Hal Clement - Cycle of Fire

He listened carefully as the record of the geologist’s summary was played over by the astronomers, but heard nothing he did not remember from its original utterance. He listened carefully to the conversation of these new scientists and never considered that they might regard his insistent questions as a discourtesy — which, as a matter of fact, most of them did not.

“I am afraid I do not know exactly what you mean when you say that Arren may have ‘captured’ Theer and Abyormen,” Dar would ask at one point.

“I think young Kruger explained something of Newton’s laws to you,” was the beginning of the answer.

“Normally, any two bodies attract each other according to definite law, and that attraction, plus the ordinary fact of inertia — the thing that keeps a stone traveling after it leaves the hand that throws it — results in definite, predictable motions of those bodies, such as the Alphard around your planet at this moment. By ‘capture’ we simply imply that originally Theer did not travel around Arren, but had its own path through space, and this path carried it close to Arren. The star’s attractive forces changed the paths so that now they travel around each other.”

“That seems clear enough. But I gathered that some of you found fault with this idea?”

“Plenty of fault. Capture doesn’t ordinarily occur; it calls, as a rule, for very special circumstances.”

“Why? If this force varies with distance as you say, I should think that all that would be needed would be for the two objects to get close enough together. In fact, I don’t see why Theer and Arren haven’t fallen into each other long ago, if what you say is right.”

“Good point. The trouble is, as two objects fall toward each other their speed increases — you can see that. Unless they are aimed exactly right to start with they won’t collide, and unless they collide they’ll start going apart again, slowing down just as fast as they picked up speed before. The outbound path will be shaped just like the inbound one, so you won’t see them spiraling together. Here, I’ll show you.”

Since the Alphard was in free fall, demonstration of the point was easy enough. Two electrically charged pith balls in the evacuated air lock behaved in a manner that made the whole affair quite clear to the curious Abyormenite.

“Then how could a capture ever take place?” he asked when his instructor had re-entered the main part of the ship and doffed his space suit. “I suppose it’s possible some way or you wouldn’t even have mentioned it.”

“It’s possible — just. If a third object is present, moving exactly the right way with respect to the others, things may turn out just right, though the probability of such an event is not awfully high; and if I’d let air into the lock a moment ago its friction would have caused the pith balls to spiral together.”

“I suppose the idea is that some of the other stars in this group served as the third body.”

“I hate to depend on such an idea, because they’re pretty far apart, but that may account for the situation.”

“At any rate it is possible that this sort of thing may account for the beginning of the hot times on Abyormen.”

“Possible. I’d not like to say more.” The Abyormenite had to be content with that — for the time being.

Naturally it did not take very many answers involving the terms “perhaps” and “probably” to start Dar pondering on the “how-do-you-know” type of question. Up to a point the astronomers bore with him even then, but eventually they suggested as tactfully as possible that he have Kruger teach him a little elementary algebra.

It never occurred to Dar to be hurt. He was mildly annoyed at himself for not thinking of this before, since so many of his previous questions had involved bits of mathematics in their answers. He went gaily off to find Kruger, who no longer accompanied him everywhere since his great improvement in English.

Dar failed to notice the slight dismay that his request caused his human friend; he settled down and wanted to learn algebra at once. Kruger did his best, but was not the world’s best teacher. He might have done better had he not been obsessed with a fear that this sort of thing was likely to destroy Dar’s interest in science.

He need not have worried. Most people who suffer in mathematics do so because they treat it as something to be memorized, and memorization held no terrors for Dar Lang Ahn. Perhaps for that reason he was extremely slow in grasping the basic idea of algebra as a problem-solving tool; he could learn all the rules but, faced with a problem, had precisely the same trouble as so many high-school freshmen. However, it was Kruger rather than Dar who eventually sought relief from this task.

Finding a new subject to interest Dar was not difficult, but for private reasons Kruger felt that it should be a non-mathematical one this time. He shared the common belief about biology’s being such a subject, and decided that it was about time to find out what the life scientists had learned about Abyormen.

It turned out that this team had been trying for some time to solve the problem of examining the only ‘hot’ life form available — one of the Teachers in the volcano-warmed refuges. The individual at the geyser village was still not exactly cooperative, but they felt that they knew him better than any of the others; it was this being who had been selected to play host to a televison-equipped robot which the Alphard’ s engineers had improvised. Dar, seeing this device, was immediately off on a new track, and Kruger was faced with explaining television and remote control. He was still trying when everyone went aboard the landing boat with the robot.

Actually Dar felt he had a fairly clear picture of what the apparatus did, and he was beginning to get a very good idea of his chances of learning how it was done. He listened while Kruger talked to the Teacher on the boat’s radio during the landing, but made no comments of his own.

“We would appreciate it if you would allow our robot to enter your retreat. We are sure it can stand the conditions.”

“Why should I do this? What good will it do either of us?”

“You have seen us, and must have formed some of your opinions as a result. Don’t you think we might modify some of our beliefs after seeing you? After all, you have claimed many times that we do not understand you, since we do not agree with your views about the spreading of knowledge. It seems to me that you would be willing to do anything which will increase our understanding.”

“How do you know I have ever seen you? I told you that I knew of no substance which would keep our environments apart and which could also be seen through.”

“Then you didn’t tell the whole truth — you have a television device of some sort. You saw clearly enough to ask about those iron belt buckles that Dar wears.”

“Very well. But how sure can I be that your seeing me will bring you strange people to your right minds?”

“I cannot tell; how can I promise what we’ll conclude from evidence we don’t yet possess? In any case you can learn more of us.”

“I have no particular interest in learning more about you.”

“You did when you were asking me all those questions a few years back.”

“I learned what I needed to know then.”

“Many of the people are learning about our science, not just Dar Lang Ahn. There were scores of them watching while we investigated a cave far to the south.”

“There seems little I can do to stop it.”

“But if you will also learn from us, you could at least have some idea of what the others are finding out; and you would be able to exercise some control over what your own people learn when their time of living arrives.”