As they approached their chosen corridor, the crowd grew denser; there was no way to avoid personal contact, since very few of the beings were equipped by nature to fly. Courtesy ruled, however, and only gentle pushes, needed for steering, were used. Molly had transferred Joe to her back, below her life-support pack, by this time, and had both hands free; and as they swung into the cavernous space that led for most of the length of the flying schoolhouse she found and grasped the first of a series of handholds along what would have been a ceiling under normal acceleration. The passage was much wider than the door that had led into it, and the crowd proportionally thinner. Also, people were spreading out along the line of travel as their different speeds took effect. Molly did not yet use her full strength.
“Joe, is your armor in the boat or in your quarters?”
“Boat. Don’t worry about me.”
“All right. So is mine. Hang on.” She repeated rapidly, and as hard as she could without losing directional control, the one-hand-after-another chinning motion that carried her from one hold to the next, and accelerated their bodies to a speed that made the Nethneen feel a little tense. He said nothing, however; this did not seem a good time to question his companion’s strength or coordination. As long as she didn’t panic, of course, he amended the thought; these beings who had to breathe sometimes did when their gas supply was threatened, and the transparent affair she was wearing was no defense against vacuum. He decided not to say anything about that, either. Molly presumably had either thought of it and was controlling herself, or one could hope she wouldn’t think of it until they reached the boat.
Two Rimmore passed them too fast for Joe to tell whether either might be Jenny; they were even better adapted for this sort of climbing than human beings, and as amphibians were more casual about lack of effective gravity. He had time for only a brief and passing thought about the matter; a turn was coming up. He wound his limbs as best he could about the giant’s trunk, avoiding her refrigerator’s heat exhaust with great care, and concentrated on holding on.
Molly seized a rung at the edge of a side passage and held firmly, swinging into the smaller corridor and letting go at the critical moment. Joe was still with her, but broke contact as they floated free—there were no more course changes, the hatch that led to their own vessel was only fifty meters ahead, and he was uncomfortably warm from the output of her heat pump. The Human had aimed perfectly; they dulled through both air lock doors and brought up against I ho far wall of the main compartment beyond.
Apparently Jenny had not been one of the centipedelike figures that had passed them earlier; the only person already in the room was shaped much like Molly but little more than three quarters of the Human’s meter-and-two-thirds height. It was already encased in armor and as they entered greeted them by pushing their own safety equipment toward them, Joe’s gaping clamshell-fashion and Molly’s unzipped. Both combined their thanks with fast motion; the Nethneen was encased more quickly, as his nearly spherical body and serpentine limbs were far easier to fit. He was sealed in time to help Molly with her helmet.
“You made quick time, Carol,” the giant remarked as she checked her last snaps. “Thanks for getting the suits out.”
“I was here already,” replied the Shervah. “I was pretty sure you two would be first, since I knew you were on watch. The others must have their armor in their quarters; it isn’t here. If that’s the case, they won’t be hurrying.”
“Charley wouldn’t hurry anyway,” Molly remarked, “but you’re probably right. Is there anything useful on the board, or is this just another drill?”
“Nothing graphic. I heard an audible signal—probably the same one that started you here from Con, judging by the time—and put my big batteries on. Then I got your stuff out, opened it up, and waited.”
“Thanks again, Carol,” said Joe. “It sounds like a drill, but we’d better get to launch stations.” Neither he nor Molly needed to comment on the fact that the Shervah had only to power her armor; her normal air pressure was so much higher than that maintained in Classroom that the usual flexible envelopes worn by most of the other air-breathing students were hopelessly inadequate for her. Joe needed no protection from the relatively inert nitrogen around them, and would normally have gone uncovered if others had not objected to the mercaptans his skin evaporated. Molly used an oxygen-nitrogen mix at ship’s total pressure. Her body temperature, murderously high to most of the red-sun species, was handled by cooling fluid circulating through the suit skin and well refrigerated—in spite of the low ambient temperature, her body generated heat faster than the insulation of her garment would pass it—by a small unit between her shoulders. Carol, on the other hand, usually wore full pressure armor outside her private quarters; this needed only additional power for long-time life-support use.
None of the three was considering this point consciously; there were more immediate problems, starting with the two missing members of the team, but by no means ending with them.
“How much project equipment is loaded, if we do have to launch?” Joe queried in a soft voice.
“Most of mine,” replied Molly. “That is, most of what I absolutely need. I can use more, of course—the faster I can collect and date samples of crust, the better—but I can make do with what’s already on board.”
“I’d be happier staying near Classroom and salvaging from it for a while.” Carol’s voice, as Molly had programmed it in her own translator, was rather deep, in deliberate contrast to the speaker’s small size.
“We can’t do that,” the Human student pointed out. “If we have to launch at all, it will be because engines or power supplies have become unstable, or something like that. We can’t even stay nearby. We’ll have to head for Enigma in order to have a reasonable chance of being picked up alive.”
“Carol knows that. It was a statement of feeling.” Joe uttered the words with no obvious emotion of his own. “As it happens, you will both be far better off than I, if it comes to waiting on the planet without wasting time. I have only one master unit on my air-current trackers completed, of the twenty I am planning to use, and only four slaves for it. The amount of data I could secure in a reasonable time would hardly be worth the trip, and would certainly not make an impressive report.”
“I still think you should both focus on my dating method,” Molly pointed out. “The only problem they’ve really set us is ridiculously simple. Unless someone has set it up as a deliberate student trap, I can see no explanation except that the world is so young it hasn’t had time to lose its original gases, or at least the immediate secondary ones. That fits in with the suns of the system—with their luminosity, they can’t possibly be very old, either. It still seems to me that a good set of crustal dates, backed up by careful gas analysis down to isotope level, will let us make a good, solid case for that idea. Charley thinks so, too, and he agreed to help me get and date rock samples.”
“Or ice samples—don’t you human beings distinguish the two rather carefully?” interjected Joe.
“Of course, I…”
“Not of course to some of us. I admit the liquid water you drink isn’t quite the same as lava, but the distinction is a bit academic.”
“I didn’t mean the of course that way; I was conceding your point.”
“I hope Charley isn’t compromising his independence of thought,” Carol remarked. “He should have come up with some notion of his own, like the rest of us.”
“I doubt that any of us can be really original.” A new voice cut into the conversation, and two more armored figures floated into the chamber. Molly would have known that Charley was the speaker even without the identifying tone pattern supplied by her translator. The smaller newcomer, who looked in his armor like a slightly larger version of Joe, brought up against a wall and continued to express opinion. “That world has been known for a good many thousands of years—more than a hundred thousand—and about all that you can find out about it is what you’ve just said about the atmosphere.”
“That’s a bit exaggerated,” said Joe mildly.
“Only a bit. They’ve been using it as a lab subject all that time, and all the reports that come in get sealed. They want to keep on using it; it’s nearby, and convenient, and does make people think a little. I had a lot of ideas about it, but I’m quite sure Molly’s is the right one, so I’m doing her isotope analyses while she gets crust samples for dating.”
“You said it that way on your preliminary report?” Even Joe’s voice, Molly thought, showed a bit of doubt.
“Of course. How else should I have said it?”
“I’d have tried to find words suggesting that my own imagination had been at work,” replied Carol frankly.
“Even if it hadn’t?”
“Are you changing the subject, or admitting that yours wasn’t?”
“Neither. I was just a little surprised at the suggestion of using words to convey a misleading idea.”
“Or, at least, contrary to one’s own hopes for the fact.”
If Charley grasped Carol’s sarcasm, which was quite obvious to Molly, he gave no sign. “Anyway,” he said, reverting to the earlier point, “I submitted my exercise plan supporting Molly’s work, as 1 said; and they did approve it.”