Iceworld

by Hal Clement

  The result was utter silence.

  At first neither listener worried; the native would naturally be surprised. Gradually, however, an expression of mild anxiety began to appear on Ken’s features, while an “I-told-you-so” air became manifest about Feth.

  “You’ve scared him away,” the latter finally said. “If his tribe stampedes with him, Drai won’t be very happy about it.”

  A faint crackling which had preceded the alien’s call, and which his concentration of chemical problems had prevented reaching Ken’s conscious mind, suddenly ballooned into recollection, and he snatched at the straw.

  “But we heard him coming — the same sort of noise the torpedo made landing — and we haven’t heard him leave. He must still be waiting.”

  “Heard him coming? Oh — that? How do you know that’s what it was? Neither of us was paying any attention.”

  “What else could it have been?” This was a decidedly unfair question, to which Feth attempted no direct answer. He simply countered with another.

  “What’s he waiting for, then?” Fate was unkind to him; Ken was spared the necessity of answering. The human voice came again, less shrill this time; history seemed to be repeating itself. Ken listened intently; Feth seemed to have forgotten his intention of dissociating himself from the proceedings and was crowded as close as the detective to the speaker. The voice went on, in short bursts which required little imagination to interpret as questions. Not a word was understandable, though both thought they recognized the human “no” on several occasions. Certainly the creature did not utter any of the names that the Sarrians had come to associate with trade items — Feth, who knew them all, was writing them on a scrap of paper. Ken finally grew impatient, took the list from the mechanic, and began to pronounce them as well as he could, pausing after each.

  “Indium — Flatinum — Gold — Osmium—”

  “Gold!” the unseen speaker cut in.

  “Gold!” responded Ken intelligently, into the microphone, and “which one is that?” in a hasty aside to Feth. The mechanic told him, also in a whisper. “There’s a sample in the torpedo. We can’t trade it off — I want to analyze it for traces of corrosion. Anyway it was melted a little while ago, and he’ll never get it out of the crucible. What’s the name for the stuff you get from them?”

  “Tofacco.” Feth answered without thinking — but he started thinking immediately afterward. He remembered Drai’s promise of the fate of anyone who gave Ken information about “the stuff” obtained from Earth, and knew rather better then Sallman just how jocular Laj was likely to be. The memory made him itch, as though his hide were already coming loose. He wondered how he could keep news of his slip from reaching the higher levels, but had no time to get a really constructive idea. The speaker interrupted him again.

  If the previous calls had been loud, this was explosive. The creature must have had his vocal apparatus within inches of the torpedo’s microphone, and been using full voice power to boot. The roar echoed for seconds through the shop and almost drowned out the clanking which followed — a sound which suggested something hard striking the hull of the torpedo. The native, for some reason, seemed to have become wildly excited.

  At almost the same instant, Ken also gave an exclamation. The thermometer dial for the gold sample had ceased to register.

  “The blasted savage is stealing my sample!” he howled, and snapped over the switch closing the cargo door. The switch moved, but the door apparently didn’t — at least, it failed to indicate “locked.” There was no way of telling whether or not it had stopped at some partly-closed position.

  The native was still jabbering — more than ever, if that were possible. Ken switched back to “open” position, waited a moment, and tried to close again. This time it worked. The Sarrians wondered whether the relatively feeble motor which closed the portal had been able to cause any injury. There seemed little doubt about the cause of the first failure; if there had been any, the noise would have removed it.

  “I don’t think he was trying to steal,” Feth said mildly. “After all, you repeated the name of the stuff more than once. He probably thought you were offering it to him.”

  “I suppose you may be right.” Ken turned back to the microphone. “I’ll try to make clear that it’s market day, not a wedding feast.” He gave a chirruping whistle, then “Tofacco! tofacco! Gold — tofacco!” Feth shrivelled, internally. If he could only learn to keep his big diaphragm frozen—.

  “Tofacco! Gold — tofacco! I wonder whether that will mean anything to him?” Ken turned a little away from the microphone. “This may not be one of the creatures you’ve been trading with — after all, we’re not in the usual place.”

  “That’s not the principal question!” Feth’s tentacles coiled tightly around his torso, as though he were expecting a thunderbolt to strike somewhere in the neighborhood. The voice which had made the last statement was that of Laj Drai.

  7

  Roger Wing, at thirteen years of age, was far from stupid. He had very little doubt where his father and brother had been, and he found the fact of considerable interest. A few minutes’ talk with Edie gave him a fairly accurate idea of how long they had been gone; and within ten minutes of the time he and his mother returned from Clark Fork he had sharply modified his older ideas about the location of the “secret mine.” Hitherto, his father had always been away several days on his visits to it.

  “You know, Edie, that mine can’t be more than eight or ten miles from here, at the outside.” The two were feeding the horses, and Roger had made sure the younger children were occupied elsewhere. “I talked to Don for about two minutes, and I know darned well Dad was showing him the mine. I’m going to see it, too, before the summer’s out. I’ll take bets on it.”

  “Do you think you ought to? After all, if Dad wanted us to know, he’d tell us.”

  “I don’t care. I have a right to know anything I can find out. Besides, we can do a better job of scouting if we know the place we’re supposed to be protecting.”

  “Well — maybe.”

  “Besides, you know Dad sometimes sets things up just so we’ll find things out for ourselves. After it’s all over he just says that’s what we have brains for. Remember he never actually said we weren’t to go looking for the mine — he just said he’d tell us when the time came. How about that?”

  “Well — maybe. What are you going to do about it? If you try to follow Dad you’ll be picked up like a dime in a schoolroom.”

  “That’s what you think. Anyway, I’m not going to follow him. I’ll lead him. I’ll go out the first thing tomorrow morning and look for any traces they may have left. Then the next time they go, I’ll be waiting for them at the farthest trace I could find, and go on from there. That’ll work, for sure!”

  “Who does the patrolling?”

  “Oh, we both do, same as before. This won’t take long. Anyway, like I said, since I’ll be watching the trail they take, it’ll be even better than the regular patrol. Don’t you think?” Edie looked a little dubious as she latched the door of the feed bin.

  “You’ll probably get away with it, but I bet you’ll have to talk fast,” was her verdict as they headed for the house.

  Twenty-four hours later Roger was wondering whether any excuses would be needed at all. Things had not gone according to his sweepingly simple forecast.

  In the first place, he had not had time to check any trail his father and Don might have left; for the two started out at daybreak the next morning. They did not follow the previous day’s route, but the one Mr. Wing had always taken in years past — the admittedly zigzag path specifically designed to permit his scouts to take short cuts to warn him, in the event that anyone followed. Roger and Edith were given stations which were to be watched for one hour after the two men had passed; each was then to intercept the trail and make a report, whether or not anyone had been seen. Roger looked suspiciously at his sister for an instant when those orders were received,
but decided she would never have told his plans. His father was simply one jump ahead, as usual.

  A good fraction of the morning had passed by the time he had made his report, and watched his father and brother disappear to the north. This was not the direction they had gone the day before, according to Edith; now the question was whether or not they had bothered to lay a false trail on that occasion, too. The only way to settle that appeared to be a straightforward search for traces. That was not too hopeless; as Roger had said while telling his father about the new patrol arrangements, there were places practically impossible to cross without leaving some sort of track, and the mere act of avoiding all those places would narrow down considerably the routes a person could take.

  In spite of this, the boy had decided by dinner time that either he knew less about tracking than he had supposed or else the two he sought had spent the day in the attic. Certainly he had found nothing to which he could point with confidence as being evidence of their passage.

  After the meal he had abandoned that line of research, and simply headed eastward. His sister had said they had taken this direction, and there was the remote chance that they might have abandoned precautions just that once. He travelled without pause for nearly half the afternoon, following what seemed to be natural trails, and finally stopped some eight miles from home.

  He found himself in a valley, its center marked as usual by a noisy brook. The hills on either side were high, though by no means as high as some of their neighbors — six to seven thousand feet was a common height in this part of the range. He had not been here before, either alone or with his father, but still felt he had a good idea of his location. His principal worry was the fact that he had as yet seen no sign of his father or brother.

  His intention was to work back toward the house from this point, zigzagging to cover as much territory as possible before dark. The first zig, he decided, should take him straight up the side of the hill to the south, thus crossing any possible trails cutting around this side of the mountain. After reaching the top, he could decide whether to go down the other side at once, or head west a short distance before sweeping back to the north. As it turned out, he never had to make that decision.

  Roger Wing was not, of course, as competent a tracker as he liked to believe. As a matter of fact, he had crossed the trail he was so diligently seeking four times since leaving the house. His present location was at the foot of the hill bearing the open slope which the “miners” had crossed the day before, and within a mile of the Sarrian homing station. The course he now took uphill would have led him within a few rods of the transmitter.

  However, he didn’t get that far. Donald had been perfectly correct in concluding that no one could cross that slope of loose rock without leaving traces. Roger failed to recognize the marks left by the two on the way out, but he did find where his brother had forced his way through an unusually thick patch of brush at the top of the scree on the way back. It was carelessness on the older boy’s part, of course; his attention at the time had been mainly taken up with the search for tracks left by the possible followers, and he had paid no attention to those he himself was leaving. While the broken bushes gave Roger no clue to the traveller’s identity, they indicated his direction very clearly; and the boy promptly turned westward. Had he stopped to think, it would have occurred to him that a trail in this direction hardly jibed with the assumption that his father and brother were going straight to the “mine”; but he was not thinking at the moment. He was tracking, as he would have told anyone who might have asked.

  Once out of the patch of brush, the trail was neither more nor less obvious than it had been all along; but Roger was able to follow it. Probably the assurance that there was a trail to follow had something to do with that. He still did not know whether the traces had been left by his father, his brother, or both. He also failed to recognize the point where the two had come together after covering both sides of the scree. He simply went on, picking out the occasional scuff in the carpet of fir needles or snapped twigs where the bushes were thicker. He descended the west side of the hill, after following it around from the point where the first traces had appeared. He crossed the narrow valley on this side, leaping the inevitable brook with little difficulty. Here he found the only assurance that he was actually following two people, in the indentations where they had landed on the bank after a similar leap. The marks were just dents, for the needles did not retain any definite shoe patterns, but there were four of them. They were in two pairs, one of each deeper than its fellow, as though the jumper had taken the shock of landing principally on one foot.

  Up the side of the next hill the boy went. It was darker now under the trees, for the sun was already concealed by the peak ahead of him; and presently he began to wonder whether he were really on the right trail. He stopped, looking about, and saw first to one side and then the other marks of the sort he had been following. He could not, he found, convince himself that those ahead of him were the right ones.

  He tried to go on, then hesitated again. Then he began to backtrack — and reached the brook many yards from the spot at which he had jumped it. He spent some minutes searching for the marks, and when he had found them realized that he had not even followed his own back trail with any accuracy.

  He should, of course, have headed for home right then. Equally, of course, he did nothing of the sort. While the gloom on the mountain’s eastward face grew ever deeper, he cast about for tracks. Every few minutes he found something, and spent long seconds over it before deciding to make sure — and then he always found something else. Gradually he worked his way up the mountain side, finally reaching open rock; and after deep thought, he moved around to the other side where it was lighter, and resumed his search. After all, the men had been heading westward.

  He had crossed another valley — this time its central watercourse was dry, and there was no sign of anyone’s jumping over — and was near the top of the unusually low hill on its farther side when he finally realized the time. He had been searching with a single-mindedness which had prevented even hunger from forcing itself on his attention. The sheer impossibility of seeing details on the shadowed ground was all that finally compelled him to consider other matters. He had no flashlight, as he had not contemplated remaining out this late. Worse, he had neither food, water, nor a blanket. The first two were serious omissions, or would be if his father heard of his venturing any distance into the woods without them.

  It was quite suddenly borne in upon Roger Wing, as he saw the first stars glimmering in the deepening blue between the tree tops, that he was not another Daniel Boone or Kit Carson. He was a thirteen year old boy whose carelessness had gotten him into a situation that was certainly going to be uncomfortable and might even be serious.

  Though rash, Roger was not stupid. His first action upon realizing the situation was not a wild break for home. Instead he sensibly stood where he was and proceeded to plan a course of action.

  He was certainly going to be cold that night. There was no help for that, though a shelter of fir branches would make some difference. Also, there was no food, or at least none that he would be able to find in the dark. Water, however, should be findable; and, after all, it was the greatest necessity. Remembering that the valley he had just crossed lacked a stream, the boy started on again over the low top in front of him and began to pick his way down the other side. He was forced to rely almost entirely on touch before he reached the bottom, for the lingering twilight made little impression on the gloom beneath the firs. He found a brook, as he had hoped, partly by sound and partly by almost falling over the bank.

  He did have a knife, and with this he cut enough fir branches to make a bed near the stream, and to lean against a fallen log beside it as a crude roof — he knew that anything at all to break air circulation immediately over his body would be a help. He then drank, loosened his belt, and crawled under the rude shelter. All things considered, he was not too long in going to sleep.
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  He was a healthy youngster, and the night was not particularly cold. He slept soundly enough so that the crackling and crashing of branches in the forest roof failed to awaken him, and even the louder crunching as Ken’s torpedo settled through the underbrush forty yards away only caused him to mutter sleepily and turn over.

  But he was awakened at last, by the stimulus which sends any forest resident into furious activity. The cargo door of the torpedo faced the boy’s shelter. The light from burning sodium and glowing gold and iron did not disturb him — perhaps they only gave him bad dreams, or perhaps he was facing the other way at the time. The blazing radiance of the burning magnesium, however, blasted directly onto his closed eyelids, and enough of it got through to ring an alarm. He was on his feet yelling “Fire,” before he was fully awake.

  He had seen the aftermath of more than one forest fire — there had been a seventy-five hundred acre blaze the summer before north of Bonner’s Ferry, and a smaller but much closer one near Troy. He knew what such a catastrophe meant for life in its path, and for several seconds was completely panic-stricken. He even made a leap away from the direction of the radiance, and was brought to his senses by the shock of falling over the tree trunk beside which he had been sleeping.

  Coming to his feet more slowly, he realized that the light was not the flickering, ruddy glow of wood flames, that there was none of the crackling roar he had heard described more than once, and that there was no smell of smoke. He had never seen magnesium burn, but the mere fact that this was not an ordinary forest fire allowed his curiosity to come once more into the foreground.

  The light was sufficient to permit him to clear the little stream without difficulty, and in a matter of seconds he had crashed through the underbrush to its source, calling as he went, “Hello! Who’s that? What’s that light?”