by Hal Clement
“You mean I shouldn’t worry about a possible flood?” Dondragmer’s voice finally returned.
“I’m guessing not,” replied McDevitt. “If I’m right about this picture, and we’ve been talking it over a lot up here, the fog that Stakendee met should have passed over the snow plain you came from—or what’s left of it—and if it were going to cause another flood that should have reached you by now. I suspect the snow, which was high enough to spill into the pass you were washed through, was all used up on the first flood, and that’s why you were finally left stranded where you are. If the new fog hasn’t reached you yet by the way, I think I know the reason.
The place where Stakendee met it is a few feet higher than you are, and air flowing from the west is coming downhill. With Dhrawn’s gravity and that air composition there’d be a terrific foehn effect-adiabatic heating as the pressure rises—and the stuff is probably evaporating just as it gets to the place where Stakendee met it.”
Dondragmer took a while to digest this. For a few seconds after the normal delay time, McDevitt wondered whether he had made himself clear; then another question came through.
“But if the ammonia fog were simply evaporating, the gas would still be there, and must be in the air around us now. Why isn’t it melting the ice just as effectively as though it were in liquid drops? fs some physical law operating which I missed in the College?
“I’m not sure whether state and concentration would make all that difference, just from memory,” admitted the meteorologist. “When Borndender gets the new data up here I’ll feed the whole works into the machine to see whether this guess of ours is ignoring too many facts. On the basis of what I have now, I still think it’s a reasonable one, but I admit it has its fuzzy aspects. There are just too many variables; with only water they are practically infinite, if you’ll forgive a loose use of the word, and with water and ammonia together the number is squared, if not worse.
“To shift from abstract to concrete, I can see Stakendee’s screen arid he’s still going along beside that streamlet in the fog; he hasn’t reached the source, but I haven’t seen any other watercourses feeding in from either side. It’s only a couple of your body-lengths wide, and has stayed about the same all along.”
“That’s a relief,” came the eventual response. “I suppose if a real flood were coming that river would be some indication. Very well, I’ll report again as soon as Borndender has his information. Please keep watching Stakendee. I’m going outside again to check under the hull; I was interrupted before.” The meteorologist had wanted to say more, but was silenced by the realization that Dondragmer would not be there to hear his words by the time they arrived. He may also have been feeling some sympathy for Benj.
They watched eagerly, the man almost as concerned as the boy, for the red-and-black inchworm to appear on the side of the hull within range of the pickup. It was not visible all the way to the ground, since Dondragmer had to go forward directly under the bridge and out of the field of view; but they saw him again near the point where the rope which had been used to get him out a few minutes earlier was still snubbed around one of Bordender’s bending posts.
They watched him swarm down the line into the pit. A Mesklinite hanging on a rope about the thickness of a six-pound nylon fishline, and free to swing pendulum-style in forty Earth gravities, is quite a sight even when the distance he has to climb is not much greater than his own body length. Even Benj stopped thinking about Beetchermarlf for a moment.
The captain was no longer worried about the ice; it was presumably frozen all the way to the bottom by now, and he went straight toward the cruiser without bothering to stay on the stones. He slowed a trifle as he drew near, eyeing the cavity in front of him thoughtfully.
Practically, the Kwembly was still frozen in, of course. The melted area had reached her trucks for a distance of some sixty feet fore and aft, but the ice was still above the mattress beyond those limits and on the port side. Even within that range, the lower part of the treads had still been an inch or two under water when the heater gave out. Beetchermarlf’s control cables had been largely freed, but of the helmsman himself there was no sign whatever. Dondragmer had no hope of finding the two alive under the Kwembly, they would obviously have emerged long ago had this been the case. The captain would not have offered large odds on the chance of finding bodies, either. Like McDevitt, he knew that there was an unevaluable probability that the crewmen had not been under the hull at all when the freeze-up occurred. There had, after all, been two other unexplained disappearances; Dondragmer’s educated guess at the whereabouts of Kervenser and Reffel was far from a certainty even in his own mind.
It was dark undernearth, out of range of the floods. Dondragmer could still see—a response to abrupt changes of illumination was a normal adaptation to Mesklin’s eighteen-minute rotation period—but some details escaped him. He saw the condition of the two trucks whose treads had been ruined by the helmsmen’s escape efforts, and he saw the piles of stones they had made in the attempt to confine the hot water in a small area; but he missed the slash in the mattress where the two had taken final refuge.
What he saw made it obvious, however, that at least one of the missing men had been there for a while. Since the volume which had evidently not frozen at all was small, the most likely guess seemed to be that they had been caught in the encroaching ice after doing the work which could be seen—though it was certainly hard to see just how this could have happened. The captain made a rapid check the full length of the ice-walled cavern, examining every exposed truck fore and aft, top and sides. It never occurred to him to look higher. He had, after all, taken part in the building of the huge vehicle; he knew there was nowhere higher to go.
He emerged at last into the light and the view field of the communicator. His appearance alone was something of a relief to Benj; the boy had concluded, just as the captain had, that the helmsmen could not be under the hull alive, and he had rather expected to see Dondragmer pulling bodies after him. The relief was only relative, of course; the burning question remained—where was Beetchermarlf? The captain was climbing out of the pit and leaving the field of view. Maybe he was coming back to the bridge to make a detailed report. Benj, now showing clearly the symptoms of sleeplessness, waited silently with his fists clenched.
But Dondragmer’s voice did not come. The captain had planned to tell the human observers what he had found, indeed; but on the way up the side of the hull, visible to them but unrecognized, he paused to talk to one of the men who was chipping ice from the lock exit.
“I only got what the human Hoffman told me about what you found when your party first reached that stream,” he said. “Are there any more details I should know? I have the picture that you had just met someone at the point where the ground was almost up into the fog, but I never heard from Hoffman whether it was Reffel or Kervenser. Who was it? And are the helicopters all right? There was an interruption just then—someone up above apparently caught sight of Kabremm back at the Esket, and I cut in myself because the stream you had found worried me. That’s why I split your party. Who was it you found?”
“It was Kabremm.”
Dondragmer almost lost his grip on the holdfasts.
“Kabremm? Destigmet’s first officer? Here? And a human being recognized him—it was your screen he was seen on?”
“It sounded that way, sir. He didn’t see our communicator until it was too late, and none of us thought for an instant that there was a chance of a human being telling one of us from another—at least, not between the time we recognized him ourselves and the time it was too late.”
“But what is he doing here? This planet has three times the area of Mesklin; there are plenty of other places to be. I knew the commander was going to hit shoals sooner or later playing this Esket trick on the human beings, but I certainly never thought he’d ground on such silly bad luck as this.”
“It’s not entirely chance, sir. Kabremm didn’t have time to tel
l us much—we took advantage of your order about exploring the stream to break up and get him out of sight of the communicator—but I understand this river has been giving trouble most of the night. There’s a buildup of ice five million or so cables downstream, not very far from the Esket, and a sort of ice river is flowing slowly into the hot lands. The Esket and the mines and the farms are right in its way.”
“Farms?”
“That’s what Destigmet calls them. Practically a Settlement with hydroponic tanks—a sort of oversized life-support rig that doesn’t have to balance as closely as the cruiser ones do. Anyway, Destigmet sent out the Gwelf under Kabremm to explore upstream in the hope of finding out how bad the ice river was likely to get. They had grounded where we met them because of the fog—they could have flown over it easily enough, but they couldn’t have seen the riverbed through it.”
“Then they must have arrived since the flood that brought us here, and if they were examining the riverbed they flew right over us. How could they possibly have missed our lights?”
“I don’t know, sir. If Kabremm told Stakendee, I didn’t hear him.”
Dondragmer gave the rippling equivalent of a shrug. “Probably he did, and made it a point to stay out of reach of our human eyes. I suppose Kervenser and Reffel ran into the Gwelf, and Reffel used his vision shutter to keep the dirigible from human sight; but I still don’t see why Kervenser, at least, didn’t come back to report.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know about any of that, either,” replied the sailor.
“Then the river we’ve washed into must bend north, if it leads to the Esket area.” The other judged correctly that Dondragmer was merely thinking out loud, and made no comment. The captain pondered silently for another minute or two. “The big question is whether the commander heard it, too, when the human—I suppose it was Mrs. Hoffman; she is about the only one that familiar with us—called out Kabremm’s name. If he did, he probably thought that someone had been careless back at the Esket, as I did. You heard her on your set and I heard her on mine, but that’s reasonable; they’re both Kwembly communicators, and probably all in one place up at the station. We don’t know, though, about their links with the Settlement. I’ve heard that all their communication equipment is in one room, but it must be a big room and the different sets may not be very close together. It’s equally possible that Bari did, or did not, hear her.
“What it all shapes up to is that one human being has recognized an Esket crew member, not only alive long after they were all supposed to be dead, but five or six million cables from the place where they presumably died. We don’t know how certain this human being was of the identification; certain enough to call Kabremm’s name on impulse, maybe not certain enough to report to other humans without further checking. After all, such a report could sound pretty silly without strong evidence. We don’t know whether Barlennan knows of this slip; and worst of all, we can’t tell what he’s likely to answer when questions about it come his way. His safest and most probable line would be complete ignorance seasoned with shocked amazement, and I suppose he’ll realize that, but I certainly wish I could talk to him without having human beings along the corridor.”
“Wouldn’t your best line be complete ignorance, too?” queried the sailor. Like all the Mesklinites on Dhrawn, he was fully aware of the trick being played on the human beings to get the Eskei off their books. He also knew as much of the reason for it as Barlennan had made public. Very few—Dondragmer not among them—had been let all the way into the commander’s thinking.
“It would be,” the captain answered, “but I can’t get away with it. I’ve already told the humans about your return. The most hopeful notion I have at the moment centers around the possibility of mistaken identity; how sure is Mrs. Hoffman, or whoever it was—the more I think of it, the more certain I am it was her voice; I wish I’d been paying more attention—that it was really Kabremm she saw? How does she tell us apart anyway? Coloration pattern? Walking style? Can she recognize any of us at a glance, or just a few whom she knows especially well, or does one have to have a missing leg, or no red on his head?
“I’d use that line, except that I just don’t know what Barlennan is going to do—or if he’s in a position to have to do anything. If he didn’t hear that call, and the human is really suspicious, it wouldn’t take many trick questions to catch him out. Even if he did, and is warned, he’s in trouble, because then he’ll be worrying about what I’m likely to say. That’s the sort of thing I’ve been worried about ever since the beginning; with all longdistance communication having to go through the humans, coordination of this trick was bound to get difficult. If we could have avoided slips until Destigmet had made enough wire to reach from the mines to the Settlement, and gotten it strung, the chances of getting away with the whole thing would have gone up a lot.”
“All that ever worried me,” replied the sailor as he resumed his chipping at the ice, “was what would happen when they did learn about what we were doing. I don’t suppose they’d really abandon us here—human beings don’t seem to be quite that firm, even on business deals—but they could as long as we don’t have spaceships of our own.”
“That was the basic argument the commander gave, as you know,” returned Dondragmer. “They seem to be dependable beings, and personally I’d trust them as far as I would anyone, but they are different in some ways and one is never quite sure what they will consider an adequate motive, or excuse, for some action. That’s why the commander wanted to get us self-supporting on this world without their knowing about it. I’m glad Destigmet has done so well with his ‘farm.’ The mines were a long step, and the dirigibles were a triumph; but we’re a long, long way from being able either to make, or to do without, the human-made energy boxes; and I sometimes wonder if the commander realizes just how far beyond us those are.
“But that’s not the immediate problem. I’m going to have to talk to the station again. I suppose my best policy is not to mention Kabremm unless they ask me, and if they do, try to convince them it was mistaken identity.”
“Not mentioning it might make them suspicious,” pointed out the sailor.
“It would be consistent with the mistaken-identity line, though. Thanks for the point; I hadn’t considered it. Carry on, and give me a wave on the bridge when the lock is clear.”
The sailor gestured agreement, and Dondragmer at last got to the bridge.
There was plenty to say to the human beings without mentioning Kabremm, and the captain began saying it as soon as he had doffed his airsuit.
“At least one of the helmsmen was under the hull for a while, and probably they both were, but I couldn’t find any trace of either one just now except work they had done trying to get out—a least, I can’t see any other reason for it; it certainly wasn’t an assigned job. They wrecked, or nearly wrecked, two of the trucks in the process. Much of the space under there is still frozen up, and I’m afraid they’re probably in the ice. We’ll search more carefully, with lights, when the crew comes back and I can spare the men. The water, or whatever it was, that was boiled away by our heater coated an ice layer on the hull which has sealed the main lock; we must get that back into service as quickly as possible. There is much equipment which can’t now be moved out if we have to abandon the Kwembly, and much which can’t be moved back inside if we don’t, because it won’t go through any other lock.
“Also, the use of that heater caused the melting of about a body length of the radiator wire, and I don’t see how we are going to restore the refrigerator to service if we do get the Kwembly free. This may not be of immediate importance, but, if we do get back into service, we’d have to think twice about going very far into Low Alpha without refrigeration. One of the few things you people seem really sure of is that the low-pressure area is caused by high temperature, presumably from internal heat, and I know you set a very high priority on finding out about it. There is virtually no metal in the ship, and one of the few things I unders
tand about that refrigerator is that its outside radiator must be an electrical conductor. Right?”
The captain waited for his reply with some interest. He hoped that the technical problem would divert human interest from the whole question of Kabremm and the Esket; but he knew that this would not have worked if he himself were on the other end of the conversation. Of course, Benj Hoffman was young—but he was probably not the only person there.
At least it was Benj who answered; but he didn’t seem much interested in technology.
“If you think they’re in the ice, shouldn’t people get down there right away and look? They might still be alive in those suits, mightn’t they? You said a while ago that no one had ever found out, but that at least they wouldn’t suffocate. It seems to me that the longer you put off finding them, the less chance they have of living. Isn’t that the most important problem right now?”
Easy’s voice followed on, before Dondragmer could frame an answer; she seemed to be talking to her son as well as to the captain.
“It’s not quite the most important. The Kwembly is synonymous with the lives of its entire crew, son. The captain is not being callous about his men. I know how you feel about your friend, and as a feeling it’s perfectly proper; but a person with responsibility has to think as well as feel.”
“I thought you were on my side.”
“I feel with you very strongly; but that doesn’t keep me from knowing the captain is right.”
