Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “We can be quicker than that.” Ginger assured them.

  “How?” asked Gene.

  “I’ll show you.” Several of the listeners guessed what was coming, but kept their mouths shut; there was nothing they could do about it, and objectively Xalco was being smart. She was economizing on her suit time.

  Those who failed to read the implication from her words understood a few seconds later as an environment suit with “GX” stencilled front and back entered the field of view of the jet’s eyes. The walk was unsteady; even Titan’s less than fourteen percent of Earth gravity was a lot more than any of the group had experienced for many months. She made good speed, however, never actually fell, and reached the wreck very quickly.

  “I don’t see anything white on the ground,” she said. “It either fell off further back or got buried in the dirt Oceanus ploughed up. Here, Art.” She needed to jump only a short distance to bring one glove against the rime on the wing. It stuck to her suit when she tried to set it down beside the nearest lab, and she had to shake it off, leaving some liquid on her palm. All watchers tried to draw inferences while the lab unit did its work.

  “Mostly ethylene, a trace of acetylene,” Goodell reported tersely after a moment.

  “Melting points?” Gene asked promptly, sure that Maria would have them on her screen at once. He was right.

  “About 104 and 192 respectively,” she reported promptly. “Check you own wings, Ginger; if you picked any up after you cooled down from entry, it would still be there.”

  “It is. I see it. It’s lucky I landed fast, I guess. I’ll wipe it off right now.” Her suit disappeared intermittently, its image reappearing as odd patches and parts from time to time as she moved into and out of the view fields the computer was using for Aitoff projection.

  “Why did we pick that up these two times, and not on any of the earlier landings? And why pick it up at all, for that matter? There isn’t much of either of those in the atmosphere.” Gene was still puzzled.

  “I think I can guess,” Barn said slowly. “You don’t need much, after all; water vapor usually doesn’t compose very much of Earth’s air, but it freezes on wings if they’re cold enough. These landings are the only ones made so far right after the jet had spent significant time up at compromise altitude, and really got its wings chilled. We can test that, if there’s ever time, by going back up there for a while and doing stall exercises, at a safe altitude of course, after we get down again.” He did not suggest reprogramming the Aitoff computer to show wings. None of them could have done this.

  “And until then, we make it a point to land a little hotter than we have been.” Gene was relieved. “Good work, Ginger. You’d better come back up; you’ve used up a lot of suit time already.”

  “I have plenty more. I’m going to take a close look at this patch while I’m here.”

  “I don’t mean to be insulting, but you’re budgeting time to fill your tanks, I trust,” Goodell interjected.

  “l am. But thanks for asking. Don’t apologize.” Her suited figure dwindled on the screens.

  “The labs can do gas analyses, can’t they?” She asked suddenly.

  “Sure.”

  “Then hadn’t we better look for free hydrogen? Remember the idea about the methanol production.”

  “We’d need water, too,” pointed out Barn. Ginger kicked at one of the boulders, almost overbalancing in the weak gravity.

  “These look like ice,” she assured him.

  “They are. I checked them before,” growled Goodell. “If you want a repeat—”

  “I know. That can wait. I want to see this smooth stuff.” She moved a few gliding steps farther, and squatted down. A lab moved slowly toward the boulder, guided from above, but the oldster said nothing aloud. Of course this would be ice, too.

  “Give!” Came mingled voices. Ginger’s suit had no camera.

  “It looks and feels through my gloves like black glass; it could still be the melted tar someone suggested. I can’t scratch it with a glove claw. Labs, please.”

  “Already there, as you should have noticed,” answered Goodell. “Analysis so far matches the other one; it’s a methanol gel, basically. I’m still working on the polymers.”

  He would be. Belvew thought. Arthur, of all the group, was the most optimistic about finding prebiotic material on Titan, and the most expert on autocatalysis and similar phenomena presumably involved with the chemical evolution stage preceding actual life. He was also hoping desperately, his companions knew, to find a key piece of the biological jigsaw puzzle while he still lived, even if that piece failed to provide a cure for his particular ailment. He was as close to being a pure idealist as anyone in the group—a scientific Nathan Hale, though no one was tactless enough to make the comparison aloud.

  The screen brought Belvew’s attention back from this brief wandering. Ginger had started to rise from her squatting position, and was putting on a rather grotesque show.

  She had been slightly off balance as she straightened her knees, and reached vertical with her center of gravity a little outside the support area outlined by her feet. There is a normal human response to this situation, acquired usually during the first year or so after birth: one picks up the foot nearest the direction of tilt and moves it farther in that direction to extend, the support area, though not so far as to make reaction initiate a fall the other way. The woman started to do this, but her right food refused to pick up. The couple resulting from pull on this one and Third Law push on the other tilted her even farther to her right. By the time she reached thirty degrees all eyes were on their screens, and at least three theories were being developed.

  “You’ve melted yourself in!” cried Martucci. Inger, whose idea involved close contact between soles and surface plus Titan’s high air pressure, said nothing but thought furiously. Goodell, already wondering how simple the chemistry for a thermotropic reaction could possibly be, called, “See whether it’s pulling in around your boots, or if you’re just sinking!”

  Ginger Xalco was moved to answer this. “Just sinking? I’m stuck, you idiot! What do I do?”

  “Find out why,” Arthur replied calmly from the safety of a seven hundred kilometer high orbit.

  “Try to tilt and slide one boot at a time,” proffered Inger. “Can anyone guess how much jet exhaust a suit will take?” asked Belvew. “I assume no one knows.”

  While the woman tried unsuccessfully to implement Barn’s suggestion, and then less enthusiastically to follow Goodell’s instruction, Gene, already in his waldo suit, silently preflighted Theia. Xalco had filled the tanks conscientiously on the way down, and the landing had depleted them only a little; there was well over enough for a takeoff. Keeping careful watch on the gauges he fired up the plasma arcs and fed liquid to the pipes. Carefully checking the relative whereabouts of woman and factory, but not letting himself worry about a few labs, he raised thrust on the right jet enough to drag Theia in a curving trail—the keels wouldn’t let it simply pivot—until it was heading toward Ginger. He then equalized both sides and sent the machine dragging forward until it was only fifty meters from the still anchored suit. Rather than attempt another tight turn he went on past, leaving Ginger on his left and turning only slightly to the right, until the exhaust was streaming past her only three or four meters away.

  “Better let me take it,” the woman said at this point. “I can tell if it’s too close, and the response will be quicker.” Gene made no argument, and relinquished control. Using waldo while standing up was more awkward than Ginger had expected, and for a few seconds she was almost tempted to let Belvew take over again; but she resisted the urge, recognizing the strength of her own arguments and possibly for other reasons.

  The jet blast was now sweeping over part of the patch, behaving just as it had before: the tar, it that’s what it was, was sinking or possibly vaporizing into a shallow groove along the track of the warm gas, while a dark cloud of smoke appeared above the affected region and s
wirled and billowed slowly away from Theia.

  Ginger examined as closely as she could the slow widening of the trench, and very carefully increased thrust on the left pipe to swing the gas stream closer to her position. The higher power widened the stream as well as turning the jet, and she almost overdid it. The unspoken question in all minds was whether the removal of surface could be managed without cooking her suit. She finally stopped the turn by cutting back on the left unit and raising power in the other. Luckily this did not provide enough total thrust to move the aircraft farther away and complicate matters even farther.

  “I still can’t tell whether it’s vaporizing, melting and sinking, or just crawling out of the way,” she reported, her voice once more calm.

  “Is it crawling over your boots?” asked Goodell. Xalco squatted once more.

  “No,” she replied after a moment. “It’s more like melting in. I’m deeper than before, but the stuff isn’t closing in around me. You know, this might work.”

  “Damn!” said Arthur with feeling. Not even Ginger criticized. All watched tensely while the trench widened toward her and finally reached the left boot. Here it seemed to stop, and after several impatient minutes she raised the thrust a few percent.

  “Your tanks are getting a bit—” Gene didn’t even try to finish the sentence. Ginger answered only by trying, hard, to slide her boot toward the once more widening trench.

  The material which had pressed up and outward like fairly stiff clay around the sole was vanishing; she squatted to watch closely, curiosity once again in the ascendant, as it blew away in a trail of smoke which she could clearly see forming from half a meter. She reported verbally to the others.

  “Can you move your foot?” cried Belvew. “Your tanks!”

  She stood and pushed sidewise again, and her left boot slid out into the exhaust stream, suddenly free.

  She brought it next to the right one and pressed down hard; it had, after all, taken a while for her to ‘stick’ earlier. She kept trying, shifting the position of the free boot every few seconds just in case, but the right one stayed firmly in place until the warm gas actually reached her armor and began to eddy around it. For several more seconds no one breathed, much less spoke; then the right foot came suddenly free, and Ginger made an unplanned but quite lengthy jump which took her off the smooth patch.

  If the released breaths from the watchers had been free to leave the station, its orbit might have been changed measurably.

  Ginger, safely on ordinary ground, did not make her way at once back to the jet. She picked up, labelled, and pouched several dirt samples from points as close to the edge of the patch as she could move the stuff. She even made a point of working loose a specimen where soil and smoothness seemed to blend. Then, without haste, she returned to the aircraft and vanished from the screens.

  “Don’t hit the factory on takeoff!” Arthur cried, then, “Sorry.”

  Ginger made no answer. A few seconds later Theia slid into the air, and a minute after that had reached ram speed with something under a hundred kilograms of mass in her tanks.

  “There’s a thunderhead at forty kilometers, two hundred degrees,” Maria informed her.

  “Right. Thanks. Is there anything I should do while I’m here, after I juice up? Or have I already earned a mission credit? I did pick up a lot of data.”

  Belvew wondered whether she would have thought of using the jet to free herself, but was far too polite to suggest this explicitly.

  “How about splitting the credit?” he asked innocently.

  END OF PART ONE

  (To be continued Next Issue)

  SETTLEMENT

  Hal Clement has been writing science fiction for more than forty years. His novel, Mission of Gravity is considered to be one of the best, if not the best, hard science fiction novels ever written.

  In his quarantined quarters in Titan Station, protected by the architecture from the ailments of his colleagues and from Saturn’s radiation belt by half a kilometer of ice, Barn Inger clipped a sensor to his ear and waited. Status, the processor dedicated to keeping track of the station personnel as well as of the information they were accumulating, presently reported the reading aloud.

  “Phase .22; sixteen percent above accepted normal, presumably tending downward. Subjective?”

  “I feel fine. I need something active.”

  “You should be all right for about twenty hours allowing standard safety factors, twenty-five to thirty hours without them, possibly fifty considering your personal viability. No confidence in the last.”

  “Fine. Someone has to go down to the factory to map those roots. Arthur’s machines can scrape but not dig. Any of you feel your better set than I am to do it now?” The other scientists in the squadron had of course heard the whole exchange; no one ever saw into another’s quarters, but auditory privacy in the station took a poor second behind the need of everyone to know who might require help and when.

  The only answer came from Inger’s regular watch mate, Gene Belvew. “I’m flying Theia right now, on polar air circulation. If you’d rather not go down physically, you could take over this run and I could land in Crius. Any preferences?”

  “Maybe I’d do better if the drill kicks.” Inger pointed out, stroking the luxuriant blond mustache which none of his colleagues had ever seen. He did not, of course, mention Belvew’s bone problems, not merely because they were common knowledge. Courtesy was not the same as privacy, but they were related.

  “Good point. Crius is yours, if no one else has anything to raise.”

  No one did as far as the trip was concerned, but Ginger Xalco’s clipped voice came with a question.

  “What route will you take to dock?”

  “Straight up the axis, then to the pole. Unless—”

  “That’s all right. Just be sure of your suit before you leave your own place, please.”

  “Sure. Don’t worry; I’m a careful type.”

  Neither speaker, and none of the listeners, had to be more specific. Actually, Ginger’s words had been superfluous, though no one blamed her for speaking. She had the usual reason for concern; her own blood was slowly being wrecked by a very ordinary but unresponsive leukemia, and no one had any idea what adding Inger’s ailment might do. His “Cepheid Sickness”, badly misnamed by a medical worker who knew very little astronomy, caused him to cycle between extreme polycythemia and severe anemia. Unlike that of a Cepheid star, its period was unpredictably variable, ranging from one hundred fifteen days to one hundred eighty and, rarely, more. The almost unique quality of the ailment was that no one had yet established its cause, far less any treatment.

  Most of the diseases currently decimating the human species followed a similar course: they appeared suddenly, killed a few thousand or a few million people, had their causes identified, and then yielded, except for an unfortunate minority of the victims, to quickly developed treatment.

  The minority formed the shock troops in an all-out research war which blended chemistry, physics, astronomy, and other disciplines in the hope of learning in detail how life really worked. Nothing less seemed likely to account for the sudden surge of emerging new ailments. Even the advance of genetic engineering seemed inadequate—there just weren’t, as far as anyone could tell, enough mad scientists or even mischievous genetic hackers in existence to account for the frequency of the new mutations.

  Barn inspected his environment suit carefully, made sure it was fully charged, disinfected its exterior with chemicals and radiation, warned the others that he was emerging, unsealed and passed through the virus-proof door, and made his way along the passage “upward”—toward the center of the rotating station. Here, his effective weight now zero, he drifted along the axis to Crius’ dock, and in a few minutes reached the craft.

  He devoted over three hours to the preflight check, only partially because he would actually be aboard this time instead of waldoing the jet from the station. With only two remaining ramjets—no one had a
ny real hope of repairing the Oceanus, though the possibility had been discussed—no avoidable risks with the craft themselves could be taken. Also, while Saturn’s particle radiation was feeble at Titan’s orbit, it was safest to make transfer flights while the satellite was nearly between Sun and planet, unless emergency justified major risk. Danger was taken for granted, and none of the group really expected to get back to Earth, but they hoped to have enough of them survive to finish the project. Inger had weighed—on his own, without consulting Status again—the importance of this job against the likelihood of his becoming incapacitated before it was done, and decided that a modest delay in the descent was in order.

  Satisfied at last, he drifted into the pilot’s “couch” and spent another twenty minutes testing his suit controls. Finally, using the spring launcher which saved reaction mass, he kicked the vessel free and allowed it to drift slowly away from the rough sphere of welded ice fragments.

  He could see both Saturn and sun, at screen coordinates which meant that they lay in opposite directions. The lumpy assemblage of ring chunks from which he had come blocked out nearly half the sky and much of Titan, while the satellite in time occulted a large fraction of the remaining starry blackness. Their almost spherical shapes were distorted grotesquely by the Aitoff projection. This bothered neither Inger nor the others sharing his view; all had become skillful with the appropriate mental corrections. Inger allowed Crius to drift until the station filled less than a tenth of the screen’s area, spun her on a lateral axis until the pipes pointed “forward” along the station’s orbit, made sure she was in rocket mode, and vaporized a small amount of reaction mass.

  The craft had not yet made any descents, and her tanks contained only a small amount of water from the rings, loaded when the station was being built. Even the little he had now used committed Crius to atmosphere after two minutes or so of falling away from the station, but the man wasted no time or thought on the fret that he, too, must descend.