Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “Well, Beedee, I guess I can only wish you luck. Maybe someone will come by in a few years looking for you. I just hope it isn’t one of the kids.”

  The machine responded only to the first sentences.

  “Perhaps you could improvise a cell to power me and keep me conscious until then. You have several metal objects in your possession, and if you strapped two pieces of different composition on my round and flat faces respectively, using a strip of leather from one of the balloons, there should be an adequate potential difference. Natural moisture in the tissue should provide electrolyte, probably to very low temperatures—it would be far from pure water. You should try before the balloons blow off the shelf.”

  Faivonen had paid no attention to the half dozen of the creatures which had apparently been blown into the relatively calm area of the shelf. Even though they were big—some of them over two meters in diameter—it would have taken dozens of them to support his weight even if he had trimmed off their excess tissues and left only gas bags.

  “You do want to do a bit of gambling, then? I told you it was the spice of—let’s call it existence, since you don’t claim to be alive.”

  “I don’t see it as gambling; I am merely trying to increase my odds of remaining able to observe. You said that wasn’t true gambling.”

  “So it isn’t. All right, I’ll do my own gambling. There’s a bush farther up the cliff, between us and the chimney. I have twenty meters of line, and a climbing grapnel. If I can hook to the bush, I can work across to the chimney with the rope carrying our weight.”

  “I noticed the bush. It is twenty-seven meters from the nearest point on the shelf.”

  “Then let’s use leather, if you can call it that, from the balloons to lengthen my line.”

  “I doubt that it could be strong enough; lightness must be its primary quality.”

  “Right. That’s what I call-gambling.”

  He rose and approached the nearest of the balloons. It was obviously alive—the rootlike tentacles were moving, apparently aimlessly. It showed no obvious awareness of his approach, and did not react even when he stepped within reach of the tentacles and poked it experimentally with his machete. The gas bag was rather taller than his own height, thin enough to be translucent, delicately tinted pink and orange. The vital organs, if they could be called that—no one was sure if the things were animals, plants, or something entirely new—were clustered in a structure about the size of a human head at the lower end; the roots radiated from just above this, at what Faivonen couldn’t help thinking of as the Antarctic circle.

  If the thing were really animal in any sense, however, it seemed to be unresponsive—perhaps the cold, the man thought. Deciding it was safe, he squatted down and examined the “head” closely. The roots continued their aimless writhing.

  After close examination which told neither of them anything useful, he dissected the central mass rapidly, letting Beedee see everything he did. The organs, their shapes, and their arrangements conveyed no meaning to the man, and the machine cast no illuminating comments although its insatiable thirst for information was presumably being slaked. The balloons, Faivonen judged, must form a kingdom of their own; they showed no clear relation to other life, Medean or Terrestrial.

  The tissues of the deflated gas bag were as flimsy as predicted, but Faivonen began cutting strips from them. Rope making would be a long job, and time seemed limited.

  “You will have to make the cord as far overstrength as we can estimate,” remarked Beedee. “It is unfortunate that we have no way to test it before completion. How long do you think you will need?”

  “Longer than we probably have. I’m hungry and thirsty now; there’s little cheese; and, by that time, less water.”

  “We should have started sooner, but it was impossible. I fear our lack of data has cost another human life, though I tried to avoid my earlier mistake.”

  Faivonen snapped a startled question. “You mean it was a situation like this that caused Riita’s death?”

  “Not exactly, though her problem involved the use of the balloons. There were human emotions involved which I had not evaluated properly, long as I had known her. She refused to kill any of the creatures, which could have been put to effective use, when I told her they were intelligent. I was more careful this time, fearing that you might react in the same way.”

  Faivonen fought off an urge to retch. “I certainly would have. How do you know they are intelligent? Are you sure?”

  “Of course. The motion patterns of their tentacles and the changing colors of their gas bags are repetitious, and seem to correlate with their actions in rising and sinking. I have been watching relays of messages going up and down the valley from one of the creatures to the next.”

  “Then they can see? We didn’t find anything like eyes in this one.

  “A very interesting problem, I agree.”

  Faivonen fell silent, and thought for several minutes. Then he removed and opened his shoulder pack, groped through its contents, and pulled out several pieces of metal.

  “You’re giving up on your gamble?” asked the diamond.

  “Not exactly.” Faivonen said no more. He selected two of the metal fragments, and cut a long strip from the gas bag, five or six centimeters wide. Then he removed the straps which held Beedee to his wrist, placed one piece of metal against its flat surface and the other on the curved one, and wrapped the skin around everything. He left the rounded ends of the machine, where its eyes and pressure senses were located, clear. Then he cut several much narrower strips and used them to tie the “bandage” in place. The package seemed secure.

  “Current flowing, Beedee?”

  “Adequately, thank you.”

  “Good. I’ve noticed that there is a breeze at our level coming from down the valley, while the gas river is still flowing in the opposite direction. Any explanation?”

  “Certainly. The gas is siphoning—enough weight has flowed down the valley to maintain the current. The last time it got to the point where we first met the frost, and then was forced back by the tidal wind; this time it’s set for the season, I judge. What we feel is the regular wind, riding over the carbon dioxide.”

  “So the gas river will flow for several weeks.”

  “It seems likely.”

  “And I can’t get away.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “All right.” Faivonen picked up the diamond and approached another of the balloons, now shifting a little in the rising wind. With more strips of skin, he bound the package to one of the thicker tendrils, still taking pains to leave the diamond’s sense organs unobstructed. Then he stood up and looked down at the glassy half-cylinder for several seconds.

  “Nothing personal,” he said at last. “You put my wife in a situation which would kill her unless she changed her personality. You’ve done the same with me. Perhaps you aren’t guilty of killing us—those human quirks you’ve mentioned, which are good for species survival but not for individuals, are probably doing that—but I don’t choose to quibble. If my kids ever come looking for me, I don’t want them to find you.”

  “The balloon won’t support me.” Beedee’s voice was fainter, but quite audible.

  “It will support you in carbon dioxide. Try calculating which wind will carry you. I’m betting on coldside—you wanted to see it anyway.” Faivonen pushed the balloon off the shelf with his foot.

  “Thank you, Elisha.” The voice was much fainter, but the words could be made out. “I am coming to understand human beings. This was the action I hoped you would take. Depending on glacier speed, I should be back with your people in a few millennia—I, too, am betting on the wind toward the cold side. I seem to be winning. Of course, if these creatures have a way of coming back, I may see men sooner. I regret that you won’t be there; you have been almost as interesting a property as your wife. Of course, if I do happen to get back in months instead of centuries, it would be inadvisable to have your report of my ad
mittedly unhuman behavior waiting for me.”

  The voice stopped. Faivonen watched the balloon for several minutes as it drifted slowly up the valley. Then he walked to the end of the shelf nearest the chimney, took out his rope and grapnel, and made sure the latter was firmly attached.

  The he began climbing down.

  “But how will we do without the diamond?” Sullivan was quite frankly horrified.

  “Quite well, I should think,” replied Faivonen. “We do without simpler calculators, aircraft, radios, and all sorts of other things we decided to eliminate until we could make them ourselves from local materials. This ship of yours shows we can do what has to be done. Come on—you know we couldn’t afford to be dependent on anything we couldn’t produce here. Beedee was left out of the original deal because he, or it, was private property, and anyway no one could decide whether he was alive or not—he might have been a citizen. Some of the younger generation have been claiming there was no use learning to read and write—Beedee would remember everything and tell us everything—that he wanted to us to believe. That, friend Sullivan, is very bad indeed, and you know it.”

  “I know it, but a lot of others don’t. They’ll want to lynch you for losing all the knowledge of Medea we’ve picked up in twenty years, and they’ll be right; we can’t live without it.”

  “They won’t and they’d be wrong,” said Faivonen. “In the first place I didn’t lose it; most of what has been learned is either common knowledge, or has been written or remembered by someone with special interest. In the second—look, Sully: Beedee knew years ago that the balloons were intelligent, but didn’t tell anyone because he foresaw it would interfere with his life style. He knew perfectly well that with the carbon dioxide river flowing one way and the air the other, the gases would be turbulent and mix at the interface—there would be oxygen enough for meters below the so-called surface of the gas river, which he wanted me to think of as the drowning line, to let me breathe and climb over to the chimney and back up again. It hurt, and was hard to keep breathing control, but I could do it and did do it. Did he tell me? No. He didn’t really care whether I died there on the shelf, but he wanted to make sure I sent him off to coldside. He wants knowledge the way a baby wants milk or a teen-ager wants sex, and he’s as completely selfish about the appetite as a baby or an untrained adolescent; humanity is a convenience to him, but its individual members are expendable conveniences. The key fact is that we can’t trust him, and once people realize that, no one’s going to want to lynch me.”

  “You mean he’s done this sort of thing to us before? We don’t know what to believe, out of what he’s recorded for us?”

  “Just that. I’d have smashed him for killing Riita, only the fact that he didn’t get away or stay conscious makes me believe he made an honest mistake that time. Maybe, if he gets back early and I’m still alive and cooled off enough, I’ll be able to ask him for the real details.”

  “You’ve been calling Beedee him instead of it. You really regard—him—as alive, don’t you?”

  “Yes. As alive as I am, or you are, and potentially just as much a member of society. But what use is a liar to any society?”

  1987

  STATUS SYMBOL

  Nimepotea did not, of course, have a mind of her own. Like any mechanism, she obeyed the laws of physics. The fact that laws which had not been considered by her designers sometimes became relevant did not make her different from any other machine; this has been going on since long before the first bowstring broke.

  The unexpected was not new even to Nimepotea’s owner and operator. The little ship had been his home for decades now, though not his first since the start of his retirement, and he was accustomed to occasional irregularity in her behavior. Usually it didn’t worry him; too many things would have to go wrong at the same time for him to be in any real danger, and right now there was help actually in sight . . .

  Cunningham had to laugh at himself. He knew perfectly well that if a space emergency really developed, it would make little difference whether the nearest help were five hundred parsecs or five hundred kilometers away. To his emotions, however, that visible speck of light made a difference. It had on its continents not only intelligent beings but actually human ones, and that was surprisingly comforting. Ishtar was not home, but it carried people he knew personally and who knew—roughly—where he was. There were even some of those people much closer; he was not the only one interested in Tammuz.

  Strictly, Ishtar should not have been visible; the glare of its sun ordinarily drowned it completely at this distance. From the bottom of a surprisingly straight, deep shaft on Tammuz’ tiny satellite, however, Bel was out of sight to one side. The nearer sun was below the local horizon, so the rim of the pit was not brightly enough lit to hide the stars and the single planet it framed. The visible planet was comforting; it radiated Security.

  It was the same sort of reasoning bypass which had made some of his ancestors feel more comfortable beside a wood fire than near a nuclear reactor, he supposed. For rational comfort, he should know just what was making his usually reliable vessel behave as it now was doing; but ignorance was normal at this stage of an investigation.

  The shaft from which he was looking might never have caught his attention at all had it been closer to the sunrise or sunset line of the satellite as he approached. With long shadows, even impact craters look deep. It is a little startling, however, to be unable to see any of a crater bottom where the sun is fifty degrees or so above the local horizon; this one had made the landscape look like a badly done painting. Cunningham had brought the Nimepotea to a point a few meters above the black circle, and made a quick check which showed that it was a hole too deep to study adequately from above. He had donned vacuum gear, picked up the remote control spindle, and stepped outside.

  During his fall, at about a thirtieth of what he considered normal gravity, he maneuvered the ship so that one of its main lamps shone straight down the opening from a little off center. This caused the walls to be fairly well illuminated without making too much of a nuisance of his own shadow.

  It took only a little over two seconds to reach the bottom, some seventy meters down. He was experienced and coordinated enough to have been able to leave the ship with no personal spin, so he landed without difficulty feet first. It was fortunate that he carried lights on his armor, because as he straightened his knees after the impact, the Nimepotea’s illumination disappeared.

  A quick glance upward showed the stars and Ishtar, but no ovoid hull occulting any part of the scene. Evidently the ship had drifted, in spite of his own handling and its automatic system. No great problem, or serious danger. The control impulses were electromagnetic, in the single-centimeter wave length band. They should diffract widely enough to reach the ship’s receivers, If they didn’t, the hole was no trap; the walls were climbable—the pit itself almost jumpable in this gravity.

  But it was a nuisance. There had been regular, flat-bottomed side tunnels opening out of the shaft. Beyond much doubt, technical work’ had been done on the satellite. This was not surprising; one of Anu’s planets, most probably Tammuz, had been inhabited by intelligent beings a billion or so years ago before the sun had become a red giant. It would have been fun to explore those tunnels; vacuum, low gravity, and radiation protection could combine to do wonders for archaeology. Laird Cunningham was neither an archaeologist nor any other kind of specialist, but he was a human being in the retired stage of life with normal curiosity and the ability to satisfy it which made life worth living for most people in his age range.

  But if Nimepotea were misbehaving, investigation of other matters would have to wait. Even the presence of potential rescuers perhaps only a few thousand kilometers away did nothing to alter current priorities. Neem was being naughty; Neem would have to be disciplined.

  Cunningham didn’t think any of this out in words. Within a second of the light’s disappearance he had aimed the control spindle upward and keyed the st
andard “align” signal into it. Within five more, as the ship had not reappeared, he had shut the device off, clipped it to the appropriate holder on his armor, and was engaged in the odd combination of climbing and jumping which the gravity and local supply of supports made the best way to get up the shaft.

  The process took about twenty seconds, the last muscular operation being a jump from the lip of a side tunnel which carried him ten meters or so above the mouth of the pit. He had a little spin this time, and could not devote full attention to finding the ship until he was sure which end up he would land. With his feet once more on rock and his helmet intact, however, he wasted no time. As he turned head and eyes to search, his knees were flexed for another jump; it might be possible, and even necessary, to go to the ship instead of bringing it to him.

  It might be necessary, but it was clearly not possible. The hull was visible enough in Bel’s light, though the Sol-type sun was only an unbearably bright star at this distance. The range to the ship was nearly two hundred meters, most of it straight up. This was the energy equivalent of a six or seven meter high jump on Earth, which was more than Cunningham could do even without armor. Even if he could have managed the height, it was extremely doubtful that he could aim well enough.

  But something had to be done. The ship was moving away—not rapidly, but definitely. Cunningham aimed the spindle and keyed a more precise maneuver signal. He breathed relief as the drift ceased, and the little vessel turned her bow toward him and began to accelerate in his direction. His comfort lasted for several seconds before the independent personality made itself felt again.

  “Neem, you cri, what are—” The man bit the words off; talk wouldn’t help. Thought and action were in order. He had learned during his years of retirement to use these, quickly and effectively, without being distracted by panic. He knew that some day one of his quick ideas or responses would be fatally wrong, but this never bothered him until the emergency was over. It was much more likely that a slow response or none would kill him first.