The Hamelin Plague

by A Bertram Chandler

"Yes," said Annette. "And quite a few scientific discoveries have been made by laymen."

  "Yes," he admitted grudgingly, adding, "In your field especially."

  She said, "I suppose I should resent that, but life's too short, and unless somebody does something it's going to be even shorter. But I think you should give us a demonstration."

  "All right," he said abruptly. "It's your time you're wasting as well as mine, but I don't suppose that matters much any more."

  He led the way back to his cluttered laboratory, motioned to the others to remain by the doorway. Carefully, he lifted one of the cages from its shelf on the wall, placed it on a table before one of the big projectors. The device was on a trolley and he wheeled it to within two feet of the cage, adjusted the reflector so that if it had belonged to a searchlight the beam would have been shining full on the rat.

  "Now," he snapped. "Watch."

  He pulled down a switch. A motor generator hummed and whined into throbbing life. He pulled down another, and two banks of tubes glowed faintly. He said sarcastically, "Normally, I should have been taking an encephalogram of the victim, but since our nautical friend wants his quite useless demonstration now, he's getting it now."

  He paused, then went on in a slightly more agreeable voice. "As you all see, at this range the target isn't worried at all. It would have been far less expensive in terms of physical energy to have knocked him on the head with a stick." He paused again. "And now I decrease the range by six inches."

  But Barrett was paying no attention. He was listening to the frenzied chitterings of the brutes still in their cages, had turned to look at them. They were becoming more and more excited, clawing and biting at the confining wire.

  He asked, "What about the others?"

  "Don't worry about them," sneered Piper. "Some sort of side effect that I haven't gotten around to investigating yet. Or maybe they just don't like seeing one of their cobbers bumped off. But a weapon is supposed to kill, not to annoy."

  Perhaps Barrett, where he was standing, was feeling some of the side effects himself. Whatever the reason, he was not satisfied with Piper's explanation. He ignored the target rat, the victim rat, started to go to look at the others in their cages along the wall. And with his second step he was in the full field of the vibrations, the inaudible waves spreading from the reverse, the convex, side of the reflector.

  There was a singing in his ears (or in his mind) and it was more, far more, than a mere, mechanical whine. It was music. It was raw, blaring brass and throbbing insistent percussion, and somehow woven into the fabric was the heart-rending sobbing of the violins. And (for he had turned around) the convex disc of the sonic reflector was now a great, golden moon, hanging low over a garden— and that garden, he knew, was the garden from which ancestral Man had been exiled and to which his descendants are ever striving to return; the garden in which the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil had not yet been eaten; in which all the other fruit had not yet turned sour and bitter.

  And she was dancing in the garden to the sobbing music, to the disturbing throb and rattle of the little drums, under that huge yellow, mellow moon. She was naked, and she was dancing, and there was something in her of Jane, and something of Pamela, and something of all the women he had ever known, of all the women he had ever desired.

  And she had turned, and she was facing him, naked and unashamed and beautiful beyond all imagining, and the perfect arms were spread wide to him, and the welcoming smile on her face was the smile of which every wandering man has dreamed, which every wandering man has longed for at his homecoming.

  And...

  Something grabbed his shoulder, pulled him violently to one side, sent him sprawling on the littered floor.

  "Bloody young fool!" swore Piper. "He might have electrocuted himself."

  Barrett tried to sit up, tried to expel the last, lingering traces of the hallucination from his mind. (And faintly in his ears—the throbbing whine of the generator? the rattle of some loose metal fitting?—there was still the music, and in his heart there was still the desire to return to the garden.)

  But, he said, with an effort, "You're the bloody fool, Piper."

  "What the hell do you mean?'"

  Barrett laughed shakily. "Next time you try to make a sonic weapon—or supersonic or subsonic or whatever it is—you might read Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin first."

  CHAPTER 11

  Katana was at anchor now, lying quietly off the island.

  For the remaining hours of daylight there had been a coming and going of boats between the ship, the Sun Islanders' jetty and Piper's wharf. The Sun Island launch had returned, its two-man crew badly frightened but, save for a few scratches, relatively uninjured. The village from which they had always purchased their stores had been undamaged by the fires, but deserted. They had tied up to the pier and gone ashore. They had been puzzled by the concentrations of crows in the street—like, as one of them said, great clots of black flies feeding on something rotten. They had noticed the smell, the sickly stench of decay, and then the first mob of crows, disturbed by their approach, had risen, clamoring, and they had seen what they had been feeding on.

  They had seen, barely in time, the things that came leaping out from the houses at them. "They were like little kangaroos," said the more talkative of the two men. "But they weren't kangaroos. There was something of the monkey about them, and something of the rat. And they came swarming out like bees from an overset hive." He was pleased with his simile. "And they had stings, too. They were holding knives. If you don't believe us, ask Annette."

  "Those slashes on your legs were made by a knife," said the doctor.

  So the launch was back, and the Sun Islanders were at last convinced of the truth of Barrett's story, and the admiral had gone to see Piper, accompanied by Maloney and Ryan, and, all in all, things were getting under way.

  Shortly after sunset the admiral, ferried by Annette in the Sun Island launch, returned to the ship. He sent for Barrett and Pamela and Clarendon. When they were assembled in the master's day room he produced the last bottle of Captain Hall's brandy, looked at it rather ruefully. Barrett got out the glasses.

  Annette said, "This is against club rules, you know."

  The admiral told her, "You're not on club premises now. This is a unit of the Royal Australian Navy."

  Like hell she is," said Barrett. This is the pride of the Tasmanian Steamship Company's fleet."

  Both men laughed. "What does it matter?" asked the admiral. He poured a generous measure into each of the glasses. He raised his. "Here's to the daylight that we're beginning to see at last."

  "And what does Piper think about it now?" asked Barrett.

  "The lethal aspect of his weapon is still useless, but the ... the lure, the bait, has long range without too great an expenditure of power, and has a fine, shotgun spread."

  "The perfect bait," squeaked Clarendon. "I'm not a soldier, only a ratcatcher, but I can see how it will work. It will drag them into the sea. Or, used ashore, it will pull them into pits and trenches filled with burning petrol."

  "If there's any petrol left to burn," qualified the admiral drily. "But we'll find something."

  Annette broke in. She said, "We were drinking just now to the daylight that we were beginning to see at last. But there's still something I'm in the dark about. Tim, just after he was saved from electrocuting himself, was babbling something about the Pied Piper of Hamelin."

  "What did you read when you were a kid, Annette?" asked Barrett.

  "Mainly my father's books. He was a doctor, too. Anatomy, pathology, all the rest of it."

  Barrett chuckled softly. "There was a poet," he said, "called Browning. Apart from all his other work, he turned out one quite famous piece of kids' verse—The Pied Piper. It sticks in my memory—possibly because I saw at about the same time as I read it the excellent cartoon film that Disney made of it. It starts something like this: 'Hamelin Town's in Brunswick, By famous Hanover
City; The River Weser, deep and wide, Washes its walls on the southern side.

  "I forget the next line or so, but—

  To see the townsfolk suffer so

  From vermin was a pity.

  Rats!

  They fought the dogs and killed the cats,

  And bit the babies in the cradles...'

  "And so on. Anyhow, it's a pretty fair description of what was happening to us before the balloon went up. But their mayor offered a reward of a thousand guilders to anybody who could exterminate the pests—"

  "They paid their rodent-control officers better in those days," said Clarendon wrily.

  "They didn't in the end," Barrett told him. "And that led to more trouble. Anyhow, this piper, the Pied Piper— so called from his parti-colored attire—presented himself to the mayor to offer his services. The mayor promised him the thousand guilders, and so the Pied Piper went out into the streets, piping away fit to bust, and all the rats came out from the houses and scampered after him.

  " 'Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, grey rats, black rats, tawny rats...'

  "And so on, and so on, until, like lemmings, they all plunged into the River Weser and drowned.

  " 'Save one, who stout as Julius Caesar Swam across and lived to carry To Rat Land home his commentary...'

  "This survivor described what he saw and heard when the piper started to play: visions of luscious food before him, incredibly tempting. He saw a huge, bulky sugar puncheon (whatever that was) gleaming before him, and he made for it, and found himself in the drink, swimming for his life in the Weser."

  Pamela asked rather spitefully, "And what was your sugar puncheon, Tim?" He said, "I'd rather not say."

  "I don't suppose," put Annette, "that a human being would have an hallucination of food. Not unless he was starving."

  "I wonder," mused Clarendon in his squeaky whisper, "if the legend was founded on fact? The Pied Piper could have been an alchemist who had stumbled upon the principles of supersonics, and that one rat who escaped could have been the first of the mutants. And bred true, and descendants multiplying over the years..."

  The admiral snorted.

  Annette asked, "And how did it all finish?"

  "The mayor tried to wriggle out of the bargain. After all, there was nothing in writing. He tried to fob the piper off with a lousy fifty guilders. So the piper took out his pipe again, and played, and piped all the children out of the town. And they never came back."

  "I suppose this thing of Piper's could be used on human beings," said the admiral thoughtfully. "After all, it worked on you, Barrett."

  "I thought you preferred sixteen-inch guns to all this newfangled gadgetry," said Barrett coldly.

  "I do," said the admiral. "They're far more gentlemanly."

  The following morning Barrett took Katana's boat in again to Piper's island. Before he left the ship he tried to have a few words with Jane. At first she listened dumbly to him, almost without comprehension, and then she flared up.

  "Yes, I know I'm useless, Tim. I know I'm useless in more ways than one. Pamela's the woman for you. I can see that. She's your mate now—aboard this blasted ship and in bed."

  "No," protested Barrett.

  "Yes. I'm not blind. It's a pity I ever managed to get down to the ship the night it happened. It would have been so much better for both of us if I hadn't."

  "Don't say that!"

  "I am saying it, and you know it's true. I'm just a drag on you in this dreadful new world, and she isn't."

  "Jane, if you'd only try."

  "Try what? Please go, Tim, and carry on with whatever you're supposed to be doing. When you're trying to save the world your wife is only in the way. I know that. Please go."

  So Barrett left her and clambered down the ladder to the waiting boat. He was silent and moody all the way to the little wharf, speaking only to issue orders. He brought the boat alongside the steps, waited until the bowman had made her fast, then stepped ashore.

  He saw Maloney coming down the path. The radio officer was dirty and tired, his fat cheeks sagging, the color gone from his face. But he was cheerful. He called, "All right, Tim. Let's have a few strong men and then we'll lug the bits and pieces down to the wharf."

  Barrett told the boat's crew what to do, watched them climbing the hillside after Maloney. He did not wish himself to revisit the laboratory. The memory of what he had experienced there was too vivid—the memory of the hunger rather than that of the promise of its gratification. After a while he saw the others coming back. He wondered if it would be possible to stow the apparatus in the boat; its components were awkward shapes and sizes.

  But they managed somehow, with Piper fluttering around like an old hen, trying to be helpful but only getting in the way. The equipment was stowed without damage, although for the return journey it was possible to use only four of the Fleming Gear levers, and the boat was uncomfortably crowded.

  Then they were alongside the ship, and the crates and boxes, and the uncrated reflector and the motor generator were being passed up to the foredeck and carried aft. And then the boat was dropped astern on its painter until it was under the davits, and the blocks were hooked on and Barrett was scrambling up the ladder to the boat deck so that he could supervise the rehoisting.

  He was functioning with a mechanical efficiency, doing all the right things, issuing all the right orders, but without enthusiasm, without interest even. He stood on the bridge with Keane and watched Joe, who had been sent forward to the windlass, to weigh the anchor. He rang Slow Ahead as soon as a single stroke of the fo'c's'le head bell indicated one shackle of cable on deck. Full Ahead when the sustained clanging told him that the anchor was aweigh. He knew that in this ship the stowing of the anchors was, at times, awkward, but he refused to let it worry him. Joe and the semiskilled man with him—he claimed yachting experience—would have to manage somehow. If they couldn't—well, with a world in flames there were more important things than an anchor cockbilled in the hawse-pipe. (And more important things, he reminded himself, than going to bed with one's wife.)

  He put the ship on to the first of the courses that he had laid off, then said to the admiral, "You may go below, sir. I'll stand the rest of the forenoon watch."

  "Thank you, Captain. I think I'll wander aft and see how Piper's getting on with his gadgetry."

  Barrett remembered something, sounded three farewell blasts on the whistle. He looked astern, saw the Sun Islanders clustered on their jetty, saw them waving. Through his binoculars he could make out Annette and Betty and the fat man, Charles. He rather envied them, and hoped sincerely that they would be unmolested either by lawless humans or the rats.

  At noon he was relieved by Pamela. He went down to the saloon for his lunch. It was mainly boiled potatoes, accompanied by a sliver of corned beef. He made desultory conversation with the others around the table. He went up to the officers' flat as soon as he was finished. He wanted to talk with Jane again, but the door to his cabin was locked.

  He wandered aft, to the poop. Piper, assisted by the admiral and Maloney and Ryan, was working on the docking bridge. The thing was taking shape. Already it was beginning to look like something copied from the cover of a science-fiction magazine, too fantastic ever to be workable. But it was no more fantastic than the enemy against whom it would be used.

  The men on the docking bridge ignored Barrett, so he returned amidships. He went up to talk with Pamela, and with her stared out to starboard, focusing his binoculars on the wide, dreadful expanses of ash and cinder, on the burned out shells of coastal towns. And yet, here and there, there was an oasis, the occasional small village that had escaped destruction. He commented on this to the girl.

  "There was the place where our nudist friends used to get their stores," she said. "That hadn't been burned either. But it makes sense. In the big cities, with so many people to be ... to be disposed of, they had to use fire. Where there was only a small population to deal with—"

/>   "Yes," he said, "it makes sense."

  She said, "Being intelligent, they'll like their little comforts. It's all very well for the rank and file, the nonmutants, to live rough, but the leaders will want something warm and dry." She paused and shuddered.

  "What's wrong?" Barrett asked.

  "Just something that just occurred to me. Something rather horrid."

  "It can't be much worse than what's already happened."

  "Much worse," she old him. "Do you know anything about ants?"

  "Ants?" he demanded, perplexed.

  "Yes. Ants. When I was a kid I had quite an unfeminine passion for all sorts of creepy-crawlies. As well as conducting my own personal observations, I used to read everything I could lay my hands on. You know, there are some ants that keep slaves. They're warriors, and they raid the nests of the more peace-loving varieties, and as their booty they carry off the so-called ants' eggs, the pupae of their victims. These they rear to maturity—as slaves."

  "But what has this to do with the rats?"

  "Plenty. If they win—and I'm glad that we can now say if instead of when—there'll still be quite a lot of machinery and such left undamaged, but all on too large a scale to be handled by the mutants. But if they have human slaves—"

  "Impossible," said Barrett.

  She said, "I wish it were." After a short silence she went on, "While you and Uncle Peter were otherwise engaged, I had a long talk with Tom."

  "Tom?"

  "One of the men in the Sun Islanders' launch. He was very worried. He told me they'd heard a noise in the village, and that Jerry had been sure it was the crying of birds."

  "What of it?"

  "Tom thought it was the crying of children," she said.

  Katana steamed south, her twin diesels beating steadily, while on her poop Piper and his assistants still worked on the supersonic weapon. She steamed south, keeping close inshore, making as direct a passage as was possible to Sydney, taking full advantage of the coastwise southerly set.

  And then, toward the end of the second dogwatch, the admiral sent down for Barrett. He said to him, as soon as he appeared on the bridge, "Your engineer officer has been on the telephone."