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 this, 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 wheter there was no one alive below to hear, 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, being wielded by eighteen-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 once more 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. Even Lalande 21185 at a distance of a quarter of a billion miles sheds nearly a thousandth as much illumination as Earth gets from its sun. This does not sound like a great deal, but it is about a thousand times the illumination of full moonlight, which in turn is much better than the helicopter’s floodlights could do if they were spread to cover the whole area visible from a thousand feet up.
To be helpful to either Mesklinite eyes or the video pickup 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. As a search effort for the missing Kervenser, little profit was expected for some time; but scientifically no one was complaining — not even the Mesklinites.
Dondragmer was not exactly worried about his first officer and helmsmen, of course, since he couldn’t really worry. It would be fair to say that he was concerned, since he had done all he could about the missing crewmen, but having done it his attention had been turned elsewhere. He had two principal things on his mind. He would have liked information about soon the ice was likely to melt, compared with how soon another have given even more for a workable suggestion on how to get rid of the ice quickly and safely for himself. He had given both wishes to the human beings as well as to his own scientists, thought 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 his final act should be a useful one.
The human reaction to this remarkably objective and inhumanly calm reaction was mixed. The weathermen and planetologists took it for granted — most of them probably weren’t even aware of the Kwembly’s predicament, much less of the missing Mesklinites. Easy Hoffman, who had stayed on watch after bring Barlennan up to date as Aucoin had directed, was not surprised; if she had any emotional reaction so far it was one of respect for the captain’s ability to avoid panic in a personally dangerous situation.
Her son felt very differently about it. He had been released temporarily from duty in the aerology lab but McDevitt, who was a tactful and sympathetic person and had been aware of the friendship developing between the boy and Beetchermarlf. Benj had become a fixture in the communication room as a result.
He had watched quietly while arrangements were being made by Dondragmer to dispatch the helicopter and the ice-chipping crews. He had even been somewhat interested in the exchange between the human and Mesklinite scientists — McDevitt had been a little reluctant to risk more weather predictions, feeling that his professional reputation had taken jolts enough recently, but promised to do his best. When all these matters had been settled, however, and Dondragmer seemed willing to do nothing but lie on his bridge and wait on events, the boy grew uneasy. Patience, the closet human equivalent to the Mesklinite reaction now being displayed, was not yet one of the youngster’s strong points. For some minutes he shifted uneasily in his seat before the screens, waiting for something to happen, and finally could restrain himself no longer.
“If no one has any immediate material to send, is it all right for me to talk to Don and his scientists?” he asked.
Easy glanced at him, and then at the others. The men shrugged or otherwise gestured indifference, so she nodded. “Go ahead. I don’t know whether any of them are in a mood for casual chatter, but the worst they’ll do is tell you they aren’t.”
Benj didn’t waste time explaining that he was not going to indulge in chatter, casual or otherwise. He switched his microphone to Dondragmer’s bridge set and began to talk.
“Don, this is Benj Hoffman. You have nothing but a bunch of sailors chipping away at the ice at the Kwembly’s bow. There is a lot of energy in your power units, more than a planetful of Mesklinites could put out by muscle in a year. Have your scientists thought of using converter output to either run that test drill for moving ice, or in some sort of heater?
“Second, are your sailors just removing ice, or are they specifically trying to get down underneath to find Beetchermarlf and Takoorch? I know it’s important to get the Kwembly loose, but the same ice will have to be taken out sometime anyway. It seems to me there’s a good chance that some of the water under the ship hasn’t frozen yet, and that your two men are still alive in it. Are you tunneling, or just ditching?”
Some of the human listeners frowned slightly at the boy’s choice of words, but no one saw fit to interrupt or even comment. Most of those who heard glanced at Easy, and decided against saying anything which might be interpreted as criticism of her son. Some, as it happened, did not feel critical anyway; they had wanted to ask similar questions but had not quite liked to be heard at it.
As usual in the conversations between the station and Dhrawn, Benj had plenty of time while waiting for the answer to think of other things he might have asked or said, and better ways in which he might have put the things he did say. Most of the adults knew from experience what was going on in his mind at this point; some were amused, all were to some degree sympathetic, several made bets with themselves that he would not be able to resist the temptation to send a reworded version of his message before the answer came back. When Dondragmer’s response came from the speaker with Benj still silent no one actually cheered, but those who knew Easy best could read and understand the satisfaction in her expression. She had not dared to bet, even with herself.
“Hello, Benj. We’re doing all we can, both for the helmsmen and my first officer. I’m afraid there is no way to apply ship’s power to any of the tools. The converters produce electric current and also rotation torque fields to the truck motors, as I am sure you know, but none of our ordinary equipment can use this — just the helicopters, some of the research equipment in the laboratory, and the lights. Even if we could work out a way to apply the drive motors to digging, we can’t get at them; they’re all under the ice. You must remember, Benj, that we deliberately chose to remain as independent as possible of really complex equipment. Just about everything we have on the planet which we couldn’t make ourselves is directly concerned with your research project.” Ib Hoffman was not present to hear that sentence, which was unfortunate; later he spent a long time making sure of its exact wording from his son’s memory.