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On the Surface

Linda Griffin

    Planet 132-B could not have been more promising—a fertile, earth-class world with a breathable, nitrogen-heavy atmosphere, a day that lasted about twenty-eight hours, and a temperate climate. It was apparently uninhabited. The Planetary Exploration Fleet ship Sakharov had made a thorough recon, cruising above every area of the planet, and found no signs of civilization or even animal life. It was apparently ripe for the taking.
    Plant life was abundant, and the last few weeks had been spent in cataloging and analyzing it. The three-man Alpha team was forty kilometers south of the equator, gathering specimens that would accompany the report recommending further exploration and possible settlement. They observed something Mallory insisted on calling a tree, although its growth was mostly horizontal, hugging the ground. A tough grass grew almost everywhere. Small shrubs had flowerlike leaves in varying shades of green, but almost no other color—because there were no bird or insect pollinators to attract?
    The land was mostly flat, with rolling hills, but nothing that could be called a mountain. Distant vistas, with the exotic plants blurring into a solid mass of green, were earthlike enough to evoke homesickness. They had seen no unusual formations or outcroppings. The one geological anomaly was a series of holes—they reminded Channing of the pits in the sandy beach at home after the tide went out, but on a larger scale. It seemed to be a natural phenomenon, too uniform to be caused by meteorites. Each hole was roughly four to six inches across and about that deep. Nothing grew in them, but they seemed to contain the same sandy soil as the surrounding area.
    It was on the sixteenth day of the botanical survey that Channing encountered the unexpected. Something was lying on the ground next to one of the holes nearest their camp, something that hadn’t been there yesterday.
    At first he thought it might be a plant that had bloomed overnight, or maybe a spreading fungus, but it wasn’t attached to the ground. Cautiously he confirmed that by picking it up in his gloved hands. Its outer layer reminded him of a coconut shell, and lying in the curve of the half shell was something yellowish and stringy. He poked at it with his index finger. It was softer than it appeared and his finger left a slight impression.
    He catalogued it’s exact location and then carried it back to camp. “What do you think this is?” he asked Stern and Mallory, who were counting and bagging small specimens. They came to look and poke at the stringy stuff.
    Stern tapped the shell. “This almost looks manmade,” he said. “I mean made by hand. Well, you know, made. Manufactured.”
    “Yeah, by who?” Mallory said. “I mean whom.”
    “Maybe we’re not the first here,” Stern said. “Maybe somebody left it behind.”
    “It wasn’t there yesterday,” Channing told them. “It’s like it fell out of the sky.” He added it to the other specimens, making careful notes on its properties. He took a small slice of the yellow stuff and ran a chemical analysis on it. It seemed to be some kind of carbohydrate. Curious, he took another tiny sample and put it on his tongue. It tasted salty. They weren’t supposed to ingest anything, but its chemical makeup seemed harmless, and it was an almost microscopic piece. He bit into it and it crumbled. He didn’t swallow it, not intentionally anyway. “Guys,” he said, “I think this is food.”
    “We’re not supposed to eat anything,” Mallory said.
    “No, I mean I think this is food for us, intended for us. Like a gift, an offering. I think there’s something out there.” He gestured vaguely in the direction he had come from. “Or somebody.”
    “I don’t think so,” Stern said. “You’re imagining things. We didn’t see any signs of animal life.”
    “He’s seen too many science fiction movies,” Mallory said. They both laughed and turned back to their work.
    Channing went back to the site at the edge of the camp. He studied the hole nearest the place where he had found the shell. It was like all the rest, smooth and empty. He shone his flashlight into it and dug into the sandy bottom, but couldn’t see anything unusual about it. It was only a hole, like all the other holes. He glanced around and saw nothing else remarkable. He shrugged.
    That night, Channing was edgy, alert for sound or movement around the camp. Was something out there? Something that had left an offering of food to the visitors? He heard nothing, but he did have a feeling...
    “Spooking yourself,” Mallory told him.
    In the morning, in the same location, they found another shell holding the same yellow stuff. Channing threw caution to the winds and pulled off a large, stringy chunk and put it in his mouth. He chewed it thoughtfully and swallowed. It tasted pretty good and went down easily. He swigged water and sat waiting to see if his stomach would rebel. After fifteen uneventful minutes, he ate the rest of it. Now he was either going to die a horrible death or he had honored the giver by enjoying the meal. He studied the empty shell. It did look as if it had been shaped, crafted. He put it back on the ground where he had found it.
    That night he did hear something beyond the perimeter of the camp. It was subtle, and Stern and Mallory claimed they couldn’t hear it. It sounded like a slight hiss that went on for some minutes and then stopped.
    In the morning, the empty shell was gone and in its place was a slightly larger shell filled with a different substance, a clump of brownish stuff. Its texture was halfway between a fungus and corn meal mush. He bagged a small sample for the survey and scooped the rest into his mouth with his fingers. The taste was similar to the first dish, but less salty and slightly tart.
    He went back to the camp and confessed to his unscientific behavior. They tested the bagged sample. Like the first, it seemed to be mostly carbohydrate. “If you feel like puking, do it outside the camp,” Stern advised, but he and Mallory now seemed willing to accept that the food was intended as a gift. “We need to report this,” Stern said, turning to the communicator. The Sakharov, in orbit above the planet, and the other scientific teams on the ground had to be notified that the planet might be inhabited after all.
    Channing slept restlessly and woke up to hear the hissing sound again. It went on longer this time, and it occurred to him for the first time that they needed to respond in some way, to make an offering of their own.
    He consulted with Stern and Mallory in the morning. “Carbs would be best,” Stern said.
    “Chocolate,” Mallory suggested. “Or something healthy and natural, like eggs.”
    “They might be vegans,” Stern said. “Anyway, we don’t have any eggs.” They did have powdered eggs. They had almost nothing that wasn’t powdered, dehydrated, processed, or condensed, but there were enough chocolate bars to spare. All three went out to the perimeter to find the third offering. This time the shell bowl was even larger than the second one and contained what looked like a collection of sticks. Mallory insisted on a chemical analysis before he would try ingesting anything, but Stern and Channing sat next to the hole and cautiously bit into the slender, brown wands. They were delicious, crunchy and sweet, and seemed to grow warmer in their mouths.
    They explored for a long time in the surrounding area, searching for biological entities or traces of their presence. They found nothing.
    Back in camp, Channing said, “We always find the food in the morning and the sounds I heard were after dark. Maybe they only come out at night. I should put our offering out tonight, so it won’t spoil in the sun.”
    He mixed up some instant mashed potatoes and powdered eggs and put them in the first bowl with half of a chocolate bar. As soon as it was dark, they went out and put the bowl down next to the hole. They made a quick search of the area with their flashlights and then went back to camp. A few hours later the hissing started, and this time all three of them heard it. It was louder than before and went on for almost fifteen minutes.
    Mallory was for going out to see what it was, but Stern advised caution. “We don’t want to spook them or offend them. First contact protocol calls for extreme caution.”
    None of them slept much that night. First thing in the morning, they went out to the hole. The bowl still rested beside it, containing a nasty mess of congealed mashed potatoes and dried-out eggs. The chocolate was gone. “Good choice,” Mallory said.
    “No, we should be offended,” Stern said. “We took everything they offered. If they didn’t like it, they didn’t have to eat it, but they should have taken it back to their nest and studied it or buried it or whatever.”
    “Nest?” Channing said.
    “So to speak.”
    That night they put an entire chocolate bar in the bowl along with the least disgusting dried rations they could rustle up. The raisins were the best bet. They decided that if the biological entities—not aliens, they were the aliens—wanted contact, it was best to wait for them to make the first move. Stern and Mallory would stay well back from the perimeter, watching from a distance, while Channing went alone to the hole. If nothing happened in one hour, he would go back to camp, leaving the offering behind.
    He set the bowl down and squatted a few yards away to wait. The trouble was that it really wasn’t possible to squat in the same position for that long. After about ten minutes his feet had gone to sleep and his leg muscles were cramping. He stood up to stretch, and something flickered at the edge of his vision. A faint hiss began and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. Something small and round moved—he wanted to say rolled—toward the bowl. He didn’t want to turn on his flashlight so he couldn’t see clearly what it was. Planet 132-B had no moon, and only a dim glow reached it from a not-too-distant star. He stood very still and waited.
    The creature appeared to be a spheroid about a foot tall. He couldn’t see any distinguishing features, or any features at all. It stopped beside the bowl and hissed for a few seconds and then it and the bowl seemed to vanish into thin air—or into the hole?
    He almost ran back to camp. “The holes are portals!” he cried. He had to admit it was only a theory, but it was such a good one! It explained the presence of the holes and the absence of visible animal life on the surface. Whatever these creatures were, they lived underground, avoiding the sun. How they reached their subterranean homes through holes that appeared to be simple depressions in the soil was a mystery.
    As soon as it was light, the team went out again. The bowl Channing had left, or one exactly like it, was beside the hole, this time containing both the yellow stringy stuff and the crunchy sticks. They tried to figure out how the holes worked, but they really did seem to be mere dimples in the earth. Stern tried putting a hand in one and leaning all his weight on it, to see if it would open under him, but nothing happened. Perhaps it had to be opened from below.
    The ship reported back that none of the other teams were experiencing anything like this. Even when they were told what to look for, they found nothing unusual and heard nothing going hiss in the night.
    That night—Day 21 of the survey, which they were methodically continuing—Channing went alone to the site and this time he sat in a comfortable position with his arms around his knees. They had filled the bowl with chocolate, raisins, and the frozen custard that passed for ice cream on the ship. It was in a sealed container in case it melted, and they were trusting that the extraterrestrials would be able to find a way in.
    Channing sat very still for nearly an hour. Finally, something rolled in and hissed for a moment before the bowl disappeared into the hole. And then the creature rolled toward him. Channing held his breath. It sat about three feet from him and hissed and vibrated. It appeared to have a hole in the top, but otherwise was smooth and round. It’s forward movement seemed to involve turning rapidly from side to side and scooting rather than rolling.
    First contact. Don’t blow it, he told himself. He pressed the button in his pocket that would send a digital image of the creature back to the ship. It didn’t flash or make a sound, but the creature immediately scuttled away.
    He was notified the next day that the image had not been clear enough to convince anyone that this was a genuine sighting, but Captain McCauley would look into sending a xenobiologist in for further study. In a way, he was glad. He didn’t want a whole team coming in to stomp around and take over. He wanted this experience to remain his for as long as possible.
    That night, the experiment was repeated. This time Channing made no attempt to record the encounter, sitting as still as he could when the extraterrestrial approached him. The creature sat nearby and hissed for a while and then moved back toward the hole. After a moment it came back, gave a brief hiss, and returned to the hole. After a few repetitions of this, it occurred to Channing that it wanted him to follow. He got up slowly and took small, cautious steps forward. The creature waited until he was only inches away and then rolled into the hole and vanished.
    Channing hadn’t seen how it was done, but clearly the creature was larger than the hole and had perched over it rather than in it. He straddled the hole with his feet as close as possible to the edges, and suddenly he was sliding. It was scary as hell, but didn’t last long. Something gravel-like scraped his face, and dust particles drifted onto his clothes, and then he was sitting on the ground in an underground chamber that stretched out on every side. He tasted dirt in his mouth, but didn’t dare spit it out.
    Some kind of artificial lighting, softer and redder than sunlight, suffused the space, and he had no trouble seeing. About thirty of the small, round creatures were gathered around him. Loud hissing came from everywhere. Elaborate structures rose behind them and along the walls of the chamber. They resembled Rube Goldberg contraptions with a lot of coiled tubes and shapeless blobs of color. He couldn’t guess at their purpose and couldn’t imagine how they had been constructed by creatures that seemed to have no appendages. How had they crafted the bowls, or prepared the food?
    Channing slowly raised his hands with the fingers spread. “Peace,” he said in what he hoped was a calm, quiet voice. His heart was hammering in his chest, and he was afraid they could hear it. “Friend,” he said. They hissed louder. He sat unmoving, waiting for something else to happen, afraid to make any move that might be misinterpreted.
    After about five minutes, when his arms were getting tired, and he was trying to decide whether to lower them, one of the creatures scuttled forward, pushing a coconut-shell bowl ahead of it. It held yellow stringy stuff, crunchy sticks—and raisins.
    “Eat?” Channing queried, gesturing with a hand to his mouth. More hissing. Cautiously he reached down and took one of the sticks. He held it up for them to see. “Eat?” he repeated and then took a bite. It tasted good, even mixed with dirt. How was he to communicate with these creatures? In bad science fiction movies, the extraterrestrials either learned English immediately or could communicate telepathically. Would they understand gestures, if they had no hands to gesture with?
    He wondered how he appeared to them. Big? Complicated? He had too many parts, too many colors. Would they see him as some kind of deity, or as a frightening monster? He tried to make himself small, hunching over and keeping his arms close to his body. He took another bite of the crunchy stick. “Good,” he said. “Yum.” A few of the creatures moved forward, coming closer—to get a better look?
    He brushed at the dust on his clothes, conscious that it was probably on his face too. He was here representing the entire Planetary Exploration Fleet and didn’t want to appear out of uniform. The dust was even finer than he had supposed and drifted around him. Abruptly he sneezed.
    All of the extraterrestrial creatures hissed loudly and scooted rapidly away from him, quickly disappearing into the shadows beyond the lighted chamber. “Whoa!” Channing said, trying not to shout. “Peace. Friend. Sorry. It was just a sneeze, guys.”
    He sat waiting for more than an hour, and they didn’t come back. It occurred to him that he didn’t know how to get back out of this place. He surveyed his surroundings and noted that the slide he had taken from the hole was along a curving track, and the hole was not that far above his head. From this side it looked something like a porthole, although no light came through. He got up carefully and tried to walk up the way he had come, but his feet slid in the sand. He couldn’t get any traction. Even if he got up to the hole, would it open to let him out?
    He stood directly under the hole and stretched his arms up, but it was still more than a foot beyond his reach. He glanced around to make sure none of the extraterrestrials was close and then shouted, “Stern! Mallory! Help!” Surely they had seen him disappear into the hole and would be close by. But they had never heard anything that seemed to come from below, no hissing, nothing—if the hole was in its usual, sealed state, maybe nobody would hear him.
    They did. Stern called to him and a rope was lowered. He tied it under his arms and they hauled him out—not emerging through a wide-open hole, but dragged through a sandy barrier that left him choking on dirt, his eyes watering from grit. They listened wide-eyed to his description of the underground chamber, and then Stern laughed. “Some ambassador,” he said. “Scared them off with a sneeze!” They stood around the ruin of what had been a portal to another civilization, but it seemed that nothing they could do would remedy the situation.
    They went back to camp and discussed their options. Stern recommended that they prepare a large and varied peace offering and leave half of it near the ruined hole and half near one of the others. Could the disrupted relations be mended? Should they wait for the xenobiologist, if the captain ever got around to sending him? Should they try to go down and search beyond the underground chamber—if they could get to it?
    During the night, Channing woke up to the sound of hissing, louder than ever. He shook Stern and Mallory awake, and they gazed out toward the ruined hole. They could not see anything clearly, but numerous dark objects were coming up out of the ground. Channing ran out to the perimeter and looked toward the other hole where they had left an offering. They were coming up from that one too, and as he turned to go back to the others, he realized that more were coming from every direction. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They were all headed for the camp.
    “Get the chocolate!” Channing snapped.
    Mallory let out a long whistle. “Too late,” he said starkly. “Get the guns.”
    Stern was at the radio. “Mayday, mayday!” he was shouting.
    A communication came in from Beta team: “Alpha, what are these...Holy cow!”
    Stern sent a hasty message to the Sakharov: “We are outnumbered. Send help.”
    It was the last transmission from the surface of Planet 132-B.

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