Hal Clement - Fossil

“What has changed?” came the slow response.

Hugh summarized the events of the last few hours. Barrar said nothing for half a minute; the Erthuma impatiently let the slow Samian thoughts wind to their next question.

“Is it necessary to find the truck? We know whose it is, and they are not really our problem.”

“Third-Supply-Watcher is my problem. So are Rekchellet and the Habras with him, though I admit they may not be with the truck and are likely to turn up by themselves. The Locrian needs to be found, in my judgment.”

There was another pause. “I agree. I approve your commitment of the flying personnel. Whether I can free an aircraft is another matter; I will have to get back to the office to check their status.”

“Can’t you just ask Spreadsheet-Thinker from here?”

“I prefer not to interrupt her cogitations. I’ll let you know as quickly as I can.” Barrar strode deliberately away.

Hugh had to be content with this, or at least to make the best he could of it. He unloaded the transmitter from the caisson by himself, dismissed robot and sweeper, left the communication device at the warehouse door, and headed slowly back to his own office — even more slowly than the Samian; so slowly as to be striding almost erect, instead of with the forward slant of an Erthuma in low gravity. His mind was very busy.

S’Nash writhed along just behind him, also silent.

There was a neutrino transmitter in the safety office, and Hugh made another futile attempt to get in touch with the truck. He decided against calling Barrar, who was presumably doing as much as he could to fulfill his promise. Hugh could have demanded one for emergency use, as he had at the time of the Pit accident, but he was not quite sure that this, even now, was a life-and-death emergency.

Not quite. Third-Supply-Watcher had a communicator at hand; why hadn’t she used it?

Perhaps she couldn’t.

Perhaps she didn’t want to.

And any imagination, especially if freed from the chains of normal discipline by the acid of worry, could produce an indefinitely large set of possible reasons for either situation.

Hugh firmly welded the chains back together, and began calling his safety people. He also put S’Nash to work rescheduling the sentry assignments of the nonflying members of his staff. If the Naxian preferred hanging around in what should be its/his free time, it/he might as well be put to useful work, especially if Naxians were going to form almost the whole of the sentry crews for some dozens of hours to come.

Moments after he started calling, a Habra appeared at the office air lock and cycled himself through. Hugh didn’t look carefully enough.

“Ted! What have you found?”

“This is Walt. We haven’t seen Ted. Hugh, there’s something strange going on.”

The Erthuma recovered from his surprise, resisted the temptation to respond sarcastically in code, and confined his reply to “What?”

“Rek was flying well ahead of us and higher than we can go, when he called to ask if we could see a light coming our way. We did, and he said to watch but not get too close while he looked it over. We agreed. We couldn’t see very well, of course, but could sense a dozen or so people flying with the light. We were expecting him to tell us what was happening. After he closed with the group, he said they were all going down. We followed, and they landed far ahead of the truck. A few seconds later his translator cut off. Then the whole group suddenly left in many different directions. We went in immediately but couldn’t sense Rek’s equipment, and it was too dark in the shadows to see him on the ground if he was there, and it was starting to fog in. We neither saw nor sensed anything. We spent a long time searching a five-kilometer radius, since the fog turned to snow. Then we decided it wasn’t wise to stay out of touch so long, so we went back to the truck. We couldn’t get in.” “What?”

“The outer door controls wouldn’t work. It had stopped. We could see into the driver’s section, and a Locrian was there, but we couldn’t tell who; they all look alike to us.”

Fafnir was a little higher above the horizon from Rekchellet’s viewpoint, since he was both farther west and much higher than Hugh. Actually, he was too high for ground searching and knew it perfectly well, but he had no intention of staying there. There had been pleasure in lifting himself into the clear upper air, and there was some excuse, since it gave him a chance to see and memorize a vast area of the wrinkled ground below. He had no plans to map the entire dark hemisphere mentally. Between his normal flier’s nervous system and his trained drawing skills he might indeed have managed this, but right now he was only trying to match the route printed out by the truck’s autodriver with topography ahead.

He had done this several times since the backtrace had started. Each time he had spotted valleys, hollows, and clefts near the mapped line which might have concealed people or objects which had left, or been removed from, the vehicle along the way.

Close examinations had turned up nothing so far, but the surveys still seemed worth making.

And only he could make them. Thanks to his smaller body and broader wings, he could fly much higher than the natives, with or without protection from the cold. A cynical Erthuma might have suggested that he had adopted this search technique to make the fact clear to his companions. This was not true, at least not consciously; the Habranhans were fliers, too, and it had never occurred to Rekchellet to feel for them the ordinary Crotonite contempt for nonflying races. Also, his general attitudes had been bent — twisted, many of his own people said — by long association with Erthumoi like Hugh and Janice Cedar.

But still he soared high, examining the rippled surface below in the light of setting Fafnir, ignoring the fact that even he could study the spreading shadows much better from nearby. He also ignored the biting chill, which grew worse as the search carried them farther and farther into the little world’s night hemisphere. Like his companions, he was wearing protective clothing on his body; like them, his wings were uncovered. Unlike theirs, his wings were living tissue, carrying circulating blood, rather than sets of thin, resilient, horny plates which grew only at the roots.

It didn’t matter yet. In flight his body generated plenty of heat; the skin covering his wing membranes was full of insulating air cells, and only by deliberate inflation of the underlying blood vessels could he lose much body heat by that route.

Nearly five kilometers below him and about as far to the east he could see the lights of the truck, lumbering along its planned path. His companions were invisible since they carried no lights, but they would be within a hundred meters of the surface and a kilometer or two of the vehicle, contour-chasing, subjecting every irregularity near the mapped track to the attention of their eyes where possible and their other senses elsewhere. So far, they had passed two places where the printout showed sharp changes in direction, but neither of these had revealed any sign that the vehicle had either stopped or discharged anything. Third-Supply-Watcher had also made a careful examination at each site, looking specifically for any hole which might once have contained the frozen Habra body, but she, too, had found nothing.

With all he could see from this height firmly in mind, Rekchellet began to glide downward. He would do more good, until they had traveled another score of kilometers at least, sharing the work of close search. He targeted a hill a good deal higher than most, a few hundred meters to the left of the truck’s intended path, as the center for a new sweep. Presumably the others hadn’t reached it yet. Fafnir and the unmoving stars watched his descent.