Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  The tension was over now, however, and once again a feeling that they were in the final stages of the mission spread through Earthmen and natives alike. Men were ready; food was ready for the start, and provision for its replenishment from the river below had been made; the rocket circling in free fall beyond the atmosphere was ready to supply what guidance it could. Rosten was holding in his impatience with considerable effort, though Barlennan did not know that. The captain simply made sure that all was ready, selected the group that was to remain to handle the hoist, ordered packs attached to harnesses, and called the Earthmen for instructions. The men were ready.

  “If you’ll wait about two minutes, Barl,” Lackland relayed the information given him by one of the computers, “the sun will be exactly on the direction line you should follow. We’ve warned you that we can’t pin the rocket down closer than about six miles; we’ll guide you into the middle of the area that we’re sure contains it, and you’ll have to work out your own search from there. If the terrain is at all similar to what you have where you are now, that will be rather difficult, I fear.”

  “You are probably right, Charles; we have had no experience with such matters. Still, I am sure we will solve that problem; we have solved all others—frequently with your help, I confess. Is the sun in line yet?”

  “Just a moment—there! Is there any landmark even reasonably distant which you can use to hold your line until the sun comes around again?”

  “None, I fear. We will have to do the best we can, and take your corrections each day.”

  “That’s a bit like dead reckoning where you don’t know the winds or currents, but it will have to do. We’ll correct our own figures every time we can get a fix on you. Good luck!”

  XVIII.

  Direction was a problem, as all concerned found out at once. It was physically impossible to maintain a straight line of travel; every few yards the party had to detour around a boulder that was too high to see or climb over. The physical structure of the Mesklinites aggravated the situation, since their eyes were so close to the ground. Barlennan tried to make his detours in alternate directions, but he had no means of checking accurately the amount of each one. It was a rare day when the direction check from the rocket did not show them to be twenty or thirty degrees off, usually to the left. Lackland transmitted the last fact to Toorey for Rosten to play with; it might keep his mind off his other troubles.

  About every fifty days a check was made on the position of the transmitter—there was only one moving now; another had been left with the group at the hoist—and a new direction computed. High-precision work was required, and occasionally some doubt was felt about the accuracy of a given fix. When this happened Barlennan was always warned, and left to his own discretion. Sometimes, if the Earthmen did not sound too doubtful of their own work, he would go on; at others, he would wait for a few days to give them a chance for a better fix. While waiting he would consolidate his position, redistributing pack loads and modifying the food rations when it seemed necessary. He had hit upon the idea of trail blazing almost before starting, and a solid line of pebbles marked their path from the edge. He had the idea of eventually clearing all the stones from a path and heaping them on each side, thus making a regular road; but this would be later, when trips back and forth between the grounded rocket and the supply base became regular.

  There was still no plant or animal life, and no moisture. The latter fact would have made the place impenetrable to human beings equipped as were the Mesklinites, but the food the latter ate supplied much of the moisture the caterpillarlike bodies needed and Barlennan’s people kept on.

  The fifty miles passed slowly under their many feet, but pass it finally did. The men, as Lackland said, had done all they could; to the best of their ability to measure, Barlennan should now be standing beside the stranded machine. Both the vision set and the captain’s voice clearly informed him that no such state of affairs existed, which did not surprise him at all.

  “That’s the best we can do, Barl. I’ll swear, knowing our math boys, that you’re within six miles of that gadget, and probably a good deal less. You can organize your men better than I for a search which will have a minimum chance of losing any of them and a maximum chance of finding what we want; I won’t try to interfere there. Anything we can do we certainly will, but I can’t imagine what it might be at this point. How do you plan to arrange matters?”

  Barlennan paused before answering. A six-mile circle is an appalling area to search when visibility averages three or four yards. He could cover territory most rapidly, of course, by spreading out his men; but that raised to the point of near certainty the chance of losing some of them. They had already tried using voice as a directional guide, and found that the larger boulders produced such a multiplicity of echoes as to render the method nearly useless even for furnishing a single direction line; with sailors all around, there would be no hope of guiding any one in the right direction if he became confused. He put this point up to Lackland.

  “The rocket itself is about twenty feet tall,” the man pointed out. “For practical purposes your vision circle is therefore larger than you say. Your point about echoes is certainly true; I heard your experiments, as you say. If you could only get up on one of those larger boulders you’d probably see the ship from where you are—that’s what’s so annoying about the whole situation.”

  “Of course; but we can’t do that. The large rocks are six or eight of your feet in height; even if we could climb their nearly vertical sides, I would certainly never again look down a straight wall, and will not risk having my men do so.”

  “Yet you climbed that cleft up to the plateau.”

  “That was different. We were never beside an abrupt drop. We knew in our minds that a roll down such a slope would be as bad as a fall, but it didn’t look the same—and the danger of actually losing hold on such a surface was practically nothing, unless something actually pulled you away.”

  “Then if a similar slope led up to one of these boulders, you wouldn’t mind getting that far from the ground?”

  “No, but—hm-m-m. I think I see what you’re driving at. Just a moment.” The captain looked at his surroundings more carefully. Several of the great rocks were nearby; the highest, as he had said, protruded some six feet from the hard ground. Around and between them were the ever-present pebbles that seemed to floor the whole plateau. Possibly if Barlennan had ever been exposed to solid geometry he would not have made the decision he did; but having no real idea of the volume of building material he was undertaking to handle, he decided that Lackland’s idea was sound.

  “We’ll do it, Charles. There’s enough small rock and dirt here to build anything we want.” He turned from the radio and outlined the plan to the sailors.

  If Dondragmer had any doubts about its feasibility he kept them to himself; and presently the entire group was rolling stones. Those closest to the selected rock were moved close against it, and others against these, until a circle of bare ground began to spread outward from the scene of operations. Periodically a quantity of the hard soil was loosened by harder pincers and spread onto the layer of small rocks; it was easier to carry and filled more space—until the next layer of stone tamped it down.

  Progress was slow, but steady; the Earthmen watched in amazement at the antlike persistence and energy the sailors and their officers displayed. The workers discovered for themselves that the further they got the faster they seemed to go—a natural fact resulting from the geometry of cones—and the discovery boosted morale. Some indication of the time it took may be gained from the fact that at one point part of the group had to be sent back along the blazed trail for further food supplies—a thing which had been unnecessary in the eight-hundred-mile walk from the cleft; but at last the relatively flat top of the boulder felt the tread of feet, probably for the first time since the inner energies of Mesklin had pushed the plateau to its present elevation. The ramp spread down and to each side from the point
of access; no one approached the other side of the boulder, where the drop was still sheer.

  No one, actually, was interested in his standing place; for from the new vantage point Lackland’s prediction was fulfilled—after months of travel and danger, the goal of the expedition was in sight. Barlennan actually had the vision set hauled up the ramp so the Earthmen could see it, too; and for the first time in over an Earth-year, Rosten’s face lost its habitual grim expression. It was not much to see; perhaps one of the Egyptian pyramids, plated with metal and placed far enough away, would have looked somewhat like the blunt cone that lifted above the intervening stones. It did not resemble the rocket Barlennan had seen before—in fact, it did not greatly resemble any rocket previously built within twenty light-years of Earth; but it was obviously something that did not belong to Mesklin’s normal landscape, and even the expedition members who had not spent months on the monstrous planet’s surface seemed to feel weight roll from their shoulders.

  Rosten was almost gay; Lackland and the computers in the rocket were grinning broadly; even the ethnology department was distracted from the screen which still showed scenes in the river village. The joy was not confined to human beings; representatives of the other worlds which had contributed to the initial experiment and the recovery attempt were equally overjoyed. A bulky, furred native of the heavy inner planet of Groombridge 1618 linked appendages with a pair of hard-shelled, three-foot-high scientists from Altair V and performed something that was presumably the equivalent of a dance of joy.

  Barlennan, though pleased, did not share the abandon that was approaching party intensity on Toorey. He was better able than those whose view depended on television to judge just what lay between his present position and the rocket. This appeared no worse than what they had already crossed, but it was certainly no better. There would no longer be the Earthmen’s guidance, either; and even with the present vantage point, he could not quite see how the party was to maintain its line of march for the mile and a half that they would have to travel.

  The men did not actually know the direction now, so their method would not work—or would it? He could tell them when the sun lay in the right direction; after that they could call him each time it passed through the same bearing. For that matter, one man could stay here and give the same information without bothering the Flyers—but wait; he had only one radio now. It could not be in both places at once. For the first time Barlennan really missed the set that had been left with the river-dwellers.

  Then it occurred to him that he might not need a radio. True, the air did not carry sound so well here—it was the only aspect of the thinner atmosphere of the plateau that the sailors had noticed at all—but the Mesklinite voice, as Lackland had remarked, was something that had to be heard to be believed. The captain decided to try it; he would leave one man here on the lookout platform, whose duty would consist of hooting with all the energy the muscles around his swimming-siphon could muster each time the sun passed straight above the gleaming cone that was their goal. The trail would be blazed as before so that he could follow when the others arrived.

  Barlennan outlined this idea to the group. Dondragmer pointed out that on the basis of past experience they might even so go too far to one side, since there would be no way of making fixes as the Earthmen had done to correct cumulative errors; the fact that the watcher’s voice did not sound from directly opposite the sun at any time would mean nothing in this echo-rich neighborhood. He admitted, however, that it was the best idea so far, and did stand a good chance of bringing them within sight of the rocket. A sailor was chosen, therefore, to man the observation post, and the trip was resumed in the new direction.

  For a short distance the post itself remained in sight, and it was possible to judge the error that had crept into their course each time the sailor’s voice was heard. Presently, however, the rock on which he was standing was lost behind others of equal size, and navigation settled down to the task of making sure they were heading as closely as possible toward the sun each time the echoing hoot sounded in their ears. The sound grew weaker as the days passed, but with no other sounds on the lifeless plateau to cover it there was never any doubt of what they heard.

  None of them even yet considered themselves experienced enough in land travel to estimate accurately the distance covered, and all were used to arriving much later than original hopes called for; so the group was pleasantly surprised when finally the monotony of the desert of stone was broken by a change in the landscape. It was not exactly the change that had been expected, but it attracted attention for all that.

  It was almost directly ahead of them, and for a moment several of the group wondered whether they had in some incomprehensible way traveled in a circle. A long slope of mixed dirt and pebbles showed between the boulders. It was about as high as the one they had built to the observation station; but as they approached they saw it extended much farther to each side—as far, in fact, as anyone could see. It lapped around large boulders like an ocean wave frozen in midmotion; even the Mesklinites, totally unused to explosion or meteor craters, could see that the material had been hurled outward from some point beyond the slope. Barlennan, who had seen rockets from Toorey land more than once, had a pretty good idea of the cause and of what he was going to see even before the party topped the rise. He was right in general, if not in detail.

  The rocket stood in the center of the bowl-shaped indentation that had been blasted by the fierce wash of her supporting jets. Barlennan could remember the way snow had swirled out of the way when the cargo rocket landed near Lackland’s “Hill.” He could appreciate the fact that the lifting power used here must have been far mightier in order to ease the bulk of this machine down, smaller though it was. There were no large boulders near it, though a few reared up near the sides of the bowl. The ground inside was bare of pebbles; the soil itself had been scooped out so that only four or five of the projectile’s twenty feet of height rose above the general run of rocks covering the plain.

  Its base diameter was almost as great as its height, and remained so for perhaps a third of the way upward. This, Lackland explained when the vision set had been brought to bear on the interior of the blast crater, was the part housing the driving power. He went on to say things about iron-hydrogen clathrate slugs which meant nothing whatever to his Mesklinite listeners and very little to himself, since he was not a physical chemist.

  The upper part of the machine narrowed rapidly to a blunt point, and this housed the apparatus which represented such a tremendous investment in time, intellectual effort, and money on the part of so many worlds. A number of openings existed in this part, as no effort had been made to render the compartments airtight. Such apparatus as required either vacuum or special atmosphere in which to function was individually sealed.

  “You said once, after the explosion in your tank that wrecked it so completely, that something of the sort must have happened here,” Barlennan said. “I see no signs of it; and if the holes I see were open when you landed it, how could enough of your oxygen still be there to cause an explosion? You told me that beyond and between worlds there was no air, and what you had would leak out through any opening.”

  Rosten cut in before Lackland could answer. He and the rest of the group had been examining the rocket on their own screen.

  “Barl is quite right. Whatever caused the trouble was not an oxygen blast. I don’t know what it was, but I’m glad it happened.”

  “Why?” Lackland wanted to know. “I’m not sorry to have met Barlennan and his people, but it’s held us up a year and a half.”

  “If that machine had tried to blast off when we sent the signal, there’d have been nothing to salvage. You saw that ship in space before it was landed; you must remember the metal legs that were projecting among the tubes to keep her above ground and the tube mouths clear. There must have been two hundred of them. You can see for yourself that the thing has settled into the ground clear to—and I should say somewhat past�
��the nozzles. I know hydroferron is a directional explosive, but you can’t make me believe she’d have held together if the tubes had fired in that situation.” Lackland looked startled, realizing for the first time that his chief was right. “Some engineers are going to have a lot of explaining to do,” Rosten added. “Those legs were supposed to hold the ship on any reasonably hard ground up to two thousand gravities—three times what they actually had to take. Someone missed a decimal point, which won’t help his earning capacity for a few years.”

  “Was there any sort of automatic safety which would prevent the tubes from firing in such an event?” asked Lackland. “That would account for her failure to start.”

  “There was not, to my knowledge. We’ll just have to keep our eyes open when we go inside, in the hope of finding the trouble—not that it will matter much by then, except to people who want to build another of these things. I’d say we might as well get to work; I have a horde of physicists on my neck simply quivering for information. It’s lucky they put a biologist in charge of this expedition; from now on there won’t be a physicist fit to approach.”

  “Your scientists will have to contain themselves a little longer,” Barlennan interjected. “You seem to have overlooked something.”

  “What?”

  “Not one of the instruments you want me to put before the lens of your vision set is within seven feet of the ground; and all are inside metal walls which I suspect would be rather hard for us to remove by brute force, soft as your metals seem to be.”

  “Blast it, you’re right, of course. The second part is easy; most of the surface skin is composed of quick-remove access plates that we can show you how to handle without much trouble. For the rest—hm-m-m. You have nothing like ladders, and couldn’t use them if you had. Your elevator has the slight disadvantage of needing at least an installation crew at the top of its travel before you can use it. Offhand, I’m afraid I’m stuck for the moment. We’ll think of something, though; we’ve come too far to be stumped now.”