Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Their pace was only moderately rapid. The sound of the ship’s passage through the air could not have been heard on the ground, and was inaudible through the double hulls; whatever power drove and supported them was efficient enough to be soundless, as well.

  They came in sight of the sea and a small settlement at almost the same instant. The town was not large, but possessed several docks and a fair-sized fleet of fishing boats. Kirk recognized it—it was the town where he had landed upon his arrival at the beginning of the summer, and where he had recently turned in his report of the season’s progress. It was now late afternoon, and a glance at his watch and a moment’s calculation informed Kirk that the ship could not have been traveling more than thirty miles an hour, for they had left the base of his operations only slightly after noon. Five hours in the low control chamber had left the man rather cramped; he flung a query at Talker, and was informed that the main corridor was probably the only room on the ship spacious enough to permit him to stretch, even lying down. Kirk’s memory of the gun rooms suggested that the herald was right, so he sent his pack sliding down the ramp, followed it, detached a blanket and stretched out on the corridor floor, to the no small astonishment of a pair of soldiers who emerged from their rooms at that moment. He had brought no food, but did not feel particularly hungry. After a few minutes, he propped himself up with the pack as a pillow, and stared off down the hallway. The door at the far end was now open, and faint sounds came from below. Kirk considered investigating, but thought better of it and relaxed on his blanket.

  A very faint trembling of the floor roused him a few minutes later. He stood up—too suddenly, for his head impinged sharply on the metal ceiling—and turned to-ward the control-room ramp once more. Something appeared to be happening. He started up the incline, but did not reach the top, for as his head attained the level of the floor above he saw Talker starting down, and retreated before him.

  Boss followed the herald into the main corridor, and Kirk walked behind the pair to the air lock. Evidently the ship had landed. The man brushed Talker’s wing tip with a finger to get his attention, and asked, “What is the matter? Why have you come down so soon? I know of none around here who could give you help.”

  “Your words do not agree with your thoughts of a few moments ago,” returned Talker, who still carried the paper and pencil. “I hoped, when I asked you aboard after your avowal of enmity toward us, that your mind would betray some knowledge of value. It has done that; you are not accustomed to having your thoughts read, and have surprisingly little control over them. Had I not been delayed through having to learn your system of mental symbology, we would have had long ago the information we needed, without the necessity of asking your consent. When the settlement near which we are now landed came into view, your mind gave out word patterns of all sorts—the name of the place, which means nothing to us, the fact that the individual who directs your work resides therein, and—the fact that there is stored somewhere in that town a supply of a chemical to be used for poisoning insects. Your master is an expert on such matters; he must be, to hold the position. It is possible that the chemical will prove to be what we require; if not, I have learned to read human minds from you, and I can pry the knowledge from the one who directs you.”

  “Then you asked me aboard solely in the hope of tricking me?” asked Kirk. “There was no friendship, as I had believed? No sincere attempt to understand my point of view, as you claimed?”

  “It would indeed be interesting to understand your peculiar ways of thought,” replied the herald, “but I have spent all too much time in satisfying idle curiosity; and I see no practical value to be derived from the understanding you mentioned. You are like the others on this ship—easily swayed by stereotyped patterns of thought; I can see no other possible reason for your refusal to aid us. I bear you no enmity, since I have almost achieved my goal in spite of you; but it would be truly idiotic to expect me to feel friendly toward you. None the less, it would be interesting to know—” the strangely shaped hand abruptly ceased writing, and its owner turned toward the air lock, where Boss was waiting impatiently.

  That last, unfinished sentence did much to check the cold anger that was starting to rise in Kirk. In silence, he watched the air-lock doors swing open. Through a screen of tangled deadwood, a few ‘houses were visible; but no people appeared to be interested in the ship. How Boss had been able to bring the vessel down unseen so near the town will forever remain unknown.

  The two aliens flew over the brush, choosing a moment when no human beings were in sight, and concealed themselves behind bushes fairly close to the nearest houses. Kirk, sitting on the sill of the outer door, could imagine the herald’s sensitive antennae picking up the thought waves of one after another of the unsuspecting townspeople. He would have trouble with some of them, thought Kirk with a grin, as he recalled the three-quarters Indian population of the place and the illiteracy of a large percentage of this group, but how would it be possible to prevent the alien’s looting the minds of Faxon, the poison specialist, or old MacArthur, the storekeeper? Warning them would be easy enough, but useless; the more they tried not to think of what was wanted, the more certain most of them were to do so. If they tried to attack and drive away the aliens, the latter could simply retreat into the ship and study the attackers at will. It looked as though Talker would win after all; or did it?

  A thought struck the man, hazy and ill-defined at first. It had something to do with Indians and illiterates; something he couldn’t quite place, dimly remembered from his psychology study—and then he had it. A grin spread over his face; he leaned back against his pack, and watched the herald as men, women, and children, both white and red, passed within a hundred yards of his hiding place. Once again Kirk pictured the mind-reading “danger”; but it was markedly different from the former picture. He tried to control his thoughts, to make the joke last as long as possible—he wasn’t sure that the herald could read his mind at this range, but why take chances? He tried to think about the subject in French, since he had to think about it; the results were not exactly what he had intended, but the mental pictures were undoubtedly tangled enough to baffle any mind reader. And then the mothmen were winging their way back to the ship.

  Kirk moved aside to let them enter, and watched as the pair settled to the air-lock floor. Talker made no attempt to write; he simply stood and looked at the Earthman with an expression of hopeless resignation in his very carriage that sent a stab of pity through Kirk’s heart.

  The man stared back for a few moments, and then began speaking softly.

  “You know, now. I did not think of it until you had gone—but I should have, from what you told me; and you should long since have known from your own observations. When we first learned to communicate with each other, you told me that my thought-wave pattern was different from that of your race, which was natural enough, as you finally realized. You did not carry that reasoning, which told you it was natural, to its logical conclusion; nor did I. Your people all `think’ alike—so far as either of us is able to tell what thought is. The patterns you broadcast are mutually intelligible to members of your race, but not to me, because you have received those wares from others of your kind from earliest childhood, and I am a stranger. But my people do not communicate in that fashion; as you have learned, we have organs capable of impressing fine modulations on sound waves, and of detecting these modulations. The activity that occurs in our brains is never directly transmitted to other brains—it is first `coded’ and then broadcast.

  “The waves you `hear’ arise from chemical activity in your nervous systems, activity that accompanies thought.

  They are—must be—controlled to a vast extent by the structure of the nerve pattern in your brains; a structure which is itself controlled during your growth by the impressed waves from outside, in conjunction with whatever strange process accompanies learning.”

  Kirk held out a hand to the herald.

  “Look closely
at the ends of my fingers. In the skin you will see a complex pattern of ridges and hollows. That pattern, stranger, is unique in me; every one of my people has a similar, but individual, pattern—no two have identical fingerprints. They form the most positive means of identification we possess, although there are more than two billion beings on this planet.

  “And yet, friend, I think I am safe in saying that there are many times as many chances that two of us should bear identical fingerprints as there be chances that two human brains should be exactly alike, nerve for nerve. From birth, each brain is isolated, can be reached only through the means of communication natural to us; there is no reason that all should develop alike.

  “On that assumption, the tiny currents that pass from nerve to nerve and give rise to the waves that you can sense cannot possibly be the same for any two of us; and so no two sets of ‘thought waves’ could be identical. You learned some of my pattern, and thought that you had the key to communicate with all my kind; but I tell you sincerely that you will have to learn afresh the ‘thought language’ of every new human being with whom you wish to converse. You have just discovered that for yourself.

  “These cerebral radiations are not entirely unknown to us. Certain devices, in the nature of extremely sensitive electric detectors, have been able to measure and record them; but the only pattern shared by any significant number of human minds is that characterizing sleep—mental inactivity. The instant the subject wakes, or even has a dream, the ‘alpha pattern’ breaks up into a seemingly disorganized jumble.

  “We also know a little concerning direct thought exchange. Some of our scientists have experimented for many years, in the attempt to determine its nature and cause. Many people—not the scientists—assume that it is due to radiations like those recorded by the devices I mentioned; they imagine the possibility of perfecting those machines and using them for communication. They have heard of the experiments in telepathy, but have not bothered to investigate their details.

  “The experimenters themselves have pointed out that the phenomena of telepathy and clairvoyance, which seem to be closely connected, are quite inconsistent with the known laws of radiation, such as the inverse square law. I don’t remember all the details, and, anyway, I’m not a physicist; but the best known of those scientists claims that our present science of physics does not contain the explanation of the experimental results.

  “Whatever the true state of affairs may be, I am sure you will never get anything from any human mind but my own. I hate to tantalize you, but if you had not made this attempt to deceive me, my emotions would probably have overcome my common sense sufficiently to force me to help you; even now I am tempted to do so, because I can’t help feeling that your mind contains the roots of curiosity, with which I sympathize—I wouldn’t have pursued my studies this far, otherwise. But I could never trust you, now. My intelligence, such as it is, gave one estimate of your character, and my feelings gave another; and unfortunately for you, your actions showed the intelligence to be at least partially correct. Your character probably isn’t your fault, but I can do nothing about that. My advice to you is to take on supplies and get away from here while some of you are still alive; the fact that you found an inhabited planetary system at the first try suggests that others may not be too hard to locate. I wish you luck, so far as good luck for you doesn’t mean bad for us.”

  Allen Kirk turned, swung the pack to his shoulder, and walked away from the spaceship. He was acutely aware, as he went, of the two pairs of yellow eyes gazing after him; but he didn’t dare to look back.

  THE END.

  AVENUE OF ESCAPE

  The sergeant swaggered into the dugout, carefully indifferent to the stares of Corporal Snodgrass, Buck Private Kendall, and the captain’s orderly. He dropped into a seat at the packing-case table, and the orderly automatically began to deal.

  “F’r gosh sakes, sarge, how did you make it?” asked the corporal, picking up his hand. “We thought we’d have to get a new fourth. Ken said you were in a shell hole up front, with a Jap machine gun pecking at you every time you poked your head out. We figgered you’d last till dark, and then they’d crawl out and drop a grenade on you.”

  The sergeant glared at his cards and then at the orderly. “I have told you children time and again that a clever man—a man, say, intelligent enough to reach the rank of mess sergeant, where all his work is done for him—can find a way out of anything,” he remarked, discarding four cards. “If Ken, instead of merely reporting the presence of that machine gun, had gone to the trouble to drop a grenade on it with that trench mortar I developed, I would have been spared the effort of thinking my own way out of trouble; but he was always a thoughtless youngster.”

  Several hands were played in silence, the men knowing better than to ask questions. As they expected, the sergeant finally unbent.

  “It is also like you young squirts to refuse to profit by the ingenuity of yer betters. I suppose it’s my duty to explain my methods, in the event of your ever occupying a similar position. As you said, I was in that shell hole, which was the only cover in the neighborhood. My support, consisting of you, had departed rearward under the wing of a handy smoke pot, not leaving room for your superior officer in the cloud. As you know, I have always been opposed to the use of machine guns, and the specimen covering my shelter did nothing to change my opinion. Maybe I can persuade the army to my way of thinking, after this.

  “There was only one of the guns in the nest, which was two hundred yards away. Knowing that you were retreating along their line of fire, I thoughtfully refrained from attracting their attention until I was sure you were safe—that was why I didn’t follow you just then. When the smoke cleared away so that I could walk without trippin’ on things, I came back.”

  “Huh? Did you have a tank with you?” asked the corporal.

  “I did not, son. I have told you many a time machine guns are useless weapons. Consider, please. That gun fired about fifteen h’indred shots a minute, with a muzzle velocity of about four thousand feet per second. A little arithmetic, of which even you should be capable, shows that there is a space of one hundred and sixty feet between bullets—enough for any normal man. I walked back.”

  1943

  ATTITUDE

  Their copters had a very curious system, a very curious motivation. The captives were allowed to—even encouraged to—build devices to bring about their escape. Only at the last moment, mysteriously, the captors always stopped them—

  Dr. Little woke up abruptly, with a distinct sensation of having just stepped over a precipice. His eyes flew open and were greeted by the sight of a copper-colored metal ceiling a few feet above; it took him several seconds to realize that it was keeping its distance, and that he was not falling either toward or away from it. When he did, a grimace of disgust flickered across his face; he had lived and slept through enough days and nights in interstellar space to be accustomed to weightlessness. He had no business waking up like a cadet on his first flight, grasping for the nearest support—he had no business waking up at all, in these surroundings! He shook his head; his mind seemed to be working on slow time, and his pulse, as he suddenly realized as the pounding in his temples forced itself on his awareness, must be well over a hundred.

  This was not his room. The metal of the walls was different, the light was different—an orange glow streaming from slender tubes running along the junction of wall and ceiling. He turned his head to take in the rest of the place, and an agonizing barrage of pins and needles shot the length of his body. An attempt to move his arms and legs met with the same result; but he managed to bend his neck enough to discover that he was enveloped to the shoulders in a sacklike affair bearing all the earmarks of a regulation sleeping bag. The number stenciled on the canvas was not his own, however.

  In a few minutes he found himself able to turn his head freely and proceeded to take advantage of the fact by examining his surroundings. He found himself in a small chamber, walled comp
letely with the coppery alloy. It was six-sided, like the cells in a beehive; the only opening was a circular hatchway in what Little considered the ceiling—though, in a second-order flight, it might as well have been a floor or wall. There was no furniture of any description. The walls were smooth, lacking even the rings normally present to accommodate the anchoring snaps of a sleeping bag. There was light shining through the grille which covered the hatchway, but from where he was Little could make out no details through the bars.

  He began to wriggle his toes and fingers, ignoring as best he could the resulting sensations; and in a few minutes he found himself able to move with little effort. He lay still a few minutes longer, and then unsnapped the top fasteners of the bag. The grille interested him, and he was becoming more and more puzzled as to his whereabouts. He had no recollection of any unusual events; he had been checking over the medical stores, he was sure, but he couldn’t recall retiring to his room afterward. What had put him to sleep? And where had he awakened?

  He grasped the top of the bag and peeled it off, being careful to keep hold of it. He started to roll it up and paused in astonishment. A cloud of dust, fine as smoke, was oozing from the fibers of the cloth with each motion, and hanging about the bag like an atmosphere. He sniffed at it cautiously and started coughing; the stuff was dry, and tickled his throat unpleasantly. There could be only one explanation; the bag had been drifting in open space for a length of time sufficient to evaporate every trace of moisture from its fibers. He unrolled it again and looked at the stenciled number—GOA-III-NA12-422. The first three groups confirmed his original belief that the bag had belonged to the Gomeisa; the last was a personal number indicating the identity of the former owner, but Little could not remember whose number it was. The fact that it had been exposed to the void was not reassuring.