Hal Clement - Heavy Planet

“I want to watch here a little longer. Benj can go up, if he can stand leaving the screens for a minute.” She looked half-questioningly at the boy; he nodded and disappeared at once. He was gone longer than she expected and returned somewhat crestfallen. “They said they’d gladly give me the map recorded from the first part of Reffel’s flight, before I had told him to go on until he could barely see the Kwembly . All they could say about where he disappeared was that it must be off that map; the map covers the valley for about a mile westward of the cruiser.” Mersereau grunted in annoyance. “I’d forgotten about that.” He turned back to his microphone to relay this not very helpful information to Dondragmer. The captain was neither particularly surprised nor greatly disturbed. He had already discussed his own estimate of the distance and direction involved with Stakendee, who was leading the search party. “I suppose the human beings were right about having you take the set along,” the captain had remarked. “It will be a nuisance to carry and I don’t much like risking its loss, but having it will cut down the risk of losing you. I?m still concerned about a repetition of the flood that brought us here, and the people up above can?t give us any definite prediction. They do agree that there should indeed be a flood season coming. With the set, they?ll be able to warn you directly if they get any definite information, and you?ll be able to reach me through them if you do find anything.? “I’m not sure in my own mind what’s best to do if a flood does come,” said Stakendee. “Of course if we’re close to the Kwembly we’ll do our best to get back aboard, and I suppose if we’re really distant we’d make for the north side of the valley, which seems to be nearer. In a borderline case, though, I’m not sure which would be best; surviving the flood would do us little good if the ship got washed a year’s walk further downstream.”

“I’ve been thinking about that too,” replied the captain, “and I still don’t have an answer. If we’re washed away again there’s a very large chance the ship will be ruined. I can’t decide whether we should take time to get life-support equipment out and set up on the valley side before we get on with trying to melt her out. Your own point is a good one, and maybe I should have the set there for your sake as well as ours. Well, I’ll solve it. Get on your way. The sooner the search is done, the less we’ll have to worry about floods.” Stakendee gestured agreement, and five minutes later Dondragmer saw him and his group emerge from the main lock. The communicator gave the party a grotesque appearance; the block of plastic, four inches high and wide and twelve in length, was being carried litter fashion by two of the searchers. The three-foot poles were only two inches apart, supported on yokes at the midpoint of the eighteen-inch-long bodies of the bearers. The poles and yokes had been fashioned from ship’s stores; the Mesklinite equivalent of lumber. There were tons of the stuff in the store compartments: another of the incongruities with which the nuclear-powered cruiser was loaded in such profusion. The search party rounded the bow of the Kwembly, which was facing northwest, and proceeded straight west. Dondragmer watched its lights for a few minutes as they wound around and over the boulders but had to turn to other matters long before they were out of sight. Elongated figures swarmed over the hull working the radiator bar loose. Dondragmer had not liked to give the order for such destructive activity; but he had weighed as best he could the relative risks of doing it or of leaving it undone; having reached a decision it was not in his nature to keep on worrying about its rightness. Just as most human beings thought of Drommians as typically paranoid, most Mesklinites who knew them at all thought of human beings as typically vacillating. Dondragmer, the decision made and the order given, simply watched to make sure that minimal damage was done to the hull. From the bridge he was unable to see over its curve to the point, far astern, where the conductors came through; he would have to go outside a little later to oversee that part of the work. Maybe it would be even better to take a vision set outside and let the human engineers supervise it. Of course, with the communication delay it would be difficult for them to stop a serious error in time. For the moment the job could be left in Praffen’s nippers. The problem the captain had mentioned to Stakendee needed more thought. The life-support equipment was easy to dismount and he could spare the men to transport it without cutting into the ice-removal project too badly; but if a flood came while it was ashore and carried the Kwembly a long distance, things might become awkward. The system was a closed-cycle one using Mesklinite plants, depending on the fusion converters for its prime energy. By its nature, it had just about the right amount of vegetation to take care of the crew; had there been much more, there would not have been enough Mesklinites to take care of the plants! It might be possible to carry part of the system away and leave the rest, then expand each part to take care of the whole crew should circumstances force a decision between ship and shore. It would be easy enough to make more tanks but making either culture large enough to supply hydrogen for the whole crew could take more time than they might have. In a way, it was too bad that all the communication went through the human station. One of the major and primary tasks of the Esket crew was to modify the old life system or to produce a new one capable of supporting a larger population. For all Dondragmer knew, this might already have been accomplished months ago. His musings were interrupted by the communicator. “Captain! Benj Hoffman here. Would it be too much trouble to set up one of the viewers so that we could watch your men work on the melting project? Maybe the one on the bridge would do if you just slid it out to starboard and faced it aft.”

“That will be easy enough,” replied the captain. “I was thinking perhaps it would be well for some of you people to watch the work.” Since the set weighed less than five hundred pounds in Dhrawn’s gravity, it was only its rather awkward dimensions which gave him trouble; he went about the problem like a man trying to move an empty refrigerator carton. By pushing it along the deck rather than trying to pick it up, he worked it into a good position in a few seconds. In due course, the boy’s acknowledgment came back. “Thanks, Captain; that’s good. I can see the ground to starboard and what I suppose is the main lock and some of your people working along the sides. It’s a little hard to judge distances, but I know how big the Kwembly is and about how far back the main lock is and of course I know how big your people are, so I’d guess your lights let me see the ice for fifty or sixty yards on past the lock.” Dondragmer was surprised. “I can see fully three times that far — no, wait; you’re using your twelve-based numbers so it’s not that much: but I do see farther. Eyes must be better than the pickup cells in your set. I hope that you are not just watching what goes on here. Are the other screens for the Kwembly sets all where you can see them? Or are there other people watching them? I want to be kept in as close touch as I possibly can with the search party that has just left on foot. After what happened to Reffel, I’m uneasy about both them and their set.” Dondragmer was debating with his own conscience as he sent this message. On the one hand, he was pretty certain that Reffel had shuttered his set deliberately, though it was even less clear to him than to Barlennan why this should have been necessary. On the other hand he disapproved of the secrecy of the whole Esket maneuver. While he would not deliberately ruin Barlennan’s plans by any act of his own, he would not be too disappointed if everything came out in the open. There certainly was a good chance that Reffel was in real trouble; if, as seemed likely, whatever had happened to him had happened only a few miles away, he would have had time to get back and explain, even on foot. In short, Dondragmer had a good excuse, but disliked the thought that he needed one. After all, there was Kervenser too. “All four screens are right in front of me,” Benj’s assurance came back. “Just now I’m alone at this station, though there are other people in the room. Mother is about ten feet away, at the Esket’ s screens. Did anyone tell you that something had moved on one of those? Mr. Mersereau has just gone off for another argument with Dr. Aucoin.” (Barlennan would have given a great deal to hear that sentence.) “There are about ten other observers in the room watching the other sets, but I don’t know any of them very well. Reffel’s screen is still blank; five people are working in whatever room in the Kwembly your other set is in but I can’t tell just what they’re doing. Your foot party is just walking along. I can see only a few feet around them, and only in one direction, of course. The lights they’re carrying aren’t nearly as strong as the ones around the Kwembly. If anything does come after them or some trouble develops, I may not even get as much warning as they do; and of course there’d be a delay before I could tell them anyway.”