A. E. Van Vogt - Moonbeast

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Moonbeast

A. E. van Vogt

Also by A. E. van Vogt in Panther Books

The Mind Cage

Slan

The Voyage of the Space Beagle

Away and Beyond

Destination: Universe!

The Book of Ptath

The WarAgainst the Rull

Panther Science Fiction

A Panther Book Moonbeast

First published in Great Britain by Sidgwick & Jackson Limited

(as‘The Beast’ inA Van Vogt Omnibus ) 1967.

Panther edition published 1969.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade orotherwise , be lent, re-sold,

hired out or otherwisecirculated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover

other than that in which it is publishedand without a similar condition including this condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser .

This book is published at a net price and is supplied subject to the Publishers Association Standard

Conditions of Sale registered under the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956.

Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press), Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk, and published by

Panther Books, jUpper James Street, London, W.1 .

One

The blue-gray engine lay almost buried in a green hillside. It lay there in that summer of 1972, a soulless

thing of metal and of forces almost as potent as life itself. Rain washed its senseless form. A July, then an

August sun blazed down on it. At night the stars reflected wanly from the metal, caring nothing for its

destiny. The ship it drove had been nosing down into Earth’s atmosphere when the meteorite plowed

through the block that held it in place. Instantly, with irresistible strength, the engine tore to shreds what

remained of the framework and plunged through the gaping meteoritehole , down, down.

For all the weeks since then it had lain on the hillside, seemingly lifeless, but actually in its great fashion

alive. There was dirt in its force field, so hard-packed that it would have taken special perception to see

how swiftly it was spinning. Not even the boys who sat one day on a flange of the engine noticed the

convulsions of the dirt. If one of them had poked a grimy hand into the inferno of energy that was the

force field, muscles, bones, blood would have spurted like gas exploding.

But the boys went away, and the engine was still there on the afternoon the searchers passed along the

bottom of the hill. Discovery was as close as that. There were two of them, perhaps a little tired at the

late hour, yet trained observers nonetheless, who anxiously scanned the hillside. But a cloud was veiling

the brightness of the sun, and they passed on, unseeing.

It was more than a week later, again late in the day, when a horse climbing the hill straddled the

protruding bulge of the engine. The horse’s rider proceeded to dismount in an astounding fashion. With

his one hand he grasped the saddlehorn andlifted himself clear of the saddle. Casually, easily, he brought

his left leg over, held himself poised in midair, and then dropped to the ground. The display of strength

seemed all the more effortless because the action was automatic. His attention was concentrated the

whole while on the thing on the ground.

His lean face twisted as he examined the machine. He glanced around, eyes narrowed. Then he smiled

sardonically as he realized the thought in his mind. Finally he shrugged. There was little chance of

anybody seeing him out here. The town of Crescentville was more than a mileaway, and there was no

sign of life around the big white house which stood among the trees a third of a mile to the northeast.

He was alone with his horse and the machine. And after a moment his voice echoed with cool irony on

the twilight air. “Well, Dandy, here’s a job for us. This scrap should buy you quite a bit of feed. We’ll

haul it to the junk dealer after dark. That way she won’t find out and we’ll save some remnant of our

pride.”

He stopped. Involuntarily he turned to stare at the garden-like estate whose width stretched for nearly a

mile betweenhimself and the town. A white fence, misty and halo-like in the twilight, made a vast circuit

around a verdant land of trees and pasture. The fence kept disappearing down gullies and into brush. It

vanished finally in the north beyond the stately white house.

The man muttered impatiently, “What a fool I’ve been, hanging around Crescentville waiting for her.” He

turned to stare down at the engine. “Have to get some idea of its weight,” he thought. Then: “Wonder

what it is.”

He climbed to the top of the hill and came down again, carrying a piece of deadwood about four feet

long and three inches in diameter. He began to pry the engine loose from the ground. It was awkward

work with only a left arm. And so, when he noticed the dirt-plugged hole in the center, he jabbed the

wood into it to get a better leverage.

His shout of surprise and pain echoed hoarsely on the evening air.

For the wood jerked. Like a shot twisted by the rifled barrel of a gun, like a churning knife, it wrenched

in his hand, tearing like a shredder, burning like fire. He was lifted up, up, and flung twenty feet down the

hill. Groaning, clutching his tattered hand to his body, he stumbled to his feet.

The sound died on his lips then as his gaze fastened on the throbbing, whirling thing that had been a dead

branch of tree. He stared. Then he climbed, trembling, onto the black horse. Nursing his bloodied hand,

blinking from the agony, he raced the animal down the hill and toward the highway that led to the town.

A stoneboat and harness for Dandy rented from a farmer, rope and tackle, a hand stiff with bandages,

still numb with pain, a trek through darkness with a thrumming thing on the sled—for three hours

Pendrake felt himself a creature in a nightmare.

But here was the engine now, on the floor of his stable, safe from discovery except for the sound that

was pouring forth from the wood in its force field. It seemed odd now how his mind had worked. The

determination to transport the engine secretly to his own cottage had been like choosing life instead of

death, like swiftly picking up a hundred-dollar bill lying on a deserted street, so automatic as to be

beyond the need of logic. It still seemed as natural as living.

The yellow glow from the lantern filled the interior of what had once been a private garage and

workshop. In one corner Dandy stood, black hide aglint, eyes glistening as he turned his head to stare at

the thing that shared his quarters. The not unpleasant smell of horse was thick now that the door was

closed. The engine lay on its side near the door. And the main trouble was that the wood in it wasn’t

straight. It slogged away against the air like some caricature of a propeller, beating a sound out of the

atmosphere by the sheer violence and velocity of its rotation.

Pendrake estimated its speed at about four thousand revolutions a minute. He stood then and strove to

grasp the nature of a machine that could snatch a piece of wood and spin it so violently. The thought got

nowhere. The frown on his face deepened as he stared down at the speed-blurred wood. He couldn’t

simply grab it. And, while undoubtedly there were a number of tools in the world that might grip a

whirling object and pull on it, they were not available here in this lantern-lighted stable.

He thought: “There must be a control, something to switch off the power.”

But the bluish-gray, doughnut-shaped outer shell was glass-smooth. Even the flanges that projected from

four ends and in which were the holes for bed bolts seemed to grow out of the shell, as if they had been

molded from the same block of metal, as if there had been a flowing, original design that spurned anything

less than oneness. Baffled, Pendrake walked around the machine. It seemed to him that the problem was

beyond the solution of a man who had as his working equipment one badly maimed and bandaged hand.

He noticed something. The machine lay solidly, heavily, on the floor. It neither jogged nor jumped. It

made not the slightest effort to begin a sedate, reactionary creep in opposition to the insanely whirling

thing that bristled from its middle. The engine was ignoring the law that action and reaction are equal and

opposite.

With abrupt realization of the possibilities, Pendrake bent down and heaved at the metal shell. Instantly

knives of pain hacked at his hand. Tears shocked into his eyes. But when he finally let go, the engine was

standing on one of its four sets of flanges. And the crooked wood was spinning, no longer vertically, but

roughly horizontal to the floor.

The pulse of agony in Pendrake’s hand slowed. He wiped the tears from his eyes and proceeded to the

next step in the plan that had occurred to him. Nails! He drove them into the bed bolts and bent them

over the metal. That was merely to make sure that the narrow-based engine wouldn’t topple over in the

event that he bumped too hard against the outer shell.

An apple box came next. Laid lengthwise on its side, it reached up to within half an inch of the exact

center of the large hole, from the opposite side of which the wood projected. Two books held steady a

piece of one-inch piping about a foot long. It was painful holding the small sledge hammer in that lame

hand of his, but he struck true. The piece of piping recoiled from thehammer, banged the wood where it

was held inside the hole of the engine, and knocked it out.

There was a crash that shook the garage. After a moment Pendrake grew aware of a long, splintered

slash in the ceiling, through which the four-foot piece of deadwood had bounced after striking the floor.

Slowly his reverberating mind gravitated into a rhythm with the silence that was settling. Pendrake drew a

deep breath. There were still things to discover, a whole new machine world to explore. But one thing

seemed clear:

He had conquered the engine.

At midnight he was still awake. He kept getting up, dropping the magazine he was reading, and going

into the dark kitchen of the cottage to peer out at the darker garage. But the night was quiet. No

marauders disturbed the peace of the town. Occasionally a car motor sounded far away.

He began to realize the psychological danger when for the dozenth time he found himself pressing his

face against the cool pane of the kitchen window. Pendrake cursed aloud and went back into the living

room. What was he trying to do? He couldn’t hope to keep that engine. It must be a new invention, a

radical postwar development, lying on that hillside because of an accident a silly ass who never read

papers or listened to the radio wouldn’t know anything about.

Somewhere in the house, he remembered, was aNew York Times he’d bought not so long ago. He

found the paper in his magazine rack with all the other old and unread papers and magazines he’d bought

from time to time. The date at the top was June 7, 1971, and this was August 16. Not too great a

difference.

Butthis wasn’t 1971.This was 1972.

With a cry Pendrake leaped to his feet,then slowly sank back into his chair. It was an ironic picture that

came then, a kaleidoscope of the existence of a man so untouched by the friction of time that fourteen

months had glided by like so many days. Lazy, miserable hound, Pendrake thought, using his lost arm

and an unforgiving woman as an excuse for lying down on life. That was over.All of it. He’d start again…

He grew aware of the paper in his hand. And the anger went out of him as in a gathering excitement he

began to glance at the headlines:

PRESIDENTCALLSONNATIONFOR

NEWINDUSTRIALEFFORT

TRILLION-DOLLARNATIONALINCOME

ONLYBEGINNING,

JEFFERSONDAYLESSAYS

6,35O,OOOFAMILYJETTRAILERS

SOLDFIRSTFIVEMONTHSOF1971

It occurred to Pendrake at that point that the situation was that he had crept away into this little cottage

of his, almost right out of the world, but that life had gone on dynamically. And somewhere, not so long

ago, a tremendous invention had spawned out of that surging tide of will and ambition and creative

genius. Tomorrow he would try to get a mortgage on this cottage. That would provide him with a little

cash and break forever the thrall of the place. Dandy he’d send over to Eleanor in the same fashion that

she had sent him three years ago, without a word. The green pastures of the estate would be like heaven

for an animal that had starved too long now on an ex-pilot’s pension.

He must have slept, with that thought.Because he awoke at 3 a.m., sweating with fear. He was out in the

night and clawing open the door of the garage-stable before he realized that he had had a bad dream.

The engine was still there, the foot-long piece of piping in its force field. In the beam of his flashlight the

piping glinted as it turned, shone with a brown glow that was hard to reconcile with the dirty, rusted,

extruded metal thing he had ransacked out of his basement.

It struck Pendrake after a moment, and for the first time, that the pipe was turning far more slowly than

had the piece of wood, not a quarter so fast, not more than fourteen or fifteen hundred revolutions per

minute. The rate of rotation must be governed by the kind of material, based on atomic weight, or

density, or something.

Uneasily, convinced that he mustn’t be seen abroad at this hour, Pendrake shut the door and returned to

the house. He felt no anger at himself or at the brief frenzy that had sent him racing into the night. But the

implications were troubling.

It was going to be hard to give up the engine to its rightful owner.

Two

The following day Pendrake went first to the office of the local newspaper. Forty issues of the weekly

CrescentvilleClarion yielded nothing. He read the first two pages of each edition, missing not a single

heading. But there was no report of an air crash, no mention of a great new engine invention. He walked

out finally into the hot August morning, exhilarated.Hard to believe. And yet, if this kept on, the engine

was his.

From the newspaper office he went to the local branch of a national bank. The loan officer smiled at him

faintly as he made his want known, and took him in to see the bank manager. The manager said, “Mr.

Pendrake, it isn’t necessary for you to take a mortgage on your cottage. You have a large account here.”

He introduced himself as Roderick Clay and went on, “As you know, when you went to Asia with the

Army Air Force, you signed all your possessions over to your wife, with the exception of the cottage

where you now live. And that, as I understand it, was omitted accidentally.”

Pendrake nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He knew now what was coming, and the manager’s

words merely verified his realization. The manager said, “At the end of the war, a few months after you

and your wife separated, she secretly reassigned to you the entire property, including bonds, shares,

cash, real estate, as well as the Pendrake estate, with the stipulation that you not be advised of the

transfer until you actually inquired or in some other fashion indicated your need for money. She further

stipulated that, in the interim, she be given the minimum living allowance with which to provide for the

maintenance of herself and the Pendrake home.

“I may say”—the man was bland, smug, satisfied with the way he had carried off an interview that he

must have planned in his idle moments with anticipatory thrills—“your affairs have prospered with those

of the nation. Stocks, bonds, and cash on hand total about one million two hundred and ninety-four

thousand dollars. Would you like me to have one of the clerks prepare a check for your signature?How

much?”

It was hotter outside. Pendrake walked back to the cottage, thinking: He should have known Eleanor

would pull something like that. These intense, introverted, unforgiving women—Sitting there that day he

had called, cold, remote, unable to break out of her shell of reserve. Sitting there knowing she had placed

herself financially at his mercy. He’d have to think out what it might mean, plan his approach, his exact

words and actions. Meanwhile, there was the engine.

It was exactly where he had left it. He glanced cursorily in at it,then padlocked the door again. On the

way to the kitchen entrance he patted Dandy, who was staked out on the back lawn. Inside the cottage,

he searched for, and found, the name of a Washington patent firm. He’d gone to Asia with the son of a

member. Awkwardly he wrote his letter. On the way to the post office to mail it, he stopped off at the

only machine shop in town and ordered a wheel-like gripping device, a sort of clutch, the wheel part of

which would whirl with anything it grasped.

The answer to his letter arrived two days later, before the ‘clutch’ was completed. The letter said:

Dear Mr. Pendrake:

As per your request, we placed the available members of our Research Department on your problem.

All the patent office records of engine inventions during the past three years were examined. In addition, I

had a personal talk with the director in charge of that particular department of the patent office.

Accordingly, I am in a position to state positively that no radical engine inventions other than jet variations

have been patented in any field since the war.

For your perusal, we are enclosing herewith copies of ninety-seven recent engine patents, as selected by

our staff from thousands.

Our bill is being sent to you by separate mail. Thank you for your advance check for two hundred

dollars.

Sincerely yours, N. V. HOSKINS

P.S. I thought you were dead. I’ll swear I saw your name in a casualty list after I was rescued, and I’ve

been mourning you ever since. I’ll write you a long letter in a week or so. I’m holding up the patent world

right now, not physically—only the great Jim Pendrake could do that. However, I’m playing the role of

mental Atlas, and I sure got a lot of dirty looks for rushing your stuff through.Which explains the big bill.

‘By for now.

NED

Pendrake was conscious of a choking sensation as he read and reread the note. It hurt him to think how

he’d cut himself off from all his friends. The phrase ‘the great Jim Pendrake’ made himglance involuntarily

at the empty right sleeve of his sweater.

He smiled grimly. And several minutes passed before he remembered the engine. He thought then, “I’ll

order an automobile chassis and an engineless plane, and a bar made of many metals—have to make

some tests first, of course.”

He stopped, his eyes widening at the possibilities. Life was opening up again. But it was strangely hard

to realize that the engine still had no owner but himself.

Two days later he went to pick up the gripper. As he unfolded a tarpaulin to put around it, Pendrake

heard a sound; then, “What’s that?” said a young man’s voice behind him.

It was growing quite dark, and the truck he had hired seemed almost formless in the gathering night.

Beside Pendrake the machine shop loomed, a gloomy, unpainted structure. The lights inside the building

glimmered faintly through greasy windows. The machine-shop employees, who had loaded the gripper on

the truck for him, were gone through a door, their raucous good nights still ringing in his ears. Pendrake

was alone with his questioner.

With a deliberate yet swift movement he pulled the canvas over the gripper and turned to stare at the

man who had addressed him. The fellow stood in the shadows, a tall, powerful-looking man. The light

from the nearest street lamp glinted on high curving cheekbones, but it was hard to make out the exact

contours of the face.

It was the intentness of the other’s manner that sent a chill through Pendrake. Here was no idler’s

curiosity, butan earnestness , a determination that was startlingly purposeful. With an effort Pendrake

caught himself. “What’s it to you?” he said curtly.

He climbed into the cab. The engine purred. Awkwardly Pendrake manipulated the right-hand

gear-control button, and the truck rolled off.

He could see the man in his rear-view mirror, still standing there in the shadows of the machine shop, a

tall, strong figure. The stranger started to walk slowly in the same direction that Pendrake was driving.

The next second Pendrake whipped the truck around a corner and headed down a side street. He

thought, “I’ll take a roundabout course to the cottage and then quickly return the truck to the man I

rented it from and then—”

Something damp trickled down his cheeks. He let go of the steering wheel and felt his face. It was

covered with sweat. He sat very still, thinking: “Am I crazy? Surely I don’t believe that someone is

secretly searching for the engine.”

His jumpy nerves slowly quieted. What was finally convincing was the coincidence of such a searcher

standing near a machine shop of a small town at the very instant that Jim Pendrake was there. It was like

an old melodrama in which the villains were dogging the unsuspecting hero. Ridiculous! Nevertheless, the

episode emphasized an important aspect of his possession of the engine. Somewhere that engine had

been built. Somewhere was the owner.

He must never forget that.

The darkness of the night had closed in when Pendrake finally entered the garage-stable and turned on

the light he had installed earlier in the day. The two-hundred-watt bulb shed a sunlike glare that somehow

made the small room even stranger than it had been by lantern light.

The engine stood exactly where he had nailed it that first night. It stood there like a swollen tire for a

small, broad wheel; like a large, candied, blue-gray doughnut. Except for the four sets of flanges and the

size, the resemblance to a doughnut was quite startling. The walls curved upward from the hole in the

center; thehole itself was only a little smaller than it should have been to be in exact proportion. But there

the resemblance to anything he had ever known ended. The hole was the damnedest thing that ever was.

It was about six inches in diameter. Its inner walls were smooth, translucent, non-metallic in appearance;

and in its geometrical center floated the piece of plumber’s pipe. Literally, the pipe hung in space, held in

position by a force that seemed to have no origin.

Pendrake drew a deep, slow, breath, picked up his hammer, and gently laid it over the outjutting end of

the pipe. The hammer throbbed in his hand, but grimly he bore the pulsing needles of pain and pressed.

The pipe whirred on, unyielding, unaffected.The hammer brrred with vibration. Pendrake grimaced from

the agony and jerked the tool free.

He waited patiently until his hand ceased throbbing,then struck the protruding end of pipe a sharp blow.

The pipe receded into the hole, and nine inches of it emerged from the other side of the engine. It was

almost like rolling a ball. With deliberate aim, Pendrake hit the pipe from the far side. It bounced back so

easily that eleven inches of it flowed out, only an inch remaining in the hole. It spun on like a shaft of a

steam turbine, only there was not even a whisper of sound, not the faintest hiss.

With lips pursed, Pendrake sat on his heels. The engine was not perfect. The ease with which the pipe

and, originally the piece of wood had been pushed in and out meant that gears or something would be

needed.Something that would hold steady at high speeds under great strains. He climbed slowly to his

feet, intent now. He dragged into position the device he had had constructed at the machine shop. It took

several minutes to adjust the gripping wheel to the right height. But he was patient.

Finally he manipulated the control lever. Fascinated, he watched the two halves of the wheel close over

the one-inch pipe, grip, and begin to spin. A glow suffused his whole body. It was the sweetest pleasure

that had touched him in three long years. Gently Pendrake pulled on the gripping machine, tried to draw it

toward him along the floor. It didn’t budge. He frowned at it. He had the feeling that the machine was too

heavy for delicate pressures. Muscle was needed here, and without restraint. Bracing himself, he began

to tug, hard.

Afterward he remembered flinging himself back toward the door in his effort to get out of the way. He

had a mental picture of the nails that held the engine to the floor pulling out as the engine toppled over

toward him. The next instant the enginelifted , lifted lightly, in some incomprehensible fashion, right off the

floor. It whirled there for a moment slowly, propeller-fashion, then fell heavily on top of the gripping

machine.

With a crash the wooden planks on the floor splintered. The concrete underneath, the original floor of

the garage, shattered with a grinding noise as the gripping machine was smashed against it fourteen

hundred times a minute. Metal squealed in torment and broke into pieces in a shattering hail of death. The

confusion of sound and dust and spraying concrete and metal was briefly a hideous environment for

Pendrake’s stunned mind.

Silence crept over the scene like the night following a day of battle, an intense, unnatural silence. There

was blood on Dandy’s quivering flank where something had gashed him. Pendrake stood, soothing the

trembling horse, assessing the extent of the destruction. He saw that the engine was lying on its face,

apparently unaffected by its own violence. Itlay , a glinting, blue-gray thing, in the light from the

miraculously untouched electric bulb.

It took half an hour to find all the pieces of what had been the gripping machine. He gathered the parts

one by one and took them into the house. The first real experiment with the machine was over.

Successfully, he decided.

He sat in darkness in the kitchen, watching. The minutes ticked by. And there was still no movement

outside. Pendrake sighed finally. It seemed clear that no one had noticed the cataclysm in his garage. Or

if they had, they were not curious. The engine was still safe.

The easing tension brought awareness of how lonely he was. Suddenly the very restfulness of the silence

oppressed him. He had an abrupt, sharp conviction that his developing victory over the engine wasn’t

going to be any fun for one man cut off from the world by the melancholy of his character. He thought

drably: “I ought to go see her.”

No—that wouldn’t work. Eleanor had acquired an emotional momentum in a given direction. It wouldn’t

do any good to go and see her. But there was another possibility.

Pendrake put on his hat and went out into the night. At the corner drugstore he headed straight for the

phone booth. “Is Mrs. Pendrake in?” he asked when his call was answered.

“Yes, suh!”The woman’s deep voice indicated that there was at least one new servant at the big house.

It was not a familiar voice.“Just a moment, suh.”

A few seconds later Eleanor’s rich contralto was saying, “Mrs. Pendrake speaking.”

“Eleanor, this is Jim.”

“Yes?” Pendrake smiled wanly at the tiny change in her tone, the defensive edge that was suddenly in it.

“I’d like to come back, Eleanor,” he said softly.

There was silence, then—

Click!

Out in the night again, Pendrake looked up at the starry heavens. The sky was dark, dark blue. The

whole fabric of the universe of Occidental earth was well settled into night. Crescentville shared with the

entire eastern seaboard the penumbral shadows of the great mother planet. He thought: “Maybe it was a

mistake, but now she knows.” Her mind had probably gone dead slow on thoughts about him. Now it

would come alive again.

He strolled up the back alley to his cottage. Reaching the yard, he suppressed an impulse to climb a tree

from which the big white house was visible. He flung himself on the cool grass of the back lawn, stared at

the garage, and thought shakily: An engine that spins anything shoved into its force field or, if it resisted,

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摘要：

MoonbeastA.E.vanVogtAlsobyA.E.vanVogtinPantherBooksTheMindCageSlanTheVoyageoftheSpaceBeagleAwayandBeyondDestination:Universe!TheBookofPtathTheWarAgainsttheRullPantherScienceFictionAPantherBookMoonbeastFirstpublishedinGreatBritainbySidgwick&JacksonLimited(as‘TheBeast’inAVanVogtOmnibus)1967.Panthered...

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