Complete Short Fiction, page 352
Captain Cranston was facing the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, the exploratory landings will be made by armed craft under the joint command of Mr. Rogan and Mr. Hanley. There’s still time for a descent today, so let’s make our preparations.”
* * *
Into the crewboat Hanley loaded a walkie-talkie, a Geiger-counter, a ground radar instrument, and a gadget that could make vibrations all the way from sound waves through the ultra-sonic range on up to short wave radio.
From the corner of one eye, he saw Rogan coming along the corridor. He turned away hastily, then—as quickly—looked again. And his first impression was right. The man wore slacks and a shirt that was open at the neck. His pockets did not bulge with gadgets. His hands were empty. He carried no visible equipment.
Rogan nodded a greeting which Hanley curtly acknowledged. As Rogan stepped into the crewboat, Hanley thought satirically:
“At least he’s condescending to travel by ordinary transportation.”
It was about ten minutes later that the small craft came to rest in the middle of the desolation that had been a settlement of one thousand people.
As Hanley climbed shakily to the ground, one of the crew members said: “The place looks as if it’d been worked over by a bulldozer.”
Hanley had to swallow as he stared at the shambles. Somebody, or something, had gone to a lot of trouble. The buildings, which had been made of field stone, were so thoroughly demolished that even the individual stones had been scattered. Here and there, grass was beginning to grow again. Except for that, and except for a few large trees, as far as he could see, the land had been ploughed raw as if by a gigantic scraper.
HANLEY strode forward, stumbled over something, looked down, and drew back hastily. He had stepped on what was left of a human being. The flesh and bone had been ground into the soil.
He saw now that there were bodies all over among the wreckage. It was not always easy to make them out. Many of them seemed a part of the ground, so completely had they been smashed, and pushed in, and covered with dirt.
Frank Stratton, a young colonist, came over and stood beside him. Hanley turned and called to Rogan:
“I think we should take a quick look over this territory, Mr. Rogan. How about you and me walking down by the river, while Mr. Stratton and—” he named a colonist technician—“go into those hills. The others can pair up to suit themselves. No directives to anyone. Just report what you see, and turn back in two hours or less.”
Hanley didn’t wait for agreement, but hurried over to the crewboat. It would be unusual for the two leaders of a group to go off together, but he was determined to see an alien communications expert at work. In the back of his mind he had already decided to try to solve the problem himself, without help from the “expert.” He lifted his pack of instruments out of the boat, and slung it over his shoulder. The weight of the load made him stagger, but he leaned into it; and presently Rogan and he were walking away from the shattered remnants of the settlement. Hanley was surprised that the other had yielded so readily to his suggestion. He noticed that Rogan kept looking into the sky, and only once or twice paused to study the ground.
The hard, gravelly soil gave way to smooth, lawn-like grass. The stones and boulders that had been everywhere around the destroyed village, disappeared. They came to the first considerable grove of trees. Some bore fruit. Others were blossom-filled. A sweet fragrance permeated the clear, warm air.
They reached the river, a wide stream that flowed with an oily slickness suggesting depth and speed. They followed a natural pathway along the foot of an ever steeper shore till finally the bank was a hundred foot high overhanging cliff. From ahead, now, came the roaring sound of water tumbling over falls.
Rogan, who was slightly ahead, paused; and Hanley chose the opportunity to lower his heavy pack and set up his instruments. The Geiger-counter had not clicked once, so he laid it on the ground out of the way. He spoke briefly into the walkie-talkie, and it roared back at him a babble of signals.
It was not a pleasant feeling, listening to that confusion of calls. Aboard ship, the effect had been eerie. Here several miles from the village, it gave Hanley a queasy sensation.
He was suddenly dissatisfied with their position. “Mr. Rogan,” he called, “don’t you think we’re in a rather vulnerable spot?”
Rogan did not turn, nor did he show in any way that he had heard the question. Hanley flushed and, abruptly furious, walked over to him. “We’ll have this out right now!” he thought.
AS HE CAME UP, he saw that the other was staring down at a small area of sand. It reminded Hanley that Rogan had paused twice previously, and both times had looked at similar patches of sand.
The discovery briefly drained Hanley’s anger. He had been looking for a pattern in Rogan’s activity; and here it was. He stopped, and studied the area. It looked like ordinary sand, a grayish yellow-brown in color, quite unassuming, and about as unlikely a source of life as anything he had ever seen.
Hanley hesitated. He wanted to ask questions, but the man was so discourteous that he hesitated to expose himself to further insults. He half-turned away—and then saw that Rogan was looking at him. Rogan said in his soft voice:
“Mr. Hanley, I sense in your attitude that you spoke to me a short time ago, and that you are incensed because I did not answer. Is that correct?”
Hanley nodded, not trusting himself to speak. The wording seemed to imply—he couldn’t decide, but it re-stimulated his anger. “Sense in your attitude,” indeed. Was Rogan trying to suggest that he had not heard the words? Hanley waited, fuming.
Rogan went on, “I find myself in this situation so often that, for the most part, I do not bother to explain it any more.” His green eyes glowed as with a light of their own. “However, since it may be necessary for us to cooperate in the coming crisis, I ask you to believe me when I say that I do not hear when I am concentrating. I shut off all extraneous phenomena.” He finished gently, “If that statement violates your sense of reality, I’m sorry.”
Hanley said grudgingly, “I’ve heard of such things. Hypnosis.”
“If you need a label,” said Rogan, and his tone was almost indifferent, “that’s as good as any. But, actually, it is not the answer.”
Belatedly, it struck Hanley that the other had made an effort to be friendly. He said quickly, “Thank you, Mr. Rogan, I appreciate the explanation. But would you mind telling me, what are you looking for in that sand?”
“Life.” Rogan was turning away. “Life in so simple a state that it is generally not even thought of as such. You see, Mr. Hanley, every planet has its own initial life-process, the state where inorganic matter and organic are almost indistinguishable. This process goes on continuously; and it is the building block of all subsequent life on that particular world. I cannot prove this to you. There is no instrument I know of except my own brain for detecting its existence. You will not immediately realize to what extent that fact rules my actions. And so, I suggest that you do not start feeling friendly toward me because I have made this rather involved explanation. You’ll probably regret it.”
Hanley, who was already disposed to be more friendly, felt uneasy. It seemed clear that Rogan meant exactly what he had said.
He saw that the man was looking at the sand. Hanley turned, and strode back to his instruments. He thought: “After all, I ought to be able to locate the larger life forms without knowing anything about the building blocks—and in that department mechanical equipment may be very useful.”
He set up his ground radar device, and began to send signals straight down. He aimed the signals in various directions and, once, obtained a reaction which indicated the existence of a tiny cave—it was a mere pocket, and unimportant.
He repacked the radar instrument, and began to tune the vibration machine. The response needle leaped suddenly. There was a shout from Rogan: “Hanley—jump—this way!”
Hanley heard a crashing sound above him, and involuntarily looked up. He yelled hoarsely as he saw the rock, only feet away. He tried to duck—and there was a stunning blow, an instant of unbearable pain, and blackness.
PAIN. His head ached and ached. With a groan, Hanley opened his eyes. He was lying beneath the overhanging edge of the rocky cliff, a few feet from where he had been when the rock struck him.
The sound of the nearby waterfall was loud in his ears. Instinctively, before he remembered that it was still out of sight, he strained to locate it. He succeeded only in getting a better view of the visible part of the ledge, where Rogan had been before the rock struck him.
Rogan was not in sight.
Hanley climbed to his feet. His equipment was lying to his left, the radar device on its side, smashed. Ignoring it, he walked along the ledge past it to where there was a sharp turn. That gave him a view of nearly a mile of the river’s curving bank. There was not a movement anywhere that he could see.
Puzzled, and beginning to be angry, Hanley walked in the other direction nearly two hundred yards. He saw the falls suddenly around a bend. The water dropped more than a hundred feet to the beginning of a great valley. A forest came down to the river’s edge, and stretched away into the distance, a green and brown vista.
Nowhere was there a sign of Rogan.
Hanley returned to get his things, undecided as to what his next move should be. He felt impelled to go on. And yet, unquestionably, the rock had missed killing him by millimeters. There was caked blood on the side of his head, and his cheek burned where the skin had been scraped off.
He was momentarily relieved to discover a note stuck in the handle of the Geiger-counter. “The guy’s human after all,” he thought.
Then he read the note. It said: “Go back to the ship! I’ll be gone for a day or two.”
Hanley compressed his lips, and the flush that mounted to his cheeks was not all fever from his wound. Yet, once more, his anger died away. Rogan was not responsible for him; and his job on this planet did not require that he look after injured people.
Hanley switched on the walkie-talkie. The earphones were alive with sounds. His own voice, in jumbled messages that he’d sent from the ship more than a week before, was part of the crescendo of noise. Half a dozen times, he tried to send an S. O. S., giving his position. The appeal was taken up, and lost among the rest.
There was nothing to do but start along the trail back . . . He reached the village just before dark, and was immediately taken up to the ship. Both doctors insisted that he spend the night in the hospital ward, though they reported reassuringly that he would probably be all right in the morning.
Hanley slept fitfully. Once, he waked up and thought: “At least he’s a courageous man. He’s down there alone, at night.”
It justified to some extent his own lie to the others. He had told them that Rogan had gone on only after assuring himself that Hanley was not seriously hurt. Rogan had done nothing of the kind. But it was essential that the colonists continue to trust him.
Some time during the night Hanley’s strength and energy came back. About dawn, he opened his eyes in tense excitement. That rock! Its fall had been no accident. Somebody or something had shoved it down upon him.
“I’ll go out there in the morning,” he decided.
HE WAS DRESSING when his wife came in, about nine o’clock. She walked over to a chair, and sank into it. Her fine gray eyes looked tired. Her long blonde hair had not been properly arranged. There were lines in her face. “I’ve been worried,” she said drably. “I’m all right.” Hanley spoke reassuringly. “I was only bruised a little, and shaken.”
She seemed not to hear. “When I think of him down there with the fate of the whole colony depending on his remaining alive—”
Briefly, it shocked Hanley to realize that her anxiety was for Rogan, not himself. She looked up unhappily.
“Len, do you think it was wise of you to let him go on alone?”
Hanley stared at her in amazement, but made no reply. It seemed to him that there was no adequate comment to make to that. Nevertheless, as he ate breakfast, he felt more determined than ever to solve this problem before Rogan.
A few minutes later, with Frank Stratton at the controls of the crewboat, he set out once more for the river. His plan of action was simplicity itself: If there was life here, it would show itself in some way. An observant man should be able to find it without having a special type of brain.
* * *
They came down in a meadow half a mile from the river and about a mile from the waterfall. It seemed a sufficiently central position from which to examine the rock-throwing episode.
Young Stratton, who had been silent during the flight said suddenly, “Pretty country—if it weren’t for the stones.” Hanley nodded absently. He climbed down to the ground, and then paused for another survey of the countryside. Trees, miles of green grass, gaily colored flowers, the silvery gleam of the waterfall, and the great forested valley beyond it—here was natural beauty in abundance.
True, as Stratton had pointed out, there were small rocks in plenty, but they could be removed. Hanley walked to the nearest one, and picked it up. It was about the size of a large melon, and unexpectedly light in weight. He stood holding it, watching the sunlight flash over its surface.
At first glance, it seemed to be granite, the bright reflecting surfaces suggesting mica specks. On closer examination, Hanley wasn’t so sure. He saw that his fingers were already stained yellow. Sulphur, he guessed. And in rather free form.
Behind him, Stratton said sullenly, “This fellow, Rogan—who is he? I mean, is there some special reason why the women have to go silly over him? Dorothy kept me awake half the night worrying about his being down here alone.”
Intent though he had been on the stone, Hanley recalled the similar reaction of Eleanora, and half turned. “He’s the only one of his kind,” he began, “except for—” He stopped. For the rest was rumor only. He went on slowly, “According to reports, his parents were wrecked on some uninhabited planet, and he was born there while they were repairing the ship. He was still a child when they took him away, and by the time they began to suspect he was different, it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“They had no idea where the planet was on which they’d been wrecked.”
“Oh!” The blonde youth was silent. Hanley was about to return his attention to the stone when Stratton said, “What’s this story about his having children all over the galaxy?”
“Another rumor.”
Hanley spoke curtly. It gave him no pleasure to defend Mark Rogan, especially when his own mind was uneasy with the same suspicions as Stratton was experiencing.
“What’s he trying to do?” asked the young man grimly. “Produce a bunch of freaks like himself?”
That was so exactly the way he had originally heard it that Hanley swallowed. In spite of himself, he said sarcastically, “Maybe he believes his wild talent for dealing with non-human races should be spread as widely as possible. Particularly, I imagine, he feels that when his services have been called for, the women of the new colony should be only too willing to provide perceptive children and so secure the future of the human race on that planet. It—”
He came to an abrupt stop, startled. He had intended to be ironic, but abruptly the notion sounded plausible. And necessary.
“My God!” he thought, “if he ever comes near Eleanora, I’ll—”
In abrupt tension, he raised the rock in his hands above his head, and flung it down upon another one nearby. There was loud, cracking sound. Both stones shattered, and a chance wind blew a cloud of yellowish dust into his face. The smell of sulphur was momentarily unbearably strong. Hanley coughed, almost choked, and then he had backed out into fresher air.
He was about to bend down over the broken pieces of the two stones, when Stratton let out a yell. “Mr. Hanley—the rocks—they’re moving!”
IN THAT FIRST MOMENT of mental confusion, Hanley had several fantastic impressions. Unquestionably, stones all over the meadow were beginning to roll towards them, slowly, as if they were not exactly sure of their direction—but they were rolling. Simultaneously, the wind that had been merely a series of gusts until then, began to blow at gale proportions. Dead leaves whirled into his face. Small pieces of grit stung his cheeks.
Hanley’s eyes began to water. Through a blur, he made his way to the crewboat, and fumbled for the steps that led to the deck. The wind was so strong now that he had to bend into it to remain on his feet. From above him, young Stratton yelled: “This way—quick!”
A hand caught Hanley’s shoulder, guiding him. A moment later he was scrambling up the steps, and had flung himself prostrate beside his companion. He lay there for a minute, gasping. Then he saw Stratton wriggling towards the controls.
Hanley shouted at him, “Frank—wait!”
The blonde youth turned, and said earnestly: “Mr. Hanky, we’d better get out of here. We might be blown over on our side.”
His words were tossed by the wind, distorted, and delivered finally half-faded, but still comprehensible. Hanley shook his head stubbornly. “Can’t you see?” he shouted. “These stones are the life-form! We’ve got to stay and find out things about them. If we can get enough information we won’t need Rogan. It stopped the young man. He turned a contorted face towards Hanley. “By heaven,” he said, “We’ll show that—”
His whole body twisted with eagerness. Hanley called to him, “Turn on the radio! Let’s see what’s coming over.”
The radio was alive with voices, Whereever Stratton turned the dial, he produced uproar that was loud and continuous. Hanley listened grimly for a minute, and then glanced over the side of the boat.
He winced as he saw that the stones were piling up against the side of the small vessel, one on top of the other. The pile, at its highest point, was about three feet from the ground. It sloped back to a thin line of pebbles some twelve to fifteen feet from the bigger stones at the front. Hanley estimated that there were several hundred stones already in the pile.
