Natives of Space, page 2
“Did you see any of the intelligent race?” asked Tes.
“Not exactly,” replied Thrykar. He told her of the encounter with the automobile, while she prepared food for him; and between mouthfuls he described the underwater hollow where he planned to conceal the ship and from which they could easily make the necessary sorties.
Tes was enthusiastic, though she was still not entirely clear as to the method Thrykar planned to employ in obtaining what he wanted from a human being without the latter’s becoming aware of the alien presence. Her husband smiled at her difficulty.
“As you said, it’s been done before,” he told her. “I’m going to sleep now; I haven’t been so tired for years. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.” He rose, tossed the eating utensils into the washer, and went back to the sleeping room. The tanks were already full; he slid into his without a splash, and was asleep almost before the water closed over him. Tes followed his example.
He had not exaggerated his fatigue; he slept long after his wife had risen and eaten. She was in the library when he finally appeared, reading once again the few chapters the handbook devoted to Earth and its inhabitants. One of her eyes rolled upward toward him as Thrykar entered.
“It seems that these men are primitive enough to have a marked tendency toward superstition — ascribing things they don’t understand to supernatural intervention. Are you going to try to pass off our present activities in that way?”
“I’m not making any effort in that specific direction,” he replied, “though the reaction you mention may well occur. They will realize that something out of the ordi-nary is happening; I don’t see how that can be avoided, unless we are extremely lucky and happen on an individ-ual whose way of life is such that he won’t be missed by his fellows for a day or so. I’m sure, however, that a judicious use of anaesthetics will prevent their acquiring enough data to reach undesirable conclusions. If you will let me have that book for a while, I’ll try to find out what is likely to affect their systems.”
“But I didn’t think we had much in the way of drugs, to say nothing of anaesthetics, aboard,” exclaimed Tes.
“We haven’t; but we have a fair supply of the com-moner chemicals and reagents. Remember your husband’s occupation, my dear!” He took the book, smiling, and settled into a sling. He read silently for about ten minutes, leafing rapidly back and forth in a way that suggested he knew what he was looking for, but which made it very difficult for his wife to read over his shoulder.
She kept on trying.
Eventually Thrykar spent several consecutive minutes on one page; then he looked up and said,
“It looks as though this stuff would do it. I’ll have to see whether we have the wherewithal to make it. Do you want to watch a chemist at work, my beloved musician?”
She followed him, of course, and watched with an absorption that almost equaled his own as he inventoried their small stock of chemicals, measured, mixed, heated and froze, distilled and collected; she had only the most general knowledge of any of the physical sciences, but in watching she could appreciate that her husband, in his own occupation, was as much of an artist as she herself. It was this understanding, shared by very few, of this side of his character that had led her to marry an individual who was considered by most of his acquaintances to be a rather stodgy and narrow-minded, if brilliant, scientist.
Thrykar connected the exhaust tube of his last distilla-tion to a small rotary pump, confining the resultant gas in a cylinder light enough to carry easily. Even Tes could appreciate the meaning of that.
“If it’s a gas, how do you plan to administer it?” she asked. “Judging from their pictures, these human beings are much more powerful than we. You can’t very well hold a mask over their faces, and even I know it’s not practical to shoot a jet of gas any distance. Why don’t you use a liquid or soluble solid that can be carried by a small dart, for example?”
”The less solid equipment we carry and risk losing, the better for all concerned,” replied Thrykar.
“If the air is fairly still and there is no rain, I can make them absorb a lungful of this stuff quite easily. It has been done before, and on this planet — you should pay more attention to what you read.” He rolled an eye back at his wife. “Did you ever blow a bubble?”
Tes stood motionless for a moment, thinking. Then she brightened. “Of course. I remember what you mean now. Passing to another phase of the problem, how and where do you find a human being alone?”
“We attack that matter after moving the ship. We’ll have to watch them for a day or two, to learn something about their habits in this neighborhood — the book is not very helpful. If a lone hunter or traveler gets near enough, the problem will solve itself; but we can’t count on that. I’ve done all I can here, my dear. We’ll have to wait till dark, now, to move the ship.”
“All right,” replied Tes. “I’m going outside for a while; our only daylight view of this planet was from high altitude. Even if we can’t get close to any small animals, there may be plants or rocks or just plain scenery that will be worth looking at. Won’t you come along?”
Thrykar acquiesced, with the proviso that neither of them should wander far from the hollow in which the ship was located. He was perfectly aware of his limita-tions in an uncivilized environment, and knew that it wouldn’t take a very skillful stalker to approach them without their knowing it. In the open, that could be dangerous; with the ship and its equipment at hand, countermeasures could always be taken.
They went out together, leaving the outer air lock door open — it could have been locked and reopened electrical-ly; but Thrykar had once read of an individual in a position similar to theirs who had returned to his ship to find the power cut off by a burned-out relay, leaving him in a very embarrassing position. The weather was overcast, as it had been ever since their arrival, but there were signs that the sun might soon break through. The woods were dripping wet, which made them if anything more unpleasant for the aliens. The temperature was, from their point of view, cool but not uncomfortable.
There was plenty of animal life. Although none of the small creatures permitted them to approach at all closely, the two were able to examine them in considerable detail; retinal cells rather smaller than those in the human eye and eyeballs more than three times as large permitted them to distinguish clearly objects for which a human being would have needed a fair-sized opera glass. The bird life was of particular interest to Tes; no such creatures had ever evolved on their watery home planet, and she made quite a collection of cast-off feathers.
The largest animal they saw was a deer. It saw them at the same moment, standing at the edge of the hollow at a point where very few trees grew; it stared at them for fully half a minute trying to digest a new factor in its existence. Then, as Tes made a slight motion toward the creature, it turned and bounded off, disappearing at once below the edge of the cup. They hastened toward the spot where it had stood, hoping to catch a final glimpse, but they were far too slow, and nothing was visible among the trees when they got there. Tes turned to her partner.
“Why isn’t it possible to use an animal like that? It’s easily large enough to take no harm, and must be at least as similar to us as these human beings.” Thrykar rippled a fin negatively.
“I’m a chemist, not a biologist, and I don’t know the whole story. It has something to do with the degree of development of the donor’s nervous system. It may seem odd that that should affect its blood, but it seems to — remember, every cell of a creature’s body has the chromosomes and genes and whatever else the biologists know about in that line, which make it theoretically possible to grow a new animal of the same sort from any of the cells. I don’t believe it’s been done yet,” he added with a touch of humor, “but who am I to say it can’t be?”
Tes interrupted him with a gesture.
“Tell me, Thrykar, is that throbbing noise I hear now the one produced by those pumps? I’m surprised that it should be audible at this distance. Listen.” He did so, wondering for a moment, then gave once more a sign of negation.
“It’s a machine of some kind, but I can’t say just what, It doesn’t seem to be down there in the town — we’d be hearing it more definitely from that direction. It might be almost anywhere among these mountains — not too far away, of course — with echoes confusing us as to its point of origin.
It can’t be an aircraft, because it’s too loud and — look out! Don’t move, Tes!” He froze as he spoke, and his wife followed his example. As the last words left his mouth, the pulsing drone increased to a howling roar which, at last, had a definite direction. The eyes of the aliens rolled upward to follow the silvery, winged shape that fled across their field of vision scarcely five hundred feet above them.
The pilot of the A-26 saw neither the aliens nor their ship. He passed directly above the latter, so that it was out of his direct vision; and although Thrykar and Tes felt horribly conspicuous in the almost clear area where they were standing, the speed of the machine and the pilot’s preoccupation with the task of navigating com-bined to prevent untimely revelations.
As the roar faded once more to a drone, Thrykar galvanized into action. He plunged into the hollow toward his ship; and Tes, after a moment’s startled immobility, followed.
“What’s the matter?” she called after him. “I don’t think he saw us, and anyway it’s too late to do anything about it.”
“That’s not the trouble,” replied Thrykar as he flung himself up the ramp into the ship. “You should have spotted that yourself. You mentioned something this morning about the tendency of man toward superstition. If he’s in that stage of social development, be shouldn’t have more than the rudiments of any of the physical sciences. The book said as much, as I recall; and I want to check up on that, right now!” He snatched up the volume, which fell open at the already well-thumbed section dealing with Earth, and began to read. Tes, with an effort, forbore to interrupt; but she vas not kept waiting long. Her husband looked up presently, and spoke.
“It’s as I thought. According to this thing, mankind has as one of its most advanced mechanisms the steam-powered locomotive. I saw one last night, you may recall. I assumed without really giving the matter much thought that the quarry pumps were also steam-driven. It says here that animals are even used for hauling or carrying loads over short distances. That all ties in with a culture still influenced by superstition. The book does not mention aircraft — and that machine wasn’t steam-powered. Those were internal-combustion engines. I think now that the pumps in the quarries had similar power plants; and if men can make them at once light and powerful enough to drive aircraft, they know more of molecular physics and chemistry than they should.”
“But why should that be a manmade ship?” asked Tes. “After all, we are here; why shouldn’t another spaceship have come in at the same time? After all, Earth is a refresher station.”
“For a variety of reasons,” replied Thrykar. “First, anyone coming here for refreshing would keep out of sight, as we are doing; and that ship flew in plain sight of the town below here, and made racket enough to be heard for miles. Second, that wasn’t a spaceship — you must have seen that it was driven by rotating airfoils and supported by fixed ones. Why should anyone from off the planet go to the trouble of bringing and assembling such a craft here, when they must have infinitely better transpor-tation in the form of their spaceship? No, Tes, that thing was manmade, and there’s something very wrong with the handbook. It’s the latest revision on this sector, too — the Earth material is only sixty or seventy years old. I hope it isn’t so badly off on the biology and physiology end; we certainly don’t want to cause injury to any man.”
“But what can you do, if the book can’t be trusted?”
“Feel my way carefully, and go on the evidence already at hand. We can’t very well leave now — you’re safe, as you aren’t of age yet, but I might be in rather bad shape by the time we reached another refresher station. We’ll carry on as planned for the present, and move the ship down to the quarry tonight. I just hope the human race isn’t so far advanced in electronics as they seem to be elsewhere; if they are, we are wide open to detection. I wonder how in blazes the individual who reported on this planet could have come to do such a slipshod job. Failure to measure their chemical or biological advancement is forgivable, those wouldn’t be so obvious; but missing aircraft, and electric lights, and internal-combustion en-gines in general is a little too much.
However,” he left the vexing question, “that is insoluble for the present. The other point that arises, Tes, is the one you mentioned. I’m afraid they won’t bear a superstitious attitude toward our activities, if they become aware of them; and we’ll have to be correspondingly more careful.
If you can think of anything that will help between now and nightfall, it will be appreciated.”
Neither of them did.
Bringing the little craft down the mountain side in the dark was rather more difficult than Thrykar had antici-pated. He was afraid to use micro-wave viewers because of the newborn fear of the scientific ability of the human race; it was necessary to drift downhill at treetop level, straining his eyes through the forward ports, until the slope flattened out. The lights of the town had been visible during the descent, and he had kept well to their left; now he backed fifty feet up the hill, turned on the reflection altimeter — whose tight, vertical beam he hoped would not scatter enough to cause a reaction in any nearby receivers — and crawled along the contour in the general direction of the lights.
He had allowed more leeway than was strictly neces-sary, and was some distance to the north of the quarries; but at last the dial of the altimeter gave a sudden jump, and the two aliens looked carefully out of the ports as Thrykar let the ship descend, a foot at a time. At last the hull touched something — and sank in; they were at the first quarry. The ship lifted again, a little higher this time for safety as its course slanted in once inure toward the mountain. Again a flicker of the needle; again the cautious descent; but this time it was permitted to sink on down after the hull made contact.
The ship stopped sinking when it was about three-fourths submerged, and Thrykar guided it carefully to the side of the great pit where he had located the undercut. While the nose continued to bump gently against the granite, he let water into compartment after compartment until the hull was completely under water — he could have used the drive, but preferred to have the ship stable in its hiding place. He did use power to ease into the hollow, which he located by use of an echo-sounder; its impulses would not be detectable out of the body of water in which they were used.
Leaving Tes to hold the ship in position temporarily, Thrykar plunged out through the air lock and made fast, using metal cables clipped to rings in the hull and extending to bars set into cracks already in the rock. He could have drilled holes specifically for the purpose, but not silently; and the existing facilities were adequate. The work completed, he tapped on the hull to signal Tes.
She cut off all power, let the ship settle into stability, and joined Thrykar in the water. It was the first swim she had had since they had started the trip, and they spent the next hour enjoying it.
A little more time was spent exploring the ground around the quarry and out to the road; then, on the chance that the next day might be more hectic than those preceding, they sought the sleeping tanks. Thrykar, before sliding into the cold water, set an alarm to awaken him shortly before sunrise.
Before the sun was very high, therefore, he and Tes were at work. They explored once more, this time by daylight, the environs of the pit; and among the bushes, heaps of crushed rock, and broken blocks of granite they found a number of good hiding places.
None was ideal; they wanted two, more or less visible from each other, commanding views along at least a short stretch of the road passing the quarry. One was very satisfactory in this respect, but unfortunately it was situated on the side away from the town and covered that segment of road which they planned to watch more to insure safety than in expectation of results. On the other side, a space under several blocks was found from which it was possible to view the other hiding place and the quarry itself, but to see the road it was necessary to crawl some twenty yards. As the crawl could be made entirely under fair cover, Thrykar finally selected this space, and stored the gas cylinders and auxiliary equipment therein.
From the point where he could see the road, Tes’ hiding place was invisible; and after a moment’s indeci-sion he called to her. He was sure no human beings were as yet in the neighborhood, but he made his words brief. Then he crawled back to the edge of the quarry. As his station was some distance up the hillside, he was fully sixty feet above the water; but he launched himself over the lip of granite without hesitation, and clove the surface with no more sound than a small stone would have made from the same height.
He entered the submerged ship, enclosed two of the small communicators such as he had used on the first night in water-tight cases, and brought them to the surface. Climbing painfully to where Tes was watching, he gave her one; then he returned to his own place, crossing above the quarry.
He settled down to his vigil, reasonably sure that the tiny sets were not powerful enough to be picked up outside the immediate vicinity, and relieved of the worry that Tes might see something without being able to warn him.
They did not have long to wait. Tes was first to signal that something was visible; before Thrykar could move to ask for details, he himself heard the engine of the car. It sped on down the road and into town — an ancient, rickety jalopy, though the aliens had no standard with which to compare it. Two more passed, going in the same direction, during the next fifteen minutes. Each held a single human being — hired men from the farms up the valley, going to town on various errands for their employers, though the watchers had no means of knowing this. After they had passed, nothing happened for nearly an hour.
