by John Wyndham
Froud and Grayson had contrived new material for argument. In the course of the lesson they had drifted into a discussion of the comparative merits of ideographic and alphabetical writing. The argument had risen over an attempt to classify the Martian script, but it soon reached the stage where Froud found himself passionately asserting the superiority of the ideograph (of which he knew extremely little) while the doctor defended the alphabet.
‘Take China,’ Froud was saying, with a generous wave of the hand, ‘a country with hundreds of dialects. Now, with an alphabet, any man wishing to write for the whole country would have to be translated or else have to learn all those dialects and languages, whereas, with ideographs, what happens?’
‘He has to learn thousands of ideographs,’ said the doctor brightly. ‘It means that educated people throughout the country can communicate whatever their language. Now if Europe, instead of having two or three alphabets, wrote purely in ideas, think of the misunderstandings which would have been avoided, and think of the possibilities for international exchange.’
‘I don’t remember hearing that there was much less misunderstanding in Europe when every educated person spoke and wrote Latin,’ the doctor observed. ‘And it seems to me that ideographs are not only more limited than words, but even more capable of misinterpretation. Furthermore, is China in its present bogged condition an advertisement for anything? Now, when the Chinese adopt an alphabet….’
‘They will also have to invent a kind of Chinese Esperanto. Unless they do, every book will have to be translated into dozens of languages and….’
‘Hi,’ interrupted Dale. ‘Just leave China for a bit and consider where we are.’
‘Well,’ said Froud, ‘where are we?’
‘I’ll tell you. We’re exactly half way there.’
For some reason they all rose and made for the unshuttered windows and stood there, looking out into the familiar darkness.
‘Seems much the same to me,’ Froud muttered at last. ‘I remember feeling similarly swindled when I crossed the Line for the first time. But then we did have some celebrations,’ he added pointedly.
Dale, with the air of a juggler, produced a bottle of whisky from behind his back. He held it up and patted it.
‘Brought specially for the occasion,’ he told them.
They watched him uncork it. The behaviour of liquids in the weightless Gloria Mundi never ceased to fascinate them, and this was an occasion of particular fascination.
Dale held the opened bottle horizontally, pointing towards Joan, and tapped the bottom lightly. A small quantity of whisky drifted out, wobbled a moment, then formed itself into a little amber sphere which wafted slowly across the room. Joan stopped it gently with one finger, leaving it suspended before her.
‘Doc,’ said Dale, tapping the bottle again.
In a few minutes all six had the translucent golden balls floating in front of them. Dale let go of the bottle and it drifted away.
‘Here’s to our continued success,’ he said.
They put their lips to the liquid and sucked it into their mouths.
‘Ah!’ said Froud. ‘The first in six weeks. I’ve never been dry so long before. And since one of the advantages of drinking here is that there is no washing up, what about another?’
Joan made her way to the intended sick room which had become her special cabin. The little celebration had reminded her uncomfortably of her status as an intruder, and the sense that though she was in, she was not of the group, prompted her to leave them to unhampered self congratulations. She had taken one drink with them, knowing that had she refused, Froud and the doctor at least would have insisted. After that she felt at liberty. She pulled herself on to the couch, fastening the covering partway up so that it might give a comforting sense of weight, and lay listening to the sound of muffled voices.
Back in the living room, the bottle made its third and last round. Dale had become unwontedly talkative and Froud was watching with a quiet amusement the enthusiastic back slapping in progress between him, the doctor and Dugan. It appeared that not even the treat of whisky could stir Burns into geniality, for he sat aloof and withdrawn into speculation as if the rest did not exist. Suddenly he hiccoughed twice, made his way to the trap door and closed it behind him. Dugan laughed.
‘See that? A Scot, too. I thought they weaned them on the stuff.’
‘Well, we’re all a bit out of practice,’ said Froud, his eye resting thoughtfully on the closed trap. ‘In fact, I’m not at all sure that I have the stomach for neat whisky that I used to have. Honestly, I feel a bit’ He gave a sheepish grin. ‘It might be safer if….’ He allowed the sentence to trail unfinished as he, too, moved towards the storeroom. Dugan laughed again. ‘And a journalist, too. Don’t say you’re going to come over queer next, Dale.”
Dale shook his head. ‘Probably the weightlessness,’ suggested the doctor. ‘Must be a lot of secondary effects from that, though I must say I feel quite all right myself.’
Froud’s grin vanished as he shut .the trap door behind him. He looked round the storeroom and saw no sign of Burns. Stepping as quietly as his metal soles would allow, he made his way to the little sick room and flung open the door. The place seemed pretty full already, but he managed to slide in.
‘Hullo! How interesting,’ he remarked. Burns, handicapped by his lack of weight, had encountered difficulties. In the circumstances, the enterprise of holding down a muscular young woman, even though her movements were hindered by a couch cover, presented unusual problems in mechanics. Moreover, the one hand occupied in covering her mouth was encountering very sharp teeth. At the sound of the voice Burns turned his head, glowering and breathing heavily. ‘Get out, you!’ Froud shook his head. ‘The hostess’s decision is final.’
‘Get out,’ Burns said again. But Froud made no move. ‘All right, if you won’t.’ The engineer shot out a large fist with all his strength behind it. Froud jerked his head aside and the knuckles crashed into the metal door frame. Before the other could move he had driven two rapid short arm jabs to the stomach. Burns folded up with an agonised grunt.
‘Short and neat,’ Froud murmured. ‘Excuse me.’
He lifted the magnetised shoes out of contact with the floor and towed the man into the storeroom. There he opened the trap door and thrust him through.
‘Hi, Doc,’ he called as the engineer’s still gasping form floated into the living room. ‘Job for you. Something seems to have disagreed with him.’ He shut the trap and returned to Joan. She still lay on the couch, and she looked up at him as he came in.
‘Thank you very much,’ she said.
‘Not at all,’ he assured her. ‘Rescue from worse than death is my speciality. I’ve risked lots of unpopularity that way. There was a girl in San Francisco it turned out afterwards that he was her husband. You’d never have thought it most unfortunate.’ He paused. ‘Any damage?’
‘The buttons are off my shirt, otherwise I think he came off worst. And I hope his hand hurts it tasted nasty.’
‘M’m, wouldn’t fancy it myself. These engineers, you know. The ingrained oil of years and all that.’
‘How did you know about him?’ she asked curiously.
‘Oh, there was a sultry, broody sort of look in his eye. I’ve been expecting it. In fact, I expected it before.’
‘You were right,’ she said, ‘only that time it was in the storeroom, and I wasn’t at such a disadvantage. I managed to dodge back into the living room.’ She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Anything else?’
‘Well,’ said Froud non-committally, ‘now you come to mention it, there has been an odd looking scratch on Dale’s face for the last four days. He mentioned something about having had a bad shave, and he didn’t take it kindly when I asked him if he usually used a circular saw for the purpose.’
Joan nodded. ‘He seemed very annoyed about it at the time.’
They looked at one another. Froud admired her attitude to the thing, but had the se
nse not to put it into words.
‘Awkward,’ he suggested.
‘A nuisance,’ she agreed, and added: ‘I dial wonder if I told Dale I was Burns’ mistress, and told Burns I was Dale’s, whether that wouldn’t head them off?’
Froud shook his head emphatically.
‘No, that wouldn’t do. It might work with Dale. But Burns is the sort of chap who would merely take it to mean that you weren’t very particular. Anyway, there would be an atmosphere of drawn daggers, and they’d probably find out that you’d been spoofing both of them. I knew when I first saw you that this trip was going to be interesting,’ he added.
‘Stop it! You make me feel like a guinea pig. I’m prepared to forget for twelve weeks that I’m a woman; why can’t they do the same?’
‘Perhaps you’re not as successful at it as you think you are. Besides, both of them resented your presence here from the start, so up pop our old friends’ sex antagonism, desire for domination and the rest of the famous cast. As long as you hold them off, they’ll harry you at least, Burns will and if you don’t hold them off, they’ll despise you.’
‘Wonderfully cheering, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘Of course, I might take to sleeping in the storeroom,’ he suggested.
‘Thereby introducing another old friend propinquity? No, that won’t do.’
‘I was afraid it mightn’t. You know,’ he went on, with an air of detachment, ‘you’re trying the impossible. How, with your figure and your face, you can solemnly expect five normal men for twelve solid weeks to oh, all right.’ He dried up at the sight of her warning expression.
Twenty minutes or so later Froud re-entered the living room. Burns greeted him with a scowl. Dugan inquired sympathetically if he were feeling better and received an assurance that the crisis had now passed. Froud crossed to the locker devoted to his private belongings and fumbled about in it. Presently he found what he wanted; a small, plated pistol. He took it out and slipped it into his pocket. The others stared in astonishment.
‘For Joan,’ he explained airily. ‘She thought she saw a rat.’
‘A rat here? Don’t talk rot,’ said Dale.
‘Oh, I don’t know wonderfully enterprising things, rats. Anyway, she thought so. Apparently she’s a dead shot on rats. She and her father used to pot them in their Welsh cottage by the hundred. So I said I’d lend her this in case she should see it again.’
He left the incredulous group, and returned to the girl.
‘Here you are,’ he said, handing the weapon across.
She took it, cautiously.
‘How do they work? I’ve never used one before.’ ,
Chapter 12. Speculation
The crossing of the invisible half way mark produced a sense of accomplishment which temporarily, at least, led to a better feeling on hoard the Gloria Mundi. The petty irritation with the personal habits of other people which close proximity aggravates, loomed for the time being less offensively large. The fact that Dale habitually scrubbed his teeth for no less than ten minutes, ceased to count against him; the doctor no longer caused general frowns when he blew his nose with sonorous trumpeting; they ceased to round on Dugan for the unmusical series of yawns with which he announced his wakening; even Froud was forgiven his irritating habit of drumming with his fingers or indulging in some other irksome mannerism. In the general thaw Dale regained his usual geniality. He appeared to have forgiven Joan’s intrusion, seeming to be relieved that she had refused his advances, and more sure of his ground, as a result of the rebuff. At moments Froud even wondered if Dale had been deliberately putting her to the test, but he found himself unable to make up his mind on the point. Whatever the cause, they were thankful for the change and to find that though he still denied the possibility of a Martian origin for Dr. Shirning’s machine, yet he was interested in it to the point of questioning Joan for all the details she could give. Though his present attitude was an immense improvement on the contemptuous silence he had maintained, they had not yet prevailed upon him to join the language class.
The exception to this refraternisation movement was Burns. He remained a determined and sulky isolationist, seldom speaking to the rest, joining in none of the occupations they devised to pass the time, and watching them out of his aloofness in a way which got on the nerves of the whole party. Indeed, the doctor held that much of the group’s newly found mutual tolerance was due to this external source of irritation. Moreover, after regarding the engineer with professional detachment, he became aware of an unprofessional sense of apprehension. Six weeks of the outward journey still to go and after that, the return trip to be faced…. He decided that he was not happy at the prospect. Burns was, or soon would be, in a state which called for handling with care, and in the circumstances he was scarcely likely to get it.
The thought turned him to a study of the rest. Dale had given him some uneasy moments in. the earlier stages, but the reasons had been complicate responsibility, organisation, resentment of the stowaway, troubles before the start, and he understood, too, that Mrs. Curtance had been no help to her husband in the circumstances, it was understandable that his reactions should be extreme. He was thankful that Dale had got over it so well, and he had little fear now of it reviving.
And Dugan. Well, Dugan had obviously fallen for the girl. That was all to the good if the girl could maintain her present attitude. The boy was curiously young for his age in some ways sheep’s eyes, and all that, apparently quite content to worship without wanting. Froud? Mentally he shook his head and gave Froud up. Anyway, be imagined that Froud’s emotions seldom got the better of his reason. Himself he saw in a kindly avuncular role towards the whole party, the girl included. It would have hurt him considerably to know that Dugan privately regarded him as an unreliable individual of the genus roué.
It was three terrestrial days past the half way that Joan sprang another surprise on the party.
Dale and Dugan had just finished making one of their periodical checks.
‘Dead on the course,’ Dale told them. ‘It’s surprising how little correction we’ve needed. We know so little of space yet that I was prepared to find all sorts of unguessed sources of deflection.’
‘Even so,’ Froud put in, ‘this three dimensional navigation business seems pretty tedious. It needs so many readings. Why, if there were much correction to be done, you two would be taking angles and levels and things all the blessed time. I suppose in the days to come, when large passenger liners and freighters go flinging themselves about all over the solar system and people look back at us and wonder how our little cockleshell survived even the take off I suppose then they will all travel on some kind of directional beam system. Like the things they use for air liners in fogs at home only, of course, it won’t be ordinary radio. The trouble is to find some kind of radiation besides light which will get through the heavy side layers.’
‘On the contrary, the trouble is to avoid the cranks who say they’ve found it already,’ Dale told him. ‘Why, half the number of experimental transmitters offered to me for this trip would have weighed as much as the Gloria Mundi herself.’
‘All dud?’
‘Most of them certainly. There were one or two I’d like to try sometime, though, but I couldn’t afford risking the extra weight this time.’
‘You won’t need to. Not if we find the creatures which sent Joan’s machine. They appear to have solved the problem completely,’ Dugan said.
‘Provided that control of the machine was exercised from Mars, they do,’ the doctor agreed. ‘But we’ve no proof that it was. We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that it may have been built on Earth.’
‘Unlikely,’ Froud thought. ‘After all, it stands to reason that a man who could invent such a thing is not going to use it just for a joke. Why, that dodge of prehensile tentacles alone would revolutionise the entire carrying trade.’
The doctor spoke impatiently. ‘Of course it’s unlikely. The whole thing’s unlikely. But there a
re plenty of possibilities. Even if the machine did come from Mars, there must have been some kind of ship which landed it. Why shouldn’t the source of the remote control have been in that ship, and the means used, ordinary radio?’
‘But it wasn’t ordinary radio,’ Joan put in. ‘My father looked for that very thing, and there was no sign of it.’
‘Well, it seems to me that it must have been controlled from some place on the Earth’s surface because the responses were immediate, instantaneous from what you told us and how do you account for that if the messages had to go all the way to Mars and back?’
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Froud admitted.
‘I’ve been wondering,’ said Joan, ‘when somebody was going to see that difficulty.’ They all looked at her.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Dugan. ‘Well, even light going at 186 thousand miles a second is going to take an appreciable time getting to Mars and back, and there would be an added delay of the operator’s responses. And yet the machine’s reactions were immediate faster than ours. I tested that.’
‘And according to Einstein, nothing can travel faster than light so what?’ asked the doctor cheerfully. ‘That hadn’t occurred to me,’ Dale admitted. ‘Absurd, because it’s obvious enough once you’ve mentioned it. Anyhow, that seems to kill the idea of remote control from Mars.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Joan. They stared at her again. ‘Wait a minute. What do you mean that’s just what you thought? Dash it all, you said….’ Froud objected.
‘Oh no, I didn’t. I said that that was my father’s theory, and you took it for granted that I believed it, too.’
‘But I distinctly remember at least, I thought I remembered Oh well, if that wasn’t your idea, what was?’
A little of Joan’s assurance left her; she glanced at the faces round her and hesitated; when she spoke, it was with a slightly defiant note. ‘It seemed to me to be an individual: a machine that could think for itself.’ The men looked at one another. ‘No, hang it all, there are limits,’ Frond said, at last. ‘I couldn’t explain it any other way can you?’