by Hal Clement
It was the energy equivalent of an eight-story fall on Earth, and even the Mesklinite was jolted. However, he retained he self-command. A single hoot told those above he had survived without serious injury, and warned them against following in case pride might have furnished an impulse which intelligence certainly would not. The captain, with that order issued, relegated the scientist to the back of his mind and concentrated on the next step.
The nearest rock with enough exposed area to accommodate him was two feet — well over a body length — away, but was at least visible. Better still, another one only slightly off the line to it expose a square inch or so of its surface; and two seconds after analyzing this situation, Dondragmer was two feet closer to the power box and looking for another stopping point. The lone square inch of the stepping stone had been touched by perhaps a dozen feet as the red-and-black length of his body had ricocheted from it to the second rock.
The next stage was more difficult. It was harder to be sure which way to go, since the hull which had been furnished orientation was now barely visible also, there were no more large surfaces as close as the one from which he had come. He hesitated, looking and planning; but before he reached a decision the question was resolved for him. The grumbling sound which had gone on for so many minutes as water exploded into steam against the hot wire and almost instantly collapses again under Dhrawn’s atmospheric pressure abruptly ceased, and Dondragmer knew that he was too late to save the metal. He relaxes immediately and waited where he was while the water cooled, the evaporation slowed, and the fog of ice crystals cleared away. He himself grew uncomfortably warm, and was more than once tempted to return the way he had come but the two-foot climb up an ice overhang with hot water at is foot, which would form part of the journey, made the temptation easy to resist. He waited.
He was still alive when the air cleared and crystals of ice began to grow around the edges of the rocks. He was some six feet from the power unit, and was able to reach it by a rather zigzag course over the cobbles once the way could be seen. He shut off the power controls, and only when that was done did he look around.
His two men had already made their way along the ice cliff to a point about the level with the original front bend of the wire; Dondragmer guessed that this must be where the metal had melted through this time.
In the other direction, under the bulking hull, was a black cavern where the Kwembly’s lights did not reach. The captain had no real wish to enter it; it was very likely that he would find the bodies of his two helmsmen there. His hesitation was observed from above.
“What’s he waiting there at the power box for?” muttered McDevitt. “Oh, I suppose the ice isn’t thick enough for him yet.”
‘That’s not all of it, I’d guess.” Benj’s tone made the meteorologist look sharply away from the screen.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“You must know what’s the matter. Beetch and his friend were under there. They must have been. How could they have gotten away from that hot water? I bet the captain only just thought of it — he’d never have let them use that way if he’d seen what would happen, any more than I would have.”
McDevitt thought rapidly; the boy wouldn’t be convinced, or even comforted, by anything but sounds reasoning, and McDevitt’s soundest reasoning suggested that Benj’s conclusion was probably right. However, he tried.
“It looks bad, but don’t give up. It doesn’t look as though this thing melted its way all the way across under the ship, but it might have; and either way there’s some hope. If it did, the could have got out the other side, which we can’t see; if it didn’t they could have stayed right at the edge of the liquid zone, where the ice could have saved them. Also, they may not have been under there.”
“Water ice save them? I thought you said that this stuff froze because it lost its ammonia, not because the temperature went down. Water ice at its melting point — zero centigrade — would give heatstroke to a Mesklinite.”
“That was my guess,” admitted the have enough measurements of any sort. I admit your little friend may have been killed; but we know so little of what has happened down there that it would be silly to give up hope. Just wait — there’s nothing else to do at this distance anyway. Even Dondragmer is staying put. You can trust him to check as soon as it’s possible.”
Benj restrained himself, and did his best to look for bright possibilities; but the eye he was supposed to be keeping on Stakendee remained fixed on the captain’s image.
Several times Dondragmer could be seen to extend part of his length onto the ice, but each time he drew back again, to the boy’s intense annoyance. At last, however, he seemed satisfied that the ice would hold his weight, and inch by inch extended himself entirely onto the newly frozen surface. Once off the power box he waited for a moment as though expecting something to happen; but the ice held, and he resumed his way toward the side of the Kwembly. The human beings watched, Benj’s fists clenched tightly and even the man more tense than usual.
Of course they could hear nothing. Not even the hoot which suddenly echoed across the ice penetrated the bridge to affect their communicator. They could not even guess why Dondragmer suddenly turned back from the hull as he was about to disappear under it. They could only watch as he raced back across the ice to a point just below his two men and waved excitedly at them, apparently indifferent to whatever there was to be learned about the fate of his helmsman and Benj’s friend.
12
Dondragmer was far from indifferent, but by his standards it was normal to focus attention on a new matter likely to require action rather than clear up an old one where action was unlikely to help. He had not dropped the fate of his men from mind, but when a distant hoot bore the words “Here’s the end of the stream” to him his [program changed abruptly and drastically.
He could not see where the voice was coming from, since he was two feet below the general surface, but Borndender reported glimpses of a light perhaps half a mile away. At the captain’s order, the scientists climbed the hull part way to get a better view, while his assistant went in search of a rope to get the captain out of the ice pit. This took time. The sailors had, with proper professional care, returned the lines used in lowering the radiator bar to their proper places inside the cruiser; and when Skendra, Borndender’s assistant, tried to get through the main lock he found it sealed by a layer of clear ice which had frozen a quarter of an inch thick on the starboard side of the hull, evidently from the vapor emitted by the hot pool. Fortunately most of the holdfasts were projecting far enough through this to be usable, so he was able to climb on up to the bridge lock.
Meanwhile, Borndender called down that there were two lights approaching across the riverbed. At the captain’s order, he howled questions across the thousand-yard gap, and the two listened carefully for answers — even Mesklinite voices had trouble carrying distinct words for such a distance and through two layer of airsuit fabric. By the time Dondragmer was out of the hole, they knew that the approaching men were part of Stakendee’s command which had been ordered to follow down the stream, and that they had reached its end less than a mile from the ship; but until the group actually reached them, no further details could be made out.
Even then, they could no entirely understand it; the description did not match anything familiar to them.
“The river stayed about the same size all the way down,” the sailors reported. “It wasn’t being fed from anywhere, And it didn’t seem to be evaporating. It wound among the stones a lot, when it got down to where they were. Then we began to run into the funniest obstructions. There would be a sort of dam of ice, with the stream running around one end or the other of it. Half as cable or so farther on there’ be another dam, with just the same thing happening. It was as though some of it froze when it met the ice among the stones, but only the beginning part. The water that followed stayed liquid and went on around the dam until it found some ice. The dams would build up to maybe half a body
length high before the following water would find its way around. We reached the last one, where it was still happening, just a few minutes ago. We’d seen the bright cloud rising over the ship before that, and wondered whether we ought to come back in case something was wrong; but we decided to carry out orders at least until the river started l to lead us away from the Kwembly again.”
“Good,” said the captain. “You’re sure the stream wasn’t getting any bigger?”
“So far as we could judge, no.”
“All right. Maybe we have more time than I thought, and it isn’t a forerunner of the same thing that brought us here. I wish I understood why the liquid was freezing in that funny way, though.”
“We’d better check with the human beings,” suggested Borndender, who had no ideas on the matter either, but preferred not to put the fact too bluntly.
“Right. And they’ll want measurements and analyses. I suppose you didn’t bring a sample of that river,” he said, rather than asked, the newcomers.
“No, sire. We had nothing to carry it in.”
“All right. Born, get containers and bring some back; analyze it as well as quickly as you can. One of these men will guide you. I’ll go back to the bridge and bring the humans up to date. The rest of you get tools and start chipping ice so we can use the main lock.”
Dondragmer closed the conversation by starting to climb the ice crusted hull. He waved toward the bridge as he went, assuming that he was being watched and perhaps even recognized.
Benj and McDevitt had managed to keep track of him, though neither found it easy to tell Mesklinites apart, and were waiting eagerly when he reached the bridge to hear what he had to say. Benj in particular had grown even more tense since the search under the cruiser had been interrupted; perhaps the helmsmen had not been there after all — perhaps they had been among the newcomers who had arrived to interrupt the search — perhaps — perhaps…
McDevitt was a patient man by nature and liked the youngster, but even he was getting irritated by the time Dondragmer’s voice reached the station.
The report fascinated the meteorologist, though it was no consolation to his young companion. Benj wanted to interrupt with a question about Beetchermarlf, but knew it would be futile; and when the captain’s account ended, McDevitt immediately began to talk.
“This is not much more than a guess, Captain,” he began, “Though perhaps you scientists will be able to stiffen it when he analyzes those samples. It seems possible that the pool around would was originally an ammonia-water solution — we had evidence of that before — which froze, not because the temperature went down, but because it lost much of its ammonia and its freezing point went up. The fog around you just before the whole trouble started, back on the snowfield, was ammonia, your scientists reported; I’m guessing that it came form the colder areas far to the west. Its droplets began to react with the water ice, and melted it partly by forming an eutectic and partly by releasing heat — you were afraid of something of that sort even before it happened, as I remember. That started your first flood. When the ammonia cloud passed on into Low Alpha the solution around you began to lose ammonia by evaporation, and finally the mixture which was left below its freezing point. I’m guessing that the fog encountered by Stakendee is more ammonia, and provided the material for the rivulet he found. As it meets the water ice near you they dissolve mutually until the mixture is too dilute in ammonia to be liquid any more — this forms the dam your men described, and the liquid ammonia still coming has to find a way around. I would suggest that if you can find a way to divert that stream over to your ship, and if there proves to be enough of it, your melting-out problem would be solved.” Benj, listening in spite of his mood, thought of wax flowing from a guttering candle and freezing first on one front and then another. He wondered wheter the computers would handle the two situations alike, if ammonia and heat were handled the same way in the two problems.
“You mean I shouldn’t worry about a possible flood?” Dondragmer’s voice finally returned.
“I’m guessing not,” replied McDevitt. “If I’m right about this picture, and we’ve been talking it over a lot up here, the fog that Stakendee met should have passed over the snow plain you from — or what’s left of it — and if it were going to cause another flood that should have reached you by now. I suspect the snow, which was high enough to spill into the pass you were washed through, was all used up on the first flood, and that’s why you were finally left stranded where you are. If the new fog hasn’t reached you yet by the way, I think I know the reason.
The place where Stakendee met it is a few feet higher than you are, and air flowing form the west is coming downhill. With Dhrawn’s gravity and that air composition there’d be a terrific foehn effect — adiabatic heating as the pressure rises — and the stuff is probably evaporating just as it gets to the place where Stakendee met it.”
Dondragmer took a while to digest this. For a few seconds after the normal delay time, McDevitt wondered wheter he had made himself clear; then another question came through.
“But if the ammonia fog were simply evaporating, the gas would still be there, and must be in the air around us now. Why isn’t it melting the ice just as effectively as though ii were in liquid drops? Is some physical law operating which I missed in the College?”
“I’m not sure where state and concentration would make all that much difference, just from memory,” admitted the meteorologist. “When Borndender gets the new data up here I’ll feed the whole works into the machine to see wheter this guess of our s is ignoring too many facts. On the basis of what I have now, I still think it’s a reasonable one, but I admit it has its fuzzy aspects. There are just too many variables; with only water they are practically infinite, if you’ll forgive a loose use of the word, and with water and ammonia together the number is squared, if not worse.
“To shift from abstract to concrete, I can see Stakendee’s screen and he’s still going along beside that streamlet in the fog; he hasn’t reached the source, but I haven’t seen any other watercourses feeding in from either side. It’s only a couple of your body-lengths wide, and has stayed about the same all along.”
“That’s a relief,” came the eventual response. I suppose if a real flood were coming that river would be some indication. Very well, I’ll report again as soon as Borndender has his information. Please keep watching Stakendee. I’m going outside again to checked under the hull; I was interrupted before.” The meteorologist had wanted to say more, but was silenced by the realization that Dondragmer would not be there to hear his words by the time they arrived. He may also have been feeling some sympathy for Benj.
They watched eagerly, the man almost as concerned as the boy, for the red-and-blank inchworm to appear on the side of the hull within range of the pickup. It was not visible all the way to the ground, since Dondragmer had to go forward directly under the bride and out of the field of view; but they saw him again near the point where the rope which had been used to get him out a few minutes earlier was still snubbed around one of Borndender’s bending posts.
They watched him swarm down the line into the pit. A Mesklinite hanging on a rope about the thickness of a six-pound nylon fishline, and free to swing pendulum-style in forty Earth gravities, is quite a sight even when the distance he has to climb is not much greater than his own body length. Even Benj stopped thinking about Beetchermarlf for a moment.
The captain was no longer worried about the ice; it was presumably frozen all the way to the bottom by now, and he went straight toward the cruiser without bothering to stay on the stones. He slowed a trifle as he drew near, eyeing the cavity in front of him thoughtfully.
Practically, the Kwembly was still frozen in, of course. The melted area had reached her trucks for a distance of some sixty feet fore and aft, but the ice was still above the mattress beyond those limits and on the port side. Even within that range, the lower part of the treads had still been an inch or two under water when the hea
ter gave out. Beetchermarlf’s control cables had been largely freed, but of those helmsman himself there was no sigh whatever. Dondragmer had no hope of finding the two alive under the Kwembly; they would obviously have emerged long ago had this been the case. The captain would not have offered large odds on the chance of finding bodies, either. Like McDevitt, he knew that there was an unevaluable probability that the crewmen had not been under the hull at all when the freeze-up occurred. There had, after all, been two other unexplained disappearances; Dondragmer’s educated guess at the whereabouts of Kervenser and Reffel was far from a certainty even in his own mind.
It was dark underneath, out of range of the floods. Dondragmer could still see a response to abrupt changes of illumination was a normal adaptation to Mesklin’s eighteen-minute rotation period — but some details escaped him. He saw the condition of the two trucks whose treads had been ruined by the helmsmen’s escape efforts, and he saw the piles of stones they had made in the attempt to confine the hot water in a small area; but he missed the slash in the mattress where the two had taken final refuge.
What he saw made it obvious, however, that at least one of the two missing men had been there for a while. Since the volume which had evidently not frozen at all was small, the most likely guess seemed to be that they had been caught in the encroaching ice after doing the work which could be seen — though it was certainly hard to see just how this could have happened. The captain made a rapid check the full length of the ice-walled cavern, examining every exposed truck for and aft, top and sides. It never occurred to him to look higher. He had, after all, taken part in the building of the huge vehicle; he knew there was nowhere higher to go.
