There was. Of course, another solution, but none of the other races would accept it. Not yet. Neither husband nor wife felt that the time for that sales pitch had come. Even S’Nash’s robot interest hadn’t reached that level.
They were still debating when the second report came in from the truck.
And the third. Rekchellet spoke this time.
The information from Pwanpwan had arrived. The truck had left the Port ten standard days before, but was not involved with the Project. The Guild knew only that the vehicle had been taken for unspecified Darkside research by a Samian whose identity could be supplied if necessary and that it had been boarded by a Samian, presumably the same one, by two Erthumoi, and a Crotonite just before its departure. There had been some surprise at the presence of the flier, but like the others he or she had been wearing environmental armor and there had been no way to satisfy casual curiosity about identities.
Hugh was intrigued by the confirmation of their earlier ideas, and its addendum.
“A Samian, too? That’s interesting. It couldn’t have traveled far from the truck without special gear, so…” he fell silent for a moment. “You’re still following the road, I take it?”
“Well, not exactly. I was about to tell you.”
“You’re off it? Which way? How far?”
“Well, not very far. The autodriver pulled us off to the left, which is north, about fifteen minutes ago. It went about two hundred meters, started up a hillside, and the engine stopped. I can’t seem to get it going. Third-Supply-Watcher can’t see anything wrong with it, but of course she doesn’t know very much about these machines.”
“Do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Can you tell whether it’s power or control?”
Rekchellet hesitated for a moment.
“Well, sort of. If I turn off the automatic driver, I can start the engine and move the truck around, but the moment I engage the auto the drive simply cuts out.”
“You’re sure you’re not at the end of the recorded path in the automatic?”
“Nowhere near it. The record readout shows it’s been far into the dark hemisphere, to a point about a hundred and fifty kilometers north of the Cold Pole. It’s clear and unambiguous, and I don’t see why the driver can’t make the truck follow it.”
The Erthuma looked at each other but found no inspiration. There was no more reason to expect Rekchellet to be familiar with Crotonite guidance devices than for Hugh to have expertise in Erthuma-made vision transmitters. The identity of the manufacturing species was irrelevant.
Their minds ran on parallel tracks that far. Then Janice began to smile.
Chapter Five
Here Hills Maintain Their Stance No More Than Waves
Hugh could see his wife had thought of something, probably something which would annoy or embarrass the Crotonite. He was a little surprised when she leaned over to bring her code sounder near the microphone of the neutrino transmitter, since she usually got no pleasure out of irritating people; then he relaxed when her fingers fell away from the keys. She turned toward him, the smile replaced by a thoughtful frown.
“Hugh, I can’t tell him. It’s too silly. Didn’t he, or someone, say that the autodriver was Crotonite equipment? I’m sure I remember that.”
“Right. They didn’t say what world, though. Rek hasn’t mentioned any trouble with using it, but that doesn’t prove it’s labeled in his own language. It could be a model standard on any number of their planets. Why?”
“Why would a Crotonite ever design or build an automatic controller for a ground vehicle, let alone make so many that it’s a stock item in galaxy-wide use?”
“Why should this one have been made for a ground— Oh!!” A slow smile, similar to his wife’s moments earlier, spread over his face; then, like hers, was replaced by a more serious expression, and Hugh looked consideringly at the microphone. After a moment he keyed a message.
“Rek, I take it the instructions on that driver don’t help.”
“I don’t know the language they’re in, much less the abbreviations. And don’t bother to ask about instruction manuals. I don’t see one around, and if there’s anything certain it’s that it wouldn’t be in any language I know.”
“But you said it had produced a record — a readout — of the route the truck had followed.”
“That’s in numbers, on a map which is simply a vector diagram. No terrain, just coordinates.”
“You can read the numbers.”
“Sure.”
“Then that language can’t be too far from your own. Still, I suppose reading tech in it might be a bit — well, never mind. Could you follow that course and drive the truck manually?”
“I suppose so. So could Third-Supply-Watcher here, I expect, with about a five-minute lesson in reading the numbers. It would be a nuisance. We’d have to identify vertical coordinate information and ignore it and — oh!” The next few seconds gave only no-symbol-equivalent signals from the translators. Husband and wife smiled at each other. At least, they hadn’t had to mortify their friend by explaining the trouble themselves, though this didn’t mean that he wasn’t mortified.
“I suppose,” Hugh cut in finally, “there’s sonic way of making the autodriver ignore elevation instructions.”
“Why should there be?” Rekchellet’s voice didn’t actually snarl recognizably, but both Erthumoi were quite sure of the feeling. Janice tried to be soothing, though this was difficult through the translator and doubly so in code.
“Wouldn’t anyone ever want to get back over or to a particular place, without necessarily following the specific dips and swoops of an earlier trip?” she asked.
“I suppose so,” came the grudging answer, “but if there’s any way of telling this mess of defective diamonds to do anything of the sort, I can’t read it off its key symbols.”
“Then we’ll have to follow the readout manually. Will that slow things down too much?” queried Hugh. “Are you listening, Third-Supply-Watcher? Do you think it will take long for you to interpret the driver’s record?”
“I am listening. It should not be difficult to learn the number symbols; the ease of actually following the chart will depend on the nature of the path. It will probably be easiest for Rekchellet to interpret the whole chart to me now, so that I can work from memory instead of stopping to read whenever the direction changes.”
“You can remember the whole thing?”
“Of course, once I understand it.”
“Then you and Rek please take care of that. If you can tell about where you’re going during any given hour, please let us know. Rek said something earlier about a place near the Cold Pole. I’m not expecting to lose track of you and the truck, but if only the expected happened I’d be helping Janice full-time at specimen dating, or be out where you are, studying dune motion.”
“Of course. We’ll keep sending the information in whatever form seems clearest once I understand it myself,” the Locrian promised.
Hugh nodded, meaninglessly as far as the truck crew were concerned. There should be no problem expressing locations on Habranha; the world was only a little over three thousand kilometers in radius, but quite large enough for its own gravity to keep it decently spherical. It was tidally locked to Grendel, as Falgite-speaking Erthumoi called its red dwarf sun, in an almost perfectly circular orbit with its rotation axis at right angles to the orbit plane. Tidal forces had done all they could over perhaps twice the age of the Solarian system, and those of Fafnir were negligible. Hence there were no complications from libration, and longitude as well as latitude could be defined objectively without an arbitrary prime meridian. This was fortunate, since all the “land” on the sunward hemisphere was floating ice and the stability of the Solid Ocean glaciers was open to doubt.