Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Structurally and functionally, it straddled the accepted arbitrary borderline between nanotech equipment and pseudolife; it had been grown like the cans, not manufactured, and much of its internal equipment was of molecular size.

  “Take it, Art. Where to?”

  “Aft, I’d say. I’ll sample at each meter until we reach the exhaust trail, and then really dig. The smellers report ready.”

  The “smellers” were of course the analytical equipment, and everyone began to tense up again as the egg crawled to its first sampling point and scraped up a specimen.

  “How hard?” queried several voices at once.

  “About three. If it’s a crust, it must be pretty thick to take Oceanus’ weight.”

  “Composition?” This answer was slower in coming, naturally, but overall percentages were ready in less than a minute.

  “Carbon fifteen point seven one; nitrogen eighteen point eight eight; hydrogen four point one one; oxygen twenty-eight point two five; phosphorus—”

  “Phosphorus?” Again, several voices merged. The first three species had all been observed in samples of the atmospheric smog, and there was nothing surprising about the oxygen, since water ice had been seen; but this was the first element past the second period to be detected on Titan. It was also something more hoped than expected. Study of prehistoric substances had high mission priority, but no one had been sure there would be anything of the sort to study; and even the now pretty certain tectonic activity might not bring material from very deep in the satellite. That would depend on the still unknown cause of the activity.

  Regardless of the fact that only two thirds of the sample mass had been accounted for, Ginger Xalco called out emphatically, “Structure, for goodness’ sake.”

  No one suggested that the elemental analysis be finished first, certainly not Goodell, who might have pulled rank if he had chosen, but who shared her feelings. He set appropriate internal machinery to work while the lab crawled on to its next sample site, and its next, and its next.

  “It’s a gel, really,” he said at last. “The solvent—pardon me, dispersing agent—is methanol. Most of the rest of the material seems to be polymers of one sort or another. Some of it’s carbohydrate, a lot has nitrogen, but it’s going to take a while to find whether we’re dealing with what we’d consider proteins—polypeptides made of the same amino acids we are.”

  “Left or right?” asked Collos and Martucci together.

  “You’ll have to wait even longer for that—”

  “Wait a minute!” Inger cut in. “Even at this temperature and gravity a gel has no business holding up a jet for very long. Gene back to outside coverage! Quick!”

  Belvew didn’t need to ask what his partner had in mind; he flicked his Aitoff back to the outside scene instantly. For a moment he felt relief, and then took a second look at his keels. Without word, warning, or delay he fed energy and mass to the plasma arcs and watched the main accelerometer, wishing once again that he could feel the jet’s response directly.

  For a moment the meter stayed at zero; the surface seemed to be clinging to the keels, which had sunk into it for several centimeters, and Belvew slowly increased the thrust. Then the landscape suddenly jerked backward, and a moment later Oceanus was airborne.

  Goodell gave an indignant cry as his lab, caught by the exhaust, stopped sending data. The pilot paid no attention for the moment, as he concentrated on reaching ram speed as quickly as possible while using a minimum of mass; it was Inger who answered the complaint.

  “Sorry, Art. We can grow more labs, but not more jets. Did anything else come in before we blew your machine away?”

  “No. And we don’t have the sample, either.” Inger pondered for a moment, then suggested, “Maybe we can find it. The lab should have held up; the exhaust cools pretty quickly, and we’d have been getting the data by beam to the plane. That would have been thrown off line. Order it to broadcast, and Gene can make some low passes back along the track; maybe we can get its signals.”

  “What if it reached the lake? It must have been blown that way.”

  “So much the better. We could use a reading on the composition of that juice. If anything is certain, it’s that it’s different from what we take from the clouds. Look at the bright side, Art.”

  The answer was a grunt which might have meant anything. Barn’s instruments, however, showed that Goodell had indeed sent the “Broadcast” command to the lab; whether he was waiting more eagerly for resumption of data flow or for a chance to go on complaining was anyone’s guess.

  Gene had been listening, even with his attention on piloting. In spite of his sympathy for Goodell’s feelings, he went up to a little over one kilometer, steered out over the lake to find a cumulus cloud and replaced the reaction mass he had just used. Then he increased thrust and nosed down—he was actually as impatient as any of the others, and more optimistic than most of them—and headed back toward shore and former landing site. He was down to fifty meters by the time the glassy patch showed ahead.

  He cut back thrust and allowed the jet to slow to ramstall-plus-twenty, and made four passes over the area at that speed, first following and then paralleling the line of the earlier landing and takeoff.

  No signals registered. With a grim expression which no one could see, and some muttered remarks which he took care no one could hear, he reset the camber, closed the ramjet intakes, and went back to rocket mode; but two more passes at a bare fifteen meters altitude and just above wing stall—neither Goodell or anyone else was going to say he hadn’t tried, whatever they might think of his flying judgement—still produced no signals. The lab had either been wrecked, though that still seemed rather unlikely, or was too deep in the lake for its signals to be picked up. The presumably nonpolar liquid shouldn’t interfere greatly with radio waves, but in broadcast mode any great depth certainly would. Titan was a strange place, but the inverse square law still applied. There was no basis yet even for guesses at the depths of the liquid bodies; that item had a very low priority in the program, though it would come eventually.

  “Sorry, Art,” Belvew said at last as he increased thrust, returned to ramjet mode when speed sufficed, and began to climb away from the area. “I had hopes too, but I guess we’ve lost it. Have you any ideas what could produce a gel here?”

  “I have enough trouble guessing what could produce methanol.”

  “Why?” retorted Belvew. “The makings are all there. Ice and methane could do it directly, with release of hydrogen. Maybe some of the pre-life catalysts you’re hoping we’d find are actually here, if you think the reaction would go too slowly at ninety K’s.”

  “Naughty, naughty!” cut in Maria. “Catalysts wouldn’t help. That’s endothermic to the tune of over a hundred kilojoules.” For a moment Gene felt an impulse to kick himself. He knew the woman hadn’t had that datum in her head, but he, too, could have called it up before making himself sound silly. Then he saw a way out.

  “The energy could come from local heat,” he said, trying to keep smugness out of his voice.

  “At ninety kelvins?”

  “Sure. I did mention the other product. Hydrogen would leave the scene, so no back reaction—”

  “That would happen only if it could leave the scene.” Goodell had pounced on the hypothesis, and was enjoying himself. “That would be at or very near the surface, not deep underground—”

  “Or in or just under a lake,” Ginger cut in. “We’ll have to look for bubbles.”

  “And lower than ordinary temperatures,” Belvew finished. “All right, we’ll look. Do some planning, you types with imaginations. I’m going to hit Line Five. Give me direction and time, Maria.”

  The fifth planned seismic array was a quarter of the way around Titan from Lake Carver, ten or eleven hours flight at standard jet speed and over two even at full thrust in the thinner air tens of kilometers up. Belvew set everything on automatic, turned his watch over to Maria, and decided to eat and sleep. He nee
ded the rest. A healthy twenty-five-year-old might have gone through the last hour casually, but he belonged to neither category. There were few now on Earth who did. Evolution of disease organisms had gotten farther and farther ahead of medical research: several dozen, counting new variations of older ailments such as leukemia, were now on the list of major health problems. Four of these involved sterility, three of them in women. Earth’s human population had actually halved in the last four decades, and the average age was barely twenty years in spite of, or because of, the species’ usual reaction to any major threat.

  Suggested explanations among the panicked survivors were legion; satisfactory ones nonexistent. Even supernaturalists had had to fall back on Noachian-flood-type divine wrath at general materialism rather than specific sins. The scientists had done better, but not very much; each virus and other causal organism had been identified beyond reasonable doubt, but the information had not yet produced much effective treatment. There were two favored notions—they showed little sign of graduation to theories—among scientists about the basic cause of the trend: the organisms had been tailored by people with unspecified, but presumably insane by most standards, motives; or the sudden appearance of so many almost at once was merely a statistical event like a baseball batting slump or winning streak.

  Belvew, who liked people, preferred the latter idea, but was too good a scientist to feel sure of it. CPRS, the ailment which would finish turning his own bones to something like eggshell china in another two or three years, would have taken only a little manipulation to produce from a normal human gene.

  He shifted to full automatic control, cutting out the waldo entirely, and extracted himself from the suit. It could use servicing too; he floated back to his own cell and napped while its various life support devices were recharged, cleaned, and otherwise readied for further use. The suits were not full-recycling, indefinitely lasting affairs; they had been designed foremost as waldoes. They did, of course, have fusers and life support capacity designed for Titan’s environment, but could keep the wearer comfortable for only thirty hours or so there, and alive for perhaps twenty more.

  Calcium-phosphorus recrystallization syndrome also, while robbing him of energy, kept him from sleeping for very long at a time, so he was back with Oceanus well before it reached the planned site of the next seismic array. There was nothing to do but watch scenery and, of course, hypothesize on the cause of the various features. He could see the ground well enough from this height, since he could use frequencies able to pierce the small amount of smog which was below him. There were block mountains and rift valleys; there were lakes large and small. The background, as well as the covering of nearly all the more or less horizontal area, might be the hypothetical tar dust; the factory had been planted on such a surface, but at the time no analysis had been possible. Neither cans nor labs had yet been grown.

  None of the lakes was large enough to be called an ocean, as mapping from orbit had made clear enough. However, it now seemed that fully a tenth of the satellite’s surface was occupied by such bodies, ranging in size from Carver, about the area of Earth’s Lake Victoria, down to puddles. The Collos Patches were neither as numerous nor as large, but far from rare.

  The locations of the lakes were to some extent controlled by topography, of course; water is a unique liquid, but not in its tendency to flow downhill. Nobody, however, had yet found any order or sense in the size, location, or arrangement of the smooth patches. Belvew amused himself, as he had before, in trying to organize patterns out of those he passed over. He reached his target area without coming up with anything more meaningful than constellations.

  Maria, who had also slept, warned that it was time to decrease thrust. The jet began to slow and settle. A real-surroundings interruption occurred just after the descent started, and Belvew wondered briefly whether he should override the device. He decided against it; his tanks were full, he would be travelling high enough and fast enough to preclude any kind of stall as he sowed the cans, and vertical disturbances could be seen at a safe distance. It was only while inside them, slowed down to collecting speed, that there was any danger.

  Any known danger, he reminded himself. Any known danger except indentifying too closely with the aircraft, which the interruptions were intended to prevent. He brought his attention back to the job as Maria began issuing more specific directions.

  He had lined up on course, reached standard speed and delivery altitude, and released the first dozen of the Line Five cans when an interruption came from a voice no one had heard for weeks. It had announced then that the last of the six relay stations which kept the station in potential instant contact with all of Titan’s surface was properly adjusted in orbit, and thus cleared the crew to get the actual project under way. They had mostly forgotten it since.

  “There is a change in map detail at the factory site. Please evaluate.” The speaker was Status, the data handler dedicated to constant rechecking of the surface, the orbits of the station and relay units, the operation of the closed-cycle life support systems, and the current medical condition of each of the explorers. Its announcement automatically put Maria, responsible for surface mapping, in charge. As usual, the voice with which she responded was calm.

  “Gene, you’re on track. You still have forty-four cans on board, which will complete about two-thirds Line Five. When they’re gone, your heading back to the factory starts at three eleven. I’ll get back to you with more headings for the Great Circle when you need them, or brief Status if it seems likely I’ll be too busy. Barn, standard: keep an eye on Gene. Art, get any readings you can from the factory itself while I check the details Status couldn’t handle. The rest of you carry on. I’ll keep everyone informed.” She fell silent for several minutes while she examined the surface around the factory with every frequency at her command.

  “The change,” she resumed at last, “seems to be the appearance of another of our glassy patches. Its texture is identical with the others, as far as I can tell. It is almost perfectly circular, just over twenty meters across, and its center is one hundred-forty four meters from the opening of the factory’s release port and directly in line with that opening—that is, directly north. Azimuth zero.”

  “How long did it take to reach that size?” asked Goodell. “Can Status tell us when the last check of the site was made? And are there enough observations to tell whether it appeared all at once or grew from a center?”

  “Less than four hours, yes, and no,” replied the mapper. “That’s the time of the last check, and there was no sign of the patch then. Does the factory itself have any data?”

  “ ‘Fraid not. It’s been making twenty cans and one lab an hour and paying no attention to above-ground surroundings since it ripened.”

  Everyone was hearing this exchange, of course, and Belvew cut in without allowing his eyes to leave his screen.

  “Above ground? But how about below? Do any of its roots go toward the patch?”

  Goodell was silent for some seconds, and finally answered in a rather embarrassed and surprised tone, “I can’t tell. Roots went out in all directions, of course, and I can tell pretty much what materials have been coming in through each major one, but we never thought of needing to know just which absolute direction any one root was taking.”

  There must have been a spectrum of reactions to this announcement, but neither laughter nor anger was audible. The jet ejected several more cans before its pilot could think of another useful question.

  “The root which went east, toward the cliff, would be picking up water sooner or—well, sooner. The factory couldn’t have started production without oxygen. Does any one of them show a richer water take than the others?”

  “Yes. Much richer. Number 12.”

  “Then it’s a reasonable guess that that one went toward the mountain, which seems to be a block of ice. Whichever is ninety degrees counterclockwise from Twelve must be pretty close to under the new patch, right?”

  “Ri
ght. Unfortunately—”

  “Unfortunately? You mean you don’t know the relative directions either?”

  “No. I don’t know whether the numbers go one way or the other, or even if the numbers are in order. I labelled them as they started to pick up raw material. Sorry. Even if we’d wanted to, there was no other way to distinguish that.”

  “So there goes any chance of analyzing that patch with the factory.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “So I go back and plant more labs around the factory.”

  “You drop the rest of your cans first,” Maria cut in. “It won’t make much difference in time. You’ll be a couple of hours getting back, and it’s where you’d be going anyway for more cans. There’s no reason to believe there’s any hurry; we don’t know what causes these patches, and we can find out enough by watching this one grow if it does.”

  “There could be need if the factory itself has anything to do with its appearance,” Goodell pointed out. Belvew started to say something, but Maria was first.

  “We’ll worry about that if it seems in order. I’ll watch how fast, and which way if any special one, this thing grows. If it does. Art, keep really close tabs on the factory’s behavior; that’s the only other thing I can think of which might let us know of any such connection. Any other ideas?”

  “Five cans to go,” Belvew answered, with no obvious relevance. “What was that return heading again?”

  Maria told him, and he finished his run in silence. He then climbed to compromise height—air thin enough for low resistance while still dense enough for the ramjets—eased in full thrust, took up the Great Circle heading back to the factory, set Oceanus on automatic control, and shifted his screen to the instruments being used by Art, Maria, and the others. There would be no verticals at this height, and he refused to worry over unknown dangers, especially when Barn was also watching. On top of everything else, as far as his own attitude went, while scientific/military procedure was of course an important and sometimes even a life-and-death matter, freedom to pay attention to a problem was equally so. The usual rank distinction between theorists and mere observers was absent here. The smooth patches might not be a military or any other kind of risk, but they now involved a basic situation change near the only equipment source currently on Titan—one which would take days at least to replace, if they did have to plant a new factory—and the more minds engaged on the problem the better.