Nothing changed significantly except for the slow rising of the sun ahead of them. Patches of plant life were sometimes numerous, sometimes cactuslike, sometimes absent. Clouds varied at least as much. The ever-flickering lightning was less obvious in sunlight, but didn’t seem actually to be decreasing. Quakes made themselves felt, and sometimes forced changes in route not foreseen either by Senatsu or their native guide. Wind alternately roared and whispered, mostly from behind but sometimes gusting from other random directions violently enough for the driver to feel. Erni and Nic, with more experience than the others, wondered aloud what the return might be like with a much lighter tank in tow. The thought of having it blown from their control was unpleasant. So was the idea of ballasting it with some local liquid which might freeze before they reached Nest. The advisability of abandoning the tank was considered, both among the crew and with Ben; it would, after all, be small loss.
The problem was tabled until the situation actually had to be faced, with some silent reservations in Nic’s mind. He was uneasy about waiting until decision was forced on them by experience, who sometimes starts her courses with the final exam.
The Hotnorth route became no straighter as the sun rose higher. It became evident that the distance estimated by their guide had not included necessary detours. Whenever Tricia or Pam asked how far they had yet to go, the answer was larger than that obtained by subtracting the current odometer reading from the last advice.
This of course made it more obvious than ever that the goal their guide meant was indeed the “city” where the women, as not even their husbands doubted now, must have died.
This fact alone was enough to relieve the boredom; everyone, driving or not, remained alert for new and different phenomena. However likely it might be that it had occurred while unloading, the fact remained that something unforeseen had happened. This is no surprise in the exploration business, and explorers are strongly motivated to collect facts which may assist foresight.
And, if at all possible, to make sense of them.
Time stretched on. The four were in no danger as far as food, oxygen, water, and waste disposal were concerned – there was no shortage of energy. Nevertheless, conversation began to deal more and more often with the next drying-out session, which would include bathing facilities under one gravity. The tiny imperfections in recycling equipment were making themselves felt.
It was known from Jellyseal’s reports that the last two thousand or so kilometres had been on fairly level ground where high speeds were reasonably safe. It was also known that this fact could change quickly on a world with county-sized tectonic plates. Luckily, the warning that it had changed came early. The original Quarterback crew had experienced it before, but this time the deeplights were no help. With the sun up and ahead of them, these were not in use. Only the increasing intensity of the temblors gave a clue to what was happening. Nic, who was driving when he recognized it, slowed abruptly.
“Send a bug out ahead!” he ordered to no one in particular. “I think we’re near another epicentre!”
“Maybe it’s behind us,” suggested the woman.
“Maybe it is, and maybe to one side or the other, but I’d rather not take even a twenty-five per cent chance of going over a half-metre ledge. If ground is rising ahead okay, we’ll see it in time; but I wouldn’t guarantee to spot a drop even with all four of us watching.”
All four were, but it was Akmet guiding a servobug who located the active fault, and issued the warning which brought Candlegrease to a firm halt.
An immediate question came from their guide, who seemed to have them under constant observation even though they had never located him, her, it, or them. Communication had improved a great deal in the last few weeks as the native(s) had joined increasingly in conversations between the vehicle and Nest.
“Why stop now?”
“Danger. Scarp here. Watch.” Pam turned to her husband. “Drive the bug over the edge, so they can see what happens.”
Akmet obeyed, with spectacular results; the drop was a full metre and a half.
“No hydrogen in the bug.”
“Right. Bug smashed. Lots of – much – hydrogen in Candlegrease, and Candlegrease would smash worse. You want hydrogen, but not here.”
“Right.”
“We need to pass the scarp without smashing Candlegrease. How far must we go, and which way?”
“How high the scarp for no danger?”
“About fifteen centimetres.”
“About unclear.”
“Not exact. Don’t know exactly. That should be safe.”
“Left forty-five kilometres to ten-centimetre scarp. Right twenty-seven. About.”
“We’ll go right – wait.”
Ben’s voice had cut in. “You have seismic thumpers in the bug hold. How about trying to flatten the slope? It might save time.”
Erni brightened visibly. “Worth trying. We wouldn’t even have to waste bugs. Three or four sets of shots should tell us whether it’ll work or not.”
Pam said tersely to their guide, “Wait. Observe.”
“Waiting.”
Actually, it didn’t wait. Erni was the first to notice; Nic and Pam were deploying bugs, and Akmet was occupied at the communicator adding details to the description of their surroundings – anything which might help Senatsu in her interpretation of radar and other microwave observations was more than welcome at Nest. Erni alone was looking through a window when one of the blackish blowing objects again made itself noticeable.
It was far larger than the general run of jetsam to which everyone had gotten accustomed. This one had not been noticed before because, as they now realized, it had been riding far higher than the rest of the material, high enough so that only careful study would have revealed its shape. Now it came down abruptly, in a sort of fluttering swoop, and hung a few metres above the wreckage of the bug in a wavering hover. They knew now that they had seen it, or something like it, before.
It had surprisingly slender wings, whose span Erni estimated as fully ten metres, and which bent alarmingly in the turbulence of the heavy atmosphere. They supported a cucumber-shaped body a metre and a half in length, with a three-metre tail projecting from what was presumably its rear. The tail was terminated by conventional empennage for aircraft, vertical and horizontal stabilizers, rudder and elevators. Erni’s warning cry called the others’ attention to the arrival, and the bugs stopped moving as their operators looked.
“A glider!” exclaimed Akmet. “In this gravity?”
“Think of the atmosphere,” pointed out Dominic.
“I’m thinking strength of materials,” was the dry rejoinder.
“I suppose that’s where they’ve been watching us from,” Pam added thoughtfully. “It gives us some idea of their size, anyway. I wonder how many it’s carrying.”
“Or whether it’s remote controlled like Jelly,” Nic pointed out. Pam admitted she hadn’t thought of that.
“No windows or lenses,” Erni submitted.
“Those wings seem to have very complex frameworks. They could also be microwave and/or radar antennae,” was Akmet’s remark, reminding the rest that conclusions were still premature and providing the morally requisite alternative hypothesis.
“Let’s not bury the bug; it seems to want to look it over. We’ll shift fifty or sixty metres before we try to knock the cliff down.” Erni acted on his own words, driving the Annie and dragging Candlegrease to the right as he spoke. No one objected. Three bugs followed with their loads of thumpers.
These were not simply packets of explosive; they were meant to be recoverable and reusable, though this was not always possible. They were hammerlike devices which did carry explosive charges, and were designed to transmit efficiently the jolt of the blast on their tops to the substrate. Ten of them were set up a meter apart and equally far from the cliff edge; a similar row was placed a metre farther back, and a third at a similar distance. The bugs then retreated – they were cheap,
but there seemed no point in wanton waste – and the thumpers fired on one command.
No one expected the wave pattern they set up to be recognizable at Nest, thousands of kilometres away, through the endless seismic static, though the computers there were alerted for it. The desired result was a collapse of the cliff face, but no one noticed for several seconds whether this had happened or not. As the charges thundered, the wavering motion of the glider ceased and it dived violently out of sight, as far as anyone could tell almost onto the wreckage of the sacrificed bug. Pam saw it go, and cried out the news as the impact echoed the blast.
“Watch out with the next shot! We don’t want to bury it!”
It was clear enough there would have to be a next shot, quite possibly several. The face of the scarp had collapsed in satisfactory fashion, but the slope of rubble was still far too steep for safety. This, however, was not what surprised the four.
“Bury still unclear.”
Pam recovered almost at once. Either they were being observed from somewhere else, or the occupant of the glider had not been disabled by what should have been a seven-gravity crash, or –
Nic’s own idea was gaining weight. So was Erni’s.
“Observe new rock. Wait.” The woman’s answer to the native was prompt, and even Erni saw what she meant.
“Observing. Waiting.”
“Set up the next shot, boys.”
The cliff had crumbled for a width of some twenty-five metres, to a distance varying from ten to fifteen metres back from its original lip. On the second shot the distance back more than doubled.
“New rock buried,” Pam announced without bothering to look.
“Bury clear.”
A third set of thumpers, skilfully placed, kept the twenty-five-metre width nearly unchanged and practically doubled the other dimension. A fourth, with Annie and Candlegrease moved farther back for safety, left a promising if still rather frightening slope.
Akmet, using the largest and heaviest of the available bugs, traversed this down, up, and down again, without starting any slides. Dominic repeated the test for practice. Then, with no argument from anyone, he turned back to Annie’s controls and very gingerly drove tug and tow down the same way. Everyone thought of trying this with the tow disconnected first, but no one mentioned the idea aloud. Erni wanted to get it over with; the others simply trusted Nic’s judgment.
At the bottom, Candlegrease safely clear of the rubble, the tug stopped and everyone went to the left windows.
The glider’s remains could now be seen easily. The body was flattened and cracked, the wings crumpled, the empennage separated from the rest. A patch of growing stems, twigs, and branches had already started to grow from, around, and through the wreckage, and after a few moments Erni brought them closer. Akmet was once again relaying descriptions to Nest. They were given little time to report.
“Go. No stop needed.”
“Right? Straight? Left?” asked Pam.
“Straight.” They were at the moment facing about Hotnorthwest. Erni, still at the controls, obeyed. After they had gone about fifty metres, “Right.” He started to swerve, and Pam muttered softly, “Full circle.” He obeyed, guessing at her plan, and kept turning after they were heading sunward and the voice expostulated “Stop right.” Back at the original heading, the woman said simply, “Three hundred sixty degrees.” It worked; the next message was “Forty degrees right.” He obeyed, and received a “Four degrees right.” In minutes the wrecked glider and the growth around it were out of sight.
They were now looking at the sky more often and more carefully. At least two more objects among or beyond the usual foreground of blackish jetsam, objects which might be other gliders, could now be seen. No one was surprised when an occasional “Left” or “Right” warned them of other obstacles, sometimes but not always before Senatsu provided the same information. The natives by now seemed to have a pretty good idea of what the human-driven vehicles could and could not do – or get away with. The tug and its tow sometimes had to be guided around a fair-sized boulder which had not been mentioned, but nothing really dangerous went unreported.
“I guess they really want us to get there,” Akmet remarked at one point, rather rhetorically.
“They want their hydrogen to get there,” retorted Erni. “It will. Don’t worry.”
“And you don’t think they care that much about us?” asked Pam.
“What do you think?” The woman shrugged, her wet suit doing nothing to conceal the motion. She said nothing.
“What do you think of them, Erni?” asked Nic. He was driving and didn’t look away from his window.
Icewall didn’t even shrug. As usual, not much of anyone’s face could be seen, but Pam gave an uneasy glance towards her husband. He answered with a barely visible raised eyebrow. It was at least a minute before anyone spoke.
Then, “They care about as much for us as for one of their branches,” Erni said flatly.
Nic nodded, his body attitude showing some surprise. “You’ve got it after all. You had me worried,” he said. This time his friend did shrug visibly. Rather unfortunately, no one chose to prolong the discussion. More time passed.
They were now really close to their goal, according to their guide – “Three hundred forty-four” was its terse response to the question.
“Any more danger?” asked Pam. “Go fast?”
“No more danger. Go fast.”
The driver, currently Akmet, started to add power, but after a mere twenty-kph increase Nic and Erni almost simultaneously laid hands on his shoulders. The former spoke.
“That’s enough for now.”
“Why?”
“Somewhere along here something happened.”
“That wasn’t until they got there!”
“As far as we know. Don’t overdrive your reflexes. Keep your eyes wide open.”
“No danger fast.”
Erni answered. “Observing.” This seemed to be an unimpeachable excuse. There was no further comment from their guides and watchers. Anyone who had hoped or expected that they would betray impatience was disappointed.
There were now six or seven of the gliders in sight most of the time. Their irregular motion made them hard to count. Pam was almost certain she had seen one struck by lightning a day before, but her question at the time – “Danger for you? Lightning?” – had gone unanswered. Since there were two new words in the sentence this might have been lack of understanding, but always before such lack had been signified with the “Unclear” phrase.
Human tension was mounting, not only in the tug but at Nest, where Ben and the others were being kept up-to-date by nearly continuous verbal reports.
The sun was causing less trouble now for the driver. It was still partly below the horizon ahead, but there were more and more clouds; and those near the distant horizon provided a nearly complete block even when only a small fraction of the sky overhead was actually covered. What the clouds failed to hide was largely behind blowing dust and other objects.
Mountains seemed much rarer, though no one assumed this a function of Hotlat alone. Senatsu assured them it was not, that only the two or three million square kilometres around and ahead of them were any smoother than average. She could now confirm the native-given distance to the “city”, but could give no more complete a description of it than before. She was certain now that it was beside one of the lakes, but had no data whatever on the nature of the fluid this held. Chemists were waiting impatiently for news on that point.
Senatsu had triumphantly reported resolving the area where the travellers had descended the cliff, and even getting an image of the thicket where the glider had crashed; but this, she said, had not grown more than a metre or two from the wreck. This made no sense to anyone but Nic, who still kept his developing ideas to himself.
The glider count continued to grow. So did the number of crashes. Several times these events were seen from Annie, but more often wreckage was sighted to one side
or the other of their track. Experience gave the human observers a way to estimate when the wrecks had occurred; it seemed that the plants which represented the remote control mechanism grew uncontrolled for a short time, then died for lack of – something. The natives had clearly not completely mastered aviation, but seemed casual about its dangers.
A clue to the nature of the something was secured when they passed an apparently thriving thicket of the stuff at the edge of a small lake. The evidence was not completely convincing, since no trace of a wrecked flying machine could be seen in the tangle. The distant chemists at Nest were more convinced of the implication than the four on Annie; it was, after all, almost dogma among biochemists that life needed liquid; it was a solution-chemistry phenomenon – though the precise solvent seemed less important.
At the present general temperature around Annie, it could easily be the cryolite found on Jellyseal. Numerous bets were on hold at Nest. Bugs went out from Annie to collect samples from the lake, but there was no means of analyzing these on board. There had been a limit to the equipment the tug could carry, no matter how many enthusiasts were involved in the design.
The missing women had been better equipped in this respect, but had apparently postponed sampling until after their cargo was delivered. They had never reported any collecting.
The lightning, even among small clouds, was now almost continuous. Thunder and even wind could be heard most of the time. The crash of one glider was near enough to be audible inside the tug; and of course the rain, frequently materializing with no obvious cloud as a source, could hardly be missed as it drummed on the vehicle’s shell. Most of the liquid that struck the ground vanished almost instantly; no one could be sure whether it was evaporating from the hot surface or soaking into it even when an experimental hole was dug by one of the bugs. The explorers paused – bringing questions from their guides – to watch for results, but these were inconclusive. Whatever was happening was too quick to permit a decision. Pam made an effort to ask the natives, but it was hard to decide afterwards whether the questions or the answers were less clear. Tricia, back at Nest, brightened up when this happened and got to work with her computer, but even she remained unsure of what had been said.
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