Planet for Plunder

by Hal Clement

His first attempt at attracting their attention consisted merely of broadcasting sustained notes on a variety of frequencies, other than the one they were using. As he had rather expected, these produced no noticeable reaction. Travel and conversation went on unaffected. When he repeated the attempts, using the same wavelength as the natives, however, the results were just as unsatisfactory. It was extremely frustrating.

  Travel stopped, and after he had repeated the signal a few times, all six of the vehicles seemed to come together at one spot. In the pauses between his own transmissions, the native speech sounded almost continuously. Yet he felt doubt that he had even been heard.

  He had rather expected that there might be an attempt to respond to him in kind, but this did not occur, even though he tried sending out his wave in various long and short pulses which should have been easy to copy. At least, he used lengths corresponding to those of the radar pulses which he had felt at his arrival, and which had, presumably, been emitted by members of this race.

  They failed to respond to the patterns, however, even when in desperation he increased the lengths of the bursts of radiation to three or four thousand microseconds. The very speech patterns of the natives changed carrier amplitude in shorter periods than that—they must, he felt, be able to distinguish such intervals!

  The agent began to speculate upon the general intelligence-level of this alien new race. He had to remind himself forcibly that, since they could move around so rapidly, they must be able to design and build complex machines. It was startling, to say the least.

  Then it occurred to him that all the vehicles he was watching might be remote controlled, that the electromagnetic waves he was receiving were the control impulses. Yes, yes, that must be it! He spent some time, trying to correlate the radio signals with the motions of the machines. The attempt, of course, failed completely, since men are at least as likely to talk while standing still, as while walking around.

  This proving a poor check on his hypothesis—it did not disprove it, since the machines might be able to do many things besides move around—he tried duplicating some of their complete signal groups, watching carefully to see whether any motion of the vehicles resulted. He realized that the controlling entity might not like what he was doing, but he was sure that satisfactory explanations could be made, once contact was established.

  The result of the experiment was a complete stoppage of motion, as nearly as he could tell. It was not quite what he had expected. But there was some gratification in getting any result at all. For several whole seconds there was silence, both seismic and electromagnetic.

  Then the native speech—it had to be speech—began again, in groups which still seemed long to the agent, but which were certainly much shorter than most of those used before. He duplicated each group as it came.

  “Who’s that? Hello?”

  “Who’s that? Hello?”

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

  “What’s going on? This isn’t funny, Mack.”

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

  “Who’s that? Hello?” The agent decided the last signal group was too long to be worth imitation, so he went back to one of the earlier groups. This action resulted in brief silence, followed by a pattern, brief, but with a fresh modulation, which he mimicked accurately. For several whole minutes, the conversation, if it could be called that, went on. He felt real pride now, a self-congratulatory kind of exaltation in being able to carry off his cleverly assumed masquerade with perfect confidence, vigor and, certainly, no small measure of success.

  The Conservation agent had decided long since what the native, machines would almost certainly do, and was pleased to detect them getting into motion once more. But when they had gone far enough for him to determine their direction of travel, he discovered, with some disappointment, that they were not moving toward him.

  He would have had little trouble solving their motives, had they been moving straight away from him. But the angle they took carried them more or less in his direction, albeit considerably to one side. He found this a complete mystery, at first. Finally he noticed that the group was traveling along a depressed portion of the lithosphere’s surface, and seized upon, as a working hypothesis, the idea that their machines found it difficult, or impossible, to climb slopes of more than a few degrees.

  In that case, of course, they might not be able to reach him, directly or otherwise, since he had buried himself some distance up the side of a valley. He considered again leaving his position and coming to meet them, but reached the same decision as before—that he could learn more by seeing what they did on their own.

  They spoke rarely as they traveled—but the agent found that he could always make them broadcast, by ceasing to radiate his own signal. Had they not been pursuing such an odd course, he would have supposed, from that fact, that they were using his radiation to lead them to him. His radiation! However, they kept on their course until they were somewhat past its nearest point to his position before they paused. Then there was a brief interchange of signals with some distant native, apparently in an atmosphere machine, and travel was resumed, at right angles to the original direction.

  Now, however, the vehicles were heading away from the buried ship, had, in fact, turned left. The Conservationist gave up theorizing for the moment and contented himself with observing. He repressed his mounting excitement and became as still as a figure of stone.

  They did not travel very far in the new direction. In less than half an hour they stopped again, held another brief conversation, and then began to retrace their steps to, and finally across, their original route. Apparently, they were still interested in the agent’s broadcasts. At any rate, they continued repeating the early “Hello” and “Who’s that” signals to which he had originally responded, whenever he stopped radiating. They were not following the radiation, but certainly—almost certainly—they had some interest in it.

  Then, quite abruptly, they stopped traveling and appeared to lose interest in the whole matter. The group broke up, and its members wandered erratically about for some time. Then they drew together once more and gradually quieted down completely, or at least to the point where the agent could not be sure that the occasional impulses coming from that area were due to their motion.

  He had just developed another theory, and this new trick bothered him seriously. He would have preferred to ignore it, but he could not. It had occurred to him that these creatures might be able to detect electromagnetic radiation of the sort he had been broadcasting, but not be able to identify the direction from which it came. He had heard of cases of physical injury among his own people which had produced such a result.

  The idea that such a disability might be universal in this race called for a severe stretch of the agent’s imagination, but he toyed with it all the same.-As a result, he had just come to realize that the peculiar motions of the things he had been observing could indeed be accounted for by the assumption that they were searching for him under some such handicap—when they stopped moving. This was hard to reconcile with any sort of search procedure. What possible reason could stop them? He wished sometimes there could be fewer complexities in his existence. What possible reason?

  Lack of fuel? Inconceivable, assuming even minimum intelligence on the part of the operator or operators.

  Surface impossible for the machines to travel over? Unlikely, since several of them had come some distance toward him during their erratic wandering after the halt of the main body. And there had been others in the atmosphere.

  Sun-powered mechanisms, halted by the fact that night had fallen? It was possible, though it seemed a trifle odd for such a device to be used on a rotating planet, where it must be sunless half the time. Also, it seemed doubtful that the machines were large enough to intercept the requisite amount of solar radiation. The agent had a fair idea of their size and mass, from the minimum observed separation, plus the
energy with which they struck the ground.

  Not interested in him at all, and stopped simply because they had reached their intended destination? This seemed all too painfully probable, if the course of their travels were considered by itself—yet nearly impossible, if their reaction to his broadcasting were taken into account.

  It was at this point that the agent began to consider seriously the possibility that he might never be able to get the information of their danger across to the inhabitants of this planet. Their behavior, so far, seemed to lack any element he could recognize as common sense. He was open-minded enough to realize that this might work both ways, yet such a possibility did not augur well for the chances of successful communication between the two intelligences involved. There were cynics even among his own people who claimed that folly and ignorance always went arm in arm, and were biological constants throughout space.

  Once more, he was facing the question of whether he should go to meet these gadgets, or wait where he was—and, in the latter case, how long he should wait. Certainly, if he were to check the possibility that they were sun-powered, he should not stir until after night was over.

  But none of the other hypotheses could very well be tested without actually examining, at close hand, the natives and their machines. He decided, then, to wait until sunrise, and for a reasonable period thereafter. Then, if these things did not resume their journey in his general direction, he would seek them out.

  As it turned out, he did not have to move. The appearance of the sun saw the vehicles already in motion, which was informative in a negative way. After a brief period of random traveling, they congregated once more, seemed to confer silently for a time, and then resumed travel along their former route. Also, they broadcast once more the signal the agent had come to interpret as a request for him to start transmitting.

  The events of the preceding afternoon were repeated in some detail. The group continued past the agent’s station on their straight-line course for a short distance, then stopped, and once more made a right-angle turn. This time, it was to the right, toward the hidden alien—and the agent realized that this theory about their sensory limitations must be at least partly correct.

  They had to go through elaborate maneuvers to locate the source of a radio broadcast—maneuvers which suggested that even their ability to judge the intensity of the radiation was rather crude. It took them about a tenth of the planet’s rotation period, this time, to narrow the field down as far as their radio senses appeared to permit.

  Before mid-morning they had made two more right-angle turns, and then spread out to cover, individually, the remaining area of uncertainty. The agent settled comfortably in his hole and awaited discovery. This should tell him much.

  Just how close would these things have to come to detect him directly? Would he be able to pick up their nerve-currents first? What would they do when they found him? How long would it take them to realize that he was not a native of their world? And, most important, would they have some constructive ideas about means of communication? Who did he think he was fooling? At the moment the agent would have admitted to anyone that he himself had none. And if he was up against a blank wall in that respect, how could he reasonably expect them to come up with something really new and brilliant?

  He kept his own senses keyed up, striving to detect the first clue, other than radio and seismic waves, of the nearness of the Earthly machines. Presumably, they were more or less electrical in nature, and he knew that electric and magnetic fields must, sooner or later, draw close enough to give him a picture of their structure. A little closer than that, and the electric fields of the operators’ nervous systems should permit him to deduce their shapes and structures—assuming, of course, that at least one operator was with the present group of machines, which could hardly yet be considered certain.

  Although it was the machine with the radio that actually stumbled on the buried vessel, the radio was not in use at the time. As a result, the agent decided, rather quickly, that no operator was in fact present. The radio was, of course, put to use the moment the ship was sighted—but its structure and nature was obvious to the alien, and it was quite evidently not an intelligent being.

  It was, however, the only object in the vicinity with functioning, electrical circuits. Moreover, there was no direct sign of life in any of the machines which gathered quickly around the ship. Finding it a little hard to believe even his own theories, the agent once more examined the radio—only to reach the same conclusion.

  Its organization was not sufficiently complex to compare with a single living crystal, much less an entire nervous system. The conclusion seemed inescapable. Not only was the machine carrying it being controlled from a distance, but even the vehicle itself operated without detectable electrical forces.

  The machine, of course, could not be invisible. His failure to see it meant merely that he was employing the wrong means—anything material can be seen, in some way or other. There remained the question of just what were the proper means in this particular case.

  Free metals affected electric or magnetic fields, or both, in ways which permitted their recognition. Only a few fragments of such material were present—fragments quite evidently shaped by intelligence, but not themselves part of either an intelligent body, or even a complex mechanism.

  Non-conducting crystals reflected and refracted many kinds of radiation. Perhaps these things, then, could be seen. The only trouble with this idea was that eyes were not a normal part of the agent’s physical makeup. While his ship possessed several which were used in navigation—stars were most easily detected and recognized by light waves—they all happened to be underground at the moment. He had never anticipated a use for them on the surface of the planet, not being himself a chemist.

  The machines were now all moving about on the ground in his immediate vicinity. One of them even moved onto the exposed section of his hull for a few moments and it gave him his first chance to approximate their mass really accurately. Unfortunately he could not determine precisely how much of the energy radiating from their footsteps was due to weight.

  The machine on his hull carried a tiny ionization tube, whose behavior at the moment was being affected by the mild radioactivity of the ship—activity only natural after a million years in interstellar space. The purpose of the tube was no more obvious than that of the electromagnetic radiator. Neither could move or think. The only possibility seemed to lie in a connection with the remote control of these machines. Perhaps, they were sensing devices of some sort.

  There seemed no logical reason for not raising the ship far enough to get a look at these alien machines. He had discovered all he could expect to learn, from where he was. They did receive him. They were interested, and they, therefore, had at least glimmerings of intelligence. They could not—or, at least, their machines could not—determine the direction from which radio-waves were coming.

  It was still not clear to him whether these machines were under the control of one individual, or that of several. There seemed no way of investigating this important question for some time to come. What the agent wanted to know, as soon as possible, was just what sort of mechanism could operate without perceptible electrical fields—and that seemed to demand that he see them. Yes, he must see them.

  His hull had long since cooled, and could be controlled without difficulty. He started it vibrating again, and, simultaneously, applied enough drive to counteract the weight of ship and its contents. For a fleeting instant, he wondered whether the distant operators could detect the flickering of the myriads of relays that responded to his thoughts, or even the electrical fields of the thoughts themselves.

  If the latter were true, they could certainly not interpret them properly. In that case, the machines would have found him much earlier, and the agent would, by now, have been holding a conference with them about the best means of intercepting the mole robots. That possibility, he decided, could be ignored.

  The patrol
flier lifted easily, until over half its bulk was above the ground. Its pilot held it there, briefly, while the rhythm of the hull packed and firmed the powdered soil that had drifted beneath it. Then he cut his power once more, and began to look about him with his newly uncovered eyes.

  VI

  THE LITTLE PARTY’S jubilation had proved short-lived. They had, it was true, attained communication with the Whatisit—but apparently all that it could or would do in this field was to mimic their voices and speech in startlingly unexpected fashion. After a quarter of an hour of ever-increasing exasperation, Truck MacLaurie won Parsons’ temporary disfavor by suggesting, “Hey! I wonder if it can sing.”

  Candace didn’t help the geologist’s feelings by laughing outright at the infantile remark.

  Hal said, “It’s not funny, dammit! How are we going to get any more sense out of it. You’d think from the way you act this was a Sunday School picnic—not something deathly serious, even terrifying.”

  “I guess we’ll have to find it first,” said Truck, rubbing his face briefly dry with a large blue bandana. He looked more troubled and uneasy than he had permitted himself to look a moment before.

  Candace gazed sadly at the ruin of her cigarette. “I wonder,” she said, “just how we’re going to accomplish that.”

  “Follow the beam,” Truck suggested. He spoke lightly, but all the levity was gone from his stare.

  “Get in,” said Parsons, nodding toward the jeep. “We’re going to find out if our friend really is beaming his messages.”

  They drove a quarter of a mile and tested. The baffling mimicry aped them just as clearly, just as strongly, as before.

  “Maybe,” said Candace optimistically, “we’re headed straight toward him.”

  “Not likely, dear,” said Parsons. But he got the jeep going over the rough terrain at right angles to their previous direction before making another test. Once again, the mockery continued without any noticeable fluctuation in volume or alteration in its monotony of tone.