MONSTER OF THE ASTEROID

By RAY CUMMINGS

They might gamble, but win or lose the take was death for these two new slaves of the Master of that pitted Devil's Isle of outer space.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The amazing thing began that summer evening of 1965 while I was sitting with Dora Franklin on the third ramp at the crossroads, listening to the outdoor public-music. We were on the fringe of the crowd in a secluded little place where there was a small bench under the overhanging branches of a tree. It was a romantic scene with the audience seated in crescent rows under the strings of colored tubelights. My arm went around Dora, with her head against my shoulder as we listened to the soft exotic music.

Around us, countless other couples were also listening in silence.

A pair of young lovers. I realize now that was doubtless what first attracted the furtive man to us. How long he and his weird little companion had been watching us I have no idea. I was aware of the two dark shapes in the shadow under a nearby tree—a tall blob and a short one. Then the tall one came forward; the short one lurked in the deep shadows a few feet away.

"The music is very pretty?" a guttural voice said. It was a man in a long, dull-black cloak. His black peaked hat had a fringe almost in woman fashion which dangled past his ears and shrouded his face so that I could hardly see it. With his mumbled greeting he sidled up and dropped to the bench beside me, peering past me at Dora as though he were infinitely more interested in her rather than me which was not in itself a surprising fact.

"Yes," I agreed. Dora and I sat up and shifted reluctantly to give him room. The little figure ten feet away, stood impassive. I recall that I stared with a sudden startled astonishment; and then with a vague shudder stabbing into me. The silent shape was no more than five feet tall, so that with a quick glance here in the dimness one might have thought it a half grown boy. A man's long black overcoat fell from the top of its head almost to the ground, as though a boy had the overcoat hung on his head, with all of him shrouded inside it. But the top of the overcoat was limp, sagging. I had the sudden crazy thought that the thing was headless—an overcoat hanging on wide square shoulders without any head above them!

I shuddered involuntarily.

"You and the young lady like music?" the man beside me was saying. "It is romantic. You are engaged maybe? Or honeymooning?" His voice was almost too solicitous.

Between the shrouding fringe of his hat the colored tubelight sheen gleamed on his partly shrouded face. It was pallid, hawk-nosed, with burning dark eyes that still were staring with an almost rude intentness at Dora.

"No," I said. I moved with an impulse to stand up and take Dora to another bench, but the man's hand reached out and touched my arm.

"Just a minute," he said in his limping guttural voice. "My name is Bragg. What is yours?"

"Ralston," I said stiffly. "Thomas Ralston."

I could see that Dora now was staring at that little lurking figure. She, too, sensed that there was something gruesome about it.

The man beside me was speaking more swiftly now in a low furtive flow of mumbled words. "I can interest young lovers like you. I have a place, just for honey-mooners. A little colony of lovers. A place to live, without cost, and no work. You would like it. A very beautiful place."

"We're not married," I said. Was this weird fellow a solicitor for some rich man's altruistic colony? I had heard of such places. In my father's day there was a big one on an island off the Florida coast, and another in the South Seas—colonies where newlyweds went to create an earthly paradise, which, of course, wouldn't work out.

"But you will be married?" the man insisted. "It is a very beautiful place. There is no place like it. I am sure Miss Franklin will—"

I tensed, jumped to my feet, and Dora stood up beside me. Miss Franklin! But I hadn't named her. This fellow knew us then. At our movement, it seemed that the little figure nearby was edging closer. I am a pretty husky, six foot fellow. As I stood up, the man on the bench rose also, with his hand still on my arm. He was about my height. I flung off his light hold.

"Not interested," I said. "Come on, Dora."

We started to go.

Was that damnable, headless little thing about to pounce on me? There were five hundred people here within sound of a shout, but despite it a thrill of fear darted through me. I'm not exactly afraid of anything human; but somehow this seemed different—as though that square, box-like, wide-shouldered little thing were something gruesome—something you couldn't fight with your fists. It was standing sidewise to us now, in a deeper shadow than before and, even more than before, I got the impression that the ominous-looking little figure was headless.

"But won't you at least come and see what I have to show you?" the man at my side was insisting. "It is not very far—"

"Thanks, no." I turned away with an arm around Dora. And suddenly the man was slinking off with the wide-shouldered little thing following after him on stiff little legs. In a moment they were gone.

That was the beginning. The details of me are not important here; I need only say that I was twenty-four that summer. Dora and I were engaged to be married. Both of us were orphans. She was wealthy; I was not, so that I did not want to marry until I had made a success of an invention on which I was working—a ray-weapon with which I hoped, not to make war more deadly, but to make war impossible. It was a non-killing, paralyzing vibration. In theory, if I could project it any great distance—a vibration on speeding form—then with it whole armies would be stricken down, rendered helpless.

But I had not progressed that far as yet. I was living in Dora's home, working in a small laboratory with which it was equipped. Just this week I had completed a miniature projector. With tests upon animals it seemed to be effective at some fifty feet....

Dora's home was some three miles out in the country from the Crossroads Municipal Village where we had gone to hear the music. We took her little air-roller which was parked nearby. We did not fly it for such a short distance, merely rolled it out on the State Road. Dora was frightened, but I tried to shrug away the mysterious incident.

"That—that little thing that stood watching us," she said. "Oh Tom—"

"Looked like a boy with an overcoat over his head," I told her. "Forget it, Dora."