Satan's World

by Poul Anderson

  “Surely I explained, even in my wooze,” Falkayn replied. “An industrial base, for the transmutation of elements.”

  “But they do that at home.”

  “On a frustratingly small scale, compared to the potential market.” Falkayn poured himself a stiff whiskey and leaned back to enjoy digesting his dinner. He felt he had earned a few hours’ ease in the saloon. Tomorrow they were to land, having completed their investigations from orbit, and things could get shaggy. “How about a poker game?”

  The Cynthian, perched on the table, shook her head. “No, thanks! I’ve barely regained my feeling for four-handed play, after Muddlehead got rich enough in its own right to bluff big. Without Adzel, the development’s apt to be too unfamiliar. The damned machine’ll have our hides.” She began grooming her silken fur. “Stick to business, you. I’m a xenologist. I never paid more attention than I could help to your ugly factories. I’d like a proper explanation of why I’m supposed to risk my tailbone down there.”

  Falkayn sighed and sipped. He would have taken for granted that she could see the obvious as readily as he. But to her, with her biological heritage, cultural background, and special interests, it was not obvious. I wonder what she sees that l miss?

  How could I even find out? “I don’t have the statistics in my head,” he admitted. “But you don’t need anything except a general knowledge of the situation. Look, there isn’t an element in the periodic table, nor hardly a single isotope, that doesn’t have some use in modern technology. And when that technology operates on hundreds of planets, well, I don’t care how minor a percentage of the consumption is Material Q. The total amount of Q needed annually is going to run into tons at a minimum—likelier into megatons.

  “Now nature doesn’t produce much of some elements. Even in the peculiar stars, transmutation processes have a low yield of nuclei like rhenium and scandium—two metals I happen to know are in heavy demand for certain alloys and semiconductors. Didn’t you hear about the rhenium strike on Maui, about twenty years ago? Most fabulous find in history, tremendous boom; and in three years the lodes were exhausted, the towns deserted, the price headed back toward intergalactic space. Then there are the unstable heavy elements, or the shorter-lived isotopes of the lighter ones. Again, they’re rare, no matter how you scour the galaxy. When you do find some, you have to mine the stuff under difficult conditions, haul it a long way home . . . and that also drives up the cost.”

  Falkayn took another swallow. He had been very sober of late, so this whiskey, on top of cocktails before dinner and wine with, turned him loquacious. “It isn’t simply a question of scarcity making certain things expensive,” he added. “Various projects are impossible for us, because we’re bottlenecked on materials. We could progress a lot faster in interstellar exploration, for instance—with everything that that implies—if we had sufficient hafnium to make sufficient polyergic units to make sufficient computers to pilot a great many more spaceships than we can build at present. Care for some other examples?”

  “N-no. I can think of several for myself,” Chee said. “But any kind of nucleus can be made to order these days. And is. I’ve seen the bloody transmutation plants with my own bloody eyes.”

  “What had you been doing the night before to make your eyes bloody?” Falkayn retorted. “Sure, you’re right as far as you go. But those were pygmy outfits you saw. They can’t ever keep up with the demand. Build them big enough, and their radioactive waste alone would sterilize whatever planets they’re on. Not to mention the waste heat. An exothermic reaction gives it off directly. But so does an endothermic one . . . indirectly, via the power-source that furnishes the energy to make the reaction go. These are nuclear processes, remember. E equals m c squared. One gram of difference, between raw material and final product, means nine times ten to the thirteenth joules. A plant turning out a few tons of element per day would probably take the Amazon River in at one end of its cooling system and blow out a steam jet at the other end. How long before Earth became too hot for life? Ten years, maybe? Or any life-bearing world? Therefore we can’t use one, whether or not it’s got sophont natives. It’s too valuable in other ways—quite apart from interplanetary law, public opinion, and common decency.”

  “I realize that much,” Chee said. “This is why most existing transmuters are on minor, essentially airless bodies. Of course.”

  “Which means they have to install heat exchangers, feeding into the cold mass of the planetoid,” Falkayn nodded. “Which is expensive. Worse, it puts engineering limitations on the size of a plant, and prohibits some operations that the managers would dearly love to carry out.”

  “I hadn’t thought about the subject before,” Chee said. “But why not use sterile worlds—new ones, for instance, where life has not begun to evolve—that have reasonable atmospheres and hydrospheres to carry off the heat for you?”

  “Because planets like that belong to suns, and circle ’em fairly close,” Falkayn answered. “Otherwise their air would be frozen, wouldn’t it? If they have big orbits, they might retain hydrogen and helium in a gaseous state. But hydrogen’s nasty. It leaks right in between the molecules of any material shielding you set up, and bollixes your nuclear reactions good. Therefore you need a world about like Earth or Cynthia, with reasonably dense air that does not include free hydrogen, and with plenty of liquid water. Well, as I said, when you have a nearby sun pouring its own energy into the atmosphere, a transmutation industry of any size will cook the planet. How can you use a river if the river’s turned to vapor? Oh, there have been proposals to orbit a dust cloud around such a world, raising the albedo to near 100. But that’d tend to trap home-grown heat. Cost-effectiveness studies showed it would never pay. And furthermore, new-formed systems have a lot of junk floating around. One large asteroid, plowing into your planet, stands a good chance of wrecking every operation on it.”

  Falkayn refreshed his throat. “Naturally,” he continued, “once a few rogues had been discovered, people thought about using them. But they were too cold! Temperatures near absolute zero do odd things to the properties of matter. It’d be necessary to develop an entire new technology before a factory could be erected on the typical rogue. And then it wouldn’t accomplish anything. Remember, you need liquid water and gaseous atmosphere—a planet’s worth of both—for your coolants. And you can’t fluidify an entire cryosphere. Not within historical time. No matter how huge an operation you mount. The energy required is just plain too great. Figure it out for yourself sometime. It turns out to be as much as all Earth gets from Sol in quite a few centuries.”

  Falkayn cocked his feet on the table and elevated his glass. “Which happens to be approximately what our planet here will have received, in going from deep space to Beta C. and back again,” he finished. He tossed off his drink and poured another.

  “Don’t sound that smug,” Chee grumbled. “You didn’t cause the event. You are not the Omnipotent: a fact which often reconciles me to the universe.”

  Falkayn smiled. “You’d prefer Adzel, maybe? Or Muddlehead? Or Old Nick? Hey, what a thought, creation operated for profit! But at any rate, you can see the opportunity we’ve got now, if the different factors do turn out the way we hope; and it looks more and more like they will. In another ten years or so, this planet ought to have calmed down. It won’t be getting more illumination than your home world or mine; the cold, exposed rocks will have blotted up what excess heat didn’t get re-radiated; temperature will be reasonable, dropping steadily but not too fast. The transmutation industry can begin building, according to surveys and plans already made. Heat output can be kept in balance with heat loss: the deeper into space the planet moves, the more facilities go to work on it. Since the air will be poisonous anyway, and nearly every job will be automated, radioactive trash won’t pose difficulties either.

  “Eventually, some kind of equilibrium will be reached. You’ll have a warm surface, lit by stars, lamps here and there, radio beacons guiding down the cargo sh
uttles; nuclear conversion units on every suitable spot; tons of formerly rare materials moving out each day, to put some real muscle in our industry—” The excitement caught him. He was still a young man. His fist smacked into his other palm. “And we brought it about!”

  “For a goodly reward,” Chee said. “It had better be goodly.”

  “Oh, it will be, it will be,” Falkayn burbled. “Money in great, dripping, beautiful gobs. Only think what a franchise to build here will be worth. Especially if Solar S & L can maintain rights of first reconnaissance and effective occupation.”

  “As against commercial competitors?” Chee asked. “Or against the unknown rivals of our whole civilization? I think they’ll make rather more trouble. The kind of industry you speak of has war potentials, you know.”

  The planet rotated in a little over thirteen hours. Its axis was tilted about eleven degrees from the normal to the plane of its hyperbolic orbit. Muddlin’ Through aimed for the general area of the arctic circle, where the deadly day would be short, though furnishing periodic illumination, and conditions were apparently less extreme than elsewhere.

  When the ship spiraled the globe at satellite altitude and slanted downward, Falkayn drew a sharp breath. He had glimpsed the sun side before, but in brief forays when he was preoccupied with taking accurate measurements. And Beta Crucis had not been this near. At wild and ever-mounting velocity, the rogue would soon round the blue giant. They were not much farther apart now than are Earth and Sol.

  With four times the angular diameter, this sun raged on the horizon, in a sky turned incandescent. Clouds roiled beneath, now steaming white, now gray and lightning-riven, now black with the smoke of volcanoes seen through rents in their reaches. Elsewhere could be glimpsed stony plains, lashed by terrible winds, rain, earthquake, flood, under mountain ranges off whose flanks cascaded the glacial melt. Vapors decked half a continent, formed into mist by the chill air, until a tornado cut them in half and a pack of gales harried the fragments away. On a gunmetal ocean, icebergs the size of islands crashed into each other; but spume and spindrift off monstrous waves hid most of their destruction. As the spaceship pierced the upper atmosphere, thin though it was, she rocked with its turbulence, and the first clamor keened through her hull plates. Ahead were stacked thunderstorms.

  Falkayn said between his teeth: “I’ve been wondering what we should name this place. Now I know.” But then they were in blindness and racket. He lacked any chance to speak further.

  The internal fields held weight steady, but did not keep out repeated shocks nor the rising, raving noise. Muddlehead did the essential piloting—the integration of the whole intricate system which was the ship—while the team waited to make any crucial decisions. Straining into screens and meters, striving to make sense of the chaos that ramped across them, Falkayn heard the computer speak through yells, roars, whistles, and bangs:

  “The condition of clear skies over the substellar point and in early tropical afternoons prevails as usual. But this continues to be followed by violent weather, with wind velocities in excess of five hundred kilometers per hour and rising daily. I note in parentheses that it would already be dangerous to enter such a meteorological territory, and that at any moment it could become impossible even for the most well-equipped vessel. Conditions in the polar regions are much as previously observed. The antarctic is undergoing heavy rainfall with frequent super-squalls. The north polar country remains comparatively cold; thus a strong front, moving southward, preserves a degree of atmospheric tranquillity at its back. I suggest that planetfall be made slightly below the arctic circle, a few minutes in advance of the dawn line, on a section of the larger northern continent which appears to be free of inundation and, judging from tectonic data, is likely to remain stable.”

  “All right,” Chee Lan said. “You pick it. Only don’t let the instruments overload your logic circuits. I guess they’re feeding you information at a fantastic rate. Well, don’t bother processing and evaluating it for now. Just stash it in your memory and concentrate on getting us down safe!”

  “Continuous interpretation is necessary, if I am to understand an unprecedented environment like this and conduct us through it,” Muddlehead answered. “However, I am already deferring consideration of facts that do not seem to have immediate significance, such as the precise reflection spectra off various types of ice fields. It is noteworthy that—” Falkayn didn’t hear the rest. A bombardment of thunder half deafened him for minutes.

  And they passed through a wild whiteness, snow of some kind driven by a wind that made the ship reel. And they were in what felt, by contrast, like utter peace. It was night, very dark. Scanner beams built up the picture of a jagged highland, while the ship flew on her own inorganic senses.

  And landed.

  Falkayn sagged a moment in his chair, simply breathing. “Cut fields,” he said, and unharnessed himself. The change to planetary weight wasn’t abrupt; it came within five percent of Earth pull, and he was used to bigger differences. But the silence rang in his ears. He stood, working the tension out of his muscles, before he considered the viewscreens again.

  Around the ship lay a rough, cratered floor of dark rock. Mountains rose sheer in the north and east. The former began no more than four kilometers away, as an escarpment roofed with crags and streaked with the white of glaciers. Stars lit the scene, for the travelers had passed beneath the clouds, which bulked swart in the south. Alien constellations shone clear, unwavering, through wintry air. Often across them streaked meteors; like other big, childless suns, Beta Crucis was surrounded by cosmic debris. Aurora danced glorious over the cliffs, and southeastward the first luster of morning climbed into heaven.

  Falkayn examined the outside meters. The atmosphere was not breathable—CO, C02, CH4, NH4, H2S, and such. There was some oxygen, broken loose from water molecules by solar irradiation, retained when the lighter hydrogen escaped into space, not yet recombined with other elements. But it was too little for him, and vilely cold to boot, not quite at minus 75 degrees Celsius. The ground was worse than that, below minus 200. The tropics had warmed somewhat more. But an entire world could not be brought from death temperature to room temperature in less than years—not even by a blue giant—and conditions upon it would always vary from place to place. No wonder its weather ran amok.

  “I’d better go out,” he said. His voice dropped near a whisper in the frozen quietness.

  “Or I.” Chee Lan seemed equally subdued.

  Falkayn shook his head. “I thought we’d settled that. I can carry more gear, accomplish more in the available time. And somebody’s got to stand by in case of trouble. You take the next outing, when we use a gravsled for a wider look around.”

  “I merely wanted to establish my claim to an exterior mission before I go cage-crazy,” she snapped.

  That’s more like the way we ought to be talking. Heartened, Falkayn proceeded to the air lock. His suit and his equipment were ready for him. Chee helped him into the armor. He cycled through and stood upon a new world.

  An old one, rather: but one that was undergoing a rebirth such as yonder stars had never seen before.

  He breathed deeply of chemical-tainted recycled air and strode off. His movements were a trifle clumsy, he stumbled now and then, on the thick soles attached to his boots. But without them, he would probably have been helpless. Muddlin’ Through could pump heat from her nuclear power plant into her landing jacks, to keep them at a temperature their metal could stand. But the chill in these rocks would suck warmth straight through any ordinary space brogan. His feet could freeze before he knew it. Even with extra insulation, his stay outdoors was sharply limited.

  The sun bounded him more narrowly, though. Day was strengthening visibly, fire and long shadows across desolation. The shielding in his armor allowed him about half an hour in the full radiance of Beta Crucis.

  “How are things?” Chee’s voice sounded faint in his earplugs, through a rising buzz of static.

&
nbsp; “Thing-like.” Falkayn unlimbered a counter from his backpack and passed it above the ground. The readoff showed scant radioactivity. Much of what there was, was probably induced by solar wind in the past decade, before the atmosphere thickened. (Not that its insignificant ozone layer was a lot of protection at present.) No matter, men and the friends of men would make their own atoms here. Falkayn hammered in a neutron-analysis spike and continued on his way.

  That looked like an interesting

  outcrop. He struck loose a sample.

  The sun lifted into view. His self-darkening faceplate went almost black. Gusts moaned down off the mountains, and vapors began to swirl above the glacial masses.

  Falkayn chose a place for a sonic probe and began to assemble the needful tripod. “Better not dawdle,” said Chee’s distorted tone. ‘The radiation background’s getting foul.”

  “I know, I know,” the Hermetian said. “But we want some idea about the underlying strata, don’t we?” The combination of glare and protection against it handicapped his eyes, making delicate adjustments difficult. He swore picturesquely, laid tongue on lip, and slogged ahead with the job. When at last he had the probe in action, transmitting data back to the ship, his safety margin was ragged.

  He started his return. The vessel looked unexpectedly small, standing beneath those peaks that also enclosed him on the right. Beta Crucis hurled wave upon wave of heat at his back, to batter past reflecting paint and refrigerating unit. Sweat made his undergarments soggy and stank in his nostrils. Simultaneously, cold stole up into his boots, until toenails hurt. He braced himself, beneath the weight of armor and gear, and jog-trotted.

  A yell snatched his gaze around. He saw the explosion on the cliff-top, like a white fountain. A moment later, the bawl of it echoed in his helmet and the earth shock threw him to his knees. He staggered erect and tried to run. The torrent—part liquid flood, part solid avalanche—roared and leaped in pursuit. It caught him halfway to the ship.