Mission of Gravity

by Harry Clement Stubbs

  It took the Flyer only the promised few minutes to get the required information, and his voice sounded once more from the tiny speaker as the clouds over the bay lightened with the rising sun.

  “I’m afraid I was right, Barl. There is no letup in sight. Practically the whole northern hemisphere—which doesn’t mean a thing to you—is boiling off its icecap. I understand the storms in general last all winter. The fact that they come separately in the higher southern latitudes is because they get broken up into very small cells by Coriolis deflection as they get away from the equator.”

  “By what?”

  “By the same force that makes any projectile you throw swerve so noticeably to the left—at least, while I’ve never seen it under your conditions, it would practically have to on this planet.”

  “What is ‘throw’?”

  “My gosh, we haven’t used that word, have we? Well, I’ve seen you jump—no, by gosh, I haven’t either!—when you were up visiting at my shelter. Do you remember that word?”

  “No.”

  “Well, ‘throw’ is when you take some other object—pick it up—and push it hard away from you so that it travels some distance before striking the ground!”

  “We don’t do that up in reasonable countries. There are lots of things we can do here which are either impossible or very dangerous there. If I were to ‘throw’ something at home, it might very well land on someone—probably me.”

  “Come to think of it, that might be bad. Three G’s here at the equator is bad enough; you have nearly seven hundred at the poles. Still, if you could find something small enough so that your muscles could throw it, why couldn’t you catch it again, or at least resist its impact?”

  “I find the situation hard to picture, but I think I know the answer. There isn’t time. If something is let go—thrown or not—it hits the ground before anything can be done about it. Picking up and carrying is one thing; crawling is one thing; throwing and—jumping?—are entirely different matters.”

  “I see—I guess. We sort of took for granted that you’d have a reaction time commensurate with your gravity, but I can see that’s just man-centered thinking. I guess I get it.”

  “What I could understand of your talk sounded reasonable. It is certainly evident that we are different; we will probably never fully realize just how different. At least we are enough alike to talk together—and make what I hope will be a mutually profitable agreement.”

  “I am sure it will be. Incidentally, in furtherance of it you will have to give me an idea of the places you want to go, and I will have to point out on your maps the place where I want you to go. Could we look at that Bowl of yours now? There is light enough for this vision set.”

  “Certainly. The Bowl is set in the deck and cannot be moved; I will have to move the machine so that you can see it. Wait a moment.”

  Barlennan inched across the raft to a spot that was covered by a smaller flap, clinging to deck cleats as he went. He pulled back and stowed the flap, exposing a clear spot on the deck; then he returned, made four lines fast about the radio, secured them to strategically placed cleats, removed the radio’s cover, and began to work it across the deck. It weighed more than he did by quite a margin, though its linear dimensions were smaller, but he was taking no chances of having it blown away. The storm had not eased in the least, and the deck itself was quivering occasionally. With the eye end of the set almost to the Bowl, he propped the other end up with spars so that the Flyer could look downward.

  Then he himself moved to the other side of the Bowl and began his exposition.

  Lackland had to admit that the map which the Bowl contained was logically constructed and, as far as it went, accurate. Its curvature matched that of the planet quite closely, as he had expected—the major error being that it was concave, in conformity with the natives’ ideas about the shape of their world. It was about six inches across and roughly one and a quarter deep at the center. The whole map was protected by a transparent cover—probably of ice, Lackland guessed—set flush with the deck. This interfered somewhat with Barlennan’s attempts to point out details, but could not have been removed without letting the Bowl fill with ammonia snow in moments. The stuff was piling up wherever it found shelter from the wind. The beach was staying relatively clear, but both Lackland and Barlennan could imagine what was happening on the other side of the hills that paralleled it on the south. The latter was secretly glad he was a sailor. Land travel in this region would not be fun for some thousands of days.

  “I have tried to keep my charts up to date,” he said as he settled down opposite the Flyer’s proxy. “I haven’t attempted to make any changes in the Bowl, though, because the new regions we mapped on the way up were not extensive enough to show. There is actually little I can show you in detail, but you wanted a general idea of where I planned to go when we could get out of here.

  “Well, actually I don’t care greatly. I can buy and sell anywhere, and at the moment I have little aboard but food. I won’t have much of that by the time winter is over, either; so I had planned, since our talk, to cruise for a time around the low-weight areas and pick up plant products which can be obtained here—materials that are valued by the people farther south because of their effect on the taste of food.”

  “Spices?”

  “If that is the word for such products, yes. I have carried them before, and rather like them—you can get good profit from a single shipload, as with most commodities whose value depends less on their actual usefulness than on their rarity.”

  “I take it, then, that once you have loaded here you don’t particularly care where you go?”

  “That is right. I understand that your errand will carry us close to the Center, which is fine—the farther south we go, the higher the prices I can get; and the extra length of the journey should not be much more dangerous, since you will be helping us as you agreed.”

  “Right. That is excellent—though I wish we had been able to find something we could give you in actual payment, so that you would not feel the need to take time in spice-gathering.”

  “Well, we have to eat. You say your bodies, and hence your foods, are made of very different substances from ours, so we can’t use your foodstuffs. Frankly, I can’t think of any desirable raw metal or similar material that I couldn’t get far more easily in any quantity I wanted. My favorite idea is still that we get some of your machines, but you say that they would have to be built anew to function under our conditions. It seems that the agreement we reached is the best that is possible, under those circumstances.”

  “True enough. Even this radio was built specifically for this job, and you could not repair it—your people, unless I am greatly mistaken, don’t have the tools. However, during the journey we can talk of this again; perhaps the things we learn of each other will open up other and better possibilities.”

  “I am sure they will,” Barlennan answered politely.

  He did not, of course, mention the possibility that his own plans might succeed. The Flyer would hardly have approved.

  Chapter 2:

  The Flyer

  The Flyer’s forecast was sound; some four hundred days passed before the storm let up noticeably. Five times during that period the Flyer spoke to Barlennan on the radio, always opening with a brief weather forecast and continuing a more general conversation for a day or two each time. Barlennan had noticed earlier, when he had been learning the strange creature’s language and paying personal visits to its outpost in the “Hill” near the bay, that it seemed to have a strangely regular life cycle; he found he could count on finding the Flyer sleeping or eating at quite predictable times, which seemed to have a cycle of about eighty days. Barlennan was no philosopher—he had at least his share of the common tendency to regard them as impractical dreamers—and he simply shrugged this fact off as something pertaining to a weird but admittedly interesting creature. There was nothing in the Mesklinite background that would enable him to deduce the exist
ence of a world that took some eighty times as long as his own to rotate on its axis.

  Lackland’s fifth call was different from the others, and more welcome for several reasons. The difference was due partly to the fact that it was off schedule; its pleasant nature to the fact that at last there was a favorable weather forecast.

  “Barl!” The Flyer did not bother with preliminaries—he knew that the Mesklinite was always within sound of the radio. “The station on Toorey called a few minutes ago. There is a relatively clear area moving toward us. He was not sure just what the winds would be, but he can see the ground through it, so visibility ought to be fair. If your hunters want to go out I should say that they wouldn’t be blown away, provided they wait until the clouds have been gone for twenty or thirty days. For a hundred days or so after that we should have very good weather indeed. They’ll tell me in plenty of time to get your people back to the ship.”

  “But how will they get your warning? If I send this radio with them I won’t be able to talk to you about our regular business, and if I don’t, I don’t see—”

  “I’ve been thinking of that,” interrupted Lackland. “I think you’d better come up here as soon as the wind drops sufficiently. I can give you another set—perhaps it would be better if you had several. I gather that the journey you will be taking for us will be dangerous, and I know for myself it will be long enough. Thirty-odd thousand miles as the crow flies, and I can’t yet guess how far by ship and overland.”

  Lackland’s simile occasioned a delay; Barlennan wanted to know what a crow was, and also flying. The first was the easier to get across. Flying for a living creature, under its own power, was harder for him to imagine than throwing—and the thought was more terrifying. He had regarded Lackland’s proven ability to travel through the air as something so allen that it did not really strike home to him. Lackland saw this, partly.

  “There’s another point I want to take up with you,” he said. “As soon as it’s clear enough to land safely, they’re bringing down a crawler. Maybe watching the rocket land will get you a little more used to the whole flying idea.”

  “Perhaps,” Barlennan answered hesitantly. “I’m not sure I want to see your rocket land. I did once before, you know, and—well, I’d not want one of the crew to be there at the time.”

  “Why not? Do you think they’d be scared too much to be useful?”

  “No.” The Mesklinite answered quite frankly. “I don’t want one of them to see me as scared as I’m likely to be.”

  “You surprise me, Commander.” Lackland tried to give his words in a jocular tone. “However, I understand your feelings, and I assure you that the rocket will not pass above you. If you will wait right next to the wall of my dome I will direct its pilot by radio to make sure of that.”

  “But how close to overhead will it come?”

  “A good distance sideways, I promise. That’s for my own safety as well as your comfort. To land on this world, even here at the equator, it will be necessary for him to be using a pretty potent blast. I don’t want it hitting my dome, I can assure you.”

  “All right. I will come. As you say, it would be nice to have more radios. What is this ‘crawler’ of which you speak?”

  “It is a machine which will carry me about on land as your ship does at sea. You will see in a few days, or in a few hours at most.”

  Barlennan let the new word pass without question, since the remark was clear enough anyway. “I will come, and will see,” he agreed.

  The Flyer’s friends on Mesklin’s inner moon had prophesied correctly. The commander, crouched on his poop, counted only ten sunrises bfore a lightening of the murk and lessening of the wind gave their usual warning of the approaching eye of the storm. From his own experience he was willing to believe, as the Flyer had said, that the calm period would last one or two hundred days.

  With a whistle that would have torn Lackland’s eardrums had he been able to hear such a high frequency the commander summoned the attention of his crew and began to issue orders.

  “There will be two hunting parties made up at once. Dondragmer will head one, Merkoos the other; each will take nine men of his own choosing. I will remain on the ship to coordinate, for the Flyer is going to give us more of his talking machines. I will go to the Flyer’s Hill as soon as the sky is clear to get them; they, as well as other things he wants, are being brought down from Above by his friends, therefore all crew members will remain near the ship until I return. Plan for departure thirty days after I leave.”

  “Sir, is it wise for you to leave the ship so early? The wind will still be high.” The mate was too good a friend for the question to be impertinent, though some commanders would have resented any such reflection on their judgment. Barlennan waved his pincers in a manner denoting a smile.

  “You are quite right. However, I want to save the time, and the Flyer’s Hill is only a mile away.”

  “But—”

  “Furthermore it is downwind. We have many miles of line in the lockers; I will have two bent to my harness, and two of the men—Terblannen and Hars, I think, under your supervision, Don—will pay those lines out through the bitts as I go. I may—probably will—lose my footing, but if the wind were able to get such a grip on me as to break good sea cord, the Bree would be miles inland by now.”

  “But even losing your footing—suppose you were to be lifted into the air—” Dondragmer was still deeply troubled, and the thought he had uttered gave even his commander pause for an instant.

  “Falling—yes—but remember that we are near the Edge—at it, the Flyer says, and I can believe him when I look north from the top of his Hill. As some of you have found, a fall means nothing here.”

  “But you ordered that we should act as though we had normal weight, so that no habits might be formed that would be dangerous when we returned to a livable land.”

  “Quite true. This will be no habit, since in any reasonable place no wind could pick me up. Anyway, that is what we do. Let Terblannen and Hars check the lines—no, check them yourself. It will take long enough.

  “That is all for the present. The watch under shelter may rest. The watch on deck will check anchors and lashings.” Dondragmer, who had the latter watch, took the order as a dismissal and proceeded to carry it out in his usual efficient manner. He also set men to work cleaning snow from the spaces between rafts, having seen as clearly as his captain the possible consequences of a thaw followed by a freeze. Barlennan himself relaxed, wondering sadly just which ancestor was responsible for his habit of talking himself into situations that were both unpleasant to face and impossible to back out of gracefully.

  For the rope idea was strictly spur-of-the moment, and it took most of the several days before the clouds vanished for the arguments he had used on his mate to appeal to their inventor. He was not really happy even when he lowered himself onto the snow that had drifted against the lee rafts, cast a last look backward at his two most powerful crew members and the lines they were managing, and set off across the wind-swept beach.

  Actually, it was not too bad. There was a slight upward force from the ropes, since the deck was several inches above ground level when he started; but the slope of the beach quickly remedied that. Also, the trees which were serving so nobly as mooring points for the Bree grew more and more thickly as he went inland. They were low, flat growths with wide-spreading tentacular limbs and very short, thick trunks, generally similar to those of the lands he knew deep in the southern hemisphere of Mesklin. Here, however, their branches arched sometimes entirely clear of the ground, left relatively free by an effective gravity less than one two-hundredth that of the polar regions. Eventually they grew close enough together to permit the branches to intertwine, a tangle of brown and black cables which furnished excellent hold. Barlennan found it possible, after a time, practically to climb toward the Hill, getting a grip with his front pincers, releasing the hold of his rear ones, and twisting his caterpillarlike body forward so that h
e progressed almost in inchworm fashion. The cables gave him some trouble, but since both they and the tree limbs were relatively smooth no serious fouling occurred.

  The beach was fairly steep after the first two hundred yards; and at half the distance he expected to go, Barlennan was some six feet above the Bree’s deck level. From this point the Flyer’s Hill could be seen, even by an individual whose eyes were as close to the ground as those of a Mesklinite; and the commander paused to take in the scene as he had many times before.

  The remaining half mile was a white, brown, and black tangle, much like that he had just traversed. The vegetation was even denser, and had trapped a good deal more snow, so that there was little or no bare ground visible.

  Looming above the tangled plain was the Flyer’s Hill. The Mesklinite found it almost impossible to think of it as an artificial structure, partly because of its monstrous size and partly because a roof of any description other than a flap of fabric was completely foreign to his ideas of architecture. It was a glittering metal dome some twenty feet in height and forty in diameter, nearly a perfect hemisphere. It was dotted with large, transparent areas and had two cylindrical extensions containing doors. The Flyer had said that these doors were so constructed that one could pass through them without letting air get from one side to the other. The portals were certainly big enough for the strange creature, gigantic as he was. One of the lower windows had an improvised ramp leading up to it which would permit a creature of Barlennan’s size and build to crawl up to the pane and see inside. The commander had spent much time on that ramp while he was first learning to speak and understand the Flyer’s language; he had seen much of the strange apparatus and furniture which filled the structure, though he had no idea of the use to which most of it was put. The Flyer himself appeared to be an amphibious creature—at least, he spent much of the time floating in a tank of liquid. This was reasonable enough, considering his size. Barlennan himself knew of no creature native to Mesklin larger than his own race which was not strictly an ocean or lake dweller—though he realized that, as far as weight alone was considered, such things might exist in these vast, nearly unexplored regions near the Rim. He trusted that he would meet none, at least while he himself was ashore. Size meant weight, and a lifetime of conditioning prevented his completely ignoring weight as a menace.