Still River

Chapter Seven Of Course I See It’s Gone

There was a moment of silence, and several sets and patterns of eyes focused on the speaker. She sprawled relaxed, in the corner of the room that had been fitted with a tangle of pipes, bars, and ropes for her comfort.

“I should have thought of it when I did the first analysis,” Jenny continued calmly. “I should certainly have thought of it when we were talking about the possibility of free oxygen.”

“But there isn’t any oxygen, you said. At least, no more than could be explained by hard light from Arc on the other gases.” Charley’s tone was indignant, through Molly’s translator.

“Quite true; there isn’t. However, there is a large amount of carbon dioxide, and that is just as improbable—at least, with activation energy—mixed with ammonia as the oxygen is. They would have reacted to produce ammonium carbamate.”

“Of which there is plenty around, you said,” Molly pointed out.

“Yes. So there is evidently nothing to block the reaction. But there must be something to reverse it, up the energy hill, or one of the gases would be gone. There is plenty of energy, of course; but how is it applied? All I can think of is the sort of thing that supplies free oxygen on your world and mine, Molly, and nitrosyl chloride on Carol’s, and high-energy nitrogen and chlorine compounds on Joe’s and Charley’s: biological catabolism.”

“But this place can’t possibly be old enough to have life at that organization level.”

“As far as our experience goes, no, Carol. I fully agree. Nevertheless, I am happier about my wild-shot project than I have been since it was approved. At the moment, the best working suggestion I can make is that there is something analogous to vegetation here that uses energy from Arc to break down ammonium compounds and release gaseous ammonia and carbon dioxide, and maybe water ice. Whether there is anything using the reverse reaction to power itself I would not presume to guess; this is, as you point out, a very young planet—we feel sure.”

“It has a very young sun,” insisted Joe.

“I accept that.”

“What do we do?” asked Charley.

“My first thought is to watch the ground we pass over much more carefully than we have been, looking for any unusual coloration. We should be particularly attentive near bodies of liquid, which will presumably be ammonia. Once your robots have started work, Joe, I want to return to the lakes we have already seen and do much more sampling and much more careful analysis of what we get. I set up for only simple compounds, I am ashamed to admit, on the earlier runs.”

“If you hadn’t, would you have finished any of them yet?” asked Joe. “Very few.”

“Then there seems no need for shame. You were doing what seemed needed. Now more seems needed. We can live with that. Molly, perhaps the time has come when your different color sense will be of help. We could of course set each screen to different selection and different false-color representation, but I have the impression that you can do more by watching your whole natural range. Do you mind riding with your screen hooded? Or would it be better if we stayed elsewhere in the boat and let you watch in comfort?”

“I don’t mind the hood, if one of you doesn’t mind looking ahead while I lock down. The assumption that we have been flying higher than any hills agrees with the radar data, but I still prefer to trust living eyes this close to the ground. The catch is that except in areas where the clouds are thin or nonexistent, and we haven’t hit any of those on the day side yet, my eyes are no better than yours; the light is very faint, fainter even if whiter than on most of your worlds, I’d guess, but if anything you can probably see better. The clearest region was around the south pole, and it’s having winter. No daylight. As I recall, Arc’s companion is shining on that area, and I’ll certainly be glad to watch it in white light when we get there.”

“I will be glad to con while…”

“I’ll do it!” Charley cut in. Joe made no attempt to argue; Molly would have been surprised if he had. She was a little startled at Charley—not at his willingness to interrupt, which all were getting used to, but at the strength of the feeling that seemed to have prompted the interruption.

“It might be better,” suggested Carol, “that we finish setting out the wind-robots as planned; then Molly, and Charley, if he wants to help her, can take a really close look at the short-wave region.”

“There is certainly little point in all of us being there; the originally scheduled work should go on as far as possible,” agreed Joe.

“And none of you will be very happy with no clouds between you and even that companion star,” added Molly. “All right, we’ll do it that way. I can look for Jenny’s life as well as for my ice—though, of course, Jenny’s idea may mean that the ice is less likely—I’ll have to think about that.”

“If you see any, sample it!” said Jenny. “Of course. Also any off-colored surface areas.” “What would you consider off-color?” asked Joe pointedly.

“Well, the sand is practically white to me by daylight-it’s mostly ammonium salts, Jenny says. The hard rock has all been darker, and I suppose that would be silicates with heavy metals. This part of space seems to have been through more stellar life cycles even than mine. The School planets run pretty high in heavy metals, don’t they, except for the way-out common ones like Sink?”

“Even the dust in those is iron-rich,” Jenny confirmed.

“Thanks. It goes along with the brand-new stars and nebulosity here at Eta Carinae, after all. Let me know when you finish some of those rock analyses, please, Jen. I guess anything that isn’t either practically white or practically black will need a closer look. There’s no point in trying to put other color words through the translators; we respond too differently to various wavelength mixtures. Two samples that looked alike to me might be very different to some or all of you, and conversely.”

“Any further thoughts?” Joe was still asking the key questions. No one said anything, and the boring aspect of the flight was resumed.

Molly spent much of the time wondering who would be next to make a dangerous or ridiculous mistake, and suspected that Charley was thinking along the same lines. The difference between them, she reflected, was that the Kantrick was probably hoping for it to happen—to someone else, of course. His sense of humor seemed to work best in situations that made him look better than others—though to do him justice, as Molly suddenly realized, he had never displayed it in a really serious situation like the present one. At parties, on picnics—if an outing where everyone wore environmental armor could be given such a name—even in class, he could be objectionable; in the lab he had been different, and he might well be so in the field. She’d give him the benefit of the doubt until something did happen.

Disappointingly, the surface showed nothing surprising or encouraging to Molly’s eyes, and only the regular samples were taken at the three sites where robots were left in open starlight. Jenny’s enthusiasm waned visibly.

As had been predicted, the sun was almost gone when they got back to the tent, though it took long-wave sensors to prove it.

Charley had decided entirely on his own, as both Nethneen and Human had been very careful not to say anything that might have been taken as a suggestion, that he would also accompany Molly to the heavily clouded arctic. He gave no special reason, but suddenly broached the idea toward the end of the search around the other pole. This area had proved to be mostly bare rock; there were no lakes or rivers, and very little loose sand or dust, but a very irregular, mountainous topography. Molly suspected that something about this fact had set the Kantrick thinking, and the report certainly bothered Carol. She couldn’t see why there should be mountains.

Molly herself spent some of the unloading time rigging a hood around her conning screen, and now she lifted the boat and headed it north, still hoping for something that looked more or less like a natural landscape instead of the dim orange-red patterns of which her eyes were so tired. She had not completely forgotten Charley’s prediction about the boat, but if he was willing to ride in it, she saw no reason to worry.

Molly had never seen Earth except from a distance, of course, being far short of retirement age. However, she was familiar enough with holograms and other images of what was technically her home world, as well as of many others. This was not exactly like any of them, but not wholly new, either.

The dunes in the region where they had landed were too light in color to be any sand she knew, but not light enough to be snow. Where these ceased, as they did before the boat had gone a hundred kilometers, the surface texture remained about the same for a while. Then increasing areas of bare solid that might be rock—it couldn’t be ice; it was far too dark—began to show. It was not really black in color. There were dark browns, traces of what to Human eyes looked reddish brown and occasionally a real red, and sometimes there showed bits of what she suspected might have been greenish or even lighter yellow patches if the light getting through the clouds had been bright enough to give her more confidence in her color sense.

Several times she was tempted to land for samples, but reflected that if she did this every time the surface tint changed she would never cover ten percent of the planet. For the present job, it would be best to wait until liquid could be seen—unless, of course, some unmistakable ice showed up.

Neither did, for hundreds of kilometers. She was flying slowly, to get a good look at the ground below, in spite of her desire to reach daylight, and time had shifted to a slow crawl.

She herself was still interested in the endlessly varying landscape below; Charley, who was taking seriously his duty of looking where they were going, was getting bored and was quite willing to say so. There were clouds and dust devils and real sandstorms, sometimes above their flight level and sometimes below, but he didn’t find their patterns at all interesting.

Conversation with the three back at the tent did not help, as all were too busy to say much. Joe had started his robots; the slaves had lifted to their assigned altitudes, and everything was obediently moving slowly upwind, whatever the local wind might be, according to the monitors. A worldwide map of air currents at five altitudes was under construction, but since no robot was yet more than ten kilometers from its starting point little could be read from it so far.

Jenny was deeply buried in chemical analysis but had not yet reported evidence either of the prelife compounds she had originally hoped or the photosynthetic life more recently inferred. Carol was equally silent; Molly supposed she was doing more with the radar maps or the data they had picked up around the “craters,” or perhaps just brooding about the arctic mountains. Joe of course said nothing and Molly herself did not like to interrupt with questions. Some of Joe’s ethical code had rubbed off on her. She regretted it slightly; chattering during lab work seemed more comfortable, but with Joe actually present she felt a little uneasy about unessential talk. It was certainly not that she disliked or feared the little Nethneen; somehow she just didn’t want to merit his disapproval. She wished something would appear on her own screen that would give excuse for a report—a real report, not just a periodic statement that the boat was still all right, as Charley was making.

But it was several hours more before this happened. The equipment indicated that they were over a thousand kilometers from the others when a lake—no, it was a chain of lakes—came into view. They were near the edge of the heavy arctic cloud cap, and the light was getting white enough if not bright enough to make Charley a little unhappy. The clouds were evidently of fairly coarse particles. The general landscape had been smoother for some time, and she had speeded up their flight, not expecting to find anything interesting; and for some minutes she and Charley had been arguing on private channel about this. He could not grasp the Human emotional attitude that because nothing had happened for some time, nothing was likely to. Being bored, he insisted, was quite different from being unreasonable.

The argument ended as the gray-blue patches that had to be liquid made themselves obvious. The Kantrick aimed his own screen downward as their horizontal motion practically ceased, and began calling out to the others.

“It looks as though we had some liquid here—lakes, ponds, whatever—I don’t see any rivers, so ponds may be it, though they’re pretty big; one is a dozen or more kilometers across, I estimate. Any new colors, Molly?”

“Yes, right around the edges, but so uniform I can’t help suspecting it just means the ground is wet.”

“Is the surface the salt-sand we’re used to, or bare rock, or something different?” asked Joe.

“It looks pretty much like the former, but I can’t be sure. We’ll be down in a moment. Will you get my armor, too, Charley?”

The Kantrick did even more. By the time the boat was grounded and controls safely capped, he was back in Con with his own armor, the Human’s, and a coil of rope. Molly decided not to ask him the purpose of the last until she had finished checking the gas tightness and temperature controls of her own equipment. She then started for the main lock and, as she had expected, was stopped by her companion.

“Wait, Molly. We’d better fasten ourselves together. I know there doesn’t seem to be any wind, and I don’t see any holes, but we don’t know what it’s like out there. If the ground is wet, there might be quicksand or something like that.”

“And if we both got pulled in?”

“We stay safely apart. One of us goes out first, and goes the full length of the rope before the other follows, then we keep that length apart until we’re reasonably sure the surface is trustworthy.”

“That still doesn’t answer what we do if we both get in trouble.”

“The others—oh.”

“Yes. The others aren’t here. Sorry, Charley. You stay inside and take the boat back to the tent for help if I get in trouble.”

The spheroidal figure stood motionless for several seconds, passing the coil of rope from one four-digited hand to the other, its forward eye fixed on Molly’s at about the same level and the two others that she could see roving aimlessly about the con room. Then the rope was tossed to one side and the transparent helmet dome of the armor slowly removed. “You’re right, of course. I’ll watch. Please keep talking whenever you think I may not be able to see you.”

“That would only be right next to the boat. I’ll keep a running report, though, anyway. And I’ll be careful of quicksand; did you have some special reason to be afraid of that?”

“Well—nothing special. It was the first thing I could think of that wouldn’t be as obvious as high winds or holes.”

“Have you ever had experience with such a thing?” asked Joe.

“Not personally. I’ve read about it.”

“All right,” said Molly, “I’ll step carefully, and in this gravity I don’t think I need really worry about that, either. No, don’t say it, I know I’d sink just as deeply into any liquid here as on my home world, but I can use inertial effects more constructively here, I’d think. We’ll hope I don’t have to find out, though. I won’t be long; I’ll get water and mud for analysis and be right back.”

Charley made no answer, but settled down at his dimly lit screen and keyed it to cover the area just outside the nearest lock. Molly quickly rechecked her armor and went out.

There was more light than before; the clouds seemed to be thinner for a moment. She had already mastered the coordination needed for walking in seven-percent gravity, of course, and required no conscious thought for that problem, so she could focus full attention on the landscape before her.

The nearest lake was about two hundred meters away. There was just enough wind to make its liquid state obvious by ruffling the surface into small waves, which moved with eye-catching slowness in Enigma’s gravity. Considering the temperature and pressure, its main constituent was presumably ammonia, but there was no reason to suppose it was very pure.

The ground at her feet was mostly the light-colored material that Jenny claimed to be ammonium salts, but now it could be seen that smaller, darker pebbles were scattered through it. Molly collected several of these, finding that they were filled with tiny, sparkling metallic-looking particles when examined closely. She reported this to Jenny, and walked slowly on toward the lake.

“Everything all right?” asked Charley.

“Eh? Oh, yes. Sorry—I promised to keep reporting, didn’t I? So far nothing special. The surface holds me up well enough and seems perfectly dry so far. As you can see, I’m heading toward the lake now.”

“Not too fast. You don’t have Jenny’s traction, and you want to be able to stop.”

“True. I’ll watch it, though getting wet with ammonia shouldn’t hurt me in this suit. My batteries are up, and I could boil a lot of it away from around me before getting frostbite.”

“But I couldn’t see you under the surface.”

“I’m not sure I’d sink; I’ve never stopped to figure out my density in armor, and would have to look up that of the ammonia. In any case, if I go under for any reason, I’ll keep talking to you. In fact, now that I think of it, getting mud from the lake bed might be a good idea; if there’s any sort of microlife on this world, the bottom of a shallow body of liquid with some decent light shining on it would seem to be the best place to look for it. Now stop worrying, Charley. I can’t guarantee there’s nothing dangerous, but I’m not going to take any unreasonable chances. I want to see my husband and little boy again, the sooner the better as long as this job is properly done. Do calm down.”

“All right. I didn’t mean to be giving orders. It’s just that I was so surprised when Joe blew…”

“So was I, and so was he. The universe is full of surprises, thank goodness. Some of my ancestors believed in an evil god they called Satan, but his real name was Boredom. Hold on a minute, here’s a patch of something that looks different. Sort of pink, no, more orange, with little veins of yellow. Its texture is slimy, of all things. This is encouraging; maybe we have Jenny’s life already. I’ll can some of it ... there. It sticks to my gloves. Probably I can rinse them off in the lake. Wait a minute.” She took a long, gliding step that brought her ankle deep in the liquid. “It doesn’t shelve off too quickly. I’ll get some of the bottom stuff in another can while I’m here. There; at least the gloves look clean. I’ll rinse them off again with a couple of different solvents when I get back to the boat, and Jenny can play with those washings, too. Now I’ll go out a little farther and get some deeper tuff.”

“Do you have to?”

“Why are we here? If it will make you feel better, I’ll come back to the boat and let you do it, but that seems a waste of time with me here already.”

“Well—I’ll go out next time.”

“Fine. I was going to suggest that anyway.”

Molly waded away from shore and boat, occasionally pushing her faceplate below the surface to get a clearer view of the bottom. It looked like plain mud or sand; there was nothing that suggested living beings, plant or animal, protist or argilloid, though she could hardly expect to see either of the last two except in colony form. She Finally reached waist depth.

“I’m going to get some stuff from the bottom. One liquid sample, one mud or whatever. I’ll be down less than fifteen seconds, if I can get down at all.”

“All right.” Charley tensed himself at his station. He was extremely uneasy in one way at losing sight of his partner, though he still had faith in the Faculty that had set their problem.

He needn’t have worried. Molly had been able to immerse her face when she wanted to see the bottom, but getting entirely below the surface was another matter. She couldn’t sink, and her center of buoyancy was if anything below her center of mass. She just couldn’t reach the bottom. Getting her feet back down after lifting them off took some doing. Even Charley was amused. Swimming was not an art with his species; as he had said, they floated even in liquid ammonia, and with no need to breathe they had never regarded staying up as a problem. Their shape and mass distribution made it easy to stay right side—head pole—up if they were floating; Molly’s present need to go head down, coupled with her already weird shape, made the situation really funny.

“Blast!” exclaimed the Human when she was finally standing again. “I know ammonia’s a lot less dense than water, but so am I with this suit. The recycling gear takes up too much room. I ought to have designed it with the batteries in the feet. I should have learned more than organometallics when I was taking that course with Jenny on Ivory. The gravity made me spend a lot of time swimming there, and of course I didn’t use real armor—just good insulation, which bulked enough to let me float in the ammonia but didn’t keep me from diving.”

Charley knew what she meant; he, too, had taken courses on the high-gravity fourth planet of Smoke, the fainter star of the binary system whose planets had been taken over almost completely by the University.

“I’ll have to make do with shallow-water samples this time and rig up some sort of long-handled scoop for the future. I’m coming back. Don’t gloat.”

“I’ve been listening, Molly” came the grating Rimmore tones. “If you need to make more equipment, how about coming back to the tent with the specimens you already have? I can’t wait to work on that slime you were talking about.”

“Well—all right, Jenny.” Molly had intended to use the shop on the boat but could sympathize with her friend’s curiosity. “I wouldn’t mind knowing what the stuff is myself. You don’t mind waiting for stuff from other lakes?” She splashed out on the shore, noting that the material underfoot was more mud than sand; it clung to her feet and ankles. She made no great effort to get rid of it; specimens were specimens, even if they collected themselves.

Actually, most of it had dried and fallen away by the time she reached the little spacecraft; her trail was marked not only by the indentations of her footprints but by the fragments of hardened mud. She did not stop to think of any implications of this rapid evaporation; after all, her armor was heated to keep her alive.

“You might as well fly, Charley,” she remarked as she closed the outer lock behind her. “I’ll have to get this stuff properly recorded.” Her companion made no objection, and by the time they were back at the tent—a far shorter trip than the outbound one, since neither of them was bothering to observe and the Kantrick used far higher speed than before—she had labeled her specimen containers more completely, described each with a brief note covering its reason for collection and location, canned several of the flakes of sediment still adhering to her armor, and topped off the batteries of the latter.

Jenny received the material with eager nippers, listened to Molly’s backup information, and settled down happily to work. Charley and his Human friend went to see the beginnings of Joe’s air-current map; the Kantrick remained to watch it grow, though there was still little sense to be made of it. Molly retired to the shop to make a shovel. This was completed in a few minutes, the shop resources being what they were, and she then suddenly realized that she could use some sleep. No one had set up a watch system as yet; the students were doing what came to hand. There was no objection to further delay in the inspection of the daylit region.

Sleep was rather uneasy this time; Enigma’s gravity was a great deal less than the normal Classroom acceleration, low as that was by Human standards, and Molly woke up several times from a falling dream.

Her conscience eventually decided that she had rested enough, and she took a quick meal before going back to the tent. Her translator had of course blocked all nonemergency communication while she slept, and the first words to come through when contact was resumed rather surprised her.

“Joe, I would never have thought it of you!” The voice was Carol’s; the machine was using the tone of honest surprise, but Molly rather suspected sarcasm. She was not yet in sight of the others, being twenty or thirty meters from the lock that led to the tent, and found herself at a loss for the motive behind the Shervah’s words. Had Joe actually interrupted someone at work, or what?

She hurried, making full use of the handholds, but her first view of the tent occupants told her nothing. All four were gathered around Joe’s map, but there had been no more words and no one appeared to be doing anything but look. Molly joined them as quickly as she could, and looked the map over silently from all sides, hoping to learn what had provoked Carol’s remark; but she saw nothing surprising.

The map itself was a holographic projection of the planet, about two meters in diameter. The sunlit side was indicated by what to the Human was slightly brighter illumination, and a coarse coordinate grid indicated the rotation axis.

Faint reddish and orange lines, all so far extremely short, marked the paths that had been followed by the robots, and the locations of each of these were indicated by slightly brighter sparks of light at the appropriate end of each line. In each case, the starting point could easily be identified as the spot from which the trails of each robot and its five slaves radiated. Presumably, as the lines lengthened, it would become possible to make some sense out of their pattern, but Molly could see nothing organized so far.

There was, of course, no meaningful connection between the starting points and the coordinate system. One of the twenty was at the arbitrarily chosen zero longitude, and neither rotation pole was anywhere near one of them, since chance had not brought them to the ground at an appropriate latitude—Molly realized with some embarrassment that she would have had some trouble calculating in her head just what an appropriate latitude would be. How many degrees apart on the circumscribed sphere were the vertices of a dodecahedron? She put that one firmly out of her mind, and returned to the possibly more immediate question.

What had Joe done or said to surprise Carol? Of course, he would never have made a remark about the pattern’s already supporting his hypothesis—not Joe.

“Does this make sense to anyone yet?” Molly asked.

“Notice the summer end of the axis,” replied the Nethneen. What Molly actually noticed was that he had not really answered her question; but she backed a little farther from the globe image to get a better view of the area in question, and examined it more closely.

The true arctic circle had not been located yet, since no one had bothered to check the orientation of the rotation axis with the planet’s current radius vector; but presumably it was farther from the pole than the circle now in total daylight. Within that circle were only two of the robot tracks, and Molly examined these very carefully. It was the area they knew to be more heavily clouded and that she and Charley had been examining more closely, but the map showed nothing of the clouds.

“I don’t see anything very different about them, she admitted at last. She was embarrassed again; if Joe had spotted a difference, surely there must be one. What could be expected to show this quickly? The region was presumably getting more heat, of course—potentially higher winds, but if anything the patterns of radiating lines were smaller suggesting slower air currents. It couldn’t be that.

“See the wind strength?” Carol still sounded sarcastic. Would Joe be drawing conclusions already about general circulation? It was a temptation common to Human minds—she wasn’t sure about many of the other species—to notice things that supported one’s one preconceived ideas. Surely Joe was above that, though; or was he: Did the robots measure vertical components? She tried to remember.

Then she suddenly saw the larger pattern. “Oh! Of course! What can have happened? When did it happen?”

“I only noticed it a few minutes ago,” replied Joe. “I’ve had to take some readings from other sensors on the slaves to make sure, but the air is generally rising over that area, and…”

“But I meant the other thing—the missing robot!” exclaimed Molly. “Isn’t that what you were talking about?”

“Oh, no. That couldn’t happen. Of course they’re all…” Joe fell silent as he realized that Molly was quite right.