Hal Clement - Cycle of Fire

Kruger’s sentence was interrupted — and not by the Teacher.

“I think I’ll say ‘uncle’ too.” The voice was a slow drawl that the boy had never to his knowledge heard before, but it was speaking English. “I can stand,” it went on, “an occasional word that sounds like good old English in any collection of random noises, and will gladly put it down to coincidence. However, when ‘child,’ ‘son,’ ‘daughter,’ ‘brother,’ ‘sister,’ and ‘uncle’ all occur within the same thirty-second period, coincidence goes a long, long way out the window. Mr. Nils Kruger, if you’ve been contributing heavily to the conversations we’ve been recording for the last couple of weeks, I hope you’ve developed a good accent. If not, a couple of philologists I know are going to be very, very angry indeed!”

MOST HUMAN beings continue hoping long after any logical excuse for it has died. The man going into battle against impossible odds, the pilot who stays with a blazing airplane to guide it away from a city, the condemned criminal in the death cell — few of them give up while they breathe. Nils Kruger had not entirely relinquished hope of seeing Earth again. He did not, however, expect to be rescued. He had had faint ideas, which he would have admitted himself were illogical, that perhaps by combining Abyormenite technology with his own some sort of ship able to cross the five hundred light years to the solar system might be built. Even after he had gained a fairly accurate idea of the technical limitations of Dar Lang Ahn’s race the thought had not entirely vanished; but unreasonable as he may have been in this respect, he never for an instant supposed that another terrestrial space ship would approach the Pleiades during his lifetime. There was too much else for them to do.

As a result the sound of an unmistakably human voice cutting in on his conversation with a creature who could hardly be less human gave Kruger quite literally the shock of his life. For some moments he was completely unable to speak. Several questions came from the radio, and when these were answered only by Dar Lang Ahn’s rather unfortunate attempts at English the disturbance in the distant space ship was nearly as great as that in the hut.

“That can’t be Kruger — he wouldn’t talk like that, and anyway he’s dead!”

“But where could they have learned English?”

“My year-old kid speaks better English than that!”

“Kruger, is that you or has the philology department gone off the rails?”

“I–I’m here all right, but you shouldn’t do things like that. What ship is that? and how come you were listening in? and what are you doing in the Pleiades anyway?”

“It’s your own ship, the Alphard; this is Donabed. That radio you have is pretty sad; I’m not sure of your voice either. We’ve been here a couple of weeks, and have been picking up and recording all the radio noise we could find in hopes of having some of the language in useful shape when we landed. I’m glad you were too sensible to expect us back; it seems that there’s something about this system that had thrown the astronomers into fits, and they had to come back to look for themselves. Is that radio a native product, or did you make it?”

“Strictly home grown.” Kruger was back in control of himself, though his knees still felt weak. “Just a minute, we have an audience that doesn’t speak English.” Kruger shifted back into the Abyormenite speech and explained to Dar and the Teacher what had happened. “Now, while you’re coming down, will you please explain to me just what is so peculiar about this place from the astronomer’s point of view?”

“I’m not an astrophysicist, but here’s the situation as I understand it,” returned Donabed. “You know the elementary facts about the sources of stellar energy, and that main-sequence stars like the sun and this red dwarf should be able to keep radiating at their present rate for billions of years. However, there are a lot of stars in space which are a lot more luminous than Sol, sometimes by a factor of tens of thousands. Suns like that are using up their hydrogen so rapidly that they should not be able to last more than a few million, or a few tens of millions, of years at the most. Alcyone, like several other stars in the Pleiades, is such a sun.

“So far, that’s all right. The Pleiades cluster is full of nebulous material, and presumably that is still combining to form other stars to add to the hundreds already in the group; but here we run into trouble. They’ve worked out to a fair degree of precision the sort of things that should happen to the condensing clouds. In some circumstances, with a certain amount of angular momentum, you can expect several stars to form, traveling in orbits about each other — a regular binary or multiple star system. In other cases, with less angular momentum, you get most of the mass in one star and the dregs left over forming a planetary system. It’s a little surprising, though not impossible, to get a double or multiple star with planets as well; but to get a star like Alcyone with planets anywhere near it is queer as all get-out! A sun like that is putting out radiation tens of thousands of times as intense as Sol’s; that radiation exerts pressure; and that pressure should easily be sufficient to push out of the neighborhood any solid particles that had any idea of coalescing into planets. That’s one of the things that can be computed and checked experimentally, and it’s hard to get around. For that reason the star-gazers were not too bothered when they found from our data that Alcyone had a red dwarf companion, but when they learned that the companion had a planet they went wild. We had quite a time persuading some of them that we hadn’t made some sort of silly mistake; we had to point out that we’d actually landed on the thing.”

“I’ll say we did!” Kruger muttered.

“You should know. By the way, its name is officially Kruger, if you care.”

“I’m afraid its name is Abyormen, if we follow accepted usage,” replied the boy. “But go on.”

“There’s not much more to tell. They hated like poison to give up their pet theories, and I’ve heard them speculating all the way out here about the possibility of the red sun’s having, been captured by Alcyone after its planet or planets formed, and so on. There’s lots of work to be done, and you can help a lot. I judge you’ve learned a good deal of the local language, and will save our time by acting as an interpreter.”

“Yes, up to a point; somehow whenever I talk to one of these people we get crossed up sooner or later. It may be happening without my even knowing it right now, since I haven’t even seen this fellow I’ve been talking to on the radio.”

“How’s that? Haven’t seen him?”

“No, and haven’t the faintest idea what he looks like. Look, Major, if you’ll come down and get me out of this steam bath I’ll be a lot better able to explain all this and, believe me, it will take quite a bit of explaining.”

“We’re on the way. Will you be coming up alone?” Kruger explained the question briefly to Dar and asked if he would care to go along. The native was a trifle dubious for a moment, then realized that more book material would undoubtedly be involved and agreed to accompany his friend.

“Dar Lang Ahn will come with me,” Kruger reported to Donabed.

“Will he need any special accommodation?”

“I’ve seen him perfectly comfortable on an ice field, and he’s made glider flights of fully two days without bothering to drink, so I don’t think temperature and humidity will bother him. I don’t know about pressure; as you say, it’s higher here.”

“How high does he go on these glider flights?”