Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell Page B

contemptuously. “We’ve carried the devil on our backs perhaps a million years and only now are aware that he’s there. Homo sapiens—the man with a load of mischief!” He murmured some underbreath comment to himself, then went on, “Only this morning I was studying a case to which no solution had been found in ten years. The details are given in the London Evening Standard of May, 16, 1938 and the British Daily Telegraph of several dates thereafter. The 5,456-ton vessel Anglo-Australian vanished at short notice, without trace. She was a modern, seaworthy boat plowing through smooth, tranquil waters when she and her crew of thirty-eight abruptly became as if they had never been. She disappeared in mid-Atlantic, within fifty miles of other ships, shortly after sending a radio message stating that all was well. Where has she gone? Where are most of the thousands of people who have been listed and sought for years by the bureau of missing persons?”
    “You tell me.” Graham’s eyes raked the darkness for the screen, failed to find it. Somewhere in the black it was standing, a silent sentry, waiting, guarding them, yet unable to do more than give them split-second warning of invaders that they alone must resist.
    “I don’t know,” confessed Beach. “Nobody knows. All we can say is that they’ve been seized by agencies only now within our ken, powers unfamiliar but in no way supernatural. They have been taken for purposes at which we can but guess. They have gone as they have been going since the beginning of history and as they’ll keep on going in the future. A few have come back, warped in ways we’ve not been able to understand. Those, we have crucified, or burned at the stake, or shot with silver bullets and buried in garlic, or incarcerated in asylums. Still more have been taken and will continue to be taken.”
    “Maybe,” said Graham, skeptically. “Maybe.”
    “Only a month ago the New York-Rio strat-plane passed behind a cloud over Port of Spain, Trinidad, and didn’t reappear. A thousand eyes saw it one moment, not the next. Nothing has been heard of it since. Nine months ago the Soviet’s Moscow-Vladivostok new streamliner vanished in similar way. That’s not been heard of, either. There has been a long series of such cases going back for decades, right to the earliest days of aeronautics.”
    “I can recall some of them.”
    “What happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan; to Lieutenant Oskar Omdal, Brice Goldsborough and Mrs. F. W. Grayson; to Captain Terence Tully and Lieutenant James Medcalf; to Nungesser and Coli? Some, perhaps, crashed, but I have little doubt that others did not. They were snatched away, exactly as human beings have been snatched for century after century, singly, in groups, in shiploads.”
    “The world must be told,” swore Graham. “It must be warned.”
    “Who can tell, can warn—and live?” asked Beach, caustically. “How many would-be tellers lie tongue-tied in their graves? How many thousands more can be silenced as effectively? To talk is to think, and to think is to be betrayed, and to be betrayed is to die. Even we, in this lonely hide-out, may eventually be found by some roaming invisible, overheard, and made to pay the penalty of knowing too much; the price of inability to camouflage our knowledge. The Vitons are ruthless, utterly ruthless, and it is ghastly evidence of the fact that they blew Silver City to hell the moment they found that we’d discovered a means of photographing them.”
    “Nevertheless, the world must be warned,” Graham insisted, stubbornly. “Ignorance may be bliss—but knowledge is a weapon. Humanity must know its oppressors to strike off their chains.”
    “Fine-sounding words,” scoffed Professor Beach. “I admire your persistent spirit, Graham, but spirit is not enough. You don’t yet know enough to appreciate the impossibility of what you suggest.”
    “That’s why I’ve come to you,” Graham riposted. “To