Polarian-Denebian War 3: The Man From Outer Space Read online

  “You’re a funny guy,” Kariven said. “You don’t call a lighter a lighter, you say ‘ingest a beverage’ instead of get a drink and… you murder people just by looking at them!”

  A smile—cynical or simply amused?—crossed the stranger’s lips. “And yet I didn’t ‘murder’ the federal agent who was blocking our way out of the establishment… sorry, the Mocambo. I just suggested to him mentally to let us leave.”

  “So, essentially, you admit to having killed those three harmless dancers?” Kariven slammed on the brakes in front of the South Spring office of the FBI. “Get out!” he ordered, grabbing him roughly by the arm. He let go right away. An unpleasant tingling shook his body from head to toe.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Mr. Kariven, just kept driving until we get around five miles from Upland7. I praise your honesty but I assure you that you did nothing wrong by sneaking out of the Mocambo with me. I recognize that I look like an… unusual murderer because it was I, in fact, who killed those three… ‘harmless dancers’ as you say. But don’t you also say ‘all’s fair in love and war’?”

  Kariven frowned and started driving again, taking Colorado Boulevard to get out of Pasadena8. “But we’re not at war!” the anthropologist complained with a shrug. “Whatever you think, I’m now an accomplice of your triple murder since I’m helping you escape.”

  The stranger shook his head. “We are at war but that’s another story. You, however, Mr. Kariven, are not my accomplice. You’re going to become my ally… Touch my arm, my friend. Touch it,” he insisted before his surprised passenger.

  Kariven took one hand off the wheel and touched the sleeve of the eerie murderer’s tuxedo. He did not feel the awful tingling that he had felt two times before.

  “Well? No reaction?”

  “None,” Kariven wondered what this was all about.

  “Do it again now.”

  “Damn!” the anthropologist cursed as he pulled back his hand.

  “Have you ever heard of ‘murderers’ who can kill simply by concentrating their will? Who can produce electric currents anywhere from a few volts to over 500 volts and electrocute a human?”

  “You… You have this power?” Kariven stuttered.

  “We have this power and many others besides… which is how I chose you.”

  “We’re five or six miles from Upland,” Kariven stopped the Kaiser on the shoulder of the road. Suddenly realizing the significance of the stranger’s declaration the explorer shuddered. “Chose me? Why?”

  “Because you bear the Mark, Mr. Kariven… I saw it on your hands.”

  “But I didn’t… What mark? I don’t remember you examining my hands.”

  “I didn’t see it with my eyes but with my mind. You put this phenomenon among the extra-sensory perceptions and call it ‘remote viewing’ or ‘supravision,’ right?”

  “Hmm… sure,” Kariven agreed. “But what mark are you talking about?”

  “Open your hands.”

  The anthropologist obeyed and held out his hands, palms upward, in the light of the dashboard.

  “There’s the Mark you have, very prominent,” the stranger pointed to a particular mark formed by a no less particular arrangement of the lines on his hand. “Don’t think that I’m playing fortune teller. This palm reading pseudo-science—Chiromancy—only makes charlatans rich at the expense of the gullible who believe them. No, Mr. Kariven, this has nothing to do with the trickery of any of those dream peddlers. “You have the Mark. Your friends Dormoy and Angelvin also, as well as a few researchers who were talking tonight at the meeting of people interested in what you call Flying Saucers.”

  “OK, I’ve got the Mark,” Kariven gave in, skeptical. “And you deduce what from it?”

  “That you belong to the New Race. To the race being born that will gradually supplant the men of the Ancient Era before the Atomic Age here on Earth. Scientists, researchers, artists, writers, engineers and even a few so-called Average Americans and Average Frenchmen… also have the Mark… without even knowing the profound meaning of it. You belong to the Future Race, Mr. Kariven, the race that one day will wipe out the stupidities of this world, overturn the present dogmas, destroy the inanities and injustices of today in order to establish the Golden Age of Civilization that once preceded yours in the long-forgotten past.

  “Think about it, Mr. Kariven. Don’t you feel like a stranger in this world, in your world? Without sounding like a cliché, don’t you feel like a stranger to the pettiness that poisons existence? Are you satisfied with Life, Society, people and things as they are and not as they should be? Don’t you aspire to something better, more beautiful, more sublime than the swamp where Humanity is floundering and this in spite of the semblance of evolution and technology it has reached today?”

  Kariven looked at his passenger for a long time before responding. “Yes, naturally. You’re saying, in fact, what many others and I have always thought. But even if all men and women bearing the Mark get together, how could they change the world? A social revolution on a planetary scale is not a reform that proceeds inevitably from a common decree. ‘Moral progress’ does not go hand in hand with technical progress, which always precedes it. These asymmetrical progressions—separated by a gulf of trial and error—are, moreover, the cause of slow human evolution. A war advances technology by forcing peoples to search in all fields for a technical way to defeat the enemy. But we can’t want a third world war…”

  The bronze-skinned man stared at him and spoke slowly and carefully. “The war has been going on, Mr. Kariven, for centuries. You saw a little incidence of it at the Mocambo.”

  “The three dancers in costumes?”

  The man nodded. “That… man and those two women I killed were not dancers. Nor were they men and women… in the sense you would understand it.”

  Kariven raised an eyebrow and stammered out, “They… you mean they were… not human?”

  “Exactly. What you thought was green paint was their real skin. And what you believed to be a costume was nothing other than their usual clothes.”

  “What! There exists, on Earth, a parallel humanity whose specimens have that awful, scaly skin like a reptile?”

  The stranger shook his head, “Not on Earth, Mr. Kariven. I told you that these beings are not human… They come from another world!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Kariven took a moment to grasp the astonishing magnitude of this revelation. He took a nervous drag off his cigarette, walked the length of the car and looked up into the starry night sky, thoughtfully.

  “These beings with green, scaly skin,” his odd companion continued, “who look more or less like Earthlings, have come to your planet to study you. They walk around briefly only at night and don’t mingle with humans except in the places called ‘costume parties,’ where they can pass for disguised dancers. During the day they spy on you from the skies on board their spaceships.”

  “At costume parties? That’s unbelievable!”

  “Perhaps, but it’s the absolute truth. Twice already I’ve been able to eliminate these extra-terrestrial spies. Tonight, however, it wasn’t done discreetly. Their three wills together were focused on mine. I couldn’t make them leave the Mocambo. Outside it would have been easy to guide them to a deserted place… and eliminate them completely without leaving the slightest trace. But their psychic barriers were fused and I had to strike them down right there and it wasn’t easy, as you saw by my tense expression, warped by the concentration of my supra-normal abilities.”

  “Where do they come from? And why are they watching us?”

  “These green beings—the Ptopans—come from the planet Ptopan in the Omink solar system. For you Earthlings Omink is not a solar system. Your rudimentary astronomical instruments cannot detect the seven planets revolving around the star you call Deneb.”

  “Deneb!” the anthropologist exclaimed. “The Alpha star in the constellation Cygnus! But this sun is 400 light years9 away from us!”

 
“Indeed,” the stranger confirmed unemotionally. “These Ptopans—or Denebians if you prefer—are trying to get to know more about you… so they can take over your planet later. Earth, Mars and Venus are targeted. Your three worlds are in what the Denebians think is their zone of influence, a zone of space that they intend to colonize.”

  Kariven flicked his cigarette butt into the grassy ditch, then after lighting another he asked, “Who are you, then, that you know all this? If your story isn’t a bunch of hogwash.”

  His face set in all seriousness, the other responded slowly, “My name is Zimko. I come from the planet Kodha, a world almost exactly like yours but that revolves around the Pole Star.”

  Kariven’s eyes opened wide. “You… You’re a Man from Outer Space too?”

  Zimko the Polarian smiled, “Man from Outer Space? Why, yes.”

  “But how could a being like you, coming from a planet of the Pole Star—a sun 300 trillion miles away—choose me and not someone else… and why me?”

  “The history of our civilization has kept a detailed account of your fabulous adventures when you traveled into the past10.”

  “You’re an Instructor, a Dragon of Wisdom11!” the anthropologist exclaimed excitedly. “So, your race has always existed?”

  “It is indestructible, my friend. It evolves but doesn’t disappear. Hundreds of millions of years ago, we spread around the Universe and instructed the worlds with races of thinking beings. Our mission is to educate the primitive species or to guide the advance races on new paths to lead them away from the errors and dangers that threaten them. The Earth and your solar system in general are in danger right now. The Earthlings suspect nothing because they’re busy with their usual petty problems: the cold war and quarrelsome demands of the international assemblies that keep them from opening their eyes.

  “Those who are on the path of truth are ridiculed and scorned. Didn’t you notice the stupid comments by the skeptics and deniers at the conference about flying saucers tonight? The investigators from various research organizations who spoke, professed the existence of UFOs as extraterrestrial vehicles and weren’t booed off stage, of course, but like me you felt the audience’s lack of belief in what they said.”

  “So, flying saucers represent a threat to our world?”

  Zimko nodded, “For Mars and Venus as well because these two planets each have their own civilization, different from yours, but still targets for the Denebians.”

  “Except in rare cases, however, flying saucers don’t appear to be hostile to Earthlings. They just fly over a city or an area, sometimes exciting the population but doing nothing that could be qualified as an attack. There was indeed that jet of Captain Mantell that was apparently shot down by a flying saucer, as well as four or five fighter jets and bombers that, it might seem, suffered the same fate. However, there’s no positive proof that these aerial disasters were actually caused by flying saucers.”

  “You have to make a distinction, Kariven, because there are really two different kinds of spaceships that you call flying saucers. Some are hostile and spy on you intensively. These are the Denebians who struck down several of your fighter jets and bombers. The other saucers soaring through Earth’s skies are totally peaceful: they are our spaceships. You Earthlings can’t tell the difference between the two similar ships. And this is exactly what will become the most dangerous thing for you… because the Denebians are getting ready to invade the Earth.”

  “But we have to alert the authorities!” the scientist exploded.

  “No, my friend,” Zimko shook his head, “the time has not yet come. Besides, it’s not strictly necessary since the Special Branch of the Air Technical Intelligence, which investigates the apparitions of flying saucers, has finally faced the facts. The federal agents in this unit have understood that the wild explanations of these phenomena don’t stand up to systematic study. Weather balloons, meteors, collective hallucinations, lightning balls, temperature inversions and ‘secret weapons’ are nonsense that satisfies the ignorant and the usual skeptics who are blinded by an outdated anthropocentrism… or simple hypocrisy.

  “The Pentagon knows that flying saucers come from another world. An accident in 1952 led them to discover the truth. In the summer of 1952 your scientists were experimenting on a Super V2 in the New Mexico desert. Over 150 miles high, at full speed, the rocket smashed into a flying saucer going almost 5,000 miles an hour. There was a huge explosion—inaudible at that altitude—and the two machines crashed to the ground, demolished and unrecognizable. The technicians at White Sands had seen the blinding flash and the radar men observed the disaster on their radarscope: the V2, a bright spot, hit another bright spot, but bigger, i.e. a flying saucer.

  “Among the mangled debris spread over miles of land your scientists found two mutilated corpses, two horrible corpses with green, scaly skin. Nevertheless, a partial reconstruction allowed them to notice their similar morphology to Earthlings. But these green monsters were not Earthlings! The Pentagon reacted. Security measures were taken and strict silence was imposed. Nobody talked about the ‘incident’ but special agents of the ATIC were doubly vigilant in watching the deserts and isolated areas, setting up 75 observation bases around the world for detecting flying saucers12, and in the end exchanging information all the time with England and Canada about these mysterious machines. In a word, it was on general alert… but the public knew nothing about it and still knows nothing. Only the independent investigative organizations, long before this incident, had become convinced that flying saucers were not the work of men.”

  “But why this insistent silence?” the anthropologist spoke up. “It makes no sense to keep the people ignorant of an imminent danger.”

  “The higher authorities fear a general panic. Imagine the global effect of an announcement of this sensational news if the President of the USA were to sound the alarm? First of all they would have to prepare the public gradually and prudently. They’d have to lead it slowly into accepting the possibility of the existence of intelligent beings on other planets. America, where science fiction is popular, is already inclined to admit this but Europe, the old country, denies these hypotheses that it considers pure fiction.

  “When the Earthlings become truly aware of the ships watching them, it will be necessary to propose, by degrees, that other planetary races in the Universe might be war-hungry, might be targeting this solar system. Likewise they’ll have to understand that there are also races like them, motivated by good intentions toward them and liable to come to Earth some day. This would be our race, Kariven, the Instructors from the Pole Star.

  “Therefore, we need allies on this globe. Men like you will be needed by us to save humanity. We prefer to choose first the Earthlings bearing The Mark rather than getting directly in touch with the governments… And you can understand why…”

  Kariven, stunned by these revelations, hazarded, “Are you referring to the conflict between the East and West?”

  “That’s right. The world is divided into two camps. If we Polarians made a pact to help the United States, for example, the Russians would likely accuse us of provocation, of partiality. The opposite is also true. But by only contacting scientists and men of good will who we can trust, men bearing The Mark, in all the countries of the world, in America as well as in Europe and Russia, we have a better chance of getting their governments’ cooperation when we reveal ourselves officially. For, the day will come when we will contact all the governments on Earth and appoint all the different men we’ve made pacts with for man’s security. We know that we can trust certain investigators working for the many Commissions in every country studying the still mysterious—for humans—phenomenon of flying saucers.”

  “You told me just now that the war’s been going on for centuries?”

  “On the cosmic level, yes. The Denebians are striving by any means possible to conquer the defenseless worlds. Yours is one of them. Because your guns and jet fighters, your ships and atomic warh
eads won’t be much help against the Denebian flying discs capable of unimaginable speeds. We’ve been fighting for centuries against these space pirates. Our two races hold thousands of planets and solar systems in the Galaxy. But whereas we join with the primitive or under-evolved peoples to help them to develop, the Denebians enslave them by force.”

  Kariven was thoughtful for a long while before deciding to speak. “What you say disturbs me, Zimko, but I wonder why our detection devices have never spotted the slightest trace of a frequency or the faintest radio or video signal coming from the flying saucers. Because you’d have to communicate between ships, right?”

  “Between ships in the same squadron as well as with our astrobases—the ‘flying cigars’ to you—or even with our planetary bases, we use two means of communication that are both absolutely impossible for you to capture or intercept. Or else we use a viewer that broadcasts on frequencies unknown on Earth, meaning they’re based on the gravity/electromagnetic principle, a variation of the energy we use for propulsion, or else we just communicate by mental waves, a kind of super-telepathy… That’s how we learned five or six languages on Earth, Mars and Venus.”

  “But how can you run around in the open on our planet? Aren’t you afraid of being rounded up some day? That would force you to…”

  “Look at this,” Zimko broke in, holding out a passport and ID with the name Ronald Allington, American citizen, traveling salesman, resident of Chandler, a small town in Arizona.

  “And this is… fake?”

  “My papers are genuine,” Zimko informed him. “The civil records in Chandler, Arizona really do have all the information printed on this ID and passport…” He waved the two under his chin casually and smiled slyly, “Hypnosis opens all doors to us. In the presence of a Polarian the civil servants are as gentle as lambs and take pleasure in drawing up any documents we ask for. One simple mental suggestion is enough for a fussy, nitpicking bureaucrat to become our ally and we get a genuine, middle class Earthling past.”