Half Life (15 page)

The first pass through the cloud had to be written off as practice; he had forgotten to set up collecting mode, and none of the others had noticed either. The practice, however, did help, and on the second try he not only took a respectable amount of liquid into his tanks but held his airspeed within three meters a second of the planned value—with the errors all on the high side. He was being
very
careful. He knew, in his head, the recovery procedure from a pipe stall, but thinking it through was one thing, reflex quite another.

Belvew noted all this without taking too much attention from his own flying procedure—after all, he did have the proper reflexes—and gave a rather obvious sigh of relief when
Crius’s
tanks indicated full.

Goodall must have heard it, but he made no comment about it. He probably felt much the same.

“So much for that,” was his only remark. “All right, Maria. My spot is at seven point one degrees south, one twenty-five point five east of the factory. Give me a heading, please.”

Maria hesitated for just a moment, and everyone including Goodall knew why. If she refused guidance, he’d have to come back—

No, he wouldn’t. He’d order Status to guide him, or if that was blocked in some way he could do a rough mental calculation. He must have kept
some
track of his entry point and subsequent flight path. Any lack of precision in his figures would simply waste suit time and fuel, and interfere with whatever he hoped to get done.

“Heading zero nine six. Climb to eighty kilometers for best speed. At thirty-seven minutes, start descent at ten k per minute. You’ll see it when you’re down to two k, about five ahead.”

“Thanks. The rest of you: this can be considered the planned settlement. We’ll have to plant another factory and plan possible manned ground structures. If you can do that soon enough I may be able to do something about checking the orientation of the factory’s roots, this time—no, you can’t manage that. It should concentrate on making structure blocks, and someone will have to come down from time to time to do the actual building until habitable quarters are ready. I know this is sooner than we planned, and someone will still have to finish the rest of the seismic lines and atmosphere checks, but I’ve decided the chemistry needs to get started right now. There’ll have to be a few, but only a few, analyzers at first—maybe a dozen or so. I have four, the dials say. The new factory can turn out any more we need, and then get at the bricks. Maria, you can slow down on mapping and take general command.”

“But I’m only—”

“You’re a light colonel as of right now. Sam Donabed has date of rank on you, but he won’t raise a fuss—will you, Sam?”

“Good General, no, sir. Who wants to spend time running things?”

“Well, Maria doesn’t either, so don’t let her argue you into it. Maria, you’re the best for it. I know. I knew long ago. That’s an order, and Status has it on record, for what that may be worth to anyone. Use your Athenian organizing powers. Set up as many more surface analysis sites as seems good to you and that the factories can supply, and concentrate first on comparing the Collos patch compositions at random locations with the ones by the settlement. You’ll know which one to watch most closely for change—I’ll use the one closer to the lake here, partly because it is closer to where I hope to land and partly because it’s smaller; what I add will have higher concentration and be easier to measure. Don’t ask any questions until I’m down; just think over what I may have missed. There’s bound to be something.”

The reference to the ancestry suggested by her name almost revived Maria’s chronic amusement. Long ago she had said something which had inspired the misunderstanding—a silly one, in view of the thorough mixing of ancestry and variation of naming customs which now characterized humanity—and she had been looking forward, someday, to letting him see her face, which was emphatically not Greek. Now—

“One question,” Belvew cut in. “I’m starting up now, and will have to concentrate on making orbit for a few minutes. How sure are you that you can make your landing—yourself?”

The colonel gave no sign of being insulted. “I’ll make some practice runs when the place is in sight, and decide. I promise I’ll let you know if I need help.”

No one pointed out that he had broken one promise already, and for long minutes the two craft went their respective ways. Little was accomplished at the station.

Belvew was still in orbit when
Crius
came in sight of the crater and lake, and Ginger was standing by to help talk the colonel down. However little anyone approved of what was happening, and however much arguing might yet be done with their nominal commander, it was still critically important to save the jet.

Everyone but Belvew, who had only his own screen and had to use it for his own flying, watched tensely as
Crius
passed slowly—too slowly, some felt—over the ring.

Still two kilometers up, Goodall shifted briefly to rocket mode, slowed down, and felt for wing-stalling speed. It seemed to be just where it should be with the tanks full and wings at landing camber. He repeated the trial several times, making recoveries with various combinations of added thrust and lowered nose, and eventually satisfied himself and almost satisfied his watchers.

“You might make it at that, Arthur,” Ginger admitted after the fourth try, “but it will be a lot safer if you let me set you down. It may not make much difference to you”—she had pretty well resigned herself to Goodall’s completion of his plan—“but keeping the machine in one piece is still pretty important to the rest of us.”

“And to me,” the commander assured her. “I want the job finished as much as you do. You know that. My judgment may be off orbit now, of course. I’d be the last to know about that. But what I’m doing is based on my considered opinion of what’s best for the job, including the fact that I won’t be able to do useful thinking much longer.”

“Moon wind!” snapped Peter Martucci. “If your judgment is off, you have no business pulling this trick!”

“I have no business doing anything else. I have other reasons for working it this way. One of them I’m sure you know or can guess, some I’m just as sure you don’t and couldn’t, but I don’t have time to argue them all. I have work to do and not much time after I’m down.”

“Then let me land you, Arthur,” Ginger said quietly. “Well—there’s a problem with that—”

“You promised! We know you broke the one about not making unauthorized flights, but surely that’s the only one—you wouldn’t break another—”

“I didn’t mean to; but there’s a problem I didn’t consider.”

“What?”

“I unplugged the override before I floated into this thing, in case someone caught on too soon and wanted to bring me back before the ship was committed. I’m still in the control niche, and no one else can fly it while my suit is here.”

“Reconnect the override, then.”

“That’s what I didn’t think of. I can’t reach the jack. No one could who is any larger than lePing, and I’m not sure about her. I can’t move around enough to reach it. I’ll have to take her down myself. Ride as close as you can, and say anything you think may be useful, Major Xalco, but I’ll have to do the real flying.”

There was silence for half a minute as Goodall swung away from the crater to set up a landing path.

Ginger Xalco briefly wondered if she could persuade him to wait until Belvew was back at the station and could do the talking, but this was only for a moment; then she realized that the old fellow wouldn’t—couldn’t—waste that much time. There were the others, of course; everyone but Martucci and the doctor was an experienced pilot. But after Belvew she was the best and knew it. Responsibility can sometimes be disconnected from authority, but never from competence.

“Don’t land across the lake,” she said carefully. “It has the usual cumulus cloud above it, and you’ll hit turbulence just before touching down. I suppose you want to stop near the patch.”

“Right.”

“Then come in on—oh, seventy-five. Drop to five hundred meters, shift to rocket, and slow down to wing stall plus twenty by the time you’re five kilometers out.”

“Why five?”

“Don’t ask questions either.
I’m
allowing for corrections when you overcontrol, if you must know. If you even think you’re starting to stall, feed full thrust, wait a second, and nose up two degrees; that will pull you out of trouble, and we can always make another pass. Or a fuel run.”

Goodall remained silent this time. If he wondered how many landing passes he really had time and mass for, no one knew it. Mass was less critical, of course; he
could
tank up again, as Ginger had said, if he wasted too much.

But time was different.

A minute later he was on line and altitude, and settling down to speed.

And feeling every signal of his waldo suit as agony.

There was no way to turn the impulses off; such a need had never been imagined. He did have ointments for dulling his skin sensitivity, but their last application had been well before his leaving the station, the stuff itself was back there, and even if it had been on the jet there was no way to apply anything through the suit. He should have been able to concentrate so thoroughly on the landing that the pain couldn’t get his attention, but it wasn’t working out that way. If he wrecked the jet—if he killed himself or hurt himself too badly to let him do what still had to be done—

“Airspeed and pitch, you idiot!” They were his own mental commands, not an actual message. The ones Belvew had provided earlier.

“Nose down just a hair.” That was Ginger. He tried to obey, but the hair would have been thick enough to hold a kite, at least in Earth’s atmosphere. The woman’s tone didn’t change; she wasn’t snapping now.

“Up a little. That’s better. A little high now, but take it out in power drop—down to five sixty.” Thrust lessened, speed decreased. He didn’t want to look at the indicator, but had to.

Two meters per second above wing stall. There’d better be no turbulence.

“Good. Hold that. Rocket mode—good. Altitude fifty. Fifty seconds to touch. Don’t change a thing. Forty meters, forty seconds. The ground is level. No complications. Twenty meters. Ten. Five to go—hold your attitude—don’t touch anything—stand by on thrust—
cut!
”

The pilot felt the keels touch, surprisingly gently.

“Let it slide!”

For the first time he felt free to look at the outside screen, and immediately forgot his pain again.

The lake was behind him and to his left, the chosen patch almost at his left wing as
Crius
came to a halt.

The crater rim was over three kilometers ahead; there would be plenty of space for whoever would do the takeoff. There was nothing left to do but the job.

He dropped two lab units between the keels, thought a moment, then dropped the remaining two. There were some seismic cans on board, according to the indicators, and he released two of these. He didn’t know where he was with respect to any of the seismic lines, but someone could check that later.

“If someone can get a factory pod down here pronto, I might last long enough to check its first root or two,” he called. “Just don’t drop it in the lake. I don’t know its bottom contours, and don’t want to take a chance wading. I’m getting out now and taking one of the lab units over to the patch. Don’t take off, Ginger or whoever will be doing it, until I get the instruments out from underneath. I won’t waste any time.”

He opened the canopies, which groaned slightly with the effort until their seals cracked and the outer air rushed in, and slid out. He was able to move easily enough in the thirteen-plus-percent gravity, though not with the ease that Belvew and Inger and Xalco had shown. He was, he reminded himself, a good deal older than any of them; allowances had to be made.

There was plenty of room for his suited form between the keels, and he quickly retrieved the equipment and carried it to the patch fifty meters away.

“I’d get a bit farther,” Ginger said soberly as he stopped. “I don’t know the surface friction—you stopped pretty quickly—and I want to use full thrust.”

Goodall didn’t argue, but moved another hundred meters past the tar patch, carrying the instruments.

“All right,” he said. “This should be plenty.”

“If you can risk it, I can.”

“Risk it. The plane’s what’s important now.”

He watched and listened as the exhaust thundered in the heavy air.
Crius
trembled, then slid forward.

She reached lift speed in about three hundred meters. Her keels cleared the ground by millimeters, then by a meter, and Ginger nosed her abruptly upward. The exhaust roar died out in the distance as the wings flattened.

Goodall got to work, wondering vaguely why he didn’t feel more lonely. His feet and joints hurt, of course; that was where there was most pressure from his armor. But that was just physical. He had expected that these last few hours would be somehow more emotional, but he found himself approaching the work as calmly as—as—he couldn’t think of an analogy. As calmly as he had ever approached anything.

He set the apparatus down for a moment, walked over to the tar patch, and inspected it closely. The view was better than he had had of the others on his screens in the station, but he could see no significant difference: the surface was smooth, glossy black, reflecting the orange sky where the Sun’s location could just be guessed at. Saturn was of course invisible; Goodall had no idea whether or not it was above the horizon—yes, he did; he knew his longitude, he suddenly recalled. It wasn’t.

He touched the glossy surface gently with his armored hand. Prelife? He’d never really know. It wasn’t sticky, in spite of Ginger’s experience. He pressed as hard as his weight would allow, and it seemed in no hurry to yield, either—well, it had taken a while even for a pair of jet keels to sink in significantly where Gene had landed. The major had stuck much more quickly, he now recalled. The patches couldn’t all be the same. That was
good
. Not just good to know.

Human senses gave too little information. He fetched the analyzer and set it on the black surface.