Copyright ©, 1965, by Ace Books, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Also by Keith Woodcott:
I SPEAK FOR EARTH (D-497)
THE LADDER IN THE SKY (F-141)
THE PSIONIC MENACE (F-199)
Printed in U.S.A.
Jason Lombard was not ill pleased with the world when he rolled yawning from bed and padded on bare feet across the warm floor of his room. He had slept deeply, but his dreams had been dull and gray, leaving him now — this early morning — with a vague sense that he was lucky: that the fates might have treated him far worse if they’d taken the trouble.
Random thoughts along this general track crossed and recrossed his still only half-wakeful mind as he went through the regular just-after-rising routine. The coffee might be heavily cut with chicory, but it was ground from natural beans, not some powdery second-stage derivative; the room was cramped, but from the stories they told, his own parents had started their married life in a trailer not much larger; and certainly a student on an exiguous financial grant in his father’s time hadn’t enjoyed all the conveniences he could call on at the touch of a switch. Of course, the power which ran these devices…
His face twisted into a brief grimace as the day’s first irritant penetrated his sleepy acceptance of the world, twenty-first century pattern. He found he was hesitating to turn the heat on under the coffee-maker.
Damnation! As if I make one millionth of one percent difference!
Megalomania in there somewhere? This insistent idea that it’s up to me to save the world from itself?
Angrily, he clicked the knob of the stove hard round to maximum heat, and made for the stall shower. Here, no joy for the moment. When he turned the tap he got the red light, signifying that as many showers were in use as the block’s hot-water system could cope with.
Crazy damned planet! More ocean than dry land, and here in the age of unlimited power I have to wait for water!
Put it down to the spread of personal hygiene. Put it down to centuries of Cork mockery: black boy, you stink. He yawned again and took the five paces necessary to check the mail.
And that was when the tatters of his mood of well-being blew over the horizon on a gale of dismay, to be replaced by awareness of all the things that were not right with the world: the first and then the second rejection of his projects for a graduation thesis, without which his long struggle to come here was null; the snubs, the contempt, the weary waiting…
He stood turning over the little silvery disc in both hands. A vidrec, of course. Formal. They went for formality in a big way, in this and most other parts of the modern world. A letter: too impersonal, adequate for circular communications (though even then having to be typed automatically, not reproduced, and to contain custom-inserted errors if the recipient was to respect the information in it) or for curt messages to social inferiors with no chance of one day overtaking the sender and snubbing him in his turn. A live conversation: too casual, too immediate, too fraught with the risk of unforeseen complications.
So: a vidrec, the ideal compromise. A conversation sent by mail.
He drew a deep breath and slid the disc into the play-over socket of the phone, thinking once more about the source of the power which would bring it alive on the small square screen.
At once the image of a stout Chinese appeared. It could at least have been a Jap, Lombard told himself morosely. They rubbed against us for a long time; they aren’t so frigid and fierce…
But the man in the screen was Chinese. One couldn’t have been certain from his face or his build; the leveling of world nutrition standards had abolished major differences of stature. His clothing, though, stated it instantly. He was even definable as high-ranking and conservative from his blue Maos-jacket buttoned to the neck and loose-legged pants.
Oddly enough he had recorded the message not in his own language but in English, a compliment absolutely at variance with the depressing implications Lombard read into it.
“Student Lombard Jason” — the name reversed, of course: it was the traditional Chinese order, patronymic first, but in this civilization of alphabetical classification it was also a universal commonplace — “it is requested that you attend at my office in the fraternity building to discuss a matter closely concerning your future plans. It is hoped you will find it convenient to present yourself first thing today. My name is Sun Yen Soo.”
A courtly bow to the unseen listener, with hands put briefly together and almost instantly drawn apart, a marvel of half-politeness. And the screen blanked.
Numb, Lombard returned to the stall shower. The red light again answered his pressure on the tap. He muttered a curse with no real feeling behind it and found he was looking at himself in the wall-mirror.
The sour hopelessness on his face, pale under its tan, was frightening. He ran his fingers through his untidy fair hair, twisted them there and tugged, as though by inflicting pain he could distract himself from the alarming prospect.
Sun Yen Soo! What his position in the hierarchy of the fraternity was, Lombard didn’t know, but he also had a university title — something like “step-father of students”. No, not father: “great-uncle.” An age-honorific. And to rate that he must be right near the top of the ladder.
Like giving a hanged man an extra yard of drop to ensure he snaps his neck.
Well, it would always be possible to work at something, even without a graduate thesis approved and published. To have been accepted as a Cork student here counted for much by itself. In India under the British Raj — so he had been told by a fellow-student from Madras — there had been such a premium set on European education that babus would proudly add to their names such distinctions as “failed B.A., Oxford”.
So all right. Call me Lombard Jason, failed M.Sc., Afrasian U. Carry on a great tradition.
“But — hell!” he said aloud. “For all they make such a fuss about their blasted ‘face,’ I’m not going to cover up mine. It’s been kicked in the teeth, and I don’t give a damn who gets to know!”
Not that they’ll care if they do get to know…
He had addressed himself to his own reflection. Much of the past three years he’d had few other people to talk to; the form of his problems was pretty predictable, for one thing, so he might as well discuss them with his own image as with an outsider. He’d considered coming here as a married student— the news of his acceptance at Afrasian U. after a long struggle and a long wait had given him such prestige that several girls had suddenly decided they were willing. But in the long run he was glad he’d not settled for one of them. The advantages — company, freedom from the obsessive hunt for sexual relief, all that — would have been outweighed by the near-certainty of disaster before now. A Cork girl here, not a student but merely a student’s wife, would have gone through hell and most likely taken it out on her husband.
He looked around the room, his mind darting bird-fashion to any perch-thought which might distract him from facing the probable deeper meaning of this order to go to the fraternity building. The retracting table, not quite flush to the wall — ought to be adjusted for a smoother fit. The blackboard over by the door, with its lines and lines of calculations converging on an elusive goal — strange that with computers so far developed it was still more satisfying to make one’s own marks with a bit of chalk, like a cave-dweller smearing mud on the walls of his home in patterns that trapped magic…
On the other hand, not to be married led to unavoidable loneliness — unavoidable, even though clearly foreseen. He had expected to be older than the vast majority of the students from the privileged areas of the world; he was, by some years. He had expected to have little in common with other Cork students; he’d been correct in that, too. Coming as most of them did from overcrowded, depressed Western Europe, they typically were introverted, bitter, carrying enormous chips on their shoulders.
Me too now, Lombard thought, and felt his own resentment boil up inside him like a black gusher of bile.
“Bastards,” he told his reflection. “For all their smug patronizing manner, they can’t take you, can they? They can’t bear to have a Cork here who makes the colored students look small!”
Was that the size of it? He’d determinedly fought off coming to that conclusion, yet seemingly nothing remained as an alternative. Allegedly, the highest IQ ever tested at Afrasian U. belonged to Jason Lombard; yet both his projects for graduation theses had been turned down — as too original, too unusual, for the rigid-minded authorities?
It would be absurd if they turned him out without letting him graduate! But how to fight them if they decided to?
Me, a Cork, fight the fraternity? Because that’s who I’d have to tackle, not the university staff. Fight them? Hear me laugh!
His belly was tight as a kettledrum, hollow and booming.
Go home? Yale, Harvard — such places still had respectable standards, some kind of reputation, and if he’d got into Afrasian he could be sure of…
“No,” he said aloud. “No, if I’d wanted a home degree I’d have got one, years ago. I wanted one with world status. But — but what the hell good is it all? Am I to sweat away my whole life, fighting prejudice, to acquire a string of letters after my name when I know that anyone who learns I’m a Cork will automatically discount them? I think I’ve thrown away three years. I think I should never have got on this stinking treadmill.”
And his image looked back in wordless agreement from the mirror.
He walked breakfastless along the streets connecting his block with the university, trying to escape the burden of imminent disaster by dismissing his own thoughts, concentrating on what impinged from outside. But far too often exterior sights and sounds and sensations recalled to him subjects bearing on his problem and shattered his neutral blankness into fragments.
The day had barely begun, yet the sun blazed hot and the crowds were on the move. Days here felt odd to a Cork, conditioned to a temperature-zone day-structures: the long morning starting shortly after dawn, divided by a siesta which was more than a mere long lunch-hour, a necessity even with unlimited power to drive the air-coolers, from an evening which was indifferently leisure-time or working time.
Already the sidewalks were jammed with people who gave him curious looks for the white skin under his tan, the fairness of his hair. Perhaps I should dye it and have done. A hundred years ago they used to sell products to rid African hair of its kindly spirals. Crazy. Put in curlers, me? Not to go that far. Indians have straight hair.
Fat mothers in calf-long skirts, laughing children clinging, exchanging the day’s gossip in rapid argot, sweat putting a plumripe bloom on their berry-black skin. And the little slant-eyed Asian women, delicate as porcelain. I had a slender fragile girl once: Samiko, Nisei, where are you? Married and raising fortunate meek children to inherit the earth.…
Shopkeepers, in this area mainly of Indian descent, bringing their wares out for display. Wonderful how tradition enables curb-side sellers to survive the competition of big stores with their modern merchandizing methods. Shoppers enjoy the gossip, maybe. Like to be friends with the seller, thinking he will not cheat them, half-afraid of the enormous impersonal machine which is a multiple store…
“Cigar, man! Have a cigar!”
Abruptly waving under his nose, a tobacco-brown hand with a sheaf of cigars in it, like four extra grown fingers. Lombard flinched away automatically, fearing some practical joke.
“Gwan! Go wan! It’s my birthday, and the first twenty go past get a cigar!”
“Oh. Oh — uh — many happy returns.” And the cigar taken, with haste rather than appreciation.
But so habitual to be lonely among the crowds of this city — so easy to yield to the desire for privacy simply by shutting the mind and pretending they’re not there, the millions of them. Ostrich-wise, so easy.
And completely impossible.
Cork bobbing on the tide of Frics, he halted at an intersection. On the corner here, to his left, was an electronics store and service center. Pulled in the side of the tributary road was a fraternity wagon, flame-yellow and lightning-blue, and the driver and inspector were chatting, laughing with the proprietor of the store. Inspection just over, no doubt, and all found satisfactory.
A griping rose in his throat, like a need to vomit. Two half-qualified grease-monkeys, one with enough training to balance a turbine and the other capable of picking his slow way around a circuit diagram, and running a fraternity wagon, both secure and looked up to in their social block and making progress, getting somewhere they wanted to go.
Compare Jason Lombard, genius. With the IQ just beyond measurable limits and the future blacker than a Bushman’s bottom. Like to say that some time. Never dared. They say it in a hundred languages, grinning, and I don’t dare. Not aloud.
That single ridiculous gloomy thought occupied him from then until he came in sight of the fraternity building, sited where the frenzy of the commercial city gave way to the landscaped placidity of the university campus, the biggest on Earth with its three hundred seventy thousand students. By then the tide of humanity which carried him along had thinned; it was a quarter-hour too early for the morning flood of students going to class which would shortly boil up from townside, and unless you were heading for the university or the fraternity building you wouldn’t come this way. So he was able to halt for a moment without being knocked into from behind, and contemplate the lair where the “great-uncle of students” awaited him.
Crude damned symbolism — having it structured like a bridge, one end townside, the other in university precincts…
When he had first seen it, three years earlier, it had so moved him as an embodiment of the fraternity’s functions that it brought a lump to his throat.
But things change. God, how fast and how utterly they do change!
“Fraternity” was the commonly accepted rendering of the Chinese phrase defining the institution he had aspired to join. Perhaps “brotherhood” would have been more suitable; unfortunately, apart from its association with religious orders in an age when Christianity was unfashionable, that term had been debased in conflicts between classes and ideological groups which in several English-speaking countries verged on civil war. So “fraternity” was the choice.
Its connection with universities began and ended at the edge of the campus, for all official purposes. It had nothing to do with the student body except insofar as their studies were preparing them for careers in an area where the fraternity assumed responsibility. But since that covered the entire field of human technology, the odds were fifty-fifty that a student would have to deal with the fraternity during his course at the university in the world.
Lombard had wanted to deal very closely and very often with it. He had wanted, and schemed and planned and finally hoped, that he would become part of it.
But maybe the idea of a brilliant Cork joining the ranks was against their principles…
He recalled vaguely, as he pushed through the crowd towards the bridge-shaped building, that in fact it wasn’t meant to be a bridge at all, but a traditional Chinese “gate of heaven,” its design filtered through several ancestral generations in concrete and glass.
Gate of heaven! Heaven!
He came scowling — let them worry about my shame, that I show my feelings! I’m to enjoy having a lifetime ambition trodden on? — to the entrance. The doors stood open to the warm day but the air-curtains plucked at the dress of those who went in and out, maintaining an invisible wall against excessive heat and humidity. A slender girl of mixed Asian extraction came to him with a bright smile to inquire his business. In Chinese.
There was something not quite right about the stress he placed on the age-honorific “great-uncle of students” when he explained about his vidrec request to come and see Sun Yen Soo. Nonetheless the girl confined her reaction to a barely perceptible wince, and invited him to take one of the chairs ranked along the wall while she returned to her commudesk and checked whether Sun could see him.
The instant he dropped into the chair he found he was too restless to stay there. Rising, he, began to pace back and forth in the low-ceilinged, luminous hallway, hating the girl who had spoken to him, hating the stout dark jolly mothers in the city with their laughing children, hating the unmet Sun Yen Soo.
Hating himself and his entire kind and species.
The way it happened was not difficult to establish with the wisdom of hindsight. The things that mostly contributed were two: one was idiocy and the other chance.
A digest version of our entire history, glossed Lombard.
Idiocy led the world’s wealthiest nations to drown in their own excreta. America, Western Europe, to a lesser but still marked extent the Soviet Union, prospered, grew fat, turned out infinitely large quantities of ever more improbable consumer goods, choking their roads with their cars, their rivers with their outboard cruisers, their mountains with collapsible frame-tents and self-powered rock-scramblers. And, as the tide of leisure rose around their necks, people reverted to the luxury and status symbol of the large family.
Predictions were made; warnings were uttered. And as had always been the case before, the warnings were disregarded and the predictions were hopelessly wrong: far too low. Around the second decade of the twenty-first century, Christian era, the white nations discovered with a grinding shock that they were swamped. The United States: population four hundred ninety-one million; Great Britain (proud name, small island): one hundred sixteen million; Benelux (compact name, compact territory): one hundred twenty-four million — and so on.
No techniques existed, no plans had been made, no slack was available in the structure of these societies for adjustment to populations numbered by the hundreds of millions. In the day of the wall-to-wall 3-D TV set, the beggars were back on the streets of New York, exhibiting their sores and whimpering; the cities were bursting at the seams and the countryside was bleeding from attempts to feed the new mouths.
While sputtering foolishness and acts of envy branded their plight on the world’s declining masters — petty wars, banditry, gangs taking over European and American cities and looting them in month-long orgies of destruction — the old hungry nations moved quietly to the top of the planetary ladder. Their roads were not choked with traffic; they had hardly any. Their railroads were not ancient and uneconomic; they were rare enough to be precious. And in any case: so what? They were using hovercraft and nuclear ‘copters, and roads didn’t matter.
China became the first billion-country at the turn of the century. Like Rome, the first million-city, whose impact resounded down the centuries and whose original city-block or “insula” was being copied with minor changes in Moscow in the 1960’s, it was inevitable that its influence should reverberate around the world. For China had techniques for handling people by the hundred of millions: governing them, educating, housing, feeding, clothing and healing them. And, choking on their own populations, other countries adapted those techniques in desperate haste: India — Indonesia — even Japan. It had nothing to do with the political divisions of the last century; communist, capitalist, nationalist, what counted was that the old poor countries had struggled for a century to cope with the problem which only now had risen like a turnip-ghost to confront their richer rivals.
Frantically, those old rich nations tried to graft on the techniques which were proving indispensible in Africa and Asia, and found the process as futile as had been all attempts to graft European ways on African and Asian stocks. The gangs of poor-white-trash shrieking low on home-made winged rockets across Central Park to bomb negro police in a landed ‘copter were not susceptible to the quietism of Matthew Sobuke-Bekwa or the ideal of the Middle Way; equally, they were not excited by the wonders, the miracles to which the people of old poor countries were ceasing to be strangers: three square meals a day, a room for each child in the house, and separate clothing for work and leisure. Things stale to the jaded palate of the white races.
But for the second main contributory factor, the one which was chance, none of this would have gone quietly into history.
Its nature was not chance. The need and greed for power was apparent without looking. Solar, atomic, tidal, thermal aerial, geothermal — any and every source of power was proving inadequate to supply man’s growing demands. When the threat loomed largest, that the next billion would sleep on the bare ground and moan naked through the cold of whiter, new power was found by a group of men who thought about the benefits science had brought. One did not even have to concentrate on weaponry to see disaster implicit in any new step; even the mercy of antibiotics led to babies weeping from hunger.
Traditionally, there had been a brotherhood of science transcending nationality and race and creed. It had become formalized; it had to speak with a clear voice. It did. It became an organization selling something the world needed more than anything else — power — at a price it was desperate enough to pay — supervision.
So now, in thirty years from its beginning, the fraternity was human scientific endeavor; was progress, research, advancement of every kind.
For others.
But not for me, Lombard thought, pacing the fine hallway of the gate-of-heaven building. Not for a Cork even if he does have a genius IQ. Not for Caucasians like me.
And the girl was back beside him, discreetly informing him that the great-uncle could welcome him now.
Sun was not alone in his stark pale office. Lombard was taken aback; he had expected to find no one else present, for it fitted the traditional respect for “face” that, when some unpleasantness had to occur, it should be confined to the fewest possible persons.
On the other hand, the man was here with Sun — a short man, rather portly, dressed in white, and wearing an old-fashioned pair of eyeglasses — was bent over a marble table where he was busy preparing tea over a tiny brazier. That too could be made to fit, Lombard decided bitterly.
Can’t just toss a Cork student out on his ear — international repercussions, whispers about prejudice. So have a high official broach the news discreetly, leaning over backwards to be fair, serving tea as breakfast for the condemned man… .
Sun acknowledged Lombard’s formal greeting and bade him be seated in a chair facing his desk. After that, nothing happened for long minutes. Slowly it began to dawn on the bewildered Lombard that Sun was waiting for the man in white to finish making the tea, and that this could have only one explanation: here was someone to whom even the “great-uncle of students” had to be deferential.
Correct. The ceremonious addition of tea to water being completed, the man with glasses turned, and Sun spoke. “This is Student Lombard Jason. Student, I present you to Dr. Wing Li Minh, of the Central Committee of the fraternity.”
Lombard scrambled awkwardly to his feet. Wing gestured him back to his chair with obvious impatience; in that first moment, it was clear he was not a person to spend time on needless formality. His voice, when he spoke, was surprisingly deep for such a short man, and his English was impeccable.
“No, don’t get up! You’ll join me in a glass of tea? And — do you smoke?” One pudgy hand took a box of cigars from the corner of Sun’s desk and nipped open the lid.
“Thank you,” Lombard said, and had to swallow enormously. “I — uh — I don’t.”
Only after that, in a flood of embarrassment, did he remember the cigar in plain view in his shirt pocket, where he had stuffed it after the seller forced it on him. But it was already too late to launch into explanations; Wing had handed him a glass of tea and given another to Sun, and was sitting down with his own in a chair half-facing Lombard’s.
“Well, Student Lombard! You must have some opinion as to why you’ve been asked to call here. May I ask what you’re expecting?”
To be shown the door with olde-worlde politeness… But Lombard firmly resisted the impulse to say so. The odds were all in favor, but he might be cutting his own lifeline. He said eventually, “Well — I assumed it would be connected with my graduation thesis.”
“Ummm — yes.” Wing rubbed his rounded chin. “You haven’t yet had a project approved formally, have you? Though you have submitted ideas.”
“Two,” Lombard said stiffly. “Both original, both seeming to me of potential importance. The first one concerned the utilization of gravitational power, and when it was refused I was compelled to assume that the rejection was for political reasons. The second I believed to be innocuous on that score at least; it was a speculative study of controls which might be exertible on the process of continuous creation, and —”
“Just a moment.” Wing held up his hand. There was a glint in his eyes, but behind the heavy glasses Lombard could not tell if it was humorous or sarcastic. “Political reasons? What makes you say that?”
Lombard took a deep breath. This was risky, but he was damned if he was going to refrain from speaking his mind.
“The fraternity does not enjoy the unalloyed adulation of everyone on the planet — does it? It’s established its preeminence by insisting on the right to supervise the application of gravitational power, in which it has a monopoly, and anything which tended to show that gravipower was less than perfectly safe and effectively inexhaustible would also tend to reduce the control the fraternity exercises.”
“Interesting,” Wing grunted. “Still, I already know from your dossier that your powers of speculation are highly developed. Elucidate this matter of gravipower being ‘less than perfectly safe’.”
Lombard was puzzled at the trend of the conversation, but there was no alternative to ploughing on. He said, “Well — uh — the published figure for the effect of modern power-consumption levels on Earth’s orbit shows it diminishing by about three hundred miles per century. This is ridiculous. The extrapolations are arithmetical, to start with. Of course, it’s not a figure the fraternity authorized for publication, but equally the fraternity has never taken steps to disabuse people of the notion that it will be centuries before the result of draining power from the mass of the planet becomes detectable except with sensitive instruments.”
He was warming to his thesis now, remembering the long nights he had struggled with chalk and blackboard to turn his suspicions into verifiable figures.
“I have no access to a computer until my project is approved, of course, but preliminary calculations showed that it will be less than a century before gross effects are manifest. There’ll be a temperature rise, there’ll be increases in sunburn among Corks and lighter-skinned people, there’ll be —”
“I have in fact seen the draft of your project,” Wing interjected quietly, and Lombard blushed with anger at himself. If this interview was to determine his fate as a student here, he wasn’t making a good showing so far. Overlooking a high-order probability like that!
But Wing didn’t seem put out. He leaned back in his chair and murmured, “It would appear that you have strong views on this subject, political or technical. Is this so?”
“Well — well, yes, I have to admit it is.”
“Expound a little, then!”
Lombard licked his lips miserably. Seeking inspiration from the bare beige walls, and finding none, he decided to plunge ahead regardless. “Frankly, I think this is just another case where human fascination with our own ingenuity is going to tie us in knots and create more problems than we’ve solved. The standard examples like antibiotics which caused gross overpopulation and geriatrics which led to a top-heavy society with too many nonproductive retired members — and the exhaustion of oil as fuel when it could have been infinitely more useful as a source of complex organics — these are going to pale into insignificance beside the result of tampering with the solid substance of the planet as we’re now doing.”
“And you think that your project for a graduation thesis on this subject was turned down because you touched on an overly sensitive subject? Goodness me.” The archaism sat well on Wing’s rather grandmotherly manner. “I assure you this is not the case. The project was turned down simply because your calculations were wrong.”
Lombard jerked upright. He dared not voice his disbelief, but in the silence of his skull he was crying: Wrong? I can’t believe it — I checked and double-checked… !
Reading his reaction from his face, Wing sighed. “Touchy young man, aren’t you? You’re American, I believe?” On Lombard’s nod: “From what particular district? Missouri, by any chance?”
“No — no, California, actually — but I don’t quite…”
“Never mind. A rather recherché reference, I’m afraid, and quite irrelevant. Excuse me. I was about to show you where you went adrift.”
He turned a file-playback, standing on the corner of Sun’s desk, so that Lombard could see it also, and worked the riffle key to run through the contents as far as the draft of the first thesis project Lombard had submitted. In the second of the four basic equations from which the entire argument derived, someone had inserted a tiny question mark; it recurred with each successive derivation from the postulate, growing bigger, until finally an irritable hand had scrawled, “Error now of order 250 percent, augmenting.”
“You see,” Wing said gently, “you have to treat this as a median, not as a mean, and it makes all the difference in the world.”
An invisible hand closed on Lombard’s throat. He could not utter the words he wanted to use in answer, and perhaps it was as well.
“However,” Wing continued affably, “it took a computer of half-megabrain capacity to trace the error, and everyone felt it was a creditable effort despite being wrong. Besides that, there are comparatively few students here who have the determination to tackle gravipower theory on their own.”
“There are good reasons,” grunted Lombard, his voice croaking back to normality. “Unless the fraternity lets you, it’s not something you can do anything with when you leave here, and until you know that you’re going to qualify it seems silly to concentrate on a subject both damned difficult and also maybe of no damned use.”
Sun, who had been sitting in absolute silence, so far forgot his impassivity as to register horror at the use of swearwords to someone so superior in rank, but Lombard took no notice. Wing counted here, not Sun, for all his honorifics.
“True,” Wing allowed. “But so rich in potentialities… Not merely the cure for our local problems, giving us power and to spare for the foreseeable future, but also enabling us to achieve manned spaceflight on an economic basis. You’re aware, presumably, that the Martian expedition came home a short time ago?”
“Yes. I can’t say I followed the news very closely.”
“Another subject on which you have strong views?”
Lombard nodded fiercely. “To spend so much time and so much effort on essentially fruitless dabbling into space is absurd. The job should be done properly or not at all, with vast fleets of automatic data-collection ships, and if necessary we should be prepared to allot a century to analyzing their findings. This half-hearted prying, with —how many is it? Three men? — in a gravipower ship, won’t get us anywhere.”
“I think you’re being unjust,” Wing countered mildly. “A few minutes ago you were in effect accusing the fraternity of not looking ahead, by saying that gravipower would create problems in its turn, and we’d be bogged down by them. Well, you’re quite correct about the long-term effect of using gravipower on the orbit of the Earth, so I don’t see why you should object to our exploring alternatives. The reduction of the diameter of the Martian orbit to zero, for example, would theoretically supply our needs for one billion years at the present rate, the same holding true of Jupiter at the present rate of increase.” He beamed over the top of his glasses at Lombard’s discomfiture.
“However, to revert to a somewhat different topic — the second of your thesis projects — it wasn’t turned down.”
“I — ” Lombard was beginning to reel under the succession of shocks. “But I had a letter saying I was to submit another subject, so even though it didn’t say outright that they’d rejected the project I naturally assumed…”
“I regret to say there was a slight panic, in a quarter which ought to be entirely immune from such disorders.” Wing looked markedly unhappy. “You see, this idea of exerting control over the process of continuous creation is almost unique, and the nature of the single other occasion on which the fraternity has run across it was such as to startle and even alarm a conservatively-minded bureaucrat who a century ago would probably have found his niche as a security officer.”
“Does this mean I’m to be allowed to submit my thesis on that subject after all?” Lombard was half out of his chair by now.
“Oh no.” Whig shook his head. “Did I give you that impression? I’m sorry. No, you’re going to Mars next, because it was in the debriefing of the expedition that the idea of controlling continuous creation cropped up. You’re young and presumably healthy enough to stand the strain, and gravi-power makes spaceflight much more comfortable than it was with rockets; you certainly have an exceptional IQ if you can run mental calculations which tax the power of a sizeable computer; and finally you’ve hit on and investigated an area where no one else has yet intruded. Accordingly you have as it were elected yourself for membership of the second expedition to Mars.”
It took Lombard a long time to react. He did so with a single burning word — “Why?”
“Come with me and I’ll show you the reports of the Mars expedition,” Wing said, rising. “You’ll note that I say ‘reports’ plural, and believe me, this is no casual distinction.”
So numbed that he committed the extreme discourtesy of ignoring Sun completely, Lombard followed him out of the office.
The sound of footsteps in the spinal corridor of the ship was a warning to Louis Abubekar that his brief interlude of privacy was at an end. Stifling a sigh, he made quick alterations in his pose, so that when the door-panel slid back he looked as though he had been really making checks on the instrument board, instead of getting lost in his own gloomy thoughts.
The intruder was Ho Chen; there was no mistaking his light, almost womanish tread for the firm stride of the third crewman, Chandra Bahadur.
“We were wondering what had become of you,” Ho said softly.
“I could hardly have got lost,” Abubekar said. “The ship isn’t big enough.”
A sketch of a smile crossed Ho’s oval, sallow face, and he seated himself with economical motions in the chair next to Abubekar’s. His dark eyes scanned the display on the board.
“Everything seems to be in order, doesn’t it?” he suggested.
“Ah — yes, yes, it does.”
A pause. Then Ho said, not looking directly at his companion. “Don’t you find gravitational power amazing? So inexhaustible and yet so simple. I like Chandra’s comparison of it with an elephant: huge, and gentle at the same time.”
“Elephants go musth,” Abubekar grunted. “I hope the analogy doesn’t hold that far.”
“If it did, we’d have established the fact by now, I think,” Ho returned with complete suavity. “Moreover, consider its reversibility, as one might call it. Consider that in the locality of a mass such as a planet — Earth — one can squeeze out the power in whatever form one chooses, electrical, thermal, kinetic… And here, by applying the energy in precisely the reverse fashion, we obtain propulsive consequences; we push ourselves uphill from the sun with such ease, such comfort that we might be on the friendly surface of Mother Earth. We have gravity in miniature for our own convenience; we have warmth and light, and protection against cosmic rays and all but the largest meteors.”
Oblivious of the fact that he had lost Abubekar’s attention during this recital of trite facts, he settled more comfortably in his chair. “And it’s more remarkable still when one considers that after the early successes they achieved in the days of brute force — their ventures with rockets, I mean — they were baffled to the point of abandoning plans for exploration of further space. Their cosmonauts suffered the ill effects of prolonged free fall; radiation damage sickened them; the way seemed closed — and to their rocket-powered battering-rams, of course, it was closed.”
He paused, as though looking to Abubekar for a response, and the African started. “Oh! I guess it was, at that.”
“Precisely. And this obsession with brute force — don’t you find it strange? For within a year or two of the perfection of gravipower as source of power, the means were developed for using it as control of power, and the path to the planets was open. Two years, and we had the moon. Five years, and we had robot craft orbiting Mars and Venus. Swift progress! All of which tends to convince me that this brute force is a racial obsession, a human equivalent of dinosaurian mass, becoming obsolete. Judo, for example, was not evolved in the West.”
“Karate wasn’t either, and if there’s anything more concerned with brute force than that I’ve yet to hear of it.” Abubekar’s eyes strayed to the forward viewplate. Mars at this range was showing a distinct naked-eye disc, and their telescopes had already revealed details previously seen only in relayed TV images from robot probes. “I don’t believe it was the superior subtlety of minds conditioned to the structure of Mandarin which led to the discovery of gravipower — and I must have told you so half a dozen times. I think it could have been discovered in the West, and the whole pattern of history would have altered in consequence.”
“For the better, I suppose!” Ho bridled and gave the big African an accusing glare. “Oh, you’re certainly conditioned! You carry a European name, you prefer a European language — French or English — to your own African tongues, which I guess isn’t surprising because those weren’t flexible or adaptable enough to stretch and accommodate new concepts. We on the other hand had a heritage of millennia of civilization and a mode of communication which — ”
The door-panel slid aside again, and Chandra Bahadur put his handsome light-brown face through the opening. Mildly he said, “I was fairly sure that if I left you two alone for more than thirty seconds an argument would flare up.”
“There’s no argument,” Ho snapped. “There never is, with either of you. For all your boasted freedom and national culture, you’re still carting around the burden of a colonial heritage.”
“You, my friend, are still carrying the burden of an orthodox communist education, about as relevant to the facts of twenty-first century society as thuggee.” Bahadur contrived to crane past Ho and get a sight of a dial which his body half-obscured. “I don’t know which annoys me more: a Christian, dogmatic, desperate and on the way down, or a communist, dogmatic, dog-in-the-manger and clinging to the top.”
Incredulous, Ho filled his lungs for an answering blast, and found himself so completely ignored that he let it out again in perfect silence. Abubekar was gazing at the same dial as Bahadur, their expressions identical masks of disbelief.
“I don’t suppose that could possibly be natural,” Bahadur said at last.
“Natural?” Ho glanced sideways at him. “There is no natural phenomenon at planetary temperatures which could produce this signal. At stellar temperatures, yes, but…”
“The probe dropped a beacon,” Abubekar ventured. “Could the shock of landing have jolted it into a — a higher mode of operation?” He knew the words were empty as he uttered them.
Bahadur shook his head. “That’s what I wanted to rule out. When I first saw the signal register — eight and a half hours ago approximately — there was a slim chance it could be emanating from the beacon the probe dropped to mark the firm and level landing-ground it located. It was on the visible hemisphere at that time. Now, if you look, you’ll see the planet’s turned and the beacon is around the shoulder of the globe, while the signal is considerably stronger.”
“And we’re still more than two million miles out,” Ho breathed. Catching himself, he added with mild indignation, “In which case the signal could not be from the probe if it were dead center in the visible hemisphere! We expect to get no reading until about one million miles, if then.”
There was a long silence after that, as they contemplated the only remaining explanation.
On a planet which during century on century of observation by man had shown no sign of life more spectacular than the seasonal shift of certain low-growing vegetation and some sluggish parasitic things as yet known only from blurred photos, a process was operating which generated a signal on the gravipower level. And gravipower was the climax of many thousands of years of technological evolution.
“Someone got there first,” Bahadur said with ghastly mock-English irony, and for once Ho was too shaken to pounce on this manifestation of his colonial conditioning.
The signal remained steady on the dial, without interruption, for the entire remainder of their flight. Its field strength grew in accordance with the modified inverse-square law obeyed by all known gravipower phenomena. When it was powerful enough to register on macro-as well as micro-scaled gauges, they were able to make a start on discriminating down to its physical source.
That finally ruled put the last lingering suspicion that they were being deluded, and the signal really did emanate from the beacon sent from Earth to mark a suitable landing area for the manned ships which were to follow. The beacon began to register on the micro-scale just about the same time as this mysterious new signal did so on macro-scale.
There was a long consultation after that. Ho argued vehemently for sticking to their original orders — which were to land near the beacon and conduct local exploration from there — on the grounds that the source of the gravipower signal must be artificial, and the creators of it might be dangerous.
“If we were able to keep in touch with Earth during the flight,” he granted, “we would be able to apply for revised instructions. But since an event like this was not envisaged in our briefing — ”
Bahadur’s scorn was enormous; the idea of ignoring this incredible phenomenon because it was unforeseen drove him to hoots of laughter.
Abubekar was torn by doubts for some while. After landing, they would be able to rig an antenna and signal Earth for revised orders; he pointed this out, and Bahadur countered with the valid consideration that in the meantime the unknowns—they had not yet got as far as thinking “Martians”— might be able to take some kind of action, if they were indeed hostile. They might not be aware of the ship’s approach in space, although if they had gravipower it was likely they could detect its employment at a distance; they might simply not be looking this way. Once the ship landed, however, and particularly if it used gravipower drawn from the planet to punch a message back to Earth, its existence could not conceivably be overlooked.
To this, Ho had a counter in his turn, and after a while Abubekar sat back and let them get on with it.
The journey had lasted mere weeks, compared with the long months envisaged by early spaceflight planners having only rockets to drive their vessels. But the tensions had been far less bearable than he had expected. He had known that a crew picked on a strictly racial basis — one man from each of the dominant groups of modern Earth — would suffer frictions. What he had not noticed until now, perhaps because he was too thankful that there had been no violence in their disagreements, was the lack of something.
The lack of love. That was as near as he could come to a definition.
Almost wondering, he gazed from Ho to Bahadur and back. The little tough-minded Chinese with his conservative communist dogmas and his garbled racial snobbery; the tall lean good-looking Indian with his acid wit and his professional iconoclasm — they had much in common, or they would not have been here. Both were near polymaths, skilled in many human sciences and crafts; both were temperamentally explorers — and so forth.
Yet Abubekar found with horror and amazement, watching them argue back and forth, that he could not imagine them embracing for joy, clapping one another on the back, dancing with delight over some exciting discovery. What would bring them together, arm in arm and waving bottles of wine in their free hands on the way to a celebration? Nothing.
And this was why he, normally the most gregarious of men, felt so lonely in their company on this trip; why he uncharacteristically sought privacy when he could steal it; why he felt now a tremendous surge of longing for someone else — for something else, even! — so long as it was different from these his companions.
He slapped the table at which they sat disputing together, and said, “I’ve made up my mind. I think we should locate the source of the signal and land close by.”
“Exactly as I’ve been saying!” Bahadur crowed.
Rigorist though he was, there must have been enough of a spark of enthusiasm in Ho for him to feel relieved that his view did not gain approval. He made no attempt to win Abubekar back to his own side, but rose and went quickly to see how the strength of the signal had increased while they were talking.
“Don’t worry!” Bahadur called after him in a jovial voice. “The Martians will still be at home when we call!”
“If one thing is certain,” Ho muttered, contemplating the astonishing signal on the dial, “it is that these are not Martians.”
“What?” Bahadur swung around in his chair, and Abubekar looked wordlessly for explanations.
“If you’re an indigenous race, and you have gravipower, do you operate it at one site only on the entire surface of your world? Oh!” He made a vigorous gesture. “Possibly a race with different concepts might not see that this was absurd, but I doubt that. I think we find one of two things: a relic, somehow functioning after a long time decaying, or else another intruder like ourselves.”
“As luck would have it,” muttered Ho, “the source of the signal is one of the very few hilly areas on the planet.” He was transferring the abstract coordinates, related only to the ship, from the dials of their instruments to the Martian grid of latitude and longitude.
“I thought luck was a bourgeois superstition,” Bahadur gibed as he moved to look over the Chinese’s shoulder. There was vitriol in the expression with which Ho reacted; Abubekar saw it and felt ice on his spine.
What would this moment of the flight have been Like without the mysterious signal? Better? He sighed to himself. Probably not; Ho would have been pontificating on the special talents that brought colored rather than Cork cosmonauts to Mars. Whereas what they ought to be doing… Abubekar couldn’t define it even to himself, and could not have described it to anyone else, but he felt it instinctively: something grave and symbolic, with pouring of wine, to be followed by laughter and dancing in celebration.
But anything of that nature he would have to organize by and for himself.
“We could set down — there,” Bahadur suggested, putting his broad thumb on a flat expanse of ground slightly darker than the typical Martian plain, twelve to fifteen miles from the source of the signal. “And go into the hilly country overland.”
“One of us, or two of us?” Abubekar half-whispered. “Do we risk one being left with the ship, or one going to this unknown meeting?”
The question had not occurred to them yet. They scowled at each other. “First thing after landing, we must tie in the gravipower units,” Bahadur muttered. “Without power, we’d be unable to defend the ship.”
“Tying in the gravipower might be exactly the conspicuous act which would draw the Mart — the — them to us,” Ho stumbled. “First on landing, we must rig the antenna and get a signal to Earth.”
“But we don’t carry the power to push a signal so far,” Bahadur snapped. “If we did, we could signal here and now!” Abubekar let his eyes wander again to the disc of the red planet looming in the forward viewplate. One would have thought that some way of sending a speech-signal back to Earth… But perhaps this was a by-product of developing gravipower, so simple, so reliable — the solar batteries maintained only the tracer signal which reported that they were on course and the amenity functions… modulate it maybe but then the risk of garbling… Besides, when the time out of touch amounted to barely a week, and after landing the mass of Mars would provide power to signal Andromeda, if desired…
“So we have to tie in the power first anyway,” Bahadur grunted. “In which case, their attention will have been drawn to us and the sensible thing will be to go visiting before they can make elaborate preparations either to hide or to move against us. What do you think, Louis?”
“Huh? I’m sorry — mind was wandering.” Abubekar clutched in his memory for the shredded wisp of sound which was Bahadur’s suggestion, and added, “Why, I’d be very glad to go.”
“So would I,” Bahadur nodded. “I think well have to fall back on Ho’s anathematized luck to make our decision. I have some dice. We’ll roll for solo as against dual expedition, and for the names of those who go and those who stay.”
The first eliminating roll named Ho as the one to go out in the sandcrawler. So did the second, when Ho nervously protested and required another try.
It wasn’t necessary for Bahadur to mention cowardice; Ho would rather have died than cede to the Indian who wanted the first opportunity to venture out across the Martian sand-flats towards the hills where the signal emanated. They set a period of twelve hours’ absence, from dawn till dusk — they were very close to the equator — and hourly radio contact.
Ho found nothing; he was getting ill-tempered when the time of return drew near. The others had come back into the ship regularly at hourly intervals to hear what he had to say, and twice frustration made him overlook the passage of time so that they were kept waiting and worrying. It was a heavy job for two men, to rig the gravipower units and tie the intake solidly to the bedrock after boring twenty thousand feet down with a stored-power mole; these unnecessarily prolonged interruptions annoyed Bahadur and he made bitter, sarcastic cracks at Ho over the microphone.
He did, however, retain sufficient self-detachment to accept a tranquilizer when Abubekar broke out their stock and pushed one into his hand.
“There’s only one explanation,” Ho grumbled when he came back to the ship, face deeply marked where the rim of his oxygen mask had pressed into the flesh. “The source must be underground. Deep down, at that.”
“Then I’ll take the mole when I go out tomorrow,” Bahadur shrugged. “It can be adapted to seek thermal strata, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t be made to home on a gravipower signal.”
But Abubekar rattled the dice in his clenched hand and gently reminded Bahadur that they hadn’t yet settled the order in which the rest of them were to go out. He hoped to win the throw, not because he especially wanted to venture out among the low whaleback hills but because he thought Bahadur was in poor shape psychologically to make the journey himself.
In fact, he did win the right to make the next trip.
After sunset they got a signal to Earth, and there was a great deal of excitement at the distant end of the radio beam. Cautious general approval was given for the course of action decided on; information was passed on how to adapt certain of the ship’s technical equipment as projectile and beam weapons — much of this, incidentally, Abubekar had worked out in his head during the voyage — and permission was given to let the more normal aspects of Martian life go unrecorded until this mystery was fathomed.
Abubekar set out shortly after dawn, made two on-the-hour reports of negative content, and then when making the third one astonished his companions by stating that he was coming back to the ship and they must leave for Earth at once. He broke contact before his hearers could demand an explanation, and shortly was seen driving the sandcrawler at maximum speed down the dunes towards the ship.
When he came in and peeled off his oxygen mask, his face was transfigured, and the whites of his eyes stood out perfectly round as he stared at memory and gave his report in a thread-like whisper.
“I know what it is and what it means — I heard, I heard! Listen, and don’t interrupt whatever you do. It’s like half a dream, and it’s fading.”
On the table next to Ho’s elbow, the recorder hummed. The microphone was pushed fractionally closer to the speaker.
“Listen. On my third pass from the snag-tooth hill you saw yesterday” — a nod to Ho — “to the shallow greenish valley, I saw someone come out between a couple of boulders. I was still a long way off and going slow for the bad surface, all rocks. I looked a second time, and she was still there.”
“She?” Bahadur echoed incredulously.
“God, don’t interrupt! I drove close and there she was, standing still and smiling. A woman. At first I thought she must be some kind of an illusion — my mind had given way or something — I mean, a woman out there and in some kind of flimsy close-fitting clothes… Except that she wasn’t, but I’ll come to that.
“She proved she wasn’t a phantom. She came and gave a good hard rap on the door of the crawler. I went and let her in, and she came in and spoke to me.”
Eyes exchanged glances of dismay. Abubekar didn’t see them; his own gaze was fixed rapturously on the past.
“Listen! They’re like us. They come from the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and out there they’re fighting for their lives. Something from another galaxy — another local group altogether — has moved in and is destroying them, and coming towards our own galaxy now. Something monstrous and greedy and hostile. So they’ve been watching our galaxy, hoping to give someone here a warning before it was too late. She said the use of gravipower is what they look for — they can detect it over interstellar distances — and they’ve found someone else using it but there wasn’t any chance of communicating, they were so different, more like the enemy they’re fighting, and then they spotted our use of the force, and they hoped desperately, and she volunteered to come here.” Abubekar wiped his face. “And we’ve got to go back and warn Earth at once!”
Bahadur gave a disgusted groan. “She’s like us, hm? And walking around out there without an oxygen mask?”
“I asked about that. I couldn’t see it at first because it was quite faint, but she had this glow all around her — like an aura! And she said it kept her warm and served the same purpose as a suit like ours.” Abubekar’s voice was quite calm.
“And she just — just came here?” Ho snapped. “By cracking her fingers and saying ‘abracadabra’? ”
“I tried to understand that, but she couldn’t make it clear. It has something to do with controlling the force of continuous creation. There’s a non-space in which gravitational force has an effect but no other regular force does, and from this non-space a signal can be returned to normal space accompanied by the creation of matter. And she was created here to act as a — a guide for us.”
“How does she like it? And why didn’t she go to Earth?”
“I asked about that. It’s because it’s easier to transmit the signal to a body of low mass. She’s okay here — only been here a short time, and she has everything she needs, a complete sort of home, you see…” His voice trailed away, and his eyes flickered from brown face to sallow face and back.
“You don’t believe me,” he whispered.
“If she’s all that eager to warn us on Earth,” Bahadur said in a musing tone, “why didn’t she come back here with you, instead of just telling you to tell us?”
“There wouldn’t be room for her in the ship, would there? Besides, she’s a woman and — ”Abubekar stopped short as the ridiculousness of considering female modesty in face of an alleged galactic catastrophe broke in on him. He put his face in his hands and began to sob.
That night, just after sunset, they reported putting Abubekar on temporary sedation; he should be awake and back to normal by noon next day. That was when Bahadur set out to explore the same area as Abubekar had covered.
And his reports, continuous because the work back at the ship was now complete with power coming in in unlimited amounts, were astonishing too.
“This whole area seems to have been churned up with a spade!” he commented. “The side of that hill is freshly exposed — the water-roots of the plants are still gleaming with moisture. And something’s sort of stirred around the level sand which you both described. Like a spoon in a sugar bowl.
“You know, I’ve been thinking over something you said,” he continued in a musing tone. “About our finding either relics or other intruders. What happened to poor Louis could be subjective, or objective. I’m not going to speculate there just yet. But I have been wondering what happens if you leave a gravipower device sucking mass from the ground, sort of idling, for a million years or so — does it create fault-systems on a world that’s otherwise geologically stabilized? Does it perhaps slowly sink into the ground as a result of its own operation, until eventually it comes to rest at the planet’s core or gets crushed too badly on the way to continue operation?”
There was a pause. “The foregoing reflections were prompted by what I’ve been watching, just ahead of me here. A large polyhedral object, partly buried, about the size of the ship, shiny but badly scratched by the sand. It gives the unmistakable impression of having burrowed its way to the surface during the night. I am going on foot for a closer look — I’d rather not take a gravipower crawler nearer than this distance — and taking all the weaponry I have.”
That was the last ever heard of Chandra Bahadur, except for an explosion which took place five and a half minutes afterwards.
The first Mars expedition left the following day. On direct orders from Earth.
The day was developing along such a totally different line from the one he had gloomily foreseen on his arrival at the fraternity building that Lombard found himself bewildered and incapable of grasping the mass of information thrust into his possession. He looked blankly at Wing.
“This is only the most superficial abridgment, of course,” the stout Chinese murmured. “The complete progress of the expedition was recorded, in especially great detail after the ship passed the limit of direct speech communication with its base, and since the return of the survivors a mass of statements and examination reports and — and so forth has been accumulated. A full study, under accelerated time, could not be compressed into less than a month.”
“But why are you telling me all this?” Lombard demanded. “Only because I chanced to mention the control of continuous creation as a possible project for my thesis?”
“Partly, yes, but partly also for other reasons I mentioned to you earlier.” Wing sat back as far as he could in his chair. They were in a miniature theatre at the very top of the building, in a corner of the bridge-like roof, equipped for full-depth-illusion wall-to-wall projection of recordings, and the edited version of the drama of the Mars expedition had been the most vivid such projection Lombard had ever seen. “For the moment, however, leave aside all scrutiny of my — our — motivation. Put such questions as you feel the abridged recording left unanswered.”
One thing was clear to Lombard: if he handled this problem correctly, he need never fear again that he would be summarily dismissed from the university — indeed, he would go on to heights his ambition had never encompassed. He made a tremendous effort to still his chaotic mind.
“Ah — this thing which Bahadur reported, just before the explosion. Is it objective? Is it there?”
“Oh yes.” Wing thumbed a switch on the console from which he had run the viewing session. The lights faded again, and the Martian landscape returned, dull red, vaguely unreal. In the centre of the wall-to-wall screen the object Bahadur had described stood out incongruously. As he had said, it was large, polyhedral, shiny although dulled by uncountable scratches. Apart from the scratches and the angles of its multicornered shape, it was featureless.
“They got these shots of it shortly before they lifted,” Wing commented. “Since then, we’ve managed to locate it from orbit with a robot probe. It hasn’t moved since it emerged to the surface, as far as we can tell.”
“Emerged?” Lombard didn’t wait for the answer, but leaned forward. “Yes, I see — the way the sand is piled up under the higher end. It does look as if it pushed up from below. Would Bahadur’s speculation have been right, in that case?”
“That it was drawing gravipower at idling level for a long period of time and ultimately sank below ground because of the stresses it created in the vicinity? Yes, this is one consistent explanation, but of course it only leaves more problems to solve.”
Lombard hesitated. “As to Bahadur himself: what became of him?”
“That.” Wing picked up a light-wand and stabbed a blur on the dry red soil of the picture.
“That? Why, it’s no more than a — ” The words died. Wing had selected the blur for magnification, and it loomed up suddenly enormous: a heap of twisted metal and plastic, and three white long bones jutting up from the tangled mess.
“It would appear that the stored power in his rather crude weapons — he was carrying an improvised projectile weapon and two laser-guns made from welding tools — was shorted through his body on a frequency which disrupted the surface tension of the cells. At any rate, his protoplasmic constituents were distributed over a wide area, and the rest is as you see.”
Lombard swallowed very hard. “But this was the only — uh — attack, as it were?”
“Unless you construe Abubekar’s rambling story as an attack on the psychic level. But that scarcely makes sense.”
“Yes.” Lombard gazed unseeing at the pale bones on the screen. “Isn’t it far more likely that it was a hallucination? To start with, this — this woman he referred to: she must have addressed him in some language known to him. From the recording, I didn’t see that this point struck his companions — at any rate, they didn’t ask how she made herself understood.”
“No. According to Ho’s later statements, both he and Bahadur — who discussed it with him when Abubekar was under sedation — immediately concluded he was out of his mind, and put the questions only in the hope of shocking him back to a state where he could see through his own false beliefs, not because they wanted the information. As you saw, his reaction on reaching this degree of self-questioning was to break down in tears.”
Wing blanked the screen and put on the lights once more. “You see the situation we’ve got ourselves into? We have two conflicting stories from the survivors: Abubekar is inflexible in his assertions about the woman from the Greater Magellanic Cloud, whereas Ho saw nothing. And Bahadur, who might have supplied some clue enabling us to fathom Abubekar’s incredible tale, isn’t — ah — available.” He gave a gruesome chuckle.
“You attach great weight to the matter of controlling continuous creation,” Lombard said slowly. “Was it an idea which Abubekar had had previously, perhaps?”
“Shrewd,” Wing approved. “This possibility occurred to us. If this was the case, he never mentioned it to anyone that we can establish. He might have had it in the back of his mind, a half-formed theory — perhaps in the same form that it came to you, an excuse to hang together some elegant speculative mathematics.” He smiled as Lombard flushed. “Forgive me, but it’s true, isn’t it? You never conceived of your finding a practical application for it.”
“Of course not,” Lombard muttered. “I only thought that the non-spatial modes by which energy transfers the full distance around a toroidal cosmos — ”
“This is not the subject under discussion,” Wing reminded him gently.
“I — I’m sorry.” Lombard’s head was beginning to ache. “There are so many questions arising from this, though…”
“I am anxious to test your reactions by comparing the order of priority you give the leading questions with the order we ourselves arrived at after much analysis.” Wing let the words ride the air, feather-light.
“Since his return,” Lombard ventured, “what changes has Abubekar made in his original story?”
“Thank you — you begin to bear out some of my confidence in you.” Wing lowered the lights again. “None. He has, however, elaborated very many aspects of it. I’m going to show you an edited recording which contains the briefest and most — ah — documented version of each of his main statements.” A grayish Abubekar appeared in the screen, flickering through sharp gestures from the chair in which he sat like a badly programmed machine. The high-speed flickering ended, and he was there, talking normally.
“No, they inhabit the third planet of a G-type sun which isn’t visible from Earth — hidden behind a small cluster.” A quick cut; the recording was punctuated with these, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, and it was startling to see the man wearing different clothes, or changing from tired to morning-fresh in no time. “They have advanced space-travel and the level of their technology is centuries ahead of ours at least.” Cut. “They have known for a long time of other life-forms in their own Cloud and possibly beyond, but no other highly civilized species.” Cut. “The exact nature of the threat wasn’t made completely clear — I have the impression that humanoid species are psychologically incapable of formulating the concept exactly, but it’s a threat to all forms of competing life. It has already established dominance over so much of the Cloud it may strike towards our galaxy.” Cut. “ — traveling by the same method used to bring her here and warn us, which in fact they discovered by observing the oncoming threat.” Cut.
“In essence this is making use of the normal process of continuous creation to bring about non-spatial, non-temporal transference of mass in a desired form. There is a non-spatial continuum connected to our normal space by the fact that gravitational forces act partly within it — I have the math for it and can probably write it out for you.”
“He did,” Wing parenthesized, holding the recording for a second so that Abubekar gaped ridiculously on the wall, mouth half open, eyes staring like a dead fish.
And cut and continue. “A kind of standing wave can be generated in this continuum which peaks into normal space in exactly the same way as the random noise does which gives rise to spontaneously appearing particles in empty space — I’ll show you how that ties into current cosmogony later, if you like; it’s neat!” Cut. “But imposing form on the signal makes it possible to create at the point of emergence anything one can formulate into a signal — even a living, aware being.” Cut. “Of course there’s no chance of her going home, but she’s only a doppelganger — her original self is back in the Cloud, carrying on the fight.” Cut.
“The motive behind this warning to us? Roughly this. They want to pass on to us, as their natural allies — in bodily form, but also in psychological attitude — the experience they’ve gained in fighting the menace in the Cloud. Even if they’re defeated, they won’t have lost completely.” Cut. “They’ve been expecting for upwards of a thousand years that the menace would become overweeningly confident and strike towards our galaxy, and they’ve been frightened that they might not contact a native race in time. But they’ve now done so, and with the information they can give us, in another thousand years we should be unchallenged rulers of the galaxy — all its billion suns, think of that!” Cut on a wide-eyed look of awe; instantly changed to a set frown.
“Probably there will be — opposition, I mean. She warned me that there are already signs of the menace striking into this galaxy. We may come across other races serving the interests of the menace — this has apparently been a common technique in the Cloud, to use other races as tools and then blot them out when their usefulness was at an end.” Cut. “We must be determined, though. Ours is possibly the only species which can guarantee the survival of human-type consciousness in the entire local group.” Cut.
“It comes clearer all the time. I can only assume that the idea I had of her speaking to me was due to my mind supplying a conventional mode of communication. But the more I think about it, the clearer it all comes even though I felt at first it would fade like a dream. Some sort of projective telepathy — that’s my best explanation.”
“So you see,” Wing murmured, shutting off the recording, “it did occur to the examiners to ask how she made herself understood.”
Lombard was staring at nothing. He gave a start and half-turned. “What? Oh, I’m sorry. Look, did he ever write out this math he referred to?”
“I have a facsimile of his original draft. Here, somewhere.” Wing turned over a pile of documents before him. “Also I can get you a computer evaluation which is rather too bulky to carry around, running as it does to some two hundred pages.”
“That won’t be necessary right now,” Lombard muttered, knitting his brows over the chicken-scratch symbols into which Abubekar had condensed his theory. “Hm — studied under Rotweiler, by the look of this. Rotweiler teaches an unreliable method of expanding codon functions.” He hesitated. “It can lead one into the same trap I fell into myself, over that extrapolation of the effects of drawing gravipower — taking a mean for a median, that sort of error.”
“The expansion of the codon function in Equation Two is a Rotweiler expansion,” Wing agreed.
“I’m sorry.” Lombard kept his eyes on the paper. “I should know better than to be patronizing towards you, sir.” He took out a stylus and wrote in tentative values for some of the symbols before him; then he started to concentrate in earnest.
Fifteen minutes of dead silence ensued before he lifted his head and gave the older man an aggrieved look.
“It can’t be done. It just can’t. And I don’t care how many thousand years they are ahead of us.”
Wing chuckled. “Which leads you to conclude what?”
“That whatever Abubekar found on Mars, it was of the nature of a gigantic confidence trick.”
Wing nodded very slowly, four or five times. “If you’re willing, Student Lombard, you’re going to go to Mars — and if it will assuage your sensitive spot, you’re being chosen not to maintain some arbitrary racial balance, like the first Mars crewmen, but on your own rather surprising merits.”
One hectic week later, and he was in the latest of many, many viewing rooms: this one, the main briefing hall at the Sahara Space Grounds. Nervous, wishing that Wing could be here because over the past several days he had established a sort of friendship — certainly a good personal relationship — with the older man, Lombard covertly eyed the distinguished arrivals as they moved into their places.
Precisely at the scheduled time, the lights went down. A single glowing scan remained, playing over a front seat close to the screen, and after a pause the screen lit with the image of the man in that seat: medium-tall, hook-nosed, with a luxuriant beard.
Looking at himself in the screen, and from the screen looking at himself and the audience behind him, he said to the relaying microphones, “Good day to you all. I am Captain Motilal, as you probably all know, but I wanted to state my name to emphasize a point it’s essential to get across to you. This is a general-purposes meeting, in the literal sense. I propose to call on key members of the group to summarize important aspects of our task; I know you have all talked them over with each other during the past several weeks, but communication is imperfect and I want to make certain beyond a doubt that the indispensable facts are in the possession of all of us.”
He paused, his eyes seeming to rove the hall, although in fact he could only be looking up at his own magnified self.
“Essentially, our first Mars expedition was a cooperative, for political reasons well known to all of you. Among three intelligent men it was possible to establish a working routine which did not require the exercise of final authority. Our second expedition is going to be far bigger, and will grow during the time it is on Mars. We depart with three ships: the ship used by the first expedition, and two vessels hurriedly converted from the Lunar run, capable of carrying in all more than twenty personnel. I shall refer to them as Alpha, Beta and Gamma respectively.
“I have been appointed captain of the expedition mainly because I have rather considerable experience in space; it seems to be an appointment which meets with general approval and I’m flattered by this acceptance.”
There was a sporadic burst of applause. Lombard, who happened to be seated next to a group of four Indians, was not reassured to see that it was Indians and only Indians who clapped.
“The three ships which from the main body of the expedition will be followed by others, also converted from Lunar vessels. The work in which all will be engaged falls into four main categories, and I shall now call on the persons in charge of the work in each category to describe for the benefit of us all the nature of their tasks.”
He glanced sideways. “Dr. Miriam Kofi is in charge of the investigation of the alien object, whatever it may be. Dr. Kofi?”
A fresh scan came on, several seats to Motilal’s right, and the image in the screen changed to that of a buxom, fortyish woman whose crisply-nappy hair contrasted with her aquiline-Berber nose.
“We are certain of one thing,” she began briskly. “Some object not of human origin but definitely not of natural origin either exists on Mars. That is to say, we know it to have existed until approximately this time yesterday — the robot probe which we sent into stationary orbit over its location ceased to transmit its regular picture then, and we assume it either suffered a breakdown or else was struck by a meteor. However, the object had been under observation for several weeks, and had shown no sign of life or of change.
“Clearly, we must investigate the object as thoroughly as possible. Confronted with something totally unprecedented, it is hard to know where one might begin, but I have made a computer evaluation of the problem and settled on a team of five people including myself as suitable to conduct the study. We begin with a bomb disposal expert; tampering with potentially dangerous mechanisms is a job for experts. He is also, luckily for us, a historian of industrial design, and carries in his head a wider cross-section of form and purpose than I suppose anyone else living. We include also a metallurgist, a general chemist, a physicist and myself, an engineering physicist. Our task as I see it is to determine first the nature of the object, then its function and purpose, and finally if possible its origin.”
The screen blanked. Captain Motilal’s voice was heard softly. “Dr. Hector Nukutiva of the Observatory of the Moon will be in charge of the — ah — areological aspects. Dr. Nukutiva?”
Another scan, in the second row this time, and on the screen a thin, untidy-haired man with the undatable youth-fulness of a Filipino or Polynesian. He spoke very fast and with poor articulation, but Lombard and almost everyone else present had heard the whole of what he had to say on previous occasions.
“Prima facie one would expect the object to have originated on the planet where it was found. The members of the first expedition hit on the suggestion that it might have been in operation for a geologically significant period of time, so causing faults to appear in local work formations and eventually sinking it into the ground. Our two tasks are as follows: first, to determine whether the object was in fact buried, if so how deep, and also whether there are any other similar relics anywhere else, not operating and therefore not detectable by straightforward gravipower — uh — detectors; and second, to survey the natural resources and also life forms on the planet in much greater detail than is possible with remote observation and if we can eliminate the possibility that there was a highly civilized Martian race, now vanished. This will leave us with the certainty of alien intrusion, more than likely extrasolar.”
There was a shivering; it went through the audience like winter wind across a field of grass.
“Dr. Kwa Feng,” Captain Motilal said. “In charge of the psychological aspects of the investigation.”
Dr. Kwa was a tough-mannered Chinese with a scar on his left cheek and a voice which sounded as though he had spent years perfecting a totally noncommittal inflection. He was speaking before his image was in focus on the screen.
“You will all have heard of the disturbing effects suffered by Louis Abubekar of the first expedition. He recalls, as clearly as real memory, being confronted by a woman wearing a field of force like an aura which enabled her to sustain life on Mars, who gave him details of a threat to humanoid beings in the Greater Magellanic Cloud against which they wish to enlist our aid as allies, and in return for this help promised that we should become within a thousand years the dominant race of our own galaxy.
“It might be assumed that this was a simple hallucination. Pointers towards this include the fact that Abubekar is an incurable romantic, in sharp contrast to the pragmatism of his companions and especially to their intense scepticism he admitted quite freely that he argued in favor of a landing in the vicinity of the then-mysterious gravipower signal because he was feeling the strain of being pent up with Ho and Bahadur. However, there are two factors which the hallucination theory fails to account for.
“First, the fact that Bahadur located the alien object in just that position where Abubekar the previous day described his meeting with the woman. Second, that he was killed when he did so. It is far more likely that some objectively existent force was exercised on Abubekar’s mind than that he had a hallucination due entirely to nervous stress.
“The nature of such a force… ?” In the screen, Kwa gave a shrug. “It’s beyond our present knowledge. But by keeping a close watch on the psychological state of the members of the present expedition and maintaining tamper-proof mechanical records as a supplement to our own memories we expect to avoid the most serious effects of it. It is noteworthy in this connection that neither Ho nor Bahadur experienced any comparable delusions.”
“As to the physical dangers,” Motilal said when Kwa had finished, “once established on-planet our ships will be among the best-armed and best-defended in history, drawing on the limitless power available from the mass of Mars. During the descent and the flight, of course, this will not be so, but short of aliens coming to challenge us in space it seems unlikely that we shall be in need of weaponry before landing… And so we come to category four, about which there has been considerable dispute.” He decided to put his image back on the screen for the rest of his remarks, and scowled reprovingly down, four times life-size.
“The recommendations of the fraternity are not made lightly. For myself, having had my life saved more than once by a fraternity suggestion, I’d agree to wearing amulets if they told me to. Some people have raised objections on fairly rational grounds — I’m not competent to assess the scientific aspects. Others have shamed us and themselves by kicking up a fuss on racial grounds.”
He’s talking about me. Vague surprise crossed Lombard’s mind.
“We’re going to hear now from Jason Lombard the reasons for his selection as a member of the expedition, and if there’s anyone here who closes his mind because of the man’s color, I won’t have him on any of the ships we’re sending. Clear?”
The reasons for my selection are not clear to me. Lombard stared at his own image as the scan for his seat came on, not liking the bitter lines frustration had etched around his mouth. He was the only Cork in the room, as for the past week he had been the only Cork in the many discussion meetings he attended with or without Wing.
So some of his intended colleagues were objecting to his inclusion on racial grounds. This was going to have to be damned good, then.
He cleared his throat, and the noise was startlingly loud over the relaying mikes.
“The most remarkable single aspect of Abubekar’s fantastic story about an invasion from the Greater Magellanic Cloud is the means alleged to have been adopted by the mystery woman in order to get here. Essentially it’s supposed to involve the transmission of a gravipower signal through the non-spatial co-continuum — excuse the jargon; I’ll explain more clearly if anyone loses touch, but this is a summary — resulting in the creation of a desired object at a distant point. Well, in fact noise in the co-continuum does correspond to, if not ‘cause’ in the literal sense, continuous creation of particulate matter in our cosmos. Coherent signaling is something altogether different. Now the math Abubekar says he got from the woman to make clear how the transfer to Mars operated incorporates a series derived from a codon function. Codon functions are used to analyze the properties of closed toroidal spaces, an analysis which Abubekar could not have correctly undertaken since his student days were under Professor Rotweiler, who taught a questionable method of expanding these functions which may result in convergent series on zero, and indeed this is what happens if you work Abubekar’s equations through with a Rotweiler expansion: you get the verdict that transmission of a complex signal through the co-continuum is possible over infinitely great distances. In fact, on looking with the jaundiced eye which infinity ought always to provoke, you see that the series has begun to converge on zero instead of — well, never mind what it ought to be doing; let me just say it’s not doing it.
“Where this notion entered into Abubekar’s vision of the mystery woman is uncertain. He may have been playing around with it, not telling anyone; under deep hypnosis Dr. Kwa has found some indication of this. On the other hand, he may have received it stone-cold from outside, along with the rest of the vision, and the faulty math may be due to his own later attempts to explain his vision in rational terms, adding in corroborative detail.
“It just so happens that I am the only person to have come to the notice of the fraternity because of speculation about controlling the process of continuous creation. I submitted a project for my graduation thesis on this, actually, and before doing so I spent several months evaluating and re-evaluating the relevant math.
“In view of the fraternity, this makes me important. Because whatever the truth of Abubekar’s vision, whether a menace from the Magellanic Clouds threatens us or not, whether the alien object we’re going to investigate is a trap or a present to mankind, the combination of limitless power— which we now have — with an actual means of controlling the process of spontaneous, continuous creation that keeps our universe in balance would be the key to the cosmos— not just our galaxy, but the plenum.”
Up till the moment when he found himself in his cabin aboard Beta, the ship off the Lunar ore-run which had been converted to serve as the first supplementary Mars vessel, Lombard had let the staggering pace of events carry him forward.
“We have one advantage in the fraternity,” Wing had said confidentially during a brief wait they had had to make outside the office of another senior executive in that organization. “We act as a coordinated unit. Since the discovery on Mars, this problem has automatically acquired precedence over every other; clearly, something touching mankind as a species surpasses anything concerning our separate branches. It has been suggested that we may develop — like benevolent organizations throughout history — into a despotism; I’m inclined to doubt it. The existence of gravipower will of itself break our monopoly; limitless power plus indefinite leisure will ensure that the techniques escape our control sooner or later. But by then, I trust, we shall have come to accept the need for discipline.”
Philosophical reflections aside, there was no doubt that the fraternity’s high-gear operations could whirl people in their wake like dead leaves behind a hurrying groundcar. Lombard checked his watch, made a mental adjustment of time-zones, and discovered that at precisely this moment ten days earlier he had been at the fraternity building on the edge of the Afrasian U. campus, waiting to be told that his study course was discontinued.
Instead…
The contrast, considered without haste, was shocking. It gave him a sensation like being dropped into ice-cold water from a great height, all muscles contracting with shock and the repiratory muscles paralyzed for long seconds.
I’m going to Mars. Aliens have been there. I’ve done a unique thing. Am I the same person, Jason Lombard, citizen of decadent on-the-way-out culture?
He stowed the single bag he had been allowed for personal effects and sat down on the edge of the bunk, looking around the cabin. It wasn’t cramped; for size, it compared with his student apartment. But there was no question of packing in passengers. Gravipower was limited only by the mass of the body being used. Turning stored power into gravitational drive, however, was very limited by the amount of transportable power. Also men consumed stores, put an extra burden on the recyclers — also needing power — and for many other reasons were the most difficult loads to transport.
The first Mars expedition had had a flight time of about three weeks out, three and a half back. Although the same ship was flying this time as Alpha, the flight out would take four full weeks; no date for a return had been set. This was partly due to the increasing separation of the planets along their orbits, partly to less efficiency because of the older design of Beta’s and Gamma’s drive.
Alpha was to carry three persons: Captain Motilal, one of Dr. Kofi’s team, and one of Dr. Kwa’s. Gamma was to carry four, as was Beta: Dr. Kofi, Abubekar, Dr. Kwa himself and another psychologist. Beta’s list ran: Lombard, Dr. Nukutiva and his chief assistant, and the other advance member of Dr. Kofi’s team. And after them, at intervals of about a week, would follow Delta and Epsilon with the remainder of the team of twenty-two in all.
Lombard had rather hoped to be assigned to the same ship as Abubekar. He had met the burly West African and taken a liking to him; moreover, he wanted to probe and probe at the structure of his remarkable fantasy. That was ruled out by the need to keep two psychologists on the same ship as Abubekar.
Consequently Lombard was not looking forward to the actual journey, whatever the kudos in the long run. To be both cramped up with these strangers and isolated from them psychologically was a daunting prospect. After four weeks of it, he could imagine himself in Aubekar’s condition. Dr. Nukutiva and his aide were both Pacifickers, the latter from Borneo, and the remaining passenger was the bomb disposal expert off Dr. Kofi’s team — a Fric.
Contemplating four weeks in this small ship, with so much space stretching forever in all directions, brought a shiver to his spine. Abruptly he wanted to mark this departure somehow, if only by sending a farewell message to somebody. Frantically pressed for time during the briefings, the preparations, the gathering of equipment, the medical tests and all the rest of it, he had simply relied on Wing’s assurance that anyone he wished to get a message would get one, and that there would be a cover story to explain his absence from the university — for the fraternity had delayed the release of any news about strange discoveries on Mars.
This must be what Wing was referring to when he talked of the fraternity becoming a despotism. Control of power equals power. We are now utterly dependent; no other source competes for cheapness or convenience; we eat and sleep and read and woo by the grace of gravipower… The fraternity sells the power against the right to inspect whatever use is made of it, from the driver-inspector team in a wagon drawn up at the neighborhood electronics center, clear through to the economists who claim the right to approve national budgets before their own parliament or congress see the figures…
He choked off that line of thought. There had been riots in the States where desperation drove the government to accept these, the only terms on which gravipower was made available, and his parents, advocating acceptance, had been beaten to death by a mob screaming independence at any price.
Not realizing he had moved so far, he found himself at the door of the cabin, as though to go and send his message, but in fact only to distract himself by moving. He heard a tap at the door, and in some bewilderment pushed it open.
The dark face beyond was that of the bomb-disposal expert, Jimmy Adoo: compact, graceful, young-faced but with hair gone completely silver, carrying in his left hand — he was left-handed — a pair of elegant and fashionable modern pince-nez. He used these as much to conduct his own conversation, like a one-man orchestra, as to aid vision.
“Good morning, friend Lombard. Since we are to spend much time in close proximity, I felt we should become better acquainted.” He beamed.
“Why — why, that’s very kind of you. Will you come in and — ?” Uncertain, as he generally was in dealing with Frics, Lombard stood aside from the doorway.
“Thank you.” Adoo was in the cabin and the door was closed, with scarcely a whisper of sound. Elsewhere in the ship there was noise: the thrumming of the drive on test. It made the entire structure of the vessel quiver. “I felt it was a good idea, especially in view of the fact that we are fellow countrymen.”
Lombard, who had been gazing around the cabin in search of some token of hospitality it might enable him to offer a guest, swung to face the silver-haired man. He forced out, “But I thought — !”
“You thought I was a Fric? Most people do. You’re meant to.” He lowered himself fastidiously to the bunk, the one soft seat in the place. “But I make no secret of my origin — now. I was in fact born in Washington, D.C., and my name was Adams. I changed it when I emigrated to Ghana at the age of twenty-one. Even then — I’m now forty-four — I didn’t expect I’d live to see young men like you following my path to the continent of opportunity.”
Lombard could not halt the scowl which came over his face, and Adoo, seeing it, was instantly contrite.
“But that’s not the subject I came to see you about, of course. If it sounded like a gibe, I apologize — it was only meant as another example of the way the world turns upside down for us. For me, to be specific. I’m a bomb disposal expert, ha-ha! I make my living, and in fact was accepted as a member of the fraternity, because I got interested in fashions in industrial design when I was a boy. Remington’s first typewriter, which looked exactly like Remington’s sewing-machines, was what triggered my interest; then I began to specialize in ultra-sensitive mechanisms, leading naturally to such devices as bomb fuses, and when I found that the last of the great disarmament technicians was near dying I went to see him and collected from him the material for two books: his biography, and a textbook of bomb mechanisms. This makes me an expert, and as such I’m here, headed for Mars, to see what I can deduce by looking at an alien construct — after which I’m supposed to open it for inspection.”
He felt in the large side pocket of his Chinese-styled jacket and produced a thick, plastic-covered book which he thrust towards Lombard. Taking it, the other found it bore a picture of a nuclear fireball on the front, and the legend: The Infernal Machine, A Historical Survey of Explosive Devices from the Grenade to the Hydrogen Bomb, by J. Y. Adoo.
“Read it, if you want to,” Adoo grunted. “And now — have you a laymen’s version of your speciality handy?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t quite —”
“Oh!” Adoo leaned back, waving with both hands instead of merely beating time to the flow of his words with the pince-nez. “Look, I was there at the general-purpose briefing where the leaders had to explain the main lines of the job, and though I ought I guess to be ashamed to admit it, I’m admitting anyway that I didn’t get one word of what you said. I told you why I’m caught up in this — me, who never wanted to step off African soil again till his dying day — and I’d like to understand why you’re caught up in it too — fellow countryman.”
Lombard’s look of uncertainty gave way to a grin. There was something extremely likable about this voluble man with the prematurely silver hair. He said, “I’ll do my best, but I can’t be sure of succeeding, because to be frank I’m not clear why the fraternity picked on me. I haven’t even graduated, let alone got into the fraternity. And the roots of this go a hell of a long way down…” He let his eyes rove.
“It’s generally accepted that the nature of the universe is such that matter appears, spontaneously, all the time at a rate just fast enough to balance the loss of mass as it recedes at velocities exceeding that of light. The gravitational constant remains constant, the amount of matter which affects other matter remains constant — we have a steady state.
“Now gravity waves travel at light speed; hence this balance effect as matter gets carried ‘over the edge’ of space. Gravitational force is a permanent field, whose value depends on the amount of matter in the cosmos and is not subject to the limiting velocity of light. Now there has to be some place for this to — to happen in, and we call that the co-continuum. We’re trying to establish it as a path for faster-than-light travel, but we haven’t succeeded and very probably won’t ever do so. However, we have found that noise — that’s disorganized signals — in the co-continuum equates mathematically with the particulate matter being created in our normal space. They’re both countable with aleph-sub-one infinities…”
He broke off. Adoo was heaving a series of monstrous sighs. “No use, no use,” he muttered. “I’ll never get it!”
“Bear with me one more moment,” Lombard requested, cursing himself for going into far too much detail. “What it comes to is this. Energy is absorbed into the co-continuum by way of the connection between gravity waves and the gravitational field of the universe, and crops out into our space again at the rate which spatial expansion allows it to — but in the form of matter, usually hydrogen nuclei and electrons.
“If we could find some way of linking gravipower into the co-continuum, we could create matter to our own design. We could in theory re-shape the universe to our will, turning limitless power into solid matter! And it just so happens that I’m along on this trip because I’d been thinking about the subject for months and no one else in the world had given it more than a passing notice.”
“I congratulate you,” Adoo said, getting up with a grin. “I couldn’t think of it for longer than two minutes without my head aching. Well, that’s what I asked for and that’s what I got.”
He gestured at the book he had given Lombard. “Read it, and if there’s anything in it that bothers you come and ask me to explain. I’ll guarantee to get you fouled up even worse than you did me.”
He went out, and there was whistling as he crossed to his own cabin. Lombard shook his head absently, eyes on the book; then he opened it and sat down on the bunk.
It turned out to be so interesting he completely failed to notice when the ship lifted. Next time he was aware of his surroundings, they were approaching the orbit of the moon.
He had cause to be grateful for the existence of Jimmy Adoo a score of times during the trip. The obsessive nature of the problem they were going to tackle made any normal conversation almost impossible; after four full weeks, he didn’t feel he knew either Nukutiva or his aide any better than when they first went aboard. They seemed to prefer each other’s company, tolerating Adoo and ignoring Lombard, so that he wondered whether it was at Nukutiva that Motilal had addressed his reproof during the general-purposes briefing.
Jimmy Adoo, on the other hand, somehow contrived to make the single inescapable subject of their talks together into something fresh and interesting every time it came up. He would take a basic assumption about what they were going to find and suggest variations on it, alternative corollaries or consequences until they had strayed light-years and centuries away from their starting-point.
“We might pair the alternatives,” he suggested on one early occasion. “Hostile or friendly? Present or past? We won’t run short of those in a hurry.”
“Present or past? I’m not quite with you.” Lombard leaned back; he already recognized the signs that Adoo was winding up for full flight.
“Present: this is the product of a contemporary species, with which we are due to come in contact. Past: it’s the relic of a dead race, maybe of Martians, and they’ll never trouble us.”
“I see.” Lombard crossed his legs. “Well, the evidence for hostility is clear enough and would be exactly the same present or past.”
“What evidence for hostility?”
“It killed Bahadur.”
“Did it? You’re mathematical and I’m not, but I’d have said the odds were only ninety-nine percent certain. No one else was around at the time. Correct?”
Lombard nodded.
“However, let’s take this as being proof of hostility, and consider the past-time aspects. What motive fits the observed action?”
“That the hypothetical dead race didn’t merely decay and become extinct gradually. It was wiped out by enemy action and left this and other shot-from-the-grave devices behind.”
Adoo grunted. “In that case we can expect to find the relics everywhere. Vengeance for racial extermination would be undertaken thoroughly, not on a hit-and-miss basis. Hmmm!” He tapped his pince-nez on the back of his other hand. “I hope Nukutiva is good at his job!”
“There’s another possibility in this category,” Lombard said after a while.
“Which is?”
“That this is one of the weapons that did the exterminating — maybe even the weapon which did the job.”
Adoo rounded his lips into an “O” of surprise. “Why not? Yes, why not? But in that case we move towards the present, not the past. The winning race will quite possibly have survived until now. It would have had to be both thorough and selfish, and thoroughness and selfishness are high-survival traits.”
“I disagree about selfishness,” muttered Lombard, and added the explanatory jab: “Fellow Countryman!”
Adoo coughed behind his hand and hastily switched the discussion to a fresh path. “Friendly-past seems to be the most exhaustible of the groups into which we’re currently classifying —”
“Just a moment.” Lombard raised his hand. “Abubekar’s vision considered as evidence of hostile intent: that’s something we should go into first.”
“This is something I can’t get straight in my mind,” Adoo frowned. “So much of it hinges on this complex notion which you understand and I don’t — this bit about control of cosmic creation, or whatever.”
“Continuous creation.”
“You know what I mean!” Adoo put his pince-nez on and immediately took them off again. “There are paired alternatives there as well: if I have it correctly, either Abubekar was subjected to a kind of psychic hypnosis, which filled his mind with a fantasy-illusion which he later amplified to rationalize it, or else he actually received a telepathic warning and the substance of it is true.”
“Hostile versus friendly again,” Lombard said. “Either a defensive deception, or a helpful message.” He paused. “But this isn’t susceptible to argument, really. If we’re to discover which of these alternatives is true, we’re bound to look for it in Abubekar’s mind. You said you hoped Nukutiva was good at his job — I say I hope Kwa is downright miraculous at his.”
There was a long silence. Finally Adoo gave a little dry laugh.
“Know something? I feel inclined to call myself Oedipus.”
“What?”
“Oedipus. The Riddle of the Sphinx.”
Lombard looked at the smile on the dark face opposite, and a chill spread through him, half-awe, half-dismay. He said slowly, “And the answer was ‘Man’!”
“Exactly. Before we get at the truth of this, we’re going to have to answer questions about ourselves which have been left aside for thousands of years because we’re too sensitive to tackle them. And here’s this damned thing, buried in the Martian desert the same way the Egyptian sphinx was buried, and we stumble across it and it says, ‘What are you?’ A Martian Sphinx — how about calling it that?”
And from that moment on, that was what it became in Lombard’s mind: a sphinx.
That was not altogether a good thing to happen, he learned later, appropriate though it seemed at the time. For — by simple association with the original concept — as the long days of the voyage passed, he grew more and more to accept that it was a relic of the far past, that Nukutiva’s seismological investigations would reveal that it had lain buried for millennia and that this would mean it was to be considered as an archeological rather than a contemporary mystery. He argued for this view at the daily ship-to-ship conferences called by Captain Motilal, at which, after quick review of the satisfactory internal operation of the three vessels, a bull session was permitted to develop in order to keep all their minds alert and busy.
Abubekar found himself at the opposite pole. He was quite rational on every other subject except of the mystery woman who had given him the message; otherwise he would not have been permitted to make the second journey. On this one point, however, he would not budge, and sometimes the scepticism of his colleagues reduced him nearly to tears — he generally wound up shouting at Lombard, and this made the others extremely annoyed, apart from the psychologists, who were eager to have him concentrate on this curious area of his memory in the hope that it would begin to fragment, to show inconsistencies which even he would recognize, and ultimately to give clues to its basic nature.
It remained solidly mortared into his consciousness.
Exactly on schedule, they began to pick up the gravipower emanation from the sphinx, and tension grew thick in the air of the three ships. The ‘scopes began to search for the robot probe which had ceased to transmit its pictures, and eventually located it, badly adrift from its planned orbit and showing signs of a violent collision. The obvious explanation was that some stray chunk of rock from the asteroid belt had circled in towards Mars and crashed through the hull; in any event, it had served its purpose and could be left to its own devices. So long as the gravipower emanation continued, they could be certain the object of their quest was there waiting.
Some twenty hours ahead of scheduled landing-time, Adoo came tapping at the door of Lombard’s cabin asking if he wanted to see the sphinx. He did, but he was disappointed; although he intellectually realized that at this distance it would be no more than a glint of shiny metal on the blurry, over-magnified ground of the viewplate, he had subconsciously expected it to be revealed as something spectacular.
Diagnosing his reaction unerringly, Adoo clapped him on the shoulder, drawing a scowl from Nukutiva who was concentrating on the image. “Never mind! At least it hasn’t burrowed back into the sand!” he exclaimed, and Lombard forced a grin in response.
It was amazing, he reflected many times during the approach to Mars, how the existence of gravipower had changed longstanding preconceptions. Bahadur, so the recording of the first expedition had informed him, liked to compare it to an elephant: enormously strong, but also gentle. The comparison seemed a good one. It would make landings on Jupiter possible eventually; already it meant that someone like Dr. Nukutiva’s aide, who had suitably fast reflexes, could jockey the ship to its landing without more than a short piloting course, the automatics insuring against any disastrous mistake.
The three ships settled within sight of each other, some mile or so south of the spot where the first expedition had landed, that much closer to the hills among which the sphinx lurked to pose its fatal question. There was silence so solid one felt it hampered movement after the touchdown, for the engines had had to disperse kinetic energy equivalent to falling from infinity to the surface during their descent, and at last they had hit a teeth-rasping pitch of mechanical excitement. When they shut off, there was also the shock of lighter gravity, giving the sensation of floating in water over one’s head.
“Congratulations on this excellent planetfall,” Captain Motilal said from the intership radio’s speaker. “I propose that we wait one hour for signs of movement in the neighborhood, or any sign that the alien object’s level of activity has increased in response to our landing. Then we shall proceed as arranged to set up first our power supplies, then our key experimental equipment such as the seismological installations, and then and only then go to look at the alien object.”
Lombard chafed during the first hour’s waiting. When it passed with no surprises, he was muttering and irritable. The conviction that the sphinx was a relic of a past so distant as to be irrelevant was deeply ingrained in his mind now, and he was virtually certain that a majority of his companions shared this belief. All kinds of subsidiary pointers indicated the same conclusion. A recent alien visitor would not have come to Mars, but to Earth — Mars was inhabited by nothing more remarkable than low-grade vegetation and some sluggish parasitical quasi-animals not yet properly studied.
Past-time. He was sure of that. And in that case, hostile or friendly was scarcely a matter for worry.
His mind continued to run on the same course throughout the busy half-day that followed; they had touched down at about eleven A.M. local solar time. By sunset they wanted their full gravipower supplies available; with them, they would be nearly impregnable, capable of ionizing the air to ground beams directed against the ships, or of turning inch-thick zones of it into plasma to vaporize incoming missiles. Gravipower — unlimited. No figure of speech. There were also offensive weapons.
Shafts were sunk into the bedrock which afforded the best source of gravitons; pulsating energy nets were woven down the shafts, and the trickling pilot currents were set to circulating. The job was done just ahead of nightfall, and they were preparing to close the switches and draw the first Martian gravipower of the trip, and Lombard was looking for Adoo in order to claim triumphantly that his opinion about the sphinx belonging to the harmless past was correct — when the aliens launched their attack.
At that instant of time Lombard was standing with his back to Gamma, facing but looking past Alpha and having Beta on his left and to the south, in the direction of the hilly ground where the sphinx was located and also in the direction from which the attack came.
In addition to installing the power-shafts, they had set up the connecting tubes between the ships — inflatable tunnels supported by Earth-normal pressure inside them — and removed the space-plating from the observation cabins of all three ships, allowing a three-sixty-degree view from the topmost point of each. And they had set out the key elements of the defensive system, much of which needed only to be placed on the ground and coupled to the power supply.
All this work had left little time for staring around at the landscape, or even for reflecting on the astonishing fact: this is Mars! Indeed, the period of thirty seconds or so directly preceding the attack was the first chance Lombard had had to draw breath, look about him and think where he was and what it meant to have crossed the multi-million-mile gulf to another planet.
The standard pattern of oxygen mask issued to the members of the expedition was very reliable, but had one drawback: it reduced the wearer’s field of peripheral vision by more than twenty percent. For this reason, and also because he was so startled, Lombard’s only impression of the pouncing aliens was an incongrous, inaccurate picture of black fluttering leaves drifting dead from the frost-gnawed branches of a tree.
Then he was flung to the ground and tangled in an incredible welter of tacky fibers, not a net, but a random mesh which could be broken where the strands touched, if one took a hard enough grip and tugged fiercely enough, but which reattached itself the instant two strands contacted one another. He went face-foremost to the ground, but rolled, shrieking with alarm, and saw the black looming airborne shape over him before the drag of one of the mesh-strands caught at his oxygen mask.
He went on struggling by reflex for another three seconds; then he stopped, for good.
The instant the seal of his mask broke, he felt exactly as though a fist covered with sandpaper had been driven down his windpipe: not the thinness, but the dryness savaged the sensitive lining of his lungs, and his eyes shut on beading tears and his jaw snapped tight as though the clench of his teeth could seal pressure in his body and stop the agony.
He pushed at the ground with his cheek, and forced the edge of the mask back into position. Pressure restored, he lay groaning and scarcely thinking, while the alien hovering above loomed like a thundercloud, relieving some of the tension in the tacky ropes as though it knew the fight was out of him.
He still did not see the actual form of his captor — only the underside of the skimming aerial platforms on which they had come swarming like hornets over the round backs of the hills to the south; but as the tears ran away from his tortured eyes he did see snatches of what was happening. The aliens must have watched, and listened, and counted, before they mounted this operation as quietly as men would go out to trap large but not savage wild animals, with just as great determination to carry it through smoothly and just as little regard for the delicate emotions of their quarry.
So: the returning members of the expedition, walking with tired steps even though the gravity was light, anticipating a good meal and a night’s sleep, were tangled in sticky webs, hurled to the ground, dragged if they resisted until the banging of rocks and the scraping of sand weakened them, and then let loose enough to rise to their feet.
After which, like dancing bears on chains, their captors forced them to return to their ships.
Lombard counted with his eyes — his head was fixed in relation to his left shoulder by a chance attachment of the web trapping him — and found that the whole membership of the expedition was here, outside the ships, from Motilal to himself and Adoo. He could not tell much about their emotions, what with their masks and the hanging strands that made the aliens’ floating platforms look like jellyfish dangling their tentacles over the humans, but in the case of one of the captives there could be no doubt at all. Abubekar was screaming that the vicious enemy from the Magellanic Clouds had caught and would destroy them.
There was a buzzing in the thin air, strained and sweet like the hum of gnats, and the aliens seemed to reach some new decision. If that was a mode of communication between them, at least they used sonic means, and that was hopeful —
Lombard started. He had thought that the idea was in his own head, so dazed was he by the fantastic speed of events, but with the last few words he caught on: he was hearing Jimmy Adoo, standing next to him in the ragged circle of captives, speaking very softly inside his mask.
“Jimmy, do you never get downhearted?” he asked, equally quietly. On either side of them, astonished fellow-captives flinched, as though expecting the aliens to strike down anyone who spoke; moments later, they relaxed when nothing of the kind transpired.
Adoo tried to shake his head, but was hindered by the twisted strands tying his mask to his chest and shoulders, almost screening his face completely. He said, “If they use sound to talk with, they’ll know we’re intelligent, won’t they?”
Three or four places along the line past him, Dr. Kwa answered, his utterly neutral tone marking him as surely as a clear sight of his face. “They would recognize our artifacts anyway. What matters is this: are they convinced we’re hostile? I think we dare hope. They might have killed us, equally without warning.”
The platitude was oddly comforting, with its implied suggestion that someone had kept his head, had rationally reviewed and evaluated the situation. Someone — Lombard couldn’t tell who — said, “Do you suppose they set a kind of intelligence test with that thing the first expedition found?”
It was an idea Adoo and Lombard had considered in their long exhaustive surveys of the problem: the possibility that one might leave a kind of beacon on the planet adjacent to the home of an intelligent race, in some distant system which one could not revisit frequently, so as to report automatically when the natives achieved spaceflight, or passed some other crucial test.
The familiarity of the suggestion was also comforting. Lombard’s throat and lungs had recovered from the blast of dehydration and depressurization following the displacement of his mask, and he felt his consciousness reengage with his panic-drenched body. For about half a minute he thought calm was returning to him, and then he and all the others got their first clear sight of their captors.
“Oh my God,” someone breathed, and the unspoken comment followed: how can we hope to deal with a creature in that monstrous shape?
Two of the aliens had cast their platforms adrift from the dangling strands holding, respectively, Dr. Kofi and Captain Motilal, tossing the ends to one side and getting them tangled with their neighbors‘. They had settled, lightly as thistledown, in the center of the rough ring of captives, and risen from the prone position in which they operated the platforms. And they were —
Lombard, head ringing with abstract knowledge of gestalt perception, tried to rid himself of preconceptions and see the actual forms. He couldn’t; resemblances crowded into his mind. How much resemblance to a man? This much: an upright stance and the inability to breathe Martian air. Nothing more.
But to a cat, this much: close gray fur on the thick, stocky body, deeply indented with a waist from which hung a dozen or more devices in things like bayonet-frogs. To a beetle, this much: a head with huge side-set eyes, covered with a single transparent bubble — two pipes entering the bubble indicated an air-supply almost conventional in design — and slashed with a pair of mandibles. To animals, the thick padded feet; to fish, the phosphorescence of the limbs, which the fur did not cover — in which case, was the fur a garment, not a natural growth? — and to insects, apart from the foregoing, the pincer-like appendages on the upper limbs.
There were eight of these, held very close to the body, in addition to the walking legs.
It was unbelievably difficult to focus on the aliens, not only because his head was trapped in the hampering web, but also because the pattern of their movements was unfamiliar. One had a preconceived idea of how an insect moved — scuttling; how a large animal moved — padding; how an ape moved… And these things were not moving in any known mode; the overall rhythm of their bodily motion broke terrestrial rhythms into nonsense.
Abubekar let out another scream, and this time they seemed to notice it, for one of the two who had got off their platforms turned his upper body — not his head — to look for the source of the disturbance, but not finding that one of the captives was trying to break loose, turned back and set out with his companion to do what was clearly the main task of this operation: inspect the resources and especially the three ships of the human expedition.
“They — they have eyes, too,” Adoo said, bravely trying to maintain the refusal to get downhearted with which Lombard had charged him. “So they can’t be all that…”
His voice, thin in the thin air, tailed away as he realized no one had any attention left over from staring at the aliens.
The platforms they vacated in order to approach the ship must have been either gravipowered or driven by some wholly unsuspected method; they were so smooth and silent in operation they could not possibly depend on a reaction principle. But the upper sides, to which their riders had clung, offered no information about the means of propulsion — the controls were clustered where the eight upper limbs could get at them, and consisted of a group of knobs without visible extension, the surface being otherwise featureless.
Lombard, having satisfied himself there was nothing more to be learned from the platforms, switched his eyes back to the aliens.
The two going on foot had reached the access lock of Alpha. This was the one large enough to discharge the ten-foot-long sandcrawler, and was in use as the exit from the ship during their stay here. The smaller personnel lock, which was also designed as an emergency escape route, was covered by the end of the inflatable tunnel which, forking some ten or twelve feet away, led to Beta and Gamma without the need to don an oxygen mask.
The best way of controlling himself, Lombard decided, was to watch the aliens’ actions and try to deduce the purpose of them. He stared. They seemed to be applying some device, carried by the first of them, to the exterior of the lock, and taking turns to bend over it and inspect it — perhaps for an instrument reading not discernible at this range.
“Neat,” Jimmy Adoo said under his breath. Lombard gave him a sour glance, sideways.
“Think you know what they’re doing?”
“Of course — didn’t you get a look at that gadget when they were closer to us? Sonic probe which will give an integrated measurement of the pressure inside the ship — tell them how much air we use.”
It fitted, but whether it was a lucky guess or a reasoned deduction Lombard didn’t have time to decide just then. The first alien reached for the release of the lock and the panel of the door slid open.
Down the line of captives Motilal began to curse tonelessly and without pause, in his native Hindi.
There was a long aching silence, during which the sweet strained gnat-hum recurred several times, not emanating from any of the aliens, but from the parked platforms: reports from those who had ventured into the ship, presumably. Abubekar’s crying and moaning diminished to a frustrated series of sobs.
The lock opened again. One of the aliens came out and walked forward. Paused, emitting the gnat-hum noise, and listened for answers.
Abruptly, without warning, Lombard found himself freed from the sticky web draped around him; the stickiness ceased on the instant and the strands shot up into a neat coil on the undersurface of the platform above his head. The alien who had come out of the ship pointed something towards him: a device ending in a two-inch tube, which must logically be a weapon. The weapon jerked, and again, in a gesture which had only one possible meaning. Come with me!
For long horrified seconds Lombard felt himself poised on a knife’s edge between open resistance and meek compliance.
Shall I be a hero or a traitor — dead, or alive?
He was almost startled at himself when he heard his own voice ring out around the circle of captives.
“Captain Motilal! Ought I to go with him? I think maybe I should — I know less about the workings of the ships than anyone else, and may at any rate delay matters a bit.”
Mortilal stopped his cursing and there was an expectant hush. The aliens were included in the silence, as if they were ready to concede the right of their captives to make up their minds at leisure… Lombard realized he was scratching for reassurance like a chicken for imaginary grains of corn.
“You’d best go along anyway,” Motilal said at last. “We don’t have to take it for granted that they mean us harm — they may just be being normally cautious.”
Lombard glanced at the others, and read on every face he could see sick relief that it was he, and no one else, whom the lot had fallen on. He took a slow step forward, and the alien kept his tube-weapon aligned on him.
They reached the lock. He put his hand warily to the release; the alien waited for him to operate it, and seemed to indicate approval— he couldn’t say how except perhaps by a subtle reduction of tension — when he did so.
In the lock, side by side while the pressure cycled to interior normal, the sense of being trapped rose in Lombard’s mind like a horde of chattering goblins — was it bait they put down, to lure us back with the hope of galactic domination? And here we are, netted like silly fish!
But that didn’t make sense. A race truly hostile would not be content with catching the dozen or so members of a single pioneering expedition.
Unless it’s to take the measure of our strength, before deciding whether we’ll make slaves or only corpses!
The interior door of the lock opened, and beyond, the second alien was waiting.
He had removed his transparent face-mask. That was the first thing to strike Lombard, and it had frightful implications: why, if they can breathe Earth-normal air, they could live on Earth, may even want to steal it from us!
Then a tapping claw came up to his own face-plate, and the alien was making unmistakable pantomime gestures with three or four of his upper limbs: Lombard was to take off his oxygen mask, thus confining himself to the ships and the tunnels.
He complied, moving slowly, and the alien with the weapon took the mask and hung it on the rack just inside the lock, above the spare oxygen cylinders. It was a tidy sort of action; irrationally, it lightened Lombard’s mood. But then, he told himself, almost anything would lighten his mood; something which would darken it would break his sanity altogether.
But that, somehow, wasn’t the end of it. He stared at the aliens; they were continuing the pantomime. Removing something else — ? of course. The remainder of his clothing. He began to peel it off: insulsuit, boots and gauntlets, underclothing. Each item, duly removed, was inspected with close attention.
It was about then that he first grew aware of the smell.
A sweet smell — rotten-sweet, like pears half-brown with bruising — crossed with a tart, almost acid tang. It awoke childhood memories, and he frowned, absurdly distracted by them. Then he had it. Undiluted battery acid. When he was ten or twelve, some old-fashioned lead-acid batteries had still been in use, not displaced by more modern means of storing electricity made available through gravipower.
The thought crossed his mind: they sweat? And he wanted to laugh.
Their inspection of his garments completed, they urged him away from the lock, setting out on a complete tour of the three ships and the tunnels linking them. Exactly how he had envisaged the possibility of being a traitor, he couldn’t now recall; there was no hope of communication except by the simplest signals, and those conveyed orders rather than information.
What they had wanted him for was clear nonetheless. Faced with a bewildering array of alien-to-them devices, including and especially controls governing power adequate for interplanetary flight, they wanted to have a reference standard by which they could puzzle out likely arrangements. Thus they made Lombard sit down in three separate chairs, one in each ship, and determined what he could reach from this sitting position.
But some things they did not need any guide to work out. The master switch bringing in the gravipower from their sunken shafts, for instance; they identified that at once, and one of them very circumspectly applied a glowing device hung from his waist so that the throw-arm of the switch was welded in the open position. This, doubtless, was a temporary measure — the gap could still be shorted across — but it was pointed at and pointed at, so that Lombard could in no way puzzled as to the implication: don’t use this power till we let you!
Specifically human objects, like the bunks and the sanitary facilities, caused them much more difficulty. The provision stores and kitchenette aboard each ship were easy; it struck Lombard as inevitable that living creatures should eat after some fashion, and when he took bread warm from an automatic oven which had been preparing the evening meal for the crew of Alpha, and broke off and chewed a piece, the aliens seemed to chatter at him to hurry and not waste their time on such petty matters.
There were so puzzled by the bunks, contrariwise, that the possibility occurred to him: don’t they sleep?
He hesitated. Then he made his mind up. They’re learning one hell of a lot about us — why shouldn’t I learn something about them?
He attracted their attention, which had wandered to the contents of the cabin lockers — this, by the look of it, was Dr. Kofi’s cabin — by waving his hands, which brought them into tensely startled poses with the tube-weapon poised. He began with a clock, and once he had made them understand that he was attempting communication they followed him easily.
Clock; period of planetary rotation; light versus dark — fortunately the switches here were of rheostat, not on-off design, so that he did not alarm them when he was trying to get across the idea of darkness — activity in the light versus non-activity in the dark.
He had just stretched out in the bunk and dimmed the lights when one of the aliens gave an exclamation that set his skull buzzing like a dentist’s drill, and tapped his arm. Folding all eight upper limbs into the retracted position, he sank on his hind limbs and contracted his upper body by a good twenty percent, making himself stubby and as incapable of overbalancing as a knock-down toy.
The companion also exclaimed, and the demonstration ended abruptly, the demonstrator rising to normal height and full alertness.
Hypothesis, Lombard told himself: this is their equivalent of lying down to sleep, and the one who gave the demonstration was told off — for divulging information, or for relaxing his watchfulness in the presence of a potentially dangerous beast. Me.
The tour ended. He was allowed to dress himself again and replace his oxygen mask, and was escorted to the waiting captives outside. While the aliens held a long, gnat-buzzing discussion among themselves, a clamorous barrage of questions assailed him.
“What did they want? Why did they take you into the ship? What have they done in there — anything? Are they going to—?”
The questions were interrupted almost as soon as they had begun, and well before Lombard had a chance to answer. Two things broke out into the flood of words: first, a wet-feeling slap across his own back which made him cry out in alarm.
“They’ve marked you, that’s all!” Jimmy Adoo called to him. “Put some kind of dark paint on your back — maybe so that they’ll know you next time!”
He relaxed, and grew aware of the second thing: the tacky webs had withdrawn from all his companions, and the aliens were hovering at a slightly higher altitude, as though testing their captives’ willingness to cooperate.
“Lombard!” Captain Motilal cried. “What do you advise? Do we try and resist, or are they potentially friendly?”
“I think they’re only being cautious and may not intend to harm us,” Lombard said. “I think…!”
“Thank God,” someone muttered brokenly. In the dimness he could not see who.
“Good. I suggest you sit down where you are,” the captain said. “Lombard, describe what happened to you.”
“This comes first!” Lombard countered. “They’ve welded the master switch linking in the gravipower so that it’s in the open position. I don’t think they’ve tampered with anything more extensively than that, but it means we’ll be entirely dependent on stored power unless we can persuade them it’s safe to let us close the switch.”
“That’s bad,” Adoo said under his breath. Lombard gave him a scowl.
“What else?” Motilal demanded.
“Not much, I’m afraid.” Lombard summarized what he had seen and deduced about the aliens during his absence. Before he reached the end, however, the aliens had already concluded their discussion. Those on the platforms moved out and down so that they formed a ring enclosing the humans.
With short, urging movements they compelled the captives to rise and go towards the ships.
“Lombard, any ideas about this?” Motilal called in a strained voice.
“They may simply be permitting us to return to more comfortable quarters,” Lombard hazarded. “My advice would be to behave normally but move rather slowly — get ready and eat the evening meal and so forth —”
“What are we going to do with Abubekar?” interrupted one of the psychologists, his voice almost a snarl as he grappled with the burly West African. The eyes in the dark face were quite round, with the whites ringing the irises, as he stared in terror at what he took to be the menaces from the Magellanic Clouds. “Since you’re so full of ideas, let’s have an answer to this little problem!”
“Shut up,” Motilal told him. “Get him under sedation. Do anything. Just don’t let him make a physical attack on the aliens — clear?”
It did look probable that the purpose of this new step was only to return the humans, under guard, to their own ships, for as each group of two or three went into the lock an alien left its parked platform and went with them, tube-weapon held ready. Lights came on in Beta and Gamma; shadows were visible on the glassy domes over the observation cabins, half-obscured with condensation because the normal heating wasn’t on. Lombard, near the back of the line, was watching with great anxiety to see if Abubekar would give trouble as he was taken inboard, when he felt a tug at his shoulder and glanced up with a start. One of the aliens, peering over the edge of a hovering platform, was trying to see the splash of what Adoo had called dark paint smeared across his back, and had extended a strand of the sticky web to turn him and let light from Alpha fall on him.
Lombard almost laughed at the irony of having to be identified by a special additional mark, when he was already singled out by being the only Cork among the expedition’s members — in other words, the concept formed: the only, and the first, Cork on Mars.
The desire to laugh left him one instant later. The one strand of the web which had caught his shoulder to turn him around was joined by the whole of the bunch coiled under the platform, and he was swept off his feet and hurled through the air, just able to see that there were other platforms keeping pace with the one carrying him, just able to hear that a few frightened cries had followed him away from the comforting presence of the three human ships.
And then nothing but the scream and batter of the thin air, lent substance by the whirlwind speed of their passage.
He had braced himself to endure this indefinitely; it was shock upon shock when the gale ceased after mere minutes, and he was turned over in the grip of the tacky web like a tiny doll in a child’s fingers, awkwardly and nearly falling— which would have been nasty, even in Martian gravity, for they were a good hundred feet up.
And below was something he could not have mistaken in a million years: the thing whose form and appearance had been etched into his mind by hours of puzzled staring at recordings and pictures.
Below him, dull-glinting, polyhedral, was the Martian Sphinx.
Abruptly lombard grew aware of the cold and the silence. At this latitude the sunset had taken place with tropic swiftness, and now the sky was black and bare, without even a smudge of cloud to filter the needle-sharp light of the stars. The friendly pool of brightness around the three human ships was behind him, out of sight, if not too far away to be seen; there was nothing here but the rolling, halfhearted hills, bent-backed, as though discouraged by the endless burden of centuries piled atop them.
Silence… When the gnat-like voice of an alien, coming he thought not from the one flying the platform from which he dangled, but over a radio or other communicator, etched the surface of the air like acid patterning glass, that only served to emphasize how dense, how unearthly, the stillness had been up till now, would be again.
Cold… A little moisture was escaping from the breathing apparatus of his escorts; it misted instantly. In the glaring beam which stabbed down from the underside of one of the platforms—bluer than humans would have preferred, as though coming through miles of ice — hoarfrost sparkled in what had been shadow for the last hour of the day.
The beam was exactly centered on the sphinx: elliptical, with the polyhedral form lying on its long axis. There could not possibly be any doubt that Lombard had been brought to it in order to test his reactions. But he had only a set of numb questions which he could make comprehensible.
What brought them here? Are they the makers of the sphinx? Or — cruel irony — do they think that we are?
As soon as it became apparent that he was merely going to hang there, the aliens launched into further discussion. He used the delay to impress the details of the sphinx on his memory, comparing it in reality with the many pictures he had seen. There was no perceptible difference; there had been no change that the harsh blue light revealed.
One end markedly higher than the other, it jutted from a shallow, sandy slope, the fact that the higher, protruding end rested on a tumbled bank of displaced dirt lent credence to the suggestion that it had worked its own way back to the surface after a long period underground.
Once, presumably, it would have been finished to mirror-like perfection, and indeed certain of its facets still made the light dance, but over most of its length it was clouded by uncountable small scratches, due perhaps to the abrasion of sand over millennia. Its exterior offered nothing else as a clue to its past or its origin. Strictly geometrical, it might have been anything from the casing for an advanced technical device to a formalized sculpture in metal.
He looked for tracks in the sandy ground, and saw what he thought to be the marks of a sandcrawler just at the edge of the ellipse of light, but they vanished into darkness after a couple of yards and he could not be sure what they were due to. These aliens, presumably, would have conducted their examination of the neighborhood from their platforms, and left the ground unmarked.
The discussion humming around him ceased. He felt himself drop — freely, but with absurd slowness, in the low gravity — to within his own height of the ground, a fall that made his belly muscles knot and his mouth go dry after it was over. In the final six feet there was a braking sensation and he arrived on the ground with no more force than if he had stepped down from the last of a flight of stairs.
Humming, weaving back and forth, sometimes closer to him and sometimes darting farther away, the aliens on their platforms hovered around. He noticed for the first time — for the one shedding the light had remained at its original altitude and was illuminating his companions now — that each of the platforms bore a larger copy of the two-inch tube-weapon he had seen before. They were taking no chances with him. Also they were using elaborate equipment: boxed instruments, on which lights glinted and which gave off occasional shrill squeaks.
The move was up to him. The web which had tied and carried him withdrew, the platform staying over his head to restore the bonds at a moment’s notice. But they were clearly waiting to see what he would do.
The hell with them. But he hunkered on a little mound of soft dirt and stared about him, trying to impose rational patterns on their actions.
Jimmy Adoo’s paired alternatives came back to him, and he found himself thinking: either they built the sphinx or they didn’t; either they know who did or they don’t know; either they think we did, or…
No, that was so transparently improbable! Yet they had brought him here, to the sphinx, in such a way as to suggest that they expected him to tell them something about it, or by his reactions give them some needed information.
Either I’m playing dumb to hide the fact that we built it. or I genuinely don’t know anything about it…
There was a shifting among the aliens, suggestive of gathering impatience.
Too bad, my friends! I can’t tell what I don’t know.
What in fact would they know, so far? Perhaps it would give some clue to what they wanted him to do if he tried to calculate the state of their knowledge about humans.
First: they would know men were not Martians. Would they know their actual home planet? For a moment he wondered if he ought to try and conceal this fact; then he realized the idea was melodramatic and absurd — there was only the one planet in this system offering the kind of atmosphere to be found in the three human ships. Take it for granted, then: the aliens know we’re from Earth.
Second: They had made a fairly accurate and rapid assessment of human technical skills, and presumably decided whether these represented a danger in the event of conflict. That followed from the way the gravipower master switch had been welded in the open position.
And that was as far as this line of reasoning could take him for the moment — after all, he couldn’t yet deduce which way the aliens’ decision had gone, dangerous or not, and he might toss a mental coin and go on to some horribly erroneous conclusions.
The sphinx, then. What could they want him to tell them, or show them? He stared at it, so still and somehow worn-looking, and thought of what it has allegedly done to the men of the first expedition: filled Abubekar’s mind with crazy hallucinations, then somehow released the energy in Bahadur’s weapons and blasted his body into fine colloidal mists…
Had it discharged its function? Had it existed only to perform a limited range of acts, and become quiescent now?
At any rate, I don’t feel any mental effects, and certainly the aliens don’t seem to be very wary — of course, they may have inactivated it. I should have thought of that…
Wait. Inspiration hit him. He felt as though his mind had suddenly turned into a high-speed punched-card sorter, scanning and rejecting all but one of an infinite range of possibilities in a few heartbeats of time.
I think that what they want me to tell them is this: what did the sphinx tell us?
He turned the notion over and over, listing the flaws from the most obvious — the aliens might have built the sphinx and know perfectly well what it had to say — to the most unlikely — that these creatures were the vanguard of a threat from the Magellanic Clouds, as Abubekar had insisted. Stubbornly the idea clung to his attention, with the same indefinable quality as a number sprung from nowhere during a gambling session.
That was going to call for very sophisticated communication indeed. He had no equipment here; he had no additional clothing to the midweight insulsuit he had been wearing before sunset, and the temperature had now dropped, well below freezing; in short, it seemed impossible to try and get over such complex ideas.
He looked, not without nervousness, at his alien escort. They showed no signs of preparing to move away — they simply waited, occasionally uttering their gnat-humming speech.
What response would he get, Lombard wondered, if he rose and started to walk off towards the human ships? Then he gave up wondering as he saw the unwavering alignment of the tube-weapons.
Of course, they might not be weapons — they might be the business ends of recording devices, or instruments unknown to us, harmless…I wish I had Jimmy Adoo’s gift for deducing function from form. Jimmy, why couldn’t they have hit on you instead of me when they took a random sample from among us?
No: weapons was the safest interpretation to put on the little tubes. So here he was, in the ultimate of cliché situations, reduced to drawing pictures on the sand of the distant beach while the savage natives grunted and gibbered among themselves — except that these weren’t natives, let alone savages.
He sighed, and dropped on his knees before a fairly flat expanse of dirt, which he proceeded to scrape to a good level with a handy rock. The aliens took considerable notice of this; they closed in, even the one shedding the light from his platform descending to get a closer look.
Another fragment of stone, with a sort of point, would serve him as a stylus. What first? Well, presumably find out if there was anything in common between their symbolism and man’s. He drew a circle with wavy lines emanating from it, and added other circles around it, placing rocks to indicate planets and moons. One of the aliens dismounted from his platform and came within arm’s reach, operating a portable device which buzzed and occasionally clicked. A recorder.
He paused, to see if the alien was inclined to help things along by showing he understood the diagram. But there was no response. He went on. Alongside the double-planet system of Earth and Moon he drew a stick-figure man, pointed at it, then at himself; he traced an arrow from Earth to Mars, where he drew in as best he could a stick-equivalent of the alien’s body-form.
He was beginning to sweat now, despite the cold. Sand, of all the media he had ever attempted to draw in, was by far the worst, especially this stuff, as dehydrated as if it had been baked, which blurred and confused his careful traceries. How the Greek philosophers ever kept their tempers…
He welcomed the chance to color his thoughts with humor; if he stopped to analyze his predicament cold-bloodedly, he felt, he would simply snap into catatonia.
If I myself can hardly make sense of these scribblings, how the hell can the aliens? If only Earth were still above the horizon, so I could just point directly and know I’d got a single fact over . . . But that season was past; the first expedition had had Earth in view after sunset for a shorter and shorter time, and now and for some while to come it would be invisible all night.
That’s as much as I can cram into this one drawing. For pity’s sake show I haven’t been wasting my time!
He thrust out his hand with the pointed stone in a fit of irritation, intending that the alien should take it and add to the sketch if he wanted to. But the suddenness of the motion startled the creature. It jerked back, and the platform hanging halo-like over Lombard dropped its sticky web again.
Heartsick, Lombard would have struck out but that his first entanglement in the mesh had taught him the result of that reaction. Well, were they going to take him back to the human ships now, or to their own ship — assuming they had one here, which didn’t necessarily follow — or what?
He saw that another of the circling platforms had settled to the ground, and its rider had got off and was approaching. The one with the recorder was somehow deferential to the new arrival. Lombard hypothesized: officer? He tried to memorize some distinguishing characteristic that might mark this one out from his companions, but he could not spot any, and he could hardly brand the creature as he himself was branded, with a splash of paint.
The newcomer bent over his diagram and there was a gnat-humming exchange between the two of them. It concluded with a scanning of the whole to get it on record, and that was as much as Lombard learned and saw that night, for without further warning the web closed tight on his body and he was whisked back into the air, carried the short distance to the human ships, and deposited — bewildered, chilled and almost crying with frustration — before the airlock of Alpha.
The thin blue early-morning sky of Mars painted the spaces in the frame overdoming the observation cabin of Alpha. It was crowded in the cabin; people pressed shoulders together, leaned and peered to get a sight of Captain Motilal.
Behind the captain, not seeming interested yet keeping a recorder in continuous operation, was one of the aliens. Another stood outside the inship door of the cabin; another and probably others watched the exit locks. It was apparrently going to be like this indefinitely.
Captain Motilal gave the guard — one couldn’t call him anything else — a nervous look and cleared his throat.
“The purpose of this meeting is to review the situation we find ourselves in… If last night is to set a pattern, we are in no direct danger, and we ought to bend our main efforts towards communication and possible ultimate friendly relations. Uh — ” He looked down at some notes he had prepared and held in his hand, while everyone listening thought about the weird night just over. To be watched, solemnly and neutrally, by the aliens in their gray fur garments; to be interrupted in innocent activity — like turning on a water-faucet — and made to wait while a thorough inspection was conducted and the presence of hot water fitted into the aliens’ tentative analysis of human behavior patterns; to begin to distinguish the aliens from one another by such unlikely labels as “this one’s jumpy and that one isn’t” — it had been disturbing, perhaps more disturbing than incarceration or open threats.
Now, here, the guard stood, making the non-stop recording of the proceedings, a tube-weapon within reach, his back to the welded-open master switch that separated them from unlimited gravitational power. One could tell by the time they spent staring at this alien guard which of the humans were standing the strain worst, which were most hopeful of survival or even escape.
“However —” Motilal went on. “However, it has been suggested to me that before we start making any plans we’d better have a session of questions to make certain we’re clear in our own minds what we believe is the truth of this — uh” He let the sentence dangle unfinished, groping in the air as though he could catch the missing words by the tail.
He looks broken. The idea came to Lombard as he studied the tall Indian’s stoop, the heavy bags under his eyes, the shaking of the hand that held the sheaf of scribbled notes. Small wonder, I guess. His expedition.
“So if anyone does have a question, we’ll try and tackle it.” Motilal looked up, blinking.
Should have let Kwa take on this job — more control. Lombard glanced towards the Chinese psychologist, whose face was as calm as a stone Buddha’s.
The first question came from Nukutiva’s aide. Lombard had of course put his name to him during the trip — a curiously Cork name, Dominique Savile — but almost nothing else; four weeks and some days after their first meeting he had only exchanged hellos with him.
A colorless man. I wonder what makes him special enough for this assignment… Colorless! Hm — funny!
“They’ll be expecting to hear from us on Earth. When we don’t send an all’s-well mesage, they’ll do something — won’t they?” Savile’s mouth worked on badly-controlled fear.
“Is there any chance of our actually rigging the necessary antenna and getting a signal through?” Dr. Kofi cut in, more practically. “Or even sending the signal on another frequency that has a chance of getting out of atmosphere and — ”
Motilal held up his hand. “One at a time,” he sighed. “The first answer is yes, of course they’ll do something, but I saw Delta being fitted out, just before we left, and she will already be well on her way, while Epsilon ran into some unexpected snags and probably won’t leave until several days after her original scheduled date. And for you, Dr. Kofi — the answer is no, the aliens have inspected all our technical equipment and we can be sure they’d recognize communication devices. We may eventually be permitted to rig the antenna, but right now I think we do no more than sustain life and try to reach some kind of understanding… Yes?” This to Kwa’s senior assistant psychologist.
“Did they wreck the robot probe which we thought had colided with a meteor?”
A chorus of murmurs greeted this suggestion, quickly suppressed at Motilal’s angry glower.
“Try and confine yourselves to questions which there’s a reasonable chance of answering here and now. Throwing out insoluble problems doesn’t get us anywhere… Yes?” To Dr. Nukutiva.
“Abubekar isn’t here. Is he in a very grave condition?”
“Dr. Kwa?” Motilal wiped a trace of sweat from his forehead. He looked glad to let someone else draw fire for a minute.
The psychologist put on a professionally sober expression. He said, “I think it’s ridiculous to try and conceal the fact that Abubekar is intensively hallucinated to the point of psychosis, his delusions all springing from the original experience here on Mars about which you know most of the details… He’s convinced that these creatures are implacably dangerous, that we must resist them, or if we cannot we must commit suicide to avoid giving them any information, and that we must at all costs warn Earth.” He paused. “In my judgment, he is better under sedation for the time being.”
“Even if he’s right?” said Jimmy Adoo sourly, and there was a shocked muttering that went around the assembly like a specter at a banquet.
“That’s neither funny, constructive nor logical!” Motilal barked. “If you have anything positive to say, say it. If not, keep quiet.”
Unrepentant, Adoo hunched forward; he had got there early and reserved himself somewhere to sit. “I have a question. When will they let us turn that gravipower on?”
“How the hell should I know?” Motilal snapped.
“Because if they don’t do so pretty soon, we’ll run our emergency stored power dry, and then where’ll we be? But dead! And have they been tampering with any of the — uh — special equipment we installed out there around the ships? Or have they got so deep inside our skulls they can recognize our far-out weaponry as well as our radio transmitters?”
“So far, the gravipower switch is the only thing they’ve touched,” Motilal said, as though keeping a tight grip on his temper. “I mean — touched to interfere with it!” he added furiously as he saw a literal objection take shape on Adoo’s lips. “Yes?” — frantically hoping that someone would put a question from elsewhere in the room.
“One moment, I haven’t done,” Adoo cut in. “How many of them are there? Anyone counting?”
Blank looks greeted this. After a longish pause, Dr. Kofi said, “The maximum must be around twenty — ”
“Wrong,” Adoo countered.
“But when they took us in those net-things, there was one for each of us, and then there were — ”
“They’re running shifts,” Adoo said curtly. “I don’t pretend to be able to tell them by name yet, but I have an eye for fine details, and I can state this positively: I’ve seen more than sixty alien individuals so far — last night about thirty, this morning about the same number.”
“Where?” Motilal exploded.
“Everywhere. You look out there — you’ll see four or five of them wandering around, skimming on their aerial platforms, or whatever. Look again in five minutes, you’ll think you see the same ones. Wrong. I think sixty, give or take four, and what they’re doing is getting their entire crew familiarized with our appearance, our ships and our technology as far as it’s displayed to view. Maybe we disgust them, and they have to learn to overcome their nausea!”
There was a moment of chill silence. Dr. Kofi broke it. She said, “The captain asked us to stick to relevant, answerable questions, Adoo. Why won’t you?”
It never struck me before, Lombard thought. She despises him for his American birth; she wouldn’t listen to him if he spoke with heavenly tongues.
Urbanely, Adoo retorted in a patronizing tone, “We won’t know what questions we can answer without asking them first. Will we?”
“But there’s one thing,” Lombard said aloud, recalling a fragmentary concept he had chanced on last night, out by the sphinx. “Why do you say ‘crew’? This implies they have a ship here.”
That interruption put everyone on the other side from him; that he was a Cork added to the fact that he seemed to be mounting nonsense. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Nukutiva demanded grumpily. “What else could they have but a ship?”
“I don’t know,” Lombard shrugged. “But —control of continuous creation, maybe, allowing them to materialize at a distant point?”
“Oh, for — !” Nukutiva muttered, and even Motilal, who had invariably tried to be tolerant of Lombard, sighed in a way that was meant to be noticed.
Dr. Kwa spoke up stiffly. “I think this is a pure waste of time. I regard it as nine-tenths certain that Abubekar is intensively hallucinated and the content of his alleged visions on the first trip sprang from his own subconscious.”
“Nine-tenths isn’t a whole, Dr. Kwa,” Lombard said.
“Keep your truisms to yourself. You didn’t experience any mental effects when you were out near the — the alien object last night, did you?”
“How should I know? I didn’t have any of your team along to tell me I was misfiring mentally!”
“Stop this,” Motilal ordered. “Stop it at once and let’s get on with our business! Lombard, you’re going to get a chance to talk your fill when we come down to the matter of your trip to the sphinx last night — ”
Dr. Kwa was taut with anger at once. “I object to your use of this ridiculous invented term ‘sphinx’, captain!”
“So do I!” Dr. Kofi agreed vigorously. “It has all kinds of undesirable associations — ”
Motilal looked directly at her, and for the first time today a ghost of a smile played around his mouth. “I’m sorry you object. I think it’s a convenient term, and I shall continue to use it with acknowledgments to Adoo for coining it.” He realized that he was still holding his notes, and balled them up and tossed them aside.
“In fact,” he continued, “I think we might go straight to that story. Of course, it was very widely discussed here on your return last night, so perhaps people feel they already have enough of the data to form the basis of a conclusion… ?”
He looked around. During the pause, Nukutiva leaned towards Kwa and obtained a nod from him. He rose. . “Captain, Dr. Savile and I have been disturbed by something. We came out here aboard Beta, as you know… Ah…” He cleared his throat. “Now, twice, Lombard has been picked on by the aliens for their special inquiries. He has been marked for future reference, too. I’ve asked Dr. Kwa about this, and I think we should all hear his answer: doctor, is it possible that they have some insight into our psychology and have chosen with knowledge of our weak points?”
Lombard jerked upright, and the blood thundered in his ears as Kwa uttered his reply, which sounded like but was not — Lombard knew it was not — the carefully weighed dispassionate view of a man of science.
“It seems unlikely. But on the other hand it’s also highly improbable that they should by pure chance have selected the one person among us who cannot help having a less intense group-oriented responsibility than the others have.”
The bastard. There’s no one who can be more skillfully nasty than a nasty psychologist.
“If they again come to select the marked individual, I’d suggest we exchange the marked jerkin of his suit for that of someone else,” Nukutiva was going on. He seemed to have the grace to be a little embarrassed; his eyes flickered to Lombard and away again, repeatedly.
But there was no opportunity to hear what the rest of the meeting felt about that proposal. There came a clattering from the direction of the exit lock, and another alien appeared in the doorway a moment later, carrying a flat tray attached to which were several small objects on strings.
His roving eyes searched the humans for the telltale smear of paint — by day, it showed up as navy-blue in color — and the moment he caught sight of it, he made an imperious gesture to the bearer.
“Well?” Lombard said. “Do I go, or change clothes, or resist arrest? I’d like your opinion. What Dr. Kwa said could have been boiled down into two words — ‘Cork traitor’ — and nobody showed much sign of disagreeing, so I’d rather hand over the job to someone you think is trustworthy.”
His eyes burned into Motilal’s face. “Well, Captain?”
The embarrassed silence lasted long enough for the aliens to show a reaction to it: puzzlement, perhaps. With one remote corner of his mind Lombard found himself wishing he had attention to spare for this — clues to the aliens’ moods and emotions would be invaluable eventually. Motilal said abruptly, “Go along. Anyone who wants to argue can do so with me later.”
Objections formed on half a dozen tongue-tips, and dissipated again without being uttered. Jimmy Adoo surveyed the others and on finding them mute raised his right hand to Lombard, ringing the thumb and forefinger in an archaic gesture of encouragement.
Fellow countrymen. Hell. How about “fellow planetmen”? With that thought acid in the forefront of his mind, Lombard worked his way out from among the close-pressed bodies to confront the alien who had beckoned him.
Got to think of some other label than just “alien” to refer to them… How about “grays”? We have blacks and browns and yellows among us, and a white; gray, a good neutral color for creatures who can’t go by the distinctions we find all-important — they have to put a paint mark on me… .
But Nukutiva or Kwa or someone would get up and mouth a pompous objection to any such suggestion. The hell. Lombard reached the few square feet of vacant floor caused by people edging away from the alien when it entered.
The flat tray-like object it carried was abruptly up-ended to present its full broadside to him. It was grayish-white, very slightly luminous. The things that dangled from it on lengths of cord were cylindrical with a point at one end.
Slightly dazed, Lombard thought: wax crayons! And realized there must be a limited number of solutions to the problem of making linear marks on a plain surface.
The alien briskly stroked each crayon in turn across the board, leaving a succession of lines in slightly different colors. The first was greenish-blue, almost turquoise; the next two were shades of light-blue, followed by two of dark-blue verging on indigo, and the last three all appeared black to Lombard’s vision.
He said in a voice which surprised him with its steadiness, “They see farther into the ultraviolet than we do. Does this mean they come from a planet of a bluer sun?”
“But they breathe oxygen at the same partial pressure as we do,” Adoo countered from behind him. “And oxygen-ozone screens the ultraviolet.”
“How can you tell?” — Kwa, harsh and hostile.
“Anyway, what makes you so sure?” — Savile, in the same moment.
“Use your eyes!” Motilal had seen Lombard’s point at once, and was on his feet, trying for a clearer look. “Uh — Lombard, do you think they’re going for the same thing you tried last night and didn’t get across?”
“It certainly looks like it,” Lombard agreed. He gave the alien a nod; at the same time, he picked up the first of the crayons and extended the alien’s own stroke with it.
“Why do you suppose they didn’t try this earlier? It seems an obvious step.”
“I’ll make a guess,” Lombard muttered. The alien was doing something to the board which removed the streaky colored lines instantly, and he had failed to see how the trick was worked. “Have we got drawing materials on board? We’d have to make do with issue styli and light-colored plastic surfaces wherever we could find them. Okay: I think they’re making a start.”
The alien proceeded briskly to describe a complex tangle of approximately bean-shaped rings on the board. In the center there was a solid pale-blue circle. Then, straight-lining across the entire confused muddle, two slashes were added, in the crayons which contrasted to the alien but to Lombard were uniformly black.
“Any ideas?” Lombard said harshly when he had stared at it blankly for ten or fifteen seconds. “Jimmy?”
“Those kidney-bean shapes look familiar,” Adoo muttered in an unconvinced tone. “Oh! Got it! Condensation of the planets from a rotating gas-cloud. I think it’s a transform of planetary orbits, and that blue disc in the middle is the Earth.”
“Correct!” Lombard agreed. “In that case, the two black streaks represent the two expeditions we’ve sent to Mars — and they’ve paid us the compliment of setting the whole thing up from a third-planet viewpoint.”
He took one of the crayons, hesitated, and began to transform the alien’s diagram into human conventions, giving it solar centricity. The result looked badly cross-hatched and confused, but Lombard had taken care to distinguish the three black crayons in his mind’s eye; the alien seemed to follow what he was getting at without difficulty.
The cabin filled with a general sense of relaxation. “I think,” Captain Motilal said half to himself, “this would justify us in acting on the basis of the aliens being non-hostile, if not actively friendly.”
“It’s premature to say that, surely,” Dr. Kwa objected. “So far, all we can see is that they’re trying to communicate. They may want to get information out of us for later use against us.”
“I think this is a lot of rigmarole anyway,” Dr. Kofi said. “I take it that it’s due to Lombard choosing this roundabout means of communication last night, making chicken-scratches in the sand out there. But these creatures talk — I mean, they employ sound for communication, and so do we. Why not start directly on verbal exchanges?”
“Two reasons!” Lombard snapped. This sniping at him seemed more and more to be prejudiced rather than reasoned. “First, I don’t know if they can hear our speech-range, and certainly we can barely hear theirs — it peaks at the top limit of adult auditory sensitivity, and to everyone I’ve asked it sounds like the hum of an insect: a gnat or a mosquito. Second, I was sure there would also be objections if I started trying to teach them English, and I couldn’t guarantee to teach them flawless Chinese, Hindi, or Swahili because none of these is my native tongue!”
Gnat-humming, nerve-grating, an exchange between the aliens took place simultaneously with this between humans, and it occurred to Lombard it might be identical, too: why go to all this fiddling trouble when they communicate as we do, in sound?
The irony of ignorance!
Motilal gave him a severe look. “Lombard, we’re all under strain, you know. Try and remember that. And I ask the rest of you to try and remember that Lombard’s in a specially difficult position, having been singled out by the aliens for a spokesman. Whether by chance or not — do you hear me, Dr. Kwa?”
The psychologist’s professional and also Chinese mask of imperturbability broke apart in a scowl, but he said nothing.
“Right!” Motilal continued briskly. “Lombard, do you—? ”
The noise. The light. The jarring. The sick sensation that the universe had ground to a halt and its fragments had begun a billion-year tumble into the bottomless pit. Somewhere there was screaming, but that was later.
First there was the light: brilliant as adding a dozen suns to the watery-blue sky. The shadows of everything the framework of the dome over the cabin, the occupants, the instruments and objects — were stamped on the viewers’ eyes like images painted directly on the retina with pitch-black ink. All color went to white, and then bluish, and only then came back, painfully slow, along the ladder of the spectrum to normality.
The light localized into a glaring pillar of fire, to the south and slightly west of here, at the same time as the sound arrived. It would have been perceived as a tremendous explosion in Earth-dense atmosphere; here, with the air thin and overburdened, it came as much through the ground as directly, and the effect of the combined ground-shock and ghostly air-blast was fearful, like stepping on a land-mine in a dream. The ship shifted a quarter-inch or so; crevasses appeared and closed again in the sides of the gentle hills visible on the skyline; dust fountained enormously towards the sun, masking the fury of the column of fire, and out of this dust came the answer to at least two of the questions the humans had wanted to solve.
Whoever had built the Martian sphinx, it was not these gray creatures who held them captive.
And the gray creatures had come in a spaceship, not by some fabulous non-spatial route calling on the most basic creative activity of the universe. For the ship must be what had been destroyed.
The destroyer was coming out of the mist of dust and smoke, with contemptuous slowness; Lombard’s mind, sluggishly working back to normal operation, threw up a reason for this contempt. There was a master switch over there, just behind one of their gray captors, welded in the “open” position.
When we homed on that gravipower trace, it wasn’t the same one the first expedition followed. The grays had got here and inactivated the sphinx; then hidden their ship among the same low-backed hills and generated a similar trace to lure us down, and then when they welded that switch open they ensured that their ship held the sole source of gravi-power signals on Mars, and that was what attracted the monster. Which comes now to huff and puff and blow our ships up; gravipowerless!
The ideas felt right; that would do for now. Besides, he had no spare energy for difficult questions. His eyes were so wide open that the muscles of his cheeks hurt; his mouth, dry, was also straining open, forgotten. Around him were moans and cries, and over all the gnat-hum of the aliens at a hysterical pitch. Outside, the four or five other aliens who had been in the vicinity at the moment of the attack were waving their limbs helplessly and taking little aimless steps back and forth.
Here’s the terror. From the Magellanic Clouds or wherever else. It has to be!
Vaster than thunderclouds, with the same implacable majesty as a tornado, the thing came riding its acres-darkening shadow across the plain of Mars. A ship. Presumably. A black, radiation-swallowing ship, without grace or proportion, but redolent of power. Broad, flat, but with protuberances like — like the towers at the corners of a medieval castle wall, to afford useful angles to the defending bowmen. Yes: very much like a space-going castle. A lumbering, purposeful, conquest-intended machine, careless of appearance, concerned uniquely with ultimate gain.
“It’s coming for us,” someone said. Lombard couldn’t turn his head to see who, and terror stole both identity and even sex from the voice. But the comprehensible words broke the spell, and the one who leapt to his feet and went charging — heedless of who was in his way — towards the nearer gray alien — was Jimmy Adoo. Hands clutching at the creature’s upper Limbs, and head jerking like a chicken’s, he forced the alien to turn to him.
It was incredible that Adoo of all people should panic. The startled Lombard swung around, and was the second person after Adoo himself to get his point: the gravipower switch!
The black thundercloud enemy came on, ponderous, leisurely. These three little ships, primitive as canoes, radiating no signals eloquent of energy inexhaustible, were to be stamped on Like beetles, deserving of no more respect. But in fact, ringing the three human ships, were perimeter defences as elaborate as Earth’s skill allowed: plasma-generating projectors, laser-beams, maser-beams, everything capable of turning gravipower energy into destructive potential.
“Oh Jesus!” Adoo screamed. “Don’t you understand?”
And they caught on. The alien near Lombard dropped bis drawing-board and snatched up a tube-weapon from the belt around his thin waist. He made a slight adjustment, a sliding adjustment of spread, Lombard deduced, and put it close to the beaded weld holding open the gravipower switch. It emitted a thin, blinding fan of light and a wafting of heat like the opening of a furnace-door; then the switch came free.
Motilal had understood by now; he had barked at those in the way to clear a path to the control panels, and sworn at Dr. Kofi for clumsiness in moving out of his way. His hands went down on the weapon switches one heartbeat later than Adoo’s closure of the master gravipower switch.
“Hide your eyes!” he shrieked, and those who could understand him did so.
As for the others…
“Jason!” Adoo whispered, while appalling energies crackled and thundered all about the ships. “They won’t have understood the order to hide their eyes, you know. Are you with me?”
Mouth dry again, Lombard nodded and flexed his hands.
Slow though the forward movement of the monstrous black ship had seemed, it was fast enough to make an instantaneous change of direction absurd. Lombard’s last glimpse of it before he clapped both hands to his eyes showed it casting its vast shadow over the outlying pattern of the perimeter defences. That was where the storm of energy caught it.
First, an arc struck from side to side of the area enclosing the three human ships. Only gravipower made it possible to strike through Mars dry air so swiftly. A beam impinging on such an arc did no more than feed additional power to the generators until the absolute limit of their load was reached. The designers of these generators had been generous: made wild estimates, doubled them, and doubled them again for safety’s sake.
Alpha, Beta and Gamma vanished behind a curtain of fire. A dome of magnetic force-lines strained and swayed overhead, forcing the inches-thick layer of plasma into an inverted bowl, condemning any missile of steel or other magnetic metal to crash and melt inside that layer, hopefully disturbing beyond usefulness the mechanisms of anything non-magnetic.
Then the longer-wave generators cut in; they took slightly more time — a few milliseconds — to hit operating temperature. Meter-wavelength; long infrared; short infrared; and then visible light poured up, like iron in a furnace going from cold to molten. The reaction was so sudden and so unforeseeable that the black monster lost slices of its hull like cheese taken off with a wire.
And finally the gamma-generators hit critical. Gamma-generators was a shorthand term. In fact, they went from soft X-rays through hard X-rays and then to gammas and at every stage of their operation they sleeted neutrons over an incredible band of energies… The idea was originally that any fission processes taking place in the target area should be shot to — almost literally — hell.
The black monster-ship turned as it came over the impossible dome of fire, exposing more than two-thirds of its underside to the maximum output of the projectors. Metal ran like water, glittering and sparkling; in the few thousandths of a second which preceded the activation of the ship’s own defenses, that clad her in fields impregnable to anything short of a close star, scores of key circuits were slashed through and huge holes were chopped in the very plates from which the defensive fields resonated. Like a whale in its death agony, it rolled to present untouched plates to the attacker and reduce the already grievous hurt to its belly, but two of the laser-projectors which were perfectly locked to their targets ate their way deeply enough into the vessel’s vitals to trigger an explosion. At once forty or fifty square yards more of the defensive fields winked into darkness, and there followed a jet of dirty grayish smoke two miles long, like a black mamba’s venom spat at its prey.
Tilting, turning, the monster-ship dropped so low that one exposed end of its broad flat hull scraped the crown from a hill to the southward; the resistance was enough to tip the balance between rising and crashing, and it settled with a long crunching to the sandy Martian soil. The human ships shivered inside their blanking dome of fire. No one inside it could know what happened outside, by definition — every form of transmissible energy was either deflected, or distorted, or simply blotted out.
“I think,” Adoo whispered, “that that was a crash. You felt the ship shake, didn’t you?”
Licking dry lips, Lombard nodded — then croaked agreement, realizing that Adoo must have his own eyelids tight down, as they all did bar the aliens.
“Now!” Adoo snapped, and instantly appended, “but shut your eyes!”
Blindly Lombard reached out. He had pieced together, in the last few moments, auditory clues: the alien with the tube-weapon had moved half a pace that way, was probably now almost but not quite touching Dr. Kofi, who had been standing there — wait: had moved out of Motilal’s way… Motilal was certainly still at the control board, holding the defense switches closed; Lombard had caught a fleeting glimpse of him poised to drive them home, and knew he would have stopped only when the levers reached the end of their traverse.
And he got it: the alien’s upper limb with the tube-weapon clipped in its claws.
Without compunction, for he had seen the ease with which that little fanning beam dissolved a metal weld, he cracked the stiff limb like a lobster-claw. At the topmost limit of audibility there was a scream, and the tube-weapon went clattering on the floor.
“Leave it! Don’t touch!” Lombard hissed as he sensed a startled move by someone unseen to pick up the fallen object, and grappled both arms around the struggling alien. It was surprising how much stronger a human arm was than their upper limbs, but their lower ones were at least as strong as a human leg, and for a desperate second he felt himself being hoisted off balance.
Then another hand snatched at the alien and toppled him; arms closed over Lombard’s and the alien’s, and hard breathing was loud in his ears.
“Lombard?” Motilal said in a level voice.
“Yes, Captain. I think we’ve overpowered the aliens who were in here.”
“That’s right — they should have been blinded. I am, I think; I was slow to shut my eyes.” No emotion in the words. “The weapon — is that safe?”
“I think I have it.” A shaky voice: Dr. Kofi. “I’m holding it by the tip of the barrel because I don’t know what triggers it.”
“Good, thank you. It was very bright of you to spot what would happen when the defense-arc was struck. Who saw it first — Adoo, wasn’t it you?”
Muffled grunts preceded Adoo’s confirmation. “He’s giving us trouble, this one,” he complained. “Won’t lie still.”
“Just hang on to him till we can tie him up. There’s another of them somewhere in Alpha, I think, though he may have had the sense to make off down the tunnels to one of the other ships. He won’t have been blinded by the brightness like the ones in here.”
Lombard gingerly relinquished the duty of holding the wriggling alien under him to Savile and Dr. Nukutiva, who took it over with savage enthusiasm.
Staggering back to his feet, he said, “Captain, are there any dark glasses anywhere?”
“Yes. Whoever’s closest to the left-hand stores locker under the distant-detector board — I think it’s you, Dr. Kwa— get out and distribute the four pairs of sunproof goggles in there. There are four more pairs on Beta and three on Gamma if I remember correctly. I’ll hold the maximum output until I hear that you’ve overpowered the remaining alien— the ones outside, I guess, will be rolling about in the sand half-fried and entirely blinded… Then I’ll cut back the projectors and we ought to be able to work out from the power readings whether we’re still under attack.”
“I think we got them by surprise,” Adoo said. “Captain, this one’s given up — I found a soft spot between his front legs and leaned on it, and all the fight went out of him. Respiratory system, I think. Half-suffocated him.”
“Thank you… What’s that?”
“That” was a scraping sound at the door of the cabin. Lombard was startled into half-opening one eye; even though his back was to the domed roof of the cabin and hence the only glare that reached him was reflected, it was like being kicked in the face; the tears started instantly and he cursed himself under his breath.
“Someone’s at the door!” a worried voice cried.
“Abubekar?” Adoo wondered aloud.
Kwa cut in. “I think I’ve found the goggles, Captain. A pair for you?”
“Wouldn’t be much good my— retinae are completely fogged at the moment. Give a pair to Adoo and a pair to Lombard and the others to anyone else willing to open the door and see who’s there.”
“I — I will,” Kwa said after a pause, and forced his way over to give Lombard and Adoo their goggles.
His eyes still smarting from their incautious opening, Lombard found nonetheless that he could manage very well with the goggles, which were of self-varying glass, responding photochemically to the ambient light-level. The defense-arc took them to the limit of their response, but the short-coming was minimal.
“May we have the alien’s weapon?” Adoo requested. Dr. Kofi handed it over by touch, doubtfully.
“Are you sure you can — ?”
“You picked me for your team because I know about design for function,” Adoo snapped, and turned the weapon over in both hands. “Yes, I see… Okay, open the door. Keep well back.”
But there was no need for caution. The newcomer was the remaining alien, weapon reversed in token of friendship, shading his big eyes with a folded piece of thin plastic, six of his eight upper limbs folded down so dejectedly that no one could doubt his resignation to fate.
They took the weapon and let him speak to his blinded companions; the air was saw-edged with shrill humming for two or three minutes. Then Adoo suggested to those holding down the alien captives that they should release their grip; reluctantly the request was obeyed, and with much rubbing and hugging of themselves the injured aliens got together with their uninjured companion. They fell to a consideration of the harm Lombard had done to the limb holding the weapon.
“They won’t be able to do anything until we cut the defense-arc out,” Adoo muttered. “Captain, I’d suggest we go reclaim the goggles in the other ships and maybe we ought to see to Abubekar, too.”
“Yes, that makes sense.” Motilal turned his head blindly, hands still white-knuckled on the control levers of the defense system. “Dr. Kwa?”
“Ah — yes, yes, I’ll do that. But is it certain that no others were in any of the ships, or in the tubes between?”
“Adoo, if you’ve got the hang of that weapon, will you go with Dr. Kwa and act as escort? Meantime, I’m going to cut back the power a little now.” Motilal sought Lombard with unseeing eyes. “Can you come here and read my instruments for me?”
Lombard complied, craning close because the amount of light removed by the tinted goggles made the deep-set dials of the instruments hard to read. He said. “We’re drawing decimal oh three percent more power from the shafts than we’re putting out right now.”
“Oh three.” Motilal frowned. “I think that’s exactly right to account for our inship consumption. Let’s take the edge off it.”
One cautious hand eased back the projector levers, step by step.
“Nothing coming in from outside to feed the arc, Captain,” Lombard said positively.
“Good. I’ll bring it down to the point where we can get an exterior instrument reading.” Easing back the defense-arc lever now.
“There’s something slightly to the south,” Lombard reported with growing excitement. “Gravipower order of magnitude but not apparently gravipowered — the local gravifield is steady at Martian standard as far as I can tell right now… And it’s surrounded by eddies. Metal, probably.”
“Think we got them?” someone — he thought Savile — muttered, not expecting an answer.
“Still nothing coming from outside,” Lombard went on. “Oh, except for —cancel that! It’s the sun, just making the inwards-energy reading flicker a little. Captain, I think we’re okay!”
“I hope,” Motilal said, and slammed the defense-arc lever back to nil.
They took off their dark goggles or opened their eyes; the one alien who had not been exposed to the glare and blinded did the same and reported keeningly to the other two.
Awed, they drank in the incredible sight.
Sprawled, twisted, deformed over five separate mounding hills to the south, the monstrous black ship lay — only partly black, now, for the upper side was sheened mirror-like and cast back the light in irregular sparkles. But smoke rose from it into the thin Martian air; glowing gashes bled molten metal across the sand; for hundreds of yards on every side bits of shed plating and struts caught the watery sun.
“What do you see?” Motilal demanded urgently.
“Oh!” Lombard caught himself. “I’m sorry, Captain. Well — well, it looks as if we’ve won our first battle in space. At any rate, the black ship has crashed, and it doesn’t look in any hurry to get up!”
The first, cautious decision was to wait in the ship until at earliest the following morning, with automatic detectors connected to the defense-arc switch. But the sight of the gray aliens who had been trapped outside the human ships and inside the dome of fire was so horrible that they felt compelled to go and rescue them.
There were five altogether. One was dead, having been only a few yards from the main line of arc projectors; he was curiously shriveled, and the gray fur had peeled off his body to reveal blistered chitinous skin. Two were in astonishingly good shape, having found shelter among rocks not far from Beta’s stern. They could not see, but they had escaped the worst effects.
Not the remaining two. Both were burned, and one had lost the use of two upper limbs; they hung slack except that at irregular intervals they gave conclusive jerks of their own accord.
“I don’t know why we’re doing this,” Adoo muttered to Lombard as they carried the second crippled alien through the airlock aboard Gamma, “Unless one of them is a doctor, we’re only putting off an inevitable finish.”
“It’s worse than that,” Lombard grunted. “We shan’t be sure till we go and look, but it’s pretty certain their ship was completely destroyed when the black one attacked it. What are they going to do for food?”
“Well, I…” Adoo paused and stared at the younger man.
“Why, that’s right. They breathe our air okay, though…”
“No guarantee we can offer them anything. Cows and termites both live on Earth — how long would you last on a diet of straight grass or woodpulp?”
They got the alien’s surprisingly fragile body through the lock and saw it safely given into Dr. Kwa’s charge. Standing back and dusting his hands together, Adoo said, “That gives me an idea. You don’t think we should get the captain’s permission to break out the sandcrawler and go look to see if their ship is completely blasted?”
“We can ask,” Lombard shrugged. “And I think we’ve got to treat these grays at least as well as they treated us. Because whether they built the sphinx or not — which I doubt now — they’ve got a powerful civilization at their back. They can’t be from the Solar System, clearly; the odds against their turning up by accident are incredible, and that means they have at least two techniques we’re hardly even dreaming of as yet: detection of gravipower operation at interstellar range, and a faster-than-light drive.”
Adoo waited with tolerant patience for Lombard to finish. He said then, “Congratulations. You’re turning out quite bright, aren’t you? ”
Lombard flushed and bridled. He said, “What’s the point of that? ”
“Simply that the same thing goes for the people in the black ship, and they aren’t interested in communicating with anything as kind and gentle and easy as wax crayons. It was a pure miracle we brought that monster down — it must have seemed to them that we were real primitives, not drawing any gravipower, and the way their ship just came trundling slow as you please over the plain…” Adoo shivered exaggeratedly. “We won’t catch them napping twice! And if there’s anyone left alive and equipped with communication facilities in the wreck yonder, we’ll have their reinforcements on our necks before we know what’s happened.”
Lombard snapped his fingers. “Gravipower! That’s something that’s been itching at my mind without my realizing. They — I mean the grays — they did turn the sphinx off, and if they know that much about it we can learn a hell of a lot from them.”
“The grays, you’re calling them? Well, why not?” Adoo was only briefly interested in that. “I don’t quite follow you.”
“They weren’t here at the time of the first expedition, right? But a gravipower trace was, and brought them to the sphinx. Presumably they detected the ship’s drive or some other use of the power, came to check, found the sphinx — and inactivated it. They must have done it. Or we would have detected two signals on our way down. What we were following must have been their gravipower equipment, carefully matched to the sphinx’s former signal level.”
“In that case their ship must have been damned near the sphinx — and the sphinx has more than likely been melted down in the blast which wrecked the ship.” Adoo glanced at the enigmatic black bulk half-visible among the hills to the south; the upper side still gave back the reflection of the sky, but the wavering irregularities seemed more widespread and dark patches were marring the even surface of the defense field.
“Do you think they’re quiet because they can’t harm us, or because they’re all dead, or because they don’t want to provoke us again before reinforcements get here?”
“I don’t know,” Lombard snapped. “And right now, what I’m chiefly concerned with is the fate of the sphinx and whether we can keep the surviving grays alive long enough to find out what it is — was.”
“I don’t like the look of the defense perimeter,” Adoo murmured at though Lombard had said nothing. “Look, there’s a gamma-generator over there which has fused itself right into the sand — set solid in a block of crude glass!”
“Jimmy, you know as well as I do that that ship’s weapons must be as far ahead of ours as its spacedrive,” Lombard said, losing patience. “If its friends turn up and attack without warning, treating us with the same respect they accorded the grays’ ship, we’re done for, and it’s no use pretending otherwise.”
“I guess the only consolation is that they come from farther away.” Adoo turned to enter the ship.
“You — Oh, I get you. Yes, I guess that figures, if they took longer to get here. But we’ve been using gravipower at home and on the lunar for a long time now — what do you suppose brought them both to Mars and not Earth?”
“I take back what I said about your becoming a bright boy,” Adoo declared. “You may have this stratospheric IQ and this mathematical talent, but you’re short on straight forward common sense. There’s only one thing that could possibly have attracted them to Mars and not Earth, and that’s the sphinx again. Come on, let’s see if they’ll let us take the sandcrawler out.”
The argument was a long one, partly because of genuine reluctance to hazard their only sandcrawler on this venture, partly because of lurking resentment that these two, the anomalous members of the expedition, should have proved to be the ones thinking and working farthest ahead at the moment.
Adoo clinched the decision, however, with the points about needing to feed the aliens somehow or watch them die a lingering death, and about the sphinx rather than the human use of gravipower as a reason for the aliens coming here.
His sore eyes covered with pads soaked in lotion, Motilal enjoined them like an old blind guru to be careful and make thorough records of whatever they found and to report back before nightfall. They promised compliance and went to the crawler.
There was some muttering from Dr. Kofi and Nukutiva and Savile, all three of whom were surveying the neighborhood of the ships on foot, the fused sand slippery under their cleated soles. The tremendous drain, so long sustained, on the gravipower system had caused other damage besides melting some of the key projectors into the ground, and this was a priority job — without power, and the knowledge that a fraction of a millisecond would see the defense-arc in full operation, their plight would seem alarming.
However, the chance that something salvageable might remain at the place where the grays had landed, or that a few more survivors might have escaped that planet-rocking blast, was something that had to be attended to as well. Adoo and Lombard, clinging tightly to the saddle-like perches of the crawler, took no notice of the sour comments passed about them and headed straight out towards the place where the immense explosion had presumably shattered the grays’ vessel.
From the wreck of the black ship, there was still no sign of life, and the patches dulling the shiny defense fields were still growing. Wisps of smoke drifted up occasionally, then dissipated, then were followed by others from other points within the damaged hull.
The crawler’s padding artificial feet — far superior to wheels on this rough ground — began to meet tektites in immense quantities: tear-shaped and button-shaped drops of fused sand, glassy witnesses to the violent heat and blast that had accompanied the destruction of the grays’ ship. Twice they had to skirt unlikely looking crevasses caused by the temblors from the blast and from the crashing of the black ship, at the lip of which sand and small rocks teetered before trickling in. Then the tops of the low hills in line-of-sight of the disaster began to show visible signs of the effects: vegetation charred, rocks cracked across like glass tumblers placed in too-hot water, sand heaped in random dune-like formations as though by a kick from a booted foot.
“What odds are you giving on the sphinx’s survival right now?” Adoo inquired of Lombard in low tones.
“Shut up,” Lombard said, and steered the crawler around a boulder which had been split from mother-rock by the heat and gone running down the flank of its hill.
The ground took on a creased appearance, as though something had dropped into water, creating waves, and then the water had miraculously become solid, freezing the waves in their instantaneous pattern. The crawler lurched up and down like a boat on a rough sea, and after the third such rise and fall they began to see what had caused the curious deformation.
The pit was a quarter-mile wide, bowl-shaped, blank as turned wood, with no hint of what had been here before it was stamped into the ground. The watery noontide sun of Mars looked down on this, the tribute to an act of wanton destructiveness and sheer joy in the ability to abolish, such as man in all his bloody history had not matched, and Lombard felt the sunlight as chill as stabbing icicles.
“But why?” Adoo said, and on giving him a sidelong glance Lombard saw that he was literally wringing his hands, twisting them on his wrists like slack-hanging cloths.
“I have a guess I could make,” Lombard said after an empty pause. “But until we can talk to the grays, I won’t tell you what it is.”
Adoo shrugged, and there was silence again until finally he said, “Well, just sitting here and staring won’t get us anywhere. Let’s go back.”
“We haven’t found the sphinx yet,” Lombard said.
Startled, Adoo exclaimed, “You think we will? In this lot?”
“Why not? That thing — this is part of my guess, but not all of it — that thing wasn’t meant to be used up quickly. It was designed for durability. It was probably meant to withstand forces far stronger than the one that carved this pit.” Lombard’s eyes roved the altered landscape as he spoke. “I think we’d be foolish to assume it’s gone — or even damaged. Think of the high probability that it was here on Mars for so long that even idling at a few watts’ power-consumption it weakened the structure of the rocks and caused the earth-subsidence which buried it… That’s not proved, but it fits best of all our theories.”
“All right,” Adoo conceded. “Take — shall we say an hour? If we don’t find it by then, I think we’ll be sure it’s done for. And you ought to remember this, in case you’re disappointed: you argued earlier in favor of the idea that the — the grays inactivated it, and this may have rendered it more vulnerable than it was originally.”
“Damn. So it may.” Lombard bit his lip and swung the crawler through the first leg of a long search-pattern covering twenty-five square miles of ground.
They spotted the sphinx in the forty-ninth minute of the search, sticking up from a huge new sand-dune like a tilted candle in a sagging cake, discolored, bluish instead of shiny, but to first glance intact after being hurled the best part of a mile by the explosion.
“Ah,” Lombard said in a perfect neutral tone. “Let’s tell them at the ship what we’ve found, and then look it over. I’m aching to see it at close quarters; it’s done things to both Abubekar and Bahadur, and they’re such contradictory things I think I’m half-expecting to find it isn’t solid at all — just a permanent collective hallucination.”
Plodding through sand so loose they sank their ankles at every step, they approached the sphinx. As they came close they saw marks on it which had previously been blurred into the general background of scratches and discoloration: a long jagged crack in its polyhedral casing, a concertinaed band of distortion around its center.
“This is the first time you’ve seen it,” Lombard muttered to Adoo. The silver-haired man nodded.
“I saw all the pictures and recordings, of course.”
“What do you make of it?”
Adoo shook his head. “It meant to give no clues — that’s about all I can be sure of. It doesn’t even fit the basic pattern of durability that you were so keen to wish on it; if I were designing for maximum endurance, I’d use a sphere and not any shape with corners on it. Corners are weak spots.”
Up-ended like a tin can in a garbage dump, the sphinx loomed over them; it was bigger than Lombard had remembered from his sight of it in the dark. Maybe more of it was exposed now, of course — that would account for the effect.
“Think we can go and peer in at that crack?” he suggested, “You said the grays had inactivated it. If they did, we won’t come to any harm; if they didn’t, too bad. We don’t have the gear with us to conduct remote ulterior examinations of a thing this size.” Adoo was already scrambling up the sloping pile of sand under its raised end. After a brief hesitation, Lombard followed.
With his usual foresight, Adoo had unclipped a powerful flashlight from the equipment rack of the crawler; in the middle of the day, flashlights hadn’t entered Lombard’s thoughts. By the spearing beam they stared into the crack, which was wider than their heads at several points.
“There’s one hell of a lot of material in there,” Adoo said at last. “It’ll take months — maybe years — to unravel all the circuitry. But it looks conventional, which is a promising sign. I mean, those are electronic and not something totally new.”
“Ah-hah? How about that down low on the left?” Lombard grunted.
Adoo swung the flashlight. The beam settled on a device of dull green and gray bars, which at first sight one might have assumed to be mechanical but which had no apparent moving parts.
“That?” he said. “I wouldn’t dare to say. You know, Dr. Kofi picked me for this trip on the strength of a fraternity recommendation and my reputation — she’s decided she wanted a bomb disposal man to tackle this thing first. And I thought what I guess you thought, pretty near — a great honor, service to mankind, even do something to make up for changing my name because of my background… I didn’t think much about the other side of the coin: what happens if I’m not right for the job? Now, looking at this tangle of stuff in here, I begin to get very cold feet. Design for function I know. But — how about functions I’ve never even imagined?”
“Like planting a hallucination in Abubekar’s head?” Lombard suggested. “Like blowing Bahadur up with the stored energy from his own weapons? I’ve been thinking I’d like a side arm of some kind, but then again, after what happened to Bahadur, I’m not sure I’d be any happier carrying weapons in this neighborhood… Dr. Kofi hadn’t met you before she asked for your services, had she?”
“No. Did I tell you that?”
“No. I just figured it out. She thought you were a Fric like herself.” Lombard wasn’t looking at his companion; as he spoke, he was pushing and tugging at the distorted shell of the sphinx, wondering at the discrepancy between its eggshell thinness and its incredible toughness.
“We’ll get some power down this way and cut that up with a laser saw,” Adoo said. “And in case you were thinking of asking me for some definitions — don’t, please. I’ll need a long time to look this over, and I won’t promise to express any opinion even then.”
“What? As to what the sphinx is for?” Lombard cocked his head. “I know that already, don’t you? I’m a bright boy in my way, remember?”
Adoo would have flushed red if his complexion hadn’t been too dark for it to show. He said, “Now just a — ”
“Jimmy, I don’t mind you patronizing me because you’re in the fraternity and I’m not even a graduate, I don’t mind you doing it because I’m half your age, but hell — I object to you or anyone else doing it because I’m a Cork! Is that clear, fellow-countryman?”
Lombard hadn’t meant for this burst of resentment to come to the surface, but once it was begun he could not halt the succession of words. Cold, he waited for Adoo’s reaction.
“I’m sorry,” was the total of it. “Shall we go back to the ship?”
“Yes,” Lombard muttered. “Yes, let’s go.”
“They’ve got the antenna rigged,” Adoo reported, rising almost to a full standing position on the crawler as they breasted the last rise before coming in full view of the three linked ships. “That’s quick work — when the subject came up earlier they were saying they couldn’t get the antenna inside the defense-arc without shifting all the projectors.”
“Meeting our first alien rivals is the kind of thing we ought to pass on,” Lombard said sourly. “Hot news, you know?”
Adoo ignored the gibe. He turned his head to look in the direction of the carcase of the black ship, and uttered a startled exclamation.
“Hey-ey-ey! It’s dead, Jason!”
“What do you — ? Oh! I see. And it is, isn’t it?” Lombard, also half-rising from his saddle-like seat, had spotted the cause of Adoo’s excitement.
When they had set off, the defense fields of the monstrous black ship had still been washing over the upper surface of the hull with a reflective barrier. Now the entire plating was exposed, dull black and vulnerable. The reason appeared to be that the wreck had settled under its own tremendous weight; a split had occurred from front to back across the thickest portion of the hull. From this opening drifted a steady pall of brownish smoke.
He turned the crawler towards the wreck and called the Alpha on radio. Motilal answered; his eyes being still affected by the blinding glare of the defense-arc, he was prevented from moving around much, and had been keeping the radio link with them since they set out.
“Did you see — I mean, did anyone there see what happened to the black ship?”
Motilal confirmed. “About an hour ago, not long after you left actually, there was a grinding noise and the whole mass seemed to sink further behind the hill which separates us from it. Then the shimmering defense field went out — gradually fading away — and smoke started to pour out. Is it still smoking?”
“Yes, but drifting rather than pouring.” Lombard stared across the intervening ground. “Since our inspection of the sphinx was so unrewarding, should we take a look at this as well?”
“I forbid it,” Motilal snapped. “There may still be hostile survivors somewhere inside.”
“Not inside!” Adoo called. “Coming out! Look!”
Afterwards, Lombard thought of it as the most pathetic thing he had ever seen, but at the time it brought panicky palpitation to his heart and sour terror-taste to his mouth.
They were without proper protective suits; some of them had enclosures around their bodies, made of half-translucent material between brown and green, but the first and last to appear were nearly naked and very ragged.
They had two long tentacles, like a cuttlefish’s, which they could cast ahead of themselves like whips and draw up so that their bodies followed, or else double back to make a pair of balancing legs like human legs. The bodies — there were no separate heads — were whitish, except where they were burned or bruised, and there they turned horrible purplish-red, like half-ripe plums, and oozed clear serum in thick treacly droplets.
They came out, tossing their tentacles to the run of the gash in their ship, hauling themselves up in the welling smoke, and half-climbing, half-falling to the ground. There they struggled, the longest of them for over half an hour, but in vain; they could not raise themselves for lack of whatever crucial gas they breathed. The ones with protective material around their bodies made some progress away from the wreck — three to four hundred yards — but it was slow and horrible.
“Are we just going to sit here and watch?” Adoo whispered when five minutes had passed.
His answer came without warning. One of the last to emerge had come slowly, one long tentacle folded around a heavy burden which he wrestled down to the ground and fell against. Tentacles writhed against it: a tall boxy form with a white top and gray sides.
Then a scything glare leapt from it, slashing the remains of the ship, carving more of the plating loose and heating it to red and then white.
“What the — ? ” Lombard whispered.
Adoo’s answer was prompt. “Scuttling their ship. Not heard of that in history lessons? To stop its secrets falling into our hands.”
“If that’s what he’s doing,” Lombard said slowly, “maybe this crack in the hull isn’t accidental. Maybe they tried to blow themselves up and didn’t make it.”
“I guess — ” Adoo began, and the words blended into a cry of alarm and pain as he flung up his hands over his face.
Not as bright as the human defense-arc, which had filled the whole field of vision, but brighter than a welding-gun, the alien beam projector had fused itself. It stood for ten seconds, silhouetted in white radiance against the desert; then it collapsed and abruptly went dark as the power dispersed to ground.
There were moans like the wind in hollow trees, which came from the dying aliens.
That was the last sign of life from the black ship, although it continued to smoke fitfully all night, and a few flurrying sparks lit the darkness between one and three A.M. The dead crew were left to be sure they were entirely dead — one wouldn’t wish to encounter a portable version of the projector which had been leveled against the ship — and the rest of the day was passed in the most urgent tasks, that continued all night without chance of rest.
A short signal was got away to Earth just before it was lost below the horizon; a sensible thing would be to set up a relay in orbit, but no one had anticipated the need for constant emergency communication, and the job would have to be done later.
We’ve lost the habit of preparing for the worst, Lombard thought. In an age of wars and poverty, we’d have foreseen enemy attack, alien disease, a million potential disasters long before we left Earth. What’s kept the tentacled beings, for instance, in this primitive verge-of-catastrophe state of mind right until now? While the grays seemed to be no more than reasonably cautious in their dealings with us.
In fact, he thought he knew by now, but lacking proof for his hypothesis he was unwilling to divulge it even to Adoo for fear of having cold water poured on the idea.
Next time there was contact with Earth, one could be sure top government and fraternity officials would be listening — plans would be in draft, appropriations being made, changes in official propaganda, a myriad alterations brought to the status of necessities by the existence of hostile intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy.
There might also prove to be friendly aliens, but if the captive grays starved to death in human hands without enough communication being established to explain to their fellows, who would presumably come looking for them eventually, the chance of friendship there would be effectively nil.
Accordingly, Motilal issued his first “don’t-argue” order since the landing: concentrate at all costs on getting contact with the grays. His first step was to number those in condition to walk and talk, starting at “One” with the gray who had surrendered of his own accord after the attack by the black ship; he seemed eager to communicate and had certainly taken charge of his companions, supervising the dressing of their wounds and apparently calming their fits of wild terror — or rage, one could hardly say which.
A little tinkering with some radio components produced a crude converter which scaled the alien voices down to a pitch human could tolerate, and the intensive effort began.
It was only three mornings later, however, that Kwa — who had perforce taken over the task of looking after the aliens — reported with a harassed expression to the daily conference on progress and plans.
“The worst-burned of the grays died during the night. We were of course expecting this and I’m sure One was also. But even though I’ve done as instructed and shown him samples of every possible foodstuff we have aboard the three ships, he’s found nothing which would suit their metabolism.”
“In other words,” Motilal suggested, “we’re going to lose them. How soon?”
“They’re all very weak already. Even One, who suffered almost no harm compared to the others, is distinctly less alert and moves very slowly.”
They all turned and looked at the subject of the discussion: eyes glazed, lethargic, uncomprehending, the creature they referred to as “One” because of the single vertical white stroke with which they had numbered his gray garment leaned in a corner.
“He looks as though he’s given up hope,” Adoo muttered.
“Has he himself done anything unusual or unprecedented?” Motilal inquired, weariness thickening his own voice. The listeners exchanged glances.
Nukutiva shrugged. “Just the opposite, I’d say. He’s been trying to get a sight of all our technical equipment, but of course we could hardly—”
“What?” Lombard and Adoo reacted simultaneously to this. “When? For how long? And why hasn’t he been allowed to?”
Motilal clapped his hands angrily. “Don’t shout! It seems reasonable to restrict his access to our technical secrets, doesn’t it?”
“What’s the most likely thing for him to be looking for?” Adoo demanded, while Lombard privately wondered why he had been so impressed, as a mere ungraduate student, by the idea of acceptance into the fraternity. He answered the question in a barking voice.
“Some way of getting a message home, of course! What use is anything else to him right now? Unless he can get a message through — even if he does! — he’s apt to starve to death inside a week!”
Dr. Kwa gave a reluctant nod. “It does fit,” he agreed. “But I’d doubt whether it’s advisable to facilitate his purpose there —”
“They’re not going to overlook us, are they?” Lombard blasted. “We can’t hide! And I’d much rather he sent a message saying ‘these strange creatures have treated me well and helped me to contact you’ than that his friends turned up and found the ship destroyed and the crew dead under suspicious circumstances.”
“In any case,” Adoo muttered, “what makes anyone think our communications gear will be any good? We don’t have a faster-than-light drive — we don’t have a means of communication that’ll do for him either!”
“No.” Lombard leaned forward. “But it’s certain that our other friends would. Somewhere in the wreck of the black ship there must be signals equipment. If the the grays can fix it and make use of it — if it’s not too badly smashed — there won’t be any question of us leaking ‘technical secrets’ to them. They’ll be feeding information to us.”
Motilal remained frozen-mouthed for a long moment under Lombard’s gibe. He said finally, “Do you think we can make it clear to him what it is we’re trying to do?”
“I think if we just take him over to the wreck and turn him loose he’ll catch on by himself,” Adoo grunted. “Shouldn’t we find out the easy way — by trying it?”
The long-tentacled aliens lay sprawled like dead lilies on the reddish ground. Cautious prodding made it certain that they were incapable of movement. Then, carrying flashlights and the grays’ tube-weapons, the four explorers approached the hulk of the black ship: Lombard, Adoo, Motilal and Dr. Kofi.
The obvious point of entry was the yawning gash which had precipitated the last disastrous sally of the crew, and it did not call for Adoo’s almost mystic insight into the function and form constructs to see how it was that the fate of the occupants had then been sealed. No less than three layers of hull-plating had been cracked open in succession as the enormous weight settled at both ends, the middle supported on a ridge of rocky ground. The atmosphere inside had puffed away in a single blasting gust and there was no hope for the crew after that.
“They’re farther from us than the grays,” Jimmy Adoo muttered as the beams of their flashlights probed the interior of the ship.
“One would think so, from their general shape if nothing else,” Motilal agreed. “But what in particular makes you —?”
“All that charring.” Adoo held his light steady on a twisted object twenty feet below. “There’s little enough oxygen in this Martian air, but there can’t have been any to speak of in the original atmosphere here. The surface of everything is flash-burned.” The circle of light moved on, and they saw what he meant: overlying every thing in sight was a thin crisp layer of oxidized material.
“In that case,” Dr. Kofi said, “there’s so little chance of our finding usable equipment—”
“There’s no chance of our finding it anyway,” Lombard thrust in. “We aren’t up to this level yet. Our job is to make sure it’s safe to come here with the grays.”
“Stop this damned backbiting, will you?” Motilal rapped. “And help me get down into the ship.”
The next hour was the weirdest Lombard had ever spent, even surpassing the time — so recent, yet so unreal — when he had been watched at every move by the grays, then their captors. Every device in the ship which relied on external power for its operation was inactive — translucent panels which might have been lights looked out of corridor walls like the dead eyes of a deep-sea monster, tall pillars set with many switch-like knobs perhaps forming the control system stood stalactite-still, some of them still having the long tentacles of the crew coiled around them.
The deaths of the crew had been many and varied, but none of them had been pretty.
Dazed, turning to Adoo frequently for his enlightened guesses but not really expecting more than the reluctant mutters he accorded in answer, they peered into what might be living quarters, curiously furnished; into cargo holds, enigmatically empty; into putative weapons sections, seared and fused by the scything beams from below; into the drive-room, where long tubular metal objects lay like cartridges in a magazine, magnified to the height of a man, linked in frames of magnesium and cross-connected with busbars…
The last place they visited was what they could only take to be the communications room. The cactus-shaped forms they had seen throughout the ship, some having aliens dangling from them in a way that graphically illustrated their function as furniture, here stood in a row before hanging transparent cubes; lens systems projected images into the cubes, that much was clear, but what else was concerned with this method of passing information defeated even Jimmy Adoo’s scowling scrutiny.
“I half-get it,” he said at last. He had lifted off panels covering the innards of the equipment, exposing ten square yards of complex circuitry. “But only half. There’s a principle involved I’ve never seen before. A few points are commonplace — one could trace the circuits, for instance, without knowing what they did, so there has to be physical continuity to complete them — but the arrangement looks ridiculous, and it must be because this isn’t radio at all.”
Motilal nodded and glanced at Dr. Kofi. “Have you managed to make sense of what you’ve seen?”
“Some of it,” she sighed. “But about the only thing I’m sure about is really irrelevant. Anyway, I’m sure Adoo has already worked it out.”
Motilal frowned. This mutual sniping was annoying him; he had never expected it to be so bad or so continual, but of course it would not have been if the expedition had merely carried out its original intentions. Finding aliens here, being their captives for even a few hours, suffering attack and turning the tables on yet other aliens — all this had sapped their reserves of self-control. And what with Abubekar continually tying up at least one of their psychologists because the alternative was to keep him in coma and this might so weaken him as to endanger his life, that was a situation likely to deteriorate and not improve.
But he decided against any comment on Dr. Kofi’s remark, saying only, “Please go on.”
“Why, in fact that this isn’t a mere exploring ship — a scout, I suppose the term would be.”
“Damned right,” Adoo said softly. “And I hadn’t spotted that point — I’ve been too busy concentrating on the trees to take stock of the wood.”
Motilal cocked an eyebrow at him.
“It’s a warship,” Adoo said positively. “Not a merchantman, for trade — unless there are pirates on the space-routes and I’m not going to swallow that without persuasion. Nor a scout, as Dr. Kofi rightly says. A straightforward vessel for exploring unknown planets would be fitted out quite differently —”
“Even allowing for differences of psychology?” Lombard objected; somehow the idea that warships should exist at all off planetary surfaces was distasteful and to be avoided. “You said yourself they must be very unlike us.”
“Yes, but—” Adoo bit his lip. “How can I make this clear? Ah! Consider the way the grays came on us: with the little personal transport-platforms, compact, easy to maneuver, ideal for exploring a new planet and equipped with the hanging webs of sticky material clearly designed to trap but not harm native animals they might wish to study. That’s a fair chunk of evidence in favor of the grays having sent a scout-ship here, or at any rate a ship with ordinary scouting equipment aboard. Here, on the contrary, we’ve seen nothing comparable — only the operating machinery of the vessel and the ancillary functions such as weaponry.”
“And a hell of a lot of that,” Dr. Kofi muttered.
“Couldn’t what you’re looking for be down there in the belly?” Lombard gestured; they were standing on a sort of catwalk twenty-feet broad, and below they could see into the crushed and buckled mess which the humans’ weapons and the impact of the crash had made of at least one-third the ship’s total interior volume.
Motilal spoke before either of the others could answer. He said, “Lombard, it may be morally correct to refuse to believe the worst of strangers, but don’t forget these tentacled creatures introduced themselves by blasting another race’s ship and crew without prior warning. On the basis of their actions, I’d incline to rate the grays as civilized and these as paranoid or barbaric.”
“I’m just hoping…” Adoo said.
“What?”
The silver-haired man shrugged. “It’s quite forlorn, of course. If there’s communication equipment here in good enough condition for the grays to salvage it and get a message away to their own kind, it will have been good enough to be used to signal the friends of these people.”
Long silence greeted that. They stood dejectedly letting their eyes rove around the hollow, booming ruin of the hull.
“Why the hell did they?” Dr. Kofi said at last. “Announce themselves with an attack of that kind, I mean? If that’s the way they generally treat other races… No, no matter how I try to make sense of it, I can’t. Not even on the assumption that these creatures and the grays are at war.”
“Ask Jason here.” Adoo jerked his head at Lombard. “He’s cooking a theory of his own which he says accounts for everything very neatly.”
Lombard turned away angrily. He said, “I’ve got ideas, you’ve got ideas, everyone has ideas! Instead of trying to make guesses we can’t confirm, how about bringing the grays over and letting them see what they can do to help themselves?
So much to do—so many things to cram into so short a time that it was barely possible to spare the time to work out the order of priorities. Only one thing assigned itself priority: the matter of the grays, because they were now weakening so rapidly that they had to be carried over to the black ship for fear of wasting their strength.
There was no doubt that One, at least, had immediately understood what was in their minds when he was shown the wrecked communications room in the black ship. But although the concepts involved were by no means as alien to him as they were to Adoo or the other humans, the design must obviously be foreign, and in any case there was no way of telling whether he, or any other of the handful of surviving grays, was a specialist in the relevant technology. There followed a heartbreakingly slow process of inspecting the equipment, indicating what was potentially useful, and then getting it out. This last was most difficult of all, even when One showed the humans how to operate the personal transport-platforms and proved that their load-carrying capacity was adequate for ten times the body-weight of a gray. For power had to be brought in to serve the cutting gear; the covering panels, strained in their mounts by the crash, had to be removed and then equipment itself sectioned under the guidance of the grays…
Meantime, they grew weaker and weaker and lapsed into a kind of blank lethargy, seeming to lack even the energy to squeak out their gnat-like speech-forms.
Over them, too, like a threatening storm, lowered the threat which Adoo had voiced: the possibility that before they made their desperate sally from the ship the tentacled aliens had signaled for help from their own kind. At any moment, perhaps, another black and monstrous vessel might roar through the thin Martian atmosphere, this time not contemptuous of the little human ships, but forewarned and determined to destroy them instantly.
The tall, prefabricated radio antenna was kept locked on the invisible locus of Earth, and as often as five or six times in a day urgent questions came through from those who back on the mother world were trying to foresee and act to solve problems not yet arisen. More ships were being converted for the long haul to Mars; more scientists and technicians were being recruited to make up the numbers, and any equipment that might conceivably prove useful was being prepared. But the two planets were orbiting apart still, and it would take weeks even to get the material here, let alone load it on the ships and crew them up.
Lombard went diffidently with a suggestion to the scowling and weary Motilal, and it was found feasible and acted upon: a tape-recording was made of One’s report on the events here — at least, this was what they assumed it to be — so that a voice from the dead, at least, could speak on their behalf when more grays came to see the fate of their fellows. They would do so, surely.
One was almost excited by the tape-recording, and went frantic trying to make clear some suggestion of his own. Hours of argument and random action ultimately led them to the correct conclusion: he wanted to make use of the recording as a continuous signal, if the ultraradio could be assembled and got working.
Where that name had come from, Lombard didn’t know. He assumed Adoo had coined it; the silver-haired man was spending all his waking moments in an intensive study of the relation into which the grays were organizing the salvaged parts from the black ship. But he would not claim to understand the principles behind it well enough to explain them to anyone else, only swore at being interrupted and went back to pouring over unfamiliar, seemingly senseless circuitry.
Meantime, there were scores of other tasks to see to. The defenses had been partly inactivated by the tremendous emergency load Motilal had poured through them when the black ship was overhead, and some of the units were useless now. Cracked blocks of melted sand had engulfed them as their own output of heat fused them into the ground, and they had to be removed and the perimeter reduced to ensure a closed arc in the event of another attack. Dr. Kofi was single-handedly trying to analyze the most frightening part of the black ship’s equipment — its weaponry — and getting ahead very slowly because this was far from her own field. Only Adoo had much knowledge of such a subject, and his talent for seeing design principles of unknown devices was better employed at present.
Reassuring promises came from Earth, but those listening grimaced with annoyance. It was going to be a long time before all that extra help arrived — the manpower, the materials, the weapons including gravipowered nuclear missiles, the instruments for studying the body chemistry of the grays in vivo and the chemical synthesizers to try and provide them with usable nourishment.
These last, in fact, were certain to be useless. For the badly-injured grays were due to die today or tomorrow or the next day at the latest, and the uninjured would starve soon after.
And out there among the low hills, near the crater that had buried the grays’ ship and the rest of its crew, the sphinx still poked enigmatically out of the sandy soil and implied the existence of a threat far worse than any mere black spaceship with its armaments blazing.
The more he considered the matter, the more certain Lombard became: the key to all these incredible events was to be found in the polyhedral cylinder on which they had bestowed so fitting a nickname. The original sphinx had waited in a desert, pregnant with terrible mystery, and had doomed those who failed to solve its riddle.
He was sure the same applied now. But he could not adduce evidence to show why examining the sphinx should take precedence over their present work of repairing the defenses and trying to signal the putatively friendly gray aliens.
Besides, he still had not completely accounted to his own satisfaction for some of the happenings attributable to the sphinx. For instance, there was the discrepant treatment accorded to Bahadur and Abubekar: one dead, the other merely having his head stuffed with fantastic illusions. And then there was treatment in turn accorded to the grays. It was hardly likely that the sphinx was “tuned” to human beings — it was on Mars, where they had never set foot before. Moreover, how much of what Abubekar had said was based on his own imaginings, and how much on some genuine outside inspiration? The fraternity considering the consequences of possessing unlimited power because that was the foundation of then- ascendancy on Earth, had taken the outside chance of including him in the second expedition merely because he was thinking of controlling the process by which matter comes into being in the universe, and that was hinted at in Abubekar’s story.
Suppose this possibility was placed before someone other than mankind… ?
Lombard cursed himself for a speculative dreamer and went back to one of the many tasks claiming his immediate attention.
The injured grays began to die, and the uninjured were so weak they could no longer do the light, delicate work on the ultraradio which they had done up till now. Human deputies — Lombard and Adoo — were compelled to work under their gesturing guidance. Lombard many times was slow to follow the implications of what they wanted, and reduced them to frantic frustrated gobbling noises, but Adoo was thinking his way through the alien devices and half the time was letting his innate skills direct him, not what the grays told him.
Two, the alien whom Lombard had overpowered and disarmed at the cost of breaking one of his upper limbs, was the next to die after the worst-injured ones. He lapsed into coma while they were at work on the ultraradio and never moved again; slowly and painfully One reached to touch him with feather-light clawtips and then made gestures which could have only one meaning.
Gone.
They did not bury the corpses. The Martian air would dehydrate them and preserve them, and there weren’t likely to be bacteria here capable of decaying their tissue. It would be better to have the bodies available to show their fellows when they came.
For the last three days of his life, One was alone, sustained only by willpower. This was certain even though no real progress towards communication had been made, time being so short. Close association with the grays had enabled Lombard to sense some of the emotions implicit in their attitudes; as a man shows his feelings on his face, so the grays revealed theirs in the way they composed their upper limbs in groups of four.
“Do you think we’ll be able to get on with these people?” he murmured to Adoo as they leaned together over the huge and complex mess of equipment they had erected in what had been Alpha’s sand-crawler dock.
“I guess so,” Adoo grunted. “If we get the chance. If the tentacled ones don’t get to us first.”
He completed a circuit with a twist of pliars, and stood back wiping his face. “There. If that doesn’t work, nothing will.”
“You mean it’s finished?”
“It damned well has to be. I think I’ve seen the principle of this gadget now — I’ll get you to explain the theory to me some time — and if it doesn’t work I’ve missed the point and I might as well walk home.” He tossed aside the pliars. “Let’s carry old One over and let him approve it.”
Gently they brought the alien to the machine. His body had shrunk incredibly in the past few days since his companions had all died. He barely had the strength to move one of his eight upper limbs at a time, and the simultaneous use of three was completely beyond him.
But a spark of excitement rose in him as he surveyed the results of their long labor, and he uttered a thin buzzing — a word of praise, perhaps. Adoo and Lombard felt a sense of achievement and satisfaction rise in them as they returned One to his resting-place and connected up the tape-recorder which had been used to record his final messages.
“Power,” Adoo said briefly. “Better warn the others — we shall be drawing a million megawatts when we hit peak.”
Lombard thrust back the door of the dock and shouted at random down the corridors of the ship.“ ‘Ware power drain! ’Ware power drain!”
And slammed home the master switch linking the ultraradio to the gravipower supply.
He was chuckling jubilantly at their nick-of-time success when Adoo gave him a scowl and pointed to One, lying where they had set him down.
He had endured this long, and not one minute longer.
After that, there was a chance to investigate the rest of the black ship’s gear, and the sphinx. But it was fearfully hard to concentrate; all the time one kept glancing at the sky, and any cloud larger and darker than the typical torn-gray-veil formations of Mars was transformed by fearful imaginings into a duplicate of the black ship.
The worst of it was, there was no way to tell whether the help from Earth would come before the grays who were being signaled, or the tentacled enemy who had almost beyond doubt been signaled days in advance. Argument back and forth passed the time spared from the now less urgent jobs confronting the handful of humans on Mars.
Lombard was perhaps the only one among them to find consolation in this uncertainty. All shadow of resentment at his Cork skin-color — all the stored dislike which would take centuries on Earth to discharge to nothing, being based as it was on an equally long period of European colonial oppression — all the petty sniping and backbiting which had marred his own satisfaction at having made valuable contributions to their thinking and planning — was fading, and sheer anxiety at what fate might hold brought them together, members of one species confronted by two others at least, and who knew how many more in the unplumbed vastness of the galaxy.
Gravipower and other, simpler detectors had been strewn and scattered throughout local space; they had gone to the trouble of detaching Gamma from the linked trio and sent her three times around the planet to set the detectors orbiting. That was a calculated risk, and came off. Nothing appeared for some time after the job was completed.
A risk that couldn’t be calculated was the risk of the tentacled aliens turning up before the grays. It was certain that whichever species arrived they would head directly for the gravipower signal emanating from the equipment now constantly in use, and might possibly home on the transmission of the ultraradio.
If the tentacled beings arrived first, it would be desirable to be inside the defense-arc, and to have struck it the instant any sign of the alien ship was spotted; and to maintain it. Whether it would resist the impact of the more advanced weaponry the star-going races could be presumed to employ, no one would hazard a guess. They found what reassurances they could in the knowledge that the grounded ships were bound to have greater stamina than one attacking from orbit; they could drain the planet’s mass like the juice from an orange — in theory, at any rate. In practice they would probably have sunk below the surface of a dusty sea of dissociating compounds long before that.
But if alien technology enabled more efficient delivery of the available power, or better point-concentration, or somehow could negate the effects of the grounding arc, there was no hope.
On the other hand, it was only a pessimistic assumption that the tentacled aliens would get here first. They must hail from farther away than the grays, to start with — so far perhaps that an emergency signal would provoke belated action. Also the communications equipment in the black ship had been considerably damaged when the humans first got a sight of it; it was at least conceivable that it was damaged in the first blasts from the human defense perimeter, and if so the crew might not have got it back in working order before the hull of the ship cracked and they fled in their fruitless attempt to destroy their secrets and weapons.
If the grays did reach Mars first, it wasn’t going to help further friendly relations to greet them with a barrage of raw energy from behind an unpenetrable defense-arc.
Consequently, lacking any means of distinguishing in milliseconds between a friendly and a hostile ship, the party had to prepare for both eventualities.
From within the defense-arc it was impossible, without reducing the energy and hence the efficacy of the arc, to obtain information about what happened outside. Someone would have to remain outside; those who were inside and in the ships would have to gamble their lives on the negative evidence of the energy-level readings which were available while the arc was struck. Assuming that no external energies of the order to be expected from an attacking beam were shown being added to the total energy in circulation, they would lower the arc cautiously after fifteen minutes.
And hope to find that the single person outside the arc was still alive and confronting a ship of the grays.
They drew lots for hourly watches outside the defense perimeter. No one objected, except Dr. Kwa, whose nerves were frayed by constant attendance on Abubekar, and who had been heard to tell himself aloud that only idiots would have thought the presence of a madman useful on this expedition.
Kwa argued that so long as he had this charge on his resources, he could not be expected to cope with the outside duties as well. Or, he added sarcastically, would the captain approve of letting Abubekar stand his turn as well, to spread the load a little farther?
Lombard had been spending some of his time, since the death of the last of the grays, trying to talk with Abubekar and learn further details of his mysterious vision; he felt a certain sympathy for Kwa at this time when most of the others felt he was merely shirking. Besides, Jimmy Adoo was fully occupied studying the wreck of the black ship; he had no time for casual chat, and Lombard had formed nothing resembling a close friendship with anyone else. Accordingly he was glad enough to take a double tour of duty outside the perimeter, in very macabre company: to wit, with a tape-recorder carrying One’s message to his kind, and the dried bodies of the aliens. It was the thin hope of the entire expedition that the grays would hesitate to fire on their own kind long enough to learn the import of the message. It had even been debated whether a similar trick should be attempted with the bodies of the tentacled creatures, but it was decided that either they had got a message through, in which case a second ship would not be deceived by such a transparent device, or else they had not, in which case it was purely a matter of chance whether a second ship came to check on the fate of the first.
The detectors signaled the presence of a ship under high-order drive when Lombard was carrying out the second, extra hour of one of his turns as outside watchman. The reaction was immediate. Everyone engaged on outside activity dropped what they were doing and fled for the security of the ships; the crawler, even, was abandoned because at a dead run even an aging man like Jimmy Adoo could outpace it
The detectors signaled that the ship was closing in towards atmosphere; by then, the full complement of the expedition, except the outside watchman, was within the perimeter.
The detectors signaled the ship homing on the general area where the human party was located. The arc was struck.
Two miles distant, crouched down between rocks overlooking a level expanse of ground which was a natural choice of landing-site for any ship wishing to investigate rather than attack the defense-arc, Lombard listened to the hissing and crackling of those enormous energies. He wondered how long it would take to start a thunderstorm by such means in the dehydrated air of Mars; on Earth, in the temperate zone especially, such an arc would probably upset the weather in minutes.
He kept trying to think of other such distracting things while the seconds ticked away. He stared up into the thin darkling sky of evening, trying to make out the shape or at least the location of the announced ship. There was nothing visible to his unaided eye.
Anything was better as a subject to occupy his mind than the reality of his predicament. He could not look behind him at the terrible brilliance of the defense-arc, much brighter than the sun; he was perfectly aware of it, however, not only because of the crackling sound it gave off, but because the enormous electrical charges made the air prickly to his skin.
Why am I here anyway? Why the hell didn’t 1 tell the bastards back home that they could pick a million boneheads for any Mars trip — glory-craving, suicidal types?
There came the ship: now he caught the gleam of slanting sunlight on its upper side. On defense fields? Or only on polished hull-plates?
Oh, because I’m a Cork and anyone can tell us to do anything provided it may re-establish us in the world which has knocked us off our old pedestal… because I was sick of what I took for deceitfulness at the university… but there was no deceit needed to lure me here: they told me in full and with footnotes what I was letting myself in for, and I came.
The ship loomed, his eyes aching as they strained towards it.
It’s…? No. Still too far to tell. Why me? Because it was twice as likely to be me as anyone else after I took on Kwa’s duties as well as mine.
His mind, escaping from his will under the intolerable stress of waiting here, began to roam. Its wandering attention drifted to a score of random reflections and memories.
Maybe I was a fool not to tell Motilal my theories, get him to signal them back to Earth… If this is the tentacled species, no one else may hit on the idea after we’re all… but I’m being conceited. I’m not uniquely brilliant, just faster at getting there than most people. We all cover the same ground; it’s a racial characteristic.
The ship was growing in size with incredible slowness. As though drifting, balloon-light, on the thin Mars air. Lombard sneaked a glance at the propped-up corpses of the gray aliens here to keep him company, moved his hand — which was growing cramped — on the switch of the tape-recorder, and wished he hadn’t turned his head. For the glare of the defense arc was fierce enough to leave after-images blurry at the extreme corners of his visual field.
Yes, someone’s bound to work out the same idea I had for the Sphinxes… plural… wonder how many altogether? Billions? And who was ours meant for? Somehow 1 think not for us. We’re late. We’re different.
Are there only the two left, out of who knows how many— the tentacled ones, and the grays?
But that possibility was too appalling, and he left the line of thought he was following.
We never saw the grays’ ship — just the hole where it was destroyed. Shall I recognize theirs, if this is theirs?
It didn’t look like the black menacing monster which they had so luckily brought down. Hope grew, little by little, in his mind, but he was so taut with anticipation and fear that he lost all power of coherent reasoning, his awareness reducing to the passive condition of a photographic plate, recording for lifetime memory the descent of the ship — on the very spot where they had hoped it would land — the opening of the locks, and the emergence — puzzled, uncertain, but at least not overly hostile — of the crew.
He noted with icy calm that they were the hoped-for grays, leaned on the switch of the tape-recorder so that One’s message could boom out in the thin Martian air — except how could a shrill buzzing like a gnat’s “boom” even at maximum volume? — and waited for the new arrivals to react.
Racing towards Mars under high-order drive, the Delta — fourth ship of the expedition, converted from the lunar run — picked up the ground signals from the huge gravipowered antenna ahead, and learned that the need for haste had at least diminished, if not been abolished. Scattered over a score or more of messages came hints and clues to what was developing on Mars, and finally there came the definitive statement of events in a long situational report by Captain Motilal.
“We are now making excellent progress in communicating with the grays, as we call them. The fundamental differences, Dr. Kwa tells me, between their language and many of ours is no greater than between Chinese and an Indo-European language, apart from the very different band of the auditory spectrum in which our respective voices fall. But we solved that one easily enough with a frequency-converter.
“This is not to say we understand each other perfectly. We kept running up against psychological quirks on either side. Their mathematical formulations, for instance, stress different aspects of the same fundamental concepts — incidentally, they number to the base eight, as one would expect from the number of their forelimbs — and there’s some philosophical concept we can’t grasp behind their refusal to represent planetary orbits on a solarcentric basis. Dr. Kwa has hypothesized a ‘solipsism of consciousness’ akin to Berkeleianism, which would deny reality to that which is not observed by a perceptive mind, and suggests that they regard uninhabitable bodies including the stars and the giant planets as being of dubious reality because they’re not observable at first hand.
“Nonetheless, this difference of attitude influences our communications relatively little. On the major questions we wanted to answer, we’ve learned an astonishing amount — I refer to things like the nature of the object we call ‘the sphinx’, and the content of Abubekar’s mysterious visions.”
Motilal hesitated. “At this point, I think I ought to let the youngest member of our expedition continue the story. In a remarkable display of intuition and deduction combined, Jason Lombard had already hit on the apparently correct explanation of both the sphinx’s presence and its effect on the members of the first expedition.”
Lombard sounded unsure of himself as he began, but with the development of his arguments he relaxed and his voice came to carry warm enthusiasm.
“To be honest — uh — it was really Jimmy Adoo who gave me the key when he baptised the ‘sphinx’. Because he referred to the original story of Oedipus and the Sphinx, and the classic riddle: ‘What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?’
“To which the answer is — man, infantile, adult and senile.
“Here too, Jimmy Adoo said, he expected the answer to be ‘man’, in the sense that we’d have to answer a lot of questions about ourselves before solving the riddle of this Martian sphinx.
“There was only one place to start formulating such questions; that was at the point where the sphinx first affected human beings. There were three members of the first expedition and all of them experienced different results.
“Ho — dogmatic, hard-headed, not given to wild speculation — reported nothing when he went to hunt the source of the mysterious gravipower signal they’d detected from space. I think this was because our guess was right and the sphinx had been there so long it had sunk into the ground as it drained off the local mass for its idling power. It was trying to get back to the surface when Ho went looking for it, and had no surplus power for its projections. Its means of digging itself out, by the way, have been discovered: it has lasers which can melt it out of solid rock if required.
“Bahadur, also a pragmatic individual, went to see for himself, and did, reporting the form and appearance of the sphinx. Then he went too close to it, or came too near to probing its interior secrets, and the sphinx destroyed him. The grays have shown us how this was done, incidentally.
“But in between we have Abubekar, and his remarkable vision which no amount of persuasion will convince him is less than an objectively based memory. He is still, even now, worried in case the grays prove to be the menace from the Magellanic Cloud which his vision refers to.
“So I started worrying at the problem along the only two lines of attack open to me: first, was there a connection between the contrasting temperaments of the three men and their contrasting experiences, and second, was there a pattern in Abubekar’s vision which corresponded to these varying experiences?
“I came to the double-affirmative conclusion. Yes, it was because of their temperaments that Bahadur and Ho didn’t also see visions; yes, there was a pattern in Abubekar’s vision.
“Now you’ll have to grant me one assumption which is a pure postulate: of those races which achieve spaceflight, the most likely individuals to make the early journeys between planets are those of romantic disposition. Unlike exploration on a planetary surface, which may pay off handsomely in jewels or spices or something else profitable, spaceflight in its early days is almost bound to be uneconomic and undertaken for its own sake, like climbing mountains.
“The nearest I’ve got to evidence for this is that only Abubekar — a romantic, and on his own admission feeling the lack of some symbol or ritual to match the solemn occasion of the first Mars landing — received the vision in coherent form. He was the nearest to the typical recipient at which the vision was aimed. In passing: yes, it was ‘broadcast’ by the sphinx. The grays have tried to explain how that’s done, but so far we haven’t made sense of the explanation.
“Well, as to the pattern I got out of the vision, it seemed to me to break down into three parts: an appeal to the instinct of racial preservation, an appeal to the desire for glory, and an appeal to the desire for naked power.
“It was about then that I began to see how unbelievably accurate Adoo had been to see that the answer to this riddle too must be ‘man’. One could hardly bracket the psychological limitations of human intelligence with three more precisely aimed shots!
“I’ll go into detail on this.
“The point about racial preservation I think is self-evident. The hypothetical menace, which was so clear to Abubekar — as the horror of a nightmare is clear without being definable in waking terms — did, however, have to stem from an immense distance in order to provoke certain reflex questions in the mind of the recipient. Obviously, one’s more likely to accept a hallucination if it includes the memory of having posed rational objections and received detailed answers.
“In effect: Abubekar saw a woman where no woman could possibly be. The female figure itself is probably supplied by his mental disposition — he was irritated by bis male companions, perhaps thought a woman more appropriate to the romance of the first Mars landing, was probably just sexually frustrated too. But he was able to ask how come you’re here. And got the answer which included the appeal to the desire for power.
“The fraternity saw the implications instantly. That in fact is why I’m here. The combination of the unlimited power available from gravitation and control over the process by which matter comes spontaneously into being is the ultimate mastery of the universe of which we can conceive. This is a goal any intelligent species might crave to attain. And I was included on the strength of the expedition purely because I seemed to be the only person on Earth seriously tackling the math leading to this goal.
“Abubekar’s math was convincing to him; he thinks he was taught it by the woman he spoke to, but in fact it came from his own subconscious. Had this erroneous account of the process not been available to him, he would doubtless have been satisfied with the assumption that human math was not yet up to the concepts involved.
“The second reason why both the menace and the offer of aid had to come from a great distance was because of the need to appeal to the desire for glory. The romantic type-recipient of the message was highly susceptible to this appeal, but would question it far too closely — after all, it promised that we should become the dominant race of the galaxy — if the maker of that promise were also an inhabitant of this galaxy!
“Now this begins to make a good deal of sense. Add in the fact that only one out of three candidates got the vision, which implies two possibilities, separately or combined: that the sphinx’s power was low after a long period of idling, or that in fact human beings weren’t the optimum recipients for its message. And this leads directly to — well, to not being surprised that the gray aliens with whom we are now getting acquainted also had a sphinx.
“And presumably, so did the tentacled species we’ve run into, and who can tell how many more races the galaxy over?
“Background, as we’ve learned it to date: the gray aliens found their sphinx on the next planet sunward of their home system. We are fairly sure that they are not from the nearest suns known to have planets — Tau Ceti, for instance — because they’re extremely blue-sensitive and that’s a red sun; so are many other local candidates. But we haven’t yet persuaded them to tell us which system is their home. Never mind. I’m disgressing.
“The story told them by their sphinx was particularly acceptable because their archeological investigations had revealed traces of an all-out attack on their home-world several millennia ago, which apparently returned their species to barbarism from an extremely high level of civilization. The available evidence corresponded perfectly to the idea that a threat from space had wrecked their earlier achievements.
“They now see that the closeness of the correspondence was partly due to their own subconscious filling in details not in the original message. It’s as though, for instance, Abubekar had believed in Atlantis, he’d have built part of his vision around this idea.
“Abubekar did not get — or if he did he hasn’t told us about — the standard conclusion of the message, which is to destroy the sphinx to prevent it at all costs from falling into the clutches of the horrible oncoming menace. The grays did get this — they milked the sphinx of every technical datum their science could wring from it and then obediently destroyed it
“Judge their astonishment, then, when over interstellar distances they detected the operation of the non-physical force which indicated the impression of a mental message. This was what brought them to Mars, and presumably the tentacled ones also — not the mere exercise of gravipower, which for one thing isn’t detectable at such range and for another has been in use now for such a long time on the Moon run and on Earth itself that they’d been here years ago if that was what interested them.
“In effect, they’d detected Abubekar getting his vision.
“Their immediate asumption was that here comes the menace again, which they’d been warned of. They were still more astonished when they got here and found nothing but a sphinx identical to the one discovered in their own system.
“This prevented them from attacking us right away. They saw the obvious implication, of course — that the existence of even one other sphinx cast doubt on the promise of eventual galactic domination made to them, and reduced to nonsense the section of the message, similar to Abubekar’s, which said that the Magellanics had hunted desperately for a race psychologically akin to their own without finding any other than this.
“Luckily, our treatment of those who fell into our hands after the tentacled creatures arrived and wrecked the grays’ ship was vouched for in his posthumous recording by the gray we referred to as One. Otherwise, having only heard an emergency signal on the ultraradio and still believing that they were isolated in a hostile galaxy, the second ship would have acted against us as the first did — trapping us for investigation. At best! They might have decided we were dangerous.
“This has enabled us to put our findings together, and so far as we’ve got them to match up to date, this is the full explanation of the existence of the sphinxes.
“Some tens of millennia ago, an old but psychologically very insecure race was planning to forestall its conquest by any younger and more vigorous race which might emerge. The technique employed was simple: a ‘divide and rule’ system.
“Abubekar’s chief conspicuous reaction to the message he received from the sphinx was — fear. This is intentional. All the rest is window-dressing; the aim is to get fear into the minds of the recipient races.
“Fear leads to instability, instability to suspicion, and suspicion to ruinous engagement in interstellar war. At any rate, that’s been the pattern up till now. It’s been thousands of years since the earlier civilization on the grays’ home world — which, if not quite at the spaceflight level, was certainly higher than nineteenth-century Earth — was wrecked by another race who had received a sphinx and thought they were divinely ordained to rule the galaxy. It’s even longer since those against whose emergence into the starlanes the sphinx was first planted in the solar system suffered the same fate on a grander and more terrifying scale.
“That is the correct way of putting it. I don’t refer to any hypothetical Atlantean civilizations. I refer to the fact that the grays found their sphinx on the next planet to sunward.
“We have, of course, calculated exactly how the fifth planet of our system failed to condense normally and instead became of its own accord a ring of asteroids. These calculations are most ingenious, but the grays seem to find them laughable — if this shrill racket is laughter — and assure us that if there’s a sphinx here it’s virtually certain there was a fifth planet with a civilization that attained nearly to space-travel before suffering a calamitous — what did they call it in the old days? — yes: ‘pre-emptive strike’ by an enemy from space.
“To disrupt a whole planet is staggering to the imagination, but if the power exists — as it certainly does — to exceed the speed of light between the stars; if power exists to sow automatically devices like these sphinxes throughout the galaxy, so that whenever a race as overweening and ambitious as man waits for diabolical temptation to catch up with him, this craving can be fulfilled — then I’m willing to grant that the grays are right and all our traditional theories wrong.
“And now, together, we’re going to try and deal with the tentacled species, who no doubt have also been duped by a sphinx into thinking they are the Chosen People of the galaxy!”
The silence which reigned aboard Alpha at the conclusion of this transmission to Earth had an embarrassed and — for Lombard — embarrassing quality. He looked at his companions: Adoo, Dr. Kofi, the captain. It was unmistakable; it was the same whenever an established authority was confronted with superior accuracy, insight or other creditable performance by someone they had previously dismissed as negligible. It was the same sensation which the Cork countries of the world had experienced when the Frics and Mongs scrambled past them to the top of the international ladder. But Lombard wasn’t minded to enjoy his private turning of the tables.
After all, what was this compared with the turmoil which would be created among the grays when they discovered that their optimistic assessment of their situation was wholly incorrect— that far from being the species chosen by the mysterious extra-galactic agents to aid the fight against the ineffable menace they had simply walked into a trap baited with their own greed?
It was a sort of miracle that the grays had recovered from their smashing ruin after such a tremendous lapse of time; they might easily have found their sphinx centuries, millennia ago and have completely adapted to belief in their chosen role before contacting Earth or any other rival race… which would have led to the same action as the tentacled creatures had taken.
How short the distance from “if we do this we shall be the dominant race” to “we are the dominant race”!
It was also a miracle that Abubekar’s visions had not been shared by all three of the original expedition; with a coherent story like that, the fraternity might have published it, the whole world would have taken it for granted, and when the nature of the trap was revealed there would have been arguments, taking of sides, factions, rows, riots…
“Give us back our eleven days!” would be nothing compared to “Give us back our galactic destiny!”
Motilal cleared his throat. He said, “I don’t know if it would have been easier or more difficult to endure the last few days before the grays came, if we’d had this theory of yours to occupy our minds.”
“I think” — Dr. Kofi, with a stumbling attempt at graciousness — “it was just as well he handled it the way he did. I’d have hated to be worrying not only about these two alien races, but about the third which created the sphinxes.”
Adoo gave her a sidelong glance. “Jason,” he said, “how do you fit the tentacled ones in? Do you see them as the ones who originally smashed the grays’ early civilization?”
“Oh no. If that were possible, part of the plan would be invalidated. The purpose was to get rid of expanding aggressive races, not consolidate them; any race that had lasted from then till now would be a real galactic conqueror and we’d have run across it before, from the underside of the boot, so to speak. No, the race responsible for wrecking the grays’ planet might be the same which smashed Planet Five of our own system — but it will long ago have been torn apart by the destructive suspicions and paranoid fears which go with all attempts at total domination. We’ll probably find its remains when we go out there.”
Motilal looked at Adoo. “How does it feel to be the only expert we have on ultraradio and faster-than-light travel?”
“You’re exaggerating, Captain,” Adoo said with a wry grin. “But — uh — hadn’t we better get back to work? We have the grays’ assurance that they can detect the emergence of any ship into normal space within the solar system, but luck’s been so good to us I wouldn’t want to risk being trapped here for the tentacled ones to find.”
“In fact, apart from stowing the gear, there’s not much we can do,” Motilal shrugged. “I have the impression—would you agree, Lombard? — that the grays are seeing to it all with a sort of savage enjoyment, as though welcoming the chance to disillusion someone else with the same sort of disillusionment they themselves have just had to undergo.”
“Yes, I think that’s precisely it. And —” Lombard hesitated, then gave a sour chuckle. “You know what’s most ironical of all about this whole business?”
“What?”
“The fact that the race which was so jealous that it could conceive and put into effect the distribution of sphinxes to every system where intelligent life seemed likely to achieve spaceflight — such a paranoid race must inevitably have been consumed by the same internecine suspicions and jealousies it tried to foster in its potential rivals. We shall perhaps find their remains too, if we get that far — but I doubt very much if we shall find them.”
Motilal quoted gloomily, “ ‘And all our pomp —’ How the hell does it end? Had to study Kipling at school, but since then I’ve… ‘One with Nineveh and Tyre,’ isn’t that how it goes?”
“That’s how it goes,” Lombard agreed. He caught a wink from Adoo as the silver-haired man turned to leave the observation cabin, and could barely repress a fit of laughter which owed as much to hysterical relief of tension as it did to honest amusement.
The defense equipment was brought inship; the sand-crawler, the tubes which had linked the three ships. Delta was signaled to slack her drive and maintain a solar orbit; the departure of Epsilon from Earth was postponed. This was business to be left to the unfortunate grays, who had discovered themselves to be willing dupes, and by way of regretful thanks to the humans who had unwittingly shown them the truth, were undertaking to do the same to their fellow-dupes, the creatures with the long tentacles.
In any case, the techniques involved were ones at the fringe of which only Jimmy Adoo had started to scratch; he had acquired an intuitive insight into the way these alien devices worked, but it might take years before any human-built equivalent could be developed. Whereas the grays, who had had the chance to take apart, study and then improve on the contents of their own sphinx, could patch together the damaged one on Mars and recharge its mysterious mental records with an altogether different message.
The next of the monstrous black ships to reach Mars would find no unsuspecting victims, no contemptible human vessels without even gravipower in use. There would, of course, be a signal to attract their attention — a loud and clear one emanating from the refurbished sphinx. They could hardly fail to recognize it; unless their obsession with their own grandiose destiny had reached insane proportions, they could not overlook the obvious corollary of there being more than one sphinx promising galactic domination to its eager hearers; but in any case this sphinx no longer posed a riddle.
It contained the answer, and this was a million times more deadly.
“They may go mad,” Jimmy Adoo said pensively, gazing from the Beta’s observation cabin towards the shrinking red disc of Mars.
Dr. Nukutiva and his assistant Savile, again their companions for the flight homewards, exchanged dismayed glances.
“They may already be crazy, of course,” Adoo pursued. “They may deny the evidence, they may refuse to accept it, the may refuse to signal home what they’ve discovered and possibly commit suicide, leaving the rest of their species unenlightened.”
“I’m hoping,” Lombard grunted, “that the grays are sufficiently expert in this technique of implanting mental messages to get across the idea that something even worse will happen if they don’t pass on the news.”
There was a pause. Then Nukutiva addressed Lombard diffidently; since the impressive presentation of his theory, Nukutiva was not the only one of his companions who had been treating the young Cork with eggshell delicacy.
“Do you know what led you to your conclusions? The rest of us had the same data, but not even Kwa made a pattern of them, and as a psychologist he might be expected at least to work out the clues contained in Abubekar’s visions.”
Lombard was silent for long seconds. Then he stretched to his full height.
“Sure, I’ll tell you what I think showed it to me rather than anyone else. It’s one of these blessing-in-disguise things, like the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks.
“I’m a Cork. I’m the only Cork here. Dr. Kwa didn’t see the pattern in Abubekar’s visions because he’s Chinese and the Chinese are on top. Listen!”
He grew very earnest all of a sudden, and his face looked old and haggard.
“Someone who’s on top — someone who’s enjoying the fruits of power — can never really let himself think there may come an end to this superiority. In fact, if he does, he gets caught up in the same vicious circle which trapped the builders of the sphinxes — fear of losing what one has quickens the moment of losing it in reality.
“We Corks can envisage losing everything because we did. Two centuries ago we were masters of the world; even a century ago, it was the Cork nations which were richest, most prosperous, most powerful. Now all that’s changed; the wheel of the world has turned and another number has won… My grandfather was a citizen of the richest nation on the planet. I’m a citizen of a backward country!”
He stared, unseeing, at the dwindling red spot on the black of space.
“The whole idea of becoming the dominant race of the galaxy was — was wrong to me. Anything which promised that as a reward had to be a lie, in my opinion. I guess I was dogmatic about it — I guess I was pig-headed, to be frank. But I was not going to accept that anyone could make a promise like that unless he was lying and the whole structure of Abubekar’s vision was a cunning deceit aimed at the weakest points of human psychology.”
“One thing,” Jimmy Adoo muttered, “does comfort me.”
“What?” Lombard glanced at him.
“If the sphinxes all offered the same kind of threats and bribes, we’re going to get on pretty well with the other races we meet out there. They’ll all have failings like ours, and the same kind of saving graces.”
“Maybe,” Lombard said. He scowled. “Maybe. But I’m not making any bets.”
A gnat-like sound filled the cabin, and they all tensed. One moment more, and Motilal’s voice followed, from the Alpha.
“That was the grays’ announcement of the arrival of another ship under high-order drive a short distance beyond Mars. It will almost certainly be the tentacled race come to check on the fate of their colleagues.”
“Poor bastards,” Lombard said. And they waited to learn what would happen when the second of this galaxy’s “master-races” was disillusioned of its pretensions.
It’s not the riddle of the sphinx that’s deadly, Lombard thought. It’s the answer — when the answer happens to be ‘man’.