A single term, “Dark adaptation,” came through mixed with the other sounds, and at almost the same instant the broad-winged shadow plunged into the hillside above them. A cloud of ice dust rose, spread, and swirled up the hill on the wind; coarser material hung around the impact site, settling slowly in the weak gravity and thick air. Rekchellet’s tirade ceased, and for a long moment only the wind could he heard.
Nobody wasted time; even Hugh saved his self-criticism for later. He did not reject his own guilt, but with luck and quick enough action he might not have to reprimand himself; Rekchellet should be able to take care of that. The surface of the ice dust was loose and fluffy, the Crotonite couldn’t possibly have hit it very hard, it was most unlikely that there was now enough weight on him to keep him from breathing, and unless Chaos had been unusually personal they should have a mishap rather than a tragedy on their hands.
Standing around watching, however, was not appropriate action. Trying to make their way up to the impact site, the Erthumoi found, was not appropriate cither. Climbing was impossible. The dust was near as angle of repose, and even in what for them was scarcely one-fifth gravity, the Erthumoi slid back with the loose material as fast as they stamped and beat it downward. Their only visible achievements were to start digging a niche at the foot of the slope, which refilled by collapse from above every few seconds, and to force the Naxian to withdraw hastily to keep from being buried. Neither human being noticed its/his retreat. They realized almost at once that they would never get up the hill themselves, but decided independently and instantly that the refill wave might help uncover Rekchellet when it reached his height. They could only hope that it wouldn’t as promptly bury him again with the next collapse.
The robot’s abrupt unordered departure brought neither question nor comment. The Naxian saw it go, but said nothing as it vanished around the southern curve of the ice pile, and it/he remained silent even when the robot reappeared a minute or so later. The Cedars were still trying to dig, and if they noticed anything beyond the dust they were moving, they didn’t waste effort or attention putting it in code. No sound had come from Rekchellet since his burial. All anyone could hear was rising wind.
The robot was no longer traveling under its own power, but riding a tracked vehicle. On this was mounted something which might on many worlds have been mistaken for a piece of field artillery, since its most obvious feature in the poor light was a slender tube some three meters long. As the machine emerged from the shadow and brought its rider into sight of the impact scar made by Rekchellet— rapidly disappearing as wind filled it with white dust — the tube swiveled upward. The vehicle halted, and a roar loud enough to drown any attempt at conversation filled the air.
Three or four meters above the Crotonite crater a new cloud rose in Fafnir’s light and swept away toward the north, and another hole appeared in the waste pile. A dull red beam of light played from a point on the machine just under the tube, striking the new pit and playing back and forth over its upper side. As the seconds passed, the excavation spread downward toward the place where Rekchellet had disappeared; but unlike that made by the still active Erthumoi. this one did not fill from above.
The wind blast from the air-sweeper continued to roar, digging closer and closer to the buried flier. The mild heat beam melted the surface, and the resulting water soaked into the still undisplaced snow and froze again almost instantly into a wall which, frail as it was, supported the material above.
The Erthumoi finally realized what was going on and ceased their frantic digging. Janice, in hope of sparing the anti-artificial intelligence prejudices of the Naxian, started to key, “It’s just experience, not…” and stopped before getting out the word “imagination.” She knew she was right, but her own imagination had suddenly kicked in and supplied her intuition with a possible reason why she and her husband and the robot had been called to this meeting by S’Nash. She hoped Hugh would see it for himself; she couldn’t tell him now. She didn’t want the others to know what she’d guessed until she could watch them both closely. The knowledge should spare her husband guilt feelings about Rekchellet’s accident, though she could, of course, be wrong.
It had not, she suddenly felt pretty sure, really been an accident.
She watched, much more calmly than Hugh, as the jet of air swung lower and lower, cutting its way into the heap of ice dust closer and closer to the point where the flier had vanished.
Neither Erthuma was surprised when a dark object suddenly whirled out of the Fafnir-lit surface and spun skyward. For a moment it simply blew away, then wings extended, the tumbling slowed and then ceased, and it was flying under control.
Rekchellet still said nothing as he glided to the ice beside them. The thunder of the sweeper died, and the billowing cloud of airborne dust which now extended for hundreds of meters north of the waste heap began slowly to settle as well as to spread in the rising wind.
“You’re all right,” keyed Hugh.
Chapter Three
The Best Precautions May Be Taken Late
“Well, I can fly!” snapped the Crotonite. “When I asked for someone to use a light to indicate your position. I didn’t mean for some idiot…” “I was a little hasty,” Hugh began. “Are you sure?” cut in Janice’s code. For a moment her husband thought she was addressing him, and wondered how to get “of course I was” across with an absolute minimum of finger work. Then he realized she was speaking to Rekchellet as she went on, “What else would you have used for an excuse?” The flier hunched silently into a more relaxed position, looking steadily at the Erthuma. His beaked face was in shadow. Janice, despite her suspicion-driven alertness and personal familiarity with the Crotonite, could probably not have read Rek’s expression even if the light had been better; but S’Nash was a little slow cutting off its/his speaker.
“Good for—!” came through the translators, complete with exclamation symbol.
Rekchellet produced a sound rather like a snort, which the translator passed unaltered and followed with no-equivalent-pattern. Words finally became clear. “There’s plenty of turbulence up there. The wind is rising; even you must have noticed that. I could have said anything I pleased. How would you ground…” he caught himself…”would you have known if I were falsifying data?”
“You wouldn’t be.” Janice’s translated code carried the emphasis clearly enough. “You knew one of us would react quickly, not hastily. Hugh did just what you wanted.” The woman had clearly centered the tracker, but if Rekchellet felt either embarrassed or flattered he made no sound or motion to reveal it. “You and S’Nash, or at least S’Nash, wanted to check on robots,” Janice went on. “You arranged to have one here, and set up a situation to find out what it would do without instruction. What if we’d instructed it?”
“I would have gotten in its way,” the Naxian answered promptly.
“You really trust an Erthuma-built artificial mind that far? You’d risk your own life to…”
“We trust some Erthumoi people that far,” said the Crotonite emphatically. “Not others. We understood that the robots on this project would just be dedicated machines, able to do only simple tasks like digging and disposing of waste ice. This is research, far too important to be entrusted to artificial thinking. Janice and Hugh, I trusted you. Many more trusted you because of me, whatever they may think of my taste in friends. You knew the understanding. Why didn’t you keep to it?”
“Was the accident in the Pit also a test?” keyed Janice.