The Beast (ss) by A. E. van Vogt

Author:A. E. van Vogt [Vogt, A. E. van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi Short Story
Publisher: Astounding Science Fiction
Published: 1943-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Big Oaf crawled out of the door of his house, and stood up.

“You took your time,” he growled.

“I’m a sick man,” Pendrake explained, “and this Moon gravity makes it possible to walk where you’d be flat on your back on Earth. That beating your men handed me didn’t help any, either.”

The monster’s answer, was a grunt, and Pendrake stared at him cautiously. They were alone inside the stockade; and the effect was of isolation from the universe, a curious, empty feeling of being cut off in an unnatural world.

He saw with a start that the creature’s piglike eyes were studying him. Big Oaf broke the silence:

“I been here a long time, Pendrake, a long time. I was kinda dumb when I first came—like these other guys are; but my brain somehow grew up over the years, and now I got the sense to worry about things they never even think about, like those Germans f’r instance.”

He paused, and looked at Pendrake. Pendrake hesitated, said finally:

“You’d better worry about them, and worry hard.”

Big Oaf waved an apelike arm, and shrugged his massive shoulders. “I merely mentioned that as a f’r instance. I got my plans laid for those fellers. What I mean is, when you look at me, think of somebody who’s got a brain with sense in it like your own, and never mind the body. How about it, uh?”

Pendrake blinked. The appeal was so unexpected, so remarkable in the picture it brought of a sensitive mind aware of its beastlike body, that he was touched in spite of himself. Then he remembered the five wives, and the two other women who had killed themselves. He said slowly:

“What other worries have you got, Big Oaf?”

It seemed to him, as he spoke the noncommittal words that the barest hint of disappointment flickered over the hairy face. Then Big Oaf said:

“I was walkin’ along a trail on Earth, ‘n’ all of a sudden I was here.”

“What’s that!” Pendrake gasped.

Incredulous, his mind hurtled back over the ape man’s words, and again the shock came. It took him a long moment to grasp coherently that he had been told the secret of how these people had arrived on the Moon. Big Oaf was continuing: “It was the same with the others. ’N’ from the way they describe it, they were coming down the same trail—that scares me, Pendrake.” Pendrake frowned. “What do you mean?”

“There’s something down there on Earth, nothing you can see, but at this end you come out of a machine. Pendrake, we gotta shut that machine off somehow. We can’t live here, not knowing who or what’s gonna barge along that trail and through the machine.”

“I see what you mean,” said Pendrake slowly.

It was the calmness of his own words that shocked him this time. For he was quivering in every nerve, his whole body cold, then hot, then cold again. A machine—A machine that transported objects unharmed—focused on a trail in the western United States, a machine through which an

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