Hal Clement: Star Light

A few cirrus clouds showed above, drifting rapidly toward the west. Evidently the winds a thousand or two feet above were opposed to the surface ones, as was usual during the daytime. This might change shortly, Dondragmer knew; only a few thousand miles to the west was country in which the setting of the sun would make a greater temperature change than it did here, and there might be weather changes in the next dozen hours. Exactly what sort of changes, was more than his Mesklinite sailor background, even fortified with alien meteorology and physics, enabled him to guess.

For the moment, though, all seemed well. He made his way down the ramp to the snow and a hundred yards to the east, partly to make sure of the rest of the sky and partly to get an overall view of his command before commencing a detailed inspection.

The western sky was no more threatening than the rest, and he favored it with only a brief glance.

The Kwembly looked just as usual. To a human being it would probably have suggested a cigar made of dough and allowed to settle on a flat table for a time. It was slightly over a hundred feet in length, between twenty and twenty-five in breadth, and its highest point was nearly twenty feet above the snow. Actually there were two such points; the upper curve of the hull, about a third of the way back, and the bridge itself. The latter was a twenty-foot crosspiece whose nearly square outlines somewhat spoiled the smooth curves of the main body. It was almost at the bow, permitting helmsman, commander, and conning personnel to watch the ground as they traveled almost to the point where the forward trucks covered it.

The flat bottom of the vehicle was nearly a yard off the snow, supported on an almost continuous set of tread-bearing trucks. These were individually castered and connected by a bewildering rigging of fine cables, allowing the Kwembly to turn in a fairly short radius with reasonably complete control of her traction. The trucks were separated from the hull proper by what amounted to a pneumatic mattress, which distributed traction and adapted to minor ground irregularities.

A caterpillar-like figure was making its way slowly along the near side of the land-cruiser, presumably Beetchermarlf continuing his inspection of the rigging. Twenty yards closer to the captain the short tower of the core drill had been erected. Above, clinging to the holdfasts which studded the hull but could hardly be seen at the captain’s distance, other crew members were climbing about as they inspected the seams for tightness. This, to a Mesklinite, was a nerve-stretching job. Acrophobia was a normal and healthy state of mind to a being reared on a world where polar gravity was more than six hundred times that of Earth, and even “home” gravity a third of that. Dhrawn’s comparatively feeble pull, scarcely thirteen hundred feet per second squared, took some of the curse off climbing, but hull inspection was still the least popular of duties. Dondragmer crawled back across the hard-packed mixture of white crystals and brown dust, interrupted by occasional sprawling bushes, and made his way up the side to help out with the job.

The great, curved plates were of boron fiber bonded with oxygen-and fluorine-loaded polymers. They had been fabricated on a world none of the Mesklinites had ever seen, though most of the crew had had dealings with its natives. The human chemical engineers had designed those hull members to withstand every corrosive agent they could foresee. They fully realized that Dhrawn was one of the few places in the universe likely to be even worse in this respect than their own oxygen-and-water world. They were quite aware of its gravity. They had all these factors in mind when they synthesized the hull members and the adhesives which held them together: both the temporary cements used during the testing on Mesklin and the supposedly permanent ones employed in reassembling the vehicles on Dhrawn. Dondragmer had every confidence in the skill of those men, but he could not forget that they had not faced and never expected to face the conditions their products were fighting. These particular parachute packers would never be asked to jump, though that analogy would have been lost on a Mesklinite.

Much as the captain respected theory, he very well knew the gap between it and practice, so he devoted full attention to examining the joints between the great hull sections.

By the time he had satisfied himself that they were still sound and tight, the sky had become noticeably darker. Kervenser, in response to a rap on the outside of the bridge and a few gestures, had turned on some of the outside lights. By their aid the climbers finished their work and made their way back onto the snow.

Beetchermarlf appeared from under the great hull and reported his tiller lines in perfect shape. The workers at the drill had recovered several feet of core, and were taking this into the laboratory as soon as each segment was obtained, in view of the ambient temperature. Actually the local “snow” seemed to be nearly all water at the surface, and therefore safely below its melting point, but no one could be sure how true this would be deeper down.

The artificial light made the sky less noticeable. The first warning of changing weather was a sudden gust of wind. The Kwembly rocked slightly on her treads, the tiller lines singing as the dense air swept past them. The Mesklinites were not inconvenienced. In Dhrawn’s gravity blowing them away would have been a job for a respectable tornado. They weighed about as much as a life-sized gold statue would have on Earth. Dondragmer, digging his claws reflexively into the dusty snow, was not bothered by the wind; but he was much annoyed at his own failure to notice earlier the clouds which accompanied it. These had changed from the fleecy cirrus perhaps a thousand feet above to broken stratus-type scud at half that height. There was no precipitation yet, but none of the sailors doubted that it would come soon. They could not guess, however, what form it would take or how violent it might be. They had been a year and a half on Dhrawn, by human measure, but this was not nearly long enough to learn all the moods of a world far larger than their own. Even had that world completed one of its own revolutions, instead of less than a quarter of one, it would not have been time enough and Dondragmer’s crew knew it.

The captain’s voice rose above the song of the wind.

“Inside, everyone. Berjendee, Reffel, and Stakendee to me to help with the drilling gear. First man inside tell Kervenser to stand by on engines and be ready to swing bow to wind when the last of us is aboard.” Dondragmer knew as he gave the command that it might be impossible to obey it. It was quite likely that the maintenance check might be at a stage which would prevent engine start. Having issued the order, however, he thought about it no further. It would be carried out if possible, and his attention was needed elsewhere. The drilling equipment was top priority; it was research apparatus, which was the entire reason for the Mesklinites’ presence on Dhrawn. Even Dondragmer, comparatively free of that suspicion of human intentions and motives which affected many Mesklinites, suspected that the average human scientist would value the drilling equipment more highly than the lives of one or two of the crew.

The researchers had already withdrawn the bit and started inside with it when he reached them. The crank and gear box of the muscle-powered device followed, leaving only the supporting frame and guide towers. These were less critical, since they could be replaced without human assistance, but since the wind was growing no worse, the captain and his helpers stayed to salvage them also. By the time this had been done, the others had vanished inside and Kervenser was clearly impatient on the bridge above.