by Larry Niven
Laurinda's fingers twisted together. She turned her face from the other two.
“I vote with you," Dorcas declared. They had been considering tactics for hours, while they gained knowledge of the world they had reached. “What are the specs of a landing site? Safe ground; concealment from anything except an unlikely observation from directly overhead, unless we can avoid that too; but we don't want to be in a radio shadow, because we hope for-we expect-a broadcast message in the fairly near future."
“Don't forget defensibility," Saxtorph reminded.
“What?" asked Laurinda, startled. “How can we possibly-”
The man grinned. “I didn't tell you, honey, because it's not a thing to blab about, but Dorcas and I always travel with a few weapons. I took them along packed among my personal effects. Managed to slip Carita a rifle and some ammo when nobody else was looking. That leaves us with another rifle, a Pournelle rapid-fire automatic, choice of solid or explosive shells; a .38-caliber machine pistol with detachable stock; and a 9-mm. mulekiller. “
“Plus a certain amount of blasting sticks," Dorcas informed him. Saxtorph goggled. “Huh?" He guffawed. “That's my nice little wifey. The standard mining equipment aboard includes knives, geologists' hammers, crow bars, and such, useful for mayhem." He sobered. “Not that we want a fight. God, no! But if we're able to give a good account of ourselves-it might make a difference. "
“A single small warhead will make a much bigger difference, unless we have dispersal and concealment capability," Dorcas observed. “All right, let's take a close look at what topographical data we've collected. " The choice was wide, but decision was quick. Shep dropped out of orbit and made for a point about 30 degrees north latitude. It was at mid-afternoon, which was a factor. Lengthening shadows would bring out details, while daylight would remain-in a rotation period of 40 hours, 37-plus minutes-for preliminary exploration of the vicinity. A mesa loomed stark, thinly powdered with ice crystals, above a glacier that had flowed under its own weight, down from the heights, until a jumble of hills beneath had brought it to a halt. As it descended, the glacier had gouged a deep, almost sheer walled coulee through slopes and steeps. The bottom was talus, under a dusting of sand, but solid; with gravity a third higher than on Earth, and epochs of time, shards and particles had settled into gridlock.
Or so the humans reasoned. The last few minutes of maneuver were very intent, very quiet except for an occasional low word of business. Saxtorph, manning the console, was prepared to cram on emergency boost at the first quiver of awareness. But Dorcas talked him down and Shep grounded firmly. For a while, nobody spoke or moved. Then husband and wife unharnessed and kissed. After a moment, Laurinda. made it a three-way embrace.
Saxtorph peered out. The canyon walls laid gloom over stone. “You ladies unlimber this and stow that while I go take a gander," he said. “Yes, dear, I won't be gone long and I will be careful.”
His added weight dragged at him, but not too badly. It wasn't more than physiology could take, even a Belter's or a Crashlander's, and distributed over the whole body. The women would get used to it, sort of, and in fact it ought to be valuable, continuous exercise in the cramped quarters of the boat. The spacesuit did feel pretty heavy.
He cycled through and stood for a few minutes learning to see the landscape. Every cue was alien, subtly or utterly, light, shadow, shapes.
The cobbles underfoot were smooth as those on a beach. They and the rubble along the sides and the cliffs above were tawny-gray, sparked with bits of what might be mica but was likelier something strange–diamond dust? Several crags survived, eroded to laciness. The lower end of the gorge, not far off, was blocked by a wall of glacier. Above reached purple sky. An ice devil whirled on the heights. Wind withered.
Saxtorph decided his party had better plant an antenna and relay inconspicuously up there. Any messages ought to be on a number of simultaneous bands, at least one of which could blanket a Tertian hemisphere, but the signal would be tenuous and these depths might screen it out altogether. He walked carefully from the arrowhead of the boat to the right-hand side and started downslope, looking for safe routes to the top. Lateral ravines appeared to offer them.
Abruptly he halted. What the flapping hellfire? He stooped and stared. Could it be ? No, some freak of nature. He wasn't qualified to identify a fossil.
He went on. By the time he had tentatively found the path he wanted, he was so near the glacier that he continued. It lifted high, not grimy like its counterparts on terrestroid planets but clear, polished glassy-smooth, a cold and mysterious blue. Whatever mineral grains once lay on it had sunken to the bottom, and Saxtorph stood moveless. The time was long before he breathed, “Oh. My. God.”
From within the ice, the top half of a skull stared at him. It could only be that, unhuman though it was. And other bones were scattered behind, and shaped stones, and pieces of what was most surely earthenware Chill possessed him from within. How old were those remnants? Big Tertia must in its youth have had a still denser atmosphere than now, greenhouse effect, heat from a contracting interior, and... those molecules that are the kernel from which life grows, perhaps evolved not here but in interstellar space, organics which the wan sun did not destroy as they drifted inward.... Life arose. It liberated oxygen. it gave birth to beings that made tools and dreams. But meanwhile the planetary core congealed and chilled, the oceans began to freeze, plants died, nothing replaced the oxygen that surface rocks bound fast.... Without copper, tin, gold, iron, any metal they could know for what it was, the dwellers had never gone beyond their late stone age, never had a chance to develop the science that might have saved them or at least have let them understand what was happening....
Saxtorph shuddered. He turned and hastened back to the boat.”
Unsure what kind of surface awaited them, Carita and Yoshii descended on the polarizer and made a feather-soft landing. They were poised to spring instantly back upward. All they felt was a slight resilience, more on their instruments than in their bones. It damped out and Fido rested quiet.
“Elastic?" Yoshii wondered. “Or viscous, or what?”
“Never mind, we'll investigate later, right now we're down safe," Carita. replied. She wiped her brow. “Hoo, but I need a stiff drink and a hot shower!”
Yoshii let-red at her. “In the opposite order, please." She cuffed him lightly. The horseplay turned into mutual unharnessing and a hug. “Hey-y," she purred, "you really do want to celebrate, don't you? Later, we'll share that shower.”
His arms dropped. She released him in her turn and he made a stumbling backward step. “, I'm sorry, I didn't intend-Well, we should take a good look outside, shouldn't we?”
The jinxian was briefly silent before she smiled wryly and shrugged. “Okay. I'll forgive you this time if you'll fix dinner. Your yakitori tacos are always consoling. You're right, anyway.”
They turned off the fluoros and peered forth. As their eyes adapted, they saw well enough through airlessness, by the thronging stars and the cold rush of the Milky Way. Bowl-shaped, the dell in which they were parked curved some 50 meters wide to heights twice as far above the bottom. Fido sat close to one side; direct sunlight would only touch her for a small part of the day, weeks hence. Every edge and lump was rounded off by the covering of the planet. In this illumination it appeared pale gray.
“What is the stuff?" Carita muttered.
“I've hit on an idea," Yoshii said. I do not warrant that it is right. It may not even make sense.”
Her teeth flashed white in the darkness. “The universe is not under obligation to make sense. Speak your piece." She switched cabin illumination back on. Radiance made the ports blank.
“I think it must be organic–carbon-based," Yoshii said. “It doesn't remotely match any mineral I've ever seen or heard of or imagined, whereas it does resemble any number of plastics.”
“Hin, yeah, I had the same thought, but discarded it. Where would the chemistry come from? Life can't have started in
the short time Prima hung onto its atmosphere, can it? Whatever carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen are left must be locked up in solid-state materials. At most we might find hydrates or something. "
“This could have come from space.”
“What?" She gaped at him. “If that's a joke, it's too deep for me." “There is matter in space, in the nebulae and even in the emptiest stretches between. It includes organic compounds, some of them fairly complex."
“Not quite concentrated enough for soup.”
“Sure, the densest nebula is still a pretty hard vacuum by Terrestrial standards. However, this system has had time to pass through many. Between them, too-yes, between galaxies-gravity has found atoms and molecules to draw in. During any single year, hardly a measurable amount. But it's been fifteen billion years, Carita.”
“Um'h," she uttered, almost as if punched in the stomach.
“The sun doesn't give off any ultraviolet to speak Of," Yoshii pursued. “Its wind is puny. Carbon-based molecules land intact. The sun does maintain a day time temperature at which they can react with each other. I daresay cosmic radiation energizes the chemistry, too. Fine grains of sand and dust–crumbled off rocks, together with meteoroid powder-provide colloidal surfaces where the stuff can cluster till there's a fairly high concentration and complicated exchanges become possible. Unsaturated bonds grab the free atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, anything included in the down drift except noble gases, and incorporate them. Maybe, here and there, some such growing patch 'learns' how to take stuff from surface rocks. It's a slow, slow process–or set of processes–but it's had time. Eventually patches meet as they expand. What happens then depends on just what their compositions happen to be. I'd expect some weird interactions while they join. Those could be going on yet. That would explain why we saw differently colored areas. But it's only the terminal reactions."
Yoshii's words had come faster and faster. He was developing his idea as he described it. Excitement turned into awe and he whispered, “A polymer. A single multiplex molecule, the size of this planet.”
Carita was mute for a whole minute before she murmured, “Whewl But why isn't the same stuff on every airless body?... No wait. Stupid of me to ask. This is the only one where conditions have been right." Yoshii nodded. “I suspect that what yellows the rest is a carbon compound, too, but something formed in space. You get some fairly complicated ones there, you know. If that particular one can't react with the organics I was talking about–too cold-then they are a minor part of the down drift compared to it. We haven't noticed the same thing in other planetary systems because they are all too young, and maybe because none of them have made repeated passages through nebulae."
“You missed your calling," Carita said tenderly. “Should've been a scientist. Is it too late? We can go out, take samples, put'em through our analyzers. When we get home, you can write a paper that'll have scholarships piled around you up to your bellybutton. Though I hope you'll keep on with the poetry. I like what you-”
A quiver went through the boat. “What the Finagle!" she exclaimed.
“A quake?" Yoshii asked.
“The prof's told us these planets are as far beyond quakes as a mummy is beyond hopscotch," Carita snapped.
Another tremor made slight noises throughout the hull. Yoshii reached for the searchlight switch. Carita caught his arm. “Hold that," she said. “The kzinti no, unless they beef up that already wild boost they are under, they won't arrive for a couple more hours." Nevertheless he refrained.
The pair studied their instrument panel. “We've been tilted a bit," Yoshii pointed out. “Should we reset the landing jacks?”
“Let's wait and see," Carita said. “I'd guess the rock beneath has settled under our weight, or one layer has slid over another, or something like that. if it's reached a new equilibrium, we don't want to upset it by shifting mass around. No sense in moving yet, when we can't tell what the ground is like anywhere else.”, “Right. I'm afraid, though, we can't relax as we had hoped." “How much relaxing could we do anyway, with kzinti sniffing after us?"
“And Laurinda-" Yoshii whispered. Harshly: “Do you want to take the controls, stand by to jump out of here, in case? I'll snug things down and, yes, throw a meal together."
Lightfoot under the low gravity, he descended aft to the engine compartment. Delicate work needed doing. The idling fusion generator must be shut down entirely, lest its neutrino smoke betray the boat-not that the kzinti could home in on it, but they would know with certainty the humans were on Prima, and in which quadrant. Batteries, isotopic and crystalline as well as chemical, held energy for weeks of life support and ordinary operations. Yet it had to be possible to restart the generator instantly, full power within a second, should there be a sudden need to scramble. That meant disconnecting the safety interlocks. Yoshii fetched tools and got busy. The task was demanding, but not too much for his spirit to wing elsewhere in space, else when in time-the Belt, Plateau, We Made It, Rover's folk on triumphal progress after their return... .
Carita's voice came over the intercom. “This is dull duty. I think I will turn on the searchlight while it's still safe to do so. Might get a clue to what caused those jolts.”
“Good idea," lie agreed absent-mindedly, and continued his task. The metal around him throbbed. Small objects rattled on the deck. “Juan!" Carita shouted. “The, the material-it's rippling, crawling-" The hull rocked. “I'm getting us out of here!”
“Yes, do," he called back, and grabbed for the nearest handhold. Within its radiation shield, the generator hummed. Needles sprang across dials, displays onto screens. Yoshii felt the upward thrust of the deck against his feet. It was light. Carita was a careful pilot, applying barely sufficient boost to rise off the ground before she committed to a leap.
The boat screamed. Things tilted. Yoshii clung. Loose things hailed around him. A couple of them drew blood. The boat canted over, toppled, struck lengthwise, tolled so that he was half deafened.
Stillness crashed down, except for a shrill whistle that he knew too well. Air was escaping from one or more rents nearby. He hauled himself erect and out of his daze. The emergency valve had already shut, sealing off this section. He had to get through the lock built into it before the pressure differential made operation fatally slow.
Somehow lie passed forth, and on along the companionway that was now a corridor, toward the control cabin. Lights were still shining, ventilators still whirring, and few articles lay strewn around. This was a good, sturdy craft, kept shipshape. How had she failed? Carita met: him in the entrance. “Hey, you sure got battered, didn't you? I was secured. Here, let me help you." She practically carried him to his chair, which she had adjusted for the new orientation. Meanwhile she talked on: “The trouble's with the landing gear, I think. Is that damn stuff a glue? No, how could it be? Take over. I'm going to suit up and go out for a look.”
“Don't," he protested. “You might get stuck there, too.” “I'll be careful. Keep watch. If I don't make it back-" She stooped, brushed lips across his, and hurried aft.
His ears rang and pained him, his head ached, he was becoming conscious of bruises, but his eyes worked. The searchlight made clear the motion in the mantle. It was slight in amplitude, as thin as the layer was, and slow, but intricate, like wave patterns spreading from countless centers to form an ever changing moiré. Those nodes were darker than the ripple-shadows and seemed to pass the darkness’s on from one to the next, so that a shifting stipple went outward from the boat, across the dell floor and, as he watched, up the side. The hull rocked a little, off and on, in irregular wise.
“Do you read me?" he heard after a while. “I'm in the Number Two lock, outer valve open, looking over the lip.”
“I read you," he answered unevenly. At least the radio system remained intact. “What do you see?”
“The same turbulence in the... stuff. Nothing clear aft, where the main damage is. The search beam doesn't diffuse, and-I'm off to inspect." “Bette
r not. If you lost your footing and fell down into–:' She barked scorn. “If you think I could, then I'm for sure the right person for this job." He clenched his fists but must needs admit that induction boots gave plenty of grip on the metal for a rockjack-a-rockjill, she often called herself. “I'm crawling out.... Standing.... On my way." The hull pitched. “Hey! That damn near threw me." Starkly: “I think Fido just settled more at the after end."
“But into what?" he cried. “Solid rock?”
“No, I guess not. I do know what we are deep down into.... Okay, proceeding. Landing gear in sight now, straddled against the sky. It's dark, I can't see much except stars. Let me unlimber my flashlight.... A-a-ah!" she nearly screamed.
He half rose in his seat. “What happened? Carita, dear, are you there?"
“Yes. A nasty shock, that sight. Listen, the Number Three leg is off the ground. The bottom end sticks up-ragged, holes in it-like a badly corroded thing that got so weak it tore apart when it came under stress.... But Juan, this is melded steel and titanium alloy. What could've eaten it?"
“We can guess," Yoshii said between his teeth. “Come back. " “No, I need to see the rest. Don't worry, I'll creep down the curve like a cat burglar.... I'm at the socket of Number Two. I'm shining my light along it. Yes. Nothing left of the foot. Seems to be sort of-absorbed into the ground. Number One-more yet is missing, and, yes, that's the unit which pulled partly loose from its mounting and made the hole in the engine compartment. I can see the skin ripped and buckled-”
The boat swayed. Her nose twisted about and lifted a few degrees as her tail sank. Groans went through the hull.
“I'm okay, mate. Well anchored. But holy Finagle! The stuff is going wild underneath. Has it come to a boil?”