Cycle of Fire

we have an audience that doesn’t speak English.” Kruger shifted back into the Abyormenite speech and explained to Dar and the Teacher what had happened. “Now, while you’re coming down, will you please explain to me just what is so peculiar about this place from the astronomer’s point of view?”

“I’m not an astrophysicist, but here’s the situation as I understand it,” returned Donabed. “You know the elementary facts about the sources of stellar energy, and that main-sequence stars like the sun and this red dwarf should be able to keep radiating at their present rate for billions of years. However, there are a lot of stars in space which are a lot more luminous than Sol, sometimes by a factor of tens of thousands. Suns like that are using up their hydrogen so rapidly that they should not be able to last more than a few million, or a few tens of millions, of years at the most. Alcyone, like several other stars in the Pleiades, is such a sun.

“So far, that’s all right. The Pleiades cluster is full of nebulous material, and presumably that is still combining to form other stars to add to the hundreds already in the group; but here we run into trouble. They’ve worked out to a fair degree of precision the sort of things that should happen to the condensing clouds. In some circumstances, with a certain amount of angular momentum, you can expect several stars to form, traveling in orbits about each other — a regular binary or multiple star system. In other cases, with less angular momentum, you get most of the mass in one star and the dregs left over forming a planetary system. It’s a little surprising, though not impossible, to get a double or multiple star with planets as well; but to get a star like Alcyone with planets anywhere near it is queer as all get-out! A sun like that is putting out radiation tens of thousands of times as intense as Sol’s; that radiation exerts pressure; and that pressure should easily be sufficient to push out of the neighborhood any solid particles that had any idea of coalescing into planets. That’s one of the things that can be computed and checked experimentally, and it’s hard to get around. For that reason the star-gazers were not too bothered when they found from our data that Alcyone had a red dwarf companion, but when they learned that the companion had a planet they went wild. We had quite a time persuading some of them that we hadn’t made some sort of silly mistake; we had to point out that we’d actually landed on the thing.”

“I’ll say we did!” Kruger muttered.

“You should know. By the way, its name is officially Kruger, if you care.”

“I’m afraid its name is Abyormen, if we follow accepted usage,” replied the boy. “But go on.”

“There’s not much more to tell. They hated like poison to give up their pet theories, and I’ve heard them speculating all the way out here about the possibility of the red sun’s having, been captured by Alcyone after its planet or planets formed, and so on. There’s lots of work to be done, and you can help a lot. I judge you’ve learned a good deal of the local language, and will save our time by acting as an interpreter.”

“Yes, up to a point; somehow whenever I talk to one of these people we get crossed up sooner or later. It may be happening without my even knowing it right now, since I haven’t even seen this fellow I’ve been talking to on the radio.”

“How’s that? Haven’t seen him?”

“No, and haven’t the faintest idea what he looks like. Look, Major, if you’ll come down and get me out of this steam bath I’ll be a lot better able to explain all this and, believe me, it will take quite a bit of explaining.”

“We’re on the way. Will you be coming up alone?” Kruger explained the question briefly to Dar and asked if he would care to go along. The native was a trifle dubious for a moment, then realized that more book material would undoubtedly be involved and agreed to accompany his friend.

“Dar Lang Ahn will come with me,” Kruger reported to Donabed.

“Will he need any special accommodation?”

“I’ve seen him perfectly comfortable on an ice field, and he’s made glider flights of fully two days without bothering to drink, so I don’t think temperature and humidity will bother him. I don’t know about pressure; as you say, it’s higher here.”

“How high does he go on these glider flights?”

“I don’t know. He hasn’t any flight instruments, by our standards.”

“Did he ever get up near the top of the usual cumulus clouds?”

“Yes. I’ve been with him. He gets as high as he can whenever he can on long-distance flights.”

“All right. I don’t think terrestrial pressure will hurt him. You’d better explain the risks to him if you can, though, and let him make his own decision.”

Kruger was never actually sure whether Dar completely understood him or not, but he was standing beside Kruger when the Alphard’s landing tender settled into the clearing of the geysers. The Teacher had been informed of what was going on, and the boy had promised to resume contact with him on the ship’s radio equipment as soon as was practical. The hidden being had made no objection, though he must have realized that the move was taking Kruger out of his reach.

The flight back to the Alphard, which was circling safely beyond Abyormen’s atmosphere, was uneventful to all except Dar Lang Ahn. He did not ask a single question while it lasted, but his eyes took in everything there was to see. One peculiarity of his behavior was noticed by most of the human crew. In most cases when a more or less primitive creature is taken for a ride off his planet he spends most of the time looking at the world as seen from outside. Nearly all Dar’s attention, on the other hand, was devoted to the structure and handling of the tender. The only time he looked down for more than a moment at a time was when circular velocity was reached and the tender went weightless. Then he looked back at the surface for nearly a minute and, to the sincere astonishment of all watchers, took the phenomenon in his stride. Apparently he had convinced himself that the falling sensation did not represent an actual fall or, if it did, that the pilots would take care of the situation before it became dangerous. Major Donabed developed a healthy respect for Dar Lang Ahn in that moment; he had experienced too many educated human beings who had become hysterical in like circumstances.

Of course, reflected the boy, Dar is a flyer and gets plenty of brief low-weight jolts when he hits downdrafts or reaches the tops of updrafts, but they never last more than a second or two. The fellow was good; Kruger himself, after nearly an earthly year on the ground, was feeling a trifle queasy.

In due course the monstrous bulk of the Alphard was sighted, approached, and contacted, and the tender eased into the hull through its special lock. The group disembarked and a conference was called at once.

The meeting was held in the ship’s largest lounge, since everyone wanted to hear Kruger’s story. By common consent he made his report first, passing briefly over the way he had escaped death at the time he was abandoned and dwelling on his experiences as they applied to the plants, animals, minerals, and people of Abyormen. The lack of anything resembling fruit, the fact that the stems of many plants were edible but not very nourishing, the chances he had taken to find that they were at least not poisonous, and his determination to leave the hot, volcano-ridden area where he had been left and make his way to the pole, where it might be more comfortable, were woven into a reasonably concise account. Everyone who listened had some question or other when he was finished, however, and it was necessary for the Alphard’s commander to act as chairman.

“You must have had a bit of trouble setting up your direction, when you first started to travel.” This was one of the astronomers.

“It was a bit confusing.” Kruger smiled. “If the red sun had merely kept changing in size it wouldn’t have been bad, but it wobbled back and forth, at the place where I landed, from southeast to southwest and back again, in a way that took me quite a while to get used to. The blue one was easier — Alcyone rises in the east and sets in the west the way things ought to. At least, it does that far from the pole, and it was easy enough to see why it didn’t when I got further north.”

“Right. The red dwarf’s motions are natural enough, if you remember how eccentric the planet’s orbit is. How much does the libration amount to, in your experience? I’ve only seen the planet through about one revolution.”

“I’d say about sixty degrees each side of the mean.”

The astronomer nodded, and yielded the floor. The captain gave the nod to a geologist.

“You say nearly all the country you saw was volcanic?”

“On the continent where you found me, yes. Actually I didn’t cover too much of the planet, remember. The long peninsula I followed north…”

“About three thousand miles,” interjected a photographer.

“Thanks. Its full length was actively volcanic, and the continental region it projected from is largely covered