Hal Clement: Heavy Planet

“It was, until this evening. There are other troubles at the mine, though. A sort of ice river is coming, very slowly, but it will soon cover the whole second settlement if it doesn’t stop. It’s already reached the Esket and started to tip it over; that’s why we were able to salvage the trucks so easily. Destigmet sent me to follow back up the glacier and try to find out whether it is likely to keep coming indefinitely, or was just a brief event. I really shouldn?t have come this far, but I couldn?t make myself stop. It?s this same river for the whole distance, sometimes solid and sometimes liquid along the way; it?s the weirdest thing I?ve seen yet on this weird world. There isn?t a chance of the ice?s stopping, and the Esket settlement is as good as done for.”

“And of course Barlennan hasn’t heard about this either.”

“There’s been no way to tell him. We only discovered the ice was moving just before dark. It was just a cliff a few dozen cables from the mine up to then.”

“In other words, we’ve lost not only my first officer and a helicopter but a dirigible with five men, and as an afterthought the whole Esket project, with my Kwembly probably on the same list. And you still think we shouldn’t end this trickery, tell the human beings the whole story, and get their help?”

“More than ever. If they learn we’re having this much trouble, they’ll probably decide we’re no more use to them and abandon us here.”

“Nonsense. No one just abandons an investment like this project; but never mind arguing; it’s a futile point anyway. I wish—”

“What you really wish is that you had an excuse for leaking the whole barrel to your oxygen-breathing friends.”

“You know I wouldn’t do that. I’m quite ready to use my own judgment in the field, but I know enough history to be afraid of making spot-changes in basic policy.”

“Thank goodness. It’s all right to like some humans, but they’re not all like the Hoffman one. You admitted that yourself.”

“What it boils down to,” Barlennan said to Bendivence, “is that we were much too hasty in sending Deeslenver to the Esket with orders to shutter its vision sets. The whole Esket question seems to have quieted down, and that will bring it to life again. We’re not ready for the main act yet, and won’t be for a year or more. I wasn’t sorry for the chance to start the human beings thinking along the lines of a native-menace idea, but Destigmet’s crew won’t be able to play the part until they have a lot more homemade mechanical and electrical equipment, things that the humans know we don’t have. Certainly, unless the native menace seems real, the human beings aren’t very likely to take the steps we want. “If there were any way to go after Dee now and cancel his orders, I’d do it. I wish I’d dared let you go ahead with radio experiments, and had a set on the Deedee right now.”

“It shouldn’t be too risky, and I’d be more than glad to work on it,” answered Bendivence. “The waves could be detected by the human beings, of course, but if we confined ourselves to brief and rare transmissions and used a simple off-on code they probably wouldn’t realize what the source was. However, it’s too late to get Deeslenver, anyway.”

“True. I wish I knew why no one up there has said another word about Kabremm. The last time I talked to Mrs. Hoffman, I got the impression that she wasn’t quite as sure as before that she’d really seen him. Do you suppose she really made a mistake? Or are the human beings trying to test us , the way I wanted to do with them? Or has Dondragmer done something to get us off that reef? If she were really wrong, we’ll have to start thinking all over again …”

“And what about that other report we’ve heard no more of, something sliding across the Esket’s floor?” countered the scientist. “Was that still another test? Or is something really happening there? Remember, we haven’t had any contact with that base for over a hundred and fifty hours. If the Esket is really being moved by something, we’re much too badly out of date to do anything sensible. You know, without saying anything against the Esket act, it’s an awful nuisance not to be able to trust your data.”

“If there’s real trouble at the Esket we’ll just have to trust Dee’s judgment,” said the commander, ignoring Bendivence’s closing sentence. “Actually, even that isn’t the chief problem. The real question is what to do about Dondragmer and the Kwembly. I suppose he had good reason to leave his ship and let her drift away, but the results have been very awkward. The fact that a couple of his men got left aboard makes it almost more so; if they hadn’t been, we could just forget about the cruiser and send out the Kalliff to pick up the people.”

“Why can’t we do that anyway? Didn’t the human Aucoin suggest it?”

“He did. I said I’d have to think it over.”

“Why?”

“Because there is less than one chance in ten, and probably less than one in a hundred, that the Kalliff could get there in time to do those two men any good. The chances are small enough that she could get there at all. Remember that snow field the Kwembly crossed before her first flood? What do you suppose that area is like now? And how long do you think two men, competent men, but with no real technical or scientific training, are going to keep that leaking hull habitable? “Of course, we could confess the whole act, tell the humans to get in touch with Destigmet through the watch he keeps at the Esket’s communicators; then they could tell him to send a rescue dirigible.”

“That would be wasting a tremendous amount of work, and ruining what still seems a promising operation,” Bendivence replied thoughtfully. “You don’t want to do that any more than I do; but of course we can’t abandon those two helmsmen.”

“We can’t,” Barlennan agreed slowly, “but I just wonder whether we’d be taking too much of a chance on them if we waited out one other possibility.”

“What’s that?”

“If the human beings were convinced that we could not possibly carry out the rescue, it?s just possible, especially with two Hoffmans to do the arguing, that they’d decide to do something about it themselves.”

“But what could they do? The ship they call the ‘barge’ will only land here at the Settlement by its automatic controls, as I understand Rescue Plan One. They certainly can’t fly it around on this world from out at the orbiting station; if it took them a whole minute to correct any mistake, they’d crash it right away. They certainly can’t fly it down personally. It’s set up to rescue us, with our air and temperature control, and besides Dhrawn’s gravity would paint a human being over the deck.”

“Don’t underestimate those aliens, Ben. They may not be exactly ingenious, but there’s been time for their ancestors to think up a lot of ready-made ideas we don’t know about yet. I wouldn’t do it if I felt there was a real chance of our getting there ourselves, but this way we’re not putting the helmsmen in any worse danger than they are already; I think that we’ll let the human beings get the idea of making the rescue themselves. It would be much better than giving up the plan.”

“What it boils down to,” said Beecchermarlf to Takoorch, “is that we somehow have to find time between plugging leaks and cleaning poison out of the air units to convince people that the Kwembly is worth salvaging. “The best way would be to get her going ourselves, though I doubt very much that we can do it. It’s the cruiser that’s going to set the policy. Your life and mine don’t mean very much to the humans, except maybe to Benj, who isn’t running things up there. If the ship stays alive, if we can keep these tanks going to supply us with food and air, and incidentally keep from being poisoned by oxygen ourselves, and make real, reportable progress in repairing and freeing the cruiser, then maybe they’ll be convinced that a rescue trip is worth while. Even if they don’t, we’ll have to do all those things for our own sakes anyway; but if we can have the humans tell Barlennan that we have the Kwembly out and running, and will get her back to Dondragmer by ourselves, it should make quite a few people happy, especially the commander.”