Planet for Plunder by Hal Clement

Author:Hal Clement [Clement, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

It all tied in, more or less, with the evident fact that these machines were not electrical, even if it did not begin to explain how they actually worked. Some sort of more precise analysis would, of course, be needed. The metal he could detect about the things seemed quite purposeless, and he did not see that it was likely to help.

It was present in small, disconnected bits and was devoid of electrical energy, if you brushed aside the minute currents generated by its motion in the planet’s magnetic field.

The machines, then, were made virtually entirely of nonconductors, and should be about as easy for the agent to examine as a device consisting exclusively of gas jets and magnetic fields would be for a human being.

This meant that the analysis would have to be by highly indirect methods. A chemist, with his laboratory machine, might be able to do the job in microseconds. But a traveling device, like the scoutship, had no equipment designed with any such purpose in mind.

He suspected that this was one of the situations where the sensile members of his race—the great majority—would leap at the chance to show their superiority over one who was bound to a machine. It had always been that way. It was a common enough feeling among those whose lives were primarily intellectual. The doers, like the agent, countered it with a clear recognition of the necessity for their work. At the moment, however, the agent rather wished that a normal person had been present, to show his intellectual superiority.

Then he realized that his own possession of machinery did not disqualify him as an intelligent being. If a member of his race could solve this problem, it was as likely to be himself as anyone else. He would have to use all his knowledge, of course, not just the specialized information which was all the millennia of flight demanded.

Enough knowledge should be there. He had, of course, been young when he had elected this life, but he had had much thinking time before his career was actually begun. Also, there had been a good deal of time to think as he drifted among the stars, and opportunities to gather data that planetbound thinkers had never possessed.

He would have to go back to the most elemental principles of thought—if he could. First, he had decided, on the basis of what seemed adequate evidence, that the planet was inhabited—that its inhabitants used machines and, therefore, had freedom of motion—and that these machines were based on a technology almost, but not quite wholly, alien to his own.

Nevertheless, the devices must operate under the same physical laws that obtained elsewhere in the universe. This meant that they must take in some form of energy, must perform a desired action, and must eventually account for the energy as heat.

The energy was not electric or magnetic, since he could have detected the presence of that kind of energy directly. It was not gravitational, since the gravitational potential

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.