Complete Short Fiction, page 282
“Your suit has seventeen point six hours.”
At least, walking was now easy.
“Your suit has seventeen point four hours.”
At last Martucci’s voice. “You’re there. Commander. Go ahead and jump. Try to land so you don’t pick up another coat of paint.”
“The updraft will have more to say about that than I, but here goes. I’m backing off—picking up speed as fast as I can—thank goodness ice isn’t slippery here—THERE! I’m through, but I’m somersaulting—don’t know how I’ll land—got a fair kick upward—coming down—feet first but leaning forward—good; I caught myself with one hand. Pete. I can’t see the jet. How far and which way?”
“One hundred thirty meters, the way you were travelling when you jumped—about forty degrees north of east. Just keep going, as fast as you can.”
“That’s not very fast. The ground’s shaking again.”
“So the accelerometers are saying,” Belvew agreed. “Status, record their readings. They should help make sense of the can reports.” Maria silently gave thanks that he could work as well as worry.
“I see Theia,” she called as the dark bulk loomed in front of her. “Good guiding, Pete. Twenty meters—the fog’s thinner—ten—I’m there. Climbing, aboard—hatch open—inside, sealed up.”
“You want to fly out yourself?” asked Gene.
“No. You keep it.” The commander let it be assumed that she was acknowledging Belvew’s piloting skill; she was not going to mention any other troubles while worry might interfere with his flying.
“Fine. I don’t know what’s ahead well enough to risk a westward takeoff. It’ll have to be downwind. No matter, with that wind speed.” The right engine roared, and Theia slid slowly forward, turning gradually to the left until her nose pointed back along the landing approach.
“Ready, Boss?”
“When you want.”
Both pipes thundered and Maria gratefully felt the acceleration which Gene could only read from his instruments far above. Her own screen showed little detail, though it was set at a wavelength which gave several hundred meters of fog penetration, and she watched the center of the Aitoff ellipse tensely.
The ground was fairly smooth, but with bumps to let her know by their cessation when Theia was airborne. Her tension remained; the crater rim was not very far ahead, she knew. How far had the run up to flying speed taken?
She remembered the flight instruments, and glanced at them.
Less than two kilometers, and it was over three to the rim—good—altitude fifty meters—a hundred—a hundred twenty as the wall flashed into view below the center of her screen. At the same moment she felt, just barely, the slight jolt as Belvew cut the reaction mass flow and let ramjet take over.
“Want to fly now, Maria?” he asked.
“No, you’d better keep it. I’m not sure I can.”
“Why not? Fatigue again?”
“A little, but that’s not the problem. I can’t get this sample of the pool off my right glove. Do you think it would be smart to warm this compartment up?”
“Commander!” Martucci cut in excitedly. “We wondered why you were tossed upward from the low side of those faults. It’s just friction! The rising side dragged the other with it for a moment! Ice isn’t slippery there, remember!”
Belvew, speechless for once, gave his attention to Theia.
Simile
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 ever written.
No one, not even Major Xalco herself, thought of her as being in her own quarantine section within meters of everyone else, though they all knew the fact. For all practical matters except vulnerability she was driving Theia, seven hundred kilometers below and a third of the way around Titan’s globe from the station’s present orbital position, trying to hold the jet at standard observation true airspeed of one hundred meters per second.
Even after an Earthly year the illusion of actually being in the aircraft tended to take over at unfortunate moments. The fact that occasionally the pilot was really on board probably made matters worse. The optimists who had believed at first that random reality reminders from Status would eventually cease to be needed had finally given up the hope.
Ginger Xalco had never been an optimist. She was in fact known as one of the first to comment whenever things seemed to be getting worse, and her voice now was practically a snarl.
“I don’t—know what would—constitute a P-K catastrophe on this—silly moon.” She got the words out in spasms, when some of her attention could wander briefly from piloting. Theia at the moment was not so much flying as being blown around, four kilometers above the smog-stained ice of the surface. Turbulence was not new; it had been met by all the pilots in reasonable places, mostly within and under the thunderheads which commonly grew in the week-long daytime over Titan’s numerous lakes. Horizontal winds of more than a meter or two a second, however, originally rare, were now routine. So was the seismic—actually new volcanic—activity which had ended the first attempt to set up a surface base and was now racking four other areas on Titan’s surface.
One of these was centered less than a dozen kilometers from the first factory. This might, of course, be coincidence; no one but a pessimist could feel sure either way.
Gene Belvew, whose non-commissioned rank made him officially a mere observer rather than a theorist, seldom let that fact keep him quiet. He answered Ginger’s rhetorical remark with a more literal question. “Why should we assume this is something catastrophic? We’ve been here only a fraction of a Saturn year, and we’re near the equinox. That’s a stormy period on Earth.”
Ginger’s attention was not too occupied to permit a retort.
“You mean some parts—of Earth, where—the sun—makes a lot of—difference. And since when—were volcanoes seasonal—whoops!”
“Trouble?” Major Collos, informally Maria, legally group commander, cut in instantly.
“Downdraft. I overcorrected—and had a pipe—stall. No danger—plenty of altitude—there. Fired up again. Status, that’ll put a—kink in my line. Allow for it.”
“Checked,” came the robot’s deliberately unmistakable voice. “It may be relevant that the increasing turbulence of your last few dozen kilometers shows a rough correlation with increasing methane content of the air.”
“Probably is,” Belvew’s voice sounded thoughtful. “Most of the thermals I’ve ever run into are over lakes, where the evaporation would drop the air density—”
“And drop the—temperature too. I thought we’d—agreed not to call them ‘thermals’. Or are—you just reminding us gently—that you were a pilot long—before this affair started and can’t—bury old professional knowledge?”
Maria, nearly certain that this charge was justified, changed the subject. “Are there lakes below you, Ginger? I don’t see anything special on my mapping stuff, and haven’t been following your Aitoff screen. What part of the spectrum are you using?”
“Long enough waves to see the ground—I’m below most of the smog anyway. There are four—lakes I can see from here, but none right—under me and none specially big. There’s no obvious reason—for extra methane—wow!”
“Another stall?”
“Just a bump. If I’d really been riding this machine—I’d—show ‘em the accelerometer records, Status.”
Exclamations like her own sounded in other human voices. All but one of the group were experienced enough, and identified well enough with their craft while flying, to “feel” the jerks shown by the instruments. The gaps in the pilot’s sentences were understandable to all.
“That’s close to red line,” Belvew worried aloud. “No one expected real turbulence here.”
“If you’d hit that at four or five times standard speed we’d be looking back at your wings,” Peter Martucci remarked uneasily. “Shouldn’t you slow down?”
“And risk having—all the lift go out—from under me?”
“You have plenty of altitude.”
“And that’s the—way I want it. How much longer—should I hold this—run, Status? I don’t—suppose the original timing means—anything any more. Is—there any trouble compensating for this—bucking? I’ll slow down if—the readings really need it.”
“There is no problem with the readings. Aircraft safety is still paramount.”
Silence, except for an occasional annoyed mutter from the acting pilot, ensued for some minutes. Maria had been tempted briefly to offer a suggestion—which would really have been a command—that Belvew take over the piloting; but the jet seemed in no real danger, and morale was important even, or perhaps especially, among a dying crew. She couldn’t compromise by taking the controls herself, for two reasons. She was no better a flyer than Xalco at the best of times and everyone knew it, and this was not the best of times.
The Waldo suits which operated the aircraft from thousands of kilometers were complex devices requiring input from many parts of the wearer’s body including toes, chins, and noses. Some potential group members on Earth long before had been rejected for poor facial control. The possibility that someone might need to fly with a missing right hand had not been foreseen, and in the fortnight since its loss no one in the Station had been able to think of a way to compensate for it.
She looked across her cubicle—actually a rather luxurious and extremely well equipped living space and laboratory—at the two tanks where most of her specimen from Arthur’s Pool reposed. It had seemed harmless enough to scoop up, in a glove designed to keep her hand from turning to glass at a surrounding temperature of ninety Kelvins and in a reasonably conductive atmosphere, a sample of the viscous matter in which Goodell had died. Xalco’s worrisome sticking in a similar pool had proven merely frightening, with no resulting damage.
Maria’s inability to clear her glove of the stuff during free fall up to the station had been merely a nuisance; Belvew had done the piloting. Embarrassing experience with their late commander had taught them to install bypass systems in the two remaining jets so they could be flown remotely even when someone was actually aboard.
Back in her quarters, however, the stubbornness of the sample had graduated from an annoyance to a problem; and when she realized that part of her glove had been dissolved and the stuff was starting to work on her hand, she had to declare an emergency situation. Of course all the individual quarters were equipped with remote-control surgical equipment, and a laser amputation had been a minor job—well within even Status’ competence. Even while it was going on, Maria had been almost more interested in another matter; she had joined with gusto, and seemingly full attention, the discussion over why the sample had failed to be inactivated by a temperature rise of over two hundred Kelvins. An egg starting at a normal three hundred ten, would have been much more than hard boiled at, say, the melting point of aluminum—a comparable ratio in temperature increase. Seichi Yakama was already talking as though the stuff were alive, but no one else went that far. Alien suit-penetrating and flesh-eating monsters seemed at least as unlikely to sober and rather conservative scientists as the alien kidnappers of UFO mythology. Besides, no one could really believe that a major goal of their mission—establishing that either life or prebiotic chemistry existed on Titan—had been achieved in less than a year and with so many of the original group still alive.
Things had never been that simple even in saber-tooth tiger days.
But Maria Collos could no longer fly, and the stuff in the tanks—one containing mostly the sheared-off forearm and gauntlet of her suit plus adhesions, the other the more personal material which had been extracted from it—was probably relevant to the problem even if not an answer. It was certainly interesting, not only to the victim. An obvious first experiment was under way; a scrap from the second tank’s contents was taped to the hand of one of the mausoleum’s residents, under remote observation to see what the stuff would do to human tissue at Titanian temperatures.
Maria had of course made the proper gesture, offering to resign the command she had so recently inherited from Goodell, but no one else wanted the job. The responsibility was often a distraction from more interesting work, and the crew unanimously, promptly, and firmly agreed that a theorist didn’t need two hands. Maria wished fleetingly that she had had as good a chance to argue with her late predecessor, but was accepting the situation. At least, the bunch of argumentative day dreamers had now committed themselves to following her—recommendations.
And the daydreams, more formally called hypotheses, were still being produced, luckily. She wouldn’t have to stimulate any imaginations. Martucci’s voice was relieving her of that worry right now.
“Y’know, Ginger, that point of Gene’s about equinox may have something. Just think of it as eclipse season. I know the sun’s a long way off, but a quick change of heat input over a whole hemisphere as Titan ducks into Saturn’s shadow might very well do something.”
Not even Belvew really spoke for some seconds, though many voices muttered at spot calculators.
“It’s worth checking,” Maria agreed slowly. “Intuitively, I’d say the input was very small, as you suggest, and if there is any effect it’d be lost in chaos. It takes Titan about half an hour to move its own diameter along its orbit, and except at the middle of the eclipse season it would take even longer to get completely covered or uncovered by Saturn’s shadow. Longest possible eclipse at mid-season, which we haven’t reached yet, is only about ten and a half hours. Could be a respectable amount of heat at that—Pete, you and Seichi think of some ways to word useful questions to Status on that one, bearing the chaotic possibility in mind.” She knew that everyone else would try to beat the assigned pair to the idea draw, but that would do no harm.
“The air’s quieting down, I think,” Xalco finally reported. “It’s been over an—hour. That’s quite a storm cell for Titan, if it was a storm cell.”
“It was not.” Status’ tone showed no change, but its firmness was taken for granted by everyone. “There was nothing cyclonic about its wind patterns, and there seems to have been more descending than ascending current area, though that cannot be certain; you traced only a single, rather irregular line across the region. The cause is not clear. I am making the obvious correlations which have been suggested as routine, but any others you want will have to be added by living imaginations. Nothing significant has appeared so far, and with the volume of data now involved it will take at least ten more minutes to make the remaining routine comparisons.”
“Please include eclipse data in them,” Maria replied.
“Done. I had already interpreted Corporal Martucci’s words as a suggestion. Only the fact that eclipse season and large-area turbulence started within a Titan orbit of each other, and in that order, is obvious. Both starting times are too recent for causal relationship either way to be reliably inferred.”
“What next?” asked Ginger. “There are a few more seismic lines to lay out, aren’t there? I mean the originally planned ones, not the stuff we’ve had to improvise around the new volcanoes.”
“You’ll need to restock on cans first,” Belvew spoke before the robot managed to do so. “The extra patterns cut into the reserves pretty deeply.”
“I know. There should be plenty at the factory—Status, you didn’t stop manufacture when the stocks we originally planned were finished, did you?”
“Yes, but I reset the unit for more after the change in operations was implemented. There will be a full load waiting when you reach the factory.”
“Then I’d better start back there now. Heading, Maria or somebody?”
“Do you still have labs aboard?” cut in Yakama.
“Sure. Why?”
“I’d like very much to make some comparisons between Arthur’s Pool, the one by the factory, and the one at Lake Carver where Gene set down and started to sink a few weeks ago. We dropped a lab there at the time, but it got blown into the lake when he found he was sinking and took off in such a hurry. There are a couple of units still working in Settlement Crater and lots at the factory site where the—where you’re going anyway, but I’d give a lot to be able to cross-check all three places where any of our stuff has touched Titan’s surface physically. D’you suppose you could drop another lab there by Lake Carver before you settle down at the factory, Ginger?”
“I don’t see why not. Wait a minute, though—we know we’d better not drop it in the lake, since we couldn’t hear the first one after it went in, and we know the ground there is pretty hard. Wouldn’t I have to land to get a lab down intact?”
“Gene landed, and you dropped labs from flight during Maria’s hike, and they stood it all right—”
“They landed in snow!”
“About four centimeters deep, as I recall.”
“That can make a big difference, especially under Titan gravity. But aren’t there any snow patches reasonably close to Carver? The labs can travel, after all.”
“I take it you’d rather not make an extra landing.”
“Is that criticism?”
“I’ll do it if you like,” Belvew cut in. Maria played this one safely, too.
“Ginger can do it if it needs to be done. I agree with the importance of having labs there, if only to get an analysis of that lake; we never found out why we couldn’t read from the unit blown into it—it could have been depth or composition of the lake or blast damage to the lab itself. Go ahead down, Ginger—but do check the area for snow patches first.”
“There were none nearby at that time,” Status reminded them. “All the ice we have seen has been massive, except the dust recently being produced from the volcanic vents.”
“I’ll look anyway. Heading, please?” Ginger relaxed; at least this should be a more comfortable ride. It was.
There was indeed no snow, and relatively little surface ice; Lake Carver was on Titan’s darker trailing hemisphere. Ginger was not, as she had tacitly admitted, eager to land, but had no intention of handing Belvew the responsibility. She made all reasonable delays, looking unsuccessfully for nearby snow patches, doing a careful wind run and even topping off her mass tanks at a nearby thunderhead—she had used rocket mode once or twice in the turbulence—but it seemed clear that dropping a lab even at minimum safe flying speed and altitude would probably only wreck the equipment. Even if the device remained in shape to heal itself, that would certainly take much longer than a landing.
