Hal Clement - Fossil

He signed off before Hugh could either point out that the flight would take only minutes or ask sarcastically whether the return was conditional on his getting the information, and long before he could report what they had already heard from Shefcheeshee. After a moment of thought he decided that this might be just as well, and refrained from calling back.

He deliberately ate before doing anything else, and then began taking steps to locate his various Habra friends. He should probably find out more than the Cephallonian had told them.

The planet’s population was only in the millions, but even one million is a very large number. They had a single culture spread over the “Iris” continent. Any native might be anywhere, as work or whim dictated. This did not promise well for finding anyone.

On the other hand, the Habras were highly civilized, had a single worldwide language, communicated naturally by electromagnetic waves, and had a sophisticated search system which worked very quickly for people actually on the continent; ones on the dark hemisphere or working undersea were quite another matter.

In less than an hour, after talking to three natives on or over various parts of the Iris, he had found Bill, the first native he had come to know at all well and with whom he and Janice had shared danger under Habranha’s seas. Bill knew all about the proposed fossil dig, though he was not involved himself; it was no secret, though no one had bothered to make a point of telling alien visitors about it. He had not known that a Cephallonian was involved.

It was to be on the ocean bottom in silicate sediment rather than ice. The Habras were quite used to dealing with this material; they mined it regularly to fertilize the ice of their floating continent. There were only two new developments involved. One was a technique for boring vertically into presumably hard mud instead of skimming soft stuff from the surface; this the Habras had worked out themselves.

The other was a means of sensing and identifying organic remnants in the material being searched. This involved a Big Box, an Erthumoi artificial intelligence. The Habras did not share the prejudice against such equipment held so firmly by the five non-Erthumoi star-faring species, and had not proven very susceptible to efforts to transmit it. Bill was enthusiastic, and wished he had gone on the trip, but the crew — of two — had already been selected when he had heard about the project. Ship and workers had been visiting the bottom now for over two years. He was voluble with details about the submarine, which he had himself handled, and displayed an interest in fossils and paleontology which he had never shown during his earlier association with Hugh, Janice, Rekchellet, and their other Crotonite partner.

Remembering the question Rekchellet had attributed to Ennissee, Hugh sounded Bill out on his attitude about Habranha evolution. No strong feeling was aroused. Bill shared an apparently general belief that the process did occur, but that, for chemical rather than mystical reasons, his own people could not be part of it. Hugh wondered if he had found another reason why some Habras were working for Ennissee.

He spent over an hour reminiscing with Bill before the native had to go his own way. Hugh headed back toward the Guild building with another minor problem of diplomacy on his hands.

Spreadsheet-Thinker and his group were very concerned with getting good, reliable, scientific answers from their own Pit Project so they could regard their administrative efforts as professional and successful.

It also seemed likely that getting answers before anyone else might carry weight with them. Barrar wanted information about the Habra project, and had mentioned interest in others. That seemed a most probable reason.

But now the natives were going to dig with the aid of artificial intelligence, in a place where fossils ought, one would expect, to be plentiful.

Locrian Spreadsheet-Thinker, Samian Ged Barrar. and the rest of their non-Erthumoi colleagues were about to collide with the fact that they were in direct competition with the nasty, immoral, improper, and generally unacceptable innovation of those irresponsible, juvenile newcomers to interstellar travel. They would be challenging Erthumoi-developed artificial intelligence. Ignoring the fact would leave them completely out of control of affairs on Habranha, because the natives would simply deal with people who could get things done.

Hugh gloated. Maybe his job was being done lor him.

Barrar received Hugh’s additional information with surprising calm, Hugh felt, and the aircraft reached Pwanpwan with equally startling speed. It was a smaller machine, and Reekess had some trouble accommodating her wings, but they were back at Pitville before this became a major discomfort.

It took some time for personal clocks to adjust, short as Hugh’s absence had been. Work on Habranha was continuous, since the “day” was a spatial rather than a temporal division. People rested, or slept if their species did this, simply according to the need of the moment, whether timed by simple fatigue or evolution-rated biological clocks.

Hugh had even gotten out of phase with Janice. Assigned duty watches in Pitville were based, of course, primarily on the need to keep a position filled; but the biological nature of the beings on duty also had to weigh heavily. This sort of scheduling formed a large part of Spreadsheet Thinker’s own job description; requests for change, such as Hugh so frequently made without consultation, ranked extremely high on her list of major nuisances. Barrar had wondered several times whether he should try to make this a little clearer to the Erthuma, but was so far still favoring natural selection.

Even with nobody actually criticizing his work, however, a safety director’s job remains full. When nothing bad is happening, there is time spent wondering when it will; when something does, one wonders why; when the reason is obvious, there is usually no one else to blame. Hugh had accepted this long ago and now simply tried not to take his irritations out on anyone else, especially not on Janice.

He was not sure how to react to S’Nash’s presence. This was frequent enough to make him wonder in his balanced moments whether the Naxian wanted Hugh’s job, and in his more paranoid ones to suspect it/him of being part of the Administration net. Knowing that the being could sense his feelings made it superfluous and even silly to relieve them with bad language or similar unrestrained behavior; on the other hand, the knowledge itself was, oddly, a sort of relief.

Hugh Cedar was a good, competent, thoughtful explorer. He was not yet a good administrator.

His wife was a good, competent, thoughtful explorer. She was also an extremely good physical chemist, at both theory and laboratory levels. Currently, therefore, she was much better off and happier than he. She knew it. She didn’t actually worry, but looked forward eagerly to the Lime when Rekchellet would be back in the air and the real, physical, possibly dangerous adventure over the Solid Ocean could start and let her husband relax. In the meantime, she tried to keep Hugh’s mind on other things, an effort sharply constrained by diving fluid and such of its effects as the need to use code rather than speech and the impossibility of enjoying such simple biological pleasures as eating.

They discussed the age of the frozen Habra in private; they had decided not to reveal it even to S’Nash, to make sure that Rekchellet’s expressed wishes weren’t accidentally frustrated. The body was, in fact, much more recent than the wing which had been found earlier, little over twenty-two thousand Common Years — well within the carbon reliability range on this world. They wondered where and how it had actually been found. The only source either one could guess was the putative Ennissee dig, and thinking of that made Hugh impatient again. All Janice could do was point out the obvious fact that the body could have come from anywhere on Habranha where ice existed, and that this was not even restricted to the dark hemisphere. The reminder didn’t really help. A confrontation with Ennissee, with a Naxian on hand to indicate whether the Crotonite were telling the truth, was very high on Hugh’s want list.