The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  The surf boomed and howled against the windward cliffs, but he listened only absently. There was a fresh smell in the wind, which he noted by its contrast with the air inside the buildings. Nobody, of course, had even considered leaving windows open during the night, though leaping flares lighted the grounds outside. Indoors, the air was stale, smelling of oil fumes and soot. The freshness outside was invigorating.

  There were noises in the kitchen at the end of the mess hall. The cook and his helpers were preparing breakfast. One of the two remaining dogs rose and stretched himself at sight of Drake.

  There was no reason for the freshness of Drake’s mind and viewpoint unless it was an analogue of second wind. He’d picked up a shotgun before he went outside. Now the stark, subantarctic vegetation did not seem dreary and dull. It appeared valiant and dogged. The few stunted trees in view seemed rather resolute than hopeless. There was movement in the clouds overhead.

  Drake remembered the penguins. There had been four of them, where five had been shipped from Gissell Bay. He went to see how they fared. He hadn’t really given them a thought during the past three days.

  Their cages were open and they were gone. They’d been released from outside. Maybe Beecham had released them. Maybe he’d told Beecham to do so. It seemed to Drake this morning that his mind had grown foggy with strain now released for no particular reason. He’d been obsessed by the events which came—each one incredible—in the midst of a numbing monotony. He, and all the rest, had acted as if they were continually besieged by a—a boojer-beast. There was no other term that quite fitted the menace on the island.

  But the siege, if siege it was, had not been continuous. The thing attacked and carried off a dog. Then it attacked the birds’ nesting space. It came back and killed Casey. Such behavior was not methodical and certainly it was not reasoned. Earlier, when they’d had no idea of anything inimical on the island, it had fumbled in a warehouse when it could have wrought havoc among the unwarned humans. Hm. No. It didn’t like light. All unconsciously, the humans had been protected by daylight, and then they’d flooded all the grounds and buildings with electric glare before they could be attacked by something which previously had killed nine men on the transport plane.

  The thing acted, when it acted, like a wild beast rather than a thinking enemy. But they’d reacted as if it had cunning and a purpose, as if it were a horror out of some nightmare with the lustful hatreds of a fiend. That was wrong. It acted under the direction of what was no more than instinct. It committed enormities, to be sure, and was deterred only by light. But it had done nothing that a predator would not do, which had not learned the fear of men.

  * * * *

  He came to the plane with its tail section absurdly elevated and its nose dug into the surface of the runway. He went around it. It wasn’t badly smashed. Hollister considered it repairable on the island. They had no pilot to fly it, to be sure, but at least they could get it moved so that another ship bringing skeptical newcomers could land. And another plane from Gissell Bay must surely make another effort to fly over the island today or at latest tomorrow.

  He made a mental note to put Sparks on monitor duty in the plane. He couldn’t send, but he should be able to pick up calls to the island, and probably transmissions from Valparaiso to Antarctica. There should be some information to be gained about plans for the relief of Gow Island.

  He passed the warehouse where the boojer had made its first showing, tumbling boxes and disturbing the trees from the Hot Lakes. He opened the great doors at the quonset’s end. He looked in. There was one bale of trees still tightly bound for transport. It was firmly wrapped for bracing against the motion of an air transport in bumpy air. He went on.

  Then, somehow unsurprised, he realized that he’d ignored one perfectly normal way to approach his problem. When human affairs proceed in normal fashion one pays attention only to the things under one’s very nose. Everything is consistent. Nothing unusual happens. The ordinary natural laws function smoothly, and people more or less tell the truth and most people go about their own affairs without undue friction or particular interest in the doings of their fellows. But when something abnormal happens, this fine tranquility is disturbed in all directions. Not only the victim of a crime, for example, has his customary way of life disturbed. There are all sorts of oddities. A criminal not only offends against one law, but by seeming instinct against many. A man may rob a filling-station very successfully. But because he thinks in a way that makes robbery seem normal, he flouts the traffic laws. A man may have made a brilliant hold-up, and then be caught because he goes the wrong way on a one-way street. A fugitive is caught, not because someone is splendidly alert, but because he nervously tries to avoid notice. All of which is common knowledge, but nobody on Gow Island had tried to apply the principle.

  A sea-bird flew over Drake’s head. It looked like the criminal it was. A door opened somewhere among the buildings. Drake headed back, developing in his mind the application of his new idea. It was mere sanity, which was badly needed if the folk of Gow Island were not to become frantic neurotics.

  The trick was simply to hunt for incidents that did not directly connect themselves with danger to the people of the depot. At least one such matter was known. There was the case of the destruction at the nest site. That was informative to some degree. The boojer-beast must have done other things which would reveal its nature and allow of its entrapment or destruction. There were the trees from the Hot Lakes. The boojer-beast had appeared at the same time as the trees. It might not have come with them, but the coincidence in time was certain. If there was more than an accident of timing involved, the trees might be affected like the people of Gow and the sea-birds had been.

  Beecham had set them out near the warm springs, choosing that place as closest to their normal environment. He’d set out all those from the broken bale, and he’d opened a second bale and planted that, too. The trees of the third bale remained, to be replanted in some zoological garden back home if Beecham’s guess of their delicacy or his choice of a transplantation site should be wrong.

  The already replanted trees should be visited, to see if anything had happened to them.

  There would be other things. Drake immediately thought of the ghastly midget monstrosity Beecham kept in a jar. There was no apparent connection between it and the trees or the boojer-beast, but again there was the coincidence in the time of its appearance. There should be a search for more such miniature horrors. There should be a quest for abnormalities of any discoverable sort. It would be parallel to the checking of alibis and motives in suspects in a murder case. One could not say that this question, asked, would bring an answer which would lead to understanding. But some question should.

  The dog, trotting cheerfully about with Drake, now stopped short. It looked quizzically at the ground before it. It sniffed. It moved to one side and sniffed again.

  Something moved on the ground. The dog barked playfully at it.

  Drake heard himself snapping: “Back! Back! Come here!”

  The dog turned his head to look at him, tail wagging. Drake bent and seized the dog’s collar. The dog wriggled and squirmed.

  There was a very tiny clump of leaves—three leaves, no more and no less—moving very laboriously across a patch of vividly colored lichen. Drake flung the dog aside and stamped on it. When he raised his foot the leaves fluttered, and there was somehow the feel of viciousness and frenzy in their motion. Drake stamped again and again.

  The dog barked excitedly, simply because Drake was engaged in violent action. He wanted to examine what Drake had stamped on. Drake drove him away. He fumbled in his pocket and found folded papers. They were pages of the first-hand report he had not yet been able to complete. He laid the paper on the ground and worked the now-crushed object on it. He stood up, holding the smashed, four-inch thing which he had not touched with his fingers.

  He went to Beecham’s quarters, carrying the almost unrecognizable carcass. Beecham look
ed as if he hadn’t slept—but everybody on the island looked that way now.

  “You wanted another specimen of the thing you showed us last night,” Drake told him. “One of the dogs turned it up, but I had to smash it to get it. Sorry. Can you use it?”

  Beecham took it, almost numbly.

  “I can find out quite a lot,” he said in a low tone. “I’ll look it over right away. The other one still eats. Anything.”

  “I’m going to take a look at your trees today,” said Drake.

  “Yes,” said Beecham. He looked uneasily at the crushed thing Drake had given him. He turned away. “Thanks.”

  Nora was at table in the mess hall when Drake went for his breakfast. But Hollister hailed him, with his mouth full. Drake went to the island’s chief mechanic.

  “I can get the plane up on its front wheels today,” said Hollister. “But I’m going to need a lot of help. The front end’s a lot heavier than the tail. Don’t let anybody go off, huh? We’ll need everybody, before we’re through.”

  “Everybody’ll be on hand,” Drake promised,

  Spaulding ate by himself. He looked nerve-racked. Drake paused at his table. Spaulding glanced up suspiciously.

  “Well?”

  “You didn’t give me your opinion about the nesting area,” said Drake in a confidential tone. “Tom Belden said it was a wreck. Did you notice anything that, now you’ve thought it over, might be helpful? Belden said there were no tracks of the beast we assume raided the place.”

  Spaulding’s cheek twitched. He’d been badly chosen for an isolated spot like Gow Island. There are some people who need the approval and even the admiration of their fellows. Spaulding felt that he’d lost both, because it was by his act that the radio shack had burned, and that he’d neither talked nor earned his way back to public esteem. The party he’d led to the nesting site had plainly found him not an acceptable leader. He’d come back walking alone, and he’d been rock-happy before this affair began. He was badly placed, in a situation like this.

  “I’ve nothing to say,” he said acidly. Then he burst out: “I did notice something, but nobody’ll credit it for an instant!”

  Drake said: “No?”

  “There’s more than one beast!” snapped Spaulding in a sort of impotent fury. “The destruction was mostly in one area, but there were paths of destruction leading to it! Whatever attacked the nesting birds invaded the nest site from several separate points! One beast would have raged about, doing its killings. It wouldn’t have wandered out to where there were no nests and then wandered back from a different spot on the edge! There were six—seven—maybe a dozen of the beasts!”

  Drake blinked. Spaulding regarded him with angry, bitter eyes. Nobody is ever so much enraged by doubt as a man who has doubts of himself.

  “You don’t believe it?” he demanded fiercely. Drake said uncomfortably: “I don’t disbelieve it, though it’s a brand-new thought. But there was slaughter still going on at the nests when something came back and killed Casey. Before that, a dog had screamed and we hunted through a tree thicket, and the radar said the birds were night-flying almost immediately afterward. I thought it remarkable that a beast could kill a dog here, and then escape from us and get to the nests so quickly. If there was more than one—one or more here and several there … But how could there be more than one? It’s impossible enough that one came on the plane! How could there be several?”

  “No need to humor me!” raged Spaulding. “You don’t believe it! You’ll find out! You’ll all find out!”

  He bent to his breakfast, dismissing Drake. His hands trembled.

  Drake sat down opposite Nora, frowning to himself. “More trouble?” she asked.

  “No-o-o,” said Drake. “In a way there’s less. I’ve stopped trying to think only about things that have happened. I’m trying to think of other things that may have happened that we haven’t noticed. Beecham was worried about his trees, you remember. Some of their branches were broken or nipped off at the ends. He wondered if there was some creature that normally fed on them, back at the Hot Lakes. If the thing we’ve been holding off with lights was something that normally fed on them, at the Hot Lakes …” He hesitated “It might be feeding on them now. So I’m going to see. I can’t make it this morning. Hollister wants everybody around to help hoist up the plane. Maybe early this afternoon.”

  A plate and a steaming cup of coffee appeared on the table before him. He said “Thanks,” and gulped at the coffee. When he looked up, Nora was regarding him with soft eyes.

  “Stop it!” he said under his breath. “We were going to inspect the lighting outside, last night. Remember? We didn’t. I’ve found time to be resentful.”

  “Yes, Mr. Drake,” said Nora. She smiled faintly.

  He growled. He began his breakfast. And thinking of Nora and facing her across the mess table, he managed to recapture the rested, almost-confident attitude he’d awakened with. During the meal they talked, saying nothing that was not perfectly normal between an administrative officer and his secretary who happened to face each other at a mess-hall table. But it was extraordinarily consoling to be able to raise his eyes and look at her. When they went out together he said: “You’ve promised to be careful. Watch where you walk! I just found another of those monstrosities Beecham showed us last night. I killed it and gave it to him. There may be more.”

  She nodded and went to the office.

  * * * *

  Hollister and his fellows were already at work on the fore part of the plane. They could get the bulky pseudo-jack under the left wing without any trouble. They did. But it took four men to work the lever, here where most of the weight of the plane was concentrated. Drake swung his weight on the long beam with the rest. The plane stirred ever so slightly. Other men came to watch and help. Drake sent Sparks inside the plane to monitor the air waves. He remembered to ask who’d released the penguins. It was Beecham. He swung on the lever again and again and again. The plane lifted half a foot. Hollister blocked it against subsiding once more into the groove it had dug on landing.

  There was a scream from the mess hall. Drake ran, with other men close beside him.

  They found the dumpy girl, Hortense, shrieking at the end of the mess hall. The cook and his two helpers, with utensils from the kitchen, poked agitatedly at something on the floor.

  A small object like a root writhed and lashed out viciously with a group of three thorny leaves at one of its ends. It moved painfully over the mess-hall floor, seeming to seek a hole to crawl into.

  Drake took a cereal bowl and clapped it over the midget. The cook brought a cookie pan. They worked it under the bowl, imprisoning the tiny horror.

  Drake sent it to Beecham in the room he used as a biological laboratory. He gave general instructions that everybody was to be very careful; that Beecham thought the small creatures might be poisonous. He went back to the plane.

  Sparks reported constant, persistent calls for Gow Island, which of course could not be answered. He picked up short-wave messages relayed from Valparaiso, in which the high brass expressed deep indignation at the failure of communication and demanded that Gissell Bay do something about it. He picked up Gissell Bay’s explanation of storm conditions which made it uncertain that a plane could get to Gow and return before flying conditions became hazardous.

  They got the front of the plane up a foot and a half. It then began to tilt. They blocked it in place, dismantled the lifting device, and set it up again under the right wing. They raised it six inches more before instability reappeared. They blocked it in place.

  There was a small uproar in the recreation hall. Drake rushed. There was a midget monstrosity in the middle of the floor, lashing about with its green leaves because it could find no hole to crawl into. Before Drake could interfere, the power officer smashed it with his heel. His girl, Elise, watched in shaking terror. To demonstrate his protectiveness, no doubt, the power officer stooped and picked up the smashed small carcass to take it out of
her sight.

  He uttered a gasp of utter anguish—and went unconscious from shock.

  Beecham brought him to, and bandaged his hand with a surface anesthetic to stop the agony where his skin had touched the thorny leaves. Beecham was ashen-white. He took this small carcass back to his laboratory.

  Drake returned to the plane, leaving Elise to console the still-suffering power officer. He did not repeat his warning to be careful of the tiny horrors. It was no longer necessary. And he carefully did not draw attention to the fact that two of them had been found inside the human quarters, which was as many as had been found in all out-doors. Presumably there was some attraction for them inside the buildings.

  They got the plane higher and shifted the jack. They got it still higher and again shifted the jack. By lunchtime, with extra men hauling on the long lever, they had it almost high enough for the front wheels to descend and support it.

  Beecham did not appear in the mess hall. Nor did Nora. Drake went to Beecham’s quarters and knocked on the door. Beecham opened it. His face was gray.

  “How are you doing with the little beasts?” asked Drake. “Have you found out what they are?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Beecham, with difficulty. “They’re not like anything normal, anywhere. They’re incredible!”

  “How about normal around the Hot Lakes?”

  “Probably,” said Beecham, with the same trouble of speech. “That area’s been separated from the rest of the world for millions of years. Even in Australia they had plants and animals not found anywhere else. And Australia was isolated comparatively recently. The Hot Lakes were isolated long before Australia, and the environment has been so abnormal that one wouldn’t expect even parallel evolution. Creatures that could live elsewhere couldn’t possibly survive there. Month-long nights—warmed by the hot ground—Anything that lived there would have to be very strange.”