ANYTHING YOU CAN DO!-3
780 Words
WANG WAS BEGINNING to realize that the thing was a spaceship, not an airship. By this time, he could see the thing more clearly. He had never actually seen a spacecraft, but he’d seen enough of them on television to know what they looked like. This one didn’t look like a standard type at all, and it didn’t behave like one, but it looked even less like an airship, and he knew enough to know that he didn’t necessarily know every type of spaceship ever built.
In shape, it resembled the old rocket-propelled jobs that had been first used for space exploration a century before, rather than looking like the fat ovoids that he was used to. But there were no signs of rocket exhausts, and yet the ship was very obviously slowing, so it must have an inertia drive.
It was coming in much lower now, on a line north of him, headed almost due east. He urged the mare forward, in order to try to keep up with the craft, although it was obviously going several hundred miles per hour—hardly a horse’s pace.
Still, it was slowing rapidly—very rapidly. Maybe—
He kept the mare moving.
The strange ship skimmed along the treetops in the distance and disappeared from sight. Then there was a thunderous crash, a tearing of wood and foliage, and a grinding, plowing sound.
For a few seconds afterward, there was silence. Then there came a soft rumble, as of water beginning to boil in some huge, but distant, samovar. It seemed to go on and on and on.
And there was a bluish, fluctuating glow on the horizon.
Radioactivity? Wang wondered. Surely not an atomic-powered ship without safety cutoffs in this day and age.
He pulled out his radiophone and thumbed the call button again.
This time, there was no delay. “Yes?”
“How are the radiation detectors behaving there, Grandfather?”
“One moment. I shall see.” There was a silence. Then: “No unusual activity, young Wang. Why?”
Wang told him, then asked: “Did you get hold of the air authorities?”
“Yes. They have no missing aircraft, but they’re checking with the space fields. The way you describe it, the thing must be a spaceship of some kind.”
“I think so, too. I wish I had a radiation detector here, though. I’d like to know whether that thing is hot or not. It’s only a couple of miles or so away. I think I’d better stay away. Meanwhile, you’d better put in a call to Central Headquarters Fire Control. There’s going to be a h*******t if I’m any judge unless they get here fast with plenty of equipment.”
“I’ll see to it,” said his grandfather, cutting off.
The bluish glow in the sky had quite died away by now, and the distant rumbling was gone, too. And, oddly enough, there was not much smoke in the distance. There was a small cloud of gray that rose, streamerlike, from where the glow had been, but even that faded away fairly rapidly in the chill breeze. Quite obviously, there would be no fire. After several more minutes of watching, he was sure of it. There couldn’t have been much heat produced in that explosion—if it could really be called an explosion.
Then he saw something moving in the trees between himself and the spot where the ship had come down. He couldn’t quite see what it was, but it looked like someone crawling.
“Halloo, there!” he called out. “Are you hurt?”
There was no answer. Perhaps whoever it was didn’t understand Russian. Wang’s command of English wasn’t too good, but he called out in that language.
Still there was no answer. Whoever it was had crawled out of sight.
Then he realized that it couldn’t be anyone crawling. No one could even have run the distance between here and the ship in the time since it had hit, much less crawled.
He frowned. A wolf, then? Possibly. They weren’t too common, but there were still plenty of them around.
He unholstered the heavy pistol at his side.
And, as he slid the barrel free, he became the first human being ever to see the Nipe.
For an instant, as the Nipe came out from behind a tree fifteen feet away, Wang Kulichenko froze as he saw those four baleful violet eyes glaring at him from the snouted head. He jerked up the pistol to fire.
He was much too late. His reflexes were too slow by far. The Nipe launched itself across the intervening space in a blur of speed that would have made a leopard seem slow. The alien’s hands slapped aside the gun with a violence that broke the man’s wrist, while other hands slammed at his skull.
Wang Kulichenko hardly had time to be surprised before he died.
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- Writer
