Leinster, Murray - Four from Planet 05

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First published in the United States

by Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1959

White Lion edition, 1974

1SBN085617 338X

Made and printed in

Great Britain

for White Lion Publishers Limited

R. Kingshott & Co.Ltd., Deadbrook Lane, Aldershot, Hampshire

THE WORLD was remarkably normal when the thing began. For some days past Soames had reminded

himself frequently that things in general were unchanged. He'd met Gail Haynes. He liked her. Too

much. But nothing could come of it. He had a small bank account in a New York bank. He had a small

income from his profession. He had never even been rich enough to own an automobile. Back in the

United States he'd had to content himself with a motorcycle, and he had practically no prospect of

ever getting richer.

There have always been people in this condition. It is not news. There was really practically

nothing novel about anything anywhere on Earth, just then, and of all commonplace situations, that

of Soames was most natural. Other people in his fix and looking for a way out of the financial

doldrums worked at things they didn't care about and made more money. Some of them took extra jobs

at night, and some of them let their wives work, and most people had moments of intense

satisfaction and other moments in which they bitterly regretted that they'd persuaded girls into

such hopelessly unglamorous marriages. Soames was resolved not to do Gail so great an injustice.

He remembered the world as, up to now, filled with bright sunshine and many colors and inhabited

by people he didn't envy because he liked the work he was doing. How quickly a girl had changed

his comfortable smugness. Now he envied every man who had a job he could expect to lead ~o

something better, so he could buy a house and scrimp to pay for it and meanwhile come home in the

evening to a wife he cared about and children who thought him remarkable.

He still liked his own work, but he wished he'd wanted to be a salesman or a truck-driver or a

corporation employee instead of a research specialist in- a non-spectacular branch of science. He

could imagine Gail and himself living in a not-too-expensive suburb, with a small lawn to cut and

movies to go to and with each other to be glad about. It was not an extravagant dream, but he

couldn't believe in it. It was too late. So he grimly tried to thrust Gail out of his mind.

It wasn't easy. And when the normal state of affairs for all the world began to bend and crack,

with the shattering of all usual happenings just ahead, Gail was within feet of him. She looked at

him with interest. She was absorbed in listening to him. It was difficult to act as he felt he

must. But he did behave with detachment, as a man acts toward a girl he thinks he'd better not get

to know too well, for her sake. The place and background and the look of things, and the subject

of his conversation too, combined to make a romantic rapport between them unthinkable. They were •

not even alone.

They were in a circular room some twenty feet across, with a plastic domed roof overhead. A

complicated machine occupied the middle of the floor. There was a square, silver-plated tube which

wavered and spun and turned and flickered. Gail watched it.

Outside the sky was black with a myriad of stars. The ground was white. But it was not really

ground at all. It was ice that covered everything. It extended twenty miles north to the Barrier,

with icy blue sea beyond that, and southward to the Pole itself, past towering mountains and

howling emptiness and cold beyond imagining.

This was the Gissel Bay base of U.S.-in-Antarctica. The main building was almost buried in snow.

One

light bulb burned outside it, to guide back those who had business out-of-doors. Other signs of

brightness showed in almost-snowed-up windows. Off to one side stood the plastic-domed meteor-

watch structure in which Soames displayed the special complicated wave-guide radar with which he

did his work here. He showed it to Gail because, as a girl reporter flown down to do human-

interest aiticles on Antarctic research, she might get a story out of it.

No motion showed anywhere. The only sound was wind. A faint shooting star streaked across the sky

and downward to extinction. Nothing else happened. This seemed the most unlikely of all possible

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places for the future of the world to begin to change.

Inside the base's main building one man stayed awake on stand-by watch. A short-wave radio

transmitter-receiver was at his elbow, tuned to the frequency of all the bases of all the nations

now on Antarctica- English, French, Belgian, Danish, Russian. The stand-by man yawned. There was

nothing to do. Nights were five hours long at this season of the year, and it was still worth

while to keep to a regular sleep-and-work schedule.

In the radar dome, under the plastic hemisphere, Soames and Gail watched a clock ticking

sepulchrally. From time to time a tinny voice came out of a repeater-speaker hooked in to the

short-wave receiver in the main building. It was designed to make all inter-base communications

available here. The voices were sometimes English, but more often French or Danish or Russian. Now

and again somebody spoke at length, and nobody answered. The effect was of disconnected mumbling.

~There's not much of a story in my work," said Soames politely. "I work with this wave-guide

radar. It's set to explore the sky instead of the horizon. It spots meteors coming in from space,

records their height and course and speed, and follows them down until they burn up in the air.

From its record we can figure out the orbits they followed before Earth's gravity pulled them

down."

Gail nodded, looking at Soames instead of the complex instrument. She wore the multi-layer cold-

weather gar

ments issued for Antarctica, but somehow she did not look grotesque in them. Now her expression

was faintly vexed.

The third person in the dome was Captain Estelle Moggs, W. A. C., in charge of Gail's journey and

the general public relations angle.

"I just chart the courses of meteors," repeated Soames. "That's all."

Captain Moggs spoke authoritatively, "Met~ws, of course, are shooting stars."

"You saw the wave-guide tube stand still jug now," observed Soames. "It pointed steadily in one

direction. it had picked up a speck of rock some seventy miles high. It followed that rock down

until it burned out thirty-five miles up and forty miles to the west of us. You saw the record on

the two screens. This machine made a graph of the height, angle and speed on this tape, rolling

through under the pens. And that's all there is to it."

Gail shook her head, watching him.

"Can't you give me a human angler' she asked. 'Tm a woman. I'd like to be interested."

He shrugged, and she said somehow disconsolately, "What will knowing the orbits of meteors lead

to?"

He shrugged again. Having Gail around him so frequently was becoming rather uncomfortable, feeling

as he did about her. And he'd been thrown together with her more than average.

Everybody at the base had to carry at least two jobs. He'd piloted Gail in a helicopter ride along

the edge of the Barrier two days before. The Barrier was the line of monstrous three-to-six-

hundred-foot-high ice cliffs which formed most of the shoreline of this part of the Antarctic

continent. They'd flown low and close to the cliffs' base, with angry seas ffinging themselves

against the ice. It was a frightening experience, but Gail hadn't flinched.

"Finding out some special meteor-orbits," he said drily, "might lead to finding out when the Fifth

Planet blew itself up. According to Bode's Law there ought to be a planet like ours between Mars

and Jupiter. If there

was, it blew itself to pieces, or maybe the people on it had an atomic war."

Gail cocked her head to one side.

"Now that promises!" she said. "Keep on!"

"There ought to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, in a certain orbit," he told her. "There

isn't. Instead, there's a lot of debris floating around. Some is as far out as Jupiter. Some is as

far in as Earth. It's mostly between Mars and Jupiter, though, and it's made up of hunks of rock

and metal of all shapes and sizes. We Call the big ones asteroids. There's no proof so far, but

it's respectable to believe that there used to be a Fifth Planet, and that it blew itself up or

was blown up by its inhabitants. I'm checking meteor-orbits to see if some meteors are really tiny

asteroids."

"Hmrninm," said Gail. Then. she asked about one of those surprising, unconnected bits of

information a person in the newspaper business picks up. "Don't they say that the mountains on the

moon were made by asteroids falling on it?" -

Soames nodded and glanced at her quickly. She'd surprised him before. Not every attractive girl

knows about the moon-mountains, craters, ring-mountains. They are the impact-splashes of monstrous

missiles which, a long time ago, hurtled out of space to blast the surface of Earth's small

companion.

Some of the craters could have been made by nothing more than giant meteorites, but there is a

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valley in the Lunar Alps which is seventy-five miles long and five miles wide. It was literally

gouged out of the moon's curved surface. It must have been made by something too big to be

anything but an asteroid, plunging wildly through emptiness and just barely touching the edge of

the moon in a grazing miss before it went on to nobody knows where. Then there are the nwres-the

so-called seas-which are certainly plains of lava formed when even larger masses plunged deep and

let the inner fires of the moon flow out.

"It's at least possible that the moon was smashed up by fragments of the Fifth Planet," agreed

Soames. "In fact, that's a more or less accepted explanation."

She looked at him expectantly. The inter-base radio speaker muttered. Somebody in the Danish base

read off readings of cosmic-particle frequency. In theory the in-formation would be avidly noted

down by the French, English, American, Belgian, and Russian bases. It wasn't.

"I have to think of my readers," insisted Gail. "It's interesting enough, but how can I make it

something they'll be concerned about? When the moon was smashed, why wasn't Earth?"

"It's assumed that Earth was," Soames told her. It, was odd to talk to Gail about abstract things,

for her never to mention anything but impersonal matters when he felt so much more than an

abstract intere~t in her and when her manner was distinctly personal.

Soarnes took a deep breath and went on about subjects which didn't seem to matter any more. "But

on Earth we have weather, and it happened a long, long time ago, maybe back in the days of three-

toed horses and ganoid fish. Undoubtedly at one time the Earth was devastated like the moon. But

our ring-mountains were worn away by rain and snow. New mountain ranges rose up. Continents

changed. Now there's no way to find even the traces of a disaster so long past. But the moon has

no weather. Nothing ever changes on it. Its wounds have never healed."

Gail frowned in concentration.

"A bombardment like that would be something to live through," she said vexedly. "An atomic war

would be trivial by comparison. But if it happened millions and millions of years ago. . . . We

women want to know about things that are happening now!"

Soames opened his mouth to speak. But he didn't utter a sound.

The flickering, wavering, silver-plated wave-guide tube of the radar suddenly steadied. It ceased

to hunt restlessly among all places overhead for a tiny object headed for Earth. It stopped dead.

It pointed, trembling a little as if with eagerness. It pointed somewhere east of due south, and

above the horizon.

"Here's a meteor. It's falling now," said Soames.

Then he looked again. The radar's twin screens should

have shown two dots of light, one to register the detected object's height and another its angle

and distance. But both screens were empty. They showed nothing at all. There was nothing where the

radar had stopped itself and where it a~thed. Instead, all of the two screens glowed faintly. The

graph-pens wrote wholly meaningless indications on their tape. A radar, and especially a meteor-

tracking radar, is an instrument of high precision. It either detects something and pin-points its

place, or it doesn't, because an object may or may not be reflecting radar-pulses.

The radar here was giving an impossible reading. It was as if it did not receive the reflections

of the pulses it sent out, but only parts of them. It was as if something were intermittently in

existence, or was partly real and partly not. Or as if the radar had encountered an almost-

something which was on the verge of becoming real, and didn't quite make it.

"What the-"

The inter-base radio screamed. There was no other word for it. It emitted a blast of pure,

horrible noise. It was deafening. At the same instant the twin radar-screens flashed bright all

over. The two pens of the tape-writing machine scrambled crazy lines on the paper. The noise

became monstrous. It was certainly not static. It was a raging, shrieking uproar such as no radio

ever gave out. It had a quality of anguish, of blind and agonized protest. There was pure horror

in it.

The most remarkable thing, though, was that at this same instant the same sound came out of every

radio and television set in use in all the world. Soames could not know the fact now, but the same

noise-the same hideous signal without significance-disturbed electrical instruments as far north

as Labrador, upset the operations of digital computers, loran devices, electron-microscope images,

and amounted to an extra time-signal in clock circuits everywhere, throwing them all out of time.

The noise stopped. Now a bright spot showed on each of the meteor-watch radar's twin screens. The

screen indicating height said that the source of the dot was four miles high. The screen

indicating line and distance said

that it bore 167° true, and was eighty miles distant. The radar showed that something previously

struggling to become more than partly real-a something which didn't quite exist, but was trying to

come into existence

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-now reported success.

Some object had come into being from nothingness, out of nowhere. It had definitely not arrived.

It had become. It was twenty thousand feet high, eighty miles 167° from the base, and its

appearance had been accompanied by such a burst of radio noise as neither storm nor atomic

explosion had ever made before.

And the thing which came from nowhere and therefore was quite impossible, now moved toward the

east at roughly three times the speed of sound.

Voices came abruptly out of the inter-base radio speaker. The French and Danish and English asked

each other if they'd heard that hellish racket, and what could it be? A Russian voice snapped

suspiciously that the Americans should be queried.

And the wave-guide radar simply followed a large object which had not come from outer space like a

meteor, nor over the horizon like a plane or a guided missile, but which quite clearly, if

theatrically, had come out of no place at all.

The sheer impossibility of the thing was only part of the problem it presented. The radar stayed

with it. Moving eastward, far away in the frigid night, it seemed suddenly to put on brakes.

According to the radar, its original speed was close to Mach 3-thirty-nine miles a minute.

Then it checked swiftly. It came to a complete stop. Suddenly it hurtled backward along the line

it had followed. It wobbled momentarily as if it had done a flip-flop four miles above the ground.

It dove. It stopped dead in mid-air for a full second and abruptly began to rise in an insane,

corkscrew course which ended in a fantastic plunge headlong toward the ground.

It dropped like a stone. It fell for long, long seconds. Once it wavered, as if making a final

effort to continue its frenzy in the air. But again it fell downward. It reached the horizon. It

dropped behind it.

Seconds later the ground trembled very, slightly. Soames hit the graph-machine case. The pens

jiggled. He'd made a time-recording of an earth-shock somewhere.

Now he read off ~he interval between the burst of screaming static and the jog he'd made by

striking the instrument. Earth-shock surface waves travel at four miles per second. The radar had

said the thing which appeared in mid-air did so eighty miles away. The static-burst was

simultaneous. There was a twenty-second interval between the static and the arrival of the earth-

tremor waves. The static and the appearance of something from nowhere and the point of origin of

the earth-shock matched up. They. were one event. The event was timed with the outburst of radio

noise, not the impact of the falling object, which was a minute later.

Soames struggled to imagine what that event could be. The inter-base radio babbled. Somebody

discovered that the static had been on all wave-lengths at the same time. It had been enormously

powerfuL No lightning-bolt could have filled all frequency-bands with static of such volume and

duration. There would be many hundreds of thousands of kilowatts needed merely to cover the

Antarctic on all broadcast bands. Voices argued about it.

Gail munnured to Captain Moggs. They heard the man on stand-by watch say tiredly that the

Americans had heard the static but didn't know what it was. The Russian voice announced that

Americans tested secret weapons in the ice-wastes of the interior. This was another test. Of what?

In the radar-dome Captain Moggs said indignantly, "This is monstrous! I shall report this to

Washington! They accuse us of testing secret weapons when we've assured them we aren't! Mr.

Soames, what, was actually the object the radar picked up, and what caused that static they talk

about? I shall need to explain it when I report."

Soames looked away from Gail.

"The static," he said, "if you call it that, was caused

by the appearance ,of the thing the radar picked up and followed."

"And what was that thing?" demanded Captain Moggs.

Soames paused.

"There isn't anything it could be," he said slowly. "It was impossible. There couldn't be anything

like that."

Gail cocked her head on one side.

"D'you mean it's something new to science?"

Soames was still aware of his own attraction to Gail, so he spoke with great formality. The radar

had tried to detect and range on an object that wasn't there, which was out of all reason. Yet it

was not a defect in the radar, because a thing did appear an instant later. The nearest accurate

statement would be that the radar had detected something just before it became something the radar

could detect, which did not begin 'to make sense. But there were only certain kinds of things in

the air above Antarctica, and the radar-target hadn't been any of them!

There could be planes, but planes didn't appear in mid-sky without previously having been

somewhere else. No, it wasn't a plane. There could be meteors, but it wasn't a meteor because it

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went too slowly and changed course and stood still in the air and went upward. Nor was it a

missile. A ballistic missile couldn't change course, a rocket-missile would have lert a trail of

heat-ionized gases that would show in the radar, and it would have had to come from somewhere. So

there wasn't anything for the object to be, even if it were possible for it really to be

something.

He looked at his watch.

"Six minutes and a half from the static," he said grimly. "Eighty miles. Sound travels a mile

every five seconds. Let's listen. Ten seconds . . . eight . . . six. . four..."

He stopped. Wind outside the dome blew snow crystals over each other. They made a brittle,

crystalline, tinkling sound. Now the wave-guide radar had gone back to normal operation. Its

silver-plated square tube ffickered and quivered and spun quickly in this

direction and that, searching all the sky.

There was a booming sound. It was infinitely low-pitched. It was a long, far-away, deep bass

growl, so low in frequency that it seemed more a vibration of the air than an actual sound.

It died away.

"Concussion-wave," said Soames soberly. "It arrived four-hundred-odd seconds after the static.

Eighty miles.

A noise has to be pretty loud to travel so far! A ground-shock has to be rather sharp to be felt

as an earth-tremor at eighty miles. Even a spark has to be very, very fierce to mess up radio and

radar reception at eighty miles. Something very remarkable happened down there tonight."

Gail said quickly, "You mean it may have come? A bomb? Could it be an atom bomb explosion?"

"There'd be a fireball and the radar would still be going crazy," said Soames. "We'd probably have

seen the flash through the dome, too. And nothing solid would have appeared because of an atomic

explosion. Quite the contrary! But something did turn up where the noise and static and earth-

shock started. It flew. It braked. It accellerated. It rose upward. It's something that somebody

ought to look into."

"How about a spaceship from another world?" asked Gail hopefully.

"It would have come in from outer space," said Soames. "It didn't."

"A secret weapon," said Captain Moggs firmly. "I shall report to Washington and ask orders to

investigate."

"I wouldn't," said Soames. "If you ask orders you promise to wait for them. And there's wind and

snow and God knows what to cover up whatever the radar said fell down to the ground. If you wait

for orders, whatever fell will be covered past discovery by the time your orders come."

Gail looked at him with interest, with confidence.

"What will you do, then?"

"I think," said Soames, "we'll find it and then report."

"But..."

"You," said Soames, "have a penguin story blocked

out. I'm to pilot you in a helicopter, tomorrow, to a penguin rookery fifty miles down the coast

where the Barrier breaks up. You were planning a cozy little article on Housewives of the

Antarctic: The Care and Feeding of one's Penguin Husband. Right?"

Gail grinned suddenly. "I see. Yes. That's a good title."

"We take off in the 'copter," said Soames. "We start out ostensibly to gather material for an

article on Can This Penguin Marriage be Saved. But we'll be blown off course. We'll find ourselves

quite accidentally where the radar said there was the great-grandfather of static bursts, with a

ground-shock and a concussion-wave to boot. We may even be blown farther, to where something dived

downward for four or five miles and vanished below the horizon."

Captain Moggs said uneasily, "Most irregular. But it might be wise."

"Of course," said Soames. "It's always safer to report something you've found than not find

something you've reported. Besides, the thing we'd report-there can't be any such thing."

"But you've some idea what it is!" protested Gail.

"My mind is full," admitted Soames, "of things that can't be. I don't know of anything it could

be."

"No spaceship?" she asked.

"I'm not that much of a pessimist," he told her, grinning. "But we'd better look and see."

"We start at sunrise," said Captain Moggs authoritatively.

"Make it after breakfast," suggested Soames mildly. "One should never challenge destiny on an

empty stomach."

Gail smiled warmly at him as he showed them out of the radar-dome. He saw them greeted at the exit

by Rex, the large and untidy dog who was the base's official mascot. Rex considered himself as

much a person as anybody else; and hence entitled to choose his company. He'd been waiting for

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Gail. He'd adored her from the hour of her arrival. He frisked about her as she started back

toward the base's main building. Soames went back to the radar.

As he looked at it, it picked out something a little smaller than a marble at a height of seventy-

nine miles and followed that incredibly ancient, small wanderer of space down to its spectacular

suicide by fire at a height of thirty-four miles.

He turned up the inter-base short-wave speaker. An almost hysterical voice snapped bitterly that

the burst of impossible static proved that the Americans were trying out dreadful devices in the

frozen wilderness of the Antarctic. There were references to Wall Street, and to warmongering, and

other familiar ideas. It was not remarkable. Since progress in science had come to mean progress

in the ability to blow people up, there was a tendency to emotional reaction even among alleged

scientists. Soames found himself thinking queasily that since it was pure chance that his radar

had picked up the inexplicable side-effects of the static-burst,' it might truly be challenging

destiny to carry on the investigation.

He painstakingly checked over the radar. It worked perfectly. The taped record of its observations

carried the story of all that Gail and Captain Moggs and he had seen. Machinery may err, but it

does not have delusions. It would have to be subject to systematic hallucinations to have reported

and recorded what this radar insisted was the truth.

The inter-base radio suddenly announced that the French seismograph had recorded an earth-shock.

Within minutes, the British and Belgians confirmed it. The Danes chimed in. The coincidence of a

ground-shock with a static-burst-assuredly in time, and apparently in place-was proof that

something dramatic had happened.

Soanies elaborately went over the whole business in his mind again. For the first time in several

days he was able to keep his thoughts away from Gail. Any ideas about a relationship with her

simply were out. The point was that he wasn't rich and never would be. He couldn't afford a wife

and there was no use thinking about it. So he would think about whatever had happened down on the

ice-cap tonight. In the present state of international

jitters, God only knew what anything like this might bring about. So far, studies for weather-

control in bacteriology, physics, aerodynamics, cybernetics, even progress in miniaturization had

been denounced fiercely in the U.N. as preparation for war. But it had appeared that a study of

meteoric orbits ought to seem a harmless pastime even to the Russians.

When dawn came, he went out to the helicopter's hangar. There was a supply plane on the runway,

but the helicopter belonged at the base.. He checked it over. He was supposed to take Gail aloft

in it today. He found himself excessively careful in his check-over. He tried to assure himself

that he was over-conscientious merely because she was a girl, a visiting reporter, but he wasn't a

good liar.

When he headed back toward the main building one of the geophysics gang beckoned to him. He

~fo1lowed to the small, distant hut, now snow-buried to its eaves, in which the seismograph ticked

away. It was several hundred yards from anywhere that strong ground-vibrations could be expected.

"I think I'm going crazy," said the geophysics man. "Did you ever hear of a ground-shock starting

inside out?"

He pointed to the graph paper that fed very slowly past the seismograph's pens. The recording

looked odd.

"If you put your hand just under the surface of the water in a bathtub," said the puzzled

geophysics man, "and jerk it downward, you get a hollow that spreads out with a wave behind it.

It's the exact opposite of dropping a pebble into water, which makes a wave that spreads out with

a hollow, a trough, behind it. Except for that one way of making a backward wave system, all waves-

absolutely all wave-systems-start out with a crest and a trough behind it. Everywhere, all the

time, unless you do what I said in a bathtub."

"I'm a shower man myself," observed Soames. "But go

on.

"This," said the geophysics man bitterly, "is like a bathtub wave. See? The ground was jerked away

and then pushed back. Normal shock-waves push away and

then spring back! An ice-crack, a rock-slide, an explosion of any sort, all of them make the same

kind of waves! All have compression phases, then rarefaction phases, then compression pl~ases, and

so on. What"-his voice was plaintive-"what in hell is this?"

Soames nervously cleared his throat. He wondered if Gail could get a human-interest story out of a

geophysicist who found earth-shock waves placed hind part before.

"Are you saying," he asked after a moment, "that ordinary earth-tremors record like explosion-

waves, but that you'd have to have an implosion to make a record like this?"

"Sure!" said the geophysics man. "But how can you have an implosion that will make an earth-shock?

I'm going to have to take this whole damned wabble-bucket apart to find out what's the matter with

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it! But nothing can be the matter because it registered what it got! But what did it get?"

"An implosion," said Soames. "And if you have trouble imagining that, I'm right there with you."

He went back to the main building and breakfast. He looked on sardonically as Gail sat at the

table surrounded by eagerly admiring staff members who'd seen only each other and supply-plane

crewmen for months past. Gail didn't look in the least like a staff member or a supply-plane

pilot. In fact, fourteen beards had been shaved off since her arrival, without making any of the

staff look very much like Gail. She was very good to look at.

He ate morosely. When the meal was done the three of them, Soames and Gail and Captain Moggs, went

out to the 'copter hangar together. The hangar originally had been a shed on top of the ice. Now

its roof was scarcely two feet above the surface, and a snow-ramp led up to the bitterly cold,

wind-swept take-off space. The supply plane would have blocked its use as a runway, but it

wouldn't need to be moved out of the way for a 'copter launching.

"I've talked to the radar and loran operator," said Soames. "I explained that you wanted to see

some

crevasses from the air, and that I'd be wandering~around looking for them on the way to the

rookery. ~ will check on us every fifteen minutes, anyhow."

Gail asked, "Have you thought of anything the-thing might be?"

"I've less than no idea," admitted Soames. "All I could think of was more things it can't be. The

geophysics boys have something to worry about too. It seems the ground-shock waves came in front

part hindmost. And there aren't supposed to be any such waves. But the seismQgraph says there are.

The thing made 'em."

He helped her up into the 'copter's cabin. Their hands touched. He tried to ignore the fact, but

Gail glanced at him quickly.

The 'copter went up the long, sloping, bulldozed snow-ramp. Soames checked his radio contact. He

nodded. The engines hummed and roared and bellowed, and the ship lifted deliberately and floated

away over the icy waste.

A 'copter ride does not feel like any other kind of airborne travel. One moves slowly by

comparison with planes, and a side-wind makes a great difference between the heading of the ship

and the way the ground moves beneath it. One seems to be traveling out of control, sliding around

the sky with no particular direction. The feeling is only an illusion, but still disturbing.

The motors droned and droned. The 'buildings of the base dwindled in size. Presently they were

very small and very far behind. To the left the sea appeared. It looked even colder than the ice

which covered everything solid.

"This is a thrill," said Gail in Soames' ear over the motor-noise. "I like to think it could be a

spaceship we're going to find!"

"I'd prefer anything else," said Soames. "Anything!" The base seemed to drift away back to the

very horizon. Soames swung the ship to the right, to the south. It went winging on over whiteness,

a thousand feet high. Below was nothing but snow. No sign showed that any human being had ever

trodden the surface beneath them. Nobody ever had. But no sign showed

that any living thing at all had ever glimpsed the terrain beneath them.

The tiny droning thiRg was infinitely lonely in the empty sky, above a bndscape that had never

known a growing thing. There was only one spot in two thousand miles where human beings were to be

found. That spot was the South Pole itself. Beyond it lay vast deserts of snow and the towering

ramparts of icy mountains, colossal plateaus many thousands of feet high over which incredibly

cold winds blew furiously. The little helicopter was, very much alone.

Soames flew carefully, checking wind-drift by the shadows of ice-spires in the waste beneath.

Twice he murmured briefly into his radio microphone. Each time his estimated position checked with

the radar. The third time he was out of radar range for his altitude. He rose steeply until the

radar picked him up again. His position checked.

"I'm going down now," he told the base. "Hunting crevasses."

He let the 'copter descend. The waste was featureless then and for a seemingly interminable time

afterward. Then his estimated position matched the site of the static earth-shock-concussion-wave

occurrence. There seemed nothing about this part of the snow-desert which was different from any

other part. No. Over to the left.

He went over to see. He hovered, a thousand feet up. A wind-pattern showed in the snow. But this

was rather far from the probable thing. There were lines-hollows- where gusts had blown at the

snow's surface. They were spiral lines, tending toward a center. They had not the faintest

resemblance to the crater of an explosion which might have made an earth-shock.

Soames stared down. Gail frowned thoughtfully. Captain Moggs announced firmly, "That is a very

singular thing."

Soames did not comment. He was getting a camera out of its place in the 'copter. Gail stared down.

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"I've seen something like that," she said, sounding puzzled. "Not a picture. Certainly not a snow-

field. I think it looks like a diagram of some sort."

"Try a storm-wind diagram," said Soàmes. "The way a cyclone ought to look from directly overhead.

The meteorology boys will break down and cry when they see this picture!"

He took a picture. He took others. The shadows of the wind-made indentations would come out

clearly in the film.

"Unless," said Soames, "unless somebody has a ~snap of a whirlwind touching a snow-field and,

bouncing up again, this will be a photographic first. It's not an ex~ plosion pattern, you'll

notice. Wind and snow weren't thrown away from the center. They were drawn toward

it. Momentarily. It's an explosion inside out. An implosion pattern."

He put away the camera and with some grimness headed for another place some twenty miles away,

where a thing that had appeared from nowhere had dived four or five miles and vanished below the

horizon, with only one sign in its falling-that it had struggled to avoid a crash.

"I don't understand," said Gail a little sheepishly. She looked hopefully at Soames for an

explanation.

"An explosion," said Soames grimly, "is a bursting-out of a suddenly present mass of gas. An

implosion is a bursting-in of a suddenly present vacuum. Set off a firecracker and you have an

explosion. Break an electric bulb and you have an implosion. Th~t pattern behind us is an

implosion pattern."

"But how could such a thing be?"

"If we knew," said Soames, "maybe we'd be running away. Maybe we should."

He was acutely conscious of Gail sitting beside him. He was even impatient with himself for being

so much aware of her when it couldn't amount to anything and he had a first-class scientific

problem on hand.

The 'copter fluttered on. The ice-sheet continued unbroken. Presently Soames said in a flat voice,

"What we're looking for ought to be in sight. It isn't. There's quite a breeze down below. It's

keeping snow stirred up in clouds. Anything solid on the ice-sheet is completely hidden by the

equivalent of a dust-storm, only it's snow."

The 'copter hovered. For a space fully two miles wide, cloudiness obscured the essentially

featureless ice-sheet. It was practically a white-out-microscopic snow-crystals kept in turmoil

like the densest of possible fogs.

"From now on," said Soames, "I shall lie awake nights trying to figure this thing out. And I'll

almost certainly never know."

"There!" cried Gail.

She pointed. Blowing snow hid everything. Then there was a hole in the whiteness, a shadow. The

shadow stirred and an object too dark to be snow appeared. It vanished again.

"There's a sheltered place," said Gail, "and there's something dark in it!"

Soames pulled the microphone to his lips.

"Calling base," he said briefly. "Calling base. Hello! I'm well beyond the last radar-fix. I think

I'm bearing about one-severz-zero degrees from base. Get a loran fix on me. Make it quick. I may

have to land."

He listened, pressing a button to activate the loran-relay which would transmit a signal from the

base, so the bearing and distance could be computed back there. It was wiser to have such

computations done aground. He readied the camera again.

Gail reached forward and took the 'copter's binoculars from their place. She gazed through them.

The peculiar shadow, hole, opening in the blowing snow reappeared. Something in it looked a little

like a missile, only it was bright metal and much too large. It lay askew on the ice. A part of it-

ia large part-was smashed.

"Spaceship?" asked Gail, "Do you think that's it?"

"God forbid!" said Soames.

There was movement. One-two-three figures stared up from beside the metal shape. A fourth

appeared. Soames grimly took pictures. Gail gasped suddenly, "They're not men!" she said shakily.

"Brad, they're children! Queerly dressed children, with bare arms and legs! They're out there on

the snow! They'll freeze! We've got to help them!"

"Calling base," said Soames into the microphone. "I'm landing. I have to. If I don't report in

twenty minutes

come with caution-repeat with caution-to see what's happened. I repeat. If I do not report in

twenty minutes come with extreme caution, to see what is the matter."

He sent the 'copter slanting downward. He reached forward and took the 'copter's standard-

equipment automatic pistol and put it in his pocket.

The 'copter made a loud noise as it went skittering down toward the object-and the children-on the

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ice.

A LL ~VER mx wom.~o the lives of people and the ,t1.. march of events proceeded according to

custom.

Commuters caught morning trains, and read their newspapers, which was not a cheerful way to begin

the day. Farmers ploughed their fields, which was less dispiriting. Small boys vociferously played

at games requiring much vocal gunfire, and small girls sedately played house. Over vast stretches

of glittering sea, ships steamed valiantly, and on land super-markets offered special bargains,

and in appropriate places dogs barked or scratched themselves or trotted impoltantly from here to

there, or else slept in complete canine comfort.

As yet no sign had appeared of any new influence which might alter a firmly established trend of

the times toward more and more complicated situations which could be more and more desperately

stalled off but never solved. Nobody had noticed any cause for immediate desperation. No. Nobody

realized that they'd noticed a cause for immediate desperation.

Already, a mere six or seven hours after its occurrence, there was discussion in scientific

circles about the remarkable. burst of static Soames had heard. As it was discussed, its

astonishing span attracted attention. It had blanketed the whole world. Then its violence began to

be realized. Never before had there been an unconfined

discharge of electric energy of even a fraction of the power of the static burst. From an oddity

to be discussed, it became a curiosity to be inquired into, and then it was a scientific problem~

of the first rank among researchers in pure science.

But, so far, it wasn't anything more. It had caused no conspicuous damage. At the beginning it

attracted attention because it couldn't happen, and had. It was plainly impossible for any single

source of radio interference to blanket the whole globe on all wave-ler~gths for three full

seconds. But it had taken place. All communication was stopped, all .eledtrical apparatus in use

was disturbed, all working meters and measuring devices thrown out of adjustment. It drew

attention to itself because it was not conceivable, but was nevertheless real.

It did not cause alarm at first. That would come later, when the power released to make the

senseless signal was computed. Right now, monitoring devices on the watch for unauthorized

broadcasts said it came from Antarctica. There was an earth-shock in Antarctica at the same time,

but there are always earth-shocks happening.

A really sensitive seismograph reports an incredible number every day. Nobody noticed the

coincidence. Nobody was scared. Certain pure-science researchers who discovered that it wasn't a

local phenomenon became more and more interested as they found it world-wide, on all wave-bands,

and of maximum signal-intensity everywhere. But they were only interested, intensely so, to be

sure, but stifi only interested.

So there was no recognition anywhere on Earth that any new thing had appeared to disturb the

orderly development of crisis and compromise, in diplomacy; rises in prices to overtake rises in

wages, in economics; and an increasing depreciation of human values in exchange for the increased

convenience with which the world could 'be blown to bits when the time for that achievement

arrived.

Nobody was really concerned except Soames-who guessed what was happening-and Gail because Soames

was disturbed. The helicopter hovered over the ice-fog.

A ship lay plainly visible on the ice. Half its length was smashed, but Soames could see that it

had never flown with wings. There weren't any.

"It looks like a spaceship," said Gail breathlessly.

'"'l"hat would finish things!" Soames said grimly.

It would. The arrival of a spaceship from another civilization on Earth was the worst catastrophe

Soames could imagine. Earth was already squabbling and divided into power groups and embittered

neutrals. It was a world armed with weapons so deadly that only the fear of retaliation kept the

peace. And contact with a farther-advanced culture would not unite humanity. It would detonate

hatred and suspicion into sheer madness.

Earth was an armed camp with all its nations more or less committed to one of two sides. A higher

civilization could tip the scales between them, if it gave one side superior weapons. Any contact

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with a superior race would result in competition for that race's favor. Yet if one part of Earth's

population appeared to be favored by the newcomers, the other part must try to destroy it before

the higher race could interfere to protect it. The world outside the Iron Curtain could not risk

the Iron Curtain nations' becoming best friends of possible invaders. Communist leaders could not

risk the free world's making alliance with a higher technology and a greater science. So actual

contact wIth a more advanced race would be the' most deadly happening that could take place in the

world as it was today.

Soames realized all this and began to perspire when the 'copter touched ground. He jumped out. He

looked at the ship and felt weak. But he snapped a quick photograph. It was quite true that it had

no wings, had never owned any. It had been probably a hundred feet long, all bright metal. Now

nearly half of it was crushed or crumpled by its fall. It must have been brought partly under

control before the impact, though, enough to keep it from total destruction. And Soames, regarding

it, saw that there had been no propellers to support it or pull it through the air. There were no

air-ducts for jet motors. It wasn't a jet. - -

There were no rockets, either. Its drive was of a kind so far undreamed of by men of here and now.

Gail stood beside Soames, her eyes bright. She looked at the children. Captain Moggs climbed

laboriously down to the snow.

Gail said, "Brad! It isn't cold here!"

Soames noted but could not attend to the fact in his appalled realization that this ship, wherever

it might have come from, was qualified to navigate space.

"Children," said Captain Moggs firmly, "we must speak to your parents at, once!"

The children looked at her interestedly. One of the girls spoke politely, in wholly unintelligible

syllables. The girls might have been thirteen or thereabouts. The boys were possibly a year older-

sturdier and perhaps more muscular than most boys of that age. All four were wholly composed. They

looked curious but not in the least alarmed, not in the least upset, as they'd have been had older

companions been injured or killed in the ship's landing.

They 'wore brief garments that would have been quite suitable for a children's beach party in mid-

summer, but did not belong on the Antarctic ice-cap at any time. Each 'wore a belt with moderately

large metal insets placed on either side of its fastening.

"Brad!" repeated Gail. "It's warm here! Do you realize it? And there's no wind!"

Soames swallowed. The camera hung from his hand. It either was, or could be a spaceship that lay

partly smashed upon the ice. He looked about him with a sort of total grimness. There was a metal

girder, quite separate from the ship, which had apparently been set up slantingly in the ice since

the landing. It had no apparent purpose.

Captain Moggs said peremptorily, "Children! We insist on speaking to your parents! At once!"

Gail moved forward. Soames now saw a small tripod near the ship. Something spun swiftly at its

top. It had plainly been brought out from inside the strange vessel. For a hundred yards in every

direction there was no wind or snow. More than that, the calm air was also

warm. It was unbelievable.

"Do you hear me?" demanded Captain Moggs. "Children!"

Gail said in a friendly fashion, smiling at the girls, "I'm sure you don't understand a word I

say, but won't you invite us to visit?"

Her tone and manner were plainly familiar to the children. With something of the self-consciously

grownup air of a young girl acting in her mother's place, one of the two girls smiled and bobbed,

not a curtsy, but still something comparable to learned politeness. She made a gesture which was

plainly hospitable. She stood aside for Gail to enter the ship.

Gail did enter, and Captain Moggs strode after her. Gail was not a tall girl, but she had to bend

her head to go through the doorway. Soames put his hand in his pocket. There was the automatic

pistol, in readiness. One of the boys beckoned politely to him.

"Yes," said Soames grimly. "I'll walk into your parlor. But it's possible that you've walked into

ours."

He moved to the ship's door. 'There was no menace in the children. Soames felt, abruptly, that if

there was any menace present it was himself. He was in the position of a savage in an encounter

with a civilization so superior that it must destroy the culture the savage had grown up in. Yet

he had a normal adult's instinctive response to children who might need help. And then it occurred

to him that Gail was involved in any disaster the coming of highly civilized aliens might bring to

Earth. His throat went dry.

He entered the ship, ducking to pass through the door. It was quite as bright inside the ship as

it was out-of-doors. There were no lights. It was simply bright. A part of the floor had buckled

upward, and the rest was not level, but the first impression was of brilliance and the second was

of a kind of simplicity that was bewildering. And there was a third. It was of haste. The ship

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file:///F|/rah/Murray%20Leinster/Leinster%20-%20Four%20From%20Planet%205\%20UC.txtCopyright@FawcettPublications,Inc.,1959FirstpublishedintheUnitedStatesbyFawcettPublications,Inc.,1959WhiteLionedition,19741SBN085617338XMadeandprintedinGreatBritainforWhiteLionPublishersLimitedR.Kingshott&Co.Ltd.,Deadb...

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Leinster, Murray - Four from Planet 05

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