by Hal Clement
He had clothing, of course. His body was well protected by fabric, but deciding whether he should cut up some of it was not so easy. Exposing his skin, which would certainly be damp with sweat from time to time, to a chlorine-laden atmosphere had its own risks.
He tossed a mental coin, removed the upper section of his suit with care to avoid disturbing the air-filtering equipment, and started cutting carefully.
This did capture Creak’s attention, though whether he was more surprised at the man’s suddenly displayed ability to remove his outer surface or interested in the use intended for the strips of fabric was not evident. He walked, dragging his own broken leg, over to take a closer look; his own slashes and abrasions seemed to have clotted without artificial help.
Jerry arranged the poles around his thigh and with much awkwardness began strapping them in place.
He had even more trouble with the portions of splint extending below his knees, and was vastly relieved when his companion began to help with wrapping and knots. The fact that one of the four independently swiveling eyeballs kept examining the partly revealed human body while the work was going on was no bother, at least not after it became evident that the creature could tie good knots with part of his attention elsewhere. Scientific curiosity was perfectly understandable.
Jerry had used the insulation between the layers of his suit to make padding, so as far as he could tell the circulation to his leg was unimpaired. It was odd, he reflected, how people tended to keep on acting on the assumption they were going to live.
Not always too sensible, but interesting.
There was still plenty of material from the outer layer of the jacket, and with his own splints secure he dragged himself to another shoot and slashed it down. Creak still seemed curious, and after the man had cut another set of splints and gestured toward the native’s broken leg he appeared to get the idea. A quarter of an hour later this limb too was splinted to the man’s satisfaction, padding and all.
The satisfaction evaporated promptly when Creak began, rather gingerly at first, to walk with the broken limb.
“Hey! Wait a minute—no, wait about a month. You’ve got a bone in there—I felt it! That’s got to knit before you can walk on that leg! Are you crazy? Or didn’t your creator give you a sense of pain?”
There was a bone in the limb, and Jerry winced as he saw the whole splint-and-leg system give slightly when a portion of the native’s weight came on it. Creak walked slowly and carefully back and forth for a dozen meters each way, and appeared not to mind the slight yielding of what should have been a rigid structure. The man cringed mentally, but the owner of the leg seemed satisfied to find that the splints could take some of his weight. His attitude relaxed as he continued to walk about, and he finally seemed to have decided how much load he could actually risk on the splinted member. Just a calibration run, apparently.
Then he came back to Snow and gestured at his broken arm.
There was little fabric left, but plenty of splint material. This time Jerry confined himself to two sections of pole; the arm was remarkably thin considering the native’s overall structure. He tried to use the last of the binding material to improvise a sling; maybe that would discourage the fellow from using the arm . . .
Making an arm sling for a creature whose four-eyed head lacks a real neck to separate it from a gorilla-like torso is awkward. When the four arms, while emerging from the upper part of the torso as a human being would hope, lack anything much like shoulders the problem is worse. Jerry was not content with the result, and neither was Creak. He wanted to use the arm, as he had the leg.
It would have been nice, Snow reflected, if the creature had had two right and two left arms; one arm could have served as a splint for the other on the same side. Unfortunately, they were right, left, front, and back, like the legs, and it was the front arm that was broken. The man finally gave up and let the owner of the limbs do what he pleased.
There was no point in offering human pain-killer to a chlorine breather, especially one who was showing no signs of suffering that Snow could identify.
Creak went through another set of tests, apparently to make sure of the usefulness of the newly splinted limb. Then he took another very careful look around the rockfall, clearly making really certain that it was unclimbable. The cliff face which backed the rest of the shelf was too nearly vertical to be worth checking, and the native then began examining very slowly the outer verge of the nearly flat area, looking over the edge every meter.
This was encouraging, Jerry felt. If the being could get down, his own words stood a fair chance of being heard somewhere, some time, by some human being. The native could live in the valley with no trouble at all—perhaps more comfortably than up here, though oxygen did not, as far as anyone knew, bother the chlorine breathers. It shouldn’t, of course, by any evolutionary reasoning; there is no way for a liquid-water planet with a high atmospheric chlorine content to be without a fair amount of oxygen. Chlorine reacts with water to produce the stuff, though rather indirectly.
The man’s filter system removed the chlorine and supplied him with the oxygen he needed—up here. Chlorine is over twice as dense as oxygen or nitrogen, and more than fifty percent denser than carbon dioxide. At the bottom of the valley there would be little but the green gas, and no matter how hard the pump of his filter system labored, there was no way a human being could get enough oxygen down there. A sieve won’t separate water from sand if there’s no water.
Up seemed impossible. Down was death.
For a human being.
Mapper felt the same about the upward chances, but down, now that her leg was more usable, was another matter. The area had been charted, though not very completely, and she knew there was a growth station half a day’s journey from the foot of Sunwarmth Valley. Getting down might easily take a day or more, if it could be managed at all, but it would be worth the try. Waiting here with little food and no water was futile death.
For a few seconds the possibility of bringing the other being along occupied Mapper’s thoughts. There would be no trouble carrying it on level ground even if it couldn’t help, as it presumably couldn’t; one serviceable walking limb out of two was clearly inadequate.
The canyon wall, however, was not level. It seemed much more sensible to go down alone first and find a route, if one existed, where trying to transport the other would at least not be silly.
There was no way of telling how much food the strange being had or needed. It had obviously eaten very tiny amounts of something several times since they had met. It might be able to last a while. Maybe it could do without water for a time as well; the peculiar use it had made of the stuff, pouring it into one of the strange objects it was carrying, might mean that it had no personal need for the liquid, though this was hard to believe. The creature, after all, was obviously as alive as Mapper herself. If it could do without water, however, the chance of its being able to stay alive up here for a while seemed fairly good. If it couldn’t, that would be inconvenient, but there seemed nothing to be done about it.
It would be nice to learn more about the strange beings; Mapper had heard a little, but only a little, about them from other people and ignorance was annoying, especially when decisions had to be made.
There seemed, however, after half an hour of careful examination, only one spot where even the start of a descent was possible. From there on down looked almost easy, but to the nearest shelf below this particular spot was a drop of something like five meters. Three more broken legs would remove the need for decision making, of course, but that seemed hardly worth the ensuing inconvenience, especially if the stranger could not get down the drop to make more repairs.
The creature now had crawled over to the edge beside Mapper, and was also looking over. She wondered briefly why it had bothered to apply the limb-stiffeners to itself at all when they obviously weren’t adequate, but it began to move again before any reasonable explanation occurred to her. Observation seeme
d more profitable than speculation for the moment.
Back at the clump of plants which had furnished the limb-stiffeners, its strange implement sent several more shoots tumbling to the ground. Two of these were left at full length, the others sectioned as before. Then the being drew several lengths of thin cord from its equipment and began lashing the shorter pieces across the two longest ones, which it had laid out parallel to each other.
Mapper had plenty of imagination. The purpose of the ladder was clear to her well before it was completed. The plant material, it seemed likely, would be strong enough for that purpose; the adequacy of the cord was less certain but no doubt worth a try.
With the last knot completed and the structure tested as well as the stranger’s arm strength could manage, it began to drag the ladder toward the point where Mapper obviously wanted to descend.
She, however, had a strong sense of self-preservation. She picked up the fabrication and carried it, not to the edge of the cliff, but in the other direction, paying no attention to the meaningless noises produced by the alien. The ladder was set up against the cliff face as steeply as possible, and the chlorine-breather cautiously began to climb up. The rungs bent, but not alarmingly. Even the top ones were tried, not by standing on them with the near certainty of another fall but by hanging from them by one or two hands—the broken arm was not used; Swift had no idea whether the creature was sensible to pain after all or merely sensible.
The testing finished, the ladder was borne to the edge and lowered carefully over. Mapper noticed, but did not interpret, the tight clenching of its maker’s hands as the climb commenced, but there proved to be nothing to worry about. The lower shelf was reached in a few seconds. She picked up the ladder and started along the ledge in what had seemed from earlier examination the more promising direction. She could see the head of the alien watching her clambering down these easier slopes, and was rather disappointed that there was no need to use the ladder again while the two were in sight of each other.
The climb was very long. Darkness came after only a few hundred meters of descent, and the journey stopped. It was unwise, to put it mildly, to travel without being able to see far enough ahead to plan the route. Mapper wondered off and on during the night how the other being was faring, but spent most of her time trying to match what she had seen so far on the way down with the incomplete chart of the area already filed in her memory.
Real connection was not yet possible, but trying was fun.
Lower down, after the light returned, the descent became ever easier, only partly because the air was denser and more useful. There was also some purely mental relief; with less and less oxygen tainting the surroundings there was less and less chance of meeting any of the ferocious little oxygen-users. Mapper knew no real chemistry, though she had names for oxygen and chlorine, and had no idea why such creatures could be so much more active than chlorine-breathers, but she knew the fact.
It would have been nice if everyone could live in deep valleys, but people also needed water, and for some reason the valleys which contained enough water also had enough oxygen to be dangerous. Mapper had wondered why, but no one had been able to satisfy her curiosity. It might be a law of nature which no one understood yet, which would make the quest hopeless, but so far such valleys seemed still worth seeking on the chance.
So people went on mapping.
Having reached nearly level ground she stored the ladder where it could be found again easily, and headed south. There was no stream to follow, but the landscape was becoming familiar, or at least similar in detail to places she had heard about. By the time the sun had brightened from deep green to yellow there was no more doubt about where she was, and she paused to think.
There would be no more serious climbing between here and the Station. It would definitely be possible to carry the stranger down by the route she had just had taken—in fact, the only place the ladder would be really needed was that very first drop from the shelf where they had been trapped. This meant that, while the implement would have to be carried back up, it would not be needed again on the descent; only the stranger would have to be carried.
But would this be worth doing? The Station would not be equipped to repair the alien body. Maybe Mapper should simply go on and get her own damage attended to, and then go back for the other with much more convenience. On the other hand, there was the water question; the being had had some use for the liquid, however strange the use seemed to be, and there was none on the shelf. Mapper could sympathize with that situation; she was no stranger to thirst in the surveying profession. There would certainly be water at the station, and maybe the creature had enough food for a while at least. Maybe, for that matter, the people at the station would know how to get in touch with others of its kind.
There was, on another hand, no need to go on to find the station; she knew where it was, now. It could not be reached before dark, and repairs to leg and arm would take two or three additional days. She could also deliver her egg during that time, but that was a minor consideration; it did not yet interfere with travel.
Reasoning was inconclusive; she made a random decision. She turned abruptly and retraced her steps to the ladder.
The sun was green again, now descending toward the Station, and even though climbing would this time be possible in the dark since the way was known, the upward travel would be harder and more rest be needed. The pauses would not, of course, be boring; patching together the details which had been observed on the way down with what had already been mapped would be recreation, especially since some of the patching would still have to be made by inference. Thinking was fun.
She hurried in order get above the heavy vegetation of the valley floor before the sun set; it would be good to check some of the more casual observations made on the way down, even though there might be enough oxygen for dangerous animals if she went very far. This was a standard risk, not worth very much attention. She could, after all, still use three of her knives.
As it happened, one at a time was enough. The carnivores this deep in the valley were larger, clumsier, and didn’t hunt in packs, so she was not even very tired when the climb was resumed at daybreak.
Tired or not, upward progress was much slower, and the sun had set again before the last stage, requiring the ladder, was reached. It seemed best not to call aloud; the alien was not looking over the edge—there was no obvious reason why it should be expecting anyone—and it was clearly inconvenient for it to crawl. Once again Mapper wondered why it had bothered to do the non-repair to its leg.
It was fully dark—the world had no moon, and at the best of times its atmosphere was too hazy for starlight to produce much more than a faint general glow—when the ladder was set up. The climb was made as carefully and quietly as possible, not so much out of consideration for the injured alien as because the ladder was shaky enough to demand full attention. For the first time it occurred to Mapper to wonder whether it would hold the two of them at once.
Maybe the trip back up had been wasted after all, but there was only one way to tell.
All the eyes that could be brought to bear swiveled carefully over the shelf the moment they were high enough. No more cutting of shoots seemed to have been done; all that had still been standing when the surveyor had departed still showed faintly against the vaguely luminous sky. The alien was not visible, but was probably lying down if it were anywhere at all in the line of sight. Mapper dragged herself over the edge and decided to rest until there was enough light.
Well before sunrise she could see the creature. It was lying motionless near the stand of plant life which had provided splints and ladder. At first it seemed dead, but as the light increased, its breathing motions could be seen; it had not shut down completely.
It had, however, changed visibly and surprisingly. At the time of Mapper’s departure its inner skin—the surface exposed largely by removal of the strap material from the upper part of its body, and partly by rips resulting from the fal
l—had shown numerous injuries. There had been scrapes, cuts and tears leaking nearly black body fluid. This had hardened to form a seal within a few minutes, as had Mapper’s over her similar injuries. This had not been at all surprising, though the alien’s smearing of a pasty material over the areas afterward was hard to understand.
Now, however, there was no sign of these injuries, though the leg was still splinted. Mapper was dumfounded.
She remembered perfectly well where each scratch and scrape had been; after all, she had a surveyor’s memory. If that had been in doubt the growing light showed paler patches at the damage sites. The uninjured integument had also changed a little; now it was darker than before.
But what had repaired the injuries? No other aliens could possibly have arrived with reconstruction equipment. There were no traces of anyone, other than the creature and Mapper herself, having moved around in the dust and rubble of the shelf; she remembered every mark they had left. Besides, why would anyone repair the minor damage and then not only ignore the leg but depart leaving the creature itself behind? It made no sense. Could the substance the creature had smeared on the scabs have been responsible for their disappearance? Hardly; repairs weren’t made that way or that quickly. New growth had to be directed.
The only thing that made sense was perhaps not impossible, but certainly unbelievable, at first. It did not occur to her for several minutes, and when it did she froze momentarily in shock.
The creature had built-in repair powers.
At least, it could handle minor damage. The leg seemed beyond it, or maybe that just took longer. The former seemed more likely by far, now that Mapper considered the whole matter. After all, repairing skin damage might be just a minor advance over having body fluids seal their leaks, which anyone could do.
But that settled it. The creature would have to be brought to the station, if only as evidence of what could be done. Self-repair would obviously be useful; she had no idea why no one had thought of incorporating it in Person design. Maybe it would even be possible on broken limbs. Mapper was going to get a really unheard of repair job this time, especially since there seemed no reason why the repair crew themselves shouldn’t share the credit.