Half Life (24 page)

One of these was centered less than a dozen kilometers from the first factory. This might, of course, be coincidence; no one but a pessimist could feel sure either way.

While Gene Belvew’s noncommissioned rank made him formally a mere observer rather than a theoretician, he seldom let that fact keep him from talking, much less from thinking. He answered Ginger’s rhetorical remark with a more literal question: “Why should we assume this is something catastrophic? We’ve been here only a tiny fraction of a Saturn year, and we’re near the equinox. That’s a stormy period on Earth.”

Ginger’s attention was not too occupied to permit a retort.

“You mean on some
parts—of
Earth, where—the sun—makes a lot of—difference. And since when—were volcanoes seasonal whoops!”

“Trouble?” Maria, still group commander in spite of her recent hand loss, cut in instantly.

“Downdraft. I overcorrected—and had a pipe—stall. No danger—plenty of altitude—there. Fired up again. Status, that’ll put a—kink in my line. Allow for it.”

“Checked,” came the data handler’s deliberately unmistakable voice. “It may be relevant that the increasing turbulence of your last few dozen kilometers shows a rough correlation with increasing methane content of the air.”

“Probably is.” Belvew’s voice sounded thoughtful. “Most of the thermals I’ve ever run into are over lakes, where the evaporation would drop the air density—”

“And drop the—temperature too. I thought we’d—agreed not to call them ‘thermals.’ Or are—you just reminding us gently—that you were a pilot long—before this affair started and can’t—bury old professional knowledge?”

Maria, nearly certain that this charge was justified, changed the subject again. “Are there lakes below you, Ginger? I don’t see anything special on my mapping stuff, and haven’t been watching your Mollweide. What part of the spectrum are you using?”

“Long-enough waves to see the ground—I’m below most of the smog anyway. There are four—lakes I can see from here, but none right—under me and none specially big. There’s no obvious reason—for extra methane—wow!”

“Another stall?”

“Just a bump. If I’d really been riding this machine—I’d—you show ’em the accelerometer records, Status.”

Exclamations like her own sounded in other human voices. Nearly all of the group were experienced enough, and identified well enough with their craft while flying, to “feel” the jerks shown by the instruments just as Ginger did. The input from the waldoes could be felt even more literally. The gaps in the pilot’s sentences were now really understandable.

“That’s close to red line,” Belvew worried aloud. “No one expected real turbulence here.”

“If you’d hit that at four or five times standard speed we’d be looking back at your wings,” Peter Martucci remarked uneasily. “Shouldn’t you slow down?”

“And risk having—all the lift go out—from under me?”

“You have plenty of altitude.”

“And that’s the—way I want it. How much longer—should I hold this—run, Status? I don’t—suppose the original timing means—much anymore. Is—there any trouble compensating for this—bucking? I’ll slow down if—the readings really need it.”

“There is no problem calculating from the readings. Aircraft safety is still paramount.”

Silence, except for an occasional annoyed mutter from the acting pilot, ensued for several more minutes.

Maria had been tempted briefly to offer a suggestion, which might have been taken as a command, that Belvew take over the piloting; but the jet seemed in no real danger, and morale was important even, or perhaps especially, among a dying crew. She couldn’t compromise by taking the controls herself, for two reasons.

She was no better a flier than Xalco at the best of times and everyone knew it, and this was not the best of times.

The waldo suits, which could direct the aircraft from thousands of kilometers, were complex devices.

They used input from many parts of the wearer’s body including toes, chins, and noses, not just fingers.

Some potential group members on Earth at the time the project was being planned had been rejected for poor control of their facial expressions. The possibility that someone might need to fly with a missing right hand had not been foreseen, and in the fortnight since Maria’s loss no one in the station had been able to think of a way to compensate for it. Total redesign and rebuilding of the jet control systems was impractical, and nothing less seemed workable.

The commander looked across her quarters—actually a rather luxurious and extremely well equipped living space and laboratory—at the two tanks where most of her specimen from Arthur’s Pool reposed.

It had seemed harmless enough to scoop up, in a glove designed to keep her hand from turning to glass at a surrounding temperature of ninety kelvins and in a fairly conductive atmosphere, a sample of the viscous matter in which Goodall had died. Xalco’s worrisome sticking in a similar pool had proven merely frightening, with no resulting damage.

Maria’s inability to clear her glove of the stuff during free fall up to the station had been merely a nuisance; outside contamination meant nothing to the waldo controls, and Belvew had done the piloting anyway.

Back in her quarters, however, the stubbornness of the sample had graduated from an annoyance to a problem; and when she discovered—visually: she hadn’t
felt
anything—before even shedding the suit that part of her glove had been dissolved and the stuff was starting to work on her hand, she had to declare an emergency. Of course all the individual quarters were equipped with remotely con trolled surgical equipment, and a laser amputation had been a minor job well within Status’s competence, fortunately.

The alternatives would have been quarantine violation or letting nature take
its
course.

Even while the operation was in progress Maria had been almost more interested in another matter; she had joined with gusto, and seemingly full attention, the discussion over why the sample had failed to be inactivated by a temperature rise of over two hundred kelvins. An egg starting at a normal three hundred ten would be much more than hard-boiled at, say, the melting point of aluminum—a comparable
ratio in
temperature increase.

Seichi Yakama was still talking as though the stuff were alive, but no one else went that far. Alien suit-penetrating and flesh-eating monsters had seemed at least as unlikely to the sober and rather conservative project planners as the alien kidnappers of UFO
mythology
. Besides, no one could believe that a major goal of their mission—establishing that either life or prebiotic chemistry was present on Titan—could have been achieved in such a short time and with so many of the original group still alive.

Maybe they didn’t
want
to believe it. What would they have
left
to live for if it had? What could they do if their problem was
solved?

No need to worry about that, most of them knew deep inside. Nothing has ever been that simple since the invention of agriculture.

But Maria Collos could no longer fly. And the stuff in the tanks across the room—one containing mostly the sheared-off forearm and gauntlet of her suit plus adhesions, the other the more personal material which had been extracted from them—was probably relevant to the problem even if it was not an answer. It was certainly interesting to others besides the victim. An obvious first experiment was under way; a scrap from the second tank’s contents was taped to the hand of one of the mausoleum’s occupants, under remote observation, to find what the stuff would do to human tissue at the Titanian temperatures maintained in that chamber. The strapping had been accompanied by another memorial to the hand’s owner, now once more contributing to the project.

Maria had of course made the proper gesture, offering to resign the command so recently inherited from Goodall, but no one else wanted the job. It was too often a distraction from more interesting work, and the crew unanimously, promptly, and firmly agreed that neither a theoretician nor a commander needed two hands. Maria wished fleetingly that she had had as good a chance to argue with her own late predecessor, but she accepted the situation. At least the bunch of argumentative daydreamers had now committed
themselves
to following her
recommendations
.

And the daydreams, more formally called speculations and hypotheses, were still being produced, luckily.

She wouldn’t have to stimulate any imaginations. Martucci’s voice was relieving her of any such worry right now.

“Y’know, Ginger, that point of Gene’s about equinox may have something. Remember it’s eclipse season, for the first time in fifteen years. I know the sun’s a long way off, but a quick change of heat input over a whole hemisphere as Titan ducks into Saturn’s shadow might do
something
.”

Not even Belvew really spoke for some seconds, though many voices muttered at Status’s calculating units.

“It’s worth checking,” Maria agreed slowly. “Intuitively, I’d say the input was very small, as you suggest, and if there is any effect it’d be lost in chaos. Still, one and a quarter percent of Earth’s solar intake over the sunward half of the satellite adds up to a lot of gigawatts, I’d guess—no, don’t anyone bother to tell me the right number. It takes Titan about half an hour to move its own diameter along its orbit, and except at the middle of the eclipse season it would take even longer to get completely covered or uncovered by Saturn’s shadow. Longest possible eclipse at midseason, which we haven’t reached yet, is only about ten and a half hours. Could be a respectable amount of heat involved at that. Pete, you and Seichi think of some ways to word useful questions to Status on that one, bearing the chaotic possibility in mind.” She knew that everyone else would try to beat the assigned pair to the idea draw, but that would do no harm.

“The air’s quieting down, I think,” Xalco finally reported. “It’s been over an—hour. That’s quite a storm cell for Titan, if it was a storm cell.”

“It was not.” Status’s tone showed no change, but its firmness was taken for granted by everyone. “There was nothing cyclonic about its wind patterns, and there seems to have been more descending than ascending current area, though that cannot be certain; you traced only a single, rather irregular line across the region. The cause is not clear. I am making the obvious correlations which have been suggested as routine, but any others you want will have to be added by living imaginations. Nothing significant has appeared so far, and with the volume of data now involved it will take at least ten more minutes to make the remaining routine comparisons.”

“Please include eclipse data in them,” Maria replied.

“I interpreted Corporal Martucci’s words as an order to that effect. Only the fact that eclipse season and large-area turbulence started within a Titan orbit of each other, and in that order, is so far obvious. Both starting times are too recent for a causal relationship either way to be reliably inferred.”

“What next?” asked Ginger. “There are a few more seismic lines to lay out, aren’t there? I mean the originally planned ones, not the stuff we’ve had to improvise around the new volcanoes.”

“You’ll need to restock on cans first.” Belvew spoke before the robot managed to do so. “The extra patterns dug into the reserves pretty deeply.”

“I know. There should be plenty at Factory One—Status, you didn’t stop manufacture when the stocks we originally planned were finished, did you?”

“Yes, but I resumed after the change in operations was implemented. There will be a full load waiting when you reach the factory. Iridium is running low at the factory, however. When restocking is needed, gold and platinum should also be taken down to save a trip.”

“I still don’t see why they didn’t use just one of those metals,” growled Pete. “I’d say iridium would be the best; it’s hardest. Then we’d have a lot less trouble over which and how much to use for labs, cans, and maybe new jets.”

“I don’t know either,” answered Ginger. “Then I’d better start back there now. Heading, Maria or somebody?”

“Do you still have labs aboard?” cut in Yakama.

“Sure. Why?”

“I’d like very much to make some comparisons between Arthur’s Pool, the one by the factory, and the one at Lake Carver where Gene set down a while ago. We dropped a lab there at the time, but it got blown away when he found he was sinking and took off in such a hurry. There are units still working in Settlement Crater and lots at the factory site where the—where you’re going anyway, but I’d give a lot to be able to cross-check all the places where any of our stuff has touched Titan’s surface physically. D’you suppose you could drop another lab there by Lake Carver before you settle down at the factory, Ginger?”

“I don’t see why not. Wait a minute, though—we know we’d better not drop it in the lake, since we couldn’t hear the first one after it went in, and we know the ground there is pretty hard. Wouldn’t I have to land to get a lab down intact?”

“Gene landed, but you dropped labs from flight during Maria’s hike, and they stood it all right—”

“They landed in snow!”

“About four centimeters deep, as I recall. And there were other drops—”

“Four centimeters can make a big difference, especially under Titan gravity. But aren’t there any snow patches reasonably close to Carver? The labs can travel, after all.”

“I take it you’d rather not make an extra landing.”

“Is that criticism?”

“I’ll do it if you like,” Belvew cut in. Maria played this one safe, too.

“Ginger can do it if it needs to be done. I agree with the importance of having labs there, if only to get an analysis of that lake; we never found out why we couldn’t read from the unit we lost there. It could have been depth or composition of the lake or blast damage to the lab itself. Nothing in the analysis of the lake at Settlement offered a clue. Go ahead down, Ginger—but do check the area for snow patches first.”

“There were none nearby at that time, or at any of the routine checks of the area since then,” Status informed them. “All the ice we have seen has been massive, except possibly the dust being produced from the volcanic vents.”