by Hal Clement
II
IT WAS ONE of the new, triangular, floating radar installations, some two hundred miles northeast of the Virginia Capes, that first picked up the track of the interstellar visitor. Since the vessel was still well up in the Photosphere, far too high for even the latest model planes, the report was worded . . . Unidentified Flying Object, altitude (tent.) 50 mi. plus, speed (tent.) 3,600 mph, direction northwest by west . . .
The ever-watchful, and supersensitive network, set up to guard the lives and property of a continent, responded with an instant alert. In the central communications hall of a huge building near Washington, D. C., worried experts and officials gathered around plotting boards or stood in tight-lipped silence before a gigantic map on which reports were automatically registered in moving beams of light. The International situation was hardly tense enough to make probable an immediate enemy action. But in a Cold War period there could be no let-up of suspicion or instant readiness to act.
“The damned thing, whatever it is, is headed straight for Chicago,” growled a grey-haired brigadier general, whose face was seamed and leathery from hundreds of air-combat hours.
“She’s coming down, too,” replied a civilian expert, frowning at the latest reports, which were coming in with increased rapidity as the strange aerial object swept over thickly populated sections of the country. “Altitude only thirty miles over Akron. And she’s losing speed by the minute.”
“That’s what worries me,” replied the brigadier unhappily. “If it were a meteor it would be picking up speed. It would be blazing like a comet, even in broad daylight.”
“Nobody has yet developed a long-range missile control that will brake an enemy aircraft over the target,” said a third member of the high-echelon group, one who wore the light grey-blue of a naval officer in summer uniform. He spoke quietly, almost shyly, but his chest, beyond a highly-colored array of battle and medal-ribbons, carried the heavy silver wings of a command pilot.
“I don’t like it,” said the brigadier, thrusting his hands deep in his trouser pockets. “Just because we don’t have this sort of long-range missile control, doesn’t mean that they haven’t come up with it. All those scientists they’ve been turning out—and the hotshots they grabbed when they moved into Germany, in nineteen forty-five—” He let it hang there.
“Lord knows, meteors have been known to act freakishly,” said the naval air officer.
At this point, Great Lakes Station came in with a report that put the UFO, still slowing, still descending, at a point well west of Chicago. There was a general sigh of relief.
But the brigadier remained unhappy. “We’ll have to alert every interceptor group in the Northwest,” he said quietly. “At the rate that mystery crate is coming down, we’ll be able to track up after it any minute now—shooting.”
It was the civilian who voiced the thought that had been in all their minds—the thought which none of the others had dared to put into words. He said, “That’s going to do us a hell of a lot of good, if she turns out to be a flying saucer. She’ll simply take off and zoom out of range.”
Nobody answered him, though long looks were exchanged. Then they all went back to checking reports, to planning the interception that seemed to grow more possible with each passing minute. The path of the object seemed to be turning more directly west as its speed continued to lessen, and its altitude to abate. Interceptor command groups within range of its path were ordered to stand by for scramble. Unfortunately, as the object came within Nike range, it was in a part of the continent where no rocket interceptors had been installed.
Then came a phone call from more than 2,000 miles away—from the lips of the general commanding the nation’s Intercontinental Bombing Command. In accordance with their routine of constant test-missions, a squadron of B-52’s, much too high for civilian observation, had been carrying out an overnight mock-bombing flight from its home field, in Texas, to a uranium mining complex far up in Northwestern Canada, near Great Slave Lake. Currently, they were making their return journey back to Texas.
Said the commanding general, his voice curiously crisp despite its nasal Midwestern drawl, “Three of my observers just spotted your UFO, flying a course a few points north of due west. It was two miles above them, moving at more than fifteen hundred. It was round and red-hot.”
“You mean round—like a saucer?” the brigadier asked, his voice breaking.
“No—it was round like a cannonball. And hotter than an H-bomb!” was the response.
When he had hung up, Minneapolis came in. Object safely past, still descending, still losing speed . . . Bismarck, North Dakota, had the object heading due west. Then came a ground observer report from Miles City, Montana, and another from Billings. In both cases, it had been seen as a round, red-hot object, streaking westward across the sky.
Then, nothing . . .
It was a rough day for the Radar Network.
IT WAS ALSO, as events were to confirm, a rough day for Field Expedition Seven, Summer of 1957, Montana University of Mines, Departments of Geology and Climatology.
Measured by its human components the expedition was a modest one and consisted of Assistant Professor Harold Parsons, his wife, Candace, and a Climatology Fellow, and Field Worker Donald MacLaurie, known to the regional sportswriters as Truck.
Their equipment consisted of one jeep with two-wheel trailer, two tents that had just been stowed away for daytime travel, canned food supplies, and an assortment of tools and instruments, including a Geiger counter bootlegged by Truck MacLaurie and currently the subject of argument between Truck and Professor Parsons.
“Listen, Truck,” Parsons said, with all the patience he could muster. “This is a university field expedition, not a uranium hunt. If you want the credit you’ll need to play football this fall, you’ll keep that click-box out of sight and out of mind. We’re here in the hills to study variations in surface clues to copper-ore formations—that is, I am here for that purpose. With your help, of course—if help is just the proper word for it. Candace is here to study cloud formations in the hills, for long-range precipitation effect on mining operations at Butte and Anaconda. I’m hoping you’ll learn enough about geology to enable me to give you that credit, come September—without putting a permanent mortgage on my professional integrity.”
“Golly, Doc—I only intended to try her out during my spare time,” protested Truck.
“What I’m trying to say, Truck, is this. There isn’t going to be any spare time on this trip.” Parsons paused, and added with a trace of acid, “You’re not back sleeping in classroom now. You’re in the field!
Parsons didn’t have to look at his wife to know how she was reacting to his lecture. Not that Candace would show disapproval in the presence of an outsider. But he was all too familiar with the slight blankness of usually alert and sympathetic brown eyes, the invisible aura of coolness that surrounded her. There were moments when he wished she weren’t quite so sympathetic and outgoing in her relations with people. It only made his own diffidence more pronounced.
Nor was he helped by the fact that, though he stood a wiry six feet one in his socks, he had to look upward to meet Truck MacLaurie’s large and blandly childish blue eyes. He also felt hampered by the fact that, while he himself was close to thirty, and Truck a mere twenty-two, the big ox looked about five years his senior.
He was about to cut it short and say, “All right, let’s get started,”—when the UFO passed, whizzing, over their heads.
It could not have been more than a mile above them, and it was round as a gigantic egg from some monster bird, red hot as a cooking stone in some giant’s barbecue-pit. It was traveling like a bat out of hell, due west, and it was falling fast. Even at that distance, it left in its wake a lingering sense of tremendous heat.
“Golly!” said Truck, following the object’s progress with open disbelief. “It’s gonna crash that crummy hill, head-on!”
The expedition of three had made camp, the nig
ht before, close to the center of an arid valley in the eastern foothills of the Rockies, roughly halfway between the mining communities of Brown and Hamilton. And camped there they still were, in a district where even the decaying remnants of ghost mining communities were scarce. It was rough, wild country—about as rough and wild as Rocky Mountain foothill country can ever get.
The western end of the valley was blocked by a range of minor hills whose topmost peak rose no more than five thousand feet from the valley floor. Unerringly, the speeding object appeared headed for this peak. Looking on with a mixture of amazement and disbelief which precluded horror, Parsons tried to remind himself that perspective played strange tricks, and that the object, whatever its nature, was undoubtedly on a course that must carry it hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles before it crashed into the rugged terrain.
Then, unaccountably, the object swerved to the south, avoiding collision as neatly as a plane skillfully piloted by a crack ace. It disappeared around the peak, not over it, and vanished from sight behind the ragged mountain wall.
Then, there was nothing . . . no crash, no explosion. Nothing at all!
“Hal honey,” said Candace Parsons, “will you, for the love of Osiris or whatever gods you worship, light me a cigarette?”
Not another word was spoken for almost two minutes. The three of them stood there, spellbound, staring at the wall of hills, waiting for something, for anything. But there was nothing.
Again, it was Candace Parsons who broke the silence. She was a trim, long-legged girl, with soft brown hair with a texture so fine that it defied shop and home permanents alike. She was remarkable, too, in that her figure and appearance remained pleasantly female, despite her all-over ranginess and the disfigurement of camping clothes.
She said, “Since neither of you geniuses has any idea of what it is, I think we ought to report it, don’t you?”
Parsons nodded. He stepped on his own cigarette and ground it out in the sandy soil. “Perhaps if that damned transmitter of ours can clear those hills we came through yesterday . . .” He let the sentence trail off, and with Truck MacLaurie went back to the jeep.
The two of them broke the radio out of the trailer and set it up in the open. After fifteen minutes, it became clear that they were not going to get through. Parsons disconnected the transmitter and nodded to Truck to cease winding the battery. He looked at the football player almost pleadingly.
“No, Doc,” said Truck. “If you think I’m gonna wheel this buggy back over the hills while you and Candace have all the fun . . . Well, the answer is no. Let the credits fall where they will.”
“Why, Truck!” exclaimed Candace, who had taken a Bachelor of Arts degree in English at a Midwestern university one year before her interests had veered to Parsons and Climatology. “That’s almost poetical.”
She saw the way both men were looking at her and shook her head. “I’m not going back either,” she added firmly. “I’ve always wanted to look at a UFO, and if you think I’m passing up this chance—”
Parsons squinted at the hills ahead. He said, “Okay, Bounty mutineers. Let’s put this show on the road. We can run up the transmitter when we hit the next range of hills, and maybe get a message through to Hamilton or Stevensville.”
A moment later, as they took their places in the jeep, he asked: “Candace, you wouldn’t kid me, would you?”
“Who’s kidding?” she countered. “That thing didn’t look like a flying saucer, but it didn’t look man-made either. And who ever heard of a meteor with sense enough to detour around a mountaintop?”
“Maybe it’s a good thing I brought the click-box along after all,” said Truck, who was massively filling the rear seat of the jeep. “You can’t tell what that thing may be radiating when we find it.”
“If we find it!” Parsons said quietly, steering the rugged little vehicle neatly around a treacherous rock outcropping that lay concealed by a mask of brush.
The object, whatever it was, had flashed over the valley in less than a minute. Covering the same distance by ground had taken the expedition almost all day.
Throughout the morning, and early afternoon, the hot summer sun beat unmercifully down upon them out of a pale blue sky, reddening already painful sunburns and causing Truck MacLaurie to break out with a rash of prickly heat that had him scratching himself almost continually.
They made only a brief stop for lunch—under a low hill that offered a very poor kind of shade. They would not have stopped at all, but Candace insisted they needed to stretch their legs even if they had lost their appetites. She served them slices of processed ham on crackers, and coffee so hot that Truck wanted to know whether she had actually used the heater or had merely left it out in the sun for two or three minutes.
When they resumed their journey, they found the sun shaded by freshly-assembled clouds, which caused the big football player to mutter, “Thank God!
We’ve got the weather on our side, anyway.”
“I don’t like it,” said Candace, staring thoughtfully at the western sky ahead. The jeep was bumping its way up toward the mountains, and something in her tone caused Hal Parsons to slow down and look at her sharply.
“What is it, baby?” he asked.
“According to meteorological tables, there has been an average of only one inch of rainfall in these hills during August,” she said. “Furthermore, there has never been a single rainfall of more than a quarter of an inch. Those clouds piling up ahead spell out heavy rain to me.”
“Speaks the climatologist,” said Parsons, concentrating on a barren, rocky patch of hillside ahead.
“Speaks a girl who’d like to know what’s going on,” Candace replied.
In the rear seat, Truck MacLaurie scratched, sweated and said nothing.
Slowly, circuitously, Parsons and Truck got the little jeep and its trailer up the roadless hillside, and set its course toward a notch in the hills ahead. It was after five o’clock when they reached the summit of the pass and could look down into the valley on the other side of the range. To all intents and purposes, it was an exact replica of the valley from which they had so painfully emerged.
“I don’t see anything,” said Truck, letting his eyes roam the panorama of scrub and sand and eroded rock that stretched out before them.
“I don’t either,” said Parsons, battling a feeling of disappointment which he knew to be absurd. There was no reason to believe that a flying object capable of detouring the mountain peak on their right would have selected such a barren piece of earth as its resting place. It could just as easily have steered past other peaks, over other valleys, until it reached a wide, fertile valley.
“Look at those clouds!” said Candace Parsons, staring not at the valley or the range of hills opposite, but at the sky above. “If we don’t get ourselves set up quick, we’ll be in for a wetting.”
“Hello!” Parsons exclaimed, following his wife’s gaze. “It does look grim—and it seems to be right overhead. Come on, Truck.”
“I’m glad we’re up here, instead of down there,” said the king-sized young gladiator, moving to help his professor with the camping gear. “Only time I ever saw clouds like that was in Colorado, when I played left guard for a junior college. We wound up with a flash flood that wiped out half the campus. I came up to Montana Mines the next year.”
“Better give the radio another run, before you break out the tents, Hal honey,” Candace Parsons suggested. “I’ll take charge of them until you get a message through.”
Even as she spoke, a large drop fell on her forehead, and the slow patter of beginning rain rustled around them. She got busy with the tents, moving swiftly, efficiently, and with surprising strength for a slim-looking woman. But her mind was on the weather that was encompassing them.
It simply couldn’t be happening—but it was. Great grey-and-white, swirling masses of cloud had boiled over to fill the heavens above them, and the fall of rain was increasing steadily. Her experience told her that
these were not cloudburst formations, from which only a flash flood could be expected. Despite Truck’s concern—they looked more like the prelude to long, steady rain. Yet they were low, closing down relentlessly, making the ceiling almost invisible as they blanketed the taller peaks that rimmed the valley.
It was her husband who broke through her abstraction, saying, “Baby, come here. I got through to Stevensville. According to them, every watcher and radar post has been alerted all day. And we’re the furthest west observers to have seen that thing. They’ve only been waiting for another report to start an air-search.”
“If it landed anywhere around here,” said Candace Parsons, eyeing a sodden cigarette in disgust, “they won’t be able to get a plane over these peaks for quite a while—not even a helicopter.”
III
THE RADAR BEAMS had stopped—or had, at least, ceased to reach the Conservation Agent—before he had gone underground. The point where he had landed was not in line-of-sight range of any of their stations. Needless to say, however, their operators had not forgotten him.
The agent was not considering possible radar operators. In fact, he would not have considered them even if radar had been, to him, something produced by a machine. He was far too busy listening.
If a human being puts his ear close against a wall, or a doorjamb in a fairly large building he will pick up a remarkable variety of sounds. He will hear doors closing, windows rattling, and assorted creaks and thuds whose origin is frequently difficult or impossible to determine. The one thing he will not hear is silence.
The crust of a planet is much the same on a vastly greater scale. It is always full of vibrations, ranging from gigantic temblors—as square miles of solid rock slip against similar areas on the two sides of a fault plane—to ghostly echoes of sound and the faintest of thermal oscillations as the sun’s heat shifts from one side of a mountain to the other, and the rocks expand and contract to adjust to the new temperatures.