Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “Well,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll be able to figure that one out. That’s what scientists are for, aren’t they?” It was Ken’s turn to look startled, though he had known Drai long enough by this time to have expected something of the sort.

  “Don’t you ever solve your own problems?” he asked, a trifle sourly. Drai nodded slowly.

  “Yes, sometimes. I like to think them over for quite a while, though, and if they’re scientific ones I don’t have the knowledge to think with. That’s why I hire people like you and Feth. Thanks for reminding me—I do have a problem at the moment, on which I have spent a good deal of thought. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll attend to the finishing touches. You can stay here and work on this one.”

  “There’s nothing more we can do on this planet for the present.”

  “That I can believe. We’ll head back for Planet One and the rest of your laboratory facilities. Come on, Lee— we’ll leave the scientist to his science.”

  Ken, unsuspicious by nature, did not even look up as the two left his room. He had just found ammonia on the list, and was wondering whether his measurement could have been far enough off to permit the true molecular weight to be only seventeen. Melting-point data finally reassured him. For safety’s sake, however, he went through all the hydrogen, lithium, beryllium, boron, nitrogen, and oxygen compounds that were listed in the handbook. The faint disturbance incident to the vessel’s takeoff did not bother him at all. The silent opening of his door made no impression on him, either.

  In fact, the door had closed again with a crisp snap before anything outside the printed pages registered on his consciousness. Then a voice, coincident with the closing door, suddenly shattered the silence.

  “Sallman Ken!” The mechanical speaker over the entrance boomed the words; the voice was that of Laj Drai. “I said when we parted a moment ago that I occasionally solve my own problems. Unfortunately, you have come to represent a problem. There seems to be only one solution which will not destroy your usefulness. In a way I regret to employ it, but you have really only your own unwarranted curiosity to thank. When you wake up, we will talk again—you can tell me what you think of our commercial product!” The voice ceased, with a click which indicated that the microphone had been switched off.

  Ken, fully aroused, had dropped the book and risen to his feet—or rather, left his rack and floated away from the floor, since they were in weightless flight. His eyes roved rapidly to all quarters of the room in search of something that might furnish meaning to Drai’s rather ominous words. Several seconds passed before he saw it—a rectangular yellow brick, floating in the air near the door. For a moment he did not recognize it, and pushed against a wall to bring himself nearer to it; then, as he felt the chill emanating from the thing, he tried futilely to check his drift.

  Already the brick was losing shape, its corners rounding with the heat and puffing off into vapor. It was frozen sulfur—harmless enough in itself if contact were avoided, but terrifying when considered with his background of knowledge and suspicion. With a frantic flailing of his tentacles, he managed to set up enough of an air current to cause the thing to drift out of his path; but an equally anxious look about the room for something which might serve as a gas mask disclosed nothing.

  He found himself unable to take his eyes from the dwindling object, now a rather elongated ellipsoid. It continued to shrink remorselessly, and suddenly there was something else visible in the yellow—the end of a small white cylinder. As the last of the protective box vanished, this began to turn brown and then black over its entire surface, and a spherical cloud of smoke enveloped it. For an instant a wild hope flashed in Ken’s mind; the thing had to burn, and a fire will not maintain itself in weightless flight. It requires a forced draft. Perhaps this one would smother itself out—but the cloud of smoke continued to swell. Apparently the thing had been impregnated with chips of frozen air in anticipation of this situation.

  Now the edges of the smoke cloud were becoming fuzzy and ill-defined as diffusion carried its particles through the room. Ken caught the first traces of a sweetish odor, and tried to hold his breath; but he was too late. The determination to make the effort was his last coherent thought.

  XII.

  “So they decided to keep you.” There might or might not have been a faint trace of sympathy in Feth Allmer’s tone. “I’m not very surprised. When Drai raised a dust storm with me for telling you how far away Sarr was, I knew you must have been doing some probing on your own. What are you, Commerce or Narcotics?” Ken made no answer.

  He was not feeling much like talking, as a matter of fact. He could remember just enough of his drug-induced slumber to realize things about himself which no conscientious being should be forced to consider. He had dreamed he was enjoying sights and pleasures whose recollection now gave him only disgust—and yet under the disgust was the hideous feeling that there had been pleasure, and there might be pleasure again. There is no real possibility of describing the sensations of a drug addict, either while he is under the influence of his narcotic or during the deadly craving just before the substance becomes a physical necessity; but at this moment, less than an hour after he had emerged from its influence, there may be some chance of his frame of mind being understandable. Feth certainly understood, but apparently chose not to dwell on that point.

  “It doesn’t matter now which you were, or whether the whole gang knows it,” he went on after waiting in vain for Ken’s answer. “It won’t worry anyone. They know you’re ours for good, regardless of what you may think at the moment. Wait until the craving comes on— you’ll see.”

  “How long will that be?” The point was of sufficient interest to Ken to overcome his lethargy.

  “Five to six days; it varies a little with the subject. Let me warn you now—don’t cross Laj Drai, ever. He really has the ship. If he keeps the tofacco from you for even half an hour after the craving comes on, you’ll never forget it. I still haven’t gotten over his believing that I told you where we were.” Again surprise caused Ken to speak.

  “You? Are you—?”

  “A sniffer? Yes. They got me years ago, just like you, when I began to get an idea of what this was all about. I didn’t know where this system was, but my job required me to get engineering supplies occasionally, and they didn’t want me talking.”

  “That was why you didn’t speak to me outside the observatory, just after we got back from the caves?”

  “You saw me come out of the office? I never knew you were there. Yes, that was the reason, all right.” Feth’s normally dour features grew even grimmer at the memory. Ken went back to his own gloomy thought, which gradually crystallized into a resolve. He hesitated for a time before deciding to mention it aloud, but was unable to see what harm could result.

  “Maybe you can’t get out from under this stuff—I don’t know; but I’ll certainly try.”

  “Of course you will. So did I.”

  “Well, even if I can’t Drai needn’t think I’m going to help him mass produce this hellish stuff. He can keep me under his power, but he can’t compel me to think.”

  “He could, if he knew you weren’t. Remember what I told you—not a single open act of rebellion is worth the effort. I don’t know that he actually enjoys holding out on a sniffer, but he certainly never hesitates if he thinks there’s need—and you’re guilty until proved innocent. If I were you, I’d go right on developing those caves.”

  “Maybe you would. At least, I’ll see to it that the caves never do him any good.”

  Feth was silent for a moment. If he felt any anger at the implication in Ken’s statement, his voice did not betray it, however.

  “That, of course, is the way to do it. I am rather surprised that you have attached no importance to the fact that Drai has made no progress exploring Planet Three for the seventeen years I have been with him.”

  For nearly a minute Ken stared at the mechanic, while his mental picture of the older being underwent a gr
adual but complete readjustment.

  “No,” he said at last, “I never thought of that at all. I should have, too—I did think that some of the obstacles to investigation of the planet seemed rather odd. You mean you engineered the television tube failures, and all such things?”

  “The tubes, yes. That was easy enough—just make sure there were strains in the glass before the torpedo took off.”

  “But you weren’t here when the original torpedoes were lost, were you?”

  “No, that was natural enough. The radar impulses we pick up are real, too; I don’t know whether this idea of a hostile race living on the blue plains of Planet Three is true or not, but there seems to be some justification for the theory. I’ve been tempted once or twice to put the wrong thickness of anti-radar coating on a torpedo so that they’d know we were getting in—but then I remember that that might stop the supply of tofacco entirely. Wait a few days before you think too hardly of me for that.” Ken nodded slowly in understanding, then looked up suddenly as another idea struck him.

  “Say, then the failure of that suit we sent to Three was not natural?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Feth smiled a trifle. “I overtightened the packing seals at knees, hips and handler joints while you were looking on. They contracted enough to let air out, I imagine—I haven’t seen the suit, remember. I didn’t want you walking around on that planet—you could do too much for this gang in an awfully short time, I imagine.”

  “But surely that doesn’t matter now? Can’t we find an excuse for repeating the test?”

  “Why? I thought you weren’t going to help.”

  “I’m not, but there’s an awfully big step between getting a first hand look at the planet and taking living specimens of tofacco away from it. If you sent a person to make one landing on Sarr, what would be the chance of his landing within sight of a Gree bush? or, if he did, of your finding it out against his wish?”

  “The first point isn’t so good; this tofacco might be all over the place like Mekko—the difficulty would be to miss a patch of it. Your second consideration, however, now has weight.” He really smiled, for the first time since Ken had known him. “I see you are a scientist after all. No narcotics agent would care in the least about the planet, under the circumstances. Well, I expect the experiment can be repeated more successfully, though I wouldn’t make the dive myself for anything I can think of.”

  “I’ll bet you would—for one thing,” Ken replied. Feth’s smile disappeared.

  “Yes—just one,” he agreed soberly. “But I see no chance of that. It would take a competent medical researcher years, even on Sarr with all his facilities. What hope would we have here?”

  “I don’t know, but neither of us is senile,” retorted Ken. “It’ll be a few years yet before I give up hope. Let’s look at that suit you fixed, and the one I wore on Four. They may tell us something of what we’ll have to guard against.” This was the first Feth had heard of the sortie on Mars, and he said so. Ken told of his experience in detail, while the mechanic listened carefully.

  “In other words,” he said at the end of the tale, “there was no trouble until you actually touched this stuff you have decided was hydrogen oxide. That means it’s either, a terrifically good conductor, has an enormous specific heat, a large heat of vaporization, or two or three of those in combination. Right?” Ken admitted, with some surprise, that that was right. He had not summed up the matter so concisely in his own mind. Feth went on: “There is at the moment no way of telling whether there is much of that stuff on Three, but the chances are there is at least some. It follows that the principal danger on that planet seems to be encountering deposits of this chemical. I am quite certain that I can insulate a suit so that you will not suffer excessive heat loss by conduction or convection in atmospheric gases, whatever they are.”

  Ken did not voice his growing suspicion that Feth had been more than a mechanic in his time. He kept to the vein of the conversation.

  “That seems right. I’ve seen the stuff, and it’s certainly easy to recognize, so there should be no difficulty in avoiding it.”

  “You’ve seen the solid form, which sublimed in a near vacuum. Three has a respectable atmospheric pressure, and there may be a liquid phase of the compound. If you see any pools of any sort of liquid whatever, I would advise keeping clear of them.”

  “Sound enough—only, if the planet is anything like Sarr, there isn’t a chance in a thousand of landing near open liquid.”

  “Our troubles seem to spring mostly from the fact that this planet isn’t anything like Sarr,” Feth pointed out dryly. Ken was forced to admit the justice of this statement, and stored away the rapidly growing stock of information about his companion. Enough of Feth’s former reserve had disappeared to make him seem a completely changed person.

  The suits were brought into the shop and gone over with extreme care. The one used on Planet Four appeared to have suffered no damage, and they spent most of the time on the other. The examination this time was much more minute than the one Ken had given it on board the Karella, and one or two new discoveries resulted. Besides the bluish deposit Ken had noted on the metal, which he was now able to show contained oxides, there was a looser encrustation in several more protected spots which gave a definite potassium spectrum—one of the few that Ken could readily recognize—and also a distinct odor of carbon bisulfide when heated. That, to the chemist, was completely inexplicable. He was familiar with gaseous compounds of both elements, but was utterly unable to imagine how there could have been precipitated from them anything capable of remaining solid at “normal” temperature.

  Naturally, he was unfamiliar with the makeup of earthly planets, and had not seen the fire whose remains had so puzzled Roger Wing. Even the best imaginations have their limits when data are lacking.

  The joints had, as Feth expected, shrunk at the seals, and traces of oxides could be found in the insulation. Apparently some native atmosphere had gotten into the suit, either by diffusion or by outside pressure after the sulfur had frozen.

  “Do you think that is likely to happen with the packing properly tightened?” Ken asked, when this point had been checked.

  “Not unless the internal heaters fail from some other cause, and in that case you won’t care anyway. The over-tightening cut down the fluid circulation in the temperature equalizing shell, so that at first severe local cooling could take place without causing a sufficiently rapid reaction in the main heaters. The local coils weren’t up to the job, and once the fluid had frozen at the joints of course the rest was only a matter of seconds. I suppose we might use something with a lower freezing point than zinc as an equalizing fluid—potassium or sodium would be best from that point of view, but they’re nasty liquids to handle from chemical considerations. Tin or bismuth are all right that way, but their specific heats are much lower than that of zinc. I suspect the best compromise would be selenium.”

  “I see you’ve spent a good deal of time thinking this out. What would be wrong with a low specific heat liquid?”

  “It would have to be circulated much faster, and I don’t know whether the pumps would handle it—both those metals are a good deal denser than zinc, too. Selenium is still pretty bad in specific heat, but its lower density will help the pumps. The only trouble is getting it. Well, it was just a thought—the zinc should stay liquid if nothing special goes wrong. We can try it on the next test, anyway.”

  “Have you thought about how you are going to justify this next trial, when Drai asks how come?”

  “Not in detail. He won’t ask. He likes to boast that he doesn’t know any science—then he gloats about hiring brains when he needs them. We’ll simply say that we have found a way around the cause of the first failure—which is certainly true enough.”

  “Could we sneak a televisor down on the next test, so we could see what goes on?”

  “I don’t see how we could conceal it—any signal we can receive down here can be picked up as well
or better in the observatory. I suppose we might say that you had an idea in that line too, and we were testing it out.”

  “We could—only perhaps it would be better to separate ideas a little. It wouldn’t help if Drai began to think you were a fool. People too often connect fools and knaves in figures of speech, and it would be a pity to have him thinking along those lines.”

  “Thanks—I was hoping you’d keep that point in mind. It doesn’t matter much anyway—I don’t see why we can’t take the Karella out near Three and make the tests from there. That would take only a matter of minutes, and you could make the dive right away if things went well. I know it will be several days before the ship will be wanted—more likely several weeks. They get eight or ten loads of tofacco from the planet during the ‘season’ and several days elapse between each load. Since all the trading is done by torpedo, Lee has a nice idle time of it.”

  “That will be better. I still don’t much like free fall, but a few hours of that will certainly be better than days of waiting. Go ahead and put it up to Drai. One other thing—let’s bring more than one suit this time. I was a little worried for a while, there, out on Four.”

  “A good point. I’ll check three suits, and then call Drai.” Conversation lapsed, and for the next few hours a remarkable amount of constructive work was accomplished. The three units of armor received an honest preservice check this time, and Feth was no slacker. Pumps, valves, tanks, joints, heating coils—everything was tested, separately and in all combinations.

  “A real outfit would spray them with liquid mercury as a final trick,” Feth said as he stepped back from the last suit, “but we don’t have it, and we don’t have any place to try it, and it wouldn’t check as cold as these are going to have to take anyway. I’ll see what Drai has to say about using the ship—we certainly can’t run three torpedoes at once, and I’d like to be sure all these suits are serviceable before any one of them is worn on Three.” He was putting away his tools as he spoke. That accomplished, he half turned toward the communicator, then appeared to think better of it.