by Brian Aldiss
Craig considered. These creatures seemed to have three different patterns of behaviour over a remarkably small stretch of territory. Where he was, by the coast, they behaved like a true Plimsol species; they were active, aggressive, curious. Where Tim Anderson was, their activity was nocturnal only and they seemed slightly less formidable. Where Barney Brangwyn was, they behaved merely like lower animals – like clumsy tortoises. There had to be a reason for this curious deviation, but as yet Craig had insufficient data to uncover it.
Abruptly he turned from the window, and climbed into the cab. Getting into the driver’s seat, he started the engine and drove the overlander further up the long slope onto level and higher ground, until he estimated he must be about three miles from the coast. Then he went to see what the turtles were doing.
Most of them followed the overlander; they covered the ground steadily, if not as vigorously as they had moved hitherto. Many seemed to be suffering from very human bouts of indecision about coming on or going back. Eventually some forty of them grouped themselves beyond the range of Craig’s light and sat themselves down to wait.
Shaking his head, he went to his bunk.
The puzzle was still with him. Unable to sleep, Craig rose again after twenty minutes and went to the little laboratory. There he pulled from the deep-freeze the remainder of the turtle who had been caught in the caterpillar tracks and began to dissect it.
He concentrated on the head first. The face was closely scaled with chitinous scales. The antenna was cartilage, and scaleless. The mouth was tongueless, with amazingly strong teeth which scooped sharply forward in the lower jaw. Pulverising one of them and analysing the powder, Craig found it to consist principally of iron tungstate and magnesium phosphate. Mineral substances lodged between the other teeth made it clear that these tough little weapons could be used for digging into softer rocks. A quick examination of the digestive tract indicated that much of the turtle’s nourishment also consisted of minerals, broken down by microorganisms so that they could pass into the bloodstream and nourish the body tissues.
The turtle’s single eye was a wonderful organ. As he worked under an optical microscope, Craig recorded his findings on tape.
‘… The turtles have both night and day vision,’ he said. ‘Their visibility spectrum must be much wider than ours, enabling them to see into both the infra-red and the ultra-violet. This is of course consistent with what one would expect from a cloud-obscured world like Askanza VI, but it also indicates a species coping with its environment with considerable success. “Turtle” is a misleading name for these creatures, and I shall hereafter refer to them as pseudo-chelonia. We shall then be less likely to underestimate their intelligence.
‘Now I am going to open the brain case and examine the brain …’
The skull was extremely dense, almost defying Craig’s best saw. As he increased revs on the motor, the saw moved faster, biting down into the curving bone. Suddenly there was a loud explosion and the skull cracked.
Craig stopped the motor. Picking up the skull, he examined it. With a needle torch he peered into the hole the saw had made. The report had been caused by an implosion, not an explosion. The pseudo-chelonia had a vacuum where their brains should have been! Dividing the vacuum space, in place of grey matter, were only one or two bony and bare shelves.
Craig stared down in amazement, and the solitary eye stared back at him.
He thought incongruously of what Tim had said over the wireless: ‘… the millions of years of peace it’s had …’ but what sort of peace had reigned in these bony cavities over those long years?
The dun-coloured morning dawned to the tune of more thunder, which died away in half an hour. Craig woke late. He looked outside as he dressed.
Certainly the view was impressive, if bleak. With the rain holding off, he could see some distance in all directions. Behind lay the mountains, rounded and bland. Ahead, the great planes of land sloped down towards the sea, hiding it from sight. All around were only simple shapes, rarely broken by a stunted tree.
The pseudo-chelonia lay silent, like boulders left by a mighty outgoing tide. Only one or two of them stirred feebly.
Grabbing a bar of condensed ration, Craig jumped down onto the ground. He chewed his breakfast as he walked. The creatures spread raggedly. Yesterday’s tyrants were today’s sluggards; nearer the overlander they were still as stones. Further away, down the slope, one or two moved on all-sixes as if in pain towards the distant sea.
Craig sat on the nearest specimen.
‘You certainly have something to contend with,’ he remarked, tapping it reflectively, ‘And I think I have an inkling as to what it is.’
When he had finished his breakfast, he rose, grave and solid and methodical, to make the group call.
‘I could have had turtle eggs for breakfast, only I didn’t fancy their metallic content,’ Barney announced. ‘I don’t mind living off the land, but not when it’s so indigestible.’
‘I could have had some too,’ Tim said. ‘I’ve been up most of the night watching, and I’ve seen these – what do you call ’em, Craig? – these pseudo-chelonia laying eggs in approved turtle style. And then along came three creatures like alligators and made a spirited attack on the egg burial spots.’
‘Interesting,’ Craig commented. ‘What happened?’
‘The pseudo-chelonia made a spirited defence. They warded off the alligators with acid contained in clay cups. Despite that, two of them were killed and a lot of eggs taken. These alligators are fast and tough. I was able to film the whole incident for the record.’
‘Can you see anything of them now?’
‘The alligators? No. They made off before dawn. And then with the light and the thunder, the pseudo-chelonia just seemed to be overcome by sleep. I can see a few of them now, all absolutely motionless, looking like boulders again.
‘Ah well, I’m going to bed for four hours.’
‘We’ll be calling you,’ Craig said. ‘Adios and out.’
He had his day’s programme all planned.
Avoiding his yesterday’s route, he drove down to and then along the coast. The beautiful pillars still protruded from the sea. Overhead, cloud still merged with cloud everlastingly. The pseudo-chelonia were still active, and thickly distributed along the sea’s margins.
Today their activities were more comprehensible to Craig, in the light of what he knew about their habits and their metabolism.
Mainly they appeared to be building – or rather, turning rocks into buildings. This they could do in two ways, dependent on the nature of the rock with which they dealt: either by scraping away the rock with their teeth, or by pouring acid into the metallic veins in the rock and then pulling the uneaten rock away. These proceedings accounted for many of the curious rock formations the PEST had seen.
Craig also knew that much of the creatures’ actual food came from the rock. Like plants, they had the ability to convert inganic matter into the living substance necessary to all forms of animal existence. And through his binoculars he soon observed the skill with which the pseudo-chelonia, beings without fire, prepared their acids, collecting and dissolving salts in little hollowed bowls of rock.
Several times armed parties came up to investigate the man who was investigating them. Craig avoided a crisis by moving on.
At last he came to the raised earthwork he had seen on the previous day. Unmistakeably, it was artificial, built by hundreds of determined flippers working in organised fashion.
From its look, it might have stood for centuries. Craig did not inspect too closely, since several pseudo-chelonia were inside it. Instead, circling them, he brought the overlander to the other side of the fortification – and here he found the remains of the enemy against whom the fortification had been built. A litter of bones and skulls told Craig he was looking at the end of some of the alligator species Tim had described.
Selecting a fresh skull, Craig stowed it away before driving on another hundred yards
to get further from the earthwork. Doubtless this was no man’s land between alligator and turtle territory, but it was the first unpopulated stretch of shore he had found. A fast and cold river flowed down into the muggy sea. The pillars that grew here were few and stunted. Craig drove right down to the waterline, hurriedly launched a collapsible boat, and chugged out to a pillar that rose only three feet above the waterline. On his way he picked up a sample of sea water for analysis.
The pillar was brown with patches of blue, the colours glinting even in the dull light, and just too thick for Craig to get his hands round.
When he hacked at it with a knife, it splintered easily. In little time, he had the stump of it in the boat and was back ashore.
He had cut things fine. Several pseudo-chelonia were coming rapidly along the beach, flinging themselves over the earthwork and running towards him. Putting the pillar stump and his water sample into a deposal locker, Craig collapsed the boat and snapped it into a side rack. He swung himself up into the cab just as the first creature burst round the corner, flippers swinging.
It took a snap at him. Missing, it took a bite at the overlander instead. For many a long day, the heavy metal of one wing bore the imprint of tooth marks, the most awesome teeth Craig had ever come across. Given half an hour on their own, these chaps could have wrecked the big vehicle utterly.
But now the overlander was speeding off, out of harm’s way. Accelerating, Craig shook off any pursuit before stopping in a shallow inland dell to examine the specimens.
As he had long suspected it would be, the pillar was natural, an alien accretion similar to the coral reefs of Earth. It consisted of crystals of metallic salts, iron chloride and copper and nickel sulphate among others, many of the crystals being abnormally large. It reminded Craig of a ‘magic’ chemical garden he had grown in water glass as a boy.
His sample of sea water proved to contain traces of many metals considered rare on Earth now, including tungsten and germanium.
When he had made the analysis, Craig sat looking out over the land to the placid sea. The sea on Askanza VI covered five sixths of the planetary surface. Here as on Earth, it had cradled life. Yet here, Craig was now fairly positive, it still held absolute power even over those creatures which had long since left it for dry land.
A man had in him much of the sea from whence he came. Wombed within water, he passed through a fish stage as a foetus; born, he carried all his life a tide in his veins and the taste of salt in his blood. But for all that, he had turned his back to the beaches in a way the pseudo-chelonia could never manage to do.
It was so, at least, if his theory was correct. To prove that conclusively, he needed equipment that only the PEST ship contained. Climbing down to the cab once more, he headed the overlander for home.
Rain came cascading down again as he touched the hills. It slowed him to little more than twenty miles an hour over the rough, so that another of Askanza’s brief days was almost over before he sighted the PEST ship. Nevertheless, the journey was not entirely wasted, since it supplied confirmation that his theory was at least near the mark.
Four miles inland, all traces of the pseudo-chelonia died away. They began again after another fifteen miles; but all the creatures he saw lay face down against the bare ground as if dead, their carapaces shining dully in the yellow downpour.
Donning oilskins, squelching through the downpour, Craig hurried into the ground lock. Tim Anderson was there to greet him; the young man had seen his vehicle drive up. Something in his attitude told Craig he was uneasy.
‘Coming back empty-handed!’ he exclaimed as he greeted Craig. ‘You’ve not much chance of indulging your favourite hobby of parasitology here, Craig.’
‘No,’ Craig agreed. ‘There’s little diversity in the life forms, but the wonder seems to be that anything organic has established itself at all.’
As they went up in the lift, Tim said, ‘Then no doubt you’ve noticed the life forms seem to be either large size or microscopic.’
‘I had noticed – and I notice Barney’s vehicle outside. He’s back already then?’
Tim shot him a veiled look.
‘Barney’s back,’ was all he answered.
Barney himself greeted them in the lounge. He was consuming a plateful of canned pork, gooseberry sauce and potatoes, and demolishing a bottle of Aldebaran wine. He waved genially to Craig.
‘Beat you to it. Have a drink?’
‘Love to,’ Craig admitted, peeling off his oilskins and stuffing them into a dryer. As he got a glass, the evening’s thunder began.
‘Everything tied up?’ Barney inquired mildly, pausing with uplifted fork.
‘What makes Askanza VI tick?’ Tim asked.
‘By the way you both ask me, I can see you all ready know all the answers,’ Craig said. ‘Well, yes, I think I know some of them myself. I’ll tell you my ideas, and you can stop me when I go wrong.’
‘The man’s modest,’ Barney said.
‘I admire the resourcefulness of this world,’ Craig said. ‘Its conditions are not unlike those on Earth’s neighbor planet Venus which – you may remember from your elementary textbooks – supports no life at all. Here we have at least two tough forms of life, the pseudo-chelonia and the alligator-things, which have managed to evolve despite an almost complete lack of anything but minerals. Minerals there are in abundance, which as Tim says should make this a very prosperous world if the colonists move in.’
‘The earliest forms of growth here – pre-living forms – are crystal accretions, which rise out of the shallow seas like masts. I’ve seen them along the coast. When I first saw them, I had the impression of wireless masts – and oddly enough I was not far wrong. However, perhaps that is not the right end to begin the story at.’
Barney and Tim exchanged glances as Craig went on.
‘Let’s take the turtles first. They have no brain in any sense that we know of. Instead, they have nature’s equivalent of a wireless receiver in their heads. There is even a vacuum in the middle of their skulls, where bony shelves impregnated with metal form a natural triode valve. The alligators function on the same principle.’
‘They do,’ Tim affirmed. ‘I shot one and its brain case imploded.’
‘Yes. No smaller reptiles exist because a big heavy head is required to house such an arrangement.
‘Their motive power is of course their own. But their – shall we say their thoughts, primitive though they are? – their thoughts are radio waves.
‘Life, as we know, develops as it can. We must expect that eventually research will show why these creatures have receivers instead of brains. Nature, however, works with what it has, and here it had a perpetual source of radio emission.
‘For me this is the most interesting fact of all. The silent seas of Askanza are gigantic low-powered transmitters. How it works in detail I don’t know, although I suggest we find out tomorrow. Roughly, though, the main items would seem to be these. Cold levels of water from rivers etcetera send up temperature differences in the sea which are transformed into small electric charges. These are influenced by the heavy metallic suspension in the seas. At the same time, the water containing germanium, various depths act in effect as gigantic transistors, amplifying the potential signal.
‘The crystal pillars serve as aerials. Day and night they radiate the message of the sea, and the pseudo-chelonia and their enemies pick them up. Do you follow this, Tim?’
Tim shook his head, moving from the window where, as he listened, he had been watching the first motionless turtles come to life with the night.
‘I’m with you, Craig, although the way you’ve deduced all this fills me with wonder and anguish.’
‘I’ve only fitted together the facts we discovered – and kept an open mind, remembering the old PEST rule, “Necessity forms the only basis for comparison between systems.” What we find on Askanza VI is the best possible operable system in the circumstances.’
‘That’s all very well,
Craig, but what first started you adding the facts towards the right answer?’ Barney inquired. Lighting a cigar, he added, ‘And don’t be afraid to boast. You don’t know how oppressive your modesty can be.’
Craig smiled.
‘Then I must boast on your behalf. You gave me the lead with your remark during our first group call. You talked about the curious mush you picked up on the short wave. That was the call of the sea – calling all life on Askanza!’
‘Ha!’ Tim exclaimed. He snapped his fingers and started walking round the room.
‘Craig, the next bit I pieced together for myself,’ he said. ‘What Barney said started me wondering too, particularly when he mentioned sky layers. Obviously the atmosphere is disturbed; thunder night and morning must mean something. What it means here is that the Appleton or F-layer which normally reflects short waves back to the ground is dissolved during the day. During the night-hours it re-establishes itself. Barney and I have proved this is so with the ship’s transmitter.
‘Working on the idea that our turtle friends were controlled by short wave radio, I saw this would explain why they were doggo by day and active by night. The signal would not reach them by day, but would radiate into space and be lost.
‘Then I asked myself why your turtles and Barney’s didn’t fit with this neat theory. Directly I thought of locating the transmitter by the coast I had my answer.’
‘Yes, when you get that far, the rest’s a matter of elementary radio theory,’ Barney said. ‘The coastal creatures get their transmission direct, so the presence or absence of an F-layer doesn’t worry them. Up to maybe three miles inland, the beasts are active day and night, as Craig found. I was on the fringe of a skip area, where the ground wave’s given out and the sky wave only reaches under freak conditions – but on planetary scale, such freak conditions must be pretty prevalent. Perhaps my beasts were explorers, shuffling along in a land where for them thought would hardly reach. Put like that, it makes them sound oddly impressive.’
‘They are impressive,’ Craig agreed. ‘And right now I can hear some of them clumping round the ship. Tim, better switch on external lights before they eat their way in.’