Heavy Planet Part 22

They had completed reconnecting on the port row, Number 1, all the way from bow to stern and were working their way forward on Row 2 when they discovered that they were trapped.

Takoorch's battery light was fading a trifle, and he took it over to the nearest fusion converter, which happened to be on a Row 1 truck, for recharging. He was quite startled to find that he couldn't get at or even see the converter; after a few seconds of fumbling and looking he called Beetchermarlf. It took nearly ten minutes for them to establish that they were completely enclosed by an opaque white wall, impenetrable even to their strength. It had welded all the outer trucks together and filled all the s.p.a.ces between them from mattress above to cobbles below, nearly three feet of height, on the average. Inside the wall they were still free to move about.

Their tools were edged rather than pointed, and too small to make appreciable way against the ice, though it took fully an hour of sc.r.a.ping to convince them both of that. Neither was greatly concerned as yet; obviously the ice was immobilizing the Kwembly, and the rest of the crew would have to dig down to them in the interest of freeing the vehicle if not for the prime purpose of rescue. Of course their supply of life hydrogen was limited, but this meant less to them than a corresponding oxygen shortage would have to a human being. They had at least ten or twelve hours yet of full activity, and when the hydrogen partial pressure dropped below a certain value they would simply lose consciousness. Their body chemistry would slow down more and more, but fifty and perhaps a hundred hours would pa.s.s before anything irreversible occurred. One of the reasons for Mesklinite durability, though human biologists had had no chance to find it out, was the remarkable simplicity of their biochemistry.

The two were calm enough, in fact, to go back to their a.s.signed work; and they were almost to the front of Row 2 before another discovery was made. This one did perturb them.

The ice was creeping inward. It was not coming rapidly, but it was coming. As it happened, neither of them knew any better than Ib Hoffman what being frozen into a block of the stuff was likely to do to them. Neither had the slightest desire to learn.

At least there was still light. Not all the power units were on outside trucks, and Takoorch had been able to recharge his battery. This made it possible to make another, very careful search of the boundaries of their prison. Beetchermarlf was hoping to find unfrozen s.p.a.ce either near the bottom or, preferably, near the top of the walls around them. He did not know whether the freezing would have started from the top or the bottom of the pond. He was not familiar, as any human being would have been, with the fact that ice floats on liquid water. This was just as well, since it would have led him to an erroneous conclusion in this instance. The crystals had indeed formed at the top, but they had been denser than the surrounding liquid and had settled, only to redissolve as they reached levels richer in ammonia. This pseudo-convection effect had had the result of robbing the lake rather uniformly of ammonia until it had reached a composition able to freeze almost simultaneously throughout. As a result, the search turned up no open s.p.a.ces.

For some time the two lay between two of the trucks, thinking and occasionally checking to see how far the freezing had progressed. They had no time measuring equipment, and therefore no basis for estimating the speed of the process. Takoorch guessed that it was slowing down; Beetchermarlf was less sure.

Occasionally an idea would strike one of them but the other usually managed to find a flaw in it.

"We can move some of these stones, the smaller ones," Takoorch remarked at one point. "Why can't we dig our way under the ice?"

"Where to?" countered his companion. "The nearest edge of the lake is forty or fifty cables away, or was the last I knew. We couldn't begin to dig that far in these rocks before our air gave out, even if there was any reason to suppose the freezing didn't include the water between the rocks underneath. Coming up before the edge wouldn't get us anywhere."

Takoorch admitted the justice of this with an acquiescent gesture and silence fell while the ice grew a fraction of an inch nearer.

Beetchermarlf had the next constructive thought.

"These lights must give off some heat, even if we can't feel it through the suits," he suddenly exclaimed. "Why shouldn't they keep the ice from forming near them, and even let us melt our way to the outside?"

"Worth trying," was Takoorch's laconic answer.

Together they approached the frosty barrier. Beetchermarlf built a small cairn of stones leaning against the ice, and set the light, adjusted for full brightness, at its top. Then both crowded close, their front ends part way up the heap of pebbles, and watched the s.p.a.ce between the lamp and the ice.

"Come to think of it," Takoorch remarked as they waited, "our bodies give off some heat, don't they? Shouldn't our just being here help melt this stuff?"

"I suppose so." Beetchermarlf was dubious. "We'd better watch to make sure that it doesn't freeze at each side and around behind us while we're waiting here."

"What will that matter? If it does, it means that we and the light together are enough to fight the freezing and we should be able to melt our way out."

"That's true. Watch, though, so we'll know if that's happening." Takoorch gestured agreement. They fell silent again.

The older helmsman, however, was not one to endure silence indefinitely, and presently he gave utterance to another idea.

"I know our knives didn't make much impression on the ice, but shouldn't c it help if we did some sc.r.a.ping right here where it's nearest the light?" He unclipped one of the blades they carried for general use and reached toward the ice.

"Wait a minute!" exclaimed Beetchermarlf. "If you start working there, how are we ever going to know whether the heat is having any effect?"

"If my knife gets us anywhere, who cares whether it's the heat or the work?" retorted Takoorch. Beetchermarlf found no good answer ready, so he subsided, muttering something about "controlled experiments" while the other Mesklinite went to work with his tiny blade.

As it happened, his interference did not spoil the experiment, though it may have delayed slightly the appearance of observable results. Body heat, lamp heat, and knife all together proved unequal to the job; the ice continued to gain. They had to remove the lamps from the cairn at last, and watch the latter slowly become enveloped in the crystalline wall.

"It won't be long now," Takoorch remarked as he swung the lights around them. "Only two of the power units are free, now. Should we charge up the lights again before they go, or isn't it worth the trouble?"

"We might as well," answered Beetchermarlf. "It seems a pity that that's the only use we can get out of all that power. Four of those things can push the Kuembly around on level ground and I once heard a human being say that one could do it if it could get traction. That certainly could chip ice for us if we could find a way to apply it."

"We can take the power box out easily enough, but what we'd do afterward beats me. The units put out electric current as one choice, but I don't see how we could shock the ice away. The mechanical torque you can get from them works only on the motor shafts."

"We'd be more likely to shock ourselves away if we used the current. I don't know very much about electricity, it was mostly plain mechanics I got in the little time I was at the College, but I know enough of it can kill. Think of something else."

Takoorch endeavored to comply. Like his young companion, he had had only a short period of exposure to alien knowledge; both had volunteered for the Dhrawn project in preference to further cla.s.swork. Their knowledge of general physics might have compared fairly well with that of Benj Hoffman when he was ten or twelve years old. Neither was really comfortable in thinking about matters for which no easily visualized model could be furnished.

They were not, however, lacking in the ability to think abstractly. Both had heard of heat as representing a lowest common denominator of energy, even if they didn't picture it as random particle motion.

It was Beetchermarlf who first thought of another effect of electricity.

"Tak! Remember the explanations we got about not putting too much power into the trucks until the cruiser got moving? The humans said it was possible to snap the treads or damage the motors if we tried to accelerate too faust."

"That's right. Quarter power is the limit below a hundred cables per hour."

"Well, we have the power controls here where we can get at them, and those motors certainly aren't going to turn. Why not just power this truck and let the motor get as hot as it wants to?"

"What makes you think it will get hot? You don't know what makes those motors go any more than I do. They didn't say it would make them hot, just that it was bad for them."

"I know, but what else could it be? You know that any sort of energy that isn't used up some other way turns into heat."

"That doesn't sound quite right, somehow," returned the older sailor. "Still, I guess anything is worth trying now. They didn't say anything about the motor's wrecking the rest of the s.h.i.+p too; if it ruins us, well, we won't be much worse off."

Beetchermarlf paused; the thought that he might be endangering the Kwembly hadn't crossed his mind. The more he thought of it, the less he felt justified in taking the chance. He looked at the relatively tiny power unit nestling between the treads of the nearby truck, and wondered whether such a minute thing could really be a danger to the huge bulk above them. Then he remembered the vastly greater size of the machine which had brought him and his fellows to Dhrawn and realized that the sort of power which could hurl such immense ma.s.ses through the sky was not to be handled casually. He would never be afraid to use such engines, since he had been given a chance to become familiar with their normal and proper handling; but deliberately misusing one of them was a different story.

"You're right," he admitted somewhat inaccurately. Takoorch had been, after all, willing to take the chance. "We'll have to work it differently. Look, if the tracks are free to turn, then we can't damage the motor or the power box and just stirring up water will warm it."

"You think so? I remember hearing something like that, but if I can't break up this ice with my own strength it's hard to see how simply stirring water is going to do it. Besides, the trucks aren't free; they're on the bottom with the Kwembly's weight on them."

"Right. You wanted to dig. Start moving rocks; that ice is getting close."

Beetchermarlf set the example and began prying the rounded cobbles from the edges of the treads. It was a hard job even for Mesklinite muscles. Smooth as they were, the stones were tightly packed; furthermore when one was moved, there was not too much room in which to put it. The stones under the treads, which were the ones which really had to be s.h.i.+fted, could not even be reached until those at the sides were out of the way. The two labored furiously to clear a ditch around the truck. They were frightened at the time it took.

When the ditch was deep enough, they tried to pry stones from under the treads and this was even more discouraging.

The Kwembly had a ma.s.s of about two hundred tons. On Dhrawn, this meant a weight of sixteen million pounds to distribute among the fifty-six remaining trucks: the mattress did a good job of distributing. Three hundred thousand pounds, even if it is a rather short three hundred thousand, is too much even for a Mesklinite, whose weight, even at Mesklin's pole, is little over three hundred. It is a great deal even for some eight square feet of caterpillar tread. If Dhrawn's gravity had not done an equally impressive job of packing its surface materials, the Kwembly and her sister vehicles would probably have sunk to their mattresses before travelling a yard.

In other words, the rocks under the tread were held quite firmly. Nothing the two sailors could do would move one of them at all. There was nothing to use as a lever; their ample supplies of spare rope were useless without pulleys; their unaided muscles were pitifully inadequate-a situation still less familiar to them than to races whose mechanical revolution lay a few centuries in the past.

The approaching ice, however, was a stimulus to thought. It could also have been a stimulus to panic but neither of the sailors was p.r.o.ne to that form of disintegration. Again, it was Beetchermarlf who led.

"Tak, get out from under. We can move those pebbles. Get forward; they're going to go the other way." The youngster was climbing the truck as he spoke, and Takoorch grasped the idea at once. He vanished beyond the next-forward truck without a word. Beetchermarlf stretched out along the main body of the drive unit, between the treads. In this foot-wide s.p.a.ce, beneath and in front of him, was the recess which held the power converter. This was a rectangular object about the same size as the communicators, with ring-tipped control rods projecting from its surface and guide loops equipped with tiny pulleys at the edges. Lines for remote handling from the bridge were threaded through some of the guides and attached to the rings but the helmsman ignored them. He could see little, since the lights were still on the bottom several feet away and the top of the truck was in shadow; however, he did not need sight. Even clad in an air suit he could handle these levers by touch.

Carefully he eased the master reactor control to the "operate" position; then, even more gingerly, started the motors forward. They responded properly; the treads on either side of him moved forward, and a clattering of small, hard objects against each other became audible for a moment. Then this ceased, and the treads began to race. Beetchermarlf instantly cut off the power, and crawled off the truck to see what had happened.

The plan had worked, just as a computer program with a logic error works: there is an answer forthcoming but not the one desired. As the helmsman had planned, the treads had scuffed the rocks under them backward; but he had forgotten the effect of the pneumatic mattress above. The truck had settled under its own weight and the downward thrust of the gas pressure until the cha.s.sis between the treads had met the bottom. Looking up, Beetchermarlf could see the bulge in the mattress where the entire drive unit had been let down some four inches.

Takoorch appeared from his shelter and looked the situation over, but said nothing. There was nothing useful to say.

Neither of them could guess how much more give there was to the mattress, and how much farther the truck would have to be let down before it would really hang free, though they knew the details of the Kwemb/y's construction. The mattress was not a single gas bag but was divided into thirty separate cells, having two trucks in tandem attached to each. The helmsmen knew the details of the attachment-boch had just spent many hours repairing the a.s.semblies-but even the recent display of the Kwembly's underside with the weight off nearly all the trucks left them very doubtful about how far any one truck could extend by itself.

"Well, back to stone lugging," remarked Takoorch as he worked his nippers under a pebble. "Maybe these have been jarred loose now; otherwise it's going to be awkward, getting at them only from the ends."

"There isn't enough time for the job. The ice is still growing toward us. We might have to get the treads a whole body-length deeper before they'll run free. Leave the trucks alone, Tak. We'll have to try something else."

"All I want to know is what."

Beetchermarlf showed him. Taking a light with him this time, he climbed once more to the top of the truck. Takoorch followed, mystified. The younger sailor reared up against the shaft which formed the swiveling support of the truck, and attacked the mattress with his knife.

"But you can't hurt the s.h.i.+p!" Takoorch objected.

"We can fix it later. I don't like it any better than you do, and I'd gladly let the air out by the regular bleeder valve if we could only reach it; but we can't, and if we don't get the load off this truck very soon we won't do it at all." He continued slas.h.i.+ng as he spoke.

It was little easier than moving the stones. The mattress fabric was extremely thick and tough; to support the Kwembly it had to hold in a pressure more than a hundred pounds per square inch above the ground. One of the nuisances of the long trips was the need to pump the cells up manually or to bleed off excess pressure, when the height of the ground they were traversing changed more than a few feet. At the moment the mattress was a little flat, since no pumping had been done after the run down the river, but the inner pressure was that much higher.

Again and again Beetchermarlf sliced at the same point on the tautstretched surface. Each time the blade went just a little deeper. Takoorch, convinced at last of the necessity, joined him. The second blade's path crossed that of the first, the two flas.h.i.+ng alternately in a rhythm almost too fast for a human eye to follow. A human witness, had one been possible, would have expected them to sever each other's nippers at any moment.

Even so, it took many minutes to get through. The first warning of success was a fine stream of bubbles which spread in all directions up the slope of the bulging gas cell. A few more slashes and the cross-shaped hole with its inch-long arms was gus.h.i.+ng Dhrawnian air in a flood of bubbles that made the work invisible. The prisoners ceased their efforts.

Slowly but visibly the stretched fabric was collapsing. The bubbles fled more slowly across its surface, gathering at the high point near the wall of ice. For a few moments Beetchermarlf thought the fabric would go entirely flat, but the weight of the suspended truck prevented that. The center of the cell or the point at which the truck was attached (neither of them knew just where the cell boundaries were) was straining downward: it was now pull instead of push.

"I'll start the engine again and see what happens," said Beetchermarlf. "Get forward again for a minute." Takoorch obeyed. The younger helmsman deliberately wedged a number of pebbles under the front ends of the treads, climbed the truck once more and settled down. He had kept the light with him this time, not to help him with handling controls but to make it easier to tell how and whether the unit moved. He looked at the point of attachment a few inches above him as he started the engine once more.

The pebbles had provided some traction; the fabric wrinkled and the swivel tilted slightly as the truck strained forward. An upper socket, inaccessible inside the cell, into which the shaft telescoped, prevented the tilt from exceeding a few degrees. The trucks, of course, could not be allowed to touch each other but the strain could be seen. As the motion reached its limit the trucks continued moving, but this time they did not race free. Sound and tactile vibrations both indicated that they were slipping on the pebbles and after a few seconds the feel of swirling, eddying water became perceptible against Beetchermarlfs s air suit. He started to climb down from the truck and was nearly swept under one of the treads as he s.h.i.+fted grips. He barely stopped the motor in time with a hasty s.n.a.t.c.h at the control. He needed several seconds to regain his composure after that; even his resilient physique could hardly have survived being worked through the s.p.a.ce between treads and rocks. At the very least, his air suit would have been ruined.

Then he took time to trace very carefully the control cords leading from the reactor to the upper guides along the bottom of the mattress, following them by eye to the point above the next truck forward where he could reach them. A few seconds later he was on top of the other truck, starting the motor up again from a safe distance and mentally kicking himself for not having done it that way from the beginning.

Takoorch reappeared beside him and remarked, "Well, we'll soon know whether stirring water up does any warming."

"It will," replied Beetchermarlf. "Besides, the treads are rubbing against the stones on the bottom instead of kicking them out of the way this time. Whether or not you believe that stirring makes heat, you certainly know that friction does. Watch the ice, or tell me if the neighborhood is getting too hot. I'm at the lowest power setting, but that's still a lot of energy."

Takoorch rather pessimistically went over to a point where the cairn should be visible if it were ever freed of ice. He settled down to wait. The currents weren't too bad here, though he could feel them tugging at his not-too-well-ballasted body. He anch.o.r.ed himself to a couple of medium-sized rocks and stopped worrying about being washed under the treads.

He did not really see how merely stirring water could heat anything but Beetchermarlf. point about friction was comforting. Also, while he would not have admitted it in so many words, he tended to give more weight to the younger sailor's opinion than to his own and he fully expected to see the ice yielding very shortly.

He was not disappointed; within five minutes he thought that more of the stony bottom was becoming visible between him and the barrier. In ten he was sure, and a hoot of glee apprised Beetchermarlf of the fact. The latter took the risk of leaving the control lines untended to come to see for himself and agreed. The ice was retreating. Immediately he began to plan.

"All right, Tak. Let's get the other units going as fast as they melt free and we can get at their controls. We should be able to melt the Kuvmbly loose from this thing, besides getting ourselves out from under."

Takoorch asked a question.

"Are you going to puncture the cells under all the powered units? That will let the air out of a third of the mattress."

Beetchermarlf was taken slightly aback.

"I'd forgotten that. No, well, we could patch them all, but-no, that's not so good. Let's see. When we get another power unit clear we can mount it on the other truck that's on this cell we've drained already; that will give us twice as much heat. After that I don't know. We could see about digging under the others-no, that didn't work so well-I don't know. Well, we can set one more driver going, anyway. Maybe that will be enough."

"We can hope," said Takoorch dubiously. The youngster's uncertainty had rather disappointed him, and he wasn't too impressed with the toned-down subst.i.tute for a plan; but he had nothing better himself to offer. "What do I do first?" he asked.

"I'd better go back and stand by those ropes, though I suppose everything's safe enough," replied Beetchermarlf indirectly. "Why don't you keep checking around the edges of the ice, and get hold of another converter as soon as one is unfrozen? We can put it into that truck," he indicated the other one attached to the deflated cell, "and start it up as soon as possible. All right?"

Takoorch gestured agreement and started surveying the ice barrier. Beetchermarlf returned to the control lines, waiting pa.s.sively. Takoorch made several circuits of the boundary, watching happily as the ice retreated in all directions. He was a little bothered by the discovery that the process was slowing down as the cleared s.p.a.ce increased but even he was not too surprised. He made up his mind eventually which of the frozen-in power boxes would be the first to be released and settled down near it to wait.

His att.i.tude, like that of his companion waiting at the controls, cannot be described exactly to a human being. He was neither patient nor impatient in the human sense. He knew that waiting was unavoidable, and he was quite unaffected emotionally by the inconvenience. He was reasonably intelligent and even imaginative by both human and Mesklinite standards, but he felt no need of anything even remotely resembling daydreaming to occupy his mind during the delay. A half-conscious mental clock caused him to check the progress of the melting at reasonably frequent intervals; this is all a human being can grasp, much less describe, about what went on in his mind.

He was certainly neither asleep nor preoccupied, because he reacted promptly to a sudden loud thud and a scattering of pebbles around him. The spot where he was lying was almost directly aft of the truck which was running, so he knew instantly what must have happened.

So did Beetchermarlf, and the power unit was shut down by a tug on the control line before a man would have perceived any trouble. The two Mesklinites met a second or two later beside the truck which had been running.

It was in a predictable condition, Beetchermarlf had to admit to himself. Mesklinite organics are very, very tough materials and the tread would have lasted for many more months under ordinary travel wear: deliberate friction against unyielding rocks, even with very modest engine power, was a little too much for it.

Perhaps the word "unyielding" does not quite describe the rocks; those which had been under the moving band of fabric had been visibly flattened on top by the wear of the last hour or so. Some of them were more than half gone. The young helmsman decided, after careful examination, that the failure of the tread had been due less to simple wear than to a cut started by a formerly spherical pebble which had worn down to a thin slice with sharp edges. Takoorch agreed, when the evidence was pointed out to him.

There was no question about what to do, and they did it at once. In less than five minutes the power converter had been removed from the damaged truck and installed in the one aft of it, which had also been unloaded by puncturing the pressure cell. Without worrying about the certainty of destroying another set of treads, Beetchermarlf started this one up promptly.

Takoorch was uneasy now. The reasonable optimism of an hour before had had the foundation cut from under it; he was doubtful that the second set of treads would last long enough to melt a path all the way to freedom. It occurred to him, after some minutes of wrestling with the question, that concentrating the warmed water on one spot might be a good idea and he suggested this to his companion. Beetchermarlf was annoyed with himself for not having thought of the same thing earlier. For half an hour the two labored, heaping pebbles between and around the trucks surrounding their heat source. They eventually produced a fairly solid wall confining some of the water they were heating to a region between the truck and the nearest part of the ice wall. Takoorch had the satisfaction of seeing the ice along a two-yard front toward the starboard side of the Kwembly melting back almost visibly.

He was not completely happy, of course. It did not seem possible to him, any more than it did to Beetchermarlf, that the treads could last very long on the second truck either; and if they went before the way out was clear, it was hard to see what else they could do toward their own salvation. A man in such a situation can sometimes sit back and hope that his friends will rescue him in time; he can, in fact, carry that hope to the last moment of consciousness. Few Mesklinites are so const.i.tuted, and neither of the helmsmen was among the number. There was a Stennish word which Easy had translated as "hope" but this was one of her less successful inferences from context.

Takoorch, driven by this indefinable att.i.tude, stationed himself between the humming truck and the melting ice, hugging the bottom to keep from deflecting the warmed current of water, trying to watch both simultaneously. Beetchermarlf remained at the control lines.

Since no digging had been done under the second truck, the friction was greater and the heating effect stronger. The control was for speed rather than power, in spite of the words the helmsman had used. Naturally but unfortunately, the wear on the treads was also greater. The heavy thud which announced their failure came annoyingly soon after the completion of the rubble wall. As before, the two bands of fabric gave way almost simultaneously: the jerk imparted to the drive shaft as one let go was enough to take care of the other.

Again the Mesklinites acted instantly, in concert, and without consultation. Beetchermarlf cut the power as he plunged away from his station toward the melting surface; Takoorch got there before him only because he started from halfway there. Both had blades out when they reached the barrier, and both began sc.r.a.ping frantically at the frosty surface. They knew they were fairly close to the Kuembly's side; less than a body length of ice remained to be penetrated, at least horizontally. Perhaps before freezing took over once more sheer muscle could get them through ...

Takoorch's knife broke in the first minute. Several of the human beings above would have been interested in the sounds he made, though not even Easy Hoffman would have understood them. Beetchermarlf cut them off with a suggestion.

"Get behind me and move around as much as you can, so that the water cooled by the ice is moved away and mixed with the rest. I'll keep sc.r.a.ping, you keep stirring." The older sailor obeyed, and several more minutes pa.s.sed with no sound except that of the knife.

Progress continued, but both could see that its rate was decreasing. The heat in the water around them was giving out. Though neither knew it, the only reason that their environment had stayed liquid for so long was that the freezing around them had cut of the escape of the ammonia. The theoreticians, both human and Mesklinite, had been perfectly correct, though they had been no help to Dondragmer. The freezing under the Kwembly had been more a matter of ammonia slowly diffusing into the ice through the still-liquid boundaries between the solid crystals.

The captain, even with this information, could have done no more about it than his two men now trapped under his s.h.i.+p. Of course, if the information had come as a prediction instead of an inspired afterthought, he might have driven the Kwembly onto dry land, if she had been able to move in time.

Even if Beetchermarlf had had all this information at the time, he would not have been considering it consciously. He was far too busy. His knife flashed in the lamp light as rapidly and as hard as he dared. His conscious mind was concerned solely with getting the most out of the tool with the least risk of breaking it.

But break it he did. He never cared to discuss the reason later. He knew that his progress was slowing, with the urge to sc.r.a.pe harder changing in inverse proportion; but being the person he was, he disliked the faintest suggestion that he might have been the victim of panic. Being what he was also prevented him, ever, from making any suggestion that the bone of the knife might have been defective. He himself could think of no explanations but those two. Whatever the reason, the knife gripped in his right-forward pair of chelae was suddenly without a blade, and the sliver of material lying in front of him was no more practical to handle for his nippers than it would have been for human fingers. He flung the handle down in annoyance and since he was under water didn't even have the satisfaction of hearing it strike the bottom violently.

Takoorch grasped the situation immediately. His comment would have been considered cynical if it had been heard six million miles above, but Beetchermarlf took it at face value.

"Do you think it would be better to stay here and freeze up near the side or get back toward the middle? The time won't make much difference, I'd say."

"I don't know. Near the side they might find us sooner; it would depend on where they come through first, if they manage to do it at all. If they don't, I can't see that it will make any difference at all. I wish I knew what being frozen into a block of ice would do to a person."

"Well, someone will know before long," said Takoorch.

"Maybe. Remember the Erket."

"What has that to do with it? This is a genuine emergency."