SIX FRIGHTENED MEN

By Randall Garrett

It was an unexplored planet and anything could happen—yet none of us expected to face a creature impossible to fight, let alone kill....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy June 1957 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

You put your life on the line when you join the Exploratory Wing of the Space Corps. They tell you that when you sign up. The way they told it to me, it went like this:

"You'll be out there on alien worlds where no human being has ever set foot—worlds which may or may not have been inhabited by hostile alien creatures. You take your life in your hands every time you make a planetfall out there. Still interested?"

"That's old stuff," I said. "You don't think I'd join up if it was an old ladies' tea party, do you?"

Which was how I happened to be crouching behind a fantastically-sculptured spiralling rock out on the yellow wind-blasted desert of Pollux V, huddling there with the fierce sweep of sand against my faceplate, looking at the monster that barred my path.

The thing was at least sixty feet tall and all eyes and mouth. The mouth yawned, showing yellow daggers a foot long. As for the eyes—well, they burned with the cold luminosity of an intelligent and inimical being.

I didn't know what the thing was. One minute I'd been examining an interesting rock formation, a second later I was hiding behind it, watching the ravening thing that had appeared out of nowhere.

Other members of the expedition were sprawled here and there on the desert too. I could see Max Feld, our paleontologist, curled in a tight plump little ball under an outcropping of weathered limestone, and there was Roy Laurence, the biochemist, flat on his stomach peering at the thing incredulously.

Back behind me were three others—Don Forster, Leo Mickens, Clyde Hamner. That made six. The two remaining members of the team, Medic Howard Graves and Anthropologist Lyman Donaldson, were back at the ship. We always left a shift of two back there in case of trouble.

And trouble had sure struck now!

I saw Laurence swivel in the sand and stare goggle-eyed at me. His lips moved, and over my helmet radio came: "What the hell is it, Phil? Where'd it come from?"

I'm a morphologist; I'm supposed to know things like that. But I could only shrug and say, "A thing like that could only come from the pits of Hell. I've never seen anything like it before."

I hadn't. We had been fine-combing the broad windswept plain in front of the ship, looking for archaeological remains. The planet was uninhabited, or so we thought after running a quick check—but Max Feld had discovered relics of a dead race, an exciting find, and we had all fanned out to help him in his search for more.

We had been heading toward a flat mountain wall that rose abruptly from the desert about a mile from the ship when—from nowhere—the creature appeared, towering above the desert like a dinosaur dropped from the skies.

But no dinosaur ever looked like this one. Sixty feet high, its skin a loathsome gray-green quivering jelly with thick hairy cilia projecting, its vat-like mouth gaping toothily, its cold, hard eyes flicking back and forth, searching for us as we flattened ourselves out of sight, it was an utterly ghastly being. Evolution had gone wild on this planet.

And we were cut off from the ship, hemmed between the mountain wall and the creature.

"What are we going to do?" Clyde Hamner whispered. "He's going to smell us out pretty soon."

As he spoke, the monster began to move—flowing, it seemed, like some vast protozoan.

"I'm going to blast it," I said, as it oozed closer to us. Cautiously, I lifted my Webley from its shoulder-holster, turned the beam to Full, began to squeeze the firing-stud.

A bright white-hot beam of force leaped from the nozzle and speared the creature's eye. It howled, seemed to leap in the air, thrashed around—

And changed.

It became a boiling mass of amorphous protoplasm, writhing and billowing on the sand. I fired again into the mass—again and again, and the alien creature continued to shift its form. I was cold with horror, but I kept up the firing. My bolts seemed to be absorbed into the fluid mass without effect, but at least I had halted the oozing advance.

It reached one final hideous stage: a giant mouth, opening before us like the gate of hell. A mouth, nothing more. It yawned in front of us—

Then advanced.

I felt noxious vapors shoot out, bathing my thermosuit, and I saw a gargling larynx feet across. I fired, again and again, into the monster's throat.

My companions were firing too. We seemed to have halted the thing's advance. It paused some twenty feet from us, a wall of mouth.

Then it disappeared.