by Hal Clement
Huge as his mass was, his normal temperature was so low that life processes went on at an incredibly slow pace. To him, a chemical reaction requiring only a few millennia to go to completion was like a dynamite explosion. A few pounds of organic compounds would feed his miles-thick bulk for many human lifetimes of high activity.
In short, the slave had been quite right.
Almost involuntarily, rationalizing his appetite as he went, the superintendent permitted himself to drift into the asteroid zone. With only the smallest part of his attention, he assumed a parabolic, free-fall orbit in the general plane of the system, with its perihelion point approximately tangent to the orbit of the third planet. At this distance from the Sun, the difference between parabolic and circular velocities was not too great to permit him to detect even the tiniest particles in time to avoid them. That fact, of course, changed as he fell sunward.
Perhaps he had been counting on a will power naturally superior to that of the slave who had warned him. If so, he had forgotten the effects of an equally superior imagination. The pull of the third planet was correspondingly stronger and, watching the spinning globe, he was jarred out of an almost hypnotic trance by the first collision. It awakened him to the fact that his natural superiority to the slave race might not be sufficient to keep him out of serious trouble.
The space around him — he was now well inside the orbit of the fourth planet — was literally crowded with grain-of-dust meteors, each, as he had seen on the slave's crust, able to blast out a crater many times its own volume in a living body. Individually, they were insignificant; collectively, they were deadly.
His attention abruptly wrenched back to immediate problems of existence, the superintendent started to check his fall and veer once more toward the safe, frozen emptiness of interstellar space. But the spell of the gourmet's paradise he had been watching was not that easily thrown off. For long moments, while the planet circled its primary once and again, he hung poised, with gluttony and physical anguish alternately gaining the upper hand in a struggle for possession of his will. Probably he would have lost, alone; but his student did have a conscience.
“Sir!” The voice came faintly but clearly to his mind. “Don't stay! You mustn't! I should never have let you come — but I was angry! I know I was a fool; I should have told you everything!”
“I learned. It was my own fault.” The superintendent found it curiously difficult to speak. “I came of my own free will and I still think that plot is worth investigation.”
“No! It's not your own free will — no will could remain free after seeing what that planet has to offer. I knew it and expected you to die — but I couldn't go through with it. Come, and quickly. I will help.”
The student was in an orbit almost identical with that of the superintendent, though still a good deal farther out. Perhaps it was the act of looking at him, which took his attention momentarily from the alluring object below, that made the older being waver. Whatever it was, the student perceived the break and profited by it.
“Don't even look at it again, sir. Look at me, and follow — or if you'd rather not look at me, look at that!”
He indicated the direction plainly, and the dazed listener looked almost involuntarily.
The thing he saw was recognizable enough. It consisted of a small nucleus which his senses automatically analyzed. It consisted of methane and other hydrocarbons, some free oxygen, a few other light-element compounds, and had nuggets of heavier elements scattered through it like raisins in a plum pudding. Around it for thousands of miles there extended a tenuous halo of the more volatile of its constituent compounds. The thing was moving away from the Sun in an elliptical orbit, showing no sign of intelligent control. A portion of its gaseous envelope was driven on ahead by the pressure of sunlight from below.
It was a dead slave, but it could as easily have been a dead master. A dead slave was nothing; but the thing that had killed it could do the same to him.
It was the first time in his incredibly long life that the personal possibility of death had struck home to him; and probably nothing less than that fear could have saved his life.
With the student close beside, he followed the weirdly glowing corpse out to the farthest point of its orbit; and as it started to fall back into the halo of death girdling that harmless-looking star, he pressed on out into the friendly darkness.
Perhaps some day that third planet would be harvested; but it would not be by one of his kind — not, at least, until that guarding haze had been swept up by the planets that drifted through its protecting veil.
It was not a very good group, Wright reflected. That always seemed to be the case. When he had luck with observing weather, he had no one around to appreciate the things that could be seen. He cast a regretful glance toward the dome of the sixty-inch telescope, where a fellow candidate was taking another plate of his series, and wondered whether there were not some better way than part-time instructing to pay the expenses of a doctorate program.
Still, the night was good. Most of the time in the latitude—“Mr. Wright! Is that a cloud or the Aurora?”
“If you will stop to consider the present position of the Sun below the horizon,” he answered indirectly, “you will discover that the patch of light you are indicating is directly opposite that point. It lies along the path of the Earth's shadow, though, of course, well beyond it. It is called the Gegenschein and, like the Zodiacal Light, is not too commonly visible at this latitude. We did see the Light some time ago, if you remember, on an evening when we started observing earlier. Actually, the Gegenschein is a continuation of the luminous band we call the Zodiacal Light. The latter can sometimes be traced all the way around the sky to the point we are now watching.”
“What causes them?”
“The most reasonable assumption is that they are light reflected from small, solid particles — meteors. Apparently a cloud of such matter extends outward for some distance past the Earth's orbit, though just how far, it is hard to say. It grows fainter with distance from the Sum, as would be expected, except for the patch we call the Gegenschein.”
“Why the exception?”
“I think one of you can answer that.”
“Would it be for the same reason that the full Moon is so much more than twice as bright as either quarter? Simply because the particles are rough, and appear dark in most positions because of the shadows of irregularities on their own surfaces — shadows which disappear when the light is behind the observer?”
“I think you will agree that that would account for it,” Wright said. “Evidently the meteors are there, are large compared to wavelengths of visible light, and form a definite part of the Solar System. I believe it was once estimated that if the space inside the Earth's orbit contained particles one millimeter in diameter and five miles apart, they would reflect enough light to account for what we are observing. They might, of course, be smaller and more numerous. Only that amount of reflecting surface is necessary.”
“You had me worried,” another voice broke in. “I'd been hearing for years that there would be little reason to fear collisions with meteors when we finally get a rocket out of the atmosphere. For a moment, I though a cloud such as you were working up to would riddle anything that got into space. One pinhead every five miles isn't so bad, though.”
“There is a fairly good chance of collision, I would say,” returned Wright, “but just what damage particles of that size would do, I am not sure. It seems rather likely that they would be volatilized by impact. How the hull of a rocket would react, we will have to find out by experience. I wouldn't mind taking the risk myself. I think we can sum up the greatest possibilities by saying that the meteoric content of the Solar System has and will have nothing but nuisance value to the human race, whether or not we ever leave our own planet.”
A streak of white fire arced silently across the sky, putting a fitting period to the subject.
Wright wondered whether it would appear on his
friend's photographic plate.
The Foundling Stars
“All right — perfect. You're the most nearly motionless thing in the universe.”
Hoey's words were figurative, of course; whether they were accurate or not depended entirely on point of view. Rocco Luisi and his Ymyrgar were indeed at rest with respect to Hoey and the Anfforddus, after more than four hours of maddening effort, but neither machine was motionless with respect to much else. Both were travelling at about four kilometers a second, roughly galactic northward, with respect to their home port on Rhyddid, seventy-five parsecs away. They were moving at a much greater velocity with respect to the far more distant Solar System. With respect to each other, however, velocity had been whittled down to somewhat less than five centimeters a year.
How long this would last was problematical. An automatic tracker was now on duty in Hoey's ship, trying to hold steady the fringe pattern produced by combining two ultraviolet laser beams, one originating in his own vessel and the other in Luisi's, in one of the most precise interferometers ever made. Since the crafts were about a light-hour apart, however, corrections tended to be late in time and, in spite of a computer's best efforts, erratic in amount and direction.
“Nineteen decimals” had been a proverbial standard of accuracy for well over a century; but achieving it on any but the atomic size and time scale was not yet standard art.
“That seems to be it,” Hoey repeated. “That means that you and I stay strapped in our seats, with no more motion than we can help, for the next four hours or so. If either of the instrument platforms on our ships moves more than half a micron with respect to the other, a lot of time and money go down the drain.”
“I know — I've had it hammered into me as often and as hard as you have.” Luisi's voice was undistorted, and the responses instant, on the medium communicator.
“Sure you have,” retorted Hoey, “only a lot of people wonder whether you really believe it.”
“Well, it depends on what you mean by believe. I can figure as well as anyone where the center of mass of my ship would go if I stood up; I…"
“I know you can. Your trouble is that you can't believe it would make as much trouble as they say. Just remember that they were even concerned about tidal forces from Cinder over there” — he gestured, rather uselessly, at the grossly misnamed o6e star glaring at them from half a parsec away—“and even went to the trouble of finding a part of this neighborhood where the wind was steady—
“Right there I break connection. Space is space. You only worry about wind when you're close to a sun, and then it's only a hard-radiation problem.”
“True enough, as a rule. The trouble is that the usual run of stellar winds involves a mass density of around ten atoms to the cubic centimeter; here it's a couple of thousand. It turned out that even that much mass wouldn't accelerate the ships seriously unless the relative velocity were very high indeed, but it was something the planners had to check on. You see what I mean; so stay put. Let's cut the chatter. The sooner the folks in 'Big Boy' can get to work, the sooner we can breathe comfortably. I'll call 'em.”
Hoey's finger tensed on a button, replacing the microscopic crystal in the activity field of his communicator with another, whose twin was aboard. “Big Boy” — more formally, the Holiad. He spoke without preamble, knowing that someone would be listening.
'We're in position, and my tracker says we're holding. Get the job going while the going's good.”
“Right.” The answer was terse, but not casual. The speaker, a heavy-set, middle-aged man with an almost fanatically intense stare in his blue eyes, leaned forward over the console in front of him and began punching buttons in an intricate sequence. He paused every second or two to interpret the patterns of light which winked at him from the board. After half a minute or so the pattern became fixed, and he leaned back, more relaxed.
“Program A is running.” A younger man, seated at a similar console a few yards away, nodded at the words. At first he did not answer aloud; then he decided to speak, though for several seconds he was obviously trying to make up his mind what to say. It was easy to make the wrong remark to Elvin Toner.
“D'you think we'll get full time out of it?” he ventured at last. “Those pilots are good, but I still wish it had been possible to use robotships for the key stations. A man can't hold still forever.”
“So do I.” Toner answered without obvious irritation, and his eyes remained fixed on his console, to the younger man's relief. “I also wish,” the director went on, “that it were possible to use the medium communicator system directly for automatic control of such things as distance, so as to get away from light-lag. But until some genius in your generation works out a way to measure the frequency, wavelength, and propagation velocity of medium waves — or at least, furnishes some evidence that a wave phenomenon is involved — we'll have to stick with electromagnetic radiation and, at times, with human beings. You may not like it, but by the time you reach my age you'll have learned to put up with it.”
“I hope not,” Ledermann couldn't help replying.
“Eh? Why not?” Toner's eyes almost flicked away from his instruments for a moment, but didn't quite.
“I mean that if I learn to put up with inconveniences, it'll be because I haven't been able to figure out anything else to do about them. Who wants to admit that?”
Toner grinned. “Nobody wants to, I suppose, but the honest people do anyway. Hold up; here comes the end of the first minute; any irregularities on your board?”
“Not so far. I don't know what that proves, though; all we are measuring is what's going into the generators. We can't touch what's coming out without changing it…"
“Of course.” The older man made a gesture of impatience. It's some relief, though, to know that things are going in right. I don't know about you, Dick, but Program A is going to be the second longest couple of hours in my life.”
“I know,” replied Ledermann. It was the first time Toner had ever been so frank about his feelings — even though they were usually quite obvious from other evidence — and certainly the first time the assistant had felt much real sympathy for the director. Since the younger man was not a fast thinker, the remark left him once more unsure of what to say.
As a matter of fact, there was probably nothing to say which would have been just right. Toner, like most middle-aged men, had developed a pretty firm personal philosophy and a rather rigid set of fundamental beliefs. The present experiment involved very heavily one of those beliefs — one which Ledermann did not share.
Although, the assistant thought as he glanced through one of the Holiad's great view ports, this was a place where it was hard to feel sure and right about anything fundamental.
Space was not dark, though the nebular material which abounds in the Orion spur of the Milky Way system is never very bright even when no planetary atmosphere dims it. Getting closer to an extended light source, of course, doesn't make each square degree look any brighter; it merely increases the number of square degrees. From the Holiad's position, most of the sky is nebula-bright; and to a spaceman, anything resembling a cloud looks wrong in space. In some directions the stars blaze steadily, as they do from Earth's moon; other directions are blacked out by light-years of dust. Some of the dust itself is bright, for 41 Orionis, named “Cinder” by some humorist who had explored the region earlier, is only half a parsec away. Not only does its fierce ultraviolet radiation keep the nebular gases fluorescing, but its visible is quite enough to light up the dust for immense distances. Not counting its emission envelope, Cinder is only about five times the diameter of Sol, which means that it looks like a point from half a parsec away; but that point illuminated the Holiad almost as effectively as the full moon illuminates the earth. Several other O and B stars flame in the neighborhood; some look brighter than Venus as seen from Earth, some reveal themselves only by illuminating the surrounding dust clouds, some are invisible in the nebulosity. The Orion Spur is one o
f the cradles of the galaxy.
Unfortunately, the occupants of the cradle are foundlings. The general circumstances surrounding a star's birth are now fairly clear; ships prowling the cloudier regions of the spiral arms have found them in all stages of gestation, from gas and dust clouds half a light-year across and little denser than the interstellar background, through T Tauri variables hot enough to radiate visibly, to the vast population of main-sequence suns whose hydrogen fires are safely alight. Like foundlings, while an entire birth has never been observed in any one case, we know enough to picture the circumstances with some confidence.
Also like foundlings, however, the precise details of a star's conception are somewhat obscure. It has been widely supposed for several decades that random variations in the density of the interstellar medium are the key factor — that the law of chance is the father. Dick Ledermann, young and conservative, had no trouble accepting this view. To him, it was obvious that the random “winds” of space must at times produce a gas concentration so dense that its gravity would override the disruptive tidal force of the rest of the galaxy — override it enough to produce a local potential well able to trap at least the lower energy particles of the cloud.
Elvin Toner, nearly twenty years older, had strong reservations about the potency of unaided statistics. Like anyone with even a modest grounding in physical science, he realized the basically statistical nature of many of the universe's laws; he admitted that a star could come into existence by the concatenations of chance which most people took for granted; but he doubted seriously that the random motions of interstellar gas could set up the appropriate conditions often enough to account for the number of observed stars, even allowing for the fairly impressive lifetime of a star. He felt sure — it was as much an article of faith as the normal scientific belief that there is a natural reason for everything — that some specific, widespread, underlying process was operating to improve the chance of protostar formation.