by Hal Clement
“That of course, was not due to buoyancy, so close to the core. The regular convection currents started by solar heat at the skin must be responsible. Therefore, those currents must extend all the way between skin and core. We’ll follow this bubble.”
“If the current goes all the way, why not just drift?”
“For two reasons. One is that the currents are slow—judging by their speed near the skin, the cycle must take over a day. Once we get away from the core, the buoyancy of this bubble will help; we can swim after it.
“The other reason is that if we simply drift we might start down again with the current before we got close enough to the skin to see daylight.
“Another trick we might try if this takes too long is to have one of us drift while the other follows the bubble to the limit of vision. That would establish the up-down line, and we could swim in that direction for a while and then repeat. I’m afraid we probably couldn’t hold swimming direction for long enough to be useful, though, and it would be hard on the reserve air supply. We’d have to make a new bubble each time we checked. These suits have recyclers, but a spacesuit isn’t built to get its oxygen from the surrounding water the way that diving gear is.”
“Let’s just follow this bubble,” Bresnahan said fervently.
At first, of course, the two merely drifted. There simply was no detectable buoyancy near the core. However, in a surprisingly short time the shimmering globule of gas began to show a tendency to drift away from them.
The direction of drift was seldom the one which Bresnahan was thinking of as “up” at the moment, but the spaceman nodded approval and carefully followed their only guide. Bresnahan wished that his training had given him more confidence in instrument readings as opposed to his own senses, but followed Silbert hopefully.
VIII
The fourteen hours he spent drifting weightless in the dark made an experience Bresnahan was never to forget, and his friends were never to ignore. He always liked crowds afterward, and preferred to be in cities or at least buildings where straight, clearly outlined walls, windows, and doors marked an unequivocal up-and-down direction.
Even Silbert was bothered. He was more used to weightlessness, but the darkness he was used to seeing around him at such times was normally pocked with stars which provide orientation. The depths of Raindrop provided nothing. Both men were almost too far gone to believe their senses when they finally realized that the bubble they were still following could be seen by a glow not from their suits’ lights.
It was a faintly blue-green illumination, still impossible to define as to source, but unmistakably sunlight filtered through hundreds of feet of water. Only minutes later their helmets met the tough, elastic skin of the satellite.
It took Silbert only a few moments to orient himself. The sun and the station were both visible—at least they had not come out on the opposite side of the satellite—and he knew the time. The first and last factors were merely checks; all that was really necessary to find the lock was to swim toward the point under the orbiting station.
“I don’t want to use the sonar locater unless I have to,” he pointed out. “There is sonar gear on the sphere. I should be able to get us close enough by sighting on the station so that the magnetic compass will work. Judging by where the station seems to be, we have four or five miles to swim. Let’s get going.”
“And let’s follow the great circle course,” added Bresnahan. “Never mind cutting across inside just because it’s shorter. I’ve had all I ever want of swimming in the dark.”
“My feeling exactly. Come on.”
The distance was considerably greater than Silbert had estimated, since he was not used to doing his sighting from under water and had not allowed for refraction; but finally the needle of the gimballed compass showed signs of making up its mind, and with nothing wrong that food and sleep would not repair the two men came at last in sight of the big lock cylinder.
For a moment, Silbert wondered whether they should try to make their approach secretly. Then he decided that if the Weisanens were there waiting for them the effort would be impractical, and if they weren’t it would be futile.
He simply swam up to the small hatch followed by Bresnahan, and they entered the big chamber together. It proved to be full of water, but the sphere was nowhere in sight. With no words they headed for the outer personnel lock, entered it, pumped back the water, and emerged on Raindrop’s surface. Silbert used his laser, and ten minutes later they were inside the station. Bresnahan’s jump had been a little more skillful than before.
“Now let’s get on the radio!” snapped Silbert as he shed his space helmet.
“Why? Whom would you call, and what would you tell them? Remember that our normal Earth-end contacts are part of the same group the Weisanens belong to, and you can’t issue a general broadcast to the universe at large screaming about a plot against mankind in the hope that someone will take you seriously. Someone might.”
“But—”
“My turn, Bert. You’ve turned what I still think was just a potentially tragic mistake of Weisanen’s into something almost funny, and incidentally saved both our lives. Now will you follow my lead? Things could still be serious if we don’t follow up properly.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“You’ll see. Take it from me, compromise is still possible. It will take a little time; Aino Weisanen will have to learn something I can’t teach him myself. Tell me, is there any way to monitor what goes on in Raindrop? For example, can you tell from here when the lock down there is opened, so we would know when they come back.”
“No.”
“Then we’ll just have to watch for them. I assume that if we see them, we can call them from here on regular radio.”
“Of course.”
“Then let’s eat, sleep, and wait. They’ll be back after a while, and when they come Aino will listen to reason, believe me. But we can sleep right now, I’m sure; it will be a while yet before they show up. They should still be looking for us—getting more worried by the minute.”
“Why should they appear at all? They must have found out long ago that they can’t get back to the station on their own. They obviously haven’t found us, and won’t. Maybe they’ve simply decided they’re already fugitive murderers and have settled down to a permanent life in Raindrop.”
“That’s possible, I suppose. Well, if we don’t see them in a couple of weeks, we can go back down and give them a call in some fashion. I’d rather they came to us, though, and not too soon.
“But let’s forget that; I’m starved. What’s in your culture tanks besides liver?”
IX
It did not take two weeks. Nine days and eight hours after the men had returned to the station, Silbert saw two spacesuited figures standing on the lock half a mile away, and called his companion’s attention to them.
“They must be desperate by this time,” remarked Bresnahan. “We’d better call them before they decide to risk the jump anyway.” He activated the transmitter which Silbert indicated, and spoke.
“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Weisanen. Do you want us to send the cobweb down?”
The voice that answered was female.
“Thank God you’re there! Yes, please. We’d like to come up for a while.” Silbert expected some qualifying remarks from her husband, but none were forthcoming. At Bresnahan’s gesture, he activated the spring gun which launched the web toward the satellite.
“Maybe you’d better suit up and go meet them,” suggested the computerman. “I don’t suppose either of them is very good at folding the web, to say nothing of killing angular speed.”
“I’m not sure I care whether they go off on their own orbit anyway,” growled the spaceman rising with some reluctance to his feet.
“Still bitter? And both of them?” queried Bresnahan.
“Well—I suppose not. And it would take forever to repair the web if it hit the station unfolded. I’ll be back.” Silbert vanished t
oward the hub, and the younger man turned back to watch his employers make the leap from Raindrop. He was not too surprised to see them hold hands as they did so, with the natural result that they spun madly on the way to the web and came close to missing it altogether.
When his own stomach had stopped whirling in sympathy, he decided that maybe the incident was for the best. Anything which tended to cut down Weisanen’s self-assurance should be helpful, even though there was good reason to suspect that the battle was already won. He wondered whether he should summon the pair to his and Silbert’s quarters for the interview which was about to ensue, but decided that there was such a thing as going too far.
He awaited the invitation to the Weisanens’ rooms with eagerness.
It came within minutes of the couple’s arrival at the air lock. When Bresnahan arrived he found Silbert already in the room where they had first reported on their brief visit to Raindrop. All three were still in spacesuits; they had removed only the helmets.
“We’re going back down as soon as possible, Mr. Bresnahan,” Weisanen began without preliminary. “I have a rather lengthy set of messages here which I would like you and Mr. Silbert to transmit as soon as possible. You will note that they contain my urgent recommendation for a policy change. Your suggestion of starting construction of smaller farms from Raindrop’s outer layers is sound, and I think the Company will follow it. I am also advising that material be collected from the vicinity of the giant planets—Saturn’s rings seem a likely source—for constructing additional satellites like Raindrop as private undertakings. Financing can be worked out. There should be enough profit from the farms, and that’s the logical direction for some of it to flow.
“Once other sources of farm material are available, Raindrop will not be used further for the purpose. It will serve as Company headquarters—it will be more convenient to have that in orbit anyway. The closest possible commercial relations are to be maintained with Earth.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, sir,” replied Bresnahan. “We’ll get the messages off as soon as possible. I take it that more of the Company’s officials will be coming up here to live, then?”
“Probably all of them, within the next two years or so. Brenda and I will go back and resume surveying now, as soon as we stock up with some food. I’ll be back occasionally, but I’d rather she kept away from high weight for the next few months, as you know.”
“Yes, sir,” Bresnahan managed, by a heroic effort, to control his smile—almost. Weisanen saw the flicker of his lip, and froze for a moment. Then his own sober features loosened into a broad grin.
“Maybe another hour won’t hurt Brenda,” he remarked. “Let’s have a meal together before we go back.”
He paused, and added almost diffidently, “Sorry about what happened. We’re human, you know.”
“I know,” replied Bresnahan. “That’s what I was counting on.”
“And that,” remarked Silbert as he shed his helmet, “is that. They’re aboard and bound for the core again, happy as clams. And speaking of clams, if you don’t tell me why that stubborn Finn changed his mind, and why you were so sure he’d do it, there’ll be mayhem around here. Don’t try to make me believe that he got scared about what he’d nearly done to us. I know his wife was on our side, basically, but she wasn’t about to wage open war for us. She was as worried about their kid as he was. Come on; make with the words, chum.”
“Simple enough. Didn’t you notice what he wanted before going back to Raindrop?”
“Not particularly—oh; food. So what? He could live on the food down there—or couldn’t he? Don’t you believe what he said?”
“Sure I believe him. He and his wife can digest cellulose, Heaven help them, and they can live off Raindrop’s seaweed. As I remarked to him, though—you heard me, and he understood me—they’re human. I can digest kale and cauliflower, too, and could probably live off them as well as that pair could live off the weeds. But did you ever stop to think what the stuff must taste like? Neither did they. I knew they’d be back with open mouths—and open minds. Let’s eat—anything but liver!” END
1966
THE FOUNDLING STARS
They were running an experiment in the space between the stars—but they never knew the result!
“All right—perfect. You’re the most nearly motionless thing in the universe.”
Hoey’s words were figurative, of course; whether they were accurate or not depended entirely on point of view. Rocco Luisi and his Ymyrgar were indeed at rest with respect to Hoey and the Anfforddus, after more than four hours of maddening effort, but neither machine was motionless with respect to much else. Both were travelling at about four kilometers a second, roughly galactic northward, with respect to their home port on Rhyddid, seventy-five parsecs away. They were moving at a much greater velocity with respect to the far more distant Solar System. With respect to each other, however, velocity had been whittled down to somewhat less than five centimeters a year.
How long this would last was problematical. An automatic tracker was now on duty in Hoey’s ship, trying to hold steady the fringe pattern produced by combining two ultraviolet laser beams, one originating in his own vessel and the other in Luisi’s, in one of the most precise interferometers ever made. Since the crafts were about a light-hour apart, however, corrections tended to be late in time and, in spite of a computer’s best efforts, erratic in amount and direction.
“Nineteen decimals” had been a proverbial standard of accuracy for well over a century; but achieving it on any but the atomic size and time scale was not yet standard art.
“That seems to be it,” Hoey repeated. “That means that you and I stay strapped in our seats, with no more motion than we can help, for the next four hours or so. If either of the instrument platforms on our ships moves more than half a micron with respect to the other, a lot of time and money go down the drain.”
“I know—I’ve had it hammered into me as often and as hard as you have.” Luisi’s voice was undistorted, and the responses instant, on the medium communicator.
“Sure you have,” retorted Hoey, “only a lot of people wonder whether you really believe it.”
“Well, it depends on what you mean by believe. I can figure as well as anyone where the center of mass of my ship would go if I stood up; I—”
“I know you can. Your trouble is that you can’t believe it would make as much trouble as they say. Just remember that they were even concerned about tidal forces from Cinder over there—” he gestured, rather uselessly, at the grossly misnamed 06e star glaring at them from half a parsec away—“and even went to the trouble of finding a part of this neighborhood where the wind was steady—”
“Right there I break connection. Space is space. You only worry about wind when you’re close to a sun, and then it’s only a hard-radiation problem.”
“True enough, as a rule. The trouble is that the usual run of stellar winds involves a mass density of around ten atoms to the cubic centimeter; here it’s a couple of thousand. It turned out that even that much mass wouldn’t accelerate the ships seriously unless the relative velocity were very high indeed, but it was something the planners had to check on. You see what I mean; so stay put. Let’s cut the chatter. The sooner the folks in ‘Big Boy’ can get to work, the sooner we can breathe comfortably. I’ll call ’em.”
Hoey’s finger tensed on a button, replacing the microscopic crystal in the activity field of his communicator with another, whose twin was aboard “Big Boy”—more formally, the Holiad. He spoke without preamble, knowing that someone would be listening.
“We’re in position, and my tracker says we’re holding. Get the job going while the going’s good.”
“Right.” The answer was terse, but not casual. The speaker, a heavy-set, middle-aged man with an almost fanatically intense stare in his blue eyes, leaned forward over the console in front of him and began punching buttons in an intricate sequence. He paused every second or two to interpr
et the patterns of light which winked at him from the board. After half a minute or so the pattern became fixed, and he leaned back, more relaxed.
“Program A is running.” A younger man, seated at a similar console a few yards away, nodded at the words. At first he did not answer aloud; then he decided to speak, though for several seconds he was obviously trying to make up his mind what to say. It was easy to make the wrong remark to Elvin Toner.
“D’you think we’ll get full time out of it?” he ventured at last. “Those pilots are good, but I still wish it had been possible to use robotships for the key stations. A man can’t hold still forever.”
“So do I.” Toner answered without obvious irritation, and his eyes remained fixed on his console, to the younger man’s relief. “I also wish,” the director went on, “that it were possible to use the medium communicator system directly for automatic control of such things as distance, so as to get away from light-lag. But until some genius in your generation works out a way to measure the frequency, wavelength, and propagation velocity of medium waves—or at least, furnishes some evidence that a wave phenomenon is involved—we’ll have to stick with electromagnetic radiation and, at times, with human beings. You may not like it, but by the time you reach my age you’ll have learned to put up with it.”
“I hope not,” Ledermann couldn’t help replying.
“Eh? Why not?” Toner’s eyes almost flicked away from his instruments for a moment, but didn’t quite.
“I mean that if I learn to put up with inconveniences, it’ll be because I haven’t been able to figure out anything else to do about them. Who wants to admit that?”
