Complete Short Fiction, page 272
Nor was there any question of taking over from the rebel even if this had been useful. Her waldo suit was in the space designed for it on the jet, and any suit there had control priority unless the wearer deliberately ceded it. “Dead-man” override from outside was not possible; such a need had not been foreseen until much too late. Construction and energy were extremely cheap, but design was not; people charged more heavily than ever for their skilled services. As a result, many structures and machines were produced with performance well short of ideal, and even the best usually turned out to lack something. The situation was not entirely new in history, but greatly aggravated by modern conditions.
Even Goodell said nothing for general hearing. There was nothing useful to say for the moment, and what would be said later would never mention penalties, or violation of rules, or disobeying orders. Science, the search for understanding, had replaced much of the desire for personal territory, influence over others’ behavior, or glory which had motivated so many of humanity’s earlier high risk activities; but the need-for-knowledge culture had not evolved along quite the same lines as the religious-economic-military one. Social awareness—idealism or patriotism, though now for the whole species—was fully as great in the now vaguely militarized ranks of science, and demanded as much team effort as war, but not the same prompt and blind submission to orders which the latter had had to evolve when the opponents were other human beings rather than a universe with no personal survival urge.
Not quite so prompt and certainly not nearly so blind, but still involving risk. Ginger knew exactly what she was doing, and why; so, in spite of his hasty question, did Gene and the others. Nothing critical was said during the hour and a half Theia took to reach atmosphere and kill her two kilometer per second relative velocity; and even when she was flying rather than orbiting, navigation instructions from Maria and flying advice from the others made up most of the conversation.
The advice was not really needed, since Ginger had spent as much time in simulators and roughly as much actually flying Oceanus as any of the others, but somehow those still in orbit felt a need to keep meaningful conversation going—to “stay in touch.”
Xalco, after tanking up, deliberately landed at higher speed than Belvew had done, but there was no way yet to tell whether this made the difference. Theia slid to a stop half a kilometer west of the factory. She would have come closer, but there were numerous objects on the surface between cliff and factory, and some even west of the latter, which had been tentatively identified by Maria’s equipment as boulders of ice from the fallen shelf. One of Goodell’s labs had confirmed this; three separate specimens were nearly pure water ice, with a trace of carbonate dust. A debate on why this was not silicate had taken up much time between the discovery and the jet’s landing, but no conclusions had been reached except that the news had better get to those on Earth as soon as possible. No one knows in advance which will prove the key piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but the unexpected screams for attention.
The landing approach had not been directly over the mystery patch, but the exhaust had melted or blown a shallow trough in the regular surface and raised a cloud of smoke apparently identical to that of Belvew’s earlier landing. This had not happened before, when landing had been made to pick up cans and labs from the factory. Something seemed to have changed, though admittedly the other approaches had been along different tracks. Possibly the apparently uniform area-uniform except for ice blocks and the still growing patch-differed here and there in composition. Goodell had all ripe labs now out and in action, and was sending out others as quickly as the factory completed them. Most, including Ginger, were listening to the analyses which Maria was numbering, tabulating, and locating on a map which usurped part of everyone’s Aitoff, and trying to make sense out of them. Belvew was the only exception. His attention was aimed more narrowly.
The form of the crashed Oceanus showed a few hundred meters from her sister jet, much closer to the strange patch, and he was trying to see why it had fallen. If the cause were actually turbulence there would probably be no evidence, but he still found this hard to believe.
“Art, could you spare a lab to sample around the wreck?” he asked at length.
“We’ll get there pretty soon anyway. Any reason for special haste?”
“Well, Ginger landed hot, but there’ll be a couple of seconds after lift-off when she’ll be as slow as I was. It might be worth at least a check. Maybe the ground was warmer or colder, for some reason and grew verticals.”
“How could it be?” The question, from Peter, was ignored by all but Barn.
“We’re looking for chemical action,” he pointed out, “and there’s methyl alcohol to explain.”
“All right,” admitted Goodell. “Two labs on the way. Tell me where you want your samples, Gene.”
Belvew went back to the view provided by Theia’s eyes, and strained his own looking for points of special interest on and about the wreck. It would be a few minutes before the slow-moving labs reached the spot.
Several of Theia’s cameras covered the remains, and with Ginger’s consent he had first one and then another of them feed the proper spots on the screen and process their images with interferometer routines, trying to produce the clearest possible view. For some time he concentrated on the ground ploughed up by Oceanus, but could detect nothing special, and finally shifted to the jet itself. The labs had arrived and without his specific instructions were starting to collect dirt samples before he saw the interrupted white ridge along the leading edge of the uptilted right wing. Parts of it, especially toward the tip, had not been shaken off by the crash. He pointed it out to the others.
“That shouldn’t be there! How could I get wing ice here?”
“How do you know it’s ice?” asked Barn reasonably.
“I don’t, but it’s where you pick up ice in Earth’s atmosphere, and it had the same effect!”
“You’re blaming it for what happened?” came Maria’s quiet voice.
“Well, not yet.” Jumping to conclusions was one of the cardinal sins. “Can you get a lab up there, Art?”
“I doubt it. They weren’t designed to climb a smooth surface.”
“That skin’s hardly smooth anymore.”
“True. I’ll try.” He suited the words with action, and for over fifteen minutes sent one of his devices rolling and clawing its way along various upward-leading wrinkles in the crumpled fuselage. Each, sooner or later, narrowed enough to let the machine topple back to the ground, undamaged but ineffective. Goodell finally gave up. Belvew, less skilled but more anxious, tried from some time himself, with no better luck.
“It looks as though some of the stuff has fallen off,” Inger pointed out at last. “There should be bits of it on the ground.”
“If there are, I can’t see them,” replied Belvew. “I suppose we can just do lots and lots of tests all around the wreck, but how will we be sure that any offbeat result can be blamed on the white stuff?”
“We can be quicker than that.” Ginger assured them.
“How?” asked Gene.
“I’ll show you.” Several of the listeners guessed what was coming, but kept their mouths shut; there was nothing they could do about it, and objectively Xalco was being smart. She was economizing on her suit time.
Those who failed to read the implication from her words understood a few seconds later as an environment suit with “GX” stencilled front and back entered the field of view of the jet’s eyes. The walk was unsteady; even Titan’s less than fourteen percent of Earth gravity was a lot more than any of the group had experienced for many months. She made good speed, however, never actually fell, and reached the wreck very quickly.
“I don’t see anything white on the ground,” she said. “It either fell off further back or got buried in the dirt Oceanus ploughed up. Here, Art.” She needed to jump only a short distance to bring one glove against the rime on the wing. It stuck to her suit when she tried to set it down beside the nearest lab, and she had to shake it off, leaving some liquid on her palm. All watchers tried to draw inferences while the lab unit did its work.
“Mostly ethylene, a trace of acetylene,” Goodell reported tersely after a moment.
“Melting points?” Gene asked promptly, sure that Maria would have them on her screen at once. He was right.
“About 104 and 192 respectively,” she reported promptly. “Check you own wings, Ginger; if you picked any up after you cooled down from entry, it would still be there.”
“It is. I see it. It’s lucky I landed fast, I guess. I’ll wipe it off right now.” Her suit disappeared intermittently, its image reappearing as odd patches and parts from time to time as she moved into and out of the view fields the computer was using for Aitoff projection.
“Why did we pick that up these two times, and not on any of the earlier landings? And why pick it up at all, for that matter? There isn’t much of either of those in the atmosphere.” Gene was still puzzled.
“I think I can guess,” Barn said slowly. “You don’t need much, after all; water vapor usually doesn’t compose very much of Earth’s air, but it freezes on wings if they’re cold enough. These landings are the only ones made so far right after the jet had spent significant time up at compromise altitude, and really got its wings chilled. We can test that, if there’s ever time, by going back up there for a while and doing stall exercises, at a safe altitude of course, after we get down again.” He did not suggest reprogramming the Aitoff computer to show wings. None of them could have done this.
“And until then, we make it a point to land a little hotter than we have been.” Gene was relieved. “Good work, Ginger. You’d better come back up; you’ve used up a lot of suit time already.”
“I have plenty more. I’m going to take a close look at this patch while I’m here.”
“I don’t mean to be insulting, but you’re budgeting time to fill your tanks, I trust,” Goodell interjected.
“l am. But thanks for asking. Don’t apologize.” Her suited figure dwindled on the screens.
“The labs can do gas analyses, can’t they?” She asked suddenly.
“Sure.”
“Then hadn’t we better look for free hydrogen? Remember the idea about the methanol production.”
“We’d need water, too,” pointed out Barn. Ginger kicked at one of the boulders, almost overbalancing in the weak gravity.
“These look like ice,” she assured him.
“They are. I checked them before,” growled Goodell. “If you want a repeat—”
“I know. That can wait. I want to see this smooth stuff.” She moved a few gliding steps farther, and squatted down. A lab moved slowly toward the boulder, guided from above, but the oldster said nothing aloud. Of course this would be ice, too.
“Give!” Came mingled voices. Ginger’s suit had no camera.
“It looks and feels through my gloves like black glass; it could still be the melted tar someone suggested. I can’t scratch it with a glove claw. Labs, please.”
“Already there, as you should have noticed,” answered Goodell. “Analysis so far matches the other one; it’s a methanol gel, basically. I’m still working on the polymers.”
He would be. Belvew thought. Arthur, of all the group, was the most optimistic about finding prebiotic material on Titan, and the most expert on autocatalysis and similar phenomena presumably involved with the chemical evolution stage preceding actual life. He was also hoping desperately, his companions knew, to find a key piece of the biological jigsaw puzzle while he still lived, even if that piece failed to provide a cure for his particular ailment. He was as close to being a pure idealist as anyone in the group—a scientific Nathan Hale, though no one was tactless enough to make the comparison aloud.
The screen brought Belvew’s attention back from this brief wandering. Ginger had started to rise from her squatting position, and was putting on a rather grotesque show.
She had been slightly off balance as she straightened her knees, and reached vertical with her center of gravity a little outside the support area outlined by her feet. There is a normal human response to this situation, acquired usually during the first year or so after birth: one picks up the foot nearest the direction of tilt and moves it farther in that direction to extend, the support area, though not so far as to make reaction initiate a fall the other way. The woman started to do this, but her right food refused to pick up. The couple resulting from pull on this one and Third Law push on the other tilted her even farther to her right. By the time she reached thirty degrees all eyes were on their screens, and at least three theories were being developed.
“You’ve melted yourself in!” cried Martucci. Inger, whose idea involved close contact between soles and surface plus Titan’s high air pressure, said nothing but thought furiously. Goodell, already wondering how simple the chemistry for a thermotropic reaction could possibly be, called, “See whether it’s pulling in around your boots, or if you’re just sinking!”
Ginger Xalco was moved to answer this. “Just sinking? I’m stuck, you idiot! What do I do?”
“Find out why,” Arthur replied calmly from the safety of a seven hundred kilometer high orbit.
“Try to tilt and slide one boot at a time,” proffered Inger. “Can anyone guess how much jet exhaust a suit will take?” asked Belvew. “I assume no one knows.”
While the woman tried unsuccessfully to implement Barn’s suggestion, and then less enthusiastically to follow Goodell’s instruction, Gene, already in his waldo suit, silently preflighted Theia. Xalco had filled the tanks conscientiously on the way down, and the landing had depleted them only a little; there was well over enough for a takeoff. Keeping careful watch on the gauges he fired up the plasma arcs and fed liquid to the pipes. Carefully checking the relative whereabouts of woman and factory, but not letting himself worry about a few labs, he raised thrust on the right jet enough to drag Theia in a curving trail—the keels wouldn’t let it simply pivot—until it was heading toward Ginger. He then equalized both sides and sent the machine dragging forward until it was only fifty meters from the still anchored suit. Rather than attempt another tight turn he went on past, leaving Ginger on his left and turning only slightly to the right, until the exhaust was streaming past her only three or four meters away.
“Better let me take it,” the woman said at this point. “I can tell if it’s too close, and the response will be quicker.” Gene made no argument, and relinquished control. Using waldo while standing up was more awkward than Ginger had expected, and for a few seconds she was almost tempted to let Belvew take over again; but she resisted the urge, recognizing the strength of her own arguments and possibly for other reasons.
The jet blast was now sweeping over part of the patch, behaving just as it had before: the tar, it that’s what it was, was sinking or possibly vaporizing into a shallow groove along the track of the warm gas, while a dark cloud of smoke appeared above the affected region and swirled and billowed slowly away from Theia.
Ginger examined as closely as she could the slow widening of the trench, and very carefully increased thrust on the left pipe to swing the gas stream closer to her position. The higher power widened the stream as well as turning the jet, and she almost overdid it. The unspoken question in all minds was whether the removal of surface could be managed without cooking her suit. She finally stopped the turn by cutting back on the left unit and raising power in the other. Luckily this did not provide enough total thrust to move the aircraft farther away and complicate matters even farther.
“I still can’t tell whether it’s vaporizing, melting and sinking, or just crawling out of the way,” she reported, her voice once more calm.
“Is it crawling over your boots?” asked Goodell. Xalco squatted once more.
“No,” she replied after a moment. “It’s more like melting in. I’m deeper than before, but the stuff isn’t closing in around me. You know, this might work.”
“Damn!” said Arthur with feeling. Not even Ginger criticized. All watched tensely while the trench widened toward her and finally reached the left boot. Here it seemed to stop, and after several impatient minutes she raised the thrust a few percent.
“Your tanks are getting a bit—” Gene didn’t even try to finish the sentence. Ginger answered only by trying, hard, to slide her boot toward the once more widening trench.
The material which had pressed up and outward like fairly stiff clay around the sole was vanishing; she squatted to watch closely, curiosity once again in the ascendant, as it blew away in a trail of smoke which she could clearly see forming from half a meter. She reported verbally to the others.
“Can you move your foot?” cried Belvew. “Your tanks!”
She stood and pushed sidewise again, and her left boot slid out into the exhaust stream, suddenly free.
She brought it next to the right one and pressed down hard; it had, after all, taken a while for her to ‘stick’ earlier. She kept trying, shifting the position of the free boot every few seconds just in case, but the right one stayed firmly in place until the warm gas actually reached her armor and began to eddy around it. For several more seconds no one breathed, much less spoke; then the right foot came suddenly free, and Ginger made an unplanned but quite lengthy jump which took her off the smooth patch.
If the released breaths from the watchers had been free to leave the station, its orbit might have been changed measurably.
Ginger, safely on ordinary ground, did not make her way at once back to the jet. She picked up, labelled, and pouched several dirt samples from points as close to the edge of the patch as she could move the stuff. She even made a point of working loose a specimen where soil and smoothness seemed to blend. Then, without haste, she returned to the aircraft and vanished from the screens.
