Complete Short Fiction, page 23
Father Feeney, his large, red face momentarily illuminated by the thin sunlight reflected from Saturn, stared in wonder. “Well, Anna,” he said finally. “It’s awfully cold, but the view alone ought to be enough to stir up some life out here.”
The little woman peered up at the stocky priest and smiled gently. “What a nice idea, Tom,” she said, “that life might emerge in response to beauty. If only it were true.”
Suddenly a lightning-set sky fire went off in Titan’s upper atmosphere where gravitational separation increased the molecular oxygen concentration, and the flat, rocky ground around them was fitfully bathed in an even redder light. They heard the thunder and then felt the ignition boom as the lander shuddered.
“I’m glad those things don’t happen on the surface,” said Commander Brunei half to himself. “Where do you think the O2 comes from, Tom?”
“Out of the rocks, Dave,” said Feeney at once. “I can’t see how the ice could ever disassociate at these temperatures. There must be a continual fall and accretion of water and hydrocarbon compounds from those ignitions.”
The Titan lander, its stubby wings jutting out on each side, sat on four eight-foot legs. The little craft had only two crew compartments, the upper one for sleeping, eating, and piloting, the lower one for lab work. The crew had known from the orbiter data that the ground-level atmospheric disturbances on Titan would be small. The high gas viscosity at these cold temperatures, coupled with the small contribution of heat from the distant sun, damped any weather activity. Their protective suits thus needed to resist only the bitter cold, but were flexible and non-armored, operating as they did at Titan’s surface pressure.
First priority was the search for life. Dr. Takoa and Brunei went off in the electric, three-wheeled land-runner to search along the shores and out onto the ice sheet near them, while Tom Feeney and Bateson poked around the rocks and dirt of a nearby “warm spot” they had located while flying across Titan’s surface. The NASA exobiologists, led by Anna Takoa, had developed an arsenal of marvelous, life-seeking instruments; deviccs that could detect the smallest bit of heat from the metabolic activity of microscopic, one-celled animals, protoplasm detectors that reported the weak radio waves emitted by all living cells undergoing certain kinds of biological activity, hydrocarbon probes that acoustically detected “large” or “complex” molecules such as might be associated with living matter.
Houston had designed the mission for a sixteen-day stay on Titan, to correspond with one complete orbit of the satellite around Saturn. Everyone had agreed before the start that if these four specialists could not find some kind of life on Titan in that time, it did not exist. And so, when they were not eating or resting, they went out on Titan’s dark surface, peering, measuring, digging, and hoping for some tiny sign of warmth or irritability.
After several days of continuous search, their disappointments began to grow. Titan seemed as sterile as Earth’s moon. There was ice with water under it. There was some oxygen and there were various hydrocarbons in the weathered “dirt.” But it was a chill, flat, dark world, and finally Father Feeney and Professor Bateson decided to spend a day in the lander organizing and assimilating their data and specimens. While Tom Feeney tried various plotting methods to separate and locate Titan’s two magnetic poles, Bateson worked in the chemical hood with some of the dirt and water from the surface.
“Hey, Father. Can you spare a minute?”
Tom Feeney, glum and disheartened, sighed and walked himself across the lab floor to the hood on his wheeled, aluminum stool. “Amoeba?” he suggested in a rumbiing, hopeful voice.
Bateson shook his long, craggy head, but he was grinning. “No, but something weird anyway, Tom. I hacked out about a gallon of ice from the edge of the lake.” He had both hands in the enclosed hood and he pointed with a slick, latex finger at the properties analysis box. “There’s a sample melted from that ice in the magic box, Tom, and I’m getting a freezing point of minus 67.1 degrees Celsius.”
Feeney frowned. “Quite a depression! Salty?” he suggested.
Bateson shook his head. “What I thought. So I distilled half a liter.” He pointed to a compact apparatus stuffed in one corner of the long hood. “Not much residue, mostly dust. I’ll look at it later. That material in the magic box now is distilled Titan water.”
“It’s not water, Greg, if it freezes at minus 67 C,” said Father Feeney, frowning harder. “What is that stuff? It’s absolutely clear?”
Bateson’s grin turned sly. “If the audience will now direct its attention to this corner of the stage.” His plastic-covered finger indicated a small electrolysis apparatus. “Notice that we have gas traps over the two electrodes, busily collccting gas from the electrolytic decomposition of this . . . ah . . . stuff. Note especially that one gas appears in juflt twice the volume of the other. Clue one. Now I take this glowing stick, ignited in the bun sen flame, and plunge it into the gas appearing in the lesser amount.” He lifted the glass cover off one of the collection burettes and plunged the glowing stick into the colorless gas. It glowed whitely, then flamed up. “Clue two,” said Bateson, peering sideways at Father Feeney’s round mouth and eyes. He then took the flaming stick, lifted the cover off the other burette, and held the fire at the mouth. A blue flame and a loud pop immediately followed. “Clue three,” said Professor Bateson, taking his hands out of the gloves.
But Tom Feeney’s initial surprise had been immediately replaced by something else, a wariness coupled with an excitement. “Greg, what else is odd about that . . . water?” he asked in a tight voice.
“Let’s see what we get for specific heat.” Bateson put his hands back in the hood and fiddled with the controls of the properties box. In a moment the monitor screen beside the hood flashed some numbers. “About 20 percent higher,” muttered Feeney thoughtfully. “Greg, can we get its density curve? Let’s see if the extremum at 4 degress C is still around anywhere.”
The box heated and tested the sample as requested and soon a full data curve of liquid density against temperature appeared on the monitor. Tom Feeney blinked at the output. “Look at that, Gregl The extremum is much deeper and at least 20 degrees above the freezing point.”
“Let me check that nutty thing with some real water,” grunted the chemist, but when he did, the curve exactly matched the Earth water reference line.
“Why is the Titan curve stopped at 28 C?” asked Feeney.
Bateson peered at the monitor. “Because that’s the boiling point, Tom. I didn’t ask it for steam properties.”
“Of course!” breathed Tom Feeney, and it suddenly seemed to Professor Bateson that Feeney was peering right out through the side of the lander.
At that moment they heard the whiss of the gas into the air lock. In a minute the hatch in the center of the circular lab compartment opened and a small, silver figure climbed up, Anna Takoa was both tired and discouraged. The finding of life, any life, on Titan would be the ultimate triumph in the carcer of any exobiologist. The hateful sterility of the place, cruel and harsh as it was, upset her. Titan wasn’t much but it was now the only hope left in the system. And she, the greatest of her exobiologist tribe, would eventually have to pronounce it a lost hope to the world press. Her science simply did not exist, at least in this system.
Dr. Takoa was followed immediately by Mission Commander Brunei in a much larger suit. And even this extrovert seemed quiet and lost, an investor who had gambled years of effort in an enterprise now seen to be without gain or profit.
Still, they could both sense that something had changed in the lab. Tom Feeney had showed that same, slumped resignation when they had left on the electric vehicle for another life search, but now he was standing straighter and his large face was flushed and tense. Even Gregory-Bateson’s New England reserve seemed frayed and his hands were twisting together.
The priest stared at the arrivals as they hung up their suits and connected them for recharge. “Greg,” he said, turning, “give them the same magic act you gave me. But start with the electrolysis.”
Nodding, Bateson pushed his hands back into the gloves and explained where he had found the water, how he had distilled it, and what he was doing now. After the flame-up and the little blue pop of an explosion, Bateson turned to Commander Brunei. “What would you say that stuff was, Dave?”
Brunei smiled at him. “Hey, you’ll have to ask harder ones than that to flunk me out. It’s water, Professor, just like in Chem 101.”
“Exactly,” said Bateson drily. “Anna, what are your thoughts?” The little Japanese woman crinkled her eyes at him. “It is obviously not water. Otherwise you wouldn’t be going through all of this,” she said with a small laugh.
“Now that’s not fair!” said Bateson. “Anyway, I now place a sample of the water in the magic box and give you . . . freezing point, density of the liquid, and boiling point at one At.”
They stared long and silently at the curve until Anna Takoa turned to look at Father Feeney. “Father Tom,” she said lightly, “do you understand this?”
Feeney sat facing them. “I may. Some of it, anyhow. But I think we should look at whatever other properties the analysis box can give first. I have to tell you a story that I think may relate to this, but you’ll believe it more after you see for yourself how this material acts.”
Brunei peered shrewdly at the older man. “Is it water, Father?” Feeney nodded. “Yes, I believe it is Titan water.”
“What other . . . changes . . . in its properties do you expect?” asked Brunei, his cool eyes peering at Feeney.
The priest smiled. “Yes, you should test me that way, Dave. All right. I think the solid phase will not only float, but have an unusually low density.”
Greg Bateson put his hands back in the hood and soon the monitor showed numbers and uncertainties. Brunei read off the ice density himself. “Point-six-two. I’ll say it’s lighter!” He whistled, then said more loudly to the chemist, “Greg, I know that super little properties box cost NASA a couple of million, but would you actually float a little Titan ice on a little Titan water for us to see?” Bateson immediately filled a beaker with water and opened the door to a small refrigerator at the back of the hood. He removed a sliver of ice with tongs, chopped it roughly cubical with deft knife strokes and popped it into the beaker.
There was no doubt about it; the Titan ice floated far higher than normal ice. And as it floated, it rapidly melted, runnels of water appearing throughout the underwater part. This caused the cube to topple over, but as it turned upside down, it kept on rotating, over and over, faster and faster, growing steadily smaller and less cubclike. They stared, astonished.
Finally Gregory Bateson rubbed his fingers into the corners of his eyes and said to the exobiologist, “Care for a couple of those ice cubes in your before-bed nip of bourbon, Anna?”
But Tom Feeney was intently watching the ice turn and melt. “Greg, is there any substance that when it melts lias an ordered, molecular momentum exchange, say from recoil effects, as the molecule leaves the solid phase?”
Bateson shook Ins head. “No way, Tom. No solid is ordered like that. And the distances are too small . . .”
But the priest was muttering, lost in thought. “We never even thought of that. A high-level ordering during solidification. But what use is it?”
“All right,” said Brunei to Tom Feeney with a rueful grin. “I give up on this property. Tell us another, Tom.”
Feeney pursed his lips and thought for a moment about Titan. “The vapor pressure curve should be steeper at the high end. Normalize the two curves, Greg, zero to 100, then superimpose them.” Indeed, the Titan water curve was much steeper near its boiling point than the curve for Earth water. Encouraged and excited, Father Feeney rattled off a few more predictions. “Thermal conductivity of the liquid is probably about the same, as is viscosity. Specific heat of the ice, the soh’d phase, will be higher. Latent heat of fusion also larger but boiling latent heat lower, way lower maybe. The ice probably has different absorptive characteristics to electromagnetic energy with infrared penetrating deeper.”
Almost an hour later, after all these statements were shown to be correct, the three of them stared silent and baffled at the priest, whose face now twitched with excitement. “I think we’d better hear that story, Tom, before I go completely nuts!” said Brunei.
“All right,” said Tom Feeney, settling his large bulk squarely on the small stool. “Understand, it was a painful time for me and I never thought . . . Well, as you know, I went to Notre Dame grad school after I joined the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits have always been big on physical science, sort of ‘keeping an eye on the enemy,’ I suppose, and I was a star in the geophysics department. So I became a professor there after my doctorate, and wrote my books and did all that business. I didn’t like academic life much. NASA has some stupid people and does some stupid things, but at least nobody is claiming they’re some kind of unique humanistic seers while behaving like hypocritical phonies.
“I was on the doctoral committee of a student named Elias Fullerton. He was a priest, a Jesuit too, so he immediately asked me to be his major professor since his other committee members were two laymen and a stuffy old Dominican who was department chairman. Fullerton was tall and scrawny, had a huge Adam’s apple, was nervous, jerky, what Freud would have seen as a classic neurasthenic.
“His dissertation topic was as odd as he was. He wanted to study, really optimize, the characteristics of water in relation to the climate of the Earth. Oh, many people had noticed how the stranger properties of water—for example its high heat capacity, density extremum, and floating of the solid phase on the liquid—related to climate and ocean behavior. But fifteen years ago it had just become possible to rnn computer simulations that could actually predict climatic changes with hypothetical changes in the properties of air or water. Before then we didn’t have the knowledge or the equations. Too much was empirical. Also, the machines couldn’t access the memory fast enough to do a complete Earth.
“The dissertation title was some typically academic jargon, ‘Climatic parameter variations of real and simulated Earth-type planets as a function of the liquid and solid phase properties of water.’ Something like that. Around the department, we called it ‘The theology of water.’
“Well, the thing interested me. It was certainly a project with some scope to it, so Fullerton wrote the proposal and we all signed it and we were off. He did the study both ways. That is, he both varied the water properties for our given Earth, then tried the true water properties on planets at different locations, with different masses and so on. That’s how I guessed out the trends for Titan’s water. I tried to remember what was the best kind of water for small planets far from the sun.”
“And the Earth’s water and the Earth itself optimized together?” asked Anna Takoa.
The priest nodded. “It was striking. For example, if you simply assumed a continuously increasing liquid density with cooling, without our water’s highly unique extremum at 4 degrees C, all kinds of drastic things happen. The cold water now lies stagnant in the deep oceans and the mean Earth temperature is over 20 Celsius degrees lower. Storms, wind and heavy cloud result. It’s even worse if you make the ice sink instead-of float. The oceans permanently freeze to within a couple of hundred feet of the surface. The rapid air temperature changes lead to massive stoim systems. Fullerton’s simulation predicted winds averaging over 300 miles an hour. If you monkey with the vapor pressure or the huge latent heat of vaporization, you get either too much cloud or none at all; either way, it’s disaster. Try reducing the high specific heat of water, and remember there are few other substances that are that high, and you lose the stabilizing effect of the ocean surface and get more storms, colder average days. Virtually everything he tried either had very little effect, as with viscosity and conductivity, or else drastic effects in either direction.”
“Then they were true optimums, Tom?” asked Dr. Takoa.
“Both ways,” answered Feeney. “UTiether you tilt the Earth up straight or lean it over to roll around like Uranus, you need another kind of water. Up straight, our water gives too much thermal stability and you get complete cloud cover and ice caps down to latitude 40 north and south. With the polar axis down flat, you get wild storms because of the source-sink effect of the hot and cold poles. To moderate this, you need a lower freezing point, lower specific heat so the storms are more localized, and other changes. In fact, it was the angle of tilt of the Earth’s axis that optimized most sharply with the properties of water.”
Commander Brunei sighed “And what was the optimizing parameter, Tom?”
Father Feeney shrugged. “It was some complicated thing that Fullerton had worked out. He went to the biologists and your gang”—Feeney pushed a finger at Professor Bateson—“to decide on a mean Earth temperature at which metabolic, hydrocarbon activity would best be served, then figured in a statistical number that expressed the severity of wind and climatic variations, kind of a standard deviation for lousy weather.”
“It was geared to us, Tom, to human life?” asked Brunei, frowning. Feeney nodded. “Yeah . . . us, Dave . . . not snakes or ants. Things that run at 98.6 Fahrenheit.”
But Commander Brunei was already wondering what he could possibly tell Houston in the next transmission.
Father Feeney continued. “What happened next, I have no excuses for. I don’t know how much you remember about the university situation fifteen years ago, but it was a discouraging, demoralizing time. I know I wasn’t thinking clearly. I hated the school, but I didn’t know what else to do, or to put it in the language inside my head, what God wanted me to do.
