Hal Clement - The Nitrogen Fix

Bones stopped, perforce, and explored the surrounding ground as well as he could with the tortured limbs. Some places seemed safe, others produced more of the pain. The Observer brought one of the injured tentacle tips within reach of the fine handling tendrils which surrounded the huge mouth, and examined it gingerly. The trouble was clear enough; the tough skin was studded with fine splinters of, apparently, glass. The tendrils could remove these easily enough from the upper and middle tentacles, but the lowest, shortest walking tentacles could not reach or be reached by these delicate appendages.

Travel was impossibly painful, and Bones was still doing everything practical to extract the devilish things when the people arrived.

There were five of them, and they swarmed around the Observer closely enough to offer the hope that they might become involved with the glass themselves; but that hope died almost at once. Even in the starlight it could be seen that they were wearing something on their feet. Kahvi, Earrin, and their child had never done this, but their regular outdoor equipment had made the concept of protective garments clear enough to their nonhuman companion.

Bones could make out a few of the words of the chattering group, but without supplemental gestures could get little or no connected meaning.

Most city dwellers in Observer memory had shown their hostility by words or, at most, thrown rocks. There was no memory of capture — at least, none which had been passed on. That thought was rather grim, though the closest any Observer unit could come to the fear of death was worry about inability to pass on new information. It had been many months since Bones had transferred memories with another Observer unit. This had been a matter of mild discomfort rather than acute anxiety, since there were so far only a few units on the planet. As long as there was freedom of action, and especially of travel, it could be assumed that a meeting would eventually occur.

Now both these freedoms were threatened, and Bones began to feel a little like a man trapped in a forest fire. The control of the situation was in other tentacles.

Transporting their captive was quite a problem for the human beings. Bones saw no reason to expend energy keeping rigid, and nearly three meters of very limp fish, weighing well over a hundred kilograms, are awkward to handle. They managed it, however, without using the tentacles as drag lines-it did not occur to Bones until much later that they might have done this, or to wonder why they didn’t. Two of them shouldered the rubbery mass, one on each side, just behind the eyes, and two more a short way back. The fifth supported the tail flukes. The group started back toward the fireplace, and for a moment Bones wondered if they planned a cremation. Then they turned south toward the big hill, and the tension eased.

For fully an hour they travelled, sometimes uphill and sometimes down, sometimes straight toward Big Blue and sometimes to the right or left of this heading — sometimes, indeed, almost away from it.

Bones was not quite sure how much route detail was worth remembering, but played it safe; it might be necessary to retrace the journey or to tell Kahvi or Earrin how to do so.

Finally they reached a small stream winding from the hills toward the eastern bay. A stone building similar to the jail was now visible by moonlight. The water from the stream had been used to improvise an air lock. This was decidedly smaller than the one at the jail, and the carriers had trouble working Bones limp form through it; but eventually everyone was inside. The people unmasked, opened their oxygen cartridges, and hung them on the walls to equilibrate.

Bones wondered whether these were normal people or oxygen addicts as described by the Fyns, but had no way to tell. From the floor it was not possible to see what sort of plants were on the air trays. The human beings talked desultorily for a while, but finally appeared to sleep. They had not tied their captive in any way, probably believing that the glass splinters were an adequate immobilizing agent. They were quite correct.

Otherwise, escape would have been easy. The roof was even lower than that of the jail, and Bones’ head would have gone through if the long body had been able to stand up. If these Hillers were anything like the Nomads Bones knew, most or all of them would have stayed to repair the roof rather thanpursue.

However, even moving tentacles was painful now. The glass seemed to be working its way deeper as time went on.

It was not quite daylight when the trip was resumed, and there was never a chance to check the building’s oxygen sources. There must have been spare cartridges; even a pure oxygen atmosphere would not have recharged the others so soon. As before, the people took for granted that their captive could not walk.

The sky quickly brightened, and Bones was surprised to discover how short a distance they had covered the night before. They were still less than a kilometer from the spot where the raft was anchored; it could be seen from the first hillock they climbed. The stream which had furnished the airlock for the little shelter emptied into the bay only five or six hundred meters south of the jail.

Travelling in the dark with an awkward burden must have been far slower than the Observer had guessed.

Not even Bones’ eyesight could spot anyone on the raft, but fully a dozen people were busy around the pile of cargo. What they were doing could not be made out before the area disappeared behind the hill. Bones resumed memorizing their travel route.

They were not headed toward any of the Great Blue Hill entrances which Bones knew about. At the moment, the goal seemed to be the nearer and lower eminence called Hemenway. Neither Kahvi nor Earrin had ever mentioned that the city extended that far, but this of course was no proof that it didn’t.

Also, of course, there was no proof that the captive was being taken to the city.

Travel was faster than in the dark, but not much straighter, and the sun had climbed well above the horizon when they came to a large pool on the eastern slope of Hemenway, in the notch between that eminence and Hancock. Bones did know the place names; the elevations were visible from the bay, and Nomads used place names wherever possible. They were sticklers for unambiguous communication, and a name was far more definite — and quicker to get across — than “the second-highest you can see to the east of Big Blue — you know, the one with the darker vegetation and the cloud over it.” Even with Bones’ hearing deficiencies it was usually possible to recognize a slowly-uttered, isolated, polysyllabic word.

The pool was clearly artificial and was presumably an air lock, though it was large enough to be used by dozens of people at once. There was no trouble getting Bones through it this time, since the Observer’s tissue was a good deal denser than water and did not resist being pulled below the surface.

All question about what might happen, all worry about the Fyns, everything extraneous vanished from Bones’ mind and attention. As far as memory went, no Observer had ever been inside one of the human cities. Even the ominous implication of this fact shrank to insignificance; here was a chance to learn, to observe, to remember.

The problem of passing the knowledge on could be faced later.

At first there was little to see. The air lock opened into a cave about fifty meters wide and long, and five or six high-the roof was far from even. The light was dim but adequate, radiating from large, irregular patches on ceiling and walls.

What made them luminous was something else to be learned; from what Bones knew of human technology, pseudolife was again the best guess.

At the moment there was no way to check as the captive was carried rapidly across the cave to the mouth of a tunnel wide enough to take both the party and equally large groups going the other way.