Ray Cummings by Wandl the Invader

Author:Wandl the Invader [Invader, Wandl the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781717316639
Google: C7mKtgEACAAJ
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2018-04-23T07:00:00+00:00

9

"You, Snap!"

"Gregg! But how...?"

"Hush! They might hear us."

"They can do more than that. They can almost hear you think."

"Anita and Venza are here."

"I know it. I was with them for a time. This accursed gravity! I can't walk."

"Careful," I whispered. "You can crack your head on something with the least false step. Are they taking us ashore?"

"I guess so. How did you happen...?"

"Tell you later."

They had come for me in that dark pressure-port, taken me along a dim corridor of the ship, which evidently had landed a few moments before. Then Snap, with strange figures around him, had been flung at me.

These weird beings! The brains were here, but not many; I saw half a dozen on the ship. They could move easily now. They bounced upon their small arms and legs, hitching with little leaps of a few feet. Close at hand they were gruesome; from a distance they had the aspect of thirty-inch ovoids, bouncing of their own volition. And I saw too that underneath, toward the back, was a shriveled body.

The other figures were wholly different; they seemed at first to be ten-foot, upright insects. The two legs were like stilts, the body narrow but with bulging chest. The neck was thin, holding the small round head, about the size of my own.

Words seem futile to picture this thing which was a man of Wandl. There was no skin, but instead what seemed to be a glossy, hard brown shell. It was laid in scales; and upon the legs was a brown fuzz of stiff hair. There were many joints, both of the legs and the torso. Clothing was worn; a single garment, hanging from a wide belt halfway down the legs seemed incongruous, fantastically aping humanity.

This was the worker, equipped by nature for mechanical tasks. There were not two arms, but at least ten. From what could have been called the shoulders, they were tentacles, half the length of an elephant's trunk, with many-fingered hands at the ends. From the waist depended huge lobster-like pincers; and from the chest and back the arms were smaller, each with a different type finger-claw.

The head and face were most of all a personal mocking of mankind. Wide, upstanding, listening ears were upon the sides of the head, one on the forehead and one on the back. The face was mobile, with tiny brown scales small as a fish. A nose orifice, with two protruding brown eyes above it was set outward on stems, and an upended slit of a mouth. There was an eye in the back of the head.

Probably, over eons of upward development from what was perhaps an original single type, these two specialized forms had developed. The "Masters," as they were known upon Wandl, neglected the body for the brain, and the "Workers," the reverse. There was no separate individual for the female. As is the case with primitive organisms, they were all bi-sexual, the parent dying in the reproduction of offspring.

Of necessity I have been forced into digression.

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