Planet for Plunder

by Hal Clement

  She glanced at her husband for reassurance, but saw in his fear-shadowed eyes a reflection of her own fears. She had learned, long ago—in high-school biology—that the legend of a snake’s ability to paralyze a bird-victim with an hypnotic stare was utterly false. Yet Hal’s trapped gaze failed to refute that ancient tale. His eyes remained fixed upon the strange object hovering almost motionless above them, half-veiled by a mist of its own creation.

  Then, suddenly, Candace screamed. The alien was returning, swooping directly down toward them with the speed of a V-2. Before the echoes of her scream could dwindle and die away, it had landed—not upon them but in its former resting place. It perched there lightly, dominating the immediate landscape, its opaque twin lenses still fixed implacably upon them.

  It was Harold, lifting himself slowly from the rain-soaked ground, who said, “Now I wonder just what in hell was the precise purpose of that maneuver.”

  Candace, close to hysteria from the backlash of terror and shock, replied, “You might just as well ask why such a creature does anything?”

  “Funny thing,” said Truck, brushing mud from the front of his clothing. “I think it wanted a better look at us. Did you notice the way it kept those fish-eyes on us all the time it was dancing that rock-’n-roll over us?”

  “I noticed,” Harold Parsons replied tersely, his face still drained of its natural color. “What beats me is why it had to hop around like that.”

  Truck frowned at the looming bulk of the alien. Then he looked at his companions and rubbed the bristles on his chin. “Funny thing,” he repeated. “I’m completely sure now it wasn’t trying to scare us.”

  “Then just what do you think it was trying to do?” Candace asked.

  Truck had latched on to something and, bulldog-like, he was not giving it up. “This probably won’t make much sense to you eggheads,” he told them, in his Southwestern drawl. “But the way that thing acted reminded me of an uncle of mine. His eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, and he won’t wear bi-focals. When he wants a good look at anything close-up, he has to pull his head back. Do you know what I mean?”

  “If your uncle looks like that,” said Candace, with a tremulous nod at the alien, “it’s no wonder you’re having trouble with your credits.”

  “Hold it, baby,” said Hal, regarding MacLaurie with something like awe. “I think he’s got something. Take a good look at those things our friend sees with—if seeing is what they’re for. Its eyes are set at much too flat a curvature to enable it to see anything small and close up without some sort of focusing agent. I can detect no evidence of its having any. In that case . . .” He paused.

  “You mean, I’m right?” Truck asked incredulously.

  “I mean you could be,” said Parsons. “Nice going, Truck.”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment, and then he added, “If it really is a space-traveling machine of some sort—and the evidence to date makes that highly probable—then its eyes would be designed for judging objects of immense size, immense distances away. It would need no focusing devices.”

  “All right, you two geniuses,” said Candace, who had recovered a small measure of her equilibrium, “if it really is a space-traveler, why would it have to resort to such extremes just to get a good look at us? Surely it has all kinds of other senses—or instruments for measurement. If not, how could it have gotten here in the first place?”

  Harold Parsons fished a limp cigarette from an equally limp pack in his breast pocket. He eyed it in disgust and quickly tossed it away. “Has it occurred to you, baby, that it may not be that simple?” he asked. “If its vision equipment is so faulty under Earth-conditions, it undoubtedly is faced with other problems.”

  He paused, wiped his forehead briefly dry, and added, “I’ll stake my Ph.D. that we’re just as big a problem to our friend as he is to us. We know that it is capable of radio communication by voice. But, so far, all that it has been able to communicate is the fact that it can indulge in parrot-like mockery of our speech.”

  “Hey!” said Truck, who had been listening attentively. “You mean it hasn’t made sense out of what we were saying.”

  “What do you think?” said Parsons.

  Candace said, “You know, this may be silly, but it makes me think of a movie I saw once—one in which an explorer on a strange island had to learn to get on with the natives by pointing out objects and then repeating over and over their speech equivalents. The natives had to do the same thing.”

  “You saw it once? I saw it six times,” said Truck. “The guy kept pointing at trees and rocks, and describing them in English.”

  Hal Parsons threw the pack after his discarded cigarette. “Probably it was Robinson Crusoe!” he exploded. “But, once again, Truck, you and Candace could be on the nose. The only trouble is—I don’t believe we managed to impart much information while our pal was zooming about.” He paused, adding with a frown, “There’s only one way to find out.”

  They plodded back to the jeep. Truck cranked the battery, while Parsons got the radio transmitter into operation. This time, he didn’t have to speak first. The moment the receiver was working, he could hear his own voice coming through the earphones in a reiterated, “Who’s that? Hello! . . . Who’s that? Hello?”

  Parsons acknowledged, with, “Hello out there. We were watching you just now.”

  Back it came. “Hello out there. We were watching you just now.” Infuriatingly, frustratingly, it went on—meaningless repetition following meaningless repetition. Finally, as before, Parsons had to give it up in disgust.

  Candace produced some dry cigarettes from the expedition stores, and she and Hal smoked them silently, under the shelter of the jeep-top. Truck, who was in training, did not join them. It was a damp, disheartening breathing spell.

  Finally, Candace said, “Well, remember Valley Forge. It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

  “Frankly, I’d rather not think about Valley Forge right now,” said Parsons unhappily. “If that thing isn’t able to make sense out of us unless it sees us, and it can’t see us—how in hell are we going to make sense out of it? I think we’d better get help from outside—if we can. Okay, it’s uphill for us again.”

  “Maybe not,” said Truck. “Listen.”

  They heard the faint thrum of plane engines coming through the overcast, maintaining itself, growing louder. Parsons threw his cigarette away and said, “Come on, Truck. Let’s get going.”

  It was the general again, anxious to know how they were making out. Parsons told him in terse syllables. Truck looked up from his battery-duty and said, “Getting anywhere, Sergeant?” And was rewarded by a shut-your-mouth gesture.

  Parsons said, “I know it’s tough. But you must be able to get through to us somehow. How about dropping a couple of philologists by ’chute?”

  “We may have to,” was the reply. “But only as a last resort. Blast this rain! But you’re doing okay, Professor. Stay with it.”

  And that was that. It was a gloomy threesome that made its way slowly over the soggy hillside from jeep to alien. They walked slowly around the alien, and then stood in front of it, regarding a little more calmly now the disclike, too-flat lenses that had gone opaque again.

  “I wonder if it can see us at all from this distance,” Parsons mused. Then, irrelevantly, “You wouldn’t think, with all the resources of modern science and the Air Force, they’d let a little rain stop them cold.”

  “It isn’t a little rain,” said Candace, who had been listening to her husband’s colloquy with the general through one earphone. “It’s a lot of rain—and it has raised hob all around here. The soil and rock formations aren’t used to so much moisture. They just can’t take it.”

  “Let’s hope we can take it a while longer,” said Parsons, putting an arm around her and squeezing.

  “Don’t, honey,” she said. “I just can’t take it right now.”

  “Hey!” called Truck, who had been eyeing the monster from a bit to
one side. “Watch it! Something’s happening!”

  IX

  As usual, the solution was ridiculously simple, once the traveler had thought of it. Most of the access-doors in the hull opened outward and all were operated electrically. He had perfect control over the current supplied to their operating motors. He knew that if he refrained from latching one or more of the doors, and simply held it shut with the motor, he could sense directly the amount of effort needed to keep it sealed against the internal pressure.

  As far as he was concerned, it was a quantitative solution—if the pressure increased. If it decreased—well, he would know it, from the extra effort needed to open the door. He was concentrating on immediate small details now—and very wisely.

  With his machine, action could follow thought without delay. The moment he had his answer, a door swung open in the side of the great metal egg he was driving, and Earth’s air poured in. Good as his seals were, the ship had not, of course, retained any significant amount of gas in the millennia it had been in space.

  He did not bother to develop a plan for enticing one of the machines through the opening. He assumed, quite justly, that any intelligent mind must have a fair proportion of curiosity in its makeup. The fact that self-preservation might oppose this influence did not, as far as the agent knew or suspect, apply to the present situation. The risk of sacrificing even an expensive remote-controlled machine should be well worth taking in such circumstances. He simply waited for one of the devices to be driven into his ship.

  Before this happened, however, there was a good deal of conversation among the machines present and, he presumed, the distant broadcaster—if, of course, it could be called conversation. The agent was still unable to reconcile this supposition with the absence of intelligent life in the present group.

  At last, however, the expected event occurred. One of the machines swung about and moved toward the opening in the hull. Just outside, it halted, and the agent guessed at a brief burst of atmospheric pressure waves, though his manometers did not react fast enough to catch them. Then it entered.

  It traveled on four struts instead of two. It became completely horizontal and advanced on the supporting struts. Evidently the upper ones, which the agent had seen, could be used for locomotion when desirable. Its entrance was slower than by its usual rate of motion, though the agent could not imagine why. The suggestion that slower motion made detail observation easier would never have occurred to a being whose perception and recording operations occupied fractions of a microsecond. Whatever the reason for the delay, it finally managed to get inside.

  The agent wasted no time. Ready to observe anything and everything that resulted, he shut the access hatch.

  Results, by his reaction-time standards, were slow—additional evidence that remote control was involved. The electromagnetic unit burst into activity the instant things finally began to happen. Some of the machines outside began to tap on the hull with dimly perceptible solid fragments, apparently pieces of silicate rock. The agent tried to find regularities in the blows that might be interpreted as communication code of some sort. He failed.

  One of the devices, standing a little distance away, moved one of its attached fragments of metal until a hollow cylinder—which formed part of it—was in line with the hull. After a long moment the more distant end of the cylinder filled with gas, sufficiently ionized to be clearly perceptible to the alien.

  The gas must have been under considerable pressure, for almost instantly it began to expand, driving before it a smaller fragment of metal which had plugged the tube. This fragment became progressively easier to perceive as its speed through the planet’s magnetic field increased.

  It emerged from the near end of the cylinder with sufficient momentum to continue in a nearly linear course, until it made contact with the hull. The agent watched with mounting excitement as it flattened, spread out and finally broke into many pieces. Incredible! He analyzed it, both electrically and mechanically, from the way it broke up. But he could make no sense of the operation.

  After a time, the pounding ceased, and the two machines remaining outside drew together. No obvious activity came from them for some time.

  Inside the hull, more interesting, possibly more understandable, events were taking place. The moment the door had closed, the machine trapped within had attempted to withdraw. Its action was a trifle faster than that of the ones still outside. The agent could not decide whether this meant that the escape reaction was automatic, or that a distant controller had turned his attention to the captive machine first.

  It had pounded aggressively on the inside of the door in the same seemingly planless fashion as its fellows. Then it had slowed down, and began to move another of the strangely fashioned pieces of metal distributed about its frame. This abruptly became clearly perceptible, as an electric current began to flow through portions of its structure.

  The source of the current was a seemingly endless supply of metallic ions—quite evidently chemical energy could be used for something. The current’s function was less obvious, since it was led through a conductor whose greatest resistance was concentrated in a tight metal spiral.

  This must in some way have been shielded from atmospheric oxygen, since, while it must have reached a fairly high temperature if the ion cloud around it meant anything, it nevertheless remained uncorroded. Heating the wire seemed all that the device accomplished—the agent refused to believe that the ion cloud was intense enough to help either in action or perception. The light and heat radiated were inconsiderable, but—wait! Perhaps that was it—perhaps this machine had eyes!

  The agent examined the electrical device more closely, and discovered that part of its uncharged structure consisted of a roughly paraboloidal piece of metal, which must certainly have been able to focus light into a beam of sorts.

  A few moments later, it became evident that it did just that. The agent’s body was exposed in several places in this part of the ship, and, time after time, one part would be struck by radiance, while the rest were in more or less complete darkness. Furthermore, a few minutes’ observation showed that when the machine moved at all it followed the direction in which the light beam happened to be pointing at the time.

  Sometimes it did not move, though the beam kept roving around the chamber. The agent deduced from that one of two things. Either the device had several eyes, or the one it had was movable over virtually the entire sphere of possible directions. The thing was making an orderly survey of the interior of the space in which it was trapped. But it was carefully refraining from touching anything except the floor on which it stood.

  That portions of this floor consisted of the agent’s tissue made no difference to either party—as far as either knew. But the agent began to wonder how much of the exposed machinery of the ship would be comprehensible to the presumed distant observer.

  Still more, he wondered how this presumed observer maintained contact with his machine. There was no energy whatever—in any form that the agent could detect—getting through his hull, either to or from the trapped machine. A minor exception to this might be the pressure waves generated by the stones striking his hull. But he had already failed to find in these blows any pattern at all, much less one which could be correlated with the actions of the machine inside.

  Naturally, the thought that this might be an automatic device, similar to the mole robots, could hardly help occurring to the Conservationist. If this were the case, its present behavior was far more complicated than that of any such machine he had ever encountered. But hold on—he had already faced the implications inherent in that idea. So the technology of this world was more advanced, in some ways, than his own. There were still things the natives didn’t know—things which would most certainly hurt them. Any concern he might have felt about himself was drowned in this larger solicitude.

  He wondered whether he could so operate any of his own machinery to or through his prisoner, so as to convey a message of any sort. Certa
inly, if it used light as a vehicle of perception, it could detect motion on the part of the relays. For example—they were larger by quite a margin than the wave length of the radiation the hot wire was emitting in greatest strength.

  There were several hundred thousand of them in the dozen square yards exposed to the direct-line vision of the captive, which should be enough to form some sort of pattern. Some sort of pattern, that is, if their owner could figure out how to operate them without making the ship misbehave.

  He was still pondering this problem, along with the question of just what would be a meaningful pattern to the operators of the machine, when his attention was once more drawn to the outside.

  The machines there seemed to have taken up a definite course of action. They had once more approached the hull, and were doing something to it which he could not at first quite understand. It quickly enough became evident, however. The brightness of the images he was receiving through the eyes, to which he had naturally been paying very little attention, began rapidly to decrease.

  Within a minute or so, the lenses ceased to transmit at all.

  His tactile “sense” consisted in part of the ability to analyze the response of his hull to the vibrating impulses he applied to it. If such impulses were followed faithfully he could be sure that there was no mass in contact with the surface. On the other hand, if they were damped to any extent, he could form a fairly accurate idea of the amount and even some of the physical properties of such a mass.

  In the present case, he discovered almost instantly that his eye lenses had been covered with a most peculiar substance. It not only adhered tenaciously to them, but seemed to absorb without noticeable reaction the same vibrations which had sent the soil dancing out of his way like summer chaff in a breeze. This did not particularly bother him, since the eyes were nearly useless for watching the machines anyway. But he kept trying to shake the material off, while he considered the implications of the move.