Neither Hugh nor Janice was currently paying any particular attention to the sky. They were familiar with it, enjoyed making up constellations for it, and had even invented a zodiac for Fafnir to follow, though they did not expect to be around for the eight hundred or so Common Years it would take the little star to complete that circle. Just now, however, they were too concerned with their path and too curious about the forthcoming meeting to stargaze.
Even the footing wasn’t too much of a problem; it would take a long fall to be dangerous here. Their thoughts were mostly on what was up, but neither had conceived a question or answer interesting enough to be worth the labor of putting into code.
The woman did glance up occasionally, wondering whether they might see Rekchellet on his way, but neither looked for the robot they were to meet.
Its orders had already been given and acknowledged, and its path would not cross theirs.
The ice shavings from the Pits had for the most part been taken well beyond the collection of Project buildings for permanent disposal; their total volume was expected to measure many cubic kilometers, though this would be far in the future. There were some small heaps, fifty to a hundred meters high, which had been left closer to and even among the buildings to serve as a water supply and as research material. The behavior of ice grains of various sizes at differing depths and over a range of times, under Habranha’s gravity, sundry forms of traffic, and different kinds of plant cover was a key body of data to the Project, and it was on these piles that the Cedars usually did their skiing. The Erthumoi had been as-Nured that the researchers regarded the effect of even this activity on the substrate as interesting and valuable information. The jumping ramp had been a rather private project of Hugh’s which had failed to catch administrative attention until recently — it was, after all, basically just another pile of ice tailings.
The present walk, however, was to the main dump — actually to the far side of it, out of view from the settlement, an aspect of S’Nash’s request which was beginning to loom larger in Janice’s mind. She was not worried about the intentions of S’Nash and Rekchellet, of course. For the Crotonite, In particular, a harmless motive could be guessed; he was associating with other species, nonflying ones at that, much more closely than most of his own people would have approved.
The couple went around the Fafnir-lit north side of the huge mound. Unlike the ski slope, it was almost bare snow; only a few bushes, most of these less than fist size, had taken root and grown fast enough to escape burial as new material was added. A few stood a meter or more out from the surface, where random winds had blown the dust away from already deep-sunk roots.
Their path around the foot of the slope curved southward until the buildings and lights behind them were all out of sight, and they might have been standing on a deserted world. The pile of ice was larger than most of the elevations they could see, but Habranha’s night hemisphere was far from level. The dustlike snow brought from the day side by the upper level winds and distributed at the surface by the even more chaotic lower ones behaved often— not always — like very fine sand on more Earthlike planets, and the topography consisted largely of ripples and dunes. These were not at all permanent in spite of the vegetation; winds varied wildly on the little planet even away from direct sunlight, and attempts to map the area around the Project base had long been given up by all except two or three stubborn natives who couldn’t, or at least refused to, accept the basic nature of Chaos.
Hugh and Janice were now plowing through relatively loose material which was technically snow, though far too fine to show individual flakes to human eyes. The wind, while only moderate at the moment, was picking up enough of the dusty stuff to block horizontal vision beyond a few hundred meters, though with the big waste pile and the companion star in clear sight neither Erthuma was worried about getting lost.
None of the others seemed to have arrived yet, however. There was no point in worrying about the robot, which could locate itself absolutely anywhere on the planet, and Rekchellet could presumably always orient himself by going high enough to see the settlement lights; but the snakelike Naxian was another matter. One could assume that it/he knew what to do outdoors, but a body that shape and size would be hard to see at any distance with the blowing powder swirling mostly near the ground.
Hugh could tell himself all this and remind himself that the trip had been the Naxian’s own idea, but Hugh had a job, and he couldn’t help wondering what special measures he had not yet thought of might help assure the protection of two-meter-long snakes wriggling around in loose snow where they were likely to be hard to see, to have trouble seeing very far themselves, and to be easily blown away in in atmosphere whose currents were sometimes strong enough to pick up much heavier objects against the local gravity.
He was brooding over this, probably more seriously than he need have been, when the robot and S’Nash arrived together.
The former was of fairly standard make, its body a cylinder about a meter high and slightly less in diameter. The top was rimmed with alternating handlers and eyes, half a dozen of each; most of the body, the Erthumoi knew, housed the power unit and machinery for handling and traveling equipment. Its “brain” was little larger than that of a human being, not one of the ten or fifteen liter “Big Boxes.” Just where the designing engineer had decided to put it, under the conflicting demands of easy service access and maximum protection, neither Hugh nor Janice knew or greatly cared. The robot differed from the digger which had performed the rescue a few hours earlier mainly in its locomotion system; instead of hydrojets it possessed three small sets of caterpillar treads, each forming the “foot” of an insectlike leg mounted near the bottom of the cylinder. It was hard to visualize any solid surface on which the system would not find traction.
Both Erthumoi were quite accustomed to such devices and should not have had their attention strongly attracted by its approach; but something prevented their noticing the Naxian until it/he was beside them. S’Nash simply appeared, sheathed in brightly gleaming full-recycling armor, scarcely a body length away. The wind eddying around its/his partly coiled form was making swirl patterns in the snow beneath it as though it/he had already been there for seconds.
One did not make exclamations of surprise in code, even if exclamations were needed with Naxians. In any case, before anything had been said by anyone at the foot of the snow hill, another voice cut in with evidence of irritation which even the Erthumoi could detect in translation.
“Doesn’t anyone have the sense to wear a light if you’re not going to stand out where someone can see you easily? I don’t suppose any of you knows what hummocky ground looks like from above under slanting light, but I thought imagination was supposed to be part of intelligence. Where are you, anyway/”
“Sorry, Rek,” keyed Janice. Hugh silently turned on his suit lamp, set it on wide beam, and swung it to follow his gaze aloft.
The rays could be followed easily enough in the blowing ice dust, but for a moment none of those on the ground could see the Crotonite. Then his wings showed darkly against the Fafnir-lit upper haze as he swung back toward them from farther west, fifty or sixty meters up, rocking slightly in the turbulent air. Hugh swung his lamp toward him to reveal their own position.
The reaction was less than grateful, they could tell, though more than half the words for the next few seconds were no-symbol-equivalent codes from their translators.