Iceworld

by Hal Clement

  “I’ll bet you would — for one thing,” Ken replied. Feth’s smile disappeared.

  “Yes — just one,” he agreed soberly. “But I see no chance of that. It would take a competent medical researcher years, even on Sarr with all his facilities. What hope would we have here?”

  “I don’t know, but neither of us is senile,” retorted Ken. “It’ll be a few years yet before I give up hope. Let’s look at that suit you fixed, and the one I wore on Four. They may tell us something of what we’ll have to guard against.” This was the first Feth had heard of the sortie on Mars, and he said so. Ken told of his experience in detail, while the mechanic listened carefully.

  “In other words,” he said at the end of the tale, “there was no trouble until you actually touched this stuff you have decided was hydrogen oxide. That means it’s either, a terrifically good conductor, has an enormous specific heat, a large heat of vaporization, or two or three of those in combination. Right?” Ken admitted, with some surprise, that that was right. He had not summed up the matter so concisely in his own mind. Feth went on: “There is at the moment no way of telling whether there is much of that stuff on Three, but the chances are there is at least some. It follows that the principal danger on that planet seems to be encountering deposits of this chemical. I am quite certain that I can insulate a suit so that you will not suffer excessive heat loss by conduction or convection in atmospheric gases, whatever they are.”

  Ken did not voice his growing suspicion that Feth had been more than a mechanic in his time. He kept to the vein of the conversation.

  “That seems right. I’ve seen the stuff, and it’s certainly easy to recognize, so there should be no difficulty in avoiding it.”

  “You’ve seen the solid form, which sublimed in a near vacuum. Three has a respectable atmospheric pressure, and there may be a liquid phase of the compound. If you see any pools of any sort of liquid whatever, I would advise keeping clear of them.”

  “Sound enough — only, if the planet is anything like Sarr, there isn’t a chance in a thousand of landing near open liquid.”

  “Our troubles seem to spring mostly from the fact that this planet isn’t anything like Sarr,” Feth pointed out dryly. Ken was forced to admit the justice of this statement, and stored away the rapidly growing stock of information about his companion. Enough of Feth’s former reserve had disappeared to make him seem a completely changed person.

  The suits were brought into the shop and gone over with extreme care. The one used on Planet Four appeared to have suffered no damage, and they spent most of the time on the other. The examination this time was much more minute than the one Ken had given it on board the Karella, and one or two new discoveries resulted. Besides the bluish deposit Ken had noted on the metal, which he was now able to show contained oxides, there was a looser encrustation in several more protected spots which gave a definite potassium spectrum — one of the few that Ken could readily recognize — and also a distinct odor of carbon bisulfide when heated. That, to the chemist, was completely inexplicable. He was familiar with gaseous compounds of both elements, but was utterly unable to imagine how there could have been precipitated from them anything capable of remaining solid at “normal” temperature.

  Naturally, he was unfamiliar with the makeup of earthly planets, and had not seen the fire whose remains had so puzzled Roger Wing. Even the best imaginations have their limits when data are lacking.

  The joints had, as Feth expected, shrunk at the seals, and traces of oxides could be found in the insulation. Apparently some native atmosphere had gotten into the suit, either by diffusion or by outside pressure after the sulfur had frozen.

  “Do you think that is likely to happen with the packing properly tightened?” Ken asked, when this point had been checked.

  “Not unless the internal heaters fail from some other cause, and in that case you won’t care anyway. The over-tightening cut down the fluid circulation in the temperature equalizing shell, so that at first severe local cooling could take place without causing a sufficiently rapid reaction in the main heaters. The local coils weren’t up to the job, and once the fluid had frozen at the joints of course the rest was only a matter of seconds. I suppose we might use something with a lower freezing point than zinc as an equalizing fluid — potassium or sodium would be best from that point of view, but they’re nasty liquids to handle from chemical considerations. Tin or bismuth are all right that way, but their specific heats are much lower than that of zinc. I suspect the best compromise would be selenium.”

  “I see you’ve spent a good deal of time thinking this out. What would be wrong with a low specific heat liquid?”

  “It would have to be circulated much faster, and I don’t know whether the pumps would handle it — both those metals are a good deal denser than zinc, too. Selenium is still pretty bad in specific heat, but its lower density will help the pumps. The only trouble is getting it. Well, it was just a thought — the zinc should stay liquid if nothing special goes wrong. We can try it on the next test, anyway.”

  “Have you thought about how you are going to justify this next trial, when Drai asks how come?”

  “Not in detail. He won’t ask. He likes to boast that he doesn’t know any science — then he gloats about hiring brains when he needs them. We’ll simply say that we have found a way around the cause of the first failure — which is certainly true enough.”

  “Could we sneak a televisor down on the next test, so we could see what goes on?”

  “I don’t see how we could conceal it — any signal we can receive down here can be picked up as well or better in the observatory. I suppose we might say that you had an idea in that line too, and we were testing it out.”

  “We could — only perhaps it would be better to separate ideas a little. It wouldn’t help if Drai began to think you were a fool. People too often connect fools and knaves in figures of speech, and it would be a pity to have him thinking along those lines.”

  “Thanks — I was hoping you’d keep that point in mind. It doesn’t matter much anyway — I don’t see why we can’t take the Karella out near Three and make the tests from there. That would take only a matter of minutes, and you could make the dive right away if things went well. I know it will be several days before the ship will be wanted — more likely several weeks. They get eight or ten loads of tofacco from the planet during the ‘season’ and several days elapse between each load. Since all the trading is done by torpedo, Lee has a nice idle time of it.”

  “That will be better. I still don’t much like free fall, but a few hours of that will certainly be better than days of waiting. Go ahead and put it up to Drai. One other thing — let’s bring more than one suit this time. I was a little worried for a while, there, out on Four.”

  “A good point. I’ll check three suits, and then call Drai.” Conversation lapsed, and for the next few hours a remarkable amount of constructive work was accomplished. The three units of armor received an honest preservice check this time, and Feth was no slacker. Pumps, valves, tanks, joints, heating coils — everything was tested, separately and in all combinations.

  “A real outfit would spray them with liquid mercury as a final trick,” Feth said as he stepped back from the last suit, “but we don’t have it, ana we don’t have any place to try it, and it wouldn’t check as cold as these are going to have to take anyway. I’ll see what Drai has to say about using the ship — we certainly can’t run three torpedoes at once, and I’d like to be sure all these suits are serviceable before any one of them is worn on Three.” He was putting away his tools as he spoke. That accomplished, he half turned toward the communicator, then appeared to think better of it.

  “I’ll talk to him in person. Drai’s a funny chap,” he said, and left the shop.

  He was back in a very few minutes, grinning.

  “We can go,” he said. “He was very particular about the plural. You haven’t been through a period of tofacco-need yet, and he is afraid yo
u’d get funny ideas alone. He is sure that I’ll have you back here in time for my next dose. He didn’t say all this, you understand, but it wasn’t hard to tell what he had in mind.”

  “Couldn’t we smuggle enough tofacco aboard to get us back to Sarr?”

  “Speaking for myself, I couldn’t get there. I understand you don’t know the direction yourself. Furthermore, if Drai himself can’t smuggle the stuff onto Sarr, how do you expect me to get it past his eyes? I can’t carry a refrigerator on my back, and you know what happens if the stuff warms up.”

  “All right — we’ll play the game as it’s dealt for a while. Let’s go.”

  Half an hour later, the Karella headed out into the icy dark. At about the same time, Roger Wing began to feel cold himself, and decided to give up the watch for that night. He was beginning to feel a little discouraged, and as he crawled through his bedroom window a short time later — with elaborate precautions of silence — and stowed the rope under his bed, he was wondering seriously if he should continue the vigil. Perhaps the strange visitor would never return, and the longer he waited to get his father’s opinion, the harder it would be to show any concrete evidence of what had happened.

  He fell asleep over the problem — somewhere about the time the test torpedo entered atmosphere a few miles above him.

  13

  The Karella hung poised deep in Earth’s shadow, well beyond measurable air pressure. The spherical compass tuned to the transmitter on the planet far below pointed in a direction that would have been straight down had there been any weight. Ordon Lee was reading, with an occasional glance at his beloved indicator board whenever a light blinked. This was fairly often, for Ken and Feth had put the testing of cold-armor on a mass-production basis. One of the suits had already returned and been checked; Feth was now in the open air lock, clad in an ordinary space suit, detaching the second from the cargo rings and putting the third in its place. He was in touch with Ken, at the torpedo controls, by radio. The scientist was holding the torpedo as well as he could partly inside the lock, which had not been designed for such maneuvers and was not large enough for the full length of the projectile. Feth was having his troubles from the same fact, and the lock-obstruction light on Lee’s board was flashing hysterically.

  With the torpedo once more plunging toward the dark surface below, things quieted down a little — but only a little. Feth brought the second suit inside, necessarily closing the outer door in the process and occasioning another pattern of colored light to disturb the pilot’s reading. Then there was nothing but the fading proximity light as the torpedo receded, and the burden of divided attention was shifted to Ken. He had to stay at his controls, but he wanted desperately to see what Feth was doing. He already knew that the first of the suits was wearable — its interior temperature had dropped about forty degrees, which represented an actual heat loss his own metabolism could easily make up; and there was a governor on the heater unit which Feth had deliberately set down so that the heat loss should be measurable. With that limitation removed, he should be as comfortable on the Planet of Ice as anyone could expect to be while encased in nearly three hundred pounds of metal.

  Knowing this, he was less worried about the second suit; but he found that he was still unable to concentrate completely on the job in hand. He was quite startled when a buzzer sounded on his own board, which proved to be announcing the fact that his torpedo had encountered outside pressure. As Ken had not reduced its speed to anything like a safe value, he was quite busy for a while; and when he had finally landed the messenger — safely, he hoped — Feth had finished his work. There were now two usable suits.

  That removed the greatest load from the minds of both scientist and mechanic, and they were not too disappointed when the third unit failed its test. Ken had a suspicion of the reason — Feth found that leakage had occurred at leg and “sleeve” joints, which would have been put under considerable stress by high acceleration. He did not volunteer this idea, and Feth asked no questions. Ken had an uneasy idea that the mechanic with the rather surprising chemical and physical background might have figured the matter out for himself, however.

  This worry, if it could be dignified by such a name, was quickly submerged in the flurry of final preparations for the descent. Ordon Lee still refused flatly to lower his ship into the heat-trap of Earth’s atmosphere, even after the success of two of the suits; it would therefore be necessary for Ken to ride down as the empty armor had done — clamped to the outside of a torpedo. The attachments would have to be modified so that he could manipulate them himself, and that took a little time. Ken ate a good meal, and took the unusual precaution of drinking — the Sarrians manufactured nearly all the liquid they needed in their own tissues.

  If the scientist felt any slight doubts as he stepped into the metallic bulk which was to be his only shield for the next few hours from the ghastliest environment he could imagine, his pride prevented them from showing. He was silent as Feth carefully dogged the upper section in place — entry was effected through the top — and listened with a tiny stethoscope to each of the equalizer pumps as they were turned on. Satisfied, he nodded approval at the armored scientist, and Ken reached out, seized a stanchion with one of his handlers, and pulled his personal tank into motion toward the air lock. He had to wait in the corridor while Feth redonned his own suit, and then patiently inside the lock while the mechanic carefully attached the armor to the hull of the torpedo. Lee had finally become helpful, and was holding the projectile inside the lock against the pull of the meteor repellers, which he still refused to turn off for an instant.

  Even when the outer door closed between Ken and the rest of the Livable space within several million miles, he managed to keep his self control. He was now used to weightlessness, fortunately; the endless-fall sensation has serious mental effects on some people. Even the relative emptiness of the surrounding space he could stand, since he could see enough objects to keep himself oriented. There were about as many stars visible here as near his home planet, since two hundred parsecs mean little in the size of the galaxy.

  In fact, he retained his calm until his eyes as well as his sense of balance agreed to tell him he was falling. The Karella had long since vanished behind — or above — him. The sun was in almost the same direction, since there had been no discussion needed to settle that the landing should be made on the day side of the planet. Rather more had been needed before the same old landing place had been selected — Ken, of course, wanted to see the natives, but even his scientific curiosity had been tempered with caution. Feth, regarding the trip chiefly as another test of the armor, had been rather against natives as an added complication; but curiosity had won out. Ken was falling toward the homing transmitter at which the trading was done, with the understanding that he would be carried a little to the west, as before — he was willing to meet “his” native, but did not want to interfere more than necessary with trade. He realized, of course, that the creatures probably moved around, but he resolutely declined to think about the probable results if the one he had frightened had met the traders; he regarded it as profitless guesswork, which it certainly would have been.

  The result of all the discussion, however, meant that he could see clearly the expanding world below — it felt like below, since Feth was now slowing the torpedo’s descent He could not see the torpedo at all easily, as his armor was facing away from it and the back view ports in the helmet were too close to the hull for real vision. He was beginning to feel, therefore, like a man hanging from the ledge of a high roof on a rope of questionable strength. If his vocal apparatus had been as closely connected with his breathing mechanism as is that of a human being, his state of mind would certainly have been betrayed by the radio to the listeners above. As it was they could not hear his tense breathing, and he endured his terror in silence and alone. It was probably just as well; Ordon Lee’s reaction would hardly have been a sympathetic one, and whatever helpful feeling Feth might have had he wou
ld not have been likely to express aloud.

  There was air around him now — at least the gaseous mixture this world used for air. It was whistling upward, audible even through the armor. He could not be much more then five miles from the ground, and the descent was still rapid — too rapid, he was beginning to feel. As if in answer to the thought, his weight increased abruptly, and he knew that Feth far above had added power. With an effort greater than he had thought himself capable of making, Ken wrenched his attention from the rapid expansion of the landscape below and the creaking of the taut chains above, and concentrated on details. Once started, this proved easy, for there was more that was fantastic around him than mere temperature.

  He could not see too far, of course. Eyes whose greatest sensitivity lies in the blue and near ultra-violet work are at a considerable disadvantage in Earth’s hazy atmosphere. Still, the ground below was taking on detail.

  It was rough, as they had deduced. Even though mountains do not show to best advantage from overhead, Ken was experienced enough to judge that these were quite respectable heights by Sarrian standards. The surface was buried in a riot of color, largely varying shades of green, brown, and gray. Here and there a patch of metallic sheen reminded him disquietingly of the vast, smooth areas where the mysteriously hostile intelligences of the planet dwelt. If these were outposts — but they had never interfered with the trading torpedoes which had been descending for years in this same area, Ken told himself.

  As he dropped lower, he saw that some of the gray elevations were of remarkable shape and form — many of them were actually broader above than lower down. He was quite low before he could see that these objects were not part of the landscape, but were actually suspended in the air. The only clouds he had ever seen were the vast dust storms raised by Sarr’s furious winds, but he judged that these must be of somewhat similar nature. Probably the particles were smaller, to permit them to remain in suspension — a planet this cold could hardly have very strong winds. He described the phenomena as minutely as he could to the listeners above. Feth reported that he was putting Ken’s broadcasts on record, and added some more pertinent information.