“I’m going to get some stuff from the bottom. One liquid sample, one mud or whatever. I’ll be down less than fifteen seconds, if I can get down at all.”
“All right.” Charley tensed himself at his station. He was extremely uneasy in one way at losing sight of his partner, though he still had faith in the Faculty that had set their problem.
He needn’t have worried. Molly had been able to immerse her face when she wanted to see the bottom, but getting entirely below the surface was another matter. She couldn’t sink, and her center of buoyancy was if anything below her center of mass. She just couldn’t reach the bottom. Getting her feet back down after lifting them off took some doing. Even Charley was amused. Swimming was not an art with his species; as he had said, they floated even in liquid ammonia, and with no need to breathe they had never regarded staying up as a problem. Their shape and mass distribution made it easy to stay right side—head pole—up if they were floating; Molly’s present need to go head down, coupled with her already weird shape, made the situation really funny.
“Blast!” exclaimed the Human when she was finally standing again. “I know ammonia’s a lot less dense than water, but so am I with this suit. The recycling gear takes up too much room. I ought to have designed it with the batteries in the feet. I should have learned more than organometallics when I was taking that course with Jenny on Ivory. The gravity made me spend a lot of time swimming there, and of course I didn’t use real armor—just good insulation, which bulked enough to let me float in the ammonia but didn’t keep me from diving.”
Charley knew what she meant; he, too, had taken courses on the high-gravity fourth planet of Smoke, the fainter star of the binary system whose planets had been taken over almost completely by the University.
“I’ll have to make do with shallow-water samples this time and rig up some sort of long-handled scoop for the future. I’m coming back. Don’t gloat.”
“I’ve been listening, Molly” came the grating Rimmore tones. “If you need to make more equipment, how about coming back to the tent with the specimens you already have? I can’t wait to work on that slime you were talking about.”
“Well—all right, Jenny.” Molly had intended to use the shop on the boat but could sympathize with her friend’s curiosity. “I wouldn’t mind knowing what the stuff is myself. You don’t mind waiting for stuff from other lakes?” She splashed out on the shore, noting that the material underfoot was more mud than sand; it clung to her feet and ankles. She made no great effort to get rid of it; specimens were specimens, even if they collected themselves.
Actually, most of it had dried and fallen away by the time she reached the little spacecraft; her trail was marked not only by the indentations of her footprints but by the fragments of hardened mud. She did not stop to think of any implications of this rapid evaporation; after all, her armor was heated to keep her alive.
“You might as well fly, Charley,” she remarked as she closed the outer lock behind her. “I’ll have to get this stuff properly recorded.” Her companion made no objection, and by the time they were back at the tent—a far shorter trip than the outbound one, since neither of them was bothering to observe and the Kantrick used far higher speed than before—she had labeled her specimen containers more completely, described each with a brief note covering its reason for collection and location, canned several of the flakes of sediment still adhering to her armor, and topped off the batteries of the latter.
Jenny received the material with eager nippers, listened to Molly’s backup information, and settled down happily to work. Charley and his Human friend went to see the beginnings of Joe’s air-current map; the Kantrick remained to watch it grow, though there was still little sense to be made of it. Molly retired to the shop to make a shovel. This was completed in a few minutes, the shop resources being what they were, and she then suddenly realized that she could use some sleep. No one had set up a watch system as yet; the students were doing what came to hand. There was no objection to further delay in the inspection of the daylit region.
Sleep was rather uneasy this time; Enigma’s gravity was a great deal less than the normal Classroom acceleration, low as that was by Human standards, and Molly woke up several times from a falling dream.
Her conscience eventually decided that she had rested enough, and she took a quick meal before going back to the tent. Her translator had of course blocked all nonemergency communication while she slept, and the first words to come through when contact was resumed rather surprised her.
“Joe, I would never have thought it of you!” The voice was Carol’s; the machine was using the tone of honest surprise, but Molly rather suspected sarcasm. She was not yet in sight of the others, being twenty or thirty meters from the lock that led to the tent, and found herself at a loss for the motive behind the Shervah’s words. Had Joe actually interrupted someone at work, or what?
She hurried, making full use of the handholds, but her first view of the tent occupants told her nothing. All four were gathered around Joe’s map, but there had been no more words and no one appeared to be doing anything but look. Molly joined them as quickly as she could, and looked the map over silently from all sides, hoping to learn what had provoked Carol’s remark; but she saw nothing surprising.
The map itself was a holographic projection of the planet, about two meters in diameter. The sunlit side was indicated by what to the Human was slightly brighter illumination, and a coarse coordinate grid indicated the rotation axis.
Faint reddish and orange lines, all so far extremely short, marked the paths that had been followed by the robots, and the locations of each of these were indicated by slightly brighter sparks of light at the appropriate end of each line. In each case, the starting point could easily be identified as the spot from which the trails of each robot and its five slaves radiated. Presumably, as the lines lengthened, it would become possible to make some sense out of their pattern, but Molly could see nothing organized so far.
There was, of course, no meaningful connection between the starting points and the coordinate system. One of the twenty was at the arbitrarily chosen zero longitude, and neither rotation pole was anywhere near one of them, since chance had not brought them to the ground at an appropriate latitude—Molly realized with some embarrassment that she would have had some trouble calculating in her head just what an appropriate latitude would be. How many degrees apart on the circumscribed sphere were the vertices of a dodecahedron? She put that one firmly out of her mind, and returned to the possibly more immediate question.
What had Joe done or said to surprise Carol? Of course, he would never have made a remark about the pattern’s already supporting his hypothesis—not Joe.
“Does this make sense to anyone yet?” Molly asked.
“Notice the summer end of the axis,” replied the Nethneen. What Molly actually noticed was that he had not really answered her question; but she backed a little farther from the globe image to get a better view of the area in question, and examined it more closely.
The true arctic circle had not been located yet, since no one had bothered to check the orientation of the rotation axis with the planet’s current radius vector; but presumably it was farther from the pole than the circle now in total daylight. Within that circle were only two of the robot tracks, and Molly examined these very carefully. It was the area they knew to be more heavily clouded and that she and Charley had been examining more closely, but the map showed nothing of the clouds.