Half Life (22 page)

“You know where she is. Pick her up now!” cried Belvew.

“Stop thinking of that!” Maria had never sounded so much like a commander. “Make another pass over me, or as nearly over me as you can, Ginger, heading as straight as you can for Arthur’s Pool. You can still see it, can’t you?”

“Sure. All right, coming back. Call when I’m closest, and tell me which side you’re on and how far if you can. I’ll be a minute or so with the turn. All right?”

Silence.

“All right?”

Silence.

“All right?
”

Maria couldn’t answer. She was off the ground again, totally disoriented. She snapped both hands above her helmet to protect it in case she landed head downward, and ignored Ginger’s increasingly frantic calls until she struck the surface again.

Her heels touched first, with her body extending back and up at about forty-five degrees. On Earth she would have slammed down on the back of her helmet; on Titan the rest of the fall took well over a second and she had plenty of time to spin cat-style and land on her hands. A medium-hard one-handed push-up brought her back on her feet; she felt a fleeting glow of pride that she hadn’t overdone it—much.

One short backward step kept her from falling the other way.

“I’m all right. I got tossed around by another quake. I don’t know whether you passed me then or not.”

“I must have. I’m halfway to the rim—Maria! My screen shows a new cloud erupting all around the lake! Is it blocking your sight?”

“The eight-hour prediction was extremely inaccurate,” Status interrupted, “but the qualitative extrapolation offered by Sergeant Belvew was very good. The lake is now near the north rim of a hexagonal area well marked by fume-emitting faults. It will take a minute or more to determine the new height of the area. The lake itself has shown no significant change in shape or area. If Major Xalco will try once more to find the commander—”

“Is that area big enough for landing?” and “Is the pool inside the prism?” came Belvew’s and Maria’s interruptions simultaneously. Status untangled the sound patterns, though none of the human listeners could. The processor answered the commander first.

“The pool is inside the area described, though quite close to the northeast corner. It has not been visibly affected by shock. It may be possible with care to land the jet within the hexagon. I would advise landing slightly north of westward, touching down as near the southern east corner as the pilot’s skill permits.”

“Take it, Gene,” Ginger called promptly.

“Not yet. Finish your run. We need to know whether Maria’s inside the hexagon, too. If she isn’t, and the boundary is hard to cross for any reason—remember how she got blown into the air at the other place—we
don’t
want to land there.”

“Right. Give me the call, Maria, if and when. Here I should be coming.”

“I hear you but can’t see you. The fog’s a lot thicker, I’m afraid.”

“Not even a glimpse?”

“No.”

“Any guess at the direction of my sound?”

“Not in armor.”

“Shall I make another pass?”

“No use, I’d say. If the new fog allows, you might go as low as seems safe over the hexagon and help Status find out if
it’s
higher or lower than the rest of the floor. I’d guess it dropped, or rather that the outside rose—I was tossed upward again.”

“You’re assuming you’re outside.”

“Yes, Gene. Unless my earlier position was wildly off or I got tossed several hundred meters, which I’m sure I wasn’t, I
have
to be north of it still.”

“I suppose so. All right, just go on, I guess. You can see your track still, can’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, no. The snow seems to have been tossed around too, I’m afraid.”

Not even Status had an immediate answer for this. After some seconds, Belvew asked, “Can you see the tracks you make right now—after the shock?”

Maria experimented—the answer seemed obvious, but she was taking no chances of being surprised by another trivium—and answered affirmatively.

“All right, just start walking, and keep a straight line as you did before, I’d say. If you’re lucky and get into clear air, fine. Sooner or later you’ll have moved far enough so Ginger can get some idea of distance and direction from when you can hear her pass over, even if that doesn’t give much resolving power. Can anyone think of anything quicker? Staying put certainly won’t accomplish anything.”

Maria admitted this, and decided not to mention that the joints of her armor were getting stiffer. There would be time enough for the others to face that worry if and when she was actually immobilized. It would have been nice, she reflected as she started to walk, if she had had a rope, or a few meters of wire, or something like that to drag behind her. Even if that were tossed off the ground, it would have to fall back somewhere near its original position.

Theia
boomed overhead, and the commander reported the sound as soon as it started to fade. Two minutes later she heard it again, this time with a fainter maximum, and she passed on this information as well. The third time was fainter still.

“All right, I think I have you fairly well boxed,” came Belvew’s voice—he had evidently taken over the jet. “Just keep traveling, and report any sort of change you catch. You’re about where we thought, only a few hundred meters from the nearest of the new faults.”

“You said they were putting out fog too. I can’t see any difference in the vision range yet—of course, I don’t really have much idea of how far I’m seeing. I
think
I hear something besides the jet, though.”

“What?”

“It’s like the deep whistle of the stuff coming from that other fault, but that may not be objective. Keep your fingers crossed, those of your who aren’t flying. I’m still walking.” The last statement was not a complete truth: her armor was continuing to get stiffer, and the walk was becoming a totter.

But she did manage to keep moving. Twice in the next few minutes she was thrown off her feet. Three times in the same interval the jet thundered past near enough to let her give Belvew some sort of direction report. The last time he was able to be encouraging.

“Stay with it, boss! You’re only a hundred meters or so from the north face of the prism. If it rose, you should see it. If it went down, r-e-a-lly watch your step!”

“It went up. I see it. It’s not plain ice, Status. It’s alternate white and dark layers of different thicknesses. Half a meter of smog at the top, a few centimeters of white—ice I, I suppose—it looks like the face at the quarry, a little—more tar, more ice—four layers with a total thickness of ten or a dozen meters, mostly dark stuff. Y’know, with fifty or sixty drill cores inside and outside it, I bet we could
date
this crater!”

“Someone get pictures!” Mastro’s voice sounded frantic: lePing, younger and much junior in rank, managed to control herself and only asked quietly, “Have you time to use your suit camera, Commander?”

“It’s on, but I can’t be sure its view field is clear. Is anything coming through?”

“Just the fact that you’ve been tossed into the air again and aren’t down yet,” Martucci answered dryly. “I grant the importance of dating, but—”

“I’m getting up on that thing,” Maria cut in. “Plan your landing, Sergeant.”

“All right, Commander. Where do I land?”

“No wonder I was tossed around, even if the prism went up more than I did. Your hexagon is over two meters above the rest of the floor, at least on this side.” Maria had shifted back to reporting as though she hadn’t heard Belvew. “I wonder whether this is something common here, or whether Arthur just picked a very bad spot.”

“It will take the detailed review you ordered of the worldwide mapping records to tell,” Status replied.

“This is not yet complete. Nothing of this sort came to anyone’s attention earlier, but I was initially instructed to compare albedo changes, not heights.”

“You can get up on the new level and check Arthur’s Pool in a few minutes,” Belvew said, giving up for a moment. “I can’t be sure where you hit the edge, but it almost has to be the north face. The pool could be about in front of you, or anywhere up to three or four hundred meters to your right. You’d know it, I suppose, if you were right at a corner.”

“I might, but not if the corner was more than a dozen or two meters away. About getting up…” The commander’s voice trailed off.

“You can jump two meters—or are you worn-out again?” Belvew made no specific reference to Maria’s ailment, of course.

“I’m afraid that’s not it. This white coating has been stiffening up my joints, including the ones I’d need for brushing some of it off, for quite a while now, enough to make walking difficult. I’ll try, but I’m not sure I can jump at all.” There was silence from the station while she tried, reported failure, and tried again.

“How about the digger?” asked Pete. “You still have it, don’t you?”

“I do, but I’m not using it on my own suit. I can’t get up half a meter. Check the pix you have so far. Is there
any
place which looks as though it
might
be anything but a vertical cliff? Surely you can’t just push a prism of ice up like this, especially if the ice is effectively rock, without some irregular cracking somewhere.”

Again Status took unintended parts of the remark literally. “Not enough is known about the mechanical properties of ice, either crystalline or glass, at these temperatures. Remember how Sergeant Inger was taken unawares by its expansion coefficient, and how much time it took to make sure we could safely hollow out rooms in the surface layers. Our only pictures of this new feature cover the minutes since it formed. There are several irregularities around its perimeter, on all six faces including the north one where you presumably are. If you can still walk, I advise you do so in either direction along the scarp.”

“If—” Belvew choked off the exclamation. Then, “I’m setting down. Go left, Maria. It’s clearest to the east. You can walk, I hope.”

“Oh, yes. But we need to check the pool, and should do the lake too, and they’re up top.”

The jet’s roar suddenly became audible over the sound of escaping vapor, then faded again. Belvew continued as though the commander hadn’t spoken.

“I
can’t
land up there.”

“Why not?” came the usual multiple voices.

“The area is just barely wide enough for a landing at all, approaching just above wing stall. At that speed the turbulence from the fog blast—I felt it with the gauges a hundred meters up—as I cross the edge would wreck the plane unless, by pure luck, updrafts under both wings were exactly equal. I know I’m safe up here, but one wing dip is more than enough to kill you. Also, the surface is white stuff, not smog; if it’s loose powder, as Maria has been finding, the landing slide may be longer than usual; and going off the edge of that raised area—well, if anyone else wants to risk it, take over and apologize in advance to Maria. I don’t.”

“I can get down again after I get up,” Maria replied calmly. “But don’t try to land anywhere until I’m through here and ready to do it. That’s an order.”

“How do you mean that word ‘through’?” Belvew let the question out, and immediately regretted it. Maria had tact as well as firmness, however.

“I think I see at least two ways of getting up,” she said, still calmly. “At the other fault, the updraft tossed me off the ground; this one seems a lot stronger. With luck, Bernoulli effect will keep me inside the stream until I get to the top.”

“And maybe longer. What will you do hanging a couple of meters out of reach of the ground?” A little to her surprise, the voice was Seichi’s, not Gene’s. She had to hesitate only a moment before answering.

“I’m a lot bigger and denser than the labs, and can do more about my overall shape. I won’t be out of control.”

“What’s your other idea?” asked Belvew predictably.

“Build a ramp. The snow is three to four centimeters deep.”

“How much snow will she have to move, Status?”

“It depends on the angle of repose of the particles, another unknown quantity. Its behavior under Earth conditions is irrelevant; it is sand or dust here, even if it actually is ice chemically. Assuming a twenty-degree repose angle, the volume would be approximately thirty-two cubic meters. If the commander’s estimate of snow depth is correct and general, it would require all the snow within a distance of some sixteen meters of the climbing point, assuming no loss of volume to packing or gain to freezing when she builds her ramp. Enough material is apparently available, but the time required to move it without tools may be excessive. This ignores the problem of building against the updraft at the inner side of the ramp. The commander has about eighteen point two hours, extrapolating from the last two hours’ consumption, to reach suit-emergency status.”

Long before this sentence was finished, Maria had approached the whistling crevice at the base of the scarp. By the time Martucci had pointed out that she could accumulate a large volume quite rapidly by the snowball-rolling technique, and Seichi had reminded him that snow did not self-weld New England style at ninety kelvins, and Martucci had pointed out that water drops kept liquid by pressure most certainly would, she had leaned for the first time as close as she could against the smooth ice face and been hurled backward with satisfying violence.

By the time she had tried again, backing against the wall and pushing as hard as she could with her legs, which was not very hard under Titanian traction conditions, someone else had pointed out that the stuff had at least stuck to the commander’s armor, so maybe Martucci was right after all.

Before the argument got any further, Maria interrupted. “What I can see of my armor is now nearly clear of its white coating. I can move quite freely. Something in the vapor stream got rid of it, I guess,” she concluded.

“It was hot enough to remelt it and blow the liquid away,” Belvew proposed at once.

“The dust particles sandblasted you clear,” Seishi came back at once with the GO6 counterhypothesis.

“If they stuck in the first place because of altered surface tension, they’d have just added to the coating this time. It has to be temperature.”