Invaders from Nowhere

Chapter VII. The Fatal Paradox

JUST then there appeared in the portal the thing that had been the cause of the flight of the Alan with the sun-helmet. It was a feline beast the size of a tiger, with a single enormous hooked claw on each foot. It snarled and sprang. Rex Piper ducked as it whizzed over his head. The weapons of the Alans went off with one deafening crash. The beast landed among the Alans. That part of the sphere became a blur of frenetic turmoil. Butland saw a black-and-white head with its absurd ear-muffs go bouncing along the floor, shorn off by one of those sickle-shaped claws.

Then they were in Antonio's.

Antonio's had changed much since it had become the portal between the earth and Ala. Gone were the restaurant tables and chairs and the bar. It now looked like the waiting-room of a bus or airline terminal. The limits of the portal were marked off on the floor. There was a telegraph desk, a U. S. customs officer, a U. S. immigration officer, and a policeman.

Butland spoke to the last of these, quickly, while the cop was still feeling for his gun: "You're a human being, aren't you? Those heathens wanted to skin us and mount us, and we just barely escaped. Don't tell 'em which way we went!" And he started for the door. Kitty was with him; Rex Piper hung back. Then the beast with the four great claws appeared. Rex yelled, jumped two feet in the air, and came down running.

The beast ran after the fleeing trio before the others in the erstwhile sink of iniquity could react. The trio stepped up their speed to college-record figures. Hitched to a fire-hydrant on the curb was one of the Alans' vehicles, a black egg-shaped thing the size of an automobile body that simply floated in the air two feet from the ground. Butland yanked the door open.

Piper said: "But nobody would dare steal one of these—"

"Get in!" snarled Butland. He shot the beast as it bounded up. It did not seem to mind in the least. He bolted in after the other two, and slammed the door.

"How do you operate this thing?" he asked.

Piper said: "I think you just sit in the driver's seat and control it with your mind."

BUTLAND tried. The egg lifted, snapped the strap that tied it to the hydrant, and rose.

"It acts kind of logy," said Piper.

Kitty looked out one of the windows and screamed."Look! No wonder it's logy!" A long furry tail swished back and forth across the window. The beast was on the roof.

"Up high and then do a barrel-roll!" cried Piper. Butland did the best he could. Slowly the egg rose, until New York was an irregularly-shaped pincushion of skyscrapers below. Then he gripped the sides of his seat and imagined a roll. Over they went. The feline, with a despairing scream, came loose and plunged toward the scattered clouds below.

"Where now?" asked Piper.

Butland imagined that they were going to Washington, D. C. At once they were on their way to Washington. Butland said: "We're going to call on the President. Say, what time is it?"

"About seven A. M.," said Kitty Blake.

"Good. We'll catch him at breakfast."

THE evening of that day, every Alan in and around New York City had been stopped by an F. B. I, man and asked the following questions: "You believe that Ng created everything?" "Yes." "And that he is all-good and all-powerful and all-knowing?" "Yes." "And that everything he did was good?" "Yes." "But that evil exists?" "Oh, yes indeed." "Well then, who created this evil?"

Whereupon the Alan, after puzzling for some minutes, would throw a mild fit and dash off to the portal, to return to his home world for instruction on how to handle this unprecedented question.

Butland, Piper, Kitty Blake, and the immigration officer checked the Alans off as they departed. They came in such a stream that they made a line reaching into the street.

"... two thousand forty-nine, two thousand fifty, two thousand fifty-one, two thousand fifty-two, two thousand fifty-three, and I think that's all," said the immigration officer.

An Alan burst out of the portal."What has been going on here?" he cried."For hours our people have been coming back so fast we have been unable to get through from the other side."

Butland gave the signal, and the huge concrete-mixer was backed up to the door of Antonio's. He cautioned the Alan: "Better get back to Ala quick. We're going to close the portal."

"What? But you cannot! We will not allow that!"

"Let 'er go!" shouted Butland. The mixer tipped, and wet concrete sluiced down a trough and spread out on the floor. Everyone in Antonio's but Butland and the Alan bolted for the door and squeezed out past the trough.

"Stop!" screamed the Alan, wet concrete piling up around his ankles. Butland made for the door. He glanced back just in time to see the Alan, and a large gob of concrete around him, disappear. More concrete flowed into the vacant space left.

They stood outside watching successive concrete mixers systematically fill the whole building with concrete.

WHEN it was all over, after midnight," Butland had his hand wrung by the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, Undersecretary Wilmington Stroud, the mayor of New York, Bishop Sutherland, Cardinal O'Toole, Rabbi Rosen, John Capman of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, and dozens more people. The President took charge personally of the books that Piper had looted from Ngat's laboratory. He said: "By the time they figure out how to open the portal with all that concrete blocking it, I hope we'll be able to meet them on more even terms. And, Mr. Butland, any time you want a job with the government, drop a line to Mr. Stroud."

When Butland finally got back to the Y. M. C. A. where he lived, and was having his swollen right hand treated in the lounge, Rex Piper, after many humble apologies, asked: "Are you going back to missionarying, Will?"

"Nope. You see, Rex, in the course of selling the President on that argument to upset the Alans, I incidentally convinced myself. So from now on I'm a hard-boiled materialist like you. Maybe I'll become an anthropologist, and study the backward peoples instead of sermonizing them. Or maybe I'll get an ordinary job like selling insurance."

Kitty Blake said: "That earnest air of yours ought to be useful at that."

"Maybe." Butland put the wrong end of a cork-tipped cigarette in the exact center of his mouth, lit it, and coughed himself blue in the face."By the way," Kitty, one of these days I think I'll ask you to marry me."

"Ree-ally? Why Will! But you'd better practice being a normal human being a while longer. Ask me again in six months."

"I will. I wouldn't propose in front of my licentious cousin Rex anyhow, for fear he'd—what's the slang expression? —gum the works with his cynical remarks. As for the practice, it'll never be earlier than it is now." He caught her wrist and hauled her to him with more determination than finesse. In fact so awkward was his initial attempt at love-making that Kitty was too helpless with laughter to resist.

Rex Piper said: "Hey, guy, you're embarrassing me. It's not decent."

Mrs. McCullogh, the Y. M. C. A. house mother, stopped in the doorway of the almost empty lounge with a tray of tea and fixings that she was bringing the returning hero. At the sight of said hero, the tray sagged, tilted, and slid to the floor with a fearful crash of samovar, cups, saucers, lady-finger plates, sugar-bowls, cream-pitchers, and teaspoons.

The hero did not even notice.