by Hal Clement
If there are no experts aboard, of course—
Hugh controlled himself just the same.
Whether Janice decided to follow her husband’s half-panicky advice or was simply overpowered by turbulence that might just as easily have driven them more deeply into the spout she never said, and Hugh didn’t ask, but things gradually quieted down. The bouncing grew less violent, and it became possible to maintain something like flight attitude and even a vague direction with the aid of the trackers. There was still no horizon; visibility had become much worse and the usual thunder louder and more frequent, though lightning even now could never be seen as more than a sourceless flicker in the haze. The wings and tail ceased to flutter seriously, as did Hugh’s nerves.
Janice, however, was bothered. “We’re not climbing.”
Her husband checked his own tracker. “Sure we are. A meter every fifteen seconds or so.”
“That’s nothing. We got over three meters a second out of that first lifter and something like five times that from the spout while we were in it.”
“Be calm. We’re going up, and heading the right way—you’re not circling.”
“That’s the trouble. This updraft has to stop soon, or rather we’re bound to fly out of it, and I don’t know which way to turn to get back in.”
“Back the way we came, of course.”
“Not if I can help it. The idea is to get to The Iris where we can find someone to help Thrasher and Splasher.”
“Come on.” Hugh let his impatience show. “You’re letting yourself get spoiled again. Even I don’t expect to make it in one straight leg. Gliders don’t work that way, and you know it as well as I do.”
“I know. But do you really want to fly back into that spout? We won’t see it coming, you know—not up here.”
“We can stand it for a few seconds. You got out before. You’d better turn back—we’re descending now, and you were right about our needing more height.”
Janice shrugged, nodded, and put the glider into a shallow right turn. Thirty seconds after completing the half circle their descent stopped. “Not too wild up here,” she remarked. “I’ll hold for a while, but do a ninety to one side and see if we can climb with ten-minute back-and-forth legs before we get back to where the spout was. You have its tracker readings?”
“Burned on my cortex,” Hugh assured her. “I’ll give—oh, three kilos’ warning? Or would you feel happier with five?”
“One,” his wife said firmly. “We want lift. Remember?”
“All right.” Hugh tried to conceal his uneasiness and might have succeeded; at least, Janice said nothing more.
The spout, however, did a much better job of concealing the fact that it was not a simple vertical column. That, at least, was what the Erthumoi decided later. They met the wild turbulence long before Hugh’s warning was due; Janice instantly started a steep left turn and before completing the intended ninety degrees was into chaos far worse than before.
She tried to reverse the turn, but found her efforts fully occupied simply making the glider fly rather than blow away. Holding her eye on the tracking indicators, she did her best to keep the machine in a slight right bank and with the nose down in what she had decided was best-range glide attitude—this should keep airspeed, and therefore stresses, at a minimum. It did not prevent violent jolts as they struck eddy after eddy with no obvious regularity. Chaos continued to reign, thunder was louder, and twice in the next few minutes lightning flashes were actually visible. They were rising, on the average but not at all regularly. Hugh tried not to look at the slender wings, which were whipping madly again, but to keep his eyes on his trackers or his wife. He felt himself jerked against his safety cord with each flap of the wings, and began to worry about that. Should he hold on to the frame, or Janice? He didn’t want to distract her, useless as her flying efforts might be, but if her safety line went—
He reached around her, as unobtrusively as he could, using the piece of cord he had employed on himself just before the launch, and secured her suit to the seat with part of it. Then he cut off the unused couple of meters and employed it to do the same for his own. The turbulence seemed to be easing—but how often could they repeat this sort of thing, and for how long could they keep it up? How long would it take them to get out of The Cataract? One more climb and glide, or a dozen? The area of high evaporation was irregular in shape, as he remembered—he had seen it from space, of course, when they were first approaching the planet that all Erthumoi nicknamed Eyeball at first sight, and the irregularity would be in time as well. For that matter, the shortest direction out might not be the same any more; his arrival had been months ago, and The Cataract probably changed its shape significantly in hours. They had known when they started the flight that the raft was not exactly under the sun, and had headed away from that pole and tried to keep the average heading unchanged. The trackers indicated that they had been only partly successful. They could still only do their best.
Just fly. Hold your heading on the long glides. Get all the altitude you can, glide as far as you can, find a lifter if possible, and repeat.
An abrupt upward jolt, more violent than anything they had felt so far, brought Hugh’s mind back to real time. He looked at the wings with a sinking sensation that had nothing to do with real motion as they bowed upward for more than two meters at the tips, wrinkling the covering fabric—briefly, the man felt thankful they had not covered the bottom; then, still intact, they whipped back to and past their normal shape, prolonging for a moment the upward ride of the fuselage.
And at the top of that ride Janice, seat and all, left the glider. For a moment she hung above it and Hugh reached for her, but he was not quick enough and would probably not have been strong enough. With the aircraft’s center of gravity shifting suddenly backward it pitched upward and its wings took a deeper bite of the air. This brought the fuselage up toward the errant pilot and for a moment she seemed about to return to her proper place; but drag had increased even more than lift. She struck the body well ahead of the cockpit, slid off after a futile attempt to reach through the polymer sheeting and grasp a longeron, and fell—not rapidly, on Habranha, but she fell. Her right hand caught a wing rigging line, and the glider went into a vertical bank. Before Hugh could react, Janice deliberately let go.
The man slid his seat forward without hesitation; like his wife, he had spent much time thinking about possible emergency actions with their untested craft, and many of these had involved balance. He seized Janice’s controls, no longer able to reach his own, and without the slightest concern for air speed or structural strength brought the nose down as far as it would go.
This was not a vertical dive or anything like it, and he had to bank into a tight spiral to bring his wife back into view from under the nose. He was losing altitude, of course, but not nearly as fast as she was, since they were both still in the updraft but the glider was far more affected by it.
For a desperate, unreasoning moment Hugh wondered whether it would do any good to try to hack the wings off with his knife to make his fall faster. Memory of the toughness of the woodlike material they had used for framework, a toughness so well displayed by the wings in the last few minutes, made him decide against it even before he thought of what the fall would be like after getting one wing off but before disposing of the other. After a fleeting and futile thought about the convenience of explosive bolts for quick disassembly, he brought his mind firmly back to reality.
He would have to keep her in sight, obviously. There was sunlight enough, hazy as the sky was; it was little over a kilometer to the surface; Jan’s suit would certainly float; it was simply a question of not losing track of her, and landing—no, “ditching” was the word, wasn’t it?—as close to her as possible.
And then they could call the Cephallonians. The one glide they had made could not have taken them out of The Box’s model range, surely. Of course, part of it had been made with a tail wind of unknown speed—don’t be sil
ly, Cedar. You don’t need dead reckoning; the trackers will tell you. But you can’t look at them just now; you can’t take your eyes off Janice. She’s starting to blend in a little too well with the haze. But you were reading them often enough a few minutes ago; what did they say?
Hugh couldn’t remember. Too much else had happened in recent moments to monopolize his attention. He’d have to worry about calling the swimmers after he’d landed and picked up his wife—where was she? He squinted, and shook his head. There were several specks in his field of vision, most of them moving erratically, and he couldn’t be sure which if any was Janice’s suit. It had blended in with the background, as it had been threatening to do for seconds-He couldn’t go straight down. The glider wouldn’t enter a vertical dive. He tried once more, with his own body as far forward as he could get it, but the broad wings had too much drag and were too far above the center of gravity, and the elevators didn’t have enough area.
But there was another way. He had heard of it, though he had never flown anything unstable enough to experience it. He brought the nose up, and for the first time hoped that the glider’s long wings were not absolutely warp free.
They weren’t. The right one stalled out first, and a moment later the glider was in an almost flat spin as nearly straight downward as the local winds allowed. Actually, it was hard to tell by eye that he was descending at all. The spin was slow, thanks to the lightness and span of the aircraft, but it was still hard to fix the eye on any reference point in the haze. Certainly not on his wife.
The tracker insisted that he was going down, however, though probably a lot more slowly than she. He could only guess at the terminal velocity of a human body in Habranhan gravity and air, but the guess was many times higher than the tracker’s quarter-meter-per-second reading. This did increase somewhat during the next minute; either the lifting current was not vertical, as he had already guessed, and the fall was taking him out of it, or the turbulence was doing its usual statistical job of working the glider into a quieter area. He hoped it was the former, which would give him a much better chance of hitting the ocean somewhere near Janice.
The water was not encouraging when it became visible. It still showed the mad choppiness of The Cataract area. Spotting a nearly submerged human form in the waves, spray, foam, and seaweed would be hard enough on the way down, and hopeless when being tossed around among them himself. Janice could be floating fifty meters away and easily be missed. Even if he did see her, moving the glider over for a rescue would be impractical. There was nothing to serve as a paddle, she would probably be unable to hear his calls over the roar of wind and wave and thunder, the fuselage floated high at the mercy of the wind, and if he left the craft to swim over to her it would probably be impossible to get back. No, he could use a safety line, since there was plenty of rope; but he would still have to see her first.
He certainly failed to do that before settling with surprising gentleness onto the waves.
The good part was the tracker claim that he was only about twenty-two kilometers from the raft. The single real glide they had made had been good, but not outstanding; it would have taken them a long, long time to reach The Iris that way.
The Box should be able to hear a call for help. Maybe Janice, who must have hit the water first, had already reported and the Cephallonians were now en route.
Even if she had he should also check in, of course. He unclipped the transducer from his suit, reached over the side to hold it under water, and reported the incident and his tracker location, finishing with a heartfelt query about his wife. There was plenty of time for the whole message before the first words could reach the raft, and he waited patiently for an answer. The possibility that he might not be heard was something he would face later if he had to.
The Box was typically terse.
“The Cephallonians are on their way. I can detect Janice with confidence, but not the glider. When they reach your area, you will have to talk steadily so that they can home on your sound.”
“Then you can’t tell me how close I am to her.” Hugh was less patient with the inevitable pause this time, though he knew what the answer had to be.
“No. I was able to associate her original call with a regular set of echoes from local wave sounds, and maintain an image. The submerged part of the sailplane reflects very little sound, and most of that downward, I expect. If you would care to get out and immerse yourself, talking all the time, and of course fastening yourself securely to the aircraft, I can probably resolve the problem.”
Hugh hesitated for only a moment. A five-hundred-kilometer water depth is, objectively, no worse to an Erthuma than fifty meters, just as a fifty-story fall is no worse than one of five. The trouble is that few Erthumoi are very objective even when scientifically educated. He spent several minutes doing careful things with rope, then eased himself out of the cockpit and let himself into the sea, holding on firmly to a wing in spite of his trust in the cord.
“All right, I’m submerged,” he reported, and began his favorite party showoff activity, reciting fragments of poetry in ancient English. The Box wouldn’t care what he said as long as it got a continuous signal. He was declaiming, with gestures of his free hand, “These are Clan Alpine’s warriors true, and Saxon, I am Roderic Dhu!” when the calm response reached him.
“You’re almost a kilometer closer to me than Janice, and getting closer at about two meters a second, presumably because of wind. Current should be affecting you both more or less equally on long-time average. There seems to be no emergency. The Cephallonians will reach you first but I would suggest that they go on and bring Janice back to the glider. I assume you will want it towed back here. I do not suppose you will want to repeat this attempt, but the structure represents much labor and material and some of it might be converted to other uses.”
Hugh said nothing. The Box was basically right, of course, but relief about his wife’s safety and the experience of what was essentially another anticlimax had shut down for the moment both his enthusiasm and his imagination. Having the heroic rescuers leave the raft and the helpless rescued return was getting to be a little too routine. He had, of course, been perfectly right about the flying project, but it is small comfort for a pessimist to be right. Hugh got no satisfaction out of saying, “I told you so,” especially to his wife. He would be very happy to tell how wrong he had been to Janice, the Cephallonians, and the assembled study authorities at Pwanpwan, once they reached the place.
He shifted to old Welsh songs, which called for more attention and allowed less freedom to brood in spite of their usual subject matter, and kept broadcasting. Halfway through “Llwyn On,” Thrasher—Hugh could tell the two apart at sight—surfaced beside him.
“Shall I stay with you while Splash picks up Janice, or go along with her? You seem safe enough.”
“Sure, go along. Do I need to keep singing? You can see me on your own sonar now, can’t you?”
“We can, but your signal helps. Besides, the music is nice. See you in a few minutes.” The swimmer vanished with no more splash than could be blamed on the choppy waves. Hugh, not used to having his voice praised and not entirely sure of Thrasher’s sincerity—Cephallonians sometimes carried courtesy to the same extreme as many Erthumoi—shifted to “Ar Hyd y Nos.” He knew only two verses of this and went on to comic songs in his own language. After all, Janice would be close enough to hear him shortly.
Even with no trouble it took the rescuers several minutes to travel over a kilometer, get the woman into one of then-packs, and swim back. Several more were spent deciding that the Erthumoi would return in the glider rather than be carried, arranging tow lines, and getting under way. There was little talk at first en route. Both human beings were discouraged, and now that the tension of the flight itself was over, they realized how tired they were. While each wanted to cheer the other up, neither could think of anything very cheerful to say.
They watched, silently at first, the rhythmic dolphin-style
motion of the Cephallonians, and Hugh soon began to compare the vector problems of swimming with those of glider flight. Janice tried to sound interested as he began to talk about this and brighten up somewhat, but she found it hard to be sincere, much less enthusiastic.
The tow was rougher than the flight, of course. Not only was the surface choppy, but every few seconds one wing tip or the other would either dip into the sea or be caught by a wave, adding a jerky yaw to the pitching discomfort. The Cephallonians had started out trying to do the trip quickly—after all, the glider was decently streamlined and drew practically no water—but gave up in a minute or two. They could stand the jerks on the tow lines themselves, but Thrasher was beginning to worry about pulling the frame apart. That, at least, was what he said; Janice muttered to her husband, “Kindhearted old fish, isn’t he? I wish he could forget about my stomach.”
Hugh raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you wish you could?”
“It’s all right with the diving juice gone. And no comments, please.”
Hugh had not planned any, and kept his face as expressionless as possible, since that part of his suit was transparent. Vectors were much more fun than arguments.
And much more inspirational, he was beginning to realize, where practical plans were concerned. The glider experiment had not been a total success, but it had certainly not been a waste of time. The sailplane had been doing just what was asked of it, combining a vector directed away from where they wanted to go with one at right angles’, working in a little basic Newton, and producing a resultant headed—yes. Even the labor and material that had gone into the aircraft itself should be useful—
The man’s carefully blank expression was gradually melting into a smile. Janice, seated ahead of him and watching the waves and the Cephallonians, as well as the change of tow line slack from moment to moment, did not notice.
Hugh probably wouldn’t have heard her if she had seen his face and asked him about it. By the time his expression reached grin level he was setting up nice, detailed, quantitative problems for The Box. Really detailed. There would even be a use for a thruster, as long as it were reliably turned off. That distracted him briefly; just what had gone wrong with the units Janice had employed on the sub? Why had they chosen to go wide open? They had turned off for her; did that mean it would be all right to use one of those four for his new idea, or would it be safer to take another? Or should something entirely different be improvised? He couldn’t think offhand of anything else on the raft that would serve the purpose, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything.