The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  But Drake was not concerned with such matters now. The men returned, strolling by ones and twos, straggling across the undulating ground and now and again hidden by hollows or patches of the native stunted trees. And Drake counted them.

  “They’re all there,” he said grimly, to Nora. “If nothing more happens, I’m a proved lunatic because I can’t explain what happened earlier. If something more does happen, I’ll be in trouble for not preventing it. Who wouldn’t want a job like mine?”

  They were outside the building which housed both the recreation hall and the administrative office of the depot. Over in one of the quonsets by the airstrip, Hollister and his mechanics used noisy tools, constructing something with which to jack up the crashed plane and permit it to stand on its own wheels presently. The surf boomed hollowly against the cliffs to windward. There was a little, speckly, swirling cloud above the nest site at the far end of the island. The generator made its monotonous rhythmic thumpings in its hall of the radio shack building. Tom Belden threw a baseball to a cook’s helper, who threw it back. They maintained a leisurely, even tempo between the smackings of the ball. It was entirely useless. It was not even amusing. It was simply something to do.

  There was now, as there had been all day, absolutely no sign of any reason for continued uneasiness—that anybody on the island knew of. Drake fretted over the absence of reason alike for lasting uneasiness or even a dubious sense of security. There’d been ten men in a plane, and then there was one, and he shot himself. Then there was something in a warehouse, which wasn’t there when the lights went on. The cause of such happenings was unknown. It was unnerving that they did not even continue. So long as mystery remained, danger might recur at any time.

  “I think,” said Nora carefully, “that most of us are trying to pretend to ourselves that nothing has happened. We can’t quite manage it, but at least my mind starts to go in circles when I try to think. I get bewildered and frustrated. So I have to try not to think about it. But I stay nervous because I can’t not-think.”

  “I could wish,” said Drake as grimly as before, that Spaulding would not-think.”

  Spaulding was becoming a nuisance. He’d needed leave badly before this affair began. He’d been attempting a frenzied romance with Nora. It was difficult to believe that he was as much enamored as rock-happy. In a sense, duty on Gow Island was not too far from prison life. Nobody could have any feeling of accomplishment when the only function of the depot was sometimes to refuel a passing plane and occasionally to add a few items to its cargo. A man with Spaulding’s temperament would find the absence of triumphs intolerable. He was frustrated because he could not meet his own need for importance. He’d argued against the measures Drake had taken, because he had to have recognition that he was smarter than Drake. He’d devised complicated Molotov cocktails because if they were used, and if they were useful, he would seem superior.

  Now he feverishly devised theories, schemes, methods of defense, and as feverishly urged them. And with the jumpiness felt by everybody else, for Drake to discourage him would be bad for morale, while Spaulding undiscouraged was bad for it anyhow. Drake did not want anybody to become incautious. There at least had been something non-human and dangerous in the plane and later in the warehouse. He did not want the island’s population to take any risks. But he did not want them to become hysterical with fear of a nameless and so far indescribable menace when there had been no sign from that menace for some twenty-four hours. But Spaulding kept the inexplicability and the menace too vividly present in everyone’s mind. Decidedly he was a nuisance.

  “Here comes Beecham,” said Nora. “He looks worried.”

  “He’s worried about his trees,” said Drake sardonically. “if they live, they’ll be left here a while so they won’t have the shock of a too early second transplanting. He’ll study them. For a while he’ll know more about them than anybody else alive, and he’ll be the happiest biologist on earth. So he’s too much absorbed in them to worry about anything else.”

  Beecham came alone over the rolling ground which had already taken on a grayish look. Twilight deepened. The other returning men paused to watch Tom Belden and the cook’s helper throwing a ball back and forth. They came on to the personnel buildings. Some went into the men’s barracks. One man put his head into the mess-hall door, to see how near the next meal was. There was a particularly loud noise from where Hollister and his aides improvised a step-jack. It would have an enormously long lever which itself could be raised by a second jack, if necessary.

  Beecham came plodding on, his head bent, seeing nothing.

  “Beecham,” said Drake. “Pull out of it! It won’t be your fault it the trees don’t take root.”

  Beecham looked at him unhappily.

  “I wish I had a pH reading on the soil they came from! I wish I had a soil analysis and a temperature reading and that I’d seen them before they were dug up!” Then he said in a querulous tone “I wish I knew if there was anything that fed on them!”

  “What’s that? Why?”

  “Planting them, I saw branches broken off,” said Beecham distressedly. “There must be gales at the Hot Lakes, and tree branches do break off in high winds. But they break off where there’s leverage! Wind never breaks off just the tips of branches! Wind-breaks in limbs are at most a third of the way out from the trunk!”

  Drake said very sharply: “Are they fresh breaks?”

  “Mostly not,” said Beecham worriedly. “Most are partly healed over, but there are some fresh ones. They look as if they’d been bitten through. But they couldn’t be! Yet I’m wondering if I ought to build wire cages to protect the ones I’ve just set out. If there’s anything that feeds on them, and it’s gotten here—”

  He shook his head dispiritedly. He went into the building before which Drake and Nora stood. Drake ran his hand through his hair.

  “I put a query through to Gissel Bay this morning,” he said, “I thought of the possibility of something close to what Beecham just said. I’m assured it’s unthinkable. Nothing big enough to carry away a man’s body or fight nine able-bodied live men—and one with a pistol—could possibly have been in the plane. So it couldn’t have gotten here!”

  Nora said slowly: “But there was something in the warehouse.”

  “I could be out of my mind,” said Drake. “I’m the only one who heard it. But if there is something on the island which feeds on those trees, it’ll feed on the ones Beecham set out today. If it does, we have more of the same trees to bait a trap with.”

  “But you don’t really believe it?”

  “No,” admitted Drake. “I don’t.”

  * * * *

  The twilight continued to deepen. There would be no sunset tonight. The gray clouds which seemed perpetually to hover over the island reached to the horizon and beyond. The sky to the east grew darker, and darkness seemed to infiltrate toward the zenith, and gradually and quite imperceptibly the grayness deepened overhead. Presently there was no light anywhere except in the west, and that was a colorless, lifeless shade. But angry boomings and roarings came from the same direction, as if the surf were a horde of gigantic animals raging at the cliffs they dashed themselves against.

  Tom Belden and the cook’s helper gave over throwing the ball. There was not enough light to see it clearly. Tom Belden went in the recreation hall to kill time until the evening meal. Drake said in a low tone: “Nearly everybody’s inside. The others will be going in in a moment.”

  Their eyes adjusted to the light as it faded. Drake could still see the plane on the runway, but details began to blur. Nearer he could still see the few logs—the trees from Antarctica—which had been brought out of the warehouse to be carried to the place of transplantation, and had had to be left behind on the last trip of the hand-pushed truck to the warm-springs edge. There was a tiny haze of vapor where the exhaust of the thumping diesel rose behind the radio-shack. The radio operator puttered at something outside that building. Drake said impat
iently: “We’re in shadow. If he only goes in.”

  Nora’s shoulder brushed his sleeve. She said in a somehow tender mixture of humor and something else: “I’m shameless. I—want him to go inside so you can kiss me. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  Their hands touched. Even if the radio operator glanced at them, at this distance he could not see that. They watched him, hands clasped, shoulders touching, waiting until he should go inside or pass around the corner of the working place.

  Lights came on. Blinding, glaring flood-lights and wall lights and lights strung on wires—all of them came on. There was a dog off to one side, scratching himself industriously in one of those preposterous sitting positions dogs adopt for the purpose. Over at the workshop a door slammed and Hollister and his two mechanics came out and headed for the barracks. The power officer came out of the generator room and looked about in the bright light. Everything was different. It seemed to Drake that even the small, waiting group of postponed trees had changed somehow.

  Nora laughed a little, in what was not quite mirth but was very tender and very rueful.

  “Fate is against us, darling.” She was no longer close enough to him for their hands to touch. “I’m going inside and look very efficient and not as disappointed as I feel.”

  She went indoors, and Drake clamped his jaws and felt at once furious and very much like a fool. He moved to meet Hollister, to ask about the prospects of jacking up the plane. As the administrator of the island, he could not afford to go into the building from deep twilight at the same time as his secretary. He had to appear a monster without emotions if he was to keep his ascendency over eighteen persons who had been nerve-racked and jumpy even before they had reason for it. The sitting, scratching dog ceased to scratch but remained in its ridiculous position. It stared off toward the dark distance, its ears pricked up. It rose and walked curiously toward the edge of the light.

  “Tomorrow,” grunted Hollister, “We’re gonna get something mighty near ready to heave at that tail-section and get it up. We’d go faster, but we got to start low down and lift a good eight feet before we can let down the wheel and lock it. Hell of a job makin’ something we ought to have in stock!”

  “Do you think you can clear the runway the day after?”

  “Two days,” said Hollister firmly. “But the ship ain’t smashed bad at all. Brown landed her pretty good. Better’n I thought. She wasn’t loaded heavy, and he’d dumped all his gas—all of it—and she lit light, for weighing what she does.”

  The dog barked, beyond the edge of brightness. Drake tamed to walk back toward the personnel buildings with the three mechanics. The dog barked again. But the barking of a dog does not necessarily call one’s attention. And this was not an angry or a frightened bark. It was a challenging one, expressive of curiosity. Drake said: “I had orders this morning not to touch—”

  Drake said: “I had orders this morning not to touch—”

  The dog screamed. It was as horrible a sound as could possibly issue from a dog’s throat. It came from just the edge of total darkness, where there was a clump of the island’s stunted trees. It was agony past expression. It was terror. It was purest undiluted horror and despair and—again—such pain as one does not willingly think about.

  As one, the four men faced the sound, instantly tense and instinctively poised to rush to the spot. But Drake commanded fiercely: “Hold it! Lights! We need lights! We need lights! And guns! Come on!”

  He ran for the building which housed the recreation room and his office together. The others raced after him. A door opened. Nora stared out, white-faced.

  “Get inside!” snapped Drake. “We want guns. And lights!”

  She drew back. The four of them plunged within. Instants later Drake tore out again, a flashlight in one hand and a shotgun in the other. Nora caught at his arm, but he did not notice. He was out of the building and running toward the spot from which the outcry had come. His own total lack of hesitation was catalytic, bringing to others the urge to action. Men caught up weapons and followed. Spaulding, even, pompously went to where he had prepared an exhibit of his Molotov cocktails, to be the subject of an instructive and triumphant lecture later in the evening. Whether or not he would have ventured out without urging may be questioned. But Nora flew to him and panted:

  “They need lights! They’ve only got flashlights! Take them some lights! Please! Please!”

  Spaulding hesitated, and she cried: “Please! You can help them!”

  And Spaulding caught up half a dozen of his handmade incendiaries and went grandly out of the door.

  There was a shot over by the patch of undersized native trees. Flashlights swept wildly about from a point nearby. They tended to concentrate on the trees.

  When Spaulding reached the spot, Drake was raging: “It’s in there! It moved!”

  He played his flashlight in and among the patch of spindling, wind-wrenched, starveling willows. Other lights swept back and forth. There were not more than a hundred or so of the stunted growths, altogether. They were twisted and gnarled and hopelessly tangled, with intertwined branches and ferns growing about their trunks.

  “I’ve got light,” said Spaulding, with something less of assured authority than he would have liked. “I’ve got bottles of gasoline.”

  “Good!” rasped Drake. “Smash one so we can see better than these damned flashlights will let us!”

  Spaulding looped his hand in a string. He tossed a glass bottle, underhand. There was a scratching sound—the match—and a flicker of flame. The bottle landed and broke, and flames leaped up instantly, ten feet high and growing from a base a yard and more across.

  “Another!” snapped Drake. “On this side! Then another behind the tree-clump!”

  Spaulding obeyed. He did not leave the group of armed men to throw his bottles. He tossed them from where the other men were.

  Yellow light spread all about. The trees were clearly visible, to the innermost parts of the small thicket. There was nothing but the trees and the ferns that grew at their bases.

  “Something was in there!” raged Drake. “I saw branches moving! We heard them thrashing! There was something in there!”

  Tom Belden began to sweep his flashlight about upon the ground. He said shakily: “Look here!”

  There were scratches on the ground. They were such markings as would be made by a dog’s paws when he was seized, if while he screamed he tried madly to draw away from the thing that had caught him. Drake still stared hotly at the thicket, in its bath of light from the gasoline flames. But Beecham bent down and put his flashlight very close indeed to the ground. And the markings were very clear. A moss patch had been clawed up by frenzied strokes of a dog’s paws. The tiny marks of his nails could be seen in the compacted, wetted earth where the moss had been torn away.

  But there was nothing in the thicket. Nothing. Spaulding officiously broke yet another gasoline bottle, very close indeed to the edge of the clump of growing things. The men could see completely through them to the now brightly lighted ground beyond.

  Drake swore.

  “I’m going in there,” he said harshly. “Keep flashlights all around me, and be careful if you shoot.”

  * * * *

  It was somehow hair-raising to enter the clump of trees. But there was brightness enough, now. Spaulding broke a fifth and sixth bottle of gasoline and went back for more. Drake gripped his shotgun firmly. There were prickles down his spine, but he pushed his way into the thicket. He raged, letting himself be angered both by the existence of a dangerous something on the island for which he was responsible, and by the prickles down his spine.

  Branches tugged at his garments as he forced himself ahead. The sensation was horrible. But this was a very small patch of woodland. It was no more than fifty feet in one direction by perhaps sixty in another. The trees grew wholly at random. Where two grew close together he was forced to turn aside. But he made himself search, coddling his anger to turn aside unease.
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  There was a crashing behind him and he turned at bay. But it was Tom Belden, flashlight in one hand and gun in the other. The boy was stumbling in there to be with him.

  “T-two of us,” panted Tom Belden, “we can—use lights better.”

  Drake nodded curtly, there in the light-speckled half-obscurity among the branches.

  “We ought to examine the ground too,” he said coldly. “Maybe the dog’s been dropped because we came.”

  Tom Belden, shivering and with chattering teeth, threw his flashlight beam downward. There were ferns—infinitely delicate maidenhair and coarser bracken. Drake stamped on them. Nothing. He went on, and Tom Belden followed closely. They went to and fro among the trees, throwing their flashlights upon the branches over their heads as well as all about and on the ferns underfoot. The other armed men watched tensely and even shamefacedly because they stayed outside.

  Drake and Tom Belden thrashed their way back and forth and back and forth, but they did not find the body of the dog. They did not find any sign of any creature larger than a night insect. They did see one huge, glistening spider-web among the branches, but that was all. On the ground they saw only ferns, which they crushed, and surface-roots of the trees.

  When there was no longer any possibility of a deadly living creature among the trees—and there had been enough of light for them to see anything, even without their flashlights—Drake led the way out.

  “There was something in there,” he said savagely, “because we saw motion in the branches and heard the thrashing. But there’s nothing in there now. It must have gotten out on the far side while we were bunched on the near using our flashlights. It doesn’t like light. That’s certain! So our lights drove it away.”

  Hollister said heavily: “This’s a hell of a note! There weren’t any animals on this island before we brought the dogs. Birds, yeah, but no animals. Nothing that could hurt a dog. But something got him!”