Complete Short Fiction, page 143
“Closer, Al,” he snapped. The others heard his voice, didn’t for a moment realize where he was since the suit radios gave little indication of distance, and Detzel obeyed the without asking why. Then Frake looked back, discovered the doctor missing, and after, added a moment located him.
“Doc! You idiot!” he cried. The call distracted Detzel, but fortunately not enough to disturb his driving. “What’s the matter?” he asked without taking his eyes from the other.
“Doc’s climbing onto Milt’s trailer! He’s nuts!”
“SHUT UP, stupid!” Imbriano’s voice came. “Well, never mind. It’s too late now.” Frake had forgotten that they were now using the suit radios, and Ingersoll could hear anything they said. The doctor, with secrecy at an end, addressed the geologist directly.
“Here I am, Milt. Right on your rear trailer. Any ideas about how to run into me now? You might as well leave the other tractor alone. Getting it won’t get me, will it?”
The answer that came back was unprintable, except for the concluding sentence: “Anyone who helps you needs squashing, too.” The larger train swerved away and slowed down, trying to bring Detzel ahead, but the engineer was alert and held his position to the other’s right rear.
Imbriano, holding firmly to the body of the trailer, spoke again. “Don’t waste too much fuel, Milt. You may find you don’t have much to spare, after all.” He began to crawl forward along the train as he finished speaking. The bodies of the vehicle were mostly empty—they never knew why Ingersoll had taken so many—and the spare tank containing the snow was bolted to the front of the second one in line. The tank on the first was, of course, actually in service.
Reaching dangerously around the snow tank, Imbriano found the pin of the coupling which connected the trailer to the one in front, and pulled.
He was unable to move it; there was too much tension on the coupling as long as the tractor was pulling. There were several cases on the front trailer, however—probably the missing food—which prevented Ingersoll from seeing what the doctor was doing; and this uncertainty led the geologist to solve the other’s problem for him.
Thinking that Imbriano was damaging his precious reserve tank, Ingersoll began randomly braking and accelerating in an effort to shake him off. This was nearly successful, but it also enabled the doctor to work the pin free after a few cycles, since each time the push changed to a pull or vice versa there was an instant when it was loose. At last he got it out, and had the satisfaction of seeing the tractor and front trailer bound away from him as Igersoll applied power once more.
THE GEOLOGIST realized instantly what had happened, cut around in as tight circle as he could to bring his lights on the trailers and Imbriano, and stopped. He evidently wasn’t ready to come out; it was too dark to see inside his cab—especially past lights—but the pause suggested that he was helmeting up and pumping back his air. Imbriano assumed that he was preparing to come out anyway, and thought of a delaying move.
“Just a minute, Milt—don’t come out yet. If I see your door open, you’ll see this stop-cock do the same thing. How about it?” Imbriano had his gloved hand on the bottom tank drain.
For a moment there was silence. Then, “Go ahead and open it. Here I come!”
The doctor couldn’t see the cab door open beyond the lights, but he wasn’t looking anyway. He carefully opened the stopcock and sprang back, expecting a jet of vapor comparable to the one from the cup not long before: He was watching for it so anxiously that he almost didn’t see Ingersoll coming, for the watching job took no longer than he had expected. Nothing happened.
Fortunately for the doctor, Ingersoll had seen the whole thing, and he came to a stop beside the trailer and laughed. “Smart boy, Doc. I suppose you expected the stuff to boil right out and leave me stranded didn’t you? You didn’t remember that the tank has never been in the sun since it was filled; and it had no water in it, and had been out of the sunlight long enough to cool down even before it was filled. Where did you expect the energy to come from? Or doesn’t the medical profession believe in conservation of energy? Why, you little . . .” his language became profane and irrelevant once more, and he made a leap in Imbriano’s direction.
The doctor had plenty of time to get out of the way; and his own leap took him out of the direct beams of the headlights, so that for a moment he effectively vanished. Ingersoll started to follow; then a flash of reason crossed his mind, and he headed back for the cab of his own tractor. He got the idea more quickly than any of the others, and made it with plenty of time. He had left the turbine idling, so there was no delay in starting, and neither the doctor nor Frake, who had also leaped from their tractor the moment Detzel brought it to a halt, had a chance to get aboard Ingersoll’s.
“Get back with Al!” called Imbriano. “Get back in the tractor, and keep it out of the way. I’m safe enough. Maybe he’ll cool down enough to reason with after he’s made a few passes at me. Unless he’s taught that machine to jump, he’ll never catch a man on foot with it!”
Frake agreed, though his words were nearly drowned in another flood of language from Ingersoll. Imbriano was promptly given the opportunity of proving his claim that he could keep out of the way of a tractor.
HIS IMGINATION supplied the thunderous turbine whine which the lunar vacuum could not transmit. Some sound, but not much, came through tracks, ground, and feet; but practically, the chase might have been recorded on an old silent film. Frake, later, claimed he was surprised not to see subtitles; but his sense of humor was not very subtle.
Imbriano was not feeling humorous at all. He was able to dodge, all, right, but it was not very easy, and he was afraid of leaping too far. A bad landing could be disastrous, since not very much has to go wrong with a space suit to kill its occupant. After a few passes which would have won very little applause in a Spanish bull-ring but were quite as exciting for Imbriano as he wished, it occurred to him that Ingersoll might be a little slower if the dodging were being done around his precious reserve tank. Accordingly, the doctor made his, next leap or two in this direction, and began playing tag around the stranded trailers.
He was still hoping that Ingersoll might cool down and be reasonable; but there was no sign of such an event, and he couldn’t think of anything to say that might have a calming effect. Throughout the affair, he had been worried by the feeling of guilt he had expressed earlier, and the we may have slowed him down—certainly some of his escapes were narrower than they needed to be.
Then a different feeling began to take hold of him. However reasonable Ingersoll’s initial resentment may have been, this grimly-determined effort to repay unpleasantness and discourtesy with murder was going a little too far. Imbriano’s sympathy and guilt-feeling began to give way to resentment and anger; his temper, never outstandingly good, was wearing thin. He was thinking, now, in terms of force rather than persuasion. But that did him little good; granted that a man on foot could keep from being harmed by the man in a tractor, there seemed nothing whatever he could do on the offensive. Certainly Imbriano could think of nothing. He kept as close as he could to the stranded trailer, answered the questions of Detzel and Frake as reassuringly as his breath permitted, and kept moving. He didn’t get onto the trailer itself; later he convinced himself without much trouble, that his own subconscious kept him off.
THE END of the contest was, in one way, something of an anticlimax. Imbriano had thought of nothing brilliant; Frake and Detzel had made no contribution; and Ingersoll had shown no sign of giving up and when the whole situation was changed—instantly and without warning.
The doctor had suffered his closest shave yet, just barely escaping the charging treads, and had ducked around the front end of the train to its right side. Ingersoll made his closest turn thus far, cutting a trifle left to get his single attached trailer clear and then swinging around so as almost to graze the front of the motionless one. There was no collision; Detzel had his lights on the scene at the moment, and he, Frake, and Imbriano himself were all certain that nothing solid touched the stranded vehicle. Imbriano, who was actually touching it at the time, was sure he would have felt the impact.
Nevertheless, something happened. It was not an explosion—at least, not exactly so. The tank which had been filled with “snow” opened almost deliberately, and sprayed over everything in front of it a furiously boiling, dense, misty vapor which glowed a bright blue-green, dazzling even against the background of the brilliantly-sunlit mountains. It covered Ingersoll’s cab completely; and blinded by the featureless glare, he brought his machine to a stop. That was enough for Detzel, who had been waiting for any sort of opportunity. He hurled his own tractor toward the other, angled it across Ingersoll’s front so that the geologist was cramped between Detzel’s tractor and the detached trailers. His own trailer, still attached, prevented him from backing without making a “cut” which his front end was not free to do. Ingersoll, or rather his machine, was pinned completely. Getting the man himself, at odds of three to one with the one under a steering wheel, was not too difficult.
“I HOPE they can straighten him out on Earth,” Imbriano said soberly to Kinchen a dozen hours later. “He’s way beyond me. He had made a real discovery there in Newton—he must have made it on the first trip, to have planned the second as he did. Instead of reporting it, and getting all the credit he seems to have wanted so, badly, he pulls this incredibly complex trick. It’s like a kid who’s daydreamed all the details of a party he’s going to attend, and flies into a tantrum when the facts don’t follow his imagined program, I think Milt planned the plant discovery before we ever left Earth—he must have, to have brought the lichens with him—and wasn’t quick enough on the uptake to throw the game aside when he made the real discovery. Life moved too fast for him.
“Of course, it moved too fast for me, too. I still can’t see what happened to his tank back there. As far as I can see, he was perfectly right about the snow still being soil and there not being enough energy to do anything.”
“You surprise me,” grunted Kinchen.
“Why?” asked the doctor.
“Your admitting that you don’t know.” Imbriano flushed, started an angry retort, then calmed down.
“Don’t rub it in, Chief. I feel enough of a heel already. I suppose it was that which helped push Milt as far as he went. I don’t say I’ll stop because habits are hard to break, but I’ll try. What did happen to the snow, though?”
“I don’t know, either, the astronomer replied. “It will take analysis to make sure. I think, though, that your suggestion about the snow collecting from space—nebular material, comet’s tails, or what have you—is probably right. But it isn’t—or a lot of it isn’t—nice plain water, ammonia, and methane.
“THERE’S a lot of radiation in space, and a lot of innocent molecules floating around there get knocked apart. What you have left is radicals—highly-reactive fragments of molecules: NH, OH, C2, CH2, and so on. I suppose equilibrium temperature there in Newton’s permanent shadow can’t be more than twenty or or -thirty degrees absolute, so the radicals were “frozen”—held below even their very low activation temperature. I’m a little surprised you were able to run the tractors over the stuff safely—but I suppose the treads were pretty cold by the time you got there.
“As for what finally touched off that tank, my guess would be the exhaust from Milt’s safety valves. You say he was running the machine full blast for several minutes, and. even in that environment it wouldn’t take what water he had left very long to heat up—after all, it must have been more than half gone by then anyway.”
“It was,” confirmed Detzel. “We transferred it to our own tank, and didn’t manage to fill up even then. Without it, we’d have walked the last fifty miles back here.”
“Well, that’s my hypothesis, then. I’m glad we don’t have to salvage some of that snow for the ship, though I suppose we could get away with it—add it a tiny bit at a time and let it react. The products would be useable enough. They’d be largely the water, ammonia, and methane Milt thought they were. That cleans up practically everything, I guess.”
“Practically?” Imbriano was curious.
Kinchen looked at him narrowly. “Just how sure are you that the plants Ingersoll discovered are Terrestrial, and that he was faking the find?”
Imbriano hesitated before answering.
“I know what I think, but I’ve done enough damage broadcasting it already,” he said at last. “I wish some of those specimens had been saved, and I certainly wish I’d had a chance to see what exposure to moon conditions did to those I put out. If they’d survived, or even formed viable spores . . .”
“They’d have been quite radical, wouldn’t they?” asked Frake.
He wondered why he was sent to look for more lichens.
Sunspot
That really close-up observations of the Sun would be useful is certain—but getting really close to the Sun is something else. A man would not have the chance of a snowball in Hell . . . or perhaps that’s just the chance he needs . . .
RON Sacco’s hand reached gently toward his switch, and paused. He glanced over at the commander, saw the latter’s eyes on him, and took a quick look at the clock. Welland turned his own face away—to hide a smile?—and Sacco almost angrily thumbed the switch.
Only one of the watchers could follow the consequences in real detail. To most, the closing of the circuit was marked a split second later by a meaningless pattern on an oscilloscope screen; to “Grumpy” Ries, who had built and installed the instrument, a great deal more occurred between the two events. His mind’s eye could see the snapping of relays, the pulsing of electrical energy into the transducers in the ice outside and the hurrying sound waves radiating out through the frozen material; he could visualize their trip, and the equally hasty return as they echoed back from the vacuum that bounded the flying iceberg. He could follow them step by step back through the electronic gear, and interpret the oscilloscope picture almost as well as Sacco. He saw it, and turned away. The others kept their eyes on the physicist.
Sacco said nothing for a moment. He had moved several manual pointers to the limits of the weird shadow on the screen, and was using his slide rule on the resulting numbers. Several seconds passed before he nodded and put the instrument back in its case.
“Well?” sounded several voices at once.
“We’re not boiling off uniformly. The maximum loss is at the south pole, as you’d expect; it’s about sixty centimeters since the last reading. It decreases almost uniformly to zero at about fifteen degrees north; any loss north of that has been too small for this gear to measure. You’ll have to go out and use one of Grumpy’s stakes if you want a reading there.”
No one answered this directly; the dozen scientists drifting in the air of the instrument room had already started arguments with each other. Most of them bristled with the phrase “I told you—” The commander was listening intently now; it was this sort of thing which had led him, days before, to schedule the radius measurements only once in twelve hours. He had been tempted to stop them altogether, but realized that it would be both impolite and impractical. Men riding a snowball into a blast furnace may not be any better off for knowing how fast the snowball is melting, but being men they have to know.
Sacco turned from his panel and called across the room.
“What are the odds now?”
“Just what they were before,” snapped Ries. “How could they have changed? We’ve buried ourselves, changed the orbit of this overgrown ice cake until the astronomers were happy, and then spent our time shoveling snow until the exhaust tunnels were full so that we couldn’t change course again if we wanted to. Our chances have been nailed down ever since the last second the motors operated, and you know it as well as I do.”
“I stand . . . pardon me, float . . . corrected. May I ask what our knowledge of the odds is now?” Ries grimaced, and jerked his head toward the commander.
“Probably classified information. You’d better ask the chief executive of Earth’s first manned comet how long he expects his command to last.”
Welland managed to maintain his unperturbed expression, though this was as close to outright insolence as Ries had come yet. The instrument man was a malcontent by nature, at least as far as speech went; Welland, who was something of a psychologist, was fairly sure that the matter went no deeper. He was rather glad of Ries’ presence, which served to bring into the open a lot of worrying which might otherwise have simmered under cover, but that didn’t mean that he liked the fellow; few people did. “Grumpy” Ries had earned his nickname well. Welland, on the present occasion, didn’t wait for Sacco to repeat the question; he answered it as though Ries had asked him directly—and politely.
“We’ll make it,” he said calmly. “We knew that long ago, and none of the measures have changed the fact. This comet is over two miles in diameter, and even after our using a good deal of it for reaction mass it still contains over thirty billion tons of ice. I may be no physicist, but I can integrate, and I know how much radiant heat this iceberg is going to intercept in the next week. It’s not enough, by a good big factor, to boil off any thirty billion tons of the stuff around us. You all know that—you’ve been wasting time making a book on how much we’d still have around us after perihelion, and not one of you has figured that we lose more than three or four hundred meters from the outside. If that’s not a safe margin, I don’t know what is.”
“You don’t know, and neither do I,” retorted Ries. “We’re supposed to pass something like a hundred thousand miles from the photosphere. You know as well as I do that the only comet ever to do that came away from the sun as two comets. Nobody ever claimed that it boiled away.”
