Nora said composedly: “I still don’t see why he’d kill himself after landing the plane. The way he went streaking away from the island, it seemed like he didn’t want to land. He started out for empty sea. His fuel supply simply wouldn’t take him to land. Then he came back. He emptied his fuel tanks and landed and killed himself. I can’t imagine a reason why.”
Drake hunted for more bullet-holes. He found nothing. The release for the cargo doors was pulled to “Open” in a perfectly normal fashion. He did find a penguin feather up toward the front of the plane. It was one of the larger, black feathers, probably from a penguin’s stumpy tail. Drake stared at it. It had been pulled out. Violently.
“Nothing here,” said Drake. He tossed the feather aside. “I’ve got to talk to Hollister about clearing the runway, and get Beecham to check on the shells in the pilot’s gun. And I’ve got to look at Brown, poor devil. There’s an impossibility—”
He helped Nora out of the plane. He looked at the cargo, now unloaded and awaiting disposition beside the ship. One box of scientific reports had been jarred loose and was partly broken open. One smashed penguin cage lay to one side. The remaining penguins conversed among themselves in high voices and a minor key. Two bales of short, thick logs with snaky limbs and furry roots-tendrils lay to one side. The contents of the broken-open bale were piled nearby.
Hollister, the chief mechanic on the island, walked slowly about the wreckage, examining the ship.
“How about getting the runway clear?” asked Drake. “How soon can it be done?”
Hollister grunted.
“We’ve got two small bulldozers to keep the strip in shape,” be snorted. “They can’t push anything this heavy! We could cut it up with torches and get it aside that way. But it’d be a crime!”
Drake waited.
“Belly-landings,” said Hollister, “ain’t what they might be. There’s been enough of them for pilots to know something about making ’em. Planes’re built rugged. This ship’s wings are okay. One prop’s gone, but we’ve got a spare. Gimme time and a chance to do it, and we can jack her up and roll her out of the way. And I’m thinking we could fix her to fly away.”
Drake looked at the ship again. The planes used in the supply of bases on Antarctica are not exactly fragile things. They are built so that in case of a forced landing they will serve as shelter for their crews until a search can be made and a helicopter sent to their aid. This ship was sturdy. Some planes might be junk after a landing like this one, but an examination of what was left, rather than the visible damage, made Hollister’s estimate plausible.
“Make a good survey,” ordered Drake, “and bring it to the office. I’ll send it off. We only work here, you know. The decision’ll have to be made back home.”
Hollister spat. Then he said: “I can’t figure that guy Brown shooting himself. He wasn’t the kind of guy to go loopy. What hit him?”
“There are several little questions like that.” Drake told him, “that I’d like to know the answers to. If you find out any of the answers, tell me.”
He headed for the warehouse where the pilot’s body had been placed. The big end doors were wide open, for the admission of the plane’s cargo. It was fairly light inside.
Drake rather squeamishly looked at the body of the one man who’d been in the ship when it came down. Brown had put the muzzle of his pistol in his mouth and fired upward. Nobody else could have done that to him. Not possibly! But for it to be possible would have made this affair at least not quite so completely frustrating.
He was insane in some way, or he wouldn’t have done it. But no kind of insanity would account for the events on the ship. No maniac could have accomplished what had happened. No maniac would. It was simply incredible.
Drake shook his head. The beginning of the struggle had been heard in the radio shack, and neither Brown nor the co-pilot had started it. So much was certain. The co-pilot had yelled for the pistol and presumably had gotten it. It had been fired empty, reloaded, and fired again. The co-pilot was gone, and Brown had gotten the pistol and landed the ship and killed himself. It wasn’t the passengers. They’d yelled for the cargo doors to be opened, and they’d tried to cooperate, with cries of “All together now! Push!”
Drake looked down at the tranquil mask which had been the face of a living man. He’d known Brown: not well, but well enough. Now he had the irritating, frustrated feeling that he wasn’t looking at Brown at all, but merely something Brown had lived in and now had left. The body of someone one has known always looks that way. The person has gone. What’s left—
An extremely absurd idea came into Drake’s mind, and the hackles at the back of his neck tended to rise. He did not believe it. Not for an instant. It was pure moonshine. It was lunacy. Planes could not be attacked in flight by things in the air outside them. They could not be invaded and captured. There was no thing which could devour or destroy ten human beings and then take the place of one of them. There couldn’t be anything which could feign the appearance of a dead man. There was nothing not-human with intelligence and horrible purposes. It was not possible!
Drake growled at his own momentary, spine-chilling surmise. He hadn’t taken it seriously, but he wished it had never occurred to him.
“Anyhow,” he said peevishly, “even if we had a doctor on the island I couldn’t ask him to make an autopsy. No excuse.”
He stopped, hearing his own voice. The walls of the quonset hut did not echo it. There was a thundering, rumbling noise made by the wind. It was an unmusical humming sound upon the metal of the building.
There were rattling noises. The men who’d unloaded the plane now came bringing its cargo to storage. There was a small-wheeled hand-pulled truck piled high with the trees from the broken-open bale. A second truck was loaded with boxes of scientific observations.
Drake watched them stowed. There was ample room on the concrete floor. He left, as the two trucks went back for the balance of the stuff to be put away.
There were four dogs on the island. One of them wagged a greeting to Drake and trotted companionably with him back to the administrative building. When Drake went inside, the dog wagged farewell and trotted off.
Nora handed him a neatly typed sheet when he went into the office. It was official reaction to Drake’s first report of the plane’s disaster. The tragedy had happened less than three hours ago. The loss of a plane was not an earth-shaking event, in itself. Such things happened—but not in this particular fashion. Hence the instant reaction.
These days every man is his own psychiatrist, as every man used to be his own doctor. When Drake’s report of the downed plane reached Washington, meticulously furnished with details that sounded like a highly developed delusional system, it received much more than routine attention. Each man to whom it went made his own diagnosis. Instant decisions were made, not on the facts reported, but on the state of mind of the man who reported them.
The Gow Island crash was instantly referred to the psychiatric service, with voluminous indorsements suggesting what the psychiatric service ought to think about so remarkable a report. Nobody suggested verification of the incident. And the orders arriving for Drake were a consequence of the practice of psychoanalysis.
The order called for a separate and personal report of the happening by each member of the Gow Island staff. Nineteen separate eye-witness accounts were to be written out and transmitted immediately.
Drake shrugged his shoulders.
“You might see that this is attended to,” he said in dry voice. “They don’t think they’re on the track of a plane crash, but of a personnel crackup. They may hope to get valuable data on a mass hallucination, and expect the plane to arrive on schedule in Valparaiso tomorrow afternoon.”
“But it won’t,” said Nora.
“No,” agreed Drake. “It won’t. Pass on the orders, please.”
She went out, to notify each person separately of this highly unusual command. Each one would take it differen
tly. Drake was able to reflect with ironic amusement upon the complete confusion to be expected in nineteen different accounts from jumpy, shocked people who had been nerve-strained by months of lonely routine beforehand.
* * * *
He filled a pipe and lighted it. In any large organization, there is always a certain amount of completely non-rational routine. Standard operational procedure is not rational, it is purely empirical. There would be a beautiful mess when it was applied to fixing the cause of this affair! Meanwhile there would be an even more splendid case of confusion when the psychologists began their explanations. Nobody, really, would be simply reasonable about the matter. Yet there must be a sane explanation!
He tried to tick off possible ones. Mutiny or conspiracy or lunacy among the passengers. Madness in the crew. They were ruled out by the overheard transmission from the plane’s open microphone before it was smashed by a shot. Yet the pilot had killed himself. And he was the last man on earth to seem likely to go mad. Still, if he did believe that horror had appeared in the plane and destroyed all but himself, he’d have been unwilling to land where the horror might find other human beings to destroy. And he had swerved away from the island, as if resolved to fly his ship to some remote part of the cold gray sea and there dive into the water to drown the horror with himself. On the other hand, if something sufficiently unlikely occurred, he might disbelieve the evidence of his senses. He might become convinced of his own insanity. He could act on the assumption that he himself had gone mad.
There was a knock on the door. Spaulding came in. He was much more tense than usual. Drake reminded himself that he’d had Spaulding down for leave at the first possible opportunity. He needed leave. He was rock-happy. His impassioned courtship of Nora was as much an indication of frayed nerves as anything else. It was not a happy courtship. Spaulding made it over-dramatic and full of squabbles. Squabbles in a community of nineteen people can have annoying consequences.
“I’ve been asking around,” said Spaulding tautly, to try to get an idea of what could have happened to the plane. I have.”
“If you’ve found out,” said Drake “accept my congratulations. Especially if it will satisfy the high brass.”
“It won’t,” said Spaulding.
“Then it’s not much good to us,” said Drake.
“It might save our lives,” snapped Spaulding.
Drake puffed on his pipe.
“In that case,” he conceded, “it might have a certain limited value. What’s the answer?”
Spaulding sat down. His every muscle was strained. There was nothing relaxed about any part of him.
“Remember when they first began to fly the Pacific?” he asked curtly, with an evident effort to seem calm. “A lot of planes vanished. They’d fly out and never be heard from again. Finally it was decided that they were smashed or their wings wrenched off by violent vertical currents. Remember that?”
Drake nodded. He puffed again. Spaulding was much too wrought up to be thinking straight, unless he’d hit on something sensible by accident.
“There aren’t as many now as there used to be,” said Spaulding. “But they’ve never stopped. Only two months ago—”
Drake nodded again, a trans-Pacific airliner went out of communication just short of Wake. Searchers found life-rafts, inflated but empty. A few bodies—not all. There were thirty-seven deaths. There were only guesses as to what had happened.
“That ship out on the runway,” said Spaulding tautly, “should have vanished the same way. It should simply have vanished, without reason or explanation.”
“And we’ll be hounded by the high brass,” observed Drake, “because it didn’t. They’d rather have a complete mystery, any day, than a story they can’t believe, even if it’s true.”
“I’m guessing that what downed the airliner was the same thing that downed this ship of ours,” said Spaulding defensively.
“Evidence?” asked Drake.
“None!” snapped Spaulding, “Not a particle! But it stands to reason! Remember, there’s been no pattern to the Pacific vanishings. They seem to happen at random. Communication stops. The crew can’t report what’s happening. They’re too busy trying to handle it!”
“What?” asked Drake mildly.
“Something,” said Spaulding fiercely, “that can catch up to a plane and snatch the people out of it. Something that does!”
His tone was defiant. His manner was aggressive. He’d been upset by the prospective coming of the plane. He’d been jealous in advance because Nora would see new faces. Now he’d transferred that tension to the alarming-because-inexplicable tragedy in the plane. Drake reminded himself to be patient. Merely to confute Spaulding would leave him more nerve-racked than before. He needed a leave from Gow Island.
“You mean something like a roc?” asked Drake politely. “I don’t pretend to know everything, but a creature that could attack a plane in midair should have been noticed by somebody who got away.”
“I don’t mean anything like a roc!” snapped Spaulding. “Don’t humor me, Drake! I’m not pretending that the Arabian Nights is history! There’ve been men killed. At least that’s not imagination! I’m saying that planes have been vanishing over the Pacific in exactly the sort of random pattern you’d find in the killing of people by tigers in India. For that to occur a tiger and a human being simply have to be at the same place at the same time. For the vanishing of planes at sea, there’s no consistent condition of weather or time or wind. They vanish exactly as if they happened to be at the same place at the same time as—something which could and would destroy them! Where something could attack them and kill their crews, who’d be so busy trying to fight that they had no time to send reports.”
Drake said gravely: “Now suppose that’s true. How can we get evidence? And what sort of something attacked the plane? And—you said your notion might save our lives?”
“It’s not a giant bird,” said Spaulding. He suddenly burst out in bitter anger. “You think I’m a fool! That I’m cracked! You’re humoring me!”
Drake spread out his hands.
“I certainly have no better explanation,” he said mildly. “Your notion does not have evidence to prove it, but there’s nothing to disprove it, either. Right now, I’m assuming that you’ve some sort of idea of a way to defend ones self against this thing, whatever it is. You seem to think it may turn up here.”
“Brown flew to the island,” said Spaulding. “Anything which had attacked his plane would know where it landed. It would know that Brown was on board. That he came here. It could come here—after Brown.”
Drake puffed.
“If I report that as your considered opinion,” he said as mildly as before, “I’ll be instructed to lock you up. I’d rather not. But you’ve some suggestion about how to defend ones self against this—this thing-which-is-not-a-bird. What’s the defense suggestion? I wouldn’t buy an unknown kind of bird of prey, Spaulding, because the plane on the runway was not ripped open by something getting in. Rather, there seems to be indication that the passengers were trying to get something out. What was it and how can it be handled?”
Spaulding said with staccato defensiveness: “Bullets are no good. Somebody fired a full dozen in the plane, less one Brown used on himself. They did no good.”
“Meaning,” said Drake,” either that bullets went through your assumed what-you-may-call-it, or that it was so small or so peculiarly shaped that none of them hit. What would be better than guns?”
“Fireworks!” said Spaulding fiercely. “Whatever we need to defend ourselves against is alive. There are animals you can’t kill with bullets unless you hit them just right. But there’s no living creature that can’t be burned! There are Very pistols in store. Issue them! Nothing can face the colored flares a Very pistol throws! That’s the way to defend Gow Island against whatever boarded the plane and killed everybody but Brown!”
Drake considered. He did not weigh the proposal for itself. He simply
debated what action, as administrative officer, he should take to maintain a tolerable morale on the island.
“You’re supply officer,” he said after a moment. “I authorize you to issue Very pistols and appropriate fireworks to anybody who asks for them. Okay?”
“It’d be better,” said Spaulding bitterly, “if you ordered everybody to wear ’em! Somebody’ll have to be killed before that’s done!”
He went out, but despite his bitterness he wore an air of satisfaction. He’d made his point, thereby triumphing in a fashion over Drake. Which was important to Spaulding because Nora Hall worked in Drake’s office and was thrown together with him more than with anybody else. Drake noted the fact. He was very tired of considering all the irrelevant things which made people act absurdly, with nobody considering how he felt or would like to behave. He envisioned a fantastic freedom for himself.
“It would be pleasant,” he told the office walls, “to be able to indulge in a case of screaming meemies just as a luxury!”
But he couldn’t. Presently there came a let-up in the work on hand. The stream of official communications diminished. The mess officer came in with his worry. The cook had drawn supplies for elaborate meals for ten extra persons. Frozen stuff had been thawed for them. It should not be refrozen.
“Use it up as you can,” said Drake.
“What happened to those people?” demanded the mess officer uneasily. “There are Russian bases on the ice. Do you suppose they sent a plane to try out some new gadget on one of ours?”
“I don’t think anything,” admitted Drake. “So far, everything cancels out. We haven’t a lead to the truth. I could accomplish as much cutting out paper dolls as reasoning on the facts at hand.”
“Spaulding told me to carry a Very pistol,” said the mess officer. “Handed me one and told me to load it and keep it by me every second.”
“That’s quite all right with me,” agreed Drake.
The mess officer went out. Nora came in.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 130
