First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  Another shaky question.

  “Me?” asked Pop. “Oh, I’m going to raise what hell I can. There’s some stuff in that ship I want.”

  He switched off the phone. He went over to his air-apparatus. He took down the cannister of diamonds which were worth five millions or more back on Earth. He found a bucket. He dumped the diamonds casually into it. They floated downward with great deliberation and surged from side to side like a liquid when they stopped. One-sixth gravity.

  Pop regarded his drawings meditatively. A sketch of his wife as he now remembered her. It was very good to remember. A drawing of his two children, playing together. He looked forward to remembering much more about them. He grinned.

  “That stair-rail,” he said in deep satisfaction. “That’ll do it!”

  He tore bed linen from his bunk and worked on the emptied cannister. It was a double container with a thermware interior lining. Even on Earth newly-mined diamonds sometimes fly to pieces from internal stress. On the Moon, it was not desirable that diamonds be exposed to repeated violent changes of temperature. So a thermware-lined cannister kept them at mine-temperature once they were warmed to touchability.

  Pop packed the cotton cloth in the container. He hurried a little, because the men in the rocket were shaky and might not practice patience. He took a small emergency-lamp from his spare spacesuit. He carefully cracked its bulb, exposing the filament within. He put the lamp on top of the cotton and sprinkled magnesium marking-powder over everything. Then he went to the air-apparatus and took out a flask of the liquid oxygen used to keep his breathing-air in balance. He poured the frigid, pale-blue stuff into the cotton. He saturated it.

  All the inside of the shack was foggy when he finished. Then he pushed the cannister-top down. He breathed a sigh of relief when it was in place. He’d arranged for it to break a frozen-brittle switch as it descended. When it came off, the switch would light the lamp with its bare filament. There was powdered magnesium in contact with it and liquid oxygen all about.

  He went out of the shack by the air-lock. On the way, thinking about Sattell, he suddenly recovered a completely new memory. On their first wedding anniversary, so long ago, he and his wife had gone out to dinner to celebrate. He remembered how she looked: the almost-smug joy they shared that they would be together for always, with one complete year for proof.

  Pop reflected hungrily that it was something else to be made permanent and inspected from time to time. But he wanted more than a drawing of this! He wanted to make the memory permanent and to extend it—

  If it had not been for his vacuum suit and the cannister he carried, Pop would have rubbed his hands.

  Tall, jagged crater-walls rose from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended inky shadows stretched enormous distances, utterly black. The sun, like a glowing octopod, floated low at the edge of things and seemed to hate all creation.

  Pop reached the rocket. He climbed the welded ladder-rungs to the air-lock. He closed the door. Air whined. His suit sagged against his body. He took off his helmet.

  When the red-headed man opened the inner door, the hand-weapon shook and trembled. Pop said calmly:

  “Now I’ve got to go handle the hoist, if Sattell’s coming up from the mine. If I don’t do it, he don’t come up.”

  The red-headed man snarled. But his eyes were on the cannister whose contents should weigh a hundred pounds on Earth.

  “Any tricks,” he rasped, “and you know what happens!”

  “Yeah,” said Pop.

  He stolidly put his helmet back on. But his eyes went past the red-headed man to the stair that wound down, inside the ship, from some compartment above. The stair-rail was pure, clear, water-white plastic, not less than three inches thick. There was a lot of it!

  The inner door closed. Pop opened the outer. Air rushed out. He climbed painstakingly down to the ground. He started back toward the shack.

  There was the most luridly bright of all possible flashes. There was no sound, of course. But something flamed very brightly, and the ground thumped under Pop Young’s vacuum boots. He turned.

  The rocketship was still in the act of flying apart. It had been a splendid explosion. Of course cotton sheeting in liquid oxygen is not quite as good an explosive as carbon-black, which they used down in the mine. Even with magnesium powder to start the flame when a bare light-filament ignited it, the cannister-bomb hadn’t equaled—say—T.N.T. But the ship had fuel on board for the trip back to Earth. And it blew, too. It would be minutes before all the fragments of the ship returned to the Moon’s surface. On the Moon, things fall slowly.

  Pop didn’t wait. He searched hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating fell only yards from him, but it did not interrupt his search.

  When he went into the shack, he grinned to himself. The call-light of the vision-phone flickered wildly. When he took off his helmet the bell clanged incessantly. He answered. A shaking voice from the mining-colony panted:

  “We felt a shock! What happened? What do we do?”

  “Don’t do a thing,” advised Pop. “It’s all right. I blew up the ship and everything’s all right. I wouldn’t even mention it to Sattell if I were you.”

  He grinned happily down at a section of plastic stair-rail he’d found not too far from where the ship exploded. When the man down in the mine cut off, Pop got out of his vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed the plastic zestfully on the table where he’d been restricted to drawing pictures of his wife and children in order to recover memories of them.

  He began to plan, gloatingly, the thing he would carve out of a four-inch section of the plastic. When it was carved, he’d paint it. While he worked, he’d think of Sattell, because that was the way to get back the missing portions of his life—the parts Sattell had managed to get away from him. He’d get back more than ever, now!

  He didn’t wonder what he’d do if he ever remembered the crime Sattell had committed. He felt, somehow, that he wouldn’t get that back until he’d recovered all the rest.

  Gloating, it was amusing to remember what people used to call such art-works as he planned, when carved by other lonely men in other faraway places. They called those sculptures scrimshaw.

  But they were a lot more than that!

  SYMBIOSIS

  Surgeon General Mors was out in the rural districts of Kantolia Province, patiently arguing peasants into allowing the vaccination of their pigs and the inoculation of their families, when the lightning occupation took place.

  There was no declaration of war, of course. Parachutists simply began to drop out of a predawn sky an hour before sunrise; at the same time, jet planes sprayed the quiet empty streets of Stadheim, the provincial capital, with machine-gun bullets, which killed two dogs and a stray cat. Then roaring, motorized columns raced across the international bridge at Balt. Armed men rounded up the drowsy customs guards and held them prisoner while tanks, armored cars, and all the impressive panoply of war drove furiously into the still peacefully sleeping countryside. Then armored trains chuffed impressively across the international line, their whistles bellowing defiance to the switch engines and handcars in the Kantolian engine yards. A splendid, totally unheralded stroke of conquest began in the cold gray light of early morning.

  When dawn actually arrived and the people of Kantolia began to wake in their beds, more than half of the province was already in enemy hands. The few enemy casualties occurred in a railroad wreck, which itself was due to the action of over-enthusiastic quislings who blew up a railroad bridge to prevent the arrival of defending troops. That action merely held up the invasion program by two hours and a half in that sector. By eight o’clock of a drowsy, sunny morning, the province of Kantolia had been taken over.

  Surgeon General Mors heard about it at nine, while he stood beside a pigsty and patiently argued with a peasant who had so far refused to allow either his pigs or his family to be inoculated. Mors heard the news in silence. Then he turned heavily to the civilian doctor with him.

  �
�I had not much hope, but it is very bad,” he said. “War is always bad! And I hoped so much that we would finish our program of immunization! No nation before has ever achieved one hundred percent inoculation. It would have been a very great achievement.”

  Standing beside the pigsty, he wiped his forehead. “Now, of course, I shall have to go to Stadheim. That will be the enemy headquarters, no doubt. I hope, Doctor, that you will continue the inoculation program while you can. I beg you to do so! One hundred percent immunization in even a single province would be a great feat! And after all, it is not as if the enemy would not be driven out. But even in ten days terrible damage can be done!”

  He went to the small, battered car in which he had been making his rounds, arguing with stubborn peasants. He was a stocky little man with deep circles under his eyes—somehow officials of small nations located close to a large one with visions of military glory tend not to sleep well of nights. Surgeon General Mors had not slept well for a long time.

  Perhaps, as a military officer, he should have tried to rejoin the defending army, which so far had not fired a shot. But his presence in this region had been to further the inoculation program, and that program had locally been directed from Stadheim.

  As his car bumped and whined along the highway toward the provincial capital, the occupation progressed all about him without actually touching him. Three times he heard flights of jet planes roaring through the clear blue sky above. He could not pick them out because of their speed. Once he saw a faraway cloud of dust which was an armored column racing for some strategic spot not yet taken over. The enemy acted as if Kantolia had bristled with troops and weapons, instead of being defended only by customs guards at the border and the fifteen-man police force of Stadheim.

  The little car clanked and sputtered. The morning was quite perfect. Here and there a cotton wool cloud floated in the blue. All about were green tablelands, spread with lusty growing crops. Surgeon General Mors looked almost enviously at the unconcerned people of the rustic villages through which he passed. They had no desire for war, and most of them did not yet know that it had come. He felt that any conceivable means was permissible for the defense of simple people like these against the alleged ideals of the enemy. But he looked very unhappy indeed.

  Toward noon, he saw the steeples of Stadheim before him. But he turned abruptly aside as if to postpone the inevitable. He drove up a gentle, rolling incline until he came to the squat, functional building which housed the pumping station for the provincial city’s water supply. The station and its surroundings seemed untouched, but when the engineer of the pumping station came out, the surgeon general could tell by his expression that he knew of the tragedy that had struck the country.

  Surgeon General Mors got out of the car.

  “They have not come here yet,” he said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice.

  Not yet, said the engineer. He ground his teeth. “I have carried out my orders,” he said harshly. “Just as I was told.”

  Surgeon General Mors nodded.

  “That is good.” Then he hesitated. “I would like to look over the plant,” he said almost apologetically. “It is very modern and clean. The—enemy spent their money on guns. They might try to remove it for one of their cities.”

  The engineer stood aside. Surgeon General Mors went through the little pumping plant. There were only twenty thousand people in Stadheim, so a large installation was not required, but it was sound and practical. There were the filters, and the chlorination apparatus, and the well-equipped small laboratory for tests of the water’s purity. The people of Stadheim would always have good water to drink, if the invaders didn’t wreck or remove this machinery.

  “It is good,” said the stocky little man unhappily, “to see things like this. It makes for people to be healthy, and therefore happy. Do you know,” he added irrelevantly, “that our inoculation program was almost one hundred per cent complete? Ah, well—” He paused. “I must go on to Stadheim. The invaders are there. I shall try to reason with them about our sanitary arrangements. Their soldiers will not understand how careful we are about sanitation. I shall try to get them not to make changes while they are here.”

  The engineer’s eyes burned suddenly.

  “While they are here!”

  “Yes,” Surgeon General Mors went on disconsolately. “They will not stay more than ten days. War is very terrible! It is everything that we doctors fight against all our lives. But so long as men do not understand, there must be wars.” He drew a deep, unhappy breath. “It will indeed be terrible! May it be the last.”

  There was a sudden change in the engineer’s eyes.

  “Then we fight? My orders—”

  “Yes,” said Surgeon General Mors, reluctantly. “In our own way, we fight. In the only way a small nation can defend itself against a great one. We may need as long as ten days before we drive them out, and when it comes it will be a very terrible victory!”

  He hesitated, and then spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. He walked out to the car and drove sturdily toward Stadheim.

  Sentries stopped him at the outskirts of the city, to confiscate the car. But when he got out wearing the uniform of his country’s military force, he was immediately arrested. He was marched toward the center of the city by a soldier who held a bayonet pressing lightly against the small of the little man’s back. Mors, of course, was of the medical branch of his army and looked hopelessly unmilitary, and he carried no weapon more dangerous than a fountain pen. But the enemy soldier felt like a conqueror, and this was his first chance to act the part.

  When the surgeon general of his country’s army was taken to the general commanding the invading troops, the latter was already much annoyed. There had not been a single shot fired in the invasion, and this time the history books would place the credit where it belonged—with the dull, anonymous men who had prepared timetables and traffic control orders, rather than with the combat leadership. General Vladek would go down in history, if at all, only as the nominal leader of an intricate cross-country troop movement. This he did not like.

  An hour since, too, he had performed an impressive ceremony on a balcony of the provincial capitol building. With officers flanking him and troops drawn up in the square below, he had read a proclamation to the people of Kantolia. They had been redeemed, said the proclamation, from the grinding oppression of their native country; henceforth they would enjoy all the blessings of oppressive taxes and secret police enjoyed by the invaders. They should rejoice, because now they were citizens of their great neighbor—and anybody who did not rejoice was very likely to be shot. In short, General Vladek had read a proclamation annexing Kantolia to his own country, and he felt very much like a fool. It was not exactly a gala occasion. But the only witnesses outside of his own troops had been two gaping street sweepers and a little knot of twenty quislings who tried to make their cheers atone for the silence of the twenty thousand people who stayed away.

  However, when Surgeon General Mors was brought to his office as a prisoner of war, General Vladek felt a little better. A general officer taken prisoner! This had some of the savor of traditional war! The prisoner, of course, was a stocky, short figure in a badly fitting uniform, and his broad features indicated peasant ancestry. But General Vladek tried to make the most of the situation with military courtesy.

  “I offer my apologies,” said General Vladek grandly, “if you were subjected to any discourtesy at the time of your capture, my dear General. But after all”—he smiled condescendingly—“this is war!”

  “Is it?” asked Mors. He continued in a businesslike tone: “I was not sure. When was the declaration of war issued, and by whom?”

  General Vladek blinked.

  “Why—ah—no formal declaration was made by my government. There were military reasons for secrecy.”

  Surgeon General Mors sat down and mopped his face.

  “Ah! I am relieved. If you invaded without a declaration of war, you hav
e the legal status of a bandit. Naturally, my government would not regularize your position. Even as a bandit, however,” he said prosaically, “you will understand that the local sanitary arrangements should not be interfered with. That was what I came to see you about. My country has the lowest death rate in all Europe, and any meddling with our health services would be very stupid. I hope you will give orders—”

  General Vladek roared. Then he calmed himself, fuming. “I did not receive you to be lectured,” he said stiffly. “So far as I am aware, you are the ranking officer of your army to be captured by my men. I make a formal demand for the surrender of all troops under your command.”

  “But there aren’t any!” said Surgeon General Mors in surprise. “My government would not be so imbecilic as to leave soldiers in a province they were not strong enough to defend! They’d only have been killed in trumped-up fighting so you could claim a victory!”

  General Vladek’s eyes glittered. He pounced.

  “Ha! Then your government knew that we intended to invade?”

  “My dear man!” said Mors with some tartness. “Your government has been drooling at the mouth for years over the fact that the taxes from our richest province would almost balance its budget! Of course we suspected you would someday try to seize it! We are not altogether fools!”

  “Yet,” said General Vladek sardonically, “you did not prepare to defend it!”

  Surgeon General Mors blinked at the slim, bemedaled figure of his official captor.

  “When a peaceful householder hears a burglar in his house,” he said shortly, “he may or may not go to fight himself, but he does not send his young sons! If he is sensible, he sends for the police.”

  “He sends for the police!” repeated Vladek incredulously. “My good Surgeon General Mors, do you expect the United Nations to interfere in this matter? The United Nations is run by diplomats, phrasemakers. They are aghast and helpless before an accomplished fact like our actual possession of Kantolia! My good sir—”