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after all, Barlennan looked more like a caterpillar than anything else, and
when a man steps on a caterpillar then he relaxed, and even grinned.
"All right, Barl. For a moment I'd forgotten the circumstances." The
Mesklinite had crawled over to his feet during the pause; and without further
hesitation Lackland took the requested step. There proved to be only one
difficulty.
Lackland had a mass of about one hundred sixty pounds. His armor, an
engineering miracle in its own way, was about as much more. On Mesklin's
equator, then, man and armor weighed approximately nine hundred fifty
pounds he could not have moved a step without an ingenious servo device in the
legs and this weight was only about a quarter greater than that of Barlennan
in the polar regions of his planet. There was no difficulty for the Mesklinite
in supporting that much weight; what defeated the attempt was simple geometry.
Barlennan was, in general, a cylinder a foot and a half long and two inches in
diameter; and it proved a physical impossibility for the armored Earthman to
balance on him.
The Mesklinite was stumped; this time it was Lackland who thought of a
solution. Some of the side plates on the fewer part of the tank had been
sprung by the blast inside; and under Lackland's direction Barlennan, with
considerable effort, was able to wrench one completely free. It was about two
feet wide and six long, and with one end bent up slightly by the native's
powerful nippers, it made an admirable sledge; bat Barlennan, on this part of
his planet, weighed about three pounds. He simply did not have the necessary
traction to tow the device and the nearest plant which might have served as an
anchor was a quarter of a mile away. Lackland was glad that a red face had no
particular meaning to the natives of this world, for the sun happened to be in
the sky when this particular fiasco occurred. They had been working both day
and night, since the smaller sun and the two moons had furnished ample light
in the absence of the storm clouds.
V: MAPPING JOB
The crew's arrival, days later, solved Lackland's problem almost at once.
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MISSION OF GRAVITY
The mere number of natives, of course, was of little help; twenty-one
Mesklinites still did not have traction enough to move the loaded sledge.
Barlennan thought of having them carry it, placing a crew member under each
corner; and he went to considerable trouble to overcome the normal Mesklinite
conditioning against getting under a massive object. When he finally succeeded
in this, however, the effort proved futile; the metal plate was not thick
enough for that sort of treatment, and buckled under the armored man's weight
so that all but the supported corner was still in contact with the ground.
Dondragmer, with no particular comment, spent the time that this test consumed
in paying out and attaching together the lines which were normally used with
the hunting nets. They proved, in series, more than long enough to reach the
nearest plants; and the roots of these growths, normally able to hold against
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the worst that Mesklin's winds could offer, furnished all the support needed.
Four days later a train of sledges, made from all the accessible plates of the
tank, started back toward the
Bree with Lackland and a tremendous load of meat aboard; and at a fairly
steady rate of a mile an hour, reached the ship in sixty-one days. Two more
days of work, with more crew members assisting, got Lackland's armor through
the vegetation growing between the ship and his dome, and delivered him safely
at the air lock. It was none too soon; the wind had already picked up to a
point where the assisting crew had to use ground lines in getting back to the
Bree, and clouds were once again whipping across the sky.
Lackland ate, before bothering to report officially what had happened to the
tank. He wished he could make the report more complete; he felt somehow that
he should know what had actually happened to the vehicle. It was going to be
very difficult to accuse someone on Toorey of inadvertently leaving a cake of
gelatine under the tank's floor.
He had actually pressed the call button on the station-to-satellite set when
the answer struck him; and when Dr. Ros-ten's lined face appeared on the
screen he knew just what to say.
"Doc, there's a spot of trouble with the tank."
"So I understand. Is it electrical or mechanical? Serious?"
"Basically mechanical, though the electrical system had a share. I'm afraid
it's a total loss; what's left of it is stranded about eighteen miles from
here, west, near the beach."
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