The Worlds of George O

by George O. Smith

  And then Phil got out of there quick. The thing might give way, and if it did he had no intention of standing under God-knows-how-many tons of falling water. He had done his best, and the deluge upon Mars would cease. If he lost the station it was too bad, but he had tried. The next thing was to go to the source of this mess and see if he could fix things there in time to save the station.

  * * * *

  The torrent of water was slowed; its flow was stopped, but the churning would go on until the energy dissipated. Slowed; that was all. And the sucking flow of the rapids was gone.

  But outside the watertight the spacecraft was so close--and so far away.

  The safety line was whipped off somewhere, of course.

  His magnetic shoes were as helpful on the concrete building as a pair of dancing pumps. He could not let go of the stanchion outside of the door; the water drew at him and pulled him back and forth. He grunted and swore, and the sound inside his helmet startled him.

  He tried to step over to the spaceship when the water seemed quiet.

  He was whipped from his feet and sent skirling tail over eyebrow.

  His hands found the air-bottle valve and he blew up his spacesuit until it was spread-eagling him again. It was buoyant once he shucked the weights from his waistline.

  He bobbed to the top and porpoised. The mad roil of the water was stilled; it was churning, of course, but the maelstrom had abated, and the lashing waves were less awesome. They were strong enough to turn Phil over and over, and to toss him under now and again. But he waited, feeling like a half-dozen dice in a shaker, safe in the cushion of the suit, until the spaceship emerged and found him.

  "Inlet," he said to Britton. "Or shall I take it?"

  Britton stood out of the pilot's chair and waved Phil down. "I'm beat," he said.

  "I gather. But look, Tom, before you come completely unglued, hang on while we figure out what happened."

  "Okay. That I can do."

  "Who's taking the trick at the cutter?"

  "Johnny Wilkes and Walter Farrow."

  "There's trouble there."

  "Right."

  Louise shook her head. "Would you bring me up to date? I feel like an innocent bystander."

  Phil smiled briefly, and said, "Sorry. I'm so used to it that I think everybody knows it." He waved a hand at the swollen Mercury Canal below them; they were sidling along above it, by now some distance from the terminal lake; the water here was still in a flood-rush. "Obviously, he said,

  "this water doesn't originate on Mercury. The boys here take tricks of a month, running Station One. Something must have happened there. Then the whole thing blew up, and among the things that went into the drink was the spacecraft used here to take care of such jaunts. So now we've got to go out to Station One and clean up the mess. We'll just stop at Inlet Station and pick up the rest of the crew and take us out there."

  "This is all very well," she said a little dazedly. "But you haven't told me where Station One is."

  "Oh--forgetting again. It's at--"

  "My God!" breathed Tom Britton.

  They all looked--at Inlet Station.

  * * * *

  Inlet Station was another huge matter-transmitter plane, held vertically against the face of a cliff. In normal times, the face of the plane spewed forth a mist of molecularly divided water that collected into drops of ice that fell into the valley below it. Rock and rill were usually covered with a glint of melting ice that built up into fantastic shapes. It was always a rather breathtaking sight... but pale and drab compared to the sight that had awakened Tom Britton.

  The face of the transmitter plane was obscured by the froth of vapor that poured forth. This was no gentle flow, but a torrential storm. And cutting the mirror from full view was a half-mile of sheer crystal fairyland. Pillars of crystal rose high, surmounted by monstrous, intricately fabricated six-sided figures. Twenty-foot snowflakes interlocked with one another, some of them whole, most of them partially complete and mingled with the ones beside them, lacery tangled into glittering domes and graceful rainbow-arches. Jagged and shapeless stalagmites of ice thrust upward through the graceful lace to heighten the delicacy by comparison, and through this Chantilly of ice flowed the frothy vapor that was settling on it to add to the structure.

  The sunlight glinted from the billion points, melting them just enough for the next layer to stick, melting the base of the crystal palace so that the structure flowed in a constantly changing pattern.

  It was the Crystal Palace of Santa Claus, or the Emerald City of the Land of Oz--

  They watched, enraptured; perhaps entrapped by the awesome incongruity of such sheer beauty growing out of disaster.

  Then Phil shook himself visibly. "Think we can make it to Inlet?"

  Britton blinked and tore his eyes away. "How?"

  "We might ram the ice until--"

  "Until we get frozen in, too?"

  "But--"

  Britton pointed down. Dimly, through the faceted crystals of a tall ice structure could be seen the sullen glint of metal. The power that would drive a spacecraft across the Solar System nearly at the speed of light was not strong enough to break the grip of this icepack upon the hull. It was more probable that the ice was crushing the hull--

  Somewhere down in that maze were the men who ran Inlet Station; and somewhere down in that crystal structure they would remain until the ice melted.

  "That's why ship number two didn't go out either," said Britton.

  Phil nodded. He set his levers, and the vast ice field began to diminish until it was no more than a tiny glinting diamond on the white-hot face of Mercury. Then the spacecraft rounded Mercury, and the diamond was gone.

  * * * *

  V

  Sol was dwindling below. The spacecraft was silent again, speeding through the inky black towards a mote in the sky ahead.

  Phil stretched and said, "This is an odd situation."

  "Odd?" asked Louise.

  "Very. Here we are, you and I, isolated in a spacecraft with about six hours of nothing to do. There have been reams of words written and miles of film exposed and kilowatts of juice burned purveying situations like this.

  Attractive woman and virile man entrapped together with nothing to do but consider each other objectively or subjectively."

  "Or personally."

  "Yah. So what do we have? Here we are in a situation where your virtue shouldn't be worth a hoot--and the joint is loaded to the scuppers with dead-weary techs draped untastefully on everything that offers a flat surface. Not that we'd wake them up with any mild activity, but they've left us nothing to be active in."

  Tom Britton emitted a slight snore, turned over languorously and burrowed deeper in the divan.

  "Damned chaperone," growled Phil.

  Louise laughed. "So," she said, "since my virtue is safe from harm, let's discuss something else."

  "Might as well. We'll take up the matter of your virtue upon some date when the environment lends itself better to experimental evidence. So where do we go from here?"

  "Phil, I'd like to know--where are we going?"

  "To the ice-mines of the Solar System," he said. "I thought you knew."

  "You were about to tell me."

  "That's so. Well, as I was saying, there is no native water on Mercury."

  "I've also been given to understand that there was no air on Mercury either. But we were breathing."

  "Sure were. But tell me, Louise, what grade of school do you teach?"

  "Fourth grade."

  "Then it isn't important to you--or them--yet. But you'd better be getting hep to a newer book of the skies."

  "Go on."

  "For centuries we have been told that Man is an adaptable animal.

  This isn't so. Man isn't adaptable. He is adapting. When his environment does not agree with his metabolism, he changes his environment. Nobody could really live on Mars. So we change it. We mine ice on Uranus and ship it to Mercury to warm it, and then de
liver it to Mars as a hot rain. This changes both the temperature and the water-vapor content of the planet to a human-acceptable norm. Venus had a lousy atmosphere, so we send that to Jupiter, where it won't be noticed, and replace it with oxygen and nitrogen from Mercury, which we get by delivering the frozen gas from Neptune. The whole thing is simple. Pluto was airless and damned cold. The air Pluto gets now is hot, and someday Pluto will be warm enough to accept colonization. Venus doesn't need hot air, so the stuff that goes there is not warmed much. And so it goes. The rest of the planets and satellites are all treated in the same way, according to their various and sundry needs."

  * * * *

  Louise looked at him softly. "And you're the gent who was complaining about everything being so calm and unruffled."

  "What's exciting about running a central heating plant? I'm just a cosmic plumber."

  "So?"

  "It's darned dull, except when it blows a fuse."

  She laughed. "Do you understand yourself at all?"

  "Who can?"

  "That I can't answer."

  "Then what are you driving at?"

  "It's just that the human race is always looking at the other side of the fence."

  "Is this bad for the human race?"

  "Not at all. People have been looking over the fence for millions of years. So that today you can stand on the intellectual shoulders of your forebears and work with what they left you. It seems unglamorous, but you forget the glorious wonder of it all. You grab in your gadgets and your science, and forget to think about the big question."

  "Which is what?"

  "Where are we going, and what are we going to do when we get there?"

  "I've pondered that question. It has no answer. Ergo, I direct myself at things that I can answer without getting into a tizzy."

  "So you go on building and inventing and creating gadgets. The man who crossed the lake in his day is no better than the man who crossed space yesterday. You sit in your cave and draw pictures and dream. You have an itch to create."

  "I suppose I do."

  "Of course you do. That's why you're here doing what you're doing."

  "But I'm not creating."

  "You are!" she said vehemently. Tom Britton snorkled, mumbled something unintelligible, and then dropped off into deep slumber again.

  "We can't all be Rembrandt or Rodin, creating something world-shakingly beautiful, or Einstein delivering something profound. Some of us have to go on through life just dropping a thin layer of ourselves on top of what's been left before. You're creating, even though you do no more than keep another man's work from falling apart."

  "I've never looked at it that way."

  "Of course not. That's why you also shy at the first tenet of creation."

  "Who--me?"

  Louise looked at her wrist watch. "It isn't too many hours ago that you were saved from the irksome task of answering an embarrassing question."

  "Which?"

  "I asked you whether romance and marriage and a family might not be the answer to your unrest."

  "That's a woman's question," he said slowly.

  "Maybe it is. But it's a man-and-woman answer." Louise smiled and looked at him. "You're quite a guy, Phil. If you were to make the right motions and the right noises at the right time--you might find an enthusiastic cooperation."

  "In other words, I am being proposed to?"

  "You are not. And if you propose to me right now, you'll get a quick

  'no'."

  "But I thought--"

  "Think a little deeper, Phil. You dated me last evening because of the possible thrill of wooing."

  "I'm--"

  Louise grinned. "Phil, if you claim that you dated me because you considered me as a possible matrimonial partner, I'll scoff at you for the liar you are. No woman is that naive. So we'll just go on."

  "Go on what?" he asked. "Admitting that I dated you for the possible fun and games?"

  * * * *

  Louise nodded. "Men come a-wooing for the fun and games, and the woman's game is to make them stay for the duration. Or so the books tell me. So you will continue to lay siege to my virtue and I shall continue to employ every weapon to capture the enemy. And someday one of two things will happen: you'll get tired of the siege and go elsewhere, or you'll succumb to my wiles. Who knows?"

  "But--"

  Louise laughed. "Let's leave it that way, Phil. It's true. Maybe my thinking is a bit archaic, but that's my opinion."

  "Okay," he said with a smile. "We'll get this mess cleaned up and then we'll get you back to Mars quietly so that we can take up where we left off."

  "You're still not convinced about this family idea, are you?"

  "They do sort of tie a man down."

  Louise smiled. "We'll leave it that way until you are convinced. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  She stood up and crossed the control room to stand before him. Her stance was deliberate. She knew that her slender waist and softly rounded breasts were attractive enough to make a man ignore the fact that her dress was crumpled from too much wearing. She leaned down to take his hands from where they lay at ease on the arms of his chair, and she knew that this motion also gave him a brief view into the neckline of her dress. His eyes widened satisfactorily. She drew him up, standing. She lifted her face.

  He reached for her and she melted into his arms, clinging to him. Her lips were soft and mobile under his; her skin was warm and soft under the dress.

  Phil raised his head, eyes a little glazed, and looked around the control room. Louise leaned back in his arms, grinning at him.

  "You're a witch," he told her.

  She laughed. "Just think of how nice it would be if we didn't have a collection of tired gents cluttering up the joint. Maybe even a joint of--all--maybe our own?"

  Phil laughed and kissed her again. "Damn you for being a calculating female," he said.

  Louise kissed back before she whirled out of his arms.

  He reached for her again, but she held him off with a shake of her head. "Coffee?" she asked.

  He looked at his watch. "Somebody's got to stay alive for the rest of this leg."

  "All the better reason for saving the canoodling until later."

  "I can canoodle and--"

  "Drive with one hand? Nope. I'll have no divided attentions, Phil. But I will build coffee."

  "Might find an egg, too."

  "I'm way ahead of you."

  "Good."

  She chuckled. "Just a bit more of the old bait, old man."

  "Shucks, lady. I can cook too."

  "It's a lousy substitute."

  "For what?" he asked.

  But he asked the back of her head--just as it disappeared down the ladder towards the galley. He eyed his reflection in the nearest port, wiped his brow, and said, "Gr-r-r-ruff!"

  * * * *

  VI

  Uranus was dim-lit by a tiny sun that cast an ineffectual light across a flat vista of blue-black ice. Crests of white showed white-diamond glints--not really snow, but a rime-ice. Below--somewhere at the end of the radar beam--was Station One.

  Station One, doing something unpredictable, no doubt.

  They dropped down, following the radar beacon, until they saw it.

  It had to be seen to be believed.

  Uranus is mostly ice. Normally its gravity was enough to keep the ice cold-flowed into a reasonably flat surface. It is too cold to snow, too cold to rain, too cold to hail or sleet or hurricane or much of anything. But it is not too cold to grind together, to thrust one planetary block against another, to cause upthrusting mountain ranges of ice, which in the normal course of events will cold-flow into the resemblance of flatness. These upthrustings are rare--

  Station One had met one of these.

  Strain develops slowly; an ounce at a time, it builds up over a long period until a tremendous pressure develops. The pressure overcomes everything. Then, with two monstrous forces thrusting against one another, the angle o
f thrust will begin to change. The vector of force will become more amiable to the forces involved, and the whole vista then drives forth along the new direction of resulting motion. In the case of planetary thrust, this direction is upward, causing mountains.

  Forty miles high, the mountain of cold-flowed ice had risen. Up and up and up in a rising pillar, a rising pyramid until the top, bowed over by some trick of angular force until it leaned sideways, broke from the mountain top and came tumbling down the side of the slope in a giant avalanche.

  There was neither rock nor stone; only ice.

  Station One was a huge structure of metal and concrete, driven by an atomic pile contained inside of it. It moved across the face of Uranus on tractor treads which depressed acres with each planting of a monstrous foot. It left behind it a trail that might someday amaze some visitor from somewhere else.

  Station One pushed before it a rectangular matter-transmitter plane like the scoop of a platypus, and the speed with which it scooped up the ice of Uranus was dictated by the needs of the Mercury Canal.

  But now it had gone berserk.

  Because it had been caught in the rise of a mountain ridge, and then walloped from above by a catapulting avalanche.

  Shelling with a three-inch rifle, it might have withstood for a time. But not cascade upon cascade of tertiary ice that slithered down in shards like giant shrapnel.

  Its normally hump-backed appearance was crushed into a veritable sickle shape. Forward was the girder structure that supported the matter-transmitter plane; behind it on a small flat platform stood a tiny spacecraft. Both were untouched by the downfall. But the center section had taken the brunt.

  It had been a tough fight.

  Battered and dented, the central of the station was for the most part intact. But it took only one hole to admit the poisonous atmosphere of Uranus--

  * * * *

  Phil swore, and Hugson crossed himself; Tom Britton reached for a hat he did not own, and Louise went solemn.

  Two men had died awfully in that monumental structure. Two men had died--but the insensate mechanism still fought to carry on its function as it had under their hands. Intellect would have known when it was licked.