Murray Leinster

by The Best of Murray Leinster (1976)

  ‘M-maybe,’ said Mr. Tedder quaveringly to himself, ‘I’m the only man left alive in these parts…’

  With the terror came an impulse to hide. It was then late afternoon. It would soon be dark. He did not want to be in a town filled with still, not-dead forms after dark! He pedaled down a side road. It became a cart-track and climbed. It dwindled to a footpath. He dived into the obscurity of woodland as the shadows grew deep.

  He came at last to an empty, rocky hilltop. Sunset was over.

  Only a lingering dim red glow remained in the west. Presently stars shone down. He looked up at them, sweating.

  If that frost-covered thing had come from the stars, something from it - a sort of devil - had stricken down the hundreds of unconscious people Mr. Tedder had seen. Maybe it was getting ready for more of its kind. He stared upward and imagined other spheres swinging down out of the darkness overhead to gouge long furrows in the ground. Maybe such things were falling all over the world____

  But he could look across-country for miles. Presently he saw joyfully that there were electric lights. He saw motorcar headlights on the highways. In particular, he saw that the very last town he had entered was now brightly lighted and there was traffic moving in and out….

  ‘Well,’ he thought with relief. ‘Whatever it was, it ain’t permanent.’ Come morning he would have somebody cut loose the pot from his head.

  He could not find fuel to make a fire, but he snatched some fitful sleep toward dawn. He was bitterly cold when he woke, and at earliest daylight he made his way back toward town.

  The dawn light was still gray and dreary when he reached it. The streets were empty. But there was a motor-truck stopped by a store, its motor purring. And there was a man tumbled in a heap above a bunch of big-city newspapers he had just put out of the truck for delivery. The man was alive, but unconscious. There was a cat in a motionless furry heap beside him, as if it had come out to rub against his legs and had collapsed without warning.

  Mr. Tedder, shivering, turned the man over. He was insensible. He could not be roused. Mr. Tedder felt hysteria stirring within him. The pot hurt his head, now. The places where it rubbed most often were getting sore. Then he noticed the headlines.

  DISASTER IN VERMONT - DEVIL LOOSE, SAY VILLAGERS

  Unexplained Mass Unconsciousness Strikes Countryside 128

  In the gray twilight of dawn, with a softly purring truck behind him and before him an unconscious man, Mr. Tedder read.

  ‘South Lupton struck by strange, creeping unconsciousness that moved like a wall or an invisible flood of oblivion… ■< Entire villages insensible for half an hour. iS. Some inhabitants undisturbed where they fell, others hauled about and pawed, but unharmed.;.. The same inexplicable insensibility moved along roads. ? ? Man driving with his little daughter lost consciousness and came to to find his car overturned and burning, and himself and the little girl lying some distance away. . i. Farmers found their horses struggling up from unconsciousness. 5 5 ·’

  Mr. Tedder’s throat went dry. He looked around furtively. This town had borne the look of a shambles yesterday, when he was here. From the hilltop he had seen it alive. But now it was dead again. s. ·. Suddenly he remembered a white dog that had come running toward him across a wide pasture. When he got to the dog it was unconscious… i

  ‘1 wonder if..’ He could not face the thought.

  Mr. Tedder shivered. He almost whimpered. But after a little he picked up the unconscious man before him. He dragged him into the back of the truck. He drove clumsily and unac-customedly out of the town. There was a long, straight stretch of road. Mr. Tedder went well out upon it. He stopped and let the unconscious man carefully down to the side of the road. He got back in the driver’s seat and drove away,* He watched through the back-view mirror.

  When he was a little more than half a mile away, the still figure stirred, rolled over, and got dazedly upright.

  Mr. Tedder swallowed noisily. He drove on a litde way and found a place where he could turn. He headed back. The owner of the truck still stood bewildered in the road. Mr. Tedder drove toward him. When he was still half a mile away, the man crumpled up and lay in a heap on the road. He was a flaccid, limp, insensible figure when Air. Tedder brought the truck to a stop and loaded him in again.

  He turned once more and rode on toward South Lupton. Mr.

  Tedder’s face was a sickly gray color.- The meekness of his normal expression was replaced by an odd, fixed horror. He had found two things which he believed came from the frosted ten-foot sphere. One was a weapon which destroyed everything when a knob on its side was touched. The other was this pot, with a strap which now held it fast upon his head.

  The pot was a weapon too. It did not affect the one who wore it. The tightening of the strap when it went on was to make sure

  - pure anguish sharpened Mr. Tedder’s perceptions - that it could not fall off while it was operating. If it did, the person -or the devil - wearing it would fall a victim too. It did not fit a man because it was designed for the brain-case of something else, something Mr. Tedder had seen vaguely as a dark moving object backing into a rusty barbed wire strung between two trees. If the pot - or helmet - had been turned on then, Mr. Tedder would never have seen anything. He would have fallen unconscious a half-mile away…

  He made a little sobbing noise in his throat. He drove un-skillfully to South Lupton. One general store was open. He went into it and filled his pockets with canned food, a loaf of bread, and matches. He took two blankets from a shelf. He stepped carefully over the two clerks and four customers in the store. They were on the floor, of course. He walked out of the store and away from the litde town.

  ‘I got to get back there,’ he said unsteadily. ‘I got to!’

  A long while later he strode across rolling pasture-land. A white dog ran to intercept him. He saw it as a distant white speck. When he came up to it, it was a still, senseless heap. He went on to the woods and into them. It took him two hours to find the gash blasted in the woods by the gun-like thing. Then it took him another half-hour to find the gun.

  He shivered when he picked it up, and carried it gingerly, but he noted that the metal was deeply pitted now. On the side that was next to the damp earth, the metal was eaten away to a depth of a quarter of an inch or more.

  He found the abandoned orchard, and the half-collapsed and wholly ruined house. Then he sat down and stared dully at nothing, trying to think of a solution to his predicament.:

  Night fell but he sat in a sort of lethargy of despair for a long while. Ultimately he rolled up in the blankets.; The pot on his head was horribly uncomfortable. It had not been made for a human head, and it did not fit. Twice during the night, also, he woke with a feeling of strangulation. He had stirred in his sleep and the tight chin-strap had choked him. The second time he found himself close to the metal gun. He had almost touched it. He made an inarticulate sound, such as a man might make who found himself about to step on a ratdesnake.

  He got up and found the well of the abandoned farm. He dropped a clod of earth in it. It splashed. He dropped in the gun like-thing. Bubbling sounds followed. They lasted a long time.

  He stayed at the abandoned farm for three days living on the canned stuff he had taken. His cheeks grew sunken and his eyes querulously pathetic. Also, a sore place started from the rubbing of the pot on his head. On the second day he found the frosted globe again. The motor in it still ran. ‘Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK! Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK1’ There was no sign that anything had come out. Perhaps there had only been one Whatever-it-was in it, and that had succumbed to a rip in its artificial hide by a bit of barbed wire. No trace of that thing remained, now. It had evaporated.

  ‘Jellyfish. Like jellyfish,’ he told himself.

  Mr. Tedder did not think in scientific terms nor speculate from what planet or star the Whatever-it-was had come. If he had been told that on the planet Jupiter there was atmosphere of ammonia and hydrogen under enormous pressure, it would have
meant nothing to him. The suggestion that the specific gravity of the giant planet meant that only light metals like sodium, potassium, and lithium - all interacting readily with water - could exist there … Such a suggestion would have had exactly no meaning at all.

  His mind dwelt exclusively upon the fact that any human being who came within a half-mile of him must fall unconscious and remain so. To the human race he was a menace; a devil. And that if he should manage to get the thick and clumsy pot off his head, he too would fall unconscious and remain so.

  He was in the most horrible solitary confinement imaginable.

  He was invulnerable, to be sure. He could rob with impunity and do murder without fear of any penalty. But nobody could speak to him. Ever.

  On the fourth day he went into East Lupton for food.

  On the fifth day aeroplanes flew overhead, back and forth. One suddenly went spinning, out of control, dipping down toward the treetops. It recovered, a bare few hundred feet up and three-quarters of a mile away. The planes disappeared.

  On the sixth day bombs fell. The first racking explosions terrified him incomparably. He fled through the underbrush. He came out of it and saw soldiers. They made a cordon about an area of woodland probably two miles square. They toppled in unconscious heaps as Mr. Tedder drew near them, and as if that were a signal there were distant boomings and artillery shells fell close to where he peered out. Mr. Tedder ran away. He dodged shells and bombs until night fell, then he ran, weeping bitterly to himself.

  ‘1 ain’t done nothing wrong!’ the thought beat through his imprisoned head.

  Of course the troops could not stop him. He pelted through their lines, unheeding. Presently he reached the village of East Lupton. No figures moved in it. Desperate, he entered it. There were many soldiers among the heaps of shallow-breathing, staring-eyed folk who lay slackly wherever unconsciousness had overtaken them.

  Mr. Tedder found food, and wolfed it. The store in which he found it was a country-village general store and sold everything. Mr. Tedder was half-mad now. The thing he wore was an intolerable burden. One of the sore places on his head from its rubbing was excruciatingly painful. It was infected. Other sore places were developing. And he was a sort of devil, working havoc wherever he moved. He took weapons - for which he had no need - and metal-cutting tools he would not dare to use. … And he saw newspapers.

  GUNS TO BLAST DEVIL OF EAST LUPTON

  He read the news account The one-mile circle of insensibility had been deduced. Its cause was not understood, but it was certain that some sensate thing was its center. It moved. It had made definite travels and returned to its starting-point. Troops now cordoned the place where it nested restlessly, and artillery was being massed. A barrage that nothing could survive would presently be poured in….

  Mr. Tedder looked at a powerful, sleek car. He could take it and go anywhere, and all of humanity was powerless to stop him - or to help him. Anyone who came near him would fall senseless. Even he, if he took off the thing on his head.;.:

  A motor-truckcame rolling into the village, its driver stricken unconscious at the wheel. It seemed certain to roll on and on.

  Mr. Tedder screamed at it. But something deflected its wheels. It curved sedately from the highway and ploughed across a sidewalk and crashed into the comer of a house.

  When the sun rose, Mr. Tedder was back at the abandoned farm which for no reason at all he considered his headquarters. His eyes were red with bitter weeping. His meek expression was utterly woebegone. But his determination was made.

  Great bombers roared high overhead, so high they were mere specks. Things dropped from them. Boomings began, all around the horizon. Shells struck and blasted. The tumult, once begun, was unending.

  Mr. Tedder cringed. Shaken and battered, he filed at the chain-link strap which held the pot on his head. The metal was soft, but the links shifted under his fingers, which trembled uncontrollably.

  A shell burst fifty yards away. Mr. Tedder was moved to sheer hysteria. He could do no such fine work as filing. He took the snips he had appropriated the night before. Once the thing was off his head, he would know nothing; no terror, no pain; nothing at all. The pot which had ridden him like the Old Man of the Sea would kill him. But he wanted to be rid of it He did not want to be near it even in death. ‘Just get it off me!’ he shouted. He was a little mad now.

  The earth shook under him. Blast-waves beat at him. Halfdeafened, sobbing, he crawled to the well. He pulled at the rotten boards. He hung his head over the noisome depth. He used the metal-snips - he had trouble getting them under the chain-link strap - to chew at the soft metal. The earth trembled under concussions. Bits of loose earth and rotted wood tumbled into the well from its edges.

  The snips met triumphantly… The pot tumbled down into the well and floated for a moment, rocking. Then it tilted and filled and sank. A thin, scummy veil of bubbles arose. Some light metals react readily with water. Potassium violently, sodium freely, lithium readily. The pot was of an alloy which would be highly useful where it was permanendy too cold for water ever to turn liquid. But on earth …

  Mr. Tedder sat up. He felt giddy; light-headed; incredibly relieved. But a shell fell thirty yards away, and a bomb exploded horribly just over the ridge, and something ripped through the half-collapsed house and exploded on beyond. There had been a devil in this woods. The devil of East Lupton, Vermont. The artillery searched for it, to exorcise it, but Mr. Tedder was not unconscious.

  ‘It’s gone!’ he cried joyfully. ‘And I’m okay now.’

  It would never occur to him that designers of a weapon who planned for the tightening of a fastening-strap when it was turned on, so that it could not possibly make its own wearer a victim, would also arrange for it to be turned off if the fastening-strap should be broken or cut It would be the most obvious of safety devices.

  But Mr. Tedder’s intellectual processes would never grasp such a thing. He simply knew that he was not unconscious and that the bombardment went on. It was overwhelming. It was maddening. Mr. Tedder put his hands over his ears and wept, cringing to the earth and awaiting death.

  Then the earth seemed to buckle beneath him. It raised up and dealt him a violent blow. Over where the frosted sphere lay self-buried in the ground, there was a sudden, incredible, impossible flare. A shell had hit the enigmatic globe in which an untended motor had run so long. The sphere exploded.

  The violence of the explosion suggested power much greater than anything human. The fuel-store of the sphere must have detonated. It made a crater a quarter-mile across, and every least fragment of the sphere itself was atomized and destroyed.

  The explosion seemed to the military to mark the death of something spectacular. They stopped the barrage and explosions.

  They found Mr. Tedder unconscious. He was sleeping as if drugged, from reaction to the end of strain. Near him there was a caved-in well which, of course, was not worth digging out.

  It was assumed that Mr. Tedder had remained unconscious through all the career of the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. He was hospitalized, and kindly told what had happened, and ultimately turned loose with a new suit of clothes and a five-dollar bill. And Mr. Tedder disappeared into the vast obscurity of the world of tramps, bums, blanket-stiffs and itinerant workmen.

  And to this day nobody pretends that they really understood anything about the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. There are even marked differences of opinion concerning its ending. Mr. Tedder thinks he was the Devil, and that he somehow ceased to be fiendish when he got the pot off his head. Other authorities think that heavy ordnance destroyed the Devil, and point to a quarter-mile crater as proof.

  But if by the Devil of East Lupton you mean the Whatever-it-was that came out of the Somewhere into the Here and caused all the catastrophes by his mere arrival..; s Why, in that case, and strictly speaking, the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont, was the Whatever-it-was which was in a leathery, hidelike garment or pressure-suit the morning Mr. Tedder ran away from t
he constable. And that Devil was destroyed by a rusty barbed wire which was strung between two trees on an abandoned farm. And it was killed long before so much as thfc existence of a Devil in those parts was suspected.

  SCRIMSHAW

  All hard-bitten SF fans are nostalgic: the good-old-days syndrome seems to be found in force wherever there is a gathering of them. Some stories are more successful than others in bringing back the very smell and feel of second-grade mechan-icd-pulp stock. This is one: is it really only twenty years ago that we were carving models out of chunks of ‘Perspex’?

  Pop Young was the one known man who could stand life on the surface of the Moon’s far side, and therefore, he occupied the shack on the Big Crack’s edge, above the mining colony there. Some people said that no normal man could do it, and mentioned the scar of a ghastly head-wound to explain his ability. One man partly guessed the secret, but only pardy. His name was Sattell and he had reason not to talk. Pop Young alone knew the whole truth, and he kept his mouth shut, too. It wasn’t anybody else’s business.

  The shack and the job he filled were located in the medieval notion of the physical appearance of hell. By day the environment was heat and torment. By night - lunar night, of course, and lunar day - it was frigidity and horror. Once in two weeks Earth-time a rocketship came around the horizon from Lunar City with stores for the colony deep underground. Pop received the stores and took care of them. He handed over the product of the mine, to be forwarded to Earth. The rocket went away again. Come nightfall Pop lowered the supplies down the long cable into the Big Crack to the colony far down inside, and freshened up the landing field marks with magnesium marking-powder if a rocket-blast had blurred them. That was fundamentally all he had to do. But without him the mine down in the Crack would have had to shut down.