Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  They had plenty of supplies, of course; Barlennan was no fool himself, and did his best to employ none. Still, fresh food was nice. He wondered how long this particular storm would keep them penned in; that was something the signs did not tell, clearly as they heralded the approach of the disturbance. Perhaps the Flyer knew that. In any case, there was nothing further to be done about the ship; he might as well talk to the strange creature. Barlennan still felt a faint thrill of unbelief whenever he looked at the device the Flyer had given him, and never tired of assuring himself once more of its powers.

  It lay, under a small shelter flap of its own, on the poop raft beside him. It was an apparently solid block three inches long and about half as high and wide. A transparent, slightly bulging spot in the otherwise black surface of one square end looked like an eye, and apparently functioned as one. The only other feature was a small, round hole in one of the long faces. The block was lying with this face upward, and the “eye” end projecting slightly from under the shelter flap. The flap itself opened downwind, of course, so that its fabric was now plastered tightly against the flat upper surface of the machine.

  Barlennan worked an arm under the flap, groped around until he found the hole, and inserted his pincer. There was no moving part, such as a switch or button, inside, but that did not bother him—he had never encountered such devices any more than he had met thermal, photonic, or capacity-activated relays. He knew from experience that the fact of putting anything opaque into that hole was somehow made known to the Flyer, and he knew that there was no point whatever in his attempting to figure out how it was done. It would be, he sometimes reflected ruefully, something like teaching navigation to a ten-day-old child. The intelligence might be there—it was comforting to think so, anyway—but some years of background experience were lacking.

  “Charles Lackland here.” The machine spoke abruptly, cutting the train of thought. “That you, Barl?”

  “This is Barlennan, Charles.” The commander spoke the Flyer’s language, in which he was gradually becoming proficient.

  “Good to hear from you. Were we right about this little breeze?”

  “It came at the time you predicted. Just a moment . . . yes, there is snow with it. I had not noticed. I see no dust as yet, however.”

  “It will come. That volcano must have fed ten cubic miles of it into the air, and it’s been spreading for days.” Barlennan made no direct reply to this. The volcano in question was still a point of contention between them, since it was located in a part of Mesklin which, according to Barlennan’s geographical background, did not exist.

  “What I really wondered about, Charles, was how long this blow was going to last. I understand your people can see it from above, and should know how big it is.”

  “Are you in trouble already? The winter’s just starting—you have thousands of days before you can get out of here.”

  “I realize that. We have plenty of food, as far as quantity goes. However, we’d like something fresh occasionally, and it would be nice to know in advance when we can send out a hunting party or two.”

  “I see. I’m afraid it will take some rather careful timing. I was not here last winter, but I understand that during that season the storms in this area are practically continuous. Have you ever been actually to the equator before?”

  “To the what?”

  “To the . . . I guess it’s what you mean when you talk of the Rim. That makes sense, at least.”

  “No, I have never been this close, and don’t see how anyone could get much closer. It seems to me that if we went much farther out to sea we’d lose every last bit of our weight and go flying off into nowhere.”

  “If it’s any comfort to you, you are wrong. If you kept going, your weight would start up again. You are on the equator right now—the place where weight is least. That is why I am here. I begin to see why you don’t want to believe there is land very much farther, north. I thought it might be language trouble when we talked of it before, but I begin to get a different idea. Perhaps you have time enough to describe to me now your ideas concerning the shape and nature of the world? Or perhaps you have maps?”

  “We have a Bowl here on the poop raft, of course. I’m afraid you wouldn’t be able to see it now, since the sun has just set and Esstes doesn’t give light enough to help through these storm clouds. When the sun rises I’ll show it to you. My flat maps wouldn’t be much good, since none of them covers enough territory to give a really good picture.”

  “Good enough. While we’re waiting for sunrise could you give me some sort of verbal idea, though? I must admit I’m curious.”

  “I’m not sure I know your language well enough yet, but I’ll try.

  “I was taught in school that Mesklin is a big, hollow bowl. The part where most people live is near the bottom, where there is decent weight. The philosophers have an idea that weight is caused by the pull of a big, flat plate that Mesklin is sitting on; the farther out we go toward the Rim, the less we weigh, since we’re farther from the plate. What the plate is sitting on no one knows; you hear a lot of queer beliefs on that subject from some of the less civilized races.”

  “I should think if your philosophers were right you’d be climbing uphill whenever you traveled away from the center, and all the oceans would run to the lowest point,” interjected Lackland. “Have you ever asked one of your philosophers that?”

  “When I was a youngster I saw a picture of the whole thing. The teacher’s diagram showed a lot of lines coming up from the plate and bending in to meet right over the middle of Mesklin. They came through the bowl straight rather than slantwise because of the curve; and the teacher said weight operated along the lines instead of straight down toward the plate,” returned the commander. “I didn’t understand it fully, but it seemed to work. They said the theory was proved because the surveyed distances on maps agreed with what they ought to be according to the theory. That I can understand, and it seems a good point. If the shape weren’t what they thought it was, the distances would certainly go haywire before you got very far from your standard point.”

  “Quite right. I see your philosophers are quite well into geometry. What I don’t see is why they haven’t realized that there are two shapes that would make the distances come out right. After all, can’t you see that the surface of Mesklin curves downward? If your theory were true, the horizon—the point on the sea that is farthest from you and still visible—would seem to be above you. How about that?”

  “Oh, it is. That’s why even the most primitive tribes know the world is bowl-shaped. It’s just out here near the Rim that it looks different. I expect it’s something to do with the light. After all, the sun rises and sets here even in summer, and it wouldn’t be surprising if things looked a little queer. Why, it even looks as though the . . . horizon, you called it? . . . was closer to north and south than it is east and west when you’re out this way. You can see a ship much farther away to the east or west. It’s the light.”

  “Hm-m-m. I find your point a little difficult to answer at the moment.” Barlennan was not sufficiently familiar with the Flyer’s speech to detect such a thing as a note of amusement in his voice. “I have never been on the surface far from the. er, Rim—and never can be, personally. I didn’t realize that things looked as you describe, and I can’t see why they should, at the moment. I hope to see it when you take that radio-vision set on our little errand.”

  “I shall be delighted to hear your explanation of why our philosophers are wrong,” Barlennan answered politely. “When you are prepared to give it, of course.” Lackland did not know all the sarcasm-inflections of the commanders native tongue either, which was just as well, as some of them had crept into his English at that point. “In the meantime, I am still somewhat curious as to whether you might be able to tell me when there will be a break in this storm.”

  “It will take a few minutes to get a report from the station on Toorey. Suppose I call you back about sunrise. I can giv
e you the weather forecast, and there’ll be light enough for you to show me your Bowl. All right?”

  “That will be excellent. I will wait.”

  Barlennan crouched where he was beside the radio while the storm shrieked on around him. The pellets of methane that splattered against his armored back failed to bother him—they hit a lot harder in the high latitudes. Occasionally he stirred to push away the fine drift of ammonia that kept accumulating on the raft, but even that was only a minor annoyance—at least, so far. Toward midwinter, in five or six thousand days, the stuff would be melting in full sunlight, and rather shortly thereafter would be freezing again. The main idea was to get the liquid away from the vessel or vice versa before the second freeze, or Barlennan’s crew would be chipping a couple of hundred rafts clear of the beach. The Bree was no river boat, but a full-sized ocean-going ship.

  The commander had little time to consider this point, which had been settled long since in any case. It took the Flyer only the promised few minutes to get the required information, and his voice sounded once more from the tiny speaker as the clouds over the bay lightened with the rising sun.

  “I’m afraid I was right, Barl. There is no letup in sight. Practically the whole northern hemisphere—which doesn’t mean a thing to you—is boiling off its ice cap, and you’re getting the results. I don’t know how thick the cap is, but I understand the storms in general last all winter. The fact that they come separately in the higher southern latitudes is because they get broken up into separate, very small cells by Coriolis deflection as they get away from the equator.”

  “By what?”

  “By the same force that makes any projectile you throw swerve so noticeably to the left—at least, while I’ve never seen it under your conditions, it would practically have to on this planet.”

  “What is Throw’?”

  “My gosh, we haven’t used that word, have we? Well, I’ve seen you jump . . . no, by gosh, I haven’t either! . . . when you were up visiting at my shelter. Do you remember that word?”

  “No.”

  “Well, ‘throw’ is when you take some other object—pick it up—and push it hard away from you so that it travels some distance before striking the ground!”

  “We don’t do that up in reasonable countries. There are lots of things we can do here which are either impossible or very dangerous there. If I were to ‘throw’ something at home, it might very well land on someone—probably me.”

  “Come to think of it, that might be bad. Three G’s here at the equator is bad enough, and Mack figured you must have nearly seven hundred at the poles. Still, if you could find something small enough so that your muscles could throw it, why couldn’t you catch it again, or at least resist its impact?”

  “I find the situation hard to picture, but I think I know the answer. There isn’t time. If something is let go—thrown or not—it hits the ground before anything can be done about it. Picking up and carrying is one thing; crawling is one thing; throwing and jumping are entirely different matters.”

  “I see . . . I guess. We sort of took for granted that you’d have a reaction time commensurate with your gravity, but I can see that’s just man-centered thinking. You’d have to have, in order to live as we do under those circumstances; but of course there’s no real reason to suppose that you’d live as we do. I guess I get it.”

  “What I could understand of your talk sounded reasonable. It is certainly evident that we are different; we will probably never fully realize just how different. At least we are enough alike to talk together—and make what I hope will be a mutually profitable agreement.”

  “I am sure it will be. Incidentally, in furtherance of it you will have to give me an idea of the places you want to go, and I will have to point out on your maps the place where I want you to go. Could we look at that Bowl of yours now? There is light enough for this vision set.”

  “Certainly. The Bowl is set in the deck and cannot be moved; I will have to move the machine so that you can see it. Wait a moment.”

  Barlennan inched across the raft to a spot that was covered by a smaller flap, clinging to deck cleats as he went. He pulled back and stowed the flap, exposing a clear spot on the deck; then he returned, made four lines fast about the radio, secured them to strategically placed cleats, removed the radio’s cover and began to work it across the deck. It weighed more than he did by quite a margin, though its linear dimensions were smaller, but he was taking no chances of having it blown away. The storm had not eased in the least, and the deck itself was quivering occasionally. With the eye end of the set almost to the Bowl, he propped the other end up at an angle with spars so that the Flyer could look downward. Then he himself moved to the other side of the Bowl so that he could also be seen, and began his exposition.

  Lackland had to admit that the map which the Bowl contained was logically constructed and, as far as it went, accurate. Its curvature matched that of the planet quite closely, as he had expected—the major error being that it was concave, in conformity with the natives’ ideas about the shape of their world. It was about six inches across and roughly one and a quarter deep at the center. The whole map was protected by a transparent cover—probably of ice, Lackland guessed— set flush with the deck. This interfered somewhat with Barlennan’s attempts to point out details, but could not have been removed without letting the Bowl fill with ammonia snow in moments. The stuff was piling up wherever it found shelter from the wind; in irregularities on the decks, in the spaces between the rafts which made up the Bree, and in the lee of the ship itself. The beach was staying relatively clear, but both Lackland and Barlennan could imagine what was happening on the other side of the hills that paralleled it on the south. The latter was secretly glad he was a sailor. Land travel in this region would not be fun for some thousands of days.

  “I have tried to keep my charts up to date,” he said as he settled down opposite the Flyer’s proxy. “I haven’t attempted to make any changes in the Bowl, though, because the new regions we mapped on the way up were not extensive enough to show. There is actually little I can show you in detail, but you wanted a general idea of where I planned to go when we could get out of here.

  “Well, actually I don’t care greatly. I can buy and sell anywhere, and at the moment I have little aboard but food. I won’t have much of that by the time winter is over, either; so I had planned, since our talk, to cruise for a time around the low-weight areas and pick up plant products which can be obtained here—materials that are valued, sometimes very highly, by the people farther south because of their effect on the taste of food.”

  “Spices?”

  “If that is the word for such products, yes. I have carried them before, and rather like them—you can get good profit from a single shipload, as with most commodities whose value depends less on their actual usefulness than on their rarity.”

  “Your people are more like mine than I would have believed,” remarked Lackland. “I take it, then, that once you have loaded here, you don’t particularly care where you go?”

  “That is right. I understand that your errand will carry us close to the Center, which is fine—the farther south we go, the higher the prices I can get; and the extra length of the journey should not be much more dangerous, since you will be helping us as you agreed.”

  “Right. That is excellent—though I wish we had been able to find something we could give you in actual payment, so that you would not feel the need to take time in spice-gathering.”

  “Well, we have to eat. You say your bodies, and hence your foods, are made of very different substances from ours, so we can’t use your foodstuffs. Frankly, I can’t think of any desirable raw metal or similar material that I couldn’t get far more easily in any quantity I wanted. My favorite idea is still that we get some of your machines, but you say that they would have to be built anew to function under our conditions. It seems that the agreement we reached is the best that is possible, under those circumstances.”


  “True enough. Even this radio was built specifically for this job, and you could not repair it . . . your people, unless I am greatly mistaken, don’t have the tools. However, during the journey we can talk of this again; and perhaps the things we learn of each other will open up other and better possibilities.”

  “I am sure they will,” Barlennan answered politely.

  He did not, of course, mention the possibility that his own plans might succeed. The Flyer would hardly have approved.

  II.

  The Flyer’s forecast was sound; some four hundred days passed before the storm let up noticeably. Five times during that period the Flyer spoke to Barlennan on the radio, always opening with a brief weather forecast and continuing a more general conversation for a day or two each time. Barlennan had noticed earlier, when he had been learning the strange creature’s language and paying personal visits to its outpost in the “Hill” near the bay, that it seemed to have a strangely regular life cycle; he found he could count on finding the Flyer sleeping or eating at quite predictable times, which seemed to have a cycle of about eighty days.

  Barlennan was no philosopher—he had at least his share of the common tendency to regard them as impractical dreamers—and he simply shrugged this fact off as something pertaining to a particularly weird but admittedly interesting creature. There was nothing in the Mesklinite background that would enable him to deduce the existence of a world that took some eighty times as long as his own to rotate on its axis. The very idea of the world’s rotation was another bit of philosophy he had picked up in school—it was another theory put forth to explain why the oceans didn’t all collect at the center of the Bowl—but Barlennan was not convinced. Mesklin was a pretty big place to be spinning like a top, he felt, and the Bree had carried him over more of it than most philosophers had ever seen.