Complete Short Fiction, page 214
“There would have to be several minutes of interruption of neutrino data while the relays were being preempted,” Ib said finally.
“Out of the how many years that they’re integrating that material?” Benj was not usually sarcastic with either of his parents, but his feelings were once more growing warm. His father nodded silently, conceding the point, and continued to think.
It must have been five minutes later, though Benj would have sworn to a greater number, that the senior Hoffman got suddenly to his feet.
“Come on, Son. You’re perfectly right. It will work for an initial space-to-surface landing, and for a surface-to-orbit lift-off, and that’s enough. For surface-to-surface flight even one second is too much control delay, but we can do without that.”
“Sure!” enthused Benj. “Lift-off into orbit, get your breath, change the orbit to suit your landing spot, and go back down.”
“That would work, but don’t mention it. For one thing, if we made a habit of it there would be a significant interruption of neutrino data transmission. Besides, I’ve wanted an excuse for this almost ever since I joined this project. Now I have one, and I’m going to use it.”
“An excuse for what?”
“For doing exactly what I think Barlennan has been trying to maneuver us into doing all along: put Mesklinite pilots on the barge. I suppose he wants his own interstellar ship, some time, so that he can start leading the same life among the stars that he used to do on Mesklin’s oceans, but he’ll have to make do with one quantum jump at a time.”
“Is that what you think he’s been up to? Why should he care about having his own space pilots so much? And come to think of it, why wasn’t that a good idea in the first place, if the Mesklinites can learn how?”
“It was, and there’s no reason to doubt that they can.”
“Then why wasn’t it done that way all along?”
“I’d rather not lecture on that subject just now. I like to feel as much pride in my species as circumstances allow, and the explanation doesn’t reflect much credit either on man’s rationality, or his emotional control.”
“I can guess, then,” replied Benj. “But in that case, what makes you think we can change it now?”
“Because now, at the trifling cost of descending to the same general level of emotional reasoning, we have a handle on some of man’s less generous drives. I’m going down to the planetology lab and filibuster. I’m going to ask those chemists why they don’t know what trapped the Kwembly, and when they say it’s because they don’t have any samples of the mud, I’m going to ask them why they don’t. I’m going to ask them why they’ve been making do with seismic and neutrino-shadow data when they might as well be analyzing mineral samples carted up here from every spot where a Mesklinite cruiser has stopped for ten minutes. If you prefer not to descend to that level, and would rather work with mankind’s nobler emotions, begin thinking of all the heart-rending remarks you could make about the horror and cruelty of leaving your friend Beetchermarlf to suffocate slowly on an alien world parsecs from his home. We could use that if we have to take this argument to a higher authority, like the general public. I don’t think we’ll really need to, but right now I’m in no mood to restrict myself to clean fighting and logical argument.
“If Alan Aucoin growls about the cost of operating the barge . . . think he has too much sense . . . I’m going to jump on him with both feet. Energy has been practically free ever since we’ve had fusion devices; what costs is personal skill. He’ll have to use Mesklinite crews anyway, so that investment is already made; and by letting the barge drift out here unused he’s wasting its cost. I know there’s a small hole in that logic, but if you point it out in Dr. Aucoin’s hearing I’ll paddle you for the first time since you were seven—and I don’t think the last decade has done too much to my arm. You let Aucoin do his own thinking.”
“You needn’t get annoyed with me, Dad.”
“I’m not. In fact, I’m not as much annoyed as I am scared.”
“Scared? Of what?”
“Of what may happen to Barlennan and his people on what your mother calls ‘that horrible planet.’ ”
“But why? Why now, more than before?”
“Because I’m coming gradually to realize that Barlennan is an intelligent, forceful, thoughtful, ambitious, and reasonably well-educated being, just as my only son was six years ago; and I remember your diving outfit much too well. Come on. We have an astronautics school to get organized, and a student body to collect.”
EPILOGUE
At two hundred miles, the barge was just visible as a starlike object reflecting Lalande 21185’s feeble light. Benj had watched the vessel as it pulled up to that distance and moved into what its pilot considered a decent station-keeping orbit, but neither he nor the pilot had discussed technical details. It was so handy to be able to hold a conversation without waiting a full minute for the other fellow’s answer that Benj and Beetchermarlf had simply chattered.
These conversations were becoming less and less frequent. Benj was really back at work now and, he suspected, making up for lost time. Beetchermarlf was often too far away on practice flights to talk at all, and even more frequently too occupied to converse with anyone but his instructor.
“Time to turn it over, Beetch,” the boy ended the present exchange as he heard Tebbetts’ whistling from down the shaft. “The taskmaster is on the way.”
“I’m ready when he is,” came the reply. “Does he want to use your language, or mine, this time?”
“He’ll let you know; he didn’t tell me. Here he is,” replied Benj.
The bearded astronomer, however, spoke first to Benj after looking quickly around. The two were drifting weightless in the direct-observation section at the center of the station’s connecting bar, and Tebbetts had taken for granted that the barge and his student would be drifting alongside. All his quick glance caught was the dull coal of the sun in one direction and the dimly lit disk of Dhrawn, little larger than Luna seen from Earth, in the other.
“Where is he, Benj? I thought I heard you talking to him, so I assumed he was close. I hope he isn’t late. He should be solving intercept orbits, even with nomographs instead of highspeed computers, better than that by now.”
“He’s here, sir.” The boy pointed. “Just over two hundred miles away, in a 17.8 minute orbit around the station.”
Tebbetts blinked. “That’s ridiculous. I don’t think this heap of hardware would whip anything around in that time at a distance of two hundred feet, let alone that many miles. He’d have to use power, accelerating straight toward us—”
“He is, sir. About two hundred Gs acceleration. The time is the rotation period of Mesklin, and the acceleration is the gravity value at his home port. He says he hasn’t been so comfortable since he signed up with Barlennan, and wishes there were some way to turn up the sunlight.”
The astronomer smiled slowly.
“Yes. I see. That does make sense. I should have thought of it myself. I have some more practice exercises for him here, but that’s about as good as any of them. I should do more of that sort of thing. Well, let’s get at it. Can you stay to check my language? I think I have the Stennish words for everything in today’s work, and space is empty enough so that his mistakes and mine should both be relatively harmless, but there’s no need to take chances.”
“It’s too bad the Kwembly couldn’t be salvaged after all,” remarked Aucoin, “but Dondragmer’s crew is doing a very good and effective study of the area while they’re waiting for relief. I think it was a very good idea to send the Kaliff after them with a skeleton crew and let them work while they waited, instead of taking them back to the Settlement in the barge. That would have been pretty dangerous anyway, until there are practiced Mesklinite pilots. The single landing near the Kwembly to get the two helmsmen, and a direct return to space while they were trained, was probably the safest way to do it.
“But now we have this trouble with the Smof. At this rate we’ll be out of cruisers before we’re halfway around Low Alpha. Does anyone know the Smofs commander the way Easy knows Dondragmer? You don’t, I suppose, Easy? Can anyone give a guess at his ability to get himself out of trouble? Or are we going to have to risk sending the barge down before those two Mesklinites are fully trained?”
“Tebbetts thinks Beetchermarlf could handle a surface landing now, as long as it wasn’t complicated by mechanical emergencies,” pointed out an engineer. “Personally I wouldn’t hesitate to let him go.”
“You may be right. The trouble is, though, that we certainly can’t land the barge on an ice pack, and not even the barge can lift one of those land-cruisers even if there were a way of fastening them together without an actual landing. Beetchermarlf and Takoorch may as well continue their training for the moment. What I want as soon as possible, Planetology, is the best direction and distance for the Smof’s crew to trek if they do have to abandon the cruiser—that is, the closest spot where the barge could land to pick them up. If it’s close to their present location, don’t tell them, of course; I want them to do their best to save the cruiser, and there’s no point in tempting them with an easy escape.” Ib Hoffman stirred slightly, but refrained from comment. Aucoin, from one point of view, was probably justified. The administrator went on, “Also, is there definite word on the phenomenon that trapped the Kwembly? You’ve had specimens of the mud, or whatever it is, that Beetchermarlf brought up, for weeks now.”
“Yes,” replied a chemist. “It’s a fascinating example of surface action. It’s sensitive to the nature and particle size of the minerals present, the proportions of water and ammonia in the lubricating fluid, the temperature, and the pressure. The Kwembly’s weight, of course, was the main cause of trouble; the Mesklinites could walk around on it—in fact, they did——safely enough. Once triggered by a pressure peak, the strength went out of the stuff in a wave—”
“All right, the rest can serve for a paper,” Aucoin nodded. “Is there any way to identify such a surface without putting a cruiser, or the barge, onto it?”
“Hm-m-m. I’d say yes. Radiation temperature should be information enough—or at least, it would serve warning that further tests should be made. For that matter, I wouldn’t worry about its ever getting the barge; the jets would boil the water and ammonia out of such a surface safely before touchdown.”
Aucoin nodded, and passed on to other matters. Cruiser reports—publication reports—supply reports—planning prospectuses . . .
Ib Hoffman’s attention wandered, important though he knew the work to be. His mind kept going back to the Kwembly and the Smof, and to a well-designed, well-built piece of diving gear which had almost killed an eleven-year-old boy. The reports, punctuated by Aucoin’s sometimes acid comments, droned on; and slowly Ib made up his mind.
“I think we’re getting ahead of the situation,” remarked Barlennan. “There was a good excuse for taking the communicators out of the Kwembly, since she was being abandoned, so we’ve been able to work on her with no restrictions. Jemblakee and Deeslenver seem to feel that she can be back in running condition in another day.” He glanced up at the feeble sun, almost exactly overhead. “The mud holding her has been nearly all washed away from the river side with water; they’ve jelled it on the other side with ammonia from the spring, so that she wouldn’t drift away before we were ready. They have a canal washed all the way to the river. The human chemists were certainly helpful about that stuff. I hated to disappoint them with the report that we had to give up. It was funny how the one who talked to Dee kept insisting that he was only guessing, while he made suggestion after suggestion, and they all worked.”
“That seems to be a human trait—lack of self-confidence,” remarked Guzmeen. “When did this news come? I didn’t see any flier.”
“The Deedee came in an hour ago, and is gone again. There’s too much for that machine to do; we’ve got to face that problem. It was bad enough when we lost the Elsh, and with Kabremm and his Gwelf overdue things are piling up. I hope we find him; he’s a good observer, among other things. Maybe the Kaliff will turn up something; he was supposed to be scouting a rescue route to get her to Dondragmer’s camp, so there’s a fair chance that one of Kenanken’s scout fliers may spot him. He’s less than a day overdue so far, so he should still be alive—”
“And with all this, you say we’re ahead of the situation?” cut in Guzmeen.
“Yes. Remember, the whole aim of the Esket act was to persuade the human beings to let us use spaceships. That’s been accomplished, or at least is beginning. The development of our self-support capacity was incidental to that end, though it was also desirable in itself. It’s a nuisance that we’ve lost so much of it now, but not really a catastrophe. We haven’t lost the personnel of the Esket, except maybe Kabremm and his dirigible crew and those of the Elsh, of course; just a lot of work.”
“But even Kabremm and Karfrengin aren’t exactly expendable. There aren’t very many of us. If Dondragmer and his crew don’t keep alive until the Kaliff reaches them, we’ll have taken a really serious loss; at least our dirigible crews weren’t our scientists and engineers.”
“Don’s in no real danger. They can always be picked up by Beetchermarlf in the human spaceship—I mean our spaceship.”
“And if anything goes wrong with that operation we’re out not only our only spaceship but our only space pilots.”
“Which suggests to me,” Barlennan said thoughtfully, “that we should try to regain some lost ground. As soon as the Kwembly is ready she should start hunting a suitable place and start replacing the Esket settlement. Don’s scientists should have little trouble finding a good location; Dhrawn seems to be rich in metal ores. Maybe we should have him search closer to here so that communication will be quicker, though.
“We’ll have to build more dirigibles; the one we have left isn’t nearly enough for the work. Maybe we ought to design bigger ones.”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” a technician who had been listening silently up to this point spoke up. “Do you suppose that it would be smart to find out more—tactfully, of course—from the humans about dirigibles? We’ve never discussed the subject with them; they showed you about balloons years ago, and some of our own people got the idea of using the human power sources with them. We don’t know if they ever used them at all. Maybe it isn’t just bad luck that we’ve lost two out of our three in a short time. Maybe there’s something fundamentally wrong with the whole idea.”
The commander gave a gesture of impatience.
“That’s silly. I didn’t try to pick rip a complete scientific education from the aliens, since it was obviously going to take too long; but one thing I did gather was that the rules, which are the central theme of the whole field, are essentially simple. Once the humans started concentrating on basic rules, they went from sailing ships to spaceships in a couple of hundred years. Balloons, powered or not, are simple devices; I understand them perfectly myself. Putting an engine aboard doesn’t change that; the same rules have to be working.”
The technician eyed his commander thoughtfully, and thought briefly of electron tubes and television circuits before replying.
“I suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “that a piece of a tent being blown away by the gale, and a ship being tacked into the wind, are also examples of the same rules at work.”
Barlennan didn’t want to give an affirmative answer, but he could find nothing better.
He was still trying to shrug off the technician’s remark, but only succeeding in growing more and more doubtful of his situation, some twenty hours later when a messenger called him to the communication room. As soon as he entered, Guzmeen spoke briefly into a microphone; a minute later, a human face which neither of them recognized appeared on the screen.
“I am Ib Hoffman, Easy’s husband and Benj’s father,” the stranger began without preamble. “I am speaking to you, Barlennan, and you, Dondragmer, at a time when no one else here is listening but my wife and son. The rest of the observing crew are concentrating on a new emergency involving one of the cruisers. Also, I am using your language as best I can. Easy is listening, knows what I want to say, and will correct me if I err too badly. I have decided that it is critically important to both you and us to clear up some points of misunderstanding. I don’t intend to mention these points to anyone else up here, for reasons which will be obvious before I finish talking.
“First, Barlennan, my hearty congratulations. I am just about certain that when we turned the barge over to a Mesklinite pilot we fulfilled one of your chief plans, probably well before you meant or expected it to happen. That’s fine. I wanted it to happen, too. Probably you want to make interstellar flights on your own, later on; that’s fine with me, too. I’ll help.
“You seem to feel that not all human beings agree with me, and that you have to act indirectly. I can’t blame you for that. I can’t even prove to you that I’m sincere; you can’t observe my actions directly, so what you choose to believe of what I say is beyond my control. I still have to say it.
“I don’t know just how far you went to set up the situation which let me argue Aucoin into approving the transfer of the barge. I suspect that the Esket disappearance wasn’t genuine. I’m not at all sure of the real status of the Kwembly. I’m almost certain that you have done a good deal more exploring, one way or another, than you have reported to us. I won’t say I don’t care, because I do; we’re here to learn as much as possible about Dhrawn, and what you don’t tell us is a loss to the project. I can’t threaten you with penalties for breach of contract, since I’m not completely certain you’ve broken it and am in no position to carry out threats. I do want to persuade you, though, that it will be better for both of us if we do without secrets. We’re at a point where anything less than complete frankness is likely to cost us a lot and cost you everything. To make that point, I’m going to tell you a story.
