Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Dondragmer and his companion were, of course, unhurt; to beings who regarded two hundred Earth gravities as normal and six hundred as a most minor inconvenience, that sort of acceleration meant nothing. They had not even lost their grips, and were still at their posts. The captain was not worried about direct injuries to his crew; his first words showed that he was considering matters much farther ahead.

  “By stations, report!” he bellowed into the speaking tubes. “Check hull soundness at all points, and report all cracks, open breaks, dents, and other evidence for leaks. Lab personnel to emergency stations, and check for oxygen. Life-support, cut tank circulation until the oxygen check is done. Now!”

  Apparently the speaking tubes were intact, at least. Hoots of response began to return immediately. As the reports accumulated, Beetchermarlf began to relax. He had not really expected the shell, which protected him from Dhrawn’s poisonous air, to withstand anything like such a shock, and his respect for alien engineering went up several grades. He had regarded artificial structures of any sort as normally inferior in strength and durability to any living body. He had, of course, excellent reason for such an attitude. Nevertheless, it appeared when all the reports were finally in that there were no major structural failures or even visible cracks. Whether the normal leaks, unavoidable in a structure which had to have entrances for personnel and equipment, not to mention hull openings for instruments and control lines, were any worse than they had been would not be known for a while; pressure monitoring and oxygen checking would, of course, continue as normal routine.

  Power was still on, which surprised no one. The twenty-five independent hydrogen converters, designed as identical modules which could be moved from any energyusing site in the Kwembly to any other, were solid-state devices with no moving parts larger than the molecules of gaseous fuel which were fed into them. They could have been placed under the hammer of a power forge without damage.

  Most of the outside lights were gone, or at least inoperative, though these could be replaced. Some were still working, however, and from the submerged end of the bridge it was possible to see out. Fog still blocked the view from the upper end. Dondragmer made his way very gingerly to the low extremity and took a brief look at the conglomeration of rounded rocks, from half his own length to a score of times that diameter, into which his command had managed to wedge itself. Then he climbed back even more circumspectly to his station, energized the sound system of his radio, and transmitted the report which Barlennan was to hear a little over a minute later. He did not wait for an answer, but began issuing orders to the helmsman.

  “Beetch, stand by here in case the men have anything to say. I’m going to make a complete check myself, especially of the air locks. With all there is to be said for that design, we didn’t have this much of a roll in mind when we settled on it. We may only be able to use the small emergency ones, especially since the main one seems to be underneath us at the moment—it may be blocked on the outside. Chatter with the human beings if you want; the more of us who can use their language, and the more of them who can use ours, the better. You have the bridge.”

  Dondragmer made the habitual, but now rather futile, gesture of rapping on the hatch for clearance; then he opened it and disappeared, leaving Beetchermarlf alone.

  The helmsman had no urge at the moment for idle talk with the station above. His captain had left him with too much to think about.

  He was not exactly overwhelmed at being left in charge of the bridge, under the circumstances. He was not even too concerned about the main air lock being blocked; the smaller ones were adequate—though not for life support equipment, he suddenly remembered. Well, at the moment the desirability of going out seemed very small, though if the Kwembly were permanently disabled that need would have to be faced.

  The real question, in such an event, was just what good going outside would do. The twelve thousand miles or so—which Beetchermarlf thought of as nearly fourteen million cables—was a long, long walk, especially with a load of life-support equipment. Without that apparatus it was not to be thought of; Mesklinites were amazingly tough organisms mechanically, and had a temperature tolerance range which was still disbelieved by many human biologists, but oxygen was another matter. Its partial pressure outside at the moment was presumably about fifty pounds per square inch, quite enough to kill any member of the Kwembly’s crew in seconds.

  The most desirable line of action at the moment was to get the big machine back on her treads. How, and probably whether, this could be done would depend largely on the stream of liquid flowing past the stranded hull. Working outside in that current might not be impossible, but it was going to be difficult and dangerous. The airsuited Mesklinites would have to be heavily ballasted to stay put at any task, and lifelines would complicate the details.

  The stream might not, of course, be permanent. It had apparently just come into existence with the change in weather, and one might hope that it would cease flowing as suddenly. However, as Beetchermarlf well knew, there is a difference between weather and climate. If the river were seasonal, it’s to be academic to the Mesklinites; “temporary” nature might turn out Dhrawn’s year was some eight times as long as that of Earth, over one and a half times that of Mesklin.

  This was the sort of field where human information might be useful. The aliens had been observing Dhrawn carefully for nearly half of one of its years, and casually for much longer. They should have some idea of its seasons. The helmsman wondered whether it would be out of order for him to put such a question to someone in the orbiting station, when the captain had not. Of course, the captain had said he could use the radio for chatter, and made no mention of what might or might not be said.

  The idea that there was anything except the Esket incident which should not be discussed with the human sponsors of the Dhrawn expedition had not dripped down the chain of command as far as Beetchermarlf. The young helmsman had almost made up his mind to initiate a call to the station when the radio beside him spoke. It spoke, furthermore, in his own language, though the accent was not above reproach.

  “Dondragmer. I know you must be busy, but if you can’t talk now I’d be glad if someone else could. I am Benjamin Hoffman, an assistant in the aerology lab here at the station, and I’d like two kinds of help if anyone can find time to give it.

  “For myself, I’d like practice in language; it must be obvious that I need it. For the lab, we’re in a very embarrassing position. Twice in a row we’ve worked out weather predictions for your part of the planet which were ’way off. We just don’t have enough detailed information to do the job properly. The observations we can make from here don’t resolve enough, and there aren’t anywhere near enough reporting stations down there. You and the others have planted a lot of automatics on your trips, but they still don’t cover much of the planet, as you know. Since good predictions will be as useful to you as they will be to us, I thought maybe I could talk things out in real detail with some of your scientists, and maybe work out the weather patterns where you are well enough to supplement the background calculations and really get good forecasts, at least right in your neighborhood.”

  The helmsman replied eagerly.

  “The captain is not on the bridge, Benjaminhoffman. I am Beetchermarlf, one of the helmsmen, now on watch. Speaking for myself, I should be very glad to exchange language practice when duties permit, as now. I am afraid the scientists will be pretty busy for a while—I am myself, most of the time. We are having some trouble, though you may not know all the details. The captain did not have time for the full story in the report I heard him send up a few minutes ago. I will give you as complete a picture as I can of the situation, and some thoughts which have occurred to me since the captain left the bridge. You might record the information for your people, and comment on my ideas if you wish. If you don’t think they’re worth mentioning to the captain, I won’t. He’ll be busy enough without them anyway. I’ll wait until you tell me you’re ready to
record, or that you don’t want to, before I start.” Beetchermarlf paused, not entirely for the reason he had just given. He was suddenly afflicted with a doubt whether he should bother one of these alien beings with his own ideas. They suddenly seemed crude and poorly worked out.

  Still, the factual reports could not help being useful; there was obviously much detailed information about the Kwembly’s present situation which the men could not possibly know yet. By the time Benj’s approval came from the speaker, the helmsman had recovered some of his self-confidence.

  “That will be fine, Beetchermarlf. I’m ready to tape your report—I was going to anyway, for language practice—and I’ll pass on whatever you want. Even if your weathermen are busy, maybe we could try what I suggested with the weather information just between the two of us. After all, you can probably get their measurements, and you’re on the spot and can see everything, and if you’re one of the sailors Barlennan recruited on Mesklin you certainly know something about weather. For all I know, you may have spent a couple of my lifetimes in that place on Mesklin learning engineering and research methods. Come ahead; I’m ready here.”

  This speech finished restoring Beetchermarlf’s morale. It had been only ten of Mesklin’s years since alien education had started for a selected few of its natives; this human being must be five years old or younger. Of course, there was no telling what that might mean in the way of maturity for his species, and one could not very well ask; but in spite of the aura of supernormality which tended to surround all the aliens, one just did not think of a five-year-old as a superior being.

  As relaxed as anyone could well be on a floor with a sixty-degree tilt, the sailor began his description of the Kwembly’s situation. He gave a detailed account of the trip down what now had to be recognized as a river, and of its conclusion. He described minutely what could be seen from the bridge. He explained how they were stranded off their tracks, and emphasized the situation which faced the crew if this could not be corrected. He even detailed the structure of the air locks, and explained why the main one was probably unusable and the others possibly so.

  “It will help a great deal in the captain’s planning,” he concluded, “if we can have some trustworthy estimate of what will happen to this river, and especially whether and when it will run dry. If the whole snowfield melts at this season and runs off the plateau through this one drain, I suppose we’re here for the best part of a year and will have to plan accordingly. If you can give any hope that we can work on dry land without having to wait too long, though, it would be very good to know.”

  Benj was rather longer than sixty-four seconds in answering this; he, too, had been given material for thought.

  “I have your details on tape, and have sent it up to Planning,” his words came through at last. “They’ll distribute copies to the labs. Even I can see that figuring out the life story of your river is going to be a nasty job; maybe an impossible one without a lot more knowledge. As you say, the whole snowfield might be starting a seasonal melt, and if the area of North America has to drain through one river you’re there for a long time. I don’t know how much of the place your aerial scout reports cover, and I don’t know how ambiguous the photos from up here may be, but I’ll bet when it’s all down on maps there still will be room for argument. Even if everyone agrees on a conclusion—well, we still don’t know much about that planet.”

  “But you’ve had so much experience with other planets—many of them!” returned Beetchermarlf. “I should think that would be of some help.”

  Again the answer was longer in coming back than light-lag alone would explain.

  “Men and their friends have had experience on a lot of planets, that’s true, and I’ve read a good deal of it. The trouble is, practically none of it helps here. There are three kinds of planet, basically.

  One we call Terrestrial, like my own home; it is small, dense, and practically without hydrogen. The second is the Jovian, or Type Two, which tend to be much larger and much less dense because they have kept most of their hydrogen from the time they originally formed—we think. Those two were the only kinds we knew about before we left our own star’s neighborhood, because they are the only kinds in our system.

  “The Type Three is very large, very dense, and very hard to account for. Theories which had the Type One’s losing their hydrogen because of their initially small mass, and the Two’s keeping theirs because of their greater mass, were fine as long as we’d never heard of the Three’s. Our ideas were perfectly satisfactory and convincing as long as we didn’t know too much, if you’ll forgive my sounding like my basic science teacher.

  “Type Three is the sort you’re on. There are none of them around any sun with a Type One planet—I suppose there must be a reason for that, but I don’t know what it is—so nothing was known about them by any of the Community races until we learned to travel between stars and began to do it on a large scale—large enough so the principal interest of wandering ships wasn’t just new habitable planets. Even then we couldn’t study them firsthand, any more than we could the Jovian worlds;

  we could send down a few special, very expensive and usually very unreliable robots, but that was all. Your species is the first we’ve ever encountered able to stand the gravity of a Type Three—or the pressure of a Type Two, for that matter.”

  “But isn’t Mesklin a Type Three, by your description? You must know a lot about it by now; you’ve been in touch with our people for something like ten years, and some of you have even landed at the Rim—I mean the equator.”

  “More like fifty of our years. The trouble is that Mesklin isn’t a Type Three. It’s a peculiar Two. It would have had all the hydrogen of any Jovian world if it hadn’t been for its rotation—that terrific spin which gives your world an eighteen-minute day and a shape like a fried egg. There aren’t any others like it which we’ve found yet, and no intermediate cases that anyone’s recognized, or at least that I’ve heard of. That’s why the Community races were willing to go to so much trouble and effort and spend so much time building up contact with your world and setting up this expedition to Dhrawn. We’ll find out a good deal in thirty years or so about that world’s makeup from the neutrino counters in the shadow satellites, but the seismic equipment you people have been planting will add a lot of detail and remove a lot of ambiguity. So will your chemical work. In five or six of your years we may know enough about that rock ball to make a sensible guess why it’s there, or at least whether it ought to be called a star or a planet.”

  “You mean you only made contact with the people of Mesklin so you could learn more about Dhrawn?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that at all. People are people, and worth getting to know for their own sake—at least, both my parents feel that way, though I’ve met folks who certainly don’t. I don’t think the idea for the Dhrawn project got started until long after your College was under way, though my mother, or Dr. Aucoin, could tell you more exactly—all that was long before I was born. Of course, when it dawned on someone that you folks could make first-hand investigation of a place like Dhrawn, everyone jumped at the chance.”

  This, of course, forced Beetchermarlf to ask a question which he would ordinarily have regarded as a strictly human affair and none of his business, like the matter of how mature a five-year-old should be. It slipped out before he caught himself, however; and for over an hour thereafter he and Benj were arguing over the reasons for such activities as the Dhrawn project—why such a vast amount of effort should be devoted to an activity with no obvious material return in prospect. Benj did not defend his side too well. He was able to give the usual answers about the drive of curiosity, which Beetchermarlf could see up to a point; he knew enough history to have heard how close man and several other species had come to extinction from energy starvation before they had developed the hydrogen fusion converter; but he was too young to be really eloquent. He lacked the experience to be able to point out convincingly, even to himself, the complet
e dependence of any culture on its understanding of the laws of the universe. The conversation never became heated, which would have been difficult in any argument where there is a built-in cooling-down period between any remark and its answer; but the only really satisfactory progress made was in Benj’s mastery of Stennish.

  The discussion was interrupted by Beetchermarlf suddenly becoming aware of a change in his surroundings. For the last hour his entire attention had been on Benj’s words and his own replies; the canted bridge and gurgling liquid had receded to the far background of his mind. He was quite surprised to realize abruptly that the pattern of lights twinkling above him was Orion. The fog had gone.

  Alert once more to his real surroundings, he noticed that the water line around the bridge seemed just a trifle lower. Ten minutes’ careful watching convinced him that this was so. The river was falling.

  Part way through the ten minutes he had, of course, been queried about his sudden silence by Benj, and had given the reason. The boy had immediately notified McDevitt, so by the time Beetchermarlf was sure about the changing water level there were several interested human beings on hand above to hear about it. The helmsman reported briefly to them on the radio, and only after doing this did he call through the speaking tubes for Dondragmer.

  The captain was far aft, behind the laboratory section and just forward of the compartment containing the pressure bladder, when the call came. There was a pause after the helmsman finished speaking, and Beetchermarlf expected the captain to come bursting through the bridge hatchway after a few seconds; but Dondragmer did not yield to the temptation. The ports in the rest of the hull, including the compartment where he was, were much too small to permit a clear estimate of the water level, so he had to accept his helmsman’s judgment. Dondragmer was willing to do this, rather to the young sailor’s surprise.