“You may not have as much as you think. Some of the people here have been considering those boulders. They are round, or nearly so, according to your report and what we can see on the bridge set. The most likely cause of that shape, according to our experience, is washing around in a stream bed or on a beach. Moving rocks that big would require a tremendous current. We’re afraid that the stream which carried you there is just a preliminary trickle, the first thaw of the season, and if you don’t get away soon you’ll face a lot more water coming down.”
Dondragmer had considered briefly.
“All right, but we’re already doing all we can. Either we get away in time, or we don’t; we can’t do better than our best. If your scientists can give any sort of specific forecast of this super-flood we’ll be glad of it, of course; otherwise we’ll have to go on as we are. I’ll leave a man on the radio here, of course, unless I have too much for them to do; in that case, try the lab. Thanks for the information, I guess.
The captain had gone back to work and to thought. He was not one to panic; in emergencies he seemed calmer than in a personal argument. Basically, his philosophy was the one he had just expressed: to do all one could in the time available, with the full knowledge that time would run out some day. At the moment, he only wished he knew what all he could do was.
The big rock was the main problem. It was keeping the drivers from traction, and until they not only touched bottom but bore heavily on it there was no moving the Kwembly with her own power. She might conceivably have been shifted by muscle power at Mesklin’s Rim, or on Earth, but not under Dhrawn’s gravity. Even a two-foot boulder was hard to move in that field.
There was rigging inside which could be set up as lifting tackle but none of it could begin to support the vehicle’s weight as a static load even if its mechanical advantage were adequate.
Some trucks, four, to be exact, were in contact with the troublesome rock itself. Several more in Row 5 were touching bottom. None of these was powered at the moment but converters could be transferred to them.
If the four on the rock, and the ones forward from them, and some of the Row 5 trucks, were all to be powered why couldn’t the cruiser simply be backed off?
She could. No reason at all to doubt it. On level ground with reasonable traction any four well-spaced power units could drive her. With her weight concentrated on only a few trucks, traction should be better than normal and a backward move would be mainly downhill.
It was not lack of self-confidence which caused Dondragmer to outline this plan to the human being on communication watch; he was announcing his intentions, not asking for advice. The man who heard him was not an engineer and gave casual approval to the move. As a matter of routine he reported the situation to Planning so that the information could be distributed. Consequently it reached an engineer within an hour or so, long before Dondragmer was ready to execute his plan.
It caused a raising of eyebrows, a quick examination of a scale model of the Kwembly, and two minutes of rapid slide-rule work.
The engineer was a poor linguist, but this was not the only reason he went looking for Easy Hoffman. He did not know Dondragmer very well, had no idea how the Mesklinite would react to criticism; he had worked with Drommians, since there were some connected with the Dhrawn project and he felt it safest to have his point presented by the official oil-spreader. Easy, when found, promptly assured him that she had never known Dondragmer to resent reasonable advice, but agreed that her better knowledge of Stennish would probably help even though the captain was fluent in the human tongue. They went together to the communication room.
Benj was there, as was usual when he was not on duty. He had by now made friends with several more of the Mesklinites, though he still liked Beetchermarlf best. The latter’s long work hours resulting from the accident had not entirely prevented them from conversing and Benj’s Stennish had improved greatly; he was now almost as good as his mother believed.
When Easy and the engineer arrived, he was listening to Takoorch and was not too sorry to interrupt the exchange with the news that there was an important message for the captain.
It took several minutes to get Dondragmer to the bridge; like the rest of the crew he had been working almost constantly, though by luck he happened to be inside when the call came.
“I’m here, Easy,” his voice finally came through. “Tak said you had a business call. Go ahead.”
“It’s about this way you plan to back off the rock, Don,” she began. “I don’t have the whole picture here, of course, but there are two things bothering our engineers. One is the fact that your forward truck will run off the stone while you still have ten feet or more of hull, including some of your bridge, over it. Have you measured to see whether there’s any risk of bare hull slamming down on the stone as the truck rolls off? Also, toward the end of the maneuver, you’ll have your hull supported almost entirely at the ends. The pneumatic undercarriage may distribute the load but my friend here isn’t sure it will; further, if you get the bare hull instead of the mattress taking half the Kwembly’s weight, Dhrawn’s gravity is going to make a very respectable effort to break your land-ship in half. Have you checked those points?”
Dondragmer had to admit to himself that he had not and that he had better do so before the project went much farther. He conceded this on the radio, thanked Easy and her friend, and headed for the main lock, long since cleared for use.
Outside, the current had dropped to the point where life-lines were no longer necessary. Water depth was down to about seven feet, measured from the average level of the smallest boulders. The water line was, indeed, at about the most inconvenient possible level for seeing the whole picture. He had to climb part way up the rock, a difficult task in itself, though helped by the fact that he had some buoyancy; from there he had to follow the forward trucks to a point where he could compare the curvature of the big boulder and that of the Kwembly’s lower bow. He could not be completely sure, since moving the hull backward would change its pitch, but he did not like what he saw. The human engineer was probably right. Not only was there risk of hull damage, but the steering bar came through the hull just ahead of the mattress by means of a nearly air-tight mechanical seal backed by a liquid trap and made its key connections with the maze of tiller-ropes. Serious damage to the bar would not actually cripple the vehicle, since there was a duplicate aft, but it was not a risk to be taken casually.
The answer to the whole situation was staring him in the face by that time but he was another hour or more in seeing it. A human psychologist, when he heard about this later, was very annoyed. He had been looking for significant differences between human and Mesklinite minds, and was finding what he considered an undue number of points of similarity.
The solution involved work, of course. Even the smallest boulders were heavy. Still, they were numerous, and it was not necessary to go far for a plentiful supply. With the entire crew of the Kwembly at the job except for Beetchermarlf and those still helping him with the trucks, a ramp of piled stones grew with fair speed from the stern of the trapped vehicle toward the key rock.
It was a help to Beetchermarlf. As fast as he readied a damaged bearing unit for service, he found himself able to get at new installation sites which had been out of reach before. He and the stone-carriers finished almost together, allowing for four trucks which he had been unable to repair because of missing parts. He had made thrifty use of these, cannibalizing them for the needs of some of the others, and had spotted the unavoidable gaps in traction widely enough to keep the cruiser’s weight reasonably well distributed. To work on Row 5. practically buried in the river bottom, he had had to deflate that part of the mattress. Pumping it up again when the two trucks were replaced caused the hull to shift slightly, to the alarm of Dondragmer and several workers underneath; fortunately the motion was insignificant.