Hollister spat.
“You’re saying there ain’t no such animal.”
“I’m saying there couldn’t be!” snapped Drake. “Because it’d be our natural enemy the way a cat is the natural enemy of mice. Could mice take over the earth as we humans have done without discovering cats?”
Hollister observed: “He says it came from Antarctica.”
“Where,” growled Drake, “it undoubtedly developed quasi-human intelligence while it waited for men to walk into its parlor to be eaten!”
“Yeah,” said Hollister. “But why don’t you shut him up?”
“Because,” said Drake, “he’s more scared then anybody else. He did do one good job inventing the gasoline bottles, though he burned our generators afterward. Maybe he’ll come up with something else. But the main thing is that—well—you aren’t as scared as you might be, because you think he’s crazy to be scared the way he is.”
Hollister blinked at him.
“Yeah. I’m not goin’ to agree with a damn fool, even in being scared. Hah! I thought I was brave! Okay. I think we’ll get the ship’s tail up before night, and maybe get her rolling off the runway before dark tomorrow.”
Drake went away without adding any urging for speed. It was not necessary. If he’d been doubtful about maintenance of his authority, he’d have been reassured. But it did not occur to him to worry about that. Men do not mutiny because their leader is baffled. They revolt because a leader is stupid.
* * * *
Warehousemen rolled out empty drums and the maintenance engineer converted them into flare-beacons which would send ten- and twenty-foot flames roaring skyward. Means for refueling them had to be devised. They were. Small wick-flares proved easy to make. They began to be turned out. Gasoline bottles were prepared by the dozen. Somebody got out blow-torches and filled and tested them. They would be close-combat weapons, if matters came to that. Drake even had four monstrous bonfires prepared, which could be set off with a single match or a flare from a Very pistol. If fired simultaneously, they would make the installation grounds as bright as day—while they lasted.
He kept everybody busy. There was no easement of the tension as such. One of the girls—a nondescript dumpy girl named Hortense—went into the girls’ barrack and opened a closet door. Something which was probably a bathrobe swayed and swung as the door opened. Hortense shrieked and went into screaming hysterics. Elise joined her. The power officer burst into the barracks with weapons ready, in fine dramatic resolution to die fighting for the girl he more often fought with. It was almost amusing. There were uneasy grins among the men who worked steadily at precautions against they did not know what. But Casey’s disappearance was a ghastly thing to contemplate. He’d been in the light; he’d been armed; he was not alone. He went into darkness for seconds—his companion heard choking sounds—and Casey had vanished.
It was not a nice thing to have on one’s mind in a gray day which was twilight from its beginning and would be twilight until its end.
Near noon the party sent to the nesting site appeared in the distance. Spaulding walked a little separated from the rest. He’d plainly been unable to resist dramatic preparations for great discoveries, on the way to the nest site. It was as clear that he’d failed to convince his followers of the importance of what he’d turned up.
He did not report to Drake. Tom Belden did.
“There was something there,” said Tom. “There’s smashed eggs everywhere. There’s torn-off feathers in chunks. There’s dead birds that cracked up, landing in the dark. There’s lamed ones. And there’s a hell of a lot of ground that was covered with nests when we were there before, that hasn’t got anything but smashed eggs and feathers on it now.”
Drake said: “Tracks?”
Belden shook his head.
“Nothin’.” Then he stared over Drake’s shoulder. “What’s Mr. Beecham doing?” He stared again. “We hunted for a soft place in that thicket, this morning. Has he found a soft place here? Was somethin’ tunnelin’ toward the buildings?”
Drake turned. Beecham dug industriously and very carefully in a place between the warehouse where Casey had disappeared and where the radio shack had stood. It was not far from where the dog had rolled and clawed and screamed, the night before. It was roughly where Beecham had seen something tiny, with a clump of green thorny leaves at its tip, drag itself down into a little hole. Beecham seemed to examine each shovelful of earth very carefully.
“I don’t know what’s on his mind,” said Drake. “How much of the nesting area, would you say was wiped out last night?”
“Close to a quarter,” said Tom Belden. “But no tracks! The birds nest on bare rock, though. There’s nothing but feathers and rotting stuff to make tracks in. Whatever messed up that place didn’t leave any footprints we could be sure of.”
Fifty yards away, Beecham put down a shovelful of earth and snatched up something like a small butterfly net. Tensely, with much eagerness and great care he worked the net in the crumbling dirt. He caught something. He had a glass jar ready. Very, very cautiously, he worked the thing he’d caught into the jar. He screwed on the cap. He looked about for Drake. He beckoned.
When Drake reached the spot, Beecham was trembling a little.
“I’ve found something,” he said agitatedly, “that may account for the dog that I tried to do an autopsy on, This!”
He held out the glass jar into which he’d put some sort of specimen. There was much loose dirt and some clinging wet stuff. It moved, as if something struggled underneath, but Drake could not see very clearly.
“You looked for it?” he asked. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Beecham uneasily. “But last night, while the radio shack was burning, I heard a little noise by my foot. And this creature, or one like it, crawled to a hole in the ground and vanished. I surmise that it may have bitten or stung the dog that Spaulding tried to save by throwing gasoline bottles.”
Again Drake saw movement within the lumps of earth. But whatever was in the glass jar was very small. It was alive, but he could tell nothing of its nature.
“You mean you think it’s poisonous?” he demanded. “When the island was checked over before the installation was built, the biologists reported no snakes or anything poisonous except small spiders.”
“I don’t think it’s native,” said Beecham painfully, “I think it may have come on the plane with the—other thing. This could have been hidden in one of the bales of trees. It could have been shaken out the cargo door when the plane landed. But the creature itself is impossible!”
“The impossible seems to be commonplace on this island lately,” said Drake sardonically. “But the question is—No. Nothing that small could have anything to do with nine men vanishing from the plane, or the disappearance of one dog, though it might have stung the second. It couldn’t account for Casey’s disappearance! And certainly it couldn’t shake branches in a thicket or carry off Brown’s body!”
“No-o-o,” agreed Beecham unhappily. “But it could—”
“Anyhow,” said Drake. “It’s not the thing that wrecked the birds’ nests and smashed their eggs last night. It’s not an answer to our problem, Beecham.”
“It might be a new problem,” said Beecham in a small voice. “I think I should study it.”
“We haven’t enough problems?” Drake tried to smile. He couldn’t quite manage it. His mind was very weary of going over and over a series of events that simply did not make sense. “Do as you please, Beecham.”
“Y-yes,” said Beecham.
He departed for his own quarters with the glass jar and its sluggishly moving, almost unseeable biological specimen.
There was motion by the workshop. Hollister and his assistants had their lifting outfit ready for use. They rolled it out of the machine shop on a four-wheeled hand-pushed truck. They went purposefully toward the tail end of the plane lying askew on the landing strip.
Drake went to watch. This
was not the only thing in progress, but it was one of the most important. To Drake, with his methodical mind, the whole of the efforts now being made amounted to something less than the sum of their parts. The making of flares and oil-lamps, the stock-piling of bottles filled with gasoline, and wick-flares able to burn for many hours,—these things were necessary, but they were not attacks upon the problem before the people of the island. And there was Nora.
He found her by the plane when Hollister and his fellows dumped their massive and clumsy apparatus beside it.
“Fancy seeing you here!” said Drake.
Her eyes searched his face anxiously.
“Nothing else has happened, has it?”
“Not yet,” he said with a false cheerfulness. “Beecham’s found a new kind of bug, or creature, or something. He thinks it’s poisonous. He’s very much wrought up. Maybe he’s occupying his mind with it because, like me, he can’t think of anything sensible about our main problem.”
Nora said unhappily: “I wish I could do something.”
“So do I,” said Drake.
“I mean for you. You look so—frustrated.”
He nodded.
“You don’t look frustrated,” he said drily. “You look desirable and wonderful and other things I refuse to comment on at the moment. I would like—” He changed his tone abruptly. “Unless I seem to be solely concerned with trying to keep everybody alive, there’ll be undesirable repercussions. Find out about this creature Beecham’s discovered, will you? If it is dangerous, you’ll want to watch out in case there are others. Everybody will. But it isn’t wise to announce a merely possible danger. People are worried enough about positive ones.”
There was a loud clanking. Hollister assembled his lifting device. There was a reinforced base of half-inch steel. One of his assistants began to poke under the tail section of the plane for a soft place through which a girder could be worked to the other side. Hollister got the heavy parts together.
It was an extremely unwieldy job to do. There had to be, first, a beam under the tail section by which it could be hoisted up enough for the lifting device itself to take hold. Then that device had to be worked, very laboriously, with a twenty-foot lever to hoist the really gigantic ship upward by a quarter-inch at each stroke. Each gain in height would immediately have to be made permanent by blocks of one sort or another. The ship was nearly a hundred feet long, fore and aft, and it would be an excessively slow and tedious job.
It was three in the afternoon before the preliminary lifting had been accomplished and the hoist actually put into use. It was four by the time a lift of two feet was made sure. All the rest of the afternoon the slow, monotonous operation went on. Hollister and his crew had to be spelled at the task from time to time. Every man on the island took part, eventually. But just when Drake had ordered the great flares lighted and the wick-lamps set out; just at the time when the sky grew dark overhead and the remaining gray in the west began to fade; just then the tail wheel came clanking down and locked itself. The plane, then, looked grotesque with its hind part upraised and its front mashed against the earth.
It was not practical to continue the job in the darkness. There came the evening meal, eaten by yellow lamplight. The community gathered in the recreation hall afterward. The atmosphere was unpleasant. There was not light enough for reading. There was only a dull-yellow duskiness in which even card games were difficult. There was the smell of burning oil everywhere. There was the feel of defeat, of defiance without confidence. There was a conviction of threat, of menace, of unguessable dangers, arising from the fact that danger existed and nobody knew certainly how to combat it.
Beecham came restlessly into the recreation room as Drake moodily gave up hope of raising the spirits of the people about him. There could be no reception of remote, uninteresting short-wave programs from places with incomprehensible names, and no record-player.
Beecham said in a carefully matter-of-fact voice: “I’ve got my specimen cleaned up so it can be seen, Drake. It’s the weirdest-looking thing you could imagine!”
“What has it turned out to be?” Drake asked without interest.
“I’ll have to dissect it to find that out,” said Beecham. “I wish I had another. I’d like to ask if anybody has noticed anything like it.”
Drake shrugged. Almost anything would be preferable to the gloomy, low-voiced uneasiness which was the atmosphere just then. Beecham took the shrug for assent. He hurried away. He came back moments later with a larger glass jar than he’d had before. There was no earth in this one. There was only the specimen.
“I want to ask,” said Beecham to the room in general, “if anybody’s seen anything like this around the island. It’s a very queer creature and it seems to spend most of its time just under the top of the ground. I don’t know exactly what to think about it.”
He put the jar on a table and brought a yellow-flamed lamp close beside it. Nora peered, and drew back with an abruptness suggesting revulsion. But Tom Belden stared into the jar for a long time. He was joined by the maintenance engineer. Then the power officer. Elise followed him, timidly holding to his sleeve. Hortense looked, and squealed, and backed away, and a warehouseman made a humorous remark and she scolded him. Then other men came. The cook arrived, having cleaned up the kitchen. He had his helpers come to peer at what everybody else was looking at.
It wasn’t much to see. It was an object possibly four inches long, counting a tightly folded greenish process which looked like thorny leaves closed for the night. It lay motionless in the bottom of the jar that held it. It appeared to be part of the root of a plant. But after a moment that appearance seemed to reveal itself as mimicry, like those walking-stick insects which look so much like twigs, and the butterflies which fold their wings and seem mere dead leaves on a bough. There were things which looked like smaller rootlets, but might have been legs, and there was a revolting appearance of thin, mangy fur which might be a similitude of capillary roots. There were no signs of eyes. Perfectly motionless as it was, it was vaguely horrible, but that was all. The impression it gave was vague.
“I don’t see anything special about it,” said the cook. A warehouseman said, “Ain’t it a piece of root?” And someone else asked, “What’s new about a hunk of root like that?”
Beecham expanded.
“It can move!” he said, with the enthusiasm of a biologist lecturing to those who only need to understand to be fascinated. “Those leaves there—folded now—they’re like the leaves of a sensitive plant, or maybe a Venus’ Fly-trap. They can move! If this is kin to the mimosas and fly-traps, it’s the highest development yet! This can actually crawl! And if it’s something else—if it’s an animal—it’s the most marvelous mimicry ever known! No other animal pretends to have leaves on it!”
“But don’t you know if it’s an animal?” asked the power officer.
“I’ve only this one specimen,” explained Beecham. “I daren’t dissect it. I want to study it. If anybody sees another one, will they come and tell me? Don’t pick it up! It may be poisonous. But if anyone sees another creature like this, please tell me immediately!”
Hollister grunted: “If it’s an animal, it’ll eat, won’t it?”
“I don’t know about that yet,” admitted Beecham. “But probably.”
“Try feeding it.”
“It might eat and still be a plant,” objected Beecham. “Venus Fly-traps do. They catch flies in a trap and digest them. But there’d certainly be no harm trying,”
“I’ll give you a piece of steak,” said the cook, amiably.
Beecham went with him to the flare-lit outside, and to the mess hall with its kitchen refrigerators at the farther end. Drake grunted to himself. Refrigeration. With both electric generators destroyed, the food supplies of the island couldn’t be kept frozen. There’d be no danger of starvation, but all the fresh-frozen food would spoil within days.
People drifted away from the glass jar with its motionless occupant. Nora
said in a low tone: “You’re going to inspect the lights outside?”
He nodded. The matter of refrigeration was something to worry about tomorrow. Then Beecham and the cook came back. Beecham had a small strip of red meat in his hand.
“Going to feed the animal?” somebody asked. “If it is an animal,” said Beecham.
He carefully loosened the screw-top of the glass jar. There was a drift back to watch. When Beecham had the top loose enough to lift off, the people of Gow Island were three deep around the table on which the jar stood.
He lifted one edge of the top, only, and that only enough to push the strip of steak through.
It did not reach the bottom of the glass container. The inert, seemingly vegetable object flung itself upward. It was horrible to see it leap. It caught the raw meat before Beecham’s fingers had let go of it. Meat and creature fell together to the bottom of the jar. The thorny leaves beat furiously at the meat.
And the previously motionless thing enveloped the meat. It swarmed over it. It devoured the steak with such ghastly, beastly ferocity that it was appalling.
The power officer’s girl fainted at the sight.
CHAPTER SIX
Very, very oddly, Drake woke next morning with a feeling of refreshment. A man’s mind works in a fashion curiously parallel to that of his body. There is such a thing as second wind. A man in reasonable physical shape can exert himself to a point where a man not in good condition will collapse. But the man in training, merely by a dogged continuance, will suddenly find himself again breathing easily and working on with a peculiar energy which has no easy explanation but is known to be a fact. The same thing can happen with one’s mind.
Drake saw the sunrise with a matter-of-fact tranquility which should have been surprising. The plane should be up on its wheels today, and off the runway. By tomorrow, if another ship came from Gissell Bay to scout the island which no longer answered radio signals, it could land. Then Nora could be gotten off the island with the other three girls. New generators and communication equipment could be sent for and could be brought. Fresh minds, perhaps, could examine the situation. It was bad, but in Drake’s mental second-wind condition it no longer seemed quite hopeless.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 137
