Complete Short Fiction, page 274
His project was not merely private but would be quite unacceptable to the others. It would involve breaking the agreement all had made after the unauthorized Xalco landing. It would also be a major violation of regulations, though that would mean less to practically everyone. Science had become a military discipline out of necessity, granting the necessity of saving the human species, but scientists were still individuals.
He might, of course, get his answer by luck. The third ramjet, Crius, was now on the ground with Inger—Goodell suddenly wondered how long his mind had been wandering; he had not been aware of the landing—about a hundred meters from the factory, and her cameras might supply information he wanted. At the moment they didn’t. They gave full-hemisphere view around Crius, but the craft provided too low a viewpoint for his needs.
Barn Inger had emerged and was examining the ground. There was an embarrassing gap in the factory data due solely to poor planning, and he had to fill it. He might already have seen what Goodell wanted to know but didn’t want to ask without considering it important. Maybe Inger would need to shift his ramjet, so the old man—he was nearly forty-five—kept Crius’ Aitoff image on one of his own screens and watched it closely.
Barn had noticed casually that the wreck was now on the pool rather than beside it, but motion of the tar had long ago been left for Status to keep track of. He did remember that Ginger had stuck when she walked on the glossy surface and that Belvew, on his first landing in Oceanus, had started to sink; but he had too much else to occupy his attention right now. The wreck had been powered down and allowed to cool on the local ninety-plus Kelvins; anything about it which anyone might want to check later would presumably still be there when and if the time came.
Inger’s work on the planning slip called for holes in the ground. The dirt was largely water ice, heavily laced with silicate particles and microscopic grains of polymer which had settled from the atmosphere. Physically it was rock rather than dirt. Inger was not trying to resolve fundamental questions like how the silicate had found its way up from Titan’s core or why the tars had mixed with the water instead of forming a layer on top of it. This was for theorists, later. He needed to find which of the numerous roots which the growing factory had extended in various directions corresponded to which analytical reader in the orbiting station; the roots themselves were numbered to match the instruments, but no one had thought to provide any way of telling which way a given root was extending. This, to put it mildly, was hampering the surface analysis part of the project.
Low-pressure ice—Ice—at ninety-four Kelvins is not slippery, at least not under the Titanian weight of a human being. Neither is it fragile. It is simply rock, perfectly usable for construction when pure and presumably, though no one had had a chance to try yet, still stronger though less workable when full of the hydrocarbon flour which the chemists still called “tar”. Getting a drill into it was turning out to be a problem. Barn Inger massed, in surface armor, just under a hundred kilograms; on Titan’s surface he weighed just over thirteen, less than he would have on Earth’s moon. Even with the ice not slippery he lacked both weight to make the drill bite and traction to turn it. The tool itself was powered, but at high speed it simply skittered around on the surface, while at the lowest RPM available the wielder found himself pushed sideways whenever it started to bite.
There were ice boulders from the cliff scattered around which might have provided backing, but none was in just the right spot. The proposed hole was random; Inger had located a root by microseismology before attempting any drilling. If the same instrument had been able to identify it, there would have been no trouble, but it would be necessary to drill to a point near the conduit and feed in some chemical identifiable by the factory monitors when the root picked it up.
“Can any of those ice chunks be moved?” Maria Collos asked at length. “You could build yourself some sort of backing to lean against, or even brace the drill against.” The amusement which bothered Goodell even though he did not know he had inspired it was still in her voice.
“Worth trying,” Inger admitted. He set the tool down and walked, in the awkward fashion dictated by Titan’s gravity, to a lump of ice whose volume he guessed at about a half a cubic meter. It was clear, apparently one of the fragments shattered from the nearby cliff when the factory had first been planted. He got a grip on one of the rough sides and tried to lift without success; even on Titan it must weigh seventy kilograms or so, he suddenly realized. Even at the present phase of his illness, it was too much for him in armor.
Rolling, while still awkward, was more successful, and in a few minutes the boulder was over the root. He settled it on one of its narrower sides to provide more height to lean against picked up the drill, and made another try.
Heavy as it was, the ice slab fell over as the tool made a brief, tentative bite.
“Right direction,” he said thoughtfully to the watchers, who now included even Belvew, as he picked himself up. “A pile of smaller stuff against the far side should take care of that.” The smaller stuff was plentiful and easier to carry, and in a quarter of an hour a slope of what had to be thought of as rather low-density rock and gravel was bracing the back of the largest fragment.
The direction might be right but the distance had not yet been reached. Another burst of power on the drill sent the man along the wall.
It was more than an hour before the structure had grown to an acute-angled “V” with solid bracing on the outside, an inward lean on the inside to give him backing for a downward push, and a pair of small but reasonably heavy blocks which should keep his feet from slipping toward the opening of the “V.”
They didn’t and by this time Maria was not the only one being amused.
Barn Inger got back on his feet breathing heavily—not entirely from fatigue, though even the best armor still made activity difficult. His glove clicked against his face plate as he unthinkingly started to stoke his mustache.
“All right. Friction just doesn’t count even if ice isn’t slippery here. Ginger, or someone, turn Crius so her pipes point this way.”
“Better get behind your wall,” the woman promptly snapped. “A push that’ll turn the plane may be too much for your armor. I suppose you want to weld the stuff down.”
“That was the idea. I won’t get behind the pile, I’ll get away from it; then neither of us will have to worry. In fact I might as well get on board and do it myself.”
“I’m already tied in,” Ginger responded, “and you can tell better from outside when I’m lined up right and which pipe to use when I stop swivelling. They’re far enough apart so it will make a difference. How much reaction mass should we budget for this trick?” She had become just a little less impulsive, though her voice remained clipped and almost snappish.
“It shouldn’t take much, and the tanks are full. Once you’re lined up I can get right next to the wall and tell you when melting starts; you can cut off right away when I call. We could use a quarter of the juice and still have plenty for a takeoff. There’s nothing to worry about.” Barn moved away from his construction toward the left side of the jet so that the exhaust—the pilot would have to use rocket mode, of course—would reach the wall before touching him. Only a little more than a sixty degree swivel to the aircraft’s right would be needed for proper aim, not too much thrust; the ice was smooth, at least even if not slippery.
Goodell was now watching the Crius’ Aitoff screen with his fists clenched near his knees—on them would have hurt—and unblinking eyes. The aircraft’s position shouldn’t change much, but the direction of the tail fin camera, which had the highest viewpoint available, surely would.
Ginger capped the pipes and fed power and reaction mass into the left one’s chamber, gently at first. She, too, was watching the Aitoff, but not for the same reason as Goodell. She stopped the thrust increase as the runners began to scrape and the scenery to move, and began feeding brief jolts to send the craft in a rather jerky turn to its right. It slid forward slightly each time; there was no way to stop that though it increased by a few meters the distance from Inger’s wall.
She cut the thrust at the same instant the man on the ground called out.
“Right pipe is just in line—you overshot a bit. It’ll be easier to use that one for melting.”
“Obviously. I’d have light it anyway to turn back. I certainly don’t want to waste mass swivelling all the way around, and I’m sure you don’t either. All I’d be risking is the ship. You’re down there.”
Barn made no answer to this point. Neither did Goodell, though he did not fully agree. A full turn would have provided a fine variety of viewpoints both high and low. Enough, he felt to a little image processing give him a fully detailed three-dimensional model of the “pool”.
“Shouldn’t you get a little farther to the side?” asked the woman. “I’d hate to either blow you away or cook your armor.”
“I’ll be all right. The exhaust doesn’t spread much in the first few meters.”
“Wrong,” Belvew cut in. “Believe me. That’s dense air.”
Ginger, from personal experience, agreed emphatically, and Inger moved a few meters rather than make an issue.
“You’re lined up fine,” were his last words. “Light off.”
The woman fed liquid and energy to the rocket, and all watched the loose pile of rocks with interest. The last hour or more had been typical of the group’s problems from the beginning; unexpected factors had time and again caused what should have been a minor, routine operation to take more time and far more effort than hoped. These had not been foreseen clearly enough, or not foreseen at all, but very few could be considered matters for blame. Any environment represents a vast number of factors; any unfamiliar environment represents more than an ordinary mind can consider all at once.
As it happened, plenty of information about the linear and volume expansion coefficients of ice near Saturn system temperatures had been gained while building the station out of welded ring fragments. That welding, however, had been done much more economically and gradually by microwave heaters. Even so, the project had managed to kill nearly a third of the original members of the group in various ways, not always particle radiation; but unfortunately it did not occur even to Status that this might be relevant now. It was.
The watchers expected the surfaces of the ice chunks which Inger had used for his wall to liquefy quickly and start to drip, or possibly blow away in the stream of hot gas, but it didn’t work out that way.
Within a second of the exhaust’s enveloping the wall everyone heard a series of sharp snapping sounds, not quite explosions. Not everyone saw the flying pieces of thermally shattered ice. At least, not in time. One of them, half the size of his helmet, struck Inger in the face. The others heard the impact; no one ever knew whether Inger himself did. He toppled backward with fascinating deliberation in Titan’s gravity, and settled to the ground with his feet more than a meter behind the point where he had been standing.
He neither spoke nor moved.
“Left one forty-seven standard.” Maria’s mild voice was the first to be heard. For once, the amusement was gone. There was no question whom she was addressing, and Belvew banked his jet sharply to the left. A real-surroundings view chose that moment to appear on his screen, but he didn’t need it. He knew he was in the station, flying with his waldo suit; he knew he would have to bring the jet back up, board it physically, and get back to the surface before he or anyone could be of help to his partner. Briefly he wondered whether it would be quicker to climb to orbit from where he was, instead of getting to the equator first, but mental arithmetic disposed of that notion. A nearly polar orbit would take less time to get him near the station, but cost too much exhaust mass to match velocities. More than he had or could carry. He had a quarter of Titan’s circumference to traverse before leaving atmosphere, and there would be hours after that before he or anyone else could get back down. All three jets were now in atmosphere or on the ground. No one expected him to be in time—no one seriously believed there was any time even now—but no one argued the need to try.
Not even Goodell. He was jolted enough not to think, for several minutes, of recording the new surface features Belvew’s cameras were covering. Even when he did, his motions were clumsier than usual in setting up the equipment, and when the adjustments were complete he realized that little would probably come of it. Theia was traveling as fast as ramjet mode would permit, which meant that she was in thin air well above the heaviest smog. Her cameras did range into the near infrared, which gave some surface detail even from this height, but there was no radar and little chance of catching the sort of feature Goodell wanted with enough detail to identify it.
Nevertheless he watched. The southern hemisphere was not yet mapped in anything like the kind of detail available for the latitudes between the factory and Lake Carver. Gigabytes of data had indeed been recorded by Maria’s instruments, but were not yet combined and translated into readable map form even in Goodell’s quarters.
He watched tensely and silently as images flowed across his screens. Sometimes they were clear, sometimes entirely meaningless; Titanian smog was far from uniform. Annoyingly, the regions around lakes tended to be worst, since the bodies of methane mixture created vertical air currents capped by clouds; methane vapor, at any given temperature and pressure, is little more than half as dense as nitrogen. This had long since ceased to be a surprise, but it could still be a nuisance.
Twice Goodell thought he glimpsed a lake with hills around it. The first time he reacted too slowly, and recorded only an approximate position. The second he was more alert, got precise map coordinates, and then had time to realize how the concentration had spared him whole minutes of awareness of his pain. He thought for a moment of calling up records immediately to build a detailed map of the area, but it seemed better simply to watch and note positions until Theia reached the equator, banked east, and started her climb to orbit.
By the time this happened he had four more possible sites in his notes. He decided to work on them in reverse order, since the last were closest to the equator and potentially most suitable for his purpose. The presumably frozen human body on the surface was as far from his mind, right then as his own pain.
The first item, after details had been added by Maria Collos’ files, turned out indeed to be an irregular lake of about two square kilometers area, near the southern edge of what almost had to be a badly eroded impact crater some fifteen kilometers across. Unfortunately, nothing Goodell could do quickly with the records revealed the slightest sign of any of the smooth areas of glassy/tarry material—the “Collos Patches”—which were central to his needs.
The second, over three hundred kilometers from the equator, seemed ideal almost from the first. The lake was much smaller, but it was accompanied by two of the patches; and the surrounding ringwall, only seven kilometers in diameter, appeared to be much more recent. Its minimum height was over fifty meters, and it rose in places to nearly three times that. Goodell drew a deep breath of satisfaction, ignoring the anguish as his expanding chest rubbed the soft material of his garment, and began to think furiously.
He was still thinking when Theia reached the station, docked, and departed again with Belvew now physically aboard. He did not worry as the craft left; there was nothing he could possibly have done toward executing his plan just yet, and it actually crossed his mind that what had happened to Inger might make the whole idea unnecessary.
At least, to the project. Goodell knew he himself would not be able to get on without it much longer.
Not too much longer. But there was still chemical work to do before he could dispense with analytical equipment and heavy thought.
He had reported the material of the “tar pool” on which Belvew had landed earlier to be a gel, with methanol as the dispersing agent. No one had pointed out, politely or otherwise, that methanol’s melting point was something like a hundred Kelvins above local temperature. Frozen jelly doesn’t wobble. Goodell himself had not thought of this for some hours, and when he did he was more dismayed at having had his word accepted uncritically than by the fact that he or his apparatus must have made some sort of a mistake. Even the observing ranks should have known better.
He made all reasonable tests of the apparature he could, allowing for the fact that the original sampler had been lost, and found nothing wrong. There had been three carbon-hydrogen bonds, one carbon-oxygen, and one hydrogen-oxygen in the principal material present. There were other compounds there, of course, to confuse the reading; but this was clearly the general background. He had not thought to look for other bonds once these had been read out; it was not at once obvious what others could be fitted into the pattern. Four for carbon, two for oxygen, one for each hydrogen—
The inspiration had come embarrassingly late. He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone yet because he had no way of checking it. The original analyzer was gone, the ones around the factory were busy on the planned routine, and there was no appropriate reference material.
For no one knew the melting point of the vinyl alcohol monomer. At terrestrial temperatures it existed too fleetingly for such properties to be measured. On Titan—who knew? It could be lower than that of methanol; the molecule was larger, its one hydrogen bond presumably less effective—or maybe not; what did the charge distribution of a carbon-carbon double bond do to the polarity of other bonds on the same atoms? Embarrassingly, Goodell didn’t know.
Could he redirect one of the analytical labs around the factory over to the place where Ginger had had her misadventure? The mere question of whether the wrecked jet were being engulfed was not excuse enough; that had already been tabled. However, a possible major error in the data which had been supplied to Status was another matter. Goodell must certainly make as sure as possible about this point before doing anything irrevocable, however tempting his planned last experiment was becoming.
