Complete Short Fiction, page 156
For long moments the radioman watched the spreading cloud, and wondered whether the Albireo could escape being struck by the flickering, ceaseless lightning. Far above the widening ring of cloud the smoke fountain drove, spreading slowly in the thinning atmosphere and beyond it. Zaino had had enough space experience to tell at a glance whether a smoke or dust cloud was in air or not. This wasn’t, at least at the upper extremity . . . And then, quite calmly, he turned back to his desk, aimed the antenna straight up, and called Eileen Harmon. She answered promptly.
THE STRATIGRAPHER listened without interruption to his report and the order to return. She conferred briefly with her companion, replied “We’ll be back in twelve hours,” and signed off. And that was that.
Zaino settled back with a sigh, and wondered whether it would be tactful to remind Rowson of his offer of a year’s pay.
All four vehicles were now homeward bound; all one had to worry about was whether any of them would make it. Hargedon and Burkett were fighting their way through an ever-increasing ash rain a scant two miles away—ash which not only cut visibility but threatened to block the way with drifts too deep to negotiate. The wind, now blowing fiercely toward the volcano, blasted the gritty stuff against their front window as though it would erode through; and the lava flow, moving far faster than the gentle ooze they had never quite measured, surged—and glowed—grimly behind.
A hundred miles or more to the east, the tractors containing Mardikian, Marini and their drivers headed southwest along the alternate route their maps had suggested; but Mardikian, some three hours in the lead, reported that he could see four other smoke columns in that general direction.
Mercury seemed to be entering a new phase. The maps might well be out of date.
Harmon and Trackman were having no trouble at the moment, but they would have to pass the great chasm. This had been shooting out daughter cracks when Zaino and Hargedon passed it hours before. No one could say what it might be like now, and no one was going out to make sure.
“We can see you!” Burkett’s voice came through suddenly. “Half a mile to go, and we’re way ahead of the flow.”
“But it’s coming?” Rawson asked tensely. He had returned from the power level at Zaino’s phoned report of success.
“It’s coming.”
“How fast? When will it get here? Do you know whether the ship can stand contact with it?”
“I don’t know the speed exactly. There may be two hour, maybe five or six. The ship can’t take it. Even the temperature measures I got were above the softening point of the alloys, and it’s hotter and much deeper now. Anyway, if the others aren’t back before the flow reaches the ship they won’t get through. The tractor wheels would char away, and I doubt that the bodies would float. You certainly can’t wade through the stuff in a space suit, either.”
“And you think there can’t be more than five or six hours before the flow arrives?”
“I’d say that was a very optimistic guess. I’ll stop and get a better speed estimate if you want, but won’t swear to it.”
Rowson thought for a moment.
“No,” he said finally, “don’t bother. Get back here as soon as you can. We need the tractor and human muscles more than we need even expert guesses.” He turned to the operator.
“Zaino, tell all the tractors there’ll be no answer from the ship for a while, because no one will be aboard. Then suit up and come outside.” He was gone.
TEN MINUTES later, six human beings and a tractor were assembled in the flame-lit near-darkness outside the ship. The cloud had spread to the horizon, and the sun was gone. Burkett and Hargedon had arrived, but Rowson wasted no time on congratulations.
“We have work to do. It will be easy enough to keep the lava from the ship, since there seems to be a foot or more of ash on the ground and a touch of main drive would push it into a ringwall around us; but that’s not the main problem. We have to keep it from reaching the chasm anywhere south of us, since that’s the way the others will be coming. If they’re cut off, they’re dead. It will be brute work. We’ll use the tractor any way we can think of. Unfortunately it has no plow attachment, and I can’t think of anything aboard which could be turned into one. You have shovels, such as they are. The ash is light, especially here, but there’s a mile and a half of dam to be built. I don’t see how it can possibly be done . . . but it’s going to be.”
“Come on, Arnie! You’re young and strong,” came the voice of the mineralogist. “You should be able to lift as much of this stuff as I can. I understand you were lucky enough to get hold of Eileen—have you asked for the bonus yet?—but your work isn’t done.”
“It wasn’t luck,” Zaino retorted. Burkett, in spite of her voice, seemed much less of a schoolmistress when encased in a space suit and carrying a shovel, so he was able to talk back to her. “I was simply alert enough to make use of existing conditions, which I had to observe for myself in spite of all the scientists around. I’m charging the achievement to my regular salary. I saw—”
He stopped suddenly, both with tongue and shovel. Then, “Captain!”
“What is it?”
“The only reason we’re starting this wall here is to keep well ahead of the flow so we can work as long as possible, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so. I never thought of trying anywhere else. The valley would mean a much shorter dam, but if the flow isn’t through it by now it would be before we could get there—oh! Wait a minute!”
“Yes, sir. You can put the main switch anywhere in a D.C. circuit. Where are the seismology stores we never had to use?”
Four minutes later the tractor set out from the Albireo, carrying Rawson and Zaino. Six minutes after that it stopped at the base of the ash cone which formed the north side of the valley from which the lava was coming. They parked a quarter of the way around the cone’s base from the emerging flood and started to climb on foot, both carrying burdens.
Forty-seven minutes later they returned empty-handed to the vehicle, to find that it had been engulfed by the spreading liquid.
With noticeable haste they floundered through the loose ash a few yards above the base until they had outdistanced the glowing menace, descended and started back across the plain to where they knew the ship to be, though she was invisible through the falling detritus. Once they had to detour around a crack. Once they encountered one, which widened toward the chasm on their right, and they knew a detour would be impossible. Leaping it seemed impossible, too, but they did it. Thirty seconds after this, forty minutes after finding the tractor destroyed, the landscape was bathed in a magnesium-white glare as the two one-and-a-half kiloton charges planted just inside the crater rim let go.
“SHOULD WE go back and see if it worked?” asked Zaino.
“What’s the use? The only other charges we had were in the tractor. Thank goodness they were nuclear instead of H. E. If it didn’t work we’d have more trouble to get back than we’re having now.”
“If it didn’t work, is there any point in going back?”
“Stop quibbling and keep walking. Dr. Burkett, are you listening?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“We’re fresh out of tractors, but if you want to try it on foot you might start a set of flow measures on the lava. Arnie wants to know whether our landslide slid properly.”
However, the two were able to tell for themselves before getting back to the Albireo.
The flow didn’t stop all at once, of course; Nit with the valley feeding it blocked off by a pile of volcanic ash four hundred feet high on one side, nearly fifty on the other and more than a quarter of a mile long, its enthusiasm quickly subsided. It was thin, fluid stuff, as Burkett had noted; but as it spread it cooled, and as it cooled it thickened.
Six hours after the blast it had stopped with its nearest lobe almost a mile from the ship, less than two feet thick at the edge.
When Mardikian’s tractor arrived, Burkett was happily trying to analyze samples of the flow, and less happily speculating on how long it would be before the entire area would be blown off the planet. When Marini’s and Harmon’s vehicles arrived, almost together, the specimens had been loaded and everything stowed for acceleration. Sixty seconds after the last person was aboard, the Albireo left Mercury’s surface at two gravities.
The haste, it turned out, wasn’t really necessary. She had been in parking orbit nearly forty-five hours before the first of the giant volcanoes reached its climax, and the one beside their former site was not the first. It was the fourth.
“And that seems to be that,” said Camille Burkett rather tritely as they drifted a hundred miles above the little world’s surface. “Just a belt of white-hot calderas all around the planet. Pretty, if you like symmetry.”
“I like being able to see it from this distance,” replied Zaino, floating weightless beside her. “By the way, how much bonus should I ask for getting that idea of putting the seismic charges to use after all?”
“I wouldn’t mention it. Any one of us might have thought of that. We all knew about them.”
“Anyone might have. Let’s speculate on how long it would have been before anyone did.”
“It’s still not like the other idea, which involved your own specialty. I still don’t see what made you suppose that the gas pillar from the volcano would be heavily charged enough to reflect your radio beam. How did that idea strike you?”
ZAINO THOUGHT back, and smiled a little as the picture of lightning blazing around pillar, cloud and mountain rose before his eyes.
“You’re not quite right,” he said. “I was worried about it for a while, but it didn’t actually strike me.”
It fell rather flat; Camille Burkett, Ph.D., had to have it explained to her.
1965
Raindrop
Harmless little Raindrop! It was life or death to one human, and feast or famine to the race!
I
“It’s not very comfortable footing, but at least you can’t fall off.”
Even through the helmet phones, Silbert’s voice carried an edge that Bresnahan felt sure was amused contempt. The younger man saw no point in trying to hide his fear; he was no veteran of space and knew that it would be silly to pretend otherwise.
“My mind admits that, but my stomach isn’t so sure,” he replied. “It can’t decide whether things will be better when I can’t see so far, or whether I should just give up and take a running dive back there.”
His metal-clad arm gestured toward the station and its comfortable spin hanging half a mile away. Technically the wheelshaped structure in its synchronous orbit was above the two men, but it took careful observing to decide which way was really “up.”
“You wouldn’t make it,” Silbert replied. “If you had solid footing for a jump you might get that far, since twenty feet a second would take you away from here permanently. But speed and velocity are two different animals. I wouldn’t trust even myself to make such a jump in the right direction—and I know the vectors better than you do by a long shot. Which way would you jump? Right at the station? Or ahead of it, or behind it? And which is ahead and which is behind? Do you know?”
“I know which is ahead, since I can see it move against the star background, but I wouldn’t know which way to jump. I think it should be ahead, since the rotation of this overgrown raindrop gives us less linear speed than the station’s orbit; but I wouldn’t know how far ahead,” Silbert said.
“Good for you.” Bresnahan noted what he hoped was approval in the spaceman’s tone as well as in his words. “You’re right as far as you committed yourself, and I wouldn’t dare go any farther myself. In any case, jumping oft this stuff is a losing game.”
“I can believe that. Just walking on it makes me feel as though I were usurping a Biblical prerogative.”
The computerman’s arm waved again, this time at the surface underfoot, and he tried to stamp on it at the same moment. The latter gesture produced odd results. The material, which looked a little like clear jelly, gave under the boot but buldged upward all around it. The bulge moved outward very slowly in all directions, the star patterns reflected in the surface writhing as it passed. As the bulge’s radius increased its height lessened, as with a ripple spreading on a pond. It might have been an ultra-slow motion picture of such a ripple, except that it did not travel far enough. It died out less than two yards from Bresnahan’s foot, though it took well over a minute to get that far.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Walking on water was kind of a divine gift, wasn’t it? Well, you can always remember we’re not right on the water. There’s the pressure film, even if you can’t see it.”
“That’s so. Well, let’s get on to the lock. Being inside this thing can’t be much worse than walking around on its surface, and I have a report to make up.” Silbert started walking again at this request, though the jelly-like response of the water to his footfalls made the resulting gait rather odd. He kept talking as he led the way.
“How come that friend of yours can’t come down from the station and look things over for himself? Why should you have to give the dope to him second-hand? Can’t he take weightlessness?”
“Better than I can, I suspect,” replied Bresnahan, “but he’s not my friend. He’s my boss, and pays the bills. Mine not to reason why, mine but to act or fry. He already knows as much as most people do about Raindrop, here. What more he expects to get from me I’m not sure. I just hope that what I can find to tell him makes him happy. I take it this is the lock.”
They had reached a disk of metal some thirty feet in diameter, projecting about two feet from the surface of the satellite. It continued below the surface for a distance which refraction made hard to estimate.
Its water line was marked by a ring of black, rubbery-looking material where the pressure film adhered to it. The men had been quite close to it when they landed on Raindrop’s surface a few minutes before, but it is hard to make out landscape details on a water surface under a black, starfilled sky; the reflection underfoot is not very different from the original above. A five-mile radius of curvature puts the reflected images far enough down so that human depth perception is no help.
Waves betrayed themselves, of course, and might have shown the lock’s location—but under a gravitational acceleration of about a tenth of an inch per second squared, the surface waves raised by spacesuit boots traveled much more slowly than the men who wore them. And with their high internal energy losses they didn’t get far enough to be useful.
As a result, Bresnahan had not realized that the lock was at hand until they were almost upon it. Even Silbert, who had known about where they would land and could orient himself with Raindrop’s rotation axis by celestial reference features, did not actually see it until it was only a few yards away.
“This is the place, all right,” he acknowledged. “That little plate near the edge is the control panel. We’ll use the manhole; no need to open the main hatch as we do when it’s a matter of cargo.”
He bent over—slowly enough to keep his feet on the metal—and punched one of the buttons on the panel he had pointed out. A tiny light promptly Hashed green, and he punched a second button.
A yard-square trap opened inward, revealing the top of a ladder. Silbert seized the highest rung and pulled himself through the opening head first—when a man weighs less than an ounce in full space panoply it makes little real difference when he elects to traverse a ladder head downward. Bresnahan followed and found himself in a cylindrical chamber which took up most of the inside of the lock structure. It could now be seen that this must extend some forty feet into the body of Raindrop.
At the inner end of the compartment, where curved and flat walls met, a smaller chamber was partitioned off. Silbert dove in this direction.
“This is a personnel lock,” he remarked. “We’ll use it; it saves flooding the whole chamber.”
“We can use ordinary spacesuits?”
“Might as well. If we were going to stay long enough for real work, we’d change—there is local equipment in those cabinets along the wall. Spacesuits are safe enough, but pretty clumsy when it comes to fine manipulation.”
“For me, they’re clumsy for anything at all.”
“Well, we can change if you want; but I understood that this was to be a fairly quick visit, and that you were to get a report back pronto. Or did I misread the tone your friend Weisanen was using?”
“I guess you didn’t, at that. We’ll go as we are. It still sounds queer to go swimming in a spacesuit.”
“No queerer than walking on water. Come on, the little lock will hold both of us.”
The spaceman opened the door manually—there seemed to be no power controls involved—and the two entered a room some five feet square and seven high. Operation of the lock seemed simple; Silbert closed the door they had just used and turned a latch to secure it, then opened another manual valve on the other side of the chamber. A jet of water squirted in and filled the space in half a minute. Then he simply opened a door in the same wall with the valve, and the spacesuited figures swam out.
This was not as bad as walking on what had seemed like nothingness. Bresnahan was a good swimmer and experienced free diver, and was used to being suspended in a medium where one couldn’t see very far.
The water was clear, though not as clear as that sometimes found in Earth’s tropical seas. There was no easy way to tell just how far vision could reach, since nothing familiar and of known size was in view except for the lock they had just quitted. There were no fishes—Raindrop’s owners were still debating the advisability of establishing them there—and none of the plant life was familiar, at least to Bresnahan. He knew that the big sphere of water had been seeded by “artificial” life forms—algae and bacteria whose genetic patterns had been altered to let them live in a “sea” so different from Earth’s.
II
