Close to Critical (4 page)

"We'll try." Nick had no time to say more; those in the control room could only watch, though Raeker's fingers were hovering over another set of switches on the complex panel before him.

"One of them's making it." It was the high voice again, and this time Raeker had to answer. "I've known these people for sixteen years, but I can't tell them from the attackers now. How can you identify them?" He let his glance shift briefly from the screens to the two nonhumans towering behind him.

"The attackers have no axes, only knives and spears," pointed out the speaker calmly. The man hastily turned back to the screens. He could not be sure that the other was right; only three or four axes could be seen, and their wielders were not very clearly visible in the swirling press. He had not noticed any lack of axes in the hands of the attackers as they came up the hill, in the brief moments after they became visible to the robot and before battle was joined; but there was no reason to doubt that someone else might have. He wished he knew Dromm and its people better. He made no answer to the slender giant's comment, but from then on watched the axes which flashed in the firelight. These really did seem to be working their way toward the huts which rimmed the top of the hill. Some failed to make it; more than one of the tools which had so suddenly become weapons ceased to swing as the robot's eyes watched.

But some did get there. For half a minute a four-armed, scaly figure stood at one of the hut doors, facing outward and smashing the crests of all attackers who approached too close. Three others, all apparently injured, crawled toward him and under the sweep of the powerful arms to take shelter in the building; one of these remained in the doorway, crouching with two spears and guarding the axeman from low thrusts. Then another defender battered his way to the side of the first, and the two retreated together inside the hut. None of the cave-dwellers seemed eager to follow.

"Are you all inside, Nick?" Raeker asked.

"Five of us are here. I don't know about the others. I'm pretty sure Alice and Tom are dead, though; they were near me at the beginning, and I haven't seen them for some time."

"Give a call to those who aren't with you. I'll have to do something very soon, and I don't want any of you hurt by it."

"They must either be safe or dead. The fighting has stopped; it's a lot easier to hear you than it was. You'd better do whatever it is without worrying about us; I think Swift's people are all heading toward you. Only a couple are outside the door here; the others are forming a big ring around where I saw you last. You haven't moved, have you?"

"No," admitted Raeker, "and you're right about the ring. One of the biggest of them is walking right up to me. Make sure you are all under cover - preferably somewhere where light won't reach you. I'll give ten seconds."

"All right," Nick answered. "We're getting under tables."

Raeker counted a slow ten, watching Hie approaching creatures in the screens as he did so. At the last number his fingers tripped a gang bar which closed twenty switches simultaneously; and as Nick described it later, "the world took fire."

It was only the robot's spotlights, unused now for years but still serviceable. It seemed quite impossible to the human watchers that any optical organs sensitive enough to work on the few quanta of light which reach the bottom of Tenebra's atmosphere could possible stand any such radiance; the lights themselves had been designed with the possibility in mind that they might have to pierce dust or smoke - they were far more powerful'than were really needed by the receptors of the robot itself.

The attackers should have been blinded instantly, according to Raeker's figuring. The sad fact slowly emerged that they were not.

They were certainly surprised. They stopped their advance for a moment, and chattered noisily among themselves; then the giant who was in front of the others strode right up to the robot, bent over, and appeared to examine one of the lights in detail. The men had long ago learned that the Tenebran vision organs were involved in some way with the spiny crests on their heads, and it was this part that the being who Raeker suspected must be Swift brought close to one of the tiny ports from which the flood of light was escaping.

The man sighed and shut off the lights.

"Nick," he called, "I'm afraid my idea didn't work. Can you get in touch with this Swift fellow, and try to get the language problem across to him? He may be trying to talk to me now, for all I can tell."

"I'll try." Nick's voice came faintly through the robot's instruments; then there was nothing but an incomprehensible chattering that ran fantastically up and down the scale. There was no way to tell who was talking, much; less what was being said, and Raeker settled back un: easily in his seat.

"Couldn't the handling equipment of that robot be used for fighting?" The shrill voice of the Drommian interrupted his worries.

"Conceivably, under other circumstances," Raeker replied. "As it happens, we're too far away. You must have noticed the delays between questions and answers when I was talking to Nick. We're orbiting Tenebra far enough I out to keep us over the same longitude; its day is about four Earth ones, and that puts us over a hundred and sixty thousand miles away. Nearly two seconds delay in reflex would make the robot a pretty poor fighter."

"Of course. I should have realized. I must apologize' for wasting your tune and interrupting on what must be a very bothersome occasion."

Raeker, with an effort, tore his mind from the scene so far below, and turned to the Drommians.

"I'm afraid the apology must be mine," he said. "I knew you were coming, and why; I should at least have appointed someone to do the honors of the place, if I couldn't manage it myself. My only excuse is the emergency you see. Please let me make up for it by helping you now. I suppose you would like to see the Vindemiatrix."

"By no means. I would not dream of taking you from this room just now. Anyway, the ship itself is of no interest compared to your fascinating project on the planet, and you can explain that to us as well here, while you are waiting for your agent's answer, as anywhere else. I understand that your robot has been on the planet a long time; perhaps you could tell me more about how you recruited your agents on the planet. Probably my SOD would like to be shown the ship, if someone else could be spared from other duties." "Certainly. I did not realize he was your son; the message telling us of your visit did not mention him, and I assumed he was an assistant."

"That is perfectly all right. Son, this is Dr. Helven Raeker; Dr. Raeker, this is Aminadorneldo."

"I am delighted to meet you, sir," piped the younger Drommian.

"The pleasure is mine. If you wait a moment, a man is coming to show you over the Vindemiatrix - unless you would rather stay here and join conversation with your father and me."

"Thank you, I would rather see the ship."

Raeker nodded, and waited in silence for a moment or two. He had already pressed the call button which would bring a crewman to the observing room. He wondered a little why the younger being was with his father; I presumably he was serving some purpose. It would be easier to talk without him, though, since the two were virtually indistinguishable to Raeker and it would be rather embarrassing to get them mixed up. Both were giants from the human point of view; standing on their hind legs - a highly unnatural attitude for them - they would have towered nearly ten feet tall. Their general build was that of a weasel - or better, an otter, since the slender digits which terminated their five pairs of limbs were webbed. The limbs themselves were short and powerful, and the webs on the first two pairs reduced to fringes of membrane along the fingers - a perfectly normal evolutionary development for intelligent amphibious beings living on a planet with a surface gravity nearly four times that of the earth. Both were wearing harnesses supporting sets of small gas tanks, with tubing running inconspicuously to the corners of their mouths; they were used to an oxygen partial pressure about a third greater than human normal. They were hairless, but something about their skins reflected a sheen similar to that of wet sealskin.

They were stretched in an indescribably relaxed attitude on the floor, with their heads high enough to see the screens clearly. When the door slid open and the crewmen entered, one of them came to his feet with a flowing motion and, introductions completed, followed the man out of the compartment. Raeker noticed that he walked on all ten limbs, even those whose webs were modified to permit prehension, though the Vindemiatrix' centrifugal "gravity" could hardly have made it necessary. Well, most men use both legs on the moon, for that matter, though hopping on one is perfectly possible. Raeker dismissed the matter from his mind, and turned to the remaining Drommian - though he always reserved some of his attention for the screens. "You wanted to know about our local agents," he began. "There's not very much to tell, in one way. The big difficulty was getting contact with the surface at all. The robot down there now represents a tremendous achievement of engineering; the environment is close to the critical temperature of water, with an atmospheric pressure near eight hundred times that of Earth. Since even quartz dissolves fairly readily under those conditions, it took quite a while to design machines which could hold up. We finally did it; that one has been down a little over sixteen of our years. I'm a biologist and can't help you much with the technical details; if you happen to care, there are people here who can.

"We sent the machine down, spent nearly a year exploring, and finally found some apparently intelligent natives. They turned out to be egg-layers, and we managed to get hold of some of the eggs. Our agents down there are the ones who hatched; - we've been educating them ever since. Now, just as we start doing some real exploring with them, this has to happen." He gestured toward the screen, where the huge Swift had paused in his examination of the robot and seemed to be listening; perhaps Nick was having some luck in his selling job. "If you could make a machine last so long in that environment, I should think you could build something which would let you go down in person," said the Drommian.

Raeker smiled wryly. "You're quite right, and that's what makes the present situation even more annoying. We have such a machine just about ready to go down; in a few days we expected to be able to cooperate directly with our people below."

"Really? I should think that would have taken a long time to design and build."

"It has. The big problem was not getting down; we managed that all right with parachutes for the robot. The trouble is getting away again."

"Why should that be particularly difficult? The surface gravity, as I understand it, is less than that of my own world, and even the potential gradient ought to be somewhat smaller. Any booster unit ought to clear you nicely."

"It would if it worked. Unfortunately, the booster that will unload its exhaust against eight hundred atmospheres hasn't been built yet. They melt down - they don't blow up because the pressure's too high." The Drommian looked a trifle startled for a moment, then nodded in a remarkably human manner. "Of course. I should have thought. I remember how much more effective rockets are on your own planet than ours. But how have you solved this? Some radically new type of reactor?"

"Nothing new; everything in the device is centuries old. Basically, it's a ship used long ago for deep-ocean exploration on my own world - a bathyscaphe, we called it. For practical purposes, it's a dirigible balloon. I could describe it, but you'd do better to - "

"Teacher!" A voice which even Aminadabarlee of Dromm could recognize as Nick's erupted from the speaker. Raeker whirled back to his panel and closed the microphone switch.

"Yes, Nick? What does Swift say?"

"In effect, no. He wants nothing to do with anything in this village but you."

"Didn't you explain the language problem to him?"

"Yes, but he says that if I was able to learn his words you, who are my teacher, should be able to learn them more quickly. Then he will not have to depend on people he doesn't trust to tell him what you're saying. I hope he's right. He's willing to leave the rest of us here, but you have to go with him." "I see. You'd better agree, for now; it will at least keep those of you who are alive out of further trouble. It may be that we'll be able to arrange a little surprise for Swift in the near future. You tell him that I'll do what he says; I'll go along with him to the caves - I suppose he'll be starting back there tomorrow, though if he wants to stay longer don't discourage him. When they go, you stay where you are; find everyone who's still alive and get them back in shape - I suppose most of you are injured - and then wait until I get in touch with you. It may be some days, but leave it to me."

Nick was a fairly fast thinker, and remembered at once that Fagin could travel at night without the aid of fire - rain did not suffocate him. He thought he saw what the teacher planned to do; it was not his fault that he was wrong. The word "bathyscaphe" had never been used in his hearing.

"Teacher!" he called, after a moment's thought. "Wouldn't it be better if we moved as soon as we could, and arranged some other place to meet you after you escape? He'll come right back here sure as rainfall."

"Don't worry about that. Just stay here, and get things back to normal as soon as possible. I'll be seeing you."

"All right, Teacher." Raeker leaned back in his seat once more, nodding his head slowly. The Drommian must have spent a good deal of time on Earth; he was able to interpret the man's attitude. "You seem a great deal happier than you were a few minutes ago," he remarked. "I take it you have seen your way out of the situation."

"I think so," replied Raeker. "I had forgotten the bathyscaphe until I mentioned it to you; when I did recall it, I realized that once it got down there our troubles would be over. The trouble with that robot is that it has to crawl, and can be tracked and followed; the bathyscaphe, from the point of view of the natives down there, can fly. It has outside handling equipment, and when the crew goes down they can simply pick up the robot some night and fly it away from the cliff. I defy Swift to do any constructive tracking."