Complete short fiction, p.270
Complete Short Fiction, page 270
Belvew remembered the ice landing vividly as he planned his present one. Some dangers were more foreseeable this time, but there was the chance that concentrating on these might lessen his readiness to respond to something unforeseen as promptly as his friend had done.
Well, Theia and Crius were still available at the orbiting station, and the chance had to be taken sometime. No one would blame him for losing Oceanus.
At least, not aloud.
He called for a wind check—even a few kilometers an hour could make a difference—and held a constant heading for ten kilometers while Inger adjusted a superimposed grid on his own screen’s image. Eventually the moving ground features followed one of the lines and let him tie their apparent motion.
“Only one point seven, from eighty seven,” was the verdict. Belvew swept out over the lake without asking Maria for a heading, lined up with the patch from a dozen kilometers to the west, and eased back on his power. He nosed up enough to split the result between descent and speed loss, and reached the shore fifty meters above the liquid and a scant two meters a second above ram stall. Chewing his lower lip, which fortunately affected no waldo controls, he closed the ram intakes and fed the liquid to the plasma arcs. There was a grunt of admiration which might have come from Goodell; the shift to rocket mode was almost perfectly smooth. The longitudinal accelerometer swung promptly to a negative reading, and stayed there as Belvew turned down his fires even more. He was approaching wing stall now, and began increasing the camber of his lifting surfaces toward the barrel-section shape which had been used so few times before, and never by him. He should, he suddenly realized, have done a few practice stalls two or three kilometers higher. He convinced himself quickly that breaking off the approach and going up to do this now was not really necessary but didn’t ask for anyone else’s opinion.
The rippled dust was fifty meters down—forty—thirty . . .
The glassy convexity loomed ahead, rising to meet his keels. He nosed up even more, killing descent briefly while airspeed continued to drop. The bulge kept rising toward him. Without orders, Inger began calling speed. The wings should maintain lift down to sixteen meters per second, Belvew knew, and the stall then should be smooth. Some levels of theory were pretty solidly established.
“Twenty-two zero—twenty-one nine—twenty-one eight . . .”
The keels were two meters from the bulge, and he nosed up still farther to keep them so as the airspeed continued to fall. That wouldn’t work much farther; past the top of the dome he’d have to drop the nose to make contact before stall, and that would speed him up. Not much in Titan’s gravity, but any would complicate the maneuver.
The side edges of his screen, representing the view to the rear, darkened suddenly, but he kept his attention ahead. If there was anything really important aft, someone would tell him, though he hoped they wouldn’t before he was stopped. For an instant he wished he were actually riding the jet, so that he could feel when touchdown occurred.
But he knew anyway. The accelerometer and three human voices supplied the knowledge simultaneously. He stopped reaction mass flow and quenched the plasma fires almost completely, but kept ready to use fractional rocket power on one side or the other if a swerve developed. Any yawing could roll the Oceanus onto its back, and it seemed most unlikely that whichever wing was underneath could take such treatment.
“You’re down!” came Ginger’s voice, this time separate from the others. Belvew snorted faintly, and spared enough of his attention to utter a bit of doggerel which had survived in various forms from the time of fabric-covered aircraft.
“A basic rule of fliers, and all who’ve ever hopped: a ship is never landed until it’s really stopped.”
But deceleration was now rapid as the keel friction made itself felt, and a quarter minute later the landing was complete. Belvew knew he wouldn’t feel it, but his stomach tightened up anyway for several more seconds as he watched screen and vertical motion meters for evidence that the ship was breaking through a crust.
Apparently it wasn’t, and at last he felt free to let his attention focus on the view aft.
The screen darkening was from a slowly spreading cloud of black smoke, its nearest edge well over a hundred meters astern. It could not, the pilot saw at once, have been produced by friction between his keels and the surface; his landing slide hadn’t started that far back, and his thermometers showed that the keels were at about a hundred and fifty kelvins. They were cooling, but not so rapidly as to suggest they had been hot enough to boil Titanian tar in the last few seconds.
Not that anyone really knew what temperature that would take, he reflected fleetingly.
More to the point, a fairly deep trough in the surface, starting just below the near side of the smoke cloud and extending as far back along his approach path as he could see, confirmed that whatever had happened to the surface had come before touchdown. The most obvious cause was the exhaust from his pipes.
The smoke was being borne very slowly away from him by the negligible wind. The trough, perhaps half a meter deep and ten or twelve wide, remained uniform as the receding cloud revealed more and more of it, extending down the slope of the convexity. The jet had come to rest almost exactly at the top of the bulge, it seemed; both pitch and roll axes read within a degree or so of horizontal.
“If it’s a crust, it’s pretty thick,” Goodell remarked.
“Unless the jets melted their way down and just produced more of it,” rejoined Ginger.
“Could be.” Being human, Goodell liked his own idea better; being a scientist of rank, he knew that alternative hypotheses, however unlikely, should always be developed as early as possible in hope of maintaining objectivity. “Let’s get samples.”
Belvew had powered down the flight controls, except for those which might be needed for emergency takeoff, and could safely nod his head, not that anyone could see him from their quarantine compartments.
“All right, in a few minutes. Non-destructive examination first. I assume everything in sight’s been recorded; now let’s look.”
“Right.” Goodell’s voice was a fraction of a syllable ahead of the others. Belvew activated the short-focus viewers on the lower part of his fuselage, and allowed their images to take over the Aitoff screen as his friends above chose—no, not above, he reminded himself; he was above with them; another real-surroundings reminder must be due. No one, however, said anything for several minutes; the surface still resembled obsidian at every magnification available and at every point the viewers could reach. The depression seen from the air was now hidden by the curve of the hill ahead, even though they were looking from its top, and the nearest point of the track presumably made by the exhaust was too distant for a really good look.
“I guess we dig,” Pete said at last. Belvew nodded again, as uselessly as before, but operated more of his controls.
The object which dropped from between the keels might almost have been an egg-shaped piece of the surface itself, as far as texture went, about fifty centimeters in its longest dimension. Until it reached the ground, which took an annoyingly long two seconds or so in Titan’s gravity, it appeared totally featureless. When it did strike, it flattened on the bottom to keep from rolling, uncovered a variety of optical sensors on the top and sides, and extended handling and digging apparatus, coring tools, and locomotion equipment.
Structurally and functionally, it straddled the accepted arbitrary borderline between nanotech equipment and pseudolife; it had been grown like the cans, not manufactured, and much of its internal equipment was of molecular size.
“Take it, Art. Where to?”
“Aft, I’d say. I’ll sample at each meter until we reach the exhaust trail, and then really dig. The smellers report ready.”
The “smellers” were of course the analytical equipment, and everyone began to tense up again as the egg crawled to its first sampling point and scraped up a specimen.
“How hard?” queried several voices at once.
“About three. If it’s a crust, it must be pretty thick to take Oceanus’ weight.”
“Composition?” This answer was slower in coming, naturally, but overall percentages were ready in less than a minute.
“Carbon fifteen point seven one; nitrogen eighteen point eight eight; hydrogen four point one one; oxygen twenty-eight point two five; phosphorus—”
“Phosphorus?” Again, several voices merged. The first three species had all been observed in samples of the atmospheric smog, and there was nothing surprising about the oxygen, since water ice had been seen; but this was the first element past the second period to be detected on Titan. It was also something more hoped than expected. Study of prehistoric substances had high mission priority, but no one had been sure there would be anything of the sort to study; and even the now pretty certain tectonic activity might not bring material from very deep in the satellite. That would depend on the still unknown cause of the activity.
Regardless of the fact that only two thirds of the sample mass had been accounted for, Ginger Xalco called out emphatically, “Structure, for goodness’ sake.”
No one suggested that the elemental analysis be finished first, certainly not Goodell, who might have pulled rank if he had chosen, but who shared her feelings. He set appropriate internal machinery to work while the lab crawled on to its next sample site, and its next, and its next.
“It’s a gel, really,” he said at last. “The solvent—pardon me, dispersing agent—is methanol. Most of the rest of the material seems to be polymers of one sort or another. Some of it’s carbohydrate, a lot has nitrogen, but it’s going to take a while to find whether we’re dealing with what we’d consider proteins—polypeptides made of the same amino acids we are.”
“Left or right?” asked Collos and Martucci together.
“You’ll have to wait even longer for that—”
“Wait a minute!” Inger cut in. “Even at this temperature and gravity a gel has no business holding up a jet for very long. Gene back to outside coverage! Quick!”
Belvew didn’t need to ask what his partner had in mind; he flicked his Aitoff back to the outside scene instantly. For a moment he felt relief, and then took a second look at his keels. Without word, warning, or delay he fed energy and mass to the plasma arcs and watched the main accelerometer, wishing once again that he could feel the jet’s response directly.
For a moment the meter stayed at zero; the surface seemed to be clinging to the keels, which had sunk into it for several centimeters, and Belvew slowly increased the thrust. Then the landscape suddenly jerked backward, and a moment later Oceanus was airborne.
Goodell gave an indignant cry as his lab, caught by the exhaust, stopped sending data. The pilot paid no attention for the moment, as he concentrated on reaching ram speed as quickly as possible while using a minimum of mass; it was Inger who answered the complaint.
“Sorry, Art. We can grow more labs, but not more jets. Did anything else come in before we blew your machine away?”
“No. And we don’t have the sample, either.” Inger pondered for a moment, then suggested, “Maybe we can find it. The lab should have held up; the exhaust cools pretty quickly, and we’d have been getting the data by beam to the plane. That would have been thrown off line. Order it to broadcast, and Gene can make some low passes back along the track; maybe we can get its signals.”
“What if it reached the lake? It must have been blown that way.”
“So much the better. We could use a reading on the composition of that juice. If anything is certain, it’s that it’s different from what we take from the clouds. Look at the bright side, Art.”
The answer was a grunt which might have meant anything. Barn’s instruments, however, showed that Goodell had indeed sent the “Broadcast” command to the lab; whether he was waiting more eagerly for resumption of data flow or for a chance to go on complaining was anyone’s guess.
Gene had been listening, even with his attention on piloting. In spite of his sympathy for Goodell’s feelings, he went up to a little over one kilometer, steered out over the lake to find a cumulus cloud and replaced the reaction mass he had just used. Then he increased thrust and nosed down—he was actually as impatient as any of the others, and more optimistic than most of them—and headed back toward shore and former landing site. He was down to fifty meters by the time the glassy patch showed ahead.
He cut back thrust and allowed the jet to slow to ramstall-plus-twenty, and made four passes over the area at that speed, first following and then paralleling the line of the earlier landing and takeoff.
No signals registered. With a grim expression which no one could see, and some muttered remarks which he took care no one could hear, he reset the camber, closed the ramjet intakes, and went back to rocket mode; but two more passes at a bare fifteen meters altitude and just above wing stall—neither Goodell or anyone else was going to say he hadn’t tried, whatever they might think of his flying judgement—still produced no signals. The lab had either been wrecked, though that still seemed rather unlikely, or was too deep in the lake for its signals to be picked up. The presumably nonpolar liquid shouldn’t interfere greatly with radio waves, but in broadcast mode any great depth certainly would. Titan was a strange place, but the inverse square law still applied. There was no basis yet even for guesses at the depths of the liquid bodies; that item had a very low priority in the program, though it would come eventually.
“Sorry, Art,” Belvew said at last as he increased thrust, returned to ramjet mode when speed sufficed, and began to climb away from the area. “I had hopes too, but I guess we’ve lost it. Have you any ideas what could produce a gel here?”
“I have enough trouble guessing what could produce methanol.”
“Why?” retorted Belvew. “The makings are all there. Ice and methane could do it directly, with release of hydrogen. Maybe some of the pre-life catalysts you’re hoping we’d find are actually here, if you think the reaction would go too slowly at ninety K’s.”
“Naughty, naughty!” cut in Maria. “Catalysts wouldn’t help. That’s endothermic to the tune of over a hundred kilojoules.” For a moment Gene felt an impulse to kick himself. He knew the woman hadn’t had that datum in her head, but he, too, could have called it up before making himself sound silly. Then he saw a way out.
“The energy could come from local heat,” he said, trying to keep smugness out of his voice.
“At ninety kelvins?”
“Sure. I did mention the other product. Hydrogen would leave the scene, so no back reaction—”
“That would happen only if it could leave the scene.” Goodell had pounced on the hypothesis, and was enjoying himself. “That would be at or very near the surface, not deep underground—”
“Or in or just under a lake,” Ginger cut in. “We’ll have to look for bubbles.”
“And lower than ordinary temperatures,” Belvew finished. “All right, we’ll look. Do some planning, you types with imaginations. I’m going to hit Line Five. Give me direction and time, Maria.”
The fifth planned seismic array was a quarter of the way around Titan from Lake Carver, ten or eleven hours flight at standard jet speed and over two even at full thrust in the thinner air tens of kilometers up. Belvew set everything on automatic, turned his watch over to Maria, and decided to eat and sleep. He needed the rest. A healthy twenty-five-year-old might have gone through the last hour casually, but he belonged to neither category. There were few now on Earth who did. Evolution of disease organisms had gotten farther and farther ahead of medical research: several dozen, counting new variations of older ailments such as leukemia, were now on the list of major health problems. Four of these involved sterility, three of them in women. Earth’s human population had actually halved in the last four decades, and the average age was barely twenty years in spite of, or because of, the species’ usual reaction to any major threat.
Suggested explanations among the panicked survivors were legion; satisfactory ones nonexistent. Even supernaturalists had had to fall back on Noachian-flood-type divine wrath at general materialism rather than specific sins. The scientists had done better, but not very much; each virus and other causal organism had been identified beyond reasonable doubt, but the information had not yet produced much effective treatment. There were two favored notions—they showed little sign of graduation to theories—among scientists about the basic cause of the trend: the organisms had been tailored by people with unspecified, but presumably insane by most standards, motives; or the sudden appearance of so many almost at once was merely a statistical event like a baseball batting slump or winning streak.
Belvew, who liked people, preferred the latter idea, but was too good a scientist to feel sure of it. CPRS, the ailment which would finish turning his own bones to something like eggshell china in another two or three years, would have taken only a little manipulation to produce from a normal human gene.
He shifted to full automatic control, cutting out the waldo entirely, and extracted himself from the suit. It could use servicing too; he floated back to his own cell and napped while its various life support devices were recharged, cleaned, and otherwise readied for further use. The suits were not full-recycling, indefinitely lasting affairs; they had been designed foremost as waldoes. They did, of course, have fusers and life support capacity designed for Titan’s environment, but could keep the wearer comfortable for only thirty hours or so there, and alive for perhaps twenty more.
Calcium-phosphorus recrystallization syndrome also, while robbing him of energy, kept him from sleeping for very long at a time, so he was back with Oceanus well before it reached the planned site of the next seismic array. There was nothing to do but watch scenery and, of course, hypothesize on the cause of the various features. He could see the ground well enough from this height, since he could use frequencies able to pierce the small amount of smog which was below him. There were block mountains and rift valleys; there were lakes large and small. The background, as well as the covering of nearly all the more or less horizontal area, might be the hypothetical tar dust; the factory had been planted on such a surface, but at the time no analysis had been possible. Neither cans nor labs had yet been grown.
