Fossil (1993) Read online

  “But your own body is fairly close to the top. If that had collapsed at the impact, wouldn’t you have been injured or killed?”

  “In theory, the frame should be able to protect me. I designed it to. Of course, I also designed these legs — it’s hard to say just what might have happened. I am most grateful to you that I did not learn — what is that cynical Erthumoi term? — ’the hard way.’ I suppose my dignity would have taken some damage, at least. It probably should anyway, but as long as no Crotonites are on hand I can stand that.”

  The Habras seemed somewhat surprised.

  “Why should it be any worse for Crotonites to see you? I’ve met some who react very badly to ridicule, even from their own kind and especially from what they call slugs or crawlers, but I don’t see why being laughed at hv a Crotonite is any worse than by anyone else.”

  “It’s not completely sensible, I admit. I’m not an administrator by choice or taste, and maybe I’m too self-conscious. This is just a task until I can write something that will earn me scholarly status; in the meantime, I worry whenever I do something silly. Crotonites are very good at pointing out the silly doings of us crawlers.”

  “What’s wrong with administration?” asked Hugh. “It’s not my regular field, but I’m in it myself at the moment — organizing plans and people so as to minimize personal risks and take care of injuries when they do occur.”

  “But that’s a sideline with you. You’re basically an explorer and observer — a researcher. I can’t do that because I didn’t start in time to learn enough, but I can still get into analysis and theoretical work. This telling whom what to do and when is trivial. Administrators are…” the translator emitted the no-equivalent-symbol sound, leaving Hugh and his wife uncertain just what the speaker thought of administration, though the context had provided some clue.

  “It involves everyone here and everything we’re doing,” Hugh pointed out firmly though not quite indignantly. “No one at Pitville, not even the Habras, is in a normal environment; everyone outdoors has to have some sort of protection, whether working or…”

  “True. But Spreadsheet-Thinker and I find questions of competence much less confusing than ones of motivation, even among members of her species and mine; and it seems to be what people want to do rather than what they do best that we have to consider most deeply. Neither of us understands that. A nice scientific paper would be a relief, for me at least.”

  “You have Naxians in your office.”

  “Knowing that someone is happy or unhappy about some part of what’s going on doesn’t by itself tell us what part. You use Naxians on general safety watch, I know, and still need to get more details when they report trouble. If that weren’t true you’d use only Naxians.”

  “If I could get that many — and didn’t need flyers, too. But you’re right, in a way. What’s your main trouble? Or would you rather not say?”

  “Personalities. Spreadsheet-Thinker has earned her name, and can deal better with such complexities, but I’m more of a scholar — a scientist, even — at heart, if that figure of speech means what I think it does. It’s so nice to be able to deal with variables one at a time. That’s — I’ll admit it to you, friend, but would rather you didn’t tell any Crotonites — why I was trying this ‘ski’ activity just now. I must admit i was cheating. I have automatic controls in this body; our nervous impulses and reactions are far too slow for this sort of thing, even in this gravity. After the first failure I was able to reset my autodriver to Handle the situation on the slope, but I would have had to find an excuse for not making the second run if you and your friends had not been here, Ted.”

  “What if you had made it to the jump-off point and they hadn’t been here?” asked Janice.

  “I prefer not to think about that.”

  “You realize now that engineering design, as well as administration, involves considering many factors it once, I hope,” Hugh keyed. He knew the remark was less than tactful, but could see no way of squaring silence on the subject with his safety officer’s conscience.

  “I do indeed.”

  The Erthumoi smiled at each other, a gesture made meaningful by the transparent face shields of their armor.

  “I hope, when your chance comes, you don’t find scientific reality too much of a shock, too.” Janice keyed, with some relief; had she been speaking, tact would have driven her to some effort to keep the laughter out of her voice.

  “But I’ll just need to center on something that needs to be proved, like this question of whether the Habras really originated on Habranha. Just concentrating on that one thing! I hope that’s not a question you feel strongly about personally, Ted; I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable. I’ve met people who consider origins a solved problem and for some reason resent the suggestion of alternative solutions.”

  “I think you miss the main point of science,” Hugh cut in.

  “But isn’t science trying to prove something?” asked Ted. Janice wondered if he were evading the administrator’s implied question; this didn’t occur to her husband. If it did to the Samian, he let the point lie.

  “Ideally, no, though things are seldom ideal,” answered Barrar, rather to the Erthumoi’s surprise. “If you have a preference, something you really want to prove, there’s a tendency to notice and remember the data supporting that preference — I’ve worked with every one of the Six Races, and that’s true of all of us. If it doesn’t apply to your own kind, Ted, you have the potential of becoming the most objective scientists in the Galaxy.”

  Not even the Erthumoi had the open-mindedness or the courtesy to add, “if you aren’t already,” to the Samian’s statement.

  “What do you prefer?” asked another of the Habras.

  “I’m lucky. Right now I simply want a nice, definite, unambiguous answer to the Pit project, so my administrative work here will count as successful.” Hugh wondered fleetingly if Barrar might not be happier in the long run if he kept his illusions and hopes by remaining an administrator, but said nothing as the Samian went on. “Even that has its risks; if no firm answer is possible from the data we find, I could catch myself giving extra weight to some items to make their meaning more definite than it should be. That’s why I’m trying to keep track of all the other work of this sort being done on Habranha.”

  “Didn’t know there was any,” remarked Hugh.

  “Oh, yes. I’ll summarize it for you if we both ever have time.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be lecturing. You’ve asked, I’ve answered. The live problem is the Spreadsheet-Thinker’s and mine and our staff’s. I must get back to work. I — well…”

  “One of us will carry you,” Ted hastily put in. “I assume you have other bodies at the quarters.”

  “Yes, of course. This one was merely improvised to let me try out this Erthumoi amusement for official and, er, other reasons. I fear I have not yet learned all I should about it. I will repair the structure and try again. I think I can travel on the three remaining appendages, if one of you will have the kindness to bring the lost one back to the Residence. I will want to examine it to learn why it proved detective. Go on skiing, Hugh and Janice, and see if you can invent some reasonably risky game for the Habras, too. It does take the mind off one’s regular troubles, I find. You shouldn’t have to be working to protect Erthumoi skeletons, even artificial ones like this, all the time, Ted. How about something like Cephallonian netball — in the liquid air of the Pits?” Barrar began to hobble away, Erthumoi and Habras watching silently. Hugh thought he could see why no major tripodal life-form was known.

  The Samian was almost out of sight when one of the natives spoke.

  “There are some bad plants along his way. I’d better watch.”

  “All right, Walt,” agreed Hugh. “He may want help in his job, but we still have ours. Jan, we have time for another couple of jumps. Ted and Jimbo, are both staying, or is one enough?”

  “Both. One might have to go for additiona
l help while the first patches armor. I don’t think it’s very likely; you’re both pretty good…”

  “It’s likelier now. I never knew — we never knew you were on watch here. Now we’re more apt to get careless or take chances.”

  “Shouldn’t we have told you? Or should we have told you at the beginning? We thought you might have resented it. The Crotonites said you would.”

  ‘Technically, you should have, since I’m your boss. Actually, I like your taking responsibility yourselves. I suppose that makes me a bad administrator, too. The only one really likely to be bothered is Spreadsheet-Thinker. She’d probably resent not knowing what’s going on at any level of the operation. Let’s stop talking for a while; my hand’s getting cramped. C’mon, Jan. You first.”

  Actually, the jumps were delayed for a few minutes by a passing snow squall, and the couple was able to take only one more each. There was further talk with the Habras while they waited, Janice this time doing most of the code work. By common consent Barrar’s problems were avoided; most of the debate was about finding better plants to stabilize the partly artificial hill on which the ski jump had been built. None of the natives was a botanist, but all Habras Hugh and Janice had met so far were imaginative and widely informed. This, of course, could have been observational selection, considering the sort of work the Erthumoi were doing on the little world; both were too experienced to assume that all members of any species were alike enough to be predictable.

  All examined the slopes and agreed that something with still longer and stronger roots would help if it could be found. The winds, while chaotic in detail even here on the dark side, had a general trend toward the sunward hemisphere near the ground. The snow hills behaved enough like sand dunes to travel slowly in the same general direction. Temperature was sometimes so low that even considerable pressure failed to weld water-ice crystals together, though sometimes the welding did occur and dunes graduated to the status of hills. The fact that a rink was very hard to keep free of drifts was only one reason why skiing was more practical than skating on Habranha’s Solid Ocean. Water is inherently a most peculiar substance; Janice and her husband had always known this after a fashion, but Habranha had really driven the fact home to them.

  The natives mentioned that many plants could be identified by smell as well as appearance. The Erthumoi would have liked to check this, if their armor had not been full of diving fluid; a brief exposure to the local atmosphere was harmless, as they had long ago found. Its total surface pressure was nearly four times their normal, but it was relatively chemically safe. The oxygen partial pressure was only about a third of a bar, and the ammonia and hydrogen cyanide were significant only in Habranha’s warmer regions where the gases were less soluble in water. They were already living at local pressure, since flexible environment armor was fairly comfortable and actually resisting the pressure to be expected when the Pit project was farther along would be impractical. Their use of diving fluid had been a concession to this fact from the beginning.

  “I guess we’ll go in now, Ted,” keyed Janice ash>er husband came to a halt beside her. “Were you on duty just because of us, or do you expect others on the slope?”

  “If there are others, they’ll almost certainly be Erthumoi. One of us will be enough until someone dually arrives. It’s Jimbo’s turn to stay, and he’ll all us if we’re needed. Walt and I will take a swing over the Pits.”

  “But you can’t do anything there. Those suits won’t do any good at liquid air temperatures, will hey?”

  “No, but we can get a look — pardon the word, I’m talking about our electric field sense — at what’s happening. I do like to know when something’s been around.”

  “Did that wing of three days ago bother you?” keyed Janice. “We have no idea how you feel about your dead, and have been rather afraid to ask. It’s a touchy subject with many people.”

  “If the owner can be identified, we’ll want to take steps. How far down was it? Have you learned its age? What really puzzled most of us was how it got separated. The idea of losing a wing is-is hard to express in words, and all the ones I can think of are negative.”

  “Couldn’t a really violent storm have done it?” asked Hugh.

  “I’ve never experienced or imagined one that could, but I suppose that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I admit I don’t like to think about that, either, though I’ve faced my share of storms. How about the age?”

  “It was four hundred eighty-one meters below the surface. The ice hasn’t been kind enough to form definite layers, so we’ve had to use other methods of dating. The carbon 14 limit on this planet is about a hundred and sixty thousand Common Years — longer than on most worlds, because you have no magnetic field to speak of and Fafnir flares fairly often, so you have a higher C 14 percentage than usual — and all I can say is the wing is older than that.”

  “In our years, that’s…”

  Both Erthumoi engaged in hasty mental arithmetic. Hugh keyed first. “A little over two and half million minimum.”

  “Then we needn’t worry about notifying relatives,” the Habra said with no obvious trace of humor. “But I’d have guessed that such an age would have brought the fossil deeper into the ice.”

  “So would I,” admitted Janice, “but remember the ice is moving too, probably in as complex patterns as your atmosphere and ocean. Even under this gravity, five hundred kilometers’ water depth gives you something like ten thousand atmospheres, which is plenty for most of the water-ice phase changes even without complications from radioactive heating from underneath. Things happen in solids, too, just a lot slower; and at this point I wouldn’t dare swear it was all solid. That’s something I’d really like to know in detail. It’s the most promising way I can think of for actually dating whatever we find buried here. Nice, unambiguous, straightforward — which is the last thing they’ll be — time-and-distance glacial flow problems.”

  “It must be fun to go into the Pits and find things yourself,” Ted remarked thoughtfully. “I wonder when we’ll manage to modify one of our regular diving suits. The pressure is no problem, of course. We have diving fluid, too. Temperature, though— we’re trying to learn more about your insulating materials. You and the other aliens who work here have been telling our chemists about the stuff you use. It should be good enough; as nearly as I can see, you need even more protection from cold than we do.”

  “That’s no problem,” Janice keyed, “but you’ll have to redesign your armor to protect your wings, too. I hope you manage it soon. It will be good to have you down there; your electrical senses might be very helpful. Looking for microfossils by sending laser beams from one hole in the ice to another works all right, but you might be a lot faster.”

  “But you find larger fossils, too. The wings I was asking about haven’t been the only remains.”

  “No. The ice is full of plant roots. We can some-limes trace them for a dozen meters or more. It looks as though a particular plant anchors itself and grows, maybe for years, maybe for centuries, until something drastic kills it — maybe it gets buried by an advancing dune, or something like that. While it lives, it affects the landscape around it, holding snow in place instead of letting it blow away— forget about decent stratigraphy!”

  “I don’t know that last word,” Ted admitted, “but at least some plants let go of their roots and allow themselves to be blown away when dunes threaten to cover them. I couldn’t tell you which kinds, off jaw.”

  “We’ll have to find out from someone who does,” replied Janice. “Somehow I’m going to get a decent dating scale for this world. But I’m tired, Hugh.

  Let’s go…”

  They went, but not to their quarters to rest. A modulated horn blast which drowned out the roar of an approaching squall took care of that.

  Chapter Two

  And Air Is Made For Swimming, Not For Flight

  There is a difference between having fast reflexes and being easily startled. Rekchellet insiste
d afterward that he was responding properly and reasonably when the shriek echoed through the monitor hull and he dropped from his observation bar with wings spread. After all, if even a ground slug is in danger one is better able to help it from the air. So he claimed, firmly and permanently.

  S’Nash, coiled in front of the speakers, knew that the sound must have come from one of the Pits and merely twitched before extending a fringe to flip from one visual monitor to another in search of a more precise datum. By rights it/he should have been more disturbed than the Crotonite, since the screaming voice was clearly Naxian and even more plainly, to S’Nash, carried genuine terror, surprise, and pain.

  But it was not the voice of a personal acquaintance, so the sentry was able to maintain its/his calm and even to stay tactful. If he refrained even from looking up until the Crotonite was clearly back to his perch and the burst of emotion startled from him was under control. Only then did the serpentine watch officer speak.

  “Rek, do any of your screens tell where that came from? None of mine shows any Naxians in trouble.” It/he heard the brief courtesy syllable indicating that the translator had done its job but got no real answer for several seconds.

  “You’re sure it was a Naxian?” the winged sentry asked at last. “I see fourteen on different screens, in various parts of the Pits. I can’t tell in detail what any of them may be doing except for one who’s polishing a new window, but none seems to be in trouble. Why don’t we have more information yet? I see no one hurt or helpless.”

  With an effort, S’Nash refrained from taking the question as the personal criticism which it/he knew was both in order and intended. It/he should have called back instantly to ask what was wrong. While Crotonites tended to be reflexively supercilious toward everyone without wings there was some excuse this time — though, one could hope, the readable critical feeling might refer to the screamer for not being more specific. The Naxian initiated routine.

  “‘What’s wrong’.’” it/he sibilated into the microphone feeding the Pit transducers. It would be best, just yet, not to alarm any non-Naxians in the area. Depending on what circuits had carried the fear-laden sound to the monitor hall, these might not even have heard it and almost certainly would not have read the emotion it carried, so it/he broadcast the question directly into the liquid mixture of nitrogen and oxygen which kept the Pits” water-ice walls from creeping shut on researchers and equipment.