Hal Clement - Heavy Planet

“It’s about this way you plan to back off the rock, Don,” she began. “We don’t have the whole picture here, of course, but there are two things bothering our engineers. One is the fact that your forward truck will run off the stone while you still have ten feet or more of hull, including some of your bridge, over it. Have you measured to see whether there’s any risk of bare hull slamming down on the stone as the truck rolls off? Also, toward the end of the maneuver, you’ll have your hull supported almost entirely at the ends. The pneumatic undercarriage may distribute the load but my friend here isn’t sure it will; further, if you get the bare hull instead of the mattress taking half the Kwembly’ s weight, Dhrawn’s gravity is going to make a very respectable effort to break your land-ship in half. Have you checked those points?” Dondragmer had to admit to himself that he had not and that he had better do so before the project went much further. He conceded this on the radio, thanked Easy and her friend, and headed for the main lock, long since cleared for use. Outside, the current had dropped to the point where lifelines were no longer necessary. Water depth was down to about seven feet, measured from the average level of the smallest boulders. The water line was, indeed, at about the most inconvenient possible level for seeing the whole picture. He had to climb part way up the rock, a difficult task in itself, though helped by the fact that he had some buoyancy; from there he had to follow the forward trucks to a point where he could compare the curvature of the big boulder and that of the Kwembly’ s lower bow. He could not be completely sure, since moving the hull backward would change its pitch, but he did not like what he saw. The human engineer was probably right. Not only was there risk of hull damage, but the steering bar came through the hull just ahead of the mattress by means of a nearly air-tight mechanical seal backed by a liquid trap and made its key connections with the maze of tiller-ropes. Serious damage to the bar would not actually cripple the vehicle, since there was a duplicate aft, but it was not a risk to be taken casually. The answer to the whole situation was staring him in the face by that time but he was another hour or more in seeing it. A human psychologist, when he heard about this later, was very annoyed. He had been looking for significant differences between human and Mesklinite minds, and was finding what he considered an undue number of points of similarity. The solution involved work, of course. Even the smallest boulders were heavy. Still, they were numerous, and it was not necessary to go far for a plentiful supply. With the entire crew of the Kwembly at the job except for Beetchermarlf and those still helping him with the trucks, a ramp of piled stones grew with fair speed from the stern of the trapped vehicle toward the key rock. It was a help to Beetchermarlf. As fast as he readied a damaged bearing unit for service, he found himself able to get at new installation sites which had been out of reach before. He and the stone-carriers finished almost together, allowing for four trucks which he had been unable to repair because of missing parts. He had made thrifty use of these, cannibalizing them for the needs of some of the others, and had spotted the unavoidable gaps in traction widely enough to keep the cruiser’s weight reasonably well distributed. To work on Row 5, practically buried in the river bottom, he had had to deflate that part of the mattress. Pumping it up again when the two trucks were replaced caused the hull to shift slightly, to the alarm of Dondragmer and several workers underneath; fortunately the motion was insignificant. The captain had spent most of the time shuttling between the radio, where he kept hoping for a reliable prediction of the next flood, and the work site, where he divided his attention between the progress of the ramp and the view upstream. By the time the ramp was complete the water was less than a yard deep, and the current had ceased entirely; they were in a pool rather than a stream. It was now full night; the sun had been gone for nearly a hundred hours. The weather had cleared completely, and workers outside could see the violently twinkling stars. Their own sun was not visible; it was barely so at the best of times this deep in Dhrawn’s heavy atmosphere, and at the moment was too close to the horizon. Not even Dondragmer knew offhand whether it was slightly above or slightly below. Sol and Fomalhaut, which even the least informed of the crew knew to be indicators of south, glowed and wavered over a low eminence a few miles in that direction. The imaginary line connecting the two had tilted less than twenty degrees, human scale, since dark; the Mesklinite navigators would have said less than four. Outside the range of the Kwembly’ s own lights it was almost totally black. Dhrawn is moonless; the stars provide no more illumination than they do on Earth or Mesklin. Temperature was nearly the same. Dondragmer’s scientists had been measuring the environment as completely as their knowledge and equipment allowed, then sending the results to the station above. The captain had been quietly hoping for some useful information in return, though he realized that the human beings didn’t owe him any. The reports, after all, were simply part of the job the Mesklinites had engaged to do in the first place. He had also suggested to his own men that they try some independent thinking. Borndender’s answer to what he regarded as sarcasm had been to the effect that if the human beings would supply him with reports from other parts of Dhrawn and with computer time with which to correlate them, he would be glad to try. The captain had not intended sarcasm; he knew perfectly well the vast difference between explaining why a ship floats on water or ammonia and explaining why 2.3 millicables of 60–20 rain fell at the Settlement between Hour 40 and Hour 100 of Day 2. He suspected that his researcher’s misinterpretation had been deliberate; Mesklinites were often quite human when in search of excuses and Borndender was currently feeling annoyed with his own lack of usefulness. Without bringing this aspect of the matter into the open, the captain merely repeated that useful ideas would be welcome, and left the lab. Even the scientists were ordered outside when the time finally came to use the ramp. Borndender was irritated at this and muttered something as he went about the academic nature of the difference between being inside the Kwemb/y and outside her if anything drastic happened. Dondragmer, however, had not made a suggestion; he had issued an order, and not even the scientists denied either his right or his competence to do so. Only the captain himself, Beetchermarlf, and a technician named Kensnee in the life-support compartment were to be aboard when the start was made. Dondragmer had considered acting as his own helmsman and taking a chance on the life equipment but reflected that Beetchermarlf knew the tiller cable layout better and was more likely to sense anything going wrong in that department. Inside power was not directly concerned with motion, but if any slip or collapse of the ramp caused trouble with the life-support system it was better to have someone on hand. This support system was even more important than the cruiser: in an emergency the crew could conceivably walk back to the Settlement carrying their air equipment even if the cruiser were ruined. The reasoning behind the evacuation order should have left Beetchermarlf and Kensnee as the only ones aboard, with even the captain watching from outside. Dondragmer was not prepared to be so reasonable. He had stayed aboard. Tension in the crowd of caterpillarlike beings gathered outside the monster hull mounted as the drivers took up the slack in their treads. Because Dondragmer could not see the tense crowd from the bridge, he was calm; Beetchermarlf could feel their mood and was perturbed. The human watchers, observing by way of a set which had been taken from the life-support room and secured on a rock projecting from the water a hundred yards from the land-cruiser, could see nothing until the cruiser actually started to move. They were all calm except Easy and Benj. The boy was paying little attention to the outside view, instead he was watching the bridge screen on which part of Beetchermarlf was visible. He had one set of chelae on the tiller, holding it fast; the other three sets were darting with almost invisible speed among the grips of the engine control lines, trying to equalize the pull of the different trucks. He had made no attempt to power more than the usual ten; the cords which normally cross-connected them, so that a single line would work them all, had been realigned for individual control. Beetchermarlf was very, very busy. As the Kwembly began to inch backward, one of the human beings commented explosively. “Why in blazes didn’t they put remote controls, or at least torque and thrust indicators, on that bridge? That poor bug is going crazy. I don’t see how he can tell when a particular set of tracks is even gripping, let alone how it responds to his handling.”