And Angels Feared to Tread

And Angels Feared to Tread

By

Paul David Robinson

(75,417 words)

Cover Design by Katrina Joyner

Copyright 1962, 2015

Back Cover with Prologue

Shorty Martin found an alien machine on his Iowa farm by accident. He excavated it and discovered that it powered up at noon. He walked up the transparent corridor and stepped out on the sphere and disappeared from Earth.

He was transported to another planet. An old witch woman named Bitina tries to kill him. He learns her language through her magic and becomes her lover.

A squad of army rangers follows Shorty to the planet. Only Dan survives. The planet was invaded ten thousand years ago by humanoids who live forever. These creatures breed human beings for food. Using Bitina's magic, Shorty and Dan plan to put an end to the genocide.

Through her magic, Bitina, Shorty and Dan saw the devils eating their victim until she was all bones except for her head, neck, lungs and heart. When the leader of the devils opened her ribcage and ate her heart, Dan screamed, the magic ended, and Dan, Bitina and Shorty were alone in the cave.

Shorty said, Dan, welcome to hell.

CHAPTER ONE:

"Shorty and the machine"

His boyhood nickname stuck with him all the way through college. Everyone called him Shorty. The college newspapers tried to tag him with the new nickname Wildcat after he quarterbacked the college football team to victory.

He didn’t accept the new nickname, and hardly anyone else at the agricultural college did either. He remained Shorty despite the football coach calling him Wildcat for one whole week. The coach finally capitulated to the vast majority of professors and students with a sigh of regret. (A five foot-six inch, 150-pound quarterback nicknamed Wildcat would seem more formidable to enemy teams than one nicknamed Shorty.)

When Georges Martin, better known as Shorty Martin, graduated from college, he went home to work with his father on the family’s Iowa farm. He was an only child. His Czechoslovakian refugee mother died while giving birth to a stillborn baby when he was three. His Chicano father died during the winter after his early summer graduation.

The elder Martin left his entire estate to his son. After taxes, there was a bank balance of seventeen thousand dollars, a three bedroom farmhouse, two pickup trucks, a tractor, farm implements, and a productive four hundred and fifty acre farm.

Shorty fired all of the farm hands two weeks after his father’s funeral. He drew no money out of the bank and didn’t intend to for ten years. In ten years, the compound interest of three and a half percent would make a good nest egg.

Shorty planted clover or grass on most of his acreage. In addition, he was paid by the government not to farm. However, he kept one hundred acres of the best land for himself to farm personally. He could live on the produce of a garden and make a good profit from the crops from his one hundred acres. His needs would be supplied and the taxes on all of the farmland paid while he decided what future he should make for himself.

The women at college thought that Shorty was cute with his brown eyes and wavy brown hair; but Shorty wasn’t interested in marriage. Therefore, he left college without a girlfriend to his name. After his father died, his weekly schedule left him plenty of time to date, but he chose to sit at home and read. He admired Bertrand Russell, even though he disagreed with the gentleman’s philosophy. He took a transistor radio with him when he worked. He watched very little television unless Boris Karloff happened to be on the late, late show.

One evening as Shorty walked across a fallow field toward home and a TV dinner, he was listening intently to a news broadcast on FM radio.

As a crucial point of news was about to be given, the radio faded out. Shorty stopped immediately. He snapped the volume control on and off. Nothing happened. He shook the radio. Nothing happened. He switched to AM and nothing happened. There wasn’t even static. Shorty shrugged his shoulders and started towards home leaving the radio volume control on as high as it would go.

He had gone but one-step when the station came on so loud and so suddenly that he almost dropped the radio. He quickly turned down the volume. He put his hand over his heart and staggered back a few steps.

Holy cow! he exclaimed, What a fright!

He pulled his handkerchief out of his hip pocket and mopped his sweating brow. He put the handkerchief back into his pocket. He took a deep breath and began to release it in a long sigh.

Whew!

He stopped suddenly again, not breathing. The radio wasn’t on. He turned the volume up again. Nothing! No static! Nothing!

He was puzzled. He held the radio up to his ear and heard nothing. He began to walk toward home with his radio loudspeaker up to his ear. The radio came on so loud it nearly broke his eardrum.

Shorty turned the radio down again and shook his head to get the ringing out of his ear.

After awhile, his ear didn’t ring anymore but he felt like he was in a church where any noise would seem too loud, so Shorty gave his attention to the radio and he did it very, very carefully. Considering all that just happened, he was very, very suspicious - and cautious.

He kept the volume at a reasonable level and stepped back again. The broadcast stopped; there was no sound. He stepped forward again; the broadcast came on again.

Shorty looked around. There were no overhead high voltage wires here at all. He stepped back and the sound went off. He stepped sideways and the sound came on. He stepped back into the quiet zone. He stepped sideways in the other direction; there was sound again. There could be no under-ground high voltage wire here either.

Shorty stood in the quiet zone with his voiceless radio. After a moment of thinking, he walked backwards two feet and he was out of the quiet zone. His radio was voicing somebody’s piano concerto. He stepped forward again. He set his radio down in the grass and took off his shirt. He put his shirt under his feet. He pulled out his jack knife from his left-front pants pocket and opened its longest blade. He stabbed the ground through his shirt so the shirt wouldn’t blow away while he was gone. He picked up his radio, turned it off, and walked home.

The next morning, Shorty was up at sunrise. He ate breakfast heartily and grabbed a sack lunch. He got his smaller pickup truck and loaded it with his digging tools. He made sure he had a good pair of insulated gloves and wore insulated boots. Then, leaving his better transistor radio at home, he armed himself with his tiny AM transistor radio.

He drove out to the fallow field. He needed to cut the wires of a barbed wire fence and pull up a fence post so he could drive into the field.

He drove up to within twenty feet of his shirt. He climbed out of the front of the truck and took a stake and a sledgehammer out of the bed of the pickup truck.

Shorty pulled his jack knife blade out of the soil and wiped it off with the shirt on the ground. He folded the knife and put it back into his pocket. Then he tossed yesterday’s shirt toward the pickup truck. He placed the stake where the knife had penetrated the soil. One pound with the sledge and the stake was in the ground. Shorty was surprise by the ease with which it entered the soil.

He laid the sledge aside and returned to the pickup. He took out the sickle and cut the grass in a three-foot diameter circle around the stake in the ground. He cropped the grass as close to the roots as possible.

Then he used the small transistor radio to stake out the size of the quiet zone. The radio fade-out occurred within a circle about two and a half feet in diameter. The stake was off center by a few inches. He moved it to the center.

Shorty Martin stood in the bed of the pickup truck trying to decide what tools to use. He decided against the posthole digger and the pick. He didn’t want to destroy whatever was buried beneath the soil. He finally decided that using the spade, a trowel, and his hands should get the job done.

Shorty knew nothing about excavating an archeological find, but he used common sense and was as careful as he could be.

The loam was deep, deeper than Shorty thought possible. He had a four-foot deep hole, thirty inches in diameter when he stopped for lunch.

Before he ate, he used the transistor radio to check out the quiet zone once more. The fade-out was persistent.

Shorty ate his meal in the shade of a tree left standing in the middle of the field by his father’s father. He had cold meatloaf sandwiches and a small thermos of milk.

When he finished eating, Shorty sat and looked at clouds and thought of hypothesis after hypothesis for the phenomenon he had stumbled onto.

He thought of the odds of anyone finding the quiet zone. You needed to have someone walking right over the spot with a working transistor radio before you would notice the fade-out. The chances of passing over that spot and not noticing anything unusual were more certain than stopping right on top of the fade-out area.

He thought about asking someone to help him search out the answer to the mystery, but he was unwilling to share any moment of curiosity with anyone. He would go to someone for help if he could not solve the problem for himself.

Feeling well rested after lunch, Shorty went back to the hole he was digging. He looked down into the shallow well and decided that he could use a bucket to remove the dirt from the bottom.

He climbed into the pickup truck and drove to the farmhouse. He found an old bucket in the tool shed.

He took it back to the excavation. The loam was packed harder now, but Shorty loathed to use the pick or the posthole digger.

He worked for an hour gaining only six inches in depth before he decided that he needed more room. It meant more dirt to remove, but Martin cut out a foot all around the circular hole.

By the time he finished enlarging the hole, he was tired enough of digging to take a short rest. He returned to the farmhouse and brought a tarp to cover the hole when he quit working for the night.

Shorty worked at digging for another two hours and brought out two feet of dirt. The hole was now so deep that Martin could not empty his bucket without climbing out first. He decided to stop work and bring a ladder to use the next morning.

Martin had expanded his excavation to twelve feet in circumference. He was eight feet down when he unearthed a metallic surface. He was very careful as he smoothed away the dirt.

It turned out to be the first of six huge gray-green metallic tubes attached to an even bigger smooth metallic surface further beneath the soil. The quiet zone was centered on the top of that smooth metallic surface two feet further below and between the six metallic tubes.

As he followed each tube down into the earth with his digging, he found that they were connected to other smooth shapes still buried beneath the loam. Martin used a trowel and his hands as he slowly unearthed more and more of the buried metal tubing. Eventually the smooth surfaces he uncovered were large enough that he could use a big cement trowel to scrape away the dirt.

Martin thought more and more of calling the University and asking his old geology professor to send an archeologist friend to aid him. However, Shorty was an independent man and liked the idea of digging up this underground machine without outside help.

As he continued digging, Shorty found that his excavation would uncover more than twenty feet of ground. Day by day as he carefully uncovered his discovery, he extended the operation, digging down until he could go no further. Now he dug outward, expanding the hole as he followed the curvature of the object and the tubes attached to it.

A month had passed since he first began to dig. He kept the excavation covered with a tarpaulin thrown over a tent framework. He left his discovery covered in this way for a week while he worked in his fields.

He caught up on the news and read more literature about excavating an archeological find. He spent some time in hunting and fishing and building up the muscles in his tired back.

He bought food to last him a month and he bought a silencer for his hunting pistol. He already had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. The last thing he did before he returned to the excavation was to make out a new will.

He would leave his property, his discovery and all monetary returns from either to be held in trust for a scholarship to his alma mater. Shorty Martin was enjoying an adventure that might result in death. He would be prepared.

Martin was back to work in the depths of his excavation before the sun rose one week after he had halted his work. In two days, he found that the object he was uncovering was spherical with six tubes attached to the top of it and to other surfaces further below the soil.

The skin of the sphere was pieced together with the gray-green metal, a blue-white metal, and some unknown transparent substance. When Martin peered into the sphere through the transparent portions, he could see nothing but light that had entered through the other transparent parts of the sphere.

The sphere seemed to come alive with the heat of the sun. At noon, with the sun reaching into the depths of the excavation, the transparent substance changed to milky white. Then the whole sphere was a changing spectrum.

The tubes at the top of the sphere seemed to be activated. A color would emerge from one end of the connected cylinders and seemed to flow slowly through the system and reenter the sphere. At the beginning of this motion, colors gradually changed within the range of gray-green, blue-white, milky white, and transparent.

Martin was afraid of his discovery now, but his curiosity was greater than his fear.

The sphere grew hot, then hotter. Martin kept as much of his skin covered as he possibly could. He wore dark glasses, gloves, and a facemask. He continued to work in his sweat under the sweltering conditions.

He drank gallons and gallons of water in a day’s time. He made sure that he had plenty of salt with his food. He was not going to kill himself digging up this strange machine.

In five more days, Martin found an entrance to his discovery. The sphere seemed to be the energy source for a larger structure. The sphere was attached at its top to the six tube-like metal legs. The ends of these legs were fastened eight feet below to the corners between all six sides of a hexagonal well.

The sphere was approximately sixteen feet in diameter. The hexagonal well surrounding it was nearly eight feet high and almost twenty feet across. Martin had followed and unearthed each of the six legs until the tube-like things ended in a corner between each of the six sides of the well.

As he continued to dig, he discovered that there was a pathway two feet wide all around the well and eight feet from the top of the well. Then the floor of the well sloped further down toward the center below the sphere. Every leg came out of an opening below the pathway. In addition, it seemed that each leg would disappear into that opening if the sphere ever descended into the center of the well.

As Martin walked the pathway, clearing it of soil, he also wiped soil from each of the hexagonal walls of the well. He found an entrance in one of those six walls.

The entrance was in the side of one section of the well. He found it when it opened as he brushed away the soil still clinging to that particular wall.

Now that the entrance was gaping open, Martin could see a long corridor on the other side. But he did not care to step inside. He was determined to finish excavating and exploring the outside of his discovery before looking around inside it.

There was light inside. The whole ceiling and floor of the corridor glowed with a soft amber light. The ceiling was warm to the touch and the floor was cold. The walls were a blue color and neither cold nor warm. At the end of the long corridor, Martin could see a large cubicle with walls lined from ceiling to floor with dials and switches.

Sweating from nervous tension as well as from the terrific heat generated by the sphere, Martin forced himself to move away from the entrance. As he backed away, his hands pulled away from the doorjamb. The door to the entrance closed and this side of the hexagonal well was solid looking again.

In a panic, Martin pressed his hands against the wall and the door in the wall moved and the entrance gaped open once more. He forced himself back again, carefully removing his hands. The entrance closed again. Martin touched the metal panel and the entrance reopened.

After several minutes of experimentation, Martin concluded that the entrance opened on contact with human or animal body heat. Resolutely, Martin left the entrance closed and began the excavation of the area directly below the sphere.

Shorty spent two days excavating at his leisure. Towards the end of the second day, Shorty was removing the last of the dirt from the bottom of what was definitely a mold for the sphere that was suspended above his head by the six tubular arms.

At that moment, a soft whirr of a motor warned Martin to look up. The sphere was descending. Shorty did not stand in the mold looking up at the sphere in fascination. As soon as he realized that the sphere was moving, he leapt toward the edge of the mold and clawed his way up and out.

Now standing on the two-foot wide walkway, he was pressed tight against the side of the well. Martin watched as the sphere dropped into the mold. The sphere fit like a cork in a bottle.

When the sphere settled into the mold, the metal walkway Martin stood upon began to glow at the edge that touched the sphere. The glow began to expand outward. Martin stood quietly waiting to see what would happen next.

When the glow reached the sides of the well, it began to travel up the sides. Five of the six sides began to glow at the base. The only side that had not begun to glow at the base was the side containing the entrance panel.

Something began to move out of the wall that Martin stood leaning against. It pushed him away from the wall and lifted him toward the sphere. Martin had no chance of getting out of the hole now. He moved quickly to the entrance panel and placed an ungloved palm against it.

The panel disappeared and Martin stepped into the corridor. Now he turned around to watch what took place in the well.

The things that moved out of the walls of the well were colorless and transparent. There were five of them moving up to meet over the sphere like a lens. He watched them come together and seem to merge into a solid one-piece transparent cover over the sphere.

At the moment that they were together above the sphere, the floor, ceiling, and sides around the entrance where he stood began to extend outward. They came together on all four sides. They formed a clear rectangular tube that moved toward the center of the well, and then up, and over the sphere.

The floor of this extension of the entrance completed the transparent lens formed over the sphere by the other five sides of the well. The sphere changed from a mix of colors to a uniform color. The sphere shone with a brilliant white light.

Martin pushed his hand through the entrance to be sure that he was seeing correctly. There was no obstruction between him and the extension of the corridor. He reached through the entrance and touched the top, sides and bottom of this extension. Then he took a step onto the transparent ramp.

He was able to walk up the ramp for six feet. The ramp climbed through this extension of the corridor. It seemed to lead to the very top of the sphere. However, the brilliant light emanating from the sphere caused him to hesitate.

He wondered if it were hot? If it were cold? Or would it just be room temperature?

He wanted to go up the ramp and find out what would happen next. But he didn’t. Instead, he walked back down the ramp and into the large hexagonal cubicle at the other end of the corridor where all the controls seemed to be.

There were controls on every wall, but one. He looked at the six glowing spheres that hung from the ceiling: five hung not far from each wall; a sixth hung above the entrance to the cubicle. Static emanated from the seventh and largest sphere that hung in the center of the room.

Martin decided that it was a receiver for a radio or a television of some sort. One whole wall of the cubicle was a flickering pattern like what a television screen would show when there was network trouble. It was opposite the entrance to the cubicle.

Dials and switches were in triplicate on each of the other four