Close to Critical

IV: COMMUNICATION; PENETRATION; ISOLATION

Aminadabarlee fell silent, his eyes fixed on the vision screen; and, nasty as the creature had been, Raeker felt sympathetic. He himself would have been at least as unsociable under similar circumstances. There was no time for pity, however, while there was still hope; too much had to be done.

“Wellenbach! What’s the combination of the bathyscaphe?” he snapped.

The communication watch officer reached over his shoulder. “I’ll get her for you, Doctor.”

Raeker pushed his hand aside. “Wait a minute. Is it a regular set at the other end? An ordinary phone, I mean, or something jury-rigged into the panels?”

“Perfectly ordinary. Why?”

“Because if it weren’t and you punched its combination, those kids might open their air lock or something like that in trying to answer. If it’s standard in design and appearance, the girl will be able to answer safely.”

“I see. She won’t have any trouble; I’ve seen her use the punch-combination sets here.”

“All right. Call them.” Raeker tried not to show the uncertainty he felt as the officer punched the buttons. It was not possible to tell yet just what had happened above Tenebra’s atmosphere; something had evidently breached the air lock of the tender, but that might or might not have affected the bathyscaphe. If it had, the children were probably dead—though their guide might have had them in space suits, of course. One could hope.

Behind him, Aminadabarlee might have been a giant statue of an otter, cast in oiled gray steel. Raeker spent no time wondering at his own fate if bad news came back through the set and that statue returned to life; all his attention was concentrated on the fate of the youngsters. A dozen different speculations chased themselves through his mind in the few seconds before the screen lighted up. Then it did, and the worst of them vanished.

A human face was looking at them out of it; thin, very pale, topped by a mop of hair which looked black on the screen but which Raeker knew was red; a face covered by an expression which suggested terror just barely held under control, but—a living face. That was the important fact.

At almost the same instant a figure came hurtling through the door of the communications room and skidded to a halt beside the motionless figure of the Drommian.

“Easy! Are you all right?” Raeker didn’t need the words to identify Councillor Rich. Neither did Aminadabarlee, and neither did the child in the screen. After the two-second pause for return contact, the terror vanished from the thin face, and she relaxed visibly…

“Yes, Dad. I was pretty scared for a minute, but it’s all right now. Are you coming?”

For a moment there was some confusion at the set as Rich, Raeker, and the Drommian all tried to speak at once; then Aminadabarlee’s physical superiority made itself felt, and he thrust his sleek head at the screen.

“Where is the other one—my son?” he shrilled.

She replied promptly, “He’s here; he’s all right.”

“Let me talk to him.” The girl left the pickup area for a moment, and they heard her voice but not her words as she addressed someone else. Then she reappeared, with her dark hair badly disheveled and a bleeding scratch on one cheek.

“He’s in a corner, and doesn’t want to come out. I’ll turn up the volume so you can talk to him there.” She made no reference to her injury, and, to Raeker’s surprise, neither did her father. Aminadabarlee seemed not to notice it. He shifted into his own shrill language, which seemed to make sense to no one else in the room but Rich, and held forth for several minutes, pausing now and then for answers.

At first he received none; then, as he grew more’persuasive, a feeble piping came back through the set. Hearing this restored the Drommian’s composure, and he talked more slowly; and after a minute or so of this Aminadorneldo’s head appeared beside Easy’s. Raeker wondered whether he looked ashamed of himself; Drom-mian facial expressions were a closed book to him. Apparently one of the family had a conscience, anyway, for after a few moments’ more talk from the elder one the child turned to Easy and shifted to English.

“I’m sorry I hurt you, Miss Rich. I was afraid, and thought you’d made the noise, and were trying to make me come out of the corner. My father says you are older than I, and that I am to do whatever you say until I am with him again.”

The girl seemed to understand the situation. “It’s all right, ’Mina,” she said gently. “You didn’t really hurt me. I’ll take care of you, and we’ll get back to your father—after a while.” She glanced at the pickup as she added the last words, and Raeker grew tense again. A glance at Councillor Rich confirmed his suspicion; the girl was trying to get something across, presumably without alarming her companion. Gently but firmly Raeker took the Drommian’s place in the pickup field. Easy r nodded in recognition; she had met him briefly on her own tour through the Vindemiatrix some time earlier.

“Miss Rich,” he began, “we’re still a little in the dark f about just what happened down there. Can you tell us? Or is your guide there, to give a report?”

She shook her head negatively at the latter question. “I don’t know where Mr. Flanagan is. He stayed hi the tender to have a smoke, I suppose; he told us to be sure not to touch any controls—he must think we’re pretty stupid. We stayed away from the board, of course—in fact, after the first look, we stayed out of the control compartment altogether, and looked through the other rooms. They’re all observation or bunkrooms, except for the galley, and we were just going to suit up to go back to the tender when a call came from Mr; Flanagan on the set he’d left tuned to suit radio frequence. He said he was at the outer lock, and would open it as soon as he closed the one on the tender—the two ships were so close together we could touch them both at once when we came across—and that we were to, stay absolutely still and not do a thing until he came. ’Mina had just opened his mouth to answer when the jolt came; we were flung against the wall, and I was held there by what felt like three or four G’s of acceleration. ’Mina could move around all right, and tried to call Mr. Flanagan on the set, but there was no answer, and I wouldn’t let him touch anything else. The acceleration lasted half a minute or ! so, I guess; you can tell better than we can. It stopped | just before you called us.”

By this time the communication room was packed with : men. Several of them began to work slide rules, and j Raeker, turning from the set, watched one of these until [ he had finished; then he asked, “Any ideas, Saki?”

“I think so,” the engineer replied. “The kid’s report | isn’t exact, of course, but judging from her estimate of I acceleration and time, and the mass of the bathyscaphe, one full ring of the solid-fuel boosters was touched off somehow. That should give just over four G’s for forty seconds—about a mile a second total velocity change. There’s no way to tell where the ship is, though, until we get there and home on it; we can’t compute, since we don’t know the direction of acceleration. I wish the ’scaphe weren’t so close to the planet, though.”

Raeker knew better than to ask the reason for this, but Aminadabarlee didn’t.

“Why?”

The engineer glanced at him, then at the image of the other Drommian in the screen, and then apparently decided not to pull punches.

“Because a one-mile-a-second change in any of a good many directions could put it in an orbit which would enter atmosphere,” he said bluntly.

“How long to entry?” cut in Rich.

“Not my pigeon. We’ll get it computed while we’re under way. My guess would be hours at the outside, though.”

“Then why are we standing here talking?” shrilled Aminadabarlee. “Why aren’t preparations for rescue being made?”

“They are,” returned the engineer calmly. “Only one shuttle was in regular use, but there are others here. One of them is being made ready, and will leave in less than ten minutes. Dr. Raeker, do you want to come?”

“I’d just add mass without being useful,” Raeker replied.

“I suppose the same could be said for me,” said Rich, “but I’d like to come if there’s room. I certainly don’t want to hamper the work, though.”

“It will be better if you don’t,” admitted Sakiiro. “We’ll keep in touch with this ship and the ’scaphe, though, so you’ll know what’s happening.” He ran from the room.

Aminadabarlee had quite obviously meant to insist upon going; after Rich’s words, however, he could hardly do that. He relieved his feelings by remarking, “No one but a fool human being would have had takeoff boosters attached to an uncompleted ship.”

“The bathyscaphe is complete, except for final circuit checks and connections,” another engineer replied calmly, “and the boosters were for landing as well as takeoff. As a matter of fact, they were not supposed to be connected until the last moment, and it will not be possible to tell what actually fired them until we salvage the ship. Until then, assigning blame is very much a waste of time.” He stared coldly at the Drommian, and Rich stepped into the breach. Raeker had to admit the fellow was good at his job; it had seemed a virtual certainty that the big weasel was going to clean the human beings out of the room, but Rich had him calmed down below boiling point in four or five minutes.

Raeker would have liked to hear the details, but he was occupied with the radio. The children on the bathyscaphe had heard, without understanding completely, most of the engineers’ statements; and Raeker found himself doing his best to keep up their morale. They were, perfectly reasonably, frightened half to death. It wasn’t as hard as he’d thought it might be, though; he hadn’t talked long before he realized that the girl was doing exactly the same thing. He couldn’t decide whether it was for the benefit of her father or her nonhuman companion, but his respect for the youngster went even higher.

The rescue ship was well on the way by this time, and as the minutes clicked by the hopes of everyone on all three vessels began to mount. If the ’scaphe were in an orbit that did not touch Tenebra’s atmosphere, of course, there was no danger; food and air equipment were aboard and had been operating for some time. On a straight chance basis, it seemed to Raeker that the probabilities were at least three to one that this was the case, though he was no ballistician. The computer on the rescue boat was kept busy grinding out possible orbits; the worst seemed to call for atmospheric contact within three-quarters of an hour of the accident; and if this didn’t occur within a little over two hours, it wouldn’t.

There were view ports in the ’scaphe, and Easy was able to recognize some stars; but while this told them roughly which side of the planet she was on, the lack of precision measurements at her command made the information useless. At that time, there was only one side she could be on.

It was sixty-seven minutes after the accident that Easy reported acceleration. By that time, even Aminadabarlee knew all the implications of the fact. The rescue boat was “there,” in the sense that it was within half a diameter of Tenebra and nearly motionless with respect to the planet—perfectly useless, as far as the trapped children were concerned. The engineers could get a fix on the ’scaphe’s transmitter and locate it within a few miles; but they couldn’t compute an interception orbit inside Tenebra’s atmosphere. No one knew enough about the atmosphere. The certain thing was that no interception whatever could be accomplished before the ’scaphe was so low that rockets could not be used—atmospheric pressure would be too high for them. Sakiiro reported this to the Vindemiatrix within a minute of Easy’s information; then, before Aminadabarlee could start to speak, he turned to the set which he had on the depth-boat’s frequency.

“Miss Rich. Please listen carefully. Your acceleration is going to get much worse over the next few minutes; I want you to strap yourself in the seat before the control panel, and do what you can about your companion.”

“None of the seats fit him,” the girl answered.

“His normal weight is four G’s,” Rich cut in from the Vindemiatrix.

“He’ll be taking more than that; but he’ll probably be able to stand it, in that case. Just tell him to lie down. Now, Miss Rich—”

“Call me Easy; it’ll save time.”

“Tell me what you recognize on the board in front of you.”

“Not much. Light switches are labeled over on the left. The communicators are top center; air-lock controls under a guard near the light switches; about two square feet of off-on relay buttons, labeled with letters, that don’t mean anything to me—” She let her voice trail off, and Saki nodded.

“All right. Now, near the top of the board, to the right of the communicators, you’ll see an area about six inches square marked ‘Hunt.’ Have you found it?”

“Yes; I see it.”

“Make sure the master toggle at its lower left corner says ‘Off.’ Then put the three in the group labeled ‘Aero’ in the ‘On’ position. Then make sure that the big one marked ‘D.I.’ is off. Do you have that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now be sure you’re strapped in. What you’ve been doing is to tie in a homing radio which is tuned to the transmission of the robot on the ground to the aerodynamic controls of the ’scaphe. I don’t dare have you use any power, but with luck the autopilot will glide you down somewhere in the general vicinity of that robot. You don’t have to worry about burning up hi the atmosphere; the ship is designed for a power-off entry. It’s a big planet, and if we can narrow down your landing area to even a five-hundred-mile radius it will be a big help in picking you up. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I’m strapped in the seat, and ’Mina is lying down.”

“All right. Now reach up to the ‘Hunt’ region you’ve just been setting, and snap on the master switch. I hope you’re not prone to motion sickness; it will be rough at first, I expect.”

Sakiiro from the rescue boat and the group in the message room of the Vindemiatrix watched tensely as the girl’s hand went up and out of the pickup field. They could not see her actually close the switch, and to the surprise of the engineers they could not detect very easily the results of the act. They had expected the girl to be jammed into her seat by an abrupt acceleration change; but things proved not nearly so bad.

“I can feel it,” Easy reported. “The ship is rolling— now the planet is on our left side—and I’m a little heavier in my seat—now we’re leveling out again, and ‘Down’ is forward, if this panel is at the front of the room.”

“It is,” replied the engineer. “You should now be headed toward the robot, and will be slowing down until you’re doing about five hundred miles an hour with respect to the air around you. The braking will be jerky; the ship had throw-away speed brakes to take it down through the heat barrier. Stay strapped in.”

“All right. How long will it take?”

“A couple of hours. You can stand it all right.”

Rich cut in at this point.

“Suppose the machine passes over your robot’s location before getting rid of its speed, Mr. Sakiiro? What will the autopilot do? Try to dive in at that point?”

“Certainly not. This is a vehicle, not a missile. It will circle the point at a distance which doesn’t demand more than an extra half-G to hold it in the turn. If necessary, it will try to land the ship; but we should be able to avoid that.”

“How? You don’t expect Easy to fly it, do you?”

“Not in the usual sense. However, when she’s down to what we can call ‘flying’ speed, the main buoyancy tanks of the ’scaphe should be full of the local atmosphere. Then I’ll tell her how to start the electrolyzers; that will fill them with hydrogen, and the ship should float, when they’re full, at an altitude where boosters can be used. Then she and her young friend can trim the ship so that she’s hanging nose up, and fire the rest of the boosters. We can be waiting overhead.”

“I thought you said the boosters weren’t connected to the control panel yet!”

Sakiiro was silent for a moment.

“You’re right; I’d forgotten that. That complicates the problem.”

“You mean my kid is marooned down there?”

“Not necessarily. It’s going to call for some tight maneuvering; but I should think we could rig boosters on this boat so as to be able to reach the ’scaphe when it’s floating at its highest. The whole design object, remember, was for the thing to float high enough for hydroferron boosters to work; and if they’ll work on one frame, they’ll certainly work on another.”

“Then you can rescue her.” The statement was more than half a question. Sakiiro was an honest man, but he had difficulty in making an answer. He did, however, after a moment’s hesitation, staring into the face of the middle-aged man whose agonized expression showed so clearly on his screen.

“We should be able to save them both. I will not conceal from you that it will be difficut and dangerous; transferring an engineer to the outside of the ’scaphe to finish up wiring, while the whole thing is floating like a balloon, from a rocket hanging on booster blasts, will present difficulties.”

“Why can’t you transfer the kids to the rescue ship?”

“Because I’m pretty sure their space suits won’t stand the pressure at the ’scaphe’s floating height,” replied Sakiiro. “I don’t know about Drommian designs, but I do know our own.”

“Mr. Sakiiro.” Easy’s voice cut back into the conversation.

“Yes, Easy.”

“Is there anything more I can do? Just sitting here doesn’t seem right, and—it scares me a little.”

Rich looked appealingly at the engineer. As a diplomat, he was an accomplished psychologist, and he knew his daughter. She was not hysterical by nature, but few twelve-year-olds had ever been put under this sort of stress. He himself was not qualified to suggest any reasonable occupation to hold her attention; but fortunately Sakiiro saw the need, too.

“There are pressure gauges to your left,” he said. “If you can give us a running report on their readings, while your friend tells us when he can first detect signs of dimming in the stars, it will be of some help. Keep it up unless you get too heavy to be able to watch easily; that may not be too long.”

Rich looked his thanks; if Aminadabarlee was doing the same, no one was able to detect the fact. For long minutes the silence was broken only by the voices of the children, reading off numbers and describing the stars.

Then Easy reported that the ship was banking again.

“All right,” said Sakiiro. “That means you’re about over the robot. From now until your speed is killed, you’re going to have to take better than three and a half gravities. Your seat folds back on its springs automatically to put you in the best position to stand it, but you’re not going to be comfortable. Your friend can undoubtedly take it all right, but warn him against moving around. The ship’s traveling fast in an atmosphere, and going from one air current to another at a few thousand miles can give quite a jolt.”

“All right.”

“The stars are getting hazy.” It was Aminadorneldo.

“Thanks. Can you give me another pressure reading?”

The girl obliged, with detectable strain in her voice. Until the last turn had started, the ’scaphe was in relatively free fall; but with its rudimentary wings biting what little there was of the atmosphere in an effort to keep it in a turn the situation was distinctly different.

Why the vehicle didn’t go into a frame-shattering series of stalls, none of the engineers could see; the turn had started at a much higher speed than had been anticipated by the designers of the machine. As it happened, the whole process was almost incredibly smooth—for a while.

Sakiiro, with no really objective data to go on, had about concluded that the vessel was down to gliding speed and was going to describe the location of the electrolysis controls to Easy when the motion changed. A series of shuddering jars shook the ship. The girl’s body was held in the seat by the straps, but her head and limbs flapped like those of a scarecrow in a high wind; the young Drommian for the first time failed to stay put. The jolting continued, the thuds punctuated by the girl’s sobs and an almost inaudibly high-pitched whine from Aminadorneldo. The elder Drommian rose once more to his feet and looked anxiously at the screen.

The engineers were baffled; the diplomats were too terrified for their children to have had constructive ideas even had they been qualified otherwise; but Raeker thought he knew the answer.

“They’re hitting raindrops!” he yelled.

He must have been right, it was decided afterward; but the information did not really help. The bathyscaphe jerked and bucked. The autopilot did its best to hold a smooth flight path, but aerodynamic controls were miserably inadequate for the task. At least twice the vessel somersaulted completely, as nearly as Raeker could tell from the way the Drommian was catapulted around the room. Sheer luck kept him out of contact with the control switches. For a time the controls were useless because their efforts were overridden—a rudder trying to force a left turn will not get far if the right wing encounters a fifty-foot sphere of water, even though the water isn’t much denser than the air. Then they were useless because they lacked enough grip on the atmosphere; the ship had given up enough kinetic energy to the raindrops to fall well below its stalling speed—low as that was, in an atmosphere seven or eight hundred times as dense as Earth’s at sea level. By that time, of coarse, the ship was falling, in the oldest and simplest sense of the word. The motion was still irregular, for it was still hitting the drops; but the violence was gone, for it wasn’t hitting them very hard.

The rate of fall was surprisingly small, for a three-G field. The reason was simple enough—even with the outside atmosphere filling most of its volume, the ship had a very low density. It was a two-hundred-foot-long, cigar-like shell, and the only really heavy part was the forty-foot sphere in the center which held the habitable portion. It is quite possible that it would have escaped serious mechanical damage even had it landed on solid ground; and as it happened, the fall ended on liquid.

Real liquid; not the borderline stuff that made up most of Tenebra’s atmosphere.

It landed upside down, but the wings had been shed like the speed brakes and its center of gravity was low enough to bring it to a more comfortable attitude. The floor finally stopped rocking, or at least the Drommian did—with the vision set fastened to the ship, the floor had always seemed motionless to the distant watchers. They saw the otterlike giant get cautiously to his feet, then walk slowly over to the girl’s chair and touch her lightly on the shoulder. She stirred and tried to sit up.

“Are you all right?” Both parents fairly shrieked the question. Aminadorneldo, his father’s orders in mind, waited for Easy to answer.

“I guess so,” she said after a moment. “I’m sorry I bawled, Dad; I was scared. I didn’t mean to scare ’Mina, though.”

“It’s all right, kid. I’m sure no one can blame you, and I don’t suppose your reaction had much to do with your friend’s. The main thing is that you’re in one piece, and the hull’s intact—I suppose you’d be dead by now if it weren’t.”

“That’s true enough,” seconded Sakiiro.

“You’ve had a rough ride, then, but it should be over now. Since you’re there, you might take a look through the windows—you’re the first non-natives ever to do that directly. When you’ve seen all you can or want to, tell Mr. Sakiiro and he’ll tell you how to get upstairs again. All right?”

“All right, Dad.” Easy brushed a forearm across her tear-stained face, unfastened the seat straps, and finally struggled to her feet.

“Golly, when are they going to cut the power? I don’t like all these G’s,” she remarked.

“You’re stuck with them until we get you away from there,” her father replied.

“I know it. I was just kidding. Hmm. It seems to be night outside; I can’t see a thing.”

“It is, if you’re anywhere near the robot,” Raeker replied, “but it wouldn’t make any difference to your eyes if it were high noon. Even Altair can’t push enough light for human eyes through that atmosphere. You’ll have to use the lights.”

“All right.” The girl looked at the board where she had already located the light switches; then, to the surprised approval of the engineers, she made sure from Sakiiro that these were the ones she wanted. Saki admitted later that his hopes of rescuing the pair soared several hundred per cent at that moment.

With the lights on, both children went over to the windows.

“There isn’t much to see,” called Easy. “We seem to have splashed into a lake or ocean. It’s as smooth as glass; not a ripple. I’d think it was solid if the ship weren’t partly under it. There are big foggy globes drifting down, yards and yards across, but they sort of fade out just before they touch, the surface. That’s every bit I can see.”

“It’s raining,” Raeker said simply. “The lake is probably sulphuric acid, I suppose fairly dilute by this time of night, and is enough warmer than the air so the water evaporates before it strikes. There wouldn’t be any waves; there’s no wind. Three knots is a wild hurricane on Tenebra.”

“With all that heat energy running around?” Rich was startled.

“Yes. There’s nothing for it to work on—I use the word in its physical sense. There isn’t enough change in volume when the atmosphere changes temperature, or even changes state, to create the pressure differences you need for high winds. Tenebra is about the calmest place you’ll find inside any atmosphere in the galaxy.”

“Does that jibe with your remarks about earthquakes a while ago?” It was a measure of Aminadabarlee’s revived confidence that he could talk of something besides the stupidity of human beings.

“No, it doesn’t,” admitted Raeker, “and I’ll have to admit, Easy, that there is a possibility that you will encounter some waves if you float there long enough. However, you won’t be able to call them weather, and they won’t carry you to any more interesting places. I’m afraid you’ve seen about all you can expect to, young lady; you may as well come up and be properly rescued.” “All right. Only I’d like to know just what’s going to make this thing float, and whether the trip up will be as rough as the one down was.”

“It won’t. You’ll go up vertically, and much more slowly. You’re going to ride a balloon. The atmosphere there is mostly water, with enough ions loose to make it a decent conductor. The largest part of your hull is divided into cells, and each cell further divided in two by a flexible membrane. Right now, those membranes are squeezed flat against one wall of each cell by atmospheric pressure. When you start the electrolysis units, some of the water will be decomposed; the oxygen will be piped outside the hull, but the hydrogen will be released on the other side of the membranes and gradually drive the air out of the cells. The old bathyscaphe used the same idea, only it didn’t need the membranes to keep the two fluids from diffusing into each other.”

“I see. How long will it take to make enougft gas to lift us?”

“I can’t tell; we don’t know the conductivity of the atmosphere. Once you start things going, there’s a bank of ammeters above the switches for each individual cell; if you’ll give me their reading after things start, I’ll try to calculate it for you.”

“All right. Where are the— Oh, here; you labeled them decently. Upper right, a bank of twelve toggles, with a gang bar and a master?”

“That’s it. You can see the meters above them. Close the lot, hit the master, and give the readings.”

“All right.” The thin arm reached up and out of the field of vision, and everyone could hear the switches click. Easy pulled her hand back to her lap, settled back into the chair under her three hundred pounds of weight, eyed the dials one after another, and said, “The readings are all zero. What do I do now?”