Enemies In Space
Edited by
Groff Conklin
First published in Digit books 1962
This book is copyright. No portion of it may be
reproduced without written permission.
Digit Books are published by Brown, Watson Ltd.,
Digit House, Harlesden Road, London, N.W.10.
Printed and made in Great Britain by
Caldra House Ltd.,
23 Coleridge Street, Hove 3, Sussex.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Howard Koch, INVASION FROM MARS.
Copyright, 1940, by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Mildred Clingerman, MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO.
Copyright, 1951, by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Barthold Fles from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February, 1952.
Fredric Brown, THE WAVERIES.
Copyright, 1945, in the U.S.A. and Great Britain by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harry Altshuler from Astounding Science fiction, August, 1945.
Edgar Pangborn, ANGEL’S EGG.
Copyright, 1951, by World Editions, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author from Galaxy Science Fiction, June, 1951.
Katherine MacLean, PICTURES DON’T LIE.
Copyright, 1951, by World Editions, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Dirk Wylie Literary Agents from Galaxy Science Fiction, August, 1951.
Contents:
ENEMIES IN SPACE
INVASION FROM MARS
MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
THE WAVERIES
ANGEL’S EGG
PICTURES DON’T LIE
THE GREATEST TERTIAN
ENEMIES IN SPACE
Karl Grunert
Justus Starck slowly sat down in a chair near the window of his small workroom on the sixth floor of one of the tallest apartment houses in the German capital. The window offered no view other than the gray, bare fire wall of a neighboring building. To others the room might have looked cell-like, but ordinarily Starck paid no attention to it, being fully and happily occupied with his books and his work.
That day, however, he felt weak and lonely. The rejection should not have come just today, on the anniversary of the death of his only sister. They had been orphaned early, and his sister, being several years older, had taken his mother’s place while he worked and studied to make up for the lack of education in his childhood. He had finally succeeded in getting a job as a draftsman in the engineering office of the Power Plant Company, and he and his sister had celebrated the occasion. He had succeeded in incorporating many of his minor ideas into his work and had attracted some favorable attention.
Then his sister died, and he spent his now lonely evenings on some work of his own. Successful work—or so it had looked until today, when he was informed that his innovation could not be used.
His eyes wandered to the table where he had his wireless receiving set, incorporating his own invention. It had seemed so promising. And there had been so many hours of thought and work before it took the shape that he now saw.
For many months he had been thinking about an improved receiver for Hertzian waves, for wireless telegraphy which had become practical through the efforts of Marconi, Slaby and Arco, Braun, and others, and which had just proved its enormous value in the Russo-Japanese War. But the range was not what one would wish, in spite of the high voltages with which the transmitter worked. To increase the range it was necessary to increase the sensitivity of the receiver—a small apparatus consisting essentially of a glass tube, about as long as a finger, with two pistons of silver that were separated by only about a millimeter. This narrow space was filled with metal filings.
It is still not known just how Justus Starck increased the sensitivity of his device so enormously: whether he used a special way of preparing the filings, or substituted organic material, or whether he had applied a new principle. At any event, the incredible sensitivity of his device visibly impressed the experts of the Long Range Radio Corporation, who had tested it thoroughly.
But it had been rejected just the same, Starck did not know why. It may have been a vague distrust against an invention made by a “mere draftsman,” or somebody’s personal envy; officially it was stated that the new receiver was “too sensitive” to be used with the firm’s normal equipment.
Justus looked thoughtfully at the small device, dreaming about the picture of the future which he had hoped to secure through it. And then there was that other dream about the future—a dream coupled with the picture of a girl whom he had met one day in the drafting room of the power station, where she had come to meet her father, who was one of the directors.
Justus got up abruptly and went to the worktable where the receiver stood. He made it ready and connected the antenna switch. He had not picked the apartment on the sixth floor merely because it was cheaper, but largely because it was so easy to get to the roof, where his antenna systems were located.
It was not quite midnight when he returned. He had gone to eat someplace and had then walked the streets for a long time, busy with his thoughts. He was physically tired but mentally alert when he returned; his dejection had worn off. For a moment he sat down at his desk and closed his eyes to think.
At that moment there came a faint clicking from his experimental receiver. At first he thought that he just imagined it, but then turned around and stared at the receiver set. He did not have any lights on, but the moon was full and the sky clear and he could clearly see that the pen of the receiving set was moving. More by instinct than by voluntary action he reached over and released the catch of the clockwork which pulled the paper tape out from under the pen. The sound of the running clockwork drowned the faint clicking of the mechanism, but he could see that there were dots and dashes on the tape. He made a minor adjustment and waited until the apparatus stopped.
Then he tried to read the message:
.... . ..—..—.—. . ..— and so on. Transliterated into normal letters, it said:
Hesternev dei ingendemoni enemi elangis? Nugae rempo! Inedef henna! These words were repeated several times.
Justus read the tape over and over. It made no sense to him; he could not even guess what language it was. Some few words such as dei and nugae might be Latin. The word enemi could be French, although the French word for “enemy” is spelled ennemi. But all the others, hesternev, elangis, rempo, inedef, and especially the strange ingendemoni, remained mysterious. The word henna had a meaning, of course, but was not likely to mean what it normally meant.
Was this the first message of the kind that his set had received? How many other nights had there been when radio waves carried these mysterious words? But then the clockwork in the set had not been running, and the whole message would have made just one blot on the unmoving tape. Justus remembered that he had found such a blot several times, but had thought it the result of some accidental jarring of the set.
Justus, normally cool and calm, grew increasingly excited the longer he thought about the message and its unknown meaning. The set remained silent. Finally, at three in the morning, Justus went to. bed, leaving the set switched on. And in spite of his unabated excitement he did fall asleep; the monotonous sound of the running clockwork had a soporific effect.
When he woke up in the morning his first glance was at the receiving set. There was a big heap of paper tape on the table, spilling over to the floor. And while much of it was empty, there were lengths of tape covered with the same words: Hesternev dei ingendemoni enemi elangis? Nugae rempo! Inedef henna! repeated over a hundred times.
Justus felt that he was not able to decipher the message, which seemed a job for professionals. B
ut there were offices which coded and decoded commercial messages for companies, and he entrusted one of them with the work. Not that he did not try himself just the same. And what he had silently been afraid of did happen: the decoding office reported that the words of the message did not correspond to any one of the commercially used cable codes and that they were in all probability just random combinations of letters. A second decoding office gave him the same answer. And a third.
Justus began to wonder whether atmospheric electricity could have influenced his set to write dots and dashes at random. But if so, would it have repeated a hundred times? Precisely the same random combination?
He sent a copy of the message to the Long Range Radio Corporation, where it was felt that they owed the rejected inventor a small favor. They checked the commercial messages of that time and even inquired of radio stations in other countries. The result was negative. Justus had foreseen this because his set had not been tuned to any wave length used commercially. He sat, office hours over, in front of his receiver, fingering a copy of the mysterious message that had ruined his sleep for many nights by now. He saw the letters mirrored in the shiny brass of the set, and suddenly there was a word he could read. The reflection had been the word elangis; it meant Signale (signals).
He felt as though he were coming out of a dark cave. It had been so ridiculously simple: All one had to do was to read the words backward. He looked at the copy of the message: hesternev. But that gave venretseh, and the one made as much sense as the other. All the other words were senseless, too; only that one word “signals” was really a word. And that might be an accident.
But Justus did not believe that it was an accident. If one word of the message made sense, the others should too. Perhaps the words should not be treated alike. If one became a meaningful word just by being spelled backward, others might yield some sense when treated as anagrams. He tried, and it was just that disappointing nine-letter word hesternev that he solved first. The same letters, rearranged, spelled verstehen (to understand). The Latin-looking word dei produced (tentatively) the German plural article die. And the apparently French enemi resolved itself into the German meine (mine or my). The remaining words were deciphered even more rapidly. Nugae tempo resulted in Augen empor (eyes high), and Inedef henna gave Feinde nahen (enemies approach).
He now had eight of the nine words, and the message read:
Verstehen die . . . meine Signale? Augen emporl
Feinde nahen!
(Do the understand my signals? Eyes high! Enemies approach!)
The one word, not yet resolved, was ingendemoni. Justus realized that it was this very word that gave the key to the meaning. He tried countless combinations of these eleven letters. He was aware of the mathematical fact that a very few symbols can be arranged in a very large number of ways. He remembered that even four symbols can have two dozen arrangements. The possible number of variations of eleven letters was astronomical! He did not realize clearly how many hours he had been working on that one word. He had missed his meals and his eyes were burning. And then he found a combination that not only made sense as a word but also fitted the message. It was Einmondigen, not an established word at all, but one which could be understood. One-Mooners. “Do the One-Mooners understand my signals . . .?”
Justus, by sheer waiting, succeeded in speaking to the Secretary of State. He put on the desk the yards of paper tape with the countless repetitions of the message. He explained about his receiving set and produced his interpretation. Somewhat to his surprise, the Secretary treated the matter with great seriousness and promised to look into it. Justus would be invited.
He was, and found a number of experts, astronomers, meteorologists, and radio specialists assembled in one room. His receiving set was on a table in the center, connected with an antenna on the roof of the building that was a precise replica of the one he had used. Except for being in a different location, the set was as it had been that night several weeks ago.
The Secretary made Justus speak first, and Justus, after repeating the circumstances, did his best to convince his listeners that this message had not originated on Earth but somewhere in space, possibly on one of the neighboring planets, Venus or Mars. But he did not make much of an impression. The electrical experts, in particular, declared that this must have been a freak caused by atmospheric electricity, that the discoverer had deceived himself, that even a deliberate hoax should not be ruled out completely.
“Is the discoverer of this message able to explain,” one of them asked smilingly, “how the operator of this heavenly transmitter picked up both the knowledge of our international Morse code and the German language?” His smile was mirrored on the faces of most of those present.
“And if we, for the sake of discussion, assume these two impossibilities to be fact,” added another, “can Mr . . . er, Mr. Starck tell us why this extraterrestrial telegrapher so garbled his message that it required an admittedly unusual amount of brainwork even to read it?”
“Under the assumption,” a third jumped in, “that Mr. Starck did decipher it correctly. Perhaps an Englishman or a Frenchman or a Russian, working along similar lines and with similar diligence, would have deciphered something different, expressed in his own language.”
“Well, I have to defend our young friend in one respect,” said the old director of the city observatory slowly. “In my opinion that term “One-Mooners” is an excellent way of characterizing an inhabitant of Earth from an astronomical point of view. A presumed inhabitant of Venus, which has no moon, might well think of Earth as the planet with one moon, since Mars has two. Similarly a Martian, because he has two moons, might also think of Earth as the planet with one moon.”
One of the wireless experts shook his head. “I must say that I have the uncomfortable feeling of being right in the middle of a Jules Verne story. Even the circumstances of this conference fail to make this any more scientific or credible to me. We all know fantastic stories of that kind, which have been written again and again ever since Kepler’s Somnium, but that such things are being treated seriously here . . .”
“I beg your pardon, sir,”—it was the Secretary of State who spoke for the first time—“I have to interrupt you at this point. As far as I know the facts, this is not a Jules Verne story being acted out.” He pushed a button on the desk and in a low voice gave an order to the male secretary who had come in. The man left the room and came back almost immediately, carrying a locked brief case. The Secretary unlocked it, took out a folder, and said:
“What I am going to tell you now is confidential. About three months ago something happened near the missionary post of Ylinde, in southeast Africa. A meteorite fell, with loud noises, around noon, literally out of a clear sky. The natives who saw it were frightened and ran to the missionary, who immediately went to the place where the meteorite had landed. He found a still smoking hole and in it, partly buried, a large half-molten piece of metal which he naturally took to be meteoric iron. Here are a few photographs the missionary took on that occasion.” He handed them out.
“But,” he continued with emphasis, “this meteorite was not an ‘honest’ meteorite. It was, gentlemen, a product of intelligent beings beyond our atmosphere. When the missionary had the natives dig up the piece, the other side showed a . . . well, yes, I have to use that word, it showed a trade-mark.”
He pulled a drawing from the brief case.
“Yes, a trade-mark just like the trade-marks that our large industrial firms stamp on their products. You’ll see that the center of the trademark shows a small circle, and next to that circle, to the right, is the sickle of the moon. Around them are a number of small elliptical figures, each of which has a stylized stroke of lightning in front. And all these points are directed against the circle with the sickle. I freely admit I did not understand that symbol until Mr. Starck came in with his telegraph tape. That word ‘One-Mooners’ made me remember the picture you are looking at now.”
“Sir, may I h
ave the floor?” asked the director of the meteorological station, a still young man. “I wish to report a mysterious occurrence that took place in connection with our work. About three years ago we prepared a research balloon designed to go to very high altitudes and to carry only recording instruments, no person. A date had been set for the ascent, which was to take place with the cooperation of the airship garrison. The balloon was shipped to their landing field and was made ready the night before. When we got out there in the early morning hours the balloon was not there and the ropes that had held it down had been untied. At first we thought this was merely an unpleasant accident, but then we were very happy when both the balloon and the instruments in the gondola were shipped to us, from some place at the southern part of Hungary. Of course, we developed the light-sensitive tape with the readings, all normal meteorological information. The barograph showed that the peak altitude reached was 25, 000 meters [82,000 feet], and just at that point we detected some writing scratched into the paper with a point of a needle. It said: ‘Black airships, looking like fish, hunt the balloon and . . .’ That was all.1
“I have to add now that one of my best assistants, one Dr. Valens, disappeared on that day. We reported this to the police, but he has never been found. Of course, we all suspected at one time or another that Dr. Valens may have ascended with the balloon, against orders and without any authorization. And I do think so now, even though it may be accused of telling another Jules Verne story. Maybe he was captured by those ‘black airships,’ which suddenly appeared twenty-five kilometers up. Of course, I’ll now forward the tape with the inscription. Up to now we’ve kept quiet about it because there was a fine chance that some practical jokester in the meteorological station had scratched the letters after the paper tapes had been removed from their containers.”
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