“The lichen peninsula is only fifteen hundred yards away now,” Noel said. “It’s still growing straight toward us. Now we’ve had fair warning what the plants could do to the space-craft’s skin, if they really can chew up metal. And it looks like they can. That means we’ve got to play it safe and keep them away from any contact with the Far Venture.”
He shook his head. “This is just among us. We could likely spend several more days here. With the lichens growing all the time. You men are the experts,” he said abruptly. “I want results I want to know how to stop those plants growing and kill them off if they turn out to be dangerous to us. My resources are at your disposal. You tell me before tomorrow morning how you recommend we do it.”
He turned on his heel. “While you’re getting dressed I’ll arrange to heat up your lab and get rid of your lichens for you.”
15
WERTZ EASED his light body to his bunk room and got into a fresh suit of coveralls. He snapped on a weight belt and pulled on gravity boots, and he felt normal again.
Noel was already back at the lab door. He had a coil of heavy cable, one end snaking away toward a heavy-duty outlet in the next lab. Four small coils of heating element were fashioned and waiting. Two men stood by.
“We can’t just leave the door open a crack for the cable to pass in,” Noel told him. “According to what you’ve said, I want this room sealed off. Can a man get in there and plug in these heaters inside your lab?”
Wertz thought about the acid tips. They hadn’t injured him or Cruzate, but it would be taking a chance. There ought to be a safer way. “We could drill a hole in the door for the cable. After it was passed through we could seal the hole up around it.”
“We’ll still have to open the door to get the heaters inside. How about that?”
“Get one of your small flame throwers up here,” Wertz told him. “First we drill a hole in the door and pass the electric cable through it. Then we open the door and spray the inside of it with flame and also all the plants close around the door. Then we attach the heaters to the cable and throw them into the middle of the room. We shut the door and seal up all the cracks. With fire shooting in the door while it’s open, the plants can’t come out.”
“It could work,” Noel admitted. “But why not just burn out the whole room?”
“The fire will kill them,” Cruzate put in, “but so will the heat, and you do not destroy the laboratory.”
“To hell with the laboratory,” Noel said. “We wouldn’t take a chance on unsealing it anyway. Whipple”—he dismissed them—“bring up an M-6 flame thrower. We’ll burn the place out,” he decided. “It’s simple and it’s sure. If heat would work, fire ought to work better.”
The notebooks. The samples! Wertz thought. “You can’t do it that way. You’ll burn up everything I’ve done on Mars. My notebooks are in there. The records of all my analyses.”
“You’ll have to do it over. What you can’t remember. You can remember most of it, can’t you?”
Wertz felt the yes-sir compelling tone. “You know better than that,” he said sharply. He thought of the painstaking, intricate analytical operations on the planet’s atmosphere. “If we should escape tomorrow or next day, I’d never have a chance to repeat the work. You want us to go back without even determining the——”
“I want us to go back,” Noel snapped. “That has priority over everything else. This ship’s got to return.”
“Okay! Okay! I’ll open the damned door and go in after my stuff! Then burn all you want to!”
“Let us try the heat for a few days,” Cruzate intervened. “I can assure you that these things are the lichen-type plants. They do not survive the temperature 150 degrees. Then the work of Wertz, it is not lost. I think even after a few hours it is quite safe to go in. They are of my profession, these lichens, you know,” he added gently.
Noel turned to his airman. “Bring me an electric drill. I want a one-inch hole through that door. Okay,” he added to Cruzate, “we’ll proceed on your advice.”
Wertz wondered why he had made such a point about it. Who could know what Pandora’s box of tricks he had unlocked? Cruzate lived in another time. A much older time of the twentieth century. He was almost early twentieth century. Systematic. Categorical. Everything subject to classification. Definable classes, admitting no penumbra. A fairish jolt of his mental kaleidoscope and it wouldn’t surprise him if Cruzate began to find teleological patterns in his ordered arrays.
The airman was a long time coming back. Apparently one-inch drills were not found in every tool chest. After he had rigged it up, Noel directed him to pierce the door panel.
The man flexed broad shoulder muscles. His husky fore-arms and hands fondled the heavy tool gracefully, with an odd suggestion of its buoyancy. He tried the security of the chuck before he pressed the trigger switch. Then he addressed the case-hardened point to the timageel surface of the door. The whirring deepened as the tool took hold and he put some weight behind it.
Suddenly he bent forward. Wertz thought the drill had won through, even as he saw a large area of the solid door crumple into pieces, like breaking a pane of painted glass. The airman lurched into the green rose that blossomed full-blown through the hole. He cried out hoarsely and staggered back, rubbing at his face.
Wertz shouted, “Lie down!” He grabbed his belt and pulled back and down. “Get down on the floor!” He snatched up a bucket of sodium carbonate. “Cover your eyes!” he yelled at the cursing, rolling figure.
He poured the bucketful over the head and hands. Then he took up the soaking sponge out of the other bucket and swabbed at eyes, ears, and neck, leaving the livid acid marks. The man was severely burned. The acid tips had turned viciously caustic since he and Cruzate had plunged out through them.
He heard Major Noel snap out an order for flame throwers. When he looked up, the evil rose had doubled. It grew visibly before his eyes, expanding its circumference and thrusting forward its protrusion, its surface shaking and stirring chaotically in a slow, Brownian dance. He grabbed the blowtorch, which mercifully still stood on the floor nearby, and fumbled with its pump. Any second the things might explode throughout the whole corridor.
“Let me have that!” Major Noel demanded. In the same breath he ordered Cruzate to get away from the danger. “We can’t risk you two. Get going!”
“The hell with you, sir!” Wertz shot back. “Commanders are not expendable either. Besides, this is my baby!”
At last the torch roared. Its nozzle hissed out a blue-white dagger.
Noel said, “Whipple, take this man. I want that torch.”
Before he could get out of his crouch, Wertz felt a choking arm shock around his neck, and a weight from behind dragged him irresistibly back, sprawling and locked in some kind of judo hold.
He saw Noel take up the torch and thrust it at the lichens. “Cover your eyes! Your eyes!” he gasped against the choking arm.
Under the moving blast of the torch the lichens blackened. A stultifying smoke arose, gray, heavy, and stinking with chemical vapors. Wertz thought of the possibility of cynogen compounds. Hydrogen cyanide...formed when carbon is strongly heated in temperatures of the order of 2000 degrees in a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen. There had been no opportunity for exhaustive study of the complex organic acids in the tips. The charred stems were certainly carbon...but the open flame...that was combustion. Anyway, one whiff of cyanide and they would all have been dead by now.
Noel went all around the circumference. Then he passed the flame over the center in slow, smooth brush strokes. Wertz decided that he was holding his own. And the sinister trembling of the plants was no longer visible. “Okay, fellow, you’ve done your job,” he said. “You can let me up now.” The smoke was getting chokingly thick. “Better lay off that, Major. You’ve breathed enough of this stuff. You’d better get some masks before you burn out the laboratory.”
“I have attended to that,” Noel said.
Neithe
r of them wanted to say much about the condition of the walls and surfaces inside. The door was of thinner metal than the decks and even the bulkheads, but then, maybe the acids were concentrated against other areas inside. Even now lichens could be erupting. The entire laboratory could be a sieve, leaking acid lichens into all the adjoining rooms and spaces.
The corridor filled rapidly with crewmen and equipment. Captain Spear came up. “This has got to be fast,” Noel told him. I want two men in asbestos suits and one for myself. You will take the rest of the men out, including these civilians, and seal off the corridor. First I want all the doors opening on this corridor sealed. This is going to make a big chemical stink. Then we’re going to pour Wertz’s laboratory full of fire. That will be all for the lichens.”
Captain Spear said, “I’ll take the M-6 in.”
“Don’t waste time, Captain,” Noel answered levelly. “You can instruct me in my duties some other time. Carry out your orders and clear out of here. On the double! I imagine that, armed with a flame thrower that can burn out a pillbox, I am the match for a small roomful of plants.”
Spear smiled wryly and began barking his orders.
Wertz grudgingly gave the devil his due. He didn’t like the guy, but Noel had the stuff in him. Wertz realized that all the others, officers and crewmen alike, had known without a word being spoken who was going in with the flame thrower. The guy was not only their commander, but he was a leader to be followed. Somehow he did look different from the others now. Just a guy, dead pan, pulling on asbestos overalls, but he emanated an easy confidence and a competence that gave the operation the assured outcome of a planned drill.
There was something about the professional military it took a long time to become aware of. They cherished their little dignities and made ostensible show of their obligations, but when the issue confronted them, they drew up together in a tight-knit band for the attack, all the way through from buck airmen to commander, relying on their commingled merits. There was a clue to it in the way Noel had ordered the “civilians” out. It was not just solicitude for the well-being of civilians; it was that civilians didn’t belong where the military stood in danger. A kind of unworthiness to meet the foe. Wertz felt a touch of disgrace.
A phone jangled sharply at the end of the corridor. One of the men ran to it. “It’s for you,” he reported to Major Noel. Wertz noted that he came back properly close before he spoke. “Emergency from the command post.”
Noel shook off the man who was adjusting the flamethrower harness to his shoulders. “I’ll take it,” he directed Captain Spear. “Check these men in their suits. I’m about ready to go in.”
16
LIEUTENANT YUDIN hitched up a leg over a knee. “I shouldn’t say it, I guess, but I don’t think Major Noel ought to keep you chained up like this.” He looked quickly down and away from the links around Dane’s ankle. “It’s already been three days. Most everybody thinks Dr. Pembroke did it anyway.”
Dane lay back easily on his bunk. “You get used to it. Especially when nobody’s going anyplace anyhow. Thanks to you, I’ve had plenty to keep me busy.”
Yudin twitched his black-rimmed glasses at the sheaf of notes and the stacks of photographic prints that cluttered the pipe-legged bunk. “I tried again today to get him to release you and put you in charge of the deciphering operation, but it’s no go. He says no go until he hears what Colonel Cragg has to say.”
Dane wanted to be left alone with the new prints. “How’s he doing today?” he asked, knowing the fellow wanted to talk. He did owe him Noel’s permission to have access to the materials.
“Captain King won’t say anything. Except that he’s doing as well as could be expected and he has a chance. You never get anything out of a medic. Not them. They never give themselves a chance to be wrong. A couple of hundred years ago they stalled you with an ‘In-God’s-hands’ and alibied with an ‘it-was-God’s-will.’ The modern ones just keep their mouth shut and pretend it’s all too complicated for the ignorant layman to understand. If the patient dies, they expected it all along, and there was nothing that could have been done to save him. If he lives, they cured him. It’s a good racket. They can’t lose.”
Yudin got out his big curved pipe and began to stuff it, settling down for a chat. “I don’t like this whole thing. Not one bit do I like it. Item one, not enough power to get off the ground, and they’re no closer to finding out what’s the matter. Item two, those lichens growing so fast you can see them. You actually can see the things grow. Right across the open sand. Straight for this big can we’re sitting in. Why? Item three, these signals. Are they phony or not? If they’re not, where the devil are they coming from? They’ve got to be straight-line transmissions. Like any radar beam. They’re coming straight from the direction of those lichens that are growing out toward us, but there’s no antenna tower that we’ve been able to spot or anything else. Noel’s had two scouting parties out. One party went fifteen miles into the lichens, and damn the risk, and never spotted a sign of anything but lichens. So maybe it’s not line-of-sight beaming after all. Maybe they’re just plain phony. Like Major Noel says, maybe we’ve got a screwball. Huh-uh. Not for me. I don’t think so. What kind of a tap they going to put on my equipment and me not find it? But then what I say is, if there are Martians here, why don’t they show themselves?”
“Maybe they’re afraid of us,” Dane said. “Maybe they’re observing us by some method we haven’t any idea about at all. Maybe they’re some small insect life hiding in the lichens like small villages in a big forest. Maybe anything. How can we tell?”
Yudin laughed a little. “You got ideas, man. But even if they could be that little, they’d have to have equipment. To send the messages.”
“There again, how do we know what they have to have? It doesn’t take a bigger particle of matter than an atom to emit energy. Supposing their entire transmitter was the size of a pinhead. You think a scouting party would find it?”
Yudin shook his head tolerantly. “The power would burn it up.”
“What kind of power? Electrical power as we know it? Or maybe power as they know it? What about a microscopic civilization using subatomic power? If it takes 250 million hydrogen atoms lined up in a row to measure one inch and then a hundred thousand electrons side by side to reach across the diameter of one hydrogen atom, it isn’t too hard for me to conceive of an intelligent being so small that we would have to have a lens to see it and yet with a brain as complex as ours.”
Yudin sprang up from his stool. “I’ve got to report this to Major Noel. They might be invisible and all over the space-craft! We’d be at their mercy!”
He was an odd duck. Somehow his parts didn’t just quite jell. A tangential type, rather than direct and purposefully controlled. No wonder he hadn’t impressed the military.
“It’s just a speculation,” Dane assured him. “I suppose we could think up a dozen more, all with some plausibility.”
“I’ve got to report it to him anyway. The commander has to be informed about all possibilities.” Yudin fell back on his starched sententiousness.
“Just one second more. While you’re telling him about possibilities, you might try to get across another item to add to the three you’re worrying about. That’s this. I know I didn’t knife Colonel Cragg. I know that for sure. I am also as sure as a man can be about another man that Dr. Pembroke didn’t do it. Under any circumstances. That adds up to an item for us all to worry about. There’s a murderer loose on this craft, and he’s no Martian either. Somebody on the Far Venture is a murderer, and my guess is he’ll try again. For my money I’d want a guard over Colonel Cragg all the time.”
The absurd mustache danced above Yudin’s pursed lips. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell him that too.” He locked the door carefully behind him.
Dane picked up the morning’s take in the box of prints Yudin had brought him. This batch was obviously different. There were 174 four-by-five photographic prints cropp
ed and enlarged from each frame taken by the 35-millimeter recording camera over the radar photo plane table. As usual, each had been dated and numbered serially by the darkroom man in the order of exposure. All were filed neatly and in consecutive order in stand-up fashion in a light carton. What struck Dane immediately on his first riffle was that most of the prints in the batch bore what resembled a word in which the former single symbols stood for letters. After the first few prints the single symbols were paired in various combinations. At the end of the two-symbol sequence he came upon a sequence with three symbols to each exposure and finally one of longer combinations with as many as six, eight, and nine symbols. Also, for the first time no new symbols had appeared.
He began sorting the 174 prints into “alphabetical” stacks in which the same symbol appeared either singly or as the first of a pair or group. This gave him eighteen stacks. Most of the prints were in the seven stacks for the seven symbols he had previously decided were numerals. All the singles and pairs were made up of these: the small circle he took for the numeral 1; the two points of light connected vertically by a bar, like a dumbbell balanced on end, apparently the numeral 2; the tiny triangle of three light points and connecting lines that must stand for 3; the square, pentagon, and hexagon for 4, 5, and 6; and a tracing of a little seven-branched tree-like object, probably a seven-tipped lichen plant but almost certainly the numeral 7.
Most of the other symbols had been identified, if some only tentatively. All were made by the threadlike line that connected the dots of light in the manner that constellations are often depicted. A “fishhook,” in which the line proceeded from one point of light and curved back toward its origin to meet another light point, had always appeared standing on its shank between two numerals. Dane assumed it meant “equals.” Two bars joining ends at right angle he called does not equal.” The fishhook with a bar dropped from its point to the middle of its shank fitted in as “equals what?” The dumbbell laid horizontally was “plus,” and shorn of its right-hand point of light it became “minus.” A circle cut through its area with an irregular curve but with two plain polar arcs could be “Mars” or “Martians.” A circle perched upon a truncated cone was obviously the spacecraft. There was a little stick figure, either “man” or “you.” For three symbols he had no meanings: two dots of light placed vertically and joined by a zigzag line; a small logarithmic spiral unwinding from a central dot to a terminal one; a rimless wheel of spokes, each tipped with a point of light.
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