Behind him he heard the click of small stones as the creature followed him laboriously. A vast port was open in the stern of the ship. He stepped through and his second step inside the ship, in the warm blue-grey glow, sent him floating toward a far wall. The sensation twisted his stomach and he was suddenly and violently ill.
When he turned, the creature was behind him, and it stood erect. He saw that the hairless head was far too small for the massive body. In the lesser gravity inside the ship the big creature moved with the controlled ease of a man on earth. Martin’s slightest movement sent him blundering out of control.
He turned sharply and floated into a slow fall as another of the creatures appeared in a huge doorway to his right.
He knew that they communicated with each other, as alien thoughts seemed to rush through his mind, just beyond his ability to comprehend. He detected the contempt of the second creature, and it seemed a sharper scorn than that which the first one had expressed.
One quick thought seemed to smell of death, and the first one protested and there was a mental shrug from the second one. A mental shrug which said, “Do what you please with it.”
The second creature turned and left. The one who had crawled on the tunnel floor and now stood erect sent flashing into Martin’s mind a vague thrust of amusement, of casual interest. Martin suddenly realized that it was the same sort of emotion that he might express concerning a strange dog who had wandered across his path.
At that, the creature’s amusement seemed to grow more intense, and Martin guessed that he had intercepted and interpreted the thought.
The air inside the ship was very hot, and very moist. The creature seemed to sweat not at all. Martin Rhode felt his clothes clinging to him. He was still nauseated from the effect of the lesser gravity.
Once again his legs began to move without his volition, thrusting him awkwardly against a wall, then carrying him through the doorway. He gasped as he looked up a seemingly endless corridor, illuminated by the blue-grey radiance that seemed to shine out from the metallic corridor walls. Everything was too big.
His steps carried him down the hall in long bounds, halting him before another doorway. He went into the room and he was alone. It was a room twenty feet square, half as high. He could move freely. He wanted to look out in the corridor again. But when he tried to go through the doorway, he ran against an invisible, transparent substance. He could not get through the doorway. He removed most of his clothes, and made a rude bed of them. He was tired and he went to sleep, as though ordered to sleep.
He awakened hearing a throb of power, a distant clanking. He was in a different part of the ship: a larger room with a huge port in one side. He stood up, forgetting the gravity, smacked lightly against the high ceiling and floated down gently.
He looked through the port and saw a vast square room. The two creatures he had seen before were outside the ship, and yet they moved easily. The room had evidently been hollowed out of the solid rock. It appeared to be at least two hundred feet square and fifty feet high. The side of the ship had been brightened in some manner so that the radiance of it filled the furthest corners of the room.
When he looked more closely at the two creatures, he saw that they wore close-fitting suits of metal. He guessed that the garments duplicated the gravitational conditions existing within the ship.
He was puzzled by their activities, apparently they were assembling some sort of equipment, but it was foreign to anything in his experience. The way they walked about was odd, due to the extra joint in their legs, a joint which was like a second knee bending in the opposite direction.
A huge cube of milky glass, thirty feet on a side, rested near the far wall. Within the cube he could vaguely make out the intricate form of what appeared to be a large natural crystal formation, hexagonal in shape. The crystal seemed to shimmer behind the clouded walls of the cube.
Supports slanted out from the top four corners of the cube as though the cube were supporting the weight of a far greater area of the ceiling.
He saw no other representatives of the odd race, and began to wonder if only the two of them had arrived in this spaceship which had punched its way down through the Earth’s crust, as though diving into water.
A great desire for sleep welled over him and he let himself sink to the floor. Something about the warm, moist air inside the ship, he guessed...
He awakened the second time on a high bench. One of the creatures stood looking down at him, and he saw the fine hair encircling the oval orifice in the middle of its face move as it breathed. The lemon-yellow slash of its mouth showed no semblance of teeth.
The mental fumbling was gone. The thoughts were clear, precise, incisive.
“You are of a warlike race. We have had difficulty with your people. A — has been placed around this area to keep them away.” One word was a blank. He had no word to fit the thought. It gave him the impression of immovable force, a linkage of particles of pure force.
“Where are you from?” Martin Rhode projected the thought as clearly as he could.
“A far place.”
“Who are you?”
“This will be difficult for a primitive to comprehend. We are two of a warrior race. This planet is much as our planet must have been countless eons ago. I have never seen our home planet. My brother and I were born in space, as were thirty generations before us. We are accustomed to lesser gravity, and the constant heat inside our ship. Your planet is cold, and gravity makes us very heavy. My brother has requested that I destroy you, as we have learned from you all that is necessary for us to know. But I have a foolish sentiment about you. You are as our race must have once been. To see you is to look into the dim past. We have seen many primitives on many strange planets that circle unknown suns. You are more like what we must have once been than any we have yet seen. Thus, there is a sentiment that fills my mind when I look on you and think on your desperate, petty little wars, like children with rocks and slings.”
In the thoughts there was such a powerful impression of great age and aloofness that Martin Rhode felt small and awed.
His lips trembled as he expressed the thought, “You called your people a warrior race?”
“Like yours. In the beginning tribe fights tribe, then city fights city, then nation fights nation, then continent fights continent. That is your present stage. Should you survive this stage, you will find planet fighting planet, then solar system fighting foreign solar system, and at last galaxy warring with galaxy. Who can tell? Possibly beyond that is universe making war with universe, or dimension against dimension. In each step there is always the possibility of mutual extermination, and with that, the peace that living things can find. Only in death is there peace, and death is the final step.”
There was horror in those thoughts. Horror and great age and great resignation.
“We have been at war with another race for eight hundred of your lifetimes. This other race is aquatic, and their spaceships are filled with the fluids of their home planet, long since destroyed. Our great fleets are no more. All told, we probably have no more than five thousand ships, four hundred thousand individuals out of the millions upon millions who once existed. This small patrol ship of ours was pursued. The ships from which we fled are somewhere in this vicinity.”
Martin’s head was whirling. He thought, “What are you planning to do here?”
“We will make certain preparations. Then we will let our presence here be known. When the pursuing ships are within proper range, we will explode this planet. We will die, of course, but the gases of the explosion with great speed, will engulf some of their ships and the heat will kill a great many of them, boil them alive in the fluids of their ships.”