Heavy Planet Part 2

Words and gestures combined in a chorus of emphatic negatives, with Dondragmer just a shade slower than the rest. Barlennan would have grinned had he possessed the physical equipment.

"Get ready for that hunt-I'll be listening to you," he dismissed his audience. They streamed obediently back toward the Bree, and their captain turned to give a suitably censored account of the conversation to Lackland. He was a little preoccupied, for the conversation just completed had given rise to several brand-new ideas in his mind; but they could be worked out when he had more leisure. Just now he wanted another ride on the tank roof.

4: BREAKDOWN.

The bay on the southern sh.o.r.e of which the Bree was beached was a tiny estuary some twenty miles long and two in width at its mouth. It opened from the southern sh.o.r.e of a larger gulf of generally similar shape some two hundred fifty miles long, which in turn was an offshoot of a broad sea which extended an indefinite distance into the northern hemisphere-it merged indistinguishably with the permanently frozen polar cap. All three bodies of liquid extended roughly east and west, the smaller ones being separated from the larger on their northern sides by relatively narrow peninsulas. The ship's position was better chosen than Barlennan had known, being protected from the northern storms by both peninsulas. Eighteen miles to the west, however, the protection of the nearer and lower of these points ceased; and Barlennan and Lackland could appreciate what even that narrow neck had saved them. The captain was once more ensconced on the tank, this time with a radio clamped beside him.

To their right was the sea, spreading to the distant horizon beyond the point that guarded the bay. Behind them the beach was similar to that on which the ship lay, a gently sloping strip of sand dotted with the black, rope-branched vegetation that covered so much of Mesklin. Ahead of them, however, the growths vanished almost completely. Here the slope was even flatter and the belt of sand grew ever broader as the eye traveled along it. It was not completely bare, though even the deep-rooted plants were lacking; but scattered here and there on the wave-channeled expanse were dark, motionless relies of the recent storm.

Some were vast, tangled ma.s.ses of seaweed, or of growths which could claim that name with little strain on the imagination; others were the bodies of marine animals, and some of these were even vaster. Lackland was a trifle startled-not at the size of the creatures, since they presumably were supported in life by the liquid in which they floated, but at the distance they lay from the sh.o.r.e. One monstrous hulk was sprawled over half a mile inland; and the Earthman began to realize just what the winds of Mesklin could do even in this gravity when they had a sixty-mile sweep of open sea in which to build up waves. He would have liked to go to the point where the sh.o.r.e lacked even the protection of the outer peninsula, but that would have involved a further journey of over a hundred miles.

"What would have happened to your ship, Barlennan, if the waves that reached here had struck it?"

"That depends somewhat on the type of wave, and where we were. On the open sea, we would ride over it without trouble; beached as the Bree now is, there would have been nothing left. I did not realize just how high waves could get this close to the Rim, of course-now that I think of it, maybe even the biggest would be relatively harmless, because of its lack of weight."

"I'm afraid it's not the weight that counts most; your first impression was probably right."

"I had some such idea in mind when I sheltered behind that point for the winter, of course. I admit I did not have any idea of the actual size the waves could reach here at the Rim. It is not too surprising that explorers tend to disappear with some frequency in these lat.i.tudes."

"This is by no means the worst, either. You have that second point, which is rather mountainous if I recall the photos correctly, protecting this whole screcch."

"Second point? I did not know about that. Do you mean that what I can see beyond the peninsula there is merely another bay?"

"That's right. I forgot you usually stayed in sight of land. You coasted along to this point from the west, then, didn't you?"

"Yes. These seas are almost completely unknown. This particular sh.o.r.e line extends about three thousand miles in a generally westerly direction, as you probably know-I'm just beginning to appreciate what looking at things from above can do for you-and then gradually bends south. It's not too regular; there's one place where you go east again for a couple of thousand miles, but I suppose the actual straight-line distance that would bring you opposite my home port is about sixteen thousand miles to the south-a good deal farther coasting, of course. Then about twelve hundred miles across open sea to the west would bring me home. The waters about there are very well known, of course, and any sailor can cross them without more than the usual risks of the sea."

While they had been talking, the tank had crawled away from the sea, toward the monstrous hulk that lay stranded by the recent storm. Lackland, of course, wanted to examine it in detail, since he had so far seen practically none of Mesklin's animal life; Barlennan, too, was willing. He had seen many of the monsters that thronged the seas he had traveled all his life, but he was not sure of this one.

Its shape was not too surprising for either of them. It might have been an unusually streamlined whale or a remarkably stout sea snake; the Earthman was reminded of the Zeuglodon that had haunted the seas of his own world thirty million years before. However, nothing that had ever lived on Earth and left fossils for men to study had approached the size of this thing. For six hundred feet it lay along the still sandy soil; in life its body had apparently been cylindrical, and over eighty feet in diameter. Now, deprived of the support of the liquid in which it had lived, it bore some resemblance to a wax model that had been left too long in the hot sun. Though its flesh was presumably only about half as dense as that of Earthly life, its tonnage was still something to stagger Lackland when he tried to estimate it; and the three-times-Earth-normal gravity had done its share.

"Just what do you do when you meet something like this at sea?" he asked Barlennan.

"I haven't the faintest idea," the Mesklinite replied dryly. "I have seen things like this before, but only rarely. They usually stay in the deeper, permanent seas; I have seen one once only on the surface, and about four cast up as is this one. I do not know what they eat, but apparently they find it far below the surface. I have never heard of a ship's being attacked by one."

"You probably wouldn't," Lackland replied pointedly. "I find it hard to imagine any survivors in such a case. If this thing feeds like some of the whales on my own world, it would inhale one of your ships and probably fail to notice it. Let's have a look at its mouth and find out." He started the tank once more, and drove it along to what appeared to be the head end of the vast body.

The thing had a mouth, and a skull of sorts, but the latter was badly crushed by its own weight. There was enough left, however, to permit the correction of Lackland's guess concerning its eating habits; with those teeth, it could only be carnivorous. At first the man did not recognize them as teeth; only the fact that they were located in a peculiar place for ribs finally led him to the truth.

"You'd be safe enough, Barl," he said at last. "That thing wouldn't dream of attacking you. One of your ships would not be worth the effort, as far as its appet.i.te is concerned-I doubt that it would notice anything less than a hundred times the Bree's size."

"There must be a lot of meat swimming around in the deeper seas," replied the Mesklinite thoughtfully. "I don't see that it's doing anyone much good, though."

"True enough. Say, what did you mean a little while ago by that remark about permanent seas? What other kind do you have?"

"I referred to the areas which are still ocean just before the winter storms begin," was the reply. "The ocean level is at its highest in early spring, at the end of the storms, which have filled the ocean beds during the winter. All the rest of the year they shrink again. Here at the Rim, where sh.o.r.e lines are so steep, it doesn't make much difference; but up where weight is decent the sh.o.r.e line may move anywhere from two hundred to two thousand miles between spring and fall." Lackland emitted a low whistle.

"In other words," he said, half to himself, "your oceans evaporate steadily for over four of my years, precipitating frozen methane on the north polar cap, and then get it all back in the five months or so that the northern hemisphere spends going from its spring to autumn. If I was ever surprised at those storms, that ends it." He returned to more immediate matters.

"Barl, I'm going to get out of this tin box. I've been wanting samples of the tissue of Mesklin's animal life ever since we found it existed, and I couldn't very well take a paring from you. Will the flesh of this thing be very badly changed in the length of time it has probably been dead? I suppose you'd have some idea."

"It should still be perfectly edible for us, though from what you have said you could never digest it. Meat usually becomes poisonous after a few hundred days unless it is dried or otherwise preserved, and during all that time its taste gradually changes. I'll sample a bit of this, if you'd like." Without waiting for an answer and without even a guilty glance around to make sure that none of his crew had wandered in this direction, Barlennan launched himself from the roof of the tank toward the vast bulk beside it. He misjudged badly, sailing entirely over the huge body, and for just an instant felt a twinge of normal panic; but he was in full control of himself before he landed on the farther side. He leaped back again, judging his distance better this time, and waited while Lackland opened the door of his vehicle and emerged. There was no air lock on the tank; the man was still wearing pressure armor, and had simply permitted Mesklin's atmosphere to enter after closing his helmet. A faint swirl of white crystals followed him out-ice and carbon dioxide, frozen out of the Earth-type air inside as it cooled to Mesklin's bitter temperature. Barlennan had no sense of smell, but he felt a burning sensation in his breathing pores as a faint whiff of oxygen reached him, and jumped hastily backward. Lackland guessed correctly at the cause of his action and apologized profusely for not giving proper warning.

"It is nothing," the captain replied. "I should have foreseen it-I got the same sensation once before when you left the Hill where you live, and you certainly told me often enough how the oxygen you breathe differs from our hydrogen-you remember, when I was learning your language."

"I suppose that's true. Still, I could hardly expect a person who hasn't grown up accustomed to the idea of different worlds and different atmospheres to remember the possibility all the time. It was still my fault. However, it seems to have done you no harm; I don't yet know enough about the life chemistry of Mesklin even to guess just what it might do to you. That's why I want samples of this creature's flesh."

Lackland had a number of instruments in a mesh pouch on the outside of his armor, and while he was fumbling among them with his pressure gauntlets Barlennan proceeded to take the first sample. Four sets of pincers shredded a portion of skin and underlying tissue and pa.s.sed it along to his mouth; for a few moments he chewed reflectively.

"Not at all bad," he remarked at last. "If you don't need all of this thing for your tests, it might be a good idea to call the hunting parties over here. They'd have time to make it before the storm gets going again, I should think, and there'll certainly be more meat than they could reasonably expect to get any other way."

"Good idea," Lackland grunted. He was giving only part of his attention to his companion; most of it was being taken up by the problem of getting the point of a scalpel into the ma.s.s before him. Even the suggestion that he might be able to use the entire monstrous body in a laboratory investigation-the Mesklinite did possess a sense of humor-failed to distract him.

He had known, of course, that living tissue on this planet must be extremely tough. Small as Barlennan and his people were, they would have been flattened into senseless pulp under Mesklin's polar gravity had their flesh been of mere Earthly consistency. He had expected some difficulty in getting an instrument through the monster's skin; but he had more or less unthinkingly a.s.sumed that, once through, his troubles would be over in that respect. He was now discovering his error; the meat inside seemed to have the consistency of teak. The scalpel was of a superhard alloy which would have been difficult to dull against anything as long as mere muscular strength was employed, but he could not drive it through that ma.s.s and finally had to resort to sc.r.a.ping. This produced a few shreds which he sealed in a collecting bottle.

"Is any part of this thing likely to be softer?" he asked the interested Mesklinite as he looked up from this task. "I'm going to need power tools to get enough out of this body to satisfy the boys on Toorey."

"Some parts inside the mouth might be a little more tractable," Barlennan replied. "However, it would be easier for me to nip off pieces for you, if you'll tell me the sizes and parts you want. Will that be all right, or do your scientific procedures demand that the samples be removed with metal instruments for some reason?"

"Not that I know of-thanks a lot; if the bio boys don't like it they can come down and do their own carving," returned Lackland. "Go right ahead. Let's follow your other suggestion, too, and get something from the mouth; I'm not really sure I'm through skin here." He waddled painfully around the head of the stranded behemoth to a point where gravity-distorted lips had exposed teeth, gums, and what was presumably a tongue. "Just get bits small enough to go in these bottles without crowding." The Earthman tentatively tried the scalpel once more, finding the tongue somewhat less obdurate than the earlier sample, while Barlennan obediently nipped off fragments of the desired size. An occasional piece found its way to his mouth-he was not really hungry, but this was fresh meat-but in spite of this drain the bottles were soon filled.

Lackland straightened up, stowing the last of the containers as he did so, and cast a covetous glance at the pillarlike teeth. "I suppose it would take blasting gelatine to get one of those out," he remarked rather sadly.

"What is that?" asked Barlennan.

"An explosive-a substance that changes into gas very suddenly, producing loud noise and shock. We use such material for digging, removing undesirable buildings or pieces of landscape, and sometimes in fighting."

"Was that sound an explosive?" Barlennan asked.

For an instant Lackland made no answer. A boom! of very respectable intensity, heard on a planet whose natives are ignorant of explosives and where no other member of the human race is present, can be rather disconcerting, especially when it picks such an incredibly apt time to happen; and to say that Lackland was startled would be putting it mildly. He could not judge accurately the distance or size of the explosion, having heard it through Barlennan's radio and his own sound discs at the same time; but a distinctly unpleasant suspicion entered his mind after a second or two.

"It sounded very much like one," he answered the Mesklinite's question somewhat belatedly, even as he started to waddle back around the head of the dead sea monster to where he had left the tank. He rather dreaded what he would find. Barlennan, more curious than ever, followed by his more natural method of travel, crawling.

For an instant, as the tank came in sight, Lackland felt an overwhelming relief; but this changed to an equally profound shock as he reached the door of the vehicle.

What remained of the floor consisted of upcurled sc.r.a.ps of thin metal, some still attached at the bases of the walls and others tangled among the controls and other interior fittings. The driving machinery, which had been under the floor, was almost completely exposed, and a single glance was enough to tell the dismayed Earthman that it was hopelessly wrecked. Barlennan was intensely interested in the whole phenomenon.

"I take it you were carrying some explosive in your tank," he remarked. "Why did you not use it to get the material you wanted from this animal? And what made it act while it was still in the tank?"

"You have a genius for asking difficult questions," Lackland replied. "The answer to your first one is that I was not carrying any; and to the second, your guess is as good as mine at this point."

"But it must have been something you were carrying," Barlennan pointed out. "Even I can see that whatever it was happened under the floor of your tank, and wanted to get out; and we don't have things that act like that on Mesklin."

"Admitting your logic, there was nothing under that floor that I can imagine blowing up," replied the man. "Electric motors and their acc.u.mulators just aren't explosive. A close examination will undoubtedly show traces of whatever it was if it was in any sort of container, since practically none of the fragments seem to have gone outside the tank-but I have a rather worse problem to solve first, Barl."

"What is that?"

"I am eighteen miles from food supplies, other than what is carried in my armor. The tank is ruined; and if there was ever an Earthman born who could walk eighteen miles in eight-atmosphere heated armor under three gravities, I'm certainly not the one. My air will last indefinitely with these algae gills and enough sunlight, but I'd starve to death before I made the station."

"Can't you call your friends on the faster moon, and have them send a rocket to carry you back?"

"I could; probably they already know, if anyone is in the radio room to hear this conversation. The trouble is if I have to get that sort of help Doc Rosten will certainly make me go back to Toorey for the winter; I had trouble enough as it was persuading him to let me stay. He'll have to hear about the tank, but I want to tell him from the station-after getting back there without his help. There just isn't energy around here to get me back, though; and even if I could get more food into the containers in this armor without letting your air in, you couldn't get into the station to get the food."

"Let's call my crew, anyway," Barlennan remarked. "They can use the food that's here-or as much of it as they can carry. I have another idea too, I think."

"We are coming, Captain." Dondragmer's voice came from the radio, startling Lackland, who had forgotten his arrangement to let each radio hear the others, and startling the commander himself, who had not realized that his mate had learned so much English. "We will be with you in a few days at most; we took the same general direction as the Flyer's machine when we started." He gave this information in his native language; Barlennan translated for Lackland's benefit.

"I can see that you won't be hungry for quite a while," the man replied, glancing somewhat ruefully at the mountain of meat beside them, "but what was this other idea of yours? Will it help with my problem?"

"A little, I think." The Mesklinite would have smiled had his mouth been sufficiently flexible. "Will you please step on me?"

For several seconds Lackland stood rigid with astonishment at the request; after all, Barlennan looked more like a caterpillar than anything else, and when a man steps on a caterpillar-then he relaxed, and even grinned.

"All right, Barl. For a moment I'd forgotten the circ.u.mstances." The Mesklinite had crawled over to his feet during the pause; and without further hesitation Lackland took the requested step. There proved to be only one difficulty.

Lackland had a ma.s.s of about one hundred sixty pounds. His armor, an engineering miracle in its own way, was about as much more. On Mesklin's equator, then, man and armor weighed approximately nine hundred fifty pounds-he could not have moved a step without an ingenious servo device in the legs-and this weight was only about a quarter greater than that of Barlennan in the polar regions of his planet. There was no difficulty for the Mesklinite in supporting that much weight; what defeated the attempt was simple geometry. Barlennan was, in general, a cylinder a foot and a half long and two inches in diameter; and it proved a physical impossibility for the armored Earthman to balance on him.

The Mesklinite was stumped; this time it was Lackland who thought of a solution. Some of the side plates on the lower part of the tank had been sprung by the blast inside; and under Lackland's direction Barlennan, with considerable effort, was able to wrench one completely free. It was about two feet wide and six long, and with one end bent up slightly by the native's powerful nippers, it made an admirable sledge; but Barlennan, on this part of his planet, weighed about three pounds. He simply did not have the necessary traction to tow the device-and the nearest plant which might have served as an anchor was a quarter of a mile away. Lackland was glad that a red face had no particular meaning to the natives of this world, for the sun happened to be in the sky when this particular fiasco occurred. They had been working both day and night, since the smaller sun and the two moons had furnished ample light in the absence of the storm clouds.

5: MAPPING JOB.

The crew's arrival, days later, solved Lackland's problem almost at once.

The mere number of natives, of course, was of little help; twenty-one Mesklinites still did not have traction enough to move the loaded sledge. Barlennan thought of having them carry it, placing a crew member under each corner; and he went to considerable trouble to overcome the normal Mesklinite conditioning against getting under a ma.s.sive object. When he finally succeeded in this, however, the effort proved futile; the metal plate was not thick enough for that sort of treatment, and buckled under the armored man's weight so that all but the supported corner was still in contact with the ground.

Dondragmer, with no particular comment, spent the time that this test consumed in paying out and attaching together the lines which were normally used with the hunting nets. They proved, in series, more than long enough to reach the nearest plants; and the roots of these growths, normally able to hold against the worst that Mesklin's winds could offer, furnished all the support needed. Four days later a train of sledges, made from all the accessible plates of the tank, started back toward the Bree with Lackland and a tremendous load of meat aboard; and at a fairly steady rate of a mile an hour, reached the ship in sixty-one days. Two more days of work, with more crew members a.s.sisting, got Lackland's armor through the vegetation growing between the ship and his dome, and delivered him safely at the air lock. It was none too soon; the wind had already picked up to a point where the a.s.sisting crew had to use ground lines in getting back to the Bree, and clouds were once again whipping across the sky.

Lackland ate, before bothering to report officially what had happened to the tank. He wished he could make the report more complete; he felt somehow that he should know what had actually happened to the vehicle. It was going to be very difficult to accuse someone on Toorey of inadvertently leaving a cake of gelatine under the tank's floor.

He had actually pressed the call b.u.t.ton on the station-to-satellite set when the answer struck him; and when Dr. Rosten's lined face appeared on the screen he knew just what to say.

"Doc, there's a spot of trouble with the tank."

"So I understand. Is it electrical or mechanical? Serious?"

"Basically mechanical, though the electrical system had a share. I'm afraid it's a total loss; what's left of it is stranded about eighteen miles from here, west, near the beach."

"Very nice. This planet is costing a good deal of money one way and another. Just what happened-and how did you get back? I don't think you could walk eighteen miles in armor under that gravity."

"I didn't-Barlennan and his crew towed me back. As nearly as I can figure out about the tank, the floor part.i.tion between c.o.c.kpit and engine compartment wasn't airtight. When I got out to do some investigating, Mesklin's atmosphere-high-pressure hydrogen-began leaking in and mixing with the normal air under the floor. It did the same in the c.o.c.kpit, too, of course, but practically all the oxygen was swept out through the door from there and diluted below danger point before anything happened. Underneath-well, there was a spark before the oxygen went."

"I see. What caused the spark? Did you leave motors running when you went out?"

"Certainly-the steering servos, dynamotors, and so on. I'm glad of it, too; if I hadn't, the blast would probably have occurred after I got back in and turned them on."

"Hmph." The director of the Recovery Force looked a trifle disgruntled. "Did you have to get out at all?" Lackland thanked his stars that Rosten was a biochemist.

"I didn't exactly have to, I suppose. I was getting tissue samples from a six-hundred-foot whale stranded on the beach out there. I thought someone might-"

"Did you bring them back?" snapped Rosten without letting Lackland finish.

"I did. Come down for them when you like-and have we another tank you could bring along?"

"We have. I'll consider letting you have it when winter is over; I think you'll be safer inside the dome until then. What did you preserve the specimens with?"

"Nothing special-hydrogen-the local air. I supposed that any of our regular preservatives would ruin them from your point of view. You'd better come for them fairly soon; Barlennan says that meat turns poisonous after a few hundred days, so I take it they have micro-organisms here."

"Be funny if they hadn't. Stand by; I'll be down there in a couple of hours." Rosten broke the connection without further comment about the wrecked tank, for which Lackland felt reasonably thankful. He went to bed, not having slept for nearly twenty-four hours.

He was awakened-partially-by the arrival of the rocket. Rosten had come down in person, which was not surprising. He did not even get out of his armor; he took the bottles, which Lackland had left in the air lock to minimize the chance of oxygen contamination, took a look at Lackland, realized his condition, and brusquely ordered him back to bed.

"This stuff was probably worth the tank," he said briefly. "Now get some sleep. You have some more problems to solve-I'll talk to you again when there's a chance you'll remember what I say. See you later." The airlock door closed behind him.

Lackland did not, actually, remember Rosten's parting remarks; but he was reminded, many hours later, when he had slept and eaten once more.

"This winter, when Barlennan can't hope to travel, will last only another three and a half months," the a.s.sistant director started almost without preamble. "We have several reams of telephotos up here which are not actually fitted into a map, although they've been collated as far as general location is concerned. We couldn't make a real map because of interpretation difficulties. Your job for the rest of this winter will be to get in a huddle with those photos and your friend Barlennan, turn them into a usable map, and decide on a route which will take him most quickly to the material we want to salvage."

"But Barlennan doesn't want to get there quickly. This is an exploring-trading voyage as far as he's concerned, and we're just an incident. All we've been able to offer him in return for that much help is a running sequence of weather reports, to help in his normal business."

"I realize that. That's why you're down there, if you remember; you're supposed to be a diplomat. I don't expect miracles-none of us do-and we certainly want Barlennan to stay on good terms with us; but there's two billion dollars' worth of special equipment on that rocket that couldn't leave the pole, and recordings that are literally priceless-"

"I know, and I'll do my best," Lackland cut in, "but I could never make the importance of it clear to a native-and I don't mean to belittle Batlennan's intelligence; he just hasn't the background. You keep an eye out for breaks in these winter storms, so he can come up here and study the pictures whenever possible."

"Couldn't you rig some sort of outside shelter next to a window, so he could stay up even during bad weather?"

"I suggested that once, and he won't leave his ship and crew at such times. I see his point."

"I suppose I do too. Well, do the best that you can-you know what it means. We should be able to learn more about gravity from that stuff than anyone since Einstein." Rosten signed off, and the winter's work began.

The grounded research rocket, which had landed under remote control near Mesklin's south pole and had failed to take off after presumably recording its data, had long since been located by its telemetering transmitters. Choosing a sea and/or land route to it from the vicinity of the Bree's winter quarters, however, was another matter. The ocean travel was not too bad; some forty or forty-five thousand miles of coastal travel, nearly half of it in waters already known to Barlennan's people, would bring the salvage crew as close to the helpless machine as this particular chain of oceans ever got. That, unfortunately, was some four thousand miles; and there simply were no large rivers near that section of coast which would shorten the overland distance significantly.

There was such a stream, easily navigable by a vessel like the Bree, pa.s.sing within fifty miles of the desired spot; but it emptied into an ocean which had no visible connection with that which Barlennan's people sailed. The latter was a long, narrow, highly irregular chain of seas extending from somewhat north of the equator in the general neighborhood of Lackland's station almost to the equator on the opposite side of the planet, pa.s.sing fairly close to the south pole on the way-fairly close, that is, as distances on Mesklin went. The other sea, into which the river near the rocket emptied, was broader and more regular in outline; the river mouth in question was at about its southernmost point, and it also extended to and past the equator, merging at last with the northern icecap. It lay to the east of the first ocean chain, and appeared to be separated from it by a narrow isthmus extending from pole to equator-narrow, again by Mesklinite standards. As the photographs were gradually pieced together, Lackland decided that the isthmus varied from about two to nearly seven thousand miles in width.