Hal Clement - Space Lash

Weisanen and his wife had taken over a set of equally sumptuous rooms on the opposite side of the rim, and had been in the process of setting up housekeeping when the two employees had descended to Raindrop's surface a short time before. This had been less than an hour after their arrival with Bresnahan on the shuttle from Earth; Weisanen had wasted no time in issuing his first orders. The two men were prepared to find every sign of disorder when the door to the “headquarters” section opened in response to Silbert's touch on the annunciator, but they had reckoned without Mrs. Weisanen.

At their employer's invitation, they entered a room which might have been lived in for a year instead of an hour. The furniture was good, comfortable, well arranged, and present in quantity which would have meant a visible bulge in a nation's space research budget just for the fuel to lift it away from the earth in the chemical fuel days.

Either the Weisanens felt strongly about maintaining the home atmosphere even when visiting, or they planned to stay on the station for quite a while.

The official himself was surprisingly young, according to both Bresnahan's and Silbert's preconceived notions of a magnate. He could hardly have been thirty, and might have been five years younger. He matched Bresnahan's five feet ten of height and looked about the same weight; but while the computerman regarded himself as being in good physical shape, he had to admit the other was far more muscular. Even Silbert's six feet five of height and far from insignificant frame seemed somehow inadequate beside Weisanen's.

“Come in, gentlemen. We felt your return a few minutes ago! I take it you have something to report, Mr. Bresnahan. We did not expect you back quite so soon.” Weisanen drew further back from the door and waved the others past him. “What can you tell us?” He closed the door and indicated armchairs. Bresnahan remained on his feet, uneasy at the incompleteness of his report; Silbert sank into the nearest chair. The official also remained standing. “Well, Mr. Bresnahan?”

“I have little — practically nothing — to report, as far as detailed, quantitative information is concerned,” the computer man took the plunge.

“We stayed inside the Raindrop only a few minutes, and it was evident that most of the detailed search for life specimens would have to be made with a microscope. I hadn't planned the trip at all effectively. I now understand that there is plankton-collecting apparatus here which Mr. Silbert uses regularly and which should have been taken along if I were to get anything worth showing to you.”

Weisanen's face showed no change in its expression of courteous interest. “That is quite all right,” he said. “I should have made clear that I wanted, not a detailed biological report, but a physical description by a non-specialist of what it is like subjectively down there. I should imagine that you received an adequate impression even during your short stay. Can you give such a description?”

Bresnahan's worried expression disappeared, and he nodded affirmatively.

“Yes, sir. I'm not a literary expert, but I can tell what I saw…"

“Good. One moment, please.” Weisanen turned toward another door and raised his voice. “Brenda, will you come in here, please? You should hear this.”

Silbert got to his feet just as the woman entered, and both men acknowledged her greeting.

Brenda Weisanen was a full head shorter than her husband. She was wearing a robe of the sort which might have been seen on any housewife expecting company; neither man was competent to guess whether it was worth fifty dollars or ten times that. The garment tended to focus attention on her face, which would have received it anyway. Her hair and eye-brows were jet black, the eyes themselves gray, and rounded cheeks and chin made the features look almost childish, though she was actually little younger than her husband. She seated herself promptly, saying no more than convention demanded, and the men followed suit.

“Please go on, Mr. Bresnahan,” Weisanen said. “My wife and I are both greatly interested, for reasons which will be clear shortly.”

Bresnahan had a good visual memory, and it was easy for him to comply. He gave a good verbal picture of the greenish, sunlit haze that had surrounded him — sunlight differing from that seen under an Earthly lake, which ripples and dances as the waves above refract it. He spoke of the silence, which had moved him to keep talking because it was the “quietest” silence he had known, and “didn't sound right.”

He was interrupted by Silbert at this point; the spaceman explained that Raindrop was not always that quiet. Even a grain-of-dust meteoroid striking the skin set up a shock wave audible throughout the great sphere; and if one were close enough to the site of collision, the hiss of water boiling out through the hole for the minute or two needed for the skin to heal could also be heard. It was rather unusual to be able to spend even the short time they had just had inside the satellite without hearing either of these sounds.

Bresnahan nodded thanks as the other fell silent, and took up the thread of his own description once more. He closed with the only real feature he had seen to describe — the weed-grown cylinder of the water-to-space lock, hanging in greenish emptiness above the dead-black void which reached down to Raindrop's core. He was almost poetical in spots.

The Weisanens listened in flattering silence until he had done, and remained silent for some seconds thereafter. Then the man spoke.

“Thank you, Mr. Bresnahan. That was just what we wanted.” He turned to his wife. “How does that sound to you, dear?”

The dark head nodded slowly, its gray eyes fastened on some point far beyond the metal walls.

“It's fascinating,” she said slowly. “Not just the way we pictured it, of course, and there will be changes anyway, but certainly worth seeing. Of course they didn't go down to the core, and wouldn't have seen much if they had. I suppose there is no life, and certainly no natural light, down there.”

“There is life,” replied Silbert. “Non-photosynthetic, of course, but bacteria and larger fungi which live on organic matter swept there from the sunlit parts. I don't know whether anything is actually growing on the core, since I've never gone in that far, but free-floating varieties get carried up to my nets. A good many of those have gone to Earth, along with their descriptions, in my regular reports.”

“I know. I've read those reports very carefully, Mr. Silbert,” replied Weisanen.

“Just the same, one of our first jobs must be to survey that core,” his wife said thoughtfully. “Much of what has to be done will depend on conditions down there.”

“Right.” Her husband stood up. “We thank you gentlemen for your word pictures; they have helped a lot. I'm not yet sure of the relation between your station time and that of the Terrestrial time zones, but I have the impression that it's quite late in the working day. Tomorrow we will all visit Raindrop and make a very thorough and more technical examination — my wife and I doing the work, Mr. Bresnahan assisting us, and Mr. Silbert guiding. Until then — it has been a pleasure, gentlemen.”

Bresnahan took the hint and got to his feet, but Silbert hesitated. There was a troubled expression on his face, but he seemed unable or unwilling to speak. Weisanen noticed it.

“What's the matter, Mr. Silbert? Is there some reason why Raindrop's owners, or their representatives, shouldn't look it over closely? I realize that you are virtually the only person to visit it in the last three years, but I assure you that your job is in no danger.”

Silbert's face cleared a trifle.

“It isn't that,” he said slowly. “I know you're the boss, and I wasn't worried about my job anyway. There's just one point — of course you may know all about it, but I'd rather be safe, and embarrassed, than responsible for something unfortunate later on. I don't mean to butt into anyone's private business, but Raindrop is essentially weightless.”