Star Light

11

It really wasn’t quite Kabremm’s fault, though Barlennan was a long time forgiving him,. The transmitter had been away from the lights. When the newcomer had first joined Stakendee’s group he had not been able to see it; later he had failed to notice it; and not until he was within a foot or two did he recognize it. Even then he wasn’t worried greatly; human beings all looked alike to him, he assumed that his own people looked at least as indistinguishable to the humans, and while he would not have put himself deliberately in view, a sudden withdrawal, or any attempt to hide, would have been far more suspicious than staying calmly where he was.

When Easy’s voice erupted from the speaker with his name, it was obviously sixty-four seconds too late to do anything. Stakendee, whose reflex response to the sound was to reach for the shutter on the top of the vision set, realized in time that this would only make matters worse.

What they should do was far from obvious to either of them. Neither was an expert in intrigue, though Mesklin’s culture was no more innocent of political deceit than it was of the commercial variety. Neither was particularly quick-witted.

Kabremm, unlike Dondragmer, approved enthusiastically of the Esket project and of keeping it secret from the aliens. Even the Kwembly’s commander, a straightforward type who would be desirable for the Mesklinite group on Dhrawn to be as completely self-sustaining as [possible; Kabremm and Destigmet not only admitted it but regarded it as the most important of the problems facing the expedition. Barlennan, who had to use this as an excuse and to give the Esket’s crew responsibility for setting up the secret base.

Kabremm was, therefore, horrified at his slip, but utterly unable to think of anything to do about it — at least, anything not likely to conflict with what Barlennan was likely to do when the news reached him. He froze before the transmitter, wondering what would be his best line of action.

Barlennan, who also heard Easy’s cry, was in exactly the same situation. He hadn’t the slightest idea how or why Kabremm had wound up anywhere near the Kwembly, though the incident of Reffel’s communication cutoff had prepared him for something of the sort. Only one of the three dirigibles was employed on the regular shuttle run between the Esket site and the Settlement; the other were under Destigmet’s control and were usually exploring. Still, Dhrawn was large enough to make the presence of one of them in the Kwembly’s neighborhood a distinct surprise.

However, it seemed to have happened. It was simply bad luck, Barlennan assumed — compounded by the fact that probably the only human being in the universe who could possibly have recognized Kabremm by sight had been in a position to see him when the slip occurred.

So the human beings now knew that the Esket’s crew had not been obliterated. No provision had been made for such a discovery; no planned, rehearsed story existed which Barlennan could count on Kabremm’s using. Maybe Dondragmer would fill in — he could be counted on to do his best, no matter what he thought of the whole matter — but it was hard to see what he could do. The trouble was that Barlennan himself would have no idea what Dondragmer said, and would not know what to say himself when questions came, as they surely would, toward the Settlement. Probably the safest tactic was to claim utter ignorance, and ask honestly for as complete a report as possible from Dondragmer. The captain would at least keep Kabremm, who had obviously been playing the fool, from leaking the whole cask.

It was fortunate for Barlennan’s peace of mind that he did not realize where Kabremm had been met. Easy, a few seconds before her cry of recognition, had told him that Benj was reporting something from a Kwembly screen, or he would have assumed that Kabremm had inadvertently stepped into the field of view of an Esket communicator. He knew no details about the search party of Stakendee, and assumed the incident to be occurring at the Kwembly and not five miles away. The five miles was just as bad as five thousand, under the circumstances; communication between Mesklinites not within hooting range of each other had to go through the human linkage, and Dondragmer was in no better position to cover the slip than Barlennan himself. However, the Kwembly’s captain managed to do it, quite unintentionally.

He, too, had heard Easy’s exclamation, much more loudly than Barlennan in view of the woman’s position among the microphones. However, it had been little more than a distraction to him, for his mind was wholly taken up with some words Benj had uttered a few seconds before. In fact, he was so disturbed by them as to do something which everyone at all experience in Dhrawn-satellite communication had long learned not to do. He had interrupted, sending an urgent call of his own pulsing upward to the station while Benj was still taking.

“Please! Before you do anything else, tell me more about that liquid. I get the impression from what you’ve said that there is a stream flowing in the riverbed in view of Stakendee’s vision pickup. If that is the case, please send these orders immediately: Stak, with two men to carry the communicator, is to follow that stream upward immediately keeping you and through you me informed of its nature — particularly, is it growing any larger? The other three are to follow it down to find how close it comes to the Kwembly; when they have ascertained this they are to come in with the information at once. I’ll worry about whom you’ve found later on; I’m glad one of them has turned up. If this trickle is the beginning of the next flood, we’ll have to stop everything else and get life-support equipment out of the ship and out of the valley. Please check, and get those orders to Stakendee at once!”

This request began to come in just as Easy finished her sentence and long before either Kabremm or Barlennan could have got a reply back to it./ Mersereau and Aucoin were still gone, so Benj had no hesitation about passing Dondragmer’s orders along; and Easy, after a second or two of thought, shelved the Kabremm question and reported the same information to Barlennan. If Don saw the situation as an emergency, she was willing to go along with his opini0n; he was on the scene. She did not take her eyes from the screen which showed Kabremm’s image, however; his presence still needed explanation. She, too, helped Barlennan unwittingly at this point.

After completing the relay of Dondragmer’s orders, she added a report of her own which clarified much for the commander.

“I don’t know how up to date you are, Barl; things have been happening rather suddenly. Don sent out a foot party with a communicator to look for Kervenser and Reffel. This was the group which is bothering Don so much, and at the same time ran into Kabremm. I don’t know how he got there, thousands of miles from the Esket, but we’ll get his story and relay it to you as soon as we can. I’ve sometimes wondered wheter he and any of the others were alive, but I never really hoped for it. I know the life-support equipment in the cruisers is supposed to be removable in case the vehicles had to be abandoned; but there was never any sign of anything being taken from the Esket. This will be useful news as well as pleasant; there must be some way for you people to live on at least some parts of Dhrawn without human equipment.”

Barlennan’s answer was a conventional acknowledgement-plus-thanks, given with very little of his attention. Easy’s closing sentence had started a new train of thought in his mind.

Benj had paid little attention to his mother’s words, having a conversation of his own to maintain. He relayed Dondragmer’s command to the foot party, say the group break up accordingly — though he failed to interpret the confusion caused by Kabremm’s telling Stakendee how he had reached the spot — and reported the start of the new mission to the captain. He followed the report, however, with comments of his own.

“Captain, I hope this isn’t going to take all your men. I know there’s a lot of work in getting your life equipment to the bank, but surely you can keep on with the job of melting the Kwembly loose. You’re not just giving up in the ship, are you? And you still have Beetch and his friend underneath — you can’t just abandon them. It won’t take many men to get the heater going, it seems to me.”

Dondragmer had formed by now a pretty clear basic picture of Benj’s personality, though some detailed aspects of it were fundamentally beyond his grasp. He answered as tactfully as he could.

I’m certainly not giving up the Kwembly while there’s any reasonably chance of saving her,” he said, “but the presence of liquid only a few miles away forces me to assume that the risk of another flood is now very high. My crew, as a group, comes first. The metal bar we have cut form the hull will be lowered to the ground in a few more minutes. Once that is done, only Borndender and one other man will be left on the heater detail. Everyone else, except of course, Stakendee’s crew, will start immediately carrying plant tanks and lights to the side of the valley. I do not want to abandon my helmsmen, but if I get certain news that high water is on the way we are all going to head for higher ground wheter or not any are still missing. I gather you don’t like the idea, but I am sure you see why there is no other possible course.” The captain fell silent, neither knowing nor greatly caring wheter Benj had an answer for this; there was too much else to consider.

He stood watching as the heavy length of metal, which was to be a heater if everyone’s ideas worked out, was eased toward the Kwembly’s starboard side. Lines were attached to it, snubbed around the climbing holdfasts, and held by men on the ice who were carefully giving length under the orders of Praffen. The latter, perched on the helicopter lock panel with his front end reared four inches higher, watched and gestured commands as the starboard par of the long strip of metal slid slowly away form him and the other side approached. Dondragmer cringed slightly as the sailor seemed about to be brushed off the hell by the silvery length of alloy, but Praffen let it pass under him with plenty of legs still on the plastic and at least three pairs of pincers gripping the holdfasts. With this personal risk ended he let the rope men work a little fast, and it took less than five more minutes to get the bar down to the ice.

Dondragmer had redonned his airsuit during the last part of the operation and gone out on the hull again, where he hooted a number of orders. Everyone else outside obediently headed for the main lock to start transferring the life support equipment; the captain himself reented the bridge to get back in radio contact with Benj and Stakendee.

The boy had said nothing during the lowering-away, which had been carried out in view of the bridge communicator. What he could see required no explanation. He was a little unhappy at the disappearance of the crew afterward, for, of course, Dondragmer had been right; Benj did not like the idea of the entire group being diverted to the abandon-ship operation. However, the emergency of two Mesklinites with a power box gave him something to watch besides Stakendee’s upstream crawl on the adjacent screen.

Benj did not know which of the two was Borndender, but wasn’t worried. Their actions were of more interest. And their troubles with the radiator made interesting watching.

The wire was rigid enough to have held its shape fairly well as it was moved, and now lay flat on the ice in much the same form it had had when attached to the hull — that is, rather like a long, narrow hairpin near the center where it outlined the helicopter lock, and the cut ends some two feet apart. The original vertical component of its curvature which had been impressed by the shape of the hull had flattened out under gravity. The unit had been turned over during the lowering so that the prongs which had attached it to the plastic were now pointing upward; hence there was good contact with the ice for practically its entire length.

The Mesklinites spent a few minutes trying to straighten it out; Benj got the impression that they wanted to run it around the side of the hull as closely as possible. However, it finally appeared to dawn on them that the free ends would have to be close together in order to go into the same power box, so they left the wire along and dragged the power unit aft. One of them examined the holes in the box and the ends of the wire carefully, while the other stood by.

Benj could not see the box very well, since its image on the screen was very small, but he was familiar with similar machines. It was a standard piece of equipment which had needed very little modification to render it usable on Dhrawn. There were several kinds of power takeoff on it besides the rotating field used for mechanical drive. The direct electrical current which Borndender wanted could be drawn from any of several places; there were contact plates on opposite sides of the box which could be energized, several different sizes of jack-type bipolar sockets, and simple unipolar sockets at opposite ends of the box. The platters would have been easiest, but the Mesklinites, as Benj learned later, had dismissed them as too dangerous; they chose to use the end sockets. This meant that one end of the “hairpin” had to go into one end of the unit, and the other into the other end. Borndender already knew that the wire was a little large for the holes and would have to be filed down, and had brought the appropriate tools with him; this was no problem. Bending the ends, however, so that short lengths of them pointed toward each other, was a different matter. While he was still working on this problem, the rest of the crew emerged from the main lock with their burden of hydroponic tanks, pumps, lights and power units, and headed northward toward the side of the valley. Borndender ignored them, except for a brief glance while he was wondering wheter he could commandeer some assistance.

The two ninety-degree bends he had to make were not entirely a matter of strength. The metal was of semicircular cross section, about a quarter of an inch in radius — Benj thought of it as heavy wire, while to the Mesklinites it was bar stock. The alloy was reasonably tough even at a hundred and seventy degrees Kelvin, so there was no risk of breaking; and Mesklinite strength was certainly equal to the task. What the two scientists lacked, which made the bending an operation instead of an incident, was traction.

The ice under them was fairly pure water with a modest percentage of ammonia, not so far either below its melting point or from the ideal ice crystal structure to have lost its slipperiness. The small area of the Mesklinite extremities caused them to dig in in normal walking, and this, combined with their low structure and multiplicity of legs, prevented slipping in ordinary walking around the frozen — in Kwembly. Now, however, Borndender and his assistant were trying to apply a strong side — wise force, and their twenty pounds of weight simply did not give enough dig for their claws. The metal refused to bend, and the long bodies lashed about on the ice with Newton’s Third Law in complete control of the situation. The sigh was enough to make Benj chuckle in spite of his worry, a reaction which was shard my Seumas McDevitt, who had just come down from the weather lab.

Borndender finally solved his engineering problem by going back into the Kwembly and bring out drilling equipment. With this he sank half a dozen foot-deep holes in the ice, and by standing lengthwise of drill-tower support rod in these he was able to provide anchorage for the Mesklinite muscles. The metal was finally changed from hairpin to caliper shape.

Fitting the ends into the appropriate holes was comparatively easy after the filing was finished. It involved a modest lifting job to get the wire up to the two-inch height of the socket holes, but this gave no problem either for strength or traction and was done in half a minute. With some hesitation, visible even to the human watchers, Borndender approached the controls of the power unit. The watchers were at least as tense; Dondragmer was not entirely sure that the operation was safe for his shi[, having only the words of the human beings about this particular situation, and Benj and McDevitt had doubts about the efficacy of the jury-rigged heater.

The last were speedily settled. The safety devices built into the unit acted properly as far as the machine’s own protection was concerned; they were not, however, capable of analyzing the exterior load in detail. They permitted the unit to deliver a current — not a voltage — up to a limit determined by the manual control setting. Borndender had, of course, set this at the lowest available value. The resistor lasted for several seconds, and might have held up indefinitely if the ends had not been off the ice.

For most of the length of the loop, all went well. A cl0ud of microscopic ice crystals began to rise the moment the power came on, as water boiled away from around the wire and froze again in the dense frigid air. It hid the sight of the wire singing into the surface ice, but no one doubted that this was happening.

The last foot or so at each end of the loop, however, was not protected by the high specific and latent heats of water. Those inches of metal showed no sign of the load they were carrying for perhaps three seconds; then they began to glow. The resistance of the wire naturally increased with its temperature, and in the effort to maintain constant current the power box applied more voltage. The additional heat developed was concentrated almost entirely in the already overheated sections. For a long moment a red, and then a white, glow illuminated the rising cloud, causing Dondragmer to retreat involuntarily to the other end of the bridge while Borndender and his companion flattened themselves against the ice.

The human watches cried out — Benj wordlessly, McDevitt protestingly, “It can’t blow!” their reactions were, of course, far too late to be meaningful. By the time the picture reached the station, one end of the wire loop had melted through had the unit had shut down automatically. Borndender, rather surprised to find himself alive, supplemented the automatic control with the manual one, and without taking time to report to the captain set about figuring what had happened.

This did not take him long; he was an orderly thinker, and had absorbed a great deal more alien than had the helmsmen who were still hoping for a rescue a few yards away. He understood the theory and construction of the power units about as a good high school student understands the theory and construction of a television set — that is, he could not have built one himself, but could make a reasonable deduction about the cause of a gross malfunction. He was more of a chemist than a physicist, as far as specific training went.

While the human beings watched in surprise, and Dondragmer in some uneasiness, the two scientist repeated the bending operation until what was left of the resistor was once again usable. With the drilling equipment they made a pit large enough to hold the power box at one end of the deep groove boiled in the ice by the first few seconds of power. They set the box in the hole, connected the ends once more, and covered everything with chips of ice removed in the digging, leaving only the controls exposed. Then Borndender switched on the power again, this time retreating much more hastily than before.

The white cloud reappeared at once, but this time grew and spread. It enveloped the near side of the Kwembly, including the bridge, blocking the view for Dondragmer and the communicator lens. Illuminated by the outside flood lamps, it caught the attention of the crew, now nearing the edge of the valley, and of Stakendee and his men miles to the west. This time the entire length of the wire was submerged in melted ice, which bubbled away from around it as hot vapor, condensed to a liquid a fraction of a millimeter away, evaporated again much less violently from the surface of the widening pool, and again condensed, this time to ice, in the air above. The streaming pool, some three quarters of the Kwembly’s length and originally some sex feet in width, began to sink below the surrounding ice as its contents were borne away as ice dust by the gentle wind fast than they were replenished by melting.

One side of it reach the cruiser, and Dondragmer, catching a glimpse of it through a momentary break in the swirling fog suddenly had a frightening thought. He donned his airsuit hurriedly and rushed to the inner door of the main lock. Here he hesitated; with the suit’s protection he could not tell by feel wheter the ship was heating dangerously, and there were not internal thermometers except in the lab. For a moment he thought of getting one; then he decided that the time needed might be risk, and opened the up safety valves in the outer lock, which were handled by pull cords from inside reaching down through the liquid trap. He did not know wheter the heat from outside would last long enough to boil ammonia in the lock itself — the Kwembly’s hull was well insulated, and leakage would be slow — but he had no desire to have boiling ammonia confined aboard his command. It was actually an example of a little knowledge causing superfluous worry; the temperature needed to bring ammonia vapor pressure anywhere near the current ambient value would have made an explosion the least of any Mesklinite’s concerns. However, no real harm was by opening the valves, and the captain felt better as a result of the action. He returned hastily to the bridge to see what was going on.

A gentle breeze from the west was providing occasional glimpses by sweeping the ice fog aside, and he could see that the level of the molten pool was lower. Its area had increased greatly, but as the minutes passed he decided that some sort of limit had been reached in that respect. His two men were visible at times, crawling here and there trying to find a good viewpoint. They finally settled down almost under the bridge, with breeze behind them.

For some time even the liquid level seemed to reach a steady state, though none of the watchers could understand why. Later they decided that the spreading pool had melted its way into the still-liquid reservoir under the Kwembly, which took fully fifteen minutes to evaporate. By the end of that time, cobbles from the river bottom began to show their tops above the simmering water, and the problem of turning the power unit off before another length of wire was destroyed suddenly occurred to Dondragmer.

He knew now that there was no danger of the power unit blowing up; however, several inches of the wire had already melted away, and there was going to be trouble restoring the refrigerator to service. This situation should not be allowed to get any worse, which it would if more metal were lost. Now, as the water level reached the cobbles and the wire ceased to follow the melting ice downward, the captain suddenly wondered wheter he could get out to the controls fast enough to prevent the sort of shut-off which had occurred before. He wasted no time mentally blasting the scientists for not attaching a cord to the appropriate control; he hadn’t thought of it in time either.

He donned his suit again and went out through the bridge lock. Here the curve of the hull hid the pool from view, and he began to make his way down the holdfasts as rapidly as he could in the poor visibility. As he went, he hooted urgently to Borndender, “Don’t let the write melt again! Turn off the power!”

An answering, but wordless, bellow told him that he had been heard, but no other information came through the white blankness. He continued to grope his way downward, finally reaching the bottom of the hull curve. Below him, separated from his level by the thickness of the mattress and two thirds the height of the trucks, was the gently steaming surface of the water. It was not, of course, actively boiling at this pressure; but it was hot even by human standards, and the captain had no illusions about the ability of an airsuit to protect him from it. It occurred to him, rather later, that there was an excellent chance that he had just cooked his two missing helmsmen to death, but this was a passing thought; there was work to be done.

The power box lay well aft of his present position, but the nearest surface on which he could walk had to be forward. Either way there was going to be trouble reaching the unit, now presumably well surrounded by hot water; but if jumping were going to be necessary, the hull holdfasts were about the poorest possible takeoff point. Dondragmer went forward.

This brought him into clear air almost at once, and he saw that his two men were gone. Presumably they had started around the far side of the pool in the hope of carrying out his order. The captain continued forward, and in another yard or two found it possible top descend to solid ice. He did so, and hastened on what he hoped was the trail of his men.

He had to slow down almost at once, however, as his course brought him back into the ice fog. He was too close to the edge of the pool to take chances. As he went he called repeatedly, and was reassured to hear each hoot answered by another. At least, his men had not yet fallen in.

He caught up with them almost under the cruise’s stern, having walked entirely around the part of the pool not bounded by the hull. None of them had accomplished anything; the power unit was not only out of reach but out of sigh. Jumping would have been utter lunacy, even if Mesklinites normally tended to think such a thing. Borndender and his assistant had not, and the idea had only occurred to Dondragmer because of his unusual experience in Mesklin’s low-gravity equatorial zone long before.

But there could not be much more time. Looking over the edge of the ice, the three could catch glimpses of the rounded tops of the rocks, separated by water surfaces which narrowed as they watched. The wire must be practically out of water by now; chance alone would not have it settle between the stones to a point much lower than their average height, and the protecting water was already there. The captain had been weighing the various risks for minutes; without further hesitation, and without issuing any orders, he slipped over the edge and dropped two feet to the top of one of the boulders.

It was the energy equivalent of an eight-story fall on Earth, and even the Mesklinite was jolted. However, he retained he self-command. A single hoot told those above he had survived without serious injury, and warned them against following in case pride might have furnished an impulse which intelligence certainly would not. The captain, with that order issued, relegated the scientist to the back of his mind and concentrated on the next step.

The nearest rock with enough exposed area to accommodate him was two feet — well over a body length — away, but was at least visible. Better still, another one only slightly off the line to it expose a square inch or so of its surface; and two seconds after analyzing this situation, Dondragmer was two feet closer to the power box and looking for another stopping point. The lone square inch of the stepping stone had been touched by perhaps a dozen feet as the red-and-black length of his body had ricocheted from it to the second rock.

The next stage was more difficult. It was harder to be sure which way to go, since the hull which had been furnished orientation was now barely visible also, there were no more large surfaces as close as the one from which he had come. He hesitated, looking and planning; but before he reached a decision the question was resolved for him. The grumbling sound which had gone on for so many minutes as water exploded into steam against the hot wire and almost instantly collapses again under Dhrawn’s atmospheric pressure abruptly ceased, and Dondragmer knew that he was too late to save the metal. He relaxes immediately and waited where he was while the water cooled, the evaporation slowed, and the fog of ice crystals cleared away. He himself grew uncomfortably warm, and was more than once tempted to return the way he had come but the two-foot climb up an ice overhang with hot water at is foot, which would form part of the journey, made the temptation easy to resist. He waited.

He was still alive when the air cleared and crystals of ice began to grow around the edges of the rocks. He was some six feet from the power unit, and was able to reach it by a rather zigzag course over the cobbles once the way could be seen. He shut off the power controls, and only when that was done did he look around.

His two men had already made their way along the ice cliff to a point about the level with the original front bend of the wire; Dondragmer guessed that this must be where the metal had melted through this time.

In the other direction, under the bulking hull, was a black cavern where the Kwembly’s lights did not reach. The captain had no real wish to enter it; it was very likely that he would find the bodies of his two helmsmen there. His hesitation was observed from above.

“What’s he waiting there at the power box for?” muttered McDevitt. “Oh, I suppose the ice isn’t thick enough for him yet.”

‘That’s not all of it, I’d guess.” Benj’s tone made the meteorologist look sharply away from the screen.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“You must know what’s the matter. Beetch and his friend were under there. They must have been. How could they have gotten away from that hot water? I bet the captain only just thought of it — he’d never have let them use that way if he’d seen what would happen, any more than I would have.”

McDevitt thought rapidly; the boy wouldn’t be convinced, or even comforted, by anything but sounds reasoning, and McDevitt’s soundest reasoning suggested that Benj’s conclusion was probably right. However, he tried.

“It looks bad, but don’t give up. It doesn’t look as though this thing melted its way all the way across under the ship, but it might have; and either way there’s some hope. If it did, the could have got out the other side, which we can’t see; if it didn’t they could have stayed right at the edge of the liquid zone, where the ice could have saved them. Also, they may not have been under there.”

“Water ice save them? I thought you said that this stuff froze because it lost its ammonia, not because the temperature went down. Water ice at its melting point — zero centigrade — would give heatstroke to a Mesklinite.”

“That was my guess,” admitted the have enough measurements of any sort. I admit your little friend may have been killed; but we know so little of what has happened down there that it would be silly to give up hope. Just wait — there’s nothing else to do at this distance anyway. Even Dondragmer is staying put. You can trust him to check as soon as it’s possible.”

Benj restrained himself, and did his best to look for bright possibilities; but the eye he was supposed to be keeping on Stakendee remained fixed on the captain’s image.

Several times Dondragmer could be seen to extend part of his length onto the ice, but each time he drew back again, to the boy’s intense annoyance. At last, however, he seemed satisfied that the ice would hold his weight, and inch by inch extended himself entirely onto the newly frozen surface. Once off the power box he waited for a moment as though expecting something to happen; but the ice held, and he resumed his way toward the side of the Kwembly. The human beings watched, Benj’s fists clenched tightly and even the man more tense than usual.

Of course they could hear nothing. Not even the hoot which suddenly echoed across the ice penetrated the bridge to affect their communicator. They could not even guess why Dondragmer suddenly turned back from the hull as he was about to disappear under it. They could only watch as he raced back across the ice to a point just below his two men and waved excitedly at them, apparently indifferent to whatever there was to be learned about the fate of his helmsman and Benj’s friend.