The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  It was a dubious situation extended almost to the breaking point. The lifeboat voyage had produced a reaction of ground vehicles and atmosphere fliers. It gave an impression of limited offensive power. But, on the other hand, there was interplanetary travel here. And the scanner beam on the Kennessee and the instant detection of the lifeboat was proof that the people of this system knew exactly what the Kennessee was.

  A civilization without defense weapons but with interplanetary ships and space radio should have tried to make contact with the Kennessee. If only to placate invaders, some attempt to open communication should have been made. Absence of such efforts was ominous. The appearance was that of a race which played possum until it could strike an overwhelming blow. So the Kennessee stayed in a state of nerve-racking alertness, with detectors out all around, and relays set to throw on overdrive should a high-velocity guided missile seem to draw near.

  “It looks bad,” admitted the skipper to Holden. “We’d have tried to make contact, in their shoes. But whoever raided the Capella colony simply rode in and started killing. Maybe these people are that sort. Anyhow, if they do get us, our fleet will know who did it and come take them apart with planet-smasher bombs.”

  Holden said dourly:

  “I wish I’d been in that lifeboat. When do we send back another message torp?”

  “We make no more landings,” said the skipper. He added, “You’d never be able to find where the other boat landed, and anyhow Buck—”

  “Was probably blasted the instant they saw him,” said Holden.

  He couldn’t blame, anybody, but he was angry. He missed Buck.

  On the twelfth day after Buck’s landing, an interplanetary ship took off from Masa Four. The Kennessee had now ridden in beyond that planet and was headed for a perihelion point on the other side of Masa Gamma. If she survived to get there, it was the skipper’s intention to put on overdrive and go back to base with all his records. But this interplanetary ship changed all plans. It appeared to be a rocket, in that it left behind a trailing cloud of vapor which looked like ejected gases. The spectroscopes, though, showed it to be merely hydrocarbon—smoke particles. And it altogether lacked the backward velocity which would have proved it a means of propulsion. It was simply a trail of vapor, as if for advertisement.

  In two days it had climbed well away from the planet and changed direction in a long smooth curve. The Navigation Officer came to the control room shortly after, to report that it was on an interception course, with interception speed, and would draw gradually closer to the Kennessee until contact was made. Then its trail of vapor broke, and swelled, and broke, and swelled, as if unmistakably to draw attention from the cruiser.

  The control-room loud-speaker boomed shortly. Holden’s voice:

  “Sir!” he said harshly. “That phony rocket is beaming signals at us, running up and down the spectrum and trying frequency and amplitude modulation and everything else. Listen!”

  The speaker said resonantly: “Woof!” It was Buck’s joyous bark. An instant later came the word “Buck” in a distorted but definitely recognizable version of Holden’s own voice. And then, quite insanely, “Lie down, sir!” “Come get it, boy.” “Fetch it, Buck,” and all the other phrases to which the dog Buck had been trained to respond. As a means of opening communication between alien and mutually suspicious races, the vocabulary known to a big brown dog named Buck lacked dignity, but nothing could have been much more informative.

  “You see what it means, sir!” said Holden in a strained voice. “They got the stuff out of Buck’s brain, somehow! They read his memories! They must have, somehow! They want to make contact!” Then he said thickly, “But if they killed him to rummage in his brain—”

  “Mr. Holden,” said the skipper, “answer them, please. Speak as if to Buck himself, and see what happens.”

  In the speaker in the control room he heard Holden’s voice as he spoke into another microphone.

  “Buck!” said Holden hoarsely. “If you hear me, speak up, boy! Buck! Do you hear me?”

  And then the loud-speaker bellowed with the joyous uproar with which Buck replied to his master. He barked and bayed and yelped and whined all at once, and then barked crazily like a creature gone quite mad with joy.

  “He…he heard me, sir,” said Holden unsteadily. “They didn’t hurt him! I…I think, sir—”

  “Quite so, Mr. Holden,” said the skipper sedately. “I was about to order you to take a lifeboat and take another chance to learn something of these people. Suppose you go over and make contact with them? A race which knows a good dog when it sees one, and is honest enough to return him to his master, can’t be the race that massacred half a million people on Capella Three!”

  * * * *

  The Masan scientist who’d tried to replace Holden in Buck’s affections nevertheless grew rather friendly with Holden after the Kennessee landed on Masa Four. A message torp, sent back to base, had explained the situation and the reason for friendly contact with the Masan civilization. Of course, if the Kennessee vanished, the Masans would be known to be definitely responsible, but that did not seem to bother them. And it did not bother the humans, either.

  The Masan scientist explained to Holden:

  “It has worked out very well. With your atomic power, you can put any amount of energy into the power beam we’ve showed you, for battle with our common enemy. It is odd that we made power beams to fuel our interplanetary ships because we didn’t have atomic energy, and you made atomic energy because you didn’t have power beams!”

  “There’ll be a lot of stuff that will fit together like that,” said Holden. “Our civilization will mesh nicely, as long as we trust each other.”

  “Yes,” said the Masan, somehow ruefully. “We intended to blast you to atoms, because we were afraid, and you intended to destroy our planets, because you were, also. I think both our races owe much to Buck.”

  “I still,” said Holden uncomfortably, “can’t see how you were able to trust us so completely. I don’t think we’d have trusted strangers as you do us. Just because of Buck—”

  “But it is because of Buck,” said the Masan wisely. “We could extract all of his memories. All of them. His kind adores men. He would accept any cruelty from you. But you are not cruel. He would give his life gladly, but no man would ask it. He is yours, unreservedly, but you do not accept from him without giving in return. Do you know when the policy of the Planetary Council, to trust men without limit, was finally decided?”

  “Why…no,” said Holden.

  “When you entered the airlock of our ship,” said the Masan, smiling, “and Buck met you. He had told us every secret he could impart. He had been almost a traitor, without knowing it. He had told us everything he knew of men. But when you entered our ship he leaped joyfully at you and you rolled on the floor together—you hugged him! You did not think of possible harm he had done. You were as glad to see him as he was to see you. That was when our policy was decided. Then we knew that men will always repay trust with loyalty.” Then the Masan added, “That is, most men.”

  Holden said uncomfortably:

  “Well—that’s something that has worried the skipper. You people act as if all of us were as decent as our dogs think us. We aren’t. You’ll have to be…well…a little cagey, sometimes…”

  “So,” said the Masan, “we learned from Buck. But also we learned that there will always be men to trust.”

  Buck came dashing madly up the dark-green lawn. Holden and the Masan scientist sat on a sort of terrace of the Masan’s home. Buck came racing up, panting happily, and thrust his muzzle into Holden’s hand. He gave the Masan a brief tail-wag and went dashing off again.

  “That,” said the Masan, “is something that he would never do to me, though I…yes…I think I like him as much as you do.”

  “That’s because he’s my dog,” said Holden. “But he treats you like a man. Didn’t you notice?”

  “True! I had not realized! But it is
true! Listen! We must have dogs, we Masans! Dogs to like us as they like men! And then no man who likes dogs can ever distrust a Masan who likes them also, and no Masan—” The Masan laughed. “We could not despise a man an honest dog had for a master! Our two races will be brothers!”

  * * * *

  That is all of the story about this one part of the hunt for the Space Assassins. Everybody knows that their home system was found, and everybody knows that when we tried to open negotiations with them their ships attacked us in a raging ferocity, and that there was no possible end to it but the extermination of men—and Masans—or of the Assassins. The battle was the first that was ever fought with power beams in Earth ships with Masan gunners. That’s history that everybody knows.

  But not everybody knows that there is a statue of Buck before the Planetary Council building on Masa Four. The Masans think it quite natural. They like dogs enormously, and dogs like them, too. The Masans already have a proverb that a dog is a Masan’s best friend. There’s no statue of Buck on Earth, though. But he doesn’t mind. Buck is a very happy dog.

  He’s with Holden. He follows him everywhere.

  *

  WEST WIND

  (Originally Published in 1948)

  CHAPTER 1

  Igor lay in a ditch while the search for him came to an inconclusive end. This was an age of science and atomic energy, but the soldiers blundered through crackling brush with the clumsiness of spear-armed troopers of five thousand years before. They did not find him. It was pitch-dark, with thick cloud-masses filling the sky, though here and there thinner spaces showed, through which the moon and some of the brighter stars appeared faintly. Presently they gave up the search. A whistle shrilled, over by the truck, and he heard the soldiers stumbling toward it. The truck’s headlights came on, and they were the only—absolutely the only—lights in all the world except the fugitive faint gleams in the sky. And the cloud-banks were piling up.

  There was a plane circling in the darkness overhead. It had been hunting him with an infra-red scanner, and picking up only the systematically moving figures of the men who hunted him. Igor was hidden from the sky by the thick foliage of a tree which overhung his ditch. Now the plane droned away to the westward. It had given up the hunt, too. The soldiers converged upon the waiting truck. Igor heard their voices. Somebody shouted, “Stefan! Stefan!” A voice answered, far away. It called again, moving toward the truck. Someone laughed, by the waiting vehicle. Some men climbed in. Igor heard their heavy boots on the floorboards. He began to make phrases in his own mind:

  “I heard the men who were hunting me laugh, because one of their number had salvaged some left-behind trifle from a deserted farmhouse! They laughed in the moment of the most monstrous disgrace in the history of their nation! They could laugh as they, the last armed men, left the land abandoned to an enemy without a blow struck or received…”

  The motor of the truck started up. The last man seemed to be running, not to be left behind. He swung aboard. The motor ground into first gear, and second, and third. The truck bumbled and growled away westward toward what was to be the new frontier. Igor was left alone.

  He climbed out of the ditch and saw the faint bright fingers of light which were the truck’s headlights flickering and jerking in the distance. He even saw, momentarily, the red taillight. Then the truck went over a low hill and was gone. But for minutes afterward he could still hear its faint and dwindling noise.

  He suddenly felt a little sickish at his stomach. Those men, those soldiers in the truck, were his countrymen. He’d hidden from them out of patriotism, and they’d gone on. Now they’d keep traveling until they caught up with the last wave of evacuation patrols—thirty miles away by now—and merge with them, and by morning they’d have reached the new frontier. Igor was the only living human being left in a good many thousand square miles. He felt abandoned. Even the patriotism of his current errand wasn’t comfort. But there was no comfort in patriotism, anyhow. It had made him become a political antagonist of the President of the Council of Ministers, though the President’s niece Elsa had looked kindly on him and he’d had hopes of her love. Naturally, those hopes were gone, now. He’d had to choose between hope of winning Elsa, and hope of serving his country without reward. He’d chosen, but there was no joy in it.

  He moved in a solitude greater than that of any marooned or shipwrecked sailor. Even the sound of the truck had ended. He came upon a stone fence. He knew that if he followed it he would come to a gateway and to an empty house. A deserted house, all its furniture and utensils remaining, but drawers open and ransacked, and all the precious personal possessions of its owners gone. The stables would be emptied. There wouldn’t even be a dog.

  He trudged toward the highroad. The night was warm and balmy, with a soft and sentimental west wind blowing. The feel of it on his cheek made him think irrelevantly of the old nursery-rhyme that had been taught him by his nurse:

  “The west wind, the west wind, it’s soft and it’s warm,

  Our old friend the west wind will guard us from harm.”

  The jingle had no more sense in it than any other folklore. Absurd!

  A mile to the north his transmitter was hidden. He’d pick that up, make a quick report, and then go on to the town two miles farther still. There’d be material for a magnificent broadcast there. He’d sacrificed Elsa and his hopes of advancement in his profession for the sake of making these broadcasts as a patriotic sacrifice. But a picture of a town of fifty thousand inhabitants, whose people had walked out of their houses never to return, and carrying only such objects as they could hold in their arms—that should rouse his countrymen! A town of intact, furnished, untouched homes, whose windows were unbroken and whose roof-tiles were still sound, lying dead and empty beneath the lowering clouds. His countrymen would be ashamed. He’d make them feel as he did, that it would have been better for the town to be obliterated in an atomic bomb crater than to be tamely yielded like this!

  He found the highway and marched toward his transmitter, half his mind busily making phrases and the other half savoring the queer, creeping horror of desertion. He automatically felt for the pistol in his pocket. Any crime could be committed here tonight, and there would be no conceivable punishment.

  But there was no one left to commit a crime! The army had been thorough. Known criminals were rounded up and taken away first. Then the inhabitants of slums, who would be least able to resist the temptation to loot. Then the middle classes, and the well-to-do last of all. The army had been efficient in evacuating the population it would not fight to defend. There had been praiseworthy speed and efficiency in moving the population of a province from its homes, leaving the homes intact and in perfect condition for the conquerors who would take them over without firing a shot.

  But Igor, left behind, was lonely! Even his shame at his country’s submission, even dramatic pictures forming in his mind of the proud holocaust that should have been—even these did not keep him from feeling a queer, lost-child desolation in the now-empty province. His heels were horribly loud on the metalled road. He heard insects in the fields about him. The mournful cry of a night-bird. But he walked quietly, because there was no one else within many, many miles.

  He found his transmitter. It had been concealed in a little patch of woodland, and he breathed quickly as he hunted for and found it. Absurdly, he gripped his revolver as he set up the directional antenna and waited for its tubes to warm. Then he angrily swore at himself for a fool. He threw the microphone-switch. He murmured into the mouthpiece:

  “Calling my fellow-citizens! Calling my fellow-citizens. I am speaking from the Province of Shame—”

  A voice said hurriedly into his earphones:

  “Call later, Igor. We’re having trouble with the recorder.”

  He disgustedly turned off the tubes. He stood up and slung the transmitter over his shoulder. He was abruptly and blessedly furious because he began to feel ridiculous. He had undertaken this task in the fine
high frenzy of raging patriotism. He could only find the Conservative Party to back him. It was the only one which, because it was hopelessly in the minority, could afford to oppose the national disgrace of giving in to his country’s traditional enemy. Igor had not liked it that in making his broadcasts he was helping a pack of pursy, asthmatic, well-fed politicians to make capital of his action. But they had agreed to record and re-broadcast his reports from the abandoned province as the enemy marched in. It should rouse his fellow-countrymen to the bitter resolution he himself felt—that it was better to die than to yield further—but at least the conservatives could have had competent technicians on the job to do the recording!

  He tramped on toward the town, coddling his anger to keep from the sick uneasiness the emptiness all about him provoked. He was twenty-four, and he’d kept his ideals even in the post-war debacle of all idealism. He’d clung doggedly to his belief that sacrifice for freedom was worth while, and that it was right and just that men should die for their country. And he was ready to die for his.

  Not that he was likely to be killed. Unless the first patrols of the enemy shot him down in sheer astonishment at seeing a living man in the abandoned province, he would at worst be taken prisoner. After that, of course, he couldn’t know what would happen. He had toyed with the idea of getting himself killed as the enemy troops rolled in. But it wouldn’t have been even a good gesture, merely silliness. He was sourly disillusioned about even this errand, now. The Conservatives not even having a recorder ready to pick up his report, after having enthusiastically accepted his offer to witness and report the occupation as a means of rousing his country’s sense of shame!

  He plodded on. He knew that he was nearing the town by the silence before him. All the fields were filled with insanely cheerful, stridulating insects. Ahead was stillness. Empty cobbled streets. Dark and empty houses. A town which lacked only humans to be alive, and was dead because its humans had lacked the courage to fight. The familiar sickish rage filled Igor again.