“There’s another point I want to take up with you,” he said. “As soon as it’s clear enough to land safely, they’re bringing down a crawler. Maybe watching the rocket land will get you a little more used to the whole flying idea.”
“Perhaps,” Barlennan answered hesitantly. “I’m not sure I want to see your rocket land. I did once before, you know, and — well, I’d not want one of the crew to be there at the time.”
“Why not? Do you think they’d be scared too much to be useful?”
“No.” The Mesklinite answered quite frankly. “I don’t want one of them to see me as scared as I’m likely to be.”
“You surprise me, Commander.” Lackland tried to give his words in a jocular tone. “However, I understand your feelings, and I assure you that the rocket will not pass above you. If you will wait right next to.the wall of my dome I will direct its pilot by radio to make sure of that.”
“But how close to overhead will it come?”
“A good distance sideways, I promise. That’s for my own safety as well as your comfort. To land on this world, even here at the equator, it will be necessary for him to be using a pretty potent blast. I don’t want it hitting my dome, I can assure you.”
“All right. I will come. As you say, it would be nice to have more radios. What is this ‘crawler’ of which you speak?”
“It is a machine which will carry me about on land as your ship does at sea. You will see in a few days, or in a few hours at most.”
Barlennan let the new word pass without question, since the remark was clear enough anyway. “I will come, and will see,” he agreed.
The Flyer’s friends on Mesklin’s inner moon had prophesied correctly. The commander, crouched on his poop, counted only ten sunrises before a lightening of the murk and lessening of the wind gave their usual warning of the approaching eye of the storm. From his own experience he was willing to believe, as the Flyer had said, that the calm period would last one or two hundred days.
With a whistle that would have torn Lackland’s eardrums had he been able to hear such a high frequency the commander summoned the attention of his crew and began to issue orders.
“There will be two hunting parties made up at once. Don-dragmer will head one, Merkoos the other; each will take nine men of his own choosing. I will remain on the ship to coordinate, for the Flyer is going to give us more of his talking machines. I will go to the Flyer’s Hill as soon as the sky is clear to get them; they, as well as other things he wants, are being brought down from Above by his friends, therefore all crew members will remain near the ship until I return. Plan for departure thirty days after I leave.”
“Sir, is it wise for you to leave the ship so early? The wind will still be high.” The mate was too good a friend for the question to be impertinent, though some commanders would have resented any such reflection on their judgment. Barlennan waved his pincers in a manner denoting a smile.
“You are quite right. However, I want to save the time, and the Flyer’s Hall is only a mile away.” “But-”
“Furthermore it is downwind. We have many miles of line in the lockers; I will have, two bent to my harness, and two of the men — Terblannenland Hars, I think, under your supervision, Don — will pay those lines out through the bitts as I go. I may — probably will — lose my footing, but if the wind were able to get such a grip on me as to break good sea cord, the Bree would be miles inland by now.”
“But even losing your footing — suppose you were to be lifted into the air — ” Dondragmer was still deeply troubled, and the thought he had uttered gave even his commander pause for an instant.
“Falling — yes — but remember that we are near the Edge — at it, the Flyer says, and I can believe him when I look north from the top of his Hill. As some of you have found, a fall means nothing here.”
“But you ordered that we should act as though we had normal weight, so that no habits might be formed that would be dangerous when we returned to a livable land.”
“Quite true. This will be no habit, since in any reasonable place no wind could pick me up. Anyway, that is what we do. Let Terblannen and Hars check the lines — no, check them yourself. It will take long enough.
“That is all for the present. The watch under shelter may rest. The watch on deck will check anchors and lashings.” Dondragmer, who had the latter watch, took the order as a dismissal and proceeded to carry it out in his usual efficient manner. He also set men to work cleaning snow from the spaces between rafts, having seen as clearly as his captain the possible consequences of a thaw followed by a freeze. Barlennan himself relaxed, wondering sadly just which ancestor was responsible for his habit of talking himself into situations that were both unpleasant to face and impossible to back out of gracefully.
For the rope idea was strictly spur-of-the moment, and it took most of the several days before the clouds vanished for the arguments he had used on his mate to appeal to their inventor. He was not really happy even when he lowered himself onto the snow that had drifted against the lee rafts, cast a last look backward at his two most powerful crew members and the lines they were managing, and set off across the wind-swept beach.
Actually, it was not too bad. There was a slight upward force from the ropes, since the deck was several inches above ground level when he started; but the slope of the beach quickly remedied that. Also, the trees which were serving so nobly as mooring points for the Bree grew more and more thickly as he went inland. They were low, flat growths with wide-spreading tentacular limbs and very short, thick trunks, generally similar to those of the lands he knew deep in the southern hemisphere of Mesklin. Here, however, their branches arched sometimes entirely clear of the ground, left relatively free by an effective gravity less than one ‘two-hundredth that of the polar regions. Eventually they grew close enough together to permit the branches to intertwine, a tangle of brown and black cables which furnished excellent hold. Barlennan found it possible, after a time, practically to climb toward the Hill, getting a grip with his front pincers, releasing the hold of his rear ones, and twisting his caterpillarlike body forward so that he progressed almost in inchworm fashion. The cables gave him some trouble, but since both they and the tree limbs were relatively smooth no serious fouling occurred.
The beach was fairly steep after the first two hundred yards; and at half the distance he expected to go, Barlennan was some six feet above the Bree’s deck level. From this point the Flyer’s Hill could be seen, even by an individual whose eyes were as close to the ground as those of a Mesklinite; and the commander paused to take in the scene as he had many times before.
The remaining half mile was a white, brown, and black tangle, much like that he had just traversed. The vegetation was even denser, and had trapped a good deal more snow, so that there was little or no bare ground visible.
Looming above the tangled plain was the Flyer’s Hill. The Mesldinite found it almost impossible to think of it as an artificial structure, partly because of its monstrous size and partly because a roof of any description other than a flap of fabric was completely foreign to his ideas of architecture. It was a glittering metal dome some twenty feet in height and forty in diameter, nearly a perfect hemisphere. It was dotted with large, transparent areas and had two cylindrical extensions containing doors. The Flyer had said that these doors were so constructed that one could pass through them without letting air get from one side to ‘the other. The portals were certainly big enough for the strange creature, gigantic as he was. One of file lower windows had an improvised ramp leading up to it which would permit a creature of Barlennan’s size and build to crawl up to the pane and see inside. The commander had spent much time on that ramp while he was first learning to speak and understand the Flyer’s language; he had seen much of the strange apparatus and furniture which filled the structure, though he had no idea of ‘the use to which most of it was put. The Flyer himself appeared to be an amphibious creature — at least, he spent much of the time floating in a tank of liquid. This was reasonable enough, considering his size. Barlennan himself knew of no creature native to Mesklin larger than his own race which was not strictly an ocean or lake dweller — though he realized that, as far as weight alone was considered, such things might exist in these vast, nearly unexplored regions near the Rim. He trusted that he would meet none, at least while he himself was ashore. Size meant weight, and a lifetime of conditioning prevented his completely ignoring weight as a menace.