“So here’s Bertha. They leave her sitting here, maybe a year ago, maybe five hundred years ago, maybe fifty thousand years ago. As long as nothing happens, Bertha just stays here, year in and year out, swinging around and around the Earth every two hours and twenty minutes, all loaded and ready to go, the door open, waiting.
“Down on the Earth, men chip flints, and then they build carts, and then they build ships, and then they build aircraft, and Bertha still sits here. Finally then, they build a rocket capable of escape velocity. They bust their guts to get up into a free-fall orbit, and there’s Bertha, waiting, with the door open. Any race curious enough to develop wheels and wings, that’s all the bait they need, just an open door in the right place.
“You get it? The right food, the right water, the right air, the right temperature, it’s all just too pat. A super mousetrap—”
McKay nodded. “It could be. On the other hand, it might not be, we don’t know, all we can do is guess. Now supposing—”
“Kefqs c’qeta!” the speaker interrupted.
Bertha had now reached a point several million miles above the orbit of Mars. The reddish glow suddenly changed to purple.
“Kefqs c’qetal” the speaker said again.
Bertha vanished.
Here Lie We
By Fox B. Holden
I
KRUGER was quiet, sitting there, watching the screen, and for a long time neither of us spoke. You could hear the soft hum of the ion drive and it got to be sort of a muted thunder. You wondered if maybe, somehow, in the awful silence of the Big Dark there were any other ears that heard it, and the wondering framed the question for you again.
The question was in Kruger’s mind, too. Maybe in a harder, cooler, more scientific sense than it was in mine, but I knew it was there. And in the silence between us we watched the orange-green sphere grow bigger by the second.
Kruger spoke, finally. “Wes,” he said, “I’ll even make eight to five. Eight to five she’s as dead as a doornail. So you lose, but think of being the first man in history to make a bet on life on Mars, knowing that in less than an hour it’s bound to be paid off one way or another! How ‘bout that!”
If he’d been anything but a government-commissioned scientist at the threshold of an historic achievement, the quipping might have been bravado-. But two years of training and study were paying off, and we had he-man danger reduced to a pretty unromantic minimum. No, it wasn’t bravado because there was no genuine fear within us. Something else; I can’t name it.
I pulled a wadded-up five-dollar bill out of my pants pocket and tossed it onto the screen. It looked funny … a five-dollar bill sitting on Mars like that. And in a second it was joined by another fiver and three singles.
“Who’ll hold the stakes?” Kruger said.
“You. You hold ’em—be more fun winning that way. How about a reading, huh? Better get ready to twist this barrel around—”
“Such a product of environment you are. Always in a hurry. He picked the money up with exaggerated slowness, pocketed it ceremoniously, and then looked for a second at the screen. Then the ready grin on his squarish, young-old face faded a little, and then it disappeared altogether. “But I suppose you’re right. Got a cigarette?”
“On the comp-panel.”
“Yeah.” I waited for him to light it, lit one myself. “Ready, kid?”
He grunted.
We twisted her.
Tail-first, ion stream cutting the Big Dark like a white-hot rapier, we started—down. There was an up and a down, now, and Mars was at the bottom.
We humped.
Then Kruger dumped out our drive potential, and it was all over. For a few seconds, anyway, it was all over.
Kruger started in with the Physical Check equipment then and I focused the screen. It was as though the whole business were a routine that we’d done for half our lives. And we had to keep it that way—not for the efficiency side of the book; hell, we had five years if we needed it. It was because Space Medicine said so—the whiz kids in Psychiatrics. “Keep it on a ‘pass the salt basis,’ ” were the orders, “and you’ll keep all your buttons. Otherwise, pffut!”
I guess they were right. The newspaper, radio and TV boys back home would be going pffut about the trip with habitual regularity—but we couldn’t. Brother, the tons of newsprint and ink they’d be chucking around while we passed the salt!
I focused, and started a slow, full circle. I jacked in the ship’s dicto and talked cryptic things onto its tape. Terse little things our confreres in science would later decipher into a complete picture of an infinite, rolling expanse of desert at twilight, with a sun the size of a shirt button almost directly overhead, letting the far-off ridges of dull green vegetation get swallowed up in the darkling night.
And then I stopped the circle. I was about two hundred degrees around, and I locked the screen in, and then hollered at Kruger.
He brought me the lens-plates I asked for, helped me mike them in over the screen. They played hell with the nice focus I had, but there wasn’t any mistaking what they blew up for us.
“Pay me, kid!” I said.
They were domes—mile upon incredible mile of polished domes, each maybe a fifth high as wide. They skirted the ridge of a long, gently curving vegetation-line, and were probably less than twenty miles away. Our preoccupation in getting the E-M-l down in one piece was the only excuse I could think of for not having spotted them on the way in.
“Not so fast, Gaylord … I still say dead as a doornail … help me break out the suits and get die track ready, huh?”
“Think we need ’em?”
“Almost pure CO-2 out there, just like the books all said in Astronomy 1. The P-C makes geniuses of us right down the line. You coming?”
“I want my money.”
“Pass the salt and come on!”
They met us halfway. Their vehicle was essentially the same as our own; broad, flat tracks over bogies slung on an efficient torsion-bar suspension—wide, light-weight chassis fitted with a tear-drop canopy of crystal transparency. But traveling with a lot less noise, and with almost twice the speed. Kruger said, “I guess I owe you eight bucks.”
“Maybe they’re robots. Long-dead civilization. Only the machines remain to traverse the wind-whipped sands… .” “Stop, you’re chilling my marrow!”
“Want to try the radio?”
“Minute … hold on, looks as if they’re stopping!” “Obviously want us there. Truce-parley in the desert-look, getting out,’ I think. Come on, club this thing on the flanks, will you?”
Kruger had his boot flat to the floor as it was, and we were tossing up sand on both sides like a miniature tornado. Typically Earth-style—lots of noise, lots of splash, all show and no go.
It seemed as if we kept them waiting for an hour, but it was actually less than ten minutes before Kruger had us up alongside.
“You think they know all about radio and such, I hope? Because brother, I’m not going to take this goldfish bowl off to hear them utter the Secret of the Universe itself… .”
“Hey, hey—they’re wearing suits and helmets themselves. What the hell … you don’t suppose you-know-who has us beat-”
“Nuts, you owe me eight bucks! Come on, let’s get out of here.”
We climbed down out of the track. And there we were, facing them, wondering a little foolishly what the intelligent thing was to do.
All three were taller than Max’s six-one by several inches. Thinner, too. Their skin was whiter, and they looked smarter. Aside from that they might have been a welcoming committee from home. Except that there were no weapons at their sides, and as far as Kruger and I could see, none dangling from their vehicle.
There were three of them, and all at once I could see one of them move his mouth, and quite fantastically heard his deep-throated voice in my ear-plugs. Fantastically, that is, in German.
“Wir—wir sind nicht Deutsch—” I heard Max stammer. He was turning a pale s
hade of mauve.
“Francois, peut-etre?’
“Non—” I managed. “Americaine—nous parlons anglais—”
“Excellent! And we welcome you, men of Earth, United States of America, and trust you had a pleasant voyage! We must apologize for our inability to have distinguished your nationality at once. But our records have never been as complete as we might wish.” And then the three of them made gracious little bows, and Kruger and I just stood there like a couple of clowns. “I am called Kell-III, and to my right and left respectively are Ghoro Elder and Juhr-IV.” And then there was a little pause … Kruger and I got the drift that it was our turn after a while.
“Dr. Max Kruger, Washington, and my technician, Wesley Latham, gentlemen. We hope you forgive our—our awkwardness, but I think you will understand our amazement. To be frank, we had not expected to find life on the fourth planet And I’m afraid even less, had we expected such intimate knowledge of ourselves to exist beyond our own sphere. We are—we are greatly appreciative of your cordiality, gentlemen.”
And that, for Kruger, was a speech. For me it would have been a major oration under the circumstances, but I felt a little better when I detected the hint of a smile at the comers of Kell-III’s thin, sensitive-looking lips.
“Allow us to escort you to the Primary’ Enclosure, gentlemen. We wish to see to your comfort, following which, if it is your pleasure, we shall be more than happy to summon a quorum of the Teachers to assist you in launching the preliminary stages of your research. If you will follow our vehicle, gentlemen.”
They bowed again, and waited until we had clambered aboard our track before turning and re-entering their own.
Kruger fumbled around for the ignition switch, maused the gears and made a mess of getting us started up.
“I don’t believe it,” was all I could get out of him for a full two minutes.
‘The University of California must have a new expansion program going,” I said. “And you don’t get your money back.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“That’s’ been our trouble all along, back home,” I said. “We’ve got all the capacity anybody needs to believe anything. We just use it on the wrong stuff. Give this thing a boot, doc. We don’t want them to think we’re slow…
The magnificent structure which Kell-III had called the Primary Enclosure was perhaps five full miles in diameter and little less than one at its maximum height. Inside it there was a city that only poets could have designed; men of practical science, perhaps never. Art and life had never been so exquisitely blended on Earth.
And about it all there was an aura of the perfect peace that the city itself bespoke—and a quietness. It was the quietude, I think, that kept Kruger and myself from taking deeper breaths. People thronged the deep green of the generous parks, the flaring sweep of the overhead ramps that twined fantastically between this towering spire and the next, the wide, immaculate thoroughfares. They were everywhere, clad in colorful toga-like garments, and each, it seemed, with a gentle manner. They would halt briefly as we walked among them behind Kell-III and his aides, but there were the same gentle, courteous bows that we’d met out on the desert; not stares, not shouts, not the mobbing so often bred by unbridled curiosity.
But even with the pleasant murmur of their low, soft voices there was the quietness, and I asked Kruger if he noticed it too. It was awkward, carrying our bulging helmets beneath our still-suited arms, but having them off at least gave us back the individuality of our voices, and that helped a little. We had to work to breathe; it was evident that the people here had adapted down to a bare minimum of oxygen before resorting to the Enclosures, but their artificial atmosphere had an invigorating tang, and that helped, too.
“They’re just a little surprised, I guess,” Kruger said in his best sotto voce. “Either that, or—well, hell, I guess we can allow for a few little differences from ourselves! They could as easily have been bug-eyed octopods with soul-tearing screams for normal voices, after all. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“I wish we’d get to it, though. These—these Teachers, whoever they are. I’ve got questions—”
“You and the big rush! But I’ve got a few of my own. Better do it their way, though. It’ll be good for your ulcers, Wes.” “Believe that when I see it,” I answered him.
Our panorama of the city widened as we started up the gently inclining ramp that circled the tower-like structure in which Kell-III and the others apparently intended to billet us. Here Kruger voiced a thought that had just started whipping around in my own head. “Not many vehicles,” he said. “Either they’re conserving power and fuel to beat the devil, or else they just don’t gad about very much…
“Maybe they’re not the type,” I said. “Maybe that track of theirs is a special-occasions-only affair—you notice we didn’t drive over here. Parked as soon as we got inside. It could answer a lot of my worries.”
“About their quietness, is that what you mean?”
“Yeah. It gets me, Max.”
“Relax—pass the salt or something… .”
But I couldn’t relax, even after we’d been left to ourselves about five stories up in one of the most gracefully appointed suites I’d ever been in. I could only think of the way the ancient Britons must have felt in their first contact with the civilization of old Marco Polo’s discovery—their first sight of fine glassware, their first touch of silk, first scent of delicate perfume… .
Kell-III told us he’d be back after we’d had food and sleep, and Max was saying if the sleeping period was as generous as the portions of food that had been sent in we might come out of the whole thing alive after all. “But I didn’t think it’d be anything like this,” he sighed. He already was stripped to the waist and stretched out on one of the low, wide couches, rubbing his eyes.
“You liked it better when we were the only frogs in the pond!”
“Oh, go to sleep! And if you can’t do that, think of meat least pity a man who had his five bucks all counted. You don’t snore, do you?”
“Softly, but not well.”
“G’night, kid,” he said, and I let it go at that. I told myself this was the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, and that everything would be put back together the way I’d left it four months ago when I woke up, and tried one of the couches for size. It fit, and if Max snored louder than I did, I didn’t hear him for ten hours.
II
ACTUALLY, the Teachers would have made a complete area of study in themselves. The civilization and culture they represented would have made a book of history for every page of Earth’s, and would have been a lifetime’s work without the kind of cooperation they gave Kruger and myself. Without their help, we’d have had to stick out our full five-year limit before leaving it to the others who would follow us in the successive voyages of the E-M-l.
But as it was, the Teachers were more than ready for us. It was almost as though they had been ready for a long time.
The quorum summoned to help us numbered eleven, and each had a full research staff ready and waiting to go to work on any of our more involved questions that required more than a series of simple statements for accurate answer.
It was the quietness about them—a sad kind of quietness— that got me; I wasn’t built for that, and it kept needling me in spite of Kruger’s objective speculations. I wanted to ask them to what they attributed that almost-haunting quality. It was information they had not offered, and I decided to leave my questions unasked.
But it made me wonder if Max had noticed something else, and I asked him about that. We’d been there almost two months, and I had talked him into a day’s holiday in one of the resort Enclosures. We were both tired, and the cool, carefully nurtured beach of green grass felt good beneath our bared backs. There was a wide, artificial lake—shallow, of course, but in every respect representative of Martian adeptness at bringing beauty to places where before there had been no beauty—and it was one of a scant half-dozen which served
the few who yet lived beneath the life-sustaining Enclosures; there were less than five million, the Teachers had said.
“Max,” I asked, “how about a snappy answer to this one … yes or no. How’ve they been supplying the information you’ve wanted? Have they ever volunteered anything?”
“Look, when are you going to begin leaving well enough alone? It’s a good thing you weren’t a cop, or your grandmother wouldn’t have known a day out of jail in her life…
“Yes or no, Max. Humor me.”
“Hell, I don’t know. The last sixty days have just been one big quiz program—have been for you, too, if you haven’t been gold-bricking over in the art galleries again! But if it means anything to your counterspy mind, as far as I can think back, no. No, they just wait until you ask something, and then they break their backs to give you an answer down to the last little detail.”
He rolled over on his stomach and said something else into the grass and I only half caught it.
“Naturally, it’s good enough for me,” I answered. “I’d say too good if—if they weren’t what they are. But I want to know more about them note—the way things are this minute. My dicto’s got about three tons of tape on their early sociotechnological history, its check-and-balance development, and how they worked out space travel and began watching us from the time we started hammering tools out of flint—but dammit, they’ve got so much history.”
“Always in a hurry, that’s my boy! Six months and we’ll have the works at the rate we’re going, then you’ll be happy. Better than five years, isn’t it? And who was the guy hollering about taking a day to catch our breaths? Roll over, will you?”
“First things first, I suppose.”
“Figures, doesn’t it?”
“That’s a naughty word. Got to keep our minds on the job, remember?”
Adventures in the Far Future Page 20