Invaders of Earth

by Groff Conklin

  Preedy said in a low voice, “I don’t think they saw us, sir. There was not a soul in sight. And, besides, they’re obviously not fit to go to sea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Didn’t you notice, sir—they haven’t got a conning tower? It must have been shot away.”

  Wardell was silent, shocked at himself for not having noticed. The vague admiration that had begun to grow inside him at the cool way in which he handled the ship deflated a little.

  Another thought came into his mind; and he scowled with a dark reluctance at the very idea of revealing a further deficiency in his observation. But he began grudgingly:

  “Funny how your mind accepts the presence of things that aren’t there.” He hesitated; then, “I didn’t even notice whether or not their deck gun was damaged.”

  It was the mate who was silent now. Wardell gave a swift glance at the man’s long face, realized that the mate was undergoing a private case of shock and annoyance, and said quickly, “Mr. Preedy, call the men forward.”

  Conscious again of superiority, Wardell went down to the deck. With great deliberateness he began examining the antisub gun beside the whale gun. He could hear the men gathering behind him, but he did not turn until feet began to shuffle restlessly.

  He looked them over then, glancing from face to rough, tough, leatherbeaten face. Fifteen men and a boy, not counting the engineer and his assistant—and every one of them looking revitalized, torn out of the glumness that had been the stock expression around the ship for three months.

  Wardell’s mind flashed back over the long years some of these men had been with him; he nodded, his heavy face dark with satisfaction, and began, “Looks like we’ve got a disabled Jap sub cornered in there, men. Our duty’s clear. The navy gave us a three-inch gun and four machine guns before we sailed, and—”

  He stopped, frowned at one of the older men. “What’s the matter, Kenniston?”

  “Begging your pardon, cap’n, that thing in there isn’t a sub. I was in the service in ‘18, and I can tell one at a glance, conning tower bombed off or not.

  “Why, that vessel in there has metal walls like dark scales—didn’t you notice? We’ve got something cornered in there, sir, but it isn’t a sub.”

  From where he lay with his little expedition, behind the line of rock ledge, Wardell studied the strange vessel. The long, astoundingly hard walk to reach this vantage point had taken more than an hour. And now that he was here, what about it?

  Through his binoculars, the—ship—showed as a streamlined, cigar-shaped, dead metal that lay motionless in the tiny pattern of waves that shimmered atop the waters of the bay. There was no other sign of life. Nevertheless—

  Wardell stiffened suddenly, with a sharp consciousness of his responsibilities—all these men, six here with him, carrying two of the precious machine guns, and the other men on the schooner.

  The alienness of the vessel, with its dark, scaly metal walls, its great length, struck him with a sudden chill. Behind him somebody said into the silence of that bleak, rocky landscape, “If only we had a radio sending set! What a bomber could do to that target! I—”

  Wardell was only dimly aware of the way the man’s voice sank queerly out of audibility. He was thinking heavily: two machine guns against that. Or, rather—even the mental admission of greater strength came unwillingly—four machine guns and a three-incher. After all, the weapons back on the Albatross had to be included, even though the schooner seemed dangerously far away. He—

  His mind went dead slowly. With a start, he saw that the flat, dark reach of deck below was showing movement: a large metal plate turning, then jerking open as if springs had snapped at it with irresistible strength. Through the hatchway thus created, a figure was coming.

  A figure—a beast. The thing reared up on horny, gleaming legs, and its scales shone in the late morning sun. Of its four arms, one was clutching a flat, crystalline structure, a second held a small, blunt object that showed faintly crimson in the dazzling sunbeams. The other two arms were at ease.

  The monster stood there under Earth’s warm sun, silhouetted against the background of limpid, blue-green sea; stood there arrogantly, its beast head flung back on its short neck with such pride and confidence that Wardell felt a tingle at the nape of his neck.

  “For Heaven’s sake,” a man whispered hoarsely, “put some bullets in it.”

  The sound, more than the words, reached into the region of Wardell’s brain that controlled his muscles.

  “Shoot!” he rasped. “Frost! Withers!”

  Chat-chat-chat! The two machine guns yammered into life, wakening a thousand echoes in the virgin silence of the cove.

  The figure, which had started striding briskly along the curving deck in the direction away from shore, its webbed feet showing plainly at each step, stopped short, turned—and looked up.

  Eyes as green and fiery as a cat’s at night blazed at—seemingly straight at—Wardell’s face. The captain felt the muscles of his body constrict; his impulse was to jerk back behind the ledge, out of sight, but he couldn’t have moved to save his life.

  The mind-twisting emotion must have been evoked in every man present. For the machine guns ceased their stammering; and there was unnatural silence.

  The yellow-green reptile moved first. It started to run, back toward the hatch. Reaching the opening, it stooped and seemed about to leap down headfirst, as if it couldn’t get in too quickly.

  Instead of going down, however, it handed the crystalline object that it had held in one hand to somebody below; then it straightened.

  There was a clang as the hatch banged shut—and the reptile stood alone on the deck, cut off from escape.

  The scene froze like that for a fraction of a second, a tableau of rigid figures against a framework of quiet sea and dark, almost barren land. The beast stood absolutely still, its head flung back, its blazing eyes fixed on the men behind the ledge.

  Wardell had not thought of its posture as a crouching one, but abruptly it straightened visibly and bounced upward and sideways, like a frog leaping or a diver jackknifing. Water and beast met with a faint splash. When the shimmering veil of agitated water subsided, the beast was gone.

  They waited.

  “What goes down,” Wardell said finally in a voice that had in it the faintest shiver, “must come up. Heaven only knows what it is, but hold your guns ready.”

  The minutes dragged. The shadow of a breeze that had been titillating the surface of the bay died completely; and the water took on a flat, glassy sheen that was broken only far out near the narrow outlet to the rougher sea beyond.

  After ten minutes, Wardell was twisting uneasily, dissatisfied with his position. At the end of twenty minutes he stood up.

  “We’ve got to get back to the ship,” he said tensely. “This thing is too big for us.”

  They were edging along the shore five minutes later when the clamor started: a distant shouting, then a long, sharp rattle of machine-gun fire, then—silence.

  It had come from where the schooner lay, out of their line of vision behind the bank of trees half a mile across the bay.

  Wardell grunted as he ran. It had been hard enough walking—earlier. Now he was in an agony of jolts and half stumbles. Twice, during the first few minutes, he fell heavily.

  The second time he got up very slowly and waited for his panting men to catch up with him. There was no more running because—it struck him with piercing sharpness—what had happened on the ship had happened.

  Gingerly, Wardell led the way over the rock-strewn shore, with its wilderness of chasms. He kept cursing softly under his breath in a sweat of fury with himself for having left the Albatross. And there was a special rage at the very idea that he had automatically set his fragile wooden ship against an armored sub.

  Even though, as it had turned out, it wasn’t a sub.

  His brain stalled before the bare contemplation of what it might be.

  For a moment he tried,
mentally tried, to picture himself here, struggling over the barren shore of this rocky inlet in order to see what a— lizard—had done to his ship. And he couldn’t. The picture wouldn’t piece together. It was not woven even remotely of the same cloth as all that life of quiet days and evenings he had spent on the bridges of ships, just sitting or smoking his pipe, mindlessly contemplating the sea.

  Even more dim and unconnectable was the civilization of back-room poker games and loud-laughing, bold-eyed women who made up his life during those brief months when he was in harbor—that curious, aimless life that he always gave up so willingly when the time came to put to sea again.

  Wardell pushed the gray, futile memory from him and said, “Frost, take Blakeman and McCann and pick up one drum of water. Danny ought to have them all filled by now. No, keep your machine gun. I want you to stay with the remaining drums till I send some more men. We’re going to get that water and then get out of here.”

  Wardell felt the better for his definite decision. He would head south for the naval base; and then others, better equipped and trained, would tackle the alien ship.

  If only his ship were still there, intact—just what he feared he wasn’t certain. He was conscious of the queasiest thrill of relief as he topped the final and steepest hill—and there she was. Through his glasses he made out the figures of men on the deck. And the last sodden weight of anxiety in him yielded to the fact that, barring accidents to individuals, everything was all right.

  Something had happened, of course. In minutes he would know—

  For a time it seemed as if he would never get the story. The men crowded around him as he clambered aboard, more weary than he cared to admit. The babble of voices that raged at him, the blazing excitement of everyone, did not help.

  Words came through about a beast “like a man-sized frog” that had come aboard. There was something about the engine room, and incomprehensibility about the engineer and his assistant waking up, and—

  Wardell’s voice, stung into a bass blare by the confusion, brought an end to the madness. The captain said crisply, “Mr. Preedy, any damage?”

  “None,” the mate replied, “though Rutherford and Cressy are still shaky.”

  The reference to the engineer and his assistant was obscure, but Wardell ignored it. “Mr. Preedy, dispatch six men ashore to help bring the water aboard. Then come to the bridge.”

  A few minutes later, Preedy was giving Wardell a complete account of what had happened. At the sound of the machine-gun fire from Wardell’s party, all the men had crowded to port side of the ship and had stayed there.

  The watery tracks left by the creature showed that it had used the opportunity to climb aboard the starboard side and had gone below. It was first seen standing at the fo’c’sle hatchway, coolly looking over the forward deck where the guns were.

  The thing actually started boldly forward under the full weight of nine pairs of eyes, apparently heading straight for the guns; abruptly, however, it turned and made a running dive overboard. Then the machine guns started.

  “I don’t think we hit him,” Preedy confessed.

  Wardell was thoughtful. “I’m not sure,” he said, “that it’s bothered by bullets. It—” He stopped himself. “What the devil am I saying? It runs every time we fire. But go on.”

  “We went through the ship and that’s when we found Rutherford and Cressy. They were out cold, and they don’t remember a thing. There’s no damage, though, engineer says; and, well, that’s all.”

  It was enough, Wardell thought, but he said nothing. He stood for a while, picturing the reality of a green-and-yellow lizard climbing aboard his ship. He shuddered. What could the damned thing have wanted?

  The sun was high in the middle heavens to the south when the last drum of water was hoisted aboard and the whaler began to move.

  Up on the bridge, Wardell heaved a sigh of relief as the ship nosed well clear of the white-crested shoals and headed into deep water. He was pushing the engine-room indicator to full speed ahead when the thud of the Diesels below became a cough that—ended.

  The Albatross coasted along from momentum, swishing softly from side to side. In the dimly lighted region that was the engine room, Wardell found Rutherford on the floor, laboriously trying to light a little pool of oil with a match.

  The action was so mad that the captain stopped, stared, and then stood there speechless and intent.

  For the oil wouldn’t take fire. Four matches joined the burned ends on the floor beside the golden puddle. Then:

  “Hell’s bells!” said Wardell, “you mean that thing put something in our oil that—”

  He couldn’t go on; and there was no immediate answer. But finally, without looking up, the engineer said thickly, “Skipper, I’ve been tryin’ ta think. Wha’ for would a bunch of lizards be wantin’ us to lay to here?”

  Wardell went back on deck without replying. He was conscious of hunger. But he had no illusions about the empty feeling inside him. No craving for food had ever made him feel like that.

  Wardell ate, scarcely noticing his food, and came out into the open feeling logy and sleepy. The climb to the bridge took all his strength and will. He stood for a moment looking out across the narrows that led into the bay.

  He made a discovery. In the brief minutes that the Diesels had operated on the untainted oil in the pipes, the Albatross had moved to a point where the dark vessel in the distance was now visible across the bows.

  Wardell studied the silent alien ship sleepily, then gazed along the shore line through his glasses. Finally he turned his attention to the deck in front of him. And nearly jumped out of his skin.

  The thing was there, calmly bending over the whale gun, its scaly body shining like the wet hide of a big lizard. Water formed in little dark pools at its feet, spread damply to where Gunner Art Zote lay face downward, looking very dead.

  If the interloper had been a man, Wardell was sure he could have forced his paralyzed muscles to draw the revolver that hung from his belt. Or even if the thing had been as far away as when he had first seen it.

  But he was standing there less than twenty-five feet from it, staring down at that glistening, reptilian monstrosity with its four arms and its scale-armored legs; and the knowledge in the back of his mind that machine-gun bullets hadn’t hurt it before, and—

  With a cool disregard for possible watching eyes, the reptile began to tug at the harpoon where it protruded from the snout of the whale gun. It gave up after a second and went around to the breech of the gun. It was fumbling there, the crimson thing it held flashing with spasmodic incarnadine brilliance, when a wave of laughter and voices shattered the silence of the afternoon.

  The next second the galley door burst open and a dozen men debouched upon the deck. The solid wooden structure that was the entrance to the fo’c’sle hid the beast from their sight.

  They stood for a moment, their ribald laughter echoing to the skies above that perpetually cold sea. As from a vast distance, Wardell found himself listening to the rough jokes, the rougher cursing; and he was thinking: like children, they are. Already, the knowledge that the strangest creatures in all creation had marooned them here on a fuelless ship must seem a dim thing in their minds. Or they wouldn’t be standing like mindless fools while—

  Wardell stopped the thought, astounded that he had allowed it to distract him for a single second. With a gasp, he snatched at his revolver and took aim at the exposed back of the lizard where it was now bending over the strong, dark cable that attached the harpoon to the ship.

  Curiously, the shot brought a moment of complete silence. The lizard straightened slowly and turned half in annoyance. And then—

  Men shouted. The machine gun in the crow’s-nest began to yelp with short, excited bursts that missed the deck and the reptile but made a white foam in the water beyond the ship’s bows.

  Wardell was conscious of a frantic irritation at the damned fool up there. In the fury of his annoyance he turned h
is head upward and yelled at the fellow to learn to aim properly. When he looked again at the deck, the beast wasn’t there.

  The sound of a faint splash permeated through a dozen other noises; and, simultaneously, there was a stampede for the rails as the crew peered down into the water. Over their heads, Wardell thought he caught the yellow-green flash in the depths, but the color merged too swiftly, too easily, with the shifting blue-green-gray of the northern sea.

  Wardell stood very still; there was a coldness in the region of his heart, an empty sense of unnormal things. His gun hadn’t wavered. The bullet couldn’t have missed. Yet nothing had happened.