by Larry Niven
“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.”
“Hm, 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 daytime 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 downdrift 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, “Whew! 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 downdrift 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 profs 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, elsewhen 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,” he 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 slight. 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 he 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, b
rushed 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 darknesses 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 searchbeam doesn’t diffuse, and—I’m off to inspect.”
“Better 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, spraddled 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?”
Yoshii could not see that where he was, but he did spy the quickening and thickening of the wave fronts farther off. Understanding blasted him. “Douse your flash!” he yelled. “Get back inside!” He grabbed for the searchlight switch as for the throat of a foeman.
“Hey, what is this?” Carita called.
“Douse your flash, I said. Can’t you see, bright light is what causes the trouble? Find your way by the stars.” He clutched his shoulders and shivered in the dark. The boat shivered with him, diminuendo.
“I read you,” Carita said faintly.
Yoshii darkened the cabin as well. “Let’s meet in my stateroom,” he proposed. The sarcastically named cubbyhole did not give on the outside. He groped till he found it. When again he dared grant himself vision, he bent above the locker where a bottle was, shook his head, straightened, and stood looking at a photograph of Laurinda on the bulkhead.
Carita entered. Her coverall was wet and pungent. Sweat glistened on the dark face. “Haven’t you poured me a drink?” she asked hoarsely.
“I decided that would be unwise.”
“Maybe for you, sonny boy. Not for me.” The Jinxian helped herself, tossed off two mouthfuls, and sighed. “That’s better. Thank you very much.”
Yoshii gestured at his bunk. It was roughly horizontal, that being how the polarizer field was ordinarily set in flight. They sat down on it, side by side. Her bravado dwindled. “So you know what’s happened to us?” she murmured.
“I have a guess,” Yoshii replied with care. “It depends on my idea of the supermolecule being correct.”
“Say on.”
“Well, you see, it grew. Or rather, I think, different ones grew till they met and linked up. There must have been all possible combinations, permutations of radicals and bases and—every kind of chemical unit. Cosmic radiation drives that kind of change. So does quantum mechanics, random effects; that was probably dominant in intergalactic space. So the chemistry . . . mutated. Whatever structure was better at assimilating fresh material would be favored. It would grow at the expense of the rest.”
Carita whistled. “Natural selection, evolution? You mean the stuff’s alive?”
“No, not like you and me or bacteria or even viruses. But it would develop components which could grab onto new atoms, and other components that are catalytic, and—and I think ways of passing an atom on from ring to ring until it’s gone as far as there are receptors for it. That would leave room for taking up more at the near end. Because I think finally the molecule evolved beyond the point of depending on whatever fell its way from the skies. I think it began extracting matter from the planet, whenever it spread to where there was a suitable substance. Breaking down carbonates and silicates and—and incorporating metallic atoms too. Clathrate formation would promote growth, as well as chemical combination. But of course metal is ultra-scarce here, so the molecule became highly efficient at stealing it.”
“At eating things.” Carita stared before her. “That’s close enough to life for me.”
“The normal environment is low-energy,” Yoshii said. “Things must go faster during the day. Not that there is much action then, either; nothing much to act on, any more. But we set down on our metal landing gear, and pumped out light-frequency quanta.”
“And it . . . woke.”
Yoshii grimaced but stayed clear of semantic argument. “It must be strongly bound to the underlying rock. It was quick to knit the feet of our landing jacks into that structure.”
“And gnaw its way upward, till I—”
He caught her hand. “You couldn’t have known. I didn’t.”
The deck swayed underfoot. The liquor sloshed in Carita’s glass. “But we’re blacked out now,” she protested, as if to the devourer.
“We’re radiating infrared,” Yoshii answered. “The boat’s warmer on the outside than her surroundings. Energy supply. The chemistry goes on, though slower. We can’t stop it, not unless we want to freeze to death.”
“How long have we got?” she whispered.
He bit his lip. “I don’t know. If we last till sunrise we’ll dissolve entirely soon after, like spooks in an ancient folk tale.”
“That’s more than a month away.”
“I’d estimate that well before then, the hull will be eaten open. No more air.”
“Our suits recycle. We can jury-rig other things to keep us alive.”
“But the hull will weaken and collapse. Do you want to be tossed down into . . . that?” Yoshii sat straight. Resolution stiffened his tone. “I’m afraid we have no choice except to throw ourselves on the mercy of the kzinti. They must have arrived.”
Carita ripped forth a string of oaths and obscenities, knocked back her drink, and rose. “Shep is still on the loose,” she said.
Yoshii winced. “Man the control cabin. I’m going to suit up and get back into the engine compartment.”
“What for?”
“Isn’t it obvious? The energy boxes are stored there.”
“Oh. Yes. You’re thinking we’ll have to take orbit under our own power and let the kzinti pick us up? I’m not keen on that.”
“
Nor I. But I don’t imagine they’ll be keen on landing here.”
He rejoined her an hour later. By starlight she saw how he trembled. “I was too late,” dragged from him. “Maybe if I hadn’t had to operate the airlock hydraulics manually—What I found was a seething mass of—of—The entire locker where the boxes were is gone.”
“That fast?” she wondered, stunned, though they had been in communication until he passed through into the after section. And then, slowly: “Well, the capacitors in those boxes are—were fully charged. Energy concentrated like the stuffs never known before. Too bad so much didn’t poison it. Instead, it got a kick in the chemistry making it able to eat everything in three gulps. We’re lucky the life-support batteries weren’t there, too.”
“Let’s hope the kzinti want us enough to come down for us.”
Shielding a flashlight with a clipboard, they activated the radio, standard-band broadcast. Yoshii spoke. “SOS. SOS. Two humans aboard a boat, marooned,” he said dully. “We are sinking into a—solvent—the macromolecule—You doubtless know about it. Rescue requested.
“We can’t lift by ourselves. The drive units in our spacesuits have only partial charge, insufficient to reach orbital speed in this field. We can’t recharge. That equipment is gone. So are all the reserve energy boxes. We can flit a goodly distance around the planet or rise to a goodly height, but we can’t escape.
“Please take us off. Please inform. We will keep our receiver open on this band, and continue transmission so you can locate us.”
Having recorded his words, he set them to repeat directly on the carrier wave and leaned back. “Not the most eloquent speech ever made,” he admitted. “But they won’t care.”
She took his hand. Heaven stood gleamful above them. Time passed. Occasionally the vessel moved a bit.
A spaceship flew low, from horizon to horizon. They had only the barest glimpse. Perhaps cameras took note of theirs.