The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  “Oh,” said Dillon. “Oh, yes. Sorry. I’ve got some cameras up yonder. I want a picture or two of those Bulgarians. See if you can persuade this young lady not to go on. I fancy it’s safe enough here. Not a normal raid route through this pass.”

  Coburn nodded. Dillon expected the raid, evidently. This sort of thing had happened in Turkey. Now it would start up here, in Greece. The soldiers would strike fast and far, at first. They wouldn’t stop to hunt down the local inhabitants. Not yet.

  “We’ll wait,” said Coburn. “You’ll be back?”

  “Oh, surely!” said Dillon. “Five minutes or less.”

  He started up the precipitous wall, at whose bottom he had slid down. He climbed remarkably well. He went up hand-over-hand despite the steepness of the stone. It looked almost impossible, but Dillon apparently found handgrips by instinct, as a good climber does. In a matter of minutes he vanished, some fifty feet up, behind a bulging mass of stone. He did not reappear.

  Coburn began to get his breath back. The girl looked at him, her forehead creased.

  “Just to make sure,” said Coburn, “I’ll see if I can get a view back down the trail.”

  Where the vastness of the sky showed, he might be able to look down. He scrambled up a barrier two man-heights high. There was a screen of straggly brush, with emptiness beyond. He peered.

  He could see a long way down and behind, and actually the village was clearly in sight from here. There were rumbling, caterpillar-tread tanks in the act of entering it. There were anachronistic mounted men with them. Cavalry is outdated, nowadays, but in rocky mountain country they can have uses where tanks can’t go. But here tanks and cavalry looked grim. Coburn squirmed back and beckoned to the girl. She joined him. They peered through the brushwood together.

  The light tanks were scurrying along the single village street. Horsemen raced here and there. A pig squealed. There was a shot. The tanks emerged from the other side. They went crawling swiftly toward the south. But they did not turn aside where the villagers had. They headed along the way Coburn had driven to Ardea.

  Infantrymen appeared, marching into the village. An advance party, rifles ready. This was strict discipline and standard military practise. Horsemen rode to tell them that all was quiet. They turned and spurred away after the tanks.

  The girl said in a strained voice. “This is war starting! Invasion!”

  Coburn said coldly, “No. No planes. This isn’t war. It’s a training exercise, Iron-Curtain style. This outfit will strike twenty—maybe thirty miles south. There’s a town there—Kilkis. They’ll take it and loot it. By the time Athens finds out what’s happened, they’ll be ready to fall back. They’ll do a little fighting. They’ll carry off the people. And they’ll deny everything. The West doesn’t want war. Greece couldn’t fight by herself. And America wouldn’t believe that such things could happen. But they do. It’s what’s called cold war. Ever hear of that?”

  The main column of soldiers far below poured up to the village and went down the straggly street in a tide of dark figures. The village was very small. The soldiers came out of the other end of the village. They poured on after the tanks, rippling over irregularities in the way. They seemed innumerable.

  “Three or four thousand men,” said Coburn coldly. “This is a big raid. But it’s not war. Not yet.”

  It was not the time for full-scale war. Bulgaria and the other countries in its satellite status were under orders to put a strain upon the outside world. They were building up border incidents and turmoil for the benefit of their masters. Turkey was on a war footing, after a number of incidents like this. Indo-China was at war. Korea was an old story. Now Greece. It always takes more men to guard against criminal actions than to commit them. When this raid was over Greece would have to maintain a full-size army in its northern mountains to guard against its repetition. Which would be a strain on its treasury and might help toward bankruptcy. This was cold war.

  The infantry ended. Horse-drawn vehicles appeared in a seemingly endless line. Motorized transport would be better, but the Bulgarians were short of it. Shaggy, stubby animals plodded in the wake of the tanks and the infantry. There were two-wheeled carts in single file all across the valley. They went through the village and filed after the soldiers.

  “I think,” said Coburn in biting anger, “this will be all there is to see. They’ll go in until they’re stopped. They’ll kidnap Greek civilians and later work them to death in labor camps. They’ll carry off some children to raise as spies. But their purpose is probably only to make such a threat that the Greeks will go broke guarding against them. They know the Greeks don’t want war.”

  He began to wriggle back from the brushwood screen. He was filled with the sort of sick rage that comes when you can’t actively resent insolence and arrogance. He hated the people who wanted the world to collapse, and this was part of their effort to bring it about.

  He helped the girl down. “Dillon said to wait,” he said. He found himself shaking with angerat the men who had ordered the troops to march. “He said he was taking pictures. He must have had an advance tip of some sort. If so, he’ll have a line of retreat.”

  Then Coburn frowned. Not quite plausible, come to think of it. But Dillon had certainly known about the raid. He was set to take pictures, and he hadn’t been surprised. One would have expected Greek Army photographers on hand to take pictures of a raid of which they had warning. Probably United Nations observers on the scene, too. Yes. There should be Army men and probably a United Nations team up where Dillon was.

  Coburn explained to the girl. “That’ll be it. And they’ll have a radio, too. Probably helicopters taking them out also. I’ll go up and tell them to be sure and have room for you.”

  He started for the cliff he’d seen Dillon climb. He paused: “I’d better have your name for them to report to Athens.”

  “I’m Janice Ames,” she told him. “The Breen Foundation has me going around arranging for lessons for the people up here. Sanitation and nutrition and midwifery, and so on. The Foundation office is in Salonika, though.”

  He nodded and attacked the cliff.

  * * * *

  It hadn’t been a difficult climb for Dillon. It wasn’t even a long one for Coburn, but it was much worse than he’d thought. The crevices for handholds were rare, and footholds were almost non-existent. There were times when he felt he was holding on by his fingernails. Dillon seemed to have made it with perfect ease, but Coburn found it exhausting.

  Fifty feet up he came to the place where Dillon had vanished. But it was a preposterously difficult task to get across an undercut to where he could grasp a stunted tree. It was a strain to scramble up past it. Then he found himself on the narrowest of possible ledges, with a sickening drop off to one side. But Dillon had made it, so he followed.

  He went a hundred yards, and then the ledge came to an end. He saw where Dillon must have climbed. It was possible, but Coburn violently did not want to try. Still…He started.

  Then something clicked in his throat. There was a rather deep ledge for a space of four or five feet. And there was Dillon. No, not Dillon. Just Dillon’s clothes. They lay flat and deflated, but laid out in one assembly beside a starveling twisted bush. It would have been possible for a man to stand there to take off his clothes, if he wanted to. But a man who takes off his clothes—and why should Dillon do that?—takes them off one by one. These garments were fitted together. The coat was over the shirt, and the trousers fitted to the bottom of the shirt over the coat, and the boots were at the ends of the trouser legs.

  Then Coburn saw something he did not believe. It palpably was not true. He saw a hand sticking out of the end of the sleeve. But it was not a hand, because it had collapsed. It was rather like an unusually thick glove, flesh color.

  Then he saw what should have been Dillon’s head. And it was in place, too. But it was not Dillon’s head. It was not a head at all. It was something quite different. There were no eyes. Merely hole
s. Openings. Like a mask.

  Coburn felt a sort of roaring in his ears, and he could not think clearly for a moment because of the shrieking impossibility of what he was looking at. Dillon’s necktie had been very neatly untied, and left in place in his collar. His shirt had been precisely unbuttoned. He had plainly done it himself. And then—the unbuttoned shirt made it clear—he had come out of his body. Physically, he had emerged and gone on. The thing lying flat that had lapsed at Coburn’s feet was Dillon’s outside. His outside only. The inside had come out and gone away. It had climbed the cliff over Coburn’s head.

  The outside of Dillon looked remarkably like something made out of foam-rubber. Coburn touched it, insanely.

  He heard his own voice saying flatly: “It’s a sort of suit. A suit that looks like Dillon. He was in it. Something was! Something is playing the part of Dillon. Maybe it always was. Maybe there isn’t any Dillon.”

  He felt a sort of hysterical composure. He opened the chest. It was patently artificial. There were such details on the inside as would be imagined in a container needed to fit something snugly. At the edges of the opening there were fastenings like the teeth of a zipper, but somehow different. Coburn knew that when this was fastened there would be no visible seam.

  Whatever wore this suit-that-looked-like-Dillon could feel perfectly confident of passing for Dillon, clothed or otherwise. It could pass without any question for—

  Coburn gagged.

  It could pass without question for a human being.

  Obviously, whatever was wearing this foam-rubber replica of Dillon was not human!

  Coburn went back to where he had to climb down the cliffside again. He moved like a sleep-walker. He descended the fifty-foot cliff by the crevices and the single protruding rock-point that had helped him get up. It was much easier going down. In his state of mind it was also more dangerous. He moved in a sort of robot-like composure.

  He moved toward the girl, trying to make words come out of his throat, when a small rock came clattering down the cliff. He looked up. Dillon was in the act of swinging to the first part of the descent. He came down, very confident and assured. He had two camera-cases slung from his shoulders. Coburn stared at him, utterly unable to believe what he’d seen ten minutes before.

  Dillon reached solid ground and turned. He smiled wryly. His shirt was buttoned. His tie was tied.

  “I hoped,” he said ruefully to Janice Ames, “that the Bulgars would toddle off. But they left a guard in the village. We can’t hope to take an easier trail. We’ll have to go back the way you came. We’ll get you safe to Salonika, though.”

  The girl smiled, uneasily but gratefully.

  “And,” added Dillon, “we’d better get started.”

  He gallantly helped the girl remount her donkey. At the sight, Coburn was shaken out of his numbness. He moved fiercely to intervene. But Janice settled herself in the saddle and Dillon confidently led the way. Coburn grimly walked beside her as she rode. He was convinced that he wouldn’t leave her side while Dillon was around. But even as he knew that desperate certitude, he was filled with confusion and a panicky uncertainty.

  When they’d traveled about half a mile, another frightening thought occurred to Coburn. Perhaps Dillon—passing for human—wasn’t alone. Perhaps there were thousands like him.

  Invaders! Usurpers, pretending to be men. Invaders, obviously, from space!

  II

  They made eight miles. At least one mile of that, added together, was climbing straight up. Another mile was straight down. The rest was boulder-strewn, twisting, donkey-wide, slanting, slippery stone. But there was no sign of anyone but themselves. The sky remained undisturbed. No planes. They saw no sign of the raiding force from across the border, and they heard no gunfire.

  Coburn struggled against the stark impossibility of what he had seen. The most horrifying concept regarding invasion from space is that of creatures who are able to destroy or subjugate humanity. A part of that concept was in Coburn’s mind now. Dillon marched on ahead, in every way convincingly human. But he wasn’t. And to Coburn, his presence as a non-human invader of Earth made the border-crossing by the Bulgarians seem almost benevolent.

  They went on. The next hill was long and steep. Then they were at the hill crest. They looked down into a village called Náousa. It was larger than Ardea, but not much larger. One of the houses burned untended. Figures moved about. There were tanks in sight, and many soldiers in the uniform that looked dark-gray at a distance. The route by which Dillon had traveled had plainly curved into the line-of-march of the Bulgarian raiding force.

  But the moving figures were not soldiers. The soldiers were still. They lay down on the grass in irregular, sprawling windrows. The tanks were not in motion. There were two-wheeled carts in sight—reaching back along the invasion-route—and they were just as stationary as the men and the tanks. The horses had toppled in their shafts. They were motionless.

  The movement was of civilians—men and women alike. They were Greek villagers, and they moved freely among the unmilitarily recumbent troops, and even from this distance their occupation was clear. They were happily picking the soldiers’ pockets. But there was one figure which moved from one prone figure to another much too quickly to be looting. Coburn saw sunlight glitter on something in his hand.

  Dillon noticed the same thing Coburn did at the same instant. He bounded forward. He ran toward the village and its tumbled soldiers in great, impossible leaps. No man could make such leaps or travel so fast. He seemed almost to soar toward the village, shouting. Coburn and Janice saw him reach the village. They saw him rush toward the one man who had been going swiftly from one prone soldier to another. It was too far to see Dillon’s action, but the sunlight glittered again on something bright, which this time flew through the air and dropped to the ground.

  The villagers grouped about Dillon. There was no sign of a struggle.

  “What’s happened?” demanded Janice uneasily. “Those are soldiers on the ground.”

  Coburn’s fright prevented his caution. He shouted furiously. “He’s not a man! You saw it! No man can run so fast! You saw those jumps! He’s not human! He’s—something else!”

  Janice jerked her eyes to Coburn in panic. “What did you say?”

  Coburn panted: “Dillon’s no man! He’s a monster from somewhere in space! And he and his kind have killed those soldiers! Murdered them! And the soldiers are men! You stay here. I’ll go down there and—”

  “No!” said Janice, “I’m coming too.”

  He took the donkey’s halter and led the animal down to the village, with Janice trembling a little in the saddle. He talked in a tight, taut, hysterical tone. He told what he’d found up on the cliffside. He described in detail the similitude of a man’s body he’d found deflated beside a stunted bush.

  He did not look at Janice as he talked. He moved doggedly toward the village, dragging at the donkey’s head. They neared the houses very slowly, and Coburn considered that he walked into the probability of a group of other creatures from unthinkable other star systems, disguised as men. It did not occur to him that his sudden outburst about Dillon sounded desperately insane to Janice.

  * * * *

  They reached the first of the fallen soldiers. Janice looked, shuddering. Then she said thinly: “He’s breathing!”

  He was. He was merely a boy. Twenty or thereabouts. He lay on his back, his eyes closed. His face was upturned like a dead man’s. But his breast rose and fell rhythmically. He slept as if he were drugged.

  But that was more incredible than if he’d been dead. Regiments of men fallen simultaneously asleep.…

  Coburn’s flow of raging speech stopped short. He stared. He saw other fallen soldiers. Dozens of them. In coma-like slumber, the soldiers who had come to loot and murder lay like straws upon the ground. If they had been dead it would have been more believable. At least there are ways to kill men. But this…

  Dillon parted the group of villagers abo
ut him and came toward Coburn and Janice. He was frowning in a remarkably human fashion.

  “Here’s a mess!” he said irritably. “Those Bulgars came marching down out of the pass. The cavalry galloped on ahead and cut the villagers off so they couldn’t run away. They started to loot the village. They weren’t pleasant. Women began to scream, and there were shootings—all in a matter of minutes. And then the looters began to act strangely. They staggered around and sat down and went to sleep!”

  He waved his hands in a helpless gesture, but Coburn was not deceived.

  “The tanks arrived. And they stopped—and their crews went to sleep! Then the infantry appeared, staggering as it marched. The officers halted to see what was happening ahead, and the entire infantry dropped off to sleep right where it stood!

  “It’s bad! If it had happened a mile or so back…The Greeks must have played a trick on them, but those cavalrymen raised the devil in the few minutes they were out of hand! They killed some villagers and then keeled over. And now the villagers aren’t pleased. There was one man whose son was murdered, and he’s been slitting the Bulgars’ throats!”

  He looked at Coburn, and Coburn said in a grating voice: “I see.”

  Dillon said distressedly: “One can’t let them slit the throats of sleeping men! I’ll have to stay here to keep them from going at it again. I say, Coburn, will you take one of their staff cars and run on down somewhere and tell the Greek government what’s happened here? Something should be done about it! Soldiers should come to keep order and take charge of these chaps.”

  “Yes,” said Coburn. “I’ll do it. I’ll take Janice along, too.”

  “Splendid!” Dillon nodded as if in relief. “She’d better get out of the mess entirely. I fancy there’d have been a full-scale massacre if we hadn’t come along. The Greeks have no reason to love these chaps, and their intentions were hardly amiable. But one can’t let them be murdered!”

  Coburn had his hand on his revolver in his pocket. His finger was on the trigger. But if Dillon needed him to run an errand, then there obviously were no others of his own kind about.