Complete Short Fiction, page 111
“You know,” said Hal, after lighting a damp cigarette, “if our friend had such a thought in mind, he couldn’t have figured out a better way to stay clear of observation. Locating him on foot, in this rain, is going to be next to impossible. And the authorities outside the area won’t find it easy to get in here. Our trail is washed out by this time. In fact, for all we know, the valley behind us will be flooded by morning. They can’t observe from the air, because of the clouds—and the ceiling is so low I don’t believe a helicopter could make a landing anywhere near here.”
“Maybe he does want to,” said Candace, relighting her cigarette thoughtfully.
“But that suggests . . .” Hal looked at her oddly.
“It suggests intelligence, all right,” his wife said quickly. “And so did the swift, sure way he steered a path around this mountain yesterday. The big question now is—what kind of intelligence?”
“You’re giving me the creeps,” said Hal. He looked at her in the light of the electric lantern and smiled. But there was no mirth in his smile and when her hand crept toward his along the moist ground, he gripped it almost eagerly.
Truck MacLaurie stood over them. “If you two lovebirds are interested,” he said, “I just got word they’re sending a plane over in five minutes, to try to drop a flare through the clouds. They’ll want to know if we can see it—and where.”
The Parsons’ scrambled to their feet and waited, by the radio, as the minutes ticked by. An eternity seemed to pass before they actually heard the distant drone of the plane. It grew rapidly louder and, all at once, appeared to be almost directly overhead. The receiver crackled, and Hal Parsons took over.
“You’re coming in,” he told them. “Parson here, Over.”
“Roger dodger, Professor,” came the buoyant voice of the airman overhead. “We’re dropping a flare in five seconds. You should see her in twenty-six, when she blossoms. If you spot any little green men, let us know.”
“Fire away,” said Parsons. He frowned and added tersely: “And stop clowning.”
“Roger dodger,” was the reply, and Parsons wished, briefly, that the over-carefree birdman had to take the brunt on the ground with them. Then he recalled Candace’s inane remark about her permanent, and it occurred to him that some people found such flipness an antidote to unendurable tension. He waited . . .
The flare burst, no more than half a mile away, its brilliance muted by the heavy mist and rainfall. Of the valley itself, it revealed almost nothing. Then, slowly, it burned out, leaving the darkness darker than before.
Parsons reported it, not too exactly under the circumstances, and the pilot said, “Well, that tells us exactly what we knew before. Stay with it, Professor.”
Curiously, Parsons thought, he sounded discouraged.
Morning dawned, grey and soggy. But even so, the three on the mountain pass were lifted up in spirit by the renewal of light. The rain continued, without letup, and patches of mist clung to the slopes above and below them—and as far as their vision could penetrate.
They breakfasted on fresh coffee and the warmed-up remnants of the meal they had been unable to finish the night before.
“I never thought I’d have a miniature lake to wash dishes in,” said Candace, dipping the plates in a puddle of fresh rainwater, and wiping them dry with a towel. “I’ve always had to scrub plates with sand on trips like this.”
“Yeah,” said Truck MacLaurie, “and radioactive rainwater, at that.”
“Shut up, Truck,” Hal Parsons said sharply, wishing he had held his tongue. It occurred to Mm, for the first time in his life, that people who can face grim reality and joke about it are, perhaps, far better realists than those who regard it so seriously that even talk of it disturbs them. What was troubling him was not the fact that the rain was mildly radioactive. It was the possibility that the great Whatisit might be emanating radiations of an alien nature, and more deadly to humans than anything the Geiger counter could pick up. Ignoring Candace’s silent reproof, he walked slowly to the jeep.
Even though the slope into the valley was not steep, getting down the western side of the pass proved a far more difficult task than hauling the jeep up the east side had been. The reason, of course, was the unremitting rain, which was turning the poorly fastened dirt-and-sand hillside surface into treacherous, slippery rivers of silt and mud.
On this part of the trip Truck rose to heroic effort. Almost at the valley floor the little vehicle unexpectedly side-slipped into a freshly made brook, causing its rear wheels to stick and the trailer to fall over on its side. In a matter of seconds, the big football player had leapt from the rear seat of the jeep into the shin-deep muck, and was heaving at the trailer, with his neckcords swelling.
Before Hal or Candace could reach him he had unlocked the coupler and was hauling an upright trailer out of the water by main strength.
“The tarp held tight,” he said cheerfully, not even panting. With his hair plastered over his forehead and his clothes clinging to him in the wet, he looked as if he had just stepped out of a shower with his clothes on. He added smilingly: “Get behind that wheel, Doc, while I push.”
It took their combined efforts, but they finally got the jeep clear of the water and back on reasonably firm soil. Candace returned to the shelter of the jeep-top, while Hal and Truck recoupled the trailer.
Feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself for his previous sharpness, Hal said, “Truck, I’m sorry if I’ve been riding roughshod over you, but this whole business has me on edge. I mean, with Candace, and—” He let it hang.
Truck laid a massive, damp hand on Hal’s already soaked shoulder and said with a grin, “Doc, don’t worry about me. I’ve been chewed out by so many coaches giving me hell in the locker room that I don’t mind a little ribbing from a guy I respect.”
For some reason, the atmosphere lightened, though the rain continued to fall—and, curiously, the going grew easier from then on. Twenty minutes later, they had reached the floor of the valley, which extended almost level into the mist that blocked the mountains on the further side.
“Well,” said Truck from the rear seat, as Hal slowly brought the jeep to a halt, “now that we’re here, what do we do?”
The Parsons exchanged a look. Until then, reaching the valley had loomed as so large a problem in front of them that they had not considered the next move.
Candace laughed and said, “I’d pause at this point to powder my face if it would do any good in the dampness—if I had any powder handy.”
To his considerable surprise, Hal found himself paraphrasing a long-forgotten and very ribald old Negro ditty which by rights should have remained buried in the rather scant excesses of his youth. He said, “It’s right here for us, and if we don’t find it, why it ain’t no fault of its.”
“Hey, Doc!” said Truck. “Where’d you pick that one up?”
“Probably,” said Candace dryly, “in the very place where he picked me up.”
It was the younger man who spoke seriously then. “No fooling, folks,” Truck said. “Now that we’re here, just how do we go about finding our inhuman friend? Don’t forget—you’re the brains in this pitch. I’m just the muscle.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to use that Geiger counter of yours again,” Hal Parsons said. “And no cracks, please! If we can find any variation of intensity in the rainfall radiation, there may be a chance . . .”
“Gotcha, Doc.” Again, the young Goliath was out of the jeep, and working at the trailer tarpaulin.
“Do you think it will work, honey?” Candace asked.
Hal Parsons shrugged. “It might,” he said. “It just might.”
But it didn’t. As remorselessly as the rain continued to fall, the mild radioactivity continued to register without variation. After testing puddles for two hours, the two men returned to the jeep, where Candace had coffee ready for them once more. She asked no questions as to the success of their experiment. One look at their faces as they emerged from the mist told her all she needed to know.
“Carnotite,” said her husband, lifting his face from an empty tin cup and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Not enough to report on—just enough to bitch us up for an hour, with a false lead. You might not believe it, but this is one hell of a big valley.”
“It keeps getting bigger,” said Truck MacLaurie mournfully, through a coffee mustache. He looked at Hal Parsons and asked, “Well, Doc—what next?”
Parsons was trying to come up with some sort of a constructive reply, when Candace motioned for him to be silent and lifted her face upward. The others followed her gaze and saw nothing but clouds, rain and fog. Then they heard it—the drone of a plane directly overhead. Without a word, both men handed Candace their empty cups and moved toward the trailer.
It was a mere matter of minutes, before they had the radio back in action, and were trying to communicate with the crew overhead. While Truck cranked away at the battery, to raise power, Parsons hung onto the transmitter, urgently repeating, “Parsons calling plane. Parsons calling plane. We hear you. We hear you. Come on in. Come on in. Over . . .”
All he could get, on the earphones, was a rumble of static, through which, now and again, he heard the faint, unintelligible mutter of the operator upstairs, trying to break through. Candace looked at him anxiously, her hair oddly slicked into bangs by the rain. He shook his head hopelessly.
“Keep trying,” she said softly. “Keep trying, Hal honey.”
Frustration was high within him, but he nodded and tried again. “Parsons calling plane. Parsons calling plane,” he began.
This time, there was no doubt about the answer. It came, clear as a voice in some unbuilt next room, saying, “Parsons calling plane. Parsons calling plane.”
“Who’s that?” he barked, recalling the impertinence of the aircraft radio message of the night before.
“Who’s that?” he barked. “Hello?”
“Who’s that? The mocking voice replied.
Parsons mopped rainwater out of his eyes and snapped, “What in hell is going on? This isn’t funny, Mack!”
And the voice replied, “What in hell is going on? This isn’t funny, Mack!”
“Cut it out, you joker!” he said furiously. “If you’ve got a message for us, unload it and take off.”
To which his tormentor retorted, “Who’s that? Hello?”
“Hal honey!” interposed Candace, who had crowded close and turned back one of the earphones to catch the mocking message. “Hal honey, he’s replying in your voice.”
“So what?” her husband countered. “Whoever he is, I’m going to see he gets hell—once we’re out of here.”
“Just a second.” She nudged him clear of the transmitter, bent over the mouthpiece, and said clearly, “Toodle-oo, old thing.”
The answer came back clear as spoken—and in perfect reproduction of Candace’s voice. “Toodle-oo, old thing.”
They stared at each other until Truck came over. He pushed back his hair and said, “What is this—a private game, or can anybody play?”
“It’s beginning to look,” said Hal quietly, his controlled voice belieing the wild excitement in his eyes, “as if your great Whatisit is as anxious to get in touch with us as we are with him.” Then, turning to Candace, he asked, “What do you think, baby?”
“I think,” she said, “if I were an alien and wanted to be a radio announcer and could only receive H. V. Kaltenborn, I’d give it back to him just the way he was giving it to me.”
V
IT BECAME INCREASINGLY evident to the Conservationist that he could lie there, until he was trapped in an earthquake, making up five hundred theories per second, without getting one whit closer to knowledge of what was happening around him. He was going to have to examine the machines more closely. The only question was one of tactics. Should he go to them, or have them come to him?
He decided first to try the second gambit, since it offered more promise of drawing out information as to their nature and abilities. He would thus be able to determine precisely what stimuli affected their senses of equipment, and the extent of their capability in analyzing what they did detect.
Naturally, not a wave of their radiation had, thus far, conveyed any meaning to the Conservationist. More accurately, the few patterns that even remotely matched patterns of his own language did not deceive him for an instant by such chance similarities. Nor did he suppose the natives would have any better luck with his language.
His first attempt at attracting their attention consisted merely of broadcasting sustained notes on a variety of frequencies, other than the one they were using. As he had rather expected, these produced no noticeable reaction. Travel and conversation went on unaffected. When he repeated the attempts, using the same wavelength as the natives, however, the results were just as unsatisfactory. It was extremely frustrating.
Travel stopped, and after he had repeated the signal a few times, all six of the vehicles seemed to come together at one spot. In the pauses between his own transmissions, the native speech sounded almost continuously. Yet he felt doubt that he had even been heard.
He had rather expected that there might be an attempt to respond to him in kind, but this did not occur, even though he tried sending out his wave in various long and short pulses which should have been easy to copy. At least, he used lengths corresponding to those of the radar pulses which he had felt at his arrival, and which had, presumably, been emitted by members of this race.
They failed to respond to the patterns, however, even when in desperation he increased the lengths of the bursts of radiation to three or four thousand microseconds. The very speech patterns of the natives changed carrier amplitude in shorter periods than that—they must, he felt, be able to distinguish such intervals!
The agent began to speculate upon the general intelligence-level of this alien new race. He had to remind himself forcibly that, since they could move around so rapidly, they must be able to design and build complex machines. It was startling, to say the least.
Then it occurred to him that all the vehicles he was watching might be remote controlled, that the electromagnetic waves he was receiving were the control impulses. Yes, yes, that must be it! He spent some time, trying to correlate the radio signals with the motions of the machines. The attempt, of course, failed completely, since men are at least as likely to talk while standing still, as while walking around.
This proving a poor check on his hypothesis—it did not disprove it, since the machines might be able to do many things besides move around—he tried duplicating some of their complete signal groups, watching carefully to see whether any motion of the vehicles resulted. He realized that the controlling entity might not like what he was doing, but he was sure that satisfactory explanations could be made, once contact was established.
The result of the experiment was a complete stoppage of motion, as nearly as he could tell. It was not quite what he had expected. But there was some gratification in getting any result at all. For several whole seconds there was silence, both seismic and electromagnetic.
Then the native speech—it had to be speech—began again, in groups which still seemed long to the agent, but which were certainly much shorter than most of those used before. He duplicated each group as it came.
“Who’s that? Hello?”
“Who’s that? Hello?”
“What in hell is going on? This isn’t funny, Mack!”
“What’s going on? This isn’t funny, Mack.”
“Cut it out, you joker! If you’ve got a message for us, unload it and take off!”
“Who’s that? Hello?” The agent decided the last signal group was too long to be worth imitation, so he went back to one of the earlier groups. This action resulted in brief silence, followed by a pattern, brief, but with a fresh modulation, which he mimicked accurately. For several whole minutes, the conversation, if it could be called that, went on. He felt real pride now, a self-congratulatory kind of exaltation in being able to carry off his cleverly assumed masquerade with perfect confidence, vigor and, certainly, no small measure of success.
The Conservation agent had decided long since what the native, machines would almost certainly do, and was pleased to detect them getting into motion once more. But when they had gone far enough for him to determine their direction of travel, he discovered, with some disappointment, that they were not moving toward him.
He would have had little trouble solving their motives, had they been moving straight away from him. But the angle they took carried them more or less in his direction, albeit considerably to one side. He found this a complete mystery, at first. Finally he noticed that the group was traveling along a depressed portion of the lithosphere’s surface, and seized upon, as a working hypothesis, the idea that their machines found it difficult, or impossible, to climb slopes of more than a few degrees.
In that case, of course, they might not be able to reach him, directly or otherwise, since he had buried himself some distance up the side of a valley. He considered again leaving his position and coming to meet them, but reached the same decision as before—that he could learn more by seeing what they did on their own.
They spoke rarely as they traveled—but the agent found that he could always make them broadcast, by ceasing to radiate his own signal. Had they not been pursuing such an odd course, he would have supposed, from that fact, that they were using his radiation to lead them to him. His radiation! However, they kept on their course until they were somewhat past its nearest point to his position before they paused. Then there was a brief interchange of signals with some distant native, apparently in an atmosphere machine, and travel was resumed, at right angles to the original direction.
Now, however, the vehicles were heading away from the buried ship, had, in fact, turned left. The Conservationist gave up theorizing for the moment and contented himself with observing. He repressed his mounting excitement and became as still as a figure of stone.
