Get Off My World!

by Murray Leinster

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

Synopsis

PLANET OF SAND: A world literally bald, completely covered by sand and devoid of life - or so the stranded spaceman thought until he saw the huge menacing girders whose origin and purpose he could not begin to fathom.

WHITE SPOT: A gold locket containing a picture of a girl, found in millennia-old ruins on a planet some hundreds of light-years from Earth, threatens the existence of the entire human race.

SECOND LANDING: A lost space team lands on a deserted planet, entirely unprepared for the strange world's one citizen; a great white amoeboid monster, hiding in wait to wreak its fury on any intruders.

Release date: November 5, 2019

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

“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 four 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-Aspasia 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 in 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 terribly alone in a waste of emptiness than any similar group had ever been before.*

That excitement lasted during the long journey in overdrive and during the almost-as-long approach to planetary landing distance after the Ecology Bureau ship was back in normal space in 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 in a swiftly flowing stream. They piled up mountainously, 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 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 Aspasia. 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 millennia 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 Elektra, 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. Elektra itself was not visible. But there was no night.

Off to what ought to be the west there was a spotty bright luminosity in the sky. It was the star cluster Canis 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 in 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 in 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 automatically 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 kin. . .