Barnacle Bull (ss), page 1
BARNACLE BULL
by Poul Anderson
(Writing as Winston P. Sanders)
Aside from other admirable features. this story
has science-fiction’s first legitimate explanation
for space barnacles!
From : Astounding/Analog September 1960 edition.
Illustrated by van Dongen
The Hellik Olav was well past Mars, acceleration ended, free-falling into the Asteroid Belt on a long elliptical orbit, when the interior radiation count began to rise. It wasn’t serious, and worried none of the four men aboard. They had been so worried all along that a little extra ionization didn’t seem to matter.
But as the days passed, the Geigers got still more noisy.
And then the radio quit.
This was bad! No more tapes were being made of signals received— Earth to one of the artificial satellites to Phobos to a cone of space which a rather smug-looking computer insisted held the Hellik Olav—for later study by electronics engineers. As for the men, they were suddenly bereft of their favorite programs. Adam Langnes, captain, no longer got the beeps whose distortions gave him an idea of exterior conditions and whose
Doppler frequency gave him a check on his velocity. Torvald Winge astronomer, had no answers to his requests for data omitted from his handbook and computations too elaborate for the ship’s digital. Per Helledahl, physicist, heard no more sentimental folk songs nor the recorded babblings of his youngest child. And Erik Bull, engineer, couldn’t get the cowboy music sent from the American radio satellite. He couldn’t even get the Russians’ Progressive jazz.
Furthermore, and still more ominous, the ship’s transmitter also stopped working.
Helledahl turned from its disassembled guts. Despite all he could do with racks, bags, magnetic boards, he was surrounded by a zero gravity halo of wires, resistances, transistors, and other small objects. His moon face peered through it with an unwonted grimness. “I can find nothing wrong,” he said. “The trouble must be outside, in the boom.”
Captain Langnes, tall and gaunt and stiff of manner, adjusted his monocle. “I dare say we can repair the trouble,” he said. “Can’t be too serious, can it?”
“It can like the devil, if the radar goes out too,” snapped Helledahl.
“Oh, heavens1” exclaimed Winge. His mild, middle-aged features registered dismay. “If I can’t maintain my meteorite count, what am I out here for?”
“If we can’t detect the big meteorites in time for the autopilot to jerk us off a collision course, you won’t be out here very long,” said Bull. “None of us will, except as scrap metal and frozen hamburger.”
Helledahl winced. “Must you, Erik?”
“Your attitude is undesirable, Herr Bull,” Captain Langnes chided. “Never forget, gentlemen, the four of us, crowded into one small vessel for possibly two year’s, under extremely hazardous conditions, can only survive by maintaining order, self-respect, morale.”
“How can I forget?” muttered Bull. “You repeat it every thirty-seven hours and fourteen minutes by the clock.” But he didn’t mutter very loudly,
“You had best have a look outside, Herr Bull,” went on the captain.
“I was afraid it’d come to that,” said the engineer dismally. “Hang on, boys, here we go again.”
Putting on space armor is a tedious job at best, requiring much assistance. In a cramped air-lock chamber—for lack of another place—and under free fall, it gets so exasperating that one forgets any element of emergency. By the time he was through the outer valve, Bull had invented three new verbal obscenities, the best of which took four minutes to enunciate.
He was a big, blocky, redhaired and freckle-faced young man, who hadn’t wanted to come on this expedition. It was just a miserable series of accidents, he thought. As a boy, standing at a grisly hour on a cliff above the Sognefjord to watch the first Sputnik rise, he had decided to be a spaceship engineer. As a youth, he got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and afterward worked for two years on American interplanetary projects. Returning home, he found himself one of the few Norwegians with that kind of experience. But he also found himself thoroughly tired of it. The cramped quarters, tight discipline, reconstituted food and reconstituted air and reconstituted conversation, were bad enough. The innumerable petty nuisances of weightlessness, especially the hours a day spent doing ridiculous exercises lest his very bones atrophy, were worse. The exclusively male companionship was still worse: especially when that all-female Russian satellite station generally called the Nunnery passed within view.
“In short,” Erik Bull told his friends, “if I want to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, I’d do better to sign up as a Benedictine monk. I’d at least have something drinkable on hand.”
Not that he regretted the time spent, once it was safely behind him. With judicious embroidering, he had a lifetime supply of dinner-table reminiscences. More important, he could take his pick of Earthside jobs. Such as the marine reclamation station his countrymen were building off Svalbard, with regular airbus service to Trondheim and Oslo. There was a post!
Instead of which, he was now spinning off beyond Mars, hell for leather into a volume of space that had already swallowed a score of craft without trace.
He emerged on the hull, made sure his life line was fast, and floated a few minutes to let his eyes adjust. A tiny heatless sun, too brilliant to look dose to, spotted puddles of undiffused glare among coalsack shadows. The stars, unwinking, needle bright, were so many that they swamped the old familiar constellations in their sheer number. He identified several points as asteroids, some twinkling as rotation exposed their irregular surfaces, some so close that their relative motion was visible. His senses did not react to the radiation, which the ship’s magnetic field was supposed to ward off from the interior but which sharply limited his stay outside. Bull imagined all those particles zipping through him, each drilling a neat submicroscopic hole, and wished he hadn’t.
The much-touted majestic silence of space wasn’t evident either. His air pump made too much noise. Also, the suit stank.
Presently he could make sense out of the view. Hie ship was a long cylinder, lumpy where meteor bumpers protected the most vital spots. A Norwegian flag, painted near the bows, was faded by solar utraviolet, eroded by micrometeoric impacts. The vessel was old, though basically sound. The Russians had given it to Norway for a museum piece, as a propaganda gesture. But then the Americans had hastily given Norway the parts needed to renovate. Bull himself had spent six dreary months helping do that job. He hadn’t been too unhappy about it, though. He liked idea of his country joining in the exploitation of space. Also, he was Americanized enough to feel a certain malicious pleasure when the Ivan Pavlov was rechristened in honor of St. Olav.
However, he had not expected to serve aboard the thing!
“O.K., O.K.,” he sneered in English, “hold still, Holy Ole, and we ll have a look at your latest disease.”
He drew himself tack along the line and waddled forward over the hull in stickum boots. Something on the radio transceiver boom … what the devil? He bent over. The motion pulled his boots loose. He upended and went drifting off toward Andromeda. Cursing in a lackluster voice, he came back hand over hand. But as he examined the roughened surface he forgot even to be annoyed.
He tried unsuccessfully to pinch himself.
An hour convinced him. He made his laborious way below again. Captain Langnes, who was Navy insisted that you went “below” when you entered the ship, even in free fall. When his spacesuit was off, with only one frost burn suffered from touching the metal, he faced the others across a cluttered main cabin.
“Well?” barked Helledahl. “What is it?”
“As the lady said when she saw an elephant eating cabbages with what she thought was his tail,” Bull answered slowly, “if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Of course I would!” said Langnes. “Out with it!”
“Well, skipper … we have barnacles.”
A certain amount of chemical and biological apparatus had been brought along to study possible effects of the whatever-it-was that seemed to forbid spacecraft crossing the Asteroid Belt. The equipment was most inadequate, and between them the four men had only an elementary knowledge of its use. But then, all equipment was inadequate in zero gravity, and all knowledge was elementary out here.
Work progressed with maddening slowness. And meanwhile the Hellik Olav fell outward and outward, on an orbit which would not bend back again until it was three Astronomical Units from the sun. And the ship was out of communication. And the radar, still functional but losing efficiency all the time, registered an ever thicker concentration of meteorites. And the ’tween-decks radiation count mounted, slowly but persistently.
“I vote we go home,” said Helledahl. Sweat glistened on his forehead, where he sat in his tiny bunk cubicle without touching the mattress.
“Second the motion,” said Bull at once. “Any further discussion? I move the vote. All in favor, say, ‘Ja’ All opposed, shut up.”
“This is no time for jokes, Herr Bull,” said Captain Langnes.
“I quite agree, sir. And this trip is more than a joke, it’s a farce. Let’s turn back!”
“Because of an encrustation on the hull?”
Surprisingly, gentle Torvald Winge supported the skipper with almost as sharp a tone. “Nothing serious has yet happened,” he said. “We have now shielded the drive tubes so that the barnac
“Live ones,” said Helledahl.
“You see,” Bull added, “we’re not in such bad shape now, but what’ll happen if this continues? Just extrapolate the radiation. I did. We’ll be dead men on the return orbit.” “You assume the count will rise to a dangerous level,” said Winge. “I doubt that. Time enough to turn back, if it seems we have no other hope. But what you don’t appreciate, Erik, is the very real, unextrapolated danger of such a course.”
“Also, we seem to be on the track of an answer to the mystery—the whole purpose of this expedition,” said Langnes. “Given a little more data, we should find out what happened to all the previous ships.” “Including the Chinese?” asked Bull.
Silence descended. They sat in midair, reviewing a situation which familiarity did nothing to beautify.
Observations from the Martian moons had indicated the Asteroid Belt was much fuller than astronomers had believed. Of course, it was still a rather hard vacuum … but one through which sand, gravel, and boulders went flying with indecent
speed and frequency. Unmanned craft were sent in by several nations. Their telemetering instruments confirmed the great density of cosmic debris, which increased as they swung further in toward the central zone. But then they quit sending. They were never heard from again. Manned ships stationed near the computed orbits of the robot vessels, where these emerged from the danger area, detected objects with radar, panted to match velocities, and saw nothing but common or garden variety meteorites.
Finally the Chinese People’s Republic sent three craft with volunteer crews, toward the Belt. One ship went off course and landed in the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco. After its personnel explained the unique methods by which they had been persuaded to volunteer, they were allowed to stay. The scientists got good technical jobs, the captain started a restaurant, and the political commissar went on the lecture circuit.
But the other two ships continued as per instructions. Their transmission stopped at about the same distance as the robot radios had, and they were never seen again either.
After that, the big nations decided there was no need for haste in such expensive undertakings. But Norway had just outfitted her own spaceship, and all true Norwegians are crazy. The Hellik Olav went out.
Winge stirred. “I believe I can tell you what happened to the Chinese,” he said.
“Sure,” said Bull. “They stayed on orbit till it was too late. Then the radiation got them.*’
“No. They saw themselves in our own situation, panicked, and started back.”
“So?”
“The meteorites got them.** “Excuse me,” said Langnes, obviously meaning it the other way around. “You know better than that, Professor Winge. The hazard isn’t that great. Even at the highest possible density of material, the probability of impact with anything of considerable mass is so low—”
“I am not talking about that, captain,” said the astronomer. “Let me repeat the facts ab initio, to keep everything systematic, even if you know most of them already.
“Modern opinion holds that the asteroids, and probably most meteorites throughout the Solar System, really are the remnants of a disintegrated world. I am inclined to suspect that a sudden phase change in its core caused the initial explosion—this can happen at a certain planetary mass— and then Jupiter s attraction gradually broke up the larger pieces. Prior to close-range study, it was never believed the asteroidean planet could have been large enough for this to happen. But today we know it must have been roughly as big as Earth. The total mass was not detectable at a distance, prior to space flight, because so much of it consists of small dark particles. These, I believe, were formed when the larger chunks broke up into lesser ones which abraded and shattered each other in collisions, before gravitational forces spread them too widely apart.”
“What has this to do with the mess were in?” asked Bull.
Winge looked startled. “Why … that is—” He blushed. “Nothing, I suppose.” To cover his embarrassment, he began talking rapidly, repeating the obvious at even greater length:
“We accelerated from Earth, and a long way beyond, thus throwing ourselves into an eccentric path with a semi-major axis of two Astronomical Units. But this is still an ellipse, and as we entered the danger zone, our velocity gained more and more of a component parallel to the planetary orbits. At our aphelion, which will be in the very heart of the Asteroid Belt, we will be moving substantially with the average meteorite. Relative velocity will be very small, or zero. Hence collisions will be rare, and mild when they do occur. Then we’ll be pulled back sunward. By the time we start accelerating under power toward Earth, we will again be traveling at a large angle to the natural orbits. But by that time, also, we will be back out of the danger zone.
“Suppose, however, we decided to turn back at this instant. We would first have to decelerate, spending fuel to kill an outward velocity which the sun would otherwise have killed for us. Then we must accelerate inward. We can just barely afford the fuel. There will be little left for maneuvers. And… we’ll be cutting almost perpendicularly across the asteroidal orbits. Their full density and velocity will be directed almost broadside to us.
“Oh, we still needn’t worry about being struck by a large object. The probability of that is quite low. But what we will get is the fifteen kilo-meter-per-second sandblast of the uncountable small particles. I have been computing the results of my investigations so far, and arrive at a figure for the density of this cosmic sand which is, well, simply appalling. Far more than was hitherto suspected. I don’t believe our hull can stand such a prolonged scouring, meteor bumpers or no.”
“Are you certain?” gulped Helledahl.
“Of course not,” said Winge testily. “What is certain, out here? I believe it highly probable, though. And the fact that the Chinese never came back would seem, to lend credence to my hypothesis.”
The barnacles had advanced astoundingly since Bull last looked at them. Soon the entire ship would be covered, except for a few crucial places toilfully kept clean.
He braced his armored self against the reactive push of his cutting torch. It was about the only way to get a full-grown barnacle loose. The things melded themselves with the hull. The flame drowned the sardonic stars in his vision but illuminated the growths.
They looked quite a bit like the Terrestrial marine sort. Each humped
up in a hard conoidal shell of blackish-brown material. Beneath them was a layer of excreted metal, chiefly ferrous, plated onto the aluminum hull.
I d hate to try landing through an atmosphere, thought Bull. Of course, that wouldn’t be necessary. We could go into orbit around Earth and call for someone to lay alongside and take us off … But heading back sunward, we’ll have one sweet time controlling internal temperature … No, I can simply slap some shiny paint on. That should do the trick. I’d have to paint anyway, to maintain constant radiation characteristics when micro-meteorites are forever scratching our metal. Another chore. Space flight is nothing but one long round of chores. The next poet who recites in my presence an ode to man’s conquest of the universe can take that universe—every galaxy and every supernova through every last, long light-year—and put . . „
If we get home alive.
He tossed the barnacle into a metal canister for later study. It was still red hot, and doubtless the marvelously intricate organism within the shell had suffered damage. But the details of the lithophagic metabolism could be left for professional biologists to figure out. All they wanted aboard Holy Ole was enough knowledge to base a decision on.
Before taking more specimens, Bull made a circuit of the hull. There were many hummocks on it, barnacles growing upon barnacles. The fore-section had turned into a hill of
shells, under which the radio transceiver boom lay buried. Another could be built when required for Earth approach. The trouble was, with the interior radiation still mounting—while a hasty retreat seemed impossible—Bull had started to doubt he ever would see Earth again.
