“And thought rightly,” said the ambassador. “We’re not equipped for space fighting yet, but we’d have sent what we had. And do you see what this means, Mr. President? We’ve got to pool everything and get ready for space warfare, and quickly. They went away, it appears, but there is no assurance that they will not return.”
Again Saunderson nodded. He said, “And now, Captain—”
“We both landed safely,” Carmody said, “We gathered enough of the supply rockets to get us started and then assembled the prefab shelter. We’d just finished it and were about to enter it when I saw the spaceship coming over the crater’s ringwall. It was—”
“You were still in spacesuit?” someone asked.
“Yes,” Carmody growled. “We were still in spacesuits, if that matters now. I saw the ship and pointed to it and Anna saw it, too. We didn’t try to duck or anything because obviously it had seen us; it was coming right toward us and descending. We’d have had time to get inside the shelter, but there didn’t seem any point to it. It wouldn’t have been any protection. Besides, we didn’t know that they weren’t friendly. We’d have got weapons ready, in case, if we’d had any weapons, but we didn’t. They landed light as a bubble only thirty yards or so away and a door lowered in the side of the ship—”
“Describe the ship, please.”
“About fifty feet long, about twenty in diameter, rounded ends. No portholes—they must see right through the walls some way—and no rocket tubes. Outside of the door and one other thing, there just weren’t any features you could see from outside. When the ship rested on the ground, the door opened down from the top and formed a sort of curved ramp that led to the doorway. The other—”
“No airlock?”
Carmody shook his head. “They didn’t breathe air, apparently. They came right out of the ship and toward us, without spacesuits. Neither the temperature nor the lack of air bothered them. But I was going to tell you one more thing about the outside of the ship. On top of it was a short mast, and on top of the mast was a kind of grid of wires something like a radar transmitter. If they were beaming anything at Earth, it came from that grid. Anyway, I’m pretty sure of it. Earth was in the sky, of course, and I noticed that the grid moved—as the ship moved—so the flat side of the grid was always directly toward Earth.”
“Well, the door opened and two of them came down the ramp toward us. They had things in their hands that looked unpleasantly like weapons, and pretty advanced weapons at that. They pointed them at us and motioned for us to walk up the ramp and into the ship. We did.”
“They made no attempt to communicate?”
“None whatsoever, then or at any time. Of course, while we were still in spacesuits, we couldn’t have heard them, anyway—unless they had communicated on the radio band our helmet sets were tuned to. But even after, they never tried to talk to us. They communicated among themselves with whistling noises. We went into the ship and there were two more of them inside. Four altogether—”
“All the same sex?”
Carmody shrugged. “They all looked alike to me, but maybe that’s how Anna and I looked to them. They ordered us, by pointing, to enter two separate small rooms—about the size of jail cells, small ones—toward the front of the ship. We did, and the doors locked after us.”
“I sat there and suddenly got plenty worried, because neither of us had more than another hour’s oxygen left in our suits. If they didn’t know that, and didn’t give us any chance to communicate with them and tell them, we were gone goslings in another hour. So I started to hammer on the door. Anna was hammering, too. I couldn’t hear through my helmet, of course, but I could feel the vibration of it any time I stopped hammering on my door.”
“Then, after maybe half an hour, my door opened and I almost fell out through it. One of the extra-terrestrials motioned me back with a weapon. Another made motions that looked as though he meant I should take off my helmet. I didn’t get it at first, and then I looked at something he pointed at and saw one of our oxygen tanks with the handle turned. Also a big pile of our other supplies, food and water and stuff. Anyway, they had known that we needed oxygen—and although they didn’t need it themselves, they apparently knew how to fix things for us. So they just used our supplies to build an atmosphere in their ship.”
“I took off my helmet and tried to talk to them, but one of them took a long pointed rod and poked me back into my cell. I couldn’t risk grabbing at the rod, because another one still had that dangerous-looking weapon pointed at me. So the door slammed on me again. I took off the rest of my spacesuit because it was plenty hot in there, and then I thought about Anna because she started hammering again.”
“I wanted to let her know it would be all right for her to get out of her spacesuit, that we had an atmosphere again. So I started hammering on the wall between our cells—in Morse. She got it after a while. She signaled back a query, so, when I knew she was getting me, I told her what the score was and she took off her helmet. After that we could talk. If we talked fairly loudly, our voices carried through the wall from one cell to the other.”
“They didn’t mind your talking to one another?”
“They didn’t pay any attention to us all the time they held us prisoners, except to feed us from our own supplies. Didn’t ask us a question; apparently they figured we didn’t know anything they wanted to know and didn’t know already about human beings. They didn’t even study us. I have a hunch they intended to take us back as specimens; there’s no other explanation I can think of.”
“We couldn’t keep accurate track of time, but by the number of times we ate and slept, we had some idea. The first few days—” Carmody laughed shortly— “had their funny side. These creatures obviously knew we needed liquid, but they couldn’t distinguish between water and whisky for the purpose. We had nothing but whisky to drink for the first two or maybe three days. We got higher than kites. We got to singing in our cells and I learned a lot of Russian songs. Been more fun, though, if we could have got some close harmony, if you know what I mean.”
The ambassador permitted himself a smile. “I can guess what you mean, Captain. Please continue.”
“Then we started getting water instead of whisky and sobered up. And started wondering how we could escape. I began to study the mechanism of the lock on my door. It wasn’t like our locks, but I began to figure some things about it and finally—I thought then that we’d been there about ten days—I got hold of a tool to use on it. They’d taken our spacesuits and left us nothing but our clothes, and they’d checked those over for metal we could make into tools.”
“But we got our food out of cans, although they took the empty cans afterward. This particular time, though, there was a little sliver of metal along the opening of the can, and I worried it off and saved it. I’d been, meanwhile, watching and listening and studying their habits. They slept, all at the same time, at regular intervals. It seemed to me like about five hours at a time, with about fifteen-hour intervals in between. If I’m right on that estimate, they probably come from a planet somewhere with about a twenty-hour period of rotation.”
“Anyway, I waited till their next sleep period and started working on the lock with that sliver of metal. It took me at least two or three hours, but I got it open. And once outside my cell, in the main room of the ship, I found that Anna’s door opened easily from the outside and I let her out.”
“We considered trying to turn the tables by finding a weapon to use on them, but none was in sight. They looked so skinny and light, despite being seven feet tall, that I decided to go after them with my bare hands. I would have, except that I couldn’t get the door to the front part of the ship open. It was a different type of lock entirely and I couldn’t even guess how to work it. And it was in the front part of the ship that they slept. The control room must have been up there, too.”