Futures Past (33 page)

  
"A product, as we now know, of alien science."

  
"But I don't know anything about languages!"

  
"That doesn't matter," said Davies, waving the engineer to silence. He spent a moment ordering his thoughts, then went on. "We are trying here to translate a language without a single clue as to its structure, the number of letters in its alphabet, or anything else at all beyond the fact that it belongs to a highly advanced, scientific civilization.

  
"But the work of the alien expedition seems to have been pretty comprehensive," Davies continued, his eyes still on Mercer's puzzled face, "and there are all sorts of charts and technical literature lying around. Well, I want you to go over those papers with me.

  
"You can see my idea now, I expect: a natural law or a chemical element is the same no matter what the language used to express or describe it. So if we find, say, a radio circuit diagram with the usual list of component values appended, you may be able to tell me that such-and-such a squiggle is the alien equivalent of a resistor or condenser—I wouldn't expect you to read the whole diagram, naturally—and we would have approximate meanings for a couple of alien words.

  
"The same applies to the Periodic Table of Elements, which would furnish a clue to their system of numbering ..."

  
Suddenly excited, Mercer said, "It might work at that. But—"

  
"But it will be a long, tedious job," Davies said. "The things I've mentioned will only give us a toehold on their language, nothing more. But a beginning is all I ask."

  
Davies and Mercer rose and began climbing into their spacesuits again, but Captain Silverman made no attempt to follow. He said, "I'm tired. It's been twenty hours or more since I've had any sleep, so I think I'll sling a hammock in the control room—that way I can hear you on the radio if you get into trouble. I'd advise you two to get some rest, too." A sudden, jaw-stretching yawn overtook him and he rubbed his eyes. As a parting shot at Mercer, he added, "The base won't run away, you know."

  
But the engineer and himself were too excited to think of sleep. In five minutes they were outside again, stepping out confidently toward the base. Davies had begun to get the hang of the long-striding and forward-leaning walk required for efficient movement in Titan's light gravity. But there was one cloud marring his otherwise sunny sky—a very small thing, really, but he might as well dispose of it now so that Mercer and he could get down to the really important work.

  
"Mr. Mercer," he said lightly, "from overhearing the discussion of the captain and yourself a few minutes ago, I know that you're itching to finish off a little investigation of your own. If you don't mind we'll attend to that first, otherwise you'll be no use to me at all."

  
Mercer chuckled, then suddenly he became serious. "The big mystery has to do with the power lines radiating from what I call the battery room," he explained. "I'm puzzled, because over half of the power available is not accounted for within the base—several of the power cables just disappear into a wall. The position of this wail, however, is close to that occupied on the surface by the pinnacle of rock I was suspicious about earlier. I can't explain it, but I have the feeling that that pinnacle is the center of this base in more ways than one . . ." He trailed off into silence, then added awkwardly, "But thanks for letting me get this particular bee out of my bonnet, Professor. I'm very curious about this business, but didn't like to ask . . ."

  
Davies passed the thanks off with an embarrassed grunt. They altered direction to head toward the pinnacle.

  
At its base Mercer came close to Davies, flicked off the toggles of both their suit radios, then touched his helmet to the professor's. Strangely muffled after the tinny clarity of the suit phones, his voice came through to a rather startled Davies.

  
"Don't be alarmed," Mercer said.
 
"I'm going to try climbing this thing, and don't want the captain to know about it. He would only worry and spoil his snooze—or maybe even forbid it. So when I switch our suit radios on again, keep all mention of climbing out of the conversation. That way, unless he goes to the view-port, he'll think we're just talking about something inside the base."

  
With their radios operating again Mercer turned and began heaving himself aloft with the ease of a practiced rock climber. After a moment's hesitation, Davies followed him at a slower pace.

  
"Well, well," said Mercer, when Davies reached the engineer's position. "What have we here?" Together they stared at something which resembled nothing so much as a nest of copper wires containing a single crystal egg. The nest was about six inches in diameter, the crystal roughly two inches, and though the device occupied the extreme tip of the pinnacle, there was enough shoulder to the outcropping to hide it from an observer at ground level.

  
"There's something funny about this, too," Mercer went on, indicating the rock surface to which they clung. "I've the feeling it's faked, possibly an extension of the original pinnacle made to hide the leads to this gadget up here..."

  
All at once Davies was not listening to Mercer anymore. He felt himself sweating. Before his eyes a crooked, black line had appeared in the rocky surface, widening rapidly and sprouting other black lines which likewise widened and sprouted. Cracks! he thought wildly, then suddenly he was falling, Mercer was falling and the surface to which they had been clinging had broken up and was falling with them into darkness. For a fleeting instant he realized that Mercer was right, the tip of the rock pinnacle had been a mere shell of plastic which had disintegrated under their combined weights, then his mouth opened in a cry of fear and astonishment as he plummeted downward.

  
When he hit, it was with not quite enough force to break his neck or damage his spacesuit. Mercer had been equally lucky; Davies saw the engineer's suit lamp playing around the walls of the circular chamber into which they had fallen as he searched for and found a light switch. With the chamber brightly lit Mercer turned and advanced anxiously on his still recumbent body.

  
Davies relieved the other's anxiety by climbing painfully to his feet.

  
Back in the Hannibal's control room Captain Silverman was shouting himself hoarse. "Mercer! Professor!" his voiced dinned in their earphones, "What's wrong? Somebody shouted! What's happening ... ?"

  
In a sheepish voice Mercer told the captain what had happened, and assured him that they were both unhurt. Captain Silverman then told Mercer a few things, mainly concerning what he thought of supposedly responsible officers who took stupid risks with the safety of others as well as themselves. Davies came in for a couple of backhanders as well—the professor was surely old enough, Silverman insisted, to know better than to join in a foolhardy stunt like this—but it was the engineer who came under the heaviest fire. And not only was the captain's tone cutting, his sarcasm was hooked, barbed and grooved for poison.

  
While this verbal flaying was going on Mercer was silent, but he had discovered a metal trap door in the floor of the chamber and a ladder leading downwards. He had ignored the torrent of abuse and recrimination to the extent of descending the ladder to explore, and when his head emerged from the opening a few minutes later, Silverman had run dry.

  
"I'm, er, afraid we can't get out, Captain," he said hesitantly. "When you're coming you'd better bring ropes."

  
Silverman didn't say anything to that, he had already said it all.

  
While they were waiting for the captain to arrive with tackle from the ship to haul them out, Mercer and Davies began a close examination of their surroundings. They were in a circular room of roughly five yards diameter which had been hollowed out of the original rock outcropping, then covered by a thin, plastic shell treated to simulate rock on the outside.

  
In the center of the room stood a tall, enigmatic piece of apparatus which they had narrowly missed in falling. Several of the heavy power lines about which Mercer had been so curious sprouted from the floor and disappeared into this imposing mechanism—which Mercer, after much peering and nosing around it, had guessed to be some form of communicator. Pointing to a silvery rod near its top he said that this was probably the antenna. However, as the rod was totally enclosed by a sphere of copper mesh it was obvious that the signal produced could not go out into the normal ether. Also, the equipment was apparently activated by an impulse which should reach it via the metal bird's nest they had seen just before their fall.

  
". . . Another thing that puzzles me," Mercer said as they stared at the device, "is the amount of power the thing uses. It must operate for a split second at tremendous overload, then burn out—those power lines go right into it without fuses or safety cutoffs of any kind.

  
"And," he continued, "when I went down that trap in the floor I discovered that this place originally had an entrance at ground level before it was sealed up—I'd swear it was at the place where we saw the peculiarities in the rock the first time we came by. So here we have a gadget that was built, carefully hidden and sealed up on completion, and its triggered off by an impulse of some sort generated by that copper and crystal thing up top."

  
Mercer took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. In the phones it sounded like trees rustling in a high wind.

  
"I'm beginning to suspect," he went on suddenly, "that the alien expedition's chief purpose was the building of this thing. Otherwise, why go to all this trouble to hide it?" Worriedly, he ended, "This business is beginning to scare me."

  
Despite the engineer's uneasiness Davies was inclined to feel more afraid of the things Silverman might say when he had them back on the ship. Technically he, Professor Davies, was the leader of this expedition, but the captain had been a very exasperated man.

  
But the expected lecture was not forthcoming, and during the two busy weeks which followed, Silverman scarcely mentioned the incident.

  
The greater part of those two weeks had been happy for Davies, with the happiness which comes only when a man is gladly flogging himself to death at the work which he loves. He had lost count of the meals he had missed and the sleep which he owed himself. His eyes were bloodshot and felt like hot, gritty pebbles in his head and altogether his face showed all the symptoms of a person on a protracted binge—an intellectual binge, in this case. During the past few days, however, a sour note had crept into this bone-weary but happy existence, and for the life of him Davies could not find the reason for it.

  
It was not that the two ship's officers had been uncooperative. Far from it, Silverman and Mercer had spent a great many hours with him poring over alien charts and papers. So much so that Davies' progress in the translation of the alien printed language was more than satisfactory. But it had been work that, because of the monotony and sheer mental drudgery involved, was very much un-suited to the temperaments of the two men. It was only natural, therefore, that they spend more and more time inside the pinnacle of rock that housed the only alien device in the base which appeared to be complete.

  
Davies had a highly intriguing and complex jigsaw puzzle of his own to piece together—the alien language. Why then should he begrudge the other two their fun?

  
This was the sort of reassuring question Davies had asked himself after first noticing the subtle change in the relations between the two ship's officers and himself. But he had always been sensitive to emotional atmosphere and now could no longer disregard the feeling that Silverman and Mercer were hiding something from him. They were a little too casual when he asked questions, their tones a little too high-pitched. And had they not, of late, initiated a new method of concealment? When out at the pinnacle together were they not being deliberately too technical in their conversation, so that Davies listening to them on the suit radio circuit had no idea at all what they were discussing ... ?

  
And now they had taken things a stage further. Either they had stopped talking altogether, or good old safety-drill conscious, radio-at-all-times Silverman had taken to switching off his suit radio for long periods. Mercer's, too, because in Davies' phones there had been nothing for the past hour but a humming silence.