Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  This period was the hardest, as far as standing guard was concerned; as the water began to boil back out of the sea, the latter’s density increased, and the raft began to float. It was extremely fortunate that there were by then no currents at all; raft and passengers went straight up. Unfortunately, but somewhat naturally, it turned upside down as it went, so that for a couple of hours the robot operator had the annoyance of seeing the natives hanging from the underside of the floating platform while they very gradually led the surface of the ocean back toward the ground. They had drifted away from the hilltop during the night, and eventually wound up floating in a relatively small pool in one of the nearby hollows. When it finally became evident that the pool would shrink no farther, the robot had to take action.

  Fortunately, the oleum was shallow—so shallow that the raft was supported more by the bodies under it than by its own buoyancy. Raeker guided the machine through the liquid, pushing the four unconscious natives ahead of it to the other side. The raft naturally came along, but eventually the rather untidy heap was dripping at the edge of the oleum pool, with the foundation members struggling gradually back to consciousness.

  By this time the bathyscaphe was also out of the sea. Like the raft, it had wound up in a pool at the bottom of a valley; unlike it, there was no question of its floating. The pool was too shallow. As a result, Easy and her friend found themselves in their pressure-tight castle fully equipped with a moat, which effectively prevented Swift and his crew from reaching them.

  For Swift was there. He turned up within an hour of the time the pool had finished shrinking, in spite of the considerable distance the bathyscaphe must have drifted during the night. It was out of sight of the sea, Easy reported; the wind that had been moving everything else inland had brought the ship along. It didn’t bother her; she said that they were getting along splendidly with Swift, and didn’t seem too worried when told about Nick’s reverses of the night. Rich lost his temper for the first time when he learned that Raeker had carelessly told the child about the destruction of the camp, and didn’t regain it until the girl’s voice made it perfectly clear that the story hadn’t affected her morale.

  Raeker himself was thinking less about her than about his rescue operation, at the moment; that was why he had been so careless with his words. Nick and Betsey, Jim and Jane were all safe; the maps had remained attached to the raft, and so had most of. the weapons. However, it was going to take a little while to find just where they were, short as the distance they had drifted probably was; and when they did find the camp site, it seemed rather unlikely that they would find much else. The herd would be gone, or nearly so; the wagon—who could tell? A similar period under an Earthly ocean would write it off completely, even in the off chance that it could be found. Here, there was no saying, but Raeker was not optimistic.

  Finding the site of last night’s fire proved easier than expected. The wind proved to be a clue, when it finally occurred to someone—Jim, rather to Raeker’s surprise. He and Jane, of course, had bucked it all the way back from their search areas, though they had not attached any meaning to it at the time; now it served to restore the “sense of direction” which for Tenebrans as for humans was a compound of memory and the understanding of elementary natural phenomena. Once they knew the direction of the sea, there was no more trouble; there was no question that they had drifted pretty straight inland. The wagon and the remains of the watch fires were found in an hour. Raeker was really startled to find it and its contents intact; the mere fact that the two-mile hurricane had changed from gas to scarcely denser liquid had made no difference to most of the solid objects in its path.

  “I think we can save a little time,” he said at length, when the status of the group’s belongings had been determined. “We can go back to the sea now, carrying the boat with us. We’ll leave the cart, with a written message for the others; they can either follow us or start moving camp, depending on what seems best at the time they get back. We’ll test out the boat, and search as far south along the coast as time permits today.”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Nick. “Do we search until dark, or until there’s only enough time to get back here before dark?”

  “Until nearly dark,” Raeker replied promptly. “We’ll go south until we decide it’s far enough, and then go straight inland from wherever we are so as to get away from the ocean in time.”

  “Then the others had better move camp no matter what time they get back, and head south with the cart. We’re going to have a food problem, and so are they, with the herd gone.”

  “Gone? I thought I saw quite a few, with Jim and Jane rounding them up.”

  “That’s true, they’re not all gone; but they’re down to where we can’t afford to eat any until a few more hatch. We couldn’t even find scales of the others, this time.”

  “You couldn’t? And I didn’t see any creatures traveling around while you were in the sea, either. It seems to me that your missing cattle are more likely to have strayed than been stolen.”

  “That may be, but they’re gone in any case, as far as we’re concerned. If all four of us are heading for the sea right away to test this boat, we won’t be able to look for them.”

  Raeker thought rapidly. Loss of the herd would be a serious blow to his community; remote-control education cannot, by itself, transform a group of people from nomadic hunters into a settled and organized culture with leisure time for intellectual activity. Without the herd Raeker’s pupils would have to spend virtually all their time finding food. Still, they would live; and unless Easy and her companion were collected pretty soon they probably wouldn’t. The question really, then, was not whether any could be spared from the cattle-hunt but whether one or two or all would be more useful in testing the boat and, if the test were successful, subsequently searching for the bathyscaphe from it.

  Certainly two people were less likely to sink the thing than four. On the other hand, four could presumably drive it faster—Raeker suddenly recalled that neither he nor Nick had given any thought to the method of propulsion the raft was to have. He supposed paddles or something of that nature would be about the only possible means; the thought of trying to teach Nick the art of sailing on a world where the winds were usually nonexistent and the nearest qualified teacher sixteen light-years away seemed impractical. With muscle power as the drive agent, though, the more muscles the better.

  “All of you will come to the sea. We’ll consider the herd problem later. If the boat won’t carry all of you, the extra ones can come back and hunt for cattle. This search is important.”

  “All right.” Nick sounded more casual than he actually felt; all his life, as a result of Raeker’s own teaching, he had felt that the safety of the herd was one of the most important considerations of all. If this search were still more so, it must really mean something to the teacher; he wished he could feel that it meant as much to him. He didn’t argue, but he wondered and worried.

  The four of them were able to carry the boat easily enough, though bucking the wind made matters a little awkward—the wind was even stronger today, Nick decided. In a way, that was good; a last backward glance at the deserted remnants of the herd showed that a huge floater was being swept past them by the savage current and, in spite of all its efforts, could not beat its way back to the relatively helpless creatures. Nick pointed this out to his companions, and they all felt a little better.

  The two miles to the sea were covered fairly rapidly, and no formalities were wasted in testing the boat. It was carried out into waist-deep oleum and set down, and the four promptly climbed aboard.

  It supported them—just. The floats were completely submerged, and the framework virtually so. The difficulty was not one off keeping on the surface, but of keeping more or less level. The four were all of almost the same age, but they did differ slightly in weight. One side of the raft persisted in settling deeper whenever they stopped moving; each time this happened they all, naturally, made a scram
ble for the rising portion, and each time they inevitably overcontrolled so that the raft rocked and tipped precariously first one way and then the other. It took several minutes and much misdirected action and speech before they learned the trick; then they took longer still to learn the use of the paddles Fagin had told them how to make. The robot itself was not too much use; if it stayed ashore its operators couldn’t see things on the raft very clearly, and if it crawled into the sea to any point near the vessel it couldn’t make itself heard—the boundary between oleum and air was sharp enough to reflect sound waves pretty completely.

  “Why do you have them looking at all?” Aminadabarlee asked acidly at this point. “The robot can travel along the shore as fast as they can paddle that ridiculous craft, and the bathyscaphe isn’t at sea anyway. If you think those pupils are going to be of any use, why not have them walk with the machine?”

  “Because, while all you say is true, the kids are inaccessible to the natives unless a boat is present. It doesn’t seem likely that we’d save time by having Nick and his friends search on foot, and then have to go all the way back for the boat when they found the ’scaphe.”

  “I see,” said the Drommian. Raeker cast a quick glance at him. The fellow was being unusually agreeable, all things considered; but the man had no time to ponder possible reasons. Nick and his companions were still too much in need of watching. He spoke over his shoulder, however, remembering Rich’s injunction about being as courteous as possible to the big weasel. “There’s one thing that might help a great deal, though. You’ve been talking to your son all along, just as Councilor Rich and I have been talking to Easy; do you suppose he’d be the better for something constructive to do down there?”

  “What?”

  “Well, if he’s as good at picking up languages as Easy was supposed to be, maybe he’d do a better job than she at finding something out from the cave dwellers. Swift quite obviously knows where both our camp and the bathyscaphe are; it would be most helpful if someone could worm a set of directions out of him for getting from the one to the other.”

  The Drommian’s face was unreadable to Raeker, but his voice suggested what from him was high approval.

  “That’s the first sensible remark I’ve heard from a human being in the last five weeks,” he said. “I’ll explain to Aminadorneldo what to do. There’s no point in expecting the human girl to do it herself, or to help him.” The diplomat must be credited with what for him was the ultimate in tact, courtesy, and self-control—he had restrained himself from remarking that no human being could be expected to be helpful in a situation calling for intelligence.

  He decided to go to the communication room in person, instead of working from Raeker’s station—the relay system was efficient, but located in a corner which was rather inconvenient to him for anatomical reasons. Unfortunately, when he reached the other compartment it was even worse; the place was crowded with human beings. Rearing the front half of his long body upward he was able to see over them without any trouble, and discovered that the screen of the settled in with the bathyscaphe was imaging the face of the human child. His own son was also visible, very much in the background, but only the human voice was audible—as usual, he reflected.

  The men were listening intently to her, and Aminadabarlee quite unthinkingly stopped to do the same before ordering the interfering creatures out of the way.

  “No matter how we ask the question, we always get the same answer,” she was saying. “At first, he seemed surprised that we didn’t know; he’s gotten over that now, but still says that Nick and Fagin told him where we were.”

  “No matter how often you say that, it sounds silly to me,” retorted one of the scientists. “Are you sure it’s not language trouble?”

  “Perfectly sure.” Easy showed no indignation, if she felt any at the question. “You wanted to know how he found us so easily, and that’s what I asked him. He claims he was given the information he needed by Nick, who had it from the robot, and that’s what I told you. I don’t remember exactly what was said to that prisoner when Nick’s people had him; but you’d better play back the transcript and see what you can get out of it. Either the prisoner himself was able to figure it out from what Nick said to him, or Swift was able to do it from the prisoner’s repetition. The first seems to make more sense, to me.”

  There were few flies on Elise Rich. Aminadabarlee wouldn’t have agreed with that, of course; her admission that she couldn’t remember exactly what had been said in a conversation she had overheard lowered her considerably in his estimation. However, even he couldn’t understand, any better than the listening scientists, what the cave dwellers had been able to learn from a brief description of country they had admittedly never seen.

  Then an idea occurred to him, and he dropped back to the horizontal position for a few moments to think. This might really do some good; he almost felt guilty at the thought that he’d left all the serious planning in this matter to the human beings. If they’d only keep quiet for a minute or two and let him get his idea straight—But they didn’t They kept on calling excited remarks and questions to the child so far away.

  “Wait a minute!” It was a geophysicist who suddenly came up with a point, Aminadabarlee thought, but he didn’t pay enough attention to be really sure. “This may be a little farfetched; but a lot of fairly primitive peoples on Earth and other places get pretty darned good climate predictors—our ancestors knew when spring was coming, you know, and built places like Stonehenge.”

  “What’s the connection?” Several voices asked this question, though not all in the same words.

  “This planet has no weather, in our sense of the word; but its geomorphology goes on at a time-rate which almost puts it in the climate class. I just remembered that Nick’s prisoner was told that the bathyscaphe stayed on one lake, motionless, for several days, and only then started to drift down a river to the sea. If we’re right about Tenebran weather, that must have been a brand-new river! That information was enough for any native—at least for anyone who hadn’t been cut off from the history or folklore or whatever the Tenebran equivalent may be of his race. They may never have been right on the scene of that river, but it was close enough to their regular stamping grounds so they could tell where it must lie.”

  “I’m going to check the lab alcohol!” commented one listener. The remark put the proponent of the new idea on his mettle.

  “Easy!” he called. “You heard what I just suggested. Ask Swift if it’s not true that he knows when things like new rivers and rising hills are going to happen. Ask him how he dares to live in caves in a cliff—which as far as any of us can see is apt to be knocked down by a quake any day!”

  “All right,” the girl said calmly. Her face vanished from the screen.

  Aminadabarlee was too furious to notice that she had gone. How dare these little monsters take his very own ideas right out of his mind, and claim them for their own? He hadn’t quite worked out the details of his notion, but it was going to be the same as the one the human scientist had broached; he was sure of that. Of course, maybe it was a bit farfetched—of course it was, now that he thought of it a little more carefully. The whole idea was the sheerest speculation, and it was a pity that the girl had been sent to waste time on it. He’d go in and show its weaknesses to his son, and suggest a more fruitful modification, as soon as he worked out its details—only then did he notice that Aminadorneldo had also disappeared from the view screen; he must have gone with the human girl. Well, that was all right; there was a little more thinking to be done, anyway. He kept at it for fifteen or twenty minutes, scarcely noticing the human conversation around him, until the children reappeared. They reported without preamble and without apparent excitement.

  “You seem to be right,” Easy said. “They seem surprised that anyone wouldn’t know when a place was going to become active in quakes, or when a lake was going to spill, and in what direction. They know it so well themselves that they have a good de
al of trouble telling me what they use for signs.” The geophysicist and his colleagues looked at each other almost prayerfully.

  “Don’t let them stop trying!” the first one said earnestly. “Get down everything they say and relay it to us, whether you understand it or not. And we were going to use Raeker’s students to learn the crustal dynamics of this planet!”

  This irrelevance was the last straw, as far as Aminadabarlee was concerned. Without regard to rules of courtesy, either human or Drommian, he plowed into the communications room, his streamlined form dividing die human occupants as a ship divides water. He brought up in front of the screen and, looking past Easy’s imaged face as though the girl were not there, he burst into an ear-hurting babble of his own language, directed at his son. None of the men interrupted; the creature’s size and the ten clawed limbs would have given most of them ideas of caution even if they had known nothing of Drommians. As it was, Councilor Rich had spread some very impressive bits of information through the complement of the Vindemiatrix, so eyes weren’t necessary.

  The shrill sounds were punctuated by others from the speaker; apparently the son was trying to get an occasional word into the conversation. He failed, however; the older being’s speech only stopped when he appeared to have run out of words to say. Then it was not Aminadorneldo who answered.

  It was Easy, and she answered in her own language, since even her vocal cords couldn’t handle Drommian speech.

  “We’ve already told him, sir. Dr. Raeker asked me to let you know when you showed up; you had just left his room when we got the information to him, and I didn’t see you until just now. He’s told Nick, and the boat should be as close as they can bring it on the sea well before night. They’ll start to bring it inland then; Swift says they should be able to see our lights from the sea, so the robot has started back to the camp to meet the others and start them on the way here.”