by Larry Niven
I couldn’t keep my bargain. I knew I was right. But what could I do about it?
Hindsight is wonderful. I could see exactly what our mistake had been, Eric’s and mine and the hundreds of men who had built his life support after the crash. There was nothing left of Eric then except the intact central nervous system, and no glands except the pituitary. “We’ll regulate his blood composition,” they said, “and he’ll always be cool, calm, and collected. No panic reactions from Eric!”
I know a girl whose father had an accident when he was forty-five or so. He was out with his brother, the girl’s uncle, on a fishing trip. They were blind drunk when they started home, and the guy was riding on the hood while the brother drove. Then the brother made a sudden stop. Our hero left two important glands on the hood ornament.
The only change in his sex life was that his wife stopped worrying about late pregnancy. His habits were developed.
Eric doesn’t need adrenal glands to be afraid of death. His emotional patterns were fixed long before the day he tried to land a moonship without radar. He’d grab any excuse to believe that I’d fixed whatever was wrong with the ram connections.
But he was counting on me to do it.
The atmosphere leaned on the windows. Not wanting to, I reached out to touch the quartz with my fingertips. I couldn’t feel the pressure. But it was there, inexorable as the tide smashing a rock into sand grains. How long would the cabin hold it back?
If some broken part were holding us here, how could I have missed finding it? Perhaps it had left no break in the surface of either wing. But how?
That was the angle.
Two cigarettes later I got up to get the sample buckets. They were empty, the alien dirt safely stored away. I filled them with water and put them in the cooler, set the cooler for 40 Absolute, then turned off the lights and went to bed.
The morning was blacker than the inside of a smoker’s lungs. What Venus really needs, I decided, philosophizing on my back, is to lose ninety-nine percent of her air. That would give her a bit more than half as much air as Earth, which would lower the greenhouse effect enough to make the temperature livable. Drop Venus’ gravity to near zero for a few weeks and the work would do itself.
The whole damn universe is waiting for us to discover antigravity.
“Morning,” said Eric. “Thought of anything?”
“Yes.” I rolled out of bed. “Now don’t bug me with questions. I’ll explain everything as I go.”
“No breakfast?”
“Not yet.”
Piece by piece I put my suit on, just like one of King Arthur’s gentlemen, and went for the buckets only after the gantlets were on. The ice, in the cold section, was in the chilly neighborhood of absolute zero. “This is two buckets of ordinary ice,” I said, holding them up. “Now let me out.”
“I should keep you here till you talk,” Eric groused. But the doors opened and I went out onto the wing. I started talking while I unscrewed the number two right panel.
“Eric, think a moment about the tests they run on a manned ship before they’ll let a man walk into the lifesystem. They test every part separately and in conjunction with other parts. Yet if something isn’t working, either it’s damaged or it wasn’t tested right. Right?”
“Reasonable.” He wasn’t giving away anything.
“Well, nothing caused any damage. Not only is there no break in the ship’s skin, but no coincidence could have made both rams go haywire at the same time. So something wasn’t tested right.”
I had the panel off. In the buckets the ice boiled gently where it touched the surfaces of the glass buckets. The blue ice cakes had cracked under their own internal pressure. I dumped one bucket into the maze of wiring and contacts and relays, and the ice shattered, giving me room to close the panel.
“So I thought of something last night, something that wasn’t tested. Every part of the ship must have been in the heat-and-pressure box, exposed to artificial Venus conditions, but the ship as a whole, a unit, couldn’t have been. It’s too big.” I’d circled around to the left wing and was opening the number three panel in the trailing edge. My remaining ice was half water and half small chips; I sloshed these in and fastened the panel. “What cut your circuits must have been the heat or the pressure or both. I can’t help the pressure, but I’m cooling these relays with ice. Let me know which ram gets its sensation back first, and we’ll know which inspection panel is the right one.”
“Howie. Has it occurred to you what the cold water might do to those hot metals?”
“It could crack them. Then you’d lose all control over the ramjets, which is what’s wrong right now.”
“Uh. Your point, partner. But I still can’t feel anything.”
I went back to the airlock with my empty buckets swinging, wondering if they’d get hot enough to melt. They might have, but I wasn’t out that long. I had my suit off and was refilling the buckets when Eric said, “I can feel the right ram.”
“How extensive? Full control?”
“No. I can’t feel the temperature. Oh, here it comes. We’re all set, Howie.”
My sigh of relief was sincere.
I put the buckets in the freezer again. We’d certainly want to take off with the relays cold. The water had been chilling for perhaps twenty minutes when Eric reported, “Sensation’s going.”
“What?”
“Sensation’s going. No temperature, and I’m losing fuel feed control. It doesn’t stay cold long enough.”
“Ouch! Now what?”
“I hate to tell you. I’d almost rather let you figure it out for yourself.”
I had. “We go as high as we can on the blimp tank, then I go out on the wing with a bucket of ice in each hand—”
We had to raise the blimp tank temperature to almost eight hundred degrees to get pressure, but from then on we went up in good shape. To sixteen miles. It took three hours.
"That’s as high as we go,” said Eric. “You ready?”
I went to get the ice. Eric could see me, he didn’t need an answer. He opened the airlock for me.
Fear I might have felt, or panic, or determination or self—sacrifice but there was nothing. I went out feeling like a used zombie.
My magnets were on full. It felt like I was walking through shallow tar. The air was thick, though not as heavy as it had been down there. I followed my headlamp to the number two panel, opened it, poured ice in, and threw the bucket high and far. The ice was in one cake. I couldn’t close the panel. I left it open and hurried around to the other wing. The second bucket was filled with exploded chips; I sloshed them in and locked the number two left panel and came back with both hands free. It still looked like limbo in all directions, except where the headlamp cut a tunnel through the darkness, and my feet were getting hot. I closed the right panel on boiling water and sidled back along the hull into the airlock.
“Come in and strap down,” said Eric. “Hurry!”
“Gotta get my suit off.” My hands had started to shake from reaction. I couldn’t work the clamps.
“No you don’t. If we start right now we may get home. Leave the suit on and come in.”
I did. As I pulled my webbing shut, the rams roared. The ship shuddered a little, then pushed forward as we dropped from under the blimp tank. Pressure mounted as the rams reached operating speed. Eric was giving it all he had. It would have been uncomfortable even without the metal suit around me. With the suit on it was torture. My couch was afire from the suit, but I couldn’t get breath to say so. We were going almost straight up.
We had gone twenty minutes when the ship jerked like a galvanized frog. “Ram’s out,” Eric said calmly. “I’ll use the other.” Another lurch as we dropped the dead one. The ship flew on like a wounded penguin, but still accelerating.
One minute … two …
The other ram quit. It was as if we’d run into molasses. Eric blew off the ram and the pressure eased. I could talk.
“Eric.”
“What?”
“Got any marshmallows?”
“What? Oh, I see. Is your suit tight?”
“Sure.”
“Live with it. We’ll flush the smoke out later. I’m going to coast above some of this stuff, but when I use the rocket it’ll be savage. No mercy.”
“Will we make it?”
“I think so. It’ll be close.”
The relief came first, icy cold. Then the anger. “No more inexplicable numbnesses?” I asked.
“No. Why?”
“If any come up you’ll be sure and tell me, won’t you?”
“Are you getting at something?”
“Skip it.” I wasn’t angry any more.
“I’ll be damned if I do. You know perfectly well it was mechanical trouble, you fool. You fixed it yourself!”
“No. I convinced you I must have fixed it. You needed to believe the rams should be working again. I gave you a miracle cure, Eric. I just hope I don’t have to keep dreaming up new placebos for you all the way home.”
“You thought that, but you went out on the wing sixteen miles up?” Eric’s machinery snorted. “You’ve got guts where you need brains, Shorty.”
I didn’t answer.
“Five thousand says the trouble was mechanical. We let the mechanics decide after we land.”
“You’re on.”
“Here comes the rocket. Two, one—”
It came, pushing me down into my metal suit. Sooty flames licked past my ears, writing black on the green metal ceiling, but the rosy mist before my eyes was not fire.
The man with the thick glasses spread a diagram of the Venus ship and jabbed a stubby finger at the trailing edge of the wing. “Right around here,” he said. “The pressure from outside compressed the wiring channel a little, just enough so there was no room for the wire to bend. It had to act as if it were rigid, see? Then when the heat expanded the metal these contacts pushed past each other.”
“I suppose it’s the same design on both wings?”
He gave me a queer look. “Well, naturally.”
I left my check for $5000 in a pile of Eric’s mail and hopped a plane for Brasilia. How he found me I’ll never know, but the telegram arrived this morning.
HOWIE COME HOME ALL IS FORGIVEN
DONOVAN’S BRAIN
I guess I’ll have to.
Wait It Out
Night on Pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts across my field of vision. Below that broken line is the dim gray-white of snow seen by starlight. Above, space-blackness and space-bright stars. From behind a jagged row of frozen mountains the stars pour up in singletons and clusters and streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly, just fast enough for a steady eye to capture their motion.
Something wrong there. Pluto’s rotation period is long: 6.39 days. Time must have slowed for me.
It should have stopped.
I wonder if I may have made a mistake.
The planet’s small size brings the horizon close. It seems even closer without a haze of atmosphere to fog the distances. Two sharp peaks protrude into the star swarm like the filed front teeth of a cannibal warrior. In the cleft between those peaks shines a sudden bright point.
I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any other, dimmer star. The sun shines as a cold point between the frozen peaks; it pulls free of the rocks and shines in my eyes…
The Sun is gone, the star field has shifted. I must have passed out.
It figures.
Have I made a mistake? It won’t kill me if I have. It could drive me mad, though …
I don’t feel mad. I don’t feel anything, not pain, not loss, not regret, not fear. Not even pity. Just: what a situation.
Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and wide and conical, stands half-submerged in an icy plain below the level of my eyes. Here I stand, looking east, waiting.
Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die.
__________
Pluto was not the most distant planet. It had stopped being that in 1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at perihelion, as close to the Sun—and to Earth—as it would ever get. To ignore such an opportunity would have been sheer waste.
And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and I, in an inflated plastic bubble poised on an ion jet. We’d spent a year and a half in that bubble. After so long together, with so little privacy, perhaps we should have hated each other. We didn’t. The UN psyche team must have chosen well.
But—just to be out of sight of the others, even for a few minutes. Just to have something to do, something that was not predictable. A new world could hold infinite sites. As a matter of fact, so could our laboratory-tested hardware. I don’t think any of us really trusted the Nerva-K under our landing craft.
Think it through. For long trips in space, you use an ion jet giving low thrust over long periods of time. The ion motor on our own craft had been decades in use. Where gravity is materially lower than Earth’s, you land on dependable chemical rockets. For landings on Earth and Venus, you use heat shields and the braking power of the atmosphere. For landing on the gas giants—but who would want to?
The Nerva-class fission rockets are used only for takeoff from Earth, where thrust and efficiency count responsiveness and maneuverability count for too much during a powered landing. And a heavy planet will always have an atmosphere for braking.
Pluto didn’t.
For Pluto, the chemical jets to take us down and bring us back up were too heavy to carry all that way. We needed a highly maneuverable Nerva-type atomic rocket motor using hydrogen for reaction mass.
And we had it. But we didn’t trust it.
Jerome Glass and I went down, leaving Sammy Cross in orbit. He griped about that, of course. He’d started that back at the Cape and kept it up for a year and a half. But someone had to stay. Someone had to be aboard the Earth-return vehicle, to fix anything that went wrong, to relay communications to Earth, and to fire the bombs that would solve Pluto’s one genuine mystery.
We never did solve that one. Where does Pluto get all that mass? The planet’s a dozen times as dense as it has any right to be. We could have solved that with the bombs, the same way they solved the mystery of the makeup of the Earth, sometime in the last century. They mapped the patterns of earthquake ripples moving through the Earth’s bulk. But those ripples were from natural causes, like the Krakatoa eruption. On Pluto the bombs would have done it better.
A bright star-sun blazes suddenly between two fangs of mountain. I wonder if they’ll know the answers, when my vigil ends.
The sky jumps and steadies, and—
I’m looking east, out over the plain where we landed the ship. The plain and the mountains behind seem to be sinking like Atlantis: an illusion created by the flowing stars. We slide endlessly down the black sky, Jerome and I and the mired ship.
The Nerva-K behaved perfectly. We hovered for several minutes to melt our way through various layers of frozen gases and get ourselves something solid to land on. Condensing volatiles steamed around us and boiled below, so that we settled in a soft white glow of fog lit by the hydrogen flame.
Black wet ground appeared below the curve of the landing skirt. I let the ship drop carefully, carefully… and we touched.
It took us an hour to check the ship and get ready to go outside. But who would be first? This was no idle matter. Pluto would be the solar system’s last outpost for most of future history, and the statue to the first man on Pluto would probably remain untarnished forever.
Jerome won the toss. All for the sake of a turning coin, Jerome would be the first name in the history books. I remember the grin I forced! I wish I could force one now. He was laughing and talking of marble statues as he went through the lock.
There’s irony in that, if you like that sort of thing.
I was screwing down my helmet when Jerome started shouting obscenities into the helmet mike. I cut the checklist short a
nd followed him out.
One look told it all.
The black wet dirt beneath our landing skirt had been dirty ice, water ice mixed haphazardly with lighter gases and ordinary rock. The heat draining out of the Nerva jet had melted that ice. The rocks within the ice had sunk, and so had the landing vehicle, so that when the water froze again it was halfway up the hull. Our landing craft was sunk solid in the ice.
We could have done some exploring before we tried to move the ship. When we called Sammy he suggested doing just that. But Sammy was up there in the Earth- return vehicle, and we were down here with our landing vehicle mired in the ice of another world.
We were terrified. Until we got clear we would be good for nothing, and we both knew it.
I wonder why I can’t remember the fear.
We did have one chance. The landing vehicle was designed to move about on Pluto’s surface; and so she had a skirt instead of landing jacks. Half a gravity of thrust would have given us a ground effect, safer and cheaper than using the ship like a ballistic missile. The landing skirt must have trapped gas underneath when the ship sank, leaving the Nerva-K engine in a bubble cavity.
We could melt our way out.
I know we were as careful as two terrified men could be. The heat rose in the Nerva-K, agonizingly slow. In flight there would have been a coolant effect as cold hydrogen fuel ran through the pile. We couldn’t use that. But the environment of the motor was terribly cold. The two factors might compensate, or—
Suddenly dials went wild. Something had cracked from the savage temperature differential. Jerome used the damper rods without effect. Maybe they’d melted. Maybe wiring had cracked, or resistors had become superconductors in the cold. Maybe the pile—but it doesn’t matter now.
I wonder why I can’t remember the fear.
Sunlight—
And a logy, dreamy feeling. I’m conscious again. The same stars rise in formation over the same dark mountains.