James Glass - Dirty Snowballs

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

Leon Gratz was nearly finished with his second EVA day-shift when it began to snow.

He was working on the port instrument pod forward, and had just inserted a replacement power pack when the first flakes whirled in front of his faceplate and stuck there.

He wiped the plate with a thickly-gloved hand, but it didn’t help much.

Snow swirled about him in a sudden flurry, blowing in from his right, the direction of the infant star spewing out its first plasma wind into the dense molecular cloud the Orion had been probing.

Leon looked towards the star, his vision blurred, and saw something bright and huge hurtling towards him. “Zeke, I got a problem out here,” he gurgled into his throat mike.

“We see it, Leon. Better get back in here quick!” Behind Zeke’s voice was the shrill shout of the emergency claxon.

“On my way,” Leon replied.

He pulled on his tether to the midship access hatch, and began handover-handing his way back, pausing to claw snow from his faceplate, amazed at the sight of it flowing on his glove like liquid, then freezing into ice and sticking his fingers together. The buildup on the hull was moving too, flowing like some plastic tiling around pods and extensors towards the dark side of the ship. The flurry intensified, and he was blind again, pulling hard on the tether and panting for breath. Hyperventilating? He willed calm, but the suffocating feeling wouldn’t go away, and his arms felt numb. “I’m not getting air!” he yelled.

No answer. Leon pulled hard, black specks dancing on the white nothingness in front of him, then he was slammed forcefully into the hull, ears ringing. His hands lost the tether and he flailed as something jerked at him, battering him back and forth before consciousness faded.

Fresh air, voices, the hum of the ship. “OK, Leon, OK, you’re back inside now. Jesus! You’re a mess!”

He was lying on his back in the airlock, and Zeke Peltros was kneeling beside him, pulling at his gloves. “Sorry about the rough entrance, but that stuff was pouring in here.”

The airlock floor and walls were covered with dirty slush melting before his eyes, globules detached by the ship’s vibrations floating lazily about them. Zeke waved some away from Leon’s face, pulled him upright with the aid of a fuzzy-faced tech II Leon didn’t know. “Let’s get out of here before we breathe any of this stuff. God knows what it is.”

The two men dragged him through the interior lock to suit-up bay, and by the time they got him unfrocked, the suit was a dripping mess of water and greenish slime, smelling like methane. Zeke wrapped the suit in plas-sheet, and gave it to the tech. “Take it to Boris. He’ll want to analyze this stuff.”

The tech left in a hurry. Leon felt cold, and the sewer smell in the room made his stomach queasy. “What the hell happened out there? We ran into something.”

“More like someone threw a dirty snowball at us out of nowhere. We caught the edge of the thing, and the rest of it kept right on going.” Zeke fiddled with Leon’s environmental pack. “Here’s the problem, I think. Your return line is frozen. That snow must be super-cold. ”

Leon shivered. “I’m cold to the bone, Zeke. I need to dry out.”

“Checkup first,” Zeke said. He hustled Leon to sickbay, then left to report to Captain Waisley. Meanwhile, the pudgy little doctor thumped, poked and prodded Leon—checking every orifice—finally did a scan, then ordered him to take a shower. “You smell like shit,” he said. “Don’t you guys take baths?”

“It’s that snow-stuff,” complained Leon. “It sticks to everything, like grease!”

The smell seemed to go away after a hot shower. Leon put on a fresh jumpsuit, and found Zeke and Captain Waisley waiting for him in sickbay. Waisley cared about his work crews. He was the best captain Leon had ever served under. The fisherman’s cap he wore made him seem more a part of them, but the white beard and cold, intense stare of those blue eyes reminded them of his many years of probe-ship command. He took Leon by the arm and sat down next to him on a cot. “What happened out there? What did you see?”

Leon told him, including the part about the flowing snow and ice. Waisley listened carefully, looked up at Zeke’s thin, scarecrow face. “The stuff hit starboard and is ail portside, now, clogging up half our reaction ports. Figure that one out.”

“Ice that flows like water?” Zeke asked.

“That’s what I saw,” said Leon. “Did it on my glove, too, like it was trying to get in between my fingers.”

“Whatever it is, we have to get it off, and quick,” said Waisley. “Half our maneuvering capability is gone. Those ports are clogged, and the stuff is a meter thick in places. We’ll have to torch it.”

“It’s not just ice, Captain,” said Zeke. “There’s a lot of organics in it. You can smell ’em when the stuff melts. Cogs is doing an analysis now. We’d better find out what we’re burning out there.”

Waisley nodded. “OK, but make it fast. I don’t like drifting so close by a T-Tauri star when it’s getting as near to ignition as our neighbor out there. That last burst of plasma wind saturated all our detectors; it probably blew that snowball right into us. God knows what kind of primordial goo is floating around in a molecular cloud as thick as the one we re in. Hell, we have planets and new stars forming in every direction here, and now I’ve had to power-down.”

The captain turned to Leon, clapped him on the shoulder. “Glad you’re OK, Leon. You get some food and sleep. We’ll need you for EVA again, and soon, but if that’s too quick for you I’ll understand. You had a bad experience out there.”

“I’ll be ready, Captain,” said Leon. “You just say when.”

“Good.” Waisley gave Leon’s shoulder a squeeze. “Zeke, you call a crew briefing for ten-hundred tomorrow, and get command on the horn for me. They’ll wonder why we’ve stopped moving.”

“Yessir,” said Zeke, and he hurried away. Leon followed Waisley out of sickbay, went to mess for coffee and what the synth-dispenser described as meat loaf and cheese potatoes, then retired to his cubicle and sacked in, falling asleep immediately.

He dreamed about snow, and was awakened twice by the faint odor of methane in the air.

The briefing was thirty minutes late because Cogs refused to leave his laboratory for it. Waisley settled for a written brief, and let the man do his work. Next to the captain, Boris Cogs was the power on the ship; half the budget of the expedition to this big molecular cloud complex was invested in his lab. Even the EVA crew knew why. Their sole mission, funded by eight planets in the Procyon Triad, was to map and economically evaluate every stock of hydrogen and organics within a hundred light-years—a job now twelve years old and just getting started. The cloud they drifted in now was the richest they’d encountered, and the T-Tauri protostar had been an exciting bonus for the astronomers back home. It had been analytical heaven for Cogs, and now he had a new toy to play with: ice that flowed like syrup.

The crew of six was bloated with coffee when Waisley finally returned from lower deck, one sheet of printout in his hand. “OK, listen up. The stuff was water ice, loaded with organics. So far Cogs has identified nine amino acids, along with whole fragments of proteins. Among other things. ‘An organic soup looking for a warm ocean to fall into.’ That’s Cogs talking.”