The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  True, there was no direct mention of a late interview with him, but on the other hand no faintest hint had escaped the edi­torial writers of the fact that he had been killed, and that his murderer had gone openly to a country from which he could not be extradited, where he was living in ease and comfort, defying the law to pun­ish him.

  When the last of the papers had been gone through, Beckwith was in a frenzy. He had killed Conway, and the papers would not mention it! He felt almost as if he were being cheated, as, in a way, he was. A large part of his triumph was the public knowledge of his superiority to both Conway and Wells. To be deprived of that was infuriating, daunting.

  Beckwith suddenly got up and went from the house, to walk heedlessly in the pouring rain and try to think what could have happened to set his plans awry. Such few brown-skinned folk as saw him shrugged their shoulders and murmured softly to one another. Los Yanquis were mad, though el Señor Beckwith had seemed less mad than they until now. But behold him walking in the downpour!

  When he finally stumbled into his own house again, Beckwith was exhausted both mentally and physically. He made his way, dripping, into the room where he had left his newspapers. His wife rose and fled from the room when he appeared, leaving behind her the picture section at which she had been looking.

  She read no English, and but little Span­ish, but the brown-tinted pictures gave her childish pleasure. Beckwith paid no at­tention to her hasty flight, but slumped down in his chair and stared gloomily at the floor. Then, suddenly, a picture on the illustrated sheet grew clear and distinct. It was a picture of Hugh Conway, at the top of his stroke, about to strike a golf-ball. The legend beneath the picture read: “Hugh Conway, well-known multimillion­aire, taking a vacation from business cares at Newport. He is shown driving off from the first tee in front of the clubhouse.”

  Beckwith, staring at the picture of the man whose life he had choked out a month before, caught his breath and began to swear at the printed sheet, hysterically, as he might have sworn at a ghost.

  * * * *

  When the fruit steamer stopped on its northern trip, Beckwith took possession of a cabin. He did not quite understand why he was going to New York, but he was fe­verishly impatient for the ship to leave Bahia del Toro. He had a letter of credit in his pocket, and was determined to find out once and for all what had happened, If Conway had escaped him before, he would not escape again.

  In his stateroom Beckwith carried the last batch of papers he had received, and spent much time reading and rereading the items concerning Conway. He weighed again and again each phrase in the ac­counts of Conway’s munificent gift to charity, hoping to find therein some hint of Conway’s death. He knew Conway was dead. He had choked Conway’s life from him with his two hands. But why, why, why did not the papers announce the murder?

  The ship steamed up the coast with in­credible slowness. It put into Havana with nerve-racking deliberation. There were fresh papers to be secured there, but none of them told of the murder. Beck­with read them minutely, and as the steam­er neared New York he came out on deck and paced back and forth, smoking incessantly, torturing his brain for an explana­tion of the silence of the newspapers.

  His nerves were in shreds when they finally reached New York. He watched the forts swing by to his left, and the tall buildings of lower Manhattan rise from the water. The fixed expressionlessness of the Statue of Liberty irritated him. He was all impatience to be ashore and free to make his final investigations. What had happened that had prevented the press from learning of Conway’s death? And why had they printed no word of his mur­der? The leisurely manner of the customs inspectors drove him nearly frantic. When he was at last free to go ashore he was trembling from sheer nervous tension.

  He went down the gangplank, an olive-skinned steward carrying his bags. He pushed roughly through the crowd of peo­ple come to meet the voyagers, and closed his ears to the soft Spanish greetings. He failed altogether to see a motion-picture photographer cranking busily. He pressed free of the assembly of people, and turned impatiently to the steward behind him.

  “Trouble you to come with me, sir,” said a quiet voice at his elbow.

  Two unimpressive figures in civilian clothes stood, one on either side. The hand of each was in his coat pocket, where a suggestive bulge warned against resist­ance.

  “What the devil!” began Beckwith fu­riously, and stopped.

  Wells was standing there, smiling sar­castically at him—Wells the commissioner of police.

  “You’re under arrest for Hugh Con­way’s murder, Beckwith,” he said causti­cally.

  A dozen or more delighted men watched the scene, cameras and notebooks busy. Beckwith saw the unmistakable signs of the reportorial trade. There was even a wo­man or two among them, “sob-sisters” be­yond a doubt.

  “We might as well made it a nice, dra­matic moment, Beckwith,” Wells said dry­ly. “I got your letter, pinned to Conway’s breast. Kind of you to tell me where you were going, and that you couldn’t be ex­tradited. I wouldn’t have got you but for that. I knew you’d look in the papers for news of your feat; as a matter of fact, you mentioned it in your letter, so I took the boys here into my confidence “—he nodded at the group of newspapermen—” and they agreed to help out. Their owners okayed the scheme, and the murder was kept ab­solutely secret from the public and the press.

  “We gave you two weeks to get wor­ried, and then announced Conway’s be­quest to charities—it was really in his will—and printed a picture or so of him. You rose to the bait, all right. We couldn’t touch you in Nueva Bolivia, but as soon as you boarded the steamer, we had you. We let you come on to New York alone, though, to save trouble. We’re much obliged to you, I’m sure.”

  Beckwith. suddenly understood. He had not won his revenge and freedom after all. He had not proven himself cleverer than Wells. He had lost, utterly and irrepar­ably. He had been lured into the power of the law by nothing more than silence. But the thing that cut deepest into his heart, that made the cup of his humiliation run over, was a final remark of Wells. The re­porters were listening intently.

  “I guess that’s all, boys,” said Wells in­dulgently, “No more to be said. You’ll have a good story for the evening editions. Beckwith couldn’t resist playing to the gal­lery gods.”

  THE RED DUST (1921)

  CHAPTER I

  PREY

  The sky grew gray and then almost white. The ever-hanging banks of clouds seemed to withdraw a little from the steaming earth. Haze that hung always among the mushroom forests and above the fungus hills grew more tenuous, and the slow and sodden rain that dripped the whole night long ceased reluctantly

  As far as the eye could see a mad world stretched out, a world of insensate cruel­ties and strange fierce maternal solici­tudes The insects of the night—the great moths whose wings spread for yards upon yards in the dimness, and the huge fireflies, four feet in length, whose beacons made the earth glow in their pale, weird light—the insects of the night had sought their hiding-places

  Now the creatures of the day ventured forth. A great anthill towered a hundred feet into the air. Upon its gravel and boul­der-strewn side a commotion became vis­ible.

  The earth crumbled, and fell into an in­visible opening then a dark chasm ap­peared and two slender, threadlike anten­nae peered out

  A warrior ant emerged, and stood for an instant in the daylight, looking all about for signs of danger to the ant-city He was all of ten inches long, this ant, and his mandibles were fierce and strong. A second and a third warrior came from the inside of the anthill, and ran with tiny clickings about the hillock, waving their antennae restlessly, searching, ever searching for a menace to their city.

  They returned to the gateway from which they had made their appearance, evidently bearing reassuring messages, be­cause shortly after they had re-entered the gateway of the ant-city, a flood of black, ill-smelling workers poured out of the opening and dispersed upon their busi­ness
es. The clickings of their limbs and an occasional whining stridulation made an incessant sound as they scattered over the earth, foraging among the mushrooms and giant cabbages, among the rubbish-heaps of the gigantic beehives and wasp colonies, and among the remains of the tragedies of the night for food for their city.

  The city of the ants had begun its daily toil, toil in which everyone shared without supervision or coercion. Deep in the re­cesses of the pyramid galleries were hol­lowed out and winding passages that led down an unguessable distance into the earth below.

  Somewhere in the maze of tunnels there was a royal apartment, in which the queen-ant reposed, waited upon by assidu­ous courtiers, fed by royal stewards, and combed and rubbed by the hands of her subjects and children.

  But even the huge monarch of the city had her constant and pressing duty of ma­ternity. A dozen times the size of her larg­est loyal servant, she was no less bound by the unwritten but imperative laws of the city than they. From the time of waking to the time of rest, she was ordained to be the queen-mother in the strictest and most literal sense of the word, for at intervals to be measured only in terms of minutes she brought forth a tiny egg, perhaps three inches in length, which was instantly seized by one of her eager attendants and carried in haste to the municipal nursery.

  There it was placed in a tiny cell a foot or more in length until a sac-shaped grub appeared, all soft, white body save for a tiny mouth. Then the nurses took it in charge and fed it with curious, tender ges­tures until it had waxed large and fat and slept the sleep of metamorphosis.

  When it emerged from its rudimentary cocoon it took the places of its nurses until its soft skin had hardened into the horny armor of the workers and soldiers, and then it joined the throngs of workers that poured out from the city at dawn to forage for food, to bring back its finds and to share with the warriors and the nurses, the drone males and the young queens, and all the other members of its communities with duties in the city itself.

  That was the life of the social insect. Absolute devotion to the cause of its city, utter abnegation of self-interest for the sake of its fellows—and death at their hands when its usefulness was past. It neither knew nor expected more nor less.

  It is a strange instinct that prompts these creatures to devote their lives to their city, taking no smallest thought for their individual good, without even the call of maternity or love to guide them. Only the queen knows motherhood. The others know nothing but toil, for purposes they do not understand, and to an end of which they cannot dream.

  At intervals all over the world of Burl’s time these ant-cities rose above the sur­rounding ground, some small and barely begun, and others ancient colonies which were truly the continuation of cities first built when the ants were insects to be crushed beneath the feet of men. These ancient strongholds towered two, three, and even four hundred feet above the plains, and their inhabitants would have had to be numbered in millions if not in billions.

  Not all the earth was subject to the ants, however. Bees and wasps and more deadly creatures crawled and flew above its surface. The bees were four feet and more in length. And slender-waisted wasps darted here and there, preying upon the colossal crickets that sang deep bass music to their mates—and the length of the crickets was that of a man, and more.

  Spiders with bloated bellies waited, mo­tionless, in their snares, whose threads were the size of small cables, waiting for some luckless giant insect to be entangled in the gummy traps. And butterflies fluttered over the festering plains of this new world, tremendous creatures whose wings could only be measured in terms of yards.

  An outcropping or rock jutted up abrupt­ly from a fungus-covered plain. Shelf-fungi and strangely colored molds stained the stone until the shining quartz was hid­den almost completely from view, but the whole glistened like tinted crystal from the dank wetness of the night. Little wisps of vapor curled away from the slopes as the moisture was taken up by the already moisture-laden air.

  Seen from a distance, the outcropping of rock looked innocent and still, but a nearer view showed many things.

  Here a hunting wasp had come upon a gray worm, and was methodically inserting its sting into each of the twelve segments of the faintly writhing creature. Presently the worm would be completely paralyzed, and would be carried to the burrow of the wasp, where an egg would be laid upon it, from which a tiny maggot would presently hatch. Then weeks of agony for the great gray worm, conscious, but unable to move, while the maggot fed upon its living flesh—

  There a tiny spider, youngest of hatch-lings, barely four inches across, stealthily stalked some other still tinier mite, the lit­tle, many-legged larva of the oil-beetle, known as the bee-louse. The almost infi­nitely small bee-louse was barely two inch­es long, and could easily hide in the thick fur of a great bumblebee.

  This one small creature would never ful­fill its destiny, however. The hatchling spi­der sprang—it was a combat of midgets which was soon over. When the spider had grown and was feared as a huge, black-bel­lied tarantula, it would slay monster crick­ets with the same ease and the same im­placable ferocity.

  The outcropping of rock looked still and innocent. There was one point where it overhung, forming a shelf, beneath which the stone fell away in a sheer drop. Many colored fungus growths covered the rock, making it a riot of tints and shades. But hanging from the roof-like projection of the stone there was a strange, drab-white object. It was in the shape of half a globe, perhaps six feet by six feet at its largest. A number of little semicircular doors were fixed about its sides, like inverted arches, each closed by a blank wall. One of them would open, but only one.

  The house was like the half of a pallid orange, fastened to the roof of rock. Thick cables stretched in every direction for yards upon yards, anchoring the habitation firmly, but the most striking of the things about the house—still and quiet and inno­cent, like all the rest of the rock outcrop­ping—were the ghastly trophies fastened to the outer walls and hanging from long silken chains below.

  Here was the hind leg of one of the smaller beetles. There was the wing-case of a flying creature. Here a snail-shell, two feet in diameter, hanging at the end of an inch-thick cable. There a boulder that must have weighed thirty or forty, pounds, dangling in similar fashion.

  But fastened here and there, haphazard and irregularly, were other more repulsive remnants. The shrunken head-armor of a beetle, the fierce Jaws of a cricket—the pitiful shreds of a hundred creatures that had formed forgotten meals for the bloated insect within the home.

  Comparatively small was the nest of the Clotho spider; it was decorated as no ogre’s castle had even been adorned. Legs sucked dry of their contents, corselets of horny armor forever to be unused by any crea­ture, a wing of this insect, the head of that. And dangling by the longest cord of all, with a silken cable wrapped carefully about it to keep the parts together, was the shrunken, shriveled, dried-up body of a long-dead man!

  Outside, the nest was a place of grue­some relics. Within, it was a place of lux­ury and ease. A cushion of softest down filled all the bulging bottom of the hemi­sphere. A canopy of similarly luxurious texture interposed itself between the rocky roof and the dark, hideous body of the rest­ing spider.

  The eyes of the hairy creature glittered like diamonds, even in the darkness, but the loathsome, attenuated legs were tucked under the round-bellied body, and the spi­der was at rest. It had fed.

  It waited, motionless, without desires or aversions, without emotions or perplexities, in comfortable, placid, machinelike con­tentment until time should bring the need to feed again.

  A fresh carcass had been added to the decorations of the nest only the night be­fore.

  For many days the spider would re­pose in motionless splendor within the silk­en castle. When hunger came again, a noc­turnal foray, a creature pounced upon and slain, brought bodily to the nest, and feast­ed upon, its body festooned upon the ex­terior, and another half-sleeping, half-waking period of
dreamful idleness within the sybaritic charnel house.

  Slowly and timidly, half a dozen pink-skinned creatures made their way through the mushroom forest that led to the upcroppings of rock under which the Clotho spider’s nest was slung. They were men, degraded remnants of the once domi­nant race.

  Burl was their leader, and was distin­guished solely by two three-foot stumps of the feathery, golden antennae of a night-flying moth he had bound to his forehead. In his hand was a horny, chitinous spear, taken from the body of an unknown flying creature killed by the flames of the burn­ing purple hills.

  Since Burl’s return from his solitary—and involuntary—journey, he had been greatly revered by his tribe. Hitherto it had been but a leaderless, formless group of people, creeping to the same hiding-place at nightfall to share in the food of the fortunate, and shuddering at the fate of those who might not appear.

  Now Burl had walked boldly to them, bearing upon his back the gray bulk of a labyrinth spider he had slain with his own hands, and clad in wonderful garments of gorgeousness they envied and admired. They hung upon his words as he struggled to tell them of his adventures, and slowly and dimly they began to look to him for leadership. He was wonderful. For days they had listened breathlessly to the tale of his adventures, but when he demanded that they follow him in another and more perilous affair, they were appalled.

  A peculiar strength of will had come to Burl. He had seen and done things that no man in the memory of his tribe had seen or done. He had stood by when the purple hills burned and formed a funeral pyre for the horde of army ants, and for uncounted thousands of flying creatures. He had caught a leaping tarantula upon the point of his spear, and had escaped from the web of a banded web-spider by oiling his body so that the sticky threads of the snare refused to hold him fast. He had attacked and killed a great gray laby­rinth spider.