Hal Clement - Heavy Planet

“All right, for a while. I have some other work to do myself, but I’ll make sure the Kwembly’s screens are covered. You’d better tell Don who’s here, though, so he won’t send up an emergency message in Stennish or whatever he calls his native language. Come to think of it, though, I suppose sixty seconds extra delay wouldn’t matter much, considering what little we could do for him from here.” The woman shrugged, spoke a few words of the little sailor’s language into the transmitter, waved to Mersereau, and was gone before Dondragmer received her last phrase. Alan Aucoin had already left. The meteorology lab was on the “highest” level of the cylinder, enough closer to the spin axis of the station to make a person about ten percent lighter than in the communication room. Facilities for exercise being as limited as they were, powered elevators had been omitted from the station’s design, and intercoms were regarded as strictly emergency equipment. Easy Hoffman had the choice of a spiral stairway at the axis of symmetry of the cylinder or any of several ladders. Since she wasn?t carrying anything, she didn?t bother with the stairs. Her destination was almost directly?above? Communications, and she reached it in less than a minute. The most prominent features in this room were two twenty-foot-diameter hemispherical maps of Dhrawn. Each was a live-vision screen carrying displays of temperature, reference-altitude pressure, wind velocity, where it was obtainable, and such other data as could be obtained either from the low-orbiting shadow satellites or the Mesklinite exploring crews. A spot of green light marked the Settlement just north of the equator, and nine fainter yellow sparks scattered closely around it indicated the exploring land-cruisers. Against the background of the gigantic planet their spread made an embarrassingly small display, scattered over a range of some eight thousand miles east and west and twenty or twenty-five thousand north and south, on the western side of what the meteorologists called Low Alpha. The yellow lights, except for two well out in the colder regions to the west, formed a rough arc framing the Low. Eventually it was to be ringed with sensing stations, but little more than a quarter of its eighty-thousand-mile perimeter had so far been covered. The cost had been high — not merely in money, which Easy tended to regard as merely a measure of effort expended, but in life. Her eyes sought the red-ringed yellow light just inside the Low which marked the position of the Esket. Seven months — three and a half of Dhrawn’s days — had passed since any human being had seen a sign of her crew, though her transmitters still sent pictures of her interior. Easy thought grimly, now and again, of her friends Kabremm and Destigmet; and occasionally she bothered Dondragmer’s conscience, though she had no way of knowing this, by talking about them to the Kwembly’s commander. “H’lo, Easy,” and “Hi, Mom,” cut into her gloomy thoughts. “Hello, weather men,” she responded. “I have a friend who’d like a forecast. Can you help?”

“If it’s for here in the station, sure,” answered Benj. “Don’t be cynical, son. You’re old enough to understand the difference between knowing nothing and not knowing everything. It’s for Dondragmer of the Kwembly.” She indicated the yellow light on the map, and outlined the situation. “Alan is bringing an exact position, if that will help.”

“Probably not much,” Seumas McDevitt admitted. “If you don’t like cynicism I’ll have to pick my words carefully; but the light on the screen there should be right within a few hundred miles, and I doubt that we can compute a precise enough forecast for that to make a significant difference.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d have enough material for any predictions at all,” Easy countered. “I understand that weather comes from the west even on this world, and the area to the west has been out of sunlight for days now. Can you see such places well enough to get useful data?”

“Oh, sure.” Benj’s sarcasm had vanished and the enthusiasm which had caused him to put down atmospheric physics as his post-primary tentative was taking over. “We don’t get much of our measurement from reflected sunlight anyway; nearly all is direct radiation from the planet. There’s a lot more emitted than it receives from the sun anyway; you’ve heard the old argument as to whether Dhrawn ought to be called a star or a planet. We can tell ground temperature, a good deal about ground cover, lapse rates, and clouds. Winds are harder—” he hesitated, seeing McDevitt’s eye on him and unable to read the meteorologist’s poker face. The man read the trouble in time and nodded him on before the rush of self-confidence had lost momentum. McDevitt had never been a teacher, but he had the touch. “Winds are harder because of the slight uncertainty in cloud heights and the fact that adiabatic temperature changes often have more to say about the location of clouds than air mass identities do. In that gravity, the air density drops by half about every hundred yards of climb, and that makes for terrific PV changes in temperature—” he paused again, this time eying his mother. “Do you know about that sort of thing, or should I slow down?”

“I’d hate to have to solve quantitative problems on what you’ve just been saying,” Easy replied, “but I think I have a fair qualitative picture. I get the impression that you’re a little doubtful about telling Don to the nearest minute when his fog is going to clear. Would a report from him on surface pressures and winds be any help? The Kwembly has instruments, you know.”

“It might,” McDevitt admitted as Benj nodded silently. “Can I talk to the Kwembly directly? And will any of them understand me? My Stennish doesn’t exist yet.”

“I’ll translate if I can keep your technical terms straight,” replied Easy. “If you plan to do more than a one-month tour here, though, it would be a good idea to try to pick up the language of our little friends. Many of them know some of ours, but they appreciate it.”

“I know. I plan to. I’d be glad if you’d help me.”

“When I can, certainly; but you’ll see a lot more of Benj.”

“Benj? He came here three weeks ago with me, and hasn’t had any better chance to learn languages than I have. We’ve both been checking out on the local observation and computer nets, and filling in on the project background.” Easy grinned at her son. “That’s as may be. He’s a language bug like his mother, and I think you’ll find him useful, though I admit he got his Stennish from me rather than the Mesklinites. He insisted on my teaching him something that his sisters wouldn’t be able to listen in on. Write as much of that off to parental pride as you like, but give him a try. Later, that is; I’d like that information for Dondragmer as soon as we can get it. He said the wind was from the west at about sixty miles an hour, if that helps at all.” The meteorologist pondered a moment. “I’ll run what we have through integration, with that bit added,” he said finally. “Then we can give him something when we call, and if the numerical details he gives us then are too different we can make another run easily enough. Wait a moment.” He and the boy turned to their equipment, and for several minutes their activities meant little to the woman. She knew, of course, that they were feeding numerical data and weighting values into computing devices which were presumably already programmed to handle the data appropriately. She was pleased to see Benj apparently handling his share of the work without supervision. She and her husband had been given to understand that the boy’s mathematical powers might not prove up to the need of his field of interest. Of course, what he was doing now was routine which could be handled by anyone with a little training whether he really understood it or not, but Easy chose to interpret the display as encouraging. “Of course,” McDevitt remarked as the machine was digesting its input, “there’ll be room for doubt anyway. This sun doesn’t do very much to the surface temperature of Dhrawn, but its effect is not completely negligible. The planet has been getting closer to the sun almost ever since we really got going here three years ago. We didn’t have any surface reports except from half a dozen robots until the Mesklinite settlement was set up a year and a half later, and even their measurements still cover only a tiny fraction of the planet. Our prediction work is almost entirely empirical, no matter how much we want to believe in the laws of physics, and we really don’t have enough data for empirical rules yet.” Easy nodded. “I realize that, and so does Dondragmer,” she said. “Still, you have more information than he does, and I guess anything is welcome to him at this point. I know if I were down there thousands of miles from any sort of help, in a machine which is really in the test stage, and not even able to see what was around me — well, I can tell you from experience that it helps to be in touch with the outside. Not just in the way of conversation, though that helps, but so they could more or less see me and know what I was going through.”