"Leinster, Murray - Exploration Team" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

Murray Leinster


EXPLORATION TEAM


“Murray Leinster” was one of the writing names used by the late William Fitzgeraid Jenkins, who also wrote as “Will F. Jenkins” and employed another half-dozen pseudonyms. Although he wrote copiously in many other fields, turning out millions of words of pulp stories, little of it other than the science fiction work he produced as Murray Leinster is known today—and, in fact, little outside of his SF work gained much attention even during his lifetime. As Murray Leinster, though, Jenkins had a profound and lasting effect on the development of modern science fiction.
“Leinster” sold his first SF story to Argosyin 1919, had work published in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing during the ‘20s, and went on to be one of the mainstays of John W. Campbell’s “Golden Age” Astounding in the ‘40s and ‘50s, where most of his best work appeared. Most of Leinster’s novels are heavily dated and long forgotten—one of the few figures of the day who made his reputation almost entirely on his short fiction, he was somehow never able to make much of an impact with his novels, which were widely regarded as inferior to his short work even during his working lifetime— but the best of his short stories remain fresh and powerful today In his short work, Leinster more or less invented several subgenres still active today: for instance, he is credited with writing one of the first Alternate History stories, “Sideways In Time,” and one of the earliest First Contact stories, the famous “First Contact,” and both stories still hold up as among the best treatments of their subjects. Also among his most famous stories is the taut, suspenseful, and scary tale that follows, “Exploration Team,” which won Leinster his only Hugo Award in 1956, and which is practically the model of how to write an intricate and intelligent adventure set on an alien world, a story which has been an influence on—if not indeed the inspiration for—countless other stories and novels, as well as television shows and movies, over the years. Nobody before Leinster had ever written the tale of Terran explorers battling a hostile alien planet any better than he wrote it here—and, you know what? Forty years lateз nobody has done it any better yet.
Leinster’s best novel is probably The Wailing Asteroid, above-average among Leinster novels for imagination and evocativeness, with some quirky detail work that holds up fairly well. His other novels include The Pirates of Zan, The Forgotten Planet, The Greks Bring Gifts, and The War with the Gizmos. “Exploration Team” was collected, with other Survey Team stories, as Colonial Survey, one of his best collections. His “Med Service” series—not as successful as his Survey Team stories, but still of interest—was collected in S.O.S. from Three Worlds and Doctor to the Stars; there were also two Med Service novels, The Mutant Weapon and This World Is Taboo. Other Leinster collections include Monsters and Such and The Best of Murray Leinster.
Almost all of Leinster’s books are long out-of-print, and almost impossible to find;
you probably have the best chance of finding The Best of Murray Leinster, published in 1978, in a used-book store, but even that’s rather unlikely these days. Fortunately, NESFA Press has just brought out a big retrospective anthology of his work, First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster (NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203, $27), which features most of his best stories. Buy it while you still can, since much of this work is unfindable anywhere else.
A multi-talented man, Will Jenkins, the person behind the Murray Leinster mask, was a successful inventor as well as an authoз having created, among other things, a front-projection method for filming backgrounds still used in the film industry today, where it is known as the “Leinster Projector.” During World War II, he also came up with an ingenious method for disguising the wake left by submarine periscopes that probably saved the lives of thousands of submarine sailors over the course of the war. He died in 1975.




I
The nearer moon went by overhead. It was jagged and irregular in shape, and was probably a captured asteroid. Huyghens had seen it often enough, so he did not go out of his quarters to watch it hurtle across the sky with seemingly the speed of an atmosphere-flier, occulting the stars as it went. Instead, he sweated over paper work, which should have been odd because he was technically a felon and all his labors on Loren Two felonious. It was odd, too, for a man to do paper work in a room with steel shutters and a huge bald eagle—untethered—dozing on a three-inch perch set in the wall. But paper work was not Huyghens’ real task. His only assistant had tangled with a night-walker and the furtive Kodius Company ships had taken him away to where Kodius Company ships came from. Huyghens had to do two men’s work in loneliness. To his knowledge, he was the only man in this solar system.
Below him, there were snufflings. Sitka Pete got up heavily and padded to his water pan. He lapped the refrigerated water and sneezed violently. Sourdough Charley waked and complained in a rumbling growl. There were divers other rumblings and mutterings below. Huyghens called reassuringly, “Easy there!” and went on with his work. He finished a climate report, and fed figures to a computer, and while it hummed over them he entered the inventory totals in the station log, showing what supplies remained. Then he began to write up the log proper.
“Sitka Pete,” he wrote, “has apparently solved the problem of killing individual sphexes. He has learned that it doesn’t do to hug them and that his claws can’t penetrate their hide—not the top hide, anyhow. Today Semper notified us that a pack of sphexes had found the scent-trail to the
station. Sitka hid downwind until they arrived. Then he cha rged from the rear and brought his paws together on both sides of a sphex ‘s head in a terrific pair of slaps. It must have been like two twelve-inch shells arriving from opposite directions at the same time. It must have scrambled the sphex ‘s brains as if they were eggs. It dropped dead. He killed two more with such mighty pairs of wallops. Sourdough Charley watched, grunting, and when the sphexes turned on Sitka, he charged in his turn. I, of course, couldn’t shoot too close to him, so he might have fared badly but that Faro Nell came pouring out of the bear quarters to help. The diversion enabled Sitka Pete to resume the use of his new technic, towering on his hind legs and swinging his paws in the new and grisly fashion. The fight ended promptly. Semper flew and screamed above the scrap, but as usual did not join in. Note: Nugget, the cub, tried to mix in but his mother cuffed him out of the way. Sourdough and Sitka ignored him as usual. Kodius Champion ‘s genes are sound!”
The noises of the night went on outside. There were notes like organ tones—song lizards. There were the tittering giggling cries of nightwalkers—not to be tittered back at. There were sounds like tack hammers, and doors closing, and from every direction came noises like hiccups in various keys. These were made by the improbable small creatures which on Loren Two took the place of insects.
Huyghens wrote out:
“Sitka seemed ruffled when the fight was over He painstakingly used his trick on every dead or wounded sphex, except those he’d killed with it, lifting up their heads for his pile-driver-like blows from two directions at once, as if to show Sourdough how it was done. There was much grunting as they hauled the carcasses to the incinerator It almost seemed—”

The arrival bell clanged, and Huyghens jerked up his head to stare at it. Semper, the eagle, opened icy eyes. He blinked.
Noises. There was a long, deep, contented snore from below. Something shrieked, out in the jungle. Hiccups. Clatterings, and organ notes— The bell clanged again. It was a notice that a ship aloft somewhere
had picked up the beacon beam—which only Kodius Company ships should know about—and was communicating for a landing. But there shouldn’t be any ships in this solar system just now! This was the only habitable planet of the sun, and it had been officially declared uninhabitable by reason of inimical animal life. Which meant sphexes. Therefore no colony was permitted, and the Kodius Company broke the law. And there were few graver crimes than unauthorized occupation of a new planet.
The bell clanged a third time. Huyghens swore. His hand went out to
cut off the beacon—but that would be useless. Radar would have fixed it and tied it in with physical features like the nearby sea and the Sere Plateau. The ship could find the place, anyhow, and descend by daylight.
“The devil!” said Huyghens, But he waited yet again for the bell to ring. A Kodius Company ship would double-ring to reassure him. But there shouldn’t be a Kodius Company ship for months.
The bell clanged singly. The space phone dial flickered and a voice came out of it, tinny from stratospheric distortion:
“Calling ground! Calling ground! Crete Line ship Odysseus calling ground on Loren Two. Landing one passenger by boat. Put on your field lights.”
Huyghens’ mouth dropped open. A Kodius Company ship would be welcome. A Colonial Survey ship would be extremely unwelcome, because it would destroy the colony and Sitka and Sourdough and Faro Nell and Nugget—and Semper—and carry Huyghens off to be tried for unauthorized colonization and all that it implied.
But a commercial ship, landing one passenger by boat— There was simply no circumstances under which that would happen. Not to an unknown, illegal colony. Not to a furtive station!
Huyghens flicked on the landing-field lights. He saw the glare in the field outside. Then he stood up and prepared to take the measures required by discovery. He packed the paper work he’d been doing into the disposal safe. He gathered up all personal documents and tossed them in. Every record, every bit of evidence that the Kodius Company maintained this station went into the safe. He slammed the door. He touched his finger to the disposal button, which would destroy the contents and melt down even the ashes past their possible use for evidence in court.
Then he hesitated. If it were a Survey ship, the button had to be pressed and he must resign himself to a long term in prison. But a Crete Line ship—if the space phone told the truth—was not threatening. It was simply unbelievable.
He shook his head. He got into travel garb and armed himself. He went down into the bear quarters, turning on lights as he went. There were startled snufflings and Sitka Pete reared himself very absurdly to a sitting position to blink at him. Sourdough Charley lay on his back with his legs in the air. He’d found it cooler, sleeping that way. He rolled over with a thump. He made snorting sounds which somehow sounded cordial. Faro Nell padded to the door of her separate apartment—assigned her so that Nugget would not be underfoot to irritate the big males.
Huyghens, as the human population of Loren Two, faced the work force, fighting force, and—with Nugget—four-fifths of the terrestrial nonhuman population of the planet. They were mutated Kodiak bears, de
scendants of the Kodius Champion for whom the Kodius Company was named. Sitka Pete was a good twenty-two hundred pounds of lumbering, intelligent carnivore. Sourdough Charley would weigh within a hundred pounds of that figure. Faro Nell was eighteen hundred pounds of female charm—and ferocity. Then Nugget poked his muzzle around his mother’s furry rump to see what was toward, and he was six hundred pounds of ursine infancy. The animals looked at Huyghens expectantly. If he’d had Semper riding on his shoulder, they’d have known what was expected of them.
“Let’s go,” said Huyghens. “It’s dark outside, but somebody’s coming. And it may be bad!”

He unfastened the outer door of the bear quarters. Sitka Pete went charging clumsily through it. A forthright charge was the best way to develop any situation—if one was an oversized male Kodiak bear. Sourdough went lumbering after him. There was nothing hostile immediately outside. Sitka stood up on his hind legs—he reared up a solid twelve feet—and sniffed the air. Sourdough methodically lumbered to one side and then the other, sniffing in his turn. Nell came out, nine-tenths of a ton of daintiness, and rumbled admonitorily at Nugget, who trailed her closely. Huyghens stood in the doorway, his night-sighted gun ready. He felt uncomfortable at sending the bears ahead into a Loren Two jungle at night. But they were qualified to scent danger, and he was not.
The illumination of the jungle in a wide path toward the landing field made for weirdness in the look of things. There were arching giant ferns and columnar trees which grew above them, and the extraordinary lanceolate underbrush of the jungle. The flood lamps, set level with the ground, lighted everything from below. The foliage, then, was brightly lit against the black night-sky—brightly lit enough to dim-out the stars. There were astonishing contrasts of light and shadow everywhere.
“On ahead!” commanded Huyghens, waving. “Hup!”
He swung the bear-quarters doorshut. He moved toward the landing field through the lane of lighted forest. The two giant male Kodiaks lumbered ahead. Sitka Pete dropped to all fours and prowled. Sourdough Charley followed closely, swinging from side to side. Huyghens came alertly behind the two of them, and Faro Nell brought up the rear with Nugget following her closely.
It was an excellent military formation for progress through dangerous jungle. Sourdough and Sitka were advance-guard and point, respectively, while Faro Nell guarded the rear. With Nugget to look after, she was especially alert against attack from behind. Huyghens was, of course, the striking force. His gun fired explosive bullets which would discour
age even sphexes, and his night-sight—a cone of light which went on when he took up the trigger-slack—told exactly where they would strike. It was not a sportsmanlike weapon, but the creatures of Loren Two were not sportsmanlike antagonists. The night-walkers, for example— But night-walkers feared light. They attacked only in a species of hysteria if it were too bright.
Huyghens moved toward the glare at the landing field. His mental state was savage. The Kodius Company station on Loren Two was completely illegal. It happened to be necessary, from one point of view, but it was still illegal. The tinny voice on the space phone was not convincing, in ignoring that illegality. But if a ship landed, Huyghens could get back to the station before men could follow, and he’d have the disposal safe turned on in time to protect those who’d sent him here.
But he heard the faraway and high harsh roar of a landing-boat rocket—not a ship’s bellowing tubes—as he made his way through the unreal-seeming brush. The roar grew louder as he pushed on, the three big Kodiaks padding here and there, sniffing thoughtfully, making a perfect defensive-offensive formation for the particular conditions of this planet.