That was stupid of me. I should have let you do the describing, to avoid suggestion.”
“I could never have done it to anything like that detail. If you think the distance is right, you’re probably as close as you’ll get. The part of the stream I used for a back sight was just about perfectly straight; I do remember that.”
“All right,” agreed Carol. “That hasn’t happened very often as I came along. We’ll hope this is it. Stand by while I reset these keys—there. No pressure response, straight line along the stream section at about three quarters the speed I can run in this gravity. I’ll flash a narrow beam straight ahead every little while; you look back when I do—I’ll tell you—and let me know if you see it.”
“Why not keep the beam steadily pointed ahead?” asked Charley. Molly and Jenny chuckled audibly; Joe was too polite.
“Because I’d have trouble looking at the rocks, of course,” Carol answered patiently.
“And I’m not pointing mine back very often, because if I do run into anything I want some warning,” added Molly. “I do hope you get here soon, Carol; I’m getting rather tired of this Juggernaut.”
Even Charley needed an explanation of that symbol. Molly had to admit that the metaphor was slightly strained.
By the fifth time Carol’s light had shone ahead without reaching her, Molly was becoming discouraged again. If both robots were following straight paths and the Shervah had picked the right direction, the distance between them should be quite small by now. The lights were powerful, and there was certainly no other illumination to compete with them—though when Molly turned her own lamp off, subjective glows and flashes swam around her field of perception. The rescuer’s light, however, would presumably not move with the watcher’s eyeball, and for the moment the Human felt some confidence in her ability to separate illusion from reality. She was beginning to wonder, however, how long she could expect this to last. The place was light-less except for her own lamp, soundless except for her friends’ voices, and practically weightless. She knew that a nervous system without input, like a nervous system whose input was at the edge of its sensory limitations, tended to amplify and organize its own noise. So far she had heard no music and seen no canals, much less angels or faces, but she found herself looking forward more and more eagerly to Charley’s voice checks and even calling one or another of her friends when she had nothing in particular to report.
On Carol’s seventh try with her light, Molly saw something flashing from her backtrack direction and almost fainted with relief. She was doubtful enough about her own perceptions by then to ask her friend to flash the beam on and off several times, but the spark blinked in and out of existence in the same pattern as the sender’s call.
“It’s you all right! Can you see my light? I’m pointing it back at you.”
“Yes. I’m glad you picked that straight bit of stream. We’re a couple of hundred meters apart laterally; my direction was a trifle off to the right. I’m correcting and will be with you in a moment.”
“Don’t stop talking. My ears as well as my eyes were beginning to deceive me. I was beginning to hear faint rumbling noises, and deep hoots and bellows.”
“That may not be illusion,” Charley interjected. “There’s another storm—a really wild one—going on up here, and you aren’t so far from the surface, after all. Even Joe noticed it, though he doesn’t really hear; the boat’s been vibrating a bit.”
“But would sound get through rock—I don’t mean that; it would travel better in rock, of course—but would it get through the rock-air interface well enough to be audible down here?” Molly was more than doubtful.
“Carol, you can hear. Are you picking it up?” asked Charley.
“I think so, now that you call my attention to it. It wouldn’t have to cross the interface, remember; there’s a closed tube connecting us with the surface for a good deal of the distance. Anyway, it’s not very important; when I get to Molly, we can check whether we’re hearing the same sort of sounds, if she’s still worried about her objectivity. I’ll be with you inside of a minute, Mol.”
“And there are only two people in the universe I’d rather see right now. Thanks, Carol.”
“I’m not hurt. I have three. Set your light for diffuse; I don’t need a beam now to spot you. I’m doing the same. Where will we have the party when we get back to our own? Pearl or Topaz? Your gravity and no air, or my gravity and your air?”
“Right now I’ll settle for anyplace where water will stay liquid and in a tub.”
“My place, then. I can melt water in the party wing, and you’ll need the air. Taking a shampoo in armor is a bit pointless. You’d have to refrigerate for me and the Others on Pearl, and I want to play some more with water anyway. I can think of some really good party tricks with ice.”
Molly watched the approaching patch of radiance containing the other robot and its tiny rider, and for the first time in what seemed like days felt really free to get off her own machine and walk along beside it. Carol pulled a few meters ahead, stopped her robot, and also dismounted, and the tiny humanoid leaped to meet her huge friend.
“Don’t squash me!” she exclaimed. “I’m glad to see you, too, but let’s not get overemotional.” Molly set her back on her feet, and the Shervah turned her attention to the first robot. After a moment, she gave Molly more instructions.
“This may be a trifle awkward. You’re going to have to walk or ride with the middle of your back, where your heat pump exhausts, as close as you can get it to this place here on the shell. Your ice coat has frozen the access panel shut, and we’ll have to melt it away before I can get at the keys. I’m not sure the laser is controllable enough, and if it vaporizes any metal I might lose my eyesight even if the beam itself doesn’t hit me.”
“No problem,” replied Molly. “I could walk on my hands in this gravity, and actually you could carry me in the best position, I suspect. How about trying it?”
That’s a thought. It never occurred to me that a living person could be used as a blowtorch, but we admit human beings are a bit special, don’t we?”
By the time the ice had disappeared from the panel, both women were feeling a trifle uneasy; Carol’s robot was some distance behind them. However, with the frozen water gone, she set her giant friend back on her own feet, opened the panel, and quickly manipulated the keys inside. The metal cylinder obediently stopped for the first time in many hours and, in response to further control, started back the way it had come at a somewhat higher speed. In two or three minutes it had reached the other machine, and Carol stopped it again.
“Relief mission accomplished,” she reported. “We are together, and Molly and both robots seem to be all right. I can find our way back easily. I suggest we go quickly as far as the big cave where the life was found and learn what we can there; we’ll need specimens. All right, Jenny?”
“Fine. I’m tempted to meet you there but have no intention of going outside in this storm. I might not be as lucky as Joe when I blow away. There are a fair number of hills around to make eddies, but I’m not sure I’d get close to one, and anyway there seem to be electrical discharges. My armor has metal in it.”
“A good excuse for staying in the big cave for a while and collecting, if an excuse is needed,” agreed Carol. “All right, I think you can trust us to pick up all you need—for a preliminary study, of course.” The Shervah looked at her companion, who nodded wordlessly, and the smaller woman set first Molly’s robot and then her own back into a traveling mode. She estimated a proper direction to bring them back to the stream, using the detailed mental picture she had formed of the parts of the cavern she had traversed so far. It was not straight back along the way either of them had come, but a little to the right of Molly’s back track; it should, Carol judged, intercept the stream two or three hundred meters above the point where they had left it. She did not want to cut any farther to the right, since there was obviously something—wall or ridge—preventing the stream itself from coming in this direction. If anything, as far as she could tell, they were nearly under the first large cavern, though some hundreds of meters to the left of the path they had first followed from it. Like Molly, she was rather uncertain of slope, however, and would have been reluctant to claim real confidence about their position.