Star Light

5: FRYER TO FREEZER

Strictly speaking, all of them weren’t missing. Several could be seen lying on the boulders, evidently dislodged at the time of the final impact. Whether any had gone with the earlier bumps, presumably miles upstream, Beetchermarlf could not guess and was rather afraid to find out. That could be checked later. Inspecting what was left would have to come first. The helmsman set to it.

The front end seemed to have sustained no damage at all; the trucks were still present and their maze of tiller lines in proper condition. Amidships, many of the lines had snapped in spite of the enormous strength of the Mesklinite fiber used in them. Some of the trucks were twisted out of alignment; several, indeed, swung freely to the touch. The pattern of missing parts aft was regular and rather encouraging. Numbering from the port side, Row 1 had lost its last five trucks; Rows 2 and 3 their last four; Row 4 the last three; Row 5, on the starboard side, its last two. This suggested that they had all yielded to the same impact, which had wiped diagonally across the bottom of the hull; and since some of the detached units were in the neighborhood, there seemed a good chance that they all would be.

The inspectors were surprised at how little damage had been done by the trucks tearing away. Beetchermarlf and his companions had had nothing to do with the design of the Kwembly and her sister machines. None of them had more than the roughest idea of the sort of thinking which had been involved. They had never considered the problems inherent in building a machine powered by the most sophisticated energy sources ever developed, but operated by beings from a culture still in the muscle-and-wind stage; beings who would be cut off from any repair and replacement facilities once they were on Dhrawn. This was, the reason the steering was done by tiller and rope rather than by powered selsyns or similar devices; why the air locks were so simple, and not completely foolproof; why the life-support system was not only manually operated (except for the lights which kept the plants alive) but had even been designed and built by Mesklinite scientists and technicians.

A few hundred of the beings had received an extensive body of alien education, though no attempt had been made to spread the new knowledge through the Mesklinite culture. Nearly all of the “college graduates” were now on Dhrawn, together with recruits like Beetchermarlf; mostly young, reasonably intelligent volunteers from among the sailors of Barlennan’s maritime nation. These were the people who would have to perform any repairs and all regular maintenance on the land-cruisers, and this fact had to be kept constantly in the foreground of the designers’ minds. Designing vehicles capable of covering thousands of miles of Dhrawn’s environment in a reasonable length of time, and at the same time reasonably safely under Mesklinite handling, had inevitably resulted in equipment with startling qualities. Beetchermarlf should not have been surprised either that the pieces of his cruiser went back together so readily, or that the cruisers had suffered so little damage.

Of course, the intelligence of the Mesklinites had been taken into account. It was the main reason for not depending on robots: these had proved unsatisfactory in the early days of space exploration. Mesklinite intelligence was obviously comparable to that of human beings, Drommians, or Paneshks: a fact surprising in itself, since all four planets appeared to have evolved their life forms over widely different lengths of geological time. It was also fairly certain that Mesklinites were much longer-lived, on the average, than human beings, though Mesklinites were oddly reluctant to discuss this; indeed, what this would mean in terms of their general competence was as problematic as Dhrawn itself. It had been a risky project from all angles, with most of the risk being taken by the Mesklinites. The giant barge drifting in orbit near the human station, which was supposed to be able to evacuate the entire Settlement in emergency, was little more than a gesture, especially for the beings afield in the land-cruisers.

None of this was in the minds of the three sailors inspecting the Kwembly’s damage. They were simply surprised and delighted to find that the lost trucks had merely popped out of the sockets in which they normally swiveled and into which they could apparently be replaced with little trouble, provided they could be found. With this problem settled to his satisfaction, Beetchermarlf made a brief cast over the river bottom to the limits imposed by the safety lines and found twelve of the trucks within that radius. Some of these were damaged: tracks broken or with missing links; bearing wheels cracked; a few axles bent. The three gathered all the material they could reach and transport and brought it back to the Kwembly’s stern. The helmsman considered doubling up on the safety lines and increasing their search radius but decided to report to Dondragmer and get his approval first. Indeed, the helmsman was a bit surprised that the captain had not appeared earlier, in view of his announced intention of checking outside.

He found the reason when he and his companions went back around the stern to the lock. Dondragmer, his two companions of the original sortie and six more crewmen, who had evidently been summoned in the meantime, were near the middle of the Kwembly laboring to remove boulders from the region of the main air lock.

The breathing suits had no special communication equipment, and the transmissive matching between their hydrogen-argon filling and the surrounding liquid was extremely poor; but the Mesklinite voice, built around a swimming siphon rather than a set of lungs (the hydrogen-using midgets lacked lungs) was another thing which had bothered human biologists. The helmsman caught his captain’s attention with a deep hoot and gestured him to follow around the stern of the cruiser. Dondragmer assumed that the matter was important and came along after directing the others to continue their work. One look and a few sentences from Beetchermarlf brought him abreast of the situation.

After a few seconds’ thought he rejected the idea of looking immediately for the missing trucks. The water was still going down; it would be safer and easier to conduct the search when it was gone, if this did not take too long. In the meantime repairs could be started on the ones which had already been found. Beetchermarlf acknowledged the order and began to sort the damaged equipment in order to plan the work.

Care was necessary; some parts were light enough to be borne away by the current when detached from the rest of the assemblies. Some such items were already missing, and had presumably gone in just that fashion. The helmsman had a portable light brought to the scene and stationed one of his helpers a few yards downstream to catch anything which got away from him. He thought how helpful a net would be but there was no such item aboard the Kwembly. It would be possible to make one from the miles of cordage she carried, but it hardly seemed worth the time.

Eight hours of labor, interrupted by occasional rests spent chatting with Benj, saw three of the damaged trucks again serviceable. Some of their parts were not of the original quality, Beetchermarlf and the others having improvised freely. They had used Mesklinite fabric and cord as well as alien polymers and alloys which were on hand. Their tools were their own; their culture had high standards of craftsmanship and such things as saws, hammers, and the usual spectrum of edged tools were familiar to the sailors. The fact that they were made of the Mesklinite equivalents of bone, horn, and shell was no disparagement to them, considering the general nature of Mesklinite tissue.

Replacing the repaired units in their swivels took muscle even by Mesklinite standards. It also took more tool work, as metal in the mountings had been bent out of shape when the trucks were torn free. The first three had to be placed in Row 4, since Row 5 was pressed against the boulders of the river bottom and the other three were too high to be reached conveniently. Beetchermarlf bowed to necessity, attached the trucks where he could, and went back to fixing more.

The river continued to fall and the current continued to decrease. Dondragmer ordered the helmsman and his helpers to move their work area from beneath the hull, anticipating what would happen as the buoyant force on the Kwembly decreased. His caution was justified when, with a grinding of boulders, the vehicle slipped from its sixty-degree tilt to about thirty, bringing two more rows of trucks within reach of the bottom and forcing two workmen to duck between stones to avoid being crushed.

At this point it became obvious that even if the water fell further, the cruiser would not. A point on its port underside about a third of the way back from the bow and between Rows 1 and 2 was now resting on a single rock some eighteen feet in diameter and half buried in the river bottom:

a hopeless object to dislodge even without the Kwembly’s weight on it. Beetchermarlf kept on with his assigned job but couldn’t help wondering how the captain proposed to lift his craft off that eminence. He was also curious about what would happen when and if he succeeded. The rocky surface which formed the river bed was the last sort of thing the cruiser’s designers had had in mind as a substrate and the helmsman doubted seriously that she could run on such a base. High-gravity planets tend to be fairly level, judging by Mesklin (the only available example), and even if an area were encountered where traction seemed unpromising, the designers must have supposed that the crew need merely refrain from venturing onto it. This was another good example of the reason manned exploration was generally better than the automated kind.

Beetchermarlf, in a temporarily philosophical mood, concluded that foresight was likely to depend heavily on the amount of hindsight available.

Dondragmer, pondering the same problem, getting his vehicle free, was no nearer a solution than his helmsman some fifty hours after going aground. The first officer and the scientists were equally baffled. They were not worried, except for the captain, and even his feeling did not exactly parallel human “worry”. He had kept to himself and Beetchermarlf (who had been on the bridge at the time) a conversation he had had with the human watchers a few hours before.

It had begun as a regular progress report, on an optimistic tone. Dondragmer was willing to admit that he hadn’t thought of a workable plan yet but not that he was unlikely to think of one. Unfortunately, he had included in the remark the phrase “we have plenty of time to work it out.

Easy, at the other end, had been forced to disagree.

“You may not have as much as you think. Some of the people here have been considering those boulders. They are round, or nearly so, according to your report and what we can see on the bridge set. The most likely cause of that shape, according to our experience, is washing around in a stream bed or on a beach. Moving rocks that big would require a tremendous current. We’re afraid that the stream which carried you there is just a preliminary trickle, the first thaw of the season, and if you don’t get away soon you’ll face a lot more water coming down.”

Dondragmer had considered briefly.

“All right, but we’re already doing all we can. Either we get away in time, or we don’t; we can’t do better than our best. If your scientists can give any sort of specific forecast of this super-flood we’ll be glad of it, of course; otherwise we’ll have to go on as we are. I’ll leave a man on the radio here, of course, unless I have too much for them to do; in that case, try the lab. Thanks for the information, I guess.

The captain had gone back to work and to thought. He was not one to panic; in emergencies he seemed calmer than in a personal argument. Basically, his philosophy was the one he had just expressed: to do all one could in the time available, with the full knowledge that time would run out some day. At the moment, he only wished he knew what all he could do was.

The big rock was the main problem. It was keeping the drivers from traction, and until they not only touched bottom but bore heavily on it there was no moving the Kwembly with her own power. She might conceivably have been shifted by muscle power at Mesklin’s Rim, or on Earth, but not under Dhrawn’s gravity. Even a two-foot boulder was hard to move in that field.

There was rigging inside which could be set up as lifting tackle but none of it could begin to support the vehicle’s weight as a static load even if its mechanical advantage were adequate.

Some trucks, four, to be exact, were in contact with the troublesome rock itself. Several more in Row 5 were touching bottom. None of these was powered at the moment but converters could be transferred to them.

If the four on the rock, and the ones forward from them, and some of the Row 5 trucks, were all to be powered why couldn’t the cruiser simply be backed off?

She could. No reason at all to doubt it. On level ground with reasonable traction any four well-spaced power units could drive her. With her weight concentrated on only a few trucks, traction should be better than normal and a backward move would be mainly downhill.

It was not lack of self-confidence which caused Dondragmer to outline this plan to the human being on communication watch; he was announcing his intentions, not asking for advice. The man who heard him was not an engineer and gave casual approval to the move. As a matter of routine he reported the situation to Planning so that the information could be distributed. Consequently it reached an engineer within an hour or so, long before Dondragmer was ready to execute his plan.

It caused a raising of eyebrows, a quick examination of a scale model of the Kwembly, and two minutes of rapid slide-rule work.

The engineer was a poor linguist, but this was not the only reason he went looking for Easy Hoffman. He did not know Dondragmer very well, had no idea how the Mesklinite would react to criticism; he had worked with Drommians, since there were some connected with the Dhrawn project and he felt it safest to have his point presented by the official oil-spreader. Easy, when found, promptly assured him that she had never known Dondragmer to resent reasonable advice, but agreed that her better knowledge of Stennish would probably help even though the captain was fluent in the human tongue. They went together to the communication room.

Benj was there, as was usual when he was not on duty. He had by now made friends with several more of the Mesklinites, though he still liked Beetchermarlf best. The latter’s long work hours resulting from the accident had not entirely prevented them from conversing and Benj’s Stennish had improved greatly; he was now almost as good as his mother believed.

When Easy and the engineer arrived, he was listening to Takoorch and was not too sorry to interrupt the exchange with the news that there was an important message for the captain.

It took several minutes to get Dondragmer to the bridge; like the rest of the crew he had been working almost constantly, though by luck he happened to be inside when the call came.

“I’m here, Easy,” his voice finally came through. “Tak said you had a business call. Go ahead.”

“It’s about this way you plan to back off the rock, Don,” she began. “I don’t have the whole picture here, of course, but there are two things bothering our engineers. One is the fact that your forward truck will run off the stone while you still have ten feet or more of hull, including some of your bridge, over it. Have you measured to see whether there’s any risk of bare hull slamming down on the stone as the truck rolls off? Also, toward the end of the maneuver, you’ll have your hull supported almost entirely at the ends. The pneumatic undercarriage may distribute the load but my friend here isn’t sure it will; further, if you get the bare hull instead of the mattress taking half the Kwembly’s weight, Dhrawn’s gravity is going to make a very respectable effort to break your land-ship in half. Have you checked those points?”

Dondragmer had to admit to himself that he had not and that he had better do so before the project went much farther. He conceded this on the radio, thanked Easy and her friend, and headed for the main lock, long since cleared for use.

Outside, the current had dropped to the point where life-lines were no longer necessary. Water depth was down to about seven feet, measured from the average level of the smallest boulders. The water line was, indeed, at about the most inconvenient possible level for seeing the whole picture. He had to climb part way up the rock, a difficult task in itself, though helped by the fact that he had some buoyancy; from there he had to follow the forward trucks to a point where he could compare the curvature of the big boulder and that of the Kwembly’s lower bow. He could not be completely sure, since moving the hull backward would change its pitch, but he did not like what he saw. The human engineer was probably right. Not only was there risk of hull damage, but the steering bar came through the hull just ahead of the mattress by means of a nearly air-tight mechanical seal backed by a liquid trap and made its key connections with the maze of tiller-ropes. Serious damage to the bar would not actually cripple the vehicle, since there was a duplicate aft, but it was not a risk to be taken casually.

The answer to the whole situation was staring him in the face by that time but he was another hour or more in seeing it. A human psychologist, when he heard about this later, was very annoyed. He had been looking for significant differences between human and Mesklinite minds, and was finding what he considered an undue number of points of similarity.

The solution involved work, of course. Even the smallest boulders were heavy. Still, they were numerous, and it was not necessary to go far for a plentiful supply. With the entire crew of the Kwembly at the job except for Beetchermarlf and those still helping him with the trucks, a ramp of piled stones grew with fair speed from the stern of the trapped vehicle toward the key rock.

It was a help to Beetchermarlf. As fast as he readied a damaged bearing unit for service, he found himself able to get at new installation sites which had been out of reach before. He and the stone-carriers finished almost together, allowing for four trucks which he had been unable to repair because of missing parts. He had made thrifty use of these, cannibalizing them for the needs of some of the others, and had spotted the unavoidable gaps in traction widely enough to keep the cruiser’s weight reasonably well distributed. To work on Row 5. practically buried in the river bottom, he had had to deflate that part of the mattress. Pumping it up again when the two trucks were replaced caused the hull to shift slightly, to the alarm of Dondragmer and several workers underneath; fortunately the motion was insignificant.

The captain had spent most of the time shuttling between the radio, where he kept hoping for a reliable prediction of the next flood, and the work site, where he divided his attention between the progress of the ramp and the view upstream. By the time the ramp was complete the water was less than a yard deep, and the current had ceased entirely; they were in a pool rather than a stream.

It was now full night; the sun had been gone for nearly a hundred hours. The weather had cleared completely, and workers outside could see the violently twinkling stars. Their own sun was not visible; it was barely so at the best of times this deep in Dhrawn’s heavy atmosphere, and at the moment was too close to the horizon. Not even Dondragmer knew offhand whether it was slightly above or slightly below. Sol and Fomalhaut, which even the least informed of the crew knew to be indicators of south, glowed and wavered over a low eminence a few miles in that direction. The imaginary line connecting the two had tilted less than twenty degrees, human scale, since dark; the Mesklinite navigators would have said less than four.

Outside the range of the Kwembly’s own lights it was almost totally black. Dhrawn is moonless; the stars provide no more illumination than they do on Earth or Mesklin.

Temperature was nearly the same. Dondragmer’s scientists had been measuring the environment as completely as their knowledge and equipment allowed, then sending the results to the station above. The captain had been quietly hoping for some useful information in return, though he realized that the human beings didn’t owe him any. The reports, after all, were simply part of the job the Mesklinites had engaged to do in the first place.

He had also suggested to his own men that they try some independent thinking. Borndender’s answer to what he regarded as sarcasm had been to the effect that if the human beings would supply him with reports for other parts of Dhrawn and with computer time with which to correlate them, he would be glad to try. The captain had not intended sarcasm; he knew perfectly well the vast difference between explaining why a ship floats on water or ammonia and explaining why 2.3 millicables of 60-20 rain fell at the Settlement between Hour 40 and Hour 100 of Day 2. He suspected that his researcher’s misinterpretation had been deliberate; Mesklinites were often quite human when in search of excuses and Borndender was currently feeling annoyed with his own lack of usefulness. Without bringing this aspect of the matter into the open, the captain merely repeated that useful ideas would be welcome, and left the lab.

Even the scientists were ordered outside when the time finally came to use the ramp. Borndender was irritated at this and muttered something as he went about the academic nature of the difference between being inside the Kwembly and outside her if anything drastic happened. Dondragmer, however, had not made a suggestion; he had issued an order, and not even the scientists denied either his right or his competence to do so. Only the captain himself, Beetchermarlf and a technician named Kensnee in the life-support compartment were to be aboard when the start was made. Dondragmer had considered acting as his own helmsman and taking a chance on the life equipment but reflected that Beetchermarlf knew the tiller cable layout better and was more likely to sense anything going wrong in that department. Inside power was not directly concerned with motion, but if any slip or collapse of the ramp caused trouble with the life-support system it was better to have someone on hand. This support system was even more important than the cruiser: in an emergency the crew could conceivably walk back to the Settlement carrying their air equipment even if the cruiser were ruined.

The reasoning behind the evacuation order should have left Beetchermarlf and Kensnee as the only ones aboard, with even the captain watching from outside. Dondragmer was not prepared to be so reasonable. He had stayed aboard.

Tension in the crowd of caterpillar like beings gathered outside the monster hull mounted as the drivers took up the slack in their treads. Because Dondragmer could not see the tense crowd from the bridge, he was calm; Beetchermarlf could feel their mood and was perturbed. The human watchers, observing by way of a set which had been taken from the life-support room and secured on a rock projecting from the water a hundred yards from the land-cruiser, could see nothing until the cruiser actually started to move. They were all calm except Easy and Benj.

The boy was paying little attention to the outside view, instead he was watching the bridge screen on which part of Beetchermarlf was visible. He had one set of chelae on the tiller, holding it fast; the other three sets were darting with almost invisible speed among the grips of the engine control lines, trying to equalize the pull of the different trucks. He had made no attempt to power more than the usual ten; the cords which normally cross-connected them, so that a single line would work them all, had been realigned for individual control. Beetchermarlf was very, very busy.

As the Kwembly began to inch backward, one of the human beings commented explosively.

“Why in blazes didn’t they put remote controls, or at least torque and thrust indicators, on that bridge? That poor bug is going crazy. I don’t see how he can tell when a particular set of tracks is even gripping, let alone how it responds to his handling.”

“If he had fancy indicators he probably couldn’t,” replied Mersereau. “Barlennan wanted no more sophisticated gear on those vehicles than his people could repair on the spot, except where there was really no choice. I agreed with him, and so did the rest of the planning board. Look — she’s sliding off, smooth as ice.”

A chorus of expressive hoots came from the speaker, muffled by the fact that most of the beings emitting them were under water. For a long moment, a score or so of the ‘midship trucks were hanging free as the stern of the Kwembly came off the ramp and moved back over the river bed. The engineer who had been afraid of the bridge effect crossed his fingers and rolled his eyes upward. Then the bow dipped as the forward trucks came down onto the ramp in their turn, and weight was once more decently distributed. The twisting stress, which no one had considered seriously, lessened as the cruiser eased onto the relatively level cobbling of the river bed and came to a halt. The crew divided and poured around bow and stern to get to the main lock, no one thinking to pick up the communicator. Easy thought of reminding the captain, but decided that it would be more tactful to wait.

Dondragmer had not forgotten the instrument. As the first members of the crew emerged from the inner surface of the lock pool, his voice echoed through the speaking tubes.

“Kervenser! Reffel! Take the scout fliers out at once. Reffel, pick up the communicator outside; make sure the shutter is in the flier before you start; then make a ten-minute sweep north to east and back. Kervenser, sweep west and around to south for the same time. Borndender, report when all your measuring equipment is aboard. Beetchermarlf and Takoorch, outside and realign the engine control cords to normal.”

His communicator at the bridge had the sound on, so Easy heard and translated these orders, though the reference to a shutter meant nothing to any of them. She and her colleagues watched the screen of the outside set with interest as the two tiny helicopters rose from the upper lock, one of them sweeping toward the pickup and presumably settling outside its field of view. The other was still climbing as it left the screen, heading west. The picture rocked as the set was picked up by Reffel and wrestled into its space aboard the flier. Easy flicked a switch absent-mindedly to record the scenes for future map work as the viewpoint lifted from the ground.

Dondragmer would have appreciated being able to watch the same screen but could only wait for a relayed verbal report from Reffel or a delayed but direct one from Kervenser. Actually, Reffel did not bother to relay. The ten-minute flights produced no information demanding speedy delivery. What it amounted to, as Dondragmer reported to the human audience, was that the Kwembly was in a valley some fifteen miles wide, with walls of bare rock quite steep by Dhrawn’s standards. The pilots estimated the slope at twenty to thirty degrees. They were also remarkably high, fully forty feet. To the west there had been no sign of a new flood as far as Kervenser had flown. He noted that the boulders strewing the valley floor gave way to bare rock within a mile or two and there were numerous pools like the one in which the Kwembly was now standing. To the east, the stones and pools continued as far as Reffel had gone. Dondragmer pondered these data for a while after relaying this information to the satellite, then ordered one of the fliers back to work.

“Kerv, get back aloft. The helmsmen won’t be done for hours yet. Go as far west along the valley as you can in an hour and check as closely as your lights will allow for any sign of more water starting down. Make that three hours, unless you have a positive finding, of course, or have to turn back because of bad visibility. I’m going off watch. Tell Stakendee to take the bridge before you leave.”

Even Mesklinites get tired but Dondragmer’s thought that this was the right time to get some rest was unfortunate, as Barlennan pointed out to him later. When the captain insisted that there would have been nothing for him to do even if he had been fully alert, his superior gave the Mesklinite equivalent of a snort of contempt.

“You’d have managed to find something. You did later.”

Dondragmer refrained from pointing out that this proved that his omission was not a serious error; but he had to admit to himself that it had appeared so at the time.

It was almost eight hours after Kervenser’s departure that a crewman hooted outside the door of the captain’s quarters. When Dondragmer responded, the other squeezed the situation into a single sentence.

“Sir, Kervenser and the helmsmen are still outside, and the pool of water we’re in has frozen.”