Explorers of Space Read online

  “Quite aristocratic!” said Roane with a touch of irony. “I take it that robots clean out the bear quarters downstairs.”

  “No!” snapped Huyghens, “I do! They’re my friends! They fight for me! They can’t understand the necessity and no robot would do the job right!”

  He growled, again. The noises of the night went on outside. Organ tones and hiccupings and the sound of tack-hammers and slamming doors. Somewhere there was a singularly exact replica of the discordant squeaking of a rusty pump.

  “I’m looking,” said Huyghens at the microviewer, “for the record of their mining operations. An open-pit operation wouldn’t mean a thing. But if they had driven a tunnel, and somebody was there supervising the robots when the colony was wiped out, there’s an off-chance he survived a while.”

  Roane regarded him with suddenly intent eyes.

  “And—”

  “Dammit,” snapped Huyghens, “if so I’ll go see! He’d . . . they’d have no chance at all, otherwise. Not that the chance is good in any case!”

  Roane raised his eyebrows.

  “I’m a Colonial Survey officer,” he said. “I’ve told you I’ll send you to prison if I can. You’ve risked the lives of millions of people, maintaining non-quarantined communication with an unlicensed planet. If you did rescue somebody from the ruins of the robot colony, does it occur to you that they’d be witnesses to your unauthorized presence here?”

  Huyghens spun the viewer again. He stopped. He switched back and forth and found what he wanted. He muttered in satisfaction: “They did run a tunnel!” Aloud he said, “I’ll worry about witnesses when I have to.”

  He pushed aside another cupboard door. Inside it were odds and ends a man makes use of to repair the things about his house that he never notices until they go wrong. There was an assortment of wires, transistors, bolts, and similar stray items that a man living alone will need. When to his knowledge he’s the only inhabitant of a solar system, he especially needs such things.

  “What now?” asked Roane mildly.

  “I’m going to try to find out if there’s anybody left alive over there. I’d have checked before if I’d known the colony existed. I can’t prove they’re all dead, but I may prove that somebody’s still alive. It’s barely two weeks’ journey away from here! Odd that two colonies picked spots so near!” He absorbedly picked over the oddments he’d selected. Roane said vexedly:

  “Confound it! How can you check whether somebody’s alive some hundreds of miles away—when you didn’t know he existed half an hour ago?”

  Huyghens threw a switch and took down a wall panel, exposing electronic apparatus and circuits behind. He busied himself with it.

  “Ever think about hunting for a castaway?” he asked over his shoulder. “There’s a planet with some tens of millions of square miles on it. You know there’s a ship down. You’ve no idea where. You assume the survivors have power—no civilized man will be without power very long, so long as he can smelt metals!—but making a space beacon calls for high-precision measurements and workmanship. It’s not to be improvised. So what will your shipwrecked civilized man do, to guide a rescue ship to the one or two square miles he occupies among some tens of millions on the planet?” Roane fretted visibly.

  “What?”

  “He’s had to go primitive, to begin with,” Huyghens explained. “He cooks his meat over a fire, and so on. He has to make a strictly primitive signal. It’s all he can do without gauges and micrometers and very special tools. But he can fill all the planet’s atmosphere with a signal that searchers for him can’t miss. You see?”

  Roane thought irritably. He shook his head.

  “He’ll make,” said Huyghens, “a spark transmitter. He’ll fix its output at the shortest frequency he can contrive—it’ll be somewhere in the five-to-fifty-meter wave-band, but it will tune very broad—and it will be a plainly human signal. He’ll start it broadcasting. Some of those frequencies will go all around the planet under the ionosphere. Any ship that comes in under the radio roof will pick up his signal, get a fix on it, move and get another fix, and then go straight to where the castaway is waiting placidly in a hand-braided hammock, sipping whatever sort of drink he’s improvised out of the local vegetation.”

  Roane said grudgingly:

  “Now that you mention it, of course—”

  “My space phone picks up micro-waves,” said Huyghens, “I’m shifting a few elements to make it listen for longer stuff. It won’t be efficient, but it will pick up a distress signal if one’s in the air. I don’t expect it, though.”

  He worked. Roane sat still a long time, watching him. Down below a rhythmic sort of sound arose. It was Sourdough Charley, snoring. Sitka Pete grunted in his sleep. He was dreaming. In the general room of the station Semper the eagle blinked his eyes rapidly and then tucked his head under a gigantic wing and went to sleep. The noises of the Loren Two jungle came through the steel-shuttered windows. The nearer moon—which had passed overhead not long before the ringing of the arrival bell—again came soaring over the eastern horizon. It sped across the sky at the apparent speed of an atmosphere-flier. Overhead, it could be seen to be a jagged irregular mass of rock or metal, plunging blindly about the great planet forever.

  Inside the station, Roane said angrily:

  “See here, Huyghens! You’ve reason to kill me. Apparently you don’t intend to. You’ve excellent reason to leave that robot colony strictly alone. But you’re preparing to help, if there’s anybody alive to need it. And yet you’re a criminal—and I mean a criminal! There’ve been some ghastly bacteria exported from planets like Loren Two! There’ve been plenty of lives lost in consequence, and you’re risking more! Why do you do it? Why do you do something that could produce monstrous results to other beings?”

  Huyghens grunted.

  “You’re only assuming there are no sanitary and quarantine precautions taken in my communications. As a matter of fact, there are. They’re taken, all right! As for the rest, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand,” snapped Roane, “but that’s no proof I can’t! Why are you a criminal?”

  Huyghens painstakingly used a screwdriver inside the wall panel. He delicately lifted out a small electronic assembly. He carefully began to fit in a spaghettied new assembly with larger units.

  “I’m cutting my amplification here to hell-and-gone,” he observed, “but I think it’ll do. I’m doing what I’m doing,” he added calmly, “I’m being a criminal because it seems to me befitting what I think I am. Everybody acts according to his own real notion of himself. You’re a conscientious citizen, and a loyal official, and a well-adjusted personality. You consider yourself an intelligent rational animal. But you don’t act that way! You’re reminding me of my need to shoot you or something similar, which a merely rational animal would try to make me forget. You happen, Roane, to be a man. So am I. But I’m aware of it. Therefore, I deliberately do things a merely rational animal wouldn’t, because they’re my notion of what a man who’s more than a rational animal should do.”

  He very carefully tightened one small screw after another. Roane said annoyedly:

  “Oh. Religion.”

  “Self-respect,” corrected Huyghens. “I don’t like robots. They’re too much like rational animals. A robot will do whatever it can that its supervisor requires it to do. A merely rational animal will do whatever it can that circumstances require it to do. I wouldn’t like a robot unless it had some idea of what was befitting it and would spit in my eye if I tried to make it do something else. The bears downstairs, now—they’re no robots! They are loyal and honorable beasts, but they’d turn and tear me to bits if I tried to make them do something against their nature. Faro Nell would fight me, and all creation together if I tried to harm Nugget. It would be unintelligent and unreasonable and irrational. She’d lose out and get killed. But I like her that way! And I’ll fight you and all creation when you make me try to do something against my nature. I�
�ll be stupid and unreasonable and irrational about it.” Then he grinned over his shoulder. “So will you. Only you don’t realize it.” He turned back to his task. After a moment he fitted a manual-control knob over a shaft in his haywire assembly.

  “What did somebody try to make you do?” asked Roane shrewdly. “What was demanded of you that turned you into a criminal? What are you in revolt against?”

  Huyghens threw a switch. He began to turn the knob that controlled the knob of his makeshift-modified receiver.

  “Why,” he said amusedly, “when I was young the people around me tried to make me into a conscientious citizen and a loyal employee and a well-adjusted personality. They tried to make me into a highly intelligent rational animal and nothing more. The difference between us, Roane, is that I found it out. Naturally, I rev—”

  He stopped short. Faint, crackling, crisp frying sounds came from the speaker of the space phone now modified to receive what once were called short waves.

  Huyghens listened. He cocked his head intently. He turned the knob very, very slowly. Then Roane made an arrested gesture, to call attention to something in the sibilant sound. Huyghens nodded. He turned the knob again, with infinitesimal increments.

  Out of the background noise came a patterned mutter. As Huyghens shifted the tuning, it grew louder. It reached a volume where it was unmistakable. It was a sequence of sounds like discordant buzzing. There were three half-second buzzings with half-second pauses between. A two-second pause. Three full-second buzzings with half-second pauses between. Another two-second pause and three half-second buzzings, again. Then silence for five seconds. Then the pattern repeated.

  “The devil!” said Huyghens. “That’s a human signal! Mechanically made, too In fact, it used to be a standard distress call. It was termed an SOS, though I’ve no idea what that meant. Anyhow, somebody must have read old-fashioned novels, some time, to know about it. And so someone is still alive over at your licensed, but now smashed-up, robot colony. And they’re asking for help. I’d say they’re likely to need it.”

  He looked at Roane.

  “The intelligent thing to do is sit back and wait for a ship—either of my friends or yours. A ship can help survivors or castaways much better than we can. A ship can even find them more easily. But maybe time is important to the poor devils! So I’m going to take the bears and see if I can reach them. You can wait here, if you like. What say? Travel on Loren Two isn’t a picnic! I’ll be fighting nearly every foot of the way. There’s plenty of ‘inimical animal life’ here!”

  Roane snapped angrily:

  “Don’t be a fool! Of course I’m coming! What do you take me for? And two of us should have four times the chance of one!”

  Huyghens grinned.

  “Not quite. You forget Sitka Pete and Sourdough Charley and Faro Nell. There’ll be five of us if you come, instead of four. And, of course, Nugget has to come—and he’ll be no help—but Semper may make up for him. You won’t quadruple our chances, Roane, but I’ll be glad to have you if you want to be stupid and unreasonable and not at all rational and come along.”

  3

  There was a jagged spur of stone looming precipitously over a river valley. A thousand feet below, a broad stream ran westward to the sea. Twenty miles to the east, a wall of mountains rose sheer against the sky. Its peaks seemed to blend to a remarkable evenness of height. There was rolling, tumbled ground between for as far as the eye could see.

  A speck in the sky came swiftly downwards. Great pinions spread, and flapped, and icy eyes surveyed the rocky space. With more great flappings, Semper the eagle came to ground. He folded his huge wings and turned his head jerkily, his eyes unblinking. A tiny harness held a miniature camera against his chest. He strutted over the bare stone to the highest point. He stood there, a lonely and arrogant figure in the vastness.

  There came crashings and rustlings, and then snuffling sounds. Sitka Pete came lumbering out into the clear space. He wore a harness too, and a pack. The harness was complex, because it had not only to hold a pack in normal travel, but, when he stood on his hind legs, it must not hamper the use of his forepaws in combat.

  He went cagily all over the open area. He peered over the edge of the spur’s farthest tip. He prowled to the other side and looked down. He scouted carefully. Once he moved close to Semper and the eagle opened his great curved beak and uttered an indignant noise. Sitka paid no attention.

  He relaxed, satisfied. He sat down untidily, his hind legs sprawling. He wore an air approaching benevolence as he surveyed the landscape about and below him.

  More snufflings and crashings. Sourdough Charley came into view, with Huyghens and Roane behind him. Sourdough carried a pack, too. Then there was a squealing and Nugget scurried up from the rear, impelled by a whack from his mother. Faro Nell appeared, with the carcass of a staglike animal lashed to her harness.

  “I picked this place from a space photo,” said Huyghens, “to make a directional fix from. I’ll get set up.”

  He swung his pack from his shoulders to the ground. He extracted an obviously self-constructed device which he set on the ground. It had a whip aerial, which he extended. Then he plugged in a considerable length of flexible wire and unfolded a tiny, improvised directional aerial with an even tinier booster at its base. Roane slipped his pack from his shoulders and watched. Huyghens slipped headphones over his ears. He looked up and said sharply:

  “Watch the bears, Roane. The wind’s blowing up the way we came. Anything that trails us—sphexes, for example—will send its scent on before. The bears will tell us.”

  He busied himself with the instruments he’d brought. He heard the hissing, frying background noise that could be anything at all except a human signal. He reached out and swung the small aerial around. Rasping, buzzing tones came in, faintly and then loudly. This receiver, though, had been made for this particular wave band. It was much more efficient than the modified space phone had been. It picked up three short buzzes, three long ones, and three short ones again. Three dots, three dashes, and three dots. Over and over again.

  SOS. SOS. SOS.

  Huyghens took a reading and moved the directional aerial a carefully measured distance. He took another reading. He shifted it yet again and again, carefully marking and measuring each spot and taking notes of the instrument readings. When he finished, he had checked the direction of the signal not only by loudness but by phase—he had as accurate a fix as could possibly be had with portable apparatus.

  Sourdough growled softly. Sitka Pete whiffed the air and arose from his sitting position. Faro Nell whacked Nugget, sending him whimpering to the farthest corner of the flea place. She stood bristling, facing downhill the way they’d come.

  “Damn!” said Huyghens.

  He got up and waved his arm at Semper, who had turned his head at the stirrings. Semper squawked in a most un-eaglelike fashion and dived off the spur and was immediately fighting the downdraft beyond it. As Huyghens reached for his weapon, the eagle came back overhead. He went magnificently past, a hundred feet high, careening and flapping in the tricky currents. He screamed, abruptly, and circled and screamed again. Huyghens swung a tiny vision plate from its strap to where he could look into it. He saw, of course, what the little camera on Semper’s chest could see—reeling, swaying terrain as Semper saw it, though without his breadth of field. There were moving objects to be seen through the shifting trees. Their coloring was unmistakable.

  “Sphexes,” said Huyghens dourly. “Eight of them. Don’t look for them to follow our track, Roane. They run parallel to a trail on either side. That way they attack on breadth and all at once when they catch up. And listen! The bears can handle anything they tangle with! It’s our job to pick off the loose ones! And aim for the body! The bullets explode.”

  He threw off the safety of his weapon. Faro Nell, uttering thunderous growls, went padding to a place between Sitka Pete and Sourdough. Sitka glanced at her and made a whuffing noise, as if derisive of her bl
ood-curdling sounds. Sourdough grunted in a somehow solid fashion. He and Sitka moved farther away from Nell to either side. They would cover a wider front.

  There was no other sign of life than the shrillings of the incredibly tiny creatures which on this planet were birds, and Faro Nell’s deep-bass, raging growls, and then the click of Roane’s safety going off as he got ready to use the weapon Huyghens had given him.

  Semper screamed again, flapping low above the treetops, following parti-colored, monstrous shapes beneath.

  Eight blue-and-tan fiends came racing out of the underbrush. They had spiny fringes, and horns, and glaring eyes, and they looked as if they had come straight out of hell. On the instant of their appearance they leaped, emitting squalling, spitting squeals that were like the cries of fighting tomcats ten thousand times magnified. Huyghens’ rifle cracked, and its sound was wiped out in the louder detonation of its bullet in sphexian flesh. A tan-and-blue monster tumbled over, shrieking. Faro Nell charged, the very impersonation of white-hot fury. Roane fired, and his bullet exploded against a tree. Sitka Pete brought his massive forepaws in a clapping, monstrous ear-boxing motion. A sphex died.

  Then Roane fired again. Sourdough Charley whuffed. He fell forward upon a spitting bi-colored fiend, rolled him over, and raked with his hind claws. The belly-side of the sphex was tenderer than the rest. The creature rolled away, snapping at its own wounds. Another sphex found itself shaken loose from the tumult about Sitka Pete. It whirled to leap on him from behind—and Huyghens fired very coldly—and two plunged upon Faro Nell and Roane blasted one and Faro Nell disposed of the other in truly awesome fury. Then Sitka Pete heaved himself erect—seeming to drip sphexes—and Sourdough waddled over and pulled one off and killed it and went back for another. And both rifles cracked together and there was suddenly nothing left to fight.