First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  Then something stirred in the doorway of the air lock anteroom. A shadow crossed the threshold. And then the Earthmen saw the creatures who were invading the ship.

  For an instant they seemed almost like men. They had two legs, and two dangling things—tentacles—which apparently served as arms and tapered smoothly to ends which split into movable, slender filaments. The tentacles and the legs alike seemed flexible in their entire lengths. There were no “joints” such as men use in walking, and the result was that the Centaurians walked with a curiously rolling gait.

  Most startling, though, was the fact that they had no heads. They came wabbling accustomedly out of the air lock, and at the end of one arm each carried a curious, semicylindrical black object which they handled as if it might be a weapon. They wore metallic packs fastened to their bodies. The bodies themselves were queerly “grained.” There was a tantalizing familiarity about the texture of their skin.

  Jack, staring incredulously, looked for eyes, for nostrils, for a mouth. He saw twin slits only. He guessed at them for eyes. He saw no sign of any mouth at all. There was no hair. But he saw a scabrous, brownish substance on the back of one of the Things which turned to hoot excitedly at the rest. It looked like bark, like tree bark. And a light burst upon Jack. He almost cried out, but instead reached down and quietly put the lever of his force gun at full power at once.

  The Things moved on. They reached a branching corridor and after much arm waving and production of their apparently articulated sounds they separated into two parties. They vanished. Their voices dwindled. The signal for an attack upon them had not yet been given. The officers, left behind, stirred uneasily. But a G.C. phone whispered.

  “Steady! They think we’re all dead. They’re separating again. We may be able to close emergency doors and have each one sealed off from all the rest and then handle them in detail. You men watch the air lock!”

  Silence. The humming of a ventilator somewhere near by. Then, suddenly, a man screamed shrilly a long distance off, and on the heels of his outcry there came a new noise from one of the Things. It was a high-pitched squealing noise, triumphant and joyous and unspeakably horrible.

  Other squealings answered it. There were rushing sounds, as if the other Things were running to join the first. And then came a hissing of compressed air and a hum of motors. Doors snapped shut everywhere, sealing off every part of the ship from every other part. And in the dead silence of their own sealed compartment, the officers on guard suddenly heard inquiring hoots.

  Two more of the Things came out of the air lock. One of the men moved. The Thing saw him and turned its half-cylindrical object upon him. The man—it was the communications officer—shrieked suddenly and leaped convulsively. He was stone dead even as his muscles tensed for that incredible leap.

  And the Thing emitted a high-pitched, triumphant note which was exactly like the other horrible sound they had heard, and sped eagerly toward the body. One of the long, tapering arms lashed out and touched the dead man’s hand.

  Then Jack’s force gun began to hum. He heard another and another open up. In seconds the air was filled with a sound like that of a hive of angry bees. Three more of the Things came out of the air lock, but they dropped in the barrage of force-gun beams. It was only when there was a sudden rush of air toward the lock, showing that the enemy ship had taken alarm and was darting away, that the men dared cease to fill that doorway with their barrage. Then it was necessary to seal the air lock in a hurry. Only then could they secure the Things that had invaded the Adastra.

  Two hours later, Jack went into the main control room and saluted with an exact precision. His face was rather white and his expression entirely dogged and resolved. Alstair turned to him, scowling.

  “I sent for you,” he said harshly, “because you’re likely to be a source of trouble. The commander is dead. You heard it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jack. “I heard it.”

  “In consequence, I am commander of the Adastra,” said Alstair provocatively. “I have, you will recall, the power of life and death in cases of mutinous conduct, and it is also true that marriage on the Adastra is made legal only by executive order bearing my signature.”

  “I am aware of the fact, sir,” said Jack.

  “Very well,” said Alstair deliberately. “For the sake of discipline, I order you to refrain from all association with Miss Bradley. I shall take disobedience of the order as mutiny. I intend to marry her myself. What have you to say to that?”

  Jack said as deliberately: “I shall pay no attention to the order, sir, because you aren’t fool enough to carry out such a threat! Are you such a fool that you don’t see we’ve less than one chance in five hundred of coming out of this? If you want to marry Helen, you’d better put all your mind on giving her a chance to live!”

  A savage silence held for a moment. The two men glared furiously at each other, the one near middle age, the other still a young man, indeed. Then Alstair showed his teeth in a smile that had no mirth whatever in it.

  “As man to man I dislike you extremely,” he said harshly. “But as commander of the Adastra I wish I had a few more like you. We’ve had seven years of routine on this damned ship, and every officer in quarters is rattled past all usefulness because an emergency has come at last. They’ll obey orders, but there’s not one fit to give them. The communications officer was killed by one of those devils, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well. You’re brevet communications officer. I hate your guts, Gary, and I do not doubt that you hate mine, but you have brains. Use them now. What have you been doing?”

  “Adjusting a dictawriter, sir, to get a vocabulary of one of these Centaurians’ speech, and hooking it up as a two-way translator, sir.”

  Alstair stared in momentary surprise, and then nodded. A dictawriter, of course, simply analyzes a word into its phonetic parts, sets up the analysis and picks out a card to match its formula. Normally, the card then actuates a printer. However, instead of a type-choosing record, the card can contain a record of an equivalent word in another language, and then operates a speaker.

  Such machines have been of only limited use on Earth because of the need for so large a stock of vocabulary words, but have been used to some extent for literal translations both of print and speech. Jack proposed to record a Centaurian’s vocabulary with English equivalents, and the dictawriter, hearing the queer hoots the strange creature uttered, would pick out a card which would then cause a speaker to enunciate its English synonym.

  The reverse, of course, would also occur. A conversation could be carried on with such a prepared vocabulary without awaiting practice in understanding or imitating the sounds of another language.

  “Excellent!” said Alstair curtly. “But put some one else on the job if you can. It should be reasonably simple, once it’s started. But I need you for other work. You know what’s been found out about these Centaurians, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. Their hand weapon is not unlike our force guns, but it seems to be considerably more effective. I saw it kill the communications officer.”

  “But the creatures themselves!”

  “I helped tie one of them up.”

  “What do you make of it? I’ve a physician’s report, but he doesn’t believe it himself!”

  “I don’t blame him, sir,” said Jack grimly. “They’re not our idea of intelligent beings at all. We haven’t any word for what they are. In one sense they’re plants, apparently. That is, their bodies seem to be composed of cellulose fibers where ours are made of muscle fibers. But they are intelligent, fiendishly intelligent.

  “The nearest we have to them on Earth are certain carnivorous plants, like pitcher plants and the like. But they’re as far above a pitcher plant as a man is above a sea anemone, which is just as much an animal as a man is. My guess, sir, would be that they’re neither plant nor animal. Their bodies are built up of the same materials as earthly plants, but they move about lik
e animals do on Earth. They surprise us, but we may surprise them, too. It’s quite possible that the typical animal form on their planet is sessile like the typical plant form on ours.”

  Alstair said bitterly: “And they look on us, animals, as we look on plants!”

  Jack said without expression: “Yes, sir. They eat through holes in their arms. The one who killed the communications officer seized his arm. It seemed to exude some fluid that liquefied his flesh instantly. It sucked the liquid back in at once. If I may make a guess, sir—”

  “Go ahead,” snapped Alstair. “Everybody else is running around in circles, either marveling or sick with terror.”

  “The leader of the party, sir, had on what looked like an ornament. It was a band of leather around one of its arms.”

  “Now, what the devil—”

  “We had two men killed. One was the communications officer and the other was an orderly. When we finally subdued the Centaurian who’d killed that orderly, it had eaten a small bit of him, but the rest of the orderly’s body had undergone some queer sort of drying process, from chemicals the Thing seemed to carry with it.”

  Alstair’s throat worked as if in nausea. “I saw it.”

  “It’s a fanciful idea,” said Jack grimly, “but if a man were in the position of that Centaurian, trapped in a space ship belonging to an alien race, with death very probably before him, well, about the only thing a man would strap to his body, as the Centaurian did the dried, preserved body of that orderly—”

  “Would be gold,” snapped Alstair. “Or platinum, or jewels which he would hope to fight clear with!”

  “Just so,” said Jack. “Now, I’m only guessing, but those creatures are not human, nor even animals. Yet they eat animal food. They treasure animal food as a human being would treasure diamonds. An animal’s remains—leather—they wear as an ornament. It looks to me as if animal tissue was rather rare on their planet, to be valued so highly. In consequence—”

  Alstair stood up, his features working. “Then our bodies would be the same as gold to them! As diamonds! Gary, we haven’t the ghost of a chance to make friends with these fiends!”

  Jack said dispassionately, “No; I don’t think we have. If a race of beings with tissues of metallic gold landed on Earth, I rather think they’d be murdered. But there’s another point, too. There’s Earth. From our course, these creatures can tell where we came from, and their space ships are rather good. I think I’ll put somebody else on the dictawriter job and see if I can flash a message back home. No way to know whether they get it, but they ought to be watching for one by the time it’s there. Maybe they’ve improved their receptors. They intended to try, anyhow.”

  “Men could meet these creatures’ ships in space,” said Alstair harshly, “if they were warned. And guns might answer, but if they didn’t handle these devils, Caldwell torpedoes would. Or a suicide squad, using their bodies for bait. We’re talking like dead men, Gary.”

  “I think, sir,” said Jack, “we are dead men.” Then he added, “I shall put Helen Bradley on the dictawriter, with a guard to handle the Centaurian. He’ll be bound tightly.”

  The statement tacitly assumed that Alstair’s order to avoid her was withdrawn. It was even a challenge to him to repeat it. And Alstair’s eyes glowed and he controlled himself with difficulty.

  “Damn you, Gary,” he said savagely, “get out!”

  He turned to the visiplate which showed the enemy ship as Jack left the control room.

  The egg-shaped ship was two thousand miles away now, and just decelerating to a stop. In its first flight it had rocketed here and there like a mad thing. It would have been impossible to hit it with any projectile, and difficult in the extreme even to keep radiation on it in anything like a tight beam. Now, stopped stock-still with regard to the Adastra, it hung on, observing, very probably devising some new form of devilment. So Alstair considered, anyhow. He watched it somberly.

  The resources of the Adastra, which had seemed so vast when she took off from Earth, were pitifully inadequate to handle the one situation which had greeted her, hostility. She could have poured out the treasures of man’s civilization to the race which ruled this solar system. Savages, she could have uplifted. Even to a race superior to men she could have offered man’s friendship and eager pupilage. But these creatures—

  The space ship stayed motionless. Probably signaling back to its home planet, demanding orders. Reports came in to the Adastra’s main control room and Alstair read them. The Centaurians were unquestionably extracting carbon dioxide from the air. That compound was to their metabolism what oxygen is to men, and in pure air they could not live.

  But their metabolic rate was vastly greater than that of any plant on Earth. It compared with the rate of earthly animals. They were not plants by any definition save that of constitution, as a sea anemone is not an animal except by the test of chemical analysis.

  The Centaurians had a highly organized nervous system, the equivalent of brains, and both great intelligence and a language. They produced sounds by a stridulating organ in a special body cavity. And they felt emotion.

  A captive creature when presented with various objects showed special interest in machinery, showing an acute realization of the purpose of a small sound recorder and uttering into it an entire and deliberate series of sounds. Human clothing it fingered eagerly. Cloth it discarded, when of cotton or rayon, but it displayed great excitement at the feel of a woolen shirt and even more when a leather belt was given to it. It placed the belt about its middle, fastening the buckle without a fumble after a single glance at its working.

  It unraveled a thread from the shirt and consumed it, rocking to and fro as if in ecstasy. When meat was placed before it, it seemed to become almost delirious with excitement. A part of the meat it consumed instantly, to ecstatic swayings. The rest it preserved by a curious chemical process, using substances from a small metal pack it had worn and for which it made gestures.

  Its organs of vision were behind two slits in the upper part of its body, and no precise examination of the eyes themselves had been made. But the report before Alstair said specifically that the Centaurian displayed an avid eagerness whenever it caught sight of a human being. And that the eagerness was not of a sort to be reassuring.

  It was the sort of excitement—only much greater—which it had displayed at the sight of wool and leather. As if by instinct, said the report, the captive Centaurian had several times made a gesture as if turning some weapon upon a human when first it sighted him.

  Alstair read this report and others. Helen Bradley reported barely two hours after Jack had assigned her to the work.

  “I’m sorry, Helen,” said Alstair ungraciously. “You shouldn’t have been called on for duty. Gary insisted on it. I’d have left you alone.”

  “I’m glad he did,” said Helen steadily. “Father is dead, to be sure, but he was quite content. And he died before he found out what these Centaurians are like. Working was good for me. I’ve succeeded much better than I even hoped. The Centaurian I worked with was the leader of the party which invaded this ship. He understood almost at once what the dictawriter was doing, and we’ve a good vocabulary recorded already. If you want to talk to him, you can.”

  Alstair glanced at the visiplate. The enemy ship was still motionless. Easily understandable, of course. The Adastra’s distance from Proxima Centauri could be measured in hundreds of millions of miles, now, instead of millions of millions, but in another terminology it was light-hours away still. If the space ship had signaled its home planet for orders, it would still be waiting for a reply.

  Alstair went heavily to the biology laboratory, of which Helen was in charge, just as she was in charge of the biological specimens—rabbits, sheep, and a seemingly endless array of small animals—which on the voyage had been bred for a food supply and which it had been planned to release should a planet suitable for colonizing revolve about the ringed star.

  The Centaurian was bou
nd firmly to a chair with a myriad of cords. He—she—it was utterly helpless. Beside the chair the dictawriter and its speaker were coupled together. From the Centaurian came hooted notes which the machine translated with a rustling sound between words.

  “You—are—commander—this—ship?” the machine translated without intonation.

  “I am,” said Alstair, and the machine hooted musically.

  “This—woman—man—dead,” said the machine tonelessly again, after more sounds from the extraordinary living thing which was not an animal.

  Helen interjected swiftly: “I told him my father was dead.”

  The machine went on: “I—buy—all—dead—man—on—ship—give—metal—gold—you—like—”

  Alstair’s teeth clicked together. Helen went white. She tried to speak, and choked upon the words.

  “This,” said Alstair in mirthless bitterness, “is the beginning of the interstellar friendship we hoped to institute!”

  Then the G.C. phone said abruptly:

  “Calling Commander Alstair! Radiation from ahead! Several wave lengths, high intensity! Apparently several space ships are sending, though we can make out no signals!”

  And then Jack Gary came into the biology laboratory. His face was set in grim lines. It was very white. He saluted with great precision.

  “I didn’t have to work hard, sir,” he said sardonically. “The last communications officer had been taking his office more or less as a sinecure. We’d had no signals for seven years, and he didn’t expect any. But they’re coming through and have been for months.

  “They left Earth three years after we did. A chap named Callaway, it seems, found that a circularly polarized wave makes a tight beam that will hold together forever. They’ve been sending to us for years past, no doubt, and we’re getting some of the first messages now.

  “They’ve built a second Adastra, sir, and it’s being manned—hell, no! It was manned four years ago! It’s on the way out here now! It must be at least three years on the way, and it has no idea of these devils waiting for it. Even if we blow ourselves to bits, sir, there’ll be another ship from Earth coming, unarmed as we are, to run into these devils when it’s too late to stop—”