Saturn Rukh (27 page)

“They seem to be having trouble. Perhaps we should help them,” suggested Petra.

“How can we?” replied Petro. “We have already found that we could not pull the heavy thing up the airtube, even when we two pull together.”

“And the five vermin do not seem to be able to move the heavy thing,” said Petra. “Even when they all pull together.” She paused as she reconsidered the strange idea that was forming in her head. “Perhaps if we two
helped
pull, then all of us, working together, could remove the heavy thing from Petru’s airtube.”

“Help?” said Petro incredulously. “I can understand helping others of the flock, for they are family. But helping
vermin?!”

“It will get the heavy thing out of Petru’s airtube,” Petra reminded him.

“Perhaps it is a good idea,” replied Petro, always a pragmatist “But how? Every time we come close to the multitendril they start their hot lights and threaten to hurt us.”

“They seem to be relatively intelligent—for vermin, that is,” said Petra. “And they do seem to understand the idea of mutual cooperation. Although we can’t talk to them, they do have that big bulbous eye at the front of their heads to see us with. Perhaps I can show them our intent by example.” She elongated her neck and stretched it out down the airtube, foreclaws reaching out like she was attempting to grasp something.

~ * ~

Sandra suddenly broke the enforced silence of the thinking group of humans. “Look! One of the eyes is doing something funny.”

“Doing what?” said Rod, coming out of his trance with his meta torch at the ready. As all their helmet lights focused on the two eyes, they could see that one of them was stretching its neck downwind, parallel to the Hoytether, but a good distance away from it. The neck then contracted, pulling the head back along the same path. It repeated the motion a number of times, each time reaching out with its foreclaws as if it were grasping something and pulling it back.

“What is it doing that for?” said Rod, bewildered. “Could it be some kind of trick? Keep a watch on the other eye—”

“Looks like it’s digging a ditch,” said Pete.

“Tote that barge... lift that bale…” murmured Dan in time to the motions of the eye, also puzzled.

“Haul that Hoytether!” said Sandra. “It’s making motions like it was pulling on the Hoytether. Like it wants to help us pull!”

“That sure makes sense,” said Dan. “I’m sure they want the reactor out of their body’s windpipe as much as we do.”

“How do you say yes in rukhese, Sandra?” asked Chastity.

“Perhaps this will do it,” said Rod. He stuffed the meta torch out of sight in a pouch on his backpack and raised both his hands to show they were empty. Pete did the same.

Watching him carefully, the eye that had been doing the hauling motion came closer to them and reached slowly for the segment of Hoytether below them. It touched one of the main strands, grasping it firmly without trying to cut it. The line was slightly slack since the load of the reactor was being carried on some of the adjacent primary lines that were anchored onto the multilooped pulling line. Chastity reached out to grab the same strand and pulled on it too. Together, human and alien felt each other pull... cooperating ... working together to bring the line taut... getting it ready for the next lift. The other eye joined with the first eye. The humans scrambled into position on the climbing line.

Now certain that they all agreed on what needed to be done, Rod, Chastity, Dan, Pete, and the two eyes pulled on the Hoytether. The reactor moved readily and Sandra scrambled to readjust the holding hooks for the pause between lifts.

At first the two eyes kept their necks far from the humans and the Hoytether. Only the foreclaws directly under the head actually touched the Hoytether lines, and then only when it was time for the next pull. But the necks found that they were pulling at an awkward angle, and as the effort went on, the smaller neck claws that extended from between each neck segment shifted their anchor positions on the airtube wall from one feather to the next, a feather more in line with the direction in which they were pulling. Then, some of the claws found a better purchase on the upper sections of Hoytether. Soon the humans found themselves practically engulfed in legs, as neck claws obtained purchase on the Hoytether lines all around them. The stronger, but only two-legged, humans and the weaker, but multilegged, alien heads soon jointly worked out a routine. The five humans and two eyes would climb the taut upper portions of the Hoytether for about ten meters, pulling the reactor with them, while the Hoytether piled up below them. Then, while four of the humans and the two eyes held their gain, Sandra got the limp section of tether out of the way and readjusted their climbing line, and they prepared for their next burst of effort.

To coordinate the effort, Rod took to yelling commands and encouragement. “Everybody ready? Everybody bend ... everybody PULL!” Soon his command of “Pull” was matched by a deep bass note that arose from deep within the air bladders of the giant body. Sandra noticed that although the body of the rukh could make sounds, the eyes were strangely silent. She had hoped that there would be an opportunity to speak more with these creatures (
creature
—she reminded herself—two eyes and two brains but only one body and one “individual”), but it was going to be difficult to hold a “conversation” with one of the eyes when it couldn’t speak.

With all of them working together, it didn’t take long to pull the reactor up the windpipe to the inside of the featherblade curtain, Tabby riding shotgun on the reactor itself. Rod had given his meta torch to Tabby, and any time one of the eyes tried to approach the reactor, Tabby warned it off. The humans didn’t need warning.

“Now what do we do?” said Chastity as they called a halt with the reactor still a hundred meters downhill and downwind. The slope of the windpipe had become shallower, and it was now possible for just two humans to haul the reactor along by pulling on the Hoytether attached to it. “We need to get the reactor up over the lip of the mouth. We can’t get near it, so we can’t push it over the edge, and we can’t pull on it, because the Hoytether goes
up
from here.” She pointed at the inflated keel of the giant bird. The prow of the keel stuck out ahead of the intake port of the mouth. “Looks like we need a few people to climb out to the end where they can anchor themselves and pull the reactor from there.” She didn’t sound very enthusiastic about the prospect. Pete gave a heavy sigh of weariness and sat down heavily in the floor of mouthfeathers. There was a long silence as everyone tried to think of some other option.

“We already
have
two of us anchored out there!” said Rod in a brightening tone. Holding on to the safety line connected high up on the hanging portion of the Hoytether, he waited until the breathing cycle of the rukh reached the point of minimum wind, and walked across the mouthfeathers to where the two eyes were watching them. As the tiny human approached the giant caterpillars, their bodies now contracted significantly in length, one of the giant ten-meter-diameter eyes bent down to Rod’s level. Rod bravely reached upward and grabbed the sharp claw at the end of one of the four large forearms. The eye, instead of pulling the claw away or using it to grab him, allowed the tiny creature to lead it by the claw. Rod brought the eye back to the section of the Hoytether where they had all been pulling, and made pulling motions toward the front of the mouth. He even went so far as to lean out over the downward-sloping lip of the mouth, held up solely by his grip on the Hoytether.

The two eyes started to pull on the Hoytether as he had shown them and the reactor actually moved a few meters, but suddenly they quit pulling, dropped the Hoytether, lifted their heads, and started contracting their inflatable neck segments.

“Shucks!” said Rod in disappointment. “I was sure they had got the idea. But instead of helping, they’re leaving.”

“As their neck segments contract, they sort of ‘back up’ their feet,” remarked Sandra bemused.

“Like a moving picture run backwards,” added Dan.

The humans watched as the multitude of legs underneath the contracting necks climbed the feathered keel and nestled into place in the notch-like “cradle” that just fit it. The last segments, however, didn’t settle down into their niche. Instead, they inflated again and lifted the eye up into the incoming wind. Small fins rose up from the head in back of each giant eye and the fins guided the eye back across the gap from the keel to the mouth, where the Hoytether and the reactor waited.

“They have built-in canards!” said Pete, impressed by nature’s engineering skills as he watched the neck and head fly the eye in for a perfect landing. With their necks now in the right orientation, the two eyes started pulling on the Hoytether again. The humans climbed up on the hanging portion of the Hoytether in order to be far away from the reactor when it passed under them. Although the humans could not advance the position of the reactor from their position, they could lighten the load that the eyes had to move, by lifting up on a line Rod had directed Tabby to tie to the reactor.

With their necks now pulling from the right direction with a good anchor, and the lift from the humans decreasing the friction load, the two eyes of the rukh had no problem pulling the reactor, Tabby still riding on it, over the high point in the floor of the mouth. Once the reactor was past the rise, it slid slowly down and off into space. The fall was carefully controlled by the humans, who changed the reactor anchor point from primary line to primary line on the Hoytether, slowly spiraling the reactor down, while adding in slack sections of Hoytether that had been gathered in during the trip of the reactor up the windpipe.

Their portion of the job done, the two eyes pulled back their necks and Sandra got to see how they deflated their heck segments until their intersegment neck claws were practically side-by-side next to each other, holding on to the feathers that ran along the sides of the two grooved niches, one running along the top of the keel and a similar one below. With all the neck segments collapsed and tucked into the groove, there was just room for the two heads to settle down at the very tip of the prow, one eye at the top of the prow and one eye below, each swiveling around independently as they jointly scanned the skies. The Sun started to set and the lower eye closed in sleep. The breathing cycle of the giant mouth increased in pace, the ever-present rush of wind increased in strength, and they felt the rukh start its nighttime climb into the darkening skies.

Finally the chore of lowering the reactor was done. It now hung safely below the rukh at the end of nearly a half-kilometer of Hoytether. The weight of the reactor caused a depression in the dense feather forest where the Hoytether passed over the feathertops, but the spread-out pressure was easily borne by the stiff high-pressure bladders that formed the leading edge of the giant wing.

“She’s down, Seichi!” Rod reported over the radio link. “Turn her on!”

“I have been checking it out while you have been lowering it,” said Seichi. “One of the three secondary cooling loops seems to have been damaged. We will have to run at reduced power.”

“How much reduced?” asked Pete, concerned. Dan felt his heart skip a beat as he waited for the answer. They had been too busy the last many hours for him to even consider attempting a call to Pamela. He was sure that the Space Unlimited crew monitoring their voyage were aware from the telemetry and video relays that their balloon had been destroyed and they were in deep trouble. But if they hadn’t gotten around to telling Pamela until they were sure of their exact status, she would be furious at him for not calling in as scheduled. She probably was now so mad that she would somehow find a way to blame him for the rukh eating their balloon....

“Two-thirds of maximum,” replied Seichi.

“That’s still four tons of meta a week,” said Pete. “Thirty weeks and the tanks will be full. We may get home a little late, but we’re on our way to collecting our billions.”

“Restarting reactor,” reported Seichi.

~ * ~

“There is something wrong,” said Petro sleepily through the thinklink. “Bright is coming up in the wrong direction.”

“That is not Bright,” said Petra, as she bent her neck down over the side of Petra’s keel to look down at the redly glowing object hanging below her. “That is the heavy thing we took out of Petru’s airtube. It is hot once again. Go back to sleep.” She felt Petro’s mind disappear from the thinklink. Through Petru’s wing she could hear others in the flock as they commented on the new source of light. Now proud that she was the possessor of something that caused so much comment, she flew off to show the others of the flock Petru’s new “things”: the glowing cylinder hanging below Petru on the end of the multitendril, and the strange conical creature and its intelligent vermin sitting in the middle of Petru’s back.

~ * ~

5

JOINING WITH THE FLOCK

“Reactor operational. Capsule prime power restored.”

The reassuring voice of Jeeves boomed inside the helmets of the five crewmembers outside, and echoed throughout
Sexdent,
with Seichi its sole inhabitant. Hanging from their windblown perches on the inside of the multistrand Hoytether, itself hanging from the leading edge of the giant wing of the rukh, they looked down at the reactor a half-kilometer below them. From their viewpoint high above, they could see the radiator fins glowing a bright red in the gathering dusk.