Hal Clement - Fossil

S’Nash was already aboard, and the Erthuma lifted off with caution dictated by the presence of many living fliers and possibly other aircraft in the area.

He flew slowly to the living quarters, left the ship and awakened Janice — they were out of phase again and he had not wanted to disturb her sooner than absolutely necessary — and waited while she, too, donned recycling gear.

Moments later the craft was rising slowly straight up, surrounded by its winged satellites, and at half a kilometer’s height he pointed the nose west and set the autopilot for a comfortable fifty kilometers per hour, which he knew both Habras and Crotonites could maintain for hundreds of kilometers. Janice had already gone back to sleep; there were scores of hours of travel ahead of them.

They passed only a short distance from where the truck had been abandoned; the Habras, for whom it was well within sensory range, reported that it was still there. This was not very surprising, but neither would its absence have been; there was no way to read Ennissee’s mind. The vehicle was dark, and no one tried to find whether anyone was aboard. Hugh flirted briefly with a mild regret that they had not brought a Locrian, but didn’t ask anyone to open the vehicle. They flew on.

From time to time one or another of the fliers would come aboard to eat and rest; there was not room for all, or even many, of them at once with the present stock of food. Plans were discussed, but had to be vague; there could only be guesses at what lay at the end of the flight. Conceivably there would be nothing; the hypothesis that Ennissee wanted them there might be wrong or irrelevant. He might not have cared whether they knew about the site, and even the location might be a deception.

They could plan on the latter assumption, and did. A wide search pattern based on the sensory powers of the Habras and the eyesight of the Crotonites was tentatively worked out. No one looked forward to implementing it, however. A search in the dark and chill for something probably not there would be purest anticlimax.

They hoped Ennissee, and the two Erthumoi for whom there was some evidence, and the Samian who had been reported as boarding the truck at the port, would all be there and all be able, willing or not, to explain the apparently senseless activities of the truck itself and at least one of its erstwhile occupants. Rekchellet, quite frankly, hoped that Ennissee would not be willing to cooperate; Rekchellet wanted an excuse. An on-the-spot excuse, since he had obviously suffered no permanent damage, and civilized people were above resenting mere temporary inconvenience.

Ennissee, one could hope, would be neither sneering nor uncooperative — except just at first. Rekchellet flew westward with that “at first” in his mind. Reekess, a few meters away, said little, but knew his thoughts and shared them.

Fafnir ceased rising behind them and to their right, and began to sink again very slowly; even the flight speed of living beings was greater than that of Habranha’s equatorial rotation. The shadows below grew long again.

The hills still resembled dunes. No one could be sure whether they moved, since no one elevation was in sight long enough, but the winds were generally less violent at the height where they were flying. Twice there were sharp, steep escarpments angling across their path; Habranha was far too small for plate shifting, but there must be slow currents in the deep ice, accompanied presumably from time to time by phase changes and glacier quakes far below, even this far from the sunward side. Chaos still ruled this world, however snaillike the pace of its armies might be here in the chill darkness.

Presently Fafnir was left behind, and only the distant stars lighted the icy surface. They flew on. Janice woke up and relieved Hugh at the control panel, though flight was still automatic; the only breaks in its monotony were pauses to open the lock and let people in and out. It would have been possible to open at their slow cruising speed without disturbing the handling of the ship, but entry into and departure from a portal with a fifty-kilometer-per-hour wind across the opening seemed risky to Hugh. All the fliers claimed they could handle such a maneuver, some even expressing indignation that the Erthuma should regard it as dangerous; but Hugh insisted, to the extent of stopping the craft instantly whenever he heard someone attempting to use the outside hatch controls in flight. His translator passed on a few Habra words not, apparently, directed at him which sounded suspiciously like “thinks we’re children,” but he reminded himself that the natives didn’t really regard this imputation as an insult and remained firm in his policy.

Possibly as a result of this, all his personnel were uninjured and reasonably rested and fed a hundred kilometers from their goal, after what he thought of as nearly four days of flight. They had agreed on an approach tactic, and now descended to a level just above the hills.

These were far more jagged than they had been nearer the terminator. The wind was much weaker, at least at the moment; and while there was still a good deal of blown ice dust filling cracks and hollows here and there, this no longer seemed to be the principal shaping agent of the landscape.

Hugh lowered his speed to let the fliers precede him, and watched them spread out in fan formation, Habras slightly ahead, as had been agreed. He kept his eyes on them, while Janice watched the tracker and reported distance and direction to the selected spot. They knew this might not be a precise location; Rekchellet had seen coordinates on the map, and was reasonably sure he was reading the numbers correctly even though the language was not his own, but there was no way to be sure what sort of trust could be placed in the map itself.

Every kilometer the aircraft’s upper light blinked the corrected distance in a simple improvised code, while the Crotonites winged steadily forward and the faster Habras swept back and forth in front of them, scanning the ice below with eyes and electric senses.

They were a dozen kilometers short of the indicated point when the Crotonite at the left of the line flashed her light back toward the others. Hugh and Janice saw it at the same instant; S’Nash started to speak, and fell silent. A touch on the board left the aircraft floating motionless a few meters above a barely visible ice peak, holding its position against the urge of a feeble breeze. Hugh opened the outer hatch and waited, but no one came aboard. A pair of broad Crotonite wings swept above the canopy after two or three minutes, however, and their owner’s voice came through.

“Miriam felt metal several kilometers in front of her, and the others now agree. They say it’s a large amount, and are sure they could not themselves be felt by another Habra at that distance. They will go no closer until they get your word, Hugh, in case you want to take the aircraft there before they themselves are sensed.”

“We thought of that,” agreed the Erthuma, “but couldn’t see what to do afterward. No, let’s follow Walt’s idea. Let the Habras approach the metal in single line, one far enough behind the next so they can just sense and talk to each other. You Crotonites will follow in the same direction as best you can with your lights out, and I’ll bring up the rear, well to one side, also dark. Whoever is in the lead look for signs of other living beings — Habras. of course, but any others he or she can infer from whatever they sense. If none are detected by the time the leader reaches the object, whatever it is, pass the message and any description back along the line to me as quickly as possible and we’ll come forward to look it over. If anyone living is detected, or any sort of trouble or danger shows up, relay the word back and I’ll be up there with all my lights going three seconds after I get it. That’s why I’ll be staying to one side; I don’t want to run into any of you. But if any emergency message does come through, turn your own lights on again, too, so I’ll be more certain to miss you. All right?”