Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Neither Lackland nor Rosten found anything to say for a long moment. Rosten broke the silence.

  “Barlennan, if you learned what you want, and began to teach your people, would you tell them where the knowledge came from? Do you think it would be good for them to know?”

  “For some, yes; they would want to know about other worlds, and people who had used the same way to knowledge they were starting on. Others—well, we have a lot of people who let the rest pull the load for them. If they knew, they wouldn’t bother to do any learning themselves; they’d just ask for anything particular they wanted to know—as I did at first; and they’d never realize you weren’t telling them because you couldn’t. They’d think you were trying to cheat them. I suppose if I told anyone, that sort would find out sooner or later, and . . . well, I guess it would be better to let them think I’m the genius. Or Don; they’d be more likely to believe it of him.”

  Rosten’s answer was brief and to the point.

  “You’ve made a deal.”

  XX.

  A gleaming skeleton of metal rose eight feet above a flat-topped mound of rock and earth whose sides were dotted with curved plates of similar material and various weirdly complex assemblies that might have been vital organs of the glittering monster that was being dismembered. Mesklinites were busily attacking another row of plates whose upper fastenings had just been laid bare. Others were pushing the freshly removed dirt and pebbles to the edge of the mound. Still others moved back and forth along a well marked road that led off into the desert; those who approached dragging flat, wheeled carts loaded with supplies, those departing usually hauling similar carts empty. The scene was one of activity; practically everyone seemed to have a definite purpose. There were two radio sets in evidence now, one on the mound where an Earthman was directing the dismantling from his distant vantage point and the other some distance away.

  Dondragmer was in front of the second set, engaged in animated conversation with the distant being he could not see. The sun still circled endlessly, but was very gradually descending now and swelling very, very slowly.

  “I am afraid,” the mate said, “that we will have serious trouble checking on what you tell us about the bending of light. Reflection I can understand; the mirrors I made from metal plates of your rocket made that very clear. It is too bad that the device from which you let us take the lens was dropped in the process; we have nothing like your glass, I am afraid.”

  “Even a reasonably large piece of the lens will do, Don,” the voice came from the speaker. It was not Lackland’s voice; he was an expert teacher, he had found, but sometimes yielded the microphone to a specialist. “Any piece will bend the light, and even make an image—but wait; that comes later. Try to find what’s left of that hunk of glass, Don, if your gravity didn’t powder it when the set landed.” Dondragmer turned from the set with a word of agreement; then turned back as he thought of another point.

  “Perhaps you could tell what this ‘glass’ is made of, and whether it takes very much heat? We have good hot fires, you know. Also there is the material set over the Bowl—ice, I think Charles called it. Would that do?”

  “Yes, I know about your fires, though I’m darned if I see how you do burn plants in a hydrogen atmosphere, even with a little meat thrown in. For the rest, ice should certainly do, if you can find any. I don’t know what the sand of your river is made of, but you can try melting it in one of your hottest fires and see what comes out. I certainly don’t guarantee anything, though; I simply say that on Earth and the rest of the worlds I know ordinary sand will make a sort of glass, which is greatly improved with other ingredients. Fm darned if I can see either how to describe those ingredients to you or suggest where they might be found, though.”

  “Thank you; I will have someone try the fire. In the meantime, I will search for a piece of lens, though I fear the blow when it struck left little usable. We should not have tried to take the device apart near the edge of the mound; the thing you called a ‘barrel’ rolled much too easily.”

  Once more the mate left the radio, and immediately encountered Barlennan.

  “It’s about time for your watch to get on the plates,” the captain said. “I’m going down to the river. Is there anything your work needs?”

  Dondragmer mentioned the suggestion about sand.

  “You can carry up the little bit I’ll need, I should think, without getting the fire too hot; or did you plan on a full load of other things?”

  “No plans; I’m taking the trip mainly for fun. Now that the spring wind has died out and we get breezes in every old direction, a little navigation practice might be useful. What good is a captain who can’t steer his ship?”

  “Fair enough. Did the Flyers tell you what this deck of machines was for?”

  “They did pretty well, but, if I were really convinced about this space-bending business, I’d have swallowed it more easily. They finished up with the old line about words not really being enough to describe it. What else beside words can you use, in the name of the Suns?”

  “I’ve been wondering myself; I think it’s another aspect of this quantity-code they call mathematics. I think it’s something for the next generation, myself, though they insist we use some of it in our navigation and the philosophers used more when they found the curvature of Mesklin. I like mechanics best myself; you can do something with it from the very beginning.” He waved an arm toward one of the carts and another toward the place where the differential pulley was lying.

  “It would certainly seem so. We’ll have a lot to take home—and some, I guess, we’d better not be too hasty in spreading about.” He gestured at what he meant, and the mate agreed soberly. “Nothing to keep us from playing with it now, though.”

  The captain went his way, and Dondragmer looked after him with a mixture of seriousness and amusement. He rather wished that Reejaaren were around; he had never liked the islander, and perhaps now he would be a little less convinced that the Bree’s crew was composed exclusively of liars.

  That sort of reflection was a waste of time, however. He had work to do. Pulling plates off the metal monster was less fun than being told how to do experiments, but his half of the bargain had to be fulfilled. He started up the mound, calling his watch after him.

  Barlennan went on to the Bree. She was already prepared for the trip, two sailors aboard and her fire hot. The great expanse of shimmering, nearly transparent fabric amused him; like the mate, he was thinking of Reejaaren, though in this case it was of what the interpreter’s reaction would be if he saw the use to which his material was being put. Not possible to trust sewn seams, indeed! Barlennan’s own people knew a thing or two, even without friendly Flyers to tell them.

  He had patched sails with the stuff before they were ten thousand miles from the island where it had been obtained, and his seams had held even in front of the valley of wind.

  He slipped through the opening in the rail, made sure it was secured behind him, and glanced into the firepit, which was lined with metal foil from a condenser the Flyers had donated. All the cordage seemed sound and taut; he nodded to the crewmen. One heaped another few sticks on the glowing, flameless fire in the pit; the other released the moorings.

  Gently, her forty-foot sphere of fabric bulging with hot air, the new Bree lifted from the plateau and drifted river ward on the light breeze.

  THE END

  GROUND

  They were inside the sun, in a temperature of 900 Kelvin. With the refrigerators out there was only one wild chance to pull through.

  The little ship plunged into the star.

  If anyone had asked Jack Elder to justify his uneasiness, he could not have obliged. He might even have gone so far as to deny any such feeling; but he would not have been speaking the truth. He had every confidence in the refrigerators of the Wraith, untried as they were; he had helped design them; but the phrase, “Inside a star,” which he had used so casually in New York a few short weeks ago, now seemed to c
arry a more tangible—and deadly—implication.

  Admittedly, the words had been a half truth, designed to impress an already awe-struck audience; the fringes of VV Cephei’s far-flung atmosphere did technically constitute a portion of the giant sun, and he was certainly well within those fringes, but the environment was certainly not the raging hell of an atomic furnace which an unwary listener to his words might have been led to suppose. There was actually solid matter outside the spherical hull of the tiny interstellar traveler.

  Elder sneaked a glance at the other men in the small cabin. Dressier, who had collaborated with him in the design of the heat-distributor, was looking at the recording dials pertaining to the device with every appearance of satisfaction. Snell, the astrophysicist, was sitting before the control board of his weird mass spectrograph that was mounted outside the hull, and periodically working knobs and switches that changed plates and altered the sensitivity regions of the device. He had some abstruse theory of isotope distribution in stellar atmospheres, and had come with the Wraith on her own test run solely to get his own data.

  Calloway, the pilot, had no regular duties while the ship was in free fall. He was engaged in a pastime which increased Elder’s uneasiness almost to the breaking point. Hanging before one of the outside view screens—the Wraith had no direct vision ports, as the electronic heat distributor required an unbroken conductor for ah outer surface—the was gazing with interest at the fuzzy red area that was the image of VV Cephei’s core, some three-quarters of a billion miles distant. Elder gave the screen a single glance, and returned to his own work. The dials before him were in the green without exception, and formed a much more comforting view. If Calloway must look at stars, he thought, why not examine the primary of the VV Cephei system, in the opposite direction? True, the blue star was not much farther away than the core of the red giant, but at least the Wraith was comfortably outside it.

  There was little speech. The ship was in free fall, in an orbit that would carry it through a “grazing” periastron point, about one hundred million miles inside the arbitrary fringe of the stellar atmosphere. It had a speed far in excess of the star’s parabolic velocity at this distance—the orbit was practically a straight line, and they would be within the atmosphere only about three weeks—but it was considered adequate for a first test. The density of the atmosphere at this altitude was known to be neglible, and they expected no serious alteration of their path by friction with the particles of liquid and solid matter, and molecules of gas, which were known to be present.

  Snell had assured them of this; there were certainly, he said, no solid or liquid objects to be encountered whose dimensions would much exceed a micron or two, and even those must be appallingly rare to permit such a low general density. Everyone was perfectly at ease, therefore, with the exception of Elder . . .

  Until a note like the clanging of an immense gong brought the four men abruptly to an erect attitude, to hang poised for seconds in startled silence as the metallic echoes reverberated through the spherical hull and gradually died away.

  “Meteor!” gasped Calloway as he leaped for his controls.

  “Nonsense!” snapped the astronomer. “There could be no possible stable orbit in a resisting medium, even one as tenuous as this. Besides we weren’t hit hard—the hull seems to be intact.”

  “The Earth’s atmosphere is a resisting medium, and lots of meteors enter it. This one may have come from outside, and have nearly matched our velocity. I’ll admit there is no danger, but what else—” He was interrupted.

  “Open your lock! Open your lock!” It was a metallic voice that belonged to none of them, and was felt as much as heard. The pilot recognized its source, turned to his lock switches with an expression of relief. “Someone has tied up to us with a magnetic grapple,” he said as he opened the outer door, “he’s talking to us with a rescue amplifier that uses our own hull as a diaphragm.”

  Elder and Dressier uttered wordless cries as the meaning of the pilot’s words penetrated, and leaped to their control panels. Their refrigerator used an electronic “equivalent of the expanding gas cycle heat absorber that had served in household refrigerators for a good many centuries; and in the present state of development of the device an uninterrupted electronic current had to flow in the outer hull. The news that a magnet of considerable power was attached to the surface they had nursed so carefully did not make the inventors any happier. Dressier, after a glance at his meters, gave an agonized yell.

  “What are the fools trying to do to us? The radiator dropped more than ninety per cent in output when they touched. And how did they get here, anyway? Nothing but our gadget could make a ship habitable for any length of time in this environment, and the only one in existence is right here!”

  “It was, I will admit, an uncomfortable journey.” The new voice caused them all to whirl toward the door of the passage that led to the air lock. The figure standing just inside the control room was obviously human, but that was all that could be said about him with any certainty. He was clad in a heavy space suit; the helmet was sealed, and the faceplate darkened sufficiently to prevent recognition of the occupant. He drifted further into the room as they stared, and half a dozen other men, similarly dressed, followed him. As the last one entered the room, Dressier found his tongue again.

  “Are you aware that your grapple is seriously impairing the functioning of our refrigerator?” he spluttered. “We would appreciate your casting off at once, before our hull temperature reaches an insupportable value. What do you want here, anyway?” Sudden realization hit him. “This test was supposed to be top secret.”

  “Some secrets are hard to keep,” replied the first of the intruders. “It was hearing about the test that brought us here. We are highly interested in your refrigerator. You will oblige me by showing at once all the apparatus connected with it.” His tone was a flat command; there was no suggestion of courtesy or of the slightest interest in Dressler’s feelings. The inventor raised his eyebrows in astonishment.

  “When tests are complete, we plan to return to Earth,” he said loftily. “At that time, we will be prepared to listen to offers for the device. Until then, gentlemen, we would prefer to be alone. I will admit that no steps have been taken as yet to secure the necessary patent rights to our machine; I make no further apology for our attitude. I have already pointed out the damage being caused by your grapple, so I am sure you will kindly leave us and break your connection with our hull as soon as possible.”

  Elder, listening silently, was able to imagine an unpleasant smile on the stranger’s face as he answered this speech.

  “I am afraid you fail to understand me. I have no business interest in your invention—at least I have no intention of paying you for it. My purpose will perhaps be made clearer when I say that the last berth of my ship was on Sheliak Three.” The ugly smile was more implicit than ever in his voice, as he saw by the reactions of the four listeners that his words had carried meaning. The Federation had made no particular secret of the fact that their patrols had, about a year since, discovered a Suzeraintist base of embarrassing strength on the planet mentioned, and that efforts to reduce it had been seriously hampered by the nearness of the great double primary Sheliak—otherwise known as Beta Lyrae. The Suzeraintists, fanatics, who believed only in violence and their sociopolitical theories, had been a thorn in the government’s side for years.

  “The discovery of our base, which you seem to recall, has not been fatal; but it is rather embarrassing. We had planned to move to another planetary system, though it would have been difficult to do so without being tracked, until we heard of the work on this new refrigeration of yours. There are two planets closer to Sheliak than our own, and Three is already uncomfortably close for existing ships. I think you understand?”

  He did, to Calloway, at least. The pilot realized instantly that the planned Suzeraintist retreat closer to the twin suns would be purposeless if the Federation also possessed the information regardin
g the new protective device and with that fact grasped, the immediate intentions of the present individual could not be in serious doubt. Calloway had the lightning reactions needed by a space pilot, and his mind was working nearly as fast; in consequence, the pirate had hardly ceased to speak before one of his listeners had burst into frenzied action.

  Kicking off from the control board behind, Calloway streaked across the room at the leader of the attackers. The latter swung up his armored arms defensively as the heel of the pilot’s big hand came fiercely at his face plate; but the Blow was a feint. The other hand streaked to the pirate’s belt, and came away with the tiny flame tube that the other had been surprised into forgetting for one precious instant. With a maneuver similar to the pivot parry of the swimming life saver, Calloway continued past his antagonist, turning as he did so, and discharged the weapon against his armor at a range of a few inches.

  Fortunately for both, the weapon was set to low power. In the instant he was able to hold it on the target, the stream of flame heated the armor sufficiently to bring a howl of agony from its occupant—and the reflected heat blistered badly, the hand holding the flame tube. For just that instant he held it; then the pirate’s followers were on him, and had wrenched the weapon from his grasp. Calloway continued fighting, falling back on his heavy boots as the only lethal devices left to him. About this time the three scientists recovered their wits sufficiently to move; but two of the armored intruders detached themselves from the melee around the pilot and covered them with flame tubes.

  Unarmed and unarmored as he was, it took several minutes to subdue the pilot. For some reasons the pirates made no attempt to burn him, and it was not until one of them resorted to his own tactics and sent a metal-shod foot slamming against his skull that the fight ceased. Calloway relaxed in the grip of two of the pirates, blood streaming from temple and cheek where the metal boot had struck; and the leader of the attackers hung before him, the pain of his burn reflected in the snarl with which he spoke.