At two hundred miles, the barge was
just visible as a starlike object reflecting Lalande 21185’s feeble
light. Benj had watched the vessel as it pulled up to that distance
and moved into what its pilot considered a decent stationkeeping
orbit, but neither he nor the pilot had discussed technical
details. It was so handy to be able to hold a conversation without
waiting a full minute for the other fellow’s answer that Benj and
Beetchermarlf had simply chattered.
These conversations were becoming less
and less frequent. Benj was really back at work now and, he
suspected, making up for lost time. Beetchermarlf was often too far
away on practice flights to talk at all, and even more frequently
too occupied to converse with anyone but his
instructor.
“Time to turn it over, Beetch,” the boy
ended the present exchange as he heard Tebbetts’ whistling from
down the shaft. “The taskmaster is on the way.”
“I’m ready when he is,” came the reply.
“Does he want to use your language or mine this time?”
“He’ll let you know; he didn’t tell me.
Here he is,” replied Benj.
The bearded astronomer, however, spoke
first to Benj after looking quickly around. The two were drifting
weightless in the direct-observation section at the center of the
station’s connecting bar, and Tebbetts had taken for granted that
the barge and his student would be drifting alongside. All his
quick glance caught was the dull ember of a sun in one direction
and the dimly lit disc of Dhrawn, little larger than Luna seen from
Earth, in the other.
“Where is he, Benj? I thought I heard
you talking to him, so I assumed he was close. I hope he isn’t
late. He should be solving intercept orbits, even with nomographs
instead of high-speed computers, better than that by
now.”
“He’s here, sir.” The boy pointed.
“Just over two hundred miles away, in a 17.8-minute orbit around
the station.”
Tebbetts blinked. “That’s ridiculous. I
don’t think this heap of hardware would whip anything around in
that time at a distance of two hundred feet, let alone that many
miles. He’d have to use power, accelerating straight toward
us—”
“He is, sir. About two hundred g’s
acceleration. The time is the rotation period of Mesklin, and the
acceleration is the gravity value at his home port. He says he
hasn’t been so comfortable since he signed up with Barlennan, and
wishes there were some way to turn up the sunlight.”
The astronomer smiled
slowly.
“Yes. I see. That does make sense. I
should have thought of it myself. I have some more practice
exercises for him here, but that’s about as good as any of them. I
should do more of that sort of thing. Well, let’s get at it. Can
you stay to check my language? I think I have the Stennish words
for everything in today’s work, and space is empty enough so that
his mistakes and mine should both be relatively harmless, but
there’s no need to take chances.”
“It’s too bad the Kwembly couldn’t be salvaged after all,” remarked
Aucoin, “but Dondragmer’s crew is doing a very good and effective
study of the area while they’re waiting for relief. I think it was
a very good idea to send the Kalliff after
them with a skeleton crew and let them work while they waited,
instead of taking them back to the Settlement in the barge. That
would have been pretty dangerous anyway, until there are practiced
Mesklinite pilots. The single landing near the Kuembly to get the two helmsmen, and a direct return to
space while they were trained, was probably the safest way to do
it.
“But now we have this trouble with the
Smof. At this rate we’ll be out of cruisers
before we’re half way around Low Alpha. Does anyone know the
Smof’s commander the way Easy knows
Dondragmer? You don’t, I suppose, Easy? Can anyone give a guess at
his ability to get himself out of trouble? Or are we going to have
to risk sending the barge down before those two Mesklinites are
fully trained?”
“Tebbetts thinks Beetchermarlf could
handle a surface landing now, as long as it wasn’t complicated by
mechanical emergencies,” pointed out an engineer. “Personally I
wouldn’t hesitate to let him go.”
“You may be right. The trouble is,
though, that we certainly can’t land the barge on an ice pack, and
not even the barge can lift one of those land-cruisers, even if
there were a way of fastening them together without an actual
landing. Beetchermarlf and Takoorch may as well continue their
training for the moment. What I want as soon as possible,
Planetology, is the best direction and distance for the
Smof’s crew to trek if they do have to
abandon the cruiser, that is, the closest spot where the barge
could land to pick them up. If it’s close to
their present location, don’t tell them, of course; I want them to
do their best to save the cruiser, and there’s no point in tempting
them with an easy escape.” Ib Hoffman stirred slightly, but
refrained from comment. Aucoin, from one point of view, was
probably justified. The administrator went on, “Also, is there
definite word on the phenomenon that trapped the Kwemb/y? You’ve had specimens of the mud, or whatever it
is, that Beetchermarlf brought up, for weeks now.”
“Yes,” replied a chemist. “It’s a
fascinating example of surface action. It’s sensitive to the nature
and particle size of the minerals present, the proportions of water
and ammonia in the lubricating fluid, the temperature, and the
pressure. The Kwembly’s weight, of course,
was the main cause of trouble; the Mesklinites could walk around on
it, in fact, they did, safely enough. Once triggered by a pressure
peak, the strength went out of the stuff in a wave—”
“All right, the rest can serve for a
paper,” Aucoin nodded. “Is there any way to identify such a surface
without putting a ship onto it?”
“Hmm. I’d say yes. Radiation
temperature should be information enough, or at least, it would
warn that further tests should be made. For that matter, I wouldn’t
worry about its ever getting the barge; the jets would boil the
water and ammonia out of such a surface safely before
touchdown.”
Aucoin nodded, and passed on to other
matters. Cruiser reports, publication reports, supply reports,
planning prospectuses.
He was still a little embarrassed. He
had known his own failing, but like most people had excused it, and
felt sure it wasn’t noticeable. But the Hoffmans had noticed it,
maybe others had. He’d have to be careful, if he wanted to keep a
responsible and respected job. Alter all, he repeated firmly to
himself, Mesklinites were people, even if they looked like
bugs.
Ib Hoffman’s attention wandered,
important though he knew the work to be. His mind kept going back
to the Kwembly, and the Smof, and to a welldesigned, well-built piece of diving
gear which had almost killed an elevenyear-old boy. The reports,
punctuated by Aucoin’s sometimes acid comments, droned on; slowly
Ib made up his mind.
“We’re getting ahead,” remarked
Barlennan. “There was good excuse for taking the vision sets out of
the Kwembly, since she was being abandoned,
so we’ve been able to work on her with no restrictions. We could
use Reffel’s helicopter, since the humans think it’s lost too.
Jemblakee and Deeslenver seem to feel that the cruiser can be back
in running state in another day.” He glanced at the feeble sun,
almost exactly overhead. “The human chemists were certainly helpful
about that mud she was in. It was funny how the one who talked to
Dee about the stuff kept insisting that he was only guessing, while
he made suggestion after suggestion. It’s too bad we couldn’t tell
him how successful most of his ideas were.”
“Self-doubt seems to be a human trait,
if it’s safe to make such a sweeping remark,” replied Guzmeen.
“When did this news get in?”
“The Deedee came
in an hour ago, and is gone again. There’s too much for that
machine to do. It was bad enough when we lost the Elsh, and with Kabremm and his Gwelf overdue things are piling up. I hope we find him.
Maybe the Kalliff will turn up something; he
was supposed to be scouting a route to get her to Don’s camp, so
maybe one of Kenanken’s scouts will spot him. He’s less than a day
overdue, so there’s still a chance …”
“And with all this, you say we’re
ahead?” cut in Guzmeen.
“Sure. Remember, the whole aim of the
Esket act was to persuade the human beings
to let us use space ships. The self-support business was
incidental, though useful. We expected to work the local-life myth
up to a major menace before we could persuade Aucoin to let us fly,
and spend months building up to it. We’re far ahead on time, and
haven’t lost very much, the base at the Esket site, of course, and the Elsh and its crew, and just possibly Kabremm and
his.”
“But even Kabremm and Karfrengin aren’t
exactly expendable. There aren’t very many of us. If Dondragmer and
his crew don’t keep alive until the Kalliff
reaches them, we’ll have taken a really serious loss; at least our
dirigible crews weren’t our scientists and engineers.”
“Don’s in no real danger. They can
always be picked up by Beetchermarlf in the human space ship—I mean
our space ship.”
“And if anything goes wrong with
that operation we’re out not only our only
space ship but our only space pilots.”
“Which suggests to me,” Barlennan said
thoughtfully, “that we should try to regain some lost ground. As
soon as the Kwembly is ready she should
start hunting a suitable place and start replacing the Esket settlement. Don’s scientists should have little
trouble finding a good location; Dhrawn seems to be rich in metal
ores. Maybe we should have him search closer to here so that
communication will be quicker, though.
“We’ll have to build more dirigibles;
the one we have left isn’t nearly enough for the work. Maybe we
ought to design bigger ones.”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” a
technician who had been listening silently up to this point spoke
up. “Do you suppose that it would be smart to find out more,
tactfully, of course, from the humans about dirigibles? We’ve never
discussed the subject with them; they taught you about balloons
years ago, and some of our own people got the idea of using the
human power sources with them. We don’t know if they ever used them at all. Maybe it isn’t just bad luck
that we’ve lost two out of our three in such a short time. Maybe
there’s something fundamentally wrong with the whole
idea.”
The commander gave a gesture of
impatience.
“That’s silly. I didn’t try to pick up
a complete scientific education from the aliens, since it was
obviously going to take too long; but one thing I did gather was
that the underlying rules are essentially simple. Once the humans
started concentrating on basic rules, they went from sailing ships
to space ships in a couple of hundred years. Balloons, powered or
not, are simple devices; I understand them perfectly myself.
Putting an engine aboard doesn’t change that; the same rules have
to be working.”
The technician eyed his commander
thoughtfully, and thought briefly of electron tubes and television
circuits before replying.
“I suppose,” he said thoughtfully,
“that a piece of a tent being blown away
by the gale, and a ship being tacked into the wind, are also
examples of the same rules at work.”
Barlennan didn’t want to give an
affirmative answer, but he could find nothing better.
He was still trying to shrug off the
technician’s remark, but only succeeding in growing more and more
doubtful of his situation, some twenty hours later when a messenger
called him to the communication room. As soon as he entered,
Guzmeen spoke briefly into a microphone; a minute later, a human
face which neither of them recognized appeared on the
screen.
“I am Ib Hoffman, Easy’s husband and
Benj’s father,” the stranger began without preamble. “I’m speaking
to you two, Barlennan and Dondragmer, alone. The rest of the
observing crew here are concentrating on a new emergency involving
one of the cruisers. I’m using your language as best I can, with my
wife standing by; she knows what I want to say, and will correct me
if I slip too badly. I have decided that it is time to clear up
some misunderstandings, but I don’t plan to tell everyone here
about them; you’ll see why before I finish, if you don’t already.
I’m bothered mostly because I hate to call anyone a liar in any
language.
“First, Barlennan, my hearty
congratulations. I am just about certain that when we turned the
barge over to a Mesklinite pilot we fulfilled one of your chief
plans, probably well before you meant or expected it to mature.
That’s fine. I wanted that to happen. Probably you want to make
interstellar flights on your own later on, too; that’s also fine
with me. I’ll help.
“You seem to feel that many or most
human beings would try to thwart you in this, and I have to admit
that some would, though I think we have the most effective one
under control now. You can’t be sure that I’m being sincere now,
for that matter; you’re tricky enough yourself to expect it of
other people. Too bad. How much you believe of what I say is beyond
my control; I still have to say it.
“I don’t know how much of the basic
situation you set up, but I can guess. I’m nearly sure the
Esket disappearance was not genuine. I’m
uncertain of the real status of the Kwembly.
You probably know more of Dhrawn than you’ve reported. I won’t say
I don’t care, because I do; we’re here to learn as much as possible
about Dhrawn, and what you don’t tell us is a loss to the project.
I can’t threaten you with penalties for breach of contract, since
I’m not completely certain you’ve broken it and am in no position
to carry out threats. And in any case have less than no desire to
even make threats. I do want to persuade you, though, that it will
be better for both of us if we do without secrets. We’re at a point
where anything less than complete frankness is likely to cost us a
lot and cost you everything. To make that point, I’m going to tell
you a story.
“You know that human beings breathe
oxygen much as you do hydrogen, though being so much larger we need
a more complicated pumping system to get it through our bodies.
Because of the details of that system, we suffocate if
deprived of gaseous, free oxygen within a certain rather narrow
range of pressures.
“About three quarters of Earth is
covered by water. We cannot breathe under water without artificial
equipment, but the use of such equipment is a common human sport.
It consists essentially of a tank of compressed air and a valve
system which releases the air to our breathing system as needed;
simple and obvious.
“Six of our years ago, when Benj was
eleven years old, he made such a device, designing it himself with
my assistance. He made the pressure tank and regulator, using
ordinary fabricating equipment such as may be found in most home
workshops, just as he had made more complex things such as small
gas turbines. He tested the parts with my help; they worked
perfectly. He calculated how long the air in the tank would last
him, and then tested the whole assembly under water. I went along
as a matter of common-sense safety, using a commercial diving
device.
“I am sure you know the principles of
hydrostatics and the gas laws; at least, Easy has given me words
for them in your language. You can see that at a certain depth, a
lungful of air would have only half its volume at the surface. Benj
knew this too, but reasoned that it would still be a lungful as far
as oxygen content was concerned, so that a one-hour tank would be a
one-hour tank regardless of depth, as long as tank pressure was
above that of the water.
“To make a long story short, it didn’t.
He ran out of air in less than a third of the calculated time, and
I had to make an emergency rescue. Because of the quick pressure
change and some human peculiarities which you don’t seem to share,
he was very nearly killed. The trouble turned out to be that the
human breathing rate is controlled, not by the oxygen in our blood,
but by the carbon dioxide, one of the waste products. To maintain a
normal equilibrium of that, we have to run normal volumes of air through our lungs, regardless of oxygen
content or total pressure; hence, an hour’s air supply at normal
pressure is only half an hour thirty-three feet under water, a
third of an hour at sixtysix, and so on.
“I don’t want to insult anyone’s
intelligence by asking if he understands my point, but I’d like
some comment from both of you on that story.”
The answers were interesting, both in
nature and arrival time. Barlennan’s popped from the speaker with
very little more than light-travel delay; Dondragmer’s came much,
much later, and did not overlap with his commander’s.
“It is obvious that incomplete
knowledge can lead to mistakes,” said Barlennan, “but I don’t see
why that is especially applicable to the present case. We know that
our knowledge can’t be complete, and that our work here is
dangerous for that reason. We have always known it. Why emphasize
the point now? I’d much rather hear your report on the cruiser you
say is in trouble. You make me suspect that you are leading up
gently to the information that I have lost another cruiser because
of something its designing engineers didn’t know.
Don’t worry, I won’t blame you for that. None of us could foresee
everything.”
Ib smiled sourly at the revelation of
yet another human characteristic.
“That’s not just what I had in mind,
Commander, though there are valid aspects to what you have just
said. I’d like to wait for Dondragmer’s answer before I say any
more, though.”
It was another full minute, a slightly
strained one, before the voice of the Kwembly’s captain arrived.
“Your account is plain enough and you
would probably have been briefer had you not meant to imply more. I
suspect that your key point is not so much that your son got into
trouble through ignorance, but that he did so even under your
experienced adult supervision. I would take the implication to be
that even though you aliens do not claim omniscience or
omnipotence, we are in a certain amount of danger here no matter
how closely you supervise and assist us, and we are adding
unnecessarily to our danger any time we act on our own, like the
student chemist who experiments on his own.” Dondragmer had spent
much more time at the College than had his commander.
“Right. Just what I meant,” said Ib. “I
can’t …”
“Just a moment,” interrupted Easy.
“Hadn’t you better relay Don’s remark to Barlennan
first?”
“Right.” Her husband gave a
one-sentence summary of the captain’s speech, and went on, “I can’t
force any policy on you, and would prefer not to even if I could. I
don’t expect you to make a complete revelation of everything that’s
gone on on Dhrawn since you first built the Settlement. In fact,
I’d advise strongly against it; I have enough complications up here
with the administration as it is. However, if Easy just happened to
get an occasional talk with her old friends Destigmet and Kabremm,
just as an example, I would have a better idea of what has gone on
and be in a better position to keep things running smoothly at this
end. I don’t expect a spot decision on any matter of major policy
change, Commander, but please think it over.”
Barlennan, being a sea captain by
training and trade, was accustomed to the need for quick decisions.
Furthermore, circumstances had already compelled thoughts on
similar lines to circulate in his tiny head. Finally, his only
really basic policy was to ensure his own survival and that of his
crew. He answered Ib promptly.
“Easy may get her talk with Destigmet,
but not right away; the Esket is a long
distance from here. I will also have to wait to tell you all that
I’d like to, because I must first hear from you the details of the
trouble you mentioned when you first called. You said that another
of my cruisers was in trouble.
“Please tell me just what has happened,
so I can plan what help to request from you.”
Ib and Easy Hoffman looked at each
other and grinned in mingled relief and triumph.
But it was Benj who made the key
remark. This was later on, in the
aerology lab, when they were recounting to him and McDevitt all
that had been said. The boy looked up at the huge globes of Dhrawn,
and the tiny area where the lights indicated partial
knowledge.
“I suppose you think he’s a lot safer
now, down there.”
It was a sobering thought.