A. E.Van Vogt - Moonbeast.pdf - A. E. Van Vogt - borsukomiks

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’ in A Van Vogt Omnibus ) 1967.

Panther edition published 1969.

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

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

other than that in which it is published and 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, j Upper 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 and lifted 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 a New 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.

But this 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

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