HUMANITY’S ARMY

Taylor and Masters raised their arms. They were caught.

“There is nothing you can do now to save yourself, or your country,” Norden said. “Nothing. The spheres will destroy you and your people. They will destroy every living creature who does not surrender to my nation. Might will come into its own.”

“Are you sure the spheres are so invincible?” Taylor asked. “Remember, they were expelled from the sun. They must have been checked on the sun many times, otherwise they would have destroyed the creatures who opposed them.”

“They are greater than anything on the earth,” Norden said.

“The spheres are not for the earth. Our battles are not theirs. By betraying your world to these creatures, you are betraying the whole human race.”

“This is not so!” Norden said, thickly. “I know how to handle them. Orkins told me. He said he imitated their whistle and they spared him, while they killed the others in the plant. He didn’t realize the value of his discovery. He was too much of a coward.”

Norden beckoned his prisoners to him and disarmed them. He pointed to the door of the casting room.

“Look!”

In the center of the room was a metal pot used for small castings. It was filled with molten, glowing metal. Beside it sat a single orange sphere, spraying the pot with bolts of heat to keep the contents warm, for the electrical energy that had supplied the melting pot had long-since been cut off.

In the center of the pot an orange-red bubble was rising from the metal. A sphere was forming on the surface of the metal.

“The rise of living energy!” Norden said. “Our own kind of life may have begun ages ago in much the same way. A spore from some far off world may have drifted here through space, found conditions just right, and taken root. Thus the spore of the sun the whispering spheres found a set of conditions fitted for growth. That metal pot is filled with seeds of the spheres. One by one they will hatch and grow into a force that will bring extinction to all men, except those of my race. The spheres do not want the world, they want the sun. We will see that they go back to the sun, after they have had their sport, killing the weaklings of your nation.”

Taylor shuddered as he looked at the growing sphere. This deep, intense intelligence, which found sport in killing human beings, already seemed to be pouring from the depths of its half-formed body.

“The fact that I am alive, proves my superiority,” Norden said. “Your people ran in terror at the sight of the spheres, but I bargained with them. I made an alliance.”

“You and your superiority!” Masters growled. “If you really were smart, you’d have counted us. Don’t you know there are three of us who aren’t afraid of the spheres?”

As Masters spoke, the point of Pember’s bayonet touched the small of Norden’s back. The soldier had crept from the tunnel, unobserved by Norden, who was engrossed in the mental torture of his prisoners.

With a cry of rage Norden whirled and fired.

But Taylor had expected such a move. Even as Norden swung around, the officer sprang, knocking the spy off his feet and spoiling his aim.

A warning whistle came from the sphere heating the cauldron.

“Back! Out of the doorway!” Taylor shouted, grappling with Norden. “I’ll take care of him!”

Pember obeyed orders. He jumped back, dragging Masters with him.

Taylor wrenched the gun from Norden’s hand, just as the spy landed a jarring blow to the body. Taylor staggered, lost his balance and dropped the gun.

Norden leaped forward to retrieve the weapon, but Taylor blocked the move. He drove Norden back with a hard right. The two men closed in and stood toe to toe, trading blows.

The screaming of the sphere grew louder. The creature by the metal pot seemed to be calling the others over the town. The half-formed sphere in the melting pot joined and the entire building rang with the shrill screams.

Taylor was slowly driving Norden back toward the door of the casting room. A tentacle of flame reached out from the monster by the metal pot, but it only circled the men. Apparently it was afraid to strike, for fear of destroying friend as well as enemy.

Norden’s knee came up. Taylor dodged in time to avoid a crippling blow, but the leg caught him on the thigh, sending him back and upsetting him on the floor.

With a cry of triumph, Norden dived toward his foe. But Taylor rolled on his back, doubled his legs and met the hurtling body with a two-footed kick.

Norden grunted with pain. He staggered back, straight toward the sphere by the metal pot.

A whistled warning had no effect. The momentum carried Norden crashing into the orange nucleus of energy. There was a blinding flash.

A small pile of glowing ashes appeared on the floor.

The whistle of the sphere stopped. It pulsed once. A feeble ray of heat lashed out toward Taylor, but the bolt halted in mid-air.

A plop cracked in Taylor’s ear. The sphere disappeared like a bursting soap bubble.

“Cap! Are you all right!”

Masters appeared in the doorway behind Taylor.

“Gosh!” His eyes settled on the pile of ashes, the remains of Norden. He turned to Taylor. “Are you all right, Cap?”

Taylor nodded.

“Where’s the sphere?” asked Masters.

“He died of frustration or sorrow over having killed the wrong man,” Taylor said grimly. Taylor indicated the half-formed monster in the pot. “Now we’ve got to get rid of that one and all the unhatched spores.”

“If that metal pot hatches ’em, we will,” said Masters. “We’ll dump the metal.”

The undeveloped sphere made no move to launch a deadly bolt toward the men. Apparently at this stage of incubation the spheres were harmless.

“Pember!”

“Yes, sir!” the soldier appeared in the doorway, carrying his bayonetted gun.

“Keep a lookout for other spheres. Masters and I are going to dump this metal pot.”

“Yes, sir!”

An electric motor ordinarily dumped the pot into molds, but this motor, like everything else electrical in the plant, now was out of commission. Masters, however, found a block and tackle and rigged it to a beam above the pot. The hook he attached to the bottom of the pot.

“Grab hold, Cap!” he said, taking the end of the rope.

Taylor loosened his tunic and seized the rope.

“Heave!” Masters chanted.

The two men strained. Slowly the pot tilted.

Pember, standing at a window, called out over his shoulder:

“They’re coming back!”

Above the creak of the pulleys rose the murmuring whisper of the spheres.

“Heave!” Both men joined in the rhythmic call, putting their weight on the rope. The pot tilted more.

The half-formed sphere whistled loudly and the spheres circling over the plant answered.

“Hurry!” Pember urged.

“Heave!” chorused the men on the ropes. The pulleys creaked.

The room suddenly blazed with a brilliant orange glow as a maddened sphere floated through the hole in the roof. It hung in the air, pulsating, scanning what was taking place below.

“Heave!” cried the two men. The pot was at an angle. The hatching sphere screamed to the globe above.

The floating sphere shrieked. Flame danced over its surface.

“It It’s got eyes!” Masters said, spacing his words with tugs on the ropes.

“Don’t look!” Taylor warned. “Heave!”

Pember faced the sphere. He patted his Garand.

“Give ’im hell, boy!”

He swung the rifle to his shoulder and fired. The bullet whined off the sphere as if it were steel. Pember jerked his head in despair. Angrily he fired again. His tin hat slid to one side of his head at a rakish angle.

“You spawn of hell!” he cried.

Pember lowered his gun. The sphere pulsed ominously. Then the doughboy charged.

Beneath the brim of his helmet Pember’s jaws were set. His half-closed eyes, glazed by the dazzling light from the sphere, were two slits of savage determination.

There was something glorious in that charge. It was a soldier going into battle against hopeless odds. And it was more. The army of human civilisation at that moment consisted of one buck private, pitting everything he had against something that even science could not analyze.

The sudden attack seemed to surprise the sphere. It bounded back, moving swiftly out of the way of the advancing one-man army.

Pember roared. There were no words in what he shouted. It was just a cry, the battle cry of humanity.

“Heave!” chorused Taylor and Masters.

They too had a battle cry. Every man was doing his best and would die doing it, if necessary.

There was a crack and a hiss. A flicker of flame flashed over the charging soldier. An odor of charred human flesh filled the room.

Then came a new sound, the hissing splash of spilled metal.

The pot was dumped.

Taylor dropped the rope and faced the sphere. He saw the charred pile of ashes beside the inhuman creature. Nearby was a fused tube of metal, all that was left of Pember’s rifle.

“All right, you devil!” shouted Taylor. “Strike and be damned! There’s one thing you can’t fix, and that’s the metal pot. Your spores are dead. Your mistake was in having a metal pot for a mother!”

Taylor sensed understanding in the sphere. Those eyes that were not eyes, but windows of the mind, seemed to fade. Flame licked out again from the monster, but it did not launch toward Taylor. Nor was Masters the target.

Instead, the flame reached toward the fading yellow hemisphere and the cooling pool of metal on the floor. There lay the hopes of the species on this planet, wrecked with a block and tackle.

Plop!

The hemisphere exploded like a bubble.

Plop!

The mourning sphere disappeared.

Plop. Plop. Plop.

Three more spheres appeared in the opening in the roof and vanished.

Masters tugged on Taylor’s sleeve.

“Come on! We’ve got a chance, if we can get to the tunnel!”

Taylor shook his head.

“No need. We’re safe now. If they’ve changed to radio energy, the big broadcast is on.”

The sky was filled with exploding spheres as the whispers sobbed the tale of the disaster. A score of the energy monsters, bred from the metal pot overnight, burst in the rays of the rising sun. Energy, meeting resistance, was changing to something else. The war of energy and matter might continue on the molten surface of the sun, but on earth there would be only the wars of ideals.