Hal Clement - Still River

“Simple. I’ll ride another of Joe’s robots, and set it to go upwind at higher speed than the one you’re riding. Sooner or later I’ll catch you, and I can reset both robots to come back downwind. Actually we shouldn’t need the rope, but I’ll play it safe; that seems the sensible way—we could be taken by surprise by something else, after all.”

“Have you consulted with Joe about taking another of his robots from the mapping project?”

“No, but this is important; and we have to save you, too.

I know your armor should be good for a long time, but as he said awhile ago, the environment is really bad for a Human. You’d freeze to death in seconds if your power failed—or maybe boil; I know you have good insulation and your body produces an incredible amount of heat.”

“The atmosphere study is important, too,” Molly pointed out in some amusement.

“Well, yes, of course. Maybe it would be quicker for Joe to make a new robot in the shop than to go off and pull another from the mapping. How about it, Joe? You must have all the patterns.”

“Yes, I do. I am not quite so sure about raw materials, however; the boat doesn’t carry much in the way of spare metal. If I improvised by making the shell from some carbon polymer, manual replanning would be needed, and that would take awhile. I fear it would be quicker to take another from the mapping job.”

“Joe,” said Molly softly, “I don’t consider myself an emergency case yet. I admit I’d be relieved to be back among you, but getting specimens for Carol and Jenny and me is also part of the job, and this is a part of the planet we’d never have seen—never have suspected, probably—if I hadn’t been so silly about making that jump a little while ago. I haven’t heard of armor failure in my lifetime, and I don’t mind a few days of mild discomfort. If Carol wants to come along and see the place for herself, and collect her own specimens, and that fits into any plan for getting me back, fine; but I don’t see why parts of the project already planned and underway need to suffer.”

“Charley, let me at the keys.” Joe spoke quietly, but for the first time a thrill of real fear—not just the sudden, brief panic that had come with a fall—seized Molly. If Joe were taking over the flying, and especially if he were changing flight path, he was not making a new robot; he was going after one of the others. That meant he considered the situation more serious than she had allowed herself to believe; and Joe’s opinion, for reasons none of the group could have stated clearly, always carried more weight than his negligible physical size warranted. Maybe it was his species; the first Nethneen Molly had met was also the first instructor at the Eta Carinae institution whose ability to get abstractions across to a student was not hampered by translators. She had given the being the translator name of Sklodowska, after one of her own classical heroes, and had been rather careful never to learn whether it was male or female. Molly herself had not, until meeting this being, really expected to learn much from lectures at the School. The incredibly informative combination of verbal symbols with animated and still graphic presentations had given her a completely new realization of what could be done with the art of communication, and left her with a respect for the teacher that, perhaps unjustly, tended to rub off on all Nethneen. If Joe thought she was in danger, then—

Then she needed to keep control of her own feelings. There was nothing any of them could do to get her out of where she was for some time yet. In the meantime, sitting on a metal cylinder and thinking about her own troubles would do no one any good. She, and Jenny, and Carol could all use specimens, so the thing to do right now was collect specimens.

Making sure that she was tied to the robot, she lowered her feet to the field rim at the lower edge. Then she set her light to a diffuse glow and clipped it to her helmet so that it would shine in whatever general direction she was looking, took hold of one of the grips installed by the Kantrick, and reached down with her other hand into the fluffy mass below. It had no strength at all; the crystals disintegrated into sparkling dust at her touch. She made several efforts to get intact samples into a specimen can, but had to settle for the microscopic fragments. She called Carol and described the problem, leaving possible solutions to her and the boat’s resources.

“How deep is this stuff?” asked Jenny. “Can you reach any substrate? Is it the usual sand or rock, or something we haven’t seen yet?”

“Whatever it is is lower than I can reach from here,” replied Molly. “Just a moment while I check this safety line.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked Charley.

“Stepping off, of course. How else do I find how deep these crystals are?”

“Lower a rope through them, of course!”

“Using what for a weight to carry it down? I’m less than four kilos here myself. I have two safety lines tied to different eyes on the robot, if that makes you feel easier. I’m letting myself down on one of them. I’m about half my height in the fluff—getting a new hold lower on the rope—down again—I’m not sure I want to go under it completely; I won’t be able to see. A little lower though—there. Yukh!”

“No symbol!” came the response in four voices.

“My feet have touched something. Something sort of between slippery and sticky. The symbol implied distaste, but nothing seems to be doing any damage. I was almost pulled loose from my grip on the rope—don’t worry, it’s tied around me as well. I’m trying to walk along behind the robot holding the line, but my feet sink in and are hard to move. I’m climbing back up—if I can pull them free—there. Loose. I’m back on top of the robot again.”

“What’s on your feet?” Carol almost shrieked.

“It’s hard to tell; it’s all covered with the metallic dust. I wish I could blow it off; brushing doesn’t do much good. There arc big gobs of it on each boot; maybe I can pry enough of the outer part off to see whether the shiny stuff is part of it, or was picked up on the way up.” She paused.

“Well?” Carol had waited for much less than a minute.

“Still far from sure. I can’t completely get rid of the metal, if that’s what it is, but there’s certainly less of it inside the lumps. Have you ever tried to get aluminum powder off something? Anyway, as best I can tell, the rest of the stuff is a brownish—to my eyes, of course—very sticky jelly.”

“Collect it!” cried Carol. “If you have no more cans, dump something you’ve already picked up and collect this!”

“Of course,” replied Molly gently. “Even if it isn’t ice, I’m collecting it. Are you ready to come and get it—and me?”

Carol, to do her justice, was embarrassed when she thought back over her recent words, but could not really believe that the others, even Molly herself, wouldn’t have felt the same.

“Of course we’ll get you! But when I get there, you’ll want to go on and find your ice, won’t you?” Molly admitted that she probably would, but that there might be qualifying factors. The Shervah felt some doubt about this, her own pit adventure having been too brief to impress her emotions greatly, but she said nothing else tactless.

“It’s a pity you didn’t see everything along your path. You could have described it, and I wouldn’t need to ride another robot; I could follow on foot.”

“Down the slope where I couldn’t keep from falling and into this cavern from the top?”

“With rope, and tools to secure it along the way, sure.” “I’m afraid that even if I’d seen enough, I wouldn’t remember it with anything like your standards. I hate to do it to Joe, but I think another robot is the answer.”