Four from Planet 5

by Murray Leinster

Genres: Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The strange visitors had landed. Why had they come, and what unknown terror would they bring upon our world? The radio and television stations of the world carried the short, terrifying statement: The visitors were telepaths. These children from another time, another planet, were about to read human minds. They were utterly invincible. And they were infinitely dreaded... In the Pentagon and the Kremlin, leaders were grim with the awareness that all military secrets would be exposed...The overlords of the underworld realized the children could smash their most profitable rackets...And even ordinary citizens shuddered at the prospect of their shabby sins being found out. So four small children came to be hated by the entire world. A whole civilization wanted them dead.

Release date: June 18, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 164

Sample

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 to 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 articles 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 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 garments 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, “Meteors, of course, are shooting stars.”

“You saw the wave-guide tube stand still just 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 angle?” she asked. “I’m 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 flinging 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.”

“Hmmmm,” 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 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 mares—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 information 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 interest in her and when her manner was distinctly personal.

Soames 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 aimed. 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—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 ai. . .