by Hal Clement
Jim and Nancy gestured agreement and understanding, and turned to the piles of firewood that almost covered the floor. The fire was burning quite close to the doorway; Nick took his stand once more in the opening, and the other two on either side of the blaze, where they could hand torches to him as rapidly as he might need. Everything was ready when the party returned to the hut.
It was a little larger this time; Swift himself had joined it. They approached to within half a dozen yards, and spoke briefly and to the point.
“If you don’t let us in to get the wood, my knives will take care of you. You have seen what I mean.”
“I have seen,” acknowledged Nick. “That’s why I want nothing to do with you. If you come any closer, it is at your own risk.”
He had never before seen Swift hesitant or uncertain, but for just a moment now the chief seemed to be running over the implications of Nick’s words. Then he was himself again.
“Very well,” he said, and swept forward with four spears couched along his forearms.
Nick’s battle plan had to be scrapped at the beginning; the spears were longer than his torches. He did succeed in striking their points aside before they touched him, but he could not reach Swift even with the spears out of the way. His hatred of the chief paralyzed his judgment for an instant, and he hurled both his left-hand torches at the giant’s chest.
Swift ducked, barely in time. Those behind him were in a close-packed wedge whose central members were unable to dodge quickly enough, and howls of pain arose in several voices as the torches struck and scattered burning coals in all directions. The chief ducked backward to just beyond spear’s length, resuming his attack stance.
“Half circle!” he snapped. The warriors obeyed with speed and precision, forming a thin line centered on Nick. “Now, all at once—get him!” The semicircle contracted, and the spear points came toward the door.
Nick was not too alarmed. None of the attackers was in a position to deliver the upward thrust which would get under scales; stone points were more likely to push him back than to penetrate. If he were pushed back against anything solid, of course, it would be a different story; the real danger at the moment, though, was that several of the fighters would get within knife range at once, and so occupy him that a spearsman could get close enough for long enough to strike from below. For just an instant he hesitated, wondering whether he should throw or strike; then he made up his mind.
“Short ones!” he ordered to the helpers behind him.
Nancy already had several foot-long sticks with their ends in the fire; she had them in his hands instantly, and was lighting others. For perhaps ten seconds Nick did his best to emulate a machine gun. More than half his projectiles missed, but a good many didn’t; and after the first three or four seconds another factor complicated the fight. Still burning torches and fragments of glowing wood were being more and more thickly scattered before the doorway, and the attackers were getting involved with these. Feet were even more sensitive to the fire than were scales, and the effect was distracting, to put it mildly. Swift, to do him justice, stayed with his men and fought as hard as any; but at length even he had had enough and withdrew a few yards, limping slightly. Nick laughed aloud as he went.
“Better get your own firewood, Swift, my friend! Of course you won’t find any within an hour’s walk of the village; we’ve used it up long ago. Even if you know where the best places to get it are, you won’t be able to get there and back through the rain. You needn’t worry, though; we’ll take care of you when you go to sleep. I wouldn’t want anything to eat you, friend Swift!”
It was almost funny to watch Swift’s fury. His hands tightened on the spear shafts, and he rose to full height on his walking legs, shaking all over with rage. For several seconds it seemed an even bet whether he would hurl the spears or charge the door across the scattered coals. Nick was perfectly ready for either, but was hoping for the latter; the mental picture of Swift with burned feet was! a very attractive one.
But the chief did neither. In the midst of his fury he suddenly relaxed, and the spear points dropped as though he had forgotten them for a moment. Then he shifted the j weapons backward until he was holding them near their j centers of gravity, in “carry” position, and turned away from the hut. Then, seemingly as an afterthought, he turned back and spoke to Nick.
“Thanks, Chopper. I didn’t expect that much help. I’d better say good-bye, now; and so had you—to your i Teacher.”
“But—you can’t travel at night.”
“Why not? You did.”
“But how about Fagin? How do you know he can?”
“You told me he could do anything you could. You also said he’d agree to do what we said. If he forgets that, or changes his mind, we can thank you for showing us what to do. Do you suppose he’ll like the touch of fire any better than we do?” Swift chuckled and strode swiftly back to the main group, bawling orders as he went. Nick began shouting at least as loudly.
“Fagin! Did you hear that? Fagin! Teacher!” In his anxiety he forgot the tune it always took the Teacher to answer, and drowned the robot out for a moment. Then its answer became audible.
“What’s the matter, Nick?” It was not possible to tell from the voice that Raeker was not at the other end; Nick’s people had been given a general idea of the “Teacher” situation, but not all the details, and they thought inevitably of the robot as an individual. This was virtually the first time it had made any difference; the man on watch knew the general picture, of course, having been briefed by Raeker when the latter had gone off duty, but he had not actually been present during Swift’s initial attack or the subsequent truce. Consequently, Nick’s words did not mean all they might have to him.
“Swift is going to start back for the caves right away; he says he’ll use fire on you if you don’t go with him. Can you stand that?”
There was a little more than the usual hesitation. No one had ever measured the temperature of a Tenebran fire, and the man on watch was not enough of a physicist to hazard a guess from its radiation output. The main consideration in his mind was the cost of the robot.
“No,” he answered. “I’ll go along with him.”
“What shall we do?”
Raeker’s order for the villagers to stay put was one thing he had not mentioned to his relief; he had expected to be back on duty long before the start of the journey. The relief did the best he could under the circumstances.
“Use your own judgment. They won’t hurt me; I’ll get in touch with you again later.”
“All right.” Nick carefully refrained from reminding the Teacher of his earlier command; he liked the new one much better. He watched in silence as the invaders, under Swift’s orders, collected what torches they could from the nearly spent fires. Then they clustered around the Teacher, leaving an opening in the crowd on the side they wished him to go. It was all done without words, but the meaning was plain enough. The robot swung around on its treads and headed south, the cave dwellers swarming after it.
Nick spent only a few moments wondering whether they’d find more torch wood before using up what they had. He had turned his mind to other matters even before the cavalcade was out of sight.
He had been given a free hand. Very well, he still felt that leaving the village was best; they would do so as soon as possible. Of course, it wouldn’t be possible for a few days, until everyone was able to travel again, but the tune could be spent in planning. There was certainly the question of where to go, and the corollary one of how to get there—Nick began to realize with a shock just what leaving the village, with its lifetime accumulation of property and equipment, would mean—and how to get back in touch with Fagin when the move was accomplished. It was easy to tell oneself that the Teacher could always find them wherever they went; but Nick was mature enough to doubt the omniscience of anyone, including the robot. That meant, then, three problems to solve. Since Nick had no desire to resemble Swift in any way, he postponed solv
ing them until the others would be awake and able to help in the discussion.
The fire lasted until morning, but only just, and only by virtue of Nick’s running around the hut rapidly on a number of occasions to stir oxygen into an oncoming mass of dead steam. He got very little sleep after the last of the outer fires went, and that was pretty early hi the night.
Morning brought no relief. The first task normally accomplished was to put a guard on the village herd, which was penned in a hollow near the village. The depression remained full of water a little later than the surrounding country, so the “cattle” were normally safe from predators until the guards could arrive; but at the moment there simply weren’t enough people in condition to guard both herd and village. They suffered several losses that morning as a result, until Nick could round up the reviving creatures by himself and herd them into the village. Then there was the problem of firewood for the next night; he had told the absolute truth to Swift in that respect. Someone had to get it. There was no choice but for the still battered Jim and Nancy to do the job together, dragging as best they could the cart on which they piled their fuel. They had never succeeded in training their cattle to pull the conveyance; the creatures stubbornly refused to budge under any sort of load.
By the second day, most of the others were on their feet if not at full efficiency, and matters were considerably easier. A consultation was held that morning, in which Nick proposed and defended vigorously the notion that they move to the viciously rough country he had crossed during his flight from the cave village. His chief point was the presence of so many spots which could only be approached from a single, narrow point, like a canyon or ridge, and could therefore be defended effectively by a small force. It was Nancy who answered the suggestion.
“I’m not sure that’s a very good plan,” she said. “In the first place, we don’t know that any of the places you describe will still be that way when we get there.” A quake lent emphasis and support to her words.
“What if they aren’t?” retorted Nick. “There will always be others. I wasn’t suggesting any of the specific spots I described, only the general area.”
“But how is Fagin to find us? Supposing one of us does get to the cave village and get a message to him, how are we to describe the way to him? We’d have to guide him directly, which would probably interfere with his own plans—you judged, and I think rightly, that he is planning to take advantage of his ability to travel at night without fire.”
Nick felt a very human surge of annoyance at this opposition, but remembered Swift in time to keep from yielding to it. He didn’t want to be compared with that savage in anyone’s mind, he told himself; besides, there was something to what Nancy was saying, now that he really gave his mind to it.
“What sort of place would you suggest?” he asked.
“You’re right about getting back in touch with Fagin, but I certainly can’t think of any place which we will ever defend as easily as those canyons in the west.”
“It seems to me that Fagin was right when he said I was foolish to fight Swift’s people at all,” returned Nancy quietly. “I was not thinking of defense; if we have to defend ourselves, we’re already out of luck, I fear. What I had in mind was the sea.”
“What?”
“You know. You helped map it. Off to the east there’s a body of water that isn’t water—at least, it doesn’t dry up entirely during the daytime. I don’t remember just what Fagin called it when we reported it to him-—”
“He said he supposed it was mostly sulphuric acid, whatever that is, but he didn’t know how to make sure,” interjected the still crippled Dorothy.
“—Whatever it is, it stays there, and if we’re on the edge of it Fagin can’t help finding us if he simply travels along its border. Probably he can travel in it for a distance, too, so the cave people can’t track him.” A hum of approving surprise greeted this notion, and after a few moments of thought Nick gestured agreement.
“All right,” he said. “If no one has other ideas, we’ll move to the edge of the sea; we can settle on the exact spot after we get there and have looked around. It’s a year or two since we mapped the place, and I don’t suppose we could trust information that old.
“The next problem is getting there. We’ll have to decide how much we can take from the village here, and how we can carry it. I suppose we can start with the wood cart, but I’ll bet there are places we won’t be able to move it across. No matter how we figure it, there’s a lot we’ll have to leave behind.
“Then, finally, there’s the matter of getting a message to Fagin. That we can leave until we’re settled; there’s no point telling him where we are before we know.
“I hope we can travel by tomorrow; in the meantime, the second question is the one to work on. Anyone who has more ideas, let’s hear them at any time.” They dispersed, each to the tasks of which he was capable.
Jim and Nancy were practically whole again, and were now looking after the cattle. There had been no further losses since they had been able to take over the job. Dorothy was at the wagon, with all the articles they hoped to take stacked around her, arranging and rearranging them in the vehicle. No matter how she packed them, there was more outside than in, and nearly constant discussion and even argument was going on between her and the other members of the group. Each wanted his own belongings to go and it took a good deal of talk to convince some of them that since everything couldn’t be taken the losses should be shared.
The argument was still going on, to a certain extent, when the journey started. Nick was beginning to feel a certain sympathy for Swift by that tune; he had discovered that at times it was necessary for a group to have a leader, and that it was not always possible for the leader to reason his followers into the desired action. Nick had had to give his first arbitrary orders, and was troubled by the thought that half his friends must by now be comparing him with Swift. The fact that he had been obeyed should have clarified him on this point, but it didn’t.
The cart was perilously overloaded, and everyone except those actually herding had to pull with all his strength. When fighting was necessary, hauling had to be stopped while weapons were snatched up and used. Actually, of course, there wasn’t too much fighting; the average Tenebran carnivore wasn’t very brainy, but most of them steered clear of such a large group. The chief exception was formed by the floaters, which were more vegetable than animal anyway. These creatures could be downed fairly safely by anyone having a spear longer than their tentacles; but even after their gas bladders were punctured they were dangerous to anyone coming within reach of the poisonous appendages. Several animals of the herd were lost when one of the monsters fell almost into it, and two of the party were painfully poisoned on the same occasion. It was some hours before they could walk unaided.
Contrary to Nick’s pessimistic forecast, it proved possible to get the wagon all the way to the sea. Late in the second day of travel they reached it, after some hours of threading their way among ever larger pools of quiet, oily liquid.
They had seen such pools before, of course; they formed in hollows in their own valley toward the end of the day—hollows which were lakes of water at sunrise, but only tiny pools of oleum when the day reached its height. These were larger, filling a much bigger fraction of their beds.
The ground was different, too; vegetation was as thick as ever, but underfoot among the stems the ground was studded with quartz crystals. The cattle didn’t seem to mind, but the feet of their owners were not quite so tough, and progress became decidedly difficult. Such masses of crystals did occur elsewhere, but usually in isolated patches which could be avoided.
The search for a stopping place was therefore briefer, and perhaps less careful, than it might otherwise have been. They agreed very quickly on a peninsula whose main body was a hill thirty or forty feet above the sea, joined to the mainland by a crystal-studded tombolo a dozen yards in width. Nick was not the only one of the party who was still considerin
g the problem of physical defense; and in addition to its advantages in this respect, the peninsula was roomy enough for the herd. They guided and trundled their belongings down the sea and up the hill, and immediately settled down to the standard business of hunting for firewood. This was plentiful enough, and by dark a very satisfactory supply had been laid in.
The watch fires were built, one of the herd animals slaughtered and eaten, and the group settled down for the night. It was not until the drops had appeared and the fires had been lighted that anyone thought to wonder what happened to the sea level during the nightly rain.
IV: COMMUNICATION; PENETRATION; ISOLATION
Aminadabarlee fell silent, his eyes fixed on the vision screen; and, nasty as the creature had been, Raeker felt sympathetic. He himself would have been at least as unsociable under similar circumstances. There was no time for pity, however, while there was still hope; too much had to be done.
“Wellenbach! What’s the combination of the bathyscaphe?” he snapped.
The communication watch officer reached over his shoulder. “I’ll get her for you, Doctor.”
Raeker pushed his hand aside. “Wait a minute. Is it a regular set at the other end? An ordinary phone, I mean, or something jury-rigged into the panels?”
“Perfectly ordinary. Why?”
“Because if it weren’t and you punched its combination, those kids might open their air lock or something like that in trying to answer. If it’s standard in design and appearance, the girl will be able to answer safely.”
“I see. She won’t have any trouble; I’ve seen her use the punch-combination sets here.”
“All right. Call them.” Raeker tried not to show the uncertainty he felt as the officer punched the buttons. It was not possible to tell yet just what had happened above Tenebra’s atmosphere; something had evidently breached the air lock of the tender, but that might or might not have affected the bathyscaphe. If it had, the children were probably dead—though their guide might have had them in space suits, of course. One could hope.
