Hal Clement - Close to Critical

“Why do you have them looking at all?” Aminadabar-lee asked acidly at this point. “The robot can travel along the shore as fast as they can paddle that ridiculous craft, and the bathyscaphe isn’t at sea anyway. If you think those pupils are going to be of any use, why not have them walk with the machine?”

“Because, while all you say is true, the kids are inaccessible to the natives unless a boat is present. It doesn’t seem likely that we’d save time by having Nick and his friends search on foot, and then have to go all the way back for the boat when they found the ’scaphe.”

“I see,” said the Drommian. Raeker cast a quick glance at him. The fellow was being unusually agreeable, all things considered; but the man had no time to ponder possible reasons. Nick and his companions were still too much hi need of watching. He spoke over his shoulder, however, remembering Rich’s injunction about being as courteous as possible to the big weasel. “There’s one thing that might help a great deal, though. You’ve been talking to your son all along, just as Councillor Rich and I have been talking to Easy; do you suppose he’d be the better for something constructive to do down there?”

“What?”

“Well, if he’s as good at picking up languages as Easy was supposed to be, maybe he’d do a better job than she at rinding something out from the cave dwellers. Swift quite obviously knows where both our camp and the bathyscaphe are; it would be most helpful if someone could worm a set of directions out of him for getting from the one to the other.”

The Drommian’s face was unreadable to Raeker, but his voice suggested what from him was high approval.

“That’s the first sensible remark I’ve heard from a human being in the last five weeks,” he said. “I’ll explain to Aminadorneldo what to do. There’s no point in expecting the human girl to do it herself, or to help him.” The diplomat must be credited with what for him was the ultimate in tact, courtesy, and self-control—he had restrained himself from remarking that no human being could be expected to be helpful in a situation calling for intelligence.

He decided to go to the communication room in person, instead of working from Raeker’s station—the relay system was efficient, but located in a corner which was rather inconvenient to him for anatomical reasons. Unfortunately, when he reached the other compartment it was even worse; the place was crowded with human beings. Rearing the front half of his long body upward he was able to see over them without any trouble, and discovered that the screen of the set tied in with the bathyscaphe was imaging the face of the human child. His own son was also visible, very much in the background, but only the human voice was audible—as usual, he reflected. The men were listening intently to her, and Aminadabarlee quite unthhikingly stopped to do the same before ordering the interfering creatures out of the way.

“No matter how we ask the question, we always get the same answer,” she was saying. “At first, he seemed surprised that we didn’t know; he’s gotten over that now, but still says that Nick and Fagin told him where we were.”

“No matter how often you say that, it sounds silly to me,” retorted one of the scientists. “Are you sure it’s not language trouble?”

“Perfectly sure.” Easy showed no indignation, if she felt any at the question. “You wanted to know how he found us so easily, and that’s what I asked him. He claims he was given the information he needed by Nick, who had it from the robot, and that’s what I told you. I don’t remember exactly what was said to that prisoner when Nick’s people had him; but you’d better play back the transcript and see what you can get out of it. Either the prisoner himself was able to figure it out from what Nick said to him, or Swift was able to do it from the prisoner’s repetition. The first seems to make more sense, to me.” There were few flies on Easy Rich. Aminadabarlee wouldn’t have agreed with that, of course; her admission that she couldn’t remember exactly what had been said in a conversation she had overheard lowered her considerably in his estimation. However, even he couldn’t understand, any better than the listening scientists, what the cave dwellers had been able to learn from a brief description of country they had admittedly never seen.

Then an idea occurred to him, and he dropped back to the horizontal position for a few moments to think. This might really do some good; he almost felt guilty at the thought that he’d left all the serious planning in this matter to the human beings. If they’d only keep quiet for a minute or two and let him get his idea straight— But they didn’t. They kept on calling excited remarks and questions to the child so far away.

“Wait a minute!” It was a geophysicist who suddenly came up with a point. Aminadabarlee thought, but he didn’t pay enough attention to be really sure. “This may be a little far-fetched; but a lot of fairly primitive peoples on Earth and other places get pretty darned good climate predictors—our ancestors knew when spring was coming, you know, and built places like Stonehenge.”

“What’s the connection?” Several voices asked this question, though not all in the same words.

“This planet has no weather, in our sense of the word; but its geomorphology goes on at a time-rate which almost puts it in the climate class. I just remembered that Nick’s prisoner was told that the bathyscaphe stayed on one lake, motionless, for several days, and only then started to drift down a river to the sea. If we’re right about Tene-bran weather, that must have been a brand-new river! That information was enough for any native—at least for any one who hadn’t been cut off from the history or folklore or whatever the Tenebran equivalent may be of his race. They may never have been right on the scene of that river, but it was close enough to their regular stamping grounds so they could tell where it must lie.”

“I’m going to check the lab alcohol,” commented one listener. The remark put the proponent of the new idea on his mettle.

“Easy!” he called. “You heard what I just suggested. Ask Swift if it’s not true that he knows when things like new rivers and rising hills are going to happen. Ask him how he dares to live in caves in a cliff—which as far as any of us can see is apt to be knocked down by a quake any day!”

“All right,” the girl said calmly. Her face vanished from the screen. Aminadabarlee was too furious to notice that she had gone. How dare these little monsters take his very own ideas right out of his mind, and claim them for their own? He hadn’t quite worked out the details of his notion, but it was going to be the same as the one the human scientist had broached; he was sure of that. Of course, maybe it was a bit far-fetched—of course it was, now that he thought of it a little more carefully. The whole idea was the sheerest speculation, and it was a pity that the girl had been sent to waste time on it. He’d go in and show its weaknesses to his son, and suggest a more fruitful modification, as soon as he worked out its details—only then did he notice that Aminadorneldo had also disappeared from the view screen; he must have gone with the human girl. Well, that was all right; there was a little more thinking to be done, anyway. He kept at it for fifteen or twenty minutes, scarcely noticing the human conversation around him, until the children reappeared. They reported without preamble and without apparent excitement.

“You seem to be right,” Easy said. “They seem surprised that anyone wouldn’t know when a place was going to become active in quakes, or when a lake was going to spill, and in what direction. They know it so well themselves that they have a good deal of trouble telling me what they use for signs.” The geophysicist and his colleagues looked at each other almost prayerfully.