by Hal Clement
“Do you think someone or something left the truck at this point?” asked Hugh bluntly.
“I have no opinion. Something could have, certainly. This could be a trace, but so far it’s no help. I don’t know what it could be a trace of.”
The Erthuma hesitated, then turned to the robot.
“Make a record, to hundredth-millimeter precision, of the marks pointed out by S’Nash.”
“I fail to distinguish them from the other marks.”
“S’Nash will indicate the strip in which they lie. Record the entire strip.”
The Naxian extended its/his gleaming armored body in a straight line. “Parallel to this, near side thirty centimeters to my right, twenty wide, starting at my tail and moving forward to my head. You should probably include my image for scale.”
“That will not be needed. Absolute measurements will be included in the record.”
“All right. When you reach my head, stop, and I’ll go forward to mark the next segment, and so on.”
The robot made no verbal response to this, but followed the instructions. Within a minute it reported the record complete.
“All right,” keyed Hugh. “We could spend hours here, but I doubt we’d find anything more. Can any of you suggest anything specific before we go back to town?”
Ted spoke up rather diffidently.
“We seem convinced that the tractor stopped here for a time, after traveling to some part of the Solid Ocean. Right?”
“Right.” Code and translated words mingled.
“Then some of the melted ice might contain plant remains from wherever it had been earlier. Should we not collect some of the frozen material, to be checked for root varieties?”
“We don’t know how species vary on the different parts of the dark hemisphere,” objected S’Nash.
“Not yet,” answered the Habra. “If what we gather here shows any difference, we will have something to look for.”
Hugh and the Locrian agreed eagerly, while S’Nash acknowledged its/his own error with less enthusiasm. They were not equipped with proper containers or labeling materials, but they were only about seventy-five kilometers from Pitville. Ted winged eagerly away, and returned, having exceeded by a wide margin what Hugh had thought was his species’ speed limit, in less than two hours with a sack carried in his handlers.
This proved to contain fully a hundred small transparent envelopes, each already numbered, and a large recording sheet. The others had filled the time by extending the search area, but not even Eleventh-Worker had found anything except the place where the autodriver had stopped the truck. This had left another sheet of ice, but no markings of the sort S’Nash had found at the road.
“Janice says to fill every one of the bags, and if any record is ambiguous you know what she’ll do,” the native reported to Hugh. “She says that any clue to what part of the truck anything fell from will be helpful. She also wants at least twenty chips of plain ice from the melted area, with no plant remains visible in it.”
“That shouldn’t be hard,” answered Hugh.
“Visible to whom?” queried Eleventh-Worker.
‘Tin sure she meant me,” replied the Erthuma. “I doubt there’s anything on the planet in which you couldn’t spot impurities.”
“You flatter me. I have no reason to believe that my resolving power is any better than your own. I am merely less hampered by what you find to be obstacles.” Hugh filed this remark as well.
“All right. Let’s dig. S’Nash, point out one of those track marks, or whatever they are, please; I’ll chip it out complete for the lab, too.”
The Naxian complied, and in due course the envelopes were filled. “Due course” meant a fortunate twenty minutes of absolutely still, clear air; another twenty of rising fog, while Fafnir slowly sank behind a hill to the northwest; and ten of increasing wind which cleared the view again but threatened to broadcast the collecting envelopes over the snowscape. Two of them were indeed snatched from unprepared hands to vanish against the dimly lit whiteness, but they were of nonconducting material, quickly picked up a frictional charge as they blew across the snow, and were found easily enough by Ted.
Hugh suspected that the Naxian was a little disappointed by this, and that it/he would have liked to make another test of the robot’s powers. The Erthuma was just as glad that nothing of the sort had happened. He didn’t want things to go too fast.
They restored the envelopes to Ted’s bag and sent him back to the settlement and Janice. The ground travelers boarded the sweeper caisson and returned more slowly. It would be half of another Common Day before Fafnir really set, but the sunlet was now behind hills nearly all the time, and the road was almost completely dark. The organic members of the group were tired and hungry, but still reasonably alert. Hugh called the truck twice during the trip to learn whether Rekchellet had found anything.
The first answer was a simple negative from the Crotonite himself, who chanced to be inside and resting, though about to go out again.
The second, a little over an hour later, was answered by Third-Supply-Watcher. Hugh was exhausted enough to react only very slowly to the report that all the fliers were out of sight and had not communicated since Rekchellet’s last departure from the vehicle.
However slow, the reaction was violent enough. The robot’s inability to get more speed out of the caisson they were riding made it worse. For an instant, Hugh considered taking it on the track of the other vehicle. Then sanity prevailed. The trail was unmarked, and even though both he and S’Nash were wearing recycling suits Eleventh-Worker was not. They were simply not prepared for an indefinite trip. There were supplies on the truck itself, but no assurance that they could find it; the communicator, as a by-product of its near-instantaneous signal speed, could not be lined up — all direction-finding devices from the earliest radio days had depended basically on the fact that the carrier impulse reached one side of a loop antenna or similar structure measurably earlier than the other. The Habras with Rekchellet and the truck also seemed to be gone even if Ted could get close enough to talk to them directly.
Hugh ordered the robot to take them back to Pitville at the greatest possible speed.
A little later he explored the idea of sending the robot alone to the truck’s aid. The machine, however, had only auditory communication, understood only Hugh’s own language and code, and carried no translator. Also, it was probably not a good idea to entrust an artificial intelligence with that much responsibility in front of S’Nash and Eleventh-Worker.
The Naxian and Locrian had heard the message from the truck. Ted presumably had not. Hugh now called the Habra down and explained the situation. The native, not surprisingly, responded with a plan of action.
“I’ll head over in the general direction they were going and try to get in touch with Walt and Crow,” he said promptly. “If you keep that light on at its present power and spread I can find you again more easily than by field alone. I can’t hear you or talk to you from very far, of course, but as long as the air is clear I can see that light from many kilometers away, and I’ll have no trouble sensing the carrier and robot from three or four at least. Ask Third-Supply-Watcher to call you right away if any of the fliers reports in, so you can tell me when I get back in touch.”
“All right. If possible, come back over us to report, even negatively, every few minutes, please. It may help to know what areas we don’t have to cover with an all-out search.”
“I understand.”
Hugh turned back to the transmitter to send Ted’s request, and found himself getting no response from the truck. After several minutes of this, he rather foolishly asked the robot whether they were going as fast as possible. He was told that they were. The machine did not add anything like, “Of course,” or, “As you ordered,” but Hugh was sure that S’Nash was reading the embarrassment which washed over the Erthuma’s sense of anger and helplessness.
Frustratingly, the air remained clear; visibility was he
mmed in only by the surrounding snow dunes. At first, some of their tops were still brightened by the last rays of Fafnir, but these became fewer and fewer until only a few high cirrus clouds were illuminated.
After about a quarter of an hour they heard Ted’s voice.
“I’ve covered only about twenty kilometers. I stayed low and looked closely. Have you heard from anyone?”
Hugh reported that the truck seemed to be missing, too.
“Would it be wise for me to climb to, say, a kilometer, which is about my limit in these clothes, and sense only for the truck, and examine it when I find it, then report back to you, before looking further for the fliers — who may be moving around anyway?”
“That seems a good idea, Ted.” Hugh glanced up and caught a brief glimpse of the slender figure silhouetted against the faintly lit clouds.
If the truck were really missing, something worrisome was going on. Hugh had refused to let himself get really concerned about the fliers, who might merely have found something interesting and be trying to find out what it was before reporting, but a dozen tons of surface-bound metal had no business vanishing, or even letting itself get buried, which was the easiest way for it to disappear. It might conceivably have been lifted off the planet by a spacecraft, but surely the Locrian would have considered that worth reporting. If she could.
Hugh made four more efforts to call Third-Supply-Watcher before the caisson brought them back to the warehouse. None got any answer. By arrival time, Hugh had a formal search fairly well planned. Finding Ged Barrar checking out the frozen Habra body was extremely convenient. He saw no reason to wonder about the administrator’s activity, which seemed perfectly in character. The Samian had no obvious special observing or measuring equipment on or in his skeletonlike walker, but this meant nothing; Hugh knew nothing about the species’ natural sensory equipment, and couldn’t even identify the “eyes” of the machine.
The Erthuma wasted no time on courtesy.
“I’m going to commit all my fliers to a search,” he keyed as the caisson came to a stop. “We’ll have to reschedule some sentry assignments. Also, I may need one of the transport aircraft — possibly; I don’t know yet whether I’ll have to go along myself.”
“What has changed?” came the slow response.
Hugh summarized the events of the last few hours. Barrar said nothing for half a minute; the Erthuma impatiently let the slow Samian thoughts wind to their next question.
“Is it necessary to find the truck? We know whose it is, and they are not really our problem.”
“Third-Supply-Watcher is my problem. So are Rekchellet and the Habras with him, though I admit they may not be with the truck and are likely to turn up by themselves. The Locrian needs to be found, in my judgment.”
There was another pause. “I agree. I approve your commitment of the flying personnel. Whether I can free an aircraft is another matter; I will have to get back to the office to check their status.”
“Can’t you just ask Spreadsheet-Thinker from here?”
“I prefer not to interrupt her cogitations. I’ll let you know as quickly as I can.” Barrar strode deliberately away.
Hugh had to be content with this, or at least to make the best he could of it. He unloaded the transmitter from the caisson by himself, dismissed robot and sweeper, left the communication device at the warehouse door, and headed slowly back to his own office — even more slowly than the Samian; so slowly as to be striding almost erect, instead of with the forward slant of an Erthuma in low gravity. His mind was very busy.
S’Nash writhed along just behind him, also silent.
There was a neutrino transmitter in the safety office, and Hugh made another futile attempt to get in touch with the truck. He decided against calling Barrar, who was presumably doing as much as he could to fulfill his promise. Hugh could have demanded one for emergency use, as he had at the time of the Pit accident, but he was not quite sure that this, even now, was a life-and-death emergency.
Not quite. Third-Supply-Watcher had a communicator at hand; why hadn’t she used it?
Perhaps she couldn’t.
Perhaps she didn’t want to.
And any imagination, especially if freed from the chains of normal discipline by the acid of worry, could produce an indefinitely large set of possible reasons for either situation.
Hugh firmly welded the chains back together, and began calling his safety people. He also put S’Nash to work rescheduling the sentry assignments of the nonflying members of his staff. If the Naxian preferred hanging around in what should be its/his free time, it/he might as well be put to useful work, especially if Naxians were going to form almost the whole of the sentry crews for some dozens of hours to come.
Moments after he started calling, a Habra appeared at the office air lock and cycled himself through. Hugh didn’t look carefully enough.
“Ted! What have you found?”
“This is Walt. We haven’t seen Ted. Hugh, there’s something strange going on.”
The Erthuma recovered from his surprise, resisted the temptation to respond sarcastically in code, and confined his reply to “What?”
“Rek was flying well ahead of us and higher than we can go, when he called to ask if we could see a light coming our way. We did, and he said to watch but not get too close while he looked it over. We agreed. We couldn’t see very well, of course, but could sense a dozen or so people flying with the light. We were expecting him to tell us what was happening. After he closed with the group, he said they were all going down. We followed, and they landed far ahead of the truck. A few seconds later his translator cut off. Then the whole group suddenly left in many different directions. We went in immediately but couldn’t sense Rek’s equipment, and it was too dark in the shadows to see him on the ground if he was there, and it was starting to fog in. We neither saw nor sensed anything. We spent a long time searching a five-kilometer radius, since the fog turned to snow. Then we decided it wasn’t wise to stay out of touch so long, so we went back to the truck. We couldn’t get in.” “What?”
“The outer door controls wouldn’t work. It had stopped. We could see into the driver’s section, and a Locrian was there, but we couldn’t tell who; they all look alike to us.”
Chapter Seven
A Closely Followed Road No Distance Saves
Fafnir was a little higher above the horizon from Rekchellet’s viewpoint, since he was both farther west and much higher than Hugh. Actually, he was too high for ground searching and knew it perfectly well, but he had no intention of staying there. There had been pleasure in lifting himself into the clear upper air, and there was some excuse, since it gave him a chance to see and memorize a vast area of the wrinkled ground below. He had no plans to map the entire dark hemisphere mentally. Between his normal flier’s nervous system and his trained drawing skills he might indeed have managed this, but right now he was only trying to match the route printed out by the truck’s autodriver with topography ahead.
He had done this several times since the backtrace had started. Each time he had spotted valleys, hollows, and clefts near the mapped line which might have concealed people or objects which had left, or been removed from, the vehicle along the way.
Close examinations had turned up nothing so far, but the surveys still seemed worth making.
And only he could make them. Thanks to his smaller body and broader wings, he could fly much higher than the natives, with or without protection from the cold. A cynical Erthuma might have suggested that he had adopted this search technique to make the fact clear to his companions. This was not true, at least not consciously; the Habranhans were fliers, too, and it had never occurred to Rekchellet to feel for them the ordinary Crotonite contempt for nonflying races. Also, his general attitudes had been bent — twisted, many of his own people said — by long association with Erthumoi like Hugh and Janice Cedar.
But still he soared high, examining the rippled surface below in the light of setting Fafnir, i
gnoring the fact that even he could study the spreading shadows much better from nearby. He also ignored the biting chill, which grew worse as the search carried them farther and farther into the little world’s night hemisphere. Like his companions, he was wearing protective clothing on his body; like them, his wings were uncovered. Unlike theirs, his wings were living tissue, carrying circulating blood, rather than sets of thin, resilient, horny plates which grew only at the roots.
It didn’t matter yet. In flight his body generated plenty of heat; the skin covering his wing membranes was full of insulating air cells, and only by deliberate inflation of the underlying blood vessels could he lose much body heat by that route.
Nearly five kilometers below him and about as far to the east he could see the lights of the truck, lumbering along its planned path. His companions were invisible since they carried no lights, but they would be within a hundred meters of the surface and a kilometer or two of the vehicle, contour-chasing, subjecting every irregularity near the mapped track to the attention of their eyes where possible and their other senses elsewhere. So far, they had passed two places where the printout showed sharp changes in direction, but neither of these had revealed any sign that the vehicle had either stopped or discharged anything. Third-Supply-Watcher had also made a careful examination at each site, looking specifically for any hole which might once have contained the frozen Habra body, but she, too, had found nothing.
With all he could see from this height firmly in mind, Rekchellet began to glide downward. He would do more good, until they had traveled another score of kilometers at least, sharing the work of close search. He targeted a hill a good deal higher than most, a few hundred meters to the left of the truck’s intended path, as the center for a new sweep. Presumably the others hadn’t reached it yet. Fafnir and the unmoving stars watched his descent.