Fossil (1993)

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Fossil (1993) Page 14

by Hal Clement


  The truck, they knew, was nearly a hundred kilometers from Pitville. The flier could have covered the distance in moments, but not safely; there were too many living searchers in the air, many of them not carrying lights yet in spite of Hugh’s efforts in that direction. The Habras were cooperative enough, but their eyesight covered nearly the full sphere and no one had yet designed a running light, other than a rather useless one pointing straight to the rear, which they could carry without the glare’s interfering with the bearer’s vision. From their own point of view, of course, their electrical senses made such equipment superfluous; they could detect each other and Hugh’s ship with no trouble.

  But if the craft were moving at anything like its full speed, they could never spot it in time to dodge.

  After endless minutes, the radio receiver picked up a Habra voice. “I see you, Hugh. Descend to one kilometer, and slow down to comfort speed.” This, to Habras, was about fifty kilometers per Common Hour. “Good. I’ll be with you in a minute or two. You’re heading in almost the right direction. I will come close enough to let you see me.”

  There was a pause. Then Jan jumped slightly as the crimson-patterned cylinder of the Habra’s trunk suddenly appeared a scant two meters — less than its own length — above the pilot canopy of their craft. As usual, the wings were invisible, partly from their transparency, partly from their rapid motion; the cockpit light was bright enough to have shown them had they been in glide mode, since it was bright enough to show the body’s color. Harness ornaments which both Erthumoi knew to signify maleness glinted.

  Hugh gestured to indicate that he saw, and the native drew smoothly ahead and down until he was directly in front of the cockpit and level with it.

  “Follow. You’ll see the truck in about five minutes,” his voice came again. “When you do, tell me and I’ll cut over to one side so I can watch you better. We’ll both stand by in case you have anything for us to do. We just relieved the last pair, and can stay for a couple of hours with no trouble.”

  “I’ll watch him,” said Hugh to the others aboard. “You keep your eyes on the ground. Let me know when you see the truck.” A mixed murmur and buzz of agreement allowed the man to focus his attention on his leader, and for the promised five minutes nothing more was said.

  It was the Locrian who spotted the truck first, partly because the native led them directly over it and neither Hugh nor his wife could see straight down. Plant-Biologist, his vision not blocked by the floor of the little craft, calmly reported the sighting.

  “The truck is below us. You will have to fall back or go to one side to observe it through any of your windows.”

  Janice was mildly annoyed, but tried to retain her scientific objectivity. They were still five hundred meters above the hilltops, and the Locrian’s words had just invalidated her favorite personal theory of how their penetrating vision worked.

  She pushed that thought into the background, as Hugh called to the Habra, slowed abruptly, and swung around in a tight circle to let more conventional eyes confirm the report.

  It was correct. Dark as the landscape now was, with the rime-covered body of the vehicle little different from the ice dust around it. even human eyes could see it.

  He went down as close as he could, but still could not see satisfactorily. The vehicle was in a narrow valley; if he flew low enough beside it to get a look through the driver’s window, dividing his attention to take the look could be disastrous. There was no reason to suppose that the local hills were as loosely constructed as the waste pile at Pitville.

  Still, he had brought Plant-Biologist along for a reason; he might as well use him. Hugh hovered over the truck and asked the Locrian to examine it as thoroughly as he could, with special reference to who and how many were aboard. The other settled more comfortably in his seat, unshielded his eye, and went to work.

  “There is only one living being there,” he said at last. “The Locrian is alone in one of the after compartments, apparently relaxing. There is no one else in that chamber, in the lock, or in the driving section.”

  “Is it Third-Supply-Watcher? Or are you acquainted with her?”

  “Yes to both questions.” “Can you talk to her?”

  “We cannot hear each other. If we can attract her attention and she sees me, we can signal.”

  “Good. Our obvious questions are why she slopped and what has happened to Rekchellet. I don’t really expect an answer to the latter. I’ll try to get to a position where she can see you — I’m surprised she hasn’t noticed us already — and you can start your arm-waving or whatever the signs involve.”

  Third-Supply-Watcher remained motionless and apparently uninterested in her surroundings for several minutes, until Hugh asked the Habra to pound on the shell of the truck. This produced results.

  “She has noticed our ship and looked at it several times. I don’t know why she hasn’t looked inside— wait; she sees me now.”

  Plant-Biologist fell silent. He made no motions that either Erthuma could see, but with Locrian eyesight there was no need for motions to be external. It seemed best not to interrupt, and Hugh waited as patiently as he could for the next few minutes. The scientist finally reported.

  “She was told that if she turned the guiding equipment off, the main power would also be cut. She doubted this, but took the chance in order to make the truck easier to locate. As you can see, she does not have full-recycling armor. She does not know her precise location, but did not want to get any farther from Pitville. There is no Locrian food aboard, and stopping here seemed better than allowing the vehicle to proceed as it had been set. I agree with her.”

  “Her armor will let her join us here,” pointed out Janice.

  “True,” agreed Hugh. “I’d have her come over in a shot if I thought she were in immediate danger.”

  “She is very hungry,” remarked Plant-Biologist.

  “Oh. Of course. Sorry.” The man pursed his lips, and hesitated. “I’d love to know where that thing is supposed to have been going, but there’s no one here who can set the autodriver up again if we do anything but simply turn it back on.”

  “Rek did,” his wife pointed out. “There are other Crotonites in your own crew, some of them probably within fifty kilometers. Why should Third have to…”

  The biologist made a querying sound.

  “Sorry. I meant Third-Supply-Watcher.”

  “She shouldn’t,” admitted Hugh. “Tell her to stop worrying for now. We’ll land, and she can come over here. Have you any food with you?”

  “Of course.” This time the biologist, or his translator, had no trouble with the address ambiguity. He fell silent once more as he signaled his fellow on the truck.

  “We’ll have to get out and work the lock controls from outside,” Janice pointed out. “They’re mechanical, and Third-Supply-Watcher may not be strong enough to handle them.”

  “Wait a minute. Something’s funny,” returned her husband. “She said the power would go off, but the drive cabin lights are still on.”

  “She is operating the inner lock, and passing through. Now she is closing it, and has operated the switch of the outer hatch.” The three watched as the door swung out and down as the Erthumoi had seen it do before. Hugh hastily grounded the flier as the lightly armored insectile figure emerged. He opened his own air lock, and Plant-Biologist reached for the pack he had brought aboard.

  Third-Supply-Watcher did not remove her helmet after coming aboard; Habranhan air was crushingly dense for her species, and Hugh had not bothered to drop the ship’s pressure, since he, Janice, and S’Nash had long been used to it themselves. However, her armor had a feeding lock and she promptly made use of it. Presumably she thanked the other Locrian, but neither Erthuma could detect the communication. Hugh, not wanting to interrupt her meal, went through the lock to check the truck out himself. Two winged figures promptly landed beside him. One was a Crotonite, which could be helpful. He beckoned them to follow him inside.

>   The power, in spite of what had been said, was still on; it had not been a matter of some emergency exit device operating. The outer hatch closed behind them as Hugh tripped the switch, and the forward lock door opened with equal docility. The inside was comfortably warm by both Erthumoi and Locrian standards; it was only as this fact tapped on the door of his consciousness that Hugh realized what a chance Third-Supply-Watcher had taken. If the power had actually been cut, she could easily have frozen before being rescued.

  There was only one difference that Hugh could see from the way things had been when he had previously examined the vehicle, not too much more, he realized with a start, than a Common Day before.

  This was a sheet of printing fabric half a meter long and a third as wide fastened to a set of clips on a side panel. He looked at it closely.

  It bore a zigzag pattern of short, straight, continuously connected line segments. From one end of this pattern there extended a longer line for a distance of about three centimeters; from the other a still longer one, nearly the length of the sheet, almost parallel to but diverging slightly from the first and broken into dashes for about the middle third of its length. Each segment was marked with tiny characters, and close examination showed that the lines themselves were made of almost microscopic writing. After a few seconds, Hugh decided that this must be the chart Rekchellet had persuaded the autodriver to print and which he and his companions had been trying to follow back to its end. The larger symbols were presumably location data and the tiny ones a continuous record of height. The spot near the Cold Pole which Rekchellet had mentioned was presumably the terminus of the longest of the lines, and the second longest must end at Pitville if the Crotonite’s interpretation had been sound.

  He turned to the two fliers and told them his suspicions. He knew the Crotonite slightly though he was not sure whether she hailed from Rekchellet’s home world.

  “Kesserah, can you read these? Rekchellet said they must be numbers, and claimed they were enough like his own to be legible. He said this point,” Hugh indicated, “was near the center of the dark hemisphere. That means this thing can’t be all to one scale.”

  “It isn’t,” replied the Crotonite. “The dashed section implies ellipsis. Rekchellet was probably right. I interpret the characters as he did.” She turned the sheet over. “That’s Rekchellet’s writing.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It makes no sense to me. Just, ‘Make Ennissee pay before you tell him that date’.”

  “Who is Ennissee?”

  “Ed say it was a Crotonite name, but it doesn’t call up a wing pattern to my memory. Has Rek met any Crotonites since you saw him last?”

  “Apparently yes, Walt told me. Something funny has happened to him, and it started in the air, I’m told. But if that involved this Ennissee, Rek must have been back on the truck since. I hope Third-Supply-Watcher has finished eating; I’ll have to ask her right now.”

  Hugh emerged as quickly as the lock system allowed, followed by his winged helpers. All entered the flier, where there was plenty of room for everyone. Third-Supply-Watcher was still eating, Hugh saw, and he made suitable apologies, but could not wait with his question.

  “Please! I’m sorry to interrupt, but I must know. Did Rekchellet come back to the truck after you reported his absence to me?”

  “Yes, but not at once. The outside hatch controls were operated by someone of whom I only caught a glimpse. That showed a Crotonite, and I looked only casually, assuming it was Rekchellet. Then the one who entered came to the driver’s cabin and dragged me away from the controls. He stopped the truck, then pushed me back to the cargo section and locked me in. Then he waited, while snow covered the truck. Presently another Crotonite, who did prove to be Rekchellet, found the buried vehicle and entered. He met the first one, and they talked — argued, it seemed to me — for a long time, though I could neither hear nor understand. Rekchellet was not at first carrying his translator, but the other gave him one.

  “Eventually, after much discussion, they set the truck going again. The other Crotonite adjusted the autodriver, and while he was doing that Rekchellet wrote something on the back of the map we had been using. Then he came back and unlocked my door and said that he had been told what I told you — that the autodriver had been set to shut off the main power if it were interfered with. Otherwise, the truck was supposed to follow where the other Crotonite was taking him. The other was listening, and his translator could certainly handle Rekchellet’s language, so I judged Rek didn’t want to say more, and I waited for a chance to read what he had written.

  “They opened the main hatch and set it to close after them, and left by wing while the truck was in motion. I looked at Rek’s note, but couldn’t read it, and saw nothing to do except stop while I was still reasonably near Pitville and hope I’d be found before I starved or froze. When the truck didn’t cool down, I tried some of the light circuits and realized the story about total cutoff was false, but I still couldn’t see what to do except wait. I could have driven without the automatic, but wasn’t sure which way to go, and staying here seemed to offer the best chance of being found before I starved. I’m not sure I would have been if I’d wandered at random.”

  “Nor I,” answered Janice. “Rek must have been pretty sure we’d be along, though. I know he’s a Crotonite and you’re not a flier, but he’s a pretty good fellow.”

  “Perhaps. What now’” asked Plant-Biologist. Hugh pursed his lips again.

  “If both you Locrians are willing to come, we’re looking for Rekchellet and then for something a bit north of the Cold Pole,” answered Hugh, “and we can certainly use you.”

  But heading for the Grendelian antipodes wasn’t quite that easy, and not yet the right thing to do. Hugh saw his wife’s raised eyebrows through the faceplate of her armor and paused to think.

  The cold pole of Habranha was nearly 4900 kilometers from the terminator, over 4500 from their present position. That meant nothing to the machine they were flying, but a great deal to two other groups — their winged and unwinged helpers, and Rekchellet and Ennissee, if the unknown Crotonite had actually been that individual. Rekchellet could not have flown the distance equipped as he was. The other—

  “Third-Supply-Watcher, could you see clearly what sort of equipment the other Crotonite was carrying when they left the truck?” Hugh asked.

  “Just ordinary Crotonite warmth harness, with very little decoration, and one or two small items of equipment. A translator, of course.”

  “Any sort of breathing mask?”

  “No.”

  That disposed of recycling equipment; Crotonites, like Erthumoi, exhaled large amounts of water with their breath, and any efficient recycler had to trap that.

  “Was there anything else noticeable about him?”

  “Yes, definitely. His wing membranes were artificial. He had lost the natural ones in some way, and those he had were of artificial film.”

  “How about the bones — the framework?”

  “Quite natural. He had lost only the membrane.”

  Hugh turned to Kesserah. “Have you ever heard of such an injury, or how it could have been suffered? Do you know of anyone who has been injured that way?”

  “No to the first and last. Wing membranes are tough but not impossible to tear. Also, they carry blood. If one were torn, I can imagine a surgical need to replace it completely if it failed to heal properly — and possibly to treat the other side to match, though I’m no medic and don’t know that that would always be needed. It’s also possible that they could be lost to frostbite, though we have alcohols in our blood which give it a low freezing point.”

  “Thanks. At least, even I should be able to recognize this one if we meet him. The trouble is, there’s no way he and Rekchellet could fly on their own over four thousand kilometers over this dark hemisphere, is there?”

  “None that I can imagine. I certainly wouldn’t try it.”

  “Then either he lied ab
out where he was going, as he did about shutting down the autodriver; or he had another vehicle hidden somewhere within flying distance of here; or he had caches of supplies which would let him stock up along the way. In any case,” Hugh chewed his lower lip reflectively, and looked around at the others, “in any case he’s told us in too many ways about this place near the Cold Pole to leave me in much doubt that he wants us to go there. I wonder why. Any ideas?” He glanced around once more.

  “The note Kesserah read for us mentioned a date we might tell him,” Janice said slowly. “I can think of only one date we could know which has any connection at all with that truck. That’s, of course, assuming the Crotonite with the damaged wings is the Ennissee Rek wrote about; nothing seems to make sense otherwise.”

  “What is the date you mean?” asked S’Nash.

  “The age of the frozen specimen we found on the truck. I don’t see anything special about it; I took samples, and made the usual checks, and it’s not as old as the wing we found in one of the Pits a while ago, but it’s certainly not current.”

  “What is the age?” asked the Naxian.

  “I’m wondering why it’s important, and why Rek wrote that we should make this Ennissee pay for the knowledge,” the woman answered obliquely. “I wonder if he meant simply payment in the ordinary, literal sense of exchange tokens or service obligations, or in some more Figurative fashion — as though this person had already contracted an obligation, and owed us something because of whatever he’d done to Rek or to us or to someone else.”

  S’Nash did not repeat his question. He must have known that, whatever her reason, Janice did not intend to answer it right then and didn’t care how obvious she made the fact. She was quite sure he didn’t know her reason; she wasn’t completely sure she knew it herself yet. She could not sec what harm the information would do, but intended to follow Rekchellet’s guidance until the matter became clearer. It boiled down to the fact that she trusted the Crotonite more than the Naxian, though she could give no objective basis for the feeling. She certainly did not dislike snakes — at least, no more than bats. She had never seen either in the original, but their ecological niches were well filled on Falga and traditional images from the mother planet had carried over. She did not think of Naxians as snakes and Crotonites as bats, or of Locrians as mantises or Cephallonians as fish or dolphins; she had grown up regarding them all as people.

 

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