The compleat collected s.., p.5
The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 5
For a while there were scuffling and grunting noises as he scrambled about among the nearer torpedoes, then he re-appeared, eyes bright with excitement, and panted, "They can see. I tried different objects ... varied distances ... Slide-rule, cigarette lighter, a pencil. I moved them around. They turned their ... their ... Well, they all looked at them. They can see. Maximum range seems to be about four feet, for small objects like the pencil, eighteen inches." He broke off and shook his head despairingly, "But how are we going to tell them to go away?"
It was a very good question. They began batting their brains out anew. Shortly the corporal cleared his throat, "If we could draw some kind of picture," he suggested diffidently, "Maybe ..."
Nelson snapped his fingers, "Corporal, you're a genius," he enthused, then turning to Cotrell, "That's it! Don't you see. We draw them pictures—before and after pictures. First show ships lying peacefully, then shells falling, show ships in little pieces. Also show them taking off safely. Make the sketches simple, with clear, black lines. Stick those in front of their eyes, that should scare them away all right." He went on breathlessly, "Have you got the lab notebook?"
Cotrell nodded quickly and began tearing out the large, stiff pages. They sketched furiously, discarded, and sketched again. The finished work would never have been hung in the Tate Gallery, but they hoped it would do. The page showed three simple pictures, with a symbolical sun in each giving them a crude time sequence. Rapidly they made two copies and crawled out among the alien ships.
THE NOSES of all the ships were now transparent. Each held his sketch up close for a few minutes, then moved to the next one. They kept circulating among the ships. Shells began falling again, uncomfortably close, and there was the distant roaring, rattling sound that could only mean the approach of an armoured column.
Suddenly Nelson bellowed something above the din and pointed vigorously. One of the ships was floating gently upwards. As they watched the black circle in its stern glowed cherry red. There was a hiss and a smell of ozone and the ship flashed upwards out of sight. Five others followed it in less than a minute. The men cheered raggedly. Only one ship remained—the one nearest the crater, it showed no sign of moving.
WITH DESPERATE haste Cotrell propped his sketch up before it and dived for cover. The area was taking an awful pasting from the guns now. It was one continuous eruption. The ground heaved and shook beneath a merciless rain of H.E. Earth and stones battered at them viciously. The crater wall on one side crumbled nearly burying them. A twisted, blackened wheel from the wrecked truck flopped down, narrowly missing the corporal. The noise was a monstrous, incredible thing that tore and hammered at their cowering, puny bodies. They knew without a shadow of a doubt that they could have only minutes left to live, then suddenly—just like that—it stopped.
It wasn't just quiet—it was utterly, deathly silent.
For a long time they couldn't move, then Cotrell dragged himself up to take a look. The other two heard him gasp. In a voice that shook with some indescribable emotion he called for them to come up. When they saw that he was outside the crater and that nothing had happened to him, they climbed out and stood beside him.
They found the force-field to be hemispherical in shape, perfectly transparent, and impenetrable to everything, including sound. It was approximately fifteen yards in diameter, and felt like warm glass. At its geometrical centre was the alien ship. Outside, the earth was still being torn up and flung violently into the sky. In here it was as quiet as an empty church.
Cotrell stood over the tiny ship, his features working through a whole spectrum of emotions. Unsteadily, he choked out, "It stayed behind to save us. One good turn deserves another. Don't you see, they're grateful." His voice broke, "Imagine those ... those snails doing a think like that."
The corporal nodded wordlessly. "Yeah," Nelson said solemnly, "It makes you think." Then he gave a sudden relieved giggle, "What are we all whispering for?"
They didn't know, but unconsciously they kept on doing it.
THEY WERE still discussing it in hushed tones two hours later when a couple of light tanks pulled up a hundred yards from them and began shooting. They stopped talking to watch. After a while an officer climbed out of one of the turrets to see why his shots weren't having any effect. When he hit the screen he stepped back quickly, his face going grey. He drew his pistol, took careful aim and fired. Barnes put his thumb to his nose and spread his fingers in the universal gesture. For a moment they thought the officer was going to burst into tears, but instead he wheeled suddenly and sprinted back to his tank. It opened fire again.
About twenty minutes later the firing ceased. Thirty men came forward in ragged line abreast and closed in around the screen. They were extremely hesitant at first. They poked it with bayonet points, battered at it with gun butts, then stepped well back and hurled grenades at it. Finally they grew tired and sat down and waited for somebody to think of something else.
A scout car came rocking and bumping along over ground pitted with newly-made craters. It was a half-tread job mounting a great brute of a machine gun. Two officers—judging by the beautiful way their uniforms fitted, very high rankers indeed—stepped out and came forward. They had the bright idea of digging under the screen and coming up inside. No luck. The force-field proved to be, not a dome, but a sphere. They began shouting and waving their arms about, but to those inside they made as much noise as a cat tramping across a deep pile rug.
It was about then that Cotrell noticed how stale the air was becoming. He mentioned it aloud.
Nelson and the corporal had been fairly killing themselves at the antics of the enemy officers, pointing and pulling faces at them and going off into gales of uncontrollable laughter. Their abrupt change of expression, in other circumstances, would have been comic. They sobered instantly. Barnes lifted his arm and carefully took his own pulse, then he did the same for Cotrell and Nelson. He nodded gravely in verification, both pulse-rate and respiration were way up. They were breathing too much CO2.
NELSON was silent for a long time, then he muttered bitterly, "It was too good to be true." He turned to the corporal, "How much time have we got before we … we ...?" He didn't finish the question, there was no need to. They were all feeling the smothering, choking sensations of imminent suffocation already, and even though it was purely psychological as yet, it was bad.
The corporal guessed somewhere between two and two and a half hours.
"There must be something we can do," Nelson burst out desperately. "We can draw more pictures, maybe. Show them the fix we're in. I know we can't do without the screen, we'd be blown to bits in seconds, but maybe they could put a hole in it or something. I'm going to try it." He snatched up the notebook and sketched rapidly, tore up the result viciously and started again. Better this time. He waved it briefly at the others and almost ran over to the ship.
But the ship's nose was no longer transparent.
Nelson lost his head then. "Open up, blast you," he screamed, and beat at it hysterically with his firsts. "Look! Look at this!" he entreated, but there was no change whatever in the smooth blank surface of the ship. In a sudden rage he grabbed it in his hands and shook it violently. It's hull suddenly went red-hot. He dropped it with a yelp of pain and aimed a kick at it. "You're not saving us. You're killing us, d'you hear, killing us." He was nearly in tears, "I was nearly drowned once when I was a kid. It was awful." Then he quietened down a little and said slowly, accusingly, "Know what I think? I think you're doing this deliberately. You have telepathy. You're doing this to torture us, get our reactions. And when we're nearly dead you'll come crawling out and ... and ..." He choked off into silence.
Cotrell felt slightly embarrassed and very sympathetic, he was close to screaming himself. Barnes looked at the ground and rebuked Nelson gently. "That's a very corny theory, Captain." he said. The bantering tone had the desired effect. Nelson grinned shamefacedly and forced a shaky laugh, "I don't really think they'll come pouring out at us with ray-guns. Maybe I read too many of the wrong stories."
AFTER that they took it quietly. Outwardly, at least, they were resigned to their fate. They agreed to conserve the air as much as possible by sitting or lying down and cutting out unnecessary conversation. Barnes made brief mention of morphia tablets he had in his pack, but either they didn't believe in suicide or they were hoping for a miracle. Probably it was a little of both. Cotrell didn't know how the other two felt, but he was scared sick. Scared both at the thought of dying and at the agonizingly slow asphyxiation that would precede it. To take his mind off things he began to observe the enemy movements. He passed a long time that wav.
Another tank rolled up, a heavy this time. It didn't stop until it was very close indeed. Smoke puffed from the turret and there was a soundless explosion on the screen. After a while it all became a little monotonous. The machine-gun on the scout car kept up a steady fire, always directed unerringly at one and only one point on the force-field, trying, he supposed to wear it away by sheer friction. He could see the steel-jacketed bullets bouncing off it in a flickering grey blur.
Suddenly, silently, the scout car bulged outwards and flung its roof away as it took a direct hit. The men beside it dropped flat. Some of them stayed that way, the others scattered frantically for cover. The tanks loosed off a final salvo, churned into reverse, and left in great haste. The counter-attack had begun.
The ground outside was again ploughed and torn up and flung about, this time by their friends. But Cotrell couldn't see it very well. Great dark splotches floated before his eyes as he fought desperately for air. If the bombardment would only stop, he thought, there might be some hope. But how could the aliens possibly distinguish between enemy and friendly high explosive. He sobbed in sheer frustration.
SUDDENLY his attention was drawn to the corporal. They had all perched on the crater's edge where the air was a little fresher. Now Barnes was struggling to get into the crater, and the air down there was dead, rotten. Cotrell reached out to stop him, but he was too weak. Then he saw Nelson trying to crawl in as well. He gasped a warning and fought himself to his hands and knees. Didn't they know they'd die in that foul muck down there, he must get them out. Then he froze in blind, panic-stricken horror as an indescribably inhuman something engulfed his mind and stated coldly, "You will enter this surface depression for your safety," and he found his limbs moving him to the edge, and he, too, rolled flabbily to the bottom of the crater.
He couldn't think what this meant. His eyes were open but everything was dark. He must be very nearly dead, he thought. He felt Nelson struggling feebly beside him, and gasped weakly, "They had telepathy all the time, the dirty—" But he didn't finish it, for with devastating suddenness sound returned. Roaring, crashing, tearing, earsplitting, beautiful sound. And with it came a blast of lovely dust-filled fresh air. The force-field had gone.
The alien ship, its tests completed, hovered momentarily above the three men now lying safely in the deep crater before it flashed upwards to rejoin its flotilla. Surveying was a pretty dull job, the Commander thought, routine for the most part, but occasionally they would come upon a quite interesting planet.
The End
The Scavengers
Astounding – October 1953
The Crawlers were fortunate in this; they couldn't put up even a token resistance to the slashing, utterly overwhelming attack of the people from out of space. Their homes, their cities, all of their works smashed their opposition totally futile—fortunately.
THE SHIP was in a hurry. It flashed through the frigid upper reaches of the atmosphere like a great silvery dart. A dart whose needle prow and stabilizers glowed with the furious, angry red of air resistance, and whose flight path was drawn across the dark blueprint of the sky by a thin, perfectly straight white line of vapor condensation. Far below it the planetary surface slid by with deceptive slowness.
In the ship's tiny control room a loud-speaker clicked, hummed, and said, Flagship to S-Five-Three—" The eyes of the three-man crew flickered briefly towards it, then switched back to their respective instrument panels. A tightness about their mouths and an involuntary jerk of their heads towards the sound betrayed the strain they were under. They relaxed, a little, when it merely stated, "This is the commander. Your ETA over target is nine minutes, fifteen seconds from—now. What have you in mind, captain?"
Spence, the ship's captain, reached out quickly—too quickly—and fumbled the switch to the "Transmit" position. But his voice was quite steady as he replied.
"The usual thing, sir. Direct, high-level approach to within fifty miles, dive, level off at five thousand, spray them, then decelerate and land. Normal procedure from there on in. It should take about two hours."
There was silence for a long moment, broken only by the faint, background hum from the speaker. The miles fled by, a large number of miles. Then the commander spoke again.
"That seems satisfactory, but we are taking too long over this, captain. Hurry it up, please. Have you looked at a clock recently? Off."
Beside the captain, the engineer and servomech officer, Bennett, moved restively. He looked straight at Spence, then at the now quiescent speaker, and inclined his close-cropped, grayish-blond head at two dials on the wide panel before him. The dials showed the hull temperature and the output of the cooling units. They each bore a conspicuous red mark, and their indicator needles seemed to be glued to these marks. Bennett gave a short, interrogatory grunt. It was his way of saying that if they hurried it up any faster they'd probably vaporize themselves, but it was for the captain to decide one way or the other. Bennett was a man of few words.
Spence shook his head curtly. There would be no increase in speed. Then he turned abruptly to the third member of the crew, Harrison, the gunnery officer.
Harrison was muttering angrily, "What did he mean by that last crack? Have we looked at anything else but clocks recently? Just who does he think he is—?"
"That's enough," said Spence sharply, as a light flashed urgently on his panel, "I haven't time to listen to you. We dive in three seconds. Brace yourselves." His hands flickered about, checking, then settled on the twin grips of a lever that grew solidly from the floor between his feet. He began to edge it slowly forward.
The great ship curved smoothly downwards into a steep dive. Straining against the straps, the crew hung forward in their seats, their faces pop-eyed, dark red masks of mounting blood pressure. The dive lasted eight seconds, then the pull-out flattened them back into the padding. That was much easier to take, thought Spence. The seats were designed to swing to compensate for any sudden change in direction, but on a planetary operation like this they had, of course, to be in a fixed up-down position.
But it wasn't the ill-treatment his body was being subjected to that was worrying him. No, that was the least of his troubles. It was Harrison.
Harrison was going soft.
Captain Spence couldn't altogether blame him. Harrison had been under a killing pressure, both physical and mental these last few days, but this was certainly not the time to develop a hypersensitive conscience.
HARRISON had joined the ship only a week ago, just two days before the current emergency, as a replacement for Walters who was still recuperating with a leg graft after that mess on Torcin Eight. He was a new boy, just out of Basic Training, and like all the freshly-qualified entrants to the Force, he'd worn the dedicated, near-exalted look that sometimes took months to wear off. The great motto of the Force, implying the ultimate in selfless service to humanity, was practically written in letters of light across his forehead as well as being traced in gold thread on cap and shoulder badges. It said, in a language long dead before the motto was even coined, "There is nothing more important than a human life," and Harrison was intensely eager to start saving lives. He was going to save lives if he had to kill himself doing it. Spence had felt the same way at the start, but that idea had been soon knocked out of him. There was no future in it; besides, it was wasteful of highly-trained technicians.
All this did not mean that Harrison had been naive or unrealistic about things. He'd known that the Force must, by its very nature, be called on to do an occasional little job that was just a shade off-color—for the greatest common good, of course. It was a pity, thought Spence, that his first job had been a five-star alarm, a very big one and the grimmest the captain had ever encountered in his twelve years of service. It was one way of finding out whether a man had what it took, but it was a rather drastic way.
Now Harrison was sitting hunched forward in his seat, staring at the screen which showed the surface ahead and below. From five thousand feet the ground was a dull, reddish-brown carpet unrolling monotonously below the furiously speeding ship. Occasionally there would be a stain on the carpet—an ugly black stain five miles across that had been the site of one of the Crawler cities. The ship had been directly responsible for quite a few of those. There was nothing like a medium-sized H-bomb exploded well underground to really reduce a city. The shock-wave left the resultant rubble looking like fine gravel. The placing and detonation of the bombs was the gunnery officer's department, so he was sitting there beginning to hate himself.
Good thing, thought Spence, that the Crawler civilization was concentrated in large, widely-separate cities. It was less wasteful of bombs and made the cleanup job a lot simpler. There were no farms or villages to deal with, but there were groups of survivors, who had somehow managed to evade the first sweep, holing up in various places. It was towards one of these groups, one of the few remaining on the planet, that Spence's ship was splitting the air.
A LOW range of mountains crept gradually over the horizon. The aliens were behind them. The ship had chosen this course so that the mountains would shield it from radar until the last possible moment, always supposing the Crawlers had radar. There was no sense in taking chances. Spence's voice was harsh as he said sharply, "Five seconds to target. Gunnery Officer stand by!"
