Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  But that was a minor detail. He forced himself firmly back to the number of questions that only The Box could handle in reasonable time. By the time they reached the raft, Hugh Cedar was completely happy again and went straight to The Box.

  Janice understood the questions, of course, which she would have heard clearly enough even if their note recording units had not been interconnected. She was less happy than Hugh, not because she could see any serious flaw in her husband’s new idea but because she hadn’t been able to see one in any of the others, either. They had all been good ideas, but had simply run into unconsidered aspects of reality.

  And there is no way in the universe to be sure when all the facets of any situation have been viewed. Ordinarily, the woman would have been quite calm about this; it was her normal personality pattern, that of a scientist. In the last few dozen hours, however—well, Chaos had not exactly developed a personality in her mind, but she was beginning to capitalize its name mentally. This was emphatically not normal Janice Cedar.

  She remembered what had happened to Thrasher when he had passed his depth limit and she had had to use the conditioned command that Splasher had confided to her in order to rescue them both. Luckily, there was no such hypnotic suggestion implanted in her own mind that Hugh or one of the Cephallonians could use—at least, she considered it lucky. Erthuma minds didn’t work that way. It would be a tempting explanation for the thruster incident, of course, if one were mystically inclined . . .

  Janice brought her thoughts back to the job with a start. What was happening to her? Was she worrying herself out of sense and sanity? So Cephallonians had safety techniques Erthumoi couldn’t use if they wanted to; human minds were different. Why should she worry about that? Especially, why should she worry about it now? All right, so she and Hugh would be starting another trip shortly, and the swimmers as usual couldn’t go along. That was all. Don’t fuss, woman.

  She came back to the real present. There had been no question of Cephallonians coming along. They couldn’t. The problem was, how much of The Box could they take? The boat wouldn’t carry the whole unit. A single module could handle the running calculations, but more would be needed to talk properly to the living crew and tell them what action the numbers demanded. The Box had no subjective disapproval, dislike, or fear of being taken apart, but even it wasn’t quite sure how much of itself would be required for the journey and how much might be needed by the Cephallonians. There was no obvious reason why they would need any of it, as far as safety was concerned, but the swimmers naturally hoped to continue at least some of the planned study work. They were thinking beings; simply waiting to starve if their friends failed to reach help was no part of their plans. For one thing, someone—Cephallonian or Box—might come up with an explanation of the thruster failure, and it might become possible to send out something piloted only by another module. The Box was not hopeful and the Cephallonians, who distrusted artificial intelligence on principle, disliked the idea, but the possibility existed and feelings might change if a fermenter died.

  The glider had been modified, though not as radically as might have been expected. The right wing had been amputated two meters from the fuselage, now once more a hull. The fabric from the severed portion now covered the other surface of the stub. Hugh’s original plan of mounting the wings to rotate on a single lateral spar had turned out fortunate; only minor changes in the rigging were necessary to make it practical now. One of the thrusters that had misbehaved for Janice was lashed firmly to the end of the shortened wing, after having the power lines from its fuser disconnected so that nothing could possibly turn it on—all hoped.

  After much discussion, most of the rest of the raft’s sheeting was cannibalized to use as a covering for the bottom of the left wing; Hugh made an impassioned argument on the importance of symmetry and won without support from The Box, which was quite ready to allow for odd shapes in its calculations. The original cockpit was covered and a new one arranged so that the crew would be located both before and behind the left wing. Lines were rigged to let the wings be rotated on their central spars by the crew.

  And, finally, a four-module section of The Box was firmly lashed into the front cockpit, and Hugh’s suit tracker plugged into it.

  The whole craft was easy to carry on Habranha, though walking was far from comfortable on the heaving raft. The Erthumoi got it over to the tank that had been vacated by the Cephallonians for the moment—if for some reason it didn’t float, there was no need for a major salvage job over five hundred kilometers of water. The thruster proved heavy enough to do what Hugh had hoped; the stub of the right wing hung as nearly straight down and the intact left one pointed as nearly straight up as wind allowed. The new cockpits were now on top and the waterline of the floating hull safely below their edge. Hugh had had the foresight to improvise a bailer from scraps of wing covering but still felt uneasy about the roughness of the sea. There was a little sheeting left on the raft; after some thought, and rather more argument, he used this to seal off the interior ahead of and behind the crew stations. He hoped he had done a good job, since the new partitions would obviously prevent bailing even more effectively than they were likely to stop inward leakage. The Cephallonians weren’t greatly bothered about the loss of the fabric; too little was left in any case to make the tank much of a shelter for them.

  The Erthumoi boarded, Janice in front as before. Wind pressure was holding them against one side of the tank; Thrasher activated several thrusters and turned the raft so the open end was downwind, and the boat drifted quickly away.

  The Module began ordering its crew to pivot first one wing and then the other as it computed the air and water currents from the tracker readings. The Erthumoi were not too surprised to find themselves moving across the wind—after all, they did not know the current direction. They did, however, see the waves, and Hugh quickly turned the hull so that these came bow on. There was no point in asking for a bailing job before it was necessary. The Module didn’t seem bothered, and their actual direction appeared little affected after the wings were turned once more to offset the change in hull heading.

  For a quarter of an hour they maneuvered at seeming random, though the raft quickly disappeared in the distance. Then they approached a spout, and Hugh grew tense. He mentioned it to The Module, which had no sensory information but the trackers.

  “I inferred that,” was the answer. “I am using the current toward it. We will pass it on the right, and gain more than a kilometer toward The Iris. The technique is very simple, but whichever of you is handling the air wing will have to be ready to respond quickly to orders. The water wing I can predict more readily.” Hugh said no more.

  “Air wing thirty-five degrees to the right.” Janice obeyed. “Overcontrolled. Two degrees left.”

  “I can only guess at degrees,” the woman pointed out.

  “Calibrate. Make some sort of marks on the control cords.”

  “Of course.”

  “Water wing, eleven degrees right.”

  “Tell me when I’ve reached it,” replied Hugh.

  “Close. Closer. Stop. Keep the hull at its present heading, whoever is handling the rudder. Are we dangerously close to the spout?”

  “About a hundred and fifty meters from the nearest spray,” Janice replied.

  “Good. Hold all settings.” There was a pause of over a minute.

  “Hull heading six degrees left, air wing six degrees right, water wing three degrees right.” It took perhaps a minute and three or four corrections to establish the new setup, and by this time both living crew members were almost relaxed. They were starting to feel comfortable with the orders, and even with the results; Janice, watching her own trackers, reported that they were actually working their way more or less steadily along a fixed line from the raft. Hugh had to take her word for it, since his own inertial equipment was now part of The Module.

  In any case, he was having to spend much of his time bailing. The glider had ridden
very high on the water and had shipped very little spray; with the weight of the thruster forcing the stub of the right wing to act as a keel, however, this was now less true. He hoped fervently that nothing was getting through the bulkheads he had improvised at either end of the cockpit. He told himself repeatedly that the Cephallonian adhesive was supposed to be very good, but did not say this aloud. Janice could be objective at inconvenient times.

  Occasionally the gain in distance was really impressive, as vectors combined to whip them around one side or the other of a spout. At other times human patience would wear thin as they crept one meter along the Iris-ward radius out of twenty or thirty along their current sub-Grendel circumference. Sometimes, even with The Module directing, they actually lost distance for a while. Neither was sure whether this was because there existed no useful vector solution at the moment or because one or both of them had been too slow following orders. Only The Module could keep real-time track of the constantly changing water and air currents, and only The Module could solve their angle problems quickly enough. By unspoken common consent, they did not ask their electronic companion who or what should be blamed, and it did not volunteer information.

  They had to sleep, of course. Janice allowed her husband to take the first watch, and carefully refrained from checking the time it started, so she didn’t know how long he let her slumber. She had hoped to give him a full ten hours when his turn came, but a complication emerged.

  “Our drag component seems to be increasing,” The Module remarked six hours or so into Hugh’s sleep. “We originally averaged nearly six meters real advance toward The Iris for each hundred of actual travel through the water. This has dropped over the last four hours to about three per hundred.” The woman thought briefly of taking care of the matter herself, since the cause seemed pretty obvious, but allowed common sense to override personal pride and awakened her husband. He, after hearing the report and agreeing with her, rigged another safety line to his suit and went over the side—Janice did not argue for the privilege—to spend several minutes removing a ten-meter-long banner of weed trailing from the bottom wing and the thruster. Much of it was charged, but his suit protected him, though flashes were visible from the surface even in daylight and caused Janice some uneasiness. He climbed back aboard, and insisted that he couldn’t get back to sleep.

  By then the spouts were noticeably less frequent and the air clearer. Grendel could occasionally be seen, though still apparently almost overhead. It was obvious even without tracker data that they were working their way out of The Cataract into clear Pupil. This was the good part. Less comforting was the realization that they were now far beyond the range of the part of The Box that had been left on the raft, and that if any serious trouble developed there was no way the Cephallonians could know about it or find them.

  But even Janice had now shed the depression following the failed glider flight and was looking ahead optimistically. The boat was not leaking detectably, the bailing had been able to keep up with water slopping into the cockpit—Hugh insisted that the exercise was doing him good—and it was even possible that in another few hours they might be visible from orbit, though neither of them considered that a chance worth counting on.

  Wave and wind were much less chaotic; sometimes half an hour would pass between orders from The Module and two or three times one or another of the Erthumoi had been able to see for themselves slight departures from a fixed angle between their path and the now long and regular waves, and to make a correction without orders.

  “You know,” Hugh remarked at one point, “this could almost be a sport. We should try it when we get home.”

  Janice pursed her lips doubtfully for a few seconds, then shook her head negatively.

  “I don’t think anything needing robot assistance could really be regarded as a game,” she pointed out. “A sport is supposed to show your personal skill, isn’t it?”

  Hugh shrugged. “I guess so. Just a thought.”

  “Hull heading slightly left, no change in water wing, air wing two degrees right,” came the commanding voice. “Slightly” had come to mean “as little as human senses will permit,” and implied that several attempts would be needed before the electronic intelligence would be satisfied, so Hugh’s full attention wandered from the conversation.

  Janice took time to eat, and spent a little more wondering whether their partial recyclers of their suits and the “cheese” they had brought with them would actually get them to The Iris. She was not worried, of course, just planning. They were likely to be seen by a native well before reaching the ring continent in any case—though whether the Habra would be interested was quite another matter. Aliens were no longer much of a novelty on the planet, they had both observed.

  On the other hand, it seemed possible that the vehicle they were riding might collect a crowd.

  Janice began glancing hopefully at the sky every few minutes.

  The routine was getting too boring to be a sport, even Hugh admitted.

  “Air wing two degrees right.” Ten minutes’ silence.

  “Hull heading one degree right.” More silence.

  “Hull heading slightly left.” This was at least more interesting, since it took more time and attention to satisfy The Module.

  “Drag getting too great. Clean the water wing again.” Janice insisted on taking her turn at this, which was a harder job than it might have been; they had agreed not to use their knives, partly because of the risk of losing them irretrievably and partly to avoid chance of damage to the covering fabric. The weed had little mechanical strength as a rule, though sometimes a strand or two of the stuff they had used to build the hull frame would be involved. Several times, as a result, the knife discussion was reopened; saving time in clearing the growths might be worthwhile, since they always lost distance—blowing downwind and drifting down current back toward The Cataract—while someone was doing the job. The Module always advised against it, however, since there was no way to tell in advance what sort of material would have to be faced, a preliminary check would be time-consuming, and loss of a knife would be permanent.

  So boredom became the order of life, while Grendel shifted very slowly downward in the sky. Erthumoi are extremely bad at judging vertical angles and they had no measuring devices for such quantities, so knowing that they only had to bring the star down to about seventy-five degrees above the horizon was little help.

  More meaningful facts were that the near edge of Iris was about six hundred eighty kilometers from the center of The Cataract, that they had started some thirty kilometers from the center, and that the trackers claimed that they had made nearly a hundred kilometers radially while traveling nearly two thousand through water in a widening spiral around the heat pole. They had not kept very careful track of time; on Habranha there were no nights to serve as punctuation, its orbit was circular enough to make one part of the roughly three-week year just like another, and while Grendel’s companion sun could be seen easily enough in the daylight sky if one looked for it and would with a little mental arithmetic provide a “yearly” calendar, neither had bothered. They had been roughly four hundred hours on the journey; their food was still adequate, and the Cephallonians should still be safe.

  But there was quite a distance yet to go, whether one thought of ideal vector or through the water.

  The sky was clear, now; they were in plain Pupil and out of The Cataract. The water too was clear except for life. The next major change would be near the end of the voyage, when silt from the melting Iris would start to discolor the ocean. The natives salvaged what silicate they could, of course, but rivers in the melting ice stole a good deal of the finer material in spite of their efforts.

  There was no sense looking for this for a long time yet, but both Erthumoi did glance at the sea more frequently than common sense dictated. Whenever one of them went over the side to clear weed he or she found it increasingly hard to feel sure that the water wasn’t just a little murkier than last time
. . .

  It occurred to Hugh, after another couple of hundred hours, that they might not have to go even that close to The Iris; there would be salvaging subs trawling for silt fairly well out in The Pupil, and fishers even farther, and one of these might easily spot them. If it did, it would certainly investigate. Their craft would certainly be a very peculiar sight to Habranhans either optically—the winged natives could see, of course—or on sonar. There was no point using their transducer to call for help, of course, since the natives sensed radio and would not, unless regularly dealing with aliens, be equipped to receive or transmit sound.

  There was no way the Erthumoi could attract native attention. Not deliberately.

  They were still nearly four hundred kilometers from the nearest shore of Iris, though they had made several widening spiral journeys around The Cataract as they stole their tiny increments of radial distance from each kilometer of sailing, when the polymer skeleton of a native submarine drew up beside them.

  The crew, of course, were all armored and saturated with their own type of diving fluid. Apparently they were not equipped with sound devices, but they looked the aliens over for several minutes, made gestures that the Erthumoi assumed to be the equivalent of friendly waves, and drew away again. They seemed not to recognize the situation as an emergency as Janice and Hugh vigorously waved back.