Hal Clement - Iceworld

“I really need a camera to give a good idea of appearances,” Ken replied. “I seem to have been wrong about their size; the ones I saw before appear to have been children. The adults are a trifle bulkier than we are.

“I don’t think the language is going to be difficult, and it looks as though this group, at least, is very cooperative.” He told about the help he had received in making the plant collection.

“I was looking at that,” said Drai. “I don’t suppose any of those things is what we’re after?”

“No, unless they use different names for the living plant and the product. They named each of these to me as they set them in, and you’d have heard as well as I if they’d said ‘tofacco’ once.” Drai seemed thoughtful for a moment before he spoke again.

“Children, eh? Maybe if you can work with them and get rid of the adults you could find things out more easily. They should be easier to fool.”

“Something like that crossed my mind, too,” Ken said. “Perhaps we ought to make a few more collection boxes to take down; I could give them to the kids to fill while I was having another language lesson, and then when they came back I’d have a good excuse to talk it over with each in turn. Something might very well crop up if the parents don’t interfere.”

“Parents? How do you know?”

“I don’t, of course; but it seems likely. But what do you think of the idea?”

“Very good, I should say. Can you get enough boxes for all the children ready by their next morning?”

“I’m not going down that soon. I was making allowances for what Feth told me was the effect of tofacco on the system, and thought I might not be able to make it.” Drai paused long enough to do some mental arithmetic.

“You’re probably right. We’ll have to go back to One to get your dose, too; I somehow can’t bring myself to keep the stuff around where it might fall into the wrong hands.” He smiled, with the same ugly undertone that was making Ken hate the drug-runner a little more each time he saw it.

“Dad, will you kindly tell me just how on Earth you worked that?” Don stared at the Sarrian radio, which was all that was visible of the aliens by the time he got back from giving the trade signal. Roger chuckled.

“He didn’t work it. He spends all afternoon teaching the thing to talk English, and just as it’s going it turns around and puts this on the ground. ‘Carry’ it booms, and takes off. What do you suppose it is, Dad?”

“I can’t possibly be sure, Son, until he comes back. It may be a piece of apparatus he intends to use on his next visit; it may be a gift in return for your aid with the plant collection. I think we’d best take it home, as he seemed to want, and do nothing at all to it until he comes back.”

“But if he’s not coming back until the day after tomorrow—”

“I know curiosity is a painful disease, Rog; I suffer from it myself. But I still think that the one who’ll come out ahead in this new sort of trading is the one who steps most cautiously and keeps his real aims up his sleeve the longest. We’re still not certain that this scientific investigation isn’t aimed at just one end — to relieve them of the need for paying us for tobacco. After all, why did this fellow start with plants? There are lots of other things he might have shown interest in.”

“If he’s as different from our sort of life as he seems to be, how would he know that tobacco is a plant?” countered Roger. “It certainly doesn’t stay unburned long enough at his temperature to let him look at the crumbs with a microscope or anything, and a cigarette doesn’t much look like a plant.”

“That’s true,” his father admitted. “Well, I only said we don’t know he hasn’t that up his sleeve. I admit it doesn’t seem likely.”

Curiously enough, Ken thought of one of those points himself before the next visit; and when he descended in the clearing by the Wing home with four collecting boxes attached to his torpedo, the first thing he did was to make clear he wanted minerals in one that was not equipped with refrigeration apparatus. Pointing to another similarly plain he said, “Thing — good — hot — cold.” The Wings looked at each other for a moment; then Edith spoke.

“You mean anything that stays good whether it’s hot or cold? Stuff that you don’t have to keep in a refrigerator?” There were too many new words in that sentence for Ken, but he took a chance. “Yes. Hot, good.” He was still drifting a foot or two from the ground, having so arranged the load this time that he could detach it without first freeing himself. Now he settled lightly to the ground, and things began to happen.

The ground, like most of that in evergreen forests, was largely composed of shed needles. These had been cleared away to some extent around the house, but the soil itself was decidedly inflammable. Naturally, the moment Ken’s armored feet touched it a cloud of smoke appeared, and only lightning-like action in lifting himself again prevented its bursting into flame. As it was, no one felt really safe until Roger had soaked the spot with a bucket of water.

That led to further complications. Ken had never seen water to his knowledge, and certainly had never seen apparatus for dispensing apparently limitless amounts of any liquid. The outside faucet from which the bucket had been filled interested him greatly; and at his request, made in a mixture of signs and English words, Roger drew another bucketful, placed it on the flat top of one of the cement posts at the foot of the porch steps, and retreated. Ken, thus enabled to examine the object without coming in contact with anything else, did so at great length; ana finished by dipping a handler cautiously into the peculiarly transparent fluid. The resulting cloud of steam startled him almost as much as the temporary but intense chill that bit through the metal, and he drew back hastily. He began to suspect what the liquid was, and mentally took off his hat to Feth. The mechanic, if that was all he really was, really could think.

Eventually Ken was installed on top of an outdoor oven near the house, the specimen boxes were on the ground, and the children had disappeared in various directions to fill them. The language lesson was resumed, and excellent progress made for an hour or so. At the end of that time, both parties were slightly surprised to find themselves exchanging intelligible sentences — crude and clumsy ones, full of circumlocutions, but understandable. A faint smile appeared on Mr. Wing’s face as he realized this; the time had come to administer a slight jolt to his guest, and perhaps startle a little useful information out of him. He remembered the conversation he had had with Don the night before, and felt quiet satisfaction in the boy — the sort of satisfaction that sometimes goes to make a father a major bore.

“You didn’t have too many times, Dad,” his son had said, “but there were enough. It ties in with other things, anyway. The intervals between signalling and the arrival of the trading torpedo have been varying in a period of just about a hundred and twenty days, taking several years into account Of course, a lot of those ‘periods’ didn’t have any trading occur, but the period is there; first two days, then three. That hundred and twenty days is the synodic period of Mercury — the length of time it takes that planet to catch the Earth up on successive trips around the sun. I remembered Mercury’s position when we studied it this spring, and did some figuring; your short times came when it was closest to us, the long ones when it was on the other side of the sun, about twice as far away. Those torpedoes seem to be coming from there at about one and a quarter G’s of acceleration.” Mr. Wing, though no physicist, understood this clearly enough. The concept had been publicized sufficiently in connection with airplanes.