Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 10 — page 36: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

& 34 report of the surveying rocket came in. It was brief and discouraging. The cliff ran into the sea some six hundred miles north- east of their present location, almost exactly on the equator. In the opposite direction it ran for some twelve hundred miles, growing very gradually lower, and disappearing completely at about the five- gravity latitude. It was not perfectly straight, showing a deep bend away from the ocean at one point; the tank had ‘struck at this point. Two fivers fell over its edge within the limits of the bay, and the tank was neatly caught between them, since in the interests of common sanity the Bree could never be towed across without first going many miles upstream from the tremendous waterfalls. One of the falls was about thirty miles away, almost due south; the other, approximately a hundred miles dis- tant to the north and east around the curve of the cliff. The rocket had not, of course, been able to examine the entire stretch of escarpment in complete detail from the altitude it had had to maintain, but the interpreter was very doubtful that the tank could scale it at any point. The best bet, however, would be near one of the waterfalls, where erosion was visible and might conceivably have created negotiable paths. “How can a cliff like this form?” Lack- land asked resentfully when he had heard all this. “Eighteen hundred miles of ridge just high enough to be a nuisance, and we have to run right into it. I bet it’s the only thing of its kind on the planet.” “Don’t bet too much,” the surveyor retorted. “The physiography boys just nodded in pleasure when I told them about it. One of them said he was sur- prised you hadn’t hit one earlier; then another piped up and said actually you’d expect most of them further from the equator, so it wasn’t surprising at all. They were still at it when I left them. I guess you're lucky that your small friend is going to do most of the traveling for you.” “That’s a thought.” Lackland paused as another idea struck him. “If these faults are so common, you might tell me whether there are any more between here and the sea. Will you have to run another survey?” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION “No. I saw the geologists before I started on this one, and looked. If you can get down this step, you’re all right —in fact, you could launch your friend’s ship in the river at the foot and he could make it alone. The river narrows in some places and the current is probably swift, but there don’t seem to be any rapids or falls in either stream between the cliff and the ocean. Your only remaining pro- lem is to get that sailboat hoisted over the edge.” “To get ... hm-m-m. I know you meant that figuratively, Hank, but you may have something there. Thanks for everything; I may want to talk to you later.” Lackland turned away from the set and lay back on his bunk, thinking furiously. He had never seen the Bree afloat; she had been beached before he encountered Barlennan, and on the recent occasions when he had towed her across rivers he had himself been below the surface most of the time in the tank. Therefore, he did not know how high the vessel floated. Still, to float at all on an ocean of liquid methane she must be extremely light, since methane is less than half as dense as water. Also she was not hollow—did not float, that is, by virtue of a large central space which lowered her average density, as does a steel ship on Earth. The “wood” of which the Bree was made was light enough to float on methane and support the ship’s crew and a sub- stantial cargo as we An individual raft, therefore, could not weigh more than a few ounces—perhaps a couple of pounds, on this world at this point. At that rate, Lackland himself could stand on the edge of the cliff and let down sevefal rafts at a time; any two sailors could probably lift the ship bodily, if they could be persuaded to get under it. Lackland himself had no rope or cable other than what he was using to tow the sled; but that was one commodity of which the Bree herself had an ample supply. The sailors should cer- tainly be able to rig hoisting gear that would take care of the situation—or could they? On Earth it would be elementary sea- manship; on Mesklin, with these startling EOMIGHOOKS GO