Complete Short Fiction, page 221
At any rate, there should be no more need for that sort of experiment. Language lessons were well under way. He had recorded a good collection of nouns, some verbs the machines had acted out, even an adjective or two. He was puzzled by the tremendous length of some of the signal groups, and suspected them of being descriptions, rather than individual basic words.
But even that theory had difficulties. The signal which, apparently, stood for the machines themselves, one which should logically have called for a rather long and detailed description, was actually one of the shortest—though even this took several hundred milliseconds to complete. The agent decided that there was no point in trying to deduce grammar rules. He could communicate with memorized symbols, and they would have to suffice.
Of course, the symbols that could be demonstrated on the spot were hardly adequate to explain the nature of Earth’s danger. The Conservationist had long since decided just what he wished to say in that matter, and was waiting impatiently for enough words to let him say it.
It gradually became evident, however, that if he depended on chance alone to bring them into the lessons he was going to wait a long time. This meant little to him, personally. But the mole robots were not waiting for any instruction to be completed. They were burrowing on. The agent tried to think of some means for leading the lessons in the desired direction.
This took a good deal of imagination on his part, obvious as his final solution would seem to a human being. The idea of having to learn a language had been utterly strange to him, and he was still amazed at the ingenuity the natives showed in devising a means for teaching one. It was some time before it occurred to him that he might very well perform some actions, just as they were doing. If he did not follow his own acts with signal groups of his own, these natives might not understand that he wanted theirs. The time had come for a more direct and audacious approach to the entire problem, and at the thought of what he was about to do his spirits soared.
He did it. He lifted the ship a few feet into the air, settled back to show that he was not actually leaving, and then rose again. He waited, expectantly.
“Up.”
“Rise.”
“Go.”
Each of the watching machines emitted a different signal, virtually simultaneously. Three of them came through very faintly, since the speakers were some distance from the radio. But he was able to correlate each with the lip-motions of its maker. He was not too much troubled by the fact that different signals were used. He was more interested in the evidence that a different individual was controlling each machine. This was a little confusing, in view of his earlier theories. But he stuck grimly to the problem at hand.
VI
The agent dropped back to the ground and went through his actions again. This time only the individual with the radio spoke. The word it used was rise. This was not the one it had used the other time. To make sure, the agent went through the act still again, and got the same word. Evidently, once their minds were made up, they intended to stick to their decisions. What could he think?
Then he tried burrowing into the ground, which seemed a useful action to be able to mention. The word given on the radio was dig, though two of the other machines apparently had different ideas once more.
It did not occur to him that these things might be detecting the by-products of his digging as well as his deliberate attempts to produce sound waves, or that his efforts to focus his third eye lens, a little while before, had actually been the cause of their sudden interest in his ship at that moment. He was much too pleased with himself at this point to entertain such extraneous ideas.
Having taken over the initiative in the matter of language lessons, he concentrated on the words he wanted, and, within a fairly short time, felt sure that he could get the basic facts of Earth’s danger across to his listeners. After all, only four signal groups were involved in the concept. Satisfied that he had these correctly, he proceeded to use them together. In his progress now he felt the surge of a very personal kind of pride.
“Man dig—mountain rise.”
For some unexplained reason the listening machines did not burst into frantic activity at the news. For a moment, he hoped that the controllers had turned to more suitable equipment to cope with the danger, leaving inactive that which they had been using. But he was quickly disabused of that bit of wishful thinking. The machine with the radio began to speak again.
“Man dig.” It bent over and began to push the loose dirt aside with the flattened ends of its upper struts. The agent realized, with some dismay, that its operator must suppose he was merely continuing the language lesson. He spoke again, more loudly, the two signal groups which the other seemed to be ignoring.
“Mountain rise.”
All the machines looked at the hill across the valley, but nothing constructive seemed likely to come from that. If they waited for that one to rise noticeably, it would be too late to do anything about enlightening them as to the robots. He tried, frantically, to think of other words he had learned, or combinations which would serve his purpose. One seemed promising to him.
“Mountain break—Earth break—man break.” The verb did not quite fit what was to happen, according to its earlier demonstration, but it did carry an implication of destruction, at least. His audience turned back to the ship, but gave no obvious sign of understanding.
He thought of another concept which might apply, but no word for it had yet appeared in the lessons. So, to illustrate it, he turned his ship’s weapon on a patch of soil, a hundred yards from the bow. Twenty seconds’ exposure to that needle of intolerable flame reduced the ground which it struck to smoking lava.
Even before he had finished the word fire came from one of the watchers. The observer made no comment on the fact that the tube which threw slugs of metal had been leveled at his hull, during most of the performance. He simply made use of the new word.
“Man dig—Earth fire—mountain fire.”
One of the machines produced its ionization tube and cautiously approached the patch of cooling slag. This had a slight amount of radioactivity from the beam, and its effect on the tube gave rise to much mutual signaling on the part of the machines. This culminated in a lengthy radio broadcast, not addressed to the agent. Then the language lessons were resumed, with the natives once more taking the initiative.
“Iron—copper—lead.” Samples were shown individually.
“Metal.” All the samples were shown together.
“Melt” This was demonstrated, when they finally made him understand that the weapon should be used again.
“Big—little.” Pairs of stones, of cacti, coins and figures, scratched in the dirt, illustrated this contrast.
Numbers—no difficulty.
“Ship.” This proved confusing, since the agent had supposed the word man covered any sort of machine. Finally, slightly fuller sentences became possible. “Fire-metal under ground,” the men tried.
The agent repeated the statement, leaving them in doubt. More time passed, while yes and no were explained. Then the same phrase brought a response of “Yes.”
“Men dig.”
“Yes—men dig—mountain melt—mountain rise.”
“Where?” This word took still more time, and was solved, at last, only by a pantomime involving all the men. Here and there were covered in the same act. However, knowing what the question meant did not make it much easier for the agent to answer it.
He had no maps of the planet, and would have recognized no man-made charts, with the possible exception of a globe, which is not standard equipment on a small field expedition.
After still more time, the men managed to get a unit of distance across to him, however, and he could use the ion beam for pointing. In this way, he did his best to indicate the locations of the moles.
“There! Eighty-one miles. Two miles down.” And, in another direction. “There! Fifteen hundred-twelve miles. Eighteen miles down.” He kept this up through the entire list of the forty-five moles he had detected and located.
The furious note-taking that accompanied his exposition did not mean anything to him, of course, though he deduced correctly the purpose of the magnetic compass one of the listening machines was using. He realized that giving positions to an accuracy of one mile was woefully inadequate for the problem of actually locating the moles.
But he could do the final close-guiding later, when the native machines approached their targets. He could come to their aid if they did not have detection equipment of their own which would work at that range. Just what possibilities in that direction might be inherent in organic engineering the agent could not guess. At any rate, the natives did not seem to feel greater precision was needed. They made no request for it.
In fact, they did not seem to want anything more. He had expected to spend a long time explaining the apparatus needed to intercept and derange the moles. But that aspect of the matter did not appear to bother the natives at all. Why, why? It should have bothered them.
In spite of appearances, the agent was not stupid. The problem of communication with an intelligence not of his own race had never, as far as he knew, been faced by any of his people. He had tried to treat it as a scientific problem. It was hardly his fault that each phenomenon he encountered had infinitely more possible explanations than ordinary scientific observation, and he could hardly be expected to guess the reason why.
Even so, he realized it could not be considered a proven fact that the natives had read the proper meaning from his signaling. He actually doubted that they had, in the way and to the extent that some mid-nineteenth century human physicists doubted the laws of gravity and conservation of energy. He determined to continue checking as long as possible, to make sure that they were right.
The human beings, partly as a result of greater experience, partly for certain purely human reasons, also felt that a check was desirable. With their far better local background, they were the first to take action. To them, fire metal, when mentioned in conjunction with a positive test for radioactivity, implied only one kind of fire.
Man dig was not quite so certain. They apparently could not decide whether the alien being was giving information or advice—whether someone was already digging at the indicated points, or that they should go there themselves to dig. The majority inclined to the latter view.
To settle the question, one of them took the trench-shovel, which was part of their equipment, and arranged a skit that eventually made clear the difference between the continuative—digging—and the imperative dig!
While this was going on, another thought occurred to the agent. Since these things had used different words for the machines he was watching and the one he was riding, perhaps man was not quite the right term for the mole-robots he was trying to tell about. He wondered how he could generalize. By the end of the second run-through of the skit he had what he hoped was a solution.
“Man digging—ship digging,” he said.
“Digging fire metal?”
“Man digging fire metal—ship digging fire metal.”
“Where?”
He ran through the list of locations again, though somewhat at a loss for the reason it was needed, and was allowed to finish, because, though he did not know it, no one could think of a way to tell him to stop. He felt satisfied when he had finished—there could hardly be any doubt in the minds of his listeners now.
They were talking to each other again—the reason was now obvious enough. The operators must be in different locations, must be communicating with each other through their machines. He had little doubt of what they were saying, in a general way.
Which was too bad—in a general way.
“It’s vague—infernally vague.”
“I know—but what else can he mean?”
“Perhaps he’s lust telling about some of our own mines, asking what we get out of them or trying to tell us he wants some of it.”
“But what can ‘flame metal’ mean but fissionables? And what mine of ours did he point out?”
“I don’t know about all of his locations, but the first one he mentioned—the closest one—certainly fits.”
“What?”
“Eighty-one miles, bearing thirty degrees magnetic.
That’s as close as you could ask to Anaconda, unless this map is haywire. There are certainly men digging there!”
“Not two miles down!”
“They will be, unless we find a substitute for copper.”
“I still think this thing is telling us about beings of its own kind, who are lifting our fissionables. They could do it easily enough, if they dig the way this one does. I’m for at least calling up there, and finding out whether anyone has thought of drilling test cores under the mine level—and how deep they went. There’s no point walking around here, looking for anything else. We’ve found our fireball, right here.”
The agent was interested but not anxious when the machines turned back to him, and direct communication was brought once more into operation. He was beginning to feel less tense, and confident that everything was going to come out all right if he stuck with it.
“Eighty-one miles that way. Men digging. Go now.”
They illustrated the last words, turning away from his ship and starting in the proper direction. The agent could not exactly relax, fitting as he did into the spaces designed for him in his ship, but he felt the appropriate emotion.
They were getting started on one of the necessary steps, at least. Presumably, the other and more distant ones would be tackled as soon as the news could be spread. These machines moved slowly, but their control impulses apparently did not.
It occurred to him that, since none of the devices had been left on hand to communicate with him, the natives might be expecting him to appear at the nearest digging site—the one they had mentioned. The more he thought of it, the more likely such an interpretation of their last message seemed. So, with the men barely started on their walk back to the waiting jeep, the Conservationist sent his ship whistling upward on a long slant toward the northeast.
VII
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 worthwhile 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 long-distance 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 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 frame-work of some sort, perhaps partly metallic even though he had not perceived it.
