Complete Short Fiction, page 279
“I’ll be there in about ten minutes,” Ginger interjected tactfully. “I’m letting down now. Status, does the absolute direction of the can lines matter? You said to make them at right angles to each other, but nothing more.”
“Even the right angle needn’t be exact,” was the answer. “In any case, the absolute orientation will be known when we calibrate them. You can drop the first one on your initial pass over the crater.”
“Only if you tell me when I’m at the right distance. I know I’m heading right, but I can’t see far enough ahead to spot the crater from fifty k’s out.”
“I can take care of that,” came Manucci’s voice. “I have your position and vector through one of the relays—the Station is below your horizon. Tell me when you’re down to drop height.”
“Five more seconds,” the pilot answered promptly.
“Then cut to sowing speed right now, or you’ll overshoot.”
“Right.” Both speakers were physically in the Station, of course; it would have been easier to let Pete take over the jet directly had he been competent to fly it. No one mentioned this.
“You start to drop in six minutes from—NOW. Remember the wide gap on these lines; is your intervalometer reset?”
“It is now. Thanks. Maria, any more jolts?”
“Yes, but nothing to send me off the floor.”
“And nothing to shear the tunnel?” asked Belvew.
There was a brief pause while the digger looked back along the bore. “Nothing I can see inside. Ginger, is anything funny ahead? The sky looks paler than usual, at least the little bit I can see through the entrance.”
“Nothing shows from here. Not even the crater, yet. The sky from here is the usual orange-tan, or whatever you like to call it, with a few cumulus. Maybe you’re seeing one of those.”
“Maybe. I can check that out later. I’ll dig until I have to rest again, or until there’s some other reason to go outside, everything here seems solid enough, now that the mud I plastered on the ceiling has all fallen back down. The real shocks seem to have stopped, but there’s a fairly steady continuing vibration.”
“Keep an eye on the tunnel mouth,” Gene suggested. “If the motion along that fault reverses, you could be in a fairly tight spot.”
“Why should it do that? Do they ever?”
“Ask me again when I know why it’s there at all—I mean in detail; we already know Titan builds mountains.”
“And why should I worry? I have the digger with me, and here’s only a few meters of ice overhead.”
“You can’t go straight up. I doubt if you can slant up at twenty degrees. That reads quite a few meters of tunnel. Think time, not distance—Commander.”
“True. I have about twenty-eight hours to go in this suit before tapping emergency storage, and two after that.”
“And that includes two or three to get up here, depending on when you start. At least, take your breaks outside.”
“We should have built recharging equipment into the jets,” remarked Martucci.
“There are a lot of things we’d have done if we’d known enough.” Anyone, including Peter himself, could have made that remark, and most of them did; Seichi beat the rest by a split second. There was silence for a few minutes while Maria continued to chip ice and Ginger’s aircraft approached Settlement Crater.
“Twenty seconds to first drop. You’re on heading, assuming no wind,” Peter announced at last.
“A Titan hurricane wouldn’t make that much difference, I ‘ve set start and interval—there goes the first!”
“Can you see the crater yet?”
“Not at fifty kilometers. I’d guess visibility about twenty, ordinary for this height. I’d rather not play with wave lengths while I fly a line; you’re all getting the same picture, though, some of you can try for more penetration.”
Again Seichi was first; he had probably been scanning the spectrum before Ginger had made her suggestion.
“I have the crater. You’re headed all right, Ginger. There’s something funny there, though.”
“What?” again several voices overlapped.
“A very low cloud, I’d say, nearly white in this wave band. It has a very sharp, straight edge on the west side, running almost north and south. It starts about a kilometer south and three west of the lake, less than a k from the near rim, and runs nearly straight north into the northwest wall. It’s interrupted there, but resumes and continues for at least one crater diameter—seven kilos or so—outside. The cloud itself is about two or three kilos wide, though the east side is a lot less sharp. It fades out pretty well by the time it reaches the north-south diameter of the ring, so I can see the lake all right. That may be what’s lightening your sky, Maria.”
“Should I investigate, or lay out the cans first?”
“The cans.” Status’ voice of course showed no emotion, but the answer came quickly enough to sound emphatic.
“That’s three quarters of an hour at standard, Maria—Commander—maybe you should go outside and at least take a look,” suggested Belvew. “The only clouds I’ve ever seen here are cumulus, formed over lakes and raining back into them or near them. This isn’t connected with the lake.”
“Status?” Maria uttered the one word.
“Sergeant Belvew is probably right. There is a good chance you can obtain useful data.”
“And a better chance of your living though the next big shock.” Gene made no effort to keep the words to himself, but no one else commented on them. Not even Maria.
She kept the chipper with her as she leaned forward twenty degrees or so to Titan walking attitude and started back up the tunnel. The visible area of sky increased as she approached the entrance, but to her surprise she could distinguish no ground even when she was within a few meters of the opening and her line of sight over the sill was very clearly downward. Surely the cliff hadn’t . . .
There was nothing but the vaguely orange-tinted grey, much lighter than the familiar color produced by the suspended smog—tar—particles constantly forming high above.
Only when she was outside and several meters from the scarp did the regular orange-tan become visible to the east, beyond the cliff. Overhead and to the west the color paled steadily until, looking toward where the horizon should be, there was only a featureless and impenetrable near-white.
“I can see it now. It’s moving. It’s blowing from west to east,” came Ginger’s voice. “There must be some wind. Can you tell, Maria?”
The commander took a glovefull of the ice dust which had been blown from the tunnel, raised it to helmet level, faced south, and let it spill from her palm.
“Yes. Not much, even for Titan, but the air’s moving east. More to the point, the surface west of me has been covered with something; it’s almost white, too. That’s why I thought I couldn’t see the ground from inside the tunnel. It’s as near as no matter the same color and brightness as the sky in that direction.”
“Are you still sensing vibrations?” asked Status.
Maria paused before answering. “Yes. I’m getting used to it, I’m afraid. I may not be able to give an objective report about it before long.”
“I suggest you walk slowly westward, looking for changes in visibility and thickness of the white ground covering as you go, Commander.”
“All right.”
“Hold it!” It was Gene, of course. “If visibility goes down too far, how do you keep track of direction?”
“You can be observed and guided from the jet,” the computer pointed out. There could have had been no insult intended in its use of “you” rather “she”, but Belvew felt snubbed just the same.
“I’ve started,” was Maria’s only comment.
A human being fully equipped with environment gear can make a standing broad jump of four or five meters on Titan, if he doesn’t care which way up he lands. A walker reasonably careful about keeping helmet upward and at least one foot fairly near the ground will take nearly a second to make a one-meter stride. This is about four kilometers an hour, considerably less than the speed of a healthy young adult on Earth. This is not in spite of the gravity on the satellite, but because of it. There were now few healthy young adults on Earth, and still fewer on Titan, but Maria could make reasonable speed by her colleagues’ standards.
By the time Ginger had finished laying the seismic detectors, therefore, Maria was nearing what Seichi had described as the west edge of the “cloud.” By this time she felt sure, and had reported, that it consisted of solid particles far too small to see individually, but large enough to settle fairly quickly even here. They now formed a layer two or three centimeters deep under her feet, hiding the smog sediment which might have extended for as much deeper, or a whole meter, or fifty meters, or not been there at all. Its thickness, they now knew, varied widely over Titan’s surface. It had been moved—drifted?—extensively, settling very slowly as ultrafine dust. Even Titan’s negligible winds could move it easily until it finally caked in the methane rains.
The most reasonable guess at the white stuff’s identity was water ice, but no one had suggested a plausible origin for it. This was only partly because of earlier experience with other white powders observed to freeze on wings.
Ginger, her run finished, was flying perhaps imprudently low along the west edge of the cloud, but could make out no real details. It was Maria who got the first good enough look at the source to feed hungry imaginations.
She could not, afterward, deny that there had been some warning. A gradually increasing roar which she had unthinkingly attributed to Theia, and a steady, faint quivering of the surface underfoot which she soon tuned out should have alerted her.
Almost suddenly, within the space of a few steps, she found herself seeing the familiar near-orange sky in all directions overhead. The dense white fog now reached only to her shoulders, swirling gently around her body in what passed for a high wind here; thinner, more transparent fluff still reached several meters above her, but she could see a horizon of sorts. A few meters ahead, beyond the drifting white, the ground showed in its usual smog color, about the same tint as the sky but much darker except where bare patches of ice were exposed. None of the “pools” was in sight.
Her eyes had just registered that the surface ahead was lower than the one she was walking on when her feet made the same discovery. She stepped over the edge of another fault.
The fall would have been only about a meter if she had simply fallen. Instead, she was hurled upward by a blast of wind; not violently and not far before starting down, but she made an almost complete back somersault, landing mostly on her shoulders on a bare patch of ice. Her helmet took some of the impact, and for a moment she felt a terrifying chill which was fortunately subjective.
She brought herself upright with a push of her left hand and looked around.
She had left the vision-hampering cloud. Westward, as she had seen before stepping over the edge, the bare ground extended to the crater wall half a kilometer away. To the east was a smooth vertical step a meter or so high, whose face was almost totally hidden by roiling streams of white which spewed, also vertically, from a narrow crack at its base. Maria started to approach it, remembered the upward kick, became conscious of the roar, and stopped to report before getting any closer.
“I’m out of the cloud, Ginger. Can you see me? There’s another fault here, open, with something blowing up at its edge. It’s the cloud source, I’d say. My best guess is still ice dust, but we need labs here pronto.”
“I’m a couple of minutes north of the rim, too far to see you. I still have labs aboard; I left only one at the new patch. How many should I drop?”
“I’d say two—one just inside the cloud, one on my side of the edge. There’s a fair amount of snow, if that’s what the white stuff is, on the ground to the east; it shouldn’t take long to get samples. This side looks like ordinary titan, but we’d better make sure.” The commander stopped talking and listened.
“Coming around, five hundred up . . . I see you. I’ll slow down as much as I can. The labs don’t have parachutes—should I land and plant them properly?”
“Take a chance with them from where you are,” Belvew advised. “They’re more replaceable than Theia.”
The commander agreed, adding, “Don’t get down too close to stall—any kind of stall—and don’t get below five hundred. There’s an updraft at the fault strong enough to pick me up. Drop to the west; that’s into what wind there is and will take a little from the impact’s horizontal component, at least.”
“All right.” The commander watched the jet bank overhead and thunder eastward over the whiteness. Its deeper sound, she now realized, could easily be distinguished from the whistle of gas from the crevice. After dwindling for a minute it swung back, heading not exactly toward her but a little to her left.
“I don’t suppose there’s much chance of damaging you with either of these,” the pilot said conventionally, “but let’s plan for a clear miss.”
“I could dodge, or shelter near the cliff, but thanks for the thought. Are you dropping on this pass?”
“Yes.” The craft swelled in the commander’s field of vision and the thunder of its ramjets made parts of Maria’s suit vibrate. Ginger was not risking a stall even of the pipes, much less the wings, and of course didn’t want to waste mass by using rocket mode. The commander saw the two black dots separate from the hull scarcely a second apart; the pilot seemed to have confidence in her bombing skill. This proved justified. The first lab vanished into the cloud sixty or seventy meters east of the step, and the second struck a little farther from the fault than Maria was standing. It rolled to a stop about fifty meters northwest of her. She moved quickly toward it and watched with relief as it extended its sampling appendages and got to work.
“Someone read those as fast as you can, especially the one in the snow,” she ordered.
“I’m handling it,” came the voice of Cheru Asagewa, who was gradually working his way into Goodell’s former jobs. “It’ll be a few minutes at least.”
“Right. If it’s something weird like the vinyl in the pools let’s find out the first time.” The voice, to the surprise of some, was Ginger’s rather than Gene’s.
“Commander, can you provide more data on this cloud-emitting fault?” queried Status. “It is impossible so far to set up a coherent picture. Specifically, can you judge the width of the opening and flow rate of the escaping gas?”
“I’ll try. It was fast enough to lift me, though not very far. If Ginger will measure the wind, I, or you, may be able to figure out something from how high the stuff rises before it gets blown east.”
“All right. That’ll be a few minutes, too,” replied the pilot. Maria stood still; she was presumably the most visible small surface object in the area, and Ginger might want to use her as a reference marker. Even if she didn’t, moving was becoming hard work; another spell of fatigue was approaching, she could tell. It didn’t matter much; she could examine the fault from where she stood.
“The crack at the foot of the step is very narrow, not more than a millimeter or two,” she reported. “Right where it opens, the cloud is too dense to let me see through it, except in glimpses. A few centimeters higher it thins out, and I can see turbulence in the gas currents.”
“What’s the face of the scarp show?” asked Seichi.
“Plain ice up to about seventy-five centimeters, then smog sediment, then a couple of centimeters of white—I suppose the same stuff that makes the cloud. Cheru, when you get a chance walk the lab that’s in the cloud eastward—no, forget it. I’ll pick up the other and put it on the top at the edge.”
Not even Belvew remembered the updraft soon enough. Maria herself was not lifted this time, but felt the trivial weight of the spheroid she was carrying disappear as she was about to place it on the white rim. A moment later she gave a grunt of surprise, which naturally produced a response from Gene.
“What’s happening?”
“More trivia,” was the calm answer. “The lab was lifted out of my hand as I started to put it through the cloud. Now it’s bobbing around in the air about six or eight centimeters above the cliff and about a meter to the right of where I was reaching in. It’s oscillating about ten centimeters each way north and south, about three east and west and about the same up and down. I’ve seen that sort of thing before, of course; I just wasn’t expecting it.”
“What? Oh, Bernoulli effect.” Belvew’s pilot experience responded to the description. “Status, there’s the information you need about the updraft speed. You know the mass, area, and shape of the lab.”
“I will have to assume the gas density is the same as that of the general atmosphere,” the robot pointed out. “It probably is, that far above the vent, if the commander is right about the turbulence. She has just over twenty hours to suit emergency status; she has been using more oxygen than usual.”
No one was particularly surprised at Status’ sudden change of subject. The processor’s top priority was the physical status of the team members.
“Thank you,” Maria acknowledged. “Cheru, should I put the lab in the snow, or leave it where it is while you run a gas analysis.”
“Gas by all means. That’ll let us check Status’ guess. I have some readings from the other lab now, but I don’t understand them all.”
“What’s the trouble?” came several voices.
“The elements in the white stuff are hydrogen and oxygen and nothing else. It should be water, ice I at this pressure, but shows no crystal structure at all. There’s just a diffraction blur corresponding to H-O bond length—”
“How about oxygen-oxygen?” again several voices sounded almost at once.
“It is not hydrogen peroxide. No O-O bonds. I said it showed no structure, like a liquid or a gas.” The chemist’s tone, and even his voice, for a moment took on a surprising similarity to those of Arthur Goodell; once again Maria felt a chill not due to her surroundings.
“You have no ideas right now,” she said, trying to keep any questioning intonation out of her voice.
