Planet explorer

Bordman waked that morning when the partly-opened port of his sleeping-cabin closed of itself and the room-warmer began to whir. He found himself burrowed deep under his covering, and when he got his head out of it the already-bright room was bitterly cold and his breath made a fog about his head.

He thought uneasily it's colder than yesterday! But a Senior Colonial Survey Officer is not supposed to let himself seem disturbed, in public, and the only way to follow that rule is to follow it in private too. So Bordman composed his features, while gloom filled him. When one has just received senior service rating and is on one's very first independent survey of a new colonial installation, the unexpected can be appalling. The unexpected was definitely here, on Lani III.

He'd been a Survey Candidate on Khali II and Taret and Arepo I, all of which were tropical, and a Junior Officer on Menes III and Thotmes--one a semi-arid planet and the other temperate-volcanic--and he'd done an assistant job on Saril's solitary world, which was nine-tenths water. But this first independent survey on his own was another matter. Everything was wholly unfamiliar. An ice-planet with a minus point one habitability rating was upsetting in its peculiarities. He knew what the books said about glacial-world conditions, but that was all.

The denseness of the fog his breath made seemed to grow less as the room-warmer whirred and whirred. When by the thinness of the mist he guessed the temperature to be not much under freezing, he climbed out of his bunk and went to the port to look out. His cabin, of course, was in one of the drone-hulls that had brought the colony's equipment to Lani III. The other emptied hulls were precisely ranged in order outside. They were connected by tubular galleries, and painstakingly leveled. They gave an impression of impassioned tidiness among the upheaved, ice-coated mountains all about.

He gazed down the long valley in which the colony lay. There were monstrous slanting peaks on either side that partly framed the morning sun. Their flanks were ice. The sky was pale, and the sun had four sun-dogs geometrically about it. Normal post-midnight temperatures in this valley ranged around ten below zero--and this was technically summer. But it was colder than ten below zero now. At noon there were normally tiny trickling rills of surface-thaw running down the sunlit sides of the mountains, but they froze again at night. And this was a sheltered valley, warmer than most of the planet's surface. The sun had its sun-dogs every day, on rising. There were nights when the brighter planets had star-pups, too.

The phone-plate lighted and dimmed and lighted and dimmed. They did themselves well on Lani III; the parent world was in this same solar system, making supply easy. That was rare. Bordman stood before the plate and it cleared. Herndon's face peered unhappily out of it. He was even younger than Bordman, and inclined to lean on the supposedly vast experience of a Senior Officer of the Colonial Survey.

"Well?" said Bordman, feeling undignified in his sleeping garments.

"We're picking up a beam from home," said Herndon anxiously. "But we can't make it out."

Because the third planet of the sun Lani was being colonized from the second, inhabited world, communication with the colony's base was possible. A tight beam could span a distance which was only light-minutes across at conjunction, and not much over a light-hour at opposition, as now. But the beam communication had been broken for the past few weeks, and shouldn't be possible again for some weeks more. The sun lay between. One wouldn't expect normal sound-and-picture transmission until the parent planet had moved past the scrambler-fields of Lani. But something had come through. It would be reasonable for it to be pretty much hash when it arrived.

"They aren't sending words or pictures," said Herndon. "The beam is wobbly and we don't know what to make of it. It's a signal, all right, and on the regular frequency. But there are all sorts of stray noises and still in the midst of it there's some sort of signal we can't make out. It's like a whine, only it stutters. It's a broken-up sound of one pitch."

Bordman rubbed his chin. He remembered a course in information theory just before he'd graduated from the Service Academy. Signals were made by pulses, pitch-changes, and frequency-variations. Information was what couldn't be predicted without information. And he remembered with gratitude a seminar on the history of communication, just before he'd gone out on his first field job as a Survey Candidate.

"Hm," he said with a trace of self-consciousness. "Those noises, the stuttering ones. Would they be, on the whole, of no more than two different durations? Like--hm.--Bzz bzz bzzzzzzz bzz?"

He felt that he lost dignity by making such ribald sounds. But Herndon's face brightened.

"That's it!" he said relievedly. "That's it! Only they're high-pitched like--" His voice went falsetto. "Bz bz bz bzzz bz bz."

Bordman thought, we sound like two idiots. He said:

"Record everything you get, and I'll try to decode it." He added, "Before there was voice communication there were signals by light and sound in groups of long and short units. They came in groups, to stand for letters, and things were spelled out. Of course there were larger groups which were words. Very crude system, but it worked when there was a lot of interference, as in the early days. If there's some emergency, your home world might try to get through the sun's scrambled-field that way."

"Undoubtedly!" said Herndon, with even greater relief. "No question, that's it!"

He regarded Bordman with respect as he clicked off. His image faded.

He thinks I'm wonderful, thought Bordman wrily. Because I'm Colonial Survey. But all I know is what's been taught me. It's bound to show up sooner or later. Damn!

He dressed. From time to time he looked out the port again. The intolerable cold of Lani III had intensified, lately. There was some idea that sunspots were the cause. He couldn't make out sunspots with the naked eye, but the sun did look pale, with its accompanying sun-dogs, the result of microscopic ice-crystals suspended in the air. There was no dust on this planet, but there was plenty of ice! It was in the air and on the ground and even under it. To be sure, the drills for the foundation of the great landing-grid had brought up cores of frozen humus along with frozen clay, so there must have been a time when this world had known clouds and seas and vegetation. But it was millions, maybe hundreds of millions of years ago. Right now, though, it was only warm enough to have an atmosphere and very slight and partial thawings in direct sunlight, in sheltered spots, at midday. It couldn't support life, because life is always dependent on other life, and there is a temperature below which a natural ecological system can't maintain itself. And for the past few weeks, the climate had been such that even human-supplied life looked dubious.

Bordman slipped on his Colonial Survey uniform with its palm-tree insignia. Nothing could be much more inappropriate than palm-tree symbols on a planet with sixty feet of permafrost. Bordman reflected, The construction gang calls it a blast, instead of a tree, because we blow up when they try to dodge specifications. But specifications have to be met! You can't bet the lives of a colony or even a ship's crew on half-built facilities!

He marched down the corridor from his sleeping-room, with the dignity he tried to maintain for the sake of the Colonial Survey. It was a pretty lonely business, being dignified all the time. If Herndon didn't look so respectful it would have been pleasant to be more friendly. But Herndon revered him. Even his sister Riki....

But Bordman put her firmly out of his mind. He was on Lani III, which had very valuable mineral resources that made colonization worth while, to check and approve the colony installations. There was the giant landing-grid for space-ships, which took power from the ionosphere to bring space vessels gently to the ground, and also to supply the colony's power needs. It likewise lifted visiting space-craft the necessary five planetary diameters out when they took off again. There was power storage in the remote event of disaster to that giant device. There was a food reserve and the necessary resources for its indefinite stretching in case of need. That usually meant hydroponic installations. All these things had had to be finished, operable, and inspected by a duly qualified Colonial Survey officer before the colony could be licensed for unlimited use.

It was all very normal and official, but Bordman was the newest Senior Survey Officer on the list, and this was the first of his independent operations. He felt inadequate at times.

He passed through the vestibule between this drone-hull and the next and went directly to Herndon's office. Herndon, like himself, was newly endowed with authority. He was actually a mining-and-minerals man and a youthful prodigy in that field, but when the director of the colony was taken ill while a supply-ship was aground, he went back to the home planet and command devolved on Herndon. I wonder, thought Bordman, if he feels as shaky as I do.

When he entered the office, Herndon sat listening to a literal hash of noises coming out of a speaker on his desk. The cryptic signal had been relayed to him, and a recorder stored it as it came. There were cacklings and squeals and moaning sounds, sputters and rumbles and growls. But behind the facade of confusion there was a tiny, interrupted, high-pitched noise. It was a monotone whining not to be confused with the random sounds accompanying it. Sometimes it faded almost to inaudibility, and sometimes it was sharp and clear. But it was a distinctive sound in itself, and it was made up of short whines and longer ones of two durations only.

"I've put Riki at making a transcription of what we've got," said Herndon with relief as he saw Bordman. "She'll make short marks for the short sounds, and long ones for the long. I've told her to try to separate the groups. We've got a full half-hour of it, already."

Bordman made an inspired guess.

"I would expect it to be the same message repeated over and over," he said. He added. "And I think it would be decoded by guessing at the letters in two-letter and three-letter words, as clues to longer ones. That's quicker than statistical analysis of frequency."

Herndon instantly pressed buttons under his phone-plate. He relayed the information to his sister, as if it were gospel. But it wasn't, Bordman remembered. It's simply a trick remembered from boyhood, when I was interested in secret languages. My interest faded when I realized I had no secrets to record or transmit.

Herndon turned from the phone-plate.

"Riki says she's already learned to recognize some groups," he reported, "but thanks for the advice. Now what?"

Bordman sat down. "It seems to me," he observed, "that the increased cold out here might not be local. Sunspots--"