by Hal Clement
“Keep track as exactly as you can of the rate of fall, until you are relieved,” was his order. “Let me and the human beings know the rate as soon as you can guess it reliably, and thereafter whenever you change your estimate.”
Beetchermarlf acknowledged the order and clambered across the bridge to a point where he could mark the water line with a scratch on one of the window stanchions. He reported the action to the captain and the human listeners, and returned to his station with his eyes fixed on the mark. The ripples in the liquid were several inches high, settling down only at rare intervals, so it was some time before he could be at all sure of the change in depth. There were two or three impatient queries from above, which he answered politely in the best he could muster of his limited human language, before Benj reported that he was once more alone except for nonentities watching other cruisers. Most of the time thereafter, until Takoorch arrived as bridge relief, was spent by the two in describing their home worlds, correcting each other’s misconceptions about Earth and Mesklin by way of language practice, and, though neither was fully aware of it, developing a warm personal friendship.
Beetchermarlf returned six hours later to let Takoorch go—actually the interval was twenty-four days by Mesklinite reckoning, a standard watch length—and found that the water was down nearly a foot from his reference mark. Takoorch informed him that the human Benj had just returned from a rest period. The younger helmsman wondered privately just how soon after Tak’s arrival the other had found it was time to take a rest. Naturally he could not ask such a question, but as he settled back into his station he sent a call radiating upward.
“I’m back on, Benj. I don’t know how recently Tak made a report to you, but the water is down over half a body length and the current seems much slower. The wind is nearly calm. Have your scientists anything to report?”
He had time during the answer delay to realize that the last question had been rather pointless, since the principal news wanted from the human scientists was the probable duration of the river, but there was nothing to be done about it now. Besides, maybe they did have something of value.
“Your friend Takoorch did tell us about the water and wind, among a good many other things,” Benj’s voice announced. “It’s good to have you back, Beetch. I haven’t heard anything from the labs, but it seems to me from what you’ve said about the way you’re tipped and the rate the water’s been dropping, and from what I can judge from the cruiser model I have here, that another sixty or seventy hours should leave you dry. That’s if the water keeps dropping at the same rate, of course. It might do that if it’s flowing away through a nice smooth channel, but I wouldn’t count on that. I hate to sound pessimistic, but my guess is that it will slow down before all the liquid is gone.”
“You may be right,” agreed Beetchermarlf. “On the other hand, with the current easing off we can probably work outside safely enough before it’s all gone.” This was a prophetic remark. It was still on its way to the station when a speaking tube hooted for attention.
“Beetchermarlf! Inform the human beings that you will be relieved immediately by Kervenser, and report at once to the starboard after emergency lock in your airsuit. I want a check of the trucks and tiller lines. Two others will go with you for safety. I am more interested in accuracy than speed. If there is any damage which would be easier to fix while we are still tilted than it would be after we are level, I want to know about it. After you make that specific inspection, take a general look around; I want a rough idea of how solidly we are wedged into this position and how much work it will take to level us and get us loose. I will be outside myself making a similar check, but I want another opinion.”
“Yes, sir,” the helmsman responded. He almost forgot to notify Benj, for this time the order was a distinct surprise—not the fact that he was to go outside, but that the captain had chosen him to check his own judgment.
The airsuits had been removed when Dondragmer was convinced that the hull was sound, but Beetchermarlf was back into his in half a minute and at the designated lock moments later. The captain and four sailors, all suited, were waiting. The crewmen held coils of rope.
“All right, Beetch,” greeted the captain. “Stakendee will go out first and attach his line to the handiest climbing grip. You will follow, then Praffen. Each of you will attach his line to a different grip. Then go about your assignments. Wait—fasten these to your suit harness; you’ll float without ballast.” He handed four weights equipped with quick-release clips for harness attachment to the helmsman.
Egress was made in silence through the tiny lock. It was essentially a U-shaped liquid trap, fundamentally similar in operation to the main one and deep enough so that the Kwembly’s tilt did not quite spoil its operation. The fact that the outer end was in liquid anyway may have made the difference. Beetchermarlf, emerging directly into the current, was glad of Stak’s steadying grip as he sought anchorage for his own safety line.
A minute later the third member of their group had joined them, and together they clambered the short distance that separated them from the river bottom. This was composed of the rounded rocks which had been visible from the bridge, arranged in an oddly wavelike pattern whose crests extended across the direction of the current. At first glance, Beetchermarlf got the impression that the cruiser had stranded in the trough between two of these waves. Enough of the outside lights were still working to make seeing possible, if not quite ideal.
The trio made their way around the stern to get a look at their vehicle’s underside; and while this was much less well lighted, it was obvious at once that there would be a great deal to report to Dondragmer.
The Kwembly had been supported by a set of sixty trucks, each some three feet wide by twice as long, arranged in five longitudinal rows of twelve. All swiveled on casters, and were interconnected by a maze of tiller ropes which were Beetchermarlf’s main responsibility. Each of the trucks had a place to install a power unit, and had its own motor consisting of a six-inch-thick shaft whose micro-structure gave it a direct grip on the rotating magnetic field which was one of the forms in which the fusion units could deliver their energy. If no power box was installed, the truck rolled free. At the time of the accident, ten of the Kwembly’s twenty-five converters had been on trucks, arranged in point-forward V patterns fore and aft.
Eighteen trucks from the rear of the cruiser, including all five of the powered ones at that end, were missing.
V
Strictly speaking, all of them weren’t missing. Several could be seen lying on the boulders, evidently dislodged at the time of the final impact. Whether any had gone with the earlier bumps, presumably miles upstream, Beetchermarlf could not guess and was rather afraid to find out. That could be checked later. Inspecting what was left would have to come first. The helmsman set to it.
The front end seemed to have sustained no damage at all; the trucks were still present and their maze of tiller lines in proper condition. Amidships, many of the lines had been snapped in spite of the enormous strength of the Mesklinite fiber used in them. Some of the trucks were twisted out of alignment—several, indeed, swung freely to the touch. The pattern of missing parts aft was regular and rather encouraging. Numbering from the port side, Row 1 had lost its last five trucks, Rows 2 and 3 their last four, Row 4 the last three, and Row 5, on the starboard side, its last two. This suggested that they had all yielded to the same impact, which had wiped diagonally across the bottom of the hull; and since some of the detached units were in the neighborhood, there seemed a good chance that they all would be.
The inspectors were surprised at how little damage had been done by tearing the trucks away. Beetchermarlf and his companions had had nothing to do with the design of the Kwembly and her sister machines; none of them had more than the roughest idea of the sort of thinking which had been involved. They had never considered the problems inherent in building a machine powered by the most sophisticated energy sources ever developed, but operated b
y beings from a culture still in the muscle-and-wind stage; beings who would be cut off from any repair and replacement facilities once they were on Dhrawn. This was the reason the steering was done by tiller and rope rather than by powered selsyns, or similar devices; why the air locks were so simple, and not completely foolproof; why the life-support system was not only manually operated, except for the lights which kept the plants alive, but had been designed and built by Mesklinite scientists and technicians.
A few hundred of the beings had received an extensive body of “alien” education, though no attempt had been made to spread the new knowledge through the Mesklinite culture. Nearly all of the “college graduates” were now on Dhrawn, together with recruits like Beetchermarlf—mostly young, reasonably intelligent volunteers from among the sailors of Barlennan’s maritime nation. These were the people who would have to perform any repairs and all regular maintenance on the land-cruisers, and this fact had to be kept constantly in the foreground of the designers’ minds. Designing vehicles capable of covering thousands of miles of Dhrawn’s environment in a reasonable length of time, and at the same time reasonably safely under Mesklinite handling, had inevitably resulted in equipment with startling qualities. Beetchermarlf should not have been surprised that the pieces of his cruiser went back together so readily, and had suffered so little damage.
Of course, the intelligence of the Mesklinites had been taken into account—it was the whole reason for not depending on robots, unsatisfactory as these had proved in the early days of space exploration. That intelligence was obviously comparable to that of the average human being, Drommian, or Paneshk—a fact surprising in itself, since all four planets appeared to have been evolving their life forms for widely differing lengths of geological time. It was also fairly certain that Mesklinites were much longer-lived on the average than human beings, though they were oddly reluctant to discuss this point, and what this would mean in terms of their general competence was an even shakier guess than the ones about Dhrawn itself. It had been a risky project from all angles, with most of the risk being taken by the Mesklinites. The giant barge drifting in orbit near the human station, which was supposed to be able to evacuate the entire Settlement in emergency, was little more than a gesture—especially for the beings afield in the land-cruisers.
None of this was in the minds of the three sailors inspecting the Kwembly’s damage. They were simply surprised and delighted to find that the lost trucks had merely popped out of the sockets in which they normally swiveled and into which they could apparently be replaced with little trouble, provided they could all be found. With this settled to his satisfaction, Beetchermarlf made a brief cast over the river bottom to the limits imposed by the safety lines, and found twelve of the trucks within that radius. Some of these were damaged—tracks broken or with missing links, bearing wheels cracked, a few axles bent. The three gathered together all the material they could reach and transport, and brought it back to the Kwembly’s stern. The helmsman considered doubling up on the safety lines and increasing their search radius, but decided to report to Dondragmer and get his approval first. As a matter of fact, he was a little surprised that the captain had not appeared earlier, in view of his announced intention to check outside.
He found the reason when they went back around the stem to the lock. Dondragmer, his two companions of the original sortie, and six more crewmen who had evidently been summoned in the meantime were near the middle of the Kwembly laboring to remove boulders from the region of the main air lock.
The breathing suits had no special communication equipment, and the transmissive matching between their hydrogen-argon filling and the surrounding liquid was extremely poor; but the Mesklinite voice—built around a swimming siphon rather than a set of lungs, since the hydrogen-using midgets lacked the latter—was another thing which had bothered human biologists. The helmsman caught his captain’s attention with a deep hoot, and gestured him to follow around the stern of the cruiser. Dondragmer assumed that the matter was important and came along, after directing the others to continue their work. One look and a few sentences from Beetchermarlf brought him abreast of the situation.
After a few seconds’ thought he disapproved the suggestion of looking immediately for the missing trucks. The water was still going down; it would be safer and easier to conduct the search when it was gone, if this did not take too long, and in the meantime repairs could be started on the ones which had already been found. Beetchermarlf acknowledged the order and began to sort over the damaged equipment in order to plan the work.
Care was necessary; some parts were light enough to be borne away by the current when detached from the rest of the assemblies. Some such items were already missing, and had presumably gone in just that fashion. The helmsman had a portable light brought to the scene and stationed one of his helpers a few yards downstream to catch anything which got away from him. He thought how helpful a net would be, but there was no such item aboard the Kwembly. It would be possible to make one from the miles of cordage she carried, but it hardly seemed worth the time.
Eight hours of labor, interrupted by occasional rests spent chatting with Benj, saw three of the damaged trucks again serviceable. Some of their parts were not of the original quality, Beetchermarlf and the others having improvised freely. They had used Mesklinite fabric and cord, and alien polymers and alloys which were on hand. Their tools were their own; their culture had high standards of craftsmanship, and such things as saws, hammers, and the usual spectrum of edged tools were familiar to the sailors. The fact that they were made of the Mesklinite equivalents of bone, horn, and shell was no disparagement to them, considering the general nature of Mesklinite tissue.
Replacing the repaired units in their swivels took muscle even by Mesklinite standards. It also took more tool work, as metal in the mountings had been bent out of shape when the trucks were torn free. The first three had to be placed in Row 4, since Row 5 was pressed against the boulders of the river bottom and the other three were too high to be reached conveniently. Beetchermarlf bowed to necessity, attached the trucks where he could, and went back to fixing more.
The river continued to fall and the current to decrease. Dondragmer ordered the helmsman and his helpers to move their work area from beneath the hull, suspecting what would happen as the buoyant force on the Kwembly decreased. His caution was justified when, with a grinding of boulders, the vehicle slipped from its sixty-degree tilt to about thirty, bringing two more rows of trucks within reach of the bottom and forcing two workmen to duck between stones to avoid being crushed.
At this point it became obvious that even if the water fell farther, the cruiser would not. A point on its port underside about a third of the way back from the bow and between Rows 1 and 2 was now resting on a single rock some eighteen feet in diameter and half buried in the river bottom—a hopeless object to dislodge even without the Kwembly’s weight on it.
Beetchermarlf kept on with his assigned job, but couldn’t help wondering how the captain proposed to lift his command off that eminence. He was also curious about what would happen when, and if, he succeeded. The cobbley surface which formed the riverbed was the last sort of thing the cruiser’s designers had had in mind as a substrate, and the helmsman doubted seriously that she could run on such a base. High-gravity planets tend to be fairly level, judging by Mesklin as the only available example; and even if an area were encountered where traction seemed unpromising, the designers must have supposed that the crew need merely refrain from venturing onto it. This was another good example of the reason manned exploration was generally better than the automated kind.
At least, one could hope so. Beetchermarlf, in a temporarily philosophical mood, reached the conclusion that foresight was likely to depend heavily on the amount of hindsight available.
Dondragmer was pondering the same problem, about getting his vehicle free, and at the time—some fifty hours after the stranding—was no nearer a solution than his helmsman. The first o
fficer and the scientists were equally baffled. They were not worried, except for the captain, and even his feeling did not exactly parallel human “worry.” He had kept to himself and Beetchermarlf, who had been on the bridge at the time, a conversation he had had with the human watchers a few hours before.
it had begun as a regular progress report, on an optimistic tone. Dondragmer was willing to admit that he hadn’t thought of a workable plan yet, but not that he was unlikely to think of one. Unfortunately, he had included in the remark the phrase “we have plenty of time to work it out.”
Easy, at the other end, had been forced to disagree.
“You may not have as much as you think. Some of the people here have been considering those boulders. They are round, or nearly so, according to your report and from what we can see on the bridge set. The most likely cause of that shape, according to our experience, is washing around in a stream bed, or on a beach. For rocks that big to be moved implies a tremendous current. We’re afraid that the stream which carried you there is just a preliminary trickle—the first thaw of the season—and if you don’t get away soon you’ll face a lot more water coming down.”
Dondragmer had considered “briefly.
“All right, but we’re already doing all we can. Either we get away in time, or we don’t; we can’t do better than our best. If your scientists can give any sort of specific forecast of this super-flood, we’ll be glad of it, of course; otherwise we’ll have to go on as we are. I’ll leave a man on the radio here, unless I have too much for them to do; in that case, try the lab. Thanks for the information.”
The captain had gone back to work and to thought. He was not the type to panic; in emergencies he seemed calmer than in a personal argument. Basically, his philosophy was the one he had just expressed—to do all one could in the time available, with the full knowledge that time would run out some day. At the moment, he only wished he knew what was “all he could do.”
