Noise

VII Glissando

Wanaka did not respond to this suggestion, leaving both Mike and the child wondering whether or not it had been silly enough to cost points.

She also said no more about the forty-five-degree latitude limit. She had managed to scoop up several bits of the floating coral without destroying them, and spent hours during the next days as Mata was borne southward in examining them as closely and thoughtfully as possible. Sometimes she did this alone, sometimes she consulted with Keo or even Mike. ’Ao stayed at the masthead most of her waking time, since in a sense they were under way.

The ship’s equipment did include a small magnifying lens. This had failed to reveal individual grains of the still unknown metal powder, but did make barely visible the separate cells in the coral that apparently held air for flotation but which shattered completely all the way through a particular specimen if given even a slight excuse. The gas might not, actually, have been air, they all realized; destroying one under fresh water—the captain decided the knowledge might be worth the use of that commodity—produced sinking dust motes and rising bubbles, but there was no way to tell what either might consist of. If the solid was at all like any coral she or Keo had seen, it was probably some form of the carbohydrate-protein copolymer that even Mike understood composed lobster shells at home. All the adults could think of ways to measure the density of the dust and become more certain about this, but sadly all the ways needed delicate weighing equipment that was not to be had. Mata, like her parent, was a cargo craft rather than a research vessel. The seed from which she had grown had plans for a basic ship only, with only basic equipment. The seed had not reproduced itself; it had been provided by the original ship-growers as part of the original sale, quite expensively as Wanaka had plainly remarked once or twice. Mike, after hearing the captain describe the deal, had come to regard the seed as a sort of limited warranty, which had now expired. Without actually worrying, he now did feel a little more conscious of the personal risks he had casually accepted.

Another of the huge floating mysteries was sighted in the next few days. Wanaka steered Mata as close as even she dared, but that was not enough to let them see any significant difference from the first one. ’Oloa, on request, reported that they were just forty-five degrees from the equator, plus or minus its—or her, as Mike was beginning to think—current accumulated three-minute uncertainty, but Wanaka said nothing more about working back to city latitudes. Keo asked no questions, and Mike of course followed—or possibly had furnished—this example. ’Ao, he had decided, really didn’t care in the least where they went or how long they took, as long as she could earn an occasional few points toward adulthood. She was not exactly kept at the masthead by orders, but knew it was the most likely place to spot something useful. She would descend to eat, sleep, and salvage hailstones for the water breakers, or to sweep the deck clear of them if these were full, but that was about all. Her conversational needs seemed to be satisfied by the doll.

Kaihapa, the twin world, was now almost at the western horizon. Kainui’s low haze made the other planet’s equatorial cloud belt—it matched climate zones closely with its slightly larger sister—almost indistinguishable; the crew now had to look through too much of their own world’s atmosphere. Its polar regions, where, as on Kainui, floe ice accumulated and raised the local albedo, were also hard but not impossible to distinguish. The apparent location of these features gave a very rough confirmation of Mata’s latitude, of course, but ’Oloa was much more reliable. Now that Mike had learned the doll’s nature and purpose, it—she—was frequently consulted.

Days later still, and well south of latitude minus forty-five, there appeared yet another of the big mysteries. This one, however, did not rise nearly as high above the sea or appear nearly so spherical as the earlier ones, and ’Ao reported it as “something big” rather than a city. Wanaka, staring unblinkingly at it, shifted Mata’s heading to an almost straight-in approach. Mike was not alone in imagining a firm-set expression on the hidden mouth. None of them needed imagination to see that this thing was far lighter in color than the others and had many more of the bright, sparkling points that had proven in the others to be ice.

The general opinion, voiced by Keo, was that this was actually much like the others but had recently completed a turnover. Approaching it should be relatively safe.

No one wondered seriously why, if it had just turned over as a result of its formerly submerged ice’s melting, it should now be lighter in color than the earlier ones. Mike, without the benefit of anyone else’s opinion, guessed privately that since they were farther from the equator there might have been more ice in the mixture to start with.

The captain again ordered the doll to calculate as best it could how far into the deep currents this one reached. She got the same nonanswer as before, more quickly this time. The currents were only known very loosely, as calculated from their latitude and generally accepted circulation theory; the depth the object might draw was completely unguessable.

By this time even ’Ao knew about simultaneous equations. She had proved it with a navigation solution—done in her head, to Hoani’s astonishment but no one else’s, apparently—and now boasted several more points on her suit and displayed correspondingly higher morale. She had admitted to him once, when the others were out of hearing, that she hoped sometime to be the youngest shipmaster in history. Mike had, of course, no idea how much farther she had to go along this course, and the child herself was not very specific on the point. He couldn’t help wonder just how clear she was herself about it. By his standards she was a ten-year-old, with a ten-year-old’s vague ideas about adulthood; but her education had certainly followed a different course from that of his own childhood back on Earth. He couldn’t guess what and how much she still had to learn.

No one was greatly worried about overturn risks as they approached the floating object, which was now looking less and less like a city and more and more like a very dirty and wave-worn iceberg. In spite of this change, Wanaka had again ordered ’Ao to keep alert for signs of people and water craft. Everyone else did the same from deck level without orders.

And without success.

There was far less flotsam this time as they approached under greatly reduced sail—Keo and Mike were kept busy trimming, following the captain’s orders from her own station at the tiller. These were sometimes vocal and sometimes in Finger, as the thunder far overhead varied in volume. It was no accident that symbols in that language that had to do with ship handling could always be managed by one—either—hand. What small floating objects there were seemed to consist, to everyone’s surprise, of nearly pure ice. There was coral in occasional pieces of this, but it was lighter in color, much closer to yellow than the dark red they had seen earlier, and surprisingly regular in size and shape. It was much less fragile, too; at Wanaka’s order, Mike gathered several specimens and had no trouble this time with their breaking up.

Keo had been watching very carefully on his own initiative for what he had seen earlier—any signs that this big mass might be rising, however slowly; but they hove to only a few dozen meters from the huge but apparently uninhabited object with no reason other than recent memory to make them worry.

“Keo, the water is very shallow; the ice goes out a lot farther from the water line than we are. Toss two grapnels. Bow and stern.” The mate complied without comment. Wanaka gestured ’Ao down to the deck, without bothering to look up herself. All remained silent for some minutes, examining every detail close enough to be seen clearly through the haze. Mike, still much more conscious of each thunderclap than any native, focused his own attention on items that looked less stable than most, wondering what effect the heavy sound waves might have on them. There were actually very few such features; he felt pretty sure that, however stable the whole mass might be, the lower parts they could now see had spent some time close enough to the water line to have experienced wave action. Most irregularities seemed rounded.

The few exceptions even he could explain. They were far up, almost too high for details to show, but they were possible pits and certainly fragments and shatter marks that might have been left by explosions.

This did not have to indicate habitation, recent or otherwise; as far as he had heard, chemical explosives were not used on Kainui. He had certainly never heard a word recognizably close to that meaning in any locally spoken language, and couldn’t offhand think of any use for such material here—though that, he realized, was not a reliable guide. There would always be lots he didn’t know about the Kainui people.

The explosions could be natural, though. The lowest few hundred meters of Kainui’s atmosphere was much too good a conductor to allow electrical charge to build up locally; all the lightning was higher, ordinarily cloud-to-cloud. ’Ao’s normal duty station was perfectly safe. The organically grown cities, however, had to be grounded to salt water; that, he knew, was one of the principal uses of copper on the planet. The grounds didn’t last very long; they corroded, melted, or otherwise succumbed to electrochemical action.

This city-sized object seemed to extend quite far enough above sea level to be vulnerable to lightning, and lightning striking a surface composed largely of ice would certainly experience explosions. Mike began looking for items that might represent scattered fragments on the lower, presumably wave-smoothed areas.

He said nothing, as usual, hoping that one of the others might make a remark that would tell him how far his planetary ignorance was misguiding him.

The captain eventually spoke, but not very helpfully.

“Mike, I’ve heard that ice is more slippery than a wet deck, even on slopes. Do you have any experience with it?”

“Yes. Lots. You get it on Aotearoa’s South Island, which has many high mountains. I’m a good—” he paused, and had to spend a minute or two getting the basics of skiing and the meaning of “mountain” and the differences between snow and ice across to his listeners. Wanaka finally nodded.

“Will it be hard or dangerous to walk or climb on this thing, then?”

“Quite likely. If there are enough small chips of the coral mixed in as there seemed to be in the others it may be safe enough, but all we’ve seen here are pretty big. I suggest you let me try it first. If I do slip, at least I won’t be taken by surprise.”

“Neither will I,” interjected ’Ao. “I’ve slipped on deck lots of times.”

“On a deck with lots of grab lines, and which is rocking so that downhill turns to uphill before you’ve gone very far. Do you think you’d be safe on one that kept you going downhill for thirty of forty ship lengths, interrupted here and there by a piece of coral big enough and sharp enough and hard enough, if the ones we’ve been picking up here are any indication, to rip off half your armor as you went by—toward the water?”

The child seemed unconvinced, but the captain wasn’t.

“How safe will you be?” she asked Hoani. He shrugged, though his noise armor concealed the gesture pretty well.

“Not perfectly, of course. Who expects to be? At home, I’d carry a small pointed axe, or even two, to get a grip if I did start to slide, and I might have metal points strapped to my feet to forestall it. We don’t have anything like that on board, though I suppose those people you mentioned who tried to build and sell icebergs probably did. But look at the shape of these bits of coral; they’re fair-sized cylinders with pointed ends. Spikes, of a sort. I could use them pretty well as ice axes, though it would be nicer if they had real handles. I suggest I go ashore on the flattest place we can find, and look for some more; I want to find out why the ones we’ve been finding near this ice are all so uniform. I’m getting an idea about that.” He paused, not for breath since he was using Finger, but to his relief Wanaka didn’t ask for details. “If my suit gets a few cuts and scratches, they’ll heal, after all.”

The captain hesitated. Both Mike and Keo could practically read her mind, though neither could guess which tack she’d take.

“All right,” she said at last rather slowly. “Hook on a safety line, though. You’re not going to climb far. Keo, hold the other end, but give him plenty of slack. If you pull him off his feet you’ll make at least two enemies.”

“Three,” said ’Ao.

“If I go off my feet, the chances are it won’t be Keo’s fault,” Mike pointed out. “But do give me lots of slack. Even if I do slip there’ll be no need to haul in until I reach the water, if I haven’t stopped myself sooner, and not much then unless I’ve been knocked out.”

“You mean you’re going to keep your helmet open?” asked ’Ao in tones suggesting shock.

Mike paused. “I was. I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks. The work would be a lot easier with it open, but I’d just as soon live through it, and getting it closed while I’m sliding downhill could be awkward. It would certainly get in the way of trying to stop the slide.”

’Ao’s own reflexes in such a situation would have been wholly concerned with her helmet, so this sentence also startled her; but she said nothing. Having caught an adult in one error was enough for a few days. The second one, after all, might have some sense behind it; she herself had never slid downhill, since Muamoku used railed stairs rather than ramps between levels, and could only guess what it might feel like. The remark about tearing armor also deserved some thinking, even if armor did eventually heal itself. Eventually did not mean instantly.

Wanaka would have been very happy to read the child’s mind just then. It seemed as though the loss of points she had taken so indignantly so many weeks before had indeed been good for her.

Mike was able to give an immediate demonstration of the problems of climbing a slippery slope. He couldn’t even get out of the sea until he had found, after some search and extracted after some effort from the submerged ice near the shoreline, two pieces of imbedded coral, each about twice the volume of a fist, in the ice just below the water line. Conveniently and, to everyone involved most interestingly, they were almost exactly the same shape as those picked up floating in the last few minutes and that were still on board—rods small enough in diameter to be held in a gloved hand, and sharp and hard enough to be usable as crude ice axes. With these Hoani dragged himself away from the water’s edge and a short distance farther, to where the slope became almost level over a few square meters. There he succeeded without too much trouble in rising to his feet.

To the captain’s unexpressed impatience, he examined his surroundings for several minutes before reporting any details. When he finally began to talk, stowing his pieces of coral in two of the tool loops in his noise armor to free his hands, he raised more questions than he answered.

“The ice I can see through, this flat part, is full of coral just like my pieces. Same size, same shape. They average half a meter to a meter apart, they’re all lying horizontally and, within a few degrees, parallel to each other. My first thought is that we’d better look around for people.”

“Mine is that this thing has been grown,” Wanaka answered. Mike was relieved; this was the suspicion he had been hoping not to have to voice. “Are any of the rods really close beneath the surface you’re standing on?”

“Yes. A dozen or more have less than a centimeter of ice over them.”

“Then get down as close to one or two of them as you can. Look for details around them, especially threads connecting any of them to their neighbors. And look over the ones you have at your belt for anything similar. ’Ao, hook on to a safety line—I’ll hold it—and swim over there. Don’t try to climb out of the water, but look for more of those things where it’s shallow. They should be as near to the surface of the ice as possible. I want to melt some of them out without breaking anything.”

“How would we do that?” asked Hoani, who had kept his eyes on the captain’s fingers rather than immediately following her orders. She had looked back at him as ’Ao had leaped for a length of cord, and saw the question.

“I’ll show you when we do it. Do your own job now.”

This was as near as the captain had yet come to addressing him as tersely and impersonally as an ordinary crew member; Mike felt more pleased than embarrassed. The embarrassment would no doubt come later, when he was shown or told about the melting technique and realized he should have guessed it for himself. The effort to guess took some of his attention from his work, but fortunately Wanaka couldn’t see this. He hoped the child would not find a spicule, if that were an appropriate word for the things, too quickly; the longer she took, the better his chances of—

His safety line jerked twice. He looked toward the ship. Keo stopped pulling the line, and Wanaka shifted to Finger.

“’Ao’s found one of them just starting to float. I suppose they’re melting out all the time. There—she has another. You needn’t spend time on the ones still under ice, at least for a while. Try climbing some more—no, come back here. Keo would have to keep an eye on you, and I want everyone to look these things over. Even you. You have no experience with anything like it, I suppose, but that could turn out to be useful.”

Mike obeyed, closing his helmet again and allowing himself to slide the few meters to the water’s edge. By the time he was standing on Mata’s deck, ’Ao was there, too, holding the objects she had picked up in each hand. The captain addressed her vocally.

“Keo and I will hold them. Take the lens and look for any trace you can find of anything even slightly like fine hair or any other fiber. Remember what Mike said and what you saw; these things are lined up with each other in the ice. I want to know whether they’re connected with each other in any way.”

“I didn’t think of that,” ’Ao replied. “If they were, I probably broke the fibers when I brought them over.”

“Maybe, but you said they’d started to float. Don’t worry about it. If you did, they’re probably sticking to the sides of the pieces, since everything there is wet. Mike may have to go back over there to study the ones still in the ice, but we’ll try this way first.”

“May I go with him this time?”

“Maybe. If you do see anything here, I’ll want you to look for the same thing still in the ice. If you don’t, maybe I’ll want you to look anyway.”

Mike silently admired the captain’s technique, but concerned himself more with what details he could see on the spicule the child wasn’t examining. He could spot nothing remarkable without the lens, other than a vague pattern that might have been scales or shingles on the main body of the cylinder. Even the lens, when his turn came to use it, showed him nothing more. There seemed little doubt that the captain was right about the objects being some form of pseudolife, but there was no sign of material connection at least between these two specimens. It was back to the main berg.

’Ao accompanied Hoani. So did Keokolo. Safety lines connected them—’Ao and Keo to Mike, the heaviest—but not to the ship, where Wanaka remained. The three reached the nearly level area that Mike had examined earlier and took turns applying the lens to the rods of coral that were close enough to the ice surface to be inside its focus. None could see anything running from any one of them to another; either the connections, if they existed at all, were too fine to be seen, or were of some more subtle type. All of them, including ’Ao, were familiar enough with pseudobiology to know the possibility of solute gradients around one “organ” controlling the growth and even the orientation of the next. They finally reported their lack of success, and even the obvious conclusions, to the captain, and without consulting either her or each other began to climb. Mike used the spicules he had collected earlier as ice axes. Keo and the child imitated him with ones they had picked up from the sea before climbing aboard the berg.

’Ao went first, again without any discussion. It was obviously safer for the far heavier men to be in a position to stop her if she slipped, though this may not have been her main reason for displaying her superior agility.

They had estimated the height of the object very roughly as four hundred meters. As they climbed, Mike felt more and more certain that it was a good deal less; the viewpoint from below had been deceptive.

Unless, of course, it was the viewpoint from above.

There was no way to determine yet the object’s horizontal dimensions since they had seen it from only one direction, though all of them held a vague mental image that assumed it to be roughly circular and therefore, from the visible curvature, something like a kilometer across.

It quickly appeared that ’Ao might be hoping to settle this point by reaching the top as quickly as possible. Somehow she was managing to keep her feet and practically run. However, the length of her safety line to Mike soon restrained her.

He sympathized but continued to crawl as before, using his coral tools carefully. He glanced back at the ship from time to time, but they were already out of reach of Finger communication or, except for occasional brief moments, voice. Thunder remained as usual.

So, it suddenly occurred to Mike, did lightning. Four hundred meters up might be within that danger zone; perhaps getting to the top wouldn’t be such a good idea. After waiting a short time in the hope that the other would mention it first, he finally suggested this to Keo, who agreed at once. Hoani was never sure whether the point had simply not occurred to the mate or whether he, too, had been waiting for his companion to speak.

Of course, both of them had had much of their attention on travel-and-traction problems. On Earth, something like lightning calls for thought or attention at specific times ; on Kainui, it’s at all times when far enough above the sea. Very seldom during a voyage does one get that far above sea level, and traveling up an ice slope tends to focus the climber’s attention on other matters.

Focus it too hard, apparently. When the men stopped and looked up to see how far above them ’Ao might be, the child was not in sight.

They weren’t worried at first. It was not the first time; the surface was very irregular, much less rounded than Mike had thought from below, and occasional humps and hollows had repeatedly put one or another of them out of the others’ line of direct vision. Even Mata could not always be seen. However, the safety line still led upward, and a very gentle tug on it presumably caught ’Ao’s attention; it was returned at once.

Perhaps it had not been quite gentle enough, however, though the possibility was not at once evident to either man. As well as attracting her notice, it might also have overloaded the girl’s already feeble friction connection with the ice. For whatever reason, she began to slip toward them.

It was two or three seconds before this became evident below, and then not as a result of sight. Mike felt the safety line slacken and took it up gently so as to maintain communication; but almost at once he realized that gently wasn’t working.

“She’s falling! Get ready to stop her as she goes by!” he bellowed as loudly as he could. Keo heard him, locked himself in position with one point, and held the other ready to stab into the ice and pull him in whatever direction might be needed. His own location at the moment was on a fairly level stretch at the foot of a steeper-than-usual slope; maybe the little one would appear directly above him, but he was as ready as possible to shift either way. Mike, on a slightly steeper area ahead and to one side, was in a poorer position for this, but did his best while also trying to get the slack out of the child’s safety line. He didn’t dare pull too hard; it might interfere with any efforts she might be making to stop herself. Just how fast was the poor kid coming, anyway? Would it be possible for either of the men, or both together, to stop her? Or would all three end up whirling helplessly into the sea?

Keo, Mike noticed, had already seized a moment to flip his helmet shut. Should he do the same? No. Stopping ’Ao was more important; when they all were going down together there’d be plenty of time for helmets. The sea was now several hundred meters away. He lacked Kainui reflexes, and was just as glad of it.

He felt tension on his rope and eased his pull. Then he stopped pulling altogether; the slack had disappeared. She’d stopped herself.

Or had been stopped by something.

“Keo! She’s stopped coming! We’d better get up this slope and find out why!” The mate flipped his helmet back to answer vocally.

“Hoping all the time she sticks her head over the edge and tells us.”

“She’s been stopped for whole seconds. Don’t wait for that!”

Keo nodded, and the two resumed clawing their way upward. Mike, by far the heavier, began to fall behind. Then the mate’s grip failed at an especially steep point, and he slid back almost to Hoani’s level before getting his coral spikes to hold again. This happened twice more before they reached the edge of the shelf or bulge or whatever it was that was blocking their upward view; even on ice, lower weight gives poorer traction when the local temperature is close to freezing.

Or does it? Should it? Mike’s mind started to wander slightly in spite of the situation, though not badly enough to interfere with his climbing, and was pulled back to reality only when he could see where ’Ao’s rope was leading. The men came almost at the same moment to the top of the slope, and found themselves looking slightly downward onto an almost white, nearly circular level area some ten meters across. A little beyond the center from where they were looking, ’Ao was getting to her feet. Her noise armor appeared intact, and the child herself unhurt.

She saw them the moment their heads appeared and spoke in Finger—the thunder was too much at the moment for even the half-dozen meters separating them.

“Sorry if I scared you. I slipped up there”—she gestured up the slope, which resumed even more steeply on the far side of the circle—“and couldn’t stop ’til I hit this level. It looks funny, doesn’t it? Like a lot of hailstones piled up on the deck before I could clear them off.”

Mike decided that if she could ignore what had just happened, he might as well do the same. He had intended to apologize for pulling her off her feet with the safety line, but of course he couldn’t be sure that was what had actually occurred. The coincidence of pull and fall could have been just that, after all; he hadn’t been able to see her.

Also, her remark about the surface she was standing on seemed to deserve attention. The men pulled themselves over the low rim that surrounded the nearer half of the level area, but didn’t bother to stand up; they could examine the surface better from a near-prone position.

’Ao was perfectly right. They were lying on what seemed to be packed hailstones varying from pea to golf-ball size, though only Mike made that comparison, of course. He thought rapidly, for him.

Hailstones. Circular area. Level area. Too-low-for-lightning area—that was a problem. No, it wasn’t. He’d merely been wrong about the thing’s rising.

Most uncharacteristically, he spoke his idea aloud. Perhaps, he thought later, it was because the captain wasn’t in hearing, and of course it was something Kainuians might reasonably not know about.

“More water we don’t need to worry about,” he remarked rather illogically. “You’re right, ’Ao. This is hail.”

“But why so level, and just here, and in a circle?” The question came from Keo, Hoani was glad to note.

“It’s collected in a lightning crater, I’d say. Explosion pits tend to be circular, and when lightning hits ice you get an explosion—”

“Then we’d better get back downhill!” exclaimed Keo. “I didn’t think we were high enough for lightning! Hurry, ’Ao. You go first, and keep your safety line taut!”

“You may be right, and I suppose we should play it safe,” countered Mike, “but I don’t think so. It’s been a pretty long time since this crater formed—”

“If it really is a crater,” cut in ’Ao. “We can only see the top, and don’t know how deep it is, or was.” Mike was nonplussed for a moment, then started to talk again, not quite so rapidly.

“It’s nearly a perfect circle, as I said,” he pointed out. “Can you think of any other reason that would be? Anyway, if it is a lightning pit it was formed long enough ago to fill with hail, and I think this berg was probably higher then. Quite a lot higher. You yourself, Keo, were pretty sure we’re still below lightning-risk height. We’re certainly not a hundred meters above sea level yet.”

The mate thought for perhaps half a minute. Mike suspected that Keo, like himself, was wondering less about what the captain would do if she were there than what she would say later—whatever they actually did now. Mike himself was simply not constituted by habit to regard lightning as a major hazard, though his mind told him this was rather silly in the present circumstances.

’Ao, content with the fact that the decision wasn’t up to her, was examining the edge of the supposed hail deposit. The ice over which the men had climbed was clear enough to see into for half a meter or more, and she was wondering whether there were coral spicules in it this high up. It took her only a few seconds to find them, and virtually no time thereafter to see something else.

“Keo! Mike! Look here! There are lots of the coral things up here, too, but they’re not all lying flat. They’re all jumbled around. Look!”

They looked. ’Ao had spoken after looking at perhaps a meter of the circle’s circumference; her elders were silent until they had checked over half the circle, uphill as well as downhill portions. The child seemed to be right, however—perhaps unfortunately, it occurred to Mike. He decided not to report her somewhat hasty leap to a conclusion if he could help it; Wanaka might well decide that a deduction of points was in order, and ’Ao had actually been a little more guilty of unreasonable haste than had Mike himself.

To reinforce this determination by making himself guiltier, he spoke again.

“I’ll bet those spicules were as flat and organized originally as the ones down below. They got knocked around by the blast that formed the crater, wouldn’t you say?”

Keo shrugged, a gesture much more visible through his noise armor than through Mike’s.

“Maybe. But aren’t the spikes pretty regular for explosion debris, though? They’re mostly pointing toward the center of the circle. But that doesn’t matter right now. We’re going down to report. ’Ao, I have another line. Take the end of it so we can both hold you back if we have to, and lead the way.”

The child fell twice during the descent, clearly not from injudicious rope tugging by either man, which made Mike feel better about her original fall. Mike himself slipped once, fortunately on a fairly shallow slope so that Keo was able to stop him with little difficulty, and in half an hour or so the three were back aboard Mata.

Mike had been a little worried, but Wanaka said nothing about their having climbed out of sight. She had, after all, issued no orders on that point. She simply listened to the accounts of all three of the investigators. Mike did feel a little of his usual self-consciousness when he had to describe his own theories, but not very much; he was fairly confident in them by this time.

His old uneasiness did not return in full strength until he had finished, and the captain asked a question.