Heavy Planet Part 25

Benj had paid even less attention. The stranding of the Esket had occurred long before his arrival at the station, and the name meant nothing in particular to him, although his mother had once mentioned her friends Destigmet and Kabremm to him.

It was Easy, of course, who had really reacted to the call. She scarcely noticed what Mersereau did or said, and never thought of telling Barlennan herself until more details came in. She moved immediately to a chair commanding a view of the "lost" cruiser's screens and relegated the rest of the universe to the background.

Barlennan's return call therefore brought him very little information. Easy, to whom it was pa.s.sed, had seen nothing herself; by the time she had reached her station all motion had ceased. The original observer was only able to say that he had seen two objects, a reel of cable or rope and a short length of pipe, roll across the Esket's laboratory floor. It was possible that something might have pushed them, though there had been no sign of life around the vehicle for several terrestrial months; it was equally possible, and perhaps more probable, that something had tilted the Esket to start them rolling. So said the observer, though he could not suggest what specifically might have tipped the monstrous machine.

This left Barlennan in a quandary. It was possible that one of Destigmet's crew had become careless. It was possible that natural causes might be operating, as the humans seemed to prefer to believe. It was also possible, considering what Barlennan himself had just been planning to do, that the whole thing was a piece of human fiction. The commander's conscience made him attach more weight to this possibility than he might have done otherwise.

It was hard to see just what they could expect to accomplish by such a fiction. It could hardly be a trap of any sort; there could be no wrong reaction to the story. Complete mystification was the only possible response. If there were something deeper and more subtle involved, Barlennan had to admit to himself that he couldn't guess what it was.

He didn't like guessing anyway. It was much easier to take reports at face value, allowing only for the capabilities of the speaker without worrying about possible motives. At times, the commander reflected, Dondragmer's annoying directness which had made him disapprove of the whole Esket trick had something to be said for it.

Yes, he had to a.s.sume that the report was truthful. By so doing, he would turn any human trick against its planners. Well then, there was nothing to do except check with Destigmet. That was simply another message to send on the Deedee.

Come to think of it, that was another way to check the veracity of the human reports. This report, whatever else could be said for or against its truth, showed signs of having come through quickly. And Mrs. Hoffman must be involved.

The thought that Easy's involvement made the situation a special one was the only idea on the incident Barlennan and Aucoin would have had in common. Of course, the latter hadn't heard anything about the new Etket incident so far; even Mersereau hadn't really thought about it. He was still otherwise engaged.

"Easy!" Boyd turned from his microphone and called across to her new station. "We seem to have convinced Don. He's sending a vision set with his six-man search party. He wants to check his own estimate of the distance at which Reffel vanished. He thinks we can pinpoint where his transmitter was. We might have estimated it at the time, but I'm not sure it was recorded. Do you want to take over here while I check up with the mappers, or would you rather go yourself?"

"I want to watch here a little longer. Benj can go up, if he can stand leaving the screens for a minute." She looked half-questioningly at the boy; he nodded and disappeared at once. He was gone longer than she expected and returned somewhat crestfallen.

"They said they'd gladly give me the map recorded from the first part of Reffel's flight, before I had told him to go on until he could barely see the Kwembly. All they could say about where he disappeared was that it must be off that map; the map covers the valley for about a mile westward of the cruiser."

Mersereau grunted in annoyance. "I'd forgotten about that." He turned back to his microphone to relay this not very helpful information to Dondragmer.

The captain was neither particularly surprised nor greatly disturbed. He had already discussed his own estimate of the distance and direction involved with Stakendee, who was leading the search party.

"I suppose the human beings were right about having you take the set along," the captain had remarked. "It will be a nuisance to carry and I don't much like risking its loss, but having it will cut down the risk of losing you. I'm still concerned about a repet.i.tion of the flood that brought us here, and the people up above can't give us any definite prediction. They do agree that there should indeed be a flood season coming. With the set, they'll be able to warn you directly if they get any definite information, and you'll be able to reach me through them if you do find anything."

"I'm not sure in my own mind what's best to do if a flood does come," said Stakendee. "Of course if we're close to the Kwembly we'll do our best to get back aboard, and I suppose if we're really distant we'd make for the north side of the valley, which seems to be nearer. In a borderline case, though, I'm not sure which would be best; surviving the flood would do us little good if the s.h.i.+p got washed a year's walk further downstream."

"I've been thinking about that too," replied the captain, "and I still don't have an answer. If we're washed away again there's a very large chance the s.h.i.+p will be ruined. I can't decide whether we should take time to get life-support equipment out and set up on the valley side before we get on with trying to melt her out. Your own point is a good one, and maybe I should have the set there for your sake as well as ours. Well, I'll solve it. Get on your way. The sooner the search is done, the less we'll have to worry about floods."

Stakendee gestured agreement, and five minutes later Dondragmer saw him and his group emerge from the main lock. The communicator gave the party a grotesque appearance; the block of plastic, four inches high and wide and twelve in length, was being carried litter fas.h.i.+on by two of the searchers. The three-foot poles were only two inches apart, supported on yokes at the midpoint of the eighteen-inch-long bodies of the bearers. The poles and yokes had been fas.h.i.+oned from s.h.i.+p's stores; the Mesklinite equivalent of lumber. There were tons of the stuff in the store compartments: another of the incongruities with which the nuclear-powered cruiser was loaded in such profusion.

The search party rounded the bow of the Kwembly, which was facing northwest, and proceeded straight west. Dondragmer watched its lights for a few minutes as they wound around and over the boulders but had to turn to other matters long before they were out of sight.

Elongated figures swarmed over the hull working the radiator bar loose. Dondragmer had not liked to give the order for such destructive activity; but he had weighed as best he could the relative risks of doing it or of leaving it undone; having reached a decision it was not in his nature to keep on worrying about its rightness. Just as most human beings thought of Drommians as typically paranoid, most Mesklinites who knew them at all thought of human beings as typically vacillating. Dondragmer, the decision made and the order given, simply watched to make sure that minimal damage was done to the hull. From the bridge he was unable to see over its curve to the point, far astern, where the conductors came through; he would have to go outside a little later to oversee that part of the work. Maybe it would be even better to take a vision set outside and let the human engineers supervise it. Of course, with the communication delay it would be difficult for them to stop a serious error in time.

For the moment the job could be left in Praffen's nippers. The problem the captain had mentioned to Stakendee needed more thought. The life-support equipment was easy to dismount and he could spare the men to transport it without cutting into the ice-removal project too badly; but if a flood came while it was ash.o.r.e and carried the Kwembly a long distance, things might become awkward. The system was a closed-cycle one using Mesklinite plants, depending on the fusion converters for its prime energy. By its nature, it had just about the right amount of vegetation to take care of the crew; had there been much more, there would not have been enough Mesklinites to take care of the plants! It might be possible to carry part of the system away and leave the rest, then expand each part to take care of the whole crew should circ.u.mstances force a decision between s.h.i.+p and sh.o.r.e. It would be easy enough to make more tanks but making either culture large enough to supply hydrogen for the whole crew could take more time than they might have.

In a way, it was too bad that all the communication went through the human station. One of the major and primary tasks of the Esket crew was to modify the old life system or to produce a new one capable of supporting a larger population. For all Dondragmer knew, this might already have been accomplished months ago.

His musings were interrupted by the communicator.

"Captain! Benj Hoffman here. Would it be too much trouble to set up one of the viewers so that we could watch your men work on the melting project? Maybe the one on the bridge would do if you just slid it out to starboard and faced it aft."

"That will be easy enough," replied the captain. "I was thinking perhaps it would be well for some of you people to watch the work." Since the set weighed less than five hundred pounds in Dhrawn's gravity, it was only its rather awkward dimensions which gave him trouble; he went about the problem like a man trying to move an empty refrigerator carton. By pus.h.i.+ng it along the deck rather than trying to pick it up, he worked it into a good position in a few seconds. In due course, the boy's acknowledgment came back.

"Thanks, Captain; that's good. I can see the ground to starboard and what I suppose is the main lock and some of your people working along the sides. It's a little hard to judge distances, but I know how big the Kwembly is and about how far back the main lock is and of course I know how big your people are, so I'd guess your lights let me see the ice for fifty or sixty yards on past the lock."

Dondragmer was surprised. "I can see fully three times that far-no, wait; you're using your twelve-based numbers so it's not that much: but I do see farther. Eyes must be better than the pickup cells in your set. I hope that you are not just watching what goes on here. Are the other screens for the Kwembly sets all where you can see them? Or are there other people watching them? I want to be kept in as close touch as I possibly can with the search party that has just left on foot. After what happened to Reffel, I'm uneasy about both them and their set."

Dondragmer was debating with his own conscience as he sent this message. On the one hand, he was pretty certain that Reffel had shuttered his set deliberately, though it was even less clear to him than to Barlennan why this should have been necessary. On the other hand he disapproved of the secrecy of the whole Esket maneuver. While he would not deliberately ruin Barlennan's plans by any act of his own, he would not be too disappointed if everything came out in the open. There certainly was a good chance that Reffel was in real trouble; if, as seemed likely, whatever had happened to him had happened only a few miles away, he would have had time to get back and explain, even on foot.

In short, Dondragmer had a good excuse, but disliked the thought that he needed one. After all, there was Kervenser too.

"All four screens are right in front of me," Benj's a.s.surance came back. "Just now I'm alone at this station, though there are other people in the room. Mother is about ten feet away, at the Esket's screens. Did anyone tell you that something had moved on one of those? Mr. Mersereau has just gone off for another argument with Dr. Aucoin." (Barlennan would have given a great deal to hear that sentence.) "There are about ten other observers in the room watching the other sets, but I don't know any of them very well. Reffel's screen is still blank; five people are working in whatever room in the Kwembly your other set is in but I can't tell just what they're doing. Your foot party is just walking along. I can see only a few feet around them, and only in one direction, of course. The lights they're carrying aren't nearly as strong as the ones around the Kwembly. If anything does come after them or some trouble develops, I may not even get as much warning as they do; and of course there'd be a delay before I could tell them anyway."

"Will you remind them of that?" asked Dondragmer. "The leader is named Stakendee. He doesn't have enough of the human language to do any good. He may very well be depending too heavily on you and your equipment for warning. I'm afraid I took for granted, without saying much about it, that your set would help warn him when we were planning the search. Please tell him that it is strictly an indirect communicator between him and me."

The boy's response was considerably longer in coming than light-lag alone would explain. Presumably he was carrying out the request without bothering to acknowledge its receipt. The captain decided not to make a point of the matter; Hoffman was very young. There was plenty else to keep Dondragmer busy, and he occupied himself with this, filing the unfinished conversation until Benj's voice once more reached the bridge.

"I've been in touch with Stak and told him what you asked. He promised to take care, but he's not very far from the Kwembly yet, still among the stones; they give out a little way upstream, you remember. He's still on the map, I think, though I can't really tell one square yard of that rock garden from another. It's either smooth ice or ice with cobblestones sticking up through it, or occasionally cobblestones with no ice between them. I don't see how they're going to search it very effectively. Even if you climb on the highest rock in the neighborhood, there are a lot of others you can't see beyond. The helicopters aren't very big, and you Mesklinites are a lot smaller."

"We realized that when we sent out the party," Dondragmer answered. "A really effective search will be nearly impossible among the stones if the missing are dead or even helpless. However, as you said, the stones give way to bare rock a short distance from here; in any case, it is possible that Kerv or Reffel could answer calls, or call for help themselves. Certainly at night one can be heard much farther than he can be seen. Also, whatever is responsible for their disappearance may be bigger or easier to spot." The captain had a pretty good idea how Benj would answer the last sentence. He was right.

"Finding whatever is responsible by having another group disappear wouldn't put us much farther ahead."

"It would if we actually learned what had happened. Keep in close touch with Stakendee's party, please, Benj. My time is going to be taken up with other matters and you'll learn whatever happens half a minute before I could anyway. I don't know that those seconds will make much real difference but at least you're closer to Stak in time than I am.

"Also, I have to go outside now. We're getting to a ticklish point in taking this metal bar off the hull. I'd bring one of the sets outside to keep in closer touch with you but I wouldn't be able to hear you very well through a suit. The volume of these communicators of yours isn't very impressive. I'll give you a call when I'm back in touch; there's no one handy to leave on watch here. In the meantime please keep a running log, in any way you find convenient, on what happens to Stakendee."

The captain waited just long enough to receive Benj's acknowledgment, which did arrive this time, before making his way down to the lock and donning his air suit. Preferring an inside climb to an outside one, he took the ramps back to the bridge and made use of the small lock which gave onto the top of the hull: a U-shaped pipe of liquid ammonia just about large enough for a Mesklinite body. Dondragmer unsealed and lifted the inner lid and entered the three-gallon pool of liquid, the cover closing by its own weight above him. He followed the curve down and up again and emerged through a similar lid outside the bridge.

With the smooth plastic of the hull curving down on all sides of him except aft he felt a little tense but he had long ago learned to control himself even in high places. His nippers Hashed from one holdfast to another as he made his way aft to the point where the few remaining refrigerator attachments were still intact. Two of these were the ones which extended entirely through the hull as electrical contacts, and were therefore the ones which caused Dondragmer the most concern. The others, as he had hoped, were coming out of the cruiser's skin like nails; but these last would have to be severed, but severed so that they could be reconnected later on. Welding and soldering were arts which Dondragmer knew only in theory; he did know whatever procedure was to be used, it would certainly need stubs projecting from the hull as a starting point. The captain wanted to make particularly sure that the cutting would allow for this.

The cutting itself, as he had been told, would be no trouble with Mesklinite saws. He carefully selected the points where the cuts were to be made and had two of his sailors get started on the task. He warned the rest to get out of the way when the bar was free. This meant not only down to the surface but well away from the hull. The idea was to lower the metal on the lock side, once it was detached, but Dondragmer was cautious about weights and knew that the bar might possibly not wait to be lowered. Even a Mesklinite would regret being underneath when it descended from the top of the hull, feeble as Dhrawn's gravity seemed to them.

All this had taken the best part of an hour. The captain was wondering about the progress of the foot party but there was another part of the melting project to check first. He reentered the s.h.i.+p and sought the laboratory, where Borndender was readying a power unit to fit the makes.h.i.+ft resistor. Actually there was little to be done; polarized sockets, one at one end of the block and one at the other, would provide direct current if the bar could be gotten into the holes and any changes needed to make a fit possible would have to be made on the bar rather than the power box. It took only a moment to make this clear to the captain, who looked for himself, decided the scientist was obviously right and made his way hastily back to the bridge. Only when he got there and tried to call Benj did he realize that he had never removed his air suit; talking to Borndender through his suit was one thing, talking to a human over the radio quite another. He stripped enough to get his speaking-siphon into the open and spoke again.

"I'm back, Benj. Has anything happened to Stakendee?" He finished removing the suit while waiting for the answer, smoothed it, and stowed it close to the center hatchway. It didn't belong there, but there wouldn't be time to get it down to the rack by the main lock and return before Benj's words.

"Nothing really important, as far as I can tell, Captain," came the boy's voice. "They've walked a long way, though I can't tell just how far; maybe three miles since you went, but that's a guess. There has been no sign of either flier, and the only thing they or I have seen which might possibly have affected either of them has been an occasional patch of cloud a few hundred feet up; at least that's what Stak guesses, I can't see well enough myself, drifting back toward the Kwemb/y. I suppose if you accidentally flew into a big cloud you might get disoriented and if it was low enough you'd crash before you could straighten out; there aren't any blind flying instruments on those things, are there? It's hard to believe they'd do such a thing. Of course, if they were keeping their eyes on the ground instead of their flying ... but none of the clouds we've seen so far is anywhere near big enough to give them time to lose their way, Stak says."

Dondragmer was inclined to share this doubt about clouds being responsible; he would have doubted it even had he not had reason for another opinion. An upward glance showed that no clouds had yet reached the Kwembly; the stars twinkled everywhere. Since Benj had said clouds were coming toward the cruiser, the ones Stakendee had seen must have been at the edge of the pattern and much farther to the west when the fliers were up. This might mean nothing as far as Kervenser was concerned; he could have been a long, long way from the Kwembly. Also Reffel had probably encountered them. Dondragmer brought his attention back to Benj, who had not paused for a reply.

"Stak says the stream bed is going uphill noticeably, but he didn't tell me how he knew; just that they'd gone up several feet since leaving the Kwembly." Pressure change, Dondragmer a.s.sumed; it was always more noticeable in the suits. Just climbing around on the hull made a difference in suit tightness which could be felt. Besides, the stream which had carried the cruiser here had been flowing fairly fast; even allowing for Dhrawn's gravity, its fall must be fairly great. "The only other real change is the nature of the bottom. They're well away from the cobbles. It's mostly bare rock, with patches of ice in the hollows."

"Good. Thank you, Benj. Have your weather men come up with anything at all about the likelihood of another flood?"

The boy chuckled, though the sound meant little to the Mesklinite. "Nothing, I'm afraid. Dr. McDevitt just can't be sure. Dr. Aucoin was complaining about it a little while ago, and my boss just cut loose. He said that it had taken men a couple of centuries before they could make reliable ten-day forecasts on Earth, with only one phase-varying component, water, and the whole planet accessible for measurement. Anyone who expects forecasting perfected in a couple of years for a world as big as Dhrawn, when we know an area the size of a large backyard and that with two phase-variables and a temperature range from fifty to over a thousand degrees Kelvin, must still believe in magic. He said we were lucky the weather hadn't produced ice fields that turned into swamps when the temperature dropped and rain storms six feet deep with clear air underneath but icing up the cruiser bridges and forty other things that his computer keeps coming up with every time he changes another variable. It was funny watching Dr. Aucoin try to calm him down. Usually it's the other way around."

"I'm sorry I wasn't there to hear it. You seem amused," replied the captain. "Did you tell your chief about the clouds which Stakendee has reported?"

"Oh, certainly. I told everyone. That was only a few minutes ago, though, and they haven't come back with anything yet. I really wouldn't expect them to, Captain; there just isn't enough detailed information from the surface for interpretation, let alone prognosis. There was one thing though; Dr. McDevitt was very interested in finding out how many feet Stak's group had climbed and he said that if the clouds they reported hadn't reached the Kwembly yet he wanted to know as exactly as possible the time they do. I'm sorry; I should have reported that earlier."

"It doesn't matter," replied Dondragmer. "The sky is still clear here. I'll let you know the moment I see any clouds. Does this mean that he thinks another fog is coming, like the one which preceded the last flood?" In spite of his innate defenses against worry, the captain waited out the next minute with some uneasiness.

"He didn't say, and he wouldn't. He's been caught too wrong too many times. He won't take the chance again, if I know him, unless it's a matter of warning you against some very probable danger. Wait! There's something on Stak's screen." Dondragmer's many legs tensed under him. "Let me check. Yes, all of Stak's men but one are in sight, and he must be carrying the back end of the set because it's still moving. There's another light ahead. It's brighter than the ones we're carrying, at least, I think so, but I can't really tell its distance. I'm not sure whether Stak's people have seen it yet, but they should have; you said your eyes are better than the pickups. Mother, do you want to get in on this? And should we call Barlennan? I'm keeping Don posted. Yes, Stak has seen it and his party has stopped moving. The light isn't moving either. Stak has the sound volume up, but I can't hear anything that means anything to me. They've put the transmitter down, and are fanning out in front of it; I can see all six of them now. The ground is nearly bare, only an occasional patch of ice. No rocks. Now Stak's men have put out their lights, and I can't see anything except the new one. It's getting brighter, but I guess it's just the pickup cells reacting to the darker field. I can't see anything around it; it looks a little foggy, if anything. Something has blocked it for a moment; no, it's on again. I could see enough of a silhouette to be pretty sure it was one of the search party; he must have reared up to get a better look ahead. Now I can hear some hooting, but it's not any words I know. I don't see why ... wait. Now Stak's people are turning their lights back on. Two of them are coming back toward the set; they're picking it up and bringing it forward toward the rest of the group. All the lights are up in front with them, so I can see pretty well now. There's mist blowing past only a few feet, maybe a few inches up; the new light is up in it a little way. I can't judge its distance yet at all. The ground has no marks to help; just bare stone, with six Mesklinites flattened down against it and their lights and a dark line beyond them which might be different colored rock or maybe a narrow stream slanting toward them from the far left and going out of sight to my right. Now I get a vague impression of motion around the new light. Maybe it's the running light of a helicopter. I don't know how they're arranged or how high off the ground they are when the machine is parked or how bright they are.

"Now it's clearer, yes, there's something moving. It's coming toward us, just a dark blob in the mist. It's not carrying any light. If my guess at distance means anything, which it probably doesn't, it's about the same size as the Mesklinites. Maybe it's Kervenser or Reffel.

"Yes. I'm almost sure it's a Mesklinite, but still too far away for me to recognize. I'm not sure I'd know either of those two anyway. He's crossing that line; it must be a stream; some liquid splashed up for a split second into the path of the light; now he's only a few yards away, and the others are converging on him. They're talking, but not loudly enough for me to make any of it out. The group is milling around, and I can't recognize anyone. If they'd come a little closer I'd ask them who's there, but I suppose they'll report pretty soon anyway and I can't make them hear through the air suits unless they're right beside the set. Now they're all coming this way and the bunch is opening out; two of them are right in front of the set; I suppose it's Stakendee and the one who's just-"

He was interrupted by a voice which originated beside him. It reached not only his ear, but three open microphones, and through them three different receivers on Dhrawn, where it produced three very different results.

"Kabremm! Where have you been all these months?" cried Easy.

11: PLAYING WITH WIRE.

It really wasn't quite Kabremm's fault, though Barlennan was a long time forgiving him. The transmitter had been away from the lights. When the newcomer had first joined Stakendee's group he had not been able to see it; later he had failed to notice it; not until he was within a foot or two did he recognize it. Even then he wasn't worried greatly; human beings all looked alike to him, he a.s.sumed that his own people looked at least as indistinguishable to the humans, and while he would not have put himself deliberately in view, a sudden withdrawal or any attempt to hide would have been far more suspicious than staying calmly where he was.

When Easy's voice erupted from the speaker with his name, it was obviously sixty-four seconds too late to do anything. Stakendee, whose reflex response to the sound was to reach for the shutter on top of the vision set, realized in time that this would only make matters worse.

What they should do was far from obvious to either of them. Neither was an expert in intrigue, though Mesklin was no more innocent of political deceit than it was of the commercial variety. Neither was particularly quick-witted. Both, unlike Dondragmer, were enthusiastic proponents of the Esket deception.

And both realized that whatever they did, or failed to do, about this mistake was likely to conflict with whatever Barlennan or Dondragmer might do. Coordination was impossible. Stakendee thought, after some seconds, of trying to address Kabremm as though he were the missing Reffel or Kervenser, but he doubted that he could get away with it. Mrs. Hoffman's recognition must have been pretty firm to let her speak as emphatically as she had, and Kabremm's response was unlikely to be helpful. He didn't, presumably, know the status of either of the missing men.

The human being had said no more, after the one question; she must be waiting for an answer. What had she seen between speaking and that time delay?

Barlennan had also heard Easy's cry, and was in exactly the same spot. He could only guess why Kabremm might be anywhere near the Kwembly, though the incident of Reffel's communication cutoff had prepared him for something of the sort. Only one of the three dirigibles was employed on the regular shuttle run between the Esket site and the Settlement; the others were under Destigmet's control and were usually exploring. Still, Dhrawn was large enough to make the presence of one of them in the Kwembly's neighborhood a distinct surprise.

However, it seemed to have happened. It was simply bad luck, Barlennan a.s.sumed, compounded by the fact that the only human being in the universe who could possibly have recognized Kabremm by sight had been in a position to see him when the slip occurred.

So the human beings now knew that the Esket's crew had not been obliterated. No provision had been made for such a discovery; no planned, rehea.r.s.ed story existed which Barlennan could count on Kabremm's using. Maybe Dondragmer would fill in; he could be counted on to do his best, no matter what he thought of the whole matter, but it was hard to see what he could do. The trouble was that Barlennan himself would have no idea what Dondragmer had said and would not know what to say himself when questions came, as they surely would, toward the Settlement. Probably the safest tactic was to claim utter ignorance, and ask honestly for as complete a report as possible from Dondragmer. The captain would at least keep Kabremm, who had obviously been playing the fool, from leaking the whole cask.

It was fortunate for Barlennan's peace of mind that he did not realize where Kabremm had been met. Easy, a few seconds before her cry of recognition, had told him that Benj was reporting something from a Kwembly screen, or he would have a.s.sumed that Kabremm had inadvertently stepped into the field of view of an Esket communicator. He knew no details about the search party of Stakendee and a.s.sumed the incident was occurring at the Kwembly and not five miles away. The five miles was just as bad as five thousand, under the circ.u.mstances; communication between Mesklinites not within hooting range of each other had to go through the human linkage, and Dondragmer was in no better position to cover the slip than was Barlennan himself. However, the Kwembly's captain managed to do it, quite unintentionally.

He, too, had heard Easy's exclamation, much more loudly than Barlennan in view of the woman's position among the microphones. However, it had been little more than a distraction to him, for his mind was wholly taken up with some words Benj had uttered a few seconds before. In fact, he was so disturbed by them as to do something which everyone at all experienced in Dhrawnsatellite communication had long ago learned not to do. He had interrupted, sending an urgent call of his own pulsing upward to the station while Benj was still talking.

"Please! Before you do anything else, tell me more about that liquid. I get the impression from what you've said that there is a stream flowing in the riverbed in view of Stakendee's vision pickup. If that is the case, please send these orders immediately: Stak, with two men to carry the communicator, is to follow that stream upward immediately, keeping you and through you, me, informed of its nature; particularly, is it growing any larger? The other three are to follow it down to find how close it comes to the Kwembly; when they have ascertained this, they are to come in with the information at once. I'll worry about whom you've found later on; I'm glad one of them has turned up. If this trickle is the beginning of the next flood, we'll have to stop everything else and get life-support equipment out of the s.h.i.+p and out of the valley. Please check, and get those orders to Stakendee at once!"

This request began to come in just as Easy finished her sentence and long before either Kabremm or Barlennan could have gotten a reply back to it. Mersereau and Aucoin were still gone, so Benj had no hesitation about pa.s.sing Dondragmer's orders along. Easy, after a second or two of thought, shelved the Kabremm question and reported the same information to Barlennan. If Don saw the situation as an emergency, she was willing to go along with his opinion; he was on the scene. She did not take her eyes from the screen which showed Kabremm's image, however; his presence still needed explanation. She too helped Barlennan unwittingly at this point.

After completing the relay of Dondragmer's orders, she added a report of her own which clarified much for the commander.

"I don't know how up to date you are, Barl; things have been happening rather suddenly. Don sent out a foot party with a communicator to look for Kervenser and Reffel. This was the group which found the running stream which is bothering Don so much, and at the same time ran into Kabremm. I don't know how he got there, thousands of miles from the Esket, but we'll get his story and relay it to you as soon as we can. I've sometimes wondered whether he and any of the others were alive, but I never really hoped for it. I know the life-support equipment in the cruisers is supposed to be removable in case the vehicles had to be abandoned; but there was never any sign of anything's being taken from the Esket. This will be useful news as well as pleasant; there must be some way for you people to live on at least some parts of Dhrawn without human equipment."

Barlennan's answer was a conventional acknowledgment-plus-thanks, given with very little of his attention. Easy's closing sentence had started a new train of thought in his mind.

Benj had paid little attention to his mother's words, having a conversation of his own to maintain. He relayed Dondragmer's command to the foot party, saw the group break up accordingly, though he failed to interpret the confusion caused by Kabremm's telling Stakendee how he had reached the spot, then reported the start of the new mission to the captain. He followed the report, however, with comments of his own.

"Captain, I hope this isn't going to take all your men. I know there's a lot of work in getting your life equipment to the bank but surely you can keep on with the job of melting the Kwembly loose. You're not just giving up on the s.h.i.+p, are you? You still have Beetch and his friend underneath; you can't just abandon them. It won't take many men to get the heater going, it seems to me."

Dondragmer had formed by now a pretty clear basic picture of Benj's personality, though some detailed aspects of it were fundamentally beyond his grasp. He answered as tactfully as he could.

"I'm certainly not giving up the Kwembly while there's any reasonable chance of saving her," he said, "but the presence of liquid only a few miles away forces me to a.s.sume that the risk of another flood is now very high. My crew, as a group, comes first. The metal bar we have cut from the hull will be lowered to the ground in a few more minutes. Once that is done, only Borndender and one other man will be left on the heater detail. Everyone else, except of course Stakendee's crew, will start immediately carrying plant tanks and lights to the side of the valley. I do not want to abandon my helmsmen, but if I get certain news that high water is on the way we are all going to head for higher ground whether or not any are still missing. I gather you don't like the idea, but I am sure you see why there is no other possible course." The captain fell silent, neither knowing nor greatly caring whether Benj had an answer for this; there was too much else to consider.

He stood watching as the heavy length of metal, which was to be a heater if everyone's ideas worked out, was eased toward the Kwembly's starboard side. Lines were attached to it, snubbed around the climbing holdfasts, and held by men on the ice who were carefully giving length under the orders of Praffen. Perched on the helicopter lock panel with his front end reared four inches higher, Praffen watched and gestured commands as the starboard part of the long strip of metal slid slowly away from him and the other side approached. Dondragmer flinched slightly as the sailor seemed about to be brushed off the hull by the silvery length of alloy, but Praffen let it pa.s.s under him with plenty of legs still on the plastic and at least three pairs of pincers gripping the holdfasts. With this personal risk ended he let the rope-men work a little faster; it took less than five more minutes to get the bar down to the ice.

Dondragmer had redonned his air suit during the last part of the operation and gone out on the hull again, where he hooted a number of orders. Everyone else outside obediently headed for the main lock to start transferring the life-support equipment; the captain himself reentered the bridge to get back in radio contact with Benj and Stakendee.

The boy had said nothing during the lowering-away, which had been carried out in view of the bridge communicator. What he could see required no explanation. He was a little unhappy at the disappearance of the crew afterward, for Dondragmer had been right. Benj did not like the idea of the entire group's being diverted to the abandon-s.h.i.+p operation. The emergence of two Mesklinites with a power box gave him something to watch besides Stakendee's upstream crawl on the adjacent screen.

Benj did not know which of the two was Borndender. However, their actions were of more interest than their ident.i.ty, especially their troubles with the radiator.

The wire was rigid enough to hold its shape fairly well as it was moved; it now lay flat on the ice in much the same shape it had had when attached to the hull, rather like a long, narrow hairpin with a set of right-angle bends near the center where it had outlined the helicopter lock, the cut ends being some two feet apart. The original vertical component of its curvature, formerly impressed by the shape of the hull, had now flattened out under gravity. The unit had been turned over during the lowering so that the p.r.o.ngs which had attached it to the plastic were now pointing upward; hence there was good contact with the ice for its entire length.

The Mesklinites spent a few minutes trying to straighten it out; Benj got the impression that they wanted to run it around the side of the hull as closely as possible. However, it finally dawned on them that the free ends would have to be close together anyway in order to go into the same power box, so they left the wire alone and dragged the power unit aft. One of them examined the holes in the box and the ends of the wire carefully, while the other stood by.

Benj could not see the box very well, since its image on the screen was very small, but he was familiar with similar machines. It was a standard piece of equipment which had needed very little modification to render it usable on Dhrawn. There were several kinds of power takeoff on it besides the rotating field used for mechanical drive. The direct electrical current which Borndender wanted could be drawn from any of several places; there were contact plates on opposite sides of the box which could be energized; several different sizes of jack-type bipolar sockets and simple unipolar sockets at opposite ends of the box. The plates would have been easiest to use, but the Mesklinites, as Benj learned later, had dismissed them as too dangerous; they chose to use the end sockets. This meant that one end of the "hairpin" had to go into one end of the unit, and the other into the other end. Borndender already knew that the wire was a little large for these holes and would have to be filed down, and had brought the appropriate tools out with him; this was no problem. Bending the ends, however, so that short lengths of them pointed toward each other, was a different matter. While he was still working on this problem, the rest of the crew emerged from the main lock with their burden of hydroponic tanks, pumps, lights, and power units, and headed northward toward the side of the valley. Borndender ignored them, except for a brief glance, wondering at the same time whether he could commandeer some a.s.sistance.

The two ninety-degree bends he had to make were not entirely a matter of strength. The metal was of semicircular cross section, about a quarter of an inch in radius; Benj thought of it as heavy wire, while to the Mesklinites it was bar stock. The alloy was reasonably tough even at a hundred and seventy degrees Kelvin, so there was no risk of breaking it. Mesklinite strength was certainly equal to the task. What the two scientists lacked, which made the bending an operation instead of a procedure, was traction. The ice under them was fairly pure water with a modest percentage of ammonia, not so far below its melting point or removed from the ideal ice crystal structure as to have lost its slipperiness. The small area of the Mesklinite extremities caused them to dig in in normal walking, which combined with their low structure and multiplicity of legs, prevented slipping during ordinary walking around the frozen-in Kwembly. Now, however, Borndender and his a.s.sistant were trying to apply a strong sidewise force, and their twenty pounds of weight simply did not give enough dig for their claws. The metal refused to bend, and the long bodies lashed about on the ice with Newton's Third Law in complete control of the situation. The sight was enough to make Benj chuckle in spite of his worry, a reaction which was shared by Seumas McDevitt, who had just come down from the weather lab.

Borndender finally solved his engineering problem by going back into the Kwembly and bringing out the drilling equipment. With this he sank half a dozen foot-deep holes in the ice. By standing lengths of drill-tower support rod in these he was able to provide anchorage for the Mesklinite muscles. The rod was finally changed from a hairpin to a caliper shape.

Fitting the ends into the appropriate holes was comparatively easy after the filing was finished. It involved a modest lifting job to get the wire up to the two-inch height of the socket holes but this was no problem of strength or traction and was done in half a minute. With some hesitation, visible even to the human watchers, Borndender approached the controls of the power unit. The watchers were at least as tense; Dondragmer was not entirely sure that the operation was safe for his s.h.i.+p, having only the words of the human beings about this particular situation. Benj and McDevitt also had doubts about the efficacy of the jury-rigged heater.

Their doubts were speedily settled. The safety devices built into the unit acted properly as far as the machine's own protection was concerned; they were not, however, capable of a.n.a.lyzing the exterior load in detail. They permitted the unit to deliver a current, not a voltage, up to a limit determined by the manual control setting. Borndender had of course set this at the lowest available value. The resistor lasted for several seconds, and might have held up indefinitely if the ends had not been off the ice.

For most of the length of the loop, all went well. A cloud of microscopic ice crystals began to rise the moment the power came on, as water boiled away from around the wire and froze again in the dense, frigid air. It hid the sight of the wire sinking into the surface ice, but no one doubted that this was happening.

The last foot or so at each end of the loop, however, was not protected by the high specific and latent heats of water. Those inches of metal showed no sign of the load they were carrying for perhaps three seconds; then they began to glow. The resistance of the wire naturally increased with its temperature, and in the effort to maintain constant current the power box applied more voltage. The additional heat developed was concentrated almost entirely in the already overheated sections. For a long moment a red, and then a white, glow illuminated the rising cloud, causing Dondragmer to retreat involuntarily to the other end of the bridge while Borndender and his companion flattened themselves against the ice.

The human watchers cried out, Benj wordlessly, McDevitt protestingly, "It can't blow!" Their reactions were of course far too late to be meaningful. By the time the picture reached the station, one end of the wire loop had melted through and the unit had shut down automatically. Borndender, rather surprised to find himself alive, supplemented the automatic control with the manual one, and without taking time to report to the captain set about figuring what had happened.

This did not take him long; he was an orderly thinker, and had absorbed a great deal more alien knowledge than had the helmsmen, still hoping for rescue a few yards away. He understood the theory and construction of the power units about as well as a high school student understands the theory and construction of a television set; he could not have built one himself, but he could make a reasonable deduction as to the cause of a gross malfunction. He was more of a chemist than a physicist, as far as specific training went.

While the human beings watched in surprise and Dondragmer in some uneasiness, the two scientists repeated the bending operation until what was left of the resistor was once again usable. With the drilling equipment they made a pit large enough to hold the power box at the end of the deep groove boiled in the ice by the first few seconds of power. They set the box in the hole, connected the ends once more, and covered everything with chips of ice removed in the digging, leaving only the controls exposed. Then Borndender switched on the power again, this time retreating much more hastily than before.

The white cloud reappeared at once, but this time grew and spread. It enveloped the near side of the Kwembly, including the bridge, blocking the view for Dondragmer and the communicator lens. Illuminated by the outside flood lamps, it caught the attention of the crew, now nearing the edge of the valley, and of Stakendee and his men miles to the west. This time the entire length of the wire was submerged in melted ice, which bubbled away from around it as hot vapor, condensed to liquid a fraction of a millimeter away, evaporated again much less violently from the surface of the widening pool, and again condensed, this time to ice, in the air above. The steaming pool, some three quarters of the Kwembly's length and originally some six feet in width, began to sink below the surrounding ice, its contents borne away as ice dust by the gentle wind faster than they were replenished by melting.

One side of it reached the cruiser, and Dondragmer, catching a glimpse of it through a momentary break in the swirling fog, suddenly had a frightening thought. He donned his air suit hurriedly and rushed to the inner door of the main lock. Here he hesitated; with the suit's protection he could not tell by feel whether the s.h.i.+p was heating dangerously, and there were no internal thermometers except in the lab. For a moment he thought of getting one; then he decided that the time needed might be risky, and opened the upper safety valves in the outer lock, which were handled by pull-cords from inside reaching down through the liquid trap. He did not know whether the heat from outside would last long enough to boil ammonia in the lock itself-the Kwemhly's hull was well insulated, and leakage would be slow, but he had no desire to have boiling ammonia confined aboard his command. It was an example of a little knowledge causing superfluous worry; the temperature needed to bring ammonia's vapor pressure anywhere near the ambient values would have made an explosion the least of any Mesklinite's concerns. However, no real harm was done by opening the valves, and the captain felt better as a result of the action. He returned hastily to the bridge to see what was going on.

A gentle breeze from the west was providing occasional glimpses as it swept the ice fog aside and he could see that the level of the molten pool was lower. Its area had increased greatly, but as the minutes pa.s.sed he decided that some limit had been reached. His two men were visible at times, crawling here and there trying to find a good viewpoint. They finally settled down almost under the bridge, with the breeze behind them.

For some time the liquid level seemed to reach a steady state, though none of the watchers could understand why. Later they decided that the spreading pool had melted its way into the still-liquid reservoir under the Kwembly, which took fully fifteen minutes to evaporate. By the end of that time, cobbles from the river bottom began to show their tops above the simmering water, and the problem of turning the power unit off before another length of wire was destroyed suddenly occurred to Dondragmer.

He knew now that there was no danger of the power unit's blowing up; however, several inches of the wire had already melted away, and there was going to be trouble restoring the refrigerator to service. This situation should not be allowed to get any worse, which it would if more metal were lost. Now, as the water level reached the cobbles and the wire ceased to follow the melting ice downward, the captain suddenly wondered whether he could get out to the controls fast enough to prevent the sort of shut-off which had occurred before. He wasted no time mentally blasting the scientists for not attaching a cord to the appropriate controls; he hadn't thought of it in time either.