Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  The surface work is being monitored from a station manned principally by human beings, in synchronous orbit six million miles from the planet. Its chief administrator is ALAN AUCOIN, who has a basic, though fairly well hidden, distrust of nonhuman beings. His staff includes ELISE RICH HOFFMAN—“EASY”—who functions as interpreter with the Mesklinites, and general spreader of oil on troubled waters; and her husband IB HOFFMAN. Their seventeen-year-old son BENJ is also at the station, serving an apprenticeship in the aerology laboratory. Like his mother, Benj is an excellent natural linguist and can talk directly with the Mesklinites.

  A distrust has been developing between human and Mesklinite leaders, partly because of Aucoin’s attitude and partly from Barlennan’s underhanded activities. Even though field communication between the settlement on Dhrawn and the land-cruisers has to be relayed through the human station, Barlennan has been working to establish another settlement independent of, and unknown to, the human beings. Toward this end he has arranged the “loss” of the land-cruiser Esket and the disappearance of her crew. The Esket is being used as the nucleus of the new settlement, at which mining and other activities leading toward local self-sufficiency are being carried on.

  Now, however, genuine troubles are developing. The complex phase relationships between water and ammonia have been outwitting the human aerologists and their computers, and Dondragmer’s Kwembly has been washed down a river formed by a suddenly melting “snow” field, grounded, damaged, partly repaired, and finally frozen in. Beetchermarlf and a companion have been trapped under the cruiser by the ice; another officer, KERVENSER, has disappeared in one of the tiny scout helicopters carried by the Kwembly.

  Part 2

  VI

  Impatience and irritation were noticeable in the Planning Laboratory, but so far no tempers had actually been lost. Ib Hoffman, back less than two hours from a monthlong errand to Earth and Dromm, had said practically nothing except to ask for information. Easy, sitting beside him, had said nothing at all so far; but she could see that something would have to be done shortly to turn the conversation into constructive channels. Changing the Project’s basic policy might be a good idea—it often was—but for the people at this end of the table to spend time blaming each other for the present one was futile. It was even less useful than the scientists’ bickering at the other end. They were still wondering why a lake should freeze when the temperature had been going up. Such a question might conceivably have a useful answer, of course, especially if it led to a reasonable course of useful action; but it seemed to her like a question for the laboratory rather than a conference room.

  If her husband didn’t take a hand in the other discussion soon, Easy would have to do something herself, she decided.

  “I’ve heard all about that side of it before, and I still don’t buy it!” snapped Mersereau. “Up to a point it’s good common sense, but I think we’re way past that point. I realize that the more complex the equipment, the fewer people you need to run it; but you also need more specialized apparatus and specially trained personnel to maintain and repair it. If the land-cruisers had been as fully automated as some people wanted, we could have got along with a hundred Mesklinites on Dhrawn instead of a couple of thousand at first’, but the chances are that every one of those machines would be out by now because we couldn’t possibly have landed all the backup equipment and personnel they’d need. There aren’t enough technically trained Mesklinites in existence yet, for one thing. I agreed with that, Barlennan agreed with it; it was common sense, as I said.

  “But you, and for some reason Barlennan, went even further. He was against including helicopters. I know there were some characters in the Project who assumed you could never teach a Mesklinite to fly, and maybe it was racial acrophobia that was motivating Barlennan; but at least he was able to realize that without air scouting the land-cruisers wouldn’t dare travel more than a few miles an hour over new ground, and it would take roughly forever to cover even Low Alpha at that rate. We did talk him over on that basis.

  “But there was a lot of stuff we’d have been glad to provide, which would have been useful and have paid its way, which he talked us out of using. No weapons; I agree they’d probably have been futile. But no short-range radio equipment? No intercoms in the Settlement? It’s dithering nonsense for Dondragmer to have to call us, six million miles away, and ask us to relay his reports to Barlennan at the Settlement. It’s usually not critical, since Bari couldn’t help him physically and the time delay doesn’t mean much, but it’s silly at the best of times. It is critical now, though, when Don’s first mate has disappeared, presumably within a hundred miles of the Kwembly and possibly less than ten, and there’s no way in the galaxy to get in touch with him either from here or from the cruiser. Why was Bari against radios, Alan? And why are you?”

  “The same reason you’ve just given,” Aucoin answered with just a trace of acerbity. “The maintenance problem.”

  “You’re dithering. There isn’t any maintenance problem on a simple voice, or even a vision, communicator. There were four of them, as I understand it, being carried around on Mesklin with Barlennan’s first outside-sponsored trip fifty years or so ago, and not one of them gave the slightest trouble. There are sixty on Dhrawn right now, with not a blip of a problem from any of them in the year and a half they’ve been there. Barlennan must know that, and you certainly do. Furthermore, why do we relay what messages they do send by voice? We could do it automatically instead of having a batch of interpreters hashing things up . . . sorry, Easy . . . and you can’t tell me there’d be a maintenance problem for a relay unit in this station. Who’s trying to kid whom?”

  Easy stirred; this was perilously close to feud material. Her husband, however, sensed the motion and touched her arm in a gesture she understood. He would take care of it. However, he let Aucoin make his own answer.

  “Nobody’s trying to kid anyone. I don’t mean equipment maintenance, and I admit it was a poor choice of words. I should have said morale. The Mesklinites are a competent and highly self-reliant species, at least the representatives we’ve seen the most of. They sail over thousands of miles of ocean on those ridiculous groups of rafts, completely out of touch with home and. help for months at a time, just as human beings did a few centuries ago. It was our opinion that making communication too easy would tend to undermine that self-confidence. I admit that this is not certain; Mesklinites are not human, though their minds resemble ours in many ways, and there’s one major factor whose effect we can’t evaluate and may never be able to. We don’t know their normal life spans, though they are clearly a good deal longer than ours. Still, Barlennan agreed with us about the radio question—as you said, it was he who brought it up—and he has never complained about the communication difficulty.”

  “To us.” Ib cut in at this point. Aucoin looked surprised, then puzzled.

  “Yes, Alan, that’s what I said. He hasn’t complained to us. What he thinks about it privately none of us knows.”

  “But why shouldn’t he complain, or even ask for radios, if he has come to feel that he should have them?” The planner was not completely sidetracked, but Easy noted with approval that the defensiveness was gone from his tone.

  “I don’t know why,” Hoffman admitted. “I just remember what I’ve learned about our first dealings with Barlennan a few decades ago. He was a highly cooperative, practically worshipful agent for the mysterious aliens of Earth and Panesh and Dromm and those other mysterious places in the sky during most of the Gravity mission, doing our work for us just as we asked; and then at the end he suddenly held us up for a blackmail jolt which five human beings, seven Paneshka, and nine Drommians out of every ten still think we should never have paid. You know as well as I do that teaching advanced technology, or even basic science, to a culture which isn’t yet into its mechanical revolution makes the sociologists see red because they feel that every race should have the right to go through its own kind of growing pains, makes
the xenophobes scream because we’re arming the wicked aliens against.us, gets the historians down on us because we’re burying priceless data, and annoys the administrative types because they’re afraid we’re setting up problems they haven’t learned to cope with yet.”

  “It’s the xenophobes who are the big problem,” Mersereau snapped. “The nuts who take it for granted that every nonhuman species would be an enemy if it had the technical capacity. That’s why we give the Mesklinites only equipment they can’t possibly duplicate themselves, like the fusion units—things which couldn’t be taken apart and studied in detail without about five stages of intermediate equipment like gamma-ray diffraction cameras, which the Mesklinites don’t have either. Alan’s argument sounds good, but it’s just an excuse. You know as well as I do that you could train a Mesklinite to fly a reasonably part-automated shuttle in two months if the controls were modified for his nippers, and that there isn’t a scientist in this station who wouldn’t give three quarts of his blood to have loads of physical specimens and instruments of his own improvising bouncing between here and Dhrawn’s surface.”

  “That’s not entirely right, though there are elements of truth in it,” Hoffman returned calmly. “I agree with your personal feeling about xenophobes, but it is a fact that with energy so cheap a decently designed interstellar freighter can pay off its construction cost in four or five years; an interstellar war isn’t the flat impossibility it was once assumed to be. Also, you know why this station has such big rooms, uncomfortable as some of us find them, and inefficient as they certainly are for some purposes. The average Drommian, if there were a room here he couldn’t get into, would assume that it contained something being deliberately kept secret from him. They have no concept of privacy, and by our standards most of them are seriously paranoid. If we had failed to share technology with them when contact was first made, we’d have created a planetful of highly competent xenophobes much more dangerous than anything even Earth has produced. I don’t know that Mesklinites would react the same way, but I still think that starting the College on Mesklin was the smartest piece of policy since they admitted the first Drommian to M.I.T.”

  “And the Mesklinites had to blackmail us into doing that.”

  “Embarrassingly true,” admitted Hoffman. “But that’s all side issue. The current point is that we just don’t know what Barlennan really thinks, or plans. We can, though, be perfectly sure that he didn’t agree to take two thousand of his people including himself onto an almost completely unknown world, certain to be highly dangerous even for a species like his, without having a very good reason indeed.”

  “We gave him a good reason,” pointed out Aucoin.

  “Yes. We tried to imitate him in the art of blackmail. We agreed to keep the College going on Mesklin, over the objections of many of our own people, if he would do the Dhrawn job for us. There was no suggestion on either side of material payment, though the Mesklinites are perfectly aware of the relation between knowledge and material wealth. I’m quite willing to admit that Barlennan is an idealist, but I’m not sure how much chauvinism there is in his idealism, or how far either one will carry him.

  “All this is aside from the point, too. We shouldn’t be worrying about the choice of equipment provided for the Mesklinites. They agreed with it, whatever their private reservations may have been. We are still in a position to help them with information on physical facts they don’t know, and which their scientists can hardly be expected to work out for themselves; we have high-speed computation; and right now we have one extremely expensive exploring machine frozen in on a lake on Dhrawn, together with about a hundred living beings who may be personnel to some of us but are personalities to the rest. If we want to change policy and insist on Barlennan’s accepting a shuttleful of new equipment, that’s fine; but it’s not the present problem, Boyd. I don’t know what we could send down right now that would be the slightest help to Dondragmer.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Ib, but I can’t help thinking about Kervenser, and how much better it would have been if—”

  “He could have carried one of the communicators, remember. Dondragmer had three besides the one on his bridge, all of them portable. The decision to take them, or not, was strictly on Kervenser himself and his captain. Let’s leave out the if’s for now and try to do some constructive planning.”

  Mersereau subsided, a little irritated at Ib for the latter’s choice of words but with his resentment of Aucoin’s attitude diverted for the moment. The planner took over the conversational lead again, looking down the table toward the point where the scientists had now fallen silent.

  “All right, Dr. McDevitt. Has any agreement been reached as to what probably happened?”

  “Not completely, but there is an idea worth checking further. As you know the Kwembly’s observers had been reporting nearly constant temperature since the fog cleared—no radiational cooling, if anything a very slight warming trend. Barometric readings have been rising very slowly at that place ever since the machine was stranded; readings before that time are meaningless because of the uncertain change in elevation. The temperatures have been well below the freezing points of either pure water or pure ammonia, but rather above that of the ammonia monohydrate-water eutectic. We’re wondering whether the initial thaw might not have been caused by the ammonia fog’s reacting with the water snow on which the Kwembly was riding—Dondragmer was afraid of that possibility; and if so, the present freeze might be due to evaporation of ammonia from the eutectic. We’d need ammidity readings—”

  “What?” cut in Hoffman and Aucoin almost together.

  “Sorry. Office slang. Partial pressure of ammonia relative to the saturation value—equivalent of relative humidity for water. We’d need readings on that to confirm, or kill, the notion, and the Mesklinites haven’t been taking them.”

  “Could they?”

  “I’m sure we could work out a technique with them. I don’t know how long it would take. Water vapor wouldn’t interfere; its equilibrium pressure is four or five powers of ten smaller than ammonia’s in that temperature range. The job shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “I realize this is an hypothesis rather than a full-blown theory, but is it good enough to base action on?”

  “That would depend on the action.” Aucoin made a gesture of impatience, and the atmospheric physicist continued hastily. “That is, I wouldn’t risk an all-or-nothing breakout effort on it alone, but I’d be willing to try anything which didn’t commit the Kwembly to exhausting some critical supply she carries, or put her in obvious danger.”

  The planner nodded. “All right,” he said. “Would you rather stay here and supply us with more ideas, or would it be more effective to talk this one over with the Mesklinites?”

  McDevitt pursed his lips and thought for a moment.

  “We’ve been talking with them pretty frequently, but I suppose there’s more good likely to come from that direction than—” he stopped, and Easy and her husband concealed smiles. Aucoin appeared not to notice the near faux pas, and nodded.

  “All right. Go on back to Communications, and good luck. Let us know if either you, or they, come up with anything else that seems worth trying.”

  The four scientists agreed to this, and left together. The ten remaining conference members were silent for some minutes before Aucoin voiced what they were all thinking—all but one.

  “Let’s face it,” he said slowly. “The real argument is going to come when we relay this report to Barlennan.”

  Ib Hoffman jerked upright. “You haven’t yet?” he snapped.

  “Only the fact of the original stranding, which Easy told them, and occasional progress reports on the repair work. Nothing yet about the freeze-up.”

  “Why not?” Easy could read danger signals in her husband’s voice, and wondered whether she wanted to smooth this one over or not. Aucoin looked surprised at the question.

  “You know why as well as I do. Whether he learned about
it now, or ten hours from now, or from Dondragmer when he gets back to the Settlement a year from now would make little difference. There is nothing Barlennan could do immediately to help, and the only thing he could do at all is something we’d rather he didn’t.”

  “And that is?” interjected Easy sweetly. She had about made up her mind which line to take.

  “That is, as you well know, sending one of the two land-cruisers still at the Settlement off to rescue the Kwembly, as he wanted to do for the Esket.”

  “And you still object to that.”

  “Certainly, for exactly the same reasons as before—which Barlennan, I admit, accepted that time. It’s not entirely that we have other specific plans for those two cruisers, but that’s part of it. Whatever you may think, Easy, I don’t dismiss life as unimportant merely because it isn’t human life. I do object, though, to wasting time and resources; and changing policy in the middle of an operation generally does both.”

  “But if you claim that Mesklinite lives mean as much to you as human ones, how can you talk about waste?”

  “You’re not thinking, Easy. I understand and don’t really blame you, but you’re ignoring the fact that the Kwembly is something like ten thousand miles airline from the Settlement, and more like thirteen thousand by the route they took. A rescue vehicle could not possibly follow that track in less than two hundred or two hundred and fifty hours. The last part of it, which the Kwembly traversed by being washed down a river, they might not be able to follow at all; the last four thousand miles across the snowfield may no longer be passable.”

  “We could give them directions with satellite fixes.”

  “We could, no doubt. The fact remains that unless Dondragmer can get himself, his crew and his vehicle out of their present trouble, nothing Barlennan can send out for him is likely to be of the slightest help—if the Kwembly is in real and immediate danger. If she is not—if it’s just a matter of being frozen in like a nineteenth century whaler—they have indefinite supplies with their closed-cycle life system and fusion converters, and we and Barlennan can plan a nice, leisurely rescue.”