The newcomers were extremely polite. They listened with charmed attention and absolute disbelief to what they were told. But there were still seventeen people on the island, and there were not nearly so many newly landed men, and the plane they’d come in could not discreetly be used to carry so many psychotics with a crew of only three. But there was a destroyer on the way.
The extra radio equipment functioned admirably. It reported to far-away authority, and far-away authority decided that the island’s company had best be removed by ship, where there were plenty of sane people available to keep them under control. But Drake himself was to board the just-landed ship and go north in it to make his reports in person and receive psychiatric examination and treatment. He was more firm in his delusions than anybody else, but what was learned from him should be very useful in the treatment of the others. And it happened that the last-arrived member of the island’s company was Nora Hall. She should be least affected, and so would furnish an excellent guide to treatment. Cures of the most and least insane persons on Gow would give a broad and comprehensive fund of information upon their remarkable contagious delusion.
Spaulding was merely soothed, at which he raged. Knowing nothing of the decisions affecting Drake and Nora, he felt a passionate resentment because his statements were treated as matters for indulgence and kindly agreement. He flew into such a fury that he was almost put into a strait-jacket.
As occupational therapy, however, he was allowed to supervise the emptying of Warehouse Four of the objects taken from the crashed plane. It was not quite practical to round up the four surviving penguins immediately. But the boxes of scientific observations, and the crate of developed photographic plates were available for shipment. And the third bale of “biological specimens from the Hot Lakes district”—the third bale of stunted trees, still tightly strapped together—the third bale of the Antarctic trees was already packed.
Spaulding saw them loaded. He even went back into the cargo space of the loaded ship and made sure that everything was as he thought suitable.
“You don’t believe what we’ve said about the trees,” he said with ironic politeness to the ranking officer of the newcomers. “I wish you’d check on how they’re loaded, to be sure we aren’t putting anything over on you!”
“Oh, that would be absurd!” said the man from Gissell Bay. He beamed. “It would be ridiculous! They’ll be examined very carefully. If your accounts are accurate, they’ll create a sensation! They’re sensational anyhow! Trees from Antarctica! That’s remarkable!”
Hollister refueled the ship from Gissell Bay. Her Right engineer watched closely. Hollister snorted. The mechanics went over it in the manner prescribed for even the briefest landing. The flight engineer watched sharply. The crew of three went on board.
The plane’s motors caught and revved up, and went down to idling. Drake and Nora climbed aboard. Spaulding did not see. The plane taxied downwind to the end of the strip, and swung awkwardly about, and the motors roared separately and all together, and the ship darted along the ground.
In seconds it lifted and was away. It bucked a little as it passed over the cliffs, and then it swung up and to the north. As it dwindled in the distance, Spaulding gloated at the definiteness with which he would be vindicated and those who had doubted his word proved fools.
In the plane, Drake found an improvised seat for Nora, and another for himself beside her. The co-pilot came back into the cargo space and looked at them with the same bland indulgence which had been so infuriating aground.
“Sorry there aren’t any ports,” he said soothingly. “But this is a cargo ship. There’s a light here.” He turned on a very small bulb. “Not enough to read by, unfortunately, but flying’s so monotonous that you’ll probably doze. If you feel nervous, we’ve something that may help.”
“Neither of us is nervous,” said Drake coldly.
The co-pilot beamed at them and disappeared. The door to the navigating compartment remained open for a time. Presently, for no reason, it closed.
“Alone,” said Drake drily, “at last. Only I’m not sure I like the look of things.” He fumbled with the small bag which contained his personal belongings. “I rather wondered, after Beecham explained the nature of the boojer-beasts, why and how they happened to become active on the plane to Gow. He guessed that to keep from being blown over and away by storms, one would need to be awake so it could either move to a sheltered spot or hold fast to something more solid than itself. So he guessed that the sound of motors might act like the sound of storm winds, and rouse the creatures even in only partial darkness. Gathered as they were, in daylight, and dangling from a rope to Gissell Bay, they wouldn’t be roused until well on the way to Gow.”
He opened his personal bag. He showed her two round aluminum cylinders. He handed her one.
“If you jerk this cord, it’ll work. You hold it by this. We’d a supply of them in storage in case some base on the ice-cap wanted one. You want to be careful with it, of course.”
Nora said despairingly: “You mean we have to think of danger even now?”,
“I’m afraid we do,” admitted Drake. “Until their own men report the same things we said we saw.”
He put a flashlight in her lap. The plane droned and droned and droned through the sky. In the cargo space, Drake and Nora sat quite still. It was large space. The load put on board at Gow was almost lost in its sixty-foot length. The sound of the motors was muffled only to some degree.
“You don’t expect them to break loose?” asked Nora faintly, after a long time.
“Naturally not!” said Drake. “They’re baled up. If they start to struggle, though, and the branch-ends squirm, we’ll call the gentlemen of the air force to look. That won’t be dramatic, but it ought at least to give somebody pause, and cause precautions against the things getting loose!”
Nora slipped her hand in his. The droning of the plane was almost hypnotic. It swayed slightly in its flight. It lifted a little, and dipped a little, in some small wind-flurry among the clouds.
* * * *
There was a snapping sound in the back of the cargo space. Nora jerked her hand free and pressed the button of the flashlight.
A snaky, wavering, writhing tendril groped blindly. There was another crack. Drake seized the flashlight.
“Open the door,” he said curtly, “and tell them to come look! I’ll hold the beasts back with the flashlight—if I can.”
Nora tugged at the door, her breath coming quickly. She could not open it. She battered at it. She screamed.
Somebody opened the door, the flight engineer.
“Come here!” cried Nora tensely. “They’ve got loose! The trees! They’re getting out of the bale!”
The flight engineer said soothingly: “That’s all right, ma’am. No harm done.”
Drake snapped: “One of you come back here! This isn’t crazy! One of you come here, and let her in the compartment up forward!”
The flight engineer continued to bar the way. An hysterical woman in the pilot’s compartment of a plane in flight is not a highly desirable thing.
“Look here, ma’am,” he said politely. “We had orders not to pay attention, besides giving you medicine, if you and he got nervous. You’re—”
Drake’s hand reached over Nora’s shoulder. He heaved. The flight engineer came hurtling into the cargo-space. He landed on the floor. He swore.
“Mac!” he called fretfully “The guy’s gone whacky! We got to—”
Drake turned on the flashlight again.
The flight engineer screamed. He charged for the navigation-room door, still screaming. He went through, babbling. The co-pilot appeared, embattled, with something heavy in his hand.
Drake used the flashlight. And now there were Things in the back of the cargo space. They were spidery, tangled, serpentine things. They writhed and squirmed blindly. Monstrous tendrils with black fur upon them fumbled at the walls. A tree-trunk appeared, staggering drunkenly.
There was a sudden subtle change in the motion of the ship. It was on automatic pilot. The pilot himself appeared in the doorway.
Half the sixty-foot cargo space of the plane, now, was filled with monstrous, moving, incredible horrors.
The pilot dived out of sight. He reappeared with a revolver—the only weapon normally carried on a transport plane. He fired, his features tense and filled with stark and absolute panic. Nothing happened. Horrid, ghastly, impossible monsters untangled their thin tentacles from each other and came rocking and slithering from the back of the plane. The pilot fired the gun empty. The bullets had no effect at all.
He babbled. He vanished. Drake heard his voice, shrill and hysterical: “Calling Gow! Calling Gow! The ship’s full of nightmares! Horrors! Giant spiders! What’ll I do? What’ll I do?”
Nora shrank close to Drake. Her teeth chattered. “Now,” said Drake grimly, “we’ll see!”
He had an aluminum cylinder in his hand. He jerked.
Instant, enormous, blinding light filled the plane. It was a chute-flare, yielding millions of candle-power. Drake held it by that small device by which it should have swung under a small parachute in mid-air.
The monsters froze. The sound of droning motors may have been a stimulus to action, because in time of storm they would need to be roused to find shelter or a firm groundhold. But light commanded them to be still.
Drake, squinting, found the lever that operated the cargo-bay doors. He pulled it. The doors dropped open, and the sound of the ship’s engines roused to bedlam. But two immobilized monsters dropped out of the opened cargo-bay into the vast, wind-swept emptiness below. Drake handed the flare to Nora.
“Hold it so,” he said curtly. “And be careful. If it starts to go out, light the other as I showed you and drop this one out that hole.”
He moved back. Very coldly and very deliberately he worked the monsters to the cargo doors and out. He was careful not to touch the ends of any branches.
He got the last one out before the second chute-flare burned out in Nora’s shaking hand. He took it from her and dropped it out the open doors. He closed the cargo doors again. Instants later, with the motor noise dropped to normal volume, they heard the pilot’s frenzied voice.
The plane swerved suddenly. It swung about in a half-circle. It flew madly back toward Gow Island. Because, of course, its pilot had received orders to return. Back on Gow, Spaulding was triumphant. He’d just informed the island’s new administrative officer that when the ship landed at Valparaiso the Antarctic trees would be found out of their bale and ready to do murder. He zestfully insisted that the crew should be warned. And this information fitted exactly with the hysterical, half-crazed messages from the ship.
Spaulding did not know that Drake and Nora had been on board and in the cargo space until the plane appeared and circled the island crazily, and there were furious orders from the ground to let down the wheels. Then the ship dipped and descended and touched ground. Its landing was wholly unskillful. It had three nerve-racked men in its navigation compartment. Two of them frantically wanted out—to get utterly away from the plane that developed such fiendishnesses in its after parts. The pilot was worse off.
He landed the plane like a somnambulist, and killed the motors, and then fumbled on the floor beside his seat. He found the revolver that had been of no use at all against the things he’d seen. He’d had time to realize the stark impossibility of such things. They did not exist. He’d seen them. They could not exist. He still believed he’d seen them. So he was insane.
The pilot put the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger as Drake opened the door from the cargo space.
The pistol clicked harmlessly. It had been shot empty.
Then men came running to get the crew out of the ship. They were very much alarmed because the crewmen seemed to have gone mad during the flight.
Just before Nora stepped on the ladder by which she would descend to the ground, again on Gow Island, she said softly: “I suppose we’ll have to act very indifferent again, but—” She smiled at him. “Anyhow I’ve decided to marry you.”
Drake grimaced as he looked out of the window.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ve decided to marry you too, so that makes it unanimous. But—That destroyer ought to get here tomorrow or next day. We’ll probably all be carried back to Valparaiso on it, while a strictly Navy crew takes over here. They’ll do some checking and hunt down the rest of the boojers. But we’ll be on the destroyer. They say,” he added, “that a surface-ship voyage is quite romantic. Moonlight on the ocean is highly praised.”
Nora grinned at him. He grinned back.
She descended the ladder to solid ground, and he followed her.
THE PIRATES OF ERSATZ (1959)
I
It was not mere impulsive action when Bron Hoddan started for the planet Walden by stowing away on a ship that had come to his native planet to hang all his relatives. He’d planned it long before. It was a long-cherished and carefully worked out scheme. He didn’t expect the hanging of his relatives, of course. He knew that they’d act grieved and innocent, and give proof that they were simple people leading blameless lives. They’d make their would-be executioners feel ashamed and apologetic for having thought evil of them, and as soon as the strangers left they’d return to their normal way of life, which was piracy. But while this was going on, Bron Hoddan stowed away on the menacing vessel. Presently he arrived at its home world. But his ambition was to reach Walden, so he set about getting there. It took a long time because he had to earn ship-passage from one solar system to another, but he held to his idea. Walden was the most civilized planet in that part of the galaxy. On Walden, Hoddan intended, in order (a) to achieve splendid things as an electronic engineer, (b) to grow satisfactorily rich, (c) to marry a delightful girl, and (d) end his life a great man. But he had to spend two years trying to arrange even the first.
On the night before the police broke in the door of his room, though, accomplishment seemed imminent. He went to bed and slept soundly. He was calmly sure that his ambitions were about to be realized. At practically any instant his brilliance would be discovered and he’d be well-to-do, his friend Derec would admire him, and even Nedda would probably decide to marry him right away. She was the delightful girl. Such prospects made for good sleeping.
And Walden was a fine world to be sleeping on. Outside the capital city its spaceport received shipments of luxuries and raw materials from halfway across the galaxy. Its landing grid reared skyward and tapped the planet’s ionosphere for power with which to hoist ships to clear space and pluck down others from emptiness. There was commerce and manufacture and wealth and culture, and Walden modestly admitted that its standard of living was the highest in the Nurmi Cluster. Its citizens had no reason to worry about anything but a supply of tranquilizers to enable them to stand the boredom of their lives.
Even Hoddan was satisfied, as of the moment. On his native planet there wasn’t even a landing grid. The few, battered, cobbled ships the inhabitants owned had to take off precariously on rockets. They came back blackened and sometimes more battered still, and sometimes they were accompanied by great hulls whose crews and passengers were mysteriously missing. These extra ships had to be landed on their emergency rockets, and, of course, couldn’t take off again, but they always vanished quickly just the same. And the people of Zan, on which Hoddan had been born, always affected innocent indignation when embattled other spacecraft came and furiously demanded that they be produced.
There were some people who said that all the inhabitants of Zan were space pirates and ought to be hung and compared with such a planet, Walden seemed a very fine place indeed. So on a certain night Bron Hoddan went confidently to bed and slept soundly until three hours after sunrise. Then the police broke in his door.
They made a tremendous crash in
doing it, but they were in great haste. The noise waked Hoddan, and he blinked his eyes open. Before he could stir, four uniformed men grabbed him and dragged him out of bed. They searched him frantically for anything like a weapon. Then they stood him against a wall with two stun-pistols on him, and the main body of cops began to tear his room apart, looking for something he could not guess. Then his friend Derec came hesitantly in the door and looked at him remorsefully. He wrung his hands.
“I had to do it, Bron,” he said agitatedly. “I couldn’t help doing it!”
Hoddan blinked at him. He was dazed. Things didn’t become clearer when he saw that a cop had slit open his pillow and was sifting its contents through his fingers. Another cop was ripping the seams of his mattress to look inside. Somebody else was going carefully through a little pile of notes that Nedda had written, squinting at them as if he were afraid of seeing something he’d wish he hadn’t.
“What’s happened?” asked Hoddan blankly. “What’s this about?”
Derec said miserably:
“You killed someone, Bron. An innocent man! You didn’t mean to, but you did, and…it’s terrible!”
“Me kill somebody? That’s ridiculous!” protested Hoddan.
“They found him outside the powerhouse,” said Derec bitterly. “Outside the Mid-Continent station that you—”
“Mid-Continent? Oh!” Hoddan was relieved. It was amazing how much he was relieved. He’d had an unbelieving fear for a moment that somebody might have found out he’d been born and raised on Zan—which would have ruined everything. It was almost impossible to imagine, but still it was a great relief to find out he was only suspected of a murder he hadn’t committed. And he was only suspected because his first great achievement as an electronic engineer had been discovered. “They found the thing at Mid-Continent, eh? But I didn’t kill anybody. And there’s no harm done. The thing’s been running two weeks, now. I was going to the Power Board in a couple of days.” He addressed the police. “I know what’s up, now,” he said. “Give me some clothes and let’s go get this straightened out.”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 144
