Complete Short Fiction, page 273
“Don’t hit the factory on takeoff!” Arthur cried, then, “Sorry.”
Ginger made no answer. A few seconds later Theia slid into the air, and a minute after that had reached ram speed with something under a hundred kilograms of mass in her tanks.
“There’s a thunderhead at forty kilometers, two hundred degrees,” Maria informed her.
“Right. Thanks. Is there anything I should do while I’m here, after I juice up? Or have I already earned a mission credit? I did pick up a lot of data.”
Belvew wondered whether she would have thought of using the jet to free herself, but was far too polite to suggest this explicitly.
“How about splitting the credit?” he asked innocently.
END OF PART ONE
(To be continued Next Issue)
Settlement
Hal Clement has been writing science fiction for more than forty years. His novel, Mission of Gravity is considered to be one of the best, if not the best, hard science fiction novels ever written.
In his quarantined quarters in Titan Station, protected by the architecture from the ailments of his colleagues and from Saturn’s radiation belt by half a kilometer of ice, Barn Inger clipped a sensor to his ear and waited. Status, the processor dedicated to keeping track of the station personnel as well as of the information they were accumulating, presently reported the reading aloud.
“Phase .22; sixteen percent above accepted normal, presumably tending downward. Subjective?”
“I feel fine. I need something active.”
“You should be all right for about twenty hours allowing standard safety factors, twenty-five to thirty hours without them, possibly fifty considering your personal viability. No confidence in the last.”
“Fine. Someone has to go down to the factory to map those roots. Arthur’s machines can scrape but not dig. Any of you feel your better set than I am to do it now?” The other scientists in the squadron had of course heard the whole exchange; no one ever saw into another’s quarters, but auditory privacy in the station took a poor second behind the need of everyone to know who might require help and when.
The only answer came from Inger’s regular watch mate, Gene Belvew. “I’m flying Theia right now, on polar air circulation. If you’d rather not go down physically, you could take over this run and I could land in Crius. Any preferences?”
“Maybe I’d do better if the drill kicks.” Inger pointed out, stroking the luxuriant blond mustache which none of his colleagues had ever seen. He did not, of course, mention Belvew’s bone problems, not merely because they were common knowledge. Courtesy was not the same as privacy, but they were related.
“Good point. Crius is yours, if no one else has anything to raise.”
No one did as far as the trip was concerned, but Ginger Xalco’s clipped voice came with a question.
“What route will you take to dock?”
“Straight up the axis, then to the pole. Unless—”
“That’s all right. Just be sure of your suit before you leave your own place, please.”
“Sure. Don’t worry; I’m a careful type.”
Neither speaker, and none of the listeners, had to be more specific. Actually, Ginger’s words had been superfluous, though no one blamed her for speaking. She had the usual reason for concern; her own blood was slowly being wrecked by a very ordinary but unresponsive leukemia, and no one had any idea what adding Inger’s ailment might do. His “Cepheid Sickness”, badly misnamed by a medical worker who knew very little astronomy, caused him to cycle between extreme polycythemia and severe anemia. Unlike that of a Cepheid star, its period was unpredictably variable, ranging from one hundred fifteen days to one hundred eighty and, rarely, more. The almost unique quality of the ailment was that no one had yet established its cause, far less any treatment.
Most of the diseases currently decimating the human species followed a similar course: they appeared suddenly, killed a few thousand or a few million people, had their causes identified, and then yielded, except for an unfortunate minority of the victims, to quickly developed treatment.
The minority formed the shock troops in an all-out research war which blended chemistry, physics, astronomy, and other disciplines in the hope of learning in detail how life really worked. Nothing less seemed likely to account for the sudden surge of emerging new ailments. Even the advance of genetic engineering seemed inadequate—there just weren’t, as far as anyone could tell, enough mad scientists or even mischievous genetic hackers in existence to account for the frequency of the new mutations.
Barn inspected his environment suit carefully, made sure it was fully charged, disinfected its exterior with chemicals and radiation, warned the others that he was emerging, unsealed and passed through the virus-proof door, and made his way along the passage “upward”—toward the center of the rotating station. Here, his effective weight now zero, he drifted along the axis to Crius’ dock, and in a few minutes reached the craft.
He devoted over three hours to the preflight check, only partially because he would actually be aboard this time instead of waldoing the jet from the station. With only two remaining ramjets—no one had any real hope of repairing the Oceanus, though the possibility had been discussed—no avoidable risks with the craft themselves could be taken. Also, while Saturn’s particle radiation was feeble at Titan’s orbit, it was safest to make transfer flights while the satellite was nearly between Sun and planet, unless emergency justified major risk. Danger was taken for granted, and none of the group really expected to get back to Earth, but they hoped to have enough of them survive to finish the project. Inger had weighed—on his own, without consulting Status again—the importance of this job against the likelihood of his becoming incapacitated before it was done, and decided that a modest delay in the descent was in order.
Satisfied at last, he drifted into the pilot’s “couch” and spent another twenty minutes testing his suit controls. Finally, using the spring launcher which saved reaction mass, he kicked the vessel free and allowed it to drift slowly away from the rough sphere of welded ice fragments.
He could see both Saturn and sun, at screen coordinates which meant that they lay in opposite directions. The lumpy assemblage of ring chunks from which he had come blocked out nearly half the sky and much of Titan, while the satellite in time occulted a large fraction of the remaining starry blackness. Their almost spherical shapes were distorted grotesquely by the Aitoff projection. This bothered neither Inger nor the others sharing his view; all had become skillful with the appropriate mental corrections. Inger allowed Crius to drift until the station filled less than a tenth of the screen’s area, spun her on a lateral axis until the pipes pointed “forward” along the station’s orbit, made sure she was in rocket mode, and vaporized a small amount of reaction mass.
The craft had not yet made any descents, and her tanks contained only a small amount of water from the rings, loaded when the station was being built. Even the little he had now used committed Crius to atmosphere after two minutes or so of falling away from the station, but the man wasted no time or thought on the fret that he, too, must descend.
An hour later and a third of the way around Titan he felt the touch of drag. Orbital velocity, less than two kilometers a second, was too low to cause a serious heating problem, and before making a full half circle from the point where he had left the mass of ice—which was still in view—he was using wings and aerodynamic controls, and had uncapped the pipes into ramjet mode.
The rest of the flight was uneventful; it was a new adventure for the aircraft, but not for Barn. Finding an adequate cloud and using it to fill the tanks with hydrocarbon, had been a long routine. Clearing the tanks first of the traces of unused water was not, but he knew very well what ice crystals at liquid methane temperature could do to Crius’ pumps and needed no reminding from his fellows. He took care of the matter early enough so that Belvew, letting his attention wander slightly from the jet he himself was operating a quarter of the way around the satellite, felt no temptation for over-the-shoulder driving.
Finding the factory and landing beside it were also routine; Inger had been the first to take one of the ramjets to the surface. The fact that he had not been physically aboard then was incidental; the Waldo suits worked either in direct-connection or remote modes, the latter suffering only the signal-travel delay which the distances involved made negligible.
Crius slid to a stop a couple of hundred meters from the factory. Its pilot completed the power-down check of the aircraft and the Titan environment check of his suit, and emerged. There was no need to report the fact even to his partner; everyone had presumably been watching carefully.
Even Belvew was having a problem of his own.
Theia was high enough in the smog layer for Saturn and its nearly edge-on rings to show dimly on her screen, though they were rising and setting too fast for comfort. Gene ignored the sight as best he could. Circling Titan’s south pole at one hundred meters per second and increasing the radius of the circle by half a kilometer each time around took no attention, of course; that sort of thing could be set up in advance. The satellite’s rotation axis being a couple of degrees from perpendicular to its orbit plane was merely background information, though it was responsible for Saturn’s present peek-a-boo behavior. The bothersome item which did demand attention was a steady altitude loss by his aircraft.
It was not frightening. The ground was fifty kilometers down and the descent mere centimeters per minute, but it was puzzling. It was also annoying; correcting the altitude manually every minute or so was a nuisance, while setting the automatic pilot to do it might hide important data in unrecorded corrections. There was also the matter of self-respect; the sergeant wanted to explain the phenomenon himself before Status, whom he preferred to think of as Nursemaid, made him feel foolish again. His rank might imply a mere observer rather than theorist, but he considered himself perfectly qualified to think.
Thrust and attack were correct, and corresponded to the airspeed. Energy consumption matched the mass of the atmosphere being cycled, the push indicated by the ramjet mounted sensors, and the weight of the aircraft. There were no lake thermals at this height at latitude. There must be some obvious factor he hadn’t—
There was. The calm voice of Status, committed to reporting changes of background whenever they reached a certain probability without regard to their dangers, made itself heard.
“There is a slow general descent of the polar air mass covered so far on this run. Symmetry suggests it to be quite precisely centered on the pole itself. There must be poleward flow above Theia’s present altitude, and equatorward below. Repetition of the present flight pattern at a larger number of levels than originally planned appears in order. When the entire volume has been vector-sampled I suggest comparison with the total upward flow over the lakes.”
Belvew could think of only one response which might restore his morale.
“How does air density match norm for this height? It should be greater if there’s such a huge downdraft.”
“It is. Qualitatively this could explain the effect.”
“And quantitatively?”
“Unanswerable until vector analysis is more nearly complete.”
Another thought restored Belvew’s self-esteem even further, and he voiced it before the analyzer bait him again.
“Is there enough more smog in the air to account for the higher density?”
A human voice cut in. Even now it sounded slightly amused, though no one knew why.
“Wouldn’t more polymer drop the density? It’s made from the surrounding gasses, and would use them up as it’s produced.”
“It would drop volume, Maria. The mass would still be there and contributing to pressure, I’d say; and that would start inflow which would carry solid and liquid particles from a distance—” The debate was interrupted.
“The inflow wouldn’t be in. It would be around. There’s Coriolis force even with a sixteen-day rotation and small planet size, and no surface friction fifty kilos up.” The new voice was Arthur Goodell’s, and no one added anything for a moment; the old fellow had an annoying habit of being right, as well as being officially their ranking member. Belvew was about to take a chance on mentioning the minuteness of the Coriolis effect, but was saved by Status’ voice.
Goodell himself, in his sealed quarters a hundred meters from Belvew’s, paid no attention to what the computer said. He had known as the words left his mouth that his reasoning was sloppy. It was getting constantly harder for him to think coherently, and more and more of his time went to wondering how long he could be useful at all to the project. The pain kept getting worse. He had been told long ago that the discomfort of SAS—synapse amplification syndrome—was less severe than that of shingles, but he had never asked how his informant knew. If anyone had ever suffered from both it must have been at different times for the effects to be distinguishable, and whichever had been experienced later would have been remembered as being worse. Arthur Goodell had the scientists’ natural mistrust of data dependent solely on human memory. Besides, he knew of no technique for actually measuring pain.
He knew all he wanted to know about SAS. Unlike shingles, it affected every square centimeter of his skin at one time or another, but caused no external markings. Like shingles and chicken pox, it was produced by a virus, one which had been identified and mapped within weeks of the first recognition of the disease. It differed from the shingles agent in only four amino acids at specific points plus one bundle, perhaps originally a separate organism, which rendered it unresponsive to both natural and engineered human immune systems. The four amino acids were few enough to be explained by natural mutation, but numerous enough to make human tampering a reasonable suspicion; the bundle was natural, but might have joined the virus either with or without human assistance. It made no difference to Goodell whether he should be blaming Nature’s indifference or human malice; the molecular engineers who now made up most of the medical profession had not yet worked out either a nonlethal contravirus or a simple chemical treatment.
They had, of course, a lot of work to do on other ailments, and there were only a few hundred cases of SAS to worry about, so there was no use complaining about being at the short end of a triage situation. That was an everyday state of affairs for humanity in general.
With the pain growing ever worse, what he really wanted now was not a cure—not exactly. He wanted an opportunity. This should, he felt, be found some time on Titan: one of Maria Collos’ gel pools, not too far from a lake, and isolated in some way from the rest of the moon’s surface would be ideal.
There were a few traces of impact craters on the ever growing map Goodell himself was developing. Their walls might provide isolation, though all seemed to be badly weathered or nearly buried. There seemed to be no high winds in Titan’s heavy atmosphere, and methane rain should be a far weaker erosive agent than water, but both had had several billion years to do their work.
At least two of the craters on Maria Collos’ less specialized maps did contain small lakes. This was hopeful, and the maps still being revised and extended, partly in the standard course of planned operations but often by Goodell himself. He wondered more and more frequently how long he could keep that up; solid, detailed work did still keep his attention from pain, sometimes for hours at a time, but the distraction of his body was getting harder and harder to fight.
The chances of finding an ideal site for his slowly developing personal project were actually decreasing, though he was not admitting this yet to himself. The equatorial regions had now been pretty well mapped, and his personal travel problems made the rest of the satellite rather less suitable, but he still had hopes. He might be short on time, but not yet on patience.
He turned his attention back to the display of Belvew’s—more correctly Theia’s—Aitoff screen, and resumed looking for ground images which might bear detailed study. Even polar areas might be usable, however less acceptable.
But watching quickly became boring, and boredom gave the pain access to his attention. He wrenched his mind back to the Titan Station, the best place to find the immediate, serious work which was almost the only thing able to keep his attention away from his body for long. Belvew was in no trouble, and the new atmospheric data seemed trivial, however interesting. There was one bit of chemistry to be rechecked, but it would be a while yet before any more data could come from Maria’s tar pools, gel pool, prebiotic reactions, or whatever they were. He hoped they would turn out to be the last, since his ripening plan practically depended on it; but he was decades past conclusion jumping or even hasty action, he hoped.
The plan itself, though still tentative, was also able to hold his attention, sometimes for a full hour. He did not cut off his connection with Theia’s screen—there was always a chance of something’s happening—but turned to another display.
The argument about atmospheric currents and polymerization had ended, and Goodell neither knew nor greatly cared how it had turned out; he was a theorist, greatly outranking Belvew, and would consider that matter when and if it became important.
The screen he now faced showed most of the scenery around Oceanus, minus a few gaps which her remaining cameras could not cover though Goodell had unobtrusively reported them. While he himself did not fly because the pain smothered his control senses too often, everyone had Waldo suits and could control the jets.
The factory was there and the ice mountain also showed. The mysterious gel area which had caused Ginger’s misadventure and had now expanded or moved to include the wreck showed only partially on the screen; this was why he didn’t know whether it was crawling or growing or even whether Oceanus was sinking in it. The last seemed quite possible from earlier experience, and Goodell badly wanted to know, but it was important to set up the preplanned part of the research program while enough of the group were still in condition to carry on routine. He didn’t want to attract attention by asking for a modification.
