by Hal Clement
“I was thinking myself,” replied the Nethneen. “Just a moment.” It was rather more than the implied quarter of a minute, but the answer was a relief. “As far as I can tell, the slope is very little nearer—certainly not more than half a meter, and I think less. I must remember to keep a measuring device attached to my person in the future; this estimating is most unsatisfactory.”
“At least you’re not about to be buried alive,” responded Molly. “Dig in again if you want. Carol must be nearly ready to go out.”
“Just starting” came the voice of the tiny humanoid. “Charley has sealed up Joe’s armor so it won’t fill with sand before we get it to him and roped it to the robot so that it’ll stick—Joe and I may have trouble detaching it, but it won’t blow away.”
“Will you need help getting out?” asked Molly.
“No more than Charley can supply, I’d say. Watch from where you are, and make sure nothing goes wrong; you can keep Joe informed as long as I’m in sight. I’ll use one of the ports down here, as soon as Charley has his armor on, too. He’s not taking chances, either. Two or three minutes now. If you’re really as close as you think, I should be with you very quickly, Joe.”
The two observers switched active sensors to cover the ground where they expected Carol to appear, and waited, eyes on screens. There was no way to pick up the port itself, either from inside or out, and they both selected surface viewpoints a little downwind of its location—if anything did go wrong, they would catch it promptly.
Nothing did, however. “All right, close up again!” came Carol’s voice. “This thing is holding steady. Let me key in—there; one. Downwind drift at about a third of a meter a second—you should be seeing me any moment, up in Con. Let me know.”
Three or four seconds later both observers called out simultaneously. “There you are.” “Steady as a ground roller,” added Jenny. Molly was not sure whether the reference was to a vehicle or some animal native to Jenny’s world, but was equally satisfied with the situation. The robot was a vertical cylinder about a meter in diameter and three quarters as high, with the projecting rim of its field shaper forming a platform eighteen or twenty centimeter* wide around the bottom. Carol was standing on one side of this and Joe’s minor sprawled on the other, both attached with festoons of rope that looped around the entire structure. The ma-chine hung some ten centimeters clear of the ground, rock-leady in the still-violent wind; as its rider had said, its motion was perfectly smooth, controlled by its own inertial system, sensors, and drive fields. Carol’s thirty-plus kilograms on one side, poorly balanced by Joe’s empty suit on the other, did not seem to bother the drive system at all.
Molly and Jenny watched silently as the figure shrank with distance. The latter keyed in a ranging sensor and set automatic magnification to keep the image large enough for details; Molly kept her scale unchanged, preferring to see directly how Carol was approaching the dune, if dune it was, that lay downwind. It occurred to her that the robot 1might try to plow into the surface as the latter rose, but either Joe or Carol had anticipated that in the program; the Sher-vah started to ride up the hill without incident.
As she neared the top, Molly called out, “I don’t know whether you can tell slope very well from where you are, Carol, but it looks from here as though you were about to go over the edge that Joe described, if you’re really following his track. If the far side is really steep, will the robot stay upright? I don’t recall the guidance program well enough.”
“It should” came the Nethneen’s voice. “Tell me when he disappears—or Carol, you tell me when you start downhill—and I’ll dig out and watch for you.”
“I’m at the edge” was Carol’s immediate response. “The slope in front of me is very steep and loose. Sand is blowing past me and falling over—I can see why the hill is crawling toward you. Here I come.”
“Then it is a dune,” Jenny remarked with audible satisfaction.
“Not only that, it’s Joe’s dune,” replied Carol. “There he is, seventy or eighty meters to my right.”
“Can you see her, Joe?” asked Jenny.
“Not against the sky glare. It’s painful even to look up. The main question is whether she can see me, and that she’s answered.”
“Does that machine ride downhill all right?” asked Molly.
“It doesn’t know the difference,” the Shervah assured her. “I’ll be at the bottom in a few seconds. Joe, you can cover up again for a moment or two if the blowing stuff hurts; I know where you are but will have to redirect this thing. As you said, the air currents here are irregular, and I’ll have to cut the wind sensor out of the guidance plan and just travel—let’s see—this will take some time—no, not so long at that—there, that should do it. Come up again when I call out—now! Good! You can see me this time, surely.”
“Yes. Here you are. Let’s get that armor ready. Charley, did you improvise with these ropes, or do you have experience?”
“Well, I have used them before, but not very much. Is there some trouble?”
“With all due recognition that a knot should not untie itself, it should be possible for someone to untie it. This one—there, it’s coming now. Can you come around to this side yet, Carol?”
“Not yet. There was more than one knot. I have one here—now it’s coming—I’ll be right with you—there, it’s loose. WATCH OUT!”
“What’s the matter?” cried Molly.
“The armor is loose—it’s blowing away—even in this wind where we can stand!”
“Don’t worry,” said Joe. “There’s another rope holding it. Just don’t untie that one until I’m inside—it’s fastened to a leg piece, and I can open up without undoing it.”
“Some things don’t need experience,” Charley remarked complacently. “A little foresight is enough.”
“Your foresight is appreciated. The thought of chasing that suit at full wind speed…”
“We could have brought the ship over, now that we know where you are. We still can, if you want,” Molly cut in.
“I’d rather like to try riding the robot upwind, as it was meant to go, if Carol doesn’t object. We’ll have to change positions, Carol, so that I can get at the access panel. You don’t seem to have had any trouble with redirecting; I’d better make sure I can do it as easily.”
“All right. This last rope seems to go all the way around; we’ll stay inside it and work our way to the right simultaneously. It’s lucky we’re not as big as Molly or Jenny.”
“The drive would support them easily enough.”
“They’d have trouble fitting, though maybe one of them could balance on top. There, can you reach in?”
“Yes, thank you. There is another trouble that I had not thought of, though. The blowing sand is getting in when the access panel is open. If it packs too tightly, I will not be able to get at the controls themselves. There, I think we are all right. Hold on. We should now head upwind, at about the same speed you came down.”
The observers looked at each other. There was a faint grin on the Human face and an equivalent twist to the Rimmore body. Neither said anything, but Molly moved over to the boat’s main controls. Silence continued for another minute or more, to be broken finally by Joe’s quiet tones.
“Do any of you air breathers have a word for a wind that goes around in small circles?”
“We call such a current an eddy, Joe,” replied Molly. Shall I bring the boat over, or do you want to reprogram without using the pressure sensors?”
“Bring the boat. I don’t think I’d better open the panel again.” The translator was doing a good job; Joe’s tone carried resignation.
“Interesting but a bit anticlimactic.” Rather to Molly’s surprise, the remark was Carol’s. The little woman was back in the conning room, her armor shed; she had found time at last to improvise a simple transparent envelope that held her high pressure and showed her gleaming dark-brown fur. As far as could be told from appearance she was feeling no more excitement than her wo
rds suggested. Joe had no eyebrows to raise, but he shifted his body position enough to bring two pairs of his optics to bear on the speaker.
“If you are here for emotional release,” Joe said, “I wish you luck; but I must admit that I don’t plan to cooperate. I also admit that while that experience was educational—defining education as anything one lives through to profit by—I look back on it with much more embarrassment than pleasure. I can attribute the event to nothing but my own lack of thought.”
“As Molly said the time that I made a fool of myself, no one can foresee everything. Those of us who haven’t done something as silly so far will probably manage it before we finish here.”
“I hope you are wrong, Charley. Where are you now? The rest of us are ready to get the planned program going, I think. We should settle finally our personal schedules of activity.”
“All right. I can hear you. I’m trying to be foresighted again.”
“In what way?” rasped Jenny. “Where are you, anyway?”
“In the shop. I’m making handholds and tie rings to put on all the master robots, and distributing a hundred meters of rope on each.”
“Did you check with Joe?”
“I’m not harming his machinery, just cementing things to the outer shells, away from gas intakes, pressure sensors, and the like. In view of what just happened, I’m sure Joe would be the last to object.”
“A good thought. I should have done it myself,” admitted the Nethneen. “I strongly suggest, however, that no one leave the boat in future without very detailed planning and without taking as much potentially useful material as can conveniently be carried.”
Molly shook her head. “A standard emergency kit is one thing,” she said. “Everything one might need is hopeless.”
“Of course,” agreed Joe. “I realize that—there would be no upper limit, especially for beings who regard the creation of an imaginary series of events as an art form. You take me too literally.”
Molly smiled to herself but made no answer. Her first acquaintance with Joe and Charley, nearly a year before, had been during a School routine translator check. The institution’s central data handler on Think, one of the common planets of the Fire-Smoke binary, was still somewhat limited in Human-language figures of speech, and a Faculty group working on the problem had asked her to describe any of the students who happened to be near her at the moment, for the translator’s benefit. Charley had been a dozen meters away, and she had taken him as her subject; the computer had returned a symbol set that gave the Faculty analysts the impression that she had meant Joe, who was also in the neighborhood. The two did have a superficial resemblance, and neither student, when brought into the conversation, seemed to be offended by the mistake. Charley, after pointing out a dozen detail differences, emphasizing size, had closed with a commiserating “Even if he does grow up, he’ll never have a decent shell!”
Joe, much later in a private conversation with Molly and her husband, had explained why he hadn’t made the obvious answer, though by then the Humans knew him well enough to guess the reason. “It might have offended you, Molly; you have hard parts, too, even if they are inside. Like the main translator, I didn’t know about Human figurative expression—even irony—then.”
“I don’t know.” Charley’s voice brought Molly back to the present. “I’ve been thinking of quite a few things that might go wrong in this environment, and…”
“By all means design an emergency kit around them. One that I can carry—in a high wind combined with low gravity!” snapped Carol. The Kantrick made no answer, but Molly felt pretty sure that he wasn’t bothered. Here, too, he would probably take the suggestion literally.
After a brief pause that no one seemed inclined to interrupt, Jenny resumed the situation summary.
“We’ve just been reminded that we can not only fail in this exercise, we can get injured or killed while trying. I don’t know how many of your languages distinguish among terms for lab exercise, research, and exploration; if anyone got the same codes for any two of those, we’d better spend some time with the translators.” She paused, but no one spoke. “Good. This is not just an exercise, no matter what earlier students found out about this place that we haven’t been told. If nothing else, no machine is perfect, and if something serious goes wrong with the boat before the classroom gets back, we’ll have to live with the results.”
“We have the tent, which we’re supposed to set up first thing,” pointed out Charley.
“Precisely. If there were anyone else around to snatch us out of trouble, we wouldn’t have been supplied with so much emergency equipment. There are reaction dampers in a student chemistry lab, but not environmental armor unless reactions that even the instructors can’t handle are expected. Think it over. Joe was lucky. We can’t count on luck consistently.”
Molly noticed that there was no code break here, either; everyone’s translator had some term for luck. The real question, she thought, was whether it meant quite the same to all of them.
There was another pause, broken this time by Joe.
“Your points are well made, Jenny. The only precaution I can see for setting up the tent is that it not be too close downwind to any of those dunes. It is strong but might not take too large a hill climbing over it even in this gravity. As far as I can see, the ship’s present location should be all right, and Molly and Jenny have already started the coordinate system from here. Any other thoughts?”
“Should we check a few more spots on the planet to see whether this wind is universal?” asked Jenny. “A quieter region might be better and safer for the tent.”
“Could we be sure such a region would remain windless?”
The air breathers, even Jenny, all made emphatic negative gestures.
“Then the time spent looking for such a spot would probably be wasted. I propose we unload and set up here. Were you listening, Charley? Do you agree?”
“I heard. This is perfectly good for the tent, if that’s what you meant about my agreeing. We should get at it quickly, too; of course the boat isn’t going to last.”
Chapter Six
Of Course It Will
Charley refused to elaborate on his remark though he did not seem bothered at having made it.
“Just a hypothesis. Perhaps the of course was a bit excessive, but we’ll see” was all he would say. Since he was still out of sight there was no way to check his expression, even if any of them had felt confident reading Kantrick body language. Joe, perhaps—no. Molly had to remind herself consciously that the resemblance between Charley and Joe was really little greater than that between herself and Carol; she could probably read any of the others, including Charley, just as well as he.
Carol was less restrained. “If that talking thramm—sorry, Joe, I know the shape is irrelevant—has any real reason to believe there’s something wrong with this boat, hypothesis or better, he has no business keeping it to himself. If he’s afraid of looking silly because it turns out to be wrong, he’ll be a lot sillier if he keeps quiet and is right, and we failed to…”
“Sorry, Carol,” the Kantrick assured her, “but it isn’t at that level at all. There is nothing for you or the rest of us to worry about, no matter what I said or think of the boat. I’m sorry I said anything.”
“But if this craft fails, there’s plenty for us to worry about. You’re talking nonsense.”
“No, I’m not,” Charley responded. “You’ll see why, if I’m right, and if I’m not there’s no danger, either. Let’s get the tent out, unless we should rest and eat first.” Carol sputtered into silence. Jenny changed the subject.
“It looks a little as though the wind were going down. Maybe we should set up one of Joe’s machines outside, programmed to keep station and report ram pressure readings to us. If it’s a real decrease, and we can be sure of it before the tent is ready to go out, it might be worth scheduling a rest period before actually setting it up. Wind won’t bother the tent, but it would be a lo
t easier for us to have quiet air while we’re outside.”
“Good idea.” Charley was clearly eager to discuss something besides his remark. “If Joe or Carol will do the programming, I’m still in armor down here and can put the thing out.”
With six hours of sleep and a good meal, Molly found (hat she didn’t care much whether the storm had ended. She trimmed her mahogany hair, which was getting a little long for air suit and armor, and joined the others, eager to face what Enigma had to offer. By the time anyone went outside again, however, the wind had dropped so far that even the smallest and lightest of them had little trouble walking. The tent was no trouble in any case; it was basically a set of six small but massive field generators that could be travel-programmed like Joe’s robots. Once in position at the corners of a hexagon a dozen meters on an edge, these sprayed out a cloud of highly specialized molecules that were maintained as a film by the fields, rather as a cloud of iron particles might be held in a given pattern by a properly arranged magnetic system. The same field anchored the generators to the ground, and there was no question of blowing away—though, as the group well knew, having the structure buried in an advancing dune might be another matter.
The tent gave much more room for work, and the research equipment was readied well before local sunset, twenty hours after their landing. Jenny had already done a lot more chemistry. The atmosphere’s composition was now firmly established; methane, nitrogen, ammonia, and carbon dioxide accounted for ninety-five percent of it. Most of the rest was carbon monoxide and argon. Molly nodded thoughtfully as the Rimmore dealt off this list of words and numbers. It fitted with her own idea of vaporized comet ices and with the fact that there seemed to be no other planets in the system.
“As I suggested, it’s just an oversized comet, still vaporizing.”
“As you also suggested, a nice prelife mixture,” remarked Joe, “with lots of energy available from the sun. If I could think of a way to do it, I’d have my robots check their areas for prebiotic compounds for you when we get them stationed, Jenny.”