First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  But there was no sign of the child. No blood. No tracks. No torn scrap from a tiny dress. There was not even, here, any trace of the scent or influence which made dogs snarl and whine and yelp. There was nothing to do but hunt in an expanding circle around the place where Clayton’s shotgun had been thrown away. They searched, very grimly.

  In a surprisingly brief time other men came through the woods to join the hunt. It spread more rapidly in extent. Within two hours men were arriving even from Tateville, having come as far as possible by car and walked the balance with guns and dogs. In an hour there were twenty men turning over every smallest bush or hiding place where a child’s body could have been thrust. In two hours there were nearer a hundred. The men beat thickets. They searched in caves and under fallen trees. They completely ignored Clayton’s story of an unnatural beast and a flash of lightning. Some of them hunted for the tracks of a mountain lion. More, perhaps, hunted for a man.

  They found nothing.

  The hunt went on and on and on. Ben searched as desperately as any. Now and again some searchers met and conferred in pantings as to where and how to hunt next. As time passed they did not seem to grow weary. With dwindling hope—not that there had been hope to begin with—fury increased. Men raged as they hunted for the killer of a little girl.

  Then Tom came upon Ben as he dug furiously into a brush pile which was a fallen tree. A child’s body could have been hidden in there. Ben almost believed that it was.

  But Tom grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him away.

  “No use hunting now,” he raged bitterly; “we just found a man asleep!”

  Ben panted at him, beside himself with fury and hatred. It had grown to mania as he envisioned the terror of a small child in the grip of the ashen-gray creature he and Tom had seen and which Tom had tried to kill. But Tom shook him.

  “The thing took the man’s clothes!” raged Tom. “It took his clothes and left him asleep like Stub was! He can’t be waked! You know what that means!”

  “I’m thinking about the kid,” said Ben thickly. “What does it mean?”

  “It means,” raged Tom, “that the thing’s learned everything another man had in his brain! It’s wearing the man’s clothes now, and at a distance it’ll pass for a man!”

  Ben said, as thickly as before, “But what’d it do with the little girl? I’ll kill the damned thing! I’ll—”

  Tom said bitterly, “I forgot. She’s all right.”

  Then Ben’s eyes opened wide with shock. He shook his head to clear it. He stared at Tom, with the noise of men hunting over a couple of square miles all about him, and the excited noises of dogs, and many shoutings. Ben said slowly, “The kid’s all right? Then what are we hunting for?”

  “I forgot about the kid,” said Tom bitterly. “We found a man asleep and dead to the world with his clothes stripped off him. The thing’s wearing those clothes! Dogs went crazy near the spot. I went back to the cabin—and the phone had been ringing for half an hour. Little Sally Clayton walked up to a house in Tateville an hour ago, knocked on the door, and very politely asked for a slice of bread and butter and would they tell her father to come and get her? She says a funny man carried her to town. A nice funny man. She’s unharmed. But she didn’t travel fifteen miles by herself! The nice funny man carried her! She says he could run very, very fast. And here we’re hunting him for nothing and he’s got away…” Tom’s voice ended in weariness. “All right. I’ll go stop the search.”

  He went stumbling away, and Ben found his thinking hopelessly confused. The castaway had taken a child away when it was deserted in the woods. But it hadn’t harmed the child. And the child said it was a nice funny man…

  There began a shouting as the word was passed by bellowings that the little girl was safe in Tateville. One man shouted the news, and others bellowed questions, and gradually the tumult was stilled, and many men moved toward the cabin, talking in the wilderness.

  When Ben reached the cabin Tom was gone. He’d have gone instantly to Tateville. He’d become obsessed with the notion—which was probably a right one—that the castaway had to be found and killed because he would regard humans as explorers have always regarded savages and lower forms of life. Tom had the convictions of the barbarian king of Mexico when the Spaniards appeared—and Opecancanough and King Phillip and Pontiac and Sitting Bull and ten thousand other long dead defenders of their peoples against civilization. And Ben desolately shared a part of his convictions—but he was also sorry for any castaway on an alien world which hated him.

  When Ben reached the small town, there were knots of men talking everywhere. There were almost as many tales of little Sally’s adventure as there were tellers, but none approached what Ben knew to be the truth. Some groups were satisfied that the little girl was found and unharmed. Others were convinced that a lynching was definitely in order. Some wavered between those convictions. Ben went to the newspaper office. His substitute was out, doubtlessly gathering the news of a lost little girl and her finding as a remarkably interesting story, when Ben knew that the real story was literally too strange to print.

  He sat down in his working chair to figure things out. He was astonished to discover how weary he was. He was startled to realize that the hunt and the return to Tateville afterward had taken up so much of the day that it was now dusk. Dusk came early to Tateville, though, in its valley among high mountains. Ben sat in his darkening office and wryly tried to figure out a way to print the truth—so that it would be taken as the serious, urgent warning that it was. Outside the office the many small sounds of the little town changed and quieted, though there remained the sound of voices.

  The sky to westward, above the mountains, turned tawny red. Through the office window Ben could see the foliage on easterly slopes change color in that illumination. He smoked, groping for a way to print the story in the Tateville Record so that it would be picked up by the wire services, checked on and needful action taken. Ben couldn’t contradict Tom Hartle’s opinion, though he couldn’t wholly agree now. But he did know that some action was needful. The castaway had to be made harmless to mankind. If that meant killing him one could feel very sorry for him, but nevertheless he would have to be killed.

  Night fell, and still Ben had no notion how to take care of the newsworthy fact that a wrecked space craft had crashed into the mountains to the east of Tateville, that there had been one survivor, that the space boat was now buried under a landslide—perhaps brought about by the surviving passenger—and that an alien, nonhuman creature was now at large on Earth. There was simply no way to make anybody believe it.

  He struck a match and lighted his pipe again. It was singularly restful to sit so ordinarily. But now he was acutely unhappy. Yet it would do no good to make a light and stare at the walls of his office.

  The door opened, and a figure stood there.

  “Mr. Lyon?”

  Ben said, “Yes. I’ll make a light.” He stirred.

  “Don’t,” said the visitor. “I’ll be needing my eyes presently. No need to dazzle them with light. I was in that hunt today, Mr. Lyon. There’s some mystery there. The little girl was perfectly all right, but she says it was a funny man who brought her to town. A nice funny man. But she can’t say what was funny about him. What do you make of that, Mr. Lyon?”

  Ben said drily, “If you’d like to hear the facts as—they were given to me, I can tell you.” His visitor sat down in a chair he seemed able to find in the dark without any difficulty. He leaned back. Ben said, “You won’t believe this, but—”

  He told the story straight, as if it had so been told to him. It was an experiment to see how a normal man would react to the narrative of the actual facts. It might give a clue to how he could tell the story convincingly. But as he went on he was wryly aware that he was telling it badly.

  When he finished, his visitor said thoughtfully, “Are you going to print it that way?”

  “Would you believe it?” asked Ben. His pipe had gone
out. He scratched another match to light it. The figure in the chair made an abrupt movement and then was still. Ben saw his face dimly in the match-light. His hand quivered slightly as he held the match over the pipe-bowl.

  “Why—yes,” said his visitor. “It’s true, as far as it goes. In fact I—” There was a pause. “I have been in touch with the castaway. I came here to tell you the story you just told me, with one addition.”

  Ben blew out the match and tried to think whose voice he was listening to. It was familiar, but he wasn’t sure.

  “The castaway,” said the figure in the chair, “blundered on the man Clayton, who shot at him. The castaway threw a flame-pellet to frighten him away. It did. He left the little girl behind. And she was hysterical with terror at the sight of him. So he—” Another pause. “He used his mind to calm her. And he could look into her memories very easily. There was no need to—quiet her as the man Stub was quieted. The castaway was very bitter and desperate, just then. He had seen only three men at close quarters, and all were ferocious creatures who tried to kill him. He believed that he would have to make himself a fortress and weapons to defend himself against the murderous natives of this world. But from the little girl’s memories he began to understand what human beings are really like.”

  Ben said—his mouth was queerly dry—“What did he learn?”

  “That men and his race are much alike. It would have to be so. As all birds, to fly, must have wings that are very similar, so beings to be intelligent must have intelligences that are very near in kind. The castaway can be friends with men. He can find companionship among men. He needs to have companionship. He cannot hope ever to leave Earth. If he is alone he will go mad, like a man in solitude.”

  Ben said in a rusty voice, “That’s a message for me?”

  “Yes,” said the voice quietly. “The memories of the man Stub said that you were a good man. The memories of the child said the same, and also the memories of another man whom the castaway—quieted when he was discovered during the hunt for the lost child. So the castaway asks your help.”

  “To make friends among men,” said Ben.

  “Yes.”

  “He can’t,” said Ben grimly. “He is different from us, so we hate him. We bristle when we know he is near. He knows more than we do, so we fear him. When it is known that he exists on Earth, all of humanity will combine to hunt him down.”

  The voice said, “Even you?”

  “I am trying,” said Ben defiantly, “to devise a way to make other men believe that he does exist. I am trying to arrange for the hunt for him to begin, so he will be killed!”

  There was a long pause. Out in the darkness of the town a dog yelped hysterically. Another dog snarled. There was a small growling murmur. The figure by the wall sat up straighter.

  “You know,” it said softly, “that I am the castaway.”

  “Of course I know!” said Ben fiercely. “And you can kill me! And I am very sorry for you because you will be killed—no matter how much you wish to be our friend—but there is nothing else to be done! You have to be killed because you are intelligent and are not a man!”

  The voice said curiously, “But you don’t hate me—”

  “I do,” said Ben. His hands were clenched. “My scalp crawls at the thought of you sitting there and talking to me, and you not a man! But I will be sorry for you even while I try to kill you.”

  The sound of dogs was louder, and nearer. There was a growling as of a small but angry mob.

  The figure stood up.

  “I made a mask of clay,” he said detachedly, “and I put on the clothes of a man. I shall have to make a better mask, and find out how to deceive dogs. I need to live among men. After all, I am a civilized being! I do not think your warned men will detect me. I learn quickly. I have already learned that noises like—that—” Dogs snarled furiously, not far away. “Noises like that mean that somebody is on my trail. So I will leave you.”

  The figure moved toward the door. Ben snatched at the drawer of his desk. There was a revolver inside. Instantly, it seemed, he was paralyzed.

  The figure ran lightly out of the door, and Ben could move again. He seized the revolver and ran to the door. He saw dark figures approaching, with the dogs yapping and snarling and hysterical among them.

  “Hurry!” shouted Ben from the doorway, waving the revolver urgently. “Come on! He’s running that way—”

  He was in the thick of the running mass of men as they swarmed past his office. They ran among trees. They plunged past the houses and the shrubbery and the garages and the tool sheds of the residences of Tateville. Once they heard a woman scream and plunged toward the sound and found her in a dead faint. The town became a swarming, deadly man-hunt—or creature-hunt. There was one dog which seemed to have greater courage than the rest. It ran ahead of the others, and they heard it screaming and snarling its hatred of something that fled before it. The men took that dog as their guide. The unseen fugitive doubled back through the other end of town. The men made a short cut in the darkness to overtake it.

  Ben found himself uttering beastly cries of fury as he ran. And he was one of those who saw the castaway as it emerged into the starlight just beyond the town, where a bridge ran over the small swift stream on which Tateville depended for water. The screaming of an infuriated dog ran with it—but there was no dog. And Ben knew that just as the castaway had learned to talk like men, it had also learned to scream like an hysterical dog, and it was leading the pursuit where it wished.

  Guns exploded luridly. The range was long. But the running figure wavered and limped and lurched—and went over the bridge-rail into the stream.

  Then Ben found himself coldly composed and desperately dejected. Because this was plainly the plan of the castaway. The stream ran swift and even fairly deep. A man could drown in it. Especially a wounded man.

  But the castaway was not a man, and Ben doubted profoundly that it was wounded. He knew that raging men, with dogs, would follow the stream down, hunting a body or a trail of a wounded man staggering out of it. He suspected that they would come finally to the conclusion that a dead body lay in an eddy of some one of the stream’s pools, and perhaps they would find scraps of rags to buttress their conviction that the fugitive was dead. But he was sure that they would never actually find a body. And he was quite sure that they would never suspect or believe that they had not chased some unknown man—some maniac, perhaps—who had wandered among the wilds and essayed a monstrous crime and had properly been hunted to his death for it.

  In this, of course, he was quite right. But he was the only man in the world who held that view and had that knowledge. Later that same night, when Tom Hartle came to him with triumph in his expression because the castaway was dead, Ben tried to convince him that the castaway was very much alive.

  “He’s dead,” said Tom Hartle positively. “I saw him drop into the stream. He’d never live through the rocks downstream. Nobody could! We can forget it now, Ben. Nobody’d have believed that he came from somewhere out among the stars, but he had to be killed. And he has been!” Then he said relievedly, “We can go on that fishing trip now, Ben.”

  But Ben didn’t go. He wanted to think things over. He knew the castaway was still alive, and he felt very sorry for him, but he knew he should be killed. But he didn’t know how to convince anybody that such a creature existed. He told a fiction writer about it, later, but the writer said he didn’t believe it. He made a story about it, but nobody took it seriously.

  Ben almost persuaded himself that the castaway had been truthful when he said he had no hope of escape from Earth or of being able to signal his kin. Then, one day, something disturbing occurred to him. No matter how many brains the castaway picked around Tateville he wouldn’t be apt to get any clear idea of atom bombs, or that the material for atomic fuel could be had on Earth. But the castaway might learn about such matters away from Tateville. And knowledge of atomic fuel to be had on Earth might give the alien hope
of escape back to his native world. And he might tell his kindred about the interesting savages he’d found where he’d been cast away. Which would be the beginning of the end, for humanity.

  Ben’s been worrying a lot since the appearance of that curious disease at Los Alamos and Hanford, Washington. It’s thought to be caused by radiation. Every so often a key technician, or one of the authorities on atomic theory, is found sleeping heavily. His pulse is normal. His breathing is deep. There is absolutely nothing wrong with him that can be detected. He wakes up after about twenty-four hours and only remembers a creepy sensation preceding the attack and a sensation of cold at the temples.

  There’ve been less than a dozen cases of the disease so far. Curiously, every one has been a man with top-secret information.

  Ben doesn’t sleep well, these nights. He’s worrying.

  THE STRANGE CASE OF JOHN KINGMAN

  It started when Dr. Braden took the trouble to look up John Kingman’s case-history card. Meadeville Mental Hospital had a beautifully elaborate system of card-indexes, because psychiatric research is stressed there. It is the oldest mental institution in the country, having been known as “New Bedlam” when it was founded some years before the Republic of the United States of America. The card-index system was unbelievably perfect. But young Dr. Braden found John Kingman’s card remarkably lacking in the usual data.

  “Kingman, John,” said the card. “White, male, 5'8", brown-black hair. Note: physical anomaly. Patient has six fingers on each hand, extra digits containing apparently normal bones and being wholly functional. Age…” This was blank. “Race…” This, too, was blank. “Birthplace…” Considering the other blanks, it was natural for this to be vacant, also. “Diagnosis: advanced atypical paranoia with pronounced delusions of grandeur apparently unassociated with usual conviction of persecution.” There was a comment here, too. “Patient apparently understands English very slightly if at all. Does not speak.” Then three more spaces. “Nearest relative…” It was blank. “Case history…” It was blank. Then, “Date of admission…” and it was blank.