A. E. Van Vogt - Vault of the beast.pdf - Van Vogt, A. E - margozap

Vault of the Beast

A.E. VAN VOGT

THE CREATURE CREPT. It whimpered from fear and pain, a thin, slobbering sound

horrible to hear. Shapeless, formless thing yet changing shape and form with

every jerky movement.

It crept along the corridor of the space freighter, fighting the terrible urge of

its elements to take the shape of its surroundings. A grey blob of disintegrating

stuff, it crept, it cascaded, it rolled, flowed, dissolved, every movement an agony

of struggle against the abnormal need to become a stable shape.

Any shape! The hard, chilled-blue metal wall of the Earth-bound freighter, the

thick, rubbery floor. The floor was easy to fight. It wasn’t like the metal that

pulled and pulled. It would be easy to become metal for all eternity.

But something prevented. An implanted purpose. A purpose that drummed

from electron to electron, vibrated from atom to atom with an unvarying intensity

that was like a special pain: Find the greatest mathematical mind in the Solar

System, and bring it to the vault of the Martian ultimate metal. The Great One

must be freed! The prime number time lock must be opened!

That was the purpose that hummed with unrelenting agony through its

elements. That was the thought that had been seared into its fundamental

consciousness by the great and evil minds that had created

it.

There was movement at the far end of the corridor. A door opened. Footsteps

sounded. A man whistling to himself. With a metallic hiss, almost a sigh, the

creature dissolved, looking momentarily like diluted mercury. Then it turned

brown like the floor. It became the floor, a slightly thicker stretch of dark-brown

rubber spread out for yards.

It was ecstasyjust to lie there, to be flat and to have shape, and to be so nearly

c~ead that there was no pain. Death was so sweet, so utterly desirable. And life

such an unbearable torment of agony, such a throbbing~ piercing nightmare of

anguished convulsion. If only the life that was approaching would pass swiftly. If

the life stopped, it would pull it into shape. Life could do that. Life was stronger

than metal, stronger than anything. The approaching life meant torture, struggle,

pain.

The creature tensed its now flat, grotesque body — the body that could develop

muscles of steel — and waited in terror for the death struggle.

Spacecraftsman Parelli whistled happily as he strode along the gleaming

corridor that led from the engine room. He had just received a wireless from the

hospital. His wife was doing well, and it was a boy. Eight pounds, the radiogram

had said. He suppressed a desire to whoop and dance. A boy. Life sure was good.

Pain came to the thing on the floor. Primeval pain that sucked through its

elements like acid burning, burning. The brown floor shuddered in every atom as

Parelli strode over it. The aching urge to pull towards him, to take his shape. The

thing fought its horrible desire, fought with anguish and shivering dread, more

consciously now that it could think with Parelli’s brain. A ripple of floor rolled

after the man.

Fighting didn’t help. The ripple grew into a blob that momentarily seemed to

become a human head. Grey, hellish nightmare of demoniac shape. The creature

hissed metallically in terror, then collapsed palpitating, slobbering with fear and

pain and hate as Parelli strode on rapidly — too rapidly for its creeping pace.

The thin, horrible sound died; the thing dissolved into brown floor, and lay

quiescent yet quivering in every atom from its unquenchable, uncontrollable urge

to live — live in spite of pain, in spite of abysmal terror and primordial longing for

stable shape. To live and fulfil the purpose of its lusting and malignant creators.

Thirty feet up the corridor, Parelli stopped. Hejerked his mind from its

thoughts of child and wife. He spun on his heels, and stared uncertainly along the

passageway from the engine room.

‘Now, what the devil was that?’ he pondered aloud.

A sound — a queer, faint yet unmistakably horrid sound was echoing and re-

echoing through his consciousness. A shiver ran the length of his spine. That

sound — that devilish sound.

He stood there, a tall, magnificently muscled man, stripped to the waist,

sweating from the heat generated by the rockets that were decelerating the craft

after its meteoric flight from Mars. Shuddering, he clenched his fists, and walked

slowly back the way he had come.

The creature throbbed with the pull of him, a gnawing, writhing, tormenting

struggle that pierced into the deeps of every restless, agitated cell, stabbing

agonizingly along the alien nervous system; and then became terrifyingly aware

of the inevitable, the irresistible need to take the shape of the life.

Parelli stopped uncertainly. The floor moved under him, a visible wave that

reared brown and horrible before his incredulous eyes and grew into a bulbous,

slobbering, hissing mass. A venomous demon head reared on twisted, half-

human shoulders. Gnarled hands on apelike, malformed

arms clawed at his face with insensate rage — and changed even as they tore at

him.

‘Good God!’ Parelli bellowed.

The hands, the arms that clutched him grew more normal, more human,

brown, muscular. The face assumed familiar lines, sprouted a nose, eyes, a red

gash of mouth. The body was suddenly his own, trousers and all, sweat and all.

‘— God!’ his image echoed; and pawed at him with letching fingers and an

impossible strength.

Gasping, Parelli fought free, then launched one crushing blow straight into the

distorted face. A drooling scream of agony came from the thing. It turned and

ran, dissolving as it ran, fighting dissolution, uttering strange half~human cries.

And, struggling against horror, Parelli chased it, his knees weak and trembling

from sheer funk and incredulity. His arm reached out, and plucked at the

disintegrating trousers. A piece came away in his hand, a cold, slimy, writhing

lump like wet clay.

The feel of it was too much. His gorge rising in disgust, he faltered in his

stride. He heard the pilot shouting ahead:

‘What’s the matter?’

Parelli saw the open door of the storeroom. With a gasp, he dived in, came out

a moment later, wild-eyed, an ato-gun in his fingers. He saw the pilot, standing

with staring, horrid brown eyes, white face and rigid body, facing one of the

great windows.

‘There it is!’ the man cried.

A grey blob was dissolving into the edge of the glass, becoming glass. Parelli

rushed forward, ato-gun poised. A ripple went through the glass, darkening it;

and then, briefly, he caught a glimpse of a blob emerging on the other side of the

glass into the cold of space.

The officer stood gaping beside him; the two of them watched the grey,

shapeless mass creep out of sight along the side of the rushing freight liner.

Parelli sprang to life. ‘I got a piece of it!’ he gasped. ‘Flung it down on the

floor of the storeroom.’

It was Lieutenant Morton who found it. A tiny section of floor reared up, and

then grew amazingly large as it tried to expand into human shape. Parelli with

distorted, crazy eyes scooped it up in a shovel. It hissed; it nearly became a part

of the metal shovel, but couldn’t because Parelli was so close. Changing, fighting

for shape, it slobbered and hissed as Parelli staggered with it behind his superior

officer. He was laughing hysterically. ‘I touched it,’ he kept saying. ‘I touched

it.’

A large blister of metal on the outside of the space freighter stirred into

sluggish life, as the ship tore into the Earth’s atmosphere. The metal

walls of the freighter grew red, then white-hot, but the creature, unaffected,

continued its slow transformation into grey mass. Vague thought came to the

thing, realization that it was time to act.

Suddenly, it was floating free of the ship, falling slowly, heavily, as if

somehow the gravitation of Earth had no serious effect upon it. A minute

distortion in its electrons started it falling faster, as in some alien way it suddenly

became more allergic to gravity.

The Earth was green below; and in the dim distance a gorgeous and

tremendous city of spires and massive buildings glittered in the sinking Sun. The

thing slowed, and drifted like a falling leaf in a breeze towards the still-distant

Earth. It landed in an arroyo beside a bridge at the outskirts of the city.

A man walked over the bridge with quick, nervous steps. He would have been

amazed, if he had looked back, to see a replica of himself climb from the ditch to

the road, and start walking briskly after him.

Find the — greatest mathematician!

It was an hour later; and the pain of that throbbing thought was a dull,

continuous ache in the creature’s brain, as it walked along the crowded street.

There were other pains, too. The pain of fighting the pull of the pushing,

hurrying mass of humanity that swarmed by with unseeing eyes. But it was

easier to think, easier to hold form now that it had the brain and body of a man.

Find — mathematician!

‘Why?’ asked the man’s brain of the thing; and the whole body shook with

startled shock at such heretical questioning. The brown eyes darted in fright

from side to side, as if expecting instant and terrible doom. The face dissolved

a little in that brief moment of mental chaos, became successively the man

with the hooked nose who swung by, the tanned face of the tall woman who

was looking into the shop window, the — With a second gasp, the creature

pulled its mind back from fear, and

fought to readjust its face to that of the smooth-shaven young man who sauntered

idly in from a side street. The young man glanced at him, looked away, then

glanced back again startled. The creature echoed the thought in the man’s brain:

‘Who the devil is that? Where have I seen that fellow before?’

Half a dozen women in a group approached. The creature shrank aside as they

passed, its face twisted with the agony of the urge to become woman. Its brown

suit turned just the faintest shade of blue, the colour of the nearest dress, as it

momentarily lost control of its outer atoms. Its mind hummed with the chatter of

clothes and ‘My dear, didn’t she look dreadful in that awful hat?’

There was a solid cluster of giant buildings ahead. The thing shook its human

head consciously. So many buildings meant metal; and the forces that held metal

together would pull and pull at its human shape. The

creature comprehended the reason for this with the understanding of the slight

man in a dark suit who wandered by dully. The slight man was a clerk; the thing

caught his thought. He was thinking enviously of his boss who was Jim Brender,

of the financial firm of J.P. Brender & Co.

The overtones of that thought struck along the vibrating elements of the

creature. It turned abruptly and followed Lawrence Pearson, bookkeeper. If

people ever paid attention to other people on the street, they would have been

amazed after a moment to see two Lawrence Pearsons proceeding down the

street, one some fifty feet behind the other. The second Lawrence Pearson had

learned from the mind of the first that Jim Brender was a Harvard graduate in

mathematics, finance and political economy, the latest of a long line of financial

geniuses, thirty years old, and the head of the tremendously wealthyJ.P. Brender

& Co. Jim Brender had just married the most beautiful girl in the world; and this

was the reason for Lawrence Pearson’s discontent with life.

‘Here I’m thirty, too,’ his thoughts echoed in the creature’s mind, ‘and I’ve

got nothing. He’s got everything — everything while all I’ve got to look forward

to is the same old boarding-house till the end of time.’

It was getting dark as the two crossed the river. The creature quickened its

pace, striding forward with aggressive alertness that Lawrence Pearson in the

flesh could never have managed. Some glimmering of its terrible purpose

communicated itself in that last instant to the victim. The slight man turned; and

let out a faint squawk as those steel-muscled fingers jerked at his throat, a single,

fearful snap.

The creature’s brain went black with dizziness as the brain of Lawrence

Pearson crashed into the night of death. Gasping, whimpering, fighting

dissolution, it finally gained control of itself. With one sweeping movement, it

caught the dead body and flung it over the cement railing. There was a splash

below, then a sound of gurgling water.

The thing that was now Lawrence Pearson walked on hurriedly, then more

slowly till it came to a large, rambling brick house. It looked anxiously at the

number, suddenly uncertain if it had remembered rightly. Hesitantly, it opened

the door.

A streamer of yellow light splashed out, and laughter vibrated in the thing’s

sensitive ears. There was the same hum of many thoughts and many brains, as

there had been in the street. The creature fought against the inflow of thought

that threatened to crowd out the mind of Lawrence Pearson. A little dazed by the

struggle, it found itself in a large, bright hail, which looked through a door into a

room where a dozen people were sitting around a dining table.

‘Oh, it’s you, Mr Pearson,’ said the landlady from the head of the table. She

was a sharp-nosed, thin-mouthed woman at whom the creature stared with brief

intentness. From her mind, a thought had

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