by Hal Clement
Karondrasee took them in charge—no one was afraid of eating any sort of animal food—and presently the opinion was confirmed. They were eggs—very good, too. Only after they had been consumed did anyone think of hatching some of them to learn what sort of animal they might belong to; and with that thought voiced, Dondragmer carried it a step further by suggesting that perhaps they might hatch an animal which could serve in the place of the missing ternee. This idea was enthusiastically accepted, and parties sallied forth once more to look for eggs. The Bree had become practically an incubator by the time Lackland woke up.
The Flyer listened with interest to what had taken place while he slept, and expressed some surprise at finding eggs while the ground was still covered for the most part with snow; but this did not seem to bother the Mesklinites. Lackland did not make a point of it; he realized that it would have been much more surprising if Mesklinite life had resembled that of Earth in any particular respect.
Making sure that all the Bree’s crew had returned aboard, he restarted the tank, and resumed the eastward journey. The hills grew higher in the next few days, and twice they crossed streams of methane, fortunately so narrow that the sled could actually bridge them. It was well that the rise in the hills was gradual, for there was a little uneasiness among the sailors whenever they had to look down ally distance; but that, Barlennan reported, was gradually decreasing.
And then, some twenty days after the start of the second lap of the journey, their minds were taken completely off the terrors of height by something which seized and froze the attention of every living being on both vehicles.
TO BE CONTINUED
MISSION OF GRAVITY
Second of Four Parts. Magellan teas a piker beside this tiny adventurer—exploring a giant world with a savage gravity seven hundred times Earth's!
SYNOPSIS
For the first time in history, the scientists of Earth arid the planets of nearby stars have acquired the opportunity to make studies of a really intense gravitational field. The solitary planet of the brighter component of the binary star 61 Cygni has a mass some five thousand times that of Earth, but because it consists largely of degenerate mailer has a volume not much larger than that of Uranus. Ordinarily this would mean a surface gravity of about three hundred times that of Earth, and for several similar worlds this has been the case; but the 61 Cygni planet has such an enormously rapid rotation rate that, while its effective equatorial gravity is only three times that of Earth, the extreme flattening gives it well over six hundred G’s at the poles.
Recognizing the opportunity, the governments of several planets pool resources and construct a special research rocket which will be capable of landing in those polar regions without destruction, and load it with as much varied apparatus as their scientists can devise. Under remote control, the rocket lands at the south pole of the giant planet, presumably secures its data—but fails to respond to the take-off signal. Some of the data was telemetered, but some is on records that must be physically recovered; and no known living creature can survive in the gravity of the polar regions.
However, a station is built at the equator to do what can be done; and Charles Lackland, while conducting xenological investigations near the dome, encounters Barlennan, a native of the world, which he calls Mesklin.
Barlennan is the captain and owner of a tramp ship, half trader and, Lackland suspects, half pirate, exploring the almost unknown equatorial zone of the world. He has beached his ship, the Bree, near the station for the season; Mesklin is approaching periastron, which is also the northern hemisphere’s midsummer, and the boiling of the cap of frozen methane which has built up around the northern pole during the preceding four Earth-years creates tremendous storms which render the seas impassable. Lackland and Barlennan form a friendship, partly because each sees a chance of obtaining what he wants from the other and partly because of natural sympathy. The Mesklinite, over a period of several weeks, learns a great deal of Lackland’s language, and a tentative agreement is reached whereby Barlennan is to make the thirty-thousand-mile voyage to the south pole, find the grounded rocket, and transmit its information by a specially designed radio-television unit which the scientists of the expedition devise to withstand Mesklin’s cold, pressure, and gravity—it is a solid block of material, using only printed circuits, transistors, and similar non-living parts. In return the expedition is to furnish weather predictions for Barlennan until he returns to his own country, thus enabling him to carry safely a far larger cargo.
The trip cannot be started until the beginning of spring in the southern hemisphere, and in the interval it is discovered through the examination of photographs made from space that the downed rocket is very awkwardly located—an overland journey of several thousand miles will be needed for the Bree’s crew to reach it. Another body of “water” also reaches the south polar regions, and a river feeding it passes within a few miles of their goal; but no navigable passage to this second sea can be found on the photographs. However, an incident which occurs when Lackland and Barlennan are exploring some miles from the station gives the latter an idea. The tank in which they were riding is crippled, and the Earthman’s cumbersome armor makes it impossible for him to reach the dome in the triple gravity; but the crew of the Bree is able to tow him back on a sled made of metal from the wrecked tank. Barlennan now suggests that a similar sled be made for his ship, and towed to the other ocean by another tank.
This proves feasible, as the ocean extends into the low-gravity regions of the equator where Lackland can survive to operate the tank. The route is laid out with the aid of more aerial photographs, the sled constructed at the main expedition base on Toorey, Mesklin’s inner moon, and ferried to the equatorial station. A s winter draws to a close, the Bree is loaded aboard—the ship is only forty feet in length, and easily carried by her crew in their present near-weightless environment—and the trip starts.
Barlennan, through a misunderstanding of Lackland’s, has already had an experience which has jarred out of him the ingrained, conditioned fear of height characteristic of all natives of his part of the planet—a fear amply justified by the savage gravitation under which they live, which makes a fall of even half their eighteen-inch body length almost certainly fatal. The very idea of a fall is strange to them; in their land, an object released at a height simply disappears, to reappear almost simultaneously on the ground below in a well flattened state.
Part 2
VII.
Up to this time, most of the hills had been gentle, smooth slopes, their irregularities long since worn off by weather. There had been no sign of the holes and crevasses which Lackland somewhat feared before starting. The hilltops had been smoothly rounded, so that even had their speed been much higher the crossing of one would hardly have been noticed. Now, however, as they topped such an acclivity and the landscape ahead came into view a difference in the next hill caught every eye at once.
It was longer than most they had crossed, more a ridge across their path than a mound; but the great difference was in the top. Instead of the smooth, windworn curve presented by its fellows, it seemed at first glance actually jagged; a closer look showed that it was crowned with a row of boulders spaced with regularity that could only mean intelligent arrangement. The rocks ranged from monstrous things as big as Lackland’s tank down to fragments of basketball size; and all, while rough in detail, were generally spherical in shape. Lackland brought his vehicle to an instant halt and seized his glasses—he was in partial armor, but was not wearing the helmet. Barlennan, forgetting the presence of his crew, made a leap over the twenty yards separating the Bree from the tank and settled firmly on top of the latter. A radio had been fastened there for his convenience long before, and he was talking almost before he had landed.
“What is it, Charles? Is that a city, such as you were telling me about on your own world? It doesn’t look very much like your pictures.”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” was the answer. “
It certainly is not a city, and the stones are too far apart for the most part to be any sort of wall or fort that I could imagine. Can you see anything moving around them? I can’t with these glasses, but I don’t know how keen your eyesight is.”
“I can just see that the hilltop is irregular; if the things on top are loose stones, I’ll have to take your word for it until we’re closer. Certainly I can see nothing moving. Anything my size would be impossible to see at that distance anyway, I should think.”
“I could see you at that range without these glasses, but I couldn’t count your eyes or arms. With them I can say pretty certainly that that hilltop is deserted. Just the same, I’ll practically guarantee that those stones didn’t get there by accident; we’d better keep our eyes open for whoever set them up. Better warn your crew.” Lackland mentally noted the fact of Barlennan’s poorer eyesight; he was not physicist enough to have predicted it from the size of the native’s eyes. The only way they could have matched Lackland’s in resolving power would be to use shorter wave lengths of light—and even the brighter component of 61 Cygni radiates less ultraviolet than does Sol. The fainter sun of the pair is too distant from Mesklin at its closest to help much, and is even redder than its companion.
For two or three minutes, while the sun moved far enough to reveal most of the areas previously in shadow, they waited and watched; but nothing except the shadows moved, and finally Lackland started the tank once more. The sun set while they were descending the slope. The tank had only one searchlight, which Lackland kept aiming at the ground in his path; so they could not see what, if anything, went on among the stones above.
Sunrise found them just crossing another brook, and tension mounted as they headed uphill once more. For a minute or two nothing was visible, as the sun was directly ahead of the travelers; then it rose far enough to permit clear forward vision. None of the eyes fastened on the hilltop could detect any change from its appearance of the night before. There was a vague impression, which Lackland found was shared by the Mesklinites, that there were now more stones; but since no one had attempted to make a count of them before, this could not be proved. There was still no visible motion.
It took five or six minutes to climb the hill at the tank’s five-mile speed, so the sun was definitely behind them when they reached the top. Lackland found that several of the gaps between the larger stones were wide enough for the tank and sled, and he angled toward one of these as he approached the crest of the ridge. He crunched over some of the smaller boulders, and for a moment Dondragmer, on the ship behind, thought one of them must have damaged the tank; for the machine came to an abrupt halt before the sled was far enough up for its occupants to see into the next valley. Barlennan could be seen still on top of the vehicle, all his eyes fixed on the scene below him; the Flyer was not visible, of course, but after a moment the Bree’s mate decided that he, too, must be so interested in the valley beyond as to have forgotten about driving.
“Captain! What is it?” Dondragmer hurled the question even as he gestured the weapons crew to the flame tanks. The rest of the crew distributed themselves along the outer rafts, clubs, knives, and spears in readiness, without orders. For a long moment Barlennan gave no answer, and the mate was on the point of ordering a party overboard to cover the tank—he knew nothing of the nature of the jury-rigged quick-firer at Lackland’s disposal—when his captain turned, saw what was going on, and gave a reassuring gesture.
“It’s all right, I guess,” he said. “We can see no one moving, but it looks a little like a town. Just a moment and the Flyer will pull you forward so that you can see without going overboard.” He shifted back to English and made this request to Lackland, who promptly complied. This action produced an abrupt change in the situation.
What Lackland had seen at first—and Barlennan, less clearly—was a broad, shallow bowllike valley entirely surrounded by hills of the type they were on. There should, Lackland felt, have been a lake at the bottom; there was no visible means of escape for rain or melted snow. Then he noticed that there was no snow on the inner slopes of the hills; their topography was bare. And strange topography it was.
It could not possibly have been natural. Starting a short distance below the ridges were broad, shallow channels. They were remarkably regular in arrangement; a cross section of the hills taken just below where they started would have suggested a very pretty series of ocean waves. As the channels led on downhill toward the center of the valley they grew narrower and deeper, as though designed to lead rain water toward a central reservoir. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, they did not all meet in the center—they did not even all reach it, though all got as far as the relatively level, small floor of the valley.
More interesting than the channels themselves were the elevations separating them. These, naturally, also grew more pronounced as the channels grew deeper; on the upper half of the slopes they were smoothly rounded ridges, but as the eye followed them down their sides grew steeper until they attained a perpendicular junction with the channel floors. A few of these little walls extended almost to the center of the valley, but they cut off with startling abruptness before actually reaching it. They did not all point toward the same spot; there were gentle curves in their courses that gave them the appearance of the flanges of a centrifugal pump rather than the spokes of a wheel. Their tops were too narrow for a man to walk on; even one of Barlennan’s people would have had difficulty in maintaining footing on what looked from this distance almost like a sharp edge, from which the sides sloped away at better than a forty-five degree angle and grew even steeper as they descended until they merged with the perpendicular lower walls.
Lackland judged that channels and separating walls alike were some fifteen or twenty feet wide where they broke off. The walls themselves, therefore, were quite thick enough to be lived in, especially for Mesklinites; and the existence of numerous openings scattered over their lower surfaces lent strength to the idea that they actually were dwellings. The glasses showed that those openings not directly at the bottom of the walls had ramps leading up to them; and before he saw a single living thing, Lackland was sure he was examining a city. Apparently the inhabitants lived in the separating walls, and had developed the entire structure in order to dispose of rain. Why they did not live on the outer slopes of the hills, if they wanted to avoid the liquid, was a question that did not occur to him.
He had reached this point in his thoughts when Barlennan asked him to pull the Bree over the brow of the hill before the sun made good seeing impossible. The moment the tank began to move, a score of dark figures appeared in the openings that he had suspected were doorways; no details were visible at that distance, but the objects, whatever they were, were living creatures. Lackland heroically refrained from stopping the tank and snatching up the glasses once more until he had pulled the Bree into a good viewing position.
As it turned out, there was no need for him to have hurried. The things remained motionless, apparently watching the newcomers, while the towing maneuver was completed; he was able to spend the remaining minutes before sunset in a careful examination of the beings. Even with the glasses some details were indistinguishable—for one reason, they seemed not to have emerged entirely from their dwellings; but what could be seen suggested strongly that they belonged to the same race as Barlennan’s people. The bodies were long and caterpillarlike; several eyes—they were hard to count at that distance— were on the foremost body segment, and limbs very similar to, if not identical with, Barlennan’s pincer-equipped arms were in evidence, though once again it was difficult to tell just how many were possessed by each individual. The coloration was a mixture of red and black, the latter predominating, as in the Bree’s complement.
Barlennan could not see all this, but Lackland relayed the description to him tensely until the city below faded from sight in the dusk. When he stopped talking the captain issued a boiled-down version in his own language to the tensely waiting crew. When that was done:
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“Have you ever heard of people living this close to the Rim, Barl? Would they be at all likely to be known to you, or even speak the same language?”
“I doubt it very much. My people become very uncomfortable, as you know, north of what you once called the ‘hundred-G line.’ I know several languages, but I can’t see any likelihood of finding one of them spoken here.”
“Then what shall we do? Sneak around this town, or go through it on the chance its people are not belligerent? I’d like to see it more closely, I admit, but we have an important job to do and I don’t want to risk its chances of success. You at least know your race better than I possibly can; how do you think they’ll react to us?”
“There’s no one rule, there. They may be frightened out of their wits at your tank, or my riding on it—though they might not have normal instincts about height, here at the Rim. We’ve met lots of strange people in our wanderings, and sometimes we’ve been able to trade and sometimes we’ve had to fight. In general, I’d say if we kept weapons out of sight and trade goods in evidence, they would at least investigate before getting violent. I’d like to go down—they might well have stuff worth trading, and this town is not a hopeless distance overland from our own sea if we want to come here later. Will the sled fit through the bottom of those channels, do you think?”