Still River

Chapter Five Of Course The Boat Won’t Last

“You knew what was going to happen!” cried Charley. Molly shook her head. “We should have. Any air breather should have, but we were too slow. It didn’t occur to either of us—to any of us…” she included Carol with her glance—“that he would never think of wind, or what wind would do on a low-gravity world like this. Blame me or us all you want, but let’s decide what to do.”

“Ask him what condition he is in, I would say” was the suggestion from the Shervah.

“How—? Oh, of course. His translator should still be in touch. Joe? Can you hear us? Are you hurt?”

“Clearly enough. I am not hurt but greatly embarrassed. I was thinking only of the chemical effects of gases and had forgotten their physical potentialities.”

“Where are you? Are you still being blown away?” “I can offer no answer to the first question, even assuming the boat’s location as starting coordinate. I traveled for an unknown but brief time at an unknown speed in whatever direction the gas carried me. Just now I am no longer traveling. I struck a sloping surface composed of powdery material, was carried up it and over the top. I fell down the farther side, where the gas was not moving nearly so rapidly but much more erratically. I have dug my way into the surface, to avoid further involuntary travel, since I don’t know that the gas speed will remain low. I am presumably not very far from the boat. Since we have no absolute direction reference as yet, I suggest that you find which way the gas is moving now, as soon as you can; I would judge that its inertia would prevent a really great velocity change in this short time. This should provide the only clue I can think of at the moment to my direction.”

“How do we do that?” asked Charley. “I don’t think we have an instrument that would ...” His voice trailed off.

The three women were at the console, using the outside screens, looking first in one direction and then another.

“There’s a hill about half a kilometer away,” Carol pointed out. “There’ll be some eddying.”

“Do what we can,” replied Molly. “The sand, or snow, or whatever it is seems to be coming from about there.” She had her screen centered some thirty degrees to the right of Carol’s hill. After a few moments’ checking with their own viewers, the others agreed.

“Then Joe should be in the opposite direction.” Carol lined up her pickup as she spoke. “There does seem to be a broad, low hill that way. Maybe it’s the one you went over, Joe. I wish this stuff would stop blowing; we could see more clearly and maybe come after you.”

“If it would stop blowing, I could get back by myself,” the Nethneen pointed out. “How about it, you heavy-atmosphere types; do we expect this to go on indefinitely, or will it stop reasonably soon? Or does the fact that this planet rotates make prediction impossible?”

“Difficult,” replied Molly. “There isn’t time for a talk about weather and forecasting just now. I don’t know whether this wind is a local storm good for a few hours, or something that will last for the next twenty or thirty years until the season changes. Any planning we do had better include the breeze, and we’ll just be grateful for the luck if it drops.” The other air-breathers gestured agreement.

Charley, not used to feeling helpless and disliking the sensation, made a suggestion. “Couldn’t we take the ship to the other side of the hill?”

“We could,” answered Molly slowly, “if we were sure we could avoid putting it down on Joe if he’s there and getting back to this spot to restore his only possible reference point if he turns out not to be.”

Jenny suddenly straightened and elevated the front half of her two meter body. “We could send one of his own wind-robots after him!” she exclaimed. “They’re inertially guided and supposed to hold position or travel on a predetermined path regardless of the air current…”

“That sounds hopeful” came Joe’s voice. “But reprogramming will be needed first. They are programmed to fly into the wind—I wanted them to determine sources, not sinks. That can be changed, of course. Someone will have to make them go with the current, but at a very restricted speed so that I can catch it if it does come close—no, I won’t be able even to see it unless it comes pretty close. Someone will have to ride with it, using it as a vehicle, and alter its course or stop it when and as needed. You all know the machinery well enough to do the control changes; I think Jenny’s thought is excellent.”

“The idea is good, but offers practical difficulties,” pointed out Molly. “Your controls are easily keyed by your tendrils. Charley and Jenny and I can’t even get handlers in to them, and even if I could reach them, I don’t think my fingers are delicate enough to…”

“True,” cut in Carol. “Not to be critical, dear, but Humans are clumsy. You drop crumbs from your cake. Also you are large and massive, which may not mean too much in this gravity, but since the robots were not designed to carry anything and the driver will have to be fastened to the machine to keep from being blown away like Joe, it probably is significant. Let’s get one of those machines. I’ll rework the program.”

All four started to leave the conning room; Jenny stopped before they reached the door. “Charley, you’re enough to help Carol if she needs any. Molly and I had better stay here and observe. Our first trouble seems to have happened because we acted without learning enough about this place.”

“A good thought” came Joe’s voice. Charley seemed hesitant, but when Molly nodded and turned back with the Rimmore he swallowed whatever he had been about to say and went on with the small woman.

“Carol had better wear full environmental armor when she goes out,” the Human remarked as they settled back in the observing stations. “I think we’d better act as though we didn’t know how long we were going to be out whenever we go outside on this world.”

“No one thinks of everything.” Jenny performed her equivalent of a shrug.

“True, but I’d come to think of Joe as a bit above that sort of slip.”

“Maybe he had, too.” For a moment Molly wondered how the Nethneen would be affected by that remark; then she remembered that both translators would have shifted to private channels in response to the tones of the speakers. Most of the team members had established such links when the group first formed, though none existed between Charley and the two nonhuman women. Molly had been rather disturbed by this at the time, but decided that there was nothing she could say that would be better than silence. Some species, of course, had a strongly negative attitude toward the idea of privacy in any form—though this could not be Charley’s reason, since he had set up channels with Joe and Molly on his own initiative.

In any case, the remark had been made, Joe had probably not heard it, and if he had, he was either detached enough not to resent it or a good enough actor not to show it. Perhaps more important was the likelihood that Charley had not heard it, either.

Those thoughts flickered through Molly’s mind too quickly to interfere with important questions; she didn’t even miss Jenny’s next point.

“Carol will have to take Joe’s armor along.”

“I thought of that” came the Shervah’s voice. “Charley is getting it ready and will figure out some way of fastening it to the machine.”

“I’m afraid I was not foresighted enough to provide the bodies with convenient points of attachment,” Joe remarked. “I should have made more allowance for the unforeseen. I begin to see why the Faculty insists on a certain amount of laboratory and field work before granting any sort of rating.”

“That annoyed me when I first got here,” remarked Molly. “I had a perfectly good doctorate in structure from a place on New Pembroke and was quite ready to make clear how much I knew to anyone who cared. They let me lake charge of a lab group doing an exercise on Sink…”

“I know that one,” remarked Jenny.

“—and I started to set up some outside equipment in ordinary space armor. All that kept me from losing my feet was the fact that the gravity was low enough to let me walk fifty meters on my hands. My brains had nothing to do with it. An ice ball at a temperature of about six Kelvins can really suck heat from a suit; even my hands were losing their feeling by the time I got back to safety. The worst of it was that I couldn’t say anything to my six-year-old except that I’d been stupid, and his father had to agree with me.”

“Do you think the child will be able to profit by the lesson?” Jenny asked with interest.

“I can only hope. I certainly did. This Faculty knows enough about teaching to let us make our own mistakes, I found out. At least your robots can be reprogrammed, Joe,” pointed out Molly.

“When I was designing them, I had not made up my mind about the best way to use them. As you’ve already noticed, I did not give thought enough to who might have to do the programming.”

“Are conditions still the same where you are, Joe?” Jenny cut in. “I know you’ve buried yourself, but with this wind it might be wise to make sure you’re not getting buried even more deeply. That hill you were carried over sounded suspiciously like a dune, and if you can’t get to the surface when Carol is near you she might as well stay here.”

“My translator has no symbol for dune, but the concept of blowing sand makes sense. A moment while I try. It’s just as well this happened to me rather than you, Jenny; I can see nothing while buried, and for you the gravity is so weak you probably couldn’t tell which way is up.” He fell silent for a few seconds. “I’m uncovered. I don’t think I was any deeper, though I admit I hadn’t measured. I do have an impression that the slope of the hill that I descended is a trifle closer than when I dug in; is that the sort of thing you had in mind?”

“Precisely. I suggest you measure the distance from the nearest point now, give us the figure, and dig in again if you wish for another quarter hour. We’ll call you at that time to come out and make another measurement. I won’t be at all surprised if the dune is crawling toward you; they do that. Right, Molly? On your world, too?”

“Yes, or so I’ve read. I have no firsthand experience, and wouldn’t know what speed to expect.”

“I have.” Jenny’s tone was grim, over and above its usual grating sound.

“I am four meters from the slope, as nearly as I can judge” came Joe’s voice. “Something is starting to itch; I must dig in again.”

“Get a couple of meters farther, first,” snapped the Rimmore.

“All right.” Silence fell again. The two observers collected what data they could; Molly was a little surprised at the lack of basic instrumentation. There was no direct way to obtain wind velocity, for example. Granted that this was a spacecraft, it was also supposed to be part of a research facility. Even if the makers had not themselves been native to a planet with a reasonable atmosphere, anyone around a Leinster site—a place like Eta Carinae likely to attract pacefaring species because it was a scientific curiosity—should have at least heard of wind.

Of course, Joe hadn’t remembered it. And this was a student facility, designed to teach people not to take too much for granted, she must remember. She’d simply have to improvise. She and Jenny analyzed the gas around them, refined the work Jenny had already done on the dust/sand/snow, set up a computer watch on the inertial navigation system to get a more precise measure of the planet’s rotation rate and their latitude, located the sun by judicious selection of wavelengths in the boat’s sensors, established their present location arbitrarily as longitude zero for convenience in future work, and determined that astronomically t hey must be in the southern hemisphere. Just how far south, in both angular and linear units, would come with increasing precision over the next few minutes as the computer compared inertial data with Arc’s apparent motion.

Presently Jenny stopped work and called to Joe. “Dig out and see how far the hill is, please. 1 should have reminded you earlier but got absorbed.”

“I was thinking myself,” replied the Nethneen. “Just a moment.” It was rather more than the implied quarter of a minute, but the answer was a relief. “As far as I can tell, the slope is very little nearer—certainly not more than half a meter, and I think less. I must remember to keep a measuring device attached to my person in the future; this estimating is most unsatisfactory.”

“At least you’re not about to be buried alive,” responded Molly. “Dig in again if you want. Carol must be nearly ready to go out.”

“Just starting” came the voice of the tiny humanoid. “Charley has sealed up Joe’s armor so it won’t fill with sand before we get it to him and roped it to the robot so that it’ll stick—Joe and I may have trouble detaching it, but it won’t blow away.”

“Will you need help getting out?” asked Molly.

“No more than Charley can supply, I’d say. Watch from where you are, and make sure nothing goes wrong; you can keep Joe informed as long as I’m in sight. I’ll use one of the ports down here, as soon as Charley has his armor on, too. He’s not taking chances, either. Two or three minutes now. If you’re really as close as you think, I should be with you very quickly, Joe.”

The two observers switched active sensors to cover the ground where they expected Carol to appear, and waited, eyes on screens. There was no way to pick up the port itself, either from inside or out, and they both selected surface viewpoints a little downwind of its location—if anything did go wrong, they would catch it promptly.

Nothing did, however. “All right, close up again!” came Carol’s voice. “This thing is holding steady. Let me key in—there; one. Downwind drift at about a third of a meter a second—you should be seeing me any moment, up in Con. Let me know.”

Three or four seconds later both observers called out simultaneously. “There you are.” “Steady as a ground roller,” added Jenny. Molly was not sure whether the reference was to a vehicle or some animal native to Jenny’s world, but was equally satisfied with the situation. The robot was a vertical cylinder about a meter in diameter and three quarters as high, with the projecting rim of its field shaper forming a platform eighteen or twenty centimeter* wide around the bottom. Carol was standing on one side of this and Joe’s minor sprawled on the other, both attached with festoons of rope that looped around the entire structure. The ma-chine hung some ten centimeters clear of the ground, rock-leady in the still-violent wind; as its rider had said, its motion was perfectly smooth, controlled by its own inertial system, sensors, and drive fields. Carol’s thirty-plus kilograms on one side, poorly balanced by Joe’s empty suit on the other, did not seem to bother the drive system at all.

Molly and Jenny watched silently as the figure shrank with distance. The latter keyed in a ranging sensor and set automatic magnification to keep the image large enough for details; Molly kept her scale unchanged, preferring to see directly how Carol was approaching the dune, if dune it was, that lay downwind. It occurred to her that the robot 1might try to plow into the surface as the latter rose, but either Joe or Carol had anticipated that in the program; the Sher-vah started to ride up the hill without incident.

As she neared the top, Molly called out, “I don’t know whether you can tell slope very well from where you are, Carol, but it looks from here as though you were about to go over the edge that Joe described, if you’re really following his track. If the far side is really steep, will the robot stay upright? I don’t recall the guidance program well enough.”

“It should” came the Nethneen’s voice. “Tell me when he disappears—or Carol, you tell me when you start downhill—and I’ll dig out and watch for you.”

“I’m at the edge” was Carol’s immediate response. “The slope in front of me is very steep and loose. Sand is blowing past me and falling over—I can see why the hill is crawling toward you. Here I come.”

“Then it is a dune,” Jenny remarked with audible satisfaction.

“Not only that, it’s Joe’s dune,” replied Carol. “There he is, seventy or eighty meters to my right.”

“Can you see her, Joe?” asked Jenny.

“Not against the sky glare. It’s painful even to look up. The main question is whether she can see me, and that she’s answered.”

“Does that machine ride downhill all right?” asked Molly.

“It doesn’t know the difference,” the Shervah assured her. “I’ll be at the bottom in a few seconds. Joe, you can cover up again for a moment or two if the blowing stuff hurts; I know where you are but will have to redirect this thing. As you said, the air currents here are irregular, and I’ll have to cut the wind sensor out of the guidance plan and just travel—let’s see—this will take some time—no, not so long at that—there, that should do it. Come up again when I call out—now! Good! You can see me this time, surely.”

“Yes. Here you are. Let’s get that armor ready. Charley, did you improvise with these ropes, or do you have experience?”

“Well, I have used them before, but not very much. Is there some trouble?”

“With all due recognition that a knot should not untie itself, it should be possible for someone to untie it. This one—there, it’s coming now. Can you come around to this side yet, Carol?”

“Not yet. There was more than one knot. I have one here—now it’s coming—I’ll be right with you—there, it’s loose. WATCH OUT!”

“What’s the matter?” cried Molly.

“The armor is loose—it’s blowing away—even in this wind where we can stand!”

“Don’t worry,” said Joe. “There’s another rope holding it. Just don’t untie that one until I’m inside—it’s fastened to a leg piece, and I can open up without undoing it.”

“Some things don’t need experience,” Charley remarked complacently. “A little foresight is enough.”

“Your foresight is appreciated. The thought of chasing that suit at full wind speed…”

“We could have brought the ship over, now that we know where you are. We still can, if you want,” Molly cut in.

“I’d rather like to try riding the robot upwind, as it was meant to go, if Carol doesn’t object. We’ll have to change positions, Carol, so that I can get at the access panel. You don’t seem to have had any trouble with redirecting; I’d better make sure I can do it as easily.”

“All right. This last rope seems to go all the way around; we’ll stay inside it and work our way to the right simultaneously. It’s lucky we’re not as big as Molly or Jenny.”

“The drive would support them easily enough.”

“They’d have trouble fitting, though maybe one of them could balance on top. There, can you reach in?”

“Yes, thank you. There is another trouble that I had not thought of, though. The blowing sand is getting in when the access panel is open. If it packs too tightly, I will not be able to get at the controls themselves. There, I think we are all right. Hold on. We should now head upwind, at about the same speed you came down.”

The observers looked at each other. There was a faint grin on the Human face and an equivalent twist to the Rimmore body. Neither said anything, but Molly moved over to the boat’s main controls. Silence continued for another minute or more, to be broken finally by Joe’s quiet tones.

“Do any of you air breathers have a word for a wind that goes around in small circles?”

“We call such a current an eddy, Joe,” replied Molly. Shall I bring the boat over, or do you want to reprogram without using the pressure sensors?”

“Bring the boat. I don’t think I’d better open the panel again.” The translator was doing a good job; Joe’s tone carried resignation.

“Interesting but a bit anticlimactic.” Rather to Molly’s surprise, the remark was Carol’s. The little woman was back in the conning room, her armor shed; she had found time at last to improvise a simple transparent envelope that held her high pressure and showed her gleaming dark-brown fur. As far as could be told from appearance she was feeling no more excitement than her words suggested. Joe had no eyebrows to raise, but he shifted his body position enough to bring two pairs of his optics to bear on the speaker.

“If you are here for emotional release,” Joe said, “I wish you luck; but I must admit that I don’t plan to cooperate. I also admit that while that experience was educational—defining education as anything one lives through to profit by—I look back on it with much more embarrassment than pleasure. I can attribute the event to nothing but my own lack of thought.”

“As Molly said the time that I made a fool of myself, no one can foresee everything. Those of us who haven’t done something as silly so far will probably manage it before we finish here.”

“I hope you are wrong, Charley. Where are you now? The rest of us are ready to get the planned program going, I think. We should settle finally our personal schedules of activity.”

“All right. I can hear you. I’m trying to be foresighted again.”

“In what way?” rasped Jenny. “Where are you, anyway?”

“In the shop. I’m making handholds and tie rings to put on all the master robots, and distributing a hundred meters of rope on each.”

“Did you check with Joe?”

“I’m not harming his machinery, just cementing things to the outer shells, away from gas intakes, pressure sensors, and the like. In view of what just happened, I’m sure Joe would be the last to object.”

“A good thought. I should have done it myself,” admitted the Nethneen. “I strongly suggest, however, that no one leave the boat in future without very detailed planning and without taking as much potentially useful material as can conveniently be carried.”

Molly shook her head. “A standard emergency kit is one thing,” she said. “Everything one might need is hopeless.”

“Of course,” agreed Joe. “I realize that—there would be no upper limit, especially for beings who regard the creation of an imaginary series of events as an art form. You take me too literally.”

Molly smiled to herself but made no answer. Her first acquaintance with Joe and Charley, nearly a year before, had been during a School routine translator check. The institution’s central data handler on Think, one of the common planets of the Fire-Smoke binary, was still somewhat limited in Human-language figures of speech, and a Faculty group working on the problem had asked her to describe any of the students who happened to be near her at the moment, for the translator’s benefit. Charley had been a dozen meters away, and she had taken him as her subject; the computer had returned a symbol set that gave the Faculty analysts the impression that she had meant Joe, who was also in the neighborhood. The two did have a superficial resemblance, and neither student, when brought into the conversation, seemed to be offended by the mistake. Charley, after pointing out a dozen detail differences, emphasizing size, had closed with a commiserating “Even if he does grow up, he’ll never have a decent shell!”

Joe, much later in a private conversation with Molly and her husband, had explained why he hadn’t made the obvious answer, though by then the Humans knew him well enough to guess the reason. “It might have offended you, Molly; you have hard parts, too, even if they are inside. Like the main translator, I didn’t know about Human figurative expression—even irony—then.”

“I don’t know.” Charley’s voice brought Molly back to the present. “I’ve been thinking of quite a few things that might go wrong in this environment, and…”

“By all means design an emergency kit around them. One that I can carry—in a high wind combined with low gravity!” snapped Carol. The Kantrick made no answer, but Molly felt pretty sure that he wasn’t bothered. Here, too, he would probably take the suggestion literally.

After a brief pause that no one seemed inclined to interrupt, Jenny resumed the situation summary.

“We’ve just been reminded that we can not only fail in this exercise, we can get injured or killed while trying. I don’t know how many of your languages distinguish among terms for lab exercise, research, and exploration; if anyone got the same codes for any two of those, we’d better spend some time with the translators.” She paused, but no one spoke. “Good. This is not just an exercise, no matter what earlier students found out about this place that we haven’t been told. If nothing else, no machine is perfect, and if something serious goes wrong with the boat before the classroom gets back, we’ll have to live with the results.”

“We have the tent, which we’re supposed to set up first thing,” pointed out Charley.

“Precisely. If there were anyone else around to snatch us out of trouble, we wouldn’t have been supplied with so much emergency equipment. There are reaction dampers in a student chemistry lab, but not environmental armor unless reactions that even the instructors can’t handle are expected. Think it over. Joe was lucky. We can’t count on luck consistently.”

Molly noticed that there was no code break here, either; everyone’s translator had some term for luck. The real question, she thought, was whether it meant quite the same to all of them.

There was another pause, broken this time by Joe.

“Your points are well made, Jenny. The only precaution I can see for setting up the tent is that it not be too close downwind to any of those dunes. It is strong but might not take too large a hill climbing over it even in this gravity. As far as I can see, the ship’s present location should be all right, and Molly and Jenny have already started the coordinate system from here. Any other thoughts?”

“Should we check a few more spots on the planet to see whether this wind is universal?” asked Jenny. “A quieter region might be better and safer for the tent.”

“Could we be sure such a region would remain windless?”

The air breathers, even Jenny, all made emphatic negative gestures.

“Then the time spent looking for such a spot would probably be wasted. I propose we unload and set up here. Were you listening, Charley? Do you agree?”

“I heard. This is perfectly good for the tent, if that’s what you meant about my agreeing. We should get at it quickly, too; of course the boat isn’t going to last.”