Heavy Planet Part 6

Moving very circ.u.mspectly and never touching a radio at any time, the sailors prepared a rope sling. Then they pried the set up from a "safe" distance with spars, and poked and pushed until the sling was in position under and around it. This accomplished, one of the sling handles was given very respectfully to Barlennan. He in turn gestured the chief closer, and with an air of handling something precious and fragile, handed the loop of rope to him. Then he gestured toward the counselors, and indicated that they should take the other handles. Several of them moved forward, rather gingerly; the chief hastily designated three for the honor, and the others fell back.

Very slowly and carefully the bearers moved the radio to the edge of the Bree's outermost raft. The chiefs canoe glided up-a long, narrow vessel evidently hollowed to a paper-thin sh.e.l.l from the trunk of one of the forest trees. Barlennan viewed it with distrust. He himself had never sailed anything but a raft; hollow vessels of any kind were strange to him. He felt certain that the canoe was too small to carry the weight of the radio; and when the chief ordered the greater part of the crew out of it he barely suppressed the equivalent of a negative headshake. He felt that the lightening thus obtained would be insufficient. He was more than startled when the canoe, upon receiving its new freight, merely settled a trifle. For a few seconds he watched, expecting vessel and cargo to pop suddenly below the surface; but nothing of the sort happened, and it became evident that nothing would.

Barlennan was an opportunist, as had been proved months ago by his unhesitating decision to a.s.sociate with the visitor from Earth and learn his language. This was something new, and obviously worth learning about; if ships could be made that would carry so much more weight for their size, the knowledge was obviously vastly important to a maritime nation. The logical thing to do was to acquire one of the canoes.

As the chief and his three co-workers entered the craft, Barlennan followed. They delayed shoving off as they saw his approach, wondering what he might want. Barlennan himself knew what he wanted, but was not sure he could get away with what he planned to try. His people, however, had a proverb substantially identical in meaning with Earth's "Nothing venture, nothing gain," and he was no coward.

Very carefully and respectfully he touched the radio, leaning across the half inch of open river surface between ship and canoe to do so. Then he spoke.

"Charles, I'm going to get this little ship if I have to come back and steal it. When I finish talking, please answer-it doesn't matter what you say. I'm going to give these people the idea that the boat which carried the radio is too changed for ordinary use, and must take the radio's place on my deck. All right?"

"I was brought up to disapprove of racketeers-I'll translate that word for you sometime-but I admire your nerve. Get away with it if you can, Barl, but please don't stick the neck you don't have out too far." He fell silent and watched the Mesklinite turn his few sentences to good account.

As before, he employed practically no spoken language; but his actions were reasonably intelligible even to the human beings, and clear as crystal to his erstwhile captors. First he inspected the canoe thoroughly, and plainly if reluctantly found it worthy. Then he waved away another canoe which had drifted close, and gestured several members of the river tribe who were still on the Bree's deck away to a safe distance. He picked up a spear which one of the counselors had discarded to take up his new position, and made it clear that no one was to come within its length of the canoe.

Then he measured the canoe itself in spear lengths, took the weapon over to where the radio had been, and ostentatiously cleared away a spot large enough to take the craft; at his order, several of his own crew gently rearranged the remaining radios to make room for their new property. More persuasion might have been attempted, but sunset cut the activity short. The river dwellers did not wait out the night; when the sun returned, the canoe with the radio was yards away, already drawn up on sh.o.r.e.

Barlennan watched it with anxiety. Many of the other canoes had also landed, and only a few still drifted near the Bree. Many more natives had come to the edge of the bank and were looking over; but to Barlennan's intense satisfaction, none came any closer to the loaded canoe. He had apparently made some impression.

The chief and his helpers carefully unloaded their prize, the tribe maintaining its original distance. This was, incidentally, several times the spear's length demanded by Barlennan. Up the bank the radio went, the crowd opening wide to let it through and disappearing after it; and for long minutes there was no more activity. The Bree could easily have pushed out of her cage at this time, the crews of the few canoes remaining on the river showing little interest in what she did, but her captain did not give up that easily. He waited, eyes on the sh.o.r.e; and at long last a number of long black and red bodies appeared over the bank. One of these proceeded toward the canoe; but Barlennan realized it was not the chief, and uttered a warning hoot. The native paused, and a brief discussion ensued, which terminated in a series of modulated calls fully as loud as any that Lackland had heard Barlennan utter. Moments later the chief appeared and went straight to the canoe; it was pushed off by two of the counselors who had helped carry the radio, and started at once toward the Bree. Another followed it at a respectful distance.

The chief brought up against the outer rafts at the point where the radio had been loaded, and immediately disembarked. Barlennan had given his orders as soon as the canoe left the bank, and now the little vessel was hauled aboard and dragged to the s.p.a.ce reserved for it, still with every evidence of respect. The chief did not wait for this operation to be finished; he embarked on the other canoe and returned to sh.o.r.e, looking back from time to time. Darkness swallowed up the scene as he climbed the bank.

"You win, Barl. I wish I had some of your ability; I'd be a good deal richer than I am now, if I were still alive by some odd chance. Are you going to wait around to get more out of them tomorrow?"

"We are leaving now!" the captain replied without hesitation.

Lackland left his dark screen and went to his quarters for his first sleep in many hours. Sixty-five minutes-rather less than four of Mesklin's days-had pa.s.sed since the village had been sighted.

11: EYE OF THE STORM.

The Bree sailed into the eastern ocean so gradually that no one could say exactly when the change was made. The wind had picked up day by day until she had normal open-sea use of her sails; the river widened rod by rod and at last mile by mile until the banks were no longer visible from the deck. It was still "fresh water"-that is, it still lacked the swarming life that stained practically all of the ocean areas in varying tints and helped give the world such a startling appearance from s.p.a.ce-but the taste was coming, as sailor after sailor verified to his own great satisfaction.

Their course was still east, for a long peninsula barred their way to the south, according to the Flyers. Weather was good, and there would be plenty of warning of any change from the strange beings that watched them so carefully. There was plenty of food still aboard, enough to last easily until they reached the rich areas of the deep seas. The crew was happy.

Their captain was satisfied as well. He had learned, partly from his own examination and experiment and partly from Lackland's casual explanations, how it was that a hollow vessel like the canoe could carry so much more weight for its size than could a raft. He was already deep in plans for the building of a large ship-as big or bigger than the Bree-built on the same principle and able to carry the profits of ten voyages in one. Dondragmer's pessimism failed to shake his rosy dream; the mate felt that there must be some reason such vessels were not used by their own people, though he could not say what the reason might be.

"It's too simple," he kept pointing out. "Someone would have thought of it long ago if that's all there was to it." Barlennan would simply point astern, where the canoe now followed gaily at the end of a rope, laden with a good half of their food. The mate could not shake his head after the fashion of an old family coachman looking over the new horseless carriage, but he would certainly have done so if he had possessed a neck.

He brightened up when they finally swung southward, and a new thought struck him.

"Watch it sink as soon as we start to get a little decent weight!" he exclaimed. "It may be all right for the creatures of the Rim, but you need a good solid raft where things are normal."

"The Flyer says not," replied Barlennan. "You know as well as I do that the Bree doesn't float any higher here at the Rim than she does at home. The Flyer says it's because the methane weighs less too, which sounds as though it might be reasonable." Dondragmer did not answer; he simply glanced, with an expression equivalent to a complacent smile, at the tough wood spring balance and weight that formed one of the ship's princ.i.p.al navigating instruments. As that weight began to droop, he was sure, something that neither his captain nor the distant Flyer had counted on would happen. He did not know what it would be, but he was certain of the fact.

The canoe, however, continued to float as the weight slowly mounted. It did not, of course, float as high as it would have on Earth, since liquid methane is less than half as dense as water; its "water" line, loaded as it was, ran approximately halfway up from keel to gunwale, so that fully four inches was invisible below the surface. The remaining four inches of freeboard did not diminish as the days went by, and the mate seemed almost disappointed. Perhaps Barlennan and the Flyer were correct after all.

The spring balance was starting to show a barely visible sag from the zero position-it had been made, of course, for use where weight was scores or hundreds of times Earth-normal-when the monotony was broken. Actual weight was about seven Earths. The usual call from Toorey was a little late, and both the captain and mate were beginning to wonder whether all the remaining radios had failed for some reason when it finally arrived. The caller was not Lackland but a meteorologist the Mesklinites had come to know quite well.

"Barl," the weather man opened without preamble, "I don't know just what sort of storm you consider too bad to be out in-I suppose your standards are pretty high-but there seems to be one coming that I certainly wouldn't want to ride out on a forty-foot raft. It's a tight cyclone, of what I would consider hurricane force even for Mesklin, and on the thousand-mile course I've been observing so far it has been violent enough to stir up material from below and leave a track of contrasting color on the sea."

"That's enough for me," Barlennan replied. "How do I dodge it?"

"That's the catch; I'm not sure. It's still a long way from your position, and I'm not absolutely sure it will cross your course just when you're at the wrong point. There are a couple of ordinary cyclones yet to pa.s.s you, and they will change your course some and possibly even that of the storm. I'm telling you now because there is a group of fairly large islands about five hundred miles to the southeast, and I thought you might like to head for them. The storm will certainly strike them, but there seem to be a number of good harbors where you could shelter the Bree until it was over."

"Can I get there in time? If there's serious doubt about it I'd prefer to ride it out in the open sea rather than be caught near land of any sort."

"At the rate you've been going, there should be plenty of time to get there and scout around for a good harbor."

"All right. What's my noon bearing?"

The men were keeping close track of the Bree's position by means of the radiation from the vision sets, although it was quite impossible to see the ship from beyond the atmosphere with any telescope, and the meteorologist had no trouble in giving the captain the bearing he wanted. The sails were adjusted accordingly and the Bree moved off on the new course.

The weather was still clear, though the wind was strong. The sun arced across the sky time after time without much change in either of these factors; but gradually a high haze began to appear and thicken, so that the sun changed from a golden disc to a rapidly moving patch of pearly light. Shadows became less definite, and finally vanished altogether as the sky became a single, almost uniformly luminous dome. This change occurred slowly, over a period of many days, and while it was going on the miles kept slipping beneath the Bree's rafts.

They were less than a hundred miles from the islands when the minds of the crew were taken off the matter of the approaching storm by a new matter. The color of the sea had shifted again, but that bothered no one; they were as used to seeing it blue as red. No one expected signs of land at this distance, since the currents set generally across their course and the birds which warned Columbus did not exist on Mesklin. Perhaps a tall c.u.mulus cloud, of the sort which so frequently forms over islands, would be visible for a hundred miles or more; but it would hardly show against the haze that covered the sky. Barlennan was sailing by dead reckoning and hope, for the islands were no longer visible to the Earthmen overhead.

Nevertheless, it was in the sky that the strange event occurred.

From far ahead of the Bree, moving with a swooping, dipping motion that was utterly strange to the Mesklinites and would have been perfectly familiar to the human beings, there appeared a tiny dark speck. No one saw it at first, and by the time they did it was too near and too high to be in the field of view of the vision sets. The first sailor to notice it gave vent to the usual hoot of surprise, which startled the human watchers on Toorey but was not particularly helpful to them. All they could see as their wandering attentions snapped back to the screens was the crew of the Bree, with the front end of every caterpillarlike body curled upward as its owner watched the sky.

"What is it, Barl?" Lackland called instantly.

"I don't know," the captain replied. "I thought for an instant it might be your rocket down looking for the islands to guide us better, but it's smaller and very different in shape."

"But it's something flying,?"

"Yes. It does not make any noise like your rocket, however. I'd say it was being blown by the wind, except that it's moving too smoothly and regularly and in the wrong direction. I don't know how to describe it; it's wider than it is long, and a little bit like a mast set crosswise on a spar. I can't get closer than that."

"Could you angle one of the vision sets upward so we could get a look at it?"

"We'll try." Lackland immediately put through a call on the station telephone for one of the biologists.

"Lance, it looks as though Barlennan had run into a flying animal of some sort. We're trying to arrange a look at it. Want to come down to the screen room to tell us what we're looking at?"

"I'll be right with you." The biologist's voice faded toward the end of the sentence; he was evidently already on his way out of the room. He arrived before the sailors had the vision set propped up, but dropped into a chair without asking questions. Barlennan was speaking again.

"It's pa.s.sing back and forth over the ship, sometimes in straight lines and sometimes in circles. Whenever it turns it tips, but nothing else about it changes. It seems to have a little body where the two sticks met ..." He went on with his description, but the object was evidently too far outside his normal experience for him to find adequate similes in a strange language.

"If it does come into view, be prepared to squint," the voice of one of the technicians cut in. "I'm covering that screen with a high-speed camera, and will have to jump the brightness a good deal in order to get a decent exposure."

" ... there are smaller sticks set across the long one, and what looks like a very thin sail stretched between them. It's swinging back toward us again, very low now-I think it may come in front of your eye this time ..."

The watchers stiffened, and the hand of the photographer tightened on a double-pole switch whose closing would activate his camera and step up the gain on the screen. Ready as he was, the object was well into the field before he reacted, and everyone in the room got a good glimpse before the suddenly bright light made their eyes close involuntarily. They all saw enough.

No one spoke while the cameraman energized the developing-frequency generator, rewound his film through its poles, swung the mounted camera toward the blank wall of the room, and snapped over the projection switch. Everyone had thoughts enough to occupy him for the fifteen seconds the operation required.

The projection was slowed down by a factor of fifty, and everyone could look as long as he pleased. There was no reason for surprise that Barlennan had been unable to describe the thing; he had never dreamed that such a thing as flying was possible until after his meeting with Lackland a few months before, and had no words in his own language for anything connected with the art. Among the few English words of that group he had learned, "fuselage" and "wing" and "empennage" were not included.

The object was not an animal. It had a body-fuselage, as the men thought of it-some three feet long, half the length of the canoe Barlennan had acquired. A slender rod extending several feet rearward held control surfaces at its extremity. The wings spanned a full twenty feet, and their structure of single main spar and numerous ribs was easily seen through the nearly transparent fabric that covered them. Within his natural limitations, Barlennan had done an excellent job of description.

"What drives it?" asked one of the watchers suddenly. "There's no propeller or visible jet, and Barlennan said it was silent."

"It's a sailplane." One of the meteorological staff spoke up. "A glider, operated by someone who has all the skill of a terrestrial sea gull at making use of the updrafts from the front side of a wave. It could easily hold a couple of people Barlennan's size, and could stay aloft until they had to come down for food or sleep."

The Bree's crew were becoming a trifle nervous. The complete silence of the flying machine, their inability to see who or what was in it, bothered them; no one likes to be watched constantly by someone he can't see. The glider made no hostile move, but their experience of aerial a.s.sault was still fresh enough to leave them uneasy about its presence. One or two had expressed a desire to practice their newly acquired art of throwing, using any hard objects they could find about the deck, but Barlennan had sternly forbidden this. They simply sailed on, wondering, until the hazy dome of the sky darkened with another sunset. No one knew whether to be relieved or worried when the new day revealed no trace of the flying machine. The wind was now stronger, and almost directly across the Bree's course from the northeast; the waves had not yet followed it and were decidedly choppy in consequence. For the first time Barlennan perceived a disadvantage in the canoe; methane that blew or washed inboard stayed there. He found it necessary before the day was over to haul the little vessel up to the outer rafts and place two men aboard to bail-an act for which he had neither a word nor proper equipment.

The days pa.s.sed without reappearance of the glider, and eventually only the official lookouts kept their eyes turned upward in expectation of its return. The high haze thickened and darkened, however, and presently turned to clouds which lowered until they hung a scant fifty feet above the sea. Barlennan was informed by the Earthmen that this was not good flying weather, and eliminated the watch. Neither he nor the human beings stopped to wonder how the first glider had found its way on a night too hazy for the stars to provide guidance.

The first of the islands to come into view was fairly high, its ground rising quickly from sea level to disappear into the clouds. It lay downwind from the point where they first sighted it; and Barlennan, after consulting the sketch map of the archipelago he had made from the Earthmen's descriptions, kept on course. As he had expected, another island appeared dead ahead before the first had faded from sight, and he altered course to pa.s.s to leeward of it. This side, according to observation from above, was quite irregular and should have usable harbors; also, Barlennan had no intention of coasting the windward sh.o.r.e during the several nights which would undoubtedly be required for his search.

This island appeared to be high also; not only did its hilltops reach the clouds, but the wind was in large measure cut off as the Bree pa.s.sed into its lee. The sh.o.r.e line was cut by frequent fiords; Barlennan was intending simply to sail across the mouth of each in the hunt, but Dondragmer insisted that it would be worth while to penetrate to a point well away from the open sea. He claimed that almost any beach far enough up would be adequate shelter. Barlennan was convinced only to the point of wanting to show the mate how wrong he was. Unfortunately for this project, the first fiord examined made a sharp hook-turn half a mile from the ocean and opened into what amounted to a lake, almost perfectly circular and about a hundred yards in diameter. Its walls rose into the mist except at the mouth where the Bree had entered and a smaller opening only a few yards from the first where a stream from the interior fed into the lake. The only beach was between the two openings.

There was plenty of time to secure both vessel and contents, as it happened; the clouds belonged to the second of the two "normal" cyclones the meteorologist had mentioned, rather than to the major storm. Within a few days of the Bree's arrival in the harbor the weather cleared once more, though the wind continued high. Barlennan was able to see that the harbor was actually the bottom of a bowl-shaped valley whose walls were less than a hundred feet in height, and not particularly steep. It was possible to see far inland through the cleft cut by the small river, provided one climbed a short distance up the walls. In doing this, shortly after the weather cleared, Barlennan made a disconcerting discovery: sea sh.e.l.ls, seaweeds, and bones of fairly large sea animals were thickly scattered among the land-type vegetation clothing the hillside. This continued, he discovered upon further investigation, quite uniformly around the valley up to a height fully thirty feet above the present sea level. Many of the remains were old, decayed almost to nothing, and partly buried; these might be accounted for by seasonal changes in the ocean level. Others, however, were relatively fresh. The implication was clear-on certain occasions the sea rose far above its present level; and it was possible that the Bree was not in as safe a position as her crew believed.

One factor alone limited Mesklin's storms to the point where sea travel was possible: methane vapor is far denser than hydrogen. On Earth, water vapor is lighter than air, and contributes enormously to the development of a hurricane once it starts; on Mesklin, the methane picked up from the ocean by such a storm tends, in a relatively short time, to put a stop to the rising currents which are responsible for its origin. Also the heat it gives up in condensing to form the storm clouds is only about a quarter as great as would be given by a comparable amount of water-and that heat is the fuel for a hurricane, once the sun has given the initial push.

In spite of all this, a Mesklinite hurricane is no joke. Barlennan, Mesklinite though he was, learned this very suddenly. He was seriously considering towing the Bree as far upstream as time would permit when the decision was taken out of his hands; the water in the lake receded with appalling suddenness, leaving the ship stranded fully twenty yards from its edge. Moments later the wind shifted ninety degrees and increased to a speed that made the sailors cling for dear life to deck cleats, if they happened to be on board, and to the handiest vegetation if they did not. The captain's shrill hoot ordering those off the ship to return went completely unheard, sheltered as they were in the almost complete circle of the valley walls; but no one needed any order. They picked their way, bush by bush, never holding with less than two sets of pincers, back to where their comrades had already lashed themselves as best they could to the vessel that was threatening every moment to lift into the wind's embrace. Rain-or, more properly, driven spray that had come completely across the island-lashed at them for long minutes; then both it and the wind ceased as though by magic. No one dared release his lashings, but the slowest sailors now made a final dash for the ship. They were none too soon.

The storm cell at sea level was probably three miles or so in diameter; it was traveling at about sixty or seventy miles per hour. The ending of the wind was only temporary; it meant that the center of the cyclone had reached the valley. This was also the low-pressure zone; and as it reached the sea at the mouth of the fiord, the flood came. It rose, gathering speed as it came, and spurted into the valley like the stream from a hose. Around the walls it swirled, picking up the Bree on the first circle; higher and higher, as the ship sought the center of the whirlpool-fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five feet before the wind struck again.

Tough as the wood of the masts was, they had snapped long since. Two crewmen had vanished, their lashing perhaps a little too hastily completed. The new wind seized the ship, bare of masts as she was, and flung her toward the side of the whirlpool; like a chip, both for helplessness and magnitude, she shot along the stream of liquid now pouring up the little river toward the island's interior. Still the wind urged her, now toward the side of the stream; and as the pressure rose once more, the flood receded as rapidly as it had risen-no, not quite; the portion now floating the Bree had nowhere to go except back out through the little river course, and that took time. Had daylight lasted, Barlennan might even in his ship's present condition have guided her back along that stream while she still floated; but the sun chose this moment to set, and in the darkness he ran aground. The few seconds delay was enough; the liquid continued to recede, and when the sun returned it looked upon a helpless collection of rafts some twenty yards from a stream that was too narrow and too shallow to float any one of them.

The sea was completely out of sight beyond the hills; the limp form of a twenty-foot-long sea monster stranded on the other side of the brook gave a graphic picture of the helplessness of the Gravity Expedition.

12: WIND RIDERS.

Much of what had happened had been seen from Toorey; the radio sets, like most of the less prominent articles about the Bree's deck, had remained lashed in position. Not much had been distinguishable, of course, while the vessel had been whirling in the brief maelstrom; but her present situation was painfully clear. None of the people in the screen room could find anything helpful to say.

The Mesklinites could say little, either. They were used to ships on dry land, since that happened fairly often during late summer and fall as the seas receded in their own lat.i.tudes; but they were not accustomed to having it happen so suddenly, and to have so much high ground between them and the ocean. Barlennan and the mate, taking stock of the situation, found little to be thankful for.

They still had plenty of food, though that in the canoe had vanished. Dondragmer took occasion to point out the superiority of rafts, neglecting to mention that the supplies in the canoe had been tied down carelessly or not at all owing to a misplaced confidence in the high sides of the boat. The little vessel itself was still at the end of its towline, and still undamaged. The wood of which it had been made shared the springiness of the low-growing plants of the higher lat.i.tudes. The Bree herself, constructed of similar materials though in much less yielding form, was also intact, though the story might have been different had there been many rocks in the wall of the round valley. She was and had remained right side up, owing to her construction-Barlennan admitted that point without waiting for the mate to bring it up. The complaints were not in any way connected with lack of ship or supplies, but with lack of an ocean to float them on.

"The surest way would be to take her apart, as we did before, and carry her over the hills. They're not very steep, and there still isn't enough weight to matter." Barlennan made this suggestion after long thought.

"You're probably right, Captain; but wouldn't it save time to separate the rafts only lengthwise, so that we have rows the full length of the ship? We could carry or drag those over to the stream, and surely they'd float before we went down very far." Hars, now his former self after his encounter with the rock, made this suggestion.

"That sounds promising. Hars, why don't you find out just how far down that would be? The rest can start unlashing as Hars suggested, and unloading where we have to. Some of the cargo will be in the way of the lashings, I'm afraid."

"I wonder if the weather is still too bad for those flying machines?" Dondragmer asked, of no one in particular. Barlennan glanced upward.

"The clouds are still low and the wind high," he said. "If the Flyers are right-and they ought to know, I should think-the weather is still too bad. However, it won't hurt to look up occasionally. I rather hope we see one again."

"One I wouldn't much mind myself," replied the mate dryly. "I suppose you want a glider to add to the canoe. I'll tell you right now that I might, in extremity, get into the canoe, but the day I climb onto one of those flying machines will be a calm winter morning with both suns in the sky." Barlennan did not answer; he had not consciously considered adding a glider to his collection, but the idea rather struck his fancy. As for flying in it-well, changed as he was, there were limits.

The Flyers reported clearing weather, and the clouds obediently thinned over the next few days. Greatly improved though the flying weather was, few crew members thought to watch the sky. All were too busy. Hars's plan had proved feasible, the stream being deep enough for the rafts only a few hundred yards toward the sea and wide enough for a single raft very little farther down. Barlennan's statement that the additional weight would mean little proved wrong; every component was twice as heavy as it had been where they last saw Lackland, and they were not accustomed to lifting anything. Powerful as they were, the new gravity taxed their hoisting abilities to the point where it was necessary to unload the rafts before the rows of little platforms could be partly carried and dragged to the stream. Once they were partly immersed, the going was much simpler; and after a digging squad had widened the banks up to the point nearest the Bree's resting place the job became almost easy. Not too many hundred days pa.s.sed before the long, narrow string of rafts, reloaded, was being towed once more toward the sea.

The flying machines appeared just after the ship had entered that portion of the stream where its walls were steepest, shortly before it emptied into the lake. Karondrasee saw them first; he was on board at the time, preparing food while the others pulled, and his attention was freer than theirs. His hoot of alarm roused Earthmen and Mesklinites alike, but the former as usual could not see the approaching visitors since the vision sets were not aimed high enough.

Barlennan saw all too clearly, however. There were eight of the gliders, traveling fairly close together but by no means in tight formation. They came straight on, riding the updraft on the leeward side of the little valley until they were almost over the ship; then they changed course to pa.s.s in front of her. As each swooped overhead, it released an object, turned, and swung back to the lee side to recover its alt.i.tude.

The falling objects were distinct enough; every sailor could see that they were spears, very much like those the river dwellers had used but with much heavier tips. For a moment the old terror of falling objects threatened to send the crew into hysteria; then they saw that the missiles would not strike them, but fall some distance in front. A few seconds later the gliders swooped again, and the sailors cowered in expectation of an improved aim; but the spears fell in about the same place. With the third pa.s.s it became evident that their aim was deliberate; and presently their purpose became apparent. Every projectile had fallen in the still narrow stream, and penetrated more than half its length into the firm clay bottom; by the end of the third run, two dozen stakes formed by the spear handles were effectually blocking the ship's pa.s.sage downstream.

As the Bree approached the barricade, the bombardment stopped. Barlennan had thought it might be continued to prevent their approaching and clearing the obstacle away, but when they reached it they found this to be superfluous. The spears were there to stay; they had been dropped from nearly a hundred feet with superlative aim in a field of seven gravities, and nothing short of power machinery was going to extract them. Terblannen and Hars proved that in five minutes of fruitless upward tugging.

"Can't you cut them?" Lackland asked from his distant observation point. "Those pincers of yours are pretty powerful, as I know."

"These are wood, not metal," Barlennan replied. "We would need one of your hard metal saws, which you claimed would attack even our wood-unless you have some machine for pulling them out."

"You must have tools which will cut it; how do you do repair work on your ship? The rafts certainly didn't grow in that shape."

"Our cutting tools are made of animal teeth set in strong frames, and most of them are not very portable. What we have we will use, but I doubt that we'll be given time to do much."

"I should think you could keep attackers away by fire."

"We can, if they come from downwind. I find it hard to imagine their being that stupid." Lackland fell silent, while the crew fell to work on the stakes with such edged tools as they could find. Their personal knives were of hardwood and would make no impression on the spears, but as Barlennan had intimated, there were a few bone and ivory cutters, and these began to chip away at the incredibly tough wood. Digging was also attempted by some of the crew who lacked tools; they took turns in sinking to the bottom of the inches-deep brook, working the clay loose, and letting its particles wash away in the sluggish current. Dondragmer watched these workers for a time, then pointed out that it would probably be easier to dig a ca.n.a.l around the obstruction than to grub out two dozen sticks from a depth of some four feet. This suggestion was eagerly adopted by the members of the crew who had nothing to cut with, and work progressed at a remarkable rate.

The gliders kept circling while all this was going on; apparently they either remained overnight or were replaced by others during the minutes of darkness-no one could tell which. Barlennan kept a sharp watch on the hills to either side of the stream, expecting ground forces to appear at any moment; but for a long time his own crew and the gliders formed the only moving parts of the scenery. The crews of the gliders themselves remained invisible; no one could even tell how many or what sort of creatures rode in the machines, though both human beings and Mesklinites had come to take more or less for granted that they belonged to Barlennan's race. They showed no evident anxiety about the sailors' digging activities, but it became apparent finally that the excavation had not gone unnoticed. The job was about three quarters finished when they took action; another series of bombing runs left the path of the new waterway as completely staked off as the original. As before, pains were apparently taken to avoid transfixing any of the crew. The action, however, was about as discouraging as if it had been a personal a.s.sault; quite evidently the digging process was useless, since the work of days could be nullified in a matter of minutes. Some other line of procedure must be devised.

At the Earthmen's advice, Barlennan had long since ordered his men not to gather in large groups; but now he drew them in toward the ship, establishing a loose cordon parallel to the string of rafts on each side of the creek. The men were far enough apart so there was no really tempting target from above, and close enough to support each other in case an attack actually developed. There they stayed; Barlennan wished it made evident that the next move was up to the personnel of the gliders. They failed to make it, however, for several more days.

Then a dozen more of the flimsy craft appeared in the distance, swooped overhead, split into two groups, and landed on the hilltops to either side of the imprisoned ship. The landings were made as the Flyers had foretold, into the wind; the machines skidded to a stop in a few feet from their point of touchdown. Four beings emerged from each, leaped to the wings, and hastily tied the gliders down, using the local bushes as anchors. What had been a.s.sumed all along now proved to be a fact; they were identical in form, size, and coloring with the sailors of the Bree.

Once the gliders were secured, their crews proceeded to set up a collapsible structure upwind from them, and attach cords equipped with hooks to this. They appeared to be measuring quite carefully the distance from this device to the nearest glider. Only when this task was completed did they pay any attention to the Bree or her crew. A single prolonged wail that sounded from one hilltop to the other apparently served as a signal that the work was complete.

Then the glider crews on the leeward hill began to descend the slope. They did not leap, as they had during the action subsequent to landing, but crawled in the caterpillarlike fashion which was the only means of locomotion Barlennan's people had known prior to his exploration of the Rim. In spite of this they made good speed and were within reasonable throwing distance-as several of the more pessimistic sailors regarded it-by sundown. They stopped at that point and waited for the night to pa.s.s; there was just enough light from the moons for each party to see that the other did nothing suspicious. With the coming of sunlight the advance was resumed, and eventually terminated with one of the newcomers only a yard or so from the nearest sailor, while his companions hung a few feet farther back. None of the party seemed to be armed, and Barlennan went to meet them, first ordering two sailors to swing one of the vision sets so that it pointed directly at the place of meeting.

The glider pilot wasted no time, but began speaking as soon as Barlennan stopped in front of him. The captain failed to understand a word. After a few sentences the speaker appeared to realize this; he paused and after a moment continued at somewhat slower speed in what Barlennan judged to be a different language. To save the time that a random search through the tongues known to the other would consume, Barlennan this time indicated his lack of comprehension verbally. The other shifted languages once more, and rather to his surprise Barlennan heard his own speech, uttered slowly and badly p.r.o.nounced, but quite comprehensible.

"It is long since I have heard your tongue spoken," the other said. "I trust I can still be understood when I use it. Do you follow me?"

"I can understand you perfectly well," replied Barlennan.