#44 - Man and Monster by K.H. Scheer

Author:K.H. Scheer [K.H. Scheer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1973-01-15T08:00:00+00:00

5/ A PARAPSYCHIC PHANTOM STRIKES

"How are they holding up?" asked Khrest.

By ‘they’ he meant the monsters, who had made their appearance after the landing. By the thousands, and perhaps by the tens of thousands, they made a stand, at a respectful distance, around the landed battleship.

They were much larger than remembered. About 7½ feet in height and 4½ feet wide, they sat ponderously, in their bell-shaped jellyfish forms on the ground. On top where one could assume the bodies ended, rounded heads with protruding knobby eyes emerged from the colourless sponge bodies, whose incredible elasticity was capable of absorbing abnormal hurricane winds by means of extreme deformation and flattening of form and face. They were so constituted by nature that they could present a narrow profile to the powerful winds, regardless which way they were cowering close to the ground.

It did not seem to be more than just cowering and yet certain unbelievably fast and scurried movements had been seen. Countless stubby appendages of locomotion projected from under the edges of the arched jellyfish bodies. The Mooffs did not appear to have a natural mechanism for grasping things. At least no one had been able to observe any yet.

Shortly after the landing, Pucky had awakened from his brief drugged sleep. Now the mouse-beaver hunched down in front of the viewscreens and lay in wait for the mental impulses of the non-human creatures.

They were natural telepaths, as Pucky had been able to determine once again. Normal human-like speech would have been impossible in the sound inferno of the eternal hurricanes. Nature had found a splendid solution.

For 10 minutes now, every man of the crew wore an Arkonide attack suit; but Rhodan had not yet given the order for launching out of the airlocks. He was waiting for something that he felt must happen as a matter of course.

When anybody came into the Command Central, he never came alone. After the telepathic attack, Rhodan had strengthened the individual commando units to at least 10 men. Each was to watch the other to see if he was acting normal.

Thus stood the Titan on its towering landing struts in the midst of a canyon-gutted plain. In the distance a low mountain emerged into the overcast sky. Whipped by the hurricane, a continuous rain of ammonia crystals beat against the high-tension defence screens of the ship. It looked as though some invisible presence were creating a mighty firework display. On the windward side, they glimmered and lightninged. The crystals then faded like dying embers while generating highly poisonous steam.

"Why don’t they attack?" asked Rhodan, speaking aloud to himself. His questioning gaze passed over the leading officers of the giant ship.

Everson sat at the magnifying controls of the infrared tracker. The bodies of the Mooffs developed a prominent heat echo, although in this super cooled cryogenic atmosphere they were practically living refrigerators. Nevertheless, they did possess bodily warmth. The infra-detectors were better than the purely optical ones, which were always getting clouded up by steaming vapours outside.

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