“Yes.” Barlennan didn’t bother to look at the block of polymer from which the question had emerged. “Hars, up as fast as you can. Never mind checking wind. I’d like to keep on this side of the rock to see what happens, but getting to the other may be safer and staying out of reach will be safest of all. I wish someone knew what ‘out of reach’ was, but if we do blow that way up will mean a lot more than sideways.”
“Right, Captain. Up it is.” Up it was. Not rapidly; it took a lot of lift to start an upward motion near Mesklin’s south pole, even though once started acceleration tended to be high. That was why more than a thousand feet of fuse had been laid out, and the original test of its burn rate had been made. “Please keep this eye aimed at the rock, wherever we go.” The block spoke again. “Right. Sherrer will see to it,” the captain responded, still without looking at the communicator. “We have you blocked up far enough to look over the rail already, and he’ll wedge the back up more if it’s needed.”
“Are you set to turn it too, or will it be easier to rotate the whole balloon?”
“Much easier, though it’ll cost a little lift. It will also make it unnecessary for you to look across the fire. Don’t worry yet, it should take half a day to burn down.”
“I never worry. I just wonder.” Jeanette Parkos, who had taken up Charles Lackland’s communication duties when health had forced him to return to Earth, was rich in comments like that. She had greatly improved Barlennan’s Spacelang in the last few thousand days, and to his surprise and in spite of her alien hearing and vocal limitations she already spoke Stennish much more fluently and clearly than her predecessor ever had. “I’d appreciate a bit of down tilt whenever Sherrer can provide it,” she now suggested.?I can?t see up to the horizon, but I can?t see down enough for anything within a couple of miles, either. You?re a lot closer to the rock than that, according to the tracker readout, and I hope you?re closer still when it goes. I sometimes wish this thing had a wider field of view. Of course, I sometimes wish it could zoom closer too.? Barlennan was not entirely sure that he shared the hope, though he wanted a good view himself. The Flyer was on Toorey, Mesklin’s inner moon. Her communicator would let her see what went on. The closer to the rock the better for her, but nothing could, presumably, happen to her at that distance. Barlennan lacked both the distance and the seeing equipment, and wasn’t sure which he missed more. The Flyers had assured him that there couldn’t possibly be enough energy in the propellant cell now being tested to lift the rock above it any significant distance, but the Flyers had been wrong before. He remembered vividly the Foucault pendulum fiasco; they had been certain it would give a convincing demonstration, this close to the pole, that Mesklin rather than the sky was doing the spinning. Unfortunately no one, native or alien, had been able to observe the six-inch pendulum’s plane of motion; its period was too short, and like any tuning fork its vibration had been damped out by the air a few seconds after it had been started. They had all heard it, of course. None of the Flyers seemed to remember that now. Barlennan had not seen an explosive in action since Lackland had used his tank’s gun so many thousands of days before, since the previous cell test had produced only the hoped-for fire fountain; but he had been told in detail how such substances were used elsewhere in the universe. These accounts, and a vivid memory of the effect of the shells Lackland had used, left him wondering why no one seemed to worry about the behavior of pieces of the rock. Unlike Jeanette, Barlennan was a rather efficient worrier; he had not raised the question with her because he knew the aliens were extremely knowledgeable in spite of their occasional slips, and he still didn’t like to look ignorant. Answers beginning with “Of course” bothered him, especially in front of his crew, most of whom were now fairly fluent in the alien common language. “Can you tell if it’s still burning, and how far it has to go?” the Flyer queried. “’Fraid not. The fire doesn’t give any light to speak of by daylight. Too bad there’s no night now — though if there were, we’d have to plan pretty tightly so the fire would reach the cell by daylight and we could see what happens to the rock.”
“It might have helped, but since we couldn’t be sure just when the fuse would run out — well, it’s academic anyway. Even if you could control your landing point well enough you’d probably not have time to get there now, get out, cut the fuse, and start over. We’ll just wait and hope. Good work, Sher; I think I see the rock now, though I can’t be sure it’s the right one. It looks like the pictures we got before, but there are such a lot of them?rocks, I mean?this close to the edge of the plateau that I could be wrong. Too bad that fuse doesn?t smoke.? Since cooking fires on Mesklin don’t normally smoke either and other kinds of fire are extremely rare, some minutes were used in explaining the last word; but someone remembered the Stennish for “fog” eventually, and there remained an unknowable length of suspense time when interpretation was managed. The earlier tests had given the Flyers some idea of the fuse burning rate, but the two had disagreed by over ten percent. Tension mounted, therefore, as the minutes passed. Especially for the captain, as Bree Three was drifting toward the rock, keeping Sherrer busy and Barlennan worried. Their height should be great enough now to be pretty safe provided the aliens hadn’t overlooked anything important, but there was no way to be sure they hadn’t. And, in fact, they had. There was no flash; the cell salvaged from the rocket’s liftoff equipment had been worked as far under the giant boulder as the latter’s shape, the hardness of the packed ground, and Mesklinite psychology had allowed. A solid object several body lengths high and wide was not something a sane native wanted close to him, much less extending overhead, though the crew had gotten more or less used in the last hundred thousand days or so to the three-hundred-foot cliff edging the plateau. They were no longer, perhaps, wholly sane by their species’ standards. This cell held a directional charge like the other, its individual macromolecules oriented to send all the exhaust in one direction, and had been aimed slightly downward and away from the rock this time. It therefore started by digging up an enormous cloud of dust. None of the aliens on Toorey was an explosives expert, and none had considered all the likely results of blocking what should have been a free stream of hot gas with several tons of dirt, dirt very solidly packed by Mesklin’s polar gravity. Essentially, all the unit’s directional qualities were lost as its reaction products hit ground and were scattered randomly. It might as well have been a halfton-mass chemical bomb. The big rock did shatter. Being correct on this point did not please the captain as much as it might have; he watched tensely, knowing that if anything did go wrong there would be no time to give Hars a meaningful order. None of the large fragments got far, and none could be seen in flight except near the tops of their trajectories, where they produced a hazy, discontinuous roof a foot or more thick and very little farther from the ground for a brief moment. Some of the much smaller stuff reached terminal velocity at other points, both upward and downward, and was visible very briefly to both Flyers and Mesklinites before hitting the surface again. Everything except for really fine dust had settled out before the sound wave reached the balloon. This was least surprising to the natives. The quick-firing gun which had been used during the near-equatorial part of their earlier odyssey had accustomed them to the sound of explosions, but had given them no clue to the speed of pressure waves in air. Their own voices had a volume astonishing to the Flyers, and they were aware in principle that there was a delay between hooting and hearing, but they had never considered the fact quantitatively. The real trouble was that the crew of the balloon had, at the recent briefing, been assured that nothing of this sort should happen with a directional charge; it was supposed to take several seconds to burn out, waste much less of its energy in sound, and eject its gases in essentially all one direction as the earlier one had done. That one had been aimed straight up; this had been supposed to dig. Barlennan added another item to his mental file of Flyer fallibilities. It wasn’t really needed; the creatures had, carefully and often, made it clear that tested scientific beliefs were always tentative though usually more reliable than speculation. One could never, obviously, be sure that all the relevant data had been secured or properly considered. “Hey! Look at that ripple!” The alien voice was not that of Jeanette, but the captain understood it well enough. Ripples he knew about. Near the equator they could be watched quite easily, though close to the poles they moved much too quickly to be visible. He also did not expect them on solid ground, here or anywhere. The word “solid” was a concept which to him did not include waves, large or small. The phenomenon was very brief; it was lucky he had been looking in the right direction. It