Hal Clement: Still River

Carol and one of her Others had seriously considered mastering the art of figure skating ...

Contact with the cavern floor brought her mind back to the present.

Even then, she didn’t discuss either hydrogen bonds or ice with the others; speed was not the only way in which her mind differed from Joe’s.

Joe felt a very slight, unfamiliar sensation. He knew that it was about time for reality interface, and wanted to believe that this was merely the effect of a strange drive system, but he somehow couldn’t feel completely sure.

There was an odd touch of disorientation, as though his walking flaps and handling tendrils might not be exactly where they seemed; and he felt oddly reluctant to move so as to find out.

It was encouraging that there had been no change in the display before him; even the most minor error as a carrier penetrates the interface between real and unreal space-time usually kills sensing apparatus completely. As it was, the terrifying image on the screen had not even flickered. Perhaps it had all been his own state of mind; a star like Arc could unsettle anyone.

Or almost anyone. He had forgotten for an instant the giant seated at her own instruments beside him. For a moment he hesitated to look at her; his standards of courtesy would have made it an intrusion, since she was presumably busy. Then he remembered—this always took a moment—that the human being would not even be aware of his glance; her only eyes were inside the hood surrounding her vision screen. Reminding himself firmly that he really wasn’t doing anything improper, he let his right-side pair of optics center on her hands.

The fingers, which the Nethneen simultaneously envied for their strength and pitied for their clumsiness, rested motionless at the key bank. If she had been bothered by the jolt, the worry was not being translated into action so far. Whether that meant she hadn’t felt it or was too familiar with what she had felt to be bothered by it was impossible to tell; asking would be intrusion even by Human standards as long as she appeared to be working. He could, of course, get her readings onto his own screen without disturbing the giant, but there were two objections to this. The first was that it probably wouldn’t answer his question, and the second that it could easily be dangerous. If she were looking at Arc in anything like its natural color ...

Joe shivered. There were usually five or six hundred species at any one time at the Eta Carinae establishment, and these tended to be fairly sophisticated about alien life forms; but the recent arrival of human beings had startled most of them badly. It had been casually accepted by the community that life could not be expected near suns hotter than about K8. One of the reasons for the face-fitting mask around the Human student’s screen was protection of her classmates from the short-wave radiation she used for vision.

Joe gave up useless speculation for the moment and went back to particle counting. It was less unnerving than examining an O-type star would be. He could ask Molly if she had felt the whatever-it-was later on.

Mary Warrender Chmenici felt the jolt, but paid no real attention to it; it was less noticeable than the interface transitions she was used to, and she interpreted it as merely another of these.

She was not even as conscious as she should have been of the display on her screen, though this was not of very great importance. In principle, students were supposed to be observing while on watch; in practice, even the stuffiest of the Faculty would not expect much useful material to be picked up before the traveling classroom got a lot closer to Enigma. If anyone had known that Molly had already formed a working hypothesis and used it to plan her operations for the next few weeks, there would have been criticism; most of the red-sun races, if the individuals she had met so far were typical, were conservative in their ideas of where reasonable organization ended and wild speculation began. Even these, however, might have made allowance for her youth.

If asked, she could have claimed she was searching for Enigma at the moment. Presumably the body would be emitting the long waves characteristic of planetary temperatures, combined with reflected light from Arc; she had set her equipment to respond to such a combination and to center her screen on the source and shift to maximum resolution if it were found. Her mind, however, was elsewhere—though her eyes, like Joe’s side and rear ones, would put in a call for attention if their input pattern changed significantly. She was taking for granted, from the barely detectable sensation that had bothered her little Nethneen friend so greatly, that they were back on the real side of interface, but that left a couple of her days of ordinary flight before the laboratory site could be examined in any detail. Arc and its almost equally huge companion formed too massive a system to permit interface transfer at planetary distances; real space-time was too badly warped in their vicinity.

Enigma. Did the Faculty member of centuries past who had named the little planet have a sense of humor? Most intelligent beings did, of course. Actually, it was Enigma 88 in decimal notation—which, she reminded herself, was not used at the School. One of the things that had made her feel more at home, during her first weeks at Eta Carinae, had been the story of a major administrative upheaval, during the establishment of the place, over the question of octal or duodecimal time units.

The Faculty had a file of Enigmas for student investigation, she knew, within reasonably short distances from the Leinster site. Molly thought she could guess why this one had been given to a team containing a Human student. The guess assumed that the Faculty had already learned a good deal about her species, but this was likely enough. Any red-sun native would have been curious about the combination of a high-energy star and a fairly habitable—from their point of view—world like Titan, and even more so about a place like Earth. In asking the Human students about these, they could hardly have failed to learn a lot about the beings they were questioning.

But that was really letting her mind wander. The assigned exercise was to produce an explanation for the basically surprising fact that Enigma, with far less mass than Earth’s moon, had a very substantial atmosphere. The team was to present observational support for its solution with an absolute minimum of items taken for granted; and here was the trouble. Ten months at Eta Carinae, and a really close friendship with Joe, had certainly not supplied her with a complete list of what even one red-star type took for granted. This was bad enough. Worse, twenty-seven Earth years of life and a good education still left her unsure of which of her own everyday assumptions would need supporting evidence to nonhuman minds. Science was science, physical evidence was evidence, but there are spaces between the points on any graph. To her, the explanation demanded by the exercise seemed obvious to the point of being trivial: the planet was too young to have lost its initial atmosphere. She was sure, however, that supporting evidence was going to have to be very carefully handled indeed. She was not normally inclined to worry, but dealing with minds of such different background still made her uneasy. They certainly weren’t all like Joe.

The hull trembled again, much more noticeably this time, snapping her attention back to her instruments. Back into false-space? Why? It didn’t feel like that, though she knew there were scores of different faster-than-light techniques and she was not really used to the one employed by Classroom. No, she was seeing directly, not by relay. Solid matter—meteoroid? It was hard to believe that any spacecraft could not handle such an incident without attracting the attention of the passengers, though in a system as young as Arc’s must be there were no doubt lots of unaccreted particles. Her fingers played over her console, shifting from simple visual imaging to build a tridimensional model of the space around the craft for a kilometer radius.