Hal Clement - Close to Critical

Fortunately, the oleum was shallow—so shallow that the raft was supported more by the bodies under it than by its own buoyancy. Raeker guided the machine through the liquid, pushing the four unconscious natives ahead of it to the other side. The raft naturally came along, but eventually the rather untidy heap was dripping at the edge of the oleum pool, with the foundation members struggling gradually back to consciousness.

By this time the bathyscaphe was also out of the sea. Like the raft, it had wound up in a pool at the bottom of a valley; unlike it, there was no question of its floating. The pool was too shallow. As a result, Easy and her friend found themselves in their pressure-tight castle fully equipped with a moat, which effectively prevented Swift and his crew from reaching them.

For Swift was there. He turned up within an hour of the time the pool had finished shrinking, in spite of the considerable distance the bathyscaphe must have drifted during the night. It was out of sight of the sea, Easy reported; the wind that had been moving everything else inland had brought the ship along. It didn’t bother her; she said that they were getting along splendidly with Swift, and didn’t seem too worried when told about Nick’s reverses of the night. Rich lost his temper for the first time when he learned that Raeker had carelessly told the child about the destruction of the camp, and didn’t regain it until the girl’s voice made it perfectly clear that the story hadn’t affected her morale.

Raeker himself was thinking less about her than about his rescue operation, at the moment; that was why he had been so careless with his words. Nick and Betsey, Jim and Jane were all safe; the maps had remained attached to the raft, and so had most of the weapons. However, it was going to take a little while to find just where they were, short as the distance they had drifted probably was; and when they did find the camp site, it seemed rather unlikely that they would find much else. The herd would be gone, or nearly so; the wagon—who could tell? A similar period under an Earthly ocean would write it off completely, even in the off chance that it could be found. Here, there was no saying, but Raeker was not optimistic.

Finding the site of last night’s fire proved easier than expected. The wind proved to be a clue, when it finally occurred to someone—Jim, rather to Raeker’s surprise. He and Jane, of course, had bucked it all the way back from their search areas, though they had not attached any meaning to it at the time; now it served to restore the “sense of direction” which for Tenebrans as for humans was a compound of memory and the understanding of elementary natural phenomena. Once they knew the direction of the sea, there was no more trouble; there was no question that they had drifted pretty straight inland. The wagon and the remains of the watch fires were found in an hour. Raeker was really startled to find it and its contents intact; the mere fact that the two-mile hurricane had changed from gas to scarcely denser liquid had made no difference to most of the solid objects in its path.

“I think we can save a little time,” he said at length, when the status of the group’s belongings had been determined. “We can go back to the sea now, carrying the boat with us. We’ll leave the cart, with a written message for the others; they can either follow us or start moving camp, depending on what seems best at the tune they get back. We’ll test out the boat, and search as far south along the coast as tune permits today.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Nick. “Do we search until dark, or until there’s only enough time to get back here before dark?”

“Until nearly dark,” Raeker replied promptly. “We’ll go south until we decide it’s far enough, and then go straight inland from wherever we are so as to get away from the ocean hi time.”

“Then the others had better move camp no matter what time they get back, and head south with the cart. We’re going to have a food problem, and so are they, with the herd gone.”

“Gone? I thought I saw quite a few, with Jim and Jane rounding them up.”

“That’s true, they’re not all gone; but they’re down to where we can’t afford to eat any until a few more hatch. We couldn’t even find scales of the others, this time.”

“You couldn’t? And I didn’t see any creatures traveling around while you were hi the sea, either. It seems to me that your missing cattle are more likely to have strayed than been stolen.”

“That may be, but they’re gone hi any case, as far as we’re concerned. If all four of us are heading for the sea right away to test this boat, we won’t be able to look for them.”

Raeker thought rapidly. Loss of the herd would be a serious blow to his community; remote-control education cannot, by itself, transform a group of people from nomadic hunters into a settled and organized culture with leisure time for intellectual activity. Without the herd Raeker’s pupils would have to spend virtually all their time finding food. Still, they would live; and unless Easy and her companion were collected pretty soon they probably wouldn’t. The question really, then, was not whether any could be spared from the cattle-hunt but whether one or two or all would be more useful in testing the boat and, if the test were successful, subsequently searching for the bathyscaphe from it.

Certainly two people were less likely to sink the thing than four. On the other hand, four could presumably drive it faster—Raeker suddenly recalled that neither he nor Nick had given any thought to the method of propulsion the raft was to have. He supposed paddles or something of that nature would be about the only possible means; the thought of trying to teach Nick the art of sailing on a world where the winds were usually nonexistent and the nearest qualified teacher sixteen light years away seemed impractical. With muscle power as the drive agent, though, the more muscles the better.

“All of you will come to the sea. We’ll consider the herd problem later. If the boat won’t carry all of you, the extra ones can come back and hunt for cattle. This search is important.”

“All right.” Nick sounded more casual than he actually felt; all his life, as a result of Raeker’s own teaching, he had felt that the safety of the herd was one of the most important considerations of all. If this search were still more so, it must really mean something to the Teacher; he wished he could feel that it meant as much to him. He didn’t argue, but he wondered and worried.

The four of them were able to carry the boat easily enough, though bucking the wind made matters a little awkward—the wind was even stronger today, Nick decided. In a way, that was good; a last backward glance at the deserted remnants of the herd showed that a huge floater was being swept past them by the savage current and, in spite of all its efforts, could not beat its way back to the relatively helpless creatures. Nick pointed this out to his companions, and they all felt a little better.

The two miles to the sea were covered fairly rapidly, and no formalities were wasted in testing the boat. It was carried out into waist-deep oleum and set down, and the four promptly climbed aboard.

It supported them—just. The floats were completely submerged, and the framework virtually so. The difficulty was not one of keeping on the surface, but of keeping more or less level. The four were all of almost the same age, but they did differ slightly in weight. One side of the raft persisted in settling deeper whenever they stopped moving; each tune this happened they all, naturally, made a scramble for the rising portion, and each time they inevitably overcontrolled so that the raft rocked and tipped precariously first one way and then the other. It took several minutes and much misdirected action and speech before they learned the trick; then they took longer still to learn the use of the paddles Fagin had told them how to make. The robot itself was not too much use; if it stayed ashore its operators couldn’t see things on the raft very clearly, and it it crawled into the sea to any point near the vessel it couldn’t make itself heard—the boundary between oleum and air was sharp enough to reflect sound waves pretty completely.