by James White
"A sh-shadow!" chattered one of the girls. "It was moving slowly, up there! Didn't you s-see it?"
"I saw something," said Wallis. "It might be a big fish. Or-r a boat on the surface . . ."
There was a sudden, muted clang and a scraping sound, subtly different from all the other metallic creakings and strainings which haunted the ship.
"A boat on the surface," said Wallis, in a voice which began as a whisper and ended as a shout, "has dropped its anchor on us!"
Within seconds they were all banging furiously on the cabin deck. and walls, in unison, with the first piece of metal or wood that came to hand. Bang-bang-bang, they signaled hysterically, bang, bang, bang, bang-bang-bang. They did not speak at all among themselves, because it was ridiculous to expect rescue after all this time and talking about the possibility would have made them realize just how ridiculous it was. Instead they banged away while the minutes grew into hours and they grew warmer than they could ever remember being from their exertions, then cold again as they weakened. During the lengthening pauses for breath they stared through the green scum on the other side of the porthole and imagined moving shadows, or listened to the odd creakings and scrapings and gurgling sounds coming from different parts of the ship, and tried to convince themselves that they were not the same noises they always heard.
"It might have been part of the mast breaking away," said Wallis, during one of the longer silences. "A piece of rusty metal falling onto the deck . . ."
They ignored him. Weakly, despairingly, they resumed hammering on the deck. Then suddenly they stopped. Light was seeping into the cabin from the tank below.
Wallis and one of the girls were first to the hatch and gained a place on the ladder while the others knelt in the cabin above, staring down, punching each other and laughing. Below him the water was lit by a lamp of some kind which was being pushed through the submerged entrance. A shape in some kind of diving suit was following it, and obviously having difficulty squeezing through. It was impossible to see details because the water was like so much cold, thick, stinking soup with the wastes that had collected in it over the past few weeks. Wallis felt suddenly anxious about their rescuer's feelings over this, and about his people's appearance and what he should say. "Hello" or "Thank God" or "You certainly took your time getting here, friend. . . ."
The figure broke the surface and Wallis saw that the helmet was designed to keep water in and air out, and that the . . . head . . . inside it was not human.
XXIII
The first tape from the former Captain Heglenni said, "It is one of their larger vessels sunk, judging by the advanced state of corrosion, more than one hundred of this planet's years ago. While investigating we were startled to hear noises emanating from it in a patterned sequence suggesting intelligence, and later discovered living gas-breathers in one of the gas pockets inside the vessel. I will repeat, there were five living gas-breathers inside the ship. After seeing me, there was a surprisingly short period of adjustment on their part, after which one of them drew signs on the powdered corrosion covering a wall. One appeared to be a geometrical design illustrating Trennochalin's theorem regarding the area of squares on a right-angled triangle and the other was a nonscale diagram of this solar system. It seems to me that contact is possible with these gas-breathers and, if so, much useful information both physical and psychological could be gained regarding them, especially since they must be totally unaware of the situation between our race and theirs. I hereby request that a communications officer be assigned to me, preferably the one who was trying to develop the sound conversion device.
"With this report I am returning a dead gas-breather. This specimen appears to have died from water strangulation rather than from disease or injury. It was in a water-filled compartment of the ship and seems to have died recently. Small native predators have been at work on the specimen, but the bone structure and major organs appear to be intact. . . ."
Captain Gunt allowed the tape to run to its conclusion before turning to the communications officer, who hung like an iridescent shadow in the darkened control room. Because of the risk of detection there was no power source operating within the ship, no lighting and no water-circulating machinery. The water they breathed was that of the sea outside, gloriously cool, at a comfortable pressure and so free of salts, unlike the water of Untha, that its effects came close to that of euphoria. This was how Untha must have been before their sun began to boil off and thicken their water. This fresh, cold, tremendous ocean came close to being the Unthan conception of Heaven. It was an effort, sometimes, to realize that this perfect place had to be fought for and that the fight would be long and hard. That when they won, if they won, this gloriously clean sea might very well be left poisoned with radiation and dirtier even than the steaming seas of Untha.
Angrily, Gunt said, "I won't order you to this duty, and it's quite obvious that you would probably desert if I tried to stop your going. Just please remember that you are not going merely to satisfy your curiosity regarding a nonhuman intelligent life-form. Your only purpose is to gain information about the enemy that will aid our survival and hasten their demise. A great many of our people are going to die shortly and the quantity and accuracy of this information will be in inverse proportion to the casualties. My original plan was to disperse the colonists as soon and as far as possible. Tell Heglenni that I now intend holding them close to the ship until the last possible moment so that they can scatter into their survival cells with all the available data on the enemy.
"Tell her that her background will fit her for this duty," Gunt went on awkwardly. "It will make her less squeamish regarding the methods of getting this vital information. Tell her also that we are very pleased with her, and that I consider this matter of such importance that I will have a line laid connecting the flagship with the wreck of the enemy. It will be a sound line, since vision would be superfluous and radio would be open to detection from above. . . ."
The second report was more in the nature of a discussion, since Gunt was in a position to comment on the data as they arrived. It seemed that the five gas-breathers were close to death from starvation, suffocation, and something else which apparently had to do with breathing, or perhaps swallowing, small quantities of water through their oral openings. Heglenni had dealt with the first problem by trapping for them a selection of small fish and crustaceans and with the second by floating pipes to the surface, during darkness so as to conceal the operation as much as possible, and replacing the foul gas inside the wreck. The third problem was more difficult since the gas-breathers refused to breathe or eat clean water brought to them from the sea outside their ship and refused it with the same degree of firmness as they had the water contaminated with their wastes. Since they had been able to survive for so long in these conditions, Heglenni was concerned and puzzled over what it was that they lacked. She intended carrying out a thorough search of the recently flooded compartments of the wreck in the hope of finding food supplies or mechanisms which might give a clue to what was missing.
The report which followed a few days later was more emotional than was called for, Gunt thought. She told him that the gas-breathers were in a severely weakened state and were scarcely able to communicate, even among themselves. The old male gas-breather -- there were three males and two females -- was in a pitiable condition. Had the captain any suggestions?
"I have, as a matter of fact," Gunt replied after some hesitation. "From observations on the way in, together with a study of the artifacts you sent us, particularly a small, electrically heated container used for warming water -- a container much too small for cooking purposes and wired in such a way that the contents would tend to become vaporized rather than simply warmed -- we have evolved a rather, uh, wild theory to the effect that the water used by the gas-breathers is exclusively the result of precipitation from water vapor in the planetary gas envelope. Water thus produced would be much freer from impurities like dissolved minerals and salts; so sea wate
r might be toxic to them. This is, uh, my theory and as I've already said, it has a low order of probability."
"It certainly has!" Heglenni burst in. "But we'll try it. We'll try anything !"
Gunt held onto his temper with an effort, thinking unkind things about overemotional females. He said, "Meanwhile, if one or more of the specimens die you will transfer the bodies to the flagship without delay -- "
"That may be difficult, sir," Dasdahar, the communications officer, broke in. "Our present contact with them is in a delicate state. We are gaining their trust, and withdrawing one of their dead could very well spoil everything."
"You surprise me," said Gunt. "I assumed that you knew only a few words of each other's language and that the rest of your knowledge regarding them was based on observation and intuition, the latter being supplied by Heglenni, whose dormant maternal instincts have been aroused by feelings of pity for her pets! Can you actually make yourselves understood in their language?"
"No, yes, sir," said Dasdahar. "What I mean, sir, is that we can make ourselves understood in our language. You see, the vocal apparatus of the gas-breathers is much more flexible than our own plus the fact that their memory is unusually retentive. They never forget anything that is told to them, even if it is only once. Quite complicated concepts were being exchanged in Unthan before they became too weakened to talk to us."
"But now we are going to revive them with distilled water!" Heglenni's voice added scornfully, "We respectfully end message, sir."
Using one of the cutting torches and an uninhabited gas pocket in the forward part of the wreck, Heglenni produced a fair quantity of distilled water and introduced it via a screw-topped container to the quarters of the gas-breathers. The effects were almost immediate and quite dramatic. But Heglenni observed the gas-breathers, and Dasdahar and she talked to them for a full day before contacting Captain Gunt again.
"Distilled water was the answer, sir," she said. "And for my disrespectful remarks and behavior yesterday I am truly sorry."
"Contact is widening, sir," said Dasdahar. "I have additional data for you. . . ."
And day after day the information continued to flow into the flagship at a steadily accelerating rate. The reason for the specimens' unusually retentive memories became plain: for more than one hundred of the planet's years the dwellers in the wreck had had nothing to do but exercise their memories! Most of the data had to do with life in the wreck, but there was an enormous amount of information regarding the world as it had been before their ship had been rendered nonbuoyant -- data on the arts as well as technology, data which gave depth and perspective to the gas-breather's culture. And through it all there was emerging the personality of Wah-Lass, the oldest specimen, who was the gas-breathing equivalent of a healer.
All the material was interesting and a fair proportion of it was useful. With the remainder of the Unthan fleet crossing the orbit of the fourth planet and with his final instructions to those ships still to go out, Captain Gunt was interested only in what was useful.
Two of the invading life-forms were captured, intact if not alive. One had been harpooned and the other machine-gunned and both were nearly torn to pieces by a ravening horde of the world's most eminent biologists eager for the chance of seeing what made the extraterrestrials tick. But when the investigation was finally carried out they were left feeling more puzzled than ever, because it appeared that the two specimens belonged to different subspecies, that the tentacles which ringed their head sections were not capable of fine manipulation and that their cranial capacity was rather small in proportion to their size, roughly that of a small whale. They would have liked to have issued a statement to the effect that the specimens in question did not have the brainpower to develop tools or the dexterity to use them, but they had to be cautious because the specimens were, after all, alien.
Meanwhile the armed forces of the world, unable to check the coming invasion, welded themselves more and more closely together and tried to perfect tactics designed to exterminate the enemy when he was down. One of them, the rapid detection and depth-bombing of sunken ships, was well-nigh perfect.
There was fresh food every day in the shape of fish and lobsters, and fresh air was piped directly from the surface every night. Their living quarters had been extended, they had a much better view, and there was even heat of a kind. The heat came from the Unthan equivalent of an acetylene burner, a gadget so powerful that it had to be directed downward into the water in Number Twelve to keep it from burning a hole through the plating. The result was a hot fog when it was working and a cold, clammy dampness when it was not.
Wallis had begun to cough a lot recently. He had other chest symptoms and sometimes a temperature which made him feel quite delirious.
It was time that he asked Heglenni, or the other one, who worked the sound-converter gadget, to put them ashore again. The first time he had asked, Heglenni had avoided the question by pretending not to understand and the doctor had not pushed it. The e-ts had saved their lives, after all, and Heglenni had wanted to learn more about the humans and she could not do this if her pet gas-breather, as she called him, was somewhere on land. She insisted that the humans and she had a great deal in common, and so had the male Unthan who was a communications officer on their ship. There was also the fact that up to now Wallis had been scared stiff of being brought to the surface. His world had been Gulf Trader and the surface was suddenly, now that it was within reach, as strange and frightening as the world of the afterlife. The others felt much the same way, so nobody had pushed the matter. Now, however, Wallis knew he would not live much longer if he stayed here.
Maybe it was due partly to his delirium and partly to his nasty, suspicious mind, but he found himself wondering about the motives of his rescuers, if rescuers they were going to be. The language wasn't much of a problem these days, although some of the growly words still made him cough, so he was pretty sure that he did not mistake the things being said to him. Ambiguity was one thing, and a downright inconsistency was another. While it was understandable that the Unthans switched out their lights at night and piped in fresh air during darkness (Wallis had received, or been given, the impression that Heglenni's ship had carried refugees fleeing from some catastrophe on the home world and they were being cautious about revealing themselves until they knew more about the place), there was still something odd about the way they refused to go into details regarding themselves.
The Game had dealt with many variations on this particular theme: good aliens, bad aliens, bad aliens pretending to be good, and so on. Wallis felt very much ashamed of himself, because he would have been dead several months ago if it hadn't been for Heglenni, but he thought that the time had come to set a few verbal traps.
He knew enough of the language, and provided he didn't cough too much when he was growling out the words and could keep his mind clear when his temperature was going into a peak, he should be able to find out what he wanted to know.
But what did he want to know?
It was at times like this, when he looked through a fog of delirium at the rusty bulkheads and the weird orange light-rod and the nightmare features of Heglenni as she hovered outside the extension to Richard's Rooms, that he wondered seriously whether or not this was all delirium and his pneumonia was farther advanced than he realized.
". . . You stupid, irresponsible fools!" Gunt's voice raged at them over the line. "How could you be so so . . . What have you to say about this?"
Dasdahar looked helplessly at Heglenni and prepared to give the softest answer possible.
"We don't know why the gas-breathers became suspicious of us, sir," he said quickly, "but they did, and quite suddenly became uncooperative. We were in the process of obtaining some very useful information and we took the decision to tell them -- "
"I took the decision," said Heglenni sharply. "The fault is entirely mine."
". . . And we took the decision to tell them the whole truth," Dasdahar went on. "Of necessity
this included much background information on Untha, the numbers, composition, and inherently non-warlike nature of the fleet. Their response to this was guarded, and they requested more detailed information. They were particularly interested in the problems met with on the flagship after the Untha-trained personnel had gone into Cold Sleep -- "
"Anyone with half a brain," Heglenni put in, "could understand why."
". . . And now," continued the communications officer quickly, while his eyes pleaded with Heglenni to shut up and not make things more difficult for them, "they have refused to supply any further data about themselves or their race until we agree to certain conditions. One of them is that you, sir, speak with and if possible meet the gas-breather Wah-Lass -- "
"No!"
There was a short silence while Heglenni and Dasdahar stared at each other -- a hulking, good-natured male who had actually lived on the home world and a sleek, hard female who was nearly always angry and who did not quite believe in the existence of the world on which the other had lived. Then suddenly Gunt was speaking again.
"I do not want to speak to the being Wah-Lass for a reason I will shortly make clear," he said. "Our position here is steadily worsening. More and more reports are coming in of the enemy's depth-bombing their inshore wrecks to keep us from using them as observation posts. As you know, the flagship has been sheltering beside the metal of one of the sunken enemy capital ships, so that our turn must soon come. Consequently we must complete our data on the enemy life-form for earliest possible transmission to the fleet. You will therefore kill the five gas-breathing specimens, making sure that they are not damaged unnecessarily in the process, and transfer them without delay to the flagship so that we can fill the gaps in our knowledge of their physiology."