Moving very circumspectly and never touching a radio at any time, the sailors prepared a rope sling. Then they pried the set up from a “safe” distance with spars, and poked and pushed until the sling was in position under and around it. This accomplished, one of the sling handles was given very respectfully to Barlennan. He in turn gestured the chief closer, and with an air of handling something precious and fragile, handed the loop of rope to him. Then he gestured toward the counselors, and indicated that they should take the other handles. Several of them moved foward, rather gingerly; the chief hastily designated three for the honor, and the others fell back.
Very slowly and carefully the bearers moved the radio to the edge of the Bree’s outermost raft. The chief’s canoe glided up—a long, narrow vessel evidently hollowed to a paper-thin shell from the trunk of one of the forest trees. Barlennan viewed it with distrust. He himself had never sailed anything but a raft; hollow vessels of any kind were strange to him. He felt certain that the canoe was too small to carry the weight of the radio; and when the chief ordered the greater part of the crew out of it he barely suppressed the equivalent of a negative headshake. He felt that the lightening thus obtained would be insufficient. He was more than startled when the canoe, upon receiving its new freight, merely settled a trifle. For a few seconds he watched, expecting vessel and cargo to pop suddenly below the surface; but nothing of the sort happened, and it became evident that nothing would.
Barlennan was an opportunist, as had been proved months ago by his unhesitating decision to associate with the visitor from Earth and learn his language. This was something new, and obviously worth learning about; if ships could be made that would carry so much more weight for their size, the knowledge was obviously vastly important to a maritime nation. The logical thing to do was to acquire one of the canoes.
As the chief and his three co-workers entered the craft, Barlennan followed. They delayed shoving off as they saw his approach, wondering what he might want. Barlennan himself knew what he wanted, but was not sure he could get away with what he planned to try. His people, however, had a proverb substantially identical in meaning with Earth’s “Nothing venture, nothing gain,” and he was no coward.
Very carefully and respectfully he touched the radio, leaning across the half inch of open river surface between ship and canoe to do so. Then he spoke.
“Charles, I’m going to get this little ship if I have to come back and steal it. When I finish talking, please answer—it doesn’t matter what you say. I’m going to give these people the idea that the boat which carried the radio is too changed for ordinary use, and must take the radio’s place on my deck. All right?”
“I was brought up to disapprove of racketeers—I’ll translate that word for you sometime—but I admire your nerve. Get away with it if you can, Barl, but please don’t stick the neck you don’t have out too far.” He fell silent and watched the Mesklinite turn his few sentences to good account.
As before, he employed practically no spoken language; but his actions were reasonably intelligible even to the human beings, and clear as crystal to his erstwhile captors. First he inspected the canoe thoroughly, and plainly if reluctantly found it worthy. Then he waved away another canoe which had drifted close, and gestured several members of the river tribe who were still on the Bree’s deck away to a safe distance. He picked up a spear which one of the counselors had discarded to take up his new position, and made it clear that no one was to come within its length of the canoe.
Then he measured the canoe itself in spear lengths, took the weapon over to where the radio had been, and ostentatiously cleared away a spot large enough to take the craft; at his order, several of his own crew gently rearranged the remaining radios to make room for their new property. More persuasion might have been attempted, but sunset cut the activity short. The river dwellers did not wait out the night; when the sun returned, the canoe with the radio was yards away, already drawn up on shore.
Barlennan watched it with anxiety. Many of the other canoes had also landed, and only a few still drifted near the Bree. Many more natives had come to the edge of the bank and were looking over; but to Barlennan’s intense satisfaction, none came any closer to the loaded canoe. He had apparently made some impression.
The chief and his helpers carefully unloaded their prize, the tribe maintaining its original distance. This was, incidentally, several times the spear’s length demanded by Barlennan. Up the bank the radio went, the crowd opening wide to let it through and disappearing after it; and for long minutes there was no more activity. The Bree could easily have pushed out of her cage at this time, the crews of the few canoes remaining on the river showing little interest in what she did, but her captain did not give up that easily. He waited, eyes on the shore; and at long last a number of long black and red bodies appeared over the bank. One of these proceeded toward the canoe; but Barlennan realized it was not the chief, and uttered a warning hoot. The native paused, and a brief discussion ensued, which terminated in a series of modulated calls fully as loud as any that Lackland had heard Barlennan utter. Moments later the chief appeared and went straight to the canoe; it was pushed off by two of the counselors who had helped carry the radio, and started at once toward the Bree. Another followed it at a respectful distance.
The chief brought up against the outer rafts at the point where the radio had been loaded, and immediately disembarked. Barlennan had given his orders as soon as the canoe left the bank, and now the little vessel was hauled aboard and dragged to the space reserved for it, still with every evidence of respect. The chief did not wait for this operation to be finished; he embarked on the other canoe and returned to shore, looking back from time to time. Darkness swallowed up the scene as he climbed the bank.
“You win, Barl. I wish I had some of your ability; I’d be a good deal richer than I am now, if I were still alive by some odd chance. Are you going to wait around to get more out of them tomorrow?”
“We are leaving now!” the captain replied without hesitation.
Lackland left his dark screen and went to his quarters for his first sleep in many hours. Sixty-five minutes—rather less than four of Mesklin’s days—had passed since the village was sighted.
Chapter 11:
Eye of the Storm
The Bree sailed into the eastern ocean so gradually that no one could say exactly when the change was made. The wind had picked up day by day until she had normal open-sea use of her sails; the river widened rod by rod and at last mile by mile until the banks were no longer visible from the deck. It was still “fresh water”—that is, it still lacked the swarming life that stained practically all of the ocean areas in varying tints and helped give the world such a startling appearance from space—but the taste was coming, as sailor after sailor verified to his own great satisfaction.
Their course was still east, for a long peninsula barred their way to the south, according to the Flyers. Weather was good, and there would be plenty of warning of any change from the strange beings that watched them so carefully. There was plenty of food still aboard, enough to last easily until they reached the rich areas of the deep seas. The crew was happy.
Their captain was satisfied as well. He had learned, partly from his own examination and experiment and partly from Lackland’s casual explanations, how it was that a hollow vessel like the canoe could carry so much more weight for its size than could a raft. He was already deep in plans for the building of a large ship—as big or bigger than the Bree—built on the same principle and able to carry the profits of ten voyages in one. Dondragmer’s pessimism failed to shake his rosy dream; the mate felt that there must be some reason such vessels were not used by their own people, though he could not say what the reason might be.
“It’s too simple,” he kept pointing out. “Someone would have thought of it long ago if that’s all there was to it.” Barlennan would simply point astern, where the canoe now followed gaily at the end of a rope, laden with a good half of their
food. The mate could not shake his head after the fashion of an old family coachman looking over the new horseless carriage, but he would certainly have done so if he had possessed a neck.
He brightened up when they finally swung southward, and a new thought struck him.
“Watch it sink as soon as we start to get a little decent weight!” he exclaimed. “It may be all right for the creatures of the Rim, but you need a good solid raft where things are normal.”
“The Flyer says not,” replied Barlennan. “You know as well as I do that the Bree doesn’t float any higher here at the Rim than she does at home. The Flyer says it’s because the methane weighs less too, which sounds as though it might be reasonable.” Dondragmer did not answer; he simply glanced, with an expression equivalent to a complacent smile, at the tough wood spring balance and weight that formed one of the ship’s principal navigating instruments. As that weight began to droop, he was sure, something that neither his captain nor the distant Flyer had counted on would happen. He did not know what it would be, but he was certain of the fact.
The canoe, however, continued to float as the weight slowly mounted. It did not, of course, float as high as it would have on Earth, since liquid methane is less than half as dense as water; its “water” line, loaded as it was, ran approximately halfway up from keel to gunwale, so that fully four inches was invisible below the surface. The remaining four inches of freeboard did not diminish as the days went by, and the mate seemed almost disappointed. Perhaps Barlennan and the Flyer were correct after all.
The spring balance was starting to show a barely visible sag from the zero position—it had been made, of course, for use where weight was scores or hundreds of times Earth-normal—when the monotony was broken. Actual weight was about seven Earths. The usual call from Toorey was a little late, and both the captain and mate were beginning to wonder whether all the remaining radios had failed for some reason when it finally arrived. The caller was not Lackland but a meteorologist the Mesklinites had come to know quite well.
“Barl,” the weather man opened without preamble, “I don’t know just what sort of storm you consider too bad to be out in—I suppose your standards are pretty high—but there seems to be one coming that I certainly wouldn’t want to ride out on a forty-foot raft. It’s a tight cyclone, of what I would consider hurricane force even for Mesklin, and on the thousand-mile course I’ve been observing so far it has been violent enough to stir up material from below and leave a track of contrasting color on the sea.”
“That’s enough for me,” Barlennan replied. “How do I dodge it?”
“That’s the catch; I’m not sure. It’s still a long way from your position, and I’m not absolutely sure it will cross your course just when you’re at the wrong point. There are a couple of ordinary cyclones yet to pass you, and they will change your course some and possibly even that of the storm. I’m telling you now because there is a group of fairly large islands about five hundred miles to the southeast, and I thought you might like to head for them. The storm will certainly strike them, but there seem to be a number of good harbors where you could shelter the Bree until it was over.”
“Can I get there in time? If there’s serious doubt about it I’d prefer to ride it out in the open sea rather than be caught near land of any sort.”
“At the rate you’ve been going, there should be plenty of time to get there and scout around for a good harbor.”
“All right. What’s my noon bearing?”
The men were keeping close track of the Bree’s position by means of the radiation from the vision sets, although it was quite impossible to see the ship from beyond the atmosphere with any telescope, and the meteorologist had no trouble in giving the captain the bearing he wanted. The sails were adjusted accordingly and the Bree moved off on the new course.
The weather was still clear, though the wind was strong. The sun arced across the sky time after time without much change in either of these factors; but gradually a high haze began to appear and thicken, so that the sun changed from a golden disc to a rapidly moving patch of pearly light. Shadows became less definite, and finally vanished altogether as the sky became a single, almost uniformly luminous dome. This change occurred slowly, over a period of many days, and while it was going on the miles kept slipping beneath the Bree’s rafts.
They were less than a hundred miles from the islands when the minds of the crew were taken off the matter of the approaching storm by a new matter. The color of the sea had shifted again, but that bothered no one; they were as used to seeing it blue as red. No one expected signs of land at this distance, since the currents set generally across their course and the birds which warned Columbus did not exist on Mesklin. Perhaps a tall cumulous cloud, of the sort which so frequently forms over islands, would be visible for a hundred miles or more; but it would hardly show against the haze that covered the sky. Barlennan was sailing by dead reckoning and hope, for the islands were no longer visible to the Earthmen overhead.
Nevertheless, it was in the sky that the strange event occurred.
From far ahead of the Bree, moving with a swooping, dipping motion that was utterly strange to the Mesklinites and would have been perfectly familiar to the human beings, there appeared a tiny dark speck. No one saw it at first, and by the time they did it was too near and too high to be in the field of view of the vision sets. The first sailor to notice it gave vent to the usual hoot of surprise, which startled the human watchers on Toorey but was not particularly helpful to them. All they could see as their wandering attentions snapped back to the screens was the crew of the Bree, with the front end of every caterpillarlike body curled upward as its owner watched the sky.
“What is it, Barl?” Lackland called instantly.
“I don’t know,” the captain replied. “I thought for an instant it might be your rocket down looking for the islands to guide us better, but it’s smaller and very different in shape.”
“But it’s something flying?”
“Yes. It does not make any noise like your rocket, however. I’d say it was being blown by the wind, except that it’s moving too smoothly and regularly and in the wrong direction. I don’t know how to describe it; it’s wider than it is long, and a little bit like a mast set cross wise on a spar. I can’t get closer than that.”
“Could you angle one of the vision sets upward so we could get a look at it?”
“We’ll try.” Lackland immediately put through a call on the station telephone for one of the biologists.
“Lance, it looks as though Barlennan has run into a flying animal of some sort. We’re trying to arrange a look at it. Want to come down to the screen room to tell us what we’re looking at?”
“I’ll be right with you.” The biologist’s voice faded toward the end of the sentence; he was evidently already on his way out of the room. He arrived before the sailors had the vision set propped up, but dropped into a chair without asking questions. Barlennan was speaking again.
“It’s passing back and forth over the ship, sometimes in straight lines and sometimes in circles. Whenever it turns it tips, but nothing else about it changes. It seems to have a little body where the two sticks meet…” He went on with his description, but the object was evidently too far outside his normal experience for him to find adequate similes in a strange language.
“If it does come into view, be prepared to squint,” the voice of one of the technicians cut in. “I’m covering that screen with a high-speed camera, and will have to jump the brightness a good deal in order to get a decent exposure.”
“…there are smaller sticks set across the long one, and what looks like a very thin sail stretched between them. It’s swinging back toward us again, very low now—I think it may come in front of your eye this time….”
The watchers stiffened, and the hand of the photographer tightened on a double-pole switch whose closing would activate his camera and step up the gain on the screen. Ready as he was, the object was well into the f
ield before he reacted, and everyone in the room got a good glimpse before the suddenly bright light made their eyes close involuntarily. They all saw enough.
No one spoke while the cameraman energized the developing-frequency generator, rewound his film through its poles, swung the mounted camera toward the blank wall of the room, and snapped over the projection switch. Everyone had thoughts enough to occupy him for the fifteen seconds the operation required.
The projection was slowed down by a factor of fifty, and everyone could look as long as he pleased. There was no reason for surprise that Barlennan had been unable to describe the thing; he had never dreamed that such a thing as flying was possible until after his meeting with Lackland a few months before, and had no words in his own language for anything connected with the art. Among the few English words of that group he had learned, “fuselage” and “wing” and “empennage” were not included.
The object was not an animal. It had a body—fuselage, as the men thought of it—some three feet long, half the length of the canoe Barlennan had acquired. A slender rod extending several feet rearward held control surfaces at its extremity. The wings spanned a full twenty feet, and their structure of single main spar and numerous ribs was easily seen through the nearly transparent fabric that covered them. Within his natural limitations, Barlennan had done an excellent job of description.
“What drives it?” asked one of the watchers suddenly. “There’s no propeller or visible jet, and Barlennan said it was silent.”
“It’s a sailplane.” One of the meteorological staff spoke up. “A glider operated by someone who has all the skill of a terrestrial sea gull at making use of the updrafts from the front side of a wave. It could easily hold a couple of people Barlennan’s size, and could stay aloft until they had to come down for food or sleep.”
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