Still River

Chapter Four Of Course It’s Safe

Molly was tempted to say something, and strongly suspected that Joe felt the same. The mere fact that permission had been given for a project did not mean that any of the Faculty thought it was good research, but only that the student was unlikely to be killed by it. Neither had a chance to utter a word, however; the Kantrick kept talking.

“If this drill gets over with in a decent time, we can certainly help Joe make up his wind-chasers. Information can always be useful, and if it doesn’t tie into our team report it may be even more helpful—perhaps they won’t seal it the way they have the earlier student reports on the planet. It would have been nice to be able to find out more about this place when we were first doing our planning.”

“Maybe they wanted to find out who would go ahead and theorize on what little we were told.” Jenny’s raspy voice had not been heard before, but this surprised no one; she listened much more than she talked. Molly’s translator carried more than a hint of sarcasm in the rebroadcast tone, and the human being thought it was probably right, though she did not really trust this bit of programming.

If Charley detected the Rimmore’s feeling, it did not seem to affect his self-confidence. “Who’s theorizing?” he returned. “You don’t make any plans without some idea of what’s going on.”

“Including the casual assumption that we’re here because of a drill, so you didn’t see fit to make any decent speed on the way to this boat?”

“With Rimmore ideas of what’s decent speed along a set of ladders, who could?” retorted Charley. Molly decided the discussion needed an orbit shift.

“Are you really sure it’s a drill?” she asked. “Have you heard or seen anything but the order to report to the boats?”

“No, of course not,” replied the Kantrick, waving his front arm casually. Unlike the others, he had allowed himself to drift away from all support and had nothing within reach of push or grasp. “If it were a real emergency, we’d have heard plenty by this time. We…”

“Do you propose that we leave the boat, or delay any longer in manning its launch stations?” Molly was rather surprised; interrupting was decidedly unlike Joe, however justified it might seem to be.

“Oh, no—not at all.” Charley’s response was quick and emphatic. “Jenny, you were last in—get the ’all aboard’ signal out and seal the lock. The rest of us know what to do.”

Jenny, who knew equally well, said nothing; Molly would have been quite annoyed in her place. The Rimmore had been last because of Charley’s dalliance, and everyone present knew it. Neither Human nor Rimmore was really adept at reading body language or facial expression of the other, especially through environment gear, but Molly’s brown eyes tracked with Jenny’s much larger green ones for a moment, and each knew what the other was thinking. The four who were holding on were at their stations in seconds. Charley took some time to thrash his way into contact with a surface that would serve to get him moving in the right direction, but the others carefully refrained from noticing this.

Molly had time to speculate on the possible reasons for the nearly universal illogical response to incongruity called a sense of humor, and why beings who knew what laughter was and who enjoyed using it nevertheless often resented being laughed at. Even Human courtesy was enough to keep her attention strictly on her assigned instruments until the Kantrick was properly stationed. Joe and the others were equally absorbed in their own business, of course, and silence fell in the craft as its crew went through power-up and prelaunch checks.

They were able to complete these, and were in full standby status for long minutes, before any additional information came through. When it did arrive, Molly was almost annoyed to hear it support Charley’s contention, and wondered whether Joe were Human enough to have a touch of similar feeling.

The same calm voice that had ordered them to the boats sounded again in their individual receivers. “Acceleration will resume in about twenty minutes. You may power down all auxiliary craft. Shift change will phase in at the acceleration signal. The interruption occurred near the end of Shift C; Shift A will start at that time. First drop-off is anticipated at Enigma 88 in about seventy-five hours.”

Molly glanced at a clock; her translator had turned the time periods into her own units, of course, but she wanted to calculate what the dial reading would be when acceleration resumed. Twenty minutes would be slightly over half a soon in Station units, which was probably what the speaker had actually said. There would be another warning just before the actual time, but no one wanted to be away from support when that came—not even Charley; like the others, she noticed, he was checking the clock. His head, like Joe’s, was an immobile dome on his nearly spherical body, but his eyes, which were single rather than paired, were a good deal larger than the Nethneen’s and it was easy to see even from Molly’s distance that one of them was covering that part of the room.

She turned head and attention back to her board, and went through the appropriate operations. It took her only half a minute to finish, but Charley was done first.

“That was a waste of time!” he practically growled. “I was almost ready to load the last of Molly’s analyzers. Now we won’t get to it until Watch B unless she wants to do it alone, and that doesn’t seem quite fair.”

“Actually, I thought it would be better to help Joe with his equipment,” the Human woman said quietly. “There’s more of it still to be made than any of the rest of us have to worry about, and having another operator in the shop should save several hours. I thank you for saving me so much effort, Charley; but since we won’t be casting off for three of my days anyway, it seems best to be sure that we’re all set as we want to be. I know you have everything you want, Charley. How about you, Jenny?”

The woman curled a meter or so of her centipedelike body away from her station, holding position with her last live pairs of climbing legs and bringing her eyes toward Molly. “I think I can manage, thanks. I’ll be sure by about halfway through the next shift and will be very glad of any help you can give, if it proves to be needed then. Thanks for the offer.”

“How about you, Carol?”

“No problems, thanks. I’ll be able to help with Joe’s machines after next shift.”

“Thank you all,” said Joe. “I am personally grateful, of course, and probably should remind all of us that we are a i cam and should all be completely familiar with all procedures and equipment anyway. The process of mutual help will move us in this direction, of course, but any apparatus anyone does not understand by the time we reach Enigma will have to be very familiar before we start work there—understood by everyone. The time taken to achieve this will have to come out of the hours we have on the planet, or i he time before we reach it. The latter seems preferable to me.”

“Good point,” conceded Charley. “I’ll help with your wind-trackers, too, as soon as Molly’s gear is on board here.”

The others expressed agreement, less hastily than the Kantrick, and they waited with their varying levels of patience for the acceleration warning.

Enigma became visible during the next watch, and by the time Molly was back on Con duty, the little world could be seen in some detail. The only trouble was that there were no real details to see. Its surface was largely hidden by a blanket of cloud, though not quite as completely as those of Venus and Titan in her own system. The veil glowed even whiter than that of the former planet in the glare of Arc and its companion. Neither the clouds nor their gaps provided patterns that offered meaning to the Human mind.

That, she reminded herself, was in what she considered proper lighting. The atmosphere—obviously there was one—could be supporting clouds of water or ammonia droplets, solid crystals of either substance, or light-colored dust—really light-colored; salts of alkali or alkaline-earth metals, possibly silica or rutile, but, except for the last, probably nothing from the transition metal part of the table that would absorb what to her was visible light. She shifted her instrument through the spectrum experimentally to see whether any albedo features might show at other wavelengths. There was some streakiness in the ultraviolet that reminded her of Venus in the same range, but interpreting this as wind was probably premature. A little work indicated that the cloud tops were at a temperature of about two hundred Kelvin, moderately comfortable for most of her friends but too cold to narrow down the chemical possibilities for the clouds themselves.

She cut off her screen and sat back to think.

“I tried a Doppler display, Molly.” It was Jenny’s harsh voice; the Rimmore woman was on watch instead of Joe, who was still manufacturing wind-robots. She was as diffident as the Nethneen about interrupting someone at work, but less likely to interpret physical inactivity as mental labor.

“Docs it suggest anything? May I look?” asked Molly.

“I was hoping you would. I think so.” Jenny keyed her monitor controls to the general output circuits, and the other woman shifted hers to take the picture. She had to modify the presentation colors, of course, but this took only a few seconds, and once she had a visible image she could see immediately that the other had some useful information.

“It is wind—I thought it might be from the cloud pattern.”

“I’ve had practice with this,” replied the Rimmore. “There’s one big difference between Ivory and Hrimm, you know. Ivory has decent gravity and general temperature, and even a breathable atmosphere…”

“Yes. There aren’t many people at the School who can walk around on one of its planets with no environment armor. But what’s the difference?”

“Climate—that is, the way weather changes with time. At home on Hrimm, the equatorial and orbital planes are only fifteen degrees apart, and Hrimm rotates in about eighteen hours. Ivory has a forty-degree inclination and a thirty-seven-hour rotation. Air circulation is simply weird, and I did a lot of work on it, both from the surface and from space.”

“Good for you, Jen. There’s some more work to be done here, but I’d guess offhand that this place has seasons. The rotation axis is somewhere near there, the end toward us out of sunlight, the one having winter. Does your world have seasons of that sort?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’d say you’re picking up high-altitude winds from the winter hemisphere to the summer one, running two or three hundred kilometers an hour at the cloud tops. Cool air would be—hey, that doesn’t make sense. High circulation ought to be the other way, shouldn’t it?”

“I would have thought so.” Jenny shifted sinuously at her station, her iridescent scales shimmering through her transparent air-suit.

“Rotation is—let’s see—by my criteria, the northern hemisphere is having summer now. We’ll need more orbit data to see how long it’s been so and how much longer it will be. As I remember size, rotation must be—no, forget that. There’s no way to tell how much of the east-west component of those winds can be credited to the solid planet.”

“Not until we have surface imaging,” agreed Jenny. “There are some old maps available, as I recall the original notes we were given. Radar ones from space; anything students did on the surface in earlier exercises has been sealed, 1 suppose.”

“So Charley insists.” Molly thought for a moment. “We’d better call up the orbit data; we’re going to have to think about seasons here. Surely they haven’t sealed that—it’s information anyone could get in seconds with ordinary navigation equipment.”

“They may expect us to get it from the student crew,” Jenny pointed out, “and sealed it from them.”

Molly nodded absently and played with her console. The other woman followed on her own screen. Both made gestures equivalent to a head nod as the requested information appeared. The Faculty was not expecting them to waste time, it seemed.

“Good,” rasped Jenny. “Very slow rotation—about twenty-three days.” Molly started to glance at the clock, then remembered that the translator would have turned whatever the Rimmore had actually said into her own days. “Nothing to affect our Doppler wind reading seriously. Joe will want this; it will help him plan the initial setup of his air-current monitors.”

“Right,” agreed Molly. “You’d better do the saving—it was your idea, and I’m likely to pick colors he couldn’t distinguish on the display. I’ll be looking for records of surface structure; someone must have given it a going over in radar.”

“We can do that ourselves.”

“Not from here, with any decent resolution. We will if we have to when we get close in.”

“We’d better anyway. Surfaces change,” Molly agreed absently; she was already keying through records for anything there might be about Enigma’s topography. It was a young planet, of course; it had to be—stars like Arc and its companion were too massive and luminous to last more than a million years or two. The surprising thing was that a planet existed at all; material that had not been incorporated into the two stars should still have been in the form of proto-planetary junk, and most of that should by rights be ejected from the binary system before it ever managed to coalesce.

No other planets. Correction: no record of other known planets. Probably a safe datum; from Enigma’s well-lit neighborhood forty-odd astronomical units from Arc, anything of decent size would be clearly visible even against a rich star background. Not even Charley would suggest that such records would have been sealed to make a more complex exercise for future students.

Especially since there was a map available. Molly recorded it with pleasure, and began looking it over in detail. It was entirely topographic, with no clue to surface composition; there were fairly large areas that appeared smooth to within the resolving limits of whatever instrument had been used, but whether these might be liquid, seas or lakes, could only be guessed.

She would have to do better than guess. There should be some order to her own planning—where would it be best to take samples for dating? Where would the oldest specimens show? The object was far too small—less than three thousand kilometers in diameter, smaller than Earth’s moon—to have crustal plate motion, but there were irregularities. Volcanoes? Possibly; silicate bodies that large could generate plenty of radioactive heat in the Solar system, and the Eta Carinae region was even richer in heavy elements than Molly’s own part of space.

The map, annoyingly, had a purely arbitrary coordinate system; no one had tied the physical surface shapes in with the rotation axis. Change or no change, the team would have to remap as they approached Enigma, as Jenny had said.

The watch ended with no further data, except for minor changes in the wind patterns that neither woman tried to analyze. Both of them spent the time planning.

“That’s all the wind-tracers I want,” Joe said thankfully, dropping his tendrils from the shop’s console. “Even with Jenny’s very helpful high-altitude Doppler map, there seems no reason to do any more regions simultaneously. Twenty masters started at symmetrically spaced sites, each with five subordinate units covering altitudes from surface up to two hundred kilometers or so, should gather enough air-current information in the time we have. As soon as Molly and Charley finish the radar map they’re doing now and decide where to do their mineral sampling, we’ll be ready for dropoff. The tent has been checked both by us and the regular crew, and will give us work space besides the boat until Classroom gets back. All apparatus except the units we have just finished is on the boat; so is the tent. I think we’re about ready to go.”

“I hope so.” Carol got up from her own board, walking around the shop rather uneasily—her home gravity was nearly as great as Molly’s and about four times Classroom’s real-space acceleration. Only Joe was really comfortable in that respect. “I hope so. The more I think about my own part of the project, the sillier it seems. 1 agree with Molly-Enigma has to be a very young planet, and that may be the only reason it has any air left at all. Still, it’s sort of ideal in temperature and atmosphere for prelife conditions, it seems to me, and there could be some very unusual chemistry contributing to the problem we’ve been handed. The chances, though, when I actually try to evaluate them…”

“You can’t evaluate them, dear,” cut in Jenny. “You know that. I think you did much better chancing a low-probability item to check than Charley did in following Molly blindly—with all due respect to Molly. I agree that the chance of actual life on a world like Enigma is essentially zero, but you’re quite right about the prelife. It’s above the melting point of ammonia at the surface, and the pressure seems high enough to allow liquid. There is certainly a lot of photochemistry in the clouds and above them—no, your only trouble will be deciding where to stop collecting data. 1 rather wish I’d done a Charley with your project—I will help, as much as I have time for, of course.”

“Of course.” Joe had waited for the Rimmore to finish but not long enough for anyone else to start. “The actual work planning will have to be done without regard to who is doing who’s job but entirely on who has time available. There will, we must remember, also be work not directly connected with the research but with keeping us all alive, which will also have to be done. You will note that nothing was said in the final approval form about who would do any task, or about government or leadership. None of us had mentioned this in his or her proposal, and the Faculty is quite capable of leaving us to discover for ourselves the need for such organization. I mention this now, before dropoff, only as a reminder; I am sure we are all ready to cooperate fully in all tasks that we agree to be desirable and necessary.”

Both women looked at the Nethneen thoughtfully.

“I did rather overlook that point,” grated Jenny. “The Human seems to have the most forceful personality, but I am not sure whether all of us ...” She did not complete the sentence.

“I’m a little surprised that Charley overlooked it—if he did,” remarked Carol.

“It’s more surprising still that he hasn’t mentioned it,” returned Jenny.

“I am quite willing to leave the matter open for the time being, once I am sure that everyone has given thought to the necessity.” Joe’s quiet tones resumed. “Should I mention it again when the others join us from their mapping task, or should I wait and speak to them one at a time, or would one of you prefer to handle the matter? I do consider it vital that everyone be aware of the need for cooperation, and I know that there is a wide range of opinion in the School about the best way to assure this.”

There was silence for a moment while the others thought. Then the Shervah spoke. “Either of us can speak to Molly. Maybe you’d better take it up with Charley in private, Joe. I don’t think I understand him as well as I do the Human, and I’m pretty sure Jenny feels the same.” A ripple of agreement flowed along the Rimmore’s body.

“Very well. We have nearly twenty hours before dropoff; I can find an appropriate occasion during that interval, I am sure. Let’s get this last stuff to the boat.”

“And I want some time out of this suit, for a shampoo. Molly’s insulation may be longer, but at least it’s only on her head, not all over,” added Carol.

Drop-off itself was uneventful; unlike the emergency drill, they were given plenty of time to board the boat, complete all checks, and separate from the huge bulk of Classroom. By this time they were only a few thousand kilometers from Enigma, though no attempt had been made to match velocities with the little world. It would be up to the students to do this, or, more accurately, to let their machinery do it for them; they were not student pilots and had only the normal educated grasp of the vector problem involved.

Not even Molly was looking outside directly. She might have been able to view the white half-moon of the planet without injury, but even she wanted nothing to do with the direct output from the O-type supergiant called Arc by the Human students. The other four not only contented themselves with false-color screen images of their surroundings but by common consent let Molly do the “piloting.” Hot stars were her normal environment, they considered, though they would have admitted, if asked, that there was really more difference between Arc and her G-type sun than between the latter and any of theirs. Unfortunately, they had without exception an almost Human tendency to be more impressed by qualitative analogies and symbols than by quantitative reality. Molly was detached enough, at the moment, to be amused.

Velocity matching took some time, mostly because of Joe’s low acceleration tolerance; the Nethneen home world had about eighteen percent of Earth’s surface gravity. It had been decided that there was no real reason to pick one landing spot over another, with one exception; the arctic zone was to be avoided. That polar region was currently having summer, and even shielded by the heavy clouds, the students would require extra protection from Arc’s scattered light. Otherwise, the surface was uniform enough so that any general topography it offered could be found within a few hundred kilometers of any given spot. This greatly simplified landing maneuvers, even with ship’s brain essentially in control.

In a way, it might have been better had a living pilot—even a student one—handled the last part of the landing. The boat itself had such perfect inertial sensing and such quick response that neither Molly nor any of the others felt the wind. The craft’s guidance equipment had already detected the planet’s solid surface and was allowing for air currents, and the faint trembling of the structure that they all felt was assumed to be normal aerodynamic stress—even Joe and Charley had made landings on planets with atmosphere, virtually airless though their own worlds were.

Once into the white clouds, Jenny paid no attention to the boat’s behavior; she was occupied in collecting samples for analysis. Molly kept her attention outside, shifting the sensors that fed her vision screen up and down the spectrum, but for some minutes was unable to tell whether the lack of view was due to lack of penetration or lack of anything to see. The other three remained apparently calm; all were accustomed to automatically controlled flight under varying conditions, though this was certainly different from space.

The pilot screen eventually cleared. They seemed to be beneath the solid cloud deck, but in either a snow or dust storm—Molly was using what she considered ordinary light, so the stuff must have been really white. All that was getting through the clouds was a dim glow, crepuscular even to the other team members. Visibility was fair, perhaps ten kilometers, and in another minute or two ground appeared below.

It looked about the way the radar map had implied: ripply, with an occasional peak strongly suggestive of a volcano. None of the hills was large—none had been on the map, either. Neither she nor Charley had had any success whatever in matching the charts they had made during approach with those they had obtained from the records. There had been no large-scale features for guidance; one might as well have tried to match two areas of pebble sidewalk that did not include ends or edges. Even an hour of computer comparison did no good; either there were more possible scales and orientations than the machine could handle in that time, or the surface had made significant and general changes in its detailed topography since the earlier map had been produced. Knowing the machine, Molly was inclined to the latter view.

This had interesting implications, even if a few thousand of her years had passed since the previous map had been made. The implications were even more interesting if the time were much shorter. There seemed no way to tell from the records.

The boat’s two-hundred-meter hull settled to the surface and sank some meters into it—Molly still could not decide whether the material was soil, sand, or snow.

“First requirement is a life center independent of the ship,” Joe pointed out. “I’ll go outside to see whether the ground is suitable for the tent.”

“But shouldn’t we…” Molly started. Then she remembered and smiled.

“You’re too environment conscious, Molly.” The Nethneen chuckled. “The temperature is quite comfortable, and I don’t care what the air is made of. The pressure is high enough to keep me from boiling—a good deal higher than normal”—he gestured toward the instrument panel…” and for once the gravity is respectable.”

Jenny gave a snort through several sets of breathing vents at once. “I’m glad there’s someone here who can feel gravity,” she muttered. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re still floating.” Molly felt much the same, though her home gravity was little more than half that of the Rimmore, and nodded in sympathy.

“Joe, it still seems to me that checking outside details would make a lot of sense before anyone stepped out. We don’t know that the air isn’t corrosive—there are worlds like Jenny’s or mine with free oxygen, and that wouldn’t be good for your skin even if you don’t ingest it, would it?”

“I’ve spent time in oxygen atmospheres,” the Nethneen replied, “and even without analysis I refuse to worry about that element here. It is thermodynamically unstable, strictly a product of life, and if there is any life on a planet this young, I’ll be delighted to take the risk of an oxygen bum just to see it.”

“But how about the stuff that’s blowing? Surely you’re not claiming that no chemical can hurt you.”

Joe hesitated for several seconds. “Perhaps that would be a bit excessive,” he said at last. “Jenny, have you made anything of the cloud composition and of this precipitate that presumably is coming from them?”

The centipedelike form turned back to her instruments and was busy for a minute or so.

“Not a simple substance,” she said at last. “Largely ammonium salts; carbamate, carbonate, amide, traces of water ice, urea, and a lot more—it will take a long time to run a complete list. A good deal of what you’d expect from reactions between gases in this atmosphere.”

“But nothing clearly dangerous.”

“Nothing that waves a flag to me.”

Joe gave the rippling arm gesture that was his equivalent of an affirmative head nod and was at the door in two long, gliding steps, something his tentacular legs could not have managed under decent gravity, Molly reflected. “We’ll keep lock protocol,” he said as he opened it. “Outer atmosphere could be a nuisance to some of the rest of you.” He closed the valve behind him, and Molly activated the screen showing the inside of the air lock. The Nethneen had already opened a bleeder valve and was letting outside air in to bring the pressure up. This was causing him no visible distress.

The team watched him reach for the key that opened the outer door, and as he did so the ship trembled very slightly.

Jenny, Molly, and Carol simultaneously shouted a warning.

“Joe! No! Wait!”

They were too late.