by Hal Clement
“Right. Just communicate,” replied Bronwen.
Ling’s gloves, slightly preceding his helmet, appeared about eight meters to the left of the cube, as seen by his companions. Chile was standing within a meter of the same spot, slowly bending over to reach for him. The main anchoring trio lay a dozen meters straight in from the point, at the junction of a “Y” outlined in chain with the other women at its arm tips and Chile at its foot.
This lasted only a split second. Then the alien robot moved again, this time pushing off from the big cube. As before, it plunged for the edge. Chile, almost upright, was in no position to oppose it. He took most of its momentum and flew over Ling’s head; the rest of the push was expended against the man’s helmet, and he followed Chile more slowly.
“Rob!” Sheila screamed, and jerked up her legs in readiness to jump. She recovered control in time to forestall the motion, but not soon enough to let Luis and Mike keep hold of her ankles. All might still have been well if she had released the loops of chain she had been coiling up, but letting go of Ling was the farthest thing from her instincts. The chain transferred part of the robot’s final thrust to her, and after two agonizingly slow bounces accompanied by futile scrabbling at surface irregularities and a shrieked “NO!” she too went over the edge. The startled watchers saw the alien robot, now falling to the safe side of the rim, lean and extend an arm as though to intercept her, but she drifted past out of its reach.
“I think we may bounce out before we hit bottom, but I’m not sure how far down that’ll happen,” Ling remarked. “ At least, there should be time to make our wills, if any of us hasn’t done it already.”
“Nine minutes thirty-three seconds,” affirmed Chile. He had hooked a foot under the chain as the other had pushed him, and was now engaged in pulling the three together. “If we approach the bottom, you two hold tightly to each other, and at the last possible moment I will kick upward against you as hard as I can, to take as much as possible of our downward momentum to myself. There seems little chance that this would suffice to preserve your lives, but it is the best I can think of. We have not enough collective spin to help the operation by—”
“Thanks, Chile, but we’ll take your word for it. Rob, was it that robot again’? Things happened too fast for me to be sure.”
“ ‘Fraid so. It seems to have a prejudice against me, or maybe against anyone who tried to touch the cube. I wonder why it didn’t come around and get you too before; you were about to do the same thing.”
“That is why I want all three of us together as quickly as possible,” Chile cut in. “It will not harm Sheila, and will have the cube here to catch her very shortly. She is human. If we are actually in contact, as she and I are now, it will probably not try to force us apart, but if you, Rob, are still at the end of the chain, I am not sure it won’t try to break you free.”
“Why? I’m—”
“Please don’t talk, Robert. Just pull in chain from your end, too. It will put an uncomfortable amount of spin on us, I fear, but should make you much safer. Here comes the cube.”
Actually, there was no hurry. The alien block, with the ghost on top, overhauled them rather slowly, seemed to look things over for more than a minute, and finally slid under the trio over two hundred meters down. Bronwen had plenty of time to unlimber the rest of the chain, but not enough to figure out how to use it.
“Then you solved the alien symbols.” Ling was talking before his feet were back on the ground. “But why does that thing regard Sheila as human, and not me?”
“I did not solve them. It was the sort of intuition which apparently any brain experiences; yours, when you organized the shadow pattern Chispa called a ship—”
“And the ridge we all named the Stegosaur!” Mike added.
“And the face Rob saw in the Rorschach blot,” continued ZH50. “It happens to positronic brains like mine, too; it may be an inevitable part of any intelligence, natural or otherwise, as I have heard suggested. Dumbo lacks it, of course; it needs Sheila to work intelligently. This other robot has the same quality, positronic or not, and apparently decided that I and the black-helmeted figures were robots, deserving of no special consideration beside the safety of its central system, but that the white-helmeted ones were human.”
“Why should it get that idea?”
“Behavior patterns are also data, and can also be connected intuitively. I did it with the robot’s actions, it did the same with yours. During the time we were investigating this cube, for example, the men made a point—possibly unconscious—of staying between their companions and the edge of the cliff. I think the key behavior, though, occurred at Barco, when—”
“When this idiotic Galahad kicked me back up the cliff, at his own risk!” snapped Sheila.
“That seems likely.”
“But I wasn’t in any real risk! I could have jumped up from that slab of ice five seconds before hitting bottom, and landed like jumping off a table!”
“The robot didn’t know your limits. It saw the basic action; you were protecting another being, and, I suggest, interpreted that as First Law behavior. The most obvious difference between the two of you was helmet color. The conclusion may have been tentative, if the thing is intelligent enough be that scientific, but it was supported later.”
“You trusted human lives to your own guess, then. How does that fit with First Law?” asked Luis.
“I did not. The lives were already at risk through no fault of mine. I told you the best action I could suggest at the time,” answered Chile. “I also implied that it would be unnecessary; I used the conditional. “ Luis blinked, thinking back.
“It’s one of those old-fashioned happy endings!” Chispa laughed. “We really have found proof of alien life, and when Chile, or maybe Chile and Dumbo between them, have worked out this machine’s code, we’ll know everything it’s learned about Miranda in however long it’s been here. Nobel prizes all around. And all the romance anyone could want.” She moved closer to Luis; then, just visibly to the others through her face plate, glanced at Sheila. “Well . . .” Her voice trailed off.
A snort, recognizably Ling’s, sounded in their helmets.
“If I’ve been that obvious, forget it. There’s such a thing as self-respect.” He made another, less describable sound.
“I can stand self-respect, even when it slops over into conceit,” Sheila said quietly. “It’s much better than hinting. How about ‘Rorschach’ for a team name?”
“Why be subtle? ‘Blot’ is more euphonious. But I’ll go with anything you like. What, except for wasted time, is in a—”
“And maybe the folks who set up this station will be back soon!” interrupted Chispa merrily.
1991
PHASES IN CHAOS
I. Above
At the moment the berg tilted, taking everyone and everything off guard, Rekchellet was sketching busily. He was taking advantage of a clear, cold, dry, and probably brief wind from Darkside. It was not that there had been no notice; there had been tremors, and then a crackling roar, in plenty of time to provide warning if only they had been a little more specific. They seemed to come from all directions, offered no clue to their cause, and, in Rekchellet’s own mind, left him and his fellows with no option but to get on with their business. When the ice dropped suddenly and sharply from underfoot it was a total surprise, and four beings and two objects could only react at their most basic levels.
Venzeer and Rekchellet took to their wings instantly and unthinkingly, the recorder’s pad and stylus dropping to the ice. The great balloon antenna had inertia enough to snap all four of its moorings, and being ballasted at slightly positive lift began to drift slowly upward. The supply carrier, left momentarily in the air by the dropping surface, drifted back down. Finding the ground no longer horizontal it began to move downhill, since this iceberg was clean enough to be slippery. Janice and Hugh Cedar, attached to the vehicle by what were meant to be safety lines, shared its brief fall and began
to follow it unwillingly toward the nearby lake of meltwater.
The carrier would of course float and the supplies inside its sausage-shaped bubble were individually sealed, so the situation was more annoying than threatening; but none of the beings took it calmly. They were much too startled.
“Why weren’t the brakes on, ground crawlers?” snapped one of the Crotonites. The woman was too busy hand-over-handing along her line toward the sliding vehicle to answer; Hugh, less concerned and less patient, retorted, “Get the balloon! We can have a court of inquiry later.”
The winged members of the team were already flapping after the fifty-meter antenna, which was obviously their business, and there were no more words for fully a minute. Janice reached her goal quickly enough, found the lever she wanted, and sent the spikes of the right steering runner jabbing into the substrate. Even in the local gravity enough momentum had built up to spray her with ice shavings as the carrier swerved toward her. By the time Hugh had reached the lever on his own side the vehicle had stopped. He pulled the handle anyway.
“Get this one!” Rekchellet was a few meters up, as close to hovering as his wing design allowed, holding one of the mooring lines close to the balloon and letting the rest dangle toward the Erthumoi. Hugh seized the lower end, laced it though the lashing eye nearest him, and made fast.
“Any more?” he called.
“The others all broke near the top. You’ll have to untie them from the ice anchors and toss an end up to us. It’ll be hard to do knots if there’s tension; leave the bottom free until we’ve finished.”
“All right,” Janice answered. Like her husband she knew that the Crotonites would have felt insulted by such detailed instructions if they had been on the receiving end; less like him, she would never make an issue of it. The creatures couldn’t help regarding nonflyers as fit only for menial tasks such as driving ground equipment. Fortunately, recapturing the balloon offered few problems since the wind had dropped. Neither species had reason to criticize the other. All four of the team members, however, were concentrating on the mooring job when the next rope broke.
This was Hugh’s safety line.
Surface waves move slowly in weak gravity, but they do move. The sudden tilt of the giant iceberg had sent the lake sloshing away from the carrier and far up a funnel-shaped bay at its sunward end. Reflection of the reddish sun from the water and the ice would have kept the party from seeing clearly that way even if they had been looking. There was little ground friction; the ice had been melting for decades and its surface, while far from flat, had no sharp corners or really rough spots. Even the vegetation was sparse and loose on this part of the berg, so the returning wave lost energy very slowly.
The water poured back into its former basin, continued up the near side, and reached the explorers from just to the right of the carrier’s front before even the flyers noticed any danger. The woman was slammed violently into the vehicle. Hugh, standing farther away on the other side, was hurled to the end of his line; if this had held, he would have been crushed by a dozen metric tons of mass—over twenty-two-hundred kilograms of weight even on Habranha—as the bubble rolled over the spot where he had been. By that time, though, he was meters away.
The Crotonites responded instantly and silently. Venzeer swooped and snatched up Janice as the rolling vehicle carried her over it. Her line was still attached, and for a moment it seemed that both might be drawn under the bubble. The physicist had seen the danger, however, and snatched a knife from his tool harness as he dived. A slash of the blade disposed of the risk.
Rekchellet had more trouble. Hugh was a moving target at first, and a snow squall had replaced the calm of moments before, so the Crotonite’s first two swoops missed. Then the man was stranded briefly as the wave reached its limit. His body was mixed up with bushes torn loose by the wave, but these seemed wet enough not to be much of an explosion risk—like the Crotonites themselves, the locally evolved life used azide ion as terrestrial beings used ATP. The flyer trusted the electrical insulation of his suit enough to take a chance, and with a screech of triumph lifted Hugh away before the backwash could catch him. Erthumoi were a heavy load even on Habranha, though, and the flyers settled as near as they dared to the water.
The sloshing was becoming more circular, and no more waves reached the carrier. Some of the bushes stranded near it were smoldering, however, wet as they were, and the rescuers avoided them. Venzeer flew quickly to check the supplies, while Rekchellet began a search for his drawing equipment.
Hugh paid no attention to them. Janice was lying where Venzeer had set her down, and the moment the man could get to his feet he made a single leap to her side.
“Jan! Honey! Can you hear me? Are you all right?” There was no immediate answer, and he began checking for injuries as well as the bulk of her suit permitted. He could see that she was breathing, and the garment’s status patch just below her throat assured him that her heart was beating. It also told him what medication was being applied. Apparently a bone was broken. Careful checking indicated that this was almost certainly not a limb, but left him to worry about skull and spine and to hope for mere ribs.
Whatever it was would knit within fifteen minutes unless he overrode the suit’s treatment. There seemed no reason to do this; there was no visible need for setting, and even if vertebrae were involved her spinal cord would almost certainly be safer if the surrounding bone healed before she was moved or tried to move herself. Hugh could not tell whether she was unconscious from medication or concussion; he could only wait, eyes alternating between face and patch, until she woke up or the treatment ended. He was interrupted before either happened.
“Is she badly hurt?” Rekchellet settled to the ice, attaching the recovered sketch pad to his harness and leaving his wings spread for a few seconds to shed body heat. Most human beings would have taken for granted that he was merely concerned for the mission; Crotonites had a poor reputation for emotions like friendship and sympathy. Hugh, however, had acquired much of his wife’s innate tendency to like people regardless of their shape, and he took the question at face value.
“Too soon to say. Do you need me?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know whether any of the moorings broke again, but Venz seems to have fixed them to the sled if they did.” The squall had ended; antenna and vehicle were visible once more. “If we’d done that in the first place, they’d probably never have broken, since the carrier didn’t jerk down as fast as the ground.”
“Because it got left behind. We secured to the ice for steadiness, so the thing wouldn’t move, which was our mistake. Are signals still coming?”
“I guess so, if they are signals. Venz’s been working the analyzer since he finished making fast. I haven’t talked to him; I’ve been looking for this pad.” Rekchellet had unclipped his drawing gear again and was recording Janice and her suit readings. “You’re right,” he added. “We should have brought equipment to make duplicate copies.”
“The flyer would have had to carry it, and then we’d have had to—”
Rekchellet paid no attention to Hugh’s interjection. “I was pretty worried for a few minutes, until I found this.” He finished his sketch, clipped pad to harness, and brooded briefly. “I still think the pattern sounds like Habranha speech, but it’s been coming from below, and I can’t believe a sensible flying person would be underwater.”
“Or inside an ice—wait!” Hugh had seen his wife stir. A moment later she grimaced and opened her eyes. She looked at Hugh and the Crotonite briefly, obviously gathering her wits; then she gave a rather sour smile, and spoke.
“My chest hurts. If it was you, I’ve told you before to take it easy. And how long have I been out? I see it’s been snowing again.”
Hugh hadn’t noticed the change in wind or even the advent of the squall until she spoke.
“It wasn’t,” he assured her, not referring to the weather. “A wave knocked you against the carrier. Med tab says broken bone. I’
m glad it’s only a rib, if it is. Can you work your arms and legs? How does your head feel?” She moved all limbs cautiously, easing Hugh’s worry about her spine. “All right; stay put until whatever else it is knits. It shouldn’t be long; you’ve been out for minutes. Rek thinks the signals are still coming.”
This news, as intended, took Janice’s mind off her discomfort. She spoke thoughtfully. “I still can’t figure that out. The direction’s been changing, but it’s always generally down. No changes have tied in with weather shifts. The line goes through at least eight or ten kilometers of this iceberg. Maybe twice that, since we don’t know the berg’s shape below the water line. Then it presumably reaches clear ocean, and no telling how much farther it goes in that. Since the source seems to be moving it can’t be someone buried in the ice—and no Habra I’ve met had a loud enough radio voice to get through even two kilos of the usual ground here.”
“They are competent technicians,” Rekchellet pointed out. “They could use amplifiers. In fact, they do. They don’t like to, of course, since they speak and hear by radio directly and amplified signals hurt them, but they have the skill.” The Erthumoi knew this, like all aliens on Habranha who wanted to use radios and couldn’t because of the native peculiarity. Hugh and Janice regarded it as more understandable than the Crotonite preference for preabstracted records—drawings over photographs, but kept to more immediate matters now.
“What native words have you recognized in the patterns? Any real conversation?” asked Hugh slowly.
“No. Just one word. ‘Here. Here. Here.’ With varying patterns sometimes following—never preceding—which neither of us could recognize.”
