by Hal Clement
Jerry eBooks
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SATELLITE Science Fiction
February, 1957
Volume 1, Number 3
Custom eBook created by
Jerry eBooks
November 2015
A CONSERVATION SERVICE vessel is quite fast and maneuverable as craft of that general type go. But there was little likelihood that this one would catch up with its present target. Its pilot knew that. He had known it since the first flicker of current in his detectors had warned him of the poacher’s presence. But with the calm determination so characteristic of his race, he made the small course-correction which he hoped would bring him through the target area at action speed.
The correction had to be small. Had the disturbance been far from his present line of flight, he would never have detected it, for his instruments covered only a narrow cone of space ahead of him. Too many pilots in the old days, with full-sphere coverage, had been unable to resist the temptation of trying to loop back to investigate disturbances whose source-areas they had already passed.
At one-third the speed of light, such a reversal of course would have wasted both energy and time. No one could make a reversal in any reasonable period, and, certainly, no poacher or other lawbreaker was going to wait for the maneuver to be completed.
Even as it was, this pilot’s principal hope lay in the possibility that the other vessel would be too preoccupied with its task of looting to detect and react to his approach in time. Detection was only possible if, like his own ship, the poacher carried but a single operator. Unfortunately, a freighter was quite likely to have at least two, even on a perfectly legal flight, and the Conservation pilot had known of cases where poaching machines had had crews as large as four.
Even the presence of two would render his approach almost certainly useless, since the loading and separating machinery would require only one manipulator, and the full attention of any others could be freed for lookout duty. Nevertheless, he bored on in, analyzing and planning as he traveled.
The poacher was big—as big as any he had ever viewed. It must have had a net load capacity of something like a half billion tons—enough to clean the concentrates off a fair-sized planet, particularly if it also boasted adequate stripping and refining apparatus. There was no way of making certain about this last factor, for no such equipment was drawing power as yet. And that, in a way, was peculiar, for the poacher must have been in his present position for some time.
Had the driving energies of the poacher been in use, the Conservation ship would have detected them long before, and would have experienced less difficulty in making the necessary course-change. With a scant five light-years in which to make the turn, the acceleration needed for the task was rather annoying. Not that it caused the pilot any actual physical discomfort. It was purely an emotional matter. His economy-conditioned mind was appalled by the waste of energy involved.
Four light-years lay behind him when the poacher reacted outrageously. For the barest instant the attacker dared to hope that he might still get within range. Then it became evident that the giant freighter had seen him long before, and had planned its maneuver with perfect knowledge of his limitations.
It began to accelerate almost toward him, at an angle which would bring it safely past. It would sweep past just out of extreme range if he kept on his present course—and probably well beyond trustworthy shooting distance, if he tried to intercept it. For an instant, the agent was tempted. But before a single relay had clicked in his own small craft he remembered what the poacher must already have known—that the planet, which had perhaps already been robbed, came first.
It must be checked for damage, even though it was uninhabited as far as anyone knew. The mere fact that the poacher had stopped there meant that it must have something worth taking. It must, therefore, be tied as soon as possible into the production network whose completeness and perfection was the only barrier between the agent’s race and galaxy-wide starvation.
He held his course, therefore, and broadcast a general warning as he went. He gave the thief’s specifications, its course, as of the last possible observation, plus the fact that it seemed to be traveling empty. The absence of cargo was an encouraging sign. Perhaps no damage had been done to the world ahead. Unfortunately, it might also mean that the raider had a higher power-to-mass ratio than any freighter the agent had ever seen or heard of. But that he seriously doubted. He assumed that the ship was without cargo, and worded his warning accordingly.
His temper was not improved by an incident which occurred just before the giant vessel passed beyond detection range. A beam, quite evidently transmitted from the fleeing mass of metal, struck his antenna, and the phrase—“Now, don’t you just hope they’ll get us!”—came clearly along the instrument.
Again, relays almost closed on the Conservation flier, but the agent contented himself with repeating his warning broadcast and adding to it the data which had inevitably come along with the poacher’s taunt—data concerning the personal voice of the speaker. Then he turned his attention to the problem of the planet ahead.
He would need more energy, of course. The interstellar speed of his craft had to be reduced to the general velocity of the stars in this part of the galaxy, for he could not make the survey that would be needed, merely by viewing the planet as he flashed by. He could, of course, get a pretty good idea of the metals that were present through such flash-technique, but he needed information as to their distribution. If he were lucky—if the poacher had actually failed to load up—there would almost certainly be concentrates worth recording and reporting to Conservation.
The sun involved was obvious enough, since it was the only one within several light years. The agent thought fleetingly of the loneliness, even terror, which would descend upon the average ground-gripper in close proximity to the nearly empty space at the galaxy’s rim and timed and directed his deceleration to bring him to rest some twenty-four diameters from the sun’s photosphere.
The poacher had begun to travel long before he drew close enough to detect individual planets, and he was faced with the problem of discovering just which planet or planetoid had been visited. There were certainly enough to choose among and he was reasonably sure he had detected them all as he approached.
The possibility that he had been moving directly toward one for the whole time, and had, as a result, failed to observe any apparent motion for it, was too remote to cause him concern, particularly since it turned out that he had been well away from the general orbital plane of the system. He had the planets, then. But which ones were important?
Since he would have to check them all anyway, he didn’t worry too much about selection. After using up the energy and time needed to stop in this forlorn speck of a planetary system, it would be senseless to leave anything unexamined. Why, he reasoned, should anyone else have to come back later to do what he had left undone? Still, he thought, it would be pleasant to determine quickly what the poacher had accomplished, if anything.
The innermost planet was definitely not the plundered victim. It had plenty of free iron, of course, and the agent noted with satisfaction that the metal was not concentrated at its core. If it ever became necessary to seek iron so far out in the galaxy, stripping it from so small a world would be relatively easy.
However, the important metals seemed to be dissolved and distributed with annoying uniformity through the tiny globe—a fact which was hardly surprising. The planet was too small, and its temperature was too high to permit either water or ammonia to exist in liquid form. Th
e ordinary geological processes which produced ore deposits simply could not function here.
The second world was more hopeful—in fact, it seemed ideal on first survey. There was water, though not in abundance. Nevertheless, in the billions of years since the planet had formed a certain amount of hydrothermal activity had gone on in its crust, and a number of very good copper, silver, and lead concentrations appeared to exist. The agent decided to land and map these, after he had completed his preliminary survey of the system. If this were the world the poachers had been sweeping, they had evidently failed to get much. Venus might be the plundered planet.
It proved not to be, however. Earth’s water is not confined to its lithosphere—it covers three-quarters of the planetary surface. It washes mountains into the seas, freezes at the poles and, at high elevations, even at the equator. It finds its way down into the rocks and joins other water molecules which have been there since the crust solidified. It picks up ions, carries them a little way, and trades them for others.
In short, Earth contains enough water to produce geological phenomena. The agent saw this almost in his first glance. He wasted a brief look at the encircling dry satellite, then he turned all of his attention on the primary planet itself. He even began to ease his ship outward from the orbit it had taken up, twenty million miles from Sol.
This, he decided, must be the world of the poacher’s selection. Even without analysis, anyone with the rudiments of a geological education would know that there must be metal concentrations here—and a civilization that uses half a trillion tons of copper a year can be expected to have at least a few trained geologists.
The agent pointed the nose of his little cruiser at the tiny disc, shining brightly eighty million miles away. He drove straight toward it, combing its surface as he went with the highest-resolution equipment he could bring to bear. All over the surface, and for a mile below, those radiations probed and returned with their information. The agent swore luridly as the indicators told their tragic story.
There had been concentrations, all right. There were still a few. But someone had been scraping busily at the best of them, and had left little that was economically worth recovering. It was the old story. If good deposits and poor ones were worked at the same time, the profit was of course smaller. But at least the deposits lasted longer.
An eternity had passed since any legal operator of the agent’s race had worked the other way, stripping the cream for a quick profit and letting the others go. Such a practice would have crippled the industry of the agent’s home planet millions of years before, had it not been checked sternly by the formation of the Conservation Board.
Crippled industry, to a race at the stage of development his had attained, was the equivalent of a death sentence. Not one in a thousand of his people could hope to escape death by starvation, if the tremendously complex system of commerce were to break down.
The agent knew that—like most of his profession, he had seen border worlds where momentary imperfections in the system had taken their toll.
His fury at the sight of this planet mingled with—and was fed by—the memory of the horrors he had seen. Apparently, he had been wrong. The poachers had gotten away with their load—in fact, scores of them must have been at work.
No one ship, not even the monster he had seen so recently, could have done such a job without assistance on a planet of this size. The Conservation Department had suspected, before now, that it faced a certain degree of organization among the poachers. Here was infuriating evidence that the suspicion was all too well-founded.
Thought followed reaction through the agent’s reception apparatus and through his mind, before his ship was within a million miles of the planet.
At that range no precise mapping was possible. In a sense, surface-mapping was no longer necessary, since the surviving deposits were hardly worth the gathering—but the tectonic charts would have to be obtained as usual.
A world like this was in constant change. A million, or ten, or a hundred million years from now the natural processes within its crust would have brought new concentrations into being. These forces must be charted, so that proper predictions could be obtained. Only through such research and predictions could Conservation beat the poachers to the next crop of metal, when it appeared.
The agent began to decelerate again, now matching his velocity with that of the planet itself. At the same time, he began a more detailed analysis of the surface, refining it constantly as the distance diminished. The water he already knew about. He had supposed the gaseous envelope to consist of methane and water vapor, with perhaps some ammonia, formed at the same time as the rest of the planet. But his instruments told a different story.
Earth had lost its primary atmosphere. The tragedy had occurred before the first member of the agent’s race had ventured away from his own planetary system. The agent found the free oxygen, and swore again. He knew what that meant—photosynthesis. The planet was infected by those carbon compounds that behaved almost like life, except for their ferociously rapid rate of reaction.
They were not very dangerous, of course, but due care had to be exercised, and constant vigilance maintained. A good many planets in the liquid-ammonia-liquid-water temperature range had them, and techniques had long since been worked out for conducting analysis, and even for mining in their presence, destructive as they often were to machinery.
The Conservation vessel, naturally, was constructed of alloys reasonably proof against any attack by free oxygen or the usual run of the carbon compounds. In fact, if this world had any unique developments of the latter the agent could always lift his ship out of the atmosphere. Such a retreat seemed to put a stop to the growth of photosynthetic life.
It never occurred to the agent that concealment might be in order. In the first place, he was on a perfectly legal mission. In the second, equally of course, he didn’t think that there might be anyone on the planet to observe his arrival.
Oxygen being what it is, he had automatically classified the world as uninhabited and uninhabitable. As a result, the events of the half-second following his machine’s penetration of Earth’s ozone layer demanded a rather drastic revision of his outlook.
The radar beams, for an instant, made him suppose that another ship was on this world, and was trying to communicate with him. He had almost begun to answer before he realized that the radiation was not modulated, and could hardly be speech—or, more accurately, that its modulation was too simple and regular to represent words. Even though such radiation did not mean intelligence, however, it obviously did imply the presence of life.
Somehow, an organism must have evolved in an oxygen atmosphere with the ability to reduce metal oxides or sulfides, and keep them reduced to free metal. At the moment, it seemed to be a low order of life. But if it continued to develop as the agent’s own species had done, this corner of the galaxy might become rather an interesting place in time. A man might have drawn a somewhat similar conclusion from hearing the chirp of a cricket under analogous circumstances.
At first, the agent supposed the radiation to have meaning similar to that of the cricket’s chirp, too—it came and it went, regularly and monotonously, from a seemingly fixed source, and had an apparent willingness to go on until the sun cooled. But, a few milliseconds after the first pulses struck his receptors, others began to come in. They shared the simplicity of pattern shown by the first, but there were more of them.
As the ship moved, and its distance from some of the sources changed, it became evident that the waves were being directed in beams, rather than broadcast in all directions—and that the beams were following the ship. Intelligent or not, something was at least aware of his presence.
A score of hypotheses ran through the agent’s mind during the next few milliseconds, for thought can move rapidly, when the neurons involved are of metal, and the impulses they carry are electronic currents, rather than potential differences between the surfaces of a colloid membrane. But none
of these theories managed to satisfy him.
Even he could not continue to theorize at the moment, either—for the hull of his vessel was glowing bright red, and the surface of the planet was coming up rather rapidly to meet him. He had to land within the next few seconds, assuming that he did not want to do his theorizing hanging motionless in the atmosphere.
The outer surface of his hull was a trifle hard to manage at its present temperature. But none of the myriads of relays further in had been affected and the sliver of metal obeyed his thoughts as it always had, slowing to a dead halt a few yards above the surface and then settling down for a landing while the agent analyzed the material directly underneath.
It was pure luck that there was no vegetation below him—luck, at least, for any local fire-fighters. The hot walls did respond to control, albeit a trifle sluggishly. Particles of sand and clay, coming in contact with the hull began to dance, like bits of sawdust on a vibrating plate. And like sawdust, the dance carried them into a particular pattern.
The pattern took the form of a hollow under the hull, while the excess soil heaped up around it on all sides. The ship eased gently downward into the crater thus formed, which deepened as it continued to sink. The settling of the vessel, and the deepening of the hole, continued for perhaps twenty feet, before the hull touched solid rock.
When it did, more relays moved, and the rock itself flowed away in fine dust. This continued for only another foot, and then the ship was resting in a perfectly fitting cradle of stone, and the displaced soil was drifting back around it, covering its still red-hot circumference. The sand smoothed itself into a low mound which almost, but not quite, covered the vessel.
Had the agent cared about concealment, of course, he could have dug a little deeper—but all he wanted was good contact with bedrock. There was much mapping to do, and the matter of local life would have to wait until it was done.