Iceworld

by Hal Clement

  “Your descent has been almost stopped, now. You are about one mile above the transmitter, and a few hundred feet higher above the place where the atmosphere tests were made. Do you want to go straight down now, or stay there and observe for a while?”

  “Down with moderate speed, please. It is not possible to see too far, and I’d like to get down to where real details are visible. It seems to be mountainous country — I’ll try to guide you in landing me near some peak, so that I can observe for a reasonable distance from a stable spot.”

  “All right. You’re going down.” Two or three minutes passed silently; then Ken spoke again.

  “Are you moving me horizontally?”

  “No. You are already away from over the transmitter— three or four miles.”

  “Then this atmosphere has stronger currents than I expected. I am drifting visibly, though not rapidly. It’s rather hard to specify the direction — the sun is not very far from straight up, and the torpedo hides it.”

  “When you’re nearly down, give me the direction with respect to the torpedo’s orientation. I’ll stop you before you touch.”

  Gradually details grew clearer. The greenness seemed to be a tangled mass of material somewhat resembling chemical growths Ken had prepared in various solutions; he tentatively identified it as plant life, and began to suspect what had caused the crackling sound when the test torpedo had been landed.

  Standing out from the green were areas quite obviously of bare rock. These seemed to be located for the most part at and near the tops of the mountains; and with infinite care Ken directed his distant pilot in an approach to one of these. Finally, hanging motionless twenty feet above a surface which even in this relatively dim light was recognizable as rock, he gave the order to lower away.

  Six feet from the ground, he had the machine stopped again, and carefully released the leg chains. The lower part of his armor dropped, almost touching; a word into the microphone brought the metal feet into contact with the ground. Releasing one of the upper chains caused him to swing around, still leaning at a sharp angle with one side up toward the supporting hull. By a species of contortionism he contrived to make a workable tripod of his legs and the rear prop of the armor, and at last released the final chain. He was standing on the Planet of Ice, on his own two feet.

  He felt heavy, but not unbearably so. His extreme caution not to land in a recumbent position was probably well founded — it was very unlikely that he could have raised himself and the armor to a standing posture with his own muscles in this gravity. Walking was going to be difficult, too — possibly even dangerous; the rock was far from level.

  This, of course, was not the principal matter. For several minutes after he had severed connections with the torpedo, Ken made no attempt to move; he simply stood where he was, listening to the almost inaudible hum of his circulation motors and wondering when his feet would start to freeze. Nothing seemed to happen, however, and presently he began to take a few cautious steps. The joints of his armor were still movable; evidently the zinc had not yet frozen.

  The torpedo had drifted away from overhead; apparently a slight wind was blowing. At Ken’s advice, Feth brought the machine to the ground. Even with his fear lost in curiosity, Ken had no intention of becoming separated by any great distance from his transportation. Once assured that it was remaining in place, he set to work.

  A few minutes’ search located several loose rock fragments. These he picked up and placed in the torpedo, since anything might be of some interest; but he principally wanted soil — soil in which things were visibly growing. Several times he examined rock specimens as closely as he could, hoping to find something that might resemble the minute plants of Planet Four; but he failed utterly to recognize as life the gray and black crustose lichens which were actually growing on some of the fragments.

  The landscape was not barren, however. Starting a few hundred yards from his point of landing, and appearing with ever-increasing frequency as one proceeded down the mountainside, there were bushes and patches of moss which gradually gave way to dwarfed trees and finally, where the rock disappeared for good beneath the soil, to full grown firs. Ken saw this, and promptly headed for the nearest clump of bushes. As an afterthought, he told Feth what he was doing, so that the torpedo could be sent along. There was no point, he told himself, in carrying all the specimens back up the hillside.

  Progress was quite difficult, since a gap a foot wide between rocks presented a major obstacle to the armor. After a few minutes of shuffling punctuated with frequent pauses for rest, he remarked:

  “The next time, we’d better have longer shoulder chains. Then I can hang right side up from the torpedo, and be spared all this waddling.”

  “That’s a thought,” replied Feth. “It certainly will be easy enough. Do you want to come back up now and make the change, or collect a few things first?”

  “Oh, I’ll stay a while, now that I’m here. I haven’t much farther to travel to get to these plants, if they are plants. The darned things are green, at least partly. I suppose, though, that objectively speaking there should be nothing surprising about that. Well, here we go again.”

  He lifted his prop from the ground and shuffled forward once more. Another minute or two sufficed to bring him within reach of the strange growth. It was only about a foot high, and he was even less able to bend down to it than he had been on Planet Four; so he extended a handler to seize a branch. The results were a trifle startling.

  The branch came away easily enough. There was no trouble about that. However, before he had time to raise it to his eyes a puff of smoke spurted from the point where the handler was touching it, and the tissue in the immediate neighborhood of the metal began to turn black. The memories aroused by this phenomenon caused Ken to drop the branch, and he would undoubtedly have taken a step backward had the armor been less cumbersome. As it was, he remembered almost instantly that no gas could penetrate his metal defenses, and once more picked up the bit of vegetation.

  The smoke reappeared and grew thicker as he lifted it toward his face port, but he had several seconds to examine its structure before the smoldering wood burst into flame. Although this startled him almost as much as the earlier phenomenon had, he retained his hold on the fragment. He watched with interest as the main branch curled, blackened, glowed, and flamed away, the drier leaves following suit while the green ones merely browned slightly. He made an effort to capture some of the traces of ash that remained when the process was completed, but all he was able to save were some bits of charcoal from the less completely burned portions. This he also stowed in the torpedo, Feth guiding the little vessel over to him in response to spoken directions.

  A bit of soil, scraped up from beneath the plant, smoked but did not burn. Ken obtained a number of airtight cans from the cargo compartment of the torpedo and spent some time scooping bits of soil up in these. He also compressed some of the air into a cylinder, using a small piston-type pump from which Feth had carefully removed all traces of lubricant. It leaked a trifle, but its moving parts moved, which was a pleasant surprise.

  “There,” said Ken, when the task was completed. “If there are any seeds in that earth, we should be able to build a little vivarium and find out at least something about this life and its needs.”

  “Do you have a balance between makers and eaters?” asked Feth. “Suppose these plants are all — what would you call them? oxidizers? — and you don’t have the corresponding reducers. I should think you’d need a balance of some sort, with any sort of life — otherwise you’d have perpetual motion.”

  “I can’t tell that, of course, until we try. Still, I might go down this mountain a little farther and try to pick up a wider variety. There are still some empty cans.”

  “Another point — I don’t recall your making any arrangement to keep them at the proper temperature. I know they’re almost as cold as outer space, but there’s a difference between almost and all the way.”

  “W
e’ll leave the cans in the torpedo until we get back to One. With no air, they’ll change temperature very slowly, and we can leave the torpedo somewhere on the twilight zone of One where it’ll stay about the right temperature until we can build a chamber with thermostats and a refrigerator — it won’t be very large; I have only a couple of cubic yards of air.”

  “All right, I guess you win. If it doesn’t work, it will be small loss anyway. Are your feet getting cold yet?”

  “Not so far — and believe me, I’m looking for it!”

  “I’m not sure I believe you. I have a pretty good idea of where most of your attention is. Have you seen any animal life? I’ve heard the old buzzing once or twice.”

  “Have you? I hadn’t noticed it. All I can hear comes from the mike in the torpedo, so I should get anything you do.”

  “I told you where your attention was. Well, I’ll call you if I hear it again.” He fell silent, and Ken resumed his laborious journey downhill. With frequent rests, he finally succeeded in filling and sealing all his containers and depositing them in the cargo space of the torpedo. He was interrupted once by Feth, who reported that the buzzing was again audible; but even though Ken himself could hear it when he listened, he was unable to find the source. Flies are not very large creatures, and the light was very dim anyway by Sarrian standards. Since there was nothing very appetizing even for a fly in the cargo compartment above which the microphone was located, the buzzing presently ceased.

  Ken took a final look at the landscape, describing everything as completely as he could so that the record being made far above would be useful. The peaks stood out far more prominently now, since some of them were higher than he was. By ignoring the vegetation with which their slopes were clothed and imagining that it was sunset just after a particularly good dust storm, he was even able to find something almost homelike in the scene — there were times when even Sarr’s blue-white sun could look as dull as the luminary of this icy world. At such times, of course, there was always a wind which would put Earth’s wildest hurricane to shame, and the silence around him was out of place on that score; but for just a moment his imagination was able to carry him across two hundred parsecs of emptiness to a world of warmth and life.

  He came to himself with a little start. This place was nothing like home — it wasn’t exactly dead, but it should be; dead as the vacuum of space it so greatly resembled. Its cold was beginning to creep into him, mentally in the form of a return of the horror he had felt the first time he had seen the planet and physically by a slight ache in his feet. Even the engineering miracle he was wearing could not keep out the fingers of the cold indefinitely. He started to call Feth, to have the torpedo lifted so that he could get at the chains and clamps; but the request was not uttered.

  As suddenly as it had done a few days before, a human voice cut sharply through the stillness of the Planet of Ice.

  14

  It was not, in the end, his own discouragement which caused the cessation of Roger’s nocturnal watchings. The night on which the Sarrians tested the armor was, indeed, the last of these journeys; but this was owing to reasons beyond the boy’s control. When he descended in the morning, his father met him and accompanied him outside. There he pointed out certain footprints. Then they went up to Roger’s room together, and the rope came to light. Mr. Wing concluded the proceedings with a request for an explanation.

  “Don’t get the idea that anyone tattled,” he added. “I don’t know whether you have anyone in your confidence, even. Both your mother and I saw that you were getting most of your sleep done daytimes. Well, what’s the story?”

  Roger never even thought of lying. The family custom of proving questionable statements on challenge had taught him, as it had the other children, to recognize evidence and forego useless denial. The only question in his mind was whether to tell or not. He knew there would be no punishment if he refused; but also, there would be no help from his father on a problem that was decidedly beyond his own abilities, and there would most certainly be no more night journeys in search of landing torpedoes. He told what had happened, with all the detail the near-eidetic memory of childhood could evoke. His father was silent for a minute or two when he had finished.

  “We’ll say nothing about your following Don and me,” he said at last. “You were never told in so many words not to, and curiosity is a healthy trait. Of course you let yourself get caught in the woods at night without food, water or light, and that is a more serious matter in view of the fact that you’re supposed to know better. However, the story being as interesting as it is, I guess we’ll suspend sentence on that offense.” Roger grinned.

  “What would the sentence have been?”

  “The logical one would be restriction to the half-mile circle for a week or two. You certainly behaved like a six-year-old. Let’s consider that that’s hanging over your head, and go on to more immediate matters. I suppose Edie knows all about this?”

  “She knows about what happened that night. Not about the times I’ve gone out since.”

  “All right. After breakfast, get her and come with me. We have a number of things to talk over.”

  It turned out that Don was also at the meeting. This was held in a little natural amphitheater a few yards uphill from the house, which had been fitted with split-log benches. Mr. Wing wasted no time, but told the younger children the same story he had told Donald a few days before. Then Roger repeated his tale, mostly for his older brother’s benefit. Don had, of course, seen a Sarrian torpedo by this time, as he had been present when the first load of tobacco had been delivered a few days before; and there seemed to be little doubt that the structure Roger had encountered was of the same origin.

  “I don’t understand why they’re shifting their base of operations after all these years.” Mr. Wing looked puzzled. “They’ve been coming back to that same gadget which we think is a directional transmitter every summer since before Don was born.”

  “You don’t really know that they haven’t landed anywhere else, though,” pointed out Donald. “It just happened that Roger met one of their torpedoes. There might have been any number of others, anywhere on the earth.”

  “That’s true, of course. Rog, you didn’t find any traces of other landings on these night walks of yours, did you?”

  “I’m not sure, Dad. There’s a little patch of bushes all by itself on a hilltop out that way, that’s been burnt over. I couldn’t find any sign of a campfire, and there haven’t been any thunderstorms. I thought maybe one of the things had dropped something like the thing that burned my hand, and started the fire; but I couldn’t find anything of the sort. I don’t really know what started it.”

  “I see. Then to sum up, we’ve been trading with creatures not native to this world for a long time; we may or may not be the only ones doing so; on at least one occasion they sent down a craft whose primary mission does not seem to have been trade.”

  “Unless the light that Rog saw was intended to attract attention, as it did,” cut in Donald.

  “In that case they would hardly have had their gold too hot to be touched. Furthermore, I’ve always refused gold — regular prospectors are competition enough without starting a rush of amateurs.”

  “We don’t know that other people, if there have been any, felt the same way. But I guess you’re right about the temperature. They must have been conducting an experiment of their own, and the offer to trade was an afterthought when they heard Rog’s voice.”

  “It was a dirty trick,” commented Roger.

  “It may have been unintentional. Their knowledge of our language is extremely limited, and apparently they can’t see down here. Either they don’t know about television or can’t mount a transmitter in those torpedoes. Besides, if you came on them unexpectedly, they may have forgotten in the excitement of the moment that the gold would be hot. You said it was another container which was providing the light. However, that’s a point there’s not much use discussing.


  “I had not planned to take this step until both Roger and Edie were older, and had had training enough to be of more help; but the matter seems to have been taken out of my control in that respect. What I want to do, and will need the help of all of you in doing, is to find out where these things are from, what sort of people are running them — and, if possible, how they work. I don’t have to tell you how important that knowledge would be. I have never tried to get outside experts on the job, because, as I told Don, I was afraid they’d let curiosity overcome prudence. I don’t want the torpedoes scared away by any hasty action. I’m too old to learn a new trade, for one thing.”

  “Nuts!” It was Edie’s first contribution to the discussion, though she had listened intently to all that had gone before.

  “What are we going to do?” Roger asked, rather more practically.

  “First of all, you two will come with us the next time we trade. I may take the younger kids along too, only it’s quite a walk for them. You can listen in, watch, and generally see the whole thing for yourselves. After that, ideas will be in order. I was hoping, Rog, that you’d be an electronics expert by the time this happened. However, we’ll use what we have.”

  “Maybe my trouble the other night could be put to use,” Roger suggested. “If they want tobacco badly enough to pay for it in platinum and iridium, they might Be in a mood to apologize.”

  “Supposing they realize they hurt you, and could think of a way to transmit the apology. I won’t refuse an extra nugget or two if they choose to send them, but that won’t be very informative.”