Half Life (5 page)

And of course this was another excuse for a few people to get away from Earth, which might or might not be a good idea.

No one had been sure, of course, that there would be anything even prebiological to study on Titan. Even the now obvious tectonic activity might not go deep enough to bring all the elements presumably needed for life from very deep in the satellite. That would depend on the still unknown causes of the seisms.

Regardless of the fact that only two-thirds of the sample mass had been accounted for, Ginger Xalco snapped out emphatically, “Structure, for goodness’ sake.”

No one suggested that the elemental analysis be finished first, certainly not Goodall, who might have pulled rank if he had chosen. He shared her feelings. He set the appropriate internal machinery to work while the lab crawled on to its next sample site, and its next, and its next.

“It’s a gel, really,” he said at last. “The solvent—pardon me, dispersing agent—is methanol. Simple methyl alcohol. Most of the rest of the material seems to be polymers of one sort or another. Some of it’s carbohydrate, a lot has nitrogen, but it’s going to take a while to find whether we’re dealing with what we’d consider proteins—polypeptides made of the same amino acids we are.”

“Left or right?” asked Collos and Martucci together.

“You’ll have to wait even longer for that—”

“Wait a minute!” Inger cut in. “Even at this temperature and gravity a gel has no business holding up a jet for very long. And it’s just been rained on! Gene, outside coverage!
Quick!
”

Belvew didn’t bother to ask what his partner had noticed, but instantly but flicked his own screen back to the full-sphere coverage. For a moment he felt relief, since the standard view excluded the aircraft; but a moment’s manipulation let him see his keels. Without word, warning, or delay he fed the plasma arcs and tensely watched the longitudinal accelerometer, wishing once again that he could feel the jet’s response directly.

For a moment the meter trembled around zero. The surface seemed to be clinging to the keels, which all could now see had sunk into it for several centimeters, and Belvew slowly increased thrust. Another black cloud appeared at the sides of the screen, supporting the idea that surface material was being boiled off by the exhaust. No one commented, yet.

The glassy surface underneath was nearly featureless and for a second or two he was unsure whether or not it was letting
Oceanus
move at all. Then the accelerometer swung, the whole landscape suddenly jerked backward as the jet snapped free, and a moment later he—no,
it
was airborne.

Goodall gave an indignant exclamation as his lab unit, in the path of the exhaust, stopped sending data.

The pilot paid no attention for a moment as he concentrated on reaching ram speed as quickly as possible using a minimum of mass. It was Inger who expressed sympathy.

“Sorry, Art. We can grow new labs much quicker than new planes. What else came in before we blew your machine into the lake?”

“Some more numerical stuff. Nothing structural, and we don’t have the samples anymore, either.”

Inger pondered for a moment, then suggested, “Maybe we can find it. The lab should be all right, at least. The exhaust cools pretty quickly, and the data were coming by beam to the plane. That would have been thrown off line when the lab was pushed. Tell the lab to broadcast, and Gene can make some low passes back along the track; maybe we can get its signals.”

“What if it reached the lake? It must have been blown that way, and it’s mostly downhill.”

“So much the better. We could use a reading on the composition of that juice. Maybe we could find out something about its depth, too. If anything’s certain, the liquid’s not exactly like what we get from the clouds. Look at the bright side, Chief.”

The answer was a grunt which might have meant anything up to “You look at it.” Barn’s instruments, however, showed that Goodall had indeed sent the broadcast command to the lab; whether he was waiting more eagerly for resumption of data flow or for a chance to go on complaining was anyone’s guess. He would have denied the latter, of course, probably pointing out that griping was much less effective than useful work at keeping pain out of his mind. Everyone knew this already.

Gene had been listening, even with most of his attention on piloting. In spite of his sympathy for the colonel’s feelings, he went up to a little over a kilometer, steered out over the lake to the rainstorm, and replaced the reaction mass he had just used. Then he increased thrust and nosed down—he was actually as impatient as any of the others for the lab data and more optimistic about the unit’s survival than most of them—and headed back toward shore and the landing site.

He was down to fifty meters by the time the glassy patch showed ahead. He eased back thrust, allowing the jet to slow to ram stall plus twenty, and made four passes over the area at that speed, first following and then paralleling the line of the landing and takeoff.

Nothing from the lab registered. With a grim expression which no one could see, and some muttered remarks which he took care no one could hear, he reset the wing camber, closed the ramjet intakes, and went back to rocket mode; but two more passes at a bare fifteen meters altitude and just above wing stall—neither Goodall nor anyone else was going to say he hadn’t tried, whatever they might think of his flying judgment—still produced no signals. Either the lab had been wrecked, though that still seemed to Belvew to be rather unlikely, or it was too deep in the lake for its signals to be picked up. Nobody, curiously, thought of its being deep in anything else; after all, it was far lighter than the ramjet.

The presumably nonpolar liquid shouldn’t interfere seriously with radio frequencies, but in broadcast mode any great depth certainly would. Titan was a weird place by human standards, but the inverse square law and rules of optical absorption still applied there.

There was no basis yet even for guesses at the depths of the numerous lakes. That would depend on details of the still hypothetical methane cycle as well as tectonics. There seemed, for example, to be practically no major rivers either to feed lakes or to fill them with sediment, though each liquid body was usually supplied by a number of small brooks.

Such items of information detail had a low priority in the early part of the program, though they would all be faced eventually.

“Sorry, Art,” Belvew said at last as he increased thrust, returned to ramjet mode when speed sufficed, and began to climb back toward the thunderhead. “I had hopes too, but I guess we’ve lost it. Have you any ideas what could produce a gel here?”

“I have enough trouble guessing what could produce methanol.”

“Why?” retorted Belvew. “The makings are all there. Ice and methane could do it directly, with release of hydrogen. Maybe some of the prelife catalysts we’re hoping to find are actually here, if you think the reaction would go too slowly at ninety K’s.”

“Naughty, naughty!” cut in Maria’s gentle voice. “Catalysts wouldn’t help. That reaction’s endothermic by over a hundred kJ.”

For a moment Gene wanted to kick himself. He knew the woman hadn’t had that datum in her head, but he, too, could have checked quietly with Status before making himself sound silly. Then he saw a way out.

“The energy could come from local heat,” he said, trying to keep smugness out of his voice.

“At ninety kelvins?”

“Sure. I did mention the other product. Hydrogen would leave the scene, so no back reaction—”

“That would happen only if it
could leave
the scene.” Goodall had pounced on the hypothesis and was enjoying himself. “That would be at or very near the surface, not deep underground—”

“Or in or just under a lake,” Ginger cut in. “We’ll have to look for bubbles.”

“And lower than ordinary temperatures, if it’s happening fast enough to show bubbles from the air,”

Belvew finished. “All right, we’ll look. Do some planning, you types with imaginations. I’m just an observer. I’m going to hit Line Five. Give me heading and time, Maria.”

The fifth planned seismic array was a quarter of the way around Titan from Lake Carver, ten or eleven hours flight at standard observing speed and over two even at full ram thrust in the thinner air tens of kilometers up. Belvew set everything on automatic, turned
Oceanus
over to Maria’s attention, and decided to eat and sleep. He needed the rest. A healthy twenty-year-old might have gone through the last hour casually, but he was neither. Very few human beings now alive were.

Evolution of disease organisms had gotten further and further ahead of medical research; dozens, counting new variations of older and once solved ailments such as the various leukemias, leprosies, and cancers, were now on the list of major health problems along with AIDS TA, VL, and XL. At least four of these involved sterility, three of them in women. The average age was now barely twenty years in spite of, or more likely because of, the species’ usual reaction to any major threat. STDs shared the increase.

Belvew and Inger were twenty-eight, quite elderly; Goodall was forty-four, almost unique.

Suggested explanations among the less panicked survivors were legion, and even ones which seemed worth testing were quite numerous. Satisfactory ones were almost nonexistent, except very briefly. Even supematuralists had had to fall back on Noachian-flood divine wrath aimed at general materialism rather than at specific sins.

The scientists had done better as far as testable ideas were concerned, but not very much; each virus, prion, genetic warp, and other cause of each given ailment had usually been identified beyond reasonable doubt quickly enough, but the information seldom produced an effective treatment before the disease in question had killed or incapacitated a few million more victims. The basic, general, underlying cause of the whole pattern was simply unknown.

There were two favored speculations—they showed little sign of graduating to real hypotheses—among scientists. Either new disease organisms had been tailored by people with motives that were unspecified, but presumably unsane by most standards; or the sudden appearance of so many ailments almost simultaneously was merely a statistical event like a baseball hitting streak. Both speculation sets took synergy for granted, and humanity still had many conspiracy fundamentalists to defend the first.

Those who preferred the second could point out how and why common worldwide travel could bring infective agents to critical concentration, at which hosts could be found and invaded faster than victims died off. They could not, however, explain why drastic restrictions on transportation and actual collapse of many travel systems had failed to show the opposite effect.

Belvew, who liked people, was not a conspiracy believer but was too well informed to feel sure of his own correctness. CPRS—calcium-phosphorus recrystallization syndrome, the ailment which would presumably finish turning his own bones to something like eggshell china in another two or three years—was known to be caused by a virus which would have taken only a little manipulation to produce from a normal human gene.

Or, of course, a very modest natural mutation.

An occasional message from Earth suggested that progress was being made in the search for its cure, but this offered Belvew little comfort. The same claims had been current for most forms of cancer for centuries; occasionally, and much less rationally, someone would even claim a cure for cancer in general.

This might be why most of Belvew’s generation tended to be skeptics who had no real need for GO6.

If success for CPRS was actually achieved, it was unlikely that the treatment could be duplicated by the Saturn crew’s relatively limited synthesis facilities. Factories could be reprogrammed or even replanned, but this shouldn’t be done for merely personal reasons.

Gene, sure that Maria was having no trouble with the aircraft, extracted himself from his suit. It could use servicing too. He floated back to his sleeping cell and napped while the waldo’s life support devices were recharged, cleaned, and otherwise readied for further use, and Status ran test programs on the control systems. The suits were not full-cycling, indefinitely lasting affairs; they had been designed mainly as waldoes. They did, of course, have fusers and life support capacity designed for Titan’s environment, but they could keep the wearer comfortable for only thirty hours or so, and alive for perhaps twenty more, on the surface.

Calcium-phosphorus recrystallization syndrome, while robbing him of energy, also kept Gene from sleeping for very long at a time. He was back with
Oceanus
sometime before it reached the planned site of the next seismic array, and Maria returned her full attention rather thankfully to her general mapping.

There was nothing for the pilot to do but watch scenery and, of course, speculate on the causes of its various features. He could see the ground well enough from this height, using frequencies able to pierce the small amount of smog which was below him.

There were block mountains and rift valleys; there were plains and what looked like volcanoes—these would come early on the investigation schedule once the weather and seismic nets were established; prebiotic chemistry, if it was happening at all, would presumably need a large variety of materials and a source of energy, and volcanic action offered the best hope of both.

There were lakes large and small. The background surface, the covering of nearly all the more or less horizontal areas, could be the hypothetical tar and ice dust; the factory had been planted on such a surface, but at that time no analysis had been possible. Neither cans nor labs had yet been grown.

None of the lakes was large enough to be called an ocean, as mapping from orbit had already made clear. However, it now seemed that fully a tenth of the satellite’s surface was occupied by liquid bodies, ranging in size from Carver, about the area of Earth’s Lake Victoria, down to puddles. The Collos patches were neither as numerous nor as a rule anything like as large as the one where
Oceanus
had just had its mishap, but they were far from rare.