Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Erni and Nic were not. They were worried—still no word from their wives—and frustrated as Senatsu guided them through a maze of hillocks, around obstacles organic and topographical, past puddles and lakes of unknown composition, and once for over fifty kilometers paralleling a cliff about as high as silicate rock could be expected to lift against Halfbaked’s gravity. She had warned them against getting within a kilometer of the edge of this scarp; they were on the high side, and there was no way of telling whether or when the tonnage of Quarterback combined with the fantastically rapid erosion by the fluoride-rich wind and rain would trigger collapse of the whole section of landscape. Being part of a seven-gee landslide would not be noticeably better than being under one. She had only used the route at all because it offered tens of kilometers of relatively flat surface which would permit maximum speed; and even then, she and Cloud had debated the idea for some time with Nic and Erni out of the comm net.

  No one felt very much better when, some ten hours after the Quarterback’s passage, the cliff did collapse in four or five places as far in as the runabout’s track.

  “I wonder,” Nic remarked when Ben relayed this information, “whether I’ll yield to temptation a few years from now. It’d be so easy to turn ten hours into ten seconds when I’m telling about this to the kids.”

  Then of course it was too late to bite his tongue off. Erni, who was driving at the time, said nothing for several seconds; then his only words were, “I’m sure I would.”

  The Jellyseal was making poor progress, according to the satellite observations. Time and again she seemed to have headed into a dead-end path and had to backtrack. One encouraging fact was that the same mistake was never made twice; it looked as though the drivers were on the job. No one could yet believe that the following of the earlier instruction had been coincidence, so the general idea was now that whatever had gone wrong earlier with the tanker’s transmitters had now spread to the receivers as well. What this might be seemed unknowable until the machinery could be checked at first hand; all the communication gear in every vehicle on the planet was multiply redundant. Disabling it should take deliberate and either highly skilled or savagely extensive sabotage.

  No one could suggest a plausible or even credible motive for either the drivers or the natives to do such a thing, and it seemed highly unlikely that the latter would have the requisite specific skills in spite of their obvious familiarity with microwave transmission. Knowledge of principles does not imply ability to design or repair complex unfamiliar equipment.

  But the tanker remained silent and apparently deaf, though it continued to move as though guided by intelligence.

  “At least,” remarked Erni after they had received another report from Senatsu that their target was once more backtracking, “They’re not forcing us to make changes in our path. If the girls had actually been making headway back home, we’d have had to change our own heading all the time.”

  “Come on, young man,” came Senatsu’s indignant voice. “Don’t you think I’d have been able to work out a reasonable intercept for you? I wouldn’t have kept you heading for where they were at the moment. I know you’re worried, but don’t get insulting.”

  She was not really indignant, of course, and Erni knew it, and she knew Erni knew it. The art of trying to keep the youngster’s mind off his troubles was now being widely practiced at Nest. It was lucky that most of the divergently planned help efforts had to funnel through one person.

  In a way Erni knew all that, too. Oddly enough, the knowing did help. People may resent pity, but honest sympathy is different; it lacks the condescension.

  Maybe that was why so few people seemed to feel that Dominic needed help, too.

  Actually, the efforts were not really necessary most of the time. The journey itself was far from boring. The basic need for constant alertness when running at high speed across poorly known topography left little time for unrelated thoughts while on duty, and caused enough fatigue to ensure deep sleep between hitches.

  The world itself was different enough from anything familiar to human explorers; it took much of the attention not needed for guiding the runabout.

  Not all of the differences were obvious to the operators. Power consumption of the vehicle, for example, recorded at Nest, indicated that it spent over two thousand kilometers climbing one side and descending the other of a three-kilometer-high dome; Nic and Erni heard only indirect echoes of the arguments as scientists tried to match this information with that from satellites and seismograms.

  The assumption that the world had a nearly equipotential surface, with strength of crustal materials essentially meaningless, was presumed to be even truer here than on any merely one-gee planet. The drivers had not noticed the changes in actual power needed to keep a given speed; they merely knew they were three thousand kilometers closer to where they wanted to be.

  They could tell, of course, when it was possible to keep a given speed; only rarely was the way open enough—and when it was, they had to be even more alert for the strange things which might change that happy state.

  Once, and once only, was there an animal, a definitely living thing moving sluggishly across their path leaving a track entirely stripped of vegetation, large and small. There was no way to see its underside, and hence no way to tell whether it was traveling on short legs—which would presumably have had to be numerous—or, though no trail was visible, something like the slime track of a gastropod. The biologists did manage this time to get a plea through Ben’s near-censorship. They wanted the Quarterback just to change course the slightest bit and roll the thing over en passant, and leave a servobug or two to examine it more closely . . .

  The drivers were not sure their vehicle could roll over something about its own size, and even less certain that the creature itself could do nothing about it if they tried. They promised to make the effort when the present emergency was ended, preferably much closer to possible help from Nest, and drove on. The bugs were controllable from only a short distance in the biological static.

  The debate was picked up by the natives, who wanted to know what “animal” meant. No one could explain with the available symbols. This was not surprising; but during the next hour Nic and Erni saw, swooping around their vehicle, objects which looked like the familiar blowing bits of black paper at a distance but which, seen close to, were clearly gliders—tossing, banking, and whirling in the wind as though barely under control, but clearly aircraft. This was duly reported to Nest. The report, presumably detectable by the natives, elicited no comment from them.

  Quarterback was now a little closer to the sunlit slightly-more-than-hemisphere (the star covered fourteen degrees of sky). The generally active tectonics had not changed significantly, but the air was decidedly warmer and the plants, possibly in consequence, more luxuriant. Nothing resembling leaves had been seen yet, again unless the apparently charred blowing sheets qualified, and there were bets among the biologists on whether such organs would be present even under direct sunlight. The drivers of Jellyseal had failed to report any, but this meant little when one considered the planet’s area. Special enlarged organs for intercepting stellar energy did seem a bit superfluous with the star scarcely a twentieth of an astronomical unit away. However, considering the illogical structure of vertebrate retinae, there was no predicting all the odd paths regular evolution might take.

  Cloud made few requests of the husbands, no matter how urgently his halo of researchers begged. He did pass on to them the suggestion that more and bigger plants might mean more if not bigger animals, but left any changes in driving policy up to them. They made none; they were already as alert as human beings could well remain.

  The final two-thousand-kilometer segment of the run was frustrating, over and beyond the general annoyance built up over twenty-two days of unbroken driving. The men were, in what now might almost be called straight-line distance, less than three hundred kilometers from their still moving goal. They could not follow a
straight line; that way was a labyrinth of seamed, faulted, broken hills where even the satellites could detect almost constant rockfalls. The Quarterback would not have to be hit by a rock; a wheelbarrow load of sand could put her instantly out of commission, and help was now tens of thousands of kilometers away. There was no option but to go around the region. Senatsu was apologetic about not having seen the details sooner, but she was easily forgiven; her attention had been confined by their own needs to areas much closer to the travelers for nearly all the trip.

  Erni responded to the news with a rather rough jerk at the steering controls; his partner fully sympathized but made the signal to change drivers. The younger man had enough self-control to obey, and the runabout set off in a new direction with Jellyseal now off toward its left rear. The sky and its omnipresent clouds flickered even more brightly than usual, as though in sympathy—or perhaps derision. Fortunately, neither driver had reached the state of personalizing the indifferent world. No one even considered how close this state might be.

  It would not of course have bothered the planet, but could easily have distorted important judgments.

  Cloud, whose telemetry had of course reported the moment of rough driving, was a little worried; but there seemed nothing he could do, and nothing he should say, about the matter.

  The two thousand kilometers took three infuriating days, though the last few hours were eliminated by Jellyseal’s luckily, though apparently fortuitously, moving to a more accessible spot and actually stopping for a time.

  The pause might have been due to her being in the center of a twenty-kilometer nearly circular hollow—almost certainly not an impact crater—with eight different narrow valleys leading from it. She had already explored two of these, according to Senatsu, and been forced to turn back; maybe the drivers were debating which to try next, Ben suggested.

  Neither husband could believe this for a moment. They knew their wives would have planned such a program much earlier. The faces behind their breathing masks were now grim. They made no answer to Cloud, but Erni, now driving again, sent them zigzagging at the highest practical speed along a rock-littered canyon which Senatsu had assured them would lead to the hollow. Nic did not object. The sooner they were out from between the looming eighty-meter walls, the better their chance of living to see—

  Whatever might be there to be seen. The satellite images were, after all, only computer constructs.

  Rocks fell, of course, but continued to miss. Neither man had any illusions about how much of this was due to driving skill, but neither gave it much conscious thought. The canyon opened into the valley twenty kilometers ahead.

  Fifteen. Ten. Five.

  They were there, and neither even felt conscious relief as the threatening cliffs opened out. They could not at once spot the tanker, and stopped to look more carefully.

  The trouble was that none of the vehicle’s lights were on. Deeplights might of course be out because it was not moving, but the floods, and the smaller but sharp and clear running and identity-pattern lights which should have been on were dark, too. It was long, long moments before Erni perceived the tanker’s outline against the faint, flickering, and complex illumination of the lightning-lit background.

  He pointed, and Dominic nodded. The younger man had been driving through the valley, but now Nic took over and approached their motionless, lightless, and possibly—probably?—lifeless goal. Erni was calling frantically into the short-range multiwave communicator. Neither was surprised at the lack of an answer; frantic was a better word.

  Tracks, wheels, and much of the lower body of the tanker were crusted with something white, but the men paid only passing attention to this.

  There should at least have been light coming from the cockpit. There wasn’t. Something else strange about the windows seized the attentions of both men, but the Quarterback was within fifty meters of the other machine before this got the door of consciousness open.

  Lights inside or not, the windows should have been visible as more than dark slots. Anything transparent, silicate or not, reflects some of the light trying to get through.

  But the sky, which was a good deal brighter than the ground, was not being reflected from Jellyseal’s windows. They were lightless gaps in the not-very-bright upper body. And the reason now became clear to both observers, drowning out the screaming denials of hope.

  The windowpanes were not there. Maybe, of course, the occupants weren’t there either, but where else could they possibly be? And more important, where else could they possibly be alive? What besides local air was in the tanker’s cockpit? Even Dominic, with the means of looking waiting at his fingertips, had trouble making the fingers act.

  But they did, slowly and much less surely than usual. He slipped into waldo gloves, and a servobug emerged from the runabout. Briefly—perhaps less briefly than usual—it checked out its limbs and lights, and made its way across to the tanker’s relatively monstrous hulk.

  It could climb, of course. There were holds on the outer shells of all Nest’s vehicles, the bug had grasping attachments on its “legs,” and the machines had been designed and grown to be used in rescue techniques as well as more general operations. It made its rather fumbling way up Jellyseal’s front end, and finally reached the openings which had once held barriers intended to keep in the flotation water, keep out one of the few environments in the known universe more corrosive than Earth’s, and still let light through. Nic was guiding the little machine by watching it from where he was. Not even Erni asked why the bug’s own eyes had not been activated yet.

  Yes, the windowpanes were gone. Yes, the bug could climb inside with no trouble. Yes, the last excuse for not using its own vision pickups was gone. Without looking at his partner, Nic turned on the bug’s eyes and his own screen.

  It could not at once be seen what was in the cockpit. Nothing human showed, but that might have been because vision reached little more than a meter into the chamber. It was blocked by a seemingly patternless tangle of twisted branches, ranging from the thickness of a human middle finger down to rather thin string. The colors filled the usual range for Halfbaked vegetation, from very dark maroons and browns to dead black.

  The stuff was very brittle, far more so than anything living should have been. Nic tried to get farther inside. The bug, under his waldoed direction, reached out to one of the thicker stems and tried to use it as a climbing support. Several centimeters of the growth vanished in dust and the machine overbalanced and fell into the cockpit. It left an elevator shaft as it pulverized its way to the floor, and Nic had to go through cleaning routines as black dust slowly settled through the dense air around and upon his mechanical agent.

  Both men were now watching the relay screen, but things weren’t much improved. The bug was still surrounded by the tangle, and as it moved slowly across the floor kept smashing its way through a three-dimensional fabric of seemingly charred growths. The stuff was brittle, but not really frail. A significant push, comparable to the bug’s weight, was needed actually to break the thickest of the branches. It was only when they broke that they went to powder.

  The cockpit was far larger than that of the Quarterback, more than five meters across and eight long, and it was many minutes before most of the floor had been examined. The bug was now moving around under an artistically tangled ceiling twenty centimeters or so high, supported by many pillars of unharmed branches. It left tracks as it went in a two- or three-millimeter-thick layer of black powder containing many short fragments of the branches.

  There was no sign of a human form, living or otherwise, anywhere on the floor, but there was all the evidence anyone could ask that the tangle above could never have supported a human body in the local gravity, and flotation water was gone. Erni finally reported this aloud, his voice as expressionless as he could make it, and summarized the observations forcing this conclusion. Ben acknowledged and opened channels for everyone at Nest.

  “We want to look farther, not consult!” Nic
objected. “There ought to be some sort of indication what happened. Where did the windows go, anyway?”

  “They’d probably be the first things to give if the refrigeration failed and the water boiled suddenly over in the daylight,” Cloud pointed out reluctantly, “unless someone who knows the structure better doesn’t think so. Speak up if anyone does. Anyway, it seems better for you to bring the tanker back here for really close checking, and if at all possible not spoil any more evidence in the cockpit. The growths you reported seem to be very frail, and therefore different from the ones we’ve seen, and it would be better if there were something besides powder to be examined here. Don’t think we’re forgetting about the girls, but if there’s to be any hope of learning what happened, we need data. You can see that.”

  “We can see it,” retorted the younger driver, “but there are still items we’d like to examine ourselves.”

  “What? There was only that one compartment they could have lived in. The whole rest of the machine was paraffin tank, with its contents melted wax for the last part of their trip, and presumably native air for the return—unless you think it was evacuated when the cargo was unloaded, and you’d have seen if it were flattened. So would Sen. What do you think you can find, anyway? You’re not set up for microscopic or high-class chemical testing.”

  “We could find leaks, if they were big enough to—to make things happen so quickly there couldn’t be any alarm sent back.”

  “I’d think small ones could have wrecked communication before they knew anything was wrong. But all right, I’ll take it on my responsibility—go ahead and look for leaks between cockpit and tank, but do leave something of the stuff you’ve been smashing up for people to study.”