Planet for Plunder

by Hal Clement

  Could it be that the orders were transmitted by metallic connections instead of radiation? They would have to be flexible, of course, since the relative positions of the machines were constantly changing! Yes, that could be it!

  IV

  Candace Parsons prepared dinner that night in the larger tent, over the fireless cooker. Because, for all of her native independence of spirit, she enjoyed being a woman and Hal’s wife, and because she found herself not yet able, either intellectually or emotionally, to accept what had happened to them during the day, she concentrated on preparing the best meal possible under the circumstances.

  While Hal and Truck continued to work the radio, under the trailer tarpaulin, she opened a couple of cans of chili, reinforced their contents with extra powder and placed on the stove a panful of the nourishing Mexican dish. She got a pot of coffee smoking, fried a dozen quarter-inch thick slices of bacon, and stirred the heated chili. Then she carried out to the men large, steaming platefuls of the rib-sticking food. They looked, she thought, as damp as she felt.

  Returning with the coffee, she found the plates barely touched and told them, “You’d better eat hearty, characters. Heaven only knows when I’ll cook another mess in this downpour.”

  Hal looked at her sheepishly, turned away from the transmitter and picked up his plate. “Sorry, baby,” he said. “But, whatever this is all about, we seem to be it. We’ve had about everybody but the President on the air, asking us what in hell is going on.”

  “Let me take over for a while,” she urged.

  Truck, temporarily deserting his chore at the crank-battery to consume his victuals in what appeared to be three immense mouthfuls, said, “I’m afraid, memsahib, that this is going to be an all-night beat.”

  It turned out to be just that, since a baffled, excited, curious and somewhat frightened world refused to leave them alone. Increasingly, it became apparent that no other observer, human or electronic, had spotted further passage of the mysterious flying object which Truck called “the Greatest Whatisit.” Thus, until the rain let up and the ceiling lifted, the Parsons Expedition was definitely roped down, and committed.

  And the rain, as Candace had foreseen, did not let up. That, in itself, was one of the most unusual elements in the situation. According to all reports, the storm that had engulfed them extended over no more than a few square miles, centering upon the valley, and its surrounding territory.

  The circumstance caused Truck to suggest, “Well, a limited storm area ought to simplify things. All they’ll have to do now is locate the center of the cloud region. The center will be it—granted our Whatisit is seeding the clouds around here with malicious intent.”

  “How could it seed clouds that didn’t even exist until after it came down?” queried Candace.

  “So it made its own clouds,” Truck suggested breezily. “Take it or leave it.”

  Candace and Hal Parsons exchanged a puzzled look. It was Parsons who got to his feet. They were sitting, Turkish fashion, on the ground beneath the larger tent’s shelter and Parsons arose quickly to say, “Never mind the battery for a moment, Truck. Where’s that Geiger counter of yours?”

  “You mean to say you’re gonna hunt uranium now?” Truck asked good-humoredly, as he complied.

  “Not exactly,” said Hal Parsons, a trifle grimly. “Okay, Truck—thanks.” Neither he nor Candace felt up to putting into words the way they felt about the fear that gripped them. Any object capable of emitting radiations which could create such a furious local storm might well be capable of emitting radiations deadly to all human life within its radius. Both had visions of the Japanese fishermen who, in 1955, were caught in a radioactive fallout hundreds of miles from the Eniwetok atomic testing grounds.

  Candace carried the electric lantern as Hal made his way about fifty feet downhill, into the saddle of the pass where they were encamped. She heard the ominous click-click-click of the counter, as her husband turned it on, and caught the strange, tense look on his features—a look sharpened by rainwater and the lantern’s bright beam. She had an odd, shafting thought that this was not her husband at all, but a stranger. Quickly she closed mental lock and key on the idea, lest it be a prelude to panic.

  He said, “It’s high, but that might be caused by any number of reasons.”

  Candace nodded, and he took a few more strides. Then he bent low over a large puddle, formed in a hollow of the ground, and held the counter directly over it. The speed of the clicking increased by a clearly audible margin. After a moment, he stood up, and turned the instrument off.

  “We’re okay,” he said. “The rain is radioactive, all right. But, unless we hang around here for a month or two, it’s not likely to cause any permanent damage.”

  “It can’t damage my permanent,” she replied. “I haven’t had one in six months, and the coil came out in a week.” The moment she had spoken, she felt like an idiot for making such a remark at such a time. On the other hand, she thought, this might be a moment when idiocy could really serve a purpose.

  Hal said gently, “Shut up, baby,” and then they walked back to the camp in silence, their minds full of oddly-parallel thoughts, hopes and fears. Increasingly, via radio and their own evidence, it was becoming clear that the Whatisit had elected to come to earth nearby, and probably knew exactly what it was doing.

  “You know,” said Hal, after lighting a damp cigarette, “if our friend had such a thought in mind, he couldn’t have figured out a better way to stay clear of observation. Locating him on foot, in this rain, is going to be next to impossible. And the authorities outside the area won’t find it easy to get in here. Our trail is washed out by this time. In fact, for all we know, the valley behind us will be flooded by morning. They can’t observe from the air, because of the clouds—and the ceiling is so low I don’t believe a helicopter could make a landing anywhere near here.”

  “Maybe he does want to,” said Candace, relighting her cigarette thoughtfully.

  “But that suggests . . .” Hal looked at her oddly.

  “It suggests intelligence, all right,” his wife said quickly. “And so did the swift, sure way he steered a path around this mountain yesterday. The big question now is—what kind of intelligence?”

  “You’re giving me the creeps,” said Hal. He looked at her in the light of the electric lantern and smiled. But there was no mirth in his smile and when her hand crept toward his along the moist ground, he gripped it almost eagerly.

  Truck MacLaurie stood over them. “If you two lovebirds are interested,” he said, “I just got word they’re sending a plane over in five minutes, to try to drop a flare through the clouds. They’ll want to know if we can see it—and where.”

  The Parsons’ scrambled to their feet and waited, by the radio, as the minutes ticked by. An eternity seemed to pass before they actually heard the distant drone of the plane. It grew rapidly louder and, all at once, appeared to be almost directly overhead. The receiver crackled, and Hal Parsons took over.

  “You’re coming in,” he told them. “Parson here, Over.”

  “Roger dodger, Professor,” came the buoyant voice of the airman overhead. “We’re dropping a flare in five seconds. You should see her in twenty-six, when she blossoms. If you spot any little green men, let us know.”

  “Fire away,” said Parsons. He frowned and added tersely: “And stop clowning.”

  “Roger dodger,” was the reply, and Parsons wished, briefly, that the over-carefree birdman had to take the brunt on the ground with them. Then he recalled Candace’s inane remark about her permanent, and it occurred to him that some people found such flipness an antidote to unendurable tension. He waited . . .

  The flare burst, no more than half a mile away, its brilliance muted by the heavy mist and rainfall. Of the valley itself, it revealed almost nothing. Then, slowly, it burned out, leaving the darkness darker than before.

  Parsons reported it, not too exactly under the circumstances, and the pilot said, “Well, that tell
s us exactly what we knew before. Stay with it, Professor.”

  Curiously, Parsons thought, he sounded discouraged.

  Morning dawned, grey and soggy. But even so, the three on the mountain pass were lifted up in spirit by the renewal of light. The rain continued, without letup, and patches of mist clung to the slopes above and below them—and as far as their vision could penetrate.

  They breakfasted on fresh coffee and the warmed-up remnants of the meal they had been unable to finish the night before.

  “I never thought I’d have a miniature lake to wash dishes in,” said Candace, dipping the plates in a puddle of fresh rainwater, and wiping them dry with a towel. “I’ve always had to scrub plates with sand on trips like this.”

  “Yeah,” said Truck MacLaurie, “and radioactive rainwater, at that.”

  “Shut up, Truck,” Hal Parsons said sharply, wishing he had held his tongue. It occurred to Mm, for the first time in his life, that people who can face grim reality and joke about it are, perhaps, far better realists than those who regard it so seriously that even talk of it disturbs them. What was troubling him was not the fact that the rain was mildly radioactive. It was the possibility that the great Whatisit might be emanating radiations of an alien nature, and more deadly to humans than anything the Geiger counter could pick up. Ignoring Candace’s silent reproof, he walked slowly to the jeep.

  Even though the slope into the valley was not steep, getting down the western side of the pass proved a far more difficult task than hauling the jeep up the east side had been. The reason, of course, was the unremitting rain, which was turning the poorly fastened dirt- and-sand hillside surface into treacherous, slippery rivers of silt and mud.

  On this part of the trip Truck rose to heroic effort. Almost at the valley floor the little vehicle unexpectedly side-slipped into a freshly made brook, causing its rear wheels to stick and the trailer to fall over on its side. In a matter of seconds, the big football player had leapt from the rear seat of the jeep into the shin-deep muck, and was heaving at the trailer, with his neckcords swelling.

  Before Hal or Candace could reach him he had unlocked the coupler and was hauling an upright trailer out of the water by main strength.

  “The tarp held tight,” he said cheerfully, not even panting. With his hair plastered over his forehead and his clothes clinging to him in the wet, he looked as if he had just stepped out of a shower with his clothes on. He added smilingly: “Get behind that wheel, Doc, while I push.”

  It took their combined efforts, but they finally got the jeep clear of the water and back on reasonably firm soil. Candace returned to the shelter of the jeep-top, while Hal and Truck recoupled the trailer.

  Feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself for his previous sharpness, Hal said, “Truck, I’m sorry if I’ve been riding roughshod over you, but this whole business has me on edge. I mean, with Candace, and—” He let it hang.

  Truck laid a massive, damp hand on Hal’s already soaked shoulder and said with a grin, “Doc, don’t worry about me. I’ve been chewed out by so many coaches giving me hell in the locker room that I don’t mind a little ribbing from a guy I respect.”

  For some reason, the atmosphere lightened, though the rain continued to fall—and, curiously, the going grew easier from then on. Twenty minutes later, they had reached the floor of the valley, which extended almost level into the mist that blocked the mountains on the further side.

  “Well,” said Truck from the rear seat, as Hal slowly brought the jeep to a halt, “now that we’re here, what do we do?”

  The Parsons exchanged a look. Until then, reaching the valley had loomed as so large a problem in front of them that they had not considered the next move.

  Candace laughed and said, “I’d pause at this point to powder my face if it would do any good in the dampness—if I had any powder handy.”

  To his considerable surprise, Hal found himself paraphrasing a long-forgotten and very ribald old Negro ditty which by rights should have remained buried in the rather scant excesses of his youth. He said, “It’s right here for us, and if we don’t find it, why it ain’t no fault of its.”

  “Hey, Doc!” said Truck. “Where’d you pick that one up?”

  “Probably,” said Candace dryly, “in the very place where he picked me up.”

  It was the younger man who spoke seriously then. “No fooling, folks,” Truck said. “Now that we’re here, just how do we go about finding our inhuman friend? Don’t forget—you’re the brains in this pitch. I’m just the muscle.”

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to use that Geiger counter of yours again,” Hal Parsons said. “And no cracks, please! If we can find any variation of intensity in the rainfall radiation, there may be a chance.”

  “Gotcha, Doc.” Again, the young Goliath was out of the jeep, and working at the trailer tarpaulin.

  “Do you think it will work, honey?” Candace asked.

  Hal Parsons shrugged. “It might,” he said. “It just might.”

  But it didn’t. As remorselessly as the rain continued to fall, the mild radioactivity continued to register without variation. After testing puddles for two hours, the two men returned to the jeep, where Candace had coffee ready for them once more. She asked no questions as to the success of their experiment. One look at their faces as they emerged from the mist told her all she needed to know.

  “Carnotite,” said her husband, lifting his face from an empty tin cup and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Not enough to report on—just enough to bitch us up for an hour, with a false lead. You might not believe it, but this is one hell of a big valley.”

  “It keeps getting bigger,” said Truck MacLaurie mournfully, through a coffee mustache. He looked at Hal Parsons and asked, “Well, Doc—what next?”

  Parsons was trying to come up with some sort of a constructive reply, when Candace motioned for him to be silent and lifted her face upward. The others followed her gaze and saw nothing but clouds, rain and fog. Then they heard it—the drone of a plane directly overhead. Without a word, both men handed Candace their empty cups and moved toward the trailer.

  It was a mere matter of minutes, before they had the radio back in action, and were trying to communicate with the crew overhead. While Truck cranked away at the battery, to raise power, Parsons hung onto the transmitter, urgently repeating, “Parsons calling plane. Parsons calling plane. We hear you. We hear you. Come on in. Come on in. Over . . .”

  All he could get, on the earphones, was a rumble of static, through which, now and again, he heard the faint, unintelligible mutter of the operator upstairs, trying to break through. Candace looked at him anxiously, her hair oddly slicked into bangs by the rain. He shook his head hopelessly.

  “Keep trying,” she said softly. “Keep trying, Hal honey.”

  Frustration was high within him, but he nodded and tried again. “Parsons calling plane. Parsons calling plane,” he began.

  This time, there was no doubt about the answer. It came, clear as a voice in some unbuilt next room, saying, “Parsons calling plane. Parsons calling plane.”

  “Who’s that?” he barked, recalling the impertinence of the aircraft radio message of the night before.

  “Who’s that?” he barked. “Hello?”

  “Who’s that?” the mocking voice replied.

  Parsons mopped rainwater out of his eyes and snapped, “What in hell is going on? This isn’t funny, Mack!”

  And the voice replied, “What in hell is going on? This isn’t funny, Mack!”

  “Cut it out, you joker!” he said furiously. “If you’ve got a message for us, unload it and take off.”

  To which his tormentor retorted, “Who’s that? Hello?”

  “Hal honey!” interposed Candace, who had crowded close and turned back one of the earphones to catch the mocking message. “Hal honey, he’s replying in your voice.”

  “So what?” her husband countered. “Whoever he is, I’m going to see he gets hell—once we’re out of
here.”

  “Just a second.” She nudged him clear of the transmitter, bent over the mouthpiece, and said clearly, “Toodle-oo, old thing.”

  The answer came back clear as spoken—and in perfect reproduction of Candace’s voice. “Toodle-oo, old thing.”

  They stared at each other until Truck came over. He pushed back his hair and said, “What is this—a private game, or can anybody play?”

  “It’s beginning to look,” said Hal quietly, his controlled voice belieing the wild excitement in his eyes, “as if your great Whatisit is as anxious to get in touch with us as we are with him.” Then, turning to Candace, he asked, “What do you think, baby?”

  “I think,” she said, “if I were an alien and wanted to be a radio announcer and could only receive H.V. Kaltenborn, I’d give it back to him just the way he was giving it to me.”

  V

  IT BECAME INCREASINGLY evident to the Conservationist that he could lie there, until he was trapped in an earthquake, making up five hundred theories per second, without getting one whit closer to knowledge of what was happening around him. He was going to have to examine the machines more closely. The only question was one of tactics. Should he go to them, or have them come to him?

  He decided first to try the second gambit, since it offered more promise of drawing out information as to their nature and abilities. He would thus be able to determine precisely what stimuli affected their senses of equipment, and the extent of their capability in analyzing what they did detect.

  Naturally, not a wave of their radiation had, thus far, conveyed any meaning to the Conservationist. More accurately, the few patterns that even remotely matched patterns of his own language did not deceive him for an instant by such chance similarities. Nor did he suppose the natives would have any better luck with his language.