“I hadn’t thought of that,” admitted Lackland. “We can do it, though; and I don’t see any ‘alternative in any case. I suppose Barlennan could explore blind, but it would be asking a lot of him.”
“Right. Well launch one of the rockets and get to work.” Lackland gave the substance of this conversation to Barlennan, who replied that he would stay where he was until the information he needed was obtained.
“I could either go on upstream, following the cliff around to the right, or leave the ship and the river and follow to the left. Since I don’t know which is best from the point of view of distance, well wait. I’d rather go upstream, of course; carrying food and radios will be no joke otherwise.”
“All right. How is your food situation? You said something about its being hard to get that far from the ocean.”
“It’s scarcer, but the place is no desert. We’ll get along for a time at least. If we ever have to go overland we may miss you and your gun, though. This crossbow has been nothing but a museum piece for nine tenths of the trip.” “Why do you keep the bow?”
“For just that reason — it’s a good museum piece, and museums pay good prices. No one at home has ever seen, or as far as I know even dreamed of, a weapon that works by throwing things. You couldn’t spare one of your guns, could you? It needn’t work, for’that purpose.”
Lackland laughed. “I’m afraid* not; we have only one. We don’t expect to need it, but I don’t see how we could explain giving it away.” Barlennjui gave the equivalent of an understanding nod, and turned back to his own duties. He had much to bring up to date on the bowl that was his equivalent of a globe; the Earthmen, throughout the trip, had been giving him bearing and distance to land in all directions, so he was able to get most of the shores of the two seas he had crossed onto the concave map.
It was also necessary to see to the food question; it was not, as he had told Lackland, really pressing, but more work with the nets was going to be necessary from now on. The river itself, now about two hundred yards wide, appeared to contain fish enough for their present needs, but the land was much less promising. Stony and bare, it ran a few yards from one bank of the stream to end abruptly against the foot of (he cliff; from the other, a series of low hills succeeded each other for mile after mile, presumably far beyond the distant horizon. The rock of the escarpment’s face was polished glass-smooth, as sometimes happens even on Earth to the rocks at the sliding edges of a fault. Climbing it, even on Earth, would have required the equipment and body weight of a fly (on Mesklin, the fly would have weighed too much). Vegetation was present, but not in any great amount, and in the first fifty days of their stay no member of the Bree’s crew saw any trace of land animal lif e. Occasionally someone thought he saw motion, but each time it turned out to be shadows cast by the whirling sun, now hidden from them only by its periodic trips beyond the cuff. They were so near the south pole that there was no visible change in the sun’s altitude during the day.
For the Earthmen, the time was a little more active. Four of the expedition, including Lackland, manned the rocket and dropped planetward from the rapidly moving moon. From their takeoff point the world looked rather like a pie plate with a slight bulge in the center; the ring was simply a line of light, but it stood out against the background of star-studded blackness and exaggerated the flattening of the giant world.
As power was applied both to kill the moon’s orbital velocity and bring them out of Mesklin’s equatorial plane the picture changed. The ring showed for what it was, but even the fact that it also had two divisions did not make the system resemble that of Saturn. Mesklin’s flattening was far too great for it to resemble anything but itself — a polar diameter of less than twenty thousand miles compared to an equatorial one of some forty-eight thousand has to be seen to be appreciated. All the expedition members had seen it often enough now, but they still found it fascinating.