“It boils down to this,” Aucoin said
from the head of the table. “We have the choice of sending down the
barge, or not. If we don’t, the Kwembly and
the two Mesklinites aboard her are lost, and Dondragmer and the
rest of her crew are out of action until a rescue cruiser such as
the Kalliff can reach them from the
Settlement. Unfortunately, if we do try to land the barge there’s a
good chance that it won’t help. We don’t know why the ground gave
under the Kwembly, and have no assurance
that the same thing won’t happen anywhere else in the vicinity.
Losing the barge would be awkward. Even if we first landed near
Dondragmer’s camp and transferred him and his crew to the cruiser,
we might lose the barge and there is no assurance that the crew
could repair the Kwembly. Beetchermarlfs
report makes me doubt it. He says he has found and sealed the major
leaks, but he’s still getting oxygen inside the hull from time to
time. Several of his life-support tanks have been poisoned by it.
So far he has been able to clean them out each time and restock
them from the others, but he can’t keep going forever unless he
stops the last of these leaks. Also, neither he nor anyone else has
made any concrete suggestion for getting that cruiser loose from
the muck or whatever it’s stuck in.
“There is another good argument against
landing the barge. If we use remote, live control, there is the
sixty-second reaction lag, which would make handling anywhere near
the ground really impossible. It would be possible to program its
computer to handle a landing, but the risks of that were proved the
hard way the first time anyone landed away from Earth. You might as
well give the Mesklinites a quick lesson in flying the thing for
themselves!”
“Don’t try to make that last sound too
silly, Alan,” Easy pointed out gently. “The Kwembly is merely the first of the cruisers to get into
what looks like final trouble. Dhrawn is a very big world, with
very little known about it, and I suspect we’re going to run out of
land-cruisers for rescue or any other purpose sooner or later.
Also, even I know that the barge controls are computer-coupled,
with push-the-way-you-want-to-go operators. I admit that even so,
the chances are ten to one or worse that anyone trying a
ground-to-ground flight with that
machine on Dhrawn without previous experience would kill himself,
but do Beetchermarlf and Takoorch have even that much chance of
survival on any other basis?”
“I think they do,” replied Aucoin
quietly.
“How, in the name of all that’s
sensible?” snapped Mersereau. “Here all along we’ve—” Easy held up
her hand, and either the gesture or the expression on her face
caused Boyd to fall silent.
“What other procedure which you could conscientiourly recommend would stand
any real chance of saving either the Kwembly
herself, or her two helmsmen, or the rest of Dondragmer’s crew?”
she asked.
Aucoin had the grace to flush deeply,
but he answered steadily enough.
“I mentioned it earlier, as Boyd
remembers,” he said. “Sending the Kalliff
from the Settlement to pick them up.”
The words were followed by some seconds
of silence, while expressions of amusement flitted across the faces
around the table. Eventually Ib Hoffman spoke.
“Do you suppose Barlennan will
approve?” he asked innocently.
“It boils down to this,” Dondragmer
said to Kabremm. “We can stay here and do nothing while Barlennan
sends a rescue cruiser from the Settlement. I assume he can think
of some reason for sending one which won’t sound too queer, after
he failed to do it for the Esket.”
“That would be easy enough,” returned
the Esket’s first officer. “One of the human
beings was against sending it, and the commander simply let him win
the argument. This time he could be firmer.”
“As though the first time wouldn’t have
made some of the other humans suspicious enough. But never mind
that. If we wait, we don’t know how long it will be, since we don’t
even know whether there’s a possible ground route from the
Settlement to here. You came from the mines by air, and we floated
part of the way.
“If we decide not to wait, we can do
either of two things. One is to move by stages toward the
Kwembly, carrying the life equipment as far
as the suits will let us and then setting it up again to recharge
them. We’d get there some time, I suppose. The other is to move the
same way toward the Settlement to meet the rescue cruiser if one
comes or get there on foot if it doesn’t. I suppose we’d even get
there, eventually. Even if we reach the
Kwembly, there is no certainty that we can
repair her; if the human beings have relayed Beetchermarlf’s
feelings at all adequately, it seems rather doubtful. I don’t like
either choice because of the wasted time they both involve. There
are better things to do than crawl over the surface of this world
on foot.
“A better idea, to my way of thinking,
is to use your dirigible either to rescue my helmsmen if it is
decided to give up on the Kwembly, or to
start ferrying my crew and equipment over to where she
is.”
“But that—”
“That, of course, sinks the raft as far
as the Erket act is concerned. Even using
Reffel’s helicopter would do that; we couldn’t explain what
happened to the vision set he was carrying without their seeing
through it, no matter what lie you think up. I’m simply not sure
that the trick is worth the deliberate sacrifice of those lives,
though I admit it’s worth the risk, of
course; I wouldn’t have gone along with it otherwise.”
“So I heard,” returned Kabremm. “No one
has been able to make you see the risk of being completely
dependent on beings who can’t possibly regard us as real
people.”
“Quite right. Remember that some of
them are as different from each other, as
they are from us. I made up my mind about the aliens the time one
of them answered my question about a differential hoist clearly and
in detail, and threw in my first lesson in the use of mathematics
in science, gratis. I realize the humans differ among themselves as
we do; certainly the one who talked Barl out of sending help to the
Esket must be as different as possible from
Mrs. Hoffman or Charles Lackland—but I don’t and never will
distrust them as a species the way you seem to. I don’t think
Barlennan really does, either; he’s changed the subject more than
once rather than argue the point with me, and that’s not Barlennan
when he’s sure he’s right. I still think it would be a good idea to
lower the sails on this act and ask directly for human help with
the Kwembly, or at least take a chance on
their finding out by using all three dirigibles
there.”
“There aren’t three, any more.” Kabremm
knew the point was irrelevant, but was rather glad of a chance to
change the subject. “Karfrengin and four men have been missing in
the Elsh for two of this world’s
days.”
“That news hadn’t reached me, of
course,” said Dondragmer. “How did the commander react to it? I
should think that even he would be feeling the temptation to ask
for human help, if we’re starting to lose personnel all over the
map.”
“He hasn’t heard about it, either.
We’ve had ground parties out searching, using trucks we salvaged
from the Erket, and we didn’t want to make a
report until it could be a complete one.”
“How much more complete could it be?
Karfrengin and his men must be dead by now. The dirigibles don’t
carry life-support gear for two days.”
Kabremm gave the rippling equivalent of
a shrug. “Take it up with Destigmet. I have troubles
enough.”
“Why wasn’t your flyer used for the
search?”
“It was, until this evening. There are
other troubles at the mine, though. A sort of ice river is coming,
very slowly, but it will soon cover the whole second settlement if
it doesn’t stop. It’s already reached the Esket and started to tip it over; that’s why we were
able to salvage the trucks so easily. Destigmet sent me to follow
back up the glacier and try to find out whether it is likely
to keep coming indefinitely, or was just a brief event. I really
shouldn’t have come this far, but I couldn’t make myself stop. It’s
this same river for the whole distance, sometimes solid and
sometimes liquid along the way; it’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen
yet on this weird world. There isn’t a chance of the ice’s
stopping, and the Esket settlement is as
good as done for.”
“And of course Barlennan hasn’t heard
about this either.”
“There’s been no way to tell him. We
only discovered the ice was moving just before dark. It was just a
cliff a few dozen cables from the mine up to then.”
“In other words, we’ve lost not only my
first officer and a helicopter but a dirigible with five men, and
as an afterthought the whole Esket project,
with my Kwembly probably on the same list.
And you still think we shouldn’t end this trickery, tell the human
beings the whole story, and get their help?”
“More than ever. If they learn we’re
having this much trouble, they’ll probably decide we’re no more use
to them and abandon us here.”
“Nonsense. No one just abandons an
investment like this project; but never mind arguing; it’s a futile
point anyway. I wish—”
“What you really wish is that you had
an excuse for leaking the whole barrel to your oxygen-breathing
friends.”
“You know I wouldn’t do that. I’m quite
ready to use my own judgment in the field, but I know enough
history to be afraid of making spot-changes in basic
policy.”
“Thank goodness. It’s all right to like
some humans, but they’re not all like the Hoffman one. You admitted
that yourself.”
“What it boils down to,” Barlennan said
to Bendivence, “is that we were much too hasty in sending
Deeslenver to the Esket with orders to
shutter its vision sets. The whole Esket
question seems to have quieted down, and that will bring it to life
again. We’re not ready for the main act yet, and won’t be for a
year or more. I wasn’t sorry for the chance to start the human
beings thinking along the lines of a native-menace idea, but
Destigmet’s crew won’t be able to play the part until they have a
lot more homemade mechanical and electrical equipment, things that
the humans know we don’t have. Certainly, unless the native menace
seems real, the human beings aren’t very likely to take the steps
we want.
“If there were any way to go after Dee
now and cancel his orders, I’d do it. I wish I’d dared let you go
ahead with radio experiments, and had a set on the Deedee right now.”
“It shouldn’t be too risky, and I’d be
more than glad to work on it,” answered Bendivence. “The waves
could be detected by the human beings, of course, but if we
confined ourselves to brief and rare transmissions and used a
simple off-on code they probably wouldn’t realize what the source
was. However, it’s too late to get Deeslenver,
anyway.”
“True. I wish I knew why no one up
there has said another word about Kabremm. The last time I talked
to Mrs. Hoffman, I got the impression that she wasn’t quite as sure
as before that she’d really seen him. Do you suppose she really
made a mistake? Or are the human beings trying to test us, the way I wanted to do with them? Or has Dondragmer
done something to get us off that reef? If she were really wrong,
we’ll have to start thinking all over again …”
“And what about that other report we’ve
heard no more of, something sliding across the Esket’s floor?” countered the scientist. “Was that still
another test? Or is something really happening there? Remember, we
haven’t had any contact with that base for over a hundred and fifty
hours. If the Esket is really being moved by
something, we’re much too badly out of date to do anything
sensible. You know, without saying anything against the
Esket act, it’s an awful nuisance not to be
able to trust your data.”
“If there’s real trouble at the
Esket we’ll just have to trust Dee’s
judgment,” said the commander, ignoring Bendivence’s closing
sentence. “Actually, even that isn’t the chief problem. The real
question is what to do about Dondragmer and the Kwembly. I suppose he had good reason to leave his ship
and let her drift away, but the results have been very awkward. The
fact that a couple of his men got left aboard makes it almost more
so; if they hadn’t been, we could just forget about the cruiser and
send out the Kalliff to pick up the
people.”
“Why can’t we do that anyway? Didn’t
the human Aucoin suggest it?”
“He did. I said I’d have to think it
over.”
“Why?”
“Because there is less than one chance
in ten, and probably less than one in a hundred, that the
Kalliff could get there in time to do those
two men any good. The chances are small enough that she could get
there at all. Remember that snow field the Kwembly crossed before her first flood? What do you
suppose that area is like now? And how long do you think two men,
competent men, but with no real technical or scientific training,
are going to keep that leaking hull habitable?
“Of course, we could confess the whole
act, tell the humans to get in touch with Destigmet through the
watch he keeps at the Esket’s communicators;
then they could tell him to send a rescue dirigible.”
“That would be wasting a tremendous
amount of work, and ruining what still seems a promising
operation,” Bendivence replied thoughtfully. “You don’t want to do
that any more than I do; but of course we can’t abandon those two
helmsmen.”
“We can’t,” Barlennan agreed slowly,
“but I just wonder whether we’d be taking too much of a chance on
them if we waited out one other possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“If the human beings were convinced
that we could not possibly carry out
the rescue, it’s just possible, especially with two Hoffmans to do the arguing, that they’d decide to do
something about it themselves.”
“But what could they do? The ship they
call the ‘barge’ will only land here at the Settlement by its
automatic controls, as I understand Rescue Plan One. They certainly
can’t fly it around on this world from out at the orbiting station;
if it took them a whole minute to correct any mistake, they’d crash
it right away. They certainly can’t fly it down personally. It’s
set up to rescue us, with our air and
temperature control, and besides Dhrawn’s gravity would paint a
human being over the deck.”
“Don’t underestimate those aliens, Ben.
They may not be exactly ingenious, but there’s been time for their
ancestors to think up a lot of ready-made ideas we don’t know about
yet. I wouldn’t do it if I felt there was a real chance of our
getting there ourselves, but this way we’re not putting the
helmsmen in any worse danger than they are already; I think that
we’ll let the human beings get the idea of making the rescue
themselves. It would be much better than giving up the
plan.”
“What it boils down to,” said
Beecchermarlf to Takoorch, “is that we somehow have to find time
between plugging leaks and cleaning poison out of the air units to
convince people that the Kwembly is worth
salvaging.
“The best way would be to get her going
ourselves, though I doubt very much that we can do it. It’s the
cruiser that’s going to set the policy. Your life and mine don’t
mean very much to the humans, except maybe to Benj, who isn’t
running things up there. If the ship stays alive, if we can keep
these tanks going to supply us with food and air, and incidentally
keep from being poisoned by oxygen ourselves, and make real,
reportable progress in repairing and freeing the cruiser,
then maybe they’ll be convinced that a
rescue trip is worth while. Even if they don’t, we’ll have to do
all those things for our own sakes anyway; but if we can have the
humans tell Barlennan that we have the Kwembly out and running, and will get her back to
Dondragmer by ourselves, it should make quite a few people happy,
especially the commander.”
“Do you think we can do it?” asked
Takoorch.
“You and I are the first ones to
convince,” replied the younger helmsman. “The rest of the world
will be easier after that.”
“What it boils down to,” said Benj to
his father, “is that we won’t risk the barge for two lives, even
though that’s what it’s here for.”
“Not quite right on either count,” Ib
Hoffman answered. “It’s a piece of emergency equipment, but it was
planned for use if the whole project collapsed and we had to
evacuate the Settlement. This was always a possibility; there was a
lot that just couldn’t be properly tested in advance. For example,
the trick of matching outside pressure in the cruisers and
air-suits by using extra argon was perfectly reasonable, but we
could not be sure there would be no side effects
on the Mesklinites themselves; argon is inert by the usual
standards, but so is xenon, which is an effective anaesthetic for
human beings. Living systems are just too complicated for
extrapolation ever to be safe, though the Mesklinites seem a lot
simpler physiologically than we are. That may be one reason they
can stand such a broad temperature range.
“But the point is, the barge is preset
to home in on a beam transmitter near the Settlement; it won’t land
itself anywhere else on Dhrawn. It can be handled by remote
control, of course, but not at this range.
“We could, I suppose, alter its onboard
computer program to make it set itself down in other places, at
least, on any reasonably flat surface; but would you want to set it
down anywhere near your friend either by a built-in, unchangeable
program or by long-delayed remote control? Remember the barge uses
proton jets, has a mass of twenty-seven thousand pounds, and must
put up quite a splash soft-landing in forty gravities, especially
since its jets are splayed to reduce cratering.” Benj frowned
thoughtfully.
“But why can’t we get closer to Dhrawn,
and cut down the remote-control lag?” he asked, after some moments’
thought. Ib looked at his son in surprise.
“You know why, or should. Dhrawn has a
mass of 3,471 Earths, and a rotation period of just over fifteen
hundred hours. A synchronous orbit to hold us above a constant
longitude at the equator is therefore just over six million miles
out. If you use an orbit a hundred miles above the surface you’d be
traveling at better than ninety miles a second, and go around
Dhrawn in something like forty minutes. You’d remain in sight of
one spot on the surface for two or three minutes out of the forty.
Since the planet has about eighty-seven times Earth’s surface area,
how many control stations do you think would be needed to manage
one landing or lift-off?”
Benj made a gesture of
impatience.
“I know all that, but there is already
a swarm of stations down there, the shadow satellites. Even I know
that they all have relay equipment, since they’re all reporting
constantly to the computers up here and at any given moment nearly
half of them must be behind Dhrawn. Why can’t a controller riding
one of these, or a ship at about the same height, tie into their
relays and handle landing and lift-off from there? Delay shouldn’t
be more than a second or so even from the opposite side of the
world.”
“Because,” Ib started to answer, and
then fell silent. He remained so for a full two minutes. Benj did
not interrupt his thinking; the boy usually had a good idea of when
he was ahead.
“There would have to be several minutes
of interruption of neutrino data while the relays were being
preempted,” Ib said finally.
“Out of the how many years that they’ve
been integrating that material?” Benj was not usually sarcastic
with either of his parents, but his feelings were once more growing
warm. His father nodded silently, conceding the point, and
continued to think.
It must have been five minutes later,
though Benj would have sworn to a greater number, that the senior
Hoffman got suddenly to his feet.
“Come on, son. You’re perfectly right.
It will work for an initial space-tosurface landing, and for a
surface-to-orbit lift-off, and that’s enough. For
surface-to-surface flight even one second is too much control
delay, but we can do without that.”
“Sure!” enthused Benj. “Lift off into
orbit, get your breath, change the orbit to suit your landing spot,
and go back down.”
“That would work, but don’t mention it.
For one thing, if we made a habit of it there would be a significant interruption of neutrino data
transmission. Besides, I’ve wanted an excuse for this almost ever
since I joined this project. Now I have one, and I’m going to use
it.”
“An excuse for what?”
“For doing exactly what I think
Barlennan has been trying to maneuver us into doing all along: put
Mesklinite pilots on the barge. I suppose he wants his own
interstellar ship, some time, so that he can start leading the same
life among the stars that he used to do on Mesklin’s oceans, but
he’ll have to make do with one quantum jump at a
time.”
“Is that what
you think he’s been up to? Why should he care about having his own
space pilots so much? And come to think of it, why wasn’t that a
good idea in the first place, if the Mesklinites can learn
how?”
“It was, and there’s no reason to doubt
that they can.”
“Then why wasn’t it done that way all
along?”
“I’d rather not lecture on that subject
just now. I like to feel as much pride in my species as
circumstances allow, and the explanation doesn’t reflect much
credit either on man’s rationality or his emotional
control.”
“I can guess, then,” replied Benj. “But
in that case, what makes you think we can change it
now?”
“Because now, at the trifling cost of
descending to the same general level of emotional reasoning, we
have a handle on some of man’s less generous drives. I’m going down
to the planetology lab and filibuster. I’m going to ask those
chemists why they don’t know what trapped the Kwembly, and when they say it’s because they don’t have
any samples of the mud, I’m going to ask them why they don’t. I’m
going to ask them why they’ve been making do with seismic and
neutrino-shadow data when they might as well be analyzing mineral
samples carted up here from every spot where a Mesklinite cruiser
has stopped for ten minutes. If you prefer not to descend to that
level, and would rather work with mankind’s nobler emotions, you be
thinking of all the heart-rending remarks you could make about the
horror and cruelty of leaving your friend Beetchermarlf to
suffocate slowly on an alien world parsecs from his home. We could
use that if we have to take this argument to a higher authority,
like the general public. I don’t think we’ll really need to, but
right now I’m in no mood to restrict myself to clean fighting and
logical argument.
“If Alan Aucoin growls about the cost
of operating the barge (I think he has too much sense), I’m going
to jump on him with both feet. Energy has been practically free
ever since we’ve had fusion devices; what costs is personal skill.
He’ll have to use Mesklinite crews anyway, so that investment is
already made; and by letting the barge drift out here unused he’s
wasting its cost. I know there’s a small
hole in that logic, but if you point it out in Dr. Aucoin’s hearing
I’ll paddle you for the first time since you were seven, and I
don’t think the last decade has done too much to my arm. You let
Aucoin do his own thinking.”
“You needn’t get annoyed with
me, Dad.”
“I’m not. In fact, I’m not as much
annoyed as I am scared.”
“Scared? Of what?”
“Of what may happen to Barlennan and
his people on what your mother calls ‘that horrible
planet.’”
“But why? Why now, more than
before?”
“Because I’m coming gradually to
realize that Barlennan is an intelligent, forceful, thoughtful,
ambitious, and reasonably well-educated being, just as my only son
was six years ago; and I remember your homemade diving outfit much
too well. Come on. We have an astronautics school to get organized,
and a student body to collect.”