Murray Leinster - Get Off My World

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GET OFF MY WORLD! A BELMONT BOOK-Apri! 1966

Published by

Belmont Productions, Inc.

66 Leonard St., New York, N. Y. 10013

Printed in Canada

SECOND LANDING

WHITE SPOT

PLANET OF SAND

GET OFF MY WORLD!

"The exploring ship Franklin made its first landing on a remarkable wide-beach on the western coast of

Chios, the largest land mass on Thalassia. Using the longest axis of the continent as a base, and the

pointed end as seen from space as O", this beach bears 246° from the median point of the base line. . . .

The Franklin later berthed inland some jour miles 360° from Firing Plaza One on the chart. There is a

pleasant savannah here, with a stream of water apparently safe for drinking . . ."

Astrographic Bureau Publication 11297, Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Pp. 58-59.

IT WAS NOT plausible that Brett Carstairs should find a picture of a girl, to all appearances human, in

millenia-old ruins on a planet some hundreds of light years from Earth. But the whole affair was unlikely,

beginning with the report of the exploring ship which caused the Thalassia-Asprasia Expedition in the first

place. If it hadn't been for photographs and the ceramic artifacts, nobody would have believed that report.

It simply was not credible that another intelligent race should ever have existed in the galaxy. In two

centuries of exploration, no hint of extraterrestrial reasoning beings had been found before. But the

exploration ship's narrative didn't stop at one impossibility

about the twin worlds Thalassia and Aspasia, revolving perpetually about each other as they trailed the

satellite sun Rubra on its course. The report wasn't content to claim one intelligent race to have existed. It

claimed two. And it offered evidence that some thousands of years before they had fought each other

bitterly and mercilessly, and that they had exterminated each other in an interplanetary war which lasted

only days or even hours—which was hard to believe.

But the picture of the girl was more impossible than anything else. Brett didn't believe it, even when he

held it in his hand. He didn't dare mention it until the thing was all over. •

He didn't find it at the actual beginning, of course. There were preliminaries. The Thalassia-Aspasia,

Expedition worked under handicaps. It was based on the exploring ship's report and had to be organized

by the Records Division of the Astrographic Survey—which never has any money to spare—and there had

to be much skimping in every way and only volunteers could be afforded for the job. Even a ship couldn't

be hired for it. The general public was much more excited about the colonization of nearby planetary

systems than hi research on a planet that wouldn't be needed for colonization in a thousand years. So the

Expedition was very small—no more than a dozen members altogether—and it would be landed on

Thalassia from an Ecology Bureau ship and left there. It would probably be called for in six months or so.

Probably. Even then, what it found out might not matter to anybody else.

Brett joined up because it was his only chance for adventure and because his hobby warranted his

inclusion in the staff. He could drive a flier of course—everybody could —but he'd specialized in

paleotechnology, the study of ancient industrial processes. If there really had been an intelligent race or

races out in space, he could make better guesses than most at how the alien machinery worked and how its

factories produced. But his personal reason for going was an odd, anticipatory feeling of excitement at the

idea of being left with a small group of human beings on a planet where not even the skies were familiar,

from which Sol itself was invisible, and where they would be more ter-

ribly alone in a waste of emptiness than any similar group had ever been before.*

That excitement lasted during the long journey hi overdrive and during the almost-as-long approach to

planetary landing distance after the Ecology Bureau ship was back in normal space hi the Elektra system.

When it went into atmosphere on Thalassia and its repulsors droned above the illimitable waters of

Thalassia's ocean, Brett watched with fascinated eyes. Waves of this ocean had a twenty thousand mile

reach in which to build up to mountainous heights. At this season of the twin planets' year, they had the

equivalent of trade winds to urge them on. When they reached the shores of Chios, the planet's only

continent, the waves were three hundred feet high, and they seemed to fling spray and spume almost out to

space itself. Brett watched the swirling maelstroms and dramatic tumult of the struggle between sea and

land. He remembered that at the very edge of the wave-washed area there were to be found the only

moving living things on the continent. They were marine forms like crabs, which scuttled out of the water

to forage and darted back to the monstrously tumultuous coastal foam.

Watching from the Ecology ship, Brett heard the report, that the radar beacon on Chios wasn't working,

and he watched as the ship found Firing Plaza Number One and the ruined refugee-settlement nearby, and

hovered there to make quite sure of its position before it descended gently at the landing place the

exploring ship had advised for later visitors.

It was a pleasant savannah, and the stream ran as clear as crystal. But the Ecology Bureau ship had been

grudgingly loaned, and it had urgent business elsewhere. Its cargo ports opened and the Expedition's

supplies went out to ground hi a swiftly flowing stream. They piled up moun-tainously, so it seemed, and

at that they weren't too complete. The biggest crates were two atmosphere fliers and a short range rocket.

The fuel for the rocket made a bigger heap than all the rest of the equipment together. There were plastic

tarpaulins to cover everything. There were houses

* Note: The survival of the crew of the exploring ship Durwent on Lundstrom IV for some years after their shipwreck was not

known at this time.

to be unfolded and braced back—but at least they weren't inflatable shelters!—and there was a spare

beacon. But there wasn't much else but food. The unloading took less than two hours.

Then the skipper of the Ecology Bureau ship asked politely if there were anything else. Minutes later the

cargo ports closed and the personnel lock shut, and the ship's repulsors began to drone. It heaved up

slowly until it was a few thousand feet up and then went into interplanetary drive and plummeted toward

the sky. It would come back in six months, most likely, or another ship would come in its stead. And the

Expedition would have to be ready to leave.

That was when Brett Carstairs realized the silence on Thalassia. The Expedition's members set to work to

make camp. There was a breeze and the vegetation was reasonably familiar in smell, at least—chlorophyl

and its associated compounds are found on the oxygen planets of all sol-type stars—and the tree leaves

rustled naturally enough. The small stream at the landing place made pleasant liquid sounds. But that was

all. No insect stirred or whirred or stridulated. No bird sang. No squirrel barked. No reasonable facsimile

of any noise made by any living creature came to the ears of the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition. The only

noises were the voices of the Expedition members themselves, and the bumpings they made with the

boxes and crates, and the breeze and the dull booming of the mountainous surf to the westward. Brett

caught himself listening uneasily.

"I didn't realize," he said ruefully to Kent, on the other end of a crate that would be a chair presently, "that

it was going to sound so lonely."

"It's been lonely here for a good many thousand years," said Kent phlegmatically, "since the race on this

planet and the characters on the other one killed each other off."

He put down his end of the crate. He and Brett opened it. They began to assemble the furnishings of the

Expedition's housing. All about them was jungle. The clearing in which they worked had a ground cover

like ivy running on the ground. It was broad-leaved instead of narrow-leaved as grasses are, and Brett had

a feeling that there should be crawling things under it.

But there weren't. The report of the exploring ship was explicit. There had been a very high civilization

here, once. And another on the from-here-invisible twin planet As-pasia. Some eight thousand years ago

they'd fought each other terribly across the half million miles of space that separated them. Fission bombs

with cobalt cases poisoned the air of Thalassia, at the same time that fusion bombs from Thalassia blasted

the oasis cities of its twin world to lakes of molten glass. There wasn't a single, air-breathing creature left

alive on Thalassia. Not any more.

The air was clean of radioactivity now, to be sure. Carbon-14 and Cobalt-60 determinations timed the

deadly war at very close to eight thousand years before. Now there was vegetation and the ocean swarmed

with marine organisms from plankton to fish. But there was no moving creature left on the land of the

nearly Earth-sized world.

Brett labored on. The atmosphere on Thalassia was depressing. It was a dead world despite its forests and

jungles. Everything that had wings or a throat—even teeth to bite or stings to sting with—had died

milennia ago with the doomed creatures whose friable skeletons the exploring ship had found about the

firing plaza. They'd died of the bombs from the other planet, which was forever invisible from here.

They'd been murdered. Butchered. The forests had no purpose with no animals to live in them. There was

a feeling of grief in the air, as if even the trees mourned.

Brett wanted to go over to the firing plaza and see where at least there had been living things, even if the

only sure knowledge about them was that they had died in the act of firing giant rockets to avenge the

extermination of their race. When they died, Thalassia was already a charnel house. Now—

There was quiet. A terrible quiet. The Expedition members braced their houses, moved the laboratory

equipment inside, uncrated their fliers and tied them down, ran their power lines, dug their refrigeration

pits, put in sanitary equipment and set their water recovery plant to work. It was safer to condense water

from the air than to use the local water supplies which might still carry undesirable trace elements. Brett

began to worry that it would be too late to go to the firing plaza before dark. Then he remembered. He

looked up at the sky. It was mostly blue, but

it was speckled. There was a dull red pinpoint of light near the horizon. That wasn't Elecktra, the sun and

center of gravity of this system. It was Rubra, the red dwarf, the satellite sun the size of Earth's Jupiter,

which shared an orbit with the twin planets. They were in Trojan relationship to it, sixty degrees behind as

it sped sullenly about its primary. Elecktra itself was not visible. But there was no night.

Off to what ought to be the west there was a spotty bright luminosity hi the sky. It was the star cluster

Fanis Venitici, on whose fringe this solar system lay. The multiple suns of the cluster swarmed so closely

and shone so brightly at the cluster's heart that even thirty light years away they gave Thalassia more light

than its own and proper sun.

There would be no night on Thalassia.

Brett had known it, of course, but nevertheless he was relieved. A dead planet is gloomy enough in the

daytime, with all its vegetation grieving that it has no purpose. At night it would be intolerable. Even hi

the daytime it would be hard to keep one's mind busy.

Brett worked at it. He had driven pegs and was tying down the tarpaulin over a mound of crates when he

saw the heap of dirt. It did not have any ground cover plants on it. It was piled up. It had been rained on,

but it was freshly dug. Brett pounded two more pegs and double-knotted the ropes that would hold the

tarpaulin in any wind. Then he jumped. Kent, by that time, was pounding in more pegs on the other side of

the pile of stores.

Brett stared at the piled-up dirt. It was surprisingly Earthlike. The top of the ground was dark humus from

rotted vegetation, and six or eight inches down it turned to clay, very much like a freshly dug hole on

Earth. But there shouldn't be any freshly dug hole on Thalassia! Nothing lived here! Nothing!

But there was a freshly dug hole hi the ground, with clay on top of the thrown out humus.

Brett stopped driving pegs and went to make sure. He stared down. He felt himself growing queasy—

sickish— and pale. There were scraps of human-made paper at the bottom of the hole. There were traces

of the rotted debris any group of humans will discard, but which humans auto-

matically put out of sight before they leave any stopping place. This savannah had been the berthing place

of the exploring ship Franklin. This was where the explorers had buried their trash. Something had dug it

up.

More, something had very carefully sorted it out, as human scientists sort out the rubbish heaps—the

kitchen middens—of a forgotten culture to find out what made it tick.

Something had carefully examined an exploring ship's kitchen midden to find out what sort of beings

human beings might be. Men from Earth wouldn't have needed to do that. They knew.

Something intelligent and curious, but not from Earth, had wanted to know about men, on a planet where

there had been nothing even breathing, much less intelligent, for eight millenia. But something had been

alive on the dead planet Thalassia. It had wanted to know about the men who'd camped here from the

exploring ship two years before.

Brett was pale when he called Kent to look. Kent looked phlegmatically down into the hole and said:

"That's the Franklin's garbage pit. Why'd they dig it up again?"

Brett said:

"They didn't. Somebody not on the Franklin dug it up. Lately. It's been rained on, but nothing's grown

over it. In two years it would have been washed flat and covered over. This was dug long after the

Franklin left. Lately. Probably within days. Just before we arrived."

He shouted, and the trees nearby echoed back his voice with a hair-raising resonance. Halliday, the official

head of the Expedition, came fretfully to see what was the matter. Brett showed him. Halliday stared

blankly for a second. He even began to frown because Brett had called him for nothing. But then the

breath went out of him with a curious whooshing sound. His face went quite gray.

"And the ship's gone!" he said irritably. "It can't take word back! There is life here after all! Intelligent

life! We're at its mercy!"

Which was absolutely true. Because Thalassia was dead, and below-the-horizon Aspasia with it. There

could be no animals to hunt or need defense from: no birds or small

creatures to collect. This was strictly an archaeological expedition to work on two worlds which had

committed suicide together. So there were no defense weapons in the Expedition's equipment. Heat guns,

yes. They were handy for lighting fires. There were some explosives for shifting rock. But there were no

more weapons capable of defending men against really dangerous creatures than a man will take on a

camping trip in a national park on Earth. And the Expedition could not communicate with other humans

for at least six months. They were hundreds of light years from help.

Brett said slowly:

"On the ship, just before we landed, I heard it said that the radar-beacon on the ground here wasn't

working. I think, sir, we'd better go over to the firing plaza and find out the worst."

They went to the firing plaza. There had been a beacon there, left to notify Earth ships where the first

exploring ship had landed. It would also notify any other intelligent race which dealt in such things as

radar. There were a dozen men who went uneasily to see if anything had happened to make their landing

unfortunate. They were defenseless, and more isolated from their kind than any humans had ever been

before.

There was no sound anywhere save the wind in the trees. No bird song. No insect cry. Nothing but the

ominous dull booming of the gigantic surf to the west. The ship that had brought them was long since in

overdrive and unreachable by any means until it came back to normal space again.

They found where the beacon had been. It was gone. It had been a complex mechanism, powered by a

pinch of atomic pile residue. It should have sent out its signal, on a standard frequency, for years to come.

It had been mounted on a solid concrete pillar, according to custom.

The concrete pillar was there, but the radar beacon was not. It had been cut from its anchorage with

something like a torch which cut the metal smoothly. There was as yet no oxidation on the severed

surfaces.

The first landing plaque had been removed from the same column. It was the plaque which recited that the

exploring ship Franklin had made a first landing on this

planet on such and such a day and year, Earth Calendar. Close by the column there was a rocket blast

crater in the ground—a small one, perhaps six or seven feet across. It was fresh. A rocket had landed here

and removed the man-made objects after studying a human refuse pit. Within days. Certainly within

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GETOFFMYWORLD!ABELMONTBOOK-Apri!1966PublishedbyBelmontProductions,Inc.66LeonardSt.,NewYork,N.Y.10013PLANETOFSAND©1948byPopularPublications,Inc.SECONDLANDING©1953byStandardMagazines,Inc.WHITESPOT©1955byBetterPublications,Inc.PrintedinCanadaSECONDLANDINGWHITESPOTPLANETOFSANDGETOFFMYWORLD!1"Theexplorin...

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