First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  There were three of them, hard-bitten and bearded and deeply embittered. When the electrified fence went down, two of them were away at a mine tunnel, installing a new control panel for the robots who worked in it. The third was in charge of the mining operation. They were alarmed by the stopping of communication with the colony and went back in a tank-truck to find out what had happened, and only the fact that they were unarmed saved them. They found sphexes prowling and caterwauling about the fallen colony, in numbers they still did not wholly believe. The sphexes smelled men inside the armored vehicle, but couldn’t break in. In turn, the men couldn’t kill them, or they’d have been trailed to the mine and besieged there for as long as they could kill an occasional monster.

  The survivors stopped all mining, of course, and tried to use remote-controlled robots for revenge and to get supplies for them. Their mining-robots were not designed for either task. And they had no weapons. They improvised miniature throwers of burning rocket-fuel, and they sent occasional prowling sphexes away screaming with scorched hides. But this was useful only because it did not kill the beasts. And it cost fuel. In the end they barricaded themselves and used the fuel only to keep a spark-signal going against the day when another ship came to seek the colony. They stayed in the mine as in a prison, on short rations, without real hope. For diversion they could only contemplate the mining-robots they could not spare fuel to run and which could not do anything but mine.

  When Huyghens and Bordman reached them, they wept. They hated robots and all things robotic only a little less than they hated sphexes. But Huyghens explained, and, armed with weapons from the packs of the bears, they marched to the dead colony with the male Kodiaks as point and advance-guard, and with Faro Nell bringing up the rear. They killed sixteen sphexes on the way. In the now overgrown clearing there were four more. In the shelters of the colony they found only foulness and the fragments of what had been men. But there was some food—not much, because the sphexes clawed at anything that smelled of men, and had ruined the plastic packets of radiation-sterilized food. But there were some supplies in metal containers which were not destroyed.

  And there was fuel, which men could use when they got to the control-panels of the equipment. There were robots everywhere, bright and shining and ready for operation, but immobile, with plants growing up around and over them.

  They ignored those robots, and instead fueled tracked flame-casters—after adapting them to human rather than robot operation—and the giant soil-sterilizer which had been built to destroy vegetation that robots could not be made to weed out or cultivate. Then they headed back for the Sere Plateau.

  As time passed Nugget became a badly spoiled bear-cub, because the freed men approved passionately of anything that would even grow up to kill sphexes. They petted him to excess when they camped.

  Finally they reached the plateau by a sphex-trail to the top and sphexes came squalling and spitting to destroy them. While Bordman and Huyghens fired steadily, the great machines swept up with their special weapons. The earth-sterilizer, it developed, was deadly against animal life as well as seeds, when its diathermic beam was raised and aimed.

  Presently the bears were not needed, because the scorched corpses of sphexes drew live ones from all parts of the plateau even in the absence of noticeable breezes. The official business of the sphexes was presumably finished, but they came to caterwaul and seek vengeance—which they did not find. After a while the survivors of the robot colony drove the machines in great circles around the huge heap of slaughtered fiends, destroying new arrivals as they came. It was such a killing as men had never before made on any planet, and there would be very few left of the sphex-horde which had bred in this particular patch of desert.

  Nor would more grow up, because the soil-sterilizer would go over the dug-up sand where the sphex-spawn lay hidden for the sun to hatch. And the sun would never hatch them.

  Huyghens and Bordman, by that time, were camped on the edge of the plateau with the Kodiaks. Somehow it seemed more befitting for the men of the robot colony to conduct the slaughter. After all, it was those men whose companions had been killed.

  There came an evening when Huyghens cuffed Nugget away from where he sniffed too urgently at a stag-steak cooking on the campfire. Nugget ambled dolefully behind the protecting form of Bordman and sniveled.

  “Huyghens,” said Bordman, “we’ve got to come to a settlement of our affairs. You’re an illegal colonist, and it’s my duty to arrest you.”

  Huyghens regarded him with interest.

  “Will you offer me lenience if I tell on my confederates?” he asked. “Or may I plead that I can’t be forced to testify against myself?”

  Bordman said:

  “It’s irritating! I’ve been an honest man all my life, but—I don’t believe in robots as I did, except in their place. And their place isn’t here! Not as the robot colony was planned, anyhow. The sphexes are nearly wiped out, but they won’t be extinct and robots can’t handle them. Bears and men will have to live here or else the people who do will have to spend their lives behind sphex-proof fences, accepting only what robots can give them. And there’s much too much on this planet for people to miss it! To live in a robot-managed environment on a planet like Loren Two wouldn’t—it wouldn’t be self-respecting!”

  “You wouldn’t be getting religious, would you?” asked Huyghens drily. “That was your term for self-respect before.”

  “You don’t let me finish!” protested Bordman. “It’s my job to pass on the work that’s done on a planet before any but the first-landed colonists may come there to live. And of course to see that specifications are followed. Now, the robot colony I was sent to survey was practically destroyed. As designed, it wouldn’t work. It couldn’t survive.”

  Huyghens grunted. Night was falling. He turned the meat over the fire.

  “In emergencies,” said Bordman, “colonists have the right to call on any passing ship for aid. Naturally! So my report will be that the colony as designed was impractical, and that it was overwhelmed and destroyed except for three survivors who holed up and signaled for help. They did, you know!”

  “Go on,” grunted Huyghens.

  “So,” said Bordman, “it just happened—just happened, mind you—that a ship with you and the bears and the eagle on board picked up the distress-call. So you landed to help the colonists. That’s the story. Therefore it isn’t illegal for you to be here. It was only illegal for you to be here when you were needed. But we’ll pretend you weren’t.”

  Huyghens glanced over his shoulder in the deepening night. He said:

  “I wouldn’t believe that if I told it myself. Do you think the Survey will?”

  “They’re not fools,” said Bordman tartly. “Of course they won’t! But when my report says that because of this unlikely series of events it is practical to colonize the planet, whereas before it wasn’t, and when my report proves that a robot colony alone is stark nonsense, but that with bears and men from your world added, so many thousand colonists can be received per year…And when that much is true, anyhow…”

  Huyghens seemed to shake a little as a dark silhouette against the flames.

  “My reports carry weight,” insisted Bordman. “The deal will be offered, anyhow! The robot colony organizers will have to agree or they’ll have to fold up. And your people can hold them up for nearly what terms they choose.”

  Huyghens’ shaking became understandable. It was laughter.

  “You’re a lousy liar, Bordman,” he said. “Isn’t it unintelligent and unreasonable to throw away a lifetime of honesty just to get me out of a jam? You’re not acting like a rational animal, Bordman. But I thought you wouldn’t, when it came to the point.”

  Bordman squirmed.

  “That’s the only solution I can think of,” he said. “But it’ll work.”

  “I accept it,” said Huyghens, grinning. “With thanks. If only because it means another few generations of men can live like men on a plane
t that is going to take a lot of taming. And—if you want to know—because it keeps Sourdough and Sitka and Nell and Nugget from being killed because I brought them here illegally.”

  Something pressed hard against Bordman. Nugget, the cub, pushed urgently against him in his desire to get closer to the fragrantly cooking meat. He edged forward. Bordman toppled from where he squatted on the ground. He sprawled. Nugget sniffed luxuriously.

  “Slap him,” said Huyghens. “He’ll move back.”

  “I won’t!” said Bordman indignantly from where he lay. “I won’t do it. He’s my friend!”

  INTRODUCTION TO THE UNPUBLISHED STORIES

  There are generally good reasons why unpublished stories, even those of great writers, should remain unpublished. Neither of the two stories that follow could be published solely on merit in the field of science fiction today. The second story, “To All Fat Policemen,” isn’t even science fiction. The first, “The Great Catastrophe,” had its chance to be printed, and the tale of why it was not published is more interesting than the story itself.

  “The Great Catastrophe” was written by Murray Leinster in 1919 and sold to the Street and Smith magazine Thrill Book. But before it was published, one or both of the editors (Eugene Clancy and Harold Hersey) asked Leinster for an extensive rewrite. Here is some of his reply:

  You gave me four pages of notes, ranging from technical questioning on my physics to queries on the psychology of submarine captains…comparison of estimated populations for 1940 with a figure you assumed me to have given—I am unable to find it in my story…You are distressed over the fact that I do not agree with you upon the probable quantity of helium in use in 1940, and similar points. Your distress over liberties with statistics and your doubts upon the accuracy of my physics (where, by the way, I cannot find I am wrong) are in rather striking contradiction to the complete complaisance with which you proposed a cloud-supported land, undiscovered by astronomers, as the scene of an insect novelette.

  Such were the travails of a pulp writer. Leinster had the check in hand and refused to do the rewrite. Thrill Book did not last the year, and the story languished in the files of the Bird Library at Syracuse University. It is included in this volume as of historical interest to those few persons who have heard of the story, and also to those who may not be familiar with early twentieth-century science fiction, which so often involved massive natural disaster.

  A fragment of another version of “The Great Catastrophe” was found in Leinster’s papers, differing from the one printed here only in that the villains were Germans rather than Esthonians. With some reluctance, I decided to keep the Esthonians as the bad guys, and I apologize to both them and the Germans for this decision.

  Among Leinster’s papers I found a folder marked “Unsold and Unpublished Stories” which contained one untitled manuscript. I took the liberty of giving it the title “To All Fat Policemen” and published it here. In the nation of emigrants which is the United States, the question of what it means to be an American is often debated. Perhaps the answer, rather than being some complicated political theory, lies in basic courtesy and equality. So I choose to end this volume with this wonderful little work, and hope you forgive its lack of a science fiction element.

  Joe Rico

  Dorchester, Mass., 1998.

  THE GREAT CATASTROPHE

  (This is a re-print of the first of the accounts of the Great Catastrophe of 1940. As it was written less than twenty years after the catastrophe itself and by a man who knew John Andrews and heard a great part of the story from his lips, it must possess considerable interest to the antiquary.)

  Dedication,

  This little volume is dedicated to John Andrews, first President of the Universal Republic, by his great admirer, the author. From the time of the Catastrophe itself to the present time the author has known and increasingly admired the President, and feels that in dedicating this history to him he shows but a little of the friendship he feels for him. The author was among the enslaved workers in the Esthonian stockade, and owes his liberty and undoubtedly his life to the President.

  (Editor’s note. The first part of the account here reprinted is taken up with a description of civilization before the Great Catastrophe, explaining at length the system of nations in which society was then organized, and making clear the elaborate social structure which the Catastrophe wrecked completely. As our readers are doubtless familiar with all of this, we simply summarize the first part of the story below.)

  In the years immediately before the Great Catastrophe, the population of the earth was estimated at more than six billions. North America had a population of one hundred and fifty million souls. China had a population of six hundred million. India held no less than four hundred and fifty million people. Compared with the present estimated population for the whole earth of a hundred and fifty thousand, the world was populated with almost incredible density. In one country—Belgium—there were three hundred and fifty people to every square mile of ground! The city of New York, whose ruins make a patch of crumbled stone and masonry for nearly twenty miles, housed no less than seven million people. The city of London—lying south-east of the new city of the same name—held eight and a quarter millions of people. The new London now has nearly four thousand people. New York has been abandoned, except for the workers still extricating tools and materials from the debris, but at one time in that city a space of less than three square miles housed as many persons as there are now upon the earth.

  A highly intricate social organization was necessary to hold all these peoples in check. Seventy-five thousand uniformed men patrolled the streets of New York to keep law-breakers in hand. Railroads, models and pictures of which can be seen in the museum of any city of the present day, gathered food from the farms and plantations and brought it to the non-producing inhabitants of the cities. By an involved system of monetary exchange, the manufactures of the cities were considered to equalize in value the products of the land.

  All of these social and economic arrangements were overwhelmed in the Great Catastrophe, and civilization now possesses but little need for money, and less need for policemen and soldiers. With the whole surface of the earth at the disposal of anyone who chooses to cultivate it, we now have no want save that arising from indolence, and there is but little indolence. Almost all of our cities—save London—are built high in the mountains where climatic conditions promote energy and industry. We have, in fact, a cleaner and a better world than ever existed before the Catastrophe. It is suggested that readers wishing to inform themselves on the state of the world before 1940 make requisition for books from the Central Library at Cosmopolis. Nearly the whole of the Washington, London, and Viennese libraries have been recovered and an abundance of material is at hand.

  The world had barely two weeks’ notice of the Great Catastrophe. The Harvard Observatory had fugitive glimpses of the asteroid “Mala” as far back as 1908, but was never able to follow it with its telescopes. It appeared on star-photographs in 1923, 1937, and 1938, but there were never three observations made at sufficiently short intervals to allow the path of the little planet to be calculated. In fact, until two weeks before the planetoid struck the earth practically nothing had been learned of it, unless by the Royal Observatory of Esthonia.

  We know now that the planetoid was approximately fourteen miles in diameter, that it struck the earth between the Lesser Antilles and Venezuela while traveling at a speed of eighty-two miles a second, and that it penetrated the solid crust of the earth to a depth of over one hundred miles. From the impact, the “crust” was cracked, and the internal fires burst out along long lines of fissures that poured out lava and ashes over a great part of the continents, and turned great areas of the ocean into seething masses of boiling water. The island of Cuba sank completely into the sea, and on the other hand the Straits of Gibraltar rose until an area of evil-smelling sea-bed was raised above the surface, making the Mediterranean an inland lake and connecting aga
in the continents of Europe and Africa. From New Orleans to Chicago a great fissure opened, and the waters of the Mississippi went up in steam. The normally volcanic area of Yellowstone Park became a mass of molten lava, which surged and seethed like the waters of a white-hot sea. Lake Erie became a boiling lake, whose clouds of steam rose for miles into the air. New England sank two hundred feet, and thousands of square miles of low-lying land were covered with the angry waters of the ocean.

  This was not all, however. When the terrific shock of the planetoid’s arrival reached Europe, the towering height of the Matterhorn crumbled into an inchoate mass of rock, which fell in jagged splinters to the valley below. The tall chalk cliffs of Dover split and fell, but not far down. The sea-bed of the English Channel rose up to meet them, and a thousand wrecks and sunken ships saw the sky once more. The Thames flowed backward from the sea, to accumulate in a brackish lake that for many months lapped over the fallen piles of London. The great Black Forest of once-imperial Germany was laid waste, the mighty trees lying in twisted heaps where they had fallen. Where the tumbling streams of the Ural Mountains had once leaped down to fill the Black Sea, now welling tides of molten rock flowed down to plunge amid colossal hissings into the strangely-colored waters.

  The inhabitants of the Himalayas saw their mountains rock and quiver. From great chasms in their sides the angry fires of the center of the earth burst forth. Japan became invisible beneath a cloud of steam and smoke. The Hawaiian Islands were rent into shattered fragments, whose still-steaming remains serve as guides to our aeroplanes on their flight across the Pacific.

  And the oceans…Where once was the Sargasso Sea, there is a mass of reddish rock which steams and hisses as the Atlantic rolls against its sides. A perpetual cloud of steam hangs over the Lesser Antilles, and from the spot where the planetoid crashed into the interior of the earth a column of white vapor rises forty miles into the air, with a rumbling and roaring that to this day can be heard two hundred miles away. Boiling springs and hissing masses of hot water appeared on the surface of all the seas. Some parts of the ocean were covered with the bodies of scalded fish and sea-animals, slain by the plutonic convulsions of the sea-bed. Strange, blind monsters from unknowable depths where sunlight never reaches, where chilly stillness reigned for a hundred thousand years, now wandered painfully about the sickening warm waters, seeking the cool darkness in which alone they could live. Monsters in size like the Kraken of which ancient voyagers told, monsters more grotesque than any fevered imaginings of man, monsters blind and pale, huge-eyed and peculiarly colored, monsters of a thousand unguessed tribes and species. All of them swam plaintively, eagerly, through the warm and sulphurous waters of the oceans. The air was full of their strange cries and the uncouth noises of their swimming.