by Hal Clement
It was not methane. At least, it certainly was not ocean-pure methane; it could barely be called a liquid. Slush or mud would be better words. It lay under them as the supporting heat dwindled below the ability of the guiding deflectors to keep the balloon contents hot enough.
The first wrinkles appeared in the bag; Karondrasee’s bellow of alarm just barely preceded contact between the basket and the semi-fluid. The car stopped almost at once, after a fall violent enough to make the stuff splash and jolt the occupants severely; the bag took rather longer to touch. The cordage tried to pull the basket toward the cliff as the wind still dragged at the balloon. For just a moment Barlennan thought the car would be tipped over and dump its fire, and had enough time to wonder what would happen when the latter met the whatever-it-was; then it appeared that there was enough weight stuck—frozen?—under their feet to hold them nearly level.
They were more or less safe, it appeared, for the moment, but like Dondragmer they were uncomfortably warm.
There seemed no practical way out of the basket for the moment; the stuff surrounding them appeared dangerously hot, and there was no way to tell yet whether this would get worse, or better, or remain unchanged, not that the last would be much help.
The captain didn’t bother to ask the Flyers anything.
“Dondragmer, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Have you been able to get back near the ship?”
“We’re closer.”
“How’s the heat? We’re down, but are stuck in some sort of goo. There’s a lot of ammonia smell, but it doesn’t look much like ammonia.”
“That’s happened here, too. It’s what’s keeping us from getting any closer to where the ship was. It looks and smells to me like the methane-ammonia slush we saw a good deal of where we wintered and met the Flyers, but that may be just a guess. If it’s right, the ammonia should freeze after a while and sink and leave ordinary methane on top, which should soon be cool enough to swim in. The Flyers won’t commit themselves either, but agree we should watch for clear liquid to show on top of the stuff.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, but here we’ll have to wait anyway. I hope we don’t cook while we’re still waiting.”
“Is your fire out? Or is there any chance of flying the Bree again?”
“None, I’d say, unless we can get rid of whatever is stuck all over the bottom of the basket and must have kept us from tipping over when we hit. Maybe we should take a chance on putting the heater out. I’ve been a little uneasy about letting fire get near the stuff around us, or vice versa, because I thought that might burn too; but if you’re right there won’t be any trouble.”
“If I’m right. Pardon me for sounding like a Flyer, but I said I was guessing.”
“Now that you’ve reminded me, I’m guessing right along with you. In any case, it’s getting warmer all the time here, and something has got to be done.”
“How about just going over the side, and seeing if being farther from your fire will be enough?”
Barlennan did not answer at once. If such an experiment were to be tried, there was just one person who would have to go over first. He temporized briefly.
“There’s no sign of the stuff settling, where you are? No liquid on top?”
“No. If it’s going to happen, it should be upstream where you are, first, I’d guess.”
“Is there any stream? There doesn’t seem to be any flow here.”
“No. I suppose the fall blocked it.”
“But the methane from upriver should flow around, and even if the original bed were filled with rock the river should just be pushed out farther from the cliff than before.”
“Maybe it was,” the mate answered thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s the liquid part of this stuff. But if it is, I wonder where the ammonia came from?”
“We’re arguing like Flyers,” the captain cut off the debate. “I’ll reach over and find out how hot this stuff is.”
The caterpillarlike Mesklinite anatomy was not constructed for toe-dipping; Barlennan had to reach over the side with one end or the other of his body, and lower a set of pincers into the stuff. He chose to use his head end, for whatever help his eyes might give him.
“Barlennan?” It was Jeanette’s voice.
“I hear you.”
“Are you all right, and is the tracker still working?”
“We’re uncomfortable but still alive. I haven’t looked at the machine since we stopped. I don’t suppose heat will hurt it, considering who made it. I’ll shade it so I can see the figures and get a reading.”
“Whenever you can, please. There are people here who will have trouble breathing until they learn its condition, now that we know you’re all right. Its reading here hasn’t changed for some minutes now.”
Jeanette was not actually a skilled liar, but had some natural diplomatic ability. It seemed unlikely that the captain, just now, would be able to sympathize very well with people worrying more about the instrument’s condition than his own.
“That’s reasonable,” Barlennan concurred. “We’ve been stranded for some time now. Here’s what I read.” He pronounced the symbols carefully.
“Good. That’s what we have here. If it should change its reading, please let me know.”
Another thought struck the captain. “Can you tell us whether the fall is still going on, upstream? Dondragmer says it stopped just below his location.”
“It did. We can see clearly with his communicator. I can’t answer your question. You’re practically at the pole, we’re over the equator. The only reason we can see your area at all from here is atmospheric refraction, which doesn’t help the image. Otherwise you’d be below our horizon. We’d have to send out another mapping rocket.”
“Do your people think that’s worth doing? I’d be glad of any information I could get from that direction.”
“I’ll ask.” The Flyer’s voice fell silent, and there seemed no more excuse for delay in testing the slush, if that’s what it was.
Gingerly, his head and a few inches of his body over the basket’s gunwale, Barlennan reached a chela toward the nearly white stuff. The sun was low as always at this latitude and season. At the moment it was beyond cliff and fog, but there was plenty of light. He could feel some warmth from the surface of whatever-it-was, but it didn’t seem as bad as before.
About like the inside of the balloon bag, which had been found to be bearable much earlier when control lines had tangled in flight.
The stuff was soft, though it resisted a little when poked. Whether it would be firm enough to support his weight, and what would happen if it weren’t, were still open questions. There was only one way to get answers that the captain could see. At least, only one which could preserve his self-respect; he could order one of the others to climb over. He didn’t.
The stuff did resemble the slush they had encountered near the equator, as the mate had said. It was uncomfortably but not dangerously warm. It did not support him until he had sunk perhaps a third of his body volume. His report, when he finally got back in the basket with the assistance of the others and a length of rope, paraphrased history for some of the human listeners.
“Too soft to walk on, too hard to swim in. We’re here for a while, but we can stand the heat. Have you tried it, Dondragmer?”
“Yes, Captain. You describe it well. We think we can see the ship, but whatever it is is almost entirely immersed in the slush, and we can’t be sure. If it is, it’s well to this side of the fallen rocks.”
“Good. Find out for sure as quickly as possible.”
The mate acknowledged the order which both knew to be superfluous.
Half a day later, with the sun on their own side of the former cliff, nothing had been accomplished except testing the inertial tracker. This had been carried from one side of the basket to the other, and the change in readings on its surface and at the receivers on Toorey had remained in agreement. Barlennan was not surprised;
from his point of view nothing at all violent had happened during the wrecking of Bree Three.
The slush was still slush. This surprised the Flyers, who seemed to feel that if anything were going to settle at all it should do it pretty quickly on Mesklin; Barlennan had no basis for an opinion, though he certainly wished that something would happen.
Fog was still rising from the slope a few hundred feet away. The Flyer prediction that the wind should cool the fallen rock fairly quickly seemed to have been another mistake. Barlennan didn’t raise the subject; he was quite sure that the beings would point out that they hadn’t actually specified a time numerically. This was quite true, and qualified as an excuse even by the captain’s standards.
There had been, twice, sounds from inside the fog suggesting that rocks had moved, and the four people in the basket were alert for anything more of the sort. Dondragmer’s people had heard nothing like it, the mate reported; but they, too, were listening. Anything like that should happen upstream first, each told himself. This was not mentioned aloud.
The fire had not been extinguished after the captain’s experiment, but was now dead for lack of fuel. There were plenty of Mesklin’s scraggy plants in sight in various directions on the shore beyond the slush, but there was no way to reach them; and there seemed not to be enough of them to get Bree Three into the air again in any case. Karondrasee had plenty of meat juice in his tank, but there seemed no way to use it.
It was two whole days before anything noteworthy happened, and its development then was gradual.
There were more of the falling-rock sounds. Nothing could be seen; the fog, if anything, was thicker, and the breeze toward the rubble slope somewhat faster.
Then another quite familiar sound made itself heard.
“Captain! A current! Flowing—” Hars uttered the words very softly for a Mesklinite, though Jeanette had no trouble hearing him. She heard the trickling of liquid, too, since the pilot had been doing his best not to drown it out with his own voice.
“Which way? Can any of you tell?” she asked. Barlennan couldn’t decide himself; the sound had seemed to come first from the direction of the rocks, then from what had been upstream, then from many directions at once. The most convincing came from the fog.
Flowing liquid? Methane? Was the ammonia, if that’s what it was, finally starting to settle?
Methane, yes. Settling ammonia, apparently not. Motion caught the eyes of the four crewmen in several directions almost at once. Most of it was from cliffward and upstream, but Barlennan caught sight of a trickle which seemed to rise from almost under the basket, a rivulet which spread, and grew, and flowed downriver as he watched. Others appeared and behaved the same way, more and more, minute after minute; then quite suddenly, they vanished in a single spreading sheet of liquid which they now realized covered much of the landscape in the upstream direction. It was as though the river had resumed flowing, and was coming up through the slush, and making a new bed for itself beyond the tumbled rocks which had filled the old one.
It was methane, as taste promptly proved—it was not a laboratory situation to the Mesklinites, who were by now pretty thirsty anyway. The river was being reborn.
Yes, reborn. There was plenty of liquid coming from upstream, but there was nearly as much—perhaps more—welling up from under the slush and from the direction of the rocks.
The basket began to move, as Jeanette promptly reported.
“We know,” the captain replied tersely.
“Will you float?” asked the Flyer.
“We should. The basket’s made of wood—real wood, not that funny stuff from the ammonia flats. What we need to know is whether it’ll float level. We didn’t worry that much about weight distribution when we made it.”
“How about the bag?”
“That’s another question. We may have to cut it free. Depends whether it acts more like a sea anchor or a sail. Dondragmer, we must be heading your way. I can’t guess how long we’ll be getting there.”
“We’re watching, Captain. If you have to free the bag, we’ll try to capture it, and you of course. The slush is still slush down here, but we’re watching for liquid, too. If the thing we think is the ship starts to move, I’ll take swimmers to do what we can.”
“Good. We’re going to be busy here, but one of us will keep in touch. If you don’t hear from us for more than a few seconds, you’ll know something we didn’t expect has happened. In that case, send some people up this way to give any help they can. We’re going faster, I think. The bag is dragging behind us, whether it’s touching bottom or feeling wind I don’t know. Probably wind, I think; there’s an upstream component to that now, and the bag itself is pulling a little toward the fog. It’s pulling us that way too.”
“Hadn’t you better cut loose, then, Captain?”
“Not until we can see whether moving in toward the rock is good or bad. We’re standing by to cut if we have to. There doesn’t seem to be anything yet for us to hit.”
Barlennan kept a running comment going, as he had promised, while basket and bag headed downstream. The nearest motionless objects were now either too distant—features on the land away from the cliff—or too vague, like the fog, to allow a trustworthy estimate of speed. It was one of the Flyers who pointed out that the tracker was moving downstream surprisingly fast. He didn’t seem really sure that it was surprising; all earlier estimates of the river current had come from direction measurements of the communicator outputs, which were not very reliable with the line of sight to the moon practically horizontal. This was not the tracker’s first trip to the lower ground, but was its first ride on what had become a surface vehicle.
One of the watchers remarked audibly that he was surprised the vehicle wasn’t in white water; another, not bothering to correct the name of the liquid, suggested that the first speaker think gravity. Just what would “white” imply about the current’s speed on Mesklin?
The twelve-plus kilometers an hour was several times any earlier estimate, however unreliable that might have been. It implied a source of liquid unrelated to what had been seen of the upstream areas from earlier balloon flights. This was not merely methane which had found its way, after some delay, around the recent rockfall.
The people on the basket finally observed this, too. The drag toward the rocks had been maintained as wind kept its grip on the now rapidly flattening bag. The sharp rocks were suddenly passing uncomfortably close to a structure which had been designed for lightness. Contact could be awkward even if the pieces continued to float, as they no doubt would. Barlennan heard himself commenting on this as part of his running report, and interrupted the monologue with a sudden, sharp order.
“All of you! Cut it free!”
Simultaneously the bag caught on a sharp, solid rock corner, jerking the basket to a halt; anywhere near the equator the crew would have been hurled overboard. Karondrasee, in fact, did get jerked over the side.
For just a moment the cook could be seen borne away from the suddenly anchored car; then, as the others finished cutting the dozen cords which had held basket and bag together, the former resumed its downstream rush even more rapidly than before. It was now relatively motionless with respect to the swimmer, and he had no trouble wriggling back to what might or might not be safety. He needed no help getting aboard through one of the gunwale crenellations, and the fact that he brought a good deal of methane with him made no real difference. In spite of the total absence of spray, the footing on board was already extremely wet. During the brief halt, the river had spilled over the upstream gunwale and nearly washed several more objects into the river.
The communicator was high enough above the deck to stay clear, but the inertial tracker was not. Neither were the three remaining natives. It was Hars, perhaps more concerned with all things connected with flying, who curled his long body about the sphere, gripping it with every leg which could be brought to the task. Sailor and instrument washed rapidly across the deck in the direction f
rom which Karondrasee was swimming, but they did not go overboard.
Hars’ own display of personal strength surprised no one, but his fellows and the watching Flyers were all rather startled that the gunwale seized by one of his chelae did not tear loose from the rest of the basket. He uncoiled partly, still retaining his grip on the tracker, and spread the load on the gunwale with more pincers; by the time the cook was safely aboard, the sloshing of liquid across the deck had ceased and the tension had eased.
“It would have been easy enough to find,” Barlennan remarked. “I know it would have sunk, but the river’s pretty clear.”
“Is the bottom solid?” a Flyer voice—again, not Jeanette’s—asked pointedly.
“I don’t know, but it looks—” the captain paused, then went on, “Just a moment.” He vanished over the rail. His crew watched with interest but no great concern; the aliens were highly concerned but couldn’t watch. The long body reappeared and moved in front of the lens.
“It might have been serious at that. It’s the same slushy stuff, and it’s travelling—not as fast as the river, but if the tracker had sunk we’d never have found it. Good work, Hars.” The exhaled breaths were audible through the communicator, but carried no meaning to the natives.
Dondragmer could not see anything nor hear everything, but had been able to infer what was happening.
“Is anyone watching ahead, Captain? You must be travelling pretty fast. We’re getting ourselves and the radio back from the river; it seems from what you said it’s a lot wider and faster where you are now, and that it became so very suddenly. All of us are staying with the radio as we move it; I’m sure the Flyers know that faster-moving methane carries things more easily.”
“Sixth-power law,” a barely audible alien voice muttered. The words were not in Stennish, but the mate understood both them and their mathematical implications. Barlennan got the former only, but no order was needed to drive the mate to greater haste. The captain had heard the question about looking ahead, and without acknowledging the words was doing so.
