Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “We seem to be down, though I can’t guarantee it’s ground as we know it. It seems to be as low as we can get, though. There’s the door switch, in case you didn’t know. You’re on your own, unless you don’t mind my hanging around to watch. I suppose the boss will be here soon, too; he should have his machine in an orbit by this time.”

  “Sure—stick around. I’ll be glad to have you. Maybe we’ll have to move the thing around, for all I can tell at the moment.” He had opened the door as he spoke, and watched with interest as the pressure gauge snapped up to a value about two thirds of Sarr normal. At the same instant, the temperature dial of the still hot titanium furnace began to rise spontaneously—apparently the greater atmospheric density was more than able to offset the slight amount of cooling that had taken place; the metal was actually burning. Ken hastily shut the door.

  The temperature continued to rise a short distance, while the light intensity in the cargo compartment of the torpedo held at a value that would have been intense even to eyes accustomed to Sarr’s fervent sun. The most interesting information, however, came from the pressure gauge; and it was on this that Ken kept his attention glued.

  For perhaps twenty seconds the reaction continued unabated; then it began to die out, and in ten more the temperature began once more to drop. The reason was evident; pressure had dropped to less than two percent of its former value. There was literally nothing left to carry on the reaction.

  Ken emitted the booming drone from his sound-diaphragm that was the Sarrian equivalent of a whistle of surprise.

  “I knew molten titanium would react to completion in our atmosphere, but I didn’t think it would possibly do it here. I guess I was wrong—I was rather expecting a mixture of compounds, whose heats of formation would prevent any such reaction. Still, I suppose at this planet’s temperature, they wouldn’t have to be very stable from our point of view. .” his voice trailed off.

  “Means nothing to me, but it certainly burned,” Feth Allmer remarked. “How about your other samples? Are you going to run them off right away, or wait for things to cool down again to planet-normal?” Another dial caught Ken’s eye before he could answer.

  “Hey—who lit the sodium?” he asked, heedless of Allmer’s query. “It’s cooling now, but it must have been burning, too, for a while when there was air.”

  “Let more in and see.” The toggle snapped over, and there was a distinct popping sound as air rushed into the rear-vacuum. The sodium continued to cool.

  “Maybe a spark from the titanium pot lighted it up.” Without answering, Ken closed the door once more and began to warm up the sodium container. Apparently Feth’s suggestion was not too far from the mark; very little additional heat was needed to ignite the metal. This time the reaction stopped after pressure had dropped about a sixth. Then the door was opened again, and another touch of artificial head caused the reaction to resume. This time it continued, presumably, until the sodium was consumed.

  “I want enough material to work on when we get it back,” Ken explained. “I’m not the Galaxy’s best analytical chemist.”

  The crucible of carbon dust gave decidedly peculiar results. Something certainly happened, for the material not only maintained but even increased its temperature for some time after the heating current was cut off; but there was no evidence either of consumption or production of gas in the closed chamber. Both Ken and Feth were slightly startled. The former, in response to the mechanic’s quizzical expression, admitted the fact was probably significant but could offer no explanation.

  Samples of iron, tin, lead, and gold followed in due course. None of these seemed greatly affected by the peculiar atmosphere at any temperature, with the possible exception of the iron; there the pressure drop was too small to be certain, since in each of these cases the heating had caused an increase in pressure which had to be allowed for. Magnesium behaved remarkably like sodium, except that it burned even more brightly than the titanium.

  Here again Ken decided to finish off the metal by relighting it with the door open; and here the testing program received a sudden interruption.

  Both Sarrians were perfectly aware that with the door open a beam of light must be stabbing out into the darkness. Both had ceased to worry about the fact; it had been equally true, though perhaps the radiance was fainter, with the blazing sodium and almost as much so when the sheer heat of the samples of iron and gold had been exposed. They had completely ceased to worry about being seen; a full hour had already passed since they had landed the torpedo, owing to the cooling periods necessary between tests, and there had been no sign that any attention had been attracted. Ken should have remembered the difficulty that had been encountered in reaching the ground.

  The possibility was brought back to their attention with the relighting of the magnesium sample. As the photocell reported the reestablishment of combustion, a shrill sound erupted from the speaker above the control board and echoed through the ship. Neither had to be told what it was; both had heard the recordings of the voice of the Third Planet native who had found the original torpedo.

  For an instant both remained frozen on their racks, exploring mentally the possibilities of the situation. Feth made a tentative gesture toward the power switches, only to be checked by an imperious snap of Ken’s tentacles.

  “Wait! Is our speaker on?” The words were whispered.

  “Yes.” Feth pulled a microphone down to chest level and retreated a step. He wanted no part in what Ken seemed about to do. Sallman himself, however, had once more become completely absorbed in the mystery of the World of Ice, to the exclusion of all other matters; he saw no reason for leaving the site where his activities had been discovered. It did not even occur to him not to answer the native who appeared to have made the discovery. With his speaking diaphragm close to the microphone, he emulated the “boss” of so many years before, and tried to imitate the sounds coming from the speaker.

  The result was utter silence.

  At first neither listener worried; the native would naturally be surprised. Gradually, however, an expression of mild anxiety began to appear on Ken’s features, while an “I-told-you-so” air became manifest about Feth.

  “You’ve scared him away,” the latter finally said. “If his tribe stampedes with him, Drai won’t be very happy about it.”

  A faint crackling which had preceded the alien’s call, and which his concentration of chemical problems had prevented reaching Ken’s conscious mind, suddenly ballooned into recollection, and he snatched at the straw.

  “But we heard him coming—the same sort of noise the torpedo made landing—and we haven’t heard him leave. He must still be waiting.”

  “Heard him coming? Oh—that? How do you know that’s what it was? Neither of us was paying any attention.”

  “What else could it have been?” This was a decidedly unfair question, to which Feth attempted no direct answer. He simply countered with another.

  “What’s he waiting for, then?” Fate was unkind to him; Ken was spared the necessity of answering. The human voice came again, less shrill this time; history seemed to be repeating itself. Ken listened intently; Feth seemed to have forgotten his intention of dissociating himself from the proceedings and was crowded as close as the detective to the speaker. The voice went on, in short bursts which required little imagination to interpret as questions. Not a word was understandable, though both thought they recognized the human “no” on several occasions. Certainly the creature did not utter any of the names that the Sarrians had come to associate with trade items—Feth, who knew them all, was writing them on a scrap of paper. Ken finally grew impatient, took the list from the mechanic, and began to pronounce them as well as he could, pausing after each.

  “Indium—Flatinum—Gold—Osmium—”

  “Gold!” the unseen speaker cut in.

  “Gold!” responded Ken intelligently, into the microphone, and “which one is that?” in a hasty aside to Feth. The mechanic told him, also in
a whisper. “There’s a sample in the torpedo. We can’t trade it off—I want to analyze it for traces of corrosion. Anyway it was melted a little while ago, and he’ll never get it out of the crucible. What’s the name for the stuff you get from them?”

  “Tofacco.” Feth answered without thinking—but he started thinking immediately afterward. He remembered Drai’s promise of the fate of anyone who gave Ken information about “the stuff” obtained from Earth, and knew rather better then Sallman just how jocular Laj was likely to be. The memory made him itch, as though his hide were already coming loose. He wondered how he could keep news of his slip from reaching the higher levels, but had no time to get a really constructive idea. The speaker interrupted him again.

  If the previous calls had been loud, this was explosive. The creature must have had his vocal apparatus within inches of the torpedo’s microphone, and been using full voice power to boot. The roar echoed for seconds through the shop and almost drowned out the clanking which followed—a sound which suggested something hard striking the hull of the torpedo. The native, for some reason, seemed to have become wildly excited.

  At almost the same instant, Ken also gave an exclamation. The thermometer dial for the gold sample had ceased to register.

  “The blasted savage is stealing my sample!” he howled, and snapped over the switch closing the cargo door. The switch moved, but the door apparently didn’t—at least, it failed to indicate “locked.” There was no way of telling whether or not it had stopped at some partly-closed position.

  The native was still jabbering—more than ever, if that were possible. Ken switched back to “open” position, waited a moment, and tried to close again. This time it worked. The Sarrians wondered whether the relatively feeble motor which closed the portal had been able to cause any injury. There seemed little doubt about the cause of the first failure; if there had been any, the noise would have removed it.

  “I don’t think he was trying to steal,” Feth said mildly. “After all, you repeated the name of the stuff more than once. He probably thought you were offering it to him.”

  “I suppose you may be right.” Ken turned back to the microphone. “I’ll try to make clear that it’s market day, not a wedding feast.” He gave a chirruping whistle, then “Tofacco! tofacco! Gold—tofacco!” Feth shrivelled, internally. If he could only learn to keep his big diaphragm frozen—.

  “Tofacco! Gold—tofacco! I wonder whether that will mean anything to him?” Ken turned a little away from the microphone. “This may not be one of the creatures you’ve been trading with—after all, we’re not in the usual place.”

  “That’s not the principal question!” Feth’s tentacles coiled tightly around his torso, as though he were expecting a thunderbolt to strike somewhere in the neighborhood. The voice which had made the last statement was that of Laj Drai.

  VII.

  Roger Wing, at thirteen years of age, was far from stupid. He had very little doubt where his father and brother had been, and he found the fact of considerable interest. A few minutes’ talk with Edie gave him a fairly accurate idea of how long they had been gone; and within ten minutes of the time he and his mother returned from Clark Fork he had sharply modified his older ideas about the location of the “secret mine.” Hitherto, his father had always been away several days on his visits to it.

  “You know, Edie, that mine can’t be more than eight or ten miles from here, at the outside.” The two were feeding the horses, and Roger had made sure the younger children were occupied elsewhere. “I talked to Don for about two minutes, and I know darned well Dad was showing him the mine. I’m going to see it, too, before the summer’s out. I’ll take bets on it.”

  “Do you think you ought to? After all, if Dad wanted us to know, he’d tell us.”

  “I don’t care. I have a right to know anything I can find out. Besides, we can do a better job of scouting if we know the place we’re supposed to be protecting.”

  “Well—maybe.”

  “Besides, you know Dad sometimes sets things up just so we’ll find things out for ourselves. After it’s all over he just says that’s what we have brains for. Remember he never actually said we weren’t to go looking for the mine—he just said he’d tell us when the time came. How about that?”

  “Well—maybe. What are you going to do about it? If you try to follow Dad you’ll be picked up like a dime in a schoolroom.”

  “That’s what you think. Anyway, I’m not going to follow him. I’ll lead him. I’ll go out the first thing tomorrow morning and look for any traces they may have left. Then the next time they go, I’ll be waiting for them at the farthest trace I could find, and go on from there. That’ll work, for sure!”

  “Who does the patrolling?”

  “Oh, we both do, same as before. This won’t take long. Anyway, like I said, since I’ll be watching the trail they take, it’ll be even better than the regular patrol. Don’t you think?” Edie looked a little dubious as she latched the door of the feed bin.

  “You’ll probably get away with it, but I bet you’ll have to talk fast,” was her verdict as they headed for the house.

  Twenty-four hours later Roger was wondering whether any excuses would be needed at all. Things had not gone according to his sweepingly simple forecast.

  In the first place, he had not had time to check any trail his father and Don might have left; for the two started out at daybreak the next morning. They did not follow the previous day’s route, but the one Mr. Wing had always taken in years past—the admittedly zigzag path specifically designed to permit his scouts to take short cuts to warn him, in the event that anyone followed. Roger and Edith were given stations which were to be watched for one hour after the two men had passed; each was then to intercept the trail and make a report, whether or not anyone had been seen. Roger looked suspiciously at his sister for an instant when those orders were received, but decided she would never have told his plans. His father was simply one jump ahead, as usual.

  A good fraction of the morning had passed by the time he had made his report, and watched his father and brother disappear to the north. This was not the direction they had gone the day before, according to Edith; now the question was whether or not they had bothered to lay a false trail on that occasion, too. The only way to settle that appeared to be a straightforward search for traces. That was not too hopeless; as Roger had said while telling his father about the new patrol arrangements, there were places practically impossible to cross without leaving some sort of track, and the mere act of avoiding all those places would narrow down considerably the routes a person could take.

  In spite of this, the boy had decided by dinner time that either he knew less about tracking than he had supposed or else the two he sought had spent the day in the attic. Certainly he had found nothing to which he could point with confidence as being evidence of their passage.

  After the meal he had abandoned that line of research, and simply headed eastward. His sister had said they had taken this direction, and there was the remote chance that they might have abandoned precautions just that once. He travelled without pause for nearly half the afternoon, following what seemed to be natural trails, and finally stopped some eight miles from home.

  He found himself in a valley, its center marked as usual by a noisy brook. The hills on either side were high, though by no means as high as some of their neighbors—six to seven thousand feet was a common height in this part of the range. He had not been here before, either alone or with his father, but still felt he had a good idea of his location. His principal worry was the fact that he had as yet seen no sign of his father or brother.

  His intention was to work back toward the house from this point, zigzagging to cover as much territory as possible before dark. The first zig, he decided, should take him straight up the side of the hill to the south, thus crossing any possible trails cutting around this side of the mountain. After reaching the top, he could decide whether to go down the other side at once,
or head west a short distance before sweeping back to the north. As it turned out, he never had to make that decision.

  Roger Wing was not, of course, as competent a tracker as he liked to believe. As a matter of fact, he had crossed the trail he was so diligently seeking four times since leaving the house. His present location was at the foot of the hill bearing the open slope which the “miners” had crossed the day before, and within a mile of the Sarrian homing station. The course he now took uphill would have led him within a few rods of the transmitter.

  However, he didn’t get that far. Donald had been perfectly correct in concluding that no one could cross that slope of loose rock without leaving traces. Roger failed to recognize the marks left by the two on the way out, but he did find where his brother had forced his way through an unusually thick patch of brush at the top of the scree on the way back. It was carelessness on the older boy’s part, of course; his attention at the time had been mainly taken up with the search for tracks left by the possible followers, and he had paid no attention to those he himself was leaving. While the broken bushes gave Roger no clue to the traveller’s identity, they indicated his direction very clearly; and the boy promptly turned westward. Had he stopped to think, it would have occurred to him that a trail in this direction hardly jibed with the assumption that his father and brother were going straight to the “mine”; but he was not thinking at the moment. He was tracking, as he would have told anyone who might have asked.

  Once out of the patch of brush, the trail was neither more nor less obvious than it had been all along; but Roger was able to follow it. Probably the assurance that there was a trail to follow had something to do with that. He still did not know whether the traces had been left by his father, his brother, or both. He also failed to recognize the point where the two had come together after covering both sides of the scree. He simply went on, picking out the occasional scuff in the carpet of fir needles or snapped twigs where the bushes were thicker. He descended the west side of the hill, after following it around from the point where the first traces had appeared. He crossed the narrow valley on this side, leaping the inevitable brook with little difficulty. Here he found the only assurance that he was actually following two people, in the indentations where they had landed on the bank after a similar leap. The marks were just dents, for the needles did not retain any definite shoe patterns, but there were four of them. They were in two pairs, one of each deeper than its fellow, as though the jumper had taken the shock of landing principally on one foot.