Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  I can’t describe how it felt. In fact, since it knocked me unconscious for several seconds, it isn’t right to say that I felt anything. There was sensation of a sort, though; perhaps if I were sure just what it feels like to be hit with a sledgehammer simultaneously on every square inch of my body I might use that as an illustration. As it is, I’ll have to let you use your own imagination, aided if you like by the experiment I suggested a moment ago.

  The shock affected all of us about equally. It was a minute, perhaps more, before we were swimming as fast as we could back toward the place we had left the others. None of us had any doubt about what had happened; none of us was really eager to go back to the scene.

  But we hurried.

  I had expected to find four bodies in the mud where our companions had been enjoying their game, but it wasn’t that simple. The wreckage of the sub was about where it had been, as far as I could tell. But the shock wave as the hull imploded had kicked up a cloud of ooze which was still settling, and our lights showed us very little. We stayed close together and swam through the obscurity in all directions, searching every square foot of bottom not only for obvious fragments but for signs of objects buried under recently settled mud. That took no communication to arrange.

  We found one of the men partly buried about fifteen feet from the nearest part of the wreck. He seemed intact as far as gross injuries were concerned, but I knew he couldn’t possibly be alive. The shock wave had knocked us out at several hundred yards, and the inverse square law applies under water, too.

  We could find none of the others on the bottom, but as the mud settled another of them became visible about twenty feet up, rising very slowly. A thin trail of oily droplets was leaking from the base of his helmet. I hadn’t stopped to think that with the dense liquid filling them, the suits must also have flotation material to let the wearers swim in water. With the heavier liquid leaking out, the fellow’s buoyancy was going positive.

  That made it fairly obvious why we couldn’t find the other two. They had probably sprung faster leaks. I could imagine them somewhere above us in the dark, ballooning toward the surface with the last of the liquid that had made their strange lives possible dribbling back toward the sea bottom. I thought of looking for a rain of oily drops which might let us track them, but I had no way of communicating the suggestion to the others, and it was pretty obvious that our lights were far too weak for such a search anyway. The rest of the group had the same general idea, evidently. With the two bodies in tow, we headed back toward the entrance.

  I wish there were enough light to read the facial expressions of our companions. I would have liked to be able to guess how they felt about the foreigners whose operations had killed four of their friends. I didn’t know what reason Bert had given for the whole procedure; maybe they thought it was an important piece of engineering research, or something like that. I hoped so. It was bad enough feeling guilty myself, without having the rest of the population down on me too.

  I also wished I knew how Bert felt. The victims might have been close friends of his, for all I knew.

  I thought I might get some idea when we reached the entrance, but I was disappointed. There was plenty of excitement when we came in, but I simply couldn’t tell what most of the facial expressions meant.

  I hadn’t realized how conventional such expressions actually are; unless you’ve grown up in a society where there is a standard face mask for anger, and another for disgust, and so on, reading faces isn’t a very safe way to collect information. The people might have been angry, sad, or disgusted; I couldn’t tell. There was much gesturing among them as the bodies were taken away, and a certain amount between some of them and Bert, but all I can say about their feeling toward us comes from the fact that we weren’t mobbed. I couldn’t even be sure that that situation would last; maybe no close friends or relatives of the victims happened to be present.

  Activity around the entrance took half an hour or so to die down to normal. The bodies were finally gone, the men who had been with us had swum off about their own affairs and the swimmers one always seemed to see around any of the entrances were paying no more attention to us than usual. For some of them, that was a good deal; the girl who had gone down to the power section with us was back with her friends.

  Bert was finally able to use the writing pad again. There was a lot I would have said—I was still feeling shaken, and guilty, and a lot of other things of which stupid was the kindest—but the same old communication trouble blocked me. There are some times when a man just can’t talk fast enough, and a lot of times when he can’t come even close to writing fast enough.

  I rather expected Bert to say something about what had happened, since I was sure enough of his facial expressions to know that he’d been hit pretty hard too. But his writing was confined strictly to business.

  “That should convince Marie, if anything will. The best thing will be for you to go to her now, tell her Joey’s sub has been found wrecked and try to persuade her to take her own boat out to see it. Then she may be willing just to keep on going. If she won’t believe you and insists on staying put, we’ll have to bring the wreck in. That’ll have to work. I don’t know what we’ll do if it doesn’t.”

  “You could stop feeding her.”

  He looked at me and raised one eyebrow.

  “Could you?” he scrawled. I shrugged my shoulders, but knew I couldn’t.

  “Lead on,” I wrote. He led.

  The speechless pauses while I was going from one place to another would have given me all sorts of opportunity to think, and maybe even to see holes in the fabric I’d been so busy weaving, if I were only another hundred percent or so quicker on the uptake. As it was, the next twenty minutes of swimming brought me no ideas at all except details of what to say to Marie.

  None of these represented first-class plotting. I was still very uneasy as I swam up to her sub—Bert had stayed out of sight, as before—and tapped on the hull. Fortunately, that attitude fitted perfectly with the act I was supposed to play.

  Marie answered almost at once, and her face appeared at the conning port. It was nice to see another set of features on which the expression could be read, even though the expression wasn’t all I would have liked just at first. It softened a little when she recognized me, though. As before, I couldn’t be sure of her vocal intonations, but the words came through understandably enough. “Where have you been? I was beginning to think they’d disposed of you, too.” I answered the important part of the remark on the pad.

  “Finding things out.”

  “From Bert?”

  “No. They have a library here, much of it handwritten stuff” by other people who have come down here in the past—and much too much of it for Bert to have written himself. The writings are pretty consistent, and I think I have a fairly sound picture of the whole situation.”

  “What did you learn about Joey?”

  I hesitated. I had been sure the question would come early, and I had my lie all made up, but telling a lie to Marie came hard. I told myself again that it was in a good cause and started to write, but she had already caught my hesitation, or maybe the expression that went with it—I’ve never claimed to be an actor.

  “You have heard about him, haven’t you?” I nodded.

  “And he’s—he’s—”

  She fell silent, watching me through the armor glass. I nodded to that, too. It was easier than writing an out-and-out falsehood.

  I couldn’t see anything but her face, but I could imagine the clenched fists. In fact, I had to wince as what was probably one of them struck the inside of the hull and sent a painful sound wave pulsing out into the room. Her voice came again.

  “I was right. He wouldn’t sell out. He wouldn’t give up everything a decent person believes in, so they killed him.”

  “Why should they destroy him that way?” I countered. “It could have been done much more easily while he was inside, as he must have been when they were talking to him
if you’re right. They could have let him suffocate or starve—which they haven’t done to you, remember—when his supplies ran out. They wouldn’t have wasted the sub that way, either.”

  “Simple. Because they wanted the death to occur outside, with him in the sub, so that when a search was made it would appear a regular accident. I’m surprised you didn’t think of that.” At least she didn’t say ‘even you’.

  I’m slower-witted than Marie and know it perfectly well, but I had thought of that, as well as an answer for it.

  “Don’t be silly. Who’d be surprised, or even suspicious, at finding nothing when they did search for him? The Pacific has a lot of square miles at its bottom, and even more cubic ones on the way down.”

  For a wonder, she had no answer to that, and was silent for several seconds. When she did speak again, she had dropped the subject of Joey for the moment and asked me to tell her what I had learned from the library.

  XXI

  It took a long time, but I did my best. She read each page with care, sometimes nodding silently, sometimes asking questions after finishing it. I answered them all as my knowledge permitted.

  About half her questions had to do with how heavily I had depended on Bert for my information. It must have been over an hour before I had painted about the same general picture for her that I had formed myself.

  I closed with the plea that was the key to the whole plan.

  “Marie, you’ve got to get back and report all this. Whatever Bert may have said about your staying, the Board has got to know everything. Bert and I will get back on our own when we can, and you don’t have to consider Joey anymore.”

  “Bert? Why should he want to go back? I know he’s staying. He admitted it. He’s had a taste of doing what he wants, without having to consider other people. He tried to talk me into doing the same, the dirty beast. The fact that he’s staying here is the only thing that makes me willing to listen to your suggestion that I go.”

  “I don’t believe that of him,” I wrote. “He told me he was staying, too, but implied that it wasn’t permanently. My feeling then was that he’d joined to find out what we need to know and would come back when and if he could, just as I did.”

  “I can believe it of you.’” She fell silent again and thought for several minutes while I listened to my own heartbeat. It was the most encouraging thing she’d ever said to me, and I felt worse than ever about the lie. I had to tell myself several times more that it was for her own safety.

  Her own safety wasn’t Marie’s concern, however. She made that clear enough in the next few minutes. When she finally did speak again, it was clear that she’d been doing some rapid planning.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll go, though I still don’t think they’ll let me get away. There’ll be some sort of accident. I’ve an idea, though, which just might tell which of us is right about this.”

  I looked at her inquiringly, but didn’t bother to write anything.

  “You seem to believe that they’re willing for me to go back and report to the Board, and that the change that’s been made in you and Bert can be reversed so that you can come back and breathe air again when you want to. Right?” I nodded. “All right. I don’t believe either of those items. To find out, you just swim off and tell Bert that I’ll go back if he’ll come with me, in this sub. He can come back down afterward again if he likes, but I’ll be much more convinced of his yarn if I see him breathing air again, and I’ll feel a lot safer if he’s in this boat with me when I drive it out of here. Now tell me why you think that’s a silly idea and a waste of time and effort, and all that sort of nonsense.”

  I didn’t need air-normal sound transmission to know there was sarcasm in her tone; I couldn’t hear it, but it was certainly there. She didn’t trust me entirely, either. At least I could get some satisfaction out of surprising her with my answer.

  “It seems like a fine idea to me,” I wrote. “I’ll find Bert and put it up to him. I suppose you wouldn’t accept me as a substitute if he prefers to stay a while longer.”

  Her expression changed a little, but I wasn’t quite sure what the new one meant.

  “ ’Fraid not,” she said. “It would prove your point about the return possibility, but I don’t think you’d make as good a hostage.” That was some comfort, anyway. “We’ll play it my way, as far as it goes. Go find Bert and learn what he says.”

  I swam off obediently. Bert was waiting in the entrance chamber this time, apparently improving his knowledge of the finger language with the assistance of our same old followers, the girl and her friends—two of them, anyway. I couldn’t have told which was the missing one.

  I had boiled everything down to one sentence on the pad and showed this to him the moment I was close enough.

  “Marie says she’ll go if you’ll change back and go with her.”

  He stared at it for a full half minute without even moving to take it from my hand. Then he suddenly snatched it and, without clearing the writing swam off down the tunnel toward the sub. The rest of us followed. He streaked over to the conning port where her face was still visible and held up the pad with my words still on it. She looked at it. He pointed at me and back at the pad and put on an expression which anyone, regardless of cultural background, could have read. She answered aloud.

  “That’s it, Bert.” He cleared the page, looking at her in a puzzled fashion.

  “Why?” he wrote.

  “I may explain later. Will you come?”

  His answer startled Marie. I wasn’t sure what it did to me.

  “Sure. I may have to come back later—there’s useful work to do down here. But it might be best if I went with you now anyway. There’s a lot to be reported that there hasn’t been time for either of us to tell you.” I thought that was a pretty tactful way of passing off her refusal to listen to him all those weeks. “I could make a more thorough job of it.” He paused in thought, even longer than it took Marie to read the sentences. Then he went on, “We’ll tow your sub to the operating room—it’ll be easier that way than for you to pilot it—and connect it to the lock. I’ll go in and get de-pressurized. They won’t argue too hard. I can come in through your lock then, and we can go back up together.” He turned to me and added the word, “Okay?”

  I wasn’t sure it was okay. Without Bert I wouldn’t be able to do anything useful, as far as I could see. No doubt the girl who was still watching us, and her friends, might be willing to keep me from starving until I learned my way around. They might even guide me back to where I could work with Joey, if that was to be my main occupation; but I couldn’t see what use I’d be to the Board that way. I hope it’s been obvious that I never intended my residence to be permanent, as Joey apparently had. I hadn’t been lying to Marie about that.

  There was no use suggesting that I go back with the two of them. The sub wouldn’t take us. It was built for one, and crowding Bert in would be hard enough.

  Then I remembered that Bert’s own sub should still be around somewhere. I grabbed the pad.

  “Why can’t we all go back?” I wrote. “Your boat must still be here, too. If Marie feels so strongly about having you in hers, I could still use yours. You can still come down again, or both of us can, if the job seems to call for it.”

  It seemed like a fine idea to me, and even Marie appeared to approve of it, but Bert had a question or two. I had to admit he raised good points.

  “The operating room will handle only one at a time. Once I’m done, there’ll be communication trouble during your own depressurization.”

  “You could explain the whole program to them first. For that matter, I could go through it first.”

  “I’m not sure I could explain it too well. Remember, I’m no expert in this finger-wiggling.”

  “But why couldn’t I go first, with you directing which sub was to be connected, and so on, until it was your turn?”

  “You could, I suppose. We’d better check my boat, though. It’s been here a
long time and been used for regular work here. The flotation system will certainly need going over. I’m not sure I’d like to risk it against pressure differential myself, but we’ll see. We’d better check that first.”

  Marie had been reading our conversation and nodded approval, so our flock went off to look over the vessel.

  He was right. The flotation liquid was completely gone. It hadn’t been used even locally for months, since there were no facilities for making the hydrocarbon its buoyancy tanks were designed to use. The local machines used the same sort of low-density solid employed in the swimming coveralls; it would have involved major structural changes to put that into the submarine. No one had considered it worth the trouble.

  “I could use one of the local boats,” I suggested when this became clear.

  “Don’t try it until you learn the language,” was the rejoinder. That seemed a little silly. A sub is a sub, and you either understand them or you don’t. A look into one of them educated me, though.

  I still don’t see why their control panels are made that way; the laws of physics are the same down here as up above. Apparently the difference in basic thinking which goes with that weird graphic language extends into more factors than mere common sense would lead anyone to expect.

  It began to look as though the other two were going back alone. Bert seemed quite resigned to it, and even I was getting that way. When we went back to Marie with the word, though, she came up with another of her ideas. I’ve come to suspect since then that she had something more in her mind than just getting me back to the surface, just as she had when she insisted on Bert’s going along, but she didn’t confide in me. Of course, that may have been because there was no way for her to speak to me alone.

  “There’s plenty of spare buoyancy in my tanks,” she pointed out suddenly and firmly. “Just attach that wreck of Bert’s to my tow-lugs, and we can haul it along. You say the hull’s sound enough to hold against the pressure when you pump it down again.”