Complete Short Fiction, page 207
Of course they could hear nothing. Not even the hoot which suddenly echoed across the ice penetrated the bridge to affect their communicator. They could not even guess why Dondragmer suddenly turned back from the hull as he was about to disappear under it. They could only watch as he raced back across the ice to a point just below his two men and waved excitedly at them, apparently indifferent to whatever there was to be learned about the fate of his helmsman and Benj’s friend.
XII
Dondragmer was far from indifferent, but by his standards it was normal to focus attention on a new matter likely to require action rather than clear up an old one where action was unlikely to help. He had not dropped the fate of his men from mind, but when a distant hoot bore the words: “Here’s the end of the stream” to him his program changed abruptly and drastically.
He could not see where the voice was coming from, since he was two feet below the general surface, but Borndender reported glimpses of a light perhaps half a mile away. At the captain’s order, the scientist climbed the hull part way to get a better view, while his assistant went in search of a rope to get the captain out of the ice pit. This took time. The sailors had, with proper professional care, returned the lines used in lowering the radiator bar to their proper places inside the cruiser; and when Skendra. Borndender’s assistant, tried to get through the main lock he found it sealed by a layer of clear ice which had frozen a quarter of an inch thick on the starboard side of the hull, evidently from the vapor emitted by the hot pool. Fortunately most of the holdfasts were projecting far enough through this to be usable, so he was able to climb on up to the bridge lock.
Meanwhile, Borndender called down that there were two lights approaching across the riverbed. At the captain’s order, he howled questions across the thousand-yard gap, and the two listened carefully for answers—even Mesklinite voices had trouble carrying distinct words for such a distance and through two layers of airsuit fabric. By the time Dondragmer was out of the hole, they knew that the approaching men were the part of Stakendee’s command which had been ordered to follow down the stream, and that they had reached its end less than a mile from the ship; but until the group actually reached them, no further details could be made out.
Even then, they could not entirely understand it; the description did not match anything familiar to them.
“The river stayed about the same size all the way down,” the sailors reported. “It wasn’t being fed from an; where, and didn’t seem to be evaporating. It wound among the stones a lot, when it got down to where they were. Then we began to run into the funniest obstructions. There would be a sort of dam of ice, with the stream running around one end or the other of it. Half a cable or so farther on there’d be another dam, with just the same thing happening. It was as though some of it froze when it met the ice among the stones, but only the beginning part. The water that followed stayed liquid and went on around the dam until it found some ice. The dams would build up to maybe half a body length high before the following water would find its way around We reached the last one, where it was still happening, just a few minutes ago. We’d seen the bright cloud rising over the ship before that, and wondered whether we ought to come back in case something was wrong; but we decided to carry out orders at least until the river started to lead us away from the Kwembly again.”
“Good,” said the captain. “You’re sure the stream wasn’t getting any bigger?”
“So far as we could judge, no.”
“All right. Maybe we have more time than I thought, and it isn’t a forerunner of the same thing that brought us here. I wish I understood why the liquid was freezing in that funny way, though.”
“We’d better check with the human beings,” suggested Borndender, who had no ideas on the matter either, but preferred not to put the fact too bluntly.
“Right. And they’ll want measurements and analyses. I suppose you didn’t bring a sample of that river,” he said, rather than asked, the newcomers.
“No, sir. We had nothing to carry it in.”
“All right. Born, get containers and bring some back; analyze it as well and as quickly as you can. One of these men will guide you. I’ll go back to the bridge and bring the humans up to date. The rest of you get tools and start chipping ice so we can use the main lock.”
Dondragmer closed the conversation by starting to climb the ice-crusted hull. He waved toward the bridge as he went, assuming that he was being watched and perhaps even recognized.
Benj and McDevitt had managed to keep track of him, though neither found it easy to tell Mesklinites apart, and were waiting eagerly when he reached the bridge to hear what he had to say. Benj in particular had grown even more tense since the search under the cruiser had been interrupted; perhaps the helmsmen had not been there after all—perhaps they had been among the newcomers who had arrived to interrupt the search—perhaps—perhaps . . .
McDevitt was a patient man by nature and liked the youngster, but even he was getting irritated by the time Dondragmer’s voice reached the station.
The report fascinated the meteorologist, though it was no consolation to his young companion. Benj wanted to interrupt with a question about Beetchermarlf, but knew that it would be futile; and when the captain’s account ended, McDevitt immediately began to talk.
“This is not much more than a guess, Captain,” he began, “though perhaps your scientist will be able to stiffen it when he analyzes those samples. It seems possible that the pool around you was originally an ammonia-water solution—we had evidence of that before—which froze, not because the temperature went down, but because it lost much of its ammonia and its freezing point went up. The fog around you just before this whole trouble started, back on the snowfield, was ammonia, your scientists reported; I’m guessing that it came from the colder areas far to the west. Its droplets began to react with the water ice, and melted it partly by forming a eutectic and partly by releasing heat—you were afraid of something of that sort even before it happened, as I remember. That started your first flood. When the ammonia cloud passed on into Low Alpha, the solution around you began to lose ammonia by evaporation, and finally the mixture which was left was below its freezing point. I’m guessing that the fog encountered by Stakendee is more ammonia, and provided the material for the rivulet he found. As it meets the water ice near you they dissolve mutually until the mixture is too dilute in ammonia to be liquid any more—this forms the dam your men described, and the liquid ammonia still coming has to find a way around. I would suggest that if you can find a way to divert that stream over to your ship, and if there proves to be enough of it, your melting-out problem would be solved.” Benj, listening in spite of his mood, thought of wax flowing from a guttering candle and freezing first on one front and then another. He wondered whether the computers would handle the two situations alike, if ammonia and heat were handled the same way in the two problems.
“You mean I shouldn’t worry about a possible flood?” Dondragmer’s voice finally returned.
“I’m guessing not,” replied McDevitt. “If I’m right about this picture, and we’ve been talking it over a lot up here, the fog that Stakendee met should have passed over the snow plain you came from—or what’s left of it—and if it were going to cause another flood that should have reached you by now. I suspect the snow, which was high enough to spill into the pass you were washed through, was all used up on the first flood, and that’s why you were finally left stranded where you are. If the new fog hasn’t reached you yet by the way, I think I know the reason.
The place where Stakendee met it is a few feet higher than you are, and air flowing from the west is coming downhill. With Dhrawn’s gravity and that air composition there’d be a terrific foehn effect-adiabatic heating as the pressure rises—and the stuff is probably evaporating just as it gets to the place where Stakendee met it.”
Dondragmer took a while to digest this. For a few seconds after the normal delay time, McDevitt wondered whether he had made himself clear; then another question came through.
“But if the ammonia fog were simply evaporating, the gas would still be there, and must be in the air around us now. Why isn’t it melting the ice just as effectively as though it were in liquid drops? fs some physical law operating which I missed in the College?
“I’m not sure whether state and concentration would make all that difference, just from memory,” admitted the meteorologist. “When Borndender gets the new data up here I’ll feed the whole works into the machine to see whether this guess of ours is ignoring too many facts. On the basis of what I have now, I still think it’s a reasonable one, but I admit it has its fuzzy aspects. There are just too many variables; with only water they are practically infinite, if you’ll forgive a loose use of the word, and with water and ammonia together the number is squared, if not worse.
“To shift from abstract to concrete, I can see Stakendee’s screen arid he’s still going along beside that streamlet in the fog; he hasn’t reached the source, but I haven’t seen any other watercourses feeding in from either side. It’s only a couple of your body-lengths wide, and has stayed about the same all along.”
“That’s a relief,” came the eventual response. “I suppose if a real flood were coming that river would be some indication. Very well, I’ll report again as soon as Borndender has his information. Please keep watching Stakendee. I’m going outside again to check under the hull; I was interrupted before.” The meteorologist had wanted to say more, but was silenced by the realization that Dondragmer would not be there to hear his words by the time they arrived. He may also have been feeling some sympathy for Benj.
They watched eagerly, the man almost as concerned as the boy, for the red-and-black inchworm to appear on the side of the hull within range of the pickup. It was not visible all the way to the ground, since Dondragmer had to go forward directly under the bridge and out of the field of view; but they saw him again near the point where the rope which had been used to get him out a few minutes earlier was still snubbed around one of Bordender’s bending posts.
They watched him swarm down the line into the pit. A Mesklinite hanging on a rope about the thickness of a six-pound nylon fishline, and free to swing pendulum-style in forty Earth gravities, is quite a sight even when the distance he has to climb is not much greater than his own body length. Even Benj stopped thinking about Beetchermarlf for a moment.
The captain was no longer worried about the ice; it was presumably frozen all the way to the bottom by now, and he went straight toward the cruiser without bothering to stay on the stones. He slowed a trifle as he drew near, eyeing the cavity in front of him thoughtfully.
Practically, the Kwembly was still frozen in, of course. The melted area had reached her trucks for a distance of some sixty feet fore and aft, but the ice was still above the mattress beyond those limits and on the port side. Even within that range, the lower part of the treads had still been an inch or two under water when the heater gave out. Beetchermarlf’s control cables had been largely freed, but of the helmsman himself there was no sign whatever. Dondragmer had no hope of finding the two alive under the Kwembly, they would obviously have emerged long ago had this been the case. The captain would not have offered large odds on the chance of finding bodies, either. Like McDevitt, he knew that there was an unevaluable probability that the crewmen had not been under the hull at all when the freeze-up occurred. There had, after all, been two other unexplained disappearances; Dondragmer’s educated guess at the whereabouts of Kervenser and Reffel was far from a certainty even in his own mind.
It was dark undernearth, out of range of the floods. Dondragmer could still see—a response to abrupt changes of illumination was a normal adaptation to Mesklin’s eighteen-minute rotation period—but some details escaped him. He saw the condition of the two trucks whose treads had been ruined by the helmsmen’s escape efforts, and he saw the piles of stones they had made in the attempt to confine the hot water in a small area; but he missed the slash in the mattress where the two had taken final refuge.
What he saw made it obvious, however, that at least one of the missing men had been there for a while. Since the volume which had evidently not frozen at all was small, the most likely guess seemed to be that they had been caught in the encroaching ice after doing the work which could be seen—though it was certainly hard to see just how this could have happened. The captain made a rapid check the full length of the ice-walled cavern, examining every exposed truck fore and aft, top and sides. It never occurred to him to look higher. He had, after all, taken part in the building of the huge vehicle; he knew there was nowhere higher to go.
He emerged at last into the light and the view field of the communicator. His appearance alone was something of a relief to Benj; the boy had concluded, just as the captain had, that the helmsmen could not be under the hull alive, and he had rather expected to see Dondragmer pulling bodies after him. The relief was only relative, of course; the burning question remained—where was Beetchermarlf? The captain was climbing out of the pit and leaving the field of view. Maybe he was coming back to the bridge to make a detailed report. Benj, now showing clearly the symptoms of sleeplessness, waited silently with his fists clenched.
But Dondragmer’s voice did not come. The captain had planned to tell the human observers what he had found, indeed; but on the way up the side of the hull, visible to them but unrecognized, he paused to talk to one of the men who was chipping ice from the lock exit.
“I only got what the human Hoffman told me about what you found when your party first reached that stream,” he said. “Are there any more details I should know? I have the picture that you had just met someone at the point where the ground was almost up into the fog, but I never heard from Hoffman whether it was Reffel or Kervenser. Who was it? And are the helicopters all right? There was an interruption just then—someone up above apparently caught sight of Kabremm back at the Esket, and I cut in myself because the stream you had found worried me. That’s why I split your party. Who was it you found?”
“It was Kabremm.”
Dondragmer almost lost his grip on the holdfasts.
“Kabremm? Destigmet’s first officer? Here? And a human being recognized him—it was your screen he was seen on?”
“It sounded that way, sir. He didn’t see our communicator until it was too late, and none of us thought for an instant that there was a chance of a human being telling one of us from another—at least, not between the time we recognized him ourselves and the time it was too late.”
“But what is he doing here? This planet has three times the area of Mesklin; there are plenty of other places to be. I knew the commander was going to hit shoals sooner or later playing this Esket trick on the human beings, but I certainly never thought he’d ground on such silly bad luck as this.”
“It’s not entirely chance, sir. Kabremm didn’t have time to tell us much—we took advantage of your order about exploring the stream to break up and get him out of sight of the communicator—but I understand this river has been giving trouble most of the night. There’s a buildup of ice five million or so cables downstream, not very far from the Esket, and a sort of ice river is flowing slowly into the hot lands. The Esket and the mines and the farms are right in its way.”
“Farms?”
“That’s what Destigmet calls them. Practically a Settlement with hydroponic tanks—a sort of oversized life-support rig that doesn’t have to balance as closely as the cruiser ones do. Anyway, Destigmet sent out the Gwelf under Kabremm to explore upstream in the hope of finding out how bad the ice river was likely to get. They had grounded where we met them because of the fog—they could have flown over it easily enough, but they couldn’t have seen the riverbed through it.”
“Then they must have arrived since the flood that brought us here, and if they were examining the riverbed they flew right over us. How could they possibly have missed our lights?”
“I don’t know, sir. If Kabremm told Stakendee, I didn’t hear him.”
Dondragmer gave the rippling equivalent of a shrug. “Probably he did, and made it a point to stay out of reach of our human eyes. I suppose Kervenser and Reffel ran into the Gwelf, and Reffel used his vision shutter to keep the dirigible from human sight; but I still don’t see why Kervenser, at least, didn’t come back to report.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know about any of that, either,” replied the sailor.
“Then the river we’ve washed into must bend north, if it leads to the Esket area.” The other judged correctly that Dondragmer was merely thinking out loud, and made no comment. The captain pondered silently for another minute or two. “The big question is whether the commander heard it, too, when the human—I suppose it was Mrs. Hoffman; she is about the only one that familiar with us—called out Kabremm’s name. If he did, he probably thought that someone had been careless back at the Esket, as I did. You heard her on your set and I heard her on mine, but that’s reasonable; they’re both Kwembly communicators, and probably all in one place up at the station. We don’t know, though, about their links with the Settlement. I’ve heard that all their communication equipment is in one room, but it must be a big room and the different sets may not be very close together. It’s equally possible that Bari did, or did not, hear her.
“What it all shapes up to is that one human being has recognized an Esket crew member, not only alive long after they were all supposed to be dead, but five or six million cables from the place where they presumably died. We don’t know how certain this human being was of the identification; certain enough to call Kabremm’s name on impulse, maybe not certain enough to report to other humans without further checking. After all, such a report could sound pretty silly without strong evidence. We don’t know whether Barlennan knows of this slip; and worst of all, we can’t tell what he’s likely to answer when questions about it come his way. His safest and most probable line would be complete ignorance seasoned with shocked amazement, and I suppose he’ll realize that, but I certainly wish I could talk to him without having human beings along the corridor.”
