by Hal Clement
“Where did you find it? How deep?” he asked. “Let me call Jan; she’ll want to see it.”
“Then you’ll carry it back and do the measuring for me? Wonderful! But I didn’t find it myself. Ennissee did.”
Rekchellet stiffened, and his wings spread slightly.
“Where?” repeated the Erthuma. “And I suppose he found the other one, that was left in the truck, too?”
“Yes. We wanted that dated without having Spreadsheet-Thinker bothered. Has that been done, by the way?”
“Jan has figures,” Hugh evaded. “What about this one? Can we see the site?”
“I’m afraid not. Our means of reaching it is gone.” Barrar paused, possibly for effect. “It was under the ice at a depth of two hundred sixteen point four one kilometers.”
Hugh and Rekchellet were not just startled. They were more dumbfounded; perhaps reasonably, S’Nash seemed more interested in watching them than in pondering Ged’s statement. Hugh glanced at the other Erthumoi to see how the words affected them, and judged that they were not even listening. They had found seats across the single room and were waiting with apparent indifference. It would hardly be news to them.
“How did you get a shaft that deep? It can’t be anywhere near here; there are no pump buildings or waste piles or…”
“There was no shaft. Ennissee had financed the development of a digging vehicle which could carry explorers, usually him and one of his Erthuma helpers. It had seismic and other sensing equipment to tell of fossils or other objects nearby, and such details as its depth below the surface. He collected a great deal of material at various depths from this area, mostly root fragments, but there are a few entire bushes, too. Everything is in this building. Janice must examine it all. This specimen, however, is the prize.
“It was the mole — the digging machine — which destroyed itself just before your arrival. I do not look forward to telling Ennissee.”
“You don’t know what caused it to blow? Was anyone in it, or using it, at the time?”
“No one was aboard, and its power was off except for minor things like maintenance heaters.”
“Did it have any sort of automatic control, like the truck?”
“Oh, yes. Ennissee sometimes sent it down on test trips unoccupied. It also had remote control, and could be operated from here.” The Samian stepped over to another worktable bearing an obvious directing console and several vision screens.
“Did you ever go down in it yourself? And did you ever pilot it yourself?”
“Yes to both, though not on really deep journeys.”
“I suppose it had a standard fusion unit for its basic power.”
“So I always assumed. I don’t really know, but it seems likely. What else could there be?”
“Those aren’t supposed to be dangerous. I wonder what could have happened.” Hugh was frowning, and it did not require a Naxian to perceive his mystification. He thought for several seconds while his fingers rested. Then, “Did Ennissee have a training simulator to go with these controls, or did he teach you on actual trips?” It was a last-hope question.
“I learned by driving the real machine, under his supervision. It was not difficult.” There was another pause.
“Did he teach you any emergency procedures?”
“No. I have no idea what emergencies he had envisioned, nor what he would have done about them.”
The last hope seemed to be gone. Hugh could not believe that any rational being would design a machine without backup equipment for the more predictable sorts of failure, but he had no specimen of the machine to examine in the hope of guessing what was predictable. Equipment, even fusers, did sometimes malfunction. The trouble was that the mechanisms which used the fusion-produced energy were more usually at fault, and the fact that the building he now occupied was still intact suggested strongly that the explosion had not been nuclear. However, no further look at the explosion crater seemed likely to furnish informative remains.
“All right,” said Hugh. “Get your specimens and their documentation together. We’ll get the flier back and load them aboard. I’m afraid it will be pretty crowded; we still have a lot of food. What would you have done, Ged, if we hadn’t shown up? Wouldn’t Spreadsheet-Thinker be missing you fairly soon?”
“There was a transmitter in the mole. There are several people at Pitville who could have come for me in a flier when I called. Without communication, as I said when you arrived, I was in trouble.”
“Are you going to let Spreadsheet-Thinker add this project to her picture, now that it seems to be finished?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Eventually, yes, but I’d prefer to wait until I get detailed measurements from Janice…”
“And have written your own report, crediting her and Ennissee, of course.”
“Naturally.” Not for the first time, Hugh wished he had the Naxian power. He hated himself for it, but was beginning to feel that he couldn’t trust anyone, and wishing that he had more of his wife’s built-in civilization. He said no more, but went outside and gestured to the aircraft waiting a few hundred meters away and forty or fifty above the ice. It approached immediately; Janice had been watching.
He boarded, and as quickly as possible summed up what had just happened. His wife, who should have been delighted, frowned thoughtfully.
“It sounds exciting, but you don’t like coincidences any better than I do. I take it you want me to be very, very critical of all this material.”
“I do. A plausible motive isn’t enough for a conviction, of course. I never cared any more for Ennissee, from what I heard of him, than Rek does; but Ged and S’Nash I’ve always thought were pretty sound people. I don’t like suddenly having to wonder which one is less reliable.”
Janice nodded silently, and rearranged her features to show proper interest for this Samian’s benefit as they entered the building. This was presumably a waste of time with S’Nash, but within moments of her seeing the fragmentary Habra body the Erthuma no longer had to pretend. Her full attention and interest went into examining it for many minutes.
“I’m not a biologist,” she said, looking up at last, “and Plant-Biologist will have to get his eye into this; but as far as I’m concerned, the sooner we’re back at Pitville the better. Tell you what — maybe we could send for another flier? This one has to stay with the Habras and Crotonites, of course. Maybe you should stay out here with them anyway, Honey. You came to look around, and haven’t spent much time at it.”
“Getting rid of me?”
“Oh, no. Come back whenever you’re ready. I just didn’t want you to feel you’d wasted the flight and food and time. You haven’t as far as I’m concerned, but I didn’t think you’d be satisfied.” She kept a perfectly straight face. Hugh glanced at the Naxian, but it/he chose not to be helpful.
“All right.” Hugh could play any games his wife could, he felt sure. “Ennissee is presumably tied down for a while, so Rekchellet’s in no hurry. The others expected to stay a while anyway. We’d better ask, though — Ged, did your borer start any holes at other places around here? Ones we could check? It would be nice to know what disturbance it made of the ice it went through, and that sort of thing. Maybe we should get some ice specimens from the inside of its holes for Jan to test. Maybe she should stay and get them herself.”
“Oh, no. You can do that perfectly well.” Janice looked again at the icebound material still on the benches. “I’ll wait until you’ve called for another transport before I move this…”
“It might be better to have Ged call,” Hugh keyed. The Samian showed no Erthuma-detectable reaction to the implication even he must have perceived, but set his walker in motion toward the flier. Hugh, embarrassed, found himself following close behind, hoping that his motive was not obvious. They went aboard, and within five minutes Ged announced that another machine, large enough to hold Janice and the specimens, would be with them shortly. How the administrative head had reacted to the new
information, which Ged had tent along with the request, was not mentioned.
“I’ll have to go back to Pitville with your wife,” he added. “I can’t stay out of touch with Spreadsheet-Thinker for the days it will lake you to get back. There’s no use my talking to your wife, though, until she has the information and I can start writing. She may want to give some guidance in the wording, too, I expect; I suppose it will really be her article, too. We won’t have to wait for Ennissee, though; I’ll simply give him support credit for developing the mole.”
“And operating it.”
“Well, of course.”
“Mightn’t he want to describe some of the under-ice search activities and problems?”
“Well, yes. We’d belter consult him, at that. Do you suppose he can talk while his wing treatment’s going on?”
“Rekchellet could,” Hugh assured him, and rejoined his wife, shaking his head gently. He had encountered jealousy in the exploring field, but it had always seemed to him that there were enough worlds to go around. Greed for publishing credit was not exactly arcana to him, but he had never before met it face on.
The other craft appeared overhead, flashed past trailing its sonic shock wave, slowed, and settled beside the building. The loading took a surprisingly long time, as Janice took extreme precautions to make sure that all Ennissee’s notes remained with the right specimens, or as nearly with them as they already were. Her initial examination had left some doubt about some of them, which the Samian was sometimes but not always able to resolve. Neither of the Erthumoi seemed able to help, though it was hard to be sure with no appropriate translator modules available. They had made trips in the mole, Barrar had said; but they seemed to be mainly muscle and hand labor in Ennissee’s project.
Eventually, however, Janice and Barrar entered the new flier, whose Locrian pilot had never left it, and moments later it had vanished in the east.
Hugh, rather deflated, set up the search arrangements which had been planned earlier in case nothing had been found, and waited for dreary hours while the activities neared and reached their anticlimax. He spent some of the time exploring two or three tunnels made by the mole, whose location had been provided by Barrar, but obtained little information. For one thing, they were extremely steep and smooth-walled; descending them on foot was hazardous, not so much because falls might be dangerous as because return might be impossible. Foresight worked.
The scouring of the area by his flying personnel provided nothing except basic science information; the patterns of the ice surface itself offered fascinating clues to what might be going on below, and Hugh thought a little wistfully about the seismic studies S’Nash had proposed earlier. Maybe, with Barrar revealing himself more widely as a would-be Respected Opinion candidate, something might be done about that without anyone’s having to be underhanded.
But right now, nothing having any imaginable bearing on the Truck Problem was appearing. Actually, it looked as though the problem itself were pretty well solved in all but minor details. Had Barrar, for example, actually been responsible in some subtle way for finding the lost Crotonite? Or was he merely trying to give that impression?
Once again, Hugh felt the acute discomfort of realizing that he could no longer completely trust someone.
Perhaps. The “perhaps” was the worst part.
The trip back to Pitville was a little less boring. There was room for more people on board now, with Janice and much of the food gone; this was fortunate, because the two Erthuma had to be carried.
There was no adequate way to talk with them; their translators seemed to work only between Ennissee’s speech, which none of Hugh’s Crotonite group knew, and their own Erthumoi languages — different ones; they could talk to each other readily enough, but had to use translators. They had kept to themselves during the stay at the explosion site, eating their own supplies — their environment armor was not full-recycling — and sleeping on air cots which were set up in one corner of the building; but when Hugh gathered his flying group and sent them in close formation on an eastward course, with the once again rising Fafnir ahead and to their left, the pair had no trouble interpreting the situation. They pointed to themselves and to Hugh’s aircraft; when Hugh nodded assent, they salvaged some cartons of food from the building and went aboard.
Their lack of appropriate translator modules helped ease the boredom of the flight; Hugh made a serious effort to learn the language of one of them, something he had never really attempted before and had no real idea how to do.
The one who had offered her help in the exercise answered to the name of Mahare Chen. She had a slightly different skin shade and facial shape, especially around the eyes, than the Falgan norm, but Hugh had seen Erthumoi displaying far wider appearance variations and was conscious of this only as a recognition feature. Before they had been exchanging noises and sketches for very long it was clear that she claimed to be from the original home world of the Erthumoi. Hugh had learned a little Swahili as part of required Human History during his basic education, but this proved not to be the right tongue, and progress remained slow.
Rekchellet’s drawing skills proved useful occasionally, but the Crotonite could not remain aboard for long at a time. He left his pad and stylus with Hugh, somewhat reluctantly the latter felt sure, and the equipment did resolve an occasional impasse in hand signs. Mahare was a better artist than Hugh, but far below Rekchellet’s level. Once or twice even S’Nash was of some help by explaining that a particular sketch had produced more humor, or concealed anger, than enlightenment, though it/he could never give a reason for the reaction.
Personal names and most of the immediately appropriate nouns came across fairly quickly. Hugh could name Naxian and Crotonite and human being and Habra in the Erthuma language without making his listener laugh at his accent; he could name the planet and speak of flying and walking and crawling and a few other activities, since the others were not wearing recycling armor and the flier lacked equivalent facilities and had to land occasionally. The world’s name sounded like “I-Bawl;” a Crotonite was a “Snutibat,” and a Naxian an “Eednite.” Sometimes there was more than one word, not surprisingly; when Rekchellet drew the specimen which Janice had taken back to Pitville ahead of them, Mahare called it a “Palaksee” or a “Pilldahn,” though she had called the living Habras “Needulz.” She had also glanced at her companion and laughed for no obvious reason. Hugh had no success relating any of these sounds to his own language; apparently even the comparatively few centuries separating Falga’s population from Earth had allowed, or possibly caused, too much linguistic evolution to permit easy tracing.
The whole flight time was not, by any means, spent at language lessons; Mahare sometimes slept, sometimes chattered at length to her tall male companion through their translators, sometimes sat and thought or simply watched the Habranhan icescape below or sky above as they flew. If there was any connection between the two other than their common employment by Ennissee, It never became obvious.
Both passengers knew the word “Pwanpwan,” and used it often enough to make Hugh realize that they hoped to get there eventually. He assumed that there would be no great difficulty about this, but tried not to make any signs likely to be taken as a promise that he would carry them there either himself or at once.
As it turned out, this was no problem. Hugh reported arrival to Ged as they slanted down toward the lights of Pitville, mentioning his passengers, and did not even have to arrange quarters for them after he landed. The small flier which had brought him and Reekess back from Pwanpwan was waiting beside the warehouse, as was Ged Barrar himself. The Samian shepherded the two Erthumoi aboard with almost discourteous haste, and they were gone before Hugh had a chance to more than wave a farewell.
“You’ll be less surprised later,” S’Nash remarked. The Naxian’s words were surprising enough right then. Clearly it/he knew more about everything going on than had been made clear so far, but this sounded almost as though the devious
character intended to provide answers it/himself. Hugh refused to worry about it; he had not seen Janice for several Common Days. He left the unloading of what was left of the supplies to the warehouse people.
As far as his wife could tell, the specimens from Ennissee’s dig were very old. This merely meant older than the carbon dating limit; there was no reliable way to go farther with organic specimens. Habranhan “Fossils” were entire frozen remains, not mineralized. The only radionuclide in them with a respectable half life was potassium-forty, and there was very little of that; Habranhan life made do with an extremely low mineral content, not too surprisingly. The argon-forty which was one of its decay products could diffuse fairly rapidly, on the geological time scale, from the immediate area of its production; cross-checking with calcium-forty, the other product, pointless on other worlds because it was ubiquitous, might help a little here, but still all one could hope for was a minimum age. Actually, Janice had found only a little of the potassium and too little of its decay products to measure. The main specimen was certainly older than one hundred sixty thousand Common Years, with another faint probability that it was older than five hundred fifty thousand; but she had no faith whatever in the latter figure.
Such of Ennissee’s plant material as she had had time for was all much younger, safely inside the carbon limits. This, surprisingly, included that which seemed to be associated with the Habra remains. She had no explanation for this. She was still correlating her various results with Ennissee’s collection notes.