Half Life (8 page)

“We’ll get there pretty soon anyway. Any reason for special haste?”

“Well, Ginger landed hot, but there’ll be a couple of seconds after liftoff when she’ll be as slow as I was. It might be worth at least a check. Maybe the ground was warmer, or colder, for some reason, and grew verticals.”

“How could it be?” The question, from Peter, was ignored by all but Barn.

“We’re looking for chemical action,” he pointed out, “and there’s the methyl alcohol to explain.”

“All right,” admitted Goodall. “Two labs on the way. Tell me where you want your samples, Gene.”

Belvew went back to the view provided by
Theia’s
eyes, and strained his own looking for points of special interest on and about the wreck. It would be a few minutes before the slow-moving labs reached the spot.

Several of
Theia’s
cameras covered the remains, and he ordered Status to process their images with interferometric routines to produce the best possible resolution. He didn’t think of asking for a stereo image. For some time he concentrated on the ground plowed up by
Oceanus
, but he could detect nothing special, and finally shifted to the jet itself. The labs had arrived and without anyone’s specific instructions were starting to scrape dirt samples with their iridium-coated hoes before he saw the interrupted white ridge along the leading edge of the uplifted right wing. Some of the material, especially toward the tip, had not been shaken off by the crash. He pointed it out to the others.

“That shouldn’t be there! How do you get wing ice on Titan?”

“How do you know it’s ice?” asked Barn reasonably.

“I don’t, but it’s where you pick up wing ice in Earth’s atmosphere, and it had the same effect!”

“You’re blaming it for what happened?” came Maria’s quiet voice.

“Well, not yet.” GO6 was sometimes soft-pedaled, but it was seldom completely ignored. “Can you get a lab up there, Art?”

“I doubt it. They weren’t designed to climb a smooth surface.”

“That skin’s hardly smooth anymore.”

“All right. I’ll try.” The colonel followed up the words with action, and for over fifteen minutes sent one of his devices rolling and clawing its way along various upward-leading wrinkles in the crumpled fuselage.

Each, sooner or later, narrowed enough to spoil his grip and let the machine topple back to the ground, undamaged in Titanian gravity but ineffective.

Goodall finally gave up. Belvew, less skilled but more anxious, tried from some time himself, with no better luck.

“It looks as though some of the stuff has fallen off,” Inger pointed out at last. “There should be bits of it on the ground.”

“If there are, I can’t see them,” replied Belvew. “I suppose we can just do lots and lots of tests all around the wreck, but how will we be sure that any offbeat result can be blamed on the white stuff?”

“We can be quicker than that,” Ginger assured them. “How?” asked Gene.

“Very simply.” Several of the listeners guessed what was coming but kept their mouths shut; there was nothing they could do about it, and objectively Xalco was being smart. She was economizing on her suit time.

Those who failed to read the implication from her words understood a few seconds later as a fluorescent orange environment suit with a black “GX” stenciled front and back entered the field of view of
Theia
’s eyes and started to make its way toward the wreck. Its walk was unsteady; even Titan’s less than fourteen percent of Earth gravity was a lot more than most of the group had experienced for many months. The station rotated, but very slowly. Centripetal acceleration just inside the equator of the original ship’s skin was much less than a hundredth of a gee.

Few of the crew could now have stood a full Earth gravity. The major made good speed, however, never actually fell, and reached
Oceanus’s
remains very quickly.

“I don’t see anything white on the ground,” she said. “It either fell off farther back or got buried in the dirt
Oceanus
plowed up. Here, Art.” She needed to jump only a short distance to bring one glove against the rime on the wing. It stuck to her suit when she tried to set it down beside the nearest lab, and she had to shake it off, leaving some liquid on her palm. All watchers tried to draw inferences while the lab unit inhaled this juice through its gold-plated liquid sampler and did its work.

“Mostly ethylene, a trace of acetylene,” Goodall reported tersely after a moment.

“Melting points?” Gene asked promptly, sure that Maria would have them on her screen at once. He was right.

“About one hundred four and one hundred ninety-two respectively,” she reported promptly. “Check your own wings, Ginger; if you picked any up after you cooled down from entry, it would still be there.”

“It is. I see it. It’s lucky I landed fast, I guess. I’ll wipe it off right now.”

“Bring the lab and sample yours, too,” said Goodall.

“Right.” Her suit disappeared intermittently, its image reappearing as odd patches and parts from time to time as she moved into and out of the parts of view fields the computer was using for Mollweide projection.

“Why did we pick that up these two times, and not on any of the earlier landings? And why pick it up at all, for that matter? There isn’t much of either of those in the atmosphere.” Gene was still puzzled.

“I think I can guess,” Barn said slowly. “You don’t need much, after all; water vapor usually doesn’t compose very much of Earth’s air, but it freezes on wings if they’re cold enough. These landings are the only ones made so far so soon after the jet had spent a long time up at compromise altitude or in space, and really got its wings chilled. I spent a lot of time on practice stalls before the first landing. We can test that, if there’s ever time, by going back up for a while and doing stall exercises, at a safe altitude of course, after we get down again.” He did not suggest merely asking Status to make wings visible; this was a scientific problem, not just a matter of safe flying. Avoiding the problem would not have answered questions.

“And we make it a point to land a little hotter than we have been.” Gene was relieved. “Good work, Ginger. You’d better come back up; you’ve used up hours of suit time already.”

“I have plenty more. I’m going to take a
close
look at this patch while I’m here.”

“I don’t mean to be insulting, but I trust you’re budgeting time to refill your tanks after takeoff,” Goodall interjected.

“I am. But thanks for asking. Don’t apologize.” Her suited figure dwindled on the screens.

“The labs can do gas analyses, can’t they?” she asked suddenly. “Sure.”

“Then hadn’t we better look for free hydrogen? Remember the idea about the methanol production.”

“We’d need water, too,” pointed out Barn. Ginger kicked at one of the boulders, almost overbalancing in the weak gravity. “These
look
like ice,” she assured him.

“They are. I checked them already,” growled Goodall. “If you want a repeat—”

“I know. That can wait. I want to see this tar-patch stuff.” She moved a few gliding steps farther and squatted down. A lab moved slowly toward the kicked boulder, guided from above, but the oldster said nothing aloud.
Of course
this would be ice, too.

“Give!” came mingled voices. Ginger’s suit had no camera.

“It looks and feels through my gloves like black glass; it could still be the melted and refrozen tar someone suggested. I can’t scratch it with a glove claw. Labs, please.”

“Already there, as you should have noticed,” answered the colonel. “Analysis so far matches the other one; it’s a methanol gel, basically. I’m still working on the polymers.”

He would be, Belvew thought. Arthur, of all the group, was the most optimistic about finding prebiotic material on Titan, though Seichi Yakama was a close second. The colonel had also informed himself most extensively from Status’s encyclopedia on autocatalysis and other phenomena presumably involved with the chemical evolution stages supposed to precede actual life. He was the only one whose training had actually included more than the standard educated adult’s basic chemistry.

He was also hoping desperately, his companions knew, to find a key piece of the biological jigsaw puzzle while he still lived, even if that piece failed to provide a cure for his particular ailment. He was as close to being a pure idealist as anyone in the group—a scientific Nathan Hale, though none were tactless enough or historically informed enough to make the comparison either aloud or silently.

The screen brought Belvew’s attention back from its brief side trip. Ginger had started to rise from her squatting position and was putting on a rather grotesque show.

She had been slightly off balance as she straightened her knees, and reached vertical with her center of gravity a little outside the support area outlined by her feet. There is a normal human response to this situation, usually acquired during the first year or so after birth: one picks up the foot nearest the direction of tilt and moves it farther in that direction to extend the support area, but not so far as to make reaction initiate a fall the other way.

The reflex, of course, is normally acquired in Earth gravity, and one or two of the watchers wondered very briefly whether she would overcontrol, but they never found out. The major started to pick up the appropriate foot, the right one, but it refused to pick up. The couple resulting from pull on this one and third-law push on the other tilted her even farther to her right. By the time she reached thirty degrees all eyes were on their screens, and at least three hypotheses were being developed.

“You’ve melted yourself in!” cried Martucci. Inger, whose idea involved close contact between soles and surface plus Titan’s high air pressure, said nothing but thought furiously. Goodall, already wondering how simple the chemistry for a thermotropic reaction could possibly be, called, “See whether it’s pulling in around your boots or if you’re just sinking!”

Major Xalco was moved to answer this.
“Just
sinking? I’m
stuck
, you old idiot! What do I do?”

“Find out why,” the colonel replied calmly from the safety and freedom from immediate responsibility of a seven-hundred-kilometer-high orbit.

“Try to tilt and slide one boot at a time,” proffered Inger.

“Can anyone guess how much jet exhaust a suit will take from, say, twenty meters?” asked Belvew. “I assume no one
knows
.”

While the woman tried unsuccessfully to implement Barn’s suggestion, and then less enthusiatically to follow Goodall’s instruction, Gene, already in his waldo suit, silently preflighted
Theia
, which he could now control. Xalco had filled the tanks conscientiously on the way down, apparently without melting her wing “ice”—that would have to be discussed sometime—and the landing had depleted them only a little; there was much more than enough juice for a takeoff.

Keeping careful watch on the gauges, Gene fired up the plasma arcs and fed liquid to the pipes. Carefully checking the relative whereabouts of woman and factory, but not letting himself worry about a few labs, he raised thrust on the right jet enough to drag
Theia
in a curving trail—the keels wouldn’t let it simply pivot—until it was heading almost toward Ginger. He then equalized thrust on both sides and sent the machine dragging forward until it was only fifty meters from the still-anchored suit. Rather than attempt another tight turn, he went on past, leaving the woman on his left and turning only slightly to the right, until the exhaust was streaming past her only a few meters away.

“Better let me take it,” she said at this point. “I can tell if it’s too close, and the response will be quicker.”

Gene made no argument. He relinquished control, but only briefly.

Using the waldo control while standing up in even a weak gravity field was not merely more awkward than Ginger had expected but essentially impossible. Uncontrollable pressures on control areas in the feet shifted the jet to rocket mode and very briefly applied heavy thrust. She would probably have been incinerated had Belvew been even a little slower resuming control.

The blast for a split second swept over part of the patch, behaving just as it had during Gene’s landing hours before. The tar, if it was that, was sinking into or possibly vaporizing out of a shallow groove along the track of the warm gas. This time no smoke appeared. Then the thrust was cut.

Ginger’s jump was equally reflexive. It was also, to everyone’s surprise, effective; she was free of the sticky surface. Her suit went up for more than two meters and away from
Theia
, kicked by the hot gas stream. She landed closer to the center of the patch. She leaped again, this time with deliberate control of her direction, and reached safe ground.

The unspoken question which had briefly crossed everyone’s mind, whether enough surface could be removed or persuaded to let go without cooking her in the suit, was answered the risky way. “I still can’t tell whether it vaporized, melted and sunk, or just crawled out of the way,” she reported, her voice lacking its usual snappishness. “I’ll watch more closely this time.” She stepped calmly back onto the patch. Two or three voices started to say something, but all stopped before finishing a word. There seemed no other way to get the information.

“Is it crawling over your boots?” asked Goodall. Xalco squatted once more.

“No,” she replied after a moment. “I’m more like melting in. The stuff isn’t closing in around me. You know, this might work. This is interesting; I wish I could send you pictures.”

“Damn!” said Arthur with feeling. Not even Ginger criticized. All watched tensely from
Theia
but learned more from the verbal report.

“It still looks tarry, but acts more like fairly soft wet clay. It squeezes up around my boots even in this gravity, but isn’t closing around them as a real liquid would.”

“Or something that was trying to swallow you,” interjected Goodall. Neither Ginger nor even Belvew could think of an appropriate answer to this, and she continued reporting.

“I can pick up one boot without much resistance. I get pulled that way, I suppose by air pressure on the boot—not suction, Arthur—and the other foot goes down a little—”