Murray Leinster - Exploration Team

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Murray Leinster

EXPLORATION TEAM

“Murray Leinster” was one of the writing names used by the late William

Fitzgeraid Jenkins, who also wrote as “Will F. Jenkins” and employed another

half-dozen pseudonyms. Although he wrote copiously in many other fields,

turning out millions of words of pulp stories, little of it other than the

science fiction work he produced as Murray Leinster is known today—and, in

fact, little outside of his SF work gained much attention even during his

lifetime. As Murray Leinster, though, Jenkins had a profound and lasting

effect on the development of modern science fiction.

“Leinster” sold his first SF story to Argosyin 1919, had work published

in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing during the ‘20s, and went on to be one of the

mainstays of John W. Campbell’s “Golden Age” Astounding in the ‘40s and ‘50s,

where most of his best work appeared. Most of Leinster’s novels are heavily

dated and long forgotten—one of the few figures of the day who made his

reputation almost entirely on his short fiction, he was somehow never able to

make much of an impact with his novels, which were widely regarded as inferior

to his short work even during his working lifetime— but the best of his short

stories remain fresh and powerful today In his short work, Leinster more or

less invented several subgenres still active today: for instance, he is

credited with writing one of the first Alternate History stories, “Sideways In

Time,” and one of the earliest First Contact stories, the famous “First

Contact,” and both stories still hold up as among the best treatments of their

subjects. Also among his most famous stories is the taut, suspenseful, and

scary tale that follows, “Exploration Team,” which won Leinster his only Hugo

Award in 1956, and which is practically the model of how to write an intricate

and intelligent adventure set on an alien world, a story which has been an

influence on—if not indeed the inspiration for—countless other stories and

novels, as well as television shows and movies, over the years. Nobody before

Leinster had ever written the tale of Terran explorers battling a hostile

alien planet any better than he wrote it here—and, you know what? Forty years

lateç nobody has done it any better yet.

Leinster’s best novel is probably The Wailing Asteroid, above-average

among Leinster novels for imagination and evocativeness, with some quirky

detail work that holds up fairly well. His other novels include The Pirates of

Zan, The Forgotten Planet, The Greks Bring Gifts, and The War with the Gizmos.

“Exploration Team” was collected, with other Survey Team stories, as Colonial

Survey, one of his best collections. His “Med Service” series—not as

successful as his Survey Team stories, but still of interest—was collected in

S.O.S. from Three Worlds and Doctor to the Stars; there were also two Med

Service novels, The Mutant Weapon and This World Is Taboo. Other Leinster

collections include Monsters and Such and The Best of Murray Leinster.

Almost all of Leinster’s books are long out-of-print, and almost

impossible to find;

you probably have the best chance of finding The Best of Murray Leinster,

published in 1978, in a used-book store, but even that’s rather unlikely these

days. Fortunately, NESFA Press has just brought out a big retrospective

anthology of his work, First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster (NESFA

Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203, $27), which features most of

his best stories. Buy it while you still can, since much of this work is

unfindable anywhere else.

A multi-talented man, Will Jenkins, the person behind the Murray

Leinster mask, was a successful inventor as well as an authoç having created,

among other things, a front-projection method for filming backgrounds still

used in the film industry today, where it is known as the “Leinster

Projector.” During World War II, he also came up with an ingenious method for

disguising the wake left by submarine periscopes that probably saved the lives

of thousands of submarine sailors over the course of the war. He died in 1975.

IThe nearer moon went by overhead. It was jagged and irregular in shape,

and was probably a captured asteroid. Huyghens had seen it often enough, so he

did not go out of his quarters to watch it hurtle across the sky with

seemingly the speed of an atmosphere-flier, occulting the stars as it went.

Instead, he sweated over paper work, which should have been odd because he was

technically a felon and all his labors on Loren Two felonious. It was odd,

too, for a man to do paper work in a room with steel shutters and a huge bald

eagle—untethered—dozing on a three-inch perch set in the wall. But paper work

was not Huyghens’ real task. His only assistant had tangled with a

night-walker and the furtive Kodius Company ships had taken him away to where

Kodius Company ships came from. Huyghens had to do two men’s work in

loneliness. To his knowledge, he was the only man in this solar system.

Below him, there were snufflings. Sitka Pete got up heavily and padded

to his water pan. He lapped the refrigerated water and sneezed violently.

Sourdough Charley waked and complained in a rumbling growl. There were divers

other rumblings and mutterings below. Huyghens called reassuringly, “Easy

there!” and went on with his work. He finished a climate report, and fed

figures to a computer, and while it hummed over them he entered the inventory

totals in the station log, showing what supplies remained. Then he began to

write up the log proper.

“Sitka Pete,” he wrote, “has apparently solved the problem of killing

individual sphexes. He has learned that it doesn’t do to hug them and that his

claws can’t penetrate their hide—not the top hide, anyhow. Today Semper

notified us that a pack of sphexes had found the scent-trail to the

station. Sitka hid downwind until they arrived. Then he cha rged from the rear

and brought his paws together on both sides of a sphex ‘s head in a terrific

pair of slaps. It must have been like two twelve-inch shells arriving from

opposite directions at the same time. It must have scrambled the sphex ‘s

brains as if they were eggs. It dropped dead. He killed two more with such

mighty pairs of wallops. Sourdough Charley watched, grunting, and when the

sphexes turned on Sitka, he charged in his turn. I, of course, couldn’t shoot

too close to him, so he might have fared badly but that Faro Nell came pouring

out of the bear quarters to help. The diversion enabled Sitka Pete to resume

the use of his new technic, towering on his hind legs and swinging his paws in

the new and grisly fashion. The fight ended promptly. Semper flew and screamed

above the scrap, but as usual did not join in. Note: Nugget, the cub, tried to

mix in but his mother cuffed him out of the way. Sourdough and Sitka ignored

him as usual. Kodius Champion ‘s genes are sound!”

The noises of the night went on outside. There were notes like organ

tones—song lizards. There were the tittering giggling cries of

nightwalkers—not to be tittered back at. There were sounds like tack hammers,

and doors closing, and from every direction came noises like hiccups in

various keys. These were made by the improbable small creatures which on Loren

Two took the place of insects.

Huyghens wrote out:

“Sitka seemed ruffled when the fight was over He painstakingly used his

trick on every dead or wounded sphex, except those he’d killed with it,

lifting up their heads for his pile-driver-like blows from two directions at

once, as if to show Sourdough how it was done. There was much grunting as they

hauled the carcasses to the incinerator It almost seemed—”

The arrival bell clanged, and Huyghens jerked up his head to stare at

it. Semper, the eagle, opened icy eyes. He blinked.

Noises. There was a long, deep, contented snore from below. Something

shrieked, out in the jungle. Hiccups. Clatterings, and organ notes— The bell

clanged again. It was a notice that a ship aloft somewhere

had picked up the beacon beam—which only Kodius Company ships should know

about—and was communicating for a landing. But there shouldn’t be any ships in

this solar system just now! This was the only habitable planet of the sun, and

it had been officially declared uninhabitable by reason of inimical animal

life. Which meant sphexes. Therefore no colony was permitted, and the Kodius

Company broke the law. And there were few graver crimes than unauthorized

occupation of a new planet.

The bell clanged a third time. Huyghens swore. His hand went out to

cut off the beacon—but that would be useless. Radar would have fixed it and

tied it in with physical features like the nearby sea and the Sere Plateau.

The ship could find the place, anyhow, and descend by daylight.

“The devil!” said Huyghens, But he waited yet again for the bell to

ring. A Kodius Company ship would double-ring to reassure him. But there

shouldn’t be a Kodius Company ship for months.

The bell clanged singly. The space phone dial flickered and a voice came

out of it, tinny from stratospheric distortion:

“Calling ground! Calling ground! Crete Line ship Odysseus calling ground

on Loren Two. Landing one passenger by boat. Put on your field lights.”

Huyghens’ mouth dropped open. A Kodius Company ship would be welcome. A

Colonial Survey ship would be extremely unwelcome, because it would destroy

the colony and Sitka and Sourdough and Faro Nell and Nugget—and Semper—and

carry Huyghens off to be tried for unauthorized colonization and all that it

implied.

But a commercial ship, landing one passenger by boat— There was simply

no circumstances under which that would happen. Not to an unknown, illegal

colony. Not to a furtive station!

Huyghens flicked on the landing-field lights. He saw the glare in the

field outside. Then he stood up and prepared to take the measures required by

discovery. He packed the paper work he’d been doing into the disposal safe. He

gathered up all personal documents and tossed them in. Every record, every bit

of evidence that the Kodius Company maintained this station went into the

safe. He slammed the door. He touched his finger to the disposal button, which

would destroy the contents and melt down even the ashes past their possible

use for evidence in court.

Then he hesitated. If it were a Survey ship, the button had to be

pressed and he must resign himself to a long term in prison. But a Crete Line

ship—if the space phone told the truth—was not threatening. It was simply

unbelievable.

He shook his head. He got into travel garb and armed himself. He went

down into the bear quarters, turning on lights as he went. There were startled

snufflings and Sitka Pete reared himself very absurdly to a sitting position

to blink at him. Sourdough Charley lay on his back with his legs in the air.

He’d found it cooler, sleeping that way. He rolled over with a thump. He made

snorting sounds which somehow sounded cordial. Faro Nell padded to the door of

her separate apartment—assigned her so that Nugget would not be underfoot to

irritate the big males.

Huyghens, as the human population of Loren Two, faced the work force,

fighting force, and—with Nugget—four-fifths of the terrestrial nonhuman

population of the planet. They were mutated Kodiak bears, de

scendants of the Kodius Champion for whom the Kodius Company was named. Sitka

Pete was a good twenty-two hundred pounds of lumbering, intelligent carnivore.

Sourdough Charley would weigh within a hundred pounds of that figure. Faro

Nell was eighteen hundred pounds of female charm—and ferocity. Then Nugget

poked his muzzle around his mother’s furry rump to see what was toward, and he

was six hundred pounds of ursine infancy. The animals looked at Huyghens

expectantly. If he’d had Semper riding on his shoulder, they’d have known what

was expected of them.

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Murray Leinster - Exploration Team

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