Iceworld

The interstellar flyer settled onto a smooth sheet of bare rock beside the dome. There were no cradling facilities, and Ken had to don vacuum armor to leave the vessel. Several other space-suited figures gathered in the airlock with him, and he suspected that most if not all of the ship’s crew were “going ashore” at the same time though, of course, they might not be crew; one operator could

handle a vessel of the Karella’s class. He wondered whether or not this was considered safe practice on a foreign planet; but a careful look around as he walked the short distance from ship to dome revealed no defensive armament, and suggested that those manning the station had no anxiety about attack. If, as had been suggested, the post had been here for twenty years, they probably should know.

The interior of the dome was comfortable enough, though Ken’s conductor made constant apology for the lack of facilities. They had a meal for which no apology was required, and Ken was shown private quarters at least as good as were provided by the average Sarrian hotel. Laj Drai took him on a brief tour of the station, and made clear the facilities which the scientist could use in his assigned job.

With his “real” job usually in mind, Ken kept constant watch for any scrap of evidence that might suggest the presence of the narcotic he sought. He was reasonably certain, after the tour, that there was no complex chemical processing plant anywhere around; but if the drug were a natural product, there might not have to be. He could name more than one such substance that was horribly effective in the form in which it was found in nature — a vegetable product some primitive tribes on his own world still used to poison their arrows, for example.

The “trading” equipment, however, proved more promising, as might have been foreseen by anyone who had considered the planet with which the trading was done. There were many remote-control torpedoes, each divided into two main sections. One of these contained the driving and control machinery and was equipped with temperature control apparatus designed to keep it near normal; the other was mostly storage space and refrigeration machinery. Neither section was particularly well insulated, either from the other or the surrounding medium. Ken examined one of the machines minutely for some time, and then began asking questions.

“I don’t see any vision transmitter; how do you see to control the thing on the planet’s surface?”

“There is none,” a technician who had been assisting Drai in the exposition replied. “They all originally had them, of course, but none has survived the trip to Three yet. We took them out, finally — it was too expensive. The optical apparatus has to be exposed to the planet’s conditions at least partly, which means we must either run the whole machine at that temperature or have a terrific temperature difference between the optical and electrical elements. We have not been able to devise a system that would stand either situation — something goes completely haywire in the electrical part under those freezing conditions, or else the optical section shatters between the hot and cold sections.”

“But how do you see to control?”

“We don’t. There is a reflection altimeter installed, and a homing transmitter that was set up long ago on the planet. We simply send the torpedo down, land it, and let the natives come to it.”

“And you have never brought any physical samples from the surface of the planet?”

“We can’t see to pick up anything. The torpedo doesn’t stay airtight at that temperature, so we never get a significant amount of the atmosphere back; and nothing seems to stick to the outer hull. Maybe it lands on a solid metal or rock surface — we wouldn’t know.”

“Surely you could make the thing hold air, even below the freezing point of sulfur?”

“Yes, I guess so. It’s never seemed to be worth the trouble. If you want a sample, it would be easier to send a smaller container down, anyway — you can work with it better afterwards.”

A thought suddenly struck Ken.

“How about the stuff you get from the natives? Doesn’t that give any clue? Could I work with some of it?” Laj Drai cut in at this point.

“You said you were not a specialist. We have tried to get the stuff analyzed by people who were, without success. After all, if it were possible to synthesize the material, do you think we’d be going to all this trouble to trade for it? That’s why we want you to get the planetary conditions for us — when you’ve done that, we’ll figure out a means of getting seeds from the natives and growing our own.”

“I see,” Ken replied. The statement was certainly reasonable enough, and did not necessarily imply anything about the nature of the material they were discussing.

It did not refute anything, either.

Ken thought that one over for a time, letting his eyes wander over the exposed machinery as he did so. He had a few more questions in mind, but he wanted to dodge anything that might be interpreted as unhealthy curiosity, if these people actually were drug-runners.

“What do these natives get from you for this product?” he asked finally. “Is it a manufactured article they can’t make, or a substance they don’t have? In the latter case, I might be able to draw some conclusions about the planet.” Drai sent a ripple down his tentacles, in a gesture equivalent to a human shrug.

“It’s material — heavy metals that don’t sulfide easily. We’ve been giving them platinum-group nuggets most of the time — they’re easiest to come by; there’s an outcropping of the stuff only a short distance from this station, and it’s easy to send a man out to blast off a few pieces. I don’t know what they use them for — for all I know they may worship the torpedo, and use the nuggets as priests’ insignia. I can’t say that I care, as long as they keep filling their end of the bargain.” Ken made the gesture of agreement, and spoke of something which had caught his attention during the last speech.

“What in the Galaxy is a loudspeaker and microphone doing in that thing? Surely they don’t work at the temperatures you mentioned — and you can’t be speaking to these natives!”

The technician answered the first question.

“It works, all right. It’s a crystal outfit without vacuum tubes, and should work in liquid hydrogen.”

Drai supplemented the other answer. “We don’t exactly talk to them, but they can apparently hear and produce sounds more or less similar to those of our speech.”

“But how could you ever have worked out a common language, or even a code, without visual contact? Maybe, unless you think it’s none of my business and will not be any help in what is, you’d better give me the whole story from the beginning.”

“Maybe I had,” Laj Drai said slowly, draping his pliant form over a convenient rack. “I have already mentioned that contact was made some twenty years ago— our years, that is; it would be nearer thirty for the natives of Planet Three.

“The Karella was simply cruising, without any particular object in view, when her previous owner happened to notice the rather peculiar color of Planet Three. You must have remarked that bluish tint yourself. He put the ship into an orbit at a safe distance beyond the atmosphere, and began sending down torpedoes. He knew better than to go down himself — there was never any doubt about the ghastly temperature conditions of the place.

“Well, he lost five projectiles in a row. Every one lost its vision connection in the upper atmosphere, since no one had bothered to think of the effect of the temperature on hot glass. Being a stubborn character, he sent them on down on long-wave instruments, and every one went out sooner or later; he was never sure even whether they had reached the surface. He had some fair engineers and plenty of torpedoes, though, and kept making changes and sending the results down. It finally became evident that most of them were reaching the surface— and going out of action the instant they did so. Something was either smashing them mechanically or playing the deuce with their electrical components.

“Up to then, the attempts had all been to make the landings on one of the relatively smooth, bluish areas; they seemed the least complicated. However, someone got the idea that this steady loss of machines could not be due to chance; somewhere there was intelligent intervention. To test the idea, a torpedo was sent down with every sort of detecting and protecting device that could be stuffed aboard — including a silver mesh over the entire surface, connected to the generators and capable of blocking any outside frequency which might be employed to interfere with control. A constantly changing control frequency was used from our end. It had automatic heat control — I tell you, it had everything. Nothing natural and darned little that was artificial should have been able to interfere with that machine; but it went out like the others, just as the reflection altimeter reported it as almost touching the surface.

“That was enough for the boss. He accepted as a working theory the idea that a race lived on the flatter parts of the planet; a race that did not want visitors. The next torpedo was sent to one of the darker, rougher