by Hal Clement
Goodell was now watching the Crius’ Aitoff screen with his fists clenched near his knees—on them would have hurt—and unblinking eyes. The aircraft’s position shouldn’t change much, but the direction of the tail fin camera, which had the highest viewpoint available, surely would.
Ginger capped the pipes and fed power and reaction mass into the left one’s chamber, gently at first. She, too, was watching the Aitoff, but not for the same reason as Goodell. She stopped the thrust increase as the runners began to scrape and the scenery to move, and began feeding brief jolts to send the craft in a rather jerky turn to its right. It slid forward slightly each time; there was no way to stop that though it increased by a few meters the distance from Inger’s wall.
She cut the thrust at the same instant the man on the ground called out.
“Right pipe is just in line—you overshot a bit. It’ll be easier to use that one for melting.”
“Obviously. I’d have light it anyway to turn back. I certainly don’t want to waste mass swivelling all the way around, and I’m sure you don’t either. All I’d be risking is the ship. You’re down there.”
Barn made no answer to this point. Neither did Goodell, though he did not fully agree. A full turn would have provided a fine variety of viewpoints both high and low. Enough, he felt to a little image processing give him a fully detailed three-dimensional model of the “pool”.
“Shouldn’t you get a little farther to the side?” asked the woman. “I’d hate to either blow you away or cook your armor.”
“I’ll be all right. The exhaust doesn’t spread much in the first few meters.”
“Wrong,” Belvew cut in. “Believe me. That’s dense air.”
Ginger, from personal experience, agreed emphatically, and Inger moved a few meters rather than make an issue.
“You’re lined up fine,” were his last words. “Light off.”
The woman fed liquid and energy to the rocket, and all watched the loose pile of rocks with interest. The last hour or more had been typical of the group’s problems from the beginning; unexpected factors had time and again caused what should have been a minor, routine operation to take more time and far more effort than hoped. These had not been foreseen clearly enough, or not foreseen at all, but very few could be considered matters for blame. Any environment represents a vast number of factors; any unfamiliar environment represents more than an ordinary mind can consider all at once.
As it happened, plenty of information about the linear and volume expansion coefficients of ice near Saturn system temperatures had been gained while building the station out of welded ring fragments. That welding, however, had been done much more economically and gradually by microwave heaters. Even so, the project had managed to kill nearly a third of the original members of the group in various ways, not always particle radiation; but unfortunately it did not occur even to Status that this might be relevant now. It was.
The watchers expected the surfaces of the ice chunks which Inger had used for his wall to liquefy quickly and start to drip, or possibly blow away in the stream of hot gas, but it didn’t work out that way.
Within a second of the exhaust’s enveloping the wall everyone heard a series of sharp snapping sounds, not quite explosions. Not everyone saw the flying pieces of thermally shattered ice. At least, not in time. One of them, half the size of his helmet, struck Inger in the face. The others heard the impact; no one ever knew whether Inger himself did. He toppled backward with fascinating deliberation in Titan’s gravity, and settled to the ground with his feet more than a meter behind the point where he had been standing.
He neither spoke nor moved.
“Left one forty-seven standard.” Maria’s mild voice was the first to be heard. For once, the amusement was gone. There was no question whom she was addressing, and Belvew banked his jet sharply to the left. A real-surroundings view chose that moment to appear on his screen, but he didn’t need it. He knew he was in the station, flying with his waldo suit; he knew he would have to bring the jet back up, board it physically, and get back to the surface before he or anyone could be of help to his partner. Briefly he wondered whether it would be quicker to climb to orbit from where he was, instead of getting to the equator first, but mental arithmetic disposed of that notion. A nearly polar orbit would take less time to get him near the station, but cost too much exhaust mass to match velocities. More than he had or could carry. He had a quarter of Titan’s circumference to traverse before leaving atmosphere, and there would be hours after that before he or anyone else could get back down. All three jets were now in atmosphere or on the ground. No one expected him to be in time—no one seriously believed there was any time even now—but no one argued the need to try.
Not even Goodell. He was jolted enough not to think, for several minutes, of recording the new surface features Belvew’s cameras were covering. Even when he did, his motions were clumsier than usual in setting up the equipment, and when the adjustments were complete he realized that little would probably come of it. Theia was traveling as fast as ramjet mode would permit, which meant that she was in thin air well above the heaviest smog. Her cameras did range into the near infrared, which gave some surface detail even from this height, but there was no radar and little chance of catching the sort of feature Goodell wanted with enough detail to identify it.
Nevertheless he watched. The southern hemisphere was not yet mapped in anything like the kind of detail available for the latitudes between the factory and Lake Carver. Gigabytes of data had indeed been recorded by Maria’s instruments, but were not yet combined and translated into readable map form even in Goodell’s quarters.
He watched tensely and silently as images flowed across his screens. Sometimes they were clear, sometimes entirely meaningless; Titanian smog was far from uniform. Annoyingly, the regions around lakes tended to be worst, since the bodies of methane mixture created vertical air currents capped by clouds; methane vapor, at any given temperature and pressure, is little more than half as dense as nitrogen. This had long since ceased to be a surprise, but it could still be a nuisance.
Twice Goodell thought he glimpsed a lake with hills around it. The first time he reacted too slowly, and recorded only an approximate position. The second he was more alert, got precise map coordinates, and then had time to realize how the concentration had spared him whole minutes of awareness of his pain. He thought for a moment of calling up records immediately to build a detailed map of the area, but it seemed better simply to watch and note positions until Theia reached the equator, banked east, and started her climb to orbit.
By the time this happened he had four more possible sites in his notes. He decided to work on them in reverse order, since the last were closest to the equator and potentially most suitable for his purpose. The presumably frozen human body on the surface was as far from his mind, right then as his own pain.
The first item, after details had been added by Maria Collos’ files, turned out indeed to be an irregular lake of about two square kilometers area, near the southern edge of what almost had to be a badly eroded impact crater some fifteen kilometers across. Unfortunately, nothing Goodell could do quickly with the records revealed the slightest sign of any of the smooth areas of glassy/tarry material—the “Collos Patches”—which were central to his needs.
The second, over three hundred kilometers from the equator, seemed ideal almost from the first. The lake was much smaller, but it was accompanied by two of the patches; and the surrounding ringwall, only seven kilometers in diameter, appeared to be much more recent. Its minimum height was over fifty meters, and it rose in places to nearly three times that. Goodell drew a deep breath of satisfaction, ignoring the anguish as his expanding chest rubbed the soft material of his garment, and began to think furiously.
He was still thinking when Theia reached the station, docked, and departed again with Belvew now physically aboard. He did not worry as the craft left; there was nothing he could possibly have done toward execut
ing his plan just yet, and it actually crossed his mind that what had happened to Inger might make the whole idea unnecessary.
At least, to the project. Goodell knew he himself would not be able to get on without it much longer.
Not too much longer. But there was still chemical work to do before he could dispense with analytical equipment and heavy thought.
He had reported the material of the “tar pool” on which Belvew had landed earlier to be a gel, with methanol as the dispersing agent. No one had pointed out, politely or otherwise, that methanol’s melting point was something like a hundred Kelvins above local temperature. Frozen jelly doesn’t wobble. Goodell himself had not thought of this for some hours, and when he did he was more dismayed at having had his word accepted uncritically than by the fact that he or his apparatus must have made some sort of a mistake. Even the observing ranks should have known better.
He made all reasonable tests of the apparature he could, allowing for the fact that the original sampler had been lost, and found nothing wrong. There had been three carbon-hydrogen bonds, one carbon-oxygen, and one hydrogen-oxygen in the principal material present. There were other compounds there, of course, to confuse the reading; but this was clearly the general background. He had not thought to look for other bonds once these had been read out; it was not at once obvious what others could be fitted into the pattern. Four for carbon, two for oxygen, one for each hydrogen—
The inspiration had come embarrassingly late. He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone yet because he had no way of checking it. The original analyzer was gone, the ones around the factory were busy on the planned routine, and there was no appropriate reference material.
For no one knew the melting point of the vinyl alcohol monomer. At terrestrial temperatures it existed too fleetingly for such properties to be measured. On Titan—who knew? It could be lower than that of methanol; the molecule was larger, its one hydrogen bond presumably less effective—or maybe not; what did the charge distribution of a carbon-carbon double bond do to the polarity of other bonds on the same atoms? Embarrassingly, Goodell didn’t know.
Could he redirect one of the analytical labs around the factory over to the place where Ginger had had her misadventure? The mere question of whether the wrecked jet were being engulfed was not excuse enough; that had already been tabled. However, a possible major error in the data which had been supplied to Status was another matter. Goodell must certainly make as sure as possible about this point before doing anything irrevocable, however tempting his planned last experiment was becoming.
Belvew entered atmosphere, made a routine tank refill, and sent his aircraft plunging toward the factory site, following the vectors prescribed by the still deadly serious Maria. Neither he nor anyone else expected to reach the place in time to do Inger any good, but the effort had to be made. Humanity was still, in spots, more moral than logical; the word “inhuman” still carried its ancient pejorative meaning. And Barn was—had been—a good friend.
Theia flashed across the factory site half a kilometer up, banked sharply, and worked herself into a landing pattern. For just a moment her pilot allowed himself to picture all three of the jets on the ground at the same place and time, and to think what would happen to the whole project if even more than one of them should fail to get off again; then he focused on his landing.
He chose to come in from the west rather than the north, as the other set-downs had been made; he knew that if he overshot he would have the ice cliff ahead of him, but the cliff itself made a landing in the opposite direction impossible and he didn’t want the complications which might ensue from involving the “tar” in his landing slide. He had gotten away with it once, and felt he knew how much luck had been involved. He was going to land hot, to make allowances for the wing “ice” which had wrecked Oceanus, and could not even guess what the higher friction would do to the gel.
The need to stop as close as possible to his partner left only the eastward landing feasible.
He was out and running the three hundred meters, if high speed human locomotion on Titan could be called running, the moment he had completed his landing check list. Neither he nor any of the others was surprised to see the shattered face plate, nor at Inger’s failure to show any sign of life.
The suits, like the station, contained pure oxygen at one fifth of a standard atmosphere, an eighth of the Titanian surface pressure. A flood of ninety-Kelvin nitrogen must have washed into the victim’s face; it was unlikely that he felt much, if anything. Certainly he had made no sound. There was no basis for sight judgment; the space behind the smashed plate was full of frost. Inger’s mustache was still invisible.
The rest of the body was not yet frozen; the environment armor was effective where it was intact. If anyone saw how this accounted for the frost in the helmet, nothing was said.
No one, not even Belvew, displayed feelings. Like the soldiers they had become in name and almost in fact, they were hardened to sudden death and to the knowledge that any of them might be next; the large fraction of the original group which had gone merely in the setup of the Station and its relay units had been expected and accepted by the survivors.
Belvew did note that his sight was lightly blurred as he gathered up the few kilograms of mass; which had been for many months now his best friend, but he refused to admit to himself what might be causing this. There was still a job to do; the body had to be gotten off Titan quickly. There was little real likelihood in this chill that it would cause chemical—still less, biological—contamination and invalidate the entire project’s labors, but this was research; the chance had to be eliminated as completely as possible.
To his relief, Belvew found his main emotion one of thankfulness that the body was still flexible enough to be fitted into the control compartment of the ramjet, and that since Ginger’s escapade an override system had been installed in both surviving craft to allow them to be controlled from outside even when a suit was in the pod.
What Goodell was thinking at this point the others of course did not know, but he was still thinking. This might affect part of his plan; should he suggest that Inger’s body be placed at the site he had almost decided on for himself? Or would that give some of the others a clue—too early a clue—to what he had in mind?
His pain gave the answer.
Belvew reboarded his own jet and lifted off, after spending some reaction mass to swivel Theia far enough to point her nose to one side of the cliff; he could not possibly have climbed fast enough to clear the elevation. Ginger took control of Crius and did the same without the preliminary, since she already had a safe heading. Maria guided them to different cumulus clouds to tank up. This was the first time two of the jets had been in the same airspace at the same time, and some of the group wondered whether Status would have done anything about traffic control if she hadn’t. No one but Belvew was moved to ask, and he restrained himself.
Tanks full, Crius headed eastward and upward, climbing back toward orbit. Theia turned south to resume the air current study; there was no hurry for Belvew to get back personally to the station since his suit was well charged, and he could do very gladly without the real-surroundings interruptions for a few hours.
The station had a cemetery, a fifty meter cube of emptiness among the roughly welded ice chunks, which already held about a dozen occupants. Goodell offered to remove Inger’s remains from the docked jet and convey them through the passages to join the others, and not even Yakama, basically in charge of station maintenance objected. Contagion-consciousness was realism, not paranoia, and no one had the slightest idea that the old man might have any ulterior motive.
Actually, the motive was now a little shaken; the sight of his frozen acquaintances brought forcefully to Goodell the fact that one aspect of his plan was really superfluous.
But there was another facet. He did what he had to do, returned to his quarters, and reported to the others that his room was virus tight once more.
The job left unf
inished by Inger’s death still had to be done somehow. How was a subject of intense discussion, but no one seriously advised that drilling should be tried again, or that anyone should be present physically no matter what was attempted. Common sense overrode heroism.
Thermite was suggested, with the admission that this might be risky for the root being checked. The risk was, after some argument, accepted; then it was realized that while oxygen was plentiful and aluminum possibly sufficient in the dirt either of the Station ice or Titanian soil, there was probably not enough iron within reach of Titan’s surface or near its orbit to make a child’s horseshoe magnet.
Goodell surprised himself, though not the others, by coming up with a workable suggestion. The gel of the “patch” could be analyzed for trace elements and the input from the various roots be monitored thereafter for a match. This should eventually identify the north root. He did not mention that this might also furnish a chance to check for carbon-carbon double bonds in the “tar”. He was delighted at the opportunity, but deeply worried by the immediate and uncritical acceptance of his suggestion by the others.
Of course, this provided another justification for what he was going to do—soon now, he had to admit. The place just wouldn’t function staffed by Arthur Goodell fundamentalists, and it had to function. He had no living children, but did want the human species to go on. It might still accomplish something, if it got itself past this crisis.
Arthur Goodell would have to keep his mind on its own problems.
For just a while longer.
Crius would not be descending for a while; the new suggestion had made that unnecessary.
A detailed job could keep his mind off his pain—for how long?