Half Life (9 page)

“How about sidewise motion?” asked Belvew. The watchers could tell that she was trying this.

“No problem. Still like soft clay. I could ski on it, I think.”

“Can you still get
off
it, or will I have to risk cooking you again?” Again the ship cameras provided the answer before Ginger’s voice. There was a little backward slipping of one boot as the other moved forward, but forward won out.

“I’m off the patch. Don’t waste any juice.”

“There are three labs near you. Save me some time. Put one on the patch about where you were standing and the other two at the edge—one on the side toward the factory, the other on the opposite one. Then grab a sample and get it up here.”

“But Art—I have hours left in my suit!”

“I’ll give you five minutes to think of something you can do down there that would be more useful than bringing some of that glop up where we can really study it. I admit it’s probably not alive, but anything squishy at that temperature needs explaining. Think on your feet!”

“You’ve already grabbed first-landing glory,” remarked Inger. “The first person to walk on Titan.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that!” the woman snapped back, indignantly but perhaps not quite truthfully. “Anyone willing to face the unforeseens which might keep her from getting back could have done that.”

“Four minutes.”

“I—I didn’t have a—all right. I’ll bring one of the ice chunks, too. You were wondering about the carbonates, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was going to suggest that. Can you carry both samples? The storage bins in the jets aren’t all that large, and I don’t suppose you took any specimen bags down with you.”

“I didn’t, I’m afraid.”

“Good.”

“Why is that good?”

“It helps me believe you didn’t premeditate this trick very long or very carefully. Got your specimens?”

There followed some seconds of silence. The watchers could see the armored figure bent over a glassy boulder, but for some reason it wasn’t moving. Belvew’s worry was the first to reach speech pressure.

“Something wrong, Ginger? That’s a lot too big for any of the bins.” Goodall didn’t seem to be worried at all.

“I’m afraid it is,” Ginger finally said as she straightened up. “But it’s interesting. We’ll have to carry personal cameras after this. Do we have any small enough to attach to our suits and built to stand local conditions?”

“We’ll see,” snapped the commander. “Someone can design and grow one, maybe. Tell us what you have there. Maybe you could bring a piece of it up.”

“I didn’t foresee needing a pick, either. How do I break off a piece?”

“Just tell us what it is!”

“A vug. A geode, if the word can be used on Titan. A cavity in the boulder, about half filled with crystals—well, maybe not crystals; the stuff looks more like mold or absorbent cotton. White and rather fluffy.”

“Hit it with another rock. Get a piece off somehow!”

There were plenty of smaller fragments around, presumably relics of the fallen cliff dating from Inger’s first landing. One of these, a rough cube half a meter in each dimension, was no problem to lift even for an ailing human being. Ginger carried it over to the larger fragment, raised it above her helmet, and slammed it down as hard as she could, lifting herself well off the ground in the process but landing on her feet.

Titan’s gravity was little help, but the ice was brittle. The piece she was using as a tool shattered into dozens of fragments, but her target split only in two, with the vug in the larger part.

“Lucky you knocked that cliff down, Barn,” she remarked as she sought another hammer.

“Any time.”

The third blow produced a fragment bearing some of the “mold” on one of its surfaces and, Ginger judged, small enough to go into sample bin.

All watched her approach the aircraft, the screens losing bits of her image in the odd patterns the watchers had seen before. No one had thought to have Status save the human figure rather than exclude the plane.

The ice fragment did indeed fit in a bin. The other specimen would have also, but another problem came up. She couldn’t let go; it was too sticky to detach from her glove.

“What do I do now?” she asked after several minutes of effort that merely distributed the stuff over both hands.

“Just bring it back, of course. All the controls are
in
your suit. Stuff outside won’t interfere with flying.”

Goodall’s impatience was getting the better of his courtesy; the “of course” had been unnecessary. Even Ginger could sympathize, however.

“Better take off to the west,” cut in Belvew. “Make as tight a turn to the right as the skids will let you, and—”

“Don’t hit the factory on takeoff!” Arthur added; then, “Sorry.”

Ginger made no answer. Seconds later
Theia
slid into the air, and moments after that had reached ram speed with nearly a thousand kilograms of mass still in her tanks.

“There’s a thunderhead at forty kilometers, two hundred degrees,” Maria informed her.

“Right. Thanks. Is there anything I should do while I’m here after I juice up? Or have I already earned a mission credit? I did pick up data.”

Belvew wondered whether his own contribution should be mentioned, but he was far too polite to suggest this explicitly. Besides, someone might have suggested including the loss of
Oceanus in
the balance.

“All yours,” he answered innocently. The pilot was too busy to answer.

Goodall had been technically right; nothing outside a suit should have been able to interfere with use of the Waldo controls. However, the inside of the aircraft, especially the coffinlike compartment where the pilot rode, was a great deal warmer than Titan. The specimen lockers had temperature controls, since the planners had foreseen a possible need to keep samples in their normal environment, but the “cockpit” was another matter. People might have to open their suits there. When Ginger entered and sealed herself in, the temperature began automatically to climb from ninety kelvins to two hundred ninety, and the “tar” began to melt.

This still caused no piloting problems, but there was no way to tell where the liquid might be going—or even if it was remaining liquid. Nothing
should
, of course, be able to escape into the rest of the aircraft’s structure, but several people began wondering about possible corrosion effects. None of them said a word; the pilot was busy.

Ginger tanked up, climbed to optimum speed altitude, followed instructions to the right point on Titan’s equator, and began to climb once more. Neither Belvew nor his partner gave any advice. The former nodded approvingly—his suit was now disconnected as far as Waldo activity was concerned—as she made a smooth transition from jet to rocket mode and from airborne flight to orbit.

Enough time had passed before she docked to ease some of the worries about possible effects of melted or vaporized tar, and at least her gloves were now free to move; only traces of the stuff now coated them, and this, while still black, was no longer really flexible.

“Stay put for a few minutes after you unseal.” Goodall’s words had the force of an order in spite of the casual tone he used. “We’d better check the dock spectroscopically before you come inside. You can hold out, can’t you?”

“Sure. Hours yet.” Ginger was in fact thinking longingly of her comfortable quarters, food, sleeping facilities, a show, and especially a bath, but she had no intention of arguing with obvious common sense.

“I expect the methanol will have vaporized pretty well; you ought to find it easily enough.”

The answer was indirect. “Get a bit of that frost or whatever it is from the other specimen, quickly so the whole thing doesn’t warm up, and see how decent temperature affects it.”

“All right.” There was a pause. “Got it, and the locker’s sealed again.”

“Don’t leave it on your gloves. Spread it—”

“I can’t. It vanished almost at once. It can’t be water.”

Another pause, during which everyone visualized the colonel’s manipulating instrument controls, taking readings, and generally keeping his attention away from his own suffering.

“Your frost seems to be ammonia. And I can’t find a trace of methanol in the dock.”

“Yes, you can have the mission credit, Ginger,” repeated Belvew. “Or does raising more questions than you answer count as a minus?”

In his quarantined quarters at the level just inside the outer skin of the original ship, protected by the architecture from the ailments of his colleagues and from Saturn’s radiation belt by half a kilometer of ice, Barn Inger clipped a sensor to his earlobe and waited. The entity responsible for keeping track of the station personnel’s physical conditions as well as of the information they were accumulating presently reported aloud.

“Phase zero point two two; sixteen percent above accepted normal, presumably trending downward. Subjective?”

“I feel fine. I
need
something active.”

“You should be all right for about twenty hours allowing standard safety factors, twenty-five to thirty without them, possibly fifty considering your personal variability. No confidence at all in the last.”

“Fine. Someone has to go down to the factory to map those roots. Arthur’s labs can scrape and suck but not really dig. Any of the rest of you feel you’re better set than I am to do it now?” The other twenty staff had of course heard the whole exchange; no one ever
saw
into someone else’s quarters, but all could hear. Privacy in the station ranked high, but took a poor second behind the need to know whether and when someone needed medical help. Sometimes a patient could call a verbal warning or a plea for help before even Status detected symptoms.

The only answer came from Gene Belvew. “I’m flying
Theia
right now, on polar air circulation. If you’d rather not go down physically, you could take over this run and I could land in
Crius
. She’s ready at last, apparently. Any preference?”

“Maybe I’d do better if the drill kicks,” Inger pointed out, stroking his luxuriant blond mustache, which none of his colleagues had ever seen. He did not, of course, mention Belvew’s bone problems, and not merely because these were common knowledge. Courtesy was not quite the same thing as privacy, but they were related.

“Good point.
Crius
is yours if no one else has anything to raise.”

Ginger Xalco’s clipped voice came with a question.

“What route will you take to the dock?”

“Standard. Straight to the axis, then along it to the pole. Unless—”

“That’s all right. Just be sure of your suit before you leave your own place, please.”

“Sure. Don’t worry; I’m a careful type.”

Neither speaker, and none of the listeners, had to be more specific. Actually, Ginger’s query had been superfluous, though no one blamed her for speaking. She had the usual reason for concern; her own blood was slowly being wrecked by a very ordinary but remarkably unresponsive leukemia variant, and no one had any idea what adding Inger’s ailment to that might do to either of them. His “Cepheid sickness,” misnamed by a medical worker who knew very little astronomy, caused him to cycle between extreme polycythemia and severe anemia. Unlike that of a Cepheid star, its period was unpredictably variable, ranging from one hundred fifteen days to one hundred eighty and, rarely, more. The almost unique quality of the ailment was that no one had yet established its cause, far less any treatment, in nearly forty years. It had killed over seventy-five million people in that time.

Most of the diseases currently decimating the human species followed a standard course: they appeared suddenly, killed a few thousand or a few million people, had their causes identified, and then yielded, except for an unfortunate minority of the victims, to quickly developed treatment. Science was trying to catch up with evolution—from far behind, now.

The minority tended to join the shock troops in the all-out research war which blended all the disciplines into a service dedicated to the hope of finding
in detail
how life could start and how it really worked.

In detail
. Repeat aloud.

Nothing less sweeping seemed likely to account for the surge of emerging new ailments. Even the advance of genetic engineering seemed inadequate—there just weren’t, most people hoped and believed, enough mad scientists or even mischievous genetic hackers in existence to account for even a fraction of the new mutations.

This did not prevent some people from firmly believing in conspiracy, which
did
have enough supporting evidence to rank as a theory. It seemed better, at least, than the vague suggestion that all mutation rates in viruses and prions had suddenly risen far enough to override the damping effect of transmission delay.

Barn inspected his environment suit carefully, made sure it was fully charged, donned it, disinfected its exterior with chemicals and radiation, and issued the routine warning to the others that he was leaving his quarters. He unsealed and passed through the prion-tight door and made his way along the passage “upward” toward the center of the rotating station—whose two-hundred-twenty-minute rotation period did not really produce an effective gravity. Here, his weight now really zero, he drifted along the axis to
Crius’s
dock, and in a few minutes he reached the craft.

He devoted over three hours to the preflight check, only partly because he would actually be aboard this time instead of waldoing the jet from the station. With only two remaining ramjets—no one had any real hope of salvaging
Oceanus
, though the possibility had been discussed—no avoidable risks with the craft themselves would be taken. Also, while Saturn’s particle radiation was feeble at Titan’s orbit, it was safest to make transfer flights while the satellite was nearly between Sun and planet.

Emergency sometimes justified a greater risk, of course. Danger was taken for granted, and none of the group really expected ever to get back to Earth, but it was still hoped that enough of them might survive to finish the project. After
that
few gave much thought, though an occasional “What’ll we do then?” crossed one mind or another.