Fred Hoyle - Element 79

The battery and computer theory wasn’t widely believed at first, because the sound waves in the ice appeared to contradict it. Why would sound waves be used in an electrical system? Not for communication. No system of computers would communicate with each other by sound, not unless the situation on Mars was even more crazy than it seemed to be. One feature of the theory was attractive to NASA, though. It supported a step to which the scientist-administrators were already strongly inclined, to continue the borehole which had been instantly stopped when the signals were first discovered. The thing to do next, it now seemed, was to discover what kind of liquid lay below the ice, if indeed there was any liquid.

When the hole was completed, instead of a soda squirt, there came a powerful great squirt of filthy, evil-smelling stuff containing chlorine, bromine, and H 2S. This was a bad blow to the prospects of a permanent Martian laboratory, but at least it supported the electrolyte theory. Yet the sound signals were still a puzzle.

The puzzle was solved at last in a singular fashion. One morning the scientist-explorers were astonished to find a shining, cigar-shaped machine standing outside the laboratory. In one side of it they could see an opening, as if a panel had been slid back. Gingerly, in a frankly suspicious frame of mind, they examined the object as best they could without actually entering it. Nothing of any kind, no projection of any sort, was to be discovered on the exterior. It was all completely smooth, a metallic alloy of some kind. A periscopic device was used to examine the interior—so that nobody need enter the thing. Absolutely nothing could be seen. There was no control console inside. It was all completely smooth.

At least the machine looked quite harmless, unless there were more panels behind which weapons of some kind were lurking. Full information was sent immediately to Earth. Instructions came back, to the effect that the scientist-explorers should proceed with extreme caution, but that reasonable enterprise should not be eschewed.

The machine lay completely static outside the laboratory for several days. The men looked it over for the hundredth time. Obviously the damn thing had arrived with some kind of intent but had then got itself stuck. It just stood there day after day, with an opening in one side. Two men got into it together, so that if anything happened there would be two of them to deal with it. Nothing happened. There seemed nothing that could happen, since there were no controls—and even if there had been controls, there was nobody to operate them. The two got out, quite safely. The others went in and out, one after the other. It was all apparently quite safe. Yet on the very last man the door closed, without making the slightest sound, not a click or a rustle. The thing moved smoothly away. There was nothing at all that could be done to stop it. The lucky ones watched as it moved forward, at no great pace, for three or four hundred yards. Then it turned at an angle, so that it looked rather like a torpedo launched from an airplane. Like a torpedo it disappeared from sight, into the ice that lay below.

The following morning the machine was back again, the door in its side open once more. Nobody ventured into it this time. They took welding torches to it. As soon as the heat began to play on the metal, the machine moved away for a few yards, rather as a cow might step away from a bunch of flies on its rump. The men followed it for a while, trying to get their instruments to work on it. Always it moved just a little way ahead of them, as if it was playing some kind of game, or trying to lead them someplace. At last they got fed up and left it alone. Within an hour it was back on their doorstep.

All these events were transmitted to Earth, along with the record of the sound waves. Immediately following the incident in which the machine made off, Europa-like, with the unfortunate scientist-explorer, the amplitude of the sound was found to be very high. From this it was deduced that the sound waves were simply a form of sonar, used by the machine as it bored its way down through the glacier. Two other points were clear. The machine was only a slave-robot sent by the real Martians to collect samples of whatever it was that had arrived on their planet. From the complexity of the sound waves, it was also evident there must be very many such machines. Probably the interior of the glacier was honeycombed by passages along which they moved in the fashion of subway trains. The sonar was obviously used for navigational purposes and to prevent collisions of one machine with another, and perhaps to prevent them from penetrating into the intricate electronic system of the Martians themselves. Presumably the latter were quite static, like terrestrial computers, the robots being used for mechanical communication.

A warning was sent from Earth, to the effect that the scientist-explorers should expect to have to deal with more than one of these slave-machines. Caution should be exercised. The warning was superfluous. Something approaching a hundred cigar-shaped machines had already surrounded the laboratory. The urgent question now was whether the mission could extricate itself at all. On every side a mass of shining metal could be seen. Gradually, almost cautiously, the machines began to close in, a foot or two at a time, in a kind of slow, shuffling movement.

There was nothing to be done except run for it. The men waited until the gleaming monsters were quite close. At first it didn’t seem too bad, because in the weak gravity of Mars they could jump clean over the brutes. The machines responded as if it were only some kind of game. Instead of each machine searching separately for the men, the things worked in a team, apparently in accord with some master plan. They sought to block each of the men, working on data from the sound waves generated in the ground by the men in their flight, or so it seemed. Certainly the machines were not equipped with apparatus sensitive to light. They could not see. When the men stopped, the machines stopped. But as soon as a man took a single step, the machines glided into some new pattern.

Four of the men made it, three did not. From the safety of the module, the four lucky ones watched in horror as each of the three was cornered, hemmed in by packed lines of machines which could not be jumped. The things built a quadrangle about each man in turn. One machine went into the quadrangle along with the man. The last desperate struggle took a long time, but always it ended the same way, with the man pushed over, sprawling on the ground. The machine rolled over on top of him, but with a door open. The unfortunate victim found himself precipitated into the quite smooth capsule inside the monster. Inevitably, the door closed. The machine with the prize in its belly then began its journey to the depths below. The other machines opened out to make a way for it. The thing moved to a middle distance. Suddenly it tilted and disappeared.

All this came out after the return of the residue of the third Martian mission. NASA didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. Everybody felt the expedition should have been armed with nuclear weapons. Yet NASA could hardly be blamed for its failure to anticipate the existence of developed Martians. Cognizant biologists had expected only to collect a few bugs or, at best, a few primitive plants.

Preparations were put in hand to plug a batch of nuclear weapons into the surface of Mars. After considerable argument, however, it was decided to wait awhile. For one thing, it wasn’t clear how the Martians, deep below their glaciers, could be harmed by surface explosions. For another, the Martians hadn’t really done anything explicitly hostile. Certainly four perfectly sound citizens had been creamed. Yet look at it from the other side for a moment. Four perfectly sound Martians had probably been sucked up through the borehole drilled by the third mission. Squirting Martians into the atmosphere in the style of a soda siphon would naturally be viewed in a grave light by the other side. Surely it would justify an examination of the situation, even to the extent of hunting down one or two of the strange creatures that had suddenly appeared out of space. We ourselves would hardly have acted in any other way. Whichever way you looked at it, nuclear weapons wouldn’t have much effect, not a kilometer or two down.