There was a slight stink of oxygen about them — a few bubbles of outside air usually accompanied anything which went through the lock — but the ubiquitous ammonia vapor and the catalyst surfaces exposed at many sites within the hull had long ago proven capable of keeping this nuisance under control. Most of the Mesklinites had learned not to mind the odor too much especially since, as far as anyone knew, really small traces of the gas were harmless.
The researchers doffed their suits and made off with their apparatus and the cases which had protected their cores from the liquid ammonia. Dondragmer dismissed the others to their regular duties, and headed for the bridge. Kervenser started to leave the command station as the captain came through the hatch, but the latter waved him back and went to the starboard end of the superstructure. Portions of its floor were transparent. The human designers had originally intended it all to be so, but they had failed to allow for Mesklinite psychology. Crawling about on the hull was bad enough, but standing on a transparent floor over fifteen feet or so of empty air was beyond all reason. The captain stopped at the edge of one of the floor panes and looked down gingerly.
The grayish surface about the huge vehicle was unchanged; the wind which shook the hull was making no apparent impression on the snow which had been packed by two-score Earth gravities for no one knew how much time. Even the eddies around the Kwembly showed no signs of their presence, though Dondragmer had rather expected them to be digging holes at the edges of his treads. Farther out, to the limit reached by the lights, nothing could be seen on the expanse except holes where the cores had been dug and the whipping branches of an occasional bush. He watched these closely for several minutes, expecting the wind to make some impression there if anywhere, but finally shifted his attention to the sky.
A few bright stars were beginning to show between the patches of scud, but the Guardians of the Pole could not be seen. They were only a few degrees above the southern horizon — much of that due to refraction — and the clouds further blocked the slanting view. There was still no sign of rain or snow, and no way of telling which, if either, to expect. The temperature outside was still just below the melting point of pure ammonia and far below that of water, but mixed precipitation was more than likely. What these would do to the nearly pure water-ice under him was more than Dondragmer cared to guess; he knew about the mutual solubility of water and ammonia, but had never attempted to memorize phase diagrams or freezing-point tables of the various possible mixtures. If the snow did dissolve, the Kwembly might get a chance to show her floating ability. He was not eager to make the test.
Kervenser interrupted his thoughts.
“Captain, we will be ready to move in four or five minutes. Do you want driving power?”
“Not yet. I was afraid that the wind would cut the snow out from under us and tip us over, like backwash on a beached ship, and I wanted to be bow-on if that happened; but there seems to be no danger of it so far. Have the maintenance checks continue except for items which would interfere with a five-minute warning for drive power.”
“That’s what we’re doing, Captain. I set it up when your order came in a few minutes ago.”
“Good. Then we’ll keep outside lights on and watch the ground around us until we’re ready to go again, or until the blow ends.”
“It’s a nuisance not being able to guess when that will be.”
“It is. At home a storm seldom lasts more than a day, and never more than an hour or so. This world turns so slowly that storm cells can be as big as a continent, and could take hundreds of hours to pass. We’ll just have to wait this one out.
“You mean we can’t travel until the wind goes down?”
“I’m not sure. Air scouting would be risky, and we couldn’t go fast enough without it for scouting to be worth the trouble, as far as the human crowd is concerned.”
“I don’t like going so fast anyway. You can’t really look over a place unless you stop for a while. We must be missing a lot that even the human funnies would find interesting.”
“They seem to know what they want — something about being able to decide whether Dhrawn is a planet or a star — and they pay the bills. I admit it gets boring for people with nothing to occupy them but routine.
Kervenser let that remark pass without comment, if not without notice. He knew his commander would not have been deliberately insulting, even after the mate’s slighting remark about human beings. This was a point on which Dondragmer differed rather sharply from many of his fellows, who took for granted that the aliens were out for what they could get, like any good traders. The commander had spent more time in close communication with human, Paneshk, and Drommian scientists than had almost any other Mesklinite and, having a rather tolerant and accommodating personality to start with, had become what many of the other Mesklinites regarded as soft with respect to the aliens.
Discussion of the matter was rare, and Beetchermarlf’s arrival forestalled it this time. He reported completion of checkout. Dondragmer relieved him, ordered him to send the new helmsman to the bridge, and fell silent until the latter arrived. Takoorch, however, was not the sort to live with silence; and when he reached the bridge lost little time in starting what he doubtless considered a conversation. Kervenser, amused as usual by the fellow’s imagination and gall, kept him going; however, Dondragmer ignored all but occasional snatches of the conversation. He was more interested in what was going on outside, little as that seemed to be at the moment.
He cut off the bridge lights and all the outside ones but the lowest floods, giving himself a better view of the sky without completely losing touch with the surface. The clouds were fewer and smaller, but they seemed to be moving past quite as rapidly as before. The sound of the wind remained about the same. More stars were slowly appearing. Once he glimpsed one of the Guardians, as the Mesklinite sailors had so quickly named them, low to the south. He could not tell which it was; Sol and Fomalhaut were about equally bright from Dhrawn, and their violent twinkling through the huge world’s atmosphere made color judgment unreliable. The glimpse was brief anyway, since the clouds were not completely gone.
“—the whole starboard group of rafts peeled off, with everyone but me on the main body—”
Still no rain or snow, and the clearing skies made them seem less likely now, to the captain’s relief. A check with the laboratory through one of the speaking tubes informed him that the temperature was dropping; it was now 75, three degrees below ammonia melting point. Still close enough for trouble with mixtures, but heading in the right direction.
“—of the islands south and west of Dingbar. We’d been ridden ashore by a storm bulge, and were high and dry with half the drift boards broken. I—”
The stars overhead were almost uninterrupted now; the scud had nearly vanished. The constellations were familiar, of course. Most of the brighter stars in the neighborhood were little affected by a three-parsec change in viewpoint. Dondragmer had had plenty of time to get used to the minor changes, anyway, and no longer noticed them. He tried to find the Guardians once more, but still had no luck. Maybe there were still clouds to the south. It was too dark now to be sure. Even cutting the rest of the floods for a moment didn’t help. It did, however, attract the attention of the other two, and the flow of anecdote ceased for a moment.