The Overlords of War

Chapter 2

The night protected Corson from the Monster, whose eyes could not detect infrared or even red, though they saw well enough in the ultraviolet. It was capable of finding its way about in the dark by using sonar frequencies, but it was far too preoccupied with self-pity to bother about tracking him down.

He was trying desperately to work out the nature of the beast’s distress. He was virtually certain that Monsters experienced no counterpart of fear. On their mother world no enemy was known that could seriously endanger their lives. Unacquainted with defeat, they doubtless had never imagined an opponent more powerful than themselves before meeting humans. The only limit on their expansion was imposed by hunger. They could not reproduce except when there was an adequate surplus of food. Without it, they remained sterile. One of the chief problems the biologists from Earth had encountered in accomplishing their project had been how to get the Monster gorged.

Corson could not believe, either, that the creature was hungry or cold. Its metabolism was capable of drawing sustenance from most organic substances and many minerals. The rich pastures of Uria would furnish it with a splendid diet. The climate distantly resembled the most hospitable regions of its mother world. The composition of the air was different, but not so much so as to worry a being which, as experiment had shown, could without apparent harm endure vacuum for hours on end or wallow in sulphuric acid.

And mere loneliness was unlikely to affect the Monster. Experiments which consisted in turning loose Monsters on barren asteroids to study their behavior had indicated how little store they set by the company of their own kind. Given that they were capable of congregating for tasks that exceeded the abilities of an individual, or to play, or to exchange the spores containing their gene equivalents, it nonetheless seemed that they were in no sense sociable.

No, none of his ideas fitted. The voice of the Monster made him think of the cries of a child shut up by mistake or for punishment in a dark closet, feeling himself lost in a vast, unfathomable, terrifying universe full of nightmares and hallucinations, caught in a trap from which he cannot escape by himself. Corson wished he could explain the nature of the trap. But that was impossible. Throughout the voyage he had tried to establish contact with the Monster. He knew it was susceptible to various types of argument, but he had fared no better than his predecessors when trying to carry on a conversation with it. There was one obvious cause: the implacable hostility the Monster displayed toward humans. Why this should be so, no one knew. It might be a matter of smell, color, sound… The biologists had tried many ways of deceiving the Monster, all in vain. Its tragedy was that it was too intelligent to be misled by tricks played on its instinctual reactions, and not intelligent enough to identify and tame the mindless powers snarling within which made it good for nothing but to kill.

Having tried a few steps forward, and stumbled, then continued on his knees for some hundreds of meters, Corson, worn out, decided to drowse without entirely relaxing his vigilance. He started awake again after what felt like only a few minutes. His watch told him he had slept for four hours. It was still night. The Monster had fallen silent.

A thick cloud must be crossing the sky, for the stars had vanished from a whole area to his left. It was moving rapidly. It had a sharply defined edge. A huge object, doubtless a flying machine of a type he had never heard of despite having studied all the engines of war employed by the Princes of Uria, was passing soundlessly overhead. It was hard to guess at its height or speed because it was so difficult to see clearly. But when it was directly above him, its black outline on the heavens swiftly grew larger and he just had time to realize that it was going to crush him.

It must be this intruder which had quieted the Monster; it must have been the sudden silence which had awakened him. Knowing what was about to happen a few seconds ahead of time, the Monster had inadvertently warned its unwilling human ally.

Corson felt his belly muscles tense, his blood run chill. He grasped his gun, under no illusions. He did not doubt that the vessel had come to capture him. Determination alone would be useless against a machine so vast. The only course for him to adopt was, once he had been made prisoner, to persuade the occupants of the ship to lure the Monster on board too. Whatever cage or cell the craft was fitted with, that would be all he’d need to do. With a bit of luck the strange ship would be as completely destroyed as the Archimedes, and the Princes of Uria would never find a trace of George Corson’s visit to their world.