Half Life (14 page)

“I can do it myself when I come back. I could start now, and meet the station in—how long, Maria?”

“Just a moment.” The woman was busy, of course, but nothing ever seemed to disconcert her. “Since you’re just about at a pole—one hundred twelve minutes to the equator, half a minute to turn, seven and a quarter to orbit speed and clearance of atmosphere, one hundred ten to intercept and two more to match—”

“Forget it,” Goodall interrupted firmly. “It should have been done long ago, and I can do it in a few minutes. You must be flying a planned pattern, Gene. Finish it out and come back whenever you intended. I’m leaving quarters, everyone, as soon as I’ve checked my suit.”

There may have been doubts, though no one claimed later to have had any. There was no objection; almost certainly there was no suspicion. Goodall was a theoretician, with rank to do as he saw fit. He was, in fact, the boss, as far as such a group could have a boss. The others were qualified, and commonly quite willing, to raise what they considered reasonable objections to his decisions, but none was likely to do it on such a trivial issue. Five minutes later he was climbing the short distance to the station axis.

He actually visited the mausoleum. He had indeed failed to shut down Inger’s heaters—that memory was what had inspired his present plan. A direct and total falsehood would probably never have occurred to him. He was now, however, facing a need to lie—really lie—probably in a very few minutes. Of course he didn’t want to until he absolutely had to, since something might always happen to make it unnecessary.

Never lie until it becomes unimportant whether anyone ever believes you again or not; this was pragmatism, not morality, he told himself.

The body had stiffened by now, though not from cold. This bothered Goodall slightly; it was general policy to forestall as much as possible the irreversible chemistry which followed death and added additional variables to any study involving a body. One never knew when more information might be needed. However, there were other possible subjects—other former friends whose memorials and personalities he could remember, he thought briefly and grimly—and as long as the error was on file with Status it shouldn’t matter much.

The frost that had filled Barn’s faceplate area was gone, but Goodall didn’t see the mustache either. He was too careful not to look closely as he opened the heater switch.

He filed the report without caring whether any others were paying attention. He left the mausoleum and headed not back to his own laboratory/hospital cell/quarters but toward the pole of the station and
Crius’s
dock. Status would pay no attention without specific instruction, since he was legitimately outside his quarters, and the more imaginative staff wouldn’t know in time.

The remotely controlled override which would allow the jets to be handled from the station even if a waldo suit was aboard was a recent improvisation, of course. It was considered less effective and less important than the unanimous agreement that no one would do anything of the sort again—the agreement whose breach was about to make Arthur Goodall a liar. It had been installed anyway because someone had now thought of illness taking over a pilot at an awkward time.

Goodall had been mainly responsible for its design, and knew what to do. Disabling it was a matter of disconnecting a single jack, easily done floating above the coffin even while wearing a suit.

He did not remember whether this would be noted by Status, but this no longer mattered. He was aboard within seconds, with the outer canopy closed. Everyone would know what was happening in a few minutes, but no one, including Status, would be able to do anything about it.

He closed the coffin hatch and started the prelaunch check. This was entirely passive at first, a matter of reading instruments, and would call no attention from outside the ship. All seemed ready. The tanks were not full, of course—most of their mass had been used to get up to the station—but there was much more than enough to break orbit and get back to atmosphere. The fusers were solid-state devices which went wrong only catastrophically when they failed at all, and they must certainly be all right now, since the jet and surrounding areas were intact. Chemical batteries were at reasonable charge. So was Goodall’s own environment suit; he had made sure of that before leaving his quarters. He could see that the launching springs were compressed, as they had been when Ginger docked. There was no status indicator for the remote controller which would release them from inside the jet, but there was no reason to worry about it; the device was too simple to be tricky. At least, nothing had gone wrong with it so far.

He energized the small tank heater which would make sure some of the reaction mass was vapor and would reach the feed pipes, waited for the required three seconds in tense anticipation of Status’s voice asking what was going on, realized at last that the jets were not part of the robot’s responsibility except through direct orders, and sprang the launcher.

That brought the questions, a confusion of voices from everyone in the station. Goodall ignored them. He had never actually flown one of the craft before except for a brief try in upper atmosphere, but in spite of the pain he had followed through with his suit many times while others were doing so; and like the others, he had received plenty of training before they left Earth.

He had more than one reason for concentrating on flying now, of course. He had no intention of being talked out of this, and if he allowed himself any distraction he’d be noticing his pain again. Right now handling the craft took
all
his attention, blissfully.

Crius
drifted away from the station and achieved regulation distance for minimal rocket use, and her pilot swung and applied the thrust. It was only a tiny fraction of a gravity, and nearly five minutes passed before the departure was irrevocable—before distance and accumulated orbital change would make return impossible with the available mass—and until that happened, and he had applied the brief but more solid thrust which would bring him down to atmosphere, he paid no attention to what anyone said. Then he uttered only one word.

“Sorry.”

Argument had already stopped; everyone but Belvew, who had not had access to the instruments in his quarters and had only a confused idea of what was happening from the equally confused tangle of voices, knew that argument was pointless. There was no way for
Crius
to return to the station until she had replenished her tanks in Titan’s atmosphere. Most of the staff had inferred even more than this, using the broken agreement as a basic datum. Ginger Xalco, whose own malfeasance had been responsible for the agreement in the first place, asked the obvious question.

“Why, Arthur?”

“I know I’m being a bit early,” he replied with no tremor or other sign of worry in his voice. “I’m starting Stage Three—settlement. I’ve found a place to start the control run, a place where there are Collos patches, a lake, and good isolation from the rest of the surface. We can now test the patches without too much contamination risk for what we hope they are—prebiotic areas, made of what may become life someday if Titan has time for it before the Sun’s a planetary nebula. Anyone can run the analyses. You know what we want to find out: mainly, whether chemical evolution is really taking place, and how fast. I think the chances are good; there is
something
making those tar pools far more mobile than they should be at Titan’s temperature, and
something
seems to be making them responsive even to simple stimuli. Also, the responses aren’t all the same. Ginger found that out; so did you, Gene. Different prebiotic molecules? We’ll have to find out. And why didn’t any of you notice that my methanol report had to be wrong? That methanol doesn’t melt until it’s a hundred kelvins hotter than that stuff can—pardon me,
should—be?
I’m only guessing what it is, but I think it’s a good guess. I’ll run an analysis when I get down, and supply a batch of enzymes afterward; you’ll have to keep track what they do, if anything, and watch for evidence that my crater system isn’t as isolated as I hope. We mustn’t contaminate all Titan; that would spoil the whole project. But we do have to see what contamination by nonnative enzymes can do, so we have a chance of recognizing it if it happens accidentally, and the contamination needs to be in an isolated spot. You know that as well as I do. We were going to do it, eventually; I’m afraid I just lost patience.”

“But why? Why?” it was Maria Collos’s almost frantic voice. She was upset at last; she, at least, had now guessed his full intent, Goodall felt sure. “It could have waited until the planned time. It
should
have.”

“It couldn’t, and you know why.” Goodall’s voice was gentle.

“Where are you getting the enzymes, and what ones will you use?” Belvew, perhaps because he had less information, was less quick than usual on the uptake.

“I don’t have a complete list, but there are a good many thousands. You and Pete, or Seichi, or whoever takes it on, should have fun reading chemistry. Don’t worry about details; Status’s memory is there. I’m priming it with a background based on what I’ve done so far, and there’s a lifetime’s worth in it already.”

It was not until the end of this sentence that Belvew caught on. He practically screamed his next words.

He wanted to do something, but was completely helpless except for talk.

“You old idiot! You could drop a steak from the food plant into the pool and get the same result! Get back up and be useful!”

“The steak will be more useful to you than I will. Shut up and think.” The colonel regretted his own lapse of courtesy, but was pretty sure that nothing less would make Belvew listen. “I haven’t really driven this thing before, and will have to plan the flying part of this mission. I wish I had enough mass for a few practice maneuvers, but I’d better not risk that. It’s less than an hour to atmosphere, after all.” Belvew actually did shut up. He could see why the theoretician needed planning time.

Goodall had never flown the jets not because he was incompetent, but because the pain which resulted when anything touched his skin drowned out the sensations supplied by the waldo suits—sensations which provided the feedback necessary for real reflex-type flying control. Without the service of his sense of touch, he could fly only by visual inspection of his instruments. A living pilot in an ordinary airplane a few centuries before would have had no problem with this, having been trained to ignore everything
except
the visual input—the seat-of-the-pants sensations had killed far too many early fliers for anyone to trust them.

Neither Goodall nor anyone else in the group had had such training; the waldos provided more tactile input than any other kind, and they all had learned to trust this. The colonel was going to have to reinvent airplane-type instrument flying, and his principal visual information would come not from gyro-referenced attitude sensors or radar displays but from a full-sphere screen distorting its picture into a Mollweide equal-area projection.

Like the others, Goodall was used to allowing for the screen distortion, but that seemed to Belvew the only bright aspect of the whole situation. He was pretty sure that no sort of argument would now swerve the chief from his plan, though the sergeant intended to keep trying. He could—thankfully—only guess
at
the
sensations the old fellow had had to endure for the last few years. He knew that he himself might have done the same thing long ago, in Good-all’s place. That knowledge might weaken the emotional intensity of his arguments, but he was still going to argue.

But not until
after
the jet’s tanks were full, or at least after
Crius
had completed atmosphere entry, and everyone had had a chance to see what sort of piloting Goodall could actually do.

Entry was not too difficult.
Crius
was after all an aircraft, designed for stable aerodynamic flight, and she lined up easily and without pilot assistance along the proper axis once drag became perceptible and airfoils effective a couple of hours after leaving the station. Initial entry speed was only about one and a half kilometers per second, which offered no thermal problems and quickly decreased. Goodall lit the ramjets in the appropriate speed range and spent some minutes practicing turns, climbs, dives, and even pipe and lift stalls. No one even offered advice. No one realized that his microphone was off most of the time so that no sounds of pain would reach the station. Handling the waldoes still hurt, but was at least possible for the commander. Reading their tactile input was not.

The watchers did grow a little tense as Goodall started a long, gentle descent to deep atmosphere and began to hunt for a thunderhead. There was less room for error recovery with only a kilometer or two of air underneath, and as others besides Belvew knew from experience, the low airspeeds needed for mass collection offered perils of their own. When a cloud did loom in the center of
Crius’s
Mollweide and Goodall slowed still further, even the imperturbable Maria Collos had to remove her hands from her mapping controls. Belvew, for the first time, offered advice.

“Watch airspeed and pitch, Art, with thrust the controlling variable. Don’t let anything else distract you.”

He spoke with a little tremor.

“Right. Thanks.” Goodall’s voice showed no emotion, though his actual feeling was one of pleasure. He hadn’t noticed much pain since entering atmosphere; he had been far too busy even to think of anything but
Crius’s
behavior.

He had stabilized now at what the others had found to be the most effective collection speed, about five meters a second above pipe stall, and he plowed into the cloud with his eyes on the instruments Gene had recommended.

He could feel the bumpiness of the air as his craft met upward and downward currents. It hurt, of course, but by keeping pitch and thrust constant as directed he held his airspeed close to optimal. It was pitch which gave the most trouble; entering an updraft tended of course to lift the jet’s nose. This would slow her down if it was allowed to happen, and the colonel’s reflexes were unpracticed. He tended to overcontrol, like any novice.