by MadMaxAU
“I can’t guarantee—“
“Listen, we’re down to a dozen, maybe fifteen able bodied. They’re dropping faster than we can unslot ‘em, I hear. I’m using men who’re groggy from work—like me—and women with noses running in their suits, coughing into tissues they’ve wadded under their chins. I mean . . .” He sucked in air, his eyes squeezed tight, expelled a tired breath. “It better work.”
Saul nodded sympathetically. “Ley’s go then.”
They met Jeffers and Sergeov and Lani in Shaft 3, where it had all started. The shaft was well lit so they could see to work, the phosphors glowing like regularly spaced advertisements along a dark highway that dwindled away into the yawning distance.
The party hung like dots of color, each suit a different primary, against the pink fiberthread background. From a lateral tunnel came a large, asymmetric bulk, towed by mechs. Three extras trailed.
—Virginia freed ‘em up, — Jeffers said happily. —Makes it a whole lot easier for us now. —
“Yeah,” Carl said. He felt irked that Saul had gotten mechs quickly, without Virginia even asking for approval. And he hadn’t had any mech backup this whole damned shift, until brilliant Saul Lintz and his miracle cure came on the scene. “About time.”
I don’t suppose I’ll cry any if this doesn’t work, Carl thought, and then immediately rebuked himself. No, that’s stupid. You’re really getting worn down.
Jeffers must have been just as tired, but he grinned and wisecracked as he wrestled gear toward the target area. His angular face gave no hint of how he felt about being awakened into hell.
Both Jeffers and Sergeov still had shadowy slot eyes. Carl said to them, “Don’t bust your butts, guys. Easy does it.”
They checked the mechs’ securing cables and pivoted the array to move up the center of the shaft. Telerobots had towed the microwave digger assembly, minus its tripod mount, all the way down from the surface. Without its legs it lost its former spidery grace and became merely another lumpy machine, pipes and struts sticking out at odd angles.
Ahead, the smooth surface of the tunnel was broken by purple strands jutting into the vacuum.
—They’re not moving, — Lani said. Beneath her high, melodious voice there was an undercurrent of fatigue.
—How long has the air been gone from this shaft? — Saul asked.
—Days, — Jeffers answered.
—And the temperature is down? Then the purples may be dormant. —
—What’s ‘at? — Jeffers asked fuzzily.
Saul glanced at Carl questioningly, as if to ask, Is he groggy?
Carl shook his head. We’re all tired, so what? We haven’t been sitting on our asses in a lab all this time.
—The larger forms apparently were stimulated by leaking heat at the intersections, — Saul sent, —where the collar makes contact with the ice. But once they broke through, looking for more heat, they hit a bonanza. The air warmed them as it rushed out, and the forms kept growing—for a while. Now it’s almost as cold in here as the ice, so they’re dormant again. Mostly.
—Uh huh. — Jeffers stared straight ahead, somewhat blearily chewing at his lip, and Carl couldn’t be sure the man had understood any of it.
“The purples will break in anywhere the gunk grows,” he said. “That means anyplace there’s heat or light or air.”
They slowed, the mechs’ jets taking up the inertia of the microwave borer. Bulbous Halleyform organisms protruded into the shaft all around Tunnel 3E. In yellow tinged phosphor light they seemed to be sweating a film of oily blue
—Beautiful, huh? — Jeffers sent sarcastically.
—In a way, — Lani said somberly, taking him seriously. —So strange…—
“Philosophy later,” Carl said. “We’ve got to kill it.”
—No, I want a sample first. — Saul coasted over to the wall and smacked into it awkwardly. Carl grinned maliciously. Let Saul make his own mistakes. He wasn’t going to waste energy babying anybody, especially Lintz.
—I have not seen them in this state. I had only reports to judge by. —
Oh great. “You mean you don’t know you understand them?”
—Oh, we’ve learned a lot. For instance, we now know that they aren’t really differentiated organisms at all, not like mammals or insects or earthworms. They’re more like jellyfish or slime molds . . . where different groups of independent cells take on specialized tasks for brief periods. I haven’t seen a phase like this before, but their fundamental chemistry could not change simply because they have a respite in their growth cycle.
The bland professorial arrogance of it irked Carl. “Who says so? How come you’re so sure?”
Saul pulled out a sample bottle. —General biological principles. The resonant frequencies of their long chain molecules can’t change simply because their life rhythm slows. —
Saul clipped a fragment from the nearest jutting growth and caught it in the bottle. He peered into the open cut, where darkening tissue oozed. —Remarkable. It exudes a film for protection against the loss of vapor to vacuum. Yet the film itself is a fluid that somehow doesn’t sublime. —
“Hey, come on,” Carl called impatiently.
—I suspect it’s a very high surface-tension fluid Somehow it hinds to the surface, yet remains liquid enough to cover the plant entirely, compensating for injuries. —
Saul clipped a section from another, then pushed off. —Done. —
—Good! Let’s get the microwave oven ready for fried eggplant, — Jeffers said.
Carl directed the mechs to focus the antennas on the plants. There would be side lobes that would lap onto the walls, but that couldn’t be helped. The trick—Saul’s idea—was to tune the microwave borer to the precise vibrational frequency of a molecule peculiar to the native forms so that a short burst would fry them without also heating the ice, nearby.
“Hope you’re sure.”
—The calculation’s straightforward. I’m confident. — Saul eyed Carl. —Look, if it works on purples, I can tune it to some of the worst varieties of green gunk, too. —
“To kill this stuff you might have to blister everything else around. If the exposed ice vaporizes, we’re going to be smack in front of a hurricane.”
Saul caught his look. —My calculations show . . . oh, to hell with it. Let’s try anyway. —
—She all tuned? — Jeffers asked.
Saul nodded. Carl put his glove on the manual switch “Firing.”
There came a faint buzz beneath his hand as the capacitors discharged, and then the wall flew at him. A white streaming gale hit Carl, blowing him across the shaft, slamming him into the wall.
He bounced off, spun, regained his attitude. The comm line carried grunts, swearing, a yelp of pain. —Watch the spider! It’s gonna crash into the wall, — Jeffers said.
The microwave unit was drifting backward with ponderous menace. If it slammed into the fiberthread—
“Mechs! Mechs!”
Jeffers and Carl leaped for the mech command module. Stopping the mammoth machine by themselves would be impossible.
Jeffers punched his side console, swearing. Figures moved in the dim light, frantically grappling for purchase on the ponderous, awkward bulk. Mechs surged in several directions, slowing the unit. In a slow motion swirl they applied force and leverage, while seconds ticked and forces merged.
It worked—barely. The unit bumped into the wall in a slow scraping of green.
“Any injuries?”
—No. —
—Only to my pride, — Saul sent. He brushed at a smear of green on his suit bottom. —Ouch. I guess I must’ve sprained my wrist, too. —
Slowly they assembled. The burst of vapor had blown Lani in a three-bank shot, ending up a hundred meters away.
—Hey! — Sergeov sent. —Regard. — He pointed to the rim of Tunnel E.
“The plants . . . they’re gone,” Carl said.
—Not just fried. We disintegrated ‘em, — Jeffers sent.
/> —Of that I was certain, — Saul said. —But why so much vapor? Must’ve boiled the water in their tissues. I’ll have to adjust the frequency better. —
“Tune all you want,” Carl said. “Come on! Slap patches on those holes before something else grows through them.”
It took another two hours of tuning before they could blow the native forms apart with a single short burst from the spider and cause only a minor steam-storm of hot steam. Carl slowly admitted that the idea seemed to work. It was hard to get used to.
Dr. Oakes was enthusiastic. She approved orders to bring in two more spiders and crews to man them. If they worked three shifts per day they might clear the most important shafts and tunnels inside forty-eight hours.
The advantage of the microwave technique was that it ripped apart the Halleyforms down at the molecular level—much more effective than chopping them up or tearing them out of the ice by hand, hoping you had gotten every root and strand.
Now, he thought, now to get rid of the goddamn green gunk itself.
Carl began to feel a faint ray of optimism cut through his bone deep weariness. He sent Virginia slow frame pictures of purples exploding as the microwaves hit the bulbs. She sent back an enthusiastic “Yaaaaay!” then echoed it artificially so that it sounded in his headphones as though an entire stadium were applauding him. That lifted his spirits more than anything.
They were heading back toward Central, inside a pressurized tunnel, when the madman struck.
“Leave it, leave it, leave it be! You killers! You’re the aliens here!”
They turned to see a man in a tattered ship suit, hanging from a side passage, glaring at them angrily.
“What . . . ?” Carl began to say. But the man screamed and leaped forth.
He threw himself at Carl, shouting, incoherently—a high pitched babble, laced with obscenity, and the eyes wide with fevered energy. Hands stretched forward like claws, legs set to kick.
Before Carl could react, hands had grabbed his helmet ring and they went spinning away together. His helmet flew out of his hands when they smacked into a wall. The madman wrapped his legs around Carl and pounded with hard, quick fists.
Carl was sluggish, dazed. He punched at the other but missed. A right cross caught him in the eye—brilliant crimson flashes. He swung wildly. Missed.
He’s fast. Carl blocked another punch. He struck—missed—and struck out again. This time he clipped the man on the shoulder. With the energy of the mad a flurry of fists smacked into his cheek, his arm, his chest. Then, at last, help arrived. Someone yanked and the man sun away, yelling, holding out a handful of something.
Carl felt friendly hands grab him, stop his mad tumble. Lani cradled him.
“What the hell?”
“Who was it?”
“Couldn’t tell.”
“Ingersoll, I think. A guy from Chem Section.”
He blinked unsteadily as the figure launched itself away with well-timed kicks off the tunnel walls. The gibberish went on, fading. No one followed. They clustered around Carl, who was still numb from surprise.
“I’ll have bruises, that’s all,” Carl said groggily, fighting down the adrenaline rush.
“Damnedest thing,” Jeffers said.
Lani touched Carl’s face gently. “It’s swelling already. What could have provoked him?”
“He seemed deranged,” Saul said. “I’d heard he had come down with something, but Akio said it did not appear to be fatal. Whatever it was, it’s obviously affected his mind.”
Sergeov’s face took on a grim, gray cast. “Now he flees into lower tunnels. Be very hard to find him, treat him, in there, if he does not want you to catch.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Carl said. rubbing his jaw, “he can stay lost forever.”
Saul nodded, but his voice was pensive and worried as he said, “There were Halleyforms smeared on his face. I wonder how many others have what he’s developing?”
SAUL
At times, the words still haunted him. We are the aliens. Men were the invaders here, the interlopers. Now and then Saul wondered what right they had, killing what they did not understand.
Still, he admitted to a feral pleasure in roaming the deep ice caverns, zapping gunk—a savage thrill in aiming a sort of ray gun down a hallway, whispering “zap, zap” under your breath, and vaporizing the more dangerous outbreaks of comet stuff.
It didn’t surprise Saul that he was of two minds on the matter.
In this instance, it’s the soldier, the caveman in me that wins over the philosopher. My job is to chip flint, to flake new weapons and help save the tribe. It’s a priority that comes down from long, long ago. And it is right.
He touched the dial on his portable beamer. The rheostat kept drifting, and it was important to keep the device tuned exactly on the right frequency, in case they rounded a corner right into a writhing mass of purples.
In the days since that first experiment, the hall crews had learned a lot about how to use the new weapons. There was neither enough power nor labor to keep every passage clear all the time, and the waste heat would prove most unpleasant, if they tried for very long. But the effect on morale had been tremendous anyway. For the first time there seemed to be a chance they might just get through this. Those who weren’t sick were actually starting to catch up on sleep. There was less desperate talk of stripping surface mechs to be brought down below the ice.
Now, if only we can lick the sicknesses. Saul’s major reason for agreeing to come out here, to the remote tunnels near the surface, was to take enough samples to develop his data base, to begin to get some idea how Halley lifeforms interrelated, what roles the microorganisms played.
Just behind him, Lani Nguyen rode a large tunnel mech. The big robot carried a microwave digger that had been modified for hall scrubbing Except for a dicey area back on E Level, they hadn’t had to use it much. The really tough areas were those closest to human habitation, where heat and light and air fed complex lichenoid growths and attracted the deadly, iron mawed, worm like colonies.
Here in the outlying tunnels, the phosphor lamps were far spaced and the temperature was kept well below freezing. Only a thin film of green coated the walls. It was easier moving about—even in spacesuits—than back where the purples crawled.
He raised his hand and Lani halted the mech at an intersection that had once been bright in orange and blue plastisheath. Now the walls were dingy under the verdant pallor of a few green covered glow panels.
Saul scraped away lichenoid, exposing letters on the wall: D-14-TAU.
Good, they weren’t lost.
—I’ll make soundings for crevices, Saul. —
He nodded. “Okay, Lani. Just don’t venture too far from the intersection.”
—I’m leashed to you like a faithful puppy, you betcha. —
Saul smiled. Lani was smart and brave, but she was also cautious. The combination was one reason he was glad to have her assigned as his partner.
She moved carefully along the walls, thumping the fibersheath and listening with an audioscope, skillfully seeking out breaks and soft spots in the ice underneath.
They had found through hard experience that the tiny, almost imperceptible Halley quakes that had been going on ever since their arrival kept opening narrow cracks in the icy aggregate. The danger was particularly acute at intersections, where the insulation was weakest. Part of their job out here was to map the worst of these crevices for later remelt and sealing . . . if there was ever enough manpower to get around to it, that is.
The scrapings from the intersection sign went into a sample vial. Saul was almost certain this was just typical Hallivirens malenkovi. But on this trip he had also discovered a host of other, as yet undescribed types. The ecosystem clearly varied from place to place as conditions changed.
Right now Akio Matsudo was back in Central’s bio lab, working with Marguerite von Zoon and three weary techs to seek treatment for the growing sick list.
&
nbsp; Akio was a competent scientist, but he was ideologically incapable of really adjusting to the implications of this unexpected tide of cometary life.
Everyone’s excited over the success of my microwave disruptor. I’ve got a reputation as a man of action, now. But has it persuaded anyone to take my advice? To step back and try to get the wide view?
Ha!
Saul was resigned to investigating the Halleyform problem on his own, in his own way. One part of that investigation was coming out here and looking into it for himself.
The biggest drawback is missing Virginia so much.
Saul said a grateful prayer every day they woke up together, neither of them yet suffering from some horrible, deadly thing. It was a blessing that she had—so far—not caught anything from him.
Virginia had had a few rough days there, back when the news had come about the coup in Hawaii. The resulting Percell Ortho tensions had almost overshadowed joy over the success of the beamer technique.
Three steps forward, four steps back, Saul thought.
He wiped his nose on the helmet’s drip pad, took another anti-histamine pill, and washed it down with a sip from a water teat. Saul bent swiveled his body upside down in the faint gravity to take another scraping of an interesting looking growth.
There was a low growl as Lani returned with the mech. She muttered rapidly in arcane engineering dialect as she recorded her results, then she looked up at Saul.
—Only small cracks as far as Shaft Six. So, do we toast this stretch of tunnels? —
He shook his head. “No, not here. We’d be half a day finding the right tunings for the individual lichenoid components. The disrupted cells would only spread out and coat the walls anyway, serving as food for a new generation. This stuff doesn’t seem to be doing any harm right now.”
He also wanted to avoid selecting for disruptor resistant variants. They had a weapon, now. It would be unwise to squander it as twentieth-century man had done with the best antibiotics and insecticides.
“Why don’t you just zap the area around each phosphor panel?” he suggested. “So this corridor doesn’t go completely dark and unusable.”