Close to Critical

II. EXPLANATION; CONCATENATION; RECRIMINATION

“What do you do now?”

Raeker ignored the question; important as he knew the speaker to be, he had no time for casual conversation. He had to act. Fagin’s television screens lined the wall around him, and every one showed the swarming forms of the fir-cone-shaped beings who were attacking the village. There was a microphone before his face, with its switch spring-loaded in the open position so that casual talk in the control room would not reach the robot’s associates; his finger was hovering over the switch, but he did not touch it. He didn’t quite know what to say.

Everything he had told Nick through the robot was perfectly true; there was nothing to be gained by trying to fight. Unfortunately, the fight had already started. Even had Raeker been qualified to give advice on the defense of the village, it was too late; it was no longer even possible for a human being to distinguish the attackers from the defenders. Spears were sailing through the air with blinding speed—nothing merely tossed gets very far in a three-gravity field—and axes and knives flashed in the firelight.

“It’s a good show, anyway.” The same shrill voice that had asked the question a minute earlier made itself heard once more. “That firelight seems to be brighter than daylight, down there.” The casual tone infuriated Raeker, who was not taking the predicament of his friends at all casually; but it was not consideration of the identity or importance of the speaker that kept him from losing his temper and saying something unfortunate. Quite unintentionally, the onlooker had given him an idea. His finger stabbed at the microphone button.

“Nick! Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Teacher.” Nick’s voice showed no sign of the terrific physical effort he was exerting; his voice machinery was not as closely tied in with his breathing apparatus as is that of a human being.

“All right. Fight your way into the nearest hut as quickly as possible, all of you. Get out of sight of me. If you can’t reach a hut, get behind a woodpile or something like that—below the curve of the hill, if nothing better is possible. Let me know as soon as you’ve all managed this.”

“We’ll try.” Nick had no time to say more; those in the control room could only watch, though Raeker’s fingers were hovering over another set of switches on the complex panel before him.

“One of them’s making it.” It was the high voice again, and this time Raeker had to answer.

“I’ve known these people for sixteen years, but I can’t tell them from the attackers now. How can you identify them?” He let his glance shift briefly from the screens to the two nonhumans towering behind him.

“The attackers have no axes, only knives and spears,” pointed out the speaker calmly. The man hastily turned back to the screens. He could not be sure that the other was right; only three or four axes could be seen, and their wielders were not very clearly visible in the swirling press. He had not noticed any lack of axes in the hands of the attackers as they came up the hill, in the brief moments after they became visible to the robot and before battle was joined; but there was no reason to doubt that someone else might have. He wished he knew Dromm and its people better. He made no answer to the slender giant’s comment, but from then on watched the axes which flashed in the firelight. These really did seem to be working their way toward the huts which rimmed the top of the hill. Some failed to make it; more than one of the tools which had so suddenly become weapons ceased to swing as the robot’s eyes watched.

But some did get there. For half a minute a four-armed, scaly figure stood at one of the hut doors, facing outward and smashing the crests of all attackers who approached too close. Three others, all apparently injured, crawled toward him and under the sweep of the powerful arms to take shelter in the building; one of these remained in the doorway, crouching with two spears and guarding the axeman from low thrusts.

Then another defender battered his way to the side of the first, and the two retreated together inside the hut. None of the cave-dwellers seemed eager to follow.

“Are you all inside, Nick?” Raeker asked.

“Five of us are here. I don’t know about the others. I’m pretty sure Alice and Tom are dead, though; they were near me at the beginning, and I haven’t seen them for some time.”

“Give a call to those who aren’t with you. I’ll have to do something very soon, and I don’t want any of you hurt by it.”

“They must either be safe or dead. The fighting has stopped; it’s a lot easier to hear you than it was. You’d better do whatever it is without worrying about us; I think Swift’s people are all heading toward you. Only a couple are outside the door here; the others are forming a big ring around where I saw you last. You haven’t moved, have you?”

“No,” admitted Raeker, “and you’re right about the ring. One of the biggest of them is walking right up to me. Make sure you are all under cover—preferably somewhere where light won’t reach you. I’ll give ten seconds.”

“All right,” Nick answered. “We’re getting under tables.”

Raeker counted a slow ten, watching Hie approaching creatures in the screens as he did so. At the last number his fingers tripped a gang bar which closed twenty switches simultaneously; and as Nick described it later, “the world took fire.”

It was only the robot’s spotlights, unused now for years but still serviceable. It seemed quite impossible to the human watchers that any optical organs sensitive enough to work on the few quanta of light which reach the bottom of Tenebra’s atmosphere could possible stand any such radiance; the lights themselves had been designed with the possibility hi mind that they might have to pierce dust or smoke—they were far more powerful’than were really needed by the receptors of the robot itself.

The attackers should have been blinded instantly, according to Raeker’s figuring. The sad fact slowly emerged 4hat they were not.

They were certainly surprised. They stopped their advance for a moment, and chattered noisily among themselves; then the giant who was in front of the others strode right up to the robot, bent over, and appeared to examine one of the lights in detail. The men had long ago learned that the Tenebran vision organs were involved in some way with the spiny crests on their heads, and it was this part that the being who Raeker suspected must be Swift brought close to one of the tiny ports from which the flood of light was escaping.

The man sighed and shut off the lights.

“Nick,” he called, “I’m afraid my idea didn’t work. Can you get in touch with this Swift fellow, and try to get the language problem across to him? He may be trying to talk to me now, for all I can tell.”

“I’ll try.” Nick’s voice came faintly through the robot’s instruments; then there was nothing but an incomprehensible chattering that ran fantastically up and down the scale. There was no way to tell who was talking, much; less what was being said, and Raeker settled back uneasily in his seat.

“Couldn’t the handling equipment of that robot be used for fighting?” The shrill voice of the Drommian interrupted his worries.

“Conceivably, under other circumstances,” Raeker replied. “As it happens, we’re too far away. You must have noticed the delays between questions and answers when I was talking to Nick. We’re orbiting Tenebra far enough out to keep us over the same longitude; its day is about four Earth ones, and that puts us over a hundred and sixty thousand miles away. Nearly two seconds delay in reflex would make the robot a pretty poor fighter.”

“Of course. I should have realized. I must apologize for wasting your tune and interrupting on what must be a very bothersome occasion.”

Raeker, with an effort, tore his mind from the scene so far below, and turned to the Drommians.

“I’m afraid the apology must be mine,” he said. “I knew you were coming, and why; I should at least have appointed someone to do the honors of the place, if I couldn’t manage it myself. My only excuse is the emergency you see. Please let me make up for it by helping you now. I suppose you would like to see the Vindemiatrix.”

“By no means. I would not dream of taking you from this room just now. Anyway, the ship itself is of no interest compared to your fascinating project on the planet, and you can explain that to us as well here, while you are waiting for your agent’s answer, as anywhere else. I understand that your robot has been on the planet a long time; perhaps you could tell me more about how you recruited your agents on the planet. Probably my sod would like to be shown the ship, if someone else could be spared from other duties.”

“Certainly. I did not realize he was your son; the message telling us of your visit did not mention him, and I assumed he was an assistant.”

“That is perfectly all right. Son, this is Dr. Helven Raeker; Dr. Raeker, this is Aminadorneldo.”

“I am delighted to meet you, sir,” piped the younger Drommian.

“The pleasure is mine. If you wait a moment, a man is coming to show you over the Vindemiatrix—unless you would rather stay here and join conversation with your father and me.”

“Thank you, I would rather see the ship.”

Raeker nodded, and waited hi silence for a moment or two. He had already pressed the call button which would bring a crewman to the observing room. He wondered a little why the younger being was with his father; presumably he was serving some purpose. It would be easier to talk without him, though, since the two were virtually indistinguishable to Raeker and it would be rather embarrassing to get them mixed up. Both were giants from the human point of view; standing on their hind legs— a highly unnatural attitude for them—they would have towered nearly ten feet tall. Their general build was that of a weasel—or better, an otter, since the slender digits which terminated their five pairs of limbs were webbed. The limbs themselves were short and powerful, and the webs on the first two pairs reduced to fringes of membrane along the fingers—a perfectly normal evolutionary development for intelligent amphibious beings living on a planet with a surface gravity nearly four times that of the earth. Both were wearing harnesses supporting sets of small gas tanks, with tubing running inconspicuously to the corners of their mouths; they were used to an oxygen partial pressure about a third greater than human normal. They were hairless, but something about their skins reflected a sheen similar to that of wet sealskin.

They were stretched hi an indescribably relaxed attitude on the floor, with their heads high enough to see the screens clearly. When the door slid open and the crewmen entered, one of them came to his feet with a flowing motion and, introductions completed, followed the man out of the compartment. Raeker noticed that he walked on all ten limbs, even those whose webs were modified to permit prehension, though the Vindemiatrix’ centrifugal “gravity” could hardly have made it necessary. Well, most men use both legs on the moon, for that matter, though hopping on one is perfectly possible. Raeker dismissed the matter from his mind, and turned to the remaining Drommian—though he always reserved some of his attention for the screens.

“You wanted to know about our local agents,” he began. “There’s not very much to tell, in one way. The big difficulty was getting contact with the surface at all. The robot down there now represents a tremendous achievement of engineering; the environment is close to the critical temperature of water, with an atmospheric pressure near eight hundred times that of Earth. Since even quartz dissolves fairly readily under those conditions, it took quite a while to design machines which could hold up. We finally did it; that one has been down a little over sixteen of our years. Tin a biologist and can’t help you much with the technical details; if you happen to care, there are people here who can.

“We sent the machine down, spent nearly a year exploring, and finally found some apparently intelligent natives. They turned out to be egg-layers, and we managed to get hold of some of the eggs. Our agents down there are the ones who hatched; we’ve been educating them ever since. Now, just as we start doing some real exploring with them, this has to happen.” He gestured toward the screen, where the huge Swift had paused in his examination of the robot and seemed to be listening; perhaps Nick was having some luck in his selling job.

“If you could make a machine last so long in that environment, I should think you could build something which would let you go down in person,” said the Drommian.

Raeker smiled wryly. “You’re quite right, and that’s what makes the present situation even more annoying. We have such a machine just about ready to go down; in a few days we expected to be able to cooperate directly with our people below.”

“Really? I should think that would have taken a long time to design and build.”

“It has. The big problem was not getting down; we managed that all right with parachutes for the robot. The trouble is getting away again.”

“Why should that be particularly difficult? The surface gravity, as I understand it, is less than that of my own world, and even the potential gradient ought to be somewhat smaller. Any booster unit ought to clear you nicely.”

“It would if it worked. Unfortunately, the booster that will unload its exhaust against eight hundred atmospheres hasn’t been built yet. They melt down—they don’t blow up because the pressure’s too high.”

The Drommian looked a trifle startled for a moment, then nodded in a remarkably human manner.

“Of course. I should have thought. I remember how much more effective rockets are on your own planet than ours. But how have you solved this? Some radically new type of reactor?”

“Nothing new; everything in the device is centuries old. Basically, it’s a ship used long ago for deep-ocean exploration on my own world—a bathyscaphe, we called it. For practical purposes, it’s a dirigible balloon. I could describe it, but you’d do better to—”

“Teacher!” A voice which even Aminadabarlee of Dromm could recognize as Nick’s erupted from the speaker. Raeker whirled back to his panel and closed the microphone switch.

“Yes, Nick? What does Swift say?”

“In effect, no. He wants nothing to do with anyone in this village but you.”

“Didn’t you explain the language problem to him?”

“Yes, but he says that if I was able to learn his words you, who are my teacher, should be able to learn them more quickly. Then he will not have to depend on people he doesn’t trust to tell him what you’re saying. I hope he’s right. He’s willing to leave the rest of us here, but you have to go with him.”

“I see. You’d better agree, for now; it will at least keep those of you who are alive out of further trouble. It may be that we’ll be able to arrange a little surprise for Swift in the near future. You tell him that I’ll do what he says; I’ll go along with him to the caves—I suppose he’ll be starting back there tomorrow, though if he wants to stay longer don’t discourage him. When they go, you stay where you are; find everyone who’s still alive and get them back in shape—I suppose most of you are injured —and then wait until I get in touch with you. It may be some days, but leave it to me.”

Nick was a fairly fast thinker, and remembered at once that Fagin could travel at night without the aid of fire—rain did not suffocate him. He thought he saw what the teacher planned to do; it was not his fault that he was wrong. The word “bathyscaphe” had never been used in his hearing.

“Teacher!” he called, after a moment’s thought. “Wouldn’t it be better if we moved as soon as we could, and arranged some other place to meet you after you escape? He’ll come right back here sure as rainfall.”

“Don’t worry about that. Just stay here, and get things back to normal as soon as possible. I’ll be seeing you.”

“All right, Teacher.” Raeker leaned back in his seat once more, nodding his head slowly.

The Drommian must have spent a good deal of time on Earth; he was able to interpret the man’s attitude. “You seem a great deal happier than you were a few minutes ago,” he remarked. “I take it you have seen your way out of the situation.”

“I think so,” replied Raeker. “I had forgotten the bathyscaphe until I mentioned it to you; when I did recall it, I realized that once it got down there our troubles would be over. The trouble with that robot is that it has to crawl, and can be tracked and followed; the bathyscaphe, from the point of view of the natives down there, can fly. It has outside handling equipment, and when the crew goes down they can simply pick up the robot some night and fly it away from the cliff. I defy Swift to do any constructive tracking.”

“Then isn’t Nick right? Won’t Swift head straight for the village? I should think you’d have done better to follow Nick’s suggestion.”

“There’ll be time to move after we get the robot. If they leave the village before, we’ll have a lot of trouble finding them, no matter how carefully we arrange a meeting beforehand. The area is not very well mapped, and what there is doesn’t stay mapped very well.”

“Why not? That sounds rather strange.”

“Tenebra is a rather strange planet. Diastrophism is like Earth’s weather; the question is not whether it will rain tomorrow but whether your pasture will start to grow into a hill. There’s a team of geophysicists champing at the proverbial bit, waiting for the bathyscaphe to go down so they can set up a really close working connection with Nick’s group. The general cause we know—the atmosphere is mostly water near its critical temperature, and silicate rocks dissolve fairly rapidly under those circumstances. The place cools off just enough each night to let a little of the atmosphere turn liquid, so for the best part of two Earth days you have the crust washing down to the oceans like the Big Rock Candy Mountain. With three Earth gravities trying to make themselves felt, it’s hardly surprising that the crust is readjusting all the time.

“Anyway, I think we’re set up now. It won’t be morning down there for a couple of days, and I don’t see how much can happen until then. My relief will be here soon; when he arrives, perhaps you would like to see the bathyscaphe with me.”

“I should be most interested.” Raeker was getting the impression that either the Drommians were a very polite race or Aminadabarlee had been selected for his diplomatic post for that quality. He didn’t keep it long.

Unfortunately, there was a delay in visiting the bathyscaphe. When Raeker and the Drommian reached the bay where the small shuttle of the Vindemiatrix was normally kept, they found it empty. A check with the watch officer—ship’s watch, not the one kept on the robot; the ; organizations were not connected—revealed that it had been taken out by the crewmen whom Raeker had asked • to show Aminadorneldo around.

“The Drommian wanted to see the bathyscaphe, Doctor, and so did young Easy Rich.”

“Who?”

“That daughter Councillor Rich has tagging along. Begging the pardon of the gentleman with you, political inspection teams are all right as long as they inspect; but when they make the trip an outing for their offspring—”

“I have my son along,” Aminadabarlee remarked.

“I know. There’s a difference between someone old enough to take care of himself and an infant whose fingers have to be kept off hot contacts …” The officer let his voice trail off, and shook his head. He was an engineer; Raeker suspected that the party had descended on the power room in the near past, but didn’t ask.

“Have you any idea when the shuttle will be back?” he asked.

The engineer shrugged. “None. Flanagan was letting the kid lead him around. He’ll be back when she’s tired, I suppose. You could call him, of course.”

“Good idea.” Raeker led the way to the signal room of the Vindemiatrix, seated himself at a plate, and punched the combination of the tender’s set. The screen lighted up within a few seconds, and showed the face of Crystal Mechanic Second Class Flanagan, who nodded when he saw the biologist.

“Hello, Doctor. Can I help you?”

“We were wondering when you’d be back. Councillor Aminadabarlee would like to see the bathyscaphe, too.” The nearly two-second pause while light made the round trip from Vindemiatrix to tender and back was scarcely noticed by Raeker, who was used to it; the Drommian was rather less patient.

“I can come back and pick you up whenever you want; my customers are fully occupied in the ’scaphe.” Raeker was a trifle surprised.

“Who’s with them?”

“I was, but I don’t really know much about the thing, and they promised not to touch anything.”

“That doesn’t sound very safe to me. How old is the Rich girl? About twelve, isn’t she?”

“I’d say so. I wouldn’t have left her there alone, but the Drommian was with her, and said he’d take care of things.”

“I still think—” Raeker got no further. Four sets of long, webbed, wire-hard fingers tightened on his shoulders and upper arm, and the sleek head of Aminadabarlee moved into the pickup area beside his own. A pair of yellow-green eyes stared at the image hi the plate, and a deeper voice than Raeker had yet heard from Drommian vocal cords cut across the silence.

“It is possible that I am less well acquainted with your language than I had believed,” were his words. “Do I understand that you have left two children unsupervised in a ship in space?”

“Not exactly children, sir,” protested Flanagan. “The human girl is old enough to have a good deal of sense, and your own son is hardly a child; he’s as big as you.”

“We attain our full physical growth within a year of birth,” snapped the Dromiman. “My son is four years old, about the social equivalent of a human being of seven. I was under the impression that human beings were a fairly admirable race, but to give responsibility to an individual as stupid as you appear to be suggests a set of social standards so low as to be indistinguishable from savagery. If anything happens to my boy—” He stopped; Flanagan’s face had disappeared from the screen, and he must have missed the last couple of sentences of Amina-dabarlee’s castigation; but the Drommian was not through. He turned to Raeker, whose face had gone even paler than usual, and resumed. “It makes me sick to think that at times I have left my son in charge of human caretakers during my years on Earth. I had assumed your race to be civilized. If this piece of stupidity achieves its most likely result, Earth will pay the full price; not a human-driven ship will land again on any planet of the galaxy that values Drommian feelings. The story of your idiocy will cross the light-years, and no human ship will live to enter Drommian skies. Mankind will have the richly earned contempt of every civilized race in—”

He was cut off, but not by words. A rending crash sounded from the speaker, and a number of loose objects visible on the screen jerked abruptly toward a near wall. They struck it loudly and rebounded, but without obeying the laws of reflection. They all bounced the same way— in the direction which Raeker recognized with a sinking feeling as that of the tender’s air lock. A book flew past the pickup area in the same direction, and struck a metal instrument traveling more slowly.

But this collision went unheard. No more sound came from the speaker; the tender was silent, with the silence of airlessness.