Half Life (12 page)

“Right pipe is just in line—you overshot a bit. It’ll be easier to use that one for melting.”

“Obviously. I’d have to light it anyway to turn back. I certainly don’t want to waste mass swiveling all the way around, and I’m sure you don’t either. All
I’d
be risking is the ship.
You’re
down there.”

Barn made no answer to this point. Neither did Goodall, though he did not fully agree. A full turn would have provided a fine variety of viewpoints both high and low. Enough, he felt, to let a little image processing give him a fully detailed three-dimensional model of the pool. At least, of its surface.

“Shouldn’t you get a little farther to the side?” asked the woman. “I’d hate to either blow you away or cook your armor.”

“I’ll be all right. The exhaust doesn’t spread much in the first few meters.”

“Wrong,” Belvew cut in. Not quite all of his attention was on flying. “Believe me. That’s dense air.”

Ginger, from personal experience, agreed emphatically, and Inger moved a few meters farther away rather than argue the matter.“You’re lined up fine,” were his last words. “Light it.” The woman fed liquid and energy to the engine, and all watched the loose pile of ice rocks with interest. The last hour or more had been typical of the group’s problems from the beginning: unexpected factors had time and again caused what should have been foreseeable procedure and equipment use to go awry. Imagination had not been built into any data processor yet, so Status’s fellow processors on Earth hadn’t helped; they had no imaginations either. Well-known facts had either not been considered at all, or dismissed as irrelevant. One of them was
not
irrelevant…

The watchers expected the surfaces of the ice chunks which Inger had used for his wall to liquefy quickly and start to drip, or possibly blow away in the stream of hot gas, but it didn’t work out that way.

Within a second of the exhaust’s enveloping the wall everyone heard a series of sharp snapping sounds, not quite explosions. Not everyone saw the flying pieces of thermally shattered ice. At least, not in time.

One of them, half the size of his helmet, struck Inger in the face. The others heard the impact; no one ever knew whether Inger himself did. He toppled backward with fascinating deliberation in Titan’s gravity, and settled to the ground with his feet more than a meter behind the point where he had been standing.

He neither spoke nor moved.

“Left one forty-seven standard.” Maria’s mild voice was the first to be heard. For once, the amusement was gone. There was no question whom she was addressing, and Belvew banked
Meta
sharply to the left. A real-surroundings view chose that moment to appear on his screen, but he didn’t heed it. He knew he was in the station, flying with his waldo suit; he knew he would have to bring
Crius
back up, board it physically, and get back to the surface before he or anyone could help his partner. Briefly he wondered whether it would be quicker to climb to orbit from where he was instead of getting to the equator first, but mental arithmetic disposed of that notion. A nearly polar orbit would take less time to get him near the station from where he was than a trip to the equator, but would not leave enough exhaust mass to match velocities. He had a quarter of Titan’s circumference, south pole to equator, to traverse before leaving atmosphere, and there would be hours after that before he or anyone else could get back down.

All three jets were now in atmosphere or on the ground. No one expected him to be in time. No one seriously believed there was any time even now, but no one even privately denied the need to try. People were people, especially friends. Even dead friends.

Not even Goodall escaped the emotional blow. He was jolted enough to forget for several minutes to record for his private map the new surface features Belvew’s cameras must be covering. Even when he did, he was clumsier than usual in setting up the equipment, and when the adjustments were complete he realized that little would probably come of it.
Theia
was traveling as fast as ramjet mode would permit, which meant that she was in thin air well above much of the heaviest smog. Her cameras did range into the near infrared, which gave some surface detail even from this height, but the jet had no radar and there was little chance of catching the sort of feature he wanted, at least with the detail he needed.

Nevertheless, he watched. The southern hemisphere was not yet mapped in anything like the detail available for the latitudes between the factory and Lake Carver. Terabytes of data had indeed been recorded by Maria’s instruments, but were not yet combined and translated into readable map form even in Goodall’s quarters.

He watched tensely and silently as images flowed across his screens. Sometimes they were quite clear, sometimes entirely meaningless; Titanian smog was far from uniform. Annoyingly, the regions around lakes tended to be worst, since the bodies of methane mixture created vertical air currents capped by clouds; methane vapor, at any given temperature and pressure, is little more than half as dense as nitrogen. This had long since ceased to be a surprise, but it could still be a nuisance.

Twice Goodall thought he glimpsed a lake with hills around it. The first time he reacted too slowly, and recorded only an approximate position. The second time he was more alert, got precise satellite surface coordinates, and then had time to realize how the concentration had spared him whole minutes of pain.

He thought briefly of Barn Inger, then for a moment of calling up records immediately to build a detailed map of the area; then he decided simply to watch and note positions until
Theia
reached the equator, banked east, and started her climb to orbit.

By the time this happened he had four more possible sites in his notes. He decided to work on them in reverse order, since the last were closest to the equator and potentially most suitable for his purpose. The presumably rock-hard human body by the factory was almost as far from his mind now as his own pain.

The first site, after details had been added from Maria Collos’s files, indeed turned out to be an irregular lake covering about two square kilometers, near the southern edge of what almost had to be a badly eroded impact crater some fifteen kilometers across. Unfortunately, nothing Goodall could do quickly with the images revealed the slightest sign of any of the smooth areas of glassy/tarry material—the “Collos patches”—which were central to his needs.

The second, over three hundred kilometers from the equator, seemed ideal almost from the first glance.

The lake was much smaller, but two of the tar patches lay inside the crater; and the surrounding ringwall, only seven kilometers in diameter, appeared to be much more recent than the first. Its minimum height was over fifty meters, and it rose in some places to nearly three times that. The commander drew a deep breath of satisfaction, ignoring the agony as his expanding chest rubbed the soft material of his suit liner—his waldo was off now, of course—and began to think furiously about many things, both positive and negative.

Sometimes even including Inger’s misfortune.

The colonel was still thinking when
Theta
reached the station, docked, and departed again with Belvew now physically aboard. He did not worry as the craft left; there was nothing he could possibly have done toward executing the plan just yet, even if he had had all the tactical details worked out. Also it crossed his mind briefly that what had happened to Inger might make the whole idea harder to justify.

To the project, that was. Goodall was getting more and more certain that he himself would not be able to get on without trying it for much longer.

Not
too
much longer. But there was still a chemical problem to solve before he could dispense with analytical equipment, heavy thought, and—most troublesome—physical contacts.

He had reported the material of the tar pool on which Belvew had landed earlier to be a gel, with methanol as the dispersing agent. No one had pointed out, politely or otherwise, that methanol’s melting point was something like a hundred kelvins above the local temperature. Frozen jelly doesn’t flow even under Titanian atmospheric pressure. Presumably none of the living minds had noticed—they might not even have the fact in their memories. Status
knew
, since both the current data and much of the chemical information known to humanity were in its memory, but would never
notice
without guidance. Goodall himself had not thought of the point for some hours after his original report, and when he did he was more dismayed at having had his word accepted uncritically than by the fact that he or his apparatus must have made some sort of mistake. Even the observing ranks should have known better.

He made all reasonable tests of the apparatus he could, strongly annoyed that the original sample and sampler had been lost, and found nothing wrong. There had been three or four carbon-hydrogen bonds, one carbon-oxygen, and one hydrogen-oxygen per molecule in the principal material present. There was no crystal structure to provide a background, either helpful or otherwise; the stuff
was
essentially liquid in spite of the temperature. There were many other compounds there, of course, to help confuse the readings; but this was plainly the general background. Testing for individual, unbonded atoms seemed pointless, though the labs could do this; they had pore sensors adjustable to virtually anything. They could even isolate and accumulate such things; atoms like gold, platinum, and iridium were potentially so useful in the manufacture of equipment that the ability had been designed into them in spite of what seemed negligible chances of finding such stuff on Titan.

Goodall had not thought to look for other bonds once the carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen ones had been read out; it was not at once obvious what others could be fitted into the pattern then being sought. Four for carbon, three or five for phosphorus, two for oxygen, one for each hydrogen He had allowed the hope of finding amino acids to steer his imagination, of course. The inspiration that he might have overlooked carbon-carbon
double
bonds had come embarrassingly late. He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone yet because he had no way of checking it. The original analyzer was gone with the sample, while the ones around the factory were busy on the planned routine now and in any case couldn’t be moved up to the Belvew site until another ship went down. Also, the appropriate reference material was too vast to digest quickly.

And not even Status knew the melting point of the vinyl alcohol monomer. At terrestrial temperatures it existed too fleetingly for such properties to be measured. On Titan—who knew? It
could
be lower than that of methanol: the molecule was larger, its one hydrogen bond presumably less effective—or maybe not; what did the charge distribution of a carbon-carbon double bond do to the polarity of other bonds on the same atoms? Embarrassingly, Goodall didn’t know.

Status might, but the colonel didn’t want to ask it now. The question might tell the others too much.

There were analytical labs from the factory around the place where Ginger had had her misadventure.

Should he reprogram one of them to do a more complete basic analysis?
Could
he without being noticed? The mere question of whether the wrecked jet was being engulfed was not excuse enough; that had already been considered and the program planned to include it.

However, a possible major error in the data which had been supplied to Status was something else.

Goodall
must
make as sure as possible about this point before doing anything irrevocable, however tempting his planned final experiment was becoming. Status should be given the right answer to file.

Merely knowing that the present one was wrong was not enough.
Why
it was wrong should also be known. Personal vanity was irrelevant.

Belvew entered atmosphere, did a routine refill, and sent his aircraft plunging toward the factory site, following the great circle vectors transmitted by the still deadly serious Maria. Neither he nor anyone else expected to reach the place in time to do Inger any good, but the effort had to be made. Humanity was still, in spots, more moral than logical and more emotional than pragmatic. The word “inhuman” was still a pejorative, though it was seldom now directed at science and scientists. Inger would have to be brought up for the data mausoleum, and properly memorialized.

And he was—had been, since there was no real possibility that he was still alive—a good friend.

Theia
flashed across the factory site half a kilometer up, banked sharply, and was worked into a landing pattern. For just a moment her pilot allowed himself to picture all three of the jets on the ground at the same place and time, and to think what would happen to the whole project if even one more of them should fail to get off again; were there enough reserve heavy elements in the station to grow another aircraft? Then he focused his attention on his landing.

He chose to come in from the west rather than the north, as the other setdowns had been made; he knew that if he overshot he would have the ice cliff ahead of him, but the cliff itself made a landing near the factory in the opposite direction impossible, and he didn’t want the complications which might ensue from involving the tar in his landing slide. He had gotten away with that once, and felt he knew how much luck had been involved. He was going to land hot, to make allowance for the wing ice which might have wrecked
Oceanus
, and he could not even guess what higher friction would do to the gel which he planned to miss.

The need to stop as close as possible to his partner left only the eastward landing feasible.

He was out and running the three-hundred-meter distance, if high-speed human locomotion on Titan could be called running, the moment he had completed his landing checklist. Neither he nor any of the others was surprised to see the shattered faceplate, nor at Inger’s failure to show any sign of life.

The suits, like the station, contained pure oxygen at one-fifth of a standard atmosphere, an eighth of the Titanian surface pressure. A flood of ninety-kelvin nitrogen must have washed into the victim’s face; it was unlikely that he had felt much, if anything. Certainly he had made no sound.