Complete Short Fiction, page 126
Sakiiro, with no really objective data to go on, had about concluded that the vessel was down to gliding speed and was going to describe the location of the electrolysis controls to Easy when the motion changed. A series of shuddering jars shook the ship. The girl’s body was held in the seat by the straps, but her head and limbs flapped like those of a scarecrow in a high wind; the young Drommian for the first time failed to stay put. The jolting continued, the thuds punctuated by the girl’s sobs and an almost inaudibly high-pitched whine from Aminadorneldo. The elder Drommian rose once more to his feet and looked anxiously at the screen.
The engineers were baffled; the diplomats were too terrified for their children to have had constructive ideas even had they been qualified otherwise; but Raeker thought he knew the answer.
“They’re hitting raindrops!” he yelled.
He must have been right, it was decided afterward; but the information did not really help. The bathyscaphe jerked and bucked. The autopilot did its best to hold a smooth flight path, but aerodynamic controls were miserably inadequate for the task. At least twice the vessel somersaulted completely, as nearly as Raeker could tell from the way the Drommian was catapulted around the room. Sheer luck kept him out of contact with the control switches. For a time the controls were useless because their efforts were overridden—a rudder trying to force a left turn will not get far if the right wing encounters a fifty-foot sphere of water, even though the water isn’t much denser than the air. Then they were useless because they lacked enough grip on the atmosphere; the ship had given up enough kinetic energy to the raindrops to fall well below its stalling speed—low as that was, in an atmosphere seven or eight hundred times as dense as Earth’s at sea level. By that time, of course, the ship was falling in the oldest and simplest sense of the word. The motion was still irregular, for it was still hitting the drops; but the violence was gone, for it wasn’t hitting them very hard.
The rate of fall was surprisingly small, for a three-G field. The reason was simple enough—even with the outside atmosphere filling most of its volume, the ship had a very low density. It was a two hundred foot long cigarlike shell, and the only really heavy part was the forty foot sphere in the center which held the habitable portion. It is quite possible that it would have escaped serious mechanical damage even had it landed on solid ground; and as it happened, the fall ended on liquid.
Real liquid; not the borderline stuff that made up most of Tenebra’s atmosphere.
It landed upside down, but the wings had been shed like the speed brakes and its center of gravity was low enough to bring it to a more comfortable attitude. The floor finally stopped rocking, or at least the Drommian did—with the vision set fastened to the ship, the floor had always seemed motionless to the distant watchers. They saw the otterlike giant get cautiously to his feet, then walk slowly over to the girl’s chair and touch her lightly on the shoulder. She stirred, and tried to sit up.
“Are you all right?” Both parents fairly shrieked the question. Aminadorneldo, his father’s orders in mind, waited for Easy to answer.
“I guess so,” she said after a moment. “I’m sorry I bawled, Dad; I was scared. I didn’t mean to scare ’Mina, though.”
“It’s all right, Kid. I’m sure no one can blame you, and I don’t suppose your reaction had much to do with your friend’s. The main thing is that you’re in one piece, and the hull’s intact—I suppose you’d be dead by now if it weren’t.”
“That’s true enough,” seconded Sakiiro.
“You’ve had a rough ride, then, but it should be over now. Since you’re there, you might take a look through the windows—you’re the first nonnatives ever to do that directly. When you’ve seen all you can or want to, tell Mr. Sakiiro and he’ll tell you how to get upstairs again. All right?”
“All right, Dad.” Easy brushed a forearm across her tear-stained face, unfastened the seat straps, and finally struggled to her feet.
“Golly, when are they going to cut the power? I don’t like all these G’s,” she remarked.
“You’re stuck with them until we get you away from there,” her father replied.
“I know it. I was just kidding. Hm-m-m. It seems to be night outside; I can’t see a thing.”
“It is, if you’re anywhere near the robot,” Raeker replied, “but it would not make any difference to your eyes if it were high noon. Even Altair can’t push enough light for human eyes through that atmosphere. You’ll have to use the lights.”
“All right.” The girl looked at the board where she had already located the light switches; then, to the surprised approval of the engineers, she made sure from Sakiiro that these were the ones she wanted. Saki admitted later that his hopes of rescuing the pair soared several hundred per cent at that moment.
With the lights on, both children went over to the windows.
“There isn’t much to see,” called Easy. “We seem to have splashed into a lake or ocean. It’s as smooth as glass; not a ripple. I’d think it was solid if the ship weren’t partly under it. There are big, foggy globes drifting down, yards and yards across, but they sort of fade out just before they touch the surface. That’s every bit I can see.”
“It’s raining,” Raeker said simply. “The lake is probably sulphuric acid, I suppose fairly dilute by this time of night, and is enough warmer than the air so the water evaporates before it strikes. There wouldn’t be any waves; there’s no wind. Three knots is a wild hurricane on Tenebra.”
“With all that heat energy running around?” Rich was startled.
“Yes. There’s nothing for it to work on—I use the word in its physical sense. There isn’t enough change in volume when the atmosphere changes temperature, or even changes state, to create the pressure differences you need for high winds. Tenebra is about the calmest place you’ll find inside any atmosphere in the galaxy.”
“Does that jibe with your remarks about earthquakes a while ago?” It was a measure of Aminadabarlee’s revived confidence that he could talk of something besides the stupidity of human beings.
“No, it doesn’t,” admitted Raeker, “and I’ll have to admit, Easy, that there is a possibility that you will encounter some waves if you float there long enough. However, you won’t be able to call them weather, and they won’t carry you to any more interesting places. I’m afraid you’ve seen about all you can expect to, young lady; you may as well come up and be properly rescued.”
“All right. Only I’d like to know just what’s going to make this thing float, and whether the trip up will be as rough as the one down was.”
“It won’t. You’ll go up vertically, and much more slowly. You’re going to ride a balloon. The atmosphere there is mostly water, with enough ions loose to make it a decent conductor. The largest part of your hull is divided into cells, and each cell further divided in two by a flexible membrane. Right now, those membranes are squeezed flat against one wall of each cell by atmospheric pressure. When you start the electrolysis units, some of the water will be decomposed; the oxygen will be piped outside the hull, but the hydrogen will be released on the other side of the membranes, and gradually drive the air out of the cells. The old bathyscaphe used the same idea, only it didn’t need the membranes to keep the two fluids from diffusing into each other.”
“I see. How long will it take to make enough gas to lift us?”
“I can’t tell; we don’t know the conductivity of the atmosphere. Once you start things going, there’s a bank of ammeters above the switches for each individual cell; if you’ll give me their reading after things start, I’ll try to calculate it for you.”
“All right. Where are the . . . oh, here; you labeled them decently. Upper right, a bank of twelve toggles, with a gang bar and a master?”
“That’s it. You can see the meters above them. Close the lot, hit the master, and give the readings.”
“All right.” The thin arm reached up and out of the field of vision, and everyone could hear the switches click. Easy pulled her hand back to her lap, settled back into the chair under her three hundred pounds of weight, eyed the dials one after another, and said, “The readings are all zero. What do I do now?”
TO BE CONTINUED
Close to Critical
Second of Three Parts. The pressure down on Tenebra was enormous, and practically constant. But the political-psychological pressure in the research station was building up to exceed even Tenebra’s frightful pressure!
SYNOPSIS
The planet Tenebra, circling the star Altaic some sixteen light-years from the Solar system, has presented a major research problem. Its diameter and surface gravity are approximately three times those of Earth. Its temperature in the equatorial regions runs between three hundred seventy and three hundred eighty degrees Centigrade. Since its escape velocity permitted it to retain originally an amount of water per square mile about equal to that of Earth, the surface atmospheric pressure is about eight hundred times Earth normal. The atmosphere consists principally of water, laced with the biological by-products nitrogen, free oxygen, and, in this rather unusual case, oxides of sulfur.
It is an even more corrosive environment than that of Earth; in spite of the general acidity, the silicate surface rocks of the planet dissolve so rapidly that the crust is in a constant state of isostatic imbalance, and earthquakes are practically continuous.
After much engineering effort, a remote-controlled robot is designed and built capable of operating on Tenebra, and is successfully lowered to the surface. It explores for months, and finally achieves its intended purpose of locating a more or less intelligent indigenous race. The creatures appear to be in a stone-age culture, though only brief observations of them are made at first; when they are found to be egg-layers, the operators of the robot steal ten of their eggs, carry them to an isolated and uninhabited area, hatch them, and bring up the young creatures with the plan of educating them as go-betweens in the planned human-tenebran activities of the future.
The story actually opens as this project is about to get under way. The kidnaped natives have been educated for some sixteen years, and are presumed ready for work, though judging by their size they are not yet adult. They do not know their own background, but regard themselves as “Fagin’s people,” some humorist among the human operators having taught them to call the robot FAGIN. A vessel patterned after the ancient bathyscaphe is practically completed, ready to carry human explorers in person to Tenebra’s surface. Two political officers have come to the Vindemiatrix, the robot’s “mother ship,” to watch the start of the contact operation.
These officers are Councilor RICH, a human being, and Councilor AMINADABARLEE, a native of Dromm in the Eta Cassiopeia system. Both have brought members of their families, regarding the trip as little more than a routine affair, to be combined with a vacation if possible. The families are ELISE—“EASY” Rich, twelve-year-old daughter of the human officer, and AMINADORNELDO, son of the Drommian. The latter is physically as large as his father, but is actually about the equivalent of a human seven-year-old.
On the planet’s surface, one of the students has been sent out exploring, deliberately, in a direction likely to bring him into contact with his parent tribe. The student, NICK CHOPPER, does find the cave dwellers, learns their language after a fashion, and both shows and tells them some of the things he has learned from his teacher “back home”—the use of fire, the keeping of domestic animals, and such items. The leader of the cave tribe, SWIFT, has his cupidity aroused, and orders Nick to bring Fagin to the cave village. Nick agrees to do this provided the teacher agrees; Swift, a complete autocrat, takes violent exception to the condition mentioned and starts uttering threats. Nick becomes afraid for the safety of his fellows, and takes the unprecedented step of escaping from the cave village by night.
At night—Tenebra’s rotation period is nearly a hundred hours—enough heat is radiated from the upper layers of the atmosphere to allow it to shift into the liquid phase. This liquid water is enough denser than the still gaseous oxygen for separation to occur, and eventually huge raindrops reach the surface which contain only the truly dissolved oxygen. This is insufficient for active animals, and most Tenebran animal life collapses into more or less suspended animation when struck by one of the “clear” drops which fall after the first few hours of night. Nick is no exception to this rule; but he finds that by carrying torches he can see to avoid the drops and remain in breathable air. He starts his journey, failing to realize that Swift would cheerfully have let him escape even by daylight so that the cave dwellers could follow him back to Fagin’s village. Nick reaches home and reports to his teacher. The human beings realize the situation, but before they can form any plan of action Swift and his people attack. HELVEN RAEKER, the ecologist in charge of surface activities, watches helplessly while two of his pupils are killed and the village captured. Swift, in spite of the language problem, makes his wishes known to the robot operators; the machine has to go back to the cave village with him, or Swift will use fire on it. Since the destruction of the robot would wreck the entire project—even if another were built, it would take years to locate this particular area again on huge, unmapped, practically featureless Tenebra—the human beings have no choice.
Nick and the other survivors, contemptuously left behind, move their herd and personal belongings away from the village. They plan to rescue Fagin, and want a base of operations unknown to the cave dwellers. They find a site on a peninsula projecting into a sea to the east of the old village, and set up a camp; unfortunately, no one stops to think what may happen to the sea level at night.
On the Vindemiatrix the two children have been taken on a sightseeing tour by a crewman. This trip includes a visit to the practically completed bathyscaphe, orbiting just above Tenebra’s atmosphere. Failing to realize that Aminadorneldo is not an adult, the guide allows them to enter the ship unattended, and remains in the shuttle rocket which brought them from the Vindemiatrix. Raeker, Rich, and Aminadabarlee discover this during a radio conversation with the man; the Drommian becomes virtually hysterical as he points out the “stupid error”, and his anxiety is transmitted too well.
In his haste to get back to the children, the crewman makes the error of touching the bathyscaphe’s hull while still in contact with that of the tender; the potential difference is enough to set up a sneak circuit which fires a set of the bathyscaphe’s booster rockets—outboard attachments designed to get the ship into an entry orbit when the time came. The crewman is kicked onto one indeterminable vector and lost; the ship onto another.
Easy is able to report on the ‘scaphe’s radio, but before another shuttle can be readied and taken across the hundred and sixty thousand miles between Vindemiatrix and planet, her ship has entered atmosphere and is no longer interceptible. The elder Drommian can hardly find words to express his opinion of human stupidity; Raeker points out that the ship was made for just such a trip, is perfectly capable of getting down to atmospheric speed under automatic control, and once down has electrolysis apparatus able to get hydrogen from Tenebra’s atmosphere to fill its buoyancy cells and get back to where rockets will work and an interception be managed. The politicians do feel better for a while, after the ship succeeds in landing after a rough descent. Its automatic pilot, energized by Easy on careful instructions from the Vindemiatrix’s engineers, has brought it down somewhere near the robot, though no one can tell just how near.
At first no one cares, since it is presumed that the ship can take off again unaided; but when the girl, under the engineers’ directions, closes the switches of the electrolyzers, they draw no current.
PART 2
V
NICK had chosen a fire on the landward side of the hill, so he was the first to have to consider the sea-level problem. In the home valley, of course, the water at night had never gotten more than thirty or forty feet deep; slow as the runoff was, enough always escaped at the valley foot to keep the village itself dry. He knew, from Fagin’s lectures, that the water which flowed away must eventually reach something like a sea or lake; but not even Fagin had stopped to think of what would happen then—naturally enough; the surface area of Earth’s oceans compared to the volume of an average day’s rainfall doesn’t correspond to much of a sea-level rise, to put it mildly.
On Tenebra, the situation is a trifle different. There is no single giant sea basin, only the very moderate-sized lake beds, which are even less permanent than those of Earth. What this difference could mean in terms of “sea” level might possibly have been calculated in advance, but not by any of Nick’s people.
At first, there was nothing to worry about. The great, cloudy drops drifted into sight from far above, settled downward, and faded out as the radiation from the fires warmed them a trifle. Then they came lower, and lower, until they were actually below the level of the hilltop on all sides.
Once a sharp quake struck and lasted for half a minute or more, but when Nick saw that the spit of land joining the hill to the shore was still there he put this from his mind. Something much more unusual was starting to happen. At home, raindrops which touched the ground after the latter had been cooled down for the night flattened into great, foggy half-globes and drifted around until a fire obliterated them; here they behaved differently. Drops striking the surface of the sea vanished instantly and by Nick’s standards, violently. The difference in pressure and temperature made the reaction between oleum and water much less noticeable than it would be in an Earthly laboratory, but it was still quite appreciable.
After each such encounter, it could be seen that further raindrops falling on the same area faded out a little higher than usual for a few minutes; Nick judged correctly that some heat was being released by the reaction.
