Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  The spaceward side of Halfbaked was well covered with what looked to human beings like plant life, though its actual ecological role was still being argued. No animals had yet been seen, unless some of the large and small objects resembling fragments of burned paper which seemed to be borne on the fierce winds were actually flying instead. There was evidence on some of the plants that things were eating them, but the pool for the first confirmed animal sighting was still unclaimed after five Terrestrial months. Two schools of thought were developing among the biologists: the katabolic part of the ecology was being handled by microbes, or was being taken care of by fire.

  Drivers could devote very little of their attention to specimen search while their machines were in motion. The Quarterback trembled slightly as it moved, partly from ground irregularities, occasionally from temblors, and mostly from winds of constantly varying violence and direction. At their present height above the reference ellipsoid—Halfbaked had no seas to provide an altitude zero—the pressure averaged about seventeen atmospheres, wavering irregularly and on a time scale of minutes by about two each way. With its molecular weight averaging well over a hundred, wind was both difficult and unsafe to ignore.

  Dominic nursed the vehicle up to nearly two hundred kilometers per hour. There were few obstacles now in sight, and the red and green deeplights flashing alternately from their masts on each side of the runabout provided shadow patterns easily interpreted as range information. It was better than computer-backed radar in the continuous howl of microwave and longer static emitted by the local plants. The lights also allowed human-reflexive response time; glancing back and forth between the outside and a screen, no matter how precise and detailed the latter’s readings might be, would have put a much lower limit on permissible driving speed much of the time.

  Erni kept his hands away from the controls, but watched their surroundings as carefully as his partner. Both could see in all directions even here on night side, since a bank of floods supplemented the deeplights and there was nearly continuous and fairly bright lightning among the clouds overhead. Halfbaked, less than eight million kilometers from the center of its G3-to-4 sun, had plenty of energy to expend on luminous, biological, and even comprehensible local phenomena.

  The driver did cast an occasional glance at his younger companion. He would never have admitted that Erni could be more worried about Jessi than he himself was about Maria, but the Icewalls had been married less than three years as against the Yuccas’ fourteen, and might possibly be less philosophical about the unpredictability of life.

  Apparently greater worry was not hurting Erni’s driving judgment, though. His “Watch it!” from the right-side station was essentially simultaneous with Nic’s cutting out drive again. Quarterback came to a quick halt, but not a smooth one.

  Active faults don’t move smoothly; even on Earth they cause quakes, often violent ones. Under more than seven Earth gravities, the quakes tend to be much more frequent and no less violent. Both drivers floated quietly at their stations and watched; there was nothing else to do until what they saw made detailed sense.

  The fault could be seen half a kilometer ahead, though rain was starting to fall, but there were no hills close enough to offer a threat of slides or rockfalls. If there had been, it was likely that not even trained driver reflexes could have coped with all the probabilities, and more worry would have been in order.

  The ground movement was largely horizontal, they could see and feel. The fault started from some indeterminate point to their left, slanted across in front, and extended out of sight ahead and to their right. It did have a small vertical component; the far side had lifted nearly half a meter since they had passed the level site less than an hour before. Rather casually, Erni reported their stopping and the reason for it to Nest; Ben acknowledged with equal aplomb.

  “Unless it gets a good deal higher, we won’t have any trouble in getting past,” Icewall concluded.

  “If it’s still shaking, maybe you ought to get by before it rises any more,” was the answering suggestion. Erni glanced at his partner, nodding thoughtfully.

  “You have a point. All right. We’ll send out bugs to see if it’s any lower within a kilo or two, and climb at the best place. We’ll call you when we start. If you don’t hear from us in two or three minutes after that, someone come out and collect the evidence.”

  “If we can spare anyone.” That point also was well taken, though too obvious to all concerned to be worthy of answer. Energy was essentially limitless thanks to ubiquitous miniature fusion units, and self-reproducing pseudolife equipment was almost equally so as long as there was no shortage of raw material; but personnel on a world like Halfbaked was another matter entirely.

  The servobugs guided them to a spot a few hundred meters to the right. The men called them back, powered up again and sent the runabout slowly toward the infant cliff, stopping again some two meters away. Both operators watched carefully for a minute or so. A slip of a millimeter or two every few seconds was accompanied by more shock waves. One could only guess whether an especially large jolt was waiting to be triggered by the car’s weight, but the regularity of the motions themselves was encouraging. Nic retracted the dozen wheels on which they had been traveling and let the body settle onto its caterpillar treads; then, for reasons he didn’t bother to state, he motioned Erni to take over. The latter obeyed in equal silence. Even more slowly than before, Quarterback eased forward until the treads touched the tiny escarpment and the front of the vehicle began to lift.

  The frequent small shocks became much easier to feel but no more worrisome. The men could see the front of the vehicle lifting but not feel it; up and down, even under heavy gravity, were not obvious except by sight to people floating in water—and sight needed a better reference horizon than this world with its vast size and short atmospheric scale height could provide.

  Tension mounted as the mass center of the vehicle approached the edge. Both men clenched their fists and held their breaths as it passed and the machine rocked forward.

  In theory, the runabout wouldn’t buckle even if its entire fourteen-hundred-ton mass—some ten thousand tons weight, here—were supported only at the center. Nesters, however, tended to have an engineering bias toward regarding such theory mainly as a guide for planning experiments. This sort of experiment had been done before but not, as far as either driver knew, with acceleration from seismic waves helping out the gravity.

  The body did hold. The impact as it finished rocking forward and the front touched down was gentle, somewhat cushioned by a patch of half-meter-wide, viciously spined growths resembling barrel cacti. Dark red, almost black, fluid which spattered from these crusted over almost at once as the air touched it, but slightly to the men’s surprise they did not ignite.

  A moment later Quarterback was resuming speed with Erni still driving. Nic reported their new status to Nest, added encouraging details about the stresses just survived, and asked for an update on the tanker.

  “Still moving, still apparently on the way back,” replied Ben. “Average speed about a hundred sixty.”

  “Did they really slow down, or is that just a better measure?” Nic barely beat his friend to the question.

  “The latter, Senatsu thinks. But they’re coming, almost certainly backtracking on their original path. They’re not heading straight toward Nest, but nearly Hot-south toward the dark side. We’re wondering now whether the original guess about travel being better out of the sunlight was right, or if they have some other reason. There’s still no direct word from the girls.”

  The flotation water was clear enough to show part of Erni’s frown above his breathing mask, but he said nothing. The clusters of spiky barrels were becoming more numerous, and even though he knew contact would not harm the Quarterback he disliked casual destruction.

  The drive settled down to routine. Quarterback didn’t have far to go by Half-baked standards. They had barely started their trip to the “city” reported by
Jellyseal’s drivers, which was nearly fifty thousand kilometers from Nest along a geodesic and much farther by realistic standards. The topography seldom allowed a completely free choice of path, and it had seemed wise to make most of the journey out of sunlight as long as there was no obvious reason for haste. Keeping the cargo below its boiling point would be much easier, for one thing.

  Now, of course, the cargo should be different.

  The husbands, when voice contact had been lost, had been worried and planned to take the geodesic route rather than follow the mapped track of the Jellyseal, but they were still on the night side less than a thousand kilometers from Nest when they turned back.

  The temblors from the shifting fault grew less intense as they moved away from it. This might be due to increasing distance or to actual quieting down of the disturbance. There was plenty of seismic equipment at Nest, and the quakes had probably been detected there; but until a far more extensive network could be set up there would be no way to pick particular ones out of the continuous rumblings and quiverings originating throughout the huge world’s crust and mantle.

  Neither driver thought of blaming other Nesters for failing to warn them about the obstacle just passed. Satellite mapping through charged clouds was difficult, and anyone away from the base was on his own—or on their own; no vehicles went out with less than two crew members, and no one went out walking. Suits which would let a human being take a step in seventeen atmospheres pressure and over seven Earth gravities, even though Nest had been built in a region of human-tolerable temperature, were not available anywhere.

  Techniques had been planned for transferring people from a crippled vehicle to a rescue machine, but so far these had not been tested in genuine emergencies. Also they depended on the cripple’s not being too badly bent out of shape. Doors had to open . . .

  The Quarterback had to slow down after an hour or so, as the rain increased. The drops were not staying on the ground, but boiling off as soon as they struck; the resulting mist, rather than the rain itself, was blocking vision. The black, blowing flakes had vanished, whether as a result of blocked vision or because they were washed to the ground could only be guessed. What was falling was anyone’s guess, too; presumably fluorine compounds, but emphatically not water. Hydrogen was far scarcer on this world than on Mars or even Mercury.

  Dominic made one of his thoughtful weather analyses as the rain slowed them.

  “There’s a high ridge back of us and to the right, remember? Surface wind seems to be toward the day side as usual, so the air is being pushed up and cooling adiabatically as it reaches the hills. Something’s condensing out, maybe oxides of sulfur or fluorides of sulfur or silicon. We ought to get out of it in a few kilos.”

  The prediction, especially the phrase “as usual,” took Erni’s mind off his worries for a moment. This world’s weather was quite literally chaotic; the word “climate” meant nothing.

  “How much’ll you bet?”

  Nic glanced over at his partner, thankful that his own face was invisible. “Well-l-l—” He let his voice trail off.

  “Come on. You’re not going to cut off my best source of income, are you?”

  “You should work for a living, but all right. Fifty says we’re in clear air in—oh, twenty kilos.”

  “You’re on. Check the odometer.” Yucca zeroed one of the wheel counters. Quarterback had been off the tracks since leaving the quake site. “Not that one, friend. It’s center right, not a driver, off the ground a lot of the time, and you know it.” Still glad that his face couldn’t be seen, the prophet activated a driving-wheel meter.

  Erni rather pointedly made sure it was actually counting, his divided attention almost at once giving Dominic a chance to distract him even further.

  “Watch it. Boulder.” The runabout swerved rather more than was really necessary, grazing an asparagus-like growth three or four meters high and knocking it over before Icewall steadied. Neither looked at the other this time, but the driver did not slow down. Yucca decided that no more needed to be done for a while to stop his friend from worrying. After all, he himself couldn’t help wondering why there had no been word from Jellyseal. Ben’s explanation had been plausible, but still . . .

  They were still in rain, though quite probably a different sort—Nic could have been partly right—an hour later. The odometer had been stopped and, after a coin had passed from Nic’s possession to Erni’s, rezeroed. There had been two or three more reports from Nest; the errant tank was still traveling, more or less in the expected direction, but still no word had come from its occupants.

  “I wonder what they’re bringing back,” Dominic ventured after a long silence. “The natives didn’t get very specific about what they could trade, though they seemed to want the hydrogen badly enough.”

  “According to Tricia,” Erni amended. “Desire’s a pretty abstract concept too, you know.”

  “They repeated the request enough times and enough different ways so even she was pretty sure. And you can see why scientists here want the stuff.” Icewall merely nodded at the obvious.

  Beings on Halfbaked at all versed in the physical sciences would presumably have detected Element One in the spectrum of their sun, looked for it on the planet, probably learning a lot of chemistry in the process, and possibly found the traces accumulated in the crust by eight billion years or so of stellar wind. The urge for enough to do macroscopic research would have matched that of the discoverers of helium and plutonium on Earth, not to mention the seekers for coronium before spectroscopic theory matured. The human explorers on Halfbaked had understood and sympathized. They had designed and grown the paraffin tanker some humorist with a background in historical trivia had named the Jellyseal, loaded it with high molecular weight hydrocarbons from the brown dwarf thirty-odd astronomical units out from 51 Pegasi, and sent it to the apparent source of the native transmissions. Communication was still vague, but there seemed a reasonable hope that something of use to human knowledge would come back. Attendant risks to human health and life were taken for granted and accepted.

  Except, to some extent and for the time being, by the spouses of the Jellyseal’s drivers.

  The two men drove, ate, and slept in turn. They felt their way through rain and fog—or maybe it was dust—held their breaths as they threaded narrow valleys where falling rocks could not possibly have been avoided, enjoyed an occasional glimpse of still unfamiliar constellations, speculated aloud about an occasional unusually large blowing object, felt the Quarterback tremble in gales which came—and ceased with no apparent pattern (though Dominic still tried, usually adding to Erni’s cash reserves), asked without result whether there had been word from their wives, listened to the constant exchange of messages with the natives which were slowly expanding a mutually useful scientific vocabulary, and drew steadily closer to Nest.

  The word about the ranker’s motions remained encouraging; it appeared to be under intelligent control. The best evidence appeared when the Quarterback was about an hour out from the base. It took the form of a report from Senatsu Ito Yoshihashi which was not, at first glance, encouraging.

  “The girls are headed for trouble, I’m afraid,” she said thoughtfully to Ben.

  “How?”

  “The path they took out has changed, about a hundred kilometers ahead of where they are now. What was a fairly narrow valley—a couple of kilos wide—seems to have been blocked up by something. It’s filling with some sort of liquid, as well as I can interpret the images. At least, its surface is now remarkably level and higher than before, and if it were freezing I’d expect crystals to do something to the reflection somewhere along the spectrum.”

  “Can’t they travel on it anyway?” Cloud was tying Quarterback into the communication link as he spoke. “The tanker should float on any liquid I can imagine at dayside temperature, and the tracks would drive it after a fashion.”

  “It’s the ‘after a fashion’ part that bothers me,” the observer/capper replie
d. “I think, though I’m not at all sure, that the stuff is spilling out the darkside—Hotsouth—end of the valley; and whether it’s a real liquid-fall or just rapids, I’m doubtful anything human-grown can hold together in either.”

  “They’ll see the lake or whatever it is and at least know better than to go boating,” was Erni’s surprisingly optimistic response.

  “But what can they do if they want to take another path?” asked Dominic. “Would the maps they started with be any help? Especially the way the topography changes? Wouldn’t they just wind up wandering around in a maze? I’d hate to have tried this trip without your guiding us.”

  “I suggest,” responded Ben slowly, “that Sen recheck their general area as thoroughly and quickly as she can. Then she can work out as good an alternate path as possible, and we’ll send it to the girls. They’re not transmitting, but we don’t know they’re not receiving.”

  “Why didn’t we call them and ask them to stop, or travel in a circle, or something like that a long time ago?” asked Erni. He carefully avoided sounding critical, since he had to include himself in the list of people who hadn’t thought of this.

  “Ask Pete. I’m not a psychologist,” Ben replied. “Sen, what sort of topo information do you have for that area?”

  “Pretty good, both current and from the original route pix. Give me a few minutes to match images and check for changes.”

  Even Erni remained silent until the mapper’s voice resumed. She did stay within the few minutes.