Star Light m-2

by Hal Clement

  Both he and Reffel had also spent some uncomfortable hours before concluding, from the lack of appropriate comment, that Reffel had shuttered his vision set quickly enough after coming within sight of the Gwelf.

  In any event, Dondragmer and Kabremm had at last achieved almost direct communication, and had been able to coordinate what they would say and do if there were any further repercussions from Easy’s recognition. One load was off the captain’s mind. However, he was still taking steps connected with that mistake.

  The cry of “Beetch!” in Benj’s unmistakable voice distracted him from one of these steps. He had been checking over his crew for people who looked as much as possible like Kabremm. The job was complicated by the fact that he had not seen the other officer for several months. Dondragmer had not yet had time to visit the Gwelf Kabremm would come no closer to the camp for any reason, and Dondragmer had never known him particularly well anyway. His plan was to have all crewmen who might reasonably be mistaken for the Esket’s first officer appear unobtrusively and casually but frequently in the field of view of the vision sets. Anything likely to undermine the certainty of Easy Hoffman that she had seen Kabremm was probably worth trying.

  However, the fate of the Kwembly and his helmsmen had never been very far from the captain’s mind in the twelve hours since his cruiser’s lights had vanished, and at the sound from the speaker he snapped to full attention.

  “Captain!” the boy’s voice continued. “Two Mesklinites have just appeared and are climbing up the hull of the Kwembly. They came out of the water; they must have been somewhere underneath all the time, even if you couldn’t find them. It couldn’t be anyone but Beetch and Tak. I can’t talk to them until they get to the bridge, of course, but it looks as though we might get your ship back after all. Two men can drive it, can’t they?”

  Dondragmer’s mind raced. He had not blamed himself for abandoning the cruiser, even though the flood had been such an anticlimax. It had been the most reasonable decision at the time and with the available knowledge. By the time the actual nature of the new flood had been clear, and it was obvious that they could have remained in the cruiser with perfect safety it had been impossible to get back. Being a Mesklinite, the captain had wasted no time on thoughts of the “if only?’ variety. He had known when he left his vehicle that the chances of getting back were rather small, and when she had drifted downstream intact instead of a shattered ruin they had grown smaller. Not quite to zero, perhaps, but not large enough to take seriously any more.

  Now suddenly they had expanded again. The Kwembly was not only usable, but his helmsmen were alive and aboard her. Something might be done, if…

  “Benj!” Dondragmer spoke as his thoughts reached this point. “Will you please get your technical men to determine as closely as they can just how far from us the Kwembly is now? It is perfectly possible for Beetchermarlf to drive her alone, though there are other problems in the way of general maintenance which will keep him and Takoorch busy. However, they should be able to manage. In any case, we must find out whether the distance involved is fifty miles or a thousand. I doubt the latter, since I don’t think this river could have carried them so far in twelve hours, but we’ll have to know. Get your people at it, and please tell Barlennan what is happening.”

  Benj obeyed quickly and efficiently. He was no longer overtired, worried, and resentful. With the abandonment of the Kwembly twelve hours before he had given up hope for his friend’s life and had left the communication room to get some long overdue sleep. He had not expected to be able to accomplish this, but his own body chemistry had fooled him. Nine hours later he had returned to his regular duties in the aerology laboratory. It had been chance alone which had brought him back to the screens within a few minutes of the helmsmen’s emergence. He had been sent by McDevitt to collect general data from the other cruisers, but had lingered for a few minutes to watch at the Kwembly station. The weather man had come to depend heavily on Benj’s knowledge of the Mesklinite language.

  The sleep, and the sudden discovery that Beetchermarlf was alive after all, combined to dispose of Benj’s lingering resentment of Dondragmer’s policy. He acknowledged the captain’s request, called his mother to take his place, and headed for the laboratory decks as rapidly as his muscles would take him up the ladders.

  Easy, who had also had some sleep, reported Benj’s departure and her own presence to Dondragmer, briefed Barlennan as requested, and switched back to the captain with a question of her own.

  “That’s two of your missing men. Do you think there is still any chance of finding your helicopter pilots?”

  Dondragmer almost slipped on his answer, carefully as he picked his words. He knew, of course, where Reffel was, since messengers had been passing steadily between the camp and the Gwelf but Kervenser, to his disappointment, had not been seen by the crew of the dirigible or anyone else. His disappearance was perfectly genuine, and the captain now regarded his chances for survival as even lower than those of the Kwembly pair an hour before. It was safe, of course, to talk about this; his slip consisted of failing to mention Reffel at all. The Stennish forms equivalent to “him” and “them” were as distinct as the human ones, and several times Dondragmer caught himself using the former when talking about his lost pilots. Easy seemed not to notice, but he wondered afterward.

  “It is hard to judge. I have not seen either one. If he went down in the area now flooded it is hard to see how they could be alive now. It is very unfortunate, not only because of the men themselves but because with even one of the helicopters we might be able to transfer more men to the Kwembly and get her back here more easily. Of course most of the equipment could not be carried that way; on the other hand, if it turns out that the two men cannot bring the cruiser back here for any reason, having one of the fliers could make a great difference to them. It is a pity that your scientists cannot locate the transmitter which Reffel was carrying, as they can the one on the Kwembly.”

  “You’re not the first to feel that way,” agreed Easy. The matter had been brought up shortly after Reffel’s disappearance. “I don’t know enough about the machines to tell why the signal strength depends on the picture brightness; I always thought a carrier wave was a carrier wave; but that seems to be it. Either Reffel’s set is in total darkness or it has been destroyed.

  “I see your life-support equipment is set up and working.”

  The last sentence was not entirely an effort of Easy’s to change the subject; it was her first good look at the equipment in question, and she was genuinely curious about it. It consisted of scores, perhaps over a hundred, of square transparent tanks covering altogether a dozen square yards, each about a third full of liquid, with the nearly pure hydrogen which constituted Mesklinite air bubbling through it. A power unit operated the lights which shone on the tanks, but the pumps which kept the gas circulating were muscle-driven. The vegetation which actually oxidized the saturated hydrocarbons of Mesklinite biological waste and gave off free hydrogen was represented by a variety of unicellular species corresponding as nearly as might be expected to terrestrial algae. They had been selected for edibility, though not, as Easy had been given to understand, for taste. The sections of the support equipment which used higher plants and produced the equivalent of fruit and vegetables were too bulky to move from the cruiser.

  Easy did not know how the non-gaseous items in the biological cycle were gotten into and out of the tanks, but she could see the charging of air suit cartridges. This was a matter of muscle-driven pumping again, squeezing hydrogen into tanks which contained slugs of porous solid. This material was another strictly non-Mesklinite product, a piece of molecular architecture vaguely analogous to zeolite in structure, which adsorbed hydrogen on the inner walls of its structural channels and, within a wide temperature range, maintained an equilibrium partial pressure with the gas which was compatible with Mesklinite metabolic needs.

  Dondragmer answered Easy’s remark. “Yes, we have just about
enough food and air. The real problem is what to do. We have saved very little of your planetological equipment; we can’t carry on your work. Conceivably we might make our way back to the Settlement on foot, but we’d have to carry the life-support material by stages. That would mean setting up a camp only a few miles from here, transferring the equipment, recharging the air cartridges after cycling has resumed, and then repeating the process indefinitely. Since the distance to the settlement is about thirty thousand, excuse me, in your numbers about twelve thousand, of your miles, it would take us years to get there: that’s no metaphor, nor do I mean your short years. If we’re to be any further use to your project, we really must get the Kwembly back here.”

  Easy could only agree, though she could see an alternative which the captain had not mentioned. Of course, Aucoin would disapprove, or would he, under the circumstances? A trained and efficient exploring crew represented quite an investment, too. That might be a useful line to follow.

  It was several more minutes before Benj returned with his information, and incidentally with a following of interested scientists.

  “Captain,” he called, “the Kwembly is still moving, though not very fast, something like twenty cables an hour. She is located, or was six minutes ago, 310.71 miles from your transmitter, in our figures. In your numbers and units that’s 233,750 cables. There’s a small error if there’s much difference in elevation. That’s great circle distance; we don’t have too good an idea of the length of the river, though they have about twenty position readings taken along it since your ship started drifting, so there’s a rough river map up in the lab.”

  “Thank you,” came the captain’s answer in due course. “Are you in verbal contact with the helmsmen yet?”

  “Not yet, but they’ve gone inside. I’m sure they’ll find the communicator on the bridge pretty soon, though I suppose there are other places they’d want to check first. The air must be pretty low in their suits.”

  This was perfectly correct. It took the helmsmen only a few minutes to ascertain that the cruiser was deserted, and to note that much of the life-support equipment was gone; but this left them with the need to check the air now aboard for contamination with oxygen from outside. Neither of them knew enough basic chemistry to invent a test, and neither was familiar with the routine ones used by Borndender and his colleagues. They were considering the rather drastic procedure of testing by smell when it occurred to Beetchermarlf that a communicator might have been left aboard for scientific reasons, and that the human beings might be of help. There was none in the laboratory, but the bridge was the next most likely spot, and Beetchermarlf’s voice was on its way up to the station some ten minutes after the helmsmen had come aboard.

  Benj postponed greetings when he heard Beetchermarlf’s question, and relayed it at once to Dondragmer. The captain called his scientists and outlined the situation, and for over half an hour the relay was very busy: Borndender explained things, and Beetchermarlf repeated the explanations, then went to the lab to examine material and equipment, then came back to the bridge to make sure of some minor point…

  Eventually both parties in the conversation felt sure that the instructions had been understood. Benj, at its pivot point, was nearly sure. He knew enough physics and chemistry himself to judge that nothing was likely to blow up if Beetch made a mistake; his only worry was that his friend might perform the tests sloppily and so miss a dangerous amount of oxygen. Was the risk simply one of poisoning, or did hydrogen oxygen mixtures present other dangers? He wasn’t quite sure; hydrogen-oxygen mixtures have other qualities. He remained rather tense until Beetchermarlf returned to the bridge with the report that both tests were complete. The catalyst which disposed of free oxygen by accelerating its reaction with ammonia was still active, and the ammonia-vapor concentration in the ship’s air was high enough to give it something to work on. The helmsmen had already removed their air-suits and neither could smell any oxygen, though, as with human beings and hydrogen sulfide, smell is not always a reliable test.

  At least, the two could live on board for a time. One of their first acts had been to “hand”-pump the feed tank which kept air bubbling through the life-support medium, and to satisfy themselves that most of the plants were still alive. The next problem was navigation.

  Benj told his friend as much as possible about his location, that of the rest of the crew, and the Kwembly’s present rate and direction of travel. There was no problem about using the information. Beetchermarlf could determine direction easily enough. The stars were visible and he had a perfectly good magnetic compass. Dhrawn’s magnetic field was a good deal stronger than Earth’s, to the consternation of the scientists who had long since taken for granted a correlation between magnetic field and rotation rate for ordinary planets.

  The discussion which produced a detailed operation plan was shorter than the one preceding the oxygen test, though it still involved the long relay. Neither Dondragmer nor the helmsmen had any serious doubts about what to do or how to do it.

  Beetchermarlf was far younger than Takoorch, but there seemed no question as to who was in charge aboard. The fact that Benj always signaled Beetch by name, rather than signaling the Kwembly formally, may have contributed to the young one’s authority. Easy and several of the other human beings suspected that Takoorch, in spite of his willingness to discuss his own past accomplishments, was in no great hurry to take on too much responsibility. He tended to agree with Beetchermarlf’s suggestions either at once or after only token arguments.

  “We’re still adrift, and unless this river has some very funny loops farther down we’ll never get any closer to the others with its help,” the younger Mesklinite summarized at last. “The first job will be to get paddles on some of the powered trucks. Trying to do it with all of them will take forever; a couple of outboard-row ones aft, and maybe a central one forward should give control. With power available on other drivers we can either pull off or get safely ashore if we run aground. Tak and I will go outside and start work right now. You keep an eye on us as much as you can, Benj; we’ll leave the set where it is.”

  Beetchermarlf did not wait for an answer. He and his companion suited up once more and broke out the paddles which were designed to be pinned onto the treads of the drivers. These had been tested on Mesklin but had never yet been used on Dhrawn; no one really knew how well they would work. Their area was small, since there was little clearance for them above the trucks, and some of that small area was taken up by a plastic shield designed to fold them flat as they were riding forward on the top side of the trucks. However, it had been proved that they would supply some thrust. What this would accomplish remained to be seen; the Kwembly was floating higher in the ammonia-water solution of Dhrawn, of course, than she had in the liquid hydrocarbon ocean of the world where she had been made.

  Installation of the fins and shields was a long and awkward job for two workers. The pieces could be taken out only one at a time, since there was nowhere to put them down with the cruiser afloat. Safety lines persistently got in the way. Mesklinite pincers are rather less effective handling organs than are human fingers, though this is somewhat offset by the fact that their owner can use all four pairs of them simultaneously and in coordination — he has no asymmetry corresponding to human right- or left-handedness.

  The need for artificial lights was still another bother. As it turned out, getting twelve paddles and one shield on each of three drivers took a total of almost fifteen hours. It could, Beetchermarlf assured Benj, have been accomplished in two with four workers on each truck.

  By this time the trackers had learned that the Kwembly was not getting any farther from the camp, though she was still moving. Apparently she had been caught in an eddy some four miles in diameter. Beetchermarlf took advantage of this when he was finally ready to apply power; he waited until the human analysts could tell him that he was being carried south before he set the three finned trucks running. For some seconds it was not apparent that
the power was doing any good; then, very slowly, helmsmen and humans alike saw that the great hull was moving gently forward. The Mesklinites could see from the bridge a feeble excuse for a bow wave; the human beings, looking aft, were able to detect small ripples spreading back from the sides. Beetchermarlf swung his helm hard over to bring the bow in line with Sol and Fomalhaut. For nearly half a minute he was left wondering whether there would be any response; then the stars began to swing overhead as the long hull swerved majestically. Once started it was hard to stop; he over-controlled many times and for a period of many minutes, sometimes by as much as a full right angle, before getting the feel of the vessel. Then for nearly an hour he managed to hold a southerly heading, though he had no idea of his actual course at first. He could guess from the earlier information that the eddy would be bearing him in the same direction at the start, but then it would presumably carry him eastward.

  It was some time, however, before the directional antennae on the shadow satellites and the computers in the station could confirm this guess. About the time they did, the Kwembly ran gently aground.