by Jerry
“Right away, sir.”
They waited. It was unlikely that there were any natives within quite a few miles, at any rate. They had seen, as they came down, no roads, no cities, no spaceports, and no sign of any smaller artificial construction. True, they had had almost no time to look for them. They had come through one hundred ninety miles of detectable atmosphere in twenty-nine seconds, and even the so-called instantaneous cameras couldn’t hold focus at that speed. But this nearly flat and mostly bare plain seemed natural and haphazard enough, without sign of planned layout, and if it was big enough for Spinelli to have picked it out from a hundred thousand miles out—
Adhem’s speaker burped and whispered for a moment, and after a few curt comments the medical officer said helplessly, “All right then.” He turned to Chang.
“I can give this place a clean bill of health, sir,” he said. His voice held a disapproving note.
Chang observed it, commented, “Something’s eating you.”
“Yes, sir. There is not one single bacterium, virus or subvirus in any of the air, soil or vegetation samples we took. There is no sign of any poison, either, but that doesn’t worry us. But it isn’t natural for there to be no bacteria!”
“Perhaps it isn’t natural,” said Chang equably. “After all, the only bacteria aboard this ship are the ones we use to digest our food, but that isn’t natural. We saw to it ourselves.”
“But you couldn’t do that to a whole world—!”
“Why not? I’d believe a lot of a race that can afford to floor the supply lock of a complete city with durasteel. Either way, what does it matter? Engelhart!”
“Sir?”
“I want a thorough survey of the immediate neighborhood from as low as your boys can go without getting into trouble. Say within a radius of a hundred miles. That’s your pigeon. Use helis, and screen them well. Deeley, I also want a full photographic record with wide-angle and instantaneous cameras and full color stereo prints of the entire surface of the planet—land and water—from high level. You can have two of the lifeboats for that. And I want results quicker than jump. Engelhart—one more thing: Tell your boys to pay special attention to anything that could be a sign of habitation and report it as soon as found.”
“Right, sir,” said Engelhart, and he and Deeley turned to their control desks, whispering orders into hanging microphones.
Chang turned to Adhem, said, “Is this planet safe?”
“One hundred per cent, sir—and no reservations.”
“Right. Have the verandah extended, will you? Let’s go outside.”
They stood leaning over the rail of the “captain’s verandah,” a platform extending outside the bridge halfway up the nose of the ship and thus about forty feet from the ground. Blue sky shone over them and the warmth of the sun refreshed them.
After a while Deeley and Engelhart joined them from inship, and they watched the survey helicopters purr out from their lock like a flight of gigantic bees, their vanes silver in the sunlight, and vanish from sight as their screens went up. Then with a roar and a clank the two lifeboats detailed for Deeley’s planetary mapping job kicked a couple of miles into the sky of anti-grav beams from the ship and went heavenwards on a cloud of atomic flame. There was nothing to do but wait, warily.
Inside the ship the crew stood to battle stations. The launchers and the mine throwers and the energy beams and the fluorine spray jets swung evenly in their guides, invisible behind screens that would go down at the first sign of hostility. The radar antennae were out, poking their radiant fingers into the blue sky, and the electron ’scopes moved in continual survey of the neighborhood. There was small chance of them catching the approach of anything even moderately well screened, but there was the possibility that alien-built screens might fail to cover a band of radiation which men used. But the alarm on Keston’s lapel speaker remained silent.
Engelhart picked a spot to lean over the rail, said appreciatively, “This could be Earth, couldn’t it?”
Chang’s pipe smoke rose blue and straight in the still air. He said with interest, “Have you been there, then?”
Engelhart laughed. He said, “Not I, sir. I was born on Beta Centauri III—Heimwelt, we call it. One of the few worlds to retain a second official language—Old German in our case, as well as Anglic Terrestrial. You been to Earth, sir?”
“No. In fact, I doubt if we have anyone aboard who has, let alone anyone born there. Have we, Deeley?”
Deeley grinned, said self-consciously, “Only myself, sir. I checked.”
Chang said, “And I didn’t know! Is this like Earth—really?” Deeley turned and stared out across the greenness of the plain to the blue hills on the horizon. He said softly, “Not in the slightest. It’s Earth as it may have been a thousand years ago, but there hasn’t been room for this much peacefulness and beauty on Earth for a good many centuries. That’s why I emigrated—to find a chance to be alone.”
Chang nodded, his pipe tying a knotted trail of smoke. He said, “It’s gotten that way on New Earth, too—where I was born. No place for beauty any more. Too much overcrowding. Too much to do and too little time to do it.”
“Uhuh,” agreed Keston with a touch of cynicism. “But by the same token, if this world is uninhabited our fortunes’ll be made by the spill-over from those same overcrowded planets.”
“What a mess that’ll make,” said Adhem seriously.
The alarm on Keston’s lapel purred softly, and the observation officer held the speaker to his mouth. He said, “Keston listening.”
“Sandiman here,” said the tiny but clear voice. “We’ve spotted a small animal of some sort on the port side—just about at the edge of the burnt patch.”
“Wait a moment,” said Keston. He turned to the left of the verandah. The others followed his example, searching for some sign of the creature.
Then they saw it—a small furry beast about the size of a wallaby and somewhat resembling one. It had blind white eyes like tennis balls and long ears cupped forward towards the ship. It was just at the edge of the burning.
Chang pulled a monocle from his pocket and looked it over with care. He said finally, “I wish they’d allow us a regular alien psychologist and semanticist instead of leaving everything to chance.”
Adhem laughed under his breath. He said, “The argument they use, sir, is that only one planet in a thousand is inhabited, and of those few races we do find common ground in five cases out of six just doesn’t exist. Then we run across a plum like this one and we get the blame if anything goes wrong.”
“Hello!” Chang interrupted. “Unless my eyes are playing tricks I don’t think that’s a specimen of the local intelligence.”
“Why, sir?” said Keston. He had produced a monocle of his own now and was also looking at the alien.
“Several things. The most obvious is that the robot we found on the Moon had six limbs and this has four, but that could be for convenience. What I do find interesting is that this one hasn’t any hands.”
Keston looked at the beast’s upper limbs with care. Sure enough, they terminated in flat pads that showed little sign of being able to grip anything, and the possession of gripping appendages was a prime attribute of all known intelligence, whether suckerlike, tentacular, manuform or even magneto-gravitic like the high-density Proximans who had a small colony on Pluto. He said, “You never know, sir.”
Chang sighed slightly. He agreed, “You never know. All right, Engelhart, I’ll attempt communication. Have everything you’ve got ready to hit if anything goes wrong. If you have to blast me, tell Deputy Captain Malory to come on watch and lift for space at once. Get me some gloves, somebody, and you’d better let me have a gravitic belt in case they shoot something at me.”
Keston whispered into his lapel speaker, and a moment later an orderly came out with a pair of steel-quilted gloves that would stand hydrofluoric for twenty seconds and yet would let the wearer tell a milled coin from a plain one, and a gravitic belt t
hat would stop a high velocity bullet aimed anywhere in head or body from more than a yard away. Chang put them on and began to descend the ladder from the verandah to the ground.
They watched in silence as he began to walk cautiously through the charred vegetation, black powdery ash marking the legs of his trousers. The alien creature did not move, except to swing its big ears from side to side.
Twenty yards from it he stopped, holding his hands well out at the side to show they were empty. The creature seemed to be studying him, listening for something. He could see now that the white, bulging eyes were not blind. Each had a black pupil and each was turned on him. But it did not take fright and run away, and, encouraged, he stepped nearer.
Feet from it, he paused again, and then started slightly as it moved, but its only action was to come up to him as if to sniff him like a dog, and then to rub itself contentedly against his legs.
Hardly the action of an intelligent being, but certainly nothing to get alarmed about. He bent down to pick it up, found it not only amenable but eager, for it jumped on his shoulder and began to play with his ear.
Gently he turned and began to walk towards the ship.
When he came within speaking distance of the verandah, Adhem said, “What is it, sir?”
“Affectionate, but not intelligent,” Chang reported. “If they’re all like this one, they’d make good pets. Do you want to examine it?”
“Not particularly, sir. Its metabolism should be substantially the same as ours, and until we contact the intelligent aliens I’m inclined to be chary of molesting the local fauna. They might misinterpret it.”
“Good enough,” said Chang. He put up his hand to help the creature down, but he heard the alarm on Keston’s lapel ring again, and waited, looking at the verandah.
After a moment the men on it turned their eyes to the skyline, and he turned and followed their example. A second’s horrified indecision, and he dumped the beast unceremoniously and went up the ladder as fast as he could. As he put his foot on the floor the screens went down and the snub nose of a mine-thrower became visible on each side of the verandah. He turned to look.
Less than half a mile away, on top of a slight rise that silhouetted him against the sky, stood a robot exactly similar in all respects but one to the one they had seen on the moon. The single difference was that this one was moving.
He came striding down the slope in the direction of the ship, arms swinging in pairs to counter the motion of his legs, the sun glinting on his polished body. He—not it. He was more like a living thing than Chang had imagined metal could look. At the edge of the burnt patch he paused and surveyed them.
The little creature on the ground below the verandah hesitated a moment, and then, as if in response to an unseen signal, scuttered across the charred “grass” till it reached the robot. It went up his legs and body as if it were scaling a tree and perched on his upper left shoulder—the robot had four arms and therefore four shoulders also—whereupon the latter turned around and began to stride the way it had come.
On the skyline it paused to take one last look at the ship, raised one “hand” as if in salute, and disappeared.
Keston exhaling loudly, said, “A robot with pets, yet!”
Deeley was staring at the place where the robot had been, a look of disbelief on his face. He shook his head slowly.
Chang said, “That makes critical mass! Engelhart, get a heli after that robot and find where, if anywhere, he’s going. Make them carry heavy arms and screen them well.”
“Right, sir,” said Engelhart crisply, going inship. A moment later his voice was heard issuing curt orders.
Chang waited impatiently, drumming on the rail with his fingertips, humming snatches of tunes culled at random from his memory. Shortly, a fast heli pulled away from the ship, its screens blanking it out as soon as it was well clear, following the track left in the thick “grass” by the heavy metal feet of the robot.
“Back to your posts,” Chang ordered his officers, and they went inship, sat down at their control desks, relaxed but ready to snap into action at a single word. They waited expectantly.
A quarter hour elapsed before Engelhart’s speaker chuckled to itself and he turned to Chang. “Radio from the heli I sent after the robot, sir. The crew report they finally caught up with him—he was running, and making a good hundred ten miles an hour at that—but in spite of their screens, the moment they hove in sight he pulled up and sat down. At the moment he’s playing with the animal he was carrying, and it seems he’s content to stay put until they leave. They’re circling overhead, hoping his patience will wear out first, but they’d appreciate further instructions.”
“Tell them to spray a tracer fluid on him and get hull-down over the horizon. Then they can track him without being seen themselves.”
Engelhart nodded and relayed the orders into his hanging mike.
Chang turned to look out the viewport. A robot that could run at more than a hundred miles an hour over unmade ground was no common automaton. How could a race that built such machines have degenerated—abandoned its lunar stations and its cities so completely that no traces could be found? And how long ago must it not have perished if it had left so little sign of its presence?
But why had the robots not gone, too, if their creators had gone?
Engelhart said with faint amusement in his voice, “Sir, the crew of the heli did what you suggested and tracked him from below the horizon, but after a while one of them noticed the tracer impulses were getting rather diffuse, so they took a look and found they were tracking a small stream. Looks like the robot washed off the tracer as soon as they were out of sight and is now hell-bent for no one knows where.”
“All right,” said Chang wearily. “Call ’em back. But next time one of those robots shows itself near the ship, have a heli on his tail at once and follow him if it takes a year to make him move. Got that?”
“Excuse me, sir,” said Engelhart. He turned to his speaker, listened to the thin voice that crackled from it. After a while he turned back. “The first survey heli’s reported in, sir. I’m having its photos developed at once, and there’ll be a map ready in about ten minutes.”
“Good work, Engelhart,” said Chang. “How about your boys, Deeley?”
“I told them not to break radio silence without reason, sir.”
“O.K. That reminds me. Keston, have you anybody monitoring the radio bands?”
“Yes, sir, but we haven’t got much so far. There’s a little that’s definitely static, and some more that could very well be, but shows symptoms of artificiality. They’re breaking it in the analyzers now.”
“Spoken language?”
“Can’t say, sir. I doubt it—though of course some languages sound pretty odd. At a guess, having heard a sample of it, I’d say it was basically mathematical.”
Chang nodded slowly four or five times. He said, “Do you mean it’s someone reciting mathematical formulae?”
“No, sir. I mean someone who thinks from a mathematical foundation. He or she or it sounds like a digital computer at work. There are two or three like that on different wave lengths. Then there are one or two that seem to be pictorial transmissions. I’ll let you know if we crack either of them.”
“Good,” nodded Chang. “Carry on.”
Engelhart said, “Sir, all the survey helis are in now. The map should be ready fairly soon. I told them to spread it out on a table in the mess—it’s a sight too big to get in here.”
Deeley was suddenly alert and bending over his speaker. He exchanged curt comments with his correspondent and then turned to Chang. He said, “Sir, my number two reports they’re being observed by an alien ship.”
“Where are they?”
“Galactic north of the planet, over the pole. The alien isn’t doing anything but sit and watch. It’s a small vessel like the one we found on the moon. They want to know if they should do anything about it and if so what.”
Chang said c
urtly, “Hold it, Keston!”
“Sir?”
“Have you any radio signals coming in from the galactic north that could conceivably not be static or aurora?”
“I’ll find out, sir.” He whispered into his mike, waited, listening.
On the top of the hull the big d-f frames swung through varying angles, and a tech somewhere in the bowels of the ship set a universal frequency oscillator to searching the wave bands. After a few moments a voice bubbled from the speaker, and Keston reported, “Yes, sir. One pictorial and one of the other sort. But they’re both so faint they’re probably leakage from a tight beam.”
“Where’s that beam focused?”
“Can’t tell without a thorough search, sir, but it’s somewhere south and west of here. At a guess, less than five hundred miles away.”
“Engelhart, have a couple of helis out and look for any sign at all of a radio installation—a frame, a loop, an aerial, anything—southwest of here and less than five hundred miles away. They can ignore the area already searched because if it’s within that it’ll show up on the photographs.”
“Yes, sir. One thing further, sir—you asked about signs of the indigenous race.”
“That’s right,” agreed Chang. “Did they find any?”
“None at all, sir. They saw several robots, with or without accompanying animals, and in one place a herd of animals with one robot in attendance. But no other creatures at all.”
“All right. Get those helis out. We can investigate that later.”
“Right, sir,” said Engelhart, pulling his microphone towards him.
“Sir, what shall I tell my men to do about the alien ship?” Deeley wanted to know.
“Carry on with their map work. If the alien shows signs of hostility, get out from under—but fast. At the same time, try and do nothing in a hurry that might be misunderstood. Got that? Who’s in command—a reliable man?”
“Sestaphokis, sir. He’s no hothead.”