Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959

The Dark
Destroyers

Manly Wade
Wellman

 
          
ONE AGAINST THE STAR THINGS

 
          
Slimy ice-cold creatures had taken over the
world in one brutal blitzkrieg, and after fifty years of their domination the
only humans left were living like animals in the deepest tropical jungles.

 
          
Among those tenacious survivors was Mark
Darragh, a brash young man who dreamed of the world his fathers had lost, and
who decided to make his dream come true.

 
          
Travelling by flimsy canoe, armed with
hopelessly outdated weapons, Mark started out for the Cold People's
stronghold. Somehow they must have an Achilles Heel —all he had to lose was his
life, but if he won, he'd win a world!

           
CAST
OF CHARACTERS

 
          
Mark
Darragh

           
Because
he had nothing to lose and everything to gain, this young rebel was without
fear.

 
          
Chief
Megan

           
As
leader of the surviving humans, Megan could think only of retaliation and never
of reconquest.

 
          
Orrin
Lyle

 
          
Playing petty dictator meant more to him
than the welfare of his people.

 
          
Brenda
Thompson

           
By
learning to love a stranger, she saved the lives of everyone around her.

 
          
Sam
Criddle

           
He
knew the truth when he heard it, but it was seldom that he got the opportunity
to listen.

 
          
ACE
BOOKS, INC.
23 West 47th Street
,
New York
36, N.Y.

 
          
the
dare destroyers

 
          
Copyright ©, 1959, by Manly Wade
Wellman

 
          
An
Ace Book, by arrangement with Thomas Bouregy & Co. Part of this novel
appeared under the tide
Nuisance Value
and
is copyright, 1938, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

 
          
.
. he who does not recognize what is in the universe is
a
stranger to the universe . . . Watch how all things continually
change, and accustom yourself to realize that Nature's prime delight is in
changing things that are . . ."

 
          
—Marcus
Aurelius Antoninus,
To Himself,
Book
IV

 
          
Copyright ©, 1960, by Ace Books, Inc.

 
          
                
^:
              
                        
\

 
          
Printed in
U.S.A.

Contents

 
          
Everyone has
heard countless theories
as to where the Cold People came from, but nobody knows for a certainty; so
sudden was their arrival on Earth, so swift and complete their victory in
battle, that the men and women of Earth had no time for meditation or study or
consideration of evidence-only time for flight.

 
          
The
Cold People were great translucent, helmet-shaped things that moved by hitching
and hunching upon rubbery pedestal-organs of locomotion, snail fashion, but
with surprising speed and maneuverability. The comblike crest of such a
creature stood full five feet high; and at the lowest and thickest point, the
body was somewhat greater than that in diameter. At a point just forward of thé
serrated comb sprouted a close-set sheaf of from six to eight tendrils, like a
weaving, wriggling plume for the helmet. These tendrils were snakily agile,
capable of stretching themselves to a length of six feet or more. Each
terminated in a disklike sucker, like a palm, that could grasp or hold or
cradle. In the midst of the cloudily-gleaming, gray bulk hung and pulsed a
heavy-appearing body, the size of a
football, that
gave off a dim reddish brown light. It is possible that this was the vital
organ, or the sensory body, or even both. At times it throbbed violently, and
the intensity of its light varied weirdly.

 
          
The
Cold People took their food—it was synthetic food, various liquids blended of
certain chemicals—by ready absorption through the surface of the body. Most
studies agree that they were sexless, and that probably they achieved
reproduction by budding, like the simpler forms of Terrestrial life. Other
natural functions appear to have been exercised in manners fully as primitive.
Some human scientists have thought that these strangers on Earth were
unicellular, amazingly evolved to intelligence, and others argue that they
were an extreme development of an originally complex organism to certain
specializations of the rational and manipulative faculties. Here again, there
was no time or opportunity for the testing of theories and the settlement of
arguments.

 
          
They
arrived unsuspected and unheralded in midwinter, a rain of black ships that
swooped down throughout
Europe
,
North America
, and northern
Asia
. At that time, there was freak weather—
a widespread siege of zero weather
that tormented Earth's
entire north temperate zone.

 
          
The
first men to see them died almost in the moment of seeing; for each ship, as it
approached Earth, gave off great concentric rings and halos of sickly white
light that exploded all living things they touched. Cities and harbors and
defenses seemed to fluff away into murky vapor. Survivors of states and
populations fled miserably from these first landings, to blunder upon other
landings and perish in senseless flight.

 
          
Heads
of governments, those who lived through the first hours, first blamed the sneak
attacks of rival powers,
then
forced themselves to
grasp the truth in its unspeakable strangeness. Men and nations tried to defend
themselves. Armies and navies mobilized and swarms of fighter and bomber planes
sped to strike at the snow-girt camps of the invaders. But bombs and bullets
sprang back from force-screens of dark green radiance, while the white lights,
now leveled in streams as though they gushed from hoses, felled the planes in
squadrons and groups, like a generation of locusts suddenly stricken with a
plague. Pilots and navigators and bombardiers melted into bladdery pulps at
their controls, and their craft plunged to smash on earth, while the Cold
People counterattacked all around the world.

 
          
There
was no gainsaying them. Guided missiles could not pierce the screens. Artillery
bombardments were as futile, with gunners dying around their pieces. The
survivors were the swiftly-furtive, the cowards. And more of the black
spacecraft arrived hourly.

 
          
The
strangers set up posts, established communications between them, and combined
their parties into deadly armies. Out darted smaller craft to scout, and in one
pitched battle fought on land and sea from
Alaska
to
Vladivostok
effortlessly obliterated the last of
Earth's soldiery, and their weapons, bases and cities with them.

 
          
That
any human beings escaped was a marvel that came about by a second whim of the
weather. Even as the survivors of the globe-spanning disaster fled
despairingly, a thaw set in—again general—throughout devastated
Russia
, shattered
England
and
Germany
, scorched and racked southern
Canada
, the catastrophe-flogged
United States
. Even as the great freeze had seemed to
bring the invasion, that great thaw seemed to perplex it. The conquerors
retreated northward before it, drawing back as men might have drawn back from
a great fire; they shut themselves up within their ships and shelters. The
second day of the thaw—when the sky shimmered blue with an almost summer heat,
and the snow ran into brooks and rivers across the continents—found no single
helmet-shaped victor abroad to survey the triumphant destruction its coming had
wrought upon Earth.

 
          
This
phenomenon gave scurrying mankind the first clue as to the nature of the enemy.
That invasion had been launched from some world far from its warm sun—a world
whose denizens throve on temperatures that would freeze Terrestrials, and
wilted in weather that on Earth seemed mild. If men would live, they must go
south, into lands too hot for the natures of their adversaries.

 
          
South
men went, where and how they could, deserting their immemorial seats of
civilized culture and rule.
New York
,
London
,
Moscow
,
Paris
,
Peiping
,
St. Louis
,
San Francisco
,
Tokyo
—all stood empty where they had not been
wrecked in the first fearsome attack. Some did not flee soon and fast enough.
Preparing for motion and action in the heat, the Cold People ventured forth
again.

 
          
Plainly,
a war of extermination was intended. The new advance was organized against the
possibility of hampering warmth; every helmet-shaped individual wore strange
sealed armor, and many rode in insulated aircraft. Again slaughter and terror
visited the rearguard of routed humanity. There was no checking or opposing the
new masters of Earth, not until the flight had come to the tropics. Then, at
last, the scornful pursuit slackened. The shattered, exhausted remnants of
mankind bivouacked in the swamps of
Florida
, the jungles of
Yucatan
, in Indo-China and Saharan oases, and along
mangrove-jungled hot coasts.

 
          
For
long after that, it was a cruel game of hide and
seek
.
No longer did humanity offer even a token resistance to the Cold People. Yet
little patrols of darting aircraft—insulated and refrigerated and irresistibly
armed—darted here and there above even the equatorial cities to bomb or ray to
death the folk whose hands had become too weak to hold their Mother Earth. What
few people remained lurking in the temperate and sub-Artie regions were
ruthlessly hunted out and exterminated. The resolute survivors of many hunts
and assaults plunged deep into hot Equatorial jungles, there to tend their
wounds and build their nests and teach their children prodigies of hate and
dread.

 
          
Those
children grew up in the starkly bitter hope of recapturing the world their
parents once had ruled . . . but half a century went by before the children
tried it.