Earth Is The Strangest Planet

by Robert Silverberg

  And the greatest of these miracles was this devil who called himself The Student, and who had now backed off in revulsion at Cliffs approach.

  But there were matters still to be investigated more closely. Dimly visible against the outer walls of the dome was a great shapeless mass that expanded and contracted as if it were breathing. Above the thing, and projecting from the dome like a canopy, was a curious curved shell of pearly, vitreous material.

  His deductive faculties keyed up, Cliff was almost certain that he understood the function of the arrangement. With his pencil he traced two questions on the board he held: “You know chemistry, physics, what oxygen and nitrogen are?”

  “Yes. I have learned from research. I have learned from men’s books,” The Student replied, conquering his revulsion.

  “You know that the air bladders of fish are filled with a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen?” Cliff asked. “You know that these gases are derived from the blood through the capillaries that line the air bladders, and that this oxygen and nitrogen is drawn originally from the oxygen and nitrogen dissolved in the sea water, by means of the gills?”

  “Yes.” “

  “Then,” Rodney went on, “the air in this place comes from animals too! That creature out there under that roof arrangement—it has gills which take the gases from the sea water and deliver them into the blood stream.

  “Part of the oxygen is used to keep the creature alive, of course; but another part of it, together with the nitrogen, is discharged through the walls of capillaries as an actual, free gas, just as a portion of the oxygen and nitrogen in the blood of a fish is discharged into its hydrostatic organ or air bladder! The roof arrangement probably collects it in some way, and delivers it here to me!”

  “That is correct,” The Student printed. “Several animals work to give you air. Something new—ages to produce.”

  “Ages all right,” Cliff breathed fervently. “I can well believe it!” He had spoken aloud.

  But he was not finished yet. His face was flushed with eagerness, and his pulses were pounding. He had another question to print: “How is the water kept out of here? Nothing of flesh could prevent it from entering when the pressure is so great.”

  “There our skill failed,” The Student responded. “We used the skill of men. We made pumps from parts of ships, and from materials which were our own. Air is pumped into the domes and from the domes—and water, when necessary.”

  The black tendrils withdrew from the window. Transparent lids flickered over the ovoid’s great eyes. The transparent body swayed languorously, reminding Cliff of the first sting ray he had seen in an aquarium when he was a child.

  It was clear at last, this alien science. Low down beyond the window, and against the shell of the dome, he glimpsed vague motion, where a monster toiled, swinging the lever of a rusty mechanism back and forth. The machine was a pump. Its operator was forcing to him the air which those other monsters produced. And beyond extended the murky, unbelievable reality of this submarine world.

  “It is all glorious,” Cliff printed in tribute, “even beautiful, almost—your achievements, your ways of doing things!”

  The Student’s tentacles stirred uneasily, but he made no reply.

  A climax had been reached and passed. Rodney’s enthusiasm began to cool a little, leaving him to become more cognizant of his own position. He thought of people and friends that he had known, and experiences he had enjoyed. The thoughts made him feel very cold and lonely.

  His pencil scratched in the silence. “What are you going to do with me?” he was demanding.

  “Keep you,” was the response.

  “Until I rot?”

  “Until you rot.”

  It was a simple statement, devoid of either malice or compassion. Yet it was loaded with a dread significance. It meant staying here in this awful place, dying of starvation, perhaps, if the icy dankness didn’t get him.

  It meant death in any event; probably it meant madness. There would be ovoid eyes watching him, studying him; there would be ovoid beaks opening and closing vacuously —crazy, wonderful things everywhere, but only his submarine, and the depressing relics in the museum, familiar!

  They had conversed, The Student and he. They had been almost friends. But beneath their apparently amicable attitudes toward each other had lain mistrust, broadened and deepened by the fact that they had so very little in common. Cliff saw it now.

  Fury smoldered within him, but he held it in check.

  He tossed aside the board, which was too covered with messages to be of any further use, and selected in its stead the pulped remnants of a book from the stack of things which supported him close to the spy window.

  On one of the illegible pages he printed a note and held it up for the ovoid to see: ‘I know a better way for you to learn about my mind. Why not establish friendly relations with the world above? Certainly we have many things that you could use. And you have many things that we could use.”

  “No!” The Student’s slender, boneless limbs seemed to jerk with emphasis as they traced the word and repeated it. “No!”

  “It will happen anyway,” Cliff promised. “Soon my people will come in machines of steel. They will make you understand what is best.”

  “Men coming here will not return,” The Student answered.

  And Clifford Rodney, remembering his own capture, and seeing now the waspish fighters patrolling the city of the ovoids, had no reason to doubt the weight of the statement. The sea people could protect themselves in their native element.

  “You fear us? You mistrust us?” Cliff wanted to know.

  The response was frank: “Yes.”

  “There is no reason.”

  To this The Student offered nothing.

  Cliff tried a new angle, printing swiftly: “What do you know of the place we live in, really—sun, stars, planets, day, night? You have read of such things, no doubt. Wouldn’t you like to see them? They are beautiful!”

  “Beautiful?” The Student questioned. “Beautiful to you. To me—to us—horrible. The sun, the great dazzling light —it is horrible—and the heat, and the emptiness of air. They make me afraid. But they are wonderful—interesting, very interesting.”

  Some emotion seemed to stir the nameless soul of the ovoid, making him hesitant and uncertain.

  Clifford Rodney thought he glimpsed a shadow of hope. He scarcely understood why he argued; whether he had some dim idea that he might save himself, or whether he was trying to advance the cause of mankind in its demand for expansion into alien realms.

  Perhaps he was urging this queer intelligence of the deeps only because it is in the nature of any strong, healthy-minded youth to fight even the most adverse circumstance.

  “You are interested, but you are afraid,” he wrote. “Why don’t you give your interest the chance it deserves? Why don’t you—” He hesitated, not knowing quite what he wished to say. “Why don’t you try to make contact with my people?”

  For a flickering instant The Student paused, in a way that betrayed some hidden process within him. Then his decision seemed to come. “The world of men is the world of men,” he printed. “The world of the sea is our world.”

  Further urgings on Cliff’s part met only with flat refusal. He desisted at last, feeling oddly like a salesman, who, through a slip in technique, has lost a sale. But that comparison could not be true either. He felt that The Student’s obstinancy was too deep-seated to be overcome by mere salesmanship.

  Dejectedly he watched the chalky words of the ovoid’s last rebuff being washed from the window by the ocean.

  Then those black tendrils holding the crayon went to work once more. “You wish to escape,” they printed, “it would be interesting, man, to watch you trying to escape.”

  Startled, Cliff wondered what bizarre mental process had given birth to these statements. Hope was resurrected.

  “I cannot escape,” he printed warily. “A glass port of my submarine needs repairing,
for one thing. I have no materials.”

  “We will give you materials,” was the astounding assertion.

  “Eh?” the man said aloud, before he remembered that the ovoid could not hear his words, or understand them if he had been able to. “I could not get out of these domes anyway,” he wrote. “It is useless.”

  Cliff Rodney was trying to make a subtle suggestion, in the hope that his unfathomable jailer would offer him a chance for freedom.

  “Men have many tricks,” The Student responded. “Watching you make use of tricks will be very interesting. We will learn much. Men have powerful explosives.”

  “I have no explosives!” Cliff insisted truthfully. A feeling of exasperation was rising within him.

  “Men have many tricks,” the ovoid repeated.

  It was a tribute, nothing less; a tribute of mingled awe and mistrust, which the people of the depths felt for the people of the upper air. It was an example of other-world minds at work.

  “You expect me to escape?” Cliff demanded.

  “You will not escape,” was the answer. “This is a test of your powers—a test of men’s powers—an experiment. If you escape from the domes you shall be recaptured. We understand caution, man.”

  Thus Rodney’s hopes were broken. But before this message had faded from the spy window, he wrote on a page of the tattered book an acceptance of the challenge: “Good! Get the materials you promised, and go to the devil!”

  “Materials shall come,” was the reply. “Go to the devil.”

  Breaking off the conversation thus, The Student wheeled in the water. His silvery fins flashed, and he vanished amid the throng of nightmare watchers.

  Cliff wondered in a detached way what emotion, if any, had prompted the ovoid to repeat his angry epithet. Was it fury, amusement, some feeling beyond human conception, or just another bit of mimicry? Cliff didn’t know; and because he didn’t the skin at the back of his neck tightened unpleasantly.

  VI

  The Student was out there among his fellows, giving orders in buzzing, tympanic tones, and preparing for the test. None could see the turmoil inside his brain—fear pitted against intense eagerness and interest.

  He had made no decisions yet, nor would the decisions he had in mind be sanctioned by his people. And it is certain, too, that he had no sympathy for the man who had fallen into his clutches, nor any desire to help him win his way to freedom.

  Clifford Rodney did not immediately climb down from his position atop the wreckage he had piled up. Instead he remained by the window, looking out, for no particular reason. The only sound, the gentle, pulsing hiss of air being forced into his prison, had a monotonous effect that was more oppressive than absolute silence.

  The weird colony wasn’t so very different, though, from the cities at home, if you allowed your eyes to sort of blur out of focus; if you didn’t see that sunken liner with the wispy ribbons trailing up from it, or the twisted architecture, or the inhabitants. The moving lights made you think of gay places and of gay music and people. One corner of his mouth drew back thoughtfully.

  He could see that his chance of getting out of this mess was practically nil: In the first place, he had not the ghost of an idea of how he might escape from the two domes. And if he did manage to break free from them, those armored fighters would bar his way. Their great claws would grip the submarine while they discharged their bolts of electric force. The metal hull would protect him to some extent, but not sufficiently, as he knew from experience.

  More conscious than ever of the aches in his body, his loneliness and dejection, he looked down at his feet absently. Under them were books. He toed one. Its gilt title was almost obliterated, but he still could make it out— Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads.

  There was a friendliness in those dim, familiar words, and he chuckled a bit. Funny to think of an ovoid intellect trying to read and understand the poems in that volume— “Danny Deever,” “Mandalay”! “If” was one of Kipling’s works too: “If you can keep your head—”

  Cliff smiled ruefully. Anyway he couldn’t go wrong by attempting to improve matters a little.

  He cast a final glance through the spy window. The ovoid crowd was growing thicker, anticipating activity. Behind them the fighters were gathering in the dusky shadows. In their claws some of them clutched massive bars of some material—rams, no doubt. Probably it had been one of those rams that had broken the port of his submarine.

  Still garmented in the tattered carpet, he started in by setting his craft in order as best he could; straightening a warped propeller blade, draining water out of machines and instruments, and repairing those that were broken, whenever it was possible. At least, he had cloth and paper from the museum to help him mop up the wetness of everything.

  The radio was a tangle, but he had hope of fixing it some way so that, by means of its beam, he could get a word up to the boys aboard the Etruria, on the surface. They couldn’t help him, of course; they could only watch and wait.

  Several hours must have passed without incident. While he worked, Cliff kept a close lookout for some sign of The Student. When it came, it was not delivered by the wizard of the deeps in person, but through the proxy of a messenger beast. The oak-leaf body of the creature wavered before a window, and on its hide luminous words appeared: “Food is coming through an air tube. Eat.”

  Cliff waited. From one of the air passages that entered the chamber, a mass of albuminous substance was blown, and it plopped to the floor. It looked like white of egg. Cliff touched a finger to it, and tasted the adhering dab.

  No doubt it was from the body of some specialized marine animal. Probably it was very nourishing, and though it hardly excited Cliff’s appetite, he realized that a man might train himself to relish such fare. At present, however, he preferred the brine-soaked chocolate and other food articles that he had brought with him on his adventure.

  The messenger now exhibited another message: “Cement for port of the submarine, through same tube.”

  Its manner of arrival was similar to that of the food. A great lump of clear, firm jelly, probably also the product of a subsea creature.

  Rodney gathered it up. As he carried it, a thin film of the substance hardened to glassy consistency on his hands, as collodion would do. He applied the jelly to the submarine’s fractured port, inside and out, pressing it as firmly as he could. It would take some time for the cement to set.

  He returned his attention to the radio transmitter, but only for a moment. Out of some inner well of his consciousness, the faint shadow of an idea had appeared.

  He clambered from the submarine, and with a knife proceeded to dig the cement from around the huge, glassy plug that kept out the sea, just as he had done before with the smaller plug that had sealed the entrance dome from the museum.

  He worked entirely around the circular mass, loosening the adhesive substance as deeply as he could probe with his blade. No seepage of sea water appeared. The great block was intended to open outwardly. It was very thick, and beyond it, holding it shut, was the weight of the Atlantic.

  But Clifford Rodney’s plan was maturing. His efforts were not entirely useless. Undoubtedly that external door was not as firmly placed as it had previously been.

  Cliff felt that he might yet demonstrate his ability to get out of the domes, though once beyond them, he could find no glimmer of reason to expect that he could elude the circle of horror that awaited him, even for a few seconds. He could only try to do his best, not so much in the expectation of escape, but to keep his energies busy.

  Conscious that his every move was watched with absorbing interest by the ovoid audience at the spy windows, he rummaged in the museum, finding there some wire and strips of metal. These he brought back beside the submarine.

  The drinking-water container of his craft was glass-lined.

  He unfastened it from its mounting, bashed in the top, and added to its contents a small amount of acid from his batteries. Then he carried it up throug
h the hatch and set it on the floor of the chamber.

  Into the water, at opposite sides of the container, he placed upright strips of metal to act as electrodes. To each of these he fastened wires, and attached their opposite ends to the powerful storage batteries of the submarine.

  Next, with paper and other refuse, he plugged the air tubes and drains of the two domes. Then he closed the switch, sending current through the apparatus he had just constructed.

  There was a hiss as of a caldron boiling as the electricity went through the water in the container, splitting it up into the elemental gases that composed it. Free oxygen and hydrogen bubbled away from the electrodes, mixing with the air of the domes.

  This crude process of electrolysis was only the beginning. From the museum Cliff collected all the combustible materials he could find, and carried them into the chamber of the submarine—books, wood, a few scraps of celluloid, hard rubber, and so forth. Then, with a little of the glassy cement that remained, he sealed the block that had separated the two domes, back into place.

  There was another matter. For a few seconds it puzzled him, but finally a solution came. With wrenches he unbolted the heavy glass lens of the submarine’s searchlight. Carefully he tapped the incandescent blub beneath, breaking it, but leaving the delicate tungsten filaments undamaged. Against them he placed a wad of paper, daubed with the remaining benzine of his cigarette lighter.

  So far, so good. He investigated the electrolysis apparatus again, shutting off the current for a moment while he scraped away the interfering bubbles that had collected on the crude electrodes.

  Satisfied that his preparations were as complete as they could be made for the present, he shut himself inside the submarine and continued to work on the radio. After perhaps an hour of fussing and tampering, he believed that he might get a code message up to the Etruria.