Star Light
by Hal Clement
1: PIT STOP
Beetchermarlf felt the vibrations die out as his vehicle came to a halt, but instinctively looked outside before releasing the Kwembly’s helm. It was wasted effort, of course. The sun, or rather, the body he was trying to think of as the sun, had set nearly twenty hours before. The sky was still too bright for stars to be seen, but not bright enough to show details on the almost featureless dusty snow field around him. Behind, which was the only direction he could not see from the center of the bridge, the Kwembly’s trail might have provided some visual reference; but from his post at the helm there was no clue to his speed.
The captain, stretched out on his platform above and behind the helmsman, interpreted correctly the latter’s raised head. If he was amused, he concealed the fact. With nearly two human lifetimes spent on Mesklin’s unpredictable oceans he had never learned to like uncertainty, merely to live with it. Commanding a “vessel” he did not fully understand, travelling on land instead of sea and knowing that his home world was over three parsecs away did nothing to bolster his own self-confidence, and he sympathized fully with the youngster’s lack of it.
“We’re stopped, helmsman. Secure, and start your hundred-hour maintenance check. We’ll stay here for ten hours.”
“Yes, sir.” Beetchermarlf slipped the helm into its locking notch. A glance at the clock told him that over an hour of his watch remained, so he began checking the cables which connected the steering bar with the Kwembly’s forward trucks.
The lines were visible enough, since no effort had been made to conceal essential machinery behind walls. The builders of the huge vehicle and her eleven sister “ships” had not been concerned with appearance. It took only a few seconds to make sure that the few inches of cable above the bridge deck were still free of wear. The helmsman gestured an “all’s well” to the captain, rapped on the deck for clearance, waited for acknowledgment from below, opened the starboard trap and vanished down the ramp to continue his inspection.
Dondragmer watched him go with no great concern. His worries were elsewhere, and the helmsman was a dependable sailor. He put the steering problem from his mind for the moment, and reared the front portion of his eighteen-inch body upward until his head was level with the speaking tubes. A siren-like wail which could have been heard over one of Mesklin’s typhoons and was almost ridiculous in the silence of Dhrawn’s snow field secured the attention of the rest of the crew.
“This is the captain. Ten hours halt for maintenance check; watch on duty get started. Research personnel follow your usual routine, being sure to check with the bridge before going outside. No flying until the scouts have been overhauled. Power distribution, acknowledge!”
“Power checking.” The voice from the speaking tube was a little deeper than Dondragmer’s.
“Life support, acknowledge!”
“Life support checking.”
“Communication, acknowledge!”
“Checking.”
“Kervenser to the bridge for standby! I’m going outside. Research, give me outside conditions!”
“One moment. Captain.” The pause was brief before the voice resumed, “Temperature 77; pressure 26.1; wind from 21, steady at 200 cables per hour; oxygen fraction standard at 0.0122.”
“Thanks. That doesn’t seem too bad.”
“No. With your permission, I’ll come out with you to get surface samples. May we set up the drill? We can get cores to a fair depth in less than ten hours.”
“That will be all right. I may be outside before you get to the lock, if you take time to collect the drill gear, but you are cleared outside when ready. Tell Kervenser the number of your party, for the log.”
“Thank you, Captain. We’ll be there right away.”
Dondragmer relaxed at his station; he would not, of course, leave the bridge until his relief appeared, even with the engines stopped. Kervenser would be some minutes in arriving, since he would have to turn his current duties over to a relief of his own. The wait was not bothersome, however, since there was plenty to think about. Dondragmer was not the worrying type (the Mesklinite nervous system does not react to uncertainty in that way) but he did like to think situations out before he lived them.
The fact that he was some ten or twelve thousand miles from help if the Kwembly were ever crippled was merely background, not a special problem. It did not differ essentially from the situation he had faced for most of his life on Mesklin’s vast seas. The principal ripple on his normally placid self-confidence was stirred up by the machine he commanded. It resembled in no way the flexible assemblage of rafts which was his idea of a ship. He had been assured that it would float if occasion arose; it actually had floated during tests on distant Mesklin where it had been built. Since then, however, it had been disassembled, loaded into shuttle craft and lifted into orbit around its world of origin, transferred in space to an interstellar flier, shifted back to another and very different shuttle after the three-parsec jump, and brought to Dhrawn’s surface before being reassembled. Dondragmer had personally supervised the disassembly and reconstruction of the Kwembly and her sister machines, but the intervening steps had not been carried out under his own eye. This formed the principal reason for his wanting to go outside now; high as was his opinion of Beetchermarlf and the rest of his picked crew, he liked firsthand knowledge.
He did not, of course, mention this to Kervenser when the latter reached the bridge. It was something which went without saying. Anyway, the first officer presumably felt the same himself.
“Maintenance checks are under way. The researchers are going out to sink a well, and I’m going out to look things over,” was all Dondragmer said as he resigned his station. “You can signal me with outside lights if necessary. It’s all yours.”
Kervenser snapped two of his flippers light-heartedly. “I’ll ride it, Don. Enjoy yourself.” The captain left by way of the still open hatch which had admitted his relief, telling himself as he went that Kervenser wasn’t as casual as he sounded.
Four decks down and sixty feet aft of the bridge was the main air lock. Dondragmer paused several times on the way to talk to members of his crew as they worked among the cords, beams, and piping of the Kwembly’s interior. By the time he reached the lock four scientists were already there with their drilling gear, and had started to don their air suits. The captain watched critically as they wriggled their long bodies and numerous legs into the transparent envelopes, made the tests for tightness, and checked their hydrogen and argon supplies. Satisfied, he gestured them into the lock and began suiting up himself. By the time he was outside the. others were well on with setting up their apparatus.
He glanced at them only briefly as he paused at the top of the ramp leading from lock to ground. He knew what they were doing and could take it for granted, but he could never be that casual about the weather. Even as he latched the outer lock portal behind him, he was looking at as much of the sky as the towering hull of his command permitted.
The darkness was deepening very, very slowly as Dhrawn’s two-month rotation carried the feeble sun farther below the horizon. As at home, the horizon itself seemed to be somewhat above his level of sight all around. The gravity-squeezed atmosphere responsible for this effect would also set the stars twinkling violently when they became visible. Dondragmer glanced toward the bow, but the twin stars which guarded the south celestial pole, Fomalhaut and Sol, were still invisible.