The Big Black Mark

by A Bertram Chandler

"Good," murmured Grimes. Then, "Never mind the analysis for now. It's all being recorded. Watch the screen. Bring the probe down to that. .. canal."

  "How do you know it's not a road or a railway?" asked Brandt.

  "I don't. But it looks like water."

  The probe was now losing altitude fast, plunging down through the rift in the clouds, dropping below the ceiling. Beneath it spread the great plain, the browns and yellows and greens of it now seen to be in regular patterns—crops as yet unripe, crops ready for harvesting, crops harvested? There were roads between the fields, not as distinct as the canal, but definite enough. There was motion—dark cloud shadows drifting with the wind, a ripple over the fields that subtly and continuously changed and shifted the intensities of light and shade and color. And there was other motion, obviously not natural—a tiny black object that crawled like a beetle along the straight line of the canal, trailing a plume of white smoke or steam.

  "Home on that boat," ordered Grimes.

  "That. . . boat, sir?"

  "That thing on the canal." Grimes could not resist a little sarcasm. "The word 'boat,' Mr. Tangye, was used long before it was applied to the small craft carried by spaceships. Home on the boat."

  "Very good, sir," responded Tangye sulkily.

  As the probe descended, details of the boat could be make out. It was a barge, self-propelled, with its foredeck practically all one long hatch, with a wheelhouse-cum-accommodation-block aft, just forward of the smoking stovepipe funnel. Suddenly a head appeared at one of the open wheelhouse windows, looking all around, finally staring upward. That was the main drawback of the probes, thought Grimes, With their inertial drive-units running they were such noisy little brutes. He could imagine the bewilderment of the bargemen when they heard the strange clattering in the sky, louder than the steady thumping of their own engines, when they looked up to see the silvery flying torpedo with its spiky efflorescence of antennae.

  The crew member who had looked up withdrew his head suddenly, but not before those in Discovery's control room had learned that he was most definitely nonhuman. The neck was too long, too thin. The eyes were huge and round. There was no nose, although there was a single nostril slit. The mouth was a pouting, fleshy-lipped circle. The skin was a dark olive-green. The huge ears were even more prominent than Grimes's own.

  The water under the stern of the barge—which, until now, had been leaving only a slight wake—boiled into white foam as the revolutions of the screw were suddenly increased. Obviously the canal vessel was putting on a burst of speed to try to escape from the thing in the sky. It could not, of course; Tangye, with a slight adjustment to the probe's remote controls, kept pace easily.

  "No need to frighten them to death," said Grimes. "Make it look as though you're abandoning the chase."

  But it was too late. The barge sheered in toward the bank and the blunt stem gouged deeply into the soft soil, the threshing screw keeping it firmly embedded. The wheelhouse erupted beings; seen from the back they looked more human than otherwise. They ran along the foredeck, jumped ashore from the bows, scurried, with their long arms flailing wildly, toward the shelter of a clump of trees.

  "Follow them, sir?" asked Tangye.

  "No. But we might as well have a close look at the barge, now. Bring the probe down low over the foredeck."

  Steel or iron construction, noted Grimes as the probe moved slowly from forward to aft. Riveted plates . . . no welding. Wooden hatch boards, as like as not, under a canvas—or something like canvas—hatch cover.

  He said, "Let's have a look in the wheelhouse, pilot Try not to break any windows."

  "Very good, sir."

  It was not, strictly speaking, a wheelhouse, as steering was done by a tiller, not a wheel. There was, however, what looked like a binnacle, although it was not possible to see, from outside, what sort of compass it housed. There was a voicepipe—for communication with the engine room? Probably.

  Grimes then had Tangye bring the probe to what had to be the engine room skylight, abaft the funnel. Unfortunately both flaps were down, and secured somehow from below so that it was impossible for the probe's working arms to lift them.

  "Well," commented Grimes at last, "we have a fair idea of the stage their technology has reached. But it's odd, all the same. People capable of building and operating a quite sophisticated surface craft shouldn't bolt like rabbits at the mere sight of a strange machine in the sky."

  "Unless," sneered Brandt, "other blundering spacemen have made landings on this world and endeared themselves to the natives."

  "I don't think so, Doctor," Grimes told him. "Our intelligence service, with all its faults, is quite efficient. If any human ships had made landings on this planet we should have known. And the same would apply in the case of nonhuman spacefarers, such as the Shaara and the Hallicheki. Mphm. Could it be, do you think that they have reason to fear flying machines that do not bear their own national colors? Mightn't there be a war in progress, or a state of strained relations liable to blow up into a war at any moment?"

  Brandt laughed nastily. "And wouldn't that be right up your alley, Commander Grimes? Gives you a chance to make a snap decision as to who are the goodies and who the baddies before taking sides. I've been warned about that unfortunate propensity of yours."

  "Have you?" asked Grimes coldly. Then, to Tangye, "Carry on along the canal until you come to the nearest town or city. Then we'll see what happens."

  Chapter 16

  Swiftly along the canal skimmed the probe, obedient to Tangye's control. It hovered for a while over a suspension bridge—an affair of squat stone pylons and heavy chain cables—and turned its cameras on to a steam railway train that was crossing the canal. The locomotive was high-stacked, big-wheeled, belching steam, smoke, and sparks, towing a dozen tarpaulin-covered freight cars. The engine crew did not look up at the noisy machine in the sky; as was made evident by the probe's audio pickups their own machinery was making more than enough racket to drown out any extraneous mechanical sounds.

  The train chuffed and rattled away serenely into the distance, and Grimes debated with himself whether or not to follow it—it had to be going somewhere—or to carry on along the canal. He ordered Tangye to lift the probe and to make an all-around scan of the horizon. At a mere two kilometers of altitude a city came into full view, on the canal, whereas the railway line, in both directions, lost itself in ranges of low hills. The choice was obvious.

  He ordered the navigator to reduce altitude. From too great a height it is almost impossible to get any idea of architectural details; any major center of habitation is no more than a pattern of streets and squares and parks. It was not long before the city appeared again on the screen—a huddle of towers, great and small, on the horizon, reflected by the gleaming straight edge of the canal. It was like an assemblage of child's building bricks—upended cylinders and rectangular blocks, crowned with hemispheres or broad-based cones. The sun came out from behind the clouds and the metropolis glowed with muted color—yellows and browns and russet reds. Without this accident of mellow light striking upon and reflected from surfaces of contrasting materials the town would have seemed formidable, ugly, even—but for these moments at least it displayed an alien beauty of its own.

  There was traffic on the canal again, big barges like the one' of which the crew had been thrown into such a panic. There were three boats outbound from the city. These, sighting the thing in the sky, turned in a flurry of reversed screws and hard-over rudders, narrowly escaping ramming one another, scurried back to the protection of the high stone walls. The probe hovered and allowed them to make their escape unpursued.

  And then, surging out from between the massive piers of a stone bridge, the Watergate, came a low black shape, a white bone in its teeth, trailing a dense streamer of gray smoke. It had a minimal funnel and a heavily armored wheelhouse aft, a domed turret forward. Through two parallel slits in the dome protruded twin barrels. There was little doubt as to what they were, even th
ough there was a strong resemblance to an old-fashioned observatory. "Those sure as hell aren't telescopes!" muttered Brabham. The barrels lifted as the dome swiveled. "Get her upstairs, pilot!" ordered Grimes. "Fast!" Tangye stabbed in fumbling haste at his controls, keeping the probe's camera trained on the gunboat, which dwindled rapidly in the screen as the robot lifted. Yellow flame and dirty white smoke flashed from the two muzzles—but it was obvious that the result would not be even a near miss. Antiaircraft guns those cannon might well be, but their gunners were not used to firing at such a swift moving target.

  "All right," said Grimes. "Hold her at that, Mr. Tangye. We can always take evasive action again if we have to. I doubt if those are very rapid-fire guns."

  "I—I can't," mumbled the navigator. In the screen the picture of the city and its environs was dwindling fast. "You can't?"

  Tangye, at his console, was giving an impersonation of an overly enthusiastic concert pianist. The lock of long fair hair that had flopped down over his forehead aided the illusion. He cried despairingly, "She—she won't answer."

  "Their gunnery must have been better than we thought," remarked Brabham, with morose satisfaction.

  "Rubbish!" snapped Swinton. "I watched for the shell bursts. They were right at the edge of the screen. Nowhere near the target."

  "Mr. Brabham," asked Grimes coldly, "did you satisfy yourself that the probe was in good working order? A speck of dust in the wrong place, perhaps . . . a drop of moisture . . . a fleck of corrosion."

  "Of course, sir," sneered Brabham, "all the equipment supplied to this ship is nothing but the best. I don't think!"

  "It is your job, Number One," Grimes told him, "to bring it up to standard."

  "I'm not a miracle worker. And I'd like to point out, sir, that this probe that we are—sorry, were—using—"

  "I'm still using it!" objected Tangye.

  "After a fashion." Then, to Grimes again: "This probe, Captain, has already seen service aboard Pathfinder, Wayfarer, and, just before we got it, Endeavor—all of them senior ships to this, with four ring captains."

  "Are you insinuating," asked Grimes, "that mere commanders get captains' leavings?" (He had thought the same himself, but did not like Brabham's using it as an excuse.)

  "Sir!" It was Tangye again. "The screen's gone blank. We've lost the picture!"

  "And the telemetering?"

  "Still working—most of it. But she's going up like a rocket. I can't stop her. She's—Sir! She's had it! She must have blown up!"

  Grimes broke the uneasy silence in the control room. "Write off one probe," he said at last. "Luckily the taxpayer has a deep pocket. Unluckily I'm a taxpayer myself. And so are all of you."

  "One would never think so," sneered Brandt.

  "Send down the other probe, sir?" asked Brabham sulkily.

  "What is its service history?" countered Grimes.

  "The same as the one Mr. Tangye just lost."

  "It lost itself!" the navigator objected hotly.

  Grimes ignored the exchange. He went on, "It has, I suppose, received the same loving attention aboard this ship as its mate?"

  Brabham made no reply.

  "Then it stays in its bay until such time as it has been subjected to a thorough—and I mean thorough—overhaul. Meanwhile, I think that we shall be able to run a fair preliminary survey of this planet if we put the ship into a circumpolar orbit. We might even be able to find out for sure if there are any wars actually in progress at this moment. I must confess that the existence of readily available antiaircraft artillery rather shook me."

  "What are you saying in your preliminary report to Base, Commander Grimes?" asked Brandt,

  "There's not going to be one," Grimes told him.

  "And why not?" demanded the scientist incredulously.

  One reason why not, thought Grimes, is that I'm not where I'm supposed to be. I'll wait until I have a fait accompli before I break radio silence. He said, "We're far too close to the territorial limits of the Empire of Waverley. If the emperor's monitors pick up a signal from us and learn that there are Earth-type planets in their back yard we shall have an Imperial battle cruiser squadron getting into our hair in less time than it takes to think about it."

  "But a coded message—" began Brandt.

  "Codes are always being broken. And the message would have to be a long one, which means that it would be easy to get a fix on the source of transmission. There will be no leakage of information insofar as this planet is concerned until we have a cast-iron treaty, signed, sealed, and witnessed, with its ruler or rulers. And, in any case, we still have another world to investigate. Mphm."

  He turned to the executive officer. "Commander Brabham, you will organize a working party and take the remaining probe down completely. You will reassemble it only when you are quite satisfied that it will work the way it should." Then it was the navigator's turn. "Mr. Tangye, please calculate the maneuvers required to put us in the circumpolar orbit. Let me know when you've finished doing your sums."

  He left the control room, well aware that if the hostile eyes directed at his back were laser projectors he would be a well-cooked corpse.

  Back in his own quarters he considered sending an initial message to Captain Davinas, then decided against it, even though such a code could never be broken and it would be extremely difficult for anybody to get a fix on such a short transmission. He would wait, he told himself, until he saw which way the cat was going to jump.

  Chapter 17

  It was an unexpected cat that jumped.

  It took the form of suddenly fracturing welding when the old ship was nudged out of her equatorial orbit into the trajectory that, had all gone well, would have been developed into one taking her over north and south poles while the planet rotated beneath her. With the rupturing of her pressure hull airtight doors slammed shut, and nobody was so unfortunate as to be caught in any of the directly affected compartments. But atmosphere was lost, as were many tons of fresh water from a burst tank. Repairs could be carried out in orbit, but the air and water could be replenished only on a planetary surface.

  A landing would have to be made.

  A landing—and a preliminary report to Base?

  A preliminary report to Base followed, all too probably, by the arrival on the scene of an Imperial warship with kind offers of assistance and a cargo of Waverley flags to be planted on very available site.

  So there was no report.

  Meanwhile, there was the landing place to select. Grimes wanted somewhere as far as possible from any center of population, but with a supply of fresh water ready to hand. He assumed that the seas of this world were salt and that the rivers and lakes would not be. That was the usual pattern on Earth-type planets, although bitter lakes were not unknown.

  There was a large island in one of the oceans, in the northern hemisphere, well out from the coastline of its neighboring continent. By day lakes and rivers could be seen gleaming among its mountains. By night there were no lights to be seen, even along the shore, to indicate the presence of cities, towns, or villages—and Discovery's main telescope could have picked up the glimmer of a solitary candle. With a little bit of luck, thought Grimes, his descent through the atmosphere would go unheard and unobserved. It should be possible to replenish air and water without interference by the natives—and, even more important, without being obliged to interfere with them.

  The repairs were carried out while the ship was still in orbit; Grimes had no desire to negotiate an atmosphere in a ship the aerodynamic qualities of which had been impaired. This essential patching up meant that there was no labor to spare to work on the remaining probe—but in these circumstances a landing would have to be made without too much delay. The closed ecology of the ship had been thrown badly out of kilter by the loss of water and atmosphere, and would deteriorate dangerously if time were spent on preliminary surveys.

  The landing was timed so that touchdown would be made shortly after sunrise. This meant that t
here would be a full day in which to work before nightfall—and as it was summer in the northern hemisphere the hours of daylight would be long. Also, a low sun casts long shadows, showing up every slightest irregularity in the ground. A spaceship, descending vertically and with tripedal landing gear, can be set down on quite uneven surfaces; nonetheless the vision of a disastrous topple recurs in the nightmares of every survey ship captain.

  During her slow, controlled fall Discovery was bathed in bright sunlight while, until the very last few minutes, the terrain directly below her was still in darkness. To the east of the terminator, where there was full daylight, the sea was a glowing blue and, dark against the oceanic horizon, in silhouette against the bright, clear sky, lifted the mountains of the distant mainland.

  Night fled to the west and the rugged landscape beneath the ship took on form and color. Yes, there was the lake, an amoeboid splotch of liquid silver almost in the center of the periscope screen, its mirrorlike surface broken by a spattering of black islets. The northern shore was cliffy, and inland from the escarpments the forested hillside was broken by deep gullies. To the south, however, there was a wide, golden beach fronting a grassy plain, beautifully level, although there were outcrops of what seemed to be large boulders. There was an area, however, that seemed to be reasonably clear of the huge stones with their betraying shadows and, applying lateral thrust, Grimes maneuvered his ship until she was directly above it.