Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  After sleeping, he would go outside and get mineral samples; the makeup of the local rocks should be checked, if only to confirm the guess about their silicate nature—or, in this area, limestone, he reminded himself. Maybe there would be fragments large enough to show fossils, though none of the Ishtar colonists who had visited Tammuz had found any so far.

  After a moment’s thought, he grounded the little ship in a valley between two of the mesas, where there would be some shade when Anu sank lower in the sky; there was no point in making Neem’s refrigerators work harder than they had to. Gravity was not merely adequate but really comfortable, and after setting his controls to arouse him if X did any broadcasting, he was able to sleep long and deeply.

  When he woke up, Anu had set. The brightest object in the sky was the red dwarf of the system, Ea, which was at a distance which made it totally inadequate as a sun though uncomfortably bright as a star. Cunningham considered going out to get his samples by artificial light, but decided against it. He could spend plenty of time thinking; there was certainly enough he did not at the moment understand. He should spend more time thinking. He suddenly realized that he was almost taking for granted that X was intelligent. While this was certainly possible, it was also a little too close to the demon hypothesis for comfort; normally educated human beings usually had a strong tendency to hunt for natural explanations for anything they didn’t understand. It was probably backlash from the heavily mystical stage the species had gone through a few centuries before, Cunningham suspected; but he had the conditioning, and felt the need to come up with some explanation for what had been happening which did not include conscious intent of persons unknown.

  Hours of thought, punctuated by minutes of eating and other hours of sleep, failed to produce any before Anu rose and provided daylight.

  Even with no atmosphere, scattering of light from the upper valley walls made the ground quite bright enough for comfort as soon as the sun was up. Ea could still be seen, though it was not far from setting; no other celestial objects, stars or planets, showed against the glare of the sunlit rock.

  Cunningham donned and checked his armor with the care that befitted his age—or at least, befitted the fact that he had reached his present age. Without bothering to move the ship from the middle of the valley, he emerged from the air lock and walked toward the mesa slope half a kilometer away.

  The rock under his feet was plainly sedimentary, fine-grained stuff; shale, presumably. It could have contained fossils, though the surface was hardly a likely place for them to show—one topographic feature conspicuously lacking was stream cuts. If anything, the rock seemed to have been polished by dust or sand. Since this would have had to be blown by wind, it could hardly have taken place recently; there should be meteoritic gardening in the ages since the air had gone. The man kept alert for signs of this, but saw none before reaching the foot of the valley slope. He had walked across nothing but incredibly smooth rock, with no evidence that anything had happened to it since Tammuz’ atmosphere had vanished.

  He could not, of course, expect to see any microscopic craters which might have been left by dust-grain impacts, and a few meters from the foot of the wall he cut a section out of the rock with his sampling beam, to take back to the ship for more detailed examination.

  The sloping side of the valley was not merely sand or soil; it was finest dust. As he had judged, it was at its angle of repose and was utterly, impossible to climb; Cunningham made a cautious attempt, but the powdery, utterly dry stuff slid under him without offering the slightest support. He did not try too hard. The material was ferociously hot as well as fine and dry; if he were to get buried in it so that his heat pump could not radiate, he could expect to cook in less than a minute. Just being on a planet, with half the potential radiant heat sink of the universe blocked, instead of in relatively empty space made things difficult enough for the equipment. If he did find a cave or overhang, he would have to be extremely careful exploring, or even approaching, it by daylight.

  There seemed to be nothing to do but collect some of the dust for analysis, and either return to Nimepotea or bring the ship to him. He hesitated briefly at the latter thought. Then he remembered that X had already displayed its ability to send out control signals to the ship without merely copying his own, and that he had unthinkingly turned on the remote control receivers when he picked up the spindle before leaving the vessel. Neem had been vulnerable to abduction for the last fifteen minutes, whether he used his own control or not. He muttered several self-derogatory remarks in German and Finnish—he had spent several years on Neu Schwarzwald before his time on Omituinen. He was not particularly bothered about the existence of the risk, but very annoyed at himself for not recognizing it sooner.

  He wondered later whether the irritation was what caused him to elevate the ship higher than was strictly necessary merely to bring it the few hundred meters across the flat valley floor to a point beside him. Neither cameras nor any other kind of recorder was running; improving the chance of intercepting any of X’s output would do Cunningham no good, since he wouldn’t be there to see or hear it. Nevertheless, he sent Nimepotea almost up to plateau level before starting it toward his position.

  He comforted himself later with the recollection that he did keep a close eye on the little craft as she moved, so he was able to say with some certainty that the foreign signal did not reach it until it was over a hundred meters above the ground. Then it must have been overpowering; Neem made not the slightest motion toward Cunningham’s position, but headed northeast along the valley on a long slant which he could see would bring it into collision with one of the slopes if the course were not changed.

  He aimed the spindle and ordered the ship to come in his direction, using the highest power the controller could send. He thought he saw a slight hesitation in its motion, but wasn’t sure; it kept on toward the valley slope kilometers away. He shifted to a homing command and held the guide beam aimed as steadily as he could. Homing was supposed to override specific maneuver programming, but this one had no effect. It was as though Nimepotea were already homing on a stronger beam, which Cunningham decided was likely enough.

  If that were true, he was being given some indication of the location of X, at least; Neem must be flying straight toward it. On the plateau? Under it? Beyond it? Would X try to fly the ship through the ground?

  Not very far, certainly, since the control waves would penetrate only a short distance—just how far would depend on the nature of the material, but two meters seemed a generous maximum, especially if Neem were receiving a guide beam strong enough to override Cunningham’s own.

  Keeping his eyes almost continuously on the ship, the man began to trudge along the hot rock after it. Would it disappear over the top of the mesa, or was it a little below that height? He could not be sure. It would be two or three minutes at its present speed before the matter was settled, and by then it would be pretty far away—not too far to see if it plowed into the dust, but too far to see how much damage resulted. In theory there should be none, of course; automatic controls would override the remotes if the hull met really firm resistance, but Cunningham would have been much happier to be at the console himself to take care of such matters.

  He stopped when the ship did the same. It was below the hilltop—not very far below, perhaps eight or ten meters for the long axis of its ovoid hull. Unhesitatingly, though without much hope, he again beamed a homing signal at it. It moved at the same instant, as nearly as he could tell, but not toward him. First it shifted out from the slope for perhaps twenty meters; then it moved straight down until it touched the ground again, perhaps sinking in a short distance—this seemed likely under the circumstances, but the man could not tell at this range. Then it moved out again, and down again, repeating the process to outline a set of steps all the way down the slope until it was within a few meters of the level rock of the valley floor.

  Cunningham could see that the hull must have penetrated the l
oose stuff at least a short distance, since the ground itself was moving downhill—not very much, just enough to fill the fresh dents made by Nimepotea, since the powdery stuff had already been at its angle of repose at least since the nearby crater had formed and probably for millions of years or so before that. He barely noted the motion; he was running as fast as he thought he could keep up in a space suit toward the point where his ship hung, possibly within reach. He did not send any more control signals; if Neem were going to stay put, he was glad to settle for that. The spindle was in his hand as he ran, however.

  Twenty-five minutes of slogging over rock hot enough to melt lead could have been painful, but his suit refrigerators held up. He was not really worried about them; almost his entire attention was on the hull which he was approaching with such painful slowness, not sure when or whether Neem on its own, or X, would decide to put it somewhere else. In spite of his relative success in predicting some of the things X had done, he felt no real confidence in his analysis of that character—or even any real certainty that it was a character. If it were, its motivation had to be curiosity—it was trying to find out things about the control impulses. What it could observe of the results of its experiments could only be guessed, so far; perhaps the recent maneuver implied that it couldn’t see the ship and sensed, or detected somehow, only the microwave output Nimepotea used for the control feedback. If the homing system had been in use just now, that would account for its allowing the ship to fly into the valley wall; now it might be trying to figure out why Neem had ceased to obey orders.

  Maybe.

  And maybe it would start another test at any moment. Cunningham, sweat soaking his clothing far beyond the environment armor’s ability to handle, drove himself even harder at the thought. There was plenty of light—Anu’s monstrous disc was almost entirely in sight now above the eastern valley wall—but there was no way to wipe sweat out of his eyes, and seeing was getting difficult.

  Half a kilometer to go. Three hundred meters. One hundred. Twenty. On the little satellite, he could have made the remaining distance in a single leap, but on Tammuz his weight was fairly normal.

  Now he was standing under the ship, the open air lock ten meters out of reach, the lowest climbing rung five. It was not straight above him, but a little way over the slope of glaring white dust which formed the valley wall. His mind knew what would happen, but his feelings made him try anyway; he started up the slope, slowly and cautiously.

  No good. The stuff slipped under his weight and carried him back to the floor of the valley, and more slid silently down from above to replace what he had shifted.

  He tried running at the hill and almost made it; if the substrate had been just a little firmer he would have, bur as it was he lost his footing, rolled back to the bottom, and had to scramble briskly to keep his radiator from being blocked by the miniature avalanche which tried to bury his momentarily prone form.

  There was no choice he could see except to risk using the controller. He stood on solid ground, as close to the hull as he could get—any of the climbing grips would do as long as he could reach it; getting to the air lock itself was secondary. He braced himself to move quickly, pointed the spindle, and keyed the command to move in his direction without altering the ship’s own heading.

  Neem obeyed instantly, and his hand closed on a rung within a second. With his whole attention on climbing, he made his way as rapidly as he could around the curved surface to the lock, entered, and closed the outer door. The moment the inner one opened, he wrenched off his helmet and leaped to the console. Only then did he realize that the ship was still where he had ordered it to go. Nothing had countermanded or supplemented his order.

  “Anticlimax!” he muttered. “Does this thing have a sense of humor as well as a mind?”

  He was moving as he spoke, and wasted no time trying to produce an answer to the rhetorical question. By the time the words were off his lips, the ship was at the top of the hill, hanging beside the point where it had first made contact. This could still be recognized, though the loose dust had nearly finished filling the depression. Cunningham examined the spot as minutely as he could from inside the vessel, but could see nothing except the white stuff. Then, aligning the ship in the direction it had been moving when it had struck the slope, he rose a little higher and moved slowly across the top of the mesa along the same line. It was harder to be sure of all the details here, as the ground was far rougher than the valley below; but nowhere along the kilometer or so before the next valley did he see anything which suggested a living form, a machine, or anything else not easily explained by Tammuz’ probable evolution. It was all topography.

  The next move seemed obvious: toss the ball to X again. Maybe it(?) could only detect microwave radio—all right, use microwave. He returned to a point just above where the ship had struck the hillside, and tried his intelligence-testing broadcast again. It would do until he thought of something better.

  It did, but the response was not the four-sixteen he had rather hoped for. Nimepotea began to move again, and the man watched his instruments as varying sets of control-band impulses came in. This time an orderly variation scheme seemed to be the order, as though X could now tell much better than before just what results his(?) efforts were having.

  Some patterns, of course, produced no results; some drove the ship in various directions at various accelerations, but none of these ever continued for long—few for more than a tenth of a second or so. Cunningham kept his hands ready at the console to cut off the remote control sensors and do anything else necessary if X brought the ship into danger, but for nearly a minute the most worrisome event was the opening of the outer lock. It closed again almost at once.

  The man was happy. There seemed no more doubt about it; X was a conscious intelligence, following a rational plan of investigation. Communication should follow as a matter of routine. Physical contact, or at least a face-to-face encounter, would be helpful, in Cunningham’s opinion; it would be interesting to find out whether X felt the same way. The man was willing to wait and let her(?) run through her(?) repertoire of tests before trying anything more of his own; X’s activities were also informative.

  They became even more so. The practically random motions had brought the vessel some distance higher than when Cunningham had started his test broadcast; now, suddenly—though it was a second or two before the man realized it was happening—the control pulses stopped coming and Neem continued on the last set of instructions she had received.

  This was carrying them almost straight down—and exactly toward the spot where the ship had struck the hill the other time.

  A split second’s glance at the instruments showed that this was again a homing command; he had a second line on X’s location.

  He waited as long as he dared, and was about to cut off the control sensor when X killed the homing beam him(?)self. Cunningham promptly set his vision equipment to its best resolution and examined the slope with all the care he could.

  The earlier impact mark of the hull was by now almost invisible. Nothing but white dust showed anywhere in the neighborhood or for meters around it in any direction. X must be inside the hill, but not very far inside if the lines indicated by its(?) homing beams meant anything.

  Presumably the entity did not mind a little disturbance of the surface, in view of earlier events. The man lowered his ship ten or fifteen meters and deliberately drove it into the hillside, keeping a close eye on the amount of thrust needed, and with the hull half buried in the yielding stuff he drove it horizontally to dig a much larger gouge out of the slope. Then he backed off a few meters and watched while the material above subsided into his cut.

  The edge of the subsidence area climbed up and away from him fairly rapidly, like the material in a freshly inverted sand picture. For half a minute or so he saw nothing but the light-colored dust; then a small object, apparently black but possibly merely darker than its surroundings, was revealed less than half a meter below the to
p of the retreating cliff of loose stuff. Before the man could get a good look, its support gave way and it fell out of the field of his screen; but at the same instant another control impulse came in, and Nimepotea jerked downward.

  Twice in the next two minutes the man was tempted to cut off the remote control receiver, but each time restrained himself. The ship was being expertly handled, doing exactly what he himself had done shortly before—scooping out grooves and gouges in the hillside to cause local collapse. Several times during the process the black object was briefly visible, each time as it was falling to a lower level; by the end of the two minutes the ship was just above the valley floor and the object buried very little higher, though its exact location would have to be ascertained by something rather smaller than the ship’s hull.

  He seemed to realize this; Nimepotea stopped and hung just above the ground.

  Cunningham, while naturally cautious, was in no way paranoid. The notion that it might be inadvisable to find the object and even riskier to bring it aboard never crossed his mind, now that he was sure that intelligence was involved. He was out of the air lock with a primitive piece of equipment—a shovel—in a very few seconds, and the only concession he made to caution was motivated by the obvious natural danger. He connected himself to one of the climbing rungs with a strong safety line, in case he got buried and had to have the ship pull him out.

  This nearly happened twice, but each time quick motion kept him safe. The second collapse of the dust revealed the black object, which fell almost at his feet. He picked it up, brushed as much dust off it as he could with his armor glove, and was back inside in moments.