by Hal Clement
The first floor consisted of a big room which did duty as dining room and parlor, with a kitchen at one end and bedroom at the other. An open stair well by the kitchen door went down to a basement, containing work benches cluttered with woodworking and radio paraphernalia as well as the wherewithal for various games. The stair to the second floor was at the other end; this was divided into six much smaller rooms, one serving as bedroom for each of the children and the remaining one filled with the various odd articles of furniture and bric-a-brac which are apt to find their way into a spare room over a period of years.
The Wings dismounted by the porch which ran along the front of the dwelling, and promptly dispersed to their various duties. Mrs. Wing and the girls unlocked the front door and disappeared inside. Billy began unscrewing and removing the shutters on the more accessible windows—those along the porch, and the first-floor ones on the uphill side of the dwelling. Mr. Wing and Donald began unloading the pack animals, while Roger took the other horses down to the stable, unsaddled, and fed them.
By sunset, the house had assumed an inhabited air. Everyone had eaten, dishes had been washed, Billy and Marjorie were in bed, and the remaining members of the family had settled down for a few minutes of relaxation in the main room. There had been some debate as to whether the fireplace should be used, which had been won by the affirmatives—not so much because of the temperature, though even a June night can be chilly in the Cabinets, but simply because they liked to sit around a fire.
The parents were ensconced in their respective seats on each side of the stone fireplace. Donald, Roger and Edith sprawled on rugs between; Roger had just put forth the suggestion that the girls help in the scouting job. His father thought for a minute or two.
“Do you know your way around well enough, in directions other than toward town?” he finally asked Edith.
“Not as well as the boys, I suppose, but they had to Learn sometime or other,” she countered.
“True enough. I wouldn’t want you to turn up missing, and your mother can’t be expected to do all the housework herself. Well, Roger seems to have let himself in for proving a point, so let’s put it this way. It will be a week or ten days before I go out for the first time. In that time the two of you, working together, will turn in a satisfactory map of the territory within three miles of this house, and a patrol schedule that will permit Edie’s housework to be done at times satisfactory to your mother. Margie may go with you, but is not to go beyond the half-mile marks alone—the old rules hold for the younger people, still. That is subject to any additions or alterations your mother may see fit to make.” He looked across at his wife, with a half smile on his face. She returned the smile, and nodded.
“That seems all right. Roger has a few duties of his own, I believe; hadn’t they better be included in the last item?”
“Fair enough. Does that suit you, Rog? Edie? all right,” as the two nodded, “time for bed. You seem to have the time for the next few days pretty well filled.” The two youngsters grimaced but obeyed; Don and his parents remained. They talked seriously in low tones far into the night. The four younger children had been asleep for several hours when Donald finally climbed the stairs to his room, but the fact did not lessen his caution. He had no desire to spend the rest of the night ducking Roger’s questions about what had gone on downstairs.
In spite of the rather strenuous day just finished, the entire family was up early the next morning. As a “special favor” to his younger brother, Donald volunteered to take the surplus horses back to town—they kept only a few at the summer house, as fodder was a little difficult to obtain. That left the younger boy free, once the shutters were removed from the upstairs windows, to get out on the mapping job, as far as his own work was concerned. Edith was delayed for a while dusting off china and washing cooking utensils—they had cleaned only enough for a sketchy meal the night before—but Roger conquered any slight distaste he might have had for women’s work and helped out. The sun was not yet very high when they emerged onto the porch, consulted briefly, and started uphill around the house.
The boy carried a small Scout compass and a steel tape which had turned up in the basement workshop; his sister had a paper-covered notebook, a school relic still possessed of a few blank pages. Between his father’s teaching and a year in a Scout troop, Roger was sure he could produce a readable map of the stipulated area with no further equipment. He had not considered at all carefully the problem of contours.
High as the Wing house was located, there was still a long climb above it; and both youngsters were quite willing to rest by the time they reached the top. They were willing, too, to sit and look at the view around them, though neither was a stranger to it.
The peaks of the Cabinets extended in all directions except the West. The elevation on which they were located was not high enough to permit them to see very far; but bits of Pend’ Oreille were visible to the southwest and the easily recognized tip of Snowshoe Peak rose between east and south. Strictly speaking, there was no definite timber line; but most of the peaks managed to thrust bare rock through the soil for at least a few hundred feet. The lower slopes were covered with forest, principally the Douglas fir which is so prevalent in the Pacific Northwest. One or two relatively clear areas, relics of forest fires of the last few years, were visible from the children’s point of vantage.
There were a number of points visible within the distance specified by Mr. Wing which looked as though they might serve as reference stations, and presently Roger took out the compass and began taking bearings on as many of these as he could. Edith was already making a free-hand sketch map of their surroundings, and the bearings were entered on this. Distances would come later; Roger knew neither his own altitude nor those of the points he was measuring, and could not have used the information had he possessed it. He knew no trigonometry and had no means of measuring angles of depression.
Details began to crowd the rough chart even before they left the hilltop; and presently the two were completely absorbed in their task. Mrs. Wing was not particularly surprised when they came in late for dinner.
III.
The station on Planet One was a decidedly primitive installation, though a good deal of engineering had obviously been needed to make it habitable at all. It was located in the bottom of a deep valley near the center of the planet’s sunward hemisphere, where the temperature was normally around four hundred degrees Centigrade. This would still have been cold enough to liquefy the sulfur which formed the principal constituent of the atmosphere Ken’s people needed; but the additional hundred degrees had been obtained by terracing the valley walls, cutting the faces of the terraces to the appropriate slope, and plating them with iron. The dark-colored metal dome of the station was, in effect, at the focus of a gigantic concave mirror; and between the angular size of sun and the actual size of the dome, solar libration never moved the focus to a serious extent.
The interstellar flyer settled onto a smooth sheet of bare rock beside the dome. There were no cradling facilities, and Ken had to don vacuum armor to leave the vessel. Several other space-suited figures gathered in the airlock with him, and he suspected that most if not all of the ship’s crew were “going ashore” at the same time though, of course, they might not be crew; one operator could handle a vessel of the Karella’s class. He wondered whether or not this was considered safe practice on a foreign planet; but a careful look around as he walked the short distance from ship to dome revealed no defensive armament, and suggested that those manning the station had no anxiety about attack. If, as had been suggested, the post had been here for twenty years, they probably should know.
The interior of the dome was comfortable enough, though Ken’s conductor made constant apology for the lack of facilities. They had a meal for which no apology was required, and Ken was shown private quarters at least as good as were provided by the average Sarrian hotel. Laj Drai took him on a brief tour of the station, and made clear the facilities which the
scientist could use in his assigned job.
With his “real” job usually in mind, Ken kept constant watch for any scrap of evidence that might suggest the presence of the narcotic he sought. He was reasonably certain, after the tour, that there was no complex chemical processing plant anywhere around; but if the drug were a natural product, there might not have to be. He could name more than one such substance that was horribly effective in the form in which it was found in nature—a vegetable product some primitive tribes on his own world still used to poison their arrows, for example.
The “trading” equipment, however, proved more promising, as might have been foreseen by anyone who had considered the planet with which the trading was done. There were many remote-control torpedoes, each divided into two main sections. One of these contained the driving and control machinery and was equipped with temperature control apparatus designed to keep it near normal; the other was mostly storage space and refrigeration machinery. Neither section was particularly well insulated, either from the other or the surrounding medium.
Ken examined one of the machines minutely for some time, and then began asking questions.
“I don’t see any vision transmitter; how do you see to control the thing on the planet’s surface?”
“There is none,” a technician who had been assisting Drai in the exposition replied. “They all originally had them, of course, but none has survived the trip to Three yet. We took them out, finally—it was too expensive. The optical apparatus has to be exposed to the planet’s conditions at least partly, which means we must either run the whole machine at that temperature or have a terrific temperature difference between the optical and electrical elements. We have not been able to devise a system that would stand either situation—something goes completely haywire in the electrical part under those freezing conditions, or else the optical section shatters between the hot and cold sections.”
“But how do you see to control?”
“We don’t. There is a reflection altimeter installed, and a homing transmitter that was set up long ago on the planet. We simply send the torpedo down, land it, and let the natives come to it.”
“And you have never brought any physical samples from the surface of the planet?”
“We can’t see to pick up anything. The torpedo doesn’t stay airtight at that temperature, so we never get a significant amount of the atmosphere back; and nothing seems to stick to the outer hull. Maybe it lands on a solid metal or rock surface—we wouldn’t know.”
“Surely you could make the thing hold air, even below the freezing point of sulfur?”
“Yes, I guess so. It’s never seemed to be worth the trouble. If you want a sample, it would be easier to send a smaller container down, anyway—you can work with it better afterwards.”
A thought suddenly struck Ken.
“How about the stuff you get from the natives? Doesn’t that give any clue? Could I work with some of it?” Laj Drai cut in at this point.
“You said you were not a specialist. We have tried to get the stuff analyzed by people who were, without success. After all, if it were possible to synthesize the material, do you think we’d be going to all this trouble to trade for it? That’s why we want you to get the planetary conditions for us—when you’ve done that, we’ll figure out a means of getting seeds from the natives and growing our own.”
“I see,” Ken replied. The statement was certainly reasonable enough, and did not necessarily imply anything about the nature of the material they were discussing.
It did not refute anything, either.
Ken thought that one over for a time, letting his eyes wander over the exposed machinery as he did so. He had a few more questions in mind, but he wanted to dodge anything that might be interpreted as unhealthy curiosity, if these people actually were drug-runners.
“What do these natives get from you for this product?” he asked finally. “Is it a manufactured article they can’t make, or a substance they don’t have? In the latter case, I might be able to draw some conclusions about the planet.” Drai sent a ripple down his tentacles, in a gesture equivalent to a human shrug.
“It’s material—heavy metals that don’t sulfide easily. We’ve been giving them platinum-group nuggets most of the time—they’re easiest to come by; there’s an outcropping of the stuff only a short distance from this station, and it’s easy to send a man out to blast off a few pieces. I don’t know what they use them for—for all I know they may worship the torpedo, and use the nuggets as priests’ insignia. I can’t say that I care, as long as they keep filling their end of the bargain.”
Ken made the gesture of agreement, and spoke of something which had caught his attention during the last speech.
“What in the Galaxy is a loudspeaker and microphone doing in that thing? Surely they don’t work at the temperatures you mentioned—and you can’t be speaking to these natives!”
The technician answered the first question.
“It works, all right. It’s a crystal outfit without vacuum tubes, and should work in liquid hydrogen.”
Drai supplemented the other answer. “We don’t exactly talk to them, but they can apparently hear and produce sounds more or less similar to those of our speech.”
“But how could you ever have worked out a common language, or even a code, without visual contact? Maybe, unless you think it’s none of my business and will not be any help in what is, you’d better give me the whole story from the beginning.”
“Maybe I had,” Laj Drai said slowly, draping his pliant form over a convenient rack. “I have already mentioned that contact was made some twenty years ago— our years, that is; it would be nearer thirty for the natives of Planet Three.
“The Karella was simply cruising, without any particular object in view, when her previous owner happened to notice the rather peculiar color of Planet Three. You must have remarked that bluish tint yourself. He put the ship into an orbit at a safe distance beyond the atmosphere, and began sending down torpedoes. He knew better than to go down himself—there was never any doubt about the ghastly temperature conditions of the place.
“Well, he lost five projectiles in a row. Every one lost its vision connection in the upper atmosphere, since no one had bothered to think of the effect of the temperature on hot glass. Being a stubborn character, he sent them on down on long-wave instruments, and every one went out sooner or later; he was never sure even whether they had reached the surface. He had some fair engineers and plenty of torpedoes, though, and kept making changes and sending the results down. It finally became evident that most of them were reaching the surface— and going out of action the instant they did so. Something was either smashing them mechanically or playing the deuce with their electrical components.
“Up to then, the attempts had all been to make the landings on one of the relatively smooth, bluish areas; they seemed the least complicated. However, someone got the idea that this steady loss of machines could not be due to chance; somewhere there was intelligent intervention. To test the idea, a torpedo was sent down with every sort of detecting and protecting device that could be stuffed aboard—including a silver mesh over the entire surface, connected to the generators and capable of blocking any outside frequency which might be employed to interfere with control. A constantly changing control frequency was used from our end. It had automatic heat control—I tell you, it had everything. Nothing natural and darned little that was artificial should have been able to interfere with that machine; but it went out like the others, just as the reflection altimeter reported it as almost touching the surface.
“That was enough for the boss. He accepted as a working theory the idea that a race lived on the flatter parts of the planet; a race that did not want visitors. The next torpedo was sent to one of the darker, rougher areas that could be seen from space, the idea being that these beings might avoid such areas. He seems to have been right, for this time the landing was successful. At any rate, the instruments said the
machine was down, it proved impossible to drive it lower, and it stayed put with power off.
“That was encouraging, but then no one could think of what to do. We still couldn’t see, and were not certain for some time whether or not the microphone was working. It was decided not to use the loudspeaker for a while. There was a faint humming sound being picked up whose intensity varied without apparent system, which we finally decided might be wind rather than electrical trouble, and once or twice some brief, harsh, quite indescribable noises which have not yet been identified; the best guess is that they may have been the voices of living creatures.
“We kept listening for a full rotation of the planet— nearly two of our days—and heard nothing else except a very faint buzzing, equally faint scratching sounds, and an irregular tapping that might or might not have been the footsteps of a hoofed creature on a hard surface. You may listen to the records we made, if you like, but you’d better have company around when you do. There’s something weird and unnerving about those noises out of nothing.
“I forgot to mention that the cargo port of the torpedo had been opened on landing, and microphones and weight detectors set to tell us if anything went in. Nothing did, however—a little surprising if there were small forms of wild life; the opening would have made a natural-looking shelter for them.
“Nothing even remotely suggestive of intelligence was heard during that rotation; and it was finally decided to use the loudspeaker. Someone worked out a schedule— starting at minimum power, repeating a tape for one rotation of the planet, then repeating with doubled output and so on until we reached the maximum which could be attained with that equipment. The program was followed, except that the boss was getting impatient and arranged to make the step-up each quarter rotation instead of the suggested time. Some humorist recorded a poem on the tape, and we started broadcasting.