Kalhern shook his head. “You’ll do nothing of the sort,” he snapped. “You know the landing rules: ‘No crewman or officer shall venture into uncharted territory on a Class C planet until that territory has first been quartered with a Tester.’ Well, this is a Class C planet. By Godfrey, I’m taking no chances!”
We divided the rest of the night into watches, setting off Regal flares at intervals of every ten minutes, but there was no sign of McKay. Dawn came .at last, bringing with it no lessening of the tenseness that was mounting within each of us. Somehow the red escarpment seemed redder and the violet swales a deeper more alien color than before. And off to the left the white pillar stood, reflecting the sunlight, a monument to the mystery which surrounded us.
I tried not to think about McKay, but the absence of his cheery “Good morning, Mr. Judson; it’s a very nice day, isn’t it, Mr. Judson?” hit me hard, and at breakfast even emotionless Hammond was visibly affected by the sight of the big man’s empty chair.
“Of course, all he did was. walk away under his own power,” said Kalhern. “There’s no reason to believe yet that harm has come to him.”
His forced cheerfulness fooled no one. We all had been on too many strange planets in the past.
And then at high noon, like a prodigal son returning, McKay came back. He came out of the swale grass, stumbling drunkenly, hands hanging loosely at his sides. When he reached the ship, we saw that those hands were dripping blood, that his tunic was ripped, tom, and dirt-stained and that there was an ugly welt under his right eye. Kalhern, his anger at the big man’s disobedience overcome for the moment by his relief* seized him by the hand.
“What happened?” he demanded. “Where did you go?”
It was five minutes at least before McKay could speak. When he did his voice was hoarse and trembling.
“I caught one,” he gasped. “It tried to kill me. It’s got the strength of ten men, but I caught one.”
“Caught what?” said Kalhern. “What tried to kill you?”
“A wafer-head. That’s what it looked like anyway. A wafer-head!”
Kalhern glanced at me and shook his head. “Put him to bed,” he ordered. “Give him a couple of cerebra-tabs, five grain. Maybe he’ll snap out of it later.”
That afternoon we got the Tester into operation and made ready for our first survey. Fundamentally we < were still on duty for Galactic Mining, and ore samples were our paramount interest. Stewart as geologist of the party had been eyeing that white pinnacle with interest. He wanted to go there first
We did that With Kalhern driving and myself chanting aloud the dial readings, we set the Tester moving over the —virgin ground.
“Gravity thirty-five, air temperature 24 C., water sixty to a hundred feet, paldine five, sub soil organic twenty . . The dials showed nothing unusual* or dangerous to man. As we crossed and criss-crossed our way forward the white pinnacle slowly grew in height and clarity before us. I estimated it to be seventy meters high and fifteen meters or less in girth. The surface was a dull grayish white, resembling chalk, as Kalhern had said, and yet at intervals high-lights appeared, reflecting the sunlight with a dazzling sheen. Midway up the side of this pyramid were a series of black marks, but whether they were part of a natural formation or hieroglyphics, the work of intelligent life, I could not tell at that distance.
But as we drew ever nearer, that same tautness, that same terror I had experienced the night before welled over me. It was as if a sub-sonic chord were striking my ears steadily in a register too low for me to hear.
Then Kalhern braked the Tester to a stop and we were directly before the white pinnacle. We got out and walked around it slowly; the swale grass and other vegetation grew to the very edge of it on three sides; on the fourth side, which was the side nearest the low flanking cliff, there was a lane about three feet wide which bore no growth but was exposed cleanly to the bare gravel.
“Looks almost like a conduit from the cliff proper,” Kal-hem said reflectively. “What do you make of it, Stewart?” The geologist had his little hammer out and was tapping lightly against the stone shaft. “Hard as flint,” he said. “I never saw anything like it before. It’s obviously nature formed, and yet it’s so geometrically perfect it looks almost as if it were carved.”
Kalhern nodded. “Judson,” he said to me, “make a copy of those marks around the middle, and we’ll study them later.... By Godfrey!”
His eyes had turned to the cliffside up to where a low outcropping and scattered pile of boulders formed a low shelf. Spread-eagled there, fastened to rock jags by strips torn from a GM tunic, was a creature about three feet in height with a curiously repulsive body and a flat wafer head. Its two lidless eyes watched us in baleful silence.
“So McKay was telling the truth after all,” Kalhern said slowly. “Only this thing doesn’t look particularly dangerous. Help me take it down.”
The creature snarled wickedly, but made no effort to resist us. Stewart quickly passed a rope around it and led it off snarling and spitting, to the Tester where he secured it in the rear seat We lingered a moment longer, staring at the strange White pinnacle. It was only when we were about to leave that Stewart made his discovery.
I remember that at the moment.it struck me that Stewart was deliberately playing up an insignificant detail in the jealous hope of magnifying his own powers of observation. Neither Kalhern nor I realized then the vital importance of his words.
“Look here,” Stewart said. “There are two flowers on this stem.”
Kalhern stared. “So what?” he demanded.
Stewart was on his knees now, studying the gravel lane on the fourth side of the pinnacle. “And every pebble has a duplicate of the same size and shape. Take a squint out there,” he continued, pointing to. the expanse of open savannah. “Notice how every grass stem has but a single blossom until you reach a point forty or fifty feet from this column; then there are double blossoms. Now look at the cliffside. Look closely.”
My eyes followed his gaze, and for a moment I saw nothing unusual. Then crevices, rocks and outcroppings arranged themselves in my vision and I understood the significance of Stewart’s discovery. Every feature of the flanking cliff had its duplicate feature; every discernible mark or protuberance to the left of the column had an identical mark or protuberance to the right It was as if a stereo photograph had been taken and the negative superimposed against the backdrop before us.
Kalhern stared and his eyes slowly widened in amazement Then he turned to look at the creature secured in the Tester.
“Some freak of volcanic action probably. Come on, I want to get back to the ship.”
We placed the Renitian—as Kalhern promptly named our captive—in one of the ship’s storerooms, gave it food and water and left it alone for two hours to adjust to its imprisonment. During those two hours excitement ran high among our company. But it wasn’t the presence of this alien creature alone that accounted for our interest; nor was it Stewart’s description of the strange phenomena surrounding the white pinnacle. It was rather Stewart’s subsequent discovery which he made accidentally while looking over the two Micro latent counters with which the Tester was equipped.
The geologist reported that delayed readings of the instruments showed conclusively that somewhere in the vicinity of the pinnacle there was a deposit of radioactive ore of undreamed richness. Furthermore—-and here Stewart’s eyes took on a gleam of unmasked avarice—if he had read the instruments correctly, that ore was something new, an unclassified element giving off Gantzen rays in addition to the usual alpha, beta and gamma rays.
“Of course I can’t be sure yet,” Stewart said. “But all indications are that we’ve struck something big.”
Kalhern took this information stoically. He smoked his pipe in thoughtful silence. Then he got up and led the way to the storeroom where, while the rest of us watched in silence, he attempted to communicate with the Renitian.
He tried the Gabre method of inter-racial commun
ication first. When that failed to elicit any response, he tried a number of jargons Which he had picked up in his years of roaming the spaceways. As a final effort he made several attempts with sign language.
Without result. The Renitian watched us calculatingly but gave no sign that it understood. Yet there was intelligence in those lidless eyes and physically at least the thing’s wafer skull appeared to have a large brain capacity.
It was not until Carson Shores said with disgust, “Turn it loose. The thing’s only an animal,” that the creature reacted. It faced Shores with malevolent hatred and then it gave off the smell.
The same sickish sweet smell that had drifted out of the blackness the night before. With it came that same feeling of inner tenseness, of cold terror.
Kalhern stood up.' “We can do nothing more here,” he said. “We’ll decide what to do with it in the morning.”
And so we spent our second night on Renit-4. How the past events affected the others of our company I did not know but, for my part, I found sleep impossible. The heavy silence weighed on my ears. After months of listening to the drone of the ship’s motors, the absolute quiet of this planet seemed a tangible thing, without chirps of a cricket or call of a night-bird to break the monotony.
At two o’clock I got up and sat down at my desk. Before me was the tom page from my notebook with the scribbled copy of the hieroglyphics that adorned the middle of the white pinnacle.
I’ve had quite a little experience deciphering unknown Writings in the past which is probably why Kalhern turned the job over to me.
The hieroglyphics were semi-picture writing, conveying thoughts in generalities rather than exact oral translations. In a vague way they suggested the cliff markings of Mars' red desert country but with a difference. Where the Mars writings were “passive” with the preciseness of an old race, these were bold and almost dashing, the stigma of a form of life still in its youth.
As near as I could translate, the legend on the white pinnacle read:
Know you by the powers of the infinite that the phenomena of all creation must be the same to two beholders who in themselves move with a tempo of motion relative to one and to each other. Know you also that whereas the unseen life-in-a-rock is the smallest known fragment of creation there can be no means of telling its place in the moons of zero in a given moon. The rock giveth and the rock taketh away.
It struck me that philosophically here were two astounding statements, manifesting an advanced state of culture. The first was nothing more than a pure Einsteinian declaration, the concept of absolute motion through space. As for the second, if we substituted “time” for “moons” and “space” for “zero” what did we have but Heisenberg’s application of the Quantum Theory to the position of an electron? The last eight words meant nothing to me.
I turned out the light and walked across the room to one of the ports. There were no clouds this night and the sky was spangled with stars; strange constellations burned - brightly, casting an eerie glow over the land.
Somewhere out there there must be other creatures like the one imprisoned in our storeroom; they must have villages, houses, families. What were their thoughts, their fears, their beliefs? What would they do when they discovered one of their number was missing? Or were they already aware of our presence, watching us . . . waiting. . . ?
With the morning the giant McKay was himself again and beyond a few scratches and cuts where the Renitian’s talons had left their mark, he betrayed no ill effect from his experience. Neither did he evince any interest when I told him we had found his captive and brought it here to the ship.
He looked at me dully, then turned and stared off in the direction of the white pinnacle.
“We’ve got to leave here, Mr. Judson,” he said. “We’ve got to leave here right away. This is an evil place, Mr. Judson.”
“Nonsense, McKay, Stewart says this is the richest planet we’ve visited yet. He says there are indications of a new radioactive ore in that cliff, back of the pinnacle.
But the big man shook his head. “This place is bad,” he said slowly.. “I can feel it.”
At noon mess Kalhern presented a plan of action which he stated quietly was to be followed to the letter. First of all, he said, *we would release the Renitian unharmed. Next, no less than two men would post guard about the ship at all times. Third, a trip would be made in the Tester to see if any native villages were in the immediate vicinity. If there were, we would make no attempt to contact them but would simply observe for war-like activities. Then, and not until then, was Stewart’s ore to be mined. And as soon as a representative sample of the deposit was obtained, we would clear out and head for our Earth base.
And then Kalhern voiced almost the same fear McKay had.
“Things have been going a little too smoothly,” he said. “There’s an—well, call it an atmosphere—about tins' place I don’t like.”
At two o’clock that afternoon Carson Shores, Hammond and I entered the Tester. Half an hour before, the Renitian had been brought out of the ship, escorted to the edge of the camp and there freed of his bonds. The native stood uncertainly for a moment, still watching us with those lidless eyes. Then he slowly headed into the swale grass and a moment later was lost to view.
Now as the Tester got under way taking the same general direction, Shores suddenly spoke. “Hold it a moment. I left my reading glasses in the ship.”
He was out of the Tester, running back to the camp before ' I could stop him. In the silence while we waited his return, Hammond swore.
“The idiot! What’s he need reading glasses for out here?” Shores came back breathlessly. “It’s all right. I just wanted to be sure I hadn’t lost them. They were on my desk.” He smiled at Hammond’s muttered profanity. “I left them there.” We headed east, the Tester ploughing through the swale grass effortlessly. Far ahead low rolling hills broke the skyline, but they seemed to recede and dwindle away as we went on. At three o’clock, we sighted the first animal life, a high flying bird of tremendous proportions. The thing apparently had a repulsive saurian head though at that height it was impossible to see it clearly.
The bird made no attempt to attack, and we went on. Then suddenly we were atop a low hillock, looking down into a shallow ravine. In the center of that ravine arranged in the form of a circle was a double row of clay buildings and passing to and fro amongst them were groups of Renitians, some smaller, some slightly larger than the one we had captured, but all with those curious wafer heads. The buildings were all cube-shaped, identical in size, inter-connected by a narrow overhead gallery cut in the form of battlements with upraised nodules every few yards surmounted by flat dislike caps. The meaning behind these architectural contrivances was not clear though it seemed safe to assume they constituted some kind of defense. Before each building stood a flat panel, many-colored and bearing inscriptions in the same strange writing that adorned the white pinnacle. ~
For twenty minutes we remained there in silence, watching. Through binoculars we saw the natives go about their routine household tasks, but we observed no sign of war-like activity. Neither did we see any evidence of weapons.
Then quietly we swung the Tester about and headed back for camp.
It was when we came into sight of the ship that Shores suddenly reached in his pocket and uttered an exclamation.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“My glasses . .. .” he faltered. “I... I left them on my desk in the ship. I know I did. . . . And yet I’ve got them here now...”
Hammond grinned. “You get like that after you’ve been on these trips enough times ...”
But Shores was deadly serious. The moment the Tester drew up before the ship he leaped out and headed for his quarters. A moment later he reappeared, a dazed look on his face. “I must be getting dotty. I could have sworn I left those glasses on my desk.”
When kalhern learned of the close proximity of the native village he frowned and tapped his pencil on his desk thoug
htfully.
“We can only hope that the trouble we had here- while you were gone won’t arouse them against us,” he said.
“Trouble? What trouble?”
“That damned fool, McKay! He sneaked away from camp again, caught up with the Renitian and cut off his scent gland.”
“He did what?”
He discovered that the source of that strange smell the native gave .off was a small external sac located at the base of the thing’s skull. You know how mad McKay is about new sources of perfume. It’s practically an obsession with him. The idiot tracked the Renitian after it had left our camp and deliberately amputated that gland. He claimed the native felt no pain, never even let out a peep; but that’s beside the point. I’ve ordered McKay confined to quarters.”
Dusk changed to darkness and the long night snailed .by. I lay in the warm vitiated air of my cabin—the ventilators had broken down, and we hadn’t got around to repairing them as yet. About midnight a low pulsation from far off drifted in the open port. The sound was at the limit of my hearing range, and for a time I thought it was drums—native drums— but after a time it died away, and I fell asleep.
At breakfast the first of the incredible events took place. I was drinking my second cup of coffee when it happened.
Stewart was just reaching for the sugar bowl when his eyes happened to turn toward the open port. He stared a moment, then turned to Kalhern.
“I thought you had confined McKay to quarters,” he said quietly.
The chief looked up questioningly.
“Because if you did, he apparently didn’t think much of the idea. Take a look out there.”
Kalhern looked, kicked back his chair and froze. “By Godfrey!”
The port opened onto the east half of the camp. Walking out of the swale grass toward the ship was McKay, his tunic buttoned up to the throat, his hands hanging stiffly at his sides. He looked to neither side but came on at that same slow mechanical pace.
There was something utterly strange about his presence there, apart from his being out of the ship. Staring at him, I got the impression that I was viewing a scene through a microscope.
Time to Come Page 16