Wonder Stories Super Pack. Fletcher PrattЧитать онлайн книгу.
work-period. We lost track of the days.”
“So did I. Where are we? Are there any other humans with you?”
“One in the cage across the corridor from me. Walter Stevens the Wall Street man.”
“Have they got him on this job, too?”
“Yes.”
Sherman could not avoid a snicker. Back in the days before the comet he had had Stevens as a passenger once, and a more difficult customer to satisfy, a more cocksure-of-his-own-importance man he had never seen. The thought of him burning his fingertips up in one of these machines gave him some amusement. But his next question was practical.
“Do you know what these machines are for?”
“Haven’t the least idea; Stevens said they were for digging something. They had the helmets on him twice.”
“What helmets?”
“Like the dopey at the door wears. The dopeys all have to wear them.”
“Why?”
“Haven’t got any brains, I guess. I had one on once when they were teaching me to do this. They tell you what to think.”
“What do you mean?”
“You put the helmet on and it’s like you’re hypnotized. You can’t think anything but what they want you to think.”
Sherman shuddered slightly. So that was how the mechanical ape-men were controlled so perfectly!
“How did they get you?” asked the girl who had described herself as Marta Lami.
“In an airplane. I’m an aviator. They shot me down somewhere and when I came to, put me in one of those cages. How did you get here?”
“The birds. I was at West Point with Stevens and that old fool Vanderschoof. They started shooting at the birds and the birds just picked us up and flew away with us.”
“Where were you after you came to? I mean after the comet.”
“New York. Century Roof. I was dancing there before.”
“You aren’t Marta Lami, the dancer?”
“Sure. Who the hell do you think?”
*
He turned and regarded her deliberately, careless of the aroused attention of the sentry. So this was the famous dancer who had blazed across two continents and three divorce suits—who had been proclaimed the most beautiful woman in the world in starring electric lights before an applauding Broadway; for whose performances speculators held tickets at prize-fight premiums! How little she resembled it now, a parody of the human form, working her fingers off as the slave of an alien and conquering race.
She asked the next question:
“Where have they got you?”
“I don’t know. In a cage somewhere. The only people around there are like these mugs.” He nodded toward the ape-man.
“I wonder how long they’ll keep us at this.”
“I wish I could tell you. How’s chances of making a break?”
“Rotten. There was a guy at the next machine tried it three or four work-periods ago. He socked the dopey at the door.”
“What happened?”
“They sent a machine down for him and gave him the yellow lights all over. It was fierce, you should have heard him scream.”
“How far down are we, anyway?”
“You got me, boy friend. Sssh! Watch the dopey.”
Sherman glanced over his shoulder to see the ape-man moving aside from the door and bent back to his work. Evidently something important was imminent, judging from the actions of the sentry and the energetic attention the ex-dancer was giving to her machine. He was not deceived. Down the passage came something moving; something flesh-like and smooth, of a pale, grey-blue, dead-fish color, like a dangling serpent, then a round bulging head and finally the full form of an elephant!
But such an elephant as mortal eye had never before seen. For it stood barely eight feet high and its legs were both longer and infinitely more slender and graceful than the legs of any earthly elephant. The ears were smaller, not loose flaps of skin, but possessed of definite form and pressed close to the head. The skull was enormous, bulging at the forehead, and wrinkled in the middle down over the large intelligent eyes in an expression permanently cross and dissatisfied. As for the trunk it reached nearly to the floor, longer and thinner in proportion than the trunk of an ordinary elephant, and at its tip divided into four finger-like projections set around the circle of the nostril.
Oddest of all, the elephant wore clothes! Or at least an outer garment, a kind of long cloak which appeared to be attached underneath its body and which covered every portion except the ankles. The feet also were covered. A kind of hood hung back from the head on that portion of the cloak which rested on the creature’s back. But what chiefly aroused Sherman’s sense of strangeness and loathing was that the naked skin, wherever exposed, was of that same poisonous, dead-fish blue.
For a moment the thing stood in the doorway, regarding them, swinging its long trunk around restlessly, as though it could tell something about them by its sense of smell. Then it advanced a step or two into the room, and placing its trunk close to Sherman’s body, began to run over it, sniffing, a few inches away. He felt that he wanted to shriek, to turn and strike the thing, or to run, but a warning glance from the dancer kept him motionless.
Apparently satisfied with the result of its examination the elephant turned to go, stopping as it did so to unhook some projection on the ape-man’s helmet and apply it to its ear. After listening for a moment, it put the end of the trunk to this projection, snorted into it, and went away with soundless steps.
For several minutes the two worked on in silence after this. Then:
“Well, now you seen him,” said the dancer, in the same word-by-word fashion as before. “That was our boss.”
“That—thing?” asked Sherman, incredulously.
“I’ll tell the cockeyed world. Say, those babies know more than Einstein ever heard of. Try to get fresh with one of them and see.”
“What do they do?”
“Shoot you with one of the light-guns. They carry little ones around with them. They melt you down wherever they hit you and you have to go to the operating room to have things put back and it hurts like hell.”
“Oh, I must have been there after they brought me down in my plane. They did something to my back.”
“Then you know, boy friend. After that they put the helmet on you and you have to tell ‘em what you’re thinking about. You can beat that game, though, if you’re careful. All I’d give ‘em was how good a couple of Scotch highballs would taste and it made monkeys of ‘em.”
It was all very strange and not a little bewildering. Intelligent elephants that controlled forces beyond the powers of men; who could place a helmet on your head and read your thoughts; who could repair the new mechanized human form after it had apparently suffered irreparable damage, and who treated men and women as lower animals. Their arrival must have been that of the comet.
*
Herbert Sherman had read deeply enough, though not widely. He remembered some Englishman—Colvin—Kevin—Kelvin, that was it!—who had a theory that life had drifted to the earth from somewhere out in the void of space and time. Had these, too, drifted in, in the same way the ancestors of man had come, to set a period to the day of man’s dominance over creation? A strange enough creation it was now, though, with its mechanical men and its animals turned to metal statues. He wondered what Noah would say, and giggled at the thought.
“What’s the joke, boy friend?”
“Oh,