Star Light m-2 Read online

The grayish surface about the huge vehicle was unchanged; the wind which shook the hull was making no apparent impression on the snow which had been packed by two-score Earth gravities for no one knew how much time. Even the eddies around the Kwembly showed no signs of their presence, though Dondragmer had rather expected them to be digging holes at the edges of his treads. Farther out, to the limit reached by the lights, nothing could be seen on the expanse except holes where the cores had been dug and the whipping branches of an occasional bush. He watched these closely for several minutes, expecting the wind to make some impression there if anywhere, but finally shifted his attention to the sky.

  A few bright stars were beginning to show between the patches of scud, but the Guardians of the Pole could not be seen. They were only a few degrees above the southern horizon — much of that due to refraction — and the clouds further blocked the slanting view. There was still no sign of rain or snow, and no way of telling which, if either, to expect. The temperature outside was still just below the melting point of pure ammonia and far below that of water, but mixed precipitation was more than likely. What these would do to the nearly pure water-ice under him was more than Dondragmer cared to guess; he knew about the mutual solubility of water and ammonia, but had never attempted to memorize phase diagrams or freezing-point tables of the various possible mixtures. If the snow did dissolve, the Kwembly might get a chance to show her floating ability. He was not eager to make the test.

  Kervenser interrupted his thoughts.

  “Captain, we will be ready to move in four or five minutes. Do you want driving power?”

  “Not yet. I was afraid that the wind would cut the snow out from under us and tip us over, like backwash on a beached ship, and I wanted to be bow-on if that happened; but there seems to be no danger of it so far. Have the maintenance checks continue except for items which would interfere with a five-minute warning for drive power.”

  “That’s what we’re doing, Captain. I set it up when your order came in a few minutes ago.”

  “Good. Then we’ll keep outside lights on and watch the ground around us until we’re ready to go again, or until the blow ends.”

  “It’s a nuisance not being able to guess when that will be.”

  “It is. At home a storm seldom lasts more than a day, and never more than an hour or so. This world turns so slowly that storm cells can be as big as a continent, and could take hundreds of hours to pass. We’ll just have to wait this one out.

  “You mean we can’t travel until the wind goes down?”

  “I’m not sure. Air scouting would be risky, and we couldn’t go fast enough without it for scouting to be worth the trouble, as far as the human crowd is concerned.”

  “I don’t like going so fast anyway. You can’t really look over a place unless you stop for a while. We must be missing a lot that even the human funnies would find interesting.”

  “They seem to know what they want — something about being able to decide whether Dhrawn is a planet or a star — and they pay the bills. I admit it gets boring for people with nothing to occupy them but routine.

  Kervenser let that remark pass without comment, if not without notice. He knew his commander would not have been deliberately insulting, even after the mate’s slighting remark about human beings. This was a point on which Dondragmer differed rather sharply from many of his fellows, who took for granted that the aliens were out for what they could get, like any good traders. The commander had spent more time in close communication with human, Paneshk, and Drommian scientists than had almost any other Mesklinite and, having a rather tolerant and accommodating personality to start with, had become what many of the other Mesklinites regarded as soft with respect to the aliens.

  Discussion of the matter was rare, and Beetchermarlf’s arrival forestalled it this time. He reported completion of checkout. Dondragmer relieved him, ordered him to send the new helmsman to the bridge, and fell silent until the latter arrived. Takoorch, however, was not the sort to live with silence; and when he reached the bridge lost little time in starting what he doubtless considered a conversation. Kervenser, amused as usual by the fellow’s imagination and gall, kept him going; however, Dondragmer ignored all but occasional snatches of the conversation. He was more interested in what was going on outside, little as that seemed to be at the moment.

  He cut off the bridge lights and all the outside ones but the lowest floods, giving himself a better view of the sky without completely losing touch with the surface. The clouds were fewer and smaller, but they seemed to be moving past quite as rapidly as before. The sound of the wind remained about the same. More stars were slowly appearing. Once he glimpsed one of the Guardians, as the Mesklinite sailors had so quickly named them, low to the south. He could not tell which it was; Sol and Fomalhaut were about equally bright from Dhrawn, and their violent twinkling through the huge world’s atmosphere made color judgment unreliable. The glimpse was brief anyway, since the clouds were not completely gone.

  “—the whole starboard group of rafts peeled off, with everyone but me on the main body—”

  Still no rain or snow, and the clearing skies made them seem less likely now, to the captain’s relief. A check with the laboratory through one of the speaking tubes informed him that the temperature was dropping; it was now 75, three degrees below ammonia melting point. Still close enough for trouble with mixtures, but heading in the right direction.

  “—of the islands south and west of Dingbar. We’d been ridden ashore by a storm bulge, and were high and dry with half the drift boards broken. I—”

  The stars overhead were almost uninterrupted now; the scud had nearly vanished. The constellations were familiar, of course. Most of the brighter stars in the neighborhood were little affected by a three-parsec change in viewpoint. Dondragmer had had plenty of time to get used to the minor changes, anyway, and no longer noticed them. He tried to find the Guardians once more, but still had no luck. Maybe there were still clouds to the south. It was too dark now to be sure. Even cutting the rest of the floods for a moment didn’t help. It did, however, attract the attention of the other two, and the flow of anecdote ceased for a moment.

  “Anything changing, Captain?” Kervenser’s jocular attitude vanished at the possibility of action.

  “Possibly. Stars are showing above, but not to the south. Not anywhere near the horizon, in fact. Try a spot.”

  The first officer obeyed, and a spear of light flicked upward from a point behind the bridge as he touched one of the few electrical controls. Dondragmer manipulated a pair of pull cables, and the beam swung toward the western horizon. A wail, the rough equivalent of a human grunt of surprise, came from Kervenser as the descending beam became more visible parallel to the ground.

  “Fog!” exclaimed the helmsman. “Thin, but that’s what’s blocking the horizon.” Dondragmer gave a gesture of agreement as he reared to a speaking tube.

  “Research!” he hooted. “Possible precipitation. Check what it is, and what it could do to this water-ice under us.”

  “It will take a while to get a sample, sir,” came the answer. “We’ll be as quick as we can. Are we cleared outside, or will we have to work through the hull?”

  The captain paused for a moment, listening to the wind and remembering how it had felt.

  “You’re cleared out. Be as quick as you can.

  “On the way, Captain.”

  At Dondragmer’s gesture, the first officer cut off the spot, and the three went to the starboard end of the bridge to watch the outside party.

  They moved quickly but the haze was becoming more noticeable by the time the lock opened. Two caterpillar-like forms emerged carrying a cylindrical package between them. They made their way forward to a point almost under the watchers, and set up their equipment — essentially a funnel facing into the wind and feeding into a filter. It took several minutes to convince them that they had a big enough sample, but eventually they dismantled the equipment, sealed the filter into a cont
ainer to preserve it from the lock fluid and made their way back to the entrance.

  “I suppose it will take them a day to decide what it is, now,” grumbled Kervenser.

  “I doubt it,” replied the captain. “They’ve been playing with quick tests for water-ammonia solutions. I think Borndender said something about density being enough, given a decent-sized sample.”

  “In that case, why are they taking so long?”

  “They could hardly be out of their air suits yet,” the captain pointed out patiently.

  “Why should they get out of them before making delivery to the lab? Why couldn’t—”

  A hoot from a speaking tube interrupted him. Dondragmer acknowledged.

  “Just about pure ammonia, sir. I think it was super-cooled liquid droplets; it froze into a froth in the filter, and let quite a bit of outside air loose when it melted in here. If you should smell oxygen for the next few minutes, that’s it. It may start icing up the hull, and if it coats the bridge, as it did the filter, it will interfere with your seeing, but that’s all I can guess at right now in the way of trouble.”

  It was not all Dondragmer could imagine, but he acknowledged the information without further comment.

  “This sort of thing hasn’t happened since we’ve been here,” he remarked. “I wonder whether it’s some sort of seasonal change coming on. We are getting closer to this body’s sun. I wish the human crowd had watched this world for a longer time before they sold us on the idea of exploring it for them. It would be so nice to know what comes next. Kervenser, start engines. When ready, turn bow into wind and proceed ahead dead slow, if you can still see out. If not, circle as sharply as possible to port, to stay on surface we know. Keep an eye on the treads — figuratively, of course; we can’t see them without going out — and let me know if there’s evidence that anything is sticking to them. Post a man at the stern port; our trail might show something. Understand?”

  “The orders, yes, sir. What you’re expecting, no.”

  “I may be wrong, and if I’m right there’s probably nothing to do anyway. I don’t like the idea of going outside to clear the treads manually. Just hope.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kervenser turned to his task, and as the fusion engines in the Kwembly’s trucks came to life, the captain turned to a block of plastic about four inches high and wide and a foot long, which lay beside his station. He inserted one of his nippers in a small hole in the side of the block, manipulated a control, and began to talk.

  2: GRANDSTAND

  His voice traveled fast, but it was a long time on the way. The radio waves carrying it sped through Dhrawn’s heavy but quickly thinning atmosphere and through the space beyond for second after second. They weakened as they traveled, but half a minute after they had been radiated their energy was still concentrated enough to affect a ten-foot dish antenna. The one they encountered was projecting from a cylinder some three hundred feet in diameter and half as long: it formed one end of a structure resembling a barbell, spinning slowly about an axis perpendicular to its bar and midway between its weights.

  The current induced by the waves in the antenna flicked, in a much shorter time, into a pinhead-size crystal which rectified it, enveloped it, used the envelope to modulate an electron stream provided by a finger-sized generator beside it and thus manipulated an amazingly old-fashioned dynamic cone in a thirty-foot-square room near the center of the cylinder. Just thirty-two seconds after Dondragmer uttered his words they were reproduced for the ears of three of the fifteen human beings seated in the room. He did not know who would be there at the time, and therefore spoke the human tongue he had learned rather than his own language; so all three understood him.

  “This is an interim report from the Kwembly. We stopped two and a half hours ago for routine maintenance and investigation. Wind was about 200 cables at the time, from the west, sky partly cloudy. Shortly after we got to work the wind picked up to over 3,000 cables—”

  One of the human listeners was wearing a puzzled expression, and after a moment managed to catch the eye of another.

  “A Mesklinite cable is about 206 feet, Boyd,” the latter said softly. “The wind jumped from about five miles an hour to over sixty.”

  “Thanks, Easy.” Their attention returned to the speaker.

  “Fog has now closed us in completely, and is getting ever thicker. I don’t dare move as I had planned; just in circles to keep the treads from icing. The fog is super-cooled ammonia according to my scientists, and the local surface is water snow. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to my research people, but with the temperature in the seventies it seems to me there’s a chance of the fog’s dissolving some of the water-ice to make a liquid. I realize this machine is supposed to float, and I don’t suppose the surface would melt very deeply anyway, but I’m wondering whether anyone has thought much about what will happen if a liquid freezes around our treads. I have to admit I never have, but the thought of chipping the ship loose by muscle power isn’t inviting. I know there’s no special equipment on board to handle such a situation, because I assembled and loaded this machine myself. I’m simply calling to report that we might possibly be here a good deal longer than planned. I’ll keep you informed, and if we do get immobilized we’ll be glad of projects to keep our scientists busy. They’ve already done most of the things you set up for an ordinary stop.

  “Thanks, Don,” replied Easy. “We’ll stand by. I’ll ask our observers and aerologists whether they can make a guess about the size of your fog bank, and how long it’s likely to stay around you. They may have some useful material already, since you’ve been on the night side for a day or so. For that matter, they may even have current pictures; I don’t know all the limits of their instruments. Anyway, I’ll check and let you know.”

  The woman opened her microphone switch and turned to the others as her words sped toward Dhrawn.

  “I wish I could tell from Don’s voice whether he’s really worried or not,” she remarked. “Every time those people run into something new on that horrible world, I wonder how we ever had the gall to send them there or how they had the courage to go.

  ‘They certainly weren’t forced or tricked into it, Easy,” pointed out one of her companions. “A Mesklinite who has spent most of his life as a sailor, and covered his home planet from equator to south pole, certainly isn’t naive about any of the aspects of exploring or pioneering. We couldn’t have kidded them if we’d wanted to.”

  “I know that in my head, Boyd, but my stomach doesn’t always believe it. When the Kwembly was bogged in sand only five hundred miles from the settlement, I was grinding enamel off my teeth until they worked her loose. When Densigeref’s Smof was trapped in a cleft by a mud flow that formed under it and let it down, I was almost the only one who backed up Barlennan’s decision to send another of the big land-rovers to the rescue. When the Esket’s crew disappeared with a couple of very good friends of mine, I fought both Alan and Barlennan on the decision not to send a rescue crew. And I still think they were wrong. I know there’s a job to be done and that the Mesklinites agreed to do it with a clear understanding of its risks, but when one of those crews gets into trouble I just can’t help imagining myself down there with them and I tend to take their side when there’s an argument about rescue action. I suppose I’ll be fired from this place eventually because of that, but it’s the way I’m made.”

  Boyd Mersereau chuckled.

  “Don’t worry, Easy. You have that job just because you do react that way. Please remember that if we do disagree strongly with Barlennan or any of his people, we’re six million miles and forty g’s of potential away and he’s probably going to do what he wants anyway. Whenever it gets to that point, it’s very much to our advantage to have someone up here whom he can regard as being on his side. Don’t change a bit, please.”

  “Humph.” If Elise Hoffman was either pleased or relieved, she failed to show it. “That’s what Ib is always saying, but I’ve been writing him off as prejud
iced.”

  “I’m sure he is, but that doesn’t necessarily disqualify him from forming a sound opinion. You must believe some things he says.

  “Thanks, Easy,” Dondragmer’s answer interrupted the discussion. He was using his own language this time, which neither of the men understood very well. “I’ll be glad of any word your observers can supply. You needn’t report to Barlennan unless you particularly want to. We aren’t actually in trouble yet and he has enough on his mind without being bothered by maybes. The research suggestions you can send down straight to the lab on set two; I’d probably mix them up if I relayed. I’ll sign off now, but we’ll keep all four sets manned.”

  The speaker fell silent, and Aucoin, the third human listener, got to his feet, looking at Easy for a translation. She obliged.

  “That means work,” he said. “We had a number of longer programs planned for later in the Kwembly’s trip, but if Dondragmer may be delayed long where he is, I’d better see which of them would fit now. I got enough of that other speech to suggest that he doesn’t really expect to move soon. I’ll go to Computation first and have them reproduce a really precise set of position bearings for him from the shadow satellites, then I’ll go to Atmospherics for their opinion and then I’ll be in the planning lab.”

  “I may see you in Atmospherics,” replied Easy. “I’m going now to get the information Dondragmer wanted, if you’ll stand watch here, Boyd.”

  “All right, for a while. I have some other work to do myself, but I’ll make sure the Kwembly’s screens are covered. You’d better tell Don who’s here, though, so he won’t send up an emergency message in Stennish or whatever he calls his native language. Come to think of it, though, I suppose sixty seconds extra delay wouldn’t matter much, considering what little we could do for him from here.”

  The woman shrugged, spoke a few words of the little sailor’s language into the transmitter, waved to Mersereau, and was gone before Dondragmer received her last phrase. Alan Aucoin had already left.