Half Life (6 page)

The locations of the lakes were to some extent controlled by topography, of course; water has many unique properties, but other liquids including methane share its tendency to flow downhill. Nobody, however, had yet found any order or sense in the size, location, or arrangement of the Collos patches.

Belvew amused himself, as he had done before, by trying to organize patterns out of those he passed over. He reached his target area, however, without coming up with any shapes more meaningful than constellations.

Maria, who had also slept briefly, warned that it was time to decrease thrust. The jet began to slow and settle. A real-surroundings interruption occurred just after the descent started, and Belvew wondered briefly whether he should have Status stop this procedure for a while. He decided against it: his tanks were full, he would be traveling high enough and fast enough to preclude any kind of stall as he sowed the cans, and vertical disturbances could be seen at a safe distance. It was only while inside them, slowed down to juice-collecting speed, that there was any danger.

Any
known
danger, he reminded himself. Any known danger except the ever-to-be-remembered one of identifying too closely with the aircraft, which the reality interruptions were intended to prevent. He brought his attention back to the job as Maria began issuing more specific directions.

He had lined up on course, reached standard speed and delivery altitude, and released the first dozen of the Line Five cans when an interruption came from a voice rarely enough heard to catch everyone’s attention.

Its most recent and important all-hands announcement had come when the last of the six relay units which kept the station in potential instant contact with all of Titan’s surface was properly adjusted in orbit, thus clearing the crew to get the actual project under way. Few had thought of it since except when receiving personal health guidance; it was as much background as traffic noise had once been.

“There is a change in map detail at the factory site. Someone should evaluate.” The speaker was Status, the data processor dedicated to constant recomparison of surface maps, maintaining of orbits, supervising the operation of all closed-cycle life support systems, and monitoring the current medical condition of each of the explorers. Its announcement automatically put Maria, currently responsible for surface mapping, in charge. As usual, the voice with which she responded was calm.

“Gene, you’re still on track. You have forty-four cans on board, which will complete about two-thirds of Line Five. When they’re gone, your heading back to the factory starts at three eleven. I’ll get back to you with more headings for the great circle when you need them, or have Status do it if it seems likely I’ll be too busy. Barn, standard; monitor Gene. Art, get any readings you can from the factory itself while I check details Status couldn’t sense. The rest of you carry on. I’ll keep everyone informed.” She fell silent for several minutes while she examined the surface around the factory with every frequency at her command.

“The change,” she resumed at last, “seems to be the appearance of another of what you so kindly call Collos patches. Its texture is identical with the others’, as far as I can tell. It is almost perfectly circular, just over twenty meters across, is essentially flat, and its center is one hundred forty-four meters from the opening of the factory’s delivery port and directly in line with that opening—that is, directly north. Azimuth zero.”

“How long did it take to reach that size?” asked Goodall. “Can you or Status tell us when the last check of the site was made? And are there enough observations to tell whether it appeared all at once or grew from a center?”

“Less than four hours, four hours, and no,” replied the mapper. “That’s the time of the last routine check of the spot, and there was no sign of the patch then. Does the factory itself have any data?”

“ ’Fraid not. It’s been finishing twenty cans and one lab an hour and paying no attention to aboveground surroundings since it ripened.”

Everyone could hear this exchange, of course, and Belvew cut in without allowing his eyes to leave his screen.

“Aboveground? But how about below? Do any of its roots go toward the patch?”

Goodall was silent for some seconds, and finally answered in a rather embarrassed and surprised tone, “I can’t tell. Roots went out in all directions, of course, and I can tell what materials have been coming in through each major one, but we never thought of wanting to know which absolute direction any one root was taking.”

There must have been a spectrum of reactions to this announcement. However, neither laughter nor anger nor surprise was audible. The jet ejected several more cans before its pilot could think of another useful question.

“The root which went east, toward the cliff, would be picking up more water sooner or—well, sooner. The factory couldn’t have started production without oxygen. Does any one of them show a richer water take than the others?”

“Yes, though not impressively greater. Number Twelve.”

“Then it’s a reasonable guess that that one went toward the mountain, which seems to be a block of ice. Whichever is ninety degrees counterclockwise from Twelve must be pretty close to under the new patch, right?”

“Wrong. Unfortunately—”

“Unfortunately? You mean you don’t know the
relative
directions either?”

“No. I don’t know whether the numbers go clockwise or otherwise, or even if they are in sequence. I labeled them as they started to pick up raw material. Sorry. Even if we’d wanted to, there was no other way to identify them.”

“So there goes any chance of analyzing that patch with the factory instruments.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“So I go back and plant more labs around the factory.”

“You drop the rest of Line Five first,” Maria cut in. “It won’t make much difference in time. You’ll be a couple of hours getting back, and it’s where you’d be going anyway for more cans. There’s no reason to suppose there’s any hurry; we don’t know what causes these patches even though you’ve found out they’re a bit gooey—”

“That
one
is a bit gooey,” muttered Corporal Pete Martucci, who was more regulation-minded than most.

“—and we can learn more sooner by watching this one grow if it does. There’s no need for speed.”

“There could be if the factory itself has anything to do with the appearance of this new one,” Goodall pointed out. Belvew started to say something, but Maria was first.

“We should worry about that if and when it seems in order, I think. I’ll watch how fast, and which way if any special one, this thing grows. If it does. Art—no, you’re too busy; you, Ludmilla—keep on top of the factory’s behavior; that’s the only other thing I can think of which might warn us of any such connection. Any other ideas?”

“Five cans to go,” Belvew answered, with no obvious relevance. “What’s that return heading again?”

Maria told him, and he finished his run in silence. He then climbed to compromise height—air thin enough for low resistance while still dense enough to feed the ramjets—eased in full thrust, took up the great circle heading back to the factory, set
Oceanus
on automatic control, presumably somewhat safer than letting Status handle it through the communication links, and shifted his screen to the instruments being used by Art, Maria, and the others. There should be no intense verticals at this height, and he refused to worry over unknowns, especially when Barn was also watching.

As far as general crew attitude went, scientific-military procedure was of course an important and sometimes even a life-and-death matter, but freedom to pay attention to a problem was more so. The rank distinction between commissioned theoreticians, mere observers, and essentially civilian technicians—even the doctor attached little weight to his technical rank of lieutenant colonel—meant nothing in that respect. The smooth patches might not be a military or any other kind of risk, but they now involved a basic situation change near the only equipment source currently on Titan—one which would take days at least to replace, if they did have to plant a new factory. The more minds speculating on the problem the better.

Sergeant Barn Inger felt just the same, and allowed the fact to direct his thinking and capture most of his attention. He had only the same data as the rest, since he couldn’t see
Oceanus’s
wings either. He
could
have looked at parts of the aircraft, since the software omitting it from the full-sphere screen was controllable merely by asking Status, but no one had ever bothered to do such a thing since the aircraft had first flown. Status could see what was happening but had been given no reason to care.

Barn saw no more reason to worry than did Gene, or anyone else. There was a more obvious and presumably more immediate problem.

It was daylight and would be for several more days at the factory site.
Oceanus
was on the night side, though Belvew expected to see the fuzzy reddened blob of the Sun—much of the smog was still above him—in another few minutes. Both factory and flier were on the hemisphere away from Saturn; to see the big disc, pierced by the needle of its edge-on rings, would have required relay from the main orbiting station and possibly one other. Even had it been above the horizon, he’d have had to use very carefully chosen sensor frequencies with
Oceanus’s
cameras or, much better he suddenly realized, shift to cameras in the base above with him. Even this might not work since the station spent over a third of its time in Titan’s Saturn-shadow. Usually no one knew any more exactly where they were in orbit than the average person on Earth knows the current phase of its moon. They had no reason to care; that sort of thing was for Status.

Even by Titan day, visible light was no use for examining the factory from above the atmosphere. Much longer waves were needed, and for these to have really high resolution the readings from at least a few kilometers of orbit travel had to be combined statistically, also by Status, into single “pictures.” Maria could never quite watch her surface images at high resolution in real time. By now it had occurred to everyone in the group how nice it would have been to provide the factory with a camera, but this was another don’t-mention-it. “If onlys” were against military, scientific, and medical discipline as well as common sense, all of which demanded dealing with things as they were. Rule X, in fact.

How
things were was slowly becoming more apparent. Before Belvew could see the Sun, Maria announced that the new patch was six centimeters broader on the east-west line and eight on the north-south than it had been when first measured. Half an hour later both amounts had increased by another ten centimeters, and the distance from the centroid of the patch to the factory was smaller by nearly a meter.

“Suggests it’s actually moving, not just growing more one way than the other,” Barn pointed out.

“Suggests I was wrong about the things’ being caused by rain,” was Maria’s less enthusiastic comment.

“Are you sure? Would the factory report rain?” asked Belvew. “No, but my viewers would. Status says it hasn’t rained there since we planted the rig. There isn’t—”

“Not during
any
of the four-hour or whatever it is intervals between his regular checks?” asked Emil diSabato, doing his best to keep any suggestion of a pouncing cat out of his tone.

“No storm we’ve seen yet has lasted less than seven or eight hours,” Maria answered. “There isn’t any lake close enough to make it likely, either. And I know rain when I see it; there’s been plenty of it here and there on Titan. You ought to know, Gene.”

“I do. It’s always been from verticals either over the lakes or very close to them. The background circulation is so slow that a thunderstorm usually dies before it gets very far from the lake that spawned it, even if it lasts for ten or fifteen hours; and the factory’s over twenty kilometers from the nearest lake.”

“They
seem
to die,” was Goodall’s more pessimistic contribution. “In any case, if all these things are made of gel like the one which tried to swallow
Oceanus
, we still have to explain how liquid methane turns into methyl alcohol.”

“There
was
a suggestion about that, and the factory is close to an ice source,” Ginger pointed out.

“But not to a lake,” Maria admitted, still rather sadly.

“So Gene drops another lab the second he gets to the factory.”

“Of course, after I land and pick some up,” replied the pilot. “That’ll still be nearly an hour, though. Aren’t there a good many labs already there? Why not get one of those on the job—or two or three, if that’ll make things faster?”

There were several seconds of silence.

“Pete, you’re the strongest of us by a good deal. If I unseal my room, would you take the chance of a quick visit and kick me? You can hold your breath long enough, or wear a suit.”

“No, Art,” replied Martucci, “but not because I’m afraid of breaking quarantine, or even regulations. I’d come and take the chance of staying even longer if
it
would help the lab work, but I don’t see how kicking
anyone
would do that.”

“Don’t be so literal. It might remind me not to let my mouth outrun my brain, but we needn’t rub it in, I suppose. I have a lab on the way, Gene.” Goodall was obviously embarrassed, as the others would have been for him if all hadn’t been equally blind. Neither the commander’s morale slip nor the general oversight was mentioned again. Failure to get ideas as soon as they might be useful was a common cause for annoyance but not a reasonable one for guilt. Even replacing the “you” of “if only you’d thought of that” with a “we” would not make such a remark an acceptable, much less a courteous, utterance.

“Better have the lab do samples on the way to the patch, not just after it arrives. We’ll need to compare the patch with the ground in its neighborhood,” pointed out Ginger. This obvious suggestion made everyone feel better; they could all share the onus of delayed conception, and the point that Goodall needn’t consider himself the only offender had been properly raised.