Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  The rest of the day passed in as boring a fashion as had the two pre­ceding.

  ~ * ~

  Evening found the three conspirators in their room, planning the night’s activities. Arthur, of course, would remain to “sleep.” They found difficulty in deciding whether Little should remain with him, or accom­pany Leo on his astronomical expedition. If he went without an obvious purpose, the guards might wonder why he was the only curious sightseer and why Arthur didn’t go, too; if he remained, they might wonder why he behaved differently from the previous occasion, and investigate the sleepers. Even the insight Little had gained into their thought processes could throw no light on this question.

  Finally, he accompanied Leo, carrying the latter’s pencil and pad to provide himself with an excuse. As on the previous occasion, none of the guards followed them through the door. They took up their former sta­tion by the wall and seated themselves on the steps until S Doradus should rise. The moon was only a little past first quarter, and the beacon would not rise tonight until some two hours after the eclipse, so they had a wait of nearly four hours. They had chosen to come out early, to avoid falling asleep and missing their chance.

  For the first time since their arrival on the planet, there were clouds in the sky. These provided matter for conversation and anxiety for nearly three hours, as they completely covered the heavens on two occasions; but by the time the waning moon was sinking low in the east they had disappeared. The remaining time before observation could be started was passed in silence.

  As the glow on the eastern horizon warned of the mighty star’s ad­vent, Leo went to work. Each of the fragments of glass he had obtained from the engineer’s goggles was tested in turn, a star viewed through the darkened glass being compared with another seen directly. Little noted the results on the pad, though there was little need. The lenses had origi­nally been very evenly darkened, and as nearly as Leo could estimate, a single thickness of the glass cut about three and five-tenths magnitudes from the brightness of an object.

  When the beacon rose, his only task was to find the number of layers necessary to reduce its apparent brightness to that of a star lying in the range where his own judgment was good. The method obviously gave room for error, which increased with each additional thickness used, but it was better than guessing; and anyway, as Leo remarked, since S Doradus is an irregular variable, the best instruments in Civilization would still have left them with a probable error of over half a magnitude.

  He measured and computed. “Art was almost right, at that,” he re­marked finally. “ ‘Near S Doradus’ would almost be enough. I get an ap­parent magnitude of minus fourteen, which means a distance of just un­der one parsec.” He took a fresh sheet of paper from the pad and wrote rapidly. “Here,” he said, handing it to Little, “is the complete specifica­tion of our position, to two decimal places—I can’t guess closer. It also includes the type of this planet and sun in standard terms, and a rough idea of our latitude on the planet. If you broadcast that and anyone hears you, they’ll find us.”

  “And he can go right ahead and broadcast it, as soon as the rubber­necks are out of the way,” broke in a new voice. “The gadget’s done. I haven’t tested it, naturally, but it can’t help working. Say the word, Doc.”

  ~ * ~

  Little shook his head. “Not tonight. We must arrange some way to keep the broadcast from being too obvious. Come on to bed and we’ll talk as we go. It would be too bad to slip up now.”

  They arose and walked slowly toward the lighted doorway.

  “It seems to me that we only need to gas the guards in the immediate neighborhood, and lock ourselves into the quarters with them outside. There are no outside catches on the main doors, and I could seal the el­evator panel with the welder—I didn’t use it for the broadcaster, and it should stand the overload long enough.”

  They passed into the corridor. “That might work,” mused the doc­tor. “There is only the one elevator, and no other entrances to the roof, from below, anyway. But we’d want as many hours as we could get, and I should think they could burn out the elevator door in a few minutes.”

  They entered the room in which they slept. “That could be prevented by simply leaving that door open when the elevator was up and going into action at that time,” contributed Leo as they pulled off their boots. “Then they couldn’t get at either the elevator or its door.”

  “How about the other men?” asked Little. “It will be difficult to tell them all about the geletane, and how to avoid its effects. What will—”

  “Stop worrying about it,” interrupted Arthur. He had lain down with the pack for a pillow, moved it to a more comfortable spot, noticed the ease with which it moved and, with a horrible suspicion in his mind, looked into the kit box inside. “The communicator is gone.”

  Possibly the guards in the corridor and on the roof were laughing, if their unhuman cerebral processes had ever evolved an emotion akin to humor. Certainly, they were pleased with themselves.

  “You loon,” growled Leo. “Why did you have to celebrate finishing the thing by tearing outside to tell us? It would have been simpler just to step outside our door and hand it to a guard.”

  The night had not passed too peacefully, in spite of Little’s advice to save recriminations until morning. Relations between the twins were slightly strained. The sunlight coming through the window revealed only too clearly on Leo’s face that expression of smug, “I wouldn’t do such a thing” superiority that tends to drive repentant sinners to homicide.

  “The meeting will please come to order,” interrupted the doctor. “Leo, lay off Arthur. If it will make you any happier, Art, I’ll tell you that if neither of you boys had spilled the beans in a day or two, I should have done so myself—carefully, of course. It was better for it to happen natu­rally. Now sit around, and wear a disgusted expression for the benefit of the guards if you like, and listen. This will take some time.

  “In the first place, I suppose you’ve realized by now that we were captured simply for observation purposes; the pentapods hoped to learn about our weapons and science from our efforts to escape. They have, we must admit, been rather successful. Our activities have probably been evident to them from the first, but they waited until the communicator was com­pleted before taking it, naturally. That habit of theirs struck me when the Vegans first described the way in which their plans were never interfered with until nearly mature.

  “There was also the question of the surprising ease with which they were able to divine our feelings and intentions. It took me longer to dis­cover the reason for that; but information supplied by the Vegans again provided the key.

  “Their language is not verbal. None of us has yet heard them utter a vocal sound. We couldn’t understand how they communicated, but to the Vegans it was so evident as to be unworthy of comment—their cap­tors’ language was of the same type as their own, visual rather than au­dible, a sign language in which the thousands of mobile spines with which their bodies are covered replaced the two antennae of a Vegan. It was so complex that the Vegans couldn’t begin to learn it, but the method was obvious to them.

  “That, to me, gave a nearly complete picture not only of their lan­guage, but of their thought; not only of the way they exchanged ideas, but of the very nature of those ideas.

  “You have heard, no doubt, that thoughts may be considered as unuttered words. Of course, we do think in visual images, too, but logical reasoning, in human minds at least, takes the form of an unuttered con­versation with oneself. Think through the proof of a theorem in grade-school geometry, if you don’t believe it. With creatures like the Vegans, an analogous process takes place; they think in terms of the visible sym­bols of their language. The language, as you know, is slow—takes much longer to get ideas across. Also, it takes longer for a Vegan to comprehend something, though they certainly can’t be called stupid.

  “The same thing should happen, and does happen, with our captors. They thi
nk and talk immeasurably faster than we do; and their thoughts are not in arbitrary word or picture symbols, but in attitudes. Watching them, I have come to the conclusion that they don’t have a language as we understand it at all; the motions and patterns of the spines, which convey thought from one to another, are as unconscious and natural as expres­sions on our faces. The difference being that their ‘faces’ cover most of their bodies, and have a far greater capacity for expression. The result is that they have as easy a time learning to interpret expressions and bodily attitudes of other creatures, as we would have learning a simple verbal tongue. What the psychologists call attitude—or expression, to us—is the key to their whole mental activity. Until we understood that, we had no chance of using their own methods to defeat them, or even of under­standing the methods.

  ~ * ~

  “When Albee and the others made that break, you noticed that the pentapods wasted no time in pursuing a man who was even slightly out of reach; they were able to reason with extreme rapidity even in a situa­tion like that, and realized that they couldn’t catch him. A man would have tried, at least.

  “Like everything else, this high-speed communication has its disadvantages. These creatures could never have invented the telephone, any more than the Vegans could; and they’d have had the same difficulty with gadgets such as the telegraph. I don’t know anything about their written language, but it must be ideographic and contain, unless I underestimate their capacity for bringing order out of chaos, a perfectly appalling num­ber of symbols. Who could make up a dot-and-dash code for that? The Orientals of Earth had the same trouble. That would interfere with the ‘evolution’ of communication devices.

  “Their long-distance communication, therefore, must be purely vi­sual transmission. We have seen the television screens in their office down­stairs—ten feet square, enough to picture any of the creatures full length. I’m sure that they can’t broadcast their vision for two reasons: the Vegans say the ship always returns unexpectedly, and preparations are never made a few hours in advance of its arrival—as they would be if they could broad­cast news of their approach. Also, there is no sign anywhere on this build­ing of a beam-type second-order projector, or even the loop of a general field broadcaster such as Art was making. The images are transmitted by wire, and only inside this building. That was the reason, Art, that I insisted on your making a visual transmitter. They would have no desire to copy a telephone unit. They have it now; they’ll have a full-size visual be­fore that ship leaves; and their communications room is right below here, and should contain emergency accumulators in case the regular power goes.

  “When the ship leaves, we wait a day. Then we collect the kitchen refuse, which Denham is accumulating, and pile it into the elevator to take outside—Leo, get that happy expression off your face—making the load big enough so that none of the guards can ride with us, though they don’t usually these days anyway. Just before we go, the stove will break down, and Denham will come kicking about it. Arthur will go back, tinker with the stove, remove the geletane tank now clamped to it and replace it with another, and toss the ‘used’ tank in with the rest of the waste. The elevator will descend one floor, and we will emerge with the tank open. We will run toward the office, which is just down the hall, in order to avert the effects of the geletane by activity; we will hold handkerchiefs over our faces to let the guards know we have gas, and hold their breaths. Two of us will enter the communication office, while the third will re­main outside to destroy the door control. He can spend the rest of his time welding the door shut, until that welder gives out.

  “The guards and operators inside should be under the influence of the gas by then, and will be thrown out before the welding starts. The two of us who are inside will keep exercising until the ventilators clear the air in the room; then we can use the vision transmitter to our heart’s content, until the starfish can bring up heavy tools and burn through the door. There are a dozen Union bases within five hundred parsecs, even I know; and five minutes should be ample to contact one of them and give our situation.

  “Art, did you really think I hoped to get anywhere with that pint-sized thing you built? The pentapods have us here so that we can build equipment for them; I decided that turn about was fair play. I only hope those infernally quick minds of theirs don’t grasp the fact that two can play at one game. In case they should, I think we had better start working with Magill on whatever plan he has evolved; that will keep us occupied, reduce the chance of our betraying our secret, and may prove a valuable second string to the bow if our plan falls through. Let’s have breakfast.”

  ~ * ~

  Little had spoken lightly of “working in” with Magill on whatever plan of escape that worthy might have evolved; at breakfast he discovered that no less than four lines of attack were being developed simultaneously. The quartermaster was hoping that one of them would go undiscovered long enough to reach a climax. He had not divided the men into separate groups for each job; the idea was to confuse the guards by having everybody work on all the plans at once. Confusion had certainly resulted, though none of the pentapods showed the symptoms. Little, first mak­ing sure that his own private plan would not be affected by any of the others, plunged joyfully into the conflicting tasks of (1) finding and us­ing one or more of the aircraft which Magill was positive were stored beneath the roof; (2) getting an armed party of human beings into the interstellar flier of the pentapods; (3) carrying out the original Vegan plan of flooding the building with ultraviolet light without at the same time forcing out the men; and (4) locating an arsenal of the pentapods and simply clearing a section of the building by brute force. Magill intended to use whichever of these plans first attained practicability.

  Four days were spent in this fashion. Work at least prevented them from being as boring as the preceding three, though little or no progress was made. On the morning of the fifth day, however, just after the morn­ing meal, an event occurred which opened a fifth line of procedure, and almost caused Magill to abandon the others.

  One of the men had gone out onto the roof; and the others were attracted by his cry. Little, following the others to the edge of the roof, looked over; and was rewarded with a clear view of nothing at all. The line of pentapods which had been loading supplies into the vast cruiser was not to be seen, and the vessel’s ports were closed. The men watched silently and expectantly, reasonably sure of what was to happen.

  Perhaps ten minutes passed without a word being spoken; then, with­out sound or ceremony, the tremendous cylinder of metal drifted lightly upward. The men followed it for a short distance with their eyes; they might have watched longer, if their attention had not been distracted by an object revealed by the cruiser’s departure.

  Just beyond the depression in the soil left by the great ship there ap­peared a second, much smaller, silvery metal torpedo; and a howl of sur­prise burst from almost every human throat on the rooftop. It was the Gomeisa, her ports open, apparently unharmed, and—apparently deserted.

  For several seconds after that involuntary expression of astonishment there was dead silence; then Magill spoke.

  “This puts a new light on the situation. Don’t do anything rash until we decide just how this affects our position; our plans will certainly need modification. I’ll be in the market for ideas all morning; we’ll have a gen­eral discussion meeting after dinner,” He turned away from the edge and walked back toward the doorway.

  ~ * ~

  Denham had long since been coached in his part,; he played it with­out a hitch. The load of refuse and the tank of geletane were tossed into the elevator; the three men followed. No guards entered; since the departure of their ship they had concentrated on guarding the lower doors rather than preventing the prisoners from wandering about the fort. Little slid the door of the cage closed and touched the button next to the top, and Arthur took the welder from his pocket.

  Slow as it was, the car took but a few seconds to reach the next level. It
stopped; Little looked at his companions and slid open the door, at the same instant opening the valve of his gas tank. The three dashed into the corridor and toward the office, handkerchiefs pressed over their mouths and noses.

  Two pentapods stood at the open door of the communication room. They swept instantly toward the approaching men, but must have con­versed with others inside the room even in that time, for three more emerged after them.

  Fast as the men were running, the gas diffused ahead of them; and the rearmost guards, who were moving more slowly than the others, were paradoxically the first to go down under the invisible attack. The others heard them fall, deduced the cause, presumably held their breath—and dropped as though shot. The men hurtled into the room, Little still lead­ing, and found it empty. Evidently the communication officers had joined the guards and, confident of their ability to overcome three human be­ings, had not even sounded an alarm,

  Leo Dennis leaped toward a mass of equipment that was all too plainly of recent installation; Little reversed his motion, snatched the welder from Arthur’s hand, and darted back through the door.