Fossil

Chapter Two And Air Is Made For Swimming, Not For Flight

There is a difference between having fast reflexes and being easily startled. Rekchellet insisted 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.

The answer was as wordless, as emotion-laden, and as information-free as before. It came this time as a series of ticking, hissing whispers. The source was still plainly one of S’Nash’s own people, but something had to be wrong with the sufferer’s vocal apparatus.

“We can’t understand you,” the sentry responded patiently. “If you’re in monitored space, turn vertical.” Rekchcllet’s translator got this message clearly enough, and it was the Crotonite who observed the response.

“There!” he whistled. “Screen seven! It’s still trying to carry that case, but it’s turned tail down. What’s wrong? It looks normal to me.”

“And to me,” answered S’Nash tersely, “but it can’t talk. Get its location! I’ll check depth. We’ll find out who’s working closest and get help there.” As it/he spoke, the Naxian keyed an alarm switch. The instant and most obvious result was a piercing howl of wordless sound. It was audible throughout Pitville and broken into a repeating sequence of long and short bursts which should have needed no translation to tell anyone that a Pit worker was in trouble, details unknown. Hugh Cedar, the Erthumoi safety chief, hearing it at the ski slope two kilometers away, would not have bet any large sum that more than half the staff could read it that completely, however.

The key also initiated other lines of activity. The pumps which fed the trickle of liquid air needed to keep the Pits filled shut off immediately. A set of floodlights flashed on, fully illuminating every liter of the two one-hundred-meter square, half-kilometer deep holes in Habranha’s glacial night hemisphere. Each of the one hundred seventy-five members of the staff currently at the site immediately checked the whereabouts and status of its, her, or his assigned partner or partners, except the one who was now trying to maintain its serpentine body in the vertical attitude S’Nash had ordered. A neutrino transmitter passed the emergency signal to the Diplomacy Guild office at Pwanpwan on Habranha’s ring continent, nearly three thousand kilometers away.

Robots supposedly dedicated to digging reported to Hugh Cedar, from their work stations at the bottom of each pit, in code which rode the siren frequencies and did not affect most translators, as being in rescue mode with full decision capacity engaged.

And Hugh and his wife slid toward the digs from the powdered-ice pile among Pitville’s structures which served as a ski jump. When they had heard the alarm howl, they had simply glanced at each other, nodded, and without bothering to use even the briefest message to one another or the Habras they had been talking to, headed east. As they went, Hugh keyed a query to the watch.

“What’s wrong?” His use of code identified him.

Rekchellet and his fellow sentry had by now learned the position of the troubled Naxian, and the Crotonite responded through the general public speakers.

“Pit One, x twenty-one, y thirty-one, z three ninety-five decreasing slowly. Naxian apparently in trouble, no clear comm. no further details.”

S’Nash, presumably hoping the contradiction would not irritate its/his partner, added one item. “Subject maintaining vertical attitude by request. You should be able to identify it easily.” He expected an indignant whistle, but apparently the Crotonite realized that his “no further details” had been a little hasty and was willing to let the matter pass.

Hugh acknowledged, and the couple headed for Pit One, shedding their skis and going over the edge without diminishing their speed. The fluid was only a little less dense than water — it was maintained carefully at an oxygen-nitrogen proportion which would offset the pressure of the surrounding ice at any given depth — so the impact could have been violent in stronger gravity. Neither Erthuma even noticed the shock, however; all that bothered them was a brief vision blur as bubbles of air, some carried down with their suits and some formed as the armor’s heat boiled the surrounding liquid, momentarily obscured their view. These, however, lifted away or condensed again almost at once, and the couple could look around the now brilliantly lit pool. They extended fins and hand webs and swam rapidly downward toward the indicated spot.

By the time the Erthumoi had reached it, several minutes after the alarm, there were two other Naxians already there. Their snakelike shape allowed them to swim very much faster than human beings, and they had not had nearly as far to come. There was still no difficulty, however, in identifying the one in trouble, or even the basic nature of its problem.

The victim and both its newly arrived fellows were all trying to work on the same area of armor, about half a meter back of the sufferer’s head. Even the wearer could reach the spot with the rather clumsy handlers installed on the Naxian suits, but no one seemed able to do anything about a stream of bubbles which was flowing from the spot.

The bubbles were collapsing again a few centimeters away, with a swirl of heated liquid rising visibly from their vanishing point for about as much farther. Clearly, there was some damage to the thermal insulation of the armor. The instrument case the being had been carrying had now been abandoned and was inking very slowly; the two-meter-plus serpents were rising under their own buoyancy even less rapidly as the Erthumoi approached.

“What can we do?” keyed the woman.

“Do you have any insulation patches?” one of the Naxians asked.

“No.” It would take too long to explain by code that Erthumoi bodies were massive enough to let them — probably — swim to the surface and leave the Pit before losing a dangerous amount of heat from such damage. In any case, the fact that no such help was on hand was the important one; excuses were irrelevant, even if Hugh Cedar was supposed to be in charge of safety.

“Can you supply energy to the area?” The question was in code, and for a moment Hugh failed to see why his wife was asking it. Of course he couldn’t — then he realized that she wasn’t addressing him. The robot had reached the group. How it knew the question was meant for it Hugh never asked — it was a courtesy-rooted standard procedure not to treat robots as rational beings in the presence of non-Erthumoi members of the Six Races, and even when people forgot this the robots themselves usually remembered. However, this one answered promptly.

“No. I am operating at ambient temperature and have only essential heaters for moving parts.”

“We can’t get it/her to the surface fast enough,” cut in one of the Naxians, “and you Erthumoi are even slower swimmers. Sentries, can a rescue craft reach us within, say, forty seconds?”

“No.” S’Nash’s buzzes and Rekchellet’s whistles could be heard as faint background to the translated word.

“Then the armor must be removed, as nearly instantly as possible. If H’Feer can be frozen quickly enough to forestall crystallization, it/she can be saved with suitable treatment. Can you understand me, H’Feer? Do you agree? Are you willing to face the risk and discomfort?”

The response was as wordless as it had been before, but even the Erthumoi interpreted the sounds as whimpers and thought they could read the agony in them. They glanced at each other. Fleetingly, Hugh wondered what having one’s body gradually frozen from midsection to ends might feel like.

The helping Naxians received the victim’s feelings far more strongly, of course, and read them correctly in spite of its/her inability to speak. For once even the Erthumoi were right on an emotional matter. The clumsy handlers on the snakelike beings’ armor reached for the victim’s release catches, and stopped.

“That’s the trouble! It/she’d have done it already, but the release is frozen or jammed somehow! Erthumoi, your grippers are stronger than ours.

Grasp the flaps on either side of the helmet and pull straight apart. The suit should split open lengthwise.”

Hugh seized one of the indicated projections and Janice the other. The woman straddled the serpentine form and, bracing her feet against her husband’s armored chest, pushed as hard as she could.

The suit held. Hugh was about to add his own legs to the system when the robot firmly shoved him aside, grabbed one flap in each of two handlers, made a precise incision at the front of the Naxian’s helmet with one of its ice shavers, and with a single continuous motion split and pulled the armor free of its occupant. There was a brief cloud of bubbles as the air in the suit escaped and liquid contacting flesh boiled; then vision cleared and the burbling hiss died out as a swirling mass of warmer than average liquid air drifted upward from the scene.

The Naxian floated rigid in the grasp of its/her fellows, quick-frozen. It would not have worked fast enough for an Erthuma even had the liquid been helium instead of air, but no part of the slender body was more than a few centimeters from the nearest surface, and heat could escape quickly.

One of the others spoke up. “There’ll probably be severe tissue damage near the injury to the armor, where there has been slow freezing going on for minutes, but at least it/she should live. We will get it/her to the surface, and…”

Hugh interrupted; he had been busy with code. “There will be an aircraft with a liquid air bath at the Pit edge in two minutes, to take H’Feer to Pwanpwan. One of your people should call ahead; I don’t know in any detail the medical work needed. I believe Th’Terro would be best, but if it/she is not available there must be others at your biology station.”

“You are right about Th’Terro, Erthuma Hugh. Thank you for the arrangements.”

“My job.” Hugh keyed. “Sorry I wasn’t set up to accomplish it more quickly. I’ll try to think of other ways to be ready, and will gladly welcome suggestions on other possible precautions and how they may be implemented within the Project’s logistic framework.”

Hugh disliked and was embarrassed by pretentious language, but had found long ago that when hampered by code restraints he usually came out ahead using longer but fewer words. It was much easier to let the translators handle vocabulary than to do his own circumlocutions by hand.

He knew that Janice was storing every precious sentence in her memory to use against him later, but didn’t grudge her that bit of fun. He could usually hold his own in marital repartee.

He watched the accident victim being towed upward for a few seconds, then got back to code work.

“Report and info request from Safety One. Naxian H’Feer thermal injury, receiving help. Director, please report on task interrupted and replacement needed.”

The translator responded at once.

“Cra’eth, Equipment Management. H’Feer was taking a projector to the next window site. It will not be urgently needed until the corresponding window in the other pit has been at least rough-polished, probably in another hour. I can most likely find someone to get it there; I will report within ten minutes to Watch if I succeed and to Administration if I have trouble.”

“Logged at Watch,” another translated voice supplemented, and then went on less formally, “This is Rek, Cedars. It looked from here as though the rescue was actually done by that robot — the digger. Should we keep quiet about it?”

“Quiet, not necessarily. Tactful, yes,” keyed Janice. “Keep an honest log, certainly; we can’t distort data.”

“Of course. Both of us will want to talk to you when we get off watch, though.” “How long will that be?”

“A little over four more hours for me, six for s Nash.”

“You both want to talk it over?”

“Very much,” came the translated voice of the Naxian.

“That could be a little harder. Jan and I could ski again while Rek goes flying for fun; but what do you folks do outdoors — for amusement, that is— around here?”

“I can show you — well, maybe not. I can tell you. You’d have trouble doing it, and I doubt that you’d enjoy it, but I’ll explain some time if you’re really curious. I’ll meet you and Rekchellet at the foot of the west slope of the main waste dump at — let’s say nineteen even.”

“Fine.”

“And please have a robot there, if you can find a way to make its presence convenient and reasonable,” added S’Nash.

“Will an ice worker from the dumps be suitable?” asked Janice.

“I would think so.” The translated voices from the watch station fell silent. Hugh and his wife looked at each other, frankly and intensely puzzled, but decided to say nothing even in code for the time being. They swam, not too quickly, to the surface of the Pit, found one of the numerous ladders, ramps, and scoops which allowed members of the various species working on the Project to emerge when necessary — though in Habranha’s gravity there was never any real trouble about this — and made their way to their own quarters.

These were currently very uncomfortable, being full of pressure fluid, but at least the Erthumoi could remove their armor and enjoy some physical contact. They could also talk privately; vocal cords were still useless, but the microphones which normally picked up and broadcast their code through the structure could be cut off, and, of course, after a few Common Years of married companionship they could bypass code for much of what they wanted to say.

“Does S’Nash actually want to talk to a robot? It’s pretty hard to believe.”

“Not quite as hard as though it were Rek,” Janice answered thoughtfully. “If it/he had asked for the digger who made the rescue, I could believe there was some progress here. I don’t see what it/he can want that could be fulfilled by just any robot, though.”

“Rek was listening, and didn’t object. Maybe…” Hugh’s code cut off, and his expressive hands stopped moving.

“Maybe what?”

“Crotonites are often good technicians, and Rek should have no trouble regarding a robot as a machine — in fact, we know he doesn’t; we’ve known him for a long time now, and for a Crotonite he’s pretty tolerant. He hasn’t called either of us a slug, or even seemed to think of us that way, for three years or more.”

“Habra years, you mean.”

“Naturally.” Hugh drifted upright in the liquid; he had removed his armor since no one would miss a chance to do this even for a few minutes, but he was wearing enough belt and ankle ballast to maintain neutral buoyancy in the dense stuff. He went on, “I don’t think this is Rek’s idea at all, though this sort of guessing does no good. We know him pretty well, and for my money the whole proposal is probably S’Nash’s idea.”

“If Rek didn’t approve, he’d have made it clear when we were asked to meet them. We both know him well enough for that. Rekchellet has become positively fond of you and me…” Janice’s signals carried no trace of smugness, but her facial expression did— “but I don’t think he’s extended that feeling to all Erthumoi, much less to the rest of the Six.”

“Right. We’re building on wind, as Rek would say. Let’s eat and get out to the meeting. Much as I like this project, I wish we could spend a few days without juice. I can do without talking, but eating is supposed to be fun.”

Janice nodded, and they ingested nourishment. The reflexes normally closing the human breathing passage when the owner swallows had been neutralized to allow “breathing” of the diving fluid. Eating, therefore, required extreme care, and was confined to substances loose enough not to need chewing but firm and cohesive enough to go down the esophagus together once started in the right direction. Stuff which broke up like cake crumbs could be dangerous; the coughing reflex had also been blocked since this would have ruptured liquid-filled lungs. Careful and rather skilled work with a hand pump was needed when food went the wrong way. If the person concerned was also wearing an environment suit, the problem could become really complicated, though the Cedars had now faced even this emergency often enough to regard it as more of a nuisance than a catastrophe.

They never went anywhere alone, however, while set up for deep diving, except for office or lab where help was nearby.

Funnels sealed directly to the trachea and extending outside the mouth to allow more control over what did reach the windpipe had been suggested often and tried occasionally, but so far had proved less than satisfactory.

Fed, or at least nourished, the couple resumed and tested their armor, left their quarters, made their way to the main residence air lock, checked out with the watch, and headed west.

They were not wearing skis this time; it was not necessary to climb over the piles of ice dust extracted from the Pits, and the level surfaces of Pitville were not dangerously slippery. This had not always been so, but the dust-fine water snow had now been beaten down within the settlement into a solid, almost clear ice pavement by passing feet, armored bellies, wheels, and treads. At the local temperatures, this ice was barely slippery except under pressures not likely to be provided by an Erthuma body on foot under Habranhan gravity. Powdered finely enough, though, the area of contact between grains or flakes could be small enough for moderate force to provide melting pressure; one could ski, or make snowballs.

The path was nearly dark. Energy was cheap, but lighting equipment had not been wasted except where it was considered important. The brightest object in the sky was Fafnir, currently at a distance which made it about as bright as Earth’s full moon. It hung some fifteen degrees above the northwest horizon, so shadows were long. At the moment, thin clouds from the day side gave the sunlet a vague halo and hid most of the other stars.

Neither Hugh nor Janice was currently paying any particular attention to the sky. They were familiar with it, enjoyed making up constellations for it, and had even invented a zodiac for Fafnir to follow, though they did not expect to be around for the eight hundred or so Common Years it would take the little star to complete that circle. Just now, however, they were too concerned with their path and too curious about the forthcoming meeting to stargaze.

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.