“You mean I shouldn’t worry about a possible flood?” Dondragmer’s voice finally returned.

“I’m guessing not,” replied McDevitt. “If I’m right about this picture, and we’ve been talking it over a lot up here, the fog that Stakendee met should have passed over the snow plain you from — or what’s left of it — and if it were going to cause another flood that should have reached you by now. I suspect the snow, which was high enough to spill into the pass you were washed through, was all used up on the first flood, and that’s why you were finally left stranded where you are. If the new fog hasn’t reached you yet by the way, I think I know the reason.

The place where Stakendee met it is a few feet higher than you are, and air flowing form the west is coming downhill. With Dhrawn’s gravity and that air composition there’d be a terrific foehn effect — adiabatic heating as the pressure rises — and the stuff is probably evaporating just as it gets to the place where Stakendee met it.”

Dondragmer took a while to digest this. For a few seconds after the normal delay time, McDevitt wondered wheter he had made himself clear; then another question came through.

“But if the ammonia fog were simply evaporating, the gas would still be there, and must be in the air around us now. Why isn’t it melting the ice just as effectively as though ii were in liquid drops? Is some physical law operating which I missed in the College?”

“I’m not sure where state and concentration would make all that much difference, just from memory,” admitted the meteorologist. “When Borndender gets the new data up here I’ll feed the whole works into the machine to see wheter this guess of our s is ignoring too many facts. On the basis of what I have now, I still think it’s a reasonable one, but I admit it has its fuzzy aspects. There are just too many variables; with only water they are practically infinite, if you’ll forgive a loose use of the word, and with water and ammonia together the number is squared, if not worse.

“To shift from abstract to concrete, I can see Stakendee’s screen and he’s still going along beside that streamlet in the fog; he hasn’t reached the source, but I haven’t seen any other watercourses feeding in from either side. It’s only a couple of your body-lengths wide, and has stayed about the same all along.”

“That’s a relief,” came the eventual response. I suppose if a real flood were coming that river would be some indication. Very well, I’ll report again as soon as Borndender has his information. Please keep watching Stakendee. I’m going outside again to checked under the hull; I was interrupted before.” The meteorologist had wanted to say more, but was silenced by the realization that Dondragmer would not be there to hear his words by the time they arrived. He may also have been feeling some sympathy for Benj.

They watched eagerly, the man almost as concerned as the boy, for the red-and-blank inchworm to appear on the side of the hull within range of the pickup. It was not visible all the way to the ground, since Dondragmer had to go forward directly under the bride and out of the field of view; but they saw him again near the point where the rope which had been used to get him out a few minutes earlier was still snubbed around one of Borndender’s bending posts.

They watched him swarm down the line into the pit. A Mesklinite hanging on a rope about the thickness of a six-pound nylon fishline, and free to swing pendulum-style in forty Earth gravities, is quite a sight even when the distance he has to climb is not much greater than his own body length. Even Benj stopped thinking about Beetchermarlf for a moment.

The captain was no longer worried about the ice; it was presumably frozen all the way to the bottom by now, and he went straight toward the cruiser without bothering to stay on the stones. He slowed a trifle as he drew near, eyeing the cavity in front of him thoughtfully.

Practically, the Kwembly was still frozen in, of course. The melted area had reached her trucks for a distance of some sixty feet fore and aft, but the ice was still above the mattress beyond those limits and on the port side. Even within that range, the lower part of the treads had still been an inch or two under water when the heater gave out. Beetchermarlf’s control cables had been largely freed, but of those helmsman himself there was no sigh whatever. Dondragmer had no hope of finding the two alive under the Kwembly; they would obviously have emerged long ago had this been the case. The captain would not have offered large odds on the chance of finding bodies, either. Like McDevitt, he knew that there was an unevaluable probability that the crewmen had not been under the hull at all when the freeze-up occurred. There had, after all, been two other unexplained disappearances; Dondragmer’s educated guess at the whereabouts of Kervenser and Reffel was far from a certainty even in his own mind.

It was dark underneath, out of range of the floods. Dondragmer could still see a response to abrupt changes of illumination was a normal adaptation to Mesklin’s eighteen-minute rotation period — but some details escaped him. He saw the condition of the two trucks whose treads had been ruined by the helmsmen’s escape efforts, and he saw the piles of stones they had made in the attempt to confine the hot water in a small area; but he missed the slash in the mattress where the two had taken final refuge.

What he saw made it obvious, however, that at least one of the two missing men had been there for a while. Since the volume which had evidently not frozen at all was small, the most likely guess seemed to be that they had been caught in the encroaching ice after doing the work which could be seen — though it was certainly hard to see just how this could have happened. The captain made a rapid check the full length of the ice-walled cavern, examining every exposed truck for and aft, top and sides. It never occurred to him to look higher. He had, after all, taken part in the building of the huge vehicle; he knew there was nowhere higher to go.

He emerged at last into the light and the view field of the communicator. His appearance alone was something of a relief to Benj; the boy had concluded, just as the captain had, that the helmsmen could not be under the hull alive, and he had rather expected to see Dondragmer pulling bodies after him. The relief was only relative, of course; the burning question remained — where was Beetchermarlf?

The captain was climbing out of the put and leaving the field of view. Maybe he was coming back to the bridge to make a detailed report. Benj, now showing clearly the symptoms of sleeplessness, waited silently with his fists clenched.

But Dondragmer’s voice did not come. The captain had planned to tell the human observers what he had found, indeed; but on the way up the side of the hull, visible to them but unrecognized, he paused to talk to one of the men who was chipping ice from the lock exit.

“I only got what the human Hoffman told me about what you found when your part first reached that stream,” he said. “Are there any more details I should know? I have the picture that you had just met someone at the point where the ground was almost up into the fog, but I never heard from Hoffman wheter it was Reffel or Kervenser. Who was it? And are the helicopters all right? There was an interruption just then — someone up above apparently caught sight of Kabremm back at the Esket, and I cut in myself because the stream you had found worried me. That’s why I split your part. Who was it you found?”

“It was Kabremm.”

Dondragmer almost lost his grip on the holdfasts.

“Kabremm? Destigmet’s first officer? Her? And a human being recognized him — it was your screen he was seen on?”