Short Fiction Robert Sheckley (best romantic books to read TXT) 📖

“Come on now, move.”

“Give me a minute.”

“A minute? Listen, I can’t stand in front of this bleeding set all night. Make your⁠—”

Static crackled sharply. Drake saw four wild pigs come trotting out of the jungle, moving slowly, like a reconnaissance squad probing for weak spots in an enemy position. They stopped; the static stopped. Byrnes, standing guard with his rifle, took a snap shot at them. The pigs turned, and static crackled as they moved back into the jungle. There was more static as the bird of paradise swept down for a look, then climbed out of range. After that, the static stopped.

Drake put down his binoculars and went back inside the shed. “That must be it,” he said. “The static is related to the Quedak. I think it comes when he’s operating the animals.”

“You mean he has some sort of radio control over them?” Sorensen asked.

“Seems like it,” Drake said. “Either radio control or something propagated along a radio wavelength.”

“If that’s the case,” Sorensen said, “he’s like a little radio station, isn’t he?”

“Sure he is. So what?”

“Then we should be able to locate him on a radio direction finder,” Sorensen said.

Drake nodded emphatically. He snapped off the receiver, went to a corner of the shed and took out one of their portable direction finders. He set it to the frequency at which Cable had picked up the Rabaul-Bougainville broadcast. Then he turned it on and walked to the door.

The men watched while Drake rotated the loop antenna. He located the maximum signal, then turned the loop slowly, read the bearing and converted it to a compass course. Then he sat down with a small-scale chart of the Southwest Pacific.

“Well,” Sorensen asked, “is it the Quedak?”

“It’s got to be,” said Drake. “I located a good null almost due south. That’s straight ahead in the jungle.”

“You’re sure it isn’t a reciprocal bearing?”

“I checked that out.”

“Is there any chance the signal comes from some other station?”

“Nope. Due south, the next station is Sydney, and that’s seventeen hundred miles away. Much too far for this R.D.F. It’s the Quedak, all right.”

“So we have a way of locating him,” Sorensen said. “Two men with direction finders can go into the jungle⁠—”

“⁠—and get themselves killed,” Drake said. “We can position the Quedak with R.D.F.s, but his animals can locate us a lot faster. We wouldn’t have a chance in the jungle.”

Sorensen looked crestfallen. “Then we’re no better off than before.”

“We’re a lot better off,” Drake said. “We have a chance now.”

“What makes you think so?”

“He controls the animals by radio,” Drake said. “We know the frequency he operates on. We can broadcast on the same frequency. We can jam his signal.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Am I sure? Of course not. But I do know that two stations in the same area can’t broadcast over the same frequency. If we tuned in to the frequency the Quedak uses, made enough noise to override his signal⁠—”

“I see,” Sorensen said. “Maybe it would work! If we could interfere with his signal, he wouldn’t be able to control the animals. And then we could hunt him down with the R.D.F.s.”

“That’s the idea,” Drake said. “It has only one small flaw⁠—our transmitter isn’t working. With no transmitter, we can’t do any broadcasting. No broadcasting, no jamming.”

“Can you fix it?” Sorensen asked.

“I’ll try,” Drake said. “But we’d better not hope for too much. Eakins was the radio man on this expedition.”

“We’ve got all the spare parts,” Sorensen said. “Tubes, manual, everything.”

“I know. Give me enough time and I’ll figure out what’s wrong. The question is, how much time is the Quedak going to give us?”

The bright copper disk of the sun was half submerged in the sea. Sunset colors touched the massing thunderheads and faded into the brief tropical twilight. The men began to barricade the copra shed for the night.

Drake removed the back from the transmitter and scowled at the compact mass of tubes and wiring. Those metal boxlike things were probably condensers, and the waxy cylindrical gadgets might or might not be resistors. It all looked hopelessly complicated, ridiculously dense and delicate. Where should he begin?

He turned on the set and waited a few minutes. All the tubes appeared to go on, some dim, some bright. He couldn’t detect any loose wires. The mike was still dead.

So much for visual inspection. Next question: was the set getting enough juice?

He turned it off and checked the battery cells with a voltmeter. The batteries were up to charge. He removed the leads, scraped them and put them back on, making sure they fit snugly. He checked all connections, murmured a propitiatory prayer, and turned the set on.

It still didn’t work.

Cursing, he turned it off again. He decided to replace all the tubes, starting with the dim ones. If that didn’t work, he could try replacing condensers and resistors. If that didn’t work, he could always shoot himself. With this cheerful thought, he opened the parts kit and went to work.

The men were all inside the copra shed, finishing the job of barricading it for the night. The door was wedged shut and locked. The two windows had to be kept open for ventilation; otherwise everyone would suffocate in the heat. But a double layer of heavy mosquito netting was nailed over each window, and a guard was posted beside it.

Nothing could get through the flat galvanized-iron roof. The floor was of pounded earth, a possible danger point. All they could do was keep watch over it.

The treasure-hunters settled down for a long night. Drake, with a handkerchief tied around his forehead to keep the perspiration out of his eyes, continued working on the transmitter.

An hour later, there was a buzz on the walkie-talkie. Sorensen picked it up and said, “What do you want?”

“I want you to end this senseless resistance,” said