“Let’s go back to the station,” he said. “I want to pick a bone with Marn, or with Deg, if necessary. There are one or two things going on that I don’t fully understand. These friends of yours don’t have to sleep half the day like a couple of poor Earthmen, do they?”
“They should still be active,” Vickers replied, looking at the sun. “It’s a couple of hours till sundown, if what I can see of the sun and what I can guess of the horizon’s position aren’t combining to fool me. These fellows sleep for a few hours each night from habit, and I guess they can do without that for quite a time. There should be no trouble in finding Marn, if he’s supposed to be looking after us.”
There was no trouble. They did not meet Trangero the moment they entered the station, but the first Heklan who saw them made it his business to deliver them into the proper custody, and led them to an office on a floor two or three levels below the integration room. Marn raised his enormous bulk from behind a desk as they entered. Vickers thought fleetingly of the curious similarity between human and Heklan forms of courtesy; then he turned his attention to the task of interpreting for the two weather men. Rodin opened the conversation with a question.
“Did I understand correctly that you were basing the prediction for the last few hours upon the passage of a warm front?”
“That is correct. I was several minutes off on the time of passage; but that is not included explicitly in the machine solutions that are recorded, and I did not occupy a machine with the detailed problem.”
“Then a front actually did pass? Why is it that there is no perceptible temperature change? I expected it to be a good deal warmer, from the amount of water vapor that was condensed at the frontal surface.”
“I can only suppose that you are working from acquaintance with a different set of conditions. The temperature change was slight, I agree — I said the front was weak. I should have given you numerical values if we had had any measuring system in common. We must remedy that situation as soon as possible, by the way. The condensation and precipitation which seems abnormal to you agreed as usual with the predictions, as did the winds.”
Rodin pondered for several moments before replying to this. “There’s a good deal I don’t understand even yet,” he finally said. “I’d better start from the beginning and learn your units. Then I might try following some of your computations manually. If that doesn’t clear me up, nothing will. Can you spare the time?”
Vickers hesitated before translating this. He hated the thought of using so much time as Rodin’s proposal would require; the months he had spent on the alien language seemed more than enough. There seemed, however, no alternative; so he transmitted the meteorologist’s request. Marn agreed, as he had expected; and what was worse, the energetic giant plunged immediately into the task, and kept at it for nearly four hours. The translation of units of distance, temperature, weight, angle, and so forth was not in itself a difficult problem; but it was complicated enormously by Vickers’ lack of scientific vocabulary. By the time Rodin had acquired a table of Heklan numerals and a series of conversion graphs, both Earthmen were in a sadly irritated frame of mind.
Vickers was more than willing to call it a day when they returned to the ship, but the meteorologist seemed to partake of the determination displayed by his Heklan fellow. He settled down with his written material, which included one of the maps made during the recent frontal passage, and began working. Vickers wanted to remain awake to hear his conclusions, and settled into a chair in the cramped library; but sheets of used paper began to litter the place, and Rodin, whenever he had to probe among them to check some previous figures, plainly considered his friend to be rather in the way. Vickers finally gave up and went to bed — a habit into which he was falling more and more deeply. The weather man labored on.