Star Light m-2

by Hal Clement

  Mersereau returned a few minutes after the others had left, and had to be brought up to date. Otherwise, nothing of note occurred. There was an occasional glimpse of a long, many-legged form on one of the screens, but the Mesklinites were going about their own affairs with no particular regard for the watchers.

  Easy thought of starting another conversation with Kervenser; she knew and liked this officer almost as well as she did his captain. However, the thought of the lag between remark and answer discouraged her, as it often did when there was nothing of importance to be said.

  Even with no lag, conversation languished. There was little for Easy and Mersereau to say to each other which had not already been said; a year away from Earth could be counted on to exhaust most subjects of conversation except professional shop talk and matters of private, personal interest. She had little of the latter in common with Mersereau, though she liked him well enough, and their professions overlapped only in connection with talking to Mesklinites.

  In consequence there was little sound in the communication room. Every few minutes one or another of the exploring land-cruisers would send in a report, which would be duly relayed to the Settlement; but most of the human beings on watch had no more occasion for small talk than Easy and Boyd Mersereau. Easy found herself trying to guess when the weather men would be back with their forecast and how reliable the new one would be. Say, two minutes to the lab, or one, if they hurried; one more to feed the new material into the computer; two for the run; five minutes of arguing, since she knew her son, over whether this prediction was really any better than the last; a repeat run with modified weights on the variables; two minutes back down to the comm room, since they certainly wouldn’t hurry this time. They’d still be arguing. They should be here soon.

  But before they made it, things changed. Quite suddenly, the bridge screen demanded attention. It had been quiet, with gray windows masked by frozen ammonia dominating the foreshortened image of part of the helmsman. The latter had been almost motionless, his tiller bar well over to one side as the Kwembly pursued the circular path described by Kervenser.

  Then the windows were suddenly clear, though little could be seen beyond them; the communicator’s angle of view was not depressed enough to reach ground within range of the lights. Two more Mesklinites appeared and flowed over to the windows, looking out and gesturing with obvious excitement. Mersereau pointed to another screen; there was excitement in the lab, too. So far, none of the little explorers had seen fit to report what was going on. Easy judged they were too occupied with immediate problems; furthermore it was customary for them to keep their sound volume down, or off completely, unless they specifically wanted to speak to the human beings.

  At this point the weather men returned. Easy saw her son out of the corner of her eye, and asked without looking around, “Do you have anything useful this time?”

  McDevitt answered briefly, “Yes. Shall I have Benj translate it to them?”

  “No. They’re in some sort of trouble, it seems. Give them the word yourself. Dondragmer would certainly be on the bridge, or will be by the time your words get there, when anything like this is going on. Here, use this seat and mike.”

  The meteorologist obeyed without question. It would be the last time for many months that he would pay Easy that compliment. He began talking as he settled into the seat.

  “Dondragmer, you should have about nineteen hours of reduced visibility. The freezing fog should last for less than another hour; the temperature is going down, and the fog will change to ammonia crystals which shouldn’t stick to your windows. If you can get rid of the ice already there, you should at least see through them into the snow. The wind will decrease gradually for about five more hours. By that time, the temperature should be low enough so you needn’t worry about eutectic melting. There will be higher clouds for another forty-five hours—” He went on, but Easy had stopped listening.

  Near the end of McDevitt’s second sentence, long before the beginning of his message could have reached Dhrawn, a Mesklinite had approached the bridge pickup so closely that his grotesque face nearly filled the screen. One of his nipper-equipped arms reached out of sight to one side, and Easy knew he was activating the voice transmitter. She was not surprised to hear the captain speaking in a much calmer tone than she could have managed under the circumstances.

  “Easy, or whoever is on watch, please get a special report to Barlennan. The temperature has gone up six degrees, to one hundred three, in the last few minutes, the ice has melted from the windows, and we are afloat.”

  3: NERVE CENTER

  Perhaps it was unkind for Dondragmer to have given his report in the human language. The time taken for translation might have eased the shock a trifle for McDevitt. The worst part, as the meteorologist said later, was realizing that his own prediction was on its way to Dhrawn and nothing could stop it. For a moment he had a wild notion of getting a ship and racing the radio waves to the planet so as to shadow them from the Kwembly’s receivers. The thought was only a flicker; only so much can be done in thirty-two seconds. Besides, none of the tenders then at the station was capable of faster-than-light flight. Most of them were used in servicing the shadow satellites.

  Easy, in the next seat, didn’t seem to have noticed the discrepancy between the prediction and Dondragmer’s report; at least, she hadn’t glanced at him with the expression which nine out of ten of his friends would have used. Well, she wouldn’t, he thought. That’s why she’s on this job.

  The woman was manipulating her selector switch again, with her attention focused on a smaller screen above the Kwembly’s four. At first an indicator beside it glowed red; as she worked her switches it turned green and the image of an office-like room with fully a dozen Mesklinites in view appeared on the screen. Easy began her report instantly.

  She was brief. All she could give was a repetition of Dondragmer’s few sentences. She had finished long before there was any evidence on the screen that her words were being received.

  ‘When the response came, however, it was satisfying. Every caterpillar-like body in sight looped toward the pickup. While Easy had never learned to read expression on the Mesklinite “face,” there was no misunderstanding the wildly waving arms and snapping pincers. One of the creatures raced toward a semicircular doorway at the far side of the room and disappeared through it. In spite of the creature’s red and black coloration, Easy found herself reminded of the sight, a few years before, of one of her daughters inhaling a strand of spaghetti. A Mesklinite in a hurry under forty Earth gravities appears legless to human eyes.

  The sound was not on yet from the Dhrawn end, but there was a rising buzz of conversation in the human communication room. It was not unusual for exploring land-cruisers to run into difficulties. In general the working Mesklinites took such difficulties more calmly than the human beings who were watching helplessly. In spite of the lack of intercom in the station, people began entering the room and filling the general seats. Screen after screen in the front monitoring areas was tuned to the “headquarters” unit in the Settlement. Meanwhile Easy and Mersereau were dividing their attention among the four sets reporting from the Kwembly, with only an occasional glance at the other picture.

  It was not obvious on the screens that the vehicle was afloat because the transmitters shared any motion it might have, and there was little loose equipment whose motion might have betrayed a pitch or a roll. The bulk of the crew were sailors by training. Lifelong habit prevented them from leaving things unsecured. Easy kept closest watch on the bridge screen hoping to spot something outside which could give a clue to what was occurring, but nothing recognizable could be seen through the windows.

  Then the panes were blotted out once more as Dondragmer came back into the foreground and expanded his report.

  “There seems to be no immediate danger. The wind is pulling us along fairly rapidly, judging by our wake. Our magnetic course is 66. We are floating level, submerged to about deck two.
Our scientists are trying to compute the density of this liquid, but no one has ever bothered to work out displacement tables for this hull as far as I know. If you human beings happen to have that information, my people would be glad to get it. Unless we run into something solid, and I can’t guess at the chances of that, we’ll be safe. All machinery is functioning properly, except that the treads have nothing to bite on. They race if we give them power. That’s all for now. If your shadow satellites can keep track of our location, we’ll be glad of that information as often as you can manage. Tell Barlennan everything is all right so far.”

  Easy shifted microphone connections and repeated the captain’s report as nearly verbatim as she could. She saw, in due course, that it was being taken down in writing at the other end. She rather hoped that the writer would have some question to ask: not that she was likely to be able to answer it, but she was beginning to get a helpless, useless feeling again. The Mesklinite, however, merely acknowledged the information and headed for the door with his notes. Easy was left wondering how far he had to go to get them to the commander. No human being had a very good idea of the layout of the Mesklinite base.

  As a matter of fact, the trip was brief Most of it appeared to be outdoors because of the settlers’ attitude toward massive objects overhead:

  an attitude hard to overcome even on a world where gravity was only a fraction of its normal Mesklin value. The roofs of the Settlement were almost all of transparent film brought from their home world. The only departure from a common, city-wide floor level was dictated by terrain. The thought of either a basement or a second story would never have occurred to a Mesklinite. The many-decked Kwembly and her sister vehicles were of basically human and Paneshk design.

  The messenger wove through a maze of corridors for some two hundred yards before reaching the commander’s office. This was at the northern edge of the cluster of foot-high structures which formed the greater part of the Settlement. The Settlement itself was close to the edge of a six-foot cliff extending almost a mile east and west, broken by a dozen or so artificial ramps. On the ground below the cliff, but still with their bridges looming above the transparent coverings of the “city,” were two of the huge land-cruisers. The wall of Barlennan’s room was also transparent and looked directly out on the nearer of these vehicles; the other was parked some thousand feet to the east. A few air suited Mesklinites were also visible outside, dwarfed by the monstrous vehicles they were tending.

  Barlennan was watching this group of mechanics critically when the runner entered. The latter used no formality, but burst into Easy’s relayed report as he entered the compartment. By the time the commander had swerved around to receive the written version, he had heard it all orally.

  It was not satisfactory, of course. Barlennan had had time to think up a number of questions since the first messenger had arrived, and this message answered none of them. The commander controlled his impatience.

  “I take it there hasn’t been anything useful from the human weather experts yet.

  “Nothing at all, sir, to us. They may have been talking to the Kwembly without our hearing, of course.”

  “True enough. Has word gone to our own weather people?”

  “Not as far as I know, sir. There’s been nothing very useful to tell them, but Guzmeen may have sent a message there, too.

  “All right. I want to talk to them myself anyway. I’ll be at their complex for the next half hour or more. Tell Guz.”

  The messenger made the affirmative nipper gesture and vanished through the door he had entered by. Barlennan took another, making his way slowly westward through building after building and over the enclosed connecting ramps which made the Settlement a single unit. Most of the ramps on his course sloped upward, so that by the time he turned south away from the cliff he was some five feet higher than his office, though not yet on a level with the bridges of the land-cruisers behind him. The roof fabric bulged a little more tautly above him, since the nearly pure hydrogen in the station did not drop as rapidly in pressure with increasing altitude as did Dhrawn’s much denser gas mixture. The Settlement had been built at an elevation which was quite high for Dhrawn. The total outside pressure was about the same as that at Mesklin’s sea level. It was only when the land-cruisers descended to lower elevations that they carried extra argon to keep their internal pressure balanced.

  Since Dhrawn’s air carried about two per cent oxygen, the Mesklinites were careful about leaks. Barlennan still remembered the awkward results of an oxygen-hydrogen explosion shortly after he had first encountered human beings.

  The research complex was the westernmost and highest side of the colony. It was fairly well separated from most of the other structures and differed from them in having a solid, though still transparent, roof. It also came closer than any other part of the Settlement to having a second story, since a number of instruments were mounted on the roof where they could be reached by ramps and liquid-trap air locks. By no means all the instruments had been furnished by the alien sponsors of the Settlement; the Mesklinites had been using their own imaginations and ingenuity for fifty years, although they had not really felt free about doing so until reaching Dhrawn.

  Like the exploring vehicles, the laboratory complex was a mixture of crudeness and sophistication. Energy was supplied by hydrogen-fusion units; chemical glassware was home-made. Communication with the orbiting station was by solid-state electromagnetic beam transmitter; but messages were carried physically about the complex by runners. Steps were being taken to change this, unknown to the human beings. The Mesklinites understood the telegraph and were on the verge of making telephones able to transmit their own voice range. However, neither telephone nor telegraph was being installed in the Settlement because most of Barlennan’s administrative effort was being concentrated on the project which had provoked Easy’s sympathy for the Esket crew. It takes a lot of work to lay cross-country telegraph lines.

  Barlennan was saying nothing about this to his sponsors. He liked human beings, though he did not go as far in that direction as Dondragmer: he was always aware of their amazingly short life span, which prevented him from getting to really know the people he worked with before they were replaced by others. He was rather concerned about the possibility of human, Drommian, and Paneshk finding out just how ephemeral they all were, for fear it might depress them. It had, in fact, become Mesklinite policy to evade discussion on the matter of age with aliens. It was also policy not to depend more heavily than could be avoided on them. You never knew whether the next ones to take over would have the same attitudes. They were intrinsically undependable, most Mesklinites felt; Dondragmer’s confidence in them was a glaring exception.

  All this was known to the Mesklinite scientists who saw the commander arrive. Their first concern was with the immediate situation. “Is someone in trouble, or are you just visiting?”

  “Trouble, I’m afraid,” replied Barlennan. He briefly outlined Dondragmer’s situation. “Collect anyone you think may be useful and come to the map.” He made way to the forty-foot-square chamber whose floor was the “map” of Low Alpha, and waited. Very little of the area had been “mapped,” so far. He felt, as he had so often before, that there was a long, long job ahead. Still, the map was more encouraging to him than its human counterpart some millions of miles above was to its human viewers. Both showed the arc covered by the land cruisers and something of the landscape. The Mesklinites had indicated this in spidery black lines suggesting a sketch of human nerve cells, complete with cell bodies.

  The specific Mesklinite data centered mostly around the spot where the Esket lay. This information, marked in red, had been obtained without direct human assistance. This was one place in the Settlement where there would be no vision transmitter as long as Barlennan was running things.

  Now, however, he focused his attention several feet to the south of the Esket, where there was discouragingly little data in either red or black. The line representing the track o
f the Kwembly looked lonesome. Barlennan had raised his front end as high as was comfortable, bringing his eyes six or seven inches from the floor, and was looking at the map gloomily when the scientists began to arrive. Bendivence was either very optimistic or very pessimistic. The commander couldn’t decide which was the more likely reason for his having called nearly twenty people to the conference. They gathered a few feet from him, reared up and waited politely for his information and questions. He started without preamble.

  “The Kwembly was here at her last report,” he indicated. “It had been crossing a field of snow, water snow, nearly clear of dissolved material but quite dirty according to Don’s science people.”

  “Borndender?” queried someone. Barlennan gestured affirmatively and went on.

  “The snow field started here.” He crawled to a spot nearly four feet northwest of the position marker. “It lies between a couple of mountain ridges, which we have indicated only roughly. Destigmet’s balloons haven’t gotten this far south yet, or at least word hasn’t reached us and Don’s fliers haven’t seen much. Just now, while the Kwembly was stopped for a routine maintenance check, a heavy wind came up, and then a dense fog of pure or nearly pure ammonia. Then, quite suddenly, the temperature rose several degrees and they found themselves afloat, being blown roughly eastward by the wind. We would like explanations and we badly need constructive advice. Why did the temperature go up, and why did the snow melt? Is there any connection between the two? Remember that the highest temperature they mentioned was only about a hundred and three, twenty-six or -seven degrees below the melting point of water. Why the wind? How long is it likely to last? It’s carrying the Kwembly toward the hot regions inside Low Alpha south of the Esket site.” He gestured toward a heavily red-marked section of the floor. “Can we tell how far they’ll be carried? I didn’t want Dondragmer to go out on this trip, and I certainly don’t want to lose him even if we don’t agree completely.