I: WINTER STORM

The wind came across the bay like something living. It tore the surface so thoroughly to shreds that it was hard to tell where liquid ended and atmosphere began; it tried to raise waves that would have swamped the Bree like a chip, and blew them into impalpable spray before they had risen a foot.

The spray alone reached Barlennan, crouched high on the Bree’s poop raft. His ship had long since been hauled safely ashore. That had been done the moment he had been sure that he would stay here for the winter; but he could not help feeling a little uneasy even so. Those waves were many times as high as any he had faced at sea, and somehow it was not completely reassuring to reflect that the lack of weight which permitted them to rise so high would also prevent their doing real damage if they did roll this far up the beach.

Barlennan was not particularly superstitious, but this close to the Rim of the World there was really no telling what could happen. Even his crew, an unimaginative lot by any reckoning, showed occasional signs of uneasiness. There was bad luck here, they muttered — whatever dwelt beyond the Rim and sent the fearful winter gales blasting thousands of miles into the world might resent being disturbed. At every accident the muttering broke out anew, and accidents were frequent. The fact that anyone is apt to make a misstep when he weighs about two and a quarter pounds instead of the five hundred and fifty or so to which he has been used all his We seemed obvious to the commander; but apparently an education, or at least the habit of logical thought, was needed to appreciate that.

Even Dondragmer, who should have known better. Barlennan’s long body tensed and he almost roared an order before he really took in what was going on two rafts away.

The mate had picked this moment, apparently, to check the stays of one of the masts, and had taken advantage of near-weightlessness to rear almost his full length upward from the deck. It was still a fantastic sight to see him towering, balanced precariously on his six rearmost legs, though most of the Bree’s crew had become fairly used to such tricks; but that was not what impressed Barlennan. At two pounds’ weight, one held onto something or else was blown away by the first breeze; and no one could hold onto anything with six walking legs. When that gale struck — but already no order could be heard, even if the commander were to shriek his loudest. He had actually started to creep across the first buffer space separating him from the scene of action when he saw that the mate had fastened a set of lines to his harness and to the deck, and was almost as securely tied down as the mast he was working on.

Barlennan relaxed once more. He knew why Don had done it — it was a simple act of defiance to whatever was driving this particular storm, and he was deliberately impressing his attitude on the crew. Good fellow, thought Barlennan, and turned his attention once more to the bay.

No witness could have told precisely where the shore line now lay. A blinding whirl of white spray and nearly white sand hid everything more than a hundred yards from the Bree in every direction; and now even the ship was growing difficult to see as hard-driven droplets of methane struck bulletlike and smeared themselves over his eye shells. At least the deck under his many feet was still rock-steady; light as it now was, the vessel did not seem prepared to blow away. It shouldn’t, the commander thought grimly, as he recalled the scores of cables now holding to deep-struck anchors and to the low trees that dotted the beach. It shouldn’t — but this would not be the first ship to disappear while venturing this near the Run. Maybe his crew’s suspicion of the Flyer had some justice. After all, that strange being had persuaded him to remain for the winter, and had somehow done it without promising any protection to ship or crew. Still, if the Flyer wanted to destroy them, he could certainly do so more easily and certainly than by arguing them into this trick. If that huge structure he rode should get above the Bree even here where weight meant so little, there would be no more to be said. Barlennan turned his mind to other matters; he had in full measure the normal Mesklinite horror of letting himself get even temporarily under anything really solid.

The crew had long since taken shelter under the deck flaps — even the mate ceased work as the storm actually struck. They were all present; Barlennan had counted the humps under the protecting fabric while he could still see the whole ship. There were no hunters out, for no sailor had needed the Flyer’s warning that a storm was approaching. None of them had been more than five miles from the security of the ship for the last ten days, and five miles was no distance to travel in this weight.

They had plenty of supplies, of course; Barlennan was no fool himself, and did his best to employ none.

Still, fresh food was nice. He wondered how long this particular storm would keep them penned in; that was something the signs did not tell, clearly as they heralded the approach of the disturbance. Perhaps the Flyer knew that. In any case, there was nothing further to be done about the ship; he might as well talk to the strange creature. Barlennan still felt a faint thrill of unbelief whenever he looked at the device the Flyer had given him, and never tired of assuring himself once more of its powers.

It lay, under a small shelter flap of its own, on the poop raft beside him. It was an apparently solid block three inches long and about half as high and wide. A transparent spot in the otherwise blank surface of one end looked like an eye, and apparently functioned as one. The only other feature was a small, round hole in one of the long faces. The block was lying with this face upward, and the “eye” end projecting slightly from under the shelter flap. The flap itself opened downwind, of course, so that its fabric was now plastered tightly against the flat upper surface of the machine.

Barlennan worked an arm under the flap, groped around until he found the hole, and inserted his pincer. There was no moving part, such as a switch or button, inside, but that did not bother him — he had never encountered such devices any more than he had met thermal, photonic, or capacity-activated relays. He knew from experience that the fact of putting anything opaque into that hole was somehow made known to the Flyer, and he knew that there was no point whatever in his attempting to figure out how it was done. It would be, he sometimes reflected ruefully, something like teaching navigation to a ten-day-old child. The intelligence might be there — it was comforting to think so, anyway — but some years of background experience were lacking.

“Charles Lackland here.” The machine spoke abruptly, cutting the train of thought. “That you, Barl?”

“This is Barlennan, Charles.” The commander spoke the Flyer’s language, in which he was gradually becoming proficient.

“Good to hear from you. Were we right about this little breeze?”

“It came at the time you predicted. Just a moment — yes, there is snow with it. I had not noticed. I see no dust as yet, however.”

“It will come. That volcano must have fed ten cubic miles of it into the air, and it’s been spreading for days.”

Barlennan made no direct reply to this. The volcano in question was still a point of contention between them, since it was located in a part of Mesklin which, according to Barlennan’s geographical background, did not exist.

“What I really wondered about, Charles, was how long this blow was going to last. I understand your people can see it from above, and should know how big it is.”

“Are you in trouble already? The winter’s just starting — you have thousands of days before you can get out of here.” “I realize that. We have plenty of food, as far as quantity goes. However, we’d like something fresh occasionally, and it would be nice to know in advance when we can send out a hunting party or two.”

“I see. I’m afraid it will take some rather careful timing. I was not here last winter, but I understand that during that season the storms in this area are practically continuous. Have you ever been actually to the equator before?” “To the what?”

“To the — I guess it’s what you mean when you talk of the Rim.”

“No, I have never been this close, and don’t see how anyone could get much closer. It seems to me that if we went much farther out to sea we’d lose every last bit of our weight and go flying off into nowhere.”

“If it’s any comfort to you, you are wrong. If you kept going, your weight would start up again. You are on the equator right now — the place where weight is least. That is why I am here. I begin to see why you don’t want to believe there is land very much farther north. I thought it might be language trouble when we talked of it before. Perhaps you have time enough to describe to me now your ideas concerning the nature of the world. Or perhaps you have maps?”

“We have a Bowl here on the poop raft, of course. I’m afraid you wouldn’t be able to see it now, since the sun has just set and Esstes doesn’t give light enough to help through these clouds. When the sun rises I’ll show it to you. My flat maps wouldn’t be much good, since none of them covers enough territory to give a really good picture.”

“Good enough. While we’re waiting for sunrise could you give me some sort of verbal idea, though?”

“I’m not sure I know your language well enough yet, but I’ll try.

“I was taught in school that Mesklin is a big, hollow bowl. The part where most people live is near the bottom, where there is decent weight. The philosophers have an idea that weight is caused by the pull of a big, flat plate that Mesklin is sitting on; the farther out we go toward the Rim, the less we weigh, since we’re farther from the plate. What the plate is sitting on no one knows; you hear a lot of queer beliefs on that subject from some of the less civilized races.”

“I should think if your philosophers were right you’d be climbing uphill whenever you traveled away from the center, and all the oceans would run to the lowest point,” interjected Lackland. “Have you ever asked one of your philosophers that?”

“When I was a youngster I saw a picture of the whole thing. The teacher’s diagram showed a lot of lines coming up from the plate and bending in to meet right over the middle of Mesklin. They came through the bowl straight rather than slantwise because of the curve; and the teacher said weight operated along the lines instead of straight down toward the plate,” returned the commander. “I didn’t understand it fully, but it seemed to work. They said the theory was proved because the surveyed distances on maps agreed with what they ought to be according to the theory. That I can understand, and it seems a good point. If the shape weren’t what they thought it was, the distances would certainly go haywire before you got very far from your standard point.”

“Quite right. I see your philosophers are quite well into geometry. What I don’t see is why they haven’t realized that there are two shapes that would make the distances come out right. After all can’t you see that the surface of Mesklin curves downward? If your theory were true, the horizon would seem to be above you. How about that?”

“Oh, it is. That’s why even the most primitive tribes know the world is bowl-shaped. It’s just out here near the Rim that it looks different. I expect it’s something to do with the light After all, the sun rises and sets here even in summer, and it wouldn’t be surprising if things looked a little queer. Why, it even looks as though the — horizon, you called it? — was closer to north and south than it is east and west. You can see a ship much farther away to the east or west. It’s the light.”

“Hmm. I find your point a little difficult to answer at the moment.” Barlennan was not sufficiently familiar with the Flyer’s speech to detect such a thing as a note of amusement in his voice. “I have never been on the surface far from the — er — Rim — and never can be, personally. I didn’t realize that things looked as you describe, and I can’t see why they should, at the moment. J hope to see it when you take that radio-vision set on our little errand.”

“I shall be delighted to hear your explanation of why our philosophers are wrong,” Barlennan answered politely. “When you are prepared to give it, of course. In the meantime, I am still somewhat curious as to whether you might be able to tell me when there will be a break in this storm.”

“It will take a few minutes to get a report from the station on Toorey. Suppose I call you back about sunrise. I can give you the weather forecast, and there’ll be light enough for you to show me your Bowl. All right?”

“That will be excellent. I will wait.” Barlennan crouched where he was beside the radio while the storm shrieked on around him. The pellets of methane that splattered against his armored back failed to bother him — they hit a lot harder in the high latitudes. Occasionally he stirred to push away the fine drift of ammonia that kept accumulating on the raft, but even that was only a minor annoyance — at least, so far. Toward midwinter, in five or six thousand days, the stuff would be melting in — full sunlight, and rather shortly thereafter would be freezing again. The main idea was to get the liquid away from the vessel or vice versa before the second freeze, or Barlennan’s crew would be chipping a couple of hundred rafts clear of the beach. The Bree was no river boat, but a full-sized oceangoing ship.

It took the Flyer only the promised few minutes to get the required information, and his voice sounded once more from the tiny speaker as the clouds over the bay lightened with the rising sun.

“I’m afraid I was right, Barl. There is no letup in sight. Practically the whole northern hemisphere — which doesn’t mean a ‘thing to you — is boiling off its icecap. I understand the storms in general last all winter. The fact that they come separately in the higher southern latitudes is because they get broken up into very small cells by Coriolis deflection as they get away from the equator.”

“By what?”

“By the same force that makes any projectile you throw swerve so noticeably to the left — at least, while I’ve never seen it under your conditions, it would practically have to on this planet.”

“What is ‘throw’?”

“My gosh, we haven’t used that word, have we? Well, I’ve seen you jump — no, by gosh, I haven’t either! — when you were up visiting at my shelter. Do you remember that word?”

“No.”

“Well, ‘throw’ is when you take some other object — pick it up — and push it hard away from you so that it travels some distance before striking the ground!”

“We don’t do that up in reasonable countries. There are lots of things we can do here which are either impossible or very dangerous there. If I were to ‘throw’ something at home, it might very well land on someone — probably me.”

“Come to think of it, that might be bad. Three G’s here at the equator is bad enough; you have nearly seven hundred at the poles. Still, if you could find something small enough so ‘that your muscles could throw it, why couldn’t you catch it again, or at least resist its impact?”

“I find the situation hard to picture, but I think I know the answer. There isn’t time. If something is let go — thrown or not — it hits the ground before anything can be done about it. Picking up and carrying is one thing; crawling is one thing; throwing and — jumping? — are entirely different matters.”

“I see — I guess. We sort of took for granted that you’d have a reaction time commensurate with your gravity, but I can see that’s just man-centered thinking. I guess I get it.”

“What I could understand of your talk sounded reasonable. It is certainly evident that we are different; we will probably never fully realize just how different. At least we are enough alike to talk together — and make what I hope will be a mutually profitable agreement.”

“I am sure it will be. Incidentally, in furtherance of it you will have to give me an idea of the places you want to go, and I will have to point out on your maps the place where I want you to go. Could we look at that Bowl of yours now? There is light enough for this vision set.”

“Certainly. The Bowl is set in the deck and cannot be moved; I will have to move the machine so that you can see it. Wait a moment.”

Barlennan inched across the raft to a spot that was covered by a smaller flap, clinging to deck cleats as he went. He pulled back and stowed the flap, exposing a clear spot on the deck; then he returned, made four lines fast about the radio, secured them to strategically placed cleats, removed the radio’s cover, and began to work it across the deck. It weighed more than he did by quite a margin, though fts linear dimensions were smaller, but he was taking no chances of having it blown away. The storm had not eased in the least, and the deck itself was quivering occasionally. With the eye — end of the set almost to the Bowl, he propped the other end up with spars so that the Flyer could look downward. Then he himself moved to the other side of the Bowl and began his exposition.

Lackland had to admit that the map which the Bowl contained was logically constructed and, as far as it went, accurate. Its curvature matched that of the planet quite closely, as he had expected — the major error being that it was concave, in conformity with the natives’ ideas about the shape of their world. It was about six inches across and roughly one and a quarter deep-at the center. The whole map was protected by a transparent cover — probably of ice, Lackland guessed — set flush with the deck. This interfered somewhat with Barlennan’s attempts to point out details, but could not have been removed without letting the Bowl fill with ammonia snow in moments. The stuff was piling up wherever it found shelter from the wind. The beach was staying relatively clear, but both Lackland and Barlennan could imagine what was happening on the other side of the hills that paralleled it on the south. The latter was secretly glad he was a sailor. Land travel in this region would not be fun for some thousands of days.

“I have tried to keep my charts up to date,” he said as he settled down opposite the Flyer’s proxy. “I haven’t attempted to make any changes in the Bowl, though, because the new regions we mapped on the way up were not extensive enough to show. There is actually little I can show you in detail, but you wanted a general idea of where I planned to go when we could get out of here.

“Well, actually I don’t care greatly. I can buy and sell anywhere, and at the moment I have little aboard but food. I won’t have much of that by the time winter is over, either; so I had planned, since our talk, to cruise for a time around the low-weight areas and pick up plant products which can be obtained here — materials that are valued by the people farther south because of their effect on the taste of food.”

“Spices?”

“If that is the word for such products, yes. I have carried them before, and rather like them — you can get good profit from a single shipload, as with most commodities whose value depends less on their actual usefulness than on their rarity.”

“I take it, then, that once you have loaded here you don’t particularly care where you go?”

“That is right. I understand that your errand will carry us close to the Center, which is fine — the farther south we go, the higher the prices I can get; and the extra length of the journey should not be much more dangerous, since you will be helping us as you agreed.”

“Right. That is excellent — though I wish we had been able to find something we could give you in actual payment, so that you would not feel the need to take time in spice-gathering.”

“Well, we have to eat. You say your bodies, and hence your foods, are made of very different substances from ours, so we can’t use your foodstuffs. Frankly, I can’t think of any desirable raw metal or similar material that I couldn’t get far more easily in any quantity I wanted. My favorite idea is still that we get some of your machines, but you say that they would have to be built anew to function under our conditions. It seems that the agreement we reached is the best that is possible, under those circumstances.”

“True enough. Even this radio was built specifically for this job, and you could not repair it — your people, unless I am greatly mistaken, don’t have the tools. However, during the journey we can talk of this again; perhaps the things we learn of each other will open up other and better possibilities.”

“I am sure ‘they will,” Barlennan answered politely.

He did not, of course, mention the possibility that his own plans might succeed. The Flyer would hardly have approved.

II: THE FLYER

The Flyer’s forecast was sound; some four hundred days passed before the storm let up noticeably. Five times during that period the Flyer spoke to Barlennan on the radio, always opening with a brief weather forecast and continuing a more general conversation for a day or two each time. Barlennan had noticed earlier, when he had been learning the strange creature’s language and paying personal visits to its outpost in the “Hill” near the bay, that it seemed to have a strangely regular life cycle; he found he could count on finding the Flyer sleeping or eating at quite predictable times, which seemed to have a cycle of about eighty days. Barlennan was no philosopher — he had at least his share of the common tendency to regard them as impractical dreamers — and he simply shrugged this fact off as something pertaining to a weird but admittedly interesting creature. There was nothing in the Mesklinite background that would enable him to deduce the existence of a world that took some eighty times as long as his own to rotate 0n its axis.

Lackland’s fifth call was different from the others, and more welcome for several reasons. The difference was due partly to the fact that it was off schedule; its pleasant nature to the fact that at last there was a favorable weather forecast.

“Barl” The Flyer did not bother with preliminaries — he knew that the Mesklinite was always within sound of the radio. “The station on Toorey called a few minutes ago. There is a relatively clear area moving toward us. He was not sure just what the winds would be, but he can see the ground through it, so visibility ought to be fair. If your hunters want to go out I should say that they wouldn’t be blown away, provided they wait until the clouds have been gone for twenty or thirty days. For a hundred days or so after that we should have very good weather indeed. They’ll tell me in plenty of time to get your people back to the ship.”

“But how will they get your warning? If I send this radio with them I won’t be able to talk to you about our regular business, and if I don’t, I don’t see — ”

“I’ve been thinking of that,” interrupted Lackland. “I think you’d better come up here as soon as the wind drops sufficiently. I can give you another set — perhaps it would be better if you had several. I gather that the journey you will be taking for us will be dangerous, and I know for myself it will be long enough. Thirty-odd thousand miles as the crow flies, and I can’t yet guess how far by ship and overland.”

Lackland’s simile occasioned a delay; Barlennan wanted to know what a crow was, and also flying. The first was the easier to get across. Flying for a living creature, under its own power, was harder for him to imagine than throwing — and the thought was more terrifying. He had regarded Lack-land’s proven ability to travel through the air as something so alien that it did not really strike home to him. Lackland saw this, partly.

“There’s another point I want to take up with you,” he said. “As soon as it’s clear enough to land safely, they’re bringing down a crawler. Maybe watching the rocket land will get you a little more used to the whole flying idea.”

“Perhaps,” Barlennan answered hesitantly. “I’m not sure I want to see your rocket land. I did once before, you know, and — well, I’d not want one of the crew to be there at the time.”

“Why not? Do you think they’d be scared too much to be useful?”

“No.” The Mesklinite answered quite frankly. “I don’t want one of them to see me as scared as I’m likely to be.”

“You surprise me, Commander.” Lackland tried to give his words in a jocular tone. “However, I understand your feelings, and I assure you that the rocket will not pass above you. If you will wait right next to.the wall of my dome I will direct its pilot by radio to make sure of that.”

“But how close to overhead will it come?”

“A good distance sideways, I promise. That’s for my own safety as well as your comfort. To land on this world, even here at the equator, it will be necessary for him to be using a pretty potent blast. I don’t want it hitting my dome, I can assure you.”

“All right. I will come. As you say, it would be nice to have more radios. What is this ‘crawler’ of which you speak?”

“It is a machine which will carry me about on land as your ship does at sea. You will see in a few days, or in a few hours at most.”

Barlennan let the new word pass without question, since the remark was clear enough anyway. “I will come, and will see,” he agreed.

The Flyer’s friends on Mesklin’s inner moon had prophesied correctly. The commander, crouched on his poop, counted only ten sunrises before a lightening of the murk and lessening of the wind gave their usual warning of the approaching eye of the storm. From his own experience he was willing to believe, as the Flyer had said, that the calm period would last one or two hundred days.

With a whistle that would have torn Lackland’s eardrums had he been able to hear such a high frequency the commander summoned the attention of his crew and began to issue orders.

“There will be two hunting parties made up at once. Don-dragmer will head one, Merkoos the other; each will take nine men of his own choosing. I will remain on the ship to coordinate, for the Flyer is going to give us more of his talking machines. I will go to the Flyer’s Hill as soon as the sky is clear to get them; they, as well as other things he wants, are being brought down from Above by his friends, therefore all crew members will remain near the ship until I return. Plan for departure thirty days after I leave.”

“Sir, is it wise for you to leave the ship so early? The wind will still be high.” The mate was too good a friend for the question to be impertinent, though some commanders would have resented any such reflection on their judgment. Barlennan waved his pincers in a manner denoting a smile.

“You are quite right. However, I want to save the time, and the Flyer’s Hall is only a mile away.” “But-”

“Furthermore it is downwind. We have many miles of line in the lockers; I will have, two bent to my harness, and two of the men — Terblannenland Hars, I think, under your supervision, Don — will pay those lines out through the bitts as I go. I may — probably will — lose my footing, but if the wind were able to get such a grip on me as to break good sea cord, the Bree would be miles inland by now.”

“But even losing your footing — suppose you were to be lifted into the air — ” Dondragmer was still deeply troubled, and the thought he had uttered gave even his commander pause for an instant.

“Falling — yes — but remember that we are near the Edge — at it, the Flyer says, and I can believe him when I look north from the top of his Hill. As some of you have found, a fall means nothing here.”

“But you ordered that we should act as though we had normal weight, so that no habits might be formed that would be dangerous when we returned to a livable land.”

“Quite true. This will be no habit, since in any reasonable place no wind could pick me up. Anyway, that is what we do. Let Terblannen and Hars check the lines — no, check them yourself. It will take long enough.

“That is all for the present. The watch under shelter may rest. The watch on deck will check anchors and lashings.” Dondragmer, who had the latter watch, took the order as a dismissal and proceeded to carry it out in his usual efficient manner. He also set men to work cleaning snow from the spaces between rafts, having seen as clearly as his captain the possible consequences of a thaw followed by a freeze. Barlennan himself relaxed, wondering sadly just which ancestor was responsible for his habit of talking himself into situations that were both unpleasant to face and impossible to back out of gracefully.

For the rope idea was strictly spur-of-the moment, and it took most of the several days before the clouds vanished for the arguments he had used on his mate to appeal to their inventor. He was not really happy even when he lowered himself onto the snow that had drifted against the lee rafts, cast a last look backward at his two most powerful crew members and the lines they were managing, and set off across the wind-swept beach.

Actually, it was not too bad. There was a slight upward force from the ropes, since the deck was several inches above ground level when he started; but the slope of the beach quickly remedied that. Also, the trees which were serving so nobly as mooring points for the Bree grew more and more thickly as he went inland. They were low, flat growths with wide-spreading tentacular limbs and very short, thick trunks, generally similar to those of the lands he knew deep in the southern hemisphere of Mesklin. Here, however, their branches arched sometimes entirely clear of the ground, left relatively free by an effective gravity less than one ‘two-hundredth that of the polar regions. Eventually they grew close enough together to permit the branches to intertwine, a tangle of brown and black cables which furnished excellent hold. Barlennan found it possible, after a time, practically to climb toward the Hill, getting a grip with his front pincers, releasing the hold of his rear ones, and twisting his caterpillarlike body forward so that he progressed almost in inchworm fashion. The cables gave him some trouble, but since both they and the tree limbs were relatively smooth no serious fouling occurred.

The beach was fairly steep after the first two hundred yards; and at half the distance he expected to go, Barlennan was some six feet above the Bree’s deck level. From this point the Flyer’s Hill could be seen, even by an individual whose eyes were as close to the ground as those of a Mesklinite; and the commander paused to take in the scene as he had many times before.

The remaining half mile was a white, brown, and black tangle, much like that he had just traversed. The vegetation was even denser, and had trapped a good deal more snow, so that there was little or no bare ground visible.

Looming above the tangled plain was the Flyer’s Hill. The Mesldinite found it almost impossible to think of it as an artificial structure, partly because of its monstrous size and partly because a roof of any description other than a flap of fabric was completely foreign to his ideas of architecture. It was a glittering metal dome some twenty feet in height and forty in diameter, nearly a perfect hemisphere. It was dotted with large, transparent areas and had two cylindrical extensions containing doors. The Flyer had said that these doors were so constructed that one could pass through them without letting air get from one side to ‘the other. The portals were certainly big enough for the strange creature, gigantic as he was. One of file lower windows had an improvised ramp leading up to it which would permit a creature of Barlennan’s size and build to crawl up to the pane and see inside. The commander had spent much time on that ramp while he was first learning to speak and understand the Flyer’s language; he had seen much of the strange apparatus and furniture which filled the structure, though he had no idea of ‘the use to which most of it was put. The Flyer himself appeared to be an amphibious creature — at least, he spent much of the time floating in a tank of liquid. This was reasonable enough, considering his size. Barlennan himself knew of no creature native to Mesklin larger than his own race which was not strictly an ocean or lake dweller — though he realized that, as far as weight alone was considered, such things might exist in these vast, nearly unexplored regions near the Rim. He trusted that he would meet none, at least while he himself was ashore. Size meant weight, and a lifetime of conditioning prevented his completely ignoring weight as a menace.

There was nothing near the dome except the ever present vegetation. Evidently the rocket had not yet arrived, and for a moment Barlennan toyed with the idea of waiting where he was until it did. Surely when it came it would descend on the farther side of the Hill — the Flyer would see to that, if Barlennan himself had not arrived. Still, there was nothing to prevent the descending vessel from passing over his present position; Lackland could do nothing about that, since he would not know exactly where the Mesklinite was. Few Earthmen can locate a body fifteen inches long and two in diameter crawling horizontally through tangled vegetation at a distance of half a mile. No, he had better go right up to the dome, as the Flyer had advised. The commander resumed his progress, still dragging the ropes behind him.

He made it in good time, though delayed slightly by occasional periods of darkness. As a matter of fact it was night when he reached his goal, though the last part of his journey had been adequately illuminated by light from the windows ahead of him. However, by the time he had made his ropes fast and crawled up to a comfortable station outside the window the sun had lifted above the horizon on his left. The clouds were almost completely gone now, though — the wind was still strong, and he could have seen in through the window even had the inside lights been turned out.

Lackland was not in the room from which this window looked, and the Mesklinite pressed the tiny call button which had been mounted on the ramp. Immediately the Flyer’s voice sounded from a speaker beside the button.

“Glad you’re here, Barl. I’ve been having Mack hold up until you came. I’ll start him down right away, and he should be here by next sunrise.”

“Where is he now? On Toorey?”

“No; he’s drifting at the inner edge of the ring, only six hundred miles up. He’s been there since well before the storm ended, so don’t worry about having kept him waiting yourself. While we’re waiting for him, I’ll bring out the other radios I promised.”

“Since I am alone, it might be well to bring only one radio this time. They are rather awkward things to carry, though light enough, of course.”

“Maybe we should wait for the crawler before I bring them out at all. Then I can ride you back to your ship — the crawler is well enough insulated so that riding outside it wouldn’t hurt you, I’m sure. How would that be?”

“It sounds excellent. Shall we have more language while we wait, or can you show me more pictures of the place you come from?”

“I have some pictures.. It will take a few minutes to load the projector, so it should be dark enough when we’re ready. Just a moment — I’ll come to the lounge.”

The speaker fell silent, and Barlennan kept his eyes on the door which he could see at one side of the room. In a few moments the Flyer appeared, walking upright as usual with the aid of the artificial limbs he called crutches. He approached the window, nodded his massive head at the tiny watcher, and turned to the movie projector. The screen at which the machine was pointed was on the wall directly facing the window; and Barlennan, keeping a couple of eyes on the human being’s actions, squatted down more comfortably in a position from which he could watch it in comfort. He waited silently while the sun arched lazily overhead. It was warm in the full sunlight, pleasantly so, though not warm enough to start a thaw; the perpetual wind from the northern icecap prevented that. He was half dozing while Lackland finished threading the machine, stumped over to his relaxation tank, and lowered himself into it. Barlennan had never noticed the elastic membrane over the surface of the liquid which kept the man’s clothes dry; if he had, it might have modified his ideas about the amphibious nature of human beings. From his floating position Lackland reached up to a small panel and snapped two switches. The room lights went out and the projector started to operate. It was a fifteen-minute reel, and had not quite finished when Lackland had to haul himself once more to his feet and crutches with the information that the rocket was landing.

“Do you want to watch Mack, or would you rather see the end of the reel?” he asked. “He’ll probably be on the ground by the time it’s done.”

Barlennan tore his attention from the screen with some reluctance. “I’d rather watch the picture, but it would probably be better for me to get used to the sight of flying things,” he said. “From which side will it come?”

“The east, I should expect. I have given Mack a careful description of the layout here, and he already had photographs; and I know an approach from that direction will be somewhat easier, as he is now set. I’m afraid the sun is interfering at the moment with your line of vision, but he’s still about forty miles up — look well above the sun.”

Barlennan followed these instructions and waited. For perhaps a minute he saw nothing; his eye was caught by a glint of metal some twenty degrees above the rising sun.

“Altitude ten — horizontal distance about the same,” Lackland reported at the same moment. “I have him on the scope here.”

The glint grew brighter, holding its direction almost perfectly — the rocket was on a nearly exact course toward the dome. In another minute it was close enough for details to be visible — or would have been, except that everything was now hidden in the glare of the rising sun. Mack hung poised for a moment a mile above the station and as far as to the east; and as Belne moved out of line Barlennan could see the windows and exhaust ports in the cylindrical hull. The storm wind had dropped almost completely, but now a warm breeze laden with a taint of melting ammonia began to blow from the point where the exhaust struck the ground. The drops of semiliquid spattered on Barlennan’s eye shells, but he continued to stare at the slowly settling mass of metal. Every muscle in his long body was at maximum tension, his arms held close to his sides, pincers clamped tightly enough to have shorn through steel wire, the hearts in each of his body segments pumping furiously. He would have been holding his breath had he possessed breathing apparatus at all similar to that of a human being. Intellectually he knew that the thing would not fall — he kept telling himself that it could not; but having grown to maturity in an environment where a fall of six inches was usually fatally destructive even to the incredibly tough Mesklinite organism, his emotions were not easy to control. Subconsciously he kept expecting the metal shell to vanish from sight, to reappear on the ground below flattened out of recognizable shape. After all, it was still hundreds of feet up…

On the ground below the rocket, now swept clear of snow, the black vegetation abruptly burst into flame. Black ash blew from the landing point, and the ground itself glowed briefly. For just an instant this lasted before the glittering cylinder settled lightly into the center of the bare patch.

Seconds later the thunder which had mounted to a roar louder than Mesklin’s hurricanes died abruptly. Almost painfully, Barlennan relaxed, opening and shutting his pincers to relieve the cramps.

“If you’ll stand by a moment, I’ll be out with the radios,” Lackland said. The commander had not noticed his departure, but the Flyer was no longer in the room. “Mack will drive the crawler over here — you can watch it come while I’m getting into armor.”

Actually Barlennan was able to watch only a portion of the drive. He saw the rocket’s cargo lock swing open and the vehicle emerge; he got a sufficiently good look at the crawler to understand everything about it — he thought — except what made its caterpillar treads move, It was big, easily big enough to hold several of the Flyer’s race unless too much of its interior was full of machinery. Like the dome, it had numerous and large windows; through one of these in the front the commander could see the armored figure of another Flyer, who was apparently controlling it. Whatever drove the machine did not make enough noise to be audible across the mile of space that still separated it from the dome.

It covered very little of that distance before the sun set, and details ceased to be visible. Esstes, the smaller sun, was still in the sky and brighter than the full moon of Earth, but Barlennan’s eyes had their limitations. An intense beam of light projected from the crawler itself along its path, and consequently straight toward the dome, did not help either. Barlennan simply waited. After all, it was still too far for really good examination even by daylight, and would undoubtedly be at the Hill by sunrise.

Even though he might have to wait, of course; the Flyers might object to the sort of examination he really wanted to give their machinery.

III: OFF THE GROUND

The tank’s arrival, Lackland’s emergence from the dome’s main air lock, and the rising of Belne all took place at substantially the same moment* The vehicle stopped only a couple of yards from the platf orln on which Barlennan was crouched. Its driver also emerged; and the two men stood and talked briefly beside the Mesklinite. The latter rather wondered that they did not return to the inside of the dome to lie down, since both were rather obviously laboring under Mesklin’s gravity; but the newcomer refused Lackland’s invitation.

“I’d like to be sociable,” he said in answer to it, “but honestly, Charlie, would you stay on this ghastly mudball a moment longer than you had to?”

“Well, I could do pretty much the same work from Toorey, or from a ship in a free orbit for that matter,” retorted Lackland. “I think personal contact means a good deal. I still want to find out more about Barlennan’s people — it seems to me that we’re hardly giving him as much as we expect to get, and it would be nice to find out if there were anything more we could do. Furthermore, he’s in a rather dangerous situation himself, and having one of us here might make quite a difference — to both of us.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Barlennan is a tramp captain — a sort of free-lance explorer-trader. He’s completely out of the normal areas inhabited and traveled through by his people. He is remaining here during the southern winter, when the evaporating north polar cap makes storms which have to be seen to be believed here in the equatorial regions — storms which are almost as much out of his experience as ours. If anything happens to him, stop and think of our chances of meeting another contact!

“Remember, he normally lives in a gravity field from two hundred to nearly seven hundred times as strong as Earth’s. We certainly won’t follow him home to meet his relatives! Furthermore, there probably aren’t a hundred of his race who are not only in the same business but courageous enough to go so far from their natural homes. Of those hundred, what ‘are our chances of meeting another? Granting that this ocean is the one they frequent most, this little arm of it, from which this bay is an offshoot, is six thousand miles long and a third as wide — with a very crooked shore line. As for spotting one, at sea or ashore, from above — well, Barlennan’s Bree is about forty feet long and a third as wide, and is one of their biggest oceangoing ships. Scarcely any of it is more than three inches above the water, besides.

“No, Mack, our meeting Barlennan was the wildest of coincidences; and I’m not counting on another. Staying under three gravities for five months or so, until the southern spring, will certainly be worth it. Of course, if you want to gamble our chances of recovering nearly two billion dollars’ worth of apparatus on the results of a search over a strip of planet a thousand miles wide and something over a hundred and fifty thousand long — ”

“You’ve made your point,” the other human being admitted, “but I’m still glad it’s you and not me. Of course, maybe if I knew Barlennan better — ” Both men turned to the tiny, caterpillarlike form crouched on the waist-high platform.

“Barl, I trust you will forgive my rudeness in not introducing Wade McLellan,” Lackland said. “Wade, this is Barlennan, captain of the Bree, and a master shipman of his world-he has not told me that, but the fact that he is here is sufficient evidence.”

“I am glad to meet you, Pfyer McLellan,” the Mesklinite responded. “No apology is necessary, and I assumed that your conversation was meant for my ears as well.” He performed the standard pincer-opening gesture of greeting. “I had already appreciated the good fortune for both of us which our meeting represents, and only hope that I can fulfill my part of the bargain as well as I am sure you will yours.”

“You speak English remarkably well,” commented McLellan. “Have you really been learning it for less than six weeks?”

“I am not sure how long your ‘week’ is, but it is less than thirty-five hundred days since I met your friend,” returned the commander. “I am a good linguist, of course — it is necessary in my business; and the films that Charles showed helped very much.”

“It is rather lucky that your voice could make all the sounds of our language. We sometimes have trouble that way.”

“That, or something like it, is why I learned your English rather than the other way around. Many of the sounds we use are much too shrill for your vocal cords, I understand.” Barlennan carefully refrained from mentioning that much of his normal conversation was also too high-pitched for human ears. After all, Lackland might not have noticed it yet, and the most honest of traders thinks at least twice before revealing all his advantages. “I imagine that Charles has learned some of our language, nevertheless, by watching and listening to us through the radio now on the Bree.”

“Very little,” confessed Lackland. “You seem, from what little I have seen, to have an extremely well-trained crew. A great deal of your regular activity is done without orders, and I can make nothing of the conversations you sometimes have with some of your men, which are not accompanied by any action.”

“You mean when I am talking to Dondragmer or Merkoos? They are my first and second officers, and the ones I talk to most.”

“I hope you will not feel insulted at this, but I am quite unable to tell one of your people from another. I simply am not familiar enough with your distinguishing characteristics.”

Barlennan almost laughed.

“In my case, it is even worse. I am not entirely sure whether I have seen you without artificial covering or not.”

“Well, that is carrying us a long way from business — we’ve used up a lot of daylight as it is. Mack, I assume you want to get back to the rocket and out where weight means nothing and men are balloons. When you get there, be sure that the receiver-transmitters for each of these four sets are placed close enough together so that one will register on another. I don’t suppose it’s worth the trouble of tying them in electrically, but these folks are going to use them for a while as contact between separate parties, and the sets are on different frequencies. Barl, I’ve left the radios by the air lock. Apparently the sensible program would be for me to put you and the radios on top of the crawler, take Mack over to the rocket, and then drive you and the apparatus over to the Bree.”

Lackland acted on this suggestion, so obviously the right course, before anyone could answer; and Barlennan almost went mad as a result.

The man’s armored hand swept out and picked up the tiny body of the Mesklinite. For one soul-shaking instant Barlennan felt and saw himself suspended long feet away from the ground; then he was deposited on the flat top of the tank. His pincers scraped desperately and vainly at the smooth metal to supplement the instinctive grips which his dozens of suckerlike feet had taken on the plates; his eyes glared in undiluted horror at the emptiness around the edge of the roof, only a few body lengths away in every direction. For long seconds — perhaps a full minute — he could not find his voice; and when he did speak, he could no longer be heard. He was too far away from the pickup on the platform for intelligible words to carry — he knew that from earlier experience; and even at this extremity of terror he remembered that the sirenlike howl of agonized fear that he wanted to emit would have been heard with equal clarity by everyone on the Bree, since there was another radio there.

And the Bree would have had a new captain. Respect for his courage was the only thing that had driven that crew into the storm-breeding regions of the Rim. If that went, he would have no crew and no ship — and, for all practical purpose, no life. A coward was not tolerated on any oceangoing ship in any capacity; and while his homeland was on this same continental mass, the idea of traversing forty thousand miles of coastline on foot was not to be considered.

These thoughts did not cross his conscious mind in detail, but his instinctive knowledge of the facts effectually silenced him while Lackland picked up the radios and, with McLellan, entered the tank below the Mesklinite. The metal under him quivered slightly as the door was closed, and an instant later the vehicle started to move. As it did so, a peculiar thing happened to its nonhuman passenger.

The fear might have — perhaps should have — driven him mad. His situation can only be dimly approximated by comparing it with that of a human being hanging by one hand from a window ledge forty stories above a paved street.

And yet he did not go mad. At least, he did not go mad in the accepted sense; he continued to reason as well as ever, and none of his friends could have detected a change in his personality. For just a little while, perhaps, an Earthman more familiar with Mesklinites than Lackland had yet become might have suspected that the commander was a little drunk; but even that passed.

And the fear passed with it. Nearly six body lengths above the ground, he found himself crouched almost calmly. He was holding tightly, of course; he even remembered, later, reflecting how lucky it was that the wind had continued to drop, even though the smooth metal offered an unusually good grip for his sucker-feet. It was amazing, the viewpoint that could be enjoyed — yes, he enjoyed it — from such a position. Looking down on things really helped; you could get a remarkably complete picture of so much ground at once. It was like a map; and Barlennan had never before regarded a map as a picture of country seen from above.

An almost intoxicating sense of triumph filled him as the crawler approached the rocket and stopped. The Mesklinite waved his pincers almost gaily at the emerging McLellan visible in the reflected glare of the tank’s lights, and was disproportionately pleased when the man waved back. The tank immediately turned to the left and headed for the beach where the Bree lay; Mack, remembering that Barlennan was unprotected, thoughtfully waited until it was nearly a mile away before lifting his own machine into the air. The sight of it, drifting slowly upward apparently without support, threatened for just an instant to revive the old fear; but Barlennan fought the sensation grimly down and deliberately watched the rocket until it faded from view in the light of the lowering sun.

Lackland had been watching too; but when the last glint of metal had disappeared, he lost no further time in driving the tank the short remaining distance to where the Bree lay. He stopped a hundred yards from the vessel, but he was quite close enough for the shocked creatures on the decks to see their commander perched on the vehicle’s roof. It would have been less disconcerting had Lackland approached bearing Barlennan’s head on a pole.

Even Dondragmer, the most intelligent and levelheaded of the Breeds complement — not excepting his captain — was paralyzed for long moments; and his first motion was with eyes only, taking the form of a wistful glance toward the flame-dust tanks and “shakers” on the outer rafts. Fortunately for Barlennan, the crawler was not downwind; for the temperature was, as usual, below the melting point of the chlorine in the tanks. Had the wind permitted, the mate would have sent a cloud of fire about the vehicle without ever thinking that his captain might be alive.

A faint rumble of anger began to arise from the assembled crew as the door of the crawler opened and Lackland’s armored figure emerged. Their half-trading, half-piratical way of life had left among them only those most willing to fight without hesitation at the slightest hint of menace to one of their number; the cowards had dropped away long since, and the individualists had died. The only thing that saved Lack-land’s life as he emerged into their view was habit — the conditioning that prevented their making the hundred-yard leap that would have cost the weakest of them the barest flick of his body muscles. Crawling as they had done all their lives, they flowed from the rafts like a red and black waterfall and spread over the beach toward the alien machine. Lackland saw them coming, of course, but so completely misunderstood their motivation that he did not even hurry as he reached up to the crawler’s roof, picked up Barlennan, and set him on the ground. Then he reached back into the vehicle and brought out the radios he had promised, setting them on the sand beside the commander; and by then it had dawned on the crew that their captain was alive and apparently unharmed. The avalanche stopped in confusion, milling in undecided fashion midway between ship and tank; and a cacophony of voices ranging from deep bass to the highest notes the radio speaker could reproduce gabbled in Lackland’s suit phones. Though he had, as Barlennan had intimated, done his best to attach meaning to some of the native conversation he had previously heard, the man understood not a single word from the crew. It was just as well for his peace of mind; he had long been aware that even armor able to withstand Mesklin’s eight-atmosphere surface pressure would mean little or nothing to Mesklinite pincers.

Barlennan stopped the babble with a hoot that Lackland could probably have heard directly through the armor, if its reproduction by the radio had not partially deafened him first. The commander knew perfectly well what was going on in the minds of his men, and had no desire to see frozen shreds of Lackland scattered over the beach.

“Calm down!” Actually Barlennan felt a very human warmth at his crew’s reaction to his apparent danger, but this was no time to encourage them. “Enough of you have played the fool here at no-weight so that you all should know I was in no danger!”

“But you forbade — ”

“We thought — ”

“You were high — ” A chorus of objections answered the captain, who cut them short.

“I know I forbade such actions, and I told you why. When we return to high-weight and decent living we must have no habits that might result in our thoughtlessly doing dangerous things like that — ” He waved a pincer-tipped arm upward toward the tank’s roof. “You all know what proper weight can do; the Flyer doesn’t. He put me up there, as you saw him take me down, without even thinking about it. He comes from a place where there is practically no weight at all; where, I believe, he could fall many times his body length without being hurt. You can see that for yourselves: if he felt properly about high places, how could he fly?”

Most of Barlennan’s listeners had dug their stumpy feet into the sand as though trying to get a better grip on it during this speech. Whether they fully digested, or even fully believed, their commander’s words may be doubted; but at least their minds were distracted from the action they had intended toward Lackland. A faint buzz of conversation arose once more among them, but its chief overtones seemed to be of amazement rather than anger. Dondragmer alone, a little apart from the others, was silent; and the captain realized that his mate would have to be given a much more careful and complete story of what had happened. Don-dragmer’s imagination was heavily backed by intelligence, and he must already be wondering about the effect on Bar-knnan’s nerves of his recent experience. Well, that could be handled in good time; the crew presented a more immediate problem.

“Are the hunting parties ready?” Barlennan’s question silenced the babble once more.

“We have not yet eaten,” Merkoos replied a little uneasily, “but everything else — nets and weapons — is in readiness.”

“Is the food ready?”

“Within a day, sir” Karondrasee, the cook, turned back toward the ship without further orders.

, “Don, Merkoos. You will each take one of these radios. You have seen me use the one on the ship — all you have to do is talk anywhere near it. You can run a really efficient pincer movement with these, since you won’t have to keep it small enough for both leaders to see each other.

“Don, I am not certain that I will direct from the ship, as I originally planned. I have discovered that one can see over remarkable distances from the top of the Flyer’s traveling machine; and if he agrees I shall ride with him in the vicinity of your operations.”

“But sir!” Dondragmer was aghast. “Won’t — won’t that thing scare all the game within sight? You can hear it coming a hundred yards away, and see it for I don’t know how far in the open. And besides — ” He broke off, not quite sure how to state his main objection. Barlennan did it for him.

“Besides, no one could concentrate on hunting with me in sight so far off the ground — is that it?” The mate’s pincers silently gestured agreement, and the movement was emulated by most of the waiting crew.

For a moment the commander was tempted to reason with them, but he realized in time the futility of such an attempt. He could not actually recapture the viewpoint he had shared with them until so recently, but he did realize that before that time he would not have listened to what he now considered “reason” either.

“All right, Don. I’ll drop that idea — you’re probably right. I’ll be in radio touch with you, but will stay out of sight.”

“But you’ll be riding on that thing? Sir, what has happened to you? I know I can tell myself that a fall of a few feet really means little here at the Rim, but I could never bring myself to invite such a fall deliberately; and I don’t see how anyone else could. I couldn’t even picture myself up on top of that thing.”

“You were most of a body length up a mast not too long ago, if I remember aright,” returned Barlennan dryly. “Or was it someone else I saw checking upper lashings without unshipping the stick?”

“That was different — I had one end on the deck,” Dondragmer replied a trifle uncomfortably.

“Your head still had a long way to fall. I’ve seen others of you doing that sort, of thing too. If you remember, I had something to say about it when we first sailed into this region.”

“Yes, sir, you did. Are those orders still in force, considering — ” The mate paused again, but what he wanted to say was even plainer than before. Barlennan thought quickly and hard.

“Well forget the order,” he said slowly. “The reasons I gave for such things being dangerous are sound enough, but if any of you get in trouble for forgetting when we’re back in high-weight it’s your own fault. Use your own judgment on such matters from now on. Does anyone want to come with me now?”

Words and gestures combined in a chorus of emphatic negatives, with Dondragmer just a shade slower than the rest. Barlennan would have grinned had he possessed the physical equipment.

“Get ready for that hunt — I’ll be listening to you,” he dismissed his audience. They streamed obediently back toward the Bree, and their captain turned to give a suitably censored account of the conversation to Lackland. He was a little preoccupied, for the conversation just completed had given rise to several brand-new ideas in his mind; but they could be worked out when he had more leisure. Just now he wanted another ride on the tank roof.

IV: BREAKDOWN

The bay on the southern shore of which the Bree was beached was a — tiny estuary some twenty miles long and two miles width at its mouth. It opened from the southern shore of a larger gulf of generally similar shape some two hundred fifty miles long, which in turn was an offshoot of a broad sea which extended an indefinite distance into the northern hemisphere — it merged indistinguishably with the permanently frozen polar cap. All three bodies of liquid extended roughly east and west, the smaller ones being separated from the larger on their northern sides by relatively narrow peninsulas. The ship’s position was better chosen than Barlennan had known, being protected from the northern storms by both peninsulas. Eighteen miles to the west, however, the protection of the nearer and lower of these points ceased; and Barlennan and Lackland could appreciate what even that narrow neck had saved them. The captain was once more ensconced on the tank, this time with a radio clamped beside him.

To their right was the sea, spreading to the distant horizon beyond the point that guarded the bay. Behind them the beach was similar to that on which the ship lay, a gently sloping strip of sand dotted with the black, rope-branched vegetation that covered so much of Mesklin. Ahead of them, however, the growths vanished almost completely. Here the slope was even flatter and the belt of sand grew ever broader as the eye traveled along it. It was not completely bare, though even the deep-rooted plants were lacking; but scattered here and there on the wave-channeled expanse were dark, motionless relics of the recent storm.

Some, were vast, tangled masses of seaweed, or of growths which could claim that name with little strain on the imagination; others were the bodies of marine animals, and some of these were even vaster. Lackland was a trifle startled — not at the size of the creatures, since they presumably were supported in life by the liquid in which they floated, but at the distance they lay from the shore. One monstrous hulk was sprawled over half a mile inland; and the Earthman began to realize just what the winds of Mesklin could do even in this gravity when they had a sixty-mile sweep of open sea in which to build up waves. He would have liked to go to the point where the shore lacked even the protection of the outer peninsula, but that would have involved a further journey of over a hundred miles.

“What would have happened to your ship, Barlennan, if the waves that reached here had struck it?”

“That depends somewhat on the type of wave, and where we were. On the open sea, we would ride over it without trouble; beached as the Bree now is, there would have been nothing left. I did not realize just how high waves could get this close to the Rim, of course — now that I think of it, maybe even the biggest would be relatively harmless, because of its lack of weight.”

“I’m afraid it’s not the weight that counts most; your first impression was probably right.”

“I had some such idea in mind when I sheltered behind that point for the winter, of course. I admit I did not have any idea of the actual size the waves could reach here at the Rim. It is not too surprising that explorers tend to disappear with some frequency in these latitudes.”

“This is by no means the worst, either. You have that second point, which is rather mountainous if I recall the photos correctly, protecting this whole stretch.”

“Second point? I did not know about that. Do you mean that what I can see beyond the peninsula there is merely another bay?”

“That’s right. I forgot you usually stayed in sight of land. You coasted along to this point from the west, then, didn’t you?”

“Yes. These seas are almost completely unknown. This particular shore line extends about three thousand miles in a generally westerly direction, as you probably know — I’m just beginning to appreciate what looking at things from above can do for you — and then gradually bends south. It’s not too regular; there’s one place where you go east again for a couple of thousand miles, but I suppose the actual straight-line distance that would bring you opposite my home port is about sixteen thousand miles to the south — a good deal farther coasting, of course. Then about twelve hundred miles across open sea to the west would bring me home. The waters about there are very well known, of course, and any sailor can cross them without more than the usual risks of the sea.”

While they had been talking, the tank had crawled away from the sea, toward the monstrous hulk that lay stranded by the recent storm. Lackland, of course, wanted to examine it in detail, since he had so far seen practically none of Mesklin’s animal life; Barlennan, too, was willing. He had seen many of the monsters that thronged the seas he had traveled all his life, but he was not sure of this one.

Its shape was not too surprising for either of them. It might have been an unusually streamlined whale or a remarkably stout sea snake; the Earthman was reminded of the Zeuglodon that had haunted the seas of his own world thirty million years before. However, nothing that had ever lived on Earth and left fossils for men to study had approached the size of this thing. For six hundred feet it lay along the still tandy soil; in life its body had apparently been cylindrical, tad over eighty feet in diameter. Now, deprived of the support of the liquid in which it had lived, it bore some resemblance to a wax model that had been left too long in the hot sun. Though its flesh was presumably only about half as dense as that of earthly life, its tonnage was still something to stagger Lackland when he tried to estimate it; and the three-times-earth-normal gravity had done its share.

“Just what do you do when you meet something like this at sea?” he asked Barlennan.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” the Mesklinite replied dryly. “I have seen things like this before, but only rarely. They usually stay in the deeper, permanent seas; I have seen one once only on the surface, and about four cast up as is this one. I do not know what they eat, but apparently they find it far below the surface. I have never heard of a ship’s being attacked by one.”

“You probably wouldn’t,” Lackland replied pointedly. “I find it hard to imagine any survivors in such a case. If this thing feeds like some of the whales on my own world, it would inhale one of your ships and probably fail to notice it. Let’s have a look at its mouth and find out.” He started the tank once more, and drove it along to what appeared to be the head end of the vast body.

The thing had a mouth, and a skull of sorts, but the latter was badly crushed by its own weight. There was enough left, however, to permit the correction of Lackland’s guess concerning its eating habits; with those teeth, it could only be carnivorous. At first the man did not recognize them as teeth; only the fact that they were located in a peculiar place for ribs finally led him to the truth.

“You’d be safe enough, Barl,” he said at last. “That thing wouldn’t dream of attacking you. One of your ships would not be worth the effort, as far as its appetite is concerned — I doubt that it would notice anything less than a hundred times the Bree’s size.”

“There must be a lot of meat swimming around in the deeper seas,” replied the Mesklinite thoughtfully. “I don’t see that it’s doing anyone much good, though.”

“True enough. Say, what did you mean a little while ago by that remark about permanent seas? What other kind do you have?”

“I referred to the areas which are still ocean just before the winter storms begin,” was the reply. “The ocean level is at its highest in early spring, at the end of the storms, which have filled the ocean beds during the winter. All the rest of the year they shrink again. Here at the Rim, where shore lines are so steep, it doesn’t make much difference; but up where weight is decent the shore line may move anywhere from two hundred to two thousand miles between spring and fall.” Lackland emitted a low whistle.

“In other words,” he said, half to himself, “your oceans evaporate steadily forever four of my years, precipitating fro7en methane on the north polar cap, and then get it afl back in the five months or so that the northern hemisphere spends going from its spring to autumn. If I was ever surprised at those storms, that ends it.” He returned to more immediate matters.

“Barl, I’m going to get out of this tin box. I’ve been wanting samples of the tissue of Mesklin’s animal life ever since we found it existed, and I couldn’t very well take a paring from you. Will the flesh of this thing be very badly changed in the length of time it has probably been dead? I suppose you’d have some idea.”

“It should still be perfectly edible for us, though from what you have said you could never digest it. Meat usually becomes poisonous after a few hundred days unless it is dried or otherwise preserved, and during all that time its taste gradually changes. I’ll sample a bit of this, if you’d like.” Without waiting for an answer and without even a guilty glance around to make sure that none of his crew had wandered in this direction, Barlennan launched himself from the roof of the tank toward the vast bulk beside it. He misjudged badly, sailing entirely over the huge body, and for just an instant felt a twinge of normal panic; but he was in full control of himself before he landed on the farther side. He leaped back again, judging his distance better this time, and waited while Lackland opened the door of his vehicle and emerged. There was no air lock on the tank; the man was still wearing pressure armor, and had simply permitted Mesklin’s atmosphere to enter after closing his helmet. A faint swirl of white crystals followed him out — ice and carbon dioxide, frozen out of the Earth-type air inside as it cooled to Mesklin’s bitter temperature. Barlennan had no sense of smell, but he felt a burning sensation in his breathing pores as a faint whiff of oxygen reached him, and jumped hastily backward. Lackland guessed correctly at the cause of his action and apologized profusely for not giving proper warning.

“It is nothing,” the captain replied. “I should have foreseen it — I got the same sensation once before when you left the Hill where you live, and you certainly told me often enough how the oxygen you breathe differs from our hydrogen — you remember, when I was learning your language.”

“I suppose that’s true. Still, I could hardly expect a person who hasn’t grown up accustomed to the idea of different worlds and different atmospheres to remember the possibility all the time. It was still my fault. However, it seems to have done you no harm; I don’t yet know enough about the life chemistry of Mesklin even to guess just what it might do to you. That’s why I want samples of this creature’s flesh.”

Lackland had a number of instruments in a mesh pouch on the outside of his armor, and while he was fumbling among them with his pressure gauntlets Barlennan proceeded to take the first sample. Four sets of pincers shredded a portion of skin and underlying tissue and passed it along to his mouth; for a few moments he chewed reflectively.

“Not at all bad,” he remarked at last. “If you don’t need all of this thing for your tests, it might be a good idea to call the hunting parties over here. They’d have time to make it before the storm gets going again, I should think, and there’ll certainly be more meat than they could reasonably expect to get any other way.”

“Good idea,” Lackland grunted. He was giving only part of his attention to his companion; most of it was being taken up by the problem of getting the point of a scalpel into the mass before him. Even the suggestion that he might be able to use the entire monstrous body in a laboratory investigation — the Mesklinite did possess a sense of humor — failed to distract him.

He had known, of course, that living tissue on this planet must be extremely tough. Small as Barlennan and his people were, they would have been flattened into senseless pulp under Mesklin’s polar gravity had their flesh been of mere Earthly consistency. He had expected some difficulty in getting an instrument through the monster’s skin; but he had more or less unthinkingly assumed that, once through, his troubles would be over in that respect. He was now discovering his error; the meat inside seemed to have the consistency of teak. The scalpel was of a superhard alloy which would have been difficult to dull against anything as long as mere muscular strength was employed, but he could not drive it through that mass and finally had to resort to scraping. This produced a few shreds which he sealed in a collecting bottle.

“Is any part of this thing likely to be softer?” he asked the interested Mesklinite as he looked up from this task. “I’m going to need power tools to get enough out of this body to satisfy the boys on Toorey.”

“Some parts inside the mouth might be a little more tractable,” Barlennan replied. “However, it would be easier for me to nip off pieces for you, if you’ll tell me the sizes and parts you want. Will that be all right, or do your scientific procedures demand that the samples be removed with metal instruments for some reason?”

“Not that I know of — thanks a lot; if the big boys don’t like it they can come down and do their own carving,” returned Lackland. “Go right ahead. Let’s follow your other suggestion, too, and get something from the mouth; I’m not really sure I’m through skin here.” He waddled painfully around the head of the stranded behemoth to a point where gravity-distorted lips had exposed teeth, gums, and what was presumably a tongue. “Just get bits small enough to go in these bottles without crowding.” The Earthman tentatively tried the scalpel once more, finding the tongue somewhat less obdurate than the earlier sample, while Barlennan obediently nipped off fragments of the desired size. An occasional piece found its way to his mouth — he was not really hungry, but this was fresh meat — but in spite of this drain the bottles were soon filled. ‘

Lackland straightened up, stowing the last of the containers as he did so, and cast a covetous glance at the pillarlike teeth. “I suppose it would take blasting gelatine to get one of those out,” he remarked rather sadly.

“What is that?” asked Barlennan.

“An explosive — a substance that changes into gas very suddenly, producing loud noise and shock. We use such material for digging, removing undesirable buildings or pieces of landscape, and sometimes in fighting.”

“Was that sound an explosive?” Barlennan asked.

For an instant Lackland made no answer. A boom of very respectable intensity, heard on a planet whose natives are ignorant of explosives and where no other member of the human race is present, can be rather disconcerting, especially when it picks such an incredibly apt time to happen; and to lay that Lackland was startled would be putting it mildly. He could not judge accurately the distance or size of the explosion, having heard it through Barlennan’s radio and his own sound discs at ‘the same time; but a distinctly unpleasant suspicion entered his mind after a second or two.

“It sounded very much like one,” he answered the Mesklin-ite’s question somewhat belatedly, even as he started to waddle back around the head of the dead sea monster to where he had left the tank. He rather dreaded what he would find. Barlennan, more curious than ever, followed by his more natural method of travel, crawling.

For an instant, as the tank came in sight, Lackland felt an overwhelming relief; but this changed to an equally profound shock as he reached the door of the vehicle.

What remained of the floor consisted of upcurled scraps

of thin metal, some still attached at the bases of the walls and others tangled among the controls and other interior fittings. The driving machinery, which had been under the floor, was almost completely exposed, and a single glance was enough to tell the dismayed Earthman that it was hopelessly wrecked. Barlennan was intensely interested in the whole phenomenon.

“I take it you were, carrying some explosive in your tank,” he remarked. “Why did you not use it to get the material you wanted from this animal? And what made it act while it was still in the tank?”

“You have a genius for asking difficult questions,” Lackland replied. “The answer to your first one is that I was not carrying any; and to the second, your guess is as good as mine at this point.”

“But it must have been something you were carrying,” Barlennan pointed out. “Even I can see that whatever it was happened under the floor of your tank, and wanted to get out; and we don’t have things that act like that on Mesklin.”

“Admitting your logic, there was nothing under that floor that I can imagine blowing up,” replied the man. “Electric motors and their accumulators just aren’t explosive. A close examination will undoubtedly show traces of whatever it was if it was in any sort of container, since practically none of the fragments seem to have gone outside the tank — but I have a rather worse problem to solve first, Barl.”

“What is that?”

“I am eighteen miles from food supplies, other than what is carried in my armor. The tank is ruined; and if there was ever an Earthman born who could walk eighteen miles in eight-atmosphere heated armor under three gravities, I’m certainly not the one. My air will last indefinitely with these algae gills and enough sunlight, but I’d starve to death before I made the station.”

“Can’t you call your friends on the faster moon, and have them send a rocket to carry you back?”

“I could; probably they already know, if anyone is in the radio room to hear this conversation. The trouble is if I have to get that sort of help Doc Rosten will certainly make me go back to Toorey for the winter; I had trouble enough as it was persuading him to let me stay. He’ll have to hear about the tank, but I want to tell him from the station — after getting back there without his help. There just isn’t energy around here to get me back, though; and even if I could get more food into the containers in this armor without letting your air in, you couldn’t get into the station to get the food.” “Let’s call my crew, anyway,” Barlennan remarked. “They can use the food that’s here — or as much of it as they can carry. I have another idea too, I think.”

“We are coming, Captain.” Dondragmer’s voice came from the radio, startling Lackland, who had forgotten his arrangement to let each radio hear the others, and startling the commander himself, who had not realized that his mate had learned so much English. “We will be with you in a few days at most; we took the same general direction as the Flyer’s machine when we started.” He gave this information in his native language; Barlennan translated for Lackland’s benefit.

“I can see that you won’t be hungry for quite a while,” the man replied, glancing somewhat ruefully at the mountain of meat beside them, “but what was this other idea of yours? Will it help with my problem?”

“A little, I think.” The Mesklinite would have smiled had his mouth been sufficiently flexible. “Will you please step on me?”

For several seconds Lackland stood rigid with astonishment at the request; after all, Barlennan looked more like a caterpillar than anything else, and when a man steps on a caterpillar — then he relaxed, and even grinned.

“All right, Barl. For a moment I’d forgotten the circumstances.” The Mesklinite had crawled over to his feet during the pause; and without further hesitation Lackland took the requested step. There proved to be only one difficulty.

Lackland had a mass of about one hundred sixty pounds. His armor, an engineering miracle in its own way, was about as much more. On Mesklin’s equator, then, man and armor weighed approximately nine hundred fifty pounds — he could not have moved a step without an ingenious servo device in the legs — and this weight was only about a quarter greater than that of Barlennan in the polar regions of his planet. There was no difficulty for the Mesklinite in supporting that much weight; what defeated the attempt was simple geometry. Barlennan was, in general, a cylinder a foot and a half long and two inches in diameter; and it proved a physical impossibility for the armored Earthman to balance on him.

The Mesklinite was stumped; this time it was Lackland who thought of a solution. Some of the side plates on the fewer part of the tank had been sprung by the blast inside; and under Lackland’s direction Barlennan, with considerable effort, was able to wrench one completely free. It was about two feet wide and six long, and with one end bent up slightly by the native’s powerful nippers, it made an admirable sledge; bat Barlennan, on this part of his planet, weighed about three pounds. He simply did not have the necessary traction to tow the device — and the nearest plant which might have served as an anchor was a quarter of a mile away. Lackland was glad that a red face had no particular meaning to the natives of this world, for the sun happened to be in the sky when this particular fiasco occurred. They had been working both day and night, since the smaller sun and the two moons had furnished ample light in the absence of the storm clouds.

V: MAPPING JOB

The crew’s arrival, days later, solved Lackland’s problem almost at once.

The mere number of natives, of course, was of little help; twenty-one Mesklinites still did not have traction enough to move the loaded sledge. Barlennan thought of having them carry it, placing a crew member under each corner; and he went to considerable trouble to overcome the normal Mesklinite conditioning against getting under a massive object. When he finally succeeded in this, however, the effort proved futile; the metal plate was not thick enough for that sort of treatment, and buckled under the armored man’s weight so that all but the supported corner was still in contact with the ground.

Dondragmer, with no particular comment, spent the time that this test consumed in paying out and attaching together the lines which were normally used with the hunting nets. They proved, in series, more than long enough to reach the nearest plants; and the roots of these growths, normally able to hold against the worst that Mesklin’s winds could offer, furnished all the support needed. Four days later a train of sledges, made from all the accessible plates of the tank, started back toward the Bree with Lackland and a tremendous load of meat aboard; and at a fairly steady rate of a mile an hour, reached the ship in sixty-one days. Two more days of work, with more crew members assisting, got Lackland’s

armor through the vegetation growing between the ship and his dome, and delivered him safely at the air lock. It was none too soon; the wind had already picked up to a point where the assisting crew had to use ground lines in getting back to the Bree, and clouds were once again whipping across the sky.

Lackland ate, before bothering to report officially what had happened to the tank. He wished he could make the report more complete; he felt somehow that he should know what had actually happened to the vehicle. It was going to be very difficult to accuse someone on Toorey of inadvertently leaving a cake of gelatine under the tank’s floor.

He had actually pressed the call button on the station-to-satellite set when the answer struck him; and when Dr. Ros-ten’s lined face appeared on the screen he knew just what to say.

“Doc, there’s a spot of trouble with the tank.”

“So I understand. Is it electrical or mechanical? Serious?”

“Basically mechanical, though the electrical system had a share. I’m afraid it’s a total loss; what’s left of it is stranded about eighteen miles from here, west, near the beach.”

“Very nice. This planet is costing a good deal of money one way and another. Just what happened — and how did you get back? I don’t think you could walk eighteen miles in armor under that gravity.”

“I didn’t — Barlennan and his crew towed me back. As nearly as I can figure out about the tank, the floor partition between cockpit and engine compartment wasn’t airtight. When I got out to do some investigating, Mesklin’s atmosphere — high-pressure hydrogen — began leaking in and mixing with the normal air under the floor. It did the same in the cockpit, too, of course, but practically all the oxygen was swept out through the door from there and diluted below danger point before anything happened. Underneath — well, there was a spark before the oxygen went.”

“I see. What caused the spark? Did you leave motors running when you went out?”

“Certainly — the steering servos, dynamotors, and so on. I’m glad of it, too; if I hadn’t, the blast would probably have occurred after I got back in and turned them on.”

“Humph.” The director of the Recovery Force looked a trifle disgruntled. “Did you have to get out at all?” Lackland thanked his stars that Rosten was a biochemist.

“I didn’t exactly have to, I suppose. I was getting tissue samples from a six hundred-foot whale stranded on the beach out there. I thought someone might — ”

“Did you bring them back?” snapped Rosten without letting Lackland finish.

“I did. Come down for them when you like — and have we another tank you could bring along?”

“We have. I’ll consider letting you have it when winter is over; I think you’ll be safer inside the dome until then. What did you preserve the specimens with?”

“Nothing special — hydrogen — the local air. I supposed that any of our regular preservatives would ruin them from your point of view. You’d better come for them fairly soon; Barlennan says that meat turns poisonous after a few hundred days, so I take it they have micro-organisms here.”

“Be funny if they hadn’t. Stand by; I’ll be down there in a couple of hours.” Rosten broke the connection without further comment about the wrecked tank, for which Lackland felt reasonably thankful. He went to bed, not having slept for nearly twenty-four hours.

He was awakened — partially — by the arrival of the rocket. Rosten had come down in person, which was not surprising. He did not even get out of his armor; he took the bottles, which Lackland had left in the air lock to minimize the chance of oxygen contamination, took a look at Lackland, realized his condition, and brusquely ordered him back to bed.

“This stuff was probably worth the tank,” he said briefly. “Now get some sleep. You have some more problems to solve-I’ll talk to you again when there’s a chance you’ll remember what I say. See you later.” The air-lock door closed behind him.

Lackland did not, actually, remember Rosten’s parting remarks; but he was reminded, many hours later, when he had slept and eaten once more.

“This winter, when Barlennan can’t hope to travel, will last only another three and a half months,” the assistant director started almost without preamble. “We have several reams of telephotos up here which are not actually fitted into a map, although they’ve been collated as far as general location is concerned. We couldn’t make a real map because of interpretation difficulties. Your job for the rest of this winter will be to get in a huddle with those photos and your friend Barlennan, turn them into a usable map, and decide on a route which will take him most quickly to the material we want to salvage.”

“But Barlennan doesn’t want to get there quickly. This is an exploring-trading voyage as far as he’s concerned, and we’re just an incident. All we’ve been able to offer him in return for that much help is a running sequence of weather reports, to help in his normal business.”

“I realize that. That’s why you’re down there, if you remember; you’re supposed to be a diplomat. I don’t expect miracles — none of us do — and we certainly want Barlennan to stay on good terms with us; but there’s two billion dollars’ worth of special equipment on that rocket that couldn’t leave the pole, and recordings that are literally priceless — ”

“I know, and I’ll do my best,” Lackland cut in, “but I could never make the importance of it clear to a native — and I don’t mean to belittle Barlennan’s intelligence; he just hasn’t the background. You keep an eye out for breaks in these winter storms, so he can come up here and study the pictures whenever possible.”

“Couldn’t you rig some sort of outside shelter next to a window, so he could stay up even during bad weather?”

“I suggested that once, and he won’t leave his ship and crew at such times. I see his point.”

“I suppose I do too. Well, do the best that you can — you know what it means. We should be able to learn more about gravity from that stuff than anyone since Einstein.” Rosten signed off, and the winter’s” work began.

The grounded research rocket, which had landed under remote control near Mesklin’s south pole and had failed to take off after presumably recording its data, had long since been located by its telemetering transmitters. Choosing a sea and/or land route to it from the vicinity of the Bre&s winter quarters, however, was another matter. The ocean travel was not too bad; some forty or forty-five thousand miles of coastal travel, nearly half of it in waters already known to Barlennan’s people, would bring the salvage crew as close to the helpless machine as this particular chain of oceans ever got. That, unfortunately, was some four thousand miles; and there simply were no large rivers near that section of coast which would shorten the overland distance significantly.

There was such a stream, easily navigable by a vessel like the Bree, passing within fifty miles of the desired spot; but it emptied into an ocean which had no visible connection with that which Barlennan’s people sailed. The latter was a long, narrow, highly irregular chain of seas extending from somewhat north of the equator in the general neighborhood of Lackland’s station almost to the equator on the opposite side of the planet, passing fairly close to the south pole on the way — fairly close, that is, as distances on Mesklin went. The other sea, into which the river near the rocket emptied, was broader and more regular in outline; the river mouth in question was at about its southernmost point, and it also extended to and past the equator, merging at last with the northern icecap. It lay to the east of the first ocean chain, and appeared to be separated from it by a narrow isthmus extending from pole to equator — narrow, again by Mesklinite standards. As the photographs were gradually pieced together, Lackland decided that the isthmus varied from about two to nearly seven thousand miles in width.

“What we could use, Barl, is a passage from one of these seas into the other,” remarked Lackland one day. The Mesklinite, sprawled comfortably on his ledge outside the window, gestured agreement silently. It was past midwinter now, and the greater sun was becoming perceptibly dimmer as it arched on its swift path across the sky to the north. “Are you sure that your people know of none? After all, most of these pictures were taken in the fall, and you say that the ocean level is much higher in the spring.”

“We know of none, at any season,” replied the captain. “We know something, but not much, of the ocean you speak of; there are too many different nations on the land between for very much contact to take place. A single caravan would be a couple of years on the journey, and as a rule they don’t travel that far. Goods pass through many hands on such a trip, and it’s a little hard to learn much about their origin by the time our traders see them in the western seaports of the isthmus. If any passage such as we would like exists at all, it must be here near the Rim where the lands are almost completely unexplored. Our map — the one you and I are making-does not go far enough yet. In any case, there is no such passage south of here during the autumn; I have been along the entire coast line as it was then, remember. Perhaps, however, this very coast reaches over to the other sea; we have followed it eastward for several thousand miles, and simply do not know how much farther it goes.”

“As I remember, it curves north again a couple of thousand miles past the outer cape, Barl — but of course that was in the autumn, too, when I saw it. It’s going to be quite troublesome, this business of making a usable map of your world. It changes too much. I’d be tempted to wait until next autumn so that at least we could use the map we made, but that’s four of my years away. I can’t stay here that long.”

“You could go back to your own world and rest until the time came — though I would be sorry to see you go.”

“I’m afraid that would be a rather long journey, Barlennan.”

“How far?”

“Well — your units of distance wouldn’t help much. Let’s see. A ray of light could travel around Mesklin’s ‘rim’ in — ah — four fifths of a second.” He demonstrated this time interval with his watch, while the native looked on with interest. “The same ray would take a little over eleven of my years; that’s — about two and a quarter of yours, to get from here to my home.”

“Then your world is too far to see? You never explained these things to me before.”

“I was not sure we had covered the language problem well enough. No, my world cannot be seen, but I will show you my sun when winter is over and we have moved to the right side of yours.” The last phrase passed completely over Barlennan’s head, but he let it go. The only suns he knew were the bright Belne whose coming and going made day and night, and the fainter Esstes, which was visible in the night sky at this moment. In a little less than half a year, at midsummer, the two would be close together in the sky, and the fainter one hard to see; but Barlennan had never bothered his head about the reason for these motions.

Lackland had put down the photograph he was holding, and seemed immersed in-’thought. Much of the floor of the room was already covered with loosely fitted pictures; the region best known to Barlennan was already mapped fairly well. However, there was yet a long, long way to go before the area occupied by the human outpost would be included; and the man was already being troubled by the refusal of the photographs to fit together. Had they been of a spherical or nearly spherical world like Earth or Mars, he could have applied the proper projection correction almost automatically on the smaller map which he was constructing, and which covered a table at one side of the chamber; but Mesklin was not even approximately spherical. As Lackland had long ago recognized, the proportions of the Bowl on the Bree — Barlennan’s equivalent of a terrestrial globe — were approximately right. It was six inches across and one and a quarter deep, and its curvature was smooth but far from uniform.

To add to the difficulty of matching photographs, much of the planet’s surface was relatively smooth, without really distinctive topographic feature; and even where mountains and valleys existed, the different shadowing of adjacent photographs made comparison a hard job. The habit of the brighter sun of crossing from horizon to horizon in less than nine minutes had seriously disarranged normal photographic procedure; successive pictures in the same series were often illuminated from almost opposite directions.

“We’re not getting anywhere with this, Barl,” Lackland said wearily. “It was worth a try as long as there might be short cuts, but you say there are none. You’re a sailor, not a caravan master; that four thousand miles overland right where gravity is greatest is going to stump us.”

“The knowledge that enables you to fly, then, cannot change weight?”

“It cannot.” Lackland smiled. “The instruments which are on that rocket grounded at your south pole should have readings which might teach us just that, in time. That is why the rocket was sent, Barlennan; the poles of your world have the most terrific surface gravity of any spot in the Universe so far accessible to ib. ‘There are a number of other worlds even more massive than yours, and closer to home, but they don’t spin the way Mesklin does; they’re too nearly spherical. We wanted measures in that tremendous gravity field — all sorts of measures. The value of the instruments that were designed and sent on that trip cannot be expressed in numbers we both know; when the rocket failed to respond to its takeoff signal, it rocked the governments of ten planets. We must have that data, even if we have to dig a canal to get the Bree into the other ocean.”

“But what sort of devices were on board this rocket?” Barlennan asked. He regretted the question almost in the same instant; the Flyer might wonder at such specific curiosity, and come to suspect the captain’s true intentions. However, Lackland appeared to take the query as natural.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you, Barl. You simply have no background which would give words like ‘electron’ and ‘neutrino’ and ‘magnetism’ and ‘quantum’ any meaning at all. The drive mechanism of the rocket might mean a little more to you, but I doubt it.” In spite of Lackland’s apparent freedom from suspicion, Barlennan decided not to pursue the subject.

“Would it not be well,” he said, “to seek the pictures that show the shore and inland regions east of here?”

Lackland replied, “There is still some chance, I suppose, that they do meet; I don’t pretend to have memorized the whole area. Maybe down next to the icecap — how much cold can you people stand?”

“We are uncomfortable when the sea freezes, but we can stand it — if it does not get too much colder. Why?”

“It’s just possible you may have to crowd the northern icecap pretty closely. We’ll see, though.” The Flyer riffled through the stack of prints, still taller than Barlennan was long, and eventually extracted a thin sheaf. “One of these. ” His voice trailed off for a few moments. “Here we are. This was taken from the inner edge of the ring, Barl, over six hundred miles up, with a narrow-angle telephoto lens. You can see the main shore line, and the big bay, and here, on the south side of the big one, the little bay where the Bree

is beached. This was taken before this station was built — though it wouldn’t show anyway.

“Now let’s start assembling again. The sheet east of this.” He trailed off again, and the Mesklinite watched in fascination as a readable map of the lands he had not yet reached took form below him. For a time it seemed they were to be disappointed, for the shore line gradually curved northward as Lackland had thought; indeed, some twelve hundred miles to the west and four or five hundred north, the ocean seemed to come to an end — the coast curved westward again. A vast river emptied into it at this point, and with some hope at first that this might be a strait leading to the eastern sea, Lackland began fitting the pictures that covered the upper reaches of the mighty stream. He was quickly disabused of this idea, by the discovery of an extensive series of rapids some two hundred and fifty miles upstream; east of these, the great river dwindled rapidly. Numerous smaller streams emptied into it; apparently it was the main artery for the drainage system of a vast area of the planet. Interested by the speed with which it broke up into smaller rivers, Lackland continued building the map eastward, watched with interest by Barlennan.

The main stream, as far as it could be distinguished, had shifted direction slightly, flowing from a more southerly direction. Carrying the mosaic of pictures in — this direction, they j found a range of very fair-sized mountains, and the Earthman looked up with a rueful shake of his head. Barlennan had come to understand the meaning of this gesture.

“Do not stop yet!” the captain expostulated. “There is a similar range along the center of my country, which is a fairly narrow peninsula. At least build the picture far enough to determine how the streams flow on the other side of the mountains.” Lackland, though not optimistic — he recalled the South American continent on his own planet too clearly to assume any symmetry of the sort the Mesklinite seemed to expect — complied with the native’s suggestion. The range proved to be fairly narrow, extending roughly east-northeast by west-southwest; and rather to the man’s surprise the numerous “water” courses on the opposite side began very quickly to show a tendency to come together in one vast river. This ran roughly parallel with the range for mile after mile, broadening as it went, and hope began to grow once more. It reached a climax five hundred miles downstream, when what was now a vast estuary merged indistinguishably with the “waters” of the eastern ocean. Working feverishly, scarcely stopping for food or even the rest he so badly needed in Mesklin’s savage gravity, Lackland worked on; and eventually the floor of the room was covered by a new map — a rectangle representing some two thousand miles in an east-west line and half as far in the other dimension. The great bay and tiny cove where the Bree was beached showed clearly at its western end; much pf the other was occupied by the featureless surface of the eastern sea. Between lay the land barrier.

It was narrow; at its narrowest, some five hundred miles north of the equator, it was a scant eight hundred miles from coast to coast, and this distance was lessened considerably if one measured from the highest usable points of the principal rivers. Perhaps three hundred miles, part of it over a mountain range, was all that lay between the Bree and a relatively easy path to the distant goal of the Earthmen’s efforts. Three hundred miles; a mere step, as distances on Mesklin went.

Unfortunately, it was decidedly more than a step to a Mesklinite sailor. The Bree was still in the wrong ocean; Lackland, after staring silently for many minutes at the mosaic about him, said as much to his tiny companion. He expected no answer, or at most a dispirited agreement; his statement was self-evidently true — but the native fooled him.

“Not if you have more of the metal on which we brought you and the meat back!” was Barlennan’s instantaneous reply.

VI: THE SLED

For another long moment Lackland stared out the window into the sailor’s eyes, while the implications of the little creature’s remark sank into his mind; then he stiffened into something as closely approaching an alert attitude as the gravity permitted.

“You mean you would be willing to tow the Bree overland on a sledge, as you did me?”

“Not exactly. The ship outweighs us very much, and we would have the same trouble with traction that we did before. What I had in mind was your towing, with another tank.”