“Yes, Nick? What does Swift say?”
“In effect, no. He wants nothing to do with anyone 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.”
“Then isn’t Nick right? Won’t Swift head straight for the village? I should think you’d have done better to follow Nick’s suggestion.”
“There’ll be time to move after we get the robot. If they leave the village before, we’ll have a lot of trouble finding them, no matter how carefully we arrange a meeting beforehand. The area is not very well mapped, and what there is doesn’t stay mapped very well.”
“Why not? That sounds rather strange.”
“Tenebra is a rather strange planet. Diastrophism is like Earth’s weather; the question is not whether it will rain tomorrow but whether your pasture will start to grow into a hill. There’s a team of geophysicists champing at the proverbial bit, waiting for the bathyscaphe to go down so they can set up a really close working connection with Nick’s group. The general cause we know—the atmosphere is mostly water near its critical temperature, and silicate rocks dissolve fairly rapidly under those circumstances. The place cools off just enough each night to let a little of the atmosphere turn liquid, so for the best part of two Earth days you have the crust washing down to the oceans like the Big Rock Candy Mountain. With three Earth gravities trying to make themselves felt, it’s hardly surprising that the crust is readjusting all the time.
“Anyway, I think we’re set up now. It won’t be morning down there for a couple of days, and I don’t see how much can happen until then. My relief will be here soon; when he arrives, perhaps you would like to see the bathyscaphe with me.”
“I should be most interested.” Raeker was getting the impression that either the Drommians were a very polite race or Aminadabarlee had been selected for his diplomatic post for that quality. He didn’t keep it long.
Unfortunately, there was a delay in visiting the bathyscaphe. When Raeker and the Drommian reached the bay where the small shuttle of the Vindemiatrix was normally kept, they found it empty. A check with the watch officer—ship’s watch, not the one kept on the robot; the ; organizations were not connected—revealed that it had been taken out by the crewmen whom Raeker had asked • to show Aminadorneldo around.
“The Drommian wanted to see the bathyscaphe, Doctor, and so did young Easy Rich.”
“Who?”
“That daughter Councillor Rich has tagging along. Begging the pardon of the gentleman with you, political inspection teams are all right as long as they inspect; but when they make the trip an outing for their offspring—”
“I have my son along,” Aminadabarlee remarked.
“I know. There’s a difference between someone old enough to take care of himself and an infant whose fingers have to be kept off hot contacts …” The officer let his voice trail off, and shook his head. He was an engineer; Raeker suspected that the party had descended on the power room in the near past, but didn’t ask.
“Have you any idea when the shuttle will be back?” he asked.
The engineer shrugged. “None. Flanagan was letting the kid lead him around. He’ll be back when she’s tired, I suppose. You could call him, of course.”
“Good idea.” Raeker led the way to the signal room of the Vindemiatrix, seated himself at a plate, and punched the combination of the tender’s set. The screen lighted up within a few seconds, and showed the face of Crystal Mechanic Second Class Flanagan, who nodded when he saw the biologist.
“Hello, Doctor. Can I help you?”
“We were wondering when you’d be back. Councillor Aminadabarlee would like to see the bathyscaphe, too.” The nearly two-second pause while light made the round trip from Vindemiatrix to tender and back was scarcely noticed by Raeker, who was used to it; the Drommian was rather less patient.
“I can come back and pick you up whenever you want; my customers are fully occupied in the ’scaphe.” Raeker was a trifle surprised.
“Who’s with them?”
“I was, but I don’t really know much about the thing, and they promised not to touch anything.”
“That doesn’t sound very safe to me. How old is the Rich girl? About twelve, isn’t she?”
“I’d say so. I wouldn’t have left her there alone, but the Drommian was with her, and said he’d take care of things.”
“I still think—” Raeker got no further. Four sets of long, webbed, wire-hard fingers tightened on his shoulders and upper arm, and the sleek head of Aminadabarlee moved into the pickup area beside his own. A pair of yellow-green eyes stared at the image hi the plate, and a deeper voice than Raeker had yet heard from Drommian vocal cords cut across the silence.
“It is possible that I am less well acquainted with your language than I had believed,” were his words. “Do I understand that you have left two children unsupervised in a ship in space?”
“Not exactly children, sir,” protested Flanagan. “The human girl is old enough to have a good deal of sense, and your own son is hardly a child; he’s as big as you.”
“We attain our full physical growth within a year of birth,” snapped the Dromiman. “My son is four years old, about the social equivalent of a human being of seven. I was under the impression that human beings were a fairly admirable race, but to give responsibility to an individual as stupid as you appear to be suggests a set of social standards so low as to be indistinguishable from savagery. If anything happens to my boy—” He stopped; Flanagan’s face had disappeared from the screen, and he must have missed the last couple of sentences of Amina-dabarlee’s castigation; but the Drommian was not through. He turned to Raeker, whose face had gone even paler than usual, and resumed. “It makes me sick to think that at times I have left my son in charge of human caretakers during my years on Earth. I had assumed your race to be civilized. If this piece of stupidity achieves its most likely result, Earth will pay the full price; not a human-driven ship will land again on any planet of the galaxy that values Drommian feelings. The story of your idiocy will cross the light-years, and no human ship will live to enter Drommian skies. Mankind will have the richly earned contempt of every civilized race in—”