing a healthy pink beneath. With many endearing terms he brought her out of her swoon as Miss Millicent's eyebrows went higher and higher.
Finally she exploded, as the two were cosily settled on a mountainous upholstery needle that had, at some time, got lost in the sofa.
"Just when, Lieutenant, did you find out that these people weren't invaders from an asteroid?"
Battle raised his eyebrows and kissed the girl.
"Have no fear, darling," he said. "A gentleman never—er—kisses—and tells."
Dead Center!
CHAPTER I.
The chilled-steel muzzle of the old-fashioned automatic swerved not an inch as Angel Maclure spoke: “I’m at your service, gentlemen. What can I do for you?”
“Put that gun down,” advised the shorter man easily. “We just didn’t want any fuss. You have our blasters—we won’t try anything.”
Maclure grinned and lowered his pistol. “Right,” he said. “I wasn’t sure whether you’d mistaken me for a banker or somebody who deserved killing.” He gestured at the blasters which he had wrenched from his assailants’ hands. “Pick ’em up, boys.” They did, and pocketed the deadly little tubes. “Now what did you want?”
The shorter, softer-spoken man began: “Excuse my friend—he’s new in our service. He doesn’t realize that we should have asked you first and then pulled the tubes. Understand?”
“All forgiven,” said Maclure shortly. “I just didn’t expect to be jumped two minutes after I get off a liner.