Impatience and irritation were
noticeable in the Planning Laboratory but so far no tempers had
actually been lost. Ib Hoffman, back for less than two hours from a
month-long errand to Earth and Dromm, had said practically nothing
except to ask for information. Easy, sitting beside him, had said
nothing at all so far, but she could see that something would have
to be done shortly to turn the conversation into constructive
channels. Changing the Project’s basic policy might be a good idea,
it often was. But right now, it was futile for the people at this
end of the table to spend time blaming each other for the present
one. Still less useful was the scientists’ bickering at the other
end. They were still wondering why a lake should freeze when the
temperature had been rising. A useful answer might lead to some
useful action but to Easy it seemed a question for the laboratory
rather than for a conference room.
If her husband didn’t take a hand in
the other discussion soon, she would have to do something herself,
she decided.
“I’ve heard all about that side of it
before, and I still don’t buy it!” snapped Mersereau. “Up to a
point it’s good common sense, but I think we’re way past that
point. I realize that the more complex the equipment, the fewer
people you need to run it; but you also need more specialized
apparatus and specially trained personnel to maintain and repair
it. If the land-cruisers had been as fully automated as some people
wanted, we could have gotten along with a hundred Mesklinites on
Dhrawn instead of a couple of thousand at
first; but the chances are that every one of these machines
would be out by now because we couldn’t possibly have landed all
the backup equipment and personnel they’d need. There aren’t enough
technically trained Mesklinites in existence yet, for one thing. I
agreed with that, Barlennan agreed with it; it was common sense, as
I said.
“But you, and for some reason
Barlennan, went even farther. He was against including helicopters.
I know there were some characters in the Project who assumed you
could never teach a Mesklinite to fly, and maybe it was racial
acrophobia that was motivating Barlennan; but at least he was able
to realize
that without air scouting the land-cruisers wouldn’t dare travel
more than a few miles an hour over new ground, and it would take
roughly forever to cover even Low Alpha at that rate. We did
convince him on that basis.
“But there was a lot of stuff we’d have
been glad to provide, which would have been useful and have paid
its way, which he talked us out of using. No weapons; I agree they’d probably
have been futile. But no short-range radio equipment? No intercoms
in the Settlement? It’s dithering nonsense for Dondragmer to have
to call us, six million miles away, and ask us to relay his reports
to Barlennan at the Settlement. It’s usually not critical, since
Barl couldn’t help him physically and the time delay doesn’t mean
much, but it’s silly at the best of times. It is critical now,
though, when Don’s first mate has disappeared, presumably within a
hundred miles of the Kwembly and possibly
less than ten, and there’s no way in the galaxy to get in touch
with him either from here or from the cruiser. Why was Barl against
radios, Alan? And why are you?”
“The same reason you’ve just given,”
Aucoin answered with just a trace of acerbity. “The maintenance
problem.”
“You’re dithering. There isn’t any
maintenance problem on a simple voice, or even a vision,
communicator. There were four of them, as I understand it, being
carried around on Mesklin with Barlennan’s first outside-sponsored
trip fifty years or so ago, and not one of them gave the slightest
trouble. There are sixty on Dhrawn right now, with not a blip of a
problem from any of them in the year and a half they’ve been there.
Barlennan must know that, and you certainly do. Furthermore, why do
we relay what messages they do send by voice? We could do it
automatically instead of having a batch of interpreters hashing
things up (sorry, Easy) and you can’t tell me there’d be a
maintenance problem for a relay unit in this station. Who’s trying
to kid whom?”
Easy stirred; this was perilously close
to feud material. Her husband, however, sensed the motion and
touched her arm in a gesture she understood. He would take care of
it. However, he let Aucoin make his own answer.
“Nobody’s trying to kid anyone. I don’t
mean equipment maintenance, and I admit it was a poor choice of
words. I should have said morale. The Mesklinites are a competent
and highly self-reliant species, at least the representatives we’ve
seen the most of. They sail over thousands of miles of ocean on
these ridiculous groups of rafts, completely out of touch with home
and help for months at a time, just as human beings did a few
centuries ago. It was our opinion that making communication too
easy would tend to undermine that self-confidence. I admit that
this is not certain; Mesklinites are not human, though their minds
resemble ours in many ways, and there’s one major factor whose
effect we can’t evaluate and may never be able to. We don’t know
their normal life spans, though they are clearly a good deal longer
than ours. Still, Barlennan agreed with us about the radio
question—as you said, it was he who brought it up—and he has never
complained about the communication difficulty.”
“To us.” Ib cut in at this point.
Aucoin looked surprised, then puzzled.
“Yes, Alan, that’s what I said. He
hasn’t complained to us. What he thinks about it privately none of
us knows.”
“But why shouldn’t he complain, or even
ask for radios, if he has come to feel that he should have them?”
The planner was not completely sidetracked, but Easy noted with
approval that the defensiveness was gone from his
tone.
“I don’t know why,” Hoffman admitted.
“I just remember what I’ve learned about our first dealings with
Barlennan a few decades ago. He was a highly cooperative,
practically worshipful agent for the mysterious aliens of Earth and
Panesh and Dromm and these other mysterious places in the sky
during most of the Gravity mission, doing our work for us just as
we asked; then at the end he suddenly held us up for a blackmail
jolt which five human beings, seven Paneshka, and nine Drommians
out of every ten still think we should never have paid. You know as
well as I do that teaching advanced technology, or even basic
science, to a culture which isn’t yet into its mechanical
revolution makes the sociologists see red because they feel that
every race should have the right to go through its own kind of
growing pains; makes the xenophobes scream because we’re arming the
wicked aliens against us; gets the historians down on us because
we’re burying priceless data; and annoys the administrative types
because they’re afraid we’re setting up problems they haven’t
learned to cope with yet.”
“It’s the xenophobes who are the big
problem,” Mersereau snapped. “The nuts who take it for granted that
every non-human species would be an enemy if it had the technical
capacity. That’s why we give the Mesklinites only equipment they
can’t possibly duplicate themselves, like the fusion units: things
which couldn’t be taken apart and studied in detail without about
five stages of intermediate equipment like gamma-ray diffraction
cameras, which the Mesklinites don’t have either. Alan’s argument
sounds good, but it’s just an excuse. You know as well as I do that
you could train a Mesklinite to fly a reasonably part-automated
shuttle in two months if the controls were modified for his
nippers, and that there isn’t a scientist in this station who
wouldn’t give three quarts of his blood to have loads of physical
specimens and instruments of his own improvising bouncing between
here and Dhrawn’s surface.”
“That’s not entirely right, though
there are elements of truth in it,” Hoffman returned calmly. “I
agree with your personal feeling about xenophobes, but it is a fact
that with energy so cheap that a decently designed interstellar
freighter can pay off its construction cost in four or five years,
an interstellar war isn’t the flat impossibility it was once
assumed to be. Also, you know why this station has such big rooms,
uncomfortable as some of us find them and inefficient as they
certainly are for some purposes. The average Drommian, if there
were a room here he couldn’t get into, would assume that it
contained something being deliberately kept secret from him. They
have no concept of privacy, and by our standards most of them are
seriously paranoid. If we had
failed to share technology with them when contact was first made,
we’d have created a planetful of highly competent xenophobes much
more dangerous than anything even Earth has produced. I don’t know
that Mesklinites would react the same way, but I still think that
starting the College on Mesklin was the smartest piece of policy
since they admitted the first Drommian student to
M.LT.”
“And the Mesklinites had to blackmail
us into doing that.”
“Embarrassingly true,” admitted
Hoffman. “But that’s all a side issue. The current point is that we
just don’t know what Barlennan really thinks or plans. We can,
though, be perfectly sure that he didn’t agree to take two thousand
of his people including himself onto an almost completely unknown
world, certain to be highly dangerous even for a species like his,
without having a very good reason indeed.”
“We gave him a good reason,” pointed
out Aucoin.
“Yes. We tried to imitate him in the
art of blackmail. We agreed to keep the College going on Mesklin,
over the objections of many of our own people, if he would do the
Dhrawn job for us. There was no suggestion on either side of
material payment, though the Mesklinites are perfectly aware of the
relation between knowledge and material wealth. I’m quite willing
to admit that Barlennan is an idealist, but I’m not sure how much
chauvinism there is in his idealism or how far either one will
carry him.
“All this is beside the point too. We
shouldn’t be worrying about the choice of equipment provided for
the Mesklinites. They agreed with the choice, whatever their
private reservations may have been. We are still in a position to
help them with information on physical facts they don’t know and
which their scientists can hardly be expected to work out for
themselves. We have high-speed computation. Right now we have one
extremely expensive exploring machine frozen in on a lake on
Dhrawn, together with about a hundred living beings who may be
personnel to some of us but are personalities to the rest. If we
want to change policy and insist on Barlennan’s accepting a
shuttleful of new equipment, that’s fine; but it’s not the present
problem, Boyd. I don’t know what we could send down right now that
would be the slightest help to Dondragmer.”
“I suppose you’re right, Ib, but I
can’t help thinking about Kervenser, and how much better it would
have been if—”
“He could have carried one of the
communicators, remember. Dondragmer had three besides the one on
his bridge, all of them portable. The decision to take them or not
was strictly on Kervenser himself and his captain. Let’s leave out
the if’s for now and try to do some constructive
planning.”
Mersereau subsided, a little irritated
at Ib for the latter’s choice of words but with his resentment of
Aucoin’s attitude diverted for the moment. The planner took over
the conversational lead again, looking down the table toward the
end where the scientists had now fallen silent.
“All right, Dr. McDevitt. Has any
agreement been reached as to what probably happened?”
“Not completely, but there is an idea
worth checking further. As you know, the Kwembly’s observers had been reporting nearly constant
temperature since the fog cleared; no radiational cooling; if
anything, a very slight warming trend. Barometric readings have
been rising very slowly at that place ever since the machine was
stranded; readings before that time are meaningless because of the
uncertain change in elevation. The temperatures have been well
below the freezing points of either pure water or pure ammonia but
rather above that of the ammonia monohydrate-water eutectic. We’re
wondering whether the initial thaw might not have been caused by
the ammonia fog’s reacting with the water snow on which the
Kwembly was riding. Dondragmer was afraid of
that possibility; and if so, the present freeze might be due to
evaporation of ammonia from the eutectic. We’d need ammidity
readings—”
“What?” Hoffman and Aucoin cut in
almost together.
“Sorry. Office slang. Partial pressure
of ammonia relative to the saturation value—equivalent of relative
humidity for water. We’d need readings on that to confirm or kill
the notion, and of course the Mesklinites haven’t been taking
them.”
“Could they?”
“I’m sure we could work out a technique
with them. I don’t know how long it would take. Water vapor
wouldn’t interfere; its equilibrium pressure is four or five powers
of ten smaller than ammonia’s in that temperature range. The job
shouldn’t be too hard.”
“I realize this is an hypothesis rather
than a full-blown theory, but is it good enough to base action
on?”
“That would depend on the action.”
Aucoin made a gesture of impatience, and the atmospheric physicist
continued hastily.
“That is, I wouldn’t risk an
all-or-nothing breakout effort on it alone, but I’d be willing to
try anything which didn’t commit the Kwemb/y
to exhausting some critical supply she carries, or put her in
obvious danger.”
The planner nodded. “All right,” he
said. “Would you rather stay here and supply us with more ideas, or
would it be more effective to talk this one over with the
Mesklinites?”
McDevitt pursed his lips and thought
for a moment.
“We’ve been talking with them pretty
frequently, but I suppose there’s more good likely to come from
that direction than—” he stopped, and Easy and her husband
concealed smiles. Aucoin nodded, appearing not to notice the
faux pas.
“All right. Go on back to
Communications, and good luck. Let us know if either you or they
come up with anything else that seems worth trying.”
The four scientists assented and left
together. The ten remaining conference
members were silent for some minutes before Aucoin voiced what all
but one were thinking.
“Let’s face it,” he said slowly. “The
real argument is going to come when we relay this report to
Barlennan.”
Ib Hoffman jerked upright. “You haven’t
yet?” he snapped.
“Only the fact of the original
stranding, which Easy told them, and occasional progress reports on
the repair work. Nothing yet about the freeze-up.”
“Why not?” Easy could read danger
signals in her husband’s voice, and wondered whether she wanted to
smooth this one over or not. Aucoin looked surprised at the
question.
“You know why as well as I do. Whether
he learned about it now or ten hours from now or from Dondragmer
when he gets back to the Settlement a year from now would make
little difference. There is nothing Barlennan could do immediately
to help, and the only thing he could do at all is something we’d
rather he didn’t.”
“And that is?” interjected Easy
sweetly. She had about made up her mind which line to
take.
“That is, as you well know, sending one
of the two land-cruisers still at the Settlement off to rescue the
Kwembly, as he wanted to do for the
Esket.”
“And you still object to
that.”
“Certainly, for exactly the same
reasons as before-which Barlennan, I admit, accepted that time.
It’s not entirely that we have other specific plans for those two
cruisers, but that’s part of it. Whatever you may think, Easy, I
don’t dismiss life as unimportant merely because it isn’t human
life. I do object, though, to wasting time and resources. Changing
policy in the middle of an operation generally does
both.”
“But if you claim that Mesklinite lives
mean as much to you as human ones, how can you talk about
waste?”
“You’re not thinking, Easy. I
understand and don’t really blame you, but you’re ignoring the fact
that the Kwembly is something like ten
thousand miles airline from the Settlement, and more like thirteen
thousand by the route they took. A rescue vehicle could not
possibly cover that track in less than two hundred or two hundred
and fifty hours. The last part of it, which the Kwembly traversed by being washed down a river, might
not be findable and the last four thousand miles across the snow
field may no longer be passable.”
“We could give them directions with
satellite fixes.”
“We could, no doubt. The fact remains
that unless Dondragmer can get himself, his crew, and his vehicle
out of their present trouble, nothing Barlennan can send out for
him is likely to be of the slightest help if
the Kwembly is in real and immediate danger.
If she is not, if it’s just a matter of being frozen in like a
nineteenth-century whaler, they have indefinite supplies with their
closed-cycle life system and fusion converters and we and Barlennan
can plan a nice, leisurely rescue.”
“Like Destigmet’s Esket,” retorted the woman with some bitterness. “It’s
been over seven months, and you squelched all rescue talk then and
ever since!”
“That was a very different situation.
The Esket is still standing there, unchanged
as far as her vision sets can tell us, but her crew has dropped out
of sight. We haven’t the faintest idea what has happened to them
but since they’re not on board and haven’t been for all this time
it’s impossible to believe they’re still alive. Even with all their
abilities and physical toughness, Mesklinites couldn’t live on
Dhrawn for seven months without a good deal more equipment than
their air suits.”
Easy had no answer. On pure logic,
Aucoin was perfectly right; but she could not accept the idea that
the situation was purely logical. Ib knew how she felt and decided
that the time had come to change course again. He shared the
planner’s opinion, up to a point, on basic policy; he also knew why
his wife could not possibly accept it.
“The real, immediate problem, as I see
it,” Hoffman interjected, “is the one Don has with the men who are
still outside. As I get it, two are under the ice, as far as anyone
can tell; and no one seems to know whether that puddle is frozen to
the bottom. In any case, judging by the work they were supposed to
be doing, they’re in among the Kwembly’s
trucks somewhere. I suppose that means a straight
icepick-and-search job. I can’t guess what the chances are of an
air suited Mesklinite’s living through that sort of thing. The
temperature won’t bother them that far below melting water ice, but
I don’t know what other physiological limitations they may
have.
“Don’s first officer is also missing,
overdue from a helicopter flight. We can’t help directly, since he
didn’t take a communicator with him, but there is another flier
available. Has Dondragmer asked us to assist while a search is made
with the other machine and a vision set?”
“He hadn’t up to half an hour ago,”
replied Mersereau.
“Then I strongly advise that we suggest
it to him.”
Aucoin nodded agreement, and glanced at
the woman. “Your job, I’d say, Easy.”
“If someone hasn beaten me to it.” She
rose, pinched Ib’s ear in passing, and left the room.
“Next point,” Hoffman went on.
“Granting that you may be right in opposing a rescue expedition
from the Settlement, I think it’s time Barlennan was brought up to
date about the Kwembly.”
“Why ask for more troubles than we
need?” retorted Aucoin. “I don’t like to argue with anyone,
especially when he doesn’t really have to listen to
me.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to argue.
Remember, he agreed with us the other time.”
“You were saying a few minutes ago that
you weren’t sure how sincere his agreements have
been.”
“I’m not, but if he had been strongly
against us that time he’d have done
just what he wanted and sent a crew out to help the Esket. He did, remember, on a couple of other occasions
when there was a cruiser in trouble.”
“That was much closer to the
settlement, and we finally approved the action,” retorted
Aucoin.
“And you know as well as I do that we
approved it because we could see that he was going to do it
anyway.”
“We approved it, Ib, because your wife
was on Barlennan’s side both times and out-talked us. Your
argument, incidentally, is a point against telling him about the
present situation.”
“Whose side was she on during the
Esket argument? I still think we should tell
Barlennan the present situation pronto. Plain honesty aside, the
longer we wait the more certain he is to find out, sooner or later,
that we’ve been censoring expedition reports on him.”
“I wouldn’t call it censoring. We’ve
never changed a thing.”
“But you have delayed the relay plenty
of times while you decided what he ought to know, and as I’ve said
before I don’t think that’s the game as we agreed to play it with
him. Pardon my reactionary sentiments, but on purely selfish
grounds we’d be well advised to keep his confidence as long as
possible.”
Several of the others, who had listened
in silence up to this point, spoke up almost at once when Hoffman
expressed this sentiment. It took Aucoin several seconds to
untangle their words, but it eventually became clear that the
feeling of the group was with Ib. The chairman yielded gracefully;
his technique did not involve standing in front of the
bull.
“All right, we pass on the complete
report to Barlennan as soon as we adjourn.” He glanced at the
winner. “That is, if Mrs. Hoffman hasn’t sent it already. What’s
the next point?”
One of the men who had done little but
listen up to this point asked a question. “Forgive me if I didn’t
follow you too clearly a few minutes ago. Ib, you and Alan both
claim that Barlennan agreed with Project policy in limiting to an
absolute minimum the amount of sophisticated equipment his
expedition was to use. That was my understanding also; but you, Ib,
just mentioned having doubts about Barlennan’s sincerity. Do any of
those doubts stern from his accepting the
helicopters?”
Hoffman shook his head. “No. The
arguments we used for their necessity were good, and the only
surprising thing to me was that Barlennan didn’t anticipate them
and take the equipment without argument.”
“But Mesklinites are acrophobic by
nature. The thought of flying, to anyone from a world like that,
must be just unimaginable.”
Ib smiled grimly. “True. But one of the
first things Barlennan did after he made his deal with the Gravity
people and started learning basic science was to design, build and
fly, on Mesklin, in the polar zone where gravity is at its highest,
a hot air balloon. Whatever is motivating Barlennan, it isn’t
acrophobia.
I don’t exactly doubt him; I’m just not sure of his thinking, if
you’ll forgive a rather crude quibble.”
“I agree,” Aucoin interjected. “And I
think we’re running dry. I suggest we break up for, say, six hours.
We can think, or go down to Comm and listen to the Mesklinites or
talk with them; anything that will keep your thoughts on Dhrawn
questions. You know my ideas about that.”
“That’s where mine have been.” It was
the same speaker. “I keep wondering about the Esket, every time one of the cruisers runs into trouble,
even when the trouble is obviously natural..
“So do we all, I imagine,” rejoined
Aucoin.
“The more I think of it, the more I
feel that her crew must have run into intelligent opposition. After
all, we know there is life on Dhrawn, more than the bushes and
pseudo-algae the Mesklinites have found. They wouldn’t account
quantitatively for that atmosphere; there must be a complete
ecological complex somewhere. I’d guess in the higher-temperature
regions.”
“Such as Low Alpha.” Hoffman completed
the thought. “Yes, you don’t have ammonia and free oxygen in the
same environment for very long, on the time scale of a planet. I
can believe the possibility of an intelligent species here. We
haven’t found any sign of it from space and the Mesklinite ground
parties haven’t met it, unless the Esket
did, but seventeen billion square miles of planet make a lot of
good reasons for that. The idea is plausible and you’re not the
first to get it but I don’t know where it leaves us. Barlennan
thought of it too, according to Easy, and debated sending another
cruiser to the area of the Esket’s loss
specifically to seek and contact any intelligence that may be
there; but even Barlennan was doubtful about undertaking a search.
We certainly haven’t pushed it.”
“Why not?” cut in Mersereau. “If we
could get in touch with natives as we did on Mesklin the project
could really get going! We wouldn’t have to depend so completely
on—oh.”
Aucoin smiled grimly.
“Precisely,” he said. “Now you
have found a good reason for wondering about
Barlennan’s frankness. I’m not saying that he’s an ice-hearted
politician who would give up the lives of his men just to keep a
hammerlock on the Dhrawn operation, but the Esket’s crew was pretty certainly already beyond rescue
when he finally agreed not to send the Kalliff in the same direction.”
“There is another point, though,”
Hoffman said thoughtfully.
“What?”
“I’m not sure it’s worth mentioning,
since we can’t evaluate it; but the Kwembly
is commanded by Dondragmer, who is a long-time associate of
Barlennan’s and should by ordinary reasoning be an extremely close
friend. Is there any chance that his being involved would influence
Barl’s judgment about a rescue trip or even make him order one
against his better judgment? Like you,
I don’t think that caterpillar is just an administrative machine.
His cold-bloodedness is purely physical.”
“I’ve wondered about that too,” the
chief planner admitted. “It surprised me greatly months ago when he
let Dondragmer go out at all. I’d gotten the impression that he
didn’t want him to take major chances. I didn’t worry too much
about ic--certainly no one knows enough about Mesklinite psychology
in general or Barlennan’s in particular to base any serious
planning on. If anyone does, Ib, it’s your wife, and she can’t or
won’t put what she understands about them into words. As you say,
we can’t assign weight to the friendship-influence possibility. We
just add it to the list of questions. Let me hear any ideas about
those crewmen who are presumably frozen under the Kuvmbly and then
we really must break up.”
“A fusion converter would keep a good,
large heating coil going, and resistors aren’t very complex
equipment,” Mersereau pointed out. “Heaters aren’t a very
unreasonable piece of equipment on Dhrawn, either. If
only-”
“But we didn’t,” interrupted
Aucoin.
“But we did, if you’d let me finish.
There are enough converters with the Kwembly to lift her off the
planet if their energy could be applied to such a job. There must
be some metal aboard which could be jury-rigged into resistors or
arcs. Whether the Mesklinites could operate such gadgets I don’t
know. There must be a limit even to their temperature tolerance but
we might at least ask if they’ve thought of such a
thing.”
“You’re wrong on one point. I know
there is very little metal either in their equipment or the
supplies on those land-cruisers and I’d be startled if Mesklinite
rope turned out to be a conductor. I’m no chemist, but anything
bonded as firmly as that stuff must have its electrons pretty well
latched in place. By all means check with Dondragmer, though. Easy
is presumably still in Comm; she can help you if there are no
linguistically broad Mesklinites on duty at the other end. We’re
adjourned.”
Mersereau nodded, already heading
toward the door, and the meeting broke up. Aucoin followed
Mersereau through one door; most of the others went other ways.
Only Hoffman remained seated at the table.
His eyes were focused nowhere in
particular, and there was a frown on his face which made him look
older than his forty years.
He liked Barlennan. He liked Dondragmer
even better, as did his wife. He had no grounds for the slightest
complaint about the progress of the Dhrawn research, considering
the policies he himself had helped set up, nor did the rest of the
planners. There was no concrete reason whatever, except a trick of
half a century before, to distrust the Mesklinite commander. That
he might want to keep hypothetical natives of Dhrawn out of the
picture could hardly be given credence. No, certainly not. After
all, the problems of transferring responsibility to such beings,
even if they existed, for the Dhrawn research project, would cause
even more delay, as Barlennan would surely realize.
The occasional case of disagreement
between explorers and planners was minor. It was the sort of thing
which happened ten times as often with, say, Drommians. No, there
was no reason to suppose the Mesklinites were already going off on
independent plans of their own.
Still, Barlennan had not wanted
helicopters, though he had finally been persuaded to accept them.
He was the same Barlennan who had built and flown in a hot air
balloon as his first exercise in applied science.
He had not sent relief to the
Esket, although all the giant land-cruisers
were necessary for the Project and despite the fact that a hundred
or so of his people were aboard.
He had refused local-range radios,
useful as they would obviously be. The argument against them was
the sort that a firm-minded teacher might use in a classroom
situation, but this was real life and deadly earnest.
He had, fifty years before, not only
jumped at the chance to acquire alien knowledge; he had maneuvered
deliberately to force his non-Mesklinite sponsors to give it to
him.
Ib Hoffman could not rid himself of the
notion that Barlennan was up to something underhanded
again.
He wondered what Easy thought about
it.