Space Lash

by Hal Clement

  As it happened, there was a scanner in his compartment; but Mayhew had long since grown tired of watching the spy try to ignite the lighter fuel, and had turned his attention elsewhere, so that Hart's actions were unobserved for some time. The door metal was thin and not particularly hard; and he was able without interference and with no worse trouble than severe finger cramp to work out a hole large enough to show him another obstacle — instead of welding the door frame itself, his captors had placed a rectangular steel bar across the portal and fastened it at points well to each side of the frame, out of the prisoner's reach. Hart stopped scraping as soon as he realized the extent of this barrier, and gave his mind to the new situation.

  He might, conceivably, work a large enough hole through the door to pass his body without actually opening the portal; but his fingers were already stiff and cramped from the use made of the tiny striker, and it was beyond reason to expect that he would be left alone long enough to accomplish any such feat. Presumably they intended to feed him occasionally.

  There was another reason for haste, as well, though he was forgetting it as his nose became accustomed to the taint in the air. The fluid, which he had permitted to escape while disassembling the lighter, was evaporating with fair speed, as it was far more volatile than the rocket fuel; and it was diffusing through the air of the little room. The alga tank removed only carbon dioxide, so that the air of the cell was acquiring an ever-greater concentration of hydrocarbon molecules. Prolonged breathing of such vapors is far from healthy, as Hart well knew; and escape from the room was literally the only way to avoid breathing the stuff.

  What would eliminate a metal door — quickly? Brute force? He hadn't enough of it. Chemicals? He had none. Heat? The thought was intriguing and discouraging at the same time, after his recent experience with heat sources. Still, even if liquid fuels would not burn perhaps other things would: there was the wicking from the lighter; a little floating cloud of metal particles around the scene of his work on the magnesium door; and the striking mechanism of the lighter.

  He plucked the wicking out of the air where it had been floating, and began to unravel it — without fuel, as he realized, it would need every advantage in catching the sparks of the striker.

  Then he wadded as much of the metallic dust as he could collect — which was not too much — into the wick, concentrating it heavily at one end and letting it thin out toward the more completely raveled part.

  Then he inspected the edges of the hole he had ground in the door, and with the striker roughened them even more on one side, so that a few more shavings of metal projected. To these he pressed the fuse, wedging it between the door and the steel bar just outside the hole, with the “lighting” end projecting into the room. He inspected the work carefully, nodded in satisfaction, and began to reassemble the striker mechanism.

  He did not, of course, expect that the steel bar would be melted or seriously weakened by an ounce or so of magnesium, but he did hope that the thin metal of the door itself would ignite.

  Hart had the spark mechanism almost ready when his attention was distracted abruptly. Since the hole had been made, a very gentle current of air had been set up in the cell by the corridor ventilators beyond — a current in the nature of an eddy which tended to carry loose objects quite close to the hole. One of the loose objects in the room was a sphere comprised of the remaining lighter fluid, which had not yet evaporated. When Hart noticed the shimmering globe, it was scarcely a foot from his fuse, and drifting steadily nearer.

  To him, that sphere of liquid was death to his plan; it would not burn itself, it probably would not let anything else burn either. If it touched and soaked his fuse, he would have to wait until it evaporated; and there might not be time for that. He released the striker with a curse, and swung his open hand at the drop, trying to drive it to one side. He succeeded only partly. It spattered on his hand, breaking up into scores of smaller drops, some of which moved obediently away, while others just drifted, and still others vanished in vapor. None drifted far; and the gentle current had them in control almost at once, and began to bear many of them back toward the hole — and Hart's fuse.

  For just a moment the saboteur hung there in agonized indecision, and then his training reasserted itself. With another curse he snatched at the striker, made sure it was ready for action, and turned to the hole in the door. It was at this moment that Mayhew chose to take another look at his captive.

  As it happened, the lens of his scanner was so located that Hart's body covered the hole in the door; and since the spy's back was toward him, the watcher could not tell precisely what he was doing. The air of purposefulness about the captive was so outstanding and so impressive, however, that Mayhew was reaching for a microphone to order a direct check on the cell when Hart spun the striker wheel.

  Mayhew could not, of course, see just what the man had done, but the consequences were plain enough. The saboteur's body was flung away from the door and toward the scanner lens like a rag doll kicked by a mule. An orange blossom of flame outlined him for an instant; and in practically the same instant the screen went blank as a heavy shock wave shattered its pickup lens.

  Mayhew, accustomed as he was to weightless maneuvering, never in his life traveled so rapidly as he did then. Floyd and several other crewmen, who saw him on the way, tried to follow; but he outstripped them all, and when they reached the sight of Hart's prison Mayhew was hanging poised outside, staring at the door.

  There was no need of removing the welded bar. The thin metal of the door had been split and curled outward fantastically; an opening quite large enough for any man's body yawned in it, though there was nothing more certain than the fact that Hart had not made use of this avenue of escape. His body was still in the cell, against the far wall; and even now the relatively strong currents from the hall ventilators did not move it. Floyd had a pretty good idea of what held it there, and did not care to look closely. He might be right.

  Mayhew's voice broke the prolonged silence.

  “He never did figure it out.”

  “Just what let go, anyway?” asked Floyd.

  “Well, the only combustible we know of in the cell was the lighter fluid. To blast like that, though, it must have been almost completely vaporized, and mixed with just the right amount of air — possible, I suppose, in a room like this. I don't understand why he let it all out, though.”

  “He seems to have been using pieces of the lighter,” Floyd pointed out. “The loose fuel was probably just a by-product of his activities. He was even duller than I, though. It took me long enough to realize that a fire needs air to burn — and can't set up convection currents to keep itself supplied with oxygen, when there is no gravity.”

  “More accurately, when there is no weight,” interjected Mayhew. “We are well within Earth's gravity field, but in free fall. Convection currents occur because the heated gas is lighter per unit volume than the rest, and rises. With no weight, and no 'up' such currents are impossible.”

  “In any case, he must have decided we were fooling him with noncombustible liquids.”

  Mayhew replied slowly: “People are born and brought up in a steady gravity field, and come to take all its manifestations for granted. It's extremely hard to foresee all the consequences which will arise when you dispense with it. I've been here for years, practically constantly, and still get caught sometimes when I'm tired or just waking up.”

  “They should have sent a spaceman to do this fellow's job, I should think.”

  “How would he have entered the station? A man is either a spy or a spaceman — to be both would mean he was too old for action at all, I should say. Both professions demand years of rigorous training, since habits rather than knowledge are required — habits like the one of al ways stopping within reach of a wall or other massive object.” There was a suspicion of the old chuckle in his voice as Mayhew spoke the final sentence, and it was followed by a roar of laughter from the other men. Floyd looked around, and
blushed furiously.

  He was, as he had suspected from the older man's humor, suspended helplessly in midair out of reach of every source of traction. Had there been anything solid around, he would probably have used it for concealment instead, anyway. He managed at last to join that laughter; but at its end he glanced once more into Hart's cell, and remarked, “If this is the worst danger that inexperience lands on my head, I don't think I'll complain. Bruce, I want to go with you on your next leave to Earth; I simply must see you in a gravity field. I bet you won't wait for the ladder when we step off the rocket — though I guess it would be more fun to see you drop a dictionary on your toe. As you implied, habits are hard to break.”

  Halo

  “You disappoint me,” the class superintendent said with some feeling. “I have a personal as well as a professional dislike of wastefully run farms, and you seem to have furnished a prime example.” He paused briefly, watching in silence as the spheroidal forcing beds drifted smoothly about their central radiator. “Of course, I would be much more sympathetic with you if your own ill-advised actions were not so largely responsible for this situation.” He checked his young listener's half-uttered pro-test. “Oh, I realize that youngsters have to learn, and experiment is the only source of knowledge; but why not use the results of other people's experiments? This sort of thing has happened before, I think you'll find.”

  “I didn't know.” The answer was sullen despite the grudging respect. “How was I supposed to?”

  “Did you get an education or not?” There was some heat in the query. “I can't imagine what the primary teachers do these days. Even though you are so young, I understood that you had some qualifications and even a bit of promise in agriculture. That's why I thought you could be trusted without supervision for a few years. Am I to assume that you became dissatisfied with the yield of this farm?”

  “Of course. Why else study agriculture?”

  “Until you can answer that for yourself, I won't try to. Tell me in detail what you did. Did you try to step up the output of the central radiator?”

  “What do you think I am?” The younger being's indignation flared abruptly.

  The other remained calm and exhibited faint traces of amusement, permitting the feeling to show in his answer rather more plainly than was strictly tactful.

  “Don't boil your crust off. You might not be able to spare it next time you go in to harvest. People still do try the stunt I mentioned, you know.

  Every now and then it works for someone after a fashion, so the rest feel it's still worth trying. If it wasn't that, just what did you do? You're missing a culture unit, if I remember this solar system correctly.”

  The student took a moment to find just the right words. “One of the lots seemed to be practically ideal. When it first solidified, it was just far enough from the radiator and just large enough to retain a thin surface film of light elements; and it responded beautifully to culturing with water-base growths. On the colder ones, by the way, I had good luck with ammonia cultures.”

  “Quite possible, in that sort of bed. I noticed a couple of them were bare, though. Was that another result of this experiment of yours?”

  “Indirectly, yes.” The young farmer looked a trifle apprehensive. “There was another plot, a good deal farther out and colder than my ideal one. But it was too hot for ammonia growths and too small to furnish the pressure they seem to need — at least the ones I'm familiar with.” The addition was made hastily.

  “I judged that it should have a good supply of food elements, cooling where it did; and since it wasn't doing well where it was, I thought it would be a good idea to move it farther in.”

  The listener's manner lost some of its amused aspect.

  “Just how did you decide to go about that? The energy involved would have demanded several times the mass of your own body, even with total conversion — which I can't believe you've mastered.”

  “I don't suppose I have. It seemed to me that the unit itself could furnish the mass without serious loss, though.”

  “I see.” The comment was grim. “Go on.”

  “Well, I went in and set up a conversion reaction. I touched it off as well as I could on the forward side of the unit, though that was a little hard to arrange — the thing was spinning like mad, as most of them do. Maybe that was the reason I let a little too much mass get involved, or maybe the globe wasn't as massive as I had thought.”

  “You mean you were uncertain of its mass? Is something wrong with your perceptive faculties as well as your judgment? Just how old are you, anyway?”

  “Fifteen.” The sullenness, which had began to depart from the youngster's tone as he warmed to his narrative, returned in full strength. The questioner noted it and realized that he was not being as tactful as he might be; but under the circumstances he felt entitled to a little emotion.

  “Fifteen years on what scale?”

  “Local — this furnace, around the mass-center of the system.”

  “Hmph. Continue.”

  “Most of the sphere was volatilized, and most of what wasn't was blown completely out of the system's gravitational influence. The rest — well, it's still circling the furnace in quite a wide variety of orbits but it's not much good to anyone.”

  There was a pause while the nearly useless outermost unit swung beneath the two speakers, then on to the far side of the glowing sphere of gas that held it with unbreakable fingers of gravity. The supervisor was not actually boiling — that would be difficult even for a body composed largely of methane, oxygen, and similar solids when it is at a temperature of about half a degree absolute — but his temper was simmering. After a moment he spoke again.

  “Let me get this straight. You sent a slave with a message that your farm had gotten out of hand and that you would like advice. Am I to understand that you spent so much time ruining one of your units that some of the others developed culture variations whose taste didn't appeal to you? I'm afraid my sympathy grows rapidly less.”

  “It's not that I don't like the stuff; it's that I can't eat it.” The youngster must have been angry, too; there was no other imaginable reason why he should have made a statement at once so true in fact and so misleading in implication. The superintendent, swallowing the implication whole, permitted the remains of his temper to evaporate completely.

  “You can't eat it? That is really too bad. Pardon me while I go to sample some of this repulsive chemical — or perhaps you would like to come along and show me what you have been eating. There is hardly enough drift in this area to support you, particularly with a decent-sized crew of slaves. What have you been feeding them? Perhaps you ought to let someone else take over this farm and get yourself a research job out in one of the drift clouds, soaking up your nourishment from a haze of free atoms ten parsecs across for a few years. You youngsters!”

  “I've been eating from the ammonia units. So have the slaves.”

  “Very well, then I shall look over your water culture, which by elimination must be the one that's been giving trouble. On second thought, you needn't come along. It's the third plot from the furnace. I can find my way.” He moved off abruptly, not even waiting for an answer.

  And the student, with no slightest shadow of an excuse, simply because of his own childish loss of temper, let him go without a word of warning.

  It might, of course, have made no difference if he had spoken. The superintendent was annoyed, too, and might understandably have chosen to ignore his junior. His attention, as he permitted himself to fall toward the central radiator, was divided between his own irritation and the condition of the various plots. Only gradually did the latter feeling predominate.

  He had to admit the outermost was too cold for much chemical action except actual life processes which were too slow to be useful. The fact that the youngster he had left above had induced anything at all to grow there was at least one point to his credit. It swung past only once while he was falling by its orbit. Though his gravity-
given speed was slow, its speed was slower — and it had farther to go.

  The next two he had noted earlier were bare of useful growths. He remembered now that the student had admitted this fact to be an indirect result of his experiment. The superintendent could not see the connection. The plots themselves, on closer inspection, seemed physically undamaged, and the student himself could not possibly have eaten them both clean, no matter what his hunger. Of course, a crowd of slaves might — but he was not going to accuse anybody yet of letting slaves get that far out from under control. They were not even allowed to approach a culture plot in person, being fed from its produce by their master.

  The plots themselves were large bodies, though not the largest in the system, with their solid bulks veiled under mile after mile of hydrogen compounds. The superintendent's senses probed in vain for the enormously complex compounds that were the preferred food of his kind. Several much smaller bodies were gravitating about each of these plots, but none was large enough to hold the light elements in the liquid or gaseous form necessary for food culture.

  The next unit had the merit of interesting appearance, if nothing else. In addition to the more or less standard quota of bodies circling it, it possessed a regular halo of minute particles traveling in a solidly interwoven maze of orbits just outside the atmosphere. On the surface, and even in the atmosphere itself, its cultures were flourishing. The superintendent paused to take a sample, and had to admit that once again the youngster had not done too badly.

  His temper cooling, he rode the farm plot most of the way around its orbit, taking an occasional taste and growing calmer by the moment. By the time he left the limits of its atmosphere, he was almost his normal self.

  This, however, did not last long enough even for him to get rid of the globe's orbital speed, to say nothing of resuming his drop toward the sun. He had slanted some distance inward and fallen well behind the ringed sphere when his attention was drawn to another, much smaller object well to one side of his line of flight.