Still River

by Hal Clement

  “As long as we call it a guess, sure. Just let’s not say it until I get there,” replied his Human friend. Molly was learning caution.

  “Is the glow uniform, or can you make out features?” asked Carol.

  “It’s still hard to be sure, but there seem to be lighter and darker patches when my light beam is fairly wide. When I narrow it down and sweep it around, it’s harder to compare.”

  “Keep watching with the wider beam, and let us know when you feel sure the features are increasing in size. That will tell us you’re near the bottom, whatever the bottom is,” Joe pointed out.

  “All right. I rather hope there’s no wind down there; I’m starting to feel cramped on this thing. It would be nice to take a walk.”

  “There’s good reason to hope the wind will be straight up from whatever you land on, isn’t there?” came Charley’s voice.

  “There’s hope. I’m not going to claim good reason.” Molly did not feel like mentioning the word ice for the time being; she was still on the emotional backswing from the jump at a conclusion that had carried her into her present trouble. If Charley wanted to keep his optimism, all right.

  There were features below, spreading and growing more distinct as she approached. Nothing really clear yet; just some places a little darker—really darker, or a little deeper?—than others. Her mind came back to full concentration on business, and she reported tersely to the others as the picture clarified.

  “It’s not a level bottom. I thought for a minute the dark places must be deeper—farther from the light—but it’s the other way. One of them is higher than I am now…”

  “Which way?”

  “That way. Please, Charley; what possible direction reference do I have? Even if this cylinder hasn’t turned during descent, and I’m willing to believe it hasn’t, I have, often enough to forget which way I was originally facing. The lighter stuff is coming up now, and I’m going to meet what seems to be a steep slope close to a fairly sharp boundary between light and dark. There. Descent has stopped, Joe. How far down did I go? At least roughly, in kilometers.”

  “About six hundred fifty meters.” Still no detectable emotion, but the Nethneen had to be laughing; Molly herself was. “Are you moving at all? Is there still wind?”

  “Yes, apparently. I can’t feel it through armor, and I don’t plan to step off as long as this thing is traveling, but it is traveling, so I assume it senses impact pressure.”

  “What’s the ground like?” cut in Jenny. “Any visible difference from what we’ve already analyzed?”

  Molly swung her light downward and looked carefully for the first time, and a grin spread on her freckled face. “I can’t see the ground, Jen,” she said softly. “It’s covered with feathery, silvery-looking crystals.”

  “What?” Carol almost screamed.

  “Yes, dear. I…”

  “Get some! Are they really dense, like an actual metal, or could they be conducting hydrocarbon—the stuff Jenny mentioned earlier?”

  “I can’t tell the density, for several reasons. Even if there were decent gravity, I have no way of telling how loose or open the structure of this fluffy stuff may be; even its inertia won’t tell me anything. It’s bound to be low. Maybe if I’m here long enough I can tell you whether it’s growing or not, but I rather hope to get specimens back to you for that sort of check.”

  “What are the temperature and pressure? Not much different from the surface, I’d suppose.”

  Molly consulted the environment checkers on her armor. “No significant pressure difference—in this gravity and with this gas mixture that would take several kilometers change in altitude, I’d think. The temperature may be a trace higher; unfortunately I didn’t think to record it to a hundredth of a Kelvin before I started down. It’s a hair over two thirty-five. For practical purposes, you have surface conditions here except for light.”

  “And that difference would be in favor of life!” said Carol happily.

  “Why?” asked Molly. “Wouldn’t the life need some sort of energy source?”

  “Of course, but not something as destructive as Arc’s light—oh, I forgot for a moment. We’ll worry about the energy later, when we have specimens.”

  “Good,” said the Human, suddenly remembering her own situation. “Is there any practical way in anyone’s mind for getting me out of here?”

  “Oh, I’ll come after you,” said the Shervah enthusiastically. “Jenny has started a rope in the shop; there’s plenty of carbon in the air, so there’s no limit on raw material. In this gravity, we can carry kilometers of cord strong enough to lift both of us, if we have to.”

  “And how are you going to find me?”

  “Simple. I’ll ride another of Joe’s robots, and set it to go upwind at higher speed than the one you’re riding. Sooner or later I’ll catch you, and I can reset both robots to come back downwind. Actually we shouldn’t need the rope, but I’ll play it safe; that seems the sensible way—we could be taken by surprise by something else, after all.”

  “Have you consulted with Joe about taking another of his robots from the mapping project?”

  “No, but this is important; and we have to save you, too.

  I know your armor should be good for a long time, but as he said awhile ago, the environment is really bad for a Human. You’d freeze to death in seconds if your power failed—or maybe boil; I know you have good insulation and your body produces an incredible amount of heat.”

  “The atmosphere study is important, too,” Molly pointed out in some amusement.

  “Well, yes, of course. Maybe it would be quicker for Joe to make a new robot in the shop than to go off and pull another from the mapping. How about it, Joe? You must have all the patterns.”

  “Yes, I do. I am not quite so sure about raw materials, however; the boat doesn’t carry much in the way of spare metal. If I improvised by making the shell from some carbon polymer, manual replanning would be needed, and that would take awhile. I fear it would be quicker to take another from the mapping job.”

  “Joe,” said Molly softly, “I don’t consider myself an emergency case yet. I admit I’d be relieved to be back among you, but getting specimens for Carol and Jenny and me is also part of the job, and this is a part of the planet we’d never have seen—never have suspected, probably—if I hadn’t been so silly about making that jump a little while ago. I haven’t heard of armor failure in my lifetime, and I don’t mind a few days of mild discomfort. If Carol wants to come along and see the place for herself, and collect her own specimens, and that fits into any plan for getting me back, fine; but I don’t see why parts of the project already planned and underway need to suffer.”

  “Charley, let me at the keys.” Joe spoke quietly, but for the first time a thrill of real fear—not just the sudden, brief panic that had come with a fall—seized Molly. If Joe were taking over the flying, and especially if he were changing flight path, he was not making a new robot; he was going after one of the others. That meant he considered the situation more serious than she had allowed herself to believe; and Joe’s opinion, for reasons none of the group could have stated clearly, always carried more weight than his negligible physical size warranted. Maybe it was his species; the first Nethneen Molly had met was also the first instructor at the Eta Carinae institution whose ability to get abstractions across to a student was not hampered by translators. She had given the being the translator name of Sklodowska, after one of her own classical heroes, and had been rather careful never to learn whether it was male or female. Molly herself had not, until meeting this being, really expected to learn much from lectures at the School. The incredibly informative combination of verbal symbols with animated and still graphic presentations had given her a completely new realization of what could be done with the art of communication, and left her with a respect for the teacher that, perhaps unjustly, tended to rub off on all Nethneen. If Joe thought she was in danger, then—

  Then she needed to keep co
ntrol of her own feelings. There was nothing any of them could do to get her out of where she was for some time yet. In the meantime, sitting on a metal cylinder and thinking about her own troubles would do no one any good. She, and Jenny, and Carol could all use specimens, so the thing to do right now was collect specimens.

  Making sure that she was tied to the robot, she lowered her feet to the field rim at the lower edge. Then she set her light to a diffuse glow and clipped it to her helmet so that it would shine in whatever general direction she was looking, took hold of one of the grips installed by the Kantrick, and reached down with her other hand into the fluffy mass below. It had no strength at all; the crystals disintegrated into sparkling dust at her touch. She made several efforts to get intact samples into a specimen can, but had to settle for the microscopic fragments. She called Carol and described the problem, leaving possible solutions to her and the boat’s resources.

  “How deep is this stuff?” asked Jenny. “Can you reach any substrate? Is it the usual sand or rock, or something we haven’t seen yet?”

  “Whatever it is is lower than I can reach from here,” replied Molly. “Just a moment while I check this safety line.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” asked Charley.

  “Stepping off, of course. How else do I find how deep these crystals are?”

  “Lower a rope through them, of course!”

  “Using what for a weight to carry it down? I’m less than four kilos here myself. I have two safety lines tied to different eyes on the robot, if that makes you feel easier. I’m letting myself down on one of them. I’m about half my height in the fluff—getting a new hold lower on the rope—down again—I’m not sure I want to go under it completely; I won’t be able to see. A little lower though—there. Yukh!”

  “No symbol!” came the response in four voices.

  “My feet have touched something. Something sort of between slippery and sticky. The symbol implied distaste, but nothing seems to be doing any damage. I was almost pulled loose from my grip on the rope—don’t worry, it’s tied around me as well. I’m trying to walk along behind the robot holding the line, but my feet sink in and are hard to move. I’m climbing back up—if I can pull them free—there. Loose. I’m back on top of the robot again.”

  “What’s on your feet?” Carol almost shrieked.

  “It’s hard to tell; it’s all covered with the metallic dust. I wish I could blow it off; brushing doesn’t do much good. There arc big gobs of it on each boot; maybe I can pry enough of the outer part off to see whether the shiny stuff is part of it, or was picked up on the way up.” She paused.

  “Well?” Carol had waited for much less than a minute.

  “Still far from sure. I can’t completely get rid of the metal, if that’s what it is, but there’s certainly less of it inside the lumps. Have you ever tried to get aluminum powder off something? Anyway, as best I can tell, the rest of the stuff is a brownish—to my eyes, of course—very sticky jelly.”

  “Collect it!” cried Carol. “If you have no more cans, dump something you’ve already picked up and collect this!”

  “Of course,” replied Molly gently. “Even if it isn’t ice, I’m collecting it. Are you ready to come and get it—and me?”

  Chapter Ten

  Of Course You Didn’t

  Carol, to do her justice, was embarrassed when she thought back over her recent words, but could not really believe that the others, even Molly herself, wouldn’t have felt the same.

  “Of course we’ll get you! But when I get there, you’ll want to go on and find your ice, won’t you?” Molly admitted that she probably would, but that there might be qualifying factors. The Shervah felt some doubt about this, her own pit adventure having been too brief to impress her emotions greatly, but she said nothing else tactless.

  “It’s a pity you didn’t see everything along your path. You could have described it, and I wouldn’t need to ride another robot; I could follow on foot.”

  “Down the slope where I couldn’t keep from falling and into this cavern from the top?”

  “With rope, and tools to secure it along the way, sure.” “I’m afraid that even if I’d seen enough, I wouldn’t remember it with anything like your standards. I hate to do it to Joe, but I think another robot is the answer.”

  “Oh, yes. We’re picking one up right now. Joe has gone out for it and commanded the slaves to come back as quickly as possible. We should be at the Molly-trap in a few more minutes.” “Joe?”

  “Yes, Molly?”

  “It didn’t take you so long to decide which robot to use this time, did it?”

  There was the barest hesitation before the Nethneen answered.

  “I took the closest one to our flight path.” “I thought that might be it. Thanks a lot. I’ll help somehow with the map to make it up.”

  “Your own work is as likely as mine to provide the help.

  It is all one picture—one pattern—we are trying to assemble, remember.”

  “You’ve been thinking of more than that,” the Human insisted. Joe made no answer.

  After a minute or two of silence, Charley resumed standard procedure. “Anything different at your end, Molly? I take it you’re still traveling.”

  “Yes. Both up and down; the cave floor is very irregular, and I can’t even guess whether I’m higher or lower than where I first reached it. It’s certainly not a straight line; I’ve been able to leave tracks in the crystals. There’s no pattern I can work out; sometimes it’s fairly straight for a while, then a turn in either direction. If there’s any cause at all, I’d say the wind was being affected to some extent by the irregularities in the floor, but that’s not very informative and certainly not surprising. About all that’s helpful at the moment is that I can tell which way I’m going and look ahead to see if anything is coming up. So far, nothing seems to be.”

  “We’ll be over your hill in another minute or two,” Joe commented. “I have this receiver at its highest practical amplification. Conceivably, if we’re close enough to straight above you, there’ll be little enough rock in the way to let some radiation through. That would depend at least partly on the shape of your cave, of course.”

  “Especially of its ceiling, which I never did see,” agreed Molly. “Anything coming through?”

  “I think—no—yes, there are traces on the right frequency, and ...” His voiced trailed off for a moment.

  “And just about straight down?” asked Molly eagerly.

  “Nearly so. The direction indication is not too definite. Charley, fly along this heading until I tell you to stop; then swing one-third circle to the right, and straight again. Keep doing that until I give you a new pattern.”

  The Kantrick took over the keys without comment, and silence fell for several more minutes.

  “Without meaning to be insulting, you’re allowing for my motion, of course,” Molly remarked at last.

  “I am allowing for the certainty that you are moving,” replied the Nethneen much more precisely. “I would love to have an independent report on the actual vector. I think I have it worked out, actually, but distance readings—for that read depth, of course—are still inconsistent. You appear to be radiating from between four and six kilometers underground, which I find hard to believe considering the total time, the known horizontal speed of the robot, and the other information you have sent.”

  “I’d just as soon not believe it myself,” responded Molly.

  “Well, it’s the best I can do. There are sudden variations in direction that force me to conclude the measurements themselves are unreliable. There seems nothing to do but descend and let Carol or me start after you. Jenny, how much rope have you completed?”

  “Five kilometers, nearly” was the chemist’s reply. “I doubt that Carol or even I could carry it all—because of the bulk rather than the weight.”

  “The robot will, if it’s neatly enough stowed,” pointed out the planetologist. “Is that your hill, C
harley?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, let us down right beside it.” “Not right into the crater?”

  “If Molly will forgive me, I’m going to devote another minute or two to practicing with the robot controls. I’d rather do that out here where a mistake won’t be quite so critical. I’m going to leave the slaves on the boat, coil the rope on top of the cylinder—the whole five kilos of it—with an end fastened to a weight or a post or something right here in the sand, rigged to pay off from the center of the coil as I travel. At least I can get back from five kilometers even if something goes wrong with the robot or my handling of it. I’m hoping with both lobes and all my blood pressure that Joe’s depth measure really is wrong. Down, Charley. Jenny, if you’ll bring the rope to the hold where the robot is, I’ll meet you there.”

  “I’m there already. I had the spinnerets coil the rope as it was made, of course. It should pull out from one end without tangling.”

  “Good. Recoiling that much by hand might have let Molly get more than five kilos away even if Joe is wrong. I’ll be right there.”

  Molly found herself much more able to examine her surroundings after hearing the other women settle this matter. She had been in full armor this long before; most of the planets of the Fire-Smoke binary system, even Pearl, where the Human colony had centered because of the gravity, had environments where no Human could survive. She had done laboratory and course work on most of them at one time or another, often with no Human-conditioned station anywhere nearby. Then, however, the interest of the work itself usually kept her from considering personal comfort for very long at a time.

  Now, though, she found herself thinking more and more of the simple comfort of being able to relax, move her limbs freely, and breathe without hearing an echo in her helmet. Decent gravity would also have been nice, though she had been aboard Classroom long enough to be less concerned with this aspect of life. With safety now a smaller problem than comfort, however, she could concentrate for a while longer on the job.