by Hal Clement
“I would suggest that you spend from now until my sailor gets here from the lookout in thought. If by that time you have no better idea, we will use mine.”
“What? You have an idea?”
“Certainly. We got to the top of that boulder from which we saw your rocket; what is wrong with using the same method here?”
Rosten was silent for fully half a minute; Lackland suspected he was kicking himself mentally.
“I can only see one point,” he said at last. “You will have a much larger job of rock-piling than you did before. The rocket is more than three times as high as the boulder where you built the ramp, and you’ll have to build up all around it instead of on one side, I suspect.”
“Why can we not simply make a ramp on one side up to the lowest level containing the machines you are interested in? It should then be possible to get up the rest of the way inside, as you do in the other rockets.”
“For two principal reasons. The more important one is that you won’t be able to climb around inside; the rocket was not built to carry living crews, and has no communication between decks. All the machinery was built to be reached from outside the hull, at the appropriate level. The other point is that you cannot start at the lower levels; granted that you could get the access covers off, I seriously doubt that you could lift them back in place when you finished with a particular section. That would mean that you’d have the covers off all around the hull before you built up to the next level; and I’m rather afraid that such a situation would not leave enough metal in place below to support the sections above. The top of the cone would—or at least might—collapse. Those access ports occupy the greater part of the skin, and are thick enough to take a lot of vertical load. Maybe it was bad design, but remember we expected to open them only in space, with no weight at all.
“What you will have to do, I fear, is bury the rocket completely to the highest level containing apparatus and then dig your way down, level by level. It may even be advisable to remove the machinery from each section as you finish with it; that will bring the load to an absolute minimum. After all, there’ll only be a rather fraillooking skeleton when you have all those plates off, and I don’t like to picture what would happen to it with a full equipment load times seven hundred, nearly.”
“I see.” Barlennan took his turn at a spell of silent thought. “You yourself can think of no alternative to this plan? It involves, as you rightly point out, much labor.”
“None so far. We will follow your recommendation, and think until your other man comes from the observation point. I suspect we work under a grave disadvantage, though—we are unlikely to think of any solution which does not involve machinery we couldn’t get to you.”
“That I had long since noticed.”
It was impossible to tell whether the Mesklinite made the statement as one of simple fact or a vehicle for sarcasm. No one attempted to ask; only Rosten so much as raised his eyebrows, and that was a harmless gesture since Barlennan had no vision receiver. The native’s remark was undoubtedly true, whatever he had meant by it.
The sun continued to circle the sky at a shade better than twenty degrees a minute. A call had long since gone echoing out to the observation platform to let the guide know his work was done; he was presumably on the way in. The sailors did nothing except rest and amuse themselves; all, at one time or another, descended the easy slope of the pit the blasts had dug to examine the rocket at close quarters. All of them were too intelligent to put its operation down to magic, but it awed them nonetheless. They understood nothing of its principle of operation, though that could easily have been made clear if Lackland had stopped to wonder how a race that did not breathe could nevertheless speak aloud. The Mesklinites possessed in well developed form the siphon arrangement, similar to that of Earthly cephalopods, which their amphibious ancestors bad used for high speed swimming; they used it as the bellows for a very Earthly set of vocal cords, but were still able to put it to its original function. They were well suited by nature to understand the rocket principle.
Their lack of understanding was not all that aroused the sailors’ respect. Their race built cities, and they had regarded themselves as good engineers; but the highest walls they ever constructed reached perhaps three inches from the ground. Multistoried buildings, even roofs other than a flap of fabric, conflicted too violently with their almost instinctive fear of solid material overhead. The experiences of this group had done something to change the attitude from one of unreasoning fear to one of intelligent respect for weight, but the habit clung nevertheless. The rocket was some eighty times the height of any artificial structure their race had ever produced; awe at the sight of such a thing was inevitable.
The arrival of the lookout sent Barlennan back to the radio, but there was no better idea than his own to be had. This did not surprise him at all. He brushed Rosten’s apologies aside, and set to work along with his crew. Not even then did any of the watchers above think of the possibility of their agent’s having ideas of his own about the rocket. Curiously enough, such a suspicion by then would have come much too late—too late to have any foundation.
Strangely, the work was not as much harder or longer as everyone had expected. The reason was simple; the rock and earth blown out by the jets was relatively loose, since there was no weather in the thin air of the plateau to pack it down as it had been before. A human being, of course, wearing the gravity nullifier the scientists hoped to develop from the knowledge concealed in the rocket, could not have pushed a shovel into it, for the gravity was a pretty good packing agent; it was loose only by Mesklinite standards. Loads of it were being pushed down the gentle inner slope of the pit to the growing pile around the tubes; pebbles were being worked clear of the soil and set rolling the same way, with a hooted warning beforehand. The warning was needed; once free and started, they moved too fast for the human eye to follow, and usually buried themselves completely in the pile of freshly moved earth.
It became evident to the watchers that this could go on indefinitely; at considerably less than the steepest slope the sailors seemed willing to tolerate, the heaped-up ring around the crater would provide ample material for the mound. Even the most pessimistic of the watchers began to feel that no more setbacks could possibly occur, in spite of the number of times they had started to unpack shelved apparatus and then had to put it away again. They watched now with mounting glee as the shining metal of the research projectile sank lower and lower in the heap of rock and earth, and finally vanished entirely except for a foot-high cone that marked the highest level in which machinery had been installed.
At this point the Mesklinites ceased work, and most of them retreated from the mound. The vision set had been brought up and was now facing the projecting tip of metal, where part of the thin line marking an access port could be seen. Barlennan sprawled alone in front of the entrance, apparently waiting for instructions on the method of opening it; and Rosten, watching as tensely as everyone else, explained to him. There were four quick-disconnect fasteners, one on each corner of the trapezoidal plate. The upper two were about on a level with Barlennan’s eyes; the others some six inches below the present level of the mound. Normally they were released by pushing in and making a quarter turn with a broad-bladed screwdriver; it seemed likely that Mesklinite pincers could perform the same function. Barlennan, turning to the plate, found that they could. The broad, slotted heads turned with little effort and popped outward, but the plate did not move otherwise.
“You had better fasten ropes to one or both of those heads, so you can pull the plate outward from a safe distance when you’ve dug down to the others and unfastened them,” Rosten pointed out. “You don’t want that piece of hardware falling on top of anyone; it’s a quarter of an inch thick. The lower ones are a darned sight thicker, I might add.”
The suggestion was followed, and the earth scraped rapidly away until the lower edge of the plate was uncovered. The fasteners here proved no more troublesome
than their fellows, and moments later a hard pull on the ropes unseated the plate from its place in the rocket’s skin. For the first fraction of an inch of its outward motion it could be seen; then it vanished abruptly, and reappeared lying horizontally while an almost riflelike report reached the ears of the watchers. The sun, shining into the newly opened hull, showed clearly the single piece of apparatus inside; and a cheer went up from the men in the screen room and the observing rocket.
“That did it, Barl! We owe you more than we can say. If you’ll stand back and let us photograph that as it is, we’ll start giving you directions for taking out the record and getting it to the lens.” Barlennan did not answer at once; his actions spoke some time before he did.
He did not get out of the way of the eye. Instead he crawled toward it and pushed the entire set around until it no longer covered the nose of the rocket.
“There are some matters we must discuss first,” he said quietly.
XIX.
Dead silence reigned in the screen room. The head of the tiny Mesklinite filled the screen, but no one could interpret the expression on the completely unhuman “face.” No one could think of anything to say; asking Barlennan what he meant would be a waste of words, since he obviously planned to tell anyway. He waited for long moments before resuming his speech; and when he did, he used better English than even Lackland realized he had acquired.
“Dr. Rosten, a few moments ago you said that you owed us more than you could hope to repay. I realize that your words were perfectly sincere in one way—I do not doubt the actuality of your gratitude for a moment—but in another they were merely rhetorical. You had no intention of giving us any more than you had already agreed to supply—weather information, guidance across new seas, possibly the material aid Charles mentioned some time ago in the matter of spice collecting. I realize fully that by your moral code I am entitled to no more; I made an agreement and should adhere to it, particularly since your side of the bargain has largely been fulfilled already.
“However, I want more; and since I have come to value the opinions of some, at least, of your people I want to explain why I am doing this—I want to justify myself, if possible. I tell you now, though, that whether I succeed in gaining your sympathy or not, I will do exactly as I planned.
“I am a merchant, as you well know, primarily interested in exchanging goods for what profit I can get. You recognized that fact, offering me every material you could think of in return for my help; it was not your fault that none of it was of use to me. Your machines you said would not function in the gravity and pressure of my world; your metals I cannot use—and would not need if I could; they lie free on the surface in many parts of Mesklin. Some people use them for ornaments; but I know from talk with Charles that they cannot be fashioned into really intricate forms without great machines, or at least more heat than we can easily produce. We do know the thing you call fire, by the way, in ways more manageable than the flame cloud; I am sorry to have deceived Charles in that matter, but it seemed best to me at the time.
“To return to the original subject, I refused all but the guidance and weather information of the things you were willing to give. I thought some of you might be suspicious of that, but I have heard no sign of it in your words. Nevertheless, I agreed to make a voyage longer than any that has been made in recorded history to help solve your problem. You had told me how badly you needed the knowledge; none of you appeared to think that I might want the same thing, though I asked time and again for just that when I saw one or another of your machines. You refused answers to those questions, making the same excuse every time. I felt, therefore, that any way in which I could pick up some of the knowledge you people possess was legitimate. You have said, at one time or another, much about the value of what you call ‘science’ and always implied was the fact that my people did not have it. I cannot see why, if it is good and valuable to your people, it would not be equally so to mine.
“You can see what I am leading up to. I came on this voyage with exactly the same objective in my mind that was in yours when you sent me; I came to learn. I want to know the things by which you perform such remarkable acts—things which would be good for me from a selfish point of view—I do not deny that—and which would also help my people. You, Charles, lived all winter in a place that should have killed you at once, by the aid of that science; it could make as much difference in the lives of my people, I am sure you will agree.
“Therefore I offer you a new bargain. I realize that my failure to live up to the letter of the old one may make you reluctant to conclude another with me. That will be simply too bad; I make no bones about pointing out that you can do nothing else. You are not here; you cannot come here; granting that you might drop some of your explosives down here in anger, you will not do so as long as I am near this machine of yours. The agreement is simple: knowledge for knowledge. You teach me, or Dondragmer, or anyone else in my crew who has the time and ability to learn the material, all the time we are working to take this machine apart for you and transmit the knowledge it contains.”
“Just a—”
“Wait, chief.” Lackland cut short Rosten’s expostulation. “I know Barl better than you do. Let me talk.” He and Rosten could see each other in their respective screens, and for a moment the expedition’s leader simply glared. Then he realized the situation and subsided.
“Right, Charlie. Tell him.”
“Barl, you seemed to have some contempt in your tone when you referred to our excuse for not explaining our machines to you. Believe me, we were not trying to fool you. They are complicated; so complicated that the men who design and build them spend nearly half their lives first learning the laws that make them operate and the arts of their actual manufacture. We did not mean to belittle the knowledge of your people, either; it is true that we know more, but it is only because we have had longer in which to learn.
“Now, as I understand it, you want to learn about the machines in this rocket as you take it apart. Please, Barl, take my word as the sincerest truth when I tell you first that I for one could not do it, since I do not understand a single one of them; and second, that not one would do you the least good if you did comprehend it. The best I can say right now is that they are machines for measuring things that cannot be seen or heard or felt or tasted—things you would have to see in operation in other ways for a long time before you could even begin to understand. That is not meant as insult; what I say is almost as true for me, and I have grown up from childhood surrounded by and even using those forces. I do not understand them. I do not expect to understand them before I die; the science we have covers so much knowledge that no one man can even begin to learn all of it, and I must be satisfied with the field I do know—and perhaps add to it what little one man may in a lifetime.
“We cannot accept your bargain, Barl, because it is physically impossible to carry out our side of it.”
Barlennan could not smile in the human sense, and he carefully refrained from giving his own version of one. He answered as gravely as Lackland had spoken.
“You can do your part, Charles, though you do not know it.
“When I first started this trip, all the things you have just said were true, and more. I fully intended to find this rocket with your help, and then place the radios where you could see nothing and proceed to dismantle the machine itself, learning all your science in the process.
“Slowly I came to realize that all you have said is true. I learned that you were not keeping knowledge from me deliberately when you taught us so quickly and carefully about the laws and techniques used by the glider-makers on that island. I learned it still more surely when you helped Dondragmer make the differential pulley. I was expecting you to bring up those points in your speech just now; why didn’t you? They were good ones.
“It was actually when you were teaching us about the gliders that I began to have a slight understanding of what was meant by your term ‘science.’ I realized, before
the end of that episode, that a device so simple you people had long since ceased to use it actually called for an understanding of more of the universe’s laws than any of my people realized existed. You said specifically at one point, while apologizing for a lack of exact information, that gliders of that sort had been used by your people more than two hundred years ago, I can guess how much more you know now—guess just enough to let me realize what I can’t know.
“But you can still do what I want. You have done a little already, in showing us the differential hoist. I do not understand it, and neither does Dondragmer who spent much more time with it; but we are both sure it is some sort of relative to the levers we have been using all our lives. We want to start at the beginning, knowing fully that we cannot learn all you know in our lifetimes. We do hope to learn enough to understand how you have found these things out. Even I can see it is not just guesswork, or even philosophizing like the learned ones who tell us that Mesklin is a bowl.
“I am willing at this point to admit you are right; but I would like to know how you found out the same fact for your own world. I am sure you knew before you left its surface and could see it all at once. I want to know why the Bree floats, and why the canoe did the same, for a while. I want to know what crushed the canoe. I want to know why the wind blows down the cleft all the time . . . no, I didn’t understand your explanation. I want to know why we are warmest in winter when we can’t see the sun for the longest time. I want to know why a fire glows, and why flame dust kills. I want my children or theirs, if I ever have any, to know what makes this radio work, and your tank, and some day this rocket. I want to know much —more than I can learn, no doubt; but if I can start my people learning for themselves, the way you must have—well, I’d be willing to stop selling at a profit.”