by Hal Clement
She was brief, of course. All she could give was a repetition of Dondragmer’s few sentences. She had finished long before there was any evidence on the screen that her words were being received.
When the response came, however, it was satisfying. Every caterpillar-like body in sight looped around toward the pickup; and while Easy had never learned to read expression on a Mesklinite “face” there was no misunderstanding the wildly waving arms and snapping pincers. One of the creatures raced toward a semicircular doorway at the far side of the room and disappeared through it. In spite of the creature’s red-and-black coloration, Easy found herself reminded of the sight, a few years before, of one of her daughters inhaling a strand of spaghetti. A Mesklinite in a hurry under forty Earth gravitities is essentially legless to human eyes.
The sound was not on yet from the Dhrawn end, but there was a rising buzz of conversation in the human communication room. It was not unusual for the exploring land-cruisers to run into difficulties, but in general the Mesklinites on the screen took them more calmly than the human beings who were helplessly watching. In spite of the lack of intercom in the station, people were entering the room and filling the general seats. Screen after screen in the front monitoring areas was being tuned to the “headquarters” unit in the Settlement. Easy and Mersereau, however, were dividing their attention among the four sets reporting from the Kwembly, with only an occasional glance at the other picture.
It was not obvious on the screens that the vehicle was afloat. The transmitters were, of course, sharing any motion it might have, and there was little loose equipment aboard whose motion might have betrayed a pitch or a roll. The bulk of the crew were sailors by training, and lifelong habit prevented them from leaving things around loosely. Easy kept closest watch on the bridge screen hoping to spot something outside which could give a clue to what was occurring, but nothing recognizable could be seen through the windows.
Then the panes were blotted out once more as Dondragmer came back into the foreground and expanded his report.
“There seems to be no immediate danger. The wind is pulling us along fairly rapidly, judging by our wake. Our magnetic course is 66. We are floating level, submerged to about Deck 2. The scientists are trying to compute the density of this liquid, but no one ever bothered to work out displacement tables for this hull as far as I know. If you human beings happen to have that information, my people would be glad to get it. Unless we run into something solid, we seem to be safe; I can’t guess at the chances of that. All machinery is functioning properly, except that the treads have nothing to bite on and race if we give them power. That’s all for now. If your shadow satellites can keep track of our location, we’ll be glad of that information as often as you can manage. Tell Barlennan everything is all right so far.”
Easy shifted microphone connections and repeated the captain’s report as nearly verbatim as she could. She saw, in due course, that it was being taken down in writing at the other end. She rather hoped that the writer would have some question to ask, not that she was likely to be able to answer it, but she was beginning to get that helpless and useless feeling again. The Mesklinite, however, merely acknowledged the information and headed for the door with his notes. Easy was left to wonder how far he had to go to get them to the commander; no human being had a very good idea of the layout of the Mesklinite base.
As a matter of fact, the trip was brief. Most of it appeared to be outdoors because of the settlers’ attitude toward massive objects overhead—an attitude hard to overcome even on a world where gravity, for them, was only a fraction of its normal value. The “roofs” of the Settlement were almost all of a transparent film brought from their home world, and the only departure from a common, city-wide floor level was dictated by terrain. The thought of either a basement or a second story would never have occurred to a Mesklinite; the many-decked Kwembly and her sister vehicles were of basically human and Paneshk design.
The messenger wove through a maze of corridors for a distance of some two hundred yards before reaching the commander’s office. This was at the northern edge of the cluster of foot-high structures which formed the greater part of the Settlement. It was close to the edge of a six-foot cliff which extended for almost a mile east and west, broken by a dozen or so artificial ramps. On the ground below the cliff, but still with their bridges looming above the transparent coverings of the “city,” were two of the huge landcruisers. The wall of Barlennan’s room was also transparent and looked directly out on the nearer of these; the other was parked a thousand feet or so to the east. A few airsuited Mesklinites were also visible outside, dwarfed by the monstrous vehicle they were tending.
Barlennan was watching this group of mechanics critically when the runner entered. The latter used no formality, but burst out with Easy’s relayed report as he entered the compartment. By the time the commander had swerved around to take the written version, he had heard it all orally.
It was not satisfactory, of course. Barlennan had had time to think up a number of questions since the first messenger had arrived, and this answered none of them. The commander was impatient, but did not show it too badly.
“I take it there hasn’t been anything useful from the human weather experts yet.”
“Nothing at all, sir, to us. They may have been talking to the Kwembly without our hearing of course.”
“True enough. Has word gone to our own weather people?”
“Not as far as I know, sir. There’s been nothing very useful to tell them, but Guzmeen may have sent a message there, too.”
“All right. I want to talk to them myself anyway. I’ll be at their complex for the next half hour or more. Tell Guz.”
The messenger made the affirmative nipper gesture and vanished through the door which had brought him. Barlennan took another, and made his way slowly westward through building after building and the enclosed ramps which connected them and made the Settlement a single unit. Most of the ramps sloped upward, and by the time he turned south away from the cliff he was some five feet higher than his office, though not yet on a level with the bridges of the land-cruisers behind him. The roof fabric bulged a little more tautly above him, since the nearly pure hydrogen in the station did not drop as rapidly in pressure with increasing altitude as did Dhrawn’s much denser gas mixture. The Settlement had been built at an elevation which was quite high for Dhrawn, and the total outside pressure was about the same as that at Mesklin’s sea level; it was only when the land-cruisers descended to lower elevations that they carried the extra argon to keep their internal pressures balanced.
Since Dhrawn’s air carried about two percent oxygen, the Mesklinites were rather careful about leaks. Barlennan still remembered the awkward results of an oxygen-hydrogen explosion shortly after he had first encountered human beings.
The research complex was the westernmost and highest side of the colony, fairly well separated from most of the other structures and differing from them in having a solid—though still transparent—roof. It also came closer than any other part of the Settlement to having a second story, since a number of instruments were mounted on the roof and could be reached by ramps and liquid-trap air locks. Not all the instruments, either inside or out, had been furnished by the alien sponsors of the Settlement; the Mesklinites had been using their own imaginations and ingenuity in the last fifty years.
Like the exploring vehicles, the laboratory complex was a mixture of sophistication and crudeness. Power came from hydrogen fusion units, but chemical glassware was homemade. Communication with the orbiting station was by solid-state radios, but messengers had to carry the news physically from one room, or building, to another within the Settlement—though steps were being taken, unknown to the human watchers, to change this. The aliens had had, of course, what they considered excellent reasons for limiting the amount and controlling the nature of the technical help they had furnished, and Barlennan had had what he considered equally good reasons for going along with those
limitations. Neither party had been completely frank in discussing the matter with the other.
Barlennan’s arrival in the central building of the laboratory group was noticed by only a few of the busy creatures there, but one of these promptly stopped his work and greeted the commander.
“Is someone in trouble, or are you just visiting?” he asked.
“Trouble, I’m afraid. The Kwembly, with Dondragmer of all people, is being washed away somewhere. Come to the map room and bring a couple of aerologists along—and find a chemist, too. Don was crossing a snowfield the last I knew, and had been for three million cables or so. Either the temperature went up very suddenly, or the nature of the ice changed, or something brand-new came up.”
“It could easily be the last,” the scientist remarked. “No one has been on this world through one of its years yet. It’s coming closer to its sun all the time—it’s closer now than it’s been since the human put instruments down on it. The sun isn’t much, but we can’t leave it out of our figuring. There are bound to be some sort of seasonal changes, maybe not like the ones at home, but—”
“But that’s just the trouble. If they were like the ones we’re used to we’d know what to expect. Well, we knew the chances we were taking; there’s no use complaining now. If we told the aliens we wanted to give up and go home, they’d be perfectly justified in giving up on us and leaving us here. I hate to think what they must have spent on this project so far, and they have a right to expect some return on it. Round up whoever you think may know something useful, and meet me at the big map.” Barlennan gestured a hasty dismissal and headed for the largest room in the group.
This was some forty feet square, and almost entirely unfurnished. Its floor was slowly being laid out as a map which would eventually, it was hoped, cover the Low Alpha area which had been selected by the project planners for concentrated study. Like the ones in the station millions of miles above, it bore markers indicating the locations of the exploring land-cruisers; and similarly, it gave anyone who examined it a feeling of futility. Dhrawn—even this small section of it—was jo big! Over nine times the diameter of Earth, nearly four times that little world’s mean density; it has over three times the surface area of even giant Mesklin. The twenty by thirty-five thousand mile oval of Low Alpha covers a larger fraction of its surface than Australia does of Earth’s, but not much larger.
On the map, surface features had been indicated in black along the routes followed so far by the land-cruisers. This matched the corresponding information on the human maps above. More data, indicated in red, had been secured from other sources, and was generally unknown to the beings above. This was one place in the Settlement where there would be no vision transmitter while Barlennan was running things.
At a scale of roughly a thousand miles to the foot, the black markings formed a solid patch a few inches square around the Settlement, with narrow lines extending as much as a dozen feet from it in some directions. If Barlennan had ever seen a photomicrograph of a human nerve cell, he would probably have regarded it as a good simile for what was on the floor around him.
He had reared his forward end up as high as was comfortable, bringing his eyes six or seven inches from the floor, and was looking at the map rather gloomily when the scientists began to arrive. Bendivence was either very optimistic or very much the opposite;
Barlennan couldn’t decide which was the more likely reason for his having called nearly twenty people to the conference. These gathered a few feet from the commander, reared up in similar fashion, and waited politely for his information and questions. He started without preamble.
“The Kwembly was here at the last report,” he indicated. “It had been crossing a field of snow—water snow, nearly pure as regards dissolved material but quite dirty according to Dondragmer’s science people.”
“Borndender, isn’t it?” queried someone. Barlennan made the affirmative gesture and went on.
“The snowfield started about here.” He crawled to a spot nearly four feet northwest of the position marker. “It lies between a couple of mountain ranges, which we have indicated only roughly. The air explorers haven’t been that far south yet, except, of course, for Dondragmer’s own scouts. A short time ago, while the Kwembly was stopped for a routine maintenance check, a heavy wind came up, and then a dense fog of pure or nearly pure ammonia. Then, quite suddenly, the temperature rose several degrees and they found themselves afloat, being blown roughly eastward by the wind. We would like explanations, and we badly need constructive advice. Why did the temperature go up, and why did the snow melt? Is there any connection between the two—remembering that the highest temperature they mentioned was only about a hundred and three, twenty-six or seven degrees below the melting point of water. Why the wind? How long is it likely to last? It’s carrying the Kwembly toward the hot regions inside Low Alpha south of the Esket site.” He gestured toward a heavily red-marked section of the floor. “Can we tell how far that way they’ll be carried? I didn’t want Dondragmer to go out on this trip, and I particularly don’t want to lose him even if we don’t agree completely.
“We’ll call for what help we can get from the men, but you’ll have to use your brains, too. I know some of you have been trying to make sense out of Dhrawn’s climatology; do you have any ideas you can trust at all, and which might apply here?”
Several minutes of silence followed. Even those in the group most given to uttering rhetorical speeches had been working with Barlennan too long to risk them now, and for some time there were no really constructive ideas. Then one of the scientists scuttled toward the door and vanished, with a “Just a moment, I have to check a table” floating behind him. He was back without thirty seconds.
“I can account for the temperature and melting,” he said firmly. “The ground surface was water ice, the fog ammonia. The heat of solution as they met and mixed would have caused the temperature to rise. Ammonia-water solutions form eutectics which can melt as low as seventy-one.”
Mild hoots of appreciation and approving gestures of nipper-equipped arms greeted this suggestion. Barlennan went with the crowd, though words had been used which were not entirely familiar to him, but he was not through with his questions.
“Does that give us any idea how far the Kwembly will be carried?”
“Not by itself. We need information about the extent of the original snowfield,” was the answer. “Since only the Kwembly has been in the area, about the only hope is the photo maps made by the humans. You know how much we can get from those. Half the time you can’t tell between ice and clouds, and they were all made before we landed here.”
“Give it a try, anyway,” ordered Barlennan. “With luck, you can at least tell whether those mountain ranges to the east are blocking the Kwembly’s present path. If they are, it’s hard to see how they could be carried more than a few hundred thousand cables.”
“Right,” answered one of the investigators. “We’ll check. Ben, Dees, come along; you’re more used to the photos than I am.” The three vanished through the door. The others broke up into small groups, muttering arguments to each other and waving excitedly, now at the map underfoot, now at less obvious items presumably in the nearby laboratories, Barlennan endured this for several minutes before deciding that a little more guidance was needed.
“If that plateau Don was crossing was such pure water, there couldn’t have been any ammonia precipitation there for a long, long time. Why should things change so suddenly?”
“It almost has to be a seasonal effect,” answered one of the men. “I can only guess so far, but I’d say it had something to do with some consistent change in the wind pattern. Air currents from different parts of the planet will be saturated with water, or ammonia, according to the nature of the surface they pass over—mostly its temperature, I suppose. The planet is nearly twice as far from its sun at one time as at another, and its axis is much more inclined than Mesklin’s. It’s easy to believe that at one time of year only
water is precipitated on that plateau and at another it gets supplied with ammonia. Actually, water’s vapor pressure is so low that it’s hard to see what situation would get water into the atmosphere without supplying even more ammonia, but I’m sure it’s possible. We’ll work on it, but it’s another of those times when we’d be a lot better off with world-wide, year-round information. These human beings seem to be in an awful hurry; they could have waited a few more years to land us here, I should think.”
Barlennan made the gesture which a human being would have matched with a noncommittal grunt. “The field data would be convenient. Just think of yourself as being here to get it instead of having it given to you.”
“Of course. Are you going to send the Kalliff or the Hoorsh out to help Dondragmer? This is certainly different from the Esket situation.”
“From our point of view, yes. It might look funny to the humans, though, if I insisted on sending out a rescue cruiser now after letting them talk me out of it the other time. I’ll think it over. There’s more than one way of sailing upwind. You do that theoretical work you’ve just been talking about, but be thinking about what you’d want to take on a field trip up toward the Kwembly.”
“Right, Commander.” The scientist started to turn away, but Barlennan added a few more words.
“And Jemblakee. No doubt you’ll be strolling over to Communications to talk to your human colleagues. Please don’t mention this . . . what was it? . . . heat of solution and eutectic business. Let them mention it first, if they’re going to, and be properly impressed when and if they do. You understand?”
“Perfectly.” The scientist would have shared a grin of understanding with his commander if their faces had been capable of that sort of distortion. Jemblakee left, and after a moment’s thought Barlennan did the same.
