A. Van Vogt - Slan

He felt a chill, impersonal interest in the knowledge that the day of action had arrived. The tendrilless slans might intend this attack on him to be but part of a vaster design that included their long-delayed assault on Earth. Whatever happened, his plans were as complete as he could make them; and though it was years too soon, he must now force the issue to the limit of his power. He was on the run, and there could be no turning back – for behind him was swift death!

Cross' ship nosed out of the little river and launched toward space on a long, slanting climb. It was important that he should not become invisible until the slans actually saw that he was out of the valley, before they had razed it in futile search. But first, there was one thing he must do.

His hand plunged home a switch. His narrowed gaze fastened on the rear visiplate, which showed the valley falling away below. At a score of points on that green floor (he counted them in lightning calculation) white flame blazed up in a strange, splotchy-looking fire. Down there, every weapon, every atomic machine, was turning on itself. Fire chambers were burning out, metal running molten in that devouring violence of energy.

The white glow was still there as he turned away a few seconds later, grimly content Now let them search through that ravaged, twisted metal. Let their scientists labor to bring to life a secret they craved so desperately, and to obtain which they had come out where human beings could see some of their powers. In every burned-out cache in that valley, they would find exactly nothing!

The destruction of all that was so precious to the attackers required a fraction of a minute but in that time he was seen. Four dead-black battleships turned toward him simultaneously – and then hovered uncertainly as he actuated the mechanism that made his vessel invisible.

Abruptly, their possession of atom-energy detectors was shown. The ships fell in behind him unerringly. Alarm bells showed others ahead, closing toward him. It was only the unmatchable atomic drivers that saved him from that vast fleet. There were so many vessels that he could not even begin to count them, and all that could come near turned their deadly projectors where their instruments pointed. They missed because during the very instant they spotted him, his machine flashed out of range of their most massive guns.

Completely invisible, traveling at many miles per second, his ship headed for Mars! He must have hurtled through mine fields, but that didn't matter now. The devouring disintegration rays that poured out from the walls of his great machine ate up mines-before they could explode, and simultaneously destroyed every light-wave that would have revealed his craft to alert eyes out there in the blaze of Sun.

There was only one difference. The mines were smashed before they reached his ship. Light, being in a wave state as it flashed up, could be destroyed only during that fraction of instant when it touched his ship and started to bounce. At the very moment of bouncing, its speed reduced, the corpuscles that basically composed it lengthened according to the laws of the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction theory – at that instant of almost quiescence, the fury of the Sun's rays was blotted out by the disintegrators.

And, because light must touch the walls first, and so could be absorbed as readily as ever, his visiplates were unaffected. The full picture of everything came through even as he hurtled on, unseen, invisible. His ship seemed to stand still in the void, except that gradually Mars became larger. At a million miles, it was a great, glowing ball as big as the Moon seen from Earth; and it grew like an expanding balloon until its dark bulk filled half the sky, and lost its redness.

Continents took form, mountains, seas, incredible gorges, rock-strewn and barren stretches of flat land. Grimmer grew the picture, deadlier every forsaken aspect of that gnarled old planet. Mars, seen through an electric telescope at thirty thousand miles, was like a too-old human being, withered, bony, ugly, cold-looking, drooling with age, enormously repellent.

The dark area that was Mare Cimmerium showed as a fanged, terrible sea* [*The same legend that had portrayed man or slan as once having spaceships whispered the myth that huge ice or oxygen meteorites from Jupiter and Saturn – comprising thousands of cubic miles of frozen water and frozen air – had been guided toward all the potentially habitable planets, and exploded. This immense debris, falling onto the barren worlds of Mars, Venus, and some of the moons of Jupiter, created – it was said – oceans and vast atmospheres where none, or at least nothing worthwhile, had been before.] . Silent, almost tideless, the waters lay under the eternal blue-dark skies; but no ship could ever breast those placid waters. Endless miles of jagged rocks broke the surface. There were no patterns, no channels, simply the sea and the protruding rock. Finally, Cross saw the city, making a strange, shimmering picture under its vast roof of glass; then a second city, showed, and a third.

Far, far past Mars he plunged, his motors dead, not the tiniest amount of atomic energy diffusing from any part of his ship. That was caution, pure and simple. There could be no fear of detector instruments in these vast distances. At last, the gravitational field of the planet began to check his flight. Slowly, the long machine yielded to the inexorable pull and began to fall toward the night side of the globe. It was a slow task. Earth days fled into Earth weeks. But finally he turned on, not his atomic energy, but the antigravity plates which he had not used since he had installed his atomic drives.

For days and days then, while centrifugal action of the planet cushioned his swift fall, he sat without sleep, staring into the visiplates. Five times the ugly balls of dark metal that were mines flashed toward him. Each time he actuated for brief seconds his all-devouring wall disintegrators – and waited for the ships that might have spotted his momentary use of force. A dozen times, his alarm bells clanged, and lights flashed on his visiplates, but no ships came within range. Below him, the planet grew vast, and filled every horizon with its dark immensity. There were not many landmarks on this night portion aside from the cities. Here and there, however, splashes of light showed some kind of habitation and activity, and at last he found what he wanted. A mere dot of flame, like a candle fluttering in remote darkness.

It turned out to be a small mine, and the light came from the little house, where the four tendrilless slans who attended the mine's completely automatic machinery lived. It was almost dark before Cross returned to his ship, satisfied that this was what he wanted.

A mist of blackness lay like a black cloth over the planet the following night when, once again, Cross landed his ship in the ravine that led toward the mine head. Not a shadow stirred. Not a sound invaded the silence as he edged forward to the mouth of the mine. Gingerly, he took out one of the metal cases which protected his hypnotism crystals, inserted the atomically unstable, glasslike object into a crack of the rock entrance – jerked off the protective covering and raced off before his own body could affect the sluggish thing. In the black of the ravine, he waited.

In twenty minutes, a door of the cottage opened. The flood of light from within revealed the outlines of a tall young man. Then the door closed; a torch blazed in the hand of the shadowed figure, glared along the path he was following, and brought a flash of reflected flame from the hypnotism crystal. The man walked toward it curiously, and stooped to examine it. His thoughts ran along the surface of his casually protected mind.

"Funny! That crystal wasn't there this morning." He shrugged. "Some rock probably jarred loose, and the crystal was behind it."