Tabby by Winston K. Marks (libby ebook reader TXT) 📖

too often as long as the sun is up.

Cleve has turned into a different man. He is soft-spoken and intense. His hands tremble so much that he is conducting most of his work by verbal directions with the botanist and me to carry them out. When his suggestion about blowing up the atoll was turned down he quit talking except to conduct his work. If things were half as ominous as he makes out we'd be pretty worried.

June 4—The spray planes got here and none too soon. We were running out of drinking water. The Tabbies got so thick that even at night a man would get stung insane if he went outside the screen.

The various sprays all worked well. This evening the air is relatively clear. Incidentally, the birds have been having a feast. Now the gulls are congregating to help us out like they did the Mormons in the cricket plague. The spiders are doing all right for themselves, too. In fact, now that we have sprayed the place the spiders and their confounded webs are the biggest nuisance we have to contend with. They are getting fat and sassy. Spin their webs between your legs if you stand still a minute too long. Remind me of real estate speculators in a land boom, the little bastardly opportunists. As you might gather, I don't care for brothers Arachnidae. They make everyone else nervous, too. Strangely, Cleveland, the entomologist, gets the worst jolt out of them. He'll stand for minutes at the screen watching them spin their nasty webs and skipping out to de-juice a stray Tabby that the spray missed. And he'll mutter to himself and scowl and curse them. It is hard to include them as God's creatures.

Cleve still isn't giving out with the opinions. He works incessantly and has filled two notebooks full of data. Looks to me like our work is almost done.

August 7, Year of our Lord 1956—To whom it will never concern: I can no longer make believe this is addressed to my friend, Ben Tobin. Cleveland has convinced me of the implications of our tragedy here. But somehow it gives me some crazy, necessary ray of hope to keep this journal until the end.

I think the real horror of this thing started to penetrate to me about June 6. Our big spray job lasted less than 24 hours, and on that morning I was watching for the planes to come in for a second try at it when I noticed the heavy spider webbing in the upper tree foliage. As I looked a gull dove through the trees, mouth open, eating Tabbies. Damned if the webs didn't foul his wings. At first he tore at them bravely and it looked like he was trying to swim in thin mud—sort of slow motion. Then he headed into a thick patch, slewed around at right angles and did a complete flip. Instantly three mammoth spiders the size of my fist pounced out on him and trussed him up before he could tear loose with his feet.

His pitiful squawking was what made me feel that horror for the first time. And the scene was repeated more and more often. The planes dusted us with everything they had, and it cut down the Tabbies pretty well again, but it didn't touch the spiders, of course.

And then our return radio messages started getting very vague. We were transmitting Cleve's data hourly as he compiled it, and we had been getting ordinary chatter and speculation from the Honolulu operator at the end of our message. That stopped on the sixth of June. Since then, we've had only curt acknowledgements of our data and sign-offs.

At the same time, we noticed that complete censorship on news of our situation and progress apparently hit all the long-wave radio broadcasts. Up to that time the newscasts had been feeding out a dilute and very cautious pablum about our fight against Tabby. Immediately when we noticed this news blind spot Cleve went all to pieces and started drinking again.

Cleve, Sellers and I had the lab tent to ourselves, having moved our bunks in there, so we got a little out of touch with the others. It wasn't the way Sellers and I liked it, but none of us liked the trip from lab to living quarters any more, although it was only fifty feet or so.

Then Sparks moved in, too. For the same reason. He said it was getting on his nerves running back and forth to the lab to pick up our outgoing bulletins. So he shifted the generator, radio gear and all over to a corner of the lab and brought in his bunk.

By the tenth of June we could see that the spraying was a losing battle. And it finally took the big tragedy to drive home the truth that was all about us already. When the crew got ready to go out to their planes on the eleventh, everyone except the four of us in the lab tent was drafted to help clear webs between the tents and the beach. We could hear them shouting from tent to tent as they made up their work party. We could no longer see across the distance. Everywhere outside, vision was obscured by the grayish film of webs on which little droplets caught the tropical sun like a million tiny mirrors. In the shade it was like trying to peer through thin milk, with the vicious, leggy little shadows skittering about restlessly.

As usual in the morning, the hum of the Tabbies had risen above the normal jungle buzzing, and this morning it was the loudest we'd heard it.

Well, we heard the first screen door squeak open, and someone let out a whoop as the group moved out with brooms, palm fronds and sticks to snatch a path through the nightmare of spider webs. The other two doors opened and slammed, and we could hear many sounds of deep disgust voiced amid the grunts and thrashings.

They must have been almost to the beach when the first scream reached us. Cleve had been listening in fascination, and the awful sound tore him loose of his senses. He screamed back. The rest of us had to sit on him to quiet him. Then the others outside all began screaming—not words, just shattering screams of pure terror, mixed with roars of pain and anger. Soon there was no more anger. Just horror. And in a few minutes they died away.

Sellers and Sparks and I looked at each other. Cleve had vomited and passed out. Sparks got out Cleve's whiskey, and we spilled half of it trying to get drinks into us.

Sparks snapped out of it first. He didn't try to talk to us. He just went to his gear, turned on the generator and warmed up the radio. He told Honolulu what had happened as we had heard it.

When he finished, he keyed over for an acknowledgment. The operator said to hold on for a minute. Then he said they would try to dispatch an air task force to get us off, but they couldn't be sure just when.

While this was coming in Cleve came to his senses and listened. He was deadly calm now, and when Honolulu finished he grabbed the mike from Sparks, cut in the TX and asked, "Are they landing discs on the mainlands?"

The operator answered, "Sorry, that's classified."

"For God's sake," Cleve demanded, "if you are ready to write us off you can at least answer our questions. Are there any of the green sonsofbitches on the mainland?"

There was another little pause, and then, "Yes."

That was all. Sparks ran down the batteries trying to raise them again for more answers, but no response. When the batteries went dead he checked the generator that had kicked off. It was out of gasoline. The drums were on the beach. Now we were without lights, power and juice for our other radios.

We kept alive the first few days by staying half drunk. Then Cleve's case of whiskey gave out and we began to get hungry. Sparks and Sellers set fire to one of our straw-ticking mattresses and used it as a torch to burn their way over to the supply tent about thirty feet away. It worked fairly well. The silky webs flashed into nothing as the flames hit them, but they wouldn't support the fire, and other webs streamed down behind the two. They had to burn another mattress to get back with a few cases of food.

Then we dug a well under the floor of our tent. Hit water within a few feet. But when we cut through the screen floor it cost us sentry duty. We had to have one person awake all night long to stamp on the spiders that slipped in around the edge of the well.

Through all of this Cleveland has been out on his feet. He has just stood and stared out through the screen all day. We had to force him to eat. He didn't snap out of it until this morning.

Sparks couldn't stand our radio silence any longer, so he talked Sellers into helping him make a dash for the gas drums on the beach. They set fire to two mattresses and disappeared into the tunnel of burned webs that tangled and caved in behind them.

When they were gone, Cleveland suddenly came out of his trance and put a hand on my shoulder. I thought for a moment he was going to jump me, but his eyes were calm. He said, "Well, Fred, are you convinced now that we've been attacked?"

I said, "It makes no sense to me at all. Why these little flies?"

Cleve said, "They couldn't have done better so easily. They studied our ecology well. They saw that our greatest potential enemy was the insect population, and the most vicious part of it was the spider. Tabanidae viridis was not sent just to plague us with horsefly bites. Tabby was sent to multiply and feed the arachnids. There are durable species in all climates. And if our botanist were still alive he could explain in detail how long our plant life can last under this spider infestation.

"Look for yourself," he said pointing outside. "Not only are the regular pollenizing insects doomed, but the density of those webs will choke out even wind pollinated grains."

He stared down our shallow well hole and stamped on a small, black, flat spider that had slithered under the screening. "I suppose you realize the spiders got the others. Down here in the tropics the big varieties could do it by working together. Sellers and Sparks won't return. Sounds like they got through all right, but they'll be bitten so badly they won't try to get back."

And even as he spoke we heard one of the aircraft engines start up. The sound was muffled as under a bed quilt.

Cleve said, "I don't blame them. I'd rather die in the sun, too. The beach should be fairly clear of webs. We've got one mattress left. What do you say?"

He's standing there now holding the mattress with the ticking sticking out. I don't think one torch will get us through. But it will be worth a try for one more look at the sun.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tabby, by Winston Marks