Iceworld

17

“Dad, will you kindly tell me just how on Earth you worked that?” Don stared at the Sarrian radio, which was all that was visible of the aliens by the time he got back from giving the trade signal. Roger chuckled.

“He didn’t work it. He spends all afternoon teaching the thing to talk English, and just as it’s going it turns around and puts this on the ground. ‘Carry’ it booms, and takes off. What do you suppose it is, Dad?”

“I can’t possibly be sure, Son, until he comes back. It may be a piece of apparatus he intends to use on his next visit; it may be a gift in return for your aid with the plant collection. I think we’d best take it home, as he seemed to want, and do nothing at all to it until he comes back.”

“But if he’s not coming back until the day after tomorrow—”

“I know curiosity is a painful disease, Rog; I suffer from it myself. But I still think that the one who’ll come out ahead in this new sort of trading is the one who steps most cautiously and keeps his real aims up his sleeve the longest. We’re still not certain that this scientific investigation isn’t aimed at just one end — to relieve them of the need for paying us for tobacco. After all, why did this fellow start with plants? There are lots of other things he might have shown interest in.”

“If he’s as different from our sort of life as he seems to be, how would he know that tobacco is a plant?” countered Roger. “It certainly doesn’t stay unburned long enough at his temperature to let him look at the crumbs with a microscope or anything, and a cigarette doesn’t much look like a plant.”

“That’s true,” his father admitted. “Well, I only said we don’t know he hasn’t that up his sleeve. I admit it doesn’t seem likely.”

Curiously enough, Ken thought of one of those points himself before the next visit; and when he descended in the clearing by the Wing home with four collecting boxes attached to his torpedo, the first thing he did was to make clear he wanted minerals in one that was not equipped with refrigeration apparatus. Pointing to another similarly plain he said, “Thing — good — hot — cold.” The Wings looked at each other for a moment; then Edith spoke.

“You mean anything that stays good whether it’s hot or cold? Stuff that you don’t have to keep in a refrigerator?” There were too many new words in that sentence for Ken, but he took a chance. “Yes. Hot, good.” He was still drifting a foot or two from the ground, having so arranged the load this time that he could detach it without first freeing himself. Now he settled lightly to the ground, and things began to happen.

The ground, like most of that in evergreen forests, was largely composed of shed needles. These had been cleared away to some extent around the house, but the soil itself was decidedly inflammable. Naturally, the moment Ken’s armored feet touched it a cloud of smoke appeared, and only lightning-like action in lifting himself again prevented its bursting into flame. As it was, no one felt really safe until Roger had soaked the spot with a bucket of water.

That led to further complications. Ken had never seen water to his knowledge, and certainly had never seen apparatus for dispensing apparently limitless amounts of any liquid. The outside faucet from which the bucket had been filled interested him greatly; and at his request, made in a mixture of signs and English words, Roger drew another bucketful, placed it on the flat top of one of the cement posts at the foot of the porch steps, and retreated. Ken, thus enabled to examine the object without coming in contact with anything else, did so at great length; ana finished by dipping a handler cautiously into the peculiarly transparent fluid. The resulting cloud of steam startled him almost as much as the temporary but intense chill that bit through the metal, and he drew back hastily. He began to suspect what the liquid was, and mentally took off his hat to Feth. The mechanic, if that was all he really was, really could think.

Eventually Ken was installed on top of an outdoor oven near the house, the specimen boxes were on the ground, and the children had disappeared in various directions to fill them. The language lesson was resumed, and excellent progress made for an hour or so. At the end of that time, both parties were slightly surprised to find themselves exchanging intelligible sentences — crude and clumsy ones, full of circumlocutions, but understandable. A faint smile appeared on Mr. Wing’s face as he realized this; the time had come to administer a slight jolt to his guest, and perhaps startle a little useful information out of him. He remembered the conversation he had had with Don the night before, and felt quiet satisfaction in the boy — the sort of satisfaction that sometimes goes to make a father a major bore.

“You didn’t have too many times, Dad,” his son had said, “but there were enough. It ties in with other things, anyway. The intervals between signalling and the arrival of the trading torpedo have been varying in a period of just about a hundred and twenty days, taking several years into account Of course, a lot of those ‘periods’ didn’t have any trading occur, but the period is there; first two days, then three. That hundred and twenty days is the synodic period of Mercury — the length of time it takes that planet to catch the Earth up on successive trips around the sun. I remembered Mercury’s position when we studied it this spring, and did some figuring; your short times came when it was closest to us, the long ones when it was on the other side of the sun, about twice as far away. Those torpedoes seem to be coming from there at about one and a quarter G’s of acceleration.” Mr. Wing, though no physicist, understood this clearly enough. The concept had been publicized sufficiently in connection with airplanes.

He had looked over Don’s figures, which were easy enough to follow, and agreed with his results; and the boy had, at his request, drawn a diagram of the orbits of inner planets of the Solar System showing the current positions of the planets themselves. This he now had in his pocket.

The word “home” had just been under discussion, more or less as a result of chance. Mr. Wing had made the concept reasonably clear, he believed; and it seemed to him that the time had come to put one of his cards on the table.

He began by waving an arm to encompass the whole horizon. “Earth,” he said. The Sarrian repeated the word, but without any gesture of his own suggesting that he understood. The man repeated the word, stamping on the ground as he did so; then he took a new page in the notebook and made a sketch of the planet as he thought it would appear from space. As a final illustration, he molded a sphere from a lump of modelling clay which had been found in the playroom and had already been put to good use. Then he pointed to the sphere, drawing, and the ground, repeating the word after each in turn.

Ken understood. He proved it by scratching a picture of his own on the ground, reaching as far as he could over the side of the oven and using his strip of metal. It was a perfectly recognizable drawing of the sun and orbits of the first three planets. He knew he might be exceeding the local knowledge of astronomy, but the fact that the native seemed to know the shape of his world was encouraging.

Mr. Wing promptly pulled out Don’s diagram, which was substantially the same as Ken’s except that Mars’ orbit and position were shown. He spent some minutes naming each of the planets, and making the generic name clear as well. Then they spent some more time in a sort of game; Ken added Jupiter and Saturn to the diagram, in an effort to find out how much astronomy the human being knew. Mr. Wing named those, and added Uranus, Neptune and Pluto; Don, who had made no contribution up to this point, made a correction in the orbit of Pluto so that it crossed that of Neptune at one point, and began adding satellites at a furious rate. They took the burst of Sarrian speech that erupted from the speaker as an indication of the alien’s surprise, and were gratified accordingly.

Ken was surprised for more reasons than one.

“Drai, if you’re listening, these folks are not any sort of savage. They must have a well-developed science. They seem to know of nine planets in this system, and we only knew about six; and there are an awful lot of moons one of them is busy telling me about right now — he’s even put two with Planet Four, and we didn’t notice any. They either have space travel or darned good telescopes.”

“We haven’t seen a space ship here in twenty years,” Feth’s voice reminded him. Ken made no answer; Mr. Wing had started to talk again. He was pointing to Planet Three on his own diagram, and repeating the name he had given it.

“Earth — my home.” He indicated himself with one hand to emphasize the personal pronoun. Then he moved the finger to the innermost world. “Mercury — your home.” And he pointed to Sallman Ken.

He was a little disappointed in the reaction, but would not have been had he known how to interpret Sarrian facial expressions. The scientist was dumbfounded for fully ten seconds; when he did regain control of his voice, he addressed the distant listeners rather than the Earth man.

“I’m sure that you will also be interested in knowing that he is aware we come from Planet One. I believe he thinks we live there, but the error is minor under the circumstances.” This time Drai’s voice responded.

“You’re crazy! You must have told him yourself, you fool! How could he possibly have learned that without help?”

“I did not tell him. You’ve been listening and ought to know. And I don’t see why I should be expected to explain how he found out; I’m just telling you what’s going on here at the moment.”

“Well, don’t let him go on thinking that! Deny it! He knows too much!”

“What’s wrong with that?” Ken asked, reasonably enough.

“Suppose they do have space travel! We don’t want them dropping in on us! Why — I’ve been keeping this place a secret for twenty years.”

Ken forbore to point out the flaws in that line of reasoning. He simply said:

“Not knowing how certain they are of their facts, I think a denial would be foolish. If they are really sure, then they’d know I was lying; and the results might not be good.” Drai made no answer to that, and Ken turned back to the Earthman, who had been listening uncomprehendingly to the conversation.

“Mercury. Yes,” the Sarrian said.

“I see. Hot,” replied Mr. Wing.

“No. Cold.” Ken paused, seeking words. “Little hot. Hot to you. Hot to—” he waved a sleeve of his armor in a wide circle—”plants, these things. Cold to me.”

Don muttered to his father, “If he regards Mercury as too cold for comfort, he must come from the inside of a volcano somewhere. Most astronomers are satisfied that there’s no planet closer to the sun, and he didn’t show one on his diagram, you’ll notice.”

“It would be nice if we knew just how hot he liked it,” agreed the older man. He was about to address Ken again in the hope of finding out something on this point when a burst of alien speech suddenly boomed from the torpedo’s speaker. Even to Ken, it carried only partial meaning.

“Ken! This—” Just those two words, in Feth’s voice; then the transmission ceased with the click that accompanies a broken circuit. Ken called Feth’s name several times into his own microphone, but there was no response. He fell silent, and thought furiously.

He suspected from the fact that the natives were simply looking at him that they realized something had gone wrong; but he did not want to worry about their feelings just then. He felt like a diver who had heard a fight start among the crew of his air-pump, and had little attention for anything else. What in the Galaxy were they about, up there? Had Drai decided to abandon him? No, even if the drug-runner had suddenly decided Ken was useless, he would not abandon a lot of expensive equipment just to get rid of him. For one thing, Ken suspected that Drai would prefer to see him die of drug hunger, though this may have been an injustice. What then? Had Drai become subtle, and cut off the transmitter above in the hope that Ken would betray himself in some way? Unlikely. If nothing else, Feth would almost certainly have warned him in some fashion, or at least not sounded so anxious in the words he had managed to transmit.

Perhaps Drai’s distrust — natural enough under the circumstances — had reached a point where he had decided to check personally on the actions of his tame scientist. However, Ken could not imagine him trusting himself in armor on the surface of the Planet of Ice no matter what he wanted to find out.

Still, there was another way of coming down personally. Lee would not like it, of course. He might even persuade his employer that it was far too dangerous. He would certainly try. Still, if Drai really had the idea in his mind, it was more than possible that he might simply refuse to listen to persuasion.

In that case, the Karella’s shadow might fall across them at any moment. That would fit in with Feth’s attempt to warn him, and its abrupt interruption. If that were actually the case, he need not worry; his conscience was clear, and for all that was going on at the moment Drai was perfectly welcome to look on until his eyes froze to the ports. There had been no sign of tofacco anywhere, although the native children had been coming back at frequent intervals with new specimens for the boxes and had named them each time. He himself had not done a single thing in furtherance of his plan.

He had just relaxed with this realization firmly in mind when the native who had been doing most of the talking produced and lighted a cigarette.

Mr. Wing had had no intention of doing anything of the sort. He had a pretty good idea of the value placed by these creatures on tobacco, and he did not want to distract the scientist from what might prove a valuable line of talk. As a matter of fact, he would have been perfectly satisfied to have the creature assume that it was someone else entirely who did the trading. Habit, however, defeated his good intentions; and he was only recalled from his speculations on the nature of this new interruption by the realization that he had taken the first puff.

The Sarrian had both eyes fixed on the little cylinder — an unusual event in itself; usually one was roving in a way calculated to get on the nerves even of someone like young Roger. The reason seemed obvious; Mr. Wing could imagine the alien running mentally over the list of things he had brought with him, wondering what he could trade for the rest of the pack. He was closer to being right than he should have been.

That line of thought, however, was profitless, and no one knew it better than Ken. The real problem of the moment was to get the infernal stuff out of sight before. Drai arrived — if he were coming. For a moment Ken wondered if the other radio, which he had seen lying on the porch when he arrived, could be put to use in time. Common sense assured him that it could not; even if he could persuade one of the natives to bring it and tow the torpedo but of earshot, he certainly could not make his wish clear in time. He would have to hope — the cylinder was vanishing slowly, and there was a chance that it might be gone before the ship arrived. If only he could be sure that the receiver as well as the transmitter aboard the space ship had been cut off!

If Drai were still listening, the silence of the last few seconds would probably make him doubly suspicious. Well, there was nothing to be done about that.

As it happened, there was plenty of time for the cigarette to burn out, thanks to Ordon Lee. Feth had tried to give his warning the instant he realized what Drai was thinking; and the other’s lashing tentacles had hurled him away from the board and across the control room before he could finish. When he had recovered and started to return, he had found himself staring into the muzzle of a pistol, its disc-shaped butt steadied against the drug-runner’s torso.

“So the two of you are up to something,” Drai had said. “I’m not surprised. Lee, find the carrier of that torpedo and home down on it!”

“But sir — into Three’s atmosphere? We can’t—”

“We can, you soft-headed field-twister. The tame brain of mine stood it for three hours and more in a suit of engineering armor, and you want me to believe the hull of this ship can’t take it!”

“But the ports — and the outer drive plates — and—”

“I said get us down there! There are ports in a suit of armor, and the bottom plates stood everything that the soil of Planet Four could give them. And don’t talk about risk from the flatlanders! I know as well as you do that the hull of this barrel is coated even against frequency-modulated radar, to say nothing of the stuff these things have been beaming out — I paid for it, and it’s been getting us through the System patrol at Sarr for a long time. Now punch those keys!” Ordon Lee subsided, but he was quite evidently unhappy. He tuned in the compass with a slightly hopeful expression, which faded when he found that Ken’s torpedo was still emitting its carrier wave. Gloomily he applied a driving force along the indicated line, and the gibbous patch of light that was Planet Three began to swell beyond the ports.

As the board flashed a warning of outside pressure, he brought the vessel to a halt and looked hopefully at his employer. Drai made a downward gesture with the gun muzzle. Lee shrugged in resigned fashion, switched on the heaters in the outer hull, and began feeling his way into the ocean of frigid gas, muttering in an undertone and putting on an I-told-you-so expression every time a clink told of contracting outer plates.

Feth, knowing he would get no further chance at the radio, glued his attention to one of the ports. One of Drai’s eyes did likewise, but no change appeared in his expression as the evidence began to pile up that Ken had been telling the truth. Great mountains, hazy air, green vegetation, even the shiny patches so suggestive of the vast blue plains where the flatlanders had downed the exploring torpedoes; all were there, as the scientist had said, dimly illuminated by the feeble sun of this system but clearly visible for all that, Feth, heedless of the gun in Drai’s hand, suddenly leaped for the door, shouting, “Camera!” and disappeared down the corridor. Drai put the gun away.

“Why can’t you be like those two?” he asked the pilot. “Just get them interested in something, and they forget that there’s anything in the universe to be afraid of.” The pilot made no immediate answer; apparently Drai expected none, for he strolled to the port without waiting. Then without looking up from his controls the pilot asked sourly:

“If you think Ken is interested in his job and nothing else, why are you so anxious to check up on him all of a sudden?”

“Mostly because I’m not quite sure whose job he’s doing. Tell me, Lee, just who would you say was to blame for the fact that this is the first time we’re landing on this world which we’ve known about for twenty years?”

The pilot made no verbal answer, but one eye rolled back and met one of his employer’s for a moment. The question had evidently made him think of something other than frostbite and cracked plates: Laj Drai may not have been a genius, as he had been known to admit, but his rule-of-thumb psychology was of a high order.

The Karella sank lower. Mountain tops were level with the port now; an apparently unbroken expanse of green lay below, but the compass pointed unhesitatingly into its midst. At five hundred feet separate trees were discernible, and the roof of the Wing home showed dimly through them. There was no sign of Ken or his torpedo, but neither being in the control room doubted for an instant that this was the house he had mentioned. Both had completely forgotten Feth.

“Take us a few yards to one side, Lee. I want to be able to see from the side ports. I think I see Ken’s armor — yes. The ground slopes; land us uphill a little way. We can see for a fair distance between these plants.” The pilot obeyed silently. If he heard the shriek of Feth, echoing down the corridor from the room where the mechanic was still taking pictures, he gave no sign; the words were rendered indistinguishable by reverberation in any case. The meaning, however, became clear a moment later. The sound of the hull’s crushing its way through the treetops was inaudible inside; but the other token of arrival was quite perceptible. An abrupt cloud of smoke blotted out the view from port, and as Laj Drai started back in astonishment a tongue of flame licked upward around the curve of the great hull.