Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Cunningham was grinning widely as pieces of the jigsaw began to fall rapidly into place. After a few moments’ thought, he replaced the monocular at his belt and resumed his northward hike. Several times he stopped to examine closely the wall of the city, as well as those of some of the small buildings outside. In every case the cement seemed sound. Further north, more than an hour later, he repeated the examination at the walls of the aqueduct, and nodded as though finding just what he had expected.

  It was dark when he reached the dam, but the moon provided enough light for travel. He did not want to climb it, but there was no other way to get to the house. He used his small belt light and was extremely careful of his footing, but he was not at all happy until he reached the top. At that point, he could see that the reservoir was nearly empty. This eased his mind somewhat; there would be no water pressure on the structure, and its slopes on either side were gentle enough so that it should be fairly stable even with the cement’s failure.

  Nereis’ house was still apparently intact, but this did not surprise him. Moonlight reflecting from the surface also indicated that its water level had not changed significantly.

  He made his way along the walls to the living room as quickly as possible, found the corner where space had been made for him in the furniture, and dropped in. He then remembered that he had not ballasted himself, but managed to roll face down and call to Nereis.

  “It’s Cunningham, Nereis. I need to talk to you. Is everything all right here?”

  The room was practically dark, the only artificial lighting used by the Rantans being a feeble bioluminescence from some of the plants; but he could see her silhouette against these as she entered the room and made her way toward him.

  “Cun’m! I did not expect to see you so soon. Has something happened? Is Creak hurt? What is being done about the dam?”

  “He’s not hurt, though he may be in some trouble. He and I had to get away from the city for a while. He was more worried about you than about us, though; he asked me to come to make sure you were safe while he stayed to solve the other problems. I see your walls aren’t leaking, so I suppose—”

  “Oh, no, the walls are sound. I suppose the water is evaporating, but it will be quite a few days before I have to worry about producing crystals instead of eggs.”

  “And you’re not worried about the walls failing, even after what happened to the dam today? You’re a long, long way from help, and you couldn’t travel very well, even in a breathing suit, in your condition.”

  “The house will last. That dam was different—”

  She broke off suddenly. Cunningham grinned invisibly in the darkness.

  “Of course, you knew it too,” he said. “I should have known when Creak didn’t arrange to have me fly you to the city.”

  Nereis remained silent, but curled up a little more tightly, drawing back into the furniture. The man went on after a moment.

  “You knew that the glue lasts indefinitely as long as it’s in some sort of contact with salt water. All your buildings have salt water inside, and apparently that’s enough even for the glue on the outside—I suppose ions diffuse through or something like that. But you have just two structures with only fresh water in contact with them—the dam and the aqueduct. How long have you known that the glue doesn’t hold up indefinitely in fresh water?”

  “Oh, everyone has known that for years.” She seemed willing enough to talk if specific plots were not the subject. “Two or three years, anyway. Cities have been dying for as long as there have been cities, and maybe some people sometimes found out why, but it was only a few years ago that some refugees from one of them got to ours and told what had happened to their reservoir. It didn’t take the scientists long to find out why, after that. That’s when Creak got his job renewing the cement on the dam. He kept saying there’s much more needed—more people to do the cementing, and more reservoirs, if we must stay out of the ocean. But no one has taken him seriously.”

  “You and he think people should go back to the ocean—or at least build your cities there. Why don’t others agree?”

  “Oh, there are all sorts of things to keep us from living there. The water is hardly breathable. All sorts of living things that people made and turned loose when they didn’t want them anymore—”

  “I get it. What my people call ‘industrial pollution.’ Hinge was right. I suppose he wasn’t in on this stunt of Creak’s—No, never mind, I don’t know his real name and can’t explain to you. Why haven’t you tried to produce a glue that could stand fresh water?”

  “How could we? No living thing, natural or artificial, has ever been able to do without food.”

  “OOOOhhh! You mean the stuff is alive!”

  “Certainly. I know you have shown us that you can change one substance into another all by yourself when you were doing what you called chemical testing, but we have never learned to do that. We can make things only with life.”

  Cunningham thought briefly. This added details to the picture, but did not, as far as he could see, alter the basic pattern. “All right,” he said at last. “I think I know enough to act sensibly. I still don’t see quite all of what you and Creak were trying to do, but it doesn’t matter much. If you’re sure you will be all right and can hold out here another few days, I’ll get back to where I left Creak.”

  He started to swim slowly toward the wall.

  “But it’s night!” Nereis exclaimed. “How can you walk back in the dark? I know you’re a land creature, but even you can’t see very well when the sun is down. You’ll have to wait here until morning.”

  Cunningham stopped swimming and thought for a moment.

  “There’s a moon,” he pointed out, “and I guess I never showed you my light, at that. I’ll be—How did you know I was walking?”

  Silence.

  “Are you in some sort of communication with Creak that you have never told me about?”

  “No.”

  “And I know you didn’t see me coining, and I didn’t say anything about leaving the ship in the city or how I traveled. So Creak had set something up before we left here, and you knew about it. He was not really anxious about you—he knew you were perfectly safe. So part of the idea was to keep me away from my ship, or at least the city for some time. I can’t guess why. That much of the plan has succeeded. Right?”

  Still no word came from the woman.

  “Well, I’m not holding it against you. You were trying for something you consider important, and you certainly haven’t hurt me so far. Right now, in fact, it’s fun. I don’t blame you for trying. Please tell me one thing, though: Are you and Creak trying to force your people to move back to the ocean, in spite of knowing about the pollution which right now makes that impossible? Or do you have something more realistic in mind? If you can bring yourself to tell me, it may make a difference in what I can do for all of you.”

  “It was the second.” Nereis took no time at all to make up her mind. “Mostly, it was to make people realize that they were just lying on their bellies doing nothing. We wanted them to see what could be done by—I can’t say this just right—by someone who wasn’t really any smarter than we are, but had the urge to act. We wanted them to see your flying machine to show them the possibilities, and we wanted to get it away from you to . . . well—”

  “To show them that I’m not really any smarter than you are?”

  “Well . . . Yes, that about says it. We hope people will be pushed into trying—as they did when they built the land cities so long ago. Saying it that way now makes it all seem unnecessarily complex, and silly, but it seemed worth trying. Anything seemed worth trying.”

  “Don’t belittle yourselves or your idea. It may just work. In any case, I’d have had to do something, myself, before leaving to prove that I wasn’t really superior to your people—Never mind why; it’s one of the rules.” He floated silently for a minute or two, then went on.

  “I agree that your people probably need that kick�
��excuse me, push—that you suggest. I’m afraid it will be a long time before you really get back to Nature, but you should at least keep moving. No race I know of ever got back there until its mastery of science was so complete that no one really had to work anymore at the necessities of life. You have a long, long way to go, but I’ll be glad to help with the push . . .

  “Look, I have to go back to the ship. I’m betting Creak won’t expect me back tonight, and the guarding won’t be too much of a problem—you folks sleep at night, too. I have to get something from the ship, which I should have been carrying all along—you’re not the only ones who get too casual. Then I’ll come back here, and if you’re willing to sacrifice your furniture to the cause, I’ll make something that will do what you and Creak want. I guarantee it.”

  “Why do you have to get something from your ship in order to make something from my furniture? I have all the glue you could possibly need.”

  “That’s the last thing I want. You depend too much on the stuff, and it’s caused your collective craftsmanship to die in the—the egg. Glue would make what I want to do a lot easier, but I’m not going to use it. You’ll see why in a few days, when I get the job done.”

  “A few days? If the weather stays dry, I may lose enough water from the house to make it too salt for me and—”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of that problem too. See you later.”

  5

  The moon had passed culmination when Cunningham reached the place where Creak had rolled down the wall a few hours before, and he was relieved to see the bulk of his ship gleaming in the moonlight a few hundred meters away. To avoid tripping or slipping, he went slowly on all fours along the walls until he reached a point closest to the vessel, but on the side opposite the airlock. Then he unclipped the remote controller from his belt and opened the lock, regretting that he could not bring the ship to him with the device.

  He listened for several minutes, but there was no evidence that the opening had attracted any attention. Of course, that was not conclusive . . .

  Very, very gently he let himself into the water. Still no response. He could feel the plants a few centimeters down, and rather than trying to swim he grasped the twining growths and pulled himself along, Rantan fashion, slowly enough not to raise ripples.

  The plants extended only twenty meters or so from the wall. He had to swim the rest of the way, expecting at every moment to feel a snaky body coil around him; he was almost surprised when he reached the hull. He had no intention of swimming around to the lock; there were handholds on every square meter of the vessel’s exterior. He found one, knew immediately where all the neighboring ones must be, reached for and found another, and hoisted himself gently out of the water. Still as quietly as possible he climbed over the top and started down toward the open lock. Now he could see the moon reflected in the water.

  He stopped as he saw the silhouette of a Rantan head projecting from the lock. The opening must have been seen or heard after all, for the creature could not have been inside before. Was it alone? Or were there others waiting inside the lock or in the water below? Those in the water would be no problem, but he would have to take his chances if any were in the ship.

  Cunningham thought out his movements for the next few minutes very carefully. Then he let himself down to a point just above the lock, three meters above the native. Securing a grip on the lowest hold he could reach, he swung himself down and inboard.

  He had no way of telling whether he would land on a section of Rantan or not; he had to budget for the possibility. One foot did hit something rubbery, but the man kept his balance and made a leap for the inner door, which he had opened with the controller simultaneously with his swing. There had been only one guard in the lock, and lying on a smooth metal surface he had had no chance at all to act; he had been expecting to deal with the man climbing from below.

  Cunningham relaxed for a few minutes, ate, and then looked over his supply of hand equipment. He selected a double-edged knife, thirty-five centimeters in blade length, cored with vanadium steel and faced with carbide. Adding a sheath and a diamond sharpener, he clipped the lot to his belt, reflecting that the assemblage could probably be called one tool without straining the term.

  Then he stepped to the control console and turned on the external viewers, tuning far enough into the infrared to spot Rantan body heat but not, he hoped, far enough to be blocked entirely by water. Several dozen of the natives surrounded the ship, so he decided not to try swimming back out. The guard had apparently joined those in the water.

  “I might get away with it, but it would be rubbing things in,” he muttered. Gently he lifted the vessel and set it down again just outside the south wall of the city. Extending the ladder from the lock, he descended, closed up with the controller, and started his long walk back to the reservoir.

  Creak, from the top of the wall, watched him out of sight and wondered where his plan had gone wrong and what he could do next. He also worried a little: Cunningham had been meaning to tell him that Nereis was all right, but had not seen him to deliver the message.

  6

  Four Rantan days later, principles shelved for the moment in his anxiety for his wife, Creak accompanied the repair party toward the dam.

  It had taken a long time to set up: the logistics of a fifteen-kilometer cross-country trip were formidable, and finding workers willing to go was worse. Glue, food, spare breathing suits and their supporting gear, arrangement for reserves and reliefs—all took time. It was a little like combing a city full of twentieth-century white-collar workers to find people who were willing to take on a job of undersea or space construction.

  It might have taken even longer, but the water in the city was beginning to taste obnoxious.

  A kilometer north of the wall they met something that startled Creak more than his first sight of Cunningham and the Nimepotea six months before. He could not even think of words to describe it, though he had managed all right with man and spaceship.

  The thing consisted of a cylindrical framework, axis horizontal, made of strips of wood. Creak did not recognize the pieces of his own furniture. The cylinder contained something like an oversized worksack, made of the usual transparent fabric, which in turn contained his wife, obviously well and happy.

  At the rear of the framework, on the underside, was a heavy transverse wooden rod, and at the ends of this were—Creak had no word for “wheels.” Under the front was a single, similar disk-shaped thing, connected to the frame by an even more indescribable object which seemed to have been shaped somehow from a single large piece of wood.

  The human being was pulling the whole arrangement without apparent effort, steering it among the rocks by altering the axial orientation of the forward disk.

  The Rantans were speechless—but not one of them had the slightest difficulty in seeing how the thing worked.

  “Principles are an awful nuisance, Creak,” the man remarked. “I swore I wasn’t going to use a drop of your glue in making the wagon. Every bit of frame is tied together—I should think that people with your evolutionary background would at least have invented knots; or did they go out of style when glue came in? Anyway, the frame wasn’t so bad, but the wheels were hell. If I’d given up and used the glue, they’d have been simple enough, and I’d have made four of them, and had less trouble with that front fork mount—though I suppose steering would have been harder then. Making bundles for the rims was easy enough, but attaching spokes and making them stay was more than I’d bargained for.”

  “Why didn’t you use the glue?” Creak asked. He was slowly regaining his emotional equilibrium.

  “Same reason I left the ship down by the city, and lived on emergency food. Principle. Your principle. I wanted you and your people to be really sure that what I did was nice and simple and didn’t call for any arcane knowledge or fancy tools. Did you ever go through the stone-knife stage?” He displayed the blade. “Well, there’s a time for everything, even if the ti
mes are sometimes a little out of order. You just have to learn how to shape material instead of just sticking it together. Get it?”

  “Well . . . I think so.”

  “Good. And I saved my own self-respect as well as yours, I think, so everyone should be happy. Now you get to work and make some more of these wagons—only for Heaven’s sake do use glue to speed things up. And let three-quarters of this crowd go back to painting pictures or whatever they were doing, and then cart some stuff up to that dam and get it fixed. It might rain sometime, you know.”

  Creak looked at his wife—she was riding with one end out of the wagon, so she could hear him. “I’m afraid we’re further than ever from Nature,” he remarked.

  She made a gesture which Cunningham knew to mean reluctant agreement.

  “I’m afraid that’s right,” the man admitted. “Once you tip the balance, you never get quite back on dead center. You started a scientific culture, just as my people did. You got overdependent on your glue, just as we did on heat engines—I’ll explain what those are, if you like, later. I don’t see how that information can corrupt this planet.

  “You still want to get back to your tidal jungles, I suppose. Maybe you will. We got back to our forests, but they are strictly for recreation now. We don’t have to find our food in them, and we don’t have much risk of getting eaten in them. So someday you may decide that’s best. In any case, it will take you a long, long time to get around that circle; and you’ll learn a lot of things on the way; and believe it or not, the trip will be fun.

  “Forgive the philosophy, please. As I remarked to you a few days ago, when your ancestors started scientific thinking they turned you onto a one-way road. And speaking of roads, which is a word you don’t know yet—you’d better make one up to the dam. These rocks I’ve been steering the wagon around are even worse than principles.”

  A QUESTION OF GUILT

  Several years ago Hal Clement was invited to write a vampire yarn for a proposed anthology. Unfortunately the anthology never materialized but Clement wrote the story. As might be guessed, it’s unlike any vampire story you’ve ever read before and has no supernatural element whatsoever. Clement is best known as the hard-science science-fiction author of Mission of Gravity, Star Light, and others. He is so good at creating scientifically valid backgrounds and believable and interesting alien characters that it’s often overlooked what a skilled and careful craftsman he is. But that care and skill and craft are abundantly evident in this story, which appears in print for the first time here.