The Watch Below (24 page)

The figure broke the surface and Wallis saw that the helmet was designed
to keep water in and air out, and that the . . . head . . . inside it
was not human.
XXIII
The first tape from the former Captain Heglenni said, "It is one of their
larger vessels sunk, judging by the advanced state of corrosion, more than
one hundred of this planet's years ago. While investigating we were
startled to hear noises emanating from it in a patterned sequence
suggesting intelligence, and later discovered living gas-breathers in
one of the gas pockets inside the vessel. I will repeat, there were
five living gas-breathers inside the ship. After seeing me, there was
a surprisingly short period of adjustment on their part, after which
one of them drew signs on the powdered corrosion covering a wall. One
appeared to be a geometrical design illustrating Trennochalin's theorem
regarding the area of squares on a right-angled triangle and the other
was a nonscale diagram of this solar system. It seems to me that contact
is possible with these gas-breathers and, if so, much useful information
both physical and psychological could be gained regarding them, especially
since they must be totally unaware of the situation between our race and
theirs. I hereby request that a communications officer be assigned to me,
preferably the one who was trying to develop the sound conversion device.
"With this report I am returning a dead gas-breather. This specimen appears
to have died from water strangulation rather than from disease or injury.
It was in a water-filled compartment of the ship and seems to have died
recently. Small native predators have been at work on the specimen,
but the bone structure and major organs appear to be intact. . . ."
Captain Gunt allowed the tape to run to its conclusion before turning to
the communications officer, who hung like an iridescent shadow in the
darkened control room. Because of the risk of detection there was no power
source operating within the ship, no lighting and no water-circulating
machinery. The water they breathed was that of the sea outside, gloriously
cool, at a comfortable pressure and so free of salts, unlike the water
of Untha, that its effects came close to that of euphoria. This was how
Untha must have been before their sun began to boil off and thicken their
water. This fresh, cold, tremendous ocean came close to being the Unthan
conception of Heaven. It was an effort, sometimes, to realize that this
perfect place had to be fought for and that the fight would be long
and hard. That when they won, if they won, this gloriously clean sea
might very well be left poisoned with radiation and dirtier even than
the steaming seas of Untha.
Angrily, Gunt said, "I won't order you to this duty, and it's quite obvious
that you would probably desert if I tried to stop your going. Just please
remember that you are not going merely to satisfy your curiosity regarding
a nonhuman intelligent life-form. Your only purpose is to gain information
about the enemy that will aid our survival and hasten their demise. A great
many of our people are going to die shortly and the quantity and accuracy
of this information will be in inverse proportion to the casualties.
My original plan was to disperse the colonists as soon and as far as
possible. Tell Heglenni that I now intend holding them close to the
ship until the last possible moment so that they can scatter into their
survival cells with all the available data on the enemy.
"Tell her that her background will fit her for this duty," Gunt went on
awkwardly. "It will make her less squeamish regarding the methods of getting
this vital information. Tell her also that we are very pleased with her,
and that I consider this matter of such importance that I will have a
line laid connecting the flagship with the wreck of the enemy. It will
be a sound line, since vision would be superfluous and radio would be
open to detection from above. . . ."
The second report was more in the nature of a discussion, since Gunt was
in a position to comment on the data as they arrived. It seemed that the
five gas-breathers were close to death from starvation, suffocation,
and something else which apparently had to do with breathing, or perhaps
swallowing, small quantities of water through their oral openings.
Heglenni had dealt with the first problem by trapping for them a selection
of small fish and crustaceans and with the second by floating pipes to
the surface, during darkness so as to conceal the operation as much as
possible, and replacing the foul gas inside the wreck. The third problem
was more difficult since the gas-breathers refused to breathe or eat
clean water brought to them from the sea outside their ship and refused
it with the same degree of firmness as they had the water contaminated
with their wastes. Since they had been able to survive for so long in
these conditions, Heglenni was concerned and puzzled over what it was
that they lacked. She intended carrying out a thorough search of the
recently flooded compartments of the wreck in the hope of finding food
supplies or mechanisms which might give a clue to what was missing.
The report which followed a few days later was more emotional than was
called for, Gunt thought. She told him that the gas-breathers were in a
severely weakened state and were scarcely able to communicate, even among
themselves. The old male gas-breather -- there were three males and two
females -- was in a pitiable condition. Had the captain any suggestions?
"I have, as a matter of fact," Gunt replied after some hesitation.
"From observations on the way in, together with a study of the artifacts
you sent us, particularly a small, electrically heated container used for
warming water -- a container much too small for cooking purposes and wired
in such a way that the contents would tend to become vaporized rather
than simply warmed -- we have evolved a rather, uh, wild theory to the
effect that the water used by the gas-breathers is exclusively the result
of precipitation from water vapor in the planetary gas envelope. Water
thus produced would be much freer from impurities like dissolved minerals
and salts; so sea water might be toxic to them. This is, uh, my theory
and as I've already said, it has a low order of probability."
"It certainly has!" Heglenni burst in. "But we'll try it.
We'll try
anything
!"
Gunt held onto his temper with an effort, thinking unkind things about
overemotional females. He said, "Meanwhile, if one or more of the specimens
die you will transfer the bodies to the flagship without delay -- "
"That may be difficult, sir," Dasdahar, the communications officer, broke in.
"Our present contact with them is in a delicate state. We are gaining their
trust, and withdrawing one of their dead could very well spoil everything."
"You surprise me," said Gunt. "I assumed that you knew only a few words
of each other's language and that the rest of your knowledge regarding
them was based on observation and intuition, the latter being supplied by
Heglenni, whose dormant maternal instincts have been aroused by feelings
of pity for her pets! Can you actually make yourselves understood in
their language?"
"No, yes, sir," said Dasdahar. "What I mean, sir, is that we can make
ourselves understood in
our
language. You see, the vocal apparatus of
the gas-breathers is much more flexible than our own plus the fact that
their memory is unusually retentive. They never forget anything that is
told to them, even if it is only once. Quite complicated concepts were
being exchanged in Unthan before they became too weakened to talk to us."
"But now we are going to revive them with distilled water!" Heglenni's voice
added scornfully, "We respectfully end message, sir."
Using one of the cutting torches and an uninhabited gas pocket in the
forward part of the wreck, Heglenni produced a fair quantity of distilled
water and introduced it via a screw-topped container to the quarters of
the gas-breathers. The effects were almost immediate and quite dramatic.
But Heglenni observed the gas-breathers, and Dasdahar and she talked to
them for a full day before contacting Captain Gunt again.
"Distilled water was the answer, sir," she said. "And for my disrespectful
remarks and behavior yesterday I am truly sorry."
"Contact is widening, sir," said Dasdahar. "I have additional data for
you. . . ."
And day after day the information continued to flow into the flagship at a
steadily accelerating rate. The reason for the specimens' unusually retentive
memories became plain: for more than one hundred of the planet's years
the dwellers in the wreck had had nothing to do but exercise their
memories! Most of the data had to do with life in the wreck, but there
was an enormous amount of information regarding the world as it had
been before their ship had been rendered nonbuoyant -- data on the
arts as well as technology, data which gave depth and perspective to
the gas-breather's culture. And through it all there was emerging the
personality of Wah-Lass, the oldest specimen, who was the gas-breathing
equivalent of a healer.
All the material was interesting and a fair proportion of it was useful.
With the remainder of the Unthan fleet crossing the orbit of the fourth
planet and with his final instructions to those ships still to go out,
Captain Gunt was interested only in what was useful.
Two of the invading life-forms were captured, intact if not alive. One had
been harpooned and the other machine-gunned and both were nearly torn to
pieces by a ravening horde of the world's most eminent biologists eager
for the chance of seeing what made the extraterrestrials tick. But when
the investigation was finally carried out they were left feeling more
puzzled than ever, because it appeared that the two specimens belonged
to different subspecies, that the tentacles which ringed their head
sections were not capable of fine manipulation and that their cranial
capacity was rather small in proportion to their size, roughly that of
a small whale. They would have liked to have issued a statement to the
effect that the specimens in question did not have the brainpower to
develop tools or the dexterity to use them, but they had to be cautious
because the specimens were, after all, alien.
Meanwhile the armed forces of the world, unable to check the coming invasion,
welded themselves more and more closely together and tried to perfect tactics
designed to exterminate the enemy when he was down. One of them, the rapid
detection and depth-bombing of sunken ships, was well-nigh perfect.
There was fresh food every day in the shape of fish and lobsters,
and fresh air was piped directly from the surface every night. Their
living quarters had been extended, they had a much better view, and
there was even heat of a kind. The heat came from the Unthan equivalent
of an acetylene burner, a gadget so powerful that it had to be directed
downward into the water in Number Twelve to keep it from burning a hole
through the plating. The result was a hot fog when it was working and
a cold, clammy dampness when it was not.
Wallis had begun to cough a lot recently. He had other chest symptoms
and sometimes a temperature which made him feel quite delirious.
It was time that he asked Heglenni, or the other one, who worked the
sound-converter gadget, to put them ashore again. The first time he had
asked, Heglenni had avoided the question by pretending not to understand
and the doctor had not pushed it. The e-ts had saved their lives, after
all, and Heglenni had wanted to learn more about the humans and she could
not do this if her pet gas-breather, as she called him, was somewhere on
land. She insisted that the humans and she had a great deal in common,
and so had the male Unthan who was a communications officer on their
ship. There was also the fact that up to now Wallis had been scared
stiff of being brought to the surface. His world had been Gulf Trader
and the surface was suddenly, now that it was within reach, as strange
and frightening as the world of the afterlife. The others felt much the
same way, so nobody had pushed the matter. Now, however, Wallis knew he
would not live much longer if he stayed here.
Maybe it was due partly to his delirium and partly to his nasty, suspicious
mind, but he found himself wondering about the motives of his rescuers,
if rescuers they were going to be. The language wasn't much of a problem
these days, although some of the growly words still made him cough,
so he was pretty sure that he did not mistake the things being said to him.
Ambiguity was one thing, and a downright inconsistency was another.
While it was understandable that the Unthans switched out their lights
at night and piped in fresh air during darkness (Wallis had received,
or been given, the impression that Heglenni's ship had carried refugees
fleeing from some catastrophe on the home world and they were being
cautious about revealing themselves until they knew more about the place),
there was still something odd about the way they refused to go into details
regarding themselves.
The Game had dealt with many variations on this particular theme:
good aliens, bad aliens, bad aliens pretending to be good, and so on.
Wallis felt very much ashamed of himself, because he would have been
dead several months ago if it hadn't been for Heglenni, but he thought
that the time had come to set a few verbal traps.
He knew enough of the language, and provided he didn't cough too much
when he was growling out the words and could keep his mind clear when
his temperature was going into a peak, he should be able to find out
what he wanted to know.
But what
did
he want to know?
It was at times like this, when he looked through a fog of delirium at
the rusty bulkheads and the weird orange light-rod and the nightmare
features of Heglenni as she hovered outside the extension to Richard's
Rooms, that he wondered seriously whether or not this was all delirium
and his pneumonia was farther advanced than he realized.
". . . You stupid, irresponsible fools!" Gunt's voice raged at them over
the line. "How could you be so so . . . What have