15: HIGH GROUND
The change of mind that had so affected the Bree’s crew was not temporary; the unreasoning, conditioned fear of height that had grown with them from birth was gone. They still, however had normal reasoning power; and in this part of their planet a fall of as much as half a body’s length was nearly certain to be fatal even to their tough organisms. Changed as they were, most of them felt uneasy as they moored the Bree to the riverbank only a few rods from the towering cliff that barred them from the grounded rocket. The Earthmen, watching in silence, tried futilely to think of a way up the barrier. No rocket that the expedition possessed could have lifted itself against even a fraction of Mesklin’s gravity; the only one that had ever been built able to do so was already aground on the planet. Even had the craft been capable, no human or qualified non-human pilot could have lived in the neighborhood; the only beings able to do that could no more be taught to fly a rocket than a Bushman snatched straight from the jungle. “The journey simply isn’t as nearly over as we thought.” Rosten, called to the screen room, analyzed the situation rapidly. “There should be some way to the plateau or farther slope — whichever is present — of that cliff. I’ll admit there seems to be no way Barlennan and his people can get up; but there seems to be nothing preventing their going around.” Lackland relayed this suggestion to the captain. “That is true,” the Mesklinite replied. “There are, however, a number of difficulties. It is already getting harder to procure food from the river; we are very far from the sea. Also, we have no longer any idea of how far we may have to travel, and that makes planning for food and all other considerations nearly impossible. Have you prepared, or can you prepare, maps with sufficient detail to let us plan our course intelligently?”
“Good point. I’ll see what can be done.” Lackland turned from the microphone to encounter several worried frowns. “What’s the matter? Can’t we make a photographic map as we did of the equatorial regions?”
“Certainly,” Rosten replied. “A map can be made, possibly with a lot of detail; but it?s going to be difficult. At the equator a rocket could hold above a given point, at circular velocity, only six hundred miles from the surface?right at the inner edge of the ring. Here circular velocity won?t be enough, even if we could use it conveniently. We?d have to use a hyperbolic orbit of some sort to get short-range pictures without impossible fuel consumption; and that would mean speeds relative to the surface of several hundred miles a second. You can see what sort of pictures that would mean. It looks as though the shots will have to be taken with long-focus lenses, at extremely long range; and we can only hope that the detail will suffice for Barlennan?s needs.? “I hadn’t thought of that,” admitted Lackland. “We can do it, though; and I don’t see any alternative in any case. I suppose Barlennan could explore blind, but it would be asking a lot of him.”
“Right. We’ll launch one of the rockets and get to work.” Lackland gave the substance of this conversation to Barlennan, who replied that he would stay where he was until the information he needed was obtained. “I could either go on upstream, following the cliff around to the right, or leave the ship and the river and follow to the left. Since I don’t know which is best from the point of view of distance, we’ll wait. I’d rather go upstream, of course; carrying food and radios will be no joke otherwise.”
“All right. How is your food situation? You said something about its being hard to get that far from the ocean.”