The Monster from Earth's End

by Murray Leinster

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

Synopsis

There was nothing on the island big enough to kill a man, yet each new day brought with it another bloody death, another mysterious disappearance. The first hint of something wrong at the outpost was the plane. It crazily circled the little island, its cargo-bay doors open, its radio dead. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment and then it dived downward, levelled and dipped again. It made a belly landing on the runway with its wheels still retracted. There was a singular, dead silence and then a shot rang out. The crew of two and the seven passengers had vanished, the cargo was strewn about and the fuel tanks had been emptied. And the pilot, after landing, had blown his brains out...

Release date: July 2, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 158

Sample

THE island was a pile of dark rocks in an ocean which reached out endlessly from its shores. The winds of all the world blew about it, and seas marched three-quarters of the way around the globe to hurl themselves thunderously against its cliffs. Usually there was a cloud of seabirds fluttering above some part of it: always there was grey vapour from a hundred-acre spot where warm mineral springs made foul smells and harsh colourings in the mud.

Evidence of human life on the island consisted of a tiny tower with a wind sock flapping from it and quonset huts for warehouses, and there was a place on the lee shore where heavy things had landed. For the rest, there were squat barracks, a recreation hall, and a few other structures. There was also a shack topped by suitable antennae and a ceaselessly revolving radar-bowl which scanned the empty sky in all directions.

On this morning, short-wave signals spread out invisibly from the radio shack. Others flickered back to it. The radar-bowl turned in its perpetual, deliberate rotation. The radar was not yet involved, but there was news. It spread quickly. The nineteen people on the island reacted appropriately. The island was Gow Island, 60°155 south latitude, 100°16 west longitude. It was 3,470 miles from Wellington, New Zealand; 1,992 miles from Valparaiso, Chile; 600 miles from the Antarctic ice-cap, and a million miles from home for everybody stationed on it.

The news was simple. There was a plane on the way from Gissell Bay, Antarctica. It was carrying scientific material and passengers back to the United States. The material included five penguins which might be standard Adelies or might not, some quite incredible vegetation from the Hot Lakes region — just landed on by men in helicopters, and recorded scientific observations by the scientific personnel in various bases on the Antarctic continent. But it was the passengers who mattered to the people on the island. There would be seven of them. They were men going home on leave after eight months on the ice-pack.

The plane was to touch down on Gow Island. Because there was a low-pressure area off the Chilean coast which it was wise to wait out, the plane and its passengers would stay overnight at the little supply depot which was Gow Island. Seven passengers and three crewmen would be guests of the establishment for sixteen hours. It was unprecedented. It was incredible. It was exciting, because Gow Island normally saw only one plane a week, and not every week at that. The planes that did come winging through, merely touched ground to refuel and to take on such items of supply as had been requisitioned from the island’s warehouses. It was rare that a plane stayed on the island’s airstrip for as long as half an hour. Flying crewmen had no time for socializing in so remote a spot.

So this plane would be a highly welcome novelty. It would be so delightful a change from the routine monotony that Drake, the island’s administrative officer, wondered rather grimly what new tensions and antagonisms would remain as souvenirs of the visitors. He could tick off some of them right away.

There were the four girls on the island. Nora Hall wouldn’t make trouble. She was the last-arrived girl at the depot, and Drake was grateful for her sanity. But there was Spaulding, who had been trying urgently to arrive at a romantic understanding with her. To him, the coming of other men would mean competition and unease. The other three girls fairly jittered in anticipation of seeing and even dancing with new men who’d seen no girls at all for many months, and consequently would be infinitely susceptible. The cook planned to make the newcomers scornful of the cooks at the antarctic bases. If they didn’t fairly wallow in his food, he’d feel bitter. The power officer already raged, because the girl he was almost engaged to would talk to the newcomers. The warehouse maintenance crew and the island’s mechanics planned a poker party — if they could get the men away from the girls for a proper manly evening of losing their money. They’d be peevish if there was no poker party, or if the newcomers took their money instead.

There was Tommy Belden. He was a mechanic’s helper at the airstrip. To him, the coming of the plane would be a reminder of the world of movies and dates and baseball — all that was normal and homelike to a nineteen-year-old. The strangers would be going back to that. He’d envy them desperately.

And there was Beecham, the biologist attached to the island to study the possible development of food crops to be grown in high latitudes. He gloated now, because he’d have a chance to look at the vegetation from the Hot Lakes district on the antarctic continent. It had been photographed from the air a year before — a stretch of some hundreds of square miles of bare ground in the midst of eternal snow, from which steam arose and which contained deep blue and rose-coloured hot-water lakes. This district had been reached by helicopter only very recently, and the first biological specimens from it were in the plane which would touch at Gow Island presently. To Beecham, the matter was of passionate importance. The Hot Lakes area had been isolated from the rest of the world since the south polar ice-cap formed, millions of years ago. Its vegetation should be like something from another planet. Beecham would be rapt while the plane was aground. But he’d be bitterly grieved when it went away and left him to pure routine.

In a way, the whole problem was absurd. Drake saw its absurdity. There was nothing in prospect but the stop-over of a plane on its way home from the antarctic ice, with the presence of ten strangers overnight. But life on Gow was not exciting. The island was isolated. It was remote. Its population was infinitesimal. Dreary grey skies and jumpy nerves and an unending thunder of surf against its precipices made for sensitiveness and unreasoning quarrels and — even worse —romances. Even the squawking, flapping seabirds who made the island their headquarters frayed the nerves of those who lived there.

The irrational tension increased, and Drake was aware of it. The radio shack relayed reports of the plane’s position. It had taken off from Gissell Bay two hours ago. It had then had twelve hundred miles to go. It was two hours from Gow. Everything was going well. Presently the plane was three hours in flight, which meant one hour from Gow. Everything was going well. Then it was three hours and a half in flight. It should touch down on the island’s airstrip in just thirty-four minutes more.

Three of the four girls laboured feverishly at their mirrors. The fourth, Nora Hall, smiled politely and fended off the efforts of Spaulding to get her off to one side so he could insist on their becoming engaged before anybody new turned up. The power officer took his girl aside and quarrelled horribly with her, because a quarrel was inevitable in any case after the strangers went away. The girl grew tear-streaked and defiant and went back to her mirror.

Drake wondered sardonically why he had ever accepted the duties of administrative officer in an isolated installation. Beecham, the biologist, grew so expansive at the prospect of a look at Hot Lakes vegetation that he presented the island’s cook with half his crop of radishes. That was the only happy gesture. The rest was almost neurotic tension — for nothing. The island’s population should not be in such an unstable state. The supply depot there was necessary. It was never ice-bound, so ships could land supplies at any time for air-lift to Antarctica. And the air-lift was short, therefore safer than the one from New Zealand, where a plane in flight might run into weather that couldn’t be predicted when it took off. The Gow installation was justified from every possible standpoint. But it was rough on the people who had to be there. There’d never been permanent inhabitants before. The island had been on charts for a hundred and fifty years, but the only persons known to have landed there before the depot was built, had not survived. When the construction crews explored the island they found a smashed whaleboat and the skeletons of its crew nearby. They appeared to have been men lost from a whaler, who’d made the island with strength enough to land but not to keep on living …

The plane was three and three-quarter hours in flight. It should touch down on Gow in nineteen minutes. In the radio shack the operator sat at his short-wave set, leaning back grandly with headphones on his ears. He smoked, from time to time saying something cryptic into the microphone on his chest. There were four other men in the shack. One watched the operator. The other three watched the radar screen which should report the plane before a human eye could see it.

The operator generously flipped on a speaker, so the others could hear what he did. The speaker relayed the transmission from the open microphone on the plane. On near approach to an island which was sometimes obscured by haze, two-way open-circuit talk was standard operational procedure.

The speaker gave out mutterings.

“Those guys back there …” said a voice, and the rest was inaudible.

“Wonder what we’ll have for dinner,” said another voice. The second voice said: “But I can’t make it out! The guys back there say there’s something happen — ”

The voice cut off abruptly. There was a thin, faint uproar that sounded like shouts and screamings. The first voice snapped: “What the devil’s that? Take a look — ” The tumult grew louder, as if the door between the pilot’s compartment and the rest of the plane had been opened. A man shouted incoherently. Another man shrieked. The second voice sounded very loud, panting: “Pistol! Quick! Pistol!” A man cried fiercely, far from the microphone: “Cargo doors! Get ’em open! Where the hell — “ There was an explosion. A second. A third. Incoherencies and screamings. Pantings.

“This way now! All together and out the cargo door.” More explosions. “Hold fast! Now push! Push! Push!”

A last explosion, which was a shot. There was a zinging sound, and then a crash in the loud-speaker.

Then there was silence.

The radio operator stared blankly. Then he snapped: “Calling Icecap! What’s the matter? Calling Icecap! Come in, Icecap!”

The speaker remained silent. All eyes turned to it. The operator sat up tensely. He barked into his transmitter, demanding that the plane in flight — Icecap — answer him.

Somebody said: “Maybe their radio’s smashed.”

Somebody else pointed numbly to the radar screen. There was a blip moving slowly but visibly at its edge. It could not be anything but the plane with Gow Island as its intended landing.

“The plane’s still up, anyhow.”

The tiny speck of light moved slowly. There was a singular dead silence in the radio shack. Drake looked in the door.

“How are things going?” he asked matter-of-factly.

Babblings answered him. Men talked feverishly all at once, with their eyes upon a slowly moving speck of brightness at the very edge of the radar screen. The radio operator panted.

“The — plane’s off course,” he chattered. “It made a turn I It’s off course!”

“Tell them about it,” commanded Drake. “Ask them — ”

“Their radio’s out!” panted the operator. “The sound cut off! They’re not transmitting!”

“Maybe they’re still receiving,” said Drake harshly. “Don’t ask questions. Tell them! Tell ’em their present course and how to correct it!”

The operator panted into his chest-mike: “Calling Icecap! Calling Icecap! You are off course for Gow Island! You are heading three-forty degrees and your true course is fifteen. You are thirty-five degrees off course! Correct, Icecap! Swing your nose right and come in!”

He repeated the command over and over. With a hideous slowness, the tiny speck of brightness moved. The operator’s voice grew agitatedly jerky. Presently the distant plane’s course was almost corrected. It was headed very nearly for the island.

“That’ll be — thirty miles off,” said Drake sharply. “Keep after it. Keep it headed straight in! Now somebody tell me what’s happened.”

More babblings. Four men tried, all together, to tell him of screamings, of shouts to open the plane’s cargo doors, and of somebody going to see what was the matter and returning to pant for a pistol. Of the shots that followed, ending in a breaking-off of sound transmission in the plane.

Drake made a guess, inevitable for one in his position. He had a very vivid picture of the difficulties of an administrative officer on the ice-cap, who was responsible for the sanity as well as the health and efficiency of the men under him. There had been crack-ups before now in the bases on the continental ice. There had been various kinds of neuroses developed. Men in enforced close contact through long antarctic nights do not always adjust. Taped music and even short-wave phone talks with their families does not necessarily make an antarctic environment tolerable after men have ceased to consider hardship the same as adventure. It would not be at all peculiar for somebody to crack up on the plane taking him away from a tension he could endure no longer.

“Shooting, eh?” said Drake. “I’ll break out the first-aid stuff. Better have a litter ready, too.”

He went away from the radio shack. The sky over the island was grey. The sea beyond the cliffs was grey. The quonset warehouses were painted an official drab colour, and the machine-shop shelters and the personnel buildings were no more decorative. The only patch of real colour in all the world, it seemed to Drake, was the gaudy red wind sock standing out stiffly from the tower at the upwind end of the runway.

He came upon Spaulding, holding Nora Hall by the arm and speaking with agitated urgency. She looked relieved when Drake drew near.

“What’s the news from the plane?” she asked. “Can I do anything like forming part of a welcoming committee?”

She smiled, while she drew away from Spaulding. He bit his lip and visibly fretted. Drake took due note.

“There’s trouble on the plane,” he said curtly. “Apparently somebody cracked up and started to fight. The plane went off course, and there were shots, and Sparks is trying to talk it in sight of the island. There’s some haze.” Then he added: “You might help, at that. If Sparks has trouble keeping contact, take over the microphone. A woman’s voice might startle even somebody in hysterics into obedience.” To Spaulding he added: “I’ve got to break out a stretcher or two and some first-aid stuff, just in case. I don’t know what’s happened. We have to get ready for anything, including lunacy.”

Nora moved quickly towards the radio shack. Spaulding, scowling, ungraciously received his orders and went towards one of the quonset warehouses. He hailed a mechanic on the way to help.

Drake went to the emergency stores. He put bottles under his arm. A man who has been deprived of all that is normal for him, can take either of two courses when his privation is removed. He may plunge furiously into the gratification of all his pent-up longings, or he may frantically retreat from any satisfaction whatever. Most healthy men, if tension is genuinely long-continued and extreme, will compromise. Drake made ready for that, with visual inducements to non-hysterical relaxation. But the situation could be serious, if someone had cracked up and was afraid to let down at all. Such a man couldn’t be handled except by force.

He headed back for the. . .