Complete Short Fiction, page 107
“Then the rest of our suits, and the gloves we wiped with in particular, ought to be clean.”
“Ought to be. I’d like nothing better than a chance to check the point.”
“Well, the old cat’s fur didn’t stay charged very long, as I remember. How long will it take this to leak off, do you think?”
“Why should it leak off at all?”
“What? Why, I should think—Hm-m-m.” Shandara was silent for a moment. “Water is pretty wonderful stuff, isn’t it?”
“Yep. And air has its uses, too.”
“Then we’re . . . Ridge, we’ve got to do something. Our air will last indefinitely, but you still can’t stay in a spacesuit too long.”
“I agree that we should do something; I just haven’t figured out what. Incidentally, just how sure are you that our air will last? The windows of the regenerators are made, as far as I know, of the same plastic our face plates are. What’ll you bet you’re not using emergency oxygen right now?”
“I don’t know—I haven’t checked the gauges.”
“I’ll say you haven’t. You won’t, either; they’re outside your helmet.”
“But if we’re on emergency now, we could hardly get back to the tractor starting this minute. We’ve got to get going.”
“Which way?”
“Toward the rim!”
“Be specific, son. Just which way is that? And please don’t point; it’s rude, and I can’t see you anyway.”
“All right, don’t rub it in. But Ridge, what can we do?”
“While this stuff is on our helmets, and possibly our air windows, nothing. We couldn’t climb even if we knew which way the hills were. The only thing which will do us the least good is to get this dust off us; and that will do the trick. As my mathematical friends would say, it is necessary and sufficient.”
“All right, I’ll go along with that. We know that the material the suits are made of is worse than useless for wiping, but wiping and electrical discharge seem to be the only methods possible. What do we have which by any stretch of the imagination might do either job?”
“What is your camera case made of?” asked Ridging.
“As far as I know, same as the suits. It’s a regular clip-on carrier, the sort that came with the suits—remember Tazewell’s remarks about the dividends AirTight must have paid when they sold the suits to the Project? It reminded me of the old days when you had to buy a lot of accessories with your automobile whether you wanted them or not—”
“All right, you’ve made your point. The case is the same plastic. It would be a pretty poor wiper anyway; it’s a box rather than a bag, as I remember. What else is there?”
The silence following this question was rather lengthy. The sad fact is that spacesuits don’t have outside pockets for handkerchiefs. It did occur to Ridging after a time that he was carrying a set of geological specimen bags; but when he finally did think of these and took one out to use as a wiper, the unfortunate fact developed that it, too, left the wrong charge on the face plate of his helmet. He could see the clear, smooth plastic of the bag as it passed across the plate, but the dust collected so fast behind it that he saw nothing of his surroundings. He reflected ruefully that the charge to be removed was now greater than ever. He also thought of using the map, until he remembered that he had put it on the ground and could never find it by touch.
“I never thought,” Shandara remarked after another lengthy silence, “that I’d ever miss a damp rag so badly. Blast it, Ridge, there must be something”
“Why? We’ve both been thinking without any result that I can see. Don’t tell me you’re one of those fellows who think there’s an answer to every problem.”
“I am. It may not be the answer we want, but there is one. Come on, Ridge, you’re the physicist; I’m just a high-priced picture-copier. Whatever answer there is, you’re going to have to furnish it: all my ideas deal with maps, and we’ve done about all we can with those at the moment.”
“Hm-m-m. The more I think, the more I remember that there isn’t enough fuel on the moon to get a rescue tractor out here, even if anyone knew we were in trouble and could make the trip in time. Still—wait a minute; you said something just then. What was it?”
“I said all my ideas dealt with maps, but—”
“No; before that.”
“I don’t recall, unless it was that crack about damp rags, which we don’t have.”
“That was it. That’s it, Shan; we don’t have any rags, but we do have water”
“Yes—inside our spacesuits. Which of us opens up to save the other?”
“Neither one. Be sensible. You know as well as I do that the amount of water in a closed system containing a living person is constantly increasing; we produce it, oxidizing hydrogen in the food we eat. The suits have driers in the air cycler or we couldn’t last two hours in them.”
“That’s right; but how do you get the water out? You can’t open your air system.”
“You can shut it off, and the check valve will keep air in your suit—remember, there’s always the chance someone will have to change emergency tanks. It’ll be a job, because we won’t be able to see what we’re doing, and working by touch through spacesuit gauntlets will be awkward as anything I’ve ever done. Still, I don’t see anything else.”
“That means you’ll have to work on my suit, then, since I don’t know what to do after the line is disconnected. How long can I last before you reconnect? And what do you do, anyway? You don’t mean there’s a reservoir of liquid water there, do you?”
“No, it’s a calcium chloride drier; and it should be fairly moist by now—You’ve been in the suit for several hours. It’s in several sections, and I can take out one and leave you the others, so you won’t suffer from its lack. The air in your suit should do you for four or five minutes, and if I can’t make the disconnection and disassembly in that time I can’t do it at all. Still, it’s your suit, and if I do make a mistake it’s your life; do you want to take the chance?”
“What have I to lose? Besides, you always were a pretty good mechanic—or if you weren’t, please don’t tell me. Get to work.”
“All right.”
As it happened, the job was not started right away, for there was the minor problem of finding Shandara to be solved first. The two men had been perhaps five yards apart when their face plates were first blanked out, but neither could now be sure that he hadn’t moved in the meantime, or at least shifted around to face a new direction. After some discussion of the problem, it was agreed that Shandara should stand still, while Ridging walked in what he hoped was the right direction for what he hoped was five yards, and then start from wherever he found himself to quarter the area as well as he could by length of stride. He would have to guess at his turns, since even the sun no longer could penetrate the layer of dust on the helmets.
It took a full ten minutes to bump into his companion, and even then he felt undeservedly lucky.
Shandara lay down, so as to use a minimum of energy while the work was being done. Ridging felt over the connection several times until he was sure he had them right—they were, of course, designed to be handled by spacesuit gauntlets, though not by a blindfolded operator. Then he warned the cartographer, closed the main cutoffs at helmet and emergency tanks to isolate the renewer mechanism, and opened the latter. It was a simple device, designed in throwaway units like a piece of electronic gear, with each unit automatically sealing as it was removed—a fortunate fact if the alga culture on which Shandara’s life for the next few hours depended was to survive the operation.
The calcium chloride cells were easy to locate; Ridging removed two of the half dozen to be on the safe side, replaced and reassembled the renewer, tightened the connections, and reopened the valves.
Ridging now had two cans of calcium chloride. He could not tell whether it had yet absorbed enough water actually to go into solution, though he doubted it; but he took no chances. Holding one of the little containers carefully right side up, he opened its perforated top, took a specimen bag and pushed it into the contents. The plastic was not, of course, absorptive—it was not the first time in the past hour he had regretted the change from cloth bags—but the damp crystals should adhere, and the solution if there was any would wet it. He pulled out the material and applied it to his face plate.
It was not until much later that he became sure whether there was any liquid. For the moment it worked, and he found that he could see; he asked no more. Hastily he repeated the process on Shandara’s helmet, and the two set out rapidly for the rim. They did not stop to pick up camera or map.
Travel is fast on the moon, but they made less than four hundred meters. Then the face plates were covered again. With a feeling of annoyance they stopped, and Ridging repeated the treatment.
This time it didn’t work.
“I supposed you emptied the can while you were jumping,” Shandara remarked in an annoyed tone. “Try the other one.”
“I didn’t empty anything; but I’ll try.” The contents of the other container proved equally useless, and the cartographer’s morale took another slump.
“What happened?” he asked. “And please don’t tell me it’s obvious, because you certainly didn’t foresee it.”
“I didn’t, but it is. The chloride dried out again.”
“I thought it held onto water.”
“It does, under certain conditions. Unfortunately its equilibrium vapor pressure at this temperature is higher than the local barometer reading. I don’t suppose that every last molecule of water has gone, but what’s left isn’t sufficient to make a conductor. Our face plates are holding charge again—maybe better than before; there must be some calcium chloride dust on them now, though I don’t know offhand what effect it would have.”
“There are more chloride cartridges in the cyclers.”
“You have four left, which should get us maybe two kilos at the present rate. We can’t use mine, since you can’t get them out; and if we use all yours you’d never get up the rim. Drying your air isn’t just a matter of comfort, you know; that suit has no temperature controls—it depends on radiation balance and insulation. If your perspiration stops evaporating, your inner insulation is done; and in any case, the cartridges won’t get us to the rim.”
“In other words you think we’re done—again.”
“I certainly don’t have any more ideas.”
“Then I suppose I’ll have to do some more pointless chattering. If it gave you the last idea, maybe it will work again.”
“Go ahead. It won’t bother me. I’m going to spend my last hours cursing the character who used a different plastic for the face plate than he did for the rest of these suits.”
“All right,” Commander Tazewell snapped as the geophysicist paused. “I’m supposed to ask you what you did then. You’ve just told me that that handkerchief of yours is a good windshield wiper; I’ll admit I don’t see how. I’ll even admit I’m curious, if it’ll make you happy.”
“It’s not a handkerchief, as I said. It’s a specimen bag.”
“I thought you tried those and found they didn’t work—left a charge on your face plate like the glove.”
“It did. But a remark I made myself about different kinds of plastic in the suits gave me another idea. It occurred to me that if the dust was, say, positively charged—”
“Probably was. Protons from the sun.”
“All right. Then my face plate picked up a negative, and my suit glove a positive, so the dust was attracted to the plate.
“Then when we first tried the specimen bag, it also charged positively and left negative on the face plate.
“Then it occurred to me that the specimen bag rubbed by the suit might go negative; and since it was fairly transparent, I could—”
“I get it! You could tie it over your face plate and have a windshield you could see through which would repel the dust.”
“That was the idea. Of course, I had nothing to tie it with; I had to hold it.”
“Good enough. So you got a good idea out of an idle remark.”
“Two of them. The moisture one came from Shan the same way.”
“But yours worked.” Ridging grinned.
“Sorry. It didn’t. The specimen bag still came out negative when rubbed on the suit plastic—at least it didn’t do the face plate any good.”
Tazewell stared blankly, then looked as though he were about to use violence.
“All right! Let’s have it, once and for all.”
“Oh, it was simple enough. I worked the specimen bag—I tore it open so it would cover more area—across my face plate, pressing tight so there wouldn’t be any dust under it.”
“What good would that do? You must have collected more over it right away.”
“Sure. Then I rubbed my face plate, dust rag and all, against Shandara’s. We couldn’t lose; one of them was bound to go positive. I won, and led him up the rim until the ground charge dropped enough to let the dust stick to the surface instead of us. I’m glad no one was there to take pictures, though; I’d hate to have a photo around which could be interpreted as my kissing Shandara’s ugly face—even through a space helmet.”
THE END
1957
Planet For Plunder
Out of the star gulfs he came, troubled, searching, with a warning for Earth no one dared ignore. Never would Earth see his like again—or know the reason why!
A CONSERVATION SERVICE vessel is quite fast and maneuverable as craft of that general type go. But there was little likelihood that this one would catch up with its present target. Its pilot knew that. He had known it since the first flicker of current in his detectors had warned him of the poacher’s presence. But with the calm determination so characteristic of his race, he made the small course-correction which he hoped would bring him through the target area at action speed.
The correction had to be small. Had the disturbance been far from his present line of flight, he would never have detected it, for his instruments covered only a narrow cone of space ahead of him. Too many pilots in the old days, with full-sphere coverage, had been unable to resist the temptation of trying to loop back to investigate disturbances whose source-areas they had already passed.
At one-third the speed of light, such a reversal of course would have wasted both energy and time. No one could make a reversal in any reasonable period, and, certainly, no poacher or other lawbreaker was going to wait for the maneuver to be completed.
Even as it was, this pilot’s principal hope lay in the possibility that the other vessel would be too preoccupied with its task of looting to detect and react to his approach in time. Detection was only possible if, like his own ship, the poacher carried but a single operator. Unfortunately, a freighter was quite likely to have at least two, even on a perfectly legal flight, and the Conservation pilot had known of cases where poaching machines had had crews as large as four.
Even the presence of two would render his approach almost certainly useless, since the loading and separating machinery would require only one manipulator, and the full attention of any others could be freed for lookout duty. Nevertheless, he bored on in, analyzing and planning as he traveled.
The poacher was big—as big as any he had ever viewed. It must have had a net load capacity of something like a half billion tons—enough to clean the concentrates off a fair-sized planet, particularly if it also boasted adequate stripping and refining apparatus. There was no way of making certain about this last factor, for no such equipment was drawing power as yet. And that, in a way, was peculiar, for the poacher must have been in his present position for some time.
Had the driving energies of the poacher been in use, the Conservation ship would have detected them long before, and would have experienced less difficulty in making the necessary course-change. With a scant five light-years in which to make the turn, the acceleration needed for the task was rather annoying. Not that it caused the pilot any actual physical discomfort. It was purely an emotional matter. His economy-conditioned mind was appalled by the waste of energy involved.
Four light-years lay behind him when the poacher reacted outrageously. For the barest instant the attacker dared to hope that he might still get within range. Then it became evident that the giant freighter had seen him long before, and had planned its maneuver with perfect knowledge of his limitations.
It began to accelerate almost toward him, at an angle which would bring it safely past. It would sweep past just out of extreme range if he kept on his present course—and probably well beyond trustworthy shooting distance, if he tried to intercept it. For an instant, the agent was tempted. But before a single relay had clicked in his own small craft he remembered what the poacher must already have known—that the planet, which had perhaps already been robbed, came first.
It must be checked for dam age, even though it was uninhabited as far as anyone knew. The mere fact that the poacher had stopped there meant that it must have something worth taking. It must, therefore, be tied as soon as possible into the production network whose completeness and perfection was the only barrier between the agent’s race and galaxy-wide starvation.
He held his course, therefore, and broadcast a general warning as he went. He gave the thiefs specifications, its course, as of the last possible observation, plus the fact that it seemed to be traveling empty. The absence of cargo was an encouraging sign. Perhaps no damage had been done to the world ahead. Unfortunately, it might also mean that the raider had a higher power-to-mass ratio than any freighter the agent had ever seen or heard of. But that he seriously doubted. He assumed that the ship was without cargo, and worded his warning accordingly.
His temper was not improved by an incident which occurred just before the giant vessel passed beyond detection range. A beam, quite evidently transmitted from the fleeing mass of metal, struck his antenna, and the phrase—“Now, don’t you just hope they’ll get us!”—came clearly along the instrument.
