Star Light m-2

by Hal Clement

  “But if you claim that Mesklinite lives mean as much to you as human ones, how can you talk about waste?”

  “You’re not thinking, Easy. I understand and don’t really blame you, but you’re ignoring the fact that the Kwembly is something like ten thousand miles airline from the Settlement, and more like thirteen thousand by the route they took. A rescue vehicle could not possibly follow that track in less than two hundred or two hundred and fifty hours. The last part of it, which the Kwembly traversed by being washed down a river, they might not be able to follow at all; the last four thousand miles across the snowfield may no longer be passable.”

  “We could give them directions with satellite fixes.”

  “We could, no doubt. The fact remains that unless Dondragmer can get himself, his crew, and his vehicle out of their present trouble, nothing Barlennan can send out for him is likely to be of the slightest help — if the Kwembly is in real and immediate danger. If she is not — if it’s just a matter of being frozen in like a nineteenth century whaler — they have indefinite supplies with their closed-cycle life system and fusion converters, and we and Barlennan can plan a nice, leisurely rescue.”

  “Like Destigmet’s Esket,” retorted the woman with some bitterness. “It’s been over seven months, and you squelched all rescue talk then — and ever since!”

  “That was a very different situation. The Esket is still standing there, unchanged as far as her vision sets can tell us, but her crew has dropped out of sight. We haven’t the faintest idea what happened to them or how, but, since they’re not on board and haven’t been for all this time it’s impossible to believe they’re still alive. With all their abilities and physical toughness, even Mesklinites don’t live on Dhrawn for seven months without a good deal more of artificial assistance than their airsuits.”

  Easy had no answer. On pure logic, Aucoin was perfectly right; but she had trouble accepting the idea that the situation was purely logical. Ib knew how she felt, and decided that the time had come to change course again. He shared the planner’s opinion, up to a point, on basic policy; but he also knew why his wife could not possibly do that.

  “The real, immediate problem, as I see it,” Hoffman interjected, “is the one Don has with the men who are still outside. As I get it, two are under the ice, as far as anyone can tell; and no one seems to know whether that puddle is frozen to the bottom. In any case, judging by the work they were supposed to be doing, they’re in among the Kwembly’s trucks somewhere. I suppose that means a straight ice-pick-and-search job. I can’t guess what the chances are of an airsuited Mesklinite’s living through that sort of thing. The temperature won’t bother them that far below melting water-ice, but I don’t know what other physiological limitations they may have.

  “The other missing one is Don’s first officer, who is overdue from a helicopter flight. We can’t help directly, since he didn’t take a communicator with him, but there is another flier available. Has Dondragmer asked us to assist while a search is made with the other machine and a vision set?”

  “He hadn’t up to half an hour ago,” replied Mersereau.

  “Then I strongly advise that we suggest it to him.”

  Aucoin nodded agreement, and glanced at the woman. “Your job, I’d say, Easy.”

  “If someone hasn’t beaten me to it.” She rose, pinched Ib’s ear in passing, and left the room.

  “Next point,” Hoffman went on, “Granting that you may be right in opposing a rescue expedition from the Settlement, I think it’s time Barlennan was brought up to date about the Kwembly.”

  “Why as for more trouble that we need?” retorted Aucoin. “I don’t like to argue with anyone, especially when he doesn’t really have to listen to me.”

  “I don’t think you’ll really have to. Remember, he agreed with us the other time.”

  “You were saying a few minutes ago that you weren’t sure how sincere his agreements have been.”

  “I’m not, in general; but if he had been strongly against us that time he’d have done just what he wanted, and sent a crew out to help the Esket. He did, remember, on a couple of other occasions when there was a cruiser in trouble.”

  “That was much closer to the settlement, and we finally approved the action,” retorted Aucoin.

  “And you know as well as I do that we approved it because we could see that he was going to do it anyway.”

  “We approved it, Ib, because your wife was on Barlennan’s side both times, and out-talked us. You argument, incidentally, is a point against telling him about the present situation.”

  “Whose side was she on during the Esket argument? I still think we should tell Barlennan the present situation pronto. Plain honesty aside, the longer we wait the more certain he is to find out, sooner or later, that we’ve been censoring expedition reports on him.”

  “I wouldn’t call it censoring. We’ve never changed a thing.”

  “But you have delayed the relay plenty of times while you decided what he ought to know, and as I’ve said before I don’t think that’s the game as we agreed to play it with him. Pardon my reactionary sentiments, but on purely selfish grounds we’d be well advised to keep his confidence as long as possible.”

  Several of the others, who had listened in silence up to this point, spoke up almost at once when Hoffman expressed this sentiment. It took Aucoin several seconds to untangle their words, but it eventually became clear that the feeling of the group was with Ib. The chairman yielded gracefully; his technique did not involve standing in front of the bull.

  “All right, we pass on the complete report to Barlennan as soon as we adjourn.” He glanced at the winner. “That is, if Mrs. Hoffman hasn’t done it already. What’s the next point?”

  One of the men who had done little but listen up to this point asked a question. “Forgive me if I didn’t follow you too clearly a few minutes ago. Ib, you and Alan both claim that Barlennan agreed with Project policy in limiting to an absolute minimum the amount of sophisticated equipment his expedition was to use. That was my understanding also; but you, Ib, just mentioned having doubts about Barlennan’s sincerity. Do any of those doubts stem from his accepting the helicopters?”

  Hoffman shook his head. “No. The arguments we used for their necessity were good, and the only surprising thing to me was that Barlennan didn’t see the for himself and take the equipment without argument.”

  But Mesklinites are acrophobic by nature. The thought of flying, to anyone from a world like that, must be just unimaginable.”

  Ib smiled grimly. “True. But one of the first things Barlennan did after he made his deal with the Gravity people and started learning basic science was to design, build and fly on Mesklin — in the polar zone where gravity is at its highest — a hot air balloon. Whatever is motivating Barlennan, it isn’t acrophobia. I don’t exactly doubt him; I’m just not sure of his thinking, if you’ll forgive a rather crude quibble.”

  “I agree,” Aucoin interjected. “And I think we’re running dry. I suggest we break up for, say, six hours. Think, or go down to Comm and listen to the Mesklinites or talk with them — anything that will keep your thoughts on Dhrawn questions. You know my ideas about that.”

  “That’s where mine have been.” It was the same speaker. “I keep wondering about the Esket, every time one of the cruisers runs into trouble — even when the trouble is obviously natural.”

  “So do we all, I imagine,” rejoined Aucoin.

  “The more I think of it, the more I feel that her crew must have run into intelligent opposition. After all, we know there is life on Dhrawn — more than the bushes and pseudo-algae the Mesklinites have found. They wouldn’t account quantitatively for that atmosphere; there must be a complete ecological complex somewhere. I’d guess in the higher-temperature regions.”

  “Such as Low Alpha.” Hoffman completed the thought. “Yes, you don’t have ammonia and free oxygen in the same environment for very long, on the time scale of a planet. I can believ
e the possibility of an intelligent species here; we haven’t found any sign of it from space, and the Mesklinite ground parties haven’t met it — unless the Esket did — but seventeen billion square miles of planet make a lot of good reasons for that. The idea is plausible, and you’re not the first to get it, but I don’t know where it leaves us. Barlennan thought of it, too, according to Easy, and has debated sending another cruiser to the area of the Esket’s loss specifically to seek and contact any intelligence that may be there; but even Barlennan is doubtful about the idea, and we certainly haven’t pushed it.”

  “Why not?” cut in Mersereau. “If we could get in touch with natives as we did on Mesklin, the project could rally get going! We wouldn’t have to depend so completely on… oh.”

  Aucoin smiled grimly.

  “Precisely,” he said. “Now you have found a good reason for wondering about Barlennan’s frankness. I’m not saying that he’s an ice-hearted politician who would give up the lives of his men just to keep a hammerlock on the Dhrawn operation — but the Esket’s crew was pretty certainly already beyond rescue when he finally agreed not the send the Kalliff in the same direction.”

  “There is another point, thought,” Hoffman said thoughtfully.

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure its worth mentioning, since we can’t evaluate it; but the Kwembly is commanded by Dondragmer, who is a long-time associate of Barlennan’s and, by ordinary reasoning, should be an extremely close friend. Is there any chance that his being involved would influence Barl’s judgement about a rescue trip — or even make him order one against his better judgement? Like you, I don’t think that caterpillar is just an administrative machine. His cold-bloodedness is purely physical.”

  “I’ve wondered about that, too,” the chief planner admitted. “It surprised me greatly months ago when he let Dondragmer go out at all; I had the impression that he didn’t want him to take major chances. I didn’t worry too much about it — certainly no one knows enough about Mesklinite psychology in general, Barlennan’s in particular, to base any serious planning on. If anyone does, Ib, it’s your wife, and she can’t or won’t, put what she understands about them into words. As you say, we can’t assign weight to the friendship-influence possibility. We just add it to the list. Let me hear if there are any ideas about those crewmen who are presumably frozen under the Kwembly, and then we really must break up.”

  “A fusion converter would keep a good, large heating coil going, and resistors aren’t very complex equipment,” Mersereau pointed out. “Heaters aren’t a very unreasonable piece of equipment on Dhrawn, either. If only—”

  “But we didn’t,” interrupted Aucoin.

  “But we did, if you’d let me finish. There are enough converters with the Kwembly to life her off the planet if their energy could be applied to such a job. There must be some metal aboard which can be jury-rigged into resistors, or arcs. Whether the Mesklinites could operate such gadgets I don’t know — there must be a limit even to their temperature tolerance — but we might at least ask if they’ve thought of such a thing.”

  “You’re wrong on one point. I know there is very little metal either in their equipment or their supplies on those land-cruisers, and I’d be most startled if Mesklinite rope turned out to be a conductor. I’m no chemist but anything bonded as firmly as that stuff must have its electrons pretty well latched in place. By all means check with Dondragmer, though. Easy is presumably still in Comm; she can help you if there are no linguistically broad Mesklinites on duty at the other end. We’re adjourned.”

  Mersereau nodded, already heading toward the door, and the meeting broke up. Aucoin followed Mersereau through one door; most of the others went other ways. Only Hoffman remained seated.

  His eyes were focused nowhere in particular, and there was a frown on his face which made him look a good deal older than his forty years.

  He liked Barlennan. He liked Dondragmer even better, as did his wife. He had no grounds for the slightest complaint about the progress of the Dhrawn research, considering the policies he himself had helped set up, nor did the rest of the planners. There was no concrete reason whatever, except his trick of half a century before, to distrust the Mesklinite commander — the suggested motive for keeping hypothetical natives Dhrawn out of the picture could hardly be given weight. No, certainly not. After all, the problems of shifting to such beings, even if they existed, as agents for the Dhrawn research project would cause even more delay, as Barlennan must surely realize.

  The occasional cases of disagreement between explorers and planners were minor — it was the sort of thing which would happen ten times as often with, say, Drommians; not reason to suppose the Mesklinites were already going off on independent plans of their own.

  Still — Barlennan had not wanted helicopters, though he had finally been persuaded to accept them. He was the same Barlennan who had built and flown in a hot-air balloon as his first exercise in applied science.

  He had not sent relief to the Esket, necessary as all the giant land-cruisers were to the Project and regardless of the fact that a hundred or so of his people were aboard.

  He had refused local-range radios, useful as they would obviously be. The argument against them was the sort that a firm-minded teacher might use in a classroom situation, but this was real life — and deadly earnest.

  He had, fifty years before, not only jumped at the change to acquire alien knowledge; he had maneuvered deliberately to force his non-Mesklinite sponsors to give it to him.

  Ib Hoffman could not rid himself of the notion that Barlennan was up to something underhanded — again.

  He wondered what Easy thought about it.

  7

  Beetchermarlf and Takoorch, like the rest of the Kwembly’s crew, were taken by surprise when the lake froze. Neither had had any occasion to look around for several hours, since the maze of fine cords on which their attention was focused was considerably more complicated than, say, the rigging of a clipper ship. Both knew exactly what to do, and there was little need for conversation. Even if their eyes had wandered from the job, there was little else to see; they were under the immense hull of their vehicle, roofed by the pneumatic “mattress” which distributed its weight among the trucks, walled partly by the trucks themselves and partly by the blackness of Dhrawn’s night which swallowed everything beyond the range of their little portable lights.

  So they had not seen, any more than the sailors inside the Kwembly, the tiny ice crystals which began to form at the surface of the lake and settle to the bottom, glinting and sparkling in the Kwembly’s floods like lead chloride setting in a cooling solution.

  They had completed the reconnecting on the port row, Number 1, all the way from bow to stern, and were working their way forward on Row 2 when they discovered that they were trapped.

  Takoorch’s battery light was fading a trifle, and he took it over to the nearest fusion converter, which happened to be on a Row 1 truck, for recharging. He was quite startled to find that he couldn’t get at or even see the converter, and after a few seconds of fumbling and looking he called Beetchermarlf. It took nearly ten minutes for them to establish that they were completely enclosed by an opaque white wall, impenetrable even to their strength, which had welded all the outer trucks together and filled off the spaces between them from mattress above to cobbles below — nearly three feet of height, on the average. Inside the wall they were still free to move about.

  Their tools were edged rather than pointed, and too small to make appreciable way against the ice, thought it took fully an hour of scraping to convince them both of that. Neither was greatly concerned as yet; obviously the ice was immobilizing the Kwembly, and the rest of the crew would have to dig down to them in the interest of freeing the vehicle if not for the prime purpose of rescue. Of course their supply of life hydrogen was limited, but this meant less to them than a corresponding oxygen shortage would have to a human being. They had at least ten or twelve hours yet of full activi
ty, and when the hydrogen partial pressure dropped below a certain value they would simply lose consciousness; their body chemistry would slow down more and more, but fifty and perhaps a hundred hours would pass before anything irreversible occurred. One of the reasons for Mesklinite durability, though human biologists had had no chance to find it out, was the remarkable simplicity of their biochemistry.

  The two were calm enough, in fact, to go back to their assigned work; and they were almost to the front of Row 2 before another discovery was made. This one did perturb them.

  The ice was creeping inward. It was not coming rapidly, but it was coming, and as it happened, neither of them knew any better than Ib Hoffman what being frozen into a block of the stuff was likely to do to them. Neither had the slightest desire to learn.

  At least there was still light. Not all the power units were on outside trucks, and Takoorch had been able to recharge his battery. This made it possible to make another, very careful search of the boundaries of their prison. Beetchermarlf was hoping to find unfrozen space either near the bottom or, preferably, near the top of the walls around them. He did not know whether the freezing would have started from the top or the bottom of the pond. He was not familiar, as any human being would have been, with the fact that ice floats on liquid water. This was just as well, since it would have led him to an erroneous conclusion in this instance. The crystals had indeed formed at the top, but they had been denser than the surrounding liquid and had settled, only to redisolve as they reached levels richer in ammonia. This pseudo-convection effect had had the result of robbing the lake rather uniformly of ammonia until it had reached a composition able to freeze almost simultaneously throughout. As a result, the search turned up no open spaces.

  For some time the two lay between the two of the trucks, thinking and occasionally checking to see how far the freezing had progressed. They had no time-measuring equipment, and, therefore, no basis for estimating the speed of the process; Takoorch formed the opinion that it was slowing down, but Beetchermarlf was less sure.