The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  While considering the problem, he kicked idly at the stonework on which he was standing. So far from his immediate situation were his thoughts that several loose fragments of rock lay around him before they caught his attention. When they did, he froze motionless, remembering belatedly what had happened when he was climbing the wall.

  Rantan cement, he had come to realize, was generally remarkable stuff—another of the mysteries now awaiting solution in his mental file. The water dwellers could hardly have fire or forges, and quite reasonably he had seen no sign of metal around Creak’s home or in his tools. It seemed unlikely that the natives’ chemical or physical knowledge could be very sophisticated, and the surprise and interest shown by Creak and Nereis when he had been making chemical studies of the local rocks and their own foodstuffs supported this idea. Nevertheless, their glue was able to hold rough, unsquared fragments of stone, and untooled strips of wood, with more force than Cunningham’s muscles could overcome. This was true even when the glued area was no more than a square millimeter or two. On one of his early visits to Creak’s home, Cunningham had become entangled in the furniture and been quite unable to break out, or even separate a single strand from its fellows.

  But now stones were coming loose under his feet. He had strolled a few meters out along the aqueduct wall again while thinking, and perhaps having this stretch come apart under him would be less serious than having the city start doing so, but neither prospect pleased. Even here a good deal of water remained, and being washed out over Ranta’s stony surface again …

  No. Be careful, Cunningham! You came pretty close to being killed when the dam gave way a few hours ago. And didn’t Creak say something like “Cement failure again” that time? Was the cement, or some other key feature of the local architecture, proving less reliable than its developers and users expected? If so, why were they only finding it out now, since the city must have been here a long time? Could an Earthman’s presence have anything to do with it? He would have to find out, tactfully, whether this had been going on for more than the six months he had been on the planet.

  More immediately, was the pile of rock he was standing on now going to continue to support him? If it collapsed, what would the attitude of the natives be, supposing he was in a condition to care? A strong human tendency exists, shared by many other intelligent species, to react to disaster by looking for someone to blame. Creak’s and Nereis’ noticeable preference for being right about things suggested that Rantans might so react. All in all, getting off the defective stonework seemed a good idea.

  Walking as carefully as he could, Cunningham made his way upstream along the lock. He felt a little easier when he reached the section where the bottom was exposed and there was no water pressure to compound the stress or wash him out among the boulders.

  He would have crossed at this point, and climbed the opposite wall to get back to his ship, but the inner walls of the conduit were practically vertical. They were quite rough enough to furnish climbing holds, but the man had developed a certain uneasiness about putting his weight on single projecting stones. Instead, he went up the wall—now dry—between the last two locks and crossed this. It held him, rather to his surprise, and with much relief he made his way down the more gradual slope on the other side to the surface rock of the planet, climbed to and through Nimepotea’s airlock, and lifted his vessel happily off the ground.

  II

  Hovering over the center of the city, he could see that it was far from deserted; though it was not easy to identify individual inhabitants even from a few meters up. Most of the spaces, even those whose primary function seemed to correspond to streets, were cluttered with plant life. The Rantans obviously preferred climbing through the stuff to swimming in clear water. But the plants formed a tangle through which nothing less skillful than a Rantan or a moray eel could have made its way. Sometimes the natives could be seen easily in contrast to the plants, but in other parts of the city they blended in so completely that Cunningham began to wonder whether the compartment he had first examined had really been deserted, after all.

  He could not, of course, tell if the creatures were aware of real trouble. It was impossible to interpret everything he saw, even as he dropped lower, but Cunningham judged that schools were in session, meals were being prepared, with ordinary craftwork and business being conducted by the majority of the natives. At least some ordinary life-support work was going on, he saw. To the southeast of the city, partly within the notch where the wall bent inward to destroy the symmetry of its four-kilometer square, and just about at high-tide mark, he noticed a number of structures that were obviously intended for the production of salt by evaporation. The tide was now going out, and numerous breathing-suited Rantans—with lorgnettes—were closing flood gates to areas that had just filled with sea water. Others were scraping and bagging deposits of brownish material in areas where the water had evaporated. Further from the ocean, similar bags had been opened and were lying in the sun, presumably for more complete drying, under elevated tentlike sheets of the same transparent fabric Creak had used for his work-bag. In fact, most of the beings laboring outside the city walls dragged similar bags with them.

  No one seemed to be working now in these upper drying spaces; this was the closest evidence Cunningham could see that city life had been at all disturbed. But naturally, if no water were coming in from the reservoir, no salt would be needed immediately. That was all he could infer from observation; for more knowledge, he would have to ask Creak.

  The meeting place was now fairly easy to spot: a seventy-meter-square “room” with much of the central portion clear of vegetation, located above the corner which cut into the southeastern part of the city. As he approached this area and settled downward, Cunningham could see that there were a number of natives—perhaps a hundred—in the clear portion. How many might be in the vegetation near the edges, he had no way to tell. He could see no really clear place to land, but once the bottom of the hull entered the water the pilot eased down slowly enough to give those below every chance to get out from under. The water was about five meters deep, and when the Nimepotea touched bottom her main airlock was a little more than a meter above the surface. Cunningham touched the override, which cut out the safety interlock, and opened both doors at once, taking up his position at the edge of the lock with a remote controller attached to his equipment belt.

  The reaction to his arrival was obvious, if somewhat surprising. Wormlike beings practically boiled out of the water, moving away from him. He could not see below the surface anywhere near the sides of the enclosure; but he could guess that the exits were thoroughly jammed, for natives were climbing over the wall at every point, apparently frantic to get out. The man had just time to hope that no one was being hurt in the crush, and to wonder whether he should lift off before anything worse happened, when something totally unexpected occurred. Two more of the natives snaked up at his feet, slipped their head ends into the airlock to either side of him, coiled around his legs, and swept him outward.

  His reactions were far too slow. He did operate the controller, but only just in time to close the lock behind him. He and his attackers struck the water with a splash that wet only the outer surface of the portal.

  His suit was not ballasted, so it floated quite high in the extremely salt solution. The natives made a futile effort to submerge him, but even their body weights—their density was considerably greater than even the ocean water of their world—did not suffice. They gave up quickly and propelled him along the surface toward the wall.

  Well before getting there, the natives found that a human body is very poorly designed for motion through Rantan living areas. The only reason they could move him at all was that he floated so high. His arms and legs, and occasionally his head, kept catching in loops of plant material—loops which to the captors were normal, regular sources of traction. The four digits at the ends of their half-tentacle, half-flipper limbs were opposed in two tonglike pairs, like those of
the African chameleon, and thus gripped the stems and branches more surely than a human hand could ever have done. Grips were transferred from one limb to the next with a flowing coordination that caught Cunningham’s attention even in his present situation.

  The difference between Cunningham’s habitual caution and ordinary fear was now obvious. Being dragged to an unknown goal by two beings who far outpowered and outweighed him physically, he could still carry on his earlier speculations about the evolution of Ranta’s intelligent species and the factors which had operated to make intelligence a survival factor.

  The planet’s single moon was much smaller and less massive than Luna, but sufficiently closer to its primary to make up more than the difference as far as tide-raising power was concerned. Ranta’s tides were nearly ten times as great as Earth’s. There were no really large continents—or rather, as the Nimepotea’s mass readers suggested, the continents that covered a large fraction of the planet were mostly submerged—and a remarkably large fraction of the world’s area was intertidal zone. Cunningham had named the world from the enormous total length of shore and beach visible from space—he had still been thinking in Finnish after his months on Omituinen. The tidal areas were largely overgrown with the springy, tangled plants the natives seemed to like so much. This environment, so much of it alternately under and above water, would certainly be one where sensory acuity and rapid nervous response would be survival factors. Selection pressures might have been fiercer even than on Earth; there must have been some reason why intelligence had appeared so early—Boss 6673 was much younger than Sol.

  The science of a water-dwelling species would tend to be more slanted in biological than in chemical or physical directions, and perhaps …

  Opportunity knocked. They had reached a wall, which projected only a few centimeters from the water and was nearly two meters thick. The natives worked their way over it, pulling themselves along by the irregularities as Creak and Nereis had done on land. These two were equally uncomfortable and clumsy, and the man judged that their attention must be as fully preempted by the needs of the moment as were their limbs; only a few of the tonglike nippers were holding him.

  He gave a sudden, violent wrench, getting his legs under him and tearing some of the holds loose. Then, as hard as he could, he straightened up. This broke the rest of the holds and lifted him from the wall top. He had had no real opportunity to plan a jump, and he came unpleasantly close to landing back in the water. But by the narrowest of margins he had enough leeway to control a second leap. This put him solidly on the wall more than a meter from the nearer of his captors.

  The latter made no serious effort to catch him. They could not duplicate his leaps or even his ordinary walking pace out of water, and neither could get back into the water from where they were for several seconds.

  Cunningham, watching alertly to either side for ones who might be in a better position to attack, headed along the wall toward the edge of the city as quickly as he dared. He was free for the moment, but he could see no obvious way to get back to the Nimepotea. The fact that he could swim faster in open water than the natives would hardly suffice; open water did not comprise the whole distance to be crossed. And he would not be safe on the walls, presumably, so his first priority was to reach relatively open country beyond them.

  His path was far from straight, since the city compartments varied widely in size, but most of the turns were at right angles. A few hundred meters brought him to the south wall a little to the east of the angle that Creak had used as a checkpoint. The outer slope was gradual, like that of the reservoir dam, but the resemblance was not encouraging; Cunningham convinced himself, however, that it was improbable for his accident of a few hours before to repeat itself so soon, so he made his way down with no difficulty.

  The high-tide mark lay fairly near, and much of the rough lava was overlain by fine, black sand. In a sense he was still inside the city, since many structures of cemented stone—some of them quite larger—were in sight. A large number of suited natives crawled and climbed among them—climbed, since many of the buildings were enveloped by scaffolding of the same general design as Creak’s furniture.

  None of the workers seemed to notice the man, and he wondered when some local genius would conceive the idea of spectacles attached over the eyes to replace the lorgnettes used to correct out-of-water refraction. Perhaps with so many limbs, the Rantans were not highly motivated to invent something which would free one more for work. It did not occur to him that lens-making was one of the most difficult and expensive processes the Rantans could handle, and one very mobile lens per worker was their best economic solution to the problem.

  His own problems were more immediate. He had to find Creak, first of all; everything else, such as persuading people to let him back to his ship, seemed to hinge on that. Unfortunately, he had just been chased away from the place where Creak was supposed to be. Communicating with some other native who might conceivably be able to find the dam-keeper was going to be complex, since no native but Creak himself and his wife could understand Cunningham—and Cunningham could not properly pronounce Creak’s name in the native language. However, there seemed nothing better to do than try—with due precautions against panic and attack reactions.

  These seemed to pose little problem on dry land, and the man approached one of the natives who was working alone at the foot of a building some fifty or sixty meters away. It was wearing a breathing suit, of course, and dragging a worksack similar to the one Creak habitually used. Like all the others, it seemed completely unaware of him, and remained so until Cunningham gave a light tug on the cord of its worksack.

  It turned its head end toward him, lorgnette in a forward hand, and looked over with apparent calmness; at least, it neither fled nor attacked.

  Cunningham spoke loudly, since sound transmission through two suits would be poor, and uttered a few sentences of a human language. He did not expect to be understood, but hoped that the regularity of the sound pattern would be obvious, as it had been so long ago to Creak.

  The creature answered audibly, and the man was able to understand fairly well, though there were occasional words he had never heard from Nereis or from Creak. “I’m afraid I can’t understand you,” the worker said. “I suppose you are the land creature which Creak has been telling about.”

  This was promising, though the man could not even approximate the sound of a Rantan affirmative, and nodding his head meant nothing to the native. If there was a corresponding gesture used here, he had never been aware of it. All he could do was make an effort at the Rantan pronunciation of Creak’s name, and no one was more aware than Cunningham what a dismal failure this was. However, the native was far from stupid.

  “Creak tells us he has learned your language, so I suppose you are trying to find him. I’m not sure where he is just now. Usually he’s at the reservoir, but sometimes he comes to town. Then you can usually find him explaining to the largest crowd he can gather why we should have more workers out there on dam maintenance, and why the rest of the city should be building shelters below high-water mark against the time the dam finally fails for good. If he’s in town now, I hadn’t heard about it; but that doesn’t prove anything. I’ve been out here since midday. Is it he that you want?”

  Cunningham made another futile effort to transmit an affirmative, and the native once more displayed his brains.

  “If you want to say ‘yes,’ wave an upper appendage; for ‘no,’ a lower one—lie down by all means; you may as well be comfortable—and if you don’t understand all or some of what I say, wave both upper limbs. Creak said you had learned to understand our talk. All right?”

  Cunningham waved an arm.

  “Good. Is it really Creak you want to find?”

  Arm.

  “Is there need for haste?”

  Cunningham hesitated, then kicked, startling the native with his ability to stand even briefly on one foot.

  “All right. The best thing I
can suggest is that you wait here, if you can, until two hours before sunset, when I finish work. Then I’ll go into town with you and spread the word that you’re looking for him. Probably he’ll be preaching, and easy to find.”

  The man waved both arms.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have put so much together. Did you understand the general plan?”

  Arm.

  “The time?”

  Arm.

  “The part about his preaching?”

  Both arms; Cunningham had never heard the word the native was using.

  “Well, hasn’t he ever told you how stupid people were ever to move out of the ocean?”

  Kick. This wasn’t exactly a falsehood, though Cunningham had grasped Creak’s disapproval of the general situation.

  “Don’t complain. Creak disapproves of cities. That’s why he and his wife took that job out in the desert, though how he ties that in with going back to Nature is more than anyone can guess. It’s further from the ocean in every sense you can use. I suppose they’re just down on everything artificial. I think he gloats every time part of the dam has to be recemented. If that hadn’t been happening long before he took the job, people would suspect him of breaking it himself.”

  Cunningham saw no reason to try to express his relief at this statement. At least, no one would be blaming the alien …

  He used the don’t-understand signal again, and the native quickly narrowed it down to the man’s curiosity about why Creak didn’t live in the ocean if he so disapproved of cities.

  “No one can live in the ocean for long; it’s too dangerous. Food is hard to find, there are animals and plants that can kill—a lot of them developed by us long ago for one purpose or another. Producing one usually caused troubles no one foresaw, and they had to make another to offset its effects, and then the new one caused trouble and something had to be done about that. Maybe we’ll hit a balance sometime, but since we’ve moved into land-based cities no one’s been trying very hard. Creak could tell you all this more eloquently than I; even he admits we can’t go back tomorrow. Now, my friend, it takes a lot of time to converse this way—enjoyable as it is—and I have work to finish. So—”