„Don’t bet too much,” the surveyor retorted. „The physiography boys just nodded in pleasure when I told them about it. One of them said he was surprised you hadn’t hit one earlier; then another piped up and said actually you’d expect most of them farther from the equator, so it wasn’t surprising at all. They were still at it when I left them. I guess you’re lucky that your small friend is going to do most of the traveling for you.”
„That’s a thought.” Lackland paused as another idea struck him. „If these faults are so common, you might tell me whether there are any more Jbetween here and the sea. Will you have to run another survey?”
„No. I saw the geologists before I started on this one, and looked. If you can, get down this step, you’re all right-in fact, you could launch your friend’s ship in the river at the foot and he could make it alone. Your only remaining problem is to get that sailboat hoisted over the edge.”
„To get — hmm. I know you meant that figuratively, Hank, but you may have something there. Thanks for everything; I may want to talk to you later.” Lackland turned away from the set and lay back on his bunk, thinking furiously. He had never seen the Bree afloat; she had been beached before he encountered Barlennan, and on the recent occasions when he had towed her across rivers he had himself been below the surface most of the time in the tank. Therefore he did not know how high the vessel floated. Still, to float at all on an ocean of liquid methane she must be extremely light, since methane is less than half as dense as water. Also she was not hollow — did not float, that is, by virtue of a large central air space which lowered her average density, as does a. steel ship on Earth. The „wood” of which the Bree was made was light enough to float on methane and support the ship’s crew and a substantial cargo as well.
An individual raft, therefore, could not weigh more than a few ounces — perhaps a couple of pounds, on this world at this point. At that rate, Lackland himself could stand on the edge of the cliff and let down several rafts at a time; any two sailors could probably lift the ship bodily, if they could be persuaded to get under it. Lackland himself had no rope or cable other than what he was using to tow the sled; but that was one commodity of which the Bree herself had an ample supply. The sailors should certainly be able to rig hoisting gear that would take care of the situation — or could they? On Earth it would be elementary seamanship; on Mesklin, with these startling but understandable prejudices against lifting and jumping and throwing and everything else involving any height, the situation might be different. Well, Bar-lennan’s sailors could at least tie knots, and the idea of towing should not be too strange to them now; so undoubtedly the matter could be straightened out. The real, final problem was whether or not the sailors would object to being lowered over the cliff along with their ship. Some men might have laid that question aside as strictly a problem for the ship’s captain, but Lackland more than suspected that he would have to contribute to its solution.
Barlennan’s opinion, however, was certainly needed at this point; and reaching.out a heavy arm, Lackland energized his smaller transmitter and called his tiny friend.
„Barl, I’ve been wondering. Why couldn’t your people lower the ship over the cliff on cables, one raft at a time, and reassemble it at the bottom?” „How would you get down?”
„I wouldn’t. There is a large river about thirty miles south of here that should be navigable all the way to the sea, if Hank Stearman’s report is accurate. What I’m suggesting is that I tow you over to the fall, help you any way I can in getting the Bree over the edge, watch you launch her in the river, and wish you the best of luck — all we can do for you from then on is give weather and navigation information, as we agreed. You have ropes, do you not, which will hold the weight of a raft?”
„Of course; ordinary cordage would take the weight of the entire ship in this neighborhood. We’d have to snub the lines against trees or your tank or something like that; the whole crew together couldn’t furnish traction enough for the job. Still, that’s no problem. I’d say you had the answer, Charles.”
„How about the personnel? Will they like the idea of being lowered down that way?” Barlennan thought for a moment.
„I think it will be all right. I’ll send them down on the rafts, with a job to do like fending off from the cliff. That will keep them from looking straight down, and sufficiently occupied so they shouldn’t be thinking of the height. Anyway, with this light feeling everyone has” — Lackland groaned silently — ”no one’s much afraid of a fall anyway; not even as much as they should be. We’ll make that part, all right. Had we better start for that cataract right away?”
„All right.” Lackland hauled himself to his controls, suddenly very weary. His part of the job was nearly over, sooner than he had expected, and his body shrieked for relief from the endless weight it had dragged around for the last seven months. Perhaps he shouldn’t have stayed through the winter, but tired as he was, he could not regret it. The tank swung to the right and started moving once more, parallel to the cliff edge two hundred yards away. The Mesklinites might be getting over their horror of heights, but Lackland was developing one. Besides, he had never attempted to repair the main spotlight since their first battle with Mesklin’s animal life, and he had no intention of driving close to that edge at night with only the running lights to guide him.
They made the cataract in a single lap of about twenty days. Both natives and Earthman heard it long before they arrived, at first a vague trembling in the air that gradually rose through a muted thunder to a roar that put even the Mesklinite vocal equipment to shame. It was day when they came in sight of it, and Lackland stopped involuntarily as they did so. The river was half a mile wide where it reached the brink, and smooth as glass — no rocks or other irregularities appeared to exist in its bed. It simply curled over the edge and spilled downward. The fall had eroded its way for a full mile back from the cliff line; and they had a splendid view of the gorge. The ripple marks gave no clue to the liquid’s speed of fall, but the violence with which the spray erupted from the bottom did. Even in this gravity and atmosphere a permanent cloud of mist hid the lower half of the curved sheet, thinning gradually away from its foot to reveal the roiled, eddied surface of the lower river. There was no wind except that created by the fall itself, and the stream grew rapidly calmer as it moved smoothly away toward the ocean.
The crew of the Bree had gone overboard the moment the tank stopped; and the way they were strung out along the rim of the gorge indicated that there would not be much morale difficulty during the descent. Now Barlennan called them back to the ship, and work commenced at once. Lackland relaxed once more while cordage was dragged forth and a plumb line dropped over the edge to secure a more precise measure of the cliff’s height. Some of the sailors began securing all loose gear about the rafts, though preparations for the original journey had left little to do in this respect; others reached down between the rafts and began unfastening the lashings which held them together and checking at the same time the buffers that held them safely apart. They were fast workers, and raft after raft was dragged away from the main body of the ship.
Barlennan and his first mate, once this work was well under way, went over to the edge to determine the best place for the lowering operation. The gorge itself was rejected at once; the river within its walls was too rough, even if they had wanted to do their reassembling while afloat. It turned out, however, that almost any point on the cliff face would be suitable, so the officers quickly chose one as close as possible to the mouth of the gorge. The reassembled ship or its separate parts would have to be dragged to the river without the tank’s help, and there was no point in making the journey any longer than necessary.