“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 any difference at all. I wish I knew what being frozen into a block of ice would do to a person.”
“Well, someone will know before long,” said Takoorch. “Maybe. Remember the Erket.”
“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 there to think about? We’re here to stay unless someone gets us out or the weather warms and we thaw out naturally. Settle down.”
“Not here. Do you suppose that running the drivers, with no treads on them, would make enough friction with anything to keep the water nearby from-”
“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 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 up inside the punctured air cell, safely out of the water.
8: FINGERS IN THE BROTH
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 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 imagine 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 its bulk, 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 whether there was no one alive below to hear or 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, wielded by fifteen-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 again 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. To be helpful to either Mesklinite eyes or the video pick-up 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. Of the search for the missing Kervenser, little could be expected for some time; but pure information was coming in so no one was complaining, not even the Mesklinites. Dondragmer was not exactly worried about his first officer and helmsman, since he couldn’t really worry. It would be fair to say that he was concerned: but he had done all he could about the missing crewmen and having done it, his attention had turned elsewhere. He had two principal things on his mind. He would have liked information about how soon the ice was likely to melt, compared with how soon another flood might arrive. He would also have given even more for a workable suggestion on how to get rid of the ice quickly and safely. He had expressed both wishes to the human beings as well as to his own scientists, though he had made it clear to the latter that he was not demanding a crash program. The search for ideas could be combined with, or even subordinated to, the basic research they were carrying on. Dondragmer was not exactly cold-blooded, but his sense of values included the notion that even one’s final act should be a useful one. The human reaction to this remarkably objective and inhumanly calm behavior was mixed. The weather men and planetologists took it for granted. Most of them probably weren’t even aware of the