First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  The sun had just risen, and the pinkish mists of morning were slowly drifting away. Since the planetoid had struck the earth a cumulative change in the climate had been noticeable. Clouds floated overhead almost all the time now, and the humidity of the air was greatly increased. The earth was warmer, as a whole, and the seas in particular were luke-warm and sickening. From their chilly depths strange sea-monsters had risen and now went plaintively about in search of cool waters in which they could live. Besides the dozens of lava-fissures on the continent, warm springs sprang from thousands of places where formerly crystal streams had poured forth, and the clouds of steam from their sulphurous flows rose whitely from a dozen hillsides within Andrews’ view.

  He saw the oily waves of the ocean surging against a wreckage-strewn shore, and saw far out at sea a strange black shape moving restlessly about. It was not a submarine. A whale, perhaps, or one of the shell-encrusted creatures from the ocean bed, in search of waters other than the warmed and suffocating ocean that was so changed by the Catastrophe. Ahead, perhaps ten miles away, a thick cloud of steam rose from a valley of ten thousand smokes, an area thickly dotted with the boiling springs become so frequent. Beyond and through the steam-cloud, Andrews saw the bent back of a mountain.

  As he watched, a sea-plane rose behind the mountain, then another and a dozen more. They sped away in a squadron, toward the west. The compressed lips of the lone man tightened, and he swung toward the mountain from behind which they had risen. Half-hidden in the mist, he rose until he could see what lay upon the further side. A city of many tents and some few houses appeared bit by bit. Andrews hung there for a moment, meditating, then swooped down for the boiling springs. They were numberless, and the clouds of vapor that rose from their bubbling waters made a dense and impenetrable wall that hid the ground from view. Andrews dared descend, however. Slowly, he let the shimmering metal airship down into the drifting, curling mass of steam. He choked upon the smell of sulphur, but settled gradually until the thick mist seemed to part and he saw the soaked and steaming earth beneath him. Here, there, and everywhere, the bowls of boiling water overflowed and joined their streams into a little rivulet of hissing, steaming liquid. Andrews settled firmly on the ground and anchored the dirigible to a boulder half-sunk in a bubbling pool.

  Carefully and gingerly he made his way between the springs, until the last one lay behind him, then turned to look. The steam coiled above his airship and concealed it perfectly. Reassured, Andrews made his way toward the mountain.

  He lay upon his stomach for a long time and studied the city from his post upon the mountain-top. A river flowed along the north side of the city. There was a wooden house of some pretension, above which floated the Royal Standard of Esthonia. Half a dozen other wooden houses were grouped about it. The rest of the city was a mass of tents in orderly rows, though here and there a framework had been erected and men could be seen at work upon another building. Armed guards walked to and fro beside those houses under construction, and Andrews soon deduced that men drafted from survivor villages were performing forced labor in building homes for their masters. He smiled grimly to himself at the thought. He had left his rifle behind him in the dirigible, but his revolver was in his belt. He fixed the plan of the city in his mind. There were two barbed-wire enclosures on the farther side of the city, and guards paced up and down outside them. There was where the forced labor of the city was housed and kept confined.

  It took Andrews four hours to make the journey around the outskirts of the city. He was watching constantly for an opportunity to get in touch with one of the laborers without being seen by a guard. He had to move so cautiously, however, that his progress was slow, and he could not get near enough to any of the working parties to speak to one of their members.

  He worked his way around to the river. Out in the middle of the stream the fish-like submarines were moored, so close together that it was possible to step from the deck of one to the deck of the other. Nearer the shore, and in one or two instances drawn up upon the shore, were the crawling salvage submarines, and there were a number of laborers working and scraping their hulls. The salvage submarines were ungainly hulks, like the “tanks” of the war of 1914-18, with long caterpillar tracks running along each side. They had no propellors, but sank to the bottom and crawled along on the ocean bed by means of those tractor belts, precisely like a “tank” or a farm tractor. Andrews saw in them his opportunity.

  He disguised a log of wood with a few branches and waded into the water some distance above the city, then floated down-stream, his head hidden by the foliage above the water. Slowly and gradually, he paddled in from the center of the river until he seemed to come to rest in the back-water behind one of the salvage subs, drawn half on the bank, and half in the water. Two laborers were working sullenly on the hulk. Andrews waited several minutes, making sure he was not observed, and then whispered softly.

  “Don’t look around! Don’t look around!”

  One of the laborers started, then asked quietly,

  “What’s the idea?”

  “I’m going to try to get you away from here, you and all the others. Do you want to come?”

  The man swore impassionedly.

  “Do I want to come? Just give me a chance! They’ve shot twenty of us in the past week for insubordination. How are you going to work it?”

  “I’m out here in this bunch of leaves in the water. Tell me how you’re confined. And are there any women held prisoner?”

  “We’re kept in a barbed-wire stockade at night, with guards outside. There are about sixty women in the other stockade. They’re going to make wives for the Esthonian soldiers.”

  “Any recent arrivals among the women?”

  “Four yesterday and two men. One girl this morning—” and the laborer gave a description that precisely fitted Ester. “Scared, but not hurt. A lot of people lived through the earthquake.”

  Andrews considered.

  “Are the rest of you men game to take a chance?”

  “We’ll do anything!”

  “Right. Now listen,” said Andrews crisply. “Tonight, about three hours after nightfall, I’ll crawl up to the line of sentries just outside the gate of your stockade. You wait until you’re sure I’m there. Then a chorus of you begin to sing as loudly as you can. When you finish, you’ll hear a shot or so. Rush for the gate and storm the guard-house. I’ll have disposed of as many of the guards as I can, and we’ll surely be able to arm a number of ourselves with their weapons. I’ve a rifle and revolver. Then we’ll storm the other stockade and release the women.”

  “And after that?”

  “Pile into the salvage submarines and make off down the coast. We’ll come ashore after nightfall tomorrow night and conceal ourselves. Then I’ll go for help. I’ve a dirigible.”

  “Lend me that revolver,” said one of the men grimly. “I’ll account for six of the guards inside.”

  Andrews worked the revolver out of the holster under his armpit and jerked it ashore, then threw a packet of cartridges after it.

  “Three hours after nightfall,” he repeated.

  “You’ll hear us singing, and when we stop we’ll begin shooting.”

  The log with the leafy branches attached seemed to drift out of the eddy behind the half-stranded salvage submarine and down the river. A mile below the city Andrews crawled ashore and made for the mountain again, where he loaded his repeating rifle with painstaking thoroughness, and turned back toward the city. Because of the long trip across the mountain, it was dusk when he again approached the city, and he needed to use less caution. He had made his way close to the barbed-wire enclosure before the moon rose.

  The moon shone down brightly, and Andrews in the shadows could see clearly. He could look through the strands of barbed wire and see figures flitting from tent to tent inside. He was assured that his instructions were being agreed upon and passed from man to man. He watched carefully the positions of the sentries and their beats. There wer
e four men on guard by the gate.

  A long time passed. An hour, two hours, three hours. The moon lighted up the whole scene and brought out the dark figures of the guards with perfect clarity. Andrews made his rifle ready. Suddenly within the stockade, a rather cracked tenor voice began to sing.

  “My country, ’tis of thee…”

  Ten, then twenty, then fifty voices joined in the song, singing defiantly yet hopefully.

  “Sweet land of liberty,

  Of thee we sing…”

  Every man in the stockade was singing now. A burly officer bustled out of the guardhouse and sputtered an order in Esthonian. Andrews’ rifle cracked spitefully and the officer fell to the ground. The rifle cracked again and again. Pandemonium broke loose. A dark mass of figures surged toward the gate, seeming to pour from every tent, and from their midst six flashes shot out. The guardsmen dropped. Andrews turned his attention to the sentries, and the sharp barks of his weapon were not wasted shots. He ran forward.

  “This way!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Get the guards’ guns and follow me!”

  The mob padded after him, some of the men still singing. They were like an irresistible black wave when they surged up to the stockade in which the prisoner women had been gathered. There were explosions, and men ran in to tell the women to come and escape with them. Andrews caught a glimpse of Esther’s white face and called her name.

  “It’s me, Esther! Come on!”

  Again the mob surged down the roadway. The dark masses of the salvage submarines loomed black and mysterious against the sands, but the fugitives swarmed into them. In the city there were shouts and cries. Men were calling other men to arms, and a few running figures appeared. A few shots stopped them. The motley mass of runaways poured into the hatches of the crawling submarines and closed them. Men examined the machinery feverishly, and started the engines going. One by one, the great tractor treads of the submarines began to move with mighty creakings, and one by one the ungainly bulks backed off the bank down into the river and the rippling water closed over them. Where the stockades had been were empty enclosures with still figures lying about their gates. Where the impressed laborers had been were dead guards and empty prisons. Where the salvaging submarines had been, there was nothing but the tracks of their treads leading down into the water.

  The prisoners had escaped, and in huge, grub-like monsters were threading their ways like furtive creatures down the dark and unknown pathway of the riverbed, into the open sea.

  IX.

  In the confined space of the submarines, the noise of the motors was almost deafening, but the newly freed laborers cared nothing for that. Those of them with a knowledge of motors—and that knowledge was nearly universal at the time of the Catastrophe—went quickly about the interior of the hulks, familiarizing themselves as well as they could with the mechanism of the steel sea-slugs. There were one or two who found the underwater wireless rooms, and Andrews was soon in communication with the bulk of his ungainly fleet. They spread themselves out in an irregular line, clumsily following the hulk in which Andrews led the way.

  Stumbling, twisting, squirming and creaking, the awkward salvage submarines crawled slowly along the sea-bottom, bumping upon obstacles and crawling painfully over them, falling heavily into depressions in the riverbed and climbing solemnly out of them again. Like blindworms making slow progress along a path full of unseen and unknown obstacles, they waddled their cumbrous selves out of the river and turned off to the right, to make their way secretly down the coast until the time for making their flight the more secure had come.

  Darkness was above them, and darkness all about. The pinkish moon shone down and silvered the surface of the sea in tiny flashes and sparkles of silver, while a faint haze gathered above the luke-warm sea, but far below the twinkling wavelets the fleeing survivors of the earthquake worked desperately to complete their safety. The forged steel of the hulls rang in dully bell-like tones as the ungainly monsters rumbled their tedious way through the double blackness of the night and the ocean’s depths. Andrews led the way, watching his depth-indicators with feverish anxiety. When they showed too great a depth he turned in toward the beach. When the covering of water overhead became too shallow, he made for a greater depth off-shore. This was the only guidance he could have, and he never knew but that he might be running into one of the under-sea fissures in the earth’s crust, akin to those that deluged the continents with lava and ashes. Did the metal sea-slug once fall into such a trap, all hope of escape for those within it would be vanished. They would be roasted in their clumsy vessel like another sea-creature in its horny shell.

  Down the coast-line the line of fugitive monsters rumbled, far beneath the waves. Falling into holes and climbing out, crawling painfully around the base of undersea cliffs whole sides they could not hope to scale; now moving smoothly over a stretch of hard white sand, now bumping determinedly over miles of rugged rock; they fled. Their flight was slow and clumsy, awkward and blind, unseeing and amazingly stupid in their mishaps.

  Behind them, in the city of the Esthonians, the fury of their one-time captors was mounting high. The dead bodies of the guards, the empty stockades, and then the vacant spaces where the crawling submarines had been, all told eloquently of the desperate venture the survivors had made. Amid cursing by the aristocratic officers of the government, men ran on board the fighting submarines, they cast off, and steamed rapidly down the river after the runaways. The pursuers were not hampered by a lack of speed. They did not count on tractor belts for progress, nor on a blundering hit-or-miss navigation for their course. They sped down the river at their highest speed, and spread out in a fan-like formation with angry listeners at the microphones, trying eagerly to pick up some sound that would tell of the whereabouts of the survivors who had risen against their benevolent captors.

  It was a long time before the crawling submarines were located. The sun had risen and its golden rays struck upon the scurrying submarines of the Esthonians, lighting up their proud flags and gilding the white wakes that trailed behind them. It touched upon the wreckage that strewed the seas, and on misshapen fish and sea-things, come gasping up from the heated waters of the ocean bed. But down in the murky darkness, far below the light of the sky, the cumbersome, slug-like submarines of the fugitives crawled toilsomely up inclines and down steep grades, over huge rocks, and tumbled from the edge of underwater cliffs.

  For a long time they crawled on their way unmolested. The very caution of Andrews in leading his little fleet as near the shoreline as he dared protected them for a long time from discovery. Because of the unknown changes in the soundings, the fighting submarines had not dared approach too close to the coast. Unguessed reefs or pinnacles of rocks might be met with at any point. Andrews gambled upon the chance. The Esthonians had not dared until one of the searching submarines heard through its microphones the clumsy bumping sound of their progress. In a little time the whole of the searching fleet had gathered near the spot, and hung above the fleeing sea-slugs until their position was made sure. They had been puzzled for a time by a curious throbbing quite unlike the muttering of a motor, but at last the crawling submarines were definitely located, and the other washing, throbbing sound was forgotten.

  Andrews heard the summons on the underwater wireless. One of the grim war-submarines hung just above each of the crawling hulks, and the voice of an Esthonian Junker ordered each toiling metal monster to rise to the surface, with the alternative of being torpedoed.

  Slowly and agonizedly, grimly and sullenly, the helpless fugitives rose to the surface. The most sluggish to rise was hastened by a depth-bomb exploded close to its side. And then beneath the rising sun the whole fleet lay still upon the waves. The commercial submarines were unarmed and without means of traveling save slowly and on the sea-bottom. The fighting submarines were armed with wicked torpedo tubes and quick-firing guns to be used on the surface, and were equipped with motors that would send them forward at a high rate of sp
eed. The ungainly vessels in which the fugitives had tried to escape were ungraceful and unbeautiful, while the other vessels had long, slim lines and looked viciously perfect, like objects of consummate art designed for ignoble uses.

  The fighting submarines drew alongside their prey with their light guns trained menacingly upon them. The fugitives prepared to submit sullenly to their fate. Upon the deck of the submarine nearest Andrews’ vessel a Junker officer appeared, choleric and sputtering with rage.

  “Verdam—” he began, furiously betraying the country of his origin, and then changed to the English his hearers would understand. “You will pay for this insolence! One man in every four will be hanged, and the rest flogged until they cannot stand! Your rations will be reduced—”

  He stopped, and his angry color faded quickly. Slowly and lazily, indifferently, even, a thick black tree-like shape appeared upon the surface of the water. It was not less than two feet thick at its smallest point, which seemed to end in a cup-like cavity, but it thickened until where it vanished beneath the waves it was no less than five feet through. And all along one side of the hideously alive Thing were whitish rings, like the rubber washers small boys use when they would play “tick-tack” upon a window-pane.

  There was a shout, and a hoarse scream that might be meant for an order. The officer disappeared precipitately into his conning-tower. Then, in the midst of the fleet of captors and captives, a shape rose and grew above the water. It was black, and balloon-like. It was horrible, and it was alive. From a flaccid mass of black bulk, colossal arms radiated. Where they joined the body they were of incredible size. In those tree-like tentacles—though no tree ever grew to such vastness—they could have seized and rent any ship that floated. The whitish suckers upon the tentacles were at their smallest a foot across, and near the body they had grown to be huge depressions from whose grasp no living thing could have hoped to escape. And upon one side of the bloated bulk an eye looked evilly across the waters.