by Hal Clement
The drops of semiliquid spattered on Barlennan’s eye shells, but he continued to stare at the slowly settling mass of metal. Every muscle in his long body was at maximum tension, his arms held close to his sides, pincers clamped tightly enough to have shorn through steel wire, the hearts in each of his body segments pumping furiously. He would have been holding his breath had he possessed breathing apparatus at all similar to that of a human being. Intellectually he knew that the thing would not fall—he kept telling himself that it could not; but having grown to maturity in an environment where a fall of six inches was usually fatally destructive even to the incredibly tough Mesklinite organism, his emotions were not easy to control. Subconsciously he kept expecting the metal shell to vanish from sight, to reappear on the ground below flattened out of recognizable shape. After all, it was still hundreds of feel up—
On the ground below the rocket, now swept clear of snow, the black vegetation abruptly burst into flame. The exhaust was cold, in the sense that random motion of its molecules was at a minimum; but it contained an enormous amount of kinetic energy, and where its tremendous velocity was checked the temperature was bound to rise. Black ash blew from the landing point, and the ground itself glowed briefly. For just an instant this lasted before the glittering cylinder settled lightly into the center of the bare patch. Seconds later the thunder which had mounted to a roar louder than Mesklin’s hurricanes died abruptly, and the rocket was safely down. Almost painfully, Barlennan relaxed, opening and shutting his pincers to relieve the cramps.
“If you’ll stand by a moment, I’ll be out with the radios,” Lackland said. The commander had not noticed his departure, but the Flyer was no longer in the room. “Mack will drive the crawler over here—you can watch it come while I’m getting into armor.”
Actually Barlennan was able to watch only a portion of the drive. He saw the rocket’s cargo lock swing open and the vehicle emerge; he got a sufficiently good look at the crawler to understand everything about it—he thought—except what made its caterpillar treads move. It was big, easily big enough to hold several of the Flyer’s race unless too much of its interior was full of machinery. Like the dome, it had numerous and large windows; through one of these in the front the commander could see the armored figure of another Flyer, who was apparently controlling it. Whatever drove the machine did not make enough noise to be audible across the mile of space that still separated it from the dome.
It covered very little of that distance before the sun set, and details ceased to be visible. Esstes, the smaller sun, was still in the sky and brighter than the full moon of Earth, but Barlennan’s eyes had their limitations. An intense beam of light projected from the crawler itself along its path, and consequently straight toward the dome, did not help either. Barlennan simply waited. After all, it was still too far for really good examination even by daylight, and would undoubtedly be at the hill by sunrise.
Even then he might have to wait, of course; the Flyers might object to the sort of examination he really wanted to give their machinery.
III.
The tank’s arrival, Lackland’s emergence from the dome’s main air lock, and the rising of Belne all took place at substantially the same moment. The vehicle stopped only a couple of yards from the platform on which Barlennan was crouched. Its driver, clad in pressure armor substantially identical with that worn by Lackland, also emerged; and the two men stood and talked briefly beside the Mesklinite. The latter rather wondered that they did not return to the inside of the dome to lie down, since both were rather obviously laboring under Mesklin’s gravity; but the newcomer refused Lackland’s invitation.
“I’d like to be sociable,” he said in answer to it, “but honestly, Charlie, would you stay on this ghastly mud-ball a moment longer than you had to?”
“Well, I could do pretty much the same work from Toorey, or from a ship in a free orbit for that matter,” retorted Lackland. “I think personal contact means a good deal. I still want to find out more about Barlennan’s people—it seems to me that we’re hardly giving him as much as we expect to get, and it would be nice to find out if there were anything more we could do. Furthermore, he’s in a rather dangerous situation himself, and having one of us here might make quite a difference—to both of us.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Barlennan is a tramp captain—a sort of free-lance explorer-trader. He’s completely out of the normal areas inhabited and traveled through by his people. He is remaining here during the southern winter, when the evaporating north polar cap makes storms which have to be seen to be believed here in the equatorial regions—storms which are almost as much out of his experience as ours. If anything happens to him, stop and think of our chances of meeting another contact!
“Remember, he normally lives in a gravity field from two hundred to nearly seven hundred times as strong as Earth’s. We certainly won’t follow him home to meet his relatives! Furthermore, there probably aren’t a hundred of his race who are not only in the same business but courageous enough to go so far from their natural homes in the face of such a mixture of genuine danger and superstition as they seem to be bucking. Of those hundred, what are our chances of meeting another? Granting that this ocean is the one they frequent most, this little arm of it, from which this bay is an offshoot, is six thousand miles long and a third as wide—with a very crooked shore line. As for spotting one, at sea or ashore, from above—well, Barlennan’s Bree is about forty feet long and a third as wide, and is one of their biggest ocean-going ships. Scarcely any of it is more than three inches above the water, besides.
“No, Mack, our meeting Barlennan was the wildest of coincidences; and I’m not counting on another. Staying under three gravities for five months or so, until the southern spring, will certainly be worth it. Of course, if you want to gamble our chances of recovering nearly two billion dollars worth of apparatus on the results of a search over a strip of planet a thousand miles wide and something over a hundred and fifty thousand long—”
“You’ve made your point,” the other human being admitted, “but I’m still glad it’s you and not me. Of course, maybe if I knew Barlennan better—” Both men turned to the tiny, caterpillarlike form crouched on the waist-high platform.
“Barl, I trust you will forgive my rudeness in not introducing Wade McLellan,” Lackland said. “Wade, this is Barlennan, captain of the Bree, and a master shipman of his world—he has not told me that, but the fact that he is here is sufficient evidence.”
“I am glad to meet you, Flyer McLellan,” the Mesklinite responded. “No apology is necessary, and I assumed that your conversation was meant for my ears as well.” He performed the standard pincer-opening gesture of greeting. “I had already appreciated the good fortune for both of us which our meeting represents, and only hope that I can fulfill my part of the bargain as well as I am sure you will yours. As for Charles’ remaining here where he obviously suffers much discomfort, I can only say that, while we would like to have him with us, we would much rather see him again in the spring in good health. I have a good crew, and have no doubt that we shall winter in perfect safety.”
“You speak English remarkably well,” commented McLellan. “Have you really been learning it for less than six weeks?”
“I am not sure how long your ‘week’ is, but it is less than thirty-five hundred days since I met your friend,” returned the commander. “I am a good linguist, of course—it is necessary in my business; and the films that Charles showed helped very much.”
“It is rather lucky that your voice could make all the sounds of our language. We sometimes have trouble that way.”
“That, or something like it, is why I learned your English rather than the other way around. Many of the sounds we use are much too shrill for your vocal cords, I understand.” Barlennan carefully refrained from mentioning that much of his normal conversation was also too high-pitched for human ears. After all, Lackland might not have noticed it yet, and the most
honest of traders thinks at least twice before revealing all his advantages. “I imagine that Charles has learned some of our language, nevertheless, by watching and listening to us through the radio now on the Bree.”
“Very little,” confessed Lackland. “You seem, from what little I have seen, to have an extremely well-trained crew. A great deal of your regular activity is done without orders, and I can make nothing of the conversations you sometimes have with some of your men, which are not accompanied by any action.”
“You mean when I am talking to Dondragmer or Merkoos? They are my first and second officers, and the ones I talk to most.”
“I hope you will not feel insulted at this, but I am quite unable to tell one of your people from another. I simply am not familiar enough with your distinguishing characteristics. I assure you that that is a very common occurrence when natives of different worlds—and sometimes even members of slightly differing varieties of the same species on a single world—meet for the first time. I have noticed that not all of your people on the Bree wear identical harness, but I have been unable to decide whether that is due to a difference of personal taste or of duty requirements. I have never seen one of you without some kind of harness, either. If you were members of my own race that might be due to necessity, but might also be custom or even religion. I just don’t know.” Barlennan almost laughed.
“In my case, it is even worse. I am not entirely sure whether I have seen you without artificial covering or not. I would say that it doesn’t matter greatly, except for the satisfaction of one’s personal curiosity. In our case, your first guess—that the harness is a matter of personal taste—is largely correct; but in these regions one must wear something in order to be able to attach oneself to the deck cleats. Otherwise my crew would have been blown most of the way around the Rim by this time.”
“Clear enough. For your information, my covering as you see it inside the dome is artificial, and strictly a matter of custom.
“However, that is carrying us a long way from business—we’ve used up a lot of daylight as it is. Mack, I assume you want to get back to the rocket and out where weight means nothing and men are balloons. When you get there, be sure that the receiver-transmitters for each of these four sets are placed close enough together so that one will register on another. I don’t suppose it’s worth the trouble of tying them in electrically, but these folks are going to use them for a while as contact between separate parties, and the sets are on different frequencies. Barl, I’ve left the radios by the air lock. Apparently the sensible program would be for me to put you and the radios on top of the crawler, take Mack over to the rocket, and then drive you and the apparatus over to the Bree.”
Lackland acted on this suggestion, so obviously the right course, before anyone could answer; and Barlennan almost went mad as a result.
The man’s armored hand swept out and picked up the tiny body of the Mesklinite. For one soul-shaking instant Barlennan felt and saw himself suspended long feet away from the ground; then he was deposited on the flat top of the tank. His pincers scraped desperately and vainly at the smooth metal to supplement the instinctive grips which his dozens of suckerlike feet had taken on the plates; his eyes glared in undiluted horror at the emptiness around the edge of the roof, only a few body lengths away in every direction. For long seconds—perhaps a full minute—he could not find his voice; and when he did speak, he could no longer be heard. He was too far away from the pickup on the platform for intelligible words to carry—he knew that from earlier experience; and even at this extremity of terror he remembered that the sirenlike howl of agonized fear that he wanted to emit would have been heard with equal clarity by everyone on the Bree, since there was another radio there.
And the Bree would have had a new captain. Respect for his courage had been the only thing that had driven that crew into the storm-breeding regions of the Rim. If that went, he would have no crew and no ship—and, for all practical purpose, no life. A coward was not tolerated on any ocean-going ship in any capacity; and while his homeland was on this same continental mass, the idea of traversing forty thousand miles of coastline on foot was not to be considered. Even though little more than half of that might bring him to civilization of a sort, it would probably be the wrong sort—and in any case, he would be unlikely to get even a fraction of the distance.
These thoughts did not cross his conscious mind in detail, but the attitude produced by his knowledge of the facts effectually silenced him while Lackland picked up the radios and, with McLellan, entered the tank below the Mesklinite. The metal under him quivered slightly as the door was closed, and an instant later the vehicle started to move. As it did so, a peculiar thing happened to its nonhuman passenger.
The fear might have—perhaps should have—driven him mad. His situation can only be dimly approximated by comparing it with that of a human being hanging by one hand from a window ledge forty stories above a paved street. The human being is at least intellectually familiar with height, however sharp an emotional shock such a situation may prove. To Barlennan, any elevation at all was something to be avoided. That had long since become ingrained habit, and was given no more though t than a man gives to walking. Hard and tough as his body tissues were, they did not begin to have the qualities which would have let him live a human-type life anywhere near the poles of his home world. He suffered, therefore, an indescribable emotional shock caused by the abrupt shattering of this bit of conditioning, as well as that caused by the normal and well founded fear of his situation.
And yet he did not go mad. At least, he did not go mad in the accepted sense; he continued to reason as well as ever, and none of his friends could have detected a change in his personality. For just a little while, perhaps, an Earthman more familiar with Mesklinites than Lackland had yet become might have suspected that the commander was a little drunk; but even that passed.
And the fear passed with it. Nearly six body lengths above the ground, he found himself crouched almost calmly. He was holding tightly, of course; he even remembered, later, reflecting how lucky it was that the wind had continued to drop, even though the smooth metal offered an unusually good grip for his sucker-feet. It was amazing, the viewpoint that could be enjoyed—yes, he enjoyed it—from such a position until sunset shut it off. Looking down on things really helped; you could get a remarkably complete picture of so much ground at once. It was like a map; and Barlennan had never before regarded a map as a picture of country seen from above. It was simply a graphic means of setting down surveying results so that they made sense when compared with each other.
An almost intoxicating sense of triumph filled him as the crawler approached the rocket and stopped. The Mesklinite waved his pincers almost gayly at the emerging McLellan visible in the reflected glare of the tank’s lights, and was disproportionately pleased when the man waved back. The tank immediately turned to the left and headed for the beach where the Bree lay; Mack, remembering that Barlennan was unprotected, thoughtfully waited until it was nearly a mile away before lifting his own machine into the air. The sight of it, drifting slowly upward apparently without support, threatened for just an instant to revive the old fear; but Barlennan fought the sensation grimly down and deliberately watched the rocket until it faded from view in the light of the lowering sun.
Lackland had been watching too; but when the last glint of metal had disappeared, he lost no further time in driving the tank the short remaining distance to where the Bree lay. He stopped a hundred yards from the vessel, as he was gradually coming to appreciate the psychological effects of height on the natives of Mesklin and did not want the tank towering over the crew; but he was quite close enough for the shocked creatures on the decks to see their commander perched on the vehicle’s roof. It would have been less disconcerting had Lackland approached bearing Barlennan’s head on a pole.
Even Dondragmer, the most intelligent and level-headed of the Bree’s complement—not excepting his captain—was paralyzed for long momen
ts; and his first motion was with eyes only, taking the form of a wistful glance toward the flame-dust tanks and “shakers” on the outer rafts. Fortunately for Barlennan, the crawler was not downwind; for the temperature was, as usual, below the melting point of the chlorine in the tanks. Had the wind permitted, the mate would have sent a cloud of fire about the vehicle without ever thinking that his captain might be alive.
A faint rumble of anger began to arise from the assembled crew as the door of the crawler opened and Lackland’s armored figure emerged. They were impulsive, rough beings, that crew; their personalities, housed in different bodies, would have been perfectly at home in any waterfront of medieval Earth, though their intelligence would have averaged higher. Their half-trading, half-piratical way of life had left among them only those most willing to fight without hesitation at the slightest hint of menace to one of their number; the cowards had dropped away long since, and the individualists had died.
The only thing that saved Lackland’s life as he emerged into their view was habit—the conditioning that prevented their making the hundred-yard leap that would have cost the weakest of them the barest flick of his body muscles. Crawling as they had done all their lives, they flowed from the rafts like a red-and-black waterfall and spread over the beach toward the alien machine. Lackland saw them coming, of course, but so completely misunderstood their motivation that he did not even hurry as he reached up to the crawler’s roof, picked up Barlennan, and set him on the ground. Then he reached back into the vehicle and brought out the radios he had promised, setting them on the sand beside the commander; and by then it had dawned on the crew that their captain was alive and apparently unharmed.
The avalanche stopped in confusion, milling in undecided fashion midway between ship and tank; and a cacophony of voices ranging from deep bass to the highest notes the radio speaker could reproduce gabbled in Lackland’s suit phones. Though he had, as Barlennan had intimated, done his best to attach meaning to some of the native conversation he had previously heard, the man understood not a single word from the crew. It was just as well for his peace of mind; he had long been aware that even armor able to withstand Mesklin’s eight-atmosphere surface pressure would mean little or nothing to Mesklinite pincers.