Close to Critical

by Hal Clement

  “Teacher!” A voice which even Aminadabarlee of Dromm could recognize as Nick’s erupted from the speaker. Raeker whirled back to his panel and closed the microphone switch.

  “Yes, Nick? What does Swift say?”

  “In effect, no. He wants nothing to do with anyone in this village but you.”

  “Didn’t you explain the language problem to him?”

  “Yes, but he says that if I was able to learn his words you, who are my teacher, should be able to learn them more quickly. Then he will not have to depend on people he doesn’t trust to tell him what you’re saying. I hope he’s right. He’s willing to leave the rest of us here, but you have to go with him.”

  “I see. You’d better agree, for now; it will at least keep those of you who are alive out of further trouble. It may be that we’ll be able to arrange a little surprise for Swift in the near future. You tell him that I’ll do what he says; I’ll go along with him to the caves—I suppose he’ll be starting back there tomorrow, though if he wants to stay longer don’t discourage him. When they go, you stay where you are; find everyone who’s still alive and get them back in shape—I suppose most of you are injured —and then wait until I get in touch with you. It may be some days, but leave it to me.”

  Nick was a fairly fast thinker, and remembered at once that Fagin could travel at night without the aid of fire—rain did not suffocate him. He thought he saw what the teacher planned to do; it was not his fault that he was wrong. The word “bathyscaphe” had never been used in his hearing.

  “Teacher!” he called, after a moment’s thought. “Wouldn’t it be better if we moved as soon as we could, and arranged some other place to meet you after you escape? He’ll come right back here sure as rainfall.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Just stay here, and get things back to normal as soon as possible. I’ll be seeing you.”

  “All right, Teacher.” Raeker leaned back in his seat once more, nodding his head slowly.

  The Drommian must have spent a good deal of time on Earth; he was able to interpret the man’s attitude. “You seem a great deal happier than you were a few minutes ago,” he remarked. “I take it you have seen your way out of the situation.”

  “I think so,” replied Raeker. “I had forgotten the bathyscaphe until I mentioned it to you; when I did recall it, I realized that once it got down there our troubles would be over. The trouble with that robot is that it has to crawl, and can be tracked and followed; the bathyscaphe, from the point of view of the natives down there, can fly. It has outside handling equipment, and when the crew goes down they can simply pick up the robot some night and fly it away from the cliff. I defy Swift to do any constructive tracking.”

  “Then isn’t Nick right? Won’t Swift head straight for the village? I should think you’d have done better to follow Nick’s suggestion.”

  “There’ll be time to move after we get the robot. If they leave the village before, we’ll have a lot of trouble finding them, no matter how carefully we arrange a meeting beforehand. The area is not very well mapped, and what there is doesn’t stay mapped very well.”

  “Why not? That sounds rather strange.”

  “Tenebra is a rather strange planet. Diastrophism is like Earth’s weather; the question is not whether it will rain tomorrow but whether your pasture will start to grow into a hill. There’s a team of geophysicists champing at the proverbial bit, waiting for the bathyscaphe to go down so they can set up a really close working connection with Nick’s group. The general cause we know—the atmosphere is mostly water near its critical temperature, and silicate rocks dissolve fairly rapidly under those circumstances. The place cools off just enough each night to let a little of the atmosphere turn liquid, so for the best part of two Earth days you have the crust washing down to the oceans like the Big Rock Candy Mountain. With three Earth gravities trying to make themselves felt, it’s hardly surprising that the crust is readjusting all the time.

  “Anyway, I think we’re set up now. It won’t be morning down there for a couple of days, and I don’t see how much can happen until then. My relief will be here soon; when he arrives, perhaps you would like to see the bathyscaphe with me.”

  “I should be most interested.” Raeker was getting the impression that either the Drommians were a very polite race or Aminadabarlee had been selected for his diplomatic post for that quality. He didn’t keep it long.

  Unfortunately, there was a delay in visiting the bathyscaphe. When Raeker and the Drommian reached the bay where the small shuttle of the Vindemiatrix was normally kept, they found it empty. A check with the watch officer—ship’s watch, not the one kept on the robot; the ; organizations were not connected—revealed that it had been taken out by the crewmen whom Raeker had asked • to show Aminadorneldo around.

  “The Drommian wanted to see the bathyscaphe, Doctor, and so did young Easy Rich.”

  “Who?”

  “That daughter Councillor Rich has tagging along. Begging the pardon of the gentleman with you, political inspection teams are all right as long as they inspect; but when they make the trip an outing for their offspring—”

  “I have my son along,” Aminadabarlee remarked.

  “I know. There’s a difference between someone old enough to take care of himself and an infant whose fingers have to be kept off hot contacts …” The officer let his voice trail off, and shook his head. He was an engineer; Raeker suspected that the party had descended on the power room in the near past, but didn’t ask.

  “Have you any idea when the shuttle will be back?” he asked.

  The engineer shrugged. “None. Flanagan was letting the kid lead him around. He’ll be back when she’s tired, I suppose. You could call him, of course.”

  “Good idea.” Raeker led the way to the signal room of the Vindemiatrix, seated himself at a plate, and punched the combination of the tender’s set. The screen lighted up within a few seconds, and showed the face of Crystal Mechanic Second Class Flanagan, who nodded when he saw the biologist.

  “Hello, Doctor. Can I help you?”

  “We were wondering when you’d be back. Councillor Aminadabarlee would like to see the bathyscaphe, too.” The nearly two-second pause while light made the round trip from Vindemiatrix to tender and back was scarcely noticed by Raeker, who was used to it; the Drommian was rather less patient.

  “I can come back and pick you up whenever you want; my customers are fully occupied in the ’scaphe.” Raeker was a trifle surprised.

  “Who’s with them?”

  “I was, but I don’t really know much about the thing, and they promised not to touch anything.”

  “That doesn’t sound very safe to me. How old is the Rich girl? About twelve, isn’t she?”

  “I’d say so. I wouldn’t have left her there alone, but the Drommian was with her, and said he’d take care of things.”

  “I still think—” Raeker got no further. Four sets of long, webbed, wire-hard fingers tightened on his shoulders and upper arm, and the sleek head of Aminadabarlee moved into the pickup area beside his own. A pair of yellow-green eyes stared at the image hi the plate, and a deeper voice than Raeker had yet heard from Drommian vocal cords cut across the silence.

  “It is possible that I am less well acquainted with your language than I had believed,” were his words. “Do I understand that you have left two children unsupervised in a ship in space?”

  “Not exactly children, sir,” protested Flanagan. “The human girl is old enough to have a good deal of sense, and your own son is hardly a child; he’s as big as you.”

  “We attain our full physical growth within a year of birth,” snapped the Dromiman. “My son is four years old, about the social equivalent of a human being of seven. I was under the impression that human beings were a fairly admirable race, but to give responsibility to an individual as stupid as you appear to be suggests a set of social standards so low as to be indistinguishable from savagery. If anything happens to my boy—” He stopped;
Flanagan’s face had disappeared from the screen, and he must have missed the last couple of sentences of Amina-dabarlee’s castigation; but the Drommian was not through. He turned to Raeker, whose face had gone even paler than usual, and resumed. “It makes me sick to think that at times I have left my son in charge of human caretakers during my years on Earth. I had assumed your race to be civilized. If this piece of stupidity achieves its most likely result, Earth will pay the full price; not a human-driven ship will land again on any planet of the galaxy that values Drommian feelings. The story of your idiocy will cross the light-years, and no human ship will live to enter Drommian skies. Mankind will have the richly earned contempt of every civilized race in—”

  He was cut off, but not by words. A rending crash sounded from the speaker, and a number of loose objects visible on the screen jerked abruptly toward a near wall. They struck it loudly and rebounded, but without obeying the laws of reflection. They all bounced the same way— in the direction which Raeker recognized with a sinking feeling as that of the tender’s air lock. A book flew past the pickup area in the same direction, and struck a metal instrument traveling more slowly.

  But this collision went unheard. No more sound came from the speaker; the tender was silent, with the silence of airlessness.

  III. CEREBRATION; TRANSPORTATION; EMIGRATION

  Nick Chopper stood in the doorway of his hut and thought furiously. Behind him the seven other survivors of the raid lay hi various stages of disrepair. Nick himself was not entirely unscathed, but he was still able to walk— and, if necessary, fight, he told himself grimly. All of the others except Jim and Nancy would be out of useful action for several days at least.

  He supposed that Fagin had been right hi yielding to Swift as he had; at least, the savage had kept his word about letting Nick collect and care for his wounded friends. Every time Nick thought of the attack, however, or even of Swift, he felt like resuming the war. It would have given him intense pleasure to remove Swift’s scales one by one and use them to shingle a hut in full view of their owner.

  He was not merely brooding, however; he was really thinking. For the first time hi a good many years, he was questioning seriously a decision of Fagin’s. It seemed ridiculous that the Teacher could get away from the cave village without help; he hadn’t been able to fight Swift’s people during the attack, and if he had any powers Nick didn’t know about that was certainly the time to use them. Getting away at night didn’t count; he’d be tracked and caught first thing in the morning.

  But wait a minute. What could the cave-dwellers actually do to Fagin? The hard white stuff the Teacher was covered with—or made out of, for all Nick knew—might be proof against knives and spears; the point had never occurred to Nick or any of his friends. Maybe that was why Fagin was being so meek now, when his people could be hurt; maybe he planned to act more constructively when he was alone.

  It would be nice to be able to talk it over with the Teacher without Swift’s interference. Of course, the chief couldn’t eavesdrop very effectively, since he couldn’t understand English, but he would know that a conference was going on, and would be in a pretty good position to block any activity planned therein. If it were practical to get Swift out of hearing—but if that were possible, the whole thing would be solved anyway. The meat of the problem was the fact that Swift couldn’t be handled.

  Of course, it was night, and therefore raining. The invaders were being protected by the village fires, at the moment; however, Nick reflected, no one was protecting the fires themselves. He glanced upward at the thirty- to fifty-foot raindrops drifting endlessly out of the black sky, following one of them down to a point perhaps three hundred yards above his head. There it vanished, fading out in ghostly fashion as it encountered the updraft from the village fires. It was not the drops straight overhead which were troublesome—not to Fagin’s village.

  Another, larger drop beyond the glowing protective double ring accomplished more. It settled to the ground fifty yards beyond one of the outer fires. The ground had been cooled enough by its predecessors to let it remain liquid, so for a short time it was visible as it drifted toward the blaze under the impulse of the fires’ own convection currents. Then radiated heat made it fade out; but Nick knew it was still there. It had been crystal clear, free of suspended oxygen bubbles; it was now pure steam, equally free of combustion’s prime necessity. Nick would have nodded in satisfaction, had his head been capable of free movement, when the fire in the path of the invisible cloud suddenly began to cool and within a few seconds faded from visibility.

  If any of the attackers noticed the incident, they certainly did nothing. None of them moved, and the fire remained out. Five seconds later Nick had his plan worked out.

  He emerged fully from the hut and walked over to the main fuel magazine. Here he loaded himself with as much as he could carry, and took it back to the building where the wounded were lying. None of the raiders stopped or questioned him; none had spoken to him since the truce had been concluded. Inside the hut, he quickly built and lighted a fire. When it had come to an even glow he lighted a torch from it and walked back to the woodpile. Casually he stuck the cold end of the torch into the pile, as though to illuminate his work; then he made several more trips carrying fuel to the hut, leaving the torch where he had placed it. Eventually the building could hold no more wood, so he ceased his labor.

  But he left the torch.

  Tenebran wood glows like punk; it does not flame. It took some time for the stick to burn down to its base, and still longer before the increase in brilliancy of the region around the village showed that the main stack had properly caught. Even then, there was no reaction from the invaders. These had gathered into a tight group surrounding the robot, which had remained in its usual position at the center of the village.

  By this time, more than half of the peripheral fires were out, most of them in the outer ring. One or two of the inner ring had also been smothered, and Nick began to get an impression of uneasiness from the clustered cave-dwellers. When the last of the outer fires died, a mutter began to grow from their ranks, and Nick chuckled to himself. Swift just might have a little trouble handling his men as their protection from the rain vanished, and no caves were available. If the muttering continued, the chief would certainly have to take some action; and all he could do, as far as Nick could see, would be to ask Nick himself for help. That should put quite a dent in his authority.

  But Nick had underestimated the big fellow. From the vicinity of the robot his voice suddenly rapped out a series of orders; and obediently a dozen of his men ran from the outskirts of the group toward one of the fires which was still burning. There, to Nick’s disgust, they seized sticks from the small woodpile at its side, lighted their ends, carried the torches to the dead fires, and rekindled these without the slightest difficulty. Evidently the cave-dwellers didn’t sleep all night in their holes; someone had watched his fire-technique long enough to get at least some of the idea. If they also knew about replenishing… They did. More wood was being put on all the fires. Nick noted with satisfaction, however, that it was far too much wood; he wouldn’t have to wait too long before the small woodpiles beside each fire were extinguished. The cave-dwellers seemed to have taken the now fiercely glowing main pile as another bonfire; Swift was going to have to do some fast thinking when the reserves disappeared.

  This he proved able to do. It was fortunate that Nick had been able to keep awake, for Swift’s men did not announce their coming. They simply came.

  They were unarmed, rather to Nick’s surprise, but they approached the hut door without hesitation, almost as though they expected him to stand aside for them. When he didn’t, they stopped, the foremost half a spear’s length away. He may have intended to say something, but Nick spoke first.

  “What do you want? My friends are all wounded and can’t help you. There is no room in the hut. Go to the others, if you want shelter.”

  “Swift sent us for wood.” It was a
calm statement, with no “or else” concealed in it, as far as Nick could tell by the tone.

  “I have only enough to keep my own fire going for the night. You will have to use the other piles.”

  “They are used up.”

  “That isn’t my fault. You know that wood burns up hi a fire; you shouldn’t have put so much on.”

  “You didn’t tell us that. Swift says that you should therefore give us your own wood, which we saw you taking, and tell us how much to use.”

  It was evident that the chief had seen through at least part of Nick’s scheme, but there was nothing to do now but carry it through.

  “As I said, I have only enough for this fire,” he said. “I shall not give it up; I need it for myself and my friends.”

  Very much to his surprise, the fellow retreated without further words. Apparently he had gone as far as his orders extended, and was going back for more. Initiative did not flourish under Swift’s rule.

  Nick watched the group as it rejoined the main crowd and began to push its way through to the chief. Then he turned and nudged Jim.

  “Better get up, you and Nancy,” he whispered. “Swift can’t let this go. I’ll fight as well as I can; you keep me in ammunition.”

  “What do you mean?” Nancy’s thoughts were less swift than usual.

  “I can’t fight them with axes; they’d be through in two minutes. I’m tired and slow. I’m going to use torches— remember what it feels like to be burned? They don’t; I warned them about it when I was at their village, and they were always very careful, so none of them has any real experience. They’re going to get it now!”

  The other two were on their feet by this time. “All right,” agreed Jim. “We’ll light torches and pass them to you whenever you call. Are you going to poke with the things, or throw them? I never thought of fighting that way.”

  “Neither did I, until now. I’ll try poking first, so give me long ones. If I decide to throw, I’ll call for really short ones—we don’t want them throwing the things back at us, and they will if there’s enough to hold on to. They’re not too stupid for that—not by a long day’s journey!”