Hal Clement - The Nitrogen Fix

They thought, though not very fast. They expostulated. They even begged; it seemed that facing their termagant leader under the circumstances was almost as frightening as losing their masks.

Earrin was not at all sure that he could, in fact carry out his threat; but Bones probably could, and in any case it seemed that the young Hillers were in no position to doubt his word. He was not lying; he fully intended to do what he had said.

The two finally went through the air lock. A renewed babble of voices sounded inside the jail; though words could not be made out very well, most of the listeners who could do so grinned behind their masks.

Then there was a brief silence, and rather to Earrin’s surprise a head popped out of the water. The Nomad did not have to test his firmness; Bones reacted instantly. A tentacle whipped out, its four-fingered tip seized the air hose and jerked. The tube pulled away from its cartridge but not from the mask; the latter left its wearer. There was a glimpse of furious female features, and the head disappeared under water again. A moment later shrieks could be heard from inside the jail; apparently the woman lacked the hangup about keeping unprotected eyes closed under water.

Even very dilute nitric acid can hurt. Fyn felt nauseated, the other human listeners went pale, and Betty started to cry. Their efforts to calm her helped the rest to resign themselves to the unpleasant situation.

“We’ve got them,” Mort remarked thoughtfully when the child was quiet again.

“Now just what do we do with them?”

The question was unanswered hours later, when the oxygen wasters had presumably gone happily to sleep inside the jail, and Kahvi and her companions arrived.

The moon was up by this time, and there was enough light for human beings and Observers to signal each other, but the latter wasted no time on gestures at first. They flung themselves into each other’s tentacles and embraced for fully a minute, while memories transferred themselves. Even Earrin, who had come to understand the situation pretty well, was embarrassed to watch — though watch he did. The other adults were shocked, though Kahvi recovered quickly when her husband explained. The burning need for population control immediately after the change, coupled with the collapse of all but pseudolife technology, had restored a decidedly Victorian behavior code, with much less hypocrisy than had characterized that age.

The Observers knew all that had happened to each other within two minutes; it took much longer for words to bring to human minds a more or less uniform and up-to-date picture of the situation. The moonwas a good deal higher by then. Action was promptly initiated by Kahvi.

“Now we bring those creatures back to normal air,” she said positively.

“How?” asked Zhamia. “We’ve seeded their plants, but it will take a couple of days before the oxygen producers are really overcome by the N-seed. If there aren’t enough nitrates in the trays, the seeding may not work at all. And we haven’t been into this new place-the lab, they called it; they must have straight oxygen there, too.

Kahvi smiled grimly inside her mask. “There’s wild cartridge tissue around. These folks have either been careless with pseudolife fragments or have been growing things deliberately all over the peninsula.

We’ll get a couple of chunks of that into the buildings, or at least the one where they are now; that’ll bring the oxygen pressure down to standard in half an hour!”

“Do you think the roof will stand it?” asked Earrin. Kahvi thought for a moment.

“Sure,” she said at last. “The wall is only a few centimeters into the air lock pool. The pressure drop will lower the water outside until bubbles can come in, before the roof tissue fails.

“Even with fresh patches?”

“We’ll hope so.” Fyn was startled; he had never seen his wife in such a ruthless mood. He had not seen their child studded with glass caltrops either. “They have masks, anyway,” Kahvi added.

“One of them doesn’t — the boss, I think. Bones pulled it off when she tried to — ”

“Yes, you told us. All right, put it back inside. Don’t leave the lock; just put it by the edge of the water. If they’re asleep we don’t want them to wake up. We can do that later if it’s necessary — but why should it be? The oxygen pressure will only go down to normal. You aren’t thinking.”

“Is normal enough for them?” asked Earrin.

“They make do with it in the city. Stop being so sympathetic, or if you must be, get sympathetic about Danna and me. We still hurt where that scientific glass went in.” Her husband, deciding not to explain that he was still worried about the roof, ceased arguing and went off for a supply of cartridge tissue. Mort and Betty followed; the child had never seen this kind of pseudolife, and her father could not reasonably overlook a chance at her education, tired as they were.

The other children were taken to the raft and nested down by Kahvi. She was back ashore long before the three got back with the needed material.

To anyone familiar with Terrestrial plants when there were any, it would have looked like a section of bamboo almost as long as Earrin was tall, and fully the length of his forearm in diameter. Its bright red color was not obvious by moonlight. It was light enough to carry easily under one arm; and in fact, Betty had carried it with a little trouble from almost the end of the peninsula. It would be over a hundred kilograms heavier when saturated with oxygen, but this could not happen outdoors. There were traces of the gas still free in Earth’s atmosphere, but even white phosphorus would not have been affected by it.

“Good!” exclaimed Kahvi as she saw the mass of tissue. “You only found one? Well, that’ll be enough; they’re all in the jail, and that’ll certainly beat a jailful of oxy — and it isn’t as though we were using it up, either. We can’t get it in dry, but that won’t slow it much. Let’s go; it’s certainly light enough.”

It was actually much too light; Kahvi couldn’t submerge it. An object which displaces around a hundred liters of water and weighs less than two kilograms will easily float a sixty-five kilogram person who is herself only a little more dense than water and loaded with breathing gear. Kahvi needed help.

Eventually, all the adults working together managed to lever one end of the cylinder under the wall, and by united and coordinated pushing worked it through until it popped to the surface on the inside. There was no sound to suggest that it had been noticed.

Then Zhamia took her daughter out to the raft, returning in a few minutes. It had been decided that only the children should occupy the tent until after sunrise, when the oxygen plants would resume activity.

The adults stayed on guard around the air lock of the jail, most of them sleeping on the slimy sand.

Kahvi and Earrin stayed awake, watching the water level of the air lock. This should have been going down as the pressure inside dropped; but nothing of the sort seemed to be happening as the minutes passed. Both knew that time appears to go slowly during periods of anticipation, but finally the comet rose.

“It should have shown something by now!” exclaimed Kahvi. “I wonder what’s gone wrong?”“Maybe the stuff has altered, and isn’t binding oxygen. You can’t really go by looks, you know The woman didn’t even bother to nod agreement; that was the most obvious of the possibilities. Even pseudolife, stable as it was cornpared to real-life, sometimes altered its genetic pattern cancerwise. “I’m going inside,” the woman said suddenly. “Something’s wrong, and they must be too sound asleep to notice.”