Hal Clement - Mission of Gravity

The remaining half mile was a white, brown, and black tangle, much like that he had just traversed. The vegetation was even denser, and had trapped a good deal more snow, so that there was little or no bare ground visible.

Looming above the tangled plain was the Flyer’s Hill. The Mesldinite found it almost impossible to think of it as an artificial structure, partly because of its monstrous size and partly because a roof of any description other than a flap of fabric was completely foreign to his ideas of architecture. It was a glittering metal dome some twenty feet in height and forty in diameter, nearly a perfect hemisphere. It was dotted with large, transparent areas and had two cylindrical extensions containing doors. The Flyer had said that these doors were so constructed that one could pass through them without letting air get from one side to ‘the other. The portals were certainly big enough for the strange creature, gigantic as he was. One of file lower windows had an improvised ramp leading up to it which would permit a creature of Barlennan’s size and build to crawl up to the pane and see inside. The commander had spent much time on that ramp while he was first learning to speak and understand the Flyer’s language; he had seen much of the strange apparatus and furniture which filled the structure, though he had no idea of ‘the use to which most of it was put. The Flyer himself appeared to be an amphibious creature — at least, he spent much of the time floating in a tank of liquid. This was reasonable enough, considering his size. Barlennan himself knew of no creature native to Mesklin larger than his own race which was not strictly an ocean or lake dweller — though he realized that, as far as weight alone was considered, such things might exist in these vast, nearly unexplored regions near the Rim. He trusted that he would meet none, at least while he himself was ashore. Size meant weight, and a lifetime of conditioning prevented his completely ignoring weight as a menace.

There was nothing near the dome except the ever present vegetation. Evidently the rocket had not yet arrived, and for a moment Barlennan toyed with the idea of waiting where he was until it did. Surely when it came it would descend on the farther side of the Hill — the Flyer would see to that, if Barlennan himself had not arrived. Still, there was nothing to prevent the descending vessel from passing over his present position; Lackland could do nothing about that, since he would not know exactly where the Mesklinite was. Few Earthmen can locate a body fifteen inches long and two in diameter crawling horizontally through tangled vegetation at a distance of half a mile. No, he had better go right up to the dome, as the Flyer had advised. The commander resumed his progress, still dragging the ropes behind him.

He made it in good time, though delayed slightly by occasional periods of darkness. As a matter of fact it was night when he reached his goal, though the last part of his journey had been adequately illuminated by light from the windows ahead of him. However, by the time he had made his ropes fast and crawled up to a comfortable station outside the window the sun had lifted above the horizon on his left. The clouds were almost completely gone now, though — the wind was still strong, and he could have seen in through the window even had the inside lights been turned out.

Lackland was not in the room from which this window looked, and the Mesklinite pressed the tiny call button which had been mounted on the ramp. Immediately the Flyer’s voice sounded from a speaker beside the button.

„Glad you’re here, Barl. I’ve been having Mack hold up until you came. I’ll start him down right away, and he should be here by next sunrise.”

„Where is he now? On Toorey?”

„No; he’s drifting at the inner edge of the ring, only six hundred miles up. He’s been there since well before the storm ended, so don’t worry about having kept him waiting yourself. While we’re waiting for him, I’ll bring out the other radios I promised.”

„Since I am alone, it might be well to bring only one radio this time. They are rather awkward things to carry, though light enough, of course.”

„Maybe we should wait for the crawler before I bring them out at all. Then I can ride you back to your ship — the crawler is well enough insulated so that riding outside it wouldn’t hurt you, I’m sure. How would that be?”

„It sounds excellent. Shall we have more language while we wait, or can you show me more pictures of the place you come from?”

„I have some pictures.. It will take a few minutes to load the projector, so it should be dark enough when we’re ready. Just a moment — I’ll come to the lounge.”

The speaker fell silent, and Barlennan kept his eyes on the door which he could see at one side of the room. In a few moments the Flyer appeared, walking upright as usual with the aid of the artificial limbs he called crutches. He approached the window, nodded his massive head at the tiny watcher, and turned to the movie projector. The screen at which the machine was pointed was on the wall directly facing the window; and Barlennan, keeping a couple of eyes on the human being’s actions, squatted down more comfortably in a position from which he could watch it in comfort. He waited silently while the sun arched lazily overhead. It was warm in the full sunlight, pleasantly so, though not warm enough to start a thaw; the perpetual wind from the northern icecap prevented that. He was half dozing while Lackland finished threading the machine, stumped over to his relaxation tank, and lowered himself into it. Barlennan had never noticed the elastic membrane over the surface of the liquid which kept the man’s clothes dry; if he had, it might have modified his ideas about the amphibious nature of human beings. From his floating position Lackland reached up to a small panel and snapped two switches. The room lights went out and the projector started to operate. It was a fifteen-minute reel, and had not quite finished when Lackland had to haul himself once more to his feet and crutches with the information that the rocket was landing.

„Do you want to watch Mack, or would you rather see the end of the reel?” he asked. „He’ll probably be on the ground by the time it’s done.”

Barlennan tore his attention from the screen with some reluctance. „I’d rather watch the picture, but it would probably be better for me to get used to the sight of flying things,” he said. „From which side will it come?”

„The east, I should expect. I have given Mack a careful description of the layout here, and he already had photographs; and I know an approach from that direction will be somewhat easier, as he is now set. I’m afraid the sun is interfering at the moment with your line of vision, but he’s still about forty miles up — look well above the sun.”

Barlennan followed these instructions and waited. For perhaps a minute he saw nothing; his eye was caught by a glint of metal some twenty degrees above the rising sun.

„Altitude ten — horizontal distance about the same,” Lackland reported at the same moment. „I have him on the scope here.”

The glint grew brighter, holding its direction almost perfectly — the rocket was on a nearly exact course toward the dome. In another minute it was close enough for details to be visible — or would have been, except that everything was now hidden in the glare of the rising sun. Mack hung poised for a moment a mile above the station and as far as to the east; and as Belne moved out of line Barlennan could see the windows and exhaust ports in the cylindrical hull. The storm wind had dropped almost completely, but now a warm breeze laden with a taint of melting ammonia began to blow from the point where the exhaust struck the ground. The drops of semiliquid spattered on Barlennan’s eye shells, but he continued to stare at the slowly settling mass of metal. Every muscle in his long body was at maximum tension, his arms held close to his sides, pincers clamped tightly enough to have shorn through steel wire, the hearts in each of his body segments pumping furiously. He would have been holding his breath had he possessed breathing apparatus at all similar to that of a human being. Intellectually he knew that the thing would not fall — he kept telling himself that it could not; but having grown to maturity in an environment where a fall of six inches was usually fatally destructive even to the incredibly tough Mesklinite organism, his emotions were not easy to control. Subconsciously he kept expecting the metal shell to vanish from sight, to reappear on the ground below flattened out of recognizable shape. After all, it was still hundreds of feet up…