Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

“Big—little.” Pairs of stones, of cacti, coins and figures, scratched in the dirt, illustrated this contrast.

  Numbers—no difficulty.

  “Ship.” This proved confusing, since the agent had supposed the word man covered any sort of machine. Finally, slightly fuller sentences became possible. “Fire-metal under ground,” the men tried.

  The agent repeated the statement, leaving them in doubt. More time passed, while yes and no were explained. Then the same phrase brought a response of “Yes.”

  “Men dig.”

  “Yes—men dig—mountain melt—mountain rise.”

  “Where?” This word took still more time, and was solved, at last, only by a pantomime involving all the men. Here and there were covered in the same act. However, knowing what the question meant did not make it much easier for the agent to answer it.

  He had no maps of the planet, and would have recognized no man-made charts, with the possible exception of a globe, which is not standard equipment on a small field expedition.

  After still more time, the men managed to get a unit of distance across to him, however, and he could use the ion beam for pointing. In this way, he did his best to indicate the locations of the moles.

  “There! Eighty-one miles. Two miles down.” And, in another direction. “There! Fifteen hundred-twelve miles. Eighteen miles down.” He kept this up through the entire list of the forty-five moles he had detected and located.

  The furious note-taking that accompanied his exposition did not mean anything to him, of course, though he deduced correctly the purpose of the magnetic compass one of the listening machines was using. He realized that giving positions to an accuracy of one mile was woefully inadequate for the problem of actually locating the moles.

  But he could do the final close-guiding later, when the native machines approached their targets. He could come to their aid if they did not have detection equipment of their own which would work at that range. Just what possibilities in that direction might be inherent in organic engineering the agent could not guess. At any rate, the natives did not seem to feel greater precision was needed. They made no request for it.

  In fact, they did not seem to want anything more. He had expected to spend a long time explaining the apparatus needed to intercept and derange the moles. But that aspect of the matter did not appear to bother the natives at all. Why, why? It should have bothered them.

  In spite of appearances, the agent was not stupid. The problem of communication with an intelligence not of his own race had never, as far as he knew, been faced by any of his people. He had tried to treat it as a scientific problem. It was hardly his fault that each phenomenon he encountered had infinitely more possible explanations than ordinary scientific observation, and he could hardly be expected to guess the reason why.

  Even so, he realized it could not be considered a proven fact that the natives had read the proper meaning from his signaling. He actually doubted that they had, in the way and to the extent that some mid-nineteenth century human physicists doubted the laws of gravity and conservation of energy. He determined to continue checking as long as possible, to make sure that they were right.

  The human beings, partly as a result of greater experience, partly for certain purely human reasons, also felt that a check was desirable. With their far better local background, they were the first to take action. To them, fire metal, when mentioned in conjunction with a positive test for radioactivity, implied only one kind of fire.

  Man dig was not quite so certain. They apparently could not decide whether the alien being was giving information or advice—whether someone was already digging at the indicated points, or that they should go there themselves to dig. The majority inclined to the latter view.

  To settle the question, one of them took the trench-shovel, which was part of their equipment, and arranged a skit that eventually made clear the difference between the continuative—digging—and the imperative dig!

  While this was going on, another thought occurred to the agent. Since these things had used different words for the machines he was watching and the one he was riding, perhaps man was not quite the right term for the mole-robots he was trying to tell about. He wondered how he could generalize. By the end of the second run-through of the skit he had what he hoped was a solution.

  “Man digging—ship digging,” he said.

  “Digging fire metal?”

  “Man digging fire metal—ship digging fire metal.”

  “Where?”

  He ran through the list of locations again, though somewhat at a loss for the reason it was needed, and was allowed to finish, because, though he did not know it, no one could think of a way to tell him to stop. He felt satisfied when he had finished—there could hardly be any doubt in the minds of his listeners now.

  They were talking to each other again—the reason was now obvious enough. The operators must be in different locations, must be communicating with each other through their machines. He had little doubt of what they were saying, in a general way.

  Which was too bad—in a general way.

  “It’s vague—infernally vague.”

  “I know—but what else can he mean?”

  “Perhaps he’s lust telling about some of our own mines, asking what we get out of them or trying to tell us he wants some of it.”

  “But what can ‘flame metal’ mean but fissionables? And what mine of ours did he point out?”

  “I don’t know about all of his locations, but the first one he mentioned—the closest one—certainly fits.”

  “What?”

  “Eighty-one miles, bearing thirty degrees magnetic.

  That’s as close as you could ask to Anaconda, unless this map is haywire. There are certainly men digging there!”

  “Not two miles down!”

  “They will be, unless we find a substitute for copper.”

  “I still think this thing is telling us about beings of its own kind, who are lifting our fissionables. They could do it easily enough, if they dig the way this one does. I’m for at least calling up there, and finding out whether anyone has thought of drilling test cores under the mine level—and how deep they went. There’s no point walking around here, looking for anything else. We’ve found our fireball, right here.”

  The agent was interested but not anxious when the machines turned back to him, and direct communication was brought once more into operation. He was beginning to feel less tense, and confident that everything was going to come out all right if he stuck with it.

  “Eighty-one miles that way. Men digging. Go now.”

  They illustrated the last words, turning away from his ship and starting in the proper direction. The agent could not exactly relax, fitting as he did into the spaces designed for him in his ship, but he felt the appropriate emotion.

  They were getting started on one of the necessary steps, at least. Presumably, the other and more distant ones would be tackled as soon as the news could be spread. These machines moved slowly, but their control impulses apparently did not.

  It occurred to him that, since none of the devices had been left on hand to communicate with him, the natives might be expecting him to appear at the nearest digging site—the one they had mentioned. The more he thought of it, the more likely such an interpretation of their last message seemed. So, with the men barely started on their walk back to the waiting jeep, the Conservationist sent his ship whistling upward on a long slant toward the northeast.

  VII

  The moment he rose above the valley, the Conservationist picked up the radar beams again—the beams that had startled him when he first approached the strange planet. As had happened on the earlier occasion, a few milliseconds served to bring many more of them to bear upon him.

  He was quite evidently being watched on this journey. But he no longer expected these beams to carry intelligent speech. More or less casually, he noted their points of origin. He wondered, for brief moments, whether it might not be worthwhile to in
vestigate them later, but felt fairly certain that it wouldn’t. He turned his full attention on his goal.

  The crusts of clay had fallen from his eyes as he flew, and he was once again limited to long-distance vision. He could make out the vast, terraced pits of the great copper mine as he approached, but could not distinguish the precise nature of the moving objects within. He did not consider sight a particularly useful or convenient sense anyway, so he settled to the ground, half a mile from the pit’s edge, bored in as he had before, and began probing with seismic detectors and electrical senses.

  He had, of course, already known of the presence of the hole. A fair amount of seismic activity had reached his original landing-spot from this place, enabling him to deduce its shape fairly accurately. Now, however, he realized—and for the first time—the amount of actual work going on. There were many machines of the sort he had already seen, which was hardly surprising. But there were many others as well, and the fact that most of them were metallic in construction startled him considerably.

  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 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 frame-work 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 worlds 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 wonde
r, 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.

  1973

  LECTURE DEMONSTRATION

  I have been a high-school teacher for a quarter of a century, a student for nearly twice as long. “Lecture Demonstration” may show me as the former to people who did not know John Campbell, but not to those who did.