by Hal Clement
“It has been easier lately. This isn’t to take care of boredom, though. It’s just one of those sure things. Would you care to allow any odds that the astrophysics crowd won’t be begging, within the next twenty-four hours, that we go into a parking orbit around the neutron star at tidal limit distance?”
Sarjuk gave a snort of disbelief. “They must know better. A few thousand more kilograms of hydrogen and we’ll have to get fuel from one of the planets to get home.”
“Well, we probably can. The big one seems to have water.”
“With enough deuterium already? Or do we build a separator?”
“We could. We expected to be here for as much as three years anyway, and personally I wouldn’t mind settling down into a less hectic life than this for a while.”
“The idea was, and remains, to make a preliminary survey and get the results home. The three-year plan was contingent on either unforeseen complication—just a safety margin—or on the making of some really fundamental discovery important enough to demand immediate work, rather than wait for the next expedition.”
“And how important would that have to be?” asked her husband.
“That will have to be settled when—and if—it happens. Until something of the sort comes up, we plan to return as soon as the planned operation—”
“Was the neutron star part of anyone’s plan?”
“No, but you know as well as I that it can really be handled only by a group set up specifically for it. No one even dreamed that such a thing would be here, I can’t see staying on and trying to do that job ourselves, even though we could live in the Manzara indefinitely. And, as I still think they know too well to ask, I will not sanction the fuel expense of getting into a parking orbit as far down in a gravity well like this as they’d need. And I won’t do any betting on the matter, dear husband.”
“I didn’t really think you would. I’ll cook up something even more certain.”
He refused to be more specific, and the captain knew him well enough by now not to try very hard.
The Manzara’s station between the two ex-stars was of course unstable, so Sforza and his colleagues would permit no interruption in their constant watch of the ballistics computer and its display. There were other, equally versatile units on board, however, and Garabed had no trouble getting time on one of these; he had an idea to cheek. He would have been as reluctant as any physicist to describe it to anyone; he would have admitted at the time, as was charged later by amateur psychologists, that it stemmed purely from wishful thinking. He made a point of setting it up in private, and looked for a long time at the display when the computer had done its work. Then he cleared the setup, and spent some time trying to decide whether to break it first to his wife or to Pardales.
The decision brought a smile to his face.
“Jeff,” he remarked to the physicist a few minutes later, “I don’t see why you fellows have had so much trouble with those pairs of neutrino bursts. I was just running your records through to check out one of the computer cores, and it seems perfectly straightforward to me.”
“Straightforward? How do you mean?”
“Well, the pattern is so simple. One of each pair is at the neutron star, as you’ve been admitting, and the other is always on the surface of a hemisphere just over a light-second in radius, centered on the neutron star and with its axis pointing—”
“Show me!” The physicist was satisfyingly jolted.
Garabed led him back to the station where he had tried his idea, and set up the material again. It showed as he had said; he had arranged the plot on a coordinate system which rotated with the Sirius B doublet, so the two main bodies showed no motion. The hundreds of luminous points which represented the records of the neutrino bursts were indeed arranged in a nearly perfect hemisphere for the one part, and concentrated around the neutron star for the other.
“Our plot was all over the place—nothing like that regular!” exclaimed Pardales. “What did you plug in there? You must have put in some extra data—”
“Not exactly,” replied Garabed. “There’s my program. Actually, I left something out. Look it over.” There was silence for a minute or two.
“You took for granted, as we did, that there was a causal relation between the members of each pair. You allowed for travel time from point of origin of each flash to the ship; you allowed for travel time from one of each pair to the other—wait a minute! No, you didn’t! You assumed they were really simultaneous!”
“Right,” grinned Garabed. “No travel time. Think it over, friend; I have to talk to the captain.” Pardales did not notice his departure. It is all very well to admit that coincidence can account for only so much; but when nothing else believable can account for it either . . .
“Captain!” called the instrument technician. Sarjuk was on the bridge, and there were others present, so he automatically avoided familiarity. “I think you’ll be having another request from Physics very shortly. I think I can forestall a suggestion of moving the ship, if you’ll let me take a tender out for a while.”
Sarjuk frowned. “That will take fuel, and are you a good enough pilot to play around in a gravity well this deep?”
“I don’t insist on driving it myself. Look, they are going to have another spell of doubting the neutrino telescope—I’ll bet on that. I want to take out the tender so they can check the scope against its engine emissions, and kill that argument before it gets started. Isn’t that worth a kilogram or two of hydrogen?”
Garabed’s words were very straightforward, but his wife thought she could detect something under them. She looked at him sharply. “Is that the whole thing?” she asked.
He knew better than to lie to her. “Not entirely,” he admitted, “but isn’t it enough?” Their eyes locked for several seconds; the others on the bridge carefully concentrated on their own jobs for the moment. Then she nodded.
“All right. Plan to stay inside one kilogram. Sforza will drive you.”
Minutes later the tender was hurtling away from the dying stars. Garabed would have climbed straight out along their orbital axis, with little regard for energy expenditure; Sforza, as a matter of habit and policy, cut out in the plane of their common orbits, slipped behind the neutron star at minimum safe distance, and let it sling them outward. Once he could see that they were safely away, Garabed made his key request.
“Will you let me have it for a few minutes? I want to change thrust patterns so Jeff and his friends can check their gear. There’s no damage I can do, I take it.”
“None that I can guess at,” replied the ballistician. “If there’s anything here to run into, I don’t know about it either. Go ahead.”
Garabed fingered the thrust potentiometer and began changing it in a careful pattern—alternately high and low, once, once again; twice, then four times; thrice, then nine times. Again and again he went through the cycle, while Sforza watched in amusement.
“It’s lucky this is a warp drive. You’d have broken our straps with straight reaction. If I were a mystery fan, I’d say you were playing spy sending code.”
“It does suggest that a little, doesn’t it?” acknowledged Garabed.
It was not the code which first caught Feroxtant’s attention; the drive units of the Manzara had bothered him enough, and the addition of the tender’s power plant gave him at least as much of a shock as Garabed had just given Pardales. The notion that anything could travel less rapidly than neutrinos was as hard for him to swallow as the demon hypothesis. Since neither his senses nor his imagination could provide data on the direction of the human machines, he could not be sure of their slow motion; but his attention, and Wattimlan’s, were firmly focused on them while the two explorers continued their casting for the white dwarf—or rather, for its slowly developing neutronium core, still so small that their thousands of random shots had not struck it.
Garabed’s code—the squares of the first three numbers—started the two on an argument which, by human
standards, would have gone on for hours. Eventually, more to prove Wattimlan wrong than because he expected any results, Feroxtant performed a multiple reversal in open space which produced neutrino bursts closer to the neutron star; and he deliberately produced a set of four, followed by sixteen. He then brought the Longline back to her mooring in the neutron star’s surface film, and sent a frantic report to his home star. By the time Garabed’s five-twenty-five reply was spreading into space, the word had come that scientists were on the way. Not even the most conservative of beings could doubt that a series of numbers followed by their squares could originate in anything but a living mind—perhaps acting indirectly, but still a mind. It might have been some sort of recording—but it had responded when Feroxtant extended the number series.
It responded with neutrinos, which had reached Feroxtant’s ship very quickly, in spite of the fact that they traveled with the ultimate slowness, so the mind—or minds—must be close to the newly discovered star. The discovery of an unknown intelligent race was worth a major research project—even if no one believed that they could travel slower than neutrinos.
“Just a minute.” Jeb Garabed was not a member of Policy, but he had the common right to speak up to the group. “We don’t dare go back to the Solar system at this stage, and you know it. We are sure now that these faster-than-light things have a different time rate than we do; if we disappeared from here for twenty years, without any more attempt to talk with them, they might be extinct—or at least, their culture might be, and they could have forgotten us. I know it takes fuel to talk to them, and we’re running low—though we could certainly build smaller fusion generators if all that’s needed is neutrino output. The only sensible thing to do is get over to planet Four, which we’re sure has water, set up a deuterium plant so we have no power problems, and just settle down to do research—which is what we’re here for anyway. We can stay right here, and keep sensibly and happily busy, and live very good lives for nineteen years until the next expedition gets here.”
“If they come,” interjected his wife.
“You know they’ll come.” Garabed spoke directly to her, but did not forget the others. “They can’t do anything else. The whole argument against interstellar flight has been the time it would take, as long as we thought the speed of light was a limit. Now we know it isn’t, and however short-sighted human beings may be, they don’t live happily with the certainty that someone can do something they can’t. Remember your history! What made it impossible to keep the nuclear bomb a secret? Leaky spy shielding? Balloon juice! The only important piece of information was given away free by the original builders—the fact that it could be done! There’ll be shiploads of people here from the Solar system as soon as they can make it. They’ll start so fast after our waves get there that we’ll probably have to rescue the first few—they’ll have set out without proper preparation. Sirius A-IV may not be really habitable, but there’ll be a human colony here in twenty years—or sooner, if my old idea is right. That radio message of ours may be all that’s needed, after all. Anyone want to bet whether it’s ten years or twenty before they get here?”
“You and your everlasting betting!” growled Sforza. “You know perfectly well that the reason you want to settle down in a colony and work only twelve hours a day has nothing to do with getting in touch with these tachyon people.”
“That,” said Garabed, “is irrelevant. The main thing is that we have to do it—not just that I want to.” He looked at his captain as he spoke, and even she couldn’t tell whether his grin meant triumph or merely contentment. She nodded slowly. “We stay. Mr. Sforza, plot a minimum-fuel course to A-IV. Chemistry, check practicability of a surface base as soon as we’re close enough for you to work. Mr. Garabed, report to me at the end of the watch.”
Garabed nodded absently. He was not really listening. He was looking into the display tank, seeing with his imagination more of the details of Sirius A-IV than the sensors had yet determined. The planet might not turn out to be as Earthlike as its color suggested, and he knew perfectly well that wishful thinking was painting a lot of his mental picture—but he was ready to bet that the next decade or two would be fun.
STUCK WITH IT
1
The light hurt his closed eyes, and he had a sensation of floating. At first, that was all his consciousness registered, and he could not turn his head to get more data. The pain in his eyes demanded some sort of action, however.
He raised an arm to shade his face and discovered that he really was floating. Then, in spite of the stiffness of his neck, he began to move his head from side to side and saw enough to tell where he was. The glare which hurt even through the visor of his airsuit was from Ranta’s F5 sun; the water in which he was floating was that of the living room of Creak’s home.
He was not quite horizontal; his feet seemed to be ballasted still, and were resting on some of the native’s furniture a foot or so beneath the surface of the water.
Internally, his chest protested with stabs of pain at every breath he took; his limbs were sore, and his neck very stiff. He could not quite remember what had happened, but it must have been violent. Almost certainly, he decided as he made some more experimental motions, he must have a broken rib or two, though his arms and legs seemed whole.
His attempts to establish the latter fact caused his feet to slip from their support. They promptly sank, pulling him into the vertical position. For a moment he submerged completely, then drifted upward again and finally reached equilibrium, with the water line near his eyebrows.
Yes, it was Creak’s house, all right. He was in the corner of the main room, which the occupants had cleared of some of its furniture to give him freedom of motion. The room itself was about three meters deep and twice as long and wide, the cleared volume representing less than a quarter of the total. The rest of the chamber was inaccessible to him, since the native furniture was a close imitation of the hopelessly tangled, springy vegetation of Ranta’s tidal zones.
Looped among the strands of flexible wood, apparently as thoroughly intertwined as they, were two bright forms which would have reminded a terrestrial biologist of magnified Nereid worms. They were nearly four meters long and about a third of a meter in diameter. The lateral fringes of setae in their Earthly counterparts were replaced by more useful appendages—thirty-four pairs of them, as closely as Cunningham had been able to count. These seemed designed for climbing through the tangle of vegetation or furniture, though they could be used after a fashion for swimming.
The nearer of the orange-and-salmon-patterned forms had a meter or so of his head end projecting into the cleared space, and seemed to be eyeing the man with some anxiety. His voice, which had inspired the name Cunningham had given him, reached the man’s ears clearly enough through the airsuit in spite of poor impedance matching between air and water.
“It’s good to see you conscious, Cun’m,” he said in Rantan. “We had no way of telling how badly you were injured, and for all I knew I might have damaged you even further bringing you home. Those rigid structures you call ‘bones’ make rational first aid a bit difficult.”
“I don’t think I’ll die for a while yet,” Cunningham replied carefully. “Thanks, Creak. My limb bones seem all right, though those in my body cage may not be. I can probably patch myself up when I get back to the ship. But what happened, anyway?”
The man was using a human language, since neither being could produce the sounds of the other. The six months Cunningham had so far spent on Ranta had been largely occupied in learning to understand, not speak, alien languages; Creak and his wife had learned only to understand Cunningham’s, too.
“Cement failure again.” Creak’s rusty-hinge phonemes were clear enough to the man by now. “The dam let go, and washed both of us through the gap, the break. I was able to seize a rock very quickly, but you went quite a distance. You just aren’t made for holding on to things, Cun’m.”
“But if the dam is gone, the reserv
oir is going. Why did you bother with me? Shouldn’t the city be warned? Why are both of you still here? I realize that Nereis can’t travel very well just now, but shouldn’t she try to get to the city while there’s still water in the aqueduct? She’ll never make it all that way over dry land—even you will have trouble. You should have left me and done your job. Not that I’m complaining.”
“It just isn’t done.” Creak dismissed the suggestion with no more words. “Besides, I may need you; there is much to be done in which you can perhaps help. Now that you are awake and more or less all right, I will go to the city. When you have gotten back to your ship and fixed your bones, will you please follow? If the aqueduct loses its water before I get there, I’ll need your help.”
“Right. Should I bring Nereis with me? With no water coming into your house, how long will it be habitable?”
“Until evaporation makes this water too salt—days, at least. There are many plants and much surface; it will remain breathable. She can decide for herself whether to fly with you; being out of water in your ship when her time comes would also be bad, though I suppose you could get her to the city quickly. In any case, we should have a meeting place. Let’s see—there is a public gathering area about five hundred of your meters north of the apex of the only concave angle in the outer wall. I can’t think of anything plainer to describe. I’ll be there when I can. Either wait for me, or come back at intervals, as your own plans may demand. That should suffice. I’m going.”
The Rantan snaked his way through the tangle of furniture and disappeared through a narrow opening in one wall. Listening carefully, Cunningham finally heard the splash which indicated that the native had reached the aqueduct—and that there was still water in it.
“All right, Nereis,” he said. “I’ll start back to the ship. I don’t suppose you want to come with me over even that little bit of land, but do you want me to come back and pick you up before I follow Creak?”
