Hal Clement - Heavy Planet

“Good. Thank you, Benj. Have your weather men come up with anything at all about the likelihood of another flood?” The boy chuckled, though the sound meant little to the Mesklinite. “Nothing, I’m afraid. Dr. McDevitt just can’t be sure. Dr. Aucoin was complaining about it a little while ago, and my boss just cut loose. He said that it had taken men a couple of centuries before they could make reliable ten-day forecasts on Earth, with only one phase-varying component, water, and the whole planet accessible for measurement. Anyone who expects forecasting perfected in a couple of years for a world as big as Dhrawn, when we know an area the size of a large backyard and that with two phase-variables and a temperature range from fifty to over a thousand degrees Kelvin, must still believe in magic. He said we were lucky the weather hadn’t produced ice fields that turned into swamps when the temperature dropped and rain storms six feet deep with clear air underneath but icing up the cruiser bridges and forty other things that his computer keeps coming up with every time he changes another variable. It was funny watching Dr. Aucoin try to calm him down. Usually it’s the other way around.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to hear it. You seem amused,” replied the captain. “Did you tell your chief about the clouds which Stakendee has reported?”

“Oh, certainly. I told everyone. That was only a few minutes ago, though, and they haven’t come back with anything yet. I really wouldn’t expect them to, Captain; there just isn’t enough detailed information from the surface for interpretation, let alone prognosis. There was one thing though; Dr. McDevitt was very interested in finding out how many feet Stak’s group had climbed and he said that if the clouds they reported hadn’t reached the Kwembly yet he wanted to know as exactly as possible the time they do. I’m sorry; I should have reported that earlier.”

“It doesn’t matter,” replied Dondragmer. “The sky is still clear here. I’ll let you know the moment I see any clouds. Does this mean that he thinks another fog is coming, like the one which preceded the last flood?” In spite of his innate defenses against worry, the captain waited out the next minute with some uneasiness. “He didn’t say, and he wouldn’t. He’s been caught too wrong too many times. He won’t take the chance again, if I know him, unless it’s a matter of warning you against some very probable danger. Wait! There’s something on Stak’s screen.” Dondragmer’s many legs tensed under him. “Let me check. Yes, all of Stak’s men but one are in sight, and he must be carrying the back end of the set because it’s still moving. There’s another light ahead. It’s brighter than the ones we’re carrying, at least, I think so, but I can’t really tell its distance. I’m not sure whether Stak’s people have seen it yet, but they should have; you said your eyes are better than the pickups. Mother, do you want to get in on this? And should we call Barlennan? I’m keeping Don posted. Yes, Stak has seen it and his party has stopped moving. The light isn’t moving either. Stak has the sound volume up, but I can’t hear anything that means anything to me. They’ve put the transmitter down, and are fanning out in front of it; I can see all six of them now. The ground is nearly bare, only an occasional patch of ice. No rocks. Now Stak’s men have put out their lights, and I can’t see anything except the new one. It’s getting brighter, but I guess it’s just the pickup cells reacting to the darker field. I can’t see anything around it; it looks a little foggy, if anything. Something has blocked it for a moment; no, it’s on again. I could see enough of a silhouette to be pretty sure it was one of the search party; he must have reared up to get a better look ahead. Now I can hear some hooting, but it’s not any words I know. I don’t see why … wait. Now Stak’s people are turning their lights back on. Two of them are coming back toward the set; they’re picking it up and bringing it forward toward the rest of the group. All the lights are up in front with them, so I can see pretty well now. There’s mist blowing past only a few feet, maybe a few inches up; the new light is up in it a little way. I can’t judge its distance yet at all. The ground has no marks to help; just bare stone, with six Mesklinites flattened down against it and their lights and a dark line beyond them which might be different colored rock or maybe a narrow stream slanting toward them from the far left and going out of sight to my right. Now I get a vague impression of motion around the new light. Maybe it?s the running light of a helicopter. I don?t know how they?re arranged or how high off the ground they are when the machine is parked or how bright they are. “Now it’s clearer, yes, there’s something moving. It’s coming toward us, just a dark blob in the mist. It’s not carrying any light. If my guess at distance means anything, which it probably doesn’t, it’s about the same size as the Mesklinites. Maybe it’s Kervenser or Reffel. “Yes. I’m almost sure it’s a Mesklinite, but still too far away for me to recognize. I’m not sure I’d know either of those two anyway. He’s crossing that line; it must be a stream; some liquid splashed up for a split second into the path of the light; now he’s only a few yards away, and the others are converging on him. They’re talking, but not loudly enough for me to make any of it out. The group is milling around, and I can’t recognize anyone. If they’d come a little closer I’d ask them who’s there, but I suppose they’ll report pretty soon anyway and I can’t make them hear through the air suits unless they’re right beside the set. Now they’re all coming this way and the bunch is opening out; two of them are right in front of the set; I suppose it’s Stakendee and the one who’s just—” He was interrupted by a voice which originated beside him. It reached not only his ear, but three open microphones, and through them three different receivers on Dhrawn, where it produced three very different results. “Kabremm! Where have you been all these months?” cried Easy.

It really wasn’t quite Kabremm’s fault, though Barlennan was a long time forgiving him. The transmitter had been away from the lights. When the newcomer had first joined Stakendee’s group he had not been able to see it; later he had failed to notice it; not until he was within a foot or two did he recognize it. Even then he wasn’t worried greatly; human beings all looked alike to him, he assumed that his own people looked at least as indistinguishable to the humans, and while he would not have put himself deliberately in view, a sudden withdrawal or any attempt to hide would have been far more suspicious than staying calmly where he was. When Easy’s voice erupted from the speaker with his name, it was obviously sixty-four seconds too late to do anything. Stakendee, whose reflex response to the sound was to reach for the shutter on top of the vision set, realized in time that this would only make matters worse. What they should do was far from obvious to either of them. Neither was an expert in intrigue, though Mesklin was no more innocent of political deceit than it was of the commercial variety. Neither was particularly quick-witted. Both, unlike Dondragmer, were enthusiastic proponents of the Esket deception. And both realized that whatever they did, or failed to do, about this mistake was likely to conflict with whatever Barlennan or Dondragmer might do. Coordination was impossible. Stakendee thought, after some seconds, of trying to address Kabremm as though he were the missing Reffel or Kervenser, but he doubted that he could get away with it. Mrs. Hoffman’s recognition must have been pretty firm to let her speak as emphatically as she had, and Kabremm’s response was unlikely to be helpful. He didn’t, presumably, know the status of either of the missing men. The human being had said no more, after the one question; she must be waiting for an answer. What had she seen between speaking and that time delay? Barlennan had also heard Easy’s cry, and was in exactly the same spot. He could only guess why Kabremm might be anywhere near the Kwembly, though the incident of Reffel?s communication cutoff had prepared him for something of the sort. Only one of the three dirigibles was employed on the regular shuttle run between the Esket site and the Settlement; the others were under Destigmet’s control and were usually exploring. Still, Dhrawn was large enough to make the presence of one of them in the Kwembly’s neighborhood a distinct surprise. However, it seemed to have happened. It was simply bad luck, Barlennan assumed, compounded by the fact that the only human being in the universe who could possibly have recognized Kabremm by sight had been in a position to see him when the slip occurred. So the human beings now knew that the Esket’s crew had not been obliterated. No provision had been made for such a discovery; no planned, rehearsed story existed which Barlennan could count on Kabremm’s using. Maybe Dondragmer would fill in; he could be counted on to do his best, no matter what he thought of the whole matter, but it was hard to see what he could do. The trouble was that Barlennan himself would have no idea what Dondragmer had said and would not know what to say himself when questions came, as they surely would, toward the Settlement. Probably the safest tactic was to claim utter ignorance, and ask honestly for as complete a report as possible from Dondragmer. The captain would at least keep Kabremm, who had obviously been playing the fool, from leaking the whole cask. It was fortunate for Barlennan’s peace of mind that he did not realize where Kabremm had been met. Easy, a few seconds before her cry of recognition, had told him that Benj was reporting something from a Kwembly screen, or he would have assumed that Kabremm had inadvertently stepped into the field of view of an Esket communicator. He knew no details about the search party of Stakendee and assumed the incident was occurring at the Kwembly and not five miles away. The five miles was just as bad as five thousand, under the circumstances; communication between Mesklinites not within hooting range of each other had to go through the human linkage, and Dondragmer was in no better position to cover the slip than was Barlennan himself. However, the Kwembly’ s captain managed to do it, quite unintentionally. He, too, had heard Easy’s exclamation, much more loudly than Barlennan in view of the woman’s position among the microphones. However, it had been little more than a distraction to him, for his mind was wholly taken up with some words Benj had uttered a few seconds before. In fact, he was so disturbed by them as to do something which everyone at all experienced in Dhrawnsatellite communication had long ago learned not to do. He had interrupted, sending an urgent call of his own pulsing upward to the station while Benj was still talking. “Please! Before you do anything else, tell me more about that liquid. I get the impression from what you’ve said that there is a stream flowing in the riverbed in view of Stakendee’s vision pickup. If that is the case, please send these orders immediately: Stak, with two men to carry the communicator, is to follow that stream upward immediately, keeping you and through you, me, informed of its nature; particularly, is it growing any larger? The other three are to follow it down to find how close it comes to the Kwembly; when they have ascertained this, they are to come in with the information at once. I’ll worry about whom you’ve found later on; I’m glad one of them has turned up. If this trickle is the beginning of the next flood, we’ll have to stop everything else and get life-support equipment out of the ship and out of the valley. Please check, and get those orders to Stakendee at once!” This request began to come in just as Easy finished her sentence and long before either Kabremm or Barlennan could have gotten a reply back to it. Mersereau and Aucoin were still gone, so Benj had no hesitation about passing Dondragmer’s orders along. Easy, after a second or two of thought, shelved the Kabremm question and reported the same information to Barlennan. If Don saw the situation as an emergency, she was willing to go along with his opinion; he was on the scene. She did not take her eyes from the screen which showed Kabremm’s image, however; his presence still needed explanation. She too helped Barlennan unwittingly at this point. After completing the relay of Dondragmer’s orders, she added a report of her own which clarified much for the commander. “I don’t know how up to date you are, Barl; things have been happening rather suddenly. Don sent out a foot party with a communicator to look for Kervenser and Reffel. This was the group which found the running stream which is bothering Don so much, and at the same time ran into Kabremm. I don’t know how he got there, thousands of miles from the Esket, but we’ll get his story and relay it to you as soon as we can. I’ve sometimes wondered whether he and any of the others were alive, but I never really hoped for it. I know the life-support equipment in the cruisers is supposed to be removable in case the vehicles had to be abandoned; but there was never any sign of anything’s being taken from the Esket. This will be useful news as well as pleasant; there must be some way for you people to live on at least some parts of Dhrawn without human equipment.” Barlennan’s answer was a conventional acknowledgment-plus-thanks, given with very little of his attention. Easy’s closing sentence had started a new train of thought in his mind. Benj had paid little attention to his mother’s words, having a conversation of his own to maintain. He relayed Dondragmer’s command to the foot party, saw the group break up accordingly, though he failed to interpret the confusion caused by Kabremm’s telling Stakendee how he had reached the spot, then reported the start of the new mission to the captain. He followed the report, however, with comments of his own. “Captain, I hope this isn’t going to take all your men. I know there’s a lot of work in getting your life equipment to the bank but surely you can keep on with the job of melting the Kwembly loose. You’re not just giving up on the ship, are you? You still have Beetch and his friend underneath; you can’t just abandon them. It won’t take many men to get the heater going, it seems to me.” Dondragmer had formed by now a pretty clear basic picture of Benj’s personality, though some detailed aspects of it were fundamentally beyond his grasp. He answered as tactfully as he could. “I’m certainly not giving up the Kwembly while there’s any reasonable chance of saving her,” he said, “but the presence of liquid only a few miles away forces me to assume that the risk of another flood is now very high. My crew, as a group, comes first. The metal bar we have cut from the hull will be lowered to the ground in a few more minutes. Once that is done, only Borndender and one other man will be left on the heater detail. Everyone else, except of course Stakendee’s crew, will start immediately carrying plant tanks and lights to the side of the valley. I do not want to abandon my helmsmen, but if I get certain news that high water is on the way we are all going to head for higher ground whether or not any are still missing. I gather you don’t like the idea, but I am sure you see why there is no other possible course.” The captain fell silent, neither knowing nor greatly caring whether Benj had an answer for this; there was too much else to consider. He stood watching as the heavy length of metal, which was to be a heater if everyone’s ideas worked out, was eased toward the Kwembly ’s starboard side. Lines were attached to it, snubbed around the climbing holdfasts, and held by men on the ice who were carefully giving length under the orders of Praffen. Perched on the helicopter lock panel with his front end reared four inches higher, Praffen watched and gestured commands as the starboard part of the long strip of metal slid slowly away from him and the other side approached. Dondragmer flinched slightly as the sailor seemed about to be brushed off the hull by the silvery length of alloy, but Praffen let it pass under him with plenty of legs still on the plastic and at least three pairs of pincers gripping the holdfasts. With this personal risk ended he let the rope-men work a little faster; it took less than five more minutes to get the bar down to the ice. Dondragmer had redonned his air suit during the last part of the operation and gone out on the hull again, where he hooted a number of orders. Everyone else outside obediently headed for the main lock to start transferring the life-support equipment; the captain himself reentered the bridge to get back in radio contact with Benj and Stakendee. The boy had said nothing during the lowering-away, which had been carried out in view of the bridge communicator. What he could see required no explanation. He was a little unhappy at the disappearance of the crew afterward, for Dondragmer had been right. Benj did not like the idea of the entire group’s being diverted to the abandon-ship operation. The emergence of two Mesklinites with a power box gave him something to watch besides Stakendee?s upstream crawl on the adjacent screen. Benj did not know which of the two was Borndender. However, their actions were of more interest than their identity, especially their troubles with the radiator. The wire was rigid enough to hold its shape fairly well as it was moved; it now lay flat on the ice in much the same shape it had had when attached to the hull, rather like a long, narrow hairpin with a set of right-angle bends near the center where it had outlined the helicopter lock, the cut ends being some two feet apart. The original vertical component of its curvature, formerly impressed by the shape of the hull, had now flattened out under gravity. The unit had been turned over during the lowering so that the prongs which had attached it to the plastic were now pointing upward; hence there was good contact with the ice for its entire length. The Mesklinites spent a few minutes trying to straighten it out; Benj got the impression that they wanted to run it around the side of the hull as closely as possible. However, it finally dawned on them that the free ends would have to be close together anyway in order to go into the same power box, so they left the wire alone and dragged the power unit aft. One of them examined the holes in the box and the ends of the wire carefully, while the other stood by. Benj could not see the box very well, since its image on the screen was very small, but he was familiar with similar machines. It was a standard piece of equipment which had needed very little modification to render it usable on Dhrawn. There were several kinds of power takeoff on it besides the rotating field used for mechanical drive. The direct electrical current which Borndender wanted could be drawn from any of several places; there were contact plates on opposite sides of the box which could be energized; several different sizes of jack-type bipolar sockets and simple unipolar sockets at opposite ends of the box. The plates would have been easiest to use, but the Mesklinites, as Benj learned later, had dismissed them as too dangerous; they chose to use the end sockets. This meant that one end of the “hairpin” had to go into one end of the unit, and the other into the other end. Borndender already knew that the wire was a little large for these holes and would have to be filed down, and had brought the appropriate tools out with him; this was no problem. Bending the ends, however, so that short lengths of them pointed toward each other, was a different matter. While he was still working on this problem, the rest of the crew emerged from the main lock with their burden of hydroponic tanks, pumps, lights, and power units, and headed northward toward the side of the valley. Borndender ignored them, except for a brief glance, wondering at the same time whether he could commandeer some assistance. The two ninety-degree bends he had to make were not entirely a matter of strength. The metal was of semicircular cross section, about a quarter of an inch in radius; Benj thought of it as heavy wire, while to the Mesklinites it was bar stock. The alloy was reasonably tough even at a hundred and seventy degrees Kelvin, so there was no risk of breaking it. Mesklinite strength was certainly equal to the task. What the two scientists lacked, which made the bending an operation instead of a procedure, was traction. The ice under them was fairly pure water with a modest percentage of ammonia, not so far below its melting point or removed from the ideal ice crystal structure as to have lost its slipperiness. The small area of the Mesklinite extremities caused them to dig in in normal walking, which combined with their low structure and multiplicity of legs, prevented slipping during ordinary walking around the frozen-in Kwembly. Now, however, Borndender and his assistant were trying to apply a strong sidewise force, and their twenty pounds of weight simply did not give enough dig for their claws. The metal refused to bend, and the long bodies lashed about on the ice with Newton’s Third Law in complete control of the situation. The sight was enough to make Benj chuckle in spite of his worry, a reaction which was shared by Seumas McDevitt, who had just come down from the weather lab. Borndender finally solved his engineering problem by going back into the Kwembly and bringing out the drilling equipment. With this he sank half a dozen foot-deep holes in the ice. By standing lengths of drill-tower support rod in these he was able to provide anchorage for the Mesklinite muscles. The rod was finally changed from a hairpin to a caliper shape. Fitting the ends into the appropriate holes was comparatively easy after the filing was finished. It involved a modest lifting job to get the wire up to the two-inch height of the socket holes but this was no problem of strength or traction and was done in half a minute. With some hesitation, visible even to the human watchers, Borndender approached the controls of the power unit. The watchers were at least as tense; Dondragmer was not entirely sure that the operation was safe for his ship, having only the words of the human beings about this particular situation. Benj and McDevitt also had doubts about the efficacy of the jury-rigged heater. Their doubts were speedily settled. The safety devices built into the unit acted properly as far as the machine’s own protection was concerned; they were not, however, capable of analyzing the exterior load in detail. They permitted the unit to deliver a current, not a voltage, up to a limit determined by the manual control setting. Borndender had of course set this at the lowest available value. The resistor lasted for several seconds, and might have held up indefinitely if the ends had not been off the ice. For most of the length of the loop, all went well. A cloud of microscopic ice crystals began to rise the moment the power came on, as water boiled away from around the wire and froze again in the dense, frigid air. It hid the sight of the wire sinking into the surface ice, but no one doubted that this was happening. The last foot or so at each end of the loop, however, was not protected by the high specific and latent heats of water. Those inches of metal showed no sign of the load they were carrying for perhaps three seconds; then they began to glow. The resistance of the wire naturally increased with its temperature, and in the effort to maintain constant current the power box applied more voltage. The additional heat developed was concentrated almost entirely in the already overheated sections. For a long moment a red, and then a white, glow illuminated the rising cloud, causing Dondragmer to retreat involuntarily to the other end of the bridge while Borndender and his companion flattened themselves against the ice. The human watchers cried out, Benj wordlessly, McDevitt protestingly, “It can’t blow!” Their reactions were of course far too late to be meaningful. By the time the picture reached the station, one end of the wire loop had melted through and the unit had shut down automatically. Borndender, rather surprised to find himself alive, supplemented the automatic control with the manual one, and without taking time to report to the captain set about figuring what had happened. This did not take him long; he was an orderly thinker, and had absorbed a great deal more alien knowledge than had the helmsmen, still hoping for rescue a few yards away. He understood the theory and construction of the power units about as well as a high school student understands the theory and construction of a television set; he could not have built one himself, but he could make a reasonable deduction as to the cause of a gross malfunction. He was more of a chemist than a physicist, as far as specific training went. While the human beings watched in surprise and Dondragmer in some uneasiness, the two scientists repeated the bending operation until what was left of the resistor was once again usable. With the drilling equipment they made a pit large enough to hold the power box at the end of the deep groove boiled in the ice by the first few seconds of power. They set the box in the hole, connected the ends once more, and covered everything with chips of ice removed in the digging, leaving only the controls exposed. Then Borndender switched on the power again, this time retreating much more hastily than before. The white cloud reappeared at once, but this time grew and spread. It enveloped the near side of the Kwembly, including the bridge, blocking the view for Dondragmer and the communicator lens. Illuminated by the outside flood lamps, it caught the attention of the crew, now nearing the edge of the valley, and of Stakendee and his men miles to the west. This time the entire length of the wire was submerged in melted ice, which bubbled away from around it as hot vapor, condensed to liquid a fraction of a millimeter away, evaporated again much less violently from the surface of the widening pool, and again condensed, this time to ice, in the air above. The steaming pool, some three quarters of the Kwembly ’s length and originally some six feet in width, began to sink below the surrounding ice, its contents borne away as ice dust by the gentle wind faster than they were replenished by melting. One side of it reached the cruiser, and Dondragmer, catching a glimpse of it through a momentary break in the swirling fog, suddenly had a frightening thought. He donned his air suit hurriedly and rushed to the inner door of the main lock. Here he hesitated; with the suit’s protection he could not tell by feel whether the ship was heating dangerously, and there were no internal thermometers except in the lab. For a moment he thought of getting one; then he decided that the time needed might be risky, and opened the upper safety valves in the outer lock, which were handled by pull-cords from inside reaching down through the liquid trap. He did not know whether the heat from outside would last long enough to boil ammonia in the lock itself — the Kwemhly ’s hull was well insulated, and leakage would be slow, but he had no desire to have boiling ammonia confined aboard his command. It was an example of a little knowledge causing superfluous worry; the temperature needed to bring ammonia’s vapor pressure anywhere near the ambient values would have made an explosion the least of any Mesklinite’s concerns. However, no real harm was done by opening the valves, and the captain felt better as a result of the action. He returned hastily to the bridge to see what was going on. A gentle breeze from the west was providing occasional glimpses as it swept the ice fog aside and he could see that the level of the molten pool was lower. Its area had increased greatly, but as the minutes passed he decided that some limit had been reached. His two men were visible at times, crawling here and there trying to find a good viewpoint. They finally settled down almost under the bridge, with the breeze behind them. For some time the liquid level seemed to reach a steady state, though none of the watchers could understand why. Later they decided that the spreading pool had melted its way into the still-liquid reservoir under the Kwembly, which took fully fifteen minutes to evaporate. By the end of that time, cobbles from the river bottom began to show their tops above the simmering water, and the problem of turning the power unit off before another length of wire was destroyed suddenly occurred to Dondragmer. He knew now that there was no danger of the power unit’s blowing up; however, several inches of the wire had already melted away, and there was going to be trouble restoring the refrigerator to service. This situation should not be allowed to get any worse, which it would if more metal were lost. Now, as the water level reached the cobbles and the wire ceased to follow the melting ice downward, the captain suddenly wondered whether he could get out to the controls fast enough to prevent the sort of shut-off which had occurred before. He wasted no time mentally blasting the scientists for not attaching a cord to the appropriate controls; he hadn’t thought of it in time either. He donned his suit again and went out through the bridge lock. Here the curve of the hull hid the pool from view, and he began to make his way down the holdfasts as rapidly as he could in the poor visibility. As he went, he hooted urgently to Borndender,?Don?t let the wire melt again! Turn off the power!? An answering but wordless hoot told him that he had been heard, but no other information came through the white blankness. He continued to grope his way downward, finally reaching the bottom of the hull curve. Below him, separated from his level by the thickness of the mattress and two thirds the height of the trucks, was the gently steaming surface of the water. It was not, of course, actively boiling at this pressure; but it was hot even by human standards and the captain had no illusions about the ability of an air suit to protect him from it. It occurred to him, rather late, that there was an excellent chance that he had just cooked his two missing helmsmen to death. This was only a passing thought; there was work to be done. The power box lay well aft of his present position, but the nearest surface on which he could walk had to be forward. Either way there was going to be trouble reaching the unit, now presumably surrounded by hot water; but if jumping were going to be necessary, the hull holdfasts were about the poorest possible takeoff point. Dondragmer went forward. This brought him into clear air almost at once, and he saw that his two men were gone. Presumably they had started around the far side of the pool in the hope of carrying out his order. The captain continued forward, and in another yard or two found it possible to descend to solid ice. He did so, and hastened on what he hoped was the trail of his men. He had to slow down almost at once, however, as his course brought him back into the ice fog. He was too close to the edge of the pool to take chances. As he went he called repeatedly, and was reassured to hear each hoot answered by another. His men had not yet fallen in. He caught up with them almost under the cruiser’s stern, having walked entirely around the part of the pool not bounded by the hull. None of them had accomplished anything; the power unit was not only out of reach but out of sight. Jumping would have been utter lunacy, even if Mesklinites normally tended to think of such a thing. Borndender and his assistant had not, and the idea had only occurred to Dondragmer because of his unusual experiences in Mesklin’s low-gravity equatorial zone so long ago. But there could not be much more time. Looking over the edge of the ice, the three could catch glimpses of the rounded tops of the rocks, separated by water surfaces which narrowed as they watched. The wire must be practically out of water by now; chance alone would not have let it settle between the stones to a point much lower than their average height, and the protecting water was already there. The captain had been weighing the various risks for minutes; without further hesitation, and without issuing any orders, he slipped over the edge and dropped two feet to the top of one of the boulders. It was the energy equivalent of an eight-story fall on Earth, and even the Mesklinite was jolted. However, he retained his self-command. A single hoot told those above that he had survived without serious injury, and warned them against following in case pride might have furnished an impulse which intelligence certainly would not. The captain, with that order issued, relegated the scientists to the back of his mind and concentrated on the next step. The nearest rock with enough exposed area to accommodate him was two feet, well over a body length, away, but it was at least visible. Better still, a closer one only slightly off the line to it exposed a square inch or so of its surface. Two seconds after analyzing this situation, Dondragmer was two feet closer to the power box and looking for another stopping point. The lone square inch of the stepping stone had been touched by perhaps a dozen feet as the red-and-black length of his body had ricocheted from it to the second rock. The next stage was more difficult. It was harder to be sure which way to go, since the hull which had furnished orientation was now barely visible; also, there were no more large surfaces as close as the one from which he had come. He hesitated, looking and planning; before he reached a decision the question was resolved for him. The grumbling sound which had gone on for so many minutes as water exploded into steam against the hot wire and almost instantly collapsed again under Dhrawn’s atmospheric pressure abruptly ceased, and Dondragmer knew that he was too late to save the metal. He relaxed immediately and waited where he was while the water cooled, the evaporation slowed, and the fog of ice crystals cleared away. He himself grew uncomfortably warm, and was more than once tempted to return the way he had come; but the two-foot climb up an ice overhang with hot water at its foot, which would form part of the journey, made the temptation easy to resist. He waited. He was still alive when the air cleared and crystals of ice began to grow around the edges of the rocks. He was some six feet from the power unit, and was able to reach it by a rather zigzag course over the cobbles once the way could be seen. He shut off the power controls, and only when that was done did he look around. His two men had already made their way along the ice cliff to a point about level with the original front bend of the wire; Dondragmer guessed that this must be where the metal had again melted through. In the other direction, under the bulk of the hull, was a black cavern which the Kwembly ’s lights did not illuminate. The captain had no real wish to enter it; it was very likely that he would find the bodies of his two helmsmen there. His hesitation was observed from above. “What’s he waiting there at the power box for?” muttered McDevitt. “Oh, I suppose the ice isn’t thick enough for him yet.”