“Yes, we’ll do it that way. I would have had to leave light power anyway, since I wanted crews to come back for work; and as I said, I wanted some sort of safety communication with them. Your suggestion fits that perfectly. I’ve turned the set back to cover the starboard side, as you no doubt see. I must leave the bridge now; the crew will be back in a minute or two, and I want to assign duties to them as they arrive.

Again, Benj began talking without checking with anyone else.

“Captain, if you’re still in hearing when this gets to you, will you wave or signal some way, or have Beetch do it, if you find him alive? I won’t ask you to make a special trip back to the bridge to give details.”

There was no answer. Presumably Dondragmer had suited up and gone outside the moment he finished speaking. There was nothing for the human beings to do but wait.

Aucoin, with Easy’s assistance, had relayed Dondragmer’s answer to the Settlement, and received Barlennan’s acknowledgment. The commander asked that he be kept up to date as completely as possible on Kwembly matters, and especially on any ideas which Dondragmer might have. Aucoin agreed, asked Easy to relay the request to the captain, and was told that this would be done as soon as the latter reestablished contact.

“All right,” nodded the planner. “At least, there’s been no mention so far of sending a rescue vehicle. We’ll leave well enough alone.”

“Personally,” retorted Easy, “I’d have dispatched the Kallqf or the Hoorsh hours ago, when they first froze in.”

“I know you would. I’m very thankful that your particular brand of ethics won’t let you suggest it to Barlennan over my objections. My only hope is that he won’t decide to suggest it himself, because every time I’ve had both of you really against me I’ve been talked down.” Easy looked at Aucoin, and then at the microphone, speculatively. Her husband decided that distraction was in order, and cut into the thickening silence with a question.

“Alan, what do you think of that theory of Barlennan’s?”

Aucoin frowned. He and Easy both knew perfectly well why lb had interrupted, but the question itself was hard to ignore; and Easy, at least, recognized that the interruption itself was a good idea.

“It’s a fascinating idea,” the planner said slowly, “but I can’t say that I think it very probable. Dhrawn is a huge planet, if it can be called a planet, and it seems funny, well, I don’t know whether it seems funnier that we’d have met intelligence so quickly or that only one of the cruisers has done so. There certainly isn’t a culture using electromagnetic energy; we’d have detected it when we first approached the place. A much lower one, well, how could they have done what seems to have been done to the Esket’s crew?”

“Not knowing their physical and mental capabilities, quite aside from their cultural level, I couldn’t even guess,” replied Hoffman. “Didn’t some of the first Indians Columbus met wind up in Spain?”

“I think you’re stretching resemblances, to put it mildly. There’s a practical infinity of things which could have happened to the Esket without her running into intelligent opposition. You know that as well as I do; you helped make up some of the lists, until you decided it was pointless speculation. I grant that Barlennan’s theory is a little bit more believable than it was, but only a very little.”

“You still think I was wrong in my identification of Kabremm, don’t you?” said Easy.

“Yes, I’m afraid I do. Furthermore, I just don’t believe that we’ve run into another intelligent species. Don’t compare me with the people who refused to believe that dePerthe’s rocks were man-made tools. Some things are just intrinsically improbable.”

Hoffman chuckled. “Human ability to judge likelihood, you might call it statistical insight, has always been pretty shaky,” he pointed out, “even if you skip purely classical examples like Lois Lane. Actually, the chances don’t seem to be that low. You know as well as I do that in the very small volume of space within five parsecs of Sol, with only seventy-four known stars and about two hundred sunless planets, what we have found in the way of intelligence: twenty races at about our own stage of development, safely past their Energy Crisis; eight, including Tenebra and Mesklin, which haven’t met it yet; eight which failed to pass it and are extinct; three which failed but have some hope of recovery; every one of them, remember, within a hundred thousand years of that key point in their history, one way or the other! That’s in spite of the fact that the planets range in age from Panesh’s nine billion years or so to Tenebra’s maybe a tenth of that. There’s more than coincidence there, Alan.”

“Maybe Panesh and Earth and the older planets have had other cultures in the past; maybe it happens to any world every few tens of millions of years.”

“It hasn’t happened before unless the earlier intelligent races were so intelligent from the beginning that they never tapped their planet’s fossil fuels. Do you think man’s presence on Earth won’t be geologically obvious a billion years from now, with looted coal seams and the beer bottle as an index fossil? I can’t buy that one, Alan.”

“Maybe not, but I’m not mystical enough to believe that some super-species is herding the races of this part of space toward one big climax.”

“Whether you like that Demon Hypothesis or prefer the ESFA Theory doesn’t matter. There’s certainly more than chance involved, and therefore you can’t use the laws of chance alone to criticize what Barlennan has suggested. You don’t have to assume he’s right, but I strongly urge you to take him seriously. I do.”

Dondragmer would have been interested in hearing this discussion, just as he would have appreciated attending the staff meeting of some hours before. However, he would have been too busy for either, even if attendance had been physically possible. With the return of most of his crew (some, of course, had stayed behind to continue setting up the life-support equipment) there was much to oversee and quite a lot to do himself. Twenty of his men were set to helping the trio already chipping ice from the main lock. As many more went under the hull with lights and tools to find and secure any power units not too solidly frozen in. The captain kept his promise to Benj, ordering this group to check most carefully for signs of Beetchermarlf and Takoorch. However, he emphasized the importance of examining the ice walls closely, and as a result the group found nothing. Its members emerged in a few minutes with the two power boxes from the trucks which the helmsmen had used, and two more which had been freed by the action of the heat. The rest, which according to Dondragmer’s recollection and the laws of arithmetic must number six, were unapproachable, even though the sailors could make a reasonably well-founded guess as to which trucks they were on.

Meanwhile, the rest of the crew had been entering the cruiser by the available locks: the small one at the bridge, the larger ones through which the fliers were launched and the pairs of one-man-at-a-time emergency traps at the sides near bow and stern. Once inside, each crewman set about an assigned job. Dondragmer had been thinking as well as talking to human beings during their absence. Some packed food to last until the life-support equipment resumed cycling normally; others readied coils of rope, lights, power units and other equipment for transportation.

Many were at work improvising carrying devices; one awkward result of the Kwembly’s being fusion-powered was a great shortage of wheels aboard. There were tiny pulleys carrying the control cables around cot-nets. These were too small for wheelbarrows or similar devices and Dondragmer had firmly forbidden any dismantling of the vehicle. There was nothing like a fork-lift or even a dolly aboard. Such devices, the former muscle-powered, of course, were known and used on Mesklin for medium-to-long-distance carrying; but there was nothing on the Kwembly which could be moved at all which a Mesklinite could not easily carry to any part of the vehicle without mechanical assistance. Now, with miles to go and the necessity of moving many items complete rather than in pieces, improvisation was in order. Litters and travois were making their appearance. The corridors leading to the main lock were rapidly being stacked with supplies and equipment awaiting the freeing of the exit.