Heavy Planet

“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 airlock 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 Batlennan’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 Bree’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. There was such a stream, easily navigable by a vessel like the Bree, passing within fifty miles of the desired spot; but it emptied into an ocean which had no visible connection with that which Barlennan’s people sailed. The latter was a long, narrow, highly irregular chain of seas extending from somewhat north of the equator in the general neighborhood of Lackland’s station almost to the equator on the opposite side of the planet, passing fairly close to the south pole on the way — fairly close, that is, as distances on Mesklin went. The other sea, into which the river near the rocket emptied, was broader and more regular in outline; the river mouth in question was at about its southernmost point, and it also extended to and past the equator, merging at last with the northern icecap. It lay to the east of the first ocean chain, and appeared to be separated from it by a narrow isthmus extending from pole to equator — narrow, again by Mesklinite standards. As the photographs were gradually pieced together, Lackland decided that the isthmus varied from about two to nearly seven thousand miles in width. “What we could use, Barl, is a passage from one of these seas into the other,” remarked Lackland one day. The Mesklinite, sprawled comfortably on his ledge outside the window, gestured agreement silently. It was past midwinter now, and the greater sun was becoming perceptibly dimmer as it arched on its swift path across the sky to the north. “Are you sure that your people know of none? After all, most of these pictures were taken in the fall, and you say that the ocean level is much higher in the spring.”

“We know of none, at any season,” replied the captain. “We know something, but not much, of the ocean you speak of; there are too many different nations on the land between for very much contact to take place. A single caravan would be a couple of years on the journey, and as a rule they don’t travel that far. Goods pass through many hands on such a trip, and it’s a little hard to learn much about their origin by the time our traders see them in the western seaports of the isthmus. If any passage such as we would like exists at all, it must be here near the Rim where the lands are almost completely unexplored. Our map — the one you and I are making — does not go far enough yet. In any case, there is no such passage south of here during the autumn; I have been along the entire coast line as it was then, remember. Perhaps, however, this very coast reaches over to the other sea; we have followed it eastward for several thousand miles, and simply do not know how much farther it goes.? “As I remember, it curves north again a couple of thousand miles past the outer cape, Bart — but of course that was in the autumn, too, when I saw it. It’s going to be quite troublesome, this business of making a usable map of your world. It changes too much. I’d be tempted to wait until next autumn so that at least we could use the map we made, but that’s four of my years away. I can’t stay here that long.”

“You could go back to your own world and rest until the time came though I would be sorry to see you go.”

“I’m afraid that would be a rather long journey, Barlennan.”

“How far?”

“Well — your units of distance wouldn’t help much. Let’s see. A ray of light could travel around Mesklin’s ‘Rim’ in — ah — four fifths of a second.” He demonstrated this time interval with his watch, while the native looked on with interest. “The same ray would take a little over eleven of my years; that’s — about two and a quarter of yours, to get from here to my home.”

“Then your world is too far to see? You never explained these things to me before.”

“I was not sure we had covered the language problem well enough. No, my world cannot be seen, but I will show you my sun when winter is over and we have moved to the right side of yours.” The last phrase passed completely over Barlennan’s head, but he let it go. The only suns he knew were the bright Belne whose coming and going made day and night, and the fainter Esstes, which was visible in the night sky at this moment. In a little less than half a year, at midsummer, the two would be close together in the sky, and the fainter one hard to see; but Barlennan had never bothered his head about the reason for these motions. Lackland had put down the photograph he was holding, and seemed immersed in thought. Much of the floor of the room was already covered with loosely fitted pictures; the region best known to Barlennan was already mapped fairly well. However, there was yet a long, long way to go before the area occupied by the human outpost would be included; and the man was already being troubled by the refusal of the photographs to fit together. Had they been of a spherical or nearly spherical world like Earth or Mars, he could have applied the proper projection correction almost automatically on the smaller map which he was constructing, and which covered a table at one side of the chamber; but Mesklin was not even approximately spherical. As Lackland had long ago recognized, the proportions of the Bowl on the Bree—Barlennan’s equivalent of a terrestrial globe — were approximately right. It was six inches across and one and a quarter deep, and its curvature was smooth but far from uniform. To add to the difficulty of matching photographs, much of the planet’s surface was relatively smooth, without really distinctive topographic feature; and even where mountains and valleys existed, the different shadowing of adjacent photographs made comparison a hard job. The habit of the brighter sun of crossing from horizon to horizon in less than nine minutes had seriously disarranged normal photographic procedure; successive pictures in the same series were often illuminated from almost opposite directions. “We’re not getting anywhere with this, Barl,” Lackland said wearily. “It was worth a try as long as there might be short cuts, but you say there are none. You’re a sailor, not a caravan master; that four thousand miles overland right where gravity is greatest is going to stump us.”