Half Life (20 page)

“I’d say two—one just inside the cloud, one on my side of the edge. There’s a fair amount of snow, if that’s what the white stuff is, on the ground to the east; it shouldn’t take long to get samples. This side looks like ordinary titan, but we’d better make sure.” The commander stopped talking and listened.

“Coming around, five hundred up… I see you. I’ll slow down as much as I can. The labs don’t have parachutes—should I land and plant them properly?”

“Take another chance with them from where you are,” Belvew advised. “The one a few minutes ago made it, and they’re more replaceable than
Theia
.”

The commander agreed, adding, “Don’t get down too close to stall—any kind of stall—and don’t get below five hundred. There’s an updraft at the fault strong enough to pick me up. Drop toward the west; that’s into what wind there is and will take a little from the impact’s horizontal component, at least.”

“All right.” The commander watched the jet bank overhead and thunder eastward over the whiteness. Its deeper sound, she now realized, could easily be distinguished from the whistle of gas from the crevice.

After dwindling for a minute it swung back, heading not exactly toward her but a little to her left.

“I don’t suppose there’s much chance of damaging you with either of these,” the pilot said conversationally, “but let’s plan for a clear miss.”

“I could dodge, or shelter near the cliff, but thanks for the thought. Are you dropping on this pass?”

“Yes.” The craft swelled in the commander’s field of vision and the thunder of its ramjets made parts of Maria’s suit vibrate. Ginger was not risking a stall even of the pipes, much less the wings, and of course didn’t want to waste mass by using rocket mode. The commander saw the two black dots separate from the hull scarcely a second apart; the pilot seemed to have confidence in her bombing skill.

It was justified. The first lab vanished into the cloud sixty or seventy meters east of the fault, and the second struck a little farther west of where Maria was standing. It rolled to a stop about fifty meters northwest of her. She moved quickly toward it and watched with relief as it extended its sampling appendages and got to work.

“Someone read those as fast as you can, especially the one in the snow,” she ordered.

“I’m handling it,” came the voice of Seichi Yakama, who was gradually, with the help of Status’s memory, working his way into Goodall’s former niche. “It’ll be a few minutes.”

“Right. If it’s something weird like the vinyl in the pools let’s find out the first time.” The voice, to the surprise of some, was Ginger’s rather than Gene’s.

“Commander, can you provide more data on this cloud-emitting fault?” queried Status. “It is impossible so far to set up a coherent picture. Specifically, can you judge the width of the opening and flow rate of the escaping gas?”

“I’ll try. It was fast enough to lift me, though not very far. If Ginger will make a wind run you may be able to figure out something from how high the stuff rises before it gets blown east.”

“All right. That’ll be a few minutes, too,” replied the pilot. Maria stood still; she was presumably the most visible small surface object in the area, and Ginger might want to use her as a reference marker. Even if she didn’t, moving was becoming hard work; another spell of fatigue was approaching, she judged. It didn’t matter much; she could examine the fault from where she stood.

“The crack at the foot of the step is very narrow, not more than a millimeter or two,” she reported. “Right where it opens, the cloud is too dense to let me see through it, except in glimpses. A few centimeters higher it thins out, and I can see turbulence in the gas currents.”

“What’s the face of the scarp show?” asked Seichi.

“Plain ice up to about seventy-five centimeters, then smog sediment, then a couple of centimeters of white—I suppose the same stuff that makes the cloud. Whoever is running it, when you get a chance walk the lab that’s in the cloud westward—no, forget it. I’ll pick up the other and put it on the top at the edge.”

Not even Belvew remembered the updraft soon enough. Maria herself was not lifted this time, but felt the trivial weight of the spheroid she was carrying disappear as she was about to place it on the white rim. A moment later she gave a grunt of surprise, which naturally produced a response from Gene.

“What’s happening?”

“More trivia,” was the calm answer. “The lab was lilted out of my hand as I started to put it past the edge. Now it’s bobbing around in the air about six or eight centimeters above the cliff and about a meter to the right of where I was reaching in. It’s oscillating about ten centimeters each way north and south, about three east and west, and about the same up and down. I’ve seen that sort of thing before, of course; I just wasn’t expecting it.”

“What? Oh, Bernoulli effect.” Belvew’s pilot experience responded to the description. “Status, there’s the information you need about the updraft speed. You know the mass, area, and shape of the lab.”

“I will have to assume the gas density is the same as that of the general atmosphere,” the robot pointed out. “It probably is, that far above the vent, if the commander is right about the turbulence. She has just over twenty hours to suit-emergency status; she has been using more oxygen than usual.”

No one was particulary surprised at Status’s sudden change of subject, considering its built-in priorities.

“Thank you,” Maria acknowledged. “Should I put the lab in the snow, or leave it where it is while you run a gas analysis?”

“The gas, by all means.” It was Seichi who answered. “That’ll let us check Status’s guess. I have some readings from the other lab now, but I don’t understand them all.”

“What’s the trouble?” came several voices.

“The elements in the white stuff are hydrogen and oxygen and nothing else. It should be water, ice I at this pressure, but shows no crystal structure at all. There’s just a diffraction blur corresponding to H-0 bond length—”

“How about oxygen-oxygen?” Again several voices sounded almost at once.

“It is
not
hydrogen peroxide. No 0-0 bonds, single or double or hybrid. I said it showed
no
structure, just an average molecular spacing, like a liquid or a gas.” The pro-tern chemist’s tone, and even his voice, for a moment took on a surprising similarity to those of Arthur Goodall; once again Maria felt a chill not due to her surroundings.

“You have no ideas right now,” she said, trying to keep any questioning intonation out of her voice.

“Not right now. I’m running the gas analysis. Do you need that, or shall I just tell Status?”

“File it.” Maria made the latter choice promptly. “It’s probably pure local atmosphere even if the white stuff is water, considering water’s vapor pressure here.

“But I should be doing something besides listening. Status, will it be better for me to go back to digging, or should I explore along this new fault? My guess is that it would be better to let you build pictures from the new seismic lines before we run that tunnel any deeper.”

“The fault can be mapped adequately from above,” the processor answered promptly. “The cliff in which we started the tunnel is now partly obscured by the cloud, and it would be valuable to check any of its recent changes. There is reason to believe now that these may become quite rapid. I suggest you go back to the east but make no attempt to seek the tunnel itself. You still have the digger, I believe. Rather, bear to the south—”

“Why not the north? Wouldn’t the region of the crater rim give us more information?”

“It probably would, but that would take you farther from any practical landing area, especially if the cloud continues to move eastward. I have just reminded you of the limitations of your suit.”

“You don’t think the information would be worth the risk?”

“No.” The answer was in Status’s calm voice; Belvew, to the surprise of the commander and several others, said nothing.

“All right. Ginger, have you had time to make the wind check? Is it all right for me to move?”

“I wasn’t using you. There are places along the fault where there are fountains, if that’s the word I want—anyway, the stuff isn’t blowing up equally high everywhere, so I had plenty of reference points; and for one component I Dopplered on the cliff face. Your wind is seventy-one point one centimeters a second from azimuth two-eighty-four. Practically a hurricane by Titan standards; don’t let yourself get blown away.”

“All right. Status, you can fit that in. I’m jumping the face—I’m being careful, Gene—and heading east. Ginger, get whatever Status asks for that you can manage without risking the plane. Between its requests, just map. Pete, track me. There’s no profit in my walking around in circles. There must be some radiation that can see through this stuff—after all, I was never out of voice contact while I was in it.”

“Right, boss. Any reading will take a minute or two; I’ll have to average half a dozen. If you want a direction it’ll take even longer, but I don’t think there’s any chance of losing you.”

“Neither does Status, apparently, or I’d have been sent south around the cloud. I won’t need direction for a while; I can look back at my own tracks in the snow and tell whether I’m circling.”

“Have you checked that, or is it extrapolation?” asked Belvew.

“The latter. Stand by a minute. I’m about to jump the cliff, and want to give it all my attention in case the updraft tips me. I’d rather land on my hands than my helmet.” There were a few seconds of silence. “It was neither, and I’m back on my feet. I’m checking the footprint prediction now… It seems valid.”

“Your tracks aren’t being blown out by the wind?”

“Not for as far back as I can see.”

“Which is how far?”

“Twenty or thirty meters. That should improve as I get farther from the source and the cloud thins.”

Gene said nothing to this, but Maria was not the only one who realized how the word “should,” which she had carefully not emphasized, was affecting him. She suspected that Martucci was not the only operator tracking her, and hoped Belvew’s regular work, or possibly his recreation, wouldn’t suffer. She hadn’t known that he, too, enjoyed reading classics. There was another GO against dividing attention when doing certain jobs, but she couldn’t recall either its number or all the items on its list.

On Earth, being lost in a blizzard has been deadly to many explorers of the planet’s mountains and pole caps. It has even killed blissfully ignorant and ordinarily competent people engaged in casual amusement within a few kilometers or even a few meters of safety.

Maria Collos was not ignorant and was well over a billion kilometers from anything like a really safe place, but she felt no actual terror. She didn’t expect to see Earth again anyway; there had been nothing surprising in Barn Inger’s death, nor in Arthur Goodall’s except his own cooperation with it, or any of the earlier ones. There would be nothing surprising in hers when it came, though she hoped this would not be until she had done something else really useful—and learned a little more, of course.

In any case, although she was immersed in weather and could see little but blowing whiteness, she did not consider herself lost. Not just yet. Hiking a hundred meters, turning and looking back to see that her trail was straight, and repeating the process for several kilometers was more boring than immediately useful, but every investigator lives with this. Status’s occasional personal report such as “You now have nineteen hours before emergency status” slightly relieved the boredom but was not otherwise helpful. This was also true of the occasional seismic shocks, two of which in the first hour were violent enough to throw her off her feet.

There had to be something odd going on. The area of the first factory had experienced nothing similar in the weeks since its planting, unless the new tar pool counted. Barn Inger’s death had occurred there, but could not be blamed on quakes. Goodall’s had occurred
here
, in Settlement Crater, but there was surely no connection—

No. Definitely none. None that Maria Collos could see, or that anyone else had suggested.

The white dust thinned as she drew farther from
its
source, and the sky started to show a trace of its natural color, though the wind seemed unchanged. The thickness of the white deposit underfoot, determined by scraping down to the substrate with a boot, had decreased to about a centimeter.

Her back, she suddenly noticed, felt warmer than her front. That was odd; the wind was mostly from behind her. If her suit’s temperature-balancing gear wasn’t on the job her back should be
colder
, and if it was there should be no difference. Another trivium, perhaps. There was little else to think about, so she considered the problem for a time.

“The new lines spot four more faults on the crater floor in the last hour,” came diSabato’s voice. “All of them run nearly north and south, all are vertical, and radar says the high side faces west. The tunnel scarp is now half a meter higher.”

“How about the tunnel itself?” asked Maria.

“Can’t tell. No sign of collapse of the region above it. Maybe you should slant north and see.”

“Status? Relative value of such information?”

“Low. You should keep on your present track. Changes around the lake and Arthur’s Pool will probably be comparably important, and you will remain closer to possible pickup sites.”

“Have any changes been seen?”

“The lake’s area has decreased slightly, a little less than one percent. Arthur’s Pool is changing color; its long-wave reflectivity is increasing,”

“How about the new patch? Has the lab told us anything? Has either its size or shape changed?”

“Its composition is not quite identical with that of the one near the factory or, as far as the limited data show, the one by Lake Carver where Sergeant Belvew landed. The differences among these are small. The ones between them and Arthur’s Pool seem significant, but can probably be attributed to his own contribution. The differences became observable shortly after his death and have been increasing since.”

Nobody asked just what the differences might be.