Going back for one now would be neither practical nor productive. Fafnir was intermittently visible, now much nearer the horizon than when it had illuminated Rekchellet’s dive into the snow, and would furnish direction for a while yet if visibility grew no worse. The road surface itself was fairly easy to distinguish — clearance by wind was roughly up with coverage by precipitation for the moment. Looking for people might not be safe, but it was important.
And his code sounder should be audible; the wind was down for the time being, too.
“S’Nash? Eleventh-Worker? Are you close enough to hear me?”
The Locrian answered at once.
“Yes. I have covered about one hundred meters of the north side of the road, to a width of fifty meters and a depth of about three. Should I work the other side, or increase the width or length of my search pattern on this?”
Hugh thought briefly. “Width on that side, I’d say,” he finally pronounced, mentally filing the possibility that the depth represented a Locrian limit. “That’s where things seem to have happened, if anything did. Can you see S’Nash?”
There was a pause, presumably while the worker looked around. “Yes,” came the answer at length. “It/he and the robot are thirty meters to the south of the road, and about fifty to the east of your position, apparently examining something on the ground.”
“Thanks.” The Erthuma took another look at Fafnir and set out toward the still invisible pair. He would have been kicking himself had his armor allowed. So what if he hadn’t brought a tracker? The robot had a built-in location system, and the Naxian had had the sense to use it. There had been no need for the safety chief to worry about losing personnel on this trip — where was Ted? He hadn’t been on the carriage when the talk with the truck had ended.
Well, Hugh hadn’t called him. He’d surely stay within range of the Erthuma’s translator, unless—
He had. He responded at once, and Hugh’s professional worries ceased for the moment. The native assured his chief that all of the party was obvious to his electrical sense, though he couldn’t always actually see them through the fog.
“Can you tell me whether I’m heading toward S’Nash?”
“Not exactly, but you’ll be close enough to see them in a few seconds.”
“Did I start out right, or are they moving?”
“I didn’t notice your start. They aren’t moving now. The Naxian is examining something on the ground.”
It/he was still examining it when Hugh came close enough to see distinctly. The robot was standing a meter or so away, motionless. The man tried to make out what was attracting the other being’s attention, but between the fog and the poor light saw nothing. He turned his own lamp on the surface.
“What’s there?” he keyed. Ted hummed to a landing beside them. S’Nash continued to examine the ice for many seconds before answering.
“I’m not sure,” it/he said at last. “The marks are faint, and many of them obliterated. We’re beyond the edge of the patch melted by the truck, but something has either chipped or melted or pressed small dents in the road ice — little cup-shaped openings. I don’t recognize them at all. What do you make of them?”
“I can’t even see them,” Hugh admitted. “Ted?”
“Nor I.”
“How big are they? I didn’t know your people could see smaller things than mine, but maybe that’s the problem.”
“They’re just over five millimeters across. There are a lot of small bumps and pits made by snow-flakes which stuck or liquid drops which froze when they hit, and these are mixed in with them. I distinguish them only by their regularity. They form a pattern — so.” A handler extended from the tubular armor and indicated, one after another, a row of dimples in the ice which answered his description. Hugh shook his head.
“I’d never have made those out from the rest of the marks. You think they’re a track of some sort?”
“Can you see the pattern, Ted?” asked the Naxian. The Habra answered negatively.
“That’s interesting. I don’t know what they are. Hugh. A track is the best word I can think of, but I have no idea what made them.”
“How far have you followed them?”
“They start at the edge of the melted surface left by the truck and end here.”
“And they’re perfectly uniform all the way? That’s — oh, thirty meters or so?”
“About that. No, they’re not all exactly equally spaced, and they’re not all along perfect lines, but they’re all — I can’t come up with a word. They’re related. That’s the best I can say.” S’Nash looked briefly at the robot, but if it/he had planned to address it, the intention was dropped before anything was said.
“Do you think someone or something left the truck at this point?” asked Hugh bluntly.
“I have no opinion. Something could have, certainly. This could be a trace, but so far it’s no help. I don’t know what it could be a trace of.”
The Erthuma hesitated, then turned to the robot.
“Make a record, to hundredth-millimeter precision, of the marks pointed out by S’Nash.”
“I fail to distinguish them from the other marks.”
“S’Nash will indicate the strip in which they lie. Record the entire strip.”
The Naxian extended its/his gleaming armored body in a straight line. “Parallel to this, near side thirty centimeters to my right, twenty wide, starting at my tail and moving forward to my head. You should probably include my image for scale.”
“That will not be needed. Absolute measurements will be included in the record.”
“All right. When you reach my head, stop, and I’ll go forward to mark the next segment, and so on.”
The robot made no verbal response to this, but followed the instructions. Within a minute it reported the record complete.
“All right,” keyed Hugh. “We could spend hours here, but I doubt we’d find anything more. Can any of you suggest anything specific before we go back to town?”
Ted spoke up rather diffidently.
“We seem convinced that the tractor stopped here for a time, after traveling to some part of the Solid Ocean. Right?”
“Right.” Code and translated words mingled.
“Then some of the melted ice might contain plant remains from wherever it had been earlier. Should we not collect some of the frozen material, to be checked for root varieties?”
“We don’t know how species vary on the different parts of the dark hemisphere,” objected S’Nash.
“Not yet,” answered the Habra. “If what we gather here shows any difference, we will have something to look for.”
Hugh and the Locrian agreed eagerly, while S’Nash acknowledged its/his own error with less enthusiasm. They were not equipped with proper containers or labeling materials, but they were only about seventy-five kilometers from Pitville. Ted winged eagerly away, and returned, having exceeded by a wide margin what Hugh had thought was his species’ speed limit, in less than two hours with a sack carried in his handlers.
This proved to contain fully a hundred small transparent envelopes, each already numbered, and a large recording sheet. The others had filled the time by extending the search area, but not even Eleventh-Worker had found anything except the place where the autodriver had stopped the truck. This had left another sheet of ice, but no markings of the sort S’Nash had found at the road.
“Janice says to fill every one of the bags, and if any record is ambiguous you know what she’ll do,” the native reported to Hugh. “She says that any clue to what part of the truck anything fell from will be helpful. She also wants at least twenty chips of plain ice from the melted area, with no plant remains visible in it.”