Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  There was a good deal of electrical activity, and at first he had hopes of finding an actual native. But these hopes quickly faded when he discovered there was nothing at all suggestive of thought-patterns. Some of the machines were magnetically driven. Others used regular electrical impulses for, apparently, starting the chemical reactions which furnished their main supply of energy.

  The really surprising fact was the depth of the pit. If this work had begun since the receipt of his information, the wretched, guilty robots would be caught without difficulty. It took some time, by his perception standards, for a truer picture of the situation to be forced on his mind.

  The pit had not been started recently. The progress of the diggers was fantastically slow. Clumsy metal scoops raised a few tons of material at a time and deposited it in mobile containers that bore it swiftly away. Fragments of the pit-wall were periodically knocked loose by expanding clouds of ionized gas, apparently formed chemically. The shocks initiated by these clouds were apparently the origin of most of the temblors he had felt from this source, while he was still eighty miles away.

  His electrical analysis finally gave him the startling, incredible facts. This was a copper mine—extracting ore far poorer in quality than any his own people could afford to process. This race was certainly confined, for some reason, to its home planet, and had been driven to picking leaner and ever leaner ores to maintain its civilization.

  The development of organic machines had given them a reprieve from barbarism and final extinction, but surely could not save them forever. Why in the galaxy, did they not use the organic robots for digging directly, as he had seen them do, during the language lessons? One would think that metal would be far too precious to such planet-bound people, for them to waste even iron on bulky, clumsy devices such as those at work here!

  Even granting that the machines he had originally seen, and which seemed the most numerous, were not ideally designed for excavation work, surely, surely, better ones could be made. A race that could do what this race had done with carbon compounds could have no lack of ingenuity—or, more properly, of creative genius.

  Very slowly, he realized why they had not—and why his mission was futile. He realized why these people would be doomed, even if the moles had never been planted. He noticed something relevant, during the conversation, but had missed its full staggering implication. The organic compounds were soft. They bent and sagged and yielded to every sort of external mechanical influence—it was a wonder, thinking about it, that the machines he had seen held their shapes so well. No doubt, there was a framework of some sort, perhaps partly metallic even though he had not perceived it.

  But such things could never force their way through rock. The only way they could dig was with the aid of metallic auxiliaries—simple ones, such as those used to illustrate the verb to him, or more capacious and complex ones like those in use here.

  This race was doomed, had been doomed long before the poachers ever approached their planet. They needed metal, as any civilization did. They were bound to their world, but kept from moving about even upon it, for not one in a thousand of these people could conceivably travel by machine, as the agent’s race did. The organic engines could not possibly be used as vehicles. They could not be so used because their very essential nature of chemical violence made them untouchable.

  These people were trapped in a vicious circle, using their metal to dig more metal, sparing what little they could for electrical machinery and other equipment essential to a civilization, always having less and less to spare, always using more and more to get it. The idea that they could survive, until the planet’s natural processes renewed the supply, was ridiculous.

  It was, in short, precisely the same tragic circle that the agent’s own race was precariously avoiding, millennium after millennium, by its complex schedule of freighters that distributed the metal from each planet in turn among thousands of others, then either waited for nature to renew the supply, or “tickled up” uninhabitable worlds as the poachers had done to this one.

  Metal kept the machines operating. The machines kept food flowing to that vast majority of individuals who could not travel in search of it, A single break in the transport schedule could starve a dozen worlds. It was a fragile system, at best, and no member of the race liked to think about—much less actually face—examples of its failure.

  The agent’s mounting discomfort as he considered the matter of Earth was natural and inevitable. This race was what his own might have been, hundreds of millions of years before, had means of space-travel not been developed. They would probably be extinct before the poachers’ torpedoes began to take effect, which was, no doubt, a mercy.

  The agent could not help them. Even if the communication problem were cracked, they could not be brought into the transport network of civilization for untold millennia. No, they were truly lost—a race under sentence of extinction. The reorganization necessary was frightening in its complexity, even to him. Teaching them to build and use the equipment of his ship would be utterly useless, since it was entirely metallic, and they would be even worse off than with their organic devices.

  They were already, probably by chemical means, stripping ores more efficiently than his own people, so he could hardly help them there. No, it was a virtual certainty that, when the planet’s crust began to heave as giant bathyliths built up beneath it, when rivers of lava poured from vents scattered over the planet, no one would be there to face it.

  This was a relief, in a way. The agent could picture, all too vividly, the plight of seeing a close friend engulfed only a few miles away, and having to spend hours or years of uncertainty, wondering when his own area would be taken—and then knowing.

  That was the worst. There was plenty of warning, as far as awareness was concerned. Anywhere from minutes to years and millennia, if one was a really good computer. You knew, and if you had a mobile machine, you could move out of the way. Even these organic machines traveled fast enough for that. But only machines would let a being get out of the way—and there would be no machines here by then.

  He wished with every atom of his being that he had never detected the poachers, had never seen this unfortunate planet or heard of its race. No good had come of it—or very little, anyway. There would, admittedly, be metal here before long, brought up with the magma flows, borne by subcrustal convection-currents in the stress-fluid that formed most of the world’s bulk.

  The poachers would be coming back for it, and he could at least deprive them of that. He would beam a report in toward the heart of the galaxy, making sure it did not radiate in the direction they had taken. Then there would be freighters to forestall them.

  It was ironic, in a way. If any of this race should have survived the disturbance that would bring back the metal, that disturbance would be the salvation both of their species and their civilization. Most probably, however, the only witnesses would be a few half-starved, dull-minded barbarians, who would wonder, dimly, what was happening for a little while before temblors shattered their bodies forever.

  There was nothing to keep him here, and the place was distasteful. More of the organic robots were approaching his position, but he did not want to talk any more. He wanted to forget this planet, to blot the memory of it forever from his mind.

  With abrupt determination, he sent the dirt boiling away from his hull in a rising cloud of dust, pointed his vessel’s blunt nose into the zenith and applied the drive. He held back just enough to keep his hull temperature within safe limits, while he was still in the atmosphere.

  Then, with detectors fanning out ahead, he swung back to the line of his patrol orbit, and began accelerating away from the Solar system. Ignorant of events behind him, he never sensed the flight of swept-winged metal machines that hurtled close below while he was still in the air, split seconds after he had left the ground.

  He did not notice the extra radar beam that fastened itself on his hull, while the machine projecting it flung itself
through the sky, computing an interception course. This was too bad, for the relays in that machine would have made him feel quite at home, and its propulsion mechanism would have given him more food for thought.

  He might have sensed its detonation, for his pursuer had a nuclear warhead. But its built-in brain realized, as quickly as the agent himself could have, that no interception was possible within its performance limits. It gave up, shutting off its fuel and curving back toward its launching station. Even the aluminum alloys in its hull would have interested the agent greatly—but he was trying to think of anything except Earth, its inhabitants and their appalling technology.

  His patrol orbit would carry him back to this vicinity in half a million years or so. The freighters would have been there by that time.

  He wondered if he could bring himself to look at the dead world.

  It was the general who explained it to the Parsons, at the University a few weeks later. He said, “He must have been in the devil’s own hurry. All he did was get his warning through, take a quick look at Anaconda, and zoom off. Ground-to-Air sent up a nuclear rocket to intercept him, but he got clear of it just in time, thank God! Plenty of heads rolled after that foul-up, I can assure you. Trigger-happy idiots they were!”

  Candace, looking exceptionally attractive in a new, soft-blue linen dress which almost miraculously complemented both her figure and her coloring, said, “I’m glad, too. It must have had something to do with his intuitive alertness, from what I’ve been able to gather. Perhaps, he thought this world was going to blow up at any minute.”

  “Hah!” said General Eades. “We’ve already located nine of those damned underground borers he told us about. At the rate they’re moving, our fiftieth-generation descendants will be out in space themselves before anything catastrophic happens. We’ll have the whole bunch spotted and disarmed by that time.”

  He paused, chuckled again and added, “The weird part of it is that twenty-seven of the damned monsters are doing their stuff under Iron Curtain soil.”

  Hal Parsons spoke thoughtfully. “I’ve been reading some of the pull-together reactions in the headlines, General. Won’t all this put you out of a job?”

  “Not for a while,” said Eades. “Actually, I hope so. No responsible soldier wants war—ever. Makes our uniforms too dusty.”

  “I still wish I knew how he produced that rain,” said Candace. “I’ve added meteorology to my other duties, hoping to get to the bottom of it.”

  “Probably, he was just taking a bath,” said Eades. He puffed on his cigar meditatively and added, “It’s good to know you got a full professorship out of it, Parsons—and that you’re on your way to one yourself, Mrs. Parsons.” He fingered the new, bright extra star on his own collar, then asked, “What happened to the big, good-looking kid you had with you? I thought for sure he’d be in Hollywood by now.”

  “Oh—poor Truck,” replied Candace. “He was all set to go. But he wanted to play in the homecoming game first. He broke his nose, and right now the movie brass isn’t interested. But he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s making out fine with one of those cute little red-headed co-eds on the campus.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said the general. He paused, frowning. “You know, it’s funny—but ever since that damned metal monster flew out of our lives, I feel as if I’d lost a friend.”

  “I feel the same way,” said Hal.

  “I guess we all do,” said Candace. She was much too wise, being a woman, to add, “I told you so.”

  1958

  CLOSE TO CRITICAL

  First of Three Parts. Meet Tenebra, the planet where raindrops are fifty feet through . . . and hard quartz rocks dissolve away like salt. Under three gravities, and a monstrously deep atmosphere, with oily seas of sulfuric acid, two children touch off a political situation that’s . . . close to critical!

  PROLOGUE

  SOL, seen at a distance of sixteen light-years, is a little fainter than the star at the tip of Orion’s sword, and could not have been contributing much to the sparkle in the diamond lenses of the strange machine. More than one of the watching men, however, got a distinct impression that the thing was taking a last look at the planetary system where it had been made. It would have been a natural thing for any sentient, and sentimenial, being to do, for it was already falling toward the great, dark object only a few thousand miles away.

  Any ordinary planet would have been glaringly bright at that range, for Altair is an excellent illuminator and was at its best right then—not that Altair is a variable star, but it rotates fast enough to flatten itself considerably, and the planet was in a part of its orbit where it got the maximum benefit from the hotter, brighter polar regions. In spite of this, the world’s great bulk was visible chiefly as a fuzzy blot not very much brighter than the Milky Way which formed a background to it. It seemed as though the white glare of Altair were being sucked in and quenched, rather than allowed to illuminate anything.

  But the eyes of the machine had been designed with Tenebra’s atmosphere in mind. Almost visibly the robot’s attention shifted, and the whitish lump of synthetic material turned slowly. The metal skeleton framing it kept pace with the motion, and a set of stubby cylinders lined themselves up with the direction of fall. Nothing visible emerged from them, for there was still too little atmosphere to glow at the impact of the ions, but the tons of metal and plastic altered their acceleration. The boosters were fighting the already fierce tug of a world nearly three times the diameter of distant Earth, and they fought well enough so that the patchwork fabrication which held them suffered no harm when atmosphere was finally reached.

  The glitter faded out of the diamond eyes as the world’s great gas mantle gradually enfolded the machine. It was dropping slowly and steadily, now; the word cautiously might almost have been used. Altair still glowed overhead, but the stars were vanishing even to the hypersensitive pickups behind those lenses as the drop continued.

  Then there was a change. Up to now, the thing might have been a rocket of unusually weird design, braking straight down to a landing on outboard jets. The fact that the jet streams were glowing ever brighter meant nothing; naturally, the air was growing denser. However, the boosters themselves should not have been glowing.

  These were. Their exhausts brightened still further, as though they were trying harder to slow a fall that was speeding up in spite of them, and the casings themselves began to shine a dull red. That was enough for the distant controllers; a group of brilliant flashes shone out for an instant, not from the boosters themselves but from points on the metal girders that held them. The struts gave way instantly, and the machine fell unsupported.

  For only a moment. There was still equipment fastened to its outer surface, and a scant half second after the blowoff of the boosters a gigantic parachute flowered above the falling lump of plastic. In that gravity it might have been expected to tear away instantly, but its designers had known their business. It held. The incredibly thick atmosphere—even at that height several times as dense as Earth’s—held stubbornly in front of the parachute’s broad expanse and grimly insisted on the lion’s share of every erg of potential energy given up by the descending mass. In consequence, even a three times Earthly surface gravity failed to damage the device when it finally struck solid ground.

  For some moments after the landing, nothing seemed to happen. Then the flat-bottomed ovoid moved, separating itself from the light girders which had held the parachute, crawled on nearly invisible treads away from the tangle of metal ribbons, and stopped once more as though to look around.

  It was not looking, however; for the moment, it could not see. There were adjustments to be made. Even a solid block of polymer, with no moving parts except its outer traveling and handling equipment, could not remain completely unchanged under an external pressure of some eight hundred atmospheres. The dimensions of the block, and of the circuitry imbedded in it, had changed slightly. The initial pause after landing had been required for the
distant controllers to find and match the slightly different frequencies now needed to operate it. The eyes, which had seen so clearly in empty space, had to adjust so that the different index of refraction between the diamond and the new external medium did not blur their pictures hopelessly. This did not take too long, as it was automatic, effected by the atmosphere itself as it filtered through minute pores into the spaces between certain of the lens elements.

  Once optically adjusted, the nearly complete darkness meant nothing to those eyes, for the multipliers behind them made use of every quantum of radiation the diamond could refract. Far away, human eyes glued themselves to vision screens which carried the relayed images of what the machine saw.

  It was a rolling landscape, not too unearthly at first glance. There were large hills in the distance, their outlines softened by what might have been forests. The nearby ground was completely covered with vegetation which looked more or less like grass, though the visible trail the robot had already left suggested that the stuff was far more brittle. Clumps of taller growths erupted at irregular intervals, usually on higher ground. Nothing seemed to move, not even the thinnest fronds of the plants, though an irregular crashing and booming registered almost constantly on the sound pickups built into the plastic block. Except for the sound it was a still-life landscape, without wind or animal activity.

  The machine gazed thoughtfully for many minutes. Probably its distant operators were hoping that life frightened into hiding by its fall might reappear; but if this were the case they were disappointed for the moment. After a time it crawled back to the remains of its parachute harness and played a set of lights carefully over the collection of metal girders, cables, and ribbons, examining them all in great detail. Then it moved away again, this time with a purposeful air.

  For the next ten hours it quartered meticulously the general area of the landing, sometimes stopping to play its light on some object like a plant, sometimes looking around for minutes on end without obvious purpose, sometimes emitting sounds of varying pitch and loudness. This last always happened when it was in a valley, or at least not on the very top of a hill; it seemed to be studying echoes for some reason.