by Hal Clement
Up the side of the next hill the boy went. It was darker now under the trees, for the sun was already concealed by the peak ahead of him; and presently he began to wonder whether he were really on the right trail. He stopped, looking about, and saw first to one side and then the other marks of the sort he had been following. He could not, he found, convince himself that those ahead of him were the right ones.
He tried to go on, then hesitated again. Then he began to backtrack—and reached the brook many yards from the spot at which he had jumped it. He spent some minutes searching for the marks, and when he had found them realized that he had not even followed his own back trail with any accuracy.
He should, of course, have headed for home right then. Equally, of course, he did nothing of the sort. While the gloom on the mountain’s eastward face grew ever deeper, he cast about for tracks. Every few minutes he found something, and spent long seconds over it before deciding to make sure—and then he always found something else. Gradually he worked his way up the mountain side, finally reaching open rock; and after deep thought, he moved around to the other side where it was lighter, and resumed his search. After all, the men had been heading westward.
He had crossed another valley—this time its central watercourse was dry, and there was no sign of anyone’s jumping over—and was near the top of the unusually low hill on its farther side when he finally realized the time. He had been searching with a single-mindedness which had prevented even hunger from forcing itself on his attention. The sheer impossibility of seeing details on the shadowed ground was all that finally compelled him to consider other matters. He had no flashlight, as he had not contemplated remaining out this late. Worse, he had neither food, water, nor a blanket. The first two were serious omissions, or would be if his father heard of his venturing any distance into the woods without them.
It was quite suddenly borne in upon Roger Wing, as he saw the first stars glimmering in the deepening blue between the tree tops, that he was not another Daniel Boone or Kit Carson. He was a thirteen year old boy whose carelessness had gotten him into a situation that was certainly going to be uncomfortable and might even be serious.
Though rash, Roger was not stupid. His first action upon realizing the situation was not a wild break for home. Instead he sensibly stood where he was and proceeded to plan a course of action.
He was certainly going to be cold that night. There was no help for that, though a shelter of fir branches would make some difference. Also, there was no food, or at least none that he would be able to find in the dark. Water, however, should be findable; and, after all, it was the greatest necessity. Remembering that the valley he had just crossed lacked a stream, the boy started on again over the low top in front of him and began to pick his way down the other side. He was forced to rely almost entirely on touch before he reached the bottom, for the lingering twilight made little impression on the gloom beneath the firs. He found a brook, as he had hoped, partly by sound and partly by almost falling over the bank.
He did have a knife, and with this he cut enough fir branches to make a bed near the stream, and to lean against a fallen log beside it as a crude roof—he knew that anything at all to break air circulation immediately over his body would be a help. He then drank, loosened his belt, and crawled under the rude shelter. All things considered, he was not too long in going to sleep.
He was a healthy youngster, and the night was not particularly cold. He slept soundly enough so that the crackling and crashing of branches in the forest roof failed to awaken him, and even the louder crunching as Ken’s torpedo settled through the underbrush forty yards away only caused him to mutter sleepily and turn over.
But he was awakened at last, by the stimulus which sends any forest resident into furious activity. The cargo door of the torpedo faced the boy’s shelter. The light from burning sodium and glowing gold and iron did not disturb him—perhaps they only gave him bad dreams, or perhaps he was facing the other way at the time. The blazing radiance of the burning magnesium, however, blasted directly onto his closed eyelids, and enough of it got through to ring an alarm. He was on his feet yelling “Fire,” before he was fully awake.
He had seen the aftermath of more than one forest fire—there had been a seventy-five hundred acre blaze the summer before north of Bonner’s Ferry, and a smaller but much closer one near Troy. He knew what such a catastrophe meant for life in its path, and for several seconds was completely panic-stricken. He even made a leap away from the direction of the radiance, and was brought to his senses by the shock of falling over the tree trunk beside which he had been sleeping.
Coming to his feet more slowly, he realized that the light was not the flickering, ruddy glow of wood flames, that there was none of the crackling roar he had heard described more than once, and that there was no smell of smoke. He had never seen magnesium burn, but the mere fact that this was not an ordinary forest fire allowed his curiosity to come once more into the foreground.
The light was sufficient to permit him to clear the little stream without difficulty, and in a matter of seconds he had crashed through the underbrush to its source, calling as he went, “Hello! Who’s that? What’s that light?”
The booming grumble of Sallman Ken’s answer startled him out of his wits. The drumlike speaking diaphragm on the Sarrian torso can be made to imitate most human speech sounds, but there is a distortion that is readily apparent to any human ear; and the attempt to imitate his words in those weird tones sent prickling chills down the boy’s spine. The fact that he could recognize his own words in the booming utterance made it, if anything, rather worse.
He stopped two yards from the torpedo, wondering. The blue-white glare from the rectangular opening had died away abruptly as he approached, and had been replaced by a fading yellow-white glow as the crucible which had contained the magnesium slowly cooled. He could just see into the door. The chamber beyond seemed to occupy most of the interior of that end of the structure, as nearly as he could tell from his inadequate view of the outside, and its floor was covered with roughly cylindrical objects a trifle larger than his fist. One of these was the source of the white-hot glow, and at least two others still radiated a dull red. He had noticed only this much when Ken began to go through his precious-metals list.
Roger knew, of course, what platinum and iridium were, even when the former suffered from the peculiarities of the Sarrian vocal apparatus; but like many other human beings, it was the mention of gold that really excited him. He repeated the word instantly.
“Gold!”
“Gold.” The booming voice from the torpedo responded, and Roger found the courage to approach the still radiant doorway, and look in. As he had guessed, the little cylindrical crucibles were everywhere. The chamber was covered with white dust, the oxides of titanium and magnesium which had sprayed from the containers during the energetic reactions which had produced them. Tiny yellowish globules of sodium peroxide were spread almost as widely. A noticeable wave of heat could still be felt coming from the chamber along with a faint sulfurous smell, but when Roger laid a cautious hand in the dust of its floor the temperature proved to be bearable. He saw almost instantly what he supposed the hidden speaker had been talking about—the gold which had already solidified in its small container. The light was bright enough for him to recognize it, particularly since there was nothing else of even approximately the same color in the chamber.
The box acted instantly, but with more forethought than might have been expected. A dead branch which he picked up as he approached was put to use—the door of the compartment reminded him too much of a trap, and he propped it open. Then he made a grab for the pot of gold.
He did not see the wires which connected its heater to the power source of the torpedo. After touching the crucible, he did not even look for them, though they were the only reason he did not succeed in getting the container out. He had time for one good tug before the fact that the metal had only recently been melted made itself felt.<
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Roger, his face almost inside the compartment, yelled even more whole-heartedly then he had before, released the crucible, delivered a furious kick on the hull of the torpedo, and danced about, holding his scorched hand and hurling abuse at the unseen beings who had been responsible for the injury. He did not notice the stick which he had used as a prop suddenly snap as the door started to close, or the thud as the portal jammed against the fragments of wood. The sudden cutting off of nearly all the light, however, did catch his attention, and he saw what had happened when the door opened again. Without quite knowing why he did so, he swept the pieces out of the way with his uninjured hand, and a moment later he was left in darkness as the door closed completely. He had an uneasy idea that he was being watched.
Again the voice boomed out. He recognized the word “gold” again, but the syllables which alternated with it were too much distorted for him to understand. He had, after all, no tobacco on his person, and there certainly was none in the torpedo, so that there was nothing to bring the substance to mind. He made no attempt to imitate the alien-sounding word, and after a moment the utterance ceased.
It was replaced by fainter sounds, which somehow did not seem to be directed at him, although they had the complexity of speech. Roger would not, of course, have analyzed them in just that way, but he got the distinct impression that they represented a conversation he could not understand.
This lasted for what seemed to the boy a long time; then the earlier refrain broke out again. “Gold—tofacco—gold—tofacco!” Eventually it got on even Roger’s nerves, and he yelled at the dark hulk.
“I don’t know what you’re saying, darn you! I’m darned if I’ll touch your gold again, and I don’t know what the other words are. Shut up!” He kicked the hull again, to emphasize his feelings, and was rather startled when the voice fell silent. He backed away a little farther, wondering what this presaged. It was well he did.
An instant later, without preliminary sound, the dark shape of the torpedo lunged upward, crashed through the overhanging branches, and vanished into the black sky with a whistle of protesting air. For minutes the boy stood where he was, gazing up through the gap smashed in the limbs; but nothing rewarded his efforts except the stars.
Roger Wing got very little sleep that night, and the fact that he got his feet wet finding his shelter was only partly responsible.
VIII.
“No, that’s not the principal question.” Laj Drai repeated the statement rather thoughtfully, as he glided into the shop and absently closed the door behind him.
“Sir, I—” Feth got no farther with his expostulation.
“Oh, don’t let me interrupt. Go right ahead, Ken—you have a problem on your hands, I see. Get it out of the way, and we’ll tackle the other afterwards. There’ll be no interruptions then.”
Rather puzzled, for he had completely forgotten Drai’s threat, Ken turned back to his microphone and resumed the apparently endless chant. While he did not understand the words with which Roger finally interrupted, the thing had gone on long enough so that he shared the boy’s impatience to some extent. Also, the clank as Roger kicked the torpedo was at least suggestive.
It was Drai who drove the projectile into the air, an instant later. He had never heard those words, either; but they were different enough from the usual human conversation to start him shivering. The thought of strained or severed relations with Planet Three was one he could not face—and this being was definitely excited and more than probably angry. That blow on the hull of the torpedo—
Drai’s tentacle whipped past Sallman Ken at the thought, and the main power and drive director switches closed as one. The investigator swivelled around on the control rack, and eyed his employer curiously.
“You seem almost as excited as the native. What’s the matter?” Laj drew a deep breath, and finally got his voice under control. He was just beginning to realize that his dramatic entry had not been the wisest of moves. It was perfectly possible that his hired expert had learned the name of Earth’s product quite innocently; and if that were the case he would be ill-advised to attach too much weight to the incident—publicly, at least. He shifted ground, therefore, as smoothly as he could.
“Your chemical analysis seems to have encountered complications.”
“It would seem so. Apparently your natives are not quite so completely diurnal as you gave me to understand.” Ken was not intentionally defending his actions, but he could have found no better answer. Laj Drai paused momentarily.
“Yes, that is a point that surprises me a little. For twenty years they have never signalled except during their daytime. I wonder if the flatlanders had anything to do with it? I can’t imagine what or how, though. Did you finish your tests?”
“Enough, I guess. We’ll have to bring the torpedo back here, so I can find out just what that atmosphere did to my samples. Some of them burned, we already know, but I’d like to know what was produced.”
“Of course it couldn’t be sulfides. That’s what one thinks of as the natural product of combustion.”
“Not unless frozen sulfur dust is suspended in the atmosphere in tremendous quantities. I hadn’t thought of that, though—I’ll check for it when the samples come back. Actually, I’m a little bothered by the results so far. I couldn’t think of anything gaseous at that temperature which would support combustion, and something definitely does.”
“How about fluorine?” Laj was digging in the dim memories of an elementary science course.
“Maybe—but how come it exists free in the atmosphere? I should think it would be too active, even at that temperature. Of course, I suppose the same would be true of anything which would support combustion, so we’ll simply have to wait until the samples are back. You know, I’m almost at the point where I’d be willing to risk a landing there, to see what the place is like.” Drai shrugged expressively.
“If you and Feth can figure out a way of doing it, I won’t stop you. We might even see our way to offering a bonus. Well, it’ll be nearly three days before your stuff is back here, and there won’t be much to do in the meantime. Feth will cut it in on the beam when it’s far enough from Three.”
Ken took this as a hint to leave, and drifted aimlessly out into the corridors. He had some thinking of his own to do. As Drai had said, nothing could be done about Planet Three until the return of the torpedo, and he had no excuse for not considering Rade’s problem for a while.
The product was called “tofacco.” That, at least, was information. Rade had had no name for the narcotic he sought, so the information was of questionable value so far.
This planetary system was relatively close to Sarr. Another fact. The precautions taken by Drai and his people to conceal that fact might or might not be considered reasonable for a near-legal commercial enterprise, but were certainly natural for anything as blatantly criminal as drug-running.
Planet Three was cold—to put it feebly—and the drug in question could not stand normal temperatures. That was a link of rather uncertain strength, reinforced slightly by Drai’s tacit admission that “tofacco” was a vegetable product.
Think as he would, he could recall no other information which could be of the slightest use to Rade. Ken was mildly annoyed at the narcotics chief anyway for involving him in such a matter, and was certainly more willing than a professional policeman would have been to go back to the purely astronomical and ecological problem that was facing him.
How about his pesky Planet Three? Certainly it was inhabited—a fantastic enough fact in itself. Certainly it was not well known; no vision transmitter and no manned ship had ever gotten through its atmosphere. That seemed a little queer, now that Ken considered the matter again. Granted the fearful cold, and the fact that an atmosphere would conduct heat away as space could not, he still found it hard to believe that a competent engineer could not design apparatus capable of the descent. Feth was supposed to be a mechanic rather than an engineer, of course; but still it seemed
very much as though the organization were singularly lacking in scientific resource. The very fact that Ken himself had been hired made that fact even more evident.
Perhaps he was not so far from Rade’s problem after all. Certainly any regular interstellar trading organization could and always did have its own ecological staff—no such concern could last without one, considering the rather weird situations apt to arise when, for example, metal-rich Sarr traded with the amphibious chemistry wizards of Rehagh. Yet he, Sallman Ken, a general science dabbler, was all that Laj Drai could get! It was not strange; it was unbelievable. He wondered how Drai had made the fact seem reasonable even for a moment.
Well, if he found out nothing they would probably not bother him. He could and would investigate Planet Three as completely as he could, go home, and turn his information over to Rade—let the narcotics man do what he wanted with it. Planet Three was more interesting.
How to land on the blasted planet? He could see keeping large ships out of its atmosphere, after the trouble with the natives of the flat, bluish areas. Still, torpedoes had been running the gauntlet without loss for twenty years, and the only detectable flatlander activity had been radar beams in the last two or three. Those were easily fooled by quarter wave coatings, as Drai had said. No, the only real objections were the frightful natural conditions of the world.
