Star Light m-2 Read online

  The meteorology lab was on the “highest” level of the cylinder, enough closer to the spin axis of the station to make a person about ten percent lighter than in the communication room. Facilities for exercise being as limited as they were, powered elevators had been omitted from the station’s design, and intercoms were regarded as strictly emergency equipment. Easy Hoffman had the choice of a spiral stairway at the axis of symmetry of the cylinder or any of several ladders. Since she wasn’t carrying anything, she didn’t bother with the stairs. Her destination was almost directly “above” Communications, and she reached it in less than a minute.

  The most prominent features in this room were two twenty-foot-diameter hemispherical maps of Dhrawn. Each was a live-vision screen carrying displays of temperature, reference-altitude pressure, wind velocity, where it was obtainable, and such other data as could be obtained either from the low-orbiting shadow satellites or the Mesklinite exploring crews. A spot of green light marked the Settlement just north of the equator, and nine fainter yellow sparks scattered closely around it indicated the exploring land-cruisers. Against the background of the gigantic planet their spread made an embarrassingly small display, scattered over a range of some eight thousand miles east and west and twenty or twenty-five thousand north and south, on the western side of what the meteorologists called Low Alpha. The yellow lights, except for two well out in the colder regions to the west, formed a rough arc framing the Low. Eventually it was to be ringed with sensing stations, but little more than a quarter of its eighty-thousand-mile perimeter had so far been covered.

  The cost had been high — not merely in money, which Easy tended to regard as merely a measure of effort expended, but in life. Her eyes sought the red-ringed yellow light just inside the Low which marked the position of the Esket. Seven months — three and a half of Dhrawn’s days — had passed since any human being had seen a sign of her crew, though her transmitters still sent pictures of her interior. Easy thought grimly, now and again, of her friends Kabremm and Destigmet; and occasionally she bothered Dondragmer’s conscience, though she had no way of knowing this, by talking about them to the Kwembly’s commander.

  “H’lo, Easy,” and “Hi, Mom,” cut into her gloomy thoughts.

  “Hello, weather men,” she responded. “I have a friend who’d like a forecast. Can you help?”

  “If it’s for here in the station, sure,” answered Benj.

  “Don’t be cynical, son. You’re old enough to understand the difference between knowing nothing and not knowing everything. It’s for Dondragmer of the Kwembly. “She indicated the yellow light on the map, and outlined the situation. “Alan is bringing an exact position, if that will help.”

  “Probably not much,” Seumas McDevitt admitted. “If you don’t like cynicism I’ll have to pick my words carefully; but the light on the screen there should be right within a few hundred miles, and I doubt that we can compute a precise enough forecast for that to make a significant difference.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d have enough material for any predictions at all,” Easy countered. “I understand that weather comes from the west even on this world, and the area to the west has been out of sunlight for days now. Can you see such places well enough to get useful data?”

  “Oh, sure.” Benj’s sarcasm had vanished and the enthusiasm which had caused him to put down atmospheric physics as his post-primary tentative was taking over. “We don’t get much of our measurement from reflected sunlight anyway; nearly all is direct radiation from the planet. There’s a lot more emitted than it receives from the sun anyway; you’ve heard the old argument as to whether Dhrawn ought to be called a star or a planet. We can tell ground temperature, a good deal about ground cover, lapse rates, and clouds. Winds are harder—” he hesitated, seeing McDevitt’s eye on him and unable to read the meteorologist’s poker face. The man read the trouble in time and nodded him on before the rush of self-confidence had lost momentum. McDevitt had never been a teacher, but he had the touch.

  “Winds are harder because of the slight uncertainty in cloud heights and the fact that adiabatic temperature changes often have more to say about the location of clouds than air mass identities do. In that gravity, the air density drops by half about every hundred yards of climb, and that makes for terrific PV changes in temperature—” he paused again, this time eyeing his mother. “Do you know about that sort of thing, or should I slow down?”

  “I’d hate to have to solve quantitative problems on what you’ve just been saying,” Easy replied, “but I think I have a fair qualitative picture. I get the impression that you’re a little doubtful about telling Don to the nearest minute when his fog is going to clear. Would a report from him on surface pressures and winds be any help? The Kwembly has instruments, you know.”

  “It might,” McDevitt admitted as Benj nodded silently. “Can I talk to the Kwembly directly? And will any of them understand me? My Stennish doesn’t exist yet.”

  “I’ll translate if I can keep your technical terms straight,” replied Easy. “If you plan to do more than a one-month tour here, though, it would be a good idea to try to pick up the language of our little friends. Many of them know some of ours, but they appreciate it.”

  “I know. I plan to. I’d be glad if you’d help me.”

  “When I can, certainly; but you’ll see a lot more of Benj.”

  “Benj? He came here three weeks ago with me, and hasn’t had any better chance to learn languages than I have. We’ve both been checking out on the local observation and computer nets, and filling in on the project background.” Easy grinned at her son.

  “That’s as may be. He’s a language bug like his mother, and I think you’ll find him useful, though I admit he got his Stennish from me rather than the Mesklinites. He insisted on my teaching him something that his sisters wouldn’t be able to listen in on. Write as much of that off to parental pride as you like, but give him a try. Later, that is; I’d like that information for Dondragmer as soon as we can get it. He said the wind was from the west at about sixty miles an hour, if that helps at all.”

  The meteorologist pondered a moment.

  “I’ll run what we have through integration, with that bit added,” he said finally. “Then we can give him something when we call, and if the numerical details he gives us then are too different we can make another run easily enough. Wait a moment.

  He and the boy turned to their equipment, and for several minutes their activities meant little to the woman. She knew, of course, that they were feeding numerical data and weighting values into computing devices which were presumably already programmed to handle the data appropriately. She was pleased to see Benj apparently handling his share of the work without supervision. She and her husband had been given to understand that the boy’s mathematical powers might not prove up to the need of his field of interest. Of course, what he was doing now was routine which could be handled by anyone with a little training whether he really understood it or not, but Easy chose to interpret the display as encouraging.

  “Of course,” McDevitt remarked as the machine was digesting its input, “there’ll be room for doubt anyway. This sun doesn’t do very much to the surface temperature of Dhrawn, but its effect is not completely negligible. The planet has been getting closer to the sun almost ever since we really got going here three years ago. We didn’t have any surface reports except from half a dozen robots until the Mesklinite settlement was set up a year and a half later, and even their measurements still cover only a tiny fraction of the planet. Our prediction work is almost entirely empirical, no matter how much we want to believe in the laws of physics, and we really don’t have enough data for empirical rules yet.”

  ‘Easy nodded. “I realize that, and so does Dondragmer,” she said. “Still, you have more information than he does, and I guess anything is welcome to him at this point. I know if I were down there thousands of miles from any sort of help, in a machine which is really in the test stage, and not even abl
e to see what was around me — well, I can tell you from experience that it helps to be in touch with the outside. Not just in the way of conversation, though that helps, but so they could more or less see me and know what I was going through.”

  “We’d have an awful time seeing him,” put in Benj. “Even when the air at the other end is clear, six million miles is a long way for telescope work.”

  “You’re right, of course, but I think you know what I mean,” his mother said quietly. Benj shrugged and said no more; in fact, a rather tense silence ensued for perhaps half a minute.

  It was interrupted by the computer, which ejected a sheet of cryptic symbols in front of McDevitt. The other two leaned over his shoulders to see it, though this did Easy little good. The boy spent about five seconds glancing over the lines of information, and emitted a sound halfway between a snort of contempt and a laugh. The meteorologist glanced up at him.

  “Go ahead, Benj. You can be as sarcastic as you like on this one. I’d advise against letting Dondragmer have these results uncensored.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with them?” asked the woman.

  “Well, most of the data, of course, was from shadow satellite readings. I did plug in your wind report, with a bit of uncertainty. I don’t know what sort of instruments the caterpillars have down there, or how precisely the figures were transmitted to you; and you did say about sixty for the wind speed. I didn’t mention the fog, since you didn’t tell me any more than the fact that it was there, and I had no numbers. The first line of this computer run says that visibility in normal light — normal to human eyes, that is, and about the same to Mesklinite ones, I gather — is twenty-two miles for a one-degree blur.”

  Easy raised her eyebrows. “Just how do you account for something like that? I thought all the old jokes about weather men had gone pretty well out of date?”

  “Actually, they just got stale. I account for it by the simple fact that we don’t and can’t have complete information for the machine. The most obvious lack is a detailed topographic chart of the planet, especially the couple of million square miles west of the Kwembly. A wind coming up or down a slope of six inches per mile at any respectable speed would change its air mass temperature rapidly just from PV change, as Benj pointed out a few minutes ago. Actually, the best maps we have of the topography were worked out from just that effect but they’re pretty sketchy. I’ll have to get more detailed measurements from Dondragmer’s people and give them another run. Did you say Aucoin was getting a more exact position for the Kwembly?”

  Easy had no time to answer; Aucoin himself appeared in the room. He did not bother with greetings, and took for granted that the meteorologists would have the background information from Easy.

  “Eight point four five five degrees south of the equator, seven point nine two three east of the Settlement meridian. That’s as close as they’ll swear to. Is a thousand yards or so too much uncertainty for what you need?”

  “Everybody’s being sarcastic today,” muttered McDevitt. “Thanks, that’ll be fine. Easy, can we go down to Comm and have that talk with Dondragmer?”

  “All right. Do you mind if Benj comes along, or is there work he should be doing here? I’d like him to meet Dondragmer, too.

  “And incidentally display his linguistic powers. All right, he may come. You, too, Alan?”

  “No. There’s other work to do. I’d like to know the details on any forecast you consider trustworthy, though, and anything Dondragmer reports which might conceivably affect Planning. I’ll be in PL.”

  The weather man nodded. Aucoin took himself off in one direction, and the other three made their way down ladders to the communication room. Mersereau had disappeared, as he had intimated he might, but one of the other watchers had shifted his position to keep an eye on the Kwembly’s screens. He waved and returned to his place as Easy entered. The others paid the party little attention. They had been aware of Easy’s and Mersereau’s departures simply because of the standing rule that there were never to be fewer than ten observers in the room at once. The stations were not assigned on a rigid schedule; this had been found to lead to the equivalent of road hypnosis.

  The four communication sets tied to the Kwembly had their speakers centered in front of a group of six seats. The corresponding vision screens were set higher, so that they could also be seen from the general seats further back. Each of the six “station” seats was equipped with a microphone and a selector switch permitting contact with any one or all four of the Kwembly’s radios.

  Easy settled herself in a comfortably central chair and switched its microphone to the set on Dondragmer’s bridge. There was little to be seen on the corresponding screen, since the transmitter’s eye was pointed forward toward the bridge windows and the Mesklinites’ report of fog was perfectly correct. The helmsman’s station and its occupant could be partly seen in the lower left-hand corner of the screen; the rest was gray blankness marked off into rectangles by the window braces. The bridge lights were subdued, but the fog beyond the windows was illuminated by the Kwembly’s outside floods, Easy judged.

  “Don!” she called. “Easy here. Are you on the bridge?” She snapped on a timer and shifted her selector switch to the set in the laboratory. “Borndender, or whoever is there,” she called, still in Stennish, “we can’t get a reliable weather prediction with the information we have. We’re talking to the bridge, but we’d be glad if you could give us as exactly as possible your present temperature, wind velocity, outside pressure, anything quantitative you have on the fog, and—” she hesitated.

  “And the same information for the past few hours, with times given as closely as possible,” Benj cut in in the same language.

  “We’ll be ready to receive as soon as the bridge finishes talking,” continued the woman.

  “We could also use whatever you have on air, fog, and snow composition,” added her son.

  “If there is any other material you think might be of help, it will also be welcome,” finished Easy. “You’re there and we aren’t, and there must be some ideas about Dhrawn’s weather you. We formed on your own.” The timer sounded a bell note. “The bridge is coming in now. We’ll be waiting for your words when the captain finishes.”

  The speaker’s first words overlapped her closing phrase. The timer had been set for the light-speed lag of a round-trip message between Dhrawn and the station, and the bridge had answered promptly.

  “Kervenser here, Mrs. Hoffman. The captain is below in the life-support room. I’ll call him here if you like, or you can switch to the set down there, but if you have any advice for us we’d like it as quickly as possible. We can’t see a body-length from the bridge and don’t dare move, except in circles. The fliers gave us an idea of the neighborhood before we stopped and it seems solid enough, but we certainly can’t take a chance on going forward. We’re going dead slow, in a circle about twenty-five cables in diameter. Except when we’re bow or stern to the wind, the ship feels as though it were going to capsize every few seconds. The fog has been freezing as it hits the windows, which is why we can’t see out. The tracks still seem to be clear, I suppose because they’re moving and ice gets cracked off before it can hurt, but I expect the tiller lines to freeze up any time, and getting the ice off them will be a glorious job. I suppose it will be possible to work outside, but I’d hate to do it myself until the wind stops. Having an air suit ice up sounds unpleasant. Any thoughts?”

  Easy waited patiently for Kervenser to finish. The sixty-four-second message delay had had a general effect on everyone who did much talking between station and planet; they developed a strong tendency to say as much as possible at one time, guessing at what the other party wanted to hear. When she knew that Kervenser had finished and was waiting for an answer, she quickly summarized the message which had been given to the scientists. As with them, she omitted all mention of the computer result which had insisted that the weather must be clear. The Mesklinites knew that human science was not infallib
le — most of them had, in fact, a much more realistic and healthy idea of its limitations than many human beings — but there was no point in making one’s self look too silly if it could be helped. She was not, of course, a meteorologist, but she was human and Kervenser would probably lump her in with the others.

  The group waited almost silently for the first officer’s answer when she finished. Benj’s muttered translation for the benefit of McDevitt took only a few seconds longer than the message itself. When the response finally came it was merely an acknowledgment and a polite hope that the human beings could furnish useful information soon; the Kwembly scientists were sending up the requested material at once.

  Easy and her son readied themselves for the data. She started a recorder to check any technical terms before attempting translation, but the message came through in the human language. Evidently Borndender was sending. McDevitt recovered promptly from his surprise and began taking notes, while the boy kept his eyes on the pencil point and his ears on the speaker.

  It was just as well that Easy was not needed for translation. Well as she knew Stennish, there were many words strange to her in both languages; she couldn’t have interpreted either way. She knew that she should not be embarrassed by the fact, but she couldn’t help it. She could not help thinking of the Mesklinites as representing a culture like that of Robin Hood or Haroun al Raschid, though she knew perfectly well that several hundred of them had received very comprehensive scientific and technical education in the last half century. The fact had not been widely published, since there was a widespread notion that it was bad to release much advanced knowledge to “backward” peoples. It was likely to give them an inferiority complex and prevent further progress.

  The weather men didn’t care. When the final “over” came through, McDevitt and his assistant uttered a hasty “Thank You” into the nearest microphone and hurried off toward the laboratory. Easy, noting that the selector switch had been set for the bridge radio, corrected it and returned a more careful acknowledgment before signing off. Then, deciding that she would be useless in the meteorology lab, she settled back on the chair which gave her the best view of the Kwembly’s four screens, and waited for something to happen.