Still, the factual reports had to be useful. There was much detailed information about the Kwembly’s present situation which the men could not possibly know yet. By the time Benj’s approval came from the speaker, the helmsman had recovered some of his self-confidence.

“That will be fine, Beetchermarlf. I’m ready to tape your report. I was going to anyway, for language practice. I’ll pass on whatever you want. Even if your weather men are busy, maybe the two of us could try to do what I suggested with the weather information. You can probably get their measurements, and you’re on the spot and can see everything and if you’re one of the sailors Barlennan recruited on Mesklin you certainly know something about weather. For all I know, you may have spent a couple of my lifetimes in that place on Mesklin learning engineering and research methods. Come ahead; I’m ready here.”

This speech completed the restoration of Beetchermarlf’s morale. It had been only ten of Mesklin’s years since alien education had started for a selected few of its natives. This human being must be five years old or younger. Of course, there was no telling what that might mean in the way of maturity for his species, and one could not very well ask; but in spite of the aura of super-normality which tended to surround all the aliens, one just did not think of a five-year-old as a superior being.

As relaxed as anyone could well be on a floor with a sixty-degree tilt, the sailor began his description of the Kwembly’s situation. He gave a detailed account of the trip down what now had to be recognized as a river, and of its conclusion. He described minutely what could now be seen from the bridge. He explained how they were now stranded off their tracks, and emphasized the situation which faced the crew if this could not be corrected. He even detailed the structure of the air-locks, and explained why the main one was probably unusable and the others possibly so.

“It will help a great deal in the captain’s planning,” he concluded, “if we can have some trustworthy estimate of what will happen to this river, and especially whether and when it will run dry If the whole snow field melts at this season and runs off the plateau through this one drain, I suppose we’re here for the best part of a year and will have to plan accordingly If you can give any hope that we can work on dry land without having to wait too long, though, it would be very good to know.”

Benj was rather longer than sixty-four seconds in answering this; he, too, had been given material for thought.

“I have your details on tape, and have sent it up to Planning,” his words came through at last. “They’ll distribute copies to the labs. Even I can see that figuring out the life story of your river is going to be a nasty job; maybe an impossible one without a lot more knowledge. As you say, the whole snow field might be starting a seasonal melt. If the waters of North America had to drain out through one river you’d be there for a long time. I don’t know how much of the place your aerial scout reports cover, and I don’t know how ambiguous the photos from up here may be, but I’ll bet when it’s all down on maps there’ll still be room for argument. Even if everyone agrees on a conclusion, well, we still don’t know much about that planet.”

“But you’ve had so much experience with other planets, many of them!” returned Beetchermarlf. “I should think that would be of some help.”

Again the answer was longer in coming back than light-lag alone would explain.

“Men and their friends have had experience on a lot of planets, that’s true, and I’ve read a good deal of it. The trouble is, practically none of it helps here. There are three kinds of planet, basically. One we call Terrestrial, like my own home; it is small, dense, and practically without hydrogen. The second is the Jovian, or Type Two, which tends to be much larger and much less dense because they have kept most of their hydrogen from the time they originally formed, we think. Those two were the only kinds we knew about before we left our own star’s neighborhood, because they are the only kinds in our system.

“Type Three is very large, very dense, and very hard to account for. Theories which had the Type Ones losing their hydrogen because of their initially small mass, and the Twos keeping theirs because of their greater mass, were fine as long as we’d never heard of the Threes. Our ideas were perfectly satisfactory and convincing as long as we didn’t know too much, if you’ll forgive my sounding like my basic science teacher.

“Type Three is the sort you’re on. There are none of them around any sun with a Type One planet. I suppose there must be a reason for that, but I don’t know what it is. Well, nothing was known about them among the Community races until we learned to travel between stars and began to do it on a large scale, large enough so the principal interest of wandering ships wasn’t just new habitable planets. Even then we couldn’t study them first hand, any more than we could the Jovian worlds. We could send down a few special, very expensive and usually very unreliable robots, but that was all. Your species is the first we’ve ever encountered able to stand the gravity of a Type Three or the pressure of a Type Two, for that matter.

“But isn’t Mesklin a Type Three, by your description? You must know a lot about it by now; you’ve been in touch with our people for something like ten years, and some of you have even landed at the Rim, I mean the equator.

“More like fifty of our years. The trouble is that Mesklin isn’t a Type Three. It’s a peculiar Two. It would have had all the hydrogen of any Jovian world if it hadn’t been for its rotation, that terrific spin which gives your world an eighteen-minute day and a shape like a fried egg. There aren’t any others like it which we’ve found yet, and no intermediate cases that anyone’s recognized, or at least that I’ve heard of That’s why the Community races were willing to go to so much trouble and effort and spend so much time building up contact with your world and setting up this expedition to Dhrawn. We’ll find out a good deal in thirty years or so about that world’s makeup from the neutrino counters in the shadow satellites but the seismic equipment you people have been planting will add a lot of detail and remove a lot of ambiguity So will your chemical work. In five or six of your years we may know enough about that rock ball to make a sensible guess why it’s there or at least, whether it ought to be called a star or a planet.”

“You mean you only made contact with the people of Mesklin so you could learn more about Dhrawn?”

“No, I didn’t mean that at all. People are people and worth getting to know for their own sake — at least, both my parents feel that way, though I’ve met folks who certainly don’t. I don’t think the idea for the Dhrawn project got started until long after your College was under way My mother or Dr. Aucoin could tell you when. It was long before I was born. Of course, when it dawned on someone that you folks could make first-hand investigation of a place like Dhrawn, everyone jumped at the chance.”

This, of course, forced Beetchermarlf to ask a question which he would ordinarily have regarded as a strictly human affair and none of his business, like the matter of how mature a five-year-old should be. It slipped out before he caught himself; for over an hour thereafter he and Benj were arguing over the reasons for such activities as the Dhrawn project and why such a vast amount of effort should be devoted to an activity with no obvious material return in prospect. Benj did not defend his side too well. He was able to give the usual answers about the force of curiosity, which Beetchermarlf could see up to a point; he knew enough history to have heard how close man and several other species had come to extinction from energy starvation before they had developed the hydrogen fusion converter; but he was too young to be really eloquent. He lacked the experience to be able to point out convincingly, even to himself, the complete dependence of any culture on its understanding of the laws of the universe. The conversation never became heated, which would have been difficult in any argument where there is a built-in cooling-down period between any remark and its answer. The only really satisfactory progress made was in Benj’s mastery of Stennish.