Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  It was this that kept him silent while the creature paused, visibly collected its waning energies, and resumed the tale.

  “I found what I thought was the answer at last. Since the tremendous number of particles must have come from the farm that had been blown up, it seemed likely that their orbits would be more or less controlled by that and would have at least a slight family resemblance. If I were to take up a powered, nearly elliptical path through that region, matching velocities with most of them instead of falling in a practically parabolic orbit across their path, I should be able to avoid the worst of the blows.”

  WEAKLY, the shattered creature shuddered and paused, mustering strength to continue.

  “I had about made up my mind to try this when I detected another slave inbound,” it went on, “and it occurred to me that two would be better than one. If one died, at least the other could learn from what had happened. I caught him easily since he was in free fall and explained the idea. He seemed willing to follow any suggestion, not thinking for himself at all, so he went with me.

  “For a while it worked. We got inside the orbit of the fourth planet without being hit more than a few times each—that was harder on me than on him, because I’d already been hurt quite a lot on the first trip. Into that level, a great deal of the wreckage is formed of quite large particles, anyway; it’s easy to see and avoid. Farther in, though, where most of the heavy stuff either never went or was cleared out by collision with the inner planets in a few million of their revolutions, there was much more extremely fine stuff. It actually seems to increase in concentration near the sun. Maybe radiation pressure has something to do with it.

  “Anyway, we began to take a bad beating again. It was a little better than before. My idea must have had something to it, but it still wasn’t good. The other slave wasn’t used to it, either, and lost control of himself just as I had. We were almost to the third farm plot then, but he must have gone completely blind from pain. He apparently never sensed the food so near by—that plot is incredibly rich.

  “He went blundering squarely into another, useless plot that accompanies the third one in its orbit; an object too small to hold culture material in that temperature range, though still several hundred times the diameter of my body or his. He rammed it hard, and the energy involved in matching velocities was more than enough to volatilize his mass completely. The object was pretty well scarred with impact craters, but he made one of the neatest.

  “I was close enough then to the third planet to start harvesting—at least, I would have been under normal circumstances. I tried, but couldn’t concentrate on one course of action long enough. The bombardment was endless. There are simply no words to describe what it was like. I was not twenty of its own diameters from the most amazingly rich farm plot I have ever seen, and was not able to touch a bit of it!

  “It had been so long since it was harvested that substances completely strange to me had developed in its surface layers. There were carbohydrates, of course, and light-element oxides and carbonates which anyone would expect; but there were proteins more fantastically complex than anyone could well imagine. Their emanations nearly drove me wild. They must have been building up and breaking down at incredible speed at that temperature—I had quite an atmosphere out, as a result of boiling off surface matter to use up incoming radiant energy—and they had evolved to an unheard-of degree. And I couldn’t get a taste!

  “I could sense them, though, and in spite of the pain of the meteor bombardment, I stayed near the planet, vacillating as I had done before, for a couple of hundred of its trips around the Sun. That may seem like a short time, but it was long enough to ruin my body past saving. It was only when my senses began to fail that I was able to turn away from it and fight my way out this far. I just managed to get into a stable orbit that would keep me clear of that hellish halo of planet fragments, and every now and then I succeeded in mustering enough energy to call for help, but I knew it was useless. Even had you come much sooner, it would still have been too late for me.

  “I live to warn you, however. Do not go within the orbit of the old fifth planet! Do not even look within it, for if you sense what lies on that unharvested third world, you will be drawn to your doom as surely as I was ordered to mine!”

  THE slave fell silent, and the superintendent pondered its tale as they drifted on about the Sun. He could not, offhand, think of any adequate punishment for the student whose recklessness had brought about this state of affairs. The mere cruelty of ordering endless crowds of slaves to nearly certain death did not affect him particularly; but the waste of it did, very much. To him the thought of hundreds of lifeless bodies drifting endlessly about the Sun, boiling off a little more of their masses with each perihelion passage until nothing was left but a loose collection of high melting-point pebbles, was a painful picture of economic loss. The fact that the best farm plot in the system had apparently become unattainable was also to be considered, and the driving of at least one slave to the extreme of thinking for himself was not to be ignored.

  Of course, everything should be checked before confronting the student with such charges. Only the last, after all, could be considered as yet a matter of objective knowledge.

  The overseer moved abruptly away from the slave—Sunward. The dying creature, seeing him depart, called once more for aid, and was silenced instantly and permanently by a slashing beam of ions. For an instant the overseer regretted the impulsive act—not from gratitude for the warning, to which he attached little weight and which was part of a slave’s duty, but simply because it was impulsive rather than reasoned. But then he reflected that the creature could probably not have told much more anyway, even if it had survived until his return.

  He was in no hurry. He let the gravity of the central furnace draw him in to the orbit of the Giant Planet, his senses covering the half-billion-mile sphere of space ahead where death was reputed to lurk.

  At this range, all seemed innocuous. He watched the inner planets circling rapidly in their paths—even the giant one made most of a revolution during his fall—and noted that the slave had spoken the truth about a companion body to the third planet. But space seemed otherwise empty.

  He did not completely abandon caution, however. What had proven fatal to slaves might be inconvenient or even dangerous to a master.

  HE stopped at the fifth planet’s orbit and began a more minute examination of that suspicious volume of space.

  The small bodies were there, all right. Thousands of them, even though he was not trying to detect anything less than a twentieth of his own diameter. They did show a rather vague preference for the orbit of the old fifth planet, as the slave had said. The greater number circled between the present fourth and fifth orbits, at any rate. There seemed no reason why he could not match velocities well enough to keep out of trouble. Why, chance alone could be trusted to protect him from collision with a few thousand asteroids, when they were scattered through something like ten-to-the-twenty-fourth-power cubic miles of space!

  Still, there was little wisdom in going into possible danger without a very sound reason. It would be well to judge from his present position if such reason existed. His finer senses could easily operate at the half billion miles that separated him from the farthest point of the third planet’s orbit. So, holding his position, he focused his attention on the elusive farm plot in question.

  Being so close to the central furnace, it revolved rapidly. He faced somewhat the same problem in examining it that a man would have trying to recognize a friend on a merry-go-round—assuming that the friend were spinning in his seat like a top at the same time.

  It took the superintendent only a few revolutions of the body to adjust to this situation, however, and as details registered more and more clearly on his consciousness, he began to admit grudgingly that the slave had not exaggerated.

  The plot was fabulous!

  Substances for which he had no name abounded, impressing themselves on the analytic
al sense that was his equivalent of both taste and smell. Strange as they were, he could tell easily that they were foods—packed with available energy and carrying fascinating taste potentialities, organized to a completely unheard-of degree. They were growths of a type and complexity which simply never had a chance to evolve on the regularly harvested worlds of the Galaxy.

  The overseer wondered whether it might not be worth while to let other plots run wild for a few years. His principal vice, by the standards of his people, was gluttony; but the most ascetic of his species would have been tempted uncontrollably by that planet.

  He almost regretted the few tons of food he had taken on from the ringed planet—though he had, he told himself quickly, sacrificed much of that in helping the slave and would lose still more if he decided actually to penetrate into the high-temperature zones near the Sun.

  Huge as his mass was, his normal temperature was so low that life processes went on at an incredibly slow pace. To him, a chemical reaction requiring only a few millennia to go to completion was like a dynamite explosion. A few pounds of organic compounds would feed his miles-thick bulk for many human lifetimes of high activity.

  In short, the slave had been quite right.

  ALMOST involuntarily, rationalizing his appetite as he went, the superintendent permitted himself to drift into the asteroid zone. With only the smallest part of his attention, he assumed a parabolic, free-fall orbit in the general plane of the system, with its perihelion point approximately tangent to the orbit of the third planet. At this distance from the Sun, the difference between parabolic and circular velocities was not too great to permit him to detect even the tiniest particles in time to avoid them. That fact, of course, changed as he fell sunward.

  Perhaps he had been counting on a will power naturally superior to that of the slave who had warned him. If so, he had forgotten the effects of an equally superior imagination. The pull of the third planet was correspondingly stronger and, watching the spinning globe, he was jarred out of an almost hypnotic trance by the first collision. It awakened him to the fact that his natural superiority to the slave race might not be sufficient to keep him out of serious trouble.

  The space around him—he was now well inside the orbit of the fourth planet—was literally crowded with grain-of-dust meteors, each, as he had seen on the slave’s crust, able to blast out a crater many times its own volume in a living body. Individually, they were insignificant; collectively, they were deadly.

  His attention abruptly wrenched back to immediate problems of existence, the superintendent started to check his fall and veer once more toward the safe, frozen emptiness of interstellar space. But the spell of the gourmet’s paradise he had been watching was not that easily thrown off. For long moments, while the planet circled its primary once and again, he hung poised, with gluttony and physical anguish alternately gaining the upper hand in a struggle for possession of his will. Probably he would have lost, alone; but his student did have a conscience.

  “Sir!” The voice came faintly but clearly to his mind. “Don’t stay! You mustn’t! I should never have let you come—but I was angry! I know I was a fool; I should have told you everything!”

  “I learned. It was my own fault.” The superintendent found it curiously difficult to speak. “I came of my own free will and I still think that plot is worth investigation.”

  “No! It’s not your own free will—no will could remain free after seeing what that planet has to offer. I knew it and expected you to die—but I couldn’t go through with it. Come, and quickly. I will help.”

  THE student was in an orbit almost identical with that of the superintendent, though still a good deal farther out. Perhaps it was the act of looking at him, which took his attention momentarily from the alluring object below, that made the older being waver. Whatever it was, the student perceived the break and profited by it.

  “Don’t even look at it again, sir. Look at me, and follow—or if you’d rather not look at me, look at that!”

  He indicated the direction plainly, and the dazed listener looked almost involuntarily.

  The thing he saw was recognizable enough. It consisted of a small nucleus which his senses automatically analyzed. It consisted of methane and other hydrocarbons, some free oxygen, a few other light-element compounds, and had nuggets of heavier elements scattered through it like raisins in a plum pudding. Around it for thousands of miles there extended a tenuous halo of the more volatile of its constituent compounds. The thing was moving away from the Sun in an elliptical orbit, showing no sign of intelligent control. A portion of its gaseous envelope was driven on ahead by the pressure of sunlight from below.

  It was a dead slave, but it could as easily have been a dead master.

  A dead slave was nothing; but the thing that had killed it could do the same to him.

  It was the first time in his incredibly long life that the personal possibility of death had struck home to him; and probably nothing less than that fear could have saved his life.

  With the student close beside, he followed the weirdly glowing corpse out to the farthest point of its orbit; and as it started to fall back into the halo of death girdling that harmless-looking star, he pressed on out into the friendly darkness.

  Perhaps some day that third planet would be harvested; but it would not be by one of his kind—not, at least, until that guarding haze had been swept up by the planets that drifted through its protecting veil.

  IT was not a very good group, Wright reflected. That always seemed to be the case. When he had luck with observing weather, he had no one around to appreciate the things that could be seen. He cast a regretful glance toward the dome of the sixty-inch telescope, where a fellow candidate was taking another plate of his series, and wondered whether there were not some better way than part-time instructing to pay the expenses of a doctorate program.

  Still, the night was good. Most of the time in the latitude—

  “Mr. Wright! Is that a cloud or the Aurora?”

  “If you will stop to consider the present position of the Sun below the horizon,” he answered indirectly, “you will discover that the patch of light you are indicating is directly opposite that point. It lies along the path of the Earth’s shadow, though, of course, well beyond it. It is called the Gegenschein and, like the Zodiacal Light, is not too commonly visible at this latitude. We did see the Light some time ago, if you remember, on an evening when we started observing earlier. Actually, the Gegenschein is a continuation of the luminous band we call the Zodiacal Light. The latter can sometimes be traced all the way around the sky to the point we are now watching.”

  “What causes them?”

  “The most reasonable assumption is that they are light reflected from small, solid particles—meteors. Apparently a cloud of such matter extends outward for some distance past the Earth’s orbit, though just how far, it is hard to say. It grows fainter with distance from the Sun, as would be expected, except for the patch we call the Gegenschein.”

  “Why the exception?”

  “I think one of you can answer that.”

  “Would it be for the same reason that the full Moon is so much more than twice as bright as either quarter? Simply because the particles are rough, and appear dark in most positions because of the shadows of irregularities on their own surfaces—shadows which disappear when the light is behind the observer?”

  “I think you will agree that that would account for it,” Wright said. “Evidently the meteors are there, are large compared to wavelengths of visible light, and form a definite part of the Solar System. I believe it was once estimated that if the space inside the Earth’s orbit contained particles one millimeter in diameter and five miles apart, they would reflect enough light to account for what we are observing. They might, of course, be smaller and more numerous. Only that amount of reflecting surface is necessary.”

  “You had me worried,” another voice broke in. “I’d been hearing for years that there would be little reas
on to fear collision with meteors when we finally get a rocket out of the atmosphere. For a moment, I thought a cloud such as you were working up to would riddle anything that got into space. One pinhead every five miles isn’t so bad, though.”

  “There is a fairly good chance of collision, I would say,” returned Wright, “but just what damage particles of that size would do, I am not sure. It seems rather likely that they would be volatilized by impact. How the hull of a rocket would react, we will have to find out by experience. I wouldn’t mind taking the risk myself. I think we can sum up the greatest possibilities by saying that the meteoric content of the Solar System has and will have nothing but nuisance value to the human race, whether or not we ever leave our own planet.”

  A streak of white fire arced silently across the sky, putting a fitting period to the subject.

  Wright wondered whether it would appear on his friend’s photographic plate.

  1953

  CRITICAL FACTOR

  Air Force bomber pilot, science teacher and scoutmaster, Hal Clement possesses a tremendous competitive advantage over the majority of his colleagues in the ranks of top-notch science-fiction writers: He understands what the scientists are talking about. This is tough on his competitors but works beautifully for the rest of us; for by ruthlessly capitalizing on his advantage he is enabled to write such horrifyingly plausible fantasies of science as——

  Pentong, excited for the first time in his life, raced northward. There was no need to grope or feel his way; this close to the great earthquake zone there were always minor tremors, and their echoes from the dense basalt below and the emptiness above reached him almost constantly. The treacherous sandstone strata, which beguiled the lazy traveler with the ease of penetration they offered and then led him up to the zones of death, were easy to spot; Pentong actually used them now, for seeing was so good that he could leave them with plenty of time to seek the safer levels below whenever they started to slope.