Complete Short Fiction, page 201
“The refrigerator is one of your solid-state electronic devices which I don’t pretend to understand in detail.” The captain’s words finally reached the station. He was still using his own language, to the annoyance of some of the listeners. “We haven’t had to use it since the acceptance tests; the weather here has sometimes been pretty warm, but not really unbearable. It’s a simple thing to describe; there are metal plates in all the rooms which get cold when we turn the power on in the system. There is a metal bar—a sort of loop—running along each side of the hull up at the top. It starts near the stern, runs forward about half a body-length to the port side of the center-line, crosses over about four body-lengths back of the bridge, and goes back along the other side to a point even with its start. It runs through the hull at start and finish—one of the few things that does. I assume that bar must be the heat radiator; I see, as you imply I should, that there must be such a part to the system and that it must be outside, and nothing else seems to qualify. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be much farther from the ice, even if it runs hot enough to melt it—which I don’t know offhand. I realize that it could be made as hot as you please by running enough electricity through it, but I’m not sure I like the idea of trying to take it off the hull for such a purpose.”
“I suppose it would wreck your refrigeration system—especially if you couldn’t get it back,” agreed Benj. “Still, maybe it’s not that bad. Let me find an engineer who really knows that system. I have an idea. I’ll call you back later.” The boy slid out of his seat without waiting for Dondragmer’s reply, and left the communication room on the run.
The moment he was gone, the observers who had not understood the language asked Easy for a summary of the conversation, which she gladly supplied. It did not make anyone happier with himself to find that they could not guess what the youngster’s idea might be. When Benj returned with an engineer in tow, those in hearing frankly abandoned their jobs to listen. Several heartfelt prayers of thanksgiving must have ascended when it was noted that the newcomer was not a linguist, and the boy was interpreting for him. The two settled into seats before the screens, and Benj made sure he knew what to say before energizing his microphone.
“I should tell the captain that most of the fastenings holding the radiator bar to the Kwembly’s skin are sort of nails; they only go a little way into the skin and can be pried out without damaging the hull. It might be necessary to use cement to fasten them back in afterward, but they should have plenty of that. The connections at the rear will have to be cut, though. The alloy isn’t very hard and their saws will be able to handle it. Once detached, the bar can be used as a resistance heater simply by pushing its ends into the D.C. holes in a power box. I can tell him that there is no danger from a short circuit, since the converters have internal safeties. Is that right, Mr. Katini?”
“That’s it,” the small, grizzled engineer replied with a nod. He was one of those who had helped design and build the land-cruisers, and one of the very few human beings actually to spend much time at Mesklin’s three-gravity equator. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble making it clear to Dondragmer, even without translation; I’ll tell him directly if you wish. He and I always got along easily enough in my own language.”
Benj nodded acknowledgment of this, but started speaking into his microphone in Stennish. Easy suspected that he was showing off, and hoped that it wouldn’t backfire on him too badly, but saw no real need to interfere. The boy was old enough to stand a little stewing in his own juice. She had to admit that he was doing a good job of the translation; he must have picked up a great deal from his friend Beetchermarlf.
When the captain’s answer came back it was in the human tongue. Dondragmer had seen the most probable reason why Benj, rather than the engineer who had provided the information, should be doing the talking. The boy looked a little startled, and confirmed his mother’s suspicions by glancing quickly at her. She carefully kept her eyes on Dondragmer’s screen.
“I have the picture,” the Mesklinite’s slightly accented voice came through—he was not always perfectly successful in confining his voice to the human audibility range. “We can detach the refrigerator bar and use it, with a power box, as a heater to melt the ice around the ship. There will be plenty of power in the converter, and no danger of blowing it up. Please clear me on two points, however.
“First, how can we be sure that we can reconnect the bar electrically afterward? I know enough to doubt that cement is the right method. I don’t want to lose the refrigerator system permanently, since Dhrawn is approaching its sun and the weather will have to be getting warmer.
“Second, with the metal carrying a current touching the ice, or dipping into the melted water, will there be any danger to people on, or in, or under that water? Will the airsuits be protection enough? I suppose they must be pretty good electrical insulators, since they are transparent.”
The engineer began to answer at once, leaving Benj to wonder what connection there might be between transparency and electrical conductivity—and how Dondragmer, with his background, happened to be acquainted with it.
“You can make the connection easily enough. Simply have the metal ends pressed tightly together, and use the adhesive to fasten a wrapping of fabric around the joint. You’re right about the glue’s conductance; make sure it doesn’t get between the metal surfaces.
“Also, you needn’t worry about electrocuting anyone in an airsuit. There’ll be plenty of protection. I rather suspect that it would take a lot of voltage to hurt you people anyway, since your body fluids are nonpolar, but I have no experimental proof and I don’t suppose you want any. It occurred to me that you might do better by striking an arc at the surface of the ice, which should have enough ammonia to be a fair conductor. If it works at all, it should work very well—only it may be too hot for any of your men to stay in the neighborhood, and it would have to be controlled carefully. Come to think of it, it would no doubt destroy too much of the bar to let you get the system together again afterward. We’d better stick to simple resistance heating, and be satisfied with melting ice instead of boiling it.”
Katini fell silent, and waited for Dondragmer’s answer. Benj was still thinking, and all the others within hearing had their eyes fixed on the captain’s screen. His shift of language had attracted even those who might otherwise have waited patiently for a translation.
This was unfortunate from the human viewpoint. Barlennan, later, wrote it off as a stroke of luck.
“All right,” Dondragmer’s answer finally came. “We will take off the metal bar and try to use it as a heater. I am now ordering men outside to start detaching the small brackets. I will have one of the communicators set up outside so that you can watch as we cut through the conductors, and check everything before we turn on power. We will work slowly, so that you can tell us if we are doing something wrong before it has gone too far. I don’t like this situation—I don’t like doing anything when I am so unsure of what is happening and what is likely to happen. I’m supposed to be in command here, and I can only wish I had learned more of your science and technology. I may have an accurate picture as far as it goes, and I’m sure I can trust your knowledge and judgment for the rest, but it’s the first time in years I’ve been so uncertain of myself.”
It was Benj who answered, beating his mother by a second.
“I heard you were the first Mesklinite to see the general idea of real science, and that you were the one who did most to get the College going. What do you mean, you wish you had learned more?”
Easy cut in; like Benj, she used Dondragmer’s own language.
“You know far more than I do, Don, and you are in command. If you hadn’t been convinced by what Katini told you, you wouldn’t have given those orders. You’ll have to get used to that feeling you don’t like; you’ve just collided with something new again. It’s like that time fifty years ago, long before I was born, when you suddenly realized that the science we aliens were using was just knowledge carried on past the common-sense level. Now you have bumped into the fact that no one—not even a commander—can know everything, and that you sometimes have to take professional advice. Calm down, Don!”
Easy leaned back and looked at her son, who was the only one in the room to have followed her speech completely. The boy looked startled, and almost awestruck. Whatever impression she had made on Dondragmer—or would, when her words got to him—she had certainly got home to Benjamin Ibson Hoffman. It was an intoxicating sensation for a parent; she had to fight the urge to say more. She was assisted by an interruption, in a human voice.
“Hey! What happened to the helicopter?”
All eyes went to Reffel’s screen. There was a full second of silence. Then Easy snapped, “Benj, report to Dondragmer while I call Barlennan!”
TO BE CONTINUED
Starlight
Part III of IV. Any effort to explore any frontier is always an invitation to a new and unexpected way of dying. On a planet like Dhrawn, with a 40-gravity load, and a weirdly unstable atmo-hydrosphere, not even atomic-powered engines were an assurance of safety!
Dhrawn is the star/planet companion of Lalande 21185, a red dwarf sun half a dozen light-years from the solar system. It has been bothering the cosmologists and planetologists. In terms of mass, it is on the borderline between typical Jovian planet and extreme dwarf star; in terms of composition, it seems to be as nearly destitute of light elements as Earth, or Venus. It is generating internal energy; its sun could not warm it above a few tens of degrees Kelvin, but there are local regions as hot as 1200°K. The atmosphere contains free oxygen, although the oceans (?) contain not only water but ammonia—a chemically unstable situation leading to the presumption that Dhrawn has active life.
Direct exploration is impossible for human beings because of the forty-Earth surface gravity. It has been decided to hire natives of Mesklin, the variable-G planet of 61 Cygni A, to do the work. BARLENNAN, the Mesklinite sea captain who had worked with non-Mesklinite researchers on his own world fifty Earth years before, jumps at the offer—with unmentioned ideas of his own in connection with the deal. A Mesklin-con ditioned settlement is established on Dhrawn, and a dozen exploring vehicles to be manned by the Mesklinites are designed and built.
One of these, the Kwembly, is commanded by DONDRAGMER, Barlennan’s first officer in the old days when they were carrying alien instruments around their own planet. One of the Kwembly’s helmsmen is a young sailor named BEETCHERMARLF.
The surface work is being monitored from a station manned principally by human beings, in synchronous orbit six million miles from the planet. Its chief administrator is ALAN AUCOIN, who has a basic, though fairly well hidden, distrust of nonhuman beings. His staff includes EL1SE RICH HOFFMAN—“EASY”—who functions as interpreter with the Mesklinites, and general spreader of oil on troubled waters; and her husband IB HOFFMAN. Their seventeen-year-old son BENJ is also at the station, serving an apprenticeship in the aerology laboratory. Like his mother, Benj is an excellent natural linguist and can talk directly with the Mesklinites.
A distrust has been developing between human and Mesklinite leaders, partly because of Aucoin’s attitude and partly from Barlennan’s underhanded activities. Even though field communication between the settlement on Dhrawn and the land-cruisers has to be relayed through the human station, Barlennan has been working to establish another settlement independent of, and unknown to, the human beings. Toward this end he has arranged the “loss” of the land-cruiser Esket and the disappearance of her crew. The Esket is being used as the nucleus of the new settlement, at which mining and other activities leading toward local self-sufficiency are being carried on.
Now, however, genuine troubles are developing. The complex phase relationships between water and ammonia have been outwitting the human aerologists and their computers, and Dondragmer’s Kwembly has been washed down a river formed by a suddenly melting “snow” field, grounded, damaged, partly repaired, and finally frozen in. Beetchermarlf and a companion have been trapped under the cruiser by the ice; another officer, KERVENSER, has disappeared in one of the tiny scout helicopters carried by the Kwembly.
The human beings get into a sharp disagreement because of the Kwembly situation. Aucoin, as in the Esket incident previously, is reluctant to authorize a rescue trip by one of the other cruisers—though he realized that if Barlennan wants to do this there is no way to stop him. The elder Hoffmans want the whole decision left up to Barlennan, with any help whatever which he may ask—including rescue from space—to be furnished from the station. They resent Aucoin’s policy of editing, or actually censoring, the reports between Dondragmer and Barlennan. Benj, who has formed a close radio friendship with Beetchermarlf, considers only the personal aspects of the problem, but is deeply upset by these. A staff discussion, kept from becoming a major brawl by Easy’s professional tact, leads to only one result: Ib Hoffman, hearing for the first time a real summary of the relevant facts, begins to realize that Barlennan really is up to something on his own.
Beetchermarlf and his companion, caught in the shrinking volume of free liquid under the Kwembly’s hull, spend hours in futile efforts to dig, scrape, and melt themselves free. They finally take refuge in one of the air cells forming the “mattress” underpinning between the hull and the driving trucks—incidentally concealing themselves very effectively from possible rescuers. Their own supply of breathing hydrogen, while not yet critically low, is causing them and the distant Benj more and more concern.
The human assistance to the Kwembly finally concentrates on technical advice, and some of the cruiser’s equipment is dismantled to improvise a heater. Dondragmer is reluctant to take this step, fully aware of the Mesklinite position with regard to replacing or repairing, the equipment—but it seems the least of a host of evils.
At the Settlement, Barlennan and his staff have come to suspect that the human beings have not been entirely frank with their Mesklinite agents. Barlennan does not resent this, since he has been extremely deceitful himself and regards such things as matters of business acumen; but he decides that he should set up a test situation to find out how truthful the men are being, using the Esket as bait. He is about to send a message containing the arrangements by one of the dirigibles which the Mesklinites have improvised from homemade balloons and human-supplied power units. At this point, however, a message arrives from the orbiting station reporting a disturbance at the site where the Esket was lost. Barlennan is left wondering whether something is really happening at his secret base there, or whether the human beings are testing him.
At the Kwembly, Dondragmer is growing more and more concerned about the possibility of another flood, and keeps asking for risk estimates from the human scientists. If such a thing happens, his command is likely to be a total loss. He is considering moving the trapped vessel’s life-support equipment to high ground, to insure his crew’s survival. He also has his other helicopter out, carrying one of the television sets which transmit to the human station. The pilot is looking for Kervenser as well as for signs of another flood.
When the human watchers report that this set has also ceased sending, it does not occur to Dondragmer that the report might be false; but he is annoyed. He supposes that the pilot shuttered the set to keep the human beings from seeing something which would betray Barlennan’s machinations, such as a wandering dirigible; and unlike most of the Mesklinite staff, he has never been in very close sympathy with Barlennan’s policy of trickery.
Part 3
IX
The weather had long since cleared at the Settlement, the ammonia fog blown into the unknown central regions of Low Alpha and the wind dropped to a gentle breeze from the northwest. Stars twinkled violently, catching the attention of occasional Mesklinites who were outside or in the corridors, but going unnoticed for the most part by those in the better lighted rooms under the transparent roof.
Barlennan was in the laboratory area at the west side of the Settlement when Easy called, so her message did not reach him at once. It arrived in written form, borne by one of Guzmeen’s messengers who, in accordance with standing orders, paid no attention to the fact that Barlennan was in conference. He thrust the note in front of his commander, who broke off his own words in mid-sentence to read it. Bendivence and Deeslenver, the scientists with whom he was speaking, waited in silence for him to finish, though their body attitudes betrayed curiosity.
Barlennan read the message twice, seemed to be trying to recall something, and then turned to the messenger.
“All this just came in, I take it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how long has it been since the preceding report from Dondragmer?”
“Not long, sir—less than an hour, I’d say. The log would show; shall I check?”
“It’s not that urgent, as long as you know. The last I heard was that the Kwembly had grounded after washing down a river for a couple of hours, and that was a long time ago. I assumed that everything was all right, since Guz didn’t pass any more on to me about it. I assume now that he either heard interim reports at the usual intervals, or asked the humans about it?”
“I don’t know, sir. I haven’t been on duty the whole time. Shall I check?”
“No. I’ll be there in a little while myself. Tell Guz not to send anything out after me; just hold any calls.” The runner vanished, and Barlennan turned back to the scientists.
“Sometimes I wonder whether we shouldn’t have more electrical communication in this place. I’d like to know how long it’s taken Don to get into this mess, but I want to learn some other things before I walk all the way to Guzmeen’s place.”
