Half Life (16 page)

Reading the results would be something of a nuisance, since the device transmitted to his own receiving/computing center in the station and took its orders from the same place. Goodall spoke aloud.

“Pete, you know my system. Get it running, and have this unit scrape up a sample and look for carbon-carbon double bonds, will you? I had Status switch my general board to you while I was coming down.”

“Sure. Some special reason?”

“Yes. I told you I messed up with my original analysis. I found three or four C-H bonds. I supposed the uncertainty came from bond direction—a C-0 and an 0-H—and assumed methanol. Now I doubt it. There could be two carbons there, and if there are—”

“If there are, you have an impossible structure.” Status’s words came flatly.

“I’m not sure, at this temperature. The point is I’ll have a really high energy molecule with a really low activation energy either for reacting with others or simply breaking up. That would be the best situation for pre-bio that anyone’s found yet. If it turns out to be true, you check other Collos patches here and there and find out whether it’s general, and then watch what happens to this one when my enzymes get distributed. If anything does,
keep it confined
and watch it come alive—if anyone can decide where the fence between pre-bio and alive is. I think we really have something here—or will if you find that double bond.”

As he spoke, the lab unit had extended its iridium-coated scraper and managed to free a sample, with no more obvious trouble than had been experienced earlier near Lake Carver, and ingested it. Goodall could visualize the miniature NMR, neutron, and gamma diffraction devices going to work; he wondered briefly how many labs they could afford to lose before running out of beryllium for the neutron sources.

They hadn’t brought much, and recycling might not be practical. He could visualize the patterns they were providing for the computer far above—but he shouldn’t do that. He should wait for the data. Predicting them at this stage was highly improper.

He wanted to hold his breath, but things already hurt enough. It was more than three minutes before the answer came down.

“The bonds are there.” The pain disappeared.

“Then it’s—well, unless you can think of something else, it’s—”

“Yeah. Vinyl alcohol, not methanol. Do you want me to figure energies for its breakdown to water and acetylene, or can you think of other likely reactions, or don’t you care if your enzymes boil the patch off the planet?”

“Think of any you want. I won’t care, and it’s time for the rest of you to start the thinking anyway. That’s all I really wanted to know; my job’s done. You needn’t really hurry with the factory.” Goodall looked thoughtfully and silently at the glistening surface for a moment. His friends were equally silent. Then he spoke again. “Well, not quite done.”

Maria gave a choked, “No—”

“I have hours yet on my suit. I’ll take a lab unit to the other pool, over by the rim, and we’ll test that too; it won’t be much of a walk, and I haven’t walked for a long, long time. It might be fun.” Ginger spoke firmly.

“I’ll have full tanks in a few more minutes. I’m going to bring the plane down, and you’re getting back aboard. You’ve been right again, and we need you to go on being right. This is really a boost; maybe we can get some really critical knowledge back to Earth while we’re—”

“While you’re still alive. I’ve been right too often for your health, and I’m looking forward to not hurting anymore. Subjective and selfish, but that’s the way it is. Start a systematic analysis of the patch, Peter, Seichi, anyone with the interest and ideas. We need to know everything that’s
in
the gel. It’s a pity Gene had to blow the earlier unit away; we might have finished this part of it by now. I’m taking one of these for a walk.”

A trifle over three kilometers is not much of a walk under Titanian gravity, even for a disease-wasted and age- and pain-racked human body. Two or three times, as his skin seemed to catch fire in another spot, Goodall considered turning back and initiating his final experiment, but each time curiosity maintained its grip and drove him on.

Even when
Crius
roared overhead once more and settled back to the surface near the lake he merely pursed his lips in annoyance and continued his hike, with no words of irritation or anything else. If they chose to leave the jet on the ground until he was finished, there was nothing he could do about it. Arguing was almost always a waste of time, except of course about points of reasoning. He was not planning anything reasonable, and the arguments of the others would be irrelevant.

Since the craft was under remote control, with no one else down even back at the factory, there was nothing they could do about
him
, either.

He reached the larger tar patch and had the unit put through its paces. While he waited for answers, the pain came back, but was somehow not as bad. He could wonder—was there a range of odd materials in the patches scattered over the big satellite? Or were they all the same? If they were the same, was it because highly probable reactions—nearly inevitable, it would have to be—had built them? Or was there transfer of material over Titan’s surface in ways no one had yet figured out? Could any of this stuff
evaporate?
Surely not in significant amounts at this temperature. He thought all this aloud; Status would store the words, and speculations were always starting points.

And he wouldn’t have time to fall in love with these.

Was subsurface transport of solutions possible? More would have to be done to keep proper track of factory roots when the new ones were planted.

Those few minutes while he waited for the next set of results raised thoughts that came closer than had any of his friends’ arguments to making Goodall change his plans and persuading him to climb back aboard
Crius
. There was so much still to do!

But the places where he was pressed, however lightly, by his suit made their own counterarguments. Yes, there was a lot to do, but he simply wouldn’t be able to do it.

He heard the report that here, too, the liquid part of the gel was probably vinyl alcohol—probably; don’t jump to conclusions, you old idiot; once is more than enough—took it as a fitting summary of what he’d done so far, and started back toward the lake.

Crius
was still there, of course; he would have heard the departure if anyone had decided to take her off.

For just an instant he panicked; had he plugged the takeover jack back in? Then he remembered that with no one in the coffin there was no need, and it had already flown without him.

He looked the jet over carefully—there was no hurry about the final experiment—and noted that there was no frozen hydrocarbon on the wings. He should have checked that earlier; it would have been more likely on his own landing. Had he been merely lucky, or had Ginger’s talk-down been designed to keep a little extra speed? No, he had been frighteningly close to wing stall those last few seconds, he recalled.

Your mind is wandering, old fellow. You’re doing the right thing. Do it
now
.

He took the seismic cans and drove them firmly into the surface, one midway between lake and tar patch and the other a quarter of the way around the lake to the north. He wished he had thought to bring at least one of them over to the crater wall, and briefly wondered about doing so now—did he have enough time in the suit for such a trip? Probably, but he couldn’t spend it for that. He was burning up.

One lab unit he set down a meter from the edge of the lake, another just in the liquid, positioning both carefully. He watched for a minute or two to make sure that the latter wouldn’t roll—there was no way of telling the slope of the lake bottom, since the liquid was not very clear. He pointed the latter fact out to Peter. The remaining lab units he set down on areas which had been scorched, or seared, or melted, by the rocket exhausts of the two landings and one takeoff. This didn’t matter much, since the devices were mobile anyway, but it would be nice to see—for them to see—what chemical effects there might be from brief warmings of the ninety-K surface. Maybe the earlier landings had already caused contamination, especially
Oceanus’s
. No, don’t think of that.

And now there was only one thing left to do. No, two. He repeated the order releasing the detailed crater information to Status’s regular files. Then he took one more look around the crater, clearly enough visible in the faint sunlight filtering through the smog. He looked at the lake, the parked aircraft, noted happily that he felt neither pain nor temptation for the moment, and walked out on the patch.

“Arthur—,” came a faint, distressed female voice.

“Be sure you don’t miss any readings from here for Status,” he answered. “Here’s where I’m betting the changes will be.”

He turned off his suit heaters—I remembered this time, he approved himself—and waited a few minutes.

The suit insulation is really good, he reflected.

Then the cold did begin to creep in. It was not at all painful. He should have tried this before; he couldn’t feel much of anything, for the first time in years.

But he couldn’t enjoy it for long. His personal enzymes would need access to the tar, or vice versa, and if he waited too long he wouldn’t be able to move. His hand went to his faceplate release as he knelt down and leaned forward.

But nothing happened to the plate. The outside pressure was far higher, and the plate wouldn’t open. It was held against its gasket by Titanian air. He gasped in surprise, and for a few seconds actually worried.

Was this all wasted? Would he just lie here, accomplishing nothing, while the tar surrounded him without being able to get at him? Should he turn the heaters back on?
Could
he? Maybe the tar could get through anyway—

He was nearly prone now. The pain was coming back, where gravity pressed him against the front of his suit. Was even the release of the cold being lost?

“Arthur. Emergency oxygen. You need pressure.” Maria’s voice was still unsteady, and she was clearly neither arguing nor amused.

“Thanks,” he muttered. He groped for, found, and opened the manual cock of the topping tank, and fell silent again while the oxygen hissed from the container to his suit, raising the inside pressure. Luckily, high oxygen concentration took a while to get one drunk. Or maybe it would be good if he did Everyone in the station heard the faceplate pop open.

Maria Collos was feeling philosophical. Personal danger usually makes one brush even the most basic personal strategy aside in favor of immediate tactics, but Commander Collos, who disliked both the title and what went with it, had a strong sense of responsibility.

She knew all about the ninety-kelvin ambient temperature and the twenty-five-hour remaining charge in her life suit. She knew the minimum time needed to get back to the station. She recognized the small but far from infinitesimal chance of an aircraft problem which would keep her from getting back at all.

Increasingly frequent trembling of the ice underfoot hinted at still other perils; but her mind still kept wandering to matters of policy. Physical exhaustion forced her to pause often in her work, and when she stopped she simply couldn’t keep from thinking.

She was a sensible person, though her present whereabouts and occupation might have suggested otherwise. Her philosophy was basically of the take-care-of-what-you-can-and-don’t-worry-about-the-rest sort; but a colony of what’s-the-use germs had somehow invaded it. She had come to Titan firmly convinced of the prelife project’s importance, despite its low chances of success. She even had a fairly optimistic view of those chances, though knew as well as anyone that there were many more wrong pieces than right ones waiting to be added to the barely started jigsaw puzzle of the Human Universe.

It certainly wasn’t a complete picture yet, and not even the assembled part could be counted on as fully accurate. Shifting an old piece to a new place or tossing it back in the box was everyday science.

She still felt sure that adding to humanity’s store of knowledge—finding more pieces of the puzzle which the physical-realists were so desperately trying to fit together—offered the only hope other than pure luck for survival of her species. She realized that the concatenation of diseases decimating humanity might turn out to be mere statistical bad luck, as did nearly everyone else but the conspiracy fundamentalists; but knowledge seemed to promise more hope than resignation did.

Looking at it one way, the assignment of the Titan group was to establish at the world-is-round level, rather than just a reasonable scientific presumption, that life could and sometimes did originate from purely natural causes, and, if at all possible from only two examples, to try to estimate the chances of its doing so.

This had been strongly implied for many decades by the partly assembled pieces of the puzzle found so far, but to the non- and antiscientists who used the word “theory” as a synonym for “guess” it was “only” a theory.

Finding something on Titan which seemed halfway to life might not be a very promising goal, but it offered hope as a lead to the solution of medical problems in general, and Titan was the only accessible body in the solar system other than Earth to make the offer. Jupiter and Europa might be more probable places, but they could not yet, if ever, be regarded as accessible ones where biogenesis seemed likely to occur. Europa was far too deep in Jupiter’s radiation field to allow a long-term human project, and Jupiter had no surface, though there had been talk of balloons.

Humanity was, after all, clutching at straws. It was much too late to see what had actually transpired when Earth conceived life. While most thinkers had taken the “natural origin” concept for granted for many decades, there were detail gaps in the assumed process; filling them
might
help what was left of humanity to save itself.

But was this really worth doing?

Collos, now head of the project, was herself human and wanted very much to live—to live longer than she probably would. Presumably most other people felt the same way, though Arthur Goodall’s example a few weeks before might justify some doubt. As long as
anyone
did, then probably one should try.