The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  Cunningham gave the affirmative gesture willingly; he had just acquired a lot to think about. It had never occurred to him that an essentially biological technology, which the Rantans seemed to have developed, could result in industrial pollution as effectively and completely as a chemical-mechanical one. Once the point was made, it was obvious enough.

  But this came nowhere near to explaining what had happened so recently, when he had landed at the meeting point. Could Creak be preaching Doomsday to the city’s less-balanced citizens? Was the fellow a monomaniac, or a zealot of some sort? This might be, judging from what Hinge (as Cunningham had mentally dubbed his new acquaintance) had been saying. Could the two natives who had attempted to capture him be local police, trying to remove the key figure from a potentially dangerous mob? Cunningham had seen cultures in which this was an everyday occurrence. Hinge seemed a calm and balanced individual—more so than the average member of a pre-space-travel culture who had just met his first off-worlder—but he was only one individual.

  And what was Hinge’s point about the glue failing? Why should that be a problem? There were all sorts of ways to fasten things together.

  Cunningham brooded on these questions while Ranta’s white sun moved slowly across the sky, a trifle more slowly than Sol crosses Earth’s. He sat facing the city, half expecting Creak to come over the wall toward him at any time. After all, even if the fellow had not been at the landing site it was hard to believe that a weird-looking alien could throw a crowd into panic and then walk out of town, with no effort at concealment, without having everyone in the place knowing what happened and where the alien was within the next hour. However, Creak did not appear.

  Two or three other workers who came to discuss something with Hinge noticed the man and satisfied an apparently human curiosity by talking to him rather as Hinge had done. None of them seemed surprised to see him, and he finally realized that Creak had made his presence known, directly or otherwise, to the city’s entire population. That made the Rantans seem rather less human. Granting the difficulty of a trip to the dam, most intelligent species which Cunningham had met would have had crowds coming to see an alien, regardless of their ideas about his origin. Maybe Creak had a good reason for trying to poke his fellow citizens into action; they did seem a rather casual and unenterprising lot.

  They knew no astronomy; they had an empirical familiarity with the motions of their sun and moon, but had barely noticed the stars and were quite unaware of Boss 6673’s other planets. They knew so little of the land areas of their own world that they took it for granted that Cunningham was from one of these—at least, Hinge had referred to him as “the land creature.”

  Where on Ranta was Creak? There were questions to be answered!

  Eventually, Hinge replaced his tools in the worksack and began to drag the latter toward the city wall. Cunningham helped. There was a ramp some three hundred meters east of the point where he had descended, and the native used this. Hinge let the man do most of the work with the bag, making his own painful way up the slope with the rope slack. At the top, he spoke again.

  “I really must eat. It will probably be quickest if you wait here. I will spread the word on my way home that you seek Creak. If he has not found you by the time I get back, I will guide you to the various places he is most likely to be. I should be back in half an hour, or a little more.”

  He waited for Cunningham to express comprehension, then dropped his worksack into the water, followed it, and disappeared into the tangle.

  III

  Evidently Hinge kept his promise about spreading the word. During the next quarter-hour, more and more native heads appeared above the water, and more and more lorgnettes were turned on the visitor. Human beings are not the only species rendered uneasy by the prolonged, silent stare; but they rank high. Before long, Cunningham was wondering whether the old idea of being frozen by a stare through a lorgnette might not have something more than an artificial social connotation.

  Several more workers came up the ramp, looked him over, and then splashed on into the city—whether to form part of the growing crowd or to go home to dinner was anybody’s guess.

  Cunningham kicked uneasily at the material underfoot, then stopped guiltily as he remembered what had happened earlier; but he looked closely and decided that the cement was in good condition here. Perhaps the Rantans paid more attention to upkeep on items which were nearby and in plain sight; after all, they had plenty of other human characteristics.

  Presumably the crowd was not really silent, but none of its sound was reaching Cunningham’s ears. This contributed to the oppressive atmosphere, which he felt more and more strongly as the minutes fled by. Hoping to hear better and perhaps get the actual feelings of the crowd, he seated himself on the inner edge of the wall and let his legs dangle in the water. He heard, but only a hopeless jumble of sound. No words could be distinguished, and he did not know the Rantans well enough to interpret general tones.

  And now the crowd was moving closer. Was it because more people were crowding into the space, or for some other reason? He looked wistfully at his ship, towering above the walls only a few hundred meters away. Would it pay to make a dash for it? Almost certainly not. He could get to the right space along the wall, but that swim through the tangle would be a waste of time if even a single native chose to interfere. He got uneasily to his feet.

  The heads were closer. Were they coming closer, or were more appearing inside the circle of early arrivals? A few minutes’ watch showed that it was the latter, and that eased his mind somewhat. Evidently the crowd was not deliberately closing on him, but it was growing in size, so the word of his presence must be spreading. When would it reach the beings who had tried to capture him earlier? What would their reaction be when it did?

  He was in no real immediate danger, of course. With any warning at all, he could spring back down the wall and be out of reach, but this would bring him no nearer to his ship in any sense. He wished Hinge or Creak would show up … or that someone would simply talk to him.

  A head emerged a couple of meters to his left, against the wall; its owner, wearing a breathing suit, slowly snaked his way out of the water.

  Cunningham stood tense for a moment. Then he relaxed, realizing that the newcomer could pose no threat at that distance. But he tightened up again and began looking at the water closely as it occurred to him that the being might be trying to distract his attention.

  The native carefully dragged himself onto the wall so that no part of his length remained in the water. This seemed more effort than it was worth, since a typical Rantan weights around four hundred fifty kilograms in air even on his own planet, and Cunningham was more suspicious than ever. He was almost sure that the fellow was bidding strictly for attention when he heard its voice.

  “Cun’m! Listen carefully! Things have gone very badly. I don’t think anyone in the water can hear me right now, but they’ll get suspicious in a moment. It’s very important that you stay away from your ship for a time, and we should both get away from here. As soon as I’m sure you understand, I’m going to roll down the wall; you follow as quickly as you can. Some may come after us, since there are a few other breathing suits on hand, so I’ll roll as far as I can. I have some rope with me, and as soon as we get together you can use it to help me travel. That way we can go faster than they, and maybe they’ll give up.”

  By now, Cunningham had recognized Creak’s body pattern.

  “Why should they want to catch us?” he asked.

  “I’ll explain when we have time. Do you understand the plan?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, here I go. Come on!”

  Creak poured his front end onto the slope and followed it with the rest of his body, curling into a flat spiral with his head in the center as he did so. His limbs were tucked against his sides, and his rubbery body offered no projections to be injured. He had given himself a downhill shove in the process of curling up, and the meter-wide disk
which was his body went bounding down the irregular outer surface of the wall. Cunningham winced in sympathy with every bounce as he watched, though he knew the boneless, gristly tissue of the Rantans was not likely to be damaged by such treatment. Then, splashes behind him suggested that Creak probably had good reason for the haste he was so strongly recommending.

  The man followed him, leaping as carefully as he could from rock to rock, tense with the fear that one of them would come loose as he landed on it. He reached the bottom safely, however, and sprinted after Creak, whose momentum combined with the southward slope of the rocky beach to carry him some distance from the wall.

  Finally, he bumped into the springy scaffolding surrounding one of the numerous buildings that dotted the area, and was brought to a halt. He promptly unrolled, and shook out the rope which he had been carrying in some obscure fashion. It was already tied into a sort of harness which he fitted over his forward end. As Cunningham came up, the native extended a long bight to him.

  The man had no trouble slipping this over his head and settling it in place around his waist. He looked back as he was finishing and saw that half a dozen suited natives had emulated Creak’s method of descending the wall. They had, however, unrolled as soon as they reached the bottom, probably to see which way the fugitives were going; and they were well behind in the race. The nearest were just starting to crawl toward them in typical Rantan dry-land fashion, pulling themselves along by whatever bits of lava they could find projecting through the sand.

  “East or west? Or does it matter?” Cunningham asked.

  “Not to me,” was the response, “but let’s get moving!”

  Cunningham took a quick look around, saw something from his erect vantage point which amused him, leaned into the bight of the rope harness, and headed east. Creak helped as much as he could, but this was not very much. The native could not conveniently look back, since the harness prevented his front end from turning and none of his eyes projected far enough. The man could, and did.

  “Only a couple are actually following,” he reported. “You’re pretty heavy, and I’m not dragging you really very much faster than they can travel; but I guess the fact that we’re going faster at all, and that I am evidently a land creature, has discouraged most of them.”

  “There are some who won’t give up easily. Don’t stop just yet.”

  “I won’t. We haven’t reached the place I have in mind.”

  “What place is that? How do you know anything about this area? Personally, I don’t think we should stop for at least a couple of your kilometers.”

  “I can see a place where I think we’ll be safe even if they keep after us. You can decide, when we get there. I’ll go on if you think we have to. But remember, you weigh half a dozen times as much as I do. This is work.”

  One by one their pursuers gave up and turned back, and at about the time the last one did so Cunningham felt the load he was pulling ease considerably. At the same moment Creak called out, “I’m sorry, Cun’m. I can’t help you at all here. It’s all sand, and there’s nothing to hold on to.”

  “I know,” the man replied. “That was what I thought I’d seen. It’s easier to pull you in deep sand, and I didn’t think anyone could follow us here.” He dragged the native on for another hundred meters or so, then dropped the rope and turned to him.

  “All right, Creak, what is this all about?”

  The native lifted the front third of his body, and looked around as well as the height and his lens would permit before answering.

  “I’ll have to give you a lot of background, first. I dodged a lot of your questions earlier because I wasn’t sure of your attitude. Now I’m pretty sure, from some of the things you’ve said, that you will agree with me and help me.

  “First, as you seem to take for granted, we used to be dwellers in the tidal jungles—many lifetimes ago. Our ancestors must have been hunters like the other creatures that live there, though they ate some plant food as well as animals. Eventually they learned to raise both kinds of food instead of hunting for it, and still later learned so much about the rules which control the forms of living things that they could make new plants and animals to suit their needs. This knowledge also enabled them to make buildings out of stone and wood, once cement was developed; and they could live in shelters and provide themselves with necessities and pleasures, without ever risking their lives or comfort in the jungles. We became, as you have called it, civilized and scientific.

  “That so-called ‘progress’ separated most of us from the realities of life. We ate when we were hungry, slept in safety when we were tired, and did whatever amused us the rest of the time—developing new plants and animals just for their appearance or taste, for example. The tides, which I think were the real cause of our developing the brains we did, became a nuisance, so we built homes and finally cities out of the water.”

  “And you think that’s bad?”

  “Of course. We are dependent on the city and what it supplies, now. We are soft. Not one in a hundred of us could live a day in the tidal jungles—they wouldn’t know what was fit to eat, or what was dangerous, or what to do when the tide went out. Even if they learned those things quickly enough to keep themselves alive, they’d die out because they couldn’t protect eggs and children long enough. I’ve been pointing all this out to them for years.”

  “But how does this lead to the present trouble? Did you really wreck the dam yourself, to force people out of the city?”

  “Oh, no. I’m enthusiastic but not crazy. Anyway, there was no need. Civilization out of water, like civilization in it, depends on construction, and construction depends on cement. It was—I suppose it was, anyway—the invention of cement which made cities possible; and now that the cement is starting to fail, the warning is clear. We should—we must—start working our way back to the sea—back to Nature. We were designed to live in the sea, and it’s foolish to go against basic design. We should no more be living on land than you should be living in the water.”

  “Some of my people do live in underwater cities,” Cunningham pointed out. “Some live on worlds with no air, or even where the temperature would freeze air.”

  “But they’re just workers, doing jobs which can’t be done elsewhere. You told me that your people work only a certain number of years, and then retire and do what they please. You’re certainly back to Nature.”

  “In some ways, I suppose so. But get back to the reason we’re sitting on the sand out of reach of my ship.”

  “Most of the people in the city can’t face facts. They plan to send a big party of workers to repair the dam, and go on just as we have been for years, of course setting up a strict water-use control until the reservoir fills again. But they plan to go on as though nothing serious had happened, or that nothing more serious could ever happen. They’re insane. They just don’t want to give up what they think of as the right to do what they want whenever they want.”

  “And you’ve been telling them all this.”

  “For years.”

  “And they refuse to listen.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, I see why you are here. But what do they have against me? Or were they merely trying to get me away from your influence?”

  If Creak saw any irony in the question he ignored it. “I’ve been telling them about you from the first, of course. I don’t understand this bit about worlds in the sky, and most of them don’t either, but there’s nothing surprising about creatures living on land even if we’ve never seen any before. I told them about your flying machine, and the things you must know of science that we don’t, and the way that you and your people have gone back to Nature just as I keep saying we must. You remember—you told me how your people had learned things which separated them from the proper life that fitted them, and which did a lot of damage to the Nature of your world, and how you finally had to change policies in order to stay alive.”

  “So I did, come to think of it. But you’ve
done a certain amount of reading between the lines. You really think I’m living closer to Nature than my ancestors of a thousand years ago?” Cunningham was more amused than indignant, or even worried.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I hate to disillusion you, but—Well, you’re not entirely wrong, but things aren’t as simple as you seem to think. I could survive for a while on my own world away from my technological culture, and most of my people could do the same, because that’s part of our education these days. However, we got back to that state very gradually. As it happened, my people did become completely dependent on the physical sciences to keep them protected and fed, just as you seem to have done with the biological ones. We did such a good job that our population rose far beyond the numbers which could be supported without the technology.

  “The real crisis came because we used certain sources of energy much faster than they were formed in Nature, and just barely managed to convert to adequate ones in time. We’re being natural in one way: we now make a strong point of not using any resource faster than Nature can renew it. However, we still live a very civilized-scientific life, the sort that lets us spend practically all our time doing what we feel like rather than grubbing for life’s necessities. You’re going to have to face the fact that the technology road is a one-way one, and cursing the ancestors who turned onto it is a waste of time. You’ll just have to take the long way around before you get anywhere near where you started.”

  “I … I suppose I was wrong, at least in some details.” The native seemed more uneasy than the circumstances called for, and Cunningham remembered the need-to-be-right which he had suspected of being unusually strong in the species. Creak went on, “Still, using you as an example was reasonable. Your flying machine proves you know a lot more than we do.”