Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  She did find out that Swift was one of those present on the nearby shore, and Raeker duly relayed this information to Nick; but when questions were asked such as whether Swift planned to follow the suggestion he must by now have received via Nick’s ex-prisoner, or how he had been able to find the bathyscaphe so quickly, no satisfactory answer was forthcoming. Raeker couldn’t decide whether the trouble was Easy’s incomplete mastery of the language, her lack of interest in the questions themselves, or a deliberate vagueness on Swift’s part. The whole situation was irritating to a man who had exercised fairly adequate control over affairs on Tenebra for some years past; at the moment a majority of his agents were out of contact, what might be called the forces of rebellion were operating freely, and the only human being on the planet was neglecting work for gossip. Of course, his viewpoint may have been slightly narrow.

  Things looked up toward the middle of the Tenebran afternoon. Jim and Jane returned, long before they had been expected, to increase the strength of the shipbuilding crew. They reported unusually easy travel and high speed, so they had reached their first search area on the initial day’s travel, examined it, and been able to cover the other and return in something like half the expected time. They had found nothing in their own areas. They had seen a light to the south, but judged that John and Nancy would cover it, and had decided to stick to their own itinerary and get the desired report in. It was quite impossible, of course, for them to read any expression from the robot, and Raeker managed to keep his feelings out of his voice, so they never suspected that their report was in any way unsatisfactory.

  For a short time, Raeker toyed with the thought of sending them out again to check the light; but then he reflected that in the first place John and Nancy would, as Jim said, have done so, and in the second place the ’scaphe had effectively been located, and he decided the pair were of more use getting leather. The lack of initiative they had just displayed tended to support this conclusion. He spoke accordingly, and the two promptly took their spears up again and went hunting.

  “One point may have struck you, Nick,” Raeker said after they had gone.

  “What is that, Teacher?”

  “They saw the light to the south of their search area. That suggests strongly that the shore of this sea bends westward as it is followed south; and since the caves of Swift lie in the same direction, it is fairly likely that they are closer to the shore than we realized. This may account for Swift’s finding the ship so quickly.”

  “It may,” admitted Nick.

  “You sound dubious. Where is the hole in the reasoning?”

  “It’s just that I hunted with Swift’s people for a good many days, and covered a lot of territory around his caves in the process, without either encountering the sea myself or hearing it mentioned by any of his people. It seems hard to believe that the lights of your missing ship could be seen a hundred miles, and something like that would be necessary to reconcile both sets of facts.”

  “Hm-m-m. That’s a point I should have considered. That light may call for more investigation, after all. Well, we’ll know more when John and Nancy come in.”

  “We should,” agreed Nick. “Whether we actually will remains to be seen. I’m going to get back to fastening this float we’ve just glued, onto the frame. I’m a lot surer that something constructive will come from that.” He went off to do as he had said, and Raeker devoted himself to listening. Thinking seemed unprofitable at the moment.

  With two more hunters, the raft progressed more rapidly than anyone had expected. The region of the new camp was not, of course, as badly hunted out as had been the neighborhood of the old village, and skins came in about as fast as they could be processed. Float after float was fastened in place, each corner being supplied in turn so as to keep the balance—Nick and Betsey were very careful about that. By the late afternoon so many had been attached that it was less a matter of keeping track of which corner came next than of finding a spot not already occupied—the frame was virtually paved with the things. No one attempted to calculate the result on its stability. If anyone thought of such a problem, he undoubtedly postponed it as something more easily determined empirically.

  The work was not, of course, completely uninterrupted. People had to eat, there was the need to gather firewood for the night, and the herd had to be guarded. This last, of course, frequently helped in the “shipyard” by providing leather without the need of hunting, but sometimes the fighting involved was less profitable. Several times the creatures attacking the herd were floaters, to everyone’s surprise.

  These creatures were reasonably intelligent, or at least learned rapidly as a rule to avoid dangerous situations. They were also rather slow-flying things—resembling, as Easy had said, the Medusae of her home world in their manner of motion—so that after a fairly short time in any one spot, and the killing of a reasonable number of them, the survivors learned to leave the herd alone. Nick and his friends had believed this end accomplished for the present camp; but in the late afternoon no less than four of the creatures had to be faced by the herders in not much more than an hour. The situation was both unusual and quite painful, since while a competent spearsman could count surely enough on grounding such a creature it was nearly impossible to do so without suffering from its tentacles, whose length and poisonous nature went far to offset their owner’s slow flight.

  The attention of all four members of the group was naturally drawn to this peculiar state of affairs, and even work on the raft was suspended while the problem was discussed. It was natural enough that an occasional floater should drift into the area from elsewhere, but four in an hour was stretching coincidence. The group’s crests scanned the heavens in an effort to find an explanation, but the gentle air current toward the southwest was still too feeble at this distance from the volcano even to be felt, much less seen. The sky of Tenebra during the daytime is much too featureless to permit easy detection of something like a slow, general movement of the floaters; and the individual movement of the creatures themselves didn’t help. Consequently, the existence of the wind was not discovered until rainfall.

  By this time, the raft seemed to be done, in that it was hard to see where any more floats could be attached. No one knew, of course, how many people it would support; it was planned to carry it to the ocean when the others returned, and determine this by experiment.

  When the evening fires were lighted, however, it was quickly seen that the rain was not coming straight down. It was the same phenomenon that John and Nancy had observed the night before, complicated by the lack of an obvious cause. After some discussion, Nick decided to light three extra fires on the northeast side of the usual defenses, compensating for the extra fuel consumption by letting an equal number on the opposite side of the outer ring burn out. A little later he let go even more on the southwest, since no drops at all came from that direction even after the convection currents of the camp were well established. He reported the matter to Fagin.

  “I know,” replied the teacher. “The same thing is happening where the ship is down, according to Easy. The drops are slanting very noticeably inland. I wish she had some means of telling direction; we could find out whether the coast is actually sloping east where she is, or the rain actually moving in a slightly different direction. Either fact, if we know it, could be useful.”

  “I suppose she can’t feel any wind?” asked Nick.

  “Not inside the ship. Can you?”

  “A little, now that the motion of the drops proves there must be some. I felt more around those fires I lighted when we were getting away from the caves, but that’s the only time. I think it’s getting stronger, too.”

  “Let me know if you become more certain of that,” replied Raeker. “We’ll keep you informed of anything from the other end which may have a bearing on the phenomenon.” Raeker’s use of “we” was apt; the observation and communication rooms were filling with geologists, engineers, and other scientists. The news that Tenebra wa
s putting on its first really mysterious act in a decade and a half had spread rapidly through the big ship, and hypotheses were flying thick and fast.

  Easy was giving a fascinating, and fascinated, description of events around the bathyscaphe; for while she and her companion had by now seen plenty of the nightly rainfall, they were for the first time at a place where they could actually observe its effect on sea level. The shore was in sight, and the way the sea bulged up away from it as water joined the oleum was like nothing either child had ever seen. Looking downhill at the nearby shore was rather disconcerting; and it continued, for as the bathyscaphe rose with the rising sea level it was borne easily inland with the bulging surface. This continued until the density of the sea fell too low to float the ship; and even then an occasional bump intimated that its motion had not stopped entirely.

  “I can’t see anything more, Dad,” Easy called at last. “We might as well stop reporting. I’m getting sleepy, anyway. You can wake us up if you need to.”

  “All right, Easy.” Rich made the answer for Raeker and the other listeners. “There’s nothing much going on at Nick’s camp right now except the wind, and that seems more surprising than critical.”

  The girl appeared briefly on the screen, smiled good night at them, and vanished; Aminadorneldo’s narrow face followed, and that station had signed off for the night.

  Attention naturally shifted to the observation room, where the surface of Tenebra could actually be seen. Nothing much was happening, however. The robot was standing as usual in the middle of the rather unbalanced fire circle, with the four natives spaced around it—not evenly, tonight; three of them were rather close together on the northeast side and the fourth paced a beat that covered the remaining three quarters of the circle. It was easy to see the reason with a few minutes’ observation; for every fire snuffed out on the single man’s beat, a full dozen went on the northeast. Someone was continually having to lope forward with a torch to relight one or two of the outer guard flames on that side. Occasionally even an inner fire would be caught, as a second drop blew too soon through the space left unguarded by the effect of a first. There seemed no actual danger, however; none of the natives themselves had been overcome, and their manner betrayed no particular excitement.

  While Raeker had been eating, his assistant had had one of the pupils pace off a course which he compared with the robot’s length, and then by timing the passage of a raindrop along it clocked the wind at nearly two miles an hour, which as far as anyone knew was a record; the information was spread among the scientists, but none of them could either explain the phenomenon or venture a prediction of its likely effects. It was an off-duty crewman, relaxing for a few minutes at the door of the observation chamber, who asked a question on the latter subject.

  “How far from the sea is that camp?” he queried.

  “About two miles from the daytime coast line.”

  “How about the night one?”

  “The sea reaches the valley just below that hill.”

  “Is that margin enough?”

  “Certainly. The amount of rainfall doesn’t vary from one year to the next. The ground moves, of course, but not without letting you know.”

  “Granting all that, what will this wind do to the shore line? With the sea not much denser than the air, the way it is late at night, I should think even this measly two-mile hurricane might make quite a difference.” Raeker looked startled for a moment; then he glanced around at the others in the room. Their faces showed that this thought had not occurred to any of them, but that most—the ones, he noted, most entitled to opinions—felt there was something to it. So did Raeker himself, and the more he thought of it the more worried he became. His expression was perfectly plain to Rich, who had lost none of his acuteness in the last month of worry.

  “Think you’d better move them back while there’s time, doctor?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. It isn’t possible to move the whole camp with just the four of them, and I hate to leave any of their stuff to be washed away. After all, they’re fifty feet higher on that hill than the sea came before.”

  “Is fifty feet much, to that sea?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t decide.” The expression on Rich’s face was hard to interpret; after all, he had spent his life in a profession where decisions were made whenever they had to be, with the consequences accepted as might be necessary.

  “You’ll have to do something, I should think,” he said. “You’ll lose everything if the sea gets them while they’re there.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Never mind,” the diplomat said, nodding toward the screens. “We didn’t think of it in time anyway, I guess. Did that happen so early last night?”

  Raeker looked, and any contempt Rich may have felt for the scientist’s indecisivness vanished. There was no mistaking the liquid curling sluggishly around the hills to the east and gleaming slickly in the firelight. Raeker started giving orders.

  “Nick! All of you! Take one second to look at what’s coming from the east, then get every map you can lay your hands on; make as secure a bundle as you can of them, and tie them to the boat. Then take your weapons and do the same. If there’s time, select whatever you consider the most important of what you have and tie it into the wagon. Maybe we’ll be able to find it again afterward. When the sea gets really close, get onto the boat and tie yourselves on firmly; be sure you leave enough rope for the job. I’d rather lose everything in that camp than one of you.”

  “But we don’t know the boat will carry all of us, to say nothing of the maps and things,” objected Nick.

  “I know it. That’s why you and the rest are being tied on. If it floats, well and good; if it doesn’t at least you’ll stay together.”

  “And be eaten together.”

  “If you don’t float, I’ll be able to stay with you. I may not be much of a fighter, but I’ll do my best. It’s the only thing we can do; you’ll never get away from that flood. Get moving!”

  The four obeyed without further argument. The men watched the flood in silence, though one or two seemed to have a little trouble remembering that it was nearly two hundred thousand miles away. It did look rather convincing on the screens; rather like honey pouring toward a trapped fly. While the nearest hills were still partly above the surface, tongues of it were projecting glacierlike between them and were on the point of surrounding the camp, while not very much farther back—well within the area lighted by the camp fires—the surface was curving above the robot’s level. It resembled a slow motion picture of an approaching tidal wave, except for the odd vagueness of the sea’s boundary.

  That vagueness destroyed Raeker’s hope. Oleum normally had a fairly distinct surface; evidently the sea had already been heavily diluted by the rain. That meant there was no point in expecting the raft to float. Its air-filled sacks were nearly half as dense as the straight acid; with this diluted stuff their bouyancy would be negligible.

  He was almost wrong, as it turned out. The sea oozed up around the hill, snuffing the fires almost at a single blow, and for an instant blurred the picture transmitted from the robot’s eyes as it covered the camp. Then the screens cleared, and showed the limp figures of the four natives on a structure that just barely scraped what had now become the bottom of the ocean. It moved, but only a few inches at a time; and Raeker gloomily sent the robot following along.

  XI

  Nights—Tenebran nights, that is—were hard on the Drommian, Aminadabarlee. They were even harder on any men who had dealings with him while they lasted. Seeing people engaged in work that had no direct bearing on the rescue of his son, and watching them for two Earthly days at a stretch, was hard for him to bear, even though he knew perfectly well that nothing could be done while the agents on the ground were immobolized or actually unconscious. This made no difference to his emotions; somebody, or everybody, should be doing something, his glands told him. He was rapidly, and quite unavoidably, coming to regard huma
n beings as the most cold-blooded and uncooperative race in the galaxy. This was in spite of the skilled efforts of Rich, who had plenty to keep him professionally busy.

  So far the great nonhuman had not descended to physical violence, but more than one man was carefully keeping out of his way. These were the ones least familiar with Drommians—so far. Raeker had noted that the number was increasing.

  Raeker himself wasn’t worrying; he wasn’t the sort. Besides, he was occupied enough to keep his mind off Dromm and its impulsive natives. The robot, fortunately, had had no fighting to do, since nothing in the form of animal life had approached the raft and its helpless passengers, or even been sighted by the carefully watching robot. This was a relief in one way, though Raeker was professionally disappointed. He had wanted to learn something of the creatures responsible for the loss to his students’ herd a few nights before, and who could apparently live in a remarkably small oxygen concentration. Still, the four tied to the raft were fairly safe, though no one dared let them drift far from the robot; a constant watch was necessary.

  As the night wore on, the vagrant currents which had been shifting raft and occupants became fewer, and so much weaker that they were no longer able to move the assembly, whose effective weight must have been only a few pounds. The man in control of the robot found it possible to leave the machine motionless for longer and longer periods; in fact, at one point Raeker almost went to sleep in the control chair. He was aroused from a doze by the shrill voice of the Drommian, however—“And Earthmen expect people to work with them!” in what even a man could recognize as a contemptuous tone—and did not repeat the slip. It didn’t matter; the raft’s passengers were drifting unharmed when day arrived.