An almost intoxicating sense of triumph filled him as the crawler approached the rocket and stopped. The Mesklinite waved his pincers almost gaily at the emerging McLellan visible in the reflected glare of the tank’s lights, and was disproportionately pleased when the man waved back. The tank immediately turned to the left and headed for the beach where the Bree lay; Mack, remembering that Barlennan was unprotected, thoughtfully waited until it was nearly a mile away before lifting his own machine into the air. The sight of it, drifting slowly upward apparently without support, threatened for just an instant to revive the old fear; but Barlennan fought the sensation grimly down and deliberately watched the rocket until it faded from view in the light of the lowering sun.
Lackland had been watching too; but when the last glint of metal had disappeared, he lost no further time in driving the tank the short remaining distance to where the Bree lay. He stopped a hundred yards from the vessel, but he was quite close enough for the shocked creatures on the decks to see their commander perched on the vehicle’s roof. It would have been less disconcerting had Lackland approached bearing Barlennan’s head on a pole.
Even Dondragmer, the most intelligent and levelheaded of the Bree’s complement—not excepting his captain—was paralyzed for long moments; and his first motion was with eyes only, taking the form of a wistful glance toward the flame-dust tanks and “shakers” on the outer rafts. Fortunately for Barlennan, the crawler was not downwind; for the temperature was, as usual, below the melting point of the chlorine in the tanks. Had the wind permitted, the mate would have sent a cloud of fire about the vehicle without ever thinking that his captain might be alive.
A faint rumble of anger began to arise from the assembled crew as the door of the crawler opened and Lackland’s armored figure emerged. Their half-trading, half-piratical way of life had left among them only those most willing to fight without hesitation at the slightest hint of menace to one of their number; the cowards had dropped away long since, and the individualists had died. The only thing that saved Lackland’s life as he emerged into their view was habit—the conditioning that prevented their making the hundred-yard leap that would have cost the weakest of them the barest flick of his body muscles. Crawling as they had done all their lives, they flowed from the rafts like a red and black waterfall and spread over the beach toward the alien machine. Lackland saw them coming, of course, but so completely misunderstood their motivation that he did not even hurry as he reached up to the crawler’s roof, picked up Barlennan, and set him on the ground. Then he reached back into the vehicle and brought out the radios he had promised, setting them on the sand beside the commander; and by then it had dawned on the crew that their captain was alive and apparently unharmed. The avalanche stopped in confusion, milling in undecided fashion midway between ship, and tank; and a cacophony of voices ranging from deep bass to the highest notes the radio speaker could reproduce gabbled in Lackland’s suit phones. Though he had, as Barlennan had intimated, done his best to attach meaning to some of the native conversation he had previously heard, the man understood not a single word from the crew. It was just as well for his peace of mind; he had long been aware that even armor able to withstand Mesklin’s eight-atmosphere surface pressure would mean little or nothing to Mesklinite pincers.
Barlennan stopped the babble with a hoot that Lackland could probably have heard directly through the armor, if its reproduction by the radio had not partially deafened him first. The commander knew perfectly well what was going on in the minds of his men, and had no desire to see frozen shreds of Lackland scattered over the beach.
“Calm down!” Actually Barlennan felt a very human warmth at his crew’s reaction to his apparent danger, but this was no time to encourage them. “Enough of you have played the fool here at no-weight so that you all should know I was in no danger!”
“But you forbade—”
“We thought—”
“You were high—” A chorus of objections answered the captain, who cut them short.
“I know I forbade such actions, and I told you why. When we return to high-weight and decent living we must have no habits that might result in our thoughtlessly doing dangerous things like that—” He waved a pincer-tipped arm upward toward the tank’s roof. “You all know what proper weight can do; the Flyer doesn’t. He put me up there, as you saw him take me down, without even thinking about it. He comes from a place where there is practically no weight at all; where, I believe, he could fall many times his body length without being hurt. You can see that for yourselves: if he felt properly about high places, how could he fly?”
Most of Barlennan’s listeners had dug their stumpy feet into the sand as though trying to get a better grip on it during this speech. Whether they fully digested, or even fully believed, their commander’s words may be doubted; but at least their minds were distracted from the action they had intended toward Lackland. A faint buzz of conversation arose once more among them, but its chief overtones seemed to be of amazement rather than anger. Dondragmer alone, a little apart from the others, was silent; and the captain realized that his mate would have to be given a much more careful and complete story of what had happened. Dondragmer’s imagination was heavily backed by intelligence, and he must already be wondering about the effect on Barlennan’s nerves of his recent experience. Well, that could be handled in good time; the crew presented a more immediate problem.
“Are the hunting parties ready?” Barlennan’s question silenced the babble once more.
“We have not yet eaten,” Merkoos replied a little uneasily, “but everything else—nets and weapons—is in readiness.”
“Is the food ready?”
“Within a day, sir.” Karondrasee, the cook, turned back toward the ship without further orders.
“Don, Merkoos. You will each take one of these radios. You have seen me use the one on the ship—all you have to do is talk anywhere near it. You can run a really efficient pincer movement with these, since you won’t have to keep it small enough for both leaders to see each other.
“Don, I am not certain that I will direct from the ship, as I originally planned. I have discovered that one can see over remarkable distances from the top of the Flyer’s traveling machine; and if he agrees I shall ride with him in the vicinity of your operations.”
“But sir!” Dondragmer was aghast. “Won’t—won’t that thing scare all the game within sight? You can hear it coming a hundred yards away, and see it for I don’t know how far in the open. And besides—” He broke off, not quite sure how to state his main objection. Barlennan did it for him.
“Besides, no one could concentrate on hunting with me in sight so far off the ground—is that it?” The mate’s pincers silently gestured agreement, and the movement was emulated by most of the waiting crew.
For a moment the commander was tempted to reason with them, but he realized in time the futility of such an attempt. He could not actually recapture the viewpoint he had shared with them until so recently, but he did realize that before that time he would not have listened to what he now considered “reason” either.
“All right, Don. I’ll drop that idea—you’re probably right. I’ll be in radio touch with you, but will stay out of sight.”
“But you’ll be riding on that thing? Sir, what has happened to you? I know I can tell myself that a fall of a few feet really means little here at the Rim, but I could never bring myself to invite such a fall deliberately; and I don’t see how anyone else could. I couldn’t even picture myself up on top of that thing.”
“You were most of a body length up a mast not too long ago, if I remember aright,” returned Barlennan dryly. “Or was it someone else I saw checking upper lashings without unshipping the stick?”
“That was different—I had one end on the deck,” Dondragmer replied a trifle uncomfortably.
“Your head still had a long way to fall. I’ve seen others of you doing that sort of thing too. If you remember, I had something to say about
it when we first sailed into this region.”
“Yes, sir, you did. Are those orders still in force, considering—” The mate paused again, but what he wanted to say was even plainer than before. Barlennan thought quickly and hard.
“We’ll forget the order,” he said slowly. “The reasons I gave for such things being dangerous are sound enough, but if any of you get in trouble for forgetting when we’re back in high-weight it’s your own fault. Use your own judgment on such matters from now on. Does anyone want to come with me now?”
Words and gestures combined in a chorus of emphatic negatives, with Dondragmer just a shade slower than the rest. Barlennan would have grinned had he possessed the physical equipment.
“Get ready for that hunt—I’ll be listening to you,” he dismissed his audience. They streamed obediently back toward the Bree, and their captain turned to give a suitably censored account of the conversation to Lackland. He was a little preoccupied, for the conversation just completed had given rise to several brand-new ideas in his mind; but they could be worked out when he had more leisure. Just now he wanted another ride on the tank roof.
Chapter 4:
Breakdown
The bay on the southern shore of which the Bree was beached was a tiny estuary some twenty miles long and two in width at its mouth. It opened from the southern shore of a larger gulf of generally similar shape some two hundred fifty miles long, which in turn was an offshoot of a broad sea which extended an indefinite distance into the northern hemisphere—it merged indistinguishably with the permanently frozen polar cap. All three bodies of liquid extended roughly east and west, the smaller ones being separated from the larger on their northern sides by relatively narrow peninsulas. The ship’s position was better chosen than Barlennan had known, being protected from the northern storms by both peninsulas. Eighteen miles to the west, however, the protection of the nearer and lower of these points ceased; and Barlennan and Lackland could appreciate what even that narrow neck had saved them. The captain was once more ensconced on the tank, this time with a radio clamped beside him.
To their right was the sea, spreading to the distant horizon beyond the point that guarded the bay. Behind them the beach was similar to that on which the ship lay, a gently sloping strip of sand dotted with the black, rope-branched vegetation that covered so much of Mesklin. Ahead of them, however, the growths vanished almost completely. Here the slope was even flatter and the belt of sand grew ever broader as the eye traveled along it. It was not completely bare, though even the deep-rooted plants were lacking; but scattered here and there on the wave-channeled expanse were dark, motionless relics of the recent storm.
Some were vast, tangled masses of seaweed, or of growths which could claim that name with little strain on the imagination; others were the bodies of marine animals, and some of these were even vaster. Lackland was a trifle startled—not at the size of the creatures, since they presumably were supported in life by the liquid in which they floated, but at the distance they lay from the shore. One monstrous hulk was sprawled over half a mile inland; and the Earthman began to realize just what the winds of Mesklin could do even in this gravity when they had a sixty-mile sweep of open sea in which to build up waves. He would have liked to go to the point where the shore lacked even the protection of the outer peninsula, but that would have involved a further journey of over a hundred miles.
“What would have happened to your ship, Barlennan, if the waves that reached here had struck it?”
“That depends somewhat on the type of wave, and where we were. On the open sea, we would ride over it without trouble; beached as the Bree now is, there would have been nothing left. I did not realize just how high waves could get this close to the Rim, of course—now that I think of it, maybe even the biggest would be relatively harmless, because of its lack of weight.”
“I’m afraid it’s not the weight that counts most; your first impression was probably right.”
“I had some such idea in mind when I sheltered behind that point for the winter, of course. I admit I did not have any idea of the actual size the waves could reach here at the Rim. It is not too surprising that explorers tend to disappear with some frequency in these latitudes.”
“This is by no means the worst, either. You have that second point, which is rather mountainous if I recall the photos correctly, protecting this whole stretch.”
“Second point? I did not know about that. Do you mean that what I can see beyond the peninsula there is merely another bay?”
“That’s right. I forgot you usually stayed in sight of land. You coasted along to this point from the west, then, didn’t you?”
“Yes. These seas are almost completely unknown. This particular shore line extends about three thousand miles in a generally westerly direction, as you probably know—I’m just beginning to appreciate what looking at things from above can do for you—and then gradually bends south. It’s not too regular; there’s one place where you go east again for a couple of thousand miles, but I suppose the actual straight-line distance that would bring you opposite my home port is about sixteen thousand miles to the south—a good deal farther coasting, of course. Then about twelve hundred miles across open sea to the west would bring me home. The waters about there are very well known, of course, and any sailor can cross them without more than the usual risks of the sea.”
While they had been talking, the tank had crawled away from the sea, toward the monstrous hulk that lay stranded by the recent storm. Lackland, of course, wanted to examine it in detail, since he had so far seen practically none of Mesklin’s animal life; Barlennan, too, was willing. He had seen many of the monsters that thronged the seas he had traveled all his life, but he was not sure of this one.
Its shape was not too surprising for either of them. It might have been an unusually streamlined whale or a remarkably stout sea snake; the Earthman was reminded of the Zeuglodon that had haunted the seas of his own world thirty million years before. However, nothing that had ever lived on Earth and left fossils for men to study had approached the size of this thing. For six hundred feet it lay along the still sandy soil; in life its body had apparently been cylindrical, and over eighty feet in diameter. Now, deprived of the support of the liquid in which it had lived, it bore some resemblance to a wax model that had been left too long in the hot sun. Though its flesh was presumably only about half as dense as that of earthly life, its tonnage was still something to stagger Lackland when he tried to estimate it; and the three-times-earth-normal gravity had done its share.
“Just what do you do when you meet something like this at sea?” he asked Barlennan.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” the Mesklinite replied dryly. “I have seen things like this before, but only rarely. They usually stay in the deeper, permanent seas; I have seen one once only on the surface, and about four cast up as is this one. I do not know what they eat, but apparently they find it far below the surface. I have never heard of a ship’s being attacked by one.”
“You probably wouldn’t,” Lackland replied pointedly. “I find it hard to imagine any survivors in such a case. If this thing feeds like some of the whales on my own world, it would inhale one of your ships and probably fail to notice it. Let’s have a look at its mouth and find out.” He started the tank once more, and drove it along to what appeared to be the head end of the vast body.
The thing had a mouth, and a skull of sorts, but the latter was badly crushed by its own weight. There was enough left, however, to permit the correction of Lackland’s guess concerning its eating habits; with those teeth, it could only be carnivorous. At first the man did not recognize them as teeth; only the fact that they were located in a peculiar place for ribs finally led him to the truth.
“You’d be safe enough, Barl,” he said at last. “That thing wouldn’t dream of attacking you. One of your ships would not be worth the effort, as far as its appetite is concerned—I doubt that it would notice anything less than a hundred times the Bree�
��s size.”
“There must be a lot of meat swimming around in the deeper seas,” replied the Mesklinite thoughtfully. “I don’t see that it’s doing anyone much good, though.”
“True enough. Say, what did you mean a little while ago by that remark about permanent seas? What other kind do you have?”
“I referred to the areas which are still ocean just before the winter storms begin,” was the reply. “The ocean level is at its highest in early spring, at the end of the storms, which have filled the ocean beds during the winter. All the rest of the year they shrink again. Here at the Rim, where shore lines are so steep, it doesn’t make much difference; but up where weight is decent the shore line may move anywhere from two hundred to two thousand miles between spring and fall.” Lackland emitted a low whistle.
“In other words,” he said, half to himself, “your oceans evaporate steadily for over four of my years, precipitating frozen methane on the north polar cap, and then get it all back in the five months or so that the northern hemisphere spends going from its spring to autumn. If I was ever surprised at those storms, that ends it.” He returned to more immediate matters.
“Barl, I’m going to get out of this tin box. I’ve been wanting samples of the tissue of Mesklin’s animal life ever since we found it existed, and I couldn’t very well take a paring from you. Will the flesh of this thing be very badly changed in the length of time it has probably been dead? I suppose you’d have some idea.”
“It should still be perfectly edible for us, though from what you have said you could never digest it. Meat usually becomes poisonous after a few hundred days unless it is dried or otherwise preserved, and during all that time its taste gradually changes. I’ll sample a bit of this, if you’d like.” Without waiting for an answer and without even a guilty glance around to make sure that none of his crew had wandered in this direction, Barlennan launched himself from the roof of the tank toward the vast bulk beside it. He misjudged badly, sailing entirely over the huge body, and for just an instant felt a twinge of normal panic; but he was in full control of himself before he landed on the farther side. He leaped back again, judging his distance better this time, and waited while Lackland opened the door of his vehicle and emerged. There was no air lock on the tank; the man was still wearing pressure armor, and had simply permitted Mesklin’s atmosphere to enter after closing his helmet. A faint swirl of white crystals followed him out—ice and carbon dioxide, frozen out of the Earth-type air inside as it cooled to Mesklin’s bitter temperature. Barlennan had no sense of smell, but he felt a burning sensation in his breathing pores as a faint whiff of oxygen reached him, and jumped hastily backward. Lackland guessed correctly at the cause of his action and apologized profusely for not giving proper warning.
Mission of Gravity Page 4
