Close to Critical.

by Hal Clement.

SOL, seen at a distance of sixteen light-years, is a little fainter than the star at the tip of Orion's sword, and it could not have been contributing much to the sparkle in the diamond lenses of the strange machine. More than one of the watching men, however, got a distinct impression that the thing was taking a last look at the planetary system where it had been made. It would be a natural thing for any sentient and sentimental being to do, for it was already falling toward the great dark object only a few thousand miles away.

Any ordinary planet would have been glaringly bright at that range, for Altair is an excellent illuminator and was at its best right then: Altair is not a variable star, but it rotates fast enough to flatten itself considerably, and the "planet was in a part of its...o...b..t where it got the maximum benefit from the hotter, brighter polar regions. In spite of this, the world's great bulk was visible chiefly as a fuzzy blot not very much brighter than the Milky Way, which formed a background to it. It seemed as though the white glare of Altair were being sucked in and quenched, rather than illuminating anything.

But the eyes of the machine had been designed with Tenebra's atmosphere in mind. Almost visibly the robot's attention shifted, and the whitish lump of synthetic material turned slowly. The metal skeleton framing it kept

PROLOGUE: INVESTIGATION; ANNEXATION.

pace with the motion, and a set of stubby cylinders lined themselves up with the direction of fall. Nothing visible emerged from them, for there was still too little atmosphere to glow at the impact of the ions, but the tons of metal and plastic altered their acceleration. The boosters were fighting the already fierce tug of a world nearly three times the diameter of distant Earth, and they fought well enough so that the patchwork fabrication which held them suffered no harm when atmosphere was finally reached.

The glitter faded out of the diamond eyes as the world's great gas mantle gradually enfolded the machine.

It was dropping slowly and steadily, now; the word cautiously might almost have been used. Altair still glowed overhead, but the stars were vanishing even to the hypersensitive pickups behind those lenses as the drop continued.

Then there was a change. Up to now, the thing might have been a rocket of unusually weird design, braking straight down to a landing on outboard jets. The fact that the jet streams were glowing ever brighter meant nothing; naturally, the air was growing denser. However, the boosters themselves should not have been glowing.

These were. Their exhausts brightened still further, as though they were trying harder to slow a fall that was speeding up in spite of them, and the casings themselves began to shine, a dull red. That was enough for the distant controllers; a group of brilliant flashes shone out for an instant, not from the boosters themselves but from points on the metal girders that held them. The struts gave way instantly, and the machine fell unsupported.

For only a moment. There was still equipment fastened to its outer surface, and a scant half-second after the blowoff of the boosters a gigantic parachute flowered above the falling lump of plastic. In that gravity it might have been expected to tear away instantly, but its designers had known their business. It held. The incredibly Prologue: Investigation; Annexation 9 thick atmosphere-even at that height several tunes as dense as Earth's-held stubbornly in front of the parachute's broad expanse and grimly insisted on the lion's share of every erg of potential energy given up by the descending ma.s.s. In consequence, even a gravity three times that of Earth's surface failed to damage the device when it finally struck solid ground.

For some moments after the landing, nothing seemed to happen. Then the flat-bottomed ovoid moved, separating itself from the light girders which had held the parachute, crawled on nearly invisible treads away from the tangle of metal ribbons, and stopped once more as though to look around.

It was not looking, however; for the moment, it could not see. There were adjustments to be made. Even a'

solid block of polymer, with no moving parts except its outer traveling and handling equipment, could not remain completely unchanged under an external pressure of some eight hundred atmospheres. The dimensions of the block, and of the circuitry imbedded in it, had changed slightly. The initial pause after landing had been required for the distant controllers to find and match the slightly different frequencies now needed to operate it. The eyes, which had seen so clearly hi empty s.p.a.ce, had to adjust so that the different index of refraction between the diamond and the new external medium did not blur their pictures hopelessly. This did not take too long, as it was automatic, effected by the atmosphere itself as it filtered through minute pores into the s.p.a.ces between certain of the lens elements, Once optically adjusted, the nearly complete darkness meant nothing to those eyes, for the multipliers behind them made use of every quantum of radiation the diamond could refract. Far away, human eyes glued themselves to vision screens which carried the relayed images of what the machine saw.

It was a rolling landscape, not too unearthly at first 10 CLOSE TO CRITICAL.

glance. There were large hills in the distance, their outlines softened by what might have been forests. The nearby ground was completely covered with vegetation which looked more or less like gra.s.s, though the visible trail the robot had already left suggested that the stuff was far more brittle. Clumps of taller growths erupted at irregular intervals, usually on higher ground. Nothing seemed to move, not even the thinnest fronds of the plants, though an irregular crashing and booming registered almost constantly on the sound pickups built into the plastic block. Except for the sound it was a still-life landscape, without wind or animal activity.

The machine gazed thoughtfully for many minutes. Probably its distant operators were hoping that life fright- ened into hiding by its fall might reappear; but if this were the case they were disappointed for the moment.

After a time it crawled back to the remains of its parachute harness and played a set of lights carefully over the collection of metal girders, cables, and ribbons, examining them all in great detail. Then it moved away again, this time with a purposeful air.

For the next ten hours it quartered meticulously the general area of the landing, sometimes stopping to play its light on some object like a plant, sometimes looking around for minutes on end without obvious purpose, sometimes emitting sounds of varying pitch and loudness. This last always happened when it was in a valley, or at least not on the very top of a hill; it seemed to be studying echoes for some reason.

Periodically it went back to the abandoned harness and repeated the careful examination, as though it were expecting something to happen. Naturally, in an environment having a three hundred-seventy-degree temperature, about eight hundred atmospheres pressure, and a climate consisting of water heavily laced with oxygen and oxides of sulphur, things started to happen soon enough; and great interest was shown in the progress of the corrosion Prologue: Investigation; Annexation 11 as it steadily devoured the metal. Some parts lasted longer than others; no doubt the designers had included different alloys, perhaps to check this very point. The robot remained in the general area until the last of the metal had vanished in slime.

At irregular intervals during this time, the surface of the ground shook violently. Sometimes the shaking was accompanied by the crashes which had first greeted the robot's "ears"; at other times it was relatively silent. The operators must have been bothered by this at first; then it became evident that all the hills in the neighborhood were well rounded with no steep cliffs, and that the ground itself was free of both cracks and loose stones, so there was little reason to worry about the effect of quakes on the fabulously expensive mechanism.

A far more interesting event was the appearance of animal life. Most of the creatures were small, but were none the less fascinating for that, if the robot's actions meant anything. It examined everything that appeared, as closely as it possibly could. Most of the creatures seemed to be scale-armored and eight- limbed; some appeared to live on the local vegetation, others, on each other.

With the harness finally gone, the attention of the robot's operators was exclusively occupied by the ani- mals for a long time. The investigation was interrupted a number of times, but this was due to loss of control rather than distraction. The lack of visible surface features on Tenebra had prevented the men from getting a very precise measure of its rotation period, and on several occasions the distant ship "set" as far as the important part of the planet was concerned. Trial and error gradually narrowed down the uncertainties in the length of Tenebra's day, however, and the interruptions in control finally vanished.

The project of studying a planet three times the diameter of Earth looked rather ridiculous when attempted 12 CLOSE TO CRITICAL.

with a single exploring machine. Had that been the actual plan, of course it would have been ridiculous; but the men had something else in mind. One machine is not much; a machine with a crew of a.s.sistants, particularly if the crew is part of a more or less world-wide culture, is something very different. The operators very definitely hoped to find local help-in spite of the rather extreme environment into which their machine had fallen. They were experienced men, and knew something of the ways of life in the universe.

However, weeks went by, and then months, with no sign .of a creature possessing more than the rudiments of a nervous system. Had the men understood the operation of the lensless, many-spined "eyes" of the local animals they might have been more hopeful; but as it was most of them grew resigned to facing a job of several lifetimes. It was sheer chance that when a thinking creature finally did turn up it was discovered by the robot. Had it been the other way around-if the native had discovered the machine-history could easily have been very different on several planets.

The creature, when they did see it, was big. It towered fully nine feet in height, and on that planet must have weighed well over a ton. It conformed to the local custom as regarded scales and number of limbs, but it walked erect on two* of the appendages, seemed not to be using the next two, and used the upper four for prehension. That was the fact that betrayed its intelligence; two long and two shorter spears, each with a carefully chipped stone head, were being carried hi obvious readiness for instant use.

Perhaps the stone disappointed the human watchers, or perhaps they remembered what happened to metals on this planet and refrained from jumping to conclusions about the culture level suggested by the material.

In any case, they watched the native carefully.

This was easier than it might have been; the present Prologue: Investigation; Annexation 13 neighborhood, many miles from the original landing point, was a good deal rougher in its contours. The vegetation was both higher and somewhat less brittle, though it was still virtually impossible to avoid leaving a trail where the robot crawled. The men guessed at first that the higher plants had prevented the native from seeing the relatively small machine; then it became apparent that the creature's attention was fully occupied by something else.

It was traveling slowly and apparently trying to leave as little trail as possible. It was also making allowance for the fact that to leave no trail was not practicable; periodically it stopped and built a peculiar arrangement consisting of branches from some of the rarer, springy plants and the sharp stone blades which it took hi seemingly endless supply from a large leather sack slung about its scaly body.

The nature of these arrangements was clear, after the native had gotten far enough ahead to permit a close inspection. They were b.o.o.by traps, designed to drive a stone point into the body of anything attempting to follow hi the creature's footsteps. They must have been intended against animals rather than other natives, since they could easily be avoided merely by paralleling the trail instead of following it.

The fact that the precaution was being taken at all, however, made the whole situation extremely interesting, and the robot was made to follow with all possible caution. The native traveled five or six miles in this fashion, and during this time set about forty of the traps. The robot avoided these without trouble, but several times tripped others which had apparently been set earlier. The blades did no harm to the machine; some of them actually broke against the plastic. It began to look as though the whole neighborhood had been "mined," however.

Eventually the trail led to a rounded hill. The native climbed this quickly, and paused at a narrow gully opening near the top. It seemed to be looking around for followers, though no organs of vision had yet been identified by the human watchers. Apparently satisfied, it drew an ellipsoidal object from its sack, examined it carefully with delicate fingers, and then disappeared into the gully.

In two or three minutes it was back, this time without its grapefruit-size burden. Heading down the hill once more, it avoided with care both its own traps and the others, and set off in a direction different from that of its approach.

The robot's operators had to think fast. Should they follow the native or find out what it had been doing up the hill? The former might seem more logical, since the native was leaving, and the hill presumably was not, but the second alternative was the one they chose. After all, it was impossible for the thing to travel without leaving some sort of trail; besides, night was approaching, so it wouldn't get far. It seemed safe to a.s.sume that it shared the characteristic of Tenebra's other animal life, of collapsing into helplessness a few hours after nightfall.

Besides, looking at the hilltop shouldn't take too long. The robot waited until the native was well out of sight, and then moved up the hill toward the gully. This, it turned out, led into a shallow crater, though the hill bore no resemblance to a volcano; on the crater floor lay perhaps a hundred ellipsoids similar to that which the native had just left there. They were arranged with great care in a single line, and except for that fact were the closest things to loose stones that the men had yet seen on Tene-bra. Their actual nature seemed so obvious that no effort was made to dissect one.

At this point there must have been a lengthy and lively discussion. The robot did nothing for quite a long time. Then it left the crater and went down the hill, picked its way carefully out through the "mine field"

on the trail of the native, and settled down to travel.

Prologue: Investigation; Annexation 15 This was not quite as easy as it would have been in the day time, since it was starting to rain and visibility was frequently obstructed by the drops. The men had not yet really decided whether it was better, hi traveling at night, to follow valleys and remain submerged or stick to ridges and hilltops so as to see occasionally; but hi this case the problem was irrelevant. The native had apparently ignored the question, and settled for something as close to a straight line as it could manage. The trail ran for some ten miles, and ended at a clearing before a cave-studded cliff.

Details could not be seen well. Not only was the rain still falling, but the darkness was virtually absolute even to the pickups of the robot. More discussion must have resulted from this; it was two or three minutes after the machine's arrival at the clearing that its lights went on and played briefly over the rock.

Natives could be seen standing inside the cave mouths, but they made no response to the light. They were either asleep, in more or less human fashion, or had succ.u.mbed to the usual night-torpor of Tenebra's animal life.

No sign of anything above a stone-age culture level could be seen anywhere about, and after a few minutes of examination the robot cut off most of its lights and headed back toward the hill and the crater.

It moved steadily and purposefully. Once at the hilltop, several openings appeared hi its sides, and from some of these armlike structures were extended. Ten of the ellipsoids were picked carefully from one end of the line- leaving no betraying gaps-and stowed in the robot's hull. Then the machine went back down the hill and began a deliberate search for b.o.o.by traps. From these it removed the stone blades, and such of these as seemed in good condition-many were badly corroded, and some even crumbled when handled-disappeared into other openings in the lump of plastic. Each of these holes was then covered by a lid of the same incredibly stable 16.CLOSE TO CRITICAL.

polymer which formed the body of the machine, so that no one could have told from outside that the storage places were there.

With this task completed, the robot headed away, at the highest speed it could maintain. By the time Altair rose and began turning the lower atmosphere back into gas, the machine, the stolen weapons, and the "kidnaped" eggs were far from the crater and still farther from the cave village.

I. EXPLORATION; EXPECTATION; ALTERCATION.

NICK pushed through the tall plants into the open, stopped, and used several words of the sort f.a.gin had always refused to translate. He was neither surprised nor bothered to find water ahead of him-it was still early in the morning-it was annoying, however, to find it on each side as well. Sheer bad luck, apparently, had led him straight out along a peninsula, and this was no time for anyone to retrace his steps.

To be really precise, he didn't know that he was being followed, of course; but it simply hadn't occurred to him to doubt that he was. He had spent two days, since his escape, in making as confused and misleading a trail as possible, swinging far to the west before turning back toward home, and he was no more willing than a human being would have been to admit that it might have been wasted effort. True, he had seen not the slightest sign of pursuers. He had been delayed by the usual encounters with impa.s.sable ground and wild animals, and none of his captors had caught up; the floating animals and plants which it was never safe to ignore completely had shown no sign of interest in anything behind him; his captors during the time he was with them had shown themselves to be hunters and trackers of superlative skill. Taking all these facts into account, he might have been excused for supposing that the fact of his continued freedom meant 17.18.CLOSE TO CRITICAL.

they weren't following. He was tempted, but couldn't bring himself to believe it. They had wanted so badly to make him lead them to f.a.gin!

He came to himself with a start, and brought his mind back to the present. Theorizing was useless just now; he must decide whether to retrace his steps along the peninsula, and risk running into his ex-captors, or wait until the lake dried up and chance their catching him. It was hard to decide which was the smaller risk, but there was one check he could make.

He walked to the water's edge, looked at the liquid carefully, then slapped it vigorously. The slow ripples which spread up the edge of the lake and out over its more or less level surface did not interest him; the drops which detached themselves did. He watched as they drifted toward him, settling slowly, and noted with satisfaction that even the largest of them faded out without getting back to the surface. Evidently the lake did not have long to go; he settled down to wait.

The breeze was picking up slowly as the plants awoke to the new day. He could smell it. He watched eagerly for its effect on the lake-not waves, but the turbulent hollows hi the surface which would mark slightly warmer bodies of air pa.s.sing over it. That would be the sign; trom then on, the surface would probably drop faster 4own the lake bed than he could travel. The breeze should keep the air breathable, as long as he didn't follow the water too closely-yes, it couldn't be long now; the very point where he was standing was below the surface level of some parts of the lake. It was drying up.

The difference increased as he waited, the edge of the water slipping back hi ghostly fashion. He followed it with caution until a wall of water towered on either side. It began to look as though the peninsula were really a ridge across the lake; if so, so much the better.

Actually, it didn't quite reach. He had to wait for a quarter of an hour at the ridge's end while the rest of the Exploration; Expectation; Altercation 19 lake turned back to air. He was impatient enough to risk breathing the stuff almost too quickly after the change, but managed to get away with it. A few minutes more brought him up the slope to the tall vegetation on the east side of the erstwhile lake. Before plunging among the plants, where he would be able to see nothing but the floaters overhead, he paused a moment to look back across the dry bottom to the point where he had first seen the water-still no pursuers. Another floater or two were drifting his way; he felt for his knives, and slightly regretted the spears he had lost. Still, there was little likelihood of danger from a floater behind him as long as he traveled at a decent speed-and that's what he'd better be doing. He plunged into the brush.

Travel was not too difficult; the stuff was flexible enough to be pushed out of the way most of the time.

Occasionally he had to cut his way, which was annoying less because of the effort involved than because it meant exposing a knife to the air. Knives were getting somewhat scarce, and f.a.gin was rather tight with those remaining.

The morning wore on, still without sight of pursuers. He made unusually good speed much of the time because of a remarkable lack of wild animals-par for a forty-mile walk being four or five fights, while he had only one. However, he more than lost the time gained when he ran into an area rougher than any he had ever seen.

The hills were sharp and jagged instead of rounded; there were occasional loose rocks, and from time to time these were sent rolling and tumbling by unusually sharp quakes. In places he had to climb steep cliffs, either up or down; in others, he threaded his way through frighteningly narrow cracks-with no a.s.surance that there was an opening at the other end. Several times there wasn't, and he had to go back. Even here he left a trail, the local plant life being what it was; but with that area behind him he found it even harder to justify the feeling that he was being pursued.

20.CLOSE TO CRITICAL.

If his ex-captors really followed through that, they deserved to catch him! But still, however often he let his attention cover his rear, no sign of them appeared.

The hours pa.s.sed, Nick traveling at the highest speed he could maintain. The one fight he had scarcely delayed him at all; it was a floater that saw him from ahead and dropped nearly to ground level in time to intercept him. It was a small one, so small that his arms outreached its tentacles; and a quick slash of one of his knives opened enough of its gas-bladders to leave it floundering helplessly behind him. He sheathed the weapon and raced on with scarcely diminished speed, rubbing an arm which had been touched lightly by the thing's poison.

The limb had ceased to sting, and Altair was high in the sky, when he finally found himself in familiar surroundings. He had hunted before this far from the home valley; rapid as changes were, the area was still recognizable. He shifted course a trifle and put on a final burst of speed. For the first time, he felt sure of being able to deliver a report of his capture, and also for the first time he realized that he had not tried to organize one. Just telling what had happened to him, item by item, might take too long; it was important that f.a.gin and the rest get away quickly. On the other hand, it would take a pretty complete explanation of the state of affairs to convince the teacher of that fact. Nick unconsciously slowed down as he pondered this problem. He was dragged from this reverie only by the sound of his own name.

"Nick! Is that really you? Where have you been? We thought you'd slept out once too often!"

At the first sound, Nick had reached for his knives; but he checked the movement as he recognized the voice.

"Johnny! It's good to hear proper talk again. What are you doing this far out? Have the sheep eaten everything closer to home?"

"No, I'm hunting, not herding." John Doolittle pushed through the undergrowth into clear view. "But where Exploration; Expectation; Altercation 21 have you been? It's been weeks since you went out, and since we stopped looking for you."

"You looked for me? That's bad. Still, I guess it didn't make any difference, or I'd have known it sooner."

"What do you mean? I don't understand what you're talking about. And what did you mean about it's being good to hear 'proper talk'? What other kind of talk is there? Let's hear the story."

"It's a long one, and I'll have to tell everyone as quickly as possible anyway. Come along home; there's no point telling it twice." He headed toward the valley they both called "home" without waiting to hear any answer. John "trailed" his spears and followed. Even without Nick's implication of trouble ahead, he would not willingly have missed the report. Fresh as he was, thpugh, he had difficulty keeping up with the returned explorer; Nick seemed to be in a hurry.

They met two more of the group on the way, Alice and Tom, who were herding. At Nick's urgent but hasty words they followed toward the village as fast as their charge would permit.

Five more of the group were actually in the village, and f.a.gin was at his usual station in the center of the ring of houses. Nick called the teacher by name as he came hi sight.

"f.a.gin! We're in trouble! What do we have for weapons that you haven't shown us yet?"

As usual, there was a pause of a couple of seconds before an answer came back.

"Why, it's Nick. We had about given you up. What's all of this about weapons? Do you expect to have to fight someone?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Who?"

"Well, they seem to be people just like us; but they don't keep animals, and they don't use fire, and they use , different words for things than we do." -.

22 CLOSE TO CRITICAL.

"Where did you run into these people, and why should we have to fight them?"

"It's a long story, I'm afraid. It will be better if I start at the beginning, I suppose; but we shouldn't waste any more time than we can help."

"I agree; a complete report will make the most sense to all of us. Go ahead." Nick settled his weight back on his standing legs and obeyed.

"I started south as we decided and went slowly, mapping as I went. Nothing much had changed seriously out to the edge of the region we usually cover in farming and grazing; after that, of course, it was hard to tell whether anything had changed at all recently, or in what way.

"The best landmark I saw by the end of the first day was a mountain, of quite regular conical shape and much higher than any I had ever seen before. I was tempted to climb it, but decided that detail mapping could be accomplished better later on; after all, my trip was to find new areas, not evaluate them.

"I pa.s.sed to the east of the mountain shortly after sunrise the second day. The wind was remarkably strong in that region and seemed always to blow toward the mountain; I called it Storm Hill on the map. Judging by tile wind, there ought to be a lot of night-growing plants there; any exploration should be planned to get off the hill before dark.

"As far as travel goes, everything was about as usual. I killed enough in self-defense to keep me in food, but none of the animals were at all unusual that day.

"The third morning, though, with the mountain out of sight, I got involved with something that lived in a hole in the ground and reached out an arm to catch things going by. It caught me around the legs, and it didn't seem to mind my spears very much. I don't think I'd have gotten away if I hadn't had help."

"Help?" The startled question came without the pause Exploration; Expectation; Altercation 23 characteristic of the teacher's remarks; it was Jim who asked it. "How could you have gotten help? None of us was down that way."

"So it wasn't one of us-at least, not exactly. He looked just like us, and used spears like ours; but when we finally managed to kill the thing in the hole and tried to talk to each other, his words were all different; in fact, it was quite a while before I realized that he was talking. He used the same sort of noises we do for words, but mixed them with a lot of others that we never learned from you.

"After a while I realized that the noises must be talk, and then I wondered why I hadn't thought of such a thing before-after all, if this person wasn't brought up by you, he'd have had to think up his own words for things, and it would be silly to expect them to be the same as ours. I decided to go with him and learn more; after all, this seemed a lot more important than just mapping. If I could learn his talk, he might know a lot more than we could find in months of exploring.

"He didn't seem to mind my trailing along, and as we went I began to catch on to some of his words. It wasn't easy, because he put them together in very strange ways; it wasn't just a matter of learning the noise he used for each object. We hunted together, though, and all the time we were learning to talk together. We didn't travel in a straight line, but I kept pretty good track of our path and can put his village on the map when I get the chance."

"Village?" It was Jim once more who interrupted; f.a.gin had said nothing.

"That's the only word I know for it. It wasn't at all like ours; it was a place at the foot of a steep cliff, and there were holes all over the face of the stone. Some of them were very small, like the solution holes you can see in any rock; others were very much larger, and there were people living in them. The one I was with was one of them.

24."They were very surprised to see me, and tried to ask me a lot of questions; but I couldn't understand them well enough to give any answers. The one I had traveled with talked to them, and I suppose told how he had met me; but they stayed interested, and a lot of them were always watching me, whatever I did.

"It was getting fairly late in the afternoon when we got to the cliff, and I was starting to wonder about camping for the night. I didn't realize just at first that these people lived in the holes in the rock, and when I finally caught on I wasn't very happy about it. There are even more quakes down that way than around here, I noticed, and that cliff seemed an awfully unhealthy neighborhood. When the sun was almost down, I decided to leave them and camp a little way out on a hilltop I'd found, and then I discovered that they didn't want me to go. They were actually prepared to get rough in order to keep me around. I had learned a few more of their words by that time, though, and I finally convinced them that I wasn't trying to get away completely, and just wanted to spend the night by myself. There was a surprising amount of firewood around, and I was able to collect enough for the night without much trouble-in fact, some of the little ones helped me, when they saw what I wanted."