Hal Clement - Iceworld

Drai’s tentacle whipped past Sallman Ken at the thought, and the main power and drive director switches closed as one. The investigator swivelled around on the control rack, and eyed his employer curiously.

“You seem almost as excited as the native. What’s the matter?” Laj drew a deep breath, and finally got his voice under control. He was just beginning to realize that his dramatic entry had not been the wisest of moves. It was perfectly possible that his hired expert had learned the name of Earth’s product quite innocently; and if that were the case he would be ill-advised to attach too much weight to the incident — publicly, at least. He shifted ground, therefore, as smoothly as he could.

“Your chemical analysis seems to have encountered complications.”

“It would seem so. Apparently your natives are not quite so completely diurnal as you gave me to understand.” Ken was not intentionally defending his actions, but he could have found no better answer. Laj Drai paused momentarily.

“Yes, that is a point that surprises me a little. For twenty years they have never signalled except during their daytime. I wonder if the flatlanders had anything to do with it? I can’t imagine what or how, though. Did you finish your tests?”

“Enough, I guess. We’ll have to bring the torpedo back here, so I can find out just what that atmosphere did to my samples. Some of them burned, we already know, but I’d like to know what was produced.”

“Of course it couldn’t be sulfides. That’s what one thinks of as the natural product of combustion.”

“Not unless frozen sulfur dust is suspended in the atmosphere in tremendous quantities. I hadn’t thought of that, though — I’ll check for it when the samples come back. Actually, I’m a little bothered by the results so far. I couldn’t think of anything gaseous at that temperature which would support combustion, and something definitely does.”

“How about fluorine?” Laj was digging in the dim memories of an elementary science course.

“Maybe — but how come it exists free in the atmosphere? I should think it would be too active, even at that temperature. Of course, I suppose the same would be true of anything which would support combustion, so we’ll simply have to wait until the samples are back. You know, I’m almost at the point where I’d be willing to risk a landing there, to see what the place is like.” Drai shrugged expressively.

“If you and Feth can figure out a way of doing it, I won’t stop you. We might even see our way to offering a bonus. Well, it’ll be nearly three days before your stuff is back here, and there won’t be much to do in the meantime. Feth will cut it in on the beam when it’s far enough from Three.”

Ken took this as a hint to leave, and drifted aimlessly out into the corridors. He had some thinking of his own to do. As Drai had said, nothing could be done about Planet Three until the return of the torpedo, and he had no excuse for not considering Rade’s problem for a while.

The product was called “tofacco.” That, at least, was information. Rade had had no name for the narcotic he sought, so the information was of questionable value so far.

This planetary system was relatively close to Sarr. Another fact. The precautions taken by Drai and his people to conceal that fact might or might not be considered reasonable for a near-legal commercial enterprise, but were certainly natural for anything as blatantly criminal as drug-running.

Planet Three was cold — to put it feebly — and the drug in question could not stand normal temperatures. That was a link of rather uncertain strength, reinforced slightly by Drai’s tacit admission that “tofacco” was a vegetable product.

Think as he would, he could recall no other information which could be of the slightest use to Rade. Ken was mildly annoyed at the narcotics chief anyway for involving him in such a matter, and was certainly more willing than a professional policeman would have been to go back to the purely astronomical and ecological problem that was facing him.

How about his pesky Planet Three? Certainly it was inhabited — a fantastic enough fact in itself. Certainly it was not well known; no vision transmitter and no manned ship had ever gotten through its atmosphere. That seemed a little queer, now that Ken considered the matter again. Granted the fearful cold, and the fact that an atmosphere would conduct heat away as space could not, he still found it hard to believe that a competent engineer could not design apparatus capable of the descent. Feth was supposed to be a mechanic rather than an engineer, of course; but still it seemed very much as though the organization were singularly lacking in scientific resource. The very fact that Ken himself had been hired made that fact even more evident.

Perhaps he was not so far from Rade’s problem after all. Certainly any regular interstellar trading organization could and always did have its own ecological staff — no such concern could last without one, considering the rather weird situations apt to arise when, for example, metal-rich Sarr traded with the amphibious chemistry wizards of Rehagh. Yet he, Sallman Ken, a general science dabbler, was all that Laj Drai could get! It was not strange; it was unbelievable. He wondered how Drai had made the fact seem reasonable even for a moment.

Well, if he found out nothing they would probably not bother him. He could and would investigate Planet Three as completely as he could, go home, and turn his information over to Rade — let the narcotics man do what he wanted with it. Planet Three was more interesting.

How to land on the blasted planet? He could see keeping large ships out of its atmosphere, after the trouble with the natives of the flat, bluish areas. Still, torpedoes had been running the gauntlet without loss for twenty years, and the only detectable flatlander activity had been radar beams in the last two or three. Those were easily fooled by quarter wave coatings, as Drai had said. No, the only real objections were the frightful natural conditions of the world.

Well, a standard suit of engineer’s armor would let a Sarrian work in a lake of molten aluminium for quite a while. There, of course, the temperature difference was less than it would be on the Planet of Ice; but the conductivity of the metal must be greater than that of the planet’s atmosphere, and might make up the difference. Even if it did not, the armor could be given extra heating coils or insulation or both. Why had this never been tried? He would have to ask Feth or Laj Drai.

Then, granting for the moment that a landing could not be made even this way, why was television impossible? Ken refused to believe that the thin glass of a television tube could not be cooled down sufficiently to match the world’s conditions without shattering, even if the electrical parts had to be kept hot. Surely the difference could be no greater than in the ancient incandescent bulbs!

He would have to put both these points up to Feth. He was heading purposefully back toward the shop with this plan in mind, when he encountered Drai, who greeted him as though there had been no suspicious thoughts in his own brain that day.

“Feth has cut you in to the main beam, and no piloting will be needed for nearly three days,” he said. “You looked as though you were going back to your controls.”

“I wanted to talk to Feth again. I’ve been thinking over the matter of armor and apparatus withstanding Planet Three’s conditions, and it seems to me something could be done.” He went on to give a censored version of his recent thoughts to his employer.

“I don’t know,” the latter said when he had finished. “You’ll have to talk to Feth, as you planned. We’ve tried it, since he joined us, and the failures occurred just as he said in the matter of television. He was not with us on the original expedition, which did no investigating except as I originally told you — it was strictly a pleasure cruise, and the only reason there were so many torpedoes available was that the owner of the ship preferred to do his sightseeing in comfort — he’d send out a dozen at once, when we entered a planetary system, and keep the Karella in space until he found something he wanted to see or do personally.”