Planet for Plunder Page 11

  General Eades, his blue eyes unusually bright and young and alert in his lined, leathery face looked at the monstrous bulk of the alien and stood for a moment in silent speculation. Then he said, “I was beginning to think it was all a pipe-dream. He’s a big fellow, isn’t he?”

  For the next few minutes, he talked with Hal, letting the geologist brief him on recent events. Then, turning to Truck, “Quite an experience for you, young man. If we get out of this thing in any sort of shape, you’ll be in Hollywood in ten days.”

  “Coach wouldn’t like it,” said the football player. “And I’m no Elvis Presley.”

  General Eades put his head back and laughed. Then he unslung the movie camera and said, “I gather you haven’t made a pictorial record of your friend over there. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be laughed out of the service. I thought you said he only had two eyes. Isn’t that a third? Did you put mud in that one, too?”

  “I’ll be damned!” said Hal. He and Candace regarded one another. They were bewildered, amazed and a little frightened. His lips tightening, Hal said, “He’s full of surprises. Stick around and you’ll find out.”

  “I intend to,” said General Eades. “I’ve been on this thing, ever since the first radar flash came in—four days ago. Haven’t had two hours consecutive sleep since. You’ve got no idea the fuss our friend has kicked up. The army’s got ten thousand men trying to crack this valley, and diplomats and newspaper men are sleeping on billiard tables in Butte—if they’re lucky enough to buy space on one.”

  As he spoke, he walked slowly around the monstrous globe, holding the camera to eye level, shooting it from all sides. Returning, he reappropriated the walkie-talkie from Truck, who had been dutifully standing guard over it.

  “I checked the stuff in your jeep and trailer on the way here from my drop,” General Eades said. “You must have got more than just arm-tired cranking that battery outfit of yours. I haven’t seen one like it since World War Two.”

  “It was the best the department at the University could allow us,” said Hal, a trifle on the defensive.

  Tactfully, Candace put in, “We’re awfully glad you got here, General. We were not only wet—we were lonely for a new face.”

  “Afraid mine’s not exactly new,” said Eades. Then, putting the walkie-talkie to work, he said resignedly. “Guess I’d better report, before they send a big drop in, and a few-score G.I.’s get killed. This valley’s full of rocks and potholes, and visibility is nil.”

  “You’re telling us, General!” said Truck.

  The general’s report, via radio, was lengthy but concise. He had yet to complete it when an audition from the alien, mimicking his own voice, caused interference that made intelligible communication impossible. He lowered the set, looked at the others, and nodded toward the grey-metal globe.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “That’s it,” said Hal.

  Almost before the words were out of his mouth, a new sound—not through the radio, but carried clearly through the open air—smote all their ears. Smote was the word, as it rose in an ear-shattering crescendo that caused them to look at one another in alarm.

  “The thing’s howling like a fire-siren!” cried Candace, clapping her hands to her ears. The others followed suit.

  It continued, for a couple of deafening minutes that all but reduced already quivering nerves to shreds. Then, as suddenly as it had started up, it ceased, and slowly they removed their hands.

  Candace wondered if her eardrums were permanently damaged. She saw Truck hammering the side of his head, like an inexperienced swimmer with water in his ear.

  He said, “If that’s his natural voice, I wonder how he sounds when he’s really worked up.”

  Hal and the general exchanged a significant look. It was Eades who broke the welcome silence. “Maybe he’s right,” he said. “Is that the first time it’s tried communicating—apart from radio mimicry?”

  “That’s right,” Hal told him.

  “Significant,” said General Eades. “Damned significant. I wonder . . . That third eye bothers me. Do you suppose it bothers him?”

  He walked up to the machine, disregarding Candace’s gasp, “Be careful!”

  Gently he scraped the mud from the lens. Nothing happened, but the sound did not return. He said, scowling at the porthole, “The surface looks too flat for close vision.”

  “We had the same thought,” Hal told him. “Still, it can see when it wants to.”

  General Eades walked around the sphere, studied the other two eyes, noted the places where the caked mud had flaked away. “Used to know an optometrist,” he muttered. “Could be, the mud helps to give him closer focus by covering most of the lens.”

  “. . . most of the lens,” said the general, though his lips did not move. Eades started, looked at the others, and instantly pointed to one of his own eyes. He said, “Eye.”

  “Eye,” said the voice from the alien. There was no question now in any of their minds. The alien had clearly discovered some means of direct vocal speech.

  After several more tests, the general walked back to the others, his blue eyes alight with excitement. “That’s it,” he told them. “Our friend made that howl to let us know it had a new means of communication.”

  Hal motioned him to silence, and they waited, breathlessly. But the alien did not repeat the speech or any part of it. The geologist advanced, pointed to himself, and said, “Man.”

  “Man,” said the alien.

  “It understands,” said Hal, his voice almost cracking. “Listen!” He accompanied the words by no pantomime, and the alien was silent.

  “I’ll be damned!” said the general.

  “Eureka!” cried Candace, raising her arms toward the sky.

  “Eureka!” said the voice from the globe.

  “Careful, baby,” Hal told her. “You just gave our friend a bum steer. Don’t gesture unless you’re outlining exactly what you mean.”

  From then on, in the excitement of attaining at least a rudimentary understanding with the thing from space, the little group on the hillside forgot the rain and their physical misery. Time was forgotten too, as they taught it new word meanings, and brought it examples of equipment and local flora in an effort to increase its vocabulary.

  Candace found a bedraggled plant, wiped mud from it and said, “Green,” pressing the stem as she held it up for the alien to see.

  “Green,” came the answer. “Plant—green.”

  “Green,” Candace repeated. “Green through sun.” She pointed skyward. “Green through photosynthesis.”

  “Plant green—through photosynthesis,” came the expected reply. Then, “Plant, man green—both photosynthesis.”

  “Bless me!” cried General Eades. “We’re on the way!”

  Hal spoke up then. “Has it occurred to you, General, that our friend here may have some message to give us? If he has, it may take us a hell of a long time before we can give him the right words to give back to us.”

  Eades stroked his chin. “You were probably right in asking for philologists earlier,” he said unhappily. “We’re a bunch of babes in the woods at this game.”

  There was a long, disconsolate silence. Then Candace broke it, saying bravely, “In any case, we’ve got to keep going. Our friend may have an answer of his own.”

  “I’d give a lot for one good word-man I could count on getting down here alive,” said the general. “I’ll put in a call.”

  But, before he could get the radio in operation, the observant Truck said, “Look! Hey, don’t tell me he’s leaving us now!”

  They stared in horror and utter dismay as the great, grey bulk of the alien rose vertically in the roil of mud already familiar to all but the general. Then they breathed sighs of relief. It hovered, only a few feet above the ground, then settled back, then rose again and remained stationary.

  “He’s trying to signal to us!” cried Candace, her voice shrill with excitement. “He wan
ts us to give him a word for what he’s doing.”

  “Fly!” shouted the general. “Up!” said Candace.

  “Rise!” called Hal Parsons.

  “Go!” yelled Truck MacLaurie.

  They spoke almost simultaneously, but the monster from space seemed confused. He made no answer at all.

  XIII

  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 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 least, 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 communicating 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 about the way and to about 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 the
mselves 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 just 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!”