Hal Clement - Iceworld

He had looked over Don’s figures, which were easy enough to follow, and agreed with his results; and the boy had, at his request, drawn a diagram of the orbits of inner planets of the Solar System showing the current positions of the planets themselves. This he now had in his pocket.

The word “home” had just been under discussion, more or less as a result of chance. Mr. Wing had made the concept reasonably clear, he believed; and it seemed to him that the time had come to put one of his cards on the table.

He began by waving an arm to encompass the whole horizon. “Earth,” he said. The Sarrian repeated the word, but without any gesture of his own suggesting that he understood. The man repeated the word, stamping on the ground as he did so; then he took a new page in the notebook and made a sketch of the planet as he thought it would appear from space. As a final illustration, he molded a sphere from a lump of modelling clay which had been found in the playroom and had already been put to good use. Then he pointed to the sphere, drawing, and the ground, repeating the word after each in turn.

Ken understood. He proved it by scratching a picture of his own on the ground, reaching as far as he could over the side of the oven and using his strip of metal. It was a perfectly recognizable drawing of the sun and orbits of the first three planets. He knew he might be exceeding the local knowledge of astronomy, but the fact that the native seemed to know the shape of his world was encouraging.

Mr. Wing promptly pulled out Don’s diagram, which was substantially the same as Ken’s except that Mars’ orbit and position were shown. He spent some minutes naming each of the planets, and making the generic name clear as well. Then they spent some more time in a sort of game; Ken added Jupiter and Saturn to the diagram, in an effort to find out how much astronomy the human being knew. Mr. Wing named those, and added Uranus, Neptune and Pluto; Don, who had made no contribution up to this point, made a correction in the orbit of Pluto so that it crossed that of Neptune at one point, and began adding satellites at a furious rate. They took the burst of Sarrian speech that erupted from the speaker as an indication of the alien’s surprise, and were gratified accordingly.

Ken was surprised for more reasons than one.

“Drai, if you’re listening, these folks are not any sort of savage. They must have a well-developed science. They seem to know of nine planets in this system, and we only knew about six; and there are an awful lot of moons one of them is busy telling me about right now — he’s even put two with Planet Four, and we didn’t notice any. They either have space travel or darned good telescopes.”

“We haven’t seen a space ship here in twenty years,” Feth’s voice reminded him. Ken made no answer; Mr. Wing had started to talk again. He was pointing to Planet Three on his own diagram, and repeating the name he had given it.

“Earth — my home.” He indicated himself with one hand to emphasize the personal pronoun. Then he moved the finger to the innermost world. “Mercury — your home.” And he pointed to Sallman Ken.

He was a little disappointed in the reaction, but would not have been had he known how to interpret Sarrian facial expressions. The scientist was dumbfounded for fully ten seconds; when he did regain control of his voice, he addressed the distant listeners rather than the Earth man.

“I’m sure that you will also be interested in knowing that he is aware we come from Planet One. I believe he thinks we live there, but the error is minor under the circumstances.” This time Drai’s voice responded.

“You’re crazy! You must have told him yourself, you fool! How could he possibly have learned that without help?”

“I did not tell him. You’ve been listening and ought to know. And I don’t see why I should be expected to explain how he found out; I’m just telling you what’s going on here at the moment.”

“Well, don’t let him go on thinking that! Deny it! He knows too much!”

“What’s wrong with that?” Ken asked, reasonably enough.

“Suppose they do have space travel! We don’t want them dropping in on us! Why — I’ve been keeping this place a secret for twenty years.”

Ken forbore to point out the flaws in that line of reasoning. He simply said:

“Not knowing how certain they are of their facts, I think a denial would be foolish. If they are really sure, then they’d know I was lying; and the results might not be good.” Drai made no answer to that, and Ken turned back to the Earthman, who had been listening uncomprehendingly to the conversation.

“Mercury. Yes,” the Sarrian said.

“I see. Hot,” replied Mr. Wing.

“No. Cold.” Ken paused, seeking words. “Little hot. Hot to you. Hot to—” he waved a sleeve of his armor in a wide circle—”plants, these things. Cold to me.”

Don muttered to his father, “If he regards Mercury as too cold for comfort, he must come from the inside of a volcano somewhere. Most astronomers are satisfied that there’s no planet closer to the sun, and he didn’t show one on his diagram, you’ll notice.”

“It would be nice if we knew just how hot he liked it,” agreed the older man. He was about to address Ken again in the hope of finding out something on this point when a burst of alien speech suddenly boomed from the torpedo’s speaker. Even to Ken, it carried only partial meaning.

“Ken! This—” Just those two words, in Feth’s voice; then the transmission ceased with the click that accompanies a broken circuit. Ken called Feth’s name several times into his own microphone, but there was no response. He fell silent, and thought furiously.

He suspected from the fact that the natives were simply looking at him that they realized something had gone wrong; but he did not want to worry about their feelings just then. He felt like a diver who had heard a fight start among the crew of his air-pump, and had little attention for anything else. What in the Galaxy were they about, up there? Had Drai decided to abandon him? No, even if the drug-runner had suddenly decided Ken was useless, he would not abandon a lot of expensive equipment just to get rid of him. For one thing, Ken suspected that Drai would prefer to see him die of drug hunger, though this may have been an injustice. What then? Had Drai become subtle, and cut off the transmitter above in the hope that Ken would betray himself in some way? Unlikely. If nothing else, Feth would almost certainly have warned him in some fashion, or at least not sounded so anxious in the words he had managed to transmit.

Perhaps Drai’s distrust — natural enough under the circumstances — had reached a point where he had decided to check personally on the actions of his tame scientist. However, Ken could not imagine him trusting himself in armor on the surface of the Planet of Ice no matter what he wanted to find out.

Still, there was another way of coming down personally. Lee would not like it, of course. He might even persuade his employer that it was far too dangerous. He would certainly try. Still, if Drai really had the idea in his mind, it was more than possible that he might simply refuse to listen to persuasion.

In that case, the Karella’s shadow might fall across them at any moment. That would fit in with Feth’s attempt to warn him, and its abrupt interruption. If that were actually the case, he need not worry; his conscience was clear, and for all that was going on at the moment Drai was perfectly welcome to look on until his eyes froze to the ports. There had been no sign of tofacco anywhere, although the native children had been coming back at frequent intervals with new specimens for the boxes and had named them each time. He himself had not done a single thing in furtherance of his plan.