Hal Clement - Close to Critical

They spent some hours at this. Then Raeker went to eat, and back to his own room to sleep for a few hours. When he reappeared in the observation room, his relief rose gladly.

“Easy has something to report,” he Said, “but she wants to tell you personally.” Raeker raised his eyebrows, dived into his station, and energized the microphone.

“I’m here, Easy,” he said. “What’s happened?”

“I thought I’d better tell you, since you’re the one who said we’d stay put,” the girl responded at once. “We’ve been drifting closer to shore for five or six hours now.”

Raeker smiled. “Are you sure the shore isn’t just getting closer to you?” he asked. “Remember, the sea level had a long way to go down even after you got to the surface.”

“I’m quite sure. We’ve been able to keep our eyes on one piece of shore, and the sea has stayed right by it while we got closer. It has a feature which makes it easy to recognize, though we weren’t able to make out very clearly just what the feature was until now.”

“What is it?” asked Raeker, seeing that he was expected to.

Easy looked at him with the expression children reserve for adults who have made a bad mistake.

“It’s a crowd of about fifty natives,” she said.

Nick, for the hundredth time, looked toward the ocean and fumed. He couldn’t see it, of course; to be out of its reach by night the camp had had to be placed well out of its sight by day, but he knew it was there. He wanted to see it, though; not only to see it but to ride on it. To explore it. To map it. That last idea presented a problem which occupied his mind for some time before he dropped it. Fagin would know the answer; in the meantime there was a boat to be built. That was the real annoyance. Nothing, really, could be done about that until the search teams got back. While it didn’t actually take all of his and Betsey’s time to watch the herd and gather firewood, neither could do any very effective hunting with those jobs in the background; and the boat was very obviously going to take a lot of skins.

Nick wasn’t sure just how many, and to his surprise Fagin had refused to offer even a guess. This was actually reasonable, since Raeker, who was not a physicist, was ignorant of the precise densities of Tenebra’s oceans and atmosphere, the volume of the average leather sack which might be used in the proposed boat, and even the weight of his pupils. He had told Nick to find out for himself, a remark which he had made quite frequently during the process of educating his agents.

Even this, however, called for a little hunting, since it seemed a poor idea to sacrifice one of the herd to the experiment. Betsey was now scouring the surrounding valleys in the hope of finding something big enough to serve—the floaters of the vicinity had already learned to leave herd and herders alone, and those killed or grounded in the process had long since been disposed of by scavengers. Besides, their skins were much too frail to make good leather.

There was no serious doubt that Betsey would find a skin, of course, but Nick wished she’d be quicker about it. Patience was not one of his strong points, as even Easy had already noticed.

He was a little mollified when she came; she had brought not only the kill, but the skin already removed and scaled—a job which Nick didn’t mind doing himself, but it was at least that much less tune spent before the actual experiment. Betsey had kept in mind the purpose to which the skin was to be put, and had removed it with a minimum of cutting; but some work was still needed to make a reasonably liquid-tight sack. It took a while to prepare the glue, though not so long for it to dry—strictly speaking, the stuff didn’t dry at all, but formed at once a reasonably tenacious bond between layers of materials such as leaves or skin. Eventually the thing was completed to their satisfaction and carried down to the pool where the bucket had floated a few hours before.

Nick tossed it in and was not in the least surprised to see that it, too, floated; that was not the point of the experiment. For that, he waded hi himself and tried to climb onto the half-submerged sack.

The results didn’t strike either Nick or Betsey as exactly funny, but when Raeker heard the story later he regretted deeply not having watched the experiment. Nick had a naturally good sense of balance, having spent his life on a high-gravity world where the ground underfoot was frequently quite unstable; but in matching reflexes with the bobbing sack of air he was badly outclassed. The thing refused to stay under him, no matter what ingenious patterns he devised for his eight limbs to enable them to control it. Time and again he splashed helplessly into the pool, which fortunately came only up to his middle. A ten-year-old trying to sit on a floating beach ball would have gone through similar antics.

It was some time before anything constructive came of the experiment, since each time Nick fell into the pool he became that much more annoyed and determined to succeed in the balancing act. Only after many tries did he pause and devote some really constructive thought to the problem. Then, since he was not particularly stupid and did have some understanding of the forces involved— Raeker felt he had not been a complete failure as a teacher —he finally developed a solution. At his instruction, Betsey waded into the pool to the other side of the sack and reached across it to hold hands with him. Then, carefully acting simultaneously, they eased the weight from their feet. They managed to keep close enough together to get all the members concerned off the bottom of the pool for a moment, but this unfortunately demonstrated rather clearly that the sack was not able to support both of them.

Getting their crests back into the air, they waded ashore, Nick bringing the bag with him. “I still don’t know how many of these we’re going to need, but it’s obviously a lot,” he remarked. “I suppose six of us will go, and two stay with the herd, the way the Teacher arranged it this time. I guess the best we can do until the others get back is hunt and make more of these things.”

“There’s another problem,” Betsey pointed out. “We’re going to have quite a time doing whatever job it is Fagin wants done while trying to stand on one or more of these sacks. We’d better pay some attention to stability as well as support.”

“That’s true enough,” Nick said. “Maybe now that we’ve done some experimenting, the Teacher will be willing to give us a little more information. If he doesn’t, there’s that other person whose voice he sends us—the one he says is in this ship we’re to look for— By the way, Bets, I’ve had an idea. You know, he’s been explaining lately about the way voices can be sent from one place to another by machines. Maybe Fagin isn’t really with us at all; maybe that’s just a machine that brings his voice to us. What do you think of that?”

“Interesting, and I suppose possible; but what difference does it make?”

“It’s information; and Fagin himself always says that the more you know the better off you are. I suppose we don’t really know this, but it’s something worth keeping in mind until evidence comes in.”

“Now that you’ve thought of it, maybe he’ll tell iis if we ask him,” Betsey pointed out. “He usually answers questions, except when he thinks it’s for the good of our education to work out the answers ourselves; and how could we check on this one experimentally—except by taking the Teacher apart?”

“That’s a point. Right now, though, the really important thing is to get this boat designed and built. Let’s stick to that question for a while; we can sneak the other one hi when there’s less chance of getting a lecture about letting our minds wander.”