First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  “What’s this?” he demanded savagely. “Just because the commander’s brought you into officers’ quarters, Gary, it doesn’t follow that your Mut methods of romance can come, too!”

  “You dare!” cried Helen furiously.

  Jack, from a hot dull flush, was swiftly paling to the dead-white of rage.

  “You’ll take that back,” he said very quietly indeed, “or I’ll show you Mut methods of fighting with a force gun! As an officer, I carry one, too, now!”

  Alstair snarled at him.

  “Your father’s been taken ill,” he told Helen angrily. “He feels the voyage is about over. Anticipation has kept up his strength for months past, but now he’s—”

  With a cry, the girl fled.

  Alstair swung upon Jack. “I take back nothing,” he snapped. “You’re an officer, by order of the commander. But you’re a Mut besides, and when I’m commander of the Adastra you don’t stay an officer long! I’m warning you! What were you doing here?”

  Jack was deathly pale, but the status of officer on the Adastra, with its consequent opportunity of seeing Helen, was far too precious to be given up unless at the last extremity. And, besides, there was the work he had in hand. His work, certainly, could not continue unless he remained an officer.

  “I was installing an interference grid on the surface,” he said, “to try to discover the sending station of the messages we’ve been getting. It will also act, as you know, as an inductor up to a certain range, and in its range is a good deal more accurate than the main inductors of the ship.”

  “Then get to your damned work,” said Alstair harshly, “and pay full attention to it and less to romance!”

  Jack plugged in the lead wire from his new grid to the pan-wave receptor. For an hour he worked more and more grimly. There was something very wrong. The inductors showed blank for all about the Adastra. The interference grid showed an object of considerable size not more than two million miles distant and to one side of the Adastra’s course. Suddenly, all indication of that object’s existence blanked out. Every dial on the pan-wave receptor went back to zero.

  “Damnation!” said Jack under his breath.

  He set up a new pattern on the controls, calculated a moment and deliberately changed the pattern on the spare bank of the main inductors, and then simultaneously switched both instruments to their new frequencies. He waited, almost holding his breath, for nearly half a minute. It would take so long for the inductor waves of the new frequency to reach out the two million miles and then collapse into the analyzers and give their report of any object in space which had tended to deform them.

  Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight seconds. Every alarm bell on the monstrous ship clanged furiously! Emergency doors hissed into place all over the vessel, converting every doorway into an air lock. Seconds later, the visiplates in the main control room began to flash alight.

  “Reporting, Rocket Control!” “Reporting, Air Service!” “Reporting, Power Supply!”

  Jack said crisply: “The main inductors report an object two million miles distant with velocity in our direction. The commander is ill. Please find Vice Commander Alstair.”

  Then the door of the control room burst open and Alstair himself raged into the room.

  “What the devil!” he gasped. “Ringing a general alarm? Have you gone mad? The inductors—”

  Jack pointed to the main inductor bank. Every dial bore out the message of the still-clanging alarms. Alstair stared blankly at them. As he looked, every dial went back to zero.

  And Alstair’s face went as blank as the dials.

  “They felt out our inductor screens,” said Jack grimly, “and put out some sort of radiation which neutralized them. So I set up two frequencies, changed both, and they couldn’t adjust their neutralizers in time to stop our alarms.”

  Alstair stood still, struggling with the rage which still possessed him. Then he nodded curtly.

  “Quite right. You did good work. Stand by.”

  And, quite cool and composed, he took command of the mighty space ship, even if there was not much for him to do. In five minutes, in fact, every possible preparation for emergency had been made and he turned again to Jack.

  “I don’t like you,” he said coldly. “As one man to another, I dislike you intensely. But as vice commander and acting commander at the moment, I have to admit that you did good work in uncovering this little trick of our friends to get within striking distance without our knowing they were anywhere near.”

  Jack said nothing. He was frowning, but it was because he was thinking of Helen. The Adastra was huge and powerful, but she was not readily maneuverable. She was enormously massive, but she could not be used for ramming. And she possessed within herself almost infinite destructiveness, in the means of producing Caldwell fields for the disintegration of matter, but she contained no weapon more dangerous than a two-thousand-kilowatt vortex gun for the destruction of dangerous animals or vegetation where she might possibly land.

  “What’s your comment?” demanded Alstair shortly. “How do you size up the situation?”

  “They act as if they’re planning hostilities,” replied Jack briefly, “and they’ve got four times our maximum acceleration so we can’t get away. With that acceleration they ought to be more maneuverable, so we can’t dodge them. We’ve no faintest idea of what weapons they carry, but we know that we can’t fight them unless their weapons are very puny indeed. There’s just one chance that I can see.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They tried to slip up on us. That looks as if they intended to open fire without warning. But maybe they are frightened and only expected to examine us without our getting a chance to attack them. In that case, our only bet is to swing over our signaling beam to the space ship. When they realize we know they’re there and still aren’t getting hostile, they may not guess we can’t fight. They may think we want to be friendly and they’d better not start anything with a ship our size that’s on guard.”

  “Very well. You’re detailed to communication duty,” said Alstair. “Go ahead and carry out that program. I’ll consult the rocket engineers and see what they can improvise in the way of fighting equipment. Dismiss!”

  His tone was harsh. It was arrogant. It rasped Jack’s nerves and made him bristle all over. But he had to recognize that Alstair wasn’t letting his frank dislike work to the disadvantage of the ship. Alstair was, in fact, one of those ambitious officers who are always cordially disliked by everybody, at all times, until an emergency arises. Then their competence shows up.

  Jack went to the communications-control room. It did not take long to realign the transmitter beam. Then the sender began to repeat monotonously the recorded last message from the Adastra to the distant and so far unidentified planet of the ringed star. And while the signal went out, over and over again, Jack called on observations control for a sight of the strange ship.

  They had a scanner on it now and by stepping up illumination to the utmost, and magnification to the point where the image was as rough as an old-fashioned half-tone cut, they brought the strange ship to the visiplate as a six-inch miniature.

  It was egg-shaped and perfectly smooth. There was no sign of external girders, of protruding atmospheric-navigation fins, of escape-boat blisters. It was utterly featureless save for tiny spots which might be portholes, and rocket tubes in which intermittent flames flickered. It was still decelerating to match the speed and course of the Adastra.

  “Have you got a spectroscope report on it?” asked Jack.

  “Yeh,” replied the observations orderly. “An’ I don’t believe it. They’re using fuel rockets—some organic compound. An’ the report says the hull of that thing is cellulose, not metal. It’s wood, on the outside.”

  Jack shrugged. No sign of weapons. He went back to his own job. The space ship yonder was being penetrated through and through by the message waves. Its receptors could not fail to be reporting that a tight beam was upon it,
following its every movement, and that its presence and probable mission were therefore known to the mighty ship from out of space.

  But Jack’s own receptors were silent. The tape came out of them utterly blank. No—a queer, scrambled, blurry line, as if the analyzers were unable to handle the frequency which was coming through. Jack read the heat effect. The other space ship was sending with a power which meant five thousand kilowatts pouring into the Adastra. Not a signal. Grimly, Jack heterodyned the wave on a five-meter circuit and read off its frequency and type. He called the main control.

  “They’re pouring short stuff into us,” he reported stiffly to Alstair. “About five thousand kilowatts of thirty-centimeter waves, the type we use on Earth to kill weevils in wheat. It ought to be deadly to animal life, but of course our hull simply absorbs it.”

  Helen. Impossible to stop the Adastra. They’d started for Proxima Centauri. Decelerating though they were, they couldn’t check much short of the solar system, and they were already attacked by a ship with four times their greatest acceleration. Pouring a deadly frequency into them—a frequency used on Earth to kill noxious insects. Helen was—

  The G.C. phone snapped suddenly, in Alstair’s voice.

  “Attention, all officers! The enemy space ship has poured what it evidently considers a deadly frequency into us, and is now approaching at full acceleration! Orders are that absolutely no control of any sort is to be varied by a hair’s breadth. Absolutely no sign of living intelligence within the Adastra is to be shown. You will stand by all operative controls, prepared for maneuver if it should be necessary. But we try to give the impression that the Adastra is operating on automatic controls alone! Understand?”

  Jack could imagine the reports from the other control rooms. His own receptor sprang suddenly into life. The almost hooted sounds of the call signal, so familiar that they seemed words. Then an extraordinary jumble of noises—words in a human voice. More stridulent sounds. More words in perfectly accurate English. The English words were in the tones and accents of an officer of the Adastra, plainly recorded and retransmitted.

  “Communications!” snapped Alstair. “You will not answer this signal! It is an attempt to find out if we survived their ray attack!”

  “Check,” said Jack.

  Alstair was right. Jack watched and listened as the receptor babbled on. It stopped. Silence for ten minutes. It began again. The Adastra hurtled on. The babble from space came to an end. A little later the G.C. phone snapped once more:

  “The enemy space ship has increased its acceleration, evidently convinced that we are all dead. It will arrive in approximately four hours. Normal watches may be resumed for three hours unless an alarm is given.”

  Jack leaned back in his chair, frowning. He began to see the tactics Alstair planned to use. They were bad tactics, but the only ones a defenseless ship like the Adastra could even contemplate. It was at least ironic that the greeting the Adastra received at the end of a seven-years’ voyage through empty space be a dose of a type of radiation used on Earth to exterminate vermin.

  But the futility of this attack did not mean that all attacks would be similarly useless. And the Adastra simply could not be stopped for many millions of miles, yet. Even if Alstair’s desperate plan took care of this particular assailant and this particular weapon, it would not mean—it could not!—that the Adastra or the folk within had any faintest chance of defending themselves. And there was Helen—

  III.

  The visiplates showed the strange space ship clearly now, even without magnification. It was within five miles of the Adastra and it had stopped. Perfectly egg-shaped, without any protuberance whatever except the rocket tubes in its rear, it hung motionless with relation to the Earth ship, which meant that its navigators had analyzed her rate of deceleration long since and had matched all the constants of her course with precision.

  Helen, her face still tear-streaked, watched as Jack turned up the magnification, and the illumination with it. Her father had collapsed very suddenly and very completely. He was resting quietly now, dozing almost continuously, with his face wearing an expression of utter contentment.

  He had piloted the Adastra to its first contact with the civilization of another solar system. His lifework was done and he was wholly prepared to rest. He had no idea, of course, that the first actual contact with the strange space ship was a burst of short waves of a frequency deadly to all animal life.

  The space ship swelled on the visiplate as Jack turned the knob. He brought it to an apparent distance of a few hundred yards only. With the illumination turned up, even the starlight on the hull would have been sufficient to show any surface detail. But there was literally none. No rivet, no bolt, no line of joining plates. A row of portholes were dark and dead within.

  “And it’s wood!” repeated Jack. “Made out of some sort of cellulose which stands the cold of space!”

  Helen said queerly: “It looks to me as if it had been grown, rather than built.”

  Jack blinked. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but the receptor at his elbow suddenly burst into the hootlike stridulations which were the signals from the egglike ship. Then English words, from recordings of previous signals from the Adastra. More vowel-less, modulated phrases. It sounded exactly as if the beings in the other space ship were trying urgently to open communication and were insisting that they had the key to the Adastra’s signals. The temptation to reply was great.

  “They’ve got brains, anyhow,” said Jack.

  The signals were cut off. Silence. Jack glanced at the wave tape. It showed the same blurring as before.

  “More short stuff. At this distance, it ought not only to kill us, but even sterilize the interior of the whole ship. Lucky our hull is heavy alloy with a high hysteresis-rate. Not a particle of that radiation can get through.”

  Silence for a long, long time. The wave tape showed that a terrific beam of thirty-centimeter waves continued to play upon the Adastra. Jack suddenly plugged in observations and asked a question. Yes, the outer hull was heating. It had gone up half a degree in fifteen minutes.

  “Nothing to worry about in that,” grunted Jack. “Fifteen degrees will be the limit they can put it up, with this power.”

  The tape came out clear. The supposed death radiation was cut off. The egg-shaped ship darted forward. And then for twenty minutes or more Jack had to switch from one outside vision disk to another to keep it in sight. It hovered about the huge bulk of the Adastra with a wary inquisitiveness. Now half a mile away, now no more than two hundred yards, the thing darted here and there with an amazing acceleration and as amazing a braking power. It had only the rocket tubes at the smaller end of its egg-shaped form. It was necessary for it to fling its whole shape about to get a new direction, and the gyroscopes within it must have been tremendously powerful. Even so, the abruptness of its turns was startling.

  “I wouldn’t like to be inside that thing!” said Jack. “We’d be crushed to a pulp by their normal navigation methods. They aren’t men like us. They can stand more than we can.”

  The thing outside seemed sentient, seemed alive. And by the eagerness of its movements it seemed the more horrible, flitting about the gigantic space ship it now believed was a monstrous coffin.

  It suddenly reversed itself and shot back toward the Adastra. Two hundred yards, one hundred yards, a hundred feet. It came to a cushioned stop against the surface of the Earth vessel.

  “Now we’ll see something of them,” said Jack crisply. “They landed right at an air lock. They know what that is, evidently. Now we’ll see them in their space suits.”

  But Helen gasped. A part of the side of the strange ship seemed to swell suddenly. It bulged out like a blister. It touched the surface of the Adastra. It seemed to adhere. The point of contact grew larger.

  “Good Lord!” said Jack blankly. “Is it alive? And is it going to try to eat our ship?”

  The general-communication phone rasped sharply: “Officers with arm
s to the air lock GH41 immediately! The Centaurians are opening the air lock from the outside. Wait orders there! The visiplate in the air lock is working and you will be informed. Go ahead!”

  The phone clicked off. Jack seized a heavy gun, one of the force rifles which will stun a man at anything up to eighteen hundred yards and kill at six, when used at full power. His side arm hung in its holster. He swung for the door.

  “Jack!” said Helen desperately.

  He kissed her. It was the first time their lips had touched, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world, just then. He went racing down the long corridors of the Adastra to the rendezvous. And as he raced, his thoughts were not at all those of a scientist and an officer of Earth’s first expedition into interstellar space. Jack was thinking of Helen’s lips touching his desperately, of her soft body pressed close to him.

  A G.C. speaker whispered overhead as he ran: “They’re inside the air lock. They opened it without trouble. They’re testing our air, now. Apparently it suits them all.”

  The phone fell behind. Jack ran on, panting. Somebody else was running ahead. There were half a dozen, a dozen men grouped at the end of the corridor. A murmur from the side wall.

  “…rking at the inner air lock door. Only four or five of them, apparently, will enter the ship. They are to be allowed to get well away from the air lock. You will keep out of sight. When the emergency locks go on, it will be your signal. Use your heavy force guns, increasing power from minimum until they fall paralyzed. It will probably take a good deal of power to subdue them. They are not to be killed if it can be avoided. Ready!”

  There were a dozen or more officers on hand. The fat rocket chief. The lean air officer. Subalterns of the other departments. The rocket chief puffed audibly as he wedged himself out of sight. Then the clicking of the inner air lock door. It opened into the anteroom. Subdued, muffled hootings came from that door. The Things—whatever they were—were inspecting the space suits there. The hootings were distinctly separate and distinctly intoned. But they suddenly came as a babble. More than one Thing was speaking at once. There was excitement, eagerness, an extraordinary triumph in these voices.