Still River

by Hal Clement

  In a way, it might have been better had a living pilot—even a student one—handled the last part of the landing. The boat itself had such perfect inertial sensing and such quick response that neither Molly nor any of the others felt the wind. The craft’s guidance equipment had already detected the planet’s solid surface and was allowing for air currents, and the faint trembling of the structure that they all felt was assumed to be normal aerodynamic stress—even Joe and Charley had made landings on planets with atmosphere, virtually airless though their own worlds were.

  Once into the white clouds, Jenny paid no attention to the boat’s behavior; she was occupied in collecting samples for analysis. Molly kept her attention outside, shifting the sensors that fed her vision screen up and down the spectrum, but for some minutes was unable to tell whether the lack of view was due to lack of penetration or lack of anything to see. The other three remained apparently calm; all were accustomed to automatically controlled flight under varying conditions, though this was certainly different from space.

  The pilot screen eventually cleared. They seemed to be beneath the solid cloud deck, but in either a snow or dust storm—Molly was using what she considered ordinary light, so the stuff must have been really white. All that was getting through the clouds was a dim glow, crepuscular even to the other team members. Visibility was fair, perhaps ten kilometers, and in another minute or two ground appeared below.

  It looked about the way the radar map had implied: ripply, with an occasional peak strongly suggestive of a volcano. None of the hills was large—none had been on the map, either. Neither she nor Charley had had any success whatever in matching the charts they had made during approach with those they had obtained from the records. There had been no large-scale features for guidance; one might as well have tried to match two areas of pebble sidewalk that did not include ends or edges. Even an hour of computer comparison did no good; either there were more possible scales and orientations than the machine could handle in that time, or the surface had made significant and general changes in its detailed topography since the earlier map had been produced. Knowing the machine, Molly was inclined to the latter view.

  This had interesting implications, even if a few thousand of her years had passed since the previous map had been made. The implications were even more interesting if the time were much shorter. There seemed no way to tell from the records.

  The boat’s two-hundred-meter hull settled to the surface and sank some meters into it—Molly still could not decide whether the material was soil, sand, or snow.

  “First requirement is a life center independent of the ship,” Joe pointed out. “I’ll go outside to see whether the ground is suitable for the tent.”

  “But shouldn’t we…” Molly started. Then she remembered and smiled.

  “You’re too environment conscious, Molly.” The Nethneen chuckled. “The temperature is quite comfortable, and I don’t care what the air is made of. The pressure is high enough to keep me from boiling—a good deal higher than normal”—he gestured toward the instrument panel…” and for once the gravity is respectable.”

  Jenny gave a snort through several sets of breathing vents at once. “I’m glad there’s someone here who can feel gravity,” she muttered. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re still floating.” Molly felt much the same, though her home gravity was little more than half that of the Rimmore, and nodded in sympathy.

  “Joe, it still seems to me that checking outside details would make a lot of sense before anyone stepped out. We don’t know that the air isn’t corrosive—there are worlds like Jenny’s or mine with free oxygen, and that wouldn’t be good for your skin even if you don’t ingest it, would it?”

  “I’ve spent time in oxygen atmospheres,” the Nethneen replied, “and even without analysis I refuse to worry about that element here. It is thermodynamically unstable, strictly a product of life, and if there is any life on a planet this young, I’ll be delighted to take the risk of an oxygen bum just to see it.”

  “But how about the stuff that’s blowing? Surely you’re not claiming that no chemical can hurt you.”

  Joe hesitated for several seconds. “Perhaps that would be a bit excessive,” he said at last. “Jenny, have you made anything of the cloud composition and of this precipitate that presumably is coming from them?”

  The centipedelike form turned back to her instruments and was busy for a minute or so.

  “Not a simple substance,” she said at last. “Largely ammonium salts; carbamate, carbonate, amide, traces of water ice, urea, and a lot more—it will take a long time to run a complete list. A good deal of what you’d expect from reactions between gases in this atmosphere.”

  “But nothing clearly dangerous.”

  “Nothing that waves a flag to me.”

  Joe gave the rippling arm gesture that was his equivalent of an affirmative head nod and was at the door in two long, gliding steps, something his tentacular legs could not have managed under decent gravity, Molly reflected. “We’ll keep lock protocol,” he said as he opened it. “Outer atmosphere could be a nuisance to some of the rest of you.” He closed the valve behind him, and Molly activated the screen showing the inside of the air lock. The Nethneen had already opened a bleeder valve and was letting outside air in to bring the pressure up. This was causing him no visible distress.

  The team watched him reach for the key that opened the outer door, and as he did so the ship trembled very slightly.

  Jenny, Molly, and Carol simultaneously shouted a warning.

  “Joe! No! Wait!”

  They were too late.

  Chapter Five

  Of Course The Boat Won’t Last

  “You knew what was going to happen!” cried Charley. Molly shook her head. “We should have. Any air breather should have, but we were too slow. It didn’t occur to either of us—to any of us…” she included Carol with her glance—“that he would never think of wind, or what wind would do on a low-gravity world like this. Blame me or us all you want, but let’s decide what to do.”

  “Ask him what condition he is in, I would say” was the suggestion from the Shervah.

  “How—? Oh, of course. His translator should still be in touch. Joe? Can you hear us? Are you hurt?”

  “Clearly enough. I am not hurt but greatly embarrassed. I was thinking only of the chemical effects of gases and had forgotten their physical potentialities.”

  “Where are you? Are you still being blown away?” “I can offer no answer to the first question, even assuming the boat’s location as starting coordinate. I traveled for an unknown but brief time at an unknown speed in whatever direction the gas carried me. Just now I am no longer traveling. I struck a sloping surface composed of powdery material, was carried up it and over the top. I fell down the farther side, where the gas was not moving nearly so rapidly but much more erratically. I have dug my way into the surface, to avoid further involuntary travel, since I don’t know that the gas speed will remain low. I am presumably not very far from the boat. Since we have no absolute direction reference as yet, I suggest that you find which way the gas is moving now, as soon as you can; I would judge that its inertia would prevent a really great velocity change in this short time. This should provide the only clue I can think of at the moment to my direction.”

  “How do we do that?” asked Charley. “I don’t think we have an instrument that would ...” His voice trailed off.

  The three women were at the console, using the outside screens, looking first in one direction and then another.

  “There’s a hill about half a kilometer away,” Carol pointed out. “There’ll be some eddying.”

  “Do what we can,” replied Molly. “The sand, or snow, or whatever it is seems to be coming from about there.” She had her screen centered some thirty degrees to the right of Carol’s hill. After a few moments’ checking with their own viewers, the others agreed.

  “Then Joe should be in the opposite direction.” Carol lined up
her pickup as she spoke. “There does seem to be a broad, low hill that way. Maybe it’s the one you went over, Joe. I wish this stuff would stop blowing; we could see more clearly and maybe come after you.”

  “If it would stop blowing, I could get back by myself,” the Nethneen pointed out. “How about it, you heavy-atmosphere types; do we expect this to go on indefinitely, or will it stop reasonably soon? Or does the fact that this planet rotates make prediction impossible?”

  “Difficult,” replied Molly. “There isn’t time for a talk about weather and forecasting just now. I don’t know whether this wind is a local storm good for a few hours, or something that will last for the next twenty or thirty years until the season changes. Any planning we do had better include the breeze, and we’ll just be grateful for the luck if it drops.” The other air-breathers gestured agreement.

  Charley, not used to feeling helpless and disliking the sensation, made a suggestion. “Couldn’t we take the ship to the other side of the hill?”

  “We could,” answered Molly slowly, “if we were sure we could avoid putting it down on Joe if he’s there and getting back to this spot to restore his only possible reference point if he turns out not to be.”

  Jenny suddenly straightened and elevated the front half of her two meter body. “We could send one of his own wind-robots after him!” she exclaimed. “They’re inertially guided and supposed to hold position or travel on a predetermined path regardless of the air current…”

  “That sounds hopeful” came Joe’s voice. “But reprogramming will be needed first. They are programmed to fly into the wind—I wanted them to determine sources, not sinks. That can be changed, of course. Someone will have to make them go with the current, but at a very restricted speed so that I can catch it if it does come close—no, I won’t be able even to see it unless it comes pretty close. Someone will have to ride with it, using it as a vehicle, and alter its course or stop it when and as needed. You all know the machinery well enough to do the control changes; I think Jenny’s thought is excellent.”

  “The idea is good, but offers practical difficulties,” pointed out Molly. “Your controls are easily keyed by your tendrils. Charley and Jenny and I can’t even get handlers in to them, and even if I could reach them, I don’t think my fingers are delicate enough to…”

  “True,” cut in Carol. “Not to be critical, dear, but Humans are clumsy. You drop crumbs from your cake. Also you are large and massive, which may not mean too much in this gravity, but since the robots were not designed to carry anything and the driver will have to be fastened to the machine to keep from being blown away like Joe, it probably is significant. Let’s get one of those machines. I’ll rework the program.”

  All four started to leave the conning room; Jenny stopped before they reached the door. “Charley, you’re enough to help Carol if she needs any. Molly and I had better stay here and observe. Our first trouble seems to have happened because we acted without learning enough about this place.”

  “A good thought” came Joe’s voice. Charley seemed hesitant, but when Molly nodded and turned back with the Rimmore he swallowed whatever he had been about to say and went on with the small woman.

  “Carol had better wear full environmental armor when she goes out,” the Human remarked as they settled back in the observing stations. “I think we’d better act as though we didn’t know how long we were going to be out whenever we go outside on this world.”

  “No one thinks of everything.” Jenny performed her equivalent of a shrug.

  “True, but I’d come to think of Joe as a bit above that sort of slip.”

  “Maybe he had, too.” For a moment Molly wondered how the Nethneen would be affected by that remark; then she remembered that both translators would have shifted to private channels in response to the tones of the speakers. Most of the team members had established such links when the group first formed, though none existed between Charley and the two nonhuman women. Molly had been rather disturbed by this at the time, but decided that there was nothing she could say that would be better than silence. Some species, of course, had a strongly negative attitude toward the idea of privacy in any form—though this could not be Charley’s reason, since he had set up channels with Joe and Molly on his own initiative.

  In any case, the remark had been made, Joe had probably not heard it, and if he had, he was either detached enough not to resent it or a good enough actor not to show it. Perhaps more important was the likelihood that Charley had not heard it, either.

  Those thoughts flickered through Molly’s mind too quickly to interfere with important questions; she didn’t even miss Jenny’s next point.

  “Carol will have to take Joe’s armor along.”

  “I thought of that” came the Shervah’s voice. “Charley is getting it ready and will figure out some way of fastening it to the machine.”

  “I’m afraid I was not foresighted enough to provide the bodies with convenient points of attachment,” Joe remarked. “I should have made more allowance for the unforeseen. I begin to see why the Faculty insists on a certain amount of laboratory and field work before granting any sort of rating.”

  “That annoyed me when I first got here,” remarked Molly. “I had a perfectly good doctorate in structure from a place on New Pembroke and was quite ready to make clear how much I knew to anyone who cared. They let me lake charge of a lab group doing an exercise on Sink…”

  “I know that one,” remarked Jenny.

  “—and I started to set up some outside equipment in ordinary space armor. All that kept me from losing my feet was the fact that the gravity was low enough to let me walk fifty meters on my hands. My brains had nothing to do with it. An ice ball at a temperature of about six Kelvins can really suck heat from a suit; even my hands were losing their feeling by the time I got back to safety. The worst of it was that I couldn’t say anything to my six-year-old except that I’d been stupid, and his father had to agree with me.”

  “Do you think the child will be able to profit by the lesson?” Jenny asked with interest.

  “I can only hope. I certainly did. This Faculty knows enough about teaching to let us make our own mistakes, I found out. At least your robots can be reprogrammed, Joe,” pointed out Molly.

  “When I was designing them, I had not made up my mind about the best way to use them. As you’ve already noticed, I did not give thought enough to who might have to do the programming.”

  “Are conditions still the same where you are, Joe?” Jenny cut in. “I know you’ve buried yourself, but with this wind it might be wise to make sure you’re not getting buried even more deeply. That hill you were carried over sounded suspiciously like a dune, and if you can’t get to the surface when Carol is near you she might as well stay here.”

  “My translator has no symbol for dune, but the concept of blowing sand makes sense. A moment while I try. It’s just as well this happened to me rather than you, Jenny; I can see nothing while buried, and for you the gravity is so weak you probably couldn’t tell which way is up.” He fell silent for a few seconds. “I’m uncovered. I don’t think I was any deeper, though I admit I hadn’t measured. I do have an impression that the slope of the hill that I descended is a trifle closer than when I dug in; is that the sort of thing you had in mind?”

  “Precisely. I suggest you measure the distance from the nearest point now, give us the figure, and dig in again if you wish for another quarter hour. We’ll call you at that time to come out and make another measurement. I won’t be at all surprised if the dune is crawling toward you; they do that. Right, Molly? On your world, too?”

  “Yes, or so I’ve read. I have no firsthand experience, and wouldn’t know what speed to expect.”

  “I have.” Jenny’s tone was grim, over and above its usual grating sound.

  “I am four meters from the slope, as nearly as I can judge” came Joe’s voice. “Something is starting to itch; I must dig in again.”

  “Get a couple of m
eters farther, first,” snapped the Rimmore.

  “All right.” Silence fell again. The two observers collected what data they could; Molly was a little surprised at the lack of basic instrumentation. There was no direct way to obtain wind velocity, for example. Granted that this was a spacecraft, it was also supposed to be part of a research facility. Even if the makers had not themselves been native to a planet with a reasonable atmosphere, anyone around a Leinster site—a place like Eta Carinae likely to attract pacefaring species because it was a scientific curiosity—should have at least heard of wind.

  Of course, Joe hadn’t remembered it. And this was a student facility, designed to teach people not to take too much for granted, she must remember. She’d simply have to improvise. She and Jenny analyzed the gas around them, refined the work Jenny had already done on the dust/sand/snow, set up a computer watch on the inertial navigation system to get a more precise measure of the planet’s rotation rate and their latitude, located the sun by judicious selection of wavelengths in the boat’s sensors, established their present location arbitrarily as longitude zero for convenience in future work, and determined that astronomically t hey must be in the southern hemisphere. Just how far south, in both angular and linear units, would come with increasing precision over the next few minutes as the computer compared inertial data with Arc’s apparent motion.

  Presently Jenny stopped work and called to Joe. “Dig out and see how far the hill is, please. 1 should have reminded you earlier but got absorbed.”