Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

Three days later and the modification of the cats was in full swing. Fritz had just returned from inspecting the work when the radio buzzed.

“Lieutenant Van Noon.”

“Fritz, Nevill here. I’ve got some work for you.”

“Bring it over,” said Fritz. “A little more won’t make much difference.”

“Right. Be with you in about ten minutes. We’ve found what might be some sort of mechanism.”

“Now you have me interested,” said Fritz. “What is it?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me.”

Ten minutes later Nevill arrived and eyed the jury-rigged electrolysis plant. Then he signalled to his assistants who dragged a large object into the hut and dropped it on the floor. Fritz looked at it dubiously.

“I think you’ve come to the wrong department. It looks like the great grandaddy of an alien chicken wishbone once belonging to some grandaddy alien chicken. Why not present it to the biology department?”

“I did,” said Nevill, “but they sent it right back with the message that you were responsible for investigating machinery.”

“Machinery?” Fritz surveyed the acquisition moodily. “Have you tried it on the catering people? Perhaps they could turn it into some sort of soup.”

“Machinery,” said Nevill firmly. “And I’ll tell you why. It isn’t animal, it’s vegetable—Tazoon ironwood to be precise. Also, it didn’t grow that way. It was manufactured, or at least trimmed to shape, as witness the tooling marks. Furthermore, the Tazoons were plenty fond of them because the Southern plain out yonder has them at an estimated density of nearly fifty thousand to the square kilometre.”

Fritz choked on his words. “ Thousand?”

Nevill nodded. “And that plain is pretty big. If the sampling we have done is representative of the whole area there could be many millions of them on that one site alone. I know the Tazoons were alien beyond our conception of the word, but I just can’t see them producing that many just for the hell of it. That would be an exercise akin to paving the Sahara desert with pencil sharpeners. It’s my belief that the wishbones are something functional. I want you to tell me what they were and what their function was.”

Fritz nodded. “I’ll let you have a preliminary report in a day or so, but if that’s a machine I should hate to see their idea of a great big alien chicken wishbone.”

After Nevill had left, Fritz spent a quiet hour examining the thing from all angles and going all over the surface of it with a magnifying glass looking for clues as to its function. Then Jacko had it hauled to the workshop for a more thorough examination. He reported back when the work was completed.

“I think we have something here, Fritz. You know those nodules on the inner surfaces, well, the fluoroscope shows a dark mass of some foreign material in each. If you’re agreeable we’re proposing to cut one out and see what it is.”

“Start cutting,” Fritz said, “because if this is a sample of Tazoon engineering then the sooner we get to grips with it the better.”

Reluctantly the handsaw cut into the ancient ironwood. Halfway through, the blade screeched complainingly on some hard inclusion. Jacko made another cut at a tangent and suddenly the nodule became detached, and from inside it he shook a large, dusty crystal on to the table.

“Now that’s interesting!” said Fritz. “There are metal fibres in the structure of the carcass and metallized facets on the crystal. On this evidence I’d say this was some form of piezo-electric device. And see how the crystal is drilled— do you suppose there could have been strings across this thing?”

Jacko counted the nodules—equal on both sides. “Lord, a harp!” he said in a voice heavy with incredulity.

Fritz stared at him dubiously. “Or a sound-transducer,” he said. “There are common electrical paths through the ironwood, and connections to the crystals. If you applied an alternating current to those contacts, the crystals would excite the strings in sympathy according to the resonant frequency of the particular system. I wonder what on earth it would sound like?”

They looked at each other in silence for a time.

“Jacko, start re-stringing what’s left of this thing while I sort out a power amplifier and a few bits and pieces. Together we can make some be-eautiful music.”

“Right,” said Jacko, “but if your conception of music is anything like your engineering I’m going to dig out some earplugs too.”

It took three hours to complete the assembly. Fritz disappeared to the communications hut and returned with an assortment of equipment which he appeared to assemble more by inspiration than by design. When everything was ready he switched on. The first results were shattering, and the electronics needed drastic revision before a reasonably tolerable result was obtained.

After some final adjustments Fritz pronounced himself satisfied with the results and dropped into a chair to listen attentively, his gaze wandering to the open shutter and the blood-red sunset trailing nakedly beyond.

“Listen to it, Jacko!” said Fritz happily. “Alien and beautiful beyond recall.”

“I might just point out,” said Jacko, “that if somebody attempted to re-string a hundred-thousand year old grand piano with random electrical cable and without any idea of the scale and pitch involved, the results would sound equally alien.”

“I’m in no mood to quibble with one who possesses such a tiny soul,” said Fritz. “To me this is music such as the ancient Tazoons knew it as they walked hand in hand in the eyeless evenings of old Tazoo. Can’t you imagine it, Jacko, this incredible music voiced by a million harps in the blood-red twilight of this alien land?”

“It makes my head ache,” said Jacko. “What are you feeding into the blasted thing, anyway?”

Fritz coughed. “Actually it’s the telemetry signals from a weather satellite, but the harp contributes about five-hundred per cent distortion, so you’d never know it from music.”

“You ought to be locked up! Isn’t there something distinctly loony,” said Jacko, “about the notion of anybody wanting thousands of crazy self-playing harps to the square kilometre. No culture could be that fond of music and survive.”

“They didn’t survive. And we can’t yet hope to understand so alien a culture. If you want a parallel, think of all the millions of personal transistor radios taken to the beaches on Terra on a public holiday.

Think how much simpler life would be if they erected loudspeakers at four-foot intervals on all beaches and made full-time listening compulsory instead of merely unavoidable.”

Despite the warmth Jacko shuddered visibly and closed his eyes, while the complex tones of the harp sang strangely with unfathomable harmonies which did curious things to his stomach. “I’m beginning to get the idea,” he said, “exactly why the Tazoons decided to migrate. Listening to this, I get precisely the same urge myself.”

At that moment the door was flung open and Nevill, eyes aglow with jubilation, burst into the hut. “Fritz, we’ve done it! A real find at last. To judge from the extent of our soundings we seem to have hit upon the location of a whole damn Tazoon city under the sand.”

Fritz raised a hand in salute. “Congratulations, Philip! This sounds like the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for. Exactly where is this place?”

“Under our very noses in fact—about twenty kilometres east of here. I tell you, Fritz, there could be a real metropolis down there.”

He stopped, aware for the first time of the singing harp.