There was an enormous, elongated shadow on the warehouse, east by the lights of the other buildings. It reached away to blackness at the warehouse’s other end. A thing which feared light could flee in that sheltering blackness. Drake ran to the end of the building, swinging his flashlight beam. Nothing there. Drake went around the building, cold sweat pouring out upon his skin.
There was a shot back where the dog screamed. It was abruptly silent. Then shouts.
The radio shack was afire. Gasoline, thrown by Spaulding, had splashed against its side wall. Now it had caught. It went up like tinder. The diesel generator continued to pound inside the building. The roof caught. Something fell, inside, and spilled oil flamed and window-panes broke with a tinkling sound.
By the time a hose could be fitted, the inside of the building was so fiercely ablaze that the diesel itself began to backfire with racking, thunderous violence. Lights everywhere wavered and brightened with the explosions. Then, after a monstrous concussion, the diesel stopped.
In that instant all the electric lights went out. There was no light anywhere except the tiny white eyes of flashlights and the flames of the burning building. There was, of course, no water pressure to fight the fires with.
It was now deep night, and the customary cloud-bank hid the moon, if it were up, and all the stars. There was utter darkness everywhere beyond the yellow circle of firelight.
Raging, Drake struggled to create some semblance of order, some pretense of a defensive posture, in the now-darkened group of buildings. There was a deadly thing on the island. It had destroyed a dog and been vanquished by light. It had appeared some four miles away on the radar in the fact of a wildly fluttering haze of sea-birds flying blindly by night above their nesting-grounds. Just now—minutes since—Casey had vanished utterly in the darkness on the shadowed side of the quonset warehouse. There was a dead dog in the firelight, shot as an act of mercy because it had encountered something unguessable.
Beecham, moving cautiously about the fire, heard a little clashing sound beside his foot. He looked down. Something tiny and utterly impossible laboriously pulled itself down into a minute hole in the ground. Beecham gaped at it. It would not account for anything that had happened. Its only relevance to the events at hand was that, like them, it was starkly impossible.
As Beecham stared at the ground, while surf boomed and the burning building crackled and roared and Drake’s angry commands sounded far away and absurd, Spaulding chattered crazily of the thing he’d tried to burn without seeing it.
“It’s invisible! It’s invisible! And we haven’t got any lights and it’ll get us all! It’ll get us all!”
This was not desirable behavior at such a moment. Drake said curtly to Tom Belden, “Hit him, Tom.”
There was a sharp, incisive smack and Spaulding ceased to yell. Drake snapped his commands. There was an icy sensation at the pit of his stomach because of Casey, but he began to bring some order out of the chaotic and hopeless situation.
* * * *
In the semi-darkness and as the flames began to dwindle in the ruins of the radio shack, Nora stood clustered with the other three girls under a guard of armed men. Among them the power officer was most desperately protective. Nora didn’t know about Casey, yet. She watched Drake as he moved about, savagely arranging for bonfires, for men to roll drums of oil out of a warehouse which now could not be lighted save by hand-lamps, and for the gradual improvisation of a ring of flames in which the people could take temporary refuge.
The power officer’s girl friend whimpered a little. One of the other girls giggled hysterically. It was an uncanny sound. It was pure nerve-strain with no sanity in it whatever.
Nora followed Drake with her eyes. She was extraordinarily proud of him. But in the flickering light she looked very wistful indeed. Drake had to think of the whole group. He couldn’t protect her alone.
She wished he could.
CHAPTER FIVE
Long, long hours later there was light. At first there was not much of it, and it was far too dull to be cheering or invigorating, but nevertheless there was light in the east. It was dawn. The grayness spread to mid-heaven and gradually trickled onward through the clouds until all the sky was a mottled, dirty-gray ceiling of indefinite height. To the west the surf boomed triumphantly, as if roaring its satisfaction that the humans inhabiting the island were in the process of destruction. All the visible universe, it seemed, was malevolent toward mankind. And not only malevolent, but mocking.
There was spite in the contrivance by which the people of Gow were now cut off from communication with the rest of their kind. There was a sort of cruelty in the bite of the wind, fluttering and plucking at their dwellings; at their garments when they ventured out; shaking the forlorn windsock which tried to give useful information when the landing strip was useless. There was a certain appalling hostility even in the lie of the ground and its barrenness, and there was pure derision in the noise the surf made.
When all the island was bathed in that twilight which was morning, men came out-of-doors. The buildings they left smelled of soot and oil. There were smoking, stinking, burned-out flares on the ground outside them. There was the heap of ashes and ruined equipment which had been the radio shack and generator room. The men moved about, searching. They verified their number.
Casey was gone. His flashlight and gun lay where he’d dropped them, or where they’d been torn from his hands in the shadow of a warehouse. Drake went to that spot first, to look for some indication on the ground of what had been lurking there.
He found nothing. No indication of any sort.
Hollister came out of the mess hall, wiping his mouth with his hand. His two assistants followed him. The three went toward the workshop where they worked on something to perform the feat of lifting a four-motored ship from its belly to its wheels. The radio operator looked helplessly around. The equipment by which he could function was destroyed. He felt more lost, more useless, more uneasy than anybody else. Tom Belden said respectfully to Drake: “Anything special I can do, sir?”
Drake shook his head, still searching the ground where Casey had disappeared. Here the earth had a surface composed mostly of small stones. They had moss and grass between them, with here and there a bit of lichen. No beast would have left a clear trail on such ground. By painstaking examination, though, Drake did see two or three pebbles that had apparently become loosened. But he could have disturbed them himself the night before, when he recklessly plunged into the darkness from which Casey had made choking sounds before he—evaporated.
Tom Belden said watchfully: “Nothing there, Mr. Drake.”
“No,” agreed Drake. He considered. “Tell me, Tom. When you were with me in that patch of trees last night, did you see anything that didn’t make sense? Anything that shouldn’t have been there? Or anything that should have been there, and wasn’t?”
Tom Belden shook his head.
“I was looking out for you,” he said awkwardly. “I figured you knew what to look for, but you might not think of what something might do to you. So I was watching out for that.”
Drake growled. Then he said: “I saw something. I don’t know what. But part of my mind insists that I saw something important, though I didn’t realize it then and can’t recall it now.”
“We can go and look some more,” suggested Tom Belden. It’s daylight now. It ought to be safe.”
* * * *
Drake picked up his gun. He tramped to the patch of spindly trees whose branches had visibly thrashed about because of something among them which human eyes could not see. But he would not believe that there was anything invisible that could kill a man and get away with his body. In a real world, everything follows natural laws. Impossible things do not happen. There is an explanation for everything that does happen. The explanation links it to other things. There are no isolated phenomena. There are only isolated observations, and sometimes there are false observations. But everything real is rational.
There was a rational reason for everything that had taken place on Gow Island. The problem was to find it.
The two of them invaded the thicket for the second time. Drake’s memory of the night before was vivid. Here was the place where desperate scratches on a patch of moss told of the death-struggle of the vanished dog. There were the scorched places where Spaulding’s gasoline flares had burned, to light the thicket more fully than flashlights could do. There were footprints—Drake’s and Tom Belden’s—where they had trampled the delicate ferns.
Drake’s hair had been standing on end when he made those tracks last night. He felt enraging qualms again as he went through the thicket by day. Something deadly had been here. Last night he hadn’t found it. But his mind insisted naggingly that he’d seen something whose meaning he should have realized.
He and Belden went through the thicket again. And they found nothing. Half-way through the search, Drake said suddenly: “Thump on the ground with your gun-butt, Tom. If something swarmed in here and went underground, we might have missed it. If the ground’s soft anywhere or sounds hollow—”
Tom Belden caught his breath. Then he began to pound the earth as he moved slowly after Drake.
They found no soft place nor any spot which sounded hollow. Drake, looking hungrily for the item that the back of his mind insisted he should have noticed, saw nothing which had meaning today. He faced the frustrating fact that he had not even the beginning of an explanation of the events to date.
He went back to the buildings. Beecham came to meet him, upset and jittery. The radio shack had caught fire because of Spaulding’s conviction that an invisible creature was in the act of killing a dog. The dog had been shot by someone as an act of mercy. Its carcass remained for examination. It was the only thing that could be examined after an encounter with the inexplicable. Beecham had done the best he could in the way of an autopsy.
“But I don’t know what the dog ran into,” he told Drake miserably. “He’d scratched and pawed at his muzzle, and it’s raw flesh there. But I can’t be sure whether his own claws did the damage, or something else!”
Drake said without animation: “If we could report your examination, somebody might make sense of it. They could ask questions and tell you what to look for. But we can’t communicate. No transmitter. Ours is burned, and the one on the plane is smashed.”
Beecham said unhappily: “There was what the radar said about the birds flying during the night. It looked like the beast was at the nest area. But it evidently came back here, because it got Casey. Still, there might be some signs at the nesting site.”
“And it’s daylight,” said Drake. “So it should be safe to go see. Is that it?”
“Yes,” said Beecham. He added reluctantly: “I’ve—I’ve got something else I want to investigate. I hesitate to name it. You’d think—”
He stopped in confusion. So Drake said with faint irony: “I won’t think you insane, Beecham, no matter what you want to check. I only gave Spaulding a bawling-out because he doesn’t want to check up on his ideas. He’s content to invent them. Check anything you please, so long as it’s by daylight. But when darkness falls, we have to act upon the assumption that there’s a boojer-beast at large. Then I have to ask you to be careful.”
“I will be,” said Beecham apologetically.
He went away. Drake was about to organize a group to go to the nesting site, when Nora found him.
“Beecham wants somebody to take a look at the seabirds’ nests,” he told her. “What’s on your mind?”
“Spaulding,” she said indignantly. “He told me that you’re jealous of him! He warned you about the kind of danger that exists, and you wouldn’t listen, and Casey is dead as a result! He offered me his sympathy for having to work closely with you! You had to admit that the gasoline bottles were a good idea, but you resent his thinking of them first! He says he’s worried for fear that your jealousy of him may lead you to make mistakes that will be very costly to the rest of us! He expected me to admire him for telling me that!”
“Did you admire him?” asked Drake, mildly.
“I was polite,” said Nora, more indignantly still. “I knew you wouldn’t want a fuss. But, my dear—”
Drake grinned.
“I’m very glad you are, Nora, though right now I’d give anything in the world if you were somewhere else.”
“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere you weren’t,” she said fiercely, under her breath. “It makes me furious, though, to hear anybody criticize you!”
“Ah!” said Drake. “For making you angry, I shall be very unkind to Spaulding.”
He gathered the men he’d chosen for a journey to the nesting site.
“I’m going to put Spaulding in charge,” he told them. “He has some ideas of what we’re up against. It may be he’ll be able to verify them. If he can find information that will let us anticipate the boojer’s actions, we’ll be able to set a trap for it and get rid of it.”
He summoned Spaulding and briefed him before the four men who were to go with him. Spaulding had absolute freedom of action, provided only that he brought his party back to the installation before dark. The primary purpose of the journey was to find out what, if anything, had happened among the nesting birds during the night. But Spaulding would make any other investigations he considered desirable. It seemed likely, though, that the birds had been disturbed and that the thing that had disturbed them found itself cheated of its prey when they took to the air even in darkness. The boojer, then, had returned to the depot, and Casey’s disappearance followed.
Spaulding swelled with importance, at the same time that he was visibly made uneasy.
“Now, my specific orders—” he began uncertainly.
Drake was almost sorry for him. But as a matter of morale he had to end Spaulding’s criticism, while still bringing out any useful action that Spaulding might accomplish.
“You haven’t any specific orders,” Drake told him. “You’ve some ideas. You can explain them as you go, and probably prove them. Only—be back well before dark.”
He watched the five figures strike out to southward across the singularly unreal landscape. It was barren. It was rocky. In the gray daylight under the clouds, there was nothing which was hospitable; nothing which was cheery. There were sea-birds over the nesting area. They could be seen as a congregation of motes against the desolation which was the sky. There was surf on the windward shore. It was triumphant, shouting hatred.
Drake shrugged. Spaulding was one of those people whose idea of achievement is the hampering of all accomplishment for which they cannot claim credit. Giving him a mission which could hardly accomplish much was a way to get him out of the way while other things were accomplished.
* * * *
There were many things to be done. Last night’s oil-lamps had to be improved in quality and increased in number. A few large beacons were desirable, but even more desirable were a large number of small ones to add to their light. Back in civilization there were small oil-flares with wicks which were used, burning smokily, to mark barriers on highways and places where excavations were taking place. Something on that order should be made in quantity. There was the airstrip. It was at least possible that with the breaking off of radio communication another plane would be sent from Gissell Bay to look over the island from the air. If the strip could be cleared and the plane could land, communication could be restored, new generators brought in, and certainly the girls on the island could be evacuated. And Drake was beginning to consider very strongly that Nora needed to be elsewhere.
It occurred to him that he’d spoken oddly to her.
“I’m very glad that you are,” he’d said. He meant it. He was glad that she existed. He rejoiced that there was someone like her—that there was a Nora—in the world. Even if he lost her to someone else, he would still be glad that she was alive. She was a part of the goodness of the universe. Which, just then, was not otherwise conspicuous.
There was
a steady roaring noise in the quonset where the island’s machine shop was. He went in. Hollister, wearing a welder’s mask, was engaged in the finicky business of cutting notches in a fair-sized steel girder with a welding torch. When Drake drew near, he turned off the torch and lifted the mask.
“This is for the job,” he grunted. “We’ve got to make a thing like they used to pull stumps with, before they had good steel or good tools or any idea of close work. We’ll work it upside down, so it’ll lift instead of pull. I’ll use a twenty-foot lever and it’ll lift a quarter of an inch a stroke—I hope! I’ve got a base coming along for it—half-inch steel that I’ll stiffen up with weldings, and I’ll stiffen this up too so it won’t buckle when the load comes on. A transport plane’s a pretty good load.”
Drake looked over the massive parts, almost ready for assembly.
“I’ll raise the tail,” said Hollister, “and block it up. Then I’ll lift up one side of the front, maybe a foot. Then I’ll block that up and lift the other side, to keep from breaking off a wing. Then I’ll block that and go back to the first one. With luck, it’ll take most of a day just to get the damn plane high enough to let the wheels down!”
Drake nodded. Hollister lighted a cigarette and puffed.
“Y’ hear Spaulding’s latest?”
Drake waited.
“He argues,” said Hollister, darkly, “that the thing in the dark acts like it’s got brains. Human brains. No, brains like a human only smarter. He says it schemed things to get the generators worked out. It wanted us in the dark—and got us.”
Drake swore.
“Y’ don’t think so?” asked Hollister.
“No,” said Drake. “I doubt Spaulding does. But it makes stuff that people will listen to. We humans have brains because we haven’t got fangs or claws. Any creature that can handle nine men at once, and one of them shooting forty-five bullets at it the while—any creature that can take on nine able-bodied men and a pistol doesn’t need brains to find food or defend itself! It’d never need brains except to prey on men, and then only if it were a natural enemy of ours. And we men haven’t any natural enemies except each other!”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 136
