Hal Clement - Heavy Planet

“That’s a relief,” came the eventual response. “I suppose if a real flood were coming, that river would give some indication. Very well, I’ll report again as soon as Borndender has his information. Please keep watching Stakendee. I’m going outside again to check under the hull; I was interrupted before.” The meteorologist had wanted to say more, but was silenced by the realization that Dondragmer would not be there to hear his words by the time they arrived. He may also have been feeling some sympathy for Benj. They watched eagerly, the man almost as concerned as his companion, for the red-and-black inchworm to appear on the side of the hull within range of the pickup. It was not visible all the way to the ground, since Dondragmer had to go forward directly under the bridge and out of the field of view; but they saw him again near where the rope which had been used to get him out a few minutes earlier was still snubbed around one of Borndender’s bending posts. They watched him swarm down the line into the pit. A Mesklinite hanging on a rope about the thickness of a six-pound nylon fishline, and free to swing pendulum-style in forty Earth gravities, is quite a sight even when the distance he has to climb is not much greater than his own body length. Even Benj stopped thinking about Beetchermarlf for a moment. The captain was no longer worried about the ice; it was presumably frozen all the way to the bottom by now, and he went straight toward the cruiser without bothering to stay on the stones. He slowed a trifle as he drew near, eyeing the cavity in front of him thoughtfully. Practically, the Kwembly was still frozen in, of course. The melted area had reached her trucks some sixty feet fore and aft, but the ice was still above the mattress beyond those limits and on the port side. Even within that range, the lower part of the treads had still been an inch or two under water when the heater had given out. Beetchermarlf’s control cables had been largely freed, but of the helmsman himself there was no sign whatever. Dondragmer had no hope of finding the two alive under the Kwembly ; they would obviously have emerged long ago had this been the case. The captain would not have offered large odds on the chance of finding bodies, either. Like McDevitt, he knew that there was a possibility that the crewmen had not been under the hull at all when the freeze-up occurred. There had, after all, been two other unexplained disappearances; Dondragmer’s educated guess at the whereabouts of Kervenser and Reffel was far from a certainty even in his own mind. It was dark underneath, out of range of the floods. Dondragmer could still see (a response to abrupt changes of illumination was a normal adaptation to Mesklin’s eighteen-minute rotation period) but some details escaped him. He saw the condition of the two trucks whose treads had been ruined by the helmsmen’s escape efforts, and he saw the piles of stones they had made in the attempt to confine the hot water in a small area; but he missed the slash in the mattress where the two had taken final refuge. What he saw made it obvious, however, that at least one of the missing men had been there for a while. Since the volume which had evidently not frozen at all was small, the most likely guess seemed to be that they had been caught in the encroaching ice after doing the work which could be seen; though it was certainly hard to see just how this could have happened. The captain made a rapid check the full length of the ice-walled cavern, examining every exposed truck fore and aft, top and sides. It never occurred to him to look higher. He had, after all, taken part in the building of the huge vehicle; he knew there was nowhere higher to go. He emerged at last into the light and the field of view of the communicator. His appearance alone was something of a relief to Benj; the boy had concluded, just as the captain had, that the helmsmen could not be under the hull alive, and he had rather expected to see Dondragmer pulling bodies after him. The relief was short, and the burning question remained: where was Beetchermarlf? The captain was climbing out of the pit and leaving the field of view. Maybe he was coming back to the bridge to make a detailed report. Benj, now showing clearly the symptoms of sleeplessness, waited silently with his fists clenched. But Dondragmer’s voice did not come. The captain had planned to tell the human observers what he had found, but on the way up the side of the hull, visible but unrecognized, he paused to talk to one of the men who was chipping ice from the lock exit. “I only know what the human, Hoffman, told me you found when your party reached that stream,” he said. “Are there more details I should know? I know that you met someone at the point where the ground reached up into the fog, but I never heard from Hoffman whether it was Reffel or Kervenser. Which was it? And are the helicopters all right? There was an interruption just then; someone up above apparently caught sight of Kabremm back at the Esket; then I broke in myself because the stream you had found worried me. That’s why I split your party. Who was it you found?”

“It was Kabremm.” Dondragmer almost lost his grip on the holdfasts. “Kabremm? Destigmet’s first officer? Here? And a human being recognized him; it was your screen he was seen on?”

“It sounded that way, sir. He didn’t see our communicator until it was too late, and none of us thought for an instant that there was a chance of a human being telling one of us from another; at least, not between the time we recognized him ourselves and the time it was too late.”

“But what is he doing here? This planet has three times the area of Mesklin; there are plenty of other places to be. I knew the commander was going to hit shoals sooner or later playing this Esket trick on the human beings, but I certainly never thought he’d ground on such silly bad luck as this.”

“It’s not entirely chance, sir. Kabremm didn’t have time to tell us much. We took advantage of your order about exploring the stream to break up and get him out of sight of the communicator, but I understand this river has been giving trouble most of the night. There’s a buildup of ice five million or so cables downstream, not very far from the Esket, and a sort of ice river is flowing slowly into the hot lands. The Esket and the mines and the farms are right in its way.”

“Farms?”

“That’s what Destigmet calls them. Actually a Settlement with hydroponic tanks; a sort of oversized life-support rig that doesn’t have to balance as closely as the cruiser rigs do. Anyway, Destigmet sent out the Gwelf under Kabremm to explore upstream in the hope of finding out how bad the ice river was likely to get. They had grounded where we met them because of the fog; they could have flown over it easily enough, but they couldn’t have seen the river bed through it.”

“Then they must have arrived since the flood that brought us here; if they were examining the river bed they flew right over us. How could they possibly have missed our lights?”

“I don’t know, sir. If Kabremm told Stakendee, I didn’t hear him.” Dondragmer gave the rippling equivalent of a shrug. “Probably he did, and made it a point to stay out of reach of our human eyes. I suppose Kervenser and Reffel ran into the Gwe/f, and Reffel used his vision shutter to keep the dirigible from human sight; but I still don’t see why Kervenser, at least, didn’t come back to report.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know about any of that, either,” replied the sailor. “Then the river we’ve washed into must bend north, if it leads to the Esket area.” The other judged correctly that Dondragmer was merely thinking out loud, and made no comment. The captain pondered silently for another minute or two. “The big question is whether the commander heard it too, when the human — I suppose it was Mrs. Hoffman; she is about the only one that familiar with us — called out Kabremm’s name. If he did, he probably thought that someone had been careless back at the Esket, as I did. You heard her on your set and I heard her on mine, but that’s reasonable. They’re both Kwembly communicators, and probably all in one place up at the station. We don’t know, though, about their links with the Settlement. I’ve heard that all their communication gear is in one room, but it must be a big room and the different sets may not be very close together. Barl may or may not have heard her. “What it all shapes up to is that one human being has recognized an Esket crew member, not only alive long after they were supposed to be dead but five or six million cables from the place where they supposedly died. We don’t know how certain this human being was of the identification; certain enough to call Kabremm’s name aloud, perhaps not certain enough to spread the word among other humans without further checking. I gather they don’t like looking silly any more than we do. We don’t know whether Barlennan knows of the slip; worst of all, we can’t tell what he’s likely to answer when questions about it come his way. His safest and most probable line would be complete ignorance seasoned with shocked amazement, and I suppose he’ll realize that, but I certainly wish I could talk to him without having human beings along the corridor.”