Half Life (19 page)

Belvew omitted the “he just believed it” part of the rather trite remark; there was no point in either being grossly insulting or leaving himself open to a devastating retort about his own adolescence. Maria probably wouldn’t have made one, but still…

The rest of the group must be listening, after all.

“I’ll be there in about ten minutes,” Ginger interjected tactfully. “I’m letting down now. Status, does the absolute direction of the can lines matter? You said to make them at right angles to each other, but nothing more.”

“No. Even the right angle needn’t be exact,” was the answer. “In any case, the absolute orientation will be found when we calibrate them. You can drop the first line on your initial pass over the crater.”

“Only if you tell me when I’m at the right distance. I know I’m heading right, but I can’t see far enough ahead to spot the crater from fifty K’s out.”

“I can take care of that,” came Martucci’s voice. “I have your position and vector through one of the relays—the station is below your horizon. Tell me when you’re down to drop height.”

“Five more seconds,” the pilot answered promptly.

“Then cut to sowing speed right now, or you’ll overshoot.”

“Right.” Both speakers were physically in the station, of course; it would have been easier to let Pete take over the jet directly had he been competent to fly it. No one mentioned this.

“You start to drop in six minutes from—now. Remember the wide gap on these lines; is your intervalometer reset?”

“It is now. Thanks. Maria, any more jolts?”

“Yes, but nothing to send me off the floor.”

“And nothing to shear the tunnel?” asked Belvew.

There was a brief pause while the digger looked back along the bore. “Nothing I can see inside. Ginger, can you see anything funny ahead? The sky looks paler than a couple of minutes ago, at least the little bit I can see through the entrance.”

“Nothing shows from here. Not even the crater yet. The sky from here is the usual orange-tan, or whatever you like to call it, with the usual cumulus presumably about over the lake. Maybe you’re seeing that.”

“Maybe, though that shouldn’t be the right direction. I can check that out later. I’ll dig until I have to rest again, or until there’s some other reason to go outside. Everything here seems solid enough, now that the mud I plastered on the ceiling has all fallen back down. The real shocks seem to have stopped, but there’s a fairly steady continuing vibration.”

“Keep an eye on the tunnel mouth,” Gene suggested. “If the motion along that fault reverses, you could be in a tight spot.”

“Why should it do that? Do they ever?”

“Ask me again when I know why it’s there at all—I mean in detail; we already know Titan can build mountains.”

“And why should I worry? I have the digger with me, and there’s only a few meters of ice overhead.”

“You can’t go straight up. I doubt if you can slant up at twenty degrees. That reads
quite
a few meters of new tunnel if you have to dig out. Think time, not distance—Commander.”

“Right. Thanks. I have about twenty-four hours to go in this suit before tapping emergency storage, and two after that.”

“And that includes two or three to get up here, depending on when you start. At least take your rest breaks outside.”

“We should have built recharging equipment into the jets,” remarked Martucci.

“There are a lot of things we’d have done if we’d known enough.” Anyone, including Peter himself, could have made remarks to that effect, and most of them did; Seichi beat the rest by a split second. There was silence for a few minutes while Maria continued to chip ice and Ginger’s aircraft approached Settlement Crater.

“Twenty seconds to first drop. You’re on heading, assuming no wind,” Peter announced at last.

“A Titan hurricane wouldn’t make that much difference. I’ve set start and interval—there goes the first!”

“Can you see the crater yet?”

“Not at thirty-plus kilometers. I’d guess visibility about ten or twelve, ordinary for this height. I’d rather not play with wavelengths while I fly a line; you’re all getting the same picture, though. Some of you can try for more penetration.”

Again Seichi was first; he had probably been scanning the spectrum before Ginger made her suggestion.

“I have the crater. You’re headed all right, Major. There’s something funny there, though.”

“What?” Again several voices overlapped.

“A very low cloud, I’d say, nearly white in this wave band. It has a very sharp, straight edge on the west side, running almost north and south. It starts about a kilometer south and three west of the lake, less than a K from the near rim, and runs nearly straight north into the northwest wall. It’s interrupted there, but resumes and continues for at least one crater diameter—seven kilos or so—outside. The cloud itself is about two or three kilos wide, though the east side is a lot less sharp. It fades out pretty well by the time it reaches the north-south diameter of the ring, so I can see the lake all right. That may be what’s lightening your sky, Maria.”

“Should I investigate, or lay out the cans first?”

“The cans.” Status’s voice of course showed no emotion, but the answer came quickly enough to
sound
emphatic. Maria had been about to say the same.

“That’s three quarters of an hour at standard. Maria—Commander—maybe you should go outside and at least take a look,” suggested Belvew. “The only low clouds I’ve ever seen here are cumulus, formed over lakes and raining back into them or near them, and those clouds weren’t as low as the major described. This shows no connection with the lake.”

“Status?” Maria uttered the one word.

“Sergeant Belvew is probably right. There is a good chance you can obtain useful data by going west.”

“And a better chance of your living though the next big shock.” Gene made no effort to keep the words to himself, but no one else commented on them. Not even the commander.

She kept the chipper with her as she leaned forward twenty degrees to Titan walking attitude and started back up the tunnel. The visible area of sky increased as she approached the entrance, but to her surprise she could distinguish no ground even when she was within a few meters of the opening and her line of sight over the sill was clearly downward. Surely the cliff hadn’t…

There was nothing but the vaguely orange-tinted gray, much lighter than the familiar color produced by the suspended smog—tar—particles constantly forming high above.

Only when she was outside and several meters from the scarp did the regular orange-tan become visible to the east, beyond the cliff edge. Overhead and to the west the color paled steadily until, looking toward where the horizon should be, there was only a featureless and impenetrable near-white.

“I can see it now. It’s moving. It’s blowing from west to east,” came Ginger’s voice. “There must be some wind. Can you tell, Maria?”

The commander took a gloveful of the ice dust which had been blown from the tunnel, raised it to helmet level, faced south, and let it spill from her palm.

“Yes. Not much, even for Titan, but the air’s moving east. More to the point, the surface west of me has been covered with something; it’s almost white, too. That’s why I thought I couldn’t see the ground from inside the tunnel. It’s as near as no matter to the same color and brightness as the sky in that direction.”

“Are you still feeling vibrations?” asked Status.

Maria paused before answering. “Yes. I’m getting used to them, I’m afraid; I may not be able to give an objective report about them before long.”

“I suggest you walk slowly westward, looking for changes in visibility and thickness of the white ground covering as you go, Commander.”

“All right.”

“Hold it!” It was Gene, of course. “If visibility goes down too far, how do you keep track of direction?”

“You can be observed and guided from the jet, and if necessary

By the time Ginger had finished laying the seismic detectors, Maria was nearing what Seichi had described as the west edge of the cloud. By this time she felt sure, and had reported, that it consisted of solid particles far too small to see individually, but dense enough to settle quickly even here. The stuff now formed a layer two to three centimeters deep under her feet, hiding the smog sediment beneath.

The latter might have extended for as much deeper, or a whole meter, or fifty meters, or not been there at all. Its thickness, they now knew, varied widely over Titan’s surface. It had been moved—drifted?—extensively during the aeons, settling very slowly as near-molecular dust. Even Titan’s feeble winds could move it easily until it finally caked in the methane rains—which did not fall everywhere. This, at least, was the general consensus, which had been through much GO6 processing.

The most reasonable guess at the white stuff’s identity was water ice, but no one had suggested a plausible origin for it. This was only partly because of earlier experience with other observed white powders.

Ginger, her run finished, had made another low, slow pass to spot the new Collos patch the commander had reported and attempt to drop a lab on it. She had missed by nearly a hundred meters, but that was acceptable. The device had survived the fall even without a parachute, and diSabato was now steering it toward its target.

“You can be observed and guided by the jet, and if necessary from orbit,” the computer pointed out. There could have been no insult intended in its use of “you” rather than “she,” since Maria was the logical person for Status to address, but Belvew felt snubbed just the same.

“I’ve started,” was the commander’s only comment.

A human being fully equipped with environment gear can make a standing broad jump of four or five meters on Titan, if he doesn’t care which way up he lands. A walker reasonably careful about keeping helmet upward and at least one foot toward the ground will take nearly a second to complete a one-meter stride.

This is about four kilometers an hour, considerably less than the speed of a healthy young adult on Earth.

The difference is not in spite of the low gravity on the satellite, but because of it.

There were relatively few healthy young adults on Earth and still fewer on Titan, but Maria could make reasonable speed by her colleagues’ standards. She started westward, wondering what walking for a few hours would do to her oxygen consumption and wishing the station would rise even though she wouldn’t be able to see it. Not all its sensors could be used reliably through the relays, and some could not be thus employed at all. It would have been nice to have a towering, highly visible mountain like that near Factory One in sight.

It occurred to her that Factory Two, west of the lake but well south of her present course, should also be checked; the tremors might have affected it. Without asking for advice, she announced what she was doing and turned south-southwest. She was assured from the station that the factory was behaving normally for its age, but she went on anyway. A kilometer and a half could be spared, even if one measured it in terms of time and oxygen, and it would be a relief to be sure.

The structure was so far operating normally, but a new Collos patch about five meters across had appeared two hundred meters away, roughly halfway between factory and lake.

Maria reported it as calmly as she could, without making any comparison with the Factory One event, and turned west again.

Status had been told to maintain a running comparison between its readings once it arrived and those of the one stationed where Goodall had performed his last experiment.

Ginger was now flying perhaps imprudently low along the west edge of the cloud, but she could make out no details. It was Maria who got the first good-enough look at the source to feed hungry imaginations.

Afterward, she could not deny that there had been some warning. A gradually increasing roar, which she had unthinkingly attributed to
Theia
, and a steady, faint quivering of the surface underfoot, which she soon tuned out, might have alerted her.

Quite abruptly, within the space of a few steps, she found herself seeing the familiar near-orange sky in all directions overhead. The dense white mist now reached only to her shoulders, swirling gently around her body in what passed for a high wind here; thinner, more transparent fluff still reached several meters above her, but she could see a horizon of sorts. A few meters ahead, beyond the drifting white, the ground showed in its usual patchy smog color, about the same tint as the sky but much darker except where bare patches of ice were exposed. A few such patches could be seen from where she stood.

Her eyes had just registered that the surface ahead was lower than the one she was walking on when her feet made the same discovery. She had stepped over the edge of another fault.

The fall would have been only about a meter if she had simply fallen. Instead, she was hurled upward by a blast of wind, not violently and not far before starting down; but she made an almost complete back somersault, landing mostly on her shoulders on a bare patch of ice. Her helmet took some of the impact, and for an instant she felt an intense, terrifying chill, which fortunately proved to be subjective.

She brought herself upright with a push of her left hand and looked around.

She had left the vision-hampering cloud. Westward, as she had seen before stepping over the edge, the bare ground extended to the crater wall half a kilometer away. To the east was the smooth vertical step, a meter or so high, which she had failed to see in time. Its face was almost totally hidden by roiling streams of white which spewed, also vertically, from a narrow crack at its base. Maria started to approach it, remembered the upward kick, became conscious of the roar, and stopped to report before getting any closer.

“I’m out of the cloud, Ginger. Can you see me? There’s another fault here, vertical, with something blowing up at its edge. It’s the source of the cloud, I’d say; there seems to be nothing more of it to the west. My best guess is still ice dust, but we need labs here pronto.”

“I’m a couple of minutes north of the rim, too far to see you. I still have labs aboard; I left only one at the new patch. How many should I drop?”