Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  He had looked over Don’s figures, which were easy enough to follow, and agreed with his results; and the boy had, at his request, drawn a diagram of the orbits of inner planets of the Solar System showing the current positions of the planets themselves. This he now had in his pocket.

  The word “home” had just been under discussion, more or less as a result of chance. Mr. Wing had made the concept reasonably clear, he believed; and it seemed to him that the time had come to put one of his cards on the table.

  He began by waving an arm to encompass the whole horizon. “Earth,” he said. The Sarrian repeated the word, but without any gesture of his own suggesting that he understood. The man repeated the word, stamping on the ground as he did so; then he took a new page in the notebook and made a sketch of the planet as he thought it would appear from space. As a final illustration, he molded a sphere from a lump of modelling clay which had been found in the playroom and had already been put to good use. Then he pointed to the sphere, drawing, and the ground, repeating the word after each in turn.

  Ken understood. He proved it by scratching a picture of his own on the ground, reaching as far as he could over the side of the oven and using his strip of metal. It was a perfectly recognizable drawing of the sun and orbits of the first three planets. He knew he might be exceeding the local knowledge of astronomy, but the fact that the native seemed to know the shape of his world was encouraging.

  Mr. Wing promptly pulled out Don’s diagram, which was substantially the same as Ken’s except that Mars’ orbit and position were shown. He spent some minutes naming each of the planets, and making the generic name clear as well. Then they spent some more time in a sort of game; Ken added Jupiter and Saturn to the diagram, in an effort to find out how much astronomy the human being knew. Mr. Wing named those, and added Uranus, Neptune and Pluto; Don, who had made no contribution up to this point, made a correction in the orbit of Pluto so that it crossed that of Neptune at one point, and began adding satellites at a furious rate. They took the burst of Sarrian speech that erupted from the speaker as an indication of the alien’s surprise, and were gratified accordingly.

  Ken was surprised for more reasons than one.

  “Drai, if you’re listening, these folks are not any sort of savage. They must have a well-developed science. They seem to know of nine planets in this system, and we only knew about six; and there are an awful lot of moons one of them is busy telling me about right now—he’s even put two with Planet Four, and we didn’t notice any. They either have space travel or darned good telescopes.”

  “We haven’t seen a space ship here in twenty years,” Feth’s voice reminded him. Ken made no answer; Mr. Wing had started to talk again. He was pointing to Planet Three on his own diagram, and repeating the name he had given it.

  “Earth—my home.” He indicated himself with one hand to emphasize the personal pronoun. Then he moved the finger to the innermost world. “Mercury—your home.” And he pointed to Sallman Ken.

  He was a little disappointed in the reaction, but would not have been had he known how to interpret Sarrian facial expressions. The scientist was dumbfounded for fully ten seconds; when he did regain control of his voice, he addressed the distant listeners rather than the Earth man.

  “I’m sure that you will also be interested in knowing that he is aware we come from Planet One. I believe he thinks we live there, but the error is minor under the circumstances.” This time Drai’s voice responded.

  “You’re crazy! You must have told him yourself, you fool! How could he possibly have learned that without help?”

  “I did not tell him. You’ve been listening and ought to know. And I don’t see why I should be expected to explain how he found out; I’m just telling you what’s going on here at the moment.”

  “Well, don’t let him go on thinking that! Deny it! He knows too much!”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Ken asked, reasonably enough.

  “Suppose they do have space travel! We don’t want them dropping in on us! Why—I’ve been keeping this place a secret for twenty years.”

  Ken forbore to point out the flaws in that line of reasoning. He simply said:

  “Not knowing how certain they are of their facts, I think a denial would be foolish. If they are really sure, then they’d know I was lying; and the results might not be good.” Drai made no answer to that, and Ken turned back to the Earthman, who had been listening uncomprehendingly to the conversation.

  “Mercury. Yes,” the Sarrian said.

  “I see. Hot,” replied Mr. Wing.

  “No. Cold.” Ken paused, seeking words. “Little hot. Hot to you. Hot to—” he waved a sleeve of his armor in a wide circle—”plants, these things. Cold to me.”

  Don muttered to his father, “If he regards Mercury as too cold for comfort, he must come from the inside of a volcano somewhere. Most astronomers are satisfied that there’s no planet closer to the sun, and he didn’t show one on his diagram, you’ll notice.”

  “It would be nice if we knew just how hot he liked it,” agreed the older man. He was about to address Ken again in the hope of finding out something on this point when a burst of alien speech suddenly boomed from the torpedo’s speaker. Even to Ken, it carried only partial meaning.

  “Ken! This—” Just those two words, in Feth’s voice; then the transmission ceased with the click that accompanies a broken circuit. Ken called Feth’s name several times into his own microphone, but there was no response. He fell silent, and thought furiously.

  He suspected from the fact that the natives were simply looking at him that they realized something had gone wrong; but he did not want to worry about their feelings just then. He felt like a diver who had heard a fight start among the crew of his air-pump, and had little attention for anything else. What in the Galaxy were they about, up there? Had Drai decided to abandon him? No, even if the drug-runner had suddenly decided Ken was useless, he would not abandon a lot of expensive equipment just to get rid of him. For one thing, Ken suspected that Drai would prefer to see him die of drug hunger, though this may have been an injustice. What then? Had Drai become subtle, and cut off the transmitter above in the hope that Ken would betray himself in some way? Unlikely. If nothing else, Feth would almost certainly have warned him in some fashion, or at least not sounded so anxious in the words he had managed to transmit.

  Perhaps Drai’s distrust—natural enough under the circumstances—had reached a point where he had decided to check personally on the actions of his tame scientist. However, Ken could not imagine him trusting himself in armor on the surface of the Planet of Ice no matter what he wanted to find out.

  Still, there was another way of coming down personally. Lee would not like it, of course. He might even persuade his employer that it was far too dangerous. He would certainly try. Still, if Drai really had the idea in his mind, it was more than possible that he might simply refuse to listen to persuasion.

  In that case, the Karella’s shadow might fall across them at any moment. That would fit in with Feth’s attempt to warn him, and its abrupt interruption. If that were actually the case, he need not worry; his conscience was clear, and for all that was going on at the moment Drai was perfectly welcome to look on until his eyes froze to the ports. There had been no sign of tofacco anywhere, although the native children had been coming back at frequent intervals with new specimens for the boxes and had named them each time. He himself had not done a single thing in furtherance of his plan.

  He had just relaxed with this realization firmly in mind when the native who had been doing most of the talking produced and lighted a cigarette.

  Mr. Wing had had no intention of doing anything of the sort. He had a pretty good idea of the value placed by these creatures on tobacco, and he did not want to distract the scientist from what might prove a valuable line of talk. As a matter of fact, he would have been perfectly satisfied to have the creature assume that it was someone else entirely who did the trading. Habit, howev
er, defeated his good intentions; and he was only recalled from his speculations on the nature of this new interruption by the realization that he had taken the first puff.

  The Sarrian had both eyes fixed on the little cylinder—an unusual event in itself; usually one was roving in a way calculated to get on the nerves even of someone like young Roger. The reason seemed obvious; Mr. Wing could imagine the alien running mentally over the list of things he had brought with him, wondering what he could trade for the rest of the pack. He was closer to being right than he should have been.

  That line of thought, however, was profitless, and no one knew it better than Ken. The real problem of the moment was to get the infernal stuff out of sight before. Drai arrived—if he were coming. For a moment Ken wondered if the other radio, which he had seen lying on the porch when he arrived, could be put to use in time. Common sense assured him that it could not; even if he could persuade one of the natives to bring it and tow the torpedo but of earshot, he certainly could not make his wish clear in time. He would have to hope—the cylinder was vanishing slowly, and there was a chance that it might be gone before the ship arrived. If only he could be sure that the receiver as well as the transmitter aboard the space ship had been cut off!

  If Drai were still listening, the silence of the last few seconds would probably make him doubly suspicious. Well, there was nothing to be done about that.

  As it happened, there was plenty of time for the cigarette to burn out, thanks to Ordon Lee. Feth had tried to give his warning the instant he realized what Drai was thinking; and the other’s lashing tentacles had hurled him away from the board and across the control room before he could finish. When he had recovered and started to return, he had found himself staring into the muzzle of a pistol, its disc-shaped butt steadied against the drug-runner’s torso.

  “So the two of you are up to something,” Drai had said. “I’m not surprised. Lee, find the carrier of that torpedo and home down on it!”

  “But sir—into Three’s atmosphere? We can’t—”

  “We can, you soft-headed field-twister. The tame brain of mine stood it for three hours and more in a suit of engineering armor, and you want me to believe the hull of this ship can’t take it!”

  “But the ports—and the outer drive plates—and—”

  “I said get us down there! There are ports in a suit of armor, and the bottom plates stood everything that the soil of Planet Four could give them. And don’t talk about risk from the flatlanders! I know as well as you do that the hull of this barrel is coated even against frequency-modulated radar, to say nothing of the stuff these things have been beaming out—I paid for it, and it’s been getting us through the System patrol at Sarr for a long time. Now punch those keys!” Ordon Lee subsided, but he was quite evidently unhappy. He tuned in the compass with a slightly hopeful expression, which faded when he found that Ken’s torpedo was still emitting its carrier wave. Gloomily he applied a driving force along the indicated line, and the gibbous patch of light that was Planet Three began to swell beyond the ports.

  As the board flashed a warning of outside pressure, he brought the vessel to a halt and looked hopefully at his employer. Drai made a downward gesture with the gun muzzle. Lee shrugged in resigned fashion, switched on the heaters in the outer hull, and began feeling his way into the ocean of frigid gas, muttering in an undertone and putting on an I-told-you-so expression every time a clink told of contracting outer plates.

  Feth, knowing he would get no further chance at the radio, glued his attention to one of the ports. One of Drai’s eyes did likewise, but no change appeared in his expression as the evidence began to pile up that Ken had been telling the truth. Great mountains, hazy air, green vegetation, even the shiny patches so suggestive of the vast blue plains where the flatlanders had downed the exploring torpedoes; all were there, as the scientist had said, dimly illuminated by the feeble sun of this system but clearly visible for all that, Feth, heedless of the gun in Drai’s hand, suddenly leaped for the door, shouting, “Camera!” and disappeared down the corridor. Drai put the gun away.

  “Why can’t you be like those two?” he asked the pilot. “Just get them interested in something, and they forget that there’s anything in the universe to be afraid of.” The pilot made no immediate answer; apparently Drai expected none, for he strolled to the port without waiting. Then without looking up from his controls the pilot asked sourly:

  “If you think Ken is interested in his job and nothing else, why are you so anxious to check up on him all of a sudden?”

  “Mostly because I’m not quite sure whose job he’s doing. Tell me, Lee, just who would you say was to blame for the fact that this is the first time we’re landing on this world which we’ve known about for twenty years?”

  The pilot made no verbal answer, but one eye rolled back and met one of his employer’s for a moment. The question had evidently made him think of something other than frostbite and cracked plates: Laj Drai may not have been a genius, as he had been known to admit, but his rule-of-thumb psychology was of a high order.

  The Karella sank lower. Mountain tops were level with the port now; an apparently unbroken expanse of green lay below, but the compass pointed unhesitatingly into its midst. At five hundred feet separate trees were discernible, and the roof of the Wing home showed dimly through them. There was no sign of Ken or his torpedo, but neither being in the control room doubted for an instant that this was the house he had mentioned. Both had completely forgotten Feth.

  “Take us a few yards to one side, Lee. I want to be able to see from the side ports. I think I see Ken’s armor—yes. The ground slopes; land us uphill a little way. We can see for a fair distance between these plants.” The pilot obeyed silently. If he heard the shriek of Feth, echoing down the corridor from the room where the mechanic was still taking pictures, he gave no sign; the words were rendered indistinguishable by reverberation in any case. The meaning, however, became clear a moment later. The sound of the hull’s crushing its way through the treetops was inaudible inside; but the other token of arrival was quite perceptible. An abrupt cloud of smoke blotted out the view from port, and as Laj Drai started back in astonishment a tongue of flame licked upward around the curve of the great hull.

  XVIII.

  Feth was not the only one who called to the pilot to hold off. Ken, realizing only too clearly that the hull of the vessel would be nearly as hot as his own suit in spite of its superior insulation, expressed himself on the radio as he would never have done before his pupils; but of course no one on board was listening. Mr. Wing and Don, guessing the cause of his excitement, added their voices; Mrs. Wing, hearing the racket, appeared at a window in time to see the glossy black cylinder settle into the trees fifty yards above the house. No one was surprised at the results—no one outside the ship, at least.

  Don and his father raced at top speed for the stable, where the portable fire pumps were kept Mrs. Wing appeared on the porch, calling in a fairly well controlled voice, “Don, where are the children?” This question was partially answered before either man could make a response, as Margie and Billy broke from the woods on opposite sides of the clearing, still carrying plants which they had forgotten to drop in their excitement.

  “Daddy! See the fire!” The boy shrilled as soon as he saw his father.

  “I know, Billy. Both of you go with your mother, start the pump, and help her spray everything near the house. I don’t think the fire will come downhill with the wind the way it is, but we mustn’t take chances.”

  “Where are Roger and Edith?” Mrs. Wing asked the younger children.

  “They were going to get rocks for the fire-man,” Margie replied. “I don’t know where they were going to get them. They’ll come back when they see the fire.”

  “I suppose so.” Their mother was obviously unhappy about the matter, but she took the youngsters in tow and went after the hoses. Don and his father continued on their way, slung the always filled fire pumps across their
shoulders, and headed back uphill toward the ever-thickening cloud of smoke and flame.

  Ken had not waited for the human beings to go into action. Pausing only to make certain his armor was still firmly attached to the torpedo, he had seized the control spindle and shot straight upward. He was taking a chance, he realized; but with the relatively cold torpedo hull to smash the initial path through the thin overhanging branches he felt that he could avoid contact with any one of them except for periods too brief to set them ablaze. He succeeded, though a suspicion of smoke floated upward in his wake as he soared clear. The Karella, he noted, had done likewise; it now floated a quarter of a mile above the blaze it had started. He wasted no further time on recriminations, even though the chances seemed good that those on board would be listening again.

  The fire was not spreading as rapidly as he had feared it might in most directions. On the side toward the house it seemed to have made no progress at all, while along the contours of the mountain its advance was very slow. Upward, however, under the combined influence of its own convection currents and the breeze which had already been blowing in that direction, it was leaping from growth to growth in fine style. Ken saw flaming bits of vegetable tissue borne far aloft on the hot air pillar; some burned out in flight, others settled into the trees farther up the mountain and gave rise to other centers of combustion. A dark-colored growth, apparently dead, a few yards in advance of the main blaze, smoked briefly in the fierce radiation and suddenly exploded with an audible roar, burning out in less then fifteen seconds and crumbling into a rain of glowing coals. Ken, unmoved by the prospect of being involved in the uprushing hot gases, maneuvered closer to the blazed At least part of the reason for the slow advance downhill became evident; the two natives with whom he had been talking were visible through the trees, spraying everything in sight with apparently tiny streams of a liquid at whose nature Ken could only make an educated guess. He watched them for some time, noting that they refilled their containers of liquid every few minutes at a stream of the stuff flowing down near the housed which Ken had not noticed earlier. He wondered where the liquid could have its source, and decided to follow the stream uphill to find out.