by Larry Niven
Against them, Rover shone like a beacon. Saxtorph cheered. As expected, the kzinti had left her on the hemisphere that always faced Secunda. The location was, however, not central but close to the north pole and the western edge. He wondered why. He’d spotted many locations that looked as good or better, when you had to bring down undamaged a vessel not really meant to land on anything this size.
He couldn’t afford the time to worry about it. By now the warboats had surely learned of the disaster to their mother ship and were headed back at top boost. Kzinti might or might not suspect what the cause had been of their supertug running amok, but they would know when Rover took off—in fact, would probably know when he reached the ship. Their shuttles, designed for strictly orbital work, were no threat. Their gunboats were. If Rover didn’t get to hyperspacing distance before those overtook her, she and her crew would be ganz kaput.
Saxtorph passed low overhead, ascended, and played back the pictures his scanners had taken in passing. As large as she was, the ship had no landing jacks. She lay sidelong on her lateral docking grapples. That stressed her, but not too badly in a gravity less than Luna’s. To compound the trickiness of descent, she had been placed just under a particularly high and steep hill. He could only set down on the opposite side. Beyond the narrow strip of flat ground on which she lay, a blotch extended several meters across the valley floor. Otherwise that floor was strewn with rocks and somewhat downward sloping toward the hill. Maybe the kzinti had chosen this site precisely because it was a bitch for him to settle on.
“I can do it, though,” Saxtorph decided. He pointed at the screen. “See, a reasonably clear area about 500 meters off.”
Laurinda nodded. With the boat falling free again, the white hair rippled around her delicate features.
Saxtorph applied retrothrust. For thrumming minutes he backed toward his goal. Sweat studded his face and darkened his tunic under the arms. Smell like a billy goat, I do, he thought fleetingly. When we come home, I’m going to spend a week in a Japanese hot bath. Dorcas can bring me sushi. She prefers showers, cold— He gave himself entirely back to his work.
Contact shivered. The deck tilted. Saxtorph adjusted the jacks to level Shep. When he cut the engine, silence fell like a thunderclap.
He drew a long breath, unharnessed, and rose. “I can suit up faster if you help me,” he told the Crashlander.
“Of course,” she replied. “Not that I have much experience.”
Never mind modesty. It had been impossible to maintain without occasional failures, by four people crammed inside this little hull. Laurinda had blushed all over, charmingly, when she happened to emerge from the shower cubicle as Saxtorph and Ryan came by. The quartermaster had only a pair of shorts on, which didn’t hide the gallant reflex. Yet nobody ever did or said anything improper, and the girl overcame her shyness. Now a part of Saxtorph enjoyed the touch of her spiderey fingers, but most of him stayed focused on the business at hand.
“Forgive me for repeating what you’ve heard a dozen times,” he said. “You are new to this kind of situation, and could forget the necessity of abiding by orders. Your job is to bring this boat back to Dorcas and Kam. That’s it. Nothing else whatsoever. When I tell you to, you throw the main switch, and the program we’ve put in the autopilot will take over. I’d’ve automated that bit also, except rigging it would’ve taken time we can ill afford, and anyway, we do want some flexibility, some judgment in the control loop.” Sternly: “If anything goes wrong for me, or you think anything has, whether or not I’ve called in, you go. The three of you must have Shep. The tug’s fast but clumsy, impossible to make planetfall with, and only barely provisioned. Your duty is to Shep. Understood?”
“Yes,” she said mutedly, her gaze on the task she was doing. “Besides, we have to have the boat to rescue Juan and Carita.”
A sigh wrenched from Saxtorph. “I told you—” After Dorcas’ flight, too few energy boxes remained to lift either of them into orbit. Shep could hover on her drive at low altitude while they flitted up, but she wasn’t built for planetary rescue work, the thrusters weren’t heavily enough shielded externally, at such a boost their radiation would be lethal.
Neither meek nor defiant, Laurinda replied, “I know. But after we’ve taken Rover to the right distance, why can’t she wait, ready to flee, till the boat comes back from Prima?”
“Because the boat never would.”
‘The kzinti can land safely.”
“More or less safely. They don’t like to, remember. Sure, I can tell you how they do it. Obvious. They put detachable footpads on their jacks. The stickum may or may not be able to grab hold of, say, fluorosilicone, but if it does, it’ll take a while to eat its way through. When the boat’s ready to leave, she sheds those footpads.”
“Of course. I’ve been racking my brain to comprehend why we can’t do the same for Shep.”
The pain in her voice and in himself brought anger into his. “God damn it, we’re spacers, not sorcerers! Groundsiders think a spacecraft is a hunk of metal you can cobble anything onto, like a car. She isn’t. She’s about as complex and interconnected as your body is. A few milligrams of blood clot or of the wrong chemical will bring your body to a permanent halt. A spacecraft’s equally vulnerable. I am not going to tinker with ours, light-years from any proper workshop. I am not. That’s final!”
Her face bent downward from his. He heard her breath quiver.
“I’m sorry, dear,” he added, softly once more. “I’m sorrier than you believe, maybe sorrier than you can imagine. Those are my crewfolk down and doomed. Oh, if we had time to plan and experiment and carefully test, sure, I’d try it. What should the footpads be made of? What size? How closely machined? How detached—explosive bolts, maybe? We’d have to wire those and—Laurinda, we won’t have the time. If I lift Rover off within the next hour or two, we can pick up Dorcas and Kam, boost, and fly dark. If we’re lucky, the kzin warboats won’t detect us. But our margin is razor thin. We don’t have the days or weeks your idea needs. Fido’s people don’t either; their own time has gotten short. I’m sorry, dear.”
She looked up. He saw tears in the ruby eyes, down the snowy cheeks. But she spoke still more quietly than he, with the briefest of little smiles. “No harm in asking, was there? I understand. You’ve told me what I was trying to deny I knew. You are a good man, Robert.”
“Aw,” he mumbled, and reached to rumple her hair.
The suiting completed, he took her hands between his gloves for a moment, secured a toolpack between his shoulders where the drive unit usually was, and cycled out.
The land gloomed silent around him. Nearing the horizon, the red sun looked bigger than it was. So did the planet, low to the southeast, waxing close to half phase. He could make out a dust storm as a deeper-brown blot on the fulvous crescent. Away from either luminous body, stars were visible—and yonder brilliancy must be Quarta. How joyously they had sailed past it.
Saxtorph started for his ship, in long low-gravity bounds. He didn’t want to fly. The kzinti might have planted a boobytrap, such as an automatic gun that would lock on, track, and fire if you didn’t radio the password. Afoot, he was less of a target.
The ground lightened as he advanced, for the yellow dust lay thicker. No, he saw, it was not actually dust in the sense of small solid particles, but more like spatters or films of liquid. Evidently it didn’t cling to things, like that horrible stuff on Prima. A ghostly rain from space, it would slip from higher to lower places; in the course of gigayears, even cosmic rays would give some slight stirring to help it along downhill. It might be fairly deep near the ship, where its surface was like a blot. He’d better approach with care. Maybe it would prove necessary to fetch a drive unit and flit across.
Saxtorph’s feet went out from under him. He fell slowly, landed on his butt. With an oath he started to get up. His soles wouldn’t grip. His hands skidded on slickness. He sprawled over onto his back. And he was gliding down the slope of the valley
floor, gliding down toward the amber-colored blot.
He flailed, kicked up dust, but couldn’t stop. The damned ground had no friction, none. He passed a boulder and managed to throw an arm around. For an instant he was checked, then it rolled and began to descend with him.
“Laurinda, I have a problem,” he managed to say into his radio. “Sit tight. Watch close. If this turns out to be serious, obey your orders.”
He reached the blot. It gave way. He sank into its depths.
He had hoped it was a layer of just a few centimeters, but it closed over his head and still he sank. A pit where the stuff had collected from the heights—maybe the kzinti, taking due care, had dumped some extra in, gathered across a wide area—yes, this was very likely their boobytrap, and if they had ghosts, Hraou-Captain’s must be yowling laughter. Odd how that name came back to him as he tumbled.
Bottom. He lay in blindness, fighting to curb his breath and heartbeat. How far down? Three meters, four? Enough to bury him for the next several billion years, unless—”Hello, Shep. Laurinda, do you read me? Do you read me?”
His earphones hummed. The wavelength he was using should have expanded its front from the top of the pit, but the material around him must be screening it. Silence outside his suit was as thick as the blackness.
Let’s see if he could climb out. The side wasn’t vertical. The stuff resisted his movements less than water would. He felt arms and legs scrabble to no avail. He could feel irregularities in the stone but he could not get a purchase on any. Well, could he swim? He tried. No. He couldn’t rise off the bottom. Too high a mean density compared to the medium; and it didn’t allow him even as much traction as water, it yielded to every motion, he might as well have tried to swim in air.
If he’d brought his drive unit, maybe it could have lifted him out. He wasn’t sure. It was for use in space. This fluid might clog it or ooze into circuitry that there had never been any reason to seal tight. Irrelevant anyway, when he’d left it behind.
“My boy,” he said, “it looks like you’ve had the course.”
That was a mistake. The sound seemed to flap around in the cage of his helmet. If he was trapped, he shouldn’t dwell on it. That way lay screaming panic.
He forced himself to lie quiet and think. How long till Laurinda took off? By rights, she should have already. If he did escape the pit, he’d be alone on the moon. Naturally, he’d try to get at Rover in some different fashion, such as coming around on the hillside. But meanwhile Dorcas would return in Shep, doubtless with the other two. She was incapable of cutting and running, off into futility. Chances were, though, that by the time she got here a kzin auxiliary or two would have arrived. The odds against her would be long indeed.
So if Saxtorph found a way to return topside and repossess Rover—soon—he wouldn’t likely find his wife at the asteroid. And he couldn’t very well turn back and try to make contact, because of those warboats and because of his overriding obligation to carry the warning home. He’d have to conn the ship all by himself, leaving Dorcas behind for the kzinti.
The thought was strangling. Tears stung. That was a relief, in the nullity everywhere around. Something he could feel, and taste the salt of on his lips. Was the tomb blackness thickening? No, couldn’t be. How long had he lain buried? He brought his timepiece to his faceplate, but the hell-stuff blocked off luminosity. The blood in his ears hammered against a wall of stillness. Had a whine begun to modulate the rasping of his breath? Was he going crazy? Sensory deprivation did bring on illusions, weirdnesses, but he wouldn’t have expected it this soon.
He made himself remember—sunlight, stars, Dorcas, a sail above blue water, fellowship among men, Dorcas, the tang of a cold beer, Dorcas, their plans for children—they’d banked gametes against the day they’d be ready for domesticity but maybe a little too old and battered in the DNA for direct begetting to be advisable—
Contact ripped him out of his dreams. He reached wildly and felt his gloves close on a solid object. They slid along it, along humanlike lineaments, a spacesuit, no, couldn’t be!
Laurinda slithered across him till she brought faceplate to faceplate. Through the black he recognized the voice that conduction carried: “Robert, thank God, I’d begun to be afraid I’d never find you, are you all right?”
“What the, the devil are you doing here?” he gasped.
Laughter crackled. “Fetching you. Yes, mutiny. Court-martial me later.”
Soberness followed: “I have a cable around my waist, with the end free for you. Feel around till you find it. There’s a lump at the end, a knot I made beforehand and covered with solder so the buckyballs can’t get in and make it work loose. You can use that to make a hitch that will hold for yourself, can’t you? Then I’ll need your help. I have two geologist’s hammers with me. Secured them by cords so they can’t be lost. Wrapped tape around the handles in thick bands, to give a grip in spite of no friction. Used the pick ends to chip notches in the rock, and hauled myself along. But I’m exhausted now, and it’s an uphill pull, even though gravity is weak. Take the hammers. Drag me along behind you. You have the strength.”
“The strength—oh, my God, you talk about my strength?” he cried.
—The cable was actually heavy-gauge wire from the electrical parts locker, lengths of it spliced together till they reached. The far end was fastened around a great boulder beyond the treacherous part of the slope. Slipperiness had helped as well as hindered the ascent, but when he reached safety, Saxtorph allowed himself to collapse for a short spell.
He returned to Laurinda’s earnest tones: “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I should have guessed. But it didn’t occur to me—such quantities gathered together like this—I simply thought ‘nebular dust,’ without stopping to estimate what substance would become dominant over many billions of years—”
He sat straight to look at her. In the level red light, her face was palely rosy, her eyes afire. “Why, how could you have foreseen, lass?” he answered. “I’d hate to tell you how often something in space has taken me by surprise, and that was in familiar parts. You did realize what the problem was, and figured out a solution. We needn’t worry about your breaking orders. If you’d failed, you’d have been insubordinate; but you succeeded, so by definition you showed initiative.”
“Thank you.” Eagerness blazed. “And listen, I’ve had another idea—” He lifted a palm. “Whoa! Look, in a couple of minutes we’d better hike back to Shep, you take your station again, I get a drive unit and fly across to Rover. But first will you please, please tell me what the mess was that I got myself into?”
“Buckyballs,” she said. “Or, formally, buckminsterfullerene. I didn’t think the pitful of it that you’d slid down into could be very deep or the bottom very large. Its walls would surely slope inward. It’s really just a . . . pothole, though surely the formation process was different, possibly it’s a small astrobleme—” She giggled. “My, the academic in me is really taking over, isn’t it? Well, essentially, the material is frictionless. It will puddle in any hole, no matter how tiny, and it has just enough cohesion that a number of such puddles close together will form a film over the entire surface. But that film is only a few molecules thick, and you can’t walk on it or anything. In this slight gravity, though—and the metal-poor rock is friable—I could strike the sharp end of a hammerhead in with a single blow to act as a kind of . . . piton, is that the word?”
“Okay. Splendid. Dorcas had better look to her standing as the most formidable woman in known space. Now tell me what the—the hell buckyballs are.”
“They’re produced in the vicinity of supernovae. Carbon atoms link together and form a faceted spherical molecule around a single metal atom. Sixty carbons around one lanthanum is common, galactically speaking, but there are other forms, too. And with the molecule closed in on itself the way it is, it acts in the aggregate like a fluid. In fact, it’s virtually a perfect lubricant, and if we didn’t have things easier to use you’d see
synthetic buckyballs on sale everywhere.” A vision rose in those ruby eyes. “It’s thought they may have a basic role in the origin of life on planets—”
“Damn near did the opposite number today,” Saxtorph said. “But you saved my ass, and the rest of me as well. I don’t suppose I can ever repay you.”
She got to her knees before him and seized his hands. “You can, Robert. You can fetch me back my man.”
22
Ponderously, Rover closed velocities with the iron asteroid. She couldn’t quite match, because it was under boost, but thus far the acceleration was low.
Ominously aglow, the molten mass dwarfed the spacecraft that toiled meters ahead of it; yet Sun Defier, harnessed by her own forcefield, was a plowhorse dragging it bit by bit from its former path; and the dwarf sun was at work, and Secunda’s gravity was beginning to have a real effect. . . .
Arrived a little before the ship, the boat drifted at some distance, a needle in a haystack of stars. Laurinda was still aboard. The tug had no place to receive Shep, nor had the girl the skill to cross safely by herself in a spacesuit even though relative speeds were small. The autopilot kept her accompanying the others.
In Rover’s command center, Saxtorph asked the image of Dorcas, more shakily than he had expected to, “How are you? How’s everything?”
She was haggard with weariness, but triumph rang: “Kam’s got our gear packed to transfer over to you, and I—I’ve worked the bugs out of the program. Compatibility with kzin hardware was a stumbling block, but—well, it’s been operating smoothly for the past several hours, and I’ve no reason to doubt it will continue doing what it’s supposed to.”