by Hal Clement
“Why not?” cut in Mersereau. “If we could get in touch with natives as we did on Mesklin the project could really get going! We wouldn’t have to depend so completely on — oh.” Aucoin smiled grimly. “Precisely,” he said. “Now you have found a good reason for wondering about Barlennan’s frankness. I’m not saying that he’s an ice-hearted politician who would give up the lives of his men just to keep a hammerlock on the Dhrawn operation, but the Esket’s crew was pretty certainly already beyond rescue when he finally agreed not to send the Kalliff in the same direction.”
“There is another point, though,” Hoffman said thoughtfully. “What?”
“I’m not sure it’s worth mentioning, since we can’t evaluate it; but the Kwembly is commanded by Dondragmer, who is a long-time associate of Barlennan’s and should by ordinary reasoning be an extremely close friend. Is there any chance that his being involved would influence Barl’s judgment about a rescue trip or even make him order one against his better judgment? Like you, I don?t think that caterpillar is just an administrative machine. His cold-bloodedness is purely physical.? “I’ve wondered about that too,” the chief planner admitted. “It surprised me greatly months ago when he let Dondragmer go out at all. I’d gotten the impression that he didn’t want him to take major chances. I didn’t worry too much about ic-certainly no one knows enough about Mesklinite psychology in general or Barlennan’s in particular to base any serious planning on. If anyone does, Ib, it’s your wife, and she can’t or won’t put what she understands about them into words. As you say, we can’t assign weight to the friendship-influence possibility. We just add it to the list of questions. Let me hear any ideas about those crewmen who are presumably frozen under the Kuvmbly and then we really must break up.”
“A fusion converter would keep a good, large heating coil going, and resistors aren’t very complex equipment,” Mersereau pointed out. “Heaters aren’t a very unreasonable piece of equipment on Dhrawn, either. If only-”
“But we didn’t,” interrupted Aucoin. “But we did, if you’d let me finish. There are enough converters with the Kwembly to lift her off the planet if their energy could be applied to such a job. There must be some metal aboard which could be jury-rigged into resistors or arcs. Whether the Mesklinites could operate such gadgets I don’t know. There must be a limit even to their temperature tolerance but we might at least ask if they’ve thought of such a thing.”
“You’re wrong on one point. I know there is very little metal either in their equipment or the supplies on those land-cruisers and I’d be startled if Mesklinite rope turned out to be a conductor. I’m no chemist, but anything bonded as firmly as that stuff must have its electrons pretty well latched in place. By all means check with Dondragmer, though. Easy is presumably still in Comm; she can help you if there are no linguistically broad Mesklinites on duty at the other end. We’re adjourned.” Mersereau nodded, already heading toward the door, and the meeting broke up. Aucoin followed Mersereau through one door; most of the others went other ways. Only Hoffman remained seated at the table. His eyes were focused nowhere in particular, and there was a frown on his face which made him look older than his forty years. He liked Barlennan. He liked Dondragmer even better, as did his wife. He had no grounds for the slightest complaint about the progress of the Dhrawn research, considering the policies he himself had helped set up, nor did the rest of the planners. There was no concrete reason whatever, except a trick of half a century before, to distrust the Mesklinite commander. That he might want to keep hypothetical natives of Dhrawn out of the picture could hardly be given credence. No, certainly not. After all, the problems of transferring responsibility to such beings, even if they existed, for the Dhrawn research project, would cause even more delay, as Barlennan would surely realize. The occasional case of disagreement between explorers and planners was minor. It was the sort of thing which happened ten times as often with, say, Drommians. No, there was no reason to suppose the Mesklinites were already going off on independent plans of their own. Still, Barlennan had not wanted helicopters, though he had finally been persuaded to accept them. He was the same Barlennan who had built and flown in a hot air balloon as his first exercise in applied science. He had not sent relief to the Esket, although all the giant land-cruisers were necessary for the Project and despite the fact that a hundred or so of his people were aboard. He had refused local-range radios, useful as they would obviously be. The argument against them was the sort that a firm-minded teacher might use in a classroom situation, but this was real life and deadly earnest. He had, fifty years before, not only jumped at the chance to acquire alien knowledge; he had maneuvered deliberately to force his non-Mesklinite sponsors to give it to him. Ib Hoffman could not rid himself of the notion that Barlennan was up to something underhanded again. He wondered what Easy thought about it.
7: ICED WAGON
Beerchermarlf and Takoorch, like the rest of the Kwembly’s crew, were taken by surprise when the lake froze. Neither had had any occasion for several hours to look around, since the maze of fine cords on which their attention was focused was considerably more complicated than, say, the rigging of a clipper ship. Both knew exactly what to do, and there was little need for conversation. Even had their eyes wandered from the job, there was little else to see. They were under the immense bulk of their vehicle, roofed by the pneumatic “mattress” which distributed its weight among the trucks, walled partly by the trucks themselves and partly by the blackness of Dhrawn’s night which swallowed everything beyond the range of their little portable lights. So they had not seen, any more than the sailors inside the Kurmbly, the tiny crystals which began to form at the surface of the lake and settle to the bottom, glinting and sparkling in the Kwembly’s floods. They had completed reconnecting on the port row, Number 1, all the way from bow to stern and were working their way forward on Row 2 when they discovered that they were trapped. Takoorch’s battery light was fading a trifle, and he took it over to the nearest fusion converter, which happened to be on a Row 1 truck, for recharging. He was quite startled to find that he couldn’t get at or even see the converter; after a few seconds of fumbling and looking he called Beetchermarlf. It took nearly ten minutes for them to establish that they were completely enclosed by an opaque white wall, impenetrable even to their strength. It had welded all the outer trucks together and filled all the spaces between them from mattress above to cobbles below, nearly three feet of height, on the average. Inside the wall they were still free to move about. Their tools were edged rather than pointed, and too small to make appreciable way against the ice, though it took fully an hour of scraping to convince them both of that. Neither was greatly concerned as yet; obviously the ice was immobilizing the Kwembly, and the rest of the crew would have to dig down to them in the interest of freeing the vehicle if not for the prime purpose of rescue. Of course their supply of life hydrogen was limited, but this meant less to them than a corresponding oxygen shortage would have to a human being. They had at least ten or twelve hours yet of full activity, and when the hydrogen partial pressure dropped below a certain value they would simply lose consciousness. Their body chemistry would slow down more and more, but fifty and perhaps a hundred hours would pass before anything irreversible occurred. One of the reasons for Mesklinite durability, though human biologists had had no chance to find it out, was the remarkable simplicity of their biochemistry. The two were calm enough, in fact, to go back to their assigned work; and they were almost to the front of Row 2 before another discovery was made. This one did perturb them. The ice was creeping inward. It was not coming rapidly, but it was coming. As it happened, neither of them knew any better than Ib Hoffman what being frozen into a block of the stuff was likely to do to them. Neither had the slightest desire to learn. At least there was still light. Not all the power units were on outside trucks, and Takoorch had been able to recharge his battery. This made it possible to make another, very careful search of the boundaries of their prison. Beetchermarlf was hoping
to find unfrozen space either near the bottom or, preferably, near the top of the walls around them. He did not know whether the freezing would have started from the top or the bottom of the pond. He was not familiar, as any human being would have been, with the fact that ice floats on liquid water. This was just as well, since it would have led him to an erroneous conclusion in this instance. The crystals had indeed formed at the top, but they had been denser than the surrounding liquid and had settled, only to redissolve as they reached levels richer in ammonia. This pseudo-convection effect had had the result of robbing the lake rather uniformly of ammonia until it had reached a composition able to freeze almost simultaneously throughout. As a result, the search turned up no open spaces. For some time the two lay between two of the trucks, thinking and occasionally checking to see how far the freezing had progressed. They had no time measuring equipment, and therefore no basis for estimating the speed of the process. Takoorch guessed that it was slowing down; Beetchermarlf was less sure. Occasionally an idea would strike one of them but the other usually managed to find a flaw in it. “We can move some of these stones, the smaller ones,” Takoorch remarked at one point. “Why can’t we dig our way under the ice?”
“Where to?” countered his companion. “The nearest edge of the lake is forty or fifty cables away, or was the last I knew. We couldn’t begin to dig that far in these rocks before our air gave out, even if there was any reason to suppose the freezing didn’t include the water between the rocks underneath. Coming up before the edge wouldn’t get us anywhere.” Takoorch admitted the justice of this with an acquiescent gesture and silence fell while the ice grew a fraction of an inch nearer. Beetchermarlf had the next constructive thought. “These lights must give off some heat, even if we can’t feel it through the suits,” he suddenly exclaimed. “Why shouldn’t they keep the ice from forming near them, and even let us melt our way to the outside?”
“Worth trying,” was Takoorch’s laconic answer. Together they approached the frosty barrier. Beetchermarlf built a small cairn of stones leaning against the ice, and set the light, adjusted for full brightness, at its top. Then both crowded close, their front ends part way up the heap of pebbles, and watched the space between the lamp and the ice. “Come to think of it,” Takoorch remarked as they waited, “our bodies give off some heat, don’t they? Shouldn’t our just being here help melt this stuff?”
“I suppose so.” Beetchermarlf was dubious. “We’d better watch to make sure that it doesn’t freeze at each side and around behind us while we’re waiting here.”
“What will that matter? If it does, it means that we and the light together are enough to fight the freezing and we should be able to melt our way out.”
“That’s true. Watch, though, so we’ll know if that’s happening.” Takoorch gestured agreement. They fell silent again. The older helmsman, however, was not one to endure silence indefinitely, and presently he gave utterance to another idea. “I know our knives didn’t make much impression on the ice, but shouldn’t c it help if we did some scraping right here where it’s nearest the light?” He unclipped one of the blades they carried for general use and reached toward the ice. “Wait a minute!” exclaimed Beetchermarlf. “If you start working there, how are we ever going to know whether the heat is having any effect?”
“If my knife gets us anywhere, who cares whether it’s the heat or the work?” retorted Takoorch. Beetchermarlf found no good answer ready, so he subsided, muttering something about “controlled experiments” while the other Mesklinite went to work with his tiny blade. As it happened, his interference did not spoil the experiment, though it may have delayed slightly the appearance of observable results. Body heat, lamp heat, and knife all together proved unequal to the job; the ice continued to gain. They had to remove the lamps from the cairn at last, and watch the latter slowly become enveloped in the crystalline wall. “It won’t be long now,” Takoorch remarked as he swung the lights around them. “Only two of the power units are free, now. Should we charge up the lights again before they go, or isn’t it worth the trouble?”
“We might as well,” answered Beetchermarlf. “It seems a pity that that’s the only use we can get out of all that power. Four of those things can push the Kuembly around on level ground and I once heard a human being say that one could do it if it could get traction. That certainly could chip ice for us if we could find a way to apply it.? “We can take the power box out easily enough, but what we’d do afterward beats me. The units put out electric current as one choice, but I don’t see how we could shock the ice away. The mechanical torque you can get from them works only on the motor shafts.”
“We’d be more likely to shock ourselves away if we used the current. I don’t know very much about electricity, it was mostly plain mechanics I got in the little time I was at the College, but I know enough of it can kill. Think of something else.” Takoorch endeavored to comply. Like his young companion, he had had only a short period of exposure to alien knowledge; both had volunteered for the Dhrawn project in preference to further classwork. Their knowledge of general physics might have compared fairly well with that of Benj Hoffman when he was ten or twelve years old. Neither was really comfortable in thinking about matters for which no easily visualized model could be furnished. They were not, however, lacking in the ability to think abstractly. Both had heard of heat as representing a lowest common denominator of energy, even if they didn’t picture it as random particle motion. It was Beetchermarlf who first thought of another effect of electricity. “Tak! Remember the explanations we got about not putting too much power into the trucks until the cruiser got moving? The humans said it was possible to snap the treads or damage the motors if we tried to accelerate too faust.”
“That’s right. Quarter power is the limit below a hundred cables per hour.”
“Well, we have the power controls here where we can get at them, and those motors certainly aren’t going to turn. Why not just power this truck and let the motor get as hot as it wants to?”
“What makes you think it will get hot? You don’t know what makes those motors go any more than I do. They didn’t say it would make them hot, just that it was bad for them.”
“I know, but what else could it be? You know that any sort of energy that isn’t used up some other way turns into heat.”
“That doesn’t sound quite right, somehow,” returned the older sailor. “Still, I guess anything is worth trying now. They didn’t say anything about the motor’s wrecking the rest of the ship too; if it ruins us, well, we won’t be much worse off.” Beetchermarlf paused; the thought that he might be endangering the Kwembly hadn’t crossed his mind. The more he thought of it, the less he felt justified in taking the chance. He looked at the relatively tiny power unit nestling between the treads of the nearby truck, and wondered whether such a minute thing could really be a danger to the huge bulk above them. Then he remembered the vastly greater size of the machine which had brought him and his fellows to Dhrawn and realized that the sort of power which could hurl such immense masses through the sky was not to be handled casually. He would never be afraid to use such engines, since he had been given a chance to become familiar with their normal and proper handling; but deliberately misusing one of them was a different story. “You’re right,” he admitted somewhat inaccurately. Takoorch had been, after all, willing to take the chance. “We’ll have to work it differently. Look, if the tracks are free to turn, then we can’t damage the motor or the power box and just stirring up water will warm it.”
“You think so? I remember hearing something like that, but if I can’t break up this ice with my own strength it’s hard to see how simply stirring water is going to do it. Besides, the trucks aren’t free; they’re on the bottom with the Kwembly’s weight on them.”
“Right. You wanted to dig. Start moving rocks; that ice is getting close.” Beetchermarlf set the example and began prying the rounded cobbles from the edges of the treads. It was a hard job even for Mesklinite mus
cles. Smooth as they were, the stones were tightly packed; furthermore when one was moved, there was not too much room in which to put it. The stones under the treads, which were the ones which really had to be shifted, could not even be reached until those at the sides were out of the way. The two labored furiously to clear a ditch around the truck. They were frightened at the time it took. When the ditch was deep enough, they tried to pry stones from under the treads and this was even more discouraging. The Kwembly had a mass of about two hundred tons. On Dhrawn, this meant a weight of sixteen million pounds to distribute among the fifty-six remaining trucks: the mattress did a good job of distributing. Three hundred thousand pounds, even if it is a rather short three hundred thousand, is too much even for a Mesklinite, whose weight, even at Mesklin’s pole, is little over three hundred. It is a great deal even for some eight square feet of caterpillar tread. If Dhrawn’s gravity had not done an equally impressive job of packing its surface materials, the Kwembly and her sister vehicles would probably have sunk to their mattresses before travelling a yard. In other words, the rocks under the tread were held quite firmly. Nothing the two sailors could do would move one of them at all. There was nothing to use as a lever; their ample supplies of spare rope were useless without pulleys; their unaided muscles were pitifully inadequate — a situation still less familiar to them than to races whose mechanical revolution lay a few centuries in the past. The approaching ice, however, was a stimulus to thought. It could also have been a stimulus to panic but neither of the sailors was prone to that form of disintegration. Again, it was Beetchermarlf who led. “Tak, get out from under. We can move those pebbles. Get forward; they’re going to go the other way.” The youngster was climbing the truck as he spoke, and Takoorch grasped the idea at once. He vanished beyond the next-forward truck without a word. Beetchermarlf stretched out along the main body of the drive unit, between the treads. In this foot-wide space, beneath and in front of him, was the recess which held the power converter. This was a rectangular object about the same size as the communicators, with ring-tipped control rods projecting from its surface and guide loops equipped with tiny pulleys at the edges. Lines for remote handling from the bridge were threaded through some of the guides and attached to the rings but the helmsman ignored them. He could see little, since the lights were still on the bottom several feet away and the top of the truck was in shadow; however, he did not need sight. Even clad in an air suit he could handle these levers by touch. Carefully he eased the master reactor control to the “operate” position; then, even more gingerly, started the motors forward. They responded properly; the treads on either side of him moved forward, and a clattering of small, hard objects against each other became audible for a moment. Then this ceased, and the treads began to race. Beetchermarlf instantly cut off the power, and crawled off the truck to see what had happened. The plan had worked, just as a computer program with a logic error works: there is an answer forthcoming but not the one desired. As the helmsman had planned, the treads had scuffed the rocks under them backward; but he had forgotten the effect of the pneumatic mattress above. The truck had settled under its own weight and the downward thrust of the gas pressure until the chassis between the treads had met the bottom. Looking up, Beetchermarlf could see the bulge in the mattress where the entire drive unit had been let down some four inches. Takoorch appeared from his shelter and looked the situation over, but said nothing. There was nothing useful to say. Neither of them could guess how much more give there was to the mattress, and how much farther the truck would have to be let down before it would really hang free, though they knew the details of the Kwemb/y’s construction. The mattress was not a single gas bag but was divided into thirty separate cells, having two trucks in tandem attached to each. The helmsmen knew the details of the attachment-boch had just spent many hours repairing the assemblies — but even the recent display of the Kwembly’s underside with the weight off nearly all the trucks left them very doubtful about how far any one truck could extend by itself. “Well, back to stone lugging,” remarked Takoorch as he worked his nippers under a pebble. “Maybe these have been jarred loose now; otherwise it’s going to be awkward, getting at them only from the ends.”
