Galactic Storm, page 5
I stepped up to them, and received a stinging blow in the face from the foremost one of the pair. I fell back, allowed them to deposit the carcass on the table, while I stared at them for the first time really clearly.
I saw what the others had already seen: the arms too low on the thin torso, the tail-like appendage, the dome of the head, beneath which a whitish substance in wrinkles and convolutions suggested the exposed surface of a brain. I guessed instantly that the domes of their heads must be incredibly hard to withstand shocks that might harm the brain. I looked in vain for sense organs, until I realised that they needed no hearing for communication, and that the transparent dome of their heads functioned exactly like the cornea of a human eye, and the entire surface of their brains was sensitive to light. Presumably their organs (if any) of smell and taste were located near the gills. This was no difficulty to them—they could twist their arms as easily behind as in front of them.
Another strange thing happened just then. The leader broke the skin of his right hand—I call it a hand, but it only had two fingers—on the sharp projecting teeth of the dead seal, and a dark brown fluid oozed out. I caught an aura of annoyance—no pain—and he turned part round, did something to a cock on his respirator pack and held his hand in a jet of gas escaping from the tap. I heard a low, "Good God Almighty!" from Honey.
Soon afterwards, the creature shut off the tap on the respirator, and I noticed the smell. It reminded me of a hospital for a second. Then I forgot it as the two creatures turned and left the way they had come. As the walls turned a smooth red behind them again, Honey rushed forward and said, "Sharp!"
"Did you see that?" Sharp demanded. "He bleeds brown and he cures himself of a cut by holding it in a jet of formaldehyde!"
So that was what it was. I smelt again. "He wasn't hurt," I said, still sniffing the elusive vapour. "I felt his thoughts—no pain in them."
"What manner of beasts are these?" Honey burst out. "Sharp—what are they? Do they come from the centre of the earth? Is that why they inhabit a volcano? Troglodytes? Cavemen de luxe?"
Sharp's eyes were suddenly very bright. "Formaldehyde was what I needed," he muttered. "No, Honey. Not from the centre of the earth. Doesn't an atmosphere of carbon dioxide plus formaldehyde plus great heat mean anything to you?"
Honey sat down suddenly on one of the stools, which were plastic like the other furniture and breathed, "Sharp, you don't mean—?"
"I do mean," Sharp asserted fiercely. "They aren't from this planet at all."
Dim memories came flooding back. The plane in which we had flown to Washington in such wild haste; what had Honey given as his reasons for wanting a drive for the stars?
I got it then. "Venus!" I said, gasping. I knew that much about the planets. "Venus!" I repeated.
Sharp grinned like a kid. "Got it in one!" he said. "Bright boy!"
Honey wasn't disposed to be cheerful. He said, "Goddam it man! Don't you know what you're talking about?"
"Sure," said Sharp. "I'm talking about interplanetary invasion." He yanked a handkerchief from his trouser pocket—they were the last garment, except his shoes, that he was wearing—and spilt a packet with a gaudy flower printed on the front. It fell to the floor. "Damn those seeds," he said abstractedly, bent to pick them up. I read the name 'Lilium Convallium Arcticum' on the packet before he tucked it away.
"Yes," he said, "here, as I see it, we have a culture that is completely unlike ours. Sit down and I'll give you the way I piece it together."
We sat.
Chapter Six
"Venusians"
"THESE CREATURES," said Sharp, his eyes bright, "belong to a culture based on a different set of circumstances from ours. They live on a world whose air is mostly carbon dioxide and formaldehyde. What does formaldehyde mean to you, Paul?"
"Bakelite," I said promptly.
"Right," nodded Sharp, "Plastics. And plastics are what these creatures are. He bled brown, didn't he? What d'you reckon that brown is?"
"Phenol?" said Honey slowly. His brow was wrinkled deeply.
"Right again," answered Sharp. "There you have it."
"Uh-uh!" interrupted Honey. "I can think of several objections to that one. First of all, how do you reckon plastics could be produced naturally? Hardly any occur naturally on earth, and not in bulk. You need great heat and most unnatural conditions, Well?"
Sharp said patiently, "The process may be difficult to execute in bulk. But think a moment. How would you go about preparing an artificial sample of something so common as human blood? You'd take ages manufacturing corpuscles and synthesizing the serum involved —yet your bone marrow is secreting corpuscles continuously. Life is a miraculous thing, Honey. What might seem difficult artificially can occur naturally just like that." He snapped his fingers.
"Okay," said Honey Hayling. "I grant you that one—though I wish you wouldn't spout platitudes. Go on—is this plastic to be thermo-plastic or thermosetting?"
"Setting, I guess. And don't complain that phenol couldn't act as a CO2 carrier to the extremities. The way I figure it it doesn't have to. The phenol is merely a sort of protective or clotting agent, which runs just below the skin—or rather, shell. When there's a cut or a crack, it combines with the formaldehyde in the atmosphere and I presume a sort of catalyst secreted in the body to heal the injury with fresh plastic. No, the vital organs are all near the gills, and the CO2 can get more or less directly at them. Don't ask me how the said organs function, because I don't know. But if you can do better, as a hypothesis—"
Honey looked defeated, and Sharp plunged on. "I think I have the whole set-up straight now. Honey, if you were a plastic being and the vast majority of your science was plastics—witness the trucks that so ingeniously flow back to their starting point—"
"Hold it," I interjected, "Aren't you assuming a little too much? Suppose these people are a plastic metabolism type, and that their shells are a sort of bakelite"—I'd gotten the way he held his hand in the spray of formaldehyde to make a fresh layer of plastic by combining with the phenol, all right—"then how about these fancy domes of theirs? Surely that's a different sort of plastic completely?"
"We're a carbon race," Sharp answered. "Look at us—the corneas of our eyes are nothing like our bones or anything else. Carry the analogy further—why shouldn't these creatures secrete different natural polymers to produce special organs?" I nodded dumbly. "Well, as I was saying, Honey, suppose you, being such a creature and having every trick of plastics at your command—their technique is probably infinitely more advanced than ours—wanted to conquer this planet and render it suitable for colonization? How would you set about it?"
"Well," Honey began, thinking deeply, "I'd start to step up the heat. You explained exactly what was up, though without knowing what was at the root of it and thinking it was happening naturally—"
"But hoping frantically that it wasn't," interjected Sharp.
"That particular opening appears to have occurred to them."
I caught suddenly at a wave of alien thought as it entered my mind. I've already compared it to riding a cyclone, and I can't think of any apter simile, but I was getting more proficient at it. By thinking of that aspect of the operation, I had seemingly set up a rapport again, and I got a few muddled pictures of atomic structure and the number 96, before everything blanked with a bang.
I gasped a little and explained what had happened. The effect was startling. Honey leapt to his feet, sent his plastic stool skittering across the floor. He said explosively, "Californium!"
"What?" I said in amazement. Honey went on rapidly.
"After we left for Washington and this God-forsaken hole, I had the problem of the californium bomb fed to your calculator Charlie by someone else. The report said that californium was odd. It has two critical masses, one above which it reacts mildly, with a good deal of heat but no blast, and another, considerably higher, above which it reacts explosively, with light, heat, gamma and blast and the whole works. It promised to be the perfect atomic pile fuel—This means that the Venusians (if they are Venusians) have apparently unlimited quantities of californium. Where from? They must be making it, because it doesn't occur in nature. Unless it's well and truly damped with cadmium, its half-life is tiny—about 45 minutes!—and it possesses the lowest level of controllable disintegration of any element. Maybe that ties in with its double critical mass." He paused.
"Go on," I said eagerly.
Honey wiped the sweat off his forehead and said, "Well, it rather looks as if those shafts of theirs are really tunnels leading to cadmium furnaces filled with californium, which heats the rock and thence the ice, thence the sea, too. So the cycle goes, just as Sharp guessed."
"That's all very well," I said. "But I understood there wasn't any water on Venus. Can they endure it?"
"Hold on," said Sharp amusedly. "Come to that later. As I understand it, they know everything—but everything—about formaldehyde, and then some. Well, they need that for their health. Honey can tell you where there's most formaldehyde in this world."
"Great God in heaven!" whispered Honey, "but it's diabolical!" His face turned grey.
"Uh-uh," said Sharp. "Just clever. Tell Paul. He's looking a bit worried."
"Well," said Honey, looking worried himself. "You know that atmosphere would be one of their biggest problems. What they want is carbon dioxide and formaldehyde. The things that prevent the carbon process from going to extinction on earth are the plants. These creatures are killing two birds—and us!—with one stone, because formaldehyde combines very readily with itself and other things, and one particular molecule, a sort of sugary substance consisting of formaldehyde times six, so to speak, six plain molecules joined into one big one, is extremely common. It's found in the leaves and stems of plants. So that if that big molecule can be broken into its simple form, the plants will die. There will be nothing to re-separate the CO2 into carbon and oxygen. And at the same time, they will have a colossal supply of formaldehyde."
"So that's what's causing the blight on the jungles," I said, after I'd digested that piece of information. "But I still want to know about the water vapour."
"Easy. The formula for formaldehyde is CH2O," Sharp explained. I think those two were getting a lot of satisfaction out of explaining anything at all, in spite of the fact that we would probably never get out of here alive. "Even you must know that water is plain H2O. Add C and you get formaldehyde. I admit it takes more than that to bring about the reaction, but since these guys are doing their job on a planet-wide scale, I imagine they can convert the water vapour into harmless CH2O, and bottle it for further reference. In addition to that, there is a small amount of water on Venus. Traces of watery vapour turn CH2O into plastic compounds of one sort or another, which would probably be innoxious to our Venusian friends. Which means they won't have to worry about the water after all."
"But," I objected, "if the water becomes para—whatsitsname—what happens to your greenhouse effect which keeps the heat in?"
"That's a point, certainly," admitted Sharp. "CO2 has the same effect to some extent, but Venus is much nearer to the sun than earth, so that alone wouldn't duplicate Venusian conditions on Earth. Honey, how do you account for that one?"
I answered it, actually, I thought aloud while Honey was scratching his head. "But do they actually need that blanket after all? They can heat a whole planet as it is, just by warming the polar icecaps"—there was a flash of alien thought again. I'd somehow re-established contact by thinking of something that happened to be in the forefront of a nearby Venusian's mind. I said, very slowly and carefully, while I still had the contact—"that's right. They won't need the blanket effect. They can use the internal heat of the planet to warm it, and they want to dry up the water or drive it into the stratosphere. There is no axial rotation on Venus—"
Sharp broke in, "But it's been established that the temperature is almost the same on the day side as the night side. That means fairly rapid axial rotation—"
"Don't interrupt," I said, with my eyes closed. "They warm the night side by tapping the internal heat, as I said." Then it was gone. It didn't hurt at all now, just slipped away from me. I was more used to the way their thoughts worked. My own were, of course, still very different, but there was no shock of losing control any more.
I opened my eyes. For a second the whole place looked familiar and my companions shockingly alien, and I was horrified to think that I was maybe learning the way of the Venusians' thoughts at the cost of thinking like them myself. For a moment Venusian and terrestrial allegiance fought wildly for my brain. Terrestrial won. It was a close thing—
I shivered. "Paul!" said Sharp, suddenly concerned. "What's wrong?"
I explained, smiling a little wanly. It was a terrible and frightening experience. When I was through. Honey said, "Paul, you mustn't go under, whatever happens! Do you think if we thought hard at you next time you catch their thoughts, it would help?"
"You can try," I said. "But—I don't much like the idea of it starting again."
Sharp bit through one of his nails with a click. He nodded at the seal on the table, changed the subject. "What do you reckon they intended that for?"
"Food, I imagine," I said. They glanced apprehensively at me.
"Did you—" began Honey. I grinned.
"It's all right," I said. "This one's just guesswork. Are you hungry?"
"Rather," admitted Honey. There was plenty of him to get hungry, too. So we ignored the seal, in spite of its being quite the most conspicuous feature of our bubble room, and passed round our iron rations, of which we had two or three boxes each. When we had taken in a little nourishment, I belied Sharp's consistent accusations that I wasn't practical, and inquired, "Is there any way we can get out of this dump?"
Sharp said, "I doubt it. Certainly we can't cut loose without oxygen masks or some means of breathing. We do all right in here, but formaldehyde is the hell of a poisonous gas. The big thing, though, is that we can't warn the world."
"They'll guess soon enough that something's up," Honey assured him.
"How soon is soon enough?" Sharp asked grimly. "We weren't scheduled to make any reports before January. Three months at least before anyone gets wise. And judging by the rapid spread of the tree blight, three months may be too long. We haven't a radio. We haven't anything. Anyway, the next expedition will come unprepared, like us, and this time the Venusians won't just stage a bombardment with six-pound hunks of rock or pumice, like they did to Paul. No, they'll have earthquakes and tidal waves on tap, like the one which sank the ship.
"What are we here for, anyway?" he broke off abruptly. "I think I know. We're probably zoological specimens. They want some samples of the aboriginal life-forms. Further, they may experiment on us, when they find time, just in case there's a quick way of disposing of us that they've failed to spot. I don't suppose that's likely."
"Either way the prospects are less than alluring."
"Understatement of the century," I grunted, pretending indifference. In reality, I was dead scared and darned nearly mad with frustration. Here we were, face to face with the biggest menace the world had ever known, a race of beings who had calmly settled down to a project for conquering a planet that might take centuries to finish, with a science, in plastics at any rate, that put ours in the shade, unlimited supplies of one of the rarest elements in the world, a body that could be healed almost instantly simply by exposure to the air of its native planet, or a jet of formaldehyde here. We could tell nobody. We were forced to sit here and wait for something to happen. I munched a hard biscuit and sighed.
Sharp returned from a study of the air vents. "The one coming in is blocked by a fan," he reported. "No chance of escape that way, even if it were wide enough to take a man's body—which it isn't. The other is completely dark except for a red glow at the top. I rather fancy it leads straight into the volcano. If it does, we'd be fried, even if this one were wide enough to get into—which it isn't either."
He waited for any comments. There were none. He sighed and sat down. We lapsed into a miserable silence.
Maybe half an hour of lethargy passed—I know I dozed off, still with those whisperings on the threshold of awareness—before there came a scuffle outside, a fleeting thought, and we all glanced up to see the wall part again to let in the leader of a group of Venusians. The rest stayed outside, but we could see them through the transparent wall.
This Venusian who came in carried three oxygen masks, plus cylinders to match, which we looped obediently on our shoulders. He showed us how to operate the valves on the masks—they were plastic, and when pressed in a certain way they changed shape instantly, thus closing the valve, retaining that shape until pressed again. I caught Sharp's significant glance at Honey Hayling, and I knew what he meant. More slick tricks with plastics!
Then he unhooked another of the queerly shaped weapons they had shown us before, and motioned that we should go through the wall. I was very glad that Sharp had a gunbelt on.
The wall was there, all right, but when I put my mask up to my face and stepped into it, it yielded in exactly the same way as a piece of gossamer, and I was through.
Behind me I heard a murmur of, "Atomic phase-shifting," from Honey, but I was too interested in seeing clearly—or nearly clearly, owing to the presence of occasional white drifts that I guessed were clouds of some plastic compound like the ones on Venus itself—the web of rails and tracks that I had previously only known indirectly. Our bubble was almost dead opposite the black tunnel whence they radiated, and we had a clear space about ten feet on a side, free of rails, to stand in. But we didn't stand there long. Our guides, keeping their weapons ready, motioned us to walk straight across towards the tunnel, and, picking our way side by side across the rails, pausing to let trucks pass, we made for it.
