saying that he’s an ice-hearted politician who would give up the lives of his men just to keep a hammerlock on the Dhrawn operation, but the Esket’s crew was pretty certainly already beyond rescue when he finally agreed not to send the Kalliff in the same direction.”
“There is another point, though,” Hoffman said thoughtfully. “What?”
“I’m not sure it’s worth mentioning, since we can’t evaluate it; but the Kwembly is commanded by Dondragmer, who is a long-time associate of Barlennan’s and should by ordinary reasoning be an extremely close friend. Is there any chance that his being involved would influence Barl’s judgment about a rescue trip or even make him order one against his better judgment? Like you, I don?t think that caterpillar is just an administrative machine. His cold-bloodedness is purely physical.? “I’ve wondered about that too,” the chief planner admitted. “It surprised me greatly months ago when he let Dondragmer go out at all. I’d gotten the impression that he didn’t want him to take major chances. I didn’t worry too much about ic-certainly no one knows enough about Mesklinite psychology in general or Barlennan’s in particular to base any serious planning on. If anyone does, Ib, it’s your wife, and she can’t or won’t put what she understands about them into words. As you say, we can’t assign weight to the friendship-influence possibility. We just add it to the list of questions. Let me hear any ideas about those crewmen who are presumably frozen under the Kuvmbly and then we really must break up.”
“A fusion converter would keep a good, large heating coil going, and resistors aren’t very complex equipment,” Mersereau pointed out. “Heaters aren’t a very unreasonable piece of equipment on Dhrawn, either. If only-”
“But we didn’t,” interrupted Aucoin. “But we did, if you’d let me finish. There are enough converters with the Kwembly to lift her off the planet if their energy could be applied to such a job. There must be some metal aboard which could be jury-rigged into resistors or arcs. Whether the Mesklinites could operate such gadgets I don’t know. There must be a limit even to their temperature tolerance but we might at least ask if they’ve thought of such a thing.”
“You’re wrong on one point. I know there is very little metal either in their equipment or the supplies on those land-cruisers and I’d be startled if Mesklinite rope turned out to be a conductor. I’m no chemist, but anything bonded as firmly as that stuff must have its electrons pretty well latched in place. By all means check with Dondragmer, though. Easy is presumably still in Comm; she can help you if there are no linguistically broad Mesklinites on duty at the other end. We’re adjourned.” Mersereau nodded, already heading toward the door, and the meeting broke up. Aucoin followed Mersereau through one door; most of the others went other ways. Only Hoffman remained seated at the table. His eyes were focused nowhere in particular, and there was a frown on his face which made him look older than his forty years. He liked Barlennan. He liked Dondragmer even better, as did his wife. He had no grounds for the slightest complaint about the progress of the Dhrawn research, considering the policies he himself had helped set up, nor did the rest of the planners. There was no concrete reason whatever, except a trick of half a century before, to distrust the Mesklinite commander. That he might want to keep hypothetical natives of Dhrawn out of the picture could hardly be given credence. No, certainly not. After all, the problems of transferring responsibility to such beings, even if they existed, for the Dhrawn research project, would cause even more delay, as Barlennan would surely realize. The occasional case of disagreement between explorers and planners was minor. It was the sort of thing which happened ten times as often with, say, Drommians. No, there was no reason to suppose the Mesklinites were already going off on independent plans of their own. Still, Barlennan had not wanted helicopters, though he had finally been persuaded to accept them. He was the same Barlennan who had built and flown in a hot air balloon as his first exercise in applied science. He had not sent relief to the Esket, although all the giant land-cruisers were necessary for the Project and despite the fact that a hundred or so of his people were aboard. He had refused local-range radios, useful as they would obviously be. The argument against them was the sort that a firm-minded teacher might use in a classroom situation, but this was real life and deadly earnest. He had, fifty years before, not only jumped at the chance to acquire alien knowledge; he had maneuvered deliberately to force his non-Mesklinite sponsors to give it to him. Ib Hoffman could not rid himself of the notion that Barlennan was up to something underhanded again. He wondered what Easy thought about it.
Beerchermarlf and Takoorch, like the rest of the Kwembly’s crew, were taken by surprise when the lake froze. Neither had had any occasion for several hours to look around, since the maze of fine cords on which their attention was focused was considerably more complicated than, say, the rigging of a clipper ship. Both knew exactly what to do, and there was little need for conversation. Even had their eyes wandered from the job, there was little else to see. They were under the immense bulk of their vehicle, roofed by the pneumatic “mattress” which distributed its weight among the trucks, walled partly by the trucks themselves and partly by the blackness of Dhrawn’s night which swallowed everything beyond the range of their little portable lights. So they had not seen, any more than the sailors inside the Kurmbly, the tiny crystals which began to form at the surface of the lake and settle to the bottom, glinting and sparkling in the Kwembly’s floods. They had completed reconnecting on the port row, Number 1, all the way from bow to stern and were working their way forward on Row 2 when they discovered that they were trapped. Takoorch’s battery light was fading a trifle, and he took it over to the nearest fusion converter, which happened to be on a Row 1 truck, for recharging. He was quite startled to find that he couldn’t get at or even see the converter; after a few seconds of fumbling and looking he called Beetchermarlf. It took nearly ten minutes for them to establish that they were completely enclosed by an opaque white wall, impenetrable even to their strength. It had welded all the outer trucks together and filled all the spaces between them from mattress above to cobbles below, nearly three feet of height, on the average. Inside the wall they were still free to move about. Their tools were edged rather than pointed, and too small to make appreciable way against the ice, though it took fully an hour of scraping to convince them both of that. Neither was greatly concerned as yet; obviously the ice was immobilizing the Kwembly, and the rest of the crew would have to dig down to them in the interest of freeing the vehicle if not for the prime purpose of rescue. Of course their supply of life hydrogen was limited, but this meant less to them than a corresponding oxygen shortage would have to a human being. They had at least ten or twelve hours yet of full activity, and when the hydrogen partial pressure dropped below a certain value they would simply lose consciousness. Their body chemistry would slow down more and more, but fifty and perhaps a hundred hours would pass before anything irreversible occurred. One of the reasons for Mesklinite durability, though human biologists had had no chance to find it out, was the remarkable simplicity of their biochemistry. The two were calm enough, in fact, to go back to their assigned work; and they were almost to the front of Row 2 before another discovery was made. This one did perturb them. The ice was creeping inward. It was not coming rapidly, but it was coming. As it happened, neither of them knew any better than Ib Hoffman what being frozen into a block of the stuff was likely to do to them. Neither had the slightest desire to learn. At least there was still light. Not all the power units were on outside trucks, and Takoorch had been able to recharge his battery. This made it possible to make another, very careful search of the boundaries of their prison. Beetchermarlf was hoping to find unfrozen space either near the bottom or, preferably, near the top of the walls around them. He did not know whether the freezing would have started from the top or the bottom of the pond. He was not familiar, as any human being would have been, with the fact that ice floats on liquid water. This was just as well, since it would have led him to an erroneous conclusion in this instance. The crystals had indeed formed at the top, but they had been denser than the surrounding liquid and had settled, only to redissolve as they reached levels richer in ammonia. This pseudo-convection effect had had the result of robbing the lake rather uniformly of ammonia until it had reached a composition able to freeze almost simultaneously throughout. As a result, the search turned up no open spaces. For some time the two lay between two of the trucks, thinking and occasionally checking to see how far the freezing had progressed. They had no time measuring equipment, and therefore no basis for estimating the speed of the process. Takoorch guessed that it was slowing down; Beetchermarlf was less sure. Occasionally an idea would strike one of them but the other usually managed to find a flaw in it. “We can move some of these stones, the smaller ones,” Takoorch remarked at one point. “Why can’t we dig our way under the ice?”
“Where to?” countered his companion. “The nearest edge of the lake is forty or fifty cables away, or was the last I knew. We couldn’t begin to dig that far in these rocks before our air gave out, even if there was any reason to
