The Miniature Menace
Copyright© 2024 by Frank Belknap Long
Chapter 3
Five minutes later Langford was replacing the bandages on Joan’s eyes. He felt like a man who was playing a game with a deadly, unseen antagonist in a room full of crouching shadows. No—not a room. As he bent above his wife, his hand on her tumbled hair, the space about him seemed to fall away into darkness. And now he was gazing straight down the interplanetary deeps at a green world swimming in a nebulous haze. The haze dissolved, drifted away, and he saw the green hills of his native land.
He saw the earth, and crouching shadows covered the face of the land.
The crouching shadows of enormous insects. He could not escape from them because they were everywhere; when he broke into a run the mantis shapes followed him. They towered above him, sinister, horrible. He felt like a man caught in an invisible trap, the sky hemming him in, the ground beneath his feet a dissolving quagmire.
He shook the illusion off, for he did not want Joan to see the shadows as he saw them. What was it Crendon had said? She must be made to feel that you need her. Well, he did; he knew now that more than his own honor was at stake. If the alien ship could not be located his fears would not remain subjective. The fate of humanity hung in the balance.
His imagination had been stimulated abnormally by the events of the past few days; now it was leaping ahead of developments. For all he knew to the contrary the alien ship had foundered in the void or crashed on one of the inner planets in a red swirl of destruction.
Interstellar exploration was not without its risks and those risks would mount steadily to an alien intelligence as unfamiliar landmarks loomed up out of the void.
“You do not need the bandages,” Langford said, a deep solicitude in his voice. “If you simply shut your eyes you would see the ship clearly. My thoughts would guide you to it.”
“My vision is sharper when my eyes are bandaged,” Joan replied. “You must trust me, darling; I know. When my eyes are sealed there is no emotional block and my inner vision has free play. I am prevented from using my eyes by an actual physical impediment. So I strain all of my faculties to see as far as I can in the dark. Call it a psychological quirk if you wish; I only know that it helps.”
“If it helps that’s all that matters,” Langford assured her. “Forget I put my oar in.”
“Don’t think about the ship for a minute,” Joan said. “Make your mind a blank. Then visualize yourself standing before the viewport staring out, just as you stood when you first saw the alien ship. Visualize the ship coming toward you through the void. If you can visualize it clearly I’ll be able to locate it, no matter where it is now.”
Joan paused, as though she didn’t quite know how to make the complexity of the problem clear to her husband. “I can’t explain the power,” she said; “I know so little about ‘time’, far less than the physicists think they know. Mutants, they tell us, can visualize ‘time’ as a stationary dimension, freezing all event objects in ‘the past’ and in the ‘probable future’. They can travel along ‘time’ in either direction at will.”
“But you do not think of it as an actual journey?” Langford asked; “you merely shut your eyes and see?”
Joan shook her head. “It isn’t quite as simple as that. Clairvoyance is never simple; it’s accompanied by an intense inward illumination. It’s a little like staring at something through a long vista of converging prisms. Objects get in the way and there’s doubt, uncertainty. Sometimes it’s sheer torment.
“Sometimes I can’t see at all. And even when I can see there’s a curious, almost terrifying sense of wrongness about it.”
“You mean you feel guilty?”
Joan smiled slightly. “Did Alice feel guilty when she went through the looking glass? Perhaps she did! But I didn’t mean that kind of wrongness, not a moral wrongness. It’s as though the strange tensions will get you if you don’t watch out. Rush in upon you and project you forcibly into another place. As though you were a jet of steam imprisoned in a bottle that’s much too tight and forced in the wrong direction by a power you can’t begin to understand.
“You keep fearing you’ll get caught in the neck of the bottle and wake up screaming.”
“Good Lord!” Langford muttered.
“I’ve never got caught,” Joan said. “Now make your mind a blank, darling. We’re going to find that ship!”
A moment later Langford stood holding his wife’s hand, a sharp apprehension in his stare. Joan seemed slightly agitated. She sat gripping the arms of her chair, her bandaged eyes turned from the light.
Suddenly her lips moved. “Ralph, I can see the ship! It’s coming straight toward the viewport. You didn’t tell me it was so beautiful, so—so huge!”
“I was waiting for you to tell me!” Langford said, quickly.
“Well, I’m telling you, darling! I’m glad you didn’t completely visualize it. Now I’m sure I’m not just reading your mind. It must be three hundred feet long; it’s hard to tell where the illumination comes from.”
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