The launch this morning of the Beagle from its docking berth on Prometheus went like the beautifully planned exercise it was. With Shirley and Cinnamon in the pilot and copilot harnesses, Jinjur and Carmen at the command and communication consoles, all the rest of us firmly strapped into our sleeping racks waved cheerfully at the monitoring cameras as we watched the hull of Prometheus slowly slide away on the individual viewscreens built into the Sound-Bar doors of our compact cabins. Our leisurely glide out to an equatorial orbit where we are to deploy the first commsat has been an entrancing panorama of the moons. As the Beagle moves among the moons, and they continue their various orbits, the view is constantly changing for us. First Zouave, then Zuni, then Zulu move into a position where Barnard's light illuminates the hemisphere facing us. Using the large telescope mounted on the topside of the Beagle, we can spot various features in the landscapes of each. There is a tall mountain rising up out of the everpresent smog, near the north pole of Zouave, as sharp and pure of line as Mt. Fuji, and although I have never been homesick, it seemed to blur for an instant in my sight. And there is what appears to be a lake on Zulu that is so perfectly triangular we all chuckled—it looks as though it has been carefully dug!
We're near the first commsat deployment site now, and John and Carmen have lifted an orbiter from its temporary berth on the engineering deck, taken it through the airlock, and tossed it gently into space. I can hear their terse comments, through my own imp, and visualize what's happening as they talk to the robot.
"OK, Russell, you're on your own now," came Carmen's voice. "You can start your deployment sequence."
"Right," came the distinctive, yet mechanical voice of the commsat. "My solar array is going out. Moving . . .moving . . .at full extension . . .now."
"Looks good to me," said John.
"High-gain antenna, unlatched," said Russell. "Command to track back and forth . . .done. Are my gimbals working? My sensors say so."
"Very smooth," replied Carmen. "But my imp reports that James says the communication with Prometheus is intermittent."
"Try again," suggested John. "Bring it back. May be a procedural error."
"OK," said Russell. "Out again. Up. Command."
"Still intermittent," reported Carmen. "Try B transponder."
"Switching to B transponder," said Russell.
"James says its perfect," said Carmen. "Try A transponder."
"Intermittent again," reported Carmen. "An electronics failure in A. Let's go with B."
"Right," said Russell. "B transponder commanded. After I get into position, while B keeps up the link, I'll use my motile to see if I can correct A."
Beagle before you start sail deployment, Bob," Carmen said.
"I am programmed to orient my axis toward you, so you can watch deployment," said Bob, as gyros whirled inside the spacecraft body and slowly turned the base of the satellite toward the open airlock door containing the two spacesuited humans. "Deployment commencing." Slowly, four collapsible booms started to unfurl from the central package, drawing with them a thin wisp of finely perforated aluminum foil. Although the film was highly reflective, it was so thin it was almost transparent, for I could see the bright reddish globe of distant Mars-like Zapotec shining right through it.
"Looks good," said John, surveying the emerging acres of lightsail for tears or wrinkles.
"Deployment completed," said Bob an hour later. "No indication of any malfunctions." The statite, now being pushed to higher and higher speeds by the light pressure of the photons from Barnard, started to drift away from the heavier rocket lander.
"Perfect!" said Carmen. "You look very pretty all lit up like that—and so big. Like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon."
"Now that you've got wings, you can fly to your position over the north pole," said John. "Check in with James when you get there."
"Will comply," radioed Bob. Then the voice channel went dead as the statite moved off to a position over the north polar region of Zuni where the light pressure on the sail from Barnard would exactly counterbalance the gravity pull from Zuni. The sail would also adjust in effective size and angle to compensate for the smaller gravity tugs from the other moons.
The process was then repeated for the second statite, Arthur, whose designated position was over the south pole of Zuni. Now, with two statites to cover the poles, and three orbiters to cover the equatorial regions, we would be in constant communication with Prometheus no matter where we traveled on the multicolored globe of Zuni in the Dragonfly VTOL aeroplane.
With our communications network set up, the next task before the actual landing is a complete, detailed survey of the landing area to make sure there are no surprises. We have excellent maps and images of St. Vincent island and Crater Lagoon taken by the science orbiter Bruce and Linda's large telescope on Prometheus, but the resolution was not as good as it should be, so Shirley put the Beagle into a elliptical orbit with its perigee right over Crater Lagoon, and a period almost exactly equal to Zuni's sidereal rotation period. By making slight orbital adjustments at apogee, she expertly shifted our time of arrival over the lagoon from early in the morning on the first day, to late in the afternoon on the fifth day. The different illumination and shadows from images taken at different times of the day will help in interpreting the scene and allow an estimation of the height of the various topographic features. During the low level flyovers of the landing site, most of us stay in the lounge, looking out the large viewport built into the hull of the lander. The viewport had been installed just for this purpose—to allow the crew to look out at the strange worlds to be found around Barnard. During these last hours, I welcomed my own time at the science console, monitoring the various instruments imaging the electromagnetic spectrum; the work helped to dissipate the suspense that is gradually building. I could see both Richard and David were also eager to take their stint in turn, and the pilots and copilots were equally quick to work. We are all striving to be accurate as we complete the detailed survey of our landing site and transmit all of the information to James, but we are eager to land!
Finally, came the electric words from Joe: "General announcement imminent!"
There was a brief pause, as Joe interrogated the personal imps to make sure everyone was listening, and then Shirley's voice, a little tense, warned: "This time around we're not going to fly by! Prepare for gees in fifteen minutes!"
"OK!" came Jinjur's voice. "Everybody who doesn't have a landing assignment get into your sleeping racks."
With alacrity, we moved to restore all the items drifting freely about the cabins, and to pack away the food trays. Arielle carefully wrapped a large sandwich in film and stuffed it into her pocket, no doubt to sustain her during the long moments of landing! I made sure the galley surfaces were clear, and followed her to the row of vertical sleeping racks. We strapped ourselves in snugly, and settled down for the long-awaited show on the viewscreens in the Sound-Bar doors. Through the imp, I can hear Shirley and Cinnamon, hanging in their stand-up harnesses, talking back and forth to each other as they prepare to land the ship. Jinjur and Carmen, strapped into their console seats, are talking quietly, surveying the weather map being transmitted down from Prometheus.
"There's a weather front approaching," says Carmen.
"That's nothing new on this planet," Shirley replies. "We're lucky we don't have to come down through cloud cover. Switch it through to the bottom left of my display, Cinnamon." I switched my viewscreen to the same map. The front is a large one, with nothing but thick clouds behind it stretching beyond the curve of the horizon. If we don't make a landing now, we won't be able to see the site again for many days.
"What time will that front get to the landing site, Joe?" says Shirley.
"About a half-hour after our scheduled landing," replies the computer.
"Good enough," says Shirley. "Down we go!"
The main engines are roaring into life, slowing the massive lander down, and letting it fall toward the approaching distant island. Someone groans as the unaccustomed tug of gravity begins.
"That was only a half gee," says Shirley. "We'll hit three gees before reentry. Got to get rid of those excess vees somehow."
As the heaviness pulls down on my body, I am grateful we won't have full Earth's gravity on this expedition! Although I know we will soon adjust to our increased weight, and indeed find it useful, the first reaction to it is always this dreary sensation of the slow drag one feels in dreams, when running becomes such an effort.
We are now approaching our chosen site on Zuni! As we come down closer and closer to the surface of the lagoon, we can see the waters begin to ripple outward from the force of our descending jets. Nels is trying to catch a glimpse of aquatic life, while I have my own viewscreen focussed on a view of the strange shoreline taken through one of the secondary monitor cameras outside the ship. Through the walls I can hear the flouwen crooning their pleasure at the sight on their viewscreen of the sliding seas beneath us. The variable and intense deceleration forces of landing have now been replaced with a constant and pleasant gravity force, and I readjust my body in its harness. As we hover here, balanced on our landing rockets, we can see the storm front we have been observing, moving slowly toward us. Shirley will now slide the Beagle sideways on its jets, over the water toward the beach, then onto the top of the . . .
My, what a peculiar noise!
We're falling!
I think I must still be in shock. I think we all are. I don't know how I look, but the faces around me are blank and empty as we slump here on the shore, heavy rain pelting down on us from thick gray clouds. In a split second, our lives have been totally changed—for we are vulnerable now—stranded—all those lost and frightening words—and, from being so careful to protect this world from us, and ourselves from this world, now we are exposed to it and must wrest survival from it, for as long as it takes.
Perhaps if I try to recall the events of the last—how long has it been? An hour? Two? It's unbelievable that I can't even determine that! Oh! It has just occurred to me, with a relief out of all proportion to its importance, that my recorder contains an accurate chronometer, and I see that it has been three hours and thirteen minutes since our disaster. I think it is vital that I keep as accurate and rational a record as I can. It may be helpful to us at some future time, and it will certainly help me to feel, in some small way, detached from my helplessness. And, in the course of an unpredictable future, my record may be important in establishing what actually caused the accident.
There had been a whistling roar, followed by a deafening explosion and the crash of the lander. All I remember is the intense noise, and the dizzy feeling of whirling and falling, helplessly, down and down, then a crushing blow from the wall of my bunk as the lander struck the water. When my vision cleared, the only thing lighting the close quarters of my bunk was an emergency light illuminating the latch for the door.
My viewscreen was dead, and so was my imp. It was still in its place, holding today's piece of lace around my collar, and its colorful lights were still shining, running on its internal batteries, but it was silent, as dead as the central computer, Joe. I stared at it for a second, sick with horror at my loss. I don't remember unbuckling my straps, but I suppose sheer instinct guided us all to free ourselves and make our frantic way down the corridor to the passway ladder that leads to the two docking ports.
One look down the passway to the engineering deck below showed there was no escape in that direction. Water was rushing in through the broken airlock windows and rising rapidly up the passway. The massive viewport in the nearby lounge was miraculously unbroken, but there was a line across the middle which indicated the division between water and air—and the line was rising rapidly up the window as air escaped and the lander continued to sink. We scrambled up the passway to the docking port on the top deck.
When I got there, I could see Shirley in the opened airlock, struggling with the latch to the outer door, while Cinnamon was still trying to get untangled from her copilot's harness. I knew instantly why Shirley was having problems with the airlock door. Having been designed for safety, it wouldn't open until the inner door was latched and secured. If we had to go through the complete airlock cycle each time, only a few people could make it out the exit before the lander sank. I went to the pilot's touchscreen. It was operating on emergency power and was obviously in an emergency backup mode, since the normal touchscreen display had been replaced by an archaic operating system prompt. Using the keyboard, I tried to raise Joe—there was no response. Dredging up seldom used commands from my own memory, I gained access to the airlock control subroutine, and programmed with frantic speed around the safety block. By now, most of the crew had made it to the top deck. The water was rising up the passway and was ankle deep on the sloping floor. I finished the changes, and hoping that I had not inserted a bug, restarted the program.
"I got it!" yelled Shirley. "It finally worked!" Although the door was now unlatched, she still had to struggle to force it open because of the water pressure outside.
The lights were now dimming as the salt water got to the emergency power supply—that was horrible, and I was becoming terrified! Richard moved forward into the airlock next to Shirley and I saw his shoulders bulge as he added his strength to hers, and the outer airlock door opened. Water came pouring in over the sill and we fell back, but Jinjur began shouting then. Even in my fear I could hear the anger she was putting into her commands, to make us move and obey. Richard and Shirley forced their way out through the hatch, and then clung to the outside, reaching arms back through to grab us in turn and tug us out into the water. Galvanized by Jinjur's furious yells, I stumbled forward with the others and was seized and pulled outward, somehow managing to move with a large bubble of air attempting to escape upward through the incoming water.
An awful sensation—the shock of being completely immersed! It has been forty years since I last swam—the water roared in my ears, and filled my mouth, and stung my eyes, and all I wanted to do was escape from it! I was not consciously swimming, but was kicking frantically. It must have been only seconds before we were all bobbing on the surface, staring around at each other. The air smelled peculiar, and the water tasted odd—everything was as strange as if we'd just been born. I filled my lungs with the atmosphere, desperately thankful that it did not hurt to do so. I could hear Jinjur counting aloud, and her gasp of relief as she breathed, "Ten!"
Then Richard swore, and dove straight down into that alien water. Shirley said, "The flouwen!" and dove after him. I followed instantly—I was a strong swimmer when young, and the urgency of freeing the flouwen sped me down into the dark fluid. But then I could go no further, and I gave up, exhausted, to float to the surface again. Richard and Shirley were already there, gasping in the strange air, obviously filling their lungs preparatory to diving again. Jinjur started to bark an order, but cut it short. I think it was then that we began to realize something of the enormity of what had happened to us, and that if the air or water is deadly to us there is nothing we can do about it. I felt suddenly very small and alone, as I realized my imp was useless, and all communication with James had stopped. I grabbed at my pocket then, and realized with a surge of relief that my precious recorder was intact, firmly buttoned in, and waterproof.
"It's sinking! It just keeps going slowly down . . ." gasped Shirley. Grimly, Richard continued to pull air into his lungs.
Jinjur commande:; "No! I forbid you to go down again, Richard!" I'm sure we all felt the same sudden dismay. Richard is the strongest among us—if he couldn't get to the flouwen, who could? I saw in Jinjur's face that realization also, and aloud we began to think, to some purpose.
"All they need is an opening . . ."
"But the valve to the transfer tube is electronically controlled!"
"Break the porthole glass?"
Shirley pulled her Swiss Army Mech-All knife from its pouch on her belt, made an adjustment to it, and holding up the now pointed end with a sparkling tip, spoke fiercely. "A diamond scribe. Now if I can get down there!"
Silently, Richard put out his hand. With a sound like a sob, Shirley smacked her precious tool into his palm. "Scribe a big triangle, then punch one corner with the point." We watched in hope and dread as he sucked one last breath, tucked the scribe into a belt pouch and dove, deep and strong, out of sight.
The next minutes were awful. Shirley dove again and came back up exhausted. Arielle was splashing awkwardly, and Carmen was sobbing. I know I was holding my own breath, and trying to see beneath the surface, and diving down to see further, and babbling silent pleas, for what seemed like hours. Suddenly I saw a dark shape below me, rising rapidly and surrounded by blobs of color.
Shirley and I plunged to them. We grabbed Richard, who was dreadfully limp, and hauled him to the surface. His eyes were closed and he was a ghastly color. Together, supporting him between us, we all swam hard for the shore. The instant Nels felt the shelving land beneath his long legs he grabbed Richard about the middle, hauled him onto solid land, and began the rough but efficient resuscitation treatment. We all straggled dripping up the beach and watched anxiously as John bent over Richard, pumping air into the half-drowned body. The desperate minutes dragged on, and Nels took over the rhythmic contractions, as John worked grimly on Richard's head. My fear mounted until I was ready to scream, and then, suddenly, I heard two wonderful sounds—air whistling into Richard's lungs as his ribs lifted of their own accord, and, out in the lagoon, a joyful singing. I slumped, exhausted, onto the sand.
We sat there for some time, each of us trying to come to a comprehension of our situation. As Richard's breathing eased, his color improved, and finally his eyes opened and he sat up.
"I kicked in the glass," he said hoarsely. "The scribe worked, but the glass wouldn't give to pounding. So I grabbed the passway rungs on each side and kicked as hard as I could before passing out."
Obviously, the flouwen, once free, and back in their own element, were able to rescue their rescuer. Richards eyes wandered down to his fist, still spasmodically clenched. He opened it, and we stared at Shirley's Mech-All lying in his palm. Silently, he held it out to her. Was that little tool and my recorder all the technology we had left to us? After all the years of James' silent caring for every need, usually before we even noticed it, were we any longer capable of living on our own?
Jinjur stood up then, slowly and carefully drawing herself fully erect, almost visibly taking charge of herself and reasserting her command. Her heels moved together, disregarding the shifting sand, and her voice snapped briskly. "We're all here, and we're going to survive, blast it!" she said, reasserting her command. "Were any of you injured?"
In some surprise, we hastily surveyed ourselves, and found no physical mishaps beyond a few rising bruises. "Right! Then the first thing we'd better find is fresh water—we're going to have to take a chance on it, I'm afraid, because the salt in that ocean . . ." She broke off, coughing. I realized suddenly that my own throat was raw and sorely burning, and instantly I was horribly thirsty. Without a word I scrambled to my feet and hurried up the beach, hunting for one of the springs our landers had indicated were numerous in this location. Behind me I could hear the others, spread out among the rocks and various likely-looking hollows. Even at the time it seemed so strange—not to have water always available, to have to search for it so desperately, knowing that when I found it, not only was I unable to verify its purity, I hadn't even a container from which to drink!
David's cracked voice suddenly rasped "Here!", and I made my way to him at an eager trot. Clear water bubbled generously out of a little cleft in the rocks here, and ran off into the sand below. We gathered to hold our cupped palms under the flow, and drank avidly. It tasted wonderful! I sincerely hoped it was clean enough, and drank again and again. When that first fiery thirst was assuaged, I helped the others arrange a series of rocks with natural declivities in them to form a small basin. It filled quickly, and certainly looked clear and wholesome. In fact, it looked beautiful, and I sat down abruptly to look at it, and rest. Gradually the others did the same, and we encircled the little pool, weary and quiet. The rocks were heavy, and irregularly shaped—my palms tingled with the first abrasions they had known in years, handling something that was not carefully shaped for their grip. Nor was my imp tending to the soreness with instant attention and the proper medication.
The shock began to wear off, I suppose, and I was left with a feeling of such loneliness and despair as I had never known. The people around me seemed like strangers, as helpless as I was to do anything about our bleak desolation. I looked down at my imp, still entangled in the bit of lace, now motionless and stiff, and lacking the colorful laser lights that normally glittered from its extremities. My robotic companion was dead. Now, without James and the imps, without supplies, without even any means of obtaining supplies, we were as shipwrecked as any mariner has ever been. We were even denied the sight of our possible salvation, for shortly after we had crashed, the storm front had come through and a drifting mist of rain had started. Prometheus, overhead, was now hidden behind a thick pall of dark gray storm clouds. I huddled into misery within myself. I had nothing—could do nothing—and was helpless and frightened and weak and alone.
Suddenly, I felt a hand—Cinnamon's strong brown hand had closed over mine. It was startling—the warmth of another life, not so different from my own—gripped me. Instinctively I tightened my grip on her hand, and reached out to Nels, next to me. I grasped the limp hand on his knee, and he turned, as startled as I had been, to stare at me. Then he grinned, and reached out his other hand, to Shirley. The warm handclasp spread.
Jinjur had not observed this sudden, silly linking—she was sitting slumped, with her head resting on her propped hands—and I saw with sudden compassion how small she really is. She looked up, astonished, at the touch of the hands on either side of her. Then she straightened, smiled, and put out her own hands. The whole foolish group of us was joined, embarrassed, but more alive and hopeful than we had yet been.
Then we coughed, or muttered something, and dropped hands. I realized then, with a little shock, that we are all shy! How absurd . . .we've known each other for years! But we have lived solitary lives, for all our proximity. With the imps to take care of our every personal need, and our own private apartments to escape to, we have developed very little intimacy. Now, abruptly, we are dependent on each other, and none of us know exactly how to handle that.
In addition to the realization, I was becoming aware of an increasing need of my own. Cinnamon had been glancing sharply at me, and now began to say something, but stopped. It is best to begin as you mean to go on! That archaic Victorian injunction floated into my mind, and I spoke into the silence, calmly but definitely.
"Personal hygiene is a matter which I feel merits our attention almost immediately, if you don't mind. Shall we arbitrarily designate a latrine area, and some arrangement for privacy there? I should like to suggest a place quite near the shoreline, in the absence of anything I have seen suitable for tissue."
The practical question broke the emotional moment with some speed, but as I say, I was becoming rather uncomfortable. After a moment's consideration, Nels asked, "Why not just use the sea itself?"
"Why not, indeed?" said Shirley. I was momentarily surprised—Shirley was always the most rigid among us about contaminating an alien surface, and about the risk of being contaminated. "I did notice, as we landed, the shoreline outside the entrance to this lagoon. It slopes away from the point, and there are long beaches along the northern side."
"Right!" said Jinjur briskly, getting to her feet with renewed vigor. "But we'll go together, this first time. Safety in numbers, I hope!"
We marched up the beach and over the point of the lagoon, a pathetic gaggle of humans heading for a comfort station. We found the long beach ideal for this humble purpose; plenty of space to spread out along it for sufficient privacy, even for me, and I waded desperately into the warm salt water as deep as I wanted . . .Oddly I had to remain there for some time—the habits of civilization are not easy to discard, even when the need is imperative!—but finally we were all back on shore, and began trudging back to the little spring.
"What happened to the flouwen?" Richard's sudden anxiety startled us.
"That's right, you were still unconscious," remembered Nels. "We heard them—at least one of them—singing out there, just as you began to get your breath back."
"Singing? What was there to sing about?" said Richard indignantly.
"Well," snapped Cinnamon, "They were free, thanks to you! I imagine it felt pretty good to be out of that little tank, down there in the dark!" It was good to hear the feeling in her voice—a return to a more normal state for at least one of our numbed minds.
"We'll get in contact with them later," Jinjur stated. "First, let's see just what we've got among us."
On a flat rock, near the spring, we put our pitifully few possessions. David and Arielle found some food in their pockets, but it had been ruined by the salt water. Shirley's Mech-All knife and my recorder were still in good shape. Shirley had lost her Permalite and it was no doubt at the bottom of the lagoon along with the lander. Cinnamon produced a small carving of a little animal, in ivory. She said it was her good-luck piece, a statement that was greeted with silence. Nels had, of all archaic things, a pencil—he explained that he liked to draw, a fact which none of us had known before. There was nothing else. From having all technology at our disposal, we were now confronted with two small tools. Shirley spread her strong hands on the rock, and gazed at them in dismay.
"If only we'd worn our suits!" she mourned. "We'd have a lot more to work with . . .like a radio to contact Prometheus with!" That was a fact—even the wiring in them might have been usable. But long ago it had been determined that spacesuits were more a hazard than a help to pilots attempting to land on a strange planet. Our clothes are in good shape—due to the constant ministrations of James and the drowned imps, but hardly suitable for an alien environment. One fortunate circumstance is that we are all shod in the light-weight but tough slipper-stockings we wore around the ship when in free-fall, so we can walk without difficulty.
Jinjur spoke with her customary authority. "All right, troops. We're all sound and strong, and we have water that so far seems harmless. We must continue to survive, and we must find some way to contact Prometheus."
The sound of the familiar name made us all look skyward, trying to spot the light, if not the shape, of our homeship. The cloud cover had thickened considerably, and there was no sign of the ship.
"Too far away." Arielle's statement was harsh.
"The quicker we can adjust to having nothing, the faster we can begin to solve the problem," said Cinnamon. "At least I hope so! I keep mentally expecting my imp to do things for me!"
"I wonder what the possibilities are for retrieving something—anything!—from the lander," said David.
"If the damn thing stops going down, I might be able to dive to it when I'm rested," said Richard.
"I was thinking more of enlisting the flouwen's assistance," said David. "D'you think there's any way we can get across to them what we want? It's pretty basic."
"How can we talk to them at all?" Shirley wailed with fresh dismay. "Our imps, the translator program, all the computers are gone along with the lander!"
John cleared his throat. "I don't like to be even more discouraging, but it's possible they've left the area for good. Without the ship and its equipment, they may feel they're on their own."
This chilling thought was countered by Carmen. "I don't believe that," she said firmly. "If nothing else, simple curiosity will bring them near fairly soon!"
The talk went on, not smoothly, but brief phrases uttered as the speaker felt compelled. Struggling to comprehend this desperate situation, searching for some sign of hope, feeling physically tired, and uncomfortable, and wet—and having to articulate our thoughts—I know I felt exhausted by the efforts I was making. And yet we kept on talking. It was a new shock, after an hour or so, when there came from the sea a loud and eerie ululation. We went to the edge of the water, and could see, well enough, the familiar forms of our alien friends, floating in the shallows.
"I don't even know how to begin!" said Cinnamon grimly. "If I wave, will they 'see' that?"
"I'm going to try talking to them," said Richard, and suited action to word with a roaring bellow of sound. "HELLO THERE!"
The keening stopped, and I was astounded to hear a strange voice—one I'd never heard before, but clear and sharp. Familiar as I had been with the computer-generated translation of the flouwen's "speech," I listened to this new sound in shocked amazement.
"Why you shout?"
"I understood that!" breathed Cinnamon.
How long had the flouwen been quietly absorbing our words on their own initiative, and how had they managed to duplicate our speech? This was an exciting development, and completely unforeseen!
"Can you hear and understand us?" called Jinjur, slowly and loudly.
"Yes," said a different voice, somewhat huskier than the first. "Like Little Red say, if talking sticks not work, we can talk human."
"Could you do this before?" asked Shirley. "We never knew! Why didn't you say you could do this?"
The third voice was much lower than the other two. "We think you prefer talking sticks. We not talk human good."
A spontaneous cheer broke from us all.
"You talk fine!" shouted Arielle encouragingly, and I agreed, heartily. The grammar can come later, if at all; the important thing is to establish comfortable and open conversations with the flouwen, who are so much at home here. They can be a very real aid to our survival, that is obvious. Not only can they retrieve vital objects from our crashed lander, they can help us procure information about the life on this planet that will keep us from harm. A powerful surge of joy swept through us all. Here was real hope! Our former condescension to the aliens was instantly transformed into appreciation—and I, at least, no longer felt quite so alone.
We moved into the ripples. Richard said warmly, "I owe my life to you, friends. Thank you." Little Red came near his friend to speak. "You let us out of tank. Hard work for you. You swim down to us! That surprise us!"
"We thought we had these creatures analyzed," said John softly. "But it didn't even occur to us that they were intelligent enough to learn to copy our speech. I wonder how much else there is to learn about them, and the rest of this planet, that is going to seem painfully obvious when we find it out?"
Shirley was full of questions, and she and Jinjur kept up a steady flow, "Is the water going to suit you? Is there food here for you? What is the lander doing, still sinking? Can you get back through the airlock? Can you bring things up? How deep . . ."
Little Purple answered patiently. "Water okay. Needs something—(the next word was unintelligible to us).
"Ammonia, I'll bet," muttered John.
"Plenty food here, different, but okay."
"GOOD!" said Little Red.
"Little Red lucky, found (another unintelligible word)" explained Little White. Obviously we have much to learn about each other's languages still!
"Is the lander still going down?" repeated Jinjur,
"Yes. Not fast now. It slide down hill. Long way to bottom." The tone was unconcerned, but the words are bad news for us. With dismay I recalled that our exploratory robot Bubble had been unable to reach the bottom of this particular lagoon, and we had selected it for that reason, ironically, as being the landing area where we would do the least damage to the environment.
I had a suggestion. "Can you show us, here on the top of the water, how far down the lander is?" A brief touch, one to the other, and Little Red sped off to one side, with Little White going in the opposite direction. At an appalling distance from each other, they sang out:
"Here!"
"To here!"
About half the width of the lagoon, or about 200 meters, straight down.
Urgently, Cinnamon, Richard, and Carmen began to try to describe to the flouwen the things they thought most important to retrieve, if possible.
"Anything that's loose and floating," said Shirley.
"Anything you can get loose!" added Jinjur.
"Anything you can break off . . ." Richard was going on to suggest more destruction, I suspect, but John stopped him.
"Wait. If they just go smashing around down there they may damage something we can eventually recover. It's not as though they are using our judgement—at least, I don't think so!" I believe it's the first time I have ever heard self-doubt from John!
As the others continued to offer suggestions for likely places to search and useful objects to bring up, I listened with little to add—these people all know their work so well!—but I did interject, whenever possible, a very sincere "Please!" Perhaps the word was alien to the flouwen now, but I was determined they should learn it happily. At length, armed with instructions, the flouwen sank from sight and we have been trying to relax, while waiting.
"I'll be glad of anything they can bring us," sighed Jinjur, "But if I had any say at all about it, I'd want some way to link back to Prometheus first of all. What I'd give to hear that dry voice of James's!"
There seems to be no answer to that. None of us has any say in the matter at all. It's starting to rain again, steadily. Fortunately, it's warm rain, but we seem to have been wet for all of our time here.
The flouwen returned rather more quickly than we expected, struggling with our badly crumpled food locker between them, and bearing disquieting news. The extremely high water pressure at the bottom of the deep lagoon has crushed most of the equipment, including the spacesuit backpacks, which were designed to withstand vacuum, not high pressure. With salt water all through them, the computers, radios, and power supplies are damaged beyond repair.
Nels inspected the food locker. "That's the supply of special frozen food that was to last us for the duration," he said quietly. "The rest of our supplies were freeze-dried items, no doubt saturated with salt water now."
"Well, let's haul this out and use what we can," said David briskly. "If we can consume it before it spoils, we'll get some good out of it." Nels and Richard tugged the thing out of the water and up the shore. There's no way we can even use the chest for much else, unless we can get some more tools.
Little Purple was obviously pleased with the small additional find he'd procured. "Stuff for helping when needed!" was his very creditable translation of the Beagle's emergency medical bag. It is damaged, but the vials of emergency pain-killers and antibiotics are intact.
Shirley was pacing up and down the beach, finally stopping to face Jinjur. "If the flouwen help me, I can get down there!" she said intensely. "And when I'm there, I know I can get into the Dragonfly and activate Josephine. With her help we can make a real try at separating the aerospaceplane from the lander. There's bound to be pockets of air for me to breathe long enough to do that, and you realize if we can get the Dragonfly up here, we can use its engines and rockets to get off this moon and back to . . ."
"No, Shirley." It was John who said it. "Dragonfly is at least two hundred meters down! Even if the flouwen sped you there and back as fast as they can go, the pressure would cave in your chest and kill you before you reached the lander—and the bends would catch you if you tried to come back up. It's just not humanly possible to get down there!"
"Dragonfly is thing with wings like Pretty-Smell that fly through the nothing?" Little White queried, having flown in Dragonfly Two back on Rocheworld.
"Yes!" said Arielle eagerly. "Is it OK?"
"No." The flat negative was chilling. "Tail broken. Not swim in nothing anymore. Warm though," he added thoughtfully. Arielle gave a single, heartbroken sob, and David reached for her.
Shirley groaned. "Dormant, that's what it is," she said. "We had the system powered down for the landing. If the flouwen can detect warmth, it's because Josephine is keeping the nuclear reactor at maintenance power level. But with a broken tail, that means part of the radiator system is gone and we'll never be able to run the nuclear reactor at operational power levels. From a technology point of view, Dragonfly is as far out of reach as Prometheus."
Involuntarily I looked up again. The sky was heavy with gray cloud, and only through occasional breaks could I see through to even more cloud, moving swiftly. No chance for the watchers overhead to send anything to us, and no way for us to signal them.
After a brief conference, we have decided to obtain as much from the lander as the flouwen are willing to bring us, and then rest. Jinjur stepped to the shore to issue orders, and I moved quickly up beside her. She listed aloud the special things to look for—containers, tools, food, bedding from the sleeping racks, and I continued to interject my softening words, changing the orders to requests. When she finished, she stared at me in exasperation. "D'you really think this is the time and place for manners, Reiki?"
"Never more so," I replied firmly. "And it's one of the few things we've have left, isn't it?"
We are settled for the night, and I have the first watch. The flouwen worked hard, bless them, and so did we all. Some of the items retrieved from the sinking lander had never seemed important to us before; Shirley pounced with a whoop of delight on her cutter-pliers, and set them out on a rock under a leaf to dry. Most of the items we carried up the beach, out of reach of the tide, and piled them in heaps under the shelter of the line of straggly trees. This is where we have decided to sleep tonight. I had feared it would be sodden, but Nels made a happy discovery.
"See these thick leaves? Of course I've no idea what the plant is, but look at the ground around the base of the trunk. It's bone-dry sand! It looks like the big leaves absorb every bit of water that hits them!"
"How curious!" said Cinnamon. "Look, even the bottoms of the leaves are dry! It's as though the water is all taken into the plant itself."
"Perhaps the water also provides food for the plant?" Carmen speculated. "I don't know much about plants, but those clouds of smoggy atmosphere we saw on the images of the leading hemisphere could have been full of elements the plants use."
"I think that's a real possibility," Nels agreed. "Perhaps the rain is like food and drink to the plant, so none of it is allowed to go to waste."
The rain continued, steady but not hard, as we worked on.
Cinnamon and Carmen took special care to set out, in an open area, what few objects of salvage were capable of holding rainwater. John has impressed upon us the necessity of boiling our drinking water as soon as we can find a way to do so, although none of us have complained so far of any discomfort resulting from the spring water we have consumed. It was another strange thing, in a day of strange things, to hear Jinjur's order: "If anyone feels sick in any way, I need to know immediately!" I'm sure everyone's first thought was my own: "What business is it of yours?", followed by the much more humble, "Of course." The private monitoring of our physical well-being by James through the imps is now gone, and for our mutual well-being it is now essential that we share our concerns. Such interdependency is going to come very hard to me—I hope very much that I continue to stay healthy, not least because I find it so intolerable to complain aloud!
We had begun by seizing the retrieved articles haphazardly, and stowing them just above the water. I don't recall just when a sort of system crept in. Nels and Richard, standing waist-deep, collected the flotsam from the flouwen, and described it, and one of what was becoming a fairly efficient bucket brigade bore the object along to someone who put it in a more reasonable place, announcing, tersely, where it was. So, after a time, our drenched belongings were more or less arranged, and all of us knew the order. It was dreary, tedious work, and no one enjoyed it less than I, but, in a way, it was satisfying to take from one pair of hands, and pass along to another, yet one more precious remnant of our vanished life.
Throughout our labors, we noted occasionally and spoke of some small creatures, about the size of housecats but looking like nothing on earth, who scuttled out from the bushes long enough to survey us, apparently, and then disappeared. They never came close enough for us to see any details of their structure, but they are a not unpleasant shade of blue-green, and vaguely fuzzy in appearance. The most singular thing—literally!—that we have been able to detect, is that they seem to have just one eye! It is so startling that it gets our attention for the brief glimpse we have of them, and then they are gone.
After some time, as we worked, the rain began to feel cool, in contrast to the warmth of the sea. I was more tired than I have been in years, and began to think dreamily of just floating in the warm water. Fortunately, Jinjur either spotting our increasing fatigue or sharing it, called a halt.
"Little Red! Little White! Little Purple! This is Jinjur. We're going to rest a while. Stay together, don't go far, and don't try anything new until I tell you!"
Silence from the water. Then, "You tell us . . .?" The flouwen's voice sounded surprised. Throughout the months of computer-translated communication, such niceties as mutual respect had been automatically dealt with by the translation program. I had believed, as had Jinjur, that the flouwen had never been able to understand Jinjur's somewhat flamboyant methods of command. Now, in direct communication with the aliens for the first time, weary and worried, she instinctively reverted to early training. There was an echo of boot-camp sergeant in Jinjur's parade-ground bellow: "That's an order!"
I waited, aghast, to hear how our only allies would respond to this arrogance. It was a tremendous relief to hear, out of the rainy dark, only a soft, three-fold shuddering splutter—the flouwen equivalent of a giggle. And to see Jinjur smack herself, smartly, on her own forehead, and turn away.
Wearily, we humans stumbled up the beach one last time. We drank from the little basin again and picked up something from one of the salvaged food lockers. The cold food was unappetizing and tasteless, but we ate whatever it was hungrily, while the rain rinsed the salt from our drenched bodies. By the time we had collected our own choices of sodden bedding or springy tufts and leaves for pillow or cover, and hollowed our selection of sand into comfortable niches, we were too tired to feel anything more than the need to sleep. As I scooped away the soft earth, I saw that our little group had spread itself over a remarkably small area. In the single stroke of our crash, we had changed from maintaining our individual privacy at any cost, to something like a huddle of puppies. I said nothing, only thankful for the sound of other humans breathing, so close to me. One of the few fortunate aspects of our situation is that the air is so warm; as I lie here, propped up on an elbow, the breeze is not even slightly chilling on my damp garment. Indeed, the gentle darkness is balmy on my skin, and brings the strange and spicy scent of the crushed herbs beneath me.
The sound of the rain on the leaves is soporific, as is the gentle wash on the shore; the occasional purposeful rustle among the dark bushes is less so. Overhead, other sounds are in the air; strange little calls and squeaks. There is nothing inherently alarming about the noises, but it will be much less disturbing when we know the source of the sounds, or so I sincerely hope! It is time for me to wake the next watch. I have only managed to stay awake by recording this, and by contemplating the white, pure line of lace around my wrists, and wondering how long I can keep it intact.