by Hal Clement
“Hey, Doc!” said Truck. “Where’d you pick that one up?”
“Probably,” said Candace dryly, “in the very place where he picked me up.”
It was the younger man who spoke seriously then. “No fooling, folks,” Truck said. “Now that we’re here, just how do we go about finding our inhuman friend? Don’t forget—you’re the brains in this pitch. I’m just the muscle.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to use that Geiger counter of yours again,” Hal Parsons said. “And no cracks, please! If we can find any variation of intensity in the rainfall radiation, there may be a chance . . .”
“Gotcha, Doc.” Again, the young Goliath was out of the jeep, and working at the trailer tarpaulin.
“Do you think it will work, honey?” Candace asked.
Hal Parsons shrugged. “It might,” he said. “It just might.”
But it didn’t. As remorselessly as the rain continued to fall, the mild radioactivity continued to register without variation. After testing puddles for two hours, the two men returned to the jeep, where Candace had coffee ready for them once more. She asked no questions as to the success of their experiment. One look at their faces as they emerged from the mist told her all she needed to know.
“Carnotite,” said her husband, lifting his face from an empty tin cup and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Not enough to report on—just enough to bitch us up for an hour, with a false lead. You might not believe it, but this is one hell of a big valley.”
“It keeps getting bigger,” said Truck MacLaurie mournfully, through a coffee mustache. He looked at Hal Parsons and asked, “Well, Doc—what next?”
Parsons was trying to come up with some sort of a constructive reply, when Candace motioned for him to be silent and lifted her face upward. The others followed her gaze and saw nothing but clouds, rain and fog. Then they heard it—the drone of a plane directly overhead. Without a word, both men handed Candace their empty cups and moved toward the trailer.
It was a mere matter of minutes, before they had the radio back in action, and were trying to communicate with the crew overhead. While Truck cranked away at the battery, to raise power, Parsons hung onto the transmitter, urgently repeating, “Parsons calling plane. Parsons calling plane. We hear you. We hear you. Come on in. Come on in. Over . . .”
All he could get, on the earphones, was a rumble of static, through which, now and again, he heard the faint, unintelligible mutter of the operator upstairs, trying to break through. Candace looked at him anxiously, her hair oddly slicked into bangs by the rain. He shook his head hopelessly.
“Keep trying,” she said softly. “Keep trying, Hal honey.”
Frustration was high within him, but he nodded and tried again. “Parsons calling plane. Parsons calling plane,” he began.
This time, there was no doubt about the answer. It came, clear as a voice in some unbuilt next room, saying, “Parsons calling plane. Parsons calling plane.”
“Who’s that?” he barked, recalling the impertinence of the aircraft radio message of the night before.
“Who’s that?” he barked. “Hello?”
“Who’s that? The mocking voice replied.
Parsons mopped rainwater out of his eyes and snapped, “What in hell is going on? This isn’t funny, Mack!”
And the voice replied, “What in hell is going on? This isn’t funny, Mack!”
“Cut it out, you joker!” he said furiously. “If you’ve got a message for us, unload it and take off.”
To which his tormentor retorted, “Who’s that? Hello?”
“Hal honey!” interposed Candace, who had crowded close and turned back one of the earphones to catch the mocking message. “Hal honey, he’s replying in your voice.”
“So what?” her husband countered. “Whoever he is, I’m going to see he gets hell—once we’re out of here.”
“Just a second.” She nudged him clear of the transmitter, bent over the mouthpiece, and said clearly, “Toodle-oo, old thing.”
The answer came back clear as spoken—and in perfect reproduction of Candace’s voice. “Toodle-oo, old thing.”
They stared at each other until Truck came over. He pushed back his hair and said, “What is this—a private game, or can anybody play?”
“It’s beginning to look,” said Hal quietly, his controlled voice belieing the wild excitement in his eyes, “as if your great Whatisit is as anxious to get in touch with us as we are with him.” Then, turning to Candace, he asked, “What do you think, baby?”
“I think,” she said, “if I were an alien and wanted to be a radio announcer and could only receive H. V. Kaltenborn, I’d give it back to him just the way he was giving it to me.”
V
IT BECAME INCREASINGLY evident to the Conservationist that he could lie there, until he was trapped in an earthquake, making up five hundred theories per second, without getting one whit closer to knowledge of what was happening around him. He was going to have to examine the machines more closely. The only question was one of tactics. Should he go to them, or have them come to him?
He decided first to try the second gambit, since it offered more promise of drawing out information as to their nature and abilities. He would thus be able to determine precisely what stimuli affected their senses of equipment, and the extent of their capability in analyzing what they did detect.
Naturally, not a wave of their radiation had, thus far, conveyed any meaning to the Conservationist. More accurately, the few patterns that even remotely matched patterns of his own language did not deceive him for an instant by such chance similarities. Nor did he suppose the natives would have any better luck with his language.
His first attempt at attracting their attention consisted merely of broadcasting sustained notes on a variety of frequencies, other than the one they were using. As he had rather expected, these produced no noticeable reaction. Travel and conversation went on unaffected. When he repeated the attempts, using the same wavelength as the natives, however, the results were just as unsatisfactory. It was extremely frustrating.
Travel stopped, and after he had repeated the signal a few times, all six of the vehicles seemed to come together at one spot. In the pauses between his own transmissions, the native speech sounded almost continuously. Yet he felt doubt that he had even been heard.
He had rather expected that there might be an attempt to respond to him in kind, but this did not occur, even though he tried sending out his wave in various long and short pulses which should have been easy to copy. At least, he used lengths corresponding to those of the radar pulses which he had felt at his arrival, and which had, presumably, been emitted by members of this race.
They failed to respond to the patterns, however, even when in desperation he increased the lengths of the bursts of radiation to three or four thousand microseconds. The very speech patterns of the natives changed carrier amplitude in shorter periods than that—they must, he felt, be able to distinguish such intervals!
The agent began to speculate upon the general intelligence-level of this alien new race. He had to remind himself forcibly that, since they could move around so rapidly, they must be able to design and build complex machines. It was startling, to say the least.
Then it occurred to him that all the vehicles he was watching might be remote controlled, that the electromagnetic waves he was receiving were the control impulses. Yes, yes, that must be it! He spent some time, trying to correlate the radio signals with the motions of the machines. The attempt, of course, failed completely, since men are at least as likely to talk while standing still, as while walking around.
This proving a poor check on his hypothesis—it did not disprove it, since the machines might be able to do many things besides move around—he tried duplicating some of their complete signal groups, watching carefully to see whether any motion of the vehicles resulted. He realized that the controlling entity might not like what he was doing, but he was sure that satisfactory explanations
could be made, once contact was established.
The result of the experiment was a complete stoppage of motion, as nearly as he could tell. It was not quite what he had expected. But there was some gratification in getting any result at all. For several whole seconds there was silence, both seismic and electromagnetic.
Then the native speech—it had to be speech—began again, in groups which still seemed long to the agent, but which were certainly much shorter than most of those used before. He duplicated each group as it came.
“Who’s that? Hello?”
“Who’s that? Hello?”
“What in hell is going on? This isn’t funny, Mack!”
“What’s going on? This isn’t funny, Mack.”
“Cut it out, you joker! If you’ve got a message for us, unload it and take off!”
“Who’s that? Hello?” The agent decided the last signal group was too long to be worth imitation, so he went back to one of the earlier groups. This action resulted in brief silence, followed by a pattern, brief, but with a fresh modulation, which he mimicked accurately. For several whole minutes, the conversation, if it could be called that, went on. He felt real pride now, a self-congratulatory kind of exaltation in being able to carry off his cleverly assumed masquerade with perfect confidence, vigor and, certainly, no small measure of success.
The Conservation agent had decided long since what the native, machines would almost certainly do, and was pleased to detect them getting into motion once more. But when they had gone far enough for him to determine their direction of travel, he discovered, with some disappointment, that they were not moving toward him.
He would have had little trouble solving their motives, had they been moving straight away from him. But the angle they took carried them more or less in his direction, albeit considerably to one side. He found this a complete mystery, at first. Finally he noticed that the group was traveling along a depressed portion of the lithosphere’s surface, and seized upon, as a working hypothesis, the idea that their machines found it difficult, or impossible, to climb slopes of more than a few degrees.
In that case, of course, they might not be able to reach him, directly or otherwise, since he had buried himself some distance up the side of a valley. He considered again leaving his position and coming to meet them, but reached the same decision as before—that he could learn more by seeing what they did on their own.
They spoke rarely as they traveled—but the agent found that he could always make them broadcast, by ceasing to radiate his own signal. Had they not been pursuing such an odd course, he would have supposed, from that fact, that they were using his radiation to lead them to him. His radiation! However, they kept on their course until they were somewhat past its nearest point to his position before they paused. Then there was a brief interchange of signals with some distant native, apparently in an atmosphere machine, and travel was resumed, at right angles to the original direction.
Now, however, the vehicles were heading away from the buried ship, had, in fact, turned left. The Conservationist gave up theorizing for the moment and contented himself with observing. He repressed his mounting excitement and became as still as a figure of stone.
They did not travel very far in the new direction. In less than half an hour they stopped again, held another brief conversation, and then began to retrace their steps to, and finally across, their original route. Apparently, they were still interested in the agent’s broadcasts. At any rate, they continued repeating the early “Hello” and “Who’s that” signals to which he had originally responded, whenever he stopped radiating. They were not following the radiation, but certainly—almost certainly—they had some interest in it.
Then, quite abruptly, they stopped traveling and appeared to lose interest in the whole matter. The group broke up, and its members wandered erratically about for some time. Then they drew together once more and gradually quieted down completely, or at least to the point where the agent could not be sure that the occasional impulses coming from that area were due to their motion.
He had just developed another theory, and this new trick bothered him seriously. He would have preferred to ignore it, but he could not. It had occurred to him that these creatures might be able to detect electromagnetic radiation of the sort he had been broadcasting, but not be able to identify the direction from which it came. He had heard of cases of physical injury among his own people which had produced such a result.
The idea that such a disability might be universal in this race called for a severe stretch of the agent’s imagination, but he toyed with it all the same.-As a result, he had just come to realize that the peculiar motions of the things he had been observing could indeed be accounted for by the assumption that they were searching for him under some such handicap—when they stopped moving. This was hard to reconcile with any sort of search procedure. What possible reason could stop them? He wished sometimes there could be fewer complexities in his existence. What possible reason?
Lack of fuel? Inconceivable, assuming even minimum intelligence on the part of the operator or operators.
Surface impossible for the machines to travel over? Unlikely, since several of them had come some distance toward him during their erratic wandering after the halt of the main body. And there had been others in the atmosphere.
Sun-powered mechanisms, halted by the fact that night had fallen? It was possible, though it seemed a trifle odd for such a device to be used on a rotating planet, where it must be sunless half the time. Also, it seemed doubtful that the machines were large enough to intercept the requisite amount of solar radiation. The agent had a fair idea of their size and mass, from the minimum observed separation, plus the energy with which they struck the ground.
Not interested in him at all, and stopped simply because they had reached their intended destination? This seemed all too painfully probable, if the course of their travels were considered by itself—yet nearly impossible, if their reaction to his broadcasting were taken into account.
It was at this point that the agent began to consider seriously the possibility that he might never be able to get the information of their danger across to the inhabitants of this planet. Their behavior, so far, seemed to lack any element he could recognize as common sense. He was open-minded enough to realize that this might work both ways, yet such a possibility did not augur well for the chances of successful communication between the two intelligences involved. There were cynics even among his own people who claimed that folly and ignorance always went arm in arm, and were biological constants throughout space.
Once more, he was facing the question of whether he should go to meet these gadgets, or wait where he was—and, in the latter case, how long he should wait. Certainly, if he were to check the possibility that they were sun-powered, he should not stir until after night was over.
But none of the other hypotheses could very well be tested without actually examining, at close hand, the natives and their machines. He decided, then, to wait until sunrise, and for a reasonable period thereafter. Then, if these things did not resume their journey in his general direction, he would seek them out.
As it turned out, he did not have to move. The appearance of the sun saw the vehicles already in motion, which was informative in a negative way. After a brief period of random traveling, they congregated once more, seemed to confer silently for a time, and then resumed travel along their former route. Also, they broadcast once more the signal the agent had come to interpret as a request for him to start transmitting.
The events of the preceding afternoon were repeated in some detail. The group continued past the agent’s station on their straight-line course for a short distance, then stopped, and once more made a right-angle turn. This time, it was to the right, toward the hidden alien—and the agent realized that this theory about their sensory limitations must be at least partly correct.
They had to go through elaborate maneuvers to locate the source of a radio broadcast—maneuvers
which suggested that even their ability to judge the intensity of the radiation was rather crude. It took them about a tenth of the planet’s rotation period, this time, to narrow the field down as far as their radio senses appeared to permit.
Before mid-morning they had made two more right-angle turns, and then spread out to cover, individually, the remaining area of uncertainty. The agent settled comfortably in his hole and awaited discovery. This should tell him much.
Just how close would these things have to come to detect him directly? Would he be able to pick up their nerve-currents first? What would they do when they found him? How long would it take them to realize that he was not a native of their world? And, most important, would they have some constructive ideas about means of communication? Who did he think he was fooling? At the moment the agent would have admitted to anyone that he himself had none. And if he was up against a blank wall in that respect, how could he reasonably expect them to come up with something really new and brilliant?
He kept his own senses keyed up, striving to detect the first clue, other than radio and seismic waves, of the nearness of the Earthly machines. Presumably, they were more or less electrical in nature, and he knew that electric and magnetic fields must, sooner or later, draw close enough to give him a picture of their structure. A little closer than that, and the electric fields of the operators’ nervous systems should permit him to deduce their shapes and structures—assuming, of course, that at least one operator was with the present group of machines, which could hardly yet be considered certain.
Although it was the machine with the radio that actually stumbled on the buried vessel, the radio was not in use at the time. As a result, the agent decided, rather quickly, that no operator was in fact present. The radio was, of course, put to use the moment the ship was sighted—but its structure and nature was obvious to the alien, and it was quite evidently not an intelligent being.
