Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (112 page)

The bulleting rush brought the howl up in pitch to a shrill scream as the yellow horde rocketed over the rooftops, the badge of a flaming sun showing on the underside of each stubby wing. Black, ominous objects excreted in pairs and waggled downward from sleek, streamlined fuselages, fell for a hushed age, buried themselves in the buildings beneath. The buildings promptly disrupted in a mad, swirling, melee of flame, fumes, bricks and splintered timbers.

For six hellish minutes Seattle shuddered and shook to an uninterrupted series of tremendous explosions. Then, like wraiths from the void, the yellow two thousand vanished into the stratosphere whence they had come.

Four hours later, while Seattle’s streets still sparkled with shards of glass and her living still moaned amid the rains, the invaders reappeared. Vancouver suffered this time. A dive, six minutes of inferno, then away. Slowly, lackadaisically, their condensing blast-streaks dissipated in the upper regions, while beneath lay pitted avenues, strewn business-blocks, crushed homes around which wandered silent, thin-lipped men, sobbing women, screaming children, some whole, some not. Here and there a voice shrieked and shrieked and shrieked like one of the damned doing his damnedest in a world of the damned. Here and there a sharp report brought quietness and peace to someone urgently in need of both. A little lead pill was welcome medicine to the partly disemboweled.

It was coincidentally with that evening’s similar and equally effective attack on San Francisco that the United States government officially identified the aggressors. The markings on the attackers’ machines should have been sufficient indication, but this evidence had seemed too unreasonable to credit. Besides, officialdom had not forgotten the days when it had been considered expedient to strike blows under any flag but one’s own.

Nevertheless, it was true. The enemy was the Asian Combine, with whom the United States was supposed to be on friendliest terms.

A despairing radio message from the Philippines confirmed the truth. Manila had fallen, the Combine’s war vessels, air machines and troops were swarming through the entire archipelago. The Filipino army no longer existed, and the United States Far East carrier fleet—caught on distant maneuvers—was being attacked even as it raced to the rescue.

America leaped to arms while its leaders met to consider this new problem so violently thrust upon them. Playboy financiers made ready to dodge the draft. End-of-the-world cultists took to the hills and waited for Gabriel to come fit them with halos. Among the rest, the mighty masses making ready for sacrifice, a fearful questioning went whispering around.

“Why didn’t they use atom bombs? Haven’t they got any—or are they wary because we’ve got more?”

With or without atom bombs, so savage and unprovoked an assault was Viton-inspired, and no doubt about it. But how had the luminosities managed to corrupt and inflame the normally slumbersome Asian Combine?

A fanatical pilot, shot down while attempting a crazy solo raid on Denver, revealed the secret. The time was ripe, he asserted, for his people to enter into their rightful heritage. Powers unseen were on their side, helping them, guiding them toward their divinely appointed destiny. The day of judgment had arrived and the meek were about to inherit the earth.

Have not our sages looked upon these little suns and recognized them as the spirits of our glorious ancestors, he asked with the certitude of one who poses the unanswerable question. Is not the Sun our ancient emblem? Are we not sons of the Sun, fated in death to become little suns ourselves? What is death but a mere transition from the army of abominable flesh to the celestial army of the shining spirit, where much esteem is to be gained in company with one’s honorable fathers and one’s exalted fathers’ fathers?

The path of the Asians is chosen, he yelled insanely, a path sweetened by the heavenly blossoms of the past as well as the unworthy weeds of the present. Kill me, kill me—that I may take my rightful place with ancestors who alone can lend grace to my filthy body!

Thus the mystic rambling of the Asian pilot. His entire continent was afire with this mad dream, cunningly conceived and expertly insinuated within their minds by powers that had mastered the Earth long before the era of Emperor Ming; powers that had the precise measure of the human cow, knew when and where to jerk its dangling udders. The notion of plausibly “explaining” themselves as ancestral spirits did full credit to the infernal ingenuity of the Vitons.

While the Western Hemisphere mobilized as speedily as it could in the face of constant and inexplicable handicaps, and while the Eastern pursued its holy war, the best brains of the Occidental world sought frantically for means by which to refute the insane idea placed in Asian minds, means to bring home to them the perilous truth.

In vain! Had not the Occidentals themselves first discovered the little suns and, therefore, could not dispute their existence? Onward, to victory!

The hordes of the spiritually inflamed poured out of their formally peaceful boundaries, their eyes aglow with ignorance instead of knowledge, their souls dedicated to a divine mission. Los Angeles shriveled in a sudden holocaust that fell upon it from the clouds. The first lone enemy flier to reach Chicago wrecked a skyscraper, minced a thousand bodies with its concrete and steel before a robot-interceptor blew him apart in mid-air.

By August the twentieth, no atom bombs, no radioactive gases, no bacteria had been used by either side. Each feared the retaliation which was the only effective defense. It was a bloody war and yet a phony war.

But Asian troops were in complete possession of the whole of California and the southern half of Oregon. On the first of September, the air-borne and submarine transports cut their increasing losses by reducing their flow across the Pacific. Contenting itself with consolidating and holding the immense foothold it had gained on the American continent, the Asian Combine turned its attention in the opposite direction.

Triumphant troops poured westward, adding maddened Viet Nam, Malaysian and Siamese armies to their strength. Two hundred ton tanks with four-feet treads rumbled through mountain passes, were manhandled when bogged by humanity in the mass. Mechanical moles gnawed broad paths through previously impassable jungles, bulldozers shifted and piled their litter, flamethrowers burned the piles. Overhead, stratplanes dotted the sky. In sheer weight of numbers lay the Asians’ strength. Theirs was the greatest weapon, the weapon possessed by every man . . . that of his own fertility.

Into India they swept, a monstrous conglomeration of men and machines. The ever-mystical and Viton-infested population received them with open arms and three hundred million Hindus became recruits at one swoop. They added themselves to the swarms of the Orient, thus making one quarter of the human race the poor dupes of an Elder People.

But not all bent the knee and bowed the head. With superb cunning the Vitons boosted the emotional crop by inciting the Moslems of Pakistan to oppose. Eighty millions of them stood with their back to Persia and barred the way. The rest of the Moslem world made ready behind them. Frenziedly, they died for Allah, and impartially Allah fattened the Vitons.

The brief breathing space permitted by pressure being transferred elsewhere enabled America to get its wind and recover from the initial shock. The press, once given exclusively to every aspect of the conflict, now saw fit to devote a little space to other matters, especially to Bjornsen’s experiments in the past, and news about Vitons’ activities both past and present.

Inspired by the resurrection of Beach’s collection of press clippings, several papers searched through their own morgues in an effort to discover cogent items which once had been ignored. There was a general hunt for bygone data, some conducting it in the hope of finding support for pet theories, others with the more serious intention of gaining worthwhile knowledge about the Vitons.

Holding the opinion that not all people could see identically the same range of electromagnetic frequencies,
The Herald- Tribune
asserted that some were endowed with wider sight than others. Wide-sighted persons, said
The Herald- Tribune,
had often caught vague, unrecognizable glimpses of Vitons many times in the past, and undoubtedly it was such fleeting sights that had given birth to and maintained various legends of banshees, ghosts, djinns and similar superstitions. This implied that spiritualists were Viton-dupes on an organized basis, but for once 
The Herald- Tribune
overlooked religious susceptibilities.

Only a year ago,
The Herald- Tribune
itself had reported strangely colored lights seen floating through the sky over Boston, Massachusetts. Reports of similar lights had been made at various times, and with astonishing frequency, as far back as they could trace. A singular feature of all reports was that they’d been received with a total lack of science’s much-vaunted curiosity: every expert had dismissed them as odd phenomena devoid of significance and unworthy of investigation.

For example: February, 1938—Colored light seen sailing high over Douglas, Isle of Man. November, 1937—Fall of a tremendous ball of light frightened inhabitants of Donaghadee, Ireland, other, smaller balls of light being seen floating in the air at the same time. May, 1937—Disastrous end of German transatlantic airship Hindenburg attributed to “St. Elmo’s fire.” The scientists tied a tag on this mysterious phenomena—and went back to their slumbers. July, 1937—Chatham, Massachusetts, station of the Radiomarine Corporation reported a message from the British freighter
Togimo,
relayed by the American vessel
Scanmail,
saying that mysterious colored lights had been sighted five hundred miles off Cape Race, Newfoundland.

New York Times,
January 8, 1937—Scientists, fed up counting sheep, produced a new theory to explain the blue lights and “similar electric phenomena” frequently seen near Khartoum, Sudan, and Kano, Nigeria.

Reynolds News
(Britain), May 29,1938—Nine men were injured by a mysterious something that dropped from the sky. One of them, a Mr. J. Hurn, described it as “like a ball of fire.”
Daily Telegraph,
February 8, 1938—Glowing spheres were reported to have been seen by many readers during an exceptional display of the Aurora Borealis, itself a rare sight in England.
Western Mail
(Wales), May, 1933— Balls of phosphorescence observed gliding over Lake Bala, mid-Wales.
Los Angeles Examiner,
September 7, 1935—Something described as a “freak lightning bolt” fell in bright sunshine at Centerville, Maryland, hurled a man from a chair and set fire to a table.

Liverpool Echo
(Britain), July 14, 1938—What witnesses described as “a big blue light” invaded Number Three Pit, Bold Colliery, St. Helens, Lancashire, contacted lurking gases and caused “a mystery explosion.” Blue lights that caused no blips on watching radar scopes caused air-raid sirens to be sounded in Northern Ireland, and fighter-interceptors roared upward, January 17, 1942. No bombs dropped, nothing was shot down. The news was suppressed in the papers and the Germans were suspected of some new devilment. Four months earlier Berlin’s guns had blasted at “navigation lights” when no planes were over.

Sydney Herald and Melbourne Leader
had made astonishingly lavish reports on glowing spheres, or fireballs, which for unknown reasons had infested Australia throughout, the year 1905, especially in the months of February and November. Eerie conventions had been held in the Antipodes. Veterans of World Slaughter had conferred, sky-high. One such phenomenon, seen by Adelaide Observatory, moved so slowly that it was watched for four minutes before it vanished.
Bulletin of the French Astronomical Society,
October, 1905—Strange, luminous phenomena seen lurking around Calabria, Italy. The same kind of phenomena, in the same area, had been reported in September, 1934, by
Il Popolo a’ltalia.

Someone found an ancient and tattered copy of
The Cruise of the Bacchante
in which King George the Fifth, then a young prince, described a strange string of floating lights, “as if of a phantom vessel all aglow,” seen by twelve members of the 
Bacchante's
crew at four o’clock in the morning of June 11, 1881.

Daily Express
(Britain), February 15, 1923—Brilliant luminosities were seen in Warwickshire, England.
Literary Digest,
November 17, 1925—Similar luminosities seen in North Carolina.
Field,
January 11, 1908—Luminous “things” in Norfolk, England.
Dagbladet,
January 17, 1936—Will-o’-the-wisps in southern Denmark, hundreds of them. Scientists sought onion blight at twenty thousand feet, but not one pursued a will-o’-the-wisp. It wasn’t their fault; like all saints and sinners, they went where Viton-inspired to go.
Peterborough Advertiser
(Britain), March 27, 1909—Queer lights in the sky over Peterborough. Over following dates, the
Daily Mail
confirmed this report, and added others from places farther away.

Something emotional might have been happening in Peterborough in March 1909, but no paper published anything correlative as between human and Viton activities . . . though there are human functions which are not news.

Daily Mail
(Britain), December 24, 1912, ran an article by the Earl of Erne describing brilliant luminosities that had appeared “for seven or eight years” near Lough Erne, Ireland. The things that started Belfast’s sirens wailing, in 1942, soared from the direction of Lough Erne, Ireland.
Berliner Tageblatt,
March 21, 1880— “A veritable horde,” of floating luminosities were seen at Kattenau, Germany. In the same century, glowing spheres were reported from dozens of places as far apart as French Senegal, the Florida Everglades, Carolina, Malaysia, Australia, Italy and England.

Journalistically enjoying itself,
The Herald-Tribune
went to town by issuing a special edition containing twenty thousand references to luminosities and glowing spheres culled from four hundred issues of
Doubt.
For good measure, it added a parallel-beam photographed copy of Webb’s jottings, publishing them with the editorial opinion that this scientist had been working along the right lines prior to his death. In the light of recently acquired knowledge, who could say how many schizophrenics were really unbalanced, how many were the victims of Viton meddling, or how many were normal people fortuitously endowed with abnormal vision?