Hal Clement - Noise

Mike climbed aboard without attracting, or distracting, their attention, and looked at his discovery over ’Ao’s head.

It was little different in shape from the iron, copper, and titanium pods he had seen before. It was soft to the touch, so the contents were probably in powder form like the others. The color was black, which might have been due either to the fineness of the powder or the composition of the envelope. The captain was weighing it thoughtfully in her hands, tossing it from one to the other, but this could hardly be helpful in guessing at density; there would certainly be space between the tiny grains, and there was no telling from outside what fraction of the whole volume this might represent.

Wanaka finally looked up from the object and caught Mike’s eye. “How did you find this?”

He told her. She and the mate exchanged glances, but no words, which were superfluous. She simply nodded her head toward the others and gestured to the rail. Both flipped on their helmets and disappeared overboard.

One fear, that they might have been wasting days by not looking under the water pods, was quickly dispelled, to be replaced gradually by another. In the first half hour of search, neither the child nor the mate found any more metal.

Wanaka seemed to be on the point of sending Mike into the sea with them, but visibly changed her mind. Instead, she ordered him to stand watch and joined the searchers herself. It was she, some fifteen minutes later, who found the second pod, under a water sack just as the first had been.

By sunset, six more had been located. Since no one had tried to keep track of the area covered or of the number of water pods checked, there was no reliable way to guess at the amount of metal that might be available; it was not even certain whether or not any of the water sources had been counted more than once.

The search was better organized the next morning. Instead of simply groping under each water container and leaving it where it was, the finder removed it from its pit. There was no way to take it all aboard, since the breakers had been filled the day before, and the thought of setting drinkable water adrift would never have occurred to a Kainuian; but since the water itself was fresh, and at this distance from the tropical storm belt the surrounding ocean was quite salty enough even at the surface to let the pods float, they had a compromise. Two hundred meters of line were used, with a pod attached every two meters, to form a ring of water-filled floats; and each new pod thereafter was released inside the ring. By the end of the day, some statistics were available: out of twenty-seven hundred water sites investigated, forty-one had also contained metal. The next day produced a nearly identical ratio.

No one yet could guess what the metal might be.

It was rare, obviously. This did not, unfortunately, mean that it was valuable. While the pseudoorganism might have been deliberately designed, in which case the stuff should be worth keeping, pseudolife was little more immune to natural mutations than any other kind. For a little while Wanaka had been thinking, or perhaps dreaming, of something like silicon, but this was ruled out very quickly. Even in powder form, with presumably nothing but water between the grains, the stuff was much too dense. She thought of platinum and its relatives, though these were useful only in small quantities as chemical catalysts on Kainui, but the creature now calming the sea around them differed greatly from any of the royal-metal trappers to be found either in the reference book or anyone’s memory. For one thing, having water and metal in the same pit seemed to be unique.

Mining boats simply could not carry large amounts of sophisticated analytical equipment like X ray or neutron diffraction cameras or NMR machines. This was a matter of economics, not size. Very rarely a skipper with enough capital might decide to specialize, ship one such device and ignore the commonly traded materials, but Wanaka had never regarded this as a hopeful technique.

She also lacked any reliable way to decide how far from the equator she should ride this possible Golconda. They were already well south of the latitudes maintained by most cities in this hemisphere. Temperatures were dropping, though not yet far enough to affect either safety or comfort. They were riding with the current and pretty well shielded by the organism itself, so there seemed no risk of a serious collision. The winds were weakening; in a few more degrees of latitude they would be in a belt of calms, she knew. This might make it difficult to get back to a city, Keo pointed out.

The captain shook her head negatively. There were cities all over the south temperate zone, though not, of course, in the ice floe regions near the poles; and in any case there would be some chance of meeting other ships. If the metal were worth trading, of course…

The crudest of tests—exposing a small sample of the material to the quite acidic sea water—eliminated the alkali and alkaline-earth metals at once, and made items like zinc and even tin unlikely; density had already ruled out most of the latter anyway.

Wanaka was becoming irritated. “Mike, you’re a linguist, aren’t you?”

“If anything, more of a historian, Captain.”

“Not a chemist.” There was no question mark.

“Well, Captain, I learned what you might call—”

“ Not a chemist.”

“No, Captain. I could figure an equilibrium constant if you gave me the electrode potentials involved, but—”

“Would that help with this problem?”

“It might, but you—”

“But I don’t have a handbook with the potentials.”

“I don’t suppose so, Captain. I have no equipment to measure them, either.”

“Then we’d both have saved breath if you’d stopped at ‘No’ a few sentences ago.”

“Yes, Captain. Sorry.”

“ I’m sorry, Mike. I’m getting bothered by all this. I know what I should do, but can’t make myself do it. I’m setting a very bad example to ’Ao, too, and I suppose I’m letting you in for more risks than you bargained for.”

Mike grinned behind his mask, and gestured quickly, “I’m not bothered. There’s nothing that’s happened yet that hasn’t been interesting.” He was not exactly lying, but tact seldom is. Not exactly. “I’ll be able to write an adventure story as well as a thesis.”

“And you haven’t done anything that was a bad example to me,” ’Ao shrilled, “except that time when—”

“You asked for that,” Wanaka cut in firmly, “and you’ve earned back more points than you lost then anyway, which was zero. I’m not apologizing for anything. We’re staying with this creature as long as we possibly can, and that could be pretty long, considering the water situation.”

“Then we’d better keep on collecting this stuff, whatever it is,” pointed out Keo, “and treat it a little more carefully than we have been. The little screen says it’s not very radioactive if at all, but it could be as poisonous as osmium or nickel, say.”

So they collected carefully, without the help of Mike or of ’Ao, who as a growing child should not be exposed to chemical risks if at all possible. She made no objection, and both of them as the days passed grew a little casual about marine discipline, especially in the matter of conserving fresh water.

Storms and waterspouts were becoming a little less frequent as their distance from the equator increased; the surface water was saltier as well as cooler, and had a lower vapor pressure. Extremely well-focused sound waves should not, of course, be affected by this factor; but Keo, who had made such a point of their rarity, began to wonder if they might not be favored by it. Twice in the space of a few days they occurred within sight of the ship, once a couple of hundred meters beyond the edge of the metal-maker and once actually within it too close for comfort to the ship, tearing a two-square-meter patch of the jelly loose and hurling it far into the air. The only one to react visibly was ’Ao, who looked down at the mate from her crow’s nest in rather critical fashion the second time.