Beecham said uncertainly: “The way the scratchings on the ground looked, it was as if he were being picked up.”
The flames of the gasoline bottles began to die down. Drake motioned for a return to the buildings. Movement in that direction began. He said abruptly: “How about a bird, Beecham? A predator?”
“No,” said Beecham, “There are arctic owls in the antarctic, too. But we’ve seen none on the island. There are no rabbits or mice for them to feed on. And none of them could carry a full-grown dog, anyhow. That’s positive!”
“We heard something thrashing in the trees,” said Drake doggedly. “We saw branches moving!”
“A bird wouldn’t try to fly in close, tangled branches,” said Beecham unhappily. “It couldn’t. There simply isn’t a night-flying bird that could pick up a dog the size of the one that got killed. I don’t think there’s any doubt he was killed.”
“If you heard him scream,” said Drake dourly, “you wouldn’t have any doubt at all!”
The lights about the buildings cast more light upon the ground as they went on. Each man stood out sharply in the brightness, distinct in every detail of clothing and feature. The light increased as they neared the buildings, until to their dark-adjusted eyes it seemed as bright as day. Before they reached the buildings, Drake said coldly: “We have never seen the thing that killed the dog. It seems to dread light. We were close to it, but apparently it couldn’t face our flashlights. It has never attempted anything in daytime—except in the cargo space of the plane, which was at least dim. In the warehouse it moved about in the dark and when the lights went on it disappeared. We can assume that there is safety in bright light. Nobody is to go anywhere in the dark except for grave reason and with authority from me. Understand?”
There was a murmur of agreement. But Casey, the warehouseman, protested: “Look here, Mr. Drake! I’m no braver than the next man, but if you tell me to be scared of the dark, I’ll have to deny it, if it’s true!”
“I’m not proud of telling you to be scared,” said Drake. “But until we learn a few more things, we have to. All of us. There’ve been enough lives lost.”
Spaulding appeared in a doorway.
“Find anything?”
Drake growled a negative, and went inside. Then he realized that of the island’s fifteen men, eight had been at the spot from which the dog’s scream came. There’d only been seven left at the depot to protect the girls. And this must not happen again.
He stamped into his office and flung himself into a chair. Chagrin and frustration made him horribly irritated. There was now proof of the existence of something deadly on the island. It had not ever shown itself before the landing of the plane. It had acted without showing itself twice since. There was something that lurked in the dark. It could not be imagined. It could not be described. It was necessary to report this new happening, but it would seem like more lunacy to high brass in comfortable civilization thousands of miles away. High brass would observe reasonably that the mere disappearance of a dog could have many explanations. It was not necessarily proof of the existence of something which, as told about in previous reports, bore much greater resemblance to a boojum than to any actually existing creature.
Nora came in the door, her features strained.
“You went in the wood after it!” she cried fiercely under her breath. “You risked everything! You want me to take care and you—you could have thrown away your life! Then what would I do?”
Drake looked up tiredly.
“I had to prove I wasn’t crazy,” he said drearily. “I had to face it, or I’d have doubts of my own sanity. Now I don’t think I’m crazy, but I profoundly doubt my good sense. But we did make sure that whatever killed the dog is afraid of light. We know now that we’re safe if we keep out of dark places.”
She wrung her hands. The door of the office was open behind her. The voices of others of the island’s complement were plainly to be heard. It would be undesirable for her to close the door. It would be noticed.
“I’ve got a name for the thing, too,” added Drake. “Maybe that’s progress.”
“What?” She didn’t care. She trembled, because she’d heard that he went into the thicket where something horrible thrashed among the branches.
“It’s a snark,” said Drake. “Remember the hunting of the snark? And the discovery that the snark was a boojum?”
It was an attempt at levity. He tried to smile. Spaulding came in, very brisk and triumphant. “It’s pretty well proved now,” he said exultantly, “that I was right about gasoline being a defense against the thing!”
“I congratulate you,” said Drake. “If you’ll write a report about it, I’ll have Sparks transmit it to Washington. You’ll get full credit for an effective means of defense—if they don’t insist that we all put each other in straitjackets.”
“I’ve been talking with those who were out there with you from the beginning,” said Spaulding forcefully. “The ones who saw the branches thrashing about in their flashlight beams. They told me something really remarkable.”
“Yes?” said Drake. He tried to keep sarcasm out of his voice. He was desperately anxious because now he couldn’t even attempt to soothe Nora, standing white-faced on the other side of his office.
“There were flashlight beams playing directly on it,” Spaulding pointed out with authority. “They saw the tree branches moving. But they couldn’t see anything moving the branches! They should have seen anything visible. They weren’t thirty feet away! They’d have been bound to see it! Do you realize what that means? Think, man, think!”
“For the moment, I’m trying to rest from thinking,” said Drake tiredly. “My brains apparently aren’t qualified to handle what we’re up against.”
“But can you imagine,” Spaulding demanded, “a creature in the midst of thin, spindling trees like those, which could shake branches without disturbing the tree trunks, and which wouldn’t be visible at thirty feet with half a dozen flashlight beams on it?”
“No.” admitted Drake. “I can’t. But I agree that that’s what happened.”
Spaulding cleared his throat impressively.
“This,” he said profoundly, “is going to sound imaginative. But there are transparent creatures in the ocean. The evidence is absolute that what we are after is transparent. It’s invisible! I can give you—”
Drake straightened up.
“Spaulding,” he said fretfully, “I’ve stood a lot of nonsense from you, but I’m damned if I’ll take that! Even if the thing had been transparent—if it had been made of the clearest glass or plastic, there were lights shining on it! If it were clear as the thinnest soap bubble, it would have been seen by the surface reflections on its skin! You can see soap bubbles! You can see glass! We’d have seen it, absolutely, unless it had the same index of refraction as air! And that’s nonsense!”
Spaulding smiled mirthlessly, his eyes accusing.
“You simply resent my pointing out the truth.”
Drake’s patience ended. He said savagely: “Real things have to be reasonable! Sometimes we don’t know the reasons in advance, but some we can figure out right away. Find a reason for invisibility in a creature on the Antarctic continent! What has it to hide from? It’s big enough to kill nine men and steal a man’s body and snatch a struggling full-grown dog. That makes it the biggest and deadliest creature on the ice-pack! The next most deadly is a penguin! It wouldn’t have enemies to hide from. They’d need to hide from it! What would it need to be invisible to? Penguins? Seabirds? Would it need to hide from sea-leopards or seals, that never go ten yards from the water’s edge? What advantage would an Antarctic creature like this gain by invisibility?”
“I’m not discussing reasons,” said Spaulding with a peculiar air of primness. “I’m discussing facts! The fact is that it is invisible!”
Drake said angrily: “There’s only one kind of invisibility—when you don’t see something because you don’t know what to look for!
Clear out, Spaulding! Write a report accusing me of lunacy in not believing in invisible animals! I’ll forward it! But stop bothering me!” Then he brought himself up short. He ground his teeth and said: “I shouldn’t have said that. There’s no reason for us to quarrel. You’ve done one very useful thing, Spaulding. You did contrive those gasoline cocktails, and they may have kept the entire group of us from being wiped out. If you’ll show somebody how to make them and get a good stock on hand, it could mean the difference between survival and destruction for everybody here.”
Spaulding smiled triumphantly.
“You admit I’ve some sense, eh? Very well! I’ll use that sense. Nora, here, is a witness that I’ve told you that the creature is invisible! Now I’ll arrange for us to be protected from it!”
He marched out of the office with an air of injured and yet triumphant pride. Drake spread out his hands.
“I feel,” he said, “as if I’m incompetent by any standard that can be thought of. But Nora—”
She stared at him, her hands twisting one within the other.
“Try to get hold of yourself,” he said gently. “Fortunately, everybody’s all worked up, so nobody noticed too much, but you don’t want to be noticed as especially concerned about me.” He paused. “In the middle of that silly argument with Spaulding, it occurred to me that I did notice something in the thicket. I don’t know what it was. I’ve got to examine my memory and pick out what I noticed without noticing that it meant something. Somewhere in the back of my mind there’s a fact I’ve got to realize. It’s something I saw out there in the thicket.”
“You’re not going back there again!” she said fiercely. “Not—not unless I go with you!”
“My dear.” protested Drake. “Please don’t try to henpeck me at this stage of the game! Save it until we’re married! But I won’t go back there tonight. I’ll look over the ground again in the morning.”
Nora struggled for composure. But, being a woman, her efforts were notably aided by the entrance of someone she did not want to have see her disturbed. Hollister came in, frowning. Nora went out. Drake wearily prepared to listen again.
Hollister was concerned about the rest of the night. He and Belden and Drake and the maintenance engineer had walked as sentries about the house the night before. There’d been no alarm. Tonight there had been. True, the disappearance of whatever had seized the dog lent plausibility to the idea that light would drive and keep the creature away. The installation was brightly lighted enough. But Hollister was still uneasy. There were several of the men who would not rest easy if no one was awake and on guard. And there were the girls to be thought of.
“We’ve lost one dead man and one live dog,” agreed Drake. “We don’t want to lose anything else—not even a penguin. I think some sort of sentry-go should be arranged for tonight.”
Hollister went out. Drake racked his brain for a memory of something he’d seen in the thicket. It had not seemed important at the time, but a part of his brain now clamored for him to think about it. His efforts to think were broken into by consultations about the division of watches outside.
There came a faint shout from the radio shack. Drake went to the outside door. The radio operator bellowed: “Something on the radar screen! Down by the nests!”
Drake went to see. Others went with him. The radar screen was exactly as usual except for one small foggy space where the sea-birds covered every inch of ground and every rock and platform with their nests.
“It’s there,” said Sparks uneasily. “Looks like fog, but that’s the way the place looks in the daytime! You can’t see anything solid. That fogginess is what the radar makes out of birds fluttering over the nests. In the daytime they sort of thin out in a streak where they’re goin’ out to sea and comin’ back. Now they’re just millin’ in the darkness over where their nests are. Something’s got them all upset so they’re trying to fly in the nighttime! They never did anything like that before!”
Drake frowned.
“If it’s the same creature, when it got the dog and we went after it with lights and flares, it headed straight for the nests. It made good time, too! It’d have to be a good-sized animal to get to those nests so quickly!”
“But if it’s there,” said Casey, quickly, “it’s not here! And if feeding’s what it wants, nobody’s going down there with lights to argue with it! It’d ought to stay there till daybreak or until it’s fed full.”
Drake nodded.
“But still we’ll stay on guard.”
There was no trace of disagreement.
It was appalling to think that a creature which was driven from one place where it had killed a dog, would instantly and directly head at top speed for another place where there were living things to destroy. It bespoke a bestial ferocity which was horrifying. But there were nests by the tens of thousands at the end of the island. It was not conceivable that any carnivore could not gorge itself to repletion upon the sea-birds. Not all of them would take to flight in the darkness. Many, or even most of them would tend to squat terror-stricken on their nests while death approached and overwhelmed them.
“We’ll keep our eyes open,” said Casey firmly, “but I’m gonna feel better because whatever it is, it’s busy with the birds.”
Drake left the special radar watch on duty in the shack. With the others, he returned to the administration building. There the news of horror afoot at the nesting site at once made flesh crawl, and gave some reassurance of safety—for the moment.
Nobody thought of going to bed, of course. Rather elaborately, even the girls manifested unaccustomed wakefulness. With the other manifold duties of an administrator to occupy him, Drake was aware of the need to persuade those people not committed to guard duty to go to bed and try to get a good night’s rest.
Reports from the radio shack confirmed that the sea-birds remained a misty, foggy luminescence on the radar screen. An hour after the first observation they were still aloft, flying blindly in the night. They were actually unable to land without stunning or killing themselves. Two hours. Three. Something kept the nesting place in an uproar. It could not be conceived to be anything but the creature which had thrashed about the small-scale forest.
Four men searched the barracks, against the time somebody should think of retiring. The power officer’s girl friend—her name was Elisa—looked big-eyed and frightened. The power officer gazed at her with extreme and desperate protectiveness. He was never far from her side, and he was rather over-conspicuously armed for her defense. Drake noticed that Tom Belden seemed to appear casually wherever he, Drake, went. It had been Tom Belden, he remembered suddenly, who’d joined him in the thicket while his own scalp crawled and prickles ran up and down his spine.
He found a moment to say: “I didn’t thank you for joining me in the bushes, Tom. I do now. Thanks.”
The boy said awkwardly: “That’s all right, Mr. Drake. I’ll do that any time.”
“Why?” demanded Drake. “I believed it was dangerous. Why should you risk your skin’?”
Tom Belden flushed. Then he said uncomfortably: “Miss—uh—Miss Hall thinks right much of you, Mr. Drake, and I think right much of her. She’s too old for me to make up to. She’s twenty-three. But—uh—you mean to see she’s safe, and she’d be right unhappy if anything happened to you. So I just figure I’m doing something for her if I stand by you.” Then he said anxiously: “You won’t tell her?”
Drake hesitated for a long time. Then he said: “You’ll do better if you stand by her direct, Tom. Nobody else thinks she’s over-concerned about me?”
Tom Belden squirmed. “No, sir. But I look at her a lot when she don’t notice. That’s why I noticed.”
Spaulding appeared, swaggering.
“I’ve got an assembly line going, turning out gasoline bombs, Drake. What now?”
“Oh, go write a report!” snapped Drake.
He turned away. It bothered him that he now had a personal bodyguard in the person of Tom Bel
den, aged nineteen. He sent the boy to add himself to the self-organized outside patrol.
This was four hours after sunset. The girls withdrew to their barracks on a strong hint from Drake. The first pair of patrolling sentinels were moving about in the outside glare. Every man in the installation was definitely jumpy, even though periodic reports from the radar assured them that the creature was still busy in the slaughter of sea-birds.
* * * *
There was a shot outside. A dog screamed, then howled. Drake was the first man outside. He saw one of the two patrolling men standing as if frozen in the brilliant glare of the outside lights. He was between the radio shack and a quonset warehouse. He’d fired his shotgun and stood as if petrified, facing the darkness.
Some twenty feet nearer the radio shack, rolling and screaming hideously, a dog flopped and writhed upon the ground. He clawed at his muzzle, and screamed, and clawed and screamed, and there was absolutely nothing in sight to account for his anguish or his strugglings.
The door behind Drake erupted men. Even Spaulding came out, nervously carrying gasoline bottles.
“What’s happened?” rasped Drake. “Where’s Casey?”
“Y-yonder—he was chokin’,” gasped the sentinel. “He was chokin?! I heard him!”
Spaulding cried out at sight of the dog. Then he cried shrilly: “It’s invisible! See? It’s invisible!” He threw a gasoline bottle. It crashed and spilled but did not ignite.
“Casey!” roared Drake. “Where’d he go?”
The sentinel panted and choked, and there was a small, faint booming sound. Spaulding had thrown a second gasoline bottle. And this one crashed and lighted. The contents of both flared up together. They’d been thrown by a nerve-racked man from a considerable distance. The gasoline splashed in long streaks. It blazed up and its farther reaches licked at the wall of the radio shack, but nobody noticed.
Drake shook the gasping man who’d been on patrol with Casey.
“Yonder—” sobbed the sentry. “Casey said he heard somethin’. He went to see …”
He pointed to the corner of the warehouse. The gasoline flames gave light there, now. Drake went plunging forward. The flames were very bright indeed. He saw a flashlight on the ground. Casey’s. He saw a shotgun. Casey had carried it. There was nothing else.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 135
