by Hal Clement
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 stale.
During the journey the crew is also forced to defy this conditioning; while trading in a strange city discovered en route, they are attacked by the natives, whose method of assault consists of rolling large rocks from the hill completely encircling the town,. The only escape for the Mesklinites is by jumping or climbing to the tank’s roof; the vehicle itself is saved by destroying with high-explosive shells the only rock in a position to do it serious damage. After this, the Mesklinites become almost comically defiant of their old fears, jumping and climbing with what amounts to recklessness and causes Barlennan some concern.
The journey is continued, and is almost at its end when the tank encounters an apparently insuperable obstacle—a cliff same sixty feet in height dropping away ahead of them, and extending as far as can be seen in either direction. The tank cannot possibly negotiate suck a drop; and even in the relatively feeble gravity of the equatorial zone sixty feet is too much for the Mesklinites—and for their ship.
Further aerial reconnaissance indicates that the cliff extends much too far in both directions to be rounded, but that two rivers empty over its edge within reasonable distance of the tank’s present position. The travelers proceed to me of these and, again at Barlennan’s suggestion, the Bree is disassembled and hoisted over the edge, together with her crew. The ship is quickly put together again by the river at the cliffs foot, and launched, She proceeds on her way alone, while Lackland, who has done all he could on Mesklin’s surface, calls the rocket to take him back to Toorey.
On the way downstream, Barlennan encounters savages of his own species and for the first time in his life sees a canoe. He is deeply impressed with the load-carrying powers of this strange, hollow boat—the Bree is a collection of rafts bound together to combine strength with flexibility—and acquires one, dreaming of revolutionizing the maritime commerce of his nation.
Part 3
XI.
On Earth, the land is the home of life. Marine biologists will say, quite warmly, that the sea swarms with living creatures; that it is, indeed, the cradle of life. Both of these statements are partly true. In the shallow, wave-beaten regions of the continental shelves life does indeed swarm; but much of it lives on the relatively tiny amount of detritus washed from the land. The broad seas that cover three fourths of the planet’s surface, while by no means deserted, can hardly be compared with a section of Amazon jungle as a home for either flora or fauna. On Earth, the seas and rivers are of water; the material picked up by the latter and carried to the broad reservoirs of the oceans is largely inorganic, since water dissolves most effectively the inorganic salts of the continental masses. Substances usable as animal food are carried to the ocean as large, suspended particles, if at all.
Mesklin’s principal liquid is methane. The fearful storms caused by the planet’s seasonal extremes involve the evaporation and subsequent fall of vast quantities of this liquid; and as it rolls back to the oceans it picks up not the salts and minerals but the organic detritus of fats and similar compounds formed by the rather sparse life of the continental areas. This has gone on for a time comparable to the two billion years in which Earth’s oceans have been collecting their salt; and the seas of Mesklin are in consequence almost like a laboratory broth for the culture of microorganisms. On Earth the life of the sea depends largely on light; the deep sea forms subsist basically on what falls from above. On Mesklin this is true also—but the relative amount of that fall is unbelievable. Animal life swarms in the seas of the giant world from surface to bottom—and the bottom forms, as Lackland already had reason to suspect, were the largest.
The Bree sailed into the eastern ocean so gradually that no one could say exactly when the change was made. The wind had picked up day by day until she had normal open-sea use of her sails; the river widened rod by rod and at last mile by mile until the banks were no longer visible from the deck. It was still “fresh water”—that is, it still lacked the swarming life that stained practically all of the ocean areas in varying tints and helped give the world such a startling appearance from space—but the taste was coming, as sailor after sailor verified to his own great satisfaction.
Their course was still east, for a long peninsula barred their way to the south, according to the Flyers. Weather was good, and there would be plenty of warning of any change from the strange beings that watched them so carefully. There was plenty of food still aboard, enough to last easily until they reached the rich areas of the deep seas. The crew was happy.
Their captain was satisfied as well. He had learned, partly from his own examination and experiment and partly from Lackland’s casual explanations, how it was that a hollow vessel like the canoe could carry so much more weight for its size than could a raft. He was already deep in plans for the building of a large ship—as big or bigger than the Bree—built on the same principle and able to carry the profits of ten voyages in one. Dondragmer’s pessimism failed to shake his rosy dream; the mate felt that there must be some reason such vessels were not used by their own people, though he could not say what the reason might be.
“It’s too simple,” he kept pointing out. “Someone would have thought of it long ago if that’s all there was to it.” Barlennan would simply point astern, where the canoe now followed gayly at the end of a rope, laden with a good half of their food. The mate could not shake his head after the fashion of an old family coachman looking over the new horseless carriage, but he would certainly have done so if he had possessed a neck.
He brightened up when they finally swung southward, and a new thought struck him.
“Watch it sink as soon as we start to get a little decent weight!” he exclaimed. “It may be all right for the creatures of the Rim, but you need a good solid raft where things are normal.”
“The Flyer says not,” replied Barlennan. “You know as well as I do that the Bree doesn’t float any higher here at the Rim than she does at home, or even near the center. The Flyer says it’s because the water weighs less too, which sounds as though it might be reasonable.” Dondragmer did not answer; he simply glanced, with an expression equivalent to a complacent smile, at the tough wood spring-balance and weight that formed one of the ship’s principal navigating instruments. As that weight began to droop, he was sure, something that neither his captain nor the distant Flyer had counted on would happen. He did not know what it would be, but he was certain of the fact.
The canoe, however, continued to float as the weight slowly mounted. It did not, of course, float as high as it would have on Earth, since liquid methane is less than half as dense as water; its “water” line, loaded as it was, ran approximately halfway up from keel to gunwale, so that fully four inches was invisible below the surface. The remaining four inches of freeboard did not diminish as the days went by, and the mate seemed almost disappointed. Perhaps Barlennan and the Flyer were correct after all.
Weight slowly increased, from the three and a half Earth gravities at the river mouth to four, and then to five, and then to seven, with nothing to break the even tenor of the passing days. They were in open sea now, with fully two thousand miles of their southward journey accomplished. Their course had not always been directly south; every few days a message would come from the watchers above, directing them to swing one way or the other to take advantage of the winds. Mesklin’s cyclones were tighter and faster moving than those of Earth, because of the planet’s enormously greater rate of spin; even this close to the equator a single cell was seldom more than a f
ew hundred miles across, and circulated usually at better than sixty miles an hour. The waves raised by these winds were high, but long and regular; they meant nothing to the crew of the Bree, who regarded much more violent weather as the norm. The unusual, and pleasant, fact about the present situation was to have both waves and wind almost constantly coming from astern. Evidently deals with the Flyers were worth while.
The spring balance was starting to show a barely visible sag from the zero position—it had been made, of course, for use where weight was scores or hundreds of times Earth-normal—when the monotony was broken. Actual weight was about seven Earth’s. The usual call from Toorey was a little late, and both the captain and mate were beginning to wonder whether all the remaining radios had failed for some reason when it finally arrived. The caller was not Lackland, but a meteorologist the Mesklinites had come to know quite well.
“Barl,” the weather man opened without preamble, “I don’t know just what sort of storm you consider too bad to be out in—I suppose your standards are pretty high—but there seems to be one coming that I certainly wouldn’t want to ride out on a forty-foot raft. It’s a tight cyclone, of what I would consider hurricane force even for Mesklin, and on the thousand-mile course I’ve been observing so far it has been violent enough to stir up material from below and leave a track of contrasting color on the sea.”
“That’s enough for me,” Barlennan replied. “How do I dodge it?”
“That’s the catch; I’m not sure. It’s still a long way from your position, and I’m not absolutely sure it will cross your course just when you’re at the wrong point. There are a couple of ordinary cyclones yet to pass you, and they will change your course some and possibly even that of the storm. I’m telling you now because there is a group of fairly large islands about five hundred miles to the southeast, and I thought you might like to head for them. The storm will certainly strike them, but there seems to be a number of good harbors where you could shelter the Bree until it was over.”
“Can I get there in time? If there’s serious doubt about it, I’d prefer to ride it out in the open sea rather than be caught near land of any sort.”
“At the rate you’ve been going, there should be plenty of time to get there and scout around for a good harbor.”
“All right. What’s my noon bearing?”
The men were keeping close track of the Bree’s position by means of the radiation from the vision sets, although it was quite impossible to see the ship from beyond the atmosphere with any telescope. No one had worked out a really satisfactory co-ordinate system for describing position on the planet, but that was largely because no one liked anyone else’s. Several were in use that were mathematically adequate, and the meteorologist had no trouble in giving the captain the bearing he wanted. The sails were adjusted accordingly and the Bree moved off on the new course. Her speed was somewhat lower, as she could take less advantage of the wind; hut after Barlennan cast the log and reported the new value on the radio, he was assured that he would still have plenty of time.
The weather was still clear, though the wind was strong. The sun arced across the sky time after time without much change in either of these factors; but gradually a high haze began to appear and thicken, so that the sun changed from a golden disk to a rapidly moving patch of pearly light. Shadows became less definite, and finally vanished altogether as the sky became a single almost uniformly luminous dome. This change occurred slowly, over a period of many days, and while it was going on the miles kept slipping beneath the Bree’s rafts, sometimes rapidly as the wind shifted to dead astern and sometimes more slowly as the sails were trimmed to take advantage of quartering breezes.
They were less than a hundred miles from the islands when the minds of the crew were taken off the matter of the approaching storm by a new matter. The color of the sea had shifted again, but that bothered no one; they were as used to seeing it blue as red. No one expected signs of land at this distance, since the currents set generally across their course and the birds which warned Columbus did not exist on Mesklin. Perhaps a tall cumulous cloud, of the sort which so frequently forms over islands, would be visible for a hundred miles or more; but it would hardly show against the haze that covered the sky. Barlennan was sailing by dead reckoning and hope, for the islands were no longer visible to the Earthmen overhead.
Nevertheless it was in the sky that the strange event occurred.
From far ahead of the Bree, moving with a swooping, dipping motion that was utterly strange to the Mesklinites and would have been perfectly familiar to the human beings, there appeared a tiny dark speck. No one saw it at first, and by the time they did it was too near and too high to be in the field of view of the vision sets. The first sailor to notice it gave vent to the usual hoot of surprise, which startled the human watchers on Toorey but was not particularly helpful to them. All they could see as their wandering attentions snapped back to the screens was the crew of the Bree, with the front end of every caterpillarlike body curled upward as its owner watched the sky.
“What is it, Barl?” Lackland called instantly.
“I don’t know,” the captain replied. “I thought for an instant it might be your rocket down looking for the islands to guide us better, but it’s smaller and very different in shape.”
“But it’s something flying?”
“Yes. It does not make any noise like your rocket, however. I’d say it was being blown by the wind, except that it’s moving too smoothly and regularly and in the wrong direction. I don’t know how to describe it; it’s wider than it is long, and a little bit like a mast set crosswise on a spar. I can’t get closer than that.”
“Could you angle one of the vision sets upward so we could get a look at it?”
“We’ll try.” Lackland immediately put through a call on the station telephone for one of the biologists.
“Lance, it looks as though Barlennan had run into a flying animal of some sort. We’re trying to arrange a look at it. Want to come down to the screen room to tell us what we’re looking at?”
“I’ll be right with you.” The biologist’s voice faded toward the end of the sentence; he was evidently already on his way out of the room. He arrived before the sailors had the vision set propped up, but dropped into a chair without asking questions. Barlennan was speaking again.
“It’s passing back and forth over the ship, sometimes in straight lines and sometimes in circles. Whenever it turns it tips, but nothing else about it changes. It seems to have a little body where the two sticks meet . . .” He went on with his description, but the object was evidently too far outside his normal experience for him to find adequate similes in a strange language.
Lance Beck, the biologist, voiced the thought that was in everyone’s mind.
“I’ve been doubting all along that there could be any life form, except something of insect size, that could evolve into a flying creature in Mesklin’s environment. The gravity is too high, the air only about half as dense as that of the Earth at sea level, and the storms too violent and long-lasting—no creature that did fly on Mesklin could afford to do without food very long, because of the enormous energy demands on its system. I wish that thing would fly in front of the scanner; when something makes me a liar I like to know why.”
“If it does come into view, be prepared to squint,” the voice of one of the technicians cut in. “I’m covering that screen with a high-speed camera, and will have to jump the brightness a good deal in order to get a decent exposure.”
There are smaller sticks set across the long one, and what looks like a very thin sail stretched between them. It’s swinging back toward us again, very low now—I think it may come in front of your eye this time . . .”
The watchers stiffened, and the hand of the photographer tightened on a double-pole switch whose closing would activate his camera and step up the gain on the screen. Ready as he was, the object was well into the field before he reacted, and everyone in the room got a good glimps
e before the suddenly bright light made their eyes close involuntarily. They all saw enough.
No one spoke while the cameraman energized the developing-frequency generator, rewound his film through its poles, swung the mounted camera toward the blank wall of the room, and snapped over the projection switch. Everyone had thoughts enough to occupy him for the fifteen seconds the operation required.
The projection was slowed down by a factor of fifty, and everyone could look as long as he pleased. There was no reason for surprise that Barlennan had been unable to describe the thing; he had never dreamed that such a thing as flying was possible until after his meeting with Lackland a few months before, and had no words in his own language for anything connected with the art. Among the few English words of that group he had learned, “fuselage” and “wing” and “empennage” were not included.
The object was not an animal. It had a body—fuselage, as the men thought of it—some three feet long, half the length of the canoe Barlennan had acquired. A slender rod extending several feet rearward held control surfaces at its extremity. The wings spanned a full twenty feet, and their structure of single main spar and numerous ribs was easily seen through the nearly transparent fabric that covered them. Within his natural limitations, Barlennan had done an excellent job of description.
“What drives it?” asked one of the watchers suddenly. “There’s no propeller or visible jet, and Barlennan said it was silent.”
“It’s a sailplane.” One of the meteorological staff spoke up. “A glider, operated by someone who has all the skill of a Terrestrial sea gull at making use of the updrafts from the front side of a wave. It could easily hold a couple of people Barlennan’s size, and could stay aloft until they had to come down for food or sleep—I don’t know whether they sleep or not; do they, Charlie?”