The Mysterious Planet

CHAPTER 15 Message from Outpost

THE COCKINESS WAS GONE from Jakes by the time they reached their suite again. Juan looked up from a Thulian book and started to grin. Then his face sobered as he saw them.

“What goes on?” he asked in Thulian.

Bob told him as quickly as he could, and the boy began to echo their worry at once. Even if they had been citizens of Thule, such a theft could result in a death sentence, or whatever Thule used to punish its traitors and spies. As it was, there was no way of guessing what might be done to them.

Jakes was washing his hands. They managed to unscrew the cold-light bulb in the bathroom first, so that he could check himself as he scrubbed. The other lights all worked on switches.

With them off, there were only a few spots that showed any of the green, and they came off with strong applications of detergent. But the brief case was loaded with it on the outside.

Juan fell to, while Jakes took care of all his clothes.

The job was finally finished, but Bob was still shuddering over what might have happened if Valin had come in when the room was dark.

“It still doesn’t take care of the marks you probably left all over the files,” Bob reminded Jakes. “Successful spies! One of the simplest things to look for.”

“Sure, I know. I’ve seen thrillers, too, and it’s in all of them. But how was I to know that the same techniques would apply here? Anyhow, some marks must be left over from a good long time before, because the old guy who showed us around opened

‘em up—and his prints would be all over, too.”

Jakes was still convinced that he’d gotten away with it, even after Bob argued with him half of the night. Bob guessed he was arguing partly in the hopes that he too could be convinced Jakes was right. But he still had a feeling inside him that Thule knew what had happened, and was only playing cat-and-mouse with them.

He knew what would be true in his own culture’s security blanket. And Thule was as busy preparing for war in its own way as the Federation was. They had installed a ring of alarms at a distance of a hundred thousand miles outside the planet, and there were automatic missiles waiting below to take off on the inertia-free drive at whatever sector was touched.

They hoped that it was safe enough to prevent any penetration, even by guided bombs. But they weren’t sure.

In such an atmosphere, their security blanket was apt to be as tight as that of the Federation.

Finally Jakes managed to change the subject. “Study those locks on the Icarius?” he asked.

“They’re neat, eh? But not as smart as Thule thinks, because they look just like one of the gadgets in the plans; I figured they might use something like that. And when the time comes and some other things work out, I can release them in almost no time. Then maybe you’ll be glad I got the plans that will give the Federation everything Thule’s got.”

Bob turned over and tried to go to sleep, but the last words rankled. He wouldn’t be glad of it, he knew. It might be the right thing to take the plans back, if they could get away with it. It was what the Federation would want. But it would destroy the last fault hope of ending the war.

Even now, there was some chance. Thule seemed to be more slanted toward holding off until she could reach Earth’s orbit and make a careful study of the people in general than of going to war now. And while the

Federation was planning for war, the papers he had seen at Outpost had shown how sickening the idea was to them. With a little time, something might be worked out.

Not, however, after those plans reached Outpost. With them, Earth and Mars would know that Thule was not merely filled with clever weapons, but that she was scientifically centuries ahead. She would be too far advanced to risk as a neighbor. This was not only true in war—but also held good in shipping, manufacturing, and nearly all other commercial ventures.

Earth would know then that she had to strike to protect her trade, and Mars would go along.

Together, they could sway the Federation. It would be a simple case of either making a striking blow at Thule before she wakened all her people and got into full production, or being forever lost in the shuffle.

With such weapons, many of them quite simple in application, even though the science behind them was unusually complicated, Earth would have a chance to win, and to win as soon as she could turn out enough of the equipment. Earth was well equipped to run almost anything through her complicated factories in a hurry.

There was another angle on it that bothered him, too. He had begun to wonder whether Thule might not have wanted Jakes to steal the plans. It seemed too simple, unless they had deliberately let him walk out with them.

Jakes had pulled stuff from one drawer of a filing cabinet. But Thule must have inventions of military value that would fill a warehouse. These seemed invincible and terrible enough. But they might be rendered harmless against her. She’d had them for a long time, and probably had answers to combat them. She also probably had a great many more weapons about which nobody from the Federation would ever dream.

He hadn’t even guessed that Federation scientists had actually made the proton cannon.

That had been a carefully guarded military secret, and his father hadn’t even told him. How many hitherto unused devices did Thule have?

He had a picture of Federation forces rushing out in full confidence because they were equipped with all the Thulian devices as well as their own, and then finding that none of them would work against Thule. He also had a picture of somebody on Thule who thought war was necessary using the theft of the “secret” weapons as a good excuse to move in before the Federation could build them.

Valin brought up the idea of the broadcasts again, but Bob realized that on this point Jakes was right, and turned it down. He expected pleading, but nothing more was said about it. If this was a major point in the Thulian strategy, they certainly kept their hands concealed well.

That bothered him, too. There was no sign that they ever noticed anything wrong. He couldn’t make up his mind whether he should take them at their face value as polite, considerate and civilized human beings, or whether Jakes was right, and they were completely untrustworthy, masking all their hidden plans to ruin the Solar System by false action, meant only to convince him.

On one point both Jakes and Bob agreed wholeheartedly, and Juan was in violent disagreement. They accepted Valin’s suggestion that they might like some music and had one of the little tape machines delivered, with a few hundred pieces of the most carefully selected music.

It came while they were out. They got back to hear something that was a cross between an anguished cat and a tin can being battered around by a stumble-footed mule. In between sections, for no reason, a female voice would come on in a high, nasal singsong.

If there was any rhythm to it, it couldn’t be found, except for a few sections where there was obviously studied effort to make a pattern.

When they threw the door open and rushed in to shut off the racket, Juan was lying there with a smile of sheer pleasure on his face, beating his hand up and down as crazily as the beat of the so-called music. He let out a squawk when they cut it off.

“Hey, I want to hear all of how it goes,” he cried. “This is interesting music.”

“This,” Jakes stated flatly, “is what happens when a banshee goes crazy. Uh-uh. Not in any place I’m living. Even my Dad couldn’t take that, and he has a tin ear.”

“You probably don’t like your music well separated,” Juan stated. “You like it all mashed together like potatoes in a pot, all going all of the time, oomp-pah-pah, oomp-pah-pah.”

“I don’t know what I like,” Jakes said. “This ain’t it Listen if you like, but not when we’re around.”

Juan looked up appealingly at Bob, but he shook his head firmly.

“The next time we hear this thing, Juan, it goes out in the hall.”

Some people even liked Chinese music, Bob thought. Maybe Juan was one of them. A man’s taste was his own business—but not when he tried to force others to share it.

They found out the next day that there were schools of music, even here. Emo brought down his own favorite tape. Juan fled the room in horror together with Jakes and Bob. Even Valin shook his head sadly as he went in to turn it off. It was a monotonous up and down screeching on a single string, punctuated by sudden loud rumbles that came irregularly enough to be shocking whenever they reached the ears. Emo informed them that it was pure ear-beat, but they didn’t care what he called it

But the incident added some variety to their life, and it was reaching the stage where they needed it. Thule was too well oiled and too smooth. Everything was available for the asking, which made nothing worth bothering with. They had seen the town, and had met all the people they cared to meet

And again, they were simply bored with it all.

The trouble came to Jakes’s attention first. “Aren’t there any female Thulians?” he asked.

Bob thought it over. He hadn’t seen one since they arrived, though there were enough pictures about to show that Thulian girls must have existed once—and rather pretty ones, at that.

Valin answered the question when they put it to him, with the statement they would have expected to hear. “No, the women have not been awakened. When there is war, why bother them. War is for men.”

Bob remembered his mother, who had served eight years as a nurse on one of the ships before she met his father. And he remembered all the other women who were working in the shops on Outpost.

“I thought in a culture as well developed as yours, you’d have complete equality between men and women.”

Valin was horrified. “We’re not barbarians, Bob. We don’t expect our women to fight the way the savages used to. Do you mean to say the Federation has females in its forces?”

“It certainly has. And volunteers too! What would you do if a woman wanted to join your military group?”

“It has happened,” Valin answered slowly. “But we usually cured their minds.”

Things like that would be no help in bringing peace about, Bob knew. Each side would continue to regard the other as technically well developed, but culturally savage. And neither would understand the other. He couldn’t see how they got that way, himself, and he’d been trying hard.

He went back to his room to try to think of something to do that might be useful and interesting, and finally fell asleep. When he awoke, there was a buzzing that sounded like a mosquito. He sat up to look for it, before he remembered that there were no insects on Thule. They had been killed off thousands of years before.

But the buzzing persisted. He turned over, and noticed that the sound was coming from the table beside the bed. Then he realized that it must be his little radio.

When he picked it up, the buzzing became a frantic shouting of words—and in his father’s voice!

“Bobbie,” it was saying over and over. Then: “Bobby, here’s daddikins. Keepum ear peeled. Eway ar-yay umingkay….”

It went on in a mixture of Pig Latin, baby talk and slang. Translated, Bob gathered that his father had somehow gotten permission to take one ship alone and come looking for him.

He’d managed with a newly improved radar to avoid the warning buoys sowed in space, and had come in close enough to study the ground. He’d even spotted the Icarius in Center Park, so he was pretty sure where they were. But he hadn’t gotten much more on that first trip.

Now he was coming back.

“Get out by that long S-shaped park at the end of the city—the far end,” his message went on in its crazy mixture of words. “There’s an open spot there big enough for me to land. If you see me, come running, because I’ll be blasting off at once. And if you’ve got any information, bring it with you.”

The message repeated again and again, then cut off. Bob knew that it must have taken almost fantastic power to blast it all the way through space on that frequency and deliver so much volume on the little set. But it didn’t puzzle him as much as the reasons for letting his father come for him. Wallingford must think he needed a lot more information on Thule than Bob had put into the simple letter to his father.

But it was no trick, he was sure. It had been his father’s voice, and the silly jumble of words were just the ones which would carry meaning to him, but wouldn’t make sense to a Thulian, even though English was understood by some of them.

He looked at his watch, and hoped that it was somewhere near right. The best time to land would be during the brief hour when Thule cut down the amount of light in the air to encourage the plants, which needed some rest apparently.

Even at best, there wasn’t one chance in a thousand that the plan would succeed. But Bob had to try to take advantage of what chance there was.