First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  “Kissed by Monsieur le Duc?” The stranger stared frankly. “Mon dieu! Where have you come from that you do not recognize Louis the Twentieth? He has but departed from a visit to madame his mistress.”

  “Louis—Louis the Twentieth!” stammered the deputy from Aisne-le-Sur. “I—I do not understand!”

  “Fool!” said the stranger impatiently. “That was the king of France, who succeeded his father as a child of ten and has been free of the regency for but six months—and already ruins France!”

  The long-distance operator plugged in with a shaking hand. “Number please…I am sorry, sir, but we are unable to connect you with Camden…The lines are down…Very sorry, sir.” She plugged in another line. “Hello…I am sorry, sir, but we are unable to connect you with Jenkintown. The lines are down…Very sorry, sir.”

  Another call buzzed and lighted up.

  “Hello…I am sorry, sir. We are unable to connect you with Dover. The lines are down…” Her hands worked automatically. “Hello…I am sorry, but we are unable to connect you with New York. The lines are down…No, sir. We cannot route it by Atlantic City. The lines are down…Yes, sir, I know the telegraph companies cannot guarantee delivery…No, sir, we cannot reach Pittsburgh, either, to get a message through…” Her voice quivered. “No, sir, the lines are down to Scranton…And Harrisburg, too. Yes, sir…I am sorry, but we cannot get a message of any sort out of Philadelphia in any direction…We have tried to arrange communication by radio, but no calls are answered…”

  She covered her face with her hands for an instant. Then she plugged in and made a call herself:

  “Minnie! Haven’t they heard anything?…Not anything?…What? They phoned for more police?…The—the operator out there says there’s fighting? She hears a lot of shooting?…What is it, Minnie?? Don’t they even know?…They-they’re using the armored cars from the banks to fight with, too?…But what are they fighting? What?…My folks are out there, Minnie! My folks are out there!”

  The doorway of the slave barracks closed and great bars slammed against its outer side. Reeking, foul, unbreathable air closed about them like a wave. Then a babbling of voices all about. The clanking of chains. The rustling of straw, as if animals moved. Some one screeched; howled above the others. He began to gain the ascendancy. There was almost some attention paid to him, though a minor babbling continued all about.

  Maida said in a strained voice: “I—I can catch a word here and there. He’s—telling these other slaves how we were captured. It’s—Latin, of sorts.”

  Bertha Ketterling squalled suddenly, in the absolute dark. “Somebody touched me!” she bawled. “A man!”

  A voice spoke humorously, somewhere near. There was laughter. It was the howled laughter of animals. Slaves were animals, according to the Roman notion. A rustling noise, as if in the noisome freedom of their barracks the utterly brutalized slaves drew nearer to the newcomers. There could be sport with new-captured folk, not yet degraded to their final status.

  Lucy Blair cried out in a stifled fashion. There was a sharp, incisive crack. Somebody fell. More laughter.

  “I knocked him out!” snapped Minott. “Harris! Hunter! Feel around for something we can use as clubs! These slaves intend to haze us, and in their own den there’s no attempt to control them. Even if they kill us they’ll only be whipped for it. And the women will—”

  Something, snarling, leaped for him in the darkness. The authoritative tone of Minott’s voice was hateful. A yapping sound arose. Other figures closed in. Reduced to the status of animals, the slaves of the Romans behaved as beasts when locked in their monster kennel. The newcomers were hateful if only because they had been freemen, not slaves. The women were clean and they were frightened—and they were prey. Chains clanked ominously. Foul breaths tainted the air. The reek of utter depravity, of human beings brought lower than beasts, filled the air. It was utterly dark.

  Bertha Ketterling began to blubber noisily. There was the sudden savage sound of a blow meeting flesh. Then pandemonium and battle, and the sudden terrified screams of Lucy Blair. The panting of men who fought. The sound of blows. A man howled. Another shrieked curses. A woman screamed shrilly.

  Bang! Bang! Bang-bang! Shots outside, a veritable fusillade of them. Running feet. Shouts. The bars at the doorway fell. The great doors opened, and men stood in the opening with whips and torches, bellowing for the slaves to come out and attack something yet unknown. They were being called from their kennel like dogs. Four of the whip men came inside, flogging the slaves out, while the sound of shots continued. The slaves shrank away, or bounded howling for the open air. But there were three of them who would never shrink or cringe again.

  Minott and Harris stood embattled in a corner of the slave shed. Lucy Blair, her hair disheveled, crouched behind Minott, who held a heavy beam in desperate readiness for further battle. Harris, likewise, held a clumsy club. With torchlight upon him, his air of savage defiance turned to one of quaint apology for the dead slave at his feet. And Hunter and two of the girls competed in stark panic for a position behind him. Maida Haynes, dead white, stood backed against a wall, a jagged fragment of gnawed bone held dagger-wise.

  The whips lashed out at them. Voices snarled at them. The whips again. Minott struck out furiously, a huge welt across his face.

  And revolvers cracked at the great door. Blake stood there, a revolver in each hand, his eyes blazing. A torchbearer dropped, and the torches flared smokily in the foul mud of the flooring.

  “All right,” said Blake fiercely. “Come on out!”

  Hunter was the first to reach him, babbling and gasping. There was sheer uproar all about. A huge grain shed roared upward in flames. Figures rushed crazily all about it. From the flames came another explosion, then two, then three more.

  “Horses over here by the stables,” said Blake, his face white and very deadly indeed. “They haven’t unsaddled them. The stable slaves haven’t figured out the cinches yet. I put some revolver bullets in the straw when I set fire to that grain shed. They’re going off from time to time.”

  A figure with whip and dagger raced around an outbuilding and confronted them. Blake shot him down.

  Minott said hoarsely: “Give me a revolver, Blake! I want to—”

  “Horses first!” snapped Blake.

  They raced into a courtyard. Two shots. The slaves fled, howling. Out of the courtyard, bent low in the saddle. They swept close to the villa itself. On a little raised terrace before it, a stout man in an only slightly modified toga raged. A slave groveled before him. He kicked the abject figure and strode out, shouting commands in a voice that cracked with fury. The horses loomed up and he shook his fists at the riders, purple with wrath, incapable of fear because of his beastly rage.

  Blake shot him dead, swung off his horse, and stripped the toga from him. He flung it to Maida.

  “Take this!” he said savagely. “I could kill—”

  There was now no question of his leadership. He led the retreat from the villa. The eight horses headed north again, straight for the luridly flaming forest.

  They stopped once more. Behind them, another building of the estate had caught from the first. Sheer confusion ruled. The slaughter of the master disrupted all organization. The roof of the slave barracks caught: Screams and howls of pure panic reached even the fugitives. Then there were racing, maddened figures rushing here and there in the glare of the fires. Suddenly there was fighting. A howling ululation arose.

  Minott worked savagely, stripping clothing from the bodies slain in that incredible, unrecorded conflict of Confederate soldiers and Roman troops, in some unguessable pathway of space and time. Blake watched behind, but he curtly commanded the salvaging of rifles and ammunition from the dead Confederates—if they were Confederates.

  And as Hunter, still gasping hysterically, took the load of yet unfamiliar weapons upon his horse, the eight felt a certain incredible, intolerable vertigo and nausea. The burning forest ahead vanished from their sight. I
nstead, there was darkness. A noisome smell came down wind; dampness and strange, overpowering perfumes of strange, colored flowers. Something huge and deadly bellowed in the space before them, which smelled like a monstrous swamp.

  The liner City of Baltimore plowed through the open sea in the first pale light of dawn. The skipper, up on the bridge, wore a worried frown. The radio operator came up. He carried a sheaf of radiogram forms. His eyes were blurry with loss of sleep.

  “Maybe it was me, sir,” he reported heavily. “I felt awful funny for a while last night, and then all night long I couldn’t raise a station. I checked everything and couldn’t find anything wrong. But just now I felt awful sick and funny for a minute, and when I come out of it the air was full of code. Here’s some of it. I don’t understand how I could have been sick so I couldn’t hear code, sir, but—”

  The skipper said abruptly: “I had that sick feeling, too—dizzy. So did the man at the wheel. So did everybody. Give me the messages.”

  His eyes ran swiftly over the yellow forms.

  “News flash: Half of London disappeared at 2:00 a.m. this morning…S.S. Manzanillo reporting. Sea serpent which attacked this ship during the night and seized four sailors returned and was rammed five minutes ago. It seems to be dying. Our bow badly smashed. Two forward compartments flooded…Warning to all mariners. Pack ice seen floating fifty miles off New York harbor…News flash: Madrid, Spain, has undergone inexplicable change. All buildings formerly known now unrecognizable from the air. Air fields have vanished. Mosques seem to have taken the place of churches and cathedrals. A flag bearing the crescent floats…European population of Calcutta seems to have been massacred. S.S. Carib reports harbor empty, all signs of European domination vanished, and hostile mobs lining shore…”

  The skipper of the City of Baltimore passed his hand over his forehead. He looked uneasily at the radio operator. “Sparks,” he said gently, “you’d better go see the ship’s doctor. Here! I’ll detail a man to go with you.”

  “I know,” said Sparks bitterly. “I guess I’m nuts, all right. But that’s what come through.”

  He marched away with his head hanging, escorted by a sailor. A little speck of smoke appeared dead ahead. It became swiftly larger. With the combined speed of the two vessels, in a quarter of an hour the other ship was visible. In half an hour it could be made out clearly. It was long and low and painted black, but the first incredible thing was that it was a paddle steamer, with two sets of paddles instead of one, and the after set revolving more swiftly than the forward.

  The skipper of the City of Baltimore looked more closely through his glasses and nearly dropped them in stark amazement. The flag flying on the other ship was black and white only. A beam wind blew it out swiftly. A white death’s-head, with two crossed bones below it—the traditional flag of piracy!

  Signal flags fluttered up in the rigging of the other ship. The skipper of the City of Baltimore gazed at them, stunned.

  “Gibberish!” he muttered. “It don’t make sense! They aren’t international code. Not the same flags at all!”

  Then a gun spoke. A monstrous puff of black powder smoke billowed over the other ship’s bow. A heavy shot crashed into the forepart of the City of Baltimore: An instant later it exploded.

  “I’m crazy, too!” said the skipper dazedly.

  A second shot. A third and fourth. The black steamer sheered off and started to pound the City of Baltimore in a businesslike fashion. Half the bridge went overside. The forward cargo hatch blew up with a cloud of smoke from an explosion underneath.

  Then the skipper came to. He roared orders. The big ship heeled as it came around. It plunged forward at vastly more than its normal cruising speed. The guns on the other ship doubled and redoubled their rate of fire. Then the black ship tried to dodge. But it had not time.

  The City of Baltimore rammed it. But at the very last moment the skipper felt certain of his own insanity. It was too late to save the other ship then. The City of Baltimore cut it in two.

  XII

  The pale gray light of dawn filtered down through an incredible thickness of foliage. It was a subdued, a feeble twilight when it reached the earth where a tiny camp fire burned. That fire gave off thick smoke from water-soaked wood. Hunter tended it, clad in ill-assorted remnants of a gray uniform.

  Harris worked patiently at a rifle, trying to understand exactly how it worked. It was unlike any rifle with which he was familiar. The bolt action was not really a bolt action at all, and he’d noticed that there was no rifling in the barrel. He was trying to understand how the long bullet was made to revolve. Harris, too, had substituted Confederate gray for the loin cloth flung him for sole covering when with the others he was thrust into the slave pen of the Roman villa. Minott sat with his head in his hands, staring at the opposite side of the stream. On his face was all bitterness.

  Blake listened. Maida Haynes sat and looked at him. Lucy Blair darted furtive, somehow wistful, glances at Minott. Presently she moved to sit beside him. She asked him an anxious question. The other two girls sat by the fire. Bertha Ketterling was slouched back against a tree-fern trunk. Her head had fallen back. She snored. With the exception of Blake, all of them were barefoot.

  Blake came back to the fire. He nodded across the little stream. “We seem to have come to the edge of a time fault,” he observed. “This side of the stream is definitely Carboniferous-period vegetation. The other side isn’t as primitive, but it isn’t of our time, anyhow. Professor Minott!”

  Minott lifted his head. “Well?” he demanded bitterly.

  “We need some information,” said Blake. “We’ve been here for hours, and there’s been no further change in time paths that we’ve noticed. Is it likely that the scrambling of time and space is ended, sir? If it has, and the time paths stay jumbled, we’ll never find our world intact, of course, but we can hunt for colonies, perhaps even cities, of our own kind of people.”

  “If we do,” said Minott bitterly, “how far will we get? We’re practically unarmed. We can’t—”

  Blake pointed to the salvaged rifles. “Harris is working on the arms problem now,” he said dryly. “Besides, the girls didn’t take the revolvers from their saddlebags. We’ve still two revolvers for each man and an extra pair. Those Romans thought the saddlebags were decorations, perhaps, or they intended to examine the saddles as a whole. We’ll make out. What I want to know is, has the time-scrambling process stopped?”

  Lucy Blair said something in a low tone: But Minott glanced at Maida Haynes. She was regarding Blake worshipfully. Minott’s eyes burned. He scowled in surpassing bitterness. “It probably hasn’t,” he said harshly. “I expect it to keep up for probably two weeks or more of—of duration. I use that term to mean time elapsed in all the time paths simultaneously. We can’t help thinking of time as passing on our particular time path only. Yes. I expect disturbances to continue for two weeks or more, if everything in time and space is not annihilated.”

  Blake sat down.

  Insensibly Maida Haynes moved closer to him. “Could you explain, sir? We can only wait here. As nearly as I can tell from the topography, there’s a village across this little stream in our time. It ought to be in sight if our time path ever turns up in view, here.”

  Minott unconsciously reassumed some of his former authoritative manner. Their capture and scornful dismissal to the status of slaves had shaken all his self-confidence. Before, he had felt himself not only a member of a superior race, but a superior member of that race. In being enslaved he had been both degraded and scorned. His vanity was still gnawed at by that memory and his self-confidence shattered by the fact that he had been able to kill only two utterly brutalized slaves, without in the least contributing to his own freedom. Now, for the first time, his voice took on a semblance of its old ring.

  “We—we know that gravity warps space,” he said precisely. “From observation we have been able to discover the amount of warping produced by a given mass. We can calcula
te the mass necessary to warp space so that it will close in completely, making a closed universe which is unreachable and undetectable in any of the dimensions we know. We know, for example, that if two gigantic star masses of a certain combined mass were to rush together, at the instant of their collision there would not be a great cataclysm. They would simply vanish. But they would not cease to exist. They would merely cease to exist in our space and time. They would have created a space and time of their own.”

  Harris said apologetically: “Like crawling in a hole and pulling the hole in after you. I read something like that in a Sunday supplement once, sir.”

  Minott nodded. He went on in a near approach to a classroom manner. “Now, imagine that two such universes have been formed. They are both invisible from the space and time in which they were formed. Each exists in its own space and time, just as our universe does. But each must also exist in a certain—well, hyper-space, because if closed spaces are separated, there must be some sort of something in between them, else they would be together.”

  “Really,” said Blake, “you’re talking about something we can infer, but ordinarily can’t possibly learn anything about by observation.”

  “Just so,” Minott nodded. “Still, if our space is closed, we must assume that there are other closed spaces. And don’t forget that other closed spaces would be as real—are as real—as our closed space is.”

  “But what does it mean?” asked Blake.

  “If there are other closed spaces like ours, and they exist in a common medium—the hyper-space from which they and we alike are sealed off—they might be likened to, say, stars and planets in our space, which are separated by space and yet affect each other through space. Since these various closed spaces are separated by a logically necessary hyper-space, it is at least probable that they should affect each other through that hyper-space.”

  Blake said slowly: “Then the shiftings of time paths—well, they’re the result of something on the order of tidal strains. If another star got close to the sun, our planets would crack up from tidal strains alone. You’re suggesting that another closed space has got close to our closed space in hyper-space. It’s awfully confused, sir.”