Hal Clement: Space Lash

“There are more chloride cartridges in the cyclers.”

“You have four left, which would get us maybe two kilos at the present rate. We can't use mine, since you can't get them out; and if we use all yours you'd never get up the rim. Drying your air isn't just a matter of comfort, you know; that suit has no temperature controls — it depends on radiation balance and insulation. If your perspiration stops evaporating, your inner insulation is done; and in any case, the cartridges won't get us to the rim.”

“In other words you think we're done — again.”

“I certainly don't have any more ideas.”

“Then I suppose I'll have to do some more pointless chattering. If it gave you the last idea, maybe it will work again.”

“Go ahead. It won't bother me. I'm going to spend my last hours cursing the character who used a different plastic for the faceplate than he did for the rest of these suits.”

“All right,” Tazewell snapped as the geophysicist paused. “I'm supposed to ask you what you did then. You've just told me that that handkerchief of yours is a good windshield wiper; I'll admit I don't see how. I'll even admit I'm curious, if it'll make you happy.”

“It's not a handkerchief, as I said. It's a specimen bag.”

“I thought you tried those and found they didn't work — left a charge on your faceplate like the glove.”

“It did. But a remark I made myself about different kinds of plastic in the suits gave me another idea. It occurred to me that if the dust was, say, positively charged…"

“Probably was. Protons from the sun.”

“All right. Then my faceplate picked up a negative, and my suit glove a positive, so the dust was attracted to the plate.

“Then when we first tried the specimen bag, it also charged positively and left negative on the faceplate.

“Then it occurred to me that the specimen bag rubbed by the suit might go negative; and since it was fairly transparent, I could…"

“I get it! You could tie it over your faceplate and have a windshield you could see through which would repel the dust.”

“That was the idea. Of course, I had nothing to tie it with; I had to hold it.”

“Good enough. So you got a good idea out of an idle remark.”

“Two of them. The moisture one came from Shan the same way.”

“But yours worked.” Ridging grinned.

“Sorry. It didn't. The specimen bag still came out negative when rubbed on the suit plastic — at least it didn't do the faceplate any good.”

Tazewell stared blankly, then looked as though he were about to use violence.

“All right! Let's have it, once and for all.”

“Oh, it was simple enough. I worked the specimen bag — I tore it open so it would cover more area — across my faceplate, pressing tight so there wouldn't be any dust under it.”

“What good would that do? You must have collected more over it right away.”

“Sure. Then I rubbed my faceplate, dust rag and all, against Shandara's. We couldn't lose; one of them was bound to go positive. I won, and led him up the rim until the ground charge dropped enough to let the dust stick to the surface instead of us. I'm glad no one was there to take pictures, though; I'd hate to have a photo around which could be interpreted as my kissing Shandara's ugly face even through a space helmet.”

Ron Sacco's hand reached gently toward his switch, and paused. He glanced over at the commander, saw the latter's eyes on him, and took a quick look at the clock. Welland turned his own face away — to hide a smile? — and Sacco almost angrily thumbed the switch.

Only one of the watchers could follow the consequences in real detail. To most, the closing of the circuit was marked a split second later by a meaningless pattern on an oscilloscope screen; to “Grumpy” Ries, who had built and. installed the instrument, a great deal more occurred between the two events. His mind's eye could see the snapping of relays, the pulsing of electrical energy into the transducers in the ice outside and the hurrying sound waves radiating out through the frozen material; he could visualize their trip, and the equally hasty return as they echoed back from the vacuum that bounded the flying iceberg. He could follow them step-by step back through the electronic gear, and interpret the oscilloscope picture almost as well as Sacco. He saw it, and turned away. The others kept their eyes on the physicist.

Sacco said nothing for a moment. He had moved several manual pointers to the limits of the weird shadow on the screen, and was using his slide rule on the resulting numbers. Several seconds passed before he nodded and put the instrument back in its case.

“Well?” sounded several voices at once.

“We're not boiling off uniformly. The maximum loss is at the south pole, as you'd expect; it's about sixty centimeters since the last reading. It decreases almost uniformly to zero at about fifteen degrees north; any loss north of that has been too small for this gear to measure. You'll have to go out and use one of Grumpy's stakes if you want a reading there.”

No one answered this directly; the dozen scientists drifting in the air of the instrument room had already started arguments with each other. Most of them bristled with the phrase “I told you…" The commander was listening intently now; it was this sort of thing which had led him, days before, to schedule the radius measurements only once in twelve hours. He had been tempted to stop them altogether, but realized that it would be both impolite and impractical. Men riding a snowball into a blast furnace may not be any better off for knowing how fast the snowball is melting, but being men they have to know.

Sacco turned from his panel and called across the room.

“What are the odds now?”

“Just what they were before,” snapped Ries. “How could they have changed? We've buried ourselves, changed the orbit of this overgrown ice cake until the astronomers were happy, and then spent our time shoveling snow until the exhaust tunnels were full so that we couldn't change course again if we wanted to. Our chances have been nailed down ever since the last second the motors operated, and you know it as well as I do.”

“I stand… pardon me, float… corrected. May I ask what our knowledge of the odds is now?” Ries grimaced, and jerked his head toward the commander.

“Probably classified information. You'd better ask the chief executive of Earth's first manned comet how long he expects his command to last.”

Welland managed to maintain his unperturbed expression, though this was as close to outright insolence as Ries had come yet. The instrument man was a malcontent by nature, at least as far as speech went; Welland, who was something of a psychologist, was fairly sure that the matter went no deeper. He was rather glad of Ries' presence, which served to bring into the open a lot of worrying which might otherwise have simmered under cover, but that didn't mean that he liked the fellow; few people, did. “Grumpy” Ries had earned his nickname well. Welland, on the present occasion, didn't wait for Sacco to repeat the question; he answered it as though Ries had asked him directly — and politely.

“We'll make it,” he said calmly. “We knew that long ago, and none of the measures have changed the fact. This comet is over two miles in diameter, and even after our using a good deal of it for reaction mass it still contains over thirty billion tons of ice. I may be no physicist, but I can integrate, and I know how much radiant heat this iceberg is going to intercept in the next week. It's not enough, by a good big factor, to boil off any thirty billion tons of the stuff around us. You all know that — you've been wasting time making a book on how much we'd still have around us after perihelion, and not one of you has figured that we lose more than three or four hundred meters from the outside. If that's not a safe margin, I don't know what is.”