Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “We’re farther out to sea than you thought we would be, Dr. Raeker,” she called. “I can just barely see the shore, at the very limit of our hottest lights. I can’t make out any details, really; but I think maybe there are some points, or maybe islands, sticking out our way.”

  “Can ’Mina see anything more?”

  “He says not,” came Easy’s answer after a brief pause. “He doesn’t seem to see quite as well as I do, anyway, I’ve noticed.”

  “I see. I suppose you can’t tell whether you’re moving or not.”

  “The sea is perfectly smooth, and there aren’t any waves around us. There’s nothing to tell by. The only things to see are those big jellyfish things floating in the air. They’re moving slowly in different directions, more of them toward shore than away from it, I think. Let me watch them for a minute.” It was considerably more than a minute before she could make up her mind that the first impression had been right. Even then she admitted willingly enough that this was not evidence of the bathyscaphe’s motion.

  “All right,” said Raeker when this had been settled. “Just keep an occasional eye on the ocean to make sure nothing happens, and give advice to Nick as long as he’ll listen to you. He’ll do what he and Betsey can about it, but that won’t be much before the others get back. They’ll probably be gone until tomorrow night, Tenebra time—between five and six days on your clock.”

  “All right, doctor. We’ll be fine. It’s rather fun watching those flying jellyfish.”

  Raeker opened his mike switch and settled back thoughtfully, and with some satisfaction. Everything seemed to be progressing properly; perhaps somewhat more slowly than he would have liked, but as rapidly as could reasonably be hoped. This feeling must have showed on his face, for his thoughts were read quite accurately.

  “Pleased with yourself, I take it, Man!” The speaker did not need to introduce himself. Raeker endeavored to control both his features and his feelings, with questionable success.

  “Not exactly, councilor—”

  “Why not exactly?” shrilled Aminadabarlee. “Why should you feel any remote sense of satisfaction? Have you accomplished anything at all?”

  “I think so,” Raeker answered in some surprise. “We know very nearly where your boy is, and we should have a rescue team out there in a week or ten days—”

  “A week or ten days! And then you’ll have to give the team members degrees in electrical engineering, and then hope the wiring of that ridiculous craft hasn’t corroded beyond repair in the interval. How long do you think the actual rescue will take?”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t hazard a guess,” Raeker answered as mildly as he could. “As you point out so clearly, we don’t know how much damage may have been done to wiring exposed by the inspection ports. I realize that it is hard to wait, but they’ve been getting on all right for a month now—”

  “How stupid can even a human being get?” asked the Drommian of the world at large. “You were talking to the ground just now, and heard as clearly as I did the human child’s remark that my son didn’t see as well as she did.”

  “I heard it, but I’m afraid the significance escaped me,” admitted the man.

  “Drommian eyesight is as good and acute as that of human beings, if not better, and my son’s has always been normal for his age. If he can’t see as well as the human with him, something’s wrong; and my guess is that the low oxygen concentration is affecting him. I gather your engineers made no particular provision for altering that factor of the vessel’s environment.”

  “They probably didn’t, since, the crew was to be human,” admitted Raeker. “I did not recognize the emergency, I must admit, councilor; I’ll try to find means of speeding up the operation—for example, I can probably get pictures of the wiring exposed by the ports from the engineers, and have Nick briefed on what to look for while he’s waiting for the others. My relief is due in half an hour; as a matter of fact, he’d probably be willing to come now if I called him. Have you been able to get medical advice from Dromm yet? I understand a human doctor arrived a few hours ago, and has been finding out what he can about the diet available on the bathyscaphe.”

  “Eta Cassiopeia is half a parsec farther from here, and I did not get a message torpedo off quite so quickly,” admitted the Drommian. “One should be here shortly, however.”

  Raeker felt that he had made a smart move in forcing the nonhuman to make such an admission; unfortunately, admitting mistakes under pressure does not improve the temper of the average human being, and Aminadabarlee’s race was quite human in this respect. He could not be insultingly superior for the moment; even his standards prevented that; but the required repression of choler was a good deal more dangerous to peace than his usual superciliousness. He retired to his own room—which the “incompetent” human engineers had at least set up with a decent atmosphere—and brooded darkly. There were lots more message torpedoes.

  With the Drommian gone, Raeker decided not to bring his relief on too early; but as soon as the fellow did show up, he made his way to the engineering section and outlined the proposal he had made on the spur of the moment to Aminadabarlee. Sakiiro and his colleagues agreed that it was worth trying, and they all settled down with their blueprints to decide what would be the best things to tell Nick and the easiest way to get the information across.

  They spent some hours at this. Then Raeker went to eat, and back to his own room to sleep for a few hours. When he reappeared in the observation room, his relief rose gladly.

  “Easy has something to report,” he said, “but she wants to tell you personally.” Raeker raised his eyebrows, dived into his station, and energized the microphone.

  “I’m here, Easy,” he said. “What’s happened?”

  “I thought I’d better tell you, since you’re the one who said we’d stay put,” the girl responded at once. “We’ve been drifting closer to shore for five or six hours, now.”

  Raeker smiled. “Are you sure the shore isn’t just getting closer to you?” he asked. “Remember, the sea level had a long way to go down even after you got to the surface.”

  “I’m quite sure. We’ve been able to keep our eyes on one piece of shore, and the sea has stayed right by it while we got closer. It has a feature which makes it easy to recognize, though we weren’t able to make out very clearly just what the feature was until now.”

  “What is it?” asked Raeker, seeing that he was expected to.

  Easy looked at him with the expression children reserve for adults who have made a bad mistake.

  “It’s a crowd of about fifty natives,” she said.

  X

  Nick, for the hundredth time, looked toward the ocean and fumed. He couldn’t see it, of course; to be out of its reach by night the camp had had to be placed well out of its sight by day, but he knew it was there. He wanted to see it, though; not only to see it but to ride on it. To explore it. To map it. That last idea presented a problem which occupied his mind for some time before he dropped it. Fagin would know the answer; in the meantime there was a boat to be built. That was the real annoyance. Nothing, really, could be done about that until the search teams got back. While it didn’t actually take all of his and Betsey’s time to watch the herd and gather firewood, neither could do any very effective hunting with those jobs in the background; and the boat was very obviously going to take a lot of skins.

  Nick wasn’t sure just how many, and to his surprise Fagin had refused to offer even a guess. This was actually quite reasonable, since Raeker, who was not a physicist, was ignorant of the precise densities of Tenebra’s oceans and atmosphere, the volume of the average leather sack which might be used in the proposed boat, and even the weight of his pupils. He had told Nick to find out for himself, a remark which he had made quite frequently during the process of educating his agents.

  Even this, however, called for a little hunting, since it seemed a poor idea to sacrifice one of the herd to the experiment. Betsey was now scourin
g the surrounding valleys in the hope of finding something big enough to serve—the floaters of the vicinity had already learned to leave herd and herders alone, and those killed or grounded in the process had long since been disposed of by scavengers. Besides, their skins were much too frail to make good leather.

  There was no serious doubt that Betsey would find a skin, of course, but Nick wished she’d be quicker about it. Patience was not one of his strong points, as even Easy had already noticed.

  He was a little mollified when she came; she had brought not just the kill, but the skin already removed and scaled—a job which Nick didn’t mind doing himself, but it was at least that much less time spent before the actual experiment. Betsey had kept in mind the purpose to which the skin was to be put, and had removed it with a minimum of cutting; but some work was still needed to make a reasonably liquid-tight sack. It took a while to prepare the glue, though not so long for it to dry—strictly speaking, the stuff didn’t dry at all, but formed a reasonably tenacious bond at once between layers of materials such as leaves or skin. Eventually the thing was completed to their satisfaction, and carried down to the pool where the bucket had floated a few hours before.

  Nick tossed it in, and was not in the least surprised to see that it, too, floated; that was not the point of the experiment. For that, he waded in himself and tried to climb onto the half submerged sack.

  The results didn’t strike either Nick or Betsey as exactly funny, but when Raeker heard the story later he regretted deeply not having watched the experiment. Nick had a naturally good sense of balance, having spent his life on a high-gravity world where the ground underfoot was frequently quite unstable; but in matching reflexes with the bobbing sack of air he was badly outclassed. The thing refused to stay under him, no matter what ingenious patterns he devised for his eight limbs to enable them to control it. Time and again he splashed helplessly into the pool, which fortunately came only up to his middle. A ten-year-old trying to sit on a floating beach ball would have gone through similar antics.

  It was some time before anything constructive came of the experiment, since each time Nick fell into the pool he became that much more annoyed and determined to succeed in the balancing act. Only after many tries did he pause and devote some really constructive thought to the problem. Then, since he was not particularly stupid and did have some understanding of the forces involved—Raeker had not been a complete failure as a teacher—he finally developed a solution. At his instruction, Betsey waded into the pool to the other side of the sack and reached across it to hold hands with him. Then, carefully acting simultaneously, they eased the weight from their feet. They managed to keep close enough together to get all the members concerned off the bottom of the pool for a moment, but this unfortunately demonstrated rather clearly that the sack was not able to support both of them.

  Getting their crests back into the air, they waded ashore, Nick bringing the bag with him. “I still don’t know how many of these we’re going to need, but it’s obviously a lot,” he remarked. “I suppose six of us will go, and two stay with the herd, the way the teacher arranged it this time. I guess the best we can do until the others get back is hunt and make more of these things.”

  “There’s another problem,” pointed out Betsey. “We’re going to have quite a time doing whatever job it is Fagin wants done while trying to stand on one or more of these sacks. We’d better pay some attention to stability as well as support.”

  “That’s true enough,” admitted Nick. “Maybe now that we’ve done some experimenting, the teacher will be willing to give a little more information. If he doesn’t, there’s that other person whose voice he sends us—the one he says is in this ship we’re to look for—by the way, Bets, I’ve had an idea. You know, he’s been explaining lately about the way voices can be sent from one place to another by machines. Maybe Fagin isn’t really with us at all; maybe that’s just a machine that brings his voice to us. What do you think of that?”

  “Interesting, and I suppose possible; but what difference does it make?”

  “It’s information; and Fagin him self always says that the more you know the better off you are. I suppose we don’t really know this, but it’s something worth keeping in mind until evidence comes in.”

  “Now that you’ve thought of it, maybe he’ll tell us if we ask him,” pointed out Betsey. “He usually answers questions, except when he thinks it’s for the good of our education to work out the answers ourselves; and how could we check on this one experimentally—except by taking the teacher apart?”

  “That’s a point. Right now, though, the really important thing is to get this boat designed and built. Let’s stick to that question for a while; we can sneak the other one in when there’s less chance of getting a lecture about letting our minds wander.”

  “All right.” This conversation had brought them to the top of the hill where the robot was standing, among the belongings of the village. Here they reported in detail the results of their experiment. Fagin heard them through in silence.

  “Good work,” he said at the end. “You’ve learned something, if not everything. Your question about stability is a good one. I would suggest that you build a wooden frame . . . oh, about the size and structure of one wall of a hut, but lying flat on the ground. Then the sacks can be fastened to the corners; any time one corner gets lower than the others, the buoyant force on it will increase, so the whole thing ought to be fairly stable.”

  “But wood sinks. How can you make a boat out of it?”

  “Just count it as part of the weight the sacks . . . let’s call those floats, by the way . . . have to carry. You’ll need even more floats, but don’t let it worry you. I’d suggest that the two of you start the frame now; you might be able to finish it by yourselves, since there’s plenty of wood. Then you can start fastening floats to it whenever you can get hold of any; you make a few kills defending the herd every day, so you should make some progress.

  “While you’re doing that, you might lend your minds to another little problem. The bathyscaphe is not staying at sea, but is drifting toward the shore.”

  “But that’s no problem; it solves our problems. We’ll just have to travel south along the shore until we find it. You had already decided it must be south of us, you said.”

  “Quite true. The problem is the fact that Swift, with most of his tribe, seems to be standing on the shore waiting for it. Strictly speaking, Easy hasn’t recognized Swift, partly because she can’t tell one of you from another yet and partly because they aren’t close enough, but it’s hard to imagine who else it could be. This raises the question of whether Swift is accepting our offer, or proposes to keep the bathyscaphe and those in it for his own purposes. I suppose it’s a little early to expect an answer from him; but if we don’t get one some time today, I think we’ll have to assume we’re on our own and act accordingly.”

  “How?”

  “That is the problem I suggest you attack right now. I suspect that whatever solution you reach, you’ll find the boat will figure in it; so go ahead and get it made, as far as you can.”

  The teacher fell silent, and his students fell to work. As Fagin had said, there was plenty of wood around, since the camp had not been there very long. Much of it, of course, was unsuitable for any sort of construction, having the brittleness of so many Tenebran plants; but a few varieties had branches or stems both long and reasonably springy, and the two were able to locate in an hour what they hoped would be enough of these. Actually cutting them with stone blades took rather longer, and binding them into a framework whose strength satisfied all concerned took longest of all. When completed, it was a rectangle some fifteen by twenty feet, made of about three dozen rods of wood which an Earthman would probably have described as saplings, lashed at right angles to each other into a reasonably solid grillwork. Thinking of it as a floor, neither Nick nor Betsey was particularly happy; the spaces were quite large enough to let their feet through, and the said feet were
even less prehensile than those of a human being. They decided, however, that this was an inconvenience rather than a serious weakness, and shifted their attention to the problem of getting floats.

  All this was reported to the teacher, who approved. The approval was more casual than the two realized, for at the moment Raeker’s attention was otherwise occupied. The bathyscaphe had now drifted within fifty yards of the shore and had there run aground, according to Easy. She had offered neither observation nor opinion as to the cause of the drift, and none of the scientists who had taken so many reels of data about the planet had done any better. Easy herself did not seem bothered; she was now engaged in language practice across the narrow span of liquid that kept the bathyscaphe out of Swift’s reach. Raeker lacked even the minor comfort of being able to hear the conversation. The microphones of the outside speakers were, somewhat sensibly, located by the observation ports, so that the girl had taken up her station where she would have to shout to be heard in the Vindemiatrix. She did not bother to shout; most of the time she didn’t even think of Raeker or, to be embarrassingly frank, of her father. She had not been interested in the biology, geology, or the virtually nonexistent climatology of Tenebra; her interest in the rescue operation, while profound and personal, had reached the point where she could only wait for information which was always the same; but here were people, and people she could talk to—at least, after a fashion. Therefore she talked, and only occasionally could anyone above get her attention long enough to learn anything.