Enemies In Space

by Groff Conklin (Ed. )

One of the linguists remained turned toward the loud-speaker, then looked at the widening patches of blue sky showing out the window, his expression puzzled. He had understood.

  “It’s dark,” the thin Intelligence Department decoder translated, low-voiced, to the man from the Times. “Your atmosphere is thick. That’s precisely what Bud said.”

  Another three minutes. The Times caught himself about to light a cigarette and swore silently, blowing the match out and putting the cigarette back into its package. He listened for the sound of the rocket jets. It was time for the landing, yet he heard no blasts.

  The green light came on in the transceiver.

  Message in.

  Instinctively, he came to his feet. Nathen abruptly was standing beside him. Then the message came in the voice he was coming to think of as Bud. It spoke and paused. Suddenly the Times knew.

  “We’ve landed.” Nathen whispered the words.

  The wind blew across the open spaces of white concrete and damp soil that was the empty airfield, swaying the wet, shiny grass. The people in the room looked out, listening for the roar of jets, looking for the silver bulk of a spaceship in the sky.

  Nathen moved, seating himself at the transmitter, switching it on to warm up, checking and balancing dials. Jacob Luke of the Times moved softly to stand behind his right shoulder, hoping he could be useful. Nathen made a half motion of his head, as if to glance back at him, unhooked two of the earphone sets hanging on the side of the tall streamlined box that was the automatic translator, plugged them in, and handed one back over his shoulder to the Times man.

  The voice began to come from the speaker again.

  Hastily, Jacob Luke fitted the earphones over his ears. He fancied he could hear Bud’s voice tremble. For a moment it was just Bud’s voice speaking the alien language, and then, very distant and clear in his earphones, he heard the recorded voice of the linguist say an English word, then a mechanical click and another clear word in the voice of one of the other translators, then another as the alien’s voice flowed from the loud-speaker, the cool single words barely audible, overlapping and blending like translating thought, skipping unfamiliar words yet quite astonishingly clear.

  “Radar shows no buildings or civilization near. The atmosphere around us registers as thick as glue. Tremendous gas pressure, low gravity, no light at all. You didn’t describe it like this. Where are you, Joe? This isn’t some kind of trick, is it?” Bud hesitated, was prompted by a deeper official voice, and jerked out the words.

  “If it is a trick, we are ready to repel attack.”

  The linguist stood listening. He whitened slowly and beckoned the other linguists over to him and whispered to them.

  Joseph Nathen looked at them with unwarranted bitter hostility while he picked up the hand mike, plugging it into the translator. “Joe calling,” he said quietly into it in clear, slow English. “No trick. We don’t know where you are. I am trying to get a direction fix from your signal. Describe your surroundings to us if at all possible.” Nearby, the floodlights blazed steadily on the television platform, ready for the official welcome of the aliens to Earth. The television channels of the world had been alerted to set aside their scheduled programs for an unscheduled great event. In the long room the people waited, listening for the swelling sound of rocket jets.

  This time, after the light came on, there was a long delay. The speaker sputtered and sputtered again, building to a steady scratching through which they could barely hear a dim voice. It came through in a few tinny words and then wavered back to inaudibility. The machine translated in their earphones.

  “Tried . . . seemed . . . repair . . .” Suddenly it came in clearly. “Can’t tell if the auxiliary blew, too. Will try it. We might pick you up clearly on the next try. I have the volume down. Where is the landing port? Repeat. Where is the landing port? Where are you?”

  Nathen put down the hand mike and carefully set a dial on the recording box and flipped a switch, speaking over his shoulder. “This sets it to repeat what I said the last time. It keeps repeating.” Then he sat with unnatural stillness, his head still half turned, as if he had suddenly caught a glimpse of answer and was trying with no success whatever to grasp it.

  The green warning light cut in, the recording clicked, and the playback of Bud’s face and voice appeared on the screen.

  “We heard a few words, Joe, and then the receiver blew again. We’re adjusting a viewing screen to pick up the long waves that go through the murk and convert them to visible light. We’ll be able to see out soon. The engineer says that something is wrong with the stern jets, and the captain has had me broadcast a help call to our nearest space base.” He made the mouth O of a grin. “The message won’t reach it for some years. I trust you, Joe, but get us out of here, will you?—They’re buzzing that the screen is finally ready. Hold everything.” The screen went gray and the green light went off.

  The Times considered the lag required for the help call, the speaking and recording of the message just received, the time needed to reconvert a viewing screen.

  “They work fast.” He shifted uneasily and added at random, “Something wrong with the time factor. All wrong. They work too fast.” The green light came on again immediately. Nathen half turned to him, sliding his words hastily into the gap of time as the message was recorded and slowed. “They’re close enough for our transmission power to blow their receiver.”

  If it was on Earth, why the darkness around the ship? “Maybe they see in the high ultraviolet—the atmosphere is opaque to that band,” the Times suggested hastily as the speaker began to talk in the young extra-Terrestrial’s voice.

  That voice was shaking now. “Stand by for the description.”

  They tensed, waiting. The Times brought a map of the state before his mind’s eye.

  “A half circle of cliffs around the horizon. A wide muddy lake swarming with swimming things. Huge, strange white foliage all around the ship and incredibly huge, pulpy monsters attacking and eating each other on all sides. We almost landed in the lake, right on the soft edge. The mud can’t hold the ship’s weight, and we’re sinking. The engineer says we might be able to blast free, but the tubes are mud-clogged and might blow up the ship. When can you reach us?”

  The Times thought vaguely of the Carboniferous era. Nathen obviously had seen something he had not.

  “Where are they?” the Times asked him quietly.

  Nathen pointed to the antenna position indicators. The Times let his eyes follow the converging imaginary lines of focus out the window to the sunlit airfield, the empty airfield, the drying concrete and green waving grass where the lines met.

  Where the lines met. The spaceship was there!

  The fear of something unknown gripped him suddenly.

  The spaceship was broadcasting again. “Where are you? Answer if possible! We are sinking! Where are you?”

  He saw that Nathen knew. “What is it?” the Times asked hoarsely. “Are they in another dimension or the past or on another world or what?”

  Nathen was smiling bitterly, and Jacob Luke remembered that the young man had a friend in that spaceship. “My guess is that they evolved on a high-gravity planet with a thin atmosphere, near a blue-white star. Sure, they see in the ultraviolet range. Our sun is abnormally small and dim and yellow. Our atmosphere is so thick it screens out ultraviolet.” He laughed harshly. “A good joke on us, the weird place we evolved in, the thing it did to us!”

  “Where are you?” called the alien spaceship. “Hurry, please! We’re sinking!”

  The decoder slowed his tumbled, frightened words and looked up into the Times’ face for understanding. “We’ll rescue them,” he said quietly. “You were right about the time factor, right about them moving at a different speed. I misunderstood. This business about squawk coding, speeding for better transmission to counteract beam waver—I was wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They don’t speed up their broadcasts.”

>   “They don’t—?”

  Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, the Times began to see again the play he had just seen—but the actors were moving at blurring speed, the words jerking out in a fluting, dizzying stream, thoughts and decisions passing with unfollowable rapidity, rippling faces in a twisting blur of expressions, doors slamming wildly, shatteringly, as the actors leaped in and out of rooms.

  No—faster, faster—he wasn’t visualizing it as rapidly as it was, an hour of talk and action in one almost instantaneous “squawk,” a narrow peak of “noise” interfering with a single word in an Earth broadcast! Faster—faster—it was impossible. Matter could not stand such stress—inertia—momentum—abrupt weight.

  It was insane. “Why?” he asked. “How?”

  Nathen laughed again harshly, reaching for the mike. “Get them out? There isn’t a lake or river within hundreds of miles from here!” A shiver of unreality went down the Time/spine. Automatically and inanely, he found himself delving in his pocket for a cigarette while he tried to grasp what had happened. “Where are they, then? Why can’t we see their spaceship?”

  Nathen switched the microphone on in a gesture that showed the bitterness of his disappointment.

  “We’ll need a magnifying glass for that.”

  THE GREATEST TERTIAN

  Anthony Boucher

  One of the outstanding characteristics of the culture of the third planet from the Sun is, as I have stressed earlier, the tendency toward onomatolatry, the worship of great names all but divorced from any true biographical or historical comprehension.

  Many of these names, employed with almost magical significance, must be investigated in later chapters; they include (to give approximate phonetic equivalents) Linkn, Mamt, Ung Klsam, Stain, Ro Sflt (who seems to have appeared in several contradictory avatars), Bakh, Sokr Tis, Mi Klan Jlo, Me Uess-tt, San Kloss, and many others, some of them indubitably of legendary origin.

  But one name appears pre-eminently in every cultural cache so far investigated. From pole to pole and in every Tertian language, we have yet to decipher any cultural remains of sizable proportion that do not contain at least a reference to what must have been unquestionably the greatest Tertian of all time: Sherk Oms.

  It is well at this point to settle once and for all the confusion concerning the two forms of the name: Sherk Oms and Sherk Sper. A few eccentric scholars, notably Shcho Raz in his last speech before the Academy2, have asserted that these names represented two separate individuals; and, indeed, there are small items in which the use of the two forms does differ.

  Sherk Sper, for instance, is generally depicted as a writer of public spectacles; Sherk Oms as a pursuer of offenders against society. Both are represented as living in the capital city of the nation3 of In Gian under the unusual control of a female administrator; but the name of this female is generally given, in accounts of Sherk Sper, as Li Zbet; in accounts of Sherk Oms, as Vi Kto Rya.

  The essential identity of these female names I have explained in my Tertian Phonology.4 The confusion of professions is more apparent than real; the fact of the matter is that Sherk Oms (to use the more widespread of the two forms) was both a writer and a man of action and tended to differentiate the form of his name according to his pursuit of the moment.

  Clinching evidence exists in the two facts that:

  (1) While we are frequently told that Sherk Oms wrote extensively, no cultural cache has turned up any fragment of his work, aside from two accounts of his personal adventures.

  (2) While we know thoroughly the literary work of Sherk Sper, no cultural cache has revealed the slightest reliable biographical material as to his life.

  One characteristic, it may be added, distinguished the great Sherk under both names: his love for disguise. We possess full details on the many magnificently assumed characterizations of Sherk Oms, while we also read that Sherk Sper was wont to disguise himself as many of the most eminent writers and politicians of his era, including Bekn, Ma Lo, Ok Sfud, and others.

  Which aspect of the great Sherk was it, you may well ask, which so endeared him to all Tertians? This is hard to answer. Aside from religious writings, there are two items which we are always sure of discovering in any Tertian cultural cache, either in the original language of In Gian or in translation: the biographical accounts5 of the crime-hunter Sherk Oms, and the plays (to use an untranslatable Tertian word) of Sherk Sper.

  Both contributed so many phrases to the language that it is difficult to imagine Tertian culture without them:

  The dog did nothing in the nighttime (a proverb equivalent to our: While nature rests, the wise chudz sleeps).

  Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears (indicating the early Tertian development of plastic surgery).

  The game is a foot (a baffling reference, in that no cultural cache has yet yielded evidence of a sport suitable to monopods).

  To bee or not to bee (an obvious reference, though by Sherk Sper, to Sherk Oms’ years of retirement).

  Difficult though it is to estimate the relative Tertian esteem for the Master in his two guises, we certainly know, at least, from our own annals, which aspect of the great Sherk would in time have been more valuable to the Tertians—and it was perhaps a realization of this fact that caused the dwellers in Ti Bet to address their prayers to him in the form: Oms mani padme Oms.6

  The very few defeats which Sherk Oms suffered were, as we all know, caused by us. Limited as even he was by the overconventional pattern of Tertian thought, he was quite unable to understand the situation when our advance agent Fi Li Mor was forced to return to his house for the temporospatial rod that Wa Tsn thought to be a rain shield. Our clumsy and bungling removal of a vessel for water transport named, I believe, A Li Sha was still sufficiently alien to perplex him; and he never, we must thank the Great Maker, understood what we had planted on his Tertian world in what he thought to be a matchbox.

  But in time, so penetrating a mind as he reveals under both guises would have understood; and more than that, he might have developed methods of counterattack. We owe our thanks to the absurd brevity of the Tertian life span that he, considered long-lived among his own people, survived fewer than a hundred orbital cycles of the third planet.

  If Sherk Oms, most perceptive and inventive of Tertians, had still been living, the ultimate conquest of the third planet by the fourth might well have been foiled, and his planet might even today still swarm with pullulating Tertians, complete with their concepts of nations, wars, and races,7 rather than being the exquisitely lifeless playground for cultural researchers which today it offers to us, the inhabitants of that neighboring planet which, as best our phoneticists can make out, the Tertians knew as Marz.

  * * *

  Footnotes:

  1 Excerpt from Rom Gul’s Tertian History and Culture. Translated by Anthony Boucher. 12 vols. Kovis, 4739.

  2 See my refutation in Academy Proceedings, 2578: 9, 11/76.

  3 For a full discussion of this extraordinary word, meaning a group of beings feeling themselves set apart from, and above, the rest of the same type of beings (a peculiarly Tertian concept), vide infra, Chapter 127.

  4 Pp. 1259 ff.

  5 Principally by Wa Tan, though also by Start, Pa Mr, Smit, Dr Leth, etc.

  6 The meaning of the middle words is lost.

  7 For these peculiarly Tertian words, again see Chapter 127.