Still River

Chapter Twenty-Five Datum Five: Molly and Others

Molly walked comfortably into the chatter room. Buzz was straddling her neck and bouncing violently, but she didn’t mind; real weight, even the three-quarters gravity of Topaz, was heavenly just now. The light was dim but adequate; Fire had set some hours before, but its distant companion provided much more illumination than Earth’s full moon. Carol was a good hostess; the space had been tented, and the air had enough oxygen for her Human and Rimmore guests. The Shervah herself wore a transparent breathing suit that permitted her freshly washed fur to show to full advantage. The Humans were similarly protected from the cold.

“Done?” Jenny, draped over the jungle of bars and ropes in her personal corner, put the rhetorical question.

“Done,” Molly said, “if the word applies to a preliminary write-up. It’s nice to know this will be studied instead of sealed.”

The Rimmore chuckled. “Enigma is still a study site. It’s merely moved up a few levels, with higher-degree types doing the studying, instead of a minor lab exercise for beginners. You’re going back, too, I see.”

“I was intending to; now there are complications, and I still don’t see why there’s a Faculty recommendation that I coordinate the next study session. I can’t see that I showed up better than anyone else. I’ve been redesigning my armor as well as I can, but I’m certainly not going to be able to do field work for the whole time.”

“Any of the group might have been selected; the general report commends the students collectively. The Faculty looks for imagination at the start, and a whole spectrum of other things thereafter. I rather think the fact that none of us was ever formally in charge impressed them. Even Charley showed up well after he broke out of his initial mold.”

“You know what his trouble was?” asked Molly.

“Some of it was obvious, and he told me more,” replied the Rimmore. “He just didn’t believe there was any danger. He was firmly convinced not only that the Faculty wouldn’t put students to personal risk, but that one of the group was a Faculty member whose main job was to watch out for us and give us spot tests. He was perfectly sure that we were going to have to get our job done and keep ourselves alive in the tent, because the Faculty would have arranged for the boat to go out of action—it would make things too easy if it were available. He’d planned heavily around that and was quite disappointed when the machine kept working.”

“I did catch onto that.” Molly nodded. “The amusing part was that for some of the time he thought I, of all people, was the Faculty member.”

“I know. Then he decided it must be Joe, and was shifting back and forth between the two of you, trying to make up his mind, never once thinking that both ideas might be wrong, until he was approaching real imbalance. When Joe found those bodies, he even thought for a while that it was an attempt to deceive him. He was dangerously close to paranoia at that point. Nearly getting himself blown to pieces was about the best thing that could have happened to him.”

“So even Charley is going back to Enigma,” remarked the squarely built Human male sprawled on a floor mat.

“With a huge crowd of biological bigwigs,” agreed Molly. “I can’t help wondering how many of them are interested in finding Enigma’s energy-fixing life and how many merely want to be there when Wendy gets born. Maybe we were a little hasty in starting her.”

“After having it hammered into our emotions as well as our brains that either of us could get killed without notice? We do it now, my one and only. And does it matter about why the biologists are interested? Being curious about your friends’ physiology is perfectly normal. We tend to think of it as childish because back when there was only one species to make friends with, we usually satisfied a lot of that curiosity during childhood. You were pretty interested in Charley’s repairs, once you could see again.”

“He couldn’t have been thinking very carefully.” Molly smiled reminiscently. “I made some of the silliest imaginable mistakes…”

“So did everyone else there,” Rovor retorted. “Your taking a bath and picking up a case of hydrazine poisoning that could have blinded you permanently wasn’t much worse than Joe’s shortsighted robot planning or walking out of the boat without armor…”

“That’s my point,” returned his wife, tossing their child to him. Buzz, already used to a range of gravities, crowed triumphantly as his hands met his father’s.

Carol rolled her eyes. “That settles it. I’m setting up a water-ice rink, and Bobby and I are going to practice figure skating. If a Human child can coordinate like that ...”

Molly smiled at her small friend. “We’ll be glad to help, though I won’t be as agile as I might be for the next few months. But, honey,” she said, returning to the earlier subject, “Charley’s idea about having Faculty with the group was just silly. I don’t say no teacher would have made such mistakes, but wouldn’t he or she have used them better for teaching? Of course, Joe did analyze his errors to us pretty carefully, now that I think of it. Maybe—but no. He wouldn’t have told an outright lie, and he did say he didn’t have his degree yet, didn’t he?”

“Of course he did,” said Jenny.

The End