Hal Clement - Iceworld

“If you’re going out to look this place over, go ahead. I don’t think your armor will suffer any worse than our hull. If you have trouble anywhere, it will be with your feet — loss through the air is nothing to speak of. If your feet get cold, though, don’t waste time — get back inside!”

Ken cast a mischievous glance at Drai. “Too bad we didn’t bring two suits,” he said. “I’m sure you’d have liked to come with me.”

“Not in a hundred lifetimes!” Drai said emphatically. Ken laughed outright. Curiously enough, his own original horror of the fearful chill of these Solar planets seemed to have evaporated; he actually felt eager to make the test. With the help of Drai and Lee he climbed into the armor they had brought from Mercury, sealed it, and tested its various working parts. Then he entered the air lock of the Karella, and observed his instruments carefully while it was pumped out. Still nothing appeared to be wrong, and he closed the switch actuating the motor of the outer door.

For some reason, as the Martian landscape was unveiled before him, his mind was dwelling on the curious discoloration of the suit that had been exposed to Planet Three’s atmosphere, and wondering if anything of the sort was likely to happen here.

Curiously enough, one hundred sixty million miles away, a thirteen year old boy was trying to account for a fire which seemed to have burned over a small patch of brush, isolated by bare rock, on a hillside five miles west of his home.

Even to an Earth man, Mars is not a world to promote enthusiasm. It is rather cold at the best of times, much too dry, and woefully lacking in air — breathable or otherwise. The first and last of these points struck Ken most forcibly.

The landscape in front of him was very flat. It was also very patchy. In some spots bare rock showed, but those were few and far between. Much of the area seemed to be dark, naked soil, with bits of green, brown, red and yellow mingling in the general background. Nearly half of the landscape seemed to be composed of the patches of white, which had seemed to be a solid mass from space. Probably, Ken realized, they formed a solid covering closer to the center of the white region; they had landed on its edge, as planned.

He took a careful step away from the ship’s side. The gravity was less than that of Sarr, but distinctly greater than on Mercury, and the armor was a severe burden. The two tentacles inside his right “sleeve” forced the clumsy pipe of steel downward almost to the ground, and manipulated the handlers at the end. With some difficulty, he scraped loose a piece of dark brown soil and raised it to eye level. He locked the “knees” of the armor and settled back on the tail-like prop that extended from the rear of the metal trunk, so that he could give all his attention to examining the specimen.

The glass of his face plate showed no signs of differential contraction so far, but he carefully avoided letting the soil touch it during the examination. He almost forgot this precaution, however, when he saw the tiny varicolored objects on the surface of the sample. Weird as they were in shape, they were unquestionably plants — tiny, oddly soft-looking compared to the crystalline growths of Sarr, but still plants. And they lived in this frightful cold! Already those nearest the metal of his handler were shrivelling and curling, cold as the outside of his armor, already must be. Eagerly Ken reported this to the listeners inside.

“This life must have something in common with that of Three,” he added. “Both must run on chemical energy of the same general sort, since there’s no important difference in their temperatures. This soil must have all the elements necessary, even if the compounds aren’t quite right for what we want — who ever heard of a life form that didn’t have a good deal of latitude that way?” He looked back at the sample he was holding. “It looks a little different around the edges, as though the heat of my armor were making some change in it. You may be right, Drai— there may be some volatile substance in this soil that’s evaporating now. I wonder if I can trap it?” He lapsed into thought, dropping his specimen.

“You can try afterward. Why not investigate the white patches?” called Drai. “And the rocks, too; they might be something familiar — and soils are made from rock, after all.” Ken admitted the justice of this, hitched himself off the rear prop, unlocked his leg joints, and resumed his walk away from the ship.

So far, he had felt no sign of cold, even in his feet. Evidently the soil was not a very good conductor of heat. That was not too surprising, but Ken made a mental note to be careful of any patches of solid rock he might encounter.

The nearest of the white areas was perhaps thirty yards from the airlock door. Reaching it quickly enough in spite of the weight of his armor, Ken looked it over carefully. He could not bend over to examine its texture, and was a little uneasy about picking it up; but remembering that the handlers of his armor extended some distance beyond the actual tips of his tentacles, as well as the fact that the first sample had been harmless, he reached down and attempted to scrape up a piece.

This seemed easy enough. The handler grated across the surface, leaving a brown streak behind — evidently the white material formed a very thin layer on the ground. Raising the sample to eye level, however, Ken discovered that he had nothing but dark-colored sand.

Excusably puzzled, he repeated the process, and this time was quick enough to see the last of the white material vanish from the sand grains. “You were right, Laj,” he said into his transmitter. “There’s something here that’s really volatile. I haven’t got enough for a good look, yet — I’ll try to find a deeper deposit.” He started forward again, toward the center of the white patch.

The expanse was perhaps fifty yards across, and Ken judged that the volatile coating might be thicker in the center. This proved to be the case, but it never became heavy enough to impede even his progress. His trail was clearly marked by bare soil, as the stuff faded eerily out of sight around each footprint. Ken, though he could have looked behind in his armor without turning his whole body, did not notice this, but the watchers from the ship did. Drai remarked on it over the radio, and Ken responded:

“Tell me if it stops — maybe that will be a place where it’s thick enough to pick some of the stuff up. I’d like to get a close look at it before it evaporates. Right now, I can’t imagine what it might be, and I need information badly in order to make even an educated guess.”

“The trail is getting narrower now — there are separate spots which outline the shape of the feet of your armor, instead of broad circular areas that blend into each other. A little farther ought to do it.”

A little farther did. Ken was not quite to the center of the white patch when Drai reported that he had ceased to leave a trail. He promptly stopped, propped himself as he had before, and scooped up a fresh handful of the evanescent substance. This time there was practically no sand included; the material was fully an inch deep. The mass on his handler began to shrink at once, but not so rapidly as to prevent his getting a fairly long look. It was crystalline, millions of minute facets catching and scattering the feeble sunlight; but the individual crystals were too tiny to permit him to determine their shape. It was gone before he was really satisfied, but there seemed little likelihood of his getting a better look. Somehow a sample would have to be obtained — and analyzed. He thought he saw how that might be done, but some careful preparation would be necessary. Announcing this fact over his suit radio, he prepared to return to the ship.