“Jenny, Charley—I’m getting close to the end of the line and haven’t met Molly yet. Should I wait there with the robot, leave the rope and ride on, or leave rope and robot and scout around on foot, do you think?”
Neither answer was surprising, but neither was very helpful.
“Wait,” said Charley at once. “She should be back with you pretty soon.”
“Scout on foot,” grated Jenny. “You can get more done while you’re waiting for her. She’ll see the robot if she gets to it.”
“Not if she’s asleep,” countered the Shervah.
“If she wakes up after passing it, she’ll see the rope.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. It’s not very big, and I don’t know how its color contrasts with the rock to her eyes; do you?”
“No, of course not. You have a point. It still seems a pity just to wait there, though.”
“How long has she been asleep? Maybe we should wake her up when I get to the end.”
“Not much over an hour. Nothing like her usual time. Make that a very last resort, I’d say.”
“Right. Well, here comes the end. I’m stopping the machine for a moment at least, because the rope is fastened to it and if we decide I should take the robot farther I’ll have to untie it.”
“How about pulling the rope straight?” asked Charley. From what you said, there’s a kilo or so been wasted by (he false trail.”
“If I could do it myself, I might take the chance,” replied Carol. “With the robot doing the pulling, though, and its speed so firmly independent of outside factors, I’d never know until much too late if the rope caught on something and broke.”
“Couldn’t you set the robot to pull just so hard?”
“No. It has nothing to sense that. And don’t blame Joe; there was never any reason why it should.”
“I wasn’t thinking of blaming anyone,” said Charley with surprising mildness. “Why don’t you scout on foot down the stream for a distance, after you park your machine? You’ll see Molly even if she does happen to be asleep.”
Neither of the women could find fault with this suggestion. Carol left the rope attached as it had been and powered down the robot. Then, making sure that she still had several empty collecting cans clipped to her armor, she set off down the brook.
It was not very deep, as she ascertained by wading in it. She was careful about this; her temperature tolerance was the narrowest of any of the group, and the present environment was about ten degrees below her minimum. Ammonia was her body fluid base, but was liquid at her temperature only because of the high pressure at which she normally lived. Her armor had good insulation, naturally, but she could feel the chill creeping into her feet before many minutes, and moved out of the stream.
As Molly had said, there was nothing remotely suggestive of life to be seen, a fact that would not have surprised any of the group had it not been for Carol’s own find back in the big cave. Why it was there, and not here where liquid was available, was far from obvious. Several times the little Shervah knelt and examined the rock as closely as she possibly could, but it remained just rock. No glittering crystals, no slippery coating, no sticky material; nothing but rock. She announced as much.
“Get a specimen or two, anyway,” advised Jenny. “Remember the planet has seasons. Maybe there are spores, or cell detritus, that we can find if we look hard enough.”
“The hammer doesn’t get it loose; I’ll have to use the laser.”
“Just don’t cook the whole specimen.”
Carol followed the suggestion, but with no great enthusiasm. Rock analysis was all very well, and she enjoyed it in its place, but life on a world like this was something new. There ought to be more of it if there was any; life didn’t just occur in small, isolated bits. It came in whole ecologies, when it came.
“Any sign of Molly?” It was Charley, of course.
“Not yet.” Carol swept her beam downstream as she spoke. “No, not in sight.”
“Judging by times and speeds, it seems to me you should have met by now. You didn’t get so absorbed in things that she might have gone by you without your noticing, did you?”
Carol was too honest to make an absolute denial, but felt pretty sure that nothing of the sort had happened, and said so.
“Did you get any distance from the stream?”
“No. I’ve been in sight of it all along.”
“Then that’s all right, I guess. Wait a minute, though! Since you left the robot, are you sure the stream has been going into the wind? Can you feel the wind yourself?”
The Shervah spun and began leaping back toward the robot as quickly as she dared. Her normal gravity was less than Molly’s, but still far greater than that of Enigma, and she had the usual trouble coordinating her leaps so as to stay upright while off the ground. She answered as she ran.
“No, I’m not, and no, I can’t. She could have gotten past me, at that.”
Joe cut in. “I’m afraid it’s worse than that. Carol, you would remember; Molly would not have been aware. Has the stream been perfectly straight while you have been following it?”
“No, not at all. I didn’t worry about it; in fact, I was hoping it would turn out that the stream had something to do with eroding this passage. After all, the robots followed it going into the wind all the time, so the passage must have been guiding the wind pretty much the same way—oh!”
“Precisely. When Molly sealed one side of her robot to make it think the wind was coming from the other, in effect she would have caused it to fall back on its inertial system. That keeps the case of the machine oriented the same way, so it would have read pressure from the same inertial direction…”
“Planet’s rotation, too!” interjected Charley.
“Not significantly, in this time interval. The point is that she wouldn’t have followed back up the stream; she’d have gone straight in the direction that was upstream when she put on the ice coat. If she’s anywhere near the stream, it’s luck—of course, the passage can’t be too wide if the wind has been turning along with the river, so she shouldn’t be too far from it. Still, she could have reached the side and maybe worked into a side passage the way she did this one. Molly!”
Several seconds passed. The Human, in spite of the limited area of the cylinder top, had fallen deeply asleep; she was still lashed in place, and the feeble gravity permitted head and extremities to be over the side with no particular discomfort. It took several repetitions of her name, in several voices, to bring her back to awareness. She had been wise enough to leave her light on, and avoided the panic that might have come from waking to a combination of total darkness and near-total weightlessness.
“What’s the matter?” she asked as she pushed herself to a more nearly upright position. “Is Carol in trouble? I don’t see her.”
“Of course you don’t; I’m nowhere near you, I’m afraid. The real question is whether you see the stream.”
It took perhaps a second for the points that Joe had just covered with the others to marshall themselves in Molly’s mind, and suddenly she felt close to real panic.
“Of course I don’t,” she replied in an unsteady voice.