Complete Short Fiction, page 267
He certainly failed to do that before settling with surprising gentleness onto the waves.
The good part was the tracker claim that he was only about twenty-two kilometers from the raft. The single real glide they had made had been good, but not outstanding; it would have taken them a long, long time to reach The Iris that way.
The Box should be able to hear a call for help. Maybe Janice, who must have hit the water first, had already reported and the Cephallonians were now en route.
Even if she had he should also check in, of course. He unclipped the transducer from his suit, reached over the side to hold it under water, and reported the incident and his tracker location, finishing with a heartfelt query about his wife. There was plenty of time for the whole message before the first words could reach the raft, and he waited patiently for an answer. The possibility that he might not be heard was something he would face later if he had to.
The Box was typically terse.
“The Cephallonians are on their way. I can detect Janice with confidence, but not the glider. When they reach your area, you will have to talk steadily so that they can home on your sound.”
“Then you can’t tell me how close I am to her.” Hugh was less patient with the inevitable pause this time, though he knew what the answer had to be.
“No. I was able to associate her original call with a regular set of echoes from local wave sounds, and maintain an image. The submerged part of the sailplane reflects very little sound, and most of that downward, I expect. If you would care to get out and immerse yourself, talking all the time, and of course fastening yourself securely to the aircraft, I can probably resolve the problem.”
Hugh hesitated for only a moment. A five-hundred-kilometer water depth is, objectively, no worse to an Erthuma than fifty meters, just as a fifty-story fall is no worse than one of five. The trouble is that few Erthumoi are very objective even when scientifically educated. He spent several minutes doing careful things with rope, then eased himself out of the cockpit and let himself into the sea, holding on firmly to a wing in spite of his trust in the cord.
“All right, I’m submerged,” he reported, and began his favorite party showoff activity, reciting fragments of poetry in ancient English. The Box wouldn’t care what he said as long as it got a continuous signal. He was declaiming, with gestures of his free hand, “These are Clan Alpine’s warriors true, and Saxon, I am Roderic Dhu!” when the calm response reached him.
“You’re almost a kilometer closer to me than Janice, and getting closer at about two meters a second, presumably because of wind. Current should be affecting you both more or less equally on long-time average. There seems to be no emergency. The Cephallonians will reach you first but I would suggest that they go on and bring Janice back to the glider. I assume you will want it towed back here. I do not suppose you will want to repeat this attempt, but the structure represents much labor and material and some of it might be converted to other uses.”
Hugh said nothing. The Box was basically right, of course, but relief about his wife’s safety and the experience of what was essentially another anticlimax had shut down for the moment both his enthusiasm and his imagination. Having the heroic rescuers leave the raft and the helpless rescued return was getting to be a little too routine. He had, of course, been perfectly right about the flying project, but it is small comfort for a pessimist to be right. Hugh got no satisfaction out of saying, “I told you so,” especially to his wife. He would be very happy to tell how wrong he had been to Janice, the Cephallonians, and the assembled study authorities at Pwanpwan, once they reached the place.
He shifted to old Welsh songs, which called for more attention and allowed less freedom to brood in spite of their usual subject matter, and kept broadcasting. Halfway through “Llwyn On,” Thrasher—Hugh could tell the two apart at sight—surfaced beside him.
“Shall I stay with you while Splash picks up Janice, or go along with her? You seem safe enough.”
“Sure, go along. Do I need to keep singing? You can see me on your own sonar now, can’t you?”
“We can, but your signal helps. Besides, the music is nice. See you in a few minutes.” The swimmer vanished with no more splash than could be blamed on the choppy waves. Hugh, not used to having his voice praised and not entirely sure of Thrasher’s sincerity—Cephallonians sometimes carried courtesy to the same extreme as many Erthumoi—shifted to “Ar Hyd y Nos.” He knew only two verses of this and went on to comic songs in his own language. After all, Janice would be close enough to hear him shortly.
Even with no trouble it took the rescuers several minutes to travel over a kilometer, get the woman into one of then-packs, and swim back. Several more were spent deciding that the Erthumoi would return in the glider rather than be carried, arranging tow lines, and getting under way. There was little talk at first en route. Both human beings were discouraged, and now that the tension of the flight itself was over, they realized how tired they were. While each wanted to cheer the other up, neither could think of anything very cheerful to say.
They watched, silently at first, the rhythmic dolphin-style motion of the Cephallonians, and Hugh soon began to compare the vector problems of swimming with those of glider flight. Janice tried to sound interested as he began to talk about this and brighten up somewhat, but she found it hard to be sincere, much less enthusiastic.
The tow was rougher than the flight, of course. Not only was the surface choppy, but every few seconds one wing tip or the other would either dip into the sea or be caught by a wave, adding a jerky yaw to the pitching discomfort. The Cephallonians had started out trying to do the trip quickly—after all, the glider was decently streamlined and drew practically no water—but gave up in a minute or two. They could stand the jerks on the tow lines themselves, but Thrasher was beginning to worry about pulling the frame apart. That, at least, was what he said; Janice muttered to her husband, “Kindhearted old fish, isn’t he? I wish he could forget about my stomach.”
Hugh raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you wish you could?”
“It’s all right with the diving juice gone. And no comments, please.”
Hugh had not planned any, and kept his face as expressionless as possible, since that part of his suit was transparent. Vectors were much more fun than arguments.
And much more inspirational, he was beginning to realize, where practical plans were concerned. The glider experiment had not been a total success, but it had certainly not been a waste of time. The sailplane had been doing just what was asked of it, combining a vector directed away from where they wanted to go with one at right angles’, working in a little basic Newton, and producing a resultant headed—yes. Even the labor and material that had gone into the aircraft itself should be useful—
The man’s carefully blank expression was gradually melting into a smile. Janice, seated ahead of him and watching the waves and the Cephallonians, as well as the change of tow line slack from moment to moment, did not notice.
Hugh probably wouldn’t have heard her if she had seen his face and asked him about it. By the time his expression reached grin level he was setting up nice, detailed, quantitative problems for The Box. Really detailed. There would even be a use for a thruster, as long as it were reliably turned off. That distracted him briefly; just what had gone wrong with the units Janice had employed on the sub? Why had they chosen to go wide open? They had turned off for her; did that mean it would be all right to use one of those four for his new idea, or would it be safer to take another? Or should something entirely different be improvised? He couldn’t think offhand of anything else on the raft that would serve the purpose, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything.
But that was a minor detail. He forced himself firmly back to the number of questions that only The Box could handle in reasonable time. By the time they reached the raft, Hugh Cedar was completely happy again and went straight to The Box.
Janice understood the questions, of course, which she would have heard clearly enough even if their note recording units had not been interconnected. She was less happy than Hugh, not because she could see any serious flaw in her husband’s new idea but because she hadn’t been able to see one in any of the others, either. They had all been good ideas, but had simply run into unconsidered aspects of reality.
And there is no way in the universe to be sure when all the facets of any situation have been viewed. Ordinarily, the woman would have been quite calm about this; it was her normal personality pattern, that of a scientist. In the last few dozen hours, however—well, Chaos had not exactly developed a personality in her mind, but she was beginning to capitalize its name mentally. This was emphatically not normal Janice Cedar.
She remembered what had happened to Thrasher when he had passed his depth limit and she had had to use the conditioned command that Splasher had confided to her in order to rescue them both. Luckily, there was no such hypnotic suggestion implanted in her own mind that Hugh or one of the Cephallonians could use—at least, she considered it lucky. Erthuma minds didn’t work that way. It would be a tempting explanation for the thruster incident, of course, if one were mystically inclined . . .
Janice brought her thoughts back to the job with a start. What was happening to her? Was she worrying herself out of sense and sanity? So Cephallonians had safety techniques Erthumoi couldn’t use if they wanted to; human minds were different. Why should she worry about that? Especially, why should she worry about it now? All right, so she and Hugh would be starting another trip shortly, and the swimmers as usual couldn’t go along. That was all. Don’t fuss, woman.
She came back to the real present. There had been no question of Cephallonians coming along. They couldn’t. The problem was, how much of The Box could they take? The boat wouldn’t carry the whole unit. A single module could handle the running calculations, but more would be needed to talk properly to the living crew and tell them what action the numbers demanded. The Box had no subjective disapproval, dislike, or fear of being taken apart, but even it wasn’t quite sure how much of itself would be required for the journey and how much might be needed by the Cephallonians. There was no obvious reason why they would need any of it, as far as safety was concerned, but the swimmers naturally hoped to continue at least some of the planned study work. They were thinking beings; simply waiting to starve if their friends failed to reach help was no part of their plans. For one thing, someone—Cephallonian or Box—might come up with an explanation of the thruster failure, and it might become possible to send out something piloted only by another module. The Box was not hopeful and the Cephallonians, who distrusted artificial intelligence on principle, disliked the idea, but the possibility existed and feelings might change if a fermenter died.
The glider had been modified, though not as radically as might have been expected. The right wing had been amputated two meters from the fuselage, now once more a hull. The fabric from the severed portion now covered the other surface of the stub. Hugh’s original plan of mounting the wings to rotate on a single lateral spar had turned out fortunate; only minor changes in the rigging were necessary to make it practical now. One of the thrusters that had misbehaved for Janice was lashed firmly to the end of the shortened wing, after having the power lines from its fuser disconnected so that nothing could possibly turn it on—all hoped.
After much discussion, most of the rest of the raft’s sheeting was cannibalized to use as a covering for the bottom of the left wing; Hugh made an impassioned argument on the importance of symmetry and won without support from The Box, which was quite ready to allow for odd shapes in its calculations. The original cockpit was covered and a new one arranged so that the crew would be located both before and behind the left wing. Lines were rigged to let the wings be rotated on their central spars by the crew.
And, finally, a four-module section of The Box was firmly lashed into the front cockpit, and Hugh’s suit tracker plugged into it.
The whole craft was easy to carry on Habranha, though walking was far from comfortable on the heaving raft. The Erthumoi got it over to the tank that had been vacated by the Cephallonians for the moment—if for some reason it didn’t float, there was no need for a major salvage job over five hundred kilometers of water. The thruster proved heavy enough to do what Hugh had hoped; the stub of the right wing hung as nearly straight down and the intact left one pointed as nearly straight up as wind allowed. The new cockpits were now on top and the waterline of the floating hull safely below their edge. Hugh had had the foresight to improvise a bailer from scraps of wing covering but still felt uneasy about the roughness of the sea. There was a little sheeting left on the raft; after some thought, and rather more argument, he used this to seal off the interior ahead of and behind the crew stations. He hoped he had done a good job, since the new partitions would obviously prevent bailing even more effectively than they were likely to stop inward leakage. The Cephallonians weren’t greatly bothered about the loss of the fabric; too little was left in any case to make the tank much of a shelter for them.
The Erthumoi boarded, Janice in front as before. Wind pressure was holding them against one side of the tank; Thrasher activated several thrusters and turned the raft so the open end was downwind, and the boat drifted quickly away.
The Module began ordering its crew to pivot first one wing and then the other as it computed the air and water currents from the tracker readings. The Erthumoi were not too surprised to find themselves moving across the wind—after all, they did not know the current direction. They did, however, see the waves, and Hugh quickly turned the hull so that these came bow on. There was no point in asking for a bailing job before it was necessary. The Module didn’t seem bothered, and their actual direction appeared little affected after the wings were turned once more to offset the change in hull heading.
For a quarter of an hour they maneuvered at seeming random, though the raft quickly disappeared in the distance. Then they approached a spout, and Hugh grew tense. He mentioned it to The Module, which had no sensory information but the trackers.
“I inferred that,” was the answer. “I am using the current toward it. We will pass it on the right, and gain more than a kilometer toward The Iris. The technique is very simple, but whichever of you is handling the air wing will have to be ready to respond quickly to orders. The water wing I can predict more readily.” Hugh said no more.
“Air wing thirty-five degrees to the right.” Janice obeyed. “Overcontrolled. Two degrees left.”
“I can only guess at degrees,” the woman pointed out.
“Calibrate. Make some sort of marks on the control cords.”
“Of course.”
“Water wing, eleven degrees right.”
“Tell me when I’ve reached it,” replied Hugh.
“Close. Closer. Stop. Keep the hull at its present heading, whoever is handling the rudder. Are we dangerously close to the spout?”
“About a hundred and fifty meters from the nearest spray,” Janice replied.
“Good. Hold all settings.” There was a pause of over a minute.
“Hull heading six degrees left, air wing six degrees right, water wing three degrees right.” It took perhaps a minute and three or four corrections to establish the new setup, and by this time both living crew members were almost relaxed. They were starting to feel comfortable with the orders, and even with the results; Janice, watching her own trackers, reported that they were actually working their way more or less steadily along a fixed line from the raft. Hugh had to take her word for it, since his own inertial equipment was now part of The Module.
In any case, he was having to spend much of his time bailing. The glider had ridden very high on the water and had shipped very little spray; with the weight of the thruster forcing the stub of the right wing to act as a keel, however, this was now less true. He hoped fervently that nothing was getting through the bulkheads he had improvised at either end of the cockpit. He told himself repeatedly that the Cephallonian adhesive was supposed to be very good, but did not say this aloud. Janice could be objective at inconvenient times.
Occasionally the gain in distance was really impressive, as vectors combined to whip them around one side or the other of a spout. At other times human patience would wear thin as they crept one meter along the Iris-ward radius out of twenty or thirty along their current sub-Grendel circumference. Sometimes, even with The Module directing, they actually lost distance for a while. Neither was sure whether this was because there existed no useful vector solution at the moment or because one or both of them had been too slow following orders. Only The Module could keep real-time track of the constantly changing water and air currents, and only The Module could solve their angle problems quickly enough. By unspoken common consent, they did not ask their electronic companion who or what should be blamed, and it did not volunteer information.
They had to sleep, of course. Janice allowed her husband to take the first watch, and carefully refrained from checking the time it started, so she didn’t know how long he let her slumber. She had hoped to give him a full ten hours when his turn came, but a complication emerged.
“Our drag component seems to be increasing,” The Module remarked six hours or so into Hugh’s sleep. “We originally averaged nearly six meters real advance toward The Iris for each hundred of actual travel through the water. This has dropped over the last four hours to about three per hundred.” The woman thought briefly of taking care of the matter herself, since the cause seemed pretty obvious, but allowed common sense to override personal pride and awakened her husband. He, after hearing the report and agreeing with her, rigged another safety line to his suit and went over the side—Janice did not argue for the privilege—to spend several minutes removing a ten-meter-long banner of weed trailing from the bottom wing and the thruster. Much of it was charged, but his suit protected him, though flashes were visible from the surface even in daylight and caused Janice some uneasiness. He climbed back aboard, and insisted that he couldn’t get back to sleep.
