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

  A suspicion started tickling Kariven. “But… money? How do you get the money you need for your life here?”

  The Man from Outer Space shook his head in amusement. “No, Kariven, rest assured. We never use hypnosis except for perfectly honest deals that don’t hurt anyone else. We’ve never robbed a cent or counterfeited the currency on the worlds we visit. On your planet gold is king. We bring gold with us and just sell it to jewelers or anyone else willing to make the transaction. Hypnotic suggestions are helpful to smooth out any difficulties or reticence from the buyer of our precious metals.

  “On Venus, for example, gold has no value. The natives, you see, are not evolved enough to extract it from the ground where it lies in abundance in its native state. The Venusians, however, take us for Gods. Therefore, we have no need to worry about cheating them and we’ve established a permanent observation base there. The same goes for Mars where, on the contrary, the civilization is on its decline.”

  “Your worlds must be chock full of gold mines and other precious metals.”

  “Yes and no, Kariven, but it doesn’t matter. It’s been hundreds of millions of years since we’ve abandoned minerals, both common and precious. Atomic transmutation is a lot simpler, less tiring and less troublesome in the long run.” He smiled, “Your experts in the chemistry of metals will look pretty funny on the day they analyze the gold we sell to live on your planet.”

  “Isn’t it good quality?”

  “On the contrary, it’s 100% pure! Your 24 carats is only a poor alloy compared to our gold from transmutation. But we don’t and never will flood the global market with this gold. We just sell enough to satisfy our needs during our missions. A day will come, my friend…”

  In the middle of his sentence the Man from Outer Space howled out inhumanly and collapsed with his hands clutching his head. He writhed on the ground, groaning. He was panting and croaking. In a spasm he flipped over on his back, did the crab—with only his head and feet touching the ground—then fell over on his side, grinding his jaws, covered in sweat.

  In a panic Kariven thought that the man was having an epileptic fit but soon he realized that it was something else.

  A weird rustling, a kind of swish like the sound of silk gently fluttering, made him look up. 300 feet above him a metal disc, glowing dimly, was slowly swaying overhead. Behind the lighted windows in its upper dome there were shadows milling around.

  “A flying saucer!” the anthropologist moaned from his constricted throat.

  What to do? What inexplicable seizure brought down the Polarian? Was it purely “natural” or really something caused by this gray disc that was now coming slowly down? And why didn’t he, a weak Earthling compared to the Polarian, experience the same thing?

  He leaned over Zimko who was shaking uncontrollably, groaning continually but more and more weakly. He clenched his teeth, opened his eyes and seemed to want to make Kariven understand something. His right hand went slowly, with great difficulty, down to his jacket but it fell motionless on the ground.

  The mysterious rustling of the flying ship grew louder the closer it got.

  All of a sudden the anthropologist understood. The Man from Outer Space wanted to get something from of his jacket or his vest. He quickly felt Zimko’s chest and touched a hard, bulky object under his armpit between his tuxedo jacket and his vest. He grabbed it and brought out a flat metal cone furnished with a kind of handle or butt. The explorer held it carefully, knowing that he was wielding a weapon but trying to figure out how it worked. And everything happened quickly, without him being aware of it.

  From the cone shot out a bluish, crackling beam of light that rattled the Frenchman’s arm violently. Then there was an extraordinary, blinding flash. Kariven’s arm was thrown back and the weapon flew in the air, still spraying its bluish radiation before it fell whistling onto the ground. The dazzling beam extinguished.

  The explorer found himself sitting in the grass, dazed, in the middle of the ditch on the side of the road. Instinctively he looked up, fearing a counter-attack by the flying saucer. It was gone. He stood up and approached Zimko who was starting to move.

  “Lord be praised!” Kariven gasped. “You’re OK.”

  The Polarian stood up and combed his hand through his hair. He winced, “Thanks to you, Kariven. But I really didn’t think you’d understand my gesture in time. My mental telepathy faculties were blocked. There was no way I could suggest to you… It was awful! But you found my weapon and… figured out—was it good?—how to use it. Good work,” he added, looking around.

  Somewhat taken aback, Kariven furrowed his brow and looked to the right and left also. His Kaiser was sliced diagonally and only half of it remained, from the right headlight to the left rear fender. A blowtorch could not have done a better job. The other half of the car had disappeared along with the palm tree behind it.

  “Don’t worry, Kariven, I’ll replace it,” Zimko promised, giving him a friendly poke.

  “But… what happened to my Kaiser? And the palm tree is severed at the base…”

  “You must not have had a steady hand on the cone. After disintegrating the flying saucer, the weapon must have got away from you and… wiped out whatever was in its way, that’s all.”

  “That’s all,” Kariven echoed in a daze. “You… you mean that I’m the one who made half my car disappear?”

  “And the palm tree and the spaceship that was shooting its psychic-lock waves at me. You could just as easily have disintegrated me,” the Polarian joked. “Look at the fanned out groove in the ground and all the plants destroyed. One side of it passed just three feet away from where I was struck down by the waves that were trying to break my will in order to destroy my cerebral neurons. Three feet to the left and I’d be back in space as radiation!”

  Kariven wiped his forehead while Zimko went to pick up his formidable weapon.

  “So, we were attacked and this simple… pistol was enough to destroy a spaceship and car? That’s incredible.”

  “I was attacked, not you. The Denebians had adjusted their psychic-lock waves to the average Polarian wavelength. The lethal beam went right through you without causing any damage to your brain cells. When I was talking with you I had automatically let down my psychic-repellant barrier that I usually surround myself with. A Denebian spaceship patrolling this area detected me right away. A minor and rather common episode in this cosmic war that we’ve been fighting for centuries.

  “Isn’t it strange to think that no Earthling has an inkling of this secret battle—pitting two extraterrestrial races against each other—that happens every day on their planet? How many sudden, inexplicable, mysterious deaths would become so extraordinary if they knew that the corpses didn’t belong to earth-bound men?

  “The Denebians, for the moment, won’t risk staying on your planet. They are perfectly aware that their green, scaly skin would give them away in a split second. So, they’re forced to fight with the Polarians while staying on their spaceships. It’s very rare for these reptilian lookalikes to take a chance on the ground. With the costume party the ones I killed tonight thought they were safe. We Polarians have the invaluable advantage of passing unnoticed among men. Our bronze skin can easily be mistaken for a natural tan. I’ve even been with Earthlings who are darker than me. But I wasn’t fooled because I didn’t detect anything in them like our telepathic manifestations. Our paranormal powers and our extra-sensory perception are unmistakable.”

  “So, you figure on staying on Earth?” Kariven asked, still troubled by their adventure.

  “That is uncertain and depends on the needs of the moment. The first phase of my mission to the USA is finished. I’ll be heading off to Europe and then to Asia where another mission is awaiting me. I’ll be there to see the Polarians who are looking for men and women with The Mark.”

  Kariven automatically stared at the palms of his hands. “I feel like I’m living in some crazy novel. But let’s stop dreaming. How are you going to get ba
ck to Los Angeles? I don’t think my half-car will make it there. Furthermore, it’s been more than two hours since we’ve been on this desert highway without seeing a single car pass by. In fact, why did you bring me out here to this deserted spot?”

  The Polarian smiled. “For this…” He concentrated hard for ten seconds, his eyes staring off into space, then continued, “In a minute we’ll leave for Los Angeles. Look…”

  A bright dot appeared in the starry sky, a moving dot, coming down at high speed. It was soon visible as a pale green disc, turning progressively to phosphorescent green. Without a sound, without even a whistle, the green disc slowly dimmed its lights the closer it got to the ground.

  The ship was perfectly circular, around 50 feet in diameter. Under its lower part, in the middle, a big window emitted a pale blue light. Three huge spheres encircled this ventral window. On its axis the disc itself was topped by a cylindrical cockpit surrounded by windows and with a round dome on top. Each of the “windows” reflected a yellow, iridescent glow on the upper side of the disc. On the top of the dome a very bright globe lit up the surrounding countryside.

  The ship from another world landed or rather hovered silently and perfectly still about one foot off the ground. A strange, very faint, phosphorescent green haloed it.

  “Come on!” Zimko ordered.

  Kariven could not believe his eyes. He obeyed in spite of everything and followed the Polarian who was walking toward the flying saucer parked 100 yards from them. He had barely covered half the distance when the headlights of a car swept over the road on the horizon.

  “Hurry up, Kariven, a car!”

  The two men ran as fast as they could. A big oval hatch opened under the disc and an inclined plank came down. Zimko and Kariven, side by side, ran up. The hatch closed behind them and without even a shudder the ship took off.

  “Come on and look out the window,” Zimko suggested, dragging his flabbergasted friend down a metal corridor with luminescent walls.

  They came into a spacious, circular cabin. In the middle of the floor, which looked like aluminum, was a shiny cylinder. About four feet high with a huge convex window on top made of some transparent material.

  Kariven imitated Zimko and leaned on the red metal ramp overlooking the axial window through which he saw the night-shrouded countryside. On the highway, 1,500 feet below them, the car was swerving off the road to park near the remains of the Kaiser. The car doors swung open and two couples jumped out, waving their arms. They looked immediately up into the sky, pointing at where the flying saucer was hovering.

  Zimko, amused by their surprise, pressed a bunch of buttons on the edge of the window. The image of the four people zoomed in before the eyes of the two observers, showing four faces frozen in surprise, mouths agape and eyelids fluttering.

  What is that? One of the guys asked.

  My God, I’m scared! My God, I’m scared! One of the girls kept screaming ludicrously.

  A saucer!

  A sau… cer? You th… thi… think so? Another girl stuttered, nervously gripping her boyfriend’s arm.

  Zimko pushed a button and the window was back to a bird’s eye view, far above the area.

  “You’re one of the rare Earthlings to have entered a flying saucer,” the Man from Outer Space declared. “Come, I’ll give you a quick tour of the spaceship before we drop you at the end of the line,” he joked.

  “So, you’re in contact with other Earthlings here?”

  “Here and elsewhere,” he answered, following a passageway lit by electroluminescence. “We have one or two trusted men in every country and we visit them on a scheduled date—the 20th of every month—if external conditions allow. By ‘external conditions,’ I mean the special agents of the Official Investigative Committees. These men, in theory, are chosen from groups of civil and independent investigators but some of them belong to no organization interested in flying saucers.”

  An oval hatch opened as they approached, revealing a huge, circular cabin. In the middle of it stood a kind of command console, half-moon shaped with a big, rectangular, convex screen overhead.

  A blonde girl was busy at the controls that were sparkling with all kinds of bright colors. A short, see-through tunic covered her harmoniously proportioned body and revealed her flawless physique. A tiny, midnight blue bikini emitting a strange phosphorescence completed her minimal outfit. Short, black, shiny boots on her feet. Her legs, arms and bust were bronzed enough to made any film star sunbathing on Manhattan Beach13 jealous.

  She turned around and smiled. Her extraordinarily beautiful face, with very subtle make-up, was perfectly balanced.

  “This is Yuln, my sister,” Zimko picked the girl up in his arms and planted two loud kisses on her cheeks. “Let me introduce you to my friend Jean Kariven. He saved my life.”

  “I know,” she said when her hardy brother put her back on the metal floor of the command post. “I was just about to intervene…” She stepped forward, still smiling, and raised her right hand with the palm facing the anthropologist. “Hello, Jean.”

  Kariven raised his hand in response to this new form of greeting, “Hello, Yuln.”

  The Mark on the palm of the blonde girl’s hand was remarkably distinct.

  “I observed you, both of you, during the night,” she explained, “and I admit that I was scared for my brother. Your carelessness,” she reproached him, “almost cost you your life tonight. You should not have let your psychic barrier down.”

  “You were watching us?” Kariven was astonished.

  “With the help of the tele-projections,” Yuln answered in her melodic voice. “The Polarians on missions on this planet are constantly observed by a spaceship hovering at a very high altitude over their zone of operation. Our tele-projectors are a kind of mix of radar and television. We project a beam of invisible waves at the ground and the portion of the territory we want to appear on this screen with a close-up of the Polarian agent we’re supposed to watch or, if need be, protect… It happens sometimes, unfortunately, that we can’t act because of the circumstances. Like tonight I hesitated to disintegrate the Denebian spaceship fearing that I might destroy you and my brother. I was finally about to fire the disintegrator when you grabbed Zimko’s cone.”

  “So, thanks to your tele-projections you can see directly through matter?”

  “Naturally. I saw you clearly through the walls of the Mocambo and through your car’s metal. The process is very common; our enemies also have a similar system… regrettably.”

  “Would you like,” Kariven asked after a moment of reflection, “to project your tele-waves at my hotel to check on my friends Dormoy and Angelvin? That is if the police have let them go.”

  “Certainly. We’re flying over Los Angeles right now and I’ve turned on the invisibility shields. Show me where your hotel is.”

  On saying this she pressed a blue button on the control panel and the screen lit up, showing a neighborhood of the big Californian city.

  “Turn the wheel, Jean,” she told him, “and stop when you’ve spotted the building you want.”

  The explorer did so and made the different areas of the city scroll by.

  “Here it is,” he said, pointing to the tall building that towered up on Hollywood Boulevard.

  After pressing two different buttons Yuln brought the hotel in close up on the screen. When she turned a kind of selector knob the image scrambled before showing the rooms and their occupants. The images sped by. Sometimes Yuln accelerated even more to avoid any inappropriate peeping.

  “There they are!” Kariven cried out but other rooms had already passed by.

  Yuln went back through the three previous images and stopped on a room where two men—Dormoy and Angelvin—had just entered. The young woman pressed a red button, adjusted the brightness and then Dormoy’s voice boomed out in the cockpit.

  The creep! Where could he have got to?

  Kariven cleared his throat. “I have the feeling that they’re talkin
g about me…”

  But I think I saw him on the dance floor with the Sioux, Dormoy added.

  Zimko burst out laughing. “That’s me now: the Sioux! It’s the name of a red-skinned people I believe.”

  Kariven nodded, without saying a word, and listened carefully with a smile on his face.

  Give me a cigarette, Michel. Angelvin said.

  I don’t have any more. Kariven always keeps an extra pack in his towel.

  Angelvin went into the next room and came back with a pack of Lucky Strikes. He offered one to Dormoy and put the pack in his pocket.

  “Let’s not be shy about it,” Kariven laughed.

  I won’t forget this party at the Mocambo, Dormoy grumbled. Three clowns disguised as who knows what swallow their birth certificates and the police round us up with the whole lot! I’ll never forget your club!

  My club, my club, Angelvin retorted, shrugging his shoulders. Did I know that a guy and his two girls were going to be poisoned in the middle of a costume party?

  Sure, Dormoy angrily flicked the ash off his cigarette. But we still ended up in the slammer! And where the devil is he? He growled, looking around the room as if it was going to tell him that “he”—Jean Kariven—was cruising 1,500 feet above Los Angeles on board a flying saucer.

  “It’s time that I went to reassure my friends,” the anthropologist decided.

  Yuln cut the broadcast. “Where do you want us to drop you? Do you know a 100-square foot lot where we can land?

  “In the middle of the city?”

  “Why not? Our spaceship is protected by an invisibility shield and can land without anyone noticing.”

  “There’s the Country Club, surrounded by palm trees, at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Santa Maria.”

  Yuln turned on the screen and Kariven, after a brief examination of the aerial view of the city, pointed to the chosen spot.

  “I think we can land here.”

  One minute later the tops of the magnificent palm trees were swaying as if blown by a strong wind. A policeman on patrol looked up and wondered what could be shaking the trees when there was not even a breeze in the city. He took off his hat, perplexed, scratched his head and shrugged his shoulders before continuing on his rounds.