Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Lackland had a number of instruments in a mesh pouch on the outside of his armor, and while he was fumbling among them with his pressure gauntlets Barlennan proceeded to take the first sample. Four sets of pincers shredded a portion of skin and underlying tissue and passed it along to his mouth; for a few moments he chewed reflectively.

  “Not at all bad,” he remarked at last. “If you don’t need all of this thing for your tests, it might be a good idea to call the hunting parties over here. They’d have time to make it before the storm gets going again, I should think, and there’ll certainly be more meat than they could reasonably expect to get any other way.”

  “Good idea,” Lackland grunted. He was giving only part of his attention to his companion; most of it was being taken up by the problem of getting the point of a scalpel into the mass before him. Even the suggestion that he might be able to use the entire monstrous body in a laboratory investigation—the Mesklinite did possess a sense of humor—failed to distract him.

  He had known, of course, that living tissue on this planet must be extremely tough. Small as Barlennan and his people were, they would have been flattened into senseless pulp under Mesklin’s polar gravity had their flesh been of mere Earthly consistency. He had expected some difficulty in getting an instrument through the monster’s skin; but he had more or less unthinkingly assumed that, once through, his troubles would be over in that respect. He was now discovering his error; the meat inside seemed to have the consistency of teak. The scalpel was of a superhard alloy which would have been difficult to dull against anything as long as mere muscular strength was employed, but he could not drive it through that mass and finally had to resort to scraping. This produced a few shreds which he sealed in a collecting bottle.

  “Is any part of this thing likely to be softer?” he asked the interested Mesklinite as he looked up from this task. “I’m going to need power tools to get enough out of this body to satisfy the boys on Toorey.”

  “Some parts inside the mouth might be a little more tractable,” Barlennan replied. “However, it would be easier for me to nip off pieces for you, if you’ll tell me the sizes and parts you want. Will that be all right, or do your scientific procedures demand that the samples be removed with metal instruments for some reason?”

  “Not that I know of—thanks a lot; if the bio boys don’t like it they can come down and do their own carving,” returned Lackland. “Go right ahead. Let’s follow your other suggestion, too and get something from the mouth; I’m not really sure I’m through skin here.” He waddled painfully around the head of the stranded behemoth to a point where gravity-distorted lips had exposed teeth, gums, and what was presumably a tongue. “Just get bits small enough to go in these bottles without crowding.” The Earthman tentatively tried the scalpel once more, finding the tongue somewhat less obdurate than the earlier sample, while Barlennan obediently nipped off fragments of the desired size. An occasional piece found its way to his mouth—he was not really hungry, but this was fresh meat—but in spite of this drain the bottles were soon filled.

  Lackland straightened up, stowing the last of the containers as he did so, and cast a covetous glance at the pillarlike teeth. “I suppose it would take blasting gelatine to get one of those out,” he remarked rather sadly.

  “What is that?” asked Barlennan.

  “An explosive—a substance that changes into gas very suddenly, producing loud noise and shock. We use such material for digging, removing undesirable buildings or pieces of landscape, and sometimes in fighting.”

  “Was that sound an explosive?” Barlennan asked.

  For an instant Lackland made no answer. A boom! of very respectable intensity, heard on a planet whose natives are ignorant of explosives and where no other member of the human race is present can be rather disconcerting, especially when it picks such an incredibly apt time to happen; and to say that Lackland was startled would be putting it mildly. He could not judge accurately the distance or size of the explosion, having heard it through Barlennan’s radio and his own sound disks at the same time; but a distinctly unpleasant suspicion entered his mind after a second or two.

  “It sounded very much like one,” he answered the Mesklinite’s question somewhat belatedly, even as he started to waddle back around the head of the dead sea monster to where he had left the tank. He rather dreaded what he would find. Barlennan, more curious than ever, followed by his more natural method of travel, crawling.

  For an instant, as the tank came in sight, Lackland felt an overwhelming relief; but this changed to an equally profound shock as he reached the door of the vehicle. The floor inside had, for practical purposes, ceased to exist.

  What remained of it consisted of upcurled scraps of thin metal, some still attached at the bases of the walls and others tangled among the controls and other interior fittings. The driving machinery which had been under the floor was almost completely exposed, and a single glance was enough to tell the dismayed Earthman that it was hopelessly wrecked. Barlennan was intensely interested in the whole phenomenon.

  “I take it you were carrying some explosive in your tank,” he remarked. “Why did you not use it to get the material you wanted from this animal? And what made it act while it was still in the tank?”

  “You have a genius for asking difficult questions,” Lackland replied. “The answer to your first one is that I was not carrying any; and to the second, your guess is as good as mine at this point.”

  “But it must have been something you were carrying,” Barlennan pointed out, quite reasonably. “Even I can see that whatever it was happened under the floor of your tank, and wanted to get out; and we don’t have things that act like that on Mesklin.”

  “Admitting your logic, there was nothing under that floor that I can imagine blowing up,” replied the man. “Electric motors and their accumulators just aren’t explosive. That region is not normally used for stowage, so it hardly seems likely that whoever used the tank last could have left anything there by mistake. A close examination will undoubtedly show traces of whatever it was if it was in any sort of container, since practically none of the fragments seem to have gone outside the tank—but I have a rather worse problem to solve first, Barl.”

  “What is that?”

  “I am eighteen miles from food supplies, other than what is carried in my armor. The tank is ruined; and if there was ever an Earthman born who could walk eighteen miles in eight-atmosphere heated armor under three gravities, I’m certainly not the one. My air will last indefinitely with these Alga gills and enough sunlight, but I’d starve to death before I made the station.”

  “Can’t you call your friends on the faster moon, and have them send a rocket to carry you back?”

  “I could; or more probably they already know, if anyone is in the radio room to hear this conversation. The trouble is if I have to get that sort of help Doc Rosten will certainly make me go back to Toorey for the winter; I had trouble enough as it was persuading him to let me stay. He’ll have to hear about the tank, but I want to tell him from the station—after getting back there without his help. There just isn’t energy around here to get me back though; and even if I could get more food into the containers in this armor without letting your air in, you couldn’t get into the station to get the food.”

  “Let’s call my crew, anyway,” Barlennan remarked. “They can use the food that’s here—or as much of it as they can carry. I have another idea, too, I think.”

  “We are coming, captain.” Dondragmer’s voice came from the radio, startling Lackland, who had forgotten his arrangement to let each radio hear the others, and startling the commander himself, who had not realized that his mate had learned so much English. “We will be with you in a few days at most; we took the same general direction as the Flyer’s machine when we started.” He gave this information in his native language; Barlennan translated for Lackland’s benefit.

  “I can see that you won’t be hungry for quite a while,” the man replie
d, glancing somewhat ruefully at the mountain of meat beside them, “but what was this other idea of yours? Will it help with my problem?

  “A little, I think.” The Mesklinite would have smiled had his mouth been sufficiently flexible. “Will you please step on me?”

  For several seconds Lackland stood rigid with astonishment at the request; after all, Barlennan looked more like a caterpillar than anything else, and when a man steps on a caterpillar—then he relaxed, and even grinned.

  “All right, Barl. For a moment I’d forgotten the circumstances.” The Mesklinite had crawled over to his feet during the pause; and without further hesitation Lackland took the requested step. There proved to be only one difficulty.

  Lackland had a mass of about one hundred sixty pounds. His armor, an engineering miracle in its own way, was about as much more. On Mesklin’s equator, then, man and armor weighed approximately nine hundred fifty pounds—he could not have moved a step without an ingenious servo device in the legs—and this weight was only about a quarter greater than that of Barlennan in the polar regions of his planet. There was no difficulty for the Mesklinite in supporting that much weight; what defeated the attempt was simple geometry. Barlennan was, in general, a cylinder a foot and a half long and two inches in diameter; and it proved a physical impossibility for the armored Earthman to balance on him even when he stood still. Any attempt on the tiny being’s part to walk with his top-heavy load would be even more certain to send it toppling, a risk which Lackland had no intention of taking under triple gravity.

  The Mesklinite was stumped; this time it was Lackland who thought of a solution. Some of the side plates on the lower part of the tank had been sprung by the blast inside; and under Lackland’s direction Barlennan, with considerable effort, was able to wrench one completely free. It was about two feet wide and six long, and with one end bent up slightly by the native’s powerful nippers, it made an admirable sled. Lackland was able to stand on it with ease, and pointed out how much more meat the crew could take back to the Bree if they made a number of the devices. That was while Barlennan was nipping a control cable out of the wrecked tank—its oxygen had long since dissipated, of course—to serve as a towline. A few moments later the Earthman stopped talking, rather suddenly.

  Barlennan, on this part of his planet, weighed about three pounds. He simply did not have the necessary traction to tow the device—and the nearest plant which might have served as an anchor was a quarter of a mile away. Lackland was glad that a red face had no particular meaning to the natives of this world, for the sun happened to be in the sky when this particular fiasco occurred. They had been working both day and night, since the smaller sun and the two moons had furnished ample light in the absence of the storm clouds.

  Temporarily, after a long pause during which neither had any more ideas, Lackland forgot his worries while he stayed his hunger with food from his armor; but he could not really ignore the fact that there was very little more of this supply. He did not eat all he really wanted.

  V.

  The crew’s arrival, days later, put an end to the inactivity. It also solved Lackland’s problem almost at once.

  The mere number of natives, of course, was of little help; twenty-one Mesklinites still did not have traction enough to move the loaded sled. Barlennan thought of having them carry it, placing a crew member under each corner; and he went to considerable trouble to overcome the normal Mesklinite conditioning against getting under a massive object. When he finally succeeded in this, however, the effort proved futile; the metal plate was not thick enough for that sort of treatment, and buckled under the armored man’s weight so that all but the supported corner was still in contact with the ground.

  Dondragmer, with no particular comment, spent the time that this test consumed in paying out and attaching together the lines which were normally used with the hunting nets. They proved, in series, more than long enough to reach the nearest plants; and the roots of these growths, normally able to hold against the worst that Mesklin’s winds could offer, furnished all the support needed. Four days later a train of sledges, made from all the accessible plates of the tank, started back toward the Bree with Lackland and a tremendous load of meat aboard; and at a fairly steady rate of a mile an hour, reached the ship in sixty-one days. Two more days of work, with more crew members assisting, got Lackland’s armor through the vegetation growing between the ship and his dome, and delivered him safely at the air lock. It was none too soon; the wind had already picked up to a point where the assisting crew had to use ground lines a good deal of the time in getting back to the Bree, and clouds were once again whipping across the sky.

  Lackland ate, before bothering to report officially what had happened to the tank. He wished he could make the report more complete; he felt somehow that he should know what had actually happened to the vehicle. It was going to be very difficult to accuse someone on Toorey of inadvertently leaving a cake of gelatin under the tank’s floor, and he had as great a dislike as anyone for being laughed at.

  He had actually pressed the call button on the station-to-satellite set when the answer struck him; and when Dr. Rosten’s lined face appeared on the screen he knew just what to say.

  “Doc, there’s a spot of trouble with the tank.”

  “So I understand. Is it electrical or mechanical? Serious?”

  “Basically mechanical, though the electrical system had a share. I’m afraid it’s a total loss; what’s left of it is stranded about eighteen miles from here, west, near the beach.”

  “Very nice. This planet is costing a good deal of money one way and another. Just what happened—and how did you get back? I know you’ve been down there long enough to be in pretty sharp muscular condition, but I don’t think you could walk eighteen miles in armor under that gravity.”

  “I didn’t—Barlennan and his crew towed me back. As nearly as I can figure out about the tank, the floor partition between cockpit and engine compartment wasn’t air-tight. When I got out to do some investigating, Mesklin’s atmosphere—high-pressure hydrogen—‘began leaking in and mixing with the normal air under the floor. It did the same in the cockpit, too, of course, but practically all the oxygen was swept out through the door from there and diluted below danger point before anything happened. Underneath—well, there was a spark before the oxygen went.”

  “I see. What caused the spark? Did you leave motors running when you went out?”

  “Certainly—the steering servos, dynamotors, and so on. I’m glad of it, too; if I hadn’t, the blast would probably have occurred after I got back in and turned them on.”

  The director of the Recovery Force looked a trifle disgruntled. “Did you have to get out at all?” Lackland thanked his stars that Rosten was a biochemist.

  “I didn’t exactly have to, I suppose. I was getting tissue samples from a six hundred foot whale stranded on the beach out there. I thought someone might—”

  “Did you bring them back?” snapped Rosten without letting Lackland finish.

  “I did. Come down for them when you like—and have we another tank you could bring along?”

  “We have. I’ll consider letting you have it when winter is over; I think you’ll be safer inside the dome until then. What did you preserve the specimens with?”

  “Nothing special—hydrogen—the local air. I supposed that any of our regular preservatives would ruin them from your point of view. You’d better come for them fairly soon; Barlennan says that meat turns poisonous after a few hundred days, so I take it they have microorganisms here.”

  “Be funny if they hadn’t. Stand by; I’ll be down there in a couple of hours.” Rosten broke the connection without further comment about the wrecked tank, for which Lackland felt reasonably thankful. He went to bed, not having slept for nearly twenty-four hours.

  He was awakened—partially—by the arrival of the rocket. Rosten had come down in person, which was not surprising. He did not even get out of his armor; he took the bottles, which L
ackland had left in the air lock to minimize the chance of oxygen contamination, took a look at Lackland, realized his condition, and brusquely ordered him back to bed.

  “This stuff was probably worth the tank,” he said briefly. “Now get some sleep. You have some more problems to solve—I’ll talk to you again when there’s a chance you’ll remember what I say. I hope none of your native friends were near the dome; we landed pretty close. See you later.” The airlock door closed behind him.

  Lackland, startled awake for the moment, almost leaped to his local radio; but he was asleep again almost before reaching his water-filled “bunk” after receiving Barlennan’s assurance that all the crew were aboard the Bree. The Earthman was too tired even to feel guilty for not having warned the natives of the rocket’s approach.

  He did not, actually, remember Rosten’s parting remarks; but he was reminded, many hours later, when he had slept and eaten once more.

  “This winter, when Barlennan can’t hope to travel, will last only another three and a half months,” the assistant director started almost without preamble. “We have several reams of telephotos up here which are not actually fitted into a map, although they’ve been collated as far as general location is concerned. We couldn’t make a real map because of interpretation difficulties. Your job for the rest of this winter will be to get in a huddle with those photos and your friend Barlennan, turn them into a usable map, and decide on a route which will take him most quickly to the material we want to salvage.”

  “But Barlennan doesn’t want to get there quickly. This is an exploring-trading voyage as far as he’s concerned, and we’re just an incident. All we’ve been able to offer him in return for that much help is a running sequence of weather reports, to help in his normal business.”