Hugh shook his head.
“It seems impossible,” he declared. “Impossible that plants could have real intelligence … that flowers could hold the mastery of a planet. I’m ready to accept almost any theory but that one …”
“Your mind sticks on parallel evolution,” Scott argued. “There’s no premise for it. On Earth animals took the spotlight, pushing the plants into a subordinate position. Animals got the head start, jumped the gun on the plants. But there’s absolutely no reason why plants should not develop along precisely the same lines here that animals developed on Earth.”
“But the Martian lily lives only one season … ten months … and then it dies,” Hugh protested. “The next season’s growth comes from seed. How could plants build intelligence? Each new crop would have to start all over again.”
“Not necessarily,” declared Scott. “Animals are born with instinct, which is nothing more or less than inherited intelligence. In mankind there are strange evidences of racial memory. Why couldn’t the plants do the same thing with their seed … progress even a step further? Why couldn’t the seed carry, along with its other attributes, all the intelligence and knowledge of the preceding generation? That way the new plant wouldn’t have to start from scratch, but would start with all the accumulated knowledge of its immediate ancestor … and would add to that knowledge and pass the sum total on to the generation that was to follow.”
Hugh kicked absent-mindedly at the sand.
“There would be advantages in that sort of development,” he agreed. “It might even be the logical course of survival on a planet like Mars. Some old Martian race, for all we know, might deliberately have shaped their development toward a plant existence when they realized the conditions toward which the planet was headed.”
“A plant society would be a strange one,” said Scott. “A sort of totalitarian society. Not the kind of a society animals would build … for an animal is an individual and a plant is not. In a plant race individuality would count for nothing, the race would count for everything. The driving force would be the preservation and advancement of the race as a whole. That would make a difference.”
Hugh glanced up sharply.
“You’re damned right that would make a difference,” he said. “They would be a deadly race. Once they got started, noting could stop that singleness of purpose.”
His face seemed to blanch under the tan.
“Do you realize what’s happening?” he shouted. “For millions of years these plants have fought for bare existence on Mars. Every ounce of their effort has been toward race preservation. Every fall the bugs carefully gather all the seeds and carry them inside the building, bring them out and plant them in the spring. It if hadn’t been for some arrangement like that they probably would have died out years ago. Only a few scattered patches of them left now …”
“But on Earth … ,” said Scott.
And the two of them, white-faced, stared at one another. On Earth the Martian lilies would not have to carry on a desperate fight for their very existence. On Earth they had plenty of water, plenty of sunlight, plenty of good, rich soil. On Earth they grew larger and stronger and straighter. Under such conditions what would be the limit of their alien powers?
With the lilies multiplying each year, growing in every fence row, every garden, crowding out the farmers’ crops, lining every stream, clogging every forest … with swarm after swarm of the metallic bugs driving out into space, heading for the Earth … what would happen?
How long would the lilies wait? How would they attack? Would they simply crowd out every other living thing, conquering by a sort of population pressure? Or would they develop more fully those powers of forcing animal minds to do their bidding? Or did they have, perhaps, even stronger weapons?
“Hugh,” Scott rasped, “we have to warn Earth. Somehow we have to let them know.”
“Yes,” Hugh agreed, “but how?”
Together, limned against the harsh horizon, they stood, looking across the desert toward the Martian building.
Tiny figures, dimmed by distance, scurried about the building.
Scott squinted his eyes against the desert glare.
“What are those?” he asked.
Hugh seemed to jerk out of a trance.
“The machines again,” he said wearily. “They’re getting ready to shoot another rocket out to Earth. It’ll be the last one of the season. Earth is drawing away again.”
“More seeds,” said Scott.
Hugh nodded. “More seeds. And more bugs going out. And the worst of it is that Earth doesn’t know. No man in his right mind on Earth could even dimly speculate upon the possibility of high intelligence in plant life. There’s no reason to. No precedent upon which to base such a speculation. Earth plants have never had intelligence.”
“A message is all we need,” declared Scott. “Just get word to the Earth. They’d root up every plant on the face of the entire globe. They’d …”
He stopped abruptly and stared out across the desert.
“The rocket,” he whispered. “The rocket is going to Earth!”
Hugh swung on him fiercely.
“What are you …”
“We could send a message by the rocket!” yelled Scott. “They always watch for them … always hoping each one will carry something new. Some new thing from Mars. It’s the only way we can get a message back to Earth.”
“But they won’t let us near,” protested Hugh. “I’ve tried to get up close to the cradle when they were launching one and those machines always drove me away. Didn’t hurt me … but threatened.”
“We have guns,” said Scott.
“Guns,” said Hugh, “wouldn’t be worth a damn against them. The bullets would just glance off. Even explosive bullets wouldn’t harm them.”
“Sledges then,” said Scott. “We’ll make junk out of the damn things. We’ve got a couple of sledges in the ship.”
Hugh looked at him levelly.
“Okay, kid, let’s get going.”
V
The machines paid them no attention. No higher than a man’s waist, they curiously resembled grotesque spiders. Gangling rods and arms sprouted out all over them and from their trunks sprouted waving, steel antennae.
Overhead hung a swarm of the metallic bugs, evidently directing the work of making the rocket ready.
“It takes just three minutes or thereabouts from the time they finally have her ready until she blasts,” said Hugh. “Whatever we are going to do has to be done in those three minutes. And we’ve got to hold them off until the rocket blasts. They’ll suspect there’s something wrong and will try to stop it but if we can hold them off …”
“They must already have radioed Earth the rocket is coming,” said Scott. “We always got word days in advance. Probably they won’t follow up with their location messages but Doc will be watching for it anyhow.”
They stood tensed, waiting, each grasping a heavy hammer.
The space about the cradle was a scene of intense, but efficient activity. Last minute adjustments were made. Readings and settings were checked. Each machine seemed to act by rote, while overhead hung the cloud of humming bugs.
“We know what we’re to do,” said Hugh. “We’ve simply got to do it.”
Scott nodded.
Hugh shot a glance at him.
“Think you can hold them off, kid? It’ll take a while to unscrew the inner and outer caps and we have got to get that message inside the inner container or it’ll burn when the rocket hits atmosphere.”
“You just get that message in and the caps back on,” said Scott. “I’ll hold them off for you.”
Suddenly the machines scurried back from the cradle, leaving a clear space of several yards around it.
“Now!” Hugh shouted and the two men charged.
The at
tack was a surprise. Their rush carried the line of machines between them and the cradle.
One machine barred Scott’s way and he smashed at it savagely with the heavy hammer. The blow flung it aside, crippled, dented, half-smashed.
Hugh was already at the cradle, clambering up the superstructure.
A machine rushed at Scott, steel arms flailing. Ducking a murderous swipe, the Earthman brought his sledge into play. It sheared through the arms, smashed into the body of the machine. The stricken mechanism seemed to reel, staggered erratically, then collapsed upon the sand.
In two leaps Scott gained the superstructure, scaled it and straddled the cradle. His sledge smashed savagely upon a climbing mechanism, flung it to the ground. But others were swarming up the steel lattice work. Tentacles snaked out, seeking to entrap him. A wicked blow on the leg almost brought him down.
His sledge worked steadily and at the foot of the cradle broken mechanisms bore testimony to its execution.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Hugh had inserted the envelope carrying the message in the inner container with the seeds, was tightening the screwcap. All that remained was to screw on the larger, heavier outer cap.
But only seconds must remain, precious seconds before the rocket blasted. And before that happened they had to be away from the cradle, for the back-lash of flames would burn them to a cinder.
Scott felt perspiration streaming over his body, running off his eyelids, blearing his sight, trickling down his nose. He heard the rasp of metal as Hugh drove home the cap with savage thrusts of the wrench.
A machine rushed up the lattice at him and he smashed at it with unreasoning fury. The head of the sledge bit deep into the metal body.
A tentacle wrapped about his leg and jerked. He felt himself losing his balance, tumbling off the cradle into the melee of threshing metal things beneath him.
Then he was on the ground, buffeted and pounded by the maddened metal creatures. He fought savagely, blindly staggering forward. The shatterproof glass in his vision plate had been “broken,” its texture smashed into a million tiny criss-cross lines, until it was like frosted glass.
He heard the tough fabric of his suit rip with a screeching sound. The bugs still were hammering against him.
The thin, acrid atmosphere of Mars burned into his nose and his lungs labored.
Unseeingly, he swung his sledge in swath-like circles. Shrieking like a wild Indian, he felt it smash and slam into the bodies of his metallic opponents.
Then the world was blotted out by a resounding roar, a Niagara of sound that beat in waves against one’s body.
That was the rocket leaving.
“Hugh!” he yelled insanely. “Hugh, we did it!”
The attack had fallen away and he stood unsteadily on his feet, panting, stiff from punishment, but filled with exultation.
They had won. He and Hugh had sent the message. Earth would be warned and Mars would lose its hope of conquering a new and younger world. Whatever dreams of conquest this old red planet may have nurtured would never come to be.
He put his hands up and ripped the helmet from his head, flinging it on the ground.
The metallic machines were ringed around him, motionless, almost as if they were looking at him. Almost as if they were waiting for his next move.
Wildly he whooped at them. “Start something, damn you! Just start something!”
But the line in front of him parted and he saw the blackened thing that lay upon the sand. The twisted, blasted, crumpled thing that huddled there.
Scott dropped his sledge and a sob rose in his throat. His hands clenched at his side and he tottered slowly forward.
He stood above the body of his brother, flung there on the sand by the searing back-lash of the rocket blast.
“Hugh!” he cried, “Hugh!”
But the blackened bundle didn’t stir. Hugh Nixon was dead.
Eyes bleared, Scott stared around at the machines. They were breaking up, scattering, moving away.
“Damn you,” he screamed, “don’t you even care?”
But even as he spoke, he knew they didn’t care. The plant civilization of Mars was an unemotional society. It knew no love, no triumph, no defeat, no revenge. It was mechanistic, cold, logical. It did only those things which aimed at a definite end. So long as there was a chance of protecting the rocket, so long as there was hope of halting its flight after it had been tampered with, that civilization would act. But now that it was in space, now that it could not be recalled, the incident was over. There would be no further action.
Scott looked down at the man at his feet.
Harry Decker and Jimmy Baldwin and now Hugh Nixon. Three men had died here on Mars. He was the only one left. And he probably would die, too, for no man could for long breathe that Martian air and live.
What was it Hugh had said that first day?
“It plays hell with the tissues of your lungs.”
He stared around him, saw the interminable red deserts and the scarlet patches of Martian lilies, nodding in the breeze. Saw the humming bugs flashing in the pale sunlight. Saw the shimmer of the mighty building that had no doors or windows.
His lungs were aching now and his throat was raw. It was harder and harder to breathe.
He knelt in the sand and lifted the blackened body. Cradling it in his arms, he staggered along.
“I have to make another cross,” he said.
Far overhead, in the depths of space, twinkled the blue planet whose life would never know the slavery of the emotionless race of a dying world.
Party Line
Even the title of this story speaks a little of the way Clifford D. Simak wrote: he took an old country institution and used it for a story about an ultra-futuristic idea. “Party Line” was originally published in the November/December 1978 issue of Destinies—the very first issue of the paperback-size magazine experiment by Baen Books. And it features a theme Cliff utilized more and more frequently in the latter part of his career: how members of a disparate group talk among themselves a lot, conversing and learning from, and with, one another. I wonder whether that might not have been Cliff’s idea of heaven?
—dww
I
Einstein did not come in. That was unusual. Very seldom was Einstein late or absent. Usually he was waiting, ready to take up again the patient teaching that had been going on for months.
Jay Martin tried again.
—Einstein. Einstein. Are you there?
Einstein was not there.
The console in front of Martin hummed and the sensor lights were flickering. The cubicle was quiet, an engineered quietness, insulated against all distraction. Martin reached up and adjusted the helmet more firmly on his head.
—Einstein. Einstein. Where are you?
A faint sense of beginning panic flicked across Martin’s mind. Had Einstein finally given it all up as a bad job? Had he (or she, or it, or them?) simply slipped away, dropping him, finally despairing of making so ignorant a student understand what he had to say?
Something out there stirred, a thin whistle of distant emptiness. Strange, thought Martin, how it always came that way—the haunting sense of distant emptiness. When there was, in fact, no distance nor no emptiness involved. The carrier waves were immune to any of the limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum. Instantaneous, no lag, as if distance, matter, time did not exist.
—Einstein? he asked, convinced that it wasn’t Einstein. It didn’t feel like Einstein, although he would have been hard pressed if he had been called upon to tell how Einstein felt.
The thin whistle came again.
—Yes, said Martin, I’m here. Who are you?
And the voice (the thought? the pulse? the intelligence?) spoke.
—The turning point, it said.
—Unclear, said Martin.
What turning point?
—The universe. The universe has reached its turning point. Universal death has started. The universe has reached its farthest point. It now is running down. Entropy has been accomplished.
—That, said Martin, is a strange way to say it.
—The universe always strove toward entropy.
—Not here, said Martin. No entropy here. The stars still burn.
—At the edge. The outer fringe. The universe at the edge has reached the point of entropy. Heat death. No more energy. And now is falling back. It is retreating.
The distance whistled. The emptiness keened.
—You are at the edge?
—Near the rim. That is how we know. Our measurement …
The distance howled, drowning out the words.
—How long? asked Martin. How long till the end?
—Equal to the time since the beginning. Our calculations—
—Fifteen billion years, said Martin.
—We do not grasp your measurement.
—Never mind, said Martin. It makes no difference. I should not have said it.
—The pity of it! The irony!
—What pity? What irony?
—We have tried so long. Everyone has tried so long. To understand the universe and now we have no time.
—We have lots of time. Another fifteen billion years.
—You may have. We haven’t. We’re too close to the rim. We are in the dying zone.
A cry for help, thought Martin. The moaning of self pity. And was shaken. For there’d never been a cry for help before.
The other caught his thought.
—No cry for help, it said. There is no help. This is warning only.
The pulse, the thought cut off. Distance and emptiness whistled for a moment and then it, too, cut off.
Martin sat huddled in his cubicle, the weight of all that distance, all that emptiness crashing down upon him.
2
The day began badly for Paul Thomas.
The desk communicator chirped at him.
“Yes,” he said.