Men gathered equipment for the highly unpromising attempt to find the cook’s helper in the darkness. Wick torches. Gasoline bottles. Arms. There was no elation, as of men preparing for adventure. Everyone was reluctant, but they doggedly made ready.
But there came a sound in the night, high-pitched and shrill above the dull thundering of the surf. It was a shriek. A human shriek. A gun exploded somewhere off in the darkness.
Drake found himself in a tight-knit bunch of five or six men, racing for the source of the sound. Their flashlights played wildly all about. Patches of light-colored lichen appeared in the murky dark; sped toward him; vanished underfoot. There were shouts behind him. He ran, and ran, panting.
Somebody cried out. Something glittered in the flashlight rays. It was itself a flashlight, its glass front and light-bulb shattered. Drake swung his own beam about. Other beams crossed and criss-crossed it. There was the gun with which Thomas had killed a seal. Its barrel was bent almost at a right angle. It was a display of incredible strength.
There was a thicket of the island’s trees. Something stirred in them. Drake cried out fiercely. All the men saw that something thrust itself swiftly into the very midst of the spindling tree-trunks. They swayed. Branches thrashed.
But there was nothing to be seen as thrashing them. There was nothing but branches being moved and trees being stirred in the flashlight rays. There was no visible thing which moved them.
His voice filled with hatred, Drake cried out orders. The men with flashlights surrounded the thicket. They kept their beams upon it. Somebody threw a gasoline bottle. It ignited and flames shot up. Other men encircled the thicket with centers of leaping flame. Nothing could come out unseen. They watched with hot, hating eyes. Nothing stirred. Nothing. The gasoline flames leaped and leaped in the night. The thicket con-tamed absolutely nothing but trees. But something had entered it and now cowered from the light. The men watched lustfully.
There appeared pin-points of light from the direction of the quonset huts. There were groups of small flames. They set themselves out in a long line, stretching toward the flares and the thicket.
Presently there were figures, placing wick-torches in a line leading to the thicket the raging men watched. Among others, Nora appeared, carrying wick-torches. She lighted them and set them in place as the others did. There was an avenue of small flares reaching back to greater flares about the island’s buildings.
Drake caught Tom Belden by the shoulder.
“Take her back there,” he rasped, “and keep her where she should be safe!”
Tom Belden vanished. But Drake was coldly enraged now. A broken flashlight and a bent rifle was the cause. The avenue of wick-torches offered an opportunity for presumably safe passage back to the buildings. He sent men back with Belden and the unwilling Nora. They brought him loads of the gasoline bottles. He distributed them.
And at a signal, half a dozen crashed among the thicket’s trees. Flaming liquid splashed and flared. It flowed in burning runlets on the ground among the trees. Bracken and maidenhair curled and shriveled in the heat. More gasoline. More. The tree-trunks dripped flames. A monstrous, cavorting tower of fire rose toward the black sky. The shadows of men moved grotesquely across the ground.
Then there were shoutings. Something writhed within the blaze. Flaming, incandescent tree-trunks swayed and toppled. Branches shook, with fire rising from their tips. Something struggled blindly among the glowing, flaming embers. They could not see it clearly. They never really saw it at all. But they could see that something struggled insanely in hellish flame, and presently it struggled more weakly, and then feebly, but still they could not see just what it was. And presently there was only a glowing ash-heap which they kept burning with fresh gasoline all night long.
It was not until gray dawn that they let the fire die so they could sift among the ashes.
They found nothing. No signs of any creature which could kill men. No trace of bones or buttons or metal. There were only ashes.
Nothing else.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bleary-eyed, sooted, and exhausted men trailed numbly back toward the buildings. They moved between the lines of wick-torches that had made a lane of light from the depot to the thicket in which the boojer-beast had been assumed to hide. They were querulous and uncertain. There’d been something in the thicket. They’d turned it into an inferno. The something had struggled as flames licked and roared, and as rivulets of burning gasoline trickled here and there. They’d seen its struggles. They’d seen burning coals churn and move. They’d seen flaring branches twisted and broken. They’d seen ashes stirred where something writhed more and more feebly, and then was still. But they hadn’t seen the writhing thing. They’d seen nothing but burning, stunted, shrivelling trees.
If they’d trapped a creature which squirmed in the flames but did not flee them, it was dead. There was no longer a boojer-beast. But there should have been a carcass. There should at least have been bones. Considering the vanishment of Thomas—
Whitish, powdery ashes alone were not a sufficient proof of death. They didn’t account for a creature which had killed two men and bent a gun-barrel almost double in a display of insensate strength. So it was not certain that the menace on the island was destroyed. The men had merely seen the death-struggles of something they could not see.
They were not satisfied. They were fretful and weary and unsure. When they got back to the quonsets, though, there was a welcome awaiting them. Nora Hall had pointed out to the cook that tired men deserved coffee after a night of danger fighting the beast that had killed his helper. She’d gone into the kitchen with him, and held a light while he examined every corner for writhing, leaf-clashing horrors. There was no doubt that they deliberately went into human-occupied places by choice. And when the kitchen was proved temporarily empty of the midget monstrosities, Nora remained with the cook, keeping watch upon the floors, while he prepared coffee. She helped him serve it when Drake and the others came back from the incinerated clump of trees.
“Drink this coffee,” she told Drake when he stumbled to where she waited. “Then you can tell us what happened.”
“I can’t,” be said bitterly. “I don’t know what happened!”
He gulped down the hot coffee.
“Maybe we killed it,” he told her. “Maybe we didn’t. We saw that something burned. It didn’t make a sound. It only squirmed—horribly! But we didn’t see it. I don’t know how—”
He gulped again. Spaulding said sharply: “It’s invisible. That’s proved now!”
Drake shook his head doggedly: “No. How could it burn without charring? Then we’d have seen it. How could it burn without at least turning flames aside from itself? We’d have seen if there’d been a place in the fire that the flames didn’t pass through! Even an invisible thing would show in the middle of leaping flames because they couldn’t leap through it!” Then he said fretfully: “There couldn’t be such a thing! Yet there was something that struggled! We saw where coals and branches moved as it struggled among them!”
He shook his head as if to clear it. He stared around among the buildings.
“How did things go here?”
Nora said briefly: “We made out. Everything’s all right.”
It was not quite the truth. There had been something close to mass hysteria among those who stayed where quonsets cast heavy shadows and one must watch very carefully where one stepped. There was a warehouse, otherwise empty, which had been prepared to be a refuge against the midget creatures as well as the major menace itself. There was a wide band of sticky fuel-oil at the edges of the concrete floor. There were chairs and bunks and improvised screens in the center of the concrete. There were lamps and wick-flares inside, casting wavery shadows against the roof and making a wholly grisly atmosphere.
But no one had stayed in it. The power officer put his girl Elise there for a while. The dumpy girl, Hortense, had stayed there for a time, too. But to sit still and wait for mon
strosities and abominations to be defeated by fuel-oil painted on concrete was an impossibility. Some of those left at the depot could not but stare away at the thicket where flames rose high about a deadly trapped thing. Some moved affrightedly about the installation, desperately seeing that all the flares and torches stayed lit. There were rumors that there was something out in the dark which would presently take action. It only waited for darkness to fall where the humans were, when it could roam horribly everywhere, seizing its victims despite their shrieks.
At least once somebody misread a moving shadow for a horror from the dark. He fired a Very pistol, and something caught fire. There had to be fire-fighting in the midst of terror. And for the CO2 truck, so it could smother the flames with the gas, they had to set off one of the four huge bonfires Drake had had prepared. It gave a highly satisfactory amount of illumination, but when it died down the diminished light was frightening.
There was the plane, risen to its landing wheels and rolled off the airstrip. There was movement near it once, and yammering panic seemed about to break. But the movement turned out to be the radio operator returning to the others after listening hungrily for messages in the night.
* * * *
Nothing had quite happened, but there was terror all night long. Nobody could bear to stay in any building except Beecham. There was a yellow glare in the window of his laboratory to prove his presence there. Once the cook shouted hysterical curses at something on the ground near a wick torch. He battered it to pulp. Once Spaulding caught something between two sticks and held it at arm’s length, calling on others to witness his triumph, and dropped it into a beacon of burning oil. Still, there were not very many of the monstrosities discovered, though the people of the installation moved fearfully about all night long. They were tensely watchful and wrought up to expect anything intolerable. When daybreak came there was no lessening of the strain, because the men who’d burned something in the tree clump were desperately uncertain that they had done anything at all.
Drake drank two mugs of coffee in the gray light of dawn. Spaulding came insistently to him.
“Drake,” he protested. “The men who were with you won’t go in the buildings and they’re falling asleep on their feet!”
“You monster-proofed a warehouse,” said Drake tiredly. “You were supposed to, anyhow. Tell them to turn in there.”
Spaulding said tensely: “But the little monsters—”
Drake blinked his eyes.
“Look, Spaulding! We’ve not had time to take care of things calmly. I’ll give you a job to test a process of defense. The refrigeration’s off. Naturally there’s a lot of fresh beef that’s going to spoil. Get the mess officer or the cook and bring some of that meat out into the open. Lay it on the ground. The little monsters eat meat. We saw it. Beecham showed us. And they go insistently into human quarters presumably because we’re there and we’re meat. One of them went after Nora. Remember? If we lay out bait on the ground, it may attract them. If it does, somebody could build a platform they can’t climb onto, and blast them with a shotgun as they turned up at the bait. Like shooting rats, or tigers. Pick your own simile. We might get an idea how many there are by the number killed. At least we should knock off a few. Go and do something about it, Spaulding.”
He sat wearily still as Spaulding went away. Spaulding’s expression was somehow disappointed. He’d have preferred to have thought of the idea of bait himself. He would try to make some brilliant improvement on the scheme.
“I’m going to talk to Beecham,” said Drake, “as soon as I’ve sat down for a moment or two. He guesses something he thinks too crazy to tell. He’s bashful about talking like a lunatic. But I’ve been having all the experiences of a madman. I’ve got to be a little bit stern and make him tell his hallucinations. They may not be delusions. Maybe they’re facts. On this island you can’t use the standards of a sane world to decide what’s crazy and what isn’t!”
Nora put her hand on his shoulder.
“Please get some rest first,” the said pleadingly. “Please! You’re all tired out!”
But Drake said bitterly: “I’m disgusted! There’s a part of my brain that’s getting fed up with the rest of me. I’ve missed something! There’s something I haven’t noticed that I should have! There’s something I’ve looked at without seeing, because I didn’t know what to look for! There’s some one damned thing that if I look at it squarely will tell me the rest! But I don’t know where to look, or for what! I’ve got to see Beecham!”
He stirred and Nora said urgently: “You sit still and I’ll ask him to come here! You’re exhausted! All day yesterday and all last night! Just sit still and I’ll ask him to come here.”
Drake’s arms and legs felt like lead. He felt even that excessively irritating degree of weariness in which one’s neck-muscles protest against the labor of holding one’s head upright. He knew that since he’d once sat down, he’d stagger if he tried to walk. Nora said anxiously: “I’ll go get him.”
“Wait!” snapped Drake. “You’ve got boots on. That’s good. But don’t go inside any building. Go to the window outside of Beecham’s laboratory and call to him through it. If the monsters have been crawling into the buildings because they smell of people—meat!—there might be a hopeful row of them waiting outside his door. Tell him that. And carry a stick. Wait a minute! Tom! Tom Belden!”
Tom Belden was standing a little distance away. Drake beckoned to him without rising. The young man came.
“I’m an old man, Tom,” said Drake drearily. “Go with Miss Hall here and let her fetch Beecham. Watch out for her, will you?”
Tom Belden nodded. He went with Nora toward the building in which Beecham had made his so-far-undisclosed discoveries about the poisonous midget creatures. Drake relaxed.
It was purely a bodily relaxation. His mind worked on. Perhaps it worked a bit better because of his physical weariness. Sitting on a packing-case, leaning against the curved wall of a quonset, doing nothing at all, for a moment he was singularly and acutely aware of his physical surroundings. The dull, booming, angry roar of the surf reached his consciousness. He heard a squawking, which was a sea-bird flying home the long way. He heard voices; the people of the island. Somebody was explaining querulously that the boojer-beast ought to be dead, but until he’d seen its carcass he wasn’t going to feel sure.
Drake’s mind worked briskly. Insistently and obstinately, it denied that anything that had happened on the island could be contrary to the nature of real things. It could be an unexpected or even unprecedented kind of reality, but it had to be rational. Nothing could happen contrary to common sense, when all the information was in.
Beecham had some information he hadn’t divulged. He’d figured that the midget abominations would be repelled by oil. There must have been rational, logical reasoning to suggest oil. He had to think of it before he tried it. And it was reasonable for the small monsters to refuse to cross an oil-smear if it would kill them. They were subject to the laws of nature. So must be the bigger, even more deadly thing which could shift packing-cases and bend rifle-barrels and kill and carry off men and dogs …
Drake began to feel a certain anger with himself. He felt that he had, in his own memories and at this moment, all the information he needed to solve the problem. And he did. He was in possession of as much relevant information as a man would need for—say—the solution of a puzzling murder case. There were questions he could ask, whose answers would add up both to common sense and to agreement with the facts. He was certain that he knew the answers—or could find them—if only he could think of the questions.
Nora came back, with Tom Belden, just as one question occurred to him.
“Beecham wasn’t in his laboratory,” said Nora. “But we found him. He caught half a dozen monsters, alive. They were waiting outside his door. He opened it a crack and they came in one by one, and he netted them. He used them for experiments, and he was checking an application of his results out-of-do
ors when we caught up with him. He’s put out some pieces of fresh meat with poison around it, so the monsters have to squirm across the poison to get at the meat. He’s getting results, he says.”
Drake said: “That’s a more sensible trick than I suggested to Spaulding. He will not be pleased. Oh, to the devil with people’s feelings! Tom, will you do one more thing—carefully?”
“Sure!” said Tom Belden.
“I feel more or less ossified,” said Drake, “as if I’d break apart if I tried to bend a joint. I wouldn’t, but I feel that way. I’ve thought of something that makes my flesh crawl. I want you to go to Warehouse Four. That’s where the stuff from the plane was stored. There’s a bale of the trees from the Hot Lakes in there. Open the end door—the big one so there’ll be plenty of light. Then look at the trees.”
“Right,” said Belden. “What do I look for?”
“The other day,” Drake told him, “Beecham said the tips of some of their branches had been nipped off, as if they were being eaten. He was afraid some natural enemy of the trees had come to the island on the plane. So you see if there’s been anything browsing on the baled trees, will you? Don’t go near, light or no light. Look from the door only. Stay in the light. Understand? Stay in the light!”
“Right,” said Belden.
Drake waited. Then he painfully turned his head to watch. Tom Belden went to Warehouse Four and opened the big doors which would allow of the passage of large objects for storage. He stared inside. He shaded his eyes, though daylight today was hardly dazzling.
He came back, frowning.
“A lot of the branches look like the ends have been eaten off,” he reported. “I couldn’t see too close from outside, but it seemed that way.” He paused. “There were a couple of the little monsters squirming around on the floor. But I didn’t see any on the trees.”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 140
