Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Barn Inger felt just the same, and he couldn’t see the jet’s wings either.

  It was daylight at the factory site, and would be for several more Earth days. The aircraft was on the night side, though Belvew expected to see the fuzzy, reddened blob of the sun—much of the smog was still above him—in another few minutes. Both factory and flyer were on the hemisphere away from Saturn; to see the big disc, pierced by the needle of its edge-on rings, he’d have had to shift to a real-surroundings view. Even that might not work, since the station naturally spent over a third of the time in Titan’s Saturn-shadow, and usually neither he nor any of the others knew just where they were in its orbit. That was something for Status to keep track of.

  Even by day, visible light was no use for examining the factory from above the atmosphere; much longer waves were needed, and for these to have really high resolution the readings from at least a few kilometers of orbit travel had to be combined into single ‘pictures’ by the data processors. Maria could not, quite, watch her surface images closely in real time. By now, it had occurred to everyone in the group how nice it would have been to provide the factory with a camera, but no one mentioned this aloud. “If onlys” were against military, scientific, and medical discipline as well as common sense; all of these demanded dealing with things as they were.

  How things were was slowly becoming more apparent. Before Belvew could see the sun, Maria announced that the patch was six centimeters broader on the east-west line and eight on the north-south than it had been when first measured. Half-an-hour later both amounts had increased by another ten centimeters, and the distance from the centroid of the patch to the factory’s nearest point was smaller by nearly a meter.

  “Suggests it’s actually moving, not just growing more one way than the other,” Bam pointed out.

  “Suggests I was wrong about its being caused by rain,” was Maria’s less enthusiastic comment.

  “Are you sure? Would the factory report rain?” asked Belvew.

  “No, but my viewers would. It hasn’t rained there since we planted the rig. And I know rain when I see it; there’s been plenty of it here and there on Titan. You ought to know, Gene.”

  “I do. It’s always been from verticals either over the lakes or very close to them. The general winds are so slow that a thunderstorm always dies before it can get very far from the lake that spawned it.”

  “It seems to,” was Goodell’s more pessimistic word. “In any case, if all these things are gel like the one we started to examine, you’d have to explain how liquid methane turned into methyl alcohol.”

  “There was a suggestion about that, and the factory is close to an ice source,” Ginger pointed out.

  “But not to a lake,” Maria admitted, still rather sadly.

  “So Gene drops another lab the second he gets there.”

  “Of course,” replied the pilot. “That’ll still be nearly an hour, though. Aren’t there a good many ready at the factory? Why not get one of those on the job—or two or three, if that’ll make things faster?”

  “Pete, you’re the strongest of us by a good deal. If I unseal my room, would you take the chance of a quick visit and kick me? You can hold your breath long enough.”

  “No, Art,” replied Martucci, “but not because I’m afraid of breaking quarantine. I’ll come and stay as long as you want if it will help your lab work, but I don’t see how it would.”

  “Don’t rub it in. I have a lab on the way, Gene.” Goodell was obviously embarrassed, as the others would have been for him if they had not been equally guilty, and neither his morale slip nor the general oversight was mentioned again.

  “Better do samples on the way to the patch, not just after the lab arrives. We’ll need to compare the patch with the ground in its neighborhood,” pointed out Ginger. This obvious suggestion made everyone feel better; they could all share the onus of not thinking to use labs from the factory long before, and the point had been stressed that Goodell needn’t deem himself the only sinner.

  The readings from the lowly travelling lab held everyone’s close attention while the jet neared mountain and factory and began its letdown. Since neither Belvew nor Inger could have seen the white accumulation which started to grow on the leading edges of its wings shortly after the descent began, this made no real difference. Even when the pilot shifted full attention to his job as final approach and landing neared, neither his eyes nor his waldo sensors told him what was coming, though the accumulation was now projecting nearly three centimeters. In effect it sharpened the leading edges, but did not yet make real difference in either lift or drag. With a few hundred more flying hours experience at a wide enough variety of altitudes and speeds, Gene might have come to recognize the tiny discrepancy between thrust and airspeed. Had he actually been riding in the jet for that much time, he might even have felt it.

  And if the material had remained where it was until after he had touched down, no one might ever have known about it. There were instruments to read and report on skin temperature at many points on the machine, but not there; even with nano-and pseudo-life technology, and their effect of making complex devices almost costless to build, there were limits to how much could be installed on even a fusion powered flying machine. The heat which leaked from the pipes and was at once carried away by the airstream, so that all but the few centimeters of wing adjacent to the ramjets themselves stayed at ambient temperature, now began to creep farther out as the speed dropped to and below tens of meters per second.

  The changing camber applied by Belvew as wing stall approached may or may not have contributed to what finally happened. The operator’s tiny pitch and yaw corrections as he maintained a straight and steady descent also may have contributed, or may not. A trace of turbulence in Titan’s own air may even have been all that was needed.

  Whatever the cause, the sharp white rim on the front of the left wing suddenly fell or blew away from the slightly warmed surface, and the lift on that side, already more dependent on wing area than on shape, dropped. It decreased only a little, but did it suddenly, and probably not even an automatic control could have done anything useful at such low airspeed.

  The wing, short as it was, grazed the ground with its tip, and Oceanus‘ nose whipped down and to the left. Belvew felt a simultaneous kick from practically all his turbulence sensors. At the same instant most of the central area of his Aitoff went blank, and the mosaic of sections which should have shown the view to the rear displayed only Titan’s pale peach sky.

  There was nothing useful to say for the moment, and Gene again made sure no one heard him saying it. “There couldn’t have been any turbulence there!” was too much like an excuse for an adult, much less a disciplined and moderately high ranking scientist, to utter aloud. Everyone’s thoughts reached the same point on the logic route, though the milestones didn’t always pass in the same order.

  No ground camera views. No transport until. Seismic nets not finished. Weather tracers not even started. Labs now available only at their source, and something odd happening there.

  Humanity is a visually oriented species, and in seconds Maria was building a new image of the factory site, whose details improved moment by moment as data poured in from different directions. The factory itself was simply a square with rounded corners, a little over five meters on a side now that it had finished growing, saved from resembling a child’s toy block by rain-gathering, light reading, gas ejecting and other apparatus on its roof. No one was looking at it yet, however.

  The jet’s nose was crumpled back almost to the wings; the ground it had tried to displace had yielded very little. The left wing and ram pipe were hidden under the fuselage, whose tail pointed upward at about sixty degrees. The right wing and engine, also pointing upward but less sharply, seemed undamaged, but image resolution was not yet down to single centimeters.

  “So much for Oceanus. Is Theia ready?” asked Goodell finally.

  “I’ll check her out,” came Ginger’s voice.
“I think I’m nearest, and I’ve just slept and done my suit.

  “Are you willing to drive again, Gene?” Belvew hesitated only a moment. The crash was presumably his fault, but there was no reason to suppose that anyone else could have avoided it; and the psychology behind the custom of a pilot’s flying again as soon as possible after an accident was still valid even when the pilot wasn’t in the aircraft at the time.

  “Sure. I’m fresh enough. I’ll nap, though, during the preflight. Call me when she’s ready, will you, Ginger?”

  “Should I hurry?”

  “No!” Goodell was emphatic. “Theia hasn’t been flown at all yet. Cover everything on the list, and anything else you can think of. If Maria reports some other change we may have to hurry, but not unless or until.”

  “I’ll be good. Gene needn’t worry.”

  “Who worries?” asked Belvew. He received no answer, and relaxed in his suit. It seemed unlikely that there would be time enough to get out of it for a real nap. This estimate, of course, was based on foreseeables, not human behavior.

  The station was far too massive for anyone to feel the reaction when a person pushed off from or stopped against a wall, but the departure of the jet was noticed by everyone. It was also identified, since everyone had felt it before. Reactions differed. Goodell and one or two others wondered momentarily whether they had been asleep and missed the end-of-checkout report. Peter Martucci made a wry face, as though something he had expected had happened in spite of his hopes. Gene Belvew was, for a fraction of a second, the most surprised, and of course Ginger Xalco was the least.

  But Belvew was quick on the uptake.

  “Ginger! Why?”

  “My suit’s fullest, and it’ll save time.”

  “We don’t need to save time!”

  “How do you know? I certainly don’t!”

  “My suit was serviced almost as recently as yours,” Belvew tacitly conceded the other argument. “It has nearly as much supplies.”

  “And I use less than three quarters the food and oxygen you do. Stop being futile; I’ve already cut speed.”

  Everyone by now understood the situation, but no one was silly enough to suggest, much less order, that the woman return with the jet. All relevant instruments showed that she had already killed enough of her station orbital speed to take the craft into atmosphere, and used most of the little reaction mass in Theia’s tanks to do so. Return was not possible until she had refilled on Titan.

  Nor was there any question of taking over from the rebel even if this had been useful. Her waldo suit was in the space designed for it on the jet, and any suit there had control priority unless the wearer deliberately ceded it. “Dead-man” override from outside was not possible; such a need had not been foreseen until much too late. Construction and energy were extremely cheap, but design was not; people charged more heavily than ever for their skilled services. As a result, many structures and machines were produced with performance well short of ideal, and even the best usually turned out to lack something. The situation was not entirely new in history, but greatly aggravated by modern conditions.

  Even Goodell said nothing for general hearing. There was nothing useful to say for the moment, and what would be said later would never mention penalties, or violation of rules, or disobeying orders. Science, the search for understanding, had replaced much of the desire for personal territory, influence over others’ behavior, or glory which had motivated so many of humanity’s earlier high risk activities; but the need-for-knowledge culture had not evolved along quite the same lines as the religious-economic-military one. Social awareness—idealism or patriotism, though now for the whole species—was fully as great in the now vaguely militarized ranks of science, and demanded as much team effort as war, but not the same prompt and blind submission to orders which the latter had had to evolve when the opponents were other human beings rather than a universe with no personal survival urge.

  Not quite so prompt and certainly not nearly so blind, but still involving risk. Ginger knew exactly what she was doing, and why; so, in spite of his hasty question, did Gene and the others. Nothing critical was said during the hour and a half Theia took to reach atmosphere and kill her two kilometer per second relative velocity; and even when she was flying rather than orbiting, navigation instructions from Maria and flying advice from the others made up most of the conversation.

  The advice was not really needed, since Ginger had spent as much time in simulators and roughly as much actually flying Oceanus as any of the others, but somehow those still in orbit felt a need to keep meaningful conversation going—to “stay in touch.”

  Xalco, after tanking up, deliberately landed at higher speed than Belvew had done, but there was no way yet to tell whether this made the difference. Theia slid to a stop half a kilometer west of the factory. She would have come closer, but there were numerous objects on the surface between cliff and factory, and some even west of the latter, which had been tentatively identified by Maria’s equipment as boulders of ice from the fallen shelf. One of Goodell’s labs had confirmed this; three separate specimens were nearly pure water ice, with a trace of carbonate dust. A debate on why this was not silicate had taken up much time between the discovery and the jet’s landing, but no conclusions had been reached except that the news had better get to those on Earth as soon as possible. No one knows in advance which will prove the key piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but the unexpected screams for attention.

  The landing approach had not been directly over the mystery patch, but the exhaust had melted or blown a shallow trough in the regular surface and raised a cloud of smoke apparently identical to that of Belvew’s earlier landing. This had not happened before, when landing had been made to pick up cans and labs from the factory. Something seemed to have changed, though admittedly the other approaches had been along different tracks. Possibly the apparently uniform area-uniform except for ice blocks and the still growing patch-differed here and there in composition. Goodell had all ripe labs now out and in action, and was sending out others as quickly as the factory completed them. Most, including Ginger, were listening to the analyses which Maria was numbering, tabulating, and locating on a map which usurped part of everyone’s Aitoff, and trying to make sense out of them. Belvew was the only exception. His attention was aimed more narrowly.

  The form of the crashed Oceanus showed a few hundred meters from her sister jet, much closer to the strange patch, and he was trying to see why it had fallen. If the cause were actually turbulence there would probably be no evidence, but he still found this hard to believe.

  “Art, could you spare a lab to sample around the wreck?” he asked at length.

  “We’ll get there pretty soon anyway. Any reason for special haste?”

  “Well, Ginger landed hot, but there’ll be a couple of seconds after lift-off when she’ll be as slow as I was. It might be worth at least a check. Maybe the ground was warmer or colder, for some reason and grew verticals.”

  “How could it be?” The question, from Peter, was ignored by all but Barn.

  “We’re looking for chemical action,” he pointed out, “and there’s methyl alcohol to explain.”

  “All right,” admitted Goodell. “Two labs on the way. Tell me where you want your samples, Gene.”

  Belvew went back to the view provided by Theia’s eyes, and strained his own looking for points of special interest on and about the wreck. It would be a few minutes before the slow-moving labs reached the spot.

  Several of Theia’s cameras covered the remains, and with Ginger’s consent he had first one and then another of them feed the proper spots on the screen and process their images with interferometer routines, trying to produce the clearest possible view. For some time he concentrated on the ground ploughed up by Oceanus, but could detect nothing special, and finally shifted to the jet itself. The labs had arrived and without his specific instructions were starting to collect dirt samples before he saw the interrupted white ridge alon
g the leading edge of the uptilted right wing. Parts of it, especially toward the tip, had not been shaken off by the crash. He pointed it out to the others.

  “That shouldn’t be there! How could I get wing ice here?”

  “How do you know it’s ice?” asked Barn reasonably.

  “I don’t, but it’s where you pick up ice in Earth’s atmosphere, and it had the same effect!”

  “You’re blaming it for what happened?” came Maria’s quiet voice.

  “Well, not yet.” Jumping to conclusions was one of the cardinal sins. “Can you get a lab up there, Art?”

  “I doubt it. They weren’t designed to climb a smooth surface.”

  “That skin’s hardly smooth anymore.”

  “True. I’ll try.” He suited the words with action, and for over fifteen minutes sent one of his devices rolling and clawing its way along various upward-leading wrinkles in the crumpled fuselage. Each, sooner or later, narrowed enough to let the machine topple back to the ground, undamaged but ineffective. Goodell finally gave up. Belvew, less skilled but more anxious, tried from some time himself, with no better luck.

  “It looks as though some of the stuff has fallen off,” Inger pointed out at last. “There should be bits of it on the ground.”

  “If there are, I can’t see them,” replied Belvew. “I suppose we can just do lots and lots of tests all around the wreck, but how will we be sure that any offbeat result can be blamed on the white stuff?”