The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  He stepped to a cabinet and picked up one of the three-inch-long transparent cylinders. A short nozzle, its end melted shut, projected from one end, and a small bubble was visible in the liquid within. The bubble moved sluggishly when the tube was inverted, and broke up into many small ones when it was shaken. These recombined instantly when the liquid came to rest, which was encouraging. Evidently the stuff possessed a very low viscosity and surface tension.

  Cray took the tube over to the breech which had been partly opened and carelessly closed so long ago, held the nozzle against the edge of the seal, and, after a moment’s hesitation, snapped off the tip with his gloved fingers. He expected the liquid to ooze out in the asteroid’s feeble gravity, but its vapor pressure must have been high, for it sprayed out in a heavy stream. Droplets rebounded from the metal and evaporated almost instantly; with equal speed the liquid which spread over the surface vanished. Only a tiny fraction of a percent, if that, could have found its way between the surfaces.

  Cray stared tensely at the dome of metal as the tube emptied itself. After a moment, he dropped the empty cylinder and applied a sideways pressure.

  A crescent, of shifting rainbow colors, appeared at the edge of the seal; and the dome slowly slid off to one side. The crescent did not widen, for the lubricant evaporated the instant it was exposed. Preble and Stevenson caught the heavy dome and eased its mass to the central catwalk.

  The last of the rainbow film of lubricant evaporated from the metal, and the engineers crowded around the open breech. There was no mass of machinery inside; the disintegrators would, of course, be within the dome which had been removed. The coils which generated the fields designed to keep the stream of ionized vapor from contact with the tube walls were also invisible, being sealed into the tube lining. Neither of these facts bothered the men, for their own engines had been similarly designed. Cray wormed his way down the full length of the tube to make sure it was not field failure which had caused it to be opened in the first place; then the three specialists turned to the breech which had been removed.

  The only visible feature of its flat side was the central port through which the metallic vapor of the exhaust had entered the tube; but application of another of the cylinders of lubricant, combined with the asteroid’s gravity, caused most of the plate to fall away and reveal the disintegrator mechanism within. Preble, Stevenson, Grant, and McEachern watched for a while as pieces of the disintegrator began to cover the floor of the room; but they finally realized that they were only getting in the way of men who seemed to know what they were doing, so a gradual retreat to the main corridor took place.

  * * *

  “Do you suppose they can find out what was wrong with it?” queried Stevenson.

  “We should.” It was Cray’s voice on the radio. “The principle of this gadget is exactly like our own. The only trouble is that they’ve used that blasted molecular-attraction fastening method everywhere. It’s taking quite a while to get it apart.”

  “It’s odd that the technology of these beings should have been so similar to ours in principle, and yet so different in detail,” remarked Grant. “I’ve been thinking it over, and can’t come to any conclusion as to what the reason could be. I thought perhaps their sense organs were different from ours, but I have no idea how that could produce such results—not surprising, since I can’t imagine what sort of senses could exist to replace or supplement ours.”

  “Unless there are bodies in the sealed-off corridor and rooms, I doubt if you’ll ever find the answer to that one,” answered Preble. “I’ll be greatly surprised if anyone ever proves that this ship was made in this solar system.”

  “I’ll be surprised enough if anyone proves anything at all constructive about it,” returned Grant.

  Cray’s voice interrupted again.

  “There’s something funny about part of this,” he said. “I think it’s a relay, working from your main controls, but that’s only a guess. It’s not only connected to the electric part of the business, but practically built around the fuel inlet as well. By itself it’s all right; solenoid and moving-core type. We’ve had it apart, too.”

  “What do you plan to do?” asked Grant. “Have you found anything wrong with the unit as a whole?”

  “No, we haven’t. It has occurred to me that the breech was unsealed for some purpose other than repair. It would make a handy emergency exit—and that might account for the careless way it was resealed. We were thinking of putting it back together, arranging the relay so that we can control it from here and test the whole tube. Is that all right with you?”

  “If you think you can do it, go ahead,” replied Grant. “We haven’t got much to lose, I should say. Could you fix up the whole thing to drive by local control?”

  “Possibly. Wait till we see what happens to this one.” Cray moved out of the line of sight in the engine-room doorway, and his radio waves were cut off.

  Stevenson moved to the doorway to watch the process of reassembly; the other three went up to the control room. The eeriness of the place had worn off—there was no longer the suggestion of the presence of the unknowable creature who had once controlled the ship. Preble was slightly surprised, since it was now night on this part of the asteroid; any ghostly suggestions should have been enhanced rather than lessened. Familiarity must have bred contempt.

  No indicator lights graced the control panel. Grant had half hoped that the work in the engine room might have been recorded here; but he was not particularly surprised. He had given up any hopes of controlling the vessel from this board, as his remarks to Cray had indicated.

  “I hope Cray can get those tubes going,” he said after a lengthy silence. “It would be enough if we could push this ship even in the general direction of Earth. Luckily the orbit of this body is already pretty eccentric. About all we would have to do is correct the plane of motion.”

  “Even if we can’t start enough tubes to control a flight, we could use one as a signal flare,” remarked Preble. “Remember, the Mizar is in this sector; you once had hopes of contacting her with the signal equipment of this ship, if you could find any. The blast from one of these tubes, striking a rock surface, would make as much light as you could want.”

  “That’s a thought,” mused Grant. “As usual, too simple for me to think of. As a matter of fact, it probably represents our best chance. We’ll go down now and tell Cray simply to leave the tube going, if he can get it started.”

  The four men glided back down the corridor to the engine room. The reassembly of the breech mechanism was far from completed, and Grant did not like to interrupt. He was, of course, reasonably familiar with such motors, and knew that their assembly was a delicate task even for an expert.

  Cray’s makeshift magnetic device for controlling the relay when the breech was sealed was a comment on the man’s ingenuity. It was not his fault that none of the men noticed that the core of the relay was made of the same alloy as the great screw cocks which held the engine-room doors shut, and the small bolts on the doors in the cargo hold. It was, in fact, a delicate governor, controlling the relation between fuel flow and the breech field strength—a very necessary control, since the field had to be strong enough to keep the hot vapor from actual contact with the breech, but not strong enough to overcome the effect of the fields protecting the throat of the tube, which were at right angles to it. There was, of course, a similar governor in manmade motors, but it was normally located in the throat of the tube and was controlled by the magnetic effect of the ion stream. The device was not obvious, and of course was not of a nature which a human engineer would anticipate. It might have gone on operating normally for an indefinite period, if Cray had used any means whatever, except magnetic manipulation, to open and close the relay.

  The engineers finally straightened and stood back from their work. The breech was once more in place, this time without the error in alignment which had caused the discovery of the seal. Clamped to the center of the dome, just where t
he fuel feed tube merged with its surface, was the control which had been pieced together from articles found in the tool cabinets. It was little more than a coil whose field was supposed to be strong enough to replace that of the interior solenoid through the metal of the breech.

  Preble had gone outside, and now returned to report that the slight downward tilt of the end of the ship in which they were working would cause the blast from this particular tube to strike the ground fifty or sixty yards to the rear. This was far enough for safety from splash, and probably close enough so that the intensity of the blast would not be greatly diminished.

  Cray reported that the assembly, as nearly as he could tell, should work.

  “Then I suggest that you and anyone you need to help you remain here and start it in a few moments, while the rest of us go outside to observe results. We’ll keep well clear of the stern, so don’t worry about us,” said Grant. “We’re on the night side of the asteroid now, and, as I remember, the Mizar was outward and counterclockwise of this asteroid’s position twenty-four hours ago—by heaven, I’ve just realized that all this has occurred in less than twenty hours. She should be able to sight the flare at twenty million miles, if this tube carries half the pep that one of ours would.”

  Cray nodded. “I can start it alone,” he said. “The rest of you go on out. I’ll give you a couple of minutes, then turn it on for just a moment. I’ll give you time to send someone in if anything is wrong.”

  Grant nodded approval, and led the other five men along the main corridor and out the airlock. They leaped to a position perhaps a hundred and fifty yards to one side of the ship, and waited.

  The tube in question was one of the lowest in the bank of those parallel to the ship’s longitudinal axis. For several moments after the men had reached their position it remained lifeless; then a silent, barely visible ghost of flame jetted from its lip. This changed to a track of dazzling incandescence at the point where it first contacted the rock of the asteroid; and the watchers automatically snapped the glare shields into place on their helmets. These were all in place before anyone realized that the tube was still firing, cutting a glowing canyon into the granite and hurling a cloud of boiling silica into space. Grant stared for a moment, leaped for the airlock, and disappeared inside. As he entered the control room from the front, Cray burst in from the opposite end, making fully as good time as the captain. He didn’t even pause, but called out as he came:

  “She wouldn’t cut off, and the fuel flow is increasing. I can’t stop it. Get out before the breech gives—I didn’t take time to close the engine-room door!”

  Grant was in midair when the engineer spoke, but he grasped a stanchion that supported the catwalk, swung around it like a comet, and reversed his direction of flight before the other man caught up to him. They burst out of the airlock at practically the same instant.

  By the time they reached the others, the tube fields had gone far out of balance. The lips of the jet tube were glowing blue-white and vanishing as the stream caught them; and the process accelerated as the men watched. The bank of stem tubes glowed brightly, began to drip, and boiled rapidly away; the walls of the engine room radiated a bright red, then yellow, and suddenly slumped inward. That was the last straw for the tortured disintegrator; its own supremely resistant substance yielded to the lack of external cooling, and the device ceased to exist. The wreckage of the alien ship, glowing red now for nearly its entire length, gradually cooled as the source of energy ceased generating; but it would have taken supernatural intervention to reconstruct anything useful from the rubbish which had been its intricate mechanism. The men, who had seen the same thing happen to their own ship not twenty hours before, did not even try to do so.

  The abruptness with which the accident had occurred left the men stunned. Not a word was spoken, while the incandescence faded slowly from the hull. There was nothing to say. They were two hundred million miles from Earth, the asteroid would be eighteen months in reaching its nearest point to the orbit of Mars—and Mars would not be there at the time. A search party might eventually find them, since the asteroid was charted and would be known to have been in their neighborhood at the time of their disappearance. That would do them little good.

  * * *

  Rocket jets of the ion type are not easily visible unless matter is in the way—matter either gaseous or solid. Since the planetoid was airless and the Mizar did not actually land, not even the usually alert Preble saw her approach. The first inkling of her presence was the voice of her commander, echoing through the earphones of the seven castaways.

  “Hello, down there. What’s been going on? We saw a flare about twenty hours ago on this body that looked as though an atomic had misbehaved, and headed this way. We circled the asteroid for an hour or so, and finally did sight your ship—just as she did go up. Will you please tell us what the other flare could have been? Or didn’t you see it?”

  It was the last question that proved too much for the men. They were still laughing hysterically when the Mizar settled beside the wreck and took them aboard. Cray alone was silent and bitter.

  “In less than a day,” he said to his colleague on the rescue ship, “I wrecked two ships—and I haven’t the faintest idea how I wrecked either one of them. As a technician, I’d be a better ground-car mechanic. That second ship was just lying there waiting to teach me more about shop technique than I’d have learned in the rest of my life; and some little technical slip ruined it all.”

  But whose was the error in technique?

  Uncommon Sense

  “So you’ve left us, Mr. Cunningham!” Malmeson’s voice sounded rougher than usual, even allowing for headphone distortion and the ever-present Denebian static. “Now, that’s too bad. If you’d chosen to stick around, we would have put you off on some world where you could live, at least. Now you can stay here and fry. And I hope you live long enough to watch us take off—without you!”

  Laird Cunningham did not bother to reply. The ship’s radio compass should still be in working order, and it was just possible that his erstwhile assistants might start hunting for him, if they were given some idea of the proper direction to begin a search. Cunningham was too satisfied with his present shelter to be very anxious for a change. He was scarcely half a mile from the grounded ship, in a cavern deep enough to afford shelter from Deneb’s rays when it rose, and located in the side of a small hill, so that he could watch the activities of Malmeson and his companion without exposing himself to their view.

  In a way, of course, the villain was right. If Cunningham permitted the ship to take off without him, he might as well open his faceplate; for, while he had food and oxygen for several days’ normal consumption, a planet scarcely larger than Luna, baked in rays of one of the fiercest radiating bodies in the galaxy, was most unlikely to provide further supplies when these ran out. He wondered how long it would take the men to discover the damage he had done to the drive units in the few minutes that had elapsed between the crash landing and their breaking through the control-room door, which Cunningham had welded shut when he had discovered their intentions. They might not notice it at all; he had severed a number of inconspicuous connections at odd points. Perhaps they would not even test the drivers until they had completed repairs to the cracked hull. If they didn’t, so much the better.

  Cunningham crawled to the mouth of his cave and looked out across the shallow valley in which the ship lay. It was barely visible in the starlight, and there was no sign of artificial luminosity to suggest that Malmeson might have started repairs at night. Cunningham had not expected that they would, but it was well to be sure. Nothing more had come over his suit radio since the initial outburst, when the men had discovered his departure; he decided that they must be waiting for sunrise, to enable them to take more accurate stock of the damage suffered by the hull.

  He spent the next few minutes looking at the stars, trying to arrange them into patterns he could remember. He had no watch, and it would help to have
some warning of approaching sunrise on succeeding nights. It would not do to be caught away from his cave, with the flimsy protection his suit could afford from Deneb’s radiation. He wished he could have filched one of the heavier work suits; but they were kept in a compartment forward of the control room, from which he had barred himself when he had sealed the door of the latter chamber.

  He remained at the cave mouth, lying motionless and watching alternately the sky and the ship. Once or twice he may have dozed; but he was awake and alert when the low hills beyond the ship’s hull caught the first rays of the rising sun. For a minute or two they seemed to hang detached in a black void, while the flood of blue-white light crept down their slopes; then, one by one, their bases merged with each other and the ground below to form a connected landscape. The silvery hull gleamed brilliantly, the reflection from it lighting the cave behind Cunningham and making his eyes water when he tried to watch for the opening of the airlock.

  He was forced to keep his eyes elsewhere most of the time, and look only in brief glimpses at the dazzling metal; and in consequence, he paid more attention to the details of his environment than he might otherwise have done. At the time, this circumstance annoyed him; he has since been heard to bless it fervently and frequently.

  Although the planet had much in common with Luna as regarded size, mass, and airlessness, its landscape was extremely different. The daily terrific heatings which it underwent, followed by abrupt and equally intense temperature drops each night, had formed an excellent substitute for weather; and elevations that might at one time have rivaled the Lunar ranges were now mere rounded hillocks, like that containing Cunningham’s cave. As on the Earth’s moon, the products of the age-long spalling had taken the form of fine dust, which lay in drifts everywhere. What could have drifted it, on an airless and consequently windless planet, struck Cunningham as a puzzle of the first magnitude; and it bothered him for some time until his attention was taken by certain other objects upon and between the drifts. These he had thought at first to be outcroppings of rock; but he was at last convinced that they were specimens of vegetable life—miserable, lichenous specimens, but nevertheless vegetation. He wondered what liquid they contained, in an environment at a temperature well above the melting point of lead.