Hal Clement - Heavy Planet

“Why ask for more troubles than we need?” retorted Aucoin. “I don’t like to argue with anyone, especially when he doesn’t really have to listen to me.”

“I don’t think you’ll have to argue. Remember, he agreed with us the other time.”

“You were saying a few minutes ago that you weren’t sure how sincere his agreements have been.”

“I’m not, but if he had been strongly against us that time he’d have done just what he wanted and sent a crew out to help the Esket . He did, remember, on a couple of other occasions when there was a cruiser in trouble.”

“That was much closer to the settlement, and we finally approved the action,” retorted Aucoin. “And you know as well as I do that we approved it because we could see that he was going to do it anyway.”

“We approved it, Ib, because your wife was on Barlennan’s side both times and out-talked us. Your argument, incidentally, is a point against telling him about the present situation.”

“Whose side was she on during the Esket argument? I still think we should tell Barlennan the present situation pronto. Plain honesty aside, the longer we wait the more certain he is to find out, sooner or later, that we’ve been censoring expedition reports on him.”

“I wouldn’t call it censoring. We’ve never changed a thing.”

“But you have delayed the relay plenty of times while you decided what he ought to know, and as I’ve said before I don’t think that’s the game as we agreed to play it with him. Pardon my reactionary sentiments, but on purely selfish grounds we’d be well advised to keep his confidence as long as possible.” Several of the others, who had listened in silence up to this point, spoke up almost at once when Hoffman expressed this sentiment. It took Aucoin several seconds to untangle their words, but it eventually became clear that the feeling of the group was with Ib. The chairman yielded gracefully; his technique did not involve standing in front of the bull. “All right, we pass on the complete report to Barlennan as soon as we adjourn.” He glanced at the winner. “That is, if Mrs. Hoffman hasn’t sent it already. What’s the next point?” One of the men who had done little but listen up to this point asked a question. “Forgive me if I didn’t follow you too clearly a few minutes ago. Ib, you and Alan both claim that Barlennan agreed with Project policy in limiting to an absolute minimum the amount of sophisticated equipment his expedition was to use. That was my understanding also; but you, Ib, just mentioned having doubts about Barlennan’s sincerity. Do any of those doubts stern from his accepting the helicopters?” Hoffman shook his head. “No. The arguments we used for their necessity were good, and the only surprising thing to me was that Barlennan didn’t anticipate them and take the equipment without argument.”

“But Mesklinites are acrophobic by nature. The thought of flying, to anyone from a world like that, must be just unimaginable.” Ib smiled grimly. “True. But one of the first things Barlennan did after he made his deal with the Gravity people and started learning basic science was to design, build and fly, on Mesklin, in the polar zone where gravity is at its highest, a hot air balloon. Whatever is motivating Barlennan, it isn’t acrophobia. I don?t exactly doubt him; I?m just not sure of his thinking, if you?ll forgive a rather crude quibble.? “I agree,” Aucoin interjected. “And I think we’re running dry. I suggest we break up for, say, six hours. We can think, or go down to Comm and listen to the Mesklinites or talk with them; anything that will keep your thoughts on Dhrawn questions. You know my ideas about that.”

“That’s where mine have been.” It was the same speaker. “I keep wondering about the Esket , every time one of the cruisers runs into trouble, even when the trouble is obviously natural.. “So do we all, I imagine,” rejoined Aucoin. “The more I think of it, the more I feel that her crew must have run into intelligent opposition. After all, we know there is life on Dhrawn, more than the bushes and pseudo-algae the Mesklinites have found. They wouldn’t account quantitatively for that atmosphere; there must be a complete ecological complex somewhere. I’d guess in the higher-temperature regions.”

“Such as Low Alpha.” Hoffman completed the thought. “Yes, you don’t have ammonia and free oxygen in the same environment for very long, on the time scale of a planet. I can believe the possibility of an intelligent species here. We haven’t found any sign of it from space and the Mesklinite ground parties haven’t met it, unless the Esket did, but seventeen billion square miles of planet make a lot of good reasons for that. The idea is plausible and you’re not the first to get it but I don’t know where it leaves us. Barlennan thought of it too, according to Easy, and debated sending another cruiser to the area of the Esket ’s loss specifically to seek and contact any intelligence that may be there; but even Barlennan was doubtful about undertaking a search. We certainly haven’t pushed it.”

“Why not?” cut in Mersereau. “If we could get in touch with natives as we did on Mesklin the project could really get going! We wouldn’t have to depend so completely on — oh.” Aucoin smiled grimly. “Precisely,” he said. “Now you have found a good reason for wondering about Barlennan’s frankness. I’m not saying that he’s an ice-hearted politician who would give up the lives of his men just to keep a hammerlock on the Dhrawn operation, but the Esket ’s crew was pretty certainly already beyond rescue when he finally agreed not to send the Kalliff in the same direction.”

“There is another point, though,” Hoffman said thoughtfully. “What?”

“I’m not sure it’s worth mentioning, since we can’t evaluate it; but the Kwembly is commanded by Dondragmer, who is a long-time associate of Barlennan’s and should by ordinary reasoning be an extremely close friend. Is there any chance that his being involved would influence Barl’s judgment about a rescue trip or even make him order one against his better judgment? Like you, I don?t think that caterpillar is just an administrative machine. His cold-bloodedness is purely physical.? “I’ve wondered about that too,” the chief planner admitted. “It surprised me greatly months ago when he let Dondragmer go out at all. I’d gotten the impression that he didn’t want him to take major chances. I didn’t worry too much about ic-certainly no one knows enough about Mesklinite psychology in general or Barlennan’s in particular to base any serious planning on. If anyone does, Ib, it’s your wife, and she can’t or won’t put what she understands about them into words. As you say, we can’t assign weight to the friendship-influence possibility. We just add it to the list of questions. Let me hear any ideas about those crewmen who are presumably frozen under the Kuvmbly and then we really must break up.”

“A fusion converter would keep a good, large heating coil going, and resistors aren’t very complex equipment,” Mersereau pointed out. “Heaters aren’t a very unreasonable piece of equipment on Dhrawn, either. If only-”

“But we didn’t,” interrupted Aucoin. “But we did, if you’d let me finish. There are enough converters with the Kwembly to lift her off the planet if their energy could be applied to such a job. There must be some metal aboard which could be jury-rigged into resistors or arcs. Whether the Mesklinites could operate such gadgets I don’t know. There must be a limit even to their temperature tolerance but we might at least ask if they’ve thought of such a thing.”

“You’re wrong on one point. I know there is very little metal either in their equipment or the supplies on those land-cruisers and I’d be startled if Mesklinite rope turned out to be a conductor. I’m no chemist, but anything bonded as firmly as that stuff must have its electrons pretty well latched in place. By all means check with Dondragmer, though. Easy is presumably still in Comm; she can help you if there are no linguistically broad Mesklinites on duty at the other end. We’re adjourned.” Mersereau nodded, already heading toward the door, and the meeting broke up. Aucoin followed Mersereau through one door; most of the others went other ways. Only Hoffman remained seated at the table. His eyes were focused nowhere in particular, and there was a frown on his face which made him look older than his forty years. He liked Barlennan. He liked Dondragmer even better, as did his wife. He had no grounds for the slightest complaint about the progress of the Dhrawn research, considering the policies he himself had helped set up, nor did the rest of the planners. There was no concrete reason whatever, except a trick of half a century before, to distrust the Mesklinite commander. That he might want to keep hypothetical natives of Dhrawn out of the picture could hardly be given credence. No, certainly not. After all, the problems of transferring responsibility to such beings, even if they existed, for the Dhrawn research project, would cause even more delay, as Barlennan would surely realize. The occasional case of disagreement between explorers and planners was minor. It was the sort of thing which happened ten times as often with, say, Drommians. No, there was no reason to suppose the Mesklinites were already going off on independent plans of their own. Still, Barlennan had not wanted helicopters, though he had finally been persuaded to accept them. He was the same Barlennan who had built and flown in a hot air balloon as his first exercise in applied science. He had not sent relief to the Esket , although all the giant land-cruisers were necessary for the Project and despite the fact that a hundred or so of his people were aboard. He had refused local-range radios, useful as they would obviously be. The argument against them was the sort that a firm-minded teacher might use in a classroom situation, but this was real life and deadly earnest. He had, fifty years before, not only jumped at the chance to acquire alien knowledge; he had maneuvered deliberately to force his non-Mesklinite sponsors to give it to him. Ib Hoffman could not rid himself of the notion that Barlennan was up to something underhanded again. He wondered what Easy thought about it.