The complete fiction, p.35
The Complete Fiction, page 35
The chattering Venusian led them to the second forecastle reserved for native seamen. Half a dozen other natives, all off duty for the present, were huddled in the passageway outside. The low room was deserted. A single fluorescent bulb glowed bluishly between the tiers of bunks. Almost directly beneath sprawled Twahna.
His face was cupped in both hands as though to shut out the sight of death. Kort rolled him over and got the shock of his life. The Venusian was dead white, his flesh drained of color. His hands stayed up before his face and Kort tried to put them down.
“He’s frozen!” Kort marveled. “Frozen stiff. Feel him.”
Hodge touched the man. “It wasn’t liquor,” he rumbled. “Alcohol will kill a native quick enough, but it won’t do that. D’loo says a snake came through the bulkhead while they were getting dressed for their watch, and wrapped itself around Twahna. It was between D’loo and the door, so he had to stay until the thing went back through the bulkhead. And he’s too scared to be lying.”
There was a clatter of footsteps on the ladder. Kort looked up into the flushed face of Pratt, and knew there was more trouble. Nothing less could have induced him to leave the comfort of the wheel-house.
“Well, mister?” asked Hodge.
“A—a net tender’s been killed,” the third mate stuttered. “They say—they say he’s the second.”
“The third, mister,” said Hodge harshly. “Anything queer about the net tender?”
“Yes—yes, he was frozen. Frozen blue. I thought I’d better call you.”
THEY went up together, leaving behind them a sorely frightened group of Venusians. The moment they reached the deck Kort knew that something else had happened since Pratt had left. It had stopped raining, although the last of the water was still sluicing from the scuppers. But not a man was in sight. Winch house, stern deck, and sorting platforms were deserted.
Yet not utterly, for just forward of the main net locker swayed the creature from the depths, a sinuous tapering trunk, its snout uplifted like a hound’s nose scenting game.
“Two of them!” gasped Pratt, pointing to a second one atop the pilot house.
“And one makes three!” muttered Hodge, for still another had appeared magically beside the first. Pratt pulled his electro-gun from its holster. Its heavy bullet splintered a hatch cover just behind the thing, but the creature showed no harm. Kort drew his own weapon and joined Pratt in pumping bullets. Wood splintered and metal clanged where the projectiles struck, but the sea slugs remained unharmed.
It seemed to Kort that the things flickered, faded from view, at the very instant he fired, only to reappear so quickly as to make him doubt his senses. Pratt was reloading furiously. He went down on all fours, crawled along one of the conveyor belts until he was no more than twelve feet from one of the things. Prone on the deck, he fired at point blank range. The soft nosed bullet smashed into planking directly behind the swaying trunk. Kort saw splinters fly at the impact, but again the sea slug had seemed to vanish for an instant, like a candle flame almost blown out by a sudden draft.
In drunken anger, Pratt seized a trident from the rail, sprang to his feet, leaped at the thing. Kort shouted warning to which the man paid no heed. Spear-like he hurled the trident; the prongs sank a full inch into the wooden deck. The swaying trunk reared, became ominously still. Kort cried out again as Pratt, howling drunken defiance, emptied his gun at it.
Like the pounce of lightning the creature struck. One instant it was upreared before Pratt, the next its fatal helix enclosed the man. He staggered, screamed once, a howl of sheer animal pain that struck Kort like a whip across the face. It was Hodge who restrained him from tackling the thing with fists and knife.
“Too late!” the older man said grimly. “No use throwing yourself after him.”
There was no sound from Pratt now. In ghastly silence the sea creature had settled down with him, his body rigid in its coiled grip, protruding eyes mirroring agony, yet already glazed with approaching death, his face slowly turning the purple of asphyxiation. Once more the gun blasted before it fell from twitching fingers. To the watchers it seemed an age before the tortured body at last went limp.
“Time the captain heard about this!” growled Hodge, “Although it ain’t likely to do any good.” His iron grip aroused Kort from the stupefaction of horror into which the sight of Pratt’s death had plunged him. Together they went forward, giving the monsters a wide berth, past the cannery deck where most of the deck crew were gathered, to the captain’s cabin.
One glimpse of the master told Kort no help might be expected from him. Spate’s huge body overflowed the bunk; he was more stupefied than asleep. The cabin reeked of liquor. Hodge slammed the door on it.
“Might’ve known it,” he grumbled. “He won’t be good for thirty hours, like that. We’re putting back to port, catch or no catch.”
They reached the forward wheelhouse from below deck, leaving the one aft in possession of the sea monsters. Hodge pushed over the engine room telegraph. At the wheel, Kort awaited the first throb of propellers to drive the ship ahead.
For a moment there was no movement but the slow roll of the Mermaid in the trough of the waves. Then the interphone crackled.
“Wellson, engine room. We have no pressure on the boilers down here. Chief Starr has gone aft to see about it. I can give you quarter speed for a few minutes.”
“Quarter speed!” barked Hodge. The vessel trembled to the surge of the screws, forged slowly ahead. That moment too came the first of the wind. Kort found his hands full keeping the ship on course in the face of it.
Once he looked aft, just in time to see the last trunk vanish from atop the aft pilot house. It did not plunge overboard, but faded from sight as abruptly as a projected image when the light is snapped off.
Briefly grateful that the things had gone, he bent all efforts to keeping the Mermaid on course in the face of freshening wind. Through the deck he could feel the whine of turbines inexorably slowing down.
“No steerageway, sir,” he said finally, as the ship yawed.
Hodge rang the interphone savagely, without result.
“Better see what’s wrong,” he told Kort. “Wait—take this.”
He thrust an electro-gun renewal clip into Kort’s hand. With the weapon in hand Kort descended ladder after ladder to the engine deck. Amid disquieting silence something within him grew coldly alert.
The engine room was empty. Giant mercury turbines spun lazily under a pressure head far too low to drive them at normal speed. A chill swept him at sight of the pressure gauges. In the dim glow of failing fluorescents he headed for the stokehole.
A nameless sense of menace cautioned him. He passed the great bunkers full of kwahna wood, the rich, oily fuel that drove the Mermaid and her kind across the planet’s five oceans. In the last bulkhead the stokehole door stood wide, somehow sounding a chill note of warning.
Without entering he called Wellson and Star. The names echoed hollowly from the dim reaches of the ship, but in response came only the faint roar of a blower left at half speed.
The thought that Wellson and Starr must have gone through that same door determined him against doing so. Instead he climbed to the deck above, coming out on a catwalk above the boilers, from which he could see into the stokehole.
Five men sprawled on the deck plates in the contorted postures of those dead by violence, knees drawn high, arms out-flung, fingers bent into claws. By the light of his pocket flash Kort recognized the distorted features of Starr. A reddish glow from an open firebox illumined those of Wellson. The other men were native stokers. When Kort moved the flash beam horror tightened its clutch upon him. The stokehole pit seemed full of sea slugs.
By actual count he found there were five of them, alert, weaving, posturing as though to sense new victims, Oddly enough the light brought no response from them, even when flashed directly upon their dingy white bodies.
Suddenly the electro gun seemed to burn in Kort’s hand. He lifted away a section of the catwalk grid to fire through the opening thus left. Bullets howled, ricocheting from deck plates and bulkheads below. Occasionally one of the creatures seemed to flicker before a shot.
When the gun was empty Kort got to his feet. His fire had been without effect. He felt a sick sense of futility as he climbed back to the wheelhouse, where Hodge soberly listened to the tale of death he had to tell.
“We’ve got to get them, son,” said the first mate grimly. “It’s them or us. Look aport.”
The sky was aflame over the horizon. Twisted ribbons of light swirled between sea and heavens, shot through now and again with flashes of crimson. Across the waters came, faintly, the rumble of thunder.
“Kilwanni!” grunted Hodge. “From the looks of that borealis, it’s headed this way. If we lie here much longer we’ll be blown out of the water.”
“With the anti-grids?” Kort protested.
“Without them,” Hodge answered dryly. “What’re you going to use for juice? The lightning generators have almost stopped, and you can’t turn the anti-grid generators on flat boilers, nor use battery juice either.”
He jerked his head significantly at the wheelhouse lamps, hardly more than aglow.
“Looks like we have to lick the things or else! No good wasting more bullets, either. The things dodge ’em. See how they flicker when you put a bullet close? No wonder D’loo calls them the ghost snakes.”
Kort nodded, and yet it seemed to him that Hodge’s appraisal was wrong, in some vague way he couldn’t himself put a finger on.
“If they dodge the bullets,” the first mate went on, “then they must see ’em coming. Maybe we need something faster than bullets—a bolt blaster, maybe.”
“And Spale’s got one!” finished Kort.
“Only one aboard,” finished Hodge. “He had a mutiny once, and a blaster saved his fat neck for him. Since then he won’t let anybody else keep one aboard, curse him. I reckon we’ll have to find his.”
FIVE minutes later the two men trod softly away from Spale’s cabin, the precious blaster, clumsy with its huge capacitor drum, ridged barrel, and pointed electrode, in Hodge’s hands. Yet Kort was haunted by an unreasonable premonition of failure. Perhaps, he told himself, repeated failure had sold him on the belief that the sea slugs were invulnerable. Certainly the blaster was no common weapon. It shot a bolt of non-oscillating high amperage current, a single shattering projectile of pure energy, with the speed of light itself. What living thing could sense the approach of that flashing death?
They entered upon the catwalk after Kort’s light had shown it clear of the creatures. The stokehole fluorescents were mere luminous streaks against encroaching darkness. Only dying embers glowed behind the open fire door. But the flash beam revealed four white trunks grouped before the boilers, as though attracted by the warmth. Purple faces of the dead glared up in the pallid light of the torch.
Hodge swore feelingly, leveled the blaster. The weapon spat a lurid, creamy-white bolt that pierced the nearest trunk. Kort held his breath. The flash seared his sight, seeming of longer duration than it really was, and limned the sea thing starkly against the blackness of the stokehole. The light of his torch seemed feeble after it.
But in that light the creature swayed, unhurt, untouched. Hodge cursed it furiously, fired again and again. The crash of bolts was thunderous in that confined space. Fringes of electrical fire leaped from metal at their touch. Ozone stung Kort’s nostrils.
But when the blaster clicked emptily not four, but five trunks swayed languidly before the boilers, curving their supple bodies in undulating motion that at times gave them the shape of huge, animated question marks.
“Drum’s empty,” said Hodge quietly. “Let’s go topside.”
Kort felt his calmness in strange contrast to the fury raging within himself—fury that mindless things from the sea should set at nought the intelligence and courage of some fifty men. What price intelligence? An ameoba, incapable of sensing the approach of death, was better off than they who could foresee, and fear, and do nothing at all to escape, extinction. What was the Kilwanni—the coming storm—but a conglomeration of ions, dead and unintelligent, possessed of no will either benevolent or malevolent, yet destined for all that to shatter the Mermaid, and commit them to death in the freezing sea—those who escaped a fiery but swifter death from the storm itself.
He followed Hodge silently back to the pilot house. Two seamen waited there, grim faced.
“Three of them by the cannery boilers,” one man said. “They got Sanderson before he could clear out.”
That was all. They stared at Hodge, waiting for him to speak. The grizzled first mate shook his head.
“I know,” said Kort suddenly, and all eyes turned to him. “The bullets were too slow—but the blaster was too fast. A bolt lasts only a few micro-seconds.”
“How d’you mean?”
“You remember when D’loo first talked about a ghost snake? He hadn’t seen the one on the net, but only the one that killed Twahna, and nobody had fired a shot at it.”
“But he saw it come through the bulkhead,” Hodge pointed out.
“That’s what threw us off the track, but that wasn’t the only reason D’loo called it the ‘ghost snake.’ Nor was it because they flicker before bullets. Have you ever known a native who cared to see ordinary cinema films?”
“Nope,” grunted Hodge, plainly mystified. “Nor one who’d let a newsreel man photograph him. They call ’em the ghost pictures. Say—!”
“There you are. They fight shy of the films because they don’t get the illusion of motion, as we do. All they see is a quickfading succession of stills, because the natives don’t have persistence of vision, as we have. The films don’t fool them as they do us. Nor do those things out there. To us they look solid. To D’loo they flicker constantly—ninety-nine percent of the time they literally aren’t there. They have a vibratory existence, like the image we seem to see on the cinema screen. Back in the twentieth century it was shown that the probability wave representing an electron extended, theoretically, to infinity. In these things free will—the life force—enters to control that mathematical probability. They can literally be two places at once—on the bottom, three miles down, and on our deck—at the same time.
“They’re here only at intervals, and persistence of vision bridges the time gap between those intervals. The blaster bolts last only a few micro-seconds, a far shorter time than their natural period. A bolt comes and goes while the thing you fire at actually isn’t there. It would be sheer luck if the bolt should coincide to hit it at the instant it’s actually materialized—sheer luck, because our eyes can’t help us. Even a Venusian wouldn’t be able to synchronize a bolt—there isn’t that quick co-ordination between brain and muscle. The odds would always be against us.”
THE seamen looked blank. Hodge drummed the chart table with a huge fist. “If you’re right, we need a faster bullet or a slower bolt.”
“Or timing!” finished Kort. “Have Sparks rig a stroboscope out of spare parts. You know how moving parts can be made to look as if they’re standing still, in an intermittent light that flashes only when they are at one point in their movement. With all other lights off, a stroboscope wouldn’t show us the things at all, except when we have it exactly synchronized with their vibratory period. Rig the blaster in series with the light circuit, and it would have to fire at exactly the right time. That’ll get them.”
One of the seamen cleared his throat. “Maybe it would—or maybe not. This is no time for theories. We’re speaking for all the men now. We don’t mean to stay aboard to be blasted by the Kilwanni or strangled by these damned snakes. We want to take the launches.”
“Supposin’ you did,” Hodge countered. “You’d last just till the Mermaid’s hit. Then the potential would flatten out, with the launches stickin’ up in it like sore thumbs. There ain’t no anti-grids on them, and you couldn’t get away quick enough.”
“We’d rather take our chances than go down with this tub,” snarled the other man. “You ain’t going to stop us!” Hodge shrugged, then stared in amazement at Kort, who stood by the door with a leveled electro-gun.
“I’m stopping you. Listen—you won’t last five minutes out there in the launches, without anti-grids. Give Sparks an hour to rig a stroboscope and we can get back into the stokehole. With pressure on the boilers we can charge the anti-grids and the storm won’t touch us.”
The men looked black rage at him, but made no move. Hodge’s right hand hovered over his own gun.
“Don’t draw!” snapped Kort. “I don’t Want to hurt you, Hodge, but this means the life of all of us, not just one or two.”
“Forgettin’ something, ain’t you?” asked Hodge dryly. “I’d be all for you, if we had an hour to spare. Take a look at the grids.”
Kort risked a glance aloft, through the wheelhouse windows. Against a dark, sultry sky the spiral network of the antigrids already glowed with faint pricklings of St. Elmo’s light—harmless prologue to the storm to come. Any weather-wise sailor could read the menace in those flaming curtains to port, swirling in fiery splendor, very tapestries of hell.
“Won’t take them but forty minutes, maybe, to get here,” continued Hodge inexorably. “And after you’ve got your stroboscope, and killed the critters, it’ll take thirty minutes to get pressure on the boilers. Not a chance your way. Better stow the gun and go along in the launches.”
It was like a pit opening before Kort’s feet. Bitterly he realized his mistake—he had forgotten those all-important thirty minutes needed to get enough pressure for the anti-grid generators. Actually there remained perhaps ten minutes to defeat the sea monsters and regain the stokehole. He’d been making a fool of himself, delaying the men’s last forlorn dash for life.
Sheepishly he holstered his gun while the seamen stalked out. Seconds later came the groan of pulleys as the first launch swung out from the davits.
