Part 1

BLACK SILENCE

By EMMETT McDOWELL

Thundering back they came across cold space--eyes aching for remembered vistas, nostrils flaring for sweet fresh air, feet itching to tread on precious soil. They stepped down--into a wasted lifeless horror! Eying each other in despair, they wondered. Must they--_could_ they--colonize an alien world they once called HOME?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1947. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"Earth!" said Matthew Magoffin happily. "Good old Terra. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?" Elbows on table, he sat listening to the specially-beamed broadcast from Earth. Half a dozen other members of the first expedition to Mars were also in the messroom of the _Argus_.

"What's first on your program when we land, Lynn?"

They had been out two and a half years, and it was a subject of which they never wearied.

Lynn said, "A bath--a real one. Not out of a tea cup." She was the expedition's photographer and reporter, a small blonde with a soft triangular face.

The music stopped in the middle of a bar. An announcer's voice broke in.

"_We interrupt this program to bring you a news flash from the Union of South America._"

Everyone stopped talking in the messroom of the spaceship.

"_The plague area in the Andean region is spreading out of control. Disease characterized by minute black spots that appear all over the body from head to foot. The spots are accompanied by a high fever and followed in two to three hours by death._"

"Whew!" said Matt to the company at large. "What a disagreeable way to die! Wonder what causes it?"

As if in answer to his question, the announcer on Earth said, "_To date, the germ has not been isolated. And all attempts to curb the spread of the disease have proved futile._

"_The Pan-American League is meeting now in Lima to consider segregating the entire Andean area where the plague is raging_...."

There was an interruption. Everyone in the messroom was tense, conscious of blurred background noises in the far away studio toward which they were flashing.

"_Here's a special bulletin!_" The announcer's voice sounded frightened and excited. "_Marseilles, Liverpool, Hong Kong and San Francisco report_...."

The speaker went dead.

Matt Magoffin found himself holding his breath, waiting for the news to come back on. But it never did.

After a minute's silence, he leaped to his feet. "Damn that operator! I'm going to see what's wrong."

He started for the starboard passage, a babble of voices breaking out behind him. Matt was a stocky, powerfully built man in his thirties, the expedition's palaeobotanist. He reached the starboard ladder, ran up to the control deck and shouldered into the radio shack without knocking.

"What's up?" he demanded of the operator, a thin freckled youth who was staring at the banks of equipment in perplexity.

Sparks knit his brows.

"Nothing--that I can find."

"What!"

"There isn't a damn thing wrong at this end. The broadcast was interrupted. Power failure, maybe."

Matt Magoffin ran his hand through his short crisp black hair, alarm in his blue eyes.

"Have you tried to contact Earth?"

"No. Not yet."

The operator sat down at his instruments, threw in a switch and spoke into a microphone.

"_Argus_ calling Earth. _Argus_ calling Earth. _Argus_ calling Earth. Come in Earth."

Silence!

* * * * *

Matt's jaw shut with a click. The operator tried again and again, but without success. He was still trying when the director of the expedition burst into the radio shack, followed closely by the captain.

"What interrupted the broadcast, Sparks?" the director burst out.

The operator shrugged. "There's nothing wrong with our instruments. But I can't raise a peep from Earth."

The captain said, "Um. Keep trying."

"Yes, sir."

"And report at once as soon as you establish contact."

"Yes, sir."

The captain turned on his heel and left. Isaac Trigg, the director, prepared to follow when Matt said: "Just a minute, Isaac. I'm coming with you."

The director paused, allowing Matt Magoffin to come abreast of him. "What do you make of it, Matt?" he asked.

"I don't know." Matt shook his head.

For two long years, between favorable oppositions with Earth, the expedition had been searching the airless, waterless wastes of Mars for any evidence of life. And had arrived at the disappointing conclusion that not only was Mars devoid of life, but that the ruddy planet never had supported life in any form.

But during the two years they had been in daily two-way communication with Earth. Not once had they lost contact. Now that they were almost returned....

The director suggested hopefully, "Perhaps they had a power breakdown."

"I don't think so." Matt shook his head. "But anyway we're only seven months out. We should be able to contact other radio stations. I don't understand it at all."

Their return to the messroom was greeted by an excited volley of questions from the others. The director held up his hands in dismay.

"The trouble is on Earth," he explained when quiet was restored. "Our instruments are functioning quite all right. There probably has been a power stoppage of some sort. We should re-establish contact any minute."

But by the beginning of the rest period seven hours later, Earth was still silent.

No one slept that night. Matt Magoffin tried, but at length he gave up and switched on the lights in his cabin. He drew on comfortable gray coveralls, which made him look even stockier than he was, and departed for the messroom.

Counting the crew, there were thirty-one members of the expedition--nine women and twenty-two men. Everyone of them, Matt realized, must be present. The tension was so apparent that he could feel a thrill of nervousness.

"No word, I suppose?" he asked, dropping into a vacant seat beside Lynn.

"No," the girl shook her head, setting her shoulder-length, yellow hair to swinging. There was generally a half-wicked, half-mischievous twinkle in her blue eyes, but it was lacking tonight. Little frown lines creased her low broad forehead. "You don't suppose the plague has anything to do with it, do you Matt?"

"Plague? How could the plague affect broadcasting?"

"I don't know." She shrugged helplessly. "Let's go up to the observation deck. This waiting is driving me off my beam."

"Sure."

Matt followed her into the passage. She was wearing coveralls like his own, but of a trimmer cut. She was unquestionably the prettiest of the nine women, he reflected. And hard as nails.

Two years on the treacherous Martian deserts had enabled Matt to arrive at a pretty accurate estimate of everyone by the way they reacted to danger, to the disappointment at failing to discover evidence of life, to their cramped quarters.

Their disappointment had been greater because Mars had been the last hope of discovering life in the Solar System besides that of Earth.

No fossil life had been reported on the moon. The Reeves' expedition to Venus two years ago had found that the Venusian clouds were composed of dust swirling about a desiccated and lifeless world. Mercury had not yet been reached, nor any of the outer planets, but there was little expectation that life could have lodged in such inhospitable environments.

No, in all the Solar System, Earth apparently was the only planet where septic conditions prevailed--and life could germinate....

* * * * *

They reached the observation deck in the bullet-shaped nose of the vessel. Here the hull was built up of many small plates of quartzite like the facets of a fly's eye. They had an unobstructed view of the ebony arch of the heavens with Sol flaming like a beacon a point to starboard.

"Where's Earth?" Lynn asked. "I never can find it."

He pointed it out, a bright greenish star on the port side of the ship. It was just assuming a disk-shape with its tiny moon barely visible beside it.

"It looks so far away," said the girl with a shiver. "I'm homesick, I guess. We've been gone almost three years."

Matt said, "It's a long time." He slipped his arm about her waist.

Lynn let her yellow head rest on his shoulder. "I'm tired of being tough. I'm scared. I want somebody to baby me and tell me everything's all right.

"You--you don't think anything's happened to Earth, do you Matt?"

"Nothing could happen to seven billion people that suddenly! We've got the jitters. We've been out too long." He kissed her almost roughly.

The girl clung to him half in terror. Matt could feel her taut young body pressed against him. Slowly the tension melted out of her muscles. _Fool_, he thought, _why didn't I try this two years ago?_

Matt stiffened. Over the crown of Lynn's yellow hair he caught sight of a pale drawn face in the shadows of the ladder well across the deck.

It took him a second to recognize Nesbit, the palaeontologist, a young man only a few years out of college.

"What is it?" Lynn asked, turning her head. "Oh!"

Nesbit glared at the pair silently; then his face disappeared as he withdrew down the ladder.

"What the hell's eating him?" asked Matt.

Lynn bit her lip. "He must have followed us up. He...." She paused, looking embarrassed. "He asked me to marry him when we reach Earth."

"Good Lord," ejaculated Matt. He turned the girl loose. "I wouldn't...."

Lynn's arms went around him fiercely and shook him. "Silly. He's just a kid. I tried to let him down easy, but I certainly didn't promise to marry him."

A grin spread across Matt's face. His arms tightened. From the corner of his eye, he could see the unwinking green disk of Earth, silent, cold, and unbelievably far away.

* * * * *

During the next three months, they tore the radio down seven times and rebuilt it with infinite care. They tested every tube and circuit. They might as well have saved their time.

Not a single message reached them from Earth.

After three months they gave up trying at last and a queer sense of dread took possession of them as the earth slowly expanded.

Sparks was a wreck. He spent incredible stretches in the radio shack listening for a signal--any signal--from his dead instruments. The cook went berserk and stabbed one of the engineers. Dr. Gwathmey, the gentle, gray-haired psychologist, picked a fight with Pendergrast, the expedition's gentle, gray-haired anthropologist over the theory that life had resulted from spores drifting to Earth on light tides. The two old men had battled it out in the messroom with their fists.

They were all, Matt realized, strained, nervous, edgy....

On the seventh of May the _Argus_ began to drop cautiously down through a blanket of clouds that hid the surface of Earth. Everyone was at the ports, but they were descending on the night side of the planet, and the clouds were like soup.

Nothing was to be seen.

They were long since through the Heaviside layer, but still no broadcast had reached them. The ether was as silent as it must have been before the discovery of radio.

"Hell!" said Matt. "There's nothing to be seen out there." He took his nose away from the port beyond which the wet clouds were roiling in sheets of red, tinted by the flaming jets. "I'm going to wait in the messroom."

He stamped off. He had grown thinner and his face was lined. His blue eyes were haggard. The _Argus_ lurched and dropped a dozen feet, hurling him to his knees.

Matt cursed viciously and caught his balance to stagger into the messroom. Isaac Trigg, the director, was there, and Pendergrast. They sat tense as violin strings, waiting.

"I couldn't stand it in the control room," Trigg explained to Matt. "They're guiding us down with radar. There's been no radio beam to lead us in. What the hell's wrong? You'd think Earth was a tomb!"

"Where are we?" Matt asked as he flung himself in a chair.

The director shook his head. "Some place in North America, the Ohio valley, I believe. But the clouds shut us off before the navigator could take accurate shots."

The loud speaker blared into sudden life, the first time since the Silence! The men jumped to their feet, thinking that at last contact had been established with Earth. Then they realized that it was the captain speaking over the intercommunicator.

Matt cursed again, then paused.

"_Attention!_" the loud speaker blared. "_Attention, everyone. We are descending in very hilly country. The radar reveals an irregular surface beneath us. Please secure yourselves in your seats. Be sure to fasten the safety straps._"

"Hilly country!" said Matt and buckled his safety strap. "But where?"

Most of the others straggled into their seats. There was no conversation. Their faces were strained and white.

"_Four thousand feet!_" came the captain's voice over the broadcaster. "_Visibility zero. Check your safety belts._"

Matt was conscious of a nervous rustle in the messroom. He realized that he was biting his lip.

The _Argus_ lurched, fell another hundred feet and brought up with a stuttering roar from her tubes. The business of landing a rocket ship without a beam was nasty and uncertain. Matt could feel his heart pumping almost in his mouth.

He looked about for Lynn and found her three seats off. She gave him a wan grin, but blanched as the _Argus_ rolled sickeningly.

"_Three thousand feet!_" came the voice through the loud speaker. "_Clouds and rain._"

An eternity went by.

At a thousand feet the suspense made Matt ill. The jets were striking the surface now, bouncing back, dispelling the clouds directly beneath them.

"_Wooded hills below_," said the loud speaker. "_Five hundred feet!_"

Again the minutes crawled away. There was a faint jar, then a settling lurch. It was almost unexpected when it came. The jets fell silent.

Earth!

Matt found himself looking around at the strained faces. Hesitantly, he threw off his straps and stood up. Others followed suit. None of them, Matt realized, was anxious to be the first out.

It was a strange homecoming--certainly nothing like the one they had all planned before the silence!

"Well," said Matt, "someone's got to be first."

He made his way to the main port. Silent, and uneasy, they all trooped after him.

"What the hell!" said Matt with a sudden grin. He spat on his hands and began to unscrew the bolts.

There was a collective sigh from those behind as he kicked open the heavy port.

Only rain and blackness met his eyes.

II

He inhaled deeply. The air was moist and sweet after the tainted stuff they'd been breathing for three years. He'd forgotten how sweet. It was almost intoxicating.

The ladder was lowered. Matt went over the side, riding it down. When it struck, he leaped off and scooped up a double-handful of the muddy earth.

There was a shout from above. Then everyone, staff and crew, came swarming down the ladder.

For a while they went a little mad, dancing and scooping up the blessed mud.

The director at last called a halt. "Hold on," he yelled above their laughing.

Matt was conscious suddenly of the cold rain. He was drenched to his hide, and he shivered. He glanced around, peering into the night.

As well as he could distinguish, they had come down in a valley. He could hear a stream purling on his left, and saw the dark slope of pines reared up behind the ship.

"It's a little after one in the morning, Earth time," the director called out. "There's nothing that we can do tonight...."

"I'd like to climb to the top of the hill and look around," Matt interrupted. "We might spot a light."

"And I!"

"Me, too." The last was Lynn's voice, Matt recognized. A dozen others echoed the wish.

"Very well," said the director. "I--I think that I, too, shall go along."

They struggled up the hill in the black and the rain. It was higher than Matt had guessed, but at length they came to the crest.

Slowly Matt turned around and around.

Blackness!

Everywhere he looked there was only impenetrable blackness. Not even a pin prick of light broke the monotony.

"We--we must be in an unsettled area," Lynn ventured in a small voice at his elbow.

He looked around at the blur that was the girl. "It's the country," he suggested. "People go to bed early in the country."

"Maybe," said the girl. "I ... let's go back to the ship, Matt. I'm cold."

Without a word, he took her arm and piloted her back down the slope. They climbed the ladder.

"What's wrong here, Matt?" asked the girl, her eyes wide and frightened.

"Wrong?" echoed Matt. They had reached the corridor to the cabins. "Nothing, so far as we know. The fact that there weren't any lights doesn't mean anything. We may be in the mountains."

He paused. "You should skin out of those clothes. You're soaked to the skin."

She shivered again. Her thin coveralls were plastered against her, revealing every swelling curve and indentation. Her hair hung limp and wringing wet. A little bead of water trickled down her tip-tilted nose.

"You look like a drowned rat," he informed her with a grin.

A sudden shrill scream burst on their ears, followed by terrified shouting.

Lynn stiffened. "What's that?"

But Matt was already plunging for the air lock.

He was met, and almost bowled over, by the tide of frightened men and women flooding up the ladder into the ship. He grabbed the nearest one.

"What is it? What's wrong out there?"

"It was a cow!"

"A cow?"

"A wild cow. It charged us--or whatever cows do."

"It was a bull," corrected Howes, the archaeologist. "I--I think it got Pendergrast."

A dead silence met Howes' words. Matt glanced over the heads in the crowded passage. "Pendergrast here?"

There wasn't any answer.

From the ground below came a snort and the sound of crashing brush.

Matt pushed to the port. He could see nothing through the blackness and the rain. "Pendergrast!" he called. "Pendergrast!"

Only the endlessly dripping rain could be heard.

He turned angrily on the others. "Get a light and the express rifle!"

"Matt!" said Lynn. She had squeezed to his side. "You're not going down there?"

"I'm going after Pendergrast."

She said, "Matt, please don't go. Let someone else." She took his hand, kissed it shamelessly and pressed it to her breast. "Wait till morning, Matt."

"He might be alive. You go on to your cabin and get out of those wet clothes."

"I'm not moving a foot until you get back." She still held onto his hand.

* * * * *

After a few minutes the chief engineer pushed through the press and handed Matt the rifle. "I'll take the light," he said. "We'll both go down."

"Thanks," said Matt. He made sure a cartridge was in the chamber and then began to climb down the ladder.

From over his head, the chief engineer's light flashed, probing the brush below. Matt could see no sign of a bull or of Pendergrast. He reached the soggy earth and waited until the chief joined him.

"It was over that way," said the chief, flashing his light toward a clump of brush beyond the circle that had been charred black by the jets.

They began to advance cautiously. The light picked out a wet shapeless bundle on the ground a yard or two this side of the thicket.

"That's Pendergrast, I guess," said Matt in a tight voice.

"Yes, I suppose so!" The chief sounded sick. "What's that?"

Matt had heard it, too, a crashing in the thicket. He halted and swung up his rifle.

The next instant the head of a large Jersey bull came into view. The animal stalked into the circle of light. The bull lowered his head and snorted, pawing the mud.

Matt fired. He fired for the neck. The bull's knees folded; he slumped gently to the ground.

"Got him, by God!" said the chief. There was a ragged cheer from the ship behind them.

"Well," said Matt in an unhappy voice. "We may as well get it over with. Pendergrast might be alive."

But he wasn't. Pendergrast had been an old man, and the bull had gored him cruelly. Matt doubted that he had lived more than a minute or two. They hauled his broken body up with a rope and laid it out on his bunk.

From outside there came the eerie hoot of an owl. Somewhere in the distance dogs were barking.

"There must be a farmhouse in the neighborhood after all," the director said, closing the door to Pendergrast's cabin.

But Matt, remembering the bull, said, "I wouldn't count on it, Isaac."

"Eh?" said Isaac.

"Dogs can run wild," Matt reminded him. "They're a hell of a sight less dangerous than bulls."

* * * * *

The next morning, it was decided that a party of five of the younger men should reconnoiter the immediate vicinity, being careful not to go so far that they couldn't make it back to the ship by dark.

"Be careful," the director admonished them. Matt, who was one of the party, noticed that Isaac Trigg's hands shook slightly. He had not shaved, and deep blue circles haunted his eyes. "The country hereabouts seems to be quite wild. We ..." the director bit his lip--"we may have come down in a plague area that has been segregated!"

The same thought had been uppermost in everyone's mind, but none of them had had the courage to express it.

"Don't," went on the director, "drink or eat anything except what you take along, and be careful about investigating deserted houses. That's all, I suppose--and good luck."

They were turning to leave when Lynn Clark presented herself. "Hold on," she said. "I'm going along."

"Nonsense!" exploded the director. "The women are staying here in the ship!"

Matt said, "Don't be obstinate, Lynn."

But the girl set her mouth. "I'm the official photographer and reporter. It's my job."

She was dressed in breeches and boots and a loose shirt. She had a holstered automatic slung about her hips, and it wasn't a woman's pearl-handled toy, but an ugly black .45 automatic pistol.

Matt said, "We don't know what we might run up against. Frankly, Lynn, we can't afford to be handicapped with looking after you."

She gave him a scathing glance. "I can take care of myself. I don't need you or anyone else to look after me!"

She walked to the open air lock, drew the automatic and fired six shots at a sapling some twenty-five yards distant.

Bark flew. The sapling quivered. All six shots, Matt realized, could have been covered by a four-inch circle.

She turned around and eyed the palaeobotanist coolly. "As for taking care of myself, Mister Magoffin, I may not be as big as a horse, but I can handle you. If you've any doubts, I'm perfectly willing to bat your ears down to prove it." And she eyed him wickedly.

Someone tittered.

Matt could feel himself getting red. His neck swelled. Then his sense of humor came to his rescue, and he roared, slapping his thighs. He couldn't have done anything that would have disconcerted Lynn more.

She flushed darkly and slung the camera about her neck. "Nevertheless, I'm going along."

Matt shrugged. "Fine, we can use you as a guard."

The director said helplessly, "Very well, Miss Clark, but don't stray from the party."

Then he shook hands all around and bade them be careful once more. It gave Matt an odd feeling. They were acting as if they were preparing to explore a strange alien planet instead of Earth.

* * * * *

It was a queer homecoming in more ways than one, he reflected soberly.

The little party of five men and a girl made their way cautiously down the valley. They were all armed with high powered rifles except the girl, and she had her automatic. They didn't talk much.

The rain had stopped and a warm spring sun beat down relentlessly. Matt began to sweat. He was conscious of birds among the scrub pine and oak cloaking the hillsides. They were familiar birds--robins and sparrows.

There was a drowsy hum of bees in the air. A crow flapped overhead, cawing discordantly. The brook, muddy and swollen by the rains, purled along on their left.