The tank’s arrival, Lackland’s
emergence from the dome’s main air lock, and the rising of Belne
all took place at substantially the same moment. The vehicle
stopped only a couple of yards from the platform on which Barlennan
was crouched. Its driver also emerged; and the two men stood and
talked briefly beside the Mesklinite. The latter rather wondered
that they did not return to the inside of the dome to lie down,
since both were rather obviously laboring under Mesklin’s gravity;
but the newcomer refused Lackland’s invitation.
“I’d like to be sociable,” he said in
answer to it, “but honestly, Charlie, would you stay on this
ghastly mudball a moment longer than you had to?”
“Well, I could do pretty much the same
work from Toorey, or from a ship in a free orbit for that matter,”
retorted Lackland. “I think personal contact means a good deal. I
still want to find out more about Barlennan’s people—it seems to me
that we’re hardly giving him as much as we expect to get, and it
would be nice to find out if there were anything more we could do.
Furthermore, he’s in a rather dangerous situation himself, and
having one of us here might make quite a difference—to both of
us.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Barlennan is a tramp captain—a sort of
freelance explorer-trader. He’s completely out of the normal areas
inhabited and traveled through by his people. He is remaining here
during the southern winter, when the evaporating north polar cap
makes storms which have to be seen to be believed here in the
equatorial regions—storms which are almost as much out of his
experience as ours. If anything happens to him, stop and think of
our chances of meeting another contact!
“Remember, he normally lives in a
gravity field from two hundred to nearly seven hundred times as
strong as Earth’s. We certainly won’t follow him home to meet his
relatives! Furthermore, there probably aren’t a hundred of his race
who are not only in the same business but courageous enough to go
so far from their natural homes. Of those hundred, what are our
chances of meeting another? Granting that this ocean is the one
they frequent most, this little arm
of it, from which this bay is an offshoot, is six thousand miles
long and a third as wide—with a very crooked shore line. As for
spotting one, at sea or ashore, from above—wet!, Barlennan’s
Bree is about forty feet long and a third as
wide, and is one of their biggest oceangoing ships. Scarcely any of
it is more than three inches above the water, besides.
“No, Mack, our meeting Barlennan was
the wildest of coincidences; and I’m not counting on another.
Staying under three gravities for five months or so, until the
southern spring, will certainly be worth it. Of course, if you want
to gamble our chances of recovering nearly two billion dollars’
worth of apparatus on the results of a search over a strip of
planet a thousand miles wide and something over a hundred and fifty
thousand long—”
“You’ve made your point,” the other
human being admitted, “but I’m still glad it’s you and not me. Of
course, maybe if I knew Barlennan better—” Both men turned to the
tiny, caterpillarlike form crouched on the waist-high
platform.
“Barl, I trust you will forgive my
rudeness in not introducing Wade McLellan,” Lackland said. “Wade,
this is Barlennan, captain of the Bree, and
a master shipman of his wortd—he has not told me that, but the fact
that he is here is sufficient evidence.”
“I am glad to meet you, Flyer
McLellan,” the Mesklinite responded. “No apology is necessary, and
I assumed that your conversation was meant for my ears as well.” He
performed the standard pincer-opening gesture of greeting. “I had
already appreciated the good fortune for both of us which our
meeting represents, and only hope that I can fulfill my part of the
bargain as well as I am sure you will yours.”
“You speak English remarkably well,”
commented McLellan. “Have you really been learning it for less than
six weeks?”
“I am not sure how long your ‘week’ is,
but it is less than thirty-five hundred days since I met your
friend,” returned the commander. “I am a good linguist, of
course—it is necessary in my business; and the films that Charles
showed helped very much.”
“It is rather lucky that your voice
could make all the sounds of our language. We sometimes have
trouble that way.”
“That, or something like it, is why I
learned your English rather than the other way around. Many of the
sounds we use are much too shrill for your vocal cords, I
understand.” Barlennan carefully refrained from mentioning that
much of his normal conversation was also too high-pitched for human
ears. After all, Lackland might not have noticed it yet, and the
most honest of traders thinks at least twice before revealing all
his advantages. “I imagine that Charles has learned some of our
language, nevertheless, by watching and listening to us through the
radio now on the Bree.”
“Very little,” confessed Lackland. “You
seem, from what little I have seen, to have an extremely
well-trained crew. A great deal of your regular activity is
done without orders, and I can make nothing of the conversations
you sometimes have with some of your men, which are not accompanied
by any action.”
“You mean when I am talking to
Dondragmer or Merkoos? They are my first and second officers, and
the ones I talk to most.”
“I hope you will not feel insulted at
this, but I am quite unable to tell one of your people from
another. I simply am not familiar enough with your distinguishing
characteristics.”
Barlennan almost laughed.
“In my case, it is even worse. I am not
entirely sure whether I have seen you without artificial covering
or not.”
“Well, that is carrying us a long way
from business—we’ve used up a lot of daylight as it is. Mack, I
assume you want to get back to the rocket and out where weight
means nothing and men are balloons. When you get there, be sure
that the receiver-transmitters for each of these four sets are
placed close enough together so that one will register on another.
I don’t suppose it’s worth the trouble of tying them in
electrically, but these folks are going to use them for a while as
contact between separate parties, and the sets are on different
frequencies. Barl, I’ve left the radios by the air lock. Apparently
the sensible program would be for me to put you and the radios on
top of the crawler, take Mack over to the rocket, and then drive
you and the apparatus over to the Bree.”
Lackland acted on this suggestion, so
obviously the right course, before anyone could answer; and
Barlennan almost went mad as a result.
The man’s armored hand swept out and
picked up the tiny body of the Mesklinite.
For one soul-shaking instant Barlennan felt and saw himself
suspended long feet away from the ground; then he was deposited on
the flat top of the tank. His pincers scraped desperately and
vainly at the smooth metal to supplement the instinctive grips
which his dozens of suckerlike feet had taken on the plates; his
eyes glared in undiluted horror at the emptiness around the edge of
the roof, only a few body lengths away in every direction. For long
seconds—perhaps a full minute—he could not find his voice; and when
he did speak, he could no longer be heard. He was too far away from
the pickup on the platform for intelligible words to carry—he knew
that from earlier experience; and even at this extremity of terror
he remembered that the sirenlike howl of agonized fear that he
wanted to emit would have been heard with equal clarity by everyone
on the Bree, since there was another radio there.
And the Bree
would have had a new captain. Respect for his courage was the only
thing that had driven that crew into the storm-breeding regions of
the Rim. If that went, he would have no crew and no ship—and, for
all practical purpose, no life. A coward was not tolerated on any
ocean-going ship in any capacity; and while his homeland was on
this same continental mass, the idea of traversing forty thousand
miles of coast line on foot was not to be considered.
These thoughts did not cross his
conscious mind in detail, but his instinctive knowledge of the
facts effectually silenced him while Lackland picked up
the radios and, with McLellan, entered the tank below the
Mesklinite. The metal under him quivered slightly as the door was
closed, and an instant later the vehicle started to move. As it did
so, a peculiar thing happened to its non-human
passenger.
The fear might have—perhaps should
have—driven him mad. His situation can only be dimly approximated
by comparing it with that of a human being hanging by one hand from
a window ledge forty stories above a paved street.
And yet he did not go mad. At least, he
did not go mad in the accepted sense; he continued to reason as
well as ever, and none of his friends could have detected a change
in his personality. For just a little while, perhaps, an Earthman
more familiar with Mesklinites than Lackland had yet become might
have suspected that the commander was a little drunk; but even that
passed.
And the fear passed with it. Nearly six
body lengths above the ground, he found himself crouched almost
calmly. He was holding tightly, of course; he even remembered,
later, reflecting how lucky it was that the wind had continued to
drop, even though the smooth metal offered an unusually good grip
for his sucker-feet. It was amazing, the viewpoint that could be
enjoyed—yes, he enjoyed it—from such a position. Looking down on
things really helped; you could get a remarkably complete picture
of so much ground at once. It was like a map; and Barlennan had
never before regarded a map as a picture of country seen from
above.
An almost intoxicating sense of triumph
filled him as the crawler approached the rocket and stopped. The
Mesklinite waved his pincers almost gaily at the emerging McLellan
visible in the reflected glare of the tank’s lights, and was
disproportionately pleased when the man waved back. The tank
immediately turned to the left and headed for the beach where the
Bree lay; Mack, remembering that Barlennan
was unprotected, thoughtfully waited until it was nearly a mile
away before lifting his own machine into the air. The sight of it,
drifting slowly upward, apparently without support, threatened for
just an instant to revive the old fear; but Barlennan fought the
sensation grimly down and deliberately watched the rocket until it
faded from view in the light of the lowering sun.
Lackland had been watching too; but
when the last glint of metal had disappeared, he lost no further
time in driving the tank the short remaining distance to where the
Bree lay. He stopped a hundred yards from
the vessel, but he was quite close enough for the shocked creatures
on the decks to see their commander perched on the vehicle’s roof.
It would have been less disconcerting had Lackland approached
bearing Barlennan’s head on a pole.
Even Dondragmer, the most intelligent
and levelheaded of the Bree’s complement—not excepting his
captain—was paralyzed for long moments; and his first motion was
with eyes only, taking the form of a wistful glance toward the
flame-dust tanks and “shakers” on the outer rafts. Fortunately for
Barlennan, the crawler was not downwind; for the temperature was,
as usual, below the
melting point of the chlorine in the tanks. Had the wind
permitted, the mate would have sent a cloud of fire about the
vehicle without ever thinking that his captain might be
alive.
A faint rumble of anger began to arise
from the assembled crew as the door of the crawler opened and
Lackland’s armored figure emerged. Their halftrading,
half-piratical way of life had left among them only those most
willing to fight without hesitation at the slightest hint of menace
to one of their number; the cowards had dropped away long since,
and the individualists had died. The only thing that saved
Lackland’s life as he emerged into their view was habit—the
conditioning that prevented their making the hundred-yard leap that
would have cost the weakest of them the barest flick of his body
muscles. Crawling as they had done all their lives, they flowed
from the rafts like a red and black waterfall and spread over the
beach toward the alien machine. Lackland saw them coming, of
course, but so completely misunderstood their motivation that he
did not even hurry as he reached up to the crawler’s roof, picked
up Barlennan, and set him on the ground. Then he reached back into
the vehicle and brought out the radios he had promised, setting
them on the sand beside the commander; and by then it had dawned on
the crew that their captain was alive and apparently unharmed. The
avalanche stopped in confusion, milling in an undecided fashion
midway between ship and tank; and a cacophony of voices ranging
from deep bass to the highest notes the radio speaker could
reproduce gabbled in Lackland’s suit phones. Though he had, as
Barlennan had intimated, done his best to attach meaning to some of
the native conversation he had previously heard, the man understood
not a single word from the crew. It was just as well for his peace
of mind; he had long been aware that even armor able to withstand
Mesklin’s eight-atmosphere surface pressure would mean little or
nothing to Mesklinite pincers.
Barlennan stopped the babble with a
hoot that Lackland could probably have heard directly through the
armor, if its reproduction by the radio had not partially deafened
him first. The commander knew perfectly well what was going on in
the minds of his men, and had no desire to see frozen shreds of
Lackland scattered over the beach.
“Calm down!” Actually, Barlennan felt a
very human warmth at his crew’s reaction to his apparent danger,
but this was no time to encourage them. “Enough of you have played
the fool here at no-weight so that you all should know I was in no
danger!”
“But you forbade—”
“We thought—”
“You were high—”
A chorus of objections answered the captain, who cut them
short.
“I know I forbade such actions, and I
told you why. When we return to high-weight and decent living we
must have no habits that might result in our thoughtlessly doing
dangerous things like that—” He waved a pincer-tipped
arm upward toward the tank’s roof. “You all know what proper
weight can do; the Flyer doesn’t. He put me up there, as you saw
him take me down, without even thinking about it. He comes from a
place where there is practically no weight at all; where, I
believe, he could fall many times his body
length without being hurt. You can see that for yourselves: if he
felt properly about high places, how could he fly?”
Most of Barlennan’s listeners had dug
their stumpy feet into the sand as though trying to get a better
grip on it during this speech. Whether they fully digested, or even
fully believed, their commander’s words may be doubted; but at
least their minds were distracted from the action they had intended
toward Lackland. A faint buzz of conversation arose once more among
them, but its chief overtones seemed to be of amazement rather than
anger. Dondragmer alone, a little apart from the others, was
silent; and the captain realized that his mate would have to be
given a much more careful and complete story of what had happened.
Dondragmer’s imagination was heavily backed by intelligence, and he
must already be wondering about the effect on Barlennan’s nerves of
his recent experience. Well, that could be handled in good time;
the crew presented a more immediate problem.
“Are the hunting parties ready?”
Barlennan’s question silenced the babble once more.
“We have not yet eaten,” Merkoos
replied a little uneasily, “but everything else—nets and weapons—is
in readiness.”
“Is the food ready?”
“Within a day, sir.” Karondrasee, the
cook, turned back toward the ship without further
orders.
“Don, Merkoos. You will each take one
of these radios. You have seen me use the
one on the ship—all you have to do is talk anywhere near it. You
can run a really efficient pincer movement with these, since you
won’t have to keep it small enough for both leaders to see each
other.
“Don, I am not certain that I will
direct from the ship, as I originally planned. I have discovered
that one can see over remarkable distances from the top of the
flyer’s traveling machine; and if he agrees I shall ride with him
in the vicinity of your operations.”
“But, sir!” Dondragmer was aghast.
“Won’t—won’t that thing scare all the game within sight? You can
hear it coming a hundred yards away, and see it for I don’t know
how far in the open. And besides—” He broke off, not quite sure how
to state his main objection. Barlennan did it for him.
“Besides, no one could concentrate on
hunting with me in sight so far off the ground—is that it?” The
mate’s pincers silently gestured agreement, and the movement was
emulated by most of the waiting crew.
For a moment the commander was tempted
to reason with them, but he realized in time the futility of such
an attempt. He could not actually recapture the viewpoint he had
shared with them until so recently, but he did realize
that before that time he would not have listened to what he now
considered “reason” either.
“All right, Don. I’ll drop that
idea—you’re probably right. I’ll be in radio touch with you, but
will stay out of sight.”
“But you’ll be riding on that thing?
Sir, what has happened to you? I know I can tell myself that a fall of a few feet really means
little here at the Rim, but I could never bring myself to invite
such a fall deliberately; and I don’t see how anyone else could. I
couldn’t even picture myself up on top of that thing.”
“You were most of a body length up a
mast not too long ago, if I remember aright,” returned Barlennan
dryly, “or was it someone else I saw checking upper lashings
without unshipping the stick?”
“That was different—I had one end on
the deck,” Dondragmer replied a trifle uncomfortably.
“Your head still had a long way to
fall. I’ve seen others of you doing that sort of thing too. If you
remember, I had something to say about it when we first sailed into
this region.”
“Yes, sir, you did. Are those orders
still in force, considering—” The mate paused again, but what he
wanted to say was even plainer than before. Barlennan thought
quickly and hard.
“We’ll forget the order,” he said
slowly. “The reasons I gave for such things being dangerous are
sound enough, but if any of you get in trouble for forgetting when
we’re back in high-weight it’s your own fault. Use your own
judgment on such matters from now on. Does anyone want to come with
me now?”
Words and gestures combined in a chorus
of emphatic negatives, with Dondragmer just a shade slower than the
rest. Barlennan would have grinned had he possessed the physical
equipment.
“Get ready for that hunt—I’ll be
listening to you,” he dismissed his audience. They streamed
obediently back toward the Bree, and their
captain turned to give a suitably censored account of the
conversation to Lackland. He was a little preoccupied, for the
conversation just completed had given rise to several brand-new
ideas in his mind; but they could be worked out when he had more
leisure. Just now he wanted another ride on the tank
roof.