Half Life (29 page)

She was understood.

Lieutenant lePing was not particularly tense as Lake Carver came into sight ahead. Low flying was of course risky, but she had followed through on many such maneuvers and performed enough on her own.

She was coming in from the south because that was most convenient. She assumed incorrectly that Belvew would be watching, and felt relieved when no remarks followed her first pass. She could see the three working labs, and knew that the other was now completely submerged or dissolved in the whatever-it-was. LePing was developing some sympathy for Seichi’s wishful thinking.

She found she could drop four labs on each pass. Even though two of the first four missed the hill, one of the others made up for it by rolling to the center of the dimple. LePing waited before making another drop until she heard Status report that all four were still in working condition, at least for now.

She did better on the next drops, averaging only about one miss per seven tries. By the time she finished the allotted number of labs, the early ones had all gone out of service. The hill seemed still to be hungry.

“Should I slow down even more and see if they’re disappearing, too, Commander? I’m a bit uneasy; I’ve used quite a bit of juice.”

“Go up and refill. It’ll take us a while to digest this material,” Maria responded, unconscious of any pun.

“Seichi, I suppose you’re thinking meteorite.”

“Of course.”

“I’m startled to find an iron or even a stony iron this far out from the Sun, but I can’t argue with the labs. Go ahead, Carla.”

There was at the moment no thunderhead immediately above Lake Carver, a fact which Maria noted as also needing explanation sooner or later, but the pilot circled slowly as she climbed, spotted a likely mass source a score of kilometers away, and headed toward it. General attention shifted from aircraft to analytical instruments.

“You said phosphorus?” asked Maria, recalling Goodall’s readings of weeks before.

“More likely C-N-O.” Belvew’s return to the conversation was less surprising than his choice of subject.

“Why on Earth?” Maria started, and stopped. The sergeant ignored the tempting lead.

“Right now I’m betting on low-weight polypeptides. The iron adds possibilities. Nice, thin glue for Ginger’s wings, too,” he added. No one could see his face—few could imagine or even remember much of it but ferociously black eyebrows after the months of isolation—but no one missed the smugness in his voice. No one missed the implications of phosphorus, either.

“It will take a while to find what part if any the iron takes in the structures, even the ones we have so far,”

Yakama reminded them, “but your inspiration seems to have some merit. Should I do an optical macro search for coarse structure, such as cell walls, before I report? The lab’s not really designed for it, but I think I could do something with the crystallography gear.”

“I’m not
that
optimistic,” Belvew replied more quietly. “Let’s check my chances of being right about the rest first, unless you can’t wait yourself.”

“I find no phosphorus in this batch,” Seichi reported. “There was before!” Belvew insisted.

“I know.”

“So it’s near the edges. Just where it’s growing—”

“Sergeant, aren’t you getting a little ahead of the data?” Maria cut in as smoothly as she could.

“Well, I suppose so. But I’ll be really surprised if we don’t find amino acids and maybe nucleic acids there. I’ve said it and I’m not apologizing,” he added.

“You needn’t,” the commander responded soothingly.

“You needn’t,” Seichi came in almost simultaneously. “There are carbon-nitrogen single bonds and carbon-oxygen doubles, but no oxygen-nitrogen either single or double. Your chances of being right have just gone up several thousand percent, I’d say.”

“That’s all I want to know for now,” Belvew replied happily. “Unless you need me, Commander, I have some more studying to do.”

“Are you looking for something specific?”

“No, just pieces.” The jigsaw-puzzle analogy needed no further explanation.

“Shape, or color?” the commander persisted.

“My stall tests are done,” Ginger came in before Gene could answer, if he had intended to. “I’m heading for Factory One.”

Minutes later lePing reported full tanks, and was sent back to Belvew’s Hill to drop more labs.

Peter Martucci was spending as much time as he could spare in his waldo suit working simulated flying problems with Status, trying to foresee as many situations as possible in which his intrinsically slow reaction time would really put a jet in danger. He had known, in a remote way, that he might someday have to fly in spite of his disability, but he had never grasped the need as a likely reality until now. Reality was forcing itself on
all
of the dwindling crew.

Seichi Yakama was considering the accumulating analysis results from the areas named for Arthur Goodall, Gene Belvew, an
Oceanus
. He had originally reported them as being generally similar; now he was wondering almost seriously whether all were on the same planet. In near desperation and after some careful lab maneuvering, he got more samples from Lake Carver itself. The results seemed not useful except possibly in the Sherlock Holmes sense: eliminate the impossible…

If you can recognize it, of course, Doyle should have added. Seichi was another minor respondent to Maria’s reading evangelism. Maria Collos got some sleep. Lieutenant Carla lePing got good practice flying low passes over Belvew’s Hill, and Yakama recorded what he could from each lab while it lasted. He took it on himself to have lePing cease dropping until he could catch up with the data; he was very aware of the heavy-metal stocks.

Status announced that the recent atmospheric oddities were statistically almost certainly due to eclipses and that specific mechanisms could be investigated if anyone with an imagination would suggest any.

Ginger heard this announcement and began to think; she was still far from the factory, the air was calm, and flying this high took little attention.

Belvew, still asleep, did not hear the announcement and in any case was not currently interested in planetary air circulation. He slept until Ginger was halfway to the factory.

He woke with no new idea in mind, wondered briefly how much chemistry he had missed, realized what Status would have done about that, ate without appetite—the station’s foods were genuine meats, fruits, and vegetables grown from cloned tissues and perfectly palatable, but he just wasn’t interested in food at the moment—and addressed a question to Seichi.

“Have you checked what’s going on in the mausoleum?”

“No. I’ve been too busy with the other comparisons. Status must have its progress, if you need to know.”

“I don’t want anyone to tell me yet. I woke up with the web of an idea, and I want to add some threads. Just a test prediction: Status, I’m guessing that nothing measurable has happened to Jerry—the fellow infected from Maria’s hand. Right?”

“Correct, Sergeant.” The word “test” had probably influenced the computer’s use of title, but did not move it to ask questions. Those would have to come from the living minds.

“Why not?” Maria, also recently awake and alert, pounced on the prediction.

She had no chance to get an answer. A dozen warning bells and lights clamored and flashed for attention.

Ginger gave a startled exclamation as her accelerometers, both linear and angular, visual and tactile, gave weird combinations of signals.

“Turbulence! You said it was safe in this hemisphere!”

“You read too much into my report. I tried to warn of its limitations. Your present disorder is at least partly due to change in aerodynamic configuration—look.”

The Mollweide screens, ordinarily showing no part of a jet’s own image, changed for everyone. Part of the new field was hard to see, as the background scenery was spinning madly. The visible sections of
Theia
, howver, were stationary with respect to her cameras, and caught all eyes at once.

The left wing, from a few meters outboard of the engine, was gone, and no trace of it could be seen by anyone in the whirling background of Titan. The break was ragged but uninformative.

“Did I hit something? I was awake, and you weren’t slipping
a
reality break on me, Status.”

“You were, and I was not. You did not strike anything in the air. My images showed and still show no obstacles in your neighborhood. The wing simply broke, without anything I could interpret as a warning. There does not seem to have been any turbulence, or to be any now, since I have analyzed the current motion pattern.”

“Have you any control? Can you possibly land without any more damage?” asked Maria.

“I can’t stop the spin, even with the other pipe completely cut out,” was the answer. Belvew gave a yelp of pain.

“What happened, Sergeant?” asked the commander.

“Don’t mind me. I just broke another bone. Ginger—no, Status—were any tar pools in sight from
Theia
just before this happened?”

“Yes. Two.”

“Good. Ginger, if you can control at all, try to head for the nearest. We might as well get another test out of this. Crash in it if you can.”

“You—”

“Do your best, Major. We’ll understand if you miss,” Maria cut in.

Xalco cut both engines completely and nosed down, but there seemed to be no combination of thrust and airspeed which would let her override the vast difference in lift now existing between the two wings. The spin continued, but the ground was clearly approaching on all the screens.

“I could imagine its happening to me, after what Gene’s been saying,” remarked Carla thoughtfully as she remembered her turbulence grids, “but Ginger’s contamination wasn’t on just that wing, was it?”

No one answered. Even Martucci was trying to follow, or better to anticipate mentally, Ginger Xalco’s efforts with
Theia’s
controls. There were faint cheers each time the dark patch which was clearly her target moved a little closer to the screen center, slight gasps and groans when it circled farther away.

“Ginger! Rocket mode! Full thrust on both pipes!” Belvew suddenly cried. Whether the pilot saw his intent or was merely in a mood to take any suggestion no one ever asked. “Flatten the right wing. Eight points camber on the left—and I thought the designer was an idiot to have those wings cambered separately! There!”

The spin stopped with startling abruptness. “Nose up carefully! Left engine half thrust, right at minimum needed to hold your heading! Get out of atmosphere! Status, give her a heading for station intercept while she can still steer!”

“I have it. Thanks, Gene.”

“Not worried, were you? Remember you’re not on board.”

“I did forget. You would have too. I didn’t really worry, though. And don’t try look at my face, please.”

In the privacy of her quarters, Major Xalco wiped her bare scalp once more.

“Sergeant, has Status taken care of your new fracture?” The late Arthur Goodall had properly judged his chosen successor’s grasp of values.

“Oh, sure. It’s lucky he can take verbal commands.”

“Why? What’s happened this time?”

“My other arm, of course.”

The last two words were echoed by Ginger, who then had the grace to add, “It’s just as well you can still talk, though. I don’t suppose I’d have been able to come up with that maneuver on my own.”

Belvew grinned in privacy. “Well, I have to admit I was talking without thinking.”

“I can believe that—sorry. Can you talk me into intercept orbit from this plane, or had we better use Status?”

“It’s not mental arithmetic this time, especially with unsymmetrical thrust. Vacuum will help, but—Status, give her the dope.”

The processor obeyed, but Belvew’s help was still needed, to his unashamed glee. The velocity changes were simple mathematical items, but actually achieving the velocities themselves was not. The lost wing segment meant a change in
Crius’s
centers of mass, pressure, and angular inertia, and complicated the actual maneuvers greatly even beyond atmosphere. By the time the acceleration integrators reported a set of velocities, they were slightly out of date and new ones were needed. By the time true orbit injection had been managed, the tank gauges were embarrassingly, but fortunately not critically, low.

The velocity match at apoapsis, involving both speed and orbit-plane change, took even more mass; but enough remained when docking was completed to permit another departure if one were ever needed.

This was not the primary consideration for everyone; after all, there was still some spare water in the station.

“Ginger, turn loose a lab while you’re still in there!” Yakama called firmly as his instruments reported docking complete. “I want the word on that wing varnish!”

“I’m not sure I want to know how close I came to dropping half the fuselage instead of half a wing, or the other wing, but all right. But what do you mean, while I’m still in there?”

“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Get to your bed ’n’ bath. I’ll do the lab work.”

Seichi didn’t find the lab work quite that easy. They did have appendages usable as legs, but no designer had considered a possible need for the labs in free fall. Even if they had had solenoids to hold them against a surface for traction, there were essentially no magnetic surfaces in either jets or the station.

Yakama went to the dock in person, found the lab which Ginger had released and which was now floating uncooperatively around the jet, and held it in place while its scraper worked.

The results were neither surprising nor, at first, very helpful. There were none of the simple hydrocarbons which had been found in the lake; these would presumably have evaporated during orbit. None of the bonding pattern now being interpreted as monovinyl alcohol showed up. This relieved many; Seichi had forgotten, if he had ever noticed, Status’s warning on possible explosion and had brought the samples to his own quarters. Status had not repeated its earlier extrapolation; all concerned had presumably heard it, and deciding whether to heed it or not was a human duty. The processor could evaluate risks by straightforward extrapolation, but could not weigh them against possible returns without highly specific instructions.