Robert Silverberg - Vampires from Outer Space

The first report of what was quickly to become known as the Vampire Menace reached the central office of the Terran Security Agency half an hour after the attack had taken place. The date was June 11, 2104. Agency Subchief Neil Harriman was busy with routine matters when the courier burst into his office, carrying a message pellet gaudy with the red-and-yellow wrapping that meant Top Level Emergency.

Harriman reached one big hand out for the message pellet. “Where’s it from?”

“San Francisco. It just came in by simultaneous visi-tape. Marked special for your office, with all the emergency labels.”

“Okay,” Harriman said. He flipped the switch that darkened the office and brought the viewing screen down from its niche in the ceiling. As Harriman unwrapped the message pellet and began to slip it into the viewer, he glanced up at the courier, who was standing by with expectant curiosity. Harriman scowled darkly. No words were necessary. The courier gulped, moistened his lips, and backed out of the office, his curiosity about the emergency message doomed to be unsatisfied.

Alone, Harriman nudged the starter button and the tape started to unwind past the photon-cell eye of the viewer. An image formed in glowing natural colors at the far side of the room.

The voice of the speaker said, “This is Special Agent Michaels reporting from San Francisco, chief. There was a killing out here twenty minutes ago. The local police sent for me because it looked like Agency business.”

The screen showed one of San Francisco’s steep hills. Some twenty feet from the camera’s eye a body lay grotesquely sprawled, face downward, head toward the foot of the hill. Gray fog swirled over the scene. It was nearly noon at Harriman’s New York office, but it was still quite early in the morning across the continent in California. Transmission of the message-tape was virtually instantaneous, thanks to progress in communications science.

Harriman watched patiently, wondering why it had been necessary to bring to his attention a routine West Coast murder. The image bounced as the man holding the camera walked toward the corpse.

Special Agent Michaels’ voice said, “This is just the way he was found, twenty minutes ago.”

A hand reached down and turned the cadaver over so its face was visible. An involuntary gasp broke from Harriman’s lips. The dead man’s face was the color of chalk. Harriman had never seen so pale a face before. The victim’s eyes were open, and frozen in them was an image of pain, of shock, of horror beyond human comprehension.

There were two dark little holes an inch apart on the dead man’s throat, just over the jugular.

“There isn’t a drop of blood in him, chief,” Michaels said quietly in commentary. “He’s as dry as if he was pumped clean with a force-pump. We’ve identified him as Sam Barrett, a salesman in a used car showroom. Unmarried, lived with his aged mother. He worked around the corner on Van Ness Avenue. There were two eye-witnesses at the scene of the crime.”

The camera’s eye panned to a balding man in his forties who stood at the edge of the sidewalk, nervously twisting his hands together. He looked almost as pale as the ghastly body on the ground.

“Go on,” prompted Michaels. “This is for the record. Tell us who you are and what you saw.”

“My name is Mack Harkins,” the balding man said in a thin, hesitant voice. “I live over on Austin Street, couple of blocks from here. Work at the Dynacar showroom around the corner. I was walking along and suddenly I looked up ahead and saw a man struggling with—well—some kind of thing.”

“Describe it,” Michaels prodded gently.

“Well—bigger than a man, purple-colored, with big bat-wings. You know, one of those bat-people, what do you call them?”

“Nirotans?”

“Yeah, that’s it. One of them Nirotans, bending over the man’s throat like he was sucking blood from him. Before I knew what was going on, the bat-thing saw me and bolted away into an alley.” Harkins shuddered. “I went to look at the body. No blood at all, just like he is now. Drained.”

“You’re sure it was a Nirotan you saw?” Michaels asked.

“I ain’t sure of anything. But there was this big purple thing with bat-wings wrestling with poor Barrett. If it wasn’t one of them Nirotans, I’d like to know what it was, then.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harkins. I think the local authorities would like to ask you some questions now.” The camera flashed toward the second witness.

The second witness was not human. He was a member of one of the half-dozen different species of alien beings that frequented Earth since the opening of the age of interstellar travel some three decades earlier.

The camera focused on the short, stockily-built being whose only external physical differences from humanity were the two tiny, heat-sensitive antennae that sprouted just above each eye.

“You are from Drosk?” Michaels asked.

The alien nodded. “I am Blen Duworn, attaché to the Drosk Trade Commission office in San Francisco,” he said in smooth, faultless English. “I was out for a morning stroll when I came upon the scene this man has just described to you.”

“Tell us what you saw.”

“I saw a large winged entity vanishing into that alley. I saw a man falling toward the ground, and another man—Mr. Harkins, rushing toward him. That is all.”

“And this large winged entity you saw—can you identify it more precisely?”

The alien frowned. “I am quite sure it was a Nirotan,” he said after a brief pause.

“Thank you,” Michaels said. The screen showed another view of the bloodless corpse. “That’s where it stands as of now, chief. I’ll keep in touch on further developments as they break. Awaiting your instructions.”

The screen went dead.

In his darkened office, Neil Harriman sat quietly with folded hands while a chill of terror rippled quickly through him. He recovered self-control with a considerable effort, and switched on the light.

His mind refused to accept what the message tape had just told him.

Harriman’s particular job in the workings of the Terran Security Agency was to deal with crime involving Earthmen and aliens. There was plenty of bad blood between the people of Earth and the strange-looking visitors from space. A planet which had not yet fully reconciled itself even to racial differences in its own one species of intelligent life could not easily adjust to the presence of bizarre life-forms, some of them considerably superior to the best that Earth had.

Up till now, Harriman’s job had largely been to protect the aliens from the hostility of Earthmen. The green-skinned Qafliks, for example, had touched off demonstrations in those parts of the world where white skin was still thought to be in some way superior to all other colors of skin. In other places, the peculiar sexual mores of the uninhibited Zadoorans had angered certain puritanical Terrestrials. So Harriman’s wing of the Agency had been given the task of protecting Earth’s many alien visitors until the people of Earth were mature enough to realize that it was not necessary to hate that which was strange.

But now an entirely new and dangerous aspect had entered the picture. One of the aliens had murdered an Earthman. And, thought Harriman bleakly, it would have to be a Nirotan that had committed the crime.

The Nirotans were recent additions to the Terran scene. They had first landed on Earth less than a year previously, and no more than a few thousand were present at this time. They were not pretty. Descended from a primitive bat-like form, they were frightening in appearance—purple-hued creatures seven feet tall, their bodies covered with thick coarse fur, their eyes tiny and set deep in their skull, their faces weird and strange. They had wings, bat-like membranes of skin stretched over vastly elongated finger-bones, while a small pair of well-equipped hands provided them with the manipulative abilities necessary for the development of a civilization.