Still River

Chapter Three Of Course I Said That

Joe felt a very slight, unfamiliar sensation. He knew that it was about time for reality interface, and wanted to believe that this was merely the effect of a strange drive system, but he somehow couldn’t feel completely sure.

There was an odd touch of disorientation, as though his walking flaps and handling tendrils might not be exactly where they seemed; and he felt oddly reluctant to move so as to find out.

It was encouraging that there had been no change in the display before him; even the most minor error as a carrier penetrates the interface between real and unreal space-time usually kills sensing apparatus completely. As it was, the terrifying image on the screen had not even flickered. Perhaps it had all been his own state of mind; a star like Arc could unsettle anyone.

Or almost anyone. He had forgotten for an instant the giant seated at her own instruments beside him. For a moment he hesitated to look at her; his standards of courtesy would have made it an intrusion, since she was presumably busy. Then he remembered—this always took a moment—that the human being would not even be aware of his glance; her only eyes were inside the hood surrounding her vision screen. Reminding himself firmly that he really wasn’t doing anything improper, he let his right-side pair of optics center on her hands.

The fingers, which the Nethneen simultaneously envied for their strength and pitied for their clumsiness, rested motionless at the key bank. If she had been bothered by the jolt, the worry was not being translated into action so far. Whether that meant she hadn’t felt it or was too familiar with what she had felt to be bothered by it was impossible to tell; asking would be intrusion even by Human standards as long as she appeared to be working. He could, of course, get her readings onto his own screen without disturbing the giant, but there were two objections to this. The first was that it probably wouldn’t answer his question, and the second that it could easily be dangerous. If she were looking at Arc in anything like its natural color ...

Joe shivered. There were usually five or six hundred species at any one time at the Eta Carinae establishment, and these tended to be fairly sophisticated about alien life forms; but the recent arrival of human beings had startled most of them badly. It had been casually accepted by the community that life could not be expected near suns hotter than about K8. One of the reasons for the face-fitting mask around the Human student’s screen was protection of her classmates from the short-wave radiation she used for vision.

Joe gave up useless speculation for the moment and went back to particle counting. It was less unnerving than examining an O-type star would be. He could ask Molly if she had felt the whatever-it-was later on.

Mary Warrender Chmenici felt the jolt, but paid no real attention to it; it was less noticeable than the interface transitions she was used to, and she interpreted it as merely another of these.

She was not even as conscious as she should have been of the display on her screen, though this was not of very great importance. In principle, students were supposed to be observing while on watch; in practice, even the stuffiest of the Faculty would not expect much useful material to be picked up before the traveling classroom got a lot closer to Enigma. If anyone had known that Molly had already formed a working hypothesis and used it to plan her operations for the next few weeks, there would have been criticism; most of the red-sun races, if the individuals she had met so far were typical, were conservative in their ideas of where reasonable organization ended and wild speculation began. Even these, however, might have made allowance for her youth.

If asked, she could have claimed she was searching for Enigma at the moment. Presumably the body would be emitting the long waves characteristic of planetary temperatures, combined with reflected light from Arc; she had set her equipment to respond to such a combination and to center her screen on the source and shift to maximum resolution if it were found. Her mind, however, was elsewhere—though her eyes, like Joe’s side and rear ones, would put in a call for attention if their input pattern changed significantly. She was taking for granted, from the barely detectable sensation that had bothered her little Nethneen friend so greatly, that they were back on the real side of interface, but that left a couple of her days of ordinary flight before the laboratory site could be examined in any detail. Arc and its almost equally huge companion formed too massive a system to permit interface transfer at planetary distances; real space-time was too badly warped in their vicinity.

Enigma. Did the Faculty member of centuries past who had named the little planet have a sense of humor? Most intelligent beings did, of course. Actually, it was Enigma 88 in decimal notation—which, she reminded herself, was not used at the School. One of the things that had made her feel more at home, during her first weeks at Eta Carinae, had been the story of a major administrative upheaval, during the establishment of the place, over the question of octal or duodecimal time units.

The Faculty had a file of Enigmas for student investigation, she knew, within reasonably short distances from the Leinster site. Molly thought she could guess why this one had been given to a team containing a Human student. The guess assumed that the Faculty had already learned a good deal about her species, but this was likely enough. Any red-sun native would have been curious about the combination of a high-energy star and a fairly habitable—from their point of view—world like Titan, and even more so about a place like Earth. In asking the Human students about these, they could hardly have failed to learn a lot about the beings they were questioning.

But that was really letting her mind wander. The assigned exercise was to produce an explanation for the basically surprising fact that Enigma, with far less mass than Earth’s moon, had a very substantial atmosphere. The team was to present observational support for its solution with an absolute minimum of items taken for granted; and here was the trouble. Ten months at Eta Carinae, and a really close friendship with Joe, had certainly not supplied her with a complete list of what even one red-star type took for granted. This was bad enough. Worse, twenty-seven Earth years of life and a good education still left her unsure of which of her own everyday assumptions would need supporting evidence to nonhuman minds. Science was science, physical evidence was evidence, but there are spaces between the points on any graph. To her, the explanation demanded by the exercise seemed obvious to the point of being trivial: the planet was too young to have lost its initial atmosphere. She was sure, however, that supporting evidence was going to have to be very carefully handled indeed. She was not normally inclined to worry, but dealing with minds of such different background still made her uneasy. They certainly weren’t all like Joe.

The hull trembled again, much more noticeably this time, snapping her attention back to her instruments. Back into false-space? Why? It didn’t feel like that, though she knew there were scores of different faster-than-light techniques and she was not really used to the one employed by Classroom. No, she was seeing directly, not by relay. Solid matter—meteoroid? It was hard to believe that any spacecraft could not handle such an incident without attracting the attention of the passengers, though in a system as young as Arc’s must be there were no doubt lots of unaccreted particles. Her fingers played over her console, shifting from simple visual imaging to build a tridimensional model of the space around the craft for a kilometer radius.

There was matter, of course—the Eta Carinae region is rich in nebulosity; but material at a density measured in atoms, or even billions of atoms, per liter does not jolt several million tons of spacecraft. The matter was unusually rich in heavy atoms, since it had cycled through more generations of star formation than even Molly’s part of space; but this seemed irrelevant, too.

There was energy. Arc was still hundreds of astronomical units away, and its companion even farther, but both radiated fiercely in their appropriate spectral ranges. None of Molly’s fellow students would have dreamed of exposing themselves to the flux outside the hull—she herself would have been uneasy about the X-ray component. Still, there seemed nothing to account for the ship’s behavior.

She frowned in thought for a moment, then flicked off her screen and removed her face from the viewing mask. Beside her, Joe made a gesture indicating that he was aware of her motion and willing to converse, though he kept his front eyes at his monitor.

“Joe, did you recognize that last bump? We went real two or three minutes ago and still are; it couldn’t have been interface.”

“Not sure. I wasn’t sure about the earlier one—it didn’t feel like faces I’ve been through, but if that’s what it seemed like to you, you’re probably right. This was some sort of real acceleration, then. Have you checked our surroundings? I’ve been concentrating on ion counts, and nothing has changed much there.”

“I made a quick sweep out to about a kilo for gross matter and obvious EM and particle radiation without spotting any immediate answer. Would any of our fellow teams be doing something that could account for it?”

Joe failed to answer at once, and for a moment Molly wondered whether she had violated one of the courtesy rules again. Some of the red-star races carried the mind-your-own-business attitude to what she considered an extreme, but her question could hardly have been an intrusion even by Nethneen standards. Scientific research was a matter of general interest, especially when several projects were working out of the same unit and likely to use the same resources. Besides, Joe would make allowances; he knew Molly and her husband very well, and several other human beings slightly.

“It’s possible,” he said at last. “There was some work to he done that involved leaving monitors adrift to gather data, and they would have to be dropped at velocities very precisely measured with respect to Arc and its companion. I suppose ...” His voice trailed off. The translator Molly carried had been well programmed in the last few months, and she got the distinct impression from the tone structure that he had been about to say more but couldn’t bring himself to do it. She remembered that the crew of the vessel consisted largely of students, too. Joe would not have wanted to say anything that reflected on the personal competence of one of these. It occurred to her that the student pilot might be a bit heavy-handed, and stopped worrying.

It was the first time she had thought even momentarily of personal danger in connection with the project, and had no trouble dismissing it from her mind at once. Space is, of course, a dangerous environment for a planetary species, but so is a world for which the organism has not evolved; and Mary Chmenici did belong to a race whose ancestors, only a few generations earlier, had casually accepted manually controlled and individually directed vehicular traffic.

Maybe some other people on watch would have ideas and be willing to discuss them, though for the most part they shared Joe’s ethical standards. At the moment, of course, everyone in the conning room was busy; this included pairs from ten different teams, whose usual membership was four, though her own group had five. She and Joe were the only ones from the Enigma Exercise now on watch.

She keyed a clock onto a corner of her screen. Looking at it directly meant that her translator was no help, and it took several seconds to interpret the dial, even ignoring the sweep-mike needle that was a little too fast for her eyesight, and work the reading into time units in which she could think comfortably. They would be relaxing in a little less than half an hour. She would spend the first ten minutes in her own decently lit cabin, thinking of personal matters like the husband and son she wouldn’t be seeing for several weeks; then she would go to the team’s office and spend some more time persuading Charley and Jenny that geo-chemical dating was really all that had to be done to solve their problem. Charley seemed nearly convinced already, and with luck she could get him to work on Joe, who was oddly hard to persuade. Then—

Then the weight went off. No one had come up with artificial gravity yet; weight on a spacecraft came from real acceleration in real space and its unreal mathematical equivalent in false-space. As a matter of safety, passengers were warned when either was about to be changed deliberately; there had been no warning this time. Main power? Molly thought. No, there was still light, and instruments were still functioning. Only drive seemed affected. No alarms, either visual or auditory, were making themselves obvious. The heavy-handed student pilot again? If so, there should be acceleration warning and a resumption of weight in, at the outside, a few seconds. Molly held her chair arm and waited.

No warning. No weight. For fully a minute, no word. The students in the conning room remained at their instruments, but a faint murmur of conversation began to interrupt the sacrosanct work atmosphere—some pairs present didn’t need translators, and the neutral gas mixture did carry sound—and faces lifted from monitor screens. Molly looked down at the Nethneen beside her and could tell that his right pair of eyes was meeting her own. Even Joe was willing to talk.

“What’s going on?” She hoped her translator was not betraying her uneasiness; she had done her best, over the last few months, to condition it to convey to her any innuendo it could read in incoming messages, but would be just as glad now to have that a one-way operation. Joe’s answer seemed free of worry, but that could be due to similar management at his own end of the communication link.

“I don’t know. No normal sequence within my experience is running, but I have never ridden in a craft of this type before, so that is not very meaningful. I can suggest nothing but to wait a reasonable time and, if no information is received, to follow standard emergency usage.”

“I know the emergency procedures. What’s a reasonable time?”

The Nethneen was spared the need to answer. Another voice, inhumanly calm, sounded in both their translators.

“Permanent crew to Condition Four stations. Research students to your assigned lifecraft, Salvage Status Four. Crew students to your assigned permanent crew monitors.” The orders were not repeated, giving Molly for the first time in some days a sharp awareness that she was not among human beings. This was reinforced by the absence of chatter among the students in the conning room. A few quick, short sentences from senior team members, establishing who was present and who was not, and a cloud of weirdly shaped forms had pushed away from their stools, chairs, wrapping posts, couches, and other stations and were floating rapidly toward the room’s dozen exits. In the dusky, rubrous light of the place, the Human student was reminded of a picture she had once seen of a stream of bats entering a cave on the home world she had never visited.

She joined one of the streams, her left hand held by Joe’s tendrils. Although accustomed to a gravity over five times as great as his, she had spent fully half her life on spacecraft and was much more adept at weightless maneuvering than he. The Nethneen knew it and allowed her to transport them both; his twenty-one kilograms of mass gave her no problems as long as he accepted responsibility for holding on.

As they approached their chosen corridor, the crowd grew denser; there was no way to avoid personal contact, since very few of the beings were equipped by nature to fly. Courtesy ruled, however, and only gentle pushes, needed for steering, were used. Molly had transferred Joe to her back, below her life-support pack, by this time, and had both hands free; and as they swung into the cavernous space that led for most of the length of the flying schoolhouse she found and grasped the first of a series of handholds along what would have been a ceiling under normal acceleration. The passage was much wider than the door that had led into it, and the crowd proportionally thinner. Also, people were spreading out along the line of travel as their different speeds took effect. Molly did not yet use her full strength.

“Joe, is your armor in the boat or in your quarters?”

“Boat. Don’t worry about me.”

“All right. So is mine. Hang on.” She repeated rapidly, and as hard as she could without losing directional control, the one-hand-after-another chinning motion that carried her from one hold to the next, and accelerated their bodies to a speed that made the Nethneen feel a little tense. He said nothing, however; this did not seem a good time to question his companion’s strength or coordination. As long as she didn’t panic, of course, he amended the thought; these beings who had to breathe sometimes did when their gas supply was threatened, and the transparent affair she was wearing was no defense against vacuum. He decided not to say anything about that, either. Molly presumably had either thought of it and was controlling herself, or one could hope she wouldn’t think of it until they reached the boat.

Two Rimmore passed them too fast for Joe to tell whether either might be Jenny; they were even better adapted for this sort of climbing than human beings, and as amphibians were more casual about lack of effective gravity. He had time for only a brief and passing thought about the matter; a turn was coming up. He wound his limbs as best he could about the giant’s trunk, avoiding her refrigerator’s heat exhaust with great care, and concentrated on holding on.

Molly seized a rung at the edge of a side passage and held firmly, swinging into the smaller corridor and letting go at the critical moment. Joe was still with her, but broke contact as they floated free—there were no more course changes, the hatch that led to their own vessel was only fifty meters ahead, and he was uncomfortably warm from the output of her heat pump. The Human had aimed perfectly; they dulled through both air lock doors and brought up against I ho far wall of the main compartment beyond.

Apparently Jenny had not been one of the centipedelike figures that had passed them earlier; the only person already in the room was shaped much like Molly but little more than three quarters of the Human’s meter-and-two-thirds height. It was already encased in armor and as they entered greeted them by pushing their own safety equipment toward them, Joe’s gaping clamshell-fashion and Molly’s unzipped. Both combined their thanks with fast motion; the Nethneen was encased more quickly, as his nearly spherical body and serpentine limbs were far easier to fit. He was sealed in time to help Molly with her helmet.

“You made quick time, Carol,” the giant remarked as she checked her last snaps. “Thanks for getting the suits out.”

“I was here already,” replied the Shervah. “I was pretty sure you two would be first, since I knew you were on watch. The others must have their armor in their quarters; it isn’t here. If that’s the case, they won’t be hurrying.”

“Charley wouldn’t hurry anyway,” Molly remarked, “but you’re probably right. Is there anything useful on the board, or is this just another drill?”

“Nothing graphic. I heard an audible signal—probably the same one that started you here from Con, judging by the time—and put my big batteries on. Then I got your stuff out, opened it up, and waited.”

“Thanks again, Carol,” said Joe. “It sounds like a drill, but we’d better get to launch stations.” Neither he nor Molly needed to comment on the fact that the Shervah had only to power her armor; her normal air pressure was so much higher than that maintained in Classroom that the usual flexible envelopes worn by most of the other air-breathing students were hopelessly inadequate for her. Joe needed no protection from the relatively inert nitrogen around them, and would normally have gone uncovered if others had not objected to the mercaptans his skin evaporated. Molly used an oxygen-nitrogen mix at ship’s total pressure. Her body temperature, murderously high to most of the red-sun species, was handled by cooling fluid circulating through the suit skin and well refrigerated—in spite of the low ambient temperature, her body generated heat faster than the insulation of her garment would pass it—by a small unit between her shoulders. Carol, on the other hand, usually wore full pressure armor outside her private quarters; this needed only additional power for long-time life-support use.

None of the three was considering this point consciously; there were more immediate problems, starting with the two missing members of the team, but by no means ending with them.

“How much project equipment is loaded, if we do have to launch?” Joe queried in a soft voice.

“Most of mine,” replied Molly. “That is, most of what I absolutely need. I can use more, of course—the faster I can collect and date samples of crust, the better—but I can make do with what’s already on board.”

“I’d be happier staying near Classroom and salvaging from it for a while.” Carol’s voice, as Molly had programmed it in her own translator, was rather deep, in deliberate contrast to the speaker’s small size.

“We can’t do that,” the Human student pointed out. “If we have to launch at all, it will be because engines or power supplies have become unstable, or something like that. We can’t even stay nearby. We’ll have to head for Enigma in order to have a reasonable chance of being picked up alive.”

“Carol knows that. It was a statement of feeling.” Joe uttered the words with no obvious emotion of his own. “As it happens, you will both be far better off than I, if it comes to waiting on the planet without wasting time. I have only one master unit on my air-current trackers completed, of the twenty I am planning to use, and only four slaves for it. The amount of data I could secure in a reasonable time would hardly be worth the trip, and would certainly not make an impressive report.”

“I still think you should both focus on my dating method,” Molly pointed out. “The only problem they’ve really set us is ridiculously simple. Unless someone has set it up as a deliberate student trap, I can see no explanation except that the world is so young it hasn’t had time to lose its original gases, or at least the immediate secondary ones. That fits in with the suns of the system—with their luminosity, they can’t possibly be very old, either. It still seems to me that a good set of crustal dates, backed up by careful gas analysis down to isotope level, will let us make a good, solid case for that idea. Charley thinks so, too, and he agreed to help me get and date rock samples.”

“Or ice samples—don’t you human beings distinguish the two rather carefully?” interjected Joe.

“Of course, I…”

“Not of course to some of us. I admit the liquid water you drink isn’t quite the same as lava, but the distinction is a bit academic.”

“I didn’t mean the of course that way; I was conceding your point.”

“I hope Charley isn’t compromising his independence of thought,” Carol remarked. “He should have come up with some notion of his own, like the rest of us.”

“I doubt that any of us can be really original.” A new voice cut into the conversation, and two more armored figures floated into the chamber. Molly would have known that Charley was the speaker even without the identifying tone pattern supplied by her translator. The smaller newcomer, who looked in his armor like a slightly larger version of Joe, brought up against a wall and continued to express opinion. “That world has been known for a good many thousands of years—more than a hundred thousand—and about all that you can find out about it is what you’ve just said about the atmosphere.”

“That’s a bit exaggerated,” said Joe mildly.

“Only a bit. They’ve been using it as a lab subject all that time, and all the reports that come in get sealed. They want to keep on using it; it’s nearby, and convenient, and does make people think a little. I had a lot of ideas about it, but I’m quite sure Molly’s is the right one, so I’m doing her isotope analyses while she gets crust samples for dating.”

“You said it that way on your preliminary report?” Even Joe’s voice, Molly thought, showed a bit of doubt.

“Of course. How else should I have said it?”

“I’d have tried to find words suggesting that my own imagination had been at work,” replied Carol frankly.

“Even if it hadn’t?”

“Are you changing the subject, or admitting that yours wasn’t?”

“Neither. I was just a little surprised at the suggestion of using words to convey a misleading idea.”

“Or, at least, contrary to one’s own hopes for the fact.”

If Charley grasped Carol’s sarcasm, which was quite obvious to Molly, he gave no sign. “Anyway,” he said, reverting to the earlier point, “I submitted my exercise plan supporting Molly’s work, as 1 said; and they did approve it.”