Complete Short Fiction, page 268
By then the spouts were noticeably less frequent and the air clearer. Grendel could occasionally be seen, though still apparently almost overhead. It was obvious even without tracker data that they were working their way out of The Cataract into clear Pupil. This was the good part. Less comforting was the realization that they were now far beyond the range of the part of The Box that had been left on the raft, and that if any serious trouble developed there was no way the Cephallonians could know about it or find them.
But even Janice had now shed the depression following the failed glider flight and was looking ahead optimistically. The boat was not leaking detectably, the bailing had been able to keep up with water slopping into the cockpit—Hugh insisted that the exercise was doing him good—and it was even possible that in another few hours they might be visible from orbit, though neither of them considered that a chance worth counting on.
Wave and wind were much less chaotic; sometimes half an hour would pass between orders from The Module and two or three times one or another of the Erthumoi had been able to see for themselves slight departures from a fixed angle between their path and the now long and regular waves, and to make a correction without orders.
“You know,” Hugh remarked at one point, “this could almost be a sport. We should try it when we get home.”
Janice pursed her lips doubtfully for a few seconds, then shook her head negatively.
“I don’t think anything needing robot assistance could really be regarded as a game,” she pointed out. “A sport is supposed to show your personal skill, isn’t it?”
Hugh shrugged. “I guess so. Just a thought.”
“Hull heading slightly left, no change in water wing, air wing two degrees right,” came the commanding voice. “Slightly” had come to mean “as little as human senses will permit,” and implied that several attempts would be needed before the electronic intelligence would be satisfied, so Hugh’s full attention wandered from the conversation.
Janice took time to eat, and spent a little more wondering whether their partial recyclers of their suits and the “cheese” they had brought with them would actually get them to The Iris. She was not worried, of course, just planning. They were likely to be seen by a native well before reaching the ring continent in any case—though whether the Habra would be interested was quite another matter. Aliens were no longer much of a novelty on the planet, they had both observed.
On the other hand, it seemed possible that the vehicle they were riding might collect a crowd.
Janice began glancing hopefully at the sky every few minutes.
The routine was getting too boring to be a sport, even Hugh admitted.
“Air wing two degrees right.” Ten minutes’ silence.
“Hull heading one degree right.” More silence.
“Hull heading slightly left.” This was at least more interesting, since it took more time and attention to satisfy The Module.
“Drag getting too great. Clean the water wing again.” Janice insisted on taking her turn at this, which was a harder job than it might have been; they had agreed not to use their knives, partly because of the risk of losing them irretrievably and partly to avoid chance of damage to the covering fabric. The weed had little mechanical strength as a rule, though sometimes a strand or two of the stuff they had used to build the hull frame would be involved. Several times, as a result, the knife discussion was reopened; saving time in clearing the growths might be worthwhile, since they always lost distance—blowing downwind and drifting down current back toward The Cataract—while someone was doing the job. The Module always advised against it, however, since there was no way to tell in advance what sort of material would have to be faced, a preliminary check would be time-consuming, and loss of a knife would be permanent.
So boredom became the order of life, while Grendel shifted very slowly downward in the sky. Erthumoi are extremely bad at judging vertical angles and they had no measuring devices for such quantities, so knowing that they only had to bring the star down to about seventy-five degrees above the horizon was little help.
More meaningful facts were that the near edge of Iris was about six hundred eighty kilometers from the center of The Cataract, that they had started some thirty kilometers from the center, and that the trackers claimed that they had made nearly a hundred kilometers radially while traveling nearly two thousand through water in a widening spiral around the heat pole. They had not kept very careful track of time; on Habranha there were no nights to serve as punctuation, its orbit was circular enough to make one part of the roughly three-week year just like another, and while Grendel’s companion sun could be seen easily enough in the daylight sky if one looked for it and would with a little mental arithmetic provide a “yearly” calendar, neither had bothered. They had been roughly four hundred hours on the journey; their food was still adequate, and the Cephallonians should still be safe.
But there was quite a distance yet to go, whether one thought of ideal vector or through the water.
The sky was clear, now; they were in plain Pupil and out of The Cataract. The water too was clear except for life. The next major change would be near the end of the voyage, when silt from the melting Iris would start to discolor the ocean. The natives salvaged what silicate they could, of course, but rivers in the melting ice stole a good deal of the finer material in spite of their efforts.
There was no sense looking for this for a long time yet, but both Erthumoi did glance at the sea more frequently than common sense dictated. Whenever one of them went over the side to clear weed he or she found it increasingly hard to feel sure that the water wasn’t just a little murkier than last time . . .
It occurred to Hugh, after another couple of hundred hours, that they might not have to go even that close to The Iris; there would be salvaging subs trawling for silt fairly well out in The Pupil, and fishers even farther, and one of these might easily spot them. If it did, it would certainly investigate. Their craft would certainly be a very peculiar sight to Habranhans either optically—the winged natives could see, of course—or on sonar. There was no point using their transducer to call for help, of course, since the natives sensed radio and would not, unless regularly dealing with aliens, be equipped to receive or transmit sound.
There was no way the Erthumoi could attract native attention. Not deliberately.
They were still nearly four hundred kilometers from the nearest shore of Iris, though they had made several widening spiral journeys around The Cataract as they stole their tiny increments of radial distance from each kilometer of sailing, when the polymer skeleton of a native submarine drew up beside them.
The crew, of course, were all armored and saturated with their own type of diving fluid. Apparently they were not equipped with sound devices, but they looked the aliens over for several minutes, made gestures that the Erthumoi assumed to be the equivalent of friendly waves, and drew away again. They seemed not to recognize the situation as an emergency as Janice and Hugh vigorously waved back.
“Now what?” asked the man as the craft disappeared.
“The wind and current are both weaker, but they both still set toward The Cataract. The choices seem to be to keep on working or give up and drift back where we came from,” Janice replied. The man had nothing better to offer, even in his thoughts. The realization of how much better they would have done with a hull that didn’t catch wind or current had struck him long ago, but so had the futility of mentioning it.
They continued to follow instructions from The Module but routine changed somewhat for a while. Six more times in the next four hours a submarine appeared near them, remained for a minute or two while its crew, resembling six-winged dragonflies but too heavy in their armor to fly, looked them over, gestured in what appeared to be unsurprised and casual friendship, and went on its way. None of them appeared equipped to communicate with aliens. Both Erthumoi wondered why the first to find them had not broadcast the news, and how long it would take before someone really helpful would show up.
“I suppose,” Janice said at last, “that the first one did report. Probably no one working in The Pupil expects to run into visitors; these others have been just people who got the word and wanted a look. The help won’t get here until news reaches The Iris and someone who knows about our study group.”
“Maybe.” Hugh was a little doubtful. “Habras aren’t usually just curious about aliens; most of them have seen us by now—they fly, remember, and have one worldwide culture. I’d have expected these other subs to have come for some different reason, but I can’t guess what it was. I suspect we’ll just be waving to them until someone from Inex or higher hears the story and gets here.”
“They’ve all seen us, but they haven’t seen a boat like this,” his wife pointed out. “I’d want to look over something this odd in a lot of detail myself.”
“Well, maybe. The vector principle it uses should be obvious enough at a quick look, though. We’ll see.”
What they saw after the seventh visit was more hours of boredom. There were no more submarines, just travel. There were occasional—very rare, now, as they emerged into the least chaotic area of Habranha’s ocean—orders to change a wing setting, but increasingly frequent demands that one of them go overside to clear weed.
This, they knew, would get even worse as they approached the ring continent. Silt from its endlessly melting inner edge enriched the water and supported a gigantic food pyramid. The natives did their best to conserve the silicate, which they brought at great labor and expense from the ocean bottom to fertilize the relatively clean ice of The Iris and let them grow food for themselves; rivers of meltwater flowing into The Pupil encountered beautifully designed and built dams and sediment traps. Still, lots of the fine stuff got away, and the natives had to make the best of it by fishing the teeming waters of the central ocean. Presumably it was fishing submarines that the Erthumoi had seen.
But now these ceased to appear, and hour after hour went by with nothing to relieve the boredom but an occasional trip overside.
Even the thunder of The Cataract was gone, though not the higher-pitched rush of wind and wave, so when the helicopter did come the couple heard its rotor beat long before they saw it. When they did, it was not directly between them and The Iris, and not heading directly toward them.
They waved and even shouted, knowing that both actions were futile against a wave and spray background, and watched with mounting tension as the aircraft went on past.
Then it shifted course roughly toward them. Only roughly; it flew by again. Then it hovered, a kilometer away, and Hugh, rising as nearly to his feet as he dared, caught glimpses between the waves of the upper part of a native submarine below the flyer and heading directly toward them.
Then the crew of the helicopter seemed to see their boat, and the machine swelled in their vision. A few seconds later two heavy-duty slings were descending toward the Erthumoi.
Hugh reached for the nearer sling and started to hook it to his suit. A thunderously amplified voice, speaking his own language, stopped him.
“Around your hull! We’ve got to get that public nuisance out of the water!”
“Why?” asked the man, quite reasonably. Janice went silently overboard with the other sling and began to adjust it.
“Tell you later! Just do it! The Habras are polite people, but in their place I’d be working up an interstellar incident. Get moving!” Hugh was still inclined to stay where he was and try to figure out why his beautiful, well-planned, and successful vector boat was a public nuisance to anyone, but Janice added her voice to the one from above. Thirty seconds later the rotor hum rose in pitch and their hull lifted gently from the surface. The bottom wing followed, trailed by the several meters of weed that had accumulated since they had last cleared it. Habras on the submarine, which had also approached, gestured, and their craft settled out of sight.
The Erthumoi climbed a ladder that had been lowered from a hatch of the flyer, and found themselves surrounded by half a dozen of their own species. Hugh, quite able to put first things first when they were important, reported where, why, and in what condition they had left their Cephallonian companions. The aircraft commander nodded.
“We’ll pass that on to the natives. Their subs can probably tow the raft out, and we should certainly let them try first. If they can’t make it, someone can design and send in a better raft.”
The Cedars nodded. There was little risk of Habranha natives developing an inferiority complex from their alien visitors, both knew, but the policy was basically a good one. It sometimes kept starfarers from getting too arrogant.
“I suppose,” the aircraft commander went on, “you’ve figured out by now why we had to get your boat out of the water.” The fellow glared at him, and Hugh had a feeling that he himself should be blushing. A glance at his wife provided no help; she evidently didn’t get it either, which was some comfort. The pilot waited only a moment. “That thruster you had on the underwater fin or whatever you call it is made of metal, which is very rare on Habranha. It had gathered weed, much of it highly charged, so it’s—”
“It was broadcasting!” Hugh was just enough behind his wife to be slightly out of phase.
“It was, according to the Habras, howling. It was making conversation impossible for forty or fifty kilometers around, even under water. What it would have done if it had been producing the same waves above the surface I hate to think, but thank reason for impedance mismatching.”
“But why so far? Water doesn’t carry low-frequency electromagnetics very well,” Hugh objected.
“When the waves stimulate discharge in electrical organisms, simple attenuation formulae don’t work,” the captain pointed out gently. “But why was the driver mounted so far down? I can see it isn’t working now, but when it was, it must have tried to lift your front end right out of the water—or was that the idea?”
Janice smiled. Hugh could get some of his own back, here.
“Oh, no.” Her husband shook his head firmly. “The driver was never working at all.” Would he explain why? she wondered briefly. Of course not. At least, not completely. No one had figured out yet what had made the thrusters unreliable, unless Thrasher or Splasher had had an inspiration since the Erthumoi had left. Inspirations did sometimes happen to people. But Hugh was quite good at covering.
“We were just using it for its weight,” he went on. “We didn’t have anything else heavy enough that we could afford to risk—nothing at all except our robot and equipment, and we needed weight to keep the wings of our vector boat vertical. If the thruster had been pushing, as you say, we’d have wanted it right up under us. Besides”—he caught Janice’s eye briefly—“if we’d been using it that far below the hull we’d have had to rig a line to control it with. Can’t you imagine what would have happened when that began to pick up weed—at high speed? More drag on the line, more pull on the control; if pull meant more power, then more drag, more speed, more speed, more weed—you’ve heard of feedback, haven’t you?” Janice kept a straight face, too.
1994
Sortie
His Aitoff screen was offering one of its occasional, brief, random, views of Sergeant Gene Belvew’s real surroundings, cutting him off for half a second from those of Oceanus deep in Titan’s atmosphere, when the pipe stall occurred.
It would, he reflected at one level of his mind. He didn’t believe in an unqualified Murphy’s Law, which was strictly for civilians, but a scientist of any rank understood Murphy’s Law of Selective Observation. If the jets had chosen any other time, he would have known it was coming, forestalled it easily without real thought, and forgotten it promptly as unimportant. As it was, his first warning was the waldo suit’s use of nonvisual input. It administered a sharp chill almost simultaneously in both of his elbows. By the time he could see Titan again, half a second later, thrust was gone and accelerometers showed that Oceanus was being slowed sharply by the dense atmosphere. His reflexes had already operated, of course, just a trifle later than they would have from a visual stimulus. The aircraft had practically no reaction mass in its tanks; he had been trying to replenish that at the time. The big satellite’s gravity, which his body in orbit couldn’t feel any more than it could the deceleration, was feeble; if the craft slowed too much now, even the vertical dive he was entering wouldn’t get him back to ram speed from his present altitude. Diving into the surface would not hurt him physically—the waldo’s feedback didn’t go that far—but would still be a bad tactical mistake. Ramjets could not be picked from trees, even if there had been trees this far from the sun. For increasingly scary moments the tension mounted as his elbows stayed cold; then ramflow resumed simultaneously in both pipes and the speed of his dive abruptly began rising with the restored thrust. Still reflexively he pulled out into horizontal flight with over a hundred meters to spare, put his nose—his own, not the ramjet’s—in the face cup and moved his head slightly to run the Aitoff screen through its half dozen most-likely-useful vision frequencies. He was already pretty sure what had caused the stall, but pilot’s common sense agreed with basic scientific procedure in demanding that he check.
Yes, he was still in the updraft; the screen displayed the appropriate false-color all around him, and the waldo—which doubled as an environment suit, and therefore did not interfere with his breathing system—was reporting the excess methane as a salty taste. As usual, there had been no one but himself to blame. He’d been driving just a little too slowly, trying to see below while filling the mass tanks, and a perfectly ordinary but random and quite unpredictable drop in the density of the rising current had raised the impact speed needed by the jets. If there’d been nothing backing up the interrupted visual sensors he’d have learned too late and had over a hundred meters less leeway.
