by Hal Clement
They were nineteen minutes from perihelion when a growing sense of complacency was rudely shattered. There was no warning—one could hardly be expected at three hundred twenty-five miles a second.
One instant they were floating at their instruments, doing their allotted work, at peace with the universe; the next there was a violent jolt, sparks flew from exposed metal terminals, and every remote indicator in the vessel went dead.
For a moment there was silence; the phenomenon ended as abruptly as it had started. Then there was a mixed chorus of yells, mostly of surprise and dismay, a few of pain. Some of the men had been burned by spark discharges. One had also been knocked out by an electric shock, and it was fortunate that the emergency lights had not been affected; they sprang automatically to life as the main ones failed, and order was quickly restored. One of the engineers applied mouth-to-mouth respiration to the shock victim—aesthetic or not, it is the only sort practical in the weightless condition—and each of the scientists began trouble shooting.
None of the remote gear registered in any way, but much of the apparatus inside the ship was still functioning, and a tentative explanation was quickly reached.
“Magnetic field,” was Mallion’s terse comment, “size impossible to tell, just as impossible to tell what formed or maintained it. We went through it at three hundred twenty miles a second, plus. If this ship had been metal, it would probably have exploded; as it was, this general sort of thing was a considered possibility and there are no long conducting paths anywhere in the ship—except the instrument controls. The field intensity was between ten and a hundred Gauss. We’ve taken all the outside readings we’re going to, I’m afraid.”
“But we can’t stop now!” howled Donegan. “We need pictures—hundreds more of them. How do we correlate all the stuff we have, and the things that will still show on the inside instruments we can still use, unless there are pictures—it’s fine to say that this or that or the other thing comes from a prominence, or a flare, or what have you, but we won’t know it does, or anything about the size of the flare . . .”
“I understand, sympathize, and agree; but what do you propose to do about it? I’d bet a small but significant sum that the cable coming in through the access tunnel did explode. Something certainly stopped the current surge before all the instruments here burned up.”
“Come on, Dr. Donegan. Get your suit.” It was Ries, of course. The physicist looked at him, must have read his mind, and leaped toward his locker.
“What are you madmen up to?” shouted Mallion. “You can’t go out to that camera—you’d be a couple of moths in a candle flame, to put it mildly!”
“Use your brain, not your thalamus, Doc,” Ries called over his shoulder. Welland said nothing. Two minutes later the pair of madmen were in the air lock, and sixty seconds after that were floating as rapidly as they dared out the tunnel.
The lights were out, but seeing was easy. There was plenty of illumination from the mouth of the tunnel, crooked as the passage was; and the two had to use the filters on their face plates long before they reached the opening. By that time, the very snow around them seemed to be glowing—and may very well have been doing just that, since light must have filtered for some distance in through the packed crystalloids as well as bounced its way around the tunnel bends.
Ries had left his foil shelters at the first bend. There was some loose snow still on hand from his earlier experiments, and they stuffed as much of this as they could between the thin metal layers, and took several of the sandwiched slabs with them as they gingerly approached the opening. They held one of the larger of these—about four feet square—ahead of them as they went; but it proved insufficient when they got within a few yards of the mouth. The trouble was not that the shield failed, but that it wasn’t big enough; no matter how close to the opening they came, the entire sky remained a sea of flame. They retreated a little way and Ries rapidly altered the foil armor, bending the sheets and wiring them together until he had a beehive-shaped affair large enough to shield a man. He used the last of their snow in this assembly.
Covered almost completely, he went alone to the tunnel mouth, and this time had no trouble. He was able to use a loop of control wire as a safety, and by hooking his toes under this reached the instrument. It had settled quite a bit—its case and mounting had transmitted heat as planned to the broad silver feet, and these had maintained good surface contact. Naturally a good deal of comet material had boiled away from under them, and the whole installation was in a pit over two feet deep and eight in width. The general lowering of the comet’s surface was less obvious.
The vanes of the legs were fairly well sunk into the surface, but with gravity as it was, the only difficulty in freeing them was the perennial one—the risk of giving too much upward momentum. Ries avoided this, got camera and mounting loose, and as quickly as possible brought them back into the tunnel. There was no need to disconnect the control wire from the main cable; as Mallion had predicted, both had disappeared. Their explosion had scarred a deep groove along the tunnel wall at several points where they had been close to the side. Ries regretted their loss; without them he had some difficulty getting himself and his burden started downward, and he wanted the camera into the tunnel’s relative shelter as quickly as possible. With its heat-shedding “feet” out of contact with the ground, it would not take long to heat up dangerously. Also, with the comet now whipping closer and closer to perihelion, there was already an annoyingly large gap in the photographic record.
Back in the tunnel. Ries improvised another set of shields for the camera and its operator, and checked the one he had used to see how much snow remained in it. There was some, but discouragingly little. He placed his helmet against that of Doncgan and spoke—the radios were useless in the Sun’s static.
“You can’t go out until we get more snow for this thing, and you’ll have to come back every few minutes for a refill. I’d do the photography, but you know better than I what has to be taken. I hope you can make out what you need to see through the sixty-five hundred filter in the shield I made for the finder. I’ll be back.”
He started back down the tunnel, but at the second turn met another suited figure coming out—with a large bag of snow. He recognized Pawlak by the number on the suit, since the face of the occupant was invisible behind the filter. Ries took the bag and gestured his thanks; Pawlak indicated that he would go back and bring more, and started on this errand. Ries reappeared at the camera soon enough to surprise his companion, but the physicist wasted no time in questions. The two men restuffed the shields with snow, and Donegan went back to the tunnel mouth to do his job.
Through the filter, the angry surface of the sun blazed a fiery orange. Features were clear enough, though not always easy to interpret. Individual “rice grains” were clearly visible; a small spot, badly foreshortened, showed far to one side. By moving his head as far as the shield allowed, the observer could see well away from the camera’s line of sight; doing this, of course, blued the sun as the ray path difference between the reflecting layers in the filter was shortened. He could not tell exactly what wave length he was using at any given angle, but he quickly learned to make use of the rather crude “tuning” that angle change afforded. He began shooting, first the spot and its neighborhood, altering the camera filter wave length regularly as he did so. Then he found something that might have been a calcium flocculus and took a series around it; then feature after feature caught his eye, and he shot and shot, trying to get each field through the full wavelength range of the camera at about fifty Angstrom intervals plus definite lengths which he knew should be there—the various series lines of hydrogen and of neutral and ionized helium particularly, though he did not neglect such metals as calcium and sodium.
He was distracted by a pull on his armored foot; Ries had come up, inadequately protected by the single remaining sheet of “parasol,” to warn him to recharge his own shield. Reluctantly he did so, grudging the time. Ries p
acked snow against the feet of the camera mounting while Donegan stuffed it between the foil layers of his shield as rapidly as his spacesuited hands could work. The moment this was done he headed back to the tunnel mouth, now not so far away as it had been, and resumed operations.
They must have been almost exactly at perihelion then. Donegan neither knew nor cared. He knew that the camera held film enough to let him take one picture a second for about ninety minutes, and he intended to use all of it if he could. He simply scanned the sun as completely as his eyesight, the protecting filter, and his own knowledge permitted, and recorded as completely as possible everything even slightly out of the ordinary that he saw. He knew that many instruments were still at work in the ship, even though many were not, and he knew that some of the devices on the comet’s surface would function—or should function—automatically even though remote control was gone; and he intended that there should be a complete record in pictures of everything which might be responsible for whatever those machines recorded. He did a good job.
Not too many—in fact, as time went on, too few—yards below him Ries also worked. If being an instrument maintenance specialist involved moving snow, and in this part of the universe it seemed to involve little else, then he would move snow. He had plenty of it; Pawlak kept bringing more and more bags of the stuff. Also, on his second trip, the engineer produced a lengthy coil of wire; and at the first opportunity Ries fastened one end of this to Donegan’s ankle. It served two purposes—it was no longer necessary to go out to let the fellow know by physical contact that his time was getting short, and it let the observer get back to work more quickly. Since he was belayed to Ries, who could brace himself against the tunnel walls beyond the bend, there was no worry of going back to the surface too rapidly and being unable to stop.
Ries kept busy. No one ever knew whether he did it silently or not, since the radios were unavailable. It was generally taken for granted that he grumbled as usual, and he may very well have done just that, or even surpassed himself. Hanging weightless in a white-glowing tunnel, trying to read a watch through the heaviest solar filter made for space helmets, holding one end of a line whose other end was keeping a man and a fantastically valuable camera from drifting away and becoming part of the solar corona, all the while trying to organize a number of large plastic sacks of pulverized frozen water, ammonia, and methane which persistently gathered around him would have driven a more self-controlled man than Ries to bad language.
Of course, Donegan didn’t map the whole surface. This would take quite a while, using a camera with a half degree field on a surface over ninety-five degrees across, even when the surface in question is partly hidden by the local horizon. It was made even more impossible by their rate of motion; parabolic velocity at a distance of five hundred eighty thousand miles from Sol’s center is just about three hundred thirty miles per second, and that produced noticeable relative motion even against a background a hundred and fifty thousand miles away. Features were disappearing below the solar horizon, sometimes, before Donegan could get around to them. Even Ries could think of no solution to this difficulty, when the physicist complained of it on one of his trips for more snow.
At this point, the sun’s apparent motion in latitude was more rapid than that in longitude—the comet was changing its direction from the sun more rapidly than it was rotating. The resultant motion across the sky was a little hard to predict, but the physicist knew that the center of the solar disk would set permanently at the latitude of the tunnel mouth an hour and three-quarters after perihelion. The angular size of the disk being what it was, there would be some observing after that, but how much depended on what might be called the local time of day, and he had not attempted to figure that out. He simply observed and photographed, except when Ries dragged him forcibly back to get his shield recharged.
Gradually the gigantic disk shrank. It never was far above the local horizon, so there was always something with which to compare it, and the shrinking could be noticed. Also, Ries could tell as time went on that there was a little more snow left in Donegan’s shield each time it came back for refilling. Evidently they were past the worst.
But the sun had taken its toll. The mouth of the tunnel was much closer to the ship than it had been; several times Ries had been forced back to another section of tunnel with his snow bags, and each resumption of observation by Donegan had involved a shorter trip than before to the surface. Ries, Donegan, and Pawlak were the only members of the expedition to know just how far the evaporation was progressing, since the echo-sounder had been wrecked by the magnetic field; they were never sure afterward whether this was good or not. Those inside were sustained, presumably, by their faith in mathematics. For the physicists this was adequate, but it might not have been for Ries if he had been with them. In any case, he didn’t worry much about the fate of the comet after perihelion had been passed; he had too many other troubles, even though his activity had quickly become routine. This left him free to complain—strictly to himself.
Donegan was furious when he finally realized that the sun was going to set at his observing station while it was still close enough to photograph. Like Ries, however, he had no way of expressing his annoyance so that anyone could hear him; and as it turned out, it would have been wasted breath. Observation was cut even shorter by something else.
They had been driven down to what had been originally the third bend in the tunnel, and at this point the passage ran horizontally for a time. Pawlak had just come to the other end of this straight stretch with what he hoped would be his last load of snow when something settled gently through its roof between him and Ries. He leaped toward it, dropping his burden, and discovered that it was one of the instruments which had been on the surface. Its silver cover was slightly corroded, and the feet of its mounting badly so. Apparently its reflecting powers had been lowered by the surface change, and it was absorbing more energy than an equivalent area of comet; so its temperature had gone up accordingly, and it had melted its way below the rest of the surface.
Low as the sun was, it was shining into the hole left by the instrument; evidently the pit it had made was very broad and shallow. Pawlak made his way around the piece of gear and up to Ries, whose attention was directed elsewhere, and reported what had happened. The instrument man looked back down the tunnel and began to haul in on the line attached to Donegan. The physicist was furious when he arrived, and the fact became evident when the three helmets were brought together.
“What in blazes is going on here?” he fulminated. “You can’t make me believe my shield had boiled dry again—I haven’t been out five minutes, and the loads are lasting longer now. We’re losing the sun, you idiot; I can’t come back because someone had a brainstorm or can’t read a watch—”
Pawlak interrupted by repeating his report. It did not affect Donegan.
“So what?” he blazed. “We expected that. All the gear around the tunnel mouth has sunk—we’re in a big pit now anyway. That’s making things still worse—we’ll lose sight of the sun that much sooner. Now let me get back and work!”
“Go back and work if you want, provided you can do anything with the naked eye,” retorted Ries, “but the camera’s going back to the ship pronto. That’s one thing we forgot—or maybe it was just assumed that gaseous ammonia in this concentration and at this temperature wouldn’t do anything to silver. Maybe it isn’t the ammonia, for all I know; maybe it’s something we’ve been picking up from the corona; but look at that camera of yours! The polish is gone; it’s picking up heat much faster than it was expected to, and not getting rid of it any quicker. If that magazine of exposed film you have in there gets too hot, you’ll have wasted a lot of work. Now come on, or else let me take the camera back.” Ries started along the tunnel without further words, and the physicist followed reluctantly.
Inside, Donegan disappeared with his precious film magazine, without taking time to thank Ries.
“Self-centered character,” he
muttered. “Not a word to anyone—just off to develop his film before somebody opens the cartridge, I suppose.”
“You can’t blame him,” Ries said mildly. “He did a lot of work for it.”
“He did a lot of work? How about us? How about you; it was all your idea in the first place—”
“Careful, Joe, or they’ll be taking my nickname away from me and giving it to you. Come on; I want to see Doc Sonne. My feet hurt.” He made his way to the main deck, and Pawlak drifted after him, grumbling. By the time the engineer arrived, the rest of the group was overwhelming Ries with compliments, and the fellow was grinning broadly. It began to look as though the name “Grumpy” would have to find a new owner.
But habit is hard to break. The doctor approached, and without removing his patient’s shoes dredged a tube of ointment out of his equipment bag.
“Burn ointment,” the doctor replied. “It’ll probably be enough; you shouldn’t have taken too bad a dose. I’ll have you patched up in a minute. Let’s get those shoes off.”
“Now wouldn’t you know it,” said Ries aloud. “Not even the doctor around here can do the right thing at the right time. Physicists who want A’s gear fixed on B’s time—won’t let a man go out to do a job in the only way it can be done—won’t give a person time to rest—and now,” it was the old Grumpy back again, “a man spends two hours or so swimming around among sacks of frozen methane, which melts at about a hundred and eighty-five degrees Centigrade below zero—that’s about two hundred and ninety below, Fahrenheit, doctor—and the doctor wants to use burn ointment. Break out the frostbite remedy, will you, please? My feet hurt.”
THE END
1963
THE GREEN WORLD
The planet was an enigma—and its solution was death!
