by Hal Clement
It took a full ten minutes to bump into his companion, and even then he felt undeservedly lucky.
Shandara lay down, so as to use a minimum of energy while the work was being done. Ridging felt over the connection several times until he was sure he had them right—they were, of course, designed to be handled by spacesuit gauntlets, though not by a blindfolded operator. Then he warned the cartographer, closed the main cutoffs at helmet and emergency tanks to isolate the renewer mechanism, and opened the latter. It was a simple device, designed in throwaway units like a piece of electronic gear, with each unit automatically sealing as it was removed—a fortunate fact if the alga culture on which Shandara’s life for the next few hours depended was to survive the operation.
The calcium chloride cells were easy to locate; Ridging removed two of the half dozen to be on the safe side, replaced and reassembled the renewer, tightened the connections, and reopened the valves.
Ridging now had two cans of calcium chloride. He could not tell whether it had yet absorbed enough water actually to go into solution, though he doubted it; but he took no chances. Holding one of the little containers carefully right side up, he opened its perforated top, took a specimen bag and pushed it into the contents. The plastic was not, of course, absorptive—it was not the first time in the past hour he had regretted the change from cloth bags—but the damp crystals should adhere, and the solution if there was any would wet it. He pulled out the material and applied it to his face plate.
It was not until much later that he became sure whether there was any liquid. For the moment it worked, and he found that he could see; he asked no more. Hastily he repeated the process on Shandara’s helmet, and the two set out rapidly for the rim. They did not stop to pick up camera or map.
Travel is fast on the moon, but they made less than four hundred meters. Then the face plates were covered again. With a feeling of annoyance they stopped, and Ridging repeated the treatment.
This time it didn’t work.
“I supposed you emptied the can while you were jumping,” Shandara remarked in an annoyed tone. “Try the other one.”
“I didn’t empty anything; but I’ll try.” The contents of the other container proved equally useless, and the cartographer’s morale took another slump.
“What happened?” he asked. “And please don’t tell me it’s obvious, because you certainly didn’t foresee it.”
“I didn’t, but it is. The chloride dried out again.”
“I thought it held onto water.”
“It does, under certain conditions. Unfortunately its equilibrium vapor pressure at this temperature is higher than the local barometer reading. I don’t suppose that every last molecule of water has gone, but what’s left isn’t sufficient to make a conductor. Our face plates are holding charge again—maybe better than before; there must be some calcium chloride dust on them now, though I don’t know offhand what effect it would have.”
“There are more chloride cartridges in the cyclers.”
“You have four left, which should get us maybe two kilos at the present rate. We can’t use mine, since you can’t get them out; and if we use all yours you’d never get up the rim. Drying your air isn’t just a matter of comfort, you know; that suit has no temperature controls—it depends on radiation balance and insulation. If your perspiration stops evaporating, your inner insulation is done; and in any case, the cartridges won’t get us to the rim.”
“In other words you think we’re done—again.”
“I certainly don’t have any more ideas.”
“Then I suppose I’ll have to do some more pointless chattering. If it gave you the last idea, maybe it will work again.”
“Go ahead. It won’t bother me. I’m going to spend my last hours cursing the character who used a different plastic for the face plate than he did for the rest of these suits.”
“All right,” Commander Tazewell snapped as the geophysicist paused. “I’m supposed to ask you what you did then. You’ve just told me that that handkerchief of yours is a good windshield wiper; I’ll admit I don’t see how. I’ll even admit I’m curious, if it’ll make you happy.”
“It’s not a handkerchief, as I said. It’s a specimen bag.”
“I thought you tried those and found they didn’t work—left a charge on your face plate like the glove.”
“It did. But a remark I made myself about different kinds of plastic in the suits gave me another idea. It occurred to me that if the dust was, say, positively charged—”
“Probably was. Protons from the sun.”
“All right. Then my face plate picked up a negative, and my suit glove a positive, so the dust was attracted to the plate.
“Then when we first tried the specimen bag, it also charged positively and left negative on the face plate.
“Then it occurred to me that the specimen bag rubbed by the suit might go negative; and since it was fairly transparent, I could—”
“I get it! You could tie it over your face plate and have a windshield you could see through which would repel the dust.”
“That was the idea. Of course, I had nothing to tie it with; I had to hold it.”
“Good enough. So you got a good idea out of an idle remark.”
“Two of them. The moisture one came from Shan the same way.”
“But yours worked.” Ridging grinned.
“Sorry. It didn’t. The specimen bag still came out negative when rubbed on the suit plastic—at least it didn’t do the face plate any good.”
Tazewell stared blankly, then looked as though he were about to use violence.
“All right! Let’s have it, once and for all.”
“Oh, it was simple enough. I worked the specimen bag—I tore it open so it would cover more area—across my face plate, pressing tight so there wouldn’t be any dust under it.”
“What good would that do? You must have collected more over it right away.”
“Sure. Then I rubbed my face plate, dust rag and all, against Shandara’s. We couldn’t lose; one of them was bound to go positive. I won, and led him up the rim until the ground charge dropped enough to let the dust stick to the surface instead of us. I’m glad no one was there to take pictures, though; I’d hate to have a photo around which could be interpreted as my kissing Shandara’s ugly face—even through a space helmet.”
THE END
1957
PLANET FOR PLUNDER
Out of the star gulfs he came, troubled, searching, with a warning for Earth no one dared ignore. Never would Earth see his like again—or know the reason why!
A CONSERVATION SERVICE vessel is quite fast and maneuverable as craft of that general type go. But there was little likelihood that this one would catch up with its present target. Its pilot knew that. He had known it since the first flicker of current in his detectors had warned him of the poacher’s presence. But with the calm determination so characteristic of his race, he made the small course-correction which he hoped would bring him through the target area at action speed.
The correction had to be small. Had the disturbance been far from his present line of flight, he would never have detected it, for his instruments covered only a narrow cone of space ahead of him. Too many pilots in the old days, with full-sphere coverage, had been unable to resist the temptation of trying to loop back to investigate disturbances whose source-areas they had already passed.
At one-third the speed of light, such a reversal of course would have wasted both energy and time. No one could make a reversal in any reasonable period, and, certainly, no poacher or other lawbreaker was going to wait for the maneuver to be completed.
Even as it was, this pilot’s principal hope lay in the possibility that the other vessel would be too preoccupied with its task of looting to detect and react to his approach in time. Detection was only possible if, like his own ship, the poacher carried but a single operator. Unfortunately, a freighter was quite likely to have at least two, even on a perfectly legal f
light, and the Conservation pilot had known of cases where poaching machines had had crews as large as four.
Even the presence of two would render his approach almost certainly useless, since the loading and separating machinery would require only one manipulator, and the full attention of any others could be freed for lookout duty. Nevertheless, he bored on in, analyzing and planning as he traveled.
The poacher was big—as big as any he had ever viewed. It must have had a net load capacity of something like a half billion tons—enough to clean the concentrates off a fair-sized planet, particularly if it also boasted adequate stripping and refining apparatus. There was no way of making certain about this last factor, for no such equipment was drawing power as yet. And that, in a way, was peculiar, for the poacher must have been in his present position for some time.
Had the driving energies of the poacher been in use, the Conservation ship would have detected them long before, and would have experienced less difficulty in making the necessary course-change. With a scant five light-years in which to make the turn, the acceleration needed for the task was rather annoying. Not that it caused the pilot any actual physical discomfort. It was purely an emotional matter. His economy-conditioned mind was appalled by the waste of energy involved.
Four light-years lay behind him when the poacher reacted outrageously. For the barest instant the attacker dared to hope that he might still get within range. Then it became evident that the giant freighter had seen him long before, and had planned its maneuver with perfect knowledge of his limitations.
It began to accelerate almost toward him, at an angle which would bring it safely past. It would sweep past just out of extreme range if he kept on his present course—and probably well beyond trustworthy shooting distance, if he tried to intercept it. For an instant, the agent was tempted. But before a single relay had clicked in his own small craft he remembered what the poacher must already have known—that the planet, which had perhaps already been robbed, came first.
It must be checked for dam age, even though it was uninhabited as far as anyone knew. The mere fact that the poacher had stopped there meant that it must have something worth taking. It must, therefore, be tied as soon as possible into the production network whose completeness and perfection was the only barrier between the agent’s race and galaxy-wide starvation.
He held his course, therefore, and broadcast a general warning as he went. He gave the thiefs specifications, its course, as of the last possible observation, plus the fact that it seemed to be traveling empty. The absence of cargo was an encouraging sign. Perhaps no damage had been done to the world ahead. Unfortunately, it might also mean that the raider had a higher power-to-mass ratio than any freighter the agent had ever seen or heard of. But that he seriously doubted. He assumed that the ship was without cargo, and worded his warning accordingly.
His temper was not improved by an incident which occurred just before the giant vessel passed beyond detection range. A beam, quite evidently transmitted from the fleeing mass of metal, struck his antenna, and the phrase—“Now, don’t you just hope they’ll get us!”—came clearly along the instrument.
Again, relays almost closed on the Conservation flier, but the agent contented himself with repeating his warning broadcast and adding to it the data which had inevitably come along with the poacher’s taunt—data concerning the personal voice of the speaker. Then he turned his attention to the problem of the planet ahead.
He would need more energy, of course. The interstellar speed of his craft had to be reduced to the general velocity of the stars in this part of the galaxy, for he could not make the survey that would be needed, merely by viewing the planet as he flashed by. He could, of course, get a pretty good idea of the metals that were present through such flash-technique, but he needed information as to their distribution. If he were lucky—if the poacher had actually failed to load up—there would almost certainly be concentrates worth recording and reporting to Conservation.
The sun involved was obvious enough, since it was the only one within several light years. The agent thought fleetingly of the loneliness, even terror, which would descend upon the average ground-gripper in close proximity to the nearly empty space at the galaxy’s rim and timed and directed his deceleration to bring him to rest some twenty-four diameters from the sun’s photosphere.
The poacher had begun to travel long before he drew close enough to detect individual planets, and he was faced with the problem of discovering just which planet or planetoid had been visited. There were certainly enough to choose among and he was reasonably sure he had detected them all as he approached.
The possibility that he had been moving directly toward one for the whole time, and had, as a result, failed to observe any apparent motion for it, was too remote to cause him concern, particularly since it turned out that he had been well away from the general orbital plane of the system. He had the planets, then. But which ones were important?
Since he would have to check them all anyway, he didn’t worry too much about selection. After using up the energy and time needed to stop in this forlorn speck of a planetary system, it would be senseless to leave anything unexamined. Why, he reasoned, should anyone else have to come back later to do what he had left undone? Still, he thought, it would be pleasant to determine quickly what the poacher had accomplished, if anything.
The innermost planet was definitely not the plundered victim. It had plenty of free iron, of course, and the agent noted with satisfaction that the metal was not concentrated at its core. If it ever became necessary to seek iron so far out in the galaxy, stripping it from so small a world would be relatively easy.
However, the important metals seemed to be dissolved and distributed with annoying uniformity through the tiny globe—a fact which was hardly surprising. The planet was too small, and its temperature was too high to permit either water or ammonia to exist in liquid form. The ordinary geological processes which produced ore deposits simply could not function here.
The second world was more hopeful—in fact, it seemed ideal on first survey. There was water, though not in abundance. Nevertheless, in the billions of years since the planet had formed a certain amount of hydrothermal activity had gone on in its crust, and a number of very good copper, silver, and lead concentrations appeared to exist. The agent decided to land and map these, after he had completed his preliminary survey of the system. If this were the world the poachers had been sweeping, they had evidently failed to get much. Venus might be the plundered planet.
It proved not to be, however. Earth’s water is not confined to its lithosphere—it covers three-quarters of the planetary surface. It washes mountains into the seas, freezes at the poles and, at high elevations, even at the equator. It finds its way down into the rocks and joins other water molecules which have been there since the crust solidified. It picks up ions, carries them a little way, and trades them for others.
In short, Earth contains enough water to produce geological phenomena. The agent saw this almost in his first glance. He wasted a brief look at the encircling dry satellite, then he turned all of his attention on the primary planet itself. He even began to ease his ship outward from the orbit it had taken up, twenty million miles from Sol.
This, he decided, must be the world of the poacher’s selection. Even without analysis, anyone with the rudiments of a geological education would know that there must be metal concentrations here—and a civilization that uses half a trillion tons of copper a year can be expected to have at least a few trained geologists.
The agent pointed the nose of his little cruiser at the tiny disc, shining brightly eighty million miles away. He drove straight toward it, combing its surface as he went with the highest-resolution equipment he could bring to bear. All over the surface, and for a mile below, those radiations probed and returned with their information. The agent swore luridly as the indicators told their tragic story.
There had been concentrations, all right. There were sti
ll a few. But someone had been scraping busily at the best of them, and had left little that was economically worth recovering. It was the old story. If good deposits and poor ones were worked at the same time, the profit was of course smaller. But at least the deposits lasted longer.
An eternity had passed since any legal operator of the agent’s race had worked the other way, stripping the cream for a quick profit and letting the others go. Such a practice would have crippled the industry of the agent’s home planet millions of years before, had it not been checked sternly by the formation of the Conservation Board.
Crippled industry, to a race at the stage of development his had attained, was the equivalent of a death sentence. Not one in a thousand of his people could hope to escape death by starvation, if the tremendously complex system of commerce were to break down.
The agent knew that—like most of his profession, he had seen border worlds where momentary imperfections in the system had taken their toll.
His fury at the sight of this planet mingled with—and was fed by—the memory of the horrors he had seen. Apparently, he had been wrong. The poachers had gotten away with their load—in fact, scores of them must have been at work.
No one ship, not even the monster he had seen so recently, could have done such a job without assistance on a planet of this size. The Conservation Department had suspected, before now, that it faced a certain degree of organization among the poachers. Here was infuriating evidence that the suspicion was all too well-founded.
Thought followed reaction through the agent’s reception apparatus and through his mind, before his ship was within a million miles of the planet.
At that range no precise mapping was possible. In a sense, surface-mapping was no longer necessary, since the surviving deposits were hardly worth the gathering—but the tectonic charts would have to be obtained as usual.
A world like this was in constant change. A million, or ten, or a hundred million years from now the natural processes within its crust would have brought new concentrations into being. These forces must be charted, so that proper predictions could be obtained. Only through such research and predictions could Conservation beat the poachers to the next crop of metal, when it appeared.