Still River

by Hal Clement

  “But that part wouldn’t have been under the surface,” Molly pointed out. “How fast are we going now? Can you judge when we should get back to that place?”

  “Not too well. Even if I’d seen the lake before, it really hasn’t any features to stick in memory.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Molly. “What’s this stuff ahead of us?” Carol indicated the direction with her light but said nothing until they had drawn level with what looked like a patch of tall grass blades sticking through the surface of the liquid. Still silent, she took hold of one of them and tried to break it off.

  “Tough and slippery,” she reported. “Can you get a grip on it, Mol?” The Human tried, and after some effort managed to pull one of the stalks loose from whatever was holding it below. By this time, several voices were wanting to know what was going on, Charley’s by no means the loudest. Molly explained briefly; she had handed her specimen to the Shervah, who was far too busy pulling it up the rest of the way and examining its base to talk to anyone.

  “Something like swamp grass”—she had to be more explicit in description—“growing from the bottom of the lake. It’s getting thicker as we go along. It must have started since Carol and I passed, probably since the lake filled. Something has changed the flow pattern down here, and the biology. I wish I could guess which was cause and which effect. Like it or not, Joe, there is complex life here, and I’d guess it’s tied in with Enigma’s seasons in some way.”

  “Is it interfering with your guide rope?” asked Joe, with his usual grasp of essentials.

  “It seems to be dragging more, as though something were holding it to the bottom,” replied Molly. “If I did lose my hold on it, it would be rather a nuisance; maybe you should take it, too, Carol, and just back me up. Put three or four meters between us; then I can warn you if something takes me by surprise and I lose it.”

  “Good idea.” The smaller student, without really taking her attention from the grass blade she held in one hand and examined with one eye, worked her robot behind the other close enough to let her take hold of the cord trailing from her friend’s glove; then she fell back a little, as suggested. Molly, of course, was still getting whatever tension was on the line.

  “Any worse?” asked the Shervah after a minute or two. “I think so, but the change is very gradual.”

  “Troubles?” came Charley’s voice.

  “Oh, no,” the Human reassured him. “The rope’s sticking to the bottom of this puddle, or maybe to the grass, a little, but we’re in no danger of losing it. We’ll be under the drop point soon.”

  “No, we won’t,” said Carol suddenly.

  “What?”

  “We’ve passed it. Look ahead.” Molly sent the beam of her light into the region that the red-sun native could already see clearly enough.

  The cave wall was a dozen meters ahead of them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Datum Three: Jenny

  It seemed a pity to have to be so quick. Hours or days would have been better, to look over the caves, decide something of the life pattern, and form some idea of a logical basis for selecting specimens. Still, she’d be back, of course. Jenny slipped out of her mapper. It was tempting to try to walk on only the back three or four pairs of legs in this trivial gravity, and one could almost balance erect, Human or Shervah style, but it really took too much attention. It must be convenient to have eyes so far from the ground and be able to see so far without making a climbing or erecting project out of it; but on the other hand, it must be a nuisance to have to bend over or fold those long, rigid legs in order to give a close examination to something on the ground. Use what you have.

  And there was work to do; one could philosophize later, though at least this was a time and place where one’s theorizing could hardly result in embarrassment. She remembered with sympathetic amusement the degree holder who had stressed, during a lecture on, if she recalled correctly, Fire’s inner planet Diamond, the universal tendency for the eyes of animals to be located close to their mouths. The unfortunate speaker had then noticed Joe in his audience. The Nethneen’s environmental armor hid the fact that his mouth was at the lower pole of his nearly spherical body, but memory had been enough.

  But this wasn’t work.

  There were lots of things growing here, but nothing moving. That did not mean, of course, that the things were all plants; it was already obvious that something radically different from the respiration-photosynthesis cycle of a typical sun-circling planet must be going on here. Jenny, like any imaginative being, was hypothesizing well ahead of data.

  The growths in the patch which had caught her eye, only a meter or two from the mapper, were pulpy things which Molly would have compared to multiple links of sausage, some growing upward and some extending in segments along the cave floor. Jenny carefully sliced off end segments from a low and a high branch and stowed them in separate specimen cans. Colorless—to her eyes—ichor flowed copiously from the cut ends; she hoped she had not done excessive damage to the creature, and watched for half a minute, worried. If there were no animals, there might be no evolutionary provision for dealing with mechanical damage.

  Then the penultimate segment shrank in on itself, the open end was pulled out of sight, and the flow ceased. The Rimmore went on, satisfied.

  She could not budget much time; she was back at the mapper in ten minutes, specimen cans full. There was a puddle of material, presumably the spilled ichor, between the spot where she had made her first collection and the robot itself. Protected by her armor, she gave little thought to stepping in it; of course it might not be a good idea to contaminate the outside of her protective suit—but she would be cleaning it off when she got back to the tent, anyway.

  The unexpected explosion hurled her into the air, completely over her robot, and sent the latter rolling sideways—she fortunately had powered it down completely when she emerged. If it had tried to hold position against the blast ...

  Jenny tested the last six legs on her left side, some of which were numb and some stinging from the shock. The armor had apparently done its job. She righted the robot, entered it, and checked its controls. Finding with relief that all was operating properly, she set out for the surface.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Datum Four: Charley

  It was a jolt to his faith. The calm certainty that the Faculty would never allow anything serious to happen to a student had kept Charley steady through all of Enigma’s unpleasant treatment of its visitors. When Joe had blown away, it had been frightening for a moment; when Carol had been trapped helplessly outside and had to be rescued, he had pictured himself in the same predicament. These had been tests, of course; students were supposed to solve them, to get out of the difficulty by their own ingenuity and intelligence. Joe and Carol hadn’t passed, and would no doubt have to face others.

  The trouble was that Charley himself wasn’t sure what he would have done in either of those situations. He could foresee some of the tests—though perhaps it had been a mistake to mention the probable failure of the boat. Maybe they’d skip that now. Maybe he should be more independent of the Human. She was pleasant, and apparently imaginative, but that could be explained if she were the source of the test problems, or the observer who was grading them.

  One couldn’t be sure about that. There was reason to think it was Molly—but then there was Joe. Very different. Looked practically normal, if he were only larger and lacked those odd paired eyes and didn’t seem to be made of rubber. How he dared to move around with no shell—maybe that had something to do with being the first victim of a failed test. But that failure didn’t need to be real—

  Would they realize that Charley’s courage was really just faith? Would they have a test designed to undermine that?

  He shouldn’t think about that too much. The assigned problem about the planet was where his attention should stay. Worrying too much about what lay behind the assignment could unbalance anyone. Just do the job as it was planned, w
ith any changes the extra tests might demand, and stop worrying about what the Faculty thought. If he didn’t get rated this time, he could always try again.

  He wondered what Molly’s real rating was.

  Or Joe’s.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Of Course Carol’s Right

  “Joe!” Neither of the women even knew who had called out first, and neither was greatly calmed by the Nethneen’s placid response. “Yes?”

  “Are you still getting any sort of position on us?”

  “Yes. As you approached the surface once more, readings got clearer. I still can’t trust them very well, though; the effect of the rock on direction and intensity…”

  “But surely we’re not too far from where we were!” It was Molly who asked.

  “Not as far as I can tell. Will you clarify what has happened down there?”

  The Human did so, summarizing events tersely.

  “Any explanation?” asked Jenny at the end. “It’s hard to believe anything has been moving the rope around, and a lot harder to suppose a new cave wall has formed.”

  “One.” Molly spoke, after glancing at her companion. “The rope broke or was broken somewhere above and fell into the pool. For some time we’ve been dragging the bight and have now completely crossed the cavern.”

  “Wouldn’t you have noticed that the line was slanting to your rear—that you were holding a bight—as you traveled?”

  “I did. I assumed it was due to our speed. We were in too much of a hurry, I guess,” replied Molly. “Carol wouldn’t have noticed anything after we found that grass.”

  There were several seconds of thoughtful silence.

  “That seems to fit what we know of the facts,” Joe admitted finally. “The problem would now seem to be finding your entry tunnel without the aid of either the rope or Carol’s memory. There could be a good many such passages, of course; it’s looking more and more as though you had quite a labyrinth down there. If Charley’s suggestion about kames is right, Enigma’s crust could be riddled with those caves; and if they’re connected enough for air currents to travel freely, there’s a real problem.”

  “We’ll have the wind,” Carol pointed out. “We’d have the sound of the storm, but that seems to have died out pretty well. I take it it’s ended up there.”

  “No, sand and dust are still blowing strongly. Visibility is very poor. When you get back to the surface, you’ll have to be careful not to blow away as I did. All right, you’d better send the robots upward at one meter per second for six hundred fifty seconds—that will bring you to the level of the original entry tunnel…”

  “Maybe. We don’t know that the lake surface is at the level of Molly’s first stop down here.”

  “Of course. Well, you’ll still be somewhere near it, I’d think.”

  “Could be. But there’s another point. I don’t like the idea of moving from one robot to the other to reset their controls with a drop like that underneath. I might conceivably live through such a fall in this gravity, especially with a splash instead of a smash at the bottom, but if I did lose my hold while transferring, Molly and I would both be in trouble. I hate to suggest leaving one of the machines here even for a little while, but it’s going to be a lot more practical for us to ride just one of them up.”

  “You have plenty of rope,” Charley cut in testily. “Why should you be worried about falling? You could tie a safety line to each machine and another one to Molly, so you wouldn’t even have to climb up by yourself if you did fall.”

  “And if I set up even a small difference in the flight courses of the robots, I could be breaking the ropes or pulling myself apart with no chance to correct it. Joe’s machines are too independent of outside influence. No, thanks, Charley.”

  Molly wondered fleetingly how much of this objection represented a serious worry of Carol’s and how much was reluctance to be corrected by the Kantrick. Even Joe hesitated before agreeing, but he did agree. Moments later, Molly had moved over to the Shervah’s robot and was lashing herself to it while her little friend worked the inside keys. Before the knots were finished, they were rising. At Carol’s suggestion, the Human kept playing her light on the nearby wall, and the smaller woman kept them keyed out of contact with it.

  At what should have been about the right height, Carol stopped their ascent. The “wall” was not yet quite a ceiling, but had developed enough overhang to permit argument on the point. Distractingly, it was now covered with patches of something that reminded Molly of moss. The Shervah sent them drifting away from it reluctantly, until the rock was scarcely visible in their lights, and reset the machine to move downwind.

  In the boat, Joe was hurrying as much as he dared on the final details of the mapping robot. Actual construction was no problem with the shop resources available, but even he was being corrupted by the notion that no possible emergency should be left unconsidered. He did not, as it happened, think of the facility as being particularly complete; it was the sort of thing one had in an auxiliary spacecraft. In a typical mechanical laboratory on any of the School planets he could have built a copy of the boat itself, complete with shop, with a few minutes of control adjustment and an hour’s waiting. He would have been disappointed in an adolescent of his own or any other supposedly intelligent species who couldn’t. He would, of course, have been a little quicker and less clumsy without the environment armor, thin as this was; but being Joe, he gave no thought to the negative aspects of the situation.

  He kept adding equipment as thoughts occurred to him. He was genuinely concerned by now about the danger to the two explorers, and had put his own wind-mapping project well into the back of his mind.

  This was unfortunate, as Molly was to point out later, though the data probably could not have been interpreted until later anyway.

  Charley, without consulting anyone, had grounded the boat as nearly as he could manage to the point where Carol had attached her safety rope, but could see no sign of it through the blowing sand. He did not seriously consider emerging to make a personal search, but remained at the keys, straining his memory for any sort of handling equipment on board that might substitute for him to find the line and be sent along it to the point where the break had presumably occurred. A light left there, or even carried farther along the passage if there were no ambiguity about the path, might help the women identify the right tunnel.

  Jenny, also without consulting anyone, had made another half kilometer of safety cord and was checking her armor with the intention of doing personally what Charley wanted to do by mechanical proxy. With her build, wind wouldn’t get too much grip on her, she kept telling herself; and as long as she was firmly attached to the ship itself she couldn’t blow too far even if it did. Unlike Joe, she came from a world where the concept of wind was very real to its people, and she was realistically scared; but if her friends were out of the physical touch Carol had so sensibly planned, something would have to be done. If anyone could climb that hill, it would be a Rimmore—maybe it would have to be from the upwind side, but she’d make it. Jenny checked her armor and made sure she had an extra light.

  Charley knew, of course, when the air lock opened—he was preoccupied but still watching his instrument banks. His screen coverage did not include the lock area, and he wondered for a moment whether Joe had finished the mapping robot and were testing it without reporting to anyone. This seemed very unlike the Nethneen, but before Charley could decide on the propriety of interrupting work with a question, Jenny flowed into the field of one of his instruments. She was barely visible, half buried in sand, her numerous legs almost entirely out of sight as they worked her long body forward.

  For just a moment her fellow student wondered about her sanity; then he caught a glimpse of the rope extending back toward the ship, bowed by the wind, and was quick enough on the uptake to grasp the whole plan before bursting into speech. When he did say anything, it was calm advice.

  “If you’re just heading for Molly’s hill
, Jenny, about five grads to your left would be better. If you’re hoping to intercept Carol’s rope before you get there, I’m not so sure, but would guess about as much to your right.”

  “I was thinking mainly of the hill” was the reply.

  “The rope would help you climb it,” pointed out the Kantrick.

  Jenny had little of Carol’s impatience and superiority where Charley was concerned. “Thanks; I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose the real question is whether I’m likely to lose more time hunting for the rope in this sandstorm than I’ll save by finding it. I’ll try your shift to the right; the hill is big enough so that won’t slow me down much in getting to it.”

  “Jenny, are you really outside?”

  “Yes, Joe. I am not blowing away, though in this disgusting gravity I feel as though I ought to, but I have a rope connecting me to the boat if I do.”

  “Please come back! The robot is almost finished, and it will carry riders. You can take it on the track of the others much more safely.”

  “It isn’t tested yet. You’d better combine a test run with backing me up. You consider time important now, or you wouldn’t have dropped everything else to make that machine. If I come back and wait for you to finish it, we’ll lose more time.”

  “True, of course. Very well. You or Charley please keep me informed of your progress. I’ll be outside in, at a guess, a quarter of an hour.” And in the shop, unseen by the others, handling tendrils moved even more rapidly.

  “I’ve reached the base of the slope,” Jenny reported a minute or so later. “I haven’t seen or touched Carol’s rope, and I’m not going to waste time looking for it. The sand is about at its angle of repose—I can’t seem to climb it any better than Carol or Molly could—but I’m going around to the windward side. At least it won’t be blowing down in my face there. The slope should be gentler, too, and the wind itself will help me up—no, wait—here’s Carol’s rope—I can haul myself up by that. Can you still see me, Charley?” “Yes. Not clearly.”