Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “All right. But how do you expect us to get Jellyseal back with her cockpit uninhabitable? There’s no way for us to refill it with water even if we could reseal the window openings.”

  “We’re working on that. Go ahead and make your search.”

  The men obeyed, Erni rather sullenly, Nic more thoughtful. The floor and rear bulkhead of the cockpit and the rear third of each side wall were between living chamber and cargo space, so there was a large area to be examined. How this could be managed without destroying all contact between walls and branches was not very evident. Human remains are large enough so that the first search had left many columns of undamaged vegetation still touching the floor, but to examine the walls for pinholes or even nail holes would be another matter. Nic thought for two or three minutes before trying anything, his partner waiting with growing impatience.

  “You know,” Yucca said slowly at last, “if there was actually a leak between cockpit and tank, would the windows have blown out? There’s a lot of volume back there for steam to expand into, even if it was nearly full of wax. There were several cubic meters full of local air to allow for the paraffin’s expanding as it warmed, whether it melted or not.”

  “I still want to look.”

  “I know. I don’t want to give up either. But think. Whatever chance the girls have of being alive, it’s not on board that machine. The natives could have—”

  “You mean they might have. But would they have known how? Could we keep one of them alive anywhere near Nest, when we have no idea about what they need—except maybe in temperature? And if they’re alive, why haven’t they called us?”

  Dominic gestured toward the tanker a few meters away. “What with? Do you think any of the comm gear is still in working shape?”

  “You two find that out, pronto,” came Ben’s voice. “There’s a good chance, the design crew thinks. If enough of it works you can use the bug that’s in there now to handle it. You find out whether it can still be set to receive short-range stuff from you, or if the controls are in shape to be handled by the bug itself. In one case, it may be possible to set up for Jelly to follow you by homing on transmission from your car. In the other, it’ll be a lot harder, but one of you using the bug’s handlers should be able to drive Jelly while the other runs Quarterback. That’ll be almighty slow, since you’ll have to stop to rest pretty often instead of swapping off, but it should be possible.”

  “But—” started Erni.

  Cloud spoke more gently, and much more persuasively. “You both know most of what little chance there is that they’re alive is if they’re somewhere under the sun. We don’t know just how smart these natives are, but remember that they got in touch with us, after hearing our satellite and vehicle transmissions. Let’s get that machine back here and find out what we can from it. Even if time is critical, and I can’t say it isn’t, aren’t the odds better this way? We can try to ask the natives, too, though a lot of language learning will have to come first, I expect.”

  “How do you know the odds are better?” Erni was snapping again.

  “I don’t, of course,” Ben maintained his soothing tone, “but to me they seem better with a whole population of smart people working on finding out just what did happen.”

  Nic nodded slowly, invisibly to Cloud but not to Erni.

  “I suppose that makes sense.”

  “Something else makes sense, too,” Erni added grimly.

  “What.”

  “Tricia got the idea that the natives were pleased with the variety of hydrogen compounds we’d supplied. I wonder just how big a variety they got.”

  “And I pointed out that the tanker did have a lot of different hydrocarbons, which I think the locals call carbon hydrides,” Nic countered instantly. There was at least a minute of silence.

  “All right. We’ll bring it back if we can. But I’d like to know one thing, if Tricia can decode it from the local static.”

  “What?” asked Ben.

  “Do the locals know what water is, or at least do they have a recognizable symbol for it even if they call it oxygen hydride, and—did they thank us for any?”

  Again there was a lengthy pause while implications echoed silently around in human skulls. No one mentioned that the request was for two things; it didn’t seem to be the time.

  “She’ll try to find out,” Ben answered at last, in as matter-of-fact a tone as he could manage.

  “Okay. We’ll go over Jelly’s controls.” Dominic, too, tried to sound calm.

  The controls did seem to be working. This was not as startling as it might have been; all such equipment was of solid-state design and imbedded—grown into—the structures of the various vehicles. There might be mechanical failure of gross moving parts, but any equipment whose principal operating components were electrons stood a good chance of standing up in Halfbaked’s environment as long as diamond or silicon were not actually exposed to fluorine.

  There seemed, however, to be no way to set up the tanker’s system simply to home on a radiation source, moving or not. No one had foreseen the need when the machine was designed. The closest thing to an autodriver in any of the vehicles was the general-shutdown control. There were no smooth paved highways with guiding beacons or buried rails on the planet. While systems able to avoid the ordinary run of obstacles on an ordinary planet were part of the common culture and could have been incorporated in the Halfbaked-built machines, these were exploring vehicles. Avoiding obstacles was simply not their basic purpose. It had been taken for granted that they would be operated by curious, intelligent people who had a standard sense of self-preservation but would be willing to take risks when appropriate.

  That left trying to drive Jellyseal with the handling equipment of a servobug. This proved possible but far from easy, and even Erni agreed that an hour or two’s practice in the open area was probably a good idea. With some confidence established by both, Dominic sent the Quarterback toward the valley by which they had entered while his younger companion, looking through the rear window of the cockpit, concentrated on keeping the larger vehicle a fixed distance directly behind them.

  He was feeling pretty confident, almost relaxed, by the time the entrance narrowed before them.

  With a brief exchange of one slightly questioning and one somewhat shaky “Okay” they entered the passage, very conscious that even at its empty weight the larger vehicle was much better able to shake the walls down on them than was their own runabout. Of course, Jelly also made a bigger target; but possibly a few dents or even a few holes in its body might not be critical now. Of course assuming that a house-sized boulder with the potential energy provided by a hundred-meter cliff under seven plus gravities would merely dent its target did seem unreasonably optimistic. Both men were optimists, even with the present probable status of their wives, but they were also reasonable; and while Nic did fairly well at concentrating on his driving, Erni’s eyes kept wandering much too often from Jellyseal’s bulk behind them to the cliffs beside and above.

  As earlier experience had warned, rocks did shake loose from time to time. It seemed very likely that the vibration of their own passage was the principal cause, since most of them slashed across the narrow way somewhat behind the Quarterback and its companion.

  Not quite all. Four times a deafening bell-like clang reached the men’s ears, deafening in spite of the poor impedance matching between the planet’s atmosphere and their vehicle’s body, and between the latter and the water inside. The bodies of the machines were not, of course, of metal, but they had enough metallic elasticity to ring on impact.

  Jellyseal was the victim all four times. Fortunately the missiles were much less than house-sized and Jelly seemed not to suffer enough damage to keep her from following. This fact did not cause Dominic to relax until they were out of the danger zone and had started to backtrack their way around the Patch of Frustration, as they had named it.

  At this point, Ben called again.

  “There’s a new
track for you. You don’t have to go back around to the way you came. Stand by for directions—”

  “Stand by for directions—”

  “Stand by for directions—”

  That became the routine through their waking hours and days for the ensuing weeks. What with sleep time and difficulties in guiding their “tow,” they averaged less than seventy kilometers an hour. The weeks went by, the monotony relieved by Senatsu’s messages, variations in wind and weather, and local biology. No more animals had been seen, or gliders, though the latter had inspired much argument at Nest. Neither had anything been said about the pot the two drivers had presumably won on the way out; neither man thought to mention it, and for some reason no one at Nest brought the matter up.

  The men were simply far too busy to think very much about the missing women, though they certainly did not forget them. When it was reported that Candlegrease was about ready, and Ben suggested that she be loaded and start at once for the native “city” with another crew, Nic and Erni both protested furiously. They tried to be logical; Erni insisted that talking with their wives during the first trip had given him and Nic a better idea of the route and its problems than anyone else could have. Ben countered that everyone on Nest had heard the conversations as well, and if necessary could replay the records of them. Nic supported his partner, pointing out that there had to be shades of meaning in the messages which only people who knew the speakers really well could be expected to catch. This was an unfair argument to use against the unmarried Cloud, but fairness was not on either driver’s mind at the moment. Ben privately doubted the validity of the argument as any bachelor might, but had no wish to be sneered at—by many people besides the bereaved husbands—for preaching outside his field of competence.

  He tried to point out the value of time. Nic countered with the value of familiarity; he and Erni were, aside from Maria and Jessi, the only people who had traveled really far from Nest. Cloud gave up at this point, agreed to wait for their arrival, but used their own argument to insist that two additional drivers go with them to gain experience.

  Erni asked pointedly, “Is Candlegrease set up to support a crew of six?” The coordinator almost gave himself away by asking what six, but made a quick recovery.

  “It will be by the time you get here.” Suggesting that there would probably be no need to take care of six was obviously unwise and might, just conceivably, be wrong. Human life, even other people’s, means a lot to civilized beings. A species which has survived its War stage and achieved star travel practically has to be civilized.

  Ben kept his word. The second tanker was ready, loaded, and set up to keep the women comfortable if they were found, by the time Erni and Nic got back to Nest. There was a second argument when they insisted, or tried to insist, on starting out at once to the hot side in spite of their extreme exhaustion. Ben won this one, but only by promising not to let Candlegrease move without them, so almost another Halfbaked year passed before the medics pronounced the two fit for the trip.

  There had been no delay, of course, in examining Jelly’s cockpit, though this had to be done with bugs. Bringing the machine into the garage and flooding it with water so that living researchers could swarm into it would quite certainly destroy any evidence there might be.

  It was quickly discovered that breaking the brittle contents did not pulverize the whole branch, merely two or three diameters to each side of the break. Cutting or snipping at two points far enough apart, therefore, detached an apparently undamaged section. Since the tank was full of the stuff too, there was no shortage. After a few mistakes resulting from failing to catch them on something soft as they fell, several lengths of the material were brought into “outdoor” labs, and biologists and chemists went happily to work with their bugs.

  The material was not very different from the tissues already investigated from the local vegetation. It was rigid rather than pliable, of course, and it finally occurred to someone that the stuff, having come from the hot side, might merely be frozen. This was easy enough to test. A sample was heated up to the probable temperature, as indicated by radiation theory and measurement from the satellites, of the Hotpole latitude where the “city” seemed to be. Long before it warmed up that far, the branch being tested was flexible as rope. Several of the investigators began privately to wonder whether they might be working over the remains of one of the intelligent natives, though no one suggested this aloud until well after Candlegrease had departed. Ben had the idea, but decided to save it; Erni might get bothered again.

  What brought the question into the open was the observation that after a day or so at high temperature, most of the branches, or roots, or vines, or whatever they were began to grow fine tendrils. The stuff was still alive.

  This was quickly reported to Ben Cloud, leaving him with the decision of how much to pass on to the now fairly distant second expedition. On one hand, the information was clearly critically important to anyone expecting to be in direct contact with the natives. On the other, Nic and Erni might be uncomfortable to learn that their examination of Jelly’s control compartment might have dismembered one of the people they were going to meet.

  Or, considering what had so probably happened to their wives, they might not. The other two drivers were a married couple, Pam Knight and Akmet Jinn Treefern, and the Treeferns might keep the other two in discussion rather than brooding mode. Ben hoped the fact that they were short, stocky, extremely sturdy people from a one-point-four-gee colony world would not become important, but he was getting uneasy over Erni’s patience limits.

  Ben was still trying to make up his mind—there was plenty of time yet before the travelers could presumably meet any day side natives—when another discovery was made.

  One of the many short sections of branch from the debris on the floor of Jelly’s cockpit had been part of one of the samples to be warmed up. It had not responded; it had neither softened nor grown extensions. After giving it several days, first with the rest of the sample and then by itself, it had been sequestered for more detailed study.

  Halfbaked’s life, it was now known, consisted mostly of carbon, with modest traces of nitrogen, oxygen, and heavy metals such as iron and titanium. The complexity needed for biological machinery was obtained not from hydrogen bonding within and between proteins and carbohydrates but from variously sized fullerenes and graphite tubes flared, tapered, curved, and branched by occasional heptagons, pentagons, and octagons in their mainly hexagonal carbon-ring nets. The “protoplasm” was considerably coarser, on the molecular scale, than anything known before to human biochemistry, and its peculiarities were contributing heavily to the Ph.D.-per-hour rate Cloud liked to brag about.

  The unresponsive segment was quite different. It had a fair amount of carbon and some iron, but there was far more sodium, calcium and phosphorus than had ever been found in the native life, and the carbon for the most part was tetrahedrally bonded. It took a while to discover the reason, and this happened only when one of the chemists sat back from her diffraction spectrometer and its confusing monitor pattern and took a close naked-eye look at the specimen.

  Then she called for a medical helper, who needed one glance.

  The branch was the charred remains of a human little finger.

  This made Ben’s communication problem more difficult, but in another way. It also forced him to face it at once. He faced it, reporting as tersely and calmly as he could to the distant Annie.

  “But why only a finger?” tiny Pam asked instantly, before either of the now confirmed widowers could react. She was honestly and reasonable curious, but was quite consciously trying to ease the shock of the message for the husbands. It was not really necessary; Nic, and even Erni, had become more and more ready to face the news as the weeks had worn on. “You two went over the whole floor, square centimeter by square centimeter, you said. Why didn’t you find a lot more—and a lot more recognizable? Maybe it’s just as well you didn’t, of course, but still I don’t see why
.”

  Dominic was able to answer at once, though Erni had thought of the explanation as quickly.

  “It was small, and they missed it.”

  That was all he needed to say. Even the “they” needed no clarification. Everyone in the tug heard that much and could picture the rest. Ben Cloud and more than fifty of the Nest personnel who were in the comm link could do the same. They listened while Dominic, in surprisingly steady tones, went on, “Ben, did Tricia ever get an answer to that question we asked a while ago about the natives and water?”

  “Not that I know of.” Cloud found his voice with difficulty. He had expected losses on Halfbaked, but the fact that none had occurred in the nearly half a Terrestrial year the party had been there had undermined his readiness. “I’ll try to find out. Carry on. And we’re sorry. I don’t know what else to say that wouldn’t be pure Pollyanna; but you know we mean it.”

  “We know.”

  “You also know, I expect,” Ben’s voice was even softer, “why I had another pair of drivers with you.” It was not put as a question. Ben, a slender half-gravity colonial, did not commonly think of muscle as useful, but he was a realist.

  “Yeah. Thanks. Don’t worry. Erni, time for you to take over. We still have things to find out up Hotnorth.”

  The sun would be starting to rise in another two thousand kilometers or so. Temperature was higher, though the principal surface winds still brought chill from the dark side; turbulence sometimes mixed in air from above, not only coming from sunlit regions but heated further by compression as it descended. Dominic still sometimes contributed to Erni’s financial security with an attempted weather forecast, but the variables he could think of were becoming too numerous even for his optimism. Motivation for such predictions remained high; they had identified another potential trigger for landslides. Suddenly hot or suddenly—by two or three hundred Kelvins—cold blasts of wind sometimes cracked off scales of rock by thermal shock. The cracks, fortunately, were never deep; but the layers peeled off were sometimes extensive and their shattered fragments dangerous, especially as the pieces were often thin enough to blow around.