Futures Past (34 page)

  
"Silverman! Mercer! Come in please!" he shouted suddenly. Silence answered him.

  
Unconsciously, he had stopped to listen. A long corridor which led toward the base's administration section stretched out in sharply diminishing perspective before him. The lighting was bright but restful. Davies was conscious of other corridors and compartments all around Mm, below him and above him, and he felt suddenly very much alone. He was frightened for some reason—not, he told himself hastily, because of the strangeness of his surroundings, or of any ghosts which the departed aliens might have left behind. If there had been any such, Davies had learned enough about the aliens to know that their ghosts would not have been the terrifying kind. But what was he afraid of?

  
Maybe I'm just overtired, Davies told himself. When we take off tomorrow I'll sleep all the way back to Earth, and not look at a single one of those alien books that I've packed away. When we're home I'll look back and laugh at these suspicions....

  
His silent conversation with himself was suddenly interrupted by the voice of Mercer erupting from his phones.

  
"All set," the engineer said. His voice sounded strained, Davies thought. Then: "Give me two minutes to get clear, then switch on!"

  
"Right," the voice of Captain Silverman answered. There was silence then except for the regular, tinny rustlings of someone breathing hard.

  
They had been at the pinnacle, Davies knew, but what were they doing? He called again, "Silverman! Mercer! Answer me! I've been trying to call you up ..."

  
"And we've been trying to call you," Silverman interrupted. "But don't let it bother you, Professor. Probably it's just a fault in your radio . . ." As if in corroboration of this theory there followed a few seconds of intermittent transmission which chopped whatever Silverman had been saying into gibberish, then silence.

  
He's lying, Davies told himself silently. Even over the phones he had been able to detect the false note in the captain's voice—Silverman was not a good enough liar. He had not been trying to call Davies, and that intermittent contact that was supposed to simulate a faulty set must have been produced by the rapid switching on and off of the captain's radio. Davies turned quickly and began retracing his steps. He was determined to find out why Silverman was lying, and whatever other funny business was going on, right this minute.

  
Suddenly there was a short, ear-splitting burst of static in his phones. Simultaneously the corridor lighting dimmed, flickered, then slowly returned to its former brightness. All at once there was a brightness in Davies' mind also, a brightness that revealed in stark detail the answer to the puzzling behavior of Silverman and Mercer. Suddenly he knew what they had done, and more, what they must be intending to do next. He had to stop them!

  
Davies broke into a run.

  
Breathing hard as he scrambled awkwardly up the spiral stairways that led to the surface, Davies' mind began jumping from present time here on Titan back to the period of the marooned "Allen" eighty years ago, then back again.

  
Suppose "Allen" had been unable to rejoin his friends on Titan before they left for home. The way Davies saw it now, the aliens might leave behind them a concealed signaling device which he could use to call someone to pick him up. Something like the carefully hidden apparatus in that hollowed-out rock.

  
Davies was remembering what Mercer had told him about that peculiar device in the pinnacle: it operated for a split-second at tremendous overload, it was activated by the nest of crystal and copper wire surmounting it, and the signal that it emitted was not propagated through the normal ether. Obviously it was a signaling device left by the aliens for "Allen's" use if he should reach Titan too late. But "Allen" had made it and the alien had not thought it worthwhile to dismantle the transmitter.

 
 
Nothing more than a simple position fix could be transmitted on a signal of such short duration, Davies thought, a simple distress signal meaning, "Here I am, pick me up!" But that would be enough for a lifeboat to be dispatched to aid the person in distress, and lifeboats did not as a rule stop to query the origin of a distress call...,

  
He had to stop them, Davies thought desperately as the spiral brought him into one of the pressure domes and he began wrestling with the lock mechanism. This was the sort of incident which started wars.

  
Outside, Davies saw that his worst fears were realized in that the alien distress signal was already on its way: the rock outcropping together with the communicating device which it had housed was a heap of fused slag surrounded by a pool of steaming, bubbling snow. Mercer had succeeded in activating the transmitter, and he had been correct in saying that it operated on a ruinous overload. He wondered briefly if the engineer had been caught in that terrific flare of energy. But then he saw a figure running clumsily toward the Hannibal and away from the slagged-down pinnacle. That would be Mercer. And the other figure which he could see in the shadow of one of the ship's stabilizer fins would be Captain Silverman.

  
The captain was bent over, working at something on the ground. Davies started running toward the ship, too.

  
He was less than forty yards from the ship when Silverman and Mercer—the engineer had reached it well ahead of him—saw him. They must have decided that it was useless pretending that his suit radio was faulty any longer, for there was a click and the captain's voice came to him. Silverman's tone was one of surprised innocence. The surprise was probably genuine.

  
"Professor! What are you doing here? You said that you had at least six hours work to do inside the base . .. ?"

  
A mixture of fear, anger and shortness of breath made it impossible for Davies to say anything coherent at first, but finally he burst out, "You c-can't do it!" He gesticulated at the little red and orange sticks lying at the captain's feet, singly and in small, wired-together bundles. Red was for incendiary and orange for explosive, Davies knew. "You can't do it," he repeated. "It—it's murder!"

  
Silverman was silent for a moment, then he said carefully, "I don't understand you. These explosive and incendiary pencils are for the purpose of splitting and melting the ice from around our shock-absorber legs, otherwise the splashout from the chemical motors might melt our stem off before the ice was softened enough to allow us to pull free. Surely I explained all this to you before."

  
"You did," said Davies angrily. "But you also said it was dangerous to set them off too close together. Why, then, have you got them tied together in bundles and with detonators wired to-each of them?"

  
"I'm afraid, Captain," Mercer broke in at that point, "he knows or has guessed what we intend doing, so we can drop the pretense that these handy little bombs are for melting ice. . . ." He turned and addressed Davies directly.

  
"To put things bluntly," Mercer said, "we have listened to you talking about the benefits which may eventually come from the investigation of this base, and the captain and I think that you are being far too optimistic. Certainly the things discovered here will give pointers to new lines of research, and the stuff in the battery room alone will be of enormous value. But we have decided to try for something really big. Something that will put Earth and the human race on an equal, or nearly equal footing with the aliens who visited here, something that will—"

  
"Give us the stars?" asked Davies coldly.

  
Mercer was taken aback somewhat by Davies' stealing of his punch line. He hesitated, then said, "Exactly."

  
The engineer had a lot more to say, but it was only the filling-in of details on the plan which Davies had deduced in broad outline already. The distress signal had gone out and now it was only a matter of waiting until the alien equivalent of a lifeboat arrived. Silverman and Mercer would take this unsuspecting vessel by force, using explosives or thermite or both to disable its airlock so that it could not take off again. They would try not to harm the pilot, of course, unless he showed resistance. But the main idea was that they would be in possession of an alien ship equipped with interstellar drive in full working order. With such a model to work from, Earth would soon be in possession of the drive also.

  
There was no need, Mercer ended, to tell the Professor what that would mean for their race. The motives of the captain and himself in doing this were of the very highest. . . .

  
Just for a moment Davies found himself caught up by the fanatical enthusiasm of Mercer, the man who was going to hand humanity the stars on a clean plate, then a measure of sanity returned to him. He said, "No! The risk is too great, quite apart from the ethics of the situation which you aren't considering at all. You know full well that the alien pilot will show resistance—you would in his place. And supposing you try to take his ship and fail? You will have made an enemy of a culture which could probably beat us with one hand tied behind its back—" "We have the approach to the ship all worked out," Silverman put in quietly, "and expect very little trouble. And anyway, there is a strong possibility that the lifeboat will be automatically controlled and therefore unmanned—"

  
"At this distance?" Davies interrupted scornfully; then, "Think, man! You've got so many stars in your eyes they're blinding you! We'll get to the stars soon enough, never fear and when we do we want to have friends out there, not enemies ..."

  
Captain Silverman interrupted him again at that point. He said that they were not sure of the speed at which the alien star drive operated—it might be instantaneous for all he knew—and suggested that Davies stay in the control room until the alien lifeboat had landed and been dealt with. It was clear that Silverman, in a quieter way, was just as blindly enthusiastic as the engineer. His suggestion was simply a polite order.

  
The control room illumination had been dimmed for better outside seeing, and radar swept the sky above and around them. Mercer paced restlessly up and down the small cleared area of deck. The captain sat still except for his eyes, which moved regularly from the direct vision port to the radar screen and back, like a man watching a slow-motion tennis match. His forehead was damp.

  
Suddenly the radar went beep. With hardly a glance at the screen the two officers leapt to the direct vision port. Slowly, Davies followed them. He saw the tiny star which moved against the backdrop of other stars, saw it grow larger as he watched. He felt suddenly too weary to talk to the others, to make a last plea for sanity.

  
He heard Silverman and Mercer catch their breath.

  
There were too many stars in the sky, far too many. And more were flickering into existence every minute. Like a great metropolis lighting up after a power failure, great loops and lines and patterns of lights crisscrossed the sky. Some of the stars were close enough for Davies to see that they were not points of light, but slim, shining needles—ships, thousands of them, singly and in vast formations, taking stations around Titan.

  
They were the biggest things that Davies had ever seen.

  
It had been a very bad moment for them when the aliens found their wavelength and started whistling and bubbling and chirping at them—Davies had been nearly paralyzed with fear—and worse when an alien with a fair knowledge of English began asking for the positions of Earth's main population centers. Meanwhile, more and more ships had been winking into existence around Titan, so that Saturn was almost hidden by their close packed ranks. But somehow he had forced himself to reply to that alien voice, and had quickly found out that this was not an invasion but something else entirely. The great swarm of ships left very quickly after that, all but the one which carried the alien with the knowledge of English.

  
This one had some highly pertinent and testy remarks to make before he, too, left for home.

  
Watching a greatly chastened Silverman and Mercer preparing the Hannibal for takeoff, Davies remembered a few of the alien's remarks and felt his face burning with shame. When he spoke he was simply thinking aloud rather than explaining what had happened to the two officers; they must have a good idea already.