Complete Short Fiction, page 269
No point thinking about that.
“What happened, Sarge? Or shouldn’t I ask?” Barn Inger, Belvew’s co-ranker and watch partner, didn’t bother to identify himself; only a few dozen people were anywhere near Saturn, and everyone knew the voice of everyone else who mattered. As Belvew’s “buddy” one of his jobs was to check with Gene vocally or in any other way possible whenever something unexpected occurred; the “shouldn’t I ask” was a standard courtesy. Not everyone enjoyed admitting mistakes, however important they might be as data, and the terminally ill people who formed an even larger fraction of the Titan exploration crew than of Earth’s remaining population were often touchy.
“I rode too close to stall. It’s all right now,” Belvew answered.
“Use anything from the tanks?”
“Nothing to use. There was enough room to dive-start.” Belvew did not mention just how little spare altitude he had had and Inger didn’t ask.
“You’re still over Carver, aren’t you? You could have put down and tanked up from the lake.” This was quite true, but neither speaker mentioned why the pilot had dodged that option without conscious thought. Both knew perfectly well; Inger’s stress on the “could” had been as close to being specific about it as either cared to go. He changed to a neutral subject.
“You seem to have the fourth leg about done.” Belvew made no answer for a moment; he was spiralling upward to start another pass through the raindrop-rich updraft—at a safer altitude this time. He wanted mass in his tanks as soon as possible, but was now prepared to accept the lower concentration to be found higher up. In standard light frequencies his target was indistinguishable from an Earthly thunderhead—there was even lightning, in spite of the nonpolar nature of the droplets, and Belvew faced the task of making several passes through it fast enough to avoid another ram stall but slow enough to escape turbulence damage to his airframe.
“Just about,” he answered at last. “I still have enough cans to finish Four and most of Five. I hope all the ones I’ve dropped so far work. I’d hate to have to go back just to make replacements. There’s too much else to do.” He fell silent again as the waldo began pressing his body at various points indicating that Oceanus was entering turbulence. His fingers, shoulders, knees, and toes exerted delicate pressure—now this way, now that—on the suit’s lining, answering the thumps he could feel and forestalling the ones the Aitoff screen was letting him anticipate by sight. For nearly two minutes the aircraft jounced its way through the vertical currents, and as the turbulence eased off and the air around his viewers cleared the pilot gave a happy grunt. He would have nodded his head in satisfaction, but that would have operated too many inappropriate controls.
“A respectable bite. Nine or ten more runs at this height should give me takeoff or orbit mass.”
“Or several dozen stall recoveries,” his official buddy couldn’t help adding. Belvew let the remark lie, and two or three minutes passed before anyone else spoke. The rest of the team had their own instruments and could read for themselves the rise of tank levels as the jet’s collection scoop gulped Titanian air, centrifuged the hydrocarbon fog droplets out of it, stored the liquid, and returned the nearly pure nitrogen to the atmosphere.
“There’s another odd surface patch a few kilos west of Carver,” Maria Collos’ voice came at length, as the main tanks neared the seven tenths mark. “It wouldn’t take you very far off plan to look at it before you start Leg Five.”
“Like the earlier ones, or something really new?” asked Belvew.
“Can’t tell for sure in long waves. It could be just another bit of melted tar. Even if that’s all, we’re getting enough of those to need explanation.”
“One would need explanation!” snapped Arthur Goodell, the least patient of the group usually, and excusably because of the endless pain of Synapse Amplification Syndrome. “I can see—so can you—how tars would settle out of the air as dust at this temperature. I can see dust getting piled into dunes even in the three kilo currents that pass for gales here. I can see it looking like obsidian if it gets melted and cooled again. What I don’t see is what on this iceball could ever melt it.”
“I’ve suggested methane rain, dissolving rather than melting the surface of a dune as it soaks in and forming a crust as it evaporates,” came the much milder and thinner voice of leukemia case Ginger Xalco.
“And I’ve suggested landing and finding out first hand whether those nice, smooth, glassy hilltops are the thin shells of evaporite over a dune, as you’re implying, or the tops of magma lenses,” snapped Goodell. “When do we do that? You’ve plenty in your tanks now. Gene. Why not take a good look at this new one—whether it turns out to be just another for Maria’s list or something really different? And don’t tell me it’s against policy; we’re here to find things out, and you know it. To quote the poetic character who wrote our original mission plan, ‘there’s no telling in advance which piece of a jigsaw puzzle will prove to be the key to the picture.’ ”
“It’s not a matter of set policy,” Belvew replied as mildly as he could—he had his own troubles, even if they didn’t include SAS. “Avoiding risk to the jets before the surface and weather gear are all deployed is common sense, and you know it. Once they’re in action, long term studies can go on even if we lose transport. We’ve made one landing to deploy the factory, and a couple of others to restock from it, after all.”
“I know. Sorry.” Goodell didn’t sound very sorry, actually, but courtesy had very high priority. “It’d be nice to be around when some of the results crystallize, though. And you can’t count the later landings because they were in the same place and we knew what to expect.”
“Not exactly. The original shelf was gone.”
“The area was plain Titanian dirt, with no cliff to fall down this time. Even I could probably have set down safely.” No one contradicted this blatant exaggeration. “The old saw about dead heroes—”
“Doesn’t apply, Arthur.” Maria, somehow, was the only one of the group who could manage to interrupt people without sounding rude. “We’re already heroes. We’ve been told so.” There might or might not have been sarcasm in her tone. No one else, even Goodell, spoke for a moment. Then Belvew referred back to the landing question.
“There’s no reason I shouldn’t make a ground check after finishing the Leg Four, if Maria’s radar and my own eyesight can find me a landing and takeoff site. Actually, we’re all as curious as Art about the smooth stuff, and it’s good tactics to eliminate possibilities as early as we can. Let me top off these tanks just to play safe, and then you can put me back where I left Leg Four, Maria. After that’s done I’ll scout your new patch for landing risk.”
No one commented, much less objected, and Gene made his remaining passes through the thunderhead with no actual stalls. There were no remarks about his two close calls, either; everyone had flown the ramjets at one time or another except Goodell, whose own senses were drowned in pain too much of the time to let him use a body waldo, and Pete Martucci, whose reflexes, though he was the only one of the dozen not known to be dying of something, had never been good enough for piloting. All knew the ordinary problems of flying.
“Standard turn left four five point five,” Maria said without waiting for Belvew to report that his tanks were full.
“Left four five point five,” he acknowledged, banking promptly to seventy-four degrees. The group had established a half-Earth gravity as a “standard” coordinated turn on Titan. The ramjet’s wings, stubby as they were, could still give that much lift at ram speed below ten kilometers or so altitude. He snapped out of the turn in just over sixteen seconds, since mission speed was an equally standard one hundred meters per second when nothing else was demanded by circumstance.
“Your heading is good. You’ll reach the break in Leg Four in two hundred fifteen seconds from—NOW! Nose down so as to reach three hundred meters at that time. I’ve allowed for the speed increase at your present power setting, so don’t change it. On my time call, level off and do a standard right turn of one seventy seven point three. Start dropping cans at standard intervals ten seconds after you finish the turn. The leg ends at the twenty-second can.”
“Got it.” Belvew remembered again, with the aid of the blunt needle mounted in the suit under his chin, not to nod. There were no more words until the time call, and no more after it until the last of the pencil shaped and sized “cans”—containers for seismometers, thermometers, ultramagnetomers, and other gear—needed for the fourth leg of the planned seismic network had been ejected.
“Okay, Maria, take my hand.” Belvew nosed the jet upward as he spoke. All the others were listening and watching as their particular instruments allowed except Goodell, who was meticulously testing the output of each of the recently dropped cans. None interrupted the terse directions which formed the response to the pilot’s request, and he hurtled northward along the eastern shore of Lake Carver eight hundred meters above its surface with his earphones still silent. He knew they could follow his progress on their duplicates of his own Aitoff, and that he could expect to have his attention called to anything he seemed to be missing, so he concentrated on the screen area a third of the way from center to lower margin. This covered the region he would pass over in the next few seconds. It was only slightly distorted by the projection which let a single screen squeeze the full sphere into an ordinary human field of vision, though this mattered little; everyone had learned long ago to correct in their own minds even for the extreme warping at the edges. No part of the aircraft itself showed; though some of the two dozen cameras mounted in various parts of its skin did have wing, nose, or tail in their fields, the computer which blended their images on the single full-sphere display deleted these.
Unfortunately.
The liquid surface was currently glass-smooth ahead and left of the jet, though even Titanian winds could raise waves; gravity was weak and liquid density low, and the highest winds occurred over the lakes themselves where evaporation lowered the air density far more than temperature changes could. Belvew gave the lake only an occasional glance, keeping his main attention on the land ahead where the patch to be examined should be.
“Three minutes,” came Maria’s quiet voice. The others remained silent. “Two. You might be able to see it now.” The pilot scanned through his vision frequencies again, dodging the longer wave lengths which were more strongly absorbed by methane.
“I can, I think. Forget timing. I’m slowing to ten meters above stall—no, make that twenty for the first run—and going down to a hundred meters, and I’m cutting out the random reality reminder. If I lose track too seriously with where I really am we can cut my shift short later. I’ll recover. The air looks steady, but I don’t want another stall at this height.”
No one objected aloud, though there must have been mental reservations. Belvew was the pilot for now; it was up to him to weigh relative risks to the aircraft. Negative comments would have been distracting, and therefore dangerous as well as discourteous.
The smooth patch grew clearer as the seconds passed. It was larger than most, about half a kilometer across, roughly circular but with four or five extensions reaching out another hundred or hundred and fifty meters at irregular points around its circumference. It might have been an oversized amoeba as far as outline went. The color seemed to be basically black, though it reflected the pale reddish-orange of the Titianian high smog as though from glass.
No small details could be made out from the present altitude and speed. Gene banked to a much less than standard turn rate for this speed, swung in a wide, slow circle north of the patch, and made a second pass in the opposite direction. This time the reflection of the brighter section of southern sky where the sun was hiding could be made out; the surface looked more than ever like glass, as Maria had described the others on her map, but there were still no informative details.
He made two more runs, this time at thirty meters above the highest point of the patch and only two meters per second above ramstall, tense and ready to shift to rocket mode—to cap the intakes and send liquid and extra heat into the pipes at the slightest drop in thrust. He was not worried about the wings stalling; even those stubby structures had plenty of lift area in this atmosphere and gravity, and the jet had been designed so that they would go out at higher airspeed than any control surfaces.
Nevertheless, his attention was enough on his aircraft and far enough from the ground so that it was Barn who spotted the irregularity.
“There’s a hollow about ten meters across half way from the high point to the base of that northwest arm. It did funny things to the jet’s reflection as we passed this time, but I can’t see it now. I can’t decide exactly how deep it is, but it’s just a dent, not a real hole.”
“Did anyone else spot it?” asked Belvew. Most of them had, but none could give any better description. The pilot made another pass, this time devoting a dangerous amount of his attention to the surface below, and saw the feature for himself; but he could make out no more details than the others.
“You know we’re going to have to land sometime,” Goodell said in what was meant to be a thoughtful tone.
“I know.” Belvew was thinking too. There was half a minute’s pause before the remote-lab manager tried again.
“What time is better than now?” The pilot could answer that one.
“When we know more about the strength of that surface. If it’s just a crust, as the rain theory suggests, Oceanus could break through and smother the jet scoops in dust, or mud, or dirt, or whatever form the stuff under it happens to have.”
“You have plenty of cans. See what happens when one of them hits. You needn’t use its chute; let it hit as hard as Titan can make it.”
“Good idea.” The pilot, with much relief, cautiously raised his speed to standard—too sudden a boost to the flame could make the pipe frontfire—and climbed to a full kilometer. There was still no wind, but the patch was a harder target than he had anticipated. Without its parachute the slender container took much longer to lose the jet’s speed, as all had expected but none could estimate quantitatively. The first attempt overshot badly. Belvew couldn’t see it, but Inger and Collos followed it with other instruments until it buried itself beyond detection in ordinary, firm Titanian “soil” a hundred and fifty meters beyond the edge of the glassy patch.
The second try, with Barn calling the release moment, was much better and quite informative in its way. The can’s own instruments stopped radiating at the instant of impact, ending passive measurements, but Maria’s shortest viewing waves showed that the little machine, solid as it was, had shattered on contact. The surface seemed pretty strong. Belvew was less happy than he might have been; if the can had broken through undamaged it would have implied a crust too weak to take the jet’s weight, much less the impact of a poor landing just here and now.
As it was, the next test appeared to be up to him. He thought furiously. Would anything except an actual landing tell them what they needed to know?
The jet lacked landing gear in any ordinary sense; there were no wheels, floats, or real skids. Its belly was shaped into a double keel meant to give it catamaran stability in an attempted liquid landing and broad support on dubiously solid surfaces, though once stopped the body would sink to something like three quarters of its diameter in the best-guess mixture of Titan’s lakes. It would float a little deeper in pure methane. This was why no one wanted to make the first lake landing; it had not occurred to anyone until much too late even to calculate, much less test, the results of attempting a rocket mode start with the pipes totally immersed in liquid. The log of the Earth to Saturn orbit had several similar annoyed entries.
The keels were adequate landing skids on a solid surface; one could make a pass at just above wing stalling speed, grazing the apparently smooth hump. If he did it right, he might resolve the question of whether the patch was solid or crust. If the latter, of course, there would be no certainty about its ultimate strength until the jet came to a stop and the wings lost all their lift.
The convexity of the surface complicated the problem slightly. If he hit too hard, easy to do on the upslope side, the question of whether the crust was stronger than the jet’s belly and keels would also become relevant.
The initial landing, Earth days before, had been on a smooth shelf of ice near the foot of the steep side of what looked like a tilted block mountain; Titan seemed still active tectonically. There had been no trouble anticipated in detail, though of course the pilot—Inger, at that time—had kept alert for the unforeseen. This was fortunate, since the exhausts had started a thermal-shock crack in the ice which chased the jet for most of its landing slide. The pilot had just managed to avoid riding to the foot of the hill on several million tons of detached shelf by a final, quick shot of thrust. The three hours it had taken for the factory pod to climb to the bottom, get to a safe distance from the cliff face and the new pile of ice rubble, put down roots and start growing had been spent in a high state of tension. Not just by Inger.
When it seemed certain that no more pods would have to be sent out, the fact that only a short length of ice shelf remained for takeoff had to be faced. Inger had been forced to use more than normal thrust, and while he concentrated his attention straight ahead, the rest of the group watched another crack chase him along the shelf, and more ice rubble fall, bounce, and roll toward the new factory. There was no longer any ice platform to land on when he did get into the air. The two later descents to pick up cans, once the factory had matured, had been on “ordinary” ground and proved uneventful. The drag on the skids, which all had feared might stress the aircraft too highly—this was why the ice shelf had been chosen for the first touchdown—had been sharp but not dangerous, and the subsequent takeoffs had presented no problems except a rather larger demand for reaction mass than had been hoped.
