Hal Clement - Iceworld

“Indium — Flatinum — Gold — Osmium—”

“Gold!” the unseen speaker cut in.

“Gold!” responded Ken intelligently, into the microphone, and “which one is that?” in a hasty aside to Feth. The mechanic told him, also in a whisper. “There’s a sample in the torpedo. We can’t trade it off — I want to analyze it for traces of corrosion. Anyway it was melted a little while ago, and he’ll never get it out of the crucible. What’s the name for the stuff you get from them?”

“Tofacco.” Feth answered without thinking — but he started thinking immediately afterward. He remembered Drai’s promise of the fate of anyone who gave Ken information about “the stuff” obtained from Earth, and knew rather better then Sallman just how jocular Laj was likely to be. The memory made him itch, as though his hide were already coming loose. He wondered how he could keep news of his slip from reaching the higher levels, but had no time to get a really constructive idea. The speaker interrupted him again.

If the previous calls had been loud, this was explosive. The creature must have had his vocal apparatus within inches of the torpedo’s microphone, and been using full voice power to boot. The roar echoed for seconds through the shop and almost drowned out the clanking which followed — a sound which suggested something hard striking the hull of the torpedo. The native, for some reason, seemed to have become wildly excited.

At almost the same instant, Ken also gave an exclamation. The thermometer dial for the gold sample had ceased to register.

“The blasted savage is stealing my sample!” he howled, and snapped over the switch closing the cargo door. The switch moved, but the door apparently didn’t — at least, it failed to indicate “locked.” There was no way of telling whether or not it had stopped at some partly-closed position.

The native was still jabbering — more than ever, if that were possible. Ken switched back to “open” position, waited a moment, and tried to close again. This time it worked. The Sarrians wondered whether the relatively feeble motor which closed the portal had been able to cause any injury. There seemed little doubt about the cause of the first failure; if there had been any, the noise would have removed it.

“I don’t think he was trying to steal,” Feth said mildly. “After all, you repeated the name of the stuff more than once. He probably thought you were offering it to him.”

“I suppose you may be right.” Ken turned back to the microphone. “I’ll try to make clear that it’s market day, not a wedding feast.” He gave a chirruping whistle, then “Tofacco! tofacco! Gold — tofacco!” Feth shrivelled, internally. If he could only learn to keep his big diaphragm frozen—.

“Tofacco! Gold — tofacco! I wonder whether that will mean anything to him?” Ken turned a little away from the microphone. “This may not be one of the creatures you’ve been trading with — after all, we’re not in the usual place.”

“That’s not the principal question!” Feth’s tentacles coiled tightly around his torso, as though he were expecting a thunderbolt to strike somewhere in the neighborhood. The voice which had made the last statement was that of Laj Drai.

Roger Wing, at thirteen years of age, was far from stupid. He had very little doubt where his father and brother had been, and he found the fact of considerable interest. A few minutes’ talk with Edie gave him a fairly accurate idea of how long they had been gone; and within ten minutes of the time he and his mother returned from Clark Fork he had sharply modified his older ideas about the location of the “secret mine.” Hitherto, his father had always been away several days on his visits to it.

“You know, Edie, that mine can’t be more than eight or ten miles from here, at the outside.” The two were feeding the horses, and Roger had made sure the younger children were occupied elsewhere. “I talked to Don for about two minutes, and I know darned well Dad was showing him the mine. I’m going to see it, too, before the summer’s out. I’ll take bets on it.”

“Do you think you ought to? After all, if Dad wanted us to know, he’d tell us.”

“I don’t care. I have a right to know anything I can find out. Besides, we can do a better job of scouting if we know the place we’re supposed to be protecting.”

“Well — maybe.”

“Besides, you know Dad sometimes sets things up just so we’ll find things out for ourselves. After it’s all over he just says that’s what we have brains for. Remember he never actually said we weren’t to go looking for the mine — he just said he’d tell us when the time came. How about that?”

“Well — maybe. What are you going to do about it? If you try to follow Dad you’ll be picked up like a dime in a schoolroom.”

“That’s what you think. Anyway, I’m not going to follow him. I’ll lead him. I’ll go out the first thing tomorrow morning and look for any traces they may have left. Then the next time they go, I’ll be waiting for them at the farthest trace I could find, and go on from there. That’ll work, for sure!”

“Who does the patrolling?”

“Oh, we both do, same as before. This won’t take long. Anyway, like I said, since I’ll be watching the trail they take, it’ll be even better than the regular patrol. Don’t you think?” Edie looked a little dubious as she latched the door of the feed bin.

“You’ll probably get away with it, but I bet you’ll have to talk fast,” was her verdict as they headed for the house.

Twenty-four hours later Roger was wondering whether any excuses would be needed at all. Things had not gone according to his sweepingly simple forecast.

In the first place, he had not had time to check any trail his father and Don might have left; for the two started out at daybreak the next morning. They did not follow the previous day’s route, but the one Mr. Wing had always taken in years past — the admittedly zigzag path specifically designed to permit his scouts to take short cuts to warn him, in the event that anyone followed. Roger and Edith were given stations which were to be watched for one hour after the two men had passed; each was then to intercept the trail and make a report, whether or not anyone had been seen. Roger looked suspiciously at his sister for an instant when those orders were received, but decided she would never have told his plans. His father was simply one jump ahead, as usual.

A good fraction of the morning had passed by the time he had made his report, and watched his father and brother disappear to the north. This was not the direction they had gone the day before, according to Edith; now the question was whether or not they had bothered to lay a false trail on that occasion, too. The only way to settle that appeared to be a straightforward search for traces. That was not too hopeless; as Roger had said while telling his father about the new patrol arrangements, there were places practically impossible to cross without leaving some sort of track, and the mere act of avoiding all those places would narrow down considerably the routes a person could take.

In spite of this, the boy had decided by dinner time that either he knew less about tracking than he had supposed or else the two he sought had spent the day in the attic. Certainly he had found nothing to which he could point with confidence as being evidence of their passage.

After the meal he had abandoned that line of research, and simply headed eastward. His sister had said they had taken this direction, and there was the remote chance that they might have abandoned precautions just that once. He travelled without pause for nearly half the afternoon, following what seemed to be natural trails, and finally stopped some eight miles from home.