Still River

by Hal Clement

  “There you are” came the grating voice. “I can see why a place like that would get anyone in trouble. Don’t pull on the rope until I’ve moved away from the edge and onto solid rock, here; the traction is poor, and I don’t want to be pulled in, too.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you when the rope reaches me but won’t pull at all. You can do that when you’re ready.”

  There was pause; Molly assumed that the Rimmore was checking the coiling of the rope, but could not see her clearly enough to be sure. Then the rough voice resumed.

  “Ready now to throw. I have no weight to attach to it; I’ve fastened one end around my body, made an open coil of the rest, and will try to throw that over you. I wish my arms were longer; maybe I should have brought Joe or Charley along.”

  “In this gravity it shouldn’t take much,” pointed out Carol. “Give it a try.”

  There followed an almost Human grunt.

  “Told you it would be easy. Fine for distance, a couple of meters to one side.”

  “I’ll coil and try again, unless you think you can climb that far.”

  “That far, yes. Wait a minute.” Pause. “There—no, missed it, and I’m back at the bottom—but the rope came a little way, too, with the sliding sand. One more try—there. 1 have it. Let me tie it around me; there. I’m no more of a knot expert than Charley, but we can get it off later. There’ll be no hurry. You can pull whenever you want.”

  “A minute. I’m getting as far from the edge as the rope will let me—there. That’s something to hold on to, though I feel as though I were floating anyway. I’m pulling—very slowly. I’m not moving, I’m glad to say. Are you?”

  “Yes. Upward bound at last. There’s an upward wind through the sand at the bottom, for some weird reason, which helps a little. Steady does it. I’m not wiggling at all; I’d do more harm than good. Halfway up now. Are you coiling the rope or backing away?”

  “Coiling. I don’t dare move a leg; I’ve got a grip with each foot and don’t dare shift a single one. Nearly up?”

  “Nearly up. Ten more meters. Five. Two. Over the edge, thanks. I’d jump over to hug you but don’t think I’ll do any more jumping on this planet. Wait till I get this rope untied.”

  “Why untie it?” came Charley’s voice. “Seems to me you’ll be a lot safer connected. Come on back to the boat; there are still some robots to put out.”

  The rope did have to be untied before the women could remove their armor, but the Kantrick’s sensible suggestion was followed. The untying was done in the conning room, by Joe’s nimble tendrils.

  “That makes two of us,” the Nethneen remarked as he recoiled the rope. “Experience has its uses, however valuable foresight may be, Charley. I hope you were less frightened than I, Carol.”

  “For just a moment it was bad,” the little humanoid admitted. “Falling into a hole means nothing in this gravity, of course, but the pit did remind me of the knevreh—ant-lion, Molly called it, which is quite a dangerous creature at home. For just a moment I thought of that. Then of course I remembered that whatever may be on Enigma, including interesting prelife chemistry, it won’t be life.”

  “Of course it won’t,” agreed Joe.

  “Of course it will,” grated Jenny.

  Chapter Seven

  Of Course I See It’s Gone

  There was a moment of silence, and several sets and patterns of eyes focused on the speaker. She sprawled relaxed, in the corner of the room that had been fitted with a tangle of pipes, bars, and ropes for her comfort.

  “I should have thought of it when I did the first analysis,” Jenny continued calmly. “I should certainly have thought of it when we were talking about the possibility of free oxygen.”

  “But there isn’t any oxygen, you said. At least, no more than could be explained by hard light from Arc on the other gases.” Charley’s tone was indignant, through Molly’s translator.

  “Quite true; there isn’t. However, there is a large amount of carbon dioxide, and that is just as improbable—at least, with activation energy—mixed with ammonia as the oxygen is. They would have reacted to produce ammonium carbamate.”

  “Of which there is plenty around, you said,” Molly pointed out.

  “Yes. So there is evidently nothing to block the reaction. But there must be something to reverse it, up the energy hill, or one of the gases would be gone. There is plenty of energy, of course; but how is it applied? All I can think of is the sort of thing that supplies free oxygen on your world and mine, Molly, and nitrosyl chloride on Carol’s, and high-energy nitrogen and chlorine compounds on Joe’s and Charley’s: biological catabolism.”

  “But this place can’t possibly be old enough to have life at that organization level.”

  “As far as our experience goes, no, Carol. I fully agree. Nevertheless, I am happier about my wild-shot project than I have been since it was approved. At the moment, the best working suggestion I can make is that there is something analogous to vegetation here that uses energy from Arc to break down ammonium compounds and release gaseous ammonia and carbon dioxide, and maybe water ice. Whether there is anything using the reverse reaction to power itself I would not presume to guess; this is, as you point out, a very young planet—we feel sure.”

  “It has a very young sun,” insisted Joe.

  “I accept that.”

  “What do we do?” asked Charley.

  “My first thought is to watch the ground we pass over much more carefully than we have been, looking for any unusual coloration. We should be particularly attentive near bodies of liquid, which will presumably be ammonia. Once your robots have started work, Joe, I want to return to the lakes we have already seen and do much more sampling and much more careful analysis of what we get. I set up for only simple compounds, I am ashamed to admit, on the earlier runs.”

  “If you hadn’t, would you have finished any of them yet?” asked Joe. “Very few.”

  “Then there seems no need for shame. You were doing what seemed needed. Now more seems needed. We can live with that. Molly, perhaps the time has come when your different color sense will be of help. We could of course set each screen to different selection and different false-color representation, but I have the impression that you can do more by watching your whole natural range. Do you mind riding with your screen hooded? Or would it be better if we stayed elsewhere in the boat and let you watch in comfort?”

  “I don’t mind the hood, if one of you doesn’t mind looking ahead while I lock down. The assumption that we have been flying higher than any hills agrees with the radar data, but I still prefer to trust living eyes this close to the ground. The catch is that except in areas where the clouds are thin or nonexistent, and we haven’t hit any of those on the day side yet, my eyes are no better than yours; the light is very faint, fainter even if whiter than on most of your worlds, I’d guess, but if anything you can probably see better. The clearest region was around the south pole, and it’s having winter. No daylight. As I recall, Arc’s companion is shining on that area, and I’ll certainly be glad to watch it in white light when we get there.”

  “I will be glad to con while…”

  “I’ll do it!” Charley cut in. Joe made no attempt to argue; Molly would have been surprised if he had. She was a little startled at Charley—not at his willingness to interrupt, which all were getting used to, but at the strength of the feeling that seemed to have prompted the interruption.

  “It might be better,” suggested Carol, “that we finish setting out the wind-robots as planned; then Molly, and Charley, if he wants to help her, can take a really close look at the short-wave region.”

  “There is certainly little point in all of us being there; the originally scheduled work should go on as far as possible,” agreed Joe.

  “And none of you will be very happy with no clouds between you and even that companion star,” added Molly. “All right, we’ll do it that way. I can look for Jenny’s life as well as for my ice—though, of cour
se, Jenny’s idea may mean that the ice is less likely—I’ll have to think about that.”

  “If you see any, sample it!” said Jenny. “Of course. Also any off-colored surface areas.” “What would you consider off-color?” asked Joe pointedly.

  “Well, the sand is practically white to me by daylight-it’s mostly ammonium salts, Jenny says. The hard rock has all been darker, and I suppose that would be silicates with heavy metals. This part of space seems to have been through more stellar life cycles even than mine. The School planets run pretty high in heavy metals, don’t they, except for the way-out common ones like Sink?”

  “Even the dust in those is iron-rich,” Jenny confirmed.

  “Thanks. It goes along with the brand-new stars and nebulosity here at Eta Carinae, after all. Let me know when you finish some of those rock analyses, please, Jen. I guess anything that isn’t either practically white or practically black will need a closer look. There’s no point in trying to put other color words through the translators; we respond too differently to various wavelength mixtures. Two samples that looked alike to me might be very different to some or all of you, and conversely.”

  “Any further thoughts?” Joe was still asking the key questions. No one said anything, and the boring aspect of the flight was resumed.

  Molly spent much of the time wondering who would be next to make a dangerous or ridiculous mistake, and suspected that Charley was thinking along the same lines. The difference between them, she reflected, was that the Kantrick was probably hoping for it to happen—to someone else, of course. His sense of humor seemed to work best in situations that made him look better than others—though to do him justice, as Molly suddenly realized, he had never displayed it in a really serious situation like the present one. At parties, on picnics—if an outing where everyone wore environmental armor could be given such a name—even in class, he could be objectionable; in the lab he had been different, and he might well be so in the field. She’d give him the benefit of the doubt until something did happen.

  Disappointingly, the surface showed nothing surprising or encouraging to Molly’s eyes, and only the regular samples were taken at the three sites where robots were left in open starlight. Jenny’s enthusiasm waned visibly.

  As had been predicted, the sun was almost gone when they got back to the tent, though it took long-wave sensors to prove it.

  Charley had decided entirely on his own, as both Nethneen and Human had been very careful not to say anything that might have been taken as a suggestion, that he would also accompany Molly to the heavily clouded arctic. He gave no special reason, but suddenly broached the idea toward the end of the search around the other pole. This area had proved to be mostly bare rock; there were no lakes or rivers, and very little loose sand or dust, but a very irregular, mountainous topography. Molly suspected that something about this fact had set the Kantrick thinking, and the report certainly bothered Carol. She couldn’t see why there should be mountains.

  Molly herself spent some of the unloading time rigging a hood around her conning screen, and now she lifted the boat and headed it north, still hoping for something that looked more or less like a natural landscape instead of the dim orange-red patterns of which her eyes were so tired. She had not completely forgotten Charley’s prediction about the boat, but if he was willing to ride in it, she saw no reason to worry.

  Molly had never seen Earth except from a distance, of course, being far short of retirement age. However, she was familiar enough with holograms and other images of what was technically her home world, as well as of many others. This was not exactly like any of them, but not wholly new, either.

  The dunes in the region where they had landed were too light in color to be any sand she knew, but not light enough to be snow. Where these ceased, as they did before the boat had gone a hundred kilometers, the surface texture remained about the same for a while. Then increasing areas of bare solid that might be rock—it couldn’t be ice; it was far too dark—began to show. It was not really black in color. There were dark browns, traces of what to Human eyes looked reddish brown and occasionally a real red, and sometimes there showed bits of what she suspected might have been greenish or even lighter yellow patches if the light getting through the clouds had been bright enough to give her more confidence in her color sense.

  Several times she was tempted to land for samples, but reflected that if she did this every time the surface tint changed she would never cover ten percent of the planet. For the present job, it would be best to wait until liquid could be seen—unless, of course, some unmistakable ice showed up.

  Neither did, for hundreds of kilometers. She was flying slowly, to get a good look at the ground below, in spite of her desire to reach daylight, and time had shifted to a slow crawl.

  She herself was still interested in the endlessly varying landscape below; Charley, who was taking seriously his duty of looking where they were going, was getting bored and was quite willing to say so. There were clouds and dust devils and real sandstorms, sometimes above their flight level and sometimes below, but he didn’t find their patterns at all interesting.

  Conversation with the three back at the tent did not help, as all were too busy to say much. Joe had started his robots; the slaves had lifted to their assigned altitudes, and everything was obediently moving slowly upwind, whatever the local wind might be, according to the monitors. A worldwide map of air currents at five altitudes was under construction, but since no robot was yet more than ten kilometers from its starting point little could be read from it so far.

  Jenny was deeply buried in chemical analysis but had not yet reported evidence either of the prelife compounds she had originally hoped or the photosynthetic life more recently inferred. Carol was equally silent; Molly supposed she was doing more with the radar maps or the data they had picked up around the “craters,” or perhaps just brooding about the arctic mountains. Joe of course said nothing and Molly herself did not like to interrupt with questions. Some of Joe’s ethical code had rubbed off on her. She regretted it slightly; chattering during lab work seemed more comfortable, but with Joe actually present she felt a little uneasy about unessential talk. It was certainly not that she disliked or feared the little Nethneen; somehow she just didn’t want to merit his disapproval. She wished something would appear on her own screen that would give excuse for a report—a real report, not just a periodic statement that the boat was still all right, as Charley was making.

  But it was several hours more before this happened. The equipment indicated that they were over a thousand kilometers from the others when a lake—no, it was a chain of lakes—came into view. They were near the edge of the heavy arctic cloud cap, and the light was getting white enough if not bright enough to make Charley a little unhappy. The clouds were evidently of fairly coarse particles. The general landscape had been smoother for some time, and she had speeded up their flight, not expecting to find anything interesting; and for some minutes she and Charley had been arguing on private channel about this. He could not grasp the Human emotional attitude that because nothing had happened for some time, nothing was likely to. Being bored, he insisted, was quite different from being unreasonable.

  The argument ended as the gray-blue patches that had to be liquid made themselves obvious. The Kantrick aimed his own screen downward as their horizontal motion practically ceased, and began calling out to the others.

  “It looks as though we had some liquid here—lakes, ponds, whatever—I don’t see any rivers, so ponds may be it, though they’re pretty big; one is a dozen or more kilometers across, I estimate. Any new colors, Molly?”

  “Yes, right around the edges, but so uniform I can’t help suspecting it just means the ground is wet.”

  “Is the surface the salt-sand we’re used to, or bare rock, or something different?” asked Joe.

  “It looks pretty much like the former, but I can’t be sure. We’ll be down in a moment. Will you get my armor, too, Charley?”

&nbs
p; The Kantrick did even more. By the time the boat was grounded and controls safely capped, he was back in Con with his own armor, the Human’s, and a coil of rope. Molly decided not to ask him the purpose of the last until she had finished checking the gas tightness and temperature controls of her own equipment. She then started for the main lock and, as she had expected, was stopped by her companion.

  “Wait, Molly. We’d better fasten ourselves together. I know there doesn’t seem to be any wind, and I don’t see any holes, but we don’t know what it’s like out there. If the ground is wet, there might be quicksand or something like that.”

  “And if we both got pulled in?”

  “We stay safely apart. One of us goes out first, and goes the full length of the rope before the other follows, then we keep that length apart until we’re reasonably sure the surface is trustworthy.”

  “That still doesn’t answer what we do if we both get in trouble.”

  “The others—oh.”

  “Yes. The others aren’t here. Sorry, Charley. You stay inside and take the boat back to the tent for help if I get in trouble.”

  The spheroidal figure stood motionless for several seconds, passing the coil of rope from one four-digited hand to the other, its forward eye fixed on Molly’s at about the same level and the two others that she could see roving aimlessly about the con room. Then the rope was tossed to one side and the transparent helmet dome of the armor slowly removed. “You’re right, of course. I’ll watch. Please keep talking whenever you think I may not be able to see you.”

  “That would only be right next to the boat. I’ll keep a running report, though, anyway. And I’ll be careful of quicksand; did you have some special reason to be afraid of that?”