Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “Barl,” he said after a few moments silence, “do you suppose you could keep out of trouble for a few weeks, until we get our nerves and digestions back up here? Every time the Bree is held up, everyone on this moon ages about ten years.”

  “Just who got me into this trouble?” retorted the Mesklinite. “If I hadn’t been advised to seek shelter from a certain storm—which it turned out I could have weathered better on the open sea—I’d certainly never had met these glider makers. I can’t say that I’m very sorry I did, myself; I learned a lot, and I know at least some of your friends wouldn’t have missed the show for anything. From my point of view this trip has been rather dull so far; the few encounters we have had have all terminated very tamely, and with a surprising amount of profit.”

  “Just which do you like best, anyway; adventure or cash?”

  “Well—I’m not sure. Every now and then I let myself in for something just because it looks interesting; but I’m much happier in the end if I make something out of it.”

  “Then please concentrate on what you’re making out of this trip. If it will help you any to do that, we’ll collect a hundred or a thousand shiploads of those spices you just got rid of and store them for you where the Bree wintered; it would still pay us, if you’ll get that information we need.”

  “Thanks, I expect to make profit enough. You’d take all the fun out of life.”

  “I was afraid you’d feel that way. All right, I can’t order you around, but please remember what this means to us.”

  Barlennan agreed, more or less sincerely, and swung his ship once more southward. For some days the island they had left was visible behind them, and often they had to change course to avoid others. Several times they saw gliders skimming the waves on the way from one island to another, but these always gave the ship a wide berth. Evidently news spread rapidly among these people. Eventually the last visible bit of land slipped below the horizon, and the human beings said that there was no more ahead—good fixes could once more be obtained with the weather in its present clear state.

  Southward they went, shifting course now and then as before to take advantage of winds predicted from above. The predictions themselves grew ever more detailed and accurate as the meteorologists grew more and more familiar with Mesklin’s weird climate. One more storm was encountered, which the Bree weathered safely at sea—there was no land which the Earthmen could see for three thousand miles. After that the weather men were able to chart hurricane formation so far ahead that such disturbances could be completely avoided. They were maintaining a list of predicted course changes for the Bree as much as five Earth days ahead, and betting on their fulfillment; in a few weeks they had to offer large odds in order to find takers.

  At about forty-gravity latitude they directed the ship on a more southeasterly course to avoid the land mass which, as Reejaaren had said, swung far to the east ahead of her. Actually the ship was following a relatively narrow passage between two major seas, but the strait was far too wide for that fact to be noticeable from shipboard. The Bree never came within fifteen hundred miles of the nearer main shore, though her course line on the great globe kept on Toorey to show her wanderings seemed to hug the coast through the passage. Once through, the heading straight south was resumed, and weight gradually continued its climb.

  One minor accident occurred some distance into the new sea. At around sixty gravities the canoe, still following faithfully at the end of its towrope, began to settle visibly in the sea. While Dondragmer put on his best “I-told-you-so” expression and remained silent, the little vessel was pulled up to the ship’s stern and examined. There was quite a bit of methane in the bottom, but when she was unloaded and pulled aboard for examination no leak was visible. Barlennan concluded that spray was responsible, though the liquid was much clearer than the ocean itself. He put the canoe back in the sea and replaced its load, but detailed a sailor to inspect every few days and bail when necessary.

  This proved adequate for many days; the canoe floated as high as ever when freshly emptied, but the rate of leakage grew constantly greater. Twice more she was pulled aboard for inspection without result; Lackland, consulted by radio, could offer no explanation. He suggested that the wood might be porous, but in that case the leaking should have been present from the beginning. It was difficult to picture the almost metal-hard, close grained wood of Mesklin’s trees ever becoming waterlogged in any case, light as it was.

  The situation reached a climax at about two hundred gravities, with more than a third of the sea journey behind them. The minutes of daylight were longer now as spring progressed and the Bree moved ever farther from her sun, and the sailors were relaxing accordingly. The individual who had the bailing job was not, therefore, very attentive as he pulled the canoe up the stern rafts and climbed over its gunwale. He was aroused immediately thereafter. The canoe, of course, settled a trifle as he entered; and as it did so, the springy wood of the sides gave a little. As the sides collapsed, it sank a little farther—and the sides yielded more—and it sank yet farther—

  Like any feedback reaction this one went to completion in a remarkably short time. The sailor barely had time to feel the side of the canoe pressing inward when the whole vessel went under water and the outside pressure was relieved. Enough of the cargo was denser than methane to keep the canoe sinking, and the sailor found himself swimming where he had expected to be riding. The canoe itself settled to the end of its towrope, slowing the Bree with a jerk that brought the entire crew to full alertness.

  The sailor climbed back into the Bree, explaining what had happened as he did so. All the crew whose duties did not keep them elsewhere rushed to the stem, and presently the rope was hauled in with the swamped canoe at the end of it.

  Lackland was calling for explanations, interspersing the request with repetitions of the standard human complaint that the vision sets were never pointed quite right when anything interesting happened. With some effort, the canoe and such of its load as had been adequately lashed down were hauled aboard, and one of the sets turned to view it. The object was not very informative; the tremendous resilience of the wood had resulted in its recovering completely even from this flattening, and the canoe had resumed its original shape, still without leaks. This last fact was established after it had once more been unloaded.

  Lackland, looking it over, shook his head and offered no explanation. “Tell me just what happened—what everyone who saw anything at all did see.”

  The Mesklinites complied, Barlennan translating the stories of the crewman who had been involved and the few others who had seen the event in any detail. It was the first, of course, that provided the important bit of information.

  “Good Earth!” Lackland muttered, half aloud. “What’s the use of a high-school education if you can’t recall it when needed later on? Pressure in a liquid corresponds to the weight of liquid above the point in question—and even methane under a couple of hundred gravities weighs a good deal per vertical inch. That wood’s not much thicker than paper, either; a wonder it held so long. I wonder if it would hold up at a decent temperature; it seems to have sprung back after being, I suppose, almost completely flattened—”

  Barlennan interrupted this rather uninformative monologue with a request for information. “I gather you now know what happened,” he said. “Could you please make it clear to us?”

  Lackland made an honest effort, but was only partly successful. The concept of pressure, in a quantitative sense, defeats a certain number of students in every high-school class. There was nothing wrong with Barlennan’s brain, but his background was considerably less scientific, in the sense denoting familiarity with the idea of precise measurement, than the average human child’s. His people were still many generations from the idea of longitude determination by precise time measurements, for example, though they were good cartographers where dimensions could be measured directly—good enough, as Barlennan had revealed long since, to have detected the curvature
of their planet’s surface in their surveys.

  He did get the idea that the deeper one went into the sea the greater was the crushing force, and that the rate of increase with depth went up along with gravity; but he did not connect this force with others such as wind, or even the distress he himself had experienced when he submerged too rapidly in swimming. Perhaps this was natural, considering the fact that a pressure change great enough for him to notice in this way would have reduced a human body to pulp.

  The main point, of course, was that any floating object had to have some part of itself under the surface, and that sooner or later that part was going to be crushed if it was hollow. He avoided Dondragmer’s eye as this conclusion was reached in his conversation with Lackland, and was not comforted when the mate pointed out that this was undoubtedly where he had betrayed his falsehood when talking to Reejaaren. Hollow ships used by his own people, indeed! The islanders must have learned the futility of that in the far south long since.

  The gear that had been in the canoe was stowed on deck, and the voyage continued. Barlennan could not bring himself to part with the now useless little vessel, though it took up a good deal of space. He disguised its uselessness thinly by packing it with food supplies which could not have been heaped so high without the sides of the canoe to retain them. Dondragmer pointed out that it was reducing the ship’s flexibility by extending the length of two rafts, but the captain did not let this fact worry him.

  Time passed, as it had before, first hundreds and then thousands of days. To the Mesklinites, long-lived by nature, its passage meant little; to the Earthmen the voyage gradually became a thing of boredom, part of the regular routine of life. Most of them returned to research jobs that had been more or less interrupted by the whole affair. Others, of course, could not do that; their lines of research hung on the data that Barlennan was trying to recover. These, and people like Lackland and Professor McKnight whose prime interest lay either in the voyage itself or in Mesklin’s people, kept a more or less faithful watch on the vision screens while the Bree crossed the endless miles of sea month after month.

  They watched and talked to the captain as the line on the globe slowly lengthened; measured and computed to determine his position and best course when he asked them to; taught English to or tried to learn a Mesklinite language from sailors who sometimes also grew bored; in short, waited, worked where possible, and killed time as four Earthly months—nine thousand four hundred and some odd Mesklinite days—passed. Gravity increased from the hundred and ninety or so at the latitude where the canoe had sunk to four hundred, and then to six, and then further, as indicated by the wooden spring balance that was the Bree’s latitude gauge. The days grew longer and the nights shorter until at last the sun rode completely around the sky without touching the horizon, though it dipped toward it in the south.

  The sun itself seemed shrunken to the men who had grown used to it during the brief time of Mesklin’s perihelion passage. The horizon, seen from the Bree’s deck through the vision sets, was above the ship all around, as Barlennan had so patiently explained to Lackland months before; and he listened tolerantly when the men assured him it was an optical illusion.

  The land that finally appeared ahead was obviously above them, too; how could an illusion turn out to be correct? The land was really there. This was proved when they reached it; for reach it they did, at the mouth of a vast bay that stretched on to the south—if any direction this close to the south pole could be called that—for some two thousand miles, half the remaining distance to the grounded rocket.

  Up the bay they sailed, more slowly as it finally narrowed to the dimensions of a regular estuary and they had to tack instead of seeking favorable winds with the Flyer’s help, and finally to the river at its head. Up this they went too, no longer sailing except at rare, favorable intervals; for the current against the blunt faces of the rafts was more than the sails could usually overcome, broad as the river still was.

  They towed instead, a watch at a time going ashore with ropes and pulling; for in this gravity even a single Mesklinite had a respectable amount of traction. More weeks, while the Earthmen lost their boredom and tension mounted in the Toorey station, the goal was almost in sight, and hopes ran high.

  And they were dashed, as they had been for a moment months before when Lackland’s tank reached the end of its journey. The reason was much the same; but this time the Bree and its crew were at the bottom of a cliff, not the top. The cliff itself was three hundred feet high, not sixty; and in nearly seven hundred gravities climbing, jumping, and other rapid means of travel which had been so freely indulged at the distant Rim were utter impossibilities for the powerful little monsters who manned the ship.

  The rocket was fifty miles away in horizontal distance; in vertical, it was the equivalent, for a human being, of a climb of nearly thirty-five—up a sheer rock wall.

  TO BE CONCLUDED

  MISSION OF GRAVITY

  Conclusion. Under the violent grip of seven hundred gravities, at the south polar plateau, the goal in sight—Barlennan was in position to drive a bargain!

  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 Earth, but because it consists largely of degenerate matter 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 awkwar
dly 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.

  Barlennan, through a misunderstanding of Lackland’s, has already had an experience which has jarred out of him the ingrained, conditioned f ear 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.