Complete Short Fiction, page 276
Crius drifted away from the station, achieved legal distance for minimal rocket use, and her pilot applied the thrust. It was only a fraction of a gravity, and nearly five minutes passed before the departure was irrevocable—before distance and accumulated orbital change would make return impossible with the available mass—and until that happened, and he had applied the sphere, he paid no attention to what anyone said. Then he uttered only one word.
“Sorry.” Argument had already stopped; everyone but Belvew, who had not had access to the instruments in his quarters and had only a confused idea of what was happening from the equally confused tangle of voices, knew that argument was pointless. There was no way for Crius to return to the station until she had replenished her tanks in Titan’s atmosphere. Most of the staff had inferred even more, using the broken agreement as a basic datum. Ginger Xalco, whose own malfeasance had been responsible for the agreement in the first place, asked the obvious question.
“Why, Arthur?”
“I know I’m being a bit early,” he replied with no tremor or other sign of worry in his voice. “This is Stage Three—settlement. I’ve found a place to start the control run, a place where there are collos patches, a lake, and good isolation from the rest of the surface. We can now test the patches for what we hope they are—prebiotic areas, made of what may become life someday if Titan has time for it. You can, among you, run the analysis. You know what we want to find out; mainly, whether chemical evolution is really taking place, and how fast. I think the chances are good; there is something making those tar pools far more mobile than they should be at Titan’s temperature, and something seems to be making them even responsive. Ginger found that out; so did you, Gene. Why didn’t any of you notice that my methanol report had to be wrong? That methanol doesn’t melt until it’s a hundred Kelvins hotter than that stuff can be? I’m only guessing what it is, but I think it’s a good guess. I’ll run an analysis when I get down, and supply a batch of enzymes afterward; you’ll have to keep track of what they do, if anything, and watch for evidence that my system isn’t as isolated as I hope. I know we don’t want to contaminate all Titan; that would spoil the whole project. But we do have to see what contamination by non-native enzymes can do, and the contamination has to be in an isolated spot. You know that as well as I do. We were going to do it, eventually; I’m afraid I just lost patience.”
“But why? Why?” It was Maria Collos’ almost frantic voice. She was upset at last; she, at least, had guessed his full intent, Goodell felt sure. “It could have waited until the planned time. It should have.”
“It couldn’t, and you know why.” Goodell’s voice was gentle.
“Where are you getting the enzymes, and what ones will you use?” Belvew, perhaps because he had less information, was less quick than usual on the uptake.
“I don’t have a complete list, but there are a good many thousands. You and Pete should have fun with the chemistry. Don’t worry about details; Status can help. I’m priming him with a lot of background.” It was not until the end of the sentence that Belvew caught on. He practically screamed his next words. He wanted to do something, but was completely helpless except for talk.
“You old idiot! You could drop a steak from culture into the pool and get the same result! Get back up and be useful!”
“The steak will be more useful to you than I will. Shut up and think. I haven’t really driven this thing before, and will have to plan the flying part of this mission. I wish I had enough mass for a few practice maneuvers, but I’d better not risk that. It’s less than an hour to atmosphere, after all.” Belvew actually did shut up. He could guess why the theorist needed planning time.
Goodell had never actually flown the jets not because he was incompetent, but because the pain which resulted when anything touched his skin drowned out the sensations supplied by the waldo suits—sensations which provided the feedback necessary for real reflex-type flying control. Without the service of his sense of touch, he could fly only by visual inspection of his instruments. A living pilot in an ordinary aircraft a century or two before would have had no problem with this, having been trained to ignore everything except the visual input—the seat of the pants had killed far too many early flyers for anyone to trust it over instruments. Neither Goodell nor anyone else in the group had such training; the waldos provided more tactile input than any other kind. The chemist was going to have to reinvent airplane-type instrument flying, and his principal visual information would come not from gyro-referenced attitude sensors or radar displays but from a full-sphere screen distorting its picture into an Aitoff equal-area projection.
Like the others, Goodell was used to allowing for this distortion, but that seemed to Belvew the only bright aspect of the whole situation. He was pretty sure that no sort of argument would now swerve Goodell from his intention, though he intended to keep trying. He could—thankfully—only guess at the sensations the old fellow had had to endure for the last few years. He knew that he himself might have made the present decision long ago, in Goodell’s place.
But he was still going to argue.
After the jet’s tanks were full. Certainly after Crius had completed atmosphere entry, and everyone had had a chance to see what sort of piloting Goodell could actually do.
Entry was not too difficult. Crius was after all an aircraft, designed for stable aerodynamic flight, and she lined up easily and without pilot assistance along the proper axis once drag became perceptible an hour or so after leaving the station. Initial entry speed was only about one and a half kilometers per second, which offered no thermal problems and quickly dropped. Goodell lit the ramjets in the appropriate speed range and spent some minutes practicing turns, climbs, dives and even pipe and lift stalls. No one even offered advice.
The watchers did grow a little tense as he started a long, gentle descent to deep atmosphere and began to hunt for a thunderhead. There was less room for error recovery with only a kilometer or two of air underneath, and as others besides Belvew knew from experience the low airspeeds needed for mass collection offered perils of their own. When a cloud did loom in the center of Crius’ Aitoff and Goodell slowed even further, even the fairly unperturbable Maria Collos had to remove her hands from her mapping controls. Belvew, for the first time, offered advice.
“Watch airspeed and pitch, Art. Don’t let anything else distract you.” He spoke with a little tremor.
“Right. Thanks.” Goodell’s voice showed no emotion, though his actual feeling was one of pleasure. He hadn’t noticed any pain since entering atmosphere; he had been far too busy even to think of anything but Crius’ behavior.
He had stabilized how at what the others had found to be the most effective collection speed, about five meters a second above pipe stall, and plowed into the cloud with his eyes on the instruments Gene had recommended.
He could feel the bumpiness of the air as his craft met upward and downward currents, but by keeping pitch and thrust constant he held his airspeed close to optimal. It was pitch which gave the most trouble; entering an updraft tended of course to lift the jet’s nose. This would slow her down if allowed actually to happen, and Goodell’s reflexes were unpracticed. He tended to overcontrol, like any novice in the cockpit.
The first pass through the cloud had to be written off as practice; he had forgotten to set up collecting mode, and none of the others had noticed either. The practice, however, did help, and on the second try he not only took a respectable amount of liquid into his tanks but held his airspeed within three meters a second of the planned value—with the errors all on the high side. He was being very careful. He knew, in his head, the recovery procedure from a pipe stall, but thinking it through was one thing, reflex quite another.
Belvew noted all this without taking too much attention from his own flying procedure—after all, he did have the proper reflexes—and gave a rather obvious sigh of relief when Crius tanks indicated full. Goodell must have heard it, but made no comment. He probably felt much the same.
“So much for that,” the theoretician remarked. “All right, Maria. My spot is at seven point one degrees south, one twenty-five point five east of the factory. Give me a heading, please.”
Maria hesitated for just a moment, and everyone including Goodell knew why. If she refused guidance, he’d have to come back—
No, he wouldn’t. He’d do a rough mental calculation—he must have kept some track of his entry point and subsequent flight path. Any lack of precision in his figures would simply waste his limited suit time, and interfere with whatever he hoped to get done.
“Heading zero nine six. Climb to eighty kilometers for best speed. At thirty-seven minutes, start descent at ten K per minute. You’ll see it when you’re down to two K, about five ahead.”
“Thanks. The rest of you: this will be the planned settlement. We’ll have to plant another factory. If you can do that soon enough I may be able to do something about checking the orientation of its roots, this time—no, you can’t manage that. It should concentrate on structure blocks, and someone will have to come down from time to time to do the actual building until habitable quarters are ready. I know this is sooner than we planned, and someone will still have to finish the rest of the seismic lines and atmosphere checks, but I’ve decided the chemistry needs to get started right now. There’ll have to be a few, but only a few, analyzers at first; maybe a dozen or so. I have four, the dials say. The new factory can turn the rest out and then get at the blocks. Maria, you can slow down on mapping and take general charge.”
“But I’m only—”
“You’re the best for it. I know. I knew long ago. That’s an order, and Status will have it on record, for what that may be worth to anyone. Use your Athenian organizing powers. Set up as many more surface analysis sites as seems good to you and that the factories can supply, and concentrate first on comparing the Collos patch compositions at random locations with the ones by the Settlement. You’ll know which one to watch for change—I’ll use the one closer to the lake. Don’t ask any questions until I’m down; think over what I may have missed. There’s bound to be something.” The reference to the ancestry suggested by her name almost revived Maria’s chronic amusement. Long ago he had said something which had suggested the misunderstanding—a silly one, in view of the thorough mixing of ancestry which now characterized humanity—and she had been looking forward, some day to letting him see her picture. Now—
“One question,” Belvew cut in. “I’m starting up now, and will have to concentrate on making orbit for a few minutes. How sure are you that you can make your landing—yourself?”
“I’ll make some practice runs when the place is in sight, and decide. I promise I’ll let you know if I need help.”
No one pointed out that he had broken one promise already, and for long minutes the two craft went on their respective ways. Little was accomplished at the station.
Belvew was still in orbit when Crius came in sight of the crater and lake, and Ginger was standing by to help with the landing. However little anyone approved of what was happening, and however much arguing might yet be done with their nominal commander, it was still critically important to save the jet. Everyone but Belvew, who had only his own screen and had to use it for flying, watched tensely as Crius passed slowly—too slowly, some felt—over the ring.
Still two kilometers up, Goodell shifted briefly to rocket mode, slowed down, and felt for wing stalling speed. It seemed to be just where it should be with the tanks full and wings at full camber. He reported the trial, making recoveries with various combinations of added thrust and lowered nose, and eventually satisfied himself and almost satisfied his watchers.
“You might make it, Arthur,” Ginger admitted after the fourth try, “but it will be a lot safer if you let me set you down. It may not make much difference to you”—she had pretty well resigned herself to Goodell’s completion of his plan—“but keeping the machine in one piece is still pretty important to the rest of us.”
“And to me,” the commander assured her. “I want the job finished as much as you do. You know that. My judgment may be off orbit now; I’d be the last to know about that; but what I’m doing is based on my considered opinion of what’s best for the job, including the fact that I wouldn’t be able to do useful thinking much longer.”
“Moon wind!” Snapped Peter Martucci. “If your judgment is off, you have no business pulling this trick!”
“I have no business doing anything else. I have other reasons for working it this way. One of them I’m sure you can guess, some I’m just as sure you couldn’t, but I don’t have time to argue them all. I have work to do and not much time after I’m down.”
“Then let me land you, Arthur,” Ginger said quietly.
“Well—there’s a problem with that—”
“You promised! We know you broke the one about not making unauthorized flights, but surely that’s the only one—you wouldn’t break another—”
“I didn’t mean to; but there’s a problem I didn’t consider.”
“What?”
“I unplugged the override before I climbed into this thing, in case someone caught on too soon and wanted to bring me back before the ship was committed. I’m still in the control niche, and no one else can fly it while my suit is here.”
“Reconnect the override then.”
“That’s what I didn’t think of. I can’t reach the jack. I can’t move around enough to reach it. I’ll have to take her down myself. Ride as close as you can, and say anything you think may be useful, Lieutenant Xalco, but I’ll have to do the real flying.”
There was silence for perhaps a half a minute. Goodell was swinging away from the crater to set up a landing path. Ginger Xalco was, briefly, wondering if she could persuade him to wait until Belvew was back at the station and could do the talking. This was only for a moment; then she realized that the chemist wouldn’t—couldn’t—waste any time. There were the others, of course; everyone but Martucci was an experienced pilot. But after Belvew she was the best and knew it. Responsibility can sometimes be disconnected from authority, but never from ability.
“Don’t land across the lake,” she said carefully. “It has the usual cumulus cloud above it, and you’ll hit turbulence just before you’re touching down. I suppose you want to stop near the patch.”
“Right.”
“Then come on in—oh, seventy-five. Drop to five hundred meters by pressure, shift to rocket, and slow down to wing stall plus twenty by the time you’re five kilometers out.”
“Why five?”
“Don’t you ask questions either. I’m allowing for corrections when you overcontrol, if you must know. If you even think you’re starting to stall, feed full thrust, wait a second, and nose up two degrees; that will pull you out of trouble, and we can always make another pass.”
Goodell remained silent this time. If he wondered how many landing passes he really had time and mass for, no one knew it. A minute later he was on line and altitude, and settling down to speed.
And feeling every signal of his waldo suit as agony.
There was no way to turn the impulses off; such a need had never been imagined. He did have ointments for dulling his skin sensitivity, but they were back at the station and even if they had been on the jet there was no way to apply them through the suit. He should have been able to concentrate so thoroughly on the landing that the pain couldn’t get his attention, but it wasn’t working out that way. If he wrecked the jet—if he killed himself or hurt himself too badly to let him do what still had to be done—
“Airspeed and pitch, you idiot!” They were his own mental commands, of course. The ones Belvew had provided earlier.
“Nose down just a hair.” That was Ginger. He tried to obey, but the hair would have suited an elephant’s tail. The woman’s tone didn’t change; she wasn’t snapping now. “Back up a little. That’s better. A little high now, but take it out in power drop—down to five sixty.” Thrust lessened, speed decreased. He didn’t want to look at the indicator, but he had to.
Two meters per second above wing stall. There’d better be no turbulence.
“Good. Hold that. Altitude fifty. Fifty seconds to touch. Don’t change a thing. Forty meters, forty seconds. The ground is level. No complications. Twenty meters. Ten. Five to go—hold your attitude—don’t touch anything—CUT THRUST!”
The pilot felt the keels touch, surprisingly gently.
“Let it slide!”
For the first time he felt free to look at the Aitoff, and immediately forgot his pain.
The lake was behind him and to his left, the chosen patch almost at his left wing as Crius came to a halt. The crater rim was over three kilometers ahead; there would be plenty of space for whoever would do the takeoff. There was nothing left to do but the job.
He dropped two lab units between the keels, thought a moment, then the remaining two. There were some seismic cans on board, according to the indicators, and he released two of these. He didn’t know where he was with respect to any of the seismic lines, but someone could check that later.
“If someone can get a factory pod down here pronto, I might last long enough to check its first root or two,” he called. “Just don’t drop it in the lake. I don’t know its bottom contours, and don’t want to take a chance wading. I’m getting out now, and am taking one of the lab units over to the patch. Don’t take off, Ginger or whoever will be doing it, until I get the instruments out from underneath. I won’t waste any time.”
He opened the canopy, which groaned slightly with the effort until its seal cracked and the outer air rushed in to match pressures, and slid out easily. In spite of the pain of contact, he had never moved his quarters to the axis of the station, preferring to maintain some sort of muscle tone even at the cost of being pressed against floors and beds. He was therefore able to move easily enough in the thirteen percent gravity, though not with the ease that Belvew and Inger and Xalco had shown. He was, he reminded himself, a good deal older than any of them.
