Microcosmic God (40 page)

All this was discovered by Earth’s spies, the dozens who came back out of the hundreds of thousands that sought the information. In two centuries, nine attempts were made on Earth to design and build a ship which could travel to Procyon fast enough to spare its crew the misfortune of dying of old age before the ship reached there. Eight crews of workers were discovered and killed or dispersed, put to work in the mines by wandering, gently thorough Martian investigators. The ninth ship got away—a physical impossibility, as the Mars-hating element on Earth freely admitted. Mars gave them no permission to build and launch the little silver craft; but the Martian investigators stretched the probability and did not discover the hidden factory.

Perhaps it was purposeful. Perhaps Mars was curious to know whether Earthmen could find the secret of Artnan transmutation. Mars couldn’t. Even now that they had Earth’s vast resources at their disposal, the Martians would be happy to free themselves from the Artnan monopoly of transmutation. They remembered with bitterness the carefully outfitted body of operatives who had entered the transmission chamber and had gone to Artna via the wave, in place of a scheduled cargo of boron. The Artnans, with their next shipment of ’235, included the six-legged, two-foot long body of an Artnan and a polite note thanking the Martians for the inclusion of the
corpses!
and expressing regret that no living thing could traverse space time via the wave; also a reminder that the latest boron shipment was slightly overdue.

All of which flashed through Bell Bellew’s mind as he stood beside Slimmy Cob and stared down at Artna. It had been a long trip—three years or so, even with the slight space warp stolen by workers in Martian shipyards. But Slimmy was good company, even if he did prefer horsing around to anything else in the world. They had both been picked for that quality, among many others. The reason was that the Martian mind is completely without humor, and the less
Martians could understand the two men, the better it would be.

“Do you see what I see?” asked Slimmy after a long moment.

Bell followed the little man’s pointing finger. Down in a hollow, nearly invisible from above, lay the squat shape of the Martian space cruiser.

“I do. I wouldn’t worry about that, Slimmy. I expected that they’d be here.”

“Why?”

“As I told you—I don’t think it was just luck that got this ship off Earth, out of our system. I think the Martians let us.”

“Yeah.” There was disbelief in Slimmy’s voice. “The Martians have always treated us that way—let us do as we pleased, when we pleased. Wipe the rest of that soap off, Bell; it’s addled your brain.”

Bellew gave Slimmy a playful pat that brought him up against the opposite bulkhead, and went back to the controls. “Let me know when you sight anything that looks like the Great Plain transmutation plant,” he said. “We can start from there.”

The planet was but slightly larger than Earth, with an astonishingly smooth topography. There were no mountain ranges, and yet there were no true plains. The whole planet was surfaced with small rolling hillocks. Most were sandy; there was little vegetation. The Artnans, whose metabolism was a mineral one, had no agriculture.

After an hour or two Slimmy grunted and came away from the forward observation port and switched on the visiplate, tuning in the buildings he had spotted. “There she be, cap’n,” he said.

Bell studied the great pile of alloy. “You got to give credit to those Martians,” he said. “They certainly built theirs the spit an’ image of this one.”

“Not quite,” said Slimmy, swinging the range finders. “Look there—see that … that—What is it anyway?”

“Sort of a shed,” said Bell. “One flat building, not more than three feet high, and all of ten miles square!”

A warning signal pinged, and their eyes swiveled toward it. A yellow light blinked among the studs on the panel. “Vibrations,” gritted Bell, and put a thousand feet of altitude under them so fast that he heard Slimmy’s kneecaps crackle. They circled slowly over
the shed, feeling carefully ahead of them with delicate instruments, and charted the hemisphere of tight-knit waves that roofed the flat structure.

“What is it?” asked Slimmy.

“Dunno. Let’s sit down and see if we can find out.”

The ship settled down gently, her antigrav plates moaning. Bell followed the curve of the vibration field at a safe distance, and came down in a depression a hundred yards from its invisible edge.

“Air O.K.?”

“Sure,” said Slimmy. “Just like home. Temperature’s just under blood heat. Come a-walkin’!”

They strapped on side arms and went out, using the air lock for safety’s sake. They topped a rise and stood a moment looking at the shed. It was barely visible from the ground, and there wasn’t a sign of life anywhere about.

“Wonder why the sand don’t drift over the thing,” said Slimmy.

“This might be why,” Bell grunted. He was staring at a line in the sand across the path. On their side of it, the sand puffed and tumbled in the light breeze. Toward the shed, however, there was apparently no moving air. “See that line? Unless I’m ‘way off my base, that’s the edge of the vibration field.” He scooped up a handful of sand, stepped cautiously close to the line and tossed it. The sand fanned out, drifted over the line and—disappeared.

Slimmy tried it for himself before he commented. “I would gather,” he said dryly, “that the Artnans would rather not have anyone look into that shed.”

“Something like that,” said Bell. “Look!” The crest of a nearby dune detached itself and scrabbled on six scrawny legs toward the line. It shot between the startled Earthmen, over the line, almost to the low wall of the shed before it turned up its pointed tail and burrowed quickly under the sand.

“What was that?” asked Slimmy.

“An Artnan, from what I’ve heard.”

“Nasty little critter,” said Slimmy. “Hey—the field didn’t seem to bother it any, Bell.”

“So I noticed. Seems that the field has been set up for the benefit
of you and me. And maybe even for our Martian friends over there.”

As they turned back toward their ship, Slimmy said pensively, “What we just saw is justification for the Laidlaw Hypothesis, if it makes any difference to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Laidlaw said that the inhabitants of any Solar System have a mutual ancestor, parallel evolutions, and similar metabolisms. You know yourself that Martians, Earthmen, Venusians and the extinct Jovians are all bipeds composed mainly of hydrocarbons. That field was set up to keep such molecular structures out. The sand here is apparently something of the sort. The Artnan who ran through the field was something different. We’ll catch us one sometime and find out just what makes him tick.”

“Yeah. You got something there. What interests me, though, is what’s in that shed. If we guessed right about who it was put up for, then the shed must cover something they want to keep Solar noses out of. Ah—it wouldn’t by any chance be what we’re looking for, would it?”

Slimmy’s eyes glowed. “The transmutation plant? Could be, pal; could be. It’s adjacent to the Prob.-wave transmitter. It’s screened against Earth or Martian interference.”

“Huh!” Bell ran a thick forefinger up behind his ear. “We got a problem here, little man. We toss ourselves through nine-odd light years of space and wind up flat-footed in front of a killer-wave thrown up around a cubist’s idea of a beanfield. I sort of expected a city—machinery, people, maybe.”

“It’s not simple,” said Slimmy. “Howsomever, let’s see if you can make your brains go where you flat feet fear to tread. Let’s go to work on the Martians. From the looks of things, they’ve been messing around here for quite some time.”

“Want to go right to work, don’t you?” grinned Bell. “Always wanted to get a Martian alone away from his playmates so you could tie a half hitch in his eyestalks! O.K., buddy—where do we find us one?”

“If I know Martians, there ought to be a couple sniffing around our ship by this time.”

There were.

They were lined up in front of the air lock, their spare bodies quivering with the palpitation peculiar to their race, and with their eyestalks pointing rigidly toward the approaching Earthmen, points together, in the well-known Martian cross-eyed stare. They had, of course, sensed the body vibrations of the men quite some time ago; the very fact that they were there meant that they were ready for a showdown.

“Hi, fellers,” said Slimmy laconically, flipping the butt of his atomic gun to make sure that it was loose in the holster.

“What are you doing here?” piped the Martian on the right.

“We’re rick-bijitting for a dew-jaw,” said Slimmy immediately.

He had studied the masterworks of the ancients in his extreme youth.

“Yes,” said Bell, taking the cue. “We willised the altibob, and no sooner did we jellik than—
boom!
here we are.”

The Martians regarded them silently. “You do not tell the truth,” one of them said.

“It ain’t a lie,” Bell dead-panned.

The evasion served its purpose, for to them, anything that was not a lie was the truth, and vice versa. Their hearing apparatus was partly sensitive to air-vibration and partly telepathic. Bell’s last statement was the truth and they knew it was the truth; that convinced them. They’d die before they admitted they didn’t know what the men were talking about.

“What are
you
doing here?” Slimmy countered, before their machinelike minds could work on the problem.

The Martians stiffened. “It is not for you to ask,” said one of them.

“Aw, don’t be like that, son,” drawled Bell. “Haven’t Martians always told Earthmen that Mars takes only its just due, and does nothing for Earth but good?”

“Yeah,” said Slimmy. His inflection was drawn-out, lowering, and meant “That’s a lot of so-and-so!”

But to the Martians “Yeah” meant “Yes,” and that was that. “Why should things be different here? You don’t have to hide the
fact that you’re looking for the same thing we are; maybe we can make a little deal.”

“Sure—come in and set awhile!” Bell pushed past the Martians and unlatched the airlock. He knew that turning his back on the enemy was bad tactics, but it was good diplomacy. Besides, fast on their feet as Martians were, no one in the Universe could draw, aim and fire faster than little Slimmy Cob.

Slimmy walked around the Martians, not between them, and sidled into the ship. He apparently faced the Martians merely to talk to them. “Sure—come on in. Maybe we can give each other a hand. We can decide later what to do if we get the information we’re after.”

Three sets of eyestalks intertwined briefly, and then the three spindly Martians bent and entered the silver ship.

The Martians squatted in a row against the starboard bulkhead, sipping Earth’s legendary cocola through glassite straws and coming as near to a feeling of well-being as was possible to these unemotional logicians. Slimmy’s sharp eyes had noticed that one of them was taller than the others, the second taller than the third. Knowing that Martian names, being in the semi-telepathic Martian language, were unpronounceable to humans, he had dubbed them Heaven, Its Wonders, and Hell.

“Have another coke,” said Bell heartily.

Its Wonders passed his empty flask. Bellew flashed a glance at Slimmy and Slimmy nodded. The Martians were getting nicely mellow; a carbonated drink plasters up the Martian metabolism with amazing efficiency. Intoxication, however, is not befuddlement to a Martian. It merely makes him move slower and think faster. If he drinks enough, he will stop altogether and turn into a genius for an hour or so. The idea of gassing the Martians up was to disarm them as to the human’s motives; for they knew that no human would dare to try to pull the wool over a drunken Martian’s eyes.

The Martians accepted the drink as a gesture of good faith, for they knew that they would soon be unable to navigate. It was the pipe of peace between them, with the Earthmen paying the piper, which was the way any deal with Mars seems to work out. So when the pale-blue flush began to blossom across their leathery hides,
Slimmy went to work on them.

“Look fellers,” he said bluntly, “there’s no sense in our cutting each other’s throats for a while yet. If you’ve guessed what we’re here after, you’ve probably guessed right. We know that Martian ’238 isn’t transmuted into ’235 on Mars. We know it’s done here, in that flat building under the killer field over there. All we want to know is how it’s done, and whether or not the method can be used in our System.”

“What has that to do with us?” asked Hell.

“I’ll take the question as a feeler,” Bellew cut in. “You want to find out how much else we know. All right. We know that more than half of Terrestrial and Martian industry is being diverted to the production of boron to pay for the Artnans’ processing of ’238. We know that Martian domina … er … control of the Solar System won’t be complete unless and until the Artnan process of transmutation is made the property of Mars; for every indication shows that the cost of the Artnan process must be practically nothing. We know that the Martian Command did not have the process when we left the System three years ago, and we know that you don’t have it yet because we wouldn’t have found any Martians here if you had.”

Heaven said, “What do you want to find the process for?”

“I might say that we of Earth would like to return to Mars some of the many kindnesses she has done us,” said Slimmy around the tongue of his cheek. “And I might say that it’s none of your damn business. I’ll do neither, and simply say that I won’t insult your intelligence by considering the question.”

Three sets of eyestalks fumblingly sought each other out and, intertwining, connected their owners in a swift, silent conference. Coming out of the huddle, Heaven addressed the humans. “We have certain information bearing on the matter at hand. How can we be assured that it will be to our benefit to share it?”

Bell answered that. “I’ve no idea how long you’ve been here, but it seems as though you haven’t got on the right track yet. I don’t know whether we’ll be able to find the process with your information and our brains. If we can, well and good. If we can’t, what have you lost?”