Half Life (7 page)

The readings from the alternately scraping and traveling lab held everyone’s close attention while the jet neared the site and began its letdown. Since neither Belvew nor Inger could see the white accumulation starting to grow on the leading edges of its wings, nose, and empennage shortly after the descent began, this made no real difference.

Status, to whom the complete camera fields were accessible, could see some of them, but had no programmed reason to pay them any attention. He—even the women seemed to regard the device as a male personality—just didn’t care.

So when the pilot shifted full alertness to his job as final approach and landing neared, neither his eyes, his waldo sensors, nor his partner told him what was coming, though the frosty ridges leading the wings and stabilizers were now projecting nearly three centimeters. In effect they sharpened the wings and fins, but did not yet make perceptible difference in lift, drag, or stability. With a few hundred more flying hours experience at a wide enough variety of altitudes and speeds, Gene—or anyone—might have learned to recognize and even interpret the tiny discrepancy between thrust and airspeed. Had he actually been riding in the jet for that much time, he might even have felt it.

And if the material had remained where it was until after he had touched down, no one might ever have known about it. There were instruments to read and report on skin temperature at many points on the machine, but not at leading edges. Even with nano and pseudolife technology, and their effect of making complex devices almost costless to build even when rare elements were involved, there were limits to how much could be installed on a flying machine, fusion-powered or not.

The heat which leaked from the pipes was at once carried away by the airstream, of course. Status, while not interested, kept a running log of everything it sensed. This was not “cleaned” to save memory more often than once a Titan day, sixteen of Earth’s in length, so that events not recognized as important when they occurred could be reviewed in detail afterward. All but a few centimeters of wing adjacent to the ramjet pods themselves stayed at ambient temperature. Warmth was now, however, beginning to creep farther out as the speed dropped to and below tens of meters per second; but no living mind knew it.

Status was not, even by those who thought if it as him, a living mind.

The increasing camber applied by Belvew as wing stall approached may have contributed to what finally happened, but no one was ever sure. The operator’s tiny pitch and yaw corrections as he maintained a straight and steady descent may have, or may not. Even a trace of turbulence in Titan’s own air may have been all that was needed.

Whatever the cause, most of the sharp white rim on the leading edge of the left wing suddenly fell or blew away from the now slightly warmer surface, and the lift on that side, already as dependent on wing area as on shape, dropped.

Slightly. So did the wing tip.

Slightly. Slightly was quite enough, since it also happened suddenly. Probably not even an automatic control, or even Status if it had been on call for such a purpose, could have reacted effectively at such low airspeed.

The wing, short as it was, grazed the ground with its tip, and
Oceanus’s
nose whipped down and to the left. Belvew felt practically simultaneous kicks, nudges, pinches, and stabs from practically all his accelerometers and other rate instruments. At the same instant most of the central area of his Mollweide went blank, and the mosaic of sections which should have shown the view to the rear displayed only Titan’s pale peach sky.

There was nothing useful to say for the moment, and Gene again made sure no one heard him saying it.

“There couldn’t have been any turbulence there!” sounded too much like an excuse to be uttered by a disciplined civilian, much less a moderately high-ranking observer. Everyone’s thoughts reached the same point on that logic route, though not all passed the milestones in the same order.

No ground camera views. No transport until. Seismic nets not finished. Weather tracers not even started.

Labs now available only at their source, where they’d have to stay; and something odd was happening there.

Humanity is a visually oriented species, and in seconds Maria and Status were building a new image of the factory site, whose details improved moment by moment as data poured in from different sensors.

The factory itself was simply a block with rounded corners, a little over five meters on a side now that it had finished growing, saved from resembling a child’s toy by rain-gathering, light-reading, gas-ejecting, and other apparatuses on its roof. No one was looking at that image yet, however.

The jet’s nose could gradually, as details were filled in, be seen crumpled back almost to the wings; the “coffin” in which a pilot could ride must be occupying only a fraction of its former volume. The ground the bow had tried to displace had not yielded significantly. The left wing and ram pipe were hidden under the fuselage, whose tail pointed upward at about sixty degrees. The right wing and engine, also pointing upward but less sharply, seemed undamaged, even after image resolution got down to single centimeters.

“So much for
Oceanus
. Is
Theia
ready?” asked Goodall finally.

“Just about,” Carla responded quietly.

“I’ll check her out,” came Ginger’s voice. “I think I’m nearest, and I’ve just slept and done my suit.”

“Are you willing to drive again, Gene?”

Belvew hesitated only a moment before answering. The crash was presumably his fault, but there was no reason to suppose that anyone else could have avoided it; and the idea behind the old custom of a pilot’s flying, or a horseman’s riding, again as soon as possible after an accident was probably still valid even when the pilot wasn’t in the aircraft at the time.

“Sure. I’m fresh enough. I’ll nap, though, during the preflight. Call me when she’s ready, will you, Ginger?”

“Should I hurry?”

“No!” Goodall was emphatic.
“Theia
hasn’t been flown at all yet. Cover everything on the checklist, and anything else you can think of. If Maria reports some other ground change we may have to hurry, but not unless or until. It’ll be two or three days before we’re at a radiation-minimum launch point, and we won’t wait that long; but since we’re heading toward one, we needn’t rush.”

“I’ll be good,” Ginger lied. “Gene needn’t worry.”

“Who worries?” asked Belvew. He received no answer, and relaxed in his suit. It seemed unlikely that there would be time enough to get out of it for a real nap, or even a video.

This estimate, of course, was based on foreseeables, not on human behavior.

The station was far too massive for anyone to feel the reaction when a person pushed off from or stopped against a wall, but the departure of
Theia
was noticed by everyone. It was also identifiable, since everyone had felt such shoves before.

Reactions differed. Goodall and one or two others wondered momentarily whether they had been asleep and missed the end-of-checkout report. Peter Martucci’s movie-idol face made a wry grimace in the privacy of his quarters, as though something he had expected had happened in spite of his hopes. Dr.

Lieutenant Colonel Sam Donabed gave a snort of irritation. Lieutenant Carla lePing shook her head disapprovingly.

No one saw any of this, of course. Looking into someone else’s quarters was almost worse than entering them. Gene Belvew was, for a fraction of a second, the most surprised, and of course Ginger Xalco was the least.

But Belvew was quick on the uptake.

“Ginger! Why?”

“My suit’s fullest, and it’ll save time.”

“We don’t need to save time!”

“Do you really know that? I certainly don’t!”

“My suit was serviced almost as recently as yours,” Belvew tacitly conceded the other argument. “It has nearly as much life supply.”

“And Status says I use less than three-quarters the food and oxygen you do, gorilla. Stop being futile; I’ve already cut speed.”

Everyone by now understood the situation, but no one was ignorant enough to suggest, much less order, that the woman return the jet. There was no point in anyone’s making speeches about poor discipline. There was nothing to be done; Ginger was not merely flying
Theia
. She was
riding
the machine, physically on board. That was a point which had to be remembered consciously by everyone until, and if, she got back to the station.

Instruments showed that she had already killed enough station orbital speed to take the craft into atmosphere, and used most of the little reaction water in
Theia’s
tanks to do so. Return was not physically possible until she had refilled on Titan.

Nor was there any question of taking over from the rebel even if this had been useful. Her waldo suit was in the space designed for it on the jet, and any suit on board automatically had control priority unless the wearer deliberately ceded it. “Dead-man” override from outside was not possible; this was another of the unforeseen needs.

However cheap construction and energy might have become, design had not; people charged more heavily than ever for their skilled services. Predictably, most structures and machines were now delivered with performance well short of ideal, and commonly somewhat short of specifications. Even the best usually turned out to lack
something
. The situation was far from new in history, but had been greatly aggravated in recent decades.

Even Goodall said nothing for general hearing. There was nothing useful to say for the moment, and what would be said later would never mention penalties, or violation of rules, or disobedience of orders.

Hunger for understanding had replaced much of the desire for personal property, for influence over others’ behavior, or for simple glory which had motivated so many of humanity’s earlier high-risk activities.

The need-for-knowledge culture, however, had not evolved in quite the same direction as the economic-religious-military one. Social awareness—idealism or patriotism—was fully as great as ever in the vaguely militarized ranks of science, and of course required as much team effort as war; but it did not usually demand the prompt and blind submission to orders which militarism had had to evolve when the opponents were other human beings. A universe with no personal wants, enmities, or survival urges was not an
enemy
.

The new patriotism, if it could be called that, was not nearly so blind as the old, but it still could demand personal risk and sacrifice. Ginger knew exactly what she was doing, and why. So, in spite of their hasty questions, did Gene and the others. Nothing critical was said during the hundred minutes that
Theia
took to touch atmosphere and start to kill her nearly two-kilometers-per-second relative velocity; and even when she was flying rather than orbiting, navigation instructions from Maria and flying advice from the others made up most of the conversation.

The advice was not needed. Ginger had spent as much time in simulators and roughly as much actually flying
Oceanus
as had any of the others, but those still in orbit felt a need to keep meaningful conversation going—to “stay in touch.”

Xalco, after carefully purging the remaining water from her mass tanks and filling up above a convenient lake, deliberately landed by the factory at higher speed than Belvew had done. There was no way yet to tell whether this made the difference.
Theia
approached from the north, touched down, and slid to a stop half a kilometer west of the factory. She would have come closer, but there were numerous objects on the surface between cliff and factory, and some even west of the latter, which had been identified by Maria’s equipment as boulders of ice from the fallen shelf. One of Goodall’s labs had by now confirmed this; three separate specimens were nearly pure water ice, with traces of carbonate dust. A debate on why this was not silicate, led by Louis Mastro and Carla lePing, had taken up much time between the discovery and the jet’s landing, but no conclusions had been reached except that the news had better get to Earth promptly. There may be no telling in advance which will prove to be the key piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but anything unexpected screams for upper-level attention. Goodall had sent the report before
Theia
touched down.

The landing approach had not been directly over the new patch, but the exhaust had melted or blown a shallow trough in the regular surface like the earlier ones, and like them raised no cloud of smoke of the sort that Belvew’s recent landing by Carver had done. It was still possible that this superficially uniform area—uniform except for ice blocks and the still-growing patch—differed here and there in composition. Goodall had all ripe labs now out and in action, and was sending out others as quickly as the factory completed them. He ignored the small size of the stock of inert metals—gold, platinum, and iridium—which the labs needed for chemical and electrical apparatuses and of which the factory had only a limited supply in the “yolk” of its original egg. This stock could, for a while at least, be replenished from the station; a fairly large reserve had been brought from Earth. It had seemed unlikely that any such materials would be found on or near Titan. Certainly none, not more than a few atoms per cubic millimeter, had been found in the E ring and nearby material which had been collected to protect the station.

Most of the group, including Ginger, were listening to the analyses of the local area which Maria was numbering, tabulating, and locating on
a
large-scale map which now usurped part of everyone’s screen, and trying to make sense out of them. Belvew was the only exception. His attention was aimed more narrowly.

The crumpled form of
Oceanus
showed a few hundred meters from her sister jet and much closer to the strange patch, and he was trying to see why it had fallen. If the cause was actually turbulence there would probably be no evidence, but he still found this hard to believe.

“Art, could you spare a lab to sample right around the wreck?” he asked at length.