Hal Clement - Stuck With It

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Stuck with It

THE LIGHT HURT his closed eyes, and he had a sensation of floating. At first, that was all his

consciousness regis-tered, and he could not turn his head to get more data. The pain in his eyes

demanded some sort of action, however.

He raised an arm to shade his face and discovered that he really was floating. Then, in spite of the

stiffness of his neck, he began to move his head from side to side and saw enough to tell where he was.

The glare which hurt even through the visor of his airsuit was from Ran-ta's F5 sun; the water in which he

was floating was that of the living room of Creak's home.

He was not quite horizontal; his feet seemed to be ballasted still, and were resting on some of the

native's furniture a foot or so beneath the surface of the water.

Internally, his chest protested with stabs of pain at every breath he took; his limbs were sore, and his

neck very stiff. He could not quite remember what had hap-pened, but it must have been violent. Almost

certainly, he decided as he made some more experimental mo-tions, he must have a broken rib or two,

though his arms and legs seemed whole.

His attempts to establish the latter fact caused his feet to slip from their support. They promptly

sank, pulling him into the vertical position. For a moment he submerged completely, then drifted upward

again and finally reached equilibrium, with the water line near his eyebrows.

Yes, it was Creak's house, all right. He was in the corner of the main room, which the occupants had

cleared of some of its furniture to give him freedom of motion. The room itself was about three meters

deep and twice as long and wide, the cleared volume repre-senting less than a quarter of the total. The

rest of the chamber was inaccessible to him, since the native furni-ture was a close imitation of the

hopelessly tangled, springy vegetation of Ranta's tidal zones.

Looped among the strands of flexible wood, appar-ently as thoroughly intertwined as they, were

two bright forms which would have reminded a terrestrial biologist of magnified Nereid worms. They

were nearly four me-ters long and about a third of a meter in diameter. The lateral fringes of setae in their

Earthly counterparts were replaced by more useful appendages—thirty-four pairs of them, as closely as

Cunningham had been able to count. These seemed designed for climbing through the tangle of

vegetation or furniture, though they could be used after a fashion for swimming.

The nearer of the orange-and-salmon-patterned forms had a meter or so of his head end projecting

into the cleared space, and seemed to be eyeing the man with some anxiety. His voice, which had

inspired the name Cunningham had given him, reached the man's ears clearly enough through the airsuit

in spite of poor impedance matching between air and water.

"It's good to see you conscious, Cun'm," he said in Rantan. "We had no way of telling how badly

you were injured, and for all I knew I might have damaged you even further bringing you home. Those

rigid structures you call 'bones' make rational first aid a bit difficult."

"I don't think I'll die for a while yet," Cun-ningham replied carefully. "Thanks, Creak. My limb bones

seem all right, though those in my body cage may not be. I can probably patch myself up when I get

back to the ship. But what happened, anyway?"

The man was using a human language, since neither being could produce the sounds of the other.

The six months Cunningham had so far spent on Ranta had been largely occupied in learning to

understand, not speak, alien languages; Creak and his wife had learned only to understand

Cunningham's, too.

"Cement failure again." Creak's rusty-hinge phonemes were clear enough to the man by now. "The

dam let go, and washed both of us through the gap, the break. I was able to seize a rock very quickly,

but you went quite a distance. You just aren't made for holding on to things, Cun'm."

"But if the dam is gone, the reservoir is going. Why did you bother with me? Shouldn't the city be

warned? Why are both of you still here? I realize that Nereis can't travel very well just now, but

shouldn't she try to get to the city while there's still water in the aqueduct? She'll never make it all that

way over dry land—even you will have trouble. You should have left me and done your job. Not that

I'm complaining."

"It just isn't done." Creak dismissed the suggestion with no more words. "Besides, I may need you;

there is much to be done in which you can perhaps help. Now that you are awake and more or less all

right, I will go to the city. When you have gotten back to your ship and fixed your bones, will you please

follow? If the aque-duct loses its water before I get there, I'll need your help."

"Right. Should I bring Nereis with me? With no wa-ter coming into your house, how long will it be

habita-ble?"

"Until evaporation makes this water too salt—days, at least. There are many plants and much

surface; it will remain breathable. She can decide for herself whether to fly with you; being out of water

in your ship when her time comes would also be bad, though I suppose you could get her to the city

quickly. In any case, we should have a meeting place. Let's see—there is a pub-lic gathering area about

five hundred of your meters north of the apex of the only concave angle in the outer wall. I can't think of

anything plainer to describe. I'll be there when I can. Either wait for me, or come back at intervals, as

your own plans may demand. That should suffice. I'm going."

The Rantan snaked his way through the tangle of furniture and disappeared through a narrow

opening in one wall. Listening carefully, Cunningham finally heard the splash which indicated that the

native had reached the aqueduct—and that there was still water in it.

"All right, Nereis," he said. "I'll start back to the ship. I don't suppose you want to come with me

over even that little bit of land, but do you want me to come back and pick you up before I follow

Creak?"

The other native, identical with her husband to hu-man eyes except for her deeper coloration,

thought a moment. "Probably you should follow him as quickly as you can. I'll be all right here for a few

days, as he said—and one doesn't suggest that someone is wrong until there is proof. You go ahead

without me. Unless you think you'll need my help; you said you had some injury."

"Thanks, I can walk once I'm out of the room. But you might help me with the climb, if you will."

Nereis flowed out of her relaxation nook in the furni-ture, the springy material rising as her weight

was re-moved.

The man took a couple of gentle arm strokes, which brought him to the wall. Ordinarily he could

have heaved himself out of the water with no difficulty, but the broken ribs made a big difference. It took

the help of Nereis, braced against the floor, to ease him to the top of the two-meter-thick outer wall of

unshaped, ce-mented rocks and gravel. He stood up without too much difficulty once there was solid

footing, and stood look-ing around briefly before starting to pick his way back to the Nimepotea. The

dam lay only a few meters to the north; the break Creak had mentioned was not visi-ble. He and the

native had been underwater in the re-servoir more than a quarter-kilometer to the west of the house

when they had been caught by the released wa-ters. Looking in that direction, he could see part of the

stream still gushing, and wondered how he had survived at all in that turbulent, boulder-studded flood.

Behind the dam, the reservoir was visibly lower, though it would presumably be some hours before it

emptied.

He must have been unconscious for some time, he thought: it would have taken the native, himself

almost helpless on dry land, a long time indeed to drag him up the dam wall from the site of the break to

the house, which was on the inside edge of the reservoir.

East of Creak's house, extending south toward the city, was the aqueduct which had determined his

selec-tion of a first landing point on Ranta. Beyond it, some three hundred meters from where he stood,

lay the black ovoid of his ship. He would first have to make his way along the walls of the

house—preferably withou-t falling in and getting tangled in the furniture—to the narrow drain that Creak

had followed to the aqueduct, then turn upstream instead of down until he reached the dam, cross the

dam gate of the aqueduct, and descend the outer face of the dam to make his way across the bare rock

to his vessel.

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Hal Clement - Stuck With It

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