Philip E. High - No Truce With Terra

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2024-12-22 0 0 235.65KB 96 页 5.9玖币
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Chapter One
LIPSCOMBE turned the car off the road and pulled up in the short drive
leading to the garage.
"The place is in a bit of a mess I'm afraid. The wife's away for a week,
you know, staying with her mother." He grinned faintly and slid open the
car door. "It could be worse—her mother could have been staying with us.
Come in for a drink anyway."
"Thanks." Collard followed him up the drive, looking interestedly at the
low detached building. "You live well, don't you?"
Lipscombe laughed. "I'll be near to retirement before I've finished
paying for it. Mind you, these fibroplastic jobs are cheaper than the
section-construction units, but in this case I'm paying through the nose
for a country avenue estate and, of course, the interior equipment." He
fumbled in his pocket for his keys. "I must say these automatic interior
units are good. Just set the controls and the damn thing dusts and cleans
itself; with the wife away it would be a horrible mess otherwise."
He inserted his key in the lock and turned. "Funny!" He pushed slightly
at the door and turned the key again.
"What's up?" Collard had been studying the flower beds with a tinge of
envy. He wished he had the time and money to devote to such exotics as
Salamson-hybrids.
Lipscombe said, "The door won't open." He turned the key again,
frowning. "Damn funny." He made three more attempts, then walked
quickly across the small lawn and peered through the window. "Strange,
can't see a thing; looks as if the pane has been blacked on the inside. Hold
on, I'll try the back."
He returned some seconds later, scowling. "Back door won't open either
and I've tried the spare key. Blasted nuisance, I can't force the door or
windows or the automatic alarm will ring the nearest police station." He
lit a cigarette irritably. "Can't think what to do."
"Your best move would be to notify the police," said Collard practically.
"I should take a note of the type of lock and ask them to bring a locksmith
with them."
Lipscombe nodded. "You're right, of course. Sorry about the drink."
"That's all right."
"You can borrow the car if you like. I promised you a lift home anyway."
"I'll hang on for a while." Collard smiled. "Candidly I'm rather
intrigued."
Lipscombe looked at him suspiciously. "I know what you're thinking;
you're thinking I mis-set those automatic controls before I left this
morning."
Collard laughed. They were old friends and he knew the other would not
take offence. "Well, I must admit the thought did occur to me. Your genius
is confined to the department, you know."
"Ridiculous! The device is childishly simple."
"Nonetheless I'm intrigued. I can't help wondering if the device has
cleaned the pattern off all the carpets or cooked and served meals for
sixteen people instead of one."
Lipscombe said, "Thanks for the kind thought," sourly, then shrugged.
"I suppose I'd better get over to the call box."
A police car containing one constable and a sharp faced individual with
a tool box arrived within ten minutes.
The constable first satisfied himself as to Lipscombe's ownership of the
property then permitted the locksmith to attack the door.
"Rather awkward for you, sir."
"Very awkward." Lipscombe managed to smile and turned his attention
to the smith who was busily removing tools from his box and assuring
everyone that the job would be done in a trice.
Twenty increasingly profane minutes later, however, the door was still
shut. "I can't understand it, sir. My firm not only installs but makes these
locks. It should be easy to short-circuit the tumbler mechanism and— He
stopped and looked shame-facedly at Lipscombe. "With your permission,
sir, I shall have to force it. Naturally, my firm will make good any damage
caused by—"
"Go ahead and force it then," interrupted Lipscombe, savagely.
"Right, sir." The locksmith produced a large hammer. "This may look a
bit crude, sir, but a sharp blow—"
At the tenth sharp blow, the man stopped, red faced. "Damn funny."
Lipscombe found it anything but funny. The incident was attracting
attention and a group of interested and faintly amused sightseers stood at
the gate.
"Move along, there," said the policeman without particular force. "Move
along, there."
The sightseers moved slightly to the left but failed to disperse.
"Clout it, man," said Lipscombe, furiously. "Clout it."
"Yes, sir, if you'll stand to one side, please." The man stood back and
swung his arm.
There was a dull thud. The locksmith used an obscene word explosively,
dropped the hammer and clutched at his wrist. "What the hell's that door
made of?" He glared accusingly at Lipscombe. "Something new and
clever?"
"It's the one that came with the lock as far as I know."
"Doesn't feel like it." The locksmith rubbed a swollen wrist "I'm not
trying that again."
"Looks as if you'll have to break a window, sir," said the policeman.
Lipscombe glowered at him. "Anti-splinter—what with?"
"This is strange." Collard was bending down studying the door. "This
resembles no plastic I know."
"What!" Lipscombe was shaken; Collard was a specialist in plastics.
"There are traces of the original substance." Collard's face was
absorbed. "But it's permeated with something else. There's only about five
per cent of the old C4+10; God knows what the other ninety-five is
composed of."
"I'm going to call an engineer," said Lipscombe, savagely." I'm going to
get into my own house if it's the last thing I do."
The engineer laid the cutting torch carefully on the step and made a
helpless gesture. "Can't touch it, can't touch any part of the walls either; as
for the windows—"
"I think," said Collard in a soothing voice. "You'd better spend the night
at my place, old chap. It's nearly nine-thirty and getting chilly."
At the end of the week an army of experts equipped with drills, torches,
a power-ram and even a small bulldozer had retired defeated. But the
house had aroused other interest: experts measuring the surface reported
that the structure did not conform to the plans provided by the local
surveyor. Further checks showed that, slowly but surely, the house was
changing shape.
Curiously, close to the walls, a peculiar growth of what looked like
blades of grass was appearing. The shoots were an odd metallic blue in
color and grew several inches in the course of a single night.
In the neighborhood there was, if not panic, general disquiet. Mothers
kept their children indoors and one or two families stayed with relatives or
took their holidays early.
There was something about this subtly misshapen house, something
about the blue metallic grass for which there was no word. The house
suggested something and, although there was no word to describe it, it
gave them the creeps. People crossed to the opposite side of the road when
they passed it with the uncomfortable, although, no doubt,
over-imaginative feeling that from behind those blind black windows
something was watching.
The police cordoned off the house and the garden became filled with a
variety of scientists who made constant but abortive tests of the walls or
concerned themselves with soil samples.
One night, during their absence, and close to the front door, something
grew. The scientists, after long conference, decided it was a plant but it
didn't look like a plant.
It was a triangular mirror balanced on a cable-like stem as thick as a
man's wrist. The "mirror" followed the sun and, at evening or on dull days,
folded itself up geometrically into a neat square black box.
Two days later there was another growth. This was a small brass
colored sphere about the size of a walnut perched on the top of a thin
black rod about two feet in height.
An intrigued expert touched it with his hand and was flung untidily to
the path. He was not dead but the local hospital had some difficulty
bringing him round. A diagnostician pronounced near-lethal electric
shock. It was then a witness recalled that there had been a shower of blue
sparks and that the scientist's hand seemed badly burned.
Local authorities took action, the government was contacted and the
army stepped in. There was no doubt now that something—no expert dare
commit himself—had occupied Lipscombe's house.
"Damn the house, it's incidental." Lipscombe strode up and down
Collard's living room, his face angry. "It's the disturbance round it which
worries me. The army wouldn't let me get near enough to get a proper
reading but some of the instruments went crazy; in two cases the needles
ran clean off the dials. I've not spent half my life in electronics for nothing
and, believe me, the kind of power piled up, or more aptly, stressed round
that building is unbelievable."
He sighed and pulled at the lobe of his ear. "How the hell can you stress
power, stretch it and shape it like an elastic garment? The answer is, of
course, you can't. Nonetheless the readings show—" He shook his head and
did not finish the sentence.
"Well, we can rule out the automatics running wild," said Collard.
"Beamed power has been completely cut off in the vicinity."
"Now it's too late. Not that anyone realized at the time there might be
danger."
"You have a theory." Collard was chain-smoking nervously.
"A thousand and one guesses, most of which will be quoted by someone
else at the conference tomorrow."
Collard looked sour." They would rope us in for that farce."
"Every available scientist was roped in; this business has become a
crisis. You can't wonder—the whole damn garden is sprouting
semi-electronic equipment in the guise of plants. Some have been
destroyed but the rest can protect themselves and defy attack." He sighed.
"Presumably they're some kind of cell growth which derive their strength
from solar energy; the fact that they resemble plants is, I think,
confusing."
Collard ground out a half smoked cigarette. "Then you do have a
theory?"
Lipscombe scowled at him. "Not one I propose to air at the conference;
they'd shut me up somewhere."
Collard lit another cigarette. "You don't suppose," he said, carefully,
"that it might be some sort of… er… alien invasion?"
Lipscombe stared at him, then lowered himself carefully into the
nearest chair. "It's nice to know we can both be mad —yes, the idea did
occur to me." He frowned and fumbled in his pocket for his pipe. "Hell, so
much has been written from that angle that one wonders and then one
discovers the possible flaw. We are an imaginative race but, alas, a little
short on visualization. We have always imagined an invasion from space,
but suppose our stellar friends decided to come in from the back door."
Collard said, "Eh?" a little stupidly.
Lipscombe did not appear to hear him. "Yes, by the back door, slyly,
while we're all watching the sky." He paused and began to push brown
tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with his thumb.
"To continue, suppose our stellar friends had never considered or even
visualized spaceships because they stumbled on something else before they
got around to it. Suppose it was some sort of relativity device which made
space/time meaningless. Assume, keeping this parallel in mind, they could
swivel this bloody thing round until they found, somewhere, a receiver,
some ready-made instrument to complete the circuit and establish
contact."
"My God!" Collard had an agile and imaginative mind and was quick to
grasp the implications. "Your house, with elaborate electrical equipment
and complicated wiring provided the perfect receiver." He ground out his
cigarette. "What a perfect method; the type of equipment alone must have
told what they were up against in the way of a culture."
"Let's not jump ahead of ourselves," warned Lipscombe. "This is only a
theory."
"I wish you hadn't thought of it, it makes a frightening kind of sense.
There's only one point; why haven't they done something?"
"With an impregnable beach-head, they can afford to take their time,
can't they?"
Collard made a sour grimace. "That, too, makes a lot of sense but what
about all this alleged foliage in the garden?"
Lipscombe lit his pipe and frowned at the bowl. "That, to me, is the
most conclusive evidence of all. One day, perhaps we, too, shall be a stellar
race and what is one of the first things we shall do if we find a habitable
world? I'll tell you: we shall take Terran plants, seeds, tubers and what-not
to grow our own natural food and try and make that planet look like
Earth. Later, of course, it will be insects for pollination, cattle for livestock
and God knows what else and, I can assure you, the colonization
programmers won't give a second thought to local flora or fauna unless it
proves useful or profitable." He paused, puffing at his pipe.
"These creatures have begun their conversion before they've taken
control. It's a logical move, surely? Particularly so if you are confident that
your kind of imported life is predominate in all respects."
Collard was silent, his face pale. "It looks as if we've got the hell of a
fight on our hands. Let's hope something decisive emerges from the
conference tomorrow."
The conference, however, never got under way. The government had
also concluded, although it skillfully evaded saying so, that some sort of
invasion was beginning. In their opinion, certain un-named conditions
constituted a threat to the community. The first and second Armored
Brigades, Southern Command, had, therefore, been directed into the crisis
area with orders to—
In the subsequent uproar, Lipscombe fought his way to a V.I.P. he knew
by sight. Passes for scientific observers, he realized, would be strictly
limited and he fought for two with unnatural savagery.
Damn it, it was his house, wasn't it? If the army were going to blast the
damn place to bits surely he had a right to be there? In any case, it was he
who had drawn the country's attention to the matter in the beginning It
was he who—
Lipscombe got his two passes.
Chapter Two
THE OBSERVATION point for scientific observers was in the top room
of an empty house at the far end of the avenue. The owners had hastily
moved and the unfurnished rooms echoed hollowly to the sound of voices
and the shuffling of feet.
Collard thought the position was too close for comfort and the untidy
heap of sandbags against the lower half of the window more of a gesture
than a protection.
Lipscombe clattered in behind him burdened with boxes, bags, trailing
wires and equipment. He had no authority to bring it but he had bluffed
his way through the security cordon by sheer personality and a handful of
impressive-looking but quite meaningless documents.
Collard, after years of close friendship, was making a rapid re-appraisal
of his friend. Lipscombe seemed to have acquired a new force and purpose
and the helplessness he had displayed once beyond the walls of his
laboratory seemed to have vanished completely.
Collard edged his way to the window and looked out. From this top
room, the prohibitive cost of this particular estate, was clearly explained.
It consisted of a single road of modem but skillfully landscaped villas in
completely unspoiled surroundings. Behind the villas, green fields, dappled
with buttercups, rose upwards to the darker green of thick woodlands.
The road by which they had reached the estate, he remembered, had
wound its gentle rural way on the far side of those woods before sloping
slowly downwards to the estate.
When they had passed the woods, soldiers had been filing through the
trees and light armored vehicles and trucks had been parked at the side of
the road.
No doubt, they were now lining the far hills among the trees. Mentally
he could see them: the prone waiting figures, the khaki-clad groups round
the rocket-mortars dragging quickly at nervous cigarettes. They would
come down the hill, dispersed, clutching automatic weapons—a textbook
assault by all units from all sides.
Then they arose and raced together Over an open stretch of herb and
heather. Exposed. And instantly the whole sky Burned with fury against
them…
The words seemed to drop unbidden into his mind and he had the
feeling that they were a grim warning. The lines had been written in
another age in the first world war, over a hundred years ago, but time had
not altered their force or meaning.
He looked down at the once green lawn below. Directly beneath him,
behind the low privet hedge was a squat, multi-barreled rocket launcher.
Three soldiers knelt behind it and a sergeant, eyes intent on his watch,
crouched as if frozen, beside them.
At the opposite end of the avenue, about a quarter of a mile away, he
could just see the squat outlines of one of the new Leviathan turretless
tanks. The thin high whine of the four powerful turbos reached him faintly
as the unseen crew tested in readiness.
Here and there, between the villas were other armored vehicles, draped,
he thought, optimistically, with a camouflage of green netting.
He turned his attention to Lipscombe's house. The change, although
startling, was an inference rather than architectural change. There was a
subtle blending of lines and angles. The door seemed lower and narrower,
the windows longer and slightly recessed. Somehow the house reminded
him of an insect and he had a sudden impression of creatures with faceted
eyes building this house on a blurred wind-swept world of dust and heat.
Pull yourself together, he told himself, your imagination is running wild.
He was vaguely aware that Lipscombe was setting up his equipment
and checking numerous dials. He seemed totally oblivious of the scene
outside and the implied drama of the pending attack.
Collard sighed uncomprehendingly and turned his attention once again
to the villa. More of the presumed plants sprouted from the garden. A
huge thing about six feet in height had grown up just beneath the window.
It was a dull metallic green in color and looked like an ice cream cone
stuck point first into the earth.
In front of the garage was the equivalent of a sunflower, with an eight
foot black stem as rigid as a metal rod. Where the bloom should have been
was a copper-colored shimmering thing like a bird cage which had been
cut in half. The cage appeared to be revolving slowly and reminded him,
frighteningly, of certain forms of radar equipment.
There was a stir of movement behind and he suddenly realized that the
tank had begun rolling down the road towards the villa. Momentarily he
was impressed; the vehicle was so huge that it filled the road and brushed
the opposite curbs. He knew the Leviathan could touch sixty over open
ground and packed the fire-power of a small battle ship.
He saw the weapon ports blink open like blind square eyes and, below
him, the sergeant raised his arm and suddenly dropped it.
"Fire!"
Collard's ears were stunned by the racket of rocket-assisted mortar
bombs and, at the same moment, fire stabbed from the ports of the
approaching tank.
Perhaps it was the noise which shocked Collard's senses and gave the
scenes which followed a curious clarity and detail as if he were observing
everything through the medium of a slow-motion camera.
摘要：

ScannedbyHighroller.ProofedmoreorlessbyHighroller.MadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.ChapterOneLIPSCOMBEturnedthecarofftheroadandpulledupintheshortdriveleadingtothegarage."TheplaceisinabitofamessI'mafraid.Thewife'sawayforaweek,youknow,stayingwithhermother."Hegrinnedfaintlyandslidopentheca...

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