Fossil Page 4

  Even the footing wasn’t too much of a problem; it would take a long fall to be dangerous here. Their thoughts were mostly on what was up, but neither had conceived a question or answer interesting enough to be worth the labor of putting into code.

  The woman did glance up occasionally, wondering whether they might see Rekchellet on his way, but neither looked for the robot they were to meet.

  Its orders had already been given and acknowledged, and its path would not cross theirs.

  The ice shavings from the Pits had for the most part been taken well beyond the collection of Project buildings for permanent disposal; their total volume was expected to measure many cubic kilometers, though this would be far in the future. There were some small heaps, fifty to a hundred meters high, which had been left closer to and even among the buildings to serve as a water supply and as research material. The behavior of ice grains of various sizes at differing depths and over a range of times, under Habranha’s gravity, sundry forms of traffic, and different kinds of plant cover was a key body of data to the Project, and it was on these piles that the Cedars usually did their skiing. The Erthumoi had been as-Nured that the researchers regarded the effect of even this activity on the substrate as interesting and valuable information. The jumping ramp had been a rather private project of Hugh’s which had failed to catch administrative attention until recently — it was, after all, basically just another pile of ice tailings.

  The present walk, however, was to the main dump — actually to the far side of it, out of view from the settlement, an aspect of S’Nash’s request which was beginning to loom larger in Janice’s mind. She was not worried about the intentions of S’Nash and Rekchellet, of course. For the Crotonite, In particular, a harmless motive could be guessed; he was associating with other species, nonflying ones at that, much more closely than most of his own people would have approved.

  The couple went around the Fafnir-lit north side of the huge mound. Unlike the ski slope, it was almost bare snow; only a few bushes, most of these less than fist size, had taken root and grown fast enough to escape burial as new material was added. A few stood a meter or more out from the surface, where random winds had blown the dust away from already deep-sunk roots.

  Their path around the foot of the slope curved southward until the buildings and lights behind them were all out of sight, and they might have been standing on a deserted world. The pile of ice was larger than most of the elevations they could see, but Habranha’s night hemisphere was far from level. The dustlike snow brought from the day side by the upper level winds and distributed at the surface by the even more chaotic lower ones behaved often— not always — like very fine sand on more Earthlike planets, and the topography consisted largely of ripples and dunes. These were not at all permanent in spite of the vegetation; winds varied wildly on the little planet even away from direct sunlight, and attempts to map the area around the Project base had long been given up by all except two or three stubborn natives who couldn’t, or at least refused to, accept the basic nature of Chaos.

  Hugh and Janice were now plowing through relatively loose material which was technically snow, though far too fine to show individual flakes to human eyes. The wind, while only moderate at the moment, was picking up enough of the dusty stuff to block horizontal vision beyond a few hundred meters, though with the big waste pile and the companion star in clear sight neither Erthuma was worried about getting lost.

  None of the others seemed to have arrived yet, however. There was no point in worrying about the robot, which could locate itself absolutely anywhere on the planet, and Rekchellet could presumably always orient himself by going high enough to see the settlement lights; but the snakelike Naxian was another matter. One could assume that it/he knew what to do outdoors, but a body that shape and size would be hard to see at any distance with the blowing powder swirling mostly near the ground.

  Hugh could tell himself all this and remind himself that the trip had been the Naxian’s own idea, but Hugh had a job, and he couldn’t help wondering what special measures he had not yet thought of might help assure the protection of two-meter-long snakes wriggling around in loose snow where they were likely to be hard to see, to have trouble seeing very far themselves, and to be easily blown away in in atmosphere whose currents were sometimes strong enough to pick up much heavier objects against the local gravity.

  He was brooding over this, probably more seriously than he need have been, when the robot and S’Nash arrived together.

  The former was of fairly standard make, its body a cylinder about a meter high and slightly less in diameter. The top was rimmed with alternating handlers and eyes, half a dozen of each; most of the body, the Erthumoi knew, housed the power unit and machinery for handling and traveling equipment. Its “brain” was little larger than that of a human being, not one of the ten or fifteen liter “Big Boxes.” Just where the designing engineer had decided to put it, under the conflicting demands of easy service access and maximum protection, neither Hugh nor Janice knew or greatly cared. The robot differed from the digger which had performed the rescue a few hours earlier mainly in its locomotion system; instead of hydrojets it possessed three small sets of caterpillar treads, each forming the “foot” of an insectlike leg mounted near the bottom of the cylinder. It was hard to visualize any solid surface on which the system would not find traction.

  Both Erthumoi were quite accustomed to such devices and should not have had their attention strongly attracted by its approach; but something prevented their noticing the Naxian until it/he was beside them. S’Nash simply appeared, sheathed in brightly gleaming full-recycling armor, scarcely a body length away. The wind eddying around its/his partly coiled form was making swirl patterns in the snow beneath it as though it/he had already been there for seconds.

  One did not make exclamations of surprise in code, even if exclamations were needed with Naxians. In any case, before anything had been said by anyone at the foot of the snow hill, another voice cut in with evidence of irritation which even the Erthumoi could detect in translation.

  “Doesn’t anyone have the sense to wear a light if you’re not going to stand out where someone can see you easily? I don’t suppose any of you knows what hummocky ground looks like from above under slanting light, but I thought imagination was supposed to be part of intelligence. Where are you, anyway/”

  “Sorry, Rek,” keyed Janice. Hugh silently turned on his suit lamp, set it on wide beam, and swung it to follow his gaze aloft.

  The rays could be followed easily enough in the blowing ice dust, but for a moment none of those on the ground could see the Crotonite. Then his wings showed darkly against the Fafnir-lit upper haze as he swung back toward them from farther west, fifty or sixty meters up, rocking slightly in the turbulent air. Hugh swung his lamp toward him to reveal their own position.

  The reaction was less than grateful, they could tell, though more than half the words for the next few seconds were no-symbol-equivalent codes from their translators.

  A single term, “Dark adaptation,” came through mixed with the other sounds, and at almost the same instant the broad-winged shadow plunged into the hillside above them. A cloud of ice dust rose, spread, and swirled up the hill on the wind; coarser material hung around the impact site, settling slowly in the weak gravity and thick air. Rekchellet’s tirade ceased, and for a long moment only the wind could he heard.

  Nobody wasted time; even Hugh saved his self-criticism for later. He did not reject his own guilt, but with luck and quick enough action he might not have to reprimand himself; Rekchellet should be able to take care of that. The surface of the ice dust was loose and fluffy, the Crotonite couldn’t possibly have hit it very hard, it was most unlikely that there was now enough weight on him to keep him from breathing, and unless Chaos had been unusually personal they should have a mishap rather than a tragedy on their hands.

  Standing around watching, however, was not appropriate action. Trying to make their way up to the
impact site, the Erthumoi found, was not appropriate cither. Climbing was impossible. The dust was near as angle of repose, and even in what for them was scarcely one-fifth gravity, the Erthumoi slid back with the loose material as fast as they stamped and beat it downward. Their only visible achievements were to start digging a niche at the foot of the slope, which refilled by collapse from above every few seconds, and to force the Naxian to withdraw hastily to keep from being buried. Neither human being noticed its/his retreat. They realized almost at once that they would never get up the hill themselves, but decided independently and instantly that the refill wave might help uncover Rekchellet when it reached his height. They could only hope that it wouldn’t as promptly bury him again with the next collapse.

  The robot’s abrupt unordered departure brought neither question nor comment. The Naxian saw it go, but said nothing as it vanished around the southern curve of the ice pile, and it/he remained silent even when the robot reappeared a minute or so later. The Cedars were still trying to dig, and if they noticed anything beyond the dust they were moving, they didn’t waste effort or attention putting it in code. No sound had come from Rekchellet since his burial. All anyone could hear was rising wind.

  The robot was no longer traveling under its own power, but riding a tracked vehicle. On this was mounted something which might on many worlds have been mistaken for a piece of field artillery, since its most obvious feature in the poor light was a slender tube some three meters long. As the machine emerged from the shadow and brought its rider into sight of the impact scar made by Rekchellet— rapidly disappearing as wind filled it with white dust — the tube swiveled upward. The vehicle halted, and a roar loud enough to drown any attempt at conversation filled the air.

  Three or four meters above the Crotonite crater a new cloud rose in Fafnir’s light and swept away toward the north, and another hole appeared in the waste pile. A dull red beam of light played from a point on the machine just under the tube, striking the new pit and playing back and forth over its upper side. As the seconds passed, the excavation spread downward toward the place where Rekchellet had disappeared; but unlike that made by the still active Erthumoi. this one did not fill from above.

  The wind blast from the air-sweeper continued to roar, digging closer and closer to the buried flier. The mild heat beam melted the surface, and the resulting water soaked into the still undisplaced snow and froze again almost instantly into a wall which, frail as it was, supported the material above.

  The Erthumoi finally realized what was going on and ceased their frantic digging. Janice, in hope of sparing the anti-artificial intelligence prejudices of the Naxian, started to key, “It’s just experience, not…” and stopped before getting out the word “imagination.” She knew she was right, but her own imagination had suddenly kicked in and supplied her intuition with a possible reason why she and her husband and the robot had been called to this meeting by S’Nash. She hoped Hugh would see it for himself; she couldn’t tell him now. She didn’t want the others to know what she’d guessed until she could watch them both closely. The knowledge should spare her husband guilt feelings about Rekchellet’s accident, though she could, of course, be wrong.

  It had not, she suddenly felt pretty sure, really been an accident.

  She watched, much more calmly than Hugh, as the jet of air swung lower and lower, cutting its way into the heap of ice dust closer and closer to the point where the flier had vanished.

  Neither Erthuma was surprised when a dark object suddenly whirled out of the Fafnir-lit surface and spun skyward. For a moment it simply blew away, then wings extended, the tumbling slowed and then ceased, and it was flying under control.

  Rekchellet still said nothing as he glided to the ice beside them. The thunder of the sweeper died, and the billowing cloud of airborne dust which now extended for hundreds of meters north of the waste heap began slowly to settle as well as to spread in the rising wind.

  “You’re all right,” keyed Hugh.

  Chapter Three

  The Best Precautions May Be Taken Late

  “Well, I can fly!” snapped the Crotonite. “When I asked for someone to use a light to indicate your position. I didn’t mean for some idiot…” “I was a little hasty,” Hugh began. “Are you sure?” cut in Janice’s code. For a moment her husband thought she was addressing him, and wondered how to get “of course I was” across with an absolute minimum of finger work. Then he realized she was speaking to Rekchellet as she went on, “What else would you have used for an excuse?” The flier hunched silently into a more relaxed position, looking steadily at the Erthuma. His beaked face was in shadow. Janice, despite her suspicion-driven alertness and personal familiarity with the Crotonite, could probably not have read Rek’s expression even if the light had been better; but S’Nash was a little slow cutting off its/his speaker.

  “Good for—!” came through the translators, complete with exclamation symbol.

  Rekchellet produced a sound rather like a snort, which the translator passed unaltered and followed with no-equivalent-pattern. Words finally became clear. “There’s plenty of turbulence up there. The wind is rising; even you must have noticed that. I could have said anything I pleased. How would you ground…” he caught himself…”would you have known if I were falsifying data?”

  “You wouldn’t be.” Janice’s translated code carried the emphasis clearly enough. “You knew one of us would react quickly, not hastily. Hugh did just what you wanted.” The woman had clearly centered the tracker, but if Rekchellet felt either embarrassed or flattered he made no sound or motion to reveal it. “You and S’Nash, or at least S’Nash, wanted to check on robots,” Janice went on. “You arranged to have one here, and set up a situation to find out what it would do without instruction. What if we’d instructed it?”

  “I would have gotten in its way,” the Naxian answered promptly.

  “You really trust an Erthuma-built artificial mind that far? You’d risk your own life to…”

  “We trust some Erthumoi people that far,” said the Crotonite emphatically. “Not others. We understood that the robots on this project would just be dedicated machines, able to do only simple tasks like digging and disposing of waste ice. This is research, far too important to be entrusted to artificial thinking. Janice and Hugh, I trusted you. Many more trusted you because of me, whatever they may think of my taste in friends. You knew the understanding. Why didn’t you keep to it?”

  “Was the accident in the Pit also a test?” keyed Janice.

  “No,” snapped the Crotonite. “Answer my question.”

  “Was this second test planned before that accident, or did you two get the idea after you saw what happened in the Pit?”

  S’Nash answered this time. “It was my idea when I saw the other rescue. Rekchellet disapproved, but I convinced him. Please answer his question. I want him to know.”

  Neither human being commented on the implication that the Naxian knew already, but both wondered briefly why it/he cared.

  “In my opinion,” Hugh keyed carefully, “we didn’t break word or trust. None of these robots is intelligent by our standards. You should know; you’ve at least seen the Big Boxes, and probably done some work with them even if you didn’t like it. None of these robots has anything to do with data identification or interpretation, and no machines do except the dedicated number-spinners you and everyone else know about.

  “However, I consider it my responsibility to have brains in any robot working where a living project member might be in danger. Not high-class brains, but ones capable of simple decisions. One person is alive now probably because of that judgment — at least, S’Nash here says the Pit accident a few hours ago was not a setup. I don’t suppose you were really in trouble up the hill here, Rekchellet, but if you had been none of us but the robot could have done you any good.” Hugh paused, realizing that he was being defensive and not liking it.

  “So what are you going to do about all this? Complain to Spreadshee
t-Thinker or the Guild about the robots? If they do anything negative about them, it will only lessen the personal safety of those working here on Darkside.”

  It was the Naxian who answered. “We’ll say as little as possible — nothing, if we can get away with it, though I expect she would probably agree with you. Let me give you our reasons.” It/he was interrupted by a single word from the robot.

  “Evaluation?”

  “Proper and adequate, interpretation and action,” Hugh keyed.

  “Anything superfluous?”

  “Most of it, but data on that fact came afterward. Your response was proper and adequate. Back to routine.” The robot and sweeper disappeared into the shadows south of the pile. Thoughtfully, Hugh watched it go. S’Nash did not.

  The serpentine schemer coiled into a presumably comfortable attitude and started its/his explanation, managing to give the impression of an educator going into lecture mode.

  “I was never really worried about your betrayal of trust, Cedars. I don’t think Rekchellet would have been either if he had thought things through carefully, but I wanted his help in getting you to the test we have just made. I had little time to think, and gave him none. I played on his feelings. I apologize, Rekchellet. I acted selfishly, crudely, improperly, discourteously, and have betrayed your trust. I am a worm and a slug, and I ask your forgiveness and a chance to earn that trust back. You may use me if you wish as I have used you.”

  The Crotonite had stirred uneasily, and the great wings had half spread at the first part of S’Nash’s admission. They folded again hastily as a gust threatened to carry him away with the snow, and the next few sentences seemed to calm him a little. Both Erthumoi guessed that S’Nash was using its/his emotion sense to the full, trying different sentences like keys on a shop console in the hope that they would forestall or calm real anger on the part of the winged listener.