Complete Short Fiction, page 116
At last, however, a minute flake of the material cracked free and fell away—and could really see! He could actually make out what was going on!
X
TO UNDERSTAND what had gone on outside the alien to cause all this on a purely human plane, an observer of the whole would have had to go back to an earlier event entirely of Truck’s doing.
As Truck spoke, something very definitely was happening to the visitor from outer space. Following the young athlete’s pointing forefinger, the Parsons saw, with astonishment, that a section of the globular metal body was slowly, steadily opening—or was being opened.
It was circular, perhaps two feet in diameter, and its opening looked unexpectedly simple for a creature, or a machine, capable of interstellar flight. A section of the full, or outer body simply dropped open and outward—apparently on hinges.
“Like dropped underwear,” Candace murmured, to be instantly quelled by a severely reproving look from her husband.
His expression remained firm.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he told her. “It seems too simple. But consider this. Any alien using such a device on a strange world must be damned well capable of protecting itself.”
“Maybe it’s an airlock,” suggested Truck.
“Maybe,” said Hal Parsons, “but don’t bet on it. It could be anything. We don’t know enough about the nature of this—” He stopped, as Candace clutched his sleeve. “What is it, baby?” he demanded.
“Hal honey,” she said, panic returning to envelope her like a torrent of water far colder than the rain. “Hal, honey, do you suppose it’s coming out?”
“It!” Truck suggested. “Why not them. Why not some of those little green men that flyboy was talking about.”
Parsons stared apprehensively at the opening in an effort to penetrate the darkness within. But he could see nothing—not even a shadow advancing toward them or hovering motionless in the gloom. He looked oddly at Truck and then began to lead his wife toward the jeep.
“Come on, Candace,” he said.
“We’d better get the rifle from the trailer—just in case.”
For an instant, Candace hesitated. She was a self-reliant, wholly modern girl, proud of her ability to handle herself as well as any man, in almost any situation. But her self-reliance crumbled when she looked again at the alien—huge, globular, impervious—with the ominous, gaping door part way up one of its flanks. This, obviously, was not a situation to be handled with reckless assurance.
She said, “Okay, honey,” in a very meek voice.
Parsons said, “Better stick with us, Truck.”
“I want to see what’s going on,” said MacLaurie, in his easy drawl. “Anyway, I don’t figure our little pal here means any harm.”
“Just how do you figure that?” Parsons asked sharply.
“If it was going to hurt us, it would have done so long before this,” was Truck’s sage reply.
“Don’t be foolish, Truck,” said Candace in an urgent tone. “It may have been merely softening us up before it opened that door.”
Truck silenced her with, “I’ve a hunch you’ve been reading too many science-fiction stories lately, Candace.”
“Hold tight then until we get back,” Hal commanded. To his wife, in a lower voice he said, “I don’t like leaving him here, either. But his mind’s made up, and someone had better keep an eye on it.”
“If that’s all he does,” murmured Candace.
“What’s that?” her husband demanded. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing, honey,” she said. But so great was her concern that she glanced several times over her shoulder while en route to the trailer. Fortunately for her peace of mind each time she looked the situation remained unchanged. Truck still stood there, his hands at his waist, his head cocked a little on one side as he regarded the menacing wide-open door.
“Better hurry, honey,” she urged as they neared the jeep. “Something we can’t cope with may happen any moment now!”
“So far, damn little has happened,” grunted Parsons. “I’m beginning to wish it would do something menacing. This stalemate is getting on my nerves.”
“I’m not so much worried about what it may do,” said Candace. “At least, not right now. It’s what Truck may do that’s got me frightened.”
Hal looked at her skeptically. But he speeded up his motions nevertheless. He got the canvas-covered Winchester out from under the trailer tarpaulin, stuffed a box of bullets into a pants’ pocket and began hurrying back towards the hillside almost at a run.
They were two-thirds of the way towards their destination when Candace, tagging and slipping a little at his heels, again gripped his arm convulsively and said, “Hal, he’s going to do it. He’s going insider
Parsons stopped dead in his tracks and yelled, “Truck! Stay where you are! Do you hear me? Don’t go any nearer until we get there!”
As they watched, appalled, Truck MacLaurie looked over his shoulder at them. For a moment his grin flashed in the rain. Then moving with a deliberation that masked the speed he was employing—a trick his opponents on the football field had learned to rue, he moved directly toward the round, open door in the alien’s flank, hoisted himself up to it, wriggled a moment or two and vanished inside.
A moment later, his deep voice rumbled at them through the rain. “I’m all right!” he shouted. “Don’t worry!”
It was then that, without sound or warning, the open door in the alien’s flank swung shut, sealing Truck inside.
Hal and Candace exchanged appalled glances and began to run toward the ship. Candace sprinted, stumbling and gasping, directly toward it. She would have hammered on the alien metal barrier with her fists had Hal not restrained her.
“Easy,” he said in tones that suggested calmness maintained only by the greatest effort. “Easy, baby. There’s no sense of all of us walking into a trap until we see what can be done.”
“But I can hear him!” she cried. And at that moment audible sounds of something banging on the inside of the alien trap could be heard.
“Hold it, honey,” said Hal. He continued to restrain her until, finally, she gave up, her face white with horror beneath the mud that caked it. Then he picked up a couple of loose stones and fired them, hard, one after the other at the portion of the hull where the door had opened.
“I tried to tell you we shouldn’t have left him,” she burst out, looking wildly around for some stones to throw herself. “Honey, we’re responsible for him. We should have made him come with us.”
“It’s a little late for that now, baby,” said Parsons, breathing heavily as he let fly with another stone.
Inside the alien ship, Hal felt for a moment like a soft-bodied larval insect cruelly encased in a metallic cocoon. The impulse that had moved him to enter the door had been irresistible. It had occurred to him, even before the Parsons had given him his opportunity, that if an alien ship offering such an invitation took off unvisited he would regret it for the rest of his life.
More than anything else he was motivated by the thought of what a certain little red-headed coed back on the Montana Mines campus might have to say about it. Competition was heavy where that girl was concerned—and as far as Truck could see at the moment, running second would make life insupportable.
He had tried to remind himself of both the danger and idiocy of disobeying Parsons’ warning. But—and this was true even with professors—Truck seldom troubled himself with the various levels of college teacherdom. Parsons, to Truck, was like most faculty members, tending to be overcautious about almost everything. A fine character, but too damned careful.
The door had been there, Truck was there—and the result had been as inevitable as Candace had foreseen. What Truck hadn’t figured on was that his host would elect to slam the door on him so quickly.
Inside, it was dark—and it was cold. It was cold with a bone-chilling, impersonal quality that reminded the gladiator of the storage room in the Arizona meatpacking establishment where he’d held a summer job two seasons back. For one horrible moment he had the ghastly idea that he was undergoing some sort of deepfreeze process, following which he would be taken back to his chilly host’s home planet, for thawing out and laboratory dissection.
A saving memory reminded him that, minutes earlier, he had ribbed Candace unmercifully about her having read too many science-fiction magazines. Now, it appeared, the proverbial shoe was on the other foot with a vengeance—his own size thirteen. She might have read too many such stories, but he was living too many—one too many, to be exact.
But the vagrant whimsy restored what had become rather a shaky sanity—and a sane Truck MacLaurie, while not exactly a mental giant, was capable in an emergency of formidable thought and action. He realized that his surroundings, while unpleasantly cold, were not of a sufficiently low temperature to quick-freeze him. The process would last a long time. It might be unpleasant, but it offered further possibilities of escape.
He wondered what his surroundings looked like, and instantly remembered that he had stuffed a flashlight into his pants’ pocket that very morning, in case he had to work the radio battery entirely under the jeep tarpaulin—to keep it from getting wet. In two seconds he had the flash out and turned on, and was surveying the strange cell in which he appeared to be imprisoned.
Earlier that year, one of his roommates, who was something of an electrical handyman, had taken apart an ailing television set in his fraternity house. Truck’s brief glimpse of the seemingly endless and incomprehensible confusion of wires, in their pink insulation wrappers, had conjured up a vision of a beehive being invaded by an army of pink worms.
Now he derived somewhat the same impression—save that the worms appeared to be of white metal, either silver or platinum, and the confusion even greater. He bent over a sector of the complex wiring that looked vaguely familiar, then jumped as a thump sounded from outside the hull. It was quickly followed by another thump.
Good old Doc! he thought, and hammered back until his hand began to ache. He considered using the flashlight, then decided against it. The thumping stopped, and he wondered how Jonah had felt in the whale’s belly, without even a flashlight.
Better keep moving, he told himself, as he felt the gooseflesh form on his forearms. Better keep looking around. Better keep trying to make this whale sick enough to throw me up . . .
Outside, Hal and Candace Parsons were engaged in grim activity, as Hal prepared to see what effect the rifle would have. “It won’t do much good,” he said somberly, slipping a bullet into the chamber. “I was figuring on using it more against what came out, if necessary, than against that solid beryllium egg, or whatever it is.”
“Maybe you’d better not shoot,” said Candace. “You might make it do something drastic. You might make it kill Truck, or take of! with him.”
“On the other hand,” Hal said, trying to sight against one of the invisible hinges of the round trapdoor in its flank, “I don’t think I can hurt him much. But I just might annoy him into reopening that damned porthole.”
He pulled the trigger, and they looked on, a bit desperately, as the steel-jacketed slug was shattered against the impervious hull. Somewhat to their relief, nothing happened. But there were no more thumps from inside the big globe.
“We’ve got to get help,” said Hal quietly, returning the rifle to its canvas cover, before it could be damaged by the rain. “This situation has got out of hand. I don’t care how many scientists break their skulls when they drop them through the cloud-layer. We can’t stand by and leave Truck trapped in there.”
“Of course we can’t,” said Candace. “I’m glad you feel so strongly about it. I was afraid he was getting on your nerves.”
“Of course he was getting on my nerves,” Hal Parsons said, somewhat testily. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t like the ham-handed . . .” He paused, finished casing the rifle, and added tersely. “Come on—let’s get moving. Before we do, let’s make sure our pal’s eyes—if they are eyes—can’t see what we’re doing.”
“How do you blindfold a giant baseball?” Candace asked.
“With whatever I can find at hand,” said her husband. “You throw a pretty good stone. Let’s see how you are at throwing mud.”
He showed her what he had in mind, and there was plenty of mud in a hollow of the hillside that had been turned into a small muck-hole by the alien-induced deluge. It took them about five minutes before the “front” of the alien was well plastered, as well as its “eyes.” When the job was done, they moved quickly back toward the jeep and the radio.
“You’ll have to crank, baby,” he told Candace. “I’ve been doing the talking to these characters, and there’s no sense—”
“Of course.” Candace cut him off. “Honey, I’m frightened. Do you suppose that thing has already—?”
She paused, and they both stopped walking. A brash, familiar voice had hailed them from a hundred yards to the rear. Unable to believe their ears, they exchanged a half-fearful glance, and then turned slowly toward the source of the sound. It was Truck, waving and coming toward them at a trot.
“I don’t know exactly what happened!” was his answer to the question that burst from them both as he caught up with them. “All of a sudden—just a little while after your shot—he opened the door and I got out of there as fast as I could.”
“What was it like?” Candace asked him. “It must have been horrible.”
“I dunno,” said Truck. “It was sort of interesting—but, brother, was it cold! I damn near froze to death!”
XI
THE REASON was obvious, of course. With an aperture of thirty centimeters and a focal length of about twenty-seven, the focus of the Conservationist’s eye-lenses was highly critical; with the aperture about half a millimeter, as it had been left by the fragment of clay he had broken off, it became a minor matter.
He recognized the machines easily, near the edge of his new field of view, and began to work on the covering of a better-located eye. He did not succeed quite so well here, as the fragment he finally detached was larger, and the image correspondingly less clear, but it was still a good-enough job to enable him to follow the actions of the devices visually.
They were not traveling, as he has deduced already. Furthermore, a fourth machine, hitherto unnoticed, had joined them. All four had settled to the ground, so that their main frames took the weight normally carried by the traveling struts, which appeared merely to be propping the roughly cylindrical shapes in a more or less vertical attitude. The different ways in which this was accomplished, in different cases, did not surprise the agent. It would not have occurred to him to expect any two machines to be precisely alike, except perhaps in such standard subcomponents as relays. And it was, of course, fortunate that every new development happened in sequence, enabling him to analyze carefully as he went along.
The upper struts were moving rather aimlessly in general, but it did not take long for him to judge that their primary function was manipulation. The objects being handled at the moment were for the most part meaningless—apparently stones, bits of metal without obvious function, utterly unrecognizable objects which might be aggregates of the unfamiliar carbon compounds, though the agent knew no way to prove it. There were one or two exceptions. The device that had projected the slug of metal at his hull was easy to recognize, even though he had not perceived all of it at the time it was being used.
He tried to decide what parts of the machines functioned as their eyes, and was able to find them. It was not difficult, for no other portion was reasonably transparent. He discovered that all these vision organs were now turned toward him, but saw nothing surprising in the fact. The operators must have been familiar with the rest of the landscape, and did not expect anything of interest to show up on it.
Then the traveler noticed that all four of the machines were rising to their struts. As he watched, they began to move toward him.
At the same time, one of them extended a handling member toward a smaller fabrication, which almost immediately turned out to be another electromagnetic radiator. It was put to use at once, being swiftly raised to the upper part of the largest machine in the vicinity of the eyes, while a minor appendage of the handling limb which held it closed a switch.
This started the carrier frequency, after a delay which the agent was able to identify as due to the slow growth of the ion-clouds in portions of the apparatus—apparently they were produced by heating metal—and to the inherent lag of mechanical operations. The relays in the device were fantastically huge. They took whole milliseconds to operate and since they rather obviously had components consisting of multi-crystalline pieces of metal, they must have had a sharply limited service life.
Evidently the natives had not gone far enough with metal technology even to get the most out of one world’s supplies. This was a side-issue, however. A far more interesting development involved the modulation of the carrier. The agent found it possible actually to see the way this was being carried out.
An opening in the machine, not far below the eyes, rimmed with a remarkably flexible substance at whose nature he could only guess, began to open, shut and go through a series of changes of shape. He found it possible to correlate many of these contortions with the modulation of the electromagnetic signal. Apparently the opening was part of a device for generating pressure-wave patterns in the atmosphere.
The agent supposed that whatever plan the distant osbervers had been maturing must be moving into action, and he wondered what the machines were about to do. He was naturally a little surprised, since he had not expected any developments of this sort so soon.
Then he wondered still more, for the advance toward him which had been commenced halted, as suddenly as it had begun. Whatever had motivated them had either ceased—or the whole affair was part of an operation whose general nature was still obscure. It would be the better part of valor to assume the latter, he decided.
