Still River

Chapter Sixteen Of Course He’d Fail

“What if the passage you’re looking for is already full of ammonia?” Charley asked anxiously.

“I don’t see how it could be.” Molly comforted him and herself. “There’s a lot of space—I have no idea how much, but I’m almost sure it’s more than this cavern here, judging by my own wanderings—to fill once it starts overflowing that way. The stream should be flowing again, though; maybe that will be some sort of guide.” “Not to the surface!”

“Well, no. But at least this particular place would have to be filling very fast indeed to cover that opening completely. We don’t have to worry about being able to get into it, I’d guess.”

“You mean you’ll go down that passage, away from the surface, in spite of…”

“Unless,” snapped Carol, “you can tell us that the storm up there, which is blowing sand fast enough to block our original entrance with a mountain-sized dune and apparently precipitating enough liquid to fill sizable caverns, is either a very small one or is about to end, yes. We are going down that passage if there is wind coming out of it. If not, we will go down any other passage we can find wind coming out of. I can’t see anything else to do. If this idiotic ball of salt kept its surface features from one century to the next—at least we can see why there was no way to match our maps with the old ones—or had a magnetic field strong enough for an ordinary person to feel, or Joe had provided some way for a person riding this robot to read its inertial sensor…”

“I did, in the new one.” An interruption by Joe was so startling that even Carol, playing straighten-out-Charley, was silenced for a moment.

Her attention shifted. “Good. Thanks. We’ll still have to use air currents for a guide, though, and following rivers upstream doesn’t seem very promising, as Charley pointed out awhile ago. For one thing, if this turns into a real river, it will probably have started out at the top from seepage; and I’m not that small. I also think we’ll have to drop this policy of keeping the robot down to a speed we can catch on foot. We don’t know how far we’ll have to go.” “But if one of you falls off…”

“If Molly falls off, I can stop the thing and wait or go back for her. If I—I’d better not.”

“I still have some surplus water,” Molly said thoughtfully. “I’d rather not use it for glazing robots, of course. But maybe we could rig some kind of gadget that would let me stop the thing with a single key—I know the controls well enough; it’s just that my hand is too big to get at them, even if I take off a glove and risk freezing my skin to the metal. All I really need is a piece of stiff wire about twenty centimeters long. I can see in as long as my light’s working—at least the keyboard faces the opening in the body! That’s luck. With Joe’s tendrils, it didn’t really have to. Sorry, Joe; that was unkind.”

“Deserved, I fear. On a less painful note, what do you have in your armor or equipment that will let you reach the keys?”

“Until I figure that out, we’ll keep multiple safety lines attached to Carol. Here comes the tunnel, doesn’t it, Carrie?”

“Yes. This lake’s draining into it, as you thought it might. We can get in at the farther side, where the opening is high enough for the robot, and see how full the stream is…”

“And whether there is any wind!” exclaimed Charley.

“And whether there is any wind,” admitted the Shervah. “That first, actually. You’ll have to duck more than I will, big friend; here it comes.”

Charley, far above, waited tensely. He could not picture clearly how close the women would have to come to the flood he imagined spilling down into Enigma’s bowels and was visualizing the worst. His faith that none of them, especially Molly, could be in real physical danger was eroding u trifle, to his own surprise, though he considered the underlying theory still valid. He continued to expect that the Human would report a new situation at any moment now, which would further complicate the group’s assigned test, but he was finding it harder and harder to feel sure that this was all that would happen. He wished briefly that he could see, or even hear, directly what was going on so far below, instead of getting everything via translators.

If translators were all one could have, however, they might as well be used.

“Is your river there, Molly?” he asked.

“Very much so.”

“Does it leave room for the two of you, or are you in danger of…”

“No danger. At least, none we can see.” Carol’s intrinsic honesty modified her impatient speech. “We’re traveling fast—as fast as the robot will go, along a weedy river. There’s life sprouting everywhere. I didn’t think it was this early in the spring!”

“You have wind, then,” another voice grated.

“A little, Jen, but actually we’re not using it. Once we were sure it existed, we decided in favor of the stream. I know it’s bound to take us down, but there must be a limit to that, and when we find its base level—underground lake or ocean, or Molly’s ice, or whatever—we should be able to choose among winds reaching that region. The strongest will have the best chance of leading through passages big enough for us.”

“Do I see Molly’s thinking behind that?”

“Not entirely. There is also biology to check.”

“Of course. I should have thought. I’m about to take Joe’s new machine upwind to the edge of the present storm area and start looking for more ways into your cavern system. Charley will take Joe back to the tent and then do a similar search with the boat—we’ll try to coordinate so as not to duplicate effort too much.”

“Good.” Molly was really relieved for a moment. “I’m glad Joe can get back to his maps.”

“I don’t think that would be wise just yet” came the Nethneen’s voice.

“Why not?” asked several people at once.

“I have been thinking. It would be better, I am sure, if I stayed in the shop and made yet another mapping robot—possibly two. I haven’t been able to forget Charley’s prediction about the failure of this boat, though he would never supply us with his reasoning; and in any case it would seem better for all three of us up here to be in a position not only to locate possible entrances to your cavern system but to enter them. This craft is far too large for that.”

“Far too large for any entrance we’ve seen so far—all one of them,” pointed out Molly.

“Far too large for any passages likely to connect the caves, big as some of the latter are. I can accept big holes if they’re really kames, but I see no reason to suppose that all the connections between them will be ship-size. Do you really expect to…”

“I don’t know what to expect, but by all means make your extra bus!” exclaimed Carol. “When Molly and I get out of here, she and Jenny and I will all want to spend a lot of time in the caverns, and rather than ride one of these things we’re on now, I’d rather…”

“Good point,” Molly and Jenny cut in simultaneously. “But Joe,” the Human went on, “don’t stay away from your own work too long. I hate to see you kept away from it by all this.”

“It’s getting done, even when I can’t watch it,” the Nethneen pointed out calmly. “The longer I have to wait between looks, the more easily I can spot new trends when I do see it. You young people just keep alive, and don’t worry about me.”

“All right, Uncle.” Molly knew the translators would handle the word and did not worry about how Joe or the others would take it. All four of their species used figurative speech, she knew.

Anyone who saw Charley’s reaction to the exchange might have wondered briefly, but the Kantrick was alone, and his silence was not long enough to attract attention.

“We’re past the place where Molly iced her robot,” Carol reported. “New territory from now on.”

“Cave or tunnel?” This was Jenny.

“I’d vote for cave. The river has spread out a lot and is flowing very fast—no walls or ceiling…”

“A lot of noise, considering the neighborhood,” Molly supplemented. “Rapids—rocks in the stream, some of them loose enough to be rolled by it. At least some of this can be blamed on water erosion. Jenny—?”

“Water?”

“Pardon. Ammonia. Stream erosion. If either of us falls off now, Carrie, we’ll never make good fossils; there won’t be any bone fragments big enough to recognize. It’s getting steeper, too; we’re really heading downhill. I shouldn’t have called these lazy swirls rapids; there isn’t enough gravity to move anything rapidly. Should we maybe go by the side of this thing instead of right over it?”

“Then how could they damage your bodies, as you suggested?” asked Charley.

“A rock my own size has inertia, whatever it may lack in weight. You know that as well as I do; are you trying to be funny?”

The Kantrick made no answer, and Carol referred back to Molly’s earlier suggestion.

“I suppose we should, though I was enjoying it. Have you ever been on Topaz? That’s planet two of the brighter School sun, Fire. It’s a wonderful place for being physical. Decent gravity and pressure—a little high for you in the latter, but you could probably stand it—and there’s even oxygen in the air. I don’t know why I’ve never seen a Human there. There’s a wilderness park where I’ve spent hundreds of hours canoeing with my Others. Real white water. No really big 1: kes or oceans; like Jenny’s world, of course. You can’t have a lot of ammonia with free oxygen, but the life is active enough to keep rivers full. Jen’s been there with us, and likes to swim while we paddle. You’ll have to come some time, with your Others. We’ll get away from over this stream for now; A little homesickness is good for me, but since my Others aren’t here I may as well stick to the job.”

The eyes of the two explorers met briefly. Molly smiled as images of Rovor and Buzz flashed across her mind, and Carol’s grotesque features twisted in an expression that might have had the same meaning.

“I know what you mean,” the Human said softly on private channel, “but it’s just as well my son isn’t here. He’d think it was fun to dive in merely because his father and I had said it wasn’t safe.”

“An independent thinker? Congratulations.”

“Thanks. We’re an independent species from early childhood. The thinking comes later. Let’s get these rapids out from under us; they’re getting even louder and scarier.”

“And prettier.” Carol maneuvered the robot to one side, however, and changed the subject. “Vegetation everywhere, if it really is plant life. I wish we dared go slower. We could be missing a lot.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. It’s spring in this hemisphere, as you said a little while ago; maybe we’re running into seasonal changes—the storms, streams filling and emptying, life or something like it visible one moment and not the next. What we saw when the upper cave was dry may have been the last of the season’s growth, wiped out right afterward by the flooding. In any case, there has to be a whole ecology, and we can’t expect to examine every species. We’ll find more, but let’s not worry about missing a few items. What we need are Joe’s new machines, so we can do it in more comfort and carry more of the stuff we need.”

“Which means we need to get back to the boat. I’m in favor of that, but I still think tracing this river to its end will give the others their best chance of finding us.”

“Or of providing you with information that will let you find yourselves.” If the remark had been made by Charley, Carol might have found fault, but she agreed with Jenny.

“I wonder how far down you are now,” the Rimmore continued. “I’ve been monitoring Joe’s receivers, and there’s no sort of signal coming back any more. You were at least three kilometers below the surface, making no allowance for refraction, the last time we got a reading.”

“And we’re heading down very steeply now,” added Carol. “I’m surprised the stream can flow so fast in this gravity; it makes me wonder if my time sense is losing track.”

“How about wind?” asked the Kantrick.

“I really don’t know how much of what we feel is due to our own motion,” Molly replied. “We should probably stop for a check some time, but that can wait awhile, I’d think. Jenny, you’re outside now. Have you left the storm area yet?”

“Yes. It’s a smallish cyclone only a couple of hundred kilometers across—rather surprising, considering Enigma’s rotation. Maybe the topography is making eddies. I’m in sunlight, as far as the clouds permit, over very hilly ground.”

“Hills or dunes?” asked Carol promptly.

“Hills. Quite solid. Not going anywhere.”

“Folds? Blocks? Volcanoes? What?”

“I don’t know. Folds, at a guess, with lots of erosion. Numerous dry streambeds.”

“Any really long rivers, cutting across ranges of hills?”

“Not that I’ve seen yet.”

“Good. Look hard for caves where the streambeds seem to enter or leave hills, particularly the former.”

“Good idea. I’ll be a long time covering the area, though.”

“Assume we have the time, lengthy friend.”

If Charley failed to grasp all the implications of this exchange, at least he asked no questions. He volunteered the boat’s position—heading rapidly for a point a hundred kilometers west of Jenny’s—and promised to start searching, too, as soon as he could see the ground. Joe said nothing.

For hours the two women raced through near-weightless darkness, not quite as helpless as roller-coaster riders. Jenny and Charley scanned Enigma’s surface, producing an excellent topographic map in the boat’s computer, but for a long time failing to find any caves with winds blowing either in or out. Joe completed another mapping robot, controlling himself in the face of the temptation to add even more safety and research equipment that might possibly be useful-yielding would have meant interrupting the work of the record-controlled shop equipment and adding much time to the project. Enigma rotated, but this made little difference to any of them; those who were on the surface were at a latitude where Arc never set at this season.

Molly slept again, and even Carol dozed, though she kept her great, side-placed, independent eyes open. It seemed unlikely that retracing their course would ever do them any good, but she was taking no risk of missing landmarks; everything her senses detected went firmly into memory, though her awareness was more concerned with earlier memories.

The dominant recollection during these hours was of her first meeting with Molly and Jenny, perhaps because it, too, had involved a trip. Carol had carelessly allowed her physical fitness rating at the School to lapse and was in the process of earning it back with a rather dangerous eight-hundred-kilometer hike on Jet, Smoke’s third planet; naturally, she had not been allowed to use a world with gravity weaker than that of her own. The Human colony was on Smoke’s inner planet and the Rimmore one on the fourth, both for reasons of gravity comfort, and Molly and Jenny had been at the starting point. Courtesy had naturally prevented Carol from asking either of the others why they were making the same trip—it could not be for her own reason, since both women were used to greater natural gravities—but it might of course have been something else embarrassing; and neither had volunteered the information. It might have been simply an interest in Jet’s native life, which like them was oxygen-breathing. In any case, enough had happened along the eight hundred kilometers, ranging from physically dangerous to merely interesting, to let each of the three be helpful to the others and lay the foundations of firm friendship. It had been Jenny who had suggested that they collaborate in the lab work still needed for their degrees, but the others had been enthusiastic.

The river was now too wide for their lights to reach across; whether rain seepage, lakes draining from the surface, or lakes already underground were feeding it none of them could guess. Wide as it was, it remained turbulent and presumably shallow.

The endless journey was taking nervous toll on everyone, not just the two travelers. Twice Charley called Molly on private channel to ask how long it was going to continue, and seemed surprised when she was irritated at the question. Charley was certainly not stupid, though these questions seemed to be; she had never suspected the theory behind his predictions and behavior. Had she even guessed at it, she would have been more tolerant of his seemingly senseless inquiries.

Then the Kantrick’s voice came through with something more interesting.

“There’s some sort of dust spout ahead!” he called. “I can’t make out details yet—this air is murky enough anyway. There’s a hill at its base, so maybe it’s a wind source like the cave you two went into. You should have been going downwind, I guess.”

Molly was as gentle as possible, consistent with the need to get her words in ahead of her companion. “Don’t guess just yet. Get a closer look, and make believe you’re writing it up for the School.”

“Oh, of course. It isn’t really much of a hill—I can see it better now as I get closer. If it’s piled up from underground the way yours must have been, it hasn’t been piling for long. The dark column rising from its middle still looks like dust, though.” He paused and keyed the boat still closer. “We need more of Joe’s regular robots to see what the wind is doing. I can’t tell whether there’s any horizontal component at all. Just a moment while I land beside it and see whether the dust is blowing or not.” No one said anything while this was accomplished. “The usual fine stuff; I’d call it drifting, not really blowing. Even Joe could walk around in it. I’ll lift again and see about the hilltop; it looks like one of those sand volcanoes you went into—lower and broader, as I said…”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Sorry, Carrie. As I meant to say. I’ll get right above it for a look straight down—there. Yes, there’s a crater, but it isn’t very deep, and the sand inside is churning violently—I’ll let down toward it. It looks as though the wind were coming up through the sand, lifting the lighter particles but not the heavy stuff—maybe if I block part of it with the boat the way I did the other, the wind will be hard enough to lift the bigger grains too and clear the way—that would open a passage for you folks.”

“Maybe by midsummer!” exclaimed the Shervah. “But try it if you like,” she added more tolerantly. “It will be interesting to see the shape of those grains, wouldn’t you say, Jenny?”

“Very” came the harsh answer. “I am tempted to interrupt the present search—but I won’t. I could go back to your first trap and probably get the same thing, I suspect; the situation doesn’t seem to be strange to Enigma. Be careful about getting too low, Charley.”

“Why? What could happen?”

“How heavy did you mean by ’heavy stuff? I don’t suppose it really matters—the boat’s pretty solid and nothing really big is likely to be carried by wind that hasn’t yet cleared all the dust out of that neck. Or were you counting on something’s happening? I was forgetting your prediction.”

“No—nothing of that sort. But maybe you’re right; I won’t get too low. In any case, I don’t see how the two of you could get through there unless the place was blown really clear—not in ordinary armor. Still, it’s good to know that there are more places where winds come from inside. It’s a pretty safe bet there are lots of them, if we’ve encountered three in such a short time.” No one commented. “The main question, I guess, Molly, is whether the wind is going in somewhere else, or the ice you’re hoping for is boiling somewhere below. I suppose it’s that hope that has you heading into the wind.”

“I’m not really good at psychology, either general or species,” Molly evaded. “Consciously, I can assure you I’d be much happier to get back to the boat, get out of this armor for a while, eat and sleep decently, have a bath, and then explore down here properly in one of Joe’s new mapping machines. What my subconscious is doing, if the translators can do that term real justice, I can’t guarantee. It will not have escaped your notice, friend Charley, that a lot of the volume below Enigma’s surface seems to be air, which is even better than ice at lowering the average density. Maybe this place is just a sponge.”

“That’s a thought—but we’d still have to find out, and there’d have to be another explanation for the wind. How far down in this gravity could the rock support caves?”

“I don’t know. Dig something out of the boat’s library and compute, I’d suggest. Just don’t ask us to tell you yet what the compressive strength of this rock may be; we haven’t had a chance to test it, you know!”

Charley took the suggestion at face value.

“Should I try to check that question out right now, or go on looking for more ways inside?”

Once again the women looked at each other, smiling. “Perhaps you’d better keep on with the search,” Molly replied. “Maybe we can get some data at this end on the depth question, before you have to face any computation. Personally, I don’t see how this downhill journey can go on much longer.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that. You didn’t seem to want to before,” Charley came back happily.

The Human refrained, just barely, from saying something impolite about herself. Wishful thinking was bad enough; doing it out loud was worse; doing it where it would influence Charley’s ideas was worst, or almost worst. Carol’s glance, carrying what Molly recognized as sympathetic understanding on the features that she now knew far too well to consider hideous, almost brought the Human woman to tears. The Shervah’s words on private channel, however, tempted laughter instead.

“I wonder what your Buzz would have said?”

For the first time, Molly gave some serious thought to what might be going on in Charley’s mind. He wasn’t a six-year-old; he was a competent adult, qualified—whatever Carol might think—as an advanced student at a major research facility; whatever his personal or racial peculiarities, he simply could not be stupid. Like Molly’s own, his words and actions were based on some set of background ideas and beliefs. The fact that the words in particular were often irritating didn’t necessarily mean his beliefs were wrong. It did mean that Mary Warrender Chmenici did not understand them as well as she should. Little Buzz, she reflected wryly, might actually do a better job than his supposedly intelligent mother at that if he were here. Most of his playmates were nonhuman.

For just a moment, she allowed her memory to flash pictures of her six-year-old holding his own with flying Parkemm children in that soupy-aired, low-gravity colony; with Nethneen in their nearly airless environment; even with Jenny’s people—the child had learned quickly enough that gravity was no real problem if one stayed submerged, though ammonia furnished less support than water. She had quickly gotten over a mother’s natural worry; the child care centers on the School planets were as good as Human ones, even when it came to teaching the very young about environments and environmental equipment.

For another second, Molly wondered whether she would do as well, in the next few days, as her son had in the last few years. Would she ever see him and his father again?

She buried the question firmly. One could only do one’s best.

“Thanks, Carrie.” Molly shifted back to the common translator channel and went on. “If that sand spout, or whatever it is, has been mapped, Charley, I’d go on with the surface search for the time being at least. It seems to me more and more important that we get an idea of air flow out to the surface and, if there is any, in from it. Joe, is your map far enough along to give us any hints at all on that point? Could this cavern circulation be enough of the total to show on the planetary scale?”

“I have no basis for a guess, since I had not considered the possibility and haven’t seen the map itself for some time. It occurs to me that it would be better for Charley to continue his search with the new mapping robot so that I can take the boat, with the shop, back to the tent. Will you please come back here, Charley? I think the matter important.”

“All right, if you’re sure the latest machine is really ready.”

“As ready as the one Jenny is using. Controllable by any of us, electromagnetic location interlock with the boat and, through the computer, with all the other robots in touch; collecting equipment; power…”

“All right. I’m on my way to the shop. I’ve started the boat back toward the tent.”

Many kilometers below, traveling at unknown speed in unknown direction, the two women listened to this conversation without expecting much new to come from it. Both were tired and getting heartily sick of darkness and recycled nourishment. Both knew that their armor was slightly less than perfectly efficient at the recycling process and that eventually it would not keep them alive, but neither was worried about this yet. Both were far too intelligent to let their minds dwell on the point. With work, they could also have kept their minds off simple discomforts, but only at rare intervals was there a chance to work.

Twice, as the hours passed, they stopped and made a close examination of the rock and pseudovegetation that formed the bank of their alien Styx, but neither study proved interesting. As far as either could tell, the former was a finegrained, possibly amorphous matrix, possibly but not certainly silicate, possibly but not certainly modified both thermally and chemically, possibly but not certainly cemented by hydrates or ammates or both. Their eyes simply couldn’t tell enough. Four times during the hours Jenny reported discovery of a cave from which wind was blowing; twice more Charley, now surveying with the new mapper, did the same. No sign of inflow had been detected. Joe, back at his map, had described verbally in great detail what was appearing, but neither he nor any of the others could recognize anything useful. It seemed like an ordinary planetary circulation, to those whose home planets had significant atmospheres, except for the presence of extraheavy dust clouds at the summer pole and relatively clear air at the other. If the clouds had been water or ammonia condensate, even that would not have been startling.

Maybe, Molly thought, when enough detail had been added—maybe, when they could see it themselves ...

But if they could see it themselves, the main problem would be solved.

Even Charley was saying less and less as the hours wore on and Enigma crawled along its vast orbit. He had decided that Molly was not going to end this underworld Odyssey until someone else made an effective move; he remained emotionally certain that she could do so whenever she wanted. He was growing more and more afraid that he himself was the one who was expected to take the effective step—he remembered what Jenny had said, days earlier back on Classroom, about originality and his own failure to display it. This had to be a part of the test.

Should he take his robot into one of the caves he had found and start mapping the passages inside? Mathematically, this seemed poor policy; the women were traveling in more or less a straight line—at least, along one line—and only wild coincidence could bring him in touch with them that way.

Was there some painfully obvious step that he should have thought of and taken? Was the Human losing patience with him?

Should he—?

“The river’s GONE!” came Carol’s voice, in a near-shriek.

He should have. He couldn’t now. Molly was taking new action herself. He’d failed, of course.