by Hal Clement
“I believe not. This glider, then, might have come from an enormous distance, riding the winds of Mesklin; is that right?”
“It could have; my personal opinion is that it probably is from the islands Barl is approaching.”
“Why?”
“They are by far the closest bodies of land. The next nearest, as far as we’ve seen, is the continental mass that Barlennan’s ship left not long ago. If they could fly this far from any other continent, they could reach that one—and we didn’t see any; or rather, you didn’t. They should, in that case, be swarming all over the equatorial regions.”
“Good point, assuming that they are actually of Barlennan’s species. I hope we see enough of them to find out. I had pretty well estimated that Barl represented about the top culture of the planet, roughly equal to Earth’s tenth century; now we appear to have a race that has learned to fly—under conditions much more difficult than those of Earth, as I understand.”
“So it appears, Don. I suppose you’ll want us to leave another vision set where you can get a look at their daily lives, too.” McKnight smiled and glanced at the other screen, which was showing a scene from the village of the river dwellers.
“I might, at that. What are my chances?”
“Negligible,” Lackland said flatly. “I sympathize with you, but basic research comes later. When—and if—we get that gravity data, the bright fellows may rig up something that will let you go down there yourself without having to live in a hydraulic hammock the whole time.”
“That would be worth waiting for, I guess. I’ll be patient. Of course, our little friend might have to buy his way out of a tight spot again.” The ethnologist turned back to his own screen and recorder, smiling. Lackland grinned in return.
“I’ll call you if he does.”
The Bree’s crew were becoming a trifle nervous. The complete silence of the flying machine, their inability to see who or what was in it now that the Earthmen had explained its nature, bothered them; no one likes to be watched constantly by someone he can’t see. The glider made no hostile move, but their experience of aerial assault was still fresh enough to leave them uneasy about its presence. One or two had expressed a desire to practice their newly acquired art of throwing, using any hard objects they could find about the deck, but Barlennan had sternly forbidden this. They simply sailed on, wondering, until the hazy dome of the sky darkened with another sunset.
Through the night they sailed, wondering; and no one knew whether to be relieved or worried when the new day revealed no trace of the flying machine. The wind was now stronger, and almost directly across the Bree’s course from the northeast; the waves had not yet followed it and were decidedly choppy in consequence. For the first time Barlennan perceived a disadvantage in the canoe; methane that blew or washed inboard stayed there. He found it necessary before the day was over to haul the little vessel up to the outer rafts and place two men aboard to bail—an act for which he had neither a word nor proper equipment. The sailors were not happy at first, but quickly discovered that relatively little effort was required merely to splash the liquid back overboard. After two or three days Barlennan started to send them out replacements, and was told they were perfectly happy to stay where they were.
The days passed without reappearance of the glider, and eventually only the official lookouts kept their eyes turned upward in expectation of its return. The high haze thickened and darkened, however, and presently turned to clouds which lowered until they hung a scant fifty feet above the sea. Barlennan was informed by the Earthmen that this was not good flying weather, and eliminated the watch. Neither he nor the human beings stopped to wonder how the first glider had found its way on a night too hazy for the stars to provide guidance.
The first of the islands to come into view was fairly high, its ground rising quickly from sea level to disappear into the clouds. It lay downwind from the point where they first sighted it; and Barlennan, after consulting the sketch map of the archipelago he had made from the Earthmen’s descriptions, kept on course. As he had expected, another island appeared dead ahead before the first had faded from sight, and he altered course to pass to leeward of it. This side, according to observation from above, was quite irregular and should have usable harbors; also, Barlennan had no intention of coasting the windward shore during the several nights which would undoubtedly be required for his search.
This island appeared to be high also; not only did its hilltops reach the clouds, but the wind was in large measure cut off as the Bree passed into its lee. Her speed dropped considerably, but remained high enough to satisfy her commander, particularly as the search ended almost as soon as it began. The shore line was cut by frequent fiords; Barlennan was intending simply to sail across the mouth of each in the hunt, but Dondragmer insisted that it would be worth while to penetrate to a point well away from the open sea. He claimed that almost any beach far enough up would be adequate shelter. Barlennan was convinced only to the point of wanting to show the mate how wrong he was.
Unfortunately for this project, the first fiord examined made a sharp hook-turn half a mile from the ocean and opened into what amounted to a lake, almost perfectly circular and about a hundred yards in diameter. Its walls rose into the mist except at the mouth where the Bree had entered and a smaller opening only a few yards from the first where a stream from the interior fed into the lake. The only beach was between the two openings.
The crew discovered these facts bit by bit, for the wind was funneling down into this circular space and out along the fiord, carrying fragments of cloud nearly down to surface level and blanketing the view almost completely. The small stream was quite wide and deep enough for the ship, but she could not be moved into it against both wind and current; so she was beached there in the lake. Certainly there seemed little chance of destructive waves reaching her there, anyway.
There was plenty of time to secure both vessel and contents, as it happened; the clouds belonged to the second of the two “normal” cyclones the meteorologist had mentioned, rather than to the major storm. Within a few days of the Bree’s arrival in the harbor the weather cleared once more, though the wind continued high. Barlennan—and through his aid, the human watchers—was able to see that the harbor was actually the bottom of a bowlshaped valley whose walls were less than a hundred feet in height, and not particularly steep.
It was possible to see far inland through the cleft cut by the small river, provided one climbed a short distance up the walls. In doing this, shortly after the weather cleared, Barlennan made a disconcerting discovery: sea shells, seaweeds, and bones of fairly large sea animals were thickly scattered among the land-type vegetation clothing the hillside. This continued, he discovered upon further investigation, quite uniformly around the valley up to a height fully thirty feet above the present sea level.
Many of the remains were old, decayed almost to nothing, and partly buried; but these might be accounted for by seasonal changes in the ocean level. Others, however, were relatively fresh. The implication was clear—on certain occasions the sea rose far above its present level; and it was possible that the Bree was not in as safe a position as her crew believed.
Barlennan, coming from Mesklin’s middle latitudes, knew nothing of tides and still less of tropical hurricanes. The storms he had experienced the preceding winter had not been the tight, fiercely whirling cells that developed a little farther from the equator; and those of his home latitudes could not lift the seas very far against the terrific gravity. Here the low-pressure zone in the center of a tight cyclone could and did raise a dome of liquid in its center, corresponding to the two- or three-foot rise of water in the center of an Earthly tropical hurricane but vastly greater. The lower density of methane and the enormously greater differences in atmospheric pressure in Mesklin’s storms more than offset the higher gravity in these latitudes; a thirty-foot rise in sea level was not at all unreasonable or unusual.
One factor alone limited Mesklin’s storms
to the point where sea travel was possible; methane vapor is far denser than hydrogen. On Earth, water vapor is lighter than air, and contributes enormously to the development of a hurricane once it starts; on Mesklin, the methane picked up from the ocean by such a storm tends, in a relatively short time, to put a stop to the rising currents which are responsible for its origin. Also the heat it gives up in condensing to form the storm clouds is only about a quarter as great as would be given by a comparable amount of water—and that heat is the fuel for a hurricane, once the sun has given the initial push.
In spite of all this, a Mesklinite hurricane is no joke. Barlennan, Mesklinite though he was, learned this very suddenly. He was seriously considering towing the Bree as far upstream as time would permit when the decision was taken out of his hands; the water in the lake receded with appalling suddenness, leaving the ship stranded fully twenty yards from its edge. Moments later the wind shifted ninety degrees and increased to a speed that made the sailors cling for dear life to deck cleats, if they happened to be on board, and to the handiest vegetation if they did not.
The captain’s shrill hoot ordering those off the ship to return went completely unheard, sheltered as they were in the almost complete circle of the valley walls; but no one needed any order. They picked their way, bush by bush, never holding with Less than two sets of pincers, back to where their comrades had already lashed themselves as best they could to the vessel that was threatening every moment to lift into the wind’s embrace. Rain—or, more properly, driven spray that had come completely across the island—lashed at them for long minutes; then both it and the wind ceased as though by magic. No one dare release his lashings, but the slowest sailors now made a final dash for the ship. They were none too soon.
The storm cell at sea level was probably three miles or so in diameter; it was traveling at about sixty or seventy miles per hour. The ending of the wind was only temporary; it meant that the center of the cyclone had reached the valley. This was also the low pressure zone; and as it reached the sea at the mouth of the fiord, the flood came. Up the narrowing waterway it rose, gathering speed as it came, and spurted into the valley like the stream from a hose. Around the walls it swirled, picking up the Bree on the first circle; higher and higher, as the ship sought the center of the whirlpool—fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five feet before the wind struck again.
Tough as the wood of the masts was, they had snapped long since. Two crewmen had vanished, their lashing perhaps a little too hastily completed. The new wind seized the ship, bare of masts as she was, and flung her toward the side of the whirlpool; like a chip, both for helplessness and magnitude, she shot along the stream of liquid now pouring up the little river toward the island’s interior. Still the wind urged her, now toward the side of the stream; and as the pressure rose once more, the flood receded as rapidly as it had risen—no, not quite; the portion now floating the Bree had nowhere to go except back out through the little rivercourse, and that took time.
Had daylight lasted, Barlennan might, even in his ship’s present condition have guided her back along that stream while she still floated; but the sun chose this moment to set, and in the darkness he ran aground. The few seconds delay was enough; the liquid continued to recede, and when the sun returned it looked upon a helpless collection of rafts some twenty yards from a stream that was too narrow and too shallow to float any one of them.
The sea was completely out of sight beyond the hills; the limp form of a twenty-foot-long sea monster stranded on the other side of the brook gave a graphic picture of the helplessness of the Gravity Expedition.
XII.
Much of what had happened had been seen from Toorey; the radio sets, like most of the less prominent articles about the Bree’s deck, had remained lashed in position. Not much had been distinguishable, of course, while the vessel had been whirling in the brief maelstrom; but her present situation was painfully clear. None of the people in the screen room could find anything helpful to say.
The Mesklinites could say little, either. They were used to ships on dry land, since that happened fairly often during late summer and fall as the seas receded in their own latitudes; but they were not accustomed to having it happen so suddenly, and to have so much high ground between them and the ocean. Barlennan and the mate, taking stock of the situation, found little to be thankful for.
They still had plenty of food, though that in the canoe had vanished. Dondragmer took occasion to point out the superiority of rafts, neglecting to mention that the supplies in the canoe had been tied down carelessly or not at all owing to a misplaced confidence in the high sides of the boat. The little vessel itself was still at the end of its towline, and still undamaged. The wood of which it had been made shared the springiness of the low-growing plants of the higher latitudes. The Bree herself, constructed of similar materials though in much less yielding form, was also intact, though the story might have been different had there been many rocks in the wall of the round valley. She was and had remained right side up, owing to her construction—Barlennan admitted that point without waiting for the mate to bring it up. The complaints were not in any way connected with lack of ship or supplies, but with lack of an ocean to float them on.
How to move the ship—or whether to abandon her and build another beside the sea. No one thought of, much less expressed, the alternative of simply settling down where they were.
“The surest way would be to take her apart, as we did before, and carry her over the hills. They’re not very steep, and there still isn’t enough weight to matter.” Barlennan made this suggestion after long thought.
“You’re probably right, captain; but wouldn’t it save time to separate the rafts only lengthwise, so that we have rows the full length of the ship? We could carry or drag those over to the stream, and surely they’d float before we went down very far.” Hars, now his former self after his encounter with the rock, made this suggestion.
“That sounds promising. Hars, why don’t you find out just how far down that would be? The rest can start unlashing as Hars suggested, and unloading where we have to. Some of the cargo will be in the way of the lashings, I’m afraid.”
“I wonder if the weather is still too bad for those flying machines?” Dondragmer asked, of no one in particular. Barlennan glanced upward.
“The clouds are still low and the wind high,” he said. “If the Flyers are right—and they ought to know, I should think—the weather is still too bad. However, it won’t hurt to look up occasionally. I rather hope we see one again.”
“One I wouldn’t much mind myself,” replied the mate dryly. “I suppose you want a glider to add to the canoe. I’ll tell you right now that I might, in extremity, get into the canoe, but the day I climb onto one of those flying machines will be a calm winter morning with both suns in the sky.”
Barlennan did not answer; he had not consciously considered adding a glider to his collection, but the idea rather struck his fancy. As for flying in it—well, changed as he was, there were limits.
The Flyers reported clearing weather, and the clouds obediently thinned over the next few days. Greatly improved though the flying weather was, few crew members thought to watch the sky. All were too busy. Hars’ plan had proved feasible, the stream being deep enough for the rafts only a few hundred yards toward the sea and wide enough for a single raft very little further down. Barlennan’s statement that the additional weight would mean little proved wrong; every component was twice as heavy as it had been where they last saw Lackland, and they were not accustomed to lifting anything.
Powerful as they were, the new gravity taxed their hoisting abilities to the point where it was necessary to unload the rafts before the rows of little platforms could be partly carried and partly dragged to the stream. Once they were partly immersed the going was much simpler; and after a digging squad had widened the banks up to the point nearest the Bree’s resting place the job became almost easy. Not too many hundred days passed before the long, narr
ow string of rafts, reloaded, was being towed once more toward the sea.
If gliders had ever been in the neighborhood none of the Bree’s crew had seen them. The sailors must have been watching from somewhere, however; for the activities of the next people they met were much too well timed to represent anything but foreknowledge and planning.
The flying machines appeared just after the ship had entered that portion of the stream where its walls were steepest, shortly before it emptied into the lake. Karondrasee saw them first; he was on board at the time, preparing food while the others pulled, and his attention was freer than theirs. His hoot of alarm roused Earthmen and Mesklinites alike, but the former as usual could not see the approaching visitors since the vision sets were not aimed high enough.
Barlennan saw all too clearly, however. There were eight of the gliders, traveling fairly close together but by no means in tight formation. They came straight on, riding the updraft on the leeward side of the little valley until they were almost over the ship; then they changed course to pass in front of her. As each swooped overhead, it released an object, turned, and swung back to the lee side to recover its altitude.
The falling objects were distinct enough; every sailor could see that they were spears, very much like those the river dwellers had used but with much heavier tips. For a moment the old terror of falling objects threatened to send the crew into hysteria; then they saw that the missiles would not strike them, but fall some distance in front.
A few seconds later the gliders swooped again, and the sailors cowered in expectation of an improved aim; but the spears fell in about the same place. With the third pass it became evident that their aim was deliberate; and presently their purpose became apparent. Every projectile had fallen in the still narrow stream, and penetrated more than half its length into the firm clay bottom; by the end of the third run, two dozen stakes formed by the spear handles were effectually blocking the ship’s passage downstream.