“Not yet. There was more than one knot. I have one here—now it’s coming—I’ll be right with you—there, it’s loose. WATCH OUT!”
“What’s the matter?” cried Molly.
“The armor is loose—it’s blowing away—even in this wind where we can stand!”
“Don’t worry,” said Joe. “There’s another rope holding it. Just don’t untie that one until I’m inside—it’s fastened to a leg piece, and I can open up without undoing it.”
“Some things don’t need experience,” Charley remarked complacently. “A little foresight is enough.”
“Your foresight is appreciated. The thought of chasing that suit at full wind speed…”
“We could have brought the ship over, now that we know where you are. We still can, if you want,” Molly cut in.
“I’d rather like to try riding the robot upwind, as it was meant to go, if Carol doesn’t object. We’ll have to change positions, Carol, so that I can get at the access panel. You don’t seem to have had any trouble with redirecting; I’d better make sure I can do it as easily.”
“All right. This last rope seems to go all the way around; we’ll stay inside it and work our way to the right simultaneously. It’s lucky we’re not as big as Molly or Jenny.”
“The drive would support them easily enough.”
“They’d have trouble fitting, though maybe one of them could balance on top. There, can you reach in?”
“Yes, thank you. There is another trouble that I had not thought of, though. The blowing sand is getting in when the access panel is open. If it packs too tightly, I will not be able to get at the controls themselves. There, I think we are all right. Hold on. We should now head upwind, at about the same speed you came down.”
The observers looked at each other. There was a faint grin on the Human face and an equivalent twist to the Rimmore body. Neither said anything, but Molly moved over to the boat’s main controls. Silence continued for another minute or more, to be broken finally by Joe’s quiet tones.
“Do any of you air breathers have a word for a wind that goes around in small circles?”
“We call such a current an eddy, Joe,” replied Molly. Shall I bring the boat over, or do you want to reprogram without using the pressure sensors?”
“Bring the boat. I don’t think I’d better open the panel again.” The translator was doing a good job; Joe’s tone carried resignation.
“Interesting but a bit anticlimactic.” Rather to Molly’s surprise, the remark was Carol’s. The little woman was back in the conning room, her armor shed; she had found time at last to improvise a simple transparent envelope that held her high pressure and showed her gleaming dark-brown fur. As far as could be told from appearance she was feeling no more excitement than her words suggested. Joe had no eyebrows to raise, but he shifted his body position enough to bring two pairs of his optics to bear on the speaker.
“If you are here for emotional release,” Joe said, “I wish you luck; but I must admit that I don’t plan to cooperate. I also admit that while that experience was educational—defining education as anything one lives through to profit by—I look back on it with much more embarrassment than pleasure. I can attribute the event to nothing but my own lack of thought.”
“As Molly said the time that I made a fool of myself, no one can foresee everything. Those of us who haven’t done something as silly so far will probably manage it before we finish here.”
“I hope you are wrong, Charley. Where are you now? The rest of us are ready to get the planned program going, I think. We should settle finally our personal schedules of activity.”
“All right. I can hear you. I’m trying to be foresighted again.”
“In what way?” rasped Jenny. “Where are you, anyway?”
“In the shop. I’m making handholds and tie rings to put on all the master robots, and distributing a hundred meters of rope on each.”
“Did you check with Joe?”
“I’m not harming his machinery, just cementing things to the outer shells, away from gas intakes, pressure sensors, and the like. In view of what just happened, I’m sure Joe would be the last to object.”
“A good thought. I should have done it myself,” admitted the Nethneen. “I strongly suggest, however, that no one leave the boat in future without very detailed planning and without taking as much potentially useful material as can conveniently be carried.”
Molly shook her head. “A standard emergency kit is one thing,” she said. “Everything one might need is hopeless.”
“Of course,” agreed Joe. “I realize that—there would be no upper limit, especially for beings who regard the creation of an imaginary series of events as an art form. You take me too literally.”
Molly smiled to herself but made no answer. Her first acquaintance with Joe and Charley, nearly a year before, had been during a School routine translator check. The institution’s central data handler on Think, one of the common planets of the Fire-Smoke binary, was still somewhat limited in Human-language figures of speech, and a Faculty group working on the problem had asked her to describe any of the students who happened to be near her at the moment, for the translator’s benefit. Charley had been a dozen meters away, and she had taken him as her subject; the computer had returned a symbol set that gave the Faculty analysts the impression that she had meant Joe, who was also in the neighborhood. The two did have a superficial resemblance, and neither student, when brought into the conversation, seemed to be offended by the mistake. Charley, after pointing out a dozen detail differences, emphasizing size, had closed with a commiserating “Even if he does grow up, he’ll never have a decent shell!”
Joe, much later in a private conversation with Molly and her husband, had explained why he hadn’t made the obvious answer, though by then the Humans knew him well enough to guess the reason. “It might have offended you, Molly; you have hard parts, too, even if they are inside. Like the main translator, I didn’t know about Human figurative expression—even irony—then.”
“I don’t know.” Charley’s voice brought Molly back to the present. “I’ve been thinking of quite a few things that might go wrong in this environment, and…”
“By all means design an emergency kit around them. One that I can carry—in a high wind combined with low gravity!” snapped Carol. The Kantrick made no answer, but Molly felt pretty sure that he wasn’t bothered. Here, too, he would probably take the suggestion literally.
After a brief pause that no one seemed inclined to interrupt, Jenny resumed the situation summary.
“We’ve just been reminded that we can not only fail in this exercise, we can get injured or killed while trying. I don’t know how many of your languages distinguish among terms for lab exercise, research, and exploration; if anyone got the same codes for any two of those, we’d better spend some time with the translators.” She paused, but no one spoke. “Good. This is not just an exercise, no matter what earlier students found out about this place that we haven’t been told. If nothing else, no machine is perfect, and if something serious goes wrong with the boat before the classroom gets back, we’ll have to live with the results.”
“We have the tent, which we’re supposed to set up first thing,” pointed out Charley.
“Precisely. If there were anyone else around to snatch us out of trouble, we wouldn’t have been supplied with so much emergency equipment. There are reaction dampers in a student chemistry lab, but not environmental armor unless reactions that even the instructors can’t handle are expected. Think it over. Joe was lucky. We can’t count on luck consistently.”