Iron mw-1

by Poul Anderson

  (It had been the most reasonable idea that was broached.) “You’ve been doing our latest studies,” Carita went on. “Found any prospective burrows? The kzinti may or may not have acquired us by now. Maybe not. That vessel may not be as well equipped to scan as this prospector, and she’s probably a good deal bigger. But they’re closing in fast, I tell you.”

  Yoshii made a shushing gesture, swiveled his seat, and evoked pictures, profiles, data tabulations. Shortly he nodded. “I think we have a pretty respectable chance.” Pointing: “See here. Prima isn’t all an unbroken plain. This range, its small valleys—and on the night side, too.”

  Carita whistled. “Hey, boy, we live right!”

  “Set up for a detailed scan and drop into low orbit to make it. We should find some cleft we can back straight down into. The kzinti would have to arc immediately above and be on the lookout for that exact spot to see us.” Yoshii said nothing about what a feat of piloting he had in mind. He was a Belter. She had almost comparable experience, together with jinxian reflexes.

  “Yah, I do think our best bet is to land and snuggle in.” Saxtorph’s look ranged through the port and across the planet, following an onward sweep of daylight as Shep orbited around to the side of the sun.

  That disc was less than half the size of Sol’s at Earth, its coal-glow light little more than one one-hundredth. Nevertheless Tertia shone so brightly as to dazzle surrounding stars out of sight. Edges softened by atmosphere, it was bestrewn with glaciers, long streaks and broad plains and frozen seas bluishly a glimmer from pole to pole. Bared rock reached darkling on mountainsides or reared in tablelands. Five Terrestrial masses had been convulsed enough as they settled toward equilibrium that the last of the heights they thrust upward had not worn away entirely during the post-tectonic eons.

  The glaciers were water, with some frozen carbon dioxide overlying them in the antarctic zone where winter now reigned. The air, about twice as dense as Earth’s, was almost entirely nitrogen, the oxygen in it insufficient to sustain fire or life. It was utterly clear save where slow winds raised swirls of glitter, dust storms whose dust was fine ice.

  A small moon, in most of four, hove in view. It sheened reddish-yellow, like amber. The largest, Luna-size, was visible, too, patched with the same hue, ashen where highlands were uncovered. It had no craters,—spalling and cosmic sand had long since done away with them.

  “But, but on the surface we’ll see only half the sky at best,” Laurinda ventured. “And atmospherics will hinder the seeing.”

  Saxtorph nodded. “True. Ordinarily I’d opt for staying in space in hopes of early warning. That does have its own drawbacks, though. A kzin search vessel could likelier than not detect us the moment we commenced boost. Since we might not be able to skedaddle flat-out from them, we’d probably drop planetside. That’s the whole idea of being where we are, remember? If we did it right, the ratcats wouldn’t know where we’d squatted, but they’d know we were someplace yonder for sure, and that would be a bigger help to them than they deserve.”

  “Treacherous terrain for landing,” Dorcas warned.

  Saxtorph nodded again. “Indeed. Which means we’ll be smart to take our time while we’ve still got it, come down cautiously and settle in thoroughly. As for knowing when a spacecraft is in the neighborhood, at a minimum there’s our neutrino detector.

  “It’s not what you’d call precise, but it will pick up an operating fusion generator within a couple million klicks, clear through the body of the planet.”

  He paused before adding, “I realize this isn’t quite what we intended when we said goodbye. But we didn’t know what Tertia is like. Doctrine exists to be modified as circumstances dictate. I’d guess the sensible thing for Juan and Carita to do is quite different.”

  Laurinda’s fingers twisted together. She turned her face from the other two.

  “I vote with you,” Dorcas declared. They had been considering tactics for hours, while they gained knowledge of the world they had reached. “What are the specs of a landing site? Safe ground; concealment from anything except an unlikely observation from directly overhead, unless we can avoid that too; but we don’t want to be in a radio shadow, because we hope for—we expect—a broadcast message in the fairly near future.”

  “Don’t forget defensibility,” Saxtorph reminded.

  “What?” asked Laurinda, startled. “How can we possibly—”

  The man grinned. “I didn’t tell you, honey, because it’s not a thing to blab about, but Dorcas and I always travel with a few weapons. I took them along packed among my personal effects. Managed to slip Carita a rifle and some ammo when nobody else was looking. That leaves us with another rifle, a Pournelle rapid-fire automatic, choice of solid or explosive shells; a. 38-caliber machine pistol with detachable stock; and a 9-mm. mulekiller.”

  “Plus a certain amount of blasting sticks,” Dorcas informed him.

  Saxtorph goggled. “Huh?” He guffawed. “That’s my nice little wifey. The standard mining equipment aboard includes knives, geologists’ hammers, crow bars, and such, useful for mayhem.” He sobered. “Not that we want a fight. God, no! But if we’re able to give a good account of ourselves—it might make a difference.”

  “A single small warhead will make a much bigger difference, unless we have dispersal and concealment capability,” Dorcas observed. “All right, let’s take a close look at what topographical data we’ve collected.” The choice was wide, but decision was quick. Shep dropped out of orbit and made for a point about 30 degrees north latitude. It was at mid-afternoon, which was a factor. Lengthening shadows would bring out details, while daylight would remain—in a rotation period of 40 hours, 37-plus minutes—for preliminary exploration of the vicinity. A mesa loomed stark, thinly powdered with ice crystals, above a glacier that had flowed under its own weight, down from the heights, until a jumble of hills beneath had brought it to a halt. As it descended, the glacier had gouged a deep, almost sheer walled coulee through slopes and steeps. The bottom was talus, under a dusting of sand, but solid; with gravity a third higher than on Earth, and epochs of time, shards and particles had settled into gridlock.

  Or so the humans reasoned. The last few minutes of maneuver were very intent, very quiet except for an occasional low word of business. Saxtorph, manning the console, was prepared to cram on emergency boost at the first quiver of awareness. But Dorcas talked him down and Shep grounded firmly. For a while, nobody spoke or moved. Then husband and wife unharnessed and kissed. After a moment, Laurinda made it a three-way embrace.

  Saxtorph peered out. The canyon walls laid gloom over stone. “You ladies unlimber this and stow that while I go take a gander,” he said. “Yes, dear, I won’t be gone long and I will be careful.”

  His added weight dragged at him, but not too badly. It wasn’t more than physiology could take, even a Belter’s or a Crashlander’s, and distributed over the whole body. The women would get used to it, sort of, and in fact it ought to be valuable, continuous exercise in the cramped quarters of the boat. The spacesuit did feel pretty heavy.

  He cycled through and stood for a few minutes learning to see the landscape. Every cue was alien, subtly or utterly, light, shadow, shapes.

  The cobbles underfoot were smooth as those on a beach. They and the rubble along the sides and the cliffs above were tawny-gray, sparked with bits of what might be mica but was likelier something strange—diamond dust? Several crags survived, eroded to laciness. The lower end of the gorge, not far off, was blocked by a wall of glacier. Above reached purple sky. An ice devil whirled on the heights. Wind withered.

  Saxtorph decided his party had better plant an antenna and relay inconspicuously up there. Any messages ought to be on a number of simultaneous bands, at least one of which could blanket a Tertian hemisphere, but the signal would be tenuous and these depths might screen it out altogether. He walked carefully from the arrowhead of the boat to the right-hand side and started downslope, looking for safe routes to the top. La
teral ravines appeared to offer them.

  Abruptly he halted. What the flapping hellfire? He stooped and stared. Could it be? No, some freak of nature. He wasn’t qualified to identify a fossil.

  He went on. By the time he had tentatively found the path he wanted, he was so near the glacier that he continued. It lifted high, not grimy like its counterparts on terrestroid planets but clear, polished glassy-smooth, a cold and mysterious blue. Whatever mineral grains once lay on it had sunken to the bottom, and Saxtorph stood moveless. The time was long before he breathed, “Oh. My. God.”

  From within the ice, the top half of a skull stared at him. It could only be that, unhuman though it was. And other bones were scattered behind, and shaped stones, and pieces of what was most surely earthenware. Chill possessed him from within. How old were those remnants? Big Tertia must in its youth have had a still denser atmosphere than now, greenhouse effect, heat from a contracting interior, and… those molecules that are the kernel from which life grows, perhaps evolved not here but in interstellar space, organics which the wan sun did not destroy as they drifted inward… Life arose. It liberated oxygen. It gave birth to beings that made tools and dreams. But meanwhile the planetary core congealed and chilled, the oceans began to freeze, plants died, nothing replaced the oxygen that surface rocks bound fast… Without copper, tin, gold, iron, any metal they could know for what it was, the dwellers had never gone beyond their late stone age, never had a chance to develop the science that might have saved them or at least have let them understand what was happening…

  Saxtorph shuddered. He turned and hastened back to the boat.

  Unsure what kind of surface awaited them, Carita and Yoshii descended on the polarizer and made a feather-soft landing. They were poised to spring instantly back upward. All they felt was a slight resilience, more on their instruments than in their bones. It damped out and Fido rested quiet.

  “Elastic?” Yoshii wondered. “Or viscous, or what?”

  “Never mind, we’ll investigate later, right now we’re down safe,” Carita replied. She wiped her brow. “Hoo, but I need a stiff drink and a hot shower!”

  Yoshii let-red at her. “In the opposite order, please.” She cuffed him lightly. The horseplay turned into mutual unharnessing and a hug. “Hey-y,” she purred, “you really do want to celebrate, don’t you? Later, we’ll share that shower.”

  His arms dropped. She released him in her turn and he made a stumbling backward step. “I’m sorry, I didn’t intend—Well, we should take a good look outside, shouldn’t we?”

  The jinxian was briefly silent before she smiled wryly and shrugged. “Okay. I’ll forgive you this time if you’ll fix dinner. Your yakitori tacos are always consoling. You’re right, anyway.”

  They turned off the fluoros and peered forth. As their eyes adapted, they saw well enough through airlessness, by the thronging stars and the cold rush of the Milky Way. Bowl-shaped, the dell in which they were parked curved some 50 meters wide to heights twice as far above the bottom. Fido sat close to one side; direct sunlight would only touch her for a small part of the day, weeks hence. Every edge and lump was rounded off by the covering of the planet. In this illumination it appeared pale gray.

  “What is the stuff?” Carita muttered.

  “I’ve hit on an idea,” Yoshii said. “I do not warrant that it is right. It may not even make sense.”

  Her teeth flashed white in the darkness. “The universe is not under obligation to make sense. Speak your piece.” She switched cabin illumination back on. Radiance made the ports blank.

  “I think it must be organic-carbon-based,” Yoshii said. “It doesn’t remotely match any mineral I’ve ever seen or heard of or imagined, whereas it does resemble any number of plastics.”

  “Hm, yeah, I had the same thought, but discarded it. Where would the chemistry come from? Life can’t have started in the short time Prima hung onto its atmosphere, can it? Whatever carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen are left must be locked up in solid-state materials. At most we might find hydrates or something.”

  “This could have come from space.”

  “What?” She gaped at him. “If that’s a joke, it’s too deep for me.”

  “There is matter in space, in the nebulae and even in the emptiest stretches between. It includes organic compounds, some of them fairly complex.”

  “Not quite concentrated enough for soup.”

  “Sure, the densest nebula is still a pretty hard vacuum by Terrestrial standards. However, this system has had time to pass through many. Between them, too—yes, between galaxies—gravity has found atoms and molecules to draw in. During any single year, hardly a measurable amount. But it’s been fifteen billion years, Carita.”

  “Um’h,” she uttered, almost as if punched in the stomach.

  “The sun doesn’t give off any ultraviolet to speak of,” Yoshii pursued. “Its wind is puny. Carbon-based molecules land intact. The sun does maintain a day time temperature at which they can react with each other. I daresay cosmic radiation energizes the chemistry, too. Fine grains of sand and dust—crumbled off rocks, together with meteoroid powder—provide colloidal surfaces where the stuff can cluster till there’s a fairly high concentration and complicated exchanges become possible. Unsaturated bonds grab the free atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, anything included in the down drift except noble gases, and incorporate them. Maybe, here and there, some such growing patch ’learns’ how to take stuff from surface rocks. It’s a slow, slow process—or set of processes—but it’s had time. Eventually patches meet as they expand. What happens then depends on just what their compositions happen to be. I’d expect some weird interactions while they join. Those could be going on yet. That would explain why we saw differently colored areas. But it’s only the terminal reactions.”

  Yoshii’s words had come faster and faster. He was developing his idea as he described it. Excitement turned into awe and he whispered, “A polymer. A single multiplex molecule, the size of this planet.”

  Carita was mute for a whole minute before she murmured, “Whew! But why isn’t the same stuff on every airless body?… No wait. Stupid of me to ask. This is the only one where conditions have been right.”

  Yoshii nodded. “I suspect that what yellows the rest is a carbon compound, too, but something formed in space. You get some fairly complicated ones there, you know. If that particular one can’t react with the organics I was talking about—too cold—then they are a minor part of the down drift compared to it. We haven’t noticed the same thing in other planetary systems because they are all too young, and maybe because none of them have made repeated passages through nebulae.”

  “You missed your calling,” Carita said tenderly. “Should’ve been a scientist. Is it too late? We can go out, take samples, put’em through our analyzers. When we get home, you can write a paper that’ll have scholarships piled around you up to your bellybutton. Though I hope you’ll keep on with the poetry. I like what you—”

  A quiver went through the boat. “What the Finagle!” she exclaimed.

  “A quake?” Yoshii asked.

  “The prof’s told us these planets are as far beyond quakes as a mummy is beyond hopscotch,” Carita snapped.

  Another tremor made slight noises throughout the hull. Yoshii reached for the searchlight switch. Carita caught his arm. “Hold that,” she said. “The kzinti—”

  “No, unless they beef up that already wild boost they are under, they won’t arrive for a couple more hours.” Nevertheless he refrained.

  The pair studied their instrument panel. “We’ve been tilted a bit,” Yoshii pointed out. “Should we reset the landing jacks?”

  “Let’s wait and see,” Carita said. “I’d guess the rock beneath has settled under our weight, or one layer has slid over another, or something like that. If it’s reached a new equilibrium, we don’t want to upset it by shifting mass around. No sense in moving yet, when we can’t tell what the ground is like anywhere else.”

&n
bsp; “Right. I’m afraid, though, we can’t relax as we had hoped.”

  “How much relaxing could we do anyway, with kzinti sniffing after us?”

  “And Laurinda—” Yoshii whispered. Harshly: “Do you want to take the controls, stand by to jump out of here, in case? I’ll snug things down and, yes, throw a meal together.”

  Lightfoot under the low gravity, he descended aft to the engine compartment. Delicate work needed doing. The idling fusion generator must be shut down entirely, lest its neutrino smoke betray the boat—not that the kzinti could home in on it, but they would know with certainty the humans were on Prima, and in which quadrant. Batteries, isotopic and crystalline as well as chemical, held energy for weeks of life support and ordinary operations. Yet it had to be possible to restart the generator instantly, full power within a second, should there be a sudden need to scramble. That meant disconnecting the safety interlocks. Yoshii fetched tools and got busy. The task was demanding, but not too much for his spirit to wing elsewhere in space, else when in time—the Belt, Plateau, We Made It, Rover’s folk on triumphal progress after their return…