by Roger Elwood
Now weve tom everything down and rebuilt from scratch. We know it’ll work right. The tanks are recharged. The ship’s ecosystem is in good order. Any time we want, we can take off for a younger sun, and travel fifty light-years without growing more than a few months older. After which, seeing no one else was around, she sought his arms; and that was more comforting then her words.
A last good-hye to Grandmother Earth, he thought. Then we can start the life over again that we got from her.
The thrust upon him mounted. Toward the end he lay in his chair, now become a couch, and concentrated on breathing.
They reached ground.
Silence rang in their ears for a long while. Kuroki was the first to move. He unstrapped his short body and snapped his chair back upright. One hand unhooked the radio microphone, another punched buttons. “Boat calling Traveler,” he intoned, “We’re O.K. so far. Come in, Traveler. Hello, hello.”
Darkington freed himself, stiffly, his flesh athrob, and helped Frederika rise. She leaned on him a minute. “Earth,” she said. Gulping: “Will you look out the port first, dearest? I find I’m not brave enough.”
He realized with a shock that none of them had yet glanced at the landscape. Convulsively, he made the gesture.
He stood motionless for so long that finally she raised her head and stared for herself.
III
They did not realize the full strangeness before they donned spacesuits and went outside. Then, saying very little, they wandered about looking and feeling. Their brains were slow to develop the gestalts which would allow them really to see what surrounded them. A confused mass of detail could not be held in the memory, the underlying form could not be abstracted from raw sense impressions. A tree is a tree, anywhere and anywhen, no matter how intricate its branching or how oddly shaped its leaves and blossoms. But what is a—
—Thick shaft of gray metal, planted in the sand, central to a labyrinthine skeleton of straight and curved girders, between which run still more enigmatic structures embodying helices and toruses and Mobius strips and less familiar geometrical elements; the entire thing some fifty feet tall; flaunting at the top several hundred thin metal plates whose black sides are turned toward the sun?
When you have reached the point of being able to describe it even this crudely, then you have apprehended it.
Eventually Darkington saw that the basic structure was repeated, with infinite variation of size and shape, as far as he could see. Some specimens tall and slender, some low and broad, they dominated the hillside. The deeper reaches were made gloomy by their overhang, but sun speckles flew piercingly bright within those shadows as the wind shook the mirror faces of the plates. That same wind made a noise of clanking and clashing and far-off booming, mile after metal mile.
There was no soil, only sand, rusty red and yellow. But outside the circle which had been devastated by the boats jets, Darkington found the earth carpeted with prismatic growths, a few inches high, seemingly rooted in the ground. He broke one off for closer examination and saw tiny crystals, endlessly repeated, in some transparent siliceous material: like snowflakes and spiderwebs of glass. It sparkled so brightly, making so many rainbows, that he couldn’t well study the interior. He could barely make out at the center a dark clump of … wires, coils, transistors? No, he told himself, don’t be silly. He gave it to Frederika, who exclaimed at its beauty.
He himself walked across an open stretch, hoping for a view even vaguely familiar. Where the hillside dropped too sharply to support anything but the crystals—they made it one dazzle of diamonds—he saw eroded contours, the remote white sword of a waterfall, strewn boulders and a few crags like worn-out obelisks. The land rolled away into blue distances; a snowcapped mountain range guarded the eastern horizon. The sky overhead was darker than in his day, faintly greenish blue, full of clouds. He couldn’t look near the fierce big sun.
Kuroki joined him.
“I hardly dare say. You?”
“Hell, I can’t think with that bloody boiler factory clattering at me.” Kuroki grimaced behind his faceplate. “Turn off your sonic mike and let’s talk by radio.”
Darkington agreed. Without amplification, the noise reached him through his insulated helmet as a far-off tolling. “We can take it for granted,” he said, “that none of this is accidental. No minerals could simply crystallize out like this.”
“Don’t look manufactured to me, though.”
“Well,” said Darkington, “you wouldn’t expect them to turn out their products in anything like a human machine shop.”
‘Them?”
“Whoever … whatever … made this. For whatever purpose.”
Kuroki whistled. “I was afraid you’d say something like that. But we didn’t see a trace of—cities, roads, anything —from orbit. I know the cloudiness made seeing pretty bad, but we couldn’t have missed the signs of a civilization able to produce stuff on this scale.”
“Why not? If the civilization isn’t remotely like anything we’ve ever imagined?”
Frederika approached, leaving a cartful of instruments behind. “The low and medium frequency radio spectrum is crawling,” she reported. “You never heard so many assorted hoots, buzzes, whirrs, squeals and whines in your life.”
“We picked up an occasional bit of radio racket while in orbit,” Kuroki nodded. “Didn’t think much about it, then.”
“Just noise,” Frederika said hastily. “Not varied enough to be any kind of … of communication. But I wonder what’s doing it?”
“Oscillators,” Darkington said, “Incidental radiation from a variety of … oh, hell, I’ll speak plainly … machines.”
“But—” Her hand stole toward his. Glove grasped glove. She wet her lips. “No, Hugh, this is absurd. How could anyone be capable of making … what we see … and not have detected us in orbit and … and done something about us?”
Darkington shrugged. The gesture was lost in his armor. “Maybe they’re biding their time. Maybe they aren’t here at the moment. The whole planet could be an automated factory, you know. Like those ocean mineral harvesters we had in our time”—it hurt to say that—“which Sam mentioned on the way down. Somebody may come around periodically and collect the production.”
“Where do they come from?” asked Kuroki in a rough tone.
“I don’t know, I tell you. Let’s stop making wild guesses and start gathering data.”
Silence grew between them. The skeleton towers belled. Finally Kuroki nodded. ‘Yeah. What say we take a little stroll? We may come on something.”
Nobody mentioned fear. They dared not.
§
Reentering the boat, they made the needful arrangements. The Traveler would be above the horizon for several hours yet. Captain Thurshaw gave his reluctant consent to an exploration on foot. The idea conflicted with his training, but what did survey doctrine mean under these conditions? The boat’s director could keep a radio beam locked on the ship and thus relay communication between Earth and orbit. While Kuroki talked, Darkington and Frederika prepared supplies. Not much was needed. The capacitor pack in each suit held charge enough to power thermostat and air renewer for a hundred hours, and they only planned to be gone for three or four. They loaded two packboards with food, water, and the “buckets” used for such natural functions as eating, but that was only in case their return should be delayed. The assorted scientific instruments they took were more to the point. Darkington holstered a pistol. When he had finished talking, Kuroki put the long tube of a rocket gun and a rackful of shells on his own back. They closed their helmets anew and stepped out.
“Which way?” Frederika asked.
“Due south,” Darkington said after studying the terrain. “We’ll be following this long ridge, you see. Harder to get lost.” There was little danger of that, with the boat emitting a continuous directional signal. Nonetheless they all had compasses on their wrists, and took note of landmarks as the
y went.
The boat was soon lost to view. They walked among surrealistic rods and frames and spirals, under ringing sheet metal. The crystals crunched beneath their tread and broke sunlight into hot shards of color. But not many rays pushed through the tangle overhead; shadows were dense and restless. Darkington began to recognize unrelated types of structure. They included long, black, seemingly telescopic rods, fringed with thin plates; glassy spheres attached to intricate grids; cables that looped from girder to girder. Frequently a collapsed object was seen crumbling on the ground.
Frederika looked at several disintegrated specimens, examined others in good shape, and said: “I’d guess the most important material, the commonest, is an aluminum alloy. Though … see here … these fine threads embedded in the core must be copper. And this here is probably manganese steel with a protective coating of … of … something more inert”
Darkington peered at the end of a broken strut through, a magnifying glass. “Porous,” he said. “Are these actually capillaries to transport water?”
“I thought a capillary was a hairy bug with lots of legs that turned into a butterfly,” said Kuroki. He ducked an imaginary fist. “O.K., O.K., somebodys got to keep up morale.”
The boats radio relayed a groan from the monitor aboard the ship. Frederika said patiently, “No, Sam, the legs don’t turn into a butterfly—” but then she remembered there would never again be bravely colored small wings on Earth and banged a hand against her faceplate as if she had been about to knuckle her eyes.
Darkington was still absorbed in the specimen he held. “I never heard of a machine this finely constructed,” he declared. “I thought nothing but a biological system could—”
“Stop! Freeze!”
Kurokis voice rapped in their earphones. Darkington laid a hand on his pistol butt. Otherwise only his head moved, turning inside the helmet. After a moment he saw the thing, too.
It stirred among shadows, behind a squat cylinder topped with the usual black-and-mirror plates. Perhaps three feet long, six or eight inches high … It came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of . articulated dull metal. A latticework swiveled at the front end like a miniature radio-radar beamcaster. Something glinted beadily beneath, twin lenses? Two thin tentacles held a metal sliver off one of the great stationary structures. They fed it into an orifice, and sparks shot back upward—
“Holy Moses,” Kuroki whispered.
The thing stopped in its tracks. The front-end lattice swung toward the humans. Then the thing was off, unbelievably fast. In half a second there was nothing to see.
Nobody moved for almost a minute. Finally Frederika clutched Darkington’s arm with a little cry. The rigidness left him and he babbled of experimental robot turtles in the early days of cybernetic research—very simple gadgets. A motor drove a wheeled platform, steered by a photoelectric unit that approached light sources by which the batteries might be recharged and, when this was done, became negatively phototropic and sought darkness. An elementary feedback circuit. But the turtles had shown astonishing tenacity, had gone over obstacles or even around …
‘That beast there was a good deal more complicated,” she interrupted.
“Certainly, certainly,” Darkington said. “But—”
“I’ll bet it heard Sam talk on the radio, spotted us with radar—or maybe eyes, if those socketed glass things were eyes—and took off.”
“Very possibly, if you must use anthropomorphic language. However—”
“It was eating that strut.” Frederika walked over to the piece of metal which the runner had dropped. She picked it up and came stiffly back with it. “See, the end has been ground away by a set of coarse emery wheels or something. You couldn’t very well eat alloy with teeth like ours. You have to grind it. Either that or dissolve it in some chemical system.”
“Hey!” Kuroki objected. “Let’s not go completely off the deep end.”
§
“What’s happened down there?” called the man aboard the Traveler.
They resumed walking, in a dreamlike fashion, as they recounted what they had seen. Frederika concluded: ‘This … this arrangement might conceivably be some kind of automated factory—chemosynthetic or something—if taken by itself. But not with beasts like that one running loose.”
“Now wait,” Darkington said. “They could be maintenance robots, you know. Clear away rubbish and wreckage.”
“A science advanced enough to build what we see wouldn’t use such a clumsy system of maintenance,” she answered. “Get off your professional caution, Hugh, and admit what’s obvious.”
Before he could reply, his earphones woke with a harsh jabber. He stopped and tried to tune in—it kept fading out, he heard it only in bursts—but the bandwidth was too great. What he did hear sounded like an electronic orchestra gone berserk. Sweat prickled his skin.
When the sound had stopped: “O.K.,” breathed Kuroki, “you tell me.”
“Could have been a language, I suppose,” said Frederika, dry throated. “It wasn’t just a few simple oscillations like that stuff on the other frequencies.”
Captain Thurshaw himself spoke from the orbiting ship. “You better get back to the boat and sit prepared for quick blastoff.”
Darkington found his nerve. “No, sir. If you please. I mean, uh, if there are intelligences … if we really do want to contact them … now’s the time. Let’s at least make an effort.”
“Well—”
“We’ll take you back first, of course, Freddie.”
“Nuts,” said the girl. “I stay right here.”
Somehow they found themselves pushing on. Once, crossing an open spot where only the crystals stood, they spied something in the air. Through binoculars, it turned out to be a metallic object shaped vaguely like an elongated manta. Apparently it was mostly hollow, upborne by air currents around the fins and propelled at low speed by a gas jet. “Oh, sure,” Frederika muttered. “Birds.”
They reentered the area of tall structures. The sonic amplifiers in their helmets were again turned high, and the clash of plates in the wind was deafening. Like a suit of armor, Darkington thought idiotically. Could be a poem in that. Empty armor on a wild horse, rattling and tossing as it galloped down an inexplicably deserted city street—symbol of …
The radio impulses that might be communication barked again in their earphones. “I don’t like this,” Thurshaw said from the sky. “You’re dealing with too many unknowns at once. Return to the boat and we’ll discuss further plans.”
They continued walking in the same direction, mechanically. We don’t seem out of place here ourselves, in this stiff cold forest, Darkington thought. Let’s turn around. Let’s assert our dignity as organic beings. We aren’t mounted on rails!
“That’s an order,” Thurshaw stated.
“Very well, sir,” Kuroki said. “And, uh, thanks.”
The sound of running halted them. They whirled. Frederika screamed.
“Whats the matter?” Thurshaw shouted. ‘Whats the matter?” The unknown language ripped across his angry helplessness.
Kuroki yanked his rocket gun loose and put the weapon to his shoulder. ‘Wait!” Darkington yelled. But he grabbed at his own pistol. The oncomer rushed in a shower of crystal splinters, whipping rods and loops aside. Its gigantic weight shuddered in the ground.
Time slowed for Darkington; he had minutes or hours to tug at his gun, hear Frederika call his name, see Kuroki take aim and fire. The shape was mountainous before him. Nine feet tall, he estimated in a far-off portion of his rocking brain, three yards of biped four-armed monstrosity, head horned with radio lattice, eyes that threw back sunlight in a blank glitter, grinder orifice and— The rocket exploded. The thing lurched and half fell. One arm was in ruins.
“Ha!” Kuroki slipped a fresh shell into his gun. “Stay where you are, you!”
Frederika, wildly embracing Darkington, found time to gasp, “Sam, maybe it wasn’t going t
o do any harm,” and Kuroki snapped, “Maybe it was. Too big to take chances with.” Then everything smashed.
Suddenly the gun was knocked spinning by a hurled iron bar they hadn’t even noticed. And the giant was among them. A swat across Kuroki’s back shattered his radio and dashed him to the ground. Flame spat and Frederika’s voice was cut short in Darkington’s receivers.
He pelted off, his pistol uselessly barking. “Run, Freddie!” he bawled into his sonic microphone. “I’ll try and—” The machine picked him up. The pistol fell from his grasp. A moment later, Thurshaw’s horrified oaths were gone: Darkington’s radio antenna had been plucked out by the roots. Frederika tried to escape, but she was snatched up just as effortlessly. Kuroki, back on his feet, stood where he was and struck with ludicrous fists. It didn’t take long to secure him either. Hog-tied, stuffed into a rack on the shoulders of the giant, the three humans were borne off southward.
IV
At first Zero almost ran. The monster must have known where its auxiliaries were and something of what had happened to them. Now that contact was broken, it might send forth others to look for them, better armed. Or it might even come itself, roaring and burning through the forest. Zero fled.
Only the monsters voice, raggedly calling for its lost members, pursued him. After a few miles he crouched in a road clump and strained his receptors. Nothing was visible but thickly growing accumulators and bare sky. The monster had ceased to shout. Though it still emitted an unmodulated signal, distance had dwindled this until the surrounding soft radio noise had almost obliterated that hum.
The units Zero had captured were making considerable sound-wave radiation. If not simply the result of malfunction in their damaged mechanism, it must be produced by some auxiliary system which they had switched on through interior control. Zeros sound receptors were not sensitive enough to tell him whether the emission was modulated. Nor did he care. Certain low forms of motile were known to have well-developed sonic parts, but anything so limited in range was useless to him except as a warning of occurrences immediately at hand. A person needed many square miles to support himself. How could there be a community of persons without the effortless ability to talk across trans-horizon distances?
