“The start is that I must travel to Mars in the pod. Alone is desirable but that would probably limit certain acts I may have to perform. I would suggest one of you accompanies me but, which one?”
A bomb had been tossed into the group.
“It’ll have to be me, buddy,” said Seth firmly. “After all, I am your master.”
Roger said with an assumed plaintive note in his voice, “I’d like to go, honest I would, but I reckon there’ll be some fighting and I really am no good at that.”
“I’ll go.” Doctor Rankin rocked them all when he broke in firmly with this. “Providing an old-timer like me can stand the gee forces and zero gravity or whatever an astronaut has to put up with … I’m the chief here and also, I have no family ties. I must be the one.”
“That’s a no go, Doctor,” said Elaine softly but firmly. “Those flight stresses you mentioned … plus the ones you will encounter on Mars when you get there. They rule you out completely, I’m afraid.” She looked around at the others for support.
“She’s right, Doc,” confirmed Seth. “And that’s another good reason why it should be me. I’m probably the fittest here.”
“Rubbish,” scoffed Lynn Caswell. “I’ll race you over the half-marathon any day.”
Seth grinned wickedly. “Oh, I was hoping you’d suggest a different type of physical test.”
Lynn smiled a little at that and nodded. “It probably won’t amount to any sort of physical test beyond the capabilities of any young, healthy person. But I reckon my maths is as good as yours … which may be useful … and my knowledge of the surface of Mars could prove invaluable. Also, like the Doctor, I have no family ties. You not only have a young wife but a very dependent son to think about. You shouldn’t go Seth.”
“I hope you are not all going to sideline me.” It was Josie. “I was trained and vetted specially to become a Martian. There was just one small defect which kept me from going but this is just a trip there, not for any long period. Hit ‘em hard and get out, I reckon.”
“I still think the ideal person to accompany Kee is someone young and fit, who knows how to handle himself, is no fool and can cope with whatever is thrown at him.” Elaine said.
They looked at one another – who had she in mind?
“Which one of us is that, Elaine?” puzzled Seth.
“He isn’t here but my ideal candidate would be Dave Flack. He’s one of us and maybe should have been in on this discussion. Also, not married … though he may have some other family. But not being married is the main thing.”
Seth whistled quietly. “Never thought of Dave. I think he’d be up for it … and he does know Kee pretty well. Mmmh.”
Josie had the last say … “You all seem pretty sure the guy chosen will not be coming back! All this, not married stuff. Doesn’t anyone give us a chance?”
Kee had been silent through all the discussion since he had suggested being accompanied. Now he took up his computations again …
“I agree Master-friend Seth that you should not go. The suggestion that Dave should be the one has several merits if he is agreeable. He will not need his Glock, tell him. I will go now to prepare the pod and key in orbit and trajectory data. Bring him over … or whoever is chosen … my second choice would be Josie. Get to the pod by early light. We must not wait until the Chaser finds nothing and decides to try Earth.
Chapter 10
Three against four The pod had been allocated a special hanger formerly used for testing balloons. This gave it the height required for its distinctive landing technique but now it lay horizontally and hovered effortlessly just above the ground. The hanger was on an airfield about a mile out of Cambridge. It had seen action in World War Two but was now used only for flying gliders and for students or staff at the university to play with their own flying – if they were lucky – contraptions.
Dave had agreed very willingly to accompany Kee and now he was being shown some of the systems used to control the vessel and its scanning devices or weaponry. Most of these were thought controlled but there had not been the time to provide Dave with a helmet for this purpose. Kee, of course, did not require any aid. A problem with the helmet, anyway, would have been language … thought-pictures would only have provided some control and then with a degree of uncertainty: it had to be spot on.
As the sun began to gain heat and rise above the poplars lining the airfield, the pod lifted slightly and glided slowly and silently forward through the hanger’s wide-open doors. A single glider waited obediently to be towed into the sky and its pilot and the tow-plane pilot plus a couple more enthusiasts watched with fascination as the huge but elegantly streamlined pod, still horizontal, steadily gathered speed and lifted over the trees. The thoughts of the four watching were, that if this was something the students had dreamed up, it was their best effort yet.
The flight continued northward and yet without gaining too much height, maybe two or three hundred feet. At last it reached the biggest man-made reservoir in Europe, the 5 mile long Rutland Water and, as had happened on the Big Tujunga, it was a single fisherman who felt its passing. He and a friend were in a boat casting for rainbow or brown trout, each facing a different direction. Looking over the side, one was aware that his floating line was caught in the powerful ripples of a sudden, strange gust of wind. Even the boat rocked. Then all was calm and the line was retrieved.
“What the bloody ‘ell were that?” he gasped to his friend but the pod had vanished, suddenly hitting an unbelievable speed.
By the time a second cast had been made, the pod was out of Earth’s atmosphere and still accelerating. Kee was on his bed calculating at hyper-speed and Dave, strapped to an improvised bed, was simply unconscious. He would remain so until they had crossed the millions of miles separating the planets and had reached the Mars approach, when the pod’s braking procedure would come into effect.
………. Those in the MARGO team who had been left behind gathered once more to carry out a discussion of the probabilities and to monitor transmissions from the pod and from Mars. They were all extremely tense, none more so than Seth. He would have loved to have had Ginny take part in all this but she had reminded him, although he didn’t really need reminding, that the last time they had left Kevin with a neighbour was when he had been abducted. They certainly couldn’t risk that happening again.
Seth thought Doctor Rankin looked extremely tired, which was only to be expected given the stresses on a man of his age. Roger was more relaxed now the immediate threat of a conflict had shifted some 40 million miles away. But he was good at his job and few could interpret off-beat signals or wave transmissions as quickly and accurately as he.
The three females did a girls-together thing mostly but Seth noticed that Josie seemed very subdued. He guessed she had talked herself into believing that she would be the one to go with Kee and was now suffering the let-down that not seeing Mars after all brought. He felt for her and tried to imagine some of what she had been through.
Seth made it a men’s thing by sitting with the Doctor and Roger. At first he was silent, thinking of Dave strapped into the pod and wandering what calculations were being made by Kee. Would the robot be able to ‘think through’ a workable plan? He thought of the chess world where electronic systems were now invincible against humans. And then, how ‘human’ was the thinking of an alien such as the Chaser? Did it possess process human-like intuition or was every thought a step-by-step logical sequence … if this
happens then that must follow, calculated to the nth degree. But, if the Chaser remaining was not the leader and Kee was correct … that it was capable of miscalculating … how could we use that moment, wondered Seth. He said,
“Any signals of any interest yet?”
“Roger spoke over his shoulder, “From Mars there is a strange sequential emission … quite faint … regular pulses. If I had to give you a similarity, I would say take a look at one of the really old war-at-sea films: it’s like the ASDIC where �
�”
“What’s ASDIC stand for?” butted in Seth.
The Doctor answered. “The ASD stands for antisubmarine division. Basically it pinged sound waves at underwater bodies such as submarines and then picked up the echo.”
“But surely the Chaser won’t expect to find the pod by simply pinging radio waves off it. Could that work?”
“Not by reflection. You’re right, that wouldn’t work. But don’t forget, the pod has scanners. When a scanner ‘picks up’ a signal of any sort it absorbs some of the energy contained in that signal. This could be detected by a super-sensitive device. Correct, Roger?”
“Yeah, Doctor; I’m sure that would work and that that is what is going on. Seems like a long job to me, though.”
Seth’s eyes glowed at them. “But we know that the pod with Kee in it isn’t just lying doggo on the surface. It will be well off the ground and looking itself for signals. By the time the Chaser’s instruments tell him that something is … absorbing some of his own transmissions … Kee will have had the time and opportunity to fire at him. Splash one Chaser.”
The girls had joined them, so silently that none of the men seem to have noticed.
Lynn smiled a little twistedly at the male trio. “So, well done the male sex! You seem to have been victorious. We came over to tell you what we have been considering but I reckon we just need to plan a celebration party.”
Seth locked onto her piercing, green eyes. “Don’t imagine for a second that we really think it will be that simple, so … if you gals have come up with an idea, by all means share it with us. I think we’ll be needin’ a bagful of tricks to beat the bearded one.”
“Can I just chip in first with the latest from Mars … from Bill Mac actually,” said Roger, turning to face them. “He’s tried to clue us up with as many details as poss. It’s a confirmation of what we thought … what Kee thought … that there is only one Chaser. He’s a brute and a killer and he’s been taking out one of our lot every day … and there was more at the start. He is dead keen, murderously so, to find Kee. They don’t know why. No way of knowing whether this one is the leader or his lieutenant but, although it seems to be a uniform or armour that he’s wearing, there is no insignia on it … which suggests to me he’s the lesser of the two evils. He’s absolutely huge, ‘bout five metres according to Bill. His hand weapon … which seems to melt anything it’s pointed at … is a small tube which is just held between his fingers. It accounted for Mrs Mc Govern, it seems. They’ve never seen the big guy’s spaceship or whatever he arrived in but there are some small mountains nearby. Could be among those. Oh, and the bearded giant doesn’t wear any breathing aid, Bill thinks.”
“I take it that was a one-way?” clarified the Doctor.
Roger just nodded but then decided to add, “And my guess is it will be permanently one-way. I reckon if this alien guy is now out searching all over, he topped poor old Bill before setting out.”
They all considered this update carefully before Lynn said, “Shall I continue?”
Doctor Rankin said, nodding, “Certainly, my dear. Let us hear what you ladies have to suggest.”
“I’m not sure that we have anything to suggest, Doctor, but we were talking about, well, what makes up an alien. We have been told that these creatures have four dimensions as against our three … plus the time dimension, of course. We know that there are unseen dimensions in the make-up of our particles. Eleven according to string theory. But it’s hard to imagine what can be seen … or how it affects the, er, mechanics of just existing, consuming energy in the way of food, reproducing, how the senses work.”
“We considered the usually quoted example of going the other way, as it were … down to two dimensions,” said Josie. “We thought about a creature who was, well, flat … living on a flat world. That flat world could, by-the-way, be the surface of a sphere but we’ll not go into that …”
“Now,” contributed Elaine, “If our flatman is on, say, the page of a book and a fly settles on the page …
Seth chimed in … “Can flatman see the fly?”
“’Fraid not,” Doctor Rankin affirmed. “He might see or be aware of six feet … or the bottoms of them … appearing by his side but the three-dimensional concept of the fly would be ours alone, not flatman’s.”
Lynn pursed her lips. “We came to that conclusion … at first. Yes, thus far, that must be so. But … we considered a step further … When we three-dees look at these new alien visitors it should be remembered perhaps that we actually have a fourth dimension ourselves. It may have been ‘curled up’ as it has been said, which basically means not used. However, it is there. We may be a kind of dormant four-dee creature.”
The men chewed over this one. Roger looked thoughtful as he spoke. “So what are you saying? What is the feminine take on this Earth-shattering insight?”
Josie brushed a hand through her red curls and then spread both palms out rather helplessly. “We don’t know,” she admitted. “It’s just that all along, all of us thought that we are an inferior species … with our three dimensions … taking on these mighty aliens with their four dimensions.” She ventured a smile and looked rather pretty for doing do. “Three against four, as it were,” she said. “Inferior odds.”
“And now,” concluded the Doctor with his usual dry wit, “It is at least four against four. Well done, ladies, for your contribution; at least we now know that we have an equal chance.”
Chapter 11
A deadly food-bin Although Dave knew there were now quite a lot of colonies scattered over the Martian landscape, he had not found one so far. He was still lying on his bed, still strapped down for safety, and his eyes stared searchingly at the monitor set near to his head. They were still some way out but slowing on an approach trajectory. Kee, in robotic form, lay by his side not moving. Dave could only guess at the trillions of computations going on inside Kee and, when he considered it, there was probably a similar number inside his own brain but he simply wasn’t aware of it.
From the moment he had agreed to accompany the robot – his friend Seth’s robot – he had wondered just how he was to fit in. After being put completely in the picture he could only imagine that he would be in close attendance to Kee, Glock out and watching his back. But Kee had said ‘no’. The sidearm would not be required. Dave learned that he was to perform some function from inside the pod but he could not imagine what that could be – Kee fed the vessel’s computer with all its instructions. Flight paths, scanning schedule, weaponry, signals to Earth or any other place … all were preprogrammed. What was there left for an un-armed human to do? Time to ask Kee exactly what he was to do.
He wanted to sit up but, although they were slowing rapidly now and the terrain features were clearer … and, yes, they had just passed near to a colony of the new Martians … he had not been told anything other than to remain prone …
“Isn’t it time to tell me exactly what I have to do, Kee? What is my role in this fight? Will it come down to a fight?”
“Who can predict just what the conclusion will be? But I was aware of your fighting capabilities before we joined forces, Seth’s friend, Dave. However, the fighting capabilities of the Chasers are fearsome. You would be no match for one of them, so … I have planned for you a more peaceful, less active role. This will be a contest of two aliens, myself, a robotic device, against a gern Chaser. But also, a Chaser’s vessel against my pod. The power for both of us lies in our vessels and, I have to tell you, Dave … the transportation vessel of the Chaser is far superior to that of my escape pod. Even the vessel this pod came from would be no match for his.”
“You’re making it sound as though we’re beaten before we do anything, Kee. You must have something…” Dave was just going to say, ‘up your sleeve’, but he guessed that would be beyond the robot’s vocabulary. He left it at that.
“Yes. Something. We must deceive the Chaser … and his vessel.”
“De..ceive!” Dave said it slowly,
savouring its significance.
At last Kee explained his plan. “When we detect the Chaser carrying out his search, we will land in his path. I will leave the pod and communicate with the Chaser. He will be wary. He may or may not leave his vessel but, being quite confident in his power, I believe he will do so quite quickly. He will be able to communicate with me better on the ground. Now, because my pod is an escape pod, I cannot program it to crash …”
“Crash?”
“Yes, my friend. It must appear to have crashed and to therefore be of no threat to the Chaser. This will be your task and I will show you how it is to be done. I will pre-program the pod to assume an escape trajectory … at a given signal … and this I must show you … you will manually crash the pod. It has the capability to protect any occupant from physical injury so, you will not be harmed.”
Dave thought it through carefully, looking for snags. It still wasn’t making sense …
“I can see that the Chaser will now be supremely over-confident. But … his vessel, with all its power, is completely untouched. You will have to face the two. Unless you have more for me … that must be it! You have a powerful weapon on board for me to use and they will be completely off-guard.”
“No, Dave. You will have completed your role when you have crashed the pod. Think about this …” The pod had now steadied to a slow cruise above fairly flat terrain. Dave sensed that the climax was approaching. “… The Chaser believes I am completely alone now … without the only major source of power available to me. He can handle me without any input from his ship. So … he will place it on standby. This he can do with a thought-wave. Just me to deal with …”
“But … can you … I can’t see how you can handle one of these monsters …”
“Trust me, Dave. Trust me. My previous masterfriend, Keelon, made me what I am. And Keelon was a genius above all others. Let me show you how to crash a pod.”
………. It wasn’t yet dark enough at Cambridge for the faintly red planet Mars to be visible to the naked eye. In the Control Room, Roger munched into a huge 3-layer cheeseburger. He noted that the search pattern signals had ceased and turned to his companion …
From Beyond the Blue Planet Page 10
