Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Inside the alien ship, Hal felt for a moment like a soft-bodied larval insect cruelly encased in a metallic cocoon. The impulse that had moved him to enter the door had been irresistible. It had occurred to him, even before the Parsons had given him his opportunity, that if an alien ship offering such an invitation took off unvisited he would regret it for the rest of his life.

  More than anything else he was motivated by the thought of what a certain little red-headed coed back on the Montana Mines campus might have to say about it. Competition was heavy where that girl was concerned—and as far as Truck could see at the moment, running second would make life insupportable.

  He had tried to remind himself of both the danger and idiocy of disobeying Parsons’ warning. But—and this was true even with professors—Truck seldom troubled himself with the various levels of college teacherdom. Parsons, to Truck, was like most faculty members, tending to be overcautious about almost everything. A fine character, but too damned careful.

  The door had been there, Truck was there—and the result had been as inevitable as Candace had foreseen. What Truck hadn’t figured on was that his host would elect to slam the door on him so quickly.

  Inside, it was dark—and it was cold. It was cold with a bone-chilling, impersonal quality that reminded the gladiator of the storage room in the Arizona meatpacking establishment where he’d held a summer job two seasons back. For one horrible moment he had the ghastly idea that he was undergoing some sort of deepfreeze process, following which he would be taken back to his chilly host’s home planet, for thawing out and laboratory dissection.

  A saving memory reminded him that, minutes earlier, he had ribbed Candace unmercifully about her having read too many science-fiction magazines. Now, it appeared, the proverbial shoe was on the other foot with a vengeance—his own size thirteen. She might have read too many such stories, but he was living too many—one too many, to be exact.

  But the vagrant whimsy restored what had become rather a shaky sanity—and a sane Truck MacLaurie, while not exactly a mental giant, was capable in an emergency of formidable thought and action. He realized that his surroundings, while unpleasantly cold, were not of a sufficiently low temperature to quick-freeze him. The process would last a long time. It might be unpleasant, but it offered further possibilities of escape.

  He wondered what his surroundings looked like, and instantly remembered that he had stuffed a flashlight into his pants’ pocket that very morning, in case he had to work the radio battery entirely under the jeep tarpaulin—to keep it from getting wet. In two seconds he had the flash out and turned on, and was surveying the strange cell in which he appeared to be imprisoned.

  Earlier that year, one of his roommates, who was something of an electrical handyman, had taken apart an ailing television set in his fraternity house. Truck’s brief glimpse of the seemingly endless and incomprehensible confusion of wires, in their pink insulation wrappers, had conjured up a vision of a beehive being invaded by an army of pink worms.

  Now he derived somewhat the same impression—save that the worms appeared to be of white metal, either silver or platinum, and the confusion even greater. He bent over a sector of the complex wiring that looked vaguely familiar, then jumped as a thump sounded from outside the hull. It was quickly followed by another thump.

  Good old Doc! he thought, and hammered back until his hand began to ache. He considered using the flashlight, then decided against it. The thumping stopped, and he wondered how Jonah had felt in the whale’s belly, without even a flashlight.

  Better keep moving, he told himself, as he felt the gooseflesh form on his forearms. Better keep looking around. Better keep trying to make this whale sick enough to throw me up . . .

  Outside, Hal and Candace Parsons were engaged in grim activity, as Hal prepared to see what effect the rifle would have. “It won’t do much good,” he said somberly, slipping a bullet into the chamber. “I was figuring on using it more against what came out, if necessary, than against that solid beryllium egg, or whatever it is.”

  “Maybe you’d better not shoot,” said Candace. “You might make it do something drastic. You might make it kill Truck, or take of! with him.”

  “On the other hand,” Hal said, trying to sight against one of the invisible hinges of the round trapdoor in its flank, “I don’t think I can hurt him much. But I just might annoy him into reopening that damned porthole.”

  He pulled the trigger, and they looked on, a bit desperately, as the steel-jacketed slug was shattered against the impervious hull. Somewhat to their relief, nothing happened. But there were no more thumps from inside the big globe.

  “We’ve got to get help,” said Hal quietly, returning the rifle to its canvas cover, before it could be damaged by the rain. “This situation has got out of hand. I don’t care how many scientists break their skulls when they drop them through the cloud-layer. We can’t stand by and leave Truck trapped in there.”

  “Of course we can’t,” said Candace. “I’m glad you feel so strongly about it. I was afraid he was getting on your nerves.”

  “Of course he was getting on my nerves,” Hal Parsons said, somewhat testily. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t like the ham-handed . . .” He paused, finished casing the rifle, and added tersely. “Come on—let’s get moving. Before we do, let’s make sure our pal’s eyes—if they are eyes—can’t see what we’re doing.”

  “How do you blindfold a giant baseball?” Candace asked.

  “With whatever I can find at hand,” said her husband. “You throw a pretty good stone. Let’s see how you are at throwing mud.”

  He showed her what he had in mind, and there was plenty of mud in a hollow of the hillside that had been turned into a small muck-hole by the alien-induced deluge. It took them about five minutes before the “front” of the alien was well plastered, as well as its “eyes.” When the job was done, they moved quickly back toward the jeep and the radio.

  “You’ll have to crank, baby,” he told Candace. “I’ve been doing the talking to these characters, and there’s no sense—”

  “Of course.” Candace cut him off. “Honey, I’m frightened. Do you suppose that thing has already—?”

  She paused, and they both stopped walking. A brash, familiar voice had hailed them from a hundred yards to the rear. Unable to believe their ears, they exchanged a half-fearful glance, and then turned slowly toward the source of the sound. It was Truck, waving and coming toward them at a trot.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened!” was his answer to the question that burst from them both as he caught up with them. “All of a sudden—just a little while after your shot—he opened the door and I got out of there as fast as I could.”

  “What was it like?” Candace asked him. “It must have been horrible.”

  “I dunno,” said Truck. “It was sort of interesting—but, brother, was it cold! I damn near froze to death!”

  XI

  THE REASON was obvious, of course. With an aperture of thirty centimeters and a focal length of about twenty-seven, the focus of the Conservationist’s eye-lenses was highly critical; with the aperture about half a millimeter, as it had been left by the fragment of clay he had broken off, it became a minor matter.

  He recognized the machines easily, near the edge of his new field of view, and began to work on the covering of a better-located eye. He did not succeed quite so well here, as the fragment he finally detached was larger, and the image correspondingly less clear, but it was still a good-enough job to enable him to follow the actions of the devices visually.

  They were not traveling, as he has deduced already. Furthermore, a fourth machine, hitherto unnoticed, had joined them. All four had settled to the ground, so that their main frames took the weight normally carried by the traveling struts, which appeared merely to be propping the roughly cylindrical shapes in a more or less vertical attitude. The different ways in which this was accomplished, in different cases, did not surprise the agent. It would n
ot have occurred to him to expect any two machines to be precisely alike, except perhaps in such standard subcomponents as relays. And it was, of course, fortunate that every new development happened in sequence, enabling him to analyze carefully as he went along.

  The upper struts were moving rather aimlessly in general, but it did not take long for him to judge that their primary function was manipulation. The objects being handled at the moment were for the most part meaningless—apparently stones, bits of metal without obvious function, utterly unrecognizable objects which might be aggregates of the unfamiliar carbon compounds, though the agent knew no way to prove it. There were one or two exceptions. The device that had projected the slug of metal at his hull was easy to recognize, even though he had not perceived all of it at the time it was being used.

  He tried to decide what parts of the machines functioned as their eyes, and was able to find them. It was not difficult, for no other portion was reasonably transparent. He discovered that all these vision organs were now turned toward him, but saw nothing surprising in the fact. The operators must have been familiar with the rest of the landscape, and did not expect anything of interest to show up on it.

  Then the traveler noticed that all four of the machines were rising to their struts. As he watched, they began to move toward him.

  At the same time, one of them extended a handling member toward a smaller fabrication, which almost immediately turned out to be another electromagnetic radiator. It was put to use at once, being swiftly raised to the upper part of the largest machine in the vicinity of the eyes, while a minor appendage of the handling limb which held it closed a switch.

  This started the carrier frequency, after a delay which the agent was able to identify as due to the slow growth of the ion-clouds in portions of the apparatus—apparently they were produced by heating metal—and to the inherent lag of mechanical operations. The relays in the device were fantastically huge. They took whole milliseconds to operate and since they rather obviously had components consisting of multi-crystalline pieces of metal, they must have had a sharply limited service life.

  Evidently the natives had not gone far enough with metal technology even to get the most out of one world’s supplies. This was a side-issue, however. A far more interesting development involved the modulation of the carrier. The agent found it possible actually to see the way this was being carried out.

  An opening in the machine, not far below the eyes, rimmed with a remarkably flexible substance at whose nature he could only guess, began to open, shut and go through a series of changes of shape. He found it possible to correlate many of these contortions with the modulation of the electromagnetic signal. Apparently the opening was part of a device for generating pressure-wave patterns in the atmosphere.

  The agent supposed that whatever plan the distant osbervers had been maturing must be moving into action, and he wondered what the machines were about to do. He was naturally a little surprised, since he had not expected any developments of this sort so soon.

  Then he wondered still more, for the advance toward him which had been commenced halted, as suddenly as it had begun. Whatever had motivated them had either ceased—or the whole affair was part of an operation whose general nature was still obscure. It would be the better part of valor to assume the latter, he decided.

  He watched all four of the machines with minute care. They were now balanced on their support struts. They were neither advancing nor retreating, and the upper members were moving in their usual random fashion. All eyes were still fixed on his ship.

  Then he noticed that the pressure-wave assemblies of all four were functioning, although three did not possess any broadcaster whose signal could be modulated. He watched them in fascination. Sometimes—usually, in fact—only one would be generating waves. At others, two, three or all four would be doing so. Even the one with the broadcaster did not always have its main switch closed at such times. Something a little peculiar was definitely occurring.

  It had already occurred to the agent that the atmospheric waves carried the control impulses for these machines. Why should the machines themselves be emitting them, however? Receivers should be enough for such machines. Then he recalled another of his passing thoughts, which might serve as an explanation. Perhaps there was only one operator for all of them. And after all, why not? It might be better to think of the whole group as a single machine.

  In that case, the pressure waves, traveling among its components, might be coordination signals. They just might be. At any rate, some testing could be done along this line. Whatever limitations he and his ship might have on this world, he could at least set up pressure waves in its atmosphere. Perhaps he could take over actual control of one or more of these assemblies. He had had the idea earlier, in connection with radiowaves, and nothing much had come of it. But there seemed no reason not to try it again with sound. Nothing could surpass the experimental method when it was pursued with one strongly likely probability in mind.

  A logical pattern to use would be the one that had been broadcast back to the distant observer a few moments before. It had been connected with a fairly simple, definite series of actions, and he had both heard and seen its production. He tried it, causing his hull to move in the complex pattern his memory had recorded a few seconds before. He tried it a second time.

  “The thing’s howling like a fire-siren!”

  Just as when he had tried the same test with radio waves, there was no doubt that an effect had been produced, though it was not quite the effect the agent had hoped for. The handling appendages on all four of the things dropped whatever they were holding and snapped toward the upper part of their bodies. Once there, their flattened tips pressed firmly against the sides of the turrets on which their eyes were mounted.

  For a monent, none of them produced any waves of its own. Then, the one with the broadcaster began to use it at great length. The agent wondered whether or not to attempt reproduction of the entire pattern it used this time, and decided against it. It was far more likely to be a report than involved in control. He decided to wait and see whether any other action ensued.

  What did result might have been foreseen even by one as unfamiliar with mankind as the Conservationist. The machine with the broadcaster began producing more pressure waves, watching the ship as it did so. The agent realized, almost at once, that the controller was also experimenting. He regretted that he could not receive the waves directly, and wondered how he could make the other—or others—understand that their signals should be transmitted electromagnetically.

  As a matter of fact, the agent could have detected the sound waves perfectly well, had it occurred to him to extend one of his seismic receptor-rods into the air. A sound wave carries little energy, and only a minute percentage of that little will pass into a solid from a gas. But an instrument capable of detecting the seismic disturbance set up by a walking man a dozen miles away is not going to be bothered by quantitative problems of that magnitude. However, this fact never dawned on the agent. Yet few would deny that he had done very well.

  As it happened, no explanation was necessary for the hidden observer. He must have remembered, fairly quickly, that all the signals the agent had imitated had been radioed, and drawn the obvious conclusion. At any rate, the broadcaster was very shortly pressed into service again. A signal would be transmitted by radio, and the agent would promptly repeat it in sound waves.

  Since the Conservationist had not the faintest idea of the significance of any of the signals this was not too helpful—but the native had a way around that. A machine advanced to the hull of the ship and scraped the clay from one of its eyes. The particular eye was the most conveniently located one, to the agent’s annoyance. But fortunately it was not the only one through which he could see the things.

  Then, an ordered attempt was begun, to provide him with data which would permit him to attach meanings to the various signal groups. Once he had grasped the significance of pointing, matters went m
errily on for some time.

  They pointed at rocks, mountains, the sun, each other—each had a different signal group, confirming the agent’s earlier assumption that they were not identical devices. But there also seemed to be a general term which took them all in.

  He was not quite sure whether this term stood for machines in general, or could be taken as implying that the devices present were part of a single assembly, as he had suspected earlier. While the lessons went on, two of them wandered about the valley seeking new objects to show him. One of these objects proved the spark for a very productive line of thought.

  Its shape, when it was brought back and shown to him, was as indescribable as that of many other things he had been shown by them. Its color was bright green and the agent, perceiving a rather wider frequency band than was usable by human eyes, did not see it or think of it as a green object. He narrowed its classification down to a much finer degree.

  He did not know the chemical nature of chlorophyll, but he had long since come to associate that particular reflection spectrum with photosynthesis. The thing did not seem to possess much rigidity. Its bulbous extensions sagged away from either side of the point where it was being supported. The handling extention that gripped it seemed to sink slightly into its substance.

  He had never seen such a phenomenon elsewhere, and had no thought or symbol from the term pulpy. However, the concept itself rang a bell in his mind, for the machines facing him seemed fabricated from material of a rather similar texture. It was a peculiarity of their aspect that had been bothering him subconsciously ever since he had seen them moving. Now a nagging puzzlement—subconscious frustration was always unpleasant—was lifted from his mind.

  The connection was not truly a logical one. Few new ideas have strictly logical connection with pre-existing knowledge. Imagination follows its own paths. Nevertheless, there was a connection, and, from the instant the thought occurred to him, the agent never doubted seriously that he was essentially correct. The natives of this planet did not merely use active carbon compounds as fuel for their machines. They constructed the machines themselves of the same sort of material!