Kwembly; they would obviously have emerged long ago had this been the case. The captain would not have offered large odds on the chance of finding bodies, either. Like McDevitt, he knew that there was a possibility that the crewmen had not been under the hull at all when the freeze-up occurred. There had, after all, been two other unexplained disappearances; Dondragmer’s educated guess at the whereabouts of Kervenser and Reffel was far from a certainty even in his own mind. It was dark underneath, out of range of the floods. Dondragmer could still see (a response to abrupt changes of illumination was a normal adaptation to Mesklin’s eighteen-minute rotation period) but some details escaped him. He saw the condition of the two trucks whose treads had been ruined by the helmsmen’s escape efforts, and he saw the piles of stones they had made in the attempt to confine the hot water in a small area; but he missed the slash in the mattress where the two had taken final refuge. What he saw made it obvious, however, that at least one of the missing men had been there for a while. Since the volume which had evidently not frozen at all was small, the most likely guess seemed to be that they had been caught in the encroaching ice after doing the work which could be seen; though it was certainly hard to see just how this could have happened. The captain made a rapid check the full length of the ice-walled cavern, examining every exposed truck fore and aft, top and sides. It never occurred to him to look higher. He had, after all, taken part in the building of the huge vehicle; he knew there was nowhere higher to go. He emerged at last into the light and the field of view of the communicator. His appearance alone was something of a relief to Benj; the boy had concluded, just as the captain had, that the helmsmen could not be under the hull alive, and he had rather expected to see Dondragmer pulling bodies after him. The relief was short, and the burning question remained: where was Beetchermarlf? The captain was climbing out of the pit and leaving the field of view. Maybe he was coming back to the bridge to make a detailed report. Benj, now showing clearly the symptoms of sleeplessness, waited silently with his fists clenched. But Dondragmer’s voice did not come. The captain had planned to tell the human observers what he had found, but on the way up the side of the hull, visible but unrecognized, he paused to talk to one of the men who was chipping ice from the lock exit. “I only know what the human, Hoffman, told me you found when your party reached that stream,” he said. “Are there more details I should know? I know that you met someone at the point where the ground reached up into the fog, but I never heard from Hoffman whether it was Reffel or Kervenser. Which was it? And are the helicopters all right? There was an interruption just then; someone up above apparently caught sight of Kabremm back at the Esket; then I broke in myself because the stream you had found worried me. That’s why I split your party. Who was it you found?”
“It was Kabremm.” Dondragmer almost lost his grip on the holdfasts. “Kabremm? Destigmet’s first officer? Here? And a human being recognized him; it was your screen he was seen on?”
“It sounded that way, sir. He didn’t see our communicator until it was too late, and none of us thought for an instant that there was a chance of a human being telling one of us from another; at least, not between the time we recognized him ourselves and the time it was too late.”
“But what is he doing here? This planet has three times the area of Mesklin; there are plenty of other places to be. I knew the commander was going to hit shoals sooner or later playing this Esket trick on the human beings, but I certainly never thought he’d ground on such silly bad luck as this.”
“It’s not entirely chance, sir. Kabremm didn’t have time to tell us much. We took advantage of your order about exploring the stream to break up and get him out of sight of the communicator, but I understand this river has been giving trouble most of the night. There’s a buildup of ice five million or so cables downstream, not very far from the Esket, and a sort of ice river is flowing slowly into the hot lands. The Esket and the mines and the farms are right in its way.”
“Farms?”
“That’s what Destigmet calls them. Actually a Settlement with hydroponic tanks; a sort of oversized life- support rig that doesn’t have to balance as closely as the cruiser rigs do. Anyway, Destigmet sent out the Gwelf under Kabremm to explore upstream in the hope of finding out how bad the ice river was likely to get. They had grounded where we met them because of the fog; they could have flown over it easily enough, but they couldn’t have seen the river bed through it.”
“Then they must have arrived since the flood that brought us here; if they were examining the river bed they flew right over us. How could they possibly have missed our lights?”
“I don’t know, sir. If Kabremm told Stakendee, I didn’t hear him.” Dondragmer gave the rippling equivalent of a shrug. “Probably he did, and made it a point to stay out of reach of our human eyes. I suppose Kervenser and Reffel ran into the Gwe/f, and Reffel used his vision shutter to keep the dirigible from human sight; but I still don’t see why Kervenser, at least, didn’t come back to report.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know about any of that, either,” replied the sailor. “Then the river we’ve washed into must bend north, if it leads to the Esket area.” The other judged correctly that Dondragmer was merely thinking out loud, and made no comment. The captain pondered silently for another minute or two. “The big question is whether the commander heard it too, when the human — I suppose it was Mrs. Hoffman; she is about the only one that familiar with us — called out Kabremm’s name. If he did, he probably thought that someone had been careless back at the Esket, as I did. You heard her on your set and I heard her on mine, but that’s reasonable. They’re both Kwembly communicators, and probably all in one place up at the station. We don’t know, though, about their links with the Settlement. I’ve heard that all their communication gear is in one room, but it must be a big room and the different sets may not be very close together. Barl may or may not have heard her. “What it all shapes up to is that one human being has recognized an Esket crew member, not only alive long after they were supposed to be dead but five or six million cables from the place where they supposedly died. We don’t know how certain this human being was of the identification; certain enough to call Kabremm’s name aloud, perhaps not certain enough to spread the word among other humans without further checking. I gather they don’t like looking silly any more than we do. We don’t know whether Barlennan knows of the slip; worst of all, we can’t tell what he’s likely to answer when questions about it come his way. His safest and most probable line would be complete ignorance seasoned with shocked amazement, and I suppose he’ll realize that, but I certainly wish I could talk to him without having human beings along the corridor.”
“Wouldn’t your best line be ignorance too?” queried the sailor. “It would be,” the captain answered, “but I can’t get away with it. I’ve already told the humans your party was back, and I couldn’t convince them that nothing at all had happened on your trip. I’d like to make Mrs. Hoffman believe she made a mistake in identity and that you had met Reffel or Kervenser; but until we find at least one of them even that would be hard to organize. How did she recognize Kabremm? How does she recognize any of us? Color pattern and habitual leg stance, as you’d expect? Or what? “And furthermore, what did become of that pair? I suppose Reffel came on the Gwelf unexpectedly, and had to shutter his set to keep the humans from seeing it; in that case we should be back in touch before long. I wish he looked more like Kabremm. I might take a chance on claiming that it was Ref she’d seen. After all, the light was pretty bad, even for those seeing machines, as I picture the situation, only I don’t know what Barl is going to do. I don’t even know whether he heard her or not. That’s the sort of thing that’s been worrying me ever since this Esket trick was started; with all our long-distance communication going through the human station, coordination was bound to be difficult. If something like this happened, as it was always likely to, before we got our own communication systems developed and working, we wind up on a raft with no center-boards and breakers downwind.” He paused and thought briefly. “Did Kabremm make any arrangements with your group about further communication when we got the talking-box out of the way?”
“Not that I know of, sir. Your orders to break up and go different ways came before much was said.”
“All right. You carry on, and I’ll think of something.”
“All that ever worried me,” replied the sailor as he resumed chipping at the ice, “was what would happen when they did learn about what we were doing. I keep telling myself they wouldn’t really abandon us here; they don’t seem to be quite that firm, even on business deals; but they could as long as we don’t have space craft of our own.”
“It was something like that fear which caused the commander to start the whole project, as you know,” returned Dondragmer. “They seem to be well-intentioned beings, as dependable as their life-spans allow; personally I’d trust them as far as I would anyone. Still, they are different, and one is never quite sure what they will consider an adequate motive or excuse for some strange action. That’s why Barlennan wanted to get us self-supporting on this world as soon as possible and without their knowledge; some of them might have preferred to keep us dependent on them.”
