by Hal Clement
This remark was prompted by the arrival of sunset once more, and Barlennan assured him that he would be kept informed. The captain had recovered his poise, and was once again more or less in control of the situation—as far as a prisoner could be.
The night was spent by the chief in discussion; his voice, interrupted occasionally by others which must belong to his counselors, came clearly to the Earthmen far above. The ethnologist sitting by Lackland had cut in a recorder, in the hope of making something of the language later on. Ethnology and philology had overlapped so thoroughly since the beginning of interstellar travel that it was no longer easy to distinguish between them. Lackland’s opinion of his chances of interpreting the weird gabble was extremely low, but he realized his own lack of training in that direction might be giving him a false impression of the task’s difficulty. He himself was listening for sounds that might indicate activity, and was more than glad when the sun reappeared without his having heard any. As nearly as he could tell from the screens—which did not, of course, give really complete coverage—everything was as it had been the evening before. Perhaps the warriors guarding the sailors were a little less attentive to their jobs, and the sailors themselves less tense; Lackland could not be sure, familiar as he had now become with their various bodily attitudes and “facial” expressions.
The chief had apparently reached a decision. He had drawn a little apart from his counselors and laid down his weapons; now, as sunlight slanted once more across the deck, he advanced toward Barlennan, waving the latter’s guards away as he approached.
The captain, already fairly sure in his mind what the other wanted, waited calmly. The chief halted with his head a few inches from Barlennan’s, paused impressively for a moment, and began to speak.
His words were still unintelligible to the sailors, naturally enough; but the gestures accompanying them were clear enough to give the speech meaning even to the distant human watchers. He waved repeatedly first at the nearest of the radios and then toward the bank; tapped the deck of the Bree with a pincer, and then pointed downstream. After each repetition of these signals with their accompanying verbal plea he would pause expectantly.
Quite plainly, he wanted a radio. Lackland found himself speculating idly on just what supernatural powers the chief supposed the device to possess. Perhaps he wanted it to protect the village from enemies, or to bring luck to his hunters. It was unlikely to be a much more complicated wish; these people seemed to be on about the cultural plane of the nineteenth-century Fans or Bushmen. That was not really an important question, however; what mattered would be his attitude when the request was refused. That might possibly be rather antisocial, and Lackland was still worrying a trifle.
Barlennan, showing what his human friend felt was rather more courage than sense, answered the speech briefly; a single word and a gesture which Lackland had long since come to recognize comprised the reply. “No” was the first Mesklinite word which Lackland learned beyond doubt, and he learned it for the first time now. Barlennan was very definite.
The chief, to the relief of at least one watcher, did not take a belligerent attitude. Instead, he gave a brief order to his men. Several of these at once laid aside their weapons and began restoring the looted food to the lockers from which it had been taken. If freedom were not enough for one of the magic boxes, he was willing to pay more. Both Barlennan and Lackland more than suspected that the fellow was now afraid to use force, badly as his possessive instincts were aroused.
With half the food returned, the chief repeated his request; when it was refused as before, he gave an amazingly human gesture of resignation and ordered his men to restore the rest. Lackland was getting uneasy.
“What do you think he’ll do when you refuse him now, Barl?” he asked softly. The chief looked at the box hopefully; perhaps it was arguing with its owner, ordering him to give his captor what he wanted.
“I’m not sure enough to venture a prediction,” the Mesklinite replied. “With luck, he’ll bring us more stuff from the village to add to the price; but I’m not sure luck goes that far. If the radio were less important, I’d give it to him now.”
The ethnologist sitting beside Lackland practically exploded at this point: “Have you been going through all this rigmarole and risking your life and those of your men just to hang onto a cheap vision set?”
“Hardly cheap,” muttered Lackland. “They were designed to hold up at Mesklin’s poles, under Mesklinite atmosphere, and through the handling of Mesklinite natives.”
“Don’t quibble!” snapped the student of cultures. “What are those sets down there for if not to get information? Give one to that savage! Where could it be better placed? And how could we observe the everyday life of a completely strange race better than through that eye? Charles, sometimes I wonder at you!”
“That will leave three in Barlennan’s possession, of which one absolutely must get to the south pole. I see your point, Don, but I think we’d better get Rosten’s approval before we actually leave one this early on the way.”
“Why? What does he have to do with it? He’s not risking anything like Barlennan, and doesn’t care about watching that society like some of the rest of us. I say leave it; I’m sure Barlennan wants to leave it; and it seems to me that Barlennan has the final say in any case.”
The captain, who had, of course, overheard this, cut in.
“You forget, friend of Charles, that the radios are not my property.
Charles let me take them, at my suggestion to be sure, as a safety measure, so that at least one would reach its goal even though unavoidable incidents deprived me of the others. It seems to me that he, not I, is the one whose word should be final.” Lackland answered instantly.
“Do as you think best, Barl. You are on the spot; you know your world and its people better than any of us can hope to; and if you do decide to leave one with these people, even that will do some good to my friends, as you have heard.”
“Thank you, Charles.” The captain’s mind was made up in the instant the Flyer finished speaking. Fortunately the chief had listened enthralled to the conversation, making no attempt to further his own interests while it was going on; now Barlennan, keeping up the play to the end, called some of his crew and gave swift orders. Their recipients, as well as the other crew members who heard, had difficulty suppressing their mirth, but they succeeded.
Moving very circumspectly and never touching a radio at any time, the sailors prepared a rope sling. Then they pried the set up from a “safe” distance with spears, and poked and pushed until the sling was in position under and around it. This accomplished, one of the sling handles was given very respectfully to Barlennan. He in turn gestured the chief closer, and with an air of handling something precious and fragile, handed the loop of rope to him. Then he gestured toward the counselors, and indicated that they should take the other handles. Several of them moved forward, rather gingerly; the chief hastily designated three for the honor, and the others fell back.
“I thought he might assign four, and give himself the honor of lead-off man,” Professor Don McKnight whispered in Lackland’s ear. “I wonder whether they have different ideas of what constitutes the position of honor, or if the chief thinks he’ll derive some mystical benefit from carrying the thing himself?”
Lackland shrugged his shoulders, having no means of answering this question. His interest was in Barlennan’s activities, anyway.
Very slowly and carefully the bearers moved the radio to the edge of the Bree’s outermost raft. The chief’s canoe glided up—a long, narrow vessel evidently hollowed to a paper-thin shell from the trunk of one of the forest trees. McKnight looked it over with interest, as well as the single “eye” now pointing in the right direction would permit him; Barlennan viewed it with distrust. He himself had never sailed anything but a raft; hollow vessels of any kind were strange to him. He felt certain that the canoe was too small to carry the weight of the radio; and when the chief ordered the great
er part of the crew out of it he barely suppressed the equivalent of a negative headshake. He felt that the lightening thus obtained would be insufficient. He was more than startled when the canoe, upon receiving its new freight, merely settled a trifle. For a few seconds he watched, expecting vessel and cargo to pop suddenly below the surface; but nothing of the sort happened, and it became evident that nothing would.
Barlennan was an opportunist, as had been proved months ago by his unhesitating decision to associate with the visitor from Earth and learn his language. This was something new, and obviously worth learning about; if ships could be made that would carry so much more weight for their size, the knowledge was obviously vastly important to a maritime nation. The logical thing to do was to acquire one of the canoes.
As the chief and his three co-workers entered the craft, Barlennan followed. They delayed shoving off as they saw his approach, wondering what he might want. Barlennan himself knew what he wanted, but was not sure he could get away with what he planned to try. His people, however, had a proverb substantially identical in meaning with Earth’s “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and he was no coward.
Very carefully and respectfully he touched the radio, leaning across the half inch of open river surface between ship and canoe to do so. Then he spoke.
“Charles, I’m going to get this little ship if I have to come back and steal it. When I’ve finished talking, please answer—it doesn’t matter what you say. I’m going to give these people the idea that the boat which carried the radio is too changed for ordinary use, and must take the radio’s place on my deck. All right?”
“I was brought up to disapprove of racketeers—I’ll translate that word for you some time—but I admire your nerve. Get away with it if you can, Barl, but please don’t stick the neck you don’t have out too far.” He fell silent and watched the Mesklinite turn his few sentences to good account.
As before, he employed practically no spoken language; but his actions were reasonably intelligible even to the human beings, and clear as crystal to his erstwhile captors. First he inspected the canoe thoroughly, and plainly if reluctantly found it worthy. Then he waved away another canoe which had drifted close, and gestured several members of the river tribe who were still on the Bree’s deck away to a safe distance. He picked up a spear which one of the counselors had discarded to take up his new position, and made it clear that no one was to come within its length of the canoe.
Then he measured the canoe itself in spear lengths, took the weapon over to where the radio had been, and ostentatiously cleared away a spot large enough to take the craft; at his order, several of his own crew gently rearranged the remaining radios to make room for their new property. More persuasion might have been attempted, but sunset cut the activity short. The river dwellers did not wait out the night; when the sun returned, the canoe with the radio was yards away, already drawn up on shore.
Barlennan watched it with anxiety. Many of the other canoes had also landed, and only a few still drifted near the Bree. Many more natives had come to the edge of the bank and were looking over; but to Barlennan’s intense satisfaction, none came any closer to the loaded canoe. He had apparently made some impression.
The chief and his helpers carefully unloaded their prize, the tribe maintaining its original distance. This was, incidentally, several times the spear’s length demanded by Barlennan. Up the bank the radio went, the crowd opening wide to let it through and disappearing after it; and for long minutes there was no more activity. The Bree could easily have pushed out of her cage at this time, the crews of the few canoes remaining on the river showing little interest in what she did, but her captain did not give up that easily. He waited, eyes on the shore; and at long last a number of long black-and-red bodies appeared over the bank.
One of these proceeded toward the canoe; but Barlennan realized it was not the chief, and uttered a warning hoot. The native paused, and a brief discussion ensued, which terminated in a series of modulated calls fully as loud as any that Lackland had heard Barlennan utter. Moments later the chief appeared and went straight to the canoe; it was pushed off by two of the counselors who had helped carry the radio, and started at once toward the Bree. Another followed it, at a respectful distance.
The chief brought up against the outer rafts at the point where the radio had been loaded, and immediately disembarked. Barlennan had given his orders as soon as the canoe had left the bank, and now another set of slings went about the bow and stern of the little vessel. It was hauled aboard and dragged to the space reserved for it, still with every evidence of respect. The chief did not wait for this operation to be finished; he embarked on the other canoe and returned to shore, looking back from time to time. Darkness swallowed up the scene as he climbed the bank.
“You win, Barl. I wish I had some of your ability; I’d be a good deal richer than I am now, if I were still alive by some odd chance. Are you going to wait around to get more out of them tomorrow?”
“We are leaving now!” the captain replied without hesitation. “I want to get where I can learn about this little ship without having to play-act all the time I’m about it. We’ll be out in the current in two minutes.” Sounds of scraping wood as the Bree was poled from her cage confirmed his statement; and moments later the sound was replaced with utter silence as the ship slipped free into the slow stream. There was a little wind, and some sails were hoisted until they reached a point well out in the river; then they were dropped once more, and the banks began to slip silently westward as the current took over. Lackland left his dark screen and went to his quarters for his first sleep in many hours. Sixty-five minutes—rather less than four of Mesklin’s days—had passed since the village was sighted.
To Be Continued
MISSION OF GRAVITY
Third of four parts. At four gravities, there are things you can get away with; on Mesklin, where an appalling seven hundred gravities waited—things didnt work out the same! Now that canoe . . . What’s wrong?
SYNOPSIS
For the first time in history, the scientists of Earth and 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 Earthy but because it consists largely of degenerate natter 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 see
s 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. As 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.