by Hal Clement
The captain pondered this advice for some time. His desire to reach the rocket was unabated, of course; the idea of waiting some sixty thousand days for the wind to drop, with no assurance that it would do so even then, was far from encouraging. They could hardly lose by trying; after all, the wind merely added to the difficulty—it was no danger. At the Rim, of course, such a hurricane would pick up a Mesklinite bodily and drive him out of sight in seconds; but at the Rim such a wind could never form, since the air caught in the bowl would have only a tiny fraction of its present weight. That much even Barlennan now had clear.
“Well go now,” he said abruptly to the radio, and turned to give orders to the crew.
The Bree was guided across the stream—Barlennan had landed her on the side away from the plateau. There she was dragged well out of the river and her tie lines secured to stakes—there were no plants capable of taking the desired load growing this close to the landslide. Five sailors were selected to remain with the ship; the rest harnessed themselves, secured the drag-lines of their packs to the harness, and started at once for the slope.
For some time they were not bothered by the wind; Barlennan had made the obvious approach, coming up the side of the fan of rubble. Its farthest parts, as they had already seen, were composed of relatively fine particles—sand and very small pebbles; as they climbed, the rock fragments grew constantly larger. All could understand the reason for this; the wind could carry the smallest pieces farthest, and all began to worry a trifle about the size of the rocks they would have to climb over in the cut itself. Rocks that the wind they had felt could not move when intensified by its imprisonment between the walls of the cut must be monsters indeed.
Only a few days were consumed in reaching the side of the wall’s opening. The wind was a little fresher here; a few yards on, it issued from behind the comer with a roar that made conversation even harder as they approached. Occasional eddies struck them, giving a tiny taste of what was to come; but Barlennan halted for only a moment. Then, making sure that his pack was dose behind him and securely attached to his harness, he gathered himself together and crawled into the full blast of the wind. The others followed without hesitation.
Even to beings equipped with Mesklinite vocal apparatus the sound was deafening as the air currents sobbed past their bodies and around the scattered rocks. Their worst fears failed to materialize; climbing individual boulders was not necessary. Such huge fragments were present, indeed, but the downhill side of each was nearly covered by a ramp of finer material that had been swept into the relatively sheltered area by the everlasting wind. The ramps overlapped to a great extent, and where they did not it was always possible to travel across the wind from one to another. Their way was tortuous, but they slowly climbed.
They had to modify the original idea that the wind was not really dangerous. One sailor became hungry, paused in what he thought was shelter, and attempted to take a piece of food from his pack; an eddy around his sheltering rock, caused probably by his very presence which disturbed the equilibrium attained after months and years of steady wind, caught in the open container. It acted like a parachute, snatched its unfortunate owner out of his shelter and down the slope. He was gone from sight in a cloud of freshly disturbed, wind-lifted sand in moments, and his fellows looked away. A six-inch fall under this gravity could kill; there would be many such falls before their comrade reached the bottom. If by chance there were not, his own hundreds of pounds of weight would be scraped against the rocks hard enough and fast enough to accomplish the same end. The survivors dug their feet in a little farther, and gave up all thought of eating before they reached the top.
Time after time the sun crossed ahead of them, shining down the cleft. Time after time it appeared behind, blazing into the opening from the opposite direction. Each time the rocks about them lighted up under its direct impact they were a little farther up the long hill; each time, they began at last to feel, the wind was just a little less furious as it roared past their long bodies. The cleft was visibly wider, and the slope gentler. Now they could see the cliff opening out forward and to each side; at last, the way ahead of them became practically horizontal and they could see the broad regions of the upper plateau ahead.
The wind was still strong, but no longer deadly; and as Barlennan led the way to the left it decreased still further. It was not sharply defined here as it was below; it fed into the cleft from all directions, but from that very fact its strength decreased rapidly as they left the cut behind them. At long last they felt safe in stopping, and all immediately opened their packs and enjoyed a meal for the first time in some three hundred days—a long fast even for Mesklinites.
With hunger attended to, Barlennan began to look over the country ahead. He had stopped his group to one side of the cut, almost at the edge of the plateau, and the ground sloped down away from him around nearly half the compass. It was discouraging ground.
The rocks were larger, and would have to be traveled around—climbing any of them was unthinkable. Even keeping to one direction among them would be impossible; no one could see more than a few yards in any direction once they surrounded him, and the sun was utterly useless as a means of guidance. It would be necessary to keep close to the edge—but not too close; Barlennan repressed an inward shudder. The problem of finding the rocket when they reached its neighborhood would have to be solved on the spot; the Flyers would surely be able to help there. Perhaps they could give him a radio signal whenever the sun was in the right direction, or something like that.
The next problem was food. There was enough in the packs for a long time—probably for the eight hundred miles back to the point above the Bree’s old halting place; but there would have to be some means of replenishing the supply, for it would never last the round trip, or maintain them at the rocket for any length of time. For a moment Barlennan could not see his way through this problem; then a solution slowly grew on him. He thought it over from every angle, and finally decided it was the best that could be managed. Once settled on details, he called Dondragmer.
The mate had brought up the rear on the arduous climb, taking without complaint the bits of sand loosened by the others which had been hurled cruelly against him by the wind. He seemed none the worse for the experience, however; he could have matched the great Hars for endurance, if not for strength. He listened now to the captain’s orders without any show of emotion, though they must have disappointed him deeply in at least one way. With his duties clear, he called together the members of his watch who were present, and added to them half the sailors of the captain’s watch. Packs were redistributed; all the food was given to the relatively small group remaining with Barlennan, and all the rope except for a single piece long enough to loop through the harnesses of Dondragmer’s entire company. They had learned from experience—experience they had no intention of repeating.
These preliminaries attended to, the mate wasted no time; he turned and led his group toward the slope they had just ascended with such effort, and presently the tail of the roped-together procession vanished into the dip that led to the cleft. Barlennan turned to the others.
“We will have to ration food strictly from now on. We will not attempt to travel rapidly; it would do us no good. The Bree should get back to the old stopping place well before us, but they will have some preparations to make before they can help us. You two who have radios, don’t let anything happen to them; they’re the only things that will let us find out when we’re near the ship—unless someone wants to volunteer to look over the edge every so often. Incidentally, that may be necessary anyway; but I’ll do it if it is.”
“Shall we start right away, captain?”
“No. We will wait here until we know that Dondragmer is back to the ship. If he runs into trouble, we will have to use some other plan, which would probably require us to go back down ourselves; in that case it would be a waste of time and effort to have traveled any distance, and would cost time that might be valuable in get
ting back.”
“I see.”
The party settled down to wait, as comfortably as possible. Since the bare ground was little if any harder than the deck of the Bree where they normally relaxed, this was little hardship. None of them experienced any distress from the air density, which was fully as low as the Earthmen had predicted. Rosten watched them for minutes through one of the vision sets which was looking out of a pack, and finally turned away, shaking his head. There was a lot about the Mesklinite organism that needed research, and that would probably be hard to arrange.
Meanwhile, Dondragmer and his group reached the slope without difficulty. They stopped just long enough for the mate to make sure that all harnesses were securely fastened at regular intervals along the rope he had brought; then he attached his own at the rear, and gave the order to start down.
The rope proved a good idea; it was harder even for the many feet of the Mesklinites to keep their traction while heading downward than it had been before. The wind showed no tendency to pick anyone up this time, since they had no packs on which it could get a grip, but the going was still awkward. As before, everyone lost all track of time, and all were correspondingly relieved when the way opened ahead and they were able to swing to the left out of the wind’s path. They still found themselves looking down, of course, which was extremely hard on Mesklinite nerves; but the worst of the descent was over.
Only three or four days were consumed in getting down the rest of the way and aboard the still waiting Bree. The sailors with the ship had seen them coming long enough in advance to develop a number of theories, mostly tragic in tone, concerning the fate of the rest of the party. They were quickly reassured, and the mate reported his arrival to the men on Toorey so that they could relay the information to Barlennan on the plateau. Then the ship was dragged back to the river—a real task, with a quarter of the crew missing and the full power of polar gravity to plaster the rafts to the beach—but it was finally accomplished.
Twice the vessel hung up on small pebbles that had not quite stopped her going the other way; the first time a sailor swam across the river with a line which he fastened to a tree, and the differential hoist was put to effective use. The rig was left in place after the first obstruction was cleared, and was usable on the second with a minimum of delay.
With the Bree once more afloat, it was carefully salvaged; Dondragmer spent much of the time on the down-stream trip examining it. He already knew its principles of construction well enough to have made one without help; but he could not quite figure out just why it worked. Several Earth men watched him with amusement, but none was discourteous enough to show the fact—and none dreamed of spoiling the Mesklinite’s chance of solving the problem by himself. Even Lackland, fond as he was of Barlennan, had long since come to the conclusion that the mate was considerably his captain’s superior in general intelligence, and rather expected that he would be regaling them with a sound mechanical explanation before the Bree reached her former stopping place; but he was wrong.
As had already been pointed out by the ethnology department, the mate’s general background did not include the concept of precise measurement of other than linear quantities, so that he was unable to form the concept of “work” in the sense in which physicists use the term. No doubt his race in a very few generations—Lackland had heard that before, and stopped worrying about the matter. By this time, the ship was almost to her destination, anyway.
The position of the grounded rocket was known with great accuracy; the uncertainty was less than half a dozen miles. Its telemetering transmitters—not all the instruments had been of permanent-record type—had continued to operate for more than an Earth-year after the failure to answer take-off signals; in that time, an astronomical number of fixes had been taken on the location of the transmitters. Mesklin’s atmosphere did not interfere appreciably with radio, and the planet’s rate of rotation was known to enough decimal places to present a clock-operated streetlight control for the next five hundred years, if anyone wanted to.
The Bree could also be located by radio, as could Barlennan’s party; it would be the job of the Earthmen to guide the two groups together and, eventually, lead them to the grounded research projectile. The difficulty was in obtaining fixes from Toorey; all three targets were on the “edge” of the disk as seen from the moon. Still worse, the shape of the planet meant that a tiny error in the determination of signal direction could mean a discrepancy of some thousands of miles on the world’s surface; the line of the antenna just about grazed the flattest part of the planet. To remedy this, the rocket that had photographed the planet so much was launched once more, and set into a circular orbit that crossed the poles at regular intervals.
At first the idea had been to place the orbit outside the outer ring; but the pilot was good and crew willing, and when finally set up the craft threaded her way neatly through the narrow gap between the inner and second ring. It could not stay there indefinitely, of course; the same gravitational forces from Toorey that had swept the gap in the first place would eventually deflect the ship to the middle ring. However, she would be safe for several months, which should be long enough, even without course corrections.
From this orbit, once it was accurately set up, fixes could be taken with sufficient precision on the tiny transmitters that the Mesklinites were carrying with them.
The ship that was their goal was no longer transmitting, and its position known only in terms of the arbitrary co-ordinates that the expedition had set up for use on the planet; so the first thing the orbiting rocket did was send a set of fix times and directions to the satellite for the mathematicians to work on. In comparatively short order the relative positions of the three objects came back; a little later a revised map of the south polar regions was transmitted, having the arbitrary latitude and longitude grid added to the topography and the positions so far known carefully indicated. From now on actual positions could be figured in the rocket itself.
The problem became even simpler when Dondragmer finally brought the Bree to its former halting place and established a camp. There was now a fixed transmitter on the planet, and this made it possible to tell Barlennan how much farther he had to go within a minute or two of any time he chose to ask. The trip settled down to routine once more—from above.
XVII.
For Barlennan himself it was hardly routine. The upper plateau was as it had seemed from the beginning; arid, stony, lifeless, and confusing. He did not dare go far from the edge; once among those boulders direction would quickly vanish. There were no hills of any size to serve as landmarks, or at least none which could be seen from the ground. The thickly scattered rocks hid everything more than a few yards away, towering into the line of sight in every direction except toward the edge of the cliff. They could not be climbed, in the hope of finding a better viewpoint; the very smallest, except for the almost solid paving of pebbles, was nearly a foot in height, and in this gravity not even the Mesklinites could raise more than an inch or two of their bodies from the ground at once. Also, in spite of the loss of much childhood conditioning, no one was really anxious to find himself a foot off the ground. Two dimensions, they felt, were enough for anyone, except in weird places like the Rim—and weirder ones where the Flyers came from.
Travel itself was not too difficult. The ground was level, except for the stones; these merely had to be avoided. Eight hundred miles is a long walk for a man, and a longer one for a creature only eighteen inches long who has to “walk” by rippling forward caterpillar style; and the endless detours made the actual distance covered much more than eight hundred miles. True, Barlennan’s people could travel with considerable speed, all things considered; but much had to be considered.
The captain actually began to worry somewhat about the food supply before the trip was over. He had felt that he was allowing a generous safety margin when he first conceived the project; this idea had to be sharply modified. Time and again he anxiously asked the human beings far
above how much farther he had to go; sometimes he received an answer—always discouraging—and sometimes the rocket was on the other side of the planet and his answer came from Toorey, telling him to wait a short time for a fix. The relay stations were still functioning, but they could not be used to take a directional reading on his radio.
It did not occur to him until the long walk was nearly over that he could have cut across among the stones after all. The sun by itself, of course, could not have served him as a directional guide; it circled the horizon completely in less than eighteen minutes, and a very accurate clock would be necessary to calculate the actual desired course from its apparent direction. However, the observers in the rocket could have told him at any time whether the sun was in front of him, behind him, or to a particular side with respect to his desired direction of travel. By the time this occurred to anyone, the remaining distance could be covered about as easily by keeping the edge in sight; the cliff was nearly straight between where Barlennan then was and the rendezvous point.
There was still a little food, but not too much, when they finally reached a position where the Earthmen could find no significant difference in the positions of the radios. Theoretically, the first thing to do should have been to proceed with the next phase of Barlennan’s plan in order to replenish the supply of eatables; but actually there was a serious step to be taken first. Barlennan had mentioned it before the march began, but no one had really considered the matter with any care. Now it stared them in the eye.
The Earthmen had said they were about as close to the Bree as they could get. There should be, then, food only a hundred yards below them; but before they could take any steps toward getting it, someone—and probably several people—must look over the edge. They must see just where they were in relation to the ship; they must rig up lifting tackle to bring the food up; in short, they must look fully three hundred feet straight down—and they had excellent depth perception.