“The cargo-bay doors are open,” said Drake relievedly. He wondered at his own relief. There was no time to speculate on what he might have feared the cargo doors represented. “It looks like something is hanging there, but it’s the doors.”
“What’d you expect? Flying saucers!”
Drake didn’t know who said that, but he did know that everyone had been guessing wildly at improbable explanations. He himself had wondered for an instant if somebody had tried a new weapon against planes in the antarctic airlift. That was a sample of the sort of speculation everyone else must be engaged in. All of it was preposterous.
* * * *
The plane’s engines roared louder even than the surf. They grew louder still as the plane came on toward the island. It seemed to swell. Every eye aground strained at it. It roared above the cliffs to windward, and bellowed overhead directly above the airstrip, and then it went on across the island and out to sea to the eastward. At its nearest, it was less than five hundred feet high. It was absolutely clear to the sight. Its wheels were up. Its cargo-bay doors were open. For a fraction of a second, the watchers on the island could actually look up inside the plane.
But then it was past. It became a speck in the gray eastern sky. It had not dropped a message.
Drake went back to the radio shack. Nora was saying composedly: “Everybody was watching for your message. Here’s someone now. The administrative officer.”
Drake said curtly: “We saw nothing fall. We saw the plane very clearly. It—” He cast about for something to say. His absurd guesses came to mind. “There is absolutely nothing wrong about the outside of the ship. Nothing is clinging to it. Nothing is following it. Nothing else is in the air anywhere near. The radar says so!”
But he felt helpless. An experienced and capable pilot had the ship in charge. He simply couldn’t imagine anything an experienced pilot would need to be told was nonexistent before he would dare to land.
Nora’s voice went on. Her eyes remained fixed on the radar screen. The blip went closer and closer to the edge of the screen. Its course would carry it over endless leagues of totally empty sea—south of Cape Horn—on the route by which giant waves could roll uninterruptedly around the south polar continent.
“And nothing’s following you,” repeated Nora persuasively. “I’m looking at the radar. There’s nothing but you aloft.”
The blip did not swerve. It reached the end of the screen. It went beyond it. It was beyond the extremest range of the radar apparatus on Gow Island.
Drake clenched his hands. For an instant his mind dwelt on the stark impossibility of making a satisfactory report on this. That was the administrative officer in him. But then he felt sick.
“There are ten men in that plane,” he said. “They’re on their way home. And something’s happened to one of them.”
He clenched his hands. A man whose job it is to see that things get done, comes to have an odd viewpoint. Human stupidity and human errors and even human breakdowns seem less than excusable because he sees their consequences. He tends to sympathize with the victims of human failure rather than the inadequate people who fail.
The radio operator came back in the shack, stamping his feet.
“It’s crazy!” he whimpered. “Crazy! The guy was perfectly all right and the other guys started to yell, and then this happens! You makin’ out a report on it for me to send north?”
Drake said heavily: “Stay on watch here. You too,” he added to Nora. “Whatever’s wrong, the plane’s under control. It could come back inside radar range and you might get another chance to work on him. At least you got him to drag the island.”
He went out. There was the thunder of the surf, beating against the two-hundred-foot-high cliffs on the island’s western side. The waves that made that thunder were monstrous. They came over the horizon with a sullen insolence, as if they could imagine no obstacle able to resist them. But the island’s cliffs defied them. So they hurled themselves against the rock with horrible growling noises. The air was never empty of their roaring.
Sea-birds fluttered overhead. Drake saw the island’s inhabitants gathered in groups of two and three, bewilderedly trying to guess the cause of the disaster which was not yet ended, but which there was no way to prevent.
Tom Belden came uneasily to Drake: “No use me staying on the fire truck, sir, is there?” he asked. “I can get back to it if the plane shows up again.”
“If it shows up, do,” said Drake. He was the administrative officer again, worried about a report he had to make. Nobody would believe it.
Tom Belden said awkwardly: “Sir, do you think this has anything to do with the—uh—skeletons they found when they started to build this place?”
Drake looked at him blankly.
“Somebody said,” Tom Belden explained, “that they were a boat’s crew from a whaler that got lost from their ship and landed here to try to wait for help, and something killed ’em. But there ain’t supposed to be anything on the island big enough to kill a man. Something did, though. Could it be—uh—”
“Whatever happened in the plane,” said Drake, “began at least a hundred miles away toward the ice. Anything that killed men on the island, and hadn’t killed them at sea, would not be likely to fly a hundred miles to wriggle into a plane in flight. Moreover, it hasn’t killed anybody lately on the island, which would seem strange if it could do so. I don It know what happened, but it wasn’t anything that lives here.”
He stalked onward. He found that he had four bottles of liquor still under his arm. He’d gotten them out to tempt a possible psychotic, if a psychotic was the cause of the trouble on the now-vanished plane.
He swore. He put the bottles back in place and went to his desk to write what could only be a preliminary report. It would be, he knew, the forerunner of official correspondence which might go on for years.
He was staring at a blank piece of paper when he heard shouts. He went to see what was the matter. The radio operator bellowed at him:
“The plane’s back on the radar screen! Heading in! It swung all around, to north or south, and’s coming in from the west again!”
Drake didn’t either believe or disbelieve it, but he hastened to the radio shack. Nora Hall, rather pale now, was talking with the same soothing persistence to the still-invisible aircraft.
“You’re right on course,” he heard her say. “Take it easy! We’re ready for anything. There’s nothing outside the plane and nothing following it. We’re ready to take care of any emergency that may exist. You just keep right on the way you’re heading and you’ll sight the island in minutes. The wind’s—”
She glanced up and Drake said: “Thirty knots, two forty degrees, slightly gusty.”
She repeated the information.
“Wheedle him down if you can,” commanded Drake. “You’re doing all right so far.”
He went out to make sure that people had carried out their orders. Everything was ready, from young Belden at the fire-extinguisher truck to Beecham and Spaulding and four warehouse men waiting with a stretcher and a strait-jacket and bandages, to be used as the situation required.
The radio operator pointed. To the west. The plane was coming in. It had made a great sweep and now headed for its landing place downwind. It didn’t occur to Drake that any action need be taken about that. No pilot would need advice not to land downwind.
The plane grew from a mote to a speck, and then a spot with stubby wings. Dots appeared on the wings. Then the plane grew enormously. Its cargo-bay doors hung downward, but its wheels were still up. It dived downward. Drake raised his arms frantically to wave warning, but the plane levelled off, then dipped.
There was a shrieking, screaming, tearing outcry of rent metal and a ghastly impact. There was a monstrous cloud of dust. The plane made a belly-landing on the stony runway, with its wheels still retracted. It slid and slid. Once it half-way turned over, then straightened out, and slid on again.
It was still. Th
e dust cloud of its landing floated on downwind. Drake began to run toward it, thinking to himself that there was no fire and therefore the pilot must have dumped his reserve fuel out at sea.
There was a singular dead silence, broken only by the sound of running feet.
There was a shot inside the plane.
Drake got first to the door of the pilot’s compartment. He wrenched it open and plunged inside.
There was no movement, until the pilot very slowly leaned in his seat and slumped in a limp heap halfway to the floor. There was a revolver on the floor of the compartment. The pilot had used it. On himself.
When they examined the rest of the plane they found eight bullet holes in the plane’s flooring and sides. That included one bullet that had smashed the radio transmitter. But they found nothing else. There was nobody in the plane but the dead pilot. The other two crewmen and seven passengers had vanished while the ship was in flight.
There had been ten men in the plane when it took off from the scientific base at Gissell Bay. There had been nothing wrong until the plane was within a hundred miles of Gow Island. But after screams and shooting the pilot had landed on (low Island downwind, with his wheels up. It was a belly-landing. And there was no other human being on the ship.
Also, after landing, the pilot had blown out his brains.
CHAPTER TWO
The day went by very slowly. There was a dead man to be taken out of the plane, which had an extraordinary emotional effect. In a city full of people one dead man goes unnoticed. But when there are but nineteen human beings and four dogs and squawking sea-birds, then a dead man is appallingly present. He is a startling reality.
The power officer and two mechanics got the pilot’s body out of the navigation compartment and out of sight in a warehouse. But his death still nagged at those on the island. The nine missing men were somehow less vividly present to the imagination. They had been in the plane. Now they were gone. Undoubtedly they had gone out of the cargo doors in some fashion. But one could not quite imagine them as hurtling downward to the sea. One could not picture it. It had happened, but one could not believe it.
The island’s radio shack sent reports northward. The reports were cold and factual, and therefore nobody could possibly believe them. Valparaiso received its first message and asked to have it repeated before forwarding it. The bases on the ice-cap received word and asked to have a relief operator duplicate the transmission. It didn’t seem right.
* * * *
On the island the winds blew out of nowhere, seas came from unthinkable remoteness, and flapping swarms of sea-birds made discordant outcries above the cliffs. There was a crippled plane askew upon the ground, midway of the landing strip. Men from the warehouse crew unloaded it with a certain disturbed caution. The air was full of the thunder of surf, and the sky was gray overhead, and the sea was gray all about.
Beecham, the biologist, had found the cargo sheet. He checked off the items as they were removed from the windowless cargo space.
“Three boxes records,” he read, “consigned to Academy of Sciences. Got ’em out? Check. What comes next? Five Adelie penguins in shipping cages? Can’t get at them yet? I’ll mark ’em off when you haul them out. Three bales biological material from Hot Lakes district. One bale broken, eh? Get the loose stuff out and we’ll bale it up again later.”
But Beecham looked hungrily at the very strange material that the unloading crew brought out. It had been enclosed in what was now ripped sacking, some of which still partly enclosed sections of thick tree-trunk perhaps six feet log. At one end of each log there were long, snaky, trailing roots, with root-fibers like coarse black fur upon each root-tendril. At the other end there were similar far-reaching branches.
“Be careful with those!” said Beecham anxiously. “They’re from the Hot Lakes district! Not many of them even there, and they’ve been growing apart from the rest of the world for five million years. Lay ’em down gently! Easy with the unbroken bales.”
He watched nervously as the specimens were laid aside. More cases of records. A flat box of developed photographic plates. A cage with an Adelie penguin in it. Three others. A broken cage, empty.
“The devil!” said Beecham. “The penguin who was in this We may be mixed up somewhere with this stuff. Watch out for him. What’s next? Personal luggage?”
The personal possessions of seven passengers came out of the plane. The private luggage of its three-man crew. And that was all. Antarctica has few exports.
Beecham wiped his forehead, though the wind from across the cliffs was chill.
“The fifth penguin’s missing,” he said uneasily. “All right. This stuff can be gotten under shelter.”
He left the plane and headed for Drake’s office. Drake looked tired and grim. He was dictating to Nora when Beecham came in.
“You got the ship unloaded, Beecham? Anything informative?”
Beecham harassedly produced the cargo list.
“One penguin’s missing,” he said. “One bale of biological specimens is broken open and the stuff scattered. We can’t know whether any specimens are missing until we try to bale ’em up again.”
Drake nodded.
“The runway’s blocked by the wreck,” added Beecham. “I don’t think another plane can land until it’s cleared.”
“Hollister’s looking over that situation,” said Drake. Hollister was the island’s chief mechanic, with two highly qualified assistants under him. “He’s tearing his hair. I’ve been putting together the information Washington’s already asking for. You’ll be called on for a specialists’ report on the condition of the specimens, I suppose.”
Beecham wanted to get at that right away.
Drake looked, harried. The job of administering an installation for the service of other installations is a thankless job at best. A place as small as Gow Island requires everything to be supervised by the one man who is responsible for it all. Which means that he needs the talents of an administrator, the tact of a mediator, the understanding of a psychologist, and the patience of Job.
“Any blood in the cargo space?” he asked abruptly.
Beecham looked surprised, then said: “That’s right! Not a bit. Neither on the ship or the stuff that was carried out!” Then he said urgently: “What about the penguins? They were put in cages for shipment. They shouldn’t be kept cooped up so closely for long! And I’m worried about the Hot Lakes specimens. They’re vegetation, from a volcanic area pretty much like the warm-spring patch on the island here. Plants are subject to shock, the same as animals. Being uprooted is a shock except when they’re dormant, as in winter. But if these specimens were adapted to a warm soil, they might not ever get dormant! They may die if we have to hold them over in bales!”
“Make a pen for the penguins,” commanded Drake. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Do what you think wise about the plants. That’s your line, Beecham. You’ve experience to guide you.”
“I could put some of them in the warm soil around our hot springs,” said Beecham. “That’s close to their normal environment. I’ll ask for authority from the Academy of Sciences.”
“Go ahead. Come along, Nora,” said Drake. “I’m going to take a look through the empty plane. Bring your notebook for memos. And if you see something I don’t, mention it.”
They went together from Drake’s office toward the runway. As they passed the radio shack, the operator appeared in the door.
“A plane-load of trouble-shooters is going to be assembled and flown down to Valparaiso and then here,” he reported.
“Tell ’em the runway’s blocked at the moment,” said Drake.
They went on. There were plaintively indignant noises as they neared the wreck. The penguins, closely confined, were fretfully talking the matter over through the bars of their cages.
“One of them is missing,” Drake remembered.
He swung up into the plane. The pilot’s coat was wadded into a cupboard behind his seat. Drake took it
out and covered the chair he’d sat in, to spare Nora the sight of certain gruesome stains that Beecham hadn’t noticed. He held out his hand to help Nora in.
He led her immediately through the navigation compartment to the cargo space behind it. The plane was canted to one side, and what light there was came only from the rectangular opening in the floor, where crumpled doors let in cold wind and a certain amount of brightness.
* * * *
The plane was roomy. There was, to be sure, a huge extra fuel tank to increase the flying range of the plane. But there was a feeling of spaciousness. There was a hot-plate, run on current from the ship’s electrical equipment. The floor was reasonably neat. There were shreds of bark from the tumbled, extraordinary trees from Antarctica, where no trees had ever been suspected before. Where the penguin cages had been there was some trash, dumped out when they were shaken in the belly-landing. But there was nothing unaccountable in sight.
Drake moved about, counting.
“Two—three—four—” He hunted again. “Seven bullet-holes. Eight, counting the one that smashed the transmitter. Either the pilot’s gun was reloaded or there were two guns going. Let’s look at that door.”
The door of the pilots’ compartment was not punctured. The bullet that had smashed the transmitter had been fired while it was open.
“The pilot and co-pilot heard the row back there. One of them went back, came back for a pistol, and went back again. Seven bullets fired back there, at least, and one into the radio transmitter. That’s eight.”
He frowned.
“Make a note to count the shells in the pilot’s gun, Nora. Find out if one gun or two was in use.”
Nora said quietly: “It would be one, I think. There are empty shells.”
She pointed. Up against the forward end of the cargo space there were six cartridge-cases where the floor and front wall met.
“Hmm,” said Drake. “The gun was shot empty and reloaded. But how’d that happen? Whoever was shooting was allowed to reload. Why? And there’s no sign of blood! Who’d miss seven times or more in a close place like this? Somebody should have gotten hit!”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 129