Hal Clement: The Nitrogen Fix

1980 Illustrations by Janet Aulisio

An ACE Book First Ace Printing: September 1980

First Mass Market Edition: October 1981

The golden brown sky was losing some of its uniformity with patches of darker scud starting to show to the west. There was still no wind, and the water was merely choppy, but Kahvi and Earrih were getting more and more uneasy about the kilometer which still separated them from the Canton shore.Milton Island was closer behind, but the cove on its south side would offer little protection if the wind really rose. The rafts, even with their present load, could not be sunk — Newell tissue was far too buoyant — but they could lose the cargo which had taken weeks to collect. The shelter between the Canton shore and the Sayre islets was looking more and more inviting.

“You were right, Kahv. We should have worked around the shore; we could have spared another day or so.” Some of Earrin’s words were spoken aloud, but since his breathing mask muffled the more subtle phoneme distinctions, hand gestures conveyed much of the thought.

His wife answered with a single, silent nod, not taking her eyes from the shore ahead for longer than was needed to read his signals. She got no particular thrill out of having been right; she had, after all, conceded the weight of the man’s arguments and had agreed to try the short cut. Risks always had to be taken; it was merely a question of which ones at any particular time. Spending more time out of reach of an air reserve could also have been dangerous.

This time the raft assembly was much larger than usual and correspondingly harder to maneuver. The Hillers had been emphatic about wanting the very largest supply of metal and glass that could be obtained in two months. There had been no way to increase the rate at which the copper came in from the sea, but Bones had found enough glass on the harbor bottom to load not only the floats usually devoted to cargo but a dozen square meters of extra deck space. It was these new, rather hastily fashioned floats which were the main worry.

Even in poling depth the cluster of rafts was awkward. Earrin and Kahvi had sometimes tried masts and sails, but neither knew anything significant about the art and had to depend on following winds. In deep water they usually used sweeps and Bones.

At the moment the human couple were resting, with their sweeps trailing alongside. The Observer, however, was still at work; the tow lines extending from two of the bow floats were taut, and the raft was still moving slowly westward. If bad weather would only hold off for another hour or so, the cargo might be safe after all. If it didn’t — well, Bones could retrieve it from the bottom, but that would be unwise in sight of the Hillers. The group which had ordered this cargo seemed to have a very low opinion of the natives — there had been some mention of “Invaders” during the negotiations, though neither Kahvi nor Earrin had pursued that line of discussion.

But there was no point in worrying about things which hadn’t happened; the important thing was action which would get them to the Canton shore and the jail as quickly as might be. Earrin was already taking up his long oar again. Kahvi did the same. The new child was not yet large enough to interfere.

At least there was no wind against them yet. The foamy tissue rode very high, and the whole structure was much less affected by water currents by those in the air. Progress was steady.

Both rowers looked over their shoulders to see whether the low clouds, colored by dioxide, were appreciably closer, but neither allowed their efforts at the sweeps to slacken, and gradually the shore grew clearer through the haze. The Blue Hills could still be seen to the south, which was a hopeful sign.

Real storms, complete with rain and wind, were usually preceded by clouds down to the surface.

This fact helped Kahvi to keep her hopes up; Earrin could not keep memory of the frequent exceptions to it out of his mind.

Bones, under water fifty meters ahead, was giving no particular thought to the weather. Neither was the raft’s other occupant, playing quietly with her toys in the air tent and looking up every little while to see whether her parents were doing anything new. The transparent tissue of the tent let her see them clearly enough, though the two thicknesses of it between them rather blurred the adults’ view of each other.

Danna had never in her memory been this far from shore, but was quite used to having the floats tossed even more violently than they were now, so she saw no reason to be afraid. Unless she was told to put on breathing gear, she would assume that everything was all right with the raft-and even then she would probably suppose it was only a drill. She was well along in acquiring the hang-ups needed for survival as a Nomad. She already knew how to check the bubbles of transparent tissue in which the Sparrel pseudolife produced breathing oxygen. She could even be trusted to warn her parents if the rise in tent pressure indicated that cartridge material was becoming saturated, though she had not been trustedwith the delicate task of bleeding off excess air. She was not, of course, strong enough to bring buckets of nitrogen under the raft to restore the tent’s breathing balance.

She did, however, know smoke when she saw it, and it was Danna who called her parents’ attention to what lay ahead. Her voice came clearly through the tent tissue as the rafts drew within three hundred meters of the Canton shore.

“Mother! Dad! Isn’t that a fire on the other side of the hill? The clouds are going up, so something must be hot!”

Her elders stopped rowing and sprang to their feet, drawing the sweeps inboard by habit. They had been watching their goal, but had not looked carefully at the darkness above it. Neither could see, very clearly at that distance; their mask windows were of salvaged window glass, and their eyes middle-aged.

Even after the child called the smoke to their attention, it was hard for them to be sure t at it was not ordinary rain scud. The ubiquitous oxides of nitrogen could be found in both.

“She’s right,” Kahvi said at last. “There is a fire beyond the slope. “What are those Hillers doing?”

“Maybe.” Earrin was less certain. “Let’s see what Bones can make of it. He has decent eyesight.” The man strode across the floats to the nearer of the tow lines and gave it a quick double pull. Both ropes became slack at once, and a moment later the native, as the Fyns regarded the being, surfaced a few meters away. Kahvi gave the come-here gesture, and the child imitated her, though Bones would have had some trouble seeing her inside the tent. The creature plunged toward the raft in a series of dolphin-like leaps, the last of which carried its grotesque figure smoothly to the deck. For a moment it lay like a stranded fish; then the slender body curled upward until it stood erect, towering well above the human beings.

The float supporting its hundred and twenty kilograms rocked irregularly in the chop, but the four lower limbs flexed to keep the body upright in spite of their fantastic slenderness and apparent frailty.

Two of them framed the horizontal flukes which were used in dolphin-style swimming; the other two originated half a meter farther up the slender trunk and extended far enough sideways and forward to provide a trapezoidal support area quite large enough to make balance easy. From a little distance, where the tentacles were not noticeable, Bones would have looked absurdly like a fish standing on its tail, to anyone who had ever seen a fish. Kahvi and Earrin had not; their own species was the only macroscopic form of native animal life still surviving on Earth.