Hal Clement - Iceworld

Instead, he turned again, moving quickly across the bare rock as though a path were plainly marked before him; and in a few steps reached the edge of a shallow declivity which appeared to have acted as a catch basin for rocks which had rolled from farther up the hill. Winding his way among these, with Donald close at his heels, he finally stopped and moved to one side, permitting his son to see what lay before them.

It was an almost featureless structure of metal, roughly cubical in shape and a little less than a yard on each edge. There was a small opening on one side, containing a single projection which had the appearance of a toggle switch. Several bolt heads of quite conventional appearance were also visible on different parts of the surface.

After allowing his son to look the object over for a few moments, Mr. Wing took a small screwdriver from his pocket and set to work on the bolts, which seemed very loose. Don, lacking tools, tried a few of the projecting heads with his fingers and had little difficulty with them; in two or three minutes, the older man was able to remove several metal plates and expose the interior of the block to view. Don looked, and whistled.

“What is it, Dad? Not an ordinary radio, certainly!”

“No. It seems to be a radio of some sort, however. I don’t know what sort of wave it uses, or its range, or its power source — though I have some ideas about the last two. There’s nothing to using it; I imagine the makers wanted that to be easy, and there is only the single control switch. I’m not so sure that the interior was meant to be so accessible.”

“But where did it come from? Who made it? How did you get hold of it?”

“That’s a rather long story, and happened, as I said, before you were born.

“I was just out of college, and had gotten interested in this part of the country; so I decided to see some of it first hand, and eventually found myself here in the hills. I started at Helena, and went on foot up to Flathead, through Glacier Park, west along the border to the Kootenai, and back along the river past Bonner’s Ferry into the Cabinets. It wasn’t a very exciting jaunt, but I saw a lot and had a pretty good time.

“I was crossing the brook we just followed up here, just after I had gotten under way one morning, when I heard the weirdest racket from up the hill. I really didn’t know too much about the neighborhood, and was a bit on the uneasy side; but I had a rifle, and managed to convince myself that I was out to satisfy my curiosity, so I headed up toward the noise.

“When I got out from among the trees, the noise began to sound more and more like spoken language; so I yelled a few words myself, though I couldn’t understand a word of it. There was no answer at first — just this tremendous, roaring voice blatting out the strangely regular sounds. Finally, a little way up the hill from here, on a rather open spot, I saw the source; and at almost the same instant the noise stopped.

“Lying out in the open, where it could be seen from any direction, was a thing that looked like a perfectly good submarine torpedo — everyone was familiar with those at the time, as they played a very prominent part in the first World War. Science-fiction had not come into style then, and Heaven knows I wasn’t much of a physical scientist, but even so I found it hard to believe that the thing had been carried there. I examined it as thoroughly as I could, and found a few discrepancies in the torpedo theory.

“In the first place, it had neither propellers nor any type of steering fin. It was about twenty feet long and three in diameter, which was reasonable for a torpedo as far as I knew, but the only break in the surface was a section of the side, near what I supposed to be the front, which was open rather like a bomb bay. I looked in, though I didn’t take a chance on sticking an arm or my head inside, and saw a chamber that occupied most of the interior of the nose section. It was empty, except for a noticeable smell of burning sulfur.

“I nearly had a heart attack when the thing began talking again, this time in a much lower tone — at any rate I jumped two feet. Then I cussed it out in every language

I knew for startling me so. It took me a minute or two to get command of myself, and then I realized that the sounds it was making were rather clumsy imitations of my own words. To make sure, I tried some others, one word at a time; and most of them were repeated with fair accuracy. Whoever was speaking couldn’t pronounce ‘P’ or ‘B,’ but got on fairly well with the rest.

“Obviously there was either someone trapped in the rear of the torpedo, or it contained a radio and someone was calling from a distance. I doubted the first, because of the tremendous volume behind the original sounds; and presently there was further evidence.

“I had determined to set up camp right there, early as it was. I was going about the business, saying an occasional word to the torpedo and being boomed at in return, when another of the things appeared overhead. It spoke, rather softly, when it was still some distance up — apparently the controllers didn’t want to scare me away! It set-tied beside the first, trailing a thin cloud of blue smoke which I thought at first must have to do with driving rockets. However, it proved to be leaking around the edges of a door similar to that in the first torpedo, and then a big cloud of it puffed out as the door opened. That made me a little cautious, which was just as well — the metal turned out to be hot enough to feel the radiation five feet away. How much hotter it had been before I can’t guess. The sulfur smell was strong for a while after the second torpedo landed, but gradually faded out again.

“I had to wait a while before the thing was cool enough to approach with comfort. When I did, I found that the nose compartment this time was not empty. There was an affair rather like a fishing-box inside, with the compartments of one side full of junk and those on the other empty. I finally took a chance on reaching in for it, once it was cool enough to touch.

“When I got it out in the sunlight, I found that the full compartments were covered with little glassy lids, which were latched shut; and there was a: tricky connection between the two sides which made it necessary to put something in an empty compartment and close its lid before you could open the corresponding one on the other side. There were only half a dozen spaces, so I fished out some junk of my own — a wad of paper from my notebook, a chunk of granite, a cigarette, some lichen from the rocks around, and so on — and cleaned out the full compartments. One of the things was a lump of platinum and related metals that must have weighed two pounds.

“Right then I settled down to some serious thinking. In the first place, the torpedo came from off this planet. The only space ship I’d ever heard of was the projectile in Jules Verne’s story, but people of this planet don’t send flying torpedoes with no visible means of propulsion carrying nuggets of what I knew even then was a valuable metal; and if they do, they don’t call attention to the practice by broadcasting weird languages loudly enough to be heard a mile away.

“Granting that the torpedo came from outer space, its behavior seemed to indicate only one thing — its senders wanted to trade. At any rate, that was the theory I decided to act on. I put all the junk except the platinum nugget back where it came from, and put the box back in the nose of the torpedo. I don’t yet know if they could see me or not — I rather doubt it, for a number of reasons — but the door closed almost at once and the thing took off — straight up, out of sight. I was sorry I hadn’t had much of value to stuff in my side of the box. I had thought of sending them a rifle cartridge to indicate we had a mechanical industry, but remembered the temperature at which the thing had arrived and decided against it.