Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  The astronomer smiled slowly.

  “Yes. I see. That does make sense. I should have thought of it myself. I have some more practice exercises for him here, but that’s about as good as any of them. I should do more of that sort of thing. Well, let’s get at it. Can you stay to check my language? I think I have the Stennish words for everything in today’s work, and space is empty enough so that his mistakes and mine should both be relatively harmless, but there’s no need to take chances.”

  “It’s too bad the Kwembly couldn’t be salvaged after all,” remarked Aucoin, “but Dondragmer’s crew is doing a very good and effective study of the area while they’re waiting for relief. I think it was a very good idea to send the Kaliff after them with a skeleton crew and let them work while they waited, instead of taking them back to the Settlement in the barge. That would have been pretty dangerous anyway, until there are practiced Mesklinite pilots. The single landing near the Kwembly to get the two helmsmen, and a direct return to space while they were trained, was probably the safest way to do it.

  “But now we have this trouble with the Smof. At this rate we’ll be out of cruisers before we’re halfway around Low Alpha. Does anyone know the Smofs commander the way Easy knows Dondragmer? You don’t, I suppose, Easy? Can anyone give a guess at his ability to get himself out of trouble? Or are we going to have to risk sending the barge down before those two Mesklinites are fully trained?”

  “Tebbetts thinks Beetchermarlf could handle a surface landing now, as long as it wasn’t complicated by mechanical emergencies,” pointed out an engineer. “Personally I wouldn’t hesitate to let him go.”

  “You may be right. The trouble is, though, that we certainly can’t land the barge on an ice pack, and not even the barge can lift one of those land-cruisers even if there were a way of fastening them together without an actual landing. Beetchermarlf and Takoorch may as well continue their training for the moment. What I want as soon as possible, Planetology, is the best direction and distance for the Smof s crew to trek if they do have to abandon the cruiser—that is, the closest spot where the barge could land to pick them up. If it’s close to their present location, don’t tell them, of course; I want them to do their best to save the cruiser, and there’s no point in tempting them with an easy escape.” Ib Hoffman stirred slightly, but refrained from comment. Aucoin, from one point of view, was probably justified. The administrator went on, “Also, is there definite word on the phenomenon that trapped the Kwembly? You’ve had specimens of the mud, or whatever it is, that Beetchermarlf brought up, for weeks now.”

  “Yes,” replied a chemist. “It’s a fascinating example of surface action. It’s sensitive to the nature and particle size of the minerals present, the proportions of water and ammonia in the lubricating fluid, the temperature, and the pressure. The Kwembly’s weight, of course, was the main cause of trouble; the Mesklinites could walk around on it—in fact, they did——safely enough. Once triggered by a pressure peak, the strength went out of the stuff in a wave—”

  “All right, the rest can serve for a paper,” Aucoin nodded. “Is there any way to identify such a surface without putting a cruiser, or the barge, onto it?”

  “Hm-m-m. I’d say yes. Radiation temperature should be information enough—or at least, it would serve warning that further tests should be made. For that matter, I wouldn’t worry about its ever getting the barge; the jets would boil the water and ammonia out of such a surface safely before touchdown.”

  Aucoin nodded, and passed on to other matters. Cruiser reports—publication reports—supply reports—planning prospectuses . . .

  Ib Hoffman’s attention wandered, important though he knew the work to be. His mind kept going back to the Kwembly and the Smof, and to a well-designed, well-built piece of diving gear which had almost killed an eleven-year-old boy. The reports, punctuated by Aucoin’s sometimes acid comments, droned on; and slowly Ib made up his mind.

  “I think we’re getting ahead of the situation,” remarked Barlennan. “There was a good excuse for taking the communicators out of the Kwembly, since she was being abandoned, so we’ve been able to work on her with no restrictions. Jemblakee and Deeslenver seem to feel that she can be back in running condition in another day.” He glanced up at the feeble sun, almost exactly overhead. “The mud holding her has been nearly all washed away from the river side with water; they’ve jelled it on the other side with ammonia from the spring, so that she wouldn’t drift away before we were ready. They have a canal washed all the way to the river. The human chemists were certainly helpful about that stuff. I hated to disappoint them with the report that we had to give up. It was funny how the one who talked to Dee kept insisting that he was only guessing, while he made suggestion after suggestion, and they all worked.”

  “That seems to be a human trait—lack of self-confidence,” remarked Guzmeen. “When did this news come? I didn’t see any flier.”

  “The Deedee came in an hour ago, and is gone again. There’s too much for that machine to do; we’ve got to face that problem. It was bad enough when we lost the Elsh, and with Kabremm and his Gwelf overdue things are piling up. I hope we find him; he’s a good observer, among other things. Maybe the Kaliff will turn up something; he was supposed to be scouting a rescue route to get her to Dondragmer’s camp, so there’s a fair chance that one of Kenanken’s scout fliers may spot him. He’s less than a day overdue so far, so he should still be alive—”

  “And with all this, you say we’re ahead of the situation?” cut in Guzmeen.

  “Yes. Remember, the whole aim of the Esket act was to persuade the human beings to let us use spaceships. That’s been accomplished, or at least is beginning. The development of our self-support capacity was incidental to that end, though it was also desirable in itself. It’s a nuisance that we’ve lost so much of it now, but not really a catastrophe. We haven’t lost the personnel of the Esket, except maybe Kabremm and his dirigible crew and those of the Elsh, of course; just a lot of work.”

  “But even Kabremm and Karfrengin aren’t exactly expendable. There aren’t very many of us. If Dondragmer and his crew don’t keep alive until the Kaliff reaches them, we’ll have taken a really serious loss; at least our dirigible crews weren’t our scientists and engineers.”

  “Don’s in no real danger. They can always be picked up by Beetchermarlf in the human spaceship—I mean our spaceship.”

  “And if anything goes wrong with that operation we’re out not only our only spaceship but our only space pilots.”

  “Which suggests to me,” Barlennan said thoughtfully, “that we should try to regain some lost ground. As soon as the Kwembly is ready she should start hunting a suitable place and start replacing the Esket settlement. Don’s scientists should have little trouble finding a good location; Dhrawn seems to be rich in metal ores. Maybe we should have him search closer to here so that communication will be quicker, though.

  “We’ll have to build more dirigibles; the one we have left isn’t nearly enough for the work. Maybe we ought to design bigger ones.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that,” a technician who had been listening silently up to this point spoke up. “Do you suppose that it would be smart to find out more—tactfully, of course—from the humans about dirigibles? We’ve never discussed the subject with them; they showed you about balloons years ago, and some of our own people got the idea of using the human power sources with them. We don’t know if they ever used them at all. Maybe it isn’t just bad luck that we’ve lost two out of our three in a short time. Maybe there’s something fundamentally wrong with the whole idea.”

  The commander gave a gesture of impatience.

  “That’s silly. I didn’t try to pick rip a complete scientific education from the aliens, since it was obviously going to take too long; but one thing I did gather was that the rules, which are the central theme of the whole field, are essentially simple. Once the humans started concentrating on basic rules, they went from sailing ships
to spaceships in a couple of hundred years. Balloons, powered or not, are simple devices; I understand them perfectly myself. Putting an engine aboard doesn’t change that; the same rules have to be working.”

  The technician eyed his commander thoughtfully, and thought briefly of electron tubes and television circuits before replying.

  “I suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “that a piece of a tent being blown away by the gale, and a ship being tacked into the wind, are also examples of the same rules at work.”

  Barlennan didn’t want to give an affirmative answer, but he could find nothing better.

  He was still trying to shrug off the technician’s remark, but only succeeding in growing more and more doubtful of his situation, some twenty hours later when a messenger called him to the communication room. As soon as he entered, Guzmeen spoke briefly into a microphone; a minute later, a human face which neither of them recognized appeared on the screen.

  “I am Ib Hoffman, Easy’s husband and Benj’s father,” the stranger began without preamble. “I am speaking to you, Barlennan, and you, Dondragmer, at a time when no one else here is listening but my wife and son. The rest of the observing crew are concentrating on a new emergency involving one of the cruisers. Also, I am using your language as best I can. Easy is listening, knows what I want to say, and will correct me if I err too badly. I have decided that it is critically important to both you and us to clear up some points of misunderstanding. I don’t intend to mention these points to anyone else up here, for reasons which will be obvious before I finish talking.

  “First, Barlennan, my hearty congratulations. I am just about certain that when we turned the barge over to a Mesklinite pilot we fulfilled one of your chief plans, probably well before you meant or expected it to happen. That’s fine. I wanted it to happen, too. Probably you want to make interstellar flights on your own, later on; that’s fine with me, too. I’ll help.

  “You seem to feel that not all human beings agree with me, and that you have to act indirectly. I can’t blame you for that. I can’t even prove to you that I’m sincere; you can’t observe my actions directly, so what you choose to believe of what I say is beyond my control. I still have to say it.

  “I don’t know just how far you went to set up the situation which let me argue Aucoin into approving the transfer of the barge. I suspect that the Esket disappearance wasn’t genuine. I’m not at all sure of the real status of the Kwembly. I’m almost certain that you have done a good deal more exploring, one way or another, than you have reported to us. I won’t say I don’t care, because I do; we’re here to learn as much as possible about Dhrawn, and what you don’t tell us is a loss to the project. I can’t threaten you with penalties for breach of contract, since I’m not completely certain you’ve broken it and am in no position to carry out threats. I do want to persuade you, though, that it will be better for both of us if we do without secrets. We’re at a point where anything less than complete frankness is likely to cost us a lot and cost you everything. To make that point, I’m going to tell you a story.

  “You know that human beings breathe oxygen much as you do hydrogen, though being so much larger we need a more complicated pumping system to get it through our bodies. Because of the details of that system, we suffocate if deprived of gaseous, free oxygen within a certain rather narrow range of pressures.

  “About three quarters of Earth is covered by water. We cannot breathe under water without artificial equipment, but the use of such equipment is a common human sport. It consists essentially of a tank of compressed air and a valve system which releases the air to our breathing system as needed—simple and obvious.

  “Six of our years ago, when Benj was eleven years old, he made such a device, designing it himself with my assistance. He made the pressure tank and regulator, using ordinary fabricating equipment such as may be found in most home workshops, just as he had made more complex things such as small gas turbines. He tested the parts with my help; they worked perfectly. He calculated how long the air in the tank would last him, and then tested the whole assembly under water. I went along as a matter of common-sense safety, using a commercial diving device.

  “I am sure you know the principles of hydrostatics and the gas laws—at least, Easy has given me words for them in your language. You can see that at a certain depth, a lungful of air would have only half its volume at the surface. Benj knew this, too, but reasoned that it would still be a lungful as far as oxygen content was concerned, so that a one-hour tank would be a one-hour tank regardless of depth, as long as tank pressure was above that of the water.

  “To make a long story short, it didn’t. He ran out of air in less than a third of the calculated time, and I had to make an emergency rescue. Because of the quick pressure change and some human peculiarities which you don’t seem to share, he was very nearly killed. The trouble turned out to be that the human breathing action is controlled, not by oxygen supply in our blood, but by that of carbon dioxide—one of the waste products. To maintain a normal equilibrium of that, we have to run normal volumes of air through our lungs, regardless of oxygen content or total pressure; hence, an hour’s air supply at normal pressure is only half an hour thirty-three feet under water, a third of an hour at sixty-six, and so on.

  “I don’t want to insult anyone’s intelligence by asking if he understands my point, but I’d like some comment from you on that story.”

  The answers were interesting, both in nature and arrival time. Barlennan’s popped from the speaker with very little more than light-travel delay; Dondragmer’s was much, much later, and did not overlap with his commander’s.

  “It is obvious that incomplete knowledge can lead to mistakes,” said Barlennan, “but I don’t see why that is especially applicable to the present case. We know that our knowledge can’t be complete, and that our work here is dangerous for that reason. We have always known it. Why emphasize the point now? I’d much rather hear your report on the cruiser you say is in trouble. You make me suspect that you are leading up gently to the information that I have lost another cruiser because of something its designing engineers didn’t know. Don’t worry—I won’t blame you for that. None of us could foresee everything.”

  Ib smiled at the revelation of another human characteristic.

  “That’s not just what I had in mind, Commander, though there are valid aspects to what you have just said. I’d like to wait for Dondragmer’s answer before I say any more, though.”

  It was another full minute—a slightly strained one—before the voice of the Kwembly‘s captain arrived.

  “The face value of your account is plain enough so that you would probably have been briefer had that been all you meant. I suspect that your key point is not so much that your son got into trouble through ignorance, but that he did so even under your adult, experienced supervision. I would take the implication to be that even though you aliens do not claim omniscience or omnipotence, and that we are in a certain amount of danger here no matter how closely you supervise and assist us, we are adding unnecessarily to our danger any time we act on our own—like the student chemist who experiments on his own.” Dondragmer had spent much more time at the College than had his commander.

  “Just what I meant,” said Ib. “Just a moment,” interrupted Easy. “Hadn’t you better relay Don’s remark to Barlennan first?”

  “Right.” Her husband gave a one-sentence summary of the captain’s speech, and went on:

  “Something has occurred to me; it may help—forestall, let’s say—some trouble for you. I know one thing you badly need is a more rapid method of transportation on Dhrawn, and I know you have used a balloon on Mesklin. It might occur to you to try using a balloon, plus an energy pack to drive it, for transport on Dhrawn—a device of the sort humans once used on Earth, called a dirigible. It’s a rather natural development of the balloon.

  “Many of them were built on Earth—and they almost invariably came to a disastrous end. A structure light enough to flo
at in air cannot be sturdy enough to resist the powerful forces of storm winds—even in Earth’s mild climate. A free balloon does not resist the wind, and can survive by running as the winds will.

  “In Dhrawn’s complex ammonia-water-oxygen-whatnot atmosphere, meteorologists say that storm fronts of immense violence, and extreme sharpness, can arise in a matter of a fraction of a minute.

  “Desirable as air-borne transportation would appear to be—on Dhrawn I would suggest you’d better not try it. An atmosphere capable of the sudden violence Dhrawn can manifest, with 40 gravities to drive it, is not suitable for lighter-than-air craft. The helicopters, because they are small, and have high strength-to-area ratios, with fusion powered engines and are stressed for 250 gravity loadings, can survive with a Mesklinite pilot.

  “But they cannot be made large, or they, too, would be torn apart in a Dhrawn-type storm.

  “The chances are, Bari, that a good number of problems in exploring Dhrawn and maintaining a settlement there, can be eased greatly by a complete and full exchange of information.

  “That won’t eliminate all problems—but it can reduce fatalities.”

  “I can’t force any policy on you, and would prefer not to even if I could. I don’t expect you to make a complete confession of everything that’s gone on Dhrawn since you first built the Settlement. In fact, I’d advise strongly against it; I have enough complications up here with the administration as it is. However, if Easy just happened to get an occasional talk with her old friends Destigmet and Kabremm, just as an example, I would have a better idea of what has gone on and be in a better position to keep things running smoothly at this end. I don’t expect a spot decision on any matter of major policy change, Commander, but please think it over.”

  Barlennan, however, was a sea captain by training and trade, and accustomed to the need for quick decisions. Furthermore, circumstances had already been forcing thoughts along these same lines to circulate in his tiny head. Finally, his only really basic policy was closely connected with his own survival and that of his crew. He answered Ib promptly.