Fortunately, the squall lasted less than ten minutes. When it abruptly ended, the Habra settled toward his companions, embraced the tube of the wind-sweeper, and folded his wings.
“I’m not as surprised as I was about that detached wing you found in the Pit,” he remarked. “Mine feel as though they’ve nearly pulled off. Someone who ventured here alone and met turbulence like that could easily have trouble, especially if he wasn’t protected from the cold. Did you find any trace of armor or clothing with that wing?”
“None,” replied Hugh. “I was there when it was excavated. The wing itself was surrounded by the usual bits of plant root you find all through the ice, but nothing artificial.”
S’Nash cut in.
“Did Janice date the plant material as well as the wing tissue?”
“Sure. She’s been doing bits of root all along. The age was the same, as nearly as she could measure.”
“Why would there be only bits, and not complete plants?” asked the Locrian. He was hard to hear; they had passed the region cleared by the wind, and the sweeper was in use again.
“The guess at the moment is that plants like those we see around here put down roots as far as they can to hold themselves in place, until some ice dune covers them and kills them…”
“It doesn’t always kill them,” pointed out S’Nash. “Some of them seem able to separate from their roots and blow away when threatened with burial— the tumbleweeds.”
“True. Well, we’ve found a few complete bush specimens in the ice at various depths. Jan’s been trying to make a depth-against-age table with them and the root fragments she’s dated, but it hasn’t been very consistent so far. Whole plants are usually older-hundreds of Habra years, even a thousand— than the root fragments at the same depth, and the bits themselves vary quite a lot at any given level, and, too, we only have specimens from this particular dig — the stuff the lasers have spotted between the Pits, and the occasional things we’ve actually run into directly as the Pits deepened, like that wing.”
“Precisely.” S’Nash uttered only the single word. Hugh felt sure it was meant more for him than for the others. He would have continued lecturing gladly had he been able to speak, but his fingers were getting tired again, and there was silence for a time as the sweeper carriage trundled along. He wondered how much Eleventh-Worker had taken in.
Hugh knew little of Locrians and their social systems, and couldn’t guess at the interests and mental abilities of someone presumably fairly low on their labor scale, judging by his name. His one question so far had been very much to the point; it would be best to assume that he was grasping everything unless he indicated otherwise, and risk the possibility that embarrassment would prevent his revealing ignorance. It was easy to regard the being as a person, despite his vague resemblance to a four-limbed insect.
“We have two hundred meters to go, if the distance you supplied is correct,” the robot interrupted Hugh’s cogitations at this point. Eleventh-Worker did not wait to be instructed, but peeled back the outer lids and exposed his single eye for full penetration, not bothering to rise or shift position to get a clearer “view” ahead. Hugh watched closely, indifferent to S’Nash’s knowledge of his efforts, but failed to observe anything which he and Janice hadn’t discussed before. The Locrian sense was still a mystery to him.
“Slow down, please,” Eleventh-Worker requested after a moment. “I want to examine everything within twenty meters on each side, and we’re going much too fast for a careful look.”
The robot obeyed without consulting Hugh; he wondered how S’Nash and Eleventh-Worker felt about that. They showed neither surprise nor revulsion nor any other emotion Hugh could read. The Naxian, it seemed likely, had merely recorded the event as another bit of evidence; it/he was, one could reasonably infer, gathering data on how intelligent the “limited decision” robots Hugh had acknowledged using in Pitville might actually be.
“You suspected that the truck stopped for a time in this area.” Eleventh-Worker’s words were a statement, not a question. Hugh agreed. “Stop here. Sweep the snow away for the next fifteen meters along the left side of the road, and an equal distance away from it.”
Again the robot obeyed without waiting for Erthuma confirmation, and the roar of the sweeper battled that of the wind. No heat beam was used this time, and Hugh felt sure that S’Nash was noting the fact and considering its implications about the robot’s intelligence. There were more items for it/him to think about in a few seconds; the loose snow billowing from the surface where the jet of air struck was swept back toward the watchers by the wind, and still without consulting anyone the robot cut off the blast, moved the sweeper around to the upwind side, carefully keeping its tracks off the area described by the Locrian, and resumed operations. Within a minute the patch of bare ice predicted by Hugh appeared from under its white covering, some of the blanket sticking and resisting stubbornly for seconds before flying away in fist-sized chunks.
The exposed surface was not perfectly smooth. Examining it closely, Hugh and the others decided that it must have stayed slushy long enough for blowing snow to be caught and build odd-shaped mounds and towers which had frozen to the substrate far too firmly for the sweeper to remove.
Among these shapes, however, tread marks could be seen and even some motions analyzed. The truck had not come to a stop, paused, and gone straight on: it had made a turn, and Hugh felt he was not yielding too much to wishful thinking in deciding that the turn had been toward Pitville. S’Nash, more objectively, insisted that the truck could have been going either way — that they could, in fact, be examining marks left by Rekchellet more recently.
“We can call him and check how long he stayed at the roadside,” Hugh pointed out. “That’s why I brought the transmitter. We’ll feel less silly, though, if Eleventh-Worker looks around for more signs of stopping, first.”
“I suggest you make the call. Eleventh-Worker make the examination, and I look over this area more broadly,” answered S’Nash. “That should make the best use of time.”
Hugh was at the transmitter before it occurred to him that S’Nash could do the talking much more easily, but both the others were now invisible in the fog which had been thickening in the minutes since the wind had died down. It seemed too much trouble to look for the serpentine form, and obviously the Locrian had to do the examining, so Hugh energized the signal equipment.
Third-Supply-Watcher responded; Rekchellet and his Habra companions were in the air. She was able to assure Hugh that they had not paused at all at the roadside; the automatic driver had guided their truck away for some two hundred meters before reaching a point where surface elevation had changed enough since the vehicle’s earlier passage to make it go on strike over failure to follow its vertical guidance — or less figuratively, had probably interpreted the failure as a malfunction and responded to a built-in stop command. Third-Supply-Watcher could tell precisely how far this was from the road and from where they had left it, if necessary. Hugh decided that it was not, and signed off with appropriate thanks.
He looked around to find himself still alone.
The fog had thickened. He could see for some three meters; nearly all of the sweeper and its carriage, but little else. S’Nash, Eleventh-Worker, and, he suddenly realized, the robot were all out of sight.
He had given the machine no instructions, which made its disappearance interesting, to say the least. One of the two possibilities which came immediately to mind was also disturbing. Hugh had been sitting on the sweeper carriage; now he slipped to the ice, stood up, glanced around carefully, looked at his left wrist, and for the first time realized that he was not carrying an inertial tracker — something he had solemnly sworn, half a Common Year ago, never again to be without on Habranha.