“He hadn’t up to half an hour ago,” replied Mersereau.

“Then I strongly advise that we suggest it to him.”

Aucoin nodded agreement, and glanced at the woman. “Your job, I’d say, Easy.”

“If someone hasn’t beaten me to it.” She rose, pinched Ib’s ear in passing, and left the room.

“Next point,” Hoffman went on, “Granting that you may be right in opposing a rescue expedition from the Settlement, I think it’s time Barlennan was brought up to date about the Kwembly.”

“Why as for more trouble that we need?” retorted Aucoin. “I don’t like to argue with anyone, especially when he doesn’t really have to listen to me.”

“I don’t think you’ll really have to. Remember, he agreed with us the other time.”

“You were saying a few minutes ago that you weren’t sure how sincere his agreements have been.”

“I’m not, in general; but if he had been strongly against us that time he’d have done just what he wanted, and sent a crew out to help the Esket. He did, remember, on a couple of other occasions when there was a cruiser in trouble.”

“That was much closer to the settlement, and we finally approved the action,” retorted Aucoin.

“And you know as well as I do that we approved it because we could see that he was going to do it anyway.”

“We approved it, Ib, because your wife was on Barlennan’s side both times, and out-talked us. You argument, incidentally, is a point against telling him about the present situation.”

“Whose side was she on during the Esket argument? I still think we should tell Barlennan the present situation pronto. Plain honesty aside, the longer we wait the more certain he is to find out, sooner or later, that we’ve been censoring expedition reports on him.”

“I wouldn’t call it censoring. We’ve never changed a thing.”

“But you have delayed the relay plenty of times while you decided what he ought to know, and as I’ve said before I don’t think that’s the game as we agreed to play it with him. Pardon my reactionary sentiments, but on purely selfish grounds we’d be well advised to keep his confidence as long as possible.”

Several of the others, who had listened in silence up to this point, spoke up almost at once when Hoffman expressed this sentiment. It took Aucoin several seconds to untangle their words, but it eventually became clear that the feeling of the group was with Ib. The chairman yielded gracefully; his technique did not involve standing in front of the bull.

“All right, we pass on the complete report to Barlennan as soon as we adjourn.” He glanced at the winner. “That is, if Mrs. Hoffman hasn’t done it already. What’s the next point?”

One of the men who had done little but listen up to this point asked a question. “Forgive me if I didn’t follow you too clearly a few minutes ago. Ib, you and Alan both claim that Barlennan agreed with Project policy in limiting to an absolute minimum the amount of sophisticated equipment his expedition was to use. That was my understanding also; but you, Ib, just mentioned having doubts about Barlennan’s sincerity. Do any of those doubts stem from his accepting the helicopters?”

Hoffman shook his head. “No. The arguments we used for their necessity were good, and the only surprising thing to me was that Barlennan didn’t see the for himself and take the equipment without argument.”

But Mesklinites are acrophobic by nature. The thought of flying, to anyone from a world like that, must be just unimaginable.”

Ib smiled grimly. “True. But one of the first things Barlennan did after he made his deal with the Gravity people and started learning basic science was to design, build and fly on Mesklin — in the polar zone where gravity is at its highest — a hot air balloon. Whatever is motivating Barlennan, it isn’t acrophobia. I don’t exactly doubt him; I’m just not sure of his thinking, if you’ll forgive a rather crude quibble.”

“I agree,” Aucoin interjected. “And I think we’re running dry. I suggest we break up for, say, six hours. Think, or go down to Comm and listen to the Mesklinites or talk with them — anything that will keep your thoughts on Dhrawn questions. You know my ideas about that.”

“That’s where mine have been.” It was the same speaker. “I keep wondering about the Esket, every time one of the cruisers runs into trouble — even when the trouble is obviously natural.”

“So do we all, I imagine,” rejoined Aucoin.

“The more I think of it, the more I feel that her crew must have run into intelligent opposition. After all, we know there is life on Dhrawn — more than the bushes and pseudo-algae the Mesklinites have found. They wouldn’t account quantitatively for that atmosphere; there must be a complete ecological complex somewhere. I’d guess in the higher-temperature regions.”

“Such as Low Alpha.” Hoffman completed the thought. “Yes, you don’t have ammonia and free oxygen in the same environment for very long, on the time scale of a planet. I can believe the possibility of an intelligent species here; we haven’t found any sign of it from space, and the Mesklinite ground parties haven’t met it — unless the Esket did — but seventeen billion square miles of planet make a lot of good reasons for that. The idea is plausible, and you’re not the first to get it, but I don’t know where it leaves us. Barlennan thought of it, too, according to Easy, and has debated sending another cruiser to the area of the Esket’s loss specifically to seek and contact any intelligence that may be there; but even Barlennan is doubtful about the idea, and we certainly haven’t pushed it.”

“Why not?” cut in Mersereau. “If we could get in touch with natives as we did on Mesklin, the project could rally get going! We wouldn’t have to depend so completely on… oh.”

Aucoin smiled grimly.

“Precisely,” he said. “Now you have found a good reason for wondering about Barlennan’s frankness. I’m not saying that he’s an ice-hearted politician who would give up the lives of his men just to keep a hammerlock on the Dhrawn operation — but the Esket’s crew was pretty certainly already beyond rescue when he finally agreed not the send the Kalliff in the same direction.”

“There is another point, thought,” Hoffman said thoughtfully.

“What?”

“I’m not sure its worth mentioning, since we can’t evaluate it; but the Kwembly is commanded by Dondragmer, who is a long-time associate of Barlennan’s and, by ordinary reasoning, should be an extremely close friend. Is there any chance that his being involved would influence Barl’s judgement about a rescue trip — or even make him order one against his better judgement? Like you, I don’t think that caterpillar is just an administrative machine. His cold-bloodedness is purely physical.”

“I’ve wondered about that, too,” the chief planner admitted. “It surprised me greatly months ago when he let Dondragmer go out at all; I had the impression that he didn’t want him to take major chances. I didn’t worry too much about it — certainly no one knows enough about Mesklinite psychology in general, Barlennan’s in particular, to base any serious planning on. If anyone does, Ib, it’s your wife, and she can’t or won’t, put what she understands about them into words. As you say, we can’t assign weight to the friendship-influence possibility. We just add it to the list. Let me hear if there are any ideas about those crewmen who are presumably frozen under the Kwembly, and then we really must break up.”

“A fusion converter would keep a good, large heating coil going, and resistors aren’t very complex equipment,” Mersereau pointed out. “Heaters aren’t a very unreasonable piece of equipment on Dhrawn, either. If only—”

“But we didn’t,” interrupted Aucoin.

“But we did, if you’d let me finish. There are enough converters with the Kwembly to life her off the planet if their energy could be applied to such a job. There must be some metal aboard which can be jury-rigged into resistors, or arcs. Whether the Mesklinites could operate such gadgets I don’t know — there must be a limit even to their temperature tolerance — but we might at least ask if they’ve thought of such a thing.”