The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  He tried to point out the value of time. Nic countered with the value of familiarity; he and Erni were, aside from Maria and Jessi, the only people who had traveled really far from Nest. Cloud gave up at this point, agreed to wait for their arrival, but used their own argument to insist that two additional drivers go with them to gain experience.

  Erni asked pointedly, “Is Candlegrease set up to support a crew of six?” The coordinator almost gave himself away by asking what six, but made a quick recovery.

  “It will be by the time you get here.” Suggesting that there would probably be no need to take care of six was obviously unwise and might, just conceivably, be wrong. Human life, even other people’s, means a lot to civilized beings. A species which has survived its war stage and achieved star travel practically has to be civilized.

  Ben kept his word. The second tanker was ready, loaded, and set up to keep the women comfortable if they were found, by the time Erni and Nic got back to Nest. There was a second argument when they insisted, or tried to insist, on starting out at once to the hot side in spite of their extreme exhaustion. Ben won this one, but only by promising not to let Candlegrease move without them, so almost another Halfbaked year passed before the medics pronounced the two fit for the trip.

  There had been no delay, of course, in examining Jelly’s cockpit, though this had to be done with bugs. Bringing the machine into the garage and flooding it with water so that living researchers could swarm into it would quite certainly destroy any evidence there might be.

  It was quickly discovered that breaking the brittle contents did not pulverize the whole branch, merely two or three diameters to each side of the break. Cutting or snipping at two points far enough apart, therefore, detached an apparently undamaged section. Since the tank was full of the stuff too, there was no shortage. After a few mistakes resulting from failing to catch them on something soft as they fell, several lengths of the material were brought into “outdoor” labs, and biologists and chemists went happily to work with their bugs.

  The material was not very different from the tissues already investigated from the local vegetation. It was rigid rather than pliable, of course, and it finally occurred to someone that the stuff, having come from the hot side, might merely be frozen. This was easy enough to test. A sample was heated up to the probable temperature, as indicated by radiation theory and measurement from the satellites, of the Hotpole latitude where the “city” seemed to be. Long before it warmed up that far, the branch being tested was flexible as rope. Several of the investigators began privately to wonder whether they might be working over the remains of one of the intelligent natives, though no one suggested this aloud until well after Candlegrease had departed. Ben had the idea, but decided to save it; Erni might get bothered again.

  What brought the question into the open was the observation that after a day or so at high temperature, most of the branches, or roots, or vines, or whatever they were began to grow fine tendrils. The stuff was still alive.

  This was quickly reported to Ben Cloud, leaving him with the decision of how much to pass on to the now fairly distant second expedition. On one hand, the information was clearly critically important to anyone expecting to be in direct contact with the natives. On the other, Nic and Erni might be uncomfortable to learn that their examination of Jelly’s control compartment might have dismembered one of the people they were going to meet.

  Or, considering what had so probably happened to their wives, they might not. The other two drivers were a married couple, Pam Knight and Akmet Jinn Treefern, and the Treeferns might keep the other two in discussion rather than brooding mode. Ben hoped the fact that they were short, stocky, extremely sturdy people from a one-point-four-gee colony world would not become important, but he was getting uneasy over Erni’s patience limits.

  Ben was still trying to make up his mind—there was plenty of time yet before the travelers could presumably meet any day side natives—when another discovery was made.

  One of the many short sections of branch from the debris on the floor of Jelly’s cockpit had been part of one of the samples to be warmed up. It had not responded; it had neither softened nor grown extensions. After giving it several days, first with the rest of the sample and then by itself, it had been sequestered for more detailed study.

  Halfbaked’s life, it was now known, consisted mostly of carbon, with modest traces of nitrogen, oxygen, and heavy metals such as iron and titanium. The complexity needed for biological machinery was obtained not from hydrogen bonding within and between proteins and carbohydrates but from variously sized fullerenes and graphite tubes flared, tapered, curved, and branched by occasional heptagons, pentagons, and octagons in their mainly hexagonal carbon-ring nets. The “protoplasm” was considerably coarser, on the molecular scale, than anything known before to human biochemistry, and its peculiarities were contributing heavily to the Ph.D.-per-hour rate Cloud liked to brag about.

  The unresponsive segment was quite different. It had a fair amount of carbon and some iron, but there was far more sodium, calcium and phosphorus than had ever been found in the native life, and the carbon for the most part was tetrahedrally bonded. It took a while to discover the reason, and this happened only when one of the chemists sat back from her diffraction spectrometer and its confusing monitor pattern and took a close naked-eye look at the specimen.

  Then she called for a medical helper, who needed one glance.

  The branch was the charred remains of a human little finger.

  This made Ben’s communication problem more difficult, but in another way. It also forced him to face it at once. He faced it, reporting as tersely and calmly as he could to the distant Annie.

  “But why only a finger?” tiny Pam asked instantly, before either of the now confirmed widowers could react. She was honestly and reasonable curious, but was quite consciously trying to ease the shock of the message for the husbands. It was not really necessary; Nic, and even Erni, had become more and more ready to face the news as the weeks had worn on. “You two went over the whole floor, square centimeter by square centimeter, you said. Why didn’t you find a lot more—and a lot more recognizable? Maybe it’s just as well you didn’t, of course, but still I don’t see why.”

  Dominic was able to answer at once, though Erni had thought of the explanation as quickly.

  “It was small, and they missed it.”

  That was all he needed to say. Even the “they” needed no clarification. Everyone in the tug heard that much and could picture the rest. Ben Cloud and more than fifty of the Nest personnel who were in the comm link could do the same. They listened while Dominic, in surprisingly steady tones, went on, “Ben, did Tricia ever get an answer to that question we asked a while ago about the natives and water?”

  “Not that I know of.” Cloud found his voice with difficulty. He had expected losses on Halfbaked, but the fact that none had occurred in the nearly half a Terrestrial year the party had been there had undermined his readiness. “I’ll try to find out. Carry on. And we’re sorry. I don’t know what else to say that wouldn’t be pure Pollyanna; but you know we mean it.”

  “We know.”

  “You also know, I expect,” Ben’s voice was even softer, “why I had another pair of drivers with you.” It was not put as a question. Ben, a slender half gravity colonial, did not commonly think of muscle as useful, but he was a realist.

  “Yeah. Thanks. Don’t worry. Erni, time for you to take over. We still have things to find out up Hotnorth.”

  The sun would be starting to rise in another two thousand kilometers or so. Temperature was higher, though the principal surface winds still brought chill from the dark side; turbulence sometimes mixed in air from above, not only coming from sunlit regions but heated further by compression as it descended. Dominic still sometimes contributed to Erni’s financial security with an attempted weather forecast, but the variables he could think of were becoming too numerous even for his optimism. Motivation for such p
redictions remained high; they had identified another potential trigger for landslides. Suddenly hot or suddenly—by two or three hundred Kelvins—cold blasts of wind sometimes cracked off scales of rock by thermal shock. The cracks, fortunately, were never deep; but the layers peeled off were sometimes extensive and their shattered fragments dangerous, especially as the pieces were often thin enough to blow around.

  The tank in tow was struck several times, forcing travel to cease while it was examined carefully by servobugs, but so far damage had been confined to small dents. The one strike on Annie had caused no damage at all, possibly because the traction problem had forced her to be grown with much extra weight.

  They had seen and avoided the common puddles of unknown makeup, but as the sky ahead grew bright these became larger areas and more frequent. Annie avoided them, though the returning Jellyseal apparently had not. The white crust on her tracks and lower body had turned out to be mostly cryolite, sodium aluminum fluoride, regarded by Greenland natives on Earth as a peculiar form of ice because it would only melt in the flame of a blubber lamp.

  It was now pretty obvious who, or what, had driven the tanker homeward. Dominic had already compared the fate of the driver with that of his wife, but had not spoken about it to anyone. For one thing, a lot of the how remained to be worked out. The tangle of apparent vegetation might, after all, have been some sort of remote control system; this world’s plants did emit and receive microwaves. Maybe no intelligent being had been on board, at that. This could all tie in with the natives’ immediate spotting of, and beaming signals to, the satellites when these had gone into operation months before. The graphite microtubes in Halfbaked tissue often circulated metal ions and could serve as antennae, among many, many less obvious things. It seemed more and more necessary, and more and more easy to believe, that the real life was at the source of the signals. And maybe one of the girls …

  No, Don’t think of that. Whatever had happened to them had happened very quickly—one could believe that, at least—and pretty certainly to both of them at once.

  But it looked as though veering around lakes might not be really necessary, since they were going Hotnorth and anything that froze on the vehicles now should melt off again shortly. Nic did suggest this. Pam vetoed the idea at once.

  “How do we know how deep these things may be?”

  “Do we need to? We’d float. We’re only twice as dense as water.”

  “That wouldn’t matter to us, but could we drive, towing like this?” Nic had no answer, and they continued to stay on solid, if sometimes shaky, ground. Neither of the other men had taken part in the debate.

  Just as they glimpsed the upper limb of the sun, a new sort of adventure eased the boredom. They were threading their way through a stand which looked much like the “Saguaro” patches Nic and Erni had found earlier. The growths were not always far enough apart for the tank, and much as they disliked it, there was sometimes no alternative to hitting and bending pairs of these, or sometimes breaking them completely. They were leaving a clear trail, not that this was their main worry.

  Nic was glad afterward, though he was far too busy otherwise to think of it at the moment, that none of his attempted weather predictions was pending. With no warning at all a far stronger wind blast than any of them had experienced so far made itself felt to the driver. Organ pipes bent and snapped in all directions.

  And, though there had been no lightning, burst into flame. For minutes they drove through the enveloping blaze, making no effort to avoid anything. The mere fact that there was no free oxygen outside meant nothing; it had not occurred to anyone to consider what the paraffin would do in unlimited supplies of this atmosphere. There was no free fluorine to speak of, but the variety of fluorine compounds actually present offered far more possibilities than any of them had time to consider. Pam joined her husband at the driving controls; Erni, with remarkable self-discipline, beamed a running report of what was happening for any satellites in position to relay to Nest; Nic deployed one of the more versatile servobugs and drove it beside them, ranging back and forth along the tank and looking carefully for any signs of rupture. After a few seconds Pam, deciding her husband needed no help—he was not attempting to dodge anything—took out another bug and covered the other side.

  They were out of the stand, and out of the fire, and presumably out of danger after three or four anxious minutes. The wind now came strongly from ahead; Nic judged that the fire had set up a strong updraft which was bringing in air from all directions. Erni, with no wager going, didn’t bother to disagree, and neither of the others found the suggestion unreasonable.

  A few hundred meters from the nearest flames Annie and Candlegrease were stopped and all four of the crew made a slow and minute inspection of tug and tow using the bugs. There was little worry about their own vehicle; they would have been aware of serious damage within seconds of incurring it. A slow leak in the tank, however, was another matter. It was assumed that the natives were equipped to unload the paraffin at their end; they had been told as clearly as possible what it was, and would presumably be ready to keep any of the precious hydrogen from escaping. Also, they had made no complaint about the first delivery.

  But no one had tried to find out what the paraffin itself would do to local life. It seemed very likely that hydrogen compounds would be about as helpful to Halfbaked’s organisms as fluorine ones in comparable concentration would be to Terrestrial tissues. Also, many paraffin components were high enough in molecular weight to sink in the local atmosphere; they would be mixed and diluted quickly by wind, of course, but wouldn’t rise on their own.

  The travelers reminded Ben of this, and asked for suggestions. What if they did find a leak, even a small one? Should they come back, at least to Hotlatitudes where the paraffin would freeze again?

  “I’ll have to ask around,” was all the coordinator could say after some seconds of thought. “Get along with your inspection, and let us know. For now, we’ll assume the worst.”

  “What would that be, to you?” asked Erni.

  “That you’re leaking so badly there’s no way of getting any of your load to where it’s supposed to be delivered. That would make the decision easy, but I hope it isn’t true.”

  So did the crew, but they were still careful.

  There were half a dozen patches of liquid near and under the tank, but there were two similar ones near the tug, and several more within a few tens of meters. There seemed no reason to suppose they were hydrocarbons, since they seemed neither to be evaporating nor reacting with the now quite hot air, but they were watched carefully for several minutes, especially those under the tank. At Nic’s suggestion, they moved the vehicles a hundred meters to an area where no puddles could be seen, and waited for more minutes.

  Nothing dripped. No puddles formed. Nothing seemed to be leaking. This was reported to Cloud. He had had time to think, or someone had, and his answer was, “Check every bit of the tank you can get an eye close to for the tiniest cracks, leaking or not, which may show. Remember the one in Jelly.”

  “What one in Jelly?” asked two voices at once.

  “Didn’t I tell you? No, come to think of it, that just led to more questions, some of them still not answered. We think we know what happened, now. The refrigerators meant to keep the paraffin from boiling when the surroundings got really hot did a good job, but when the liquid was drained, we suppose by the customers, the tank naturally filled with local air. Some of this, maybe sulfur trioxide, formed frost on the coils and insulated them, so air at its regular temperature—eight or nine hundred Kelvins or more, depending on the local weather—swept in and hit the rear bulkhead of the cockpit. This was too thick, it turned out.”

  “Too thick?” There were more than two voices this time.

  “Too thick. A thin glass will handle hot washing fluid better than a thick one. The body composition of the vehicles is as strong as we could make it, but it’s also a very poor heat conductor, as intended. It be
nt in toward the cockpit just a little under the pressure, and that added to thermal shock to start a U-shaped crack in the rear bulkhead from floor to floor, and straight along the floor, framing about ten square meters. The area was pushed into the cockpit momentarily by the atmospheric pressure, far enough to open a gap maybe one or two centimeters wide all around. The support water, or enough of it, boiled almost instantly, the windows blew out, and the steam pressure slammed the flap back where it had come from so tightly the crack was practically invisible.”

  “And you never told us? Why not?” asked Pam.

  “Well, it couldn’t happen to you. Your living space isn’t even in the same vehicle with the cargo. One point for the towing idea.”

  “And several points minus for keeping us in the dark!”

  “We’ll check for cracks,” added Dominic, as steadily as he could. They all turned their attentions back to the bugs.

  The fire had almost completely died out. So had the wind from Hotnorth. Dominic, glancing away from his work occasionally, saw that the pillar of smoke was sheared cleanly at, he judged, nearly a kilometer above, with the higher part whipping back toward Hotsouth. It was high enough to glow for some distance in the sunlight against an unusually dark and cloud-free sky. He was tempted to try another weather guess, but firmly turned his attention back to Candlegrease’s body. So cracks could be really hard to see …