Heavy Planet Part 10

At long last the platform appeared above the edge of the cliff and its supporting sling reached the pulley, preventing any further elevation. The edge of the elevator was only an inch or so from the cliff; it was long and narrow, to accommodate the Mesklinite form, and a push on one end with a spar sent the other swinging over solid ground. Dondragmer, who had opened his eyes at the sound of voices, crawled thankfully off and away from the edge.

The watching Lackland announced his safety even before Barlennan could do so to the waiting sailors below, and his words were at once translated by one who knew some English. They were relieved, to put it mildly; they had seen the platform arrive, but could not tell the condition of its pa.s.senger. Barlennan took advantage of their feelings, sending the lift down as fast as possible and starting another pa.s.senger up.

The whole operation was completed without accident; ten times in all the elevator made its trip before Barlennan decided that there could be no more taken from below without making the supply job of those who remained too difficult.

The tension was over now, however, and once again a feeling that they were in the final stages of the mission spread through Earthmen and natives alike.

"If you'll wait about two minutes, Barl," Lackland relayed the information given him by one of the computers, "the sun will be exactly on the direction line you should follow. We've warned you that we can't pin the rocket down closer than about six miles; we'll guide you into the middle of the area that we're sure contains it, and you'll have to work out your own search from there. If the terrain is at all similar to what you have where you are now, that will be rather difficult, I fear."

"You are probably right, Charles; we have had no experience with such matters. Still, I am sure we will solve that problem; we have solved all others-frequently with your help, I confess. Is the sun in line yet?"

"Just a moment-there! Is there any landmark even reasonably distant which you can use to hold your line until the sun comes around again?"

"None, I fear. We will have to do the best we can, and take your corrections each day."

"That's a bit like dead reckoning where you don't know the winds or currents, but it will have to do. We'll correct our own figures every time we can get a fix on you. Good luck!"

18: MOUND BUILDERS.

Direction was a problem, as all concerned found out at once. It was physically impossible to maintain a straight line of travel; every few yards the party had to detour around a boulder that was too high to see or climb over. The physical structure of the Mesklinites aggravated the situation, since their eyes were so close to the ground. Barlennan tried to make his detours in alternate directions, but he had no means of checking accurately the amount of each one. It was a rare day when the direction check from the rocket did not show them to be twenty or thirty degrees off.

About every fifty days a check was made on the position of the transmitter-there was only one moving now; another had been left with the group at the hoist-and a new direction computed. High-precision work was required, and occasionally some doubt was felt about the accuracy of a given fix. When this happened Barlennan was always warned, and left to his own discretion. Sometimes, if the Earthmen did not sound too doubtful of their own work, he would go on; at others, he would wait for a few days to give them a chance for a better fix. While waiting he would consolidate his position, redistributing pack loads and modifying the food rations when it seemed necessary. He had hit upon the idea of crailblazing almost before starting, and a solid line of pebbles marked their path from the edge. He had the idea of eventually clearing all the stones from a path and heaping them on each side, thus making a regular road; but this would be later, when trips back and forth between the grounded rocket and the supply base became regular.

The fifty miles pa.s.sed slowly under their many feet, but pa.s.s it finally did. The men, as Lackland said, had done all they could; to the best of their ability to measure, Barlennan should now be standing beside the stranded machine. Both the vision set and the captain's voice clearly informed him that no such state of affairs existed, which did not surprise him at all.

"That's the best we can do, Barl. I'll swear, knowing our math boys, that you're within six miles of that gadget, and probably a good deal less. You can organize your men better than I for a search. Anything we can do we certainly will, but I can't imagine what it might be at this point. How do you plan to arrange matters?"

Barlennan paused before answering. A six-mile circle is an appalling area to search when visibility averages three or four yards. He could cover territory most rapidly, of course, by spreading out his men; but that raised to the point of near certainty the chance of losing some of them. He put this point up to Lackland.

"The rocket itself is about twenty feet tall," the man pointed out. "For practical purposes your vision circle is therefore larger than you say. If you could only get up on one of those larger boulders you'd probably see the s.h.i.+p from where you are-that's what's so annoying about the whole situation."

"Of course; but we can't do that. The large rocks are six or eight of your feet in height; even if we could climb their nearly vertical sides, I would certainly never again look down a straight wall, and will not risk having my men do so."

"Yet you climbed that cleft up to the plateau."

"That was different. We were never beside an abrupt drop."

"Then if a similar slope led up to one of these boulders, you wouldn't mind getting that far from the ground?"

"No, but-hmmm. I think I see what you're driving at. Just a moment." The captain looked at his surroundings more carefully. Several of the great rocks were nearby; the highest, as he had said, protruded some six feet from the hard ground. Around and between them were the ever-present pebbles that seemed to floor the whole plateau. Possibly if Barlennan had ever been exposed to solid geometry he would not have made the decision he did; but having no real idea of the volume of building material he was undertaking to handle, he decided that Lackland's idea was sound.

"We'll do it, Charles. There's enough small rock and dirt here to build anything we want." He turned from the radio and outlined the plan to the sailors. If Dondragmer had any doubts about its feasibility he kept them to himself; and presently the entire group was rolling stones. Those closest to the selected rock were moved close against it, and others against these, until a circle of bare ground began to spread outward from the scene of operations. Periodically a quant.i.ty of the hard soil was loosened by harder pincers and spread onto the layer of small rocks; it was easier to carry and filled more s.p.a.ce-until the next layer of stone tamped it down.

Progress was slow but steady. Some indication of the time it took may be gained from the fact that at one point part of the group had to be sent back along the blazed trail for further food supplies-a thing which had been unnecessary in the eight-hundred-mile walk from the cleft; but at last the relatively flat top of the boulder felt the tread of feet, probably for the first time since the inner energies of Mesklin had pushed the plateau to its present elevation. The ramp spread down and to each side from the point of access; no one approached the other side of the boulder, where the drop was still sheer.

From the new vantage point Lackland's prediction was fulfilled-after months of travel and danger, the goal of the expedition was in sight. Barlennan actually had the vision set hauled up the ramp so the Earthmen could see it too; and for the first time in over an Earth year, Rosten's face lost its habitual grim expression. It was not much to see; perhaps one of the Egyptian pyramids, plated with metal and placed far enough away, would have looked somewhat like the blunt cone that lifted above the intervening stones. It did not resemble the rocket Barlennan had seen before-in fact, it did not greatly resemble any rocket previously built within twenty light-years of Earth; but it was obviously something that did not belong to Mesklin's normal landscape, and even the expedition members who had not spent months on the monstrous planet's surface seemed to feel weight roll from their shoulders.

Barlennan, though pleased, did not share the abandon that was approaching party intensity on Toorey. He was better able than those whose view depended on television to judge just what lay between his present position and the rocket. This appeared no worse than what they had already crossed, but it was certainly no better. There would no longer be the Earthmen's guidance, either; and even with the present vantage point, he could not quite see how the party was to maintain its line of march for the mile and a half that they would have to travel. The men did not actually know the direction now, so their method would not work-or would it? He could tell them when the sun lay in the right direction; after that they could call him each time it pa.s.sed through the same bearing. For that matter, one man could stay here and give the same information without bothering the Flyers-but wait; he had only one radio now. It could not be in both places at once. For the first time Barlennan really missed the set that had been left with the river-dwellers.

Then it occurred to him that he might not need a radio. True, the air did not carry sound so well here-it was the only aspect of the thinner atmosphere of the plateau that the sailors had noticed at all-but the Mesklinite voice, as Lackland had remarked, was something that had to be heard to be believed. The captain decided to try it; he would leave one man here on the lookout platform, whose duty would consist of hooting with all the energy the muscles around his swimming-siphon could muster each time the sun pa.s.sed straight above the gleaming cone that was their goal. The trail would be blazed as before so that he could follow when the others arrived.

Barlennan outlined this idea to the group. Dondragmer pointed out that on the basis of past experience they might even so go too far to one side, since there would be no way of making fixes as the Earthmen had done to correct c.u.mulative errors; the fact that the watcher's voice did not sound from directly opposite the sun at any time would mean nothing in this echo-rich neighborhood. He admitted, however, that it was the best idea so far, and did stand a good chance of bringing them within sight of the rocket. A sailor was chosen, therefore, to man the observation post, and the trip was resumed in the new direction.

For a short distance the post itself remained in sight, and it was possible to judge the error that had crept into their course each time the sailor's voice was heard. Presently, however, the rock on which he was standing was lost behind others of equal size, and navigation settled down to the task of making sure they were heading as closely as possible toward the sun each time the echoing hoot sounded in their ears. The sound grew weaker as the days pa.s.sed, but with no other sounds on the lifeless plateau to cover it there was never any doubt of what they heard.

None of them even yet considered themselves experienced enough in land travel to estimate accurately the distance covered, and all were used to arriving much later than original hopes called for; so the group was pleasantly surprised when finally the monotony of the desert of stone was broken by a change in the landscape. It was not exactly the change that had been expected, but it attracted attention for all that.

It was almost directly ahead of them, and for a moment several of the group wondered whether they had in some incomprehensible way traveled in a circle. A long slope of mixed dirt and pebbles showed between the boulders. It was about as high as the one they had built to the observation station; but as they approached they saw it extended much farther to each side-as far, in fact, as anyone could see. It lapped around large boulders like an ocean wave frozen in mid-motion; even the Mesklinites, totally unused to explosion or meteor craters, could see that the material had been hurled outward from some point beyond the slope. Barlennan, who had seen rockets from Toorey land more than once, had a pretty good idea of the cause and of what he was going to see even before the party topped the rise. He was right in general, if not in detail.

The rocket stood in the center of the bowl-shaped indentation that had been blasted by the fierce wash of her supporting jets. Barlennan could remember the way snow had swirled out of the way when the cargo rocket landed near Lackland's "Hill." He could appreciate the fact that the lifting power used here must have been far mightier in order to ease the bulk of this machine down, smaller though it was. There were no large boulders near it, though a few reared up near the sides of the bowl. The ground inside was bare of pebbles; the soil itself had been scooped out so that only four or five of the projectile's twenty feet of height rose above the general run of rocks covering the plain.

Its base diameter was almost as great as its height, and remained so for perhaps a third of the way upward. This, Lackland explained when the vision set had been brought to bear on the interior of the blast crater, was the part housing the driving power.

The upper part of the machine narrowed rapidly to a blunt point, and this housed the apparatus which represented such a tremendous investment in time, intellectual effort, and money on the part of so many worlds. A number of openings existed in this part, as no effort had been made to render the compartments airtight. Such apparatus as required either vacuum or special atmosphere in which to function was individually sealed.

"You said once, after the explosion in your tank that wrecked it so completely, that something of the sort must have happened here," Barlennan said. "I see no signs of it; and if the holes I see were open when you landed it, how could enough of your oxygen still be there to cause an explosion? You told me that beyond and between worlds there was no air, and what you had would leak out through any opening."

Rosten cut in before Lackland could answer. He and the rest of the group had been examining the rocket on their own screen.

"Barl is quite right. Whatever caused the trouble was not an oxygen blast. I don't know what it was. We'll just have to keep our eyes open when we go inside, in the hope of finding the trouble-not that it will matter much by then, except to people who want to build another of these things. I'd say we might as well get to work; I have a horde of physicists on my neck simply quivering for information. It's lucky they put a biologist in charge of this expedition; from now on there won't be a physicist fit to approach."

"Your scientists will have to contain themselves a little longer," Barlennan interjected. "You seem to have overlooked something."

"What?"

"Not one of the instruments you want me to put before the lens of your vision set is within seven feet of the ground; and all are inside metal walls which I suspect would be rather hard for us to remove by brute force, soft as your metals seem to be."

"Blast it, you're right, of course. The second part is easy; most of the surface skin is composed of quick-remove access plates that we can show you how to handle without much trouble. For the rest-hmm. You have nothing like ladders, and couldn't use them if you had. Your elevator has the slight disadvantage of needing at least an installation crew at the top of its travel before you can use it. Offhand, I'm afraid I'm stuck for the moment. We'll think of something, though; we've come too far to be stumped now."

"I would suggest that you spend from now until my sailor gets here from the lookout in thought. If by that time you have no better idea, we will use mine."

"What? You have an idea?"

"Certainly. We got to the top of that boulder from which we saw your rocket; what is wrong with using the same method here?" Rosten was silent for fully half a minute; Lackland suspected he was kicking himself mentally.

"I can only see one point," he said at last. "You will have a much larger job of rock-piling than you did before. The rocket is more than three times as high as the boulder where you built the ramp, and you'll have to build up all around it instead of on one side, I suspect."

"Why can we not simply make a ramp on one side up to the lowest level containing the machines you are interested in? It should then be possible to get up the rest of the way inside, as you do in the other rockets."

"For two princ.i.p.al reasons. The more important one is that you won't be able to climb around inside; the rocket was not built to carry living crews, and has no communication between decks. All the machinery was built to be reached from outside the hull, at the appropriate level. The other point is that you cannot start at the lower levels; granted that you could get the access covers off, I seriously doubt that you could lift them back in place when you finished with a particular section. That would mean that you'd have the covers off all around the hull before you built up to the next level; and I'm rather afraid that such a situation would not leave enough metal in place below to support the sections above. The top of the cone would-or at least might-collapse. Those access ports occupy the greater part of the skin, and are thick enough to take a lot of vertical load. Maybe it was bad design, but remember we expected to open them only in s.p.a.ce, with no weight at all.

"What you will have to do, I fear, is bury the rocket completely to the highest level containing apparatus and then dig your way down, level by level. It may even be advisable to remove the machinery from each section as you finish with it; that will bring the load to an absolute minimum. After all, there'll only be a rather frail-looking skeleton when you have all those plates off, and I don't like to picture what would happen to it with a full equipment load times seven hundred, nearly."

"I see." Barlennan took his turn at a spell of silent thought. "You yourself can think of no alternative to this plan? It involves, as you rightly point out, much labor."

"None so far. We will follow your recommendation, and think until your other man comes from the observation point. I suspect we work under a grave disadvantage, though-we are unlikely to think of any solution which does not involve machinery we couldn't get to you."

"That I had long since noticed."

The sun continued to circle the sky at a shade better than twenty degrees a minute. A call had long since gone echoing out to the observation platform to let the guide know his work was done; he was presumably on the way in. The sailors did nothing except rest and amuse themselves; all, at one time or another, descended the easy slope of the pit the blasts had dug to examine the rocket at close quarters. All of them were too intelligent to put its operation down to magic, but it awed them nonetheless. They understood nothing of its principle of operation, though that could easily have been made clear if Lackland had stopped to wonder how a race that did not breathe could nevertheless speak aloud. The Mesklinites possessed in well-developed form the siphon arrangement, similar to that of Earthly cephalopods, which their amphibious ancestors had used for high-speed swimming; they used it as the bellows for a very Earthly set of vocal cords, but were still able to put it to its original function. They were well suited by nature to understand the rocket principle.

Their lack of understanding was not all that aroused the sailors' respect. Their race built cities, and they had regarded themselves as good engineers; but the highest walls they ever constructed reached perhaps three inches from the ground. Multi-storied buildings, even roofs other than a flap of fabric, conflicted too violently with their almost instinctive fear of solid material overhead. The experiences of this group had done something to change the att.i.tude from one of unreasoning fear to one of intelligent respect for weight, but the habit clung nevertheless. The rocket was some eighty times the height of any artificial structure their race had ever produced; awe at the sight of such a thing was inevitable.

The arrival of the lookout sent Barlennan back to the radio, but there was no better idea than his own to be had. This did not surprise him at all. He brushed Rosten's apologies aside, and set to work along with his crew. Not even then did any of the watchers above think of the possibility of their agent's having ideas of his own about the rocket. Curiously enough, such a suspicion by then would have come much too late-too late to have any foundation.

Strangely, the work was not as hard or long as everyone had expected. The reason was simple; the rock and earth blown out by the jets was relatively loose, since there was no weather in the thin air of the plateau to pack it down as it had been before. A human being, of course, wearing the gravity nullifier the scientists hoped to develop from the knowledge concealed in the rocket, could not have pushed a shovel into it, for the gravity was a pretty good packing agent; it was loose only by Mesklinite standards. Loads of it were being pushed down the gentle inner slope of the pit to the growing pile around the tubes; pebbles were being worked clear of the soil and set rolling the same way, with a hooted warning beforehand. The warning was needed; once free and started, they moved too fast for the human eye to follow, and usually buried themselves completely in the pile of freshly moved earth.

Even the most pessimistic of the watchers began to feel that no more setbacks could possibly occur, in spite of the number of times they had started to unpack shelved apparatus and then had to put it away again. They watched now with mounting glee as the s.h.i.+ning metal of the research projectile sank lower and lower in the heap of rock and earth, and finally vanished entirely except for a foot-high cone that marked the highest level in which machinery had been installed.

At this point the Mesklinites ceased work, and most of them retreated from the mound. The vision set had been brought up and was now facing the projecting tip of metal, where part of the thin line marking an access port could be seen. Barlennan sprawled alone in front of the entrance, apparently waiting for instructions on the method of opening it; and Rosten, watching as tensely as everyone else, explained to him. There were four quick-disconnect fasteners, one on each corner of the trapezoidal plate. The upper two were about on a level with Barlennan's eyes; the others some six inches below the present level of the mound. Normally they were released by pus.h.i.+ng in and making a quarter turn with a broad-bladed screwdriver; it seemed likely that Mesklinite pincers could perform the same function. Barlennan, turning to the plate, found that they could. The broad, slotted heads turned with little effort and popped outward, but the plate did not move otherwise.

"You had better fasten ropes to one or both of those heads, so you can pull the plate outward from a safe distance when you've dug down to the others and unfastened them," Rosten pointed out. "You don't want that piece of hardware falling on top of anyone; it's a quarter of an inch thick. The lower ones are a darned sight thicker, I might add."

The suggestion was followed, and the earth sc.r.a.ped rapidly away until the lower edge of the plate was uncovered. The fasteners here proved no more troublesome than their fellows, and moments later a hard pull on the ropes unseated the plate from its place in the rocket's skin. For the first fraction of an inch of its outward motion it could be seen; then it vanished abruptly, and reappeared lying horizontally while an almost riflelike report reached the ears of the watchers. The sun, s.h.i.+ning into the newly opened hull, showed clearly the single piece of apparatus inside; and a cheer went up from the men in the screen room and the observing rocket.

"That did it, Barl! We owe you more than we can say. If you'll stand back and let us photograph that as it is, we'll start giving you directions for taking out the record and getting it to the lens." Barlennan did not answer at once; his actions spoke some time before he did.

He did not get out of the way of the eye. Instead he crawled toward it and pushed the entire set around until it no longer covered the nose of the rocket.

"There are some matters we must discuss first," he said quietly.

19: NEW BARGAIN.

Dead silence reigned in the screen room. The head of the tiny Mesklinite filled the screen, but no one could interpret the expression on the completely unhuman "face." No one could think of anything to say; asking Barlennan what he meant would be a waste of words, since he obviously planned to tell anyway. He waited for long moments before resuming his speech; and when he did, he used better English than even Lackland realized he had acquired.

"Dr. Rosten, a few moments ago you said that you owed us more than you could hope to repay. I realize that your words were perfectly sincere in one way-I do not doubt the actuality of your grat.i.tude for a moment-but in another they were merely rhetorical. You had no intention of giving us any more than you had already agreed to supply-weather information, guidance across new seas, possibly the material aid Charles mentioned some time ago in the matter of spice collecting. I realize fully that by your moral code I am ent.i.tled to no more; I made an agreement and should adhere to it, particularly since your side of the bargain has largely been fulfilled already.

"However, I want more; and since I have come to value the opinions of some, at least, of your people I want to explain why I am doing this-I want to justify myself, if possible. I tell you now, though, that whether I succeed in gaining your sympathy or not, I will do exactly as I planned.

"I am a merchant, as you well know, primarily interested in exchanging goods for what profit I can get. You recognized that fact, offering me every material you could think of in return for my help; it was not your fault that none of it was of use to me. Your machines, you said, would not function in the gravity and pressure of my world; your metals I cannot use-and would not need if I could; they lie free on the surface in many parts of Mesklin. Some people use them for ornaments; but I know from talk with Charles that they cannot be fas.h.i.+oned into really intricate forms without great machines, or at least more heat than we can easily produce. We do know the thing you call fire, by the way, is in ways more manageable than the flame cloud; I am sorry to have deceived Charles in that matter, but it seemed best to me at the time.

"To return to the original subject, I refused all but the guidance and weather information of the things you were willing to give. I thought some of you might be suspicious of that, but I have heard no sign of it in your words. Nevertheless, I agreed to make a voyage longer than any that has been made in recorded history to help solve your problem. You had told me how badly you needed the knowledge; none of you appeared to think that I might want the same thing, though I asked time and again for just that when I saw one or another of your machines. You refused answers to those questions, making the same excuse every time. I felt, therefore, that any way in which I could pick up some of the knowledge you people possess was legitimate. You have said, at one time or another, much about the value of what you call *science,' and always implied was the fact that my people did not have it. I cannot see why, if it is good and valuable to your people, it would not be equally so to mine.

"You can see what I am leading up to. I came on this voyage with exactly the same objective in my mind that was in yours when you sent me; I came to learn. I want to know the things by which you perform such remarkable acts. You, Charles, lived all winter in a place that should have killed you at once, by the aid of that science; it could make as much difference in the lives of my people, I am sure you will agree.

"Therefore I offer you a new bargain. I realize that my failure to live up to the letter of the old one may make you reluctant to conclude another with me. That will be simply too bad; I make no bones about pointing out that you can do nothing else. You are not here; you cannot come here; granting that you might drop some of your explosives down here in anger, you will not do so as long as I am near this machine of yours. The agreement is simple: knowledge for knowledge. You teach me, or Dondragmer, or anyone else in my crew who has the time and ability to learn the material, all the time we are working to take this machine apart for you and transmit the knowledge it contains."

"Just a-"

"Wait, Chief." Lackland cut short Rosten's expostulation. "I know Barl better than you do. Let me talk." He and Rosten could see each other in their respective screens, and for a moment the expedition's leader simply glared. Then he realized the situation and subsided.

"Right, Charlie. Tell him."

"Barl, you seemed to have some contempt in your tone when you referred to our excuse for not explaining our machines to you. Believe me, we were not trying to fool you. They are complicated; so complicated that the men who design and build them spend nearly half their lives first learning the laws that make them operate and the arts of their actual manufacture. We did not mean to belittle the knowledge of your people, either; it is true that we know more, but it is only because we have had longer in which to learn.

"Now, as I understand it, you want to learn about the machines in this rocket as you take it apart. Please, Barl, take my word as the sincerest truth when I tell you first that I for one could not do it, since I do not understand a single one of them; and second, that not one would do you the least good if you did comprehend it. The best I can say right now is that they are machines for measuring things that cannot be seen or heard or felt or tasted-things you would have to see in operation in other ways for a long time before you could even begin to understand. That is not meant as insult; what I say is almost as true for me, and I have grown up from childhood surrounded by and even using those forces. I do not understand them. I do not expect to understand them before I die; the science we have covers so much knowledge that no one man can even begin to learn all of it, and I must be satisfied with the field I do know-and perhaps add to it what little one man may in a lifetime.

"We cannot accept your bargain, Barl, because it is physically impossible to carry out our side of it."

Barlennan could not smile in the human sense, and he carefully refrained from giving his own version of one. He answered as gravely as Lackland had spoken.

"You can do your part, Charles, though you do not know it.

"When I first started this trip, all the things you have just said were true, and more. I fully intended to find this rocket with your help, and then place the radios where you could see nothing and proceed to dismantle the machine itself, learning all your science in the process.

"Slowly I came to realize that all you have said is true. I learned that you were not keeping knowledge from me deliberately when you taught us so quickly and carefully about the laws and techniques used by the glider-makers on that island. I learned it still more surely when you helped Dondragmer make the differential pulley. I was expecting you to bring up those points in your speech just now; why didn't you? They were good ones.

"It was actually when you were teaching us about the gliders that I began to have a slight understanding of what was meant by your term *science.' I realized, before the end of that episode, that a device so simple you people had long since ceased to use it actually called for an understanding of more of the universe's laws than any of my people realized existed. You said specifically at one point, while apologizing for a lack of exact information, that gliders of that sort had been used by your people more than two hundred years ago. I can guess how much more you know now-guess just enough to let me realize what I can't know.

"But you can still do what I want. You have done a little already, in showing us the differential hoist. I do not understand it, and neither does Dondragmer, who spent much more time with it; but we are both sure it is some sort of relative to the levers we have been using all our lives. We want to start at the beginning, knowing fully that we cannot learn all you know in our lifetimes. We do hope to learn enough to understand how you have found these things out. Even I can see it is not just guesswork, or even philosophizing like the learned ones who tell us that Mesklin is a bowl. I am willing at this point to admit you are right; but I would like to know how you found out the same fact for your own world. I am sure you knew before you left its surface and could see it all at once. I want to know why the Bree floats, and why the canoe did the same, for a while. I want to know what crushed the canoe. I want to know why the wind blows down the cleft all the time-no, I didn't understand your explanation. I want to know why we are warmest in winter when we can't see the sun for the longest time. I want to know why a fire glows, and why flame dust kills. I want my children or theirs, if I ever have any, to know what makes this radio work, and your tank, and someday this rocket. I want to know much-more than I can learn, no doubt; but if I can start my people learning for themselves, the way you must have-well, I'd be willing to stop selling at a profit." Neither Lackland nor Rosten found anything to say for a long moment. Rosten broke the silence.

"Barlennan, if you learned what you want, and began to teach your people, would you tell them where the knowledge came from? Do you think it would be good for them to know?"

"For some, yes; they would want to know about other worlds, and people who had used the same way to knowledge they were starting on. Others-well, we have a lot of people who let the rest pull the load for them. If they knew, they wouldn't bother to do any learning themselves; they'd just ask for anything particular they wanted to know-as I did at first; and they'd never realize you weren't telling them because you couldn't. They'd think you were trying to cheat them. I suppose if I told anyone, that sort would find out sooner or later, and-well, I guess it would be better to let them think I'm the genius. Or Don; they'd be more likely to believe it of him."

Rosten's answer was brief and to the point.

"You've made a deal."

20: FLIGHT OF THE BREE.

A gleaming skeleton of metal rose eight feet above a flat-topped mound of rock and earth. Mesklinites were busily attacking another row of plates whose upper fastenings had just been laid bare. Others were pus.h.i.+ng the freshly removed dirt and pebbles to the edge of the mound. Still others moved back and forth along a well-marked road that led off into the desert, those who approached dragging flat, wheeled carts loaded with supplies, those departing usually hauling similar carts empty. The scene was one of activity; practically everyone seemed to have a definite purpose. There were two radio sets in evidence now, one on the mound where an Earthman was directing the dismantling from his distant vantage point and the other some distance away.

Dondragmer was in front of the second set, engaged in animated conversation with the distant being he could not see. The sun still circled endlessly, but was very gradually descending now and swelling very, very slowly.