Close to Critical (7 page)

Jim and Nancy were practically whole again, and were now looking after the cattle. There had been no further losses since they had been able to take over the job. Dorothy was at the wagon, with all the articles they hoped to take stacked around her, arranging and rearranging them in the vehicle. No matter how she packed them, there was more outside than in, and nearly constant discussion and even argument was going on between her and the other members of the group. Each wanted his own belongings to go and it took a good deal of talk to convince some of them that since everything couldn't be taken the losses should be shared. The argument was still going on, to a certain extent, when the journey started. Nick was beginning to feel a certain sympathy for Swift by that tune; he had discovered that at times it was necessary for a group to have a leader, and that it was not always possible for the leader to reason his followers into the desired action. Nick had had to give his first arbitrary orders, and was troubled by the thought that half his friends must by now be comparing him with Swift. The fact that he had been obeyed should have clarified him on this point, but it didn't.

The cart was perilously overloaded, and everyone except those actually herding had to pull with all his strength. When fighting was necessary, hauling had to be stopped while weapons were snatched up and used. Actually, of course, there wasn't too much fighting; the average Tenebran carnivore wasn't very brainy, but most of them steered clear of such a large group. The chief exception was formed by the floaters, which were more vegetable than animal anyway. These creatures could be downed fairly safely by anyone having a spear longer than their tentacles; but even after their gas bladders were punctured they were dangerous to anyone coming within reach of the poisonous appendages. Several animals of the herd were lost when one of the monsters fell almost into it, and two of the party were painfully poisoned on the same occasion. It was some hours before they could walk unaided. Contrary to Nick's pessimistic forecast, it proved possible to get the wagon all the way to the sea. Late in the second day of travel they reached it, after some hours of threading their way among ever larger pools of quiet, oily liquid.

They had seen such pools before, of course; they formed in hollows in their own valley toward the end of the day - hollows which were lakes of water at sunrise, but only tiny pools of oleum when the day reached its height. These were larger, filling a much bigger fraction of their beds.

The ground was different, too; vegetation was as thick as ever, but underfoot among the stems the ground was studded with quartz crystals. The cattle didn't seem to mind, but the feet of their owners were not quite so tough, and progress became decidedly difficult. Such masses of crystals did occur elsewhere, but usually in isolated patches which could be avoided.

The search for a stopping place was therefore briefer, and perhaps less careful, than it might otherwise have been. They agreed very quickly on a peninsula whose main body was a hill thirty or forty feet above the sea, joined to the mainland by a crystal-studded tombolo a dozen yards in width. Nick was not the only one of the party who was still considering the problem of physical defense; and in addition to its advantages in this respect, the peninsula was roomy enough for the herd. They guided and trundled their belongings down the sea and up the hill, and immediately settled down to the standard business of hunting for firewood. This was plentiful enough, and by dark a very satisfactory supply had been laid in.

The watch fires were built, one of the herd animals slaughtered and eaten, and the group settled down for the night. It was not until the drops had appeared and the fires had been lighted that anyone thought to wonder what happened to the sea level during the nightly rain.

IV: COMMUNICATION; PENETRATION; ISOLATION

AMINADABARLEE fell silent, his eyes fixed on the vision screen; and, nasty as the creature had been, Raeker felt sympathetic. He himself would have been at least as unsociable under similar circumstances. There was no time for pity, however, while there was still hope; too much had to be done. "Wellenbach! What's the combination of the bathyscaphe?" he snapped.

The communication watch officer reached over his shoulder. "I'll get her for you, Doctor." Raeker pushed his hand aside. "Wait a minute. Is it a regular set at the other end? An ordinary phone, I mean, or something jury-rigged into the panels?"

"Perfectly ordinary. Why?"

"Because if it weren't and you punched its combination, those kids might open their air lock or something like that in trying to answer. If it's standard in design and appearance, the girl will be able to answer safely."

"I see. She won't have any trouble; I've seen her use the punch-combination sets here."

"All right. Call them." Raeker tried not to show the uncertainty he felt as the officer punched the buttons. It was not possible to tell yet just what had happened above Tenebra's atmosphere; something had evidently breached the air lock of the tender, but that might or might not have affected the bathyscaphe. If it had, the children were probably dead - though their guide might have had them in space suits, of course. One could hope.

Behind him, Aminadabarlee might have been a giant statue of an otter, cast in oiled gray steel. Raeker spent no time wondering at his own fate if bad news came back through the set and that statue returned to life; all his attention was concentrated on the fate of the youngsters. A dozen different speculations chased themselves through his mind in the few seconds before the screen lighted up. Then it did, and the worst of them vanished.

A human face was looking at them out of it; thin, very pale, topped by a mop of hair which looked black on the screen but which Raeker knew was red; a face covered by an expression which suggested terror just barely held under control, but - a living face. That was the important fact.

At almost the same instant a figure came hurtling through the door of the communications room and skidded to a halt beside the motionless figure of the Drommian.

"Easy! Are you all right?" Raeker didn't need the words to identify Councillor Rich. Neither did Aminadabarlee, and neither did the child in the screen. After the two-second pause for return contact, the terror vanished from the thin face, and she relaxed visibly..

"Yes, Dad. I was pretty scared for a minute, but it's all right now. Are you coming?"

For a moment there was some confusion at the set as Rich, Raeker, and the Drommian all tried to speak at once; then Aminadabarlee's physical superiority made itself felt, and he thrust his sleek head at the screen. "Where is the other one - my son?" he shrilled.

She replied promptly, "He's here; he's all right."

"Let me talk to him." The girl left the pickup area for a moment, and they heard her voice but not her words as she addressed someone else. Then she reappeared, with her dark hair badly disheveled and a bleeding scratch on one cheek.

"He's in a corner, and doesn't want to come out. I'll turn up the volume so you can talk to him there." She made no reference to her injury, and, to Raeker's surprise, neither did her father. Aminadabarlee seemed not to notice it. He shifted into his own shrill language, which seemed to make sense to no one else in the room but Rich, and held forth for several minutes, pausing now and then for answers.

At first he received none; then, as he grew more'persuasive, a feeble piping came back through the set. Hearing this restored the Drommian's composure, and he talked more slowly; and after a minute or so of this Aminadorneldo's head appeared beside Easy's. Raeker wondered whether he looked ashamed of himself; Drom-mian facial expressions were a closed book to him. Apparently one of the family had a conscience, anyway, for after a few moments' more talk from the elder one the child turned to Easy and shifted to English.

"I'm sorry I hurt you, Miss Rich. I was afraid, and thought you'd made the noise, and were trying to make me come out of the corner. My father says you are older than I, and that I am to do whatever you say until I am with him again."

The girl seemed to understand the situation. "It's all right, 'Mina," she said gently. "You didn't really hurt me. I'll take care of you, and we'll get back to your father - after a while." She glanced at the pickup as she added the last words, and Raeker grew tense again. A glance at Councillor Rich confirmed his suspicion; the girl was trying to get something across, presumably without alarming her companion. Gently but firmly Raeker took the Drommian's place in the pickup field. Easy r nodded in recognition; she had met him briefly on her own tour through the Vindemiatrix some time earlier.

"Miss Rich," he began, "we're still a little in the dark f about just what happened down there. Can you tell us? Or is your guide there, to give a report?"

She shook her head negatively at the latter question. "I don't know where Mr. Flanagan is. He stayed in the tender to have a smoke, I suppose; he told us to be sure not to touch any controls - he must think we're pretty stupid. We stayed away from the board, of course - in fact, after the first look, we stayed out of the control compartment altogether, and looked through the other rooms. They're all observation or bunkrooms, except for the galley, and we were just going to suit up to go back to the tender when a call came from Mr; Flanagan on the set he'd left tuned to suit radio frequence. He said he was at the outer lock, and would open it as soon as he closed the one on the tender - the two ships were so close together we could touch them both at once when we came across - and that we were to, stay absolutely still and not do a thing until he came. 'Mina had just opened his mouth to answer when the jolt came; we were flung against the wall, and I was held there by what felt like three or four G's of acceleration. 'Mina could move around all right, and tried to call Mr. Flanagan on the set, but there was no answer, and I wouldn't let him touch anything else. The acceleration lasted half a minute or ! so, I guess; you can tell better than we can. It stopped | just before you called us."

By this time the communication room was packed with : men. Several of them began to work slide rules, and Raeker, turning from the set, watched one of these until [ he had finished; then he asked, "Any ideas, Saki?"

"I think so," the engineer replied. "The kid's report isn't exact, of course, but judging from her estimate of acceleration and time, and the mass of the bathyscaphe, ' one full ring of the solid-fuel boosters was touched off somehow. That should give just over four G's for forty seconds - about a mile a second total velocity change. There's no way to tell where the ship is, though, until we get there and home on it; we can't compute, since we don't know the direction of acceleration. I wish the 'scaphe weren't so close to the planet, though."

Raeker knew better than to ask the reason for this, but Aminadabarlee didn't.

"Why?"

The engineer glanced at him, then at the image of the other Drommian in the screen, and then apparently decided not to pull punches.

"Because a one-mile-a-second change in any of a good many directions could put it in an orbit which would enter atmosphere," he said bluntly.

"How long to entry?" cut in Rich.

"Not my pigeon. We'll get it computed while we're under way. My guess would be hours at the outside, though."

"Then why are we standing here talking?" shrilled Aminadabarlee. "Why aren't preparations for rescue being made?"

"They are," returned the engineer calmly. "Only one shuttle was in regular use, but there are others here. One of them is being made ready, and will leave in less than ten minutes. Dr. Raeker, do you want to come?"

"I'd just add mass without being useful," Raeker replied.

"I suppose the same could be said for me," said Rich, "but I'd like to come if there's room. I certainly don't want to hamper the work, though."

"It will be better if you don't," admitted Sakiiro. "We'll keep in touch with this ship and the 'scaphe, though, so you'll know what's happening." He ran from the room.

Aminadabarlee had quite obviously meant to insist upon going; after Rich's words, however, he could hardly do that. He relieved his feelings by remarking, "No one but a fool human being would have had takeoff boosters attached to an uncompleted ship."

"The bathyscaphe is complete, except for final circuit checks and connections," another engineer replied calmly, "and the boosters were for landing as well as takeoff. As a matter of fact, they were not supposed to be connected until the last moment, and it will not be possible to tell what actually fired them until we salvage the ship. Until then, assigning blame is very much a waste of time." He stared coldly at the Drommian, and Rich stepped into the breach. Raeker had to admit the fellow was good at his job; it had seemed a virtual certainty that the big weasel was going to clean the human beings out of the room, but Rich had him calmed down below boiling point in four or five minutes.

Raeker would have liked to hear the details, but he was occupied with the radio. The children on the bathyscaphe had heard, without understanding completely, most of the engineers' statements; and Raeker found himself doing his best to keep up their morale. They were, perfectly reasonably, frightened half to death. It wasn't as hard as he'd thought it might be, though; he hadn't talked long before he realized that the girl was doing exactly the same thing. He couldn't decide whether it was for the benefit of her father or her nonhuman companion, but his respect for the youngster went even higher.

The rescue ship was well on the way by this time, and as the minutes clicked by the hopes of everyone on all three vessels began to mount. If the 'scaphe were in an orbit that did not touch Tenebra's atmosphere, of course, there was no danger; food and air equipment were aboard and had been operating for some time. On a straight chance basis, it seemed to Raeker that the probabilities were at least three to one that this was the case, though he was no ballistician. The computer on the rescue boat was kept busy grinding out possible orbits; the worst seemed to call for atmospheric contact within three-quarters of an hour of the accident; and if this didn't occur within a little over two hours, it wouldn't.