Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 120: what you’re looking at

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

118 few others who had seen the event in any detail. It was the, first, of course, that provided the ee bit of information. “Good Earth!’’ Lackland muttered, half aloud. “‘What’s the use of a high- school education if you can’t recall it when needed later on? Pressure in a liquid corresponds to the weight of liquid: above the point in question— and even methane under a couple of hundred gravities weighs a good deal per vertical inch. That wood’s not much thicker than paper, either; a wonder it held so long. I wonder if it would hold up at a decent tempera- ture; it seems to have sprung back after being I suppose, almost com- pletely flattened—” Barlennan interrupted this rather uninformative monologue with a request for information. “I gather you now know what happened,” he said. “Could you, please make it clear to us?” Lackland made an honest effort but was only partly successful. The con- cept of pressure, in a quantitative sense, defeats a certain number of students in every high-school class. There was nothing wrong with Bar- lennan’s brain, but his background was considerably less, scientific, in the sense denoting familiarity with the idea of precise measurement, than the average human child’s. His people were still many generations from the idea of longitude determination by precise time measurements, for exam- ple, though they were good cartogra- phers where dimensions could be meas- ured directly—good enough, as Bar- lennan had revealed long since, to have detected the curvature of their planet’s surface in their surveys. He did get the idea that the deeper one went into the sea the greater was the crushing force, and that the rate of increase with depth went up along with gravity; but he did not connect ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION this force with others such as wind, or even the distress he himself had ex- perienced when he submerged too rapidly in swimming. Perhaps this was natural, considering the fact that a pressure change great enough for him to notice in this way would have reduced a human body to pulp. The main point, of course, was that any floating object had to have some part of itself under the surface, and that sooner or later that part was going to be crushed if it was hollow. He avoided Dondragmer’s eye as_ this conclusion was reached in his conver- sation with Lackland, and was not comforted when the mate pointed out that this was undoubtedly where he had betrayed his falsehood when talk- ing to Reejaaren. Hollow ships used by his own people, indeed! The islanders must have learned the futility of that in the far south long since. The gear that had been in the canoe was stowed on deck, and the voyage continued. Barlennan could not bring himself to part with the now useless little vessel, though it took up a good deal of space. He disguised its useless- ness thinly by packing it with food supplies which could not have been heaped so high without the sides of the canoe to retain them. Dondragmer pointed out that it was reducing the Ship’s flexibility by extending the length of two rafts, but the captain did not let this fact worry him. Time passed, as it had before, first hundreds and then thousands of days. To the Mesklinites, long-lived by nature, its passage meant little; to the Earthmen the voyage gradually be- came a thing of boredom, part of the regular routine of life. Most of them returned to research jobs that had been more or less interrupted by the whole affair. Others, of course, could not do that; their lines of research hung on the data that Barlennan was Cconnicloooks COLUM