by James Blish
Oxygen tension!
There was one planet, and one only, where such a measurement could have any meaning.
Sweeney ran.
He was no longer running by the time he had reached Rullman's office, although he was still thoroughly out of breath. Knowing that he would be unable to cross back over the top of the pantrope lab again, feeling that heat beating up at him and knowing at least in part what it meant, he had gone in the opposite direction, past the gigantic heat-exchangers, and blundered his way up from the other side. The route he had followed had covered over three erratic miles, and several additional discoveries which bad shaken him almost as hard as had the first one.
He was entirely unsure that he was even rational any more. But he had to know. Nothing was important to him now but the answer to the main question, the permanent founding or dashing of the hope under which he had lived so long.
Rullman was already back in the office, almost surrounded by his staff. Sweeney pushed his way forward among the Ganymedians, his jaw set, his diaphragm laboring.
"This time we're going to close all the safety doors," Rullman said into the phone. "The pressure fronts are going to be too steep to allow us to rely on the outside locks alone. See to it that everybody knows where he's to be as soon as the alert sounds, and this time make it stick; we don't want anybody trapped between doors for the duration. This time it may swoop down on us at damn short notice."
The phone murmured and cut out.
"Hallam, how's the harvesting? You've got less than a week, you know."
"Yes, Dr. Rullman — we'll be through in time."
"And another thing — oh, hello, Donald. What's the matter? You're looking a little pasty. I'm pretty busy, so make it fast, please."
"I'll make it fast," Sweeney said. "I can put it all into one question if I can talk to you privately. For just a few seconds,"
Rullman's reddish eyebrows went up, but after examining Sweeney's face more closely, the scientist nodded and rose. "Come next door, then. . . . Now then, youngster, spit it out. With the storm coming up, we don't have time for shilly-shallying."
"All right," Sweeney said, taking a long breath. "This is it: Is it possible to change an Adapted Man back into a human being? An Earth-normal human being?"
Rullman's eyes narrowed very slowly; and for what seemed a long time, he said nothing. Sweeney looked back. He was afraid, but he was no longer afraid of Rullman.
"You've been down below, I see," the scientist said at last, drumming at the base of his chin with two fingers. "And from the terms you use, it strikes me that Shirley Leverault's educational methods left — well, the cliché springs to mind — something to be desired. But we'll let those things pass for now.
"The answer to your question, in any case, is: No. You will never be able to live a normal life in any other place than Ganymede, Donald. And I'll tell you something else that your mother should have told you: You ought to be damned glad of it."
"Why should I?" Sweeney said, almost emotionlessly.
"Because, like every other person in this colony, you have a Jay-positive blood type. This wasn't concealed from you when we found it, on the first day you joined us, but evidently it didn't register — or had no special significance for you. Jay-positive blood doesn't mean anything on Ganymede, true enough. But Jay-positive Earth-normal people are cancer-prones. They are as susceptible to cancer as hemophiliacs are to bleeding to death — and upon equally short notice.
"If by some miracle you should be changed to an Earth-normal man, Donald, you would be under immediate sentence of death. So I say you should be glad that it can't happen — damn glad!"
3
T he crisis on Ganymede — though of course it would not even be an incident, were there nobody there to live through it — comes to fruition roughly every eleven years and nine months. It is at the end of this period that Jupiter — and hence his fifteen-fold family of moons and moonlets — makes his closest approach to the Sun.
The eccentricity of Jupiter's orbit is only 0.0484, which amounts to very little for an ellipse which averages 483,300,000 miles from its focal points. Nevertheless, at perihelion Jupiter is nearly ten million miles closer to the Sun than he is at aphelion; and the weather on Jupiter, never anything less than hellish, becomes indescribable during that approach. So, on a smaller but sufficient scale, does the weather on Ganymede.
The perihelion temperature on Ganymede never rises high enough to melt the ice of Neptune's Trident, but it does lift through the few niggardly degrees necessary to make the vapor pressure of Ice III known in Ganymede's air. Nobody on Earth could dream of calling the resulting condition 'humidity', but Ganymede's weather turns upon such microscopic changes; an atmosphere containing no water will react rapidly to even a fractional vapor content. For one thing, it will pickup more heat. The resulting cycle does not go through more than a few turns before it flattens out, but the end-product is no less vicious.
The colony, Sweeney gathered, had come through one such period without any but minor difficulties, simply by withdrawing entirely under the mountain; but for many reasons that course was no longer possible. There were now semi-permanent installations — weather stations, observatories, radio beacons, bench-marks and other surveying monuments — which could be dismantled only with the loss of much time before the crisis, and re-established with still more loss afterwards. Furthermore, some of them would be needed to report and record the progress of the crisis itself, and hence had to stay where they were.
"And don't get the idea," Rullman told a mass meeting of the colonists, gathered, in the biggest cavern of the maze, "that even the mountain can protect us all the way through this one. I've told you before, but I'll remind you again, that the climax this year coincides with the peak of the sunspot cycle. Everybody's seen what that does to the weather on Jupiter proper. We can expect similar effects, to scale, on Ganymede. There's going to be trouble no matter how well we prepare. All we can hope for is that the inevitable damage will be minor. Anybody who thinks we're going to get off scot-free has only to listen for a minute."
In the calculated, dramatic pause which followed, everybody listened. The wind was audible even down here, howling over the outlets and intakes of the ventilation system, carried, amplified and encrusted with innumerable echoes, by the metal miles of the air ducts. The noise was a reminder that, at the height of the coming storm, the exterior ports would all be closed, so that everyone under the mountain would have to breathe recirculated air. After a moment, a mass sigh — an involuntary intake of breath against the easily imagined future — passed through Rullman's audience. He grinned.
"I don't mean to frighten you," he said. "We'll get along. But I don't want any complacency either, and above all, I won't stand for any sloppiness in the preparations. It's particularly important that we keep the outside installations intact this time, because we're going to need them before the end of the next Jovian year — a long time before that, if everything continues to go well."
The grin was suddenly quenched. "I don't need to tell some of you how important it is that we get that project completed on schedule," Rullman said, quietly. "We may not have much time left before the Port cops decide to move in on us — it amazes me that they haven't already done so, particularly since we're harboring a fugitive the cops troubled to chase almost into our atmosphere — and we can't plan on their giving us any leeway.
"For those of you who know about the project only in outline, let me emphasize that there is a good deal more hanging from it than immediately meets the eye. Man's whole future in space may be determined by how well we carry it off; we can't afford to be licked — neither by the Earth nor by the weather. If we are, our whole long struggle for survival will have been meaningless. I'm counting on everyone here to see to it that that doesn't happen."
It was difficult to be sure of what Rullman was talking about when he got onto the subject of the 'project'. It had something to do with the pantrope labs, that
much was clear; and it bad to do also with the colony's original spaceship, which Sweeney had run across that same day, stored in a launching chimney almost identical with the one on the Moon out of which Sweeney had been rocketed to begin his own free life, and fitted — if judgment based upon a single brief look could be trusted — either for a long voyage by a few people, or for a short trip by a large group.
Beyond that, Sweeney knew nothing about the 'project', except for one additional fact of which he could make nothing: it had something to do with the colony's long-term arrangements for circumventing the loss of unfixed genes. Possibly — nobody would be less able to assess the possibility than Sweeney — the only connection this fact had with the 'project' was that it was long-term.
Sweeney, in any event, knew better than to ask questions. The storm that was going on inside him took precedence, anyhow; as far as he was concerned, it was even more important than the storms that were sweeping Ganymede, or any that might sweep that world in the foreseeable future. He was not used to thinking in terms of a society, even a small one; Pullman's appeals to that Ideal were simply incomprehensible to him. He was the solar system's most thorough-going individualist — not by nature, but by design.
Perhaps Rullman sensed it. Whether he did or not, the assignment he gave Sweeney might have been perfectly calculated to throw a lonely man into the ultimate isolation he feared; to put the burden of an agonizing decision entirely upon the shoulders of the man who had to carry it; or — to isolate a Port spy where he could do the least harm while the colony's attention was fully occupied elsewhere. Or possibly, even probably, he had none of these motives in mind; what counted, in any event, was what he did.
He assigned Sweeney to the South polar weather station,or the duration of the emergency.
There was almost nothing to do there but watch the crystals of methane 'snow' bank against the windows, and keep the station tight. The instruments reported back to base by themselves, and needed no further attention. At the height of the crisis, perhaps, Sweeney might find himself busy for a while; or, he might not. That remained to be seen.
In the meantime, he had plenty of time to ask questions — and nobody to ask them of but himself, and the hooting, constantly rising wind.
There was an interlude. Sweeney hiked, on foot, back to Howe's H to recover the radio transceiver he had buried there, and then hiked back to the weather station. It took him eleven days, and efforts and privations of which Jack London might have made a whole novel. To Sweeney it meant nothing; he did not know whether or not he would want to use the radio after he got back with it; and as for the saga of his solo journey, he did not know that it was a saga, or even that it had been unusually difficult and painful. He had nothing against which to compare it, not even fiction; he had never read any. He measured things by the changes they made in his situation, and possession of the radio had not changed the questions he was asking himself; it had only made it possible to act upon the answers, once he had any answers.
Coming back to the station, he saw a pinnah-bird. It burrowed into the nearest drift as soon as it saw him, but for the preceding instant he had had company. He never saw it again, but now and then he thought about it.
The question, put simply, was: What was he going to do now? That he was thoroughly in love with Mike Leverault could no longer be argued. It was doubly difficult to come to grips with the emotion, however, because he did not know the name of it, and so had to reason each time with the raw experience itself, rather than with the more convenient symbol. Each time be thought about it, it shook him all over again. But there it was.
As for the colonists, he was certain that they were not criminals in any way, except by Earth's arbitary fiat. They were a hard-working, courageous, decent lot, and had offered to Sweeney the first disinterested friendliness he had ever known.
And, like all the colonists, Sweeney could not help but admire Rullman.
There, in those three propositions, rested the case against using the radio. The time for reporting to Meiklejon was almost up. The inert transceiver on the table before Sweeney had only to send a single one of five notes, and the colony on Ganymede would be ended. The notes were coded:
WAVVY: Have custody need pickup
NAVVY: Have custody need help
VVANY: Need custody have help
AAVYV: Need custody need pickup
YYAWY: Have custody have pickup
What response the computer on board the ship would make, what course of action it would dictate in response to any one of those signals was unknown, but that was now almost beside the point. Any response would be inappropriate, since not one of the five signals fitted the actual situation — despite all the intellectual travail which had gone into tailoring them.
If no note were sent, Meiklejon would go away at the end of 300 days. That might mean that Pullman's 'project', whatever that was, would go through — but that wouldn't save the colony. It would take Earth a minimum of two generations to breed and mature another Sweeney from the artificially maintained ovaries of mercifully long-dead Shirley Leverault, and it was hardly likely that Earth would even try. Earth probably knew more than Sweeney did about the 'project' — it would be difficult to know less — and if Sweeney himself failed to stop it, the next attempt would most likely arrive as a bomb. Earth would stop wanting 'those men' back, once it became evident that she couldn't get them even through so subtle a double agent as Sweeney.
Item: chain reaction. There was, Sweeney knew, a considerable amount of deuterium on Ganymede, some of it locked in the icy wastes of Neptune's Trident, a lesser amount scattered through the rocks in the form of lithium deuteride. A fission bomb going off here would stand an excellent chance of starting a fusion explosion which would detonate the whole satellite. If any still-active fragment of that explosion should hit Jupiter, only a bare 665,000 miles away now, that planet would be quite large enough to sustain a Bethé or carbon cycle; it was diffuse, but it alone among the planets had the mass. The wave front of that unimaginable catastrophe would boil Earth's seas in their beds; it might also — the probability was about 3/8 — trigger a nova outburst from the Sun, though nobody would stay alive to be grateful very long if it didn't.
Since Sweeney knew this, he had to assume that it was common knowledge, and that Earth would use chemical explosives only on Ganymede. But would it? Common knowledge and Sweeney had had precious little contact so far.
Still, it hardly mattered. If Earth bombed the colony, it would be all up with him, regardless. Even the limited companionship, the wordless love, the sense that he might yet be born, all would be gone. He would be gone. So might the little world.
But if he signalled Meiklejon and the computer, he would be taken alive away from Mike, away from Rullman, away from the colony, away and away. He would stay his own dead self. He might even have a new chance to learn that same endless lesson about the shapes loneliness can take; or, Earth might work a miracle and turn him into a live, Jay-positive human being.
The wind rose and rose. The congruent furies of the storms inside and outside Sweeney mounted together. Their congruence made a classic example, had he been able to recognize it, of the literary device called 'the pathetic fallacy' — but Sweeney had never read any fiction, and recognizing nature in the process of imitating art would have been of no use to him anyhow.
He did not even know that, when the crisis of the exterior storm began to wear away the windward edge of the weatherstation's foundations with a million teeth of invisible wrath, his lonely battle to save the station might have made an epic. Whole chapters, whole cantos, whole acts of what might have been conscious heroism in another man, in a human being, were thrown away while Sweeney went about his business, his mind on his lonely debate.
There was no signal he could send that would tell Meiklejon or the computer the truth. He did not have custody of the men Earth wanted, and he didn't want to have it, so it would be idiotic to ask for help to get it. He no longer believ
ed that Earth 'must have those men back', either for Earth's purposes — mysterious though they remained — or for his own, essentially hopeless though his own appeared to be.
But any signal would take him off Ganymede — if he wanted to be taken.
The crisis, he saw, was over. He made the station fast.
He checked the radio once more. It worked. He snapped the turning pointer to one of its copper contacts and closed the key, sending Meiklejon VVANY. After half an hour. the set's oscillator began to peep rhythmically, indicating that Meiklejon was still in Ganymede's sky, and had heard.
Sweeney left the set on the table in the station, went back to the mountain, and told Rullman what he was and what he had done.
Rullman's fury was completely quiet, and a thousand times more frightening than the most uncontrolled rage could have been. He simply sat behind his desk and looked at Sweeney, all the kindness gone out of his face, and the warmth out of his eyes. After a few moments, Sweeney realized that the blankness of Rullman's eyes meant that he was not seeing him at all; his mind was turned inward. So was his rage.
"I'm astonished," he said, in a voice so even that it seemed to contain no surprise at all. "Most of all, I'm astonished at myself. I should have anticipated something like this. But I didn't dream that they had the knowledge, or the guile, to stake everything on a long-term program like this. I have been, in short, an idiot."
His voice took on, for a moment, a shade of color, but it was so scathing that it made Sweeney recoil. And yet no single word of condemnation of Sweeney had yet been forthcoming from Rullman; the man was, instead, strafing himself. Sweeney said tentatively:
"How could you have known? There were a lot of points where I might have given myself away, but I was doing my damndest not to. I might have kept the secret still longer, if I'd wanted it that way."