Hal Clement - Close to Critical

“Hmph. That’s a point I should have considered. That light may call for more investigation, after all. Well, we’ll know more when John and Nancy come hi.”

“We should,” agreed Nick. “Whether we actually will remains to be seen. I’m going to get back to fastening this float we’ve just glued onto the frame. I’m a lot surer that something constructive will come from that.” He went off to do as he had said, and Raeker devoted himself to listening. Thinking seemed unprofitable at the moment.

With two more hunters, the raft progressed more rapidly than anyone had expected. The region of the new camp was not, of course, as badly hunted out as had been the neighborhood of the old village, and skins came in about as fast as they could be processed. Float after float was fastened in place, each corner being supplied in turn to keep the balance—Nick and Betsey were very careful about that. By the late afternoon so many had been attached that it was less a matter of keeping track of which corner came next than of finding a spot not already occupied—the frame was virtually paved with the things. No one attempted to calculate the result of its stability. If anyone thought of such a problem, he undoubtedly postponed it as something more easily determined empirically.

The work was not, of course, completely uninterrupted. People had to eat, there was the need to gather firewood for the night, and the herd to be guarded. This last, of course, frequently helped in the “shipyard” by providing leather without the need of hunting, but sometimes the fighting involved was less profitable. Several times the creatures attacking the herd were floaters, to everyone’s surprise.

These creatures were reasonably intelligent, or at least learned rapidly as a rule to avoid dangerous situations. They were also rather slow-flying things—resembling, as Easy had said, the medusae of her home world in their manner of motion—so that after a fairly short time in any one spot, when a reasonable number of them had been killed, the survivors learned to leave the herd alone. Nick and his friends had believed this end accomplished for the present camp; but in the late afternoon no less than four of the creatures had to be faced by the herders in not much over an hour. The situation was both unusual and quite painful: while a competent spearsman could count surely enough on grounding such a-creature, it was nearly impossible to do so without suffering from its tentacles, whose length and poisonous nature went far to offset their owner’s slow flight.

The attention of all four members of the group was naturally drawn to this peculiar state of affairs, and even the work on the raft was suspended while the problem was discussed. It was natural enough that an occasional floater should drift into the area from elsewhere, but four in an hour was stretching coincidence. The group’s crests scanned the heavens in an effort to find an explanation, but the gentle air current toward the southwest was still too feeble at this distance from the volcano even to be felt, much less seen. The sky of Tenebra during the daytime is much too featureless to permit easy detection of something like a slow, general movement of the floaters; and the individual movement of the creatures didn’t help. Consequently, the existence of the wind was not discovered until rainfall.

By this time, the raft seemed to be done, in that it was hard to see where any more floats could be attached. No one knew, of course, how many people it would support; it was planned to carry it to the ocean when the others returned, and determined this by experiment.

When the evening fires were lighted, however, it was quickly seen that the rain was not coming straight down. It was the same phenomenon that John and Nancy had observed the night before, complicated by the lack of an obvious cause. After some discussion, Nick decided to light three extra fires on the northeast side of the usual defenses, compensating for the extra fuel consumption by letting an equal number on the opposite side of the outer ring burn out. A little later he let go even more on the southwest, since no drops at all came from that direction even after the convection currents of the camp were well established. He reported the matter to Fagin.

“I know,” replied the Teacher. “The same thing is happening where the ship is down, according to Easy. The drops are slanting very noticeably inland. I wish she had some means of telling direction; we could find out whether the coast is actually sloping east where she is, or the rain actually moving in a slightly different direction. Either fact, if we know it, could be useful.”

“I suppose she can’t feel any wind?” asked Nick.

“Not inside the ship. Can you?”

“A little, now that the motion of the drops proves there must be some. I felt more around those fires I lighted when we getting away from the caves, but that’s the only time. I think it’s getting stronger, too.”

“Let me know if you become more certain of that,” replied Raeker. “We’ll keep you informed of anything from the other end which may have a bearing on the phenomenon.” Raeker’s use of “we” was apt; the observation and communication rooms were filling with geologists, engineers, and other scientists. The news that Tenebra was putting on its first really mysterious act in a decade and a half had spread rapidly through the big ship, and hypotheses were flying thick and fast.

Easy was giving a fascinating, and fascinated, description of events around the bathyscaphe; for while she and her companion had by now seen plenty of the nightly rainfall, they were for the first time at a place where they could actually observe its effect on sea level. The shore was in sight, and the way the sea bulged up away from it as water joined the oleum was like nothing either child had ever seen. Looking downhill at the nearby shore was rather disconcerting; and it continued, for as the bathyscaphe rose with the rising sea level it was borne easily inland with the bulging surface. This continued until the density of the sea fell too low to float the ship; and even then an occasional bump intimated that its motion had not stopped entirely.

“I can’t see anything more, Dad,” Easy called at last. “We might as well stop reporting. I’m getting sleepy, anyway. You can wake us up if you need to.”

“All right, Easy.” Rich made the answer for Raeker and the other listeners. “There’s nothing much going on at Nick’s camp right now except the wind, and that seems more surprising than critical.” The girl appeared briefly on the screen, smiled good night at them, and vanished; Aminadorneldo’s narrow face followed, and that station had signed off for the night.

Attention naturally shifted to the observation room, where the surface of Tenebra could actually be seen. Nothing much was happening, however. The robot was standing as usual in the middle of the rather unbalanced fire circle, with the four natives spaced around it—not evenly, tonight; three of them were rather close together on the northeast side and the fourth paced a beat that covered the remaining three-quarters of the circle. It was easy to see the reason with a few minutes’ observation; for every fire snuffed out on the single man’s beat, a full dozen went on the northeast. Someone was continually having to lope forward with a torch to relight one or two of the outer guard flames on that side. Occasionally even an inner fire would be caught, as a second drop blew too soon through the space left unguarded by the effect of a first. There seemed no actual danger, however; none of the natives themselves had been overcome, and their manner betrayed no particular excitement.

While Raeker had been eating, his assistant had had one of the pupils pace off a course which he compared with the robot’s length, and then by timing the passage of a raindrop along it clocked the wind at nearly two miles an hour, which as far as anyone knew was a record; the information was spread among the scientists, but none of them could either explain the phenomenon or venture a prediction of its likely effects. It was an off-duty crewman, relaxing for a few minutes at the door of the observation chamber, who asked a question on the latter subject.