Feth frowned at this suggestion. “I thought of that, too, while I was trying to keep the torpedo near you this time,” he said. “Frankly, I doubt it — not that the set could be made small enough, but that I could do it with the materials I have at hand. Still, I’ll look into the possibility when we get back to One. I take it you have no objection to Drai’s hearing about these last two suggestions?”
“Of course not. They ought to keep him happy. I suppose it would be too much to hope that he’d take a trip down there himself, once we showed it was safe enough?” Feth smiled broadly at the scientist’s suggestion.
“It would take a better psychologist than either of us to endue him with that much trust in his fellows, I fear. Besides, what good would it do? We wouldn’t gain anything by leaving him there, pleasant as the idea sounds, and there’d be no use trying to threaten him, since he’d never dream of keeping any inconvenient promises you might wring out of him.”
“I didn’t really expect much from the idea. Well, with the other matter understood, I suppose we’d better take those samples back to One before they freeze, and get a vivarium knocked together. If we can grow anything at all, it ought to keep Drai quiet for a little while.”
The torpedo which had transported Ken and his specimens had been allowed to drift to the edge of the repeller field as soon as he had detached himself from it. Feth now returned to the control room and began to monitor the little vessel, holding it close against the hull of the large ship so that it would be dragged along in the Karella’s drive fields; and Lee, at Ken’s request, headed sunward once more. A thousand miles from the surface of Mercury the torpedo was cast loose again, and Feth eased it down to a landing near the caves — a televisor had been set up there some time since, and he was able to guide — the landing with the aid of this. He arranged matters so that about three feet of the torpedo’s nose was in sunlight, while the rest was in the shadow of a large mass of rock. That, he judged, should maintain somewhere near the right temperature for a few hours at least.
As soon as the Karella was grounded, he and Ken adjourned at once to the shop. There, a metal case about a yard square and two feet high was quickly assembled. Feth very carefully welded all seams and tested them against full atmospheric pressure. A glass top was provided, sealed in place with a silicone vacuum wax that was standard equipment on any space ship; this also checked out against a pressure equivalent to an earthly barometric reading of twelve hundred fifty millimeters of mercury. A second, similar case large enough to enclose the first was under construction when Drai appeared. He had evidently noticed at last that the ship was back.
“Well, I understand from Lee that you actually talked to a native. Good work, good work. Did you find out anything about how they make their tofacco?”
“We haven’t learned their language too well, yet,” Feth replied with as little sarcasm as he could manage. “We were operating on a slightly different line of investigation.” He indicated the partly constructed vivarium. Drai frowned at it, as though trying to gather its purpose. “It’s a small chamber where we can reproduce Planet Three’s conditions, we hope; more or less of an experiment. The larger one goes outside, and we’ll maintain a vacuum between the two. Feth says one of the sulfur hexafluoride refrigerators he knocked together years ago will get the temperature low enough, and we got enough of the planet’s air to fill it a couple of times at their pressure.” Drai looked puzzled still.
“But isn’t it a little small for one of the natives? Lee said you’d described them as nearly five feet tall. Besides, I didn’t hear about these plans at all.”
“Natives? I thought you wanted us to grow vegetation. What good would a native do us here?” The master’s face cleared.