Complete Short Fiction, page 230
“Right. Or at least reasonable,” he agreed. “Just the same, it seems pretty likely that he’s had some sort of accident. Otherwise, the chances are, he’d have come within radio range of someone hours ago. If the accident occurred at the beginning, just as he started back toward us—well, he should still be somewhere around here. It seems to me we should keep at what we’re doing right now—search this area. It’s the best chance.”
“Maybe,” returned Marie. “But it would make sense for at least one person to follow back and try my idea. I’d be willing to go by myself—” She fell silent. She knew the dangers of traveling alone on Moon territory. She was putting Jim Talles in a completely impossible position.
But Talles didn’t consider it impossible. He didn’t even stop to think. “Take the crawler,” he said. Marie stood motionless for perhaps a second, a startled expression behind her faceplate. Then she whirledand leaped toward the vehicle.
“Just don’t turn your brains off,” he added as she swung into the cab. Then the machine was rolling smoothly away behind its shadow toward the hilltop where they had started searching. It stayed in sight for several minutes, finally vanished over a ridge.
A sensibly calculated risk, Talles told himself. Even if he did have to worry now about two kids instead of one.
A seventh hour.
An eight and ninth. Another small group of helpers arrived, with the cheerful news that they had seen nothing of either Marie or the crawler, much less of Rick. The news was cheerful only because Talles was able to convince himself that it meant the girl must have found a reasonable branch-off point on the backtrail. The orderly search went on.
Peter Willett caught the first glimpse of the returning crawler. He was so nearly asleep that it took him several seconds to digest what his eyes were trying to tell ‘ him. The reaction of Jim Talles to Peter’s call was almost as slow. Jim had managed to make the young people take some sort of rest in brief shifts but had had none himself. He watched the slowly approaching machine for perhaps half a minute before finding his voice.
“Marie! Have you found him? Is he all right?” Then, as he took in the astonishingly slow speed at which the machine was approaching, he croaked, “What’s wrong?”
“Sorry, Uncle Jim,” came Rick’s voice. “Marie is asleep. She told me which way to go and explained the crawler’s controls, then just could not stay awake. Say, I’m not very good at driving this thing. Maybe I’d better stop here and let you come and take over.”
FOUR hours later, at North-Down, Marie was awake enough to make light of the matter.
“Once you understand how a fellow thinks, it’s easy enough to guess what he’ll do. The only really difficult choice after I took the crawler was my first one, between a fairly wide and level gully that led southwest and a narrow one that went more nearly west, the way Rick would want to go. I didn’t think the narrow one would go through, so I picked the other. I still don’t know whether Rick wasted any time on the dead end. At the next guessing point I had a footprint to help, but it was wrong. Rick must have started one way and then changed his mind. Another blind alley. After that it was easy, until I came to a fault where you could see the Sun coming through—it had to be a clear path west. Partway through it there’s a thirty-foot downstep in loose soil, and I could see where the edge had broken away—”
“Bixby’s Grave,” remarked one of her adult listeners. “How did he get that far off course?”
“That whole area is mostly fault cracks,” pointed out Marie. “Most of the time the Sun can’t be seen, and sunlight on rocks overhead can be very tricky. Anyway, Rick had left prints in the gully, so I knew I was right by then. It was too narrow for the crawler and I’d gone in on foot. I didn’t dare follow Rick over the edge. But I flashed my light on the walls over the step, and he saw it and flashed his. So I went back to the crawler and got a rope and that was all.”
“All?” asked Jim Talles. “I wouldn’t say so.”
“Well, except for the luck. Rick said he’d been asleep down there for a while—the other end was blocked, and the crack the sun was shining through didn’t come within forty feet of his level. If he’d been asleep when I flashed my light, he’d be there now and I’d still be looking for the other end of the crack so as to guess my way away from him. But how did you know about that? Or were you guessing, too?”
“That wasn’t what I had in mind; I neither knew nor guessed. I—”
“I know what I want you to tell me,” cut in Jeb McCulloch. “I know you were right, but what made you decide that Rick had gone along the road to Lick E instead of the way up to Pic G as had been planned? I imagine that’s what Jim would like you to explain, though I realize he must know the answer.”
“Easy enough,” Marie D’Nombu smiled. “Which way is Pic G from North-Down?”
“Straight north, of course.”
“Right. And Rick knew that from the maps. How did you find north, Rick?”
The boy was surprised. “North Star, of course. You can see—”
Marie shook her head, and grinned at McCulloch.
“No, Rick. It’s too bad you didn’t get here and start your hike a couple of hours later. Polaris would have been set by then, instead of hanging right above Lick E Pass—and when you couldn’t find it you might have remembered that it isn’t the North Star here.”
The Logical Life
“Excuse me, Laird.” T’Nekku put the helm hard over, and his boat swung about so that her bow was into the wind, the boom trailing aft just above the giant’s head.
The human passenger swung the infrared flash in his hand to see what his friend, pilot and guide was up to. The Tuinainen was partly hidden by the mast and rigging—Cunningham was riding as far up in the bow as he could get, in the interest of comfort and safety for both of them—but the beam showed fairly clearly the bulky pyramid that was his body. It looked whitish, but color of course was meaningless through the converter goggles. The native had stood up without disturbing the boat’s trim—it was merely a matter of straightening the four blocky legs which supported him—and seized a harpoon. Judging by the weapon’s position, his attention was directed off to port; Cunningham swung the flash in that direction, but could see only ocean. He pushed up his goggles for a moment, but unaided human eyes did no better. The Orion Nebula covered a quarter of the sky behind him, and several O-type stars lay within a parsec of Omituinen; but starlight is still only starlight and no nebula is much help to Earthly optics.
“What’s the trouble, Nek?” he asked. “Anything I can do?”
“Nothing,” came the rumbling voice of the native. “It’s a kind of fish you haven’t seen, or at least we don’t have a common word for it. He’s hungry too, I judge; just a moment while I settle who eats whom.” The harpoon suddenly vanished; the arm holding it had swung too fast for Cunningham’s eye to follow. The missile plunged into a wave with a barely audible schloop twenty yards away, and the ocean surface erupted into a cloud of spray. The man was not sure whether to be frightened or not. T’Nekku seemed to be taking the whole matter calmly, but the only emotion Cunningham had ever seen him show was humor. The giant took the serious things of life with a calmness few human beings could even emulate, much less feel. The man wondered whether the fish represented a real menace or not. He could tell from the splashing that it must be quite large, but the boat was over thirty feet long and, in spite of its bone frame and skin covering, solidly built.
The ‘Tuinainen was playing the harpoon line, hauling in when he could, letting out when he had to. Evidently the fish was trying to escape rather than attack, which was some relief. Judging by the sound, it was leaping out of the water repeatedly. Cunningham wished he could see it. Several times the boat heeled several degrees toward the scene of the struggle, but presently the splashing became less violent, the hull righted itself and T’Nekku began to haul in steadily, coiling the line beside him as he had not had time to do before.
At last his quarry was alongside. With the aid of a noose that he slung outboard and maneuvered briefly, the native hauled into view something which might have come straight from a Gulf Stream marlin contest. Cunningham was not too surprised. Omituinen had some weird-looking land life, his guide being far from the least remarkable; but there is such a thing as parallel evolution, and a fish does have the engineering requirements of a fish.
T’Nekku did something, Cunningham could not see just what, and the creature stopped struggling. The rumbling voice came again.
“Do you want to examine this before I eat it?” The words were in well-enunciated Lingua Terra. The man hesitated a moment before answering.
“Not unless the ocean is a lot warmer here than around your islands,” he finally said. “Have you felt it, or should I check by instrument?”
“It is a little warmer than at home, but still comfortable. With your strong feeling for numbers, you should probably use your thermometer. I can wait a few minutes even though the fish is here, but please waste no time.”
Cunningham knew better than to waste time. Like men, the ‘Tuinainen had two kinds of appetite—the habit-and-memory-controlled intellectual one and the more emotional one triggered by the actual presence of food. However, they had less control than an adult human being over the latter, and Cunningham was acutely aware that T’Nekku outweighed him five to one and was correspondingly strong. His instruments were small and light, since he was planning to carry the kit for long distances on foot under Omituinen’s fifty-percent-over gravity. He whipped out a thermometer, made sure his airsuit glove was tight at the wrist, and reached overside into the ammonia ocean. Waiting a second or two for the instrument to equilibrate, he pressed the lock button and brought it up to his flash to read.
“Six degrees up. Maybe you’d better let me have a small slice. Be sure it includes some skin, please.” The ‘Tuinainen made some more obscure motions and boomed, “Ready to catch? Or should I toss it on the deck beside you?”
“On the deck, please. I can’t see well enough to trust myself for a catch, even if I were sure of my reflexes in your gravity. Good eating.” There was a thud beside him, and he picked up the sliver of tissue and slipped it into the freezer installed in the bow. Detailed examination would have to come later, under much more suitable conditions.
T’Nekku in the meantime was using a couple of hands to devour his catch and the others to bring his vessel once more onto course. The first operation took longer, but even that was completed in a very few minutes. He left nothing of the fish, though the man knew it had bones—he heard them crunch as the native ate.
The wind, dead astern, was the only way Cunningham could tell they were on course, though keeping the nebula to his left also meant something. The island the man wanted to visit was a heat source according to the long-wave maps from space—that was why he wanted to go there. Omituinen was a sunless planet. It had condensed from cosmic dust, just as the solar system had, but lacked the mass or the hydrogen content to be a star. Its parent cloud, in the Orion area, had been rich—by astronomical standards—in heavy elements; there was enough K-40 and uranium-series matter to have warmed the planet hundreds of degrees over the billions of years it had existed. It seemed that the radioactives had concentrated, presumably through zone-melting phenomena, so that some restricted areas of the world were actually volcanic. Indeed, Omituinen must have been much hotter at some time in the past, though radioactivity might not have been responsible—somehow it had gotten rid of most of its hydrogen, which was hardly more common than on Earth.
To a human explorer, the main problem was the planet’s lack of light. Cunningham would have been much happier if a spotlight or even a hand flash had not been a death ray to Omituinan life. He trusted his native friend, but still wished he could see where he was going. It was a frightening ride.
Of course, clouds could be seen, silhouetted against the nebula or glimmering faintly in the starlight. Perhaps, like Columbus or Maui, he could use a thunderhead to find his goal, but the chances were poor.
Sauvala, at the trading post on Uhittelava, had claimed he was crazy, the trader being well below retirement age and quite satisfied with ordinary dangers. The explorer had made no effort to explain to him what a few decades without meaningful work would do to a normal human mind—that a man has to do something. Competitive sports seem futile after a while, win or lose. The gratifying of physical appetites palls even sooner and is never a full-time satisfaction anyway. Aside from artistic expression, which is not open to all minds, only active research—any bit of which may suddenly turn out to be of life-and-death importance to mankind or even to all intelligence—can provide both the satisfaction of accomplishment and the necessary feeling of usefulness. So, at least, Cunningham felt.
Sauvala was far too young to think so. He had helped, though. He had found the Terran-speaking T’Nekku, had supplied the maps Cunningham needed and had argued the pros and cons of the explorer’s driving theory. The trader was a fairly good biologist himself, since Omituinen’s principal export was enzymes, produced by its hydrazine-and-nitrate-using animal life. All the youngster had asked in return for his help was specimens to check for commercial value.
This fitted nicely with Cunningham’s own goal, which was to find something analogous to plant life, not yet known on Omituinen. The animals got their nitrates, hydrazine and, of course, ammonia from the sea; logically, since the planet was at least half as old as Earth, something must be replacing these compounds just as something was constantly replacing Earth’s oxygen. Presumably, something anabolic was fixing the planet’s atmospheric nitrogen, but no one had found the organism yet.
So Laird Cunningham, driven by curiosity and by the human urge to accomplish something—and supported by confidence in a perfectly logical theory of his own—was sailing blindly across an almost unmapped ocean in a thirty-foot sailboat piloted by a being he had known for less than two Earthly months. T’Nekku understood the situation completely and had spent much of the trip discussing the matter with his passenger. Now, once more running steadily before the wind, he resumed the talk.
“Laird, if your idea is right, we should be finding more and more fish as we approach the island and the sea becomes richer in food chemicals. So far I have seen no real change.”
“Are you sure? What I really expect is a larger quantity of the very small animals, to which you don’t usually pay much attention. Actually I don’t expect a really great change until we come fairly close to land—perhaps close enough to see the cloud which I expect will be above it.”
“I suppose the little net you cast from time to time is to check for these small creatures. I am surprised, with your strong feeling for numbers, that you don’t measure in some way how much sea the net has traversed each time you use it.”
“I do time each cast.”
“But we are not always sailing at the same speed.”
“Surely it doesn’t change very much. I hadn’t been worrying about that at all. Can you tell how fast we are going at any given time?”
“Not in numbers. I know whether we are going fast or slow.”
“Hmph. I should have brought some sort of log.” The ‘Tuinainen asked for an explanation and agreed with the man when he had received it.
“I have nothing of the sort, I fear. I know where we are, well enough to find my way home, but I could not tell you in numbers anything about it. I judge that this would not help you with this net measurement.”
“I guess not,” sighed Cunningham through his breathing mask. “I’ll just have to do my best. Anyway, if we do start netting a lot of plankton it will suggest that I’m not too far wrong.”
“That seems sensible,” agreed T’Nekku. “Your idea is that these things you call plants make the chemicals that fishes, and therefore people, need for food; that they live in hot places, so the nearer we get to a hot place, the more of these chemicals there should be in the sea. It seems logical enough. I know the world is big, but these things would have been used up long ago if there were not some way of making more.”
“Precisely. And making them takes energy, as I explained to you long ago.”
“If all this is of such great interest to you and your people, why has not one of them tried to find out about it sooner? The traders have been here for over ten days, and it did not take them even one to learn that there were things here they wanted.”
Cunningham smiled, not really cynically. “I doubt that I could tell you enough about star-traveling people to make clear the difference between those who have useful jobs and those who don’t, since your people are still in the state where you do useful work or starve. Actually, the principal answer to your question is that there are many, many more unsolved problems in the Universe than there are beings interested in solving them—I am thankful to be able to say. It might easily have been a hundred or more of your days before anyone happened to hear about this particular one and get interested in it. It might not have been one of my species, for that matter.”
The debate went on until Cunningham had to sleep. The native was familiar with this human peculiarity and fell silent, while he guided the boat on under the glow of the nebula. He was quite willing to think silently, without disturbing his passenger.
It was T’Nekku’s voice, however, that wakened the man.
“Laird! Look ahead! You said there might be a cloud shaped like that over your island, but you did not warn me of the light!”
The human being stretched, straightened up and looked over the bow. It took only a moment for him to grasp what he saw.
“Sorry, Nek. My fault. I should have foreseen it, though I must say this is a livelier thunderhead than I ever ran into on my own world or on any other.”
Actually, the view was still impressive only to someone who could fill in from reason or experience the portion still below the horizon—or to someone as vulnerable to high-energy quanta as the ‘Tuinainen. The top of what was obviously a very large cumulonimbus cloud could be seen, partly silhouetted against wisps of nebula, partly showing dimly in the starlight and mostly illuminated by a continuous flicker of its own lightning.:.
