The Time Traveler's Almanac (136 page)

Now the driver’s head was right round, his eyes looking straight at the visitor. The knob had projected to its limit. Something that made hissing noises under the floor went silent and the train’s progress was only that of its forward momentum against the brakes. A creep measurable in inches or fractions of an inch.

“Hello!” repeated Leigh, feeling that he had never voiced a sillier word.

The driver’s mouth opened to a pink oval, revealed long, narrow teeth but no tongue. He shaped the mouth and by the time he’d got it to his satisfaction the listener could have smoked half a cigarette. Leigh perked his ears for the expected greeting. Nothing came out, not a sound, a note, a decibel. He waited a while, hoping that the first word might emerge before next Thursday. The mouth made a couple of slight changes in form while pink palps at the back of it writhed like nearly-dead worms. And that was all.

Walterson ceased ultra-slow mooching on the tangled clover and called, “It has stopped, commodore.”

Stepping backward from the cab, Leigh shoved hands deep into pockets and gazed defeatedly at the driver whose formerly blank face was now acquiring an expression of surprised interest. He could watch the features registering with all the lackadaisical air of a chameleon changing colour, and at about the same rate.

“This is a hell of a note,” complained Pascoe, nudging Leigh. He pointed at the row of door handles projecting from the four cars. Most of them had tilted out of the horizontal and were moving a degree at a time toward the vertical. “They’re falling over themselves to get out.”

“Open up for them,” Leigh suggested.

Hoffnagle, who happened to be standing right by an exit, obligingly twisted a handle and lugged the door. Out it swung complete with a clinging passenger who hadn’t been able to let go. Dropping his contact charts, Hoffnagle dexterously caught the victim, planted him on his feet. It took forty-eight seconds by Romero’s watch for this one to register facial reaction, which was that of bafflement.

After this, doors had to be opened with all the caution of a tax collector coping with a mysterious parcel that ticks. Pascoe, impatient as usual, hastened the dismounting process by lifting aliens from open doorways and standing them on the greensward. The quickest-witted one among the lot required a mere twenty-eight seconds to start mulling the problem of how he had passed from one point to another without crossing intervening space. He would solve that problem – given time.

With the train empty there were twenty-three Waitabits hanging around. None exceeded four feet in height or sixty pounds Eterna-weight.

All were well-clothed in manner that gave no clue to sex. Presumably all were adults, there being no tiny specimens among them. Not one bore anything remotely resembling a weapon.

Looking them over Leigh readily conceded that no matter how sluggish they might be they were not dopey. Their outlandishly coloured features held intelligence of a fairly high order. That was already self-evident from the tools they made and used, such as this train, but it showed in their faces, too.

The Grand Council, he decided, had good cause for alarm in a way not yet thought of by its members. If the bunch standing before him were truly representative of their planet, then they were completely innocuous.

They embodied no danger whatsoever to Terran interests anywhere in the cosmos. Yet, at the same time, they implied a major menace of which he hated to think.

With their easily comprehensible charts laid out on the ground the three communicators prepared to explain their origin, presence and purposes by an effective sign-and-gesture technique basic for all first contacts. The fidgety Pascoe speeded up the job by arranging Waitabits in a circle around the charts, picking them up like so many lethargic dolls and placing them in position.

Leigh and Walterson went to have a look at the train. If any of its owners objected to this inspection, they didn’t have enough minutes in which to do something about it.

The roofs of all four cars were of pale yellow, transparent plastic extending down the sides to a line flush with the door-tops. Beneath the plastic lay countless numbers of carefully-arranged silicon wafers. Inside the cars, beneath plates forming the centre aisles, were arrays of tiny cylinders rather like nickel-alloy cells. The motors could not be seen, they were hidden beneath small driving-cabs of which there was one to each car.

“Sun power,” said Leigh. “The prime motive force is derived from those solar batteries built into the roofs.” He paced out the length of a car, made an estimate. “Four feet by twenty apiece. Including the side-strips, that’s six-forty square feet of pickup area.”

“Nothing marvellous about it,” ventured Walterson, unimpressed. “They use better ones in the tropical zones of Earth and have similar gadgets on Dramonia and Werth.”

“I know. But here the night-time lasts six months. What sort of storage batteries will last that long without draining? How do they manage to get around on the night-side? Or does all transport cease while they snore in bed?”

“Pascoe could make a better guess at their boudoir habits. For what it’s worth, I’d say they sleep, six months being to them no more than a night is to us. Anyway, why should we speculate about the matter? We’ll be exploring the night-side sooner or later, won’t we?”

“Yes, sure. But I’d like to know whether this contraption is more advanced in any single respect than anything we’ve got.”

“To discover that much we’d have to pull it to pieces,” Walterson objected. “Putting Shallom and his boys on a wrecking job would be a lousy way of maintaining friendship. These Waitabits wouldn’t like it even though they can’t stop us.”

“I’m not that ham-handed,” Leigh reproved. “Apart from the fact that destruction of property belonging to non-hostile aliens could gain me a court-martial, why should I invite trouble if we can get the information from them in exchange for other data? Did you ever hear of a genuinely intelligent Me form that refused to swap knowledge?”

“No,” said Walterson. “And neither did I ever hear of one that took ten years to pay for what it got in ten minutes.” He grinned with malicious satisfaction, added, “We’re finding out what Boydell discovered, namely, that you’ve got to give in order to receive – and in order to receive you’ve got to wait a bit.”

“Something inside of me insists that you’re dead right.” Leigh shrugged and went on, “Anyway, that’s the Council’s worry. Right now we can do no more until the contact men make their report. Let’s get back to the ship.”

They mounted the bluff. Seeing them go, Pascoe hastened after them, leaving the trio of communicators to play with Keen charts and make snakes of their arms.

“How’s it going?” Leigh inquired as they went through the lock.

“Not so good,” said Pascoe. “You ought to try it yourself. It would make you whirly.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“How can you synchronize two values when one of them is unknown? How can you make rhythm to a prolonged and completely silent beat? Every time Hoffnagle uses the orbit-sign he is merely demonstrating that the quickness of the hand deceives the eye so far as the audience is concerned. So he slows, does it again and it still fools them. He slows more.” Pascoe sniffed with disgust. “It’s going to take those three luckless characters all of today and maybe most of a week to find, practise and perfect the quickest gestures that register effectively. They aren’t teaching anybody anything – they’re learning themselves. It’s time-and-motion study with a vengeance.”

“It has to be done,” Leigh remarked quietly. “Even if it takes a lifetime.”

“Whose lifetime?” asked Pascoe, pointedly.

Leigh winced, sought a satisfactory retort, failed to find one.

At the corner of the passageway Garside met them. He was a small, excitable man whose eyes looked huge behind thick spectacles. The great love of his life was bugs, any size, shape, colour or origin so long as they were bugs.

“Ah, commodore,” he exclaimed, bubbling with enthusiasm, “a most remarkable discovery, most remarkable! Nine species of insect life, none really extraordinary in structure, but all afflicted with an amazing lassitude. If this phenomenon is common to all native insects, it would appear that local metabolism is—”

“Write it down for the record,” advised Leigh, patting him on the shoulder. He hastened to the signals room. “Anything special from Ogilvy?”

“No, commodore. All his messages have been repeats of his first ones. He is now most of the way back and due to arrive here in about an hour.”

“Send him to me immediately he returns.”

“As you order, sir.”

Ogilvy appeared in the promised time. He was a lanky, lean-faced individual given to irritating grins. Entering the room he held hands behind his back, hung his head and spoke with mock shame.

“Commodore, I have a confession to make.”

“So I see from the act you’re putting on. What is it?”

“I landed, without permission, right in the main square of the biggest city I could find.”

Leigh raised his eyebrows. “And what happened?”

“They gathered around and stared at me.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, sir, it took them twenty minutes to see me and assemble, by which time the ones farther away were still coming. I couldn’t wait any longer to discover what they’d do next. I estimated that if they fetched some rope and tied down my landing gear they’d have the job finished about a year next Christmas.”

“Humph! Were things the same everywhere else?”

“Yes, sir. I passed over more than two hundred towns and villages, reached extreme range of twelve-fifty miles. Conditions remained consistent.” He gave his grin, continued, “I noticed a couple of items that might interest you.”

“What were those?”

“The Waitabits converse with their mouths but make no detectable noises. The ’copter has a supersonic converter known as Bat-ears which is used for blind flying. I tuned its receiver across its full range when in the middle of that crowd but didn’t pick up a squeak. So they’re not talking high above us. I don’t see how they can be subsonic either. It must be something else.”

“I’ve had a one-sided conversation with them myself,” Leigh informed. “It may be that we’re overlooking the obvious while seeking the obscure.”

Ogilvy blinked and asked, “How d’you mean, sir?”

“They’re not necessarily employing some unique faculty such as we cannot imagine. It is quite possible that they communicate visually. They gaze into each other’s gullets and read the waggling palps. Something like you semaphoring with your tonsils.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. “And what’s your other item?”

“No birds,” replied Ogilvy. “You’d think that where insects exist there would also be birds or at least things somewhat birdlike. The only airborne creature I saw was a kind of membrane-winged lizard that flaps just enough to launch itself, then glides to wherever it’s going. On Earth it couldn’t catch a weary gnat.”

“Did you make a record of it?”

“No, sir. The last magazine was in the camera and I didn’t want to waste strip. I didn’t know if anything more important might turn up later.”

“All right.”

Leigh watched the other depart, picked up the phone, said to Shallom, “If those ’copter reels prove sharp enough for long-range beaming, you’d better run off an extra copy for the signals room. Have them boost it to Sector Nine for relay to Earth.”

As he put down the phone Romero entered looking desperate.

“Commodore, could you get the instrument mechs to concoct a phenakistoscope with a revolution-counter attached?”

“We can make anything, positively anything,” chimed in Pascoe from near the port. “Given enough centuries in which to do it.”

Ignoring the interruption, Leigh asked, “What do you want it for?”

“Hoffnagle and Nolan think we could use it to measure the precise optical register of those sluggards outside. If we can find out at what minimum speed they see pictures merge into motion it would be a great help.”

“Wouldn’t the ship’s movie projector serve the same purpose?”

“It isn’t sufficiently variable,” Romero objected. “Besides, we can’t operate it independently of our own power supply. A phenakistoscope can be carried around and cranked by hand.”

“This becomes more fascinating every moment,” Pascoe interjected. “It can be cranked. Add a few more details and I’ll start to get a hazy idea of what the darned thing is.”

Taking no notice of that either, Leigh got through to Shallom again, put the matter to him.

“Holy Moses!” ejaculated Shallom. “The things we get asked for! Who thought up that one?” A pause, followed by, “It will take two days.”

“Two days,” Leigh repeated to Romero.

The other looked aghast.

“What’s eating you?” asked Pascoe. “Two days to get started measuring visual retention is mighty fast in this world. You’re on Eterna now. Adapt, boy, adapt!”

Leigh eyed Pascoe carefully and said, “Becoming rather pernickety this last hour or two, aren’t you?”

“Not yet. I have several dregs of patience left. When the last of them has trickled away you can lock me in the brig because I’ll be nuts.”

“Don’t worry. We’re about to have some action.”

“Haha!” said Pascoe disrespectfully.

“We’ll drag out the patrol wagon, go to town and have a look around in the middle of them.”

“About time, too,” Pascoe endorsed.

The armoured, eight-seater car rumbled down the ramp on heavy caterpillars, squatted in the clover. Only a short, flared nozzle in its bonnet and another in its tail revealed the presence of button-controlled snort-guns. The boxed lens on its roof belonged to an automatic camera.

The metal whip atop the box was a radio antenna.

They could have used the helicopter which was capable of carrying four men with equipment but, once landed, that machine would be of little good for touring the streets.

Leigh shared the front seat with Lieutenant Harding and the duty driver. Behind him were two of Harding’s troop and Pascoe. At back sat the radio operator and the snort gunner.

Walterson, Garside and all the other specialists remained with the ship.