Iceworld

“Not tomorrow?”

“No. Two days. Go now; cold.” And Sallman Ken turned, took the extra radio from the cargo compartment, placed it on the ground, said, “Carry!” and addressed himself to the task of attaching himself to the torpedo once more. He had detached himself, in spite of his original plan, when he found that he could not reach the cargo compartment while chained to the hull of the carrier.

The native mercifully said nothing as he completed this task. As a matter of fact, Mr. Wing was too dumbfounded at this turn of events to say anything; and even the children wondered how he had done it. Ken rose into the air amid a dead silence, until the two youngest children remembered their training and shrilled, “Goodbye!” after the vanishing form. He barely heard the words, but was able to guess at the meaning.

Back at the Karella, his first care was to get the vivarium inside. He had already evacuated the space between the walls by opening a small valve for a time during the journey through space; now he started the refrigerator, and refused to take his eyes from the inside thermometer until he had satisfied himself that all fluctuation had ceased. Then, and then only, did he start going over the tape record with Feth to make sure he remembered the hundred or so words he had been taught during his brief dive. Laj Drai, rather to Ken’s surprise, forbore to interrupt, though Feth said he had listened carefully during the entire stay on the planet. During this session, Ken managed to tell the mechanic what he had done with the radio, and the latter agreed that it had been a wise move. There was now no need to fear a casual check on the contents of the torpedo by Drai or Lee.

It seemed that Ken had been more convincing than he had expected, in his speech to Drai just before leaving. He had been a little surprised when the boss had failed to interrupt him after his return; now he found that Drai had been itching to do just that, but had been afraid of putting himself in the wrong again. The moment the conference between Ken and Feth came to an end, he was at the scientist’s side, asking for an eyewitness account to supplement what he had heard on the radio.

“I really need a camera to give a good idea of appearances,” Ken replied. “I seem to have been wrong about their size; the ones I saw before appear to have been children. The adults are a trifle bulkier than we are.

“I don’t think the language is going to be difficult, and it looks as though this group, at least, is very cooperative.” He told about the help he had received in making the plant collection.

“I was looking at that,” said Drai. “I don’t suppose any of those things is what we’re after?”

“No, unless they use different names for the living plant and the product. They named each of these to me as they set them in, and you’d have heard as well as I if they’d said ‘tofacco’ once.” Drai seemed thoughtful for a moment before he spoke again.

“Children, eh? Maybe if you can work with them and get rid of the adults you could find things out more easily. They should be easier to fool.”

“Something like that crossed my mind, too,” Ken said. “Perhaps we ought to make a few more collection boxes to take down; I could give them to the kids to fill while I was having another language lesson, and then when they came back I’d have a good excuse to talk it over with each in turn. Something might very well crop up if the parents don’t interfere.”

“Parents? How do you know?”

“I don’t, of course; but it seems likely. But what do you think of the idea?”

“Very good, I should say. Can you get enough boxes for all the children ready by their next morning?”

“I’m not going down that soon. I was making allowances for what Feth told me was the effect of tofacco on the system, and thought I might not be able to make it.” Drai paused long enough to do some mental arithmetic.

“You’re probably right. We’ll have to go back to One to get your dose, too; I somehow can’t bring myself to keep the stuff around where it might fall into the wrong hands.” He smiled, with the same ugly undertone that was making Ken hate the drug-runner a little more each time he saw it.

17

“Dad, will you kindly tell me just how on Earth you worked that?” Don stared at the Sarrian radio, which was all that was visible of the aliens by the time he got back from giving the trade signal. Roger chuckled.

“He didn’t work it. He spends all afternoon teaching the thing to talk English, and just as it’s going it turns around and puts this on the ground. ‘Carry’ it booms, and takes off. What do you suppose it is, Dad?”

“I can’t possibly be sure, Son, until he comes back. It may be a piece of apparatus he intends to use on his next visit; it may be a gift in return for your aid with the plant collection. I think we’d best take it home, as he seemed to want, and do nothing at all to it until he comes back.”

“But if he’s not coming back until the day after tomorrow—”

“I know curiosity is a painful disease, Rog; I suffer from it myself. But I still think that the one who’ll come out ahead in this new sort of trading is the one who steps most cautiously and keeps his real aims up his sleeve the longest. We’re still not certain that this scientific investigation isn’t aimed at just one end — to relieve them of the need for paying us for tobacco. After all, why did this fellow start with plants? There are lots of other things he might have shown interest in.”

“If he’s as different from our sort of life as he seems to be, how would he know that tobacco is a plant?” countered Roger. “It certainly doesn’t stay unburned long enough at his temperature to let him look at the crumbs with a microscope or anything, and a cigarette doesn’t much look like a plant.”

“That’s true,” his father admitted. “Well, I only said we don’t know he hasn’t that up his sleeve. I admit it doesn’t seem likely.”

Curiously enough, Ken thought of one of those points himself before the next visit; and when he descended in the clearing by the Wing home with four collecting boxes attached to his torpedo, the first thing he did was to make clear he wanted minerals in one that was not equipped with refrigeration apparatus. Pointing to another similarly plain he said, “Thing — good — hot — cold.” The Wings looked at each other for a moment; then Edith spoke.

“You mean anything that stays good whether it’s hot or cold? Stuff that you don’t have to keep in a refrigerator?” There were too many new words in that sentence for Ken, but he took a chance. “Yes. Hot, good.” He was still drifting a foot or two from the ground, having so arranged the load this time that he could detach it without first freeing himself. Now he settled lightly to the ground, and things began to happen.

The ground, like most of that in evergreen forests, was largely composed of shed needles. These had been cleared away to some extent around the house, but the soil itself was decidedly inflammable. Naturally, the moment Ken’s armored feet touched it a cloud of smoke appeared, and only lightning-like action in lifting himself again prevented its bursting into flame. As it was, no one felt really safe until Roger had soaked the spot with a bucket of water.

That led to further complications. Ken had never seen water to his knowledge, and certainly had never seen apparatus for dispensing apparently limitless amounts of any liquid. The outside faucet from which the bucket had been filled interested him greatly; and at his request, made in a mixture of signs and English words, Roger drew another bucketful, placed it on the flat top of one of the cement posts at the foot of the porch steps, and retreated. Ken, thus enabled to examine the object without coming in contact with anything else, did so at great length; ana finished by dipping a handler cautiously into the peculiarly transparent fluid. The resulting cloud of steam startled him almost as much as the temporary but intense chill that bit through the metal, and he drew back hastily. He began to suspect what the liquid was, and mentally took off his hat to Feth. The mechanic, if that was all he really was, really could think.

Eventually Ken was installed on top of an outdoor oven near the house, the specimen boxes were on the ground, and the children had disappeared in various directions to fill them. The language lesson was resumed, and excellent progress made for an hour or so. At the end of that time, both parties were slightly surprised to find themselves exchanging intelligible sentences — crude and clumsy ones, full of circumlocutions, but understandable. A faint smile appeared on Mr. Wing’s face as he realized this; the time had come to administer a slight jolt to his guest, and perhaps startle a little useful information out of him. He remembered the conversation