The unexpected explosion hurled her into the air, completely over her robot, and sent the latter rolling sideways—she fortunately had powered it down completely when she emerged. If it had tried to hold position against the blast ...
Jenny tested the last six legs on her left side, some of which were numb and some stinging from the shock. The armor had apparently done its job. She righted the robot, entered it, and checked its controls. Finding with relief that all was operating properly, she set out for the surface.
Chapter Fourteen
Datum Four: Charley
It was a jolt to his faith. The calm certainty that the Faculty would never allow anything serious to happen to a student had kept Charley steady through all of Enigma’s unpleasant treatment of its visitors. When Joe had blown away, it had been frightening for a moment; when Carol had been trapped helplessly outside and had to be rescued, he had pictured himself in the same predicament. These had been tests, of course; students were supposed to solve them, to get out of the difficulty by their own ingenuity and intelligence. Joe and Carol hadn’t passed, and would no doubt have to face others.
The trouble was that Charley himself wasn’t sure what he would have done in either of those situations. He could foresee some of the tests—though perhaps it had been a mistake to mention the probable failure of the boat. Maybe they’d skip that now. Maybe he should be more independent of the Human. She was pleasant, and apparently imaginative, but that could be explained if she were the source of the test problems, or the observer who was grading them.
One couldn’t be sure about that. There was reason to think it was Molly—but then there was Joe. Very different. Looked practically normal, if he were only larger and lacked those odd paired eyes and didn’t seem to be made of rubber. How he dared to move around with no shell—maybe that had something to do with being the first victim of a failed test. But that failure didn’t need to be real—
Would they realize that Charley’s courage was really just faith? Would they have a test designed to undermine that?
He shouldn’t think about that too much. The assigned problem about the planet was where his attention should stay. Worrying too much about what lay behind the assignment could unbalance anyone. Just do the job as it was planned, with any changes the extra tests might demand, and stop worrying about what the Faculty thought. If he didn’t get rated this time, he could always try again.
He wondered what Molly’s real rating was.
Or Joe’s.
Chapter Fifteen
Of Course Carol’s Right
“Joe!” Neither of the women even knew who had called out first, and neither was greatly calmed by the Nethneen’s placid response. “Yes?”
“Are you still getting any sort of position on us?”
“Yes. As you approached the surface once more, readings got clearer. I still can’t trust them very well, though; the effect of the rock on direction and intensity…”
“But surely we’re not too far from where we were!” It was Molly who asked.
“Not as far as I can tell. Will you clarify what has happened down there?”
The Human did so, summarizing events tersely.
“Any explanation?” asked Jenny at the end. “It’s hard to believe anything has been moving the rope around, and a lot harder to suppose a new cave wall has formed.”
“One.” Molly spoke, after glancing at her companion. “The rope broke or was broken somewhere above and fell into the pool. For some time we’ve been dragging the bight and have now completely crossed the cavern.”
“Wouldn’t you have noticed that the line was slanting to your rear—that you were holding a bight—as you traveled?”
“I did. I assumed it was due to our speed. We were in too much of a hurry, I guess,” replied Molly. “Carol wouldn’t have noticed anything after we found that grass.”
There were several seconds of thoughtful silence.
“That seems to fit what we know of the facts,” Joe admitted finally. “The problem would now seem to be finding your entry tunnel without the aid of either the rope or Carol’s memory. There could be a good many such passages, of course; it’s looking more and more as though you had quite a labyrinth down there. If Charley’s suggestion about kames is right, Enigma’s crust could be riddled with those caves; and if they’re connected enough for air currents to travel freely, there’s a real problem.”
“We’ll have the wind,” Carol pointed out. “We’d have the sound of the storm, but that seems to have died out pretty well. I take it it’s ended up there.”
“No, sand and dust are still blowing strongly. Visibility is very poor. When you get back to the surface, you’ll have to be careful not to blow away as I did. All right, you’d better send the robots upward at one meter per second for six hundred fifty seconds—that will bring you to the level of the original entry tunnel…”
“Maybe. We don’t know that the lake surface is at the level of Molly’s first stop down here.”
“Of course. Well, you’ll still be somewhere near it, I’d think.”
“Could be. But there’s another point. I don’t like the idea of moving from one robot to the other to reset their controls with a drop like that underneath. I might conceivably live through such a fall in this gravity, especially with a splash instead of a smash at the bottom, but if I did lose my hold while transferring, Molly and I would both be in trouble. I hate to suggest leaving one of the machines here even for a little while, but it’s going to be a lot more practical for us to ride just one of them up.”
“You have plenty of rope,” Charley cut in testily. “Why should you be worried about falling? You could tie a safety line to each machine and another one to Molly, so you wouldn’t even have to climb up by yourself if you did fall.”
“And if I set up even a small difference in the flight courses of the robots, I could be breaking the ropes or pulling myself apart with no chance to correct it. Joe’s machines are too independent of outside influence. No, thanks, Charley.”
Molly wondered fleetingly how much of this objection represented a serious worry of Carol’s and how much was reluctance to be corrected by the Kantrick. Even Joe hesitated before agreeing, but he did agree. Moments later, Molly had moved over to the Shervah’s robot and was lashing herself to it while her little friend worked the inside keys. Before the knots were finished, they were rising. At Carol’s suggestion, the Human kept playing her light on the nearby wall, and the smaller woman kept them keyed out of contact with it.
At what should have been about the right height, Carol stopped their ascent. The “wall” was not yet quite a ceiling, but had developed enough overhang to permit argument on the point. Distractingly, it was now covered with patches of something that reminded Molly of moss. The Shervah sent them drifting away from it reluctantly, until the rock was scarcely visible in their lights, and reset the machine to move downwind.
In the boat, Joe was hurrying as much as he dared on the final details of the mapping robot. Actual construction was no problem with the shop resources available, but even he was being corrupted by the notion that no possible emergency should be left unconsidered. He did not, as it happened, think of the facility as being particularly complete; it was the sort of thing one had in an auxiliary spacecraft. In a typical mechanical laboratory on any of the School planets he could have built a copy of the boat itself, complete with shop, with a few minutes of control adjustment and an hour’s waiting. He would have been disappointed in an adolescent of his own or any other supposedly intelligent species who couldn’t. He would, of course, have been a little quicker and less clumsy without the environment armor, thin as this was; but being Joe, he gave no thought to the negative aspects of the situation.