He bewilderedly and apprehensively finished his tale just as the dawn light grew bright. Ben became conscious of the light when he realized that the dogs were crowded fearfully close to the door. Now and again they growled, with raised hackles. Sometimes they whined. They stayed close to the house while Tom cooked bacon and flapjacks and made coffee. As the men ate—Ben marveled mildly that mystery did not affect one’s appetite—they could be heard very near. Once or twice a dog scratched imploringly at the door.
“Something looks like it’s spoiled a bunch of good dogs,” said Tom, frowning. “They were good dogs till yesterday. Now they’re scared. Ben, what d’you think?”
Ben said briefly, “It said it was a castaway.”
“What said it?” demanded Stub.
“The thing that talked like you,” said Ben. “The thing that paralyzed you and put something to your temples and apparently learned how to talk from what was in your mind.”
Tom growled.
“And used a flame-thrower to warn Ben back.”
“Yes,” agreed Ben. “Only that wasn’t a flame-thrower like we use. Something landed and flared. Call it a flame-grenade, or maybe a heat-bomb. It would stop any creature, I’d say. It stopped me. A nice trick for a castaway to use to defend himself with. It could be a castaway, at that.” Then he thought wryly of civilization as he’d seen it, twisted and distorted to the purposes of war. “The Earth would be a desert island and we’d be savages. We’d be the murderous natives, riding on animals across mountains to the spot where a wrecked—ah—boat had landed, to hunt for survivors of the wreck. A castaway might manage to sight a single one of the natives first, paralyze him, read his mind and learn how to talk to the natives, but he’d be appalled at the violence and brutality of the savage’s thoughts. That’s you, Stub!”
He grinned at Stub without mirth.
Tom Hartle looked at Ben—hard.
“You think the fireball was something else too?”
Ben said, “There isn’t any sensible explanation. The whole business is unreasonable. It might have a fantastic explanation. I just offered one.”
“I figured nearly the same thing,” said Tom Hartle, slowly. “I’m remembering that the thing said that it was a castaway, not that they were castaways. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ve got to find it,” said Tom flatly. “If there are creatures that have got spaceships and such, then compared to them we are savages. And if there’s a castaway on earth that we humans seem savages to, then he’s pretty dangerous. We’ve got to get him—it.”
Stub said plaintively, “What the hell’re you talkin’ about, Tom?”
“I’m saying that Ben and I aren’t going on a fishing trip like we planned,” said Tom. “We’re going hunting.”
Ben felt queer. He said, “After all, if there is a creature—and it is a castaway—it’s in a bad fix. It’s marooned. And it said it wanted to make friends…”
“I knew a pilot in the Pacific,” said Tom curtly. “He was cast away when his plane conked out. He made an island. He made friends with the natives. Sure! He wanted help in signaling for a rescue. He wanted help to make a boat to head back home in. They helped him. They made a signal. He was working on a boat—and they were helping him—when a destroyer came by and picked him up. His signal had been seen. The destroyer left a party on the island to watch for other castaways and for possible submarines. It grew up into a small base. What happened to the natives?”
His tone was sardonic. He drank his coffee and got up. He went rummaging in one of the other rooms of the ranch house. He came back with repeating shotguns and buckshot shells and other items. He made two fairly neat packs to be strapped behind saddles. There was food for three or four days, and blankets. And armament enough for a war.
“Stub,” he said shortly, “you and Brick take care of the ranch. Ben and me—we’re going off. You two stick together when you leave the house. Keep a couple of the dogs indoors at night and take ’em with you wherever you go.”
Stub said blankly, “You goin’ to hunt that critter you’ve been talking about?”
“We know it’s here,” said Tom. “It knows we know. If it’s smart enough to learn how to talk English out of your brain, Stub, it’s pretty sure to know everything else you do. So it’ll know better than to hang around here. It’ll make for a place where nobody knows about it. And it’ll try to get, there, whatever it wants to make friends for.”
Stub scratched his head.
“That don’t make sense to me!” he complained.
“Right!” said Tom. “That’s what I hoped.”
He went off to the corral. In minutes he was back before the ranch house with two horses. He slung a saddle-holster for a shotgun on each of them, in addition to the rifle-holsters already attached. He lashed the small packs in place. Then he drove two of the dogs indoors, to remain with Brick and Stub, and mounted and waited for Ben.
Ben mounted, but almost reluctantly. There was a slightly crawly sensation at the back of his neck. He felt a completely unreasonable aversion to the hunt. It was partly the sort of shuddery uneasiness a man feels at the thought of the uncanny or the supernatural. It was partly a natural sympathy with an imagined castaway on an alien and hostile world. But also he remembered that instinctive hatred he’d felt on the hillside, when a weapon he could not defy had blazed up before him. He felt that, too.
They rode off. Tom matter-of-factly headed toward the hillside Ben had essayed to climb. He put his mount at the ascent, with the dogs trotting close beside his horse’s hoofs.
They reached the hill-crest, and the dogs created an uproar of agitated whinings and yelps. They bristled at an empty space of ground where something had pulled away grass and left a patch of bare earth. In the earth there were scratchings made with a stick. The scratchings spelled out, Man, I want to make friends.
Tom’s expression was hard. He nodded at the scratched lines.
“He read Stub’s mind, all right. Knows how to read and write. But he calls us ‘man.’ That means he’s something else.”
Ben said helplessly, “This is crazy!”
“Not if you’re right about the fireball being something else,” said Tom inexorably. “We’re savage natives on a desert isle—or desert planet. What happens to savages when civilized people find ’em? What happened to the Indians? To the Incas? What happened in the South Seas? Want that to happen to all the Earth?” To the dogs he added, “Find him, boy! Go find him!”
But the dogs hung back. They trailed gingerly, whining. They did not like what they were hunting. At once they tended to snarl and to cringe and whimper. But they did show the way.
The trail led from this hill-crest into a ravine between even higher hills. They went on painstakingly. Presently, for no reason whatever, Ben found prickles running up and down his spine. He found himself sweating.
“I think it’s watching us,” he said uneasily.
“Yeah,” said Tom. “I feel it too. Keep your gun handy.”
They went on. The dogs made a great to-do about a place where brush almost closed the way before them. They snarled at the place. Ben noticed that the crawly sensation was stronger. There was nothing to account for the dogs’ behavior. They went on, and the crawly feeling diminished.
“I think,” said Ben, “we’re getting farther away from it.”
“My guess,” Tom said dispassionately, “is that it was trying to paralyze us like it did Stub. Only maybe because there were two of us it couldn’t. Or maybe we were too far away. Oh-oh!”
There was an upcropping of soft rock before them. It was weathered a dark gray. A stone had made lighter-colored scratches on the deeper-tinted rock. The scratchings said, Will you be friends?
“Maybe we should try,” said Ben unhappily.
“It didn’t paralyze us,” said Tom, “but it ought to want to pick our brains like it did Stub’s. You want that to happen? Get close to it, and—it could paralyze us like it did
him. And it could find out everything we know. We know more than Stub. Some things we know—about government and guns and fighting and such—it’d better not know yet. Better not know at all!”
He dismounted with great deliberation. He picked up a scrap of stone and scratched Show yourself beneath the other scratchings. He remounted and said, “Come on.”
Ben followed. This was still early morning, and in the ravine there were dewdrops on foliage where the sun had not yet warmed the ground. The sky was remarkably blue overhead. There were insect cries and once or twice there were birdcalls. But there were no other sounds at all except the thumping of the horses’ hoofs and the small snuffling sounds from the dogs. Ben noticed their silence.
“The dogs aren’t trailing now.”
“I know,” said Tom. “The thing doubled back.”
But he went on, and Ben began to feel a little bit sick. He saw Tom’s intention. And in a very real sense Tom was right. A civilized man cast ashore on any desert island is a deadly danger to the aborigines—unless they kill him. If a race existed of which a member had been cast away on Earth in a wrecked space craft, that alien creature would be deadly indeed. It was already proved that it could subjugate an individual and learn all that his brain contained. It would naturally look upon men as animals lower than itself. It would not feel any obligation not to injure them, certainly, and if it could repair its space craft or make a signaling apparatus to call to its fellows…Then humanity would share the fate of other savage races which died or shriveled on contact with civilization.
On the other hand, it could be a castaway in a more permanent sense. Its space boat might be wrecked utterly beyond repair. It might have no faintest hope of signaling. In such a case one could sympathize deeply. A man on an alien planet, millions of billions of miles from any other human being or any hope of companionship. A man on a world of strange and hostile beings would be a tragic case indeed. If Earth was such an alien planet to this castaway he could have no hope, and his tragedy would be heart-wrenching.
So that Ben felt a sickish reluctance to hunt down the creature which scratched desperate messages asking for friendship. And still he remembered the crawling sensation he had felt from its mere presence.
The horses climbed, with the dogs beginning to act naturally again. They trotted here and there and sniffed absorbedly at this and that. The floor of the ravine dropped below them. They were climbing out of it. They reached its upper rim. And here they could look back and down for a long way, out into the lower valley in which the ranch house lay, though the house and corrals were invisible.
“We’ll backtrack in a minute,” said Tom. “It’ll think we’re going to report what we know.”
He went on a quarter mile, with the dogs rummaging briskly in the underbrush. Then he halted and called them in a low tone. He tethered them and tied the horses.
“The thing scares them,” he said dourly. “We don’t want ’em running off. We’ll need them.”
He drew his rifle from the saddle-holster and started back along the way in which they had come. Ben duplicated his actions in a peculiar mingling of pity and revulsion.
It took time to retrace that last quarter of a mile in silence. They disturbed a surprising amount of small life as they went along. A column of ants swarming to and fro between their buried city and some tiny bit of carrion. Birds he had not seen from horseback. Dragonflies. There was a rustling that would be a rabbit. And there were an infinite variety of brushwood and smaller plants among the trees.
They came out, very cautiously, where they could look down at the rock on which something had scratched a plea for friendship.
There was something there now, looking at the scratched Show yourself beneath its own message.
It was not human, though it was the size of a man. It was a pale, ash-gray color all over. It had two legs, a head and two arms. Ben could not make out whether it was clothed or in what or whether the ash color of its form was the color of the creature itself. There was assuredly a belt about its middle, to which things were fastened. It was too far away for him to see the features of its head. But he could not look too closely, anyhow. He wanted to be sick. He quivered in horror and instinctive sympathy and a bristling, unreasoning hostility.
The thing was looking at the writing on the gray stone. It turned. It faced them exactly. Ben felt that prickly, crawling sensation that made the dogs whimper and snarl. The thing seemed to know that they were there and looking at it. It stood still, showing itself defiantly.
Tom fired.
The thing moved with incredible swiftness and agility. To Ben it seemed that it was out of sight before the high-powered bullet struck—within inches of where it had stood. The report of the rifle echoed and re-echoed and echoed yet again between the walls of the ravine. And then Tom was swearing bitterly, and Ben was at once relieved and instinctively furious because the thing had not been killed.
He heard his own voice saying strainedly, “It’s warned now. We’ll have to get to town and report that it exists. We’ll have to get Air Force planes to spot it from the air and soldiers to hunt it on the ground. If it can be captured—”
“Who’ll believe us?” asked Tom detachedly.
Ben didn’t have to answer. But the answer was nobody.
Tom wasted no time staring where the thing had vanished. He turned and made his way purposefully back toward the horses. He had a very definite plan of action in his mind.
“Too bad I missed,” said Tom dourly. “But I can guess what the thing will do next. It got from Stub’s mind—along with how to talk and read and write—what he knows about the country round about. It came to the ranch house because Stub knew about that. It’ll go to some other place he knows about, either to try to make friends or to get something it wants. And Stub gets whisky from Clayton, at his cabin up ahead. Five miles. If we can get there first we may get another shot at it.”
There was nothing for Ben to say. But when they’d reached the horses again and were mounted and riding for Clayton’s cabin, he couldn’t help imagining this situation as the castaway would see it. He’d be perhaps hundreds of light-years from any others of his kind. Perhaps there was no hope that any of his kind would ever know what had happened to him. He could be cast away as hopelessly as ever a sailor on an unknown isle. And the scene of his casting away was filled with ferocious native inhabitants with primitive blood-lusts and arbitrary enmities. He’d know that as his presence became known a world would arm to hunt him down to murder him. He’d expect to be hunted untiringly, ruthlessly, terribly.
A man in such a case would become the wild beast his enemies imagined him. He would fight as ferociously as they did. The castaway…
They rode for seven miles instead of five before they reached Clayton’s cabin. There was a patch of a garden. There was a crumbling barn. Clayton sat trembling on his doorstep, his sallow face ashen beneath its stubble of beard. His wife was loading a rifle with extraordinarily steady fingers. Her face was like a marble mask. As Ben and Tom Hartle rode into view she turned burning eyes upon them.
“Some critter kilt my little Sally,” she said tonelessly. “Come help me track it down an’ kill it.”
Her husband quavered, “It weren’t a natural beast. I seen it. No use trackin’.”
Tom Hartle said coldly, “It walked on two legs, it was ash-gray, dogs were scared of it and it wasn’t a human being.”
“Y-yeah,” whimpered Clayton. Even in the shock of hearing such news Ben was ashamed that a creature which was not human had encountered such a specimen of the human race.
“I was—ahuntin’ for squir’ls,” Clayton said, quavering. “Sally was with me. The dawgs turned up something they was scared of. They yelped an’ howled terrible. I went to see and Sally come with me, and this heah thing came bustin’ out an’ I let it have both bar’ls, an’ lightnin’ come from it and I run…”
“Leaving Sally,” said Tom.
“It flung lightnin’,” whim
pered Clayton. “I—forgot.”
Tom addressed himself to Clayton’s wife.
“Did you telephone for help to hunt it down?” he asked coldly. “We’ll help, but there ought to be more—to be certain it’s killed.”
The woman put down the gun and went into the house with a steady machine-like precision. They heard the tinkle of the telephone-bell as she cranked it to call Central. Tom dismounted and tied up his horse. He considered his arsenal.
“Buckshot for brush,” he decided and took the repeating shotgun. Ben unhappily followed suit.
The woman came out and picked up the rifle and started for the edges of the wooded ground about. They followed. Tom whistled to his dogs to follow. They overtook the woman.
“Where’d it happen?” demanded Tom.
She nodded dumbly in the direction in which she was headed. They marched with her. A part of Ben’s mind said dispassionately that the thing they were hunting was not human, and therefore it would not consider humans as other than animals. A man on an alien world would not be choosy. The thing could not be blamed for killing a human child any more than for killing a fawn…But there was a murderous red rage filling Ben’s veins even as he thought so dispassionately.
The woman sobbed presently, and Ben saw why. There were footprints on a patch of bare damp ground. A man’s and a small child’s. They went on. The dogs snuffled curiously.
A scorched smell came on the air through the trees. They moved toward it. They saw Clayton’s shotgun, thrown away in his panicked flight. Ben went on, knowing what to look for.
There was a charred place on the ground. It was quite eighteen inches across. It was baked dry. In the very center the organic part of the earth was turned to ash, and the ash was melted to a curiously glassy slag. Ben knew what had happened. There had been a flash of flame and intolerable heat—which Clayton had called lightning—and nearby shrubs burst into steam. And then there was nothing but a screeching man in blind flight with a little girl left behind.
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 27
