C Kornbluth - His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

From the shadows, with completely noiseless tread, stole a figure.

"Good evening, sir," said Battle. "I've brought all of the Sabre Club that's available on two hours' notice.

"Miss Millicent, this is Mr. Cromleigh," he announced, leading forth from the shadows a tall, crisp woman. When she spoke it was with a faint, Southern drawl:

"Pleased t' know you. Any frien' of Lieutenant Battle's …" She trailed back into the darkness and vanished completely.

"Doctor Mogilov, former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kazan." A slight, smiling man bowed out from the darkness; he was smooth-shaven and looked very un-Russian. In a pronounced Cambridge dialect he said: "Delighted," and put one hand on the butt of a revolver slung from his slender waist.

"And Alex Vaughn, Yorkshire born and bred." The Englishman said thickly, in the peculiar speech that makes the clear-headed, big-boned men of York sound always a little intoxicated: "Ah coom wi' russi-veh-shins, soor. Lut thawt bay oondair-stud."

"He says," interpreted the Lieutenant, "that he comes with reservations; let that be understood. And that completes the present roster of the Sabre Club present in New York."

"Only three?" complained Cromleigh. "And one a woman? You gave me to understand that they could completely smash the invaders."

"Yes," said the Lieutenant, his voice heavy with added meaning. "Any invaders."

"No doubt—" said Cromleigh. Then some message in Battle's eyes alarmed him unaccountably; his hand trembled on the desk-top and gripped the edge to steady itself.

"That did it!" snapped Battle. He swung on Ole Cromleigh "How long have we?" he grated, pulling a gun and aiming for the financier's throat.

In a voice hoarse with hatred Cromleigh yelled: "Just two minutes more, you meddling scum! Then—"

"Lights!" yelled Battle. "Turn the damned lights on, Miss Millicent !" As the overhead indirects flared up, bathing the huge lab in a lambent, flaming radiance, the four figures of the Sabre Club members, the Billionaire Clubman and one other leaped into sharp reality.

It was the figure of the sofa. "We took the liberty," said Battle, his gun not swerving an inch, "of removing this object from the smoking room.

It's going lock, stock and barrel into the enlarging machine you have here."

"You fool!" roared Cromleigh. "Don't you know—" The descending gun butt cut off any further conversation.

"Hurry up!" grated the Lieutenant. He hefted the sofa to his broad shoulders.

"That trembling hand was a signal if ever I saw one. His friends'll be here any minute. Open that damned machine and plug in the power!"

The Russian philosopher, muttering wildly to himself, swung wide the gates of the box-like magnifier through which Battle had come only a few hours before.

"Thank God there's plenty of room!" groaned Battle. "And if this doesn't work, prepare for Heaven, friends!" He turned on the machine full power and speed, took Miss Millicent by the arm and dragged her to the far end of the vast lab.

DURING THE INCREDIBLY long three minutes that ensued, they made ready their weapons for what might prove to be a siege, while Battle explained in rapid-fire undertones what he had had no time for during the plane-ride from Manhattan.

As he checked the load of his quickfirers he snapped: "Invaders—fooey!

Anybody could tell that those women were fresh from an office. They had the clerical air about them. The only invader—as a carefully logical process of deduction demonstrated—was the gruesome creature who's been posing as Cromleigh. Just murdered the old guy—I suppose—and took over his body. Him and his friends whom he just signaled. He's the only baby who hypnotized the Phi Beta Kappas they use for busboys.

"Why did he risk sending me in there? The inevitable mark of a louse.

Doesn't trust anybody, not even his own office-staff dyed a pale green and reduced to half gnat-size. So he sent me in for a spy on them. The whole cock-and-bull story of the creatures from an asteroid was so that there'd be no suspicion directed at him in case some bright waiter should find the louse-people. Wouldn't be surprised if he's from an asteroid himself. Crazy business! Craziest damned business!"

"How about the financial angle?" asked Vaughn, who could be intelligible when money was involved.

"I picked that bird's pocket slick as a whistle just before I conked him.

Feels like a hundred grand."

"Here they come !" snapped Miss Millicent.

"They" were creatures of all shapes and sizes who were streaming through the only door to the lab, at the other end of the room.

"Awk!" gulped the lady involuntarily. "They" were pretty awful. There were a hundred or so of them, many much like men, a few in an indescribable liquid-solid state that sometimes was gaseous. The luminous insides of these churned wildly about; there were teeth inside them two feet long.Others were gigantic birds, still others snakes, still others winged dragons.

"That settles it," grunted the Russian philosopher as he flicked his gun into and out of its holster faster than the eye could follow. "That settles it. They are amoebic, capable of assuming any shape at all. One is changing now—awk!" He persevered. "Indubitably possessed of vast hypnotic powers over unsuspecting minds only. Otherwise they would be working on us."

"They" were rolling in a flood of shifting, slimy flesh down the floor of the lab.

"The machine! The sofa!" cried Miss Millicent. Battle breathed a long sigh of relief as the cabinet-like expander exploded outward and the sofa it held kept on growing—and growing—and growing—and growing! It stopped just as it filled the segment of the lab that it occupied.

With a squeaking of tortured timbers the laws of cross-sectional sufferance power asserted themselves and the hundred-yard-high sofa collapsed in a monstrous pile of rubble.

"Sit very still," said the Lieutenant. "Be quite quiet and blow the head off any hundred-yard centipede that wanders our way."

There were agonized yells from the other side of the couch's ruins.

"That couch," Battle informed them, "was just plain lousy. Full of centipedes, lice, what have you. And when a louse smells blood—God help any invaders around, be they flesh, fish, fowl or amoebic!"

AFTER TEN MINUTES there was complete quiet.

"What about the insects?" asked Vaughn.

"They're dead," said Battle, rising and stretching. "Their respiratory system can't keep up with the growth. They were good for about ten minutes, then they keel over. Their tracheae can't take in enough oxygen to keep them going, which is a very good thing for the New Jersey countryside."

He strolled over to the vast pile of rubble and began turning over timbers, Miss Millicent assisting him.

"Ah!" he grunted. "Here it is!" He had found the body of an apple-green young lady whose paint was beginning to peel, revealing a healthy pink beneath. With many endearing terms he brought her out of her swoon as Miss Millicent's eyebrows went higher and higher.

Finally she exploded, as the two were cozily settled on a mountainous upholstery-needle that had, at some time, got lost in the sofa.

"Just when, Lieutenant, did you find out that these people weren't invaders from an asteroid?"

Rattle raised his eyebrows and kissed the girl. "Have no fear, darling,"

he said. "A gentleman never—er—kisses—and tells.

Now that I'm a cranky, constipated old man I can afford to say that the younger generation of scientists makes me sick to my stomach. Short-order fry cooks of destruction, they hear through the little window the dim order: "Atom bomb rare, with cobalt sixty!" and sing it back and rattle their stinking skillets and sling the deadly hash—just what the customer ordered, with never a notion invading their smug, too-heated havens that there's a small matter of right and wrong that takes precedence even over their haute cuisine.