Heavy Planet

to tell the dismayed Earthman that it was hopelessly wrecked. Barlennan was intensely interested in the whole phenomenon. “I take it you were carrying some explosive in your tank,” he remarked. “Why did you not use it to get the material you wanted from this animal? And what made it act while it was still in the tank?”

“You have a genius for asking difficult questions,” Lackland replied. “The answer to your first one is that I was not carrying any; and to the second, your guess is as good as mine at this point.”

“But it must have been something you were carrying,” Barlennan pointed out. “Even I can see that whatever it was happened under the floor of your tank, and wanted to get out; and we don’t have things that act like that on Mesklin.”

“Admitting your logic, there was nothing under that floor that I can imagine blowing up,” replied the man. “Electric motors and their accumulators just aren’t explosive. A close examination will undoubtedly show traces of whatever it was if it was in any sort of container, since practically none of the fragments seem to have gone outside the tank?but I have a rather worse problem to solve first, Barl.? “What is that?”

“I am eighteen miles from food supplies, other than what is carried in my armor. The tank is ruined; and if there was ever an Earthman born who could walk eighteen miles in eight-atmosphere heated armor under three gravities, I’m certainly not the one. My air will last indefinitely with these algae gills and enough sunlight, but I’d starve to death before I made the station.”

“Can’t you call your friends on the faster moon, and have them send a rocket to carry you back?”

“I could; probably they already know, if anyone is in the radio room to hear this conversation. The trouble is if I have to get that sort of help Doc Rosten will certainly make me go back to Toorey for the winter; I had trouble enough as it was persuading him to let me stay. He’ll have to hear about the tank, but I want to tell him from the station — after getting back there without his help. There just isn’t energy around here to get me back, though; and even if I could get more food into the containers in this armor without letting your air in, you couldn’t get into the station to get the food.”

“Let’s call my crew, anyway,” Barlennan remarked. “They can use the food that’s here — or as much of it as they can carry. I have another idea too, I think.”

“We are coming, Captain.” Dondragmer’s voice came from the radio, startling Lackland, who had forgotten his arrangement to let each radio hear the others, and startling the commander himself, who had not realized that his mate had learned so much English. “We will be with you in a few days at most; we took the same general direction as the Flyer’s machine when we started.” He gave this information in his native language; Barlennan translated for Lackland’s benefit. “I can see that you won’t be hungry for quite a while,” the man replied, glancing somewhat ruefully at the mountain of meat beside them, “but what was this other idea of yours? Will it help with my problem?”

“A little, I think.” The Mesklinite would have smiled had his mouth been sufficiently flexible. “Will you please step on me?” For several seconds Lackland stood rigid with astonishment at the request; after all, Barlennan looked more like a caterpillar than anything else, and when a man steps on a caterpillar — then he relaxed, and even grinned. “All right, Barl. For a moment I’d forgotten the circumstances.” The Mesklinite had crawled over to his feet during the pause; and without further hesitation Lackland took the requested step. There proved to be only one difficulty. Lackland had a mass of about one hundred sixty pounds. His armor, an engineering miracle in its own way, was about as much more. On Mesklin’s equator, then, man and armor weighed approximately nine hundred fifty pounds — he could not have moved a step without an ingenious servo device in the legs — and this weight was only about a quarter greater than that of Barlennan in the polar regions of his planet. There was no difficulty for the Mesklinite in supporting that much weight; what defeated the attempt was simple geometry. Barlennan was, in general, a cylinder a foot and a half long and two inches in diameter; and it proved a physical impossibility for the armored Earthman to balance on him. The Mesklinite was stumped; this time it was Lackland who thought of a solution. Some of the side plates on the lower part of the tank had been sprung by the blast inside; and under Lackland’s direction Barlennan, with considerable effort, was able to wrench one completely free. It was about two feet wide and six long, and with one end bent up slightly by the native’s powerful nippers, it made an admirable sledge; but Barlennan, on this part of his planet, weighed about three pounds. He simply did not have the necessary traction to tow the device — and the nearest plant which might have served as an anchor was a quarter of a mile away. Lackland was glad that a red face had no particular meaning to the natives of this world, for the sun happened to be in the sky when this particular fiasco occurred. They had been working both day and night, since the smaller sun and the two moons had furnished ample light in the absence of the storm clouds.

5: 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. Rosten?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.”

“Hmph.” 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?”