Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Actually, looking aside was more worrisome; the basket was still closer than he liked to the edge of the rockfall.

  Worse—much worse—it could be seen that much of the finer waste from the cliff was being washed away by the current, leaving widening spaces between the larger fragments.

  Well, the Flyers weren’t always wrong, of course.

  He could not see what was happening to the loosened stuff. The surface was too turbulent to offer a clear view below it.

  He remembered his earlier promise and began describing the new phenomenon to Dondragmer. Sherrer, his flexible body partly overside, rotated the basket to let the communicator eye look ahead. His chelae were poorly shaped for the work, but his paddling did have results.

  “You seem to be approaching a bend to the right, in both fog and river,” Jeanette remarked. “I’d guess it’s that kink—that point—in what used to be the cliff, a couple of miles or so upstream from where Don is.”

  Barlennan saw no reason to disagree, and the possibilities which a quick change in flow might offer were enough to focus his attention. “Dondragmer, is your part of the river widening at all rapidly? It should be if the Flyer’s right. How well are you moving the radio? Can you keep it moving and also let it look upstream?”

  “We are moving. I’m not sure about change in width, since we’re away from the river itself now. We’re keeping the lens pointed more or less upstream, but I’m afraid they’re not getting a very steady view.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Don. We can take pix when it’s steady and look at them. You’re right about keeping the viewer as safe as possible.”

  “Thank you, Flyer Jeanette.”

  It was indeed a turn to the right, the captain saw as they approached it. The current was visibly swifter; they were still close enough to the shattered, pulverized, and steaming rocks for this to be very obvious.

  He suddenly realized that everything at the foot of the pile was much larger now; the fragments resembled the gigantic—to him—slabs and prisms which had earlier shown only on the higher and steeper part of the fall.

  It was hard to tell from this close, but the general slope seemed to be steeper, too, as though the whole fallen mass were still gently sinking.

  Maybe it was. The fine stuff below was certainly vanishing.

  There was a fan of standing ripples angling out across their course ahead; the mate would almost certainly have been curious about this, but Barlennan was just uneasy. The river was still liquid. He felt it again to make sure. He did not, however, wonder what made these little ridges in it—only what would happen to the basket and its passengers when they reached them.

  Which they would do in seconds. Would they be hitting liquid, or something solid enough to support those humps which lay a little above the general river level, or something slippery which would bend the raft’s structure into its own shape?

  It was liquid, both its high and its low parts, they found. Motionless waves were something new to Barlennan, and he reported as well as he could to his mate and the aliens. The basket was still intact, though everyone aboard had felt the deck under his feet follow the up-and-down displacement of the surface as they passed the still ripples. The Flyers seemed unsurprised, but Barlennan was not asking for explanations just yet.

  The foursome ceased thinking about the ripples at once. The next event was prompt, less unfamiliar, and more frightening.

  There was an eddy on the downstream side of the point, where the liquid swept around, They had all seen such things before, but never in gravity this high. If there had been time to think, they might have foreseen this one, though not in full detail. They had never, after all, felt one in gravity this high either.

  Barlennan tried to keep reporting.

  “We’re around the corner. We can’t see you, though—”

  “I haven’t seen you, either.”

  “Not surprising. There’s a hollow in the methane, we’re quite a bit below the river level, and can’t see much but the rocks—when we’re looking that way.”

  “Captain! What’s happening? The eye and the tracker both say you’re—you’re moving in a tight circle. How can?—”

  It was often nice to have the Flyers tell him what was going on and advise him what to do about it. It was sometimes nice to have them unable to tell him what was going on, thus providing a little salting to the flavor of omniscience they claimed not to want. It was not nice when he didn’t know what to do about it himself. He described what was happening in as much detail as he could observe, and as he did so realized what was probably going to happen next.

  The broad swirl of liquid cut in toward the edge of the rock slope and divided there, some swerving back upstream and some resuming its original journey down. At the point where the division occurred, the biggest rocks were visibly settling still. Not fast, but visibly. The finer stuff had washed out from between and among them, and the higher and larger items were crowding vertically closer to each other as the material originally separating them vanished.

  The pieces were big. They were very big, and as the seconds brought the basket closer the face of the slope began to change. It grew still steeper, and the spaces between the huge boulders seemed to open like mouths, leading into the face of the bank—with throats leading under it.

  All four sailors were familiar with the hazard of striking rocks. They had even, occasionally, been swept between rocks.

  But they were Mesklinites, and if any of their colleagues had ever been carried under rocks no one had ever heard about it. The four paddled frantically but without much result, even after the captain got them all paddling in the same direction. The basket flung itself toward the bank, swerving only at the last moment, with some of the huge fragments close enough for even the Mesklinites to touch.

  The swerve was upstream, back toward the point, which meant that they would be going through it all again. And perhaps again, and again . . .

  The rocks were still quite hot, though the wind toward the rocky bank made things a little better. Methane striking the fragments didn’t actually splash, though it did rise a short distance above its regular level before boiling into invisibility and reappearing as fog. Spray was extremely rare this far from the equator.

  They reached the upstream side of the eddy, swept out into the main current once more, but were not yet free. It was going to be again.

  But only once. They were carried back toward the fallen cliff somewhat farther downstream this time. The settling was still going on, but less rapidly; could one hope it was actually stopping? that the mud was nearly all gone, and the big fragments resting directly on each other? Well, yes, one could hope. There were no sounds of falling and grinding, after all.

  The lowest part of the rock pile was now definitely much steeper and formed of really huge fragments, with open spaces between sometimes wide enough for one of the old Bree’s rafts; and the current was not dividing at the very edge any more. Methane was flowing into the interstices, flowing almost as rapidly as in the farther-out parts of the eddy. There was no way to paddle the basket fast enough and far enough either up- or downstream to get it carried in either direction. It was going to travel into the wreckage of the cliff.

  Not even the Flyers could find words. They could see it coming; their lens at the moment was pointing in the basket’s direction of motion. None of them ever admitted whether the fate of the natives or the loss of the communicator and tracker concerned them more.

  There were other communicators, of course, and Dondragmer might prove to be a better agent than his captain; but there was only the one tracker, and great things had been planned for it once it had been found to be still functional. If it could be carried over land and sea all the way back to the equator, while being followed from above by communicator waves so that gravity and inertial effects could be distinguished, what couldn’t be learned of Mesklin’s interior?

  No one had yet discussed this project with Barlennan, and in any case it
would not have been the captain’s primary concern just now. He and his men were being washed underground, on what amounted to a patch of driftwood. It was much, much later before any of them realized how lucky it was that the sun was ahead of them, on the high side of the cliff, just then.

  It grew relatively dark the moment they had rock nearly surrounding them, with only a modest illumination from the sunlit ground across the river. Their heads and eyes turned back toward the light, and stayed there as the view narrowed; and before they really saw and could respond to the unimaginable tonnage of material suddenly above them, the darkness was complete except for the faint glow of the tracker’s numbers.

  The Flyers, Barlennan thought after a moment, should have commented on the darkness or the fact that the tracker was still indicating motion or something, but the communicator was silent. It remained so after several hopeful calls by the captain.

  It had never occurred to him that whatever carried the messages to and from Toorey might be blocked by intervening rock. The concept of a completely surrounding bed of intervening anything had never crossed his mind.

  For a moment he managed to concentrate on all he could see. The digits on the tracker screen agreed with his own sensations; they were speeding up, slowing down, jerking from side to side—the basket was in fact still being carried by a current, which was weaving its way around things. He should have been able to tell which way and how far, from the tracker readings; should, indeed, have been able to retrace their path if he had had any control of their motion. The general direction was indeed obvious; they were heading deeper under the former cliff. How far under was another matter; he didn’t remember the position reading when they had gone into the dark, and the succession of numbers which had followed that moment had been too complex to memorize.

  It was never clear to any of them later how they were able to keep thinking—why the four of them didn’t succumb at once to total panic. The Flyers commented later how fortunate it was that all four had had balloon experience, but it was not clear to Barlennan why that should help them with the concept of heavy material overhead. He tended to credit his own retention of sanity to his profession. He was a captain, he was responsible, he was used to doing whatever he could that was called for at the moment, and leaving what he couldn’t control to luck. This may have corresponded to an almost human personal arrogance. Even so, every little while—he had no way of telling how often—the thought of what he was under threatened to crowd his attention away from everything else.

  Anything to take that awareness away from him would have helped. He would even have welcomed a theoretical argument from the Flyers. Why all this open space under the cliff, or where the cliff had been? How much mud had there been to wash away, and how had it vanished this quickly so far from the actual river? Or had it? How far did the open space extend? Up and down, probably not very; they were still floating, and it was hard to imagine how the methane surface could have gotten either above the river outside or very far below it. That inspiration caused him to focus on the vertical readings of the tracker for a while; he found that their height was indeed almost constant.

  But liquid flows downhill, and this was flowing, so there must be at least a small drop. There might be a big one farther ahead; this didn’t seem very good to think of either.

  How deep was it? What were their chances of grounding—and staying there in the dark with too much of the world overhead? He thought of trying to find out by swimming, but could imagine no way for a swimmer to find the basket again. He realized later what his failure to think of safety ropes must have implied about his state of mind.

  They could call to each other, of course; he tried that.

  Multiple echoes responded to his hoots and made sound direction meaningless. In a way this was comforting; Mesklin’s stratosphere started only a few hundred meters above the general surface at this latitude. The air, after cooling for a very short distance upward, began to rise in temperature with increasing altitude, so that sounds originating at one spot refracted downward again before going too far. Complex echo patterns from sounds of distant origin were standard, and these gave a slight—very slight—suggestion of clear air above. They actually fooled Karondrasee, who asked, “Captain! It’s got to be open above after all! Why is it so dark?”

  The captain was quick enough to reply that he didn’t know, and almost as quickly inspired to ask, “See if you can think of an answer before the Flyers tell us.” That should provide something to distract all the others.

  Hars, though, seemed somehow able to think coherently, at least for the moment.

  “Captain, shouldn’t we do something to secure the instruments? We could run aground any time, though we do seem to be getting carried around things so far, and we don’t know how hard we’d strike. The radio isn’t any good to us right now, but the tracker might make a lot of difference. If it went overboard I don’t see how we’d ever get back out.”

  “Right. I don’t see how we can manage that anyway until the current lets us go, but secure them just the same. The radio will be easy enough; it was made to be fastened to things. The tracker wasn’t, though. All of you try to think of a hitch or something to hold it fast.”

  “Why did they make it ball-shaped?” Even Sherrer sounded more annoyed than afraid. “Didn’t they ever think of having to keep it from falling overboard?”

  Barlennan could think of no useful answer. He had a fairly clear idea of where the rocket had traveled, but no real notion of ballistics. “Salvage all the cordage you can find,” was all he said. “Coil it up and stow it around your bodies. Hars, stay with the tracker and hold onto it as well as you can until we solve the tie-down problem. Think of this as a doldrum situation. We do what we can to make use of wind, or current, or an animal we can harpoon to tow us, and hope that one or another of them will happen. Only this time we have a whole new list of things we need to be ready for, and don’t know anything on the list.”

  “Shouldn’t we perhaps moor to something, Captain?” asked Sherrer. “The tracker says we’re getting farther from the river all the time. The farther we travel, the farther we’ll have to go to get back.”

  “If you can find a way to moor us, I’ll agree. Personally I can’t see what we’re passing.”

  “Of course we can’t see, but we can reach out to feel. Surely some of the broken cliff must be rough enough for a grip!”

  “For a grip, maybe. For a rope? Well, reach out and learn what you can.” The sailor presumably obeyed, but made no report for a long time.

  Nothing particular happened during that time—whether a day or an hour none of them could tell. Cordage was found and secured. Hars contrived a spherical, close-meshed net of some of the finer lines, and enclosed the tracker in this. Without commenting to the captain, he secured it to his own body. Like the rest, he had a strong feeling that this device, if anything, was most likely to get them back to daylight.

  Again, Barlennan began wishing for Flyer theories and arguments. He found himself even thinking along Flyer lines. Why was there liquid so far under what had been a layer of solid rock hundreds of feet thick? The fact that the rock was no longer solid did not explain where the liquid filling the new space could be coming from. Why was there any place away from the original river for it to flow to? (Item not to think of: liquid flows downhill; where were they being carried?) Why had the finer material been washed, or carried somehow, away from the really large fragments of rock, even in here, apparently turning the whole fallen area into a random stack of slabs and columns long enough and wide enough, as it had seemed from their last glimpses outside, to enclose more empty space than rock? Where had the fine stuff gone? (Well, downstream, obviously.) Where had the medium-sized stuff gone? (No obvious answer.)

  Why did they all seem to be sane in a situation which should have driven any normal person out of his mind? (Or were they? No, Captain, keep away from that thought, too.) They were, after all, experienced and competent members of a
dangerous profession, and knew that quite often a dangerous situation offered a good chance of getting something worth while out of it. (And of course a better one of not living to enjoy the profit.) That last thought had been banished from all their minds years before, of course. They were still alive; therefore they were lucky.

  Where had the underpinnings of the plateau gone, actually? That was a real Flyer question. And the Flyers were in no position to answer it.

  They would want to know the answer, though. And Barlennan and his people were the only ones likely ever to be able to provide one.

  That was a thought to bolster sanity. The Flyers always wanted information.

  Sherrer was having more trouble. His sounds, when he made any at all, were less and less understandable words and more and more short howls of terror. When words could be made out, they were ones that only magnified the fear.

  “The world is up there . . . it’s heavy . . . it can flatten us . . . what can keep it from falling? We’re . . .”

  “Quiet!” snapped the captain. “Why should it fall? It hasn’t yet, and . . .” his voice trailed off. The stuff above, after all, hadn’t had that much time to finish the settling it seemed to have started. It could quite easily be getting ready to fall farther. And it was indeed heavy. There was no way of convincing themselves they were back near the equator, where a healthy person could lift rocks like that. No way, even if they couldn’t see. Stop catching Sherrer’s fears, Captain . . .

  Even if they couldn’t see . . .

  He jerked out another order; his own mind was recovering, it seemed. “Sherrer, bend a good line around yourself, at least twenty body lengths, and make sure its other end is secure to the basket—to some really strong part of the basket. Then go overboard carefully and try to find how deep it is, and whether there is anything we could moor to. Don’t leave too much slack; keep most of it coiled against you and stay close to us at first.”