“You’re wrong on one point. I know there is very little metal either in their equipment or their supplies on those land-cruisers, and I’d be most startled if Mesklinite rope turned out to be a conductor. I’m no chemist but anything bonded as firmly as that stuff must have its electrons pretty well latched in place. By all means check with Dondragmer, though. Easy is presumably still in Comm; she can help you if there are no linguistically broad Mesklinites on duty at the other end. We’re adjourned.”

Mersereau nodded, already heading toward the door, and the meeting broke up. Aucoin followed Mersereau through one door; most of the others went other ways. Only Hoffman remained seated.

His eyes were focused nowhere in particular, and there was a frown on his face which made him look a good deal older than his forty years.

He liked Barlennan. He liked Dondragmer even better, as did his wife. He had no grounds for the slightest complaint about the progress of the Dhrawn research, considering the policies he himself had helped set up, nor did the rest of the planners. There was no concrete reason whatever, except his trick of half a century before, to distrust the Mesklinite commander — the suggested motive for keeping hypothetical natives Dhrawn out of the picture could hardly be given weight. No, certainly not. After all, the problems of shifting to such beings, even if they existed, as agents for the Dhrawn research project would cause even more delay, as Barlennan must surely realize.

The occasional cases of disagreement between explorers and planners were minor — it was the sort of thing which would happen ten times as often with, say, Drommians; not reason to suppose the Mesklinites were already going off on independent plans of their own.

Still — Barlennan had not wanted helicopters, though he had finally been persuaded to accept them. He was the same Barlennan who had built and flown in a hot-air balloon as his first exercise in applied science.

He had not sent relief to the Esket, necessary as all the giant land-cruisers were to the Project and regardless of the fact that a hundred or so of his people were aboard.

He had refused local-range radios, useful as they would obviously be. The argument against them was the sort that a firm-minded teacher might use in a classroom situation, but this was real life — and deadly earnest.

He had, fifty years before, not only jumped at the change to acquire alien knowledge; he had maneuvered deliberately to force his non-Mesklinite sponsors to give it to him.

Ib Hoffman could not rid himself of the notion that Barlennan was up to something underhanded — again.

He wondered what Easy thought about it.

Beetchermarlf and Takoorch, like the rest of the Kwembly’s crew, were taken by surprise when the lake froze. Neither had had any occasion to look around for several hours, since the maze of fine cords on which their attention was focused was considerably more complicated than, say, the rigging of a clipper ship. Both knew exactly what to do, and there was little need for conversation. Even if their eyes had wandered from the job, there was little else to see; they were under the immense hull of their vehicle, roofed by the pneumatic “mattress” which distributed its weight among the trucks, walled partly by the trucks themselves and partly by the blackness of Dhrawn’s night which swallowed everything beyond the range of their little portable lights.

So they had not seen, any more than the sailors inside the Kwembly, the tiny ice crystals which began to form at the surface of the lake and settle to the bottom, glinting and sparkling in the Kwembly’s floods like lead chloride setting in a cooling solution.

They had completed the reconnecting on the port row, Number 1, all the way from bow to stern, and were working their way forward on Row 2 when they discovered that they were trapped.

Takoorch’s battery light was fading a trifle, and he took it over to the nearest fusion converter, which happened to be on a Row 1 truck, for recharging. He was quite startled to find that he couldn’t get at or even see the converter, and after a few seconds of fumbling and looking he called Beetchermarlf. It took nearly ten minutes for them to establish that they were completely enclosed by an opaque white wall, impenetrable even to their strength, which had welded all the outer trucks together and filled off the spaces between them from mattress above to cobbles below — nearly three feet of height, on the average. Inside the wall they were still free to move about.

Their tools were edged rather than pointed, and too small to make appreciable way against the ice, thought it took fully an hour of scraping to convince them both of that. Neither was greatly concerned as yet; obviously the ice was immobilizing the Kwembly, and the rest of the crew would have to dig down to them in the interest of freeing the vehicle if not for the prime purpose of rescue. Of course their supply of life hydrogen was limited, but this meant less to them than a corresponding oxygen shortage would have to a human being. They had at least ten or twelve hours yet of full activity, and when the hydrogen partial pressure dropped below a certain value they would simply lose consciousness; their body chemistry would slow down more and more, but fifty and perhaps a hundred hours would pass before anything irreversible occurred. One of the reasons for Mesklinite durability, though human biologists had had no chance to find it out, was the remarkable simplicity of their biochemistry.

The two were calm enough, in fact, to go back to their assigned work; and they were almost to the front of Row 2 before another discovery was made. This one did perturb them.

The ice was creeping inward. It was not coming rapidly, but it was coming, and as it happened, neither of them knew any better than Ib Hoffman what being frozen into a block of the stuff was likely to do to them. Neither had the slightest desire to learn.

At least there was still light. Not all the power units were on outside trucks, and Takoorch had been able to recharge his battery. This made it possible to make another, very careful search of the boundaries of their prison. Beetchermarlf was hoping to find unfrozen space either near the bottom or, preferably, near the top of the walls around them. He did not know whether the freezing would have started from the top or the bottom of the pond. He was not familiar, as any human being would have been, with the fact that ice floats on liquid water. This was just as well, since it would have led him to an erroneous conclusion in this instance. The crystals had indeed formed at the top, but they had been denser than the surrounding liquid and had settled, only to redisolve as they reached levels richer in ammonia. This pseudo-convection effect had had the result of robbing the lake rather uniformly of ammonia until it had reached a composition able to freeze almost simultaneously throughout. As a result, the search turned up no open spaces.

For some time the two lay between the two of the trucks, thinking and occasionally checking to see how far the freezing had progressed. They had no time-measuring equipment, and, therefore, no basis for estimating the speed of the process; Takoorch formed the opinion that it was slowing down, but Beetchermarlf was less sure.

Occasionally an idea would strike one of them, but the other usually managed to find a flaw in it.

“We can move some of these stones — the smaller ones,” Takoorch remarked at one point. “Why can’t we dig our way under the ice?”

“Where to?” countered his companion. “The nearest edge of the lake is forty of fifty cables away, or was the last I knew. We couldn’t begin to dig that far in these rocks before our air gave out, even if the freezing didn’t include the water between the rocks underneath. Coming up before the edge wouldn’t get us anywhere.”