The Hard Way Up

by A Bertram Chandler

  Now these two suits had to be modified. The radio transceivers, with their metallic parts, were removed from the helmets. Plastic air bottles were substituted for the original metal ones. Jointures and seals between helmet and shoulder pieces were removed, and replaced by plastic.

  While this was going on Beadle asked, "Who are you sending, Captain?"

  "I'm sending nobody, Number One. I shall be going myself, and if any one of you gentlemen cares to volunteer . . . No, not you. You're second in command. You must stay with the ship."

  Surprisingly it was Deane who stepped forward. "I'll come with you, Captain."

  "You, Spooky?" asked Grimes, not unkindly.

  The telepath flushed. "I . . . I feel that I should. That . . . That thing out there is awakening. It was as though that rocket was a knock on the door . . ."

  "Why didn't you tell us?"

  "I . . . I wasn't sure. But the feeling's getting stronger. There's something there. Some sort of intelligence."

  "Can't you get in touch with it?"

  "I've been trying. But it's too vague, too weak. And I've the feeling that there has to be actual contact. Physical contact, I mean."

  "Mphm."

  "In any case, Captain, you need me with you."

  "Why, Spooky?"

  Deane jerked his head towards the watch on Grimes's wrist. "We'll not be allowed to take any metal with us. How shall we know when we've been away long enough, that we have to get back before our air runs out?"

  "How shall we know if you're along?"

  "Easy. Somebody will have to sit with Fido, and clock watch all the time, really concentrating on it. At that short range Fido will pick up the thoughts even of a non-telepath quite clearly. I shall remain en rapport with Fido, of course."

  "Mphm," grunted Grimes. Yes, he admitted to himself, the idea had its merits. He wondered whom he should tell off for the clock-watching detail. All spacemen except psionic radio officers hate the organic amplifiers, the so-called "dogs' brains in aspic," the obscenely naked masses of canine thinking apparatus floating in their spherical containers of circulating nutrient fluid.

  Slovotny liked dogs. He'd be best for the job.

  Slovotny was far from enthusiastic, but was told firmly that communications are communications, no matter how performed.

  The Inertial Drive was restarted to make it easier for Grimes and Deane to get into their suits. Each, stripped to brief, supporting underwear, lay supine on his spread-out garment. Carefully they wriggled their hands into the tight-fitting gloves—the gloves that became tighter still once the fabric was in contact with the skin. They worked their feet into the bootees, aided, by Beadle and von Tannenbaum, acting as dressers. Then, slowly and carefully, the First Lieutenant and the Navigator drew the fabric up and over arms and legs and bodies, smoothing it, pressing out the least wrinkle, trying to maintain an even, all-over pressure. To complete the job the seams were welded. Grimes wondered, as he had wondered before, what would happen if that fantastic adhesive came unstuck when the wearer of the suit was cavorting around in hard vacuum. It hadn't happened yet—as far as he knew—but there is always a first time.

  "She'll do," said Beadle at last.

  "She'd better do," said Grimes. He added, "If you're after promotion, Number One, there are less suspect ways of going about it."

  Beadle looked hurt.

  Grimes got to his feet, scowling. If one is engaged upon what might be a perilous enterprise armor is so much more appropriate than long underwear. He said, "All right. Shut down inertial drive as soon as we've got our helmets on. Then we'll be on our way."

  They were on their way.

  Each man carried, slung to his belt, a supply of little rockets—Roman candles, rather—insulated cardboard cylinders with friction fuses. They had flares, too, the chemical composition of such making them combustible even in a vacuum.

  The Roman candles functioned quite efficiently, driving them across the gap between ship and sphere. Grimes handled himself well, Deane not so well. It was awkward having no suit radio; it was impossible to give the telepath any instructions. At the finish Grimes came in to a perfect landing, using a retro blast at the exact split second. Deane came in hard and clumsily. There was no air to transmit the clang, but Grimes felt the vibration all along and through his body.

  He touched helmets. "Are you all right, Spooky?"

  "Just . . .winded, Captain."

  Grimes leading, the two men crawled over the surface of the sphere, the adhesive pads on gloves, knees, elbows and feet functioning quite well—rather too well, in fact. But it was essential that they maintain contact with the smooth metal. Close inspection confirmed distant observation. The 100-foot-diameter globe was utterly devoid of protuberances. The markings—they were no letters or numerals known to the Earthmen—could have been painted on, but Grimes decided that they were probably something along the lines of an integrated circuit. He stopped crawling, carefully made contact with his helmet and the seamless, rivetless plating. He listened. Yes, there was the faintest humming noise. Machinery?

  He beckoned Deane to him, touched helmets. He said, "There's something working inside this thing, Spooky."

  "I know, Captain. And there's something alive in there. A machine intelligence, I think. It's aware of us."

  "How much time have we?"

  Deane was silent for a few seconds, reaching out with his mind to his psionic amplifier aboard Adder. "Two hours and forty-five minutes."

  "Good. If we could only find a way to get into this oversized beach ball . . ."

  Deane jerked his head away from Grimes's. He was pointing with a rigid right arm. Grimes turned and looked. Coming into view in the glare of the searchlight, as the ball rotated, was a round hole, an aperture that expanded as they watched it. Then they were in shadow, but they crawled towards the opening. When they were in the light again they were almost on top of it. They touched helmets again. "Will you come into my parlor . . . ?" whispered Grimes.

  "I . . . I feel that it's safe . . ." Deane told him.

  "Good. Then we'll carry on. Is that an airlock, I wonder? There's only one way to find out . . ."

  It was not an airlock. It was a doorway into cavernous blackness, in which loomed great, vague shapes, dimly visible in the reflected beam of Adder's searchlight—then invisible as this hemisphere of the little, artificial world was swept into night. Grimes was falling; his gloves could get no grip on the smooth, slippery rim of the hole. He was falling, and cried out in alarm as something brushed against him. But it was only Deane. The telepath clutched him in an embrace that, had Deane been of the opposite sex, might have been enjoyable.

  "Keep your paws off me, Spooky!" ordered Grimes irritably. Yet he, too, was afraid of the dark, was suffering the primordial fear. The door through which they had entered must be closed now, otherwise they would be getting some illumination from Adder's searchlight. The dense blackness was stifling. Grimes fumbled at his belt, trying to find a flare by touch. The use of one of the little rockets in this confined space could be disastrous. But there had to be light. Grimes was not a religious man, otherwise he would have prayed for it.

  Then, suddenly, there was light.

  It was a soft, diffused illumination, emanating from no discernible source. It did not, at first, show much. The inner surface of the sphere was smooth, glassy, translucent rather than transparent. Behind it hulked the vague shapes that they had glimpsed before their entry. Some were moving slowly, some were stationary. None of them was like any machine or living being that either of the two men had ever seen.

  Helmets touched.

  "It's aware of us. It knows that we need light . . ." whispered Deane.

  "What is It?"

  "I . . . I dare not ask. It is too . . . big?"

  And Grimes, although no telepath, was feeling it too, awe rather than fear, although he admitted to himself that he was dreadfully afraid. It was like his first space walk, the first time that he had been out from the f
rail bubble of light and warmth, one little man in the vastness of the emptiness between the worlds. He tried to take his mind off it by staring at the strange machinery—if it was machinery—beyond that glassy inner shell, tried to make out what these devices were, what they were doing. He focused his attention on what seemed to be a spinning wheel of rainbow luminescence. It was a mistake.

  He felt himself being drawn into that radiant eddy—not physically, but psychically. He tried to resist. It was useless.

  Then the pictures came—vivid, simple.

  There was a naked, manlike being hunkered down in a sandy hollow among rocks. Manlike? It was Grimes himself. A flattish slab of wood was held firmly between his horny heels, projecting out and forward, away from him. In his two hands he gripped a stick, was sawing away with it, to and fro on the surface of the slab, in which the pointed end of it had already worn a groove. (Grimes could feel that stick in his hands, could feel the vibration as he worked it backwards and forwards.) There was a wisp of blue smoke from the groove, almost invisible at first, but becoming denser. There was a tiny red spark that brightened, expanded. Hastily Grimes let go of the fire stick, grabbed a handful of dried leaves and twigs, dropped them on top of the smolder. Carefully he brought his head down, began to blow gently, fanning the beginnings of the fire with his breath. There was flame now—feeble, hesitant. There was flame, and a faintly heard crackle as the kindling caught. There was flame—and Grimes had to pull his head back hastily to avoid being scorched.

  The picture changed.

  It was night now—and Grimes and his family were squatting around the cheerful blaze. One part of his mind that had not succumbed to the hypnosis wondered who that woman was. He decided wryly that she—big-bellied, flabby-breasted—was not his cup of tea at all. But he knew that she was his mate, just as he knew that those almost simian brats were his children. •

  It was night, and from the darkness around the camp came the roars and snarls of the nocturnal predators. But they were afraid of fire. He, Grimes, had made fire. Therefore those beasts of prey should be afraid of him. He toyed with the glimmerings of an idea. He picked up a well-gnawed femur—that day he had been lucky enough to find a not-too-rotten carcass that had been abandoned by the original killer and not yet discovered by the other scavengers—and hefted it experimentally in his hand. It seemed to belong there. From curiosity rather than viciousness he brought it swinging around, so that the end of it struck the skull of the woman with a sharp crack. She squealed piteously. Grimes had no language with which to think, but he knew that a harder blow could have killed her. Dimly he realized that a hard blow could kill a tiger . . .

  He . . .

  He was outside the sphere, and Deane was with him. Coming towards him was a construction of blazing lights. He was afraid—and then he snapped back into the here-and-now. He was John Grimes, Lieutenant, Federation Survey Service, Captain of the courier Adder. That was his ship. His home. He must return to his home, followed by this Agent of the Old Ones, so that observation and assessment could be made, and plans for the further advancement of the race.

  The ship was no longer approaching.

  Grimes pulled a Roman candle from his belt, motioned to Deane to do likewise. He lit it, jetted swiftly towards Adder. He knew, without looking around, that the sphere was following.

  Although blinded by the searchlight he managed to bring himself to the main airlock without mishap, followed by Deane. The two men pulled themselves into the little compartment. The outer door shut. Atmospheric pressure built up. Grimes removed the telepath's helmet, waited for Deane to perform a like service for him.

  Deane's face was, if possible, even paler than usual. "Captain," he said, "we got back just in time. We've no more than a few minutes' air in our bottles

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  Deane laughed shakily. "How could I? I was being . . . educated. If it's any use to me or to anybody else, I know how to make wheels out of sections of tree trunk . . ."

  Beadle's voice crackled from an intercom bulkhead speaker. "Captain! Captain! Come up to Control! It's . . . vanished!"

  "What's vanished?" demanded Grimes into the nearest pick-up.

  "That . . . that sphere . . ."

  "We're on our way," said Grimes.

  Yes, the sphere had vanished. It had not flickered out like a snuffed candle; it had seemed to recede at a speed approaching that of light. It was gone, and no further investigation of its potentialities and capabilities would be possible.

  It was Deane who was able to give an explanation of sorts. He said, "It was an emissary of the Old Ones. All intelligent races in this Galaxy share the legends—the gods who came down from the sky, bearing gifts of fire and weaponry, setting Man, or his local equivalent, on the upward path . . ."

  "I played God myself once," said Grime. "I wasn't very popular. But go on, Spooky."

  "These Old Ones . . . Who were they? We shall never know. What were their motivations? Missionary zeal? Altruism? The long-term development of planets, by the indigenes, so that the Old Ones could, at some future date, take over?

  "Anyhow, I wasn't entirely under Its control. I was seeing the things that It meant me to see, feeling the things that It meant me to feel—but, at the same time, I was picking up all sorts of outside impressions. It was one of many of Its kind, sent out—how long ago?—on a missionary voyage. It was a machine, and—as machines do—it malfunctioned. Its job was to make a landing on some likely world and to make contact with the primitive natives, and to initiate their education. It was programmed, too, to get the hell out if It landed on a planet whose natives already used fire, who were already metal workers. That was why It, although not yet awakened from Its long sleep, repelled our metallic sounding rocket. That was why you, Captain, got this odd hunch about a nonmetallic approach.

  "Your plastic rocket woke It up properly. It assumed that we, with no metal about us, were not yet fire-making, tool-using animals. It did what It was built to do—taught us how to make fire, and tools and weapons. And then It followed us home. It was going to keep watch over us, from generation to generation, was going to give us an occasional nudge in the right direction. Possibly It had another function—to act as a sort of marker buoy for Its builders, so that They, in Their own good time, could find us, to take over.

  "But even It, with Its limited intelligence, must have realized, at the finish, that we and It were in airless space and not on a planetary surface. It must have seen that we, using little rocket-propulsion units, were already sophisticated fire-users. And then, when we entered an obviously metallic spaceship, the penny must finally have dropped, with a loud clang.

  "Do you want to know what my last impression was, before It shoved off?"

  "Of course," said Grimes.

  "It was one of hurt, of disillusion, of bewilderment. It was the realization that It was at the receiving end of a joke. The thing was utterly humorless, of course—but It could still hate being laughed at."

  There was a silence, broken by Beadle. "And Somewhere," he said piously, "at Some Time, Somebody must have asked, 'Where is my wandering buoy tonight?' "

  "I sincerely hope," Grimes told him, "that this Somebody is not still around, and that He or It never tries to find out."

  The Mountain Movers

  Olgana—Earth-type, revolving around a Sol-type primary—is a backwater planet. It is well off the main Galactic trade routes, although it gets by quite comfortably by exporting meat, butter, wool and the like to the neighboring, highly industrialized Mekanika System. Olgana was a Lost Colony, one of those worlds stumbled upon quite by chance during the First Expansion, settled in a spirit of great thankfulness by the personnel of a hopelessly off-course, completely lost emigrant lodejammer. It was rediscovered—this time with no element of chance involved—by the Survey Service's Trail Blazer, before the colonists had drifted too far from the mainstream of human culture. Shortly thereafter there were legal proceedings against these same colonists, o
ccupying a few argumentative weeks at the Federation's Court of Galactic Justice in Geneva, on Earth; had these been successful they would have been followed by an Eviction Order. Even in those days it was illegal for humans to establish themselves on any planet already supporting an intelligent life form. But—and the colonists' Learned Counsel made the most of it—that law had not been in existence when Lode Jumbuk lifted off from Port Woomera on what turned out to be her last voyage. It was only a legal quibble, but the aborigines had no representation at Court—and, furthermore, Counsel for the Defense had hinted, in the right quarters, that if he lost this case he would bring suit on behalf of his clients against the Interstellar Transport Commission, holding that body fully responsible for the plights of Lode Jumbuk's castaways and their descendants. ITC, fearing that a dangerous and expensive precedent might be established, brought behind-the-scenes pressure to bear and the case was dropped. Nobody asked the aborigines what they thought about it all.