ordinary travel wear: deliberate friction against unyielding rocks, even with very modest engine power, was a little too much for it. Perhaps the word “unyielding” does not quite describe the rocks; those which had been under the moving band of fabric had been visibly flattened on top by the wear of the last hour or so. Some of them were more than half gone. The young helmsman decided, after careful examination, that the failure of the tread had been due less to simple wear than to a cut started by a formerly spherical pebble which had worn down to a thin slice with sharp edges. Takoorch agreed, when the evidence was pointed out to him. There was no question about what to do, and they did it at once. In less than five minutes the power converter had been removed from the damaged truck and installed in the one aft of it, which had also been unloaded by puncturing the pressure cell. Without worrying about the certainty of destroying another set of treads, Beetchermarlf started this one up promptly. Takoorch was uneasy now. The reasonable optimism of an hour before had had the foundation cut from under it; he was doubtful that the second set of treads would last long enough to melt a path all the way to freedom. It occurred to him, after some minutes of wrestling with the question, that concentrating the warmed water on one spot might be a good idea and he suggested this to his companion. Beetchermarlf was annoyed with himself for not having thought of the same thing earlier. For half an hour the two labored, heaping pebbles between and around the trucks surrounding their heat source. They eventually produced a fairly solid wall confining some of the water they were heating to a region between the truck and the nearest part of the ice wall. Takoorch had the satisfaction of seeing the ice along a two-yard front toward the starboard side of the Kwembly melting back almost visibly. He was not completely happy, of course. It did not seem possible to him, any more than it did to Beetchermarlf, that the treads could last very long on the second truck either; and if they went before the way out was clear, it was hard to see what else they could do toward their own salvation. A man in such a situation can sometimes sit back and hope that his friends will rescue him in time; he can, in fact, carry that hope to the last moment of consciousness. Few Mesklinites are so constituted, and neither of the helmsmen was among the number. There was a Stennish word which Easy had translated as “hope” but this was one of her less successful inferences from context. Takoorch, driven by this indefinable attitude, stationed himself between the humming truck and the melting ice, hugging the bottom to keep from deflecting the warmed current of water, trying to watch both simultaneously. Beetchermarlf remained at the control lines. Since no digging had been done under the second truck, the friction was greater and the heating effect stronger. The control was for speed rather than power, in spite of the words the helmsman had used. Naturally but unfortunately, the wear on the treads was also greater. The heavy thud which announced their failure came annoyingly soon after the completion of the rubble wall. As before, the two bands of fabric gave way almost simultaneously: the jerk imparted to the drive shaft as one let go was enough to take care of the other. Again the Mesklinites acted instantly, in concert, and without consultation. Beetchermarlf cut the power as he plunged away from his station toward the melting surface; Takoorch got there before him only because he started from halfway there. Both had blades out when they reached the barrier, and both began scraping frantically at the frosty surface. They knew they were fairly close to the Kuembly’s side; less than a body length of ice remained to be penetrated, at least horizontally. Perhaps before freezing took over once more sheer muscle could get them through … Takoorch’s knife broke in the first minute. Several of the human beings above would have been interested in the sounds he made, though not even Easy Hoffman would have understood them. Beetchermarlf cut them off with a suggestion. “Get behind me and move around as much as you can, so that the water cooled by the ice is moved away and mixed with the rest. I’ll keep scraping, you keep stirring.” The older sailor obeyed, and several more minutes passed with no sound except that of the knife. Progress continued, but both could see that its rate was decreasing. The heat in the water around them was giving out. Though neither knew it, the only reason that their environment had stayed liquid for so long was that the freezing around them had cut of the escape of the ammonia. The theoreticians, both human and Mesklinite, had been perfectly correct, though they had been no help to Dondragmer. The freezing under the Kwembly had been more a matter of ammonia slowly diffusing into the ice through the still-liquid boundaries between the solid crystals. The captain, even with this information, could have done no more about it than his two men now trapped under his ship. Of course, if the information had come as a prediction instead of an inspired afterthought, he might have driven the Kwembly onto dry land, if she had been able to move in time. Even if Beetchermarlf had had all this information at the time, he would not have been considering it consciously. He was far too busy. His knife flashed in the lamp light as rapidly and as hard as he dared. His conscious mind was concerned solely with getting the most out of the tool with the least risk of breaking it. But break it he did. He never cared to discuss the reason later. He knew that his progress was slowing, with the urge to scrape harder changing in inverse proportion; but being the person he was, he disliked the faintest suggestion that he might have been the victim of panic. Being what he was also prevented him, ever, from making any suggestion that the bone of the knife might have been defective. He himself could think of no explanations but those two. Whatever the reason, the knife gripped in his right-forward pair of chelae was suddenly without a blade, and the sliver of material lying in front of him was no more practical to handle for his nippers than it would have been for human fingers. He flung the handle down in annoyance and since he was under water didn?t even have the satisfaction of hearing it strike the bottom violently. Takoorch grasped the situation immediately. His comment would have been considered cynical if it had been heard six million miles above, but Beetchermarlf took it at face value. “Do you think it would be better to stay here and freeze up near the side or get back toward the middle? The time won’t make much difference, I’d say.”
“I don’t know. Near the side they might find us sooner; it would depend on where they come through first, if they manage to do it at all. If they don’t, I can’t see that it will make any difference at all. I wish I knew what being frozen into a block of ice would do to a person.”
“Well, someone will know before long,” said Takoorch. “Maybe. Remember the Erket.”
“What has that to do with it? This is a genuine emergency.”
“Just that there are a lot of people who don’t know what happened there.”
“Oh, I see. Well, personally I’m going back to the middle and think while I can.” Beetchermarlf was surprised. “What’s there to think about? We’re here to stay unless someone gets us out or the weather warms and we thaw out naturally. Settle down.”
“Not here. Do you suppose that running the drivers, with no treads on them, would make enough friction with anything to keep the water nearby from-”
“Try it if you like. I wouldn’t expect it, with no real load on them even at their fastest. Besides, I’d be afraid to get close to them if they’re really turning up speed. Face it, Tak, we’re under water, water, not regular ocean, and when it freezes we’re going to be inside it. There’s just nowhere else to-oh!”
“What?”
“You win. We should never stop thinking. I’m sorry. Come on.” Ninety seconds later the two Mesklinites, after some trouble in wriggling through the knife slits, were up inside the punctured air cell, safely out of the water.
