The Third Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  The climax came on a beautifully moonlit night at a seashore resort where they were quite confident they would not be discovered. The beach was like silver, and the waves were dark and mysterious, except where the reflection of the moon glittered on their shining sides. Davis and Nita, forgetting the world and devoutly hoping that they were by the world forgot, sat and looked at the moon and played idly in the sand and told each other the eternal foolishnesses that are probably the truest wisdom. They were utterly happy just being alone with each other.

  A dark figure looked up over and coughed. They started.

  “You are Flight Commander and Mrs. Davis?” said a voice deprecatingly.

  Davis groaned and admitted it.

  “Our little villagers learned that you are visiting here, and a banquet has been prepared in the pavilion in your honor. Won’t you do us the honor to attend?”

  Davis muttered several words under his breath, for which Nita later reprimanded him, and rose heavily.

  The banquet was a great success. The freedom of the village was given them both. Speeches were made, in which Davis was told how superlatively clever he was. The band played “See the Conquering Hero Comes.” Davis sat miserably through it all, with Nita, scarcely less miserable, by his side.

  The next morning he sent a wire to Teddy Gerrod:

  Can we come and spend our honeymoon with you? People won’t let us alone.

  Davis.

  Within an hour the answer came:

  Come along. We’ll let you alone. We’re having a second honeymoon ourselves.

  Gerrod.

  Davis showed the wire to Nita.

  “Splendid!” she said with a sigh of relief. Then she dimpled and looked up at Davis. “But, Dicky, dear, we’ll never have a second honeymoon like they are having.”

  “We won’t?” demanded Davis. “Why not?”

  “Because,” said Nita, putting her face very close to his. “Because our first one is never going to stop.”

  TANKS

  Originally published in Astounding Stories, January 1930.

  … The deciding battle of the War of 1932 was the first in which the use of infantry was practically discontinued…

  —History of the U.S., 1920-1945 (Gregg-Harley).

  The persistent, oily smell of fog-gas was everywhere, even in the little pill-box. Outside, all the world was blotted out by the thick gray mist that went rolling slowly across country with the breeze. The noises that came through it were curiously muted—fog-gas mutes all noises somewhat—but somewhere to the right artillery was pounding something with H E shell, and there were those little spitting under-current explosions that told of tanks in action. To the right there was a distant rolling of machine-gun fire. In between was an utter, solemn silence.

  Sergeant Coffee, disreputable to look at and disrespectful of mien, was sprawling over one of the gunners’ seats and talking into a field telephone while mud dripped from him. Corporal Wallis, equally muddy and still more disreputable, was painstakingly manufacturing one complete cigarette from the pinched-out butts of four others. Both were rifle-infantry. Neither had any right or reason to be occupying a definitely machine-gun-section post. The fact that the machine-gun crew was all dead did not seem to make much difference to sector H.Q. at the other end of the telephone wire, judging from the questions that were being asked.

  “I tell you,” drawled Sergeant Coffee, “they’re dead.… Yeah, all dead. Just as dead as when I told you the firs’ time, maybe even deader.… Gas, o’course. I don’t know what kind.… Yeh. They got their masks on.”

  He waited, looking speculatively at the cigarette Corporal Wallis had in manufacture. It began to look imposing. Corporal Wallis regarded it affectionately. Sergeant Coffee put his hand over the mouthpiece, and looked intently at his companion.

  “Gimme a drag o’ that, Pete,” he suggested. “I’ll slip y’ some butts in a minute.”

  Corporal Wallis nodded, and proceeded to light the cigarette with infinite artistry. He puffed delicately upon it, inhaled it with the care a man learns when he has just so much tobacco and never expects to get any more, and reluctantly handed it to Sergeant Coffee.

  Sergeant Coffee emptied his lungs in a sigh of anticipation. He put the cigarette to his lips. It burned brightly as he drew upon it. Its tip became brighter and brighter until it was white-hot, and the paper crackled as the line of fire crept up the tube.

  “Hey!” said Corporal Wallis in alarm.

  Sergeant Coffee waved him aside, and his chest expanded to the fullest limit of his blouse. When his lungs could hold no more he ceased to draw, grandly returned about one-fourth of the cigarette to Corporal Wallis, and blew out a cloud of smoke in small driblets until he had to gasp for breath.

  “When y’ ain’t got much time,” said Sergeant Coffee amiably, “that’s a quick smoke.”

  Corporal Wallis regarded the ruins of his cigarette with a woeful air.

  “Hell!” said Corporal Wallis gloomily. But he smoked what was left.

  “Yeah,” said Sergeant Coffee suddenly, into the field telephone, “I’m still here, an’ they’re still dead.… Listen, Mr. Officer, I got me a black eye an’ numerous contusions. Also my gas-mask is busted. I called y’up to do y’ a favor. I aim to head for distant parts.… Hell’s bells! Ain’t there anybody else in the army—” He stopped, and resentment died out in wide-eyed amazement. “Yeh.… Yeh.… Yeh.… I gotcha, Loot. A’right, I’ll see what I c’n do. Yeh.… Wish y’d see my insurance gets paid. Yeh.”

  He hung up, gloomily, and turned to Corporal Wallis.

  “We’ got to be heroes,” he announced bitterly. “Sit out here in th’ stinkin’ fog an’ wait for a tank t’ come along an’ wipe us out. We’ the only listenin’ post in two miles of front. That new gas o’ theirs wiped out all the rest without report.”

  He surveyed the crumpled figures, which had been the original occupants of the pill-box. They wore the same uniform as himself and when he took the gas-mask off of one of them the man’s face was strangely peaceful.

  “Hell of a war,” said Sergeant Coffee bitterly. “Here our gang gets wiped out by a helicopter. I ain’t seen sunlight in a week, an’ I got just four butts left. Lucky I started savin’ ’em.” He rummaged shrewdly. “This guy’s got half a sack o’ makin’s. Say, that was Loot’n’t Madison on the line, then. Transferred from our gang a coupla months back. They cut him in the line to listen in on me an’ make sure I was who I said I was. He recognized my voice.”

  * * * *

  Corporal Wallis, after smoking to the last and ultimate puff, pinched out his cigarette and put the fragments of a butt back in his pocket.

  “What we got to do?” he asked, watching as Sergeant Coffee divided the treasure-trove into two scrupulously exact portions.

  “Nothin’,” said Coffee bitterly, “except find out how this gang got wiped out, an’ a few little things like that. Half th’ front line is in th’ air, the planes can’t see anything, o’course, an’ nobody dares cut th’ fog-gas to look. He didn’t say much, but he said for Gawd’s sake find out somethin’.”

  Corporal Wallis gloated over one-fourth of a sack of tobacco and stowed it away.

  “Th’ infantry always gets th’ dirty end of the stick,” he said gloomily. “I’m goin’ to roll me a whole one, pre-war, an’ smoke it, presently.”

  “Hell yes,” said Coffee. He examined his gas-mask from force of habit before stepping out into the fog once more, then contemptuously threw it aside. “Gas-masks, hell! Ain’t worth havin’. Come on.”

  Corporal Wallis followed as he emerged from the little round cone of the pill-box.

  The gray mist that was fog-gas hung over everything. There was a definite breeze blowing, but the mist was so dense that it did not seem to move. It was far enough from the fog-flares for the last least trace of striation to have
vanished. Fifteen miles to the north the fog-flares were placed, ranged by hundreds and by thousands, burning one after another as the fog service set them off, and sending out their incredible masses of thick gray vapor in long threads that spread out before the wind, coalesced, and made a smoke-screen to which the puny efforts of the last war—the war that was to make the world safe for democracy—were as nothing.

  Here, fifteen miles down wind from the flares, it was possible to see clearly in a circle approximately five feet in diameter. At the edge of that circle outlines began to blur. At ten feet all shapes were the faintest of bulks, the dimmest of outlines. At fifteen feet all was invisible, hidden behind a screen of mist.

  “Cast around,” said Coffee gloomily. “Maybe we’ll find a shell, or tracks of a tank or somethin’ that chucked the gas here.”

  * * * *

  It was rather ludicrous to go searching for anything in that mass of vapor. At three yards distance they could make each other out as dim outlines, no more. But it did not even occur to them to deplore the mist. The war which had already been christened, by the politicians at home, the last war, was always fought in a mist. Infantry could not stand against tanks, tanks could not live under aircraft-directed artillery fire—not when forty guns fired salvos for the aircraft to spot—and neither artillery nor aircraft could take any advantage of a victory which either, under special conditions, might win. The general staffs of both the United States and the prominent nation—let us say the Yellow Empire—at war with it had come to a single conclusion. Tanks or infantry were needed for the use of victories. Infantry could be destroyed by tanks. But tanks could be hidden from aerial spotters by smoke-screens.

  The result was fog-gas, which was being used by both sides in the most modern fashion when, their own unit wiped out and themselves wandering aimlessly in the general direction of the American rear, Sergeant Coffee and Corporal Wallis stumbled upon an American pill-box with its small garrison lying dead. For forty miles in one direction and perhaps thirty in the other, the vapor lay upon the earth. It was being blown by the wind, of course, but it was sufficiently heavier than air to cling to the ground level, and the industries of two nations were straining every nerve to supply the demands of their respective armies for its material.

  The fog-bank was nowhere less than a hundred feet thick—a cloud of impalpable particles impenetrable to any eye or any camera, however shrewdly filtered. And under that mattress of pale opacity the tanks crawled heavily. They lurched and rumbled upon their deadly errands, uncouth and barbarous, listening for each other by a myriad of devices, locked in desperate, short-range conflict when they came upon each other, and emitting clouds of deadly vapor, against which gas-masks were no protection, when they came upon opposing infantry.

  The infantrymen, though, were few. Their principal purpose was the reporting of the approach or passage of tanks, and trenches were of no service to them. They occupied unarmed little listening-posts with field telephones, small wireless or ground buzzer sets for reporting the enemy before he overwhelmed them. They held small pill-boxes, fitted with anti-tank guns which sometimes—if rarely—managed to get home a shell, aimed largely by sound, before the tank rolled over gun and gunners alike.

  And now Sergeant Coffee and Corporal Wallis groped about in that blinding mist. There had been two systems of listening-posts hidden in it, each of admittedly little fighting value, but each one deep and composed of an infinity of little pin-point posts where two or three men were stationed. The American posts, by their reports, had assured the command that all enemy tanks were on the other side of a certain definite line. Their own tanks, receiving recognition signals, passed and repassed among them, prowling in quest of invaders. The enemy tanks crawled upon the same grisly patrol on their own side.

  But two miles of the American front had suddenly gone silent. A hundred telephones had ceased to make reports along the line nearest the enemy. As Coffee and Wallis stumbled about the little pill-box, looking for some inkling of the way in which the original occupants of the small strong-point had been wiped out, the second line of observation-posts began to go dead.

  Now one, now another abruptly ceased to communicate. Half a dozen were in actual conversation with their sector headquarters, and broke off between words. The wires remained intact. But in fifteen nerve-racking minutes a second hundred posts ceased to make reports and ceased to answer the inquiry-signal. G.H.Q. was demanding explanations in crisp accents that told the matter was being taken very seriously indeed. And then, as the officer in command of the second-line sector headquarters was explaining frenziedly that he was doing all any man could do, he stopped short between two words and thereafter he, also, ceased to communicate.

  Front-line sector headquarters seemed inexplicably to have escaped whatever fate had overtaken all its posts, but it could only report that they had apparently gone out of existence without warning. American tanks, prowling in the area that had gone dead, announced that no enemy tanks had been seen. G-81, stumbling on a pill-box no more than ten minutes after it had gone silent, offered to investigate. A member of her crew, in a gas-mask, stepped out of the port doorway. Immediately thereafter G-81’s wireless reports stopped coming in.

  * * * *

  The situation was clearly shown in the huge tank that had been built to serve as G.H.Q. That tank was seventy feet long, and lay hidden in the mist with a brood of other, smaller tanks clustered near it, from each of which a cable ran to the telephones and instruments of the greater monster. Farther off in the fog, of course, were other tanks, hundreds of them, fighting machines all, silent and motionless now, but infinitely ready to protect the brain of the army.

  The G.H.Q. maneuver-board showed the battle as no single observer could ever have seen it. A map lay spread out on a monster board, under a pitiless white light. It was a map of the whole battlefield. Tiny sparks crawled here and there under the map, and there were hundreds of little pins with different-colored heads to mark the position of this thing and that. The crawling sparks were the reported positions of American tanks, made visible as positions of moving trains had been made visible for years on the electric charts of railroads in dispatcher’s offices. Where the tiny bulbs glowed under the map, there a tank crawled under the fog. As the tank moved, the first bulb went out and another flashed into light.

  The general watched broodingly as the crawling sparks moved from this place to that place, as varicolored lights flashed up and vanished, as a steady hand reached down to shift tiny pins and place new ones. The general moved rarely, and spoke hardly at all. His whole air was that of a man absorbed in a game of chess—a game on which the fate of a nation depended.

  He was thus absorbed. The great board, illuminated from above by the glaring bulb, and speckled with little white sparks from below by the tiny bulbs beneath, showed the situation clearly at every instant. The crawling white sparks were his own tanks, each in its present position. Flashing blue sparks noted the last report of enemy tanks. Two staff officers stood behind the general, and each spoke from time to time into a strapped-on telephone transmitter. They were giving routine orders, heading the nearest American patrol-tanks toward the location of the latest reported enemies.

  * * * *

  The general reached out his hand suddenly and marked off an area with his fingers. They were long fingers, and slender ones: an artist’s fingers.

  “Our outposts are dead in this space,” he observed meditatively. The use of the word “outposts” dated him many years back as a soldier, back to the old days of open warfare, which had only now come about again. “Penetration of two miles—”

  “Tank, sir,” said the man of the steady fingers, putting a black pin in position within that area, “let a man out in a gas-mask to examine a pill-box. The tank does not report or reply, sir.”

  “Gas,” said the general, noting the spot. “Their new gas, of course. It must go through masks or sag-paste,
or both.”

  He looked up to one of a row of officers seated opposite him, each man with headphones strapped to his ears and a transmitter before his lips, and each man with a map-pad on his knees, on which from time to time he made notations and shifted pins absorbedly.

  “Captain Harvey,” said the general, “you are sure that dead spot has not been bombarded with gas-shells?”

  “Yes, General. There has been no artillery fire heavy enough to put more than a fraction of those posts out of action, and all that fire, sir, has been accounted for elsewhere.”

  The officer looked up, saw the general’s eyes shift, and bent to his map again, on which he was marking areas from which spotting aircraft reported flashes as of heavy guns beneath the mist.

  “Their aircraft have not been dropping bombs, positively?”

  A second officer glanced up from his own map.

  “Our planes cover all that space, sir, and have for some time.”

  “They either have a noiseless tank,” observed the general meditatively, “or.…”

  The steady fingers placed a red pin at a certain spot.

  “One observation-post, sir, has reopened communication. Two infantrymen, separated from their command, came upon it and found the machine-gun crew dead, with gas-masks adjusted. No tanks or tracks. They are identified, sir, and are now looking for tank tracks or shells.”

  The general nodded emotionlessly.

  “Let me know immediately.”

  * * * *

  He fell back to the ceaseless study of the board with its crawling sparks and sudden flashes of light. Over at the left, there were four white sparks crawling toward a spot where a blue flash had showed a little while since. A red light glowed suddenly where one of the white sparks crawled. One of the two officers behind the general spoke crisply. Instantly, it seemed, the other three white sparks changed their direction of movement. They swung toward the red flash—the point where a wireless from the tank represented by the first white flash had reported, contact with the enemy.