Still River

Chapter Eleven Of Course I Don’t See It

“Better stop right now!” exclaimed Charley.

“Thanks. A good idea,” replied the Shervah, almost as tonelessly as Joe’s usual style. “I’ll need to be careful with this rope as I retrace, though there shouldn’t be enough of it to make a real tangle. Can you suggest whether I should go right or left when I get back to the big cave?”

“I take it we were too optimistic about the constancy of the wind,” Molly opined before Charley could react as she feared he might. He could read sarcasm in words, with or without tones.

“That would seem to be it. I think I’ll stop the machine and hunt on foot along the wall; that will be quicker than recoiling rope if I pick the wrong direction first time.”

“Unless you encounter some of that sticky material Molly reported,” interjected Charley.

“That’s a point. I’ll be very careful if anything but bare rock is underfoot. I’m back out of that tunnel and am stopping the robot. There.”

“Bare rock, or more of this live stuff you just reported?” asked Jenny.

“Patches of both. Don’t distract me now. I’m going along the wall, to my left as one faces it. The cave floor is dipping noticeably downhill, and the wall at my side is rough enough and slopes back enough so I think I could climb it in this gravity. You certainly could, Jenny. Now I’m at the bottom of the dip as far as the wall base is concerned, though the floor out to my left is lower still. I think I see a puddle of liquid there—you didn’t spot anything of that sort, either, did you, Molly?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“I don’t see how you could have missed it. Our tracks diverged, all right.”

“How deep is the puddle?” came Jenny’s grating tone.

“I can’t tell from here but will find out later if there’s a chance. I’m heading uphill again. I’ll go a little over a kilo this way, and if I don’t find any match with what Molly saw I’ll come back and do the other direction. It’s all bare rock now, none of the living stuff and none of the crystals—I can’t help wondering if they’re alive, too. Ddravgh!”

“Symbol?” queried four voices politely.

“Sorry. Impolite. I stepped on something extremely slippery. Just a moment while I get upright again. Maybe it was water ice, Molly—remember those skating sessions? If one would only fall with decent speed here, there wouldn’t be time for one’s feet to get so far from underneath.”

“What did you slip on? Please collect it!”

“All right, I guess Molly can spare a quarter of a minute. It’s a very thin layer, and not easy to scrape off the rock, but—ah, I don’t have to get it from the rock. I have some on my armor. It’s slimy, not brittle; sorry, Mol, I guess it can’t be your ice.”

“With your mass, and the local gravity and temperature, would even water ice have been slippery?” asked Joe.

“I’m not sure,” the Human replied thoughtfully. “That point didn’t occur to me. I just think of water ice when I think ice, and I think of ice as slippery. Well, it was a nice hope while it lasted.”

“Now relax, Jenny, we’ll get it to you some time,” Carol continued. “I’m traveling again.” She fell silent, and for several minutes no one else found anything to say.

Then the Shervah reported again. “That’s the limit I set to the left. I’m heading back to the robot. There was nothing but that slippery patch to watch out for, so I’m going a lot faster. I’ll reach the machine in a minute or two.”

Rather to Molly’s surprise—her optimism was suffering another setback—this confidence proved justified and the small woman set out on the opposite leg of her journey. Molly’s presumed path was not within this range, either; and once again back at the robot, Carol had to make a decision.

“You should come back and go out again when we make a mapping robot of the sort Joe suggested. It seems there is a complicated set of caves down there, that the winds change capriciously—or at least that we do not yet know the pattern of their changes—and a real map will be needed” was Jenny’s firm opinion. Joe said nothing; rather to Molly’s surprise, Charley was also silent. She herself did not feel very objective at this point. She very much hoped that Carol would not go back, but for purely Human reasons was embarrassed to say anything.

“I’m staying,” said the Shervah flatly. “There is no way we could map this whole place fast enough to catch up with Molly while she’s moving. If you want to come down yourself with such a machine, Jenny, I’m all for it; but I’m looking for Molly.”

“I agree,” said Joe. “I take it you will ride the robot now all around the cave wall. That place can’t be too big. It would probably be best to leave the rest of the rope where you are now; unwinding it around the circumference of the cavern will accomplish nothing that I can see.”

“Good point,” agreed Carol. “It will be easier riding without it, too; I won’t have to watch out for being caught as it pays out. There, it’s off. Here I go. Any supernatural basis for a decision between left and right?”

No one proffered any, and she set out with no further remarks. There was little said in the boat, either. “Give this one a body that can be ridden comfortably, Joe,” grated Jenny’s voice, to tell Molly all she needed to know what was going on above. She reflected that the wind chart was still being made back at the tent, even if its designer wasn’t there to watch. Poor Joe would get a look at it eventually, and of course she had no way of knowing that until that look was taken, she would be getting deeper and deeper into trouble.

A little rill of liquid, presumably ammonia since the surroundings were too cold for liquid water and much too hot for liquid methane even at this pressure, joined her path from one side and kept her company thereafter, picking up tributaries occasionally until it was a brook half a meter across. The passage she was following had widened gradually until she could see neither roof nor sides, and the wind dropped below her personal detection ability, though the robot still seemed to have an opinion about it. It was still coming from downslope, and the slope itself was getting much steeper; the stream was becoming a series of rapids and even falls of several meters height. She was carried some distance first to one side and then the other of the brook, but the latter never went out of sight. She kept the others informed of all this; Carol acknowledged with interest. They had seen no rivers at any point on the surface.

“Keep your light on and your eyes open for more life!” the Shervah exclaimed. “It certainly ought to be around any liquid. If the passage levels off and there are pools or lakes, be really alert.”

“As alert as I can,” replied the Human. “There’s going to be another trouble before too long, though. I don’t know how much longer I can keep awake; and if the wind isn’t reliable, as it didn’t seem to be in the big cave, any more gaps in my own recollection of where I’ve been could be pretty serious.”

“That was one reason I stayed down here,” replied Carol. “If we could think of a way for you to stop while you slept, things would be much less tense. It would be rather nice if that machine were to jam in a narrow passage for a few hours, wouldn’t it?”

“It found its way around the only narrow passage I’ve seen so far, but I’m all for another,” admitted Molly. “I’ll look for that as well as your life forms; the more I have to think of, the better I can stay awake—I hope.”

“I’ve been about four kilos along this wall so far. It’s hard to believe the cavern wind could have changed so much. It probably means I started the wrong way. I’d be tempted to go back, only for all I know I may be more than halfway around this thing by now. As Jenny said, a real map would be useful. I wish I had some idea what could have made this space; I might be able to make an intelligent guess at its size. On any decent planet, gravity would prevent a cave from getting too big before its roof caved in, but this is not a decent planet. I could almost believe this was a big bubble, maintained by gas pressure.”

“Except,” pointed out Molly, “that there is direct communication with the outside air, and the pressure in here can’t be significantly different.”

“Not even from altitude difference?” asked Joe. “You could really be a kilometer or two down by now.”

“And what difference would even five kilos make with this atmosphere at this temperature in this gravity?” asked Molly, who had had time to do some mental arithmetic since the question had come up earlier.

Joe took a second or two to run through the same figures. “Less than a thousandth of an atmosphere,” he said at last.

“Which would not show on my suit gauge, I’m afraid. If I do get deep enough in this planet to read it there, I’m not sure I want to know it. I’ll be facing a long, long trip back up again.”

“How about a kame?” asked Charley.

“A what? Oh, I remember…”

“A place where a deposit of the ice you’re looking for used to be, but melted or vaporized out, leaving your cave.”

“Where did you learn about that? I didn’t think ammonia behaved that much like ice.”

“I don’t know whether it does. I’ve done a lot of reading about your world since you people showed up. It’s a fantastic place. I can’t get over water’s expanding when it freezes…”

“Neither could Carol when she found how slippery that made it,” Molly remarked drily. “Say, I wonder…”

“Molly! I think I’ve found where you went in!” came Carol’s excited voice. “Wait a bit, I’ll check a few hundred meters around out in the cavern. Yes, your crystal region, and what seem to be your traces are here.”

“About how far did you have to go to find it?” asked Molly.

“I’m estimating about six kilometers.” The others knew that with the combination of depth judgment and memory possessed by the Shervah, this was probably good within ten percent. “That leaves another question. Am I most of the way around the cave, so that it will be quicker to go on for the rope than to go back, or not?”

“We’d better hope you are,” said Joe drily. “If not, the rope is nowhere nearly long enough. With Molly getting farther away all the time, there is already some doubt about its reaching her.”

“Right. I’ll go on.

“Also,” added Carol happily, “that will give us a good chance to find the actual size of this cave and maybe start some reasonable guessing about what formed it.”

This rather barbed implication about Charley’s suggestion was not taken up, even by the Kantrick.

“You’re traveling as you talk, I hope,” remarked Molly.

“Absolutely. I’ve gone about four hundred meters from the narrow end of the crack—the end you didn’t go into—and you will be pleased to know that I remember this part of the cavern. The rope is a kilo farther along. I’ll be with you soon.”

“You mean if you’d gone only a little farther to the right on your original foot search, you’d have saved an hour or so?” asked Charley.

“You seem to have the picture. If Joe hasn’t tied up all the tools, you might start some more rope in the shop while you’re waiting. Jenny must have filed the specs. I hope we won’t need it, but I certainly can’t promise we won’t.”

Molly was tempted to express her annoyance at the lost time even more vehemently than Charley, but again found that she would rather not reveal such a feeling in Joe’s hearing. It had happened; there had been no way to foresee it, and there was nothing to be done about it now. Complaint, or even remark, was meaningless. Leave that sort of thing for Buzz, until he outgrew it.

She was getting sleepy, and the surrounding darkness, relieved only by her own light, was more and more oppressive. She had used most of the rope Charley had loaded on the robot to fasten herself securely; she would not fall off even if she did go to sleep. Now, however, she began to wonder whether that were wise. If Carol were really close on her trail, was it best for Molly herself to stay with her own machine so faithfully—perhaps beyond the reach of the Shervah’s kilometers of guideline? If she did fall asleep, she would be unable to report anything that might give warning of another branch in the trail; she might descend into another cavern as large as or larger than the first, with equally variable winds, without ever knowing it. She was certainly descending, much too fast for her own peace of mind when she thought of the length of Carol’s line.

If only this tireless, indifferent thing that was carrying her would stop! If only—

She smiled and then grinned broadly as an idea took shape. For a moment she thought of calling Joe, but he must be busy on the mapping machine by now; and even if that weren’t going to be needed for her own rescue, the Rimmore and Carol would be annoyed if work were delayed on it. No, there was no need for discourtesy yet; she could report in a few minutes. She remembered now what Joe had said about the pressure sensors on the robot—a point she had known herself during their construction, though she had forgotten it for the moment.

Her armor recycled everything chemical, of course, with negligible leakage; all it needed in any normal—or over ninety-nine percent of all abnormal—usage was replacement of energy. It had water and food buffers, some full and some empty at the start, to handle lack of uniformity in use versus production of these. In other words, she had spare water.

She could get at the spare water. The processing units of the armor were around her midsection, making her feel at times, where freedom of motion was concerned, a little as she had in the weeks before Buzz had been born. There was no risk of mistake, deadly as the environment around her was; she could have taken the armor apart and reassembled it blindfolded—Humans sometimes retired to Earth, but they grew up in other environments; and a Human who did not know armor was simply not adult. One was expected to design and build one’s own.

The fact that she could open it without looking did not mean that she did. Carefully she unsealed a panel near her left hip, closed four valves, and removed a flexible container that held rather less than a liter of water. Two of the valves were on the container itself, the other two on the other side of the breaks with the armor tubing. Now, carefully, she reopened one of the former, and with gentle pressure began to squirt a fine stream of liquid over the front surface of the robot.

The metal was some forty degrees below water’s freezing point, and a film of ice quickly formed over its surface. Well before the task was complete, Molly could tell her plan was working; the robot’s direction of travel began to veer to one side. Using the brook as her direction guide, she covered the cylinder until the machine was moving back in the direction from which it had come.

She thought briefly of coating its entire surface and waiting where she was for Carol, but decided against it for several reasons.

One was economy of water. Another was the robot’s computer; it was, as Joe had said, ready to allow for and discount plugged pressure ports. If she covered most of the surface with ice, she might miss a few tiny areas and find the machine moving in some unpredictable direction while she wasted even more water trying to find and block a single microscopic opening.

“I’m heading back toward you, Carol,” she reported briefly. The response from three incomprehensibly mixed voices was completely satisfying. Carol, Jenny, and Joe all produced variations of “What did you do?” and “How did you do it?” Charley said nothing on the general channel; his voice came through on private. “I wondered when it would be. Are you sure the rope will still reach?”

The Human described her technique briefly, not trying to comment on Charley’s words.

“None of us can feel too guilty for not coming up with that one,” commented Jenny. “Who would have water in her armor?”

“I’m not bragging,” assured Molly. “I should have gotten the notion long ago. Now, if you’ll forgive, I intend to stop observing for a while. I’m not sure I can really sleep on top of this thing, but I’m going to try.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?” asked Charley.

“No, I’m not at all sure; but it’s going to have to happen some time soon, and I feel safer right now than I have for some time past. I won’t turn the light out, and if anything really out of the way happens, the chances are I’ll notice—I hope. Right now, sleep is my prime order of business—unless I spot some life forms, of course, Carol and Jenny.”

Joe, in the shop working on the new mapping robot, said nothing, and none of the others was in sight of him. If they had been, they would probably have been unable to guess his concern. Even Charley, who resembled him fairly closely in the eyes of the other three, was of a widely different body chemistry, physical engineering, and evolution, and would not have noticed or interpreted the suddenly increased effort the Nethneen put into his work as Molly finished talking.

Joe might have been worried, but Carol, presumably in far more danger at the moment, was not. She rode the rim of her robot, holding on with one hand and grasping a collecting can in the other. Like Molly, she had clipped her light to her helmet for convenience; unlike the two males, she could turn her head, though her eye arrangement made this unnecessary. She was noticing only incidentally where she was going; like her Human friend, she could not feel the wind that was guiding the robot. She was, of course, hoping for more life forms; in spite of Joe’s emphatic denial of the possibility and her own knowledge that Enigma could not be a million years old and should not have evolved anything like the things she had collected, she knew what she had seen and had little doubt of its nature. A really close examination might prove her wrong, of course; she was burning to get the material back to the instruments in the bout and the tent, and the even more sophisticated equipment on Classroom, but she could postpone that while there was a chance of getting more data on Enigma. Her work, as initially planned, bridged that of Jenny and Molly; she was interested in the planet itself, physically, structurally, chemically, and biologically. She had not really expected the last aspect to appear, but since it seemed to have done so ...

Carol’s emotions were less obvious than Charley’s, but she had them.

She had found a stream, presumably the one that Molly had reported, and confirmed its composition with some of the safety equipment on her armor; it was not pure enough for her to drink, being loaded with dissolved salts, but it was ammonia. The robot was following fairly close to it, as Molly’s had done. The Human, when last heard from, had been following it back up, and it seemed likely that they would meet soon. Carol wondered in passing what Joe’s program would do with two robots in collision, but she didn’t waste any real time worrying about the matter. If anything of the sort seemed imminent, she could steer her own machine out of the way.

The only thing that caused her anything like worry was the rope. She had made no effort to go back to her first landing point in the cave and lay a straight line to the new passage, so about a kilometer of it had been wasted by the supposed wind change. There was not very much left in the coil now, and she had not considered what to do if it ran out before she met her friend. She found herself keeping one eye more and more constantly on what was left, and as this dwindled to a few hundred meters she slipped one of her tiny, almost human hands into the control access opening in the body of the robot.

“Jenny, Charley—I’m getting close to the end of the line and haven’t met Molly yet. Should I wait there with the robot, leave the rope and ride on, or leave rope and robot and scout around on foot, do you think?”

Neither answer was surprising, but neither was very helpful.

“Wait,” said Charley at once. “She should be back with you pretty soon.”

“Scout on foot,” grated Jenny. “You can get more done while you’re waiting for her. She’ll see the robot if she gets to it.”

“Not if she’s asleep,” countered the Shervah.

“If she wakes up after passing it, she’ll see the rope.”

“I wouldn’t count on it. It’s not very big, and I don’t know how its color contrasts with the rock to her eyes; do you?”

“No, of course not. You have a point. It still seems a pity just to wait there, though.”

“How long has she been asleep? Maybe we should wake her up when I get to the end.”

“Not much over an hour. Nothing like her usual time. Make that a very last resort, I’d say.”

“Right. Well, here comes the end. I’m stopping the machine for a moment at least, because the rope is fastened to it and if we decide I should take the robot farther I’ll have to untie it.”

“How about pulling the rope straight?” asked Charley. From what you said, there’s a kilo or so been wasted by (he false trail.”

“If I could do it myself, I might take the chance,” replied Carol. “With the robot doing the pulling, though, and its speed so firmly independent of outside factors, I’d never know until much too late if the rope caught on something and broke.”

“Couldn’t you set the robot to pull just so hard?”

“No. It has nothing to sense that. And don’t blame Joe; there was never any reason why it should.”

“I wasn’t thinking of blaming anyone,” said Charley with surprising mildness. “Why don’t you scout on foot down the stream for a distance, after you park your machine? You’ll see Molly even if she does happen to be asleep.”

Neither of the women could find fault with this suggestion. Carol left the rope attached as it had been and powered down the robot. Then, making sure that she still had several empty collecting cans clipped to her armor, she set off down the brook.

It was not very deep, as she ascertained by wading in it. She was careful about this; her temperature tolerance was the narrowest of any of the group, and the present environment was about ten degrees below her minimum. Ammonia was her body fluid base, but was liquid at her temperature only because of the high pressure at which she normally lived. Her armor had good insulation, naturally, but she could feel the chill creeping into her feet before many minutes, and moved out of the stream.

As Molly had said, there was nothing remotely suggestive of life to be seen, a fact that would not have surprised any of the group had it not been for Carol’s own find back in the big cave. Why it was there, and not here where liquid was available, was far from obvious. Several times the little Shervah knelt and examined the rock as closely as she possibly could, but it remained just rock. No glittering crystals, no slippery coating, no sticky material; nothing but rock. She announced as much.

“Get a specimen or two, anyway,” advised Jenny. “Remember the planet has seasons. Maybe there are spores, or cell detritus, that we can find if we look hard enough.”

“The hammer doesn’t get it loose; I’ll have to use the laser.”

“Just don’t cook the whole specimen.”

Carol followed the suggestion, but with no great enthusiasm. Rock analysis was all very well, and she enjoyed it in its place, but life on a world like this was something new. There ought to be more of it if there was any; life didn’t just occur in small, isolated bits. It came in whole ecologies, when it came.

“Any sign of Molly?” It was Charley, of course.

“Not yet.” Carol swept her beam downstream as she spoke. “No, not in sight.”

“Judging by times and speeds, it seems to me you should have met by now. You didn’t get so absorbed in things that she might have gone by you without your noticing, did you?”

Carol was too honest to make an absolute denial, but felt pretty sure that nothing of the sort had happened, and said so.

“Did you get any distance from the stream?”

“No. I’ve been in sight of it all along.”

“Then that’s all right, I guess. Wait a minute, though! Since you left the robot, are you sure the stream has been going into the wind? Can you feel the wind yourself?”

The Shervah spun and began leaping back toward the robot as quickly as she dared. Her normal gravity was less than Molly’s, but still far greater than that of Enigma, and she had the usual trouble coordinating her leaps so as to stay upright while off the ground. She answered as she ran.

“No, I’m not, and no, I can’t. She could have gotten past me, at that.”

Joe cut in. “I’m afraid it’s worse than that. Carol, you would remember; Molly would not have been aware. Has the stream been perfectly straight while you have been following it?”

“No, not at all. I didn’t worry about it; in fact, I was hoping it would turn out that the stream had something to do with eroding this passage. After all, the robots followed it going into the wind all the time, so the passage must have been guiding the wind pretty much the same way—oh!”

“Precisely. When Molly sealed one side of her robot to make it think the wind was coming from the other, in effect she would have caused it to fall back on its inertial system. That keeps the case of the machine oriented the same way, so it would have read pressure from the same inertial direction…”

“Planet’s rotation, too!” interjected Charley.

“Not significantly, in this time interval. The point is that she wouldn’t have followed back up the stream; she’d have gone straight in the direction that was upstream when she put on the ice coat. If she’s anywhere near the stream, it’s luck—of course, the passage can’t be too wide if the wind has been turning along with the river, so she shouldn’t be too far from it. Still, she could have reached the side and maybe worked into a side passage the way she did this one. Molly!”

Several seconds passed. The Human, in spite of the limited area of the cylinder top, had fallen deeply asleep; she was still lashed in place, and the feeble gravity permitted head and extremities to be over the side with no particular discomfort. It took several repetitions of her name, in several voices, to bring her back to awareness. She had been wise enough to leave her light on, and avoided the panic that might have come from waking to a combination of total darkness and near-total weightlessness.

“What’s the matter?” she asked as she pushed herself to a more nearly upright position. “Is Carol in trouble? I don’t see her.”

“Of course you don’t; I’m nowhere near you, I’m afraid. The real question is whether you see the stream.”

It took perhaps a second for the points that Joe had just covered with the others to marshall themselves in Molly’s mind, and suddenly she felt close to real panic.

“Of course I don’t,” she replied in an unsteady voice.