by Hal Clement
“Was that sound an explosive?” Barlennan asked. For an instant Lackland made no answer. A boom! of very respectable intensity, heard on a planet whose natives are ignorant of explosives and where no other member of the human race is present, can be rather disconcerting, especially when it picks such an incredibly apt time to happen; and to say that Lackland was startled would be putting it mildly. He could not judge accurately the distance or size of the explosion, having heard it through Barlennan’s radio and his own sound discs at the same time; but a distinctly unpleasant suspicion entered his mind after a second or two. “It sounded very much like one,” he answered the Mesklinite’s question somewhat belatedly, even as he started to waddle back around the head of the dead sea monster to where he had left the tank. He rather dreaded what he would find. Barlennan, more curious than ever, followed by his more natural method of travel, crawling. For an instant, as the tank came in sight, Lackland felt an overwhelming relief; but this changed to an equally profound shock as he reached the door of the vehicle. What remained of the floor consisted of upcurled scraps of thin metal, some still attached at the bases of the walls and others tangled among the controls and other interior fittings. The driving machinery, which had been under the floor, was almost completely exposed, and a single glance was enough to tell the dismayed Earthman that it was hopelessly wrecked. Barlennan was intensely interested in the whole phenomenon. “I take it you were carrying some explosive in your tank,” he remarked. “Why did you not use it to get the material you wanted from this animal? And what made it act while it was still in the tank?”
“You have a genius for asking difficult questions,” Lackland replied. “The answer to your first one is that I was not carrying any; and to the second, your guess is as good as mine at this point.”
“But it must have been something you were carrying,” Barlennan pointed out. “Even I can see that whatever it was happened under the floor of your tank, and wanted to get out; and we don’t have things that act like that on Mesklin.”
“Admitting your logic, there was nothing under that floor that I can imagine blowing up,” replied the man. “Electric motors and their accumulators just aren’t explosive. A close examination will undoubtedly show traces of whatever it was if it was in any sort of container, since practically none of the fragments seem to have gone outside the tank?but I have a rather worse problem to solve first, Barl.? “What is that?”
“I am eighteen miles from food supplies, other than what is carried in my armor. The tank is ruined; and if there was ever an Earthman born who could walk eighteen miles in eight-atmosphere heated armor under three gravities, I’m certainly not the one. My air will last indefinitely with these algae gills and enough sunlight, but I’d starve to death before I made the station.”
“Can’t you call your friends on the faster moon, and have them send a rocket to carry you back?”
“I could; probably they already know, if anyone is in the radio room to hear this conversation. The trouble is if I have to get that sort of help Doc Rosten will certainly make me go back to Toorey for the winter; I had trouble enough as it was persuading him to let me stay. He’ll have to hear about the tank, but I want to tell him from the station — after getting back there without his help. There just isn’t energy around here to get me back, though; and even if I could get more food into the containers in this armor without letting your air in, you couldn’t get into the station to get the food.”
“Let’s call my crew, anyway,” Barlennan remarked. “They can use the food that’s here — or as much of it as they can carry. I have another idea too, I think.”
“We are coming, Captain.” Dondragmer’s voice came from the radio, startling Lackland, who had forgotten his arrangement to let each radio hear the others, and startling the commander himself, who had not realized that his mate had learned so much English. “We will be with you in a few days at most; we took the same general direction as the Flyer’s machine when we started.” He gave this information in his native language; Barlennan translated for Lackland’s benefit. “I can see that you won’t be hungry for quite a while,” the man replied, glancing somewhat ruefully at the mountain of meat beside them, “but what was this other idea of yours? Will it help with my problem?”
“A little, I think.” The Mesklinite would have smiled had his mouth been sufficiently flexible. “Will you please step on me?” For several seconds Lackland stood rigid with astonishment at the request; after all, Barlennan looked more like a caterpillar than anything else, and when a man steps on a caterpillar — then he relaxed, and even grinned. “All right, Barl. For a moment I’d forgotten the circumstances.” The Mesklinite had crawled over to his feet during the pause; and without further hesitation Lackland took the requested step. There proved to be only one difficulty. Lackland had a mass of about one hundred sixty pounds. His armor, an engineering miracle in its own way, was about as much more. On Mesklin’s equator, then, man and armor weighed approximately nine hundred fifty pounds — he could not have moved a step without an ingenious servo device in the legs — and this weight was only about a quarter greater than that of Barlennan in the polar regions of his planet. There was no difficulty for the Mesklinite in supporting that much weight; what defeated the attempt was simple geometry. Barlennan was, in general, a cylinder a foot and a half long and two inches in diameter; and it proved a physical impossibility for the armored Earthman to balance on him. The Mesklinite was stumped; this time it was Lackland who thought of a solution. Some of the side plates on the lower part of the tank had been sprung by the blast inside; and under Lackland’s direction Barlennan, with considerable effort, was able to wrench one completely free. It was about two feet wide and six long, and with one end bent up slightly by the native’s powerful nippers, it made an admirable sledge; but Barlennan, on this part of his planet, weighed about three pounds. He simply did not have the necessary traction to tow the device — and the nearest plant which might have served as an anchor was a quarter of a mile away. Lackland was glad that a red face had no particular meaning to the natives of this world, for the sun happened to be in the sky when this particular fiasco occurred. They had been working both day and night, since the smaller sun and the two moons had furnished ample light in the absence of the storm clouds.
5: MAPPING JOB
The crew’s arrival, days later, solved Lackland’s problem almost at once. The mere number of natives, of course, was of little help; twenty-one Mesklinites still did not have traction enough to move the loaded sledge. Barlennan thought of having them carry it, placing a crew member under each corner; and he went to considerable trouble to overcome the normal Mesklinite conditioning against getting under a massive object. When he finally succeeded in this, however, the effort proved futile; the metal plate was not thick enough for that sort of treatment, and buckled under the armored man’s weight so that all but the supported corner was still in contact with the ground. Dondragmer, with no particular comment, spent the time that this test consumed in paying out and attaching together the lines which were normally used with the hunting nets. They proved, in series, more than long enough to reach the nearest plants; and the roots of these growths, normally able to hold against the worst that Mesklin’s winds could offer, furnished all the support needed. Four days later a train of sledges, made from all the accessible plates of the tank, started back toward the Bree with Lackland and a tremendous load of meat aboard; and at a fairly steady rate of a mile an hour, reached the ship in sixty-one days. Two more days of work, with more crew members assisting, got Lackland’s armor through the vegetation growing between the ship and his dome, and delivered him safely at the air lock. It was none too soon; the wind had already picked up to a point where the assisting crew had to use ground lines in getting back to the Bree, and clouds were once again whipping across the sky. Lackland ate, before bothering to report officially what had happened to the tank. He wished he could make the report more complete; he felt somehow that he shoul
d know what had actually happened to the vehicle. It was going to be very difficult to accuse someone on Toorey of inadvertently leaving a cake of gelatine under the tank’s floor. He had actually pressed the call button on the station-to-satellite set when the answer struck him; and when Dr. Rosten?s lined face appeared on the screen he knew just what to say. “Doc, there’s a spot of trouble with the tank.”
“So I understand. Is it electrical or mechanical? Serious?”
“Basically mechanical, though the electrical system had a share. I’m afraid it’s a total loss; what’s left of it is stranded about eighteen miles from here, west, near the beach.”
“Very nice. This planet is costing a good deal of money one way and another. Just what happened — and how did you get back? I don’t think you could walk eighteen miles in armor under that gravity.”
“I didn’t — Barlennan and his crew towed me back. As nearly as I can figure out about the tank, the floor partition between cockpit and engine compartment wasn’t airtight. When I got out to do some investigating, Mesklin’s atmosphere — high-pressure hydrogen — began leaking in and mixing with the normal air under the floor. It did the same in the cockpit, too, of course, but practically all the oxygen was swept out through the door from there and diluted below danger point before anything happened. Underneath — well, there was a spark before the oxygen went.”
“I see. What caused the spark? Did you leave motors running when you went out?”
“Certainly — the steering servos, dynamotors, and so on. I’m glad of it, too; if I hadn’t, the blast would probably have occurred after I got back in and turned them on.”
“Hmph.” The director of the Recovery Force looked a trifle disgruntled. “Did you have to get out at all?” Lackland thanked his stars that Rosten was a biochemist. “I didn’t exactly have to, I suppose. I was getting tissue samples from a six-hundred-foot whale stranded on the beach out there. I thought someone might—”
“Did you bring them back?” snapped Rosten without letting Lackland finish. “I did. Come down for them when you like — and have we another tank you could bring along?”
“We have. I’ll consider letting you have it when winter is over; I think you’ll be safer inside the dome until then. What did you preserve the specimens with?”
“Nothing special — hydrogen — the local air. I supposed that any of our regular preservatives would ruin them from your point of view. You’d better come for them fairly soon; Barlennan says that meat turns poisonous after a few hundred days, so I take it they have micro-organisms here.”
“Be funny if they hadn’t. Stand by; I’ll be down there in a couple of hours.” Rosten broke the connection without further comment about the wrecked tank, for which Lackland felt reasonably thankful. He went to bed, not having slept for nearly twenty-four hours. He was awakened — partially — by the arrival of the rocket. Rosten had come down in person, which was not surprising. He did not even get out of his armor; he took the bottles, which Lackland had left in the air lock to minimize the chance of oxygen contamination, took a look at Lackland, realized his condition, and brusquely ordered him back to bed. “This stuff was probably worth the tank,” he said briefly. “Now get some sleep. You have some more problems to solve — I’ll talk to you again when there’s a chance you’ll remember what I say. See you later.” The airlock door closed behind him. Lackland did not, actually, remember Rosten’s parting remarks; but he was reminded, many hours later, when he had slept and eaten once more. “This winter, when Barlennan can’t hope to travel, will last only another three and a half months,” the assistant director started almost without preamble. “We have several reams of telephotos up here which are not actually fitted into a map, although they’ve been collated as far as general location is concerned. We couldn’t make a real map because of interpretation difficulties. Your job for the rest of this winter will be to get in a huddle with those photos and your friend Barlennan, turn them into a usable map, and decide on a route which will take him most quickly to the material we want to salvage.”
“But Barlennan doesn’t want to get there quickly. This is an exploring-trading voyage as far as he’s concerned, and we’re just an incident. All we’ve been able to offer him in return for that much help is a running sequence of weather reports, to help in his normal business.”
“I realize that. That’s why you’re down there, if you remember; you’re supposed to be a diplomat. I don’t expect miracles — none of us do — and we certainly want Barlennan to stay on good terms with us; but there’s two billion dollars’ worth of special equipment on that rocket that couldn’t leave the pole, and recordings that are literally priceless—”
“I know, and I’ll do my best,” Lackland cut in, “but I could never make the importance of it clear to a native — and I don’t mean to belittle Batlennan’s intelligence; he just hasn’t the background. You keep an eye out for breaks in these winter storms, so he can come up here and study the pictures whenever possible.”
“Couldn’t you rig some sort of outside shelter next to a window, so he could stay up even during bad weather?”
“I suggested that once, and he won’t leave his ship and crew at such times. I see his point.”
“I suppose I do too. Well, do the best that you can — you know what it means. We should be able to learn more about gravity from that stuff than anyone since Einstein.” Rosten signed off, and the winter’s work began. The grounded research rocket, which had landed under remote control near Mesklin?s south pole and had failed to take off after presumably recording its data, had long since been located by its telemetering transmitters. Choosing a sea and/or land route to it from the vicinity of the Bree’s winter quarters, however, was another matter. The ocean travel was not too bad; some forty or forty-five thousand miles of coastal travel, nearly half of it in waters already known to Barlennan’s people, would bring the salvage crew as close to the helpless machine as this particular chain of oceans ever got. That, unfortunately, was some four thousand miles; and there simply were no large rivers near that section of coast which would shorten the overland distance significantly. There was such a stream, easily navigable by a vessel like the Bree, passing within fifty miles of the desired spot; but it emptied into an ocean which had no visible connection with that which Barlennan’s people sailed. The latter was a long, narrow, highly irregular chain of seas extending from somewhat north of the equator in the general neighborhood of Lackland’s station almost to the equator on the opposite side of the planet, passing fairly close to the south pole on the way — fairly close, that is, as distances on Mesklin went. The other sea, into which the river near the rocket emptied, was broader and more regular in outline; the river mouth in question was at about its southernmost point, and it also extended to and past the equator, merging at last with the northern icecap. It lay to the east of the first ocean chain, and appeared to be separated from it by a narrow isthmus extending from pole to equator — narrow, again by Mesklinite standards. As the photographs were gradually pieced together, Lackland decided that the isthmus varied from about two to nearly seven thousand miles in width. “What we could use, Barl, is a passage from one of these seas into the other,” remarked Lackland one day. The Mesklinite, sprawled comfortably on his ledge outside the window, gestured agreement silently. It was past midwinter now, and the greater sun was becoming perceptibly dimmer as it arched on its swift path across the sky to the north. “Are you sure that your people know of none? After all, most of these pictures were taken in the fall, and you say that the ocean level is much higher in the spring.”
“We know of none, at any season,” replied the captain. “We know something, but not much, of the ocean you speak of; there are too many different nations on the land between for very much contact to take place. A single caravan would be a couple of years on the journey, and as a rule they don’t travel that far. Goods pass through many hands on such a trip, and it’s a little hard to learn much about their origin b
y the time our traders see them in the western seaports of the isthmus. If any passage such as we would like exists at all, it must be here near the Rim where the lands are almost completely unexplored. Our map — the one you and I are making — does not go far enough yet. In any case, there is no such passage south of here during the autumn; I have been along the entire coast line as it was then, remember. Perhaps, however, this very coast reaches over to the other sea; we have followed it eastward for several thousand miles, and simply do not know how much farther it goes.? “As I remember, it curves north again a couple of thousand miles past the outer cape, Bart — but of course that was in the autumn, too, when I saw it. It’s going to be quite troublesome, this business of making a usable map of your world. It changes too much. I’d be tempted to wait until next autumn so that at least we could use the map we made, but that’s four of my years away. I can’t stay here that long.”
