by Hal Clement
“There’s a good deal of diving juice here, and some food too, which could be useful to someone—not you folks, of course. If you wouldn’t mind taking that along, too, and dropping it farther from the sea, it might be handy to someone a long way from home. Thanks.” The wings began to beat rather slowly, somewhat out of phase with each other; if they had been connected by membrane, the latter would have rippled like the fins of a mania ray swimming, though the Erthuma watchers were reminded rather of a similar creature native to Falch.
They considered this aspect for only a moment. The Crotonites rose with the native and accompanied it for several hundred meters on its way. Hugh didn’t know whether to worry more about what they might do to him or what they might say to him. Janice refused to worry, and seemed justified; their winged companions presently peeled away and swung back toward the iceberg, leaving the native to dwindle in the distance and quickly disappear in Grendel’s glare.
Hugh was not surprised when the Crotonites settled beside the diving armor the being had left behind. After all, he and his wife were already there themselves; examining a suit which apparently could protect its wearer from thousands of atmospheres pressure seemed very much in order.
The jointing was ingenious, but the material baffling. There seemed nothing particularly pressure resistant about it. The covering for the wings and other limbs was actually flexible. Close examination of a torn-off piece—torn off easily enough to compound the mystery—showed that body plates as well could easily be bent not only by Erthuma hands but by the less sturdy and efficient graspers of the Crotonites. There seemed no way the suit could defend its wearer from significant fluid pressure; and Habranhan bodies appeared frail even by Crotonite standards—large, of course, but far from rugged.
Still the fellow had said, quite unambiguously as far as Hugh could remember, that he had been working much farther down than the thirty kilometers or so that marked the bottom of the ice mountain the foursome was riding. He had been talking about ice phase changes which the man was pretty sure implied thousands of atmospheres. How this went with flexible armor material was very unclear.
“We’ll have to take some of this stuff for analysis,” Venzeer said firmly. “As far as I can tell, it’s about like the polymers they make fences and weather guards out of, but there must be something different about it. Maybe—wait a minute, did any of you see water draining out of it as he took it off?”
“Yes, now that you mention it,” admitted the woman. “Not much, but there was some. I just assumed he’d loosened a joint or a valve for some reason before he got ashore, and some ocean had gotten in.
“Could you—assume—why he’d do such a thing?”
“There seemed too many possibilities to make a guess worth while.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, personal comfort, if he’d been wearing it a long time. The urge to breathe fresh air. Freedom of motion. Thirst—can these people drink their ocean water?”
“No. They don’t mind the ammonia, but there’s biological contamination; a lot of the azide ion most of the local life uses for energy storage—like us, though I’ve heard you use something else—is free in the ocean, I suppose from plankton decay.” Venzeer furnished this information, giving his Erthuma listeners further pause for thought. Janice’s rapid list of guesses had silenced Rekchellet for the moment, but he had not abandoned the thought underlying the earlier question. He made his way to the spot where the armor had first been shed and examined it and the ground closely, sketching busily from time to time.
It was the usual ice, rendered milky by ultrafine silt trapped when it had frozen for the last time, possibly airborne dust which had blown to Darkside and mixed with the snow. There was some sign of recent local melting, in the form of a narrow line of the white sediment to seaward in a barely perceptible depression, but this might as well have been due to the native’s body heat as to water leaking from the armor. The recorder brought his face to the ice and sniffed, mouth gaping—taste and smell were even less distinct for Crotonites than for Erthumoi. Hugh wondered privately how he would sketch an odor.
“Hugh—Jan—come here and sniff. I don’t know whether your sense of smell is any better than ours, but can you tell whether anything strange is here?”
The walkers complied, and looked at each other uncertainly. “There’s something,” the woman admitted, “but I certainly don’t recognize it. I’ve never noticed any particular smell to the Habras, but I’m not sure I’ve been close enough to one to have caught it if there were.”
“I have been, but they don’t smell, as far as we’re concerned.” Venzeer spoke thoughtfully. “Anyway, there’s something here, which probably came from his diving suit. Let’s see if it smells.”
All sniffed or gaped at the armor. Janice shrugged. “I get it here, too, but don’t see that that’s any help. We still don’t know if it’s something chemical—I suppose that’s what you have in mind—or perfectly normal for the occupant.”
Hugh cut in. “How would a chemical help? Make his flesh so hard it could resist ocean pressure? That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Nor to me,” admitted the Crotonite. “It’s just that the whole situation is strange, and I’d like to get all the strange items in one place if I can.”
“If you had asked me before I went, I could have told you all you wanted to know about the suit with no need to damage it.”
Human and Crotonite beings alike froze briefly at the words. Hugh, the only one standing instead of being bent over the armor, was the first to look up, but the others were almost as quick. There was little doubt about the owner of the voice. Sure enough, a six-winged body was flapping slowly a few meters overhead. With all the usual Erthuma tendency to blame someone else, especially a Crotonite if one were available, for an embarrassing situation, Hugh found himself hastily uttering an excuse for the entire company.
“We hadn’t thought there would be anything to ask. We didn’t notice how flexible the material was until we picked it up; then we couldn’t understand how it could protect anyone from depth pressure.”
Venzeer cut in with his own thoughts. “How did you know we were damaging it? Why did you come back?”
“I heard a piece being torn off.” The native glided down beside them.
“But—oh. Of course.” Janice cut her objection short. The armor was of polymer and certainly an electrical nonconductor—it would have to be, to protect its wearer from inadvertent contact with plants, even underwater. Tearing one part from another would set up enough potential difference to produce radio emissions, even if their own translators had not picked it up—which they might have done; neither Crotonite, as Rekchellet admitted later, would have noticed random static.
The native seemed to accept the excuse, but appeared a little surprised at Hugh’s words.
“We don’t try to resist the pressure. We—oh. When I mentioned diving fluid, you thought I meant ballast, I suppose.”
“We didn’t even get that far,” Janice admitted. “I don’t think any of us even thought about those words. You even said it would be no use to us, didn’t you?” The Habranhan’s still inflated wings cocked upward in what even the Erthumoi knew was an affirmative gesture.
“Oh!” Hugh said softly. “I get it. Ducking PV troubles by holding delta-V down. All liquid. All body cavities free of air bubbles. Something able to carry oxygen fast enough in solution or loose bonding. I’ve heard of that, though I don’t think it’s ever been done at home. Very long ago, maybe even back on Earth.”
“I hadn’t,” his wife said, “but I could see he meant something of the sort.”
“What are you talking about?” cut in Venzeer.
“Most of the damage done to a living creature by pressure change results from the big volume change of gas. Liquid doesn’t change volume very much with DP. If one goes up or down slowly enough to let body fluids—mostly water, for all of us—diffuse even a little through membranes and cell wall, ther
e’s no trouble. Even deep-sea creatures don’t burst unless they have air bladders or unless they’re brought up really fast. The Habranhans must have developed a fluid which they can use to soak their entire bodies, including the cavities normally used for oxygen exchange, and fill the space between body and armor. Then pressure doesn’t mean anything.”
“But there are other dangers beside PV,” her husband put in. “How about nitrogen narcosis?”
“I don’t know. We must have solved that one, too, if what you remember is right. And maybe these people aren’t as subject to that; after all, they can stand some hydrogen cyanide in the air, as the Crotonites do.”
“Of course,” Rekchellet muttered softly. “We’re not crawlers, either.” Janice ignored the interjection.
“Cyanide ion, carbon monoxide, and molecular nitrogen have identical electronic structures. They only differ in polarity and net change. Anyone able to handle cyanide should have no trouble with nitrogen.”
“You’re speculating,” her husband pointed out.
“Of course I am. There hasn’t been time for a library check, but I’m going to get on the transmitter pronto. We’ve only just heard about all this from—what should we call you?” Janice tried to make it obvious from her attitude that she was addressing the native. Apparently he understood.
“I am—” the rest was unreproducible static.
“I’m sorry,” Janice said as tactfully as she could. “That symbol does not convert to sound patterns we can make. Will a simple pattern such as William be unambiguous?”
“It sounds like ‘backward flyer,’ but I can make allowances. I understand the difficulty. If William is convenient, I am William.”
“Bill would be even easier and quicker.”
“That has no meaning, but I can remember and produce it.”
“Thank you, Bill. Do you know why we are here—the four of us?”
“I assumed you were making current studies and possibly other analyses of our ocean and atmosphere, just as we do. I had supposed formerly that there were probably others of your people making similar studies below the surface. I gather now that you have not started that yet.”
“We walking people haven’t, and I doubt that the Crotonites have either. We would normally do such work with the aid of machines we call robots, and these would have to be very specialized. We have none so far on this planet. Venz? Rek? How about your people?”
“We do not use such machines. We prefer to do our own work.” Enough of Rekchellet’s tone came through the translator to remind Hugh and his wife of the distrust of artificial intelligence shared by most of the non-human starfarers. The woman pressed the point, however; it was poor tact, but she wanted Bill to learn something about the Crotonites which they themselves were unlikely to have told to the natives.
“But you haven’t done any underwater exploring here, have you?”
“Not here, nor anywhere else. We fly.”
“Of course. And one cannot fly underwater.”
Bill cut in at this point. “But one can. We do. It is how one gets around, outside the submarines. It is how I escaped being crushed by the rising ice mountain I was on, when it collided with yours.”
Venzeer cut in sharply. “You fly underwater?”
“We call it swimming,” Hugh said hastily. “I suppose Bill’s people would use their wings, though.” He regretted the second sentence even before he had finished, and silently cursed his inbuilt honesty. The Crotonites made no immediate answer, but looked thoughtfully at each other. There were several seconds of silence in which the thoughts of each of the five would have been of great interest to all the others.
Venzeer’s imagination was playing with the Habranhan’s revelation: You could fly down there. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, after all; maybe one could go down, share experience, even a new kind of flight, and get to know the natives better—realize why they seemed so indifferent to the opportunity of leaving their world and flying among the stars. Their ancestors must have done it; these people had not evolved on Habranha. Not only was there no linkage—the ring continent had no land animal life, let alone flying creatures—but these flyers didn’t even use azide in their biochemistry, even though they were as electrical in many ways as the plants and the sea creatures. Neither did the plants they grew for food. They must be colonists. Maybe even—no, that would be too much to expect.
The thought of flying in the deeps, though. That could be a real experience—but it would be so dark. No way to see any distance; just muddy, unlit water all around. It would be flying, of course. The native had said so. But there would be no clouds, no stars, nothing but hearing and touching to keep one in contact with the universe. The natives were flyers and knew what seeing meant better than any ground crawler, but they wouldn’t miss it quite so much if it were gone. They had that Habranhan advantage—they could detect electric fields and impulses as well as see and hear . . .
And they could fly underwater, under hopelessly crushing pressures. Learning how they did it—finding the formula of their diving liquid—would be no help to Crotonites. Probably the simple creatures would supply it for the asking. No, they weren’t that simple, they were flyers—though since the information would be no real use to the Crotonites, why should they worry about handing it out freely? But—just how different were Crotonite and Habranhan biochemistries, anyway? And if the liquid didn’t work, couldn’t one find materials which would really keep the pressure out? What were engineering researchers for? The idea of armor went naturally with ground crawlers, of course; no flyer would consider playing with that much weight just for protection. But the weight would mean little or nothing underwater; that was elementary physics. Much library inquiry was in order. There must be plenty of relevant information.
Rekchellet dreamt along a different line. These things have a field we don’t. They have a bigger world of their own to explore than anyone else has ever had. Not just surface and atmosphere, but a sixth of the radius below the surface. A third of the planet’s volume in which things live and where things happen. Why should they care about space? Whether they’re philosophers hunting knowledge for its own sake or pragmatists trying to keep alive, they have a universe of material for thought and work from now on. A few suggestions for new fields of activity at home, and we won’t have to worry about them anywhere else in the galaxy for centuries. Even if they’re the Seventh Race and used to travel the stars, they’ve changed. Of course, we’ll have to know enough about their world—their universe—to command their respect. We’ll have to be interested in their problems, not get them interested in ours.
But how do we get down there? The native flyers aren’t built the way we are, even chemically. Azide is poisonous to them. How could we develop anything like their diving liquid in a lifetime, or several? Not even the artificial brains the Erthumoi used could—
He firmly stopped that line of thought. Still, flying in the deeps should be fun. New things to see and to draw. No doubt the Erthuma artificial eyes could be attached to some machine to look things over down there, but how could one abstract the essentials after a picture had been made? There would be far too much irrelevant material in the image.
Janice didn’t really worry about Crotonite attitudes; she took them for granted, often wrongly, but this was seldom brought home to her. Bill, however, was interesting. He was brave; regardless of the perfection of Habranhan diving technology, he had been risking his life. It might have been simple curiosity, or it might have been a sense of duty. That didn’t matter. She could empathize with either. She could feel a call from Habranha’s deep oceans, an utterly new environment. There would be strange life, currents even more complex than those in the air, and storms driven by icebergs calving upward and by heat absorbed or emitted as ice changed phase with depth and giant bergs either shattered to powder or changed density more sedately and rose or sank accordingly . . . Bill’s brief account had been enough to trigger the imagination of any chemist. There would be cl
ouds and rains, both upward and downward, of silt scraped from Habranha’s core by the Darkside glacier in its eternal grind sunward along the ocean bottom, silt incorporated in the ice and shed at different depths and different rates as the bergs melted, crumbled, or burst. There would be hot currents going downward because they were silt laden, cold ones rising because of their ammonia content, storms where they met and formed gels out of colloids. William had been down there and seen it all, and Hugh would want to hear her guesses and check them out . . .
There must be, in some library file, data on the diving liquid. Riding a merely floating iceberg and keeping track of even chaotic winds and snow squalls was suddenly boring. She was going to get the neutrino beam busy, and she didn’t care how many planetary libraries would have to be probed. It wouldn’t be hard to get Venzeer and Rekchellet interested in this new search.
Hugh shared much of his wife’s feelings, but didn’t take the Crotonites for granted. Maybe Bill’s words would persuade Venz or Rek or both actually to try something in the deep sea, something only remotely like flying, though it was hard to guess what the artist—Hugh wasn’t sure he was really more than an illustrator and recorder—would find to employ his talents. That might be good; it could make the fellow realize that what you could see wasn’t everything and that people who couldn’t fly and comprehend the whole landscape at once weren’t necessarily beneath notice. Whether the Habranhans took to space travel or not wasn’t really important, though the man rather hoped they would; he had no intention of taking sides with either of the Crotonites and didn’t much care whether the Seventh Race turned out to be Habranhans or never turned up at all. They were probably extinct, anyway. The natives could take care of their own futures, in space or ocean. It would be fun, though, to have both Venzeer and Rekchellet a couple of hundred kilos deep and learning to fly in water—never mind what verb the translator used. And one could get them arguing later with the single Cephallonian at Pwanpwan about the joys of swimming, and hearing them sneer at the inability of the water breather to “swim” in air. It would be a relief to give them someone, or something, besides “ground crawlers” to belittle.
