Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “Yes, I know. It occurred to me that instead of taking much time to reverse the machine after it was wound up tightly, however, I could unfasten the buckle and rethread it.”

  “That would work, provided you were not lifting a load that had to be supported in the meantime,” replied the Earthman. “Good for you, Don.” The crew immediately headed for the original group of stakes, but Barlennan called to them to wait, “There aren’t so many blocking the canal we were digging, Don, did the Flyer say how long it would take to pull them out with that contraption?”

  “He wasn’t sure, since he didn’t know how deeply they were buried or how fast we could operate it; but he guessed at a day or so each—faster than we could cut through them.”

  “But not so fast that we wouldn’t gain time by having some of us finish that canal while you take as many men as you need to pull the stakes in it. Incidentally, did he have any name for the thing?”

  “He called it a differential hoist. The second word is plain enough, but I don’t see how to translate the first—it’s just a noise to me.”

  “Me, too. Differential it is. Let’s get to work; your watch to the hoist, and mine to the canal.” The crew buckled down with a will.

  The canal was finished first, since it quickly became evident that most of the crew would be free to dig; two sailors, taking turns on the hoist at intervals of a few minutes, proved enough to start the spear shafts sliding very slowly out of the hard ground. To Barlennan’s satisfaction the heads came with them, so that he had eight very effective looking spears when the operation was completed. His people did little work in stone, and the quartz heads were extremely valuable in his estimation.

  Once through the barrier, the distance to the lake was relatively short; and there they stopped to reassemble the Bree in her natural form. This was quickly accomplished—indeed, the crew might now be considered expert at the task—and once more the ship floated in relatively deep water. The Earthmen above heaved a collective sigh of relief. This proved to be premature.

  The gliders had been passing back and forth throughout the journey from the trading site. If their crews had been at all surprised at the method used to extract the spears, no evidence had appeared of the fact. Barlennan, of course, hoped they had seen and added the information to the list of his own people’s superior accomplishments. He was not too surprised to see a dozen gliders on the beach near the mouth of the fiord, and ordered the helmsman to turn the ship ashore at that point. Perhaps at least the islanders would notice that he had recovered the spears intact.

  Reejaaren was the first to greet them as the Bree anchored a few yards offshore. “So your ship is seaworthy again, eh? I’d try to meet any more storms a long way from land, if I were you.”

  “Right,” Barlennan agreed. “The difficulty in a sea you don’t know is being sure where you stand in that respect. Perhaps you would tell us the disposition of lands in this sea? Or would you, perhaps, have charts you could provide us with? I should have thought to ask before.”

  “Our charts of these islands, of course, are secret,” the interpreter replied. “You should be out of the group in forty or fifty days, however, and then there is no land for some thousands of days’ sail to the south. I do not know your ship’s speed, so I cannot guess just when you are likely to make it. Such lands as there are are mostly islands at first; then the coast of the land you crossed turns east, and if you keep straight south you will encounter it at about—” he gave an expression which referred to a spring balance reading, and corresponded to about forty-five Earth gravities of latitude. “I could tell you about many of the countries along that coast, but it would take a long time. I can sum it up by saying that they will probably trade rather than fight—though some will undoubtedly do their best not to pay for what they get”

  “Will any of them assume we are spies?” Barlennan asked pleasantly.

  “There is that risk, naturally, though few have secrets worth stealing. Actually they will probably try to steal yours, if they know you have any. I should not advise your discussing the matter of flying while there.”

  “We did not plan to,” Barlennan assured him, with glee that he managed to conceal. “We thank you for the advice and information.” He gave the order to hoist the anchor, and for the first tune Reejaaren noticed the canoe, now trailing once more at the end of its towrope and loaded with food.

  “I should have noticed that before,” the interpreter said. “Then I would never have doubted your story of coming from the south. How did you get that from the natives?” In the answer to this question Barlennan made his first serious mistake in dealing with the islander.

  “Oh, we brought that with us; we frequently use them for carrying extra supplies. You will notice that its shape makes it easy to tow.” He had picked up his elementary notions of streamlining from Lackland not too long after acquiring the canoe.

  “Oh, you developed that craft in your country, too?” the interpreter asked curiously. “That is interesting; I had never seen one in the south. May I examine it, or do you not have time? We have never bothered to use them ourselves.”

  Barlennan hesitated, suspecting this last statement to be a maneuver of the precise sort he himself had been employing; but he saw no harm in complying, since Reejaaren could learn nothing more from a close examination than he could from where he was. After all, it was the canoe’s shape that was important, and anyone could see that. He allowed the Bree to drift closer inshore, pulled the canoe to him with the towrope, and gave it a push toward the waiting islander.

  Reejaaren plunged into the bay and swam out to the little vessel when it ran aground, in a few inches of liquid. The front part of his body arched upward to look into the canoe; powerful pincer-tipped arms poked at the sides. These were of ordinary wood, and yielded springily to the pressure; and as they did so the islander gave a hoot of alarm that brought the four gliders in the air swinging toward the Bree and the shore forces up to full alertness.

  “Spies!” he shrieked. “Bring your ship aground at once, Barlennan—if that is your real name. You are a good liar, but you have lied yourself into prison this time!”

  XIV.

  Barlennan had been told at various times during his formative years that he was some day pretty sure to talk himself into more trouble than he could talk himself out of. At various later times during his career this prediction had come alarmingly close to fulfillment, and each time he had resolved to be more careful in future with his tongue. He felt the same way now, together with an injured feeling arising from the fact that he did not yet know just what he had said that had betrayed his mendacity to the islander. He did not have time to theorize over it, either; something in the line of action was called for, the quicker the better.

  Reejaaren had already howled orders to the glider crews to pin the Bree to the bottom if she made a move toward the open sea, and the catapults on shore were launching more of the machines to reinforce those already aloft. The wind was coming from the sea at a sufficient angle to be lifted as it struck the far wall of the fiord so the fliers could remain aloft as long as necessary. Barlennan had learned from the. Earth men that they probably could not climb very high—high enough for effective missile dropping—under the thrust of the updrafts from ocean waves; but he was a long way from the open sea where they would have to depend on such currents. He had already had a chance to observe their accuracy, and dismissed at once any idea of trusting to his dodging ability to save his ship.

  As so frequently happened, the action was performed by a crew member while he was debating the best course. Dondragmer snatched up the crossbow that had been given them by Reejaaren, nocked a bolt, and cocked the weapon with a speed that showed he could not have been completely absorbed in his hoist project at all times. Swinging the weapon shoreward he rested it on its single support leg and covered the interpreter with the point.

  “Hold on, Reejaaren; you’re moving in the wrong direction.” The islander stopped on his w
ay out of the bay, liquid dripping from his long body, and doubled his front half back toward the ship to see what the mate meant. He saw clearly enough, but seemed for a moment undecided about the proper course of action.

  “If you want to assume I’ll probably miss because I’ve never handled one of those things, go right ahead. I’d like to find out myself. If you don’t start coming this way in an awfully short time, though, it will be just as though you had tried to escape. Move!”

  The last word was issued in a barking roar that removed much of the interpreter’s indecision. He apparently was not quite sure of the mate’s incompetence; he continued the doubling movement, re-entered the bay, and swam out to the Bree. If he thought of concealing himself by submerging during the process, he evidently lacked the courage to try it. As he well knew, the methane was only a few inches deep even at the ship’s location, and would hardly protect him from a bolt hurled with force enough to penetrate three inches of wood after a forty-yard trajectory under seven gravities. He did not think of it in those terms, of course, but he knew very well what those projectiles could do.

  He clambered aboard, shaking with rage and fear.

  “Do you think this will save you?” he asked. “You have simply made things worse for yourselves. The gliders will drop in any event if you try to move, whether I am aboard or not.”

  “You will order them not to.”

  “They will obey no order I give while I am obviously in your power; you should know that if you have any sort of fighting force.”

  “I’ve never had much to do with soldiers,” Barlennan replied. He had recovered the initiative, as he usually did once things had started in a definite direction. “However, I’ll believe you for the time being. We’ll just have to hold you here until some understanding is reached concerning this nonsense about our going ashore—unless we can take care of those gliders of yours in the meantime. It’s a pity we didn’t bring some more modem armament into this backward area.”

  “You can stop that nonsense now,” returned the captive. “You have nothing more than the rest of the savages of the south. I’ll admit you fooled us for a time, but you betrayed yourself a moment ago.”

  “And what did I say that made you think I’d been lying?”

  “I see no reason to tell you. The fact that you don’t yet know just proves my point. It would have been better for you if you hadn’t fooled us so completely; then we’d have been more careful with secret information, and you wouldn’t have learned enough to make your disposal necessary.”

  “And if you hadn’t made that last remark, you might have talked us into surrendering,” cut in Dondragmer, “though I admit it’s not likely. Captain, I’ll bet that what you slipped up on was what I’ve been telling you all along. It’s too late to do anything about that now, though. The question is how to get rid of these pesky gliders; I don’t see any surface craft to worry about, and the folks on shore have only the crossbows from the gliders that were on the ground. I imagine they’ll leave things to the aircraft for the time being.” He shifted to English. “Do you remember anything we heard from the Flyers that would help us get rid of these pesky machines?” Barlennan mentioned their probable altitude limitations over open sea, but neither could see how that helped at the moment.

  “We might use the crossbow on them.” Barlennan made the suggestion in his own language, and Reejaaren sneered openly. Krendoranic, the munitions officer of the Bree, who like the rest of the crew had been listening eagerly, was less contemptuous.

  “Let’s do that,” he cut in sharply. “There’s been something I’ve wanted to try ever since we were at that river village.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think you’d want me to talk about it with our friend listening. We’ll show him instead, if you are willing.” Barlennan hesitated a moment, then gave consent.

  The guard of the islander was taken over by a pair of knife-equipped sailors, and the crossbow given to the munitions officer. He bore it away to his store lockers with an expression that wiped the superiority from the prisoner’s face as he saw it.

  Barlennan looked a trifle worried as Krendoranic opened one of the flame lockers, but the officer knew what he was doing. He removed a small bundle already wrapped in light-proof material, thus giving evidence of at least some of his occupation during the nights since they had left the village of the river-dwellers.

  The bundle was roughly spherical, and evidently designed to be thrown by arm-power; like everyone else, Krendoranic had been greatly impressed by the possibilities of this new art of throwing. Now he was extending his idea even farther, however.

  He took the bundle and lashed it firmly to one of the crossbow bolts, wrapping a layer of fabric around bundle and shaft and tying it at either end as securely as possible. Then he placed the bolt in the weapon. He was not able to draw it fully because of the bulge on the shaft, but that did not bother him; the difficulty he had in cocking convinced him that there would still be plenty of kick. He had, as a matter of duty, familiarized himself with the weapon during the brief trip downstream and the reassembly of the Bree, and had no doubt about his ability to hit a sitting target at a reasonable distance; he was somewhat less sure about moving objects, but at least the gliders could only turn rapidly if they banked sharply, and that would give him warning.

  At his order, one of the sailors who formed part of his flame-thrower crew moved up beside him with the igniting device, and waited. Then, to the intense annoyance of the watching Earthmen, who had been prevented by their inability to understand Barlennan’s language from fully grasping what was occurring anyway, he crawled to the nearest of the radios and set the leg of the bow on top of it to steady himself and the weapon in an upward position. This effectively prevented the human beings from seeing what went on, since the radios were set to look outward from a central point and neither of the others commanded a view of the first.

  As it happened, the gliders were still making relatively low passes, some fifty feet above the bay, and coming directly over the Bree on what could on an instant’s notice become bomb runs; so a much less experienced marksman than the munitions officer could hardly have missed. He barked a command to his assistant as one of the machines approached, and began to lead it carefully. The moment he was sure of his aim, he gave a command of execution and the assistant touched the igniter to the bundle on the slowly rising arrow point. As it caught, Krendoranic’s pincers tightened on the trigger and a line of smoke marked the trail of the missile from the bow.

  Krendoranic and his assistant ducked wildly back to deck level and rolled upwind to get away from the smoke released at the start; sailors to leeward of the release point leaped to either side. By the time they felt safe, the air action was almost over.

  The bolt had come as close as possible to missing entirely; the marksman had underestimated his target’s speed. It had struck about as far aft on the main fuselage as it could, and the bundle of chlorine powder was blazing furiously. The cloud of flame was spreading to the rear of the glider and leaving a trail of smoke that the following machines made no effort to avoid. The crew of the target ship escaped the effects of the vapor, but in a matter of seconds their tail controls burned away. The glider’s nose dropped and it fluttered down to the beach, pilot and crew leaping free just before it touched. The two aircraft which had flown into the smoke also went out of control as the hydrogen chloride fumes incapacitated their personnel, and both settled into the bay. All in all, it was one of the great antiaircraft shots of history.

  Barlennan did not wait for the last of the victims to crash, but ordered the sails set. The wind was very much against him, but there was depth enough for the centerboards, and he began to tack out of the fiord. For a moment it looked as though the shore personnel were about to turn their own crossbows on the ship, but Krendoranic had loaded another of his frightful missiles and aimed it toward the beach, and the mere threat sent them scampering for safety—upwind; they were sensible beings
for the most part.

  Reejaaren had watched in silence, while his bodily attitude betrayed blank dismay. Gliders were still in the air, and some were climbing as though they might attempt runs from a higher altitude; but he knew perfectly well that the Bree was relatively safe from any such attempt, excellent though his aimers were. She was riding a choppy sea as the wind bucked the current from up the fiord, and her speed and course were both far too variable to make a satisfactory target. One of the gliders did make a run at about three hundred feet, but another trail of smoke whizzing past spoiled his aim badly and no further attempts were made. The machines drifted in wide circles well out of range while the Bree slipped on down the fiord to the sea.

  “What has been happening, Barl?” Lackland, unable to restrain himself longer, decided it was safe to speak as the crowd on shore dwindled with distance. “I haven’t been butting in for fear the radios might spoil some of your plans, but please let us know what you’ve been doing.”

  Barlennan gave a brief resume of the events of the last few hundred days, filling in for the most part the conversations his watchers had been unable to follow. The account lasted through the minutes of darkness, and sunrise found the ship almost at the mouth of the fiord. The interpreter had listened with shocked dismay to the conversation between captain and radio; he assumed, with much justice, that the former was reporting the results of his spying to his superiors, though he could not imagine how it was being done. Apparently the nation this shipmaster represented had abilities that transcended anything he had ever imagined; and as Barlennan had suspected, the realization actually forced upon him collapsed his morale completely.

  With the coming of sunrise he asked to be put ashore in a tone completely different from any he had used before; and Barlennan, taking pity on a creature who had probably never asked for a favor in his life from a member of another nation, let him go overboard from the moving vessel fifty yards from the beach. He did not dare come to a stop or take the ship ashore, for the gliders were still in evidence and might not have been able to resist the temptation of a motionless target. Lackland saw the islander dive into the sea with some relief; he knew Barlennan quite well, but had not been sure just what course of action he would consider proper under the circumstances.