Futures Past

by James White

  When he hit, it was with not quite enough force to break his neck or damage his spacesuit. Mercer had been equally lucky; Davies saw the engineer's suit lamp playing around the walls of the circular chamber into which they had fallen as he searched for and found a light switch. With the chamber brightly lit Mercer turned and advanced anxiously on his still recumbent body.

  Davies relieved the other's anxiety by climbing painfully to his feet.

  Back in the Hannibal's control room Captain Silverman was shouting himself hoarse. "Mercer! Professor!" his voiced dinned in their earphones, "What's wrong? Somebody shouted! What's happening ... ?"

  In a sheepish voice Mercer told the captain what had happened, and assured him that they were both unhurt. Captain Silverman then told Mercer a few things, mainly concerning what he thought of supposedly responsible officers who took stupid risks with the safety of others as well as themselves. Davies came in for a couple of backhanders as well—the professor was surely old enough, Silverman insisted, to know better than to join in a foolhardy stunt like this—but it was the engineer who came under the heaviest fire. And not only was the captain's tone cutting, his sarcasm was hooked, barbed and grooved for poison.

  While this verbal flaying was going on Mercer was silent, but he had discovered a metal trap door in the floor of the chamber and a ladder leading downwards. He had ignored the torrent of abuse and recrimination to the extent of descending the ladder to explore, and when his head emerged from the opening a few minutes later, Silverman had run dry.

  "I'm, er, afraid we can't get out, Captain," he said hesitantly. "When you're coming you'd better bring ropes."

  Silverman didn't say anything to that, he had already said it all.

  While they were waiting for the captain to arrive with tackle from the ship to haul them out, Mercer and Davies began a close examination of their surroundings. They were in a circular room of roughly five yards diameter which had been hollowed out of the original rock outcropping, then covered by a thin, plastic shell treated to simulate rock on the outside.

  In the center of the room stood a tall, enigmatic piece of apparatus which they had narrowly missed in falling. Several of the heavy power lines about which Mercer had been so curious sprouted from the floor and disappeared into this imposing mechanism—which Mercer, after much peering and nosing around it, had guessed to be some form of communicator. Pointing to a silvery rod near its top he said that this was probably the antenna. However, as the rod was totally enclosed by a sphere of copper mesh it was obvious that the signal produced could not go out into the normal ether. Also, the equipment was apparently activated by an impulse which should reach it via the metal bird's nest they had seen just before their fall.

  ". . . Another thing that puzzles me," Mercer said as they stared at the device, "is the amount of power the thing uses. It must operate for a split second at tremendous overload, then burn out—those power lines go right into it without fuses or safety cutoffs of any kind.

  "And," he continued, "when I went down that trap in the floor I discovered that this place originally had an entrance at ground level before it was sealed up—I'd swear it was at the place where we saw the peculiarities in the rock the first time we came by. So here we have a gadget that was built, carefully hidden and sealed up on completion, and its triggered off by an impulse of some sort generated by that copper and crystal thing up top."

  Mercer took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. In the phones it sounded like trees rustling in a high wind.

  "I'm beginning to suspect," he went on suddenly, "that the alien expedition's chief purpose was the building of this thing. Otherwise, why go to all this trouble to hide it?" Worriedly, he ended, "This business is beginning to scare me."

  Despite the engineer's uneasiness Davies was inclined to feel more afraid of the things Silverman might say when he had them back on the ship. Technically he, Professor Davies, was the leader of this expedition, but the captain had been a very exasperated man.

  But the expected lecture was not forthcoming, and during the two busy weeks which followed, Silverman scarcely mentioned the incident.

  The greater part of those two weeks had been happy for Davies, with the happiness which comes only when a man is gladly flogging himself to death at the work which he loves. He had lost count of the meals he had missed and the sleep which he owed himself. His eyes were bloodshot and felt like hot, gritty pebbles in his head and altogether his face showed all the symptoms of a person on a protracted binge—an intellectual binge, in this case. During the past few days, however, a sour note had crept into this bone-weary but happy existence, and for the life of him Davies could not find the reason for it.

  It was not that the two ship's officers had been uncooperative. Far from it, Silverman and Mercer had spent a great many hours with him poring over alien charts and papers. So much so that Davies' progress in the translation of the alien printed language was more than satisfactory. But it had been work that, because of the monotony and sheer mental drudgery involved, was very much un-suited to the temperaments of the two men. It was only natural, therefore, that they spend more and more time inside the pinnacle of rock that housed the only alien device in the base which appeared to be complete.

  Davies had a highly intriguing and complex jigsaw puzzle of his own to piece together—the alien language. Why then should he begrudge the other two their fun?

  This was the sort of reassuring question Davies had asked himself after first noticing the subtle change in the relations between the two ship's officers and himself. But he had always been sensitive to emotional atmosphere and now could no longer disregard the feeling that Silverman and Mercer were hiding something from him. They were a little too casual when he asked questions, their tones a little too high-pitched. And had they not, of late, initiated a new method of concealment? When out at the pinnacle together were they not being deliberately too technical in their conversation, so that Davies listening to them on the suit radio circuit had no idea at all what they were discussing ... ?

  And now they had taken things a stage further. Either they had stopped talking altogether, or good old safety-drill conscious, radio-at-all-times Silverman had taken to switching off his suit radio for long periods. Mercer's, too, because in Davies' phones there had been nothing for the past hour but a humming silence.

  "Silverman! Mercer! Come in please!" he shouted suddenly. Silence answered him.

  Unconsciously, he had stopped to listen. A long corridor which led toward the base's administration section stretched out in sharply diminishing perspective before him. The lighting was bright but restful. Davies was conscious of other corridors and compartments all around Mm, below him and above him, and he felt suddenly very much alone. He was frightened for some reason—not, he told himself hastily, because of the strangeness of his surroundings, or of any ghosts which the departed aliens might have left behind. If there had been any such, Davies had learned enough about the aliens to know that their ghosts would not have been the terrifying kind. But what was he afraid of?

  Maybe I'm just overtired, Davies told himself. When we take off tomorrow I'll sleep all the way back to Earth, and not look at a single one of those alien books that I've packed away. When we're home I'll look back and laugh at these suspicions....

  His silent conversation with himself was suddenly interrupted by the voice of Mercer erupting from his phones.

  "All set," the engineer said. His voice sounded strained, Davies thought. Then: "Give me two minutes to get clear, then switch on!"

  "Right," the voice of Captain Silverman answered. There was silence then except for the regular, tinny rustlings of someone breathing hard.

  They had been at the pinnacle, Davies knew, but what were they doing? He called again, "Silverman! Mercer! Answer me! I've been trying to call you up ..."

  "And we've been trying to call you," Silverman interrupted. "But don't let it bother you, Professor. Probably it's just a fault in your radio . . ." As if in c
orroboration of this theory there followed a few seconds of intermittent transmission which chopped whatever Silverman had been saying into gibberish, then silence.

  He's lying, Davies told himself silently. Even over the phones he had been able to detect the false note in the captain's voice—Silverman was not a good enough liar. He had not been trying to call Davies, and that intermittent contact that was supposed to simulate a faulty set must have been produced by the rapid switching on and off of the captain's radio. Davies turned quickly and began retracing his steps. He was determined to find out why Silverman was lying, and whatever other funny business was going on, right this minute.

  Suddenly there was a short, ear-splitting burst of static in his phones. Simultaneously the corridor lighting dimmed, flickered, then slowly returned to its former brightness. All at once there was a brightness in Davies' mind also, a brightness that revealed in stark detail the answer to the puzzling behavior of Silverman and Mercer. Suddenly he knew what they had done, and more, what they must be intending to do next. He had to stop them!

  Davies broke into a run.

  Breathing hard as he scrambled awkwardly up the spiral stairways that led to the surface, Davies' mind began jumping from present time here on Titan back to the period of the marooned "Allen" eighty years ago, then back again.

  Suppose "Allen" had been unable to rejoin his friends on Titan before they left for home. The way Davies saw it now, the aliens might leave behind them a concealed signaling device which he could use to call someone to pick him up. Something like the carefully hidden apparatus in that hollowed-out rock.

  Davies was remembering what Mercer had told him about that peculiar device in the pinnacle: it operated for a split-second at tremendous overload, it was activated by the nest of crystal and copper wire surmounting it, and the signal that it emitted was not propagated through the normal ether. Obviously it was a signaling device left by the aliens for "Allen's" use if he should reach Titan too late. But "Allen" had made it and the alien had not thought it worthwhile to dismantle the transmitter.

  Nothing more than a simple position fix could be transmitted on a signal of such short duration, Davies thought, a simple distress signal meaning, "Here I am, pick me up!" But that would be enough for a lifeboat to be dispatched to aid the person in distress, and lifeboats did not as a rule stop to query the origin of a distress call...,

  He had to stop them, Davies thought desperately as the spiral brought him into one of the pressure domes and he began wrestling with the lock mechanism. This was the sort of incident which started wars.

  Outside, Davies saw that his worst fears were realized in that the alien distress signal was already on its way: the rock outcropping together with the communicating device which it had housed was a heap of fused slag surrounded by a pool of steaming, bubbling snow. Mercer had succeeded in activating the transmitter, and he had been correct in saying that it operated on a ruinous overload. He wondered briefly if the engineer had been caught in that terrific flare of energy. But then he saw a figure running clumsily toward the Hannibal and away from the slagged-down pinnacle. That would be Mercer. And the other figure which he could see in the shadow of one of the ship's stabilizer fins would be Captain Silverman.

  The captain was bent over, working at something on the ground. Davies started running toward the ship, too.

  He was less than forty yards from the ship when Silverman and Mercer—the engineer had reached it well ahead of him—saw him. They must have decided that it was useless pretending that his suit radio was faulty any longer, for there was a click and the captain's voice came to him. Silverman's tone was one of surprised innocence. The surprise was probably genuine.

  "Professor! What are you doing here? You said that you had at least six hours work to do inside the base . .. ?"

  A mixture of fear, anger and shortness of breath made it impossible for Davies to say anything coherent at first, but finally he burst out, "You c-can't do it!" He gesticulated at the little red and orange sticks lying at the captain's feet, singly and in small, wired-together bundles. Red was for incendiary and orange for explosive, Davies knew. "You can't do it," he repeated. "It—it's murder!"

  Silverman was silent for a moment, then he said carefully, "I don't understand you. These explosive and incendiary pencils are for the purpose of splitting and melting the ice from around our shock-absorber legs, otherwise the splashout from the chemical motors might melt our stem off before the ice was softened enough to allow us to pull free. Surely I explained all this to you before."

  "You did," said Davies angrily. "But you also said it was dangerous to set them off too close together. Why, then, have you got them tied together in bundles and with detonators wired to-each of them?"

  "I'm afraid, Captain," Mercer broke in at that point, "he knows or has guessed what we intend doing, so we can drop the pretense that these handy little bombs are for melting ice. . . ." He turned and addressed Davies directly.

  "To put things bluntly," Mercer said, "we have listened to you talking about the benefits which may eventually come from the investigation of this base, and the captain and I think that you are being far too optimistic. Certainly the things discovered here will give pointers to new lines of research, and the stuff in the battery room alone will be of enormous value. But we have decided to try for something really big. Something that will put Earth and the human race on an equal, or nearly equal footing with the aliens who visited here, something that will—"

  "Give us the stars?" asked Davies coldly.

  Mercer was taken aback somewhat by Davies' stealing of his punch line. He hesitated, then said, "Exactly."

  The engineer had a lot more to say, but it was only the filling-in of details on the plan which Davies had deduced in broad outline already. The distress signal had gone out and now it was only a matter of waiting until the alien equivalent of a lifeboat arrived. Silverman and Mercer would take this unsuspecting vessel by force, using explosives or thermite or both to disable its airlock so that it could not take off again. They would try not to harm the pilot, of course, unless he showed resistance. But the main idea was that they would be in possession of an alien ship equipped with interstellar drive in full working order. With such a model to work from, Earth would soon be in possession of the drive also.

  There was no need, Mercer ended, to tell the Professor what that would mean for their race. The motives of the captain and himself in doing this were of the very highest. . . .

  Just for a moment Davies found himself caught up by the fanatical enthusiasm of Mercer, the man who was going to hand humanity the stars on a clean plate, then a measure of sanity returned to him. He said, "No! The risk is too great, quite apart from the ethics of the situation which you aren't considering at all. You know full well that the alien pilot will show resistance—you would in his place. And supposing you try to take his ship and fail? You will have made an enemy of a culture which could probably beat us with one hand tied behind its back—" "We have the approach to the ship all worked out," Silverman put in quietly, "and expect very little trouble. And anyway, there is a strong possibility that the lifeboat will be automatically controlled and therefore unmanned—"

  "At this distance?" Davies interrupted scornfully; then, "Think, man! You've got so many stars in your eyes they're blinding you! We'll get to the stars soon enough, never fear and when we do we want to have friends out there, not enemies ..."

  Captain Silverman interrupted him again at that point. He said that they were not sure of the speed at which the alien star drive operated—it might be instantaneous for all he knew—and suggested that Davies stay in the control room until the alien lifeboat had landed and been dealt with. It was clear that Silverman, in a quieter way, was just as blindly enthusiastic as the engineer. His suggestion was simply a polite order.

  The control room illumination had been dimmed for better outside seeing, and radar swept the sky above and around them. Mercer paced restlessly up and down the small
cleared area of deck. The captain sat still except for his eyes, which moved regularly from the direct vision port to the radar screen and back, like a man watching a slow-motion tennis match. His forehead was damp.

  Suddenly the radar went beep. With hardly a glance at the screen the two officers leapt to the direct vision port. Slowly, Davies followed them. He saw the tiny star which moved against the backdrop of other stars, saw it grow larger as he watched. He felt suddenly too weary to talk to the others, to make a last plea for sanity.

  He heard Silverman and Mercer catch their breath.

  There were too many stars in the sky, far too many. And more were flickering into existence every minute. Like a great metropolis lighting up after a power failure, great loops and lines and patterns of lights crisscrossed the sky. Some of the stars were close enough for Davies to see that they were not points of light, but slim, shining needles—ships, thousands of them, singly and in vast formations, taking stations around Titan.

  They were the biggest things that Davies had ever seen.

  It had been a very bad moment for them when the aliens found their wavelength and started whistling and bubbling and chirping at them—Davies had been nearly paralyzed with fear—and worse when an alien with a fair knowledge of English began asking for the positions of Earth's main population centers. Meanwhile, more and more ships had been winking into existence around Titan, so that Saturn was almost hidden by their close packed ranks. But somehow he had forced himself to reply to that alien voice, and had quickly found out that this was not an invasion but something else entirely. The great swarm of ships left very quickly after that, all but the one which carried the alien with the knowledge of English.