Earth Is The Strangest Planet

by Robert Silverberg

  He was almost ready, but there was one thing more. Aboard the craft there were ten flasks of compressed oxygen. Opening the valves of nine of these, he tossed them through the hatch, retaining only one for breathing purposes.

  While their contents soughed away he disconnected the electrolysis wires and closed the heavy steel door over his head. Working the key of the radio, he flashed out his appeal:

  Rodney calling S.S. Etruria … Rodney calling S.S.

  Etruria … Captured by deep-sea creatures … Trying to escape … Get position and stand by to help.

  He repeated the communication several times. If it was received, it would be simple for his confreres to calculate his position from the direction the waves came in. They’d be waiting to pick him up. He even chuckled ruefully at the thought.

  Through the ports he could see that the ovoids had moved back from the spy windows of the dome, anticipating danger; but their forms, and the forms of their fighters, still hovered tensely in the luminescent haze of the ocean bed. He could not see many from his unfavorable position, but doubtless they were above and all around the dome, waiting for him to make a move!

  VII

  Cliff forced himself to forget these unnerving thoughts. His hand touched the searchlight switch. His face was grim as he directed his gaze through another port toward the great, circular block that kept out the sea.

  “Any one of three things can happen.” he muttered: “The force can be insufficient, in which case what I have done won’t accomplish anything at all—1*11 still be locked in this dome. Or it can be too great, forcing out that plug all at once and letting the water in here all at once, to smash this steel coffin—all at once. Or it can be just right, admitting the ocean gradually enough so that this old tub can stand the strain.”

  Even the stout steel hull couldn’t withstand the sudden thrust of the pressure of the deeps, he knew. Its position would be something like that of a nut under the blow of a hammer.

  Cliff didn’t want to give himself time to think. He closed the switch. Almost immediately there was a flash of red. as the hot filaments of the searchlight ignited the benzine-soaked paper that was in contact with them.

  The flame spread through the dome in a wave of orange, as the hydrogen in the air burned. The sound which penetrated the thick shell of the craft was not the concussion of an explosion. Rather, it was a whispering, soughing roar: for the weight of the sea without was too vast for this feeble beginning of chemical forces to combat.

  However, the reserves now came into action. Immersed in a highly oxygenated atmosphere under pressure, the paraphernalia from the museum took fire. and. though damp, rapidly became a inferno of incandescence that threw off enormous volumes of gas. expanding irresistibly with heat.

  His heart thumping. Rodney kept his eyes glued to the great block which he hoped to dislodge. Stubbornly it continued to stand its ground, unmoved. He gritted his teeth as if, by sheer force of will, he sought to move the insensate thing that barred his way.

  Moments passed. There was a snap like a muffled rifle shot. The block jerked, shuddered. Around its rim a curtain of glass appeared—no—not glass—water, screaming like a concourse of mad devils. The flood rolled over the floor, found the fire, and burst into steam, the pressure of which added to the titanic forces combatting the titanic weight of the deeps.

  More moments—the chamber was half full of water. Then, with a sort of majestic resignation, the plug yielded, folding outward like a dying colossus. The ocean was in then, swiftly—so swiftly that a living eye could not capture its movements. The thud of it was heavier than a clap of thunder.

  The submarine bobbed in the maelstrom like a bit of flotsam. But its hull held, even though it was flung repeatedly against the walls of the dome.

  A minute went by before Clifford Rodney was able to do anything. He picked himself up from the place where he had been hurled, and scrambled to the controls. He could see the opening which led from his prison. The motors throbbed and the submarine turned, heading through the still surging water.

  It did get clear of the dome. Cliff almost thought he had a chance. Maybe the confusion produced in the vicinity by the suction when the sea had entered the dome, had unnerved the ovoids momentarily.

  He set the vertical screws spinning. Their lift wasn’t very good. They had been damaged again. It was hardly remarkable after the way the little ship had been bounced around.

  Cliff looked up through a ceiling port. Six fighters were pouncing down upon him, their hinged claws spread wide, their long, armored forms ghostly in the shadows. Others were approaching from all directions, accompanied by a horde of ovoids.

  A seventh had joined the six now. Rodney had not seen it dart up from the deep muck of the bottoms, where it had lain, hidden even to the people of the depths. It bore a strange, glassy object of considerable size. Without much attention the man wondered what it might be.

  “All right,” he muttered, “you win! I hope you enjoyed the show!”

  The fighters were upon him. He could hear the scrape of their claws against metal. Clouds of black stuff, like the ink of a squid, surrounded the submarine, hiding everything from view. He was still rising, though—rather rapidly, he thought. In a moment the electric bolts would stun him.

  Upward and upward he went. Cliff began to be puzzled. He detected scraping noises that he could not interpret. He must have advanced half a mile toward the surface since the start. It was all very odd.

  There was a jolt. The climb became halting and erratic. The motors labored doggedly.

  The water cleared. Cliff could make out schools of phosphorescent fish, hanging in the darkness like scattered galaxies. He was alone, far above the bottoms. There were no fighters around him, though he thought he glimpsed dim shapes vanishing beneath. They could not endure the reduced pressure that existed here.

  Matters were better, far better, than he had dared to expect—mysteriously so. Now if the vertical screws continued to function at all— The submarine appeared to be badly damaged. It seemed clumsy, heavy.

  Cliff came into a region of deep bluish light, beautiful as some fairy-peopled realm of infinity. Not long thereafter the bathyspheric craft broke through the sunlighted surface of the Atlantic. Cliff opened the valves of a pressure tank, inflating the bellows-like water wings which supported the heavy submarine when it was on the surface.

  How had this all happened? There was still the mystery. He almost forgot that he must gradually reduce the pressure around him, to avoid the “bends.”

  At length he opened the hatch and crawled out onto the rounded top of the undersea boat. An egg-shaped object was fastened to the metal shell just behind the hatch. Rodney approached it, unable yet to fathom its nature. Glassy cement, like that with which he had recently become acquainted, held the thing in place.

  It was a massive object, six feet through at its greatest diameter. It was made of the same material as the domes, except that this substance was darker, perhaps to shield what it covered from the fierce sun.

  Rodney peered into the semitransparent depths of the object, discerning there a huddled form enveloped in a milky, semiliquid film. The form was delicate; vital organs pulsed visibly beneath its skin. It had flippers, and masses of black tendrils. Its beaked mouth opened and closed, giving it an air of vacuous solemnity, but its eyes were keen. Its tentacles clutched a white crayon. It was The Student!

  Clifford Rodney’s mind was a whirl as he sought to solve the riddle. Then, since no other means of printing a message was available, he traced words with a finger on the wet surface of the oval object:

  “You helped me—how?”

  The Student’s tendrils trembled as he printed the answer on the inside of his protecting shell: “I helped you. The six fighters, and the seventh, were mine. They did not attack you. Concealed by the liquid that darkens the sea, they raised your submarine upward.

  “They attached me to the submarine. They raised it as far as they could climb.
It was a trick to outwit my people. They forbid traffic with the upper world. They are afraid. I was afraid, but at last I chose. While you prepared for the test an idea came. I used it, outwitting my people. I am afraid. But I am glad.”

  Rodney was lost in the fantastic wonder of it all. “Thank you, my friend!” he printed.

  The Student plied his crayon again: “Friend? No. I am not your friend. What I did, I did for myself.”

  “Then why in reason’s name are you here?” Cliff printed. “Men will put you in an aquarium, and stare at and study you!”

  “Good,” was the response, “I am glad. Men study me. I study them. Good. That is why I came: to see the accomplishments of men, to see the stars, to see the planets. Now I see the sun and sky—dreadful but interesting—very interesting. Good.”

  “Good if you don’t smother before you can be transferred to a suitable aquarium,” Rodney traced.

  “I am safe here,” the ovoid answered with a nervous flurry of tendrils. “The pressure is normal. There is much oxygen in the fluid which surrounds me. But do what you must, man. I am waiting.”

  Cliff was accustomed enough to the situation by now to grin down at the great dark egg. Mixed with his awe there was a curious inner warmth. Man and ovoid were different in form and mind; perhaps real sympathy between them was impossible. But Cliff had found a tangible similarity.

  In this sullen devil of the depths, eagerness to know the unknown had battled fear, and had won. The Student had placed himself, without defense, in the power of the unknown. It took guts to do that, courage—

  Young Rodney thought of many things as he looked out over the water in search of signs of rescue. A ship was approaching. It was near enough so that he could recognize it as the Etruria.

  “The boys’ll probably call you Davy Jones’ ambassador or something,” he said banteringly, addressing the ovoid. “I hope you’re sport enough to take it, old socks!”

  But The Student wouldn’t have listened even if he were able. His eyes were drinking in the miracle of the approaching ship.

  ROCK DIVER

  Harry Harrison

  Of all the strange terrestrial environments explored in this collection, the one we visit in this story must be the strangest: the heart of the earth, the sealed interior of the planet, a place more remote, more inaccessible, than the dark reaches of space or the deepest trenches of the ocean. Harry Harrison, the veteran writer and editor who takes us on this eerie trip, is the author of such books as Death-world, The Technicolor Time Machine, and Make Room! Make Room!—the novel on which the movie Soylent Green was based. “Rock Diver,” published more than a quarter of a century ago, was his first science-fiction story.

  * * *

  The wind hurtled over the crest of the ridge and rushed down the slope in an icy torrent. It tore at Pete’s canvas suit, pelting him with steel-hard particles of ice. Head down, he fought against it as he worked his way uphill towards the granite outcropping.

  He was freezing to death. A man can’t wear enough clothes to stay alive in fifty degrees below zero. Pete could feel the numbness creeping up his arms. When he wiped his frozen breath from his whiskers there was no sensation. His skin was white and shiny wherever it was exposed to the Alaskan air.

  “All in a day’s work.” His cracked lips painfully shaped themselves into the ghost of a smile. “If any of those claimjumping scissorbills followed me this far they’re gonna be awful cold before they get back.”

  The outcropping sheltered him as he fumbled for the switch at his side. A shrill whine built up in the steel box slung at his belt. The sudden hiss of released oxygen was cut off as he snapped shut the faceplate of his helmet. Pete clambered onto the granite ridge that pushed up through the frozen ground.

  He stood straight against the wind now, not feeling its pressure, the phantom snowflakes swirling through his body. Following the outcropping, he slowly walked into the ground. The top of his helmet bobbed for a second like a bottle in water, then sank below the surface of the snow.

  Underground it was warmer, the wind and cold left far behind; Pete stopped and shook the snow from his suit. He carefully unhooked the ultra-light from his pack and switched it on. The light beam, polarized to his own mass-penetrating frequency, reached out through the layers of surrounding earth as if they were cloudy gelatine.

  Pete had been a rock diver for eleven years, but the sight of this incredible environment never ceased to amaze him. He took the miracle of his vibratory penetrator, the rock diver’s “walk-through,” for granted. It was just a gadget, a good gadget, but something he could take apart and fix if he had to. The important thing was what it did to the world around him.

  The hogback of granite started at his feet and sank down into a murky sea of red fog. It was a fog composed of the lighter limestone and other rock, sweeping away in frozen layers. Seemingly suspended in mid-air were granite boulders and rocks of all sizes, caught in the strata of lighter materials. He ducked his head carefully to avoid these.

  If his preliminary survey was right, this rocky ridge should lead him to the site of the missing lode. He had been following leads and drifts for over a year now, closing in on what he hoped was the source of the smaller veins.

  He trudged downward, leaning forward as he pushed his way through the soupy limestone. It rushed through and around him like a strong current of water. It was getting harder every day to push through the stuff. The piezoelectric crystal of his walk-through was getting farther away from the optimum frequency every day. It took a hard push to get the atoms of his body between those of the surrounding matter. He twisted his head around and blinked to focus his eyes on the two-inch oscilloscope screen set inside his helmet. The little green face smiled at him—the jagged wave-pattern gleaming like a row of broken teeth. His jaw clenched at the variations between the reading and the true pattern etched onto the surface of the tube. If the crystal failed, the entire circuit was inoperative, and frozen death waited quietly in the air far above him for the day he couldn’t go under. Or he might be underground, when the crystal collapsed. Death was here, too, a quicker and much more spectacular death that would leave him stuck forever like a fly in amber. A fly that is part of the amber. He thought about the way Soft-Head had got his and shuddered slightly.

  Soft-Head Samuels had been one of the old gang, the hard-bitten rock divers who had been the first to uncover the mineral wealth under the eternal Alaskan snows. SoftHead had slipped off a hogback two hundred meters down, and literally fallen face first into the fabulous White Owl mother lode. That was the strike that started the rush of ’63. As the money-hungry hordes rushed north to Dawson he had strolled south with a fortune. He came back in three years with no more than his plane fare and a measureless distrust of humanity.

  He rejoined the little group around the pot-bellied stove, content just to sit among his old cronies. He didn’t talk about his trip to the outside and no one asked any questions. The only sign that he had been away was the way he clamped down on his cigar whenever a stranger came into the room. North American Mining grubstaked him to a new outfit and he went back to tramping the underground wastes.

  One day he walked into the ground and never came up again. “Got stuck,” they muttered, but they didn’t know just where until Peter walked through him in ’71.

  Pete remembered it, too well. He had been dog-tired and sleepy when he had walked through that hunk of rock that hadn’t been all rock. Soft-Head was standing there— trapped for eternity in the stone. His face was horror-stricken as he stood half bent over, grabbing at his switch box. For one horrible instant Soft-Head must have known that something was wrong with his walk-through—then the rock had closed in. He had been standing there for seven years in the same position he would occupy for all eternity, the atoms of his body mixed inextricably with the atoms of the surrounding rock.

  Peter cursed under his breath. If he didn’t get enough of a strike pretty soon to buy a new crystal, he would become part of that
timeless gallery of lost prospectors. His power pack was shot and his oxygen tank leaked. His beat-up Miller sub-suit belonged in a museum, not on active duty. It was patched like an inner tube and still wouldn’t hold air the way it should. All he needed was one strike, one little strike.

  His helmet light picked a blue glint from some crystals in the gulley wall. It might be Ytt. He leaped off the granite spine he had been following and sank slowly through the lighter rock. Plugging his hand neutralizer into the socket in his belt, he lifted out a foot-thick section of rock. The shining rod of the neutralizer adjusted the vibration plane of the sample to the same frequency as his own. Pete pressed the mouth-shaped opening of the spectro-analyzer to the boulder and pressed the trigger. The brief, intensely hot atomic flame blazed against the hard surface, vaporizing it instantly.

  The flim transparency popped out of the analyzer and Pete studied the spectrographic lines intently. Wrong again; no trace of the familiar Yttrotantalite lines. With an angry motion he stowed the test equipment in his pack and ploughed on through the gummy rock.

  Yttrotantalite was the ore and tantalum was the metal extracted from it. This rare metal was the main ingredient of the delicate piezoelectric crystals that made the vibratory mass penetrator possible. Ytt made tantalum, tantalum made crystals, crystals operated the walk-through that he used to find more Ytt to make … It was just like a squirrel cage, and Pete was the squirrel, a very unhappy animal at the present moment.

  Pete carefully turned the rheostat knob on the walkthrough, feeding a trifle more power into the circuit. It would be hard on the crystal, but he needed it to enable him to push through the jelly-like earth.

  His thoughts kept returning to that little crystal that meant his life. It was a thin wafer of what looked like dirty glass, ground and polished to the most exacting tolerances. When subjected to an almost microscopic current, it vibrated at exactly the correct frequency that allowed one mass to slide between the molecules of another. This weak signal in turn controlled the much more powerful circuit that enabled himself and all his equipment to move through the earth. If the crystal failed, the atoms of his body would return to the vibratory plane of the normal world and alloy themselves with the earth atoms through which he was moving… . Pete shook his head as if to clear away the offending thoughts and quickened his pace down the slope.