by Hal Clement
The first pass through the cloud had to be written off as practice; he had forgotten to set up collecting mode, and none of the others had noticed either. The practice, however, did help, and on the second try he not only took a respectable amount of liquid into his tanks but held his airspeed within three meters a second of the planned value—with the errors all on the high side. He was being very careful. He knew, in his head, the recovery procedure from a pipe stall, but thinking it through was one thing, reflex quite another.
Belvew noted all this without taking too much attention from his own flying procedure—after all, he did have the proper reflexes—and gave a rather obvious sigh of relief when Crius tanks indicated full. Goodell must have heard it, but made no comment. He probably felt much the same.
“So much for that,” the theoretician remarked. “All right, Maria. My spot is at seven point one degrees south, one twenty-five point five east of the factory. Give me a heading, please.”
Maria hesitated for just a moment, and everyone including Goodell knew why. If she refused guidance, he’d have to come back—
No, he wouldn’t. He’d do a rough mental calculation—he must have kept some track of his entry point and subsequent flight path. Any lack of precision in his figures would simply waste his limited suit time, and interfere with whatever he hoped to get done.
“Heading zero nine six. Climb to eighty kilometers for best speed. At thirty-seven minutes, start descent at ten K per minute. You’ll see it when you’re down to two K, about five ahead.”
“Thanks. The rest of you: this will be the planned settlement. We’ll have to plant another factory. If you can do that soon enough I may be able to do something about checking the orientation of its roots, this time—no, you can’t manage that. It should concentrate on structure blocks, and someone will have to come down from time to time to do the actual building until habitable quarters are ready. I know this is sooner than we planned, and someone will still have to finish the rest of the seismic lines and atmosphere checks, but I’ve decided the chemistry needs to get started right now. There’ll have to be a few, but only a few, analyzers at first; maybe a dozen or so. I have four, the dials say. The new factory can turn the rest out and then get at the blocks. Maria, you can slow down on mapping and take general charge.”
“But I’m only—”
“You’re the best for it. I know. I knew long ago. That’s an order, and Status will have it on record, for what that may be worth to anyone. Use your Athenian organizing powers. Set up as many more surface analysis sites as seems good to you and that the factories can supply, and concentrate first on comparing the Collos patch compositions at random locations with the ones by the Settlement. You’ll know which one to watch for change—I’ll use the one closer to the lake. Don’t ask any questions until I’m down; think over what I may have missed. There’s bound to be something.” The reference to the ancestry suggested by her name almost revived Maria’s chronic amusement. Long ago he had said something which had suggested the misunderstanding—a silly one, in view of the thorough mixing of ancestry which now characterized humanity—and she had been looking forward, some day to letting him see her picture. Now—
“One question,” Belvew cut in. “I’m starting up now, and will have to concentrate on making orbit for a few minutes. How sure are you that you can make your landing—yourself?”
“I’ll make some practice runs when the place is in sight, and decide. I promise I’ll let you know if I need help.”
No one pointed out that he had broken one promise already, and for long minutes the two craft went on their respective ways. Little was accomplished at the station.
Belvew was still in orbit when Crius came in sight of the crater and lake, and Ginger was standing by to help with the landing. However little anyone approved of what was happening, and however much arguing might yet be done with their nominal commander, it was still critically important to save the jet. Everyone but Belvew, who had only his own screen and had to use it for flying, watched tensely as Crius passed slowly—too slowly, some felt—over the ring.
Still two kilometers up, Goodell shifted briefly to rocket mode, slowed down, and felt for wing stalling speed. It seemed to be just where it should be with the tanks full and wings at full camber. He reported the trial, making recoveries with various combinations of added thrust and lowered nose, and eventually satisfied himself and almost satisfied his watchers.
“You might make it, Arthur,” Ginger admitted after the fourth try, “but it will be a lot safer if you let me set you down. It may not make much difference to you”—she had pretty well resigned herself to Goodell’s completion of his plan—“but keeping the machine in one piece is still pretty important to the rest of us.”
“And to me,” the commander assured her. “I want the job finished as much as you do. You know that. My judgment may be off orbit now; I’d be the last to know about that; but what I’m doing is based on my considered opinion of what’s best for the job, including the fact that I wouldn’t be able to do useful thinking much longer.”
“Moon wind!” Snapped Peter Martucci. “If your judgment is off, you have no business pulling this trick!”
“I have no business doing anything else. I have other reasons for working it this way. One of them I’m sure you can guess, some I’m just as sure you couldn’t, but I don’t have time to argue them all. I have work to do and not much time after I’m down.”
“Then let me land you, Arthur,” Ginger said quietly.
“Well—there’s a problem with that—”
“You promised! We know you broke the one about not making unauthorized flights, but surely that’s the only one—you wouldn’t break another—”
“I didn’t mean to; but there’s a problem I didn’t consider.”
“What?”
“I unplugged the override before I climbed into this thing, in case someone caught on too soon and wanted to bring me back before the ship was committed. I’m still in the control niche, and no one else can fly it while my suit is here.”
“Reconnect the override then.”
“That’s what I didn’t think of. I can’t reach the jack. I can’t move around enough to reach it. I’ll have to take her down myself. Ride as close as you can, and say anything you think may be useful, Lieutenant Xalco, but I’ll have to do the real flying.”
There was silence for perhaps a half a minute. Goodell was swinging away from the crater to set up a landing path. Ginger Xalco was, briefly, wondering if she could persuade him to wait until Belvew was back at the station and could do the talking. This was only for a moment; then she realized that the chemist wouldn’t—couldn’t—waste any time. There were the others, of course; everyone but Martucci was an experienced pilot. But after Belvew she was the best and knew it. Responsibility can sometimes be disconnected from authority, but never from ability.
“Don’t land across the lake,” she said carefully. “It has the usual cumulus cloud above it, and you’ll hit turbulence just before you’re touching down. I suppose you want to stop near the patch.”
“Right.”
“Then come on in—oh, seventy-five. Drop to five hundred meters by pressure, shift to rocket, and slow down to wing stall plus twenty by the time you’re five kilometers out.”
“Why five?”
“Don’t you ask questions either. I’m allowing for corrections when you overcontrol, if you must know. If you even think you’re starting to stall, feed full thrust, wait a second, and nose up two degrees; that will pull you out of trouble, and we can always make another pass.”
Goodell remained silent this time. If he wondered how many landing passes he really had time and mass for, no one knew it. A minute later he was on line and altitude, and settling down to speed.
And feeling every signal of his waldo suit as agony.
There was no way to turn the impulses off; such a need had never been imagined. He did have ointments for dulling his skin sensiti
vity, but they were back at the station and even if they had been on the jet there was no way to apply them through the suit. He should have been able to concentrate so thoroughly on the landing that the pain couldn’t get his attention, but it wasn’t working out that way. If he wrecked the jet—if he killed himself or hurt himself too badly to let him do what still had to be done—
“Airspeed and pitch, you idiot!” They were his own mental commands, of course. The ones Belvew had provided earlier.
“Nose down just a hair.” That was Ginger. He tried to obey, but the hair would have suited an elephant’s tail. The woman’s tone didn’t change; she wasn’t snapping now. “Back up a little. That’s better. A little high now, but take it out in power drop—down to five sixty.” Thrust lessened, speed decreased. He didn’t want to look at the indicator, but he had to.
Two meters per second above wing stall. There’d better be no turbulence.
“Good. Hold that. Altitude fifty. Fifty seconds to touch. Don’t change a thing. Forty meters, forty seconds. The ground is level. No complications. Twenty meters. Ten. Five to go—hold your attitude—don’t touch anything—CUT THRUST!”
The pilot felt the keels touch, surprisingly gently.
“Let it slide!”
For the first time he felt free to look at the Aitoff, and immediately forgot his pain.
The lake was behind him and to his left, the chosen patch almost at his left wing as Crius came to a halt. The crater rim was over three kilometers ahead; there would be plenty of space for whoever would do the takeoff. There was nothing left to do but the job.
He dropped two lab units between the keels, thought a moment, then the remaining two. There were some seismic cans on board, according to the indicators, and he released two of these. He didn’t know where he was with respect to any of the seismic lines, but someone could check that later.
“If someone can get a factory pod down here pronto, I might last long enough to check its first root or two,” he called. “Just don’t drop it in the lake. I don’t know its bottom contours, and don’t want to take a chance wading. I’m getting out now, and am taking one of the lab units over to the patch. Don’t take off, Ginger or whoever will be doing it, until I get the instruments out from underneath. I won’t waste any time.”
He opened the canopy, which groaned slightly with the effort until its seal cracked and the outer air rushed in to match pressures, and slid out easily. In spite of the pain of contact, he had never moved his quarters to the axis of the station, preferring to maintain some sort of muscle tone even at the cost of being pressed against floors and beds. He was therefore able to move easily enough in the thirteen percent gravity, though not with the ease that Belvew and Inger and Xalco had shown. He was, he reminded himself, a good deal older than any of them.
There was plenty of room for his suited form between the keel, and he quickly retrieved the equipment and carried it to the patch fifty meters away.
“I’d get a bit further,” Ginger said soberly as he stopped. “I don’t know the surface friction—you stopped pretty quickly—and I don’t want to use full thrust.”
Goodell didn’t argue, but moved another hundred meters past the tar patch carrying the instruments.
“All right,” he said. “This should be plenty.”
“If you can risk it, I can.”
“Risk it. The plane’s what’s important now.”
He watched and listened as the exhaust thundered in the heavy air. Crius trembled, then slid forward. She reached lift speed in three hundred meters. Her keels cleared the ground by millimeters, then by a meter, and Ginger nosed her abruptly upward. The exhaust roar died out in distance as the wings flattened.
Goodell got to work, wondering vaguely why he didn’t feel more lonely. His feet and joints hurt, of course; that was where there was most pressure from his armor, but that was just physical. He had expected that these last few hours would be somehow more emotional, but he found himself approaching the work as calmly as—as—he couldn’t think of an analogy. As calmly as he’d ever approached anything.
He set the apparatus down for a moment, walked over to the tar patch, and inspected it closely. The view was better than he had had of the others on his screens in the station, but he could see no significant difference: the surface was smooth, glossy black, reflecting the orange sky where the sun’s location could just be guessed at. Saturn was of course invisible; Goodell had no idea whether or not it was above the horizon—yes, he did; he knew his longitude, he suddenly recalled. It wasn’t.
He touched the glossy surface gently with his armored hand. Pre-life? He’d never really know. It wasn’t sticky, in spite of Ginger’s experience. He pressed as hard as his weight would allow, and it seemed in no hurry to yield, either—well, it had taken a while even for a pair of jet keels to sink in significantly when Gene had landed.
Human senses gave little information. He fetched the analyzer and set it on the black surface.
Reading the results would be something of a nuisance, since the device transmitted to his own receiving/computing center in the station, and took its orders from the same place. Goodell spoke aloud.
“Pete, you know my system. Get it running, and have this unit scrape up a sample and look for carbon-carbon double bonds, will you? I had Status switch my general board to you while I was coming down.”
“Sure. Some special reason?”
“Yes. I think I messed up with my original analysis. I found three C-H bonds, a C-O and an O-H, and assumed methanol. Now I doubt it. There could be two carbons there, and if there are—”
“If there are, you have an impossible structure,” the answer came flatly.
“I’m not sure, at this temperature. The point is I’ll have a high, or fairly high, energy molecule with a really low activation energy for collapsing to something else. That would be the best situation for pre-bio that anyone’s found yet. If it turns out to be true, you check other Collos Patches here and there and make sure whether it’s general, and then watch what happens to this one when my enzymes get to work. If anything does, KEEP IT CONFINED and watch it come alive—if anyone can decide where the fence between pre-bio and alive is. I think we really have something here—or will if you find that double bond.”
As he spoke, the lab unit had extended its scraper and managed to free a sample, with no more obvious trouble than had been experienced earlier near Lake Carver, and ingested it. Goodell could visualize the miniature NMR and gamma diffraction devices going to work; he could visualize the patterns they were providing for the computer far above—but he shouldn’t do that. He should wait for the data, not predict them.
He wanted to hold his breath, but things already hurt enough. It was more than three minutes before the answer came down.
“The bonds are there.” The pain disappeared.
“Then it’s—well, unless you can think of something else, it’s—”
“Yeah. Vinyl alcohol, not methanol. Do you want me to figure energies for its breakdown to water and acetylene, or can you think of other likely reactions, or don’t you care if your enzymes boil the patch off the planet?”
“Think of any you want. I won’t care, and it’s time for the rest of you to start the thinking anyway. That’s all I really wanted to know; my job’s done. Don’t hurry with the factory.” Goodell looked thoughtfully and silently at the tarry surface for a moment. His friends were equally silent. Then he spoke again. “Well, not quite done.”
Maria gave a choked, “No—”
“I have hours yet on my suit. I’ll take a lab unit to the other pool, over by the rim, and we’ll test that too; it won’t be much of a walk, and I haven’t walked for a long, long time. It might be fun.”
Ginger spoke firmly. “I’ll have full tanks in a few more minutes. I’m going to bring the plane down, and you’re getting back aboard. You’ve been right again, and we need you to go on being right. This is really a jump; maybe we can get something critical back t
o Earth while we’re—”
“While You’re still alive. I’ve been right too often for your health, and I’m looking forward to not hurting anymore. Subjective and selfish, but that’s the way it is. Start a systematic analysis of the patch, Peter. We need to know everything that’s in the gel. It’s a pity Gene had to blow the earlier unit away; we might have finished this part of it by now. I’m taking one of these for a walk.”
A trifle over three kilometers is not much of a walk under Titanian gravity, even for a disease-wasted and pain-racked human body. Two or three times, as his skin seemed to catch fire in another spot, Goodell considered turning back and performing his final experiment, but each time curiosity maintained its grip on his attention aid drove him on.
Even when Crius roared overhead once more and settled back to the surface near the lake he merely pursed his lips in annoyance and continued his hike, with no words of irritation or anything else. If they chose to leave the jet on the ground until he was finished, there was nothing he could do about it. Since the craft was under remote control, with no one else down even back at the factory, there was nothing they could do about him either.
He reached the larger tar patch and had the unit put through its paces. While he waited for answers, the pain came back, but was somehow not as bad. He could wonder—was there a range of odd materials in the patches scattered over the big satellite? Or were they all the same? If they were the same, was it because probable—nearly inevitable, it would have to be—reactions had built them? Or was there transfer of material over Titan’s surface in ways no one had yet figured out? Could any of this stuff evaporate! Surely not in significant amounts at this temperature.
Was subsurface transport possible? More would have to be done to keep proper track of factory roots, when the new ones were planted.
Those few minutes while he waited for the next set of results raised thoughts that came closer than had any of his friend’s arguments to making Goodell change his plans and persuading him to climb back aboard Crius. There was still so much to do!
