V: 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 massive 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 assisting, 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 assisting 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 button on the station-to-satellite set when the answer struck him; and when Dr. Ros-ten’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 partition between cockpit 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 cockpit, 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.”
„Humph.” 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 air-lock 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 assistant 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 Barlennan’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 Bre&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.