Star Light

Again, the Mesklinites acted instantly, in concert, and without consultation. Beetchermarlf cut the power as he plunged away from his station toward the melting surface; Takoorch got there before him only because he started from halfway there. Both had blades out when they reached the barrier, and both began scraping frantically at the frosty surface. They knew they were fairly close to the Kwembly’s side; less than a body length of ice remained to be penetrated, at least horizontally. Perhaps before freezing took over once more sheer muscle could get them through…

Takoorch’s knife broke in the first minute. Several of the human beings above would have been interested in the sounds he made, though not even Easy Hoffman would have understood them. Beetchermarlf cut them off with a suggestion.

“Get behind me and move around as much as you can, so that the water cooled by the ice is moved away and mixed with the rest. I’ll keep scraping, you keep stirring.” The older sailor obeyed, and several more minutes passed with no sound except that of the knife.

Progress continued, but both could see that its rate was decreasing. The heat in the water around them was giving out. Though neither knew it, the only reason that their environment had stayed liquid for so long was that the freezing around them had cut off the escape of the ammonia — the theoreticians, both human and Mesklinite, had been perfectly correct, though they had been no help to Dondragmer. The freezing under the Kwembly had been more a matter of ammonia slowly diffusing into the ice through the still-liquid boundaries between the solid crystals.

The captain, even with this information, could have done no more about it than his two men now trapped under his ship. Of course, if the information had come as a prediction instead of an inspired afterthought, he might have driven the Kwembly onto dry land — if she had been able to move in time.

Even if Beetchermarlf had had all this information at the time, he would not have been considering it consciously. He was far too busy. His knife flashed in the lamplight, and his conscious mind was concerned solely with getting the most out of the tool with the least risk of breaking it.

But break it he did. he never cared to discuss the reason later. He knew that his progress was slowing, with the urge to scrape harder changing in inverse proportions; but being the person he was, he disliked the suggestion that he might possibly have been the victim of panic. Being what he was also prevented him, ever, from making any suggestion that the bone of the knife might have been defective; and he himself could think of no explanations but those two. Whatever the reason, the knife gripped in his right-forward pair of chelae was suddenly without a blade, and the sliver of material lying in front of him was no more practical to handle for his nipper than it would have been in human fingers. He flung down the handle in a

Takoorch grasped the situation immediately. His comment would have been considered cynical if it had been heard six million miles above, but Beetchermarlf took it at face value.

“Do you think it would be better to stay here and freeze up near the side, or get back toward the middle? The time won’t make much difference, I’d say.”

“I don’t know. Near the side they might find us sooner; it would depend on where they come through first, if they manage to do it at all. If they don’t, I can’t see that it will make much difference at all. I wish I knew what being frozen in a block of ice would do to a person.”

“Well, someone will know before long,” said Takoorch.

“Maybe. Remember the Esket.”

“What has that to do with it? This is a genuine emergency.”

“Just that there are a lot of people who don’t know what happened there.”

“Oh, I see. Well, personally I’m going back to the middle and think while I can.”

Beetchermarlf was surprised. “What’s to think about? We’re here to stay unless someone gets us out or the weather warms and we thaw naturally. Settle down.”

“Not here. Do you suppose that ru

“Try it if you like. I wouldn’t expect it, with no real load on them even at their fastest. Besides, I’d be afraid to get this close to them if they’re really turning up speed. Face it, Tak, we’re under water — water, not regular ocean — and when it freezes we’re going to be inside it. There’s just nowhere else to… oh!”

“What?”

“You win. We should never stop thinking. I’m sorry. Come on.”

Ninety seconds later the two Mesklinites, after some trouble in wriggling through the knife slits, were inside the punctured air cell, safely out of the water.

8

Dondragmer, dismissing as negligible the chance that one of his missing helmsmen might be directly underneath, had ordered his scientists to set up the test drill near the main lock and get a sample of the ice. This established that the puddle in which the Kwembly was standing in had frozen all the way to the bottom in at least one spot. It might be hoped that this would not apply directly under the hull, where neither heat nor ammonia could escape so rapidly; but the captain vetoed the suggestion of a slanting bore into this region. That did seem to be the most likely whereabouts of the missing helmsmen; they had been at work there, and it was hard to see how they could have failed to see the freeze coming if they had been anywhere else.

There was no obvious way to get in touch with them, however. The Kwembly’s plastic hull would transmit sound, of course; rapping would have solved the problem if it had not been for the mattress. On the off chance that hull sounds might be heard even through this, Dondragmer ordered a crewman to go from bow to stern on the lowest deck, tapping with a pry bar every few feet. The results were negative, which meant inconclusive. There was no way to tell wheter there was no one alive below to hear, no penetration of the sound, or simply no way for those below to reply.

Another group was outside working at the ice, but the captain had already learned that progress would be slow. Even with Mesklinite muscular strength little was being accomplished. Tools about the size of a human machinist’s center punch, being wielded by eighteen-inch twenty-pound caterpillars, would take a long time to get around some two hundred and fifty feet of hull circumference to an unknown depth. They would take even longer if detailed chipping around drivers, trucks and control lines were to be necessary, as seemed likely.

Besides all this, the second helicopter was aloft again with Reffel once more at its controls. The communicator was still aboard, and the human beings were examining as carefully as Reffel himself the landscape revealed by the little machine’s lights. They were also cursing as heartily as the pilot the length of Dhrawn’s nights; this one had well over six hundred hours yet to go, and until the sun rose really quick and effective searching would be impossible. Even Lalande 21185 at a distance of a quarter of a billion miles sheds nearly a thousandth as much illumination as Earth gets from its sun. This does not sound like a great deal, but it is about a thousand times the illumination of full moonlight, which in turn is much better than the helicopter’s floodlights could do if they were spread to cover the whole area visible from a thousand feet up.

To be helpful to either Mesklinite eyes or the video pickup of the communicator, the lights had to be held to a rather narrow beam, covering a circle only a few hundred feet across. Reffel was flying a slow zigzag course which swept this circle back and forth across the valley as he moved slowly westward. At the station far above, the televised image on his screen was being recorded and reproduced for the benefit of topographers. These were already working happily on the structure of an intermittent stream valley under forty Earth gravities. As a search effort for the missing Kervenser, little profit was expected for some time; but scientifically no one was complaining — not even the Mesklinites.