Read Ebook: Children of the Chronotron by Byrne S J Stuart James

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 656 lines and 31857 words, and 14 pages

"Your name is Henry," she said, irrelevantly.

"Yes, and yours is Martia. I feel like something is going to happen."

"That's why I'm scared."

She pressed against him and held on to him, shuddering in nameless terror, as hysterical screams and shouts suddenly emanated from A deck, above them. He held her, equally frightened, while the babies screamed--and while the people on B deck began to shout and scurry about in all directions.

"What in God's name--!" a man yelled, getting up from his seat by the windows.

"Something's happened on A deck!" exclaimed the commissary steward.

"What the hell! It's a fight!" shouted a grizzled construction worker.

"Come on!" cried another, excitedly anticipating something to write home about.

"Stay where you are! Don't panic!" shouted a newsman, fumbling frantically with the straps of his camera carrying case.

Henry caught sight of a young woman wearing the uniform of a WAAC nurse sliding down upside down under the feet of the mob, her face bloodied, eyes rolled upward into her head. Either she had fainted or been knocked unconscious. Or she was dead. Grown men, frothing at the mouth and shrieking curses, struck at each other with intent to kill. It was blind panic riding on the animal instinct to survive.

Far from regarding the scene calmly, Henry was visited by an instinctive desire to run through that crowd and find Uncle Andy, who always knew the answer when the chips were down. But the quivering girl beside him detained him, and her presence also made him fight to control an incipient trembling of his chin. It was as though he could smell events and the events there in the lounge had a stench of disaster, of death, of tragic newspaper headlines. You couldn't really smell such things, but Henry had no name for the strange sense that gave him a vivid impression of the total human element surrounding him.

The air hostess maintained a clear head. She ran to two high-ranking officers, one an Army Colonel and the other a Major of the Air Force.

Which was sufficient to arouse them from their momentary paralysis. With a look at each other, a few hurried words and quick nods of agreement, the two officers sprang into action.

"All men on B deck!" yelled the Colonel, suddenly brandishing a Service automatic. "Converge on the staircase and pull the passengers out--women first where possible!"

Henry stared curiously at the gun. He knew it did not contain ammunition. Although this ship was a MATS charter, ammunition was not allowed for sidearms on such flights.

The Major and two Army non-coms were already at the staircase, working fast.

"Come down single file, those of you on the staircase!" yelled the Major. "All others remain on A deck! No fighting, you! Move!" He was also waving a gun in the air.

When one man struck out wildly at another who was in his way, the Major reached up and hit him over the head with his weapon--under the sudden brilliance of the newsman's flash bulb. The man slumped, and a number of B deck men heaved at him, pulling him through.

Henry wondered if Uncle Andy was playing it safe, staying in his seat. Couldn't be a fire. No smoke. Something much different, more dangerous, he sensed. He recalled the ringing in his and Martia's ears. Then he also remembered having bumped into someone in the aisle upstairs--someone that he could not see.... A prickly sensation crept down his spine.

They had the unconscious WAAC nurse stretched out on a seat under the observation windows. The air hostess was calling to the commissary steward to break out the first aid supplies, and the Swedish actress ran to get them for her. The Indian Prince had lost his turban and, being quite bald, was trying to wrap it around his head again, while his eyes stared in fright at the milling crowd and he cowered in the farthest corner muttering prayers in Hindustani.

"What the hell's happening up there?" asked the Major of one male passenger from A deck who seemed to be more rational. Henry remembered that this was the scar-faced man who had sat behind him and Uncle Andy. On his hardened face was an expression of deep concern, and his forehead glistened with sweat.

"It's a--a man," he stammered.

"A man! Well what the--"

"Mother!" shrieked Martia, suddenly. She broke away from Henry and ran toward the crowd at the staircase.

Henry ran after her and caught her by the wrist. "You'll get yourself killed trying to get up there!" he yelled at her. "Stay here!"

"Mother!" she cried out again, sobbing hysterically and struggling frantically to break away from him.

"Shush, girl!" commanded the Colonel. The P.T. speaker was blaring.

The two small children, Henry noted, were still crying, uncontrollably.

"Henry!" Martia, huddling close in the protective circle of his arm, was whispering to him. "I think the same as you!" She was trembling.

Someone in the observation lounge started to cry out in alarm--one of the women carrying a baby--but the Colonel said, "Quiet!" so vehemently that she stopped, staring at the staircase with round glassy eyes.

This was followed by general silence. Henry and Martia listened for sounds of activity from A deck. Had they heard screams or the sound of mortal conflict above them they could not have been more terrified than they were by this absence of any noise other than the muffled roar of the engines outside. It was as though A deck were totally devoid of human occupants and the ship were being piloted by phantoms.

Colonel Rogers silently motioned to everybody, herding the women and children over to one side of the lounge, next to the drinking fountain where Henry and Martia stood. The Major and the non-coms lined up the men. There were whispered arguments.

"What the hell does he think he's doing?"

"Yeah, there's more guys on A deck! Why don't they pile him?"

Some of the men, by their facial expression and obvious emotional condition, were considered inadequate for the task before them and were excused. The scar-faced man, however, quietly followed instructions. Henry wanted to go to him and ask him about Uncle Andy, but he could no longer move against the press of the crowd.

Men and women pressed closely against the two adolescents. Henry could sense their accumulated tenseness. He could hear grown men panting and he could observe the dryness of their tightly compressed lips, the animal-like flaring of nostrils, the hunted look in their staring eyes. He saw one woman grip her husband's hand until he winced. Martia pressed her face against his shoulder and would not look at the staircase.

They waited. And Henry watched the Major.

He was a short, stockily built man with a clear, youthful face and brown, wavy hair. On his chest were campaign ribbons and one small medal of some kind. Henry saw his Adam's apple move as he swallowed nervously. His blue-grey eyes never wavered from the staircase.

The scar-faced man stood slightly apart from the crowd, watching the stairs with a quiet, expressionless intentness. About a dozen men waited tensely on either side of the stairs, trying to remain out of a direct line of sight from above.

There was an audible drawing of breaths as they saw the alien intruder descend the stairs. He came down to the second step from the bottom and stood there surveying the scene before him.

He was taller than men, by about a head. His shoulders, arms and musculature were not human. He was almost four feet across his sloping shoulders, with ponderous arms and six-fingered hands that reached below his thick knees. There was a thumb, in addition to the taloned fingers, a prehensile, calloused extension of the heel of the hand. A second set of three, prehensile appendages writhed slowly about just above his multi-jointed wrists. His large, almost circular chest was split by a multiple lipped orifice that slowly opened and closed like a sea anemone as he breathed. He wore only a meager harness and loin cloth, the plastic-like straps supporting a heavy instrument box at his waist and a pack of apparatus on his back. His skin was leathery, almost brittle appearing, as though he were partially exoskeletal, and of mottled colors ranging from dark red to purple, like a mass of birth-marks that left no room for normal pigment. His face was small, chinless and devoid of nose or nostrils, but he had a round mouth the lips of which were like the beak of a blow-fish. His cranium was large, hairless, and heavily veined. Under absurdly accentuated, hairless brows, a single, monstrous insect's eye with a thousand gleaming facets rotated about, examining them balefully.

Martia could not see the alien. Henry could. She felt him shudder.

Three women quietly passed out, but no one paid them any attention. Colonel Rogers and the Major stood there looking back at the creature in the same attitude of momentary shock paralysis as the others. The non-com soldiers and male passengers constituting the ambush on either side of the staircase were all white-faced, staring. "Scarface" stood apart, more or less facing the intruder.

Then--the alien spoke. The little beaks of his mouth moved, and a rather high-pitched voice spoke, laboriously, in a language which was gutteral, vaguely familiar, but nonetheless incomprehensible.

No one moved, but the men tensed, as though for action.

Henry recognized the menace of this creature, but he could not refrain from reflecting, during those brief, weirdly timeless seconds of inactivity, that to communicate with it might be worth a thousand Rosetta Stones. A single, intelligible conversation, and Man might conquer the stars! But this was the Unknown. Man, in his egotism, abhorred the Unknown as Nature abhorred a vacuum. Man had to reduce the Unknown to the level of his own understanding. "The only good Injun is a dead one!" This superman from out of space or time, this harbinger of wonders yet to be discovered, this mute, alien vessel of perhaps incalculable knowledge--was suspect, and condemned to be taken, dead or alive. Henry was aware of no sympathetic sentiments around him. He knew that the mass reaction was for violence. The judgment: Death!

Suddenly, the newsman took a picture and the flash bulb caused the alien to start and move one of his amazingly dextrous hands toward the control box at his waist.

The two babies screamed, and the stranger turned his cyclopean eye upon them for the first time. He moved down to the floor and started toward them.

It was then that Scarface whipped out a gun and fired, point blank. The loud report in that tensely silent place stimulated involuntary muscular reactions and the crowd seemed to jump as one body.

The bullet made a round, neat hole to the right of the chest orifice, and the alien stopped. Nobody wondered why Scarface happened to be carrying a loaded gun. They merely sensed relief when he fired the shot. A known element had entered the picture. Man had met the Unknown with a gun, and the gun could do harm. It was effective.

The alien looked at Scarface briefly, then turned dials at his waist, even as Scarface pumped three more shots into him in very rapid succession.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet