Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “We should have brought that can of chocolate syrup,” Vicki suggested. “That would at least bring mice—or maybe a bear.”

  “Or bugs,” pointed out D’Orrey. “Actually, haven’t we don most of what I wanted your help for? We know, basically, why the snakes were behaving so weirdly. As science, this is a fizzle. Nature hasn’t done anything surprising—just some hacker, and who can be surprised at them.”

  “Don’t be insulting, Uncle Jaques. Even hackers have reasons for what we do—sometimes good ones.”

  “Sure. You want to prove you can do it, never mind the side effects. Some one’s probably shot the ecology of this island to pieces just for his”—he shot a glance at Vicki—“or her own amusement, like a kid making tracks with a dune buggy. I sometimes wish—”

  “Hold it friend,” the woman cut in. “Whoever did this certainly knows just how many snakes were used. He knows or is finding out how much they eat, and how often. He’s altered one variable, essentially; just their hunting techniques. He’s in a position to make a more quantitative study of one piece of this local ecology than anyone, to my knowledge, ever has before. And I hope you weren’t about to wish nanotech had never been developed.”

  D’Orrey was silent, and Peter nobly refrained from smirking.

  After a moment, Vicki went on less emphatically. “I’m just providing the obligatory alternative hypothesis, of course; we’re supposed to be doing research—testing an idea, not just finding support for one. I was thinking hacker too, but I don’t want to get trapped into taking that for granted.”

  D’Orrey nodded; he too, would have spent a long time seeking alternative explanations rather than risk being called a watchmakerite, even one assuming a human watchmaker. “Right, Pete, get what details you can about the homing signals. We should have checked at Orondo to see if anyone is doing a research project up here. When”—he carefully did not say “if”—“you have them, we’ll call there.”

  The youngster nodded, and settled down with his kit. “You keep an eye out for anything coming up,” he instructed. His uncle nodded, and positioned himself where he could see anything working up the climbway, and for some time the only words were terse reports.

  “One rattler, but seems casual.”

  “Another, not headed this way.”

  “First one interested—heading up.”

  “Lost its enthusiasm. I’ll scare it.”

  Over an hour passed before Peter said, “I think that’s everything. There seem to be ten patterns which make them home this way. For all I can tell not more than one or two of them may actually be meant to make them do anything—maybe none of them; this all may be just a side effect of whatever was planned. We’ll have to see another hunt, and try to find what’s radiated or what I can do to change that pattern before we can even start to be sure. For all I really know, what I’ve just been doing may have shut off the intended program and spoiled our project and the other guy’s. You’d better hope it’s a hacker, or Orono will be on your neck for not checking with them first.” He started to stand up with his kit. “HEY!!”

  There are evidently more than one way up the rock, as far as snakes were concerned. D’Orrey’s attention had been on the path they had used, and Peter’s on his instruments; Vicki was still on top watching the Stage. None of them had noticed the two-meter specimen approaching from slightly above the level of the experimenters and, as it happened, from behind both. The rattler was still intent on something ahead of it. Peter say the motion from the corner of his eye as he was rising, and had immediate insight on what the signal must be.

  He was also lifting his kit, and as it reached a point about half a meter off the ground—beyond what D’Orrey would have considered striking range—the creature struck.

  Its target might have been the kit, but the kit was in Peter’s hands, protected only by the gloves of his cam suit.

  The serpent dropped away and recoiled itself. The boy lashed out with a kick which sent it flying off the rock before it could strike again.

  “Uncle Jack! It got me!”

  “Drop your kit. Vicki, first aid! Pete, sit and relax. Never mind your box. If it’s still attracting anything we’ll solve that later. Let’s see your hand!”

  The boy obeyed, and both saw instantly what had happened. The fleshy outer edge of his right hand bore the significant double puncture, and without waiting for instructions he tried to place it in his mouth. The location of the would made this difficult, but not impossible, and he began to suck.

  After a few seconds he stopped and spat, and both could see that he was getting an encouraging amount of blood. He was about to repeat the process when Vicki arrived with the first aid kit.

  No time was wasted; all knew what to do. She took a matchbox-sized container from the main carton and handed two copper-colored objects the size of split peas to D’Orrey. Peter was resting the arm and hand, palm up, on his right knee. The man carefully place on of the hemispheres on each of the punctures and touched a tiny button on the matchbox.

  Vicki had extracted another device, cylindrical in shape, also copper colored except for a narrow red stripe along the curved surface from face to face, and about three centimeters in length and diameter. She lifted Peter’s arm so the elbow was straight and placed the curve of the cylinder inside the joint with the stripe across the large vein which showed there. The boy flinched slightly as she energized the unit and two needles worked their way into the blood vessel; emergency medical equipment did not always have anesthetic refinements.

  “That should handle it,” D’Orrey said as he relaxed visibly. “Most of what’s in the puncture won’t get away from it, and any toxin getting as far downstream as the big vein will be handled by the washer. Not natural—at least, not as natural as the snake or the poison ivy Peter had your suit draped over last night—but it works.”

  Vicki sneezed, but made no move to take another pill, and no response to either part of the “natural” remark. The man resumed, addressing Peter. “I suppose you have enough material to let me call Orono about this project? You hadn’t quite said so when our subject was interrupted.” He wasn’t quite as indifferent, or even quite as confident in the first aid equipment, as he sounded, but wanted to get his nephew’s mind elsewhere.

  “The interruption was more info. If you’ll get my kit, I’ll see.”

  “If can get it. Our friend may be back by now.”

  “Dropping it should have turned everything off.”

  “It didn’t when I dropped it to you before,” Vicki pointed out.

  Peter’s mouth opened, and he looked blankly at her for a moment.

  “You’re right! It didn’t!!” His gaze wandered into the distance, and he strated to move his right arm. She stopped him firmly; he obeyed her hand pressure, without bringing his attention back from wherever it had gone.

  “Uncle Jaques. Check the kit. If no snakes are near, bring it to me.” D’Orrey obeyed without comment; maybe the kid should be in charge right now.

  “I don’t see any,” he reported. “Here it is.”

  Peter seized the block with his left hand as Vicki tightened her hold unnecessarily on his right. He set the kit on his left knee, took the monitor from his belt, and watched its screen for some seconds.

  “It didn’t turn off this time, either,” he said at last. “Something’s interfered with my controls. How long before I can use both hands?”

  The woman looked at the first-aid screen. “Five or six more minutes should have you pumped out.” Peter waited out the time with what his uncle considered surprising patience, learning only later what the real emotion was.

  Vicki removed the blood filter pump and the venom denaturant units at last, and he flexed his arm and fingers for another half minute.

  Then he went to work on his nano kit. He seemed to be examining every separate module and trying every switch, though it was not always obvious to the watchers just what was going on; the control system itself was as hard t
o see and obscure in detail as the mechanisms it directed. The first aid kit was state of the art as of a couple of years earlier and reasonably familiar to any adult; this, like any hacker’s work, was an individual—private—development.

  Peter spent several minutes at the task, and his uncle got a distinct impression toward the end that he was working very slowly, almost as though he suspected a truth he didn’t really want to believe.

  Finally he detached completely the plate which until then had hinged out from the brick and carried another monitor screen on its inner face, something neither had seen before.

  An imperceptible gesture brought the screen to life. Exactly in its center was a blank area about a centimeter across with a set of tiny red symbols inside it. Peter seemed about to throw the whole assembly to the ground, but he controlled himself, put it down gently, stood up, and walked toward the top of the rock. He stood there silently for two or three minutes, while D’Orrey and Vicki looked at each other blankly. Eventually, the man’s imagination clicked back into gear.

  He carefully refrained from saying anything like “Made a fool of you again, did he?” At the same time, he had to know—

  “D’you suppose it was Jerry?” he asked.

  The answer came before the boy could speak. It sounded in the left ear of each of the trio, in the form of a husky whisper not recognizable as anyone’s voice—small size puts physical limits on the detail of any wave pattern produced by a speaker.

  “It was. Sorry, Mr. Becker. I had to, and it wasn’t all your fault. I apologize to you for bugging your kit, and to all of you for violating your personal privacy with these ear canal speakers. They’ll be removed as soon as I’ve finished talking to you. Doctor D’Orrey, just why didn’t you check with the department? I have better things to do with my time than ward even the well-meaning curious off my experiments. And I thank you, Dr. Kalani, for your analysis even though I suspect you didn’t really believe it. It was essentially correct.”

  “But you knew what I was doing when I asked you to check my instruments!” exclaimed D’Orrey.

  “I did not. You said you’d seen something queer and wanted to check its legitimacy, but you gave me no details. I judged you were hoping to make a discovery, which I can well understand, and wanted no rivals beating you to publication, which I can also understand, so I asked for no more. We’re as bad as the hackers, Jaques; we don’t trust each other enough. Maybe you can profit by this, Mr. Becker, and don’t wind up a complete lone wolf. I fear we two scientists may be too old to change.”

  “Three,” corrected Vicki Kalani. “I guess it’s natural. Pete, of course you can do something about the catechols in poison ivy. I haven’t started to itch yet, but if . . .” her statement trailed off and Peter Ben Becker looked uncomfortable again.

  “Better try the first aid kit,” he muttered.

  “Better still,” suggested his uncle, “try learning to recognize poison ivy. You are planning some outdoor research, aren’t you? And Vick—how about taking one of my cooking turns? I cleaned your suit last night while you were both asleep.”

  OPTIONS

  To Jerry it seemed pretty clear that there was no way back up. A good deal of the cliff had fallen with them, leaving a slope of jumbled rock fragments, but the slope had not quite reached angle of repose. Creak’s attempts to pick his way up the pile had cost two more broken limbs.

  Jerry Snow, whose right femur had snapped in the fall, hadn’t even tried. Luckily there was pain-killer in his kit, so he could still think. Whether he needed to or not was debatable; any possible action would demand most careful planning, but there might be no possible action. Even before the fall he had been pretty well resigned to starvation; one does not find usable food on a world like Paintbox even if some of its life forms do breathe oxygen. The broken leg might actually make decisions simpler.

  Creak had no visible kit or any other equipment but long sheath knives on each forearm, but didn’t seem to be suffering as far as the human being could tell. Of course, what the signs would have been was anyone’s guess. He—Jerry thought the male pronoun from habit, knowing it might be wrong—might also be able to do some constructive thinking, but this could do the man little good. Both species used sound for communication, but only with their own kinds.

  The human being had heard that the rusty-hinge noises the natives made represented words and sentences, patterns which some people had even learned to understand, but they carried no meaning to him. He himself had not seen a native until shortly after hitting the ground some sixty hours earlier.

  His own speech seemed to be as just meaningless to the other, which was hardly surprising. The two had used gestures since their first meeting. These had let them help each other find enough water for the kit’s purifier and the native’s thirst, but there had been no attempt to discuss route or destination. It seemed to the man that wherever the native might be heading must offer at least a slightly better chance of rescue than random wandering.

  Gestures had also been effective when Jerry had noticed a swarm of what looked like oversized rats streaming toward them from a nearby gully; at least, Creak had been able to draw his knives in time and, in some thirty seconds of almost invisibly rapid motion, scatter a dozen or more dismembered bodies around them and send the survivors back to their gully. A few hours later, however, the man had failed to understand one of Creak’s arm-wavings at a critical moment.

  Now it seemed evident that the gesture had been a warning against being so close to the edge of the cliff.

  He wasn’t sure how guilty he should feel at involving Creak in the fall. The creature had plainly made a deliberate effort to seize him and pull him back from the crumbling rock, but maybe he would have shared the fall anyway in spite of his better footing; or maybe he had risked his life deliberately without regard for his own safety. Either way, it had obviously been Jerry’s fault. Warning or not, he should have been more alert.

  More constructively, what could either of them now do about it? Jerry could crawl, but there was no way he could walk even if he managed to splint his leg; it would take days even with kit medication for the bone to knit. His various contusions were nothing to worry about; they’d be invisible in a day or two, if he were still alive.

  One of Creak’s walking limbs was also broken. This made less difference to him since he had four of them, but the advantage was offset at least partly by a body weight of some two hundred fifty kilograms. Still, he could travel.

  From the human viewpoint, therefore, the problem seemed to lie not in any doubt of Creak’s getting somewhere but in how to tell him what to do when he got there. Sending a message would be easy; the Paintbox natives could memorize—record—in perfect detail the most complex sound patterns, Jerry had been told. Whether the noises carried meaning for them or not didn’t seem to matter. Snow’s problem would be to explain to whom the message should go. It was almost certain that Creak was unfamiliar with human beings; he had not produced a recognizable word since Jerry had met him, so presumably had never heard any, and he had appeared surprised at some of the man’s actions such as pouring water into the purification kit instead of drinking it. He might never even have heard of offworlders, who were certainly rare enough on Paintbox.

  But Jerry had talked to him anyway, in the hope that sooner or later his own words would be repeated in a place where they had meaning. It would, after all, be nice if someone found out eventually what had happened to him. He had property, and a child he’d be glad to have get it.

  He had never really hoped to get out of the situation alive himself. He had had to eject with a minimum of equipment. Even when people missed his flyer and began looking for it, he was nowhere near any spot where it might have crashed. It might not, for that matter, have crashed at all; the unbalanced reactor which had forced him to get out with so little notice, without even any food to speak of, might have left nothing but a spreading cloud of extra pollution in Paintbox’s already foul atmosphere.
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br />   “I’m going to try to splint a broken right thigh,” he said slowly. “I still won’t be able to walk on it, but at least it may knit straight—if I last long enough for that. If anyone ever hears this, I’ve been trapped by a rockfall on a ledge overlooking the west side of Death Valley, probably about two hundred kilos from Gem. I’ve recorded my will, which I don’t want to recite this publicly, and it would be nice if someone found it even if it’s too late for me. The native I call Creak is still with me; he fell too. We’re both hurt, he broke a leg and an arm in the same fall, but he can travel. Neither of us can climb back up, though, and of course I can’t go very much farther down. There are trees of a sort on this shelf, thin enough to cut and I hope strong enough to make splints. I can’t tell Creak what I want to do, so I’m going to crawl over and start cutting. Maybe he’ll get the idea.”

  The crawl would have been impossible, Jerry knew, without the pain-killer. He dragged the broken leg as directly behind him as possible. This had the effect of more or less straightening it out and pulling the visible bone end inside—as effective a setting job as was possible unless he could persuade the native to pull it straight. Even with the drug, however, he could feel the crepidation as he moved.

  He also felt weak, he hoped not from shock. It was lucky that his knife still had power, though he didn’t know how much; he’d have to use it economically.

  A growth resembling a ten-meter bamboo toppled slowly after a single slash, and four more cuts produced sections which should serve as splints if he could fasten them in place. The cutting had offered no difficulty, but moving along the fallen pole to the place where he wanted to cut had been another matter. Creak had watched with apparent interest, but showed no signs yet of realizing what the human being had in mind.

  Binding material, preferably tape, was the next problem. The kit had sealant for cuts and abrasions to help out ordinary clotting. This he had already used, but it was no help gluing splints. Rope was not included in the ejection gear, cutting edges being considered more basic, and the parachute lines he had saved were much too thin, though undoubtedly strong enough.