Heavy Planet Part 26

He donned his suit again and went out through the bridge lock. Here the curve of the hull hid the pool from view, and he began to make his way down the holdfasts as rapidly as he could in the poor visibility. As he went, he hooted urgently to Borndender, "Don't let the wire melt again! Turn off the power!"

An answering but wordless hoot told him that he had been heard, but no other information came through the white blankness. He continued to grope his way downward, finally reaching the bottom of the hull curve. Below him, separated from his level by the thickness of the mattress and two thirds the height of the trucks, was the gently steaming surface of the water. It was not, of course, actively boiling at this pressure; but it was hot even by human standards and the captain had no illusions about the ability of an air suit to protect him from it. It occurred to him, rather late, that there was an excellent chance that he had just cooked his two missing helmsmen to death. This was only a pa.s.sing thought; there was work to be done.

The power box lay well aft of his present position, but the nearest surface on which he could walk had to be forward. Either way there was going to be trouble reaching the unit, now presumably surrounded by hot water; but if jumping were going to be necessary, the hull holdfasts were about the poorest possible takeoff point. Dondragmer went forward.

This brought him into clear air almost at once, and he saw that his two men were gone. Presumably they had started around the far side of the pool in the hope of carrying out his order. The captain continued forward, and in another yard or two found it possible to descend to solid ice. He did so, and hastened on what he hoped was the trail of his men.

He had to slow down almost at once, however, as his course brought him back into the ice fog. He was too close to the edge of the pool to take chances. As he went he called repeatedly, and was rea.s.sured to hear each hoot answered by another. His men had not yet fallen in.

He caught up with them almost under the cruiser's stern, having walked entirely around the part of the pool not bounded by the hull. None of them had accomplished anything; the power unit was not only out of reach but out of sight. Jumping would have been utter lunacy, even if Mesklinites normally tended to think of such a thing. Borndender and his a.s.sistant had not, and the idea had only occurred to Dondragmer because of his unusual experiences in Mesklin's low-gravity equatorial zone so long ago.

But there could not be much more time. Looking over the edge of the ice, the three could catch glimpses of the rounded tops of the rocks, separated by water surfaces which narrowed as they watched. The wire must be practically out of water by now; chance alone would not have let it settle between the stones to a point much lower than their average height, and the protecting water was already there. The captain had been weighing the various risks for minutes; without further hesitation, and without issuing any orders, he slipped over the edge and dropped two feet to the top of one of the boulders.

It was the energy equivalent of an eight-story fall on Earth, and even the Mesklinite was jolted. However, he retained his self-command. A single hoot told those above that he had survived without serious injury, and warned them against following in case pride might have furnished an impulse which intelligence certainly would not. The captain, with that order issued, relegated the scientists to the back of his mind and concentrated on the next step.

The nearest rock with enough exposed area to accommodate him was two feet, well over a body length, away, but it was at least visible. Better still, a closer one only slightly off the line to it exposed a square inch or so of its surface. Two seconds after a.n.a.lyzing this situation, Dondragmer was two feet closer to the power box and looking for another stopping point. The lone square inch of the stepping stone had been touched by perhaps a dozen feet as the red-and-black length of his body had ricocheted from it to the second rock.

The next stage was more difficult. It was harder to be sure which way to go, since the hull which had furnished orientation was now barely visible; also, there were no more large surfaces as close as the one from which he had come. He hesitated, looking and planning; before he reached a decision the question was resolved for him. The grumbling sound which had gone on for so many minutes as water exploded into steam against the hot wire and almost instantly collapsed again under Dhrawn's atmospheric pressure abruptly ceased, and Dondragmer knew that he was too late to save the metal. He relaxed immediately and waited where he was while the water cooled, the evaporation slowed, and the fog of ice crystals cleared away. He himself grew uncomfortably warm, and was more than once tempted to return the way he had come; but the two-foot climb up an ice overhang with hot water at its foot, which would form part of the journey, made the temptation easy to resist. He waited.

He was still alive when the air cleared and crystals of ice began to grow around the edges of the rocks. He was some six feet from the power unit, and was able to reach it by a rather zigzag course over the cobbles once the way could be seen. He shut off the power controls, and only when that was done did he look around.

His two men had already made their way along the ice cliff to a point about level with the original front bend of the wire; Dondragmer guessed that this must be where the metal had again melted through.

In the other direction, under the bulk of the hull, was a black cavern which the Kwembly's lights did not illuminate. The captain had no real wish to enter it; it was very likely that he would find the bodies of his two helmsmen there. His hesitation was observed from above.

"What's he waiting there at the power box for?" muttered McDevitt. "Oh, I suppose the ice isn't thick enough for him yet."

"That's not all of it, I'd guess." Benj's tone made the meteorologist look sharply away from the screen.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"You must know what's the matter. Beetch and his friend were under there. They must have been. How could they have gotten away from that hot water? I bet the captain only just thought of it; he'd never have let them use that way if he'd seen what would happen, any more than I would have. Can you imagine what happened to Beetch?"

McDevitt thought rapidly; the boy wouldn't be convinced, or even comforted, by anything but sound reasoning, and McDevitt's soundest reasoning suggested that Benj's conclusion was probably right. However, he tried.

"It looks bad, but don't give up. It doesn't look as though this thing melted its way all the way across under the ship, but it might have; and either way there's some hope. If it did, they could have gotten out the other side, which we can't see; if it didn't, they could have stayed right at the edge of the liquid zone, where the ice could have saved them. Also, they may not have been under there."

"Water ice save them? I thought you said that this stuff froze because it lost its ammonia, not because the temperature went down. Water ice at its melting point, zero centigrade, would give heat-stroke to a Mesklinite."

"That was my guess," admitted the meteorologist, "but I'm certainly not sure of it. I don't have enough measurements of any sort. I admit your little friend may have been killed; but we know so little of what has happened down there that it would be silly to give up hope. Just wait, there's nothing else to do at this distance anyway. Even Dondragmer is staying put. You can trust him to check as soon as it's possible."

Benj restrained himself, and did his best to look for bright possibilities; but the eye he was supposed to be keeping on Stakendee remained fixed on the captain's image.

Several times Dondragmer extended part of his length onto the ice, but each time he drew back again, to the boy's intense annoyance. At last, however, he seemed satisfied that the ice would hold his weight, and inch by inch extended himself entirely onto the newly frozen surface. Once off the power box he waited for a moment as though expecting something to happen; the ice held, and he resumed his way toward the side of the Kwembly. The human beings watched; Benj's fists were clenched tightly and even the man was more tense than usual.

They could hear nothing. Not even the hoot, which suddenly echoed across the ice, penetrated the bridge to affect their communicator. They could not even guess why Dondragmer suddenly turned back from the hull as he was about to disappear under it. They could only watch as he raced back across the ice to a point just below his two men and waved excitedly at them, apparently indifferent to whatever there was to be learned about the fate of his helmsman and Benj's friend.

12: GUIDED EXTRAPOLATION.

Dondragmer was far from indifferent, but by his standards it was normal to focus attention on a new matter likely to require action rather than to clear up an old one where action was unlikely to help. He had not forgotten the fate of his men but when a distant hoot bore the words "Here's the end of the stream," his program changed abruptly and drastically.

He could not see where the voice was coming from, since he was two feet below the general surface, but Borndender reported glimpses of a light perhaps half a mile away. At the captain's order, the scientist climbed the hull part way to get a better view, while his a.s.sistant went in search of a rope to get the captain out of the ice pit. This took time. The sailors had, with proper professional care, returned the lines used in lowering the radiator bar to their proper places inside the cruiser; and when Skendra, Borndender's a.s.sistant, tried to get through the main lock he found it sealed by a layer of clear ice which had frozen a quarter of an inch thick on the starboard side of the hull, evidently from the vapor emitted by the hot pool. Fortunately most of the holdfasts were projecting far enough through this to be usable, so he was able to climb on up to the bridge lock.

Meanwhile, Borndender called down that there were two lights approaching across the river bed. At the captain's order, he howled questions across the thouand-yard gap, and the two listened carefully for answers: even Mesklinite voices had trouble carrying distinct words for such a distance and through two layers of air suit fabric. By the time Dondragmer was out of the hole, they knew that the approaching men were the part of Stakendee's command which had been ordered downstream: they had reached its end less than a mile from the ship, but until the group actually reached them, no further details could be obtained.

When they were, the officers could not entirely understand them; the description did not match anything familiar.

"The river stayed about the same size all the way down," the sailors reported. "It wasn't being fed from anywhere, and didn't seem to be evaporating. It wound among the stones a lot, when it got down to where they were. Then we began to run into the funniest obstructions. There would be a sort of dam of ice, with the stream running around one end or the other of it. Half a cable or so farther on there'd be another dam, with just the same thing happening. It was as though some of it froze when it met the ice among the stones, but only the lead part. The water that followed stayed liquid and went on around the dam until it found some ice. The dams would build up to maybe half a body length high before the following water would find its way around. We reached the last one, where it was still happening, just a few minutes ago. We'd seen the bright cloud rising over the ship before that, and wondered whether we ought to come back in case something was wrong, but we decided to carry out orders at least until the river started to lead us away from the Kwembly again."

"Good," said the captain. "You're sure the stream wasn't getting any bigger?"

"As nearly as we could judge, no."

"All right. Maybe we have more time than I thought, and what's happening isn't a prelude to what brought us here. I wish I understood why the liquid was freezing in that funny way, though."

"We'd better check with the human beings," suggested Borndender, who had no ideas on the matter either but preferred not to put the fact too bluntly.

"Right. And they'll want measurements and a.n.a.lyses. I suppose you didn't bring a sample of that river," he said, rather than asked, the newcomers.

"No, sir. We had nothing to carry it in."

"All right. Born, get containers and bring some back; a.n.a.lyze it as well and as quickly as you can. One of these men will guide you. I'll go back to the bridge and bring the humans up to date. The rest of you get tools and start chipping ice so we can use the main lock." Dondragmer closed the conversation by starting to climb the ice-crusted hull. He waved toward the bridge as he went, a.s.suming that he was being watched and perhaps even recognized.

Benj and McDevitt had managed to keep track of him, though neither found it easy to tell Mesklinites apart. They were waiting eagerly when he reached the bridge to hear what he had to say. Benj in particular had grown ever more tense since the search under the cruiser had been interrupted; perhaps the helmsmen had not been there after all; perhaps they had been among the newcomers who had arrived to interrupt the search, perhaps, perhaps.

Although McDevitt was a quiet man by nature, even he was getting impatient by the time Dondragmer's voice reached the station.

The report fascinated the meteorologist, though it was no consolation to his young companion. Benj wanted to interrupt with a question about Beetchermarlf, but knew that it would be futile; and when the captain's account ended, McDevitt immediately began to talk.

"This is not much more than a guess, Captain," he began, "though perhaps your scientist will be able to stiffen it when he a.n.a.lyzes those samples. It seems possible that the pool around you was originally an ammonia-water solution (we had evidence of that before) which froze, not because the temperature went down but because it lost much of its ammonia and its freezing point went up. The fog around you just before this whole trouble started, back on the snow field, was ammonia, your scientists reported. I'm guessing that it came from the colder areas far to the west. Its droplets began to react with the water ice, and melted it partly by forming a eutectic and partly by releasing heat; you were afraid of something of that sort even before it happened, as I remember. That started your first flood. When the ammonia cloud pa.s.sed on into Low Alpha, the solution around you began to lose ammonia by evaporation, and finally the mixture which was left was below its freezing point. I'm guessing that the fog encountered by Stakendee is more ammonia, and has provided the material for the rivulet he has found. As the fog meets the water ice near you they mix until the mixture is too dilute in ammonia to be liquid any more (this forms the dam your men described) and the liquid ammonia still coming has to find a way around. I would suggest that if you can find a way to divert that stream over to your ship and if there proves to be enough of it, your melting-out problem would be solved." Benj, listening in spite of his mood, thought of wax flowing from a guttering candle and freezing first on one front and then another. He wondered whether the computers would handle the two situations alike, if ammonia and heat were handled the same way in the two problems.

"You mean I shouldn't worry about a possible flood?" Dondragmer's voice finally returned.

"I'm guessing not," replied McDevitt. "If I'm right about this picture, and we've been talking it over a lot up here, the fog that Stakendee met should have pa.s.sed over the snow plain you came from, or what's left of it, and if it were going to cause another flood that should have reached you by now. I suspect the snow which was high enough to spill into the pa.s.s you were washed through was all used up on the first flood, and that's why you were finally left stranded where you are. If the new fog hasn't reached you yet, by the way, I think I know the reason. The place where Stakendee met it is a few feet higher than you are and air flowing from the west is coming downhill. With Dhrawn's gravity and that air composition there'd be a terrific foehn effect (adiabatic heating as the pressure rises) and the stuff is probably evaporating just as it gets to the place where Stakendee met it."

Dondragmer took a while to digest this. For a few seconds after the normal delay time, McDevitt wondered whether he had made himself clear; then another question came through.

"But if the ammonia fog were simply evaporating, the gas would still be there, and must be in the air around us now. Why isn't it melting the ice just as effectively as though it were in liquid drops? Is some physical law operating which I missed in the College?"

"I'm not sure whether state and concentration would make all that difference, just from memory," admitted the meteorologist. "When Borndender gets the new data up here I'll feed the whole works into the machine to see whether this guess of ours is ignoring too many facts. On the basis of what I have now, I still think it's a reasonable one, but I admit it has its fuzzy aspects. There are just too many variables; with only water they are practically infinite, if you'll forgive a loose use of the word; with water and ammonia together the number is infinity squared.

"To shift from abstract to concrete, I can see Stakendee's screen and he's still going along beside that streamlet in the fog; he hasn't reached the source but I haven't seen any other watercourses feeding in from either side. It's only a couple of your body lengths wide, and has stayed about the same all along."

"That's a relief," came the eventual response. "I suppose if a real flood were coming, that river would give some indication. Very well, I'll report again as soon as Borndender has his information. Please keep watching Stakendee. I'm going outside again to check under the hull; I was interrupted before." The meteorologist had wanted to say more, but was silenced by the realization that Dondragmer would not be there to hear his words by the time they arrived. He may also have been feeling some sympathy for Benj. They watched eagerly, the man almost as concerned as his companion, for the red-and-black inchworm to appear on the side of the hull within range of the pickup. It was not visible all the way to the ground, since Dondragmer had to go forward directly under the bridge and out of the field of view; but they saw him again near where the rope which had been used to get him out a few minutes earlier was still snubbed around one of Borndender's bending posts.

They watched him swarm down the line into the pit. A Mesklinite hanging on a rope about the thickness of a six-pound nylon fishline, and free to swing pendulum-style in forty Earth gravities, is quite a sight even when the distance he has to climb is not much greater than his own body length. Even Benj stopped thinking about Beetchermarlf for a moment.

The captain was no longer worried about the ice; it was presumably frozen all the way to the bottom by now, and he went straight toward the cruiser without bothering to stay on the stones. He slowed a trifle as he drew near, eyeing the cavity in front of him thoughtfully.

Practically, the Kwembly was still frozen in, of course. The melted area had reached her trucks some sixty feet fore and aft, but the ice was still above the mattress beyond those limits and on the port side. Even within that range, the lower part of the treads had still been an inch or two under water when the heater had given out. Beetchermarlf's control cables had been largely freed, but of the helmsman himself there was no sign whatever. Dondragmer had no hope of finding the two alive under the Kwembly; they would obviously have emerged long ago had this been the case. The captain would not have offered large odds on the chance of finding bodies, either. Like McDevitt, he knew that there was a possibility that the crewmen had not been under the hull at all when the freeze-up occurred. There had, after all, been two other unexplained disappearances; Dondragmer's educated guess at the whereabouts of Kervenser and Reffel was far from a certainty even in his own mind.

It was dark underneath, out of range of the floods. Dondragmer could still see (a response to abrupt changes of illumination was a normal adaptation to Mesklin's eighteen-minute rotation period) but some details escaped him. He saw the condition of the two trucks whose treads had been ruined by the helmsmen's escape efforts, and he saw the piles of stones they had made in the attempt to confine the hot water in a small area; but he missed the slash in the mattress where the two had taken final refuge.

What he saw made it obvious, however, that at least one of the missing men had been there for a while. Since the volume which had evidently not frozen at all was small, the most likely guess seemed to be that they had been caught in the encroaching ice after doing the work which could be seen; though it was certainly hard to see just how this could have happened. The captain made a rapid check the full length of the ice-walled cavern, examining every exposed truck fore and aft, top and sides. It never occurred to him to look higher. He had, after all, taken part in the building of the huge vehicle; he knew there was nowhere higher to go.

He emerged at last into the light and the field of view of the communicator. His appearance alone was something of a relief to Benj; the boy had concluded, just as the captain had, that the helmsmen could not be under the hull alive, and he had rather expected to see Dondragmer pulling bodies after him. The relief was short, and the burning question remained: where was Beetchermarlf? The captain was climbing out of the pit and leaving the field of view. Maybe he was coming back to the bridge to make a detailed report. Benj, now showing clearly the symptoms of sleeplessness, waited silently with his fists clenched.

But Dondragmer's voice did not come. The captain had planned to tell the human observers what he had found, but on the way up the side of the hull, visible but unrecognized, he paused to talk to one of the men who was chipping ice from the lock exit.

"I only know what the human, Hoffman, told me you found when your party reached that stream," he said. "Are there more details I should know? I know that you met someone at the point where the ground reached up into the fog, but I never heard from Hoffman whether it was Reffel or Kervenser. Which was it? And are the helicopters all right? There was an interruption just then; someone up above apparently caught sight of Kabremm back at the Esket; then I broke in myself because the stream you had found worried me. That's why I split your party. Who was it you found?"

"It was Kabremm."

Dondragmer almost lost his grip on the holdfasts.

"Kabremm? Destigmet's first officer? Here? And a human being recognized him; it was your screen he was seen on?"

"It sounded that way, sir. He didn't see our communicator until it was too late, and none of us thought for an instant that there was a chance of a human being telling one of us from another; at least, not between the time we recognized him ourselves and the time it was too late."

"But what is he doing here? This planet has three times the area of Mesklin; there are plenty of other places to be. I knew the commander was going to hit shoals sooner or later playing this Esket trick on the human beings, but I certainly never thought he'd ground on such silly bad luck as this."

"It's not entirely chance, sir. Kabremm didn't have time to tell us much. We took advantage of your order about exploring the stream to break up and get him out of sight of the communicator, but I understand this river has been giving trouble most of the night. There's a buildup of ice five million or so cables downstream, not very far from the Esket, and a sort of ice river is flowing slowly into the hot lands. The Esket and the mines and the farms are right in its way."

"Farms?"

"That's what Destigmet calls them. Actually a Settlement with hydroponic tanks; a sort of oversized life-support rig that doesn't have to balance as closely as the cruiser rigs do. Anyway, Destigmet sent out the Gwelf under Kabremm to explore upstream in the hope of finding out how bad the ice river was likely to get. They had grounded where we met them because of the fog; they could have flown over it easily enough, but they couldn't have seen the river bed through it."

"Then they must have arrived since the flood that brought us here; if they were examining the river bed they flew right over us. How could they possibly have missed our lights?"

"I don't know, sir. If Kabremm told Stakendee, I didn't hear him."

Dondragmer gave the rippling equivalent of a shrug. "Probably he did, and made it a point to stay out of reach of our human eyes. I suppose Kervenser and Reffel ran into the Gwe/f, and Reffel used his vision shutter to keep the dirigible from human sight; but I still don't see why Kervenser, at least, didn't come back to report."

"I'm afraid I don't know about any of that, either," replied the sailor.

"Then the river we've washed into must bend north, if it leads to the Esket area." The other judged correctly that Dondragmer was merely thinking out loud, and made no comment. The captain pondered silently for another minute or two. "The big question is whether the commander heard it too, when the human-I suppose it was Mrs. Hoffman; she is about the only one that familiar with us-called out Kabremm's name. If he did, he probably thought that someone had been careless back at the Esket, as I did. You heard her on your set and I heard her on mine, but that's reasonable. They're both Kwembly communicators, and probably all in one place up at the station. We don't know, though, about their links with the Settlement. I've heard that all their communication gear is in one room, but it must be a big room and the different sets may not be very close together. Barl may or may not have heard her.

"What it all shapes up to is that one human being has recognized an Esket crew member, not only alive long after they were supposed to be dead but five or six million cables from the place where they supposedly died. We don't know how certain this human being was of the identification; certain enough to call Kabremm's name aloud, perhaps not certain enough to spread the word among other humans without further checking. I gather they don't like looking silly any more than we do. We don't know whether Barlennan knows of the slip; worst of all, we can't tell what he's likely to answer when questions about it come his way. His safest and most probable line would be complete ignorance seasoned with shocked amazement, and I suppose he'll realize that, but I certainly wish I could talk to him without having human beings along the corridor."

"Wouldn't your best line be ignorance too?" queried the sailor.

"It would be," the captain answered, "but I can't get away with it. I've already told the humans your party was back, and I couldn't convince them that nothing at all had happened on your trip. I'd like to make Mrs. Hoffman believe she made a mistake in ident.i.ty and that you had met Reffel or Kervenser; but until we find at least one of them even that would be hard to organize. How did she recognize Kabremm? How does she recognize any of us? Color pattern and habitual leg stance, as you'd expect? Or what?

"And furthermore, what did become of that pair? I suppose Reffel came on the Gwelf unexpectedly, and had to shutter his set to keep the humans from seeing it; in that case we should be back in touch before long. I wish he looked more like Kabremm. I might take a chance on claiming that it was Ref she'd seen. After all, the light was pretty bad, even for those seeing machines, as I picture the situation, only I don't know what Barl is going to do. I don't even know whether he heard her or not. That's the sort of thing that's been worrying me ever since this Esket trick was started; with all our long-distance communication going through the human station, coordination was bound to be difficult. If something like this happened, as it was always likely to, before we got our own communication systems developed and working, we wind up on a raft with no center-boards and breakers downwind." He paused and thought briefly. "Did Kabremm make any arrangements with your group about further communication when we got the talking-box out of the way?"

"Not that I know of, sir. Your orders to break up and go different ways came before much was said."

"All right. You carry on, and I'll think of something."

"All that ever worried me," replied the sailor as he resumed chipping at the ice, "was what would happen when they did learn about what we were doing. I keep telling myself they wouldn't really abandon us here; they don't seem to be quite that firm, even on business deals; but they could as long as we don't have s.p.a.ce craft of our own."

"It was something like that fear which caused the commander to start the whole project, as you know," returned Dondragmer. "They seem to be well-intentioned beings, as dependable as their life-spans allow; personally I'd trust them as far as I would anyone. Still, they are different, and one is never quite sure what they will consider an adequate motive or excuse for some strange action. That's why Barlennan wanted to get us self-supporting on this world as soon as possible and without their knowledge; some of them might have preferred to keep us dependent on them."

"I know."

"The mines were a long step, and the dirigibles were a triumph, but we're a long, long way from being able to make do without the human energy-boxes; and I sometimes wonder if the commander realizes just how far beyond us those things really are.

"But this talk isn't solving problems. I have to talk to the humans again. I hope that not mentioning Kabremm at all won't make them suspicious; at least it would be consistent with the mistaken-ident.i.ty line, if we have to use it. Carry on, and give me a wave on the bridge when the main lock is clear."

The sailor gestured understanding-and-compliance, and Dondragmer at last got to the bridge.

There was plenty to say to the human beings without mentioning Kabremm, and the captain began saying it as soon as he had doffed his air suit.

"At least one of the helmsmen was under the hull for a while, and probably they both were, but I couldn't find any trace of either one just now except work they had done trying to get out; at least, I can't see any other reason for the work; it certainly wasn't an a.s.signed job. They wrecked, or nearly wrecked, two of the trucks in the process. Much of the s.p.a.ce under there is still frozen up, and I'm afraid they're probably in the ice. We'll search more carefully, with lights, when the crew comes back and I can spare the men. The water, or whatever it was, that was boiled away by our heater made an ice layer on the hull which has sealed the main lock; we must get that back into service as quickly as possible. There is much equipment which can't now be moved out if we have to abandon the Kwembly, and much which can't be moved back inside if we don't, because it won't go through any other lock.

"Also, the use of that heater caused the melting of about a body length of the radiator wire, and I don't see how we are going to restore the refrigerator to service if we do get the Kwembly free. This may not be of immediate importance, but if we do get back into service we'd have to think twice about going very far into Low Alpha without refrigeration. One of the few things you people seem really sure of is that the low-pressure area is caused by high temperature, presumably from internal heat, and I know you set a very high priority on finding out about it. There is virtually no metal in the ship, and one of the few things I understand about that refrigerator is that its outside radiator must be an electrical conductor. Right?"

The captain waited for his reply with some interest. He hoped that the technical problem would divert human interest from the whole question of Kabremm and the Esket; but he knew that this would not have worked if he himself were on the other end of the conversation. Of course, Benj Hoffman was young; but he was probably not the only person there.

Benj answered; he didn't seem much interested in technology.

"If you think they're in the ice, shouldn't people get down there right away and look? They might still be alive in those suits, mightn't they? You said a while ago that no one had ever found out, but that at least they wouldn't suffocate. It seems to me that the longer you put off finding them, the less chance they have of living. Isn't that the most important problem right now?"

Easy's voice broke in before Dondragmer could frame an answer; she seemed to be talking to her son as well as to the captain.

"It's not quite the most important. The Kwembly is synonymous with the lives of its entire crew, Benj. The captain is not being callous about his men. I know how you feel about your friend and it's perfectly proper; but a person with responsibility has to think as well as feel."

"I thought you were on my side."

"I feel with you very strongly; but that doesn't keep me from knowing the captain is right."

"I suppose Barlennan would react the same way. Have you asked him what Dondragmer should do?"

"I haven't asked him, but he knows the situation; if you don't think so, there's the microphone; give your side of it to him. Personally I don't think he'd dream of overriding Dondragmer or any other cruiser captain in such a matter, when he himself isn't on the scene." There was a pause while Benj hunted for words to refute this claim; he was still young enough to think that there was something fundamentally inhuman about thinking more than one step ahead at a time. After ten seconds or so of silence, Dondragmer a.s.sumed that the station transmission was over and a reply was in order.

"Mrs. Hoffman, I believe I recognized her voice, is quite right, Benj. I have not forgotten Beetchermarlf, any more than you have forgotten Takoorch, although it is obvious even to me that you are thinking less of him. It is simply that I have more lives to consider than theirs. I'm afraid I'll have to leave any more discussion of it to her, right now. Would you please get some of your engineers thinking about the problem of my refrigerator? And you probably see Borndender climbing the hull with his sample; the report about the stream should come up in a few minutes. If Mr. McDevitt is still there, please have him stand by; if he has left for any reason, will you please have him come back?"

The watchers had seen a climbing Mesklinite as the captain had said, though not even Easy had recognized Bomdender. Before Benj could say anything, McDevitt answered, "I'm still here, Captain. We'll wait, and as soon as the a.n.a.lysis is here I'll take it to the computer. If Borndender has any temperature and pressure readings to send along with his chemical information, they will be useful."

Benj was still unhappy, but even he could see that this was not the time for further interruption. Besides, his father had just entered the communication room, accompanied by Aucoin and Mersereau. Benj tactfully slid out of the seat in front of the bridge screen to make room for the planner, though he was too angry and upset to hope that his badly chosen words of the last few minutes would go unmentioned. He was not even relieved when Easy, in bringing the newcomers up to date, left the question of the missing helmsmen unmentioned.