Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Takoorch gestured agreement and started the round of the ice barrier. Beetchermarlf returned to the control lines, waiting passively. Takoorch made several circuits of the boundary, watching happily as the ice retreated in all directions. He was a little bothered by the discovery that the process was slowing down as the cleared space increased, but even he was not too surprised. He made up his mind eventually which of the frozen-in power boxes would be the first to be released, and settled down near it to wait.

  His attitude, like that of his companion waiting at the controls, cannot be described exactly to a human being. He was neither patient nor impatient in the human sense. He knew that waiting was unavoidable, and he was quite unaffected emotionally by the inconvenience. He was reasonably intelligent and even imaginative by both human and Mesklinite standards, but he felt no need of anything even remotely resembling daydreaming to occupy his mind during the delay. A half-conscious mental clock caused him to check the progress of the melting at reasonably frequent intervals; this is all a human being can grasp, much less describe, about what went on in his mind.

  He was certainly neither asleep nor preoccupied, because he reacted promptly to a sudden loud thud and a scattering of pebbles around him. The spot where he was lying was almost directly aft of the truck which was running, and he knew instantly what must have happened.

  So did Beetchermarlf, and the power unit was shut down by a tug on the control line before a man would have perceived any trouble. The two Mesklinites met, a second or two later, beside the truck which had been running.

  It was in a predictable condition, Beetchermarlf had to admit to himself. Mesklinite organics are very, very tough materials, and the tread would have lasted for many more months under ordinary travel wear; but deliberately rubbing against unyielding rocks under even very modest engine power was a little too much for it.

  Perhaps the word “unyielding” does not quite describe the rocks; those which had been under the moving band of fabric were visibly flattened on top by the wear of the last hour or so. Some of them, indeed, were more than half gone, and the young helmsman decided, after careful examination, that the failure of the tread had been due less to simple wear than to a cut started by a formerly spherical pebble which had worn down to a thin slice with sharp edges. Takoorch agreed, when the evidence was pointed out to him.

  There was no question about what to do, and they did it at once. In less than five minutes the power converter had been removed from the damaged truck and installed in the one aft of it, which had also been unloaded by puncturing the pressure cell; and without worrying about the certainty of destroying another set of treads, Beetchermarlf started this one up promptly.

  Takoorch was uneasy now. The reasonable optimism of an hour before had had the foundation cut from under it; he was doubtful that the second set of treads would last long enough to melt a path all the way to freedom. It occurred to him, after some minutes of wrestling with the question, that concentrating the wanned water on one spot might be a good idea, and he suggested this to his companion. Beetchermarlf was annoyed with himself for not having thought of the same thing earlier, and for half an hour the two labored heaping pebbles between and around the trucks surrounding their heat source. They eventually produced a fairly solid wall confining some of the water they were heating to a region between the truck and the nearest part of the ice wall. Takoorch had the satisfaction of seeing the ice along a two-yard front toward the starboard side of the Kwembly melting back almost visibly.

  He was not completely happy, of course. It did not seem possible to him, any more than it did to Beetchermarlf, that the treads could last very long on the second truck either; and if they went before the way out was clear, it was hard to see what else they could do toward their own salvation. A man in such a situation can sometimes sit back and hope that his friends will rescue him in time—he can, in fact, carry that hope to the last moment of consciousness. Few Mesklinites are so constituted, and neither of the helmsmen was among the number. There was a Stennish word which Easy had translated as “hope,” but this was one of her less successful inferences from context.

  Takoorch, driven by this undefinable attitude, stationed himself between the humming truck and the melting ice, hugging the bottom to keep from deflecting the warmed current of water, and tried to watch both simultaneously. Beetchermarlf remained at the control lines.

  Since no digging had been done under the second truck, the friction was greater and the heating effect stronger—the control was for speed rather than power, in spite of the words the helmsmen had used. Naturally but unfortunately, the wear on the treads was also greater, and the heavy thud which announced their failure came annoyingly soon after the completion of the rubble wall. As before, the two bands of fabric gave way almost simultaneously—probably the jerk imparted to the drive shaft as one let go was enough to take care of the other.

  Again the Mesklinites acted instantly, in concert, and without consultation. Beetchermarlf cut the power as he plunged away from his station toward the melting surface; Takoorch got there before him only because he started from halfway there. Both had blades out when they reached the barrier, and both began scraping frantically at the frosty surface. They knew they were fairly close to the Kwembly’s side; less than a body length of ice remained to be penetrated, at least horizontally. Perhaps before freezing took over once more sheer muscle could get them through . . .

  Takoorch’s knife broke in the first minute. Several of the human beings above would have been interested in the sounds he made, though not even Easy Hoffman would have understood them. Beetchermarlf cut them off with a suggestion.

  “Get behind me and move around as much as you can, so that the water cooled by the ice is moved away and mixed with the rest. I’ll keep scraping, you keep stirring.” The older sailor obeyed, and several more minutes passed with no sound except that of the knife.

  Progress continued, but both could see that its rate was decreasing. The heat in the water around them was giving out. Though neither knew it, the only reason that their environment had stayed liquid for so long was that the freezing around them had cut off the escape of the ammonia—the theoreticians, both human and Mesklinite, had been perfectly correct, though they had been no help to Dondragmer. The freezing under the Kwembly had been more a matter of ammonia slowly diffusing into the ice through the still-liquid boundaries between the solid crystals.

  The captain, even with this information, could have done no more about it than his two men now trapped under his ship. Of course, if the information had come as a prediction instead of an inspired afterthought, he might have driven the Kwembly onto dry land—if she had been able to move in time.

  Even if Beetchermarlf had had all this information at the time, he would not have been considering it consciously. He was far too busy. His knife flashed in the lamplight, as rapidly and as hard as he dared, and his conscious mind was concerned solely with getting the most out of the tool with the least risk of breaking it.

  But break it he did. He never cared to discuss the reason later. He knew that his progress was slowing, with the urge to scrape harder changing in inverse proportion; but being the person he was, he disliked the faintest suggestion that he might possibly have been the victim of panic. Being what he was also prevented him, ever, from making any suggestion that the bone of the knife might have been defective; and he himself could think of no explanations but those two. Whatever the reason, the knife gripped in his right-forward pair of chelae was suddenly without a blade, and the sliver of material lying in front of him was no more practical to handle for his nipper than it would have been for human fingers. He flung the handle down in annoyance, and since he was under water didn’t even have the satisfaction of hearing it strike the bottom violently.

  Takoorch grasped the situation immediately. His comment would have been considered cynical if it had been heard six million miles above, but Beetchermarlf took it at face value.

  “Do you thin
k it would be better to stay here and freeze up near the side, or get back toward the middle? The time won’t make much difference, I’d say.”

  “I don’t know. Near the side they might find us sooner; it would depend on where they come through first, if they manage to do it at all. If they don’t, I can’t see that it will make any difference at all. I wish I knew what being frozen into a block of ice would do to a person.”

  “Well, someone will know before long,” said Takoorch.

  “Maybe. Remember the Esket.”

  “What has that to do with it? This is a genuine emergency.”

  “Just that there are a lot of people who don’t know what happened there.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, personally I’m going back to the middle and think while I can.”

  Beetchermarlf was surprised. “What’s to think about? We’re here to stay unless someone gets us out or the weather warms and we thaw out naturally. Settle down.”

  “Not here. Do you suppose that running the drivers, with no treads on them, would make enough friction with anything to keep the water nearby from—”

  “Try it if you like. I wouldn’t expect it, with no real load on them even at their fastest. Besides, I’d be afraid to get this close to them if they’re really turning up speed. Face it, Tak, we’re under water—water, not regular ocean—and when it freezes we’re going to be inside it. There’s just nowhere else to . . . oh!”

  “What?”

  “You win. We should never stop thinking. I’m sorry. Come on.”

  Ninety seconds later the two Mesklinites, after some trouble in wriggling through the knife slits, were inside the punctured air cell, safely out of the water.

  VIII

  Dondragmer, dismissing as negligible the chance that one of his missing helmsmen might be directly underneath, had ordered his scientists to set up the test drill near the main lock and get a sample of the ice. This established that the puddle in which the Kwembly was standing had frozen all the way to the bottom in at least one spot. It might be hoped that this would not apply directly under the hull, where neither heat nor ammonia could escape so rapidly; but the captain vetoed the suggestion of a slanting bore into this region. That did seem to be the most likely whereabouts of the missing helmsmen; they had been at work there, and it was hard to see how they could have failed to see the freeze coming if they had been anywhere else.

  There was no obvious way to get in touch with them, however. The Kwembly’s plastic hull would transmit sound, of course; rapping would have solved the problem if it had not been for the mattress. On the off chance that hull sounds might be heard even through this, Dondragmer ordered a crewman to go from bow to stern on the lowest deck, tapping with a pry bar every few feet. The results were negative, which meant inconclusive. There was no way to tell whether there was no one alive below to hear, no penetration of the sound, or simply no way for those below to reply.

  Another group was outside working at the ice, but the captain had already learned that progress would be slow. Even with Mesklinite muscular strength little was being accomplished. Tools about the size of a human machinist’s center punch, being wielded by eighteen-inch twenty-pound caterpillars, would take a long time to get around some two hundred and fifty feet of hull circumference to an unknown depth. They would take even longer if detailed chipping around drivers, trucks, and control lines were to be necessary, as seemed likely.

  Besides all this, the second helicopter was aloft again with Reffel once more at its controls. The communicator was still aboard, and the human beings were examining as carefully as Reffel himself the landscape revealed by the little machine’s lights. They were also cursing as heartily as the pilot the length of Dhrawn’s nights; this one had well over six hundred hours yet to go, and until the sun rose really quick and effective searching would be impossible. Even Lalande 21185 at a distance of a quarter of a billion miles sheds nearly a thousandth as much illumination as Earth gets from its sun. This does not sound like a great deal, but it is about a thousand times the illumination of full moonlight, which in turn is much better than the helicopter’s floodlights could do if they were spread to cover the whole area visible from a thousand feet up.

  To be helpful to either Mesklinite eyes or the video pickup of the communicator, the lights had to be held to a rather narrow beam, covering a circle only a few hundred feet across. Reffel was flying a slow zigzag course which swept this circle back and forth across the valley as he moved slowly westward. At the station far above, the televised image on his screen was being recorded and reproduced for the benefit of topographers. These were already working happily on the structure of an intermittent stream valley under forty Earth gravities. As a search effort for the missing Kervenser, little profit was expected for some time; but scientifically no one was complaining—not even the Mesklinites.

  Dondragmer was not exactly worried about his first officer and helmsmen, of course, since he couldn’t really worry. It would be fair to say that he was concerned, since he had done all he could about the missing crewmen, but having done it his attention had turned elsewhere. He had two principal things on his mind. He would have liked information about how soon the ice was likely to melt, compared with how soon another flood might arrive; and he would have given even more for a workable suggestion on how to get rid of the ice quickly and safely himself. He had given both wishes to the human beings as well as to his own scientists, though he had made it clear to the latter that he was not demanding a crash program; the search for ideas could be combined with, or even subordinated to, the basic research they were carrying on. Dondragmer was not exactly cold-blooded, but his sense of values included the notion that even his final act should be a useful one.

  The human reaction to this remarkably objective and inhumanly calm reaction was mixed. The weathermen and planetologists took it for granted—most of them probably weren’t even aware of the Kwembly’s predicament, much less of the missing Mesklinites. Easy Hoffman, who had stayed on watch after bringing Barlennan up to date as Aucoin had directed, was not surprised; if she had any emotional reaction so far it was one of respect for the captain’s ability to avoid panic in a personally dangerous situation.

  Her son felt very differently about it. He had been released temporarily from duty in the aerology lab by McDevitt, who was a tactful and sympathetic person and had been aware of the friendship developing between the boy and Beetchermarlf. Benj had become a fixture in the communication room as a result.

  He had watched quietly while arrangements were being made by Dondragmer to dispatch the helicopter and the ice-chipping crews. He had even been somewhat interested in the exchange between the human and Mesklinite scientists—McDevitt had been a little reluctant to risk more weather predictions, feeling that his professional reputation had taken jolts enough recently, but promised to do his best. When all these matters had been settled, however, and Dondragmer seemed willing to do nothing but lie on his bridge and wait on events, the boy grew uneasy. Patience, the closest human equivalent to the Mesklinite reaction now being displayed, was not yet one of the youngster’s strong points. For some minutes he shifted uneasily in his seat before the screens, waiting for something to happen, and finally could restrain himself no longer.

  “If no one has any immediate material to send, is it all right for me to talk to Don and his scientists?” he asked.

  Easy glanced at him, and then at the others. The men shrugged or otherwise gestured indifference, so she nodded. “Go ahead. I don’t know whether any of them are in a mood for casual chatter, but the worst they’ll do is tell you they aren’t.”

  Benj didn’t waste time explaining that he was not going to indulge in chatter, casual or otherwise. He switched his microphone to Dondragmer’s bridge set and began to talk.

  “Don, this is Benj Hoffman. You have nothing but a bunch of sailors chipping away the ice at the Kwembly’s bow. There is a lot of energy in your power units, more than a planetful of Mesklinites could put out
by muscle in a year. Have your scientists thought of using converter output either to run that test drill for moving ice, or in some sort of heater?

  “Second, are your sailors just removing ice, or are they specifically trying to get down underneath to find Beetchermarlf and Takoorch? I know it’s important to get the Kwembly loose, but the same ice will have to be taken out sometime anyway. It seems to me there’s a good chance that some of the water under the ship hasn’t frozen yet, and that your two men are still alive in it. Are you tunneling, or just ditching?”

  Some of the human listeners frowned slightly at the boy’s choice of words, but no one saw fit to interrupt or even comment. Most of those who heard glanced at Easy, and decided against saying anything which might be interpreted as criticism of her son. Some, as it happened, did not feel critical anyway; they had wanted to ask similar questions but had not quite liked to be heard at it.

  As usual in conversations between the station and Dhrawn, Benj had plenty of time while waiting for the answer to think of other things he might have asked or said, and of better ways in which he might have put the things he did say. Most of the adults knew from experience what was going on in his mind at this point; some were amused, all were to some degree sympathetic, several made bets with themselves that he would not be able to resist the temptation to send a reworded version of his message before the answer came back. When Dondragmer’s response came from the speaker with Benj still silent no one actually cheered, but those who knew Easy best could read and understand the satisfaction in her expression. She had not dared to bet, even with herself.