The Monster from Earth's End by Murray Leinster

Author:Murray Leinster [Leinster, Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SF, monsters
Publisher: Fawcett Gold Medal
Published: 1959-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Drake picked up his gun. He tramped to the patch of spindly trees whose branches had visibly thrashed about because of something among them which human eyes could not see. But he would not believe that there was anything invisible that could kill a man and get away with his body. In a real world, everything follows natural laws. Impossible things do not happen. There is an explanation for everything that does happen. The explanation links it to other things. There are no isolated phenomena. There are only isolated observations, and sometimes there are false observations. But everything real is rational. There was a rational reason for everything that had taken place on Gow Island. The problem was to find it.

The two of them invaded the thicket for the second time. Drake’s memory of the night before was vivid. Here was the place where desperate scratches on a patch of moss told of the death-struggle of the vanished dog. There were the scorched places where Spaulding’s gasoline flares had burned, to light the thicket more fully than flashlights could do. There were footprints—Drake’s and Tom Belden’s—where they had trampled the delicate ferns.

Drake’s hair had been standing on end when he made those tracks last night. He felt enraging qualms again as he went through the thicket by day. Something deadly had been here. Last night he hadn’t found it. But his mind insisted naggingly that he’d seen something whose meaning he should have realized.

He and Belden went through the thicket again. And they found nothing. Half-way through the search, Drake said suddenly: “Thump on the ground with your gun-butt, Tom. If something swarmed in here and went underground, we might have missed it. If the ground’s soft anywhere or sounds hollow—”

Tom Belden caught his breath. Then he began to pound the earth as he moved slowly after Drake.

They found no soft place nor any spot which sounded hollow. Drake, looking hungrily for the item that the back of his mind insisted he should have noticed, saw nothing which had meaning today. He faced the frustrating fact that he had not even the beginning of an explanation of the events to date.

He went back to the buildings. Beecham came to meet him, upset and jittery. The radio shack had caught fire because of Spaulding’s conviction that an invisible creature was in the act of killing a dog. The dog had been shot by someone as an act of mercy. Its carcass remained for examination. It was the only thing that could be examined after an encounter with the inexplicable. Beecham had done the best he could in the way of an autopsy.

“But I don’t know what the dog ran into,” he told Drake miserably. “He’d scratched and pawed at his muzzle, and it’s raw flesh there. But I can’t be sure whether his own claws did the damage, or something else!”

Drake said without animation: “If we could report your examination, somebody might make sense of it. They could ask questions and tell you what to look for.

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