Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

“It seems as though it should work, though,” he admitted grudgingly. “Just what sort of sledge are we supposed to build for this ocean liner of your friend’s? How big is it, again?”

  “The Bree is about forty feet long and fifteen across; I suppose it draws five or six inches. It’s made of a lot of rafts about three feet long and half as wide, roped together so they can move fairly freely—I can guess why, on this world.”

  “So can I. If a ship that long had its two ends supported by waves while the middle hung free, up near the pole, it would be in pieces before long whether it started that way or not. How is it driven?”

  “Sails; there are masts on twenty or thirty of the rafts. I suspect there may be centerboards on some of them too, retractable so the ship can be beached; but I never asked Barlennan. I don’t really know how far advanced the art of sailing is on this world, but from the casual way in which he speaks of crossing long stretches of open ocean, I assume they know about beating into a wind.”

  “Seems reasonable. Well, we’ll build something out of light metal here on the moon, and cart it down to you when we finish.”

  “You’d better not bring it down until winter’s over. If you leave it inland it’ll get lost under the snow and dust—I wish that volcano would stop; I like white snow—and if you drop it at the seashore someone may have to dive for it, if the water line goes up the way Barlennan expects.”

  “If it’s going to, why is it waiting so long? The winter is more than half over, and there’s been a fantastic amount of precipitation in the parts of the southern hemisphere that we can see.”

  “Why ask me things like that? There are meteorologists on the staff, I believe, unless they’ve gone crazy trying to study this planet. I have my own worries. When do I get another tank?”

  “When you can use it; after winter is over, as I said. And if you blow that one up it’ll be no use howling for another, because there isn’t one closer than Earth unless the Krueger expedition can spare one. I wouldn’t count on that. See you later.” Rosten ended the conversation in his usual abrupt manner.

  Barlennan, hearing the gist of this conversation at his next visit some hundreds of days later, was perfectly satisfied. His crew was enthusiastic about the proposed trip; they might, as he had implied, be lured by the prospective gain, but there was liberally distributed among them a share of the plain love of adventure which had carried Barlennan so far into unknown territory. The commander did not give them credit for it even in his own mind, but a little thought would have forced him to admit that no other type of person could have stayed with him for any length of time; and practically all the Bree’s present crew were veterans in Barlennan’s service.

  “We will go as soon as the storms break,” he said to Lackland. “There will still be much snow on the ground; that will help where the course lies over land different from the loose sand of the beach.”

  “I don’t think it will make much difference to the tank,” replied Lackland.

  “It will to us,” pointed out Barlennan. “I admit it would not be dangerous to be shaken off the deck, but it would be annoying in the middle of a meal. Have you decided what would be the best course to follow across the land?”

  “I’ve been working on it.” The man brought out the map that was the result of his efforts. “The shortest route, that we discovered together, has the disadvantage of requiring that I tow you over a mountain range. It might be possible, but I don’t like to think of the effects on your crew. I don’t know how high those mountains are, but any is too much on this world.

  “I’ve worked out this route, which I’ve shown by a red line. It follows up the river that empties into the big bay on this side of the point, for about twelve hundred miles—not counting the small curves in the river, which we probably won’t have to follow. Then it goes straight across country for another four hundred or so, and reaches the head of another river. You could probably sail down that if you wanted, or have me keep on towing—whichever would be faster or more comfortable for you. The whole thing is a good deal longer than that first one, but has the advantage of being possible as far as I can see from the pictures. Its worst feature is that so much of it runs three or four hundred miles south of the equator—another half gravity or more for me to take. I can handle it, though.”

  “If you are sure of that, I would say that this is indeed the best way.” Barlennan gave his statement after careful study of the map. “The ground must rise to some extent in the middle of the isthmus, or there would not be such a definite watershed; but as you say, there seem to be no indications of actual mountains. Your towing will probably be faster than sailing, at least in the river where there will probably be no room to tack.” He had to use his own language for the last word; Lackland received the explanation of its meaning with satisfaction. He had guessed correctly about the extent of nautical progress among Barlennan’s people it seemed.

  With the route agreed on, there was little more for Lackland to do while Mesklin drifted along its orbit toward the next equinox. That would not be too long, of course; with the southern hemisphere’s midwinter occurring almost exactly at the time the giant world was closest to its sun, orbital motion during fall and winter was extremely rapid. Each of those seasons was a shade over two Earthly months in length—spring and summer, on the other hand, each occupied some eight hundred and thirty Earth days, roughly twenty-six months. There should be plenty of time for the voyage itself.

  Lackland’s enforced idleness was not shared aboard the Bree, Preparations for the overland journey were numerous, and complicated by the fact that no member of the crew knew exactly what the ship would have to face. They might have to make the entire journey on stored food; there might be animal life along the way sufficient not only to feed them but to provide trading material if its skins and bones were of the right sort. The trip might be as safe as the sailors avowedly believed all land journeys to be, or they might face dangers from both the terrain and the creatures inhabiting it. About the first they could do little; that was the Flyer’s responsibility. Concerning the second, weapons were brought to a high degree of readiness. Bigger clubs than even Hars or Terblannen could swing up in the higher latitudes were manufactured; some of the plants which stored crystals of chlorine in their stems were found, and the flame tanks replenished from them. There were, of course, no projectile weapons; the idea had never developed on a world where none of the inhabitants had ever seen a solid, unsupported object because it fell too fast to be visible. A .50-caliber bullet fired horizontally at Mesklin’s pole would drop over one hundred feet in its first hundred yards of travel, and would have fallen considerably farther than it had gone horizontally before attaining a distance of half a mile from the muzzle.

  Barlennan, since meeting Lackland, had come to have some idea of the “throw” concept and had even considered asking the Flyer about the possibility of weapons based on the principle; but he had decided to stick to more familiar arms. Lackland, on his part, had done a little wondering about the possible results of meeting a race, on their trip across the isthmus, which had developed the bow and arrow. He did a little more than Barlennan with the thought; he outlined the situation to Rosten and asked that the towing tank be equipped with a 40-millimeter gun with thermite and explosive shells. After the usual grumbling Rosten had acquiesced; his objections were justified in a way, since the party had only one such weapon. However, the expedition was scientific rather than military and few of its members had cared whether the gun were brought along in the first place, so the possibility of its loss now was regarded with little anxiety on the whole.

  The sled was finished easily and quickly; large amounts of sheet metal were available, and the structure was certainly not complicated. Following Lackland’s advice it was not brought to the surface of Mesklin immediately, since the storms were still depositing their loads of ammonia-tainted methane snow and volcano dust. The ocean level had still not risen appreciably near the equator, and the meteorologist
s had been making unkind remarks at first about Barlennan’s truthfulness and linguistic ability; but as sunlight reached farther and farther into the southern hemisphere with the approach of spring, and new photographs were secured and compared with those of the preceding fall, the weather men grew silent and were observed wandering around the station muttering distractedly to themselves.

  The sea level in the higher latitudes had already risen several hundreds of feet, as the native had predicted, and was still rising visibly as the days went by. The phenomenon of widely differing sea levels at the same time on the same planet was a little outside the experience of Earth-trained meteorologists, and none of the non-human scientists with the expedition could throw any light on the matter, either. Lackland was no help at all when they appealed to him; Barlennan had not told him anything that seemed to offer an explanation, and Lackland himself was not particularly interested in the matter. He agreed casually to ask the native about it when the opportunity occurred, and promptly forgot the question. The weather men were still racking their brains when the sun’s diurnal arc eased southward past the equator and spring officially began in Mesklin’s southern hemisphere.

  The storms had decreased tremendously both in frequency and intensity long before this time, partly because the planet’s extreme flattening had cut down the radiation on the north polar cap very rapidly after midwinter and partly because Mesklin’s distance from the sun had increased more than fifty per cent during the same time; Barlennan, when consulted on the matter, proved perfectly willing to start the journey with the astronomical advent of spring, and showed no apparent anxiety about equinoctial gales.

  Lackland reported the natives’ readiness to the station on the inner moon, and the operation of transferring tank and sled to the surface was started at once; everything had been in readiness for weeks.

  Two trips of the cargo rocket were necessary, light as the sled was and fantastically high the thrust developed by the hydrogen-iron slugs. The sled was brought down first, with the intention of letting the crew of the Bree haul it onto the structure while the rocket went back for the tank; but Lackland warned against landing close to the ship, so that the clumsy looking vehicle was left beside the dome until the tractor arrived to tow it over to the shore. Lackland himself drove the tractor, although the crew of the rocket stood by to satisfy their curiosity and, if needed, lend assistance with the loading procedure.

  No human help was needed. The Mesklinites, under a mere three Earth gravities, were perfectly capable physically of lifting their ship and walking off with it; and the insuperable mental conditioning that prevented their getting any part of their bodies underneath such a mass did not prevent their towing it easily across the beach with ropes—each crewman, of course, anchored firmly to a tree with one or both sets of rear pincers. The Bree, sails furled and centerboards retracted, slid easily across the sand and onto the gleaming platform of metal. Barlennan’s winter-long vigilance to keep her from freezing to the beach had proved adequate; also, in the last couple of weeks, the ocean level had started to rise as it had already done farther south. The advancing liquid, which had already necessitated moving the vessel two hundred yards inland, would certainly have melted her free had that been necessary.

  The builders of the sledge, on distant Toorey, had provided eyes and cleats in sufficient numbers to allow the sailors to lash the Bree firmly in place. The cordage used appeared remarkably thin to Lackland, but the natives showed full confidence in it. They had some justice, the Earthman reflected; it had held their ship on the beach during storms when he himself would not have cared to walk abroad in full armor. After all, if the ropes were made of native plant fibers, they might well be remarkably strong; vegetable tissue might reasonably be expected to be as tough as that of the animal life on this planet. It might, he reflected, be worth while to find out if the cordage and fabric the Mesklinites used could stand Terrestrial temperatures.

  This train of thought was interrupted by Barlennan’s approach with the report that all was ready on the ship and sledge. The latter was already attached to the tank by its tow cable; the tank itself stocked with sufficient food to last its one-man crew for several days. The plan was to re-supply Lackland by rocket whenever necessary, landing far enough ahead so that the flying rocket would not cause too much perturbation to the natives on the ship. This was not to be done oftener than strictly necessary; after the first accident, Lackland did not intend to open the tank to the outer air oftener than he could possibly help. A good deal of work had been done on the moon to make the engine compartment of the vehicle more nearly airtight, but Lackland was perfectly aware that hydrogen is a remarkably penetrating substance. On the whole, the more tightly sealed the door of the tank was kept, the better it would be. Lackland could not live in armor the entire time, and if he were to light a cigarette after picking up food and too soon for the air circulators to have done their work the Bree would be stranded a long way from an ocean.

  “I guess we’re ready to go, then, little friend,” he said in response to Barlennan’s statement. “I won’t need sleep for a good many hours yet, and we can get quite a distance upstream in that time. I wish your days were of a decent length; I’m not too happy about driving over a snow field in the dark. I don’t think your crew could pull the tank out of a hole, even if they could find the traction.”

  “I rather doubt it myself, though my ability to judge weight is very uncertain here at the Rim,” the captain replied. “I doubt that the risk is very great, however; the snow isn’t sticky enough to do a good job of covering a large hole.”

  “Unless it drifted in to fill it completely. Well, I’ll worry about that if and when it happens. All aboard!” He entered the tank, sealed the door, pumped out the Mesklinite atmosphere and released the Earthly air that had been compressed into tanks before opening the door earlier. The small tank that held the algae whose job was to keep the air fresh glimmered as the circulators began driving bubbles through it. A tiny spectrometric “sniffer” reported the hydrogen content of the air to be negligible; once assured of this, Lackland started his main motors without further hesitation, and headed the tank and its unwieldy trailer into the east.

  The cove where the ship had spent the winter remained in sight only a short time; they passed its head very quickly. The river of which it was the widened mouth ran too far to the north for them to catch more than occasional glimpses, though Lackland’s map indicated that it would curve back enough to force them quite a distance to the south later on. He could have saved actual distance by angling that way from the beginning, but he did not want to go a single mile from the equator any sooner than he had to. He was going to have to experience more than another half gravity before the trip was over, but there was no hurry about that.

  The near flatness of the country around the cove changed gradually. In the forty days or so before Lackland had to stop for sleep, they had covered some fifty miles, and were in an area of rolling hills which reached heights of three or four hundred feet. No trouble had been encountered, either in pulling the sled or in riding it. Barlennan reported on his radio that the crew were enjoying the experience, and that the unusual idleness had not bothered anyone yet. The speed of the tank and its tow was about five miles an hour, which was a good deal faster than the usual Mesklinite crawl; but in the negligible—to them—gravity, some of the crew were going overside and experimenting with other methods of travel. None had actually jumped as yet, but it looked as though Barlennan might have companions before long who shared his newly acquired indifference to falls. He had given up trying to stop such experiments; if his men came to grief later through forgetting where they were, it would be their own fault.

  No animal life had been seen so far, but there had been occasional tiny tracks in the snow which apparently belonged to creatures similar to those the Bree’s crew had hunted for food during the winter. The plant life was distinctly different; in some places the snow was almost hidden by grasslike veg
etation that had grown up through it, and on one occasion the crew was held spellbound at the sight of a growth which to Lackland resembled a rather stumpy tree. The Mesklinites had never seen anything grow so far from the ground, and even the Earthman was a little surprised that it had held up under the winter’s storms. He would have liked to secure a specimen of its wood, but realized that if he started that sort of thing the trip would never be finished. He consoled himself with the thought that the sled would be coming back with him, and there would be no need for it to make the trip empty. He forgot for the moment that there would be no need for him to come back.

  While Lackland slept as comfortably as he could in his cramped quarters, the crew spread out over the surrounding country. They were at least partly motivated by a desire for fresh food, but salable cargo was the goal that really moved them. All were familiar with a wide variety of the plants which produced what Lackland had called spices, but none of these grew anywhere in the neighborhood. There were numerous growths bearing seeds, and nearly all had leaflike appendages of one sort or another and roots; the trouble was that there seemed no way of telling whether these were even safe to eat, to say nothing of being palatable. None of Barlennan’s sailors was rash or naive enough to take even a taste of a plant he had never seen; too much of Mesklin’s vegetable life protected itself with fearsome efficiency with poisons. The usual means of testing in such cases involved trusting to the senses of any of several small animals commonly used by the Mesklinites as pets; what a parsk or a ternee would eat was safe. Unfortunately, the only such animal aboard the Bree had not survived the winter—or rather, the equator; it had blown away in the gust of one of the winter storms when its owner failed to lash it down.

  The sailors did, indeed, bring numerous hopeful-looking specimens back to the ship; but none of them could offer a practical suggestion as to what to do with his find. Dondragmer alone made what might be termed a successful trip; more imaginative than his fellows, he had thought to look under objects, and had indeed turned over a great many stones. He had been a little uneasy at first, but his nervousness had finally worn off completely; and a genuine enthusiasm for the new sport had possessed him. There were lots of things to be found under even quite heavy stones, he discovered; and he presently returned to the ship carrying a number of objects which everyone agreed must be eggs.