Classic Fiction
Page 55
“When I got out from among the trees, the noise began to sound more and more like spoken language; so I yelled a few words myself, though I couldn’t understand a word of it. There was no answer at first—just this tremendous, roaring voice blatting out the strangely regular sounds. Finally, a little way up the hill from here, on a rather open spot, I saw the source; and at almost the same instant the noise stopped.
“Lying out in the open, where it could be seen from any direction, was a thing that looked like a perfectly good submarine torpedo—everyone was familiar with those at the time, as they played a very prominent part in the first World War. Science-fiction had not come into style then, and Heaven knows I wasn’t much of a physical scientist, but even so I found it hard to believe that the thing had been carried there. I examined it as thoroughly as I could, and found a few discrepancies in the torpedo theory.
“In the first place, it had neither propellers nor any type of steering fin. It was about twenty feet long and three in diameter, which was reasonable for a torpedo as far as I knew, but the only break in the surface was a section of the side, near what I supposed to be the front, which was open rather like a bomb bay. I looked in, though I didn’t take a chance on sticking an arm or my head inside, and saw a chamber that occupied most of the interior of the nose section. It was empty, except for a noticeable smell of burning sulfur.
“I nearly had a heart attack when the thing began talking again, this time in a much lower tone—at any rate I jumped two feet. Then I cussed it out in every language I knew for startling me so. It took me a minute or two to get command of myself, and then I realized that the sounds it was making were rather clumsy imitations of my own words. To make sure, I tried some others, one word at a time; and most of them were repeated with fair accuracy. Whoever was speaking couldn’t pronounce ‘P’ or ‘B,’ but got on fairly well with the rest.
“Obviously there was either someone trapped in the rear of the torpedo, or it contained a radio and someone was calling from a distance. I doubted the first, because of the tremendous volume behind the original sounds; and presently there was further evidence.
“I had determined to set up camp right there, early as it was. I was going about the business, saying an occasional word to the torpedo and being boomed at in return, when another of the things appeared overhead. It spoke, rather softly, when it was still some distance up—apparently the controllers didn’t want to scare me away! It set-tied beside the first, trailing a thin cloud of blue smoke which I thought at first must have to do with driving rockets. However, it proved to be leaking around the edges of a door similar to that in the first torpedo, and then a big cloud of it puffed out as the door opened. That made me a little cautious, which was just as well—the metal turned out to be hot enough to feel the radiation five feet away. How much hotter it had been before I can’t guess. The sulfur smell was strong for a while after the second torpedo landed, but gradually faded out again.
“I had to wait a while before the thing was cool enough to approach with comfort. When I did, I found that the nose compartment this time was not empty. There was an affair rather like a fishing-box inside, with the compartments of one side full of junk and those on the other empty. I finally took a chance on reaching in for it, once it was cool enough to touch.
“When I got it out in the sunlight, I found that the full compartments were covered with little glassy lids, which were latched shut; and there was a: tricky connection between the two sides which made it necessary to put something in an empty compartment and close its lid before you could open the corresponding one on the other side. There were only half a dozen spaces, so I fished out some junk of my own—a wad of paper from my notebook, a chunk of granite, a cigarette, some lichen from the rocks around, and so on—and cleaned out the full compartments. One of the things was a lump of platinum and related metals that must have weighed two pounds.
“Right then I settled down to some serious thinking. In the first place, the torpedo came from off this planet. The only space ship I’d ever heard of was the projectile in Jules Verne’s story, but people of this planet don’t send flying torpedoes with no visible means of propulsion carrying nuggets of what I knew even then was a valuable metal; and if they do, they don’t call attention to the practice by broadcasting weird languages loudly enough to be heard a mile away.
“Granting that the torpedo came from outer space, its behavior seemed to indicate only one thing—its senders wanted to trade. At any rate, that was the theory I decided to act on. I put all the junk except the platinum nugget back where it came from, and put the box back in the nose of the torpedo. I don’t yet know if they could see me or not—I rather doubt it, for a number of reasons—but the door closed almost at once and the thing took off—straight up, out of sight. I was sorry I hadn’t had much of value to stuff in my side of the box. I had thought of sending them a rifle cartridge to indicate we had a mechanical industry, but remembered the temperature at which the thing had arrived and decided against it.
“It took two or three hours for the torpedo to make its round trip. I had set up my tent and rounded up some firewood and water by the time it came back, and I found out my guess was right. This time they had put another platinum nugget in one compartment, leaving the others empty; and I was able to remember what I had put in the corresponding space on the previous visit.
“That about tells the story.” Mr. Wing grinned at his son. “I’ve been swapping cigarettes for platinum and indium nuggets for about thirty years now—and you can see why I wanted you to study some astronomy!”
Don whistled gently. “I guess I do, at that. But you haven’t explained this,” he indicated the metal cube on which his father was sitting.
“That came down a little later, grappled to a torpedo, and the original one took off immediately afterwards. I have always supposed they use it to find this spot again. We’ve sort of fallen into a schedule over the years. I’m never here in the winter any more, and they seem to realize that; but from two to three days after I snap this switch off and on a few times, like this,” he demonstrated, “the exchequer gets a shot in the arm.”
Don frowned thoughtfully, and was silent for a time.
“I still don’t see why you keep it a secret,” he said at last. “If the affair is really interplanetary, it’s tremendously important.”
“That’s true, of course. However, if these people wanted contact with mankind in general, they could certainly establish it without any difficulty. It has always seemed to me that their maintaining contact in this fashion was evidence that they did not want their presence generally known; so that if experts began taking their transmitter apart, for example, or sending literature and machinery out to them in an effort to show our state of civilization, they would simply leave.”
“That seems a little far-fetched.”
“Perhaps; but can you offer a better suggestion why they don’t land one of these things in a city? They’re paying tremendous prices for darned small quantities of tobacco—and a corner drug store could stock them for years at their rate of consumption.
“Don’t get me wrong, son; I certainly appreciate the importance of all this, and want very much to find out all I can about these things and their machines; but I want the investigating done by people whom I can trust to be careful not to upset the apple cart. I wish the whole family were seven or eight years older; we’d have a good research team right here. For the moment, though, you and I—principally you—are going to have to do the investigating, while Rog and Edie do the scouting. I expect they’ll sneak over to watch us, of course; Roger’s curiosity is starting to keep him awake nights, and he has the makings of a man of action. I’m wondering whether we don’t find his tracks or Edie’s on the way back—he might have persuaded her to go to town for him. There’s nothing more to be done here, unless you want to look this communicator over more closely; we might as well head back, and find out how enterprising the younger generation is.”
“Me, too. I’ve learned a good deal about radios in the last twenty years, but it’s a bit beyond me. Of course, I’ve never dared take off more than the outer casing; there are parts too deeply stowed to be visible, which might be highly informative if we could see them.”
“Exactly what I was thinking. There should be some way to look into it—we ought to dig up one of those dentist’s mirrors.”
“You don’t catch me sticking anything made of metal into a gadget that almost certainly uses astronomical voltages.”
“Well—I suppose not. We could turn it off first, if we were sure which position of that switch were off. We don’t really know whether you’re calling them with a short transmission when you move it, or whether you’re breaking a continuous one. If they use it for homing, it would be the latter; but we can’t be sure.”
“Even if we were, turning it off wouldn’t be enough. Condensers can hold a nasty bite for a long time.”
Don admitted the justice of this point, and spent only a few minutes peering through the openings left by the removal of the plates.
“Most of the inside seems to be blocks of bakelite anyway,” he said at last. “I suppose they have everything sealed in for permanence. I wonder how they expect to service it? I guess you’re right—we may as well go home until the torpedo comes.” He slung the pack that had contained their lunch—or rather, the sandwiches they had eaten in route—over his shoulder, and straightened up. His father nodded in agreement, and they began to retrace their steps down the hillside.
Don was wrapped in thought, and his father forbore to interrupt. He knew how he had reacted to the events he had just described, when he had been very little older than his son was now; also, he had a high opinion of his children’s intelligence, and believed firmly in letting them solve problems for themselves as much as was safe. He reflected somewhat ruefully that nothing he could say would be too much help, in any case.
There was no trace of anyone’s having followed them at any point on the trail home, though they split up to take opposite sides of the scree they had deliberately crossed on the way out. Neither found this very surprising, for it turned out that Edith had made her scheduled patrols and spent the rest of the day with the younger children, while Roger had gone to town as expected. If he had thought of finding a substitute and following his father, nothing had come of it. Mr. Wing was not sure whether he ought to be pleased or disappointed.
V.
Laj Drai found his hired schoolteacher beside one of the torpedoes, checking off its contents with loops of one tentacle. The mechanic was listening as he named off the items.
“Magnesium cell; titanium cell; sodium—oh, hello, Drai. Anything going on?”
“Hard to say. You are setting up a research project, I take it?”
“Just checking some hypotheses. I’ve listed all the elements that would be gaseous under the conditions of Planet Three, and as many compounds as I could find in the Tables. Some are a little doubtful, since I have no pressure data; they might be liquid. Still, if they are there in any quantity, their vapors should be present.
“Then I eliminated as many as possible on theoretical grounds, since I can’t test for everything at once.”
“Theoretical grounds?”
“Yes. For example, while fluorine is still gaseous under those conditions, it’s much too active to be expected in the free state. The same is true of chlorine—which may be liquid—and oxygen. On the other hand, hydrogen seems very likely, along with hydrogen sulfide and other volatile compounds of both those elements. Nitrogen should be present, and the inert gases—though I don’t know how I can test for those.
“I’ve built little cells containing various materials, along with built-in heaters; and I’m going to warm them up one at a time after landing this torpedo and opening it to the atmosphere. Then I’ll bring it back and see what the air did to my samples. I have magnesium and titanium, which should detect the nitrogen, and sodium, and a couple of sulfides which should be reduced if there’s much hydrogen, and so on. The report may not be complete, but we should learn something.”
“So I should say, from what little I know about it Were you planning to send the torpedo out right away?”
“Yes; everything seems to be ready, unless there are complications from your department.”
“Nothing much. We were just going to send one out ourselves; our native signalled a short time ago.”
“Can you control two torpedoes at once?”
“Yes, easily. It occurs to me, however, that it might be best for you to keep a mile or two away from our homing station, and make your descent when that part of the planet is in darkness. The natives are diurnal, we are sure; and it would be a pity to scare them off if any of your chemical reactions are bright or noisy or smelly.”
“Or affect some sense we don’t know about. All right; you have a good point. Do you want me to wait until you have finished your trading, or go ahead of you if the chance occurs?”
“I don’t see that it matters much. I don’t remember whether it will be night or day there when the torpedoes arrive overhead; there’s a table for figuring it up in the office, and we’ll check before arrival time. I’d say if it was day, we’d go right down while you waited, and if it’s night you get first shot.”
“All right with me.”
“You’ll have to control from down here—there’s only one unit up in the observatory. It won’t matter, since you’ll be “working blind anyway. I’ll go up and tell them that you’re operating too—we have a relay unit with detection apparatus circling the planet now, and there’s no point in having the observers think the flatlanders are out in space.”
“Have you been getting activity from them?”
“Not much. Within the last three or four years we have picked up some radiation suspiciously like radar, but it’s all been constant frequency so far. We put quarter-wave coatings of plastic with a half-reflecting film of metal on all the torpedoes, and we haven’t had any trouble. They only use a dozen different frequencies, and we’re set up for all of them—when they change, we simply use another drone. I suppose they’ll start using two or more wave lengths in one area or maybe frequency modulation eventually, and we’ll have to get a non-reflective coating. That would be simpler anyway—only it’s more expensive. I learned that when I had the Karella coated. I wonder how we’ll get around it if they learn to pick up infra-red? The torps are enough hotter than the planet to show up like novae, when we happen to start them from the ship just outside the atmosphere.”
“Let ‘em hang in space until they cool off,” Ken and the mechanic replied in chorus. “Or send them all from here, as we’ve been doing,” added the latter. Laj Drai left without further remark.
“That fellow needs a whole scientific college,” the mechanic remarked as the door closed. “He’s so darned suspicious he’ll hire only one man at a time, and usually fires them before long.”
“Then I’m not the first?”
“You’re the first to get this far. There were a couple of others, and he got the idea they were poking into his business, so I never even found out what ideas they had. I’m no scientist, but I’m curious—let’s get this iron cigar into space before he changes his mind about letting it go.”
Ken gestured agreement, but hung back as the mechanic cut the test controller into the main outside beam circuit—two multiphase signals could be handled as easily as one on the beam, and both torpedoes would be close enough together so that one beam would suffice. The mechanic’s information was interesting; it had never occurred to him that others might have preceded him on this job. In a way, that was good—the others had presumably not been narcotics agents, or Rade would have told him. Therefore he had better protective coloration than he had supposed.
Drai might even be getting used to having outsiders connected with his project.
But just what did this mechanic know? After all, he had apparently been around for some time, and Drai was certainly not afraid to talk in his presence. Perhaps he might be worked up into a really effective source of information; on the other hand, it might be dangerous to try—quite conceivably one of his minor duties was keeping a watchful eye on Sallman Ken’s behavior. He was a rather taciturn individual and Ken had not given him much attention so far.
At the moment he was all technician. He was draped over the rack in front of the control board, his tentacles resting on the various toggles and verniers, and a rising hum indicated that the tubes were warming. After a moment, he twisted a vernier knob slightly, and the torpedo on which Ken had been working lifted gently from the cradle. He spoke without turning his eyes backward:
“If you’ll go to the far end of the room, I’ll run it down there and we can test the microphone and speaker. I know you don’t plan to use them, but we might as well have them serviceable.”
Ken followed the suggestion, testing first the sound apparatus and then the various recorders and other instruments in the cargo chamber which were intended to tell whether or not any violent chemical reactions took place—photocells and pyrometers, and gas pumps connected to sample flasks and precipitators. Everything appeared in working order and was firmly clamped in place.
Assured of this, the operator guided the little vessel to a tunnel-like air lock in one wall of the room, maneuvered it in, pumped back the air, and drove the torpedo out into the vacuum of Mercury’s surface.
Without further ado he sent it hurtling away from the planet, its control keyed in with a master achronic beam running from the station to the relay unit near Earth. No further attention would be needed until it approached the planet.