by Hal Clement
Meantime, the rest of the crew had been entering the cruiser by the available locks—the small one at the bridge, the larger ones through which the fliers were launched, and the pairs of one-man-at-a-time emergency traps at the sides near bow and stern. Once inside, each crewman set about an assigned job; Dondragmer had been thinking as well as talking to human beings during their absence. Some packed food to last until the life-support equipment resumed cycling normally; others readied coils of rope, lights, power units, and other equipment for transportation.
Many were at work improvising carrying devices; one awkward result of the Kwembly’s being fusion-powered was a great shortage of wheels aboard. There were tiny pulleys carrying the control cables around corners, but not only were these too small for wheelbarrows, or similar devices, but Dondragmer had firmly forbidden anything resembling dismantling of the vehicle. There was nothing resembling a fork-lift or even a dolly aboard. Such devices—the former variety muscle-powered, of course—were known and used on Mesklin for medium-to-long-distance carrying; but there was literally nothing on the Kwembly which could be moved at all which a Mesklinite could not easily carry to any part of the vehicle without such assistance. Now, with a distance of miles facing them and the necessity of moving many items complete rather than in pieces, improvisation was in order. Litters and travois were making their appearance. The corridors leading to the main lock were rapidly being stacked with supplies and equipment awaiting the freeing of the exit.
None of the bustle and thumping, however, penetrated the mattress where Beetchermarlf and Takoorch still lay concealed. As nearly as could be judged later, they must have sought this shelter within a very few minutes of the time the resistance heater went into action. The thick, rubbery material of the mattress itself, which had been so difficult for even a Mesklinite-wielded knife to penetrate, resisted even better the sounds made by the crackling steam-bubbles around the hot metal and the calls of the workers who entered later. Had these last been forced to communicate with anyone at a distance, their resonant hooting might well have made its way even through that tough material; but there was little for them to say even to each other; they all knew their jobs perfectly well. The slit through which the helmsmen had found their entrance was held tightly enough closed by the elasticity of the fabric so that no light reached them.
Finally, the Mesklinite personality trait most nearly described as a combination of patience and fatalism assured that neither Beetchermarlf nor his companion was likely to check outside their refuge until the breathing hydrogen in their suits became a serious problem.
As a result, even if Dondragmer had heard Benj’s appeal, there would have been nothing for him to signal. The helmsmen, little over three feet above some of their companions and a similar distance below many others, were not found.
Not quite all the Kwembly‘s crew were engaged in preparation for the move. When the most necessary aspects of that operation had been arranged, Dondragmer called two of his sailors for a special detail.
“Go over to the stream—head northwest and you can’t miss it—and follow it up until you find Kabremm and the Gwelf,” he ordered. “Tell him what we are doing. We will set up a livable site as quickly as we can—you tell him where; you’ve been there and I haven’t—and we will set up the human machines so they are looking into the lighted, active portion of that area. That will make it safe for him to bring the Gwelf down and land her anywhere outside that area, with no risk of being seen by the human beings. Tell him that the commander seems to be starting the native-life part of the play early, apparently to account for Kabremm’s being seen in this neighborhood. He’s suggested no details, and will probably stick to the original idea of letting the human beings invent their own.
“When you have seen Kabremm, go on upstream until you find Stakendee, and give him the same information. Be careful about getting into the view field of his communicator—when you think you may be getting near him, shut off your lights every little while and look for his. I’ll be in touch with him through the human beings, of course, but not with that message. You understand.”
“Yes, sir,” the two replied in unison, and were gone.
The hours passed. The main lock was freed and opened, and nearly all the material to be taken was outside when a call came from above. The communicator which had been in the laboratory was now outside, so Dondragmer could be reached directly. Benj was still the speaker.
“Captain, Stakendee reports that the stream he is following is getting noticeably broader and swifter, and that the clouds are becoming rain. I’ve told him to start back, on my own responsibility.” The captain looked up at the still cloudless sky, and westward toward the place where Stakendee’s fog might have shown if it had been daylight.
“Thanks, Benj. That’s what I would have ordered. We’re leaving the Kwembly right now, in that case, before the stream gets too big to cross with the equipment. I have lashed down the communicator on the bridge, and will leave the lights on as Mr. McDevitt requested. We’ll hope you can tell us that it’s safe to come back, before too long. Please report this to Barlennan, and tell him that we will watch as carefully as possible for the natives; if, as he seems to be suggesting, they are using Kabremm as a means of getting in touch with us, I will do my best to set up cooperative relations with them. Remember, I haven’t seen Kabremm myself yet, and you haven’t mentioned him since the first time, so I’m entirely in the dark about his status so far.
“Be sure to keep me informed of Barlennan’s thoughts and plans, as far as you can; I’ll do the same from here, but things may happen too quickly for any possible advance warning. Watch your screens. That’s all for now; we’re starting.”
The captain uttered a resonant hoot which, fortunately for human ears, was not faithfully reproduced in volume by the set. The Mesklinites fell into rough line, and within two minutes were gone from the field of view of the bridge communicator.
The other set was being borne near the tail of the line, so the screen far above showed the string of lights bobbing in front of it. Little else, however, could be seen. The nearest sailors, those within two or three yards of the lens, could be made out in reasonable detail as they wound among the boulders with their burdens, but that was all. The line could have been flanked on both sides twenty feet away by a legion of natives, without any human being the wiser. Aucoin was neither the first, nor the last, to curse Dhrawn’s 1,500-hour rotation period; there were still over six hundred hours to go before the feeble daylight from Lalande 21185 would return.
The stream was still small when the group splashed through it, though Stakendee’s set a few miles west had confirmed the report that it was growing. Benj, noticing this, suggested that the small party also cross so that its members could meet the main body on the other side of the valley. Fortunately he made this suggestion to Dondragmer before acting on his own; the captain, remembering the two messengers he had sent upstream, hastily advised that the crossing be postponed as long as possible so that Stakendee and his men could compare more accurately the size of the stream with what it had been when they had passed the same area earlier.
Benj and Easy accepted this excuse; Ib Hoffman, quite aware that the foot party was carrying no time measuring devices and could give no meaningful report on the rate of change, was startled for a few seconds. Then he smiled, privately.
For many minutes, which stretched into one hour and then another, there was little to watch. The crew reached and climbed the bare rock sides of the valley at the spot where the first load of equipment had been left, and set about constructing something which might have been called either a camp or a town. Life-support equipment had first priority, of course. It would be many hours yet before any air-suits would need recharging, but the time would come; and for organisms as profligate of energy as the Mesklinites food was also a matter of immediate concern. They set about it quickly and efficiently; Dondragmer, like the rest of the cruiser captains, had given plenty of advance th
ought to the problem of abandoning ship.
Stakendee’s group finally crossed the river and, somewhat later, reached the encampment. The crossing had been approved by Dondragmer after he had received through Benj a message which contained, quite incidentally, the name of one of the messengers the captain had sent from the Kwembly.
Consequently no one, either member of the Kwembly crew or human being, was able to watch the growth of the ammonia-water stream. It would have been an interesting sight. At first, as the witnesses had reported, it was little more than a trickle running from hollow to hollow on the bare rock in the higher reaches of the riverbed, and winding among the boulders lower down. As the drops of liquid in the fog coalesced and settled out more rapidly, tiny new tributaries began to feed into the main stream from the sides, and the stream itself grew deeper and faster. On the bare rock it meandered more violently, overflowing the basins which had originally contained it. Here and there it froze temporarily, as the proportions of water supplied by the frozen puddles upstream and of ammonia from the fog shifted one way or the other from the eutectic which was liquid at the local temperature—about 174 degrees on the human Kelvin scale, roughly 71 on that used by the Mesklinite scientists.
Among the boulders, as it neared the Kwembly, it found more and more water-ice, and the progress grew more complicated. The ammonia would dissolve water for a time, the mixture flowing away as the composition entered the liquid range. Then it would stop and build up—as Benj had pictured, like wax flowing from a candle—as it solidified temporarily from an addition of ammonia. Then it would slump away again as underlying ice reacted with the mixture.
It finally reached the hole which had been melted along the Kwembly‘s starboard side, where the human beings could watch once more. By this time the “stream” was a complex network of alternate liquid, solid, and slush perhaps two miles across. The solid, however, was losing out. While there were still no clouds this far downstream, the air was nearly saturated with ammonia—saturated, that is, with respect to a pure liquid-ammonia surface. Naturally, the ammonia vapor pressure needed for equilibrium over an ammonia-water mixture would be lower; so condensation was taking place on the mostly-water and low-ammonia ice. As it reached the appropriate composition for liquefaction its surface flowed away and exposed more solid to the vapor. Of course, the liquid tended to solidify again as it absorbed still more ammonia vapor, but its freedom to move also gave it access to more water-ice.
The situation was a little different in the space under the Kwembly’s hull, but not greatly so. Where liquid touched ice the latter dissolved and slush appeared; but more ammonia diffusing from the free surface at the side melted it again. Slowly—slowly—minute after minute—the grip of the ice on the huge vehicle relaxed; so gently that neither the human beings watching with fascination from above, nor the two Mesklinites waiting in their dark refuge, could detect the change, the hull floated free.
By now the entire riverbed was liquid, with a few surviving patches of slush. Gently, very unlike the flood of a hundred hours or so before when three million square miles of water-snow had been touched by the first ammonia-fog of the advancing season, a current began to develop. Imperceptibly to all concerned, the Kwembly moved with that current—imperceptibly, because there was no relative motion to catch the eyes of the human beings, and no rocking, or pitching, to be felt by the hidden Mesklinites.
The seasonal river which drains the great plateau where the Kwembly had been caught slices through a range of hills—for Dhrawn, respectable mountains—which extends for some four thousand miles northwest-southeast. The Kwembly had paralleled this range for most of its length before the flood. Dondragmer, his helmsmen, his air scouts, and indeed most of the crew had been quite aware of the gentle elevation to their left, sometimes near enough to be seen from the bridge and sometimes only a pilot’s report.
The flood had carried the cruiser through a pass near the southeastern end of this range to the somewhat lower and rougher regions close to the edge of Low Alpha before she had grounded. Now she followed the pass which shaped the river once more; first almost eastward, then more and more to the north. She was backtracking on the path which Kabremm had followed in his dirigible from the Esket area some six thousand miles away, but she did not make the whole distance.
Low Alpha is an active tectonic region. Its energy, as men had guessed and were still trying to prove, is radioactive. Selection reactions which produce subcrustal effects analogous to zone melting—as they do at greater depths in Earth’s crust—have concentrated unstable isotopes such as potassium 40 into definite, comparatively limited areas, so that Dhrawn’s climate is internally controlled. This is not quite as completely true as for a typical sunless planet, of course;
Lalande 21185 by itself would warm Dhrawn when at its closest to about fifty degrees Kelvin. Low Alpha is over two hundred degrees hotter, averaging somewhere around the melting temperature of water-ice. In this range, of course, the sun adds less than one degree to the thermometer reading.
Low Beta, some forty thousand miles away around the planet’s north pole, is actively volcanic. It is the major source of energy for Dhrawn’s air circulation, and hence the key controlling area for its climate. The Mesklinites would have been landed there if anyone could have thought of a practical way to keep them alive.
The Kwembly’s northward drift was carrying it into regions of higher temperature which kept the river fluid, even though it was now losing ammonia by evaporation. The course of the stream was almost entirely controlled by the topography, rather than the other way around: the river was geologically too young to have altered the landscape greatly by its own action. Also, much of the exposed surface of the planet in this area was bedrock, igneous and hard, rather than a covering of loose sediment in which a stream could have its own way.
About three hundred miles from the point at which she had been abandoned, the Kwembly was borne into a broad, shallow lake. She promptly, but gently, ran aground on the soft mud delta where the river fed into it. The great hull naturally deflected the currents around it, and set them to digging a new channel alongside. After about half an hour she tilted sideways and slid off into the new channel, righting herself as she floated free. It was the rocking associated with this last liberation which caught the attention of the helmsmen and induced them to come out for a look around.
XIV
It would be untrue to say that Benj recognized Beetchermarlf at first glance. As a matter of fact, the first of the caterpillarlike figures to emerge from the river and clamber up the hull was Takoorch. However, it was the younger helmsman’s name which echoed from four speakers on Dhrawn.
One of these was on the Kwembly‘s bridge and went unheard. Two were in Dondragmer’s encampment a few hundred yards from the edge of the broad, swift river which now filled the valley. The fourth was in Reffel’s helicopter, parked close beside the bulk of the Gwelf.
The flying machines were about a mile west of Dondragmer’s camp; Kabremm would go no closer, not wanting to take the slightest chance of repeating his earlier slip. He would probably not have moved at all from the site where Stakendee had found him if the river had not risen. For one thing, he had been fog-bound and had no wish to fly at all. Reffel had been even less anxious. However, there had been no choice, so Kabremm had allowed his craft to float upward on its own lift until it was in clear air, Reffel hovering as close to the other machine’s running lights as he dared. Once above the few yards of ammonia droplets they had been able to navigate, and had flown toward Dondragmer’s lights until the dirigible’s commander had decided they were close enough. Letting the Gwelf come to the knowledge of the men above in orbit would be an even more serious mistake than the one he had made already, and Kabremm was still trying to decide what he was going to say to Barlennan about that the next time they met.
Both he and Reffel had also spent some uncomfortable hours before concluding, from the lack of appropriate comment, that the latter had shu
ttered his vision set quickly enough after coming within sight of the Gwelf.
At least, Dondragmer and Kabremm had at last got into personal conversation, and been able to coordinate what they would say and do if there were ever any further repercussions from Easy’s recognition. One load was off the captain’s mind. However, he was still taking steps connected with that mistake.
The cry of “Beetch!” in Benj’s unmistakable voice distracted him from one of these steps. He had been checking over his crew for people who looked as much as possible like Kabremm. The job was complicated by the fact that he had not seen the other officer for several months—Dondragmer had not yet had time to visit the Gwelf, and Kabremm would come no closer to the camp for any reason—and had never known him particularly well anyway. His plan was to have all crewmen who might reasonably be mistaken for the Esket’s first officer to appear unobtrusively and casually but frequently in the field of view of the vision sets. Anything likely to undermine the certainty of Easy Hoffman that it was really Kabremm she had seen was probably worth trying.
However, the fate of the Kwembly and his helmsmen had never been very far from the captain’s mind in the twelve hours since his cruiser’s lights had vanished, and at the sound from the speaker he snapped to full attention.
“Captain!” the boy’s voice continued. “Two Mesklinites have just appeared and are climbing up the hull of the Kwembly. They came out of the water; they must have been somewhere underneath all the time, even if you couldn’t find them. It couldn’t be anyone but Beetch and Tak. I can’t talk to them until they get to the bridge, of course, but it looks as though we might get your ship back after all. Two men can drive it, can’t they?”
