Hal Clement - Close to Critical

The raft was launched, and Nick and Betsey took Swift out on the surface of the pool to a point just outside one of the bathyscaphe’s observation ports. Raeker could see the meeting between Tenebrans and the ship’s two occupants but could not hear their conversation— Easy was, of course, using the outside speakers, and the robot was too far away to hear these directly. The talk was long, and quite animated, for the gestures of all parties concerned could be seen—the port was large enough to let Raeker see fairly well into the ’scaphe even from the robot’s vantage point. He tried to interpret the motions, but had no luck. Conversation did not end until nearly night; then the raft returned to the shore, and everyone began to pack up. A dozen cave dwellers helped carry the raft, others helped pull the cart. For the first time, Swift paid attention to the robot; he ordered it to come along, using Nick as an interpreter. Raeker agreed briefly; the journey was obviously to escape the sea, which would presumably come at least as far inland tonight as it had before.

“Where will the big ship go tonight?” he asked, more to secure a demonstration of the cave people’s abilities than because the answer made any difference to him. He rather expected Swift would not bother to answer, but title chief was in a very good humor—everything had been going just as he wanted it all day. Once the group was under way, he walked beside the robot and talked quite cheerfully. Nick relayed his words, and he described in great detail the country which they were approaching and the point to which he expected the bathyscaphe to be washed. He also explained his reasons for this opinion, and the geophysicists listened, took notes, and watched with motherly care the recorders which were storing the conversation. For the first hour or two of that night there was more general happiness than the region of Altair had experienced for decades. About the only people not sharing in it were Aminadabarlee and Raeker.

Swift stopped his cavalcade after a scant two hours of rather slow travel. Night had fallen, and the rain was starting to do likewise; he set everyone to work gathering firewood, and ordered Nick to place the guard fires for a camp. Nick and his fellows obeyed without argument; Raeker suspected that they were human enough to enjoy the chance to show off their knowledge. Cave dwellers were at each of the fire sites practicing with friction drills, and one by one the piles of fuel began to glow.

For sixteen years, the lighting of the evening fires had been a signal for a forty-eight-hour period of relaxation on the Vindemiatrix, since nothing but rain ever happened at night on Tenebra. Now that was changed; discussion, sometimes verging on argument, went on full tilt. The engineers were busy festooning the outside of the shuttle with hydroferron boosters and their control lines. The diplomats wouldn’t have been speaking to each other if they had followed their personal inclinations, but professional pride kept them outwardly courteous. People who knew them, however, listened to their talk very uneasily, and thought of jammed reactor control rods.

A few enthusiasts kept watch through the robot’s eyes, partly in the hope that something would happen and partly to keep Raeker company. The biologist refused to leave the observation room; he felt sure that matters were building to some sort of climax, but couldn’t guess just what sort. Even during the night this feeling grew worse —particularly at such times as he happened to see or hear one of the diplomats. Actually, Raeker was suffering badly from a sudden lack of self-confidence; he was wondering how he could possibly teach his students to make the necessary repairs on the bathyscaphe, even if they chose to listen to him. If they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, he didn’t want to see or hear of Rich or Aminadabarlee again; he had convinced himself, quite unjustly, that his own arguments had caused them to pin their faith in him and not undertake any other steps toward a rescue.

In spite of the anxiety which let him sleep only for moments at a time, he managed to get through the night. The departure of the shuttle distracted him for a few minutes—at one point he almost convinced himself that he should go along with it, but common sense prevailed. Several times incidents occurred at the camp, and were pictured on the robot’s screen, which would have made him laugh under different circumstances. The cave dwellers were not at all used to fires yet, and had some odd ideas of their properties, uses, and limitations. Several times Nick or one of the other human-educated natives had to make a rescue as someone ran blithely into the dead-air zone of a boiled-away raindrop to relight a fire. When they finally realized that a newly destroyed raindrop was like a newly boiled lake in the early morning, some of them took to waiting a long time before venturing near the extinguished fires, so that the fuel cooled too far to let the blaze spring back to Me at the mere touch of a torch. Several of them grew worried about the fuel supply, which the experienced group had pronounced sufficient, and kept trying to persuade Swift to organize wood-collecting parties. Raeker could not, of course, understand these requests, but he heard a couple of his own people commenting on them with something like contempt in their voices. This made him feel somewhat better; if his pupils felt that way about the cave dwellers, perhaps they still had some attachment for their teacher.

Morning finally came without any serious incident in camp or at the bathyscaphe; and once the hill on which the camp was located ceased to be an island—it had been surrounded by the usual rainfall, but not by ocean, as far as anyone could tell—the group headed for the spot where the bathyscaphe was expected to be. This meant a walk nearly as long as that of the previous night, since Swift and his people had expected little motion on the part of the stranded machine. Raeker didn’t know whether Easy had reported any drifting; he hadn’t heard her voice very often during the last forty-eight hours.

Raeker himself wasn’t sure how far to believe the predictions of the natives, and wasn’t sure how far he wanted to believe them. If they proved right, of course, it would mean a lot to the geophysicists; but it might also mean that Easy had some grounding for her optimism about the day’s events. That was good only if it was solid grounding; and Raeker could not for the life of him imagine how the girl expected the machine to be either flown, blown, or carried up to a point where the shuttle could meet it. On the few occasions that he had dozed, his sleep had been troubled by wild nightmares involving volcanoes, floaters, and forms of sea life whose shapes never became quite clear.

There was no question of how the geophysicists felt when the predicted spot was reached and the bathyscaphe found to be absent. They buzzed like a swarm of bees, hurling hypotheses at each other with scarcely time to listen to their neighbors. Aminadabarlee fainted, and constituted an absorbing first aid problem for several minutes until he revived by himself, none of die men having the slightest idea of what to do for him. Fortunately, the ship turned up after a quarter of an hour’s search exactly where it had been left the night before, which made things easier on the fathers but left many human beings and quite a few Tenebrites rather at a loss for an explanation. The sea had certainly been there; Easy had reported as much. Apparently its transporting power had been lower than expected. Some of the scientists pointed out that this was obvious; this much farther from its natural bed, the sea would be correspondingly more diluted with water. It satisfied him and some of his friends, but Raeker wondered how a slightly greater dilution of something which must already have been pretty pure H 2O, as pure water went on Tenebra, could make that much difference. He wondered what excuse Swift was using, but couldn’t find out.