The Nitrogen Fix

by Hal Clement

  The verb stung the prisoners, not yet entirely free of their upbringing. “We didn’t invent them. They showed up in a pseudolife mutation that used to make fiberglass for insulation, so we used them. Anyone would have.”

  Kahvi, adding the sandals to her burden, sniffed audibly through her mask. “Anyone not burdened by ethics or conscience might. Knowing that I’ve picked several dozen of the things out of my child, though, you’ll excuse me for excluding such people from the human species, I’m sure. Free breathing.”

  She disappeared into the pool. Bones gave her about five seconds than, tossed the prisoners against the far wall and lunged through before they recovered their footing.

  Outside, Kahvi had introduced herself and Danna to the others, and learned their names. The woman was Viah Renuchi, her husband Jonathan Demang, and their son Ray Vellik. They had never met Nomads before, nor had they seen one of Bones’ kind, but of course had heard of both. They had the usual city tendency to regard Kahvi as a rather low variety of human being, but the fact that she couldconverse with Bones forced them to modify their views about both. They were a little awed by the Observer.

  “I have to get back to our raft with Danna and learn what Earrin’s doing,” Kahvi explained when introductions were complete. “He must have been in the city. You said that a Nomad brought the word about oxygen in the jails, and we’re the only ones I know of around here. You didn’t see him?”

  “I guess we did,” replied Jonathan. “He was with the people who did the briefing, and they referred to him a lot, but never by name. He was about your height, a little lighter in build, blue eyes, rather narrow face, and had a much smaller one of these creatures with him.”

  “That’s Earrin. There was another native in the city and Bones here did meet her or him or it, but neither had met Earrin at that time. The two escaped together from some of your oxy-wasters; Bones was recaptured but brought outside, where I found her a little while ago. The other one must have found Earrin, or been found by him. If they were with your people, they must have gone back to the raft, or at least be on the way. I must get back too, and get into step with him and the other native. Do you want to come too, or go back to the city? There’s plenty of air at the raft, and you’ll find out more about what these young people of yours are doing. It looks as though more of you ought to find out; or would you rather get Ray back indoors before you do anything else.

  “He’s all right as long as he’s with us Viah replied. “We never have done much outdoors, but he needs the training, and would probably get it better with you around. Besides, we’re book copiers, and maybe you could help us find better writing tissue or ink. We’ve heard that Nomads sell things like that.”

  “Maybe,” agreed Kahvi. “All right, come along. It’s about three kilometers on the map, so I suppose between four and five walking. We can travel all right by moonlight. I hope we don’t need the sandals; if we run into glass we’ll have to carry the kids, and I don’t know what we’ll do with Bones. You wear sandals, and I’ll go ahead barefoot so the young ones won’t be first to run into it.”

  The others knew nothing of the glass caltrops, and were suitably horrified by Kahvi’s account. They had barely heard of the Hemenway delinquents, and couldn’t guess what was going on — the news industry was one of the casualties of the change. They were still, however, willing to go the shore. Kahvi, hoping fervently that she was right in believing that the glass had been sown only in special areas for special purposes, led the way…

  XVII

  Mail, Melanic

  The message was no real surprise to Earrin, but it did not make him at all happy. He was not yet very worried about his family, but it would be nice to know whether Kahvi had gone somewhere on her own initiative or had been persuaded as he himself had been some twenty-four hours before.

  It didn’t seem a good idea to ask those approaching, though it didn’t occur to him that they would lie.

  He noticed the footgear they were wearing, but it meant nothing to him; he had not had Kahvi’s experience, and the smaller Bones had not included the glass detail in their conversations.

  Fyn was spared the need of deciding what to say; one of the approaching Hillers opened the conversation. The Nomad had not recognized him, but evidently they had met.

  “I’m sorry you chose not to stay with us, Fyn. I think if you’d listened you’d have understood why we wanted you.”

  Earrin raised his eyebrows, though his mask hid the gesture. “It seemed to me I did know,” he replied. “You weren’t too happy about my use of the word, as I recall, but you wanted me to help you capture a friend of mine for experimental use.

  There was no sharp reaction to the scientific word this time, but there was little friendliness in the voice.

  “I see you’ve met up with Genda, the World’s major mouth. Been getting your faith renewed?”

  “Not exactly. Some of us Nomads listen critically to people — not everyone really knows what he’s talking about, you realize.”“And naturally, if they don’t know, you don’t listen.” The sarcasm was obvious.

  “When people waste oxygen on purpose I don’t need Genda or anyone else to tell me their judgment needs polishing,” the Nomad said quietly. “Look, friend, I didn’t come to argue. If you’ll give me the plants we agreed on as payment for the metal and glass I see you’ve been using, I’ll listen to anything you want, but most happily to an order for more material. You can straighten out anything else with Genda, or Mort here, or anyone and everyone else in the city. You can all go on straight oxygen as far as I care. I’d be happier, of course, if you’d leave the jail here use as a breathing place when we make deliveries. We don’t absolutely need it, but we always feel happier when a spare is in reach, and our own nearest one is several kilos away. We’ll put up with this situation if we have to, but the offense to our feeling about waste may cost you more on future deals.”

  “And if we don’t want to make any future deals?” asked a woman.

  “We’ll live with that. There are other cities.” The woman pulled in her horns. “I suppose we could leave old-style air in one building, especially since we have another almost ready right beside it. Your glass was very useful, and I suppose Genda and that other woman are spoiling the air in the jail anyway.

  We do find you useful, I admit — more than we realized originally. You do know about the Invader that was following you, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but as you know I don’t call him an Invader. He’s a friend of mine, and has been for some years. I’ll be glad to tell you all I know about him, but I won’t help you experiment on how to kill him. He says he didn’t have anything to do with the world’s air change, and I believe him.”

  “Why believe him rather than us?” These Hillers seemed neither surprised nor excited at the revelation that the “Invaders” were intelligent enough to talk. It was, after all, consistent with their basic dogma. “I know you Nomads will believe anyone, but can’t you see that if those things had destroyed the world’s air, they’d certainly deny it?”

  “No, I can’t. The reason I believe Bones rather than you wasters lies in what you just said — you believe there are reasons for lying. That, as far as I’m concerned, says all I need to know about you.”

  The Hiller was silent. Mort and Zhamia, who had been brought up with the respect for truth necessary for any reasonably large society but who lacked the Nomads’ extreme attitude, were amused at the oxygen-waster’s discomfiture.

  Their daughter was greatly impressed, looking at Earrin with admiration but saying nothing.

  Another of the sandal-wearing group took up the debate.

  “We don’t say lying is good,” she pointed out, “but you can’t blame us for realizing that there are people — and things — who don’t always tell the truth. We can admire idealism, but we’ve found the need to be a little realistic ourselves.”

  “So you believe what you’ve decided to believe.” Fyn was plainly sarcastic, to
o.

  “We don’t know what to believe, but the Invader idea fits what facts we have and seems reasonable.

  We are willing to have more information — ”

  “You mean it’s a hypothesis and you need more data, though you didn’t like to admit that earlier,”

  Earrin said rather brutally. Mort and his wife were properly shocked; their daughter felt the pleasurable thrill which a child of an earlier millennium would have gotten from hearing an adult utter a string of four-lettered words. “Sorry, you folks,” Earrin added hastily. “I know this sort of thing bothers you, but the fact is that these people are trying to be scientific, and when you come right down to it I have to do the same to stay alive. I can’t really blame them, except for hedging about it. The old words offend people, but they originally stood for common-sense actions. It’s necessary to — pardon me — experiment in order to learn facts, and we need facts so as to be able to do the right things to stay alive.”

  “Then you agree with us!” one of the women exclaimed.

  “No. I still believe Bones. I believe in some of your attitudes. I was taught the Faith in Surplus school, you know, and you can’t expect someone who was aborted for the crime of being the third child born to his parents to feel much love for — ”

  “But they taught you how to live outside in that school, didn’t they?”

  “They taught me what to believe, not what to do. If I hadn’t had the luck to meet another Nomad within a couple of days after being thrown out of Beehive, I’d have been a patch of slime on the Mainericks thirteen years ago. Don’t get me started on Surplus schools. My wife says pretty much the same about yours here at Great Blue. She only lived because she was older when she left, and there are a lot of jails around which she’d already had a chance to get to know. Now you characters are spoiling those.”

  “Making the air richer isn’t spoiling them.”

  “Arranging that new Nomads will need three or four times normal oxygen concentration to have rationally is certainly spoiling them.”

  “But when the world gets back to normal, they’ll be ready for it!”

  Earrin, having no idea of the original composition of Earth’s atmosphere, had no reply to this, but Mort did.

  “The old atmosphere wasn’t all oxygen. If you combine elementary chemistry with elementary arithmetic you find it couldn’t have been more than a quarter. All you’re likely to do if you try is run the total pressure up and make more trouble. To be all oxygen, you’ll have to get rid of the nitrogen. Have you plans for that?”

  Two of the young people laughed, and the discussion degenerated into noise while dogmatic statements flew back and forth.

  Earrin kept silent; he liked Mort, but in spite of Bones’ account he was not at all sure about the Hill dogma. He had grown up to treat all scientific terms as dirty words, but as he had come to learn what most of them meant — largely second-hand, from Kahvi’s reading — he had realized that they described the policies he himself had to follow to keep alive. He did not, of course, stress this fact in his dealings with city-dwellers.

  It was his fear of wasted action and time which finally caused Earrin to interrupt the polemic. It was increasingly obvious that neither side would convince the other.

  “Save breath!” he called loudly, at last. “Mort, these kids have spent years convincing themselves that they’re right. You’re not going to talk them out of it. Even Bones couldn’t talk them out of it, though he might possibly suggest experiments which would dent them. You others — Mort is a nice, devout Hiller, with lots of common sense buried in his devotion, and you’re not going to get him to help with anything that goes against both the faith and the common sense. Find something else to argue about; arguments are a waste of time unless they’re fun.”

  Neither party took this interruption very well, since Fyn had not been particularly tactful. Even Betty felt that her father had been unfairly described. The woman who had spoken before was also irritated this may have caused her to use now a tactic which should certainly have been saved as a final resort.

  “Mort, or whatever his name is, will be helping us whether he wants to or not. We have techniques which have worked before with parents — I suppose this is his child?”

  “Yes,” Fyn admitted unthinkingly, his habitual truthfulness once again overriding his common sense.

  “I thought so. What’s your name, young woman?”

  “Betty-Betty Dent,” the child replied.

  “Betty, how would you like to spend the next few days, or maybe weeks, breathing really nice air — air that makes you feel smart and strong all the time?”

  “You can’t — ” Mort started to snap, and Earrin also tensed as he saw what must be coming and connected it with the absence of his family.

  “We can!” the woman cut in. “There are too many of us here. You could stop us from getting her into a building, of course, but you don’t have hands enough to keep all of us from her air hose. That could be pulled away very easily, couldn’t it?”

  “You couldn’t — no one could do a thing like that!”

  The woman shook her head. “They all react the same. These idealists. They think no one would do what they can’t bring themselves to do. No imagination. If the reasons are strong enough, a person can bring himself to do anything, no matter how unpleasant, Mort. We’ve found that out.”

  “In an oxygen dream, I suppose.”

  “That’s right. Still no originality. First they don’t believe, then they get insulting. Was it Betty’s mother who went with Genda to spoil our air?”

  “Yes.” Mort could see nothing to be gained by denying the fact, though his conditioning againstfalsehood was not quite as overwhelming as Earrin’s.

  “Then we’ll give you a while to decide. When she comes back we’ll all tell her the situation. You can have fun while Genda explains why duty to the faith requires you both to defy us, and let Betty be turned into a — what’s that nice insulting term? — an oxygen junky. You can assure each other that your child is too well brought up to yield to the awful temptation of breathing happily. You and your wife can argue with Genda either way you like. We won’t take Betty away just yet; it may be a while before there’s any point in it.

  The jail air may still be good, but I’m sure its plants have been spoiled by Genda and the other pure-nose, so maybe we couldn’t convert Betty there, and she’d be in the way here in the lab. She might even cause damage, as your invader did in the other one — throwing critical cultures around like an animal!

  “But let’s keep the rules clear, Mort. You and your family will stay around here until you decide to help the work. If you try to leave, especially to go back to the city, a certain air hose will be in danger.

  We oxygen-wasters are going to make sure that the oxygen in the jail isn’t wasted — except, of course, for a couple who will stay outside to see that you behave. You may go out to Earrin’s raft, of course, if there’s enough air for you there. You two — ” she indicated two of the largest men in her group — ”stay outside for a while. Keep close to the young lady — she’s not to go out to the raft-and make sure none of these people does anything I wouldn’t like. I’ll send someone out to take your places before we’ve breathed up too much of what’s still there. Come on, you others.”

  Earrin interrupted the group’s departure.

  “I suppose this is an old trick of yours, as you say. Does that mean you have my wife and daughter hidden away somewhere, too?”

  The woman turned back to him, and the rest of the group stopped to listen. “No,” she said without hesitation. “They don’t seem to have been on your raft all day. We looked and could tell you had a child there, but neither it nor your wife has been seen. We’ve had work parties all over the peninsula and even on the islands gathering material for the lab here, and none of them saw anyone. We had a guard on your raft for a while, to be honest — ” she tilted her head at one of her companions — ”but he got sick and had to
come ashore. Wherever your wife is, she went of her own free will, if you can trust those monsters you associate with.”

  “And if I can trust your word,” Earrin returned pointedly. The woman made no response to this, and a minute later all but the two guards, Earrin, Mort, and Betty had disappeared. There was an indistinct sound of voices from the jail, and then Zhamia and Genda emerged. The latter appeared highly indignant, the expression being partly concealed by her mask and clearly revealed by her body set.

  A few words brought both parties more or less up to date. The women had seeded about two thirds of the oxygen plants in the jail, but it would take a day or two for the new organisms to take over. None of this, however, was going to prevent the young Hillers from running things as they pleased, the part of the situation which bothered Earrin the most. He growled this fact aloud, and Mort agreed glumly.

  “I don’t see what we can do about it, though,” the teacher added.

  “How about that animal who hid in the water Genda asked. “I suppose there’s no way it can be useful.” Fyn ignored the implied contempt, and answered slowly.

  “I was just wondering about that,” he said. “This version of Bones isn’t very large, but — you know, he does have a certain advantage. I’ll have to thank that bossy female for reminding me of it. You folks wait here; I expect he’s in or under the raft, and I want to talk to him before it’s too dark to read signals.”

  Without waiting for agreement, Earrin plunged into the water. The two guards had heard the conversation and looked rather uneasy but couldn’t decide on any action. The orders, after all, had been definite that the prisoners could visit the raft if they chose. Of course, there had not at that time been any suggestion that one of the Invaders might be there. They drew a little apart from the others and talked in a low tone.