by Hal Clement
But the places where he was pressed, however lightly, by his suit made their counterarguments. Yes, there was a lot to do, but he simply wouldn’t be able to do it. He took the report that here, too, the liquid part of the gel was probably vinyl alcohol—probably, don’t jump to conclusions, you old idiot; once is more than enough—as a fitting summary of what he’d done so far, and started back toward the lake.
Crius was still there, of course; he would have heard its departure if anyone had decided to take it off. He looked it over carefully—there was no real hurry about the final experiment—and noted that there was no frozen hydrocarbon on the wings. He should have checked that earlier; it would have been more likely on his own landing. Had he been merely lucky, or had Ginger’s talk-down been designed to keep a little extra speed? No, he had been frighteningly close to wing-stall those last few seconds, he recalled.
Your mind is wandering, old fellow. You’re doing the right thing. Do it NOW.
He took the seismic cans and drove them firmly into the surface, one midway between lake and tar patch and the other a quarter of the way around the lake to the north. He wished he had thought to bring at least one of them over to the crater wall, and briefly wondered about doing so now—did he have enough time in the suit for such a trip? Probably not.
One lab unit he set down a meter from the edge of the lake, another just in the liquid, positioning both carefully. He watched for a minute or two to make sure that the later wouldn’t roll—there was no way of telling the slope of the lake bottom, since the liquid was not very clear. He pointed the latter fact out to Peter. The remaining lab units he set down on areas which had been scorched, or seared, or melted, or whatever had been done to them by the rocket exhausts of his own landing and Ginger’s subsequent takeoff. This didn’t matter very much, since the devices were mobile anyway, but it would be nice to see—for them to see—what chemical effects there might be from brief warming of the ninety-K surface. Maybe the earlier landings had already caused contamination—no. Don’t think of that.
And now there was only one thing left to do, No, two. He gave the order releasing the detailed crater information to Status. Then he took one more look around the crater, clearly enough visible in the faint sunlight filtering through the smog. He looked at the lake, the parked aircraft, noted happily that he felt neither pain nor temptation for the moment, and walked out on the patch.
“Arthur—” came a faint, unamused female voice.
“Be sure you feed all the readings from here to Status,” he answered. “Here’s where I’m betting the changes will be.”
He turned off his suit heaters—I remembered this time, he approved himself—and waited a few minutes. The suit insulation is really good, he reflected.
Then the cold began to creep in. It was not at all painful. He should have tried this before; he couldn’t feel much of anything, for the first time in years.
But he couldn’t enjoy it for long. His personal enzymes would need access to the tar, or vice versa, and if he waited too long he wouldn’t be able to move. His hand went to his face plate release as he knelt down and leaned forward.
But nothing happened to the plate. The outside pressure was far higher, and it wouldn’t open. It was held against its gasket by Titanian air. He gasped in surprise, and for a few seconds actually worried. Was this all wasted? Would he just lie here, accomplishing nothing, while the tar surrounded him without being able to get at him?
He was nearly prone now. The pain was coming back, where gravity pressed him against the front of his suit. Was even the release of the cold being lost?
“Arthur. Emergency oxygen.” The woman’s voice was still unsteady, and she was clearly neither arguing nor amused.
“Thanks,” he muttered. He groped for, found, and opened the cock of the spare tank, and fell silent again while the oxygen spread through his suit, raising the inside pressure.
Everyone in the station heard the face plate pop open.
1995
SEISMIC SIDETRACK
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.
Maria Collos was feeling philosophical. This was in spite of her personal danger, which should have made her brush even the most basic personal strategy aside in favor of tactics.
Ignorance was not responsible; she knew about the ninety Kelvin ambient temperature and thirty hour charge in her life suit including time needed to get back to the Station. Increasingly frequent trembling of the ice underfoot hinted at still other perils, but her mind still wandered. Exhaustion had forced her to pause in her work, and she couldn’t keep from thinking.
She was a sensible person, in spite of her present whereabouts. Her philosophy was basically sound, of the take-care-of-what-you-can-and-don’t-worry-about-the-rest sort, but a what’s-the-use germ was starting to attack it. She had come to Titan firmly convinced of the project’s importance, despite its low chance of real success. She still felt sure that adding to humanity’s store of knowledge—finding more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which the physical-reality believers were so desperately trying to fit together—offered the only hope other than pure luck for her species’ continuation. She realized that the concatenation of diseases now decimating humanity might in fact turn out to be mere statistical bad luck, but knowledge offered a brighter hope than resignation. Establishing that life could and did originate on its own from purely natural causes, as implied by the partly-assembled pieces found so far, was the specific assignment of the Titan group. It might not be a very promising goal, but the big satellite was the only body in the Solar system other than Jupiter and Earth where the phenomenon seemed likely to occur, and humanity was clutching at straws.
There was still no practical way to check out Jupiter, and it was too late to see it happen on Earth. However many thinkers might take the concept for granted, there were gaps in the assumed process; filing them might help what was left of humanity save itself.
But was this really worth doing?
Collos, now head of the project, was herself human and wanted very much to live. Presumably most other people felt the same way, though Arthur Goodell’s example a few weeks before justified some doubt. If they did, then probably one should try . . .
Even when tired. She hadn’t used to get this tired. She knew all about her own ailment, of course, and the knowledge widened the mental crack which was letting in the what’s-the-use feelings; but she still had a patch for that leak.
This was a perfectly rational thought: If you quit, you’ll never find out. If saving humanity were indeed worth any trouble, then quitting would obviously be a mistake; if it were not, and the fact finally became evident, one could always quit later. After the uselessness was actually demonstrated, of course.
And could life be useless if there were still ways to have fun, like finding things out?
She was certainly being useful right now. Alone on Titan’s surface with the jet which had brought her down back in service and, between shuttle flights, doing work of its own rather than waiting for her, showed that clearly enough. There was so much to be done down here, so much which had to be useful.
Work was going on. Crius, she knew, had already restocked its mass tanks and was in orbit back to the Station, probably flown by Gene. Theia was in atmosphere dropping seismic cans or checking air circulation or something. Oceanus—well, that hadn’t been her fault. In not too many hours Seichi Yakama would relieve her on the ground here at Settlement Crater and Crius, after taking her back to the Station to rest and restock her suit, would descend again and resume adding details to Status’ image of the satellite. Routine went on, in other words.
It was all Status’ doing, actually. Goodell’s death had brought the personnel count down to what the data handler considered a critical number, and it now insisted that time spent ferrying people back and forth from station
to surface was wasteful as well as dangerous. It would be better in the long run to construct a base below and transfer everyone down for good. The extra commuting needed while construction lasted would be offset by time and probably personnel saved later.
When Maria and others had doubted this, Status had shown detailed calculations. These seemed to be correct, but only a bare majority of the surviving researchers had accepted them. The figures were emotionally negative, like those offered back in the days when human population was still rising, showing how long it would take to transform the earth into human flesh if current trends continued. The Saturn group consisted of scientists and engineers, better qualified than any supernaturalist to tell when a silly conclusion was due to faulty math and when to faulty assumptions, but its members still had the normal human difficulty in changing long-standing attitudes.
But there was no point sitting here brooding. Resting wouldn’t, after all, really help Maria’s fatigue, which had causes unrelated to how hard she was working, and delay would only lengthen the time being used—wasted?—on this construction. She moved back toward the tunnel mouth.
In front of her as she faced east was a vertical cliff some fifteen meters high. To the south its face descended gradually, merging with the crater floor about half a kilometer away and about as far from the central lake. Near this point lay the area where the jets had been landing. Northward the scarp seemed to grow higher, but how far this continued no one knew yet.
This ignorance was embarrassing to Maria, who had been responsible for the original mapping from orbit. A fault like this, which had to postdate the crater itself, should have been noticed by Status if not by herself. As it was, not even the pilots landing in the crater had seen it until after the decision to move down, when the crater had been mapped more carefully. Of course, their attention would have been taken up by other matters like landing, but still . . .
No one believed yet that it could have formed in the last few weeks. Most of its top showed the rusty-brown edge of the smog deposit which covered so much of Titan, but the ground at the foot was bare ice, and it must have taken time to wash away the original sediment. A few crusty deposits like candle drippings, presumably dissolved from the top of the cliff by rain and precipitated again at the foot by evaporation, were all that marred the level surface near the tunnel mouth. These presumably had taken a long time to form. Titan’s surface was clearly being reworked by erosion, but there seemed no reason yet to suppose that this was happening any faster than on Earth.
She would have liked to see what the fault had done to the north rim of the crater, but firmly rejected the temptation to go and look. There should, after all, be a nicely detailed answer somewhere in the unexamined data above. Status might “know” the answer, in a sense; but the processor was neither omniscient nor imaginative. It would come up with correlations it had been told to seek, but never with theories; it could only criticize these.
On the other hand, if Maria herself seemed likely to be too far from the landing site when the jet came back, so that she might not reach orbit while her suit supplies lasted, the computer would foresee that and firmly recommend return before she got anywhere near the rim. Suits could not yet recharge on the surface. None of this was conscious thought for Maria at the moment, just background knowledge.
Status.
Just north of one of the small tar fans was the entrance to the tunnel she was digging. It was about two meters high, with a five centimeter sill of piled ice sand across the bottom, and about as wide. Equipment as well as suited people would have to get in eventually. It was dug in the clear, nearly pure low-pressure ice—ice I—which formed the lower two thirds of the cliff under the sediment layer. The latter was thinner than average here; one might use that to date the impact which had formed this crater—no, it was gone from the cliff foot, and there was no way even to guess how much the stuff on top had been affected by the same erosion. Or why there was a difference—never mind that now, Collos.
Back to work. Research and fun later. She stepped across the clear ice and the rill of liquid methane running southward along the foot of the scarp—it was raining—picked up the chipper, and turned it on. It hummed obediently, so she descended the twenty meters of completed tunnel and pressed it against the end wall. It resumed shaving and swallowing ice, and spitting the resulting powder toward the tunnel mouth behind her.
The group had learned; this machine had a double head and counter-rotating blades. It did not try to spin her in either direction no matter how hard she pressed against the wall.
She was getting more skillful in its use, too. It could only exhaust straight back, but she was now able to aim the heads most of the time so that “straight back” not only missed her suit but blew the dust all the way to the tunnel mouth, and she only had to pause every ten or fifteen minutes to clear her exit path. Her relief would bring a newly grown blower to handle that job, she had been told; most of the survivors could still do improvisional programming on equipment “seeds”. The new factory now growing near the central lake nine hundred meters to the south even had locatable roots, a quality omitted from its predecessor. In two or three weeks it should also have produced a remotely controllable tunneler, and Maria and the others could get back to their proper, planned work.
She was angling the tunnel downward, and already had seven or eight meters of ice and sediment overhead. Human beings under Titanian gravity, she had noticed, seemed not to feel much fear of cave-ins, a comforting if unrealistic attitude. It had started to change recently as ground tremors became more frequent, but she did her best to enjoy it. Details of the planned Base had not yet been completely worked out, but it would certainly have to be deep enough to be walled and ceiled by clear, seamless ice even if they decided to change to Titanian air pressure. The fallen smog layer was about as strong as sand except where methane reins had caused it to crust. While sturdier at such spots it would still not make a reliable ceiling even in local gravity and with balanced pressure.
The need for the downward slope had therefore been obvious. That for the sill at the tunnel mouth had not. The stream along the cliff face was intermittent, and had been dry when the digging started. Now there was methane sloshing around Maria’s feet as she worked. Blowing this outside with the chipper had seemed an obvious solution when the liquid first trickled in, but the drops wouldn’t fly as far as the denser ice chips in the heavy air. They settled to the floor and ran back downhill.
She had taken care of most of the problem by digging a sump a few meters back but this, unfortunately, had meant plastering some of the ceiling with an ice-methane mud which always chose the moment she was underneath to drop by handfuls onto her helmet. Water still did not bond closely to hydrocarbons, though the digger was also an effective blender. Maria still spent some of her work time distracted by thoughts on which of this new crop of unexpected trivia might turn out to be lethal.
She did what she could about that, reporting every action and its result to Status though she put more faith in human imagination than in the data processor to provide warnings.
“More vibration!” she called suddenly. Belvew replied.
“Could it be your chipper getting out of balance, or biting deeper with one head than the other?” Alternative hypotheses were a moral imperative on Titan; being too sure too soon—the Aarn Munro syndrome, as some classicist had long ago named it—had proved a fruitful source of trouble.
She turned off the machine as the most obvious way to test this one.
“Right, I guess, but—no, there it is again.” She reactivated the digger and pressed it once more against the ice. The quivering stopped briefly, then resumed. “It’s not that.”
“Local quake? Titan still has plenty of tectonics, we know.” This time it was Pete Martucci.
“Wouldn’t the seismometers be telling us?”
“Not necessarily,” Status’ calm voice answered. “Seismic events have occurred often since the first can line began
reporting; and are presumably regular Titan phenomena. However, the outer ice layer does not carry waves as quickly as silicate rock. None of the lines is close enough to Settlement Crater for an epicenter under that point to be recorded promptly. I suggest you leave the tunnel until that idea can be checked, Commander Collos.”
“But that’ll delay—”
“Not as much as would the collapse of the tunnel, and it would be better for the overall project if you observed such an event from outside.”
“Yes! For Reason’s sake get out of there!” snapped Belvew. “And if you want to remind me that Arthur left you in charge, do it as you run!”
“Why didn’t you mention the quakes before we started the tunnel, and if you knew about them why did you plan an underground Station at all?” interjected Yakama. It was obvious to all, including the machine, whom he was addressing.
“Because no temblor has yet approached an intensity likely to damage the sort of structure we plan, and—”
“Then why did you order me outside?” snapped Maria, without slowing her pace back to open air.
“Because theory must yield to observation, and this is our first chance to observe the actual effect of such an event on anything like the proposed structure.” No one tried to argue this point; Maria changed the subject.
“I’m outside,” she reported. “The rain seems to have stopped, if that matters to anyone.”
“It may be relevant,” Status commented, apparently recognizing no irony. “Most of the quakes recorded in detail so far have originated at the Ice I-Ice III interface, and redistribution of surface mass caused by rain, with resulting changes in deep pressure, could well be the basic cause. The correlation is statistically—”
“All right, keep track of it. When can I get back to work? I’m still using oxygen you know.”
“I know. It will take nearly twenty minutes for a wave front starting at your coordinates to pass enough network stations for reliable analysis. Are there any new local data which you could report? That might speed a possible decision.”
