Complete Short Fiction, page 203
This question caught Barlennan by surprise. He had, in the few minutes since discussing the matter with his scientists, been growing more and more certain that the men would deny being able to detect such lights. Certainly if the commander had been a little more foresighted he would not have answered as he did—in fact, he was regretting what he said well before the words reached the station.
“You should have no trouble spotting our land-cruiser Kwembly; you already know its location better than I do, and its bridge lights would be on. Its two helicopters have just disappeared, and they normally carry lights. I’d like to have you scan the area within, say, two hundred miles of the Kwembly as carefully as you can for other lights, and tell both me and Dondragmer the positions of any you find. Would that take long?”
The message lag was quite long enough to let Barlennan realize how he had slipped. There was nothing to be done about it now, of course, but to hope, though that word is a bad translation of the nearest possible Mesklinite attitude. The answer did cause him to brighten up a little; maybe the slip wasn’t too serious—as long as the human beings didn’t find more than two other lights near the Kwembly!
“I’m afraid I was thinking merely of detecting lights,” said Tebbetts. “Pinpointing the sources will be harder, especially from here. I’m pretty sure we can solve your problem, though . . . that is, if your missing helis are shining their lights. If you think they may have crashed, I shouldn’t think there’d be much chance of light, but I’ll get right to it.”
“How about their power plants?” asked Barlennan, determined to learn the worst now that he had started. “Aren’t there other radiations than light given off in nuclear reactions?”
By the time this question reached the station Tebbetts had left according to his promise, but fortunately Benj was able to supply the answer—the information happened to be basic to the Project, which had been carefully explained to him right after his arrival.
“The fusion converters give off neutrinos which we can detect, but we can’t spot their source exactly,” he told the commander. “That’s what the shadow satellites are for. They detect neutrinos, which are practically all coming from the sun. The power plants on Dhrawn and up here don’t count for much against that, even if it isn’t much of a sun. The computers keep track of where the satellites are, and especially whether the planet is between a given one and the sun, so there’s a measure of the neutrino absorption through different parts of the planet, in a few years we hope to have a statistical X ray of Dhrawn—maybe that isn’t a good analogy for you. I mean a good idea of the density and composition of the planet’s insides. They’re still arguing, you know, whether Dhrawn should be called a planet or a star, and whether the extra heat is from hydrogen fusion in the middle or radioactivity near the surface.
“But I’m sure as can be that they couldn’t find your missing fliers from their neutrino emission, even if all their converters are still on.”
Barlennan managed to conceal his glee at this news, and merely answered, “Thanks. We can’t have everything. I take it you’ll tell me when your astronomer finds anything, or when he is sure he’ll find nothing; I’d like to know if I have to stop counting on that. I’m through talking for now, Benj, but call here if anything comes up on either the fliers or those friends of yours—after all, I’m concerned about them, though perhaps not the way you are about Beetchermarlf. Takoorch is the one I remember.”
Barlennan, with more direct contact with human beings and, to be honest, more selfish reasons to develop such skills, had been able to read more accurately between the lines of Benj’s talk and obtain a more nearly correct picture of the boy’s feelings than Dondragmer had. It would, he was sure, be useful; but he put it from his mind as he turned away from the communicator.
“That could be both better and worse,” he remarked to the two scientists. “It’s certainly just as well we didn’t set up that blinker system for night communication; they’d have seen us certainly.”
“Not certainly,” objected Deeslenver. “The human said they could spot such lights, but there was no suggestion that they made a habit of looking for them. If it takes instruments, I’d bet the instruments are busy on more important things.”
“So would I, if the stakes weren’t so high,” returned Barlennan. “Anyway, we wouldn’t dare use it now, because we know they’ll be looking this way with the best machines they have. We just asked them to.”
“But they won’t be looking here. They’ll be searching the neighborhood of the Kwembly, millions of cables from here.”
“Think of yourself back home looking up at Toorey. If you were supposed to examine one part of it closely with a telescope, how much of a slip would it take to make you glance at another?”
Deeslenver conceded the point with a gesture.
“Then we either wait for sunrise, or fly a special if we want to use the Esket as you suggested. I admit I haven’t thought of anything else. I haven’t even thought of what we might do there which would make a good test.”
“It shouldn’t matter too much. The real question would be how soon, and how accurately and completely, the human beings do report whatever we set up for them to see. I’ll think of something in the next couple of hours. Aren’t you researchers setting up for a flight to leave soon, anyway?”
“Not that soon,” said Bendivence. “Also, I don’t agree with you that details don’t matter. You don’t want them to get the idea that we could possibly have anything to do with what they see happen at the Esket, and they certainly aren’t stupid.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean that they should. It will be something natural, making full allowance for the fact that the human beings know even less than we do about what’s natural on this world. You get back to the labs and tell everyone who has equipment to get onto the Deedee that departure time has been moved ahead. I’ll have a written message for Destigmet in two hours.”
“All right.” The scientists vanished through the door, and Barlennan followed them more slowly. He was just beginning to realize how valid Bendivence’s point was. What could be made to happen, in range of one of the Esket’s vision transmitters, which would not suggest that there were Mesklinites in the neighborhood, but which would attract human interest—and tempt the big creatures to edit their reports? Could he think of such a thing without knowing why the reports were being held up? Or, for that matter, without being quite sure that they were?
It was still possible that the delay on the Kwembly matter had been a genuine oversight; as the young human had suggested, each person might have thought that someone else had attended to the matter. To Barlennan’s sailor’s viewpoint this smacked of gross incompetence and inexcusable disorganization; but it would not be the first time he had suspected human beings—not as a species, of course, but on an individual basis—of these qualities.
The test certainly had to be made, and the Esket’s transmitters must surely be possible tools for the purpose. As far as Barlennan knew, these were still active. Naturally, care had been taken that no one enter their field of view since the “loss” of the cruiser, and it had been long since any human being had made mention of them. They would have been shuttered rather than avoided, since this obviously left the Mesklinites at the place much greater freedom of action; but the idea of the shutters had not occurred until after Destigmet had departed with his instructions to set up a second Settlement unknown to the human beings.
As Barlennan remembered, one of the transmitters had been at the usual spot on the bridge, one in the laboratory, one in the hangar where the helicopters were kept—these had been carefully arranged to be out on routine flights when the “catastrophe” occurred—and the fourth in the life-support section, though not covering the entrance. It had been necessary to take much of the equipment from this chamber, of course.
With all the planning, the situation was still inconvenient; having the lab and life rooms out of bounds, or at best possible to visit with only the greatest care, had caused Destigmet and his first officer, Kabremm, much annoyance. They had more than once requested permission to shutter the sets, since the technique had been invented. Barlennan had refused, not wanting to call human attention back to the Esket but now—well, maybe the same net could take two fish. The sudden blanking of one, or perhaps all four, of those screens would certainly be noticed from above. Whether the humans would feel any inclination to” hide the event from the Settlement there was no way of telling; one could only try.
The more he thought it over, the better the plan sounded. Barlennan felt the glow familiar to every intelligent being, regardless of species, who has solved a major problem unassisted. He enjoyed it for fully half a minute. At the end of that time, another of Guzmeen’s runners caught up with him.
“Commander!” The messenger fell into step beside him in the nearly dark corridor. “Guzmeen says that you should come back to Communications at once. One of the human beings—the one called Mersereau—is on the screen. Guz says he ought to be excited, but isn’t, because he’s reporting something going on at the Esket—something is moving in the laboratory!”
X
Keeping in phase with Barlennan as he switched directions took some doing, but the messenger managed it. The commander took his continued presence for granted.
“Any further details? When, or what was moving?”
“None, sir. The man simply appeared on the screen without any warning. He said, ‘Something is happening at the Esket. Tell the commander.’ Guzmeen ordered me to bring you back on hurricane priority, so I didn’t hear any more.”
“Those were his exact words? He used our language?”
“No, it was the human speech. His words were—” the runner repeated the phrase, this time in the original tongue. Barlennan could read no more into the words than had been implicit in the translation.
“Then we don’t know whether someone slipped up and was seen, or dropped something into the field of the lens, or—”
“I doubt the first, sir. The human could hardly have failed to recognize a person.”
“I suppose not. Well, some sort of detail should be in by the time we get back there.
There wasn’t, however. Boyd Mersereau was not even on the screen by the time Barlennan reached Communications. More surprising, neither was anyone else. The commander looked at Guzmeen suspiciously; the communication officer gave the equivalent of a shrug. “He just went, sir, after that one sentence about the lab.”
Barlennan, mystified, squeezed the “attention” control.
But Boyd Mersereau had other things on his mind. Most, but not quite all, were concerned with events on Dhrawn, but not with the Esket; and there were a few matters much closer than the giant star-planet.
The chief of these was the cooling down of Aucoin. The planner was annoyed at not having been brought into the exchanges between Dondragmer and Katini, and the captain and Tebbetts. He was inclined to blame young Hoffman for going ahead with policy-disturbing matters without official approval. However, he did not want to say anything which would annoy Easy; he regarded her, with some justification, as the most nearly indispensable member of the communications group. In consequence, Mersereau and others received some fallout from the administrator’s deflected ire.
This was not too serious, as far as Boyd was concerned. He had years before pigeonholed the pacifying of administrators along with shaving—something which took up time but did not demand full attention, and worth doing at all only because it was usually less trouble in the long run. The real attention-getter, the thing which kept even news from the Esket in the background, was the state of affairs at the Kwembly . . .
By himself he might have been moderately concerned, but only moderately. The missing Mesklinites weren’t close personal friends of his. He was civilized enough not to be any less bothered by their loss than if they had been human, but it was not as though they were his brothers or sons.
The Kwembly herself was a problem, but a fairly routine one. Land-cruisers had been in trouble before, and so far had always been extricated sooner or later. So, all in all, Mersereau would have been merely absorbed, not bothered, if left to himself.
He was not left to himself. Benj Hoffman felt much more strongly about the whole matter, and had a way of making his feelings clear. This wasn’t entirely by talking, though he was perfectly willing to talk. Even when silent he empathized. Boyd would find himself discussing with Dondragmer the progress of the melting-out plan, or the chances of another flood in terms of their effect on the missing helmsmen, rather than with reasonable and proper professional detachment. It was annoying. Beetchermarlf and Takoorch, and even Kervenser, just weren’t that central to the work, and the real question was the survival of the crew. Benj, sitting silently beside him, or, at most, interjecting a few remarks or questions, somehow managed to make objectivity seem like callousness; and Mersereau, who had never raised any children of his own, had no defense against that particular treatment. Easy knew perfectly well what was going on, but she did not interfere because she shared almost perfectly her son’s feelings. Partly because of her sex and partly because of her own background she felt a very intense sympathy for Beetchermarlf and his companion, and even for Takoorch. She had been caught in a rather similar situation some twenty-five years before, when a concatenation of errors had stranded her in an unmanned research vessel on a high-temperature, high-pressure planet.
In fact, she went to greater lengths than Benj had dared. Dondragmer might—probably would—have sent out a ground party to the site of Reffel’s disappearance, since the location was fairly well known; but it was unlikely that he would have risked sending one of his three remaining communicators along. Easy, partly by straightforward argument in her own name and partly by using her son’s techniques to swing Mersereau to the same side, convinced the captain that the risk of not taking the equipment along would be even greater. This discussion, like so many of the others, was conducted in Aucoin’s absence, and, even as he argued with Dondragmer, Mersereau was wondering how he would justify this one to the planner. Nevertheless, he argued on Easy’s side, with Benj almost grinning in the background.
With this claim on his attention, Boyd scarcely noticed the call from another observer that a couple of objects were moving across the screen which showed the Esket’s laboratory. He switched channels briefly and passed the word on to the Settlement, cutting back to the Kwembly without waiting for the end of the communication cycle. Later he claimed that he had never been really conscious of the Esket’s name in the report; he had thought of the message as a routine report from some observer or other, and his principal feeling had been one of irritation at being distracted. Some people would have snapped at the observer; Boyd, being the person he was, had taken what seemed to him the quickest and simplest way of disposing of the interruption. He had then quite genuinely forgotten the incident.
Benj had paid even less attention. The Esket incident had occurred long before his arrival at the station, and the name meant nothing in particular to him, although his mother had once mentioned her friends Destigmet and Kabremm to him.
It was Easy, of course, who had really reacted to the call. She scarcely noticed what Mersereau did or said, and never thought of telling Barlennan herself until more details came in. She moved immediately to a chair commanding a view of the “lost” cruiser’s screens and relegated the rest of the universe to background status.
Barlennan’s return call, therefore, brought him very little information. Easy, to whom it was passed, had seen nothing herself; by the time she had reached her new station all motion had ceased. The original observer was only able to say that he had seen two objects, a reel of cable, or rope, and a short length of pipe, roll across the Esket’s laboratory floor. It was possible that something might have pushed them, though there had been no sign of life around the vehicle for several terrestrial months; it was equally possible, and perhaps more probable, that something had tilted the Esket to start them rolling. So said the observer, though he could not suggest specifically what might have tipped the monstrous machine.
This left Barlennan in a quandary. It was possible that one of Destigmet’s crew had become careless. It was possible that natural causes might be operating, as the humans seemed to prefer to believe. It was also possible, considering what Barlennan himself had just been planning to do, that the whole thing was a piece of human fiction. The commander’s conscience made him attach rather more weight to this possibility than he might have done in other circumstances.
It was hard to see just what they could expect to accomplish by such a fiction, of course. It could hardly be a trap of any sort; there could be no wrong reaction to the story. Complete mystification was the only possible response. If there were something deeper and more subtle involved, Barlennan had to admit to himself that he couldn’t guess what it was.
And he didn’t like guessing anyway. It was so much easier to be able to take reports at face value, allowing only for the capabilities of the speaker and not worrying about his possible motives. At times, the commander reflected, the annoying straightforwardness of Dondragmer which made him disapprove of the whole Esket trick had something to be said for it.
Really, all one could do was assume-that the report was a truthful one; that should, at least, cause anything underhanded on the human side to backfire on its planners. In that case, there was nothing to do except check with Destigmet. That was simply another message to send on the Deedee.
Come to think of it, this was another potential check on the accuracy of the human reports. Certainly this one, whatever else could be said for or against it, showed signs of having come through quickly. Of course, Mrs. Hoffman was involved this time.
The thought that Easy’s involvement made the situation a special one was probably the only idea Barlennan and Aucoin would have had in common just then. Of course, the latter hadn’t heard anything about the new Esket incident so far, and even Mersereau hadn’t really thought about it. He was still otherwise engaged.
“You should have no trouble spotting our land-cruiser Kwembly; you already know its location better than I do, and its bridge lights would be on. Its two helicopters have just disappeared, and they normally carry lights. I’d like to have you scan the area within, say, two hundred miles of the Kwembly as carefully as you can for other lights, and tell both me and Dondragmer the positions of any you find. Would that take long?”
The message lag was quite long enough to let Barlennan realize how he had slipped. There was nothing to be done about it now, of course, but to hope, though that word is a bad translation of the nearest possible Mesklinite attitude. The answer did cause him to brighten up a little; maybe the slip wasn’t too serious—as long as the human beings didn’t find more than two other lights near the Kwembly!
“I’m afraid I was thinking merely of detecting lights,” said Tebbetts. “Pinpointing the sources will be harder, especially from here. I’m pretty sure we can solve your problem, though . . . that is, if your missing helis are shining their lights. If you think they may have crashed, I shouldn’t think there’d be much chance of light, but I’ll get right to it.”
“How about their power plants?” asked Barlennan, determined to learn the worst now that he had started. “Aren’t there other radiations than light given off in nuclear reactions?”
By the time this question reached the station Tebbetts had left according to his promise, but fortunately Benj was able to supply the answer—the information happened to be basic to the Project, which had been carefully explained to him right after his arrival.
“The fusion converters give off neutrinos which we can detect, but we can’t spot their source exactly,” he told the commander. “That’s what the shadow satellites are for. They detect neutrinos, which are practically all coming from the sun. The power plants on Dhrawn and up here don’t count for much against that, even if it isn’t much of a sun. The computers keep track of where the satellites are, and especially whether the planet is between a given one and the sun, so there’s a measure of the neutrino absorption through different parts of the planet, in a few years we hope to have a statistical X ray of Dhrawn—maybe that isn’t a good analogy for you. I mean a good idea of the density and composition of the planet’s insides. They’re still arguing, you know, whether Dhrawn should be called a planet or a star, and whether the extra heat is from hydrogen fusion in the middle or radioactivity near the surface.
“But I’m sure as can be that they couldn’t find your missing fliers from their neutrino emission, even if all their converters are still on.”
Barlennan managed to conceal his glee at this news, and merely answered, “Thanks. We can’t have everything. I take it you’ll tell me when your astronomer finds anything, or when he is sure he’ll find nothing; I’d like to know if I have to stop counting on that. I’m through talking for now, Benj, but call here if anything comes up on either the fliers or those friends of yours—after all, I’m concerned about them, though perhaps not the way you are about Beetchermarlf. Takoorch is the one I remember.”
Barlennan, with more direct contact with human beings and, to be honest, more selfish reasons to develop such skills, had been able to read more accurately between the lines of Benj’s talk and obtain a more nearly correct picture of the boy’s feelings than Dondragmer had. It would, he was sure, be useful; but he put it from his mind as he turned away from the communicator.
“That could be both better and worse,” he remarked to the two scientists. “It’s certainly just as well we didn’t set up that blinker system for night communication; they’d have seen us certainly.”
“Not certainly,” objected Deeslenver. “The human said they could spot such lights, but there was no suggestion that they made a habit of looking for them. If it takes instruments, I’d bet the instruments are busy on more important things.”
“So would I, if the stakes weren’t so high,” returned Barlennan. “Anyway, we wouldn’t dare use it now, because we know they’ll be looking this way with the best machines they have. We just asked them to.”
“But they won’t be looking here. They’ll be searching the neighborhood of the Kwembly, millions of cables from here.”
“Think of yourself back home looking up at Toorey. If you were supposed to examine one part of it closely with a telescope, how much of a slip would it take to make you glance at another?”
Deeslenver conceded the point with a gesture.
“Then we either wait for sunrise, or fly a special if we want to use the Esket as you suggested. I admit I haven’t thought of anything else. I haven’t even thought of what we might do there which would make a good test.”
“It shouldn’t matter too much. The real question would be how soon, and how accurately and completely, the human beings do report whatever we set up for them to see. I’ll think of something in the next couple of hours. Aren’t you researchers setting up for a flight to leave soon, anyway?”
“Not that soon,” said Bendivence. “Also, I don’t agree with you that details don’t matter. You don’t want them to get the idea that we could possibly have anything to do with what they see happen at the Esket, and they certainly aren’t stupid.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean that they should. It will be something natural, making full allowance for the fact that the human beings know even less than we do about what’s natural on this world. You get back to the labs and tell everyone who has equipment to get onto the Deedee that departure time has been moved ahead. I’ll have a written message for Destigmet in two hours.”
“All right.” The scientists vanished through the door, and Barlennan followed them more slowly. He was just beginning to realize how valid Bendivence’s point was. What could be made to happen, in range of one of the Esket’s vision transmitters, which would not suggest that there were Mesklinites in the neighborhood, but which would attract human interest—and tempt the big creatures to edit their reports? Could he think of such a thing without knowing why the reports were being held up? Or, for that matter, without being quite sure that they were?
It was still possible that the delay on the Kwembly matter had been a genuine oversight; as the young human had suggested, each person might have thought that someone else had attended to the matter. To Barlennan’s sailor’s viewpoint this smacked of gross incompetence and inexcusable disorganization; but it would not be the first time he had suspected human beings—not as a species, of course, but on an individual basis—of these qualities.
The test certainly had to be made, and the Esket’s transmitters must surely be possible tools for the purpose. As far as Barlennan knew, these were still active. Naturally, care had been taken that no one enter their field of view since the “loss” of the cruiser, and it had been long since any human being had made mention of them. They would have been shuttered rather than avoided, since this obviously left the Mesklinites at the place much greater freedom of action; but the idea of the shutters had not occurred until after Destigmet had departed with his instructions to set up a second Settlement unknown to the human beings.
As Barlennan remembered, one of the transmitters had been at the usual spot on the bridge, one in the laboratory, one in the hangar where the helicopters were kept—these had been carefully arranged to be out on routine flights when the “catastrophe” occurred—and the fourth in the life-support section, though not covering the entrance. It had been necessary to take much of the equipment from this chamber, of course.
With all the planning, the situation was still inconvenient; having the lab and life rooms out of bounds, or at best possible to visit with only the greatest care, had caused Destigmet and his first officer, Kabremm, much annoyance. They had more than once requested permission to shutter the sets, since the technique had been invented. Barlennan had refused, not wanting to call human attention back to the Esket but now—well, maybe the same net could take two fish. The sudden blanking of one, or perhaps all four, of those screens would certainly be noticed from above. Whether the humans would feel any inclination to” hide the event from the Settlement there was no way of telling; one could only try.
The more he thought it over, the better the plan sounded. Barlennan felt the glow familiar to every intelligent being, regardless of species, who has solved a major problem unassisted. He enjoyed it for fully half a minute. At the end of that time, another of Guzmeen’s runners caught up with him.
“Commander!” The messenger fell into step beside him in the nearly dark corridor. “Guzmeen says that you should come back to Communications at once. One of the human beings—the one called Mersereau—is on the screen. Guz says he ought to be excited, but isn’t, because he’s reporting something going on at the Esket—something is moving in the laboratory!”
X
Keeping in phase with Barlennan as he switched directions took some doing, but the messenger managed it. The commander took his continued presence for granted.
“Any further details? When, or what was moving?”
“None, sir. The man simply appeared on the screen without any warning. He said, ‘Something is happening at the Esket. Tell the commander.’ Guzmeen ordered me to bring you back on hurricane priority, so I didn’t hear any more.”
“Those were his exact words? He used our language?”
“No, it was the human speech. His words were—” the runner repeated the phrase, this time in the original tongue. Barlennan could read no more into the words than had been implicit in the translation.
“Then we don’t know whether someone slipped up and was seen, or dropped something into the field of the lens, or—”
“I doubt the first, sir. The human could hardly have failed to recognize a person.”
“I suppose not. Well, some sort of detail should be in by the time we get back there.
There wasn’t, however. Boyd Mersereau was not even on the screen by the time Barlennan reached Communications. More surprising, neither was anyone else. The commander looked at Guzmeen suspiciously; the communication officer gave the equivalent of a shrug. “He just went, sir, after that one sentence about the lab.”
Barlennan, mystified, squeezed the “attention” control.
But Boyd Mersereau had other things on his mind. Most, but not quite all, were concerned with events on Dhrawn, but not with the Esket; and there were a few matters much closer than the giant star-planet.
The chief of these was the cooling down of Aucoin. The planner was annoyed at not having been brought into the exchanges between Dondragmer and Katini, and the captain and Tebbetts. He was inclined to blame young Hoffman for going ahead with policy-disturbing matters without official approval. However, he did not want to say anything which would annoy Easy; he regarded her, with some justification, as the most nearly indispensable member of the communications group. In consequence, Mersereau and others received some fallout from the administrator’s deflected ire.
This was not too serious, as far as Boyd was concerned. He had years before pigeonholed the pacifying of administrators along with shaving—something which took up time but did not demand full attention, and worth doing at all only because it was usually less trouble in the long run. The real attention-getter, the thing which kept even news from the Esket in the background, was the state of affairs at the Kwembly . . .
By himself he might have been moderately concerned, but only moderately. The missing Mesklinites weren’t close personal friends of his. He was civilized enough not to be any less bothered by their loss than if they had been human, but it was not as though they were his brothers or sons.
The Kwembly herself was a problem, but a fairly routine one. Land-cruisers had been in trouble before, and so far had always been extricated sooner or later. So, all in all, Mersereau would have been merely absorbed, not bothered, if left to himself.
He was not left to himself. Benj Hoffman felt much more strongly about the whole matter, and had a way of making his feelings clear. This wasn’t entirely by talking, though he was perfectly willing to talk. Even when silent he empathized. Boyd would find himself discussing with Dondragmer the progress of the melting-out plan, or the chances of another flood in terms of their effect on the missing helmsmen, rather than with reasonable and proper professional detachment. It was annoying. Beetchermarlf and Takoorch, and even Kervenser, just weren’t that central to the work, and the real question was the survival of the crew. Benj, sitting silently beside him, or, at most, interjecting a few remarks or questions, somehow managed to make objectivity seem like callousness; and Mersereau, who had never raised any children of his own, had no defense against that particular treatment. Easy knew perfectly well what was going on, but she did not interfere because she shared almost perfectly her son’s feelings. Partly because of her sex and partly because of her own background she felt a very intense sympathy for Beetchermarlf and his companion, and even for Takoorch. She had been caught in a rather similar situation some twenty-five years before, when a concatenation of errors had stranded her in an unmanned research vessel on a high-temperature, high-pressure planet.
In fact, she went to greater lengths than Benj had dared. Dondragmer might—probably would—have sent out a ground party to the site of Reffel’s disappearance, since the location was fairly well known; but it was unlikely that he would have risked sending one of his three remaining communicators along. Easy, partly by straightforward argument in her own name and partly by using her son’s techniques to swing Mersereau to the same side, convinced the captain that the risk of not taking the equipment along would be even greater. This discussion, like so many of the others, was conducted in Aucoin’s absence, and, even as he argued with Dondragmer, Mersereau was wondering how he would justify this one to the planner. Nevertheless, he argued on Easy’s side, with Benj almost grinning in the background.
With this claim on his attention, Boyd scarcely noticed the call from another observer that a couple of objects were moving across the screen which showed the Esket’s laboratory. He switched channels briefly and passed the word on to the Settlement, cutting back to the Kwembly without waiting for the end of the communication cycle. Later he claimed that he had never been really conscious of the Esket’s name in the report; he had thought of the message as a routine report from some observer or other, and his principal feeling had been one of irritation at being distracted. Some people would have snapped at the observer; Boyd, being the person he was, had taken what seemed to him the quickest and simplest way of disposing of the interruption. He had then quite genuinely forgotten the incident.
Benj had paid even less attention. The Esket incident had occurred long before his arrival at the station, and the name meant nothing in particular to him, although his mother had once mentioned her friends Destigmet and Kabremm to him.
It was Easy, of course, who had really reacted to the call. She scarcely noticed what Mersereau did or said, and never thought of telling Barlennan herself until more details came in. She moved immediately to a chair commanding a view of the “lost” cruiser’s screens and relegated the rest of the universe to background status.
Barlennan’s return call, therefore, brought him very little information. Easy, to whom it was passed, had seen nothing herself; by the time she had reached her new station all motion had ceased. The original observer was only able to say that he had seen two objects, a reel of cable, or rope, and a short length of pipe, roll across the Esket’s laboratory floor. It was possible that something might have pushed them, though there had been no sign of life around the vehicle for several terrestrial months; it was equally possible, and perhaps more probable, that something had tilted the Esket to start them rolling. So said the observer, though he could not suggest specifically what might have tipped the monstrous machine.
This left Barlennan in a quandary. It was possible that one of Destigmet’s crew had become careless. It was possible that natural causes might be operating, as the humans seemed to prefer to believe. It was also possible, considering what Barlennan himself had just been planning to do, that the whole thing was a piece of human fiction. The commander’s conscience made him attach rather more weight to this possibility than he might have done in other circumstances.
It was hard to see just what they could expect to accomplish by such a fiction, of course. It could hardly be a trap of any sort; there could be no wrong reaction to the story. Complete mystification was the only possible response. If there were something deeper and more subtle involved, Barlennan had to admit to himself that he couldn’t guess what it was.
And he didn’t like guessing anyway. It was so much easier to be able to take reports at face value, allowing only for the capabilities of the speaker and not worrying about his possible motives. At times, the commander reflected, the annoying straightforwardness of Dondragmer which made him disapprove of the whole Esket trick had something to be said for it.
Really, all one could do was assume-that the report was a truthful one; that should, at least, cause anything underhanded on the human side to backfire on its planners. In that case, there was nothing to do except check with Destigmet. That was simply another message to send on the Deedee.
Come to think of it, this was another potential check on the accuracy of the human reports. Certainly this one, whatever else could be said for or against it, showed signs of having come through quickly. Of course, Mrs. Hoffman was involved this time.
The thought that Easy’s involvement made the situation a special one was probably the only idea Barlennan and Aucoin would have had in common just then. Of course, the latter hadn’t heard anything about the new Esket incident so far, and even Mersereau hadn’t really thought about it. He was still otherwise engaged.
