Complete Short Fiction, page 119
“My God!” exclaimed a white-lipped Hal Parsons. “He’s set fire to the earth itself!” He picked up the rifle, which he was still carrying, unslung its cover and aimed it at the hull-opening, pushing Candace behind him as he did so.
“Put that toy away, Parsons,” said the general with grim insistence. “It won’t do a damned bit of good. Do you understand? Put it away.”
The intolerable ray of heat vanished, and the opening in the alien’s hull disappeared as abruptly as it had opened. The visitor said, slowly, “Man dig—Earth fire—mountain fire.”
“Let’s have the scintillometer,” the general said to Truck. “It’s a lot better than that Geiger job you’ve been using.”
“I can work it,” said Hal. Taking the instrument, and adjusting it, he walked over to the rapidly cooling, but still semi-molten spot which the heat-ray had turned to lava. The count ran high and fast as he approached it. Turning back to the general, he said, “No doubt about it—she’s plenty hot.”
“Got to report this,” said Eades tersely. “He’s trying to get something through, all right—and I don’t like the looks of it. Maybe some of those eggheads sitting around in Butte can give us a clue.”
It was a lengthy broadcast, relayed through the radio of a helicopter hovering above the clouds. When it was over, the general signed off in disgust.
“How do you like that?” he said, to no one in particular. “Those broad-beamed boffins want us to carry on.” He cursed, fluently, effectively, and then added, “Sorry, ma’am,” to Candace without turning a grey hair.
She said, “Maybe we’d better try him on minerals alone.”
So, the lesson continued, until some of the confusion about various stones and metals, upon the nature of machines, was partially cleared up. Then came the alarming statement, “Yes—men dig—mountain melt—mountain rise.”
“Is he trying to tell us men are planting volcanoes under us?” Candace asked incredulously.
“He’s trying to tell us someone or something is,” her husband told her grimly. “Ask him where, General?”
This led to laborious exchanges, establishing direction and distance units, after which the alien began issuing his information, as to the location of the horrors to come if his warnings were ignored. While this was going on, Parsons took notes, doing his best to write legibly on limp paper. Finally Candace, who had once learned shorthand, took over the job.
General Eades turned toward her and said, “That seems to be all. Got them?”
“All forty-five, General,” said Candace. “Want me to read them back to you?”
“Not yet,” said Eades. “I want to know what he means by men digging volcanoes.”
The results were not satisfactory, and so the alien went through the entire list again. Then, in desperation, the general got into touch with the higher-ups once more. He talked long and determinedly and with authority. He concluded with, “. . . There’s absolutely no point in walking around here, looking for anything else. We’ve found our fireball, right here.”
He paused, looked at the impassive facade of the alien inquiringly. “More?” he asked. “Anything more?”
The voice, so oddly human, so utterly like his own in tone and inflection, replied, “Eighty-one miles that way. Men digging. Go now.”
“Okay,” said the general. “That’s the message.” And, to the alien, “Eighty-one miles that way. Men digging. Go now.” He motioned to the others to follow, and led the way through the rain toward the jeep.
“You’re not going to leave him?” Candace asked, incredulously.
“It may take all of us to get out of this damned valley,” Eades told her. “If what he reported is true—no matter how garbled—our work is at Anaconda. That’s where the nearest trouble is, according to him. We’ll have weasels in here by tomorrow, to do a proper survey job. Complete with scients . . .” Then, with a look of apology, “Sorry, folks, I mean specialists. You’ve done great.”
“That’s okay, General,” said Truck, in his easy-going drawl.
The others laughed.
Candace said, “This probably sounds screwy, but I’m going to miss our globular friend. He was—”
“Not he—it,” said Parsons. “Why must you give it sex?”
“Forget about sex,” the general told them, masking a smile. “We’re going to have one sweet job getting out of here.”
Candace looked back, through the mist and rain and darkness of approaching twilight, and suddenly uttered a cry of alarm. “Look!” she said, grabbing the nearest arm, which happened to belong to the general. “He’s taking off!” They watched, all with mixed emotions, as the alien rose vertically from its hillside bed, and hovered a moment at mountain-top level. Then it suddenly veered, moved swiftly toward the north and disappeared.
“Well,” said Truck. “Goodby.” And that seemed to sum it up. Before they had the jeep halfway up the pass the rain had stopped, and there was a break of afterglow gold in the western sky.
XV
THE MOMENT HE rose above the valley, the Conservationist picked up the radar beams again—the beams that had startled him when he first approached the strange planet. As had happened on the earlier occasion, a few milliseconds served to bring many more of them to bear upon him.
He was quite evidently being watched on this journey. But he no longer expected these beams to carry intelligent speech. More or less casually, he noted their points of origin. He wondered, for brief moments, whether it might not be worth while to investigate them later, but felt fairly certain that it wouldn’t. He turned his full attention on his goal.
The crusts of clay had fallen from his eyes as he flew, and he was once again limited to longdistance vision. He could make out the vast, terraced pits of the great copper mine as he approached, but could not distinguish the precise nature of the moving objects within. He did not consider sight a particularly useful or convenient sense anyway, so he settled to the ground, half a mile from the pit’s edge, bored in as he had before, and began probing with seismic detectors and electrical senses.
He had, of course, already known of the presence of the hole. A fair amount of seismic activity had reached his original landing-spot from this place, enabling him to deduce its shape fairly accurately. Now, however, he realized—and for the first time—the amount of actual work going on. There were many machines of the sort he had already seen, which was hardly surprising. But there were many others as well, and the fact that most of them were metallic in construction startled him considerably.
There was a good deal of electrical activity, and at first he had hopes of finding an actual native. But these hopes quickly faded when he discovered there was nothing at all suggestive of thought-patterns. Some of the machines were magnetically driven. Others used regular electrical impulses for, apparently, starting the chemical reactions which furnished their main supply of energy.
The really surprising fact was the depth of the pit. If this work had begun since the receipt of his information, the wretched, guilty robots would be caught without difficulty. It took some time, by his perception standards, for a truer picture of the situation to be forced on his mind.
The pit had not been started recently. The progress of the diggers was fantastically slow. Clumsy metal scoops raised a few tons of material at a time and deposited it in mobile containers that bore it swiftly away. Fragments of the pit-wall were periodically knocked loose by expanding clouds of ionized gas, apparently formed chemically. The shocks initiated by these clouds were apparently the origin of most of the temblors he had felt from this source, while he was still eighty miles away.
His electrical analysis finally gave him the startling, incredible facts. This was a copper mine—extracting ore far poorer in quality than any his own people could afford to process. This race was certainly confined, for some reason, to its home planet, and had been driven to picking leaner and ever leaner ores to maintain its civilization.
The development of organic machines had given them a reprieve from barbarism and final extinction, but surely could not save them forever. Why in the galaxy, did they not use the organic robots for digging directly, as he had seen them do, during the language lessons? One would think that metal would be far too precious to such planet-bound people, for them to waste even iron on bulky, clumsy devices such as those at work here!
Even granting that the machines he had originally seen, and which seemed the most numerous, were not ideally designed for excavation work, surely, surely, better ones could be made. A race that could do what this race had done with carbon compounds could have no lack of ingenuity—or, more properly, of creative genius.
Very slowly, he realized why they had not—and why his mission was futile. He realized why these people would be doomed, even if the moles had never been planted. He noticed something relevant, during the conversation, but had missed its full staggering implication. The organic compounds were soft. They bent and sagged and yielded to every sort of external mechanical influence—it was a wonder, thinking about it, that the machines he had seen held their shapes so well. No doubt, there was a framework of some sort, perhaps partly metallic even though he had not perceived it.
But such things could never force their way through rock. The only way they could dig was with the aid of metallic auxiliaries—simple ones, such as those used to illustrate the verb to him, or more capacious and complex ones like those in use here.
This race was doomed, had been doomed long before the poachers ever approached their planet. They needed metal, as any civilization did. They were bound to their world, but kept from moving about even upon it, for not one in a thousand of these people could conceivably travel by machine, as the agent’s race did. The organic engines could not possibly be used as vehicles. They could not be so used because their very essential nature of chemical violence made them untouchable.
These people were trapped in a vicious circle, using their metal to dig more metal, sparing what little they could for electrical machinery and other equipment essential to a civilization, always having less and less to spare, always using more and more to get it. The idea that they could survive, until the planet’s natural processes renewed the supply, was ridiculous.
It was, in short, precisely the same tragic circle that the agent’s own race was precariously avoiding, millennium after millennium, by its complex schedule of freighters that distributed the metal from each planet in turn among thousands of others, then either waited for nature to renew the supply, or “tickled up” uninhabitable worlds as the poachers had done to this one.
Metal kept the machines operating. The machines kept food flowing to that vast majority of individuals who could not travel in search of it, A single break in the transport schedule could starve a dozen worlds. It was a fragile system, at best, and no member of the race liked to think about—much less actually face—examples of its failure.
The agent’s mounting discomfort as he considered the matter of Earth was natural and inevitable. This race was what his own might have been, hundreds of millions of years before, had means of space-travel not been developed. They would probably be extinct before the poachers’ torpedoes began to take effect, which was, no doubt, a mercy.
The agent could not help them. Even if the communication problem were cracked, they could not be brought into the transport network of civilization for untold millennia. No, they were truly lost—a race under sentence of extinction. The reorganization necessary was frightening in its complexity, even to him. Teaching them to build and use the equipment of his ship would be utterly useless, since it was entirely metallic, and they would be even worse off than with their organic devices.
They were already, probably by chemical means, stripping ores more efficiently than his own people, so he could hardly help them there. No, it was a virtual certainty that, when the planet’s crust began to heave as giant bathyliths built up beneath it, when rivers of lava poured from vents scattered over the planet, no one would be there to face it.
This was a relief, in a way. The agent could picture, all too vividly, the plight of seeing a close friend engulfed only a few miles away, and having to spend hours or years of uncertainty, wondering when his own area would be taken—and then knowing.
That was the worst. There was plenty of warning, as far as awareness was concerned. Anywhere from minutes to years and millennia, if one was a really good computer. You knew, and if you had a mobile machine, you could move out of the way. Even these organic machines traveled fast enough for that. But only machines would let a being get out of the way—and there would be no machines here by then.
He wished with every atom of his being that he had never detected the poachers, had never seen this unfortunate planet or heard of its race. No good had come of it—or very little, anyway. There would, admittedly, be metal here before long, brought up with the magma flows, borne by subcrustal convection-currents in the stress-fluid that formed most of the world’s bulk.
The poachers would be coming back for it, and he could at least deprive them of that. He would beam a report in toward the heart of the galaxy, making sure it did not radiate in the direction they had taken. Then there would be freighters to forestall them.
It was ironic, in a way. If any of this race should have survived the disturbance that would bring back the metal, that disturbance would be the salvation both of their species and their civilization. Most probably, however, the only witnesses would be a few half-starved, dull-minded barbarians, who would wonder, dimly, what was happening for a little while before temblors shattered their bodies forever.
There was nothing to keep him here, and the place was distasteful. More of the organic robots were approaching his position, but he did not want to talk any more. He wanted to forget this planet, to blot the memory of it forever from his mind.
With abrupt determination, he sent the dirt boiling away from his hull in a rising cloud of dust, pointed his vessel’s blunt nose into the zenith and applied the drive. He held back just enough to keep his hull temperature within safe limits, while he was still in the atmosphere.
Then, with detectors fanning out ahead, he swung back to the line of his patrol orbit, and began accelerating away from the Solar system. Ignorant of events behind him, he never sensed the flight of swept-winged metal machines that hurtled close below while he was still in the air, split seconds after he had left the ground.
He did not notice the extra radar beam that fastened itself on his hull, while the machine projecting it flung itself through the sky, computing an interception course. This was too bad, for the relays in that machine would have made him feel quite at home, and its propulsion mechanism would have given him more food for thought.
He might have sensed its detonation, for his pursuer had a nuclear warhead. But its built-in brain realized, as quickly as the agent himself could have, that no interception was possible within its performance limits. It gave up, shutting off its fuel and curving back toward its launching station. Even the aluminum alloys in its hull would have interested the agent greatly—but he was trying to think of anything except Earth, its inhabitants and their appalling technology.
His patrol orbit would carry him back to this vicinity in half a million years or so. The freighters would have been there by that time.
He wondered if he could bring himself to look at the dead world.
It was the general who explained it to the Parsons, at the University a few weeks later. He said, “He must have been in the devil’s own hurry. All he did was get his warning through, take a quick look at Anaconda, and zoom off. Ground-to-Air sent up a nuclear rocket to intercept him, but he got clear of it just in time, thank God! Plenty of heads rolled after that foul-up, I can assure you. Trigger-happy idiots they were!”
Candace, looking exceptionally attractive in a new, soft-blue linen dress which almost miraculously complemented both her figure and her coloring, said, “I’m glad, too. It must have had something to do with his intuitive alertness, from what I’ve been able to gather. Perhaps, he thought this world was going to blow up at any minute.”
“Hah!” said General Eades. “We’ve already located nine of those damned underground borers he told us about. At the rate they’re moving, our fiftieth-generation descendants will be out in space themselves before anything catastrophic happens. We’ll have the whole bunch spotted and disarmed by that time.”
He paused, chuckled again and added, “The weird part of it is that twenty-seven of the damned monsters are doing their stuff under Iron Curtain soil.”
Hal Parsons spoke thoughtfully. “I’ve been reading some of the pull-together reactions in the headlines, General. Won’t all this put you out of a job?”
“Not for a while,” said Eades. “Actually, I hope so. No responsible soldier wants war—ever. Makes our uniforms too dusty.”
“I still wish I knew how he produced that rain,” said Candace. “I’ve added meteorology to my other duties, hoping to get to the bottom of it.”
“Probably, he was just taking a bath,” said Eades. He puffed on his cigar meditatively and added, “It’s good to know you got a full professorship out of it, Parsons—and that you’re on your way to one yourself, Mrs. Parsons.” He fingered the new, bright extra star on his own collar, then asked, “What happened to the big, good-looking kid you had with you? I thought for sure he’d be in Hollywood by now.”
“Oh—poor Truck,” replied Candace. “He was all set to go. But he wanted to play in the homecoming game first. He broke his nose, and right now the movie brass isn’t interested. But he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s making out fine with one of those cute little red-headed co-eds on the campus.”
