Star Light

6

Impatience and irritation were noticeable in the Planning Laboratory, but so far no tempers had actually been lost. Ib Hoffman, back less than two hours from a month long errand to Earth and Droom, had said practically nothing except to ask for information. Easy sitting beside him, had said nothing at all so far; but she could see that something would have to be done shortly to turn the conversation into constructive channels. Changing the Project’s basic policy might be a good idea — it often was — but for the people at this end of the table to spend time blaming each other for the present one was futile. It was even less useful than the scientists’ bickering at the other end. They were still wondering why a lake should freeze when the temperature had been going up. Such a question might conceivably have a useful answer, of course, especially if it led to a reasonable course of useful action; but it seemed to her like a question for the laboratory rather than a conference room.

If her husband didn’t take a hand in the other discussion soon, Easy would have to do something herself, she decided.

I’ve heard all about that side of it before, and I still don’t buy it!” snapped Mersereau. “Up to a point it’s good common sense, but I think we’re way past that point. I realize that the more complex the equipment, the fewer people you need to run it; but you also need more specialized apparatus and specially trained personnel to maintain and repair it. If the land-cruisers had been fully automated as some people wanted, we could have got along with a hundred Mesklinites on Dhrawn instead of a couple of thousand at first; but the machines would be out by now because we couldn’t possibly have landed all the backup equipment and personnel they’d need. There aren’t enough technically trained Mesklinites in existence yet, for one thing. I agreed with that, Barlennan agreed with it; it was common sense, as I said.

“But you, and for some reason Barlennan, went even further. He was against including helicopters. I know there were come characters in the Project who assumed you could never teach a Mesklinite to fly, and maybe it was racial acrophobia that was motivating Barlennan; but at least he was able to realize that without air scouting the land-cruisers wouldn’t dare travel more than a few miles an hour over new ground, and it would take roughly forever to cover even Low Alpha at that rate. We did talk him over on that basis.

“But there was a lot of stuff we’d have been glad to provide, which would have been useful and have paid its way, which he talked us out of using. No weapons; I agree they’d probably have been futile. But no short-range radio equipment? No intercoms in the Settlement? It’s dithering nonsense for Dondragmer to have to call us, six million miles away, and ask us to relay his reports to Barlennan at the Settlement. It’s usually not critical, since Barl couldn’t help him physically and the time delay doesn’t mean much, but it’s silly at the best of times. It is critical now, though, when Don’s first mate has disappeared, presumably within a hundred miles of the Kwembly and possibly less than ten, and there’s no way in the galaxy to get in touch with him either from here or from the cruiser. Why was Barl against radios, Alan? And why are you?”

“The same reason you’ve just given,” Aucoin answered with just a trace of acerbity. “The maintenance problem.”

“You’re dithering. There isn’t any maintenance problem on a simple voice or even a vision, communicator. There were four of them, as I understand it, being carried around on Mesklin with Barlennan’s first outside-sponsored trip fifty years of so ago, and not on of them gave the slightest trouble. There are sixty of Dhrawn right now, with not a blip of a problem from any of them in the year and a half they’ve been there, Barlennan must know that, and you certainly do. Furthermore, why do we relay what messages they do send by voice? We could do it automatically instead of having a batch of interpreters hashing things up… sorry, Easy… and you can’t tell me there’d be a maintenance problem for a relay unit in this station. Who’s trying to kid whom?”

Easy stirred; this was perilously close to feud material. Her husband, however, sensed the motion and touched her arm in a gesture she understood. He would take care of it. However, he let Aucoin make his own answer.

“Nobody’s trying to kid anyone. I don’t mean equipment maintenance, and I admit it was a poor choice of words. I should have said morale. The Mesklinites are a competent and highly self-reliant species, at least the representatives we’ve seen the most of. They sail over thousands of miles of ocean on those ridiculous groups of rafts, completely out of touch with home and help for months at a time, just as human beings did a few centuries ago. It was our opinion that making communication too easy would tend to undermine that self-confidence. I admit that this is not certain; Mesklinites are not human, though their minds resemble ours in many ways, and there’s one major factor whose effect we can’t evaluate and may never be able to. We don’t know their normal life spans, though they are clearly a good deal longer than ours. Still, Barlennan agreed with us about the radio question — as you said, it was he who brought it up — and he has never complained about the communication difficulty.”

“To us.” Ib cut in at this point. Aucoin looked surprised, then puzzled.

“Yes, Alan, that’s what I said. He hasn’t complained to us. What he thinks about it privately none of us knows.”

“But why shouldn’t he complain, or even ask for radios, if he has come to feel that he should have them?” The planner was not completely sidetracked, but Easy noted with approval that the defensiveness was gone from his tone.

“I don’t know why,” Hoffman admitted. “I just remember what I’ve learned about our first dealings with Barlennan a few decades ago. He was a highly cooperative, practically worshipped agent for the mysterious aliens of Earth and Panesh and Dromm, and those other mysterious places in the sky during most of the Gravity mission, doing our work for us just as we asked; and then at the end he suddenly held us up for a blackmail jolt which five human beings, seven Paneshka, and nine Drommians out of every ten still think we should never have paid. You know as well as I do that teaching advanced technology, or even basic science, to a culture which isn’t yet into it’s mechanical revolution makes the sociologists see red because they feel that every race should have the right to go through its own kind of growing pains, makes the xenophobes scream because we’re arming the wicked aliens against us, gets the historians down on us because we’re burying priceless data, and annoys the administrative types because they’re afraid we’re setting up problems they haven’t learned to cope with yet.”

“It’s the xenophobes who are the big problem,” Mersereau snapped. “The nuts who take it for granted that every nonhuman species would be an enemy if it had the technical capacity. That’s why we give the Mesklinites only equipment they can’t possibly duplicate themselves, like the fusion units — things which couldn’t be taken apart and studied in details without five stages of intermediate equipment like gamma-ray diffraction cameras, which the Mesklinites don’t have either. Alan’s argument sounds good, but it’s just an excuse. You know as well as I do that you could train a Mesklinite to fly a reasonably part-automated shuttle in two months if the controls were modified for his nippers, and that there isn’t a scientist in this station who wouldn’t give three quarts of his blood to have loads of physical specimens and instruments of his own improvising bouncing between here and Dhrawn’s surface.”

“That’s not entirely right, though there are elements of truth in it,” Hoffman returned calmly. ” I agree with your personal feeling about xenophobes, but its a fact that with energy so cheap a decently designed interstellar freighter can pay off its construction cost in four or five years, an interstellar war isn’t the flat impossibility it was once assumed to be. Also, you know why this station has such big rooms, uncomfortable as some of us find them, and inefficient as they certainly are for some purposes. The average Drommian, if there were a room here he couldn’t get into, would assume that it contained something deliberately kept secret from him. They have no concept of privacy, and by our standards most of them are seriously paranoid. If we had failed to share technology with them when contact was first made, we’d have created a planetful of highly competent xenophobes much more dangerous than anything even Earth has produced. I don’t know that Mesklinites would react the same way, but I still think that starting the College on Mesklin was the smartest piece of policy since they admitted the first Drommian to MIT.”

“And the Mesklinites had to blackmail us into doing that.”

“Embarrassingly true,” admitted Hoffman. “But that’s all side issue. The current point is that we just don’t know what Barlennan really thinks, or plans. We can, though, be perfectly sure that he didn’t agree to take two thousand of his people including himself onto an almost completely unknown world, certain to be highly dangerous even for a species like his, without having a very good reason indeed.”

“We gave him a good reason,” pointed out Aucoin.

“Yes. We tried to imitate him in the art of blackmail. We agreed to keep the College going on Mesklin over the objections of many of our own people, if he would do the Dhrawn job for us. There was no suggestion on either side of material payment, though the Mesklinites are perfectly aware of the relation between knowledge and material wealth. I’m quite willing to admit that Barlennan is an idealist, but I’m not sure how much chauvinism there is in his idealism, or how far either one will carry him.

“All this is aside from the point, too. We shouldn’t be worrying about the choice of equipment for the Mesklinites. They agreed with it, whatever their private reservations may have been. We are still in a position to help them with information on physical facts they don’t know, and which their scientists can hardly be expected to work out for themselves; we have high-speed computation; and right now we have one extremely expensive exploring machine frozen in on a lake on Dhrawn, together with about a hundred living beings who may be personnel to some of us but are personalities to the rest. If we want to change policy and insist on Barlennan’s accepting a shuttleful of new equipment, that’s fine; but it’s not the present problem, Boyd. I don’t know what we could send down right now that would be slightest help to Dondragmer.”

“I suppose you’re right, Ib, but I can’t help thinking about Kervenser, and how much better it would have been if—”

“He could have carried one of the communicators, remember. Dondragmer had three besides the one on his bridge, all of them portable. The decision to take them, or not, was strictly, on Kervenser himself and his captain. Let’s leave out the if’s for now and try to do some constructive planning.”

Mersereau subsided, a little irritated at Ib for the latter’s choice of words but with his resentment of Aucoin’s attitude diverted for the moment. The planner took over the conversational lead again, looking down the table toward the point where the scientists had now fallen silent.

“All right, Dr. McDevitt. Has any agreement been reached as to what probably happened?”

“Not completely, but there is an idea worth checking further. As you know the Kwembly’s observers had been reporting nearly constant temperature since the fog cleared — no radiational cooling, if anything a very slight warming trend. Barometric readings have been rising very slowly at that place ever since the machine was stranded; readings before that time are meaningless because of the uncertain change in elevation. The temperatures have been well below freezing points of either pure water below the freezing points of either pure water or pure ammonia, but rather above that of the ammonia monohydrate — water eutectic. We’re wondering wheter the initial thaw might now have been caused by the ammonia’s fog reacting with the water snow on which the Kwembly was riding — Dondragmer was afraid of that possibility; and if so, the present freeze might be due to evaporation of ammonia form the eutectic. We’d need ammidity readings—”

“What?” cut in Hoffman and Aucoin almost together.

“Sorry. Office slang. Partial pressure of the ammonia relative to the saturation value-equivalent of relative humidity for water. We’d need readings on that to confirm, or kill, the notion, and the Mesklinites haven’t been taking them.”

“Could they?”

“I’m sure we could work out a technique with them. I don’t know how long it would take. Water vapor wouldn’t interfere; its equilibrium pressure is four or five powers of ten smaller than ammonia’s in that temperature range. The job shouldn’t be too hard.”

“I realize this is an hypotheses rather than a full-blown theory, but is it good enough to base action on?”

“That would depend on the action.” Aucoin made a gesture of impatience, and the atmospheric physicist continued hastily. “That is, I wouldn’t risk an all-or-nothing breakout effort on it alone, but I’d be willing to try anything which didn’t commit the Kwembly to exhausting some critical supply she carries, or put her in obvious danger.”

The planner nodded. “All right,” he said. “Would you rather stay here and supply us with more ideas, or would it be more effective to talk this one over with the Mesklinites?”

McDevitt pursed his lips and thought for a moment.

“We’ve been talking with them pretty frequently, but I suppose there’s more good likely to come from that direction than—” he stooped and Easy and her husband concealed smiles. Aucoin appeared not to notice the near faux pas, and nodded.

“All right. Go on back to Communications, and good luck. Let us know if either you, or they, come up with anything else that seems worth trying.”

The four scientists agreed to this, and left together. The ten remaining conference members were silent for some minutes before Aucoin voiced what they were all thinking — all but one.

“Let’s face it,” he said slowly. “The real argument is going to come when we relay this report to Barlennan.”

Ib Hoffman jerked upright. “You haven’t yet?” he snapped.

“Only the fact of the original stranding, which Easy told them, and occasional progress reports on the repair work. Nothing yet about the freeze-up.”

“Why not?” Easy could read danger signals in her husband’s voice, and wondered whether she wanted to smooth this one over or not. Aucoin looked surprised at the question.

“You know why as well as I do. Whether he learned about it now, or ten hours from now, or from Dondragmer when he gets back to the Settlement a year from now would make little difference. There is nothing Barlennan could do immediately to help, and the only thing he could do at all is something we’d rather he didn’t.”

“And that is?” interjected Easy sweetly. She had about made up her mind which line to take.

“That is, as you well know, sending one of the two land-cruisers still at the Settlement off to rescue the Kwembly, as he wanted to do for the Esket.”

“And you still object to that.”

“Certainly, for exactly the same reasons as before — which Barlennan, I admit, accepted that time. It’s not entirely that we have other specific plans for those two cruisers, but that’s part of it. Whatever you may think, Easy, I don’t dismiss life as unimportant merely because it isn’t human life. I do object, though, to wasting time and resources; and changing policy in the middle of an operation generally does both.”

“But if you claim that Mesklinite lives mean as much to you as human ones, how can you talk about waste?”

“You’re not thinking, Easy. I understand and don’t really blame you, but you’re ignoring the fact that the Kwembly is something like ten thousand miles airline from the Settlement, and more like thirteen thousand by the route they took. A rescue vehicle could not possibly follow that track in less than two hundred or two hundred and fifty hours. The last part of it, which the Kwembly traversed by being washed down a river, they might not be able to follow at all; the last four thousand miles across the snowfield may no longer be passable.”

“We could give them directions with satellite fixes.”

“We could, no doubt. The fact remains that unless Dondragmer can get himself, his crew, and his vehicle out of their present trouble, nothing Barlennan can send out for him is likely to be of the slightest help — if the Kwembly is in real and immediate danger. If she is not — if it’s just a matter of being frozen in like a nineteenth century whaler — they have indefinite supplies with their closed-cycle life system and fusion converters, and we and Barlennan can plan a nice, leisurely rescue.”

“Like Destigmet’s Esket,” retorted the woman with some bitterness. “It’s been over seven months, and you squelched all rescue talk then — and ever since!”

“That was a very different situation. The Esket is still standing there, unchanged as far as her vision sets can tell us, but her crew has dropped out of sight. We haven’t the faintest idea what happened to them or how, but, since they’re not on board and haven’t been for all this time it’s impossible to believe they’re still alive. With all their abilities and physical toughness, even Mesklinites don’t live on Dhrawn for seven months without a good deal more of artificial assistance than their airsuits.”

Easy had no answer. On pure logic, Aucoin was perfectly right; but she had trouble accepting the idea that the situation was purely logical. Ib knew how she felt, and decided that the time had come to change course again. He shared the planner’s opinion, up to a point, on basic policy; but he also knew why his wife could not possibly do that.

“The real, immediate problem, as I see it,” Hoffman interjected, “is the one Don has with the men who are still outside. As I get it, two are under the ice, as far as anyone can tell; and no one seems to know whether that puddle is frozen to the bottom. In any case, judging by the work they were supposed to be doing, they’re in among the Kwembly’s trucks somewhere. I suppose that means a straight ice-pick-and-search job. I can’t guess what the chances are of an airsuited Mesklinite’s living through that sort of thing. The temperature won’t bother them that far below melting water-ice, but I don’t know what other physiological limitations they may have.

“The other missing one is Don’s first officer, who is overdue from a helicopter flight. We can’t help directly, since he didn’t take a communicator with him, but there is another flier available. Has Dondragmer asked us to assist while a search is made with the other machine and a vision set?”

“He hadn’t up to half an hour ago,” replied Mersereau.

“Then I strongly advise that we suggest it to him.”

Aucoin nodded agreement, and glanced at the woman. “Your job, I’d say, Easy.”

“If someone hasn’t beaten me to it.” She rose, pinched Ib’s ear in passing, and left the room.

“Next point,” Hoffman went on, “Granting that you may be right in opposing a rescue expedition from the Settlement, I think it’s time Barlennan was brought up to date about the Kwembly.”

“Why as for more trouble that we need?” retorted Aucoin. “I don’t like to argue with anyone, especially when he doesn’t really have to listen to me.”

“I don’t think you’ll really have to. Remember, he agreed with us the other time.”

“You were saying a few minutes ago that you weren’t sure how sincere his agreements have been.”

“I’m not, in general; but if he had been strongly against us that time he’d have done just what he wanted, and sent a crew out to help the Esket. He did, remember, on a couple of other occasions when there was a cruiser in trouble.”

“That was much closer to the settlement, and we finally approved the action,” retorted Aucoin.

“And you know as well as I do that we approved it because we could see that he was going to do it anyway.”

“We approved it, Ib, because your wife was on Barlennan’s side both times, and out-talked us. You argument, incidentally, is a point against telling him about the present situation.”

“Whose side was she on during the Esket argument? I still think we should tell Barlennan the present situation pronto. Plain honesty aside, the longer we wait the more certain he is to find out, sooner or later, that we’ve been censoring expedition reports on him.”

“I wouldn’t call it censoring. We’ve never changed a thing.”

“But you have delayed the relay plenty of times while you decided what he ought to know, and as I’ve said before I don’t think that’s the game as we agreed to play it with him. Pardon my reactionary sentiments, but on purely selfish grounds we’d be well advised to keep his confidence as long as possible.”

Several of the others, who had listened in silence up to this point, spoke up almost at once when Hoffman expressed this sentiment. It took Aucoin several seconds to untangle their words, but it eventually became clear that the feeling of the group was with Ib. The chairman yielded gracefully; his technique did not involve standing in front of the bull.

“All right, we pass on the complete report to Barlennan as soon as we adjourn.” He glanced at the winner. “That is, if Mrs. Hoffman hasn’t done it already. What’s the next point?”

One of the men who had done little but listen up to this point asked a question. “Forgive me if I didn’t follow you too clearly a few minutes ago. Ib, you and Alan both claim that Barlennan agreed with Project policy in limiting to an absolute minimum the amount of sophisticated equipment his expedition was to use. That was my understanding also; but you, Ib, just mentioned having doubts about Barlennan’s sincerity. Do any of those doubts stem from his accepting the helicopters?”

Hoffman shook his head. “No. The arguments we used for their necessity were good, and the only surprising thing to me was that Barlennan didn’t see the for himself and take the equipment without argument.”

But Mesklinites are acrophobic by nature. The thought of flying, to anyone from a world like that, must be just unimaginable.”

Ib smiled grimly. “True. But one of the first things Barlennan did after he made his deal with the Gravity people and started learning basic science was to design, build and fly on Mesklin — in the polar zone where gravity is at its highest — a hot air balloon. Whatever is motivating Barlennan, it isn’t acrophobia. I don’t exactly doubt him; I’m just not sure of his thinking, if you’ll forgive a rather crude quibble.”

“I agree,” Aucoin interjected. “And I think we’re running dry. I suggest we break up for, say, six hours. Think, or go down to Comm and listen to the Mesklinites or talk with them — anything that will keep your thoughts on Dhrawn questions. You know my ideas about that.”

“That’s where mine have been.” It was the same speaker. “I keep wondering about the Esket, every time one of the cruisers runs into trouble — even when the trouble is obviously natural.”

“So do we all, I imagine,” rejoined Aucoin.

“The more I think of it, the more I feel that her crew must have run into intelligent opposition. After all, we know there is life on Dhrawn — more than the bushes and pseudo-algae the Mesklinites have found. They wouldn’t account quantitatively for that atmosphere; there must be a complete ecological complex somewhere. I’d guess in the higher-temperature regions.”

“Such as Low Alpha.” Hoffman completed the thought. “Yes, you don’t have ammonia and free oxygen in the same environment for very long, on the time scale of a planet. I can believe the possibility of an intelligent species here; we haven’t found any sign of it from space, and the Mesklinite ground parties haven’t met it — unless the Esket did — but seventeen billion square miles of planet make a lot of good reasons for that. The idea is plausible, and you’re not the first to get it, but I don’t know where it leaves us. Barlennan thought of it, too, according to Easy, and has debated sending another cruiser to the area of the Esket’s loss specifically to seek and contact any intelligence that may be there; but even Barlennan is doubtful about the idea, and we certainly haven’t pushed it.”

“Why not?” cut in Mersereau. “If we could get in touch with natives as we did on Mesklin, the project could rally get going! We wouldn’t have to depend so completely on… oh.”

Aucoin smiled grimly.

“Precisely,” he said. “Now you have found a good reason for wondering about Barlennan’s frankness. I’m not saying that he’s an ice-hearted politician who would give up the lives of his men just to keep a hammerlock on the Dhrawn operation — but the Esket’s crew was pretty certainly already beyond rescue when he finally agreed not the send the Kalliff in the same direction.”

“There is another point, thought,” Hoffman said thoughtfully.

“What?”

“I’m not sure its worth mentioning, since we can’t evaluate it; but the Kwembly is commanded by Dondragmer, who is a long-time associate of Barlennan’s and, by ordinary reasoning, should be an extremely close friend. Is there any chance that his being involved would influence Barl’s judgement about a rescue trip — or even make him order one against his better judgement? Like you, I don’t think that caterpillar is just an administrative machine. His cold-bloodedness is purely physical.”

“I’ve wondered about that, too,” the chief planner admitted. “It surprised me greatly months ago when he let Dondragmer go out at all; I had the impression that he didn’t want him to take major chances. I didn’t worry too much about it — certainly no one knows enough about Mesklinite psychology in general, Barlennan’s in particular, to base any serious planning on. If anyone does, Ib, it’s your wife, and she can’t or won’t, put what she understands about them into words. As you say, we can’t assign weight to the friendship-influence possibility. We just add it to the list. Let me hear if there are any ideas about those crewmen who are presumably frozen under the Kwembly, and then we really must break up.”

“A fusion converter would keep a good, large heating coil going, and resistors aren’t very complex equipment,” Mersereau pointed out. “Heaters aren’t a very unreasonable piece of equipment on Dhrawn, either. If only—”

“But we didn’t,” interrupted Aucoin.

“But we did, if you’d let me finish. There are enough converters with the Kwembly to life her off the planet if their energy could be applied to such a job. There must be some metal aboard which can be jury-rigged into resistors, or arcs. Whether the Mesklinites could operate such gadgets I don’t know — there must be a limit even to their temperature tolerance — but we might at least ask if they’ve thought of such a thing.”

“You’re wrong on one point. I know there is very little metal either in their equipment or their supplies on those land-cruisers, and I’d be most startled if Mesklinite rope turned out to be a conductor. I’m no chemist but anything bonded as firmly as that stuff must have its electrons pretty well latched in place. By all means check with Dondragmer, though. Easy is presumably still in Comm; she can help you if there are no linguistically broad Mesklinites on duty at the other end. We’re adjourned.”

Mersereau nodded, already heading toward the door, and the meeting broke up. Aucoin followed Mersereau through one door; most of the others went other ways. Only Hoffman remained seated.

His eyes were focused nowhere in particular, and there was a frown on his face which made him look a good deal older than his forty years.

He liked Barlennan. He liked Dondragmer even better, as did his wife. He had no grounds for the slightest complaint about the progress of the Dhrawn research, considering the policies he himself had helped set up, nor did the rest of the planners. There was no concrete reason whatever, except his trick of half a century before, to distrust the Mesklinite commander — the suggested motive for keeping hypothetical natives Dhrawn out of the picture could hardly be given weight. No, certainly not. After all, the problems of shifting to such beings, even if they existed, as agents for the Dhrawn research project would cause even more delay, as Barlennan must surely realize.

The occasional cases of disagreement between explorers and planners were minor — it was the sort of thing which would happen ten times as often with, say, Drommians; not reason to suppose the Mesklinites were already going off on independent plans of their own.

Still — Barlennan had not wanted helicopters, though he had finally been persuaded to accept them. He was the same Barlennan who had built and flown in a hot-air balloon as his first exercise in applied science.

He had not sent relief to the Esket, necessary as all the giant land-cruisers were to the Project and regardless of the fact that a hundred or so of his people were aboard.

He had refused local-range radios, useful as they would obviously be. The argument against them was the sort that a firm-minded teacher might use in a classroom situation, but this was real life — and deadly earnest.

He had, fifty years before, not only jumped at the change to acquire alien knowledge; he had maneuvered deliberately to force his non-Mesklinite sponsors to give it to him.

Ib Hoffman could not rid himself of the notion that Barlennan was up to something underhanded — again.

He wondered what Easy thought about it.